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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T19:34:44.490" Score="8" ViewCount="696" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own daughter asked - only two days ago - &quot;What is physics&quot;? While that may be a little too simple - there's plenty of definitions easily available - how simple can (or should) we go on this site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="36" LastEditDate="2010-11-02T20:00:03.143" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T19:33:35.733" Title="How basic is too basic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T19:45:08.220" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be pretty difficult to create a question that is considered &quot;too basic&quot; from every perspective. After all, questions that on the surface look basic often pose much deeper questions. Physics, after all, is about the fundamentals. None other than Einstein spent much of his youth thinking about problems the average person would probably take for granted; and he gave us relativity theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is physics?&quot; is actually a surprisingly pertinent question. Your average person certainly couldn't answer it well, and some physicists may even struggle to precise about it. &quot;The study of energy and matter&quot; is a common answer given, though somehow it doesn't fully justify it. Physics, especially these days, often blurs with mathematics at one end and philosophy at the other, not to mention chemistry and the more obvious ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T19:45:08.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="4" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T19:46:36.437" Score="6" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;Half a section of the FAQ can be edited (just copied the image from math.SE):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WW8oK.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was recommended we just include the on- and off-topic stuff, e.g. copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/faq&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Super User is for computer enthusiasts and power users. If you have a question about …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;computer hardware&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;computer software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and it is &lt;strong&gt;not about&lt;/strong&gt; …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;videogames or consoles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;websites or web services like Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;electronic devices, media players, cell phones or smart phones, except insofar as they interface with your computer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a shopping or buying recommendation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… then you're in the right place to ask your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions what to put there? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(BTW, just to be clear, we can also add extra sections in that area, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;cooking.SE&lt;/a&gt;, but the last section must be followed by that &quot;Please look around...&quot; paragraph, making it hard to deviate from the on-/off-topic theme.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T14:52:32.657" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T14:52:32.657" Title="What to put in the FAQ (the &quot;on-/off-topic&quot; section)?" Tags="|discussion|scope|top-7|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-04T12:27:43.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T19:53:44.573" Score="35" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, that's it. MathJax doesn't appear to be working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it hasn't been put in place yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2010-12-15T19:00:45.020" LastActivityDate="2011-06-12T18:51:45.423" Title="LaTeX not working?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-19T08:27:49.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T19:59:18.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So here is a variant of the question that I think the OP is asking: should this be more like MO level or MSE level? I personally committed on Area51 because I think the physics community should get in on the type of stuff that can happen on an MO type site. I doubt that I will be asking questions on here for very long simply because I expect most of my questions to be too basic. That is the way it should be. Simple questions should be left for another site, except that it took so long to get this beta underway it may be detrimental to the community to turn people away. A lot of people think that MO is a bit snobbish, but they are missing the point, the website is for research level questions only. Or at least something that you might wonder about after qualifiers or some such thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a better example of a basic question would be the following: &quot;I don't get free body diagrams, can someone please help?&quot; I think this should be considered too basic, but I am not even the type of person this place is for so... those are my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: MO is Mathoverflow and MSE is Math.stackexchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T19:59:18.557" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="7" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-11-02T19:59:59.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, no LaTeX support/MathJax here either, it seems. Hopefully the implementation will be copied over from math.se soon, it will definitely be needed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T19:59:59.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="8" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T20:05:00.567" Score="10" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we have a fairly broad definition for what is allowed for discussion, we'll probably end up with a number of variations on the standard physics subfield tags. What are some general rules we should devise for managing these tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. &lt;code&gt;particle-physics&lt;/code&gt; or just &lt;code&gt;particle&lt;/code&gt; with physics being redundant? I've added tags with &lt;code&gt;particle-physics&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt; so far. I think it's more clear to have the -physics, even though it may be redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a tag for &lt;code&gt;definition&lt;/code&gt; already on the front page. Valid? I tend to think not... though an argument could be made for looking up all the definition posts we'll eventually have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2010-11-07T08:20:52.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T03:47:13.197" Title="Physics subfield tags and general tag rules" Tags="|discussion|tags|top-7|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T20:18:24.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple rule: if a satisfactory answer can be provided by a simple Wikipedia query, it is too basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2010-11-02T21:24:37.767" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:24:37.767" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="10" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T20:41:58.257" Score="-7" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing that I noticed about &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site was the irony of its name. Surely I'm not the only one who would rather have the logo look like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xtr60.png&quot; alt=&quot;meta Physics, not Physics meta&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I guess this is a meta.meta.physics question.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T04:08:41.330" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T04:08:41.330" Title="meta Physics, not Physics meta" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2010-11-02T20:45:22.277" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disagree. From talking to users new to the Stack Exchange system, one of the things that confuses them the most is the purpose of the Meta complement site to each Stack Exchange site. Having these new users come to the Physics site, see the meta button at the top, click it, and then see metaphysics as the banner would confuse them even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T20:45:22.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-11-02T20:49:26.687" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wish to see LaTeX support please upvote this question.  We will revisit this in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T20:49:26.687" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19" CreationDate="2010-11-02T20:57:11.253" Score="9" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several physics questions, all of which are about the sloshing mode of water.  Should I ask all the questions in a single thread, or create separate threads?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="58382" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T10:21:36.920" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T10:21:36.920" Title="Can I ask several related questions in a single thread?" Tags="|discussion|faq|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:00:47.403" Score="8" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that we will have a lot of &quot;Basic explanation of xxx [theory | principle | ...&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion about that ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mine is that we should not hesitate to point to wikipedia (or equivalent) and close. The question can then be asked again about a more specific point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we post long answer explaining basics things again and again, then we should better edit Wikipedia. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not an encyclopedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2010-11-03T09:38:39.960" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T16:06:29.713" Title="Wikipedia like questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:02:48.940" Score="16" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems a lot users here will be from USA, but still SI units are standard in science-level physics and may encourage broader participation. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2013-02-28T04:36:57.823" Title="Shall we force to use SI?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:04:48.533" Score="7" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I ask questions that I know the answer to, but are puzzles?  For example, can I ask whether the level of water in a cup of ice water goes up or down while the ice melts?  This is a standard conceptual question in introductory physics and I know the answer, but can I ask such things (especially novel examples of this sort of question) just to promote people thinking about it and coming up with solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2010-11-03T09:38:00.803" LastActivityDate="2011-02-15T01:27:13.517" Title="Are &quot;Puzzle&quot; Questions Appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="17" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:07:41.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In classical electromagnetism, CGS is more natural.  In other cases we might want to discuss things in units where c = 1 or hbar = 1, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:07:41.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:11:45.873" Score="3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing Astronomy as a GCSE (at high/secondary school) and the teacher often goes above the course, and we (the students) often ask above what the course requires. But because its a GCSE there's a timeline, so sadly we can't spend a week on each subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is great, but for things like physics, to understand an article you need to read all the articles it links to and so on, it doesn't give the straight forward explanations/answers that class and stack exchange sites do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically can astronomy questions be asked here?&#xA;Such as 'Whats the difference between a neutron star and a pulsar?' or '[How] does the mass of a planet orbiting a star affect it's orbit?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2010-11-03T09:39:10.367" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T09:39:10.367" Title="Astronomy/Astrophyiscs related question here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-07T02:01:15.383" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="19" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:16:51.023" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each question should go in its own thread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question per post allows users to answer each question individually with the proper comments and voting for each question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not combine multiple inquiries into one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:16:51.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:20:25.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first reaction is that the first example doesn't belong and the second example does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning isn't so solid but it goes like this: the first is sort of an astronomical classification issue, which should really go in the yet-to-be &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51/astronomy&quot;&gt;astronomy stack site&lt;/a&gt;. The second is more of a &quot;what is the physics behind this astronomical phenomenon?&quot; which is, of course, physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:20:25.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:31:16.700" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually this is not only a Q&amp;amp;A site, but a source of knowledge that most people should access through search engines and arrive at the question directly that is relevant to their search term, so it is kind of a encyclopedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is great if you already understand what your trying to learn. Many of the physics pages contain &quot;jargon&quot; which you must read the page about that which contains more &quot;jargon&quot; and you end up reading 30 pages to understand one page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an answer I think that the answer should just be a link to a wiki article, but a link to the wiki article followed by a relatively-basic explanation, to which the asker can comment on and ask for more clarification or more depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:31:16.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:34:34.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think explanations should be independent from the units, and while giving specific examples or formulas, the units system should be made explicit ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, any European student would cry if you answer EM problems in CGS units...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:34:34.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:44:24.067" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should encourage the assumption that SI units are used unless specified otherwise. I agree that HEP formulae with $\hbar=c=1$ look better, but that should be stated somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T21:44:24.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26" CreationDate="2010-11-02T21:50:00.163" Score="14" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, no questions of this sort have been asked yet. I suppose it will happen &lt;em&gt;sometime&lt;/em&gt;, but I have no idea how we should respond. We could simply mark for deletion, but this will only cause the original poster to ask why we did so and argue further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a short term member of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt;, I found quite a bit of flame wars between physicists and new users with warped ideas. Topics included optimization questions for their perpetual motion machine that would supposedly make them millions, hollow earth theorists, moon landing conspiracy theorists, and even people who were apparently from the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can we handle these topics to avoid chaos threads?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T11:02:07.077" Title="How do we deal with perpetual motion and other hoax questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:02:17.080" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is this site conceived?  Math Overflow is a pretty valuable&#xA;tool for research mathematicians.  There is a parallel site&#xA;for undergraduate-level math.  If Physics Overflow/Area 51/Physics&#xA;is to be about research-level physics, perhaps the design should convey this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2010-11-02T22:31:57.637" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T04:04:23.020" Title="The design looks high school-y, don't you think?" Tags="|discussion|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:03:39.043" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't automatically consider question about perpetum mobiles as hoax questions. If the question really includes a &quot;So, I considered [some facts], but I can't find a flaw. Why doesn't it work?&quot; it might be acceptable. But real hoax questions and &quot;Hey, I solved all problems in the world&quot; (&amp;lt;- what's the question here?) should be closed as &quot;not a real question&quot;. We should keep them as a warning to jesters unless they take overhand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;update&lt;/strong&gt; First (valid) question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/556/97&quot;&gt;What is the fallacy in this infinite motion machine?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T11:02:07.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:05:28.013" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The design is the same for all site in the beta phase, Jin will give each site a unique design in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T22:05:28.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:06:00.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sketchyness of the site is because the site is in beta and a design hasn't been discussed, let alone decided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually done after about 90-100 days of public beta, currently we are in private beta, and there are 5 days left of private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Also this site [hopefully] won't be completely research-level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T22:06:00.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="29" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:34:14.993" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Research-level question&quot; = looking for research level answers, citing articles, giving an overview of articles/subfield, instead of repeating textbook/Wikipedia type knowledge and basic clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T18:13:21.283" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T18:13:21.283" Title="Differentiate research-level questions?" Tags="|feature-request|questions|tags|content-level|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:36:37.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you want to differentiate? If you need a &quot;research-level&quot; answer, just state that in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T22:36:37.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="31" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:49:34.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's just create a research-level tag then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T22:49:34.340" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="32" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29" CreationDate="2010-11-02T22:55:17.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't this be clear from the phrasing of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T22:55:17.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29" CreationDate="2010-11-02T23:25:03.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is implicit: Research level questions require research level answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T23:25:03.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="34" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-02T23:47:35.160" Score="12" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Professional physicists often jealously guard their good ideas, since they are afraid that competing researchers might steal them and publish first. As a junior scientist, I am sometimes appalled by what lengths some colleagues go to to avoid collaboration, which is why I'm such an ardent supporter of websites such as this one that promote open and unreserved discussion of ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what should a hypothetical Physics user, who is also a researcher, do if a discussion on Physics leads to that spark of inspiration which ultimately results in a publication? Pride is easily wounded (especially other people's ;-) and we wouldn't want people withdrawing from discussions because they think their ideas are too good! Our hypothetical researcher would presumably like to give credit where credit is due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will we see a new wave of papers in Physical Review Letters that say in the Acknowledgements section at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The authors thank the community of physics.stackexchange.com for fruitful discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would people like to go about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T03:49:20.523" Title="How should we assign credit for ideas?" Tags="|discussion|publishing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="35" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="34" CreationDate="2010-11-03T00:15:17.133" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license of everything here is clear: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Whatever you say, you keep the law of being attributed the author (profile has a place for your name and e-mail, so the real identity of an user can be usually justified when needed), but you allow others to use it as they wish.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the advances of open science will someday tend to situation you described, but yet many good ideas will be inevitably hidden. Still, this shouldn't drive this place totally useless (-;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T00:15:17.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="34" CreationDate="2010-11-03T06:27:51.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since each post (both questions and answers) provide a &lt;code&gt;link&lt;/code&gt;, you can quote what helped you for example as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;mbq, http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/35&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, user names may sound strange compared to real names we are used to, but that's the attribution required by the license (although I'm not certain how to link to the user profile as well without overcrowding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I cheated with the link: For questions, a shorturl à la &lt;code&gt;http://site.com/q/123/456&lt;/code&gt; is the official link, where you can remove the last number if you need more space and don't need it to be referral link. For answers, you get something like &lt;code&gt;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34/how-should-we-assign-credit-for-ideas/35#35&lt;/code&gt;. Just pick the number at the end which identifies the answers post number and use the &lt;code&gt;site.com/q/35&lt;/code&gt; shorturl. This is however not officially supported and might break one day...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T06:27:51.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-03T07:20:44.083" Score="12" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the site's current policy on homework questions is found at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which will always have the current version of the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many communities must deal with this question sooner or later, might as well get the ball rolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should we deal with homework questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that the Mathematics.StackExchange site is handling things well. Here are some links to their deliberations on these matters. As a frequent user of that site, I must say that we have been fairly successful of handling these questions well: both supportive, but not too helpful to be destructive to the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/&quot;&gt;How to deal with HW questions.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/410/&quot;&gt;More policy about HW questions.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/415/&quot;&gt;How to not give complete solutions.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/621/&quot;&gt;Homework tags.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update July 2014:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14981/11127&quot;&gt;Math.SE votes on homework tag.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/16425/11127&quot;&gt;Result of voting.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T17:46:53.140" Title="Towards a canonical homework question" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="38" CreationDate="2010-11-03T12:16:06.843" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most people have enough of a sense of the concept of &quot;fair play&quot; that I'd like to think this would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, it's almost certainly going to come up, and we don't want to deter people from legitimately using this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cribbing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10811/homework-on-stackoverflow&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; - on which the Mathematics.StackExchange site builds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two principles involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;It is okay to ask about homework&lt;/b&gt;. For one, it would be impossible to stop it all even if we wanted to. Stack Overflow exists to help programmers learn and provide a standard repository for programming problems, both simple and complex, and this includes helping students.&lt;/li&gt;   &#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;Providing an answer that doesn't help a student learn is not in the student's own best interest&lt;/b&gt;. Therefore you might choose to treat homework questions differently than other questions.&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it'll be nigh-impossible to determine in advance which are homework questions 100% of the time. On the other hand, there will be those questions are going to stick out like a sore thumb as obvious homework. I don't think we want to get in the habit of providing homework answers directly, as that directly violates principle 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's wrong to inquire if a question is a homework or class-related question in the comments. If it is, the questioner ought to be willing to accept help in a form similar to what they might get from a reasonably accommodating professor or TA, and it should be our job to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, if we could get people with homework questions to &lt;strong&gt;voluntarily&lt;/strong&gt; tag their questions appropriately, then everyone would benefit. Maybe this ought to be in our FAQs or guidelines somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T10:55:37.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-03T14:38:51.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why don't we encourage posters to give a little bit of their background and their own thoughts?  That way, we can address answers to an appropriate level, and also remind ourselves that we once had similar &quot;basic questions&quot; as well...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T14:38:51.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="41" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2010-11-03T16:23:18.003" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics - Stack Exchange is for active researchers, academics and students. We welcome questions of all levels, but please stick to the following topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explanations of observed physical phenomena (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/629/why-does-one-experience-a-short-pull-in-the-wrong-direction-when-a-vehicle-stops&quot;&gt;Why does one experience a short pull in the wrong direction when a vehicle stops?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experimental designs and results (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/185/what-is-needed-to-claim-the-discovery-of-the-higgs-boson&quot;&gt;What is needed to claim the discovery of the Higgs boson ?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accepted and/or actively researched theories (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2051/why-do-we-think-there-are-only-three-generations-of-fundamental-particles&quot;&gt;Why do we think there are only three generations of fundamental particles?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics and physics (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/414/number-theory-in-Physics&quot;&gt;Number theory in physics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following types of questions are not allowed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obvious &quot;do my homework&quot;-type physics questions (&quot;A 4kg ball is traveling at 8m/s in the x direction, how do I find...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pitches for your own personal theories or work (Don't link to your own site if you can avoid it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A work in progress, any suggestions are welcome.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T14:49:19.877" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-04T12:27:43.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="42" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-03T21:26:32.993" Score="9" ViewCount="4078" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for such pseudoquestion, but check it out:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-01-12T22:39:30.817" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T22:39:30.817" Title="Did you know there is a chat room for physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="44" CreationDate="2010-11-03T22:54:55.523" Score="8" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether questions such as these should be considered appropriate on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/115/mathematica-to-help-for-an-hamiltonian-problem&quot;&gt;Mathematica to help for an Hamiltonian problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107/conversion-from-fits-to-netcdf&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107/conversion-from-fits-to-netcdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/207/matlab-simpowersystem-simple-generator-implementation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/207/matlab-simpowersystem-simple-generator-implementation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They seem like questions which are relevant to physicists (or some subset of physicists) but are really about computing rather than physics. In my view, just because the specific programs or file formats in question are typically used by physicists, it doesn't mean the question is necessarily appropriate here. Sometimes Super User might be a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As discussed in Noldorin's answer and Tobias's comment, we seem to be taking the position that questions about the interpretation or justification of an algorithm or its results, or about physically motivated algorithm design, are okay, but questions about how to accomplish &amp;lt;task&amp;gt; in &amp;lt;program&amp;gt; (or &amp;lt;programming language&amp;gt;) should generally go to Super User (or Stack Overflow, respectively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:29:35.647" Title="Should we allow computational questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|software-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2010-11-04T00:49:54.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I agree that these sorts of questions should generally be asked on Super User (if they are specifically related to how to use plotting/CAS/simulation/etc. software); or the Mathematics SE (if they relate to how to perform numerical integration, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are however some potential cases where computational questions would be quite valid here. For example, you might ask what approximations and numerical shortcuts could be made for simulating a given dynamical system. Or a more obvious example (though perhaps not quite what you mean) - quantum computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we judge relevance on a question by question basis, in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T00:49:54.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="45" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2010-11-04T23:59:15.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another related question: what should we do with tags like &lt;code&gt;elevator&lt;/code&gt; or such things. Should poeple able to edit tags try to retag question with a tag that is an actual physics field ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T23:59:15.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2010-11-05T05:31:17.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you considered using arxiv style tags? It's being used on both MathOverflow and CSTheory, and seems to make a lot of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T05:31:17.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-06T19:00:39.903" Score="9" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there going to be a way for me to make a very minor edit, e.g. punctuation, without pushing the question to the top of the activity date sort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T18:25:46.663" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Very minor edits, e.g. punctuation" Tags="|support|editing|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="47" CreationDate="2010-11-06T21:22:23.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26483/could-we-have-the-ability-to-mark-a-change-as-minor-in-questions-or-answers/26496#26496&quot;&gt;No&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2010-11-06T21:22:23.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-07T03:53:54.483" Score="4" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;To increase the amount of knowledge on the site (in question and answer form), I am considering if I should write some specific questions that I could provide answers to myself, with others answering as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funny, the filter/matcher is telling me &quot;The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems in line with the purpose of the site and would provide material for Google searches. Of course, we need to work on getting more researchers and students to sign up (I still need to finish an explanation and invite for a professor, the SPS club, and some friends).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T05:34:29.620" Title="Is it okay with you to write &quot;seed&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2010-11-07T04:44:21.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, seeding is fine, but I would suggest trying to write the question as if you didn't know the answer, so that people who actually don't know the answer can identify with it. Also, I'd suggest not answering your own question right away, but rather giving other people a day or two to answer it. Afterwards, if you haven't gotten a satisfactory answer, then post your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If the site is telling you that the question appears subjective, that's probably just because of some particular word you're using in the title, so don't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-11-07T04:44:21.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2010-11-07T09:12:11.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought it might be useful, at least at the beginning of the site, to make a list of some canonical forms of subfield tags. Obviously it's impossible to create a comprehensive list of tags, but my idea is to have a set such that any question which is appropriate for the site could be tagged with at least one tag from the set. This will also help us out later when people get enough rep to vote on tag synonyms, since we'll already know what the community thinks the canonical forms of certain tags should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, these tags are already used on the site and I think they would make good subject tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acoustics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;astrophysics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;atmospheric-science&lt;/code&gt; (physical aspects of meteorology and climatology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;classical-mechanics&lt;/code&gt; (when &lt;code&gt;lagrangian-mechanics&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;hamiltonian-mechanics&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/code&gt;  are too specific)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;cosmology&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;education&lt;/code&gt; (could be renamed to &lt;code&gt;physics-education&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;electro-magnetism&lt;/code&gt; (needs to have the hyphen removed though)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;general-relativity&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;geophysics&lt;/code&gt; (physical aspects of geology and seismology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;gravity&lt;/code&gt; (when &lt;code&gt;general-relativity&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;newtonian-gravity&lt;/code&gt; are too specific)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;hamiltonian-mechanics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;kinematics&lt;/code&gt; (basic relationships between position, velocity, and acceleration)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;lagrangian-mechanics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;magnetohydrodynamics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;medical-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;nuclear-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;optics&lt;/code&gt; (when &lt;code&gt;quantum-optics&lt;/code&gt; is either too specific or inappropriate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;particle-physics&lt;/code&gt; (although this might fit under &lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;physical-chemistry&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;quantum-optics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;rotational-dynamics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;special-relativity&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;string-theory&lt;/code&gt; (also might fit under &lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;thermodynamics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;wave-theory&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have not been used on the site, but I think they would be appropriate subject tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;atomic-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;computational-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;condensed-matter-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;newtonian-gravity&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tags in the following list are in use, and I can see how they &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be good subject tags, but I think they're either too broad or too specific, or redundant with the preceding lists. Note that I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; advocating that these tags be renamed or deleted. They're fine as tags (well most of them are fine), but I just think that any question that uses them still should have a tag from one of the previous lists. Others may disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;mechanics&lt;/code&gt;: too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;climate-science&lt;/code&gt;: subset of &lt;code&gt;atmospheric-science&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;applied-physics&lt;/code&gt;: too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;experimental-physics&lt;/code&gt;: too broad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;standard-model&lt;/code&gt;: subset of &lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;aerodynamics&lt;/code&gt;: subset of &lt;code&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;sound&lt;/code&gt;: typically equivalent to &lt;code&gt;acoustics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;philosophy&lt;/code&gt;: probably off-topic, or there should be another applicable tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;large-hadron-collider&lt;/code&gt;: subset of &lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;accelerator-physics&lt;/code&gt;: subset of &lt;code&gt;high-energy-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;software&lt;/code&gt;: equivalent to &lt;code&gt;computational-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;nuclear-engineering&lt;/code&gt;: equivalent to &lt;code&gt;nuclear-physics&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;material-science&lt;/code&gt;: either equivalent to &lt;code&gt;condensed-matter-physics&lt;/code&gt;, or the question may be off topic for this site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;electrostatics&lt;/code&gt;: subset of &lt;code&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments and suggestions are welcome and encouraged. I'm making this CW so it can be collaboratively edited (although if you change something other than fixing a typo, please leave a comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T03:47:13.197" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T03:47:13.197" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-07T09:12:11.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-07T09:25:26.357" Score="7" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question #7 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;7 essential meta questions&lt;/a&gt; is about promotion: once the private beta ends, how do we get people, and especially &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt;, to sign up and start asking and answering questions? I thought it would be useful to have a meta question where we can coordinate or discuss our promotion ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few points to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What channels of communication can you use to make people aware of the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What incentive can we offer researchers and other experts to participate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What distinguishes this site from other existing physics Q&amp;amp;A sites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T14:01:48.787" Title="How should we promote the site?" Tags="|discussion|top-7|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="53" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-07T14:14:25.873" Score="4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Elevator Pitch&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't as easy as it sounds. Imagine the user who will never read your FAQ and you have two seconds to grab their attention. It should be catchy but descriptive. It should be thoroughly clear but painfully concise. &lt;strong&gt;Make every... word... count.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some creative examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gawker.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gawker&lt;/a&gt;: Daily Manhattan media news and gossip. Reporting live from the center of the universe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gizmodo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gizmodo&lt;/a&gt;: The gadget guide. So much in love with shiny new toys, it’s unnatural.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.autoblog.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autoblog&lt;/a&gt;: We obsessively cover the auto industry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dumblittleman.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DumbLittleMan&lt;/a&gt;: So what do we do here? Well, it’s simple. 15 to 20 times per week we provide tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.needcoffee.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Needcoffee.com&lt;/a&gt;: We are the Internet equivalent of a triple espresso with whipped cream. Mmmm…whipped cream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Use it as a Tagline&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shorter elevator pitch &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used as a tagline — something you can display in the header at the top of the page. If it doesn't fit, consider shortening it or creating a separate tagline. Here are some great examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://slashdot.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slashdot&lt;/a&gt;: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifehacker.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lifehacker&lt;/a&gt;: Don’t live to geek, geek to live!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesimpledollar.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Simple Dollar&lt;/a&gt;: Financial talk for the rest of us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Motto (don't forget your logo)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A logo begs for it own little, short tagline — like a motto. Maybe the tagline inspires the logo; Maybe it's the other way around. Mottos make good t-shirt, bumper stickers, and other marketing material. Either way, you'll recognize a good motto when you see it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think Different.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Uncola.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intel inside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like a rock.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The king of beers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…and perhaps all this leads to a proper name and domain for your site… &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;. So let's start from the basics. &lt;strong&gt;Come up with a killer elevator pitch, tagline, and/or motto!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T10:15:04.813" Title="Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline" Tags="|discussion|top-7|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-08T15:12:02.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="54" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2010-11-07T22:22:16.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Quantum of knowledge&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to get this barest seed of an idea out there, the phrase comes to mind. I'm not sure what we could do with it. If you have ideas, edit them in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T10:09:26.483" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-07T22:22:16.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="56" CreationDate="2010-11-07T22:57:39.090" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not too familiar with the process, so hopefully someone can clarify here. Do we need any moderators for the public beta, which seems to be coming up in less than 2 days? Will members of the official StackExchange team act as temporary moderators during this beta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2010-11-08T13:56:29.443" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Moderators for beta. How does it work?" Tags="|support|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2010-11-08T01:41:45.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are already members of the SE team who are registered on the site and have moderator powers, but I don't think they participate heavily in the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator-choosing process is described in e.g. this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57986/how-to-organize-a-formal-moderator-election-on-a-beta-se-site/58056#58056&quot;&gt;post on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; but here's the gist: about a week after the public beta starts, temporary moderators will be chosen by the Stack Exchange team, based on community input. Then later on, after the end of the beta period, there will be an election of permanent moderators - or rather, an election of moderator &lt;em&gt;candidates&lt;/em&gt; to indicate who the community prefers, but I'm sure the results will be reviewed by the SE team and the final choice is up to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T15:43:09.750" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2010-11-08T06:39:41.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd rather we don't force answerers to use units/unit systems that they aren't comfortable with, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; they shouldn't object if their answer is edited to have the conversions in other (more convenient?) units, or if someone contributes a version of their answer with a different unit system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user172" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T06:39:41.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2010-11-08T15:39:15.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is simply &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a good idea for a new site&lt;/strong&gt; to &quot;seed&quot; it with questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blog post: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/area-51-asking-the-first-questions/#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Area 51: Asking the First Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are calling &quot;seeding&quot; isn't typically such a good idea. Users should be asking real questions about problems they actually have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People love answering questions. But fewer people want to watch someone to talk to themselves and even fewer people want to be given homework assignments for the sake of busy work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you must, at least limit it to that &lt;em&gt;rare&lt;/em&gt;, particularly &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; problem in the past where you wish you had this site to help you at the time. Or if you come across a good problem in your work, ask it&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;You don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to answer it, even if you know the answer. But more times than not, if you're going to sit and simply &lt;em&gt;think up&lt;/em&gt; some hypothetical &quot;problems&quot; to fill the site, it's going to look forced and pedestrian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T15:39:15.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="66" CreationDate="2010-11-09T20:34:17.530" Score="4" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at our &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;Area 51 page&lt;/a&gt; I notice that it says about 10% of the users who committed to the site proposal have actually signed up. This is a little worrying given that the private beta is &lt;strike&gt;almost&lt;/strike&gt; now over. The equivalent number for all the other beta sites I checked was between 30% and 90%+. Anyone have an idea why our participation is so low? (I guess if you're reading this, you probably don't know the answer ;-p I just felt the need to rant)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ideas about how to pull in more people, who didn't commit, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-should-we-promote-the-site&quot;&gt;How should we promote the site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T09:28:22.707" Title="Where are all our committed users?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="60" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="59" CreationDate="2010-11-09T20:49:19.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is very strange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;234 users committed&#xA;  10.3% signed up for beta&#xA;  0% fulfilled commitment &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly we were more than 23 during the private beta ... and I don't know what they mean with &quot;fulfilled commitment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T20:49:19.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="61" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-11-09T21:50:52.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the physics community is highly accessible and well connected through the Internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physicsforums.com&lt;/a&gt; is a very popular Internet forum. If anyone is an active member of that community, perhaps they'd be willing to spread the word about this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physics.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics.org&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Your guide to physics on the web&quot;) happens to have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physics.org/toplistdetail.asp?id=11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Best Q&amp;amp;A Site Award&lt;/a&gt;. Working as a group, we should be able to make ourselves known on that site as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T21:50:52.130" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-11-10T03:04:56.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came up with the following fairly generic &amp;quot;sales pitch,&amp;quot; with Ami's feedback incorporated. Please offer suggestions for improvement if you have any. And of course, feel free to use it, either as-is or in modified form, if you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi everyone... I wanted to bring people's attention to a new physics Q&amp;amp;A site that just opened up to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is built on the same system as &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, the most popular computer programming Q&amp;amp;A site on the internet. It's a system specifically designed for the question-and-answer format, rather than extended discussions. Anyone can answer questions, and the best answers are voted to the top; registered members who consistently give good answers are rewarded with &amp;quot;reputation&amp;quot; and increased privileges on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody is welcome to contribute; in fact, you can ask and answer questions with no registration required! But we're most interested in attracting &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt;: researchers, graduate students and advanced undergraduates in physics or related fields. We want this site to be a place where anyone with a question about physics can come to find &lt;strong&gt;quick, reliable answers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T04:05:41.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="63" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-10T05:09:11.063" Score="12" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from a meta level positive rant I temporarily appended to an answer to a question about performing the Cavendish experiment at home.    I realized how few lab type experiments we reference here, and how useful they would be for students.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Editorial (I'll move this positive rant to meta soon) - given the obviously widely varied audience on this site, I would very much like to see more questions like this one relating to amateur or home experiments.   The analysis of the data and possible sources of errors in these experiments is often subtle, and is very instructive.    To have real physicists and other clever students publicly criticize some aspect of an experiment that is actually being done at home or in a school lab provides something that many students may never get otherwise.   The social network framework will help many newcomers from different countries learn what real science is in a way that yet another dose of imperfectly understood theory never will.   And it's fun too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see my point?   Maybe we can make a &quot;doable experiment&quot; tag, and have sort of lab teams or something in chat rooms, making suggestions or something.    Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T03:39:39.163" Title="This is currently a site for people at all levels. Let's make something really positive from this - distributed labs." Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2010-11-10T05:34:29.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want stronger people on the site, I suggest asking the questions that are really puzzling you, for real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T05:34:29.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="65" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="67" CreationDate="2010-11-10T08:53:28.257" Score="6" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/439/what-would-be-the-real-world-implications-of-the-kessler-syndrome&quot;&gt;What would be the real-world implications of the Kessler Syndrome?&lt;/a&gt; is essentially an engineering (applied physics) question. If we ignore the specifics of that question, should we accept applied physics questions here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To suggest another example in the same category: &quot;Can you use any semiconductor material to create a LED?&quot; - undoubtedly solid state physics, but not really academical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T17:13:02.247" Title="Are engineering questions OK?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="59" CreationDate="2010-11-10T09:28:22.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one of the problems is the long time the site needed to reach beta. Look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/?page=13&amp;amp;tab=newest&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/?page=13&amp;amp;tab=newest&lt;/a&gt;, where you can see that the Physics proposal is one of the oldest proposals, and of these only two (Physics together with &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1619/homebrewing-beer-wine-etc&quot;&gt;Homebrewing&lt;/a&gt;) are currently in a beta with &amp;lt; 10 days. All other older proposals are either already at the &gt; 90 days mark or still rather far from reaching beta. Maybe this was too long to wait for some, or they will join in later. Let's hope things improve during the next 83 days...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T09:28:22.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="67" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="65" CreationDate="2010-11-10T17:13:02.247" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, of course, applied physics questions are allowed. But the questions should be specific enough to actually be about physics. The second example, about semiconductors and LEDs, certainly seems fine (although it could be interpreted as an electrical engineering question or as a solid state physics question), but the first one about the Kessler syndrome encompasses a whole range of topics: aerospace engineering, materials engineering, environmental science, and probably some fields that don't even really have names, in addition to just physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that engineering is not exactly synonymous with applied physics. At least, I think not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-11-10T17:13:02.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="70" CreationDate="2010-11-11T01:55:36.783" Score="6" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/519/what-now-is-the-surface-temperature-of-the-neutron-star-which-was-formed-12-bil&quot;&gt;What is the temperature of the surface and core of a neutron star formed 12 billion years ago now equal to?&lt;/a&gt;: part of the question was asked in Russian, which is the first time I can recall seeing a non-English question on a Stack Exchange site. Should we do something about questions in other languages? Edit a translation into the body of the question, perhaps? (Assuming someone is confident enough in their language skills to do the translation) Or do we just leave them as they are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Do we have a language policy?" Tags="|discussion|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="70" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="68" CreationDate="2010-11-11T08:52:46.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is with respect to SO (&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, the site that started the whole SE business), which we are not but since it works good there we should at least think about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff Atwood &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3774/add-meta-tag-to-support-internationalization/7320#7320&quot;&gt;stated&lt;/a&gt; (regarding non-english posts on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;http://stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe programmers who speak only Mandarin, or French, or Spanish, are better off forming their own communities and centers of gravity. Shared language is one of the fundamental aspects of community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just visit Chinatown in nearby San Francisco to see what I mean..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some digging I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&quot;&gt;this blog post from '07&lt;/a&gt; as a follow-up on the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/non-english-question-policy/&quot;&gt;We need to help non-English-speakers somehow…&lt;/a&gt;, and the faq-entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/13676/146482&quot;&gt;Is English required on Stack Overflow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, on SO the policy is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say keep it in English. I'm not against diversity or other languages, I'm for us all being able to communicate under one. This isn't political, this isn't about smothering peoples cultures with Western ideologies. It is about being pragmatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that multiple languages on one site cause confusion. But we should not &amp;quot;ban&amp;quot; non-english speakers, so I suggest we do not vote on non-english posts (both questions and answers) and try to translate things to english as good as possible. As soon as the correctness of the translation is verified, the original text should be removed - it will still be available by clicking on the &lt;em&gt;edited by&lt;/em&gt; link. Maybe one can edit in a&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[original version in russian](http://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/519/revisions#rev3252802a-affc-499f-9316-3e44d8a4f81c)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;link or post that as comment, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-11T08:52:46.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-11-11T16:38:48.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not an answer, but do we have an explanation of how to use LaTeX on this site somehwere? I couldn't seem to figure it out until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastActivityDate="2010-11-11T16:38:48.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-11T18:28:04.390" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are specialized questions about some detail of a physics paper appropriate? (ie &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.4847&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="331" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2010-11-11T19:30:32.620" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T08:16:24.510" Title="Specialized questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2010-11-12T02:13:08.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the community's thoughts on this are but I'd be inclined to say yes, in general such questions are appropriate. Certainly there is nothing inherently wrong with asking a very specific question. Of course it's possible that nobody on the site will know the answer, but that should not discourage you from asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a question could be inappropriate for other reasons, of course. For example, if your question is about pure math that just happens to be used in a physics paper, it may get closed as off-topic, because the mathematics SE site would be a better place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T02:13:08.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="34" CreationDate="2010-11-12T03:49:20.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given all the protections, there is still nothing to prevent any user from using an idea or solution method obtained from this or any other forum, in their own work without attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A site like this is amazing and will lead to awesome new collaborations. However, as with all powerful tools, I guess a cautionary approach to using this site is probably prudent, especially for newbies - such as yours truly :-D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T03:49:20.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2010-11-12T08:16:24.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm all in favour of this, since the main intention of physics.SE was to be a  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A site for active researchers, academics and students&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should include discussing details of publications, although I agree with David that pure math questions might be better off at math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T08:16:24.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-12T11:16:25.283" Score="37" ViewCount="1625" Body="&lt;p&gt;The level of questions (and answers) on Physics is not high enough.&#xA;I'm not saying this snobbishly, but because if the answers are not&#xA;high quality and accurate then the website does the community a&#xA;disservice, contrary to its aims.  (Perhaps, in the end, the notion&#xA;of reputation will remedy the deficits that appear at start-up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remedy, I think, is to attract higher-level users to the site.&#xA;But this also requires that the community of users start rejecting&#xA;homework-level and ill-posed questions.  Unless this is done,&#xA;higher-level users will not be drawn to the site.  I think&#xA;Math Overflow does this successfully (at least three Fields&#xA;medalists figure prominently there) even though there are certainly&#xA;problems of quality on that site, too.  And this much was basically&#xA;true from day one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T00:58:16.537" Title="Level of questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="16" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="78" CreationDate="2010-11-12T17:17:21.133" Score="3" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, the graph paper design that is characteristic of many StackExchange sites, and currently is the background for Physics SE, is not pleasing to my eye. In fact, it has made me not feel as much like revisiting other StackExchange sites. I know that this is very subjective (and may stem from some deep-seated resentment of graph paper from school), but I find myself not wanting to visit sites as much that have graph paper or lined paper backgrounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be alone in preferring the plain background of Stack Overflow and Math Overflow. I'm not saying that this site should have the same site design as those sites, but do we need to have the same background as so many other SE sites? If you personally love the graph paper background, please state why rather than downvoting this question. If you would prefer something else, do you have any suggestions for an alternative background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="364" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T19:22:08.560" Title="Do we like the current background on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-05-16T04:05:52.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="78" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2010-11-12T17:21:38.260" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The graph paper design is used for all beta sites. It's only temporary. If we get promoted to a full SE site, we'll get our own individual design that will be created with community input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T17:21:38.260" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="79" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-12T17:32:10.257" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree and my experience bares that out: You can show your expertise, even when answering the most basic questions. You don't legislate away easy questions as if top-tier experts are just going to start filling the void. Sure, you have to ask great questions. But you also have to consistently provide &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt; content with &lt;em&gt;every answer&lt;/em&gt;, no matter how simple or mundane. That's how you will gain the respect and recognition of an expert community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the most highly-respected physicists in the world are teachers; answering Physics 201-level questions from rank-and-file students. Think about it. If you heard a seminar from someone like Einstein or Newton eloquently describing how gravity works when an apple falls to Earth, are you going to say &quot;Nah, that's baby stuff&quot; or do they somehow maintain that go-to source authority when it comes to areas of expertise. Be a great teacher!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the intervening time between now and when this system is filled with world-class physicists using this site in their daily work&amp;hellip; keep in mind that &lt;strong&gt;only a small percentage&lt;/strong&gt; of the content of this site is questions. What you can offer today&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;right now&amp;hellip; with the talent you have right here&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;are &lt;strong&gt;world-class, canonical &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to those questions&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: Boring Anectodote&amp;mdash;&lt;/strong&gt; When I first started using Stack Overflow, I had 25 years of expert programming experience when I asked my first question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/941584/byte-byte-int-why&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). Without getting too technical, I was asking about, quite literally, one of the most &lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt; concepts of a programming language. Surprisingly, the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; provided some deep, insightful responses I never expected. One was from a Microsoft senior developer on the team that designed the language; The other from someone who literally wrote the book on the subject. Unmatched, expert-level answers to a canonical question; That's the level of response we've come to expect from Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when someone asks &quot;why do apples fall &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt; to the earth,&quot; &lt;strong&gt;provide that world-class, canonical answer&lt;/strong&gt; which can be improved upon indefinitely. Every time someone searches for an answer to their question, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site should have THE canonical answer on that subject&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;that, and every subject in physics. When an expert happens across this site, they should say, &quot;Woah! These guys know what they are talking about. This is the site for me!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T00:23:31.983" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="80" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="652" CreationDate="2010-11-12T17:45:34.853" Score="12" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there are good tags and not-so-good tags, but this one in particular just irks me. Physics is not philosophy; philosophy is not physics, and if we have a &quot;philosophy&quot; tag on the site, it's going to motivate people to ask questions about abstract concepts that physics doesn't deal with. Like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/650/what-is-an-idea-in-terms-of-time-space-and-matter&quot;&gt;What is an &amp;quot;Idea&amp;quot; in terms of time space and matter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/philosophy&quot;&gt;list of questions tagged &lt;code&gt;[philosophy]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I don't think we really need this tag. Other than the one I linked above, I think the &lt;code&gt;[philosophy]&lt;/code&gt; questions aren't actually about philosophy and could have the tag removed. Some of those questions are about interpretation of physical results, so maybe we could have an &quot;interpretation&quot; tag, but I think we really need to push the message that philosophy itself is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T07:22:04.103" Title="Can we get rid of the &quot;philosophy&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="81" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-12T21:35:32.603" Score="7" ViewCount="563" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I am not too bothered about the level of questions &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; on this site so far, I am slightly disturbed by the lack of any quantitative questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existing range from high-school to undergraduate level, with a lot of 'enthusiasts' questions. They also tend to be very qualitative/overview-based, and either very narrow or in the odd case very wide-scoped questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder: where are the typical quantitative physics questions one might expect on a site like this? Exam questions, perhaps, or longer problem-solving based ones? Physics is a &lt;em&gt;quantitative science&lt;/em&gt; (has been for over 400 years), and as such mathematics is highly important with in. I have however visited this site daily for the last week or so and seen astonishingly few &quot;proper&quot; (quantitative or semi-quanitative) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else noticed this issue; does anyone share this view? If so, what can we do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2010-11-14T13:08:29.867" LastActivityDate="2010-11-14T13:08:29.867" Title="Quantitative Questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="82" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-13T03:14:38.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathoverflow has math.stackexchange to which to send people.   Maybe we could find and publicize a list of more didactic physics sites.   I think I will do this with &quot;What are some good didactic physics sites which are more appropriate for elementary misunderstandings?&quot;.   Any objections to putting this question on physics.stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I also enjoy thinking about naive questions which point out my own unstated assumptions.   I can see that simple ignorance will soon get tiring, however.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T03:14:38.653" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="83" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="81" CreationDate="2010-11-13T08:01:31.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm much more likely to be able to answer a quantitative question on my own than a qualitative question.  If I can't solve a problem I'm trying to work through, I usually can look up the solution online or in a book, or can put it in Mathematica, or can simulate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I need humans for is when I have a conceptual question that I'm not sure how to get at.  What would be a decent model for XXX phenomenon?  How can we give a clear operational definition of XXX concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fairly reasonable to have more of these conceptual questions than quantitative ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T08:01:31.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2010-11-13T10:40:24.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about using the tag &quot;soft question&quot;, as one does in math.stack exchange or mathoverflow?  It might be more precise and less aggrandizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T10:40:24.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-13T17:22:26.977" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is this site has become analogous to math.se rather than MathOverflow, and there is little hope of transforming it into a research level website. Most of the questions here seem to me to be either at the pop sci level (with correspondingly pop  sci level answers) or basic undergraduate physics. I don't think there is much hope of making this site attractive to researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution would then perhaps be to create a physics stack exchange which is research level only and strictly enforce this rule. Actually, I suspect a separate stackexchanges may be appropriate for research level in theoretical physics and experimental physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: TP research-only stack exchange proposal &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastEditorUserId="163" LastEditDate="2010-11-13T18:12:26.050" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T18:12:26.050" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="86" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-13T17:44:19.510" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how long I'll stick around this site. It's not analogous to MathOverflow, which has a remarkably high level of discourse. Still, this site could be useful for students, or people who have questions arising from popular books or TV shows. My worry, though, is that the average level of knowledge of the participants is quite low. People are accepting inferior answers to their questions, and in some cases better answers are getting voted down in favor of mistaken ones. In particular, just keeping up with all the questions about quantum mechanics and trying to explain the importance of decoherence for a correct understanding of what measurements are and how the classical world arises would take a significant amount of time, and if no one does it the answers will rapidly degenerate to the level of popular books (and even a lot of textbook accounts) that completely muddle the subject and make &quot;measurement&quot; out to be some mystical, poorly-understood, non-quantum process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T17:44:19.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="87" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-13T20:56:17.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I enjoy answering simple questions and teaching others, I joined physics.stackexchange.com hoping for 'Mathoverflow for physicists'. The proposal says clearly 'Beta Q&amp;amp;A site for active researchers, academics and students' - and we should cling to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of good textbooks, there is wikipedia*), there is a number of other places. When there is a simple question it is easy to give an answer (it suffices to have any academician or even a good undergraduate/high-school student). Elementary questions often are good, but should go somewhere else (another stackexchange?). However, there is no place when researchers in physics can ask and answer high-end questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*) Some articles on wikipedia are too complicated for the beginner? Then edit them. Its much more beneficial than answering a question which has been already answered a dozen times on different fora or usenet groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah - but you need to invite your labmates, friends from conferences, active professors, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="184" LastEditDate="2010-11-13T21:16:11.563" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T21:16:11.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="88" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2010-11-13T20:59:51.000" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It often helps to understand if one asks about technical details of, for example, quantum measurement or &quot;What is &gt;the very meaning&amp;lt; of a quantum measurement?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T20:59:51.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="89" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="81" CreationDate="2010-11-13T21:11:05.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually when you can formulate well a quantitative questions, then you can answer it as well. Of course there may be exceptions, but well, no one forbids to ask them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existence of a definitive answer should never be a criterium of asking a question in physics. It is not maths and the most fundamental thinks usually are such in which we do not even now if we are asking the right questions. Definite numerical answer is only guaranteed for some textbooks problems.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, sometimes quantative answers are natural, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/379/in-optics-how-does-the-vacuum-state-compare-to-thermal-radiation/446#446&quot;&gt;In optics, how does the vacuum state compare to thermal radiation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T21:11:05.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="90" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-13T22:48:31.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this site aims at emulating the success of Math Overflow and CS Theory (i.e. providing a research level Q&amp;amp;A site, as opposed to popular/undergrad level questions), it should be kept in mind that both sites from their very start:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) as a rule, discouraged too basic/popular questions and stayed focused on grad level and above&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) started with a &quot;seed&quot; core of dedicated users (in Math Overflow case, it was a group of grad students and researchers working in algebraic geometry and related fields); experts and &quot;big shots&quot; (Terry Tao etc.) were attracted very quickly (in CS Theory, almost from the first day of beta version!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for now, I see neither a clear policy as to the target level nor the seed group of dedicated users. Simply waiting for more users to get high quality material won't work (I think it's not possible to build a critical mass solely with &quot;casual users&quot;). Nobody will post an expert level question if he knows it's going to be swamped by stuff like basic mechanics problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="307" LastActivityDate="2010-11-13T22:48:31.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-14T02:49:15.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My position is somewhat intermediate.  I am not a research physicist; I'm applying to grad school now, and have only a general physics undergraduate knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, I tend to ask fairly basic questions, but ones that are not very simple or easy to answer.  These are attracting lots of bad answers (and some good ones).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A research-level site would be interesting to me, but only as an observer for the time being.  I would learn what sorts of things people are thinking about, but would not be able to participate in the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a &quot;pop-sci&quot; site is not very useful because there are too many uninformed responses for each good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm really hoping to find is an online environment to replace the one I had as an undergrad, where I could go talk to people at roughly the same level (other students) or higher level (TA's and professors) than myself, but with a focus on understanding the nuances in the more fundamental material I'm learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it sounds like neither of the ideas being tossed around - a high-level site or researchers or a low-level site for the general public - are a place that I completely fit in.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Cartaino's model, a site where experts still answer basic questions very well, is what I would like, but it looks like there are practical difficulties with implementing it because the most competent people are largely interested in research-level discussion only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2010-11-14T02:49:15.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2010-11-14T04:15:14.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Answers to the multiverse's most basic questions. And some trivial ones too.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sold on the word 'trivial' though, suggestions welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T10:10:40.527" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-14T04:15:14.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2010-11-14T08:21:17.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Don't panic! Now the force is with you!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy and StarWars combined :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T10:12:02.810" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-14T08:21:17.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="94" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-14T13:31:47.203" Score="21" ViewCount="838" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a lot of discussions about the level of the questions and the quality of the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that we have a core group of users, that are following Physics SE from a long time, and that this group would prefer to have a Physics SE closer to mathoverflow than to Math SE as it is now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have this &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;new proposal for a theoretical physics SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions is: what should we do now ? Could we try to move the center of mass of this site more on the &quot;research level&quot; side ? How could we do it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we close more questions ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have quite a high number of questions, so slowing things down (by closing question) is not a problem I think. In addition we still have time to modify the way things are going, we are still a the begining of the beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another action would be to change the definition of the site to clearly reflect the expected level: is it possible ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should give up now and consider the site &quot;dead&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's your opinion about that ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that &quot;research level&quot; is a bit too restrictive: as pointed by @Noldorin, questions related to (under)grad course are interesting as well, my idea is that such an undergrad student would not ask &quot;What is the most efficient way to destroy the universe?&quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are not research level but coming from an (under)grad course can really benefit from answers coming from real physics practitioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion: in any way the level, at this moment, is too low and we should try to restrict the range of questions, and maybe even more importantly up vote good answers (which is easier to do if the questions are more interesting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2010-11-14T19:23:11.747" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T02:26:53.987" Title="Level of questions: what do we do now ?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="95" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-11-14T15:06:58.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My intention in creating the other proposal was not to kill off this site. It seems reading through a lot of the definition phase stuff that there was an intention all along to allow questions at the amateur and undergrad levels. I don't have a problem with this, and it is certainly a worthy cause to help answer physics questions in general. As I see it, concerns about the quality of answers aside, this site seems to be heading towards becoming a physics version of math.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there seems to be (at least) two strong views held by different groups in the community. One group wants a physics version of MathOverflow, while the other wants a site where the scope and level is much more broadly defined. These two goals don't have to be mutually exclusive, but I do think they require separate SE sites. This current site has already fallen into the second role, whether that was intentional or not and I think it is unlikely that it can be changed. After all SE sites are run in a very democratic way, and are setup in such a way that a group within the community will find it very hard to change the direction of the site. That is why I proposed the TP site, to fill the gap left for a research level site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2010-11-14T15:06:58.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-11-14T18:40:37.373" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough reputation to post a comment, but I am very disappointed that not only are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24/does-leaning-banking-help-cause-turning-on-a-bike&quot;&gt;simple mechanics questions&lt;/a&gt; not getting good answers, but the good answers aren't getting many more votes than the bad answers. (For those who care, Tristan's answer to the linked question is the one which is most accurate.) If you don't do something to increase the level of discussion here, this site will be in danger of becoming useless. If good answers don't get more votes than bad answers, I think the site is in serious trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2010-11-14T18:40:37.373" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-11-15T04:34:30.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thought has been that increasing the level of the site is best done by &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; questions of an appropriate level. That way, newcomers will see examples of what kinds of questions we expect here and hopefully the expectation value of the question level will rise, without us having to close all that many of the more basic questions (which can still potentially generate good answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I certainly do agree that some questions we get should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I've been trying to put this into practice by asking questions which are representative of what I would like to see on the site, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/814/how-do-you-calculate-the-anomalous-precession-of-mercury&quot;&gt;How do you calculate the anomalous precession of Mercury?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/339/how-can-i-determine-transmission-reflection-coefficients-for-light&quot;&gt;How can I determine transmission/reflection coefficients for light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T00:16:11.873" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-11-15T07:00:08.747" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@ David Z - This is too long for a comment, which is why it looks like a question.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand what you are trying to doing by asking your question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/814/how-do-you-calculate-the-anomalous-precession-of-mercury&quot;&gt;How do you calculate the anomalous precession of Mercury?&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you saying that you want a lot of standard textbook references for a standard advanced undergraduate/basic graduate course in relativity?    There is no really current research oriented theory question about your question, is there?   I mean there might have been 40 years ago when Dicke was asking whether the same precession could have been caused by unmeasured solar oblateness, but not now.   Are you asking for references to experimental error bars?   Probably not.   It just seems made up and sort of hokey, or a question on the history of physics.   So why would a researcher be interested, except didactically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a current research oriented question along the same line might be asking about analytics related to gravitational recoil from black hole mergers, or recent evidence supporting GR in binary neutron star systems with very large precession, or whether precession is expected in the galactic center, or something else more modern, a question that requires a researcher to answer properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T07:00:08.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-15T10:17:24.857" Score="5" ViewCount="620" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;update&lt;/strong&gt; Our first four moderators have been appointed (in alphabetical order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/82/cedric-h&quot;&gt;Cedric H.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/124/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/13/noldorin&quot;&gt;Noldorin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! &lt;em&gt;Please respect their judgement but also don't hesitate to post praise and reprimand at meta!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57986/how-to-organize-a-formal-moderator-election-on-a-beta-se-site&quot;&gt;these guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, please nominate one user per post. Please take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/150/163&quot;&gt;math.SE's election&lt;/a&gt; for inspiration. You may nominate yourself or someone else, in the latter case you should make it CW so the nominee can edit in what the nomination should include: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a link to the parent-site profile (&lt;code&gt;#[username](http://https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/number&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a statement like &quot;I accept the nomination&quot; edited in by the nominee if not self-nominating&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an estimate of presence times&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the standing on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/76/97&quot;&gt;level of questions issue&lt;/a&gt; the nominee will defend with their power (e.g. immediate closing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an introduction to the nominee is appreciated as well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members who have declined moderator nomination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/74/mark-eichenlaub&quot;&gt;Mark Eichenlaub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/97/tobias-kienzler&quot; title=&quot;at least for now...&quot;&gt;Tobias Kienzler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2010-12-25T00:31:54.110" Title="Nominate and elect our temporary moderators" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="14" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-23T22:11:40.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2010-11-15T10:18:17.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is time for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/100/97&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T10:18:17.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-15T10:34:20.623" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would gladly nominate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/82/cedric-h&quot;&gt;Cedric H.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as a beta moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience Cedric has contributed a lot to Physics SE so far, with a steady good quality of answers (and questions). He has also been quite active on meta of course, which is definitely helpful. Importantly (as I hope others agree), he represents a level balance of views with all the debates/arguments going on about this site and certain questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About me:&lt;/strong&gt; I am an Engineering student (specialized in Physics / Engineering Physics) from Brussels, Belgium. I am now starting a graduate program on Accelerator Physics and I am starting a PhD at CERN in the field of Accelerator Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already spent some time of Physics SE and I would appreciate to continue this experience as a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now&quot;&gt;level of questions discussion&lt;/a&gt; I think I am in the &amp;quot;intermediate case&amp;quot;: I hope the level will soon be higher than it is now, but I don't think we should restrict question to be at a pure &amp;quot;research-level&amp;quot; (see the discussion on meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T14:50:39.623" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-15T13:04:36.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-15T10:41:35.690" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to nominate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/124/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Cedric, he has been actively contributing to this site from the beginning at a high quality. As a graduate student of physics, he represents precisely the sort of student we want to attract here (undergraduates being equally welcome I'd say). He's also shown a good attitude in response to questions and generally within the community, I'd like to think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;edit by David&lt;/em&gt;) Sure, I'll accept the nomination. I really want to see this site succeed, and being a moderator during the beta would allow me to help that process along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About me:&lt;/strong&gt; As mentioned above, I'm a graduate student in physics, specifically in my third year of the PhD program at Penn State University. I'm doing research in high-energy particle phenomenology (the BFKL kernel, if anyone cares about the specifics). I've been a member of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/member.php?u=180339&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt; for about a year and a half, which has certainly influenced my idea of how this site could work. I also have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsix.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; which nobody looks at ;-) where I occasionally post some physics-related musings. I also have a hobby interest in computer programming, and to that end I've been a semi-active participant in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/56541/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; and the other &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/users/2115&quot;&gt;original&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/users/2419&quot;&gt;trilogy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/56541/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;sites&lt;/a&gt;, so I have some idea of how the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to be awake at strange hours, usually after noon until some time in the wee hours of the morning local time. That puts me online from about 4:00 PM to 6:00 AM GMT, on average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the issue of the question level: I would like to see this site develop into a place where research-level questions are &lt;em&gt;welcome&lt;/em&gt;, and can hopefully have a decent chance of getting answered. But I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in favor of categorically excluding all questions below the graduate level, because I think if we try to do that, the site will fail. There are many questions about physics at the undergrad level that I would like to see this site address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now/97#97&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to one of the &amp;quot;level questions,&amp;quot; my preferred technique for controlling the level of the site is making sure that there are enough people &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; the kinds of questions we want, rather than closing large numbers of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T14:49:52.120" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-15T13:04:13.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-11-15T12:00:48.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I proposed this site my intention was to have a site for researchers, but also for the discussion of thought experiments and other things not related to their own field. These are questions also undergrads should be interested and be able to take part in and that was whom I meant with students. &quot;Basic&quot; questions where intended to go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4955/popular-natural-science?referrer=nwBIGRh-wRAN5QfMOt5KEg2&quot;&gt;Popular Natural Sciences&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is, pop-sci didn't take off at all, maybe being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76/level-of-questions/79#79&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino's answer&lt;/a&gt;. I didn't actually intend this site to become MO for physics, but also not &quot;only&quot; math.SE (personally, I like math.SE, but I sense some consider it not &quot;pure&quot; enough) but rather somewhere in between. If someone asks why a rainbow is coloured, either answer it professionally, or up-vote the correct answers, or skip that questions. I think first of all we need &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/100/97&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; to assist the community, but we also need everyone of us to actively help improving posts that have the potential to become good but just aren't well-posed right now. If questions are tagged and titled well, it should also be easy to skip questions of a level you don't like (at that time of the day that is...) and find the ones interesting / challenging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ask and answer questions of the level you desire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;vote on those you accept,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ignore those you consider wrong level but are still valid,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and vote to close the really bad ones or help improving them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T12:00:48.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-15T15:02:50.053" Score="21" ViewCount="1274" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among users of Physics SE there is a group of people who wants to have their 'Physicsoverflow', that is, a group oriented for research-level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is almost impossible to turn this SE into research level, for three main reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Physics SE was founded with purpose for general audience (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908?phase=definition&quot;&gt;definition phase of Physics SE&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple (but not stupid) questions in physics are important (I never tried to discourage asking or answering them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now there is only a tiny fraction of research-level questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is proposal of &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics SE&lt;/a&gt; with ambition to become 'physical Mathoverflow'. I like the idea very much, but with one (albeit strong) reservation: should it be restricted only to theoretical physics? I would much more like to participate in Physics Research SE, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most conferences I attended (in wave and quantum optics) had both theoretical and experimental lectures&amp;amp;posters and it was stimulating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When asking research-level questions both theoretical and experimental answer would be appreciated (at least, for me).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good experimentalist need to know theory. Physics is immanently connected to experiment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics - pure maths - experiment = applied maths without an application. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not afraid of abundance of experimentalists as it is somehow easier to ask theoretical question (&quot;what is wrong with my assumptions&quot; vs &quot;what is wrong with my experimental setup&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyway, most of the users will be interested only in some questions. Even a factor of two won't break anything (and you can filter experimental questions if you really want).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need people to join - I doubt if there are by now too many physicist for the one research-level SE group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do not know what percent of potential users of Theoretical Physics SE share similar attitude. Also, I think it is not the best to propose another SE without a proper consultation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now&quot;&gt;Level of questions: what do we do now?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76/level-of-questions&quot;&gt;Level of questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/what-to-put-in-the-faq-the-on-off-topic-section&quot;&gt;What to put in the FAQ (the “on-/off-topic” section)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics - Area 51 - Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (group proposal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.jfitzsimons.org/?p=218&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joe Fitzsimons' Blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main question are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who of you are interested in having general Physics Research SE rather than Theoretical Physics SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are on Physics SE any experimentalists wanting to ask&amp;amp;answer research-level questions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, should I propose Physics Research SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-06-10T21:26:39.120" Title="Where should research-level questions go? Theoretical Physics SE or Physics Research SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-11-15T15:22:39.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your questions, but also struggle with the precise name.  &quot;Theoretical/Experimental&quot;?  Maybe just, &quot;Research Level Physics SE&quot;?    The current proposal is too good to waste, however, so maybe just start by proposing a few good experimental questions there.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T15:22:39.253" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-11-15T15:51:02.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems important not to be afraid of this good development.   Math.Stackexchange continues to have many interesting questions and answers.   Two sites are pretty clearly needed, so that there is someplace to refer the general questions.   It's just that in this case the general site was founded first.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T15:51:02.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-11-15T15:58:08.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggested the focus of the proposed site be on theory simply because when you combine both theory and experiment I suspect you get a field so broad that we would struggle to get consistently good answers. I would suggest that if you want to have an experimental physics site, that someone propose it, and at a later stage it is possible that the two sites would decide to merge (a process which has been done before on SE). However, for the moment I would suggest maintaining the restriction to questions with a theoretical bent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T15:58:08.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-11-15T18:25:48.577" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think another site is a bad idea, but I still don't understand why you guys do not ask what you consider &quot;appropriate level&quot; on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this thing is based on the assumption that things cannot be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the proposal is again based on another assumption: theory + experiment is too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what will be the next attempt to divide the community even more ? Apparently PSE spent a very long time before the beta, maybe we should try to understand why before proposing one or two more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2010-11-15T18:25:48.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-15T21:28:13.873" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be very pleased to vote for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/13/noldorin&quot;&gt;Noldorin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as a beta moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I saw since the private beta, Noldorin does have a useful knowledge of physics for this community. I think as a moderator he would be helpful as he can help make this SE site a very good high level physics site, with a good balance between the proverbial &amp;quot;research-level&amp;quot; and more basic aspects of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I say in the comments, I am grateful to receive this nomination, and will accept for the reason that I want to see this website and community develop and mature into something praiseworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit about myself: I'm currently an undergraduate (3rd year) student of (theoretical) physics in London, England. My knowledge is certainly no higher than intermediate in terms of the scope of users here (ranging from pre-college to research), though I am quite interested in a few fields in particular. I would like to think I represent well an questioning undergraduate type, and could thus be of general help here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to help get this site up to a solid undergraduate to graduate level at its core, and build a strong user base of skilled and active physicists/students. Both answering questions and communicating a &amp;quot;vision&amp;quot; for the site are important over the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T16:25:25.543" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-15T23:29:50.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-16T00:28:05.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;update: Due to other duties I must for now decline the nomination lacking the time for regular visits. I will still try my best at supporting the community by voting etc when I have the time, but it may be irregular from now on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/97/tobias-kienzler&quot;&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Tobias Kienzler&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(declined)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has done a lot of work to push this place through Area51 and has an impressive &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/146482/tobias-kienzler&quot;&gt;Meta.SO record&lt;/a&gt; (one should recall that moderatorship is mainly administrative work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About me: I started writing my PhD-thesis this year, the subject is Metamaterials based on colloidal particles. Before that I wrote my &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diplom&lt;/a&gt; thesis on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization_group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Renormalization flow equation&lt;/a&gt; of the three-dimensional &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wess-Zumino_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wess-Zumino model&lt;/a&gt; (-&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supersymmetry&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Cedric and David I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now/104#104&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt; the intermediate level, that is, we should encourage research related questions but not just close everything else as &amp;quot;too basic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm usually actively here on workdays around 8-9 am GMT but also pass by every few hours (say, during European daylight) on an irregular basis, so flags would get attention then, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt; in case you ever need to do a dimensional reduction of a model with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Majorana fermions&lt;/a&gt; from 3+1 to 3+0, use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_matrices#Weyl_basis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Weyl basis&lt;/a&gt;, it'll save you some work!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-12-14T04:10:00.013" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-16T01:17:46.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-16T02:14:19.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/56&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;KennyTM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, if he's interested in the position. He's been fairly active, more so than his current site reputation would suggest, in comments and making minor edits to posts on the main site. Also he is a well-established SO user so he's certainly familiar with the system and the use of the 10k tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T02:14:19.947" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-17T18:18:20.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-11-16T10:24:07.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing you should always keep in mind: Jeff et al. might at one point decide that one physics.SE is enough, so you shouldn't assume PR.SE will definitely be there one day. But if there will be one, there will almost certainly be a question migration path to here and vice versa. So why not ask research level questions here and &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; PR.SE starts have them migrated or ask again? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T10:24:07.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-11-16T11:08:51.440" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is a good idea; SE site needs mass (both in users and questions/answers) to be self-sustained; without it, it would become a chat place for a few people. Also many sites on a similar topic makes a migration hell and some inconvenience in using few sites at a time.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, I don't see a reason why mixing trivial and complex questions may be harmful; SO is doing very well with both questions about merging strings in JS and optimizing Erlang code. Not to mention that sometimes it is harder to explain something plain than to cite something complex.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Broad scope is also not a problem; first of all one can always use tags to filter questions, second mixing fields tend to a creation of novel views on a problem. CV evolved from Q&amp;amp;A for statistics to Q&amp;amp;A for statistics, data mining, machine learning, visulisation and data-driven computing and nothing bad happened, even more, some communities stuck in Area started avid activity there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T11:08:51.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-16T11:22:34.803" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone seems to set Mathoverflow/math.SE as a base example but this is not the whole story; for instance on CrossValidated.com we have both popular and research level questions and both classes gets their answers. Indeed, there wasn't even a discussion about question level.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Same holds for GIS and to some extent for E&amp;amp;R, not to mention StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T11:22:34.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-16T14:33:36.043" Score="9" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as we don't have many hi-rep users, it is useful to have a place with list of candidates to close; at least it worked well on other betas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a link to the candidate for closure in the top answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explanation of why it needs closing is optional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete it from the answer if you see that the question is closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2012-04-01T12:09:44.050" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T04:41:17.170" Title="What questions should be considered to close by 3000+ users?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2012-04-01T12:10:13.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14" CreationDate="2010-11-16T15:35:41.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;People often ask general questions without even bothering to search Wikipedia (or Google). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be firmly discouraged (voting down/closing + writing this rule in FAQ) as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It reduces level of this SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is simply wasting time of others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When question is general it is difficult to choose the right level and focus on the part of the asker's interest. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, when someone finds Wikipedia article vague/complicated/not-existent or points to a specific part which (s)he does not understand - the question is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="184" LastEditDate="2010-11-16T16:06:29.713" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T16:06:29.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-16T17:22:24.250" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/127/i-didnt-get-my-100-starting-reputation-from-associating-this-account-to-my-other&quot;&gt;I didn&amp;#39;t get my 100 starting reputation from associating this account to my other accounts.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, and atleast one other (JCL), didn't get the +100 reputation for associating other stackexchange accounts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/923/i-didnt-get-my-100-starting-reputation-from-associating-this-account-to-my-other/926#926&quot;&gt;This thread&lt;/a&gt; in the main forum was created about it, because we weren't able to ask this question on meta in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I fixed my problem by unlinking and relinking the accounts, like people were advising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="488" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Not getting 100 rep for associating accounts" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2010-11-19T19:15:52.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="122" CreationDate="2010-11-16T17:38:14.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is SE-wide bug; if you need this +100 now, create account on any other SE site, this should make the transfer here. Yet this will be fixed, hopefully soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70147/account-association-not-giving-100/70149#70149&quot;&gt;Account association not giving +100&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T19:10:27.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-16T16:16:16.197" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thus, I can't ask this question in meta, since it takes at least 5 reputation. Can a mod transfer this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="487" OwnerDisplayName="JCL" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2010-11-19T19:16:03.693" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T19:16:03.693" Title="I didn't get my 100 starting reputation from associating this account to my other accounts." Tags="|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2010-11-16T16:33:49.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the same problem, so I can't put this as a comment on this question. Regardless of if I need the reputation, it's a bug, so I just wanted to mention I experienced it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; - I've got 6 rep now, so I cross-posted a question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/122/not-getting-100-rep-for-associating-accounts&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt; that links here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; - xbones: I've got accounts at SO,SU,SF,Ubuntu,Gaming,DIY and others. For each of them, I've always gotten the +100 at the new site I'm using, not the site I'm linking to. If this has changed, then it's changed, but I hadn't heard anything about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="488" OwnerDisplayName="Steve Armstrong" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T19:24:55.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2010-11-16T17:41:19.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I made an account here, I got 100 rep at Stack Overflow, not here. You get the 'linking' rep at the other stack exchange website you're a part of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just happened to visit Physics.stackexchange again and this time, I got a notification that I got +100 for linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" OwnerDisplayName="xbonez" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2010-11-16T19:31:19.273" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T19:31:19.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2010-11-16T20:27:51.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the same problem. I fixed it by unlinking and then linking my profile a second time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T20:27:51.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2010-11-16T20:39:33.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that there are two kinds of physicists, the ones that love the subject formula-wise, and the ones that love the subject meaning-wise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do believe that good physics teachers are more of the second sort. Probably researchers (especially theoretical ones) are more of the first kind. Both do physics and should be represented in this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are arguably many divulgative physics books (Brief history of time, etc.), which, although they are &quot;soft-physics&quot; they propose argumentations and discussions which are undoubtedly physical - assertions can be proven or disproven through experiment - and this makes these kinds of topics very different from abstract philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question in your example is a bad question for many reasons, but it does have a very clear physical answer. Information is related to physics in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T20:39:33.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2010-11-16T20:48:17.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source community has this problem ages ago. They have written comprehensive &lt;a href=&quot;http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;how to ask question guides&lt;/a&gt;. At first I would redirect poor questions to this link, which are in agreement with my opinions. But then I gave it another reading and found that I could revise it to make it less computer directed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EDv67qWqJzeogBzH8gqwtW2YaLCJVqzfd3itiUACIn0/edit?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is my initial effort, I will be slowly working on it. Some endorsement or contribution from the community would be very welcome so it show more legitimacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I put about the effort in the question as I saw the asker did on making his question. I would probably put more if I find the question interesting and is not answered elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="62" LastEditDate="2010-11-16T20:58:55.190" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T20:58:55.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2010-11-17T09:39:23.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should, because it tends to be a meta-tag (not in the meaning it is, but users use and will use it as so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T09:39:23.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-17T12:47:10.107" Score="7" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a bit of time using the site I can see people using lots of nice equations. But there's nothing in the &quot;How to format&quot; help box (or in the &quot;full reference &gt;&gt;&quot; link) saying how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got a couple of comments like &quot;use $$ around your equations&amp;quot; but that didn&amp;#39;t actually work. I guess I had the format slightly off or something. I&amp;#39;ve not used LaTeX before either so didn&amp;#39;t naturally know what to do.&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;I think it would be a great help (especially for newbies) to have a single line in the &amp;quot;How to format&amp;quot; section saying something like &amp;quot;Enter formulas like this &amp;#39;$$ \pi $$' - see  for details of how to do this better&quot; with a link to a LaTeX reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the current feature isn't very 'discoverable' unless you already know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="474" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T21:54:00.560" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T21:54:00.560" Title="Is it possible to explain how to use LaTeX in questions / answers in the &quot;How to format&quot; help box?" Tags="|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="136" CreationDate="2010-11-17T13:55:09.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is already posted on Meta.SO by KennyTM, so all we can do is wait (or upvote the post on meta): &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68388/there-should-be-universal-latex-mathjax-guide-for-sites-supporting-it&quot;&gt;There should be universal LaTeX/MathJax guide for sites supporting it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T13:55:09.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-17T17:33:11.500" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was disappointed that my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/386/how-do-i-compute-the-eigenfunctions-of-the-fourier-transform-closed&quot;&gt;question about eigenfunctions of the fourier transform&lt;/a&gt; was closed so quickly.  Given the ubiquity of the Fourier transform in physics, it seems like an excessively narrow view of &quot;physics&quot; to consider the question off-topic.  Or should we direct all 'math methods' questions to math.SE?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T02:34:01.953" Title="Mathematical methods?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2010-11-17T18:17:43.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put, the Fourier transform itself is math, and there is already a site for math questions. The fact that it is widely used in physics doesn't necessarily make it anything more than pure math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T18:17:43.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2010-11-17T19:10:23.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this site can benefit itself by allowing questions about mathematics which are directly related to physics. However, in the case of that particular question you're asking, it is a completely mathematical procedure in which the particular physics is not important to solve your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2010-11-18T02:34:01.953" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T02:34:01.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-17T21:55:21.097" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to nominate myself,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a creative mixture of a physicist, computer scientist and molecular biologist. In the field of physics I'm mainly messing with CFD, currently quantum turbulence, but also with geophysics and molecular dynamics. I work for &lt;a href=&quot;http://icm.edu.pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ICM&lt;/a&gt;, a hybrid of HPC centre and all-computational-sciences institute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably my biggest advantage and disadvantage is that I'm a veteran moderator of &lt;a href=&quot;http://crossvalidated.com&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt;; I know how things work but I don't want to steal anyone's chance for a moderating adventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a compulsory editor (beware, redundant spaces) and retagger, yet I think closing should be done by community and it is better to let things evolve and converge organically rather then make flame discussions about forcing some overcomplex policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I live in the CET zone, yet as most academics I work/sleep in random hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T21:55:21.097" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-17T21:55:37.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-11-18T02:26:53.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I am rather new to the site, I already took quite a liking to it. Nevertheless, the level is certainly low. Personally, I'd like to see the main target of the site being standard university physics courses level (i.e. undergradutate/graduate) which would put it somewhere between MO and math.SE (as Tobias suggests) instead of somewhere between high school and undergraduate (which is IMHO where math.SE is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this certainly doesn't mean that I want to prohibit other kinds of questions. But some level should certainly be enforced (by moderators and the core group of users) in order to get a reasonable mean and variance for the distribution of the level of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, all of this was written with an implicit assumption that TP.SE takes off and become a second MO. If you think this is an unreasonable assumption and also want to have a place for some research then obviously standards for physics.SE would have to be set a lot higher. In particular, all undergrad-level questions and below should be closed immediately (and this is probably an unreasonable request). Also graduate-level and research-level question should have to be asked a lot (but here the question is: who will ask them?; and more importantly: who will answer them?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as the previous doesn't appear to be very realistic, the first paragraph then seems a next best goal with respect to quality. Also, I think this goal is certainly attainable. In particular, I will start asking some graduate-level questions that have been interesting me lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note regarding what Peter Shor was saying about the concept of good/bad answers not really working&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this might be a problem of communication. If there is an apparently wrong answer, don't just vote but &lt;strong&gt;leave a comment&lt;/strong&gt; that says so. It may be clear to someone knowledgeable that the answer is wrong but other people might not see this (except as a downvote which can be lost if the question has a few upvotes already anyway). With the comment present, this can be resolved very quickly and it also gives a hint to others to be cautious around the answer. In the same spirit &lt;strong&gt;leave a comment&lt;/strong&gt; letting the others know that some answer is good. I know this is not really democratic but this site has to be built by a core of knowledgeable users. Their votes must count more than votes of someone who knows next to nothing about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second thing I noticed is that OPs don't really care about accepting good answers. But why don't they accept it? Was it (in their opinion) not all that good and/or didn't they understand something? Well, then they should obviously &lt;strong&gt;leave a comment&lt;/strong&gt; addressing the issue. Or do they think that no answer to their question is even coming close? Well, then they should &lt;strong&gt;update the question so that everyone can see what's in their head&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, there must always appear an answer that is good enough to be accepted (given that the community knows enough about the topic and the question doesn't turn out to be an open problem; both of these conditions are usually satisfied). But if OP neither accepts an answer nor communicates then I take this as a complete ignorance of someone's work (especially when the answer is good). Why should anyone bother answering them? More importantly: why did the OP ask the question in the first place if they don't really care about getting an answer? This behavior appears quite worrisome to me. &lt;em&gt;And no, I am not talking about not getting 15 pts of rep, if anyone asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T02:26:53.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2010-11-19T01:23:31.183" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this idea. How about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/try-this-at-home&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;try-this-at-home&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;try-this-at-home&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the assumption that such experiments are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reasonably safe, or at least have very obvious risks with straight forward mitigating strategies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Require mostly equipment that is easily obtained (with perhaps one or two more specialized tools)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Require limited---and clear---analysis of the results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2010-11-19T03:39:39.163" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T03:39:39.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-19T13:56:01.470" Score="4" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do we deal with wording that is wrong or ambiguous?&#xA;Particularly when the mistake is a very common one, or a widely miss-understood one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question on water in a vacuum, someone said it would boil, when really it would evaporate. These two words mean different things in physics, but as a common miss-conception they are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we deal with this / correct it in a way that doesn't offend the people involve, but also doesn't perpetuate these miss-conceptions further? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T22:36:33.410" Title="How to deal with ambiguous / wrong wording in questions and answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="150" CreationDate="2010-11-19T17:07:35.520" Score="4" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: reseach-level + particle-physics + quantum-field-theory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2010-11-22T08:16:24.307" LastActivityDate="2010-11-22T08:16:24.307" Title="Is it possible to select questions by two or more tags at once?" Tags="|support|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="149" CreationDate="2010-11-19T17:42:35.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can search for &quot; [research-level] [particle-physics] [quantum-field-theory] &quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/particle-physics+quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;[particle-physics] [quantum-mechanics]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T17:42:35.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="148" CreationDate="2010-11-19T18:29:13.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just edit. SE policy is that users are encouraged to improve posts, also by other users -- this is this wiki element mentioned in about page. Everyone is warned by FAQ that their posts can be edited, so there is no problem in offending anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that currently only &lt;strike&gt;3&lt;/strike&gt; 4 (congrats, j.c.) people can edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2010-11-19T22:36:33.410" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T22:36:33.410" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="148" CreationDate="2010-11-19T21:38:17.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I finished writing this without answering the question. &quot;MBQ&quot; makes a point I have to agree with. Editing, if done properly, can only help the site. I remember poor questions are improved by editors all the time on Stack Overflow. Additionally, imagine the distraction of correcting and discussing these items in the comments below the question or an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would like to include (correcting into) proper, understandable English&lt;/strong&gt; under &quot;wrong wording&quot; as well. I see too, too many questions on SO, Pr, and other sites that are not even phrased as questions, or simply need revision. The question headings are the face of the site, and a low standard reflects poorly on the site as a whole (and looks unprofessional, not that we are &quot;professionals&quot;, but we should strive for a high standard on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As for the moderator problem:&lt;/strong&gt; I have suggested having &quot;voting drives&quot; where you can pledge, say, 3 votes per day or 10 per week (to me!), in exchange for special prizes or privileges (to be determined)! I was inspired by politicians and a local radio program. (A classical radio station was encouraging &quot;pledges&quot; in exchange for membership benefits and such). Wikipedia does this, but without direct benefits to the donors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastEditorUserId="121" LastEditDate="2010-11-19T22:10:28.520" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T22:10:28.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-22T03:35:10.400" Score="22" ViewCount="745" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been meaning to ask about the timeline of discovery of a certain physical phenomenon on the main site, but I thought I should probably ask a more general question here on meta to clear the air:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would questions on the history of physics be okay to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That is, presuming of course that the questioner has already looked at Wikipedia and other places, and needs further clarification/explanation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user172" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T19:58:37.463" Title="Are history of physics questions allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2010-11-22T06:11:06.867" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm... well, physics certainly does have a history, and it's useful to know something about that history, but as a rule, physicists tend not to care about it in the sense that a historian would. That is, the details of &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; certain experiments were performed or when certain papers were published wind up being less important than the methodology and results of the experiments/papers themselves. So a question that just asks about the dates when certain things happened, or the order in which they happened, is probably off-topic here, but asking about the actual physics work that has been done in a particular area should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide an example (not the greatest), asking &quot;What events constitute the November Revolution?&quot; is not as good of a question as &quot;How did the experiment that discovered the $J/\psi$ meson work?&quot; (Of course both of these are well documented on Wikipedia and elsewhere.) Or, &quot;When was WMAP first proposed?&quot; is not as good as &quot;What made WMAP so much better than previous CMB probes?&quot; (although that last one may actually be more engineering than physics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it's sort of hard to tell in general. If you wanted a yes-or-no type answer, I'd say just ask the question, maybe with a link to this thread, and we'll see if it gets closed. (I promise not to downvote)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="34382" LastEditDate="2014-12-25T19:58:37.463" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T19:58:37.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2010-11-22T19:05:21.267" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that questions like &lt;em&gt;&quot;What were some early explanations of [phenomena], and why were they discarded in favor of [later theory]?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; are sufficiently focused on physics to be considered. Though there is some risk that the topic will be too broad to be effectively addressed in the Q&amp;amp;A format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less certain about questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the source of the appellation &lt;em&gt;&quot;barn&quot;&lt;/em&gt; for the unit of nuclear cross-section?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the significance and meaning of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Who ordered that?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it true that [Big Name] and [Famous Personality] had a bet about [Theory]? Who took which side? Who won?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question has little physics content, but they are part of the culture of our discipline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2010-11-22T19:05:21.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-25T14:28:03.803" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wonder whether numerical solution to structural dynamic question belongs here, or belongs to Math SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of such a question would be: What is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fs.cvut.cz/en/u2052/node113.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the stability of Newmark numerical method when applied to transient problems&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="605" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2010-11-25T17:58:05.023" LastActivityDate="2010-11-25T22:40:32.620" Title="Structural Dynamics Numerical Method Question: Does it Belong here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="166" CreationDate="2010-11-25T16:04:12.330" Score="7" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does mathematical physics questions belong here, or on math?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, for example, I wish to ask about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Hawking_singularity_theorems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems&lt;/a&gt;-- basically they are just the theorems and the solutions of Einstein gravitational field equations. Or I wish to ask about the existence and smoothness of navier-stokes equation ( talking about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/navierstokes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;clay institutes's millennium prize problem&lt;/a&gt;). Should I post the question here, or on Math SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="605" LastEditorUserId="605" LastEditDate="2010-11-26T04:09:47.140" LastActivityDate="2010-12-03T23:05:54.803" Title="Mathematical Physics: Does it Belong here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="164" CreationDate="2010-11-25T17:53:17.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question requires any physical insight/understanding, then you are best off posting it here I think. It is more appropriate and you will probably get higher quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, the question is purely relating to manipulating and solving complex equations that happen to &lt;em&gt;appear&lt;/em&gt; in physics, then Math StackExchange (or MathOverflow even) may be the better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2010-11-25T20:17:51.020" LastActivityDate="2010-11-25T20:17:51.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2010-11-25T22:40:32.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try it; since all numerics proposals are stuck in Area51, we could host some questions like this here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-11-25T22:40:32.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-26T16:41:02.033" Score="1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can help distinguish questions about specific problems and theoretical physics from &quot;practical&quot; ones that tend to generate interest in people that are less interested in science and math. I am not studying physics but I would love to follow these types of questions that answer how things work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible questions that fall in this category:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; How does [insert musical instrument of choice] work?&#xA;&lt;li&gt; Why do rainbows form?&#xA;&lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1326/why-do-earphone-pieces-repel-each-other-when-music-is-on&quot;&gt;Why do earphone pieces repel each other when music is on?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; Why can't I put metal in the microwave?&#xA;&lt;li&gt; How do radar guns work?&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's these types of questions that make Physics so interesting to me. A tag would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should the tag be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-03-27T06:53:29.087" Title="What tag should we use to indicate &quot;how does X work?&quot; ?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2010-11-26T16:56:40.313" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest &quot;what-makes-it-tick&quot;. Kind of long though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-11-26T16:56:40.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2010-11-26T17:33:17.900" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a meta tag, so it shouldn't be used at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-11-26T17:33:17.900" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2010-11-26T22:46:11.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not &quot;how does that work ?&quot;, taken straight from your question ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373" LastActivityDate="2010-11-26T22:46:11.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2010-11-28T11:22:51.607" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest using &quot;classical-physics&quot; when appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2010-11-28T11:22:51.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-28T14:32:53.313" Score="19" ViewCount="934" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post here tag synonym proposals for voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: what tags should by synonyms of &quot;quantum-mechanics&quot;? See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4007/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post can also be used to suggest minor changes to a tag, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4677/2451&quot;&gt;pluralization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the format &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/write-here-synonym&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;write-here-synonym&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;write-here-synonym&lt;/a&gt;→&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/write-here-master&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;write-here-master&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;write-here-master&lt;/a&gt; in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Copy-pasteable template: &lt;code&gt;[tag:write-here-synonym]→[tag:write-here-master]&lt;/code&gt; .)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Before creating a new answer, please go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/write-here-master/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/write-here-master/synonyms&lt;/a&gt; (where the write-here-master part of the URL is appropriately replaced) and check that your tag synonym has not already been proposed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it is recommended to only suggest a tag synonym if the tag is used at least twice. (Tags that are only used once will expire automatically by themselves after some time.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T00:14:04.973" Title="Tag synonyms for voting" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-27T10:40:11.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-11-28T21:36:47.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/66/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he's interested in accepting position. His reputation and answers,(among others of course) are what keep me coming back to the site everyday to learn, to be awe-inspired.  :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-11-28T21:36:47.807" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-11-28T21:36:47.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-28T21:01:08.943" Score="3" ViewCount="2241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was really disappointed to see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4964/chemistry&quot;&gt;chemistry&lt;/a&gt; site on area51 having just 32 followers compared to roughly 700 for &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;physics.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; and 3.5K+ on &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;math.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;Isn't chemistry also &quot;up there&quot; among the top?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought I'd raise this as an awareness question to drive the chemistry site into beta. Hoping it does not get down voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="619" OwnerDisplayName="conqenator" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2010-11-28T23:15:31.093" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T11:34:23.560" Title="Is chemistry an abstracted subset of physics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="178" CreationDate="2010-11-29T01:27:29.853" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is close-minded to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is just a subset of Medicine is just a subset of Biology is just a subset of Chemistry is just a subset of Physics is just applied Mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sure, all chemical reactions ultimately break down to quantum mechanics and (quantum) thermodynamics. But is this a helpful view? I strongly disagree. When Chemists try to figure something out, I doubt that they start from the full Schrödinger equation for N electrons and M nuclei. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, Chemistry is on another plane w.r.t complexity, and hence an entire new set of phenomena &lt;em&gt;emerge&lt;/em&gt;. If you're interested in a better discussion of this, read the very famous essay &quot;More is different&quot; by P.A.W. Anderson. You should have no problem finding it using Google Scholar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="661" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T01:27:29.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="178" CreationDate="2010-11-30T07:32:50.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that chemistry is merely less &lt;em&gt;glamourous&lt;/em&gt; than physics and biology, which are more open fields - physics &quot;claiming&quot; to aim to explain reality and biology having the &quot;claim&quot; to try to explain life and evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T07:32:50.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-02T20:45:48.683" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wiki article on interpretation of quantum mechanics discusses 16 different interpretations. It is a subject that probably will continue to come up among users. And I personally think that the question itself is legitimate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it is linked to so many vague and confusing opinions that the question often raises irritation, also it may become boring, because everything has already been said many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it perhaps an idea to create one community wiki question for this subject - and refer other questions to it?&#xA;E.g. What interpretation of quantum mechanics - or aspect of it - do you (dis)like the most and why? Please give arguments but keep your statement and arguments short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastActivityDate="2010-12-02T21:15:01.963" Title="Interpretation of quantum mechanics" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2010-12-02T21:15:01.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interpretation of quantum mechanics is not necessarily philosophical in nature. There are great many physical and mathematical questions about interpretations (obvious ones are: which interpretations are physical and which are mathematically consistent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's true many more are just layman, crackpot and philosophical questions that have nothing to do with science. So I think one should decide on a case-by-case basis. Here is my (quite non-exhaustive) list of good and bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what interpretation is measurement &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; explained (as opposed to not cared about as in &lt;em&gt;shut up and calculate!&lt;/em&gt; approach)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is measurement realized in the Consistent Histories framework?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the physical implications of EPR paradox?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the resolution of Schroedinger's cat paradox in Many-Worlds interpretation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is the border between classical and quantum description and how does decoherence address this question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad questions (I can't really think of many but I am sure there  are lots of them out there):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which interpretation makes QM easy to understand?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is QM so hard?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is nature not deterministic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-02T21:15:01.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-03T14:42:52.540" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current system is to add an answer to  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117/what-questions-should-be-considered-to-close-by-500-users&quot;&gt;What questions should be considered to close by 500+ users?&lt;/a&gt; for question to be closed, but it is not obvious what to do when the question are closed. The closed questions are then mixed with questions to be closed, which is impractical. Should we delete the closed questions ? Add another &quot;community wiki&quot; answer recording all closed questions ?  Use another system ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2010-12-03T14:57:26.753" Title="How to deal with closed questions and questions to be closed ?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="188" CreationDate="2010-12-03T14:57:26.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or maybe another possibility might be to forget about this ad-hoc system altogether, as there are now about 25 500+ users and many others are close to 500. I suppose this is enough to make the voting system work on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd suggest to start a new CW meta-question that would only be for users that don't yet have 500 rep. Because if you have 500 rep already you don't have to post about bad questions; just go ahead and vote to close directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although right now I thought about another related matter: cleanup of old questions. Probably another CW meta-question should be started for this. The rationale here being of getting attention of all the community to close old questions that went unnoticed and are unlikely to be spotted by enough people to close them anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-03T14:57:26.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="164" CreationDate="2010-12-03T23:05:54.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would mostly depend on the field of the person asking the question. If it is a physics student they may want a more &quot;physics-y&quot; answer. If it is a math student maybe they want the insight of the Physics.SE community. Essentially, it should be asked wherever the OP decides to ask it. Maybe someone could suggest they try their hand at asking on MSE or MO if they are of the opinion they would get a better answer there. In general, I think each separate community will provide different insight, so why not allow it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2010-12-03T23:05:54.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-04T07:24:35.260" Score="3" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading this question - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/961/why-is-the-nucleus-of-an-iron-atom-so-stable&quot;&gt;Why is the nucleus of an Iron atom so stable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two good answers. One explains in words, in a way that might be satisfying to those who have been wondering and come upon the question.  The other shows the math in enough detail that one can work the numbers and grind it out.  That too would be of interest to some who come upon the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter which kind of answer the OP sought; the value of a SE site like this is answering questions of visitors who come along after and find it's already been asked.    Some visitors will seek qualitative word answers, just wanting to know the essential point and are perhaps not themselves physicsts,  while other visitors will be hungry for the serious math .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just fantasizing... Could both of these good answers get the hallowed green checkmark? Or different colored checkmarks, say blue for the best mathematically detailed answer and orange for the best qualitative words only question?  Would that make sense for more than just a few questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T11:11:09.853" Title="Best Qualitative Answer vs. Best Mathematical Answer - Choose Both?" Tags="|feature-request|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2010-12-04T08:30:23.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I highly doubt that the SE people would change their software to allow us to mark two accepted answers, and in any case, I don't think it'd really be that good of an idea in general. It'd probably be more likely to confuse a lot of people (the &quot;non-regulars&quot;) than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And besides, generally the best answer possible for a question includes both elements: qualitative explanation for people who want the big picture, as well as a calculation (or references to one) for people who want to go through the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-04T08:30:23.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-04T10:58:54.983" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, is there a way to insert line-breaks into a comment? This is often frustrating me because the comments are sometimes quite unreadable without line-breaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be also nice if [Enter] didn't submit the comment; this still surprises me sometimes and makes me add unfinished comment. &lt;em&gt;(I don't believe it can be changed though).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, is there some nice FAQ or other resource where one can learn everything about the site's user interface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Some questions about the site's user interface." Tags="|support|user-interface|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2010-12-04T16:08:46.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, is there a way to insert line-breaks into a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No there isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be also nice if [Enter] didn't submit the comment; this still surprises me sometimes and makes me add unfinished comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63644/pressing-enter-in-comment-box-unexpectedly-submits-form&quot;&gt;Pressing Enter in comment box unexpectedly submits form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More generally, is there some nice FAQ or other resource where one can learn everything about the site's user interface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may ask a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;support&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt; question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2010-12-04T16:08:46.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2010-12-04T16:09:20.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the theory is that if a 'comment' is long enough and has enough structure to require paragraphs (i.e. line breaks), then it should really be answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I quite like that it just takes [Enter] to submit comments. This is a recent change in the user interface of this site, and makes comment writing a bit quicker, in the case where one leaves many short comments (as I often do). [Shift-Enter] still gives you a normal line-break (only visible in the editor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;the set of &lt;code&gt;faq&lt;/code&gt;-tagged questions on Meta StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; you may find quite helpful. These are generally large community-wiki style questions detailing various aspects of StackExchange sites, dating back to the early days of StackOverflow (but updated a lot since).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2010-12-04T16:09:20.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-04T16:14:03.460" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1307/sonic-boom-equivalent-for-speed-of-light-barrier&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sonic boom equivalent for speed of light barrier&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; seems to have provoked much debate in terms of whether this question is appropriate, in level and content, for this StackExchange site. Views seem to range from &quot;definitely yes&quot; to &quot;definitely no&quot;, with some advocating that it belongs on the pop. sci. SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I thought I'd gauge the community (in particular the more active members) on whether this question really belongs here. Depending on feedback, it could potentially remain open as is, locked, closed, or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts? Please cast your desired vote on the answer (and leave a comment with your brief explanation ideally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2010-12-05T00:38:48.547" Title="Does this question belong on this site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|content-level|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="197" CreationDate="2010-12-04T16:14:28.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, this question belongs here&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Up-vote if you agree, down-vote if you disagree. Please leave short explanation in either case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-12-04T16:14:28.357" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="197" CreationDate="2010-12-04T23:16:00.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The particular question in question is tricky. I was an early defender, but I am partially convinced by Daniel's arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Properly formed it is a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; if rather basic question, and xenon provided a perfectly good if rather basic answer. Unfortunately the question (especially the original text) is a little shaky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basically boils down to another crack at &lt;em&gt;&quot;What is the proper level of discourse on physics.se?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Coming with a largely Stack Overflow background (note that I did not participate in the definition and commitment phases) I just dove in to answer it (and found I'd been beaten to the punch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My recommendation&lt;/strong&gt; for pop-sci questions that get at real physics: &lt;strong&gt;edit the questions&lt;/strong&gt; to render it more sophisticated. NB: Don't render it into something that can't be answered without a lot of math, just strip off any Star Trekism and other pernicious pop-sci influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us free to clobber junk science questions without ruling that amateurs are not welcome in our midst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2010-12-05T00:38:48.547" LastActivityDate="2010-12-05T00:38:48.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2010-12-05T09:57:07.243" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've suggested &lt;em&gt;subatomic&lt;/em&gt; as a synonym for &lt;em&gt;particle-physics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/particle-physics/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/particle-physics/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2010-12-05T09:57:07.243" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-27T10:40:11.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-05T21:39:57.310" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having gained 1500 reputation, I didn't lose any time and created a tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/classical-mechanics/info&quot;&gt;classical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quickly found out that creating something useful isn't easy at all. Actually, I am not really sure what kind of information to include (there are some hints but I didn't really find them helpful).&#xA;So I'd like this question become a place for a discussion of general format of the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One suggestion per answer, please. &lt;em&gt;(Also I'd like to make this community wiki).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2010-12-05T23:37:20.797" Title="What to do with tag wikis?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="205" CreationDate="2010-12-05T23:31:48.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on what we do on Stack Overflow (where the individual tag wikis vary considerable):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First and foremost:&lt;/strong&gt; a description of what the tag means and what kinds of questions should be tagged that way (and what questions should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; if there is confusion with a closely related tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that it gets trickier, but consider &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;links to good introductory resources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;links to particularly good questions currently on the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;acknowledgment of any particularly controversial aspects of the subject (i.e. the quantum mechanics tag wiki should say something about the epistemological questions surrounding the subject and the existence of multiple interpretations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A (very!) brief history possibly listing the founding problems and or scientists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that might be particular to physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some notes about notation or conventions (i.e. particle physics generally uses &quot;natural&quot; units and relativists typically employ the sum convention, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currently outstanding problems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This physics is the underling principle that makes &amp;lt;spiffy everyday technology&amp;gt; work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2010-12-05T23:37:20.797" LastActivityDate="2010-12-05T23:37:20.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-07T17:21:58.697" Score="10" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I signed the petition and committed to participating in this website.  This pledge accounts for some of my involvement.  However, it seems clear from tracking the site statistics that Physics-Stack-Exchange is ill.  (A healthy sign would be exponential, or at least super-linear, growth.)  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guesses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Advertisement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quality.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nervousness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many working physicists know about the site?  Probably not many, and I believe the answer is tied in with #2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I understand that the community disfavors simply research-level questions.  However, without high-quality answers the site rambles through low-level questions with a high noise-to-signal ratio.  This state of affairs will not attract the attention of those who who can make the site better.  It's fun to ask about fans and cars and planes and sails, but modeling these things seriously to reveal deeper phenomena is formidable.  Instead, we get a mostly qualitative, hand-wavy argument about why things work.  That has value, but it is not academic physics.  (Maybe that's the goal?  If so, I [personally] would discontinue using the site after fulfilling my start-up commitment.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think some physicists &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know about the site but are unwilling to reveal their uncertainties and insecurities.  This may be a physics-culture thing or it may not.  There is some similar phenonmenon in Math-Overflow, but at least postdocs seem very open to the Web exchange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solutions?  I don't know.  You?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2010-12-17T19:50:24.230" Title="Is the site working?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2010-12-07T18:21:56.903" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you really sure that the state of affairs is so bad? What did you compare the site statistics with? Looking at other SE proposals it seems to me that this site is doing quite well for a site 30 days in beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, it will take some time to attract more knowledgeable people and maybe higher standards for questions should be probably encouraged (more onto this later), but I think on the whole, the site is fine. But if people like you (who are absolute top on this site, in my opinion) start to leave then the site obviously has a big problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, back to the level of questions. I think we have decided that the level should be higher. But apparently there are still lots of (or even most?) popular and high school level questions and we are doing nothing to stop that (I am not sure whether that's good or bad, just stating the obvious). But I guess if we would start to drastically close those questions many people would leave and although standards would be higher, there would be just few good physicists left and the site would collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a better approach (apart from starting a research level site like TP.SE) is to let these questions stay, let lots of people come to ask them and make the site popular. Because then also good physicist will discover the site (at least I believe so) and the level will slowly rise (hopefully). I honestly don't see any other way than this. In particular, I am not quite sure how to spread the word in a way that would attract established physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-07T18:21:56.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-09T02:58:24.080" Score="3" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1758/520&quot;&gt;help with coefficient of friction&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A basic physics 101 question, and a one-and-a-half step variety at that. As questions-that-students-have go there is nothing unusual about it, but there is little help that can be offered short of doing the problem for the student. I've offered a pointer in the comments, but how should the question treated on physics.se?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;// For amusement, check out the original tag...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T11:22:49.990" Title="Yet another &quot;What level?&quot; question. This time for physics 101 homework." Tags="|discussion|content-level|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="209" CreationDate="2010-12-09T10:38:40.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just going to post a question about this one myself but from a different perspective. &#xA;And I also have an answer how to treat this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, I would close it at once. Level of the site will never rise if we allow these questions here. I think high-school questions are fine as long as they are clever. But high-school (or lower) homework? &lt;strong&gt;No sir, thank you very much!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T10:38:40.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="209" CreationDate="2010-12-09T11:22:49.990" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908?phase=definition&quot;&gt;defintion phase&lt;/a&gt;'s most upvoted comment on what the level of this site should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;no question is too basic, but we won't do your homework&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll vote to close this question and every other one that simply asks &quot;how to insert these values I have into a formula - and which formula btw&quot;. Although in the latter case the OP should be asked to edit their question into a more useful &quot;which formula to use to ...&quot; which could then at least help other people visiting this site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T11:22:49.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-09T22:17:46.930" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1683/mechanics-around-a-rail-tank-wagon/&quot;&gt;Mechanics around a rail tank wagon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that when most answers have 30+ comments, it becomes very hard to follow what is going on or have a constructive discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my answer I have at the moment 86 comments...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better way of using the site in such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Too many comments on answers?" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2010-12-09T22:57:07.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are a lot of comments, only those highly upvoted show up at a first glance -- this of course make all comment conversations loose context. So, you can count that other people will upvote only relevant and valuable comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The better solution is to move discussions from comments to chat, but this may be hard to enforce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally the moderator can delete some comments in order to clean the view, but it doesn't seem common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2010-12-10T00:23:13.490" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T00:23:13.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2010-12-10T10:31:54.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, there is certainly a tiny amount of working physicist register here. Most of the registered user should be students. I guess there is only a quarter of them are graduate students and post-doc, maybe the same set of those 100 people committed in the TP.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rough estimate of all working physicist should be around 50k (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62.7557&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;number of physics author&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the employment&lt;/a&gt;). It is obvious that there is much room for improvements while it is comparing with the 800 people registered here. The grow of the registered user seems to be slowed down, so some form of advertisement may help this situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regard of the quality of questions, it should be fine if part of them are easier than the research level questions. Sometimes askers do want a deep answer for an easy question. You also need new questions to attract people coming back. It should be noticed that more questions itself is a good way to advertise because you can easily found the website in the google. I know the SO simply because it often appears in my search of programming topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For high quality questions, it is likely to be asked by knowledgeable people in the particular field. Hence, the number of high quality questions is always much less than the number of low quality questions. So, why don't you try to ask difficult questions here to attract them. It may surprise you that there is person that can answer those questions. Those questions may need weeks of reading and consulting your supervisor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no single good ways for physicists to ask questions in the web and this site has a good system. So, hopefully, it should attract them slowly if we can keep the current quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Regarding your last question, I have been surprised to see Peter Shor (shor algorithm of prime factorization) participating the discussion in the TCS.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;: It also seems that people rarely asking questions about papers, which should be count toward research level question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="562" LastEditorUserId="562" LastEditDate="2010-12-10T13:37:51.963" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T13:37:51.963" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2010-12-10T11:59:15.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43055/146482&quot;&gt;Greasemonkey script for displaying threaded comments&lt;/a&gt; to get a better overview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://unicorn.&amp;#252;-wie-geek.de/threaded2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alt text http://unicorn.&amp;#252;-wie-geek.de/threaded2.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You still have to click on &lt;code&gt;show more comments...&lt;/code&gt; if necessary, and the heuristic is of course not always perfect, but I like it. Other useful greasemonkey scripts can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3687/146482&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5188/146482&quot;&gt;that one&lt;/a&gt; at meta.SO, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3687/greasemonkey-script-ideas-best-of-stackoverflow-greasemonkey-implementations/25927#25927&quot;&gt;Show unread questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49704/double-intensity-shading-for-questions-with-1-interesting-tags/49724#49724&quot;&gt;Highlight which tag is the interesting one, plus different shading if more than one tag is interesting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/38600/146482&quot;&gt;Script to add “reply” links to comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T11:59:15.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-10T20:44:19.237" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/universe&quot;&gt;universe&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; tags you'll immediately notice that except for one or two of the questions the rest either has wrong tags, are closed or else are hugely down-voted (by the way, this is a good moment to take a look and vote to close some of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I wonder what's the best strategy to go about these tags? Personally I'd remove the &lt;em&gt;space&lt;/em&gt; tag completely (because space, in its most concrete meaning is either just a mathematical or a philosophical concept. No physics in that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;universe&lt;/em&gt;, I am inclined to let it stay (in connection with cosmology and astrophysics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you think we should do with them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T18:03:20.053" Title="What to do with 'universe' and 'space' tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2010-12-11T01:02:13.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a similar dilemma on Math.SE. I had asked a question about how the curvature of a manifold could affect the fundamental group, and I received two excellent answers. If it were possible to merge the two answers, I would gladly accept that one (one dealt with the case of positive curvature and the other negative curvature). I did pick a single answer because one of them answered more of the question I was thinking about than the other. It was more of the type of answer I was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not only do I doubt that SE will not change their software, but I think that one answer will probably help the OP more than the other, and that is the one they should pick. Also, you can always comment on each answer about how pleasing you find each in order to reassure the answerer they are appreciated. While they won't get a boost in rep, they will probably feel appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2010-12-11T01:02:13.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="222" CreationDate="2010-12-11T06:53:07.320" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem was &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1323/slow-processing-different-look-to-math-processing-problem-with-fonts-is-it-me&quot;&gt;first reported&lt;/a&gt; on Math.SE. I'm bring this to your attention since Physics.SE also uses Mathjax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the latest build of Firefox version 3.6.13 has a known issue of messing up Mathjax font(to the point where the font doesn't load). The devs of Mathjax are &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues#issue/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aware of this&lt;/a&gt;, and are working on a fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T07:23:03.013" Title="Firefox 3.6.13 messes up Mathjax" Tags="|bug|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-12-11T21:53:03.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Promote physics.stackexchange on physics conferences. Distribute flayers, make a showcase (ok, that is a bit expensive) I am definitely doing this next one I go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastActivityDate="2010-12-11T21:53:03.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-12-12T01:53:13.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that might entice serious physics researchers is if the questions were at a higher level. The signal to noise ratio is not good enough to get serious researchers on board. There is nothing wrong with low level questions, but there are some obviously half-baked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no high level questions then no serious physicists will want to stay on the site. Also, sifting through nonsense isn't any fun, in the end it won't be worth their energy. I think that advertising the site before we have anything worth their time will have a negative effect on the impression of the quality of what is on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should try to close down the cranky questions more effectively. Do we have pro tem moderators yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T01:53:13.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="219" CreationDate="2010-12-12T07:23:03.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;New OTF font files have been downloaded and applied to all installations where MathJax is used. If you are still having trouble clear your browser cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T07:23:03.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2010-12-12T11:11:09.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that both quantitative and qualitative answers are acceptable. Note that there are quantitative questions and qualitative questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question in the example seems to be qualitative, so I think a qualitative answer is probably more in tone with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, using formulas to answer a qualitative question may not be the best way. The equations do not explain &quot;why something is so&quot;, it's the interpretation of them that does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then again, SO works in a simple way: the owner of the question should mark the one they feel answers best. Did the owner want a qualitative or quantitative answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upvotes, in SO are merely a guide for the occasional visitor to quickly find the best answers (since the occasional visitor might be looking for something different from what the owner thinks is the best answer) - they also encourage people to give answers that find consensus in the community (so, typically, correct ones!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T11:11:09.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2010-12-12T14:01:48.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't understand why I haven't thought of this before but actually there is a very simple way for every student: &lt;strong&gt;post (lots of) posters at your school!&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, this is simple only as long as there are any posters to post. I think David's text will do very well for starters. But in order to attract people's attention it would also be needed to have a nice design and perhaps a logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I'll try to come up with some reasonable poster later (and will update this question then). In any case, I am certainly doing this one way or another and I hope other people will too :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T14:01:48.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2010-12-12T14:52:47.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear Eric,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to give a little comment on the second part, the quality discussion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Actually I think that it is no problem to have different kinds of quality on the page as long reputation does not play a major role. Answers and questions of different levels have different work load. You can get a lot of reputation by just answering simple questions and you get almost nothing with stuff that only a minority can actually understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this situation is not so uncommon. It is exactly the difference between fundamental and applied research. You simply cannot compare publishing behaviour of those two groups. So one might ask the question: If this site is ill, what will happen to TP.SE? Or are simply our definitions of &quot;illness of a beta&quot; not comparable between different areas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever will happen, I wish everybody a nice third advent :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T14:52:47.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="216" CreationDate="2010-12-12T22:44:16.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm... well, I think there are legitimate questions about the universe that could be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;universe&lt;/a&gt; (probably along with either &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;, or both). There &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; even be some legitimate questions about space. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/560/does-anything-exist-in-the-intergalactic-space&quot;&gt;Does anything exist in the intergalactic space?&lt;/a&gt; might be an example, but you could argue that that's an astronomy question, not really astrophysics.) But I wouldn't be opposed to getting rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; questions right now are either really about spacetime, or have nothing to do with space. I'll go through and retag some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T18:03:20.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-12-13T05:51:15.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I nominate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/329/marek&quot;&gt;Marek&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thank you. I accept the nomination.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Something about my studies:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a theoretical physics grad student (I hope it's the correct term, but I am not really sure anymore; if so, please let me know and I'll fix it) working on my diploma thesis of &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0512502&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gradient Gibbs states&lt;/a&gt; (paper by my advisor, prof. Kotecký). My main interest lies in statistical physics but I am very open to all areas of modern theoretical physics and even more generally to any kind of physics (although my knowledge of other areas obviously ranges from rudimentary to non-existent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also great interest in pure mathematics. For one thing I enjoy reading about all of modern stuff like algebraic geometry, Langlands program, category theory, algebraic topology and K-theory to name a few (unfortunately my knowledge often doesn't extend beyond knowing the name of the subject...). For another (and one I actually know something more about), I am interested in group theory and representation theory and also in probability theory and stochastic processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Something about me and this site:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it should be pretty obvious that I love this site. I try to provide answer anytime the topic sounds like it might be within my reach. Not sure whether this is an entirely correct approach because sometimes I necessarily give just a sketchy and basic answers. But I believe the voting system should take care of that (i.e. be sure to down-vote my bad answers ;-) ). I am also trying to sort tags out from to time and most recently am trying to come up with some graphics and posters (not sure how it will turn out though; I am a physicist in the end).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for my attitude, in general I am trying to be friendly and helpful, but people probably already noticed that I do get carried away sometimes. Even to the point of being suspended by Noldorin yesterday (I think it's honest to let you know about this; no point in having a moderator you don't know anything about). But fortunately we were able to sort it out in the end and I think it helped me improve as a person and I'll try not make the sort of mistakes I made in the past. If I am elected a moderator I promise to have unbiased and purely rational attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relating to the above, if I am elected a moderator, I would actually try to moderate as little as possible, letting community sort most of the stuff. I would only take care of really extreme cases of spamming and trolling (which fortunately haven't occurred yet). I am not really sure what the job is about yet but I'd try to be as helpful to the community as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-12-14T08:04:54.503" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-12-13T05:51:15.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2010-12-13T21:59:19.490" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really see any reason to split the site. StackOverflow has somewhere around milion questions at all levels from basic to very advanced and only recently it split. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has not even left beta and already it feels like splitting. Why that? Are you annoyed by stupid questions? Skip them! Are the quetions to simple and not intriguing enough? Spliting will not bring more or more interesting ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a theoretical-physics and research-level tags and filter the other questions. Otherwise it might end with one site with 20 bored PhD physicists with no questions and 200 students and enthusiasts with lots of questions but no answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I got involved in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1683/mechanics-around-a-rail-tank-wagon/&quot;&gt;leaking wagon&lt;/a&gt; discussion and even the top rated users still do not have a clear answer everyone would agree on (at least I cannot find it there)... And it would not turn better with less users. You don't raise the level of the site by deleting easy questions, bud by answering them correctly. The site needs some basement to grow on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T21:59:19.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="927" CreationDate="2010-12-14T01:30:13.760" Score="4" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1873/the-concepts-of-path-integral-in-quantitative-finance&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; on econophysics is closed for being 'off-topic'. But at this stage-- when there is no econophysics forum and the boundary of Physics SE is less defined and rigid-- it should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be closed. Also one must understand that econophysics is physics, with some economics bent. Much like how engineering physics is physics with engineering application bent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention closing a question when &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1873/the-concepts-of-path-integral-in-quantitative-finance#comment4639_1874&quot;&gt;the answerer hadn't even done with his answer&lt;/a&gt; is plain-- how to put it nicely-- &lt;em&gt;rude&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't you feel that my question should remain open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="605" LastEditorUserId="605" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T08:38:05.993" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T13:25:21.113" Title="Should We Allow Econophysics Questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-14T21:22:41.957" Score="7" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators Pro Tempore&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that each community’s issues are properly addressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jAeg3.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YHv1c.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5JUlt.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HoYCW.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Did I overlook anyone?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My failure to account for everyone this early on is in &lt;em&gt;no way&lt;/em&gt; a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why &lt;strong&gt;you'll have your elections in several weeks.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It’s a learning experience for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2010-12-14T21:22:41.957" Title="Moderator Pro Tem Announcement" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-14T21:39:58.990" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking over the various badges the site has to offer, and noticed that a poster can earn a few of them for hitting a built-in upper limit for rep earned in a given day. That's fine, but I'm curious as to what that number is? I used the search here on the meta site and found nothing to indicate an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their names are: Epic, Legendary, and Mortarboard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user756" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T09:49:01.000" Title="Does the site have a cap on how many reputation points a poster can earn per day?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="232" CreationDate="2010-12-14T21:55:41.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, I was going to delete my question, but then there is the small chance someone else has a little trouble finding the correct answer to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ for the physics site (not the physics meta site) gives the answer: 200 points per day is the cutoff (although accepted answers and bounty awards are immune to this limit). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user756" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T09:49:01.000" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T09:49:01.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="235" CreationDate="2010-12-15T10:26:53.040" Score="6" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1942/does-the-cube-stay-on-the-loop-de-loop&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as homework, and the user replied that it wasn't homework, but a practice problem for exam review.  In my view, exactly the same question could be asked as homework and exam review, and the purpose of the questions is exactly the same (i.e. teaching).  Hence, I think the homework tag should pull double-duty here.  Do you agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T16:05:07.113" Title="Do practice problems encountered in independent study or exam review get the &quot;homework&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="234" CreationDate="2010-12-15T10:33:25.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes (I agree) ;-P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why is pretty much what you put in your comment on the linked question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My opinion is that the &quot;homework&quot; tag is there to say to answerers &quot;don't just give away the answer because then the questioner won't have to reason it through.&quot; For final exam review questions or homework questions, the goal is to give hints towards the answer and have you work towards the rest of it as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I would say that &lt;code&gt;[homework]&lt;/code&gt; applies to any question in which we shouldn't give a full explanation in the interest of letting the OP get full educational value out of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(However, I don't think this applies to the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question you identified, for reasons explained in my comment on that question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T10:33:25.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="244" CreationDate="2010-12-15T15:28:54.977" Score="6" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I like the home-experiment topic very much. For me they are even more relevant to physics than any theoretical/mathematical stuff. I'm pretty sure that the roots of the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;not even wrong&lt;/a&gt;&quot; attitude to theoretical physics are in exactly this &quot;experimental nihilism&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can argue that &quot;this is a popular science&quot;, so what? What are the reasons to close such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastActivityDate="2010-12-17T08:37:10.283" Title="Why not &quot;home-experiment&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="254" CreationDate="2010-12-15T18:57:32.857" Score="3" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first chat session is complete and we had some good ideas come up. We are now &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/288/time-for-another-chat-session&quot;&gt;trying to schedule another one&lt;/a&gt;. Stay tuned to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/physics?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;chat room schedule&lt;/a&gt; and/or the first linked question for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite a few people have raised concerns about how well this site is doing, in terms of the number of new questions, new users, page views, etc. that we're getting each day. And indeed, if you look at our &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;proposal page&lt;/a&gt; on Area 51, some of the numbers are kind of low. That's okay, but I think &lt;strong&gt;we can do better&lt;/strong&gt;. I feel like we haven't really made our best possible &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; effort to promote the site yet. If we want those numbers to improve, it's really up to us, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I was thinking we could use our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; to hold a more active discussion about how we can get more people, more questions, more good answers, and generally more (and better) activity on the site. Of course, the room is always open, and you can leave messages there any time, but I'd like to try setting a time when as many active users as possible will be able to log on and contribute in near-real-time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try it like this: I'll put a time suggestion in an answer. If you would join in a chat session at that time, upvote the answer. If you'd like to participate but have a conflict, downvote the answer, and feel free to provide your own time suggestion as a different answer. If you think the whole chat thing is just a terrible idea, downvote the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Transcripts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/physics?tab=conversations&quot;&gt;Site promotion chat #1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T03:45:46.987" Title="How about a chat session to discuss site promotion?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2010-12-16T18:02:56.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I guess that (once again) this has to do with what level the site is aiming at. Because at some point of sophistication, you can no longer really run experiments at home (you certainly can't run LHC at home, but also lots of other much simpler experiments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I personally think that the site should be aimed at least at the undergraduate level. So this means that it should be fine to allow experiments such as the ones that are being done in standard university courses. In other words, experiments with at least some degree of sophistication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for experiments that anyone with no experience in physics can do at home, I don't believe that such questions belong here. There is a proposal of &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4955/popular-natural-science&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Popular Natural Science&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which would be an ideal place for such questions. So if you want &lt;em&gt;home-experiment&lt;/em&gt; go support that proposal!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone could suggest that we should leave such questions here at least until the PNS reaches beta but I think this would lower site's level and so I am reluctant to allowing that. Also, perhaps it would be useful to go over the older questions and close them as well. I know some people won't be happy, but I believe this site should have boundary. We don't do biology here. We don't do mathematics here. And we are definitely not doing elementary school physics here... The question is &lt;strong&gt;are we doing home-experiments here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T18:02:56.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-16T18:07:20.263" Score="4" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a questions about the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1998/meaning-and-application-of-average-speed-closed&quot;&gt;average speed and its application&lt;/a&gt; on this site, but it get closed. It should be acceptable, because physical quantities are the basic of mathematical analysis. Without it you can do nothing meaningful. So it is natural to seek their application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about if someone come up some special definition and want to know the application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How about if someone someday come up with the idea of spin-correlation and ask whether it may can show the phase transition of some models?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How about if they ask where can they apply the vortex-correlation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the size of spin cluster has applications?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the average of loop length has any correlation to the magnetization, superconductivity, etc?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why we cannot ask such kind of questions in this forum? This fit well here as physics questions, so we may seek the others opinions on the subject and someone might help each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is clear and the definition is unambiguously, don't you think that it should be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="562" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T06:02:39.277" Title="Should we allow the &quot;definition and application&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2010-12-16T18:22:13.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Marek said, I think it really depends on what you think the site is for.  Let me see if I can summarize some of the reasons for avoiding these types of things that he left out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the people who will use this site the most (by far) are research level physicists.  I would say at least graduate school level, and most of the people &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; questions are probably postdoc or beyond.  (I myself am a graduate student, and I'll be the first to admit I don't have the breadth of knowledge to answer most of the &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions on this site).  The problem is that the percentage of total internet users that are actually research level physicists is very, very small.  So statistically, even if a very small percentage of that internet using public visits this site and an even smaller percentage ask questions that are mostly relevant to non-physicists, we would still be inundated with questions that are not that interesting for academic, research-level physicists.  I believe there's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/merging-season/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; by the StackOverflow team that calls this the &quot;Yahoo answers effect&quot; (though you may disagree with me on the interpretation of this blog post; feel free to that's the purpose of the meta site).  It may seem rude, mean, or unfair to say so, but to be honest, this site really does a lot more good as a place for people to ask and answer questions pertaining to their &lt;em&gt;jobs&lt;/em&gt; rather than their hobbies, and it definitely does everyone a lot more good as a place to ask and answer high level questions rather giving out Physics 101 homework answers for free (I know that's not exactly the same thing that this question is about, but it falls into the same category in my mind).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope I didn't step on too many toes; if I did, I apologize in advance, particularly if they are the toes of any of the nice people who have taken the time to answer &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, don't get me wrong, I'm all for promoting physics education to the wider public; I just think that a popular science site or something like that would be a much better place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T18:22:13.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="246" CreationDate="2010-12-16T19:54:55.800" Score="8" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, Noldorin has closed three questions that I've noticed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1845&quot;&gt;using household devices to experiment with electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1873/the-concepts-of-path-integral-in-quantitative-finance&quot;&gt;econophysics&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1998/application-of-mean-of-speed-distribution-closed&quot;&gt;whether a certain definable quantity has a physical importance&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each case, the asker of the question believed the question was appropriate for  the site.  None of these were trolling, spam, or other flagrant violations of the site's purpose.  As David Zaslavsky and mbq have pointed out to me, moderators cannot &quot;vote to close&quot;, they can only close questions or leave them, and so their decisions are important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The econophysics question was reopened, but the other two are still closed as of right now.  We should be working to decide communally what the scope of the site is, and what questions are off-topic.  Instead, we have posters whose questions are being quickly shut down, even when there are a number of people here who believe they are relevant questions, and want to either provide an answer or at least follow the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;At this early stage of the site, moderators should only close questions that are advertisements (&quot;Why haven't you purchased my self-published pamphlet?&quot;, clear trolling (&quot;Why are all physicists so full of themselves?&quot;), or egregiously off-topic, (&quot;Who is your favorite Rainbow Brite character?&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When moderators want to close questions that don't fall into these categories, I request they first post a comment explaining their desire to close, then wait twelve hours or so to hear if there are objections before closing, at least at this early stage of the site when we are not finished defining the site's scope.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edit&lt;/b&gt;&#xA;After hearing comments from Robert and David, it seems appropriate for moderators to close questions quickly due to the &quot;broken window&quot; effect.  My request becomes one that I'm sure the moderators are already doing - just to stay abreast of the discussions on meta about which sorts of questions are appropriate and back of the consensus of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T18:17:37.973" Title="What guidelines should moderators use to decide when to close questions?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2010-12-16T20:15:28.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's a difference between &quot;I tried to use PV = nRT to solve my homework and it didn't work!&quot; and &quot;How can I effectively demonstrate the ideal gas law at home?&quot;  For me, the difference is very clear - only one of these questions is interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having received an undergraduate physics education, I can answer questions on adiabatic expansion easily.  I am not sure, though, how close the air in this room is to being an ideal gas.  I'm not sure of a good way to build my own barometer or thermometer.  I have a basic idea of what these things are and how they could be constructed, but I think it's likely I could learn a great deal if knowledgable people were to answer the question about this simple experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean only that I would learn the sorts of things I'm supposed to learn in a shop class.  I mean I would learn actual physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there was one question a while back about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1075/home-experiment-to-estimate-avogadros-number&quot;&gt;how one can measure Avogadro's number at home&lt;/a&gt;.  I already knew the answer about Brownian motion, but didn't know the one about creating a monolayer of oil on top of a body of water.  That answer was physically interesting to me because it led me to wonder why the oil would 1)spread out to a single layer and 2)stay contiguous once it had become a single layer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of thinking  about, devising, and executing such simple home experiments is likely to be engaging and educational, even on the level of people who do have significant physics education, and is not equivalent to entry-level theoretical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for people who, unlike I, are already very skilled at experiment, I can guess it would be an interesting challenge to discover simple home experiments that demonstrate physical effects people are interested in observing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T20:15:28.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-12-16T20:29:39.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can't be done -- mods have only supervotes that close instantly. We have asked to give us normal votes also, but this was rejected by the SE team. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with the moderator decision, flag it! Then we would all try to settle such case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T20:29:39.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-12-16T20:59:18.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, moderator votes are always binding. There's no &quot;vote to close.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have a difficult task, particularly early in the site's development. Philosophically speaking, they are asked to act with great restraint, acting only as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;human exception handler&lt;/a&gt; for egregious problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand &amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;particularly early on&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;moderators are asked to act quickly and decisively (as a sort of community self-moderation by proxy) when there are not enough members to perform routine policing and cleanup duties. I try&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;as best as I am able to determine these things&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;to pick users who have an above-average understanding of the philosophy that drives these sites. Most often moderators have to act decisively in the interest of keeping the site from going off in the wrong direction; fixing &lt;strong&gt;broken windows&lt;/strong&gt; quickly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Broken Window&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But moderators are not perfect; they can make mistakes, misread the situation, or simply be on the minority side of an opinion. If a binding vote does not seem in the best interest of the site, raise the issue in meta. That is one of the primary purposes of meta. But be considerate and be respectful. Some issues simply have no wide-spread consensus, and sometimes you simply have to concede and agree to disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2010-12-16T22:21:25.747" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T22:21:25.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-12-16T22:35:04.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When moderators want to close questions that don't fall into these categories, I request they first post a comment explaining their desire to close, then wait twelve hours or so to hear if there are objections before closing, at least at this early stage of the site when we are not finished defining the site's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is practical. If a question should be closed, it's best to close it immediately so that everyone knows this is not the kind of question that goes on the site. Otherwise, people will answer it and discuss it and it'll start to look more legitimate than it really is. I'd rather have us define the scope of the site in advance, then moderators will know what questions can be closed as off-topic without stirring up so much controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T22:35:04.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2010-12-16T22:52:32.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if you ask a home-experiment question on this site, there is no restriction on the sophistication of the answer, one can propose very suggest experiments which answer the question, one can argue theoretically or mathematically why the proposed home experiment would work etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you pose the same question on a basic level side, I think there should (and will) be (almost) also basic answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analogously for other &quot;basic&quot; questions. The point is, that it sould be possible to ask such questions without restrictions on the sophistication level of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="667" LastActivityDate="2010-12-16T22:52:32.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2010-12-17T08:37:10.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on some of the information in the other answers, I have an idea. (It might even be a good idea but I don't want to jinx it :-P) Suppose we allow home experiment questions, but only if they meet particular guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Format:&lt;/strong&gt; A good home experiment question should invite answers that include a specific &lt;strong&gt;procedure&lt;/strong&gt; and a specific method of &lt;strong&gt;data analysis&lt;/strong&gt;. For instance, I like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1845/1857#1857&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question that prompted this discussion, because it reads like a (very short) lab manual, describing the steps to take to perform the experiment, the data that will be collected, and the method by which you can interpret the results to demonstrate the relevant phenomenon. I don't like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1845/1854#1854&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1845/1881#1881&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specificity:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions should ask about a specific &lt;strong&gt;quantity&lt;/strong&gt; that can be measured, or a specific &lt;strong&gt;physical principle&lt;/strong&gt; that can be demonstrated (although the latter type may be at slightly higher risk of being closed as too vague). For instance, &quot;How can I measure the resistance of the human body at home?&quot; would be okay (assuming it meets the other guidelines of course). Similarly, &quot;How can I demonstrate interference of light waves?&quot; should be fine. But something like &quot;What interesting demos can I do with a hair dryer?&quot; would be too unfocused.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Materials:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions cannot be restricted to &quot;common household materials&quot; because if you limit yourself to the things that most people happen to have lying around the house, there's not that much you can do. It would be better to allow (and even encourage) answers describing experiments which use materials that can be purchased at a reasonable cost from, say, a hardware store or electronic supply store. Someone who is really interested in physics wouldn't mind spending a little bit of money to further their knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Level:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions should invite answers describing experiments that would be &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; to a college undergrad majoring in physics, or someone at a higher level (grad student, professor). This doesn't always mean that the experiments should require a college-level physics education to pull off; in fact, a good description of an experiment will often (but not always) be clear enough for someone without any specialized training to follow it. But the experiment should be based on physics that is more substantial than introductory level, and ideally should allow someone with a physics education to figure out new and interesting ways to analyze the data.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2010-12-17T08:37:10.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2010-12-17T13:38:03.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Broad advertisement would be a bad idea right now because most professional physicists would take a look or two and not come back because of the low level of questions and answers. It would make sense to selectively recruit a few sympathetic people, perhaps some of the more physically inclined people from MO and anyone else who you think would raise the standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The quality of questions varies, but what disturbs me more is the low quality of some of the answers, many of which get lots of up votes in spite of being vague, misguided and sometimes plain wrong. I'd love to vote some of them down but don't have enough rep to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) There are a few legitimate reasons for anonymity, but by and large the reputation of the site will be higher the smaller the number of anonymous users. If you are going to put some effort into asking and answering good questions why not let the world know who you are? It might even help you get a job some day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2010-12-17T13:38:03.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2010-12-17T19:50:24.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added this site as a proposed URL into Google and Bing to increase its level of visibility. However, a proper way to do it (and one much more effective) would need administration privileges. Therefore, I encourage the administration to take those steps (if they haven't already). This concern arises from the fact that few searches return this site in a decent ranking (e.g. physics forum, physics Q&amp;amp;A, etc) which is somewhat worrying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2010-12-17T19:50:24.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="229" CreationDate="2010-12-18T18:43:29.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't have a strong feeling on this a I will argue the contrary position just to have it down here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's a finance question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really that's the whole argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're asking about using a particular tool, and the tool arose in a physics context and is taught almost exclusively to and by physicists, but it is still just a tool. If the business colleges every get around to teaching that math themselves putting questions like this in a physics context will look really silly in retrospect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, by historical accident physics forums are the place to find people who know the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2010-12-18T18:43:29.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-20T03:21:20.100" Score="11" ViewCount="5297" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2072/&quot;&gt;This recent question on an infinite resistor grid&lt;/a&gt; is certainly interesting, but why should we include such questions on the site?  The question has already been asked and answered many times on the internet.  In fact, the question is asked simply by copying it from somewhere else, and it is answered (as of now) by linking to a solution somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't we want to discourage questions that can easily be answered by a quick search?  Should we ask questions just to have them on this particular site?  If so, we should grab a couple of problem books out of the library and start transcribing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason I can think of to encourage this sort of question is that some users might not have seen it before, and will find it fun and amusing to think about.  But that's the only reason I have thought of, and doesn't seem like it's the primary goal of this site; there are other places online dedicated to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T20:26:35.593" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T20:26:35.593" Title="Should we repeat common questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2010-12-20T03:53:34.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the transcript, so I thought a list of the main ideas collected from the chat session would be useful. Furthermore, it could spark some debate about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seed questions - not allowed but potentially useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple questions atract more people but discourage experts vs hard questions atract less people but hopefully experts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'The important thing is questions that can be answered in a high-quality way' (even if they are simple questions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upcoming posters for promotion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get promotion by getting relevant blogs and other sites to mention the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rely on the Stack Exchange team to get needed support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe go over some of the better questions and improve their titles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking elementary questions that require expert answers (how?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A great answer could be not recognized as such by the asker (e.g. why the sky is blue? maybe the asker doesn't want to hear about the Rayleigh scattering).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't make reference to whom the question originally &quot;belonged&quot; (as I found that a bit cumbersome and frankly unnecessary). As David already wrote in the original post, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71/2010/12/19&quot;&gt;transcript&lt;/a&gt; can be found easily, in case that information is needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T03:53:34.643" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-12-20T03:53:34.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-12-20T08:34:00.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think asking such questions is fine under the condition that the OP had already used google and didn't find other solutions satisfying or wants to hear about other strategies to solve the problem not found elsewhere. They should mention all of this already in the question statement. If it's not there and the solution is to be found on the internet, I would just close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, answers that just link to other solutions and provide none genuine content should be discouraged (in particular, I don't like how Sklivvz's answer got 7 votes just because he knows how to search with google). We are not here to replace google. We are here to provide some good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are exceptions to the above because some content (although available) is not easily accessible or sometimes you just don't know where to start. One can imagine a good question polling for resources on a certain topic and an answer with such a collection and some explanations of why the references are good. But I believe these questions/answers are distinct enough from this [XKCD] question to be considered fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T08:34:00.693" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-20T08:48:59.967" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has to do with this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2079/is-superstring-theory-dead&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2079/is-superstring-theory-dead&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raised my main concerns in the comments there. To summarize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the question as stated is too argumentative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is easily seen to have no real content and the answer need not be much longer than &quot;your question doesn't make sense because it's based on wrong assumptions&quot;. Namely, assumptions that science journalist know what they are writing about. In general you'll be on the safe side if you assume they don't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is not to say that there is no relevant physics going on. Just that the question completely misses the point. So what to do with them? Just close them or else encourage OP to rewrite them so that they ask for some real physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T17:14:53.597" Title="Should we allow ill-founded sensational questions [as found in newspapers]?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="256" CreationDate="2010-12-20T08:57:54.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already wrote this in a comment on the question in question, but I actually prefer to do both. Questions can be edited after they are closed, so I think we get the best of both worlds by closing the question temporarily and asking the OP to edit it into a more precise form. (Alternatively, 2k+ users and mods could edit it themselves if it is clear what needs to be done to fix it up... though I'm generally wary of making major changes to other peoples' posts without their consent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T08:57:54.020" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="256" CreationDate="2010-12-20T09:00:20.363" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear Marek,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that such questions can be a very nice starting point for a lively discussion. One should not assume that any person interested in physics has a (scientific) background giving him the chance to actually raise questions interesting for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should give those people the chance to see what is wrong with the question and correct the (maybe hidden) wrong assumptions as you mentioned. I remember that the question concerning common false beliefs was really popular and I guess one can still give very nice and clear &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; to questions that might be somehow conceptually wrong. Since those questions might arise often from the general public, they are, to my mind, welcome here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, I believe in the &quot;There is no stupid question, only stupid answers&quot;-paradigm :)&#xA;Sincerely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T09:00:20.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-12-20T09:03:00.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, in part we are trying to build a repository of physics knowledge (just like SO is trying to become - or has become - a repository of programming knowledge). So there isn't necessarily anything wrong with duplicating things that already exist elsewhere on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose one could think of SE as a little like Wikipedia but where knowledge is indexed by the question you ask to find it rather than by the topic it's about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T09:03:00.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-12-20T15:56:46.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the question was inspired by a recent &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat session&lt;/a&gt; where David quoted this comic strip but I think that it can attract the right sort of people to this site through search engines. I would like to see if it becomes a Google magnet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T15:56:46.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="256" CreationDate="2010-12-20T17:14:53.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should encourage people to ask specific questions with specific answers and to&#xA;try to avoid questions that are designed to lead to &quot;lively discussion.&quot; In my experience you can't have a productive discussion of an advanced physics topic (like string theory) in this kind of format. I would really like to avoid dragging this site into the String Wars and it seems this question is designed to do precisely that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T17:14:53.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-12-20T17:21:07.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should be supporting the site and the community. What are the most important problems that we face?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my personal opinion, that we don't have enough questions, and that we don't have enough phd or postdoc users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think simple questions (whether they are google-able or not) are the problem here. There is pretty much space for everybody. I think the problem is that, for some, there are not enough high-level questions (high-level meaning phd or better level)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should do all that we can to support the still flimsy community on the site to grow. That includes supporting questions which are maybe not the best in the ideal world. We should be an inclusive community, encourage people to come to the site and become active users!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is not so good, help it improve, via comments for example. If an answer is not so good, help it improve, or even better, write a better one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complaining, closing abruptly possibly valid or salvageable questions, making rude statements (and there's more than a few around) makes the site weaker - people leave because of that, and we can't afford it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T17:21:07.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2010-12-20T17:42:09.837" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what I think:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;No, we don't want to discourage questions that can easily be answered by a quick search.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Easy questions get answered all the time on the SE network, there's really nothing wrong with them. I agree 100% with David's answer, and I'd like to add a little. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And here's why:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The point of the site is to bring in anyone who's searching for an answer to a question about physics. If we restrict ourselves to answers that can't easily be found, we are narrowing our scope &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt;. Just because an answer is already on Google, it doesn't mean this site won't be able to top the previous answer and become the new &quot;first result&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the whole point of a SE community is to get most of it's traffic from search engines eventually. And the questions most easy to find are usually the ones that most searched, so why would we ban them? They are as legit as any other question, and nobody is forced to answer them. Users who think it's a waste of their time can just ignore it. Not to mention, if the question really is easy, it will be a chance for less experienced users to contribute as well, which can only help the site grow. The site won't hold itself on phd's alone, it needs both. We should down vote questions that are not real questions, are not about physics, or are terribly phrased; but we should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; down vote or close questions that are easy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the answer is not completely satisfactory. We should prefer answers with at least some content, instead of just links. Which is why I was waiting to accept an answer that brought some content with it. But that's not a reason to close the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: All that said, I'll agree that manually filling up the site with hundreds of questions that any undergrad can easily find an answer for in under 5 minutes is bad. It will probably act as noise and cover up the good stuff in the site. Also, it will probably push away more experienced users from joining. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, we need this questions, but we need the hard ones as well. It's a fine balance that will take some discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2010-12-21T17:52:59.640" LastActivityDate="2010-12-21T17:52:59.640" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2010-12-21T03:03:53.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I've been particularly concerned about so here are my 2 cents from the peanut gallery :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1201/linearity-of-quantum-mechanics-closed&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; by @andrea on the &quot;linearity of quantum mechanics&quot;. One of the comments is by @Peter Shor - who I'm sure (no pun intended) doesn't need introduction. He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's wrong with this question? (Aside from being really difficult to answer properly.) – Peter Shor Nov 22 at 21:21&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When questions such as @Andrea's are closed right away you are doing a disservice to the community, by cutting off any chance people have of expressing their views on it. Some will say that such questions belong to metaphysics or philosophy. However, physics is NOT mathematics. The word &quot;physics&quot; comes from the latin for &quot;Natural Philosophy&quot; - a point that most physicists seem to be unaware of! In physics the most intriguing and important questions often have some philosophical content and cannot be framed according to some algorithm or be answered by one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has the potential for becoming an &lt;strong&gt;invaluable&lt;/strong&gt; tool for the physics community. Its revolutionary potential for encouraging contact among students and researchers around the world is self-evident. By adopting far too rigid a criterion for when a question should be closed we are keeping physics.se from fulfilling its potential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to turn this more into an answer than a rant, here are some guidelines I'd suggest moderators use when deciding to close questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Err on the side of caution&lt;/strong&gt;: If you're not sure if you should close a question, don't close it. &lt;strike&gt;Instead note your objections in a comment and wait for a response from either another moderator or the questioner.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be generous&lt;/strong&gt;: You are a moderator presumably because you have a good understanding of the basic notions of physics. This, by itself and barring any evidence to the contrary, puts you above most other users in terms of credibility and competence. Therefore use your position of power magnanimously. The question might sound nonsensical, but sometimes that is because the questioner is not able to frame the words correctly. And English is by no means native to the majority of physicists. Your duty is not to keep out &quot;the huddled masses yearning to break free&quot; (from the chains of official dogma), but to provide guidance to those in need of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be Humble&lt;/strong&gt;: For every smart person in this world, there is someone smarter out there. Always be aware that your own understanding can &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be complete. Always be aware of the limits of your knowledge and the depths of your ignorance. There is no such thing as a question that is &quot;too dumb&quot; to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be Brave&lt;/strong&gt;: Sometimes the best of us ask the worst of questions. Do not base your decision to close on the reputation of the questioner. If having given the question the benefit of doubt according to guidelines #1,#2 and #3, if you still feel it should be closed, then do so regardless of the questioner's standing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be professional&lt;/strong&gt;: Nobody is immune to feeling slighted or being taken for granted. Physicists in particular are know to have large and sensitive egos. Do not base a decision to close on any personal feelings you might have about the questioner or the question. As Voltaire said: &quot;I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, in judging any question &lt;strike&gt;use&lt;/strike&gt; exercise restraint, generosity, humility, courage and professionalism. Is that too much to ask :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2010-12-21T05:40:29.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="241" CreationDate="2010-12-21T04:56:58.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read the title, I thought &quot;hey, I can get on board with that!&quot; But then I read the question that started this meta thread, and I have to agree with Marek. Applications of average velocity do not seem at all appropriate for this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I will answer the question in your title:&#xA;I think these kinds of questions are important and helpful if the level is appropriate. They have definite answers and are certainly informative. We keep on coming back to what is &quot;appropriate.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if i have much more to say about it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="40" LastEditDate="2010-12-21T05:03:15.890" LastActivityDate="2010-12-21T05:03:15.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-22T06:19:47.327" Score="9" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE (25 Dec 2010)&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone else want to discuss some idea or contribute with another one?. Maybe this is the wrong date to ask for it. We certainly can wait a few days but the time to finish the Public BETA is coming closer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until now there hasn't been any further discussion on the ideas drawn from the chat session. Therefore, I think it is time to begin such a discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will take the nine ideas I could catch from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;transcript&lt;/a&gt; (although, I think everyone is open to new ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Seed questions&lt;/strong&gt;. Apparently, seeding questions 'to fill the site' is frowned upon, however, a milder form of seeding can be quite interesting and useful. For example, take a problem you know the answer of, but ask for a cleverer solution. That can be potentially challenging. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple questions vs Hard questions&lt;/strong&gt;. Well, frankly I don't see a conflict here. The site can maintain both easy and difficult questions. Hopefully experts will be attracted to the hard questions and novices can contribute to answer simple questions adding value to the site while, if they're interested, learning from some hard questions. However, let me be precise; obviously, hard questions for its own sake do not attract experts (or anyone, really), as the interest from people is based on particular topics or on certain kind of ideas. Therefore, we need simple and hard engaging questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The important thing is questions that can be answered in a high-quality way&lt;/strong&gt;. It is a safe bet to assume we all agree on that. However, one question could be 'How can we assure that?'. As far as I know, the only way to manage the quality of the answers is by managing the quality of the questions. Of course, it would be great to hear other ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posters for promotion&lt;/strong&gt;. That's a wonderful initiative. I think that the initial idea is to get those posters in universities, which is perfectly fine. Besides that, it could be very helpful trying to distribute them online. Where? As already was mentioned in the chat session, getting relevant blogs to mention the site is a great idea. Using a poster could be a less awkward way to promote the site for the blogger and a smoother way in social media.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Get promotion by getting relevant blogs and other sites to mention the site&lt;/strong&gt;. I think I covered that part in the last point, so I leave it there. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using the Stack Exchange team to get support&lt;/strong&gt;. As this is very generic, it would be very nice to come up with particular ideas. For example, I mentioned to David that I found a bit worrisome to notice that the site doesn't appear in a decent ranking for general Google searches (such as 'Physics forum, Physics Q&amp;amp;A, etc), even if some of the questions do appear when a search is very specific. I think this is one of the things in which the Stack Exchange team can be quite helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Improve the titles of the better questions in the site&lt;/strong&gt;. Well, I doubt very much that that can result in an appreciable boost in the site popularity. Nonetheless, it can be good in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking elementary questions that require expert answers&lt;/strong&gt;. Maybe someone else will chime in to offer a possible way to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A great answer could be not recognized as such by the asker&lt;/strong&gt;. I think that answers need to be targeted to the appropriate level of the asker, minimizing the possibility of having the OP unsatisfied, except when the quality of the question is not acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-01-13T07:31:53.913" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T07:31:53.913" Title="Discussion on site promotion" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="266" CreationDate="2010-12-22T06:53:20.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9.&lt;/strong&gt; I backup your opinion on this item. Many physicists (me included) have the habit of wanting to share all the knowledge they can. While the intention is good, the result is could be more harm than good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's ok to write complex and extremely high-level answers. In fact, I think we should encourage these answers, as they are the ones that might get expert users interested in this site. However, these questions might not help the OP. It will vary on a case-by-case basis: some people will love to see complete and general answers, others will be intimidated by them and prefer the simpler ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I think we need to encourage both. If every (interesting) question had two good answers, one that fully explores the &lt;em&gt;interestingness&lt;/em&gt; of the question and one that answers it on a more basic level, than we would be giving different people the full amount of information they can take. (Though, if a single answer can do both roles, than that's awesome ;-). )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2010-12-22T14:29:54.480" LastActivityDate="2010-12-22T14:29:54.480" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="270" CreationDate="2010-12-22T19:10:07.513" Score="-3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it off limits to ask where you can get a Tapered Roller Bearing capable of turning a whole 25,000 vehicle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="325" LastActivityDate="2010-12-26T19:56:00.153" Title="Questions about suppliers for basic mechanical parts off limits?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="268" CreationDate="2010-12-22T22:40:08.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that it is completely off limits. But this was never mentioned explicitly so it can't hurt to discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am saying we are physics site, not physics supplies site. Up-vote this if you agree, provide separate answer if you disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-22T22:40:08.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="268" CreationDate="2010-12-22T22:51:00.253" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems as if with no better place to ask it, and with it being directly related to physics, it should be permissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not just permit two new tags &lt;code&gt;[manufacturer]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;[supplier]&lt;/code&gt; for questions of those sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[supplier]&lt;/code&gt; Where can I get a tapered bearing that can withstand 25,000 lbs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[manufacturer]&lt;/code&gt; Where can I get a device a cheap device to demonstrate how a hovercraft works? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="325" LastActivityDate="2010-12-22T22:51:00.253" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="268" CreationDate="2010-12-26T19:38:57.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer to the question title and body:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; off limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Side discussion:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pursuant to David's comment on Evan's answer I'd like to bring up the topic of demo equipment and or student laboratory kit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a fair number of specialized demo toys and tools for student laboratories that don't have and use or demand outside of the physics classroom. If we were going to make an exception (to the general rule &lt;em&gt;&quot;This is not a shopping advice site&quot;&lt;/em&gt; that Marek proposes) this would presumably be one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of the kind of thing I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A clear plastic tube containing a nut and a down feather with vacuum valves at either end to allow a atmosphere-free Galilian-drop in the class room&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stirling engines which will run on the temperature gradient provided by a cup of coffee  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Air-tracks and spark tables&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2010-12-26T19:56:00.153" LastActivityDate="2010-12-26T19:56:00.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-26T19:49:51.437" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/236/why-not-home-experiment-questions&quot;&gt;Why not “home-experiment” questions?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A point brought to my mind by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/268/520&quot;&gt;Evan's questions about shopping&lt;/a&gt;, is the place of demonstrations in our efforts here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Demos are effective teaching tools and can be powerful attractors for getting people (potential students, potential funders, general enthusiasts...) interested in what we do, and they can be surprisingly tricky to build and operate without letting small corrections &#xA;detract from the rhetorical impact we'd like them to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are questions about the design, construction, care and operation of demonstration tools OK. I'll leave the question of acquisition of parts and/or whole apparatus to be discussed under Evan's topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2010-12-26T19:49:51.437" Title="Are &quot;How to...&quot; questions for demos and try-this-at-home experiments on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-01-11T03:36:44.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="276" CreationDate="2010-12-26T20:37:55.797" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's it really. Not contesting anything, just asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T16:17:42.640" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T16:17:42.640" Title="What is the [soft-question] tag for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="277" CreationDate="2010-12-26T21:03:27.773" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably an issue just because the site is young but I still keep coming to great older questions that I missed and that haven't received the attention they should've.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because I joined the site few weeks after it launched, so I missed some of those early questions. And so did lots of other people who joined later. Is there any direct mechanism for bringing these older questions into the front so that they can get attention (and in particular votes)? I can think of few procedures, but every one of them has certain problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can edit either the question or some answer. But this is just a work-around and I am not sure it's polite towards other, newer questions (not to mention towards author of the post I am editing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can provide a new answer. Again, this is not what I want to do in general: there might already be a good answer (or more of them) but I'd like more people to come and check them (and provide votes, most importantly).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can make the question featured. This feels again work-aroundish. Because I don't really want to award any bounty. I just want people to come and look at the question and answers already provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these three approaches I think 3. is the best but it doesn't really solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here are the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do we want to get older questions that (lot of) people missed to the front?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If so, what is the best way to accomplish it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2010-12-27T06:37:57.063" Title="Is it possible/good/worthwhile trying to get older questions to the front so that new users see them?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-26T21:25:05.697" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in answers to questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Took HS physics?   Physics or math major or minor?  Last class taken?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Teacher?  Researcher?  Published papers in Phys?&#xA;Reads any phys journals?  Which?  Member APS or equiv. society? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follows certain topics on arxiv?  Which? Occasionally?  often?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last few physics books read?  Understood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last few (semi)popular math/phys books read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People could post excerpts on their profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments?  Other questions to add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastActivityDate="2011-01-26T19:02:28.240" Title="How about a voluntary survey of physics education for users of the site." Tags="|discussion|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-12-26T21:26:17.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, these are questions on &lt;em&gt;how to do physics in general&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;how to solve a particular problem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions might ask about the list of literature for a certain subject. Or ask for general ideas useful in physics (or subject thereof). Or about history of a certain topic (but this is subtle: we'd in general like to have at least some physical content in the question, rather than just a historical). I guess you get the idea. Anyway, why don't you just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;go look at those questions for yourself&lt;/a&gt;? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2010-12-26T21:26:17.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="274" CreationDate="2010-12-27T06:37:57.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system actually does this automatically, to some extent - it randomly &quot;bumps&quot; an old question every once in a while. I don't remember the details of which questions are eligible or how often this happens, but I bet there's a post on MSO describing it. I'll edit in a link if I find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we really need to get old questions up to the front of the site that much, though. People can only focus on so much content at a time, and given that I think we'd rather have everyone's attention &lt;em&gt;mainly&lt;/em&gt; on the new questions which need to be answered. People will occasionally go back and browse old questions on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-27T06:37:57.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2010-12-27T06:54:41.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently put up a question about correcting myths in the history of Physics, which was closed, hopefully only temporarily.  It referenced a lecture at the KITP, i.e. an audience of physicists.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also point out that the same sorts of questions are accepted both in Mathoverflow and math.stackexchange and don't seem to do any harm there.   I recall many such lectures in the Physics departments of several scientific institutions which were both very interesting and stimulating.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are a HS kid or undergraduate somewhere, and wander onto this site.   This could be quite helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" LastEditorUserId="78" LastEditDate="2010-12-27T07:00:55.803" LastActivityDate="2010-12-27T07:00:55.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="275" CreationDate="2010-12-27T17:03:57.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posting questions simply to poll the participants would not be an appropriate use for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;E.g. What is the last Physics class you took? [closed as off topic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the context of Q&amp;amp;A, users sometime post &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; that are little more than a survey of the participants. Usually, those questions are (or at least should be) closed as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;E.g. What do you think of this physics book? [closed as off topic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are to provide canonical answers to &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt;, answerable questions. Polling might be useful (or even fun, for the curious), but it simply is not what we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2010-12-27T17:03:57.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="283" CreationDate="2010-12-28T18:05:23.107" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of asking a question not directly related to physics, but to a physics journal. Do you guys think these kind of questions should be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a .tex template for submissions to [said journal]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would [said-journal] accept a submission about [subject]? (where subject is similar but not exactly one of the jounrnal's areas)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the correct (journal name) abbreviation to use when citing a paper from [said journal]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2010-12-28T22:24:19.263" LastActivityDate="2010-12-29T04:09:11.260" Title="Should we allow questions regarding a specific physics journal?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="266" CreationDate="2010-12-28T20:39:04.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Get promotion by getting relevant blogs and other sites to mention the site. I think I covered that part in the last point, so I leave it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll need to have an ample supply of link-worthy questions, since we're more likely to get bloggers etc. to link to specific questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Using the Stack Exchange team to get support. As this is very generic, it would be very nice to come up with particular ideas. For example, I mentioned to David that I found a bit worrisome to notice that the site doesn't appear in a decent ranking for general Google searches (such as 'Physics forum, Physics Q&amp;amp;A, etc), even if some of the questions do appear when a search is very specific. I think this is one of the things in which the Stack Exchange team can be quite helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll take this up with Robert Cartaino and see whether he or any of the other SE people have anything to offer us. I've been wondering a lot lately about what we can do to improve our search engine rankings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Improve the titles of the better questions in the site. Well, I doubt very much that that can result in an appreciable boost in the site popularity. Nonetheless, it can be good in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd imagine it can help us bring in clicks from Google (et al) searches of the type that people are likely to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-28T20:39:04.827" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-12-28T20:39:15.373" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2010-12-29T04:09:11.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a .tex template for submissions to [said journal]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Robert commented, you'd probably want to contact the journal. If you don't get anything from them, you could ask at tex.SE. I don't think it belongs here though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would [said-journal] accept a submission about [subject]? (where subject is similar but not exactly one of the jounrnal's areas)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's okay (as long as the journal is a physics journal of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the correct (journal name) abbreviation to use when citing a paper from [said journal]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hm... now that isn't really about physics at all, although it is of interest to physicists. I think this is similar to the first one - it wouldn't go at tex.SE, of course, but I think if we allow the first one it'd make sense to allow this, and if we don't allow the first one it'd make sense not to allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2010-12-29T04:09:11.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-31T14:59:15.157" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems I can no longer comment on questions. (Using Firefox 4 Beta 8.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I could type a comment, then submitting would simply discard it. Today, &quot;Add Comment&quot; doesn't even work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone else experiencing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Jarrod: Thanks. Seems the problem with displaying the comment box is only sporadic, but the submitting problem is persistent. In fact, it seems AJAX is generally quite broken. Just realised post preview isn't working now too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-01-01T02:02:37.100" LastActivityDate="2011-01-01T02:02:37.100" Title="Commenting broken" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="284" CreationDate="2010-12-31T23:10:53.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that we don't support beta browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't see any other reports of commenting issues, so I'd try again in a released browser after clearing your cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2010-12-31T23:10:53.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="287" CreationDate="2011-01-05T01:33:51.437" Score="5" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a question about a phenomenon from a science fiction movie I saw recently. I looked for existing questions related to science fiction and found a wide range of feedback. For example, here are three questions I found and their current status:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/759/246&quot;&gt;Does Quantum Physics really suggests (sic) this universe as a computer simulation ? (sic)&lt;/a&gt;: -2 votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1203/246&quot;&gt;Could teleportation ever really happen?&lt;/a&gt;: 4 votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2460/246&quot;&gt;Time-travel and random events&lt;/a&gt;: 0 votes, closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I must ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are questions based on science fiction off-topic? The question that got 4 votes was actually considered off-topic in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics/23955#23955&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics Q&amp;amp;A Area 51 proposal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If asking about science fiction is not a problem, then what are the characteristics of an acceptable question and those of an unacceptable question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T01:00:33.663" Title="Are questions related to science fiction acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="286" CreationDate="2011-01-05T03:51:41.217" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that questions related to the purported physics in speculative fiction are fine as long as they stick to &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt;. That is, it is OK to find your motivation in SF and even to reference a well known book, but not every plot element from a book that you find in the Sci. Fi. aisle is fair game. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, anything that is based on a presumed breakthough (i.e. not found in current science) is going to be a bit shaky. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I feel that you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; describe the physics situation in enough detail that a reader need not go to the book to figure out what is being asked. That last bit is the biggest failing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1816/520&quot;&gt;&quot;Orbital mechanics of Dragon's Egg&quot;&lt;/a&gt; as I see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see from your examples that the consensus is not really tight just now. I am not a big fan of high speculative questions: there is no way to judge the correctness of answers (well, there may be ways to judge some really &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt;, but...) aside from simple popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;side note&lt;/strong&gt;: The &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;theoretical physics&lt;/a&gt; proposal is different from &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T01:00:33.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="289" CreationDate="2011-01-06T03:44:04.240" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that the holidays are over, I think it's an opportune time to hold another chat session to discuss site promotion, and perhaps other issues that we think are important. Let's schedule and run it along similar lines to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237/how-about-a-chat-session-to-discuss-site-promotion&quot;&gt;the first one&lt;/a&gt;. I'll post an answer to suggest a time. If you would attend at that time, upvote it; if you have a conflict, downvote it and suggest a different time in a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T22:39:05.967" Title="Time for another chat session?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="288" CreationDate="2011-01-06T03:45:03.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First suggestion: Monday, January 10, at 8:00 PM GMT (3:00 PM US Eastern time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-06T03:45:03.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-10T17:47:24.080" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it stands right now, I think the [mechanics] tag is useless in the best cases, and a little harmful in the worst cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it way too broad to be considered a topic. The number of possible topics inside it (quantum, classical, statistical, ...) is very large, and they are very different from each other. So when someone uses the [mechanics] tags, one of two things happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They also use a sub-mechanics tag (like [quantum-mechanics] or [classical-mechanics]), in which case the actual [mechanics] tag is completely useless.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are led to believe that just the [mechanics] tag is enough, in which case it is actually harmful, because it almost the same as leaving it tagless. Just saying a question is about &lt;em&gt;mechanics&lt;/em&gt; doesn't give the reader any clue at all of what he should expect to find in it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mechanics&quot;&gt;quick search&lt;/a&gt; shows that this tag is being used both alone &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; with subtopics. So I say: &lt;em&gt;Consistency&lt;/em&gt;. We should decide whether to get rid of it, or to encourage people to only use it with subtopics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should we sart removing the [mechanics] tag, and replacing it (where necessary) with its subtopics? Or should we just add subtopics where missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T13:33:58.977" Title="Should we replace the [mechanics] tag with more specific ones?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-10T21:26:30.953" Score="-5" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2545/what-is-the-most-efficient-way-to-separate-egg-whites&quot;&gt;my question was closed&lt;/a&gt;. Why is it off limits to propose a question asking for the best way to do something that would obviously require energy to be spent. I want to know what is the most efficient way to separate eggs. How is that any worse than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/770/what-is-the-most-efficient-way-to-destroy-the-universe&quot;&gt;this stupid question&lt;/a&gt;, which is not just on the same lines but destructive too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe in the future all closed questions for physics.stackexchange.com should be brought up in meta first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="325" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T11:58:48.487" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T21:05:18.633" Title="Question closed before moderators could think about it" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="291" CreationDate="2011-01-11T11:17:45.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see you put some effort into your question, that does not justify your behaviour. It is OK to appeal here when your question is closed, but you loose the right to be taken seriously when you start calling other questions stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is fairly good, in a grammatical sense, but is terrible in a physical sense. You didn't actually ask anything physical. In fact, it's not clear at all what you were asking. I only understood what you were looking for after reading the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had given some examples in your answers (of what physics has to do with it, such as buoyancy or a centrifuge) it might have worked a little better. You can try editing it, but I can't guarantee that it'll be reopen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the fact that it was closed without moderator assistance is not something to complain about, it just shows how &quot;off&quot; your question was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2011-01-11T11:17:45.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-11T18:40:12.140" Score="9" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2707/&quot;&gt;Solution for the Finite 2D Potential Well - Rotational Symmetry&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is being voted to close as off-topic. Reading the comments, that seems to be because it the physics is basically done, all that's left is to solve a differential equation. That is true, but I wonder if it's really a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question was just an example, let's focus on the general case. A lot of physics problems and exercises have very little physics and quite a lot of mathematics. Let us assume a question is asked where the physics is basically done, so that it is solvable through strictly mathematical procedures. The motivation is something like: the Lagrangian of a several body system, the velocity field of a fluid around a specific object, or the eigenstates of a QM system. Also assume the level is not too basic, so it is within our pre-established level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we consider such a question off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the answer only requires mathematics, it looks like the kind of question a physics student might be interested in. Do we want to keep it here or move it to math.stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T12:38:26.250" Title="Should we allow questions asking the mathematical solution to physics problems?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-12T13:00:32.593" Score="10" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2567/is-there-a-light-source-that-emits-all-wavelengths-of-visible-light-at-the-same-t/2570#2570&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was reopened by 5 reopen votes from 5 members with more than 500 reputation points (including me) which at this point of the forum's history is quite a few votes. Only 38 members have enough reputation to vote to reopen so 5 is 13% of those eligible to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, Noldorin, who closed the question the first time closed it again with this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, I'm closing this again&#xA;  until the question is improved! –&#xA;  Noldorin♦ 5 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why give us the right to reopen if a moderator is going to arbitrarily close it without discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the guidelines for moderators overriding the reopen votes of the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="948" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T20:46:41.640" Title="When Should Moderators Override Community Vote to Reopen?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-12T15:55:35.487" Score="6" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether this has been discussed anywhere; if so, please point me to the right place. Still it shouldn't hurt to discuss it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the site growing there will be an increasing need for including images into answers (I find they help a huge deal in certain cases; one picture is worth a 10&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; words, etc.). But what about copyright issues? I guess most of the authors (if they can be find, that is) wouldn't mind but it would still be correct to ask them, right (and not just because they might sue you)? On the other hand, it seems strange not to post an answer while waiting for a response from the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, is there any policy about these things? Or is it perhaps no big deal, with issues being solved &lt;em&gt;a posteriori&lt;/em&gt; after author finds his copyright is being infringed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2014-08-04T10:25:07.463" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T10:25:07.463" Title="Copyright issues with including images into answers?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="293" CreationDate="2011-01-12T16:15:12.903" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; In case it seems like I am answering a different question: I am not. I am just saying that it's not always clear what it means &lt;em&gt;&quot;that physics is basically done&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. This is because there are various ways physics can be done to reduce the problem to mathematical form and some of them are pretty bad resulting in horribly complex math problems that are completely unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OTOH if by &quot;physics is basically done&quot; you meant that it was done in the right way and math is the only thing that remains to solve it then such problems are not welcome in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I'd be tempted to move such questions over to the math sites (and I've voted to close some of those question myself in the past). But thinking more about it, sometimes physicists can give insight that mathematicians wouldn't provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I mean? Few (perhaps contrived) examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Trying to do computation in wrong coordinates (which don't make use of some symmetry, say). The calculation could still be carried out but will be tedious. Physicist will immediately set the OP straight by telling him &quot;think again about choosing the $z$ axis you moron&quot; (perhaps without the moron part).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Trying to solve equations in Newtonian formalism. Again, doable in principle. But physicist will point out that, passing to Lagrangian formalism, there are two conserved quantities and there is actually nothing to solve anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Computing the tear of the space-time fabric. Brian Greene would recommend passing to the mirror dual Calabi-Yau (okay, I am just reading The Elegant Universe :-D).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am getting at is that are &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; insights into purely mathematical problems. So we should move the questions only if its clear that they are too simple already. If the correct coordinates and formalism have been chosen already and all the symmetries and dualities exploited and there is nothing else left than tedious calculation then okay, let's move it over to math sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="329" LastEditDate="2011-01-12T18:46:24.133" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T18:46:24.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="295" CreationDate="2011-01-12T19:02:38.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The policy on this has changed since my answer was originally posted, so I thought an update would be in order. If you include content from another site, there are two separate reasons that it might be problematic: copyright violation, and plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/strong&gt; is the inclusion of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; content taken from another source, unless the content is quoted and the source is acknowledged. Our rule on this site is that plagiarism is not acceptable, and plagiarized content will be removed or the post will be edited to quote and cite it, as we discover it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright violation&lt;/strong&gt; is the copying of content from another source in a way that doesn't satisfy certain legal conditions. It is illegal and you shouldn't do it, but since Stack Exchange now has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;formal process to handle DMCA takedown requests&lt;/a&gt;, moderators do not deal with copyright violations. If the content is also plagiarized (which is often the case), we'll delete or edit it for that reason, but we don't take any action because of a copyright violation. The SE team will delete content used in violation of copyright when they are made aware of it through a DMCA request.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To include content from other sources in your posts, you need to avoid both kinds of problems. Avoiding plagiarism is generally straightforward; always cite and quote your content. Avoiding copyright violation is a little more complex; yes, you should check that the material is available under a compatible CC license at the original source, or that the part you are using constitutes fair use, or try to get permission from the copyright holder, but in practice there may not be any consequences for not doing so if the copyright holder doesn't notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-08-03T15:19:09.347" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T15:19:09.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2011-01-12T19:09:48.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with your proposal to remove &lt;code&gt;[mechanics]&lt;/code&gt; and replace it with subtopic tags. When tagging I like to work off the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8/physics-subfield-tags-and-general-tag-rules/51#51&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; I came up with in the early days of the site - of course that's not an official policy or anything but it might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it's possible that there might be some questions (either that have been asked or that could be asked) for which none of the mechanics subtopic tags would be appropriate. In a case like that, it'd be fine to leave &lt;code&gt;[mechanics]&lt;/code&gt; on that question. But I'm sure those should be a very small minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T19:09:48.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2011-01-12T20:05:53.537" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a topic that we should definitely hash out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view is that moderators should &lt;strong&gt;almost never&lt;/strong&gt; override the community. The reasoning behind that is that, although moderators were presumably chosen because of their (our) ability to exercise good judgment on administrative matters, a moderator is still just one user. In general, I don't see any justification for the opinion of &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; user to override the opinion of &lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt; others who have expressed the opposite view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a community-driven website, and most of our decisions should be made by consensus. So when there is a clear disagreement between two groups of people, both with the ability to undo each others' actions (e.g. one moderator and five other users), we need to put things on hold, allow both sides to make their case, and determine which view has greater support. Once we reach a decision, everyone then needs to abide by it, but especially the moderators, since we have that unilateral power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In this case, that would entail starting a separate question on meta in which we decide whether the original question should be open or closed. Noldorin can present his case for closing and other people who think the question should be open can present their case for that. Perhaps I'll start that other question shortly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be certain times in which it would be appropriate for a moderator to override a community close vote. I can't really think of a good example, but I just want to acknowledge the possibility that it may happen. This is probably not as much of an issue here as on Stack Overflow, though, where there are so many 10k+ users that a question can get 5 close votes even if a minority of people actually think it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to downvote this if you don't agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T20:05:53.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2011-01-12T20:46:41.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Moderators are human exception handlers.&lt;/a&gt; Therefore they shouldn't override community vote to reopen, except for exceptional cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the particular case you are mentioning &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; exceptional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T20:46:41.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="306" CreationDate="2011-01-12T20:56:24.627" Score="5" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2567/is-there-a-light-source-that-emits-all-wavelengths-of-visible-light-at-the-same-t&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been causing a fair amount of controversy lately. Some people think it should be closed, some people think it should be opened. So I think we should get the community's input on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a light source that emits all wavelengths of visible light at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should this be dealt with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this meta question is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to establish the community opinion on what to do with the original question.&lt;/strong&gt; This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the place to discuss whether it is correct for a moderator to override a community vote, and it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the place to discuss whether any of the comments posted or other actions taken were inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever opinion emerges from this meta question will be taken under advisement by the moderators (well, by me at least), but at this time I cannot &lt;em&gt;promise&lt;/em&gt; that the original question will be opened or closed in accordance with what we decide here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T00:52:09.873" Title="Should the light source question be opened or closed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="302" CreationDate="2011-01-12T21:28:08.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two separate issues with that question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's short. This is not necessarily a problem. Some questions just are short. In this case I think the question could benefit by being made more precise but it's perfectly well answerable as it stands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But as pointed out by Sklivvz, it's a high school stuff. Well, perhaps not. Maybe it was intended an a research-level question asking about physical processes behind various sources of light (black bodies, QED and nuclear emission, properties of gases, semiconductors, whatever). But if so then &lt;em&gt;OP needs to make that clear&lt;/em&gt;. Otherwise the answer is as short as, &lt;em&gt;yes, it's called lightbulb&lt;/em&gt; and that's it. I don't think we need such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the question should remain closed until OP (or someone else) makes it clear that it's non-trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-01-12T21:28:08.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-12T22:20:24.110" Score="11" ViewCount="1438" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is about time to start thinking about the final design of the site; please turn on your creativity and start posting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Colours, shapes, motifs, fonts... anything visual that you think is connected with physics (eg. &quot;Magenta Rutherford atoms!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Things you definitely don't want (eg. &quot;Everything except yet another Rutherford atom model!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Logo sketches/ideas (eg. &quot;The electons' orbits should form `Physics' in Comic Sans.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catchy ideas for upvote/downvote buttons, tabs, badges, tags (eg. &quot;Downvoting should make it change into Thomson model.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideas for 404/Error/CAPTCHA pages (eg. &quot;404? Obviously a photo of dark energy!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as usual, upvoting ideas you like and downvoting things you don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T10:40:43.910" Title="What should our site look like?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-12T22:22:30.240" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="307" CreationDate="2011-01-12T22:35:08.983" Score="12" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original idea comes form CrossValidated (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/674/first-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/685/second-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;); basically, each month users propose and select in voting one not too specific, yet intriguing or simply interesting OpenAcess paper that is later discussed during a special chat session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think we should try to implement it on Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.273" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T19:19:13.997" Title="Physics Journal Club on chat?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="302" CreationDate="2011-01-13T00:52:09.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is short but I don't see why that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Specific - It displays a knowledge of some physics, i.e. that light comes in waves and is characterized by the wavelength; and that visible light has a bounded range of wavelengths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) About Physics - One can argue whether or not the question is too simple, but it is clearly on topic. The emission of light is clearly within the domain of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Not Obvious - If you don't already know the answer, it is not obvious or deducible. If you happened to have just learned that photons come from electrons dropping energy levels which correspond to specific wavelengths of light, you might not yet realize that blackbodies (and light bulbs as one such example) emit a continuous spectra, or the reasons why they do this. This is not obvious physics even if it is generally taught in high-school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, at times, even an easy question can have interesting answers. As Colin K. noted, there are broadband coherent light sources as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really want to close as &quot;off-topic&quot; questions that can be easily answered as too easy? What kind of message does that send to the asker? You're stupid? Don't ask dumb questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a reason that particular question was never updated by the asker. It was closed as being off topic very quickly and probably before the asker even returned to check for answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happened to me the first time I came here, I'd never bother coming back. I might just think to myself: &quot;Physicists are real jerks&quot; and never come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What possible harm is caused by questions of this sort? Are we saying that we don't want any high-school physics students here? Really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about engineers and other professionals that are 20 years out of school, do we assume they remember everything from their high-school and college physics so they know what is &quot;trivial&quot; and what is an &quot;on-topic&quot; question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="948" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T00:52:09.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="305" CreationDate="2011-01-13T06:47:29.583" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a good idea. We might even be able to use it to bring people into the site, because these chat sessions might make good events to advertise (although I suppose it'd be a bit of a pain for someone who doesn't already have an SE account to get one just to participate in the chat). Also, if we are able to successfully invite any authors, we could perhaps make a good impression on them and gain their support for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T06:47:29.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="305" CreationDate="2011-01-13T07:57:07.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking on the &quot;chat&quot; side of things, I think that has much merit re community building - my thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use a dedicated room for the purpose; not the local &quot;tavern&quot; room (if you see what I mean)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;perhaps put up a scheduled event advert (the room owners can do this via the &quot;events&quot; tab)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;note that &lt;em&gt;normally&lt;/em&gt; anyone talking would need to have legitimately gained the nominal (it really is small) minimum rep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is a &lt;em&gt;legitimate&lt;/em&gt; guest-speaker (i.e. the paper's author / experts etc), the system &lt;em&gt;does support&lt;/em&gt; allowing them to talk, but this is now a moderator-only function - use sensibly please ;p And as you say, this may &quot;suck them in&quot;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, as part of general site advocacy I think I'd happily see things like this on a &lt;em&gt;range&lt;/em&gt; of sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T07:57:07.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-01-13T08:49:04.267" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not another atom. Absolutely. Maybe some logo with a $\Psi$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dark Energy for &quot;not found&quot;, of course, will do. But I think the most suitable here would be the higgs boson (at least up to now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I've checked how other launched sites look like and I really don't like the look of some of them. Too many bright colors or too many tiny details are really distracting. I actually like the present &quot;scetchy&quot; look -- maybe one can adopt it from &quot;notebook scetchy&quot; to &quot;white/blackboard scetchy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: This is what I made a minute ago, using my blackboard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IIxMH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Black board&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to use ladder operators but they didn't look nice...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While I think that bra-s or ket-s (better ket-s) should be used for tags, don't they? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T10:40:43.910" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T10:40:43.910" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-13T08:49:04.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-13T11:42:14.730" Score="8" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm more than 99% sure the wrong answer was accepted here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2508/rotation-angle-of-a-giant-lily-when-a-child-crawls-on-its-rim&quot;&gt;Rotation angle of a giant lily when a child crawls on its rim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, I'm subject to significant bias saying this, since I submitted a different answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edit:&lt;/b&gt; In the particular question I linked, the wrong answer's been changed, so I'm happy about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily, if a wrong answer is accepted and a better answer exists, the better answer will still get a lot of up votes so that a user browsing the site can see the community's opinion.  In this case, I think the scenario is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incorrect answer was originally a  correct answer to a simplified version of the problem.  That correct answer got a lot of upvotes.  Then the author generalized the answer incorrectly, resulting in an incorrect answer with a lot of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now, the incorrect answer has a lot of upvotes, and is marked accepted, even though I believe strongly that the community  as a whole would not support it as the correct answer.  Is there some course of action I can take to call the community's general attention to this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edit&lt;/b&gt;: I'm not completely sure whether this is an &quot;honest&quot; meta question, or whether I'm actually just fishing for people to support my answer.  If this question gets a couple of downvotes, I'll take the hint and delete it.  On the other hand, behind my emotional desire to be validated, I really do want the correct answer to be accepted in general and think there is some actual validity to this meta question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T07:39:07.263" Title="What do you do when an accepted answer is changed from correct to incorrect?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2011-01-13T13:26:17.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. In my opinion, this shows the fundamental weakness of the StackExchange based approach. Everything is static and any change (either in question or answer) is not reflected at all and leads to inconsistencies. So assuming SE people won't change the engine underlying voting, one can only suggest that things &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be changed unless absolutely necessary. It's fine to make the question/answer more precise but to change them completely is just bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, this is an issue just for questions because changing them makes all the given answers invalid. But if someone wants to change the answer I suggest they just post a new one. This also suggest a solution to your problem: revert the accepted answer to the old, correct one (albeit simplified) and let ftiaronsem post a new answer with his new solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T13:26:17.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="293" CreationDate="2011-01-13T16:07:12.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like questions of this type, not because they are lacking in physics, but because they are such standard textbook problems. I'm sure I could find a couple of QM texts with this precise problem in the exercises. If we encourage questions like this it seems likely to me that we will start having people posting problems from their homework sets here and hoping to get answers and I think we should discourage that. Of course I am not saying that was the intention of the person who posted this question. It also reflects my opinion (which I'm sure not everyone agrees with) that it would be a good thing if this site had more emphasis on research level questions in physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T16:07:12.747" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2011-01-13T19:49:45.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment --  with good argument, this should make answerer correct the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote to enforce reading the comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If answerer is not responding (for instance lost interest in SE), edit the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the mutating question problem, this should be resolved by adding new question, not new answers. In SE philosophy, a question/accepted answer pair should later serve as instant-information page -- one Googles the question, reads the answer and has his problem solved; a clutter of answers to different stages of question evolution effectively masks any useful &#xA;information. So, if you see this happening, ask the OP to make a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T19:49:45.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-01-13T20:00:23.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually love this look. The thing is that I've been around polished websites for so long that they glaze over my head. Looking at this page is just a sight for sore eyes. Let me tell you why. As someone who dabbles in design I think that sleek, sophisticated design is overrated. Simplicity isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now what you have is just an unpretentious page on which the content flows out. It's like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be explored. Waiting to be written upon. There's nothing there but pure nothingness. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why dress it up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've seen the design for &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hacker|News&lt;/a&gt; it looks so primitive at the start, but the fact is that it performs a function it acts as a barrier against the 4Chan/Digg crowd as there is nothing there on the site, but the content itself. No videos. No dressup. No &quot;social features&quot;. Just the content. What can be more beautiful than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me that's the highest possible form of design. Paul Graham has tweaked it so that it actually encourages the participation of his target audience and acts as a repellent against the gremlins. What could be more beautiful than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please keep our site like this. In fact, if you can remove the nifty design tricks that you've built into it. Just make a blank sheet of paper and we, the community, will do the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1065" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T20:00:23.177" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-13T20:00:23.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="293" CreationDate="2011-01-13T21:44:19.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear Bruce,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as the one putting up the question you mentioned I am willing to say something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure it might be trivial and also sure that most people here (well, I might include myself here) can write down the solution instantaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did I ask?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;First of all since I am interested in similar systems and knowing good resources that provide &lt;strong&gt;additional information&lt;/strong&gt; in the context of the question would have been nice (in the sense of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/293/should-we-allow-questions-asking-the-mathematical-solution-to-physics-problems/296#296&quot;&gt;Marek's answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Second, I thought it might be a nice idea since in on of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/266/358&quot;&gt;threads concerning promotion&lt;/a&gt;, someone was suggesting to ask questions we know the answer of but it would be nice to have it answered on the site anyways, maybe from interesting perspectives (to create content, I suppose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was actually a little wondering about the reactions the post immediatly created regarding that a lot of the questions posted are actually on a High-School level. And, in turn, those seem to be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2605/358&quot;&gt;most popular ones&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sincerely  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS.: I was the first to vote to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-01-13T21:44:19.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-01-14T22:44:07.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you mention upvote and downvote buttons, it would be neat if we could somehow tie them into the raising and lowering operators. But I can't think of a way to do it that wouldn't be excessively nerdy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually kind of like the design for math.SE, with a few exceptions. The graph paper in the background I could do without, of course, and I don't think parentheses are enough to visually distinguish the tags, and I'd like the upvote and downvote buttons to be a little more colorful, and it wouldn't be that bad to have some faint colors to highlight some of the regions in the right sidebar. But I do like the general feel of simplicity, e.g. using a pure white background and simple, thin lines to separate sections of the pages, along with a bold logo and site title at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think the logo for webmasters.SE is pretty nice. Of course we're all tired of classical atom models so I'm not saying I would have wanted that logo for this site, but I am a fan of the use of the three primary colors (which corresponding to quark colors, coincidentally enough), and the subtly highlighted globe which is unobtrusive against the blue background of that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually webmasters.SE has a pretty plain look as well. It's probably my favorite of all the SE site designs. My only real criticism is that it's a little too blue for my taste; I prefer to have just a tad more variety in the color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-14T22:44:07.950" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-14T22:44:07.950" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-15T03:32:52.533" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;My chosen email address, which has worked for years at other Stack Exchange sites, was today rejected for a question at Physics Stack Exchange, and again here at the corresponding Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the email address is &lt;code&gt;bignose+stackoverflow@whitetree.org&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3696&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 3696&lt;/a&gt; makes it plain that &lt;strong&gt;any printable character is valid in an email address&lt;/strong&gt;, given the protocol rules. So, for example an email address containing a punctuation character (&lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;~&lt;/code&gt;, etc.) in the local part is valid so long as it follows the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, in the local-part (the part before the final &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; character), &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; character may appear in a valid email address. It's not up to the sender to decide what is and isn't a valid local-part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3696#section-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Specifically&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hence, they should not be rejected in filtering routines&#xA;but, should instead be passed to the email system for&#xA;evaluation by the destination host.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;ensure the Stack Exchange software does not reject valid email addresses&lt;/strong&gt; chosen by the user for their notification address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T06:47:20.403" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T19:02:08.373" Title="The Stack Exchange software should not be rejecting valid email addresses" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="320" CreationDate="2011-01-15T04:00:46.257" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been under the impression that &quot;solid state physics&quot; is just an older term for what is now commonly called &quot;condensed matter physics,&quot; i.e. that they refer to essentially the same types of physics. Is that actually true? (Or, perhaps I should say, is that view also common in the wider world outside my department?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that we have both a &lt;code&gt;solid-state-physics&lt;/code&gt; tag and a &lt;code&gt;condensed-matter&lt;/code&gt; tag. If the terms are actually synonymous, I'll merge the tags together; otherwise I think we should get started writing tag wikis that distinguish them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-01-15T05:23:42.597" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T05:23:42.597" Title="Is solid state physics the same as condensed matter physics?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="321" CreationDate="2011-01-15T04:31:45.453" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a banner that pops up when someone visits physics.SE without being logged in, which says, &quot;Welcome to a Q&amp;amp;A site for active researchers, academics, and students of physics!&quot; or something like that. Someone made an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/01/13/physics-stack-exchange/comment-page-1/#comment-152006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; at Cosmic Variance about how this might discourage people who are not actually active researchers or students, but are interested in physics and capable of posting good questions and answers. Basically, the banner could give the impression that this site is &lt;em&gt;exclusively&lt;/em&gt; for the named groups of people, which is certainly not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we try to have the banner text changed to reflect the fact that anyone is welcome as long as they can make good contributions? If so, what should it say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T22:57:49.733" Title="What should the text on the banner be?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="318" CreationDate="2011-01-15T05:15:21.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Solid state physics is definitely a branch of condensed matter, but I was under the impression that we want subfield specific tags, no? So for questions on the general theory of solids (band structure, crystallography, semi-conductor physics) I think it's a good, descriptive tag to keep, even if it might always appear with the cond-mat tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="791" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T05:15:21.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="319" CreationDate="2011-01-15T09:59:54.597" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's alright to keep it as it is. It's obvious that there are already lots of people with no physics education whatsoever so that banner clearly hasn't discouraged &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps we might lose a valueable person here and there but I prefer that to lots of sci-fi and pop-sci fans joining in and overrunning the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to down-vote this if you disagree. I'd actually wouldn't have anything against modifying the banner if someone comes up with a clever slogan that supports the right kind of people but puts off the wrong kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T09:59:54.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="317" CreationDate="2011-01-15T19:00:11.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plus addressing works fine, and has since forever. I can't reproduce this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We use plus addresses all the time internally too, so if it wasn't working, we would know..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T19:00:11.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-01-15T20:12:09.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we're to have any graphical motifs there should be a Feynman diagram included. And something that references classical physics (Maxwell's equations? The classic Keplerian areal sweeps on an elliptical orbit? Ray optics?), and something that talks to experiment (a graph with real data including error bars/bands or an event display from a Fermi top quark event or ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets have a diverse set of representations. Physics is a &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; field, let's show it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;tex.SE&lt;/a&gt; header provides one template for how this might be done, but I confess to not liking the overall layout very much. I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; like the ghostly figures in the header, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:34:29.613" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T22:41:19.660" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-15T20:12:09.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="293" CreationDate="2011-01-15T20:17:38.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least some of the time, the physics &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; done just because you've reduced the problem to math (even if you've done the best possible reduction to math)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...because, after you've cranked through the math you have to &lt;em&gt;interpret&lt;/em&gt; the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be sure for the typical introductory mechanics question the interpretation is trivial, but for real physics that is rarely the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I don't think that &lt;em&gt;&quot;reduced to math&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a good metric. What we are looking for is &lt;em&gt;&quot;there is still physics to do&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and this may require some intelligence to suss out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-01-16T22:03:55.373" LastActivityDate="2011-01-16T22:03:55.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-16T09:52:10.820" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all let me commit the crime and then plead innocence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently found out that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~kostecki/school3/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3rd Quantum Gravity and Quantum Geometry (QGQG3) School&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is being held in &lt;strong&gt;Zakopane, Poland&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;Feb 28 - March 11, 2011&lt;/strong&gt;. The list of speakers is wide-ranging and impressive. I especially encourage all my string theory friends on this site to attend so that you can hear the story from the horse's mouth, so to speak ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that we have a lively and growing community which has the potential to seed highly productive inter-disciplinary collaborations, it seems that there should be a bulletin board where we can share such announcements. This sort of arrangement could, along with the recent suggestion of a physics journal club, be one of the &lt;em&gt;adjunct&lt;/em&gt; social functions this site could easily provide. Or maybe not so easily. It is easy to offer suggestions when you are not the one who has to dig into the entrails of the site's code to make changes :&gt;/ In the absence of any specialized tools we could, &lt;strong&gt;by common consent&lt;/strong&gt;, make use of meta for such announcements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the community feel about this possibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T11:38:52.933" Title="Can we use meta to share announcements regarding special schools and camps?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="325" CreationDate="2011-01-16T11:59:39.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are already few questions asking for e.g. PhD or postdoc positions. I don't see any reason why not creating also a CW big-list of winter/summer schools and conferences. Only thing to decide is how specific that question should be. Perhaps we should create one question for each topic (like quantum gravity) separately. Also, this doesn't belong to meta, it's perfectly relevant on the main site as a soft-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-01-16T11:59:39.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="325" CreationDate="2011-01-17T00:01:58.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chat room sort of functions as a bulletin board when we use it infrequently. That might not be a bad place to post announcements about these sorts of things. It could be done in addition to announcing them on the main site (or meta) if we decide that that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly doubt that the SE team will change their software to add a specialized feature for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T00:01:58.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="325" CreationDate="2011-01-17T11:38:52.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Marek that this would be on topic at the main site, although I'm not sure how to put this into the SE engine. Maybe we&lt;sup&gt;+&lt;/sup&gt; should start a dedicated blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;+&lt;/sup&gt; I must admit by &quot;we&quot; I mean &quot;someone else&quot; since I wouldn't have the time to manage it...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T11:38:52.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="319" CreationDate="2011-01-17T22:57:49.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that math.SE has the banner text &quot;Welcome to Q&amp;amp;A for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields,&quot; which I kind of like. So I was thinking we could use something like that, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Q&amp;amp;A for physics students, enthusiasts, and professionals in related fields&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;although Marek makes a good point that we don't want to be overrun with uninformed popular science fans, who would probably consider themselves &quot;enthusiasts.&quot; So I'm not sold on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making this CW so anyone can edit in a better modification of the slogan if you can think of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-17T22:57:49.733" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-17T22:57:49.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-18T22:28:05.680" Score="12" ViewCount="710" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things have changed in the past few days and I think it's about time it's being discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's great that we have lots of new people here (including few well-known physicists) and to attract attention of the general public was naturally the goal from the very beginning, I couldn't help but to notice a great increase of bullshit (pardon my French ladies) answers left all over. Perhaps this is inevitable but I still don't like it (and other pages like MO do avoid it somehow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am not sure whether I have a concrete question here (besides trying to stir up a discussion) but if there were one it would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do to stop this site degenerating into another crackpot forum? Perhaps appointing more moderators might help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure. All I can say is that I don't like the site very much in the past few days (beside there being few very great questions and also few answers that I was happy to read) and it seems that also lots of other usual suspects (top 10--20 users, say) stopped contributing (me included). Perhaps this is natural and it's good that the site will pass into the hands of the community. All I fear is what kind of community that might become and whether we don't want to shape it a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T18:09:18.517" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T18:09:18.517" Title="Answers they are a-changin'" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|content-level|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2011-01-18T22:57:41.650" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What can we do to stop this site degenerating into another crackpot forum? Perhaps appointing more moderators might help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote bad answers, that's how the system works. If it doesn't work with us, than that probably means that the intended model for this site wasn't meant for the SE network anyway.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More moderators can certainly help. Ultimately though, the Mods can't (nor should) close every crap answer, they can only teach the community to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(beside there being few very great questions and also few answers that I was happy to read)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is natural. Look at other successful SE sites. You won't see many great questions lying around the front page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and it seems that also lots of other usual suspects (top 10--20 users, say) stopped contributing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True. I guess the influx of traffic has been overwhelming, and people will likely loose interest in keeping up with it. To be fair, it has been only a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion,&lt;/strong&gt; I think the questions and answers really have gone down in quality here, and the reason is that we got a lot of new users in very little time. If the community grew more slowly, people would be more motivated to keep up and to educate new users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think that's a bad thing. In the most recent stats, quality of answers was abundant, it was traffic that we lacked. Right now we have all the traffic, we just need to keep it in by teaching users how to give better answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More moderators is probably a good idea, but the most important is that everyone downvotes bad answers and leave comments saying why they're bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T22:57:41.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2011-01-19T03:41:34.753" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, there's a real drop in signal-to-noise, after a brief period when the site seemed to be doing well. I think part of the problem is not so much the crackpots (although some of them are producing prodigious amounts of text) as with other people who seem to vote them up whenever they write anything that looks vaguely technical, apparently under the presumption that mathematical symbols imply competence. It's disappointing to see utter gibberish get upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T03:41:34.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2011-01-19T11:33:28.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think its fair to ask people to come here to participate and then call them crackpots.  There are a number of mechanisms that are available to close questions, but I would distinguish between people who geniunely try to learn about physics through exchanges and those who want to simply increase the noise.  I for one admit to not being the best in physics, but that doesn't mean I don't take it seriously and try to improve my level of knowledge on a continuous basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I think there is an element of this discussion that is legitimate, I feel there is another element that is immature selfishness.  I am sorry to say so, but that is how I see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1383" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T11:33:28.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2011-01-19T13:57:53.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you should do if you see a bad answer, is to vote it down, post a comment explaining why its wrong, but &lt;em&gt;most importantly post a good answer and see it getting massively upvoted&lt;/em&gt;, that is how the system is meant to work, and it works well for all the other SE sites! I have a huge doubt that any trolls or crackpots will have any higher chances of success at this site then any other. Also ofcourse like you do, raise any concerncs at all on meta !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastEditorUserId="1708" LastEditDate="2011-01-19T14:26:10.677" LastActivityDate="2011-01-19T14:26:10.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-19T19:41:22.837" Score="4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all can agree that our FAQ is far from being satisfactory. However, I think it's our responsibility as a community to improve the FAQ or create a similar resource to address some issues which will begin to have an noticeable impact on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/330/answers-they-are-a-changin&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; posted by Marek, one of those issues is that possibly new users don't know what kind of answers or questions deserve upvotes or downvotes and under which conditions is appropriate to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that important? Well, we have seen an increase of questions and answers, however, some people have noticed that bad answers are being upvoted in a way that defeats the whole purpose of having a rating system. Presumably, experienced users don't exacerbate this problem. Therefore, we need to let new users know when is acceptable to upvote or downvote in such a way that the quality of the site doesn't suffer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What rules should we follow regarding this issue?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I expect that a notice for this post or an updated FAQ will appear on the main site from time to time in the same way that chat sessions are announced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T18:02:58.533" Title="FAQ for upvoting and downvoting" Tags="|discussion|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="335" CreationDate="2011-01-20T03:51:57.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why don't you have a lower limit on the number of up votes a person can make, at least until they have a higher reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T03:51:57.103" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2011-01-20T04:10:44.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic problem with obtaining good moderation is that the people who have the knowledge and skill have more productive ways to spend their time. The best you can hope for is to find people who understand enough about physics to eliminate obvious errors. But you have to ask yourself, &quot;why does someone who's so smart have so much time on their hands?&quot; Whatever you come up with as an answer for that question, if you're being realistic, it's not going to be very pretty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T04:10:44.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2011-01-20T04:16:50.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've changed my mind completely on this. I don't think you should split the site. I can navigate quite reasonably with the tags. And right now, the site is WAY TOO SMALL to split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the number of questions becomes so large that I'm unable to read the day's new questions in 15 minutes it might be time to consider splitting, or some way of allowing a reader to get only a partial sample of the questions. For example, if all questions were required to carry one or more of three tags: &quot;Experimental Research&quot;, &quot;Theoretical Research&quot;, or &quot;Not Research&quot;, or something like that, then those only interested in a single factor could read that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously I had written the following which I will leave here for continuity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You absolutely should split the site.&#xA;  The only reason I'm hanging around is&#xA;  because I've got time on my hands.&#xA;  That will end in the next few weeks.&#xA;  If there were a research level place&#xA;  I'd be happy to contribute, but to put&#xA;  research level questions here is a&#xA;  waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The purpose (to a researcher) for&#xA;  having research level questions is to&#xA;  widen the number of people who are&#xA;  aware of a question. The problem with&#xA;  this site is that the level of the&#xA;  discourse is too low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One thing that might help with a&#xA;  research level site is to require that&#xA;  the posters be actual researchers. A&#xA;  good requirement would be at least one&#xA;  peer reviewed article published in the&#xA;  past 2 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="1272" LastEditDate="2011-01-30T00:46:30.060" LastActivityDate="2011-01-30T00:46:30.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-20T09:51:45.280" Score="21" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems the bulk of questions being closed are being closed unilaterally by moderators or by agreement between moderators, and not by the &quot;vote to close&quot; mechanism. This is extremely irritating, as questions get closed suddenly and without any prior warning, meaning that you can spend a long time writing answer only to get a notification that you can no longer post it. Could the moderators please take a step back on borderline questions and let the community decide. They are of course free to vote to close, like anyone else with sufficient rep, but please please refrain from just closing questions (except for massive breaches of the site rules/faq). There is really no need for it, and it undermines the community driven nature of StackExchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-01-23T12:19:44.110" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T23:18:34.687" Title="Can we please let the community close questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="390" CreationDate="2011-01-20T13:48:48.100" Score="11" ViewCount="1160" Body="&lt;p&gt;While some have noticed an apparent increase in the &quot;noise-to-signal&quot; ratio on this site, what concerns me is the rise in the &quot;incivility-to-civility&quot; ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us be clear about one thing - the word &quot;crackpot&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an epithet. It is a label used all to easily to dismiss anything, anyone might have to say which is contrary established wisdom or which is in conflict with anybody's personal beliefs. Its liberal usage, especially by &quot;authority figures&quot; is disturbing and revelatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to deny that there are genuine &quot;trolls&quot; and &quot;crackpots&quot; in this world, whose purpose is not to discuss but to bludgeon ideologically  opposing viewpoints into the dust. However, a community, by its very definition, takes all kinds to grow and prosper. Opposing viewpoints are an &lt;em&gt;essential ingredient&lt;/em&gt; of any community. Otherwise it becomes more of a cult or a country club than a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what does the community feel in this regard? My own personal opinion is that down-voting and critical commentary are more than sufficient to highlight perceived weaknesses in any questions or answers on this site &lt;strong&gt;without resorting to disparaging particular individuals or particular lines of inquiry&lt;/strong&gt;. Obviously such etiquette is assumed to be present from the get-go in such an enterprise. However recently I have noticed a change for the worse in the tone which suggests that these &quot;rules of the road&quot; cannot be taken for granted. I hope that by highlighting this issue and encouraging its open discussion perhaps some balance can be restored to the force :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, let me clarify, this question is not intended as a personal attack (direct or indirect) on anyone. Everyone has their own way of speaking and their own style of doing physics and we would be poorer for censoring either this or that individual for their choice of words. If anything it is an assault on the common tendency to use words such as &quot;crackpot&quot; and on the overall tone that we should use in approaching viewpoints we strongly disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T12:23:50.727" Title="Discouraging the use of personal attacks and epithets such as &quot;crackpot&quot;" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|language|best-practices|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-20T14:03:15.273" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this question is apparently about me (but perhaps you have more people in mind) I'll post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is a grain of truth in what you write in that it can't hurt to be more civil, in general your question is just politically correct propaganda that makes me sick to my stomach. While it's true that the term crackpot can be abused sometimes, usually (at least when I use it) it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; mean people that only produce bullshit more or less consistently and there is just &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; value for such people in the community. It doesn't make sense to criticize every individual answer of theirs and ignoring the real problem which is simply their presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to have an analogy, community, like democracy doesn't mean that everyone can do whatever they want. While it's consensus driven, when someone oversteps a line they are put in prison in real life or termed a crackpot here. What you are basically saying is that just because sometimes someone innocent is put in the prison we should disband justice altogether. Think about it ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T14:03:15.273" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="335" CreationDate="2011-01-20T18:02:58.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you're wondering what kind of draconian rules I'd like to see imposed, one rule could be stated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not downvote or upvote in case you're not sure about the quality of the answer or question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T18:02:58.533" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-20T18:02:58.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="339" CreationDate="2011-01-20T18:20:25.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could the moderators please take a step back on borderline questions and let the community decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with that is that the community closing process takes a long time to work, if it even works at all. We don't have anywhere near as many users with vote-to-close privileges as Stack Overflow, for example. I've actually tried your suggestion in the past, namely leaving more questions open and hoping that the community would close them. In most cases, it didn't happen; the questions just languish and collect bad answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current rate of closing questions is a direct reaction to recent posts on meta complaining about the decreasing quality of questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They are of course free to vote to close, like anyone else with sufficient rep&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually no, we don't have that ability. Moderator close votes are instantly binding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...meaning that you can spend a long time writing answer only to get a notification that you can no longer post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're answering a question that you think might be closed... well, honestly, you shouldn't. But if you absolutely insist on posting an answer, bear in mind that there is a grace period of four hours, I believe, after a question is closed, after which you can submit an answer - as long as you started writing that answer before the closure, and you don't reload the question page after the closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that is technically possible is to post a short &quot;placeholder&quot; answer (which must still be an answer, but it can omit details) to get it in before the question is closed, and then edit it later. That used to be a recommended procedure, but these days it's frowned upon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-10-30T23:18:34.687" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T23:18:34.687" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-20T18:22:54.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having had the misfortune to be seated with a known crank at a APS meeting dinner, I can assure you that there are people who are quite incapable of holding a meaningful conversation about something that most of us would recognize as &quot;physics&quot;. Or indeed of being diverted to less controversial subjects like partisan politics or college football ranking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, most of the questions we get about...erhm...non-standard physics are not put forth by actual cranks and crackpots. They're just aspiring amateurs who don't know any better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't hurt to develop a gentle language for saying &lt;em&gt;&quot;Bollocks! Go read a textbook!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and we should entertain challengers to accepted theories if they are marked as such. That is &lt;em&gt;&quot;How would long range modifications of the $1/r^2$ dependence of gravity deal with galactic rotation curves? Are these theories consistent with cluster dynamics?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; ought to be allowed &lt;em&gt;even though&lt;/em&gt; these theories are in the doghouse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyone who insists that we discuss his theory where energy means something different from &lt;em&gt;&quot;the orthodoxy&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;charge is an illusion&quot;&lt;/em&gt; probably isn't going to find acceptance here. Because they are around the bend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-01-20T18:30:08.920" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T18:30:08.920" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-20T20:14:31.877" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we had a few exchanges over some answers I thought were not adding any value. Let me say a few things about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many professional physicists I know have passion for their trade, and would love to spend a couple of minutes having an exchange on interesting physics. This is a good way to stir things up, remind yourself of things you thought you knew, and have fun in the process. This is a resource I think you'd want to tap into.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those people, myself included, have enough on their plates already. This is only going to work if this is fun, and not too time consuming. Fighting with excessive amounts of noise is going to kill all the fun, and is very time-consuming, so noise control is essential to having high quality conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For readers, there has to be a easy and straightforward way to distinguish good answer from bad ones. So, again, quality control is the issue. In the current system, seems to me the best way to achieve that is to massively downvote anything that is pure crap, so it is on the bottom of the page and does not disturb the conversation. If there is hope for correction, then by all means add a comment, but nobody in their right mind will get into an argument with the same set of people who necessitate you having a spam filter on your email.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of that, I am stressing that quality control is the problematic issue. I am sorry about not being too diplomatic or democratic here, but there is such a thing as a bad answer, there is such thing as gibberish, and there should be a way to control the entropy generation. There is a range of reasonable opinions, especially about areas that are uncertain, but there are also opinions that are plain wrong. The sentiment you expressing here and elsewhere, that everyone is equal and we all need to be heard would result in a pleasant and civil conversation of no value to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, this is already taking too much time and effort, I certainly don't want to get into an argument with you, or anyone else. If you want to have a different type of forum, which is more open to brave new alternative ideas and less aggressive about the correctness of physics, I think you'll find this is easy to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastEditorDisplayName="user566" LastEditDate="2011-01-21T01:17:50.167" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T01:17:50.167" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-20T23:29:37.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, for one, have not problem in being called crackpot in a private exchange, or during the lenghtly progress of a public discussion. In such cases, it is used by one of the members of the discussion to call attention about some point, and it is just an emphasis, as tone or corporal language. The problem about epithets, either &quot;crackpot&quot; or &quot;genius&quot;, in short messages or as rethorical introductions is that they help to do &quot;groupthinking&quot;, in this case they can induce upvotes and downvotes without real analysis of the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloggers have this same problem in the contrary direction, they keep telling one another how good and nice they are, and sometimes they neglect to analyze the contents. Not to tell about microbloggers &quot;How excelent is this!&quot; &quot;This lecturer is a real luxury&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we could do a list of &quot;bad words&quot; and pay one reputation point for each use in a comment or reply :-D It will not be a big cost for the people in the thousands, and will avoid the entry level trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A marginally related question: am I right in assuming that deleting an entry clears all the positive and negative reputation gained/lost by the author of such entry? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1335" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T23:29:37.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-21T02:58:05.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a hard question, its very odd, I actually don't mind it so much if used when I know if I have been overly arrogant.  I think its a problem to call someone a crackpot when in instances the recipient isn't claiming knowledge but only proposing ideas in order to get better guidance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it is partially excusable when someone takes a position that is clearly wrong and fails to strive to understand why they are wrong. I think someone who claims authoritatively that the earth is flat is clearly a crackpot, but someone who suggests it is flat out of ignorance, but is willing to accept it isn't when presented with proof is not a crackpot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1383" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T02:58:05.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2011-01-21T05:08:03.253" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual method in teaching is that the teacher asks the students questions. The students provide answers (guesses), and the teacher grades them. This works because the teacher is assumed to have more knowledge about the subject than the students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange tries to turn this on its head. The &quot;student&quot; asks a question. The &quot;teacher&quot; provides an answer. Then the other students (i.e. readers) grade them. This kind of teaching method is suitable for subjects far simpler than physics. Physics is about learning how to make calculations. Stack Exchange is mostly about the transmission of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't be too surprising that the result is kind of rough sometimes. You're letting the inmates run the asylum. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that something to the effect that democracy was a horrible system of government but seemed to work better than the alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, why should it be such a horrible thing that a wrong answer, or even a complete crank answer, gets voted up and accepted by the questioner? It's not like someone is going to be executed as a result of the decisions made here. A student who relies on the internet for answers to their homework shouldn't be shocked when (a) they occasionally get wrong answers and (b) they usually don't learn anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn physics, reading answers is not going to help you. The people who are learning physics here are the ones answering the more difficult (for them!) questions, not the people reading other people's answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think things will work better if we all understand that the primary purpose of this site, just like the evening news, is entertainment, not truth. That said, I've had some good use out of this system and will likely continue to use it. I don't expect it to converge to the &quot;truth&quot; and won't lose any sleep over its failure to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T05:08:03.253" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-21T05:56:10.293" Score="5" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339/can-we-please-let-the-community-close-questions&quot;&gt;Can we please let the community close questions?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quit using Physics Forums because of a single case of moderation. I started a thread on the site to do a general relativity calculation in public. Along the way I was told by several respected posters that what I was doing was hopelessly wrong. Eventually a moderator closed it:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=126996&amp;amp;page=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schwarzschild Orbits in Cartesian coordinates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result of my calculation was a paper that was the first amateur paper to win an honorable mention in the annual gravitation essay contest:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0660&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0660&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem with allowing single people to close posts is that single individuals (heck, even groups of them) do not know enough about physics to distinguish between crank efforts and real physics. Sorry, physics is big and each of you, individually, is quite small. If you allow individuals to close threads you will eventually have this sort of problem drive people away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reminded of a statement by Harry Collins (a sociologist specializing in physicists):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of my failings ... is that I&#xA;  cannot generate the levels of disdain&#xA;  for physicists that one physicist can&#xA;  generate for another; I know what I am&#xA;  missing because ... in my own field I&#xA;  can readily generate such levels of&#xA;  disdain for some of my fellow social&#xA;  scientists!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology-of-science.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology-of-science.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with disdain is that it is an emotion that can blind the reader. And the people most attracted to giving effort on Stack Exchange; do you think they're going to have LESS than the average level of disdain? I suggest that they're likely to be those who have more difficulty &quot;getting along with others&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the reason you should not have single moderators closing topics is the same reason physics journals use more than just a single person (the editor) when deciding whether a paper is worth publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-02-21T21:11:17.857" Title="On the subject of moderation by single individuals" Tags="|discussion|moderators|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2011-01-21T07:39:07.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is edited into an (not necessarily) incorrect answer, but a conflicting with the earlier, or critically stiuation changing details are added after the answer beeing accepted, a moderator should revert it to the earlier version and the user should be told to post instead a new answer, since these changes constitute the definition of a NEW answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T07:39:07.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="349" CreationDate="2011-01-21T07:59:31.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree to this, when a question is not in 100% clear violation of the FAQ or site guidelines, the community shall decide, moderators should only enforce the written rules, not thin and vague complaints that some (one) person posted on meta long time ago, that would lead to chaos and need of moderation of moderators, which I believe is tried to avoid on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a situation where one needs to close lots of questions under short time, there should be added a rule to the FAQ that these questions violate, thus giving moderators power to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know anything about the process of forming the FAQ or site guidelines on SE ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastEditorUserId="1708" LastEditDate="2011-01-21T08:06:11.553" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T08:06:11.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-21T10:02:14.953" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2865/wormholes-time-machines-for-experts-in-gr-maths&quot;&gt;wormhole time machines&lt;/a&gt; is getting into complicated discussions. Comments are too short for responses (and don't support e.g. images, which I intend to use for clarification) and extending the original questions/answers loses continuity of discussion. [I extended my question to deal with various comments &amp;amp; Lubos Motl's answer; Lubos has expanded his answer... I now need to address the Lubos Expansion in detail...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I proceed? TIA, Julian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1280" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-01-29T11:47:52.683" Title="How do I manage postings in discussions on an ongoing complex question" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="295" CreationDate="2011-01-21T10:38:30.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as Stack Exchange provides a mechanism for complaints about copyright and is willing to take down copyright material as appropriately requested, I would have thought that widespread &quot;fair-use&quot; provisions would cover the use of even copyright material, particularly if the source is clearly acknowledged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect fair-use to apply if the item used is a small part of a larger work, but it is not prima facie obvious that reusing a single image would be &quot;fair use&quot; (that image might be one of a set of illustrations intended to be licensed for use individually). I would hope that a combination of common sense, reasonable efforts and fair-use would benefit all concerned. There is no guarantee that any re-use is necessarily valid (how do you know that the person you emailed for permission to reuse is in fact the copyright holder?), so why not strike a reasonable balance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1280" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T10:38:30.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2011-01-21T18:17:37.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've also seen a couple of questions closed today that I found quite thought provoking. They could have drawn interesting answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were &quot;Weight of earth&quot; and &quot;The vjazanka draw problem&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly there were some problems in the English of the questions but those could have been fixed easily. The questions might have drawn answers about mass and energy in relativity, especially general relativity that would have been quite interesting and led to some nice insights for the question askers, but the moderators closed them very quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I wonder if the moderators know enough physics to understand the subtleties in those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they should at least wait for a few up/down votes before closing. It is very off-putting when you are thinking up an interesting answer and then the question is just closed without the moderators even giving an explanation about why they closed it other than &quot;not a proper question&quot;. Without an explanation it is difficult to dispute the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1341" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T18:17:37.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-21T20:51:49.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you over censor comments, the blog will lose its fun aspect and you get self-appointed censors controlling the content. Obvious insults should be removed by a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1495" LastActivityDate="2011-01-21T20:51:49.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="362" CreationDate="2011-01-22T00:46:32.863" Score="5" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me put it this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that a person knows that they're the smartest physicist on earth. Such a person would find it very frustrating that their votes on questions and answers can be canceled by a single vote by another individual. What's worse, + votes for answers count for +10 reputation points, while - votes only count for -2, I think. To repair this deficit in the system design the only logical thing to do is to arrange to have multiple accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there safeguards in the system for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-01-23T00:40:18.873" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T00:40:18.873" Title="Multiple Personality Disorder (sock puppetry)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2011-01-22T16:47:33.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to see if the community vote system SE is based upon is robust enough to avoid this forum to degenerate into what some refer to as 'crackpot forum'. If it isn't, something is wrong in the system, and 'more moderators' is not going to repair such a system flaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new here, and also this is my first experience with SE, but it seems to me that the up/down-vote bonus/malus is skewed to the extent that karma becomes a cumulative system. In other words, Karma seems to be dominated by quantity rather than quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it indeed the case that someone who receives as many downvotes as upvotes, if active enough, will bypass a person who only receives upvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1268" LastActivityDate="2011-01-22T16:47:33.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-22T17:47:06.543" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or should only substantive questions be allowed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If not, is there another place to ask reference questions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Actually, I would like to ask reference questions, so I will make this a feature-request,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;even though it began as a simple request for information.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would be quite happy if reference questions were kept in a separate location or category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-01-23T00:05:53.293" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T19:57:50.220" Title="Is asking for references OK?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-22T18:02:38.160" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to be too blunt about this, but I think it's clearly useful to be fairly harsh about obviously crackpotty statements.  We have to remember, most of the people asking questions here almost &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt;, are not experts, and they can't distinguish between an Ed Witten and an Archimedes Plutonium (sadly, all too many professionals can't too, but that's beside the point).  Sometimes, the best thing to say is just &quot;no, that's stupid, let's move on.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can add details and discussion too, of course, but the typical non-expert is not going to know the difference between a polite argument about a legitimately unknown issue, and a polite &quot;argument&quot; on a topic that's been understood for a century.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can easily imagine asking a question on a topic I don't know much about, say, &quot;I just heard in the news that, according to quantum computing, experiment X can determine if P=NP,&quot; and would sincerely appreciate responses like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard and that article contradicts everything about information theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;over a polite &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well you see the article refers to Bob's equation which says blah blah blah and you see that as a consequence of blah blah blah we know that, assuming ZFC such statements aren't decidable so the article's conclusion is fallacious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a non-expert, the second one could easily be interpreted to mean there are technical deficiencies, and it would be a legitimate research project to try to avoid them.  The first one clearly says: no, it's wrong and unfixable, and no sane person works on this.  Anyone who actually cares about the answer would certainly prefer the decisive answer. (Obviously both at once would be preferred, but I understand that the experts answering a question only have so much time, and that may not really be possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say downvoting accomplishes this, but that can be done for many reasons.  Say someone asks about the QCD beta function, and one response is correct, except that it has a minus sign error which causes it to come to the opposite conclusion.  So, okay, it gets downvoted by everyone because it comes to the obviously opposite conclusion, but it's still more valuable than the nonsense answer everyone &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I do not see any problem with being harsh, or calling answers/theories crackpot ones.  The fact is, this is science, and there's really not a lot of opinion involved on if something is correct or not.  There is also a pretty sharp difference between &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; a question that may not make sense, and &lt;em&gt;proposing&lt;/em&gt; an answer that does not make sense, and the latter deserves less explanation than the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1403" LastActivityDate="2011-01-22T18:02:38.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="365" CreationDate="2011-01-22T21:21:43.030" Score="13" ViewCount="866" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently physics.SE has seen more users regularly including salutations and sign-off in their posts. That &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-and-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts/3021#3021&quot;&gt;behavior has been strongly discouraged on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; for a very long time, and I would prefer the same here. But I'm not ready to start a major editing campaign without polling the locals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/37439/2509&quot;&gt;Editing for Brevity?&lt;/a&gt; (Closed as a duplicate of the above, but much more recent and containing some additional discussion.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thought?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T18:43:35.090" Title="Are salutations, sign-offs and other politese appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="360" CreationDate="2011-01-23T00:04:46.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been particular about it so far, but if there are not vehement objections from the community, I would be fine going along with a plan to edit them out. We can then make this an &lt;code&gt;[faq]&lt;/code&gt; question to refer people to in the future when they wonder why the greetings etc. have been stripped out of their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T00:04:46.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2011-01-23T00:39:53.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes they are, and we are watching you all the time. When sock-puppet is detected, all cross-votes are invalidated and so the reputation earned this way vanishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, if one has real MPD, he/she can use multiple accounts -- the only crime is to vote on other personalities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T00:39:53.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="339" CreationDate="2011-01-23T01:17:45.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was mentioned few times so I'll try to explain my actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not encouraging to bypass the community close voting, I proposed to flag questions witch cannot be closed in a normal mechanism for some reason (for instance the question is not frequently visited on requires specific knowledge to be recognized as junk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet mods are also to enforce some standard SE policies and guard some basic site level -- thus, for instance, I try to close questions that are just too vague or too lame before they got zyllions of &quot;Dear X, there is something called conservation of energy...&quot;-like answers and later stand as a bad example for future askers. I know it may be irritating since they are good sources of easy reputation, but sorry -- we all really don't want another Yahoo answers here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T01:17:45.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="370" CreationDate="2011-01-23T01:39:23.823" Score="7" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was some positive feedback on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/305/physics-journal-club-on-chat&quot;&gt;the previous question&lt;/a&gt;, so let's give it a try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brief introduction:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Journal Club is intended to be a whole day meeting (with 3 meet-up sessions to seed the discussion) on chat where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting. It should be both interesting and understandable (at least in idea) for a broader audience.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We (mods) will try to invite the author(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer) and/or upvote propositions you like. The deadline for voting is 1.28.2011 23:59UTC and the first approximation of the JC itself is 2.4.2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-02-05T14:03:09.730" Title="Propose a paper for the first Physics SE Journal Club!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="360" CreationDate="2011-01-23T11:19:21.300" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#signatures&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#signatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Can I use a signature or tagline?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don’t use signatures or taglines in your posts. Every post you make is already &amp;quot;signed&amp;quot; with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you — fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is forbidden by the faq, and continuing to do it when politely being asked to refrain is grounds for timed suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T11:19:21.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="339" CreationDate="2011-01-23T12:16:08.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;And in the voice of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349/on-the-subject-of-moderation-by-single-individuals&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This place is not a discussion forum&lt;/strong&gt;. Simply. The structure and mechanism are not optimized to this purpose and effectively change each discussion (regardless of the disputants' intentions) into a clutter of randomly voted statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss something, use chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have built a working time machine out of slinky and rare-earth magnets and even managed to transport a living triceratops into the backyard, send a paper to Nature or Science rather than downvote someone's answer claiming it is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have your own formulation of quantum mechanics that involves nanobubble dynamics and lemon trees, don't enlighten a student that wants to understand quantization of angular momentum before his exam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T12:16:08.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="360" CreationDate="2011-01-23T23:40:45.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very old and very old-school.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I like these pleasantries and think they help avoid flame wars.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I violated this rule on my first few posts out of ignorance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But now I am trying to comply.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(I find this is a fairly complex and more than slightly intimidating site for a newbie, but maybe that's just me.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now I am strongly tempted to end with a complimentary close, and a signature,  but I won't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T23:40:45.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="364" CreationDate="2011-01-24T00:58:38.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brouder, Christian (2000), &quot;Runge–Kutta methods and renormalization&quot;, Eur.Phys.J. C12: 521–534, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9904014&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;arxiv:9904014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a &quot;so what&quot; paper, even if true one is left asking &quot;ok, and so what?&quot;. But by studying it we can link to all the series of Dirk Kreimer (and Connes-Kreimer) on perturbative renormalisation and eventualy to the rigorization of Renormalisation Group Methods. And if some people here comes from computer science, perhaps we could get some input on the real role of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher_group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Butcher group&lt;/a&gt; in numerical methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1335" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T00:58:38.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="364" CreationDate="2011-01-24T03:34:40.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest a trio of papers centered around the topics of &lt;strong&gt;non-commutative field theory&lt;/strong&gt; and its relationship to the &lt;strong&gt;quantum hall effect&lt;/strong&gt;. These are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Quantum Hall Fluid and Non-Commutative Chern Simons Theory&lt;/em&gt;, L. Susskind, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0101029&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hep-th/0101029&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quantum Hall states as matrix Chern-Simons theory&lt;/em&gt;, A. Polychronakos, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hep-th/0103013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quantum Hall physics = noncommutative field theory&lt;/em&gt;, S. Hellerman and M. V. Raamsdonk, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103179&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hep-th/0103179&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T03:34:40.663" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="364" CreationDate="2011-01-24T09:04:37.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A critical overview of Loops and Foams&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.4475&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;arXiv:1009.4475&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some great discussions on LQG on the main site. This paper is a very pedagogical explanation to some of the basic notions. It also happens to be written by two &quot;outsiders&quot; who are quite frank about the problems LQG faces and the work required to overcome them. In other words for those interesting in learning about the subject, but are understandably hesitant given the bad reviews of the subject floating around, this paper might provide an acceptable middle ground. To quote from the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A particular emphasis is given to the issue of diffeomorphism and local Lorentz symmetries at the quantum level and to the discussion of new spin foam models.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in other words catnip for the curious mind :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T09:04:37.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="375" CreationDate="2011-01-24T17:03:23.113" Score="1" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if debunking of these claims falls within the scope of the site: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/24/1550205/Italian-Scientists-Demonstrate-Cold-Fusion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/24/1550205/Italian-Scientists-Demonstrate-Cold-Fusion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-italian-scientists-cold-fusion-video.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-italian-scientists-cold-fusion-video.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?WO=2009125444&amp;amp;IA=IT2008000532&amp;amp;DISPLAY=DOCS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?WO=2009125444&amp;amp;IA=IT2008000532&amp;amp;DISPLAY=DOCS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know CF == crackpottery, however would a &quot;how to debunk&quot; question be beneficial/on topic on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T02:54:11.410" Title="Debunking cold fusion claims" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="372" CreationDate="2011-01-24T17:47:50.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 4 cases to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Applying physics to the claim leads to contradiction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 2) Claims are already self-contradictory.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 3) Claim is non-scientific.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 4) Claim is true within physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are certain that 1) or 4) applies, then my opinion is that its discussion is relevant for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T17:47:50.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="372" CreationDate="2011-01-24T18:05:44.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than answer the question as asked I'll suggest a cold fusion related question that I think &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What are the experimental realities that make Fleischmann-&amp;amp;-Pons style cold fusions experiments easy to get wrong?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is important because F&amp;amp;P appear to have thought they really had something (i.e. it wasn't a knowing scam), and some of the other reputable scientists who tried to reproduce their work had apparent success for some time afterward. So it is reasonable to ask &lt;em&gt;&quot;How could that be?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-01-24T18:11:51.840" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T18:11:51.840" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="372" CreationDate="2011-01-24T20:04:24.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it might be nice to have a question like &quot;Why is cold fusion considered bogus?&quot; to explain something about the reasons why nobody takes the idea of cold fusion seriously, hopefully in more detail than the Wikipedia article. But we shouldn't rush to debunk the recent claims of Rossi and Focardi, at least not before people have tried and failed to replicate their experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T20:04:24.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="372" CreationDate="2011-01-25T02:54:11.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm amazed at the gentle treatment of F&amp;amp;P in this discussion. I agree it wasn't a deliberate scam, but they did very shoddy work and their behavior during and after was very bad. Let's not forget that in spite of all the evidence that accumulated against their result they nonetheless continued their work and managed to extract many millions of dollars from the Toyota corporation before they too wised up and cut off the funding. The book &quot;Bad Science&quot; by Gary Taubes is an excellent and entertaining discussion of the whole cold fusion fiasco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T02:54:11.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="295" CreationDate="2011-01-25T10:07:26.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1572/how-to-determine-the-n-m-dimensions-of-a-carbon-nanotube/1573#1573&quot;&gt;answer about nanotubes&lt;/a&gt; included a very interesting (at least to me) diagram. I thought the author really took the time to conjure up some TikZ magic. Eventually, I found this paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The electronic properties of graphene&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Castro Neto, F Guinea, N Peres, K Novoselov, A Geim (2009)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Reviews of Modern Physics 81 (1) p. 109-162&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/RevModPhys.81.109&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/RevModPhys.81.109&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the exact same image was in Figure 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we have a policy regarding citing sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for one, am preparing for graduate school, and I would like to learn how to find my way around the field I am applying to; so knowing which important papers to read would be very helpful for community members like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I almost added a comment to the answer regarding citing the source, but I didn't know how to play the role of &quot;plagiarism police&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="293" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-01-25T10:07:26.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="275" CreationDate="2011-01-26T19:02:28.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is a good idea if the SE system does not have a specific tool for that. The site is optimized for Q&amp;amp;A but not for a poll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, despite agreeing that this would be very nice, I don't think that there is a way of implementing in in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1337" LastActivityDate="2011-01-26T19:02:28.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-27T04:21:13.510" Score="16" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brahms' music is rich and interesting, but not easily accessible to a layman.  Justin Bieber's is not very interesting, but he gets downloaded from iTunes a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last week or two, there have been a lot more questions at the advanced and research levels, and a number of professional physicists have been answering them.  I almost never vote on these questions and their answers because I can't distinguish good from bad.  It seems to be a rough general trend that the more advanced the question, the less voting there will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be construed as a disincentive to post research-level questions and answers as compared to more broadly-accessible ones.  Someone who provides a lot of helpful, interesting answers to questions in their field might still wind up with low site reputation, especially compared to the high effort they put into answering technical questions.  (I'm personally the opposite of this - I answer mostly basic-level questions and don't have a field.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess that if you ask most individual users, they would say that this isn't a problem for them because they don't care about reputation, except maybe to have enough to get full participation privileges.  (That's what I would say, if you asked me.)  However, as a whole, the behavior of users of StackExchange must be affected somewhat by reputation, or it wouldn't be recorded, displayed, and put up on &quot;top user&quot; charts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this effect an issue that may affect the quality of the questions and answers?  If so, is there any particular thing we should do, or at least be cognizant of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2011-01-29T19:00:19.043" Title="The Brahms vs. Bieber Effect" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-01-27T10:51:58.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an partial aside, we have noticed that our hard science sites tend to naturally striate into &quot;research-level advanced topics&quot; and &quot;typical entry college level topics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not entirely sure the needs of both audiences can be realized on a single site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T10:51:58.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-01-27T11:42:40.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that the problem is not in &quot;advanced vs basic&quot; dichotomy in the first place.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nor it is about &quot;specialized vs broad&quot; or &quot;professional vs amateur&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that people tend to vote up &quot;fun&quot; posts. There are posts that have a lot of upvotes, while I doubt that there are many people (or at least &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; many people) that are able to assess the quality of these questions or answers. Posts about black holes or entanglement are more likely to be popular than about classical mechanics or RLC circuits. Also in your answer you can write a lot of nice &quot;bla-bla-bla&quot; around the topic without actually getting to the point. And you'll get much more than short and concrete answer on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Populism. Every community-driven site is affected by it. I think that it is unfair. And the only way to at least reduce this unfairness is to keep that in mind, when you vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me finally note that the idea behind the SE sites is &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt;. So if you feel that you have learnt something new -- why don't you vote it up?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T11:42:40.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-01-27T12:18:14.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only a problem caused by people who really care about their reputation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;BUT - for people that really care, they will answer any question they can, so there is no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only a minor effect if people tend to prioritize answering easier question, I think the opposite is more true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A real concern that may degrade quality is that the fastest (and thus often not the best) answer tends to get mroe upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastEditorUserId="1708" LastEditDate="2011-01-27T12:23:27.133" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T12:23:27.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="364" CreationDate="2011-01-27T17:47:18.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it spacetime or, is it space + time?&lt;/strong&gt; How sure we are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it space expansion or a matter shrinking scenario?&lt;/strong&gt; How sure we are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We assume that the atom sizes are absolute. This presumption is an obfuscation to understand the universe and time properties. This paper analyses the effects that arise from the perspective  of an 'instant observer', splitting spacetime into space + time.  The derivation of the Einstein Special relativity is presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0205/0205033v1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cosmological Principle and Relativity - Part I&lt;/strong&gt;  (arxiv physics&#xA;0205033)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper extends on the consequences of the first one, and presents a model of our Universe that is scale-invariant (self-similar) where Dark Energy is not invited. This paper is easier to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0208/0208365v1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A relativistic time variation of matter/space fits both local and&#xA;cosmic data&lt;/strong&gt; (arxiv astro-ph&#xA;0208365)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm friend of the author Alfredo and, maybe, I can persuade him to appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1257" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-02-04T18:43:47.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2011-01-28T07:34:10.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there is a now a &lt;a href=&quot;http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;discussion site at area51&lt;/a&gt; I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/36/133&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; there with the following suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as theoretical physics site does not even exist, &lt;strong&gt;ask your toughest questions at physics.SE&lt;/strong&gt;. That way you gain rep to &lt;strong&gt;help progressing commitment phase&lt;/strong&gt; for one thing, and, what is more important, you &lt;strong&gt;help supporting physics.SE with high level questions&lt;/strong&gt;. In the hopefully occurring event that both sites make it out of beta, questions can still be migrated at a later point (and merged if cross-posted to seed TP.SE beta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2011-01-28T07:34:10.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2011-01-29T11:47:52.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not ask such questions; they are just unmanageable in Q&amp;amp;A system. Ask questions that can get simple, definite answers and move discussions to chat (for instance propose relevant paper for Journal Club) and other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-01-29T11:47:52.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-01-29T19:00:19.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that we need to focus on building a stronger community - clearly if advanced questions get less votes, it can only mean that we have still too few advanced users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the community thrives, inclusively, both kind of answers will get voted. However I do agree that we will see some striation of users. It doesn't worry me, because as soon as the community is strong, a more specialised site can emerge and succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2011-01-29T19:00:19.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2011-01-31T03:36:07.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should enforce $\hbar=c=1$ and end of story. :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now seriously. I don't see the point of enforcing a unit system. If it's crucial to the question, the poster will inevitably make clear what is the unit system he's using. If he don't, then we can ask him to clarify the point. But most of the time the units will just be patently transparent...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="673" LastActivityDate="2011-01-31T03:36:07.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="360" CreationDate="2011-01-31T09:32:55.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the originial &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-and-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts/3021#3021&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/520/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; is mentioning the argumentation is all about &lt;strong&gt;effectiveness&lt;/strong&gt; and getting the content of something straight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is important to come to a point fast.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But: This is a question of which &lt;strong&gt;culture&lt;/strong&gt; one wants to have in such a community. The &lt;em&gt;extraneous clutter&lt;/em&gt; mentioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/22164/thetxi&quot;&gt;TheTXI&lt;/a&gt; might indeed be something meaningful in &lt;strong&gt;human communication&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I strongly plead to leave the &lt;strong&gt;freedom&lt;/strong&gt; to the members of our community in which way to personalize questions and answers - I think I am not just a machine creating content for some website...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-01-31T09:32:55.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-31T19:25:50.503" Score="-19" ViewCount="1103" Body="&lt;h1&gt;This is a sandbox&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use this question as a formatting sandbox (if you can edit CW questions), and you can post answers if you want to test out formatting there as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: It's hard not to like this meta post but please keep it downvoted to -8 or less (rather than upvoting it) so that it doesn't get bumped to the front meta page every time someone is experimenting in the sandbox, which usually is not interesting to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T14:15:34.473" Title="This is a sandbox" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="22" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-01T04:23:13.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-01-31T22:33:42.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the community should aspire to standards of polite discourse. It's one of those things that is like pornography. I don't know how to define it but I know it when I see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-01-31T22:33:42.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-13T03:28:37.060" Score="53" ViewCount="6047" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;was closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another Internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we keep a list of other Internet sites that might help students&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; of physics. One site per answer. To keep the list at a reasonable size, please only include sites which fulfill the following criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site should be a physics site or have a physics section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site's scope should be wider than Phys.SE's scope. In particular, it should welcome questions in all areas of physics and at any level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site should be free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please avoid blatant promotion. This meta post is meant as a service for students in need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The question wasn't reopened after I edited the question. Also no one helped me (sufficiently) when I asked in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;Phys.SE chat room&lt;/a&gt;. (The chat room requires &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;20 reputation points&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The word &lt;em&gt;student&lt;/em&gt; includes self-student.  &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78" OwnerDisplayName="sigoldberg1" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-09-07T09:38:22.667" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T21:46:05.097" Title="My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another Internet site where my question might be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|faq|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2011-02-01T08:59:13.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some apparent redspace problems, 10 m/s (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2372/how-long-it-will-take-for-a-tree-to-fall-on-a-ground/2401#2401&quot;&gt;original post&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The period of a pendulum of length $h$ for small oscillations is $2\pi \sqrt{h/g}$, with $g$ the acceleration due to gravity, about $10 m/s$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sοurce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The period of a pendulum of length $h$ for small oscillations &#xA;is $2\pi \sqrt{h/g}$, with $g$ the acceleration due to gravity, &#xA;about $10 m/s$.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-11-06T06:54:41.293" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-01T08:59:13.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-01T11:25:38.350" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since yesterday there is an entry in my &quot;StackExchange&quot; inbox, &#xA;coming from a thread about &quot;why is atomic density not linear...&quot; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line reads :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Georg Given that this answer is in agreement with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I click on this entry, I get &quot;Page not found&quot;. &#xA;But the thread does exist, although not this comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-02-02T02:23:54.280" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T03:39:39.453" Title="&quot;Page not found&quot; when clicking on inbox item" Tags="|support|inbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="393" CreationDate="2011-02-02T02:23:12.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is sometimes possible due to race conditions when someone adds a comment and then deletes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-02T02:23:12.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-03T01:49:12.233" Score="1" ViewCount="990" Body="&lt;p&gt;Out of 1000+ questions on physics stack exchange, only 7 have a -4 or worse count (this link is temporary):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?page=78&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?page=78&amp;amp;sort=votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of these is a question I asked about asteroids and life on the planet:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Could life survive if the earth's axis were knocked 70 degrees by an asteroid collision?&quot;  -4&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4334/&quot;&gt;Could life survive a pole shift caused by an asteroid collision?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently four people voted it down and none up and I don't have a clue why. It's a basic physics question, it can be answered with a simple calculation, and it's of interest to the general public. Comments on the question are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some people have evidently never&#xA;  played with a gyroscope or tried to&#xA;  turn a spinning bicycle wheel out of&#xA;  plane with their hands. What mechanism&#xA;  is proposed to damp the ferocious&#xA;  precession that would be the&#xA;  inevitable aftermath of twisting the&#xA;  axis around like that? Bah! Humbug! –&#xA;  dmckee 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What sort of asteroid could knock&#xA;  Earth's axis off by 70 degrees without&#xA;  ripping the planet to shreds, for that&#xA;  matter!? – Noldorin♦ yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Noldorin: Yeah. I started trying to&#xA;  estimate the energies involved, but&#xA;  floundered when I realized there was&#xA;  no impulse-like way to get from there&#xA;  to here. – dmckee yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some very simple calculation would&#xA;  answer this question. – Georg&#xA;  yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, I answered my own question with the calculation I outlined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the only questions with a lower rating (i.e -5) are questions which, one way or another, do not make sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If energy in a flat space is zero, are we saying that a flat space is isolated?&quot; -5&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4448/if-energy-in-a-flat-space-is-zero-are-we-saying-that-a-flat-space-is-isolated&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4448/if-energy-in-a-flat-space-is-zero-are-we-saying-that-a-flat-space-is-isolated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why is there something rather than nothing? [closed]&quot; -5&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/908/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing&quot;&gt;Why is there something rather than nothing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering. Anyone have a clue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three other asteroid / meteor questions. This one also has to do with a life endangering asteroid:&#xA;&quot;Relativistic Object Impacts the Earth&quot;  +2&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3362/relativistic-object-impacts-the-earth&quot;&gt;Relativistic object impacts the earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other questions:&#xA;&quot;Orbital mechanics of Dragon's Egg&quot;  +3&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1816/orbital-mechanics-of-dragons-egg&quot;&gt;Orbital mechanics of Dragon&amp;#39;s Egg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What would be the real-world implications of the Kessler Syndrome?&quot;  +0&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/439/what-would-be-the-real-world-implications-of-the-kessler-syndrome&quot;&gt;What would be the real-world implications of the Kessler Syndrome?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T11:24:43.847" Title="Why did my asteroid question end up with -4 votes?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|voting|down-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="398" CreationDate="2011-02-03T03:12:57.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am no expert, but it strikes me as more of a science fiction &quot;what if?&quot; than an actual hard Physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&lt;/a&gt; and in particular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T03:12:57.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="398" CreationDate="2011-02-03T11:29:07.913" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote on this question of yours - but yes, it's mostly because I hadn't previously read it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make such a change, you need a nearly Moon-sized asteroids, and there aren't any in the Solar System, especially not those that are on collision course with Earth. Moreover, changes of some poles would clearly be the last worry if we were going to collide with a Moon-sized objects. Moreover, all the questions you are asking about this insanely unlikely scenario can be easily calculated by elementary mechanics. People just didn't think it was a question worth their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1236" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T11:29:07.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2011-02-03T12:23:50.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's a more appropriate term? &quot;Reality deprived&quot;? &quot;Methodologically challenged&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1704" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T12:23:50.727" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="398" CreationDate="2011-02-03T16:14:07.133" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it was a big mistake to begin your question with a ridiculous theory of your fellow. Even worse, the question itself is just the last two lines and the rest of the text is some nonsense that I would rather not read and that is why I downvoted your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: even worse, some naive person would read it and then remember that he saw a theory at Physics.SE about how oil was formed because of the asteroid impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2016-01-10T11:24:43.847" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T11:24:43.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="398" CreationDate="2011-02-03T19:22:27.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote it down, nor did I vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the proposed scenario is obvious tripe, because &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; impulse-like event that caused a large change in angular momentum like that would leave the body with a fearsome precession. Jumping Jebus, man! You don't even have a pure torque (what the engineers call a &quot;couple&quot;) in the problem, so there'd be a huge transfer of linear momentum as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your BOTE calculation is a brave attempt, but it doesn't model the proposed physics because it doesn't end with Earth having a small precession. That's why I didn't go ahead with a similar calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T19:22:27.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-05T15:25:54.753" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now I have a comment in my &quot;inbox&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;comment on Water Pressure in Free Fall&#xA;This doesn't get you differences in a single&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in that thread I do not see any comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-02-06T07:11:37.230" LastActivityDate="2011-03-08T07:11:54.963" Title="Missing comment" Tags="|support|inbox|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-02-06T02:23:54.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How easy would it be to alter the menu for questions at the top, so people could select how many levels of questions they want to appear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people posted, they would have to define the level of the question, with moderators moving questions to other levels if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T02:23:54.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-06T03:30:40.443" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13/can-i-ask-several-related-questions-in-a-single-thread&quot;&gt;Can I ask several related questions in a single thread?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you do if you want to ask a second, related but different question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(The original question can be your own question, or someone else’s question.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, considerable time may have elapsed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start a new question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Put it in an answer box?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Put it in a comment?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I see no good answer, but my intuition would be to ask a new question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Advice, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T03:39:34.337" Title="Protocol for asking closely related, but different questions?" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-02-06T04:04:02.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2011-02-06T07:11:28.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the timing of the comment deletion, it may or may not show up in your network inbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T07:11:28.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-06T09:54:46.230" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I noticed that 50 reputation points vanished overnight from my total. This was particularly galling since I had just crossed the 2,000 mark and the difference left me back in the 1900s. Has anyone else had this happen to them and does anyone know of an explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen the threads on SO and the SE blog which discuss the mechanisms for &quot;correcting&quot; anomalous voting patterns and such. However, in the absence of any formal notification or transparency in this correction process, such a change is disturbing to say the least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if I inexplicably lost points some others might have inexplicably gained, possibly some because of the same underlying voodoo. However you should also be concerned. Tomorrow you could be on the receiving end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T02:55:50.867" Title="The case of the missing reputation points" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="410" CreationDate="2011-02-06T10:08:48.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt; ? I recommend starting there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like there were some invalid votes on your account that got cleaned up by the daily vote anomaly process on Feb 2 UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T10:08:48.077" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="410" CreationDate="2011-02-07T02:55:50.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure about the technicalities, but you might take comfort in the realization these numbers have no implications out there in the real world (and not much here, either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T02:55:50.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="449" CreationDate="2011-02-07T05:16:05.583" Score="8" ViewCount="759" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is voting without a comment justifying the vote allowed ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the usefulness of having a graded and changing answer list ( though sometimes it is a bit funny, getting an answer before the comment that gave rise to it). Also the usefulness of keeping all answers in the voting result  order: It gives what people consider the clearest answer top position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When anonymity is taken into account though, this can lead to a group think of people down voting people with whom they do not agree, even for answers that are reasonable and clear. If each voter justifies the vote ( unphysical, not clear enough, trivial, or whatever) it will give readers a rational reason for the down voting and provoke further thoughts to the one who wrote the answer. The judge should be open to judgment and moderation too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I saw a  down vote in a comment that said &quot;you have been told that this is not the place to talk of your own theories&quot;. This goes against the open format of this forum. If Nima Arkani-Hamed had been answering a question using his new twistor revolution concepts would one say &quot;this is not the place to talk of your own theories&quot; ? As long as it is clear that it is a new out of the beaten path proposal censorship should be avoided, imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that scientific questions are not decided by consensus but by physics and mathematics clearly stated. The concept of this forum is admirable, but I think that the voting procedure needs some tweaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-02-24T22:43:45.583" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Can voting anonymously and without comment lead to &quot;consensus science&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-07T07:00:59.973" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already show a reminder to those who downvote and are below 2k rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gzdqj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;please consider adding a comment if you think this post can be improved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(don't worry, no posts were harmed in the creation of this screenshot)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no rational way to &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; people to leave a comment explaining their downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have some free time and wish to read the weeks and weeks of discussion on this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2263/require-comments-on-downvotes&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2263/require-comments-on-downvotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-down-votes&quot;&gt;Encouraging people to explain downvotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6521/allow-users-to-leave-an-anonymous-comment-when-voting&quot;&gt;Allow users to leave an anonymous comment when voting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Linked&quot; and &quot;Related&quot; columns of those questions are voluminous and probably cover every possible permutation of this conversation we could have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T07:00:59.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-07T08:03:42.257" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvoting is more powerful than downvoting (+10 rep vs -2 rep) but nobody is worried by anonymous upvoting&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;. It's simply our nature - nobody likes being criticized, but I believe that it is wrong to cut oneself of criticism, even anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; Upd: at least I have never seen a demand to comment an upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastEditorUserId="701" LastEditDate="2011-02-07T15:40:56.820" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T15:40:56.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-07T13:41:44.363" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a research site, sadly. If it was, we could argue our reasoned opinions and worry about attempts to suppress discussion, because it is good to have a wide range of opinions. This is a site where people ask questions which, almost always, have one correct answer and many incorrect ones. The incorrect one can result from honest confusion, in which case short discussion is a good idea. It can also come from the rather small set of people who have their own alternative ideas on what physics is, and even though there are not too many of them they tend to dominate online discussions. You can believe me that you don’t have the time to get into a discussion with them, and changing their minds is not an option.&#xA;When I identify this, The mechanism of downvoting is the only way I can help in directing any reader towards the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T13:41:44.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-07T21:59:03.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From looking at the older StackExchange sites, it's clear that physics is still very young. Some of the older questions on other sites have several dozen up votes. I don't think there's any real need for the 24th person to comment on why they liked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to help age physics, I've been getting rid of my 30 available votes per day by looking through old questions and upvoting them if they make sense. It seems to me that a lot of people are hanging on to their votes as if their objective was to have all questions and answers on the site carry a 0 except for the (future) answer which provides the succinct description of the unified field theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, I don't think it's necessary to comment on votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T21:59:03.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-08T15:58:34.227" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several things to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all -- this is my comment and I see nothing wrong with it. This site is obviously not a place to &lt;strong&gt;promote&lt;/strong&gt; ones theories. Let me emphasise the word &lt;strong&gt;promote&lt;/strong&gt; -- not &quot;talk&quot;. If your theory or method is accepted by scientific community and you think that it is relevant to the question -- do as you please. If you are twisting even the basic level questions eventually coming to the discussion of your own &quot;great discovery&quot; -- this is not the place. And the person in consideration was told about it several times. I didn't call anyone &quot;crackpot&quot; or some thing like this. I didn't tell that the &quot;theory&quot; was wrong. I just stated the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second is about &lt;strong&gt;what to downvote&lt;/strong&gt;. The answer is supposed to be downvoted if it is not helpful. It can be perfectly correct but not helpful. Such answers are to be downvoted. Again -- no abuse, nothing personal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third is about the &lt;strong&gt;commenting the downvote&lt;/strong&gt;: I have an observation that &quot;people who promote their theories&quot; do this everywhere for one and only reason -- they want their &quot;theories&quot; to be &quot;discussed&quot;. Being rejected by standard &quot;discussion areas&quot; in science they go to inappropriate places to fulfil their desire for communication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behaviour is very similar to trolling -- any kind of feedback you give to them receives even bigger reaction. And &quot;not feeding the troll&quot; strategy: &lt;em&gt;silent downvoting&lt;/em&gt; -- is best way do deal with this kind of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, about &lt;strong&gt;this “consensus science” stuff&lt;/strong&gt;. Not only this site is community-driven -- whole science is community-driven. If you think that you have made a great discovery, which is not accepted by scientific community, then it is your responsibility to be as correct and clear and careful as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you ever seen any great physicists with real great discoveries, comparing themselves to Galileo Galilei? Even if the discovery wasn't accepted first due to the community rigidity? I haven't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastEditorUserId="386" LastEditDate="2011-02-08T20:23:52.980" LastActivityDate="2011-02-08T20:23:52.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-09T16:46:53.687" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I reach just the moderators of physics stack exchange by email?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T07:12:54.247" Title="Contacting physics stack exchange mods" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2011-02-09T20:29:01.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably shouldn't. If you have an issue on the site that needs moderator attention, flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for some reason other than that, you want to contact the moderators, either leave a message in the chat room or use an @-notification on a question or answer that one of us has posted or commented on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't use the features the site provides to contact moderators (for example, if you aren't able to log in), email team+physics@stackexchange.com, and the Stack Exchange team will help you out. That email address doesn't go to the site moderators, but in cases like that there's probably nothing we could do about it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Personally, I do list an email address where I can be reached on my profile, but it shouldn't be used for matters relating to this site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-07-30T07:12:54.247" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T07:12:54.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-02-10T15:54:49.107" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I think we should avoid is overly representing mathematics or equations in the design, so no Schroedinger equations or nablas. We should go for a physical phenomenon. My personal preference would be something actually visually observable, for example with the naked eye or under a microscope, not just a plot of something. My personal preference leans toward optics, so for example a diffraction pattern. Perhaps a standing wave pattern from acoustics made visible in some fashion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastActivityDate="2011-02-10T15:54:49.107" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-10T15:54:49.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-11T08:54:58.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not mind getting downvotes but I am here also to learn so I would love to understand my errors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2011-02-11T08:54:58.570" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="425" CreationDate="2011-02-12T15:31:44.060" Score="8" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far I posed one question at the Physics StackExchange. &#xA;Since I really want to know the answer I offered a bounty of about 70% of my reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am sure that a good answer to this question will require quite some work (probably more than a week) - so maybe StackExchange is not the right platform, but let me ask you nevertheless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a time-scale of a week not way too short for some questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to provide some mechanism that extends the bounty-period?&#xA;Perhaps by increasing the bounty after some given time-period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1782" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T16:18:19.180" Title="Is the time scale for bounties too short on stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="424" CreationDate="2011-02-12T16:18:19.180" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bounty period has always been 7 days. I can suggest a few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bounties can be repeated indefinitely, so long as you have the reputation; try smaller bounties over a longer period of time&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site may need to grow larger to find the audience to answer your question, so you might try again in a few months.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are fundamentally obscure / difficult / unanswerable. Bounties on these questions are not magical, they cannot solve everything. Consider, is there something you can do to make your question more clear, break it down or simplify it in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T16:18:19.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-02-12T23:28:47.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think puzzles would be great for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Code golf&quot; questions pop on stackoverflow all the time. These questions challenge users to write code that successfully accomplishes a task in as few characters as possible. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3499538/code-golf-conways-game-of-life&quot;&gt;Write the shortest program that implements John H. Conway's Game of Life cellular automaton&lt;/a&gt;. (Mathematica can do this in 151 characters, amazingly!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of thing actually can be very educational and interesting. Even seasoned programmers can learn a lot from seeing other people try to work out solutions to problems in novel ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, physicists shouldn't get too haughty and start to believe that they know everything, and certainly not that they know every method. You can learn a lot from seeing how other people approach problems. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1683/mechanics-around-a-rail-tank-wagon&quot;&gt;Mechanics around a rail tank wagon&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T23:28:47.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-02-13T02:41:52.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say no, don't ask a question to which you already know the answer. Not because there's some fundamental problem with doing so, but because if you know the answer to your own question it typically winds up being phrased badly. Also, if you ask something like your example, whether the level of water goes up or down as ice melts, you're going to get answers targeted at someone who legitimately doesn't know what the answer is, and they'll sound condescending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think you know the answer to a problem but you're not entirely convinced, that's a different story, because in that case the real question you're asking is &quot;can anyone provide a more convincing justification for this?&quot; And that's a question you don't know the answer to. Those sorts of things can be decent puzzle questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T02:41:52.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-02-13T06:37:44.170" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that we had &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1683/520&quot;&gt;Mechanics around a rail tank wagon&lt;/a&gt; which is more or less a puzzle question, but was sufficiently challenging to keep several quite good physicist arguing and muddling their way through before we arrived at an answer that I believe to be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T06:37:44.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-13T12:38:10.733" Score="28" ViewCount="1654" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are more and more questions, which are formulted like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Can you explain that without math?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;I know that there is math, but is there an explanation in plain words?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or even &lt;em&gt;&quot;Can you tell without doing actual calculation?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel uneasy about them: mathematics is a language, it just helps to be rigorous and concrete, while we're asked not to use it. That is why such &quot;plain words explanations&quot; often lead to misunderstandings and even give rise new popular misconceptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I'm not telling that one always must throw bunch of formulae in a poor fellow's face. I'm just against another extreme &quot;no mathematics at all&quot; means &quot;no physics at all&quot; as well. Maybe we should if not forbid, then at least discourage such kind of questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T07:36:53.443" Title="&quot;No math, please&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-02-13T15:52:29.103" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, too, worry about these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, they're fine. I mean, Feynmann did a really amazing job explaining QED with no math, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mathless explanations of non-trivial subjects are often are longer (sometimes &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; longer) than math enabled ones. This affects how &quot;big&quot; a topic can be handled in the Q&amp;amp;A format.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without great care, explanation by analogy leads to follow-up question based on cases where the analogy breaks. In other words, physics by analogy is often misleading or outright wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To whatever extent we're trying to &quot;keep the level up&quot; here, this risk pulling it down.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-02-16T04:30:35.857" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T04:30:35.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-13T19:10:03.143" Score="3" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3710/field-in-physics-vs-field-in-math&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3710/field-in-physics-vs-field-in-math&lt;/a&gt; was closed by the single vote of a moderator. This is unfortunate. There is an actual question there. While I do agree that it should not be tagged as math-physics it is rather rash to close a question asking for a clarification of terms. This is a question I once asked some of my friends in physics, and I believe I know a decent answer, which I alluded to in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also am bothered that this question was confused for a linguistic issue. On other SE sites it is not uncommon to see a question of the form &quot;Are X and X' related? The terminology suggests they are.&quot; This is hardly a linguistic issue since people picked the names of X and X'. They possibly did so because they thought that they were related, or know that they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I find the closure of such a good faith question by a single moderator who does not seem to understand the question very troubling. It can be seen that the question was closed 5 minutes after it was asked at the same time that the moderator left a comment saying why he was closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this situation troubling. I know I haven't been here for a while, maybe I have missed some change in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T19:23:18.267" Title="Field in physics vs. Field in math" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-02-13T19:14:25.497" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not support both types of answers? E.g., someone who is inclined to answer with math, could answer with math, and someone who is inclined to answer without math could answer without math?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T19:14:25.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="431" CreationDate="2011-02-13T19:23:18.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't find that question very enlightening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between a physical field and a mathematical field is the same as the distinction between a physical scalar and a mathematical scalar: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The physics one is alleged to represent something in some sense &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt;, and is assumed to be affected by a set of rules beyond those imposed by mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you haven't learned anything there, you've simply described physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T19:23:18.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-02-13T21:12:19.880" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encountered the opposite issue: some people ask for precise definition, or mathematical exposition, or other technical sounding request, of some concept they clearly don’t understand. I tend to reply in words to that, despite the request. I think the problem with the “no math” request is more that it tends to accompany questions that are not well defined and potentially too elementary. This is an independent issue though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T21:12:19.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-02-14T20:25:56.540" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should encourage questions where the OP already knows the answer, puzzles or not, but I don't see anything wrong with a community wiki question asking for people to submit their favorite physics puzzles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T20:25:56.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-02-14T22:38:52.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we already have an abundance of people who have clever things to say, whether or not those observations are related in any way to the discussion they are joining. This sort of thing will get out of control if they are encouraged to show their brilliance in the form of a puzzle. For an example where this can lead you can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4827/is-the-total-energy-conserved-in-a-moving-reference-frame&quot;&gt;this gem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user566" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-02-15T01:27:13.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-02-15T16:18:41.953" Score="-12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Math is itself no math, any math symbol or theorem can be ultimately explained without math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1916" LastEditorUserId="1916" LastEditDate="2011-02-16T17:52:02.963" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T17:52:02.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-02-15T22:33:54.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164/mathematical-physics-does-it-belong-here&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on another physics-math related question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People visiting the site are really looking for physical insight/understanding.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When the language is math, it may well be that mathematical rigorousness and exactness hides the fact that on a physical level one cannot really explain what is going on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, please note that I am not opposed to math or rigourness, on the contrary.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But I am even more interested in trying to understand what is &quot;really&quot; going on under the hood of math. And also in this physical field I am looking for &quot;exactness&quot; - please don't say its just math and one shouldn't try to understand physics. Its my personal opinion that that is the main challenge in theoretical physics today.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly this is a minority opinion, but I hope the site will also be a place for some of the minorities - would it be interesting enough otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2011-02-15T22:33:54.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-16T10:52:09.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases I got anonymous downvotes I would have liked to know &#xA;whether this was some &quot;revenge&quot; or some error in my answer. &#xA;In extreme cases, knowing might allow to apply &quot;tit for a tat&quot; &#xA;strategy, but- in general, downvotes are not a real problem, just &#xA;think that world is not classic mechanics of work and reward, &#xA;there is entropy too :=(&#xA;Georg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T10:52:09.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-16T17:14:13.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one instance in which I don't like the upvotes, although I believe that it is a right people can exercise. It is the case when people upvote posts which they like and would make a good bolg entry, but are actually not good answers. In fact in some cases, they are not answers at all. They are general explanations about topics related to the question, but don't answer any portion of the question, and usually give information that can be easily found on the web. In my opinion, and this is just an opinion, upvoting should be used only for good answers, not for good exposition in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1382" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T17:14:13.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="442" CreationDate="2011-02-17T03:56:53.507" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to ask for criticism of an unpublished physics paper one is writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure how such a question should be phrased. An example is &quot;What's the worst mistake I've made in this paper I'm planning on sending to a journal?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already asked questions about other's unpublished physics papers and it seemed to go okay. See:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4986/could-ball-lightening-be-a-form-of-plasma&quot;&gt;Could ball lightening be a form of plasma?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T20:50:28.340" Title="Is it appropriate to ask for criticism of a paper one is writing?" Tags="|discussion|publishing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2011-02-17T04:36:06.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it would genuinely and honestly be &lt;strong&gt;of general interest and utility to others interested in Physics&lt;/strong&gt;, then perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what we want to avoid here is being &quot;too localized&quot;, e.g. a question that would only narrowly benefit your paper and you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T04:36:06.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-02-18T09:15:17.267" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a sketchy inspired chalkboard design?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images06/ChalkBoard01.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T09:15:17.267" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-18T09:15:17.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-02-18T09:54:57.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment, the most popular question tags are &lt;em&gt;quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and general relativity&lt;/em&gt;, so Schrödinger equation or Feynman diagrams are perfect elements for the site design. On the contrary, decorating the site with elementary pictures of interference, white light dispersion or pendulum motion would give Physics.SE an 'easy' look and would probably attract lower-level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T09:54:57.270" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-18T09:54:57.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-02-18T20:03:24.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that, most of the time, these questions are actually symptomatic of a different problem. A lot of us here tend to give answers in the most complicated and advanced language possible. This is a great disservice to anybody with less advanced mathematical abilities. I suspect that what the asker actually means is &quot;please answer this in a way that I can understand.&quot; When they say &quot;no math please&quot; I see it as an overreaction, intended to balance out our own tendency to explain simple things in complex terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when somebody who is &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; at a high school or early undergraduate level comes around, asking something valid but simple, for example &quot;Why does a projectile follow a parabolic path,&quot; we really need to avoid the temptation to give an answer in terms of number theoretic symmetry groups, Lagrangian dynamics, and quantum field theory!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is room for the more advanced explanation, and it is often good to have that answer in addition to the simpler one. More advanced readers should be able to find a response at their level; I don't debate that. Ultimately, though, if we want to stop people from asking for &quot;no math please&quot; then we need people to feel that if they ask a question using intermediate level language, they will get at least one response that is both correct, and expressed at an intermediate level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'd just like to clarify that I'm speaking here in generalities. I agree that there are plenty of cases where a &quot;no math please&quot; question cannot be properly answered without math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastEditorUserId="869" LastEditDate="2011-02-18T22:20:15.797" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T22:20:15.797" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-18T22:46:36.320" Score="24" ViewCount="2628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi all. I'm &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/our-designer-in-residence-jin-yang/&quot;&gt;Jin&lt;/a&gt;, and I'll be working on the designs for the Stack Exchange sites as they graduate from the beta phase. Each site will have its own unique theme that will reflect its topic. However, all sites will share quite a bit of common elements so they feel like they're part of the Stack Exchange family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to thank you for creating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/304/what-should-our-site-look-like&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; on design ideas. It's helped me a great deal. After reading through all the suggestions, and researching on my own, I feel a blackboard theme would work well. It conveys a strong academic theme and has a personal touch, it also gives this community a distinctive character and identity. For those who are still in school learning and teaching, this theme creates a similar setting. For those outside of academia, it strikes a nostalgic feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T0yYR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, creating a dark themed design is always tricky. Bright text on flat black is harsh. But I believe when done right, a dark theme can be beautiful and sophisticated.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inspired by the above black board photo I found, as well as some photos submitted in the other &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/our-designer-in-residence-jin-yang/&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The design goal is to mimic the blackboard theme. It will have physics equations serving as visual decoration, but subtly so as to not get in the way of the main content. It needs to be simple and relatable to the site's audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the design concepts. &lt;em&gt;(click on image to see full resolution versions)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XPV0e.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XPV0e.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Home&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tfqn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tfqn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The faint grunge texture in the background is there to add to the blackboard effect. I've used some suggested equations/figures from the other thread as decorations, again, subtly. For the logo, I'm using the Mexican Hat. I think a geometric figure works well in the allotted space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equations I used are:  Feynman diagram, Maxwell's equation, Heliocentric coordinate system for Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and Electronic properties of graphene. Of course, you are the physics experts, please let me know if I made any mistakes representing them. Also, if you feel there are certain equations that should be included to better serve the site(to reflect the level of questions), let me know. But do keep in mind, these equations are for decorative purpose only. I certainly don't want the entire background to be full of ghost marks. It would be hard to read the real content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the tag treatment, I'm keeping it simple. I believe a straightforward &quot;—&quot; feels more natural to how you'd write tags on a blackboard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm keeping the number of colors very limited for this theme. They resemble traditional chalk colors: white, yellow and red(pink).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this design works for the goal intended. The dark theme really makes this site stand out, and the important content is easier to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know your thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to get the site launched very soon. So an early congrats from me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T10:53:56.203" Title="Design for Physics-SE" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="14" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T01:57:10.750" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm generally skeptical of dark backgrounds, but the mock ups look good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I liked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chalked in effect on the badges and the vote arrows&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This semester I'm teaching on a blackboard for the first time in quite a while and you've also done a good job getting the grainy pastel feel of the colors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chalkboard type face for the titles and other oddments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;Mexican hat potential&quot; logo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This I disliked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing big.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't really like the way the question author block is set off.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The footer feels a little cramped (and, yeah, this is in conflict with my appreciation of the font choice...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I'm ambivalent about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the clean, sans serif typeface for the comments and post bodies is good for readability, but seems to detract a little from the theme. However, I have no suggestion for making it better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T01:57:10.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-02-19T02:50:02.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For answers, I like &quot;upvote if it is useful, downvote if it is wrong&quot;. Perhaps someone could change the arrows to mean than (instead of useful/not useful). A right but not useful answer, to me, is a zero but not a negative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure of the politics for questions. It is very subjetive, and perhaps in this case the reasons for downvoting could be done compulsory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People has said that upvoting is more powerful than downvoting, and it should be; I understand this is inspired in the previous experience of StackOverflow. But downvoting is more damaging: it tells the downvoted poster that it is not just uninteresting, that it is wrong or mad or unuseful or hated. And without a comment, the downvoted person can start to think that his posting is wrong when it is just mad, or the reverse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1335" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T02:50:02.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T10:22:24.133" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, to me it looks a little unprofessional.&#xA;The idea itself and realization are interesting and I am sure you've put a lot of thought and work into it but IMO the underlying concept itself is somewhat flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More precisely, I prefer clean simple designs, simple fonts, etc. I also don't particularly like black backgrounds (but I could deal with it if otherwise the design was a little more mature). What I particularly dislike are the chalky fonts. They remind me very strongly of Comic Sans and I think I've become allergic to anything similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the criticism. If the design was merely an art to be looked at, I'd like it very much. But if I am to use this site daily and will have to endure looking at those fonts all the time, I think it'll kill me sooner or later :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T10:22:24.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T11:18:10.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, well done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit that, as for a physics site, where no non-embarrassing nor non-controversial global symbols exists, the blackboard is a very good rejoinder (although it scared me at first because of my chalk-allergy ;-) ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the footer is too visible in handwrite, it definitely should go in the text font as on other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T11:18:10.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T15:28:36.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a dark background is hard to pull off properly, what about a whiteboard background, with colored marker pen fonts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1039" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T15:28:36.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T15:31:42.133" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think white background is better. How about a scribbled notebook background? It could be an authentic notebook, with Einstein's handwriting or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T15:31:42.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T18:48:11.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who dislike black background - make sure that you view the images at 100% zoom. Since the blackboard is not really black and the text is completely white, I find the contrast very comfortable. I like the idea of giving unique look to our site and I would like to see how the blackboard design works out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Small remark: bright red color of &lt;strong&gt;Add&lt;/strong&gt; buttons does not fit to the color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T18:48:11.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-19T22:39:08.673" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Marek, I absolutely hate the chalkboard font. That's my only complaint -- I actually don't have strong feelings about the white-on-black design, for instance -- but I really don't like that font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1241" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T22:39:08.673" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2011-02-19T23:51:16.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your paper tells people something, then it's not a question. If there's something you're not happy with in a paper, then maybe it's not a paper, but looking for a way to make the issue you're not happy with into an interesting question will help even if you don't get interesting and useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you genuinely and honestly &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it would be of &lt;strong&gt;interest and utility to others interested in Physics&lt;/strong&gt;, then go ahead, ask a question that points to a paper. If others think the question has been asked in an interesting way, they'll give you the five Reps; if they're neutral, they'll leave it alone; if they hate the question or the paper, they'll say so and you'll lose some Reps &amp;mdash; or, if it's bad enough, you'll just lose some Reps. If you're making enough Reps elsewhere, answering questions in an interesting way, asking other questions that are interesting, then you can spend some of your credit. There's a danger that you'll become known as the crazy person who has somehow amassed lots of Reps, which likely would hurt your ability to amass Reps in the future, but if you care about that then only ask safe questions, or only ask difficult questions in safe ways. My sense of SE is that there's plenty of pressure to conform, so extra pressure on this particular issue is likely not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the number of papers that go through arXiv every day, there's a danger that SE could be overwhelmed if lots of people took this route, but I doubt that would happen in significant numbers and I think the bridge can be looked at if people cross it. SE would, however, be doing the Physics Community a favor if at least a few papers can be improved or weeded out before they're sent to a journal. Anything that finds disapprobation on SE would very likely not be sent to referees at many journals (though somewhere can be found for most anything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, who cares about meta? &amp;mdash; just do it. If you're going to hate it if everyone dumps on you, do it carefully or do something else. If meta says you can do it, that's not going to stop people dumping on a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd say that &quot;What's the worst mistake I've made in this paper I'm planning on sending to a journal?&quot; is not a great Question. But then, this isn't a great Answer, despite the time I've spent on it (too much, but hopefully I've learned a little from the stops and restarts along the way even if no-one else does).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best wishes, Carl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1588" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T23:51:16.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-22T05:03:12.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I've got my laptop on my belly late at night, the only way I can find the keys is by the light emitted by the display. So a black background is quite inconvenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-02-22T05:03:12.610" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-22T09:44:19.563" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea - I actually had my screen colours inverted completely for some days. However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at one white on black site for a while and then back at the usual black on white causes some uncomfortable afterimages for me, and while I like spending some time here I usually have Matlab/Mathematica/etc. on my screen and don't like to be distracted by funny colourful spots (that's also why I stopped using inverted colours, it didn't work on remote sessions). Maybe that's just me though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could also interfere with accessibility issues, I'm afraid. But I like the style if you just invert the colours, giving it an also nostalgic &lt;strong&gt;pencil-calculations&lt;/strong&gt; look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rFXZQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rFXZQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Inverted style&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Amplifying the background a bit wouldn't hurt, too IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also like the sketchy style and colour choice of e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crayonphysics.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crayon Physics&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.kloonigames.com/crayon/screenshots/crayon_shot_02.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but that's probably giving the wrong idea to someone with &quot;advanced&quot; questions. OTOH I can't help but smirk at the thought of a quite sophisticated discussion written down in wax colours :-7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2011-02-23T15:48:03.800" LastActivityDate="2011-02-23T15:48:03.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="461" CreationDate="2011-02-22T19:33:07.403" Score="14" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/questions-of-procedure/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you wish to know about &lt;a href=&quot;http://polymathprojects.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Polymath&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one would love to be a part of some collaborative problem solving endeavor. Although it can be said that quite some physics research is already massively collaborative -the LHC- for example, but I am talking about some research level theoretical question. There are some issues that I thought about, and I would like to here your own:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lots of people are already working&#xA;on lots of problems individually,&#xA;for their thesis etc. An ideal&#xA;question should be somewhere between&#xA;an examination question and a thesis&#xA;report for such a project to be&#xA;feasible. (i.e too tough for an exam, but not big/exhaustive enough for an entire thesis)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some senior practicing&#xA;physicist(s) must mentor/administer such a&#xA;project. This is the only way to ensure that nonsensical things do not get accepted by some sort of crowd consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is it different from physics.SE?&#xA;This is where I have my greatest&#xA;apprehension. Here people post their&#xA;own solutions which are intended to&#xA;be complete. These are then judged&#xA;and voted accordingly as per their&#xA;accuracy and clarity, etc. I don't&#xA;see how this can be applied to physics problems, although it might be possible. For example, a Maths problem the collaborative effort usually goes like this.. people start by testing for trivial cases, trying induction, trying to reduce the problem to an easier or known one, etc. In physics, if we are to study some physical problem, we might have  to make simplifications to put it into an analyzable-framework. It then reduces to using known physical laws and applying it to the specifics of the problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how clear I have been, I would like to know what you all think about this. I am in no position qualified to start such a project, but I would have loved to participate if such a thing existed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;from the comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Need a blog or an equivalent platform with commenting-type feature as the place to release problems to general public. Will anyone volunteer to host such a problem in his/her blog/website?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;phy.SE might be the best place to propose problems. I beleive a problem has to be good enough to allow different kinds of approaches so that we may learn from different insights.  However, I guess some problem proposals here, even sketchy, might be a good idea to start.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1671" LastEditorUserId="1671" LastEditDate="2011-02-23T01:21:45.227" LastActivityDate="2011-03-03T13:05:45.583" Title="Polymath project equivalent for Physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="460" CreationDate="2011-02-22T21:13:49.793" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, first I have to say that I love the idea. I like problem solving and it seems that it has basically died out around here recently. But few months ago there were some neat problems going around that I liked thinking about and it could be great if we could revive that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we just have few problems to solve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to organize stuff? How will we decide what to work on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest everybody just propose some problem in this thread and let the voting sort it out. Then we will start working on it in the separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How hard should it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For starters I would suggest something relatively simple, or at least something we know should be solvable. Some nice problem from mechanics, thermodynamics, etc. If it works, we can move on to genuine research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to manage discussions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you followed Gower's blog then you know that discussions there are miles long. There's no way we can manage that here. Perhaps we'll be able to exploit the chat room. But I guess we can at least try to do this and see what happens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add some problem I'd like to see solved later. Can't think of anything that isn't either too easy or too hard right now :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" OwnerDisplayName="Marek" LastActivityDate="2011-02-22T21:13:49.793" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-24T22:12:20.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When posting an answer, I get a very white glow, can this be corrected? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TkLjB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2192" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T22:12:20.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-24T22:22:03.610" Score="4" ViewCount="1560" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi all,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see the new design is live, which means Physics-SE has been officially launched, and is no longer a Beta site! Congratulations! Also, thank you for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/447/design-for-physics-se&quot;&gt;feedback&lt;/a&gt; on the design. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided not to use the handwritten font as much I did in the mockups. I agree with you that they're a bit harder to read at a smaller size. I'm only using it for the top nav and header text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still seeing the old favicons, load the follow two urls in your browser and hard refresh:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sstatic.net/physics/img/favicon.ico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sstatic.net/physics/img/favicon.ico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sstatic.net/physicsmeta/img/favicon.ico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sstatic.net/physicsmeta/img/favicon.ico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any CSS glitches, please start a new post, and tag it with &quot;Design&quot; and &quot;Bug&quot; so I can track them easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, congrats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="New Design Launched" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-24T22:42:49.140" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an issue that I don't think anyone foresaw, but some old material uses images with transparency, and those images now can't be read.  For example, I just checked out an old post I wrote that copied an equation from Wikipedia as an image.  The black text of the image doesn't stand out against the background any more.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5170/what-happens-when-you-cut-a-biconvex-lens-in-half/5173#5173&quot;&gt;What happens when you cut a biconvex lens in half?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T22:42:49.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="467" CreationDate="2011-02-24T22:45:14.053" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The small boxes on user pages that are supposed to show the number of votes just show blank green squares for me if the answer was accepted. Like this:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EAB4u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it matters, I'm using Chrome on Ubuntu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1655" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-02-25T01:52:27.623" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T01:52:27.623" Title="can't see number of votes on accepted answer in user pages" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="495" CreationDate="2011-02-24T22:46:20.153" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I got on top of my screen when I first logged in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cX6qy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My eyesight isn't good, but I believe that's light yellow over light grey (mostly #FFF7CE over #F8FAF7), which is to say it's hardly visible at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Firefox 3, Vista (you only get to choose some things in the business world...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1449" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-02-26T06:49:17.817" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T06:49:17.817" Title="&quot;Welcome back&quot; bar colour scheme" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="465" CreationDate="2011-02-24T22:52:36.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T22:52:36.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-24T23:10:54.260" Score="12" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the edit boxes are still white, and combined with dark design this is really eye-hurting. I think they should all look like the search box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW there are few issues of bright text on bright background in the moderator tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-02-26T06:54:19.560" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T06:54:56.690" Title="Some bright backgrounds" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="468" CreationDate="2011-02-24T23:14:29.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example of this is the &quot;share this hot question&quot; box:&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V9nF0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That box near the mouse is supposed to say &quot;to earn the publicist badge.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1655" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T23:14:29.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-24T23:19:41.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that it is difficult to concentrate for long trying to read white print on a black background. I do not like it at all and find that rather than being drawn to the stack, I want to navigate away from it. I hope it is not going to stay like this for long. You don't need &quot;cute&quot; design. The beta was fine.  Go to mathstack and look at it for clarity and readability, then come back here and tell me you prefer this and find it easier to focus on the ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1495" LastActivityDate="2011-02-24T23:19:41.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-25T02:10:51.107" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the background update, I seem to have lost access to moderation tools, and to the ability to vote on closing questions. Was that intentional? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="lost privileges" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="471" CreationDate="2011-02-25T02:24:40.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes -- this is by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67054/can-we-grandfather-in-rep-abilities-as-sites-leave-beta&quot;&gt;Can we grandfather in rep abilities as sites leave beta?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;more detail at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T02:24:40.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-02-25T02:33:52.553" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Newbie here, with a little story :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I found this &lt;em&gt;awsome&lt;/em&gt; site and was really surprised that I've never heard about it. It seems so &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; from other and &quot;professional&quot; in almost all aspects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one thing I liked very, very, I mean very very much, was &lt;em&gt;nice clean design&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;&quot;Thanks god&quot;, I thought, &quot;finally one &quot;normal-looking&quot; discussion board, in oppose to bunch of awfull-looking kid-designed forums&quot;.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am the one of those who hate black backgrounds on sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tonight I come here 2nd time, happy to find good answers to my question, happy to see a lot of other interesting questions and answers, happy with all concept of a site, full of motivation to participate in this remmember &lt;em&gt;normal-looking&lt;/em&gt; site.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And after one refresh black backgorund slap in my face! &#xA;Can't beleive :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how long this site &quot;normaly&quot; (means with white background:) ) exist &quot;before me&quot;. But putting dark background right now, when I come here, I find as act of conspiracy :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest if this site has dark background when I come first time here, I will, in spite of content, never stay here more than time needed to see content of link which got me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, keep in mind that I am not talking about bad or good design. That's out of my scope of interest and competence. I appreciate effort of designers and his elaboration in justifying new design, and I am sorry for sort of criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as a user I prefere (if not demand) nice, clean, discrete and unobtrusive design, in which black/dark on white/light background, however it sounds fraky, is &quot;must&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2179" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T02:33:52.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-25T03:51:46.267" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;On tag pages such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;, the text &quot;tag has no wiki summary, would you like to&quot; is unreadably dark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &quot;help us create it?&quot; part looks good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1108" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T07:38:53.937" Title="Unreadable dark text on tag pages." Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-03-28T17:56:04.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-25T07:51:26.873" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The previous design was much more attractive to me. Especially irritating is now the blackboard background with not completely erased stuff. It looks at least dirty, foggy, and distracts attention. The white font is not white but grey so the contrast decreased. Please, return the beta version. Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="1390" LastEditDate="2011-02-25T09:59:45.503" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T09:59:45.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-25T08:32:45.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the design. However I am not exactly pleased with what it does to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/49704/146482&quot;&gt;highlight SOFU tag&lt;/a&gt; greasemonkey script which made it easy to spot which and how many tags of a question actually are favourites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QKYNb.png&quot; alt=&quot;tagged&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T08:32:45.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-25T09:08:48.993" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's bothering me about this design is the usability aspect of it. White text on a black background isn't exactly eminently readable for me. Is there any way to use a whiteboard instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/447/design-for-physics-se/459#459&quot;&gt;white notebook look&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but I just find this design to straining for me eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1065" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T09:19:03.693" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-25T09:48:28.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have You ever read something on readability of a design?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart of the dark background this &quot;just vanishing&quot; &#xA;things (physics on a blackboard?) are very &#xA;irritating.  I am a &quot;quick&quot; reader, this design &#xA;is distracting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T09:48:28.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="488" CreationDate="2011-02-25T10:59:01.057" Score="31" ViewCount="1331" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear community,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/our-designer-in-residence-jin-yang/&quot;&gt;Jin&lt;/a&gt; has done a great Job for the community so far and comes up with very nice ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, as pointed out by a lot of people by now in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/447/358&quot;&gt;Design for Physics-SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/463/358&quot;&gt;New Design Launched&lt;/a&gt;, it has severe drawbacks in &lt;strong&gt;readability&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;usability&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/97/tobias-kienzler&quot;&gt;Tobias&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/447/design-for-physics-se/459#459&quot;&gt;proposed&lt;/a&gt; a very nice modification of the design which would still be in Jin's sense (I suppose) by just inverting colours which is to my mind much more feasible for our site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u3hk5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tobias design modification&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we please change the design to black-on-white in a manner as Tobias suggested?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:50:43.010" Title="Can we please change the design to black-on-white?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-25T11:16:36.957" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is rather a bad idea since the inverted scheme just looks ugly (and there is no substantial benefit form the fact that it can be apparently done fast -- it can't be, since it raises additional problems); the whiteboard scheme is taken, so the probably the best way to switch to back-on-white is a move to some notebook inspirations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-02-26T14:34:12.257" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T14:34:12.257" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="468" CreationDate="2011-02-25T11:19:16.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;jQuery animation after answer is a white blast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T11:19:16.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="496" CreationDate="2011-02-25T13:54:45.573" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unreadable bounty message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZcvA0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;bounty message&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-02-26T06:50:05.693" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T06:51:00.593" Title="Unreadable bounty message" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-25T15:00:33.163" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I was going to like the white on black/grey design, but now that it has been implemented I find I really hate it to the point I don't want to spend much time here. I'm not sure that a simple reversal will do it, but I am strongly in favor of a change to a black on white design. When I go from what is here to a page with black on white I get a physical sense of relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T15:00:33.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-25T16:08:35.393" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have precisely the same reaction as Jeff. Some websites have theme chooser options, maybe this is the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T16:08:35.393" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-25T17:47:07.410" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;We'll put together a user script at &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackapps.com?tab=scripts&quot;&gt;http://stackapps.com?tab=scripts&lt;/a&gt; for folks who really want the white layout -- in fact, we can probably put together a de-styler that converts any Stack Exchange design to a fairly minimalistic one for those that prefer it.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on extensive meta feedback, site design is withdrawn indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-03-02T08:23:19.570" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:23:19.570" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-25T18:00:11.627" Score="8" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;--something like:&#xA;1. I want white lettering/black background&#xA;2. I want black lettering/white background&#xA;3. Something else&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that quite a few people don't go to meta and that new members may not know&#xA;what it is. Moderators could frame the poll question and tablulate votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1495" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-03-02T08:20:54.080" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:20:54.080" Title="Is it possible to have a community wiki poll of members about the colors not just discussion on meta?" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-02-25T19:03:34.810" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The people in charge have often stated that poll questions are not welcome on Stack Exchange sites. So although it would be interesting to gather that information, a meta question wouldn't be the place to do it. Besides, I'm not sure how much flexibility there is to change the design now that the site has officially launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to set up a poll, you could do so using an external poll site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T19:03:34.810" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-02-25T20:09:42.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't clutter the main site with a meta topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to poll the users (and I'm not opposed, though I would suggest waiting another couple of days) lets ask for a &lt;strong&gt;notification bar on the main site&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;leave the poll on meta&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm waiting a while to decide if I get used to it, but am currently leaning toward asking for a redesign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-02-25T20:09:42.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="498" CreationDate="2011-02-26T02:54:50.310" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/98.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/98.png?theme=clean&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default and clean theme for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair&quot;&gt;user flairs&lt;/a&gt; have unreadable font colors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T07:25:56.380" Title="Flair font color unreadable" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2011-02-26T03:29:42.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in the next deployment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T03:29:42.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="466" CreationDate="2011-02-26T03:43:08.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fix will be in the next deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T03:43:08.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="483" CreationDate="2011-02-26T06:51:00.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is now fixed -- sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T06:51:00.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="468" CreationDate="2011-02-26T06:54:56.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the bright input areas have been fixed, including the one mbq mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please try to open one item or &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; related item(s) per question, otherwise it's hard to process this stuff.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T06:54:56.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="492" CreationDate="2011-02-26T07:08:34.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I changed the default link color in this setting to &lt;code&gt;#888E84&lt;/code&gt; which is based on the physics logo color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T07:08:34.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-02-26T11:05:24.870" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a voting engine on board -- we used it on CV to vote on a site name. I feel it is really a good idea to use it in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it must be set up by the SE team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T11:05:24.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-26T14:13:14.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciated the blackboard effect and the faint equations shown in the background, but I agree that black on white background  is more restful, easier on the eyes and, more importantly, the psyche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of us come from cultures where black is associated with  mourning and even language reflects it :&quot;black is the day I ...&quot;, &quot;I threw a black stone behind me&quot; meaning I &quot;will never come back&quot;, &quot;my soul turned black&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there is the little black dress :) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Firefox, I just now went to Tools, options. content, colors and imposed my black on white. The page turned from black to white with letters black ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only argument from me comes on whether the default given by stackexchange is attractive to new users or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T14:13:14.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-26T16:14:20.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics is an image and equation based subject. It is not something that you can jam into whatever color scheme you like. We may use blackboards for classroom demonstrations but we don't publish them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what a standard Feynman diagram from wikipedia looks like in the new scheme, a big white light, not a good combination with dark background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ppCPl.png&quot; alt=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg/287px-Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to use a symbol not supported by the site LaTeX such as. This is fairly common. Here's the gim symbol &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZSYk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;gim&quot;&gt; used in a physics paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0505220&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0505220&lt;/a&gt; that now will look like heck every time it's inserted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White on black is incompatible with physics standards for text. This means that whenever we copy text from a physics book, Latex renderer, or other source we will have a big white square in the middle of our equations. Now when we copy a block of text from a paper (which can be much quicker than having to LaTeX it, especially if it's complicated), this is what it looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tGhtJ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;gimvec2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White on black is a great idea for a designer but is unsatisfactory for working physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="1272" LastEditDate="2011-02-27T04:38:23.217" LastActivityDate="2011-02-27T04:38:23.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-02-26T16:45:44.790" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, It was expected that most complains would be about the &quot;white on black&quot;...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I must say that this is generally not true, that it is unusual setup for physicist. Or even that it is more more diffcult to read/write in this case. I personally spend a large part of my working time either using blackboard (which is black), either writing LaTeX/code in Vim in unix console (which is black). So for me there is no need to adapt to such a palette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T16:45:44.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-26T18:41:02.440" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics, is a subject where lot of equations and other things are involved so the white design is a must. Infact, at the StackExchange community Mathematics, Physics along with statistics are the three sites which are going to make the use of LaTeX to the maximum extent. Atleast, for that a white design is a must.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2011-02-26T18:41:02.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4487" CreationDate="2011-02-27T04:47:47.320" Score="22" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update from Manishearth: Now that migration to Math.SE seems to be reasonably high, I'm bumping this to see if we can get the migration path now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One for the SE team: can we get an official migration path for moving questions from physics.SE to math.SE? A non-negligible fraction of the off-topic questions we get here are purely mathematical in nature and mbq or I wind up moving them to the math site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current stats (26 June, 2013):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past 90 days, 25 questions have been migrated from Phy.SE to Math.SE, with a 4% rejection rate (that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60331/what-does-the-following-statement-mean&quot;&gt;1 rejected migration&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we have this now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T16:54:09.977" Title="Can we get a migration path opened to math.SE?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="507" CreationDate="2011-02-27T15:10:44.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to open up a migration path, we'd first like to see evidence that a significant number of closed questions have been manually migrated by moderators or should be migrated to the destination site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you / the community can create an answer here that points to a lot of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-02-27T15:10:44.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="507" CreationDate="2011-02-27T18:36:23.840" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an incomplete list of questions that have been migrated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6034/vector-multiplication-with-scalars&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6034/vector-multiplication-with-scalars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5987/derivation-of-the-method-of-lagrange-multipliers&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5987/derivation-of-the-method-of-lagrange-multipliers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5694/prove-that-honeycomb-structures-are-the-most-geometrically-efficient-structure&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5694/prove-that-honeycomb-structures-are-the-most-geometrically-efficient-structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5391/derivation-of-fourier-series&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5391/derivation-of-fourier-series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4714/what-is-the-current-status-of-vinay-deolalikars-proof-that-p-is-not-equal-to-np&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4714/what-is-the-current-status-of-vinay-deolalikars-proof-that-p-is-not-equal-to-np&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11976/fractal-dimension-after-nonlinear-transformation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11976/fractal-dimension-after-nonlinear-transformation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question probably would have been migrated if we had the migration path open, as it was closed by 5 community votes, but as it is I had to reopen it and migrate it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66468/uniqueness-of-the-vector-in-mathbbrn-specified-by-the-curl-divergence-and&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66468/uniqueness-of-the-vector-in-mathbbrn-specified-by-the-curl-divergence-and&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4626/vector-product-in-2-dimensions&quot;&gt;Vector product in 2 dimensions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could have been migrated, but as I recall it's so basic we figured it wasn't worth it, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to edit in additional examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T19:10:03.967" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-27T18:36:23.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-28T18:22:53.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take a look at some successful templates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.physicsforums.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physicsforums does have a theme to it, with the background a light grey, and hints of green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://terrytao.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://terrytao.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gowers.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://gowers.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three maths sites are black on white, with a soothing blueish theme and look the best, in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://motls.blogspot.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this has a theme similar to the one currently here, yet is pleasant on the eyes. It seems to be related to the overall brightness, which is nice and light, and an intelligent use of colour tones - blue on green looks good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the white on darkboard theme is OK in small doses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:50:43.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-28T18:26:22.983" Score="12" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clear that most of the people providing content on this site don't like the current design and would like it changed to a black on white default. It would be nice to know that something is being done about this, even if it might take some time to implement. How about it @Jeff Atwood and co.? How about a response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-03-02T08:20:25.873" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:24:06.197" Title="Is anybody there from the SE team?" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="479" CreationDate="2011-02-28T20:14:17.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've put together &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MosheBerman/MinimalOverflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a userscript&lt;/a&gt; which is destyles an SE site to the basics. It's hosted on GitHub and has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2143/minimaloverflow-a-themescript-for-stackexchange&quot;&gt;page on StackApps&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2011-02-28T20:14:17.190" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2011-03-01T00:01:05.870" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Their response is to make a userscript, which I think is very unsatisfactory, because not all browsers (mobiles) support userscripts. And in many browsers userscripts do not take effect immediately, so there will be a few seconds flash where the site is black each time the page loads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides it seems pretty clear that most users dislike the black background and they will not even change it. this along with the two other physics sites on their out of area 51 means this site is likely to die. The thing I dislike about stackoverflow is the authoritarian control under the guise that they want to build communities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will not be a banner on the main site linking to a poll on the meta site because they dont like polls and there has never been any publicity for meta sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's either like it or use the userscript no other way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to add, is that when people first visit this site they will be greeted with an unreadable site. Userscripts can't be installed on public computers (or computers that aren't yours; eg at work/schools). The userscript has only been published on meta physics, not the main site, and the majority of users never visit meta, this means those users will be less active due to the readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swallow your pride and change it. It's not hard to change a background image and a font color!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-03-01T16:55:43.817" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T16:55:43.817" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2011-03-01T09:11:33.400" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you seek contact with the team, you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Contact us&quot; link in the footer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat -- go to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;physics room&lt;/a&gt; and shout @RebeccaChernoff, @Jin or @RobertCartaino. With some (not so much) luck one of them will come, especially in CT working hours. Since now, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; opinion about the design appeared there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-03-01T10:54:26.627" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T10:54:26.627" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-03-01T15:16:56.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate all the work that went into this, but the new white on black is fatal. I would not dream of recommending to my colleagues to visit this site as long as this horrible color scheme is in place. It looks unprofessional, unreadable and is a pain for my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be converted to black on white (or something similar) as soon as possible; right now would be best - each day in this design will drive away potential visitors for a long time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest to use the beta-version design in the meantime, until this issue is settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1782" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T15:16:56.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2011-03-01T18:32:52.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would love to see more questions based on real research (and real publications). In fact, I can't imagine the better ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, good one is asking if a proof can be simplified, or if there is a better function to fit certain data, or if one has to take into account additional phenomenon for the correct analysis etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad ones are only these which are too general or vague (e.g. ''What do you think of my paper?'', when it is not a 4 pages publication with a very novel idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I would prefer to receive bad research-level questions than bad (pre) high school ones (ofter already -&gt;well&amp;lt;- answered on wikipedia or another googleable page). As questions with linked draft show that someone put at least some effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="184" LastEditDate="2011-03-01T20:50:28.340" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T20:50:28.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2011-03-01T19:34:46.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a user script to switch to any Stack Exchange design here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2143/minimaloverflow-a-themescript-for-stackexchange&quot;&gt;https://stackapps.com/questions/2143/minimaloverflow-a-themescript-for-stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With some improvements, that will be the officially supported method of changing for those that prefer not to use websites with dark background designs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, on mobile, we now serve a minimalistic, low bandwidth, white background theme to all mobile clients. Try it in your iPhone / Android, etc. You can also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=change+browser+user+agent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;change your browser user agent&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;iPhone&quot; if you want that theme immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're still working on this, so give us some time to get it worked out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: Based on extensive meta feedback, site design is withdrawn indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:24:06.197" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-03-01T22:36:12.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to physics., but wanted to say i REALLY like the design. I think it looks great! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T22:36:12.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-03-02T05:44:28.113" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new design looks good. I can't understand the comments about not being able to read &quot;white on black&quot;. Maybe you have neurological sensory issues or are color blind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thumbs up from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1670" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T05:44:28.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-03-02T08:24:52.187" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on extensive meta feedback, site design is withdrawn indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:24:52.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-03-02T08:27:02.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;edit: Based on extensive meta feedback, site design is withdrawn indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-03-02T08:27:02.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-03T05:26:29.230" Score="2" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;In explaining derivations and proofs, it is really handy to show terms that go to zero or cancel with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to include the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/cancel.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cancel package&lt;/a&gt; or something equivalent in the MathJax install?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="429" LastActivityDate="2011-03-03T05:26:29.230" Title="Include the cancel package for LaTeX" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-03T11:13:41.847" Score="8" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just want to bring your attention to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;the review site&lt;/a&gt; where you can see questions/answers posted by new users so we can assist them in getting to know the SE system and maybe improving their posts. (courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1001/430&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; thread at meta.TeX)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T15:48:01.117" Title="Help reviewing new users' posts" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T20:18:11.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="460" CreationDate="2011-03-03T11:44:56.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idea is great, but good idea is not enough. You need to find the appropriate questions, efficient method of collaboration and get the critical mass of brains (no idea how much is enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start with, maybe it is good to ask questions on physicsSE, perhaps as community wiki for open questions. If you see that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is some interest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; too much discussion/reformulation is involved for the frames of SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; it may be worth to start a blog/wiki/... Otherwise, the idea might be not as good as it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kinds of questions, which may be good (note that I am biased):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Short, well defined ones (e.g. quantum state engineering, wave optics). Stimuli: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1110/which-qubit-states-are-accessible-with-linear-optics-operations&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt; (though it did not get much attention).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open questions, easily to solve or simulate, but more difficult to define &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. complex system - modeling human behaviour, simple models of seen phenomena). Stimuli: &lt;a href=&quot;http://zia.hss.cmu.edu/econ/homework98.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is That Seat Taken?&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://zia.hss.cmu.edu/econ/homework10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;http://ptf.fuw.edu.pl/tmf.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Young Physicists' Tournament&lt;/a&gt; (click -&gt; problems; there are mostly experimental and for high school, but just interesting and open, so they show how to ask potentially good questions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Problems of the Physics Olympiad seems to be less profound (or rather: have less potential of being converted into something profound) than that of the Mathematical Olympiad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general, in Mathematics it is simpler to define exactly a problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In physics, there are less conjectures and more open-defined questions (i.e. when asking the right question is crucial, using realistic approximations, including/excluding phenomena in meaningful way, ...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would like to have the tool decentralizes - anyone can post problem, anyone up/down vote questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-03-03T13:05:45.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-03T15:29:42.223" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's something special with negative numbers? &#xA;there is something like an absolute zero for votes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't understand why zero is so important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like my question be seen in the list, I have totally reworded it, but there is no easy way someone could note that because is hidden..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To delete and create a new question perhaps is what one should do in this case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(but paradox, I can't delete a bounty question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1916" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2011-03-03T21:23:37.010" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T00:10:43.387" Title="why negative voted questions are hidden from featured list?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="527" CreationDate="2011-03-03T21:32:12.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: You question appears in my browser:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AMTGs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you running a UserScript of some kind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5241/520&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; is a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not stupid, nor necessarily wrong, but it conflates at least two problems and is riddled with imprecise statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I find troubling about the question (i.e. things you could try fixing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to have framed a question about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;measurement problem&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in terms of the double slit experiment. That's unnecessary complication and can only distract from the issue at hand (and to tell the truth, I'm not sure which issue you really want addressed).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Making a analogy to alpha--atom scattering in an attempt to understand photon--bulk-material interaction is deeply silly: they simply don't share enough physics for this to make sense. (The target in the Rutherford experiment was carefully prepared to have a thickness on order of a small integer number of atoms because alphas have very short ranges in matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T00:10:43.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-04T02:52:26.080" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the answers given to the question:&#xA;How long it will take for a tree to fall on a ground?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example how are the following to be interpreted&#xA;$ $$  \  {  }&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and what are:&#xA;frac  mgh  mh  mathcal  partial  left  right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem unable to find any sort of &quot;introduction&quot; to  physics.stackexchange.  I'd appreciate being pointed in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask this question on &quot;meta&quot; as directed - but found I need &quot;five reputation&quot; - &amp;amp; can find nothing telling what this is and how to earn them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also please advise of all the faux pas made herein&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2376" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T21:52:39.227" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T21:52:39.227" Title="Where can I find the explanation for the LaTeX/mathjax symbology used for equations in physics.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|support|formatting|mathjax|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2011-03-04T02:55:37.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is essentially LaTeX. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&lt;/a&gt;. The JavaScript tool that handles the translation is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" OwnerDisplayName="dmckee" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T02:55:37.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2011-03-04T03:05:55.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the same question, and found this site, with its examples, of value:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/latextutorial9.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/latextutorial9.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1924" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Luciuk" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T03:05:55.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2011-03-05T19:12:38.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you actually see &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; signs instead of nicely rendered equations this means either that you have javascript disabled or that the post you're looking at contains errors. In the latter case flag for moderator attention so it gets fixed. For a test, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26/velocity-of-object-from-electromagnetic-field/58#58&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which contains a squareroot. If instead you see &lt;code&gt;$\sqrt&lt;/code&gt; etc. you need to enable JavaScript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T19:12:38.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-06T22:28:45.670" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the recent debate about the site design, I was wondering what would work. What about the blackboard as a background, but with paper &quot;stuck&quot; on so that all the text etc has a white background. So that you only see the blackboard at the edges, like the Home Improvement design, just with more rugged paper and a blackboard instead of blue blueprint background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a suggestion, because i thought the blackboard design &lt;strong&gt;looked&lt;/strong&gt; good, but was impractical, which outweighed the looks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-03-06T23:10:21.933" Title="Site design idea" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-06T23:05:02.033" Score="9" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a followup to the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/460/polymath-project-equivalent-for-physics&quot;&gt;previous discussion&lt;/a&gt; on starting a collaborative research project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've decided to start with a simpler (in the sense of being solvable) problems first, so here's a bunch of them and I'd like people to post an answer (and then up-vote it) for whichever one would they like to work on most (you can of course add a problem of your own). These problems are mostly taken from references Approximist has given last time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a container filled with a liquid, heat transport will occur when the bottom of the container is heated&#xA;  and the top surface is cooled. How does the phenomenon change when the container rotates about its&#xA;  vertical axis?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you ride too slow, you fall over – as it is well known, if one rides the bicycle too slow, it is easy to capsize.&#xA;  Let us model this (in reality rather complicated) phenomenon by a single hoop of mass $m$ and radius $R$ (the&#xA;  mass of the hoop is concentrated on the very rim), which rolls vertically on a horizontal ground at velocity $v_0$&#xA;  without slipping. What is the minimal value of $v_0$ , if this motion is stable against small perturbations? What&#xA;  is the frequency of the vibrations (waggling) of the hoop, if it is slightly pushed out of its original motion?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Determine all the possible paths which a light beam can trace in the gravitational field of a spherically symmetric&#xA;  body. Does any closed path exist?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider a one dimensional harmonic potential complemented with a power series beginning at a cubic term.&#xA;  How should one choose the all nonzero Taylor coefficients so that the exact period becomes independent of the&#xA;  amplitude? Try to guess the full potential function either from a few lower order coefficients, or, from other&#xA;  simple physical reasoning, and then show the constancy of the period.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How far can an astronaut reach from Earth during his lifetime? Let us assume that such rocket technology is&#xA;  available which can provide constant acceleration for an arbitrarily long time! (The problems of rocket fuel and&#xA;  other disturbing details can be disregarded!) Let us choose reasonable parameters, such as 30 years of travel,&#xA;  acceleration equals to the terrestrial gravity! Also consider the recently mostly accepted Universe model with&#xA;  accelerating expansion (Lambda-CDM) with its presently known parameters!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Determine the energy levels of an electron confined in a box with the sides of the box given as a and b, height&#xA;  h, and a homogeneous vertical gravitational force acting on the electron! The sides of the box can be regarded&#xA;  as infinitely high potential walls. Study the high energy (semi-classical) limiting case!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A model for phase diffusion of a simple harmonic oscillator is provided by the master equation ${{\rm d} \rho \over {\rm d} t}= −\Gamma [a^{\dagger} a, [a^{\dagger} a, \rho]]$&#xA;  Calculate the Fokker-Planck equation of the density matrix $\rho$ in $P$-representation. Determine the Langevin equations from the Fokker-Planck equation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S.: As this is not really about the site itself, could it be posted on the main site?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.P.S: also, it seems TeX isn't enabled here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-03-08T14:50:13.037" Title="What to work on in the &quot;polyphysics&quot; project?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="533" CreationDate="2011-03-06T23:10:21.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree. Unless someone convinces me otherwise, I think blackboard just as a frame would look horrible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me a completely light design with just white background and decent colors is all I need. What we have now isn't bad but colors could definitely be improved (don't ask me how though) and I also dislike the squares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-03-06T23:10:21.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="534" CreationDate="2011-03-07T03:07:58.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(6) Also sounds 'sexy' and can be done using SciPy (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scipy.org/PyLab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PyLab&lt;/a&gt;) to make the concepts very clear. Further, studying what happens to the solutions as 'b &amp;rarr; a' (or vice-versa, depending on who's larger: no loss of generality here) may give insights into the symmetries of the problem and of its solutions — and may open a nice door to discussing about Hermitian Complements of Operators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my 2¢…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="142" LastEditDate="2011-03-07T15:45:31.903" LastActivityDate="2011-03-07T15:45:31.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="534" CreationDate="2011-03-07T08:28:12.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd like to work on (7). It's always nice to derive something useful from microscopic laws. Not that I know much about this stuff but I think this is a good opportunity to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-03-07T08:28:12.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="534" CreationDate="2011-03-07T15:45:15.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Following Marek's suggestion, i'm splitting my original answer in two.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Finding CTCs in Schwarzschild-like solutions (with or without angular momentum, ie, Kerr) is sort of a sexy problem — and, nowadays, can probably be done using Mathematica (or some other sort of symbolic computation software). In fact, this problem can possibly be readily generalized to that of the &quot;Twin Paradox&quot; in GR (as opposed to SR); which may lead to a nice discussion about &lt;strike&gt;homologies&lt;/strike&gt; holonomies in GR (and their relation to curvature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="142" LastEditDate="2011-03-08T14:50:13.037" LastActivityDate="2011-03-08T14:50:13.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="542" CreationDate="2011-03-07T17:23:05.030" Score="14" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without mentioning any names, I observe the following. Some answers given on the main site by certain individuals are consistently long and not really relevant to the question, instead giving inappropriate amount of minute and highly technical details related to keywords in the questions - without really addressing or answering the question, often not even showing any understanding of what is being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instinct is to identify this as a quick cut and paste job. Not to open a can of worms here, but I am wondering if answers are occasionally checked for this sort of thing. If I encountered this phenomena in an essay I gave as an assignment, I'd definitely run one of the standard tools to check for similarities to other texts out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:03:40.430" Title="Plagiarism checks?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="539" CreationDate="2011-03-07T18:18:16.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't mind such answers, they give a bit of information even if it is not very relevant. I would prefer if this was explicitly pointed out in the answer. What annoys me is people upvoting such answers because they found them interesting or informative. I wish voting was based on how good the answer is as an answer to the question, not how much users liked it. After all, the votes next to the answer should indicate a good answer not a good blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About plagiarism, so that my answer is not one more example of answers not on topic, I don't find this as a problem. After all this is not a test, it is Q&amp;amp;A site. If the information is copy-pasted or written in the user's own words it serve the same purpose. Of course elementary ethics requires people to cite their source.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1382" LastActivityDate="2011-03-07T18:18:16.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="539" CreationDate="2011-03-07T19:34:20.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moshe,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a certain &quot;standard&quot; to &quot;flag&quot; an answer/post. In the case you're describing (borderline ethical, crackpot-ty, devoid of content, etc)... i usually flag it for review by the moderators: if they think it's a valid post, fine; otherwise, they know better what to do. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastActivityDate="2011-03-07T19:34:20.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="539" CreationDate="2011-03-07T19:45:30.533" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your question directly, there is no automatic plagiarism detection (as far as I know). Generally we rely on alert users to notice when something appears to be copied and pasted from another source. If you see something that you suspect might be plagiarized and you'd like to do something about it, pick out a distinctive phrase or two and run it through Google. If you have access to plagiarism detection software and you'd like to use it on the post, although that'd be a little more extreme, there's nothing wrong with doing so (assuming it doesn't violate the terms of your license to use that software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, by any method, you find a match from which the post content has been copied, you have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the post to bring it into compliance with our guidelines on plagiarism. Specifically, that means it needs to identify exactly what was copied (using quote blocks or quotation marks or some other clear method), and it needs to say where each piece was copied from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can't do that (or don't want to), leave a comment on the post including the source and mentioning what was copied, and flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy is that content which is copied from another source should be either deleted, or edited to make it clear what was copied and where it came from. If it happens repeatedly, it could lead to moderator action. Plagiarism is not tolerated on the site as an ethical matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that moderators are only authorized to handle cases of plagiarism, not copyright violations. When you cast your flag, make sure to say &quot;plagiarism,&quot; not &quot;copyright violation&quot; (because if you do the latter, there are potentially tricky legal implications). If you do want to report content as a copyright violation, not as an instance of plagiarism, you will need to go through the DMCA takedown process described on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;legal page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-04-18T13:03:40.430" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:03:40.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2011-03-10T09:23:48.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Red button hurts my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me the black BG seems fine but the heading font choice does look kinda childish. Although I doubt a normal clean font will fit in with a blackboard. Font should be changed, But changed to What, I dont know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2461" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T09:23:48.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-10T14:15:33.067" Score="5" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;This very useful question (community wiki) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books&quot;&gt;list-of-freely-available-physics-books&lt;/a&gt; is &#xA;collecting a list of freely available resources that we find out there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How to make it more organized, without transfer the work to some specific individual ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1257" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-03-11T13:36:11.287" Title="How to organize a List of Free Resources in the conxtext of PSE" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="547" CreationDate="2011-03-10T15:53:35.410" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today was the third time in the month and a half I have been participating here that by mistake instead of commenting, I answered. This happens when I want to comment on the last question, and right below the &quot;comment&quot; location is the nice open square of the &quot;your answer&quot; panel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers cannot be simply deleted, and so I end up commenting my answer that it should be a comment, or leaving it without comment, if it is not too much off the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this happen to other people too, or is it just me, sort of old age dyslexia? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe if &quot;your answer&quot; was also clickable, instead of a nice panel ready for writing, I would avoid the trap :). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that a lot of people have asked for a simple delete ( not a vote one ) choice in answers which has not been satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T06:06:01.713" Title="sending an answer by mistake" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="545" CreationDate="2011-03-10T16:26:38.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It hasn't happen to me, but I don't think it is such a big deal. I doubt that anyone would be unhappy and mind seeing a comment mistakenly written as an answer. For example I was ok with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1382" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T16:26:38.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="545" CreationDate="2011-03-10T17:03:13.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When that happens, you can either delete your answer or flag it for moderator attention. We have the ability to turn an answer into a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;: I thought you could always delete your own answers (unless they've been awarded a bounty or accepted, or something like that). Perhaps I'm wrong though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-03-10T18:15:25.007" LastActivityDate="2011-03-10T18:15:25.007" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="544" CreationDate="2011-03-11T09:31:23.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to make it more organized&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is community wiki, then just actively encourage everyone to edit it -- &lt;strong&gt;make sure the post itself prominently says &quot;please edit me to make me better!&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also support anonymous peer reviewed edits as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/suggested-edits-and-edit-review/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/suggested-edits-and-edit-review/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-03-11T09:31:23.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="544" CreationDate="2011-03-11T13:36:11.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are really going to make a list of all the free physics books out there, including things like readable sets of lecture notes, it will get unwieldy.  We might want to start separate threads for separate areas of physics and link them to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2011-03-11T13:36:11.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-13T15:32:03.097" Score="4" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see a comment that a questions should be a community wiki. What is this and how is it differentiated from a normal question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1495" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-03-13T22:10:39.000" LastActivityDate="2011-03-13T22:10:39.000" Title="What is a community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-03-13T22:11:10.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-13T17:12:49.747" Score="1" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that that a lot of unclear or ill-posed questions get premature answers, which may effectively &quot;freeze&quot; the question in its current bad formulation, instead of revealing a perhaps more profound question hiding underneath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6231/use-of-the-mathematical-concept-function-in-theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Use of the mathematical concept &amp;#39;function&amp;#39; in theoretical physics&lt;/a&gt; NB: It is not my intention to discredit or debate this particular question or its answers; I take comfort in the fact that the question poser himself can laugh over the outcome.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps, in other cases, there is actually no real question at all, and the bad question should have been closed immediately instead of proliferating/cluttering the site with trivialities, misunderstandings, or duplicate entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that questions, posed by users with less than X reputation points, cannot be answered for a Y hours curfew, in-which only comments, edits and chats are allowed. The philosophy is to make the question perfect before an answer is attempted. This is to increase quality of both question and answers. Initially, one could, e.g., let X=500 and let Y=24. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T14:44:25.770" Title="A 24 hours answering curfew on some questions?" Tags="|discussion|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2011-03-13T21:38:52.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting idea, but I think in order for this to make sense, it would have to be the case that a &lt;em&gt;majority&lt;/em&gt; of questions asked by users with less than X reputation (for some X) are bad in their submitted form - bad enough that they can't even be improved by editing without further input from the OP. I don't believe that's actually the situation here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, not every problem has to have a technical solution. The site relies on its users (primarily the experienced, high-rep ones) to detect bad questions and deal with them. If you see a question of this sort that you think is not clear enough to answer, or is inappropriate for some other reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you think you can edit it to make it better, please do so! As long as there is enough information present to make the questioner's intent clear, there's no reason not to edit the question itself into a better form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, you can flag the question as being of low quality (or flag for moderator attention, it works out to kind of the same thing). In this case it helps if you leave a comment explaining why you think the question is bad and what could be done to fix it. (You could also consider downvoting the question - that's what downvotes are for.) If a question really shouldn't be accumulating answers, a moderator can close it until it's improved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-03-13T21:38:52.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2011-03-14T06:40:53.277" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or perhaps, in other cases, there is actually no real question at all, and the bad question should have been closed immediately instead of proliferating/cluttering the site with trivialities, misunderstandings, or duplicate entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this might be what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the question has any merit at all, I can't imagine why &quot;locking&quot; it for a period of time would do anything but hinder the person asking, and those who wish to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T06:40:53.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2011-03-14T14:44:25.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't fundamentally different from closing the question and commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current system has these features&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A close makes it clear that the question is sub-standard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The close reason give a hint why, and closers can leave detailed comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP can still edit a closed question, to correct its deficiencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editing bumps the question to the top of the active queue, so it gets seen again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the OP &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; fix it (the usual case) the question is in the proper place in its lifecycle: closed and ready to be deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two things the current system doesn't do correctly as a matter of course:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clear out the comment noise after the changes have been made---for that flag for moderator attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tell new users &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; that they can get the question re-opened if they fix it---I use comments for that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-03-14T14:44:25.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-03-15T23:08:04.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any new thoughts on increasing the number of &quot;research-level questions&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2011-03-15T23:08:04.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-17T21:31:35.783" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time old (about 2 months) questions reappear anew, the last author &#xA;named then is &quot;community&quot;. Is this a kind of routine? What is the idea behind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="old question reappearing after months" Tags="|discussion|questions|request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2011-03-17T21:46:07.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system automatically bumps old questions which don't have any (upvoted?) answers, under the guise of the &quot;Community&quot; user, in order to expose them to fresh eyes. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6981/why-does-a-question-appear-as-modified-by-the-community-user&quot;&gt;this MSO question&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-03-17T21:46:07.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2011-03-19T00:30:41.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is worth checking out &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;the &quot;Community&quot; user page&lt;/a&gt;, BTW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you will learn that this is a automated process that takes care a various little jobs and &quot;owns&quot; all the needs an owner but should be be attributed to a real user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community exist on all the sites in the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-03-19T00:30:41.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-03-19T19:35:33.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with Robert. I would also point out that our best questions - where best is defined as highest voted - are all interesting questions which are both accessible to laypersons and interesting for specialists to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to be &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; reference site for physics we &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; to be able to communicate, we &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; to be able to be authoritative by the breadth, depth and quality of our answers, and not merely by limiting the topics, audience and users to some elite few who speak lingo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this I do think we are lacking and we could improve massively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-03-19T19:35:33.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="568" CreationDate="2011-03-20T14:15:20.633" Score="24" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/faq&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow faq&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We feel the best Stack Overflow&#xA;  questions have a bit of source code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange faq&lt;/a&gt; should say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We feel the best Physics Stack&#xA;  Exchange answers include external&#xA;  citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen more than one completely incorrect answer accepted on Physics Stack Exchange, which I have not seen on Stack Overflow. I suspect this is because unlike coding, it's hard to immediately verify physics claims. For this reason, I think external citations to trusted sources are especially important for physics answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to see more answers clearly indicate their logical foundation. Is your answer...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Original research?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Predicted by peer-reviewed theory, but unverified?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indirectly experimentally verified?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Directly experimentally verified?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't make us guess!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many answers here based on rock-solid, universally trusted theory. This is great! However, if experimental verification has not actually been cited, &lt;strong&gt;this should be clear&lt;/strong&gt;. Experiment frequently lags behind theory, but has been known to expose flaws and loopholes in theory, and &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; occasionally, invalidates theory entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from my personal experience: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2029/can-i-levitate-an-object-without-using-an-electromagnet&quot;&gt;Can I levitate an object without using an electromagnet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For months, the accepted answer was basically &quot;No, because of Earnshaw's theorem&quot;. This was an excellent answer; Earnshaw's theorem is rock-solid, universally accepted theory. End of story? No, because this answer was also good enough to include an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnshaw%27s_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;external citation&lt;/a&gt;. As the external citation made clear, there are loopholes in Earnshaw's theorem that make the correct answer 'yes', not 'no'. The correct answer is supported by a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aDiamagnetic_graphite_levitation.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;picture of a levitating object&lt;/a&gt; - direct experimental verification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2011-03-21T06:16:02.900" Title="Citations are the 'source code' of physics stackexchange" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|etiquette|faq-proposed|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="564" CreationDate="2011-03-20T15:27:30.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with this approach quite strongly: i think that every answer that can be backed by further &quot;evidence&quot; (as in references ranging from Wikipedia to scholarly published articles) should include those — in fact, i wish people would recognize earlier and earlier how &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; this &lt;em&gt;modus operandi&lt;/em&gt; really is: you build your work on top of previous work — &lt;em&gt;ergo&lt;/em&gt;, the relevance of the use of citations, references, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given Physics.SE's volume of answers, the rate of answers that have citations (of any sort) seems to me to be relatively low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, in all fairness, i think this is part of the reason of why the overall quality of answers is a bit below what some of us had expected. :-(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastActivityDate="2011-03-20T15:27:30.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-20T18:37:44.660" Score="11" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7294/do-you-really-need-to-be-a-math-whiz-to-succeed-in-physics-closed&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the second time today that a naive question was closed, and this time even before arguments started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;closed as subjective and argumentative by mbq♦ 1 hour ago&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that the simple answer that mathematics is necessary for learning physics is either subjective,  or argumentative. If physicists do not have a consensus on the need of mathematics we should all hand in our degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is good that an eye is kept on comments and answers that are bickering instead of offering information, one has to respect/check whether the questioner is young, as he must be in this case just by the way the question was formulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one incendiary comment  was not taken up in a response :&lt;em&gt;well, he could become a &quot;climate scientist&quot; and get honorary doctorates just like Al Gore... – jwenting 2 hours ago&lt;/em&gt; .  The comment could have been deleted, as I have seen other comments deleted instead of closing the question. What if trolling becomes a problem, would the moderators close all trolled questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This high handedness on the part of moderators is not nurturing the young who want to become physicists, and should either be encouraged or &lt;em&gt;gently&lt;/em&gt; discouraged. It is a question that students would be looking at after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless students are to be discouraged in stating questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T14:07:23.793" Title="Is the precautionary closing of immature questions so very necessary?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="566" CreationDate="2011-03-20T19:44:07.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is clearly off topic, and as such it's correctly been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not subjective and argumentative. The closure and the comments are, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The comments are really, really pointless, unhelpful and arrogant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No. If you have lousy math skill then you can't probably have good physics intuition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;well, he could become a &amp;quot;climate scientist&amp;quot; and get honorary doctorates just like Al Gore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You don't even need to be a math whiz to succeed in mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good, helpful and appropriate comment would have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hi Myers, welcome to our site. Questions on this site should be about physical theories and not physics as a profession. Your question has been closed as off-topic for this reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why mbq chose not to leave such a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-03-20T19:44:07.340" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="564" CreationDate="2011-03-20T20:44:46.000" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure -- this should be &lt;em&gt;de rigeur&lt;/em&gt; on our harder science sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even on sites where the topic is much more subjective (SciFi, etc) we ask that opinions be backed up with facts and references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/b&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;Opinion isn&amp;#8217;t &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; bad, so long as it&amp;#8217;s backed up with something other than &amp;#8220;because I&amp;#8217;m an expert&amp;#8221;, or &amp;#8220;because I said so&amp;#8221;, or &amp;#8220;just because&amp;#8221;. Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you&amp;#8217;ve done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like you. We &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to believe you. But like wikipedia itself, {{citation needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the outset: &lt;i&gt;back it up!&lt;/i&gt; &#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-03-20T20:44:46.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="564" CreationDate="2011-03-21T05:56:17.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I sort of agree with the principle, and would endorse fully it if we had higher level of questions, which would make this site generally more interesting. But, for questions that either ask for an overview of textbook material, or sorting out some fairly straightforward confusion of the OP (or a majority of the existing answers, as the case may be), this etiquette is probably not necessary. From my experience, you rarely need to use or cite any specific research papers or experimental results from, say the last couple of decades. I agree that for higher level questions which call for information like that a good answer should be clear on the source of the information, and the level of confidence one has in the answer. I really hope that at some stage a larger fraction of the questions would be at that level, where the worry you express is justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastEditorDisplayName="user566" LastEditDate="2011-03-21T06:16:02.900" LastActivityDate="2011-03-21T06:16:02.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="566" CreationDate="2011-03-21T06:07:03.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the level of the questions on the site currently leaves something to be desired. So, I for one be happy if more of the questions are closed on the “too elementary”  grounds, and the level of the site is somewhat elevated. On that question for example, I see a lively conversation developing involving lots of opinions and not that many facts, which describe many other venues on the internet. Here’s hoping this site does not turn into one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-03-21T06:07:03.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-03-21T12:29:28.780" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right, &#xA;the most basic questions can be rather difficult to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend to make age a must-entry when applying for physics SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-03-21T12:29:28.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-21T18:32:07.577" Score="4" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I liked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;math stack exchange&lt;/a&gt; design:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hx761.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Math StackExchange Image&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and think we can do something similar but different. I like how they keep the background clutter off of the questions and answers to improve readability. Thinking about something similar to graph paper (in terms of colors and easy on the eyes) but that is present in a lot of areas of physics, both experimental and theoretical, I came upon the idea of wave interference. So here's my contribution for a physics only design background (just a quick mock-up, not intended to be final in any way):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0DcBP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;WaveInterference&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I joined the math stack exchange a few minutes ago and now I'm experiencing envy. They get a lot more traffic. Things get voted up much more quickly. I wonder if that will last; surely people are more interested in the physical world than in a bunch of dusty dry theorems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Site design (Math stack exchange envy)" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="572" CreationDate="2011-03-22T08:57:38.253" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry but I don't like your idea at all. All of these fancy schmunzy effects will start to bug you (after few days at most) and we'll be back where we were with black design. Moreover, I don't like this one even for just looking (which I did with black design).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, I have to repeat my sentiment of wanting to have plain white site with as simple design as possible and subtle use of colors. math.SE isn't that bad but I certainly don't envy them. For one thing they could also benefit from getting rid of that cartesian chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T08:57:38.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="572" CreationDate="2011-03-22T11:50:18.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like it. But since taste is subjective, I still hope that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64697/allow-individual-se-theming-settings&quot;&gt;Allow individual SE theming settings&lt;/a&gt; will get accepted. Until then, those who don't like the current design can have a look &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2113/beta-gaming-se-black-edition&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for some inspiration how to manipulate this to one's individual pleasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T11:50:18.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-03-22T15:57:06.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember this site isn't for you - it's for the shareholders of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim is to maximize number of visitors X quality of visitors, to sell to advertisers.&#xA;Now unless Phys Rev Letters has a higher promotional budget than I think, then a site where 3 people discuss the same paper on loop quantum gravity isn't going to bring in the ad $$$$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly a site full of UFO and hollow earth cranks, or one full of the same grade school  question about paths of cannon balls (the problem with physicsforums) is also going to lack readership pretty soon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The optimum is probably something like Scientific America/ Discovery channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was also the launch model for SE. The stackoverflow site deals with relatively simple questions, then programmers.se for more 'professional' topics and cstheory for the 3 people in the world that are interested in computer science theory but aren't mathematicians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the aim should be a mid-level site with a future proposal for an physics-research site if this site doesn't work for you. Remember you can use tags to filter out questions that are too simple or out of your field of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2525" LastActivityDate="2011-03-22T15:57:06.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-23T15:15:47.757" Score="6" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;My name is Eric Sokolsky and I do PR for Stack Exchange.  I came across a media opportunity that might be good for someone in the Physics community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reporter writes a regular career column for the national publication of the American Physical Society, APS News.  She is looking to interview people with physics degrees who are entrepreneurs. It doesn't matter whether you have a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in physics, but she wants to know how your physics degree has helped you launch your company. Early-stage to beyond IPO is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an ongoing column, but her next deadline is 7:00pm EST &lt;em&gt;TODAY&lt;/em&gt; (March 23).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think you fit the bill, please contact the reporter directly and put &quot;physicist entrepreneurs&quot; in the subject line.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be great if in your introduction you could plug Stack Exchange - something like:  &quot;Hi, my name is XXX, and my company is YYY, but I heard about this opportunity via Stack Exchange - a community-driven network of expert Q&amp;amp;A sites where experts share knowledge and answer complex technical questions.  You should check out the Physics site (physics.stackexchange.com) as well as the other 45 Stack Exchange sites - perhaps you'll find some interesting content for future stories.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contact: &#xA;Alaina Levine alaina@alainalevine.com &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2725" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-03-24T10:19:31.043" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T10:19:31.043" Title="Journalist Looking For Physicist Entrepreneurs" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2011-03-24T10:19:55.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-03-24T01:52:24.087" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stop upvoting questions and answers that you don't think are valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason people post low end questions and answers is because they get upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that I hit the rep cap on the first day with a few half-hearted answers and a bit of googling should be eye opening.  Yes, I write in a style that appears authoritative, but I nearly flunked the two theoretical physics classes I had to take to get my engineering degree.  Love calculus.  Love physics.  Just couldn't wrap my head around mixing the two together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop upvoting answers that aren't truly great.  That means you have to skip over posts that are &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; if that's all they have going for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have, however, come to the conclusion that research X and practical X aren't simply two different levels of the same thing, they are actually fundamentally different topics.  I hope people get the theoretical physics site off the ground, in addition to this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even then, I hope people won't go around voting up every neat question or answer here - even low end questions and answers should have a minimum dress standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is the primary feedback loop that tells people what the community should look like.  Vote often, but vote carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2710" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T01:52:24.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="566" CreationDate="2011-03-24T14:07:23.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation that is actually left with the closure is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's impossible to objectively answer this question; questions of this type are too open ended and usually lead to confrontation and argument&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which seems appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think generalises Anna's point a little is that new users may not formulate their questions in an appropriate way and can get some unexpected treatment [including Closure] as a result. If these new users are also elementary students, then they will have received a certain discouragement from this site as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it is up to the moderators (and the PR team who seem to exist) to decide whether all this is OK, or whether some form of Site Tutoring is required for genuine students with basic career and study questions (e.g. which subjects do I need to study for physics? why get a physics degree?), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1460" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T14:07:23.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="580" CreationDate="2011-03-25T10:16:35.763" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post refers to the white-on-black, blackboard design initially proposed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/447/design-for-physics-se&quot;&gt;Design for Physics-SE&lt;/a&gt;. This design was withdrawn and (after a spell back in site-beta design) replaced with the current one, which first appeared in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/new-site-design&quot;&gt;New Site Design&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I still see the &quot;beta&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CSS&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not seeing the styling that would indicate that this site is out of beta, I've tried hard refreshes, and using browsers that I've never used before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the design actually launched, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2759" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T23:45:08.933" Title="Why do I still see the &quot;beta&quot; CSS?" Tags="|support|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="579" CreationDate="2011-03-25T10:43:48.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The design was launched and withdrawn based on community feedback. Browse the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'design'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; tag for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T10:43:48.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2011-03-25T10:54:36.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt; is applicable for most of these&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T10:54:36.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="583" CreationDate="2011-03-28T02:08:48.967" Score="19" ViewCount="915" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/7687/2451&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I cited some work I did a while ago.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent should we allow self-linking?  I have noticed in some cases there is self-linking that is only tangentially related to the question.  (I'll give the example I had in mind if need be, but if not it'd be nicer not to call the user out before we've discussed the issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What policy should we have to deal with cases of vanity-linking? I would propose that any time a user puts a link to content they have generated (or participated in generating), they explicitly state that it's their content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T19:25:51.503" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T19:25:51.503" Title="How do you cite yourself?" Tags="|discussion|faq|answers|links|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="582" CreationDate="2011-03-28T02:51:12.567" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that's a pretty general rule across SE sites, that you should disclose personal connections whenever you reference something you're involved with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, I don't see anything wrong with linking to (or otherwise referencing) your own content, as long as it's relevant to the question being asked or answered. For any given question, there's a decent chance that people who are qualified to answer it will already have done some work in the subject, and it'd be a shame if they weren't able to cite that work freely. Plus, it seems fair that people who contribute a lot to the site can be rewarded with the occasional opportunity to plug their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it certainly is possible to abuse the ability to post self-promotional links. When an established user does it once in a while, that's probably okay, but a newer user who links to their own content in a majority of their posts, regardless of disclosure (but &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; if they don't disclose a personal connection), could be considered to be spamming the site, which is not allowed. If you see that sort of thing happening, and if it's clear that it's not just an isolated incident, don't hesitate to flag it as spam or for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T02:51:12.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-28T12:25:53.657" Score="1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7702/does-quantum-mechanics-prohibit-extraterrestrial-life-closed&quot;&gt;Does quantum mechanics prohibit extraterrestrial life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been closed as &quot;off-topic&quot; with a reference to the FAQ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&lt;/a&gt;). I have read the FAQ and found nothing that could prohibit that kind of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that the question is heavily based on the &quot;quantum immortality&quot; hypothesis which is not universally accepted, and I was attacked for referencing to this hypothesis as well as the Tegmark's interpretation of Quantum mechanics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I believe that &quot;quantum immortality&quot; hypothesis even if incorrect, still is a completely valid one, and supported by a number of prominent physicists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I oppose closing questions based on personal theoretic preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T18:16:42.390" Title="Why my question was closed?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="587" CreationDate="2011-03-28T12:51:11.217" Score="3" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;In just one minute I received 7 downvotes in 7 different questions. It is quite obvious to me that I am a victim of pursuit of a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2      21 mins ago     downvote    What is the difference between a measurement and any other interaction in quantum mechanics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  22 mins ago     downvote    Is Angular Momentum truly fundamental?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  23 mins ago     downvote    What is information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  23 mins ago     downvote    Do all massive bodies emit Hawking radiation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  23 mins ago     downvote    Popular depictions of electromagnetic wave: is there an error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  24 mins ago     downvote    What do you think about teaching Standard Model in school?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-2  24 mins ago     downvote    What is the wavefunction of the observer himself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this type of behavior allowed in Stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T15:31:31.420" Title="It seems somebody pursuits me." Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2011-03-28T15:25:25.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several people were in favor of closing your question, and I can't speak for all of them, but the original reason I closed it was that the &quot;quantum immortality&quot; idea you spoke of seemed like abstract speculation, not physics. The fact that you didn't link to any resources to give background information on your question certainly played a role in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a second look, I searched the web for information and read a little more about this quantum immortality idea. Although I still have my doubts about whether it is legitimate physics, I decided to reclassify the closing as &quot;not a real question&quot; because I don't see how you're making a coherent argument. Questions on the interpretations of quantum mechanics are always iffy, and if you are not very careful to stick to rigorous arguments, it greatly increases the chance that your question will be closed. The question as it stands &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be appropriate for a philosophy site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that I'm not the only one who thought it was appropriate to close the question. Perhaps others will add their input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T15:25:25.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="585" CreationDate="2011-03-28T15:31:31.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this type of behavior allowed in Stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't. There are automatic algorithms in place to detect serial downvoting and reverse the votes cast. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/more-voting-anomalies/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Stack Exchange blog post&lt;/a&gt; for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T15:31:31.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-28T18:03:23.380" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently posted a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7539/is-there-any-inherent-danger-in-operating-a-thermonuclear-reactor&quot;&gt;dangers of operating a thermonuclear reactor&lt;/a&gt; and in the opening paragraph used a little bit of narration about importance of obtaining a sustainable source of energy such as nuclear fusion because of the climate change and the human suffering caused by fossil fuel wars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abandoning fossil fuels and obtaining&#xA;  a sustainable, practically unlimited,&#xA;  source of energy should be a prime&#xA;  goal of scientific research in physics&#xA;  because the climate change related to&#xA;  use of fossil fuels threatens the very&#xA;  existence of this civilization, and&#xA;  the endless wars over oil cause&#xA;  immeasurable human suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was blasted and down-voted by a single user as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;dominated by meaningless, tendentious,&#xA;  and absurd ideology (about &quot;climate&#xA;  change&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this paragraph was afterwards edited out by another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is my understanding that there is a broad consensus about the reality of climate change in the scientific community and therefore the comment was inappropriate and over the top on that level too, my basic question is if narration and subjective opinions should be allowed or even encouraged here @ Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, the purpose of that first paragraph of my question was to put the question in a perspective that a lot of people can relate to and that is why it made sense to have it there in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I see no harm in this approach, after all, the scientist who did most to popularize the science, like Carl Sagan, were heavy on narration and opinions and had the great ability to explain scientific concepts in terms understandable to a much wider audience than the scientific community alone. &#xA;While I'm sure some purists would love that all communication here was within strict language of physics and dominated by equations and I see nothing wrong in majority of the questions being asked and answered in that manner, at the same time why would it be wrong to use some narration and subjective opinions to make the communication more interesting and approachable to people who are not physicists and cannot communicate at that level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2628" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T14:05:57.727" Title="Are narration and subjective opinions acceptable on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2011-03-28T18:16:42.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quantum immortality is a silly idea and piling more layers of deductions (logically unsound too, by the way) upon it can't possibly lead to anything else than arguments and quarrels. And even if everything was logically sound and in the boundaries of reasonable theoretical physics, I still wouldn't see any real value in the question. I believe all of this gives plenty of reasons to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to have any chance of turning this into a normal question, you might ask about the nature of quantum immortality itself and how people view it (a bit subjective though). This would have at least some value of addressing some useless thought experiments and misconceptions arising from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T18:16:42.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-03-28T18:30:27.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Narration is fine as long as it adds some important background. But we obviously don't want off topic ramblings, not to mention ones soaked in propaganda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit subjective decision but I hope you can distinguish between useful information -- such as why is the question interesting, either to you or to a wider audience -- and between ramblings that have only marginal association with the real question. Asking about a box sliding with friction down the hill is a fine basic question. Adding that there will be some heat generation is kind of fine if that's what you are aiming for. But starting to talk about temperature increase of the planet and then AGW and that we should ban boxes, hills and friction is &lt;em&gt;not fine&lt;/em&gt;. I hope you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T18:30:27.010" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-03-28T18:39:49.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear Kzen,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not prone to blast people but at the same time I do also hold strong opinions about the specific &lt;em&gt;&quot;the climate change related to use of fossil fuels threatens the very existence of this civilization,&quot;&lt;/em&gt; statement . I had appended a comment in my answer, and then deleted it when this paragraph was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not the only physicist who has delved into this famous anthropogenic global warming that has morphed into &quot;climate change&quot; ( as if the climate is ever stable) and is going into &quot;climate disruption&quot;. The past three years I have read up in depth on the subject, and am convinced that the whole thing is a red herring as far as the &quot;anthropogenic&quot; goes, and a lot is missing from the so called &quot;climate science&quot; .  Evidently there was a second physicist with the same opinions and probably many more might have chimed in if it had not been changed. This is not a place for climate wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it behooves us as scientists on a science site to be as succinct and minimal in the formulation of our problems, to aid in getting an answer. Controversial opinions stated as acceptable premises by all will tend to create reactions. Physicists do not do physics by consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, introduction to difficult subjects is always useful, imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2011-03-29T10:26:09.307" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T10:26:09.307" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-28T20:38:39.283" Score="8" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2011 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-04-17T00:50:37.463" Title="2011 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-03-28T20:38:39.283" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-03-28T21:14:27.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... no. Kind of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of reasons that I would say extended narration and subjective assertions are discouraged. Physics is a quantitative, logical subject: in the course of developing the science, we go to a great deal of trouble to pose questions in an objective manner and also to answer them in an objective manner. This is why we use math, so that we can reach conclusions that aren't dependent on the biases or preconceptions of the person doing the thinking. Besides, most subjective, opinion-based questions don't work very well within the SE model. As the FAQ says, &quot;we prefer questions that can be &lt;strong&gt;answered&lt;/strong&gt;, not just discussed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you might point out that the subjectivity of your first paragraph had little to do with the question you were asking - in other words, you weren't asking a subjective question, just offering up some opinions to motivate it. Yes, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; an extended introduction in which you assert your opinion doesn't really contribute anything to the question. It's a question about hydrogen fusion, and there's no need to reference climate change to justify asking about fusion reactors. Plenty of people here, including especially the kinds of people who would take an interest in your question, find fusion power interesting on its own merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I fully agree that the edit that removed your introduction helped make the question more focused, and I would think so even if it hadn't generated any controversy. (That doesn't mean you did anything wrong, by the way. Most people have a tendency to write more than they need to. It's difficult to tell that you're doing so when you're looking at your own writing; I'm sure the majority of questions on the site could benefit from being &quot;trimmed&quot; by someone other than the original poster.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why would it be wrong to use some narration and subjective opinions to make the communication more interesting and approachable to people who are not physicists and cannot communicate at that level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is certainly something to be said for not getting bogged down in math, keep in mind that this is a site mainly targeted at people who are interested in physics, enough to put in a bit of work to communicate using the language of the field. Besides, it's not necessary to be subjective to capture people's interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T21:14:27.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-03-28T23:34:45.933" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should strive to avoid polemics and unrelated commentary, and stick to the science whenever possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Telling a story is great, but try to avoid proselytizing along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-03-28T23:34:45.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-03-29T08:26:05.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO an analogy with food would of help here. Every question with its set of answers is like a dish prepared by the contributions of my cooks. Someone baked the crust, someone made the tomato sauce and a third person brought the anchovies (ok, ew :L). But the point in life is not just to eat healthy dishes. They should also have some &lt;em&gt;taste&lt;/em&gt; and, if possible, &lt;em&gt;flair&lt;/em&gt;. Without spice, without taste, cooking would be as empty and banal as life without music or movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly questions and answers without &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; element of humor, wit, story-telling and other emotional flourishes are akin to boiled potatoes. Healthy and great for breakfast on occasion and when sick but add a little discussion, some context and even some amount of philosophizing and those boiled potatoes become something you ate at Applebee's [&lt;strong&gt;context:&lt;/strong&gt; Applebee's is an American restaurant chain where I had my first black russian.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, by all means, discuss and converse and debate. But try to put some effort into your philosophizing and poetics so that this pot-luck we call physics.SE satisfies and nourishes one and all inquiring minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T08:26:05.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-03-29T14:05:57.727" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in the title is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are narration and subjective opinions acceptable on Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers are that any &lt;strong&gt;narration&lt;/strong&gt; needs to add to the clarity of the question. So yes narration only so far as it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adds to the clarity of the physics&lt;br&gt;&#xA;scenario to be answered;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clarifies the level of physics&#xA;understanding of the OP;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identifies the type of answer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;expected (for certain questions&#xA;where this needs explaining).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several Questions (and sometime repeated added comments) add narration that does not meet these conditions (except suggesting that the OP knowledge of physics or scientific procedure is low) and so is unhelpful and perhaps misleading to audiences who are expecting facts only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subject opinions&lt;/strong&gt; should not be presented on Physics SE. This is not to be confused with the point that we all currently have subjective opinions about the value of given theories or data or the prospects of where research should go next etc. These opinions based often on our level of understanding of the inter-relationships between complex phenomena; how much physics we have actually studied etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me I dont care who believes in String Theory versus LQG: or who believes in fission power, fusion power or wave energy. I just want facts from those theories in answers to questions about those theories; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What causes problems also is that some questions (and the behaviour of the OP afterwards) suggest that this site is being used to promote specific idiosyncratic theories; as a general education mechanism; or as a physics and philosophy discussion group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may or may not be other sites for these latter topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1460" LastActivityDate="2011-03-29T14:05:57.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="572" CreationDate="2011-04-03T02:36:11.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see your point, but while the math.stackexchange design is subtle, it hurts my eyes a little.  If we are to go with graph paper, I like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stats site&lt;/a&gt; better.  Still subtle, but the touch of color makes it a bit easier to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:17.117" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T02:36:11.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="592" CreationDate="2011-04-03T09:16:50.900" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Still only 2 candidates :( There are definitely people who I think would make good candidates who haven't yet nominated themselves, especially in the mid-reputation range (1000-5000-ish). Don't be shy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way I know this should be a comment but I'm posting it as an answer as a last-ditch effort to draw some attention to the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T09:16:50.900" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-03T09:16:50.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-03T14:56:57.487" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latex and MathJax preview don't seem to work anymore when asking/editing/answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2011-04-03T20:50:12.837" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T20:50:39.827" Title="Latex/MathJax is broken in preview" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-03T15:32:38.110" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is good that we are finally having elections. Of course given that we have three candidates for three posts this election will, most likely, not be terribly exciting. However, in general, it would be nice to have some sort of forum where users can pose questions to the candidates. A person's previous record can give us some idea of future behavior, but this can only be a very rough indicator of actual performance. The best way for users to be able to get to know candidates, and also to be able to select the best among them, would be by soliciting candidate responses to user-submitted questions. It is only such a public &quot;stress-test&quot; that can help reveal each candidate's best qualities and greatest flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggestion comes too late for us to do anything for this election. But perhaps this is something that we should keep in mind as we look to future elections which might turn out to be far more hotly contested than this one. What are the community thoughts about the desirability or feasibility of having such an arrangement for future elections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-04-03T21:32:18.877" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T00:12:02.113" Title="Moderator Nominee Debates?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="601" CreationDate="2011-04-03T15:43:10.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally favour this in either of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions on meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Q&amp;amp;A on the chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T15:43:10.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="601" CreationDate="2011-04-03T15:50:57.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If only three users would like to volounteer, there's not much point in this &amp;mdash; you can't force a diamond upon the unwilling. SE Inc. employee Rebecca Chernoff, however, normally holds Q&amp;amp;A events on chat (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=all&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;filter=town%20hall&amp;amp;nohide=true&quot;&gt;&quot;town hall chat&quot;s&lt;/a&gt;) with moderator nominees to help people vote. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/610730#610730&quot;&gt;Here's, for example, Unix's.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="887" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T15:50:57.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-03T16:56:11.017" Score="10" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are rumors that the site redesign will happen soon, so I open this thread for some more suggestions, ideas and possible good points of previous design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T08:38:10.047" Title="Site design, take 2" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="601" CreationDate="2011-04-03T17:15:53.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An election getting 5 or 6 nominees is much better than struggling to get 3.  I'm surprised by the community not having people put themselves forward for nomination.  Having only 3 nominees means that the community is unable to voice its collective opinion and vote for the candidates they want to see elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been assisting communities put on Town Hall Chats so that the community can pose questions to the candidates to get a feel for different moderating styles.  Again, this really only makes sense if there is truly an election, but if there is, I am absolutely happy to try and put one together as quickly as I can.  Aside from that, the community is absolutely welcome to pose questions to the candidates here on meta with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this election, if people think it would help, we can extend the nomination phase by a couple days to see if anyone else steps forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added 2 days to the nomination phase.  Maybe this will draw out a couple other nominations.  At the very least, since there are now more than 3 nominations, it gives a bit of a buffer for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/610/1097&quot;&gt;town hall chat&lt;/a&gt; to be scheduled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T00:12:02.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="599" CreationDate="2011-04-03T20:12:07.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Either very slow or broken on FF 3.6.16 on Mac OS, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it was working last night. Did something change recently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T20:12:07.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-04-03T20:14:56.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really liked the font in the blackboard theme (the text one of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T20:14:56.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-04-03T20:24:29.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some support for cloning Math.SE; one thing I dislike most about it is this ugly space-waisting header:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pdtbe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the standard one is way better:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x240K.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T20:24:29.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="599" CreationDate="2011-04-03T20:50:39.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a regression - the CDN version of MathJax wasn't wired up correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T20:50:39.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-03T23:57:04.043" Score="6" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Town Hall Chat session with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.  I am working with the candidates to find a time that allows the most participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Town Hall Chat will take place Wednesday the 6th at 9pm UTC, or 5pm EST on the 6th.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=4&amp;amp;day=6&amp;amp;year=2011&amp;amp;hour=21&amp;amp;min=0&amp;amp;sec=0&amp;amp;p1=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;view in other timezones&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/406/physics-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;join the chat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the details so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have coordinated with the candidates and done the best I could with a best fit match.  &lt;s&gt;I would like to schedule this towards the beginning of the election phase, so I am looking at the 6th-9th.  As soon as I coordinate with the existing moderators and candidates, I will edit this post with details on the &quot;when&quot;.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Town Hall Chat will be a one-hour event using our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat platform&lt;/a&gt;.  You can register for the event &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/406/physics-town-hall-chat?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The format will be an open discussion.  Users are encouraged to pose questions to the candidate regarding their thoughts on moderation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the chat session, the transcript of the event will be permanently linked here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2011-04-06T20:51:49.863" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T20:51:49.863" Title="2011 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat:  9pm UTC / 5pm EDT on the 6th - now!" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-04-04T05:14:26.483" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The present format is fine for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The white letters on dark background are not easy for formulae  and copyings. They get too much prominence. It would be OK if only the general background were dark but the answers and comments were black letters on white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2011-04-04T05:14:26.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-05T11:00:01.167" Score="5" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not yet another question on &quot;level&quot; but on &quot;relevance&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we allow &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; homework questions like e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4506/homework-about-spinning-top&quot;&gt;Homework about spinning top&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8045/i-lost-a-factor-of-two-in-the-electromagnetic-field-tensor&quot;&gt;I lost a factor of two in the electromagnetic field tensor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or close them as &quot;Too Localized&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: there are clearly other homework questions with a larger general value, like e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1683/mechanics-around-a-rail-tank-wagon&quot;&gt;Mechanics around a rail tank wagon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These should be kept as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/are-puzzle-questions-appropriate&quot;&gt;discussed here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-05-24T20:16:52.337" Title="Specific homework questions - too localized to be of general interest?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="612" CreationDate="2011-04-05T17:23:41.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I favor &quot;Too localized&quot; for most basic homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, I will usually provide some hints, because I like to see people make some headway, but these &quot;questions&quot; suffer in at least two ways&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we allow them we become a &quot;homework help site&quot; and the discourse here will be dominated by them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They rarely address things at the level of &lt;em&gt;principles&lt;/em&gt; rather than the raw mechanics of churning through a problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T17:23:41.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="619" CreationDate="2011-04-05T18:45:16.390" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to post some code in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8074/why-is-the-earth-so-fat/8114#8114&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, but only a portion of the code I've copied is showing up.  What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T04:51:23.927" Title="Only a portion of code block displaying" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2011-04-05T20:08:08.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be a section on the reasons for &quot;closed&quot; and maybe some links to show examples of closure: migrated to other boards, or the reasons. New users might be really discouraged from asking again if they get a close, and most of them read the FAQ, so they should be prepared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a close look at closed questions should come up with a list of no no's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Leading to arguments&quot;, for example has been used for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a link for such a closure: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7112/why-do-people-still-talk-about-bohmian-mechanics-hidden-variables-closed&quot;&gt;Why do people still talk about bohmian mechanics/hidden variables&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the explanation:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;closed as subjective and argumentative&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;even though there were many answers, some reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another has &lt;em&gt;closed as too localized&lt;/em&gt; because the problem was answered and no need for more answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T05:33:07.847" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-05T20:08:08.640" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="616" CreationDate="2011-04-06T02:44:24.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, I think I see what's going on: IIRC HTML is still interpreted inside a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; block, so the parser saw a less-than sign in your code and treated it as the start of an HTML tag. Another user edited the post to use indentation instead of a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; block, so now it displays correctly since HTML is not parsed within an indented Markdown code block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T02:44:24.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="622" CreationDate="2011-04-06T05:06:05.163" Score="7" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a low-rep user with a faint grasp of physics. I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8062/about-the-complex-nature-of-the-wave-function&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (which itself was downvoted, no qualms) and in one of the answers was bombarded by references that pertain to interpretational aspects and did not appear to be mainstream. Now I had asked something which could be called a standard textbook doubt, and I have no desire to go anywhere beyond the operational utility of quantum mechanics. Should such philosophical answers be allowed?? I am not interested in reading stuff from people who push forward marginal opinions and speculative theories. Shouldn't such answers be somehow discouraged? Another issue is that these answers sometimes get upvoted, for whatever reasons (eg comment in an answer to my most recent question ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is that I am wrong everywhere and that the answer is totally relevant and I am just assuming. In that case i would offer apologies. But how do I judge when I am bombarded by an answer that cites 5+ journal papers with the only explanations provided are highlighted abstracts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T13:02:26.503" Title="Should philosophical/speculative/non-mainstream answers be allowed to simple questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2011-04-06T06:33:14.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an excerpt from an email I sent to Robert Cartaino back in the early days of the beta period. (The bold formatting I just added; the links were originally there) Although I probably wouldn't write all the same things today, I think this could be relevant in refining our FAQ excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest issue that the physics site faces right now is publicity. But it's not just a matter of attracting as many people as possible to participate: we need to attract people who are going to ask the right kinds of questions, neither too low-level nor too high-level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, any physics Q&amp;amp;A site has a tendency to attract a certain number of so-called &amp;quot;crackpot&amp;quot; questions, which are either &lt;strong&gt;not well formulated or not answerable using established physics&lt;/strong&gt;. It can be a subjective determination, but I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/650/what-is-an-idea-in-terms-of-time-space-and-matter-closed&quot;&gt;What is an &amp;quot;Idea&amp;quot; in terms of time space and matter?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/770/what-is-the-most-efficient-way-to-destroy-the-universe&quot;&gt;What is the most efficient way to destroy the universe?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/908/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing-closed&quot;&gt;Why is there something rather than nothing?&lt;/a&gt; are decent examples (especially the last one). We've been reasonably lucky not to get a whole lot of these so far, but undoubtedly, as the site becomes more popular and reaches out to a wider user base, they'll become more and more frequent. I'll say up front that I don't want to see these kinds of questions tolerated on the site, since I think they misrepresent the scope of physics as a science. (Of course, if the community disagrees with that, I'll go along with them, but then I probably would not remain an active participant on the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's hard to characterize good physics questions in general, they typically ask about &lt;strong&gt;the result of an actual experiment&lt;/strong&gt; that has been or could be performed (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123/how-does-one-measure-the-mass-of-a-galaxy-and-other-such-large-quantities&quot;&gt;How does one measure the mass of a galaxy? And other such large quantities.&lt;/a&gt;), or about &lt;strong&gt;a calculation using a well-formulated theory&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1574/deriving-the-speed-of-the-propagation-of-a-change-in-the-electromagnetic-field-fr&quot;&gt;Deriving the speed of the propagation of a change in the Electromagnetic Field from Maxwell's Equations&lt;/a&gt;), or about a &lt;strong&gt;definition of a recognized physical concept or quantity&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1419/what-is-the-definition-of-momentum-when-a-mass-distribution-rhor-t-is-given&quot;&gt;What is the definition of momentum when a mass distribution ρ(r,t) is given?&lt;/a&gt;). As I stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now/97#97&quot;&gt;one of my answers&lt;/a&gt; on Physics meta, I think the best way to &amp;quot;enforce&amp;quot; the kinds of questions we want to see on the site is by asking good questions, not by closing bad ones, thereby setting an example for people who come along to ask questions in the future.  And of course, in order to have a lot of good questions, we need to expand the community with more people who will ask good questions. That means that, generally speaking, the kinds of people who we most want to attract are college students who are studying physics or a related field, or people at a higher level of study in physics, up to and including full-fledged researchers. My sense is that most people who have not studied physics at the college level would not have a sense of what distinguishes a good physics question from a bad one, and although this certainly doesn't and shouldn't disqualify them from being able to ask questions, it does mean they're not the kinds of people that the site really needs in order to succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T06:33:14.440" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-06T06:33:14.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-04-06T06:54:35.893" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way to discourage answers is by downvoting them. So if you thought the answer was not helpful, just downvote it. (It's polite to leave a comment explaining why, as you did.) Keep in mind that a good answer will match the level of the question so that the asker can understand it. If an answer to your question is too complex or confusing, that can be a valid reason to downvote it even if it's technically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if other people find it useful and relevant, they can upvote it. That way each answer gets judged by the community. If the answer is totally relevant and you just don't see it, others probably will, and they'll upvote it, so your downvote won't matter so much. Conversely (actually contrapositively, I guess), if an answer does get a lot of downvotes then that probably means you weren't the only one who thought it wasn't helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question asker, you also have the ability to accept an answer, which is a way of indicating which answer was most useful for your question specifically. So if you don't like an answer, don't accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking whether there should be more extreme measures than downvoting... well, no, at least not for this sort of case. There are moderator flags and the like but that's just for spam, or answers that are &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; irrelevant to the question, not even on the same topic at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T06:54:35.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-07T09:20:41.267" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to log in in a different SE forum, eg sceptics, &#xA;do I need to log in there separately, with a new identity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T13:02:17.617" Title="Question on log-in on other SE forums" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="624" CreationDate="2011-04-07T09:46:57.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You only have to log in once with the same openID to create the account, it will then be linked to your other accounts automatically (and, since you have &gt;200 rep here, you'll get a 100 rep start bonus). &lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; You can also use two different openIDs in case you want the accounts to remain separated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2011-04-07T13:02:17.617" LastActivityDate="2011-04-07T13:02:17.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-04-08T13:02:26.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a look at this question, which just seemed rather longwinded to me. I also learn that it once had a different form. There is an art to getting the right answers at the right level on SE (and generally I suppose). I am not sure what form of the question was answered by who.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One issue with several physics topics (like foundational QM) is that there are different mathematical formulations of the same material, as well as different interpretations of some of it. What happened in this particular case is that the original question asked about the formulation in a standard textbook. Clearly that question can be answered. So also could be answered about other formulations which have certain advantages, or which some researchers like. Of course different mathematical formulations have to be shown to be equivalent, so assuming that, other formulations &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; relevant to the question in a sense. However you were not interested in non-standard (or at least non-textbook) answers to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in this case the person answering had only just learned of these techniques themselves and so could only provide references rather than explain anything line by line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A broader issue (which was in another remark) was about the legitimacy of providing &quot;answers&quot; not appropriate for the OP, but which are appropriate in some broader SE sense. The quote was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, even if it were suitable only for Albert Einstein it has to be posted here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite like the quote, but I dont know what the SE policy is on this one. One can see both sides of the argument on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was stated because of the concern that any duplicate would be closed. Consequently even Albert Einstein would get his duplicate question closed in favour of yours, and so he would want to see all the other mathematical arguments presented as Answers to your question. On the other hand maybe Albert Einstein would also need to learn how to ask his duplicate question in a way that it doesnt get closed, by refering to your question and then saying &quot;I would like to see much more mathematics and philosophy than discussed in these answers.&quot; Maybe that wouldnt get closed, but you see the dilemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1460" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T13:02:26.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-08T18:46:26.000" Score="30" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pseudo-answers&lt;/strong&gt; are partial answers, which are mere speculation or irony or an addition to someone else's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pseudo-answers do, sometimes, make great contribution to the thread. However, Physics is not a forum. We are a question and answer site. Answers are meant to be answers, not replies. &lt;strong&gt;If you have something to add and it's not actually an answer, then write it in the comment section.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why this matters&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site's success depends on our ability to continually produce great answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High quality answers are the life and blood of our site. If we continually produce high quality content, we'll attract more experts who will want to help fellow physicists. On the other hand, if low quality dominates the site, an expert who visits the site will conclude this site is a waste of time and never come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pseudo-answers go against at goal in at least three ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question does not have any answers with a score of at least 1, and has no accepted answer, it will show up in the Unanswered Questions tab. That's right, it's not enough for a question to have answers, it has to have positively voted answers to be considered answered. An upvoted pseudo-answers might be the reason why a question has not yet received a good answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heavily upvoted pseudo-answers gives the impression that this is the kind of content we want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heavily upvoted pseudo-answers may reduce the visibility of good answers. If by the time a good answer is posted there are already a few upvoted bad answers, then it's less likely the great answer will be upvoted to the top. It may stay buried under a pile of bad answers, where few will ever see it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our goal is high quality answers, and it is, then &lt;strong&gt;pseudo-answers are the enemy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tell-tale signs of a possible pseudo-answer are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answerer refers to other answers like &amp;quot;In addition to what Alice said...&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Referring to Bob's answer...&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer is prefaced by &amp;quot;This is not a complete answer, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;...&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole answer is less than three lines long.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer starts with &amp;quot;This is just a guess but&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I think that&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Maybe that, &amp;quot;I would guess that&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;In my opinion,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Personally,&amp;quot; or any other term that suggest speculation rather than certainty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How can I help?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to help us get rid of the pseudo-answers threat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write good, complete answers.&lt;/strong&gt; The best way to avoid the creation of pseudo-answers on a question is to write great answers. If an user learns by reading your answer, it is much less likely that he will feel the need to post an answer of his own. If this is done constantly on each answer, a new user will learn that this is the kind of answer his answer will compete with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvote them, at least down to zero.&lt;/strong&gt; Downvoting pseudo-answers is paving the way for better, more informative answers: it makes sure that unanswered questions show up in the Unanswered Questions tab and gives more visibility to new questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leave comments on infringing answers.&lt;/strong&gt; Downvoting sends a signal, for sure, but the lesson might not be clear. When downvoting, try to leave a comment explaining why. With luck, the author will persevere and learn from his mistake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag them.&lt;/strong&gt; If you see a pseudo-answer, please flag it as &amp;quot;low quality.&amp;quot; If moderators agree, they might convert the question into a comment, delete it, or downvote it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write good questions.&lt;/strong&gt; A well-written question helps reduce the probability of pseudo-answers being written. It's not a miracle remedy, and sometimes a well-written question will receive several poorly written questions, but putting effort into your questions never hurts!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we work hard together, we can purge the site of pseudo-answers and the site will be much better for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Post freely adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/383/pseudo-answers-are-the-enemy&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, where it lead to much rejoicing and puppy unicorns.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T22:11:41.127" Title="Pseudo-answers are the enemy" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="642" CreationDate="2011-04-08T20:24:16.083" Score="5" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8276/optimal-technique-to-tear-perforated-paper-along-the-perforation&quot;&gt;Optimal technique to tear perforated paper along the perforation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have a question which is considered to be off topic by some members of the community, but on topic by others (as evidenced by the fact that they answered it). I'm not entirely sure which camp I'm in. At first, I thought it was off topic, but I've been closing a lot of questions recently and since at the time, nobody else objected to the question, I thought I would give it a chance. (Besides, there is physics involved in paper tearing at &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; level.) However, now it's clear that there are people who consider this sort of question unambiguously off topic, and in many cases I'm inclined to agree with them. So we should make a decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about practical phenomena that don't address the underlying reasons: on topic or off topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272/are-how-to-questions-for-demos-and-try-this-at-home-experiments-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are &amp;quot;How to...&amp;quot; questions for demos and try-this-at-home experiments on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/170/what-tag-should-we-use-to-indicate-how-does-x-work&quot;&gt;What tag should we use to indicate &amp;quot;how does X work?&amp;quot; ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples of these practical questions (all the ones I could find happen to be closed, but I think there are others out there that weren't; please comment or edit in links if you find them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7681/extracting-water-out-of-silica-gel&quot;&gt;Extracting water out of silica gel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6290/what-materials-can-be-used-to-release-odours-when-wet-closed&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6290/what-materials-can-be-used-to-release-odours-when-wet-closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T02:43:34.190" Title="Paper tearing and other practical questions: off topic or not?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2011-04-08T20:40:18.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say &lt;strong&gt;burn them from orbit&lt;/strong&gt; -- completely off topic. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that questions should be strictly about Physics, not the &quot;general physical world&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The risk is that we will end up with questions potentially overlapping with half of the other StackExchange sites! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head these sites as of today would overlap with those kinds of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Motor Vehicle Maintenance and Repair (&quot;How does a car engine work?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fitness and Nutrition (&quot;How are food calories measured?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Skeptics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantitative Finance (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1873/the-concepts-of-path-integral-in-quantitative-finance&quot;&gt;The Concepts of Path Integral in Quantitative Finance&lt;/a&gt;&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guitars (&quot;How do I calculate string tension for a baritone guitar?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Audio Recording and Production (&quot;How does a loudspeaker work?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bicycles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Photography&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cooking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, some of these questions hold some interest (fun!) for this community. They just belong somewhere else, where they probably will receive far better answers.&#xA;Ultimately we need to have a very clear and explicit &quot;scope&quot; so we can be a focused Q&amp;amp;A site of physicists for physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/low_orbit_ion_cannon.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burn from orbit http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/low_orbit_ion_cannon.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T20:40:18.113" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="627" CreationDate="2011-04-08T20:56:07.997" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I agree with you that there are such things as pseudo-answers which don't belong on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But based on my experience here, I think this is not as big of an issue on physics.SE as I imagine it is on Skeptics. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The answerer refers to other answers like &quot;In addition to what Alice said...&quot;, or &quot;Referring to Bob's answer...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is collaborative. It's perfectly valid to build off someone else's answer, in the same way that you might build off a paper, blog post, or Wikipedia page (by citing it). We've produced a lot more thorough information that way than we could otherwise. In fact, based on experience I consider this a sign of a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer, as long as the original answer being referenced is also good and the new answer adds something substantive to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example from my own experience: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/185/what-is-needed-to-claim-the-discovery-of-the-higgs-boson/195#195&quot;&gt;What is needed to claim the discovery of the  Higgs boson?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The answer is prefaced by &quot;This is not a complete answer, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could go either way. It's often difficult for one person to cover an issue completely, and I consider it a good sign when they recognize that and point out that there is more to be done, leaving an opening for someone else to come in and complete the explanation (either by editing the existing answer, or posting a new answer that builds on it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The whole answer is less than three lines long.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreed, that is probably a sign of a bad answer. (Or perhaps a sign of a bad question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The answer starts with &quot;This is just a guess but&quot;, &quot;I think that&quot;, &quot;Maybe that, &quot;I would guess that&quot;, &quot;In my opinion,&quot; &quot;Personally,&quot; or any other term that suggest speculation rather than certainty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &quot;In my opinion&quot; or &quot;Personally,&quot; I agree. But for other phrases, it depends to some extent on who's guessing. A good physicist knows how to extrapolate new information from what he or she knows, without stepping over the line into &lt;em&gt;unfounded&lt;/em&gt; speculation. So even an educated guess or a tentative thought can be good information, if it comes from someone who knows what they're doing. It's common knowledge that &lt;em&gt;scientists make mistakes&lt;/em&gt; sometimes, and it will help our site when people disclose their level of certainty (or uncertainty) in the conclusions they're drawing - kind of like the verbal version of error bars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-04-08T22:11:41.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:24:11.947" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a &quot;digest&quot; version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/610&quot;&gt;2011 Moderator Election Town Hall Chat&lt;/a&gt;. The format, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;as described on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, is one &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to this question &lt;em&gt;for every question&lt;/em&gt; asked in the Town Hall, containing all the candidate's answers to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To view the digest chronologically, please sort the answers by &quot;oldest&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions or comments about this, &lt;strong&gt;please do not answer this question&lt;/strong&gt; as the answers are designed to be used for the questions from the Town hall itself. Instead, please ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;the parent question&lt;/a&gt; or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/352/town-hall-discussion&quot;&gt;the Town Hall Discussion Room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any corrections which need to be made to this digest, or if you were a candidate who was unable to attend the town hall and would like your answers included, please add your replies to the chat room and comment here so they can be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:31:43.420" Title="2011 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat Digest" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:25:34.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793753#793753&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; What do y'all see as the biggest challenge when it comes to moderating Physics-SE?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793763#793763&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff It seems that there are some tensions in the community regarding people behaving &quot;like bullies&quot;. Also, it seems that some basic discussions weren't completed during Beta, like &quot;what should go in our FAQ&quot;, and that is making it difficult to know when to close questions. I think that this should be a happy community, but at the moment it looks the mood could improve. I'd like to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793766#793766&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Biggest challenge: Well two: Big, strong personalities who are used to being Right, and strongly held, very much off the mainstream, ideas (i.e. those which might get labeled as crank or crackpot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793771#793771&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Hmm... well, from what I've seen on the site so far, I think keeping arguments under control is the most challenging part of the job. As physicists we have a tendency to be pretty stubborn when our views are challenged (some people more than others) so it's easy for a simple disagreement to blow up and turn into insults being traded back and forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:25:34.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:26:36.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793777#793777&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Official false modesty meter calibration query for all candidates: What do you believe is or will be your biggest weakness as a moderator?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793790#793790&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @dmckee Tough one. I am not a professional physicist, grad level only -- I think there should be some other moderator with me with me with more physics knowledge. My strengths are in &quot;moderation art&quot; and I can also help with lower level question (I have 3000+ rep here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793797#793797&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I have a temper that occasionally shows through. Just yesterday @Sklivvz had to cleanup some too-strongly-state comments I left on Skeptics. I know better, and I usually walk away from the computer when that happens, but evidently not every time. That can't be allowed to happen whilst wielding the Power of the Diamond (tm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793801#793801&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @dmckee Ah, well I was thinking about a good way to say this and then Sklivvz popped up with the perfect wording: I've had the feeling my biggest weakness is &quot;moderation art,&quot; i.e. defusing debates, the ability to enforce boundaries without angering people. In practice, this often means I'll let things go (e.g. rude comments) when they should perhaps be deleted or dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:26:36.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:27:47.963" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793810#793810&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793834#793834&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Hardest possible scenario, huh? If they contribute to the comment noise, then cleaning up after them can be a warning. If that fails, a private email after consulting with other mods. The sin bin for a short time if they persist, but I'm thinking of Rich B. levels of persistent conflict generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793846#793846&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff First of all, I would be present on the site and nuke flame wars from orbit. This is not where you come to fight. Aside, I would approach the user in chat first (using the new @@ tool, possibly) and try to reason. I would explain that the community is more important than any single user, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793854#793854&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff If that fails, and the behaviour continues, then I would use a formal warning, and then repeated suspensions. The main point here is that one user can spoil everybody's fun. Even if they are high rep... Actually, especially if the are high rep, they should set the golden standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793856#793856&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff First reaction: just reply to the comments asking everyone involved to keep a level head and avoid saying rude things. I might delete comments if they seem excessively bad and/or irrelevant to the question. If that fails after a few instances, then send an official warning (moderator message), then after that, suspensions of increasing length, starting with a day or two, until it's no longer a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793862#793862&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff (continued) Contributing good answers can earn a user some leniency in the &quot;disciplinary&quot; process, but it's not an excuse to be rude and get away with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:27:47.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:28:39.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3f7473eceac532fa519415251e181c24?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Edward&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/11827/edward&quot;&gt;Edward&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793850#793850&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:* What do you consider the purpose of the 'comments' section (what will you encourage / discourage)?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793868#793868&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Edward Comments on Physics.SE provide a place to discuss the limits, exceptions, special cases, and requirements that afflict most statements you can make in physics. It is rare that any of us write an absolutely true statement. Done well, this can clarify without generating conflict. Done badly it makes bruised egos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793874#793874&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Edward Comments are second class citizens in the SE network. They should be used only for minor discussions related to the post. They should not be used as a forum. I think that physics needs to address this, as we are not using the tools we have in the best possible way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793878#793878&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Edward Good question :-) The primary purpose of comments on questions should be to ask for clarification, and comments on answers should be used to point out or ask about inconsistencies or errors in the answer posted. In both cases they basically function as a way to point out ways for the OP to improve the post through edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793879#793879&quot;&gt;replied&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Sklivvz I'd like to say &quot;Hear! Hear!&quot; to Sklivvz's line on the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:28:39.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:29:49.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793904#793904&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Do you think the Physics-SE community generally gets the SE engine? What is something you think the community still needs education on, and how can you help improve this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/406?m=793918#793918&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think that the community could use some help. I've been involved in the SE network for 2 years 6 months now, and I believe I can say I've lived through the many changes, errors and corrections of the platform. I know how it should work, and that when it works it's possibly the best community platform available today. As how to make it happen, is through community building (continued)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793927#793927&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I can bring as an example, the Skeptics site I am moderating. It's a very tough gig, because our questions are on the extreme side of subjective. Similarly to Physics we attract &quot;eccentrics&quot; pretty much every other day and we have to deal with them while keeping the community in a happy place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793930#793930&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I believe the most commonly used term here is &quot;crackpots&quot; but it's possibly too evil :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793931#793931&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Not quite. One issue is that the quality of an answer on a hard science site needs to be judged by its correctness (that is, after all, why we call it hard science) and people don't always use that criterion. Another issue is that we tend to overuse the comment system, but then again questions in physics are often more discussion-intensive (or one could say argument-prone) than other topic areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793949#793949&quot;&gt;continued again&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think that down votes should also be used to judge the quality of the answers (not only the correctness). But I believe that the community should set a standard and follow it, not the moderators. We facilitate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:29:49.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:30:15.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3f7473eceac532fa519415251e181c24?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Edward&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/11827/edward&quot;&gt;Edward&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793957#793957&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; As a follow up then: If responses are to remain associated with a question, where do you feel 'non-minor' discussion of possible errors or follow up to an answer should go? Sometimes the most educationally useful stuff I've seen is when there are conflicting answers, and learning why a particular answer turned out to be wrong.  But previous answers regarding comments seem to want non-minor back and forth discussion reduced in comments.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793967#793967&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Edward If it's going to be an extended discussion, the chat room can be good for that. But in many cases, I envision a cycle of &quot;comment, edit, delete the comment&quot; to improve the posts without cluttering up the comment section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793970#793970&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Edward There are other better ways. First: post a better answer instead. Second: use tools like the chat that work way better than the comments. If the discussion is of a more general nature, bring it to meta. I know physicists are tough people with 150IQ! But believe me, nerdy programmers are just as tough - and the platform is built around helping community of opinionated geeks be happy and productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794072#794072&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @Edward In 99% of the cases it's only necessary to point out why an answer is wrong once. You also have to remember that the answer might be wrong, but also the comment. So, surely you can point out things in comments if it's helpful. Remember that our AIM here is NOT to win a right-or-wrong contest, but it's to get the best possible answers, so don't point out errors in an unfriendly way but BE NICE and help improve the answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:30:15.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:30:39.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793981#793981&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; What can be done to bring more people to the community? Do you feel that's part of your responsibility as a moderator?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sklivvz http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/793995#793995&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff It's absolutely part of the job of a moderator. I can only say that, as a moderator, I managed to get Skeptics linked by Phil Plait (Bad Astronomer) and successfully posted more than one question on HackerNews, bringing over 10,000 visitors in 2 days. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1700/does-more-monitor-real-estate-increase-productivity&quot;&gt;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1700/does-more-monitor-real-estate-increase-productivity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794007#794007&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff This was a major concern of mine at the beginning of the beta period. I think we have less of a problem with publicity now, but it's still something to think about. The best thing we can do in general, IMO, is build a reputation of giving people accurate answers. More short-term, we should be sharing interesting questions with influential bloggers and other &quot;trendsetters&quot; in the physics community. (TBC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794009#794009&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff (cont.) I believe that the moderators can play a part in spurring this sort of action on, but it's not exclusively their responsibility. Site promotion is a project that the whole community can/should get involved in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sklivvz http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794013#794013&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff As a moderator you also need to be able to ask great questions, setting the standard. I have a couple of very very popular questions on StackOverflow. Here on physics my best one is Could gravity be an emergent property of nature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sklivvz http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794018#794018&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; A last thing. Moderators are the only users with direct access to stats. They must therefore play a major role in promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:37.237" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:30:39.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:31:02.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794012#794012&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; I have one that I guess only Sklivvz will be able to answer right now: For candidates who are also moderators of other SE sites, how do you expect your duties on the other site to affect your ability to moderate physics.SE?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794030#794030&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @DavidZaslavsky Actually, I think it is a great advantage. First of all, moderators keep an eye most of the time. So it's a matter of being always present. Obviously I am already around because of Skeptics, so it's easy for me. Secondly, I think that seeing two different communities gives a great deal of experience that you can't have with a single site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794312#794312&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @DavidZaslavsky I'm a pro tem mod on CodeGolf right now. It's a easy gig, and I intend to give it up when they get around to elections right now. It means I've had a look at the tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:31:02.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:31:23.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794063#794063&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794086#794086&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff Great question. I can point out this question here that was closed last night on Skeptics. I opter for closing, and the other mod present disagreed. So this is what we did. We posted a question on meta, to let the community decide. In the meanwhile (continued)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794094#794094&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; The question was quickly becoming problematic - a flame war. So to expedite the decision we went in Teacher's Lounge (a special chat room for all the moderators) and we asked for advice there. After some discussion we all agreed on closing. I believe that we avoided a bad flame war and pointless question without making the community unhappy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794088#794088&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I'd bring it up with the other moderator in the mods' chat room (or perhaps by email if that didn't work for some reason). If other people also shared my opinion, I would encourage them to bring it up on meta so the community can decide. But I wouldn't reverse another moderator's action unless they asked me to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794092#794092&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think this answer I posted on physics meta might be relevant to that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794346#794346&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think mods have to talk to one another in cases like that. Meta or chat should do. Teachers' Lounge is a secure place if the site's meta or general chat isn't appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:31:23.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="631" CreationDate="2011-04-09T01:31:43.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d8c43bb4c449d8054aebdd4ad98c6f6c?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Rebecca Chernoff&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23/rebecca-chernoff&quot;&gt;Rebecca Chernoff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794108#794108&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; Perhaps some final thoughts from the candidates?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fd9e5b2c59170ec3d74dde30d233fa4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Sklivvz&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1211/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794126#794126&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I really want to help here. I love physics. I come from a family of scientists, so I know them. On the other hand I am a community builder, I've been helping here but I also do it in my real life job. I help maintain an open source project, again, community. Here I can join two things I love :-) And, Bacon Waffles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/794136#794136&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; @RebeccaChernoff I think the questions covered it pretty well. This is not an easy site to moderate but I think we're doing a pretty good job of propagating good information despite the challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T01:31:43.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2011-04-09T02:43:34.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of closing practical questions and asking them to be rephrased as physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the key is that with the questions you cited, the asker wanted to know something along the lines of &quot;what's the best way to...&quot;  This elicits practical, non-physics answers (the answers to the paper-tearing question simply talk about things like running pencils along a crease; they don't have significant physics content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions, slightly modified but about the same topic, could read &quot;Why does such and such act this way...&quot;. If the paper question were phrased &quot;Does the angle you tear paper have an effect, and why?&quot;, it would elicit more physics-based answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1343/why-does-dust-stick-to-rotating-fan-propeller&quot;&gt;the question about why dust sticks to fans&lt;/a&gt; is a fine question, but if it had been asked, &quot;What's the best way to keep my fan from accumulating dust?&quot;, it would be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T02:43:34.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="647" CreationDate="2011-04-09T06:52:42.547" Score="4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8179/how-can-a-point-particle-have-properties&quot;&gt;How can a point-particle have properties?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited the parts that were open to criticism. It has 4 upvotes, and people who are trying to answer it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote up for open, down for close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T23:10:38.403" Title="Why is my question closed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="645" CreationDate="2011-04-09T10:48:36.880" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to this question in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8312/is-a-work-life-balance-incompatible-with-becoming-an-international-scientist&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8312/is-a-work-life-balance-incompatible-with-becoming-an-international-scientist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to experts, in order to become an international scientist, you have to put in 80 hour weeks for a decade. Is becoming an international scientist incompatible with a work/life balance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T01:38:45.377" Title="Are questions about general life on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="644" CreationDate="2011-04-09T10:55:19.137" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;not pertinent to physics at all&lt;/strong&gt; and should probably fit in a personal help column.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with this hypothetical question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to experts, in order to become an &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;insert career of choice&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, you have to put in 80 hour weeks for a decade. Is becoming an &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;insert career of choice&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; incompatible with a work/life balance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only a variation of the more general: &quot;Is it worth it to put in 80 hour weeks for 10 years in order to become successful at work?&quot; which has nothing to do with physics, is subjective and, frankly, not the kind of question we should have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2011-04-09T16:02:07.560" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T16:02:07.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="644" CreationDate="2011-04-09T18:06:18.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read the title what came to mind was some blog post I read in the last few months. &lt;a href=&quot;http://science-professor.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSP&lt;/a&gt; and other bloggers have written about work/life balance issues for early career  professors, and about the possibly gender differentiated interpretation of choices that people face in these circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have several career related questions scattered around the site---though it is not clear that we have a consensus about when or even if those are OK:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1779/520&quot;&gt;What is an effective way to search for post-doc positions in physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6052/520&quot;&gt;Starting a physics Ph.D. at 60?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7327/520&quot;&gt;Is it possible to restart formal higher education in physics at a later age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7477/520&quot;&gt;Is there any reason to major in physics if you're certain you will never do a Ph.D?&lt;/a&gt; [closed]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7491/520&quot;&gt;Is it possible to work on physics independently outside academia?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6582/520&quot;&gt;What sort of jobs do physics graduates with B.Sc/M.Sc get?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also some question concerning the sociology or culture of physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1599/520&quot;&gt;Can a web community write papers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2334/520&quot;&gt;Are the results from models considered “data”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2343/520&quot;&gt;Are all theoretical physicists like Sheldon Cooper?&lt;/a&gt; [closed]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5495/520&quot;&gt;What does it take to become a top physicist?&lt;/a&gt;  &amp;lt;== Note the relationship between this one and the one under discussion!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5930/520&quot;&gt;Are collaborations needed to be productive in physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on this particular question is much like Sklivvz: there is nothing physics specific there, but we want to have a set of clearly-articulated, easy-to-understand metrics for telling when career-related or sociological questions are or are not on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T18:06:18.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="643" CreationDate="2011-04-09T23:10:38.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I was keeping it closed was mostly because of this paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not only that, but it can also detect all fields without having any structure. Maybe it can check curvature of spacetime to account fo gravity, but how does it &quot;sense&quot; what the other fields-vectors are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particles are not alive. (I guess we don't know &lt;em&gt;for certain&lt;/em&gt; but the idea would be exceedingly difficult to support) They don't actively &quot;detect&quot; fields, they don't &quot;check&quot; or &quot;sense&quot; anything and then decide how to react.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, since nobody else seems to support having the question closed I reopened it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-04-09T23:10:38.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-11T02:38:42.777" Score="15" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering why there is so little activity on physics stack exchange compared with math stack exchange. It occurred to me that a contribution to the difference is that we may be closing too many questions as &quot;duplicates&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a liberal definition of &quot;duplicate&quot; means that there will be fewer questions available to answer and this reduces the likelihood that someone searching for an answer will be able to locate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us review official Stack Exchange policy on duplicates. From the blog, my emphasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff Atwood, Nov 15, 2010 &lt;em&gt;Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One thing I want to be clear about,&#xA;  though, is that duplication is not&#xA;  necessarily bad. Quite the contrary —&#xA;  some duplication is desirable. There’s&#xA;  often &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;benefit to having multiple&#xA;  subtle variants of a question around,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  as people tend to ask and search using&#xA;  completely different words, and the&#xA;  better our coverage, the better odds&#xA;  people can find the answer they’re&#xA;  looking for. And isn’t that, really,&#xA;  the whole point of this exercise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joel Spolsky, Jan 5, 2011, &lt;em&gt;The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you’re going to close a user’s&#xA;  question as a duplicate, it has to be&#xA;  a real duplicate. For example, if a&#xA;  user asks, “What does the IP address&#xA;  128.0.1.1/24 mean?” it’s OK to close that as a duplicate of a more general&#xA;  question like “What do IP addresses of&#xA;  the form a.b.c.d/e mean?” But it’s not&#xA;  OK to close it as a duplicate of a&#xA;  twenty-seven page guide to netmasks.&#xA;  That’s the moral equivalent of saying&#xA;  “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RTFM&lt;/a&gt;.” Stack Overflow is not&#xA;  meant to be a library of reference&#xA;  manuals. It’s supposed to contain the&#xA;  same information as a library of&#xA;  reference manuals, in the form of&#xA;  millions of questions and answers.&#xA;  Combined with Google, that gives us&#xA;  the magical power of a library of&#xA;  reference manuals you never have to&#xA;  read! It’s like, you got to the&#xA;  library, and there’s a wizard there at&#xA;  the door, and you ask your question,&#xA;  and, instead of being told to read a&#xA;  book, you just got (are you sitting&#xA;  down?) the actual answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s why &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;we actually don’t mind&#xA;  having several versions of every&#xA;  question&lt;/a&gt;, where there are&#xA;  variations in wording or&#xA;  circumstances. The more chance that&#xA;  someone types a question into Google&#xA;  and finds their exact question already&#xA;  answered, the better a job we’ve done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we've reviewed official SE policy on duplicate, let's take a look at a question I posted that, as I write, has 3 votes to close based on &quot;duplicate&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8341/&quot;&gt;Does throwing a watch into the air cause it to gain or lose time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm on a non rotating planet.&#xA;  I have two identical, perfect watches.&#xA;  I synchronize them. Then I throw one&#xA;  of them into the air and catch it.&#xA;  Does the one I throw into the air gain&#xA;  or lose time with respect to the one I&#xA;  was holding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's the question proposed as its duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8314&quot;&gt;Maximum time difference between clocks in a gravity field&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a&#xA;  clock on the ground. The idea is that&#xA;  you have to be back when the clock on&#xA;  the ground says one hour has passed.&#xA;  Now you want it so that when you come&#xA;  back, your clock is as far ahead as&#xA;  possible. According to Einstein, if&#xA;  you go very high, your clock will go&#xA;  faster, because the higher something&#xA;  is in a gravitational field, the&#xA;  faster its clock goes. But if you try&#xA;  to go too high, since you've only got&#xA;  an hour, you have to go so fast to get&#xA;  there that the speed slows your clock&#xA;  down. So you can't go too high. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The&#xA;  question is, exactly what program of&#xA;  speed and height should you make so&#xA;  that you get the maximum time on your&#xA;  clock?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This assistant of Einstein worked on&#xA;  it for quite a bit before he realized&#xA;  that the answer is the real motion of&#xA;  matter. If you shoot something up in a&#xA;  normal way, so that the time it takes&#xA;  the shell to go up and come down is an&#xA;  hour, that's the correct motion. It's&#xA;  the fundamental principle of&#xA;  Einstein's gravity--that is, what's&#xA;  called the &quot;proper time&quot; is at a&#xA;  maximum for the actual curve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions are similar in that they begin on a planet and involve a time piece. But in the first posted the question is &quot;exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?&quot; In the other, the question is: &quot;Does the one I throw into the air gain or lose time with respect to the one I was holding?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that (under the policy of Stack Exchange) it should be clear and obvious to all that these are not the same question. The first has to do with maximizing a time difference over a path that is not a geodesic (i.e. the rocket ship) as compared to a path that is on a planet's surface (and hence is not a geodesic). The second has to do with the relationship between two paths, one stationary on the planet's surface, the other a geodesic near the planet's surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's unfair to expect that a reader not already possessing an understanding of general relativity will see any relationship between these problems. Second, it's unlikely that they will locate the original post in searching for the problem. Third, it's unlikely that they will be able to work out the answer to the problem based on the answers given in the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd like to point out that voting to close a question as duplicate has a tendency to suppress answers to the question. Why bother to write up an answer to a question that is going to be closed as a duplicate? For the question at hand, neither of the two answers give directly tell which watch gains and loses time. The best answer so far provided is: &quot;The &quot;stationary&quot; watch, which is actually accelerated, is following some other path and so must experience a shorter proper time.&quot; To someone seeking to understand general relativity this will be confusing at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T21:33:11.520" Title="Liberal definition of duplicate questions and the health of physics stack exchange." Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="648" CreationDate="2011-04-11T03:15:32.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an attempt to define exact duplicate questions in physics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If understanding the answer to question A implies that you will immediately understand the answer to question B and vice versa, then questions A and B are exact duplicates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with subtle differences could pass this test; I think the questions on watches are an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, if question B is closed as an exact duplicate of A, readers who find B through search will be redirected to A, read the answers to A, and, by definition, understand the answer to B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T03:15:32.303" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2011-04-11T18:45:13.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree -- this tag has been removed, it can only be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T18:45:13.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2011-04-11T19:38:24.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most people frequenting this site are not qualified to answer questions in the philosophy of science (which does not stop them from having strong opinions on the subject). So, that tag &quot;philosophy&quot; (as in hypothetical tags &quot;biology&quot; or &quot;dog breeding&quot;) is just a shorthand for &quot;off topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T19:38:24.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="644" CreationDate="2011-04-12T01:38:45.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as it's &lt;strong&gt;truly specific to &lt;em&gt;a career in physics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and not generically applicable to, say, careers in other sciences.. or any career at all .. it can be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also important that such questions don't become too dominant on the site; the focus should remain on hard(ish) Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T01:38:45.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="648" CreationDate="2011-04-12T05:26:49.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it helps at all, I also think some level of duplication in answers (across multiple very similar questions) can be OK as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can often give answerers a chance to show off a different emphasis or some other aspect of an answer, or present it more clearly -- even if it was roughly &quot;the same&quot; as an answer on a duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't want &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much of this, of course, but &lt;strong&gt;I believe that repetition is often helpful in learning&lt;/strong&gt; and clamping down too hard on the &quot;all duplication is bad!&quot; bandwagon is much more harmful to the health of your site than a few great semi-duplicate answers and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;quality should be maintained in any case; a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; duplicate question or answer doesn't help anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;nobody should set out with the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of duplicating work, unless they have strong reason to believe the existing stuff can be substantially improved&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would certainly be generous with the benefit of the doubt here and realize that for most folks, learning == repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T05:26:49.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-04-12T20:11:52.190" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Never touch a running process. :=(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T20:11:52.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="662" CreationDate="2011-04-12T21:24:05.080" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some clarification: I didn't actually try to add a bounty to a question, I just noticed that in already answered questions (questions not created by me), the link for &quot;add a bounty&quot; is still available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this makes sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, I would think it is great to be able to add bounties to already answered questions if I think the current answer is not satisfactory. However, it probably doesn't make any sense with the current stackexchange framework, since I wouldn't be able to vote for a new answer since the question doesn't belong to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-04-15T03:56:43.313" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T03:56:43.313" Title="Why can I add a bounty to already answered questions?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2011-04-12T21:32:04.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bounties are assigned separately from accepted answers. You can add bounties to your questions or other people's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T21:32:04.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="648" CreationDate="2011-04-12T21:33:11.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's clear that every problem involving gravity can be solved by understanding gravity. Therefore, we should have only one gravity question. It will be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;what is general relativity&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we can mark every other question about gravity as a duplicate of &quot;What is general relativity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T21:33:11.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-13T06:41:05.533" Score="-12" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's way too many nonsense questions being asked, all starting with the word &quot;why&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It devalues the site greatly, making it appear more like a gathering of conspiracy theorists and other crackpots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly many of them will upvote each others' questions, so they don't get to a close treshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2625" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-14T04:31:54.667" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T11:47:30.343" Title="Restrict the word &quot;why&quot; in questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2011-04-13T07:17:12.650" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are upset about bad questions, not about using the word &quot;why&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because many bad questions use the word &quot;why&quot; doesn't mean that questions using the word &quot;why&quot; will be bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T07:17:12.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2011-04-13T08:22:55.003" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you believe the questions are nonsense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvote them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flag them for moderator attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make use of the tools  you have!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T08:22:55.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2011-04-13T10:20:23.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improvements-to-bounty-system/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improvements-to-bounty-system/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For additional context on the changes. There is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; relationship between accepted answer and bounty now, at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T10:20:23.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-13T17:34:15.690" Score="2" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;What steps are needed to cancel one's account and annonymize the existing content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T10:16:26.537" Title="Account management" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-04-13T18:09:55.723" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the site is for undergraduates to research questions, I hope they stick with the current practical theme, rather than changing to a theme that is childish and tacky in pretending to be something which it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T18:09:55.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-04-13T19:20:28.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When is this going to happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I like the layouts at some of the other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is pretty plain, and has the graph paper background that lots of people like, though I don't like it in particular, but otherwise I like the design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is also nice. It is a little cluttered, but not distracting, and doesn't have anything that would get in the way of math or diagrams. And I like the color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks more readable to me, and has larger fonts, and less cluttered. I like the color scheme here better, but the gray background won't work with math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would be happy with anything that looks like any of these.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to see the most is: readable text, compatible with math and diagrams, not cluttered, and plain color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1403" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:17.117" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T19:20:28.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2011-04-13T20:14:56.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't want your name associated with the site, just change your display name. That can always be done from your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, you can always offer your feedback and try to keep the site from going in a direction you don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T20:14:56.167" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="675" CreationDate="2011-04-14T04:39:11.243" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where are the rules about suspension? Maybe they should be in FAQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="where are the rules of suspension posted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="672" CreationDate="2011-04-14T05:05:47.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you're asking about the rules governing when a user can be suspended: there is only one, &quot;don't be a jerk.&quot; This is intentionally vague. Suspensions are imposed at the discretion of the moderators. Generally they only occur after an official warning has been given but has not had the desired effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23366/suspension-reasons&quot;&gt;this MSO question&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23661/what-is-the-point-of-a-30-day-account-suspension/23681#23681&quot;&gt;this MSO answer&lt;/a&gt; (though I'm not saying we're obligated to use that exact sequence on this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T05:05:47.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2011-04-14T06:01:22.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get your account deleted by asking the moderators in chat for example, or you can set your user name as &quot;please delete me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example try typing &quot;please delete me&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T06:01:22.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="672" CreationDate="2011-04-14T07:23:13.620" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly; the most common reasons are documented here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When users exhibit a pattern of either &amp;#8230;&lt;/p&gt; &#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;No effort to learn and improve over time&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt; &#xA;&lt;li&gt;This user does not put reasonable effort into the questions they ask of the community.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is little or no evidence of this user learning over time, either in the topic itself or in the community norms on the site.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This user intentionally spams the site with the same question or very similar questions, over and over.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user never gives anything back to the community, but only takes.&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Disruptive behavior&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt; &#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other users tend to react poorly to this user&amp;#8217;s contributions, posting negative responses in kind and generally causing a commotion.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a broad sense of community resentment over this user&amp;#8217;s behavior, and they are frequently cited in discussion about the community.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a dark storm cloud of &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/improved-flagging/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;moderator flags&lt;/a&gt; that seems to follow this user around wherever they go.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moderators get email complaints about this user&amp;#8217;s behavior.&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This user makes overtly snide, rude, or hostile comments to their fellow users.&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &#xA;&amp;hellip; these problem behaviors &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to be dealt with. When they aren&amp;#8217;t, it takes up excessive moderator time that could be used for something more productive &amp;#8212; and, even worse, these behaviors begin to &lt;b&gt;actively turn people away from our community, stunting its growth and harming everyone.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T07:23:13.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-14T08:16:03.847" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you want to now about these, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59445/recent-feature-changes-to-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a the thread at meta.SO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T08:16:03.847" Title="Recent feature changes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T20:17:10.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2011-04-14T10:16:26.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can change your name and, if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to, ask the team (team@stackexchange.com) to delete your account. It is however close to impossible to entirely anonymize your participation since that would require to modify/delete @replies by other users as well. It would be a shame to loose you as a valuable participant though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2011-04-14T10:16:26.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-15T03:40:11.627" Score="4" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're evaluating the feasibility of &lt;strong&gt;sponsoring a member of the physics community to speak at a conference in 2011&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking is a relatively big &quot;ask&quot;, so this needs to be planned many months in advance. Let's get started! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd like the community to establish &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What relevant physics conferences are coming up in 2011 that have open speaker slots or calls for papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and then &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which members of the community are strongly interested in being sponsored by Stack Exchange, Inc to speak at one of the above conferences in 2011?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the speaker is free talk about anything he or she wants so long as it would be roughly on topic for this site -- with a quick acknowledgement of support from Stack Exchange and a mention of the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-04-17T03:29:26.837" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T04:35:01.660" Title="Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships -- 2011" Tags="|discussion|speakers-bureau|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2011-04-15T15:35:49.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two links which contain comprehensive lists of conferences in high energy, string theory and related topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aei.mpg.de/~stefan/schools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.aei.mpg.de/~stefan/schools/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-library.desy.de/conf.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-library.desy.de/conf.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deadlines for abstract submission for many  of the conferences taking place in the first half of the year have already passed but there are a LOT of events on these two lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither one of the above lists mentions the Loops '11 (as in LQG) conference in Madrid from May 23 - 28.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Deepak Vaid" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T15:35:49.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2011-04-16T00:20:41.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any APS meeting will allow essentially anyone to give a 10 minute talk. You can sign up yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I had a conjecture on a new decomposition of unitary matrices proven on math stack exchange here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/28413/8536&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/28413/8536&lt;/a&gt; which I'm putting into a paper for Journal Math Physics. A version of the paper before adding the new proof is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://brannenworks.com/Gravity/qioumm_view.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://brannenworks.com/Gravity/qioumm_view.pdf&lt;/a&gt; I'm planning on presenting it at the NWAPS meeting in October at Oregon State: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aps.org/units/nws/meetings/meeting.cfm?name=NWS11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.aps.org/units/nws/meetings/meeting.cfm?name=NWS11&lt;/a&gt; To make a presentation you have to prepare a set of slides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These meetings come with a fee of about $50. If you slide me the fee, and maybe $100 for gasoline driving over there, I'd be happy to acknowledge you as a sponsor and to give the math and physics stack exchange a good word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T00:20:41.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-19T10:56:45.500" Score="5" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take e.g. &lt;code&gt;$\delta A$&lt;/code&gt;, which is just δA in some other font. Why should it be rendered over and over again when it is sufficient to store the unicode text together with some &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ThisIsAFormulaSoUseAMathFont&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T10:56:45.500" Title="If MathJax renders pure unicode, store that directly instead of re-rendering formulae" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="683" CreationDate="2011-04-22T06:15:36.037" Score="2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Im convinced an answer of mine is incorrect, or at least, not as correct as some other answers. I wish to delete it. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastActivityDate="2011-04-22T07:14:22.670" Title="How do I delete an accepted answer?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="682" CreationDate="2011-04-22T07:14:22.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flag for moderator attention and explain the situation. You cannot delete it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2011-04-22T07:14:22.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-22T19:05:22.340" Score="2" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderator elections are over, I think. Or is the election running still? &#xA;Where do I find results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concluded the election is over because David Zaslavski kills &#xA;questions again using his special kind of &quot;reasoning&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastEditorUserId="1370" LastEditDate="2011-04-23T11:35:42.817" LastActivityDate="2011-04-23T11:35:42.817" Title="Election result" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="684" CreationDate="2011-04-22T19:13:50.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; over, and you find the results at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;election page&lt;/a&gt;. There was also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=832787#832787&quot;&gt;more detailed, but unofficial breakdown&lt;/a&gt; posted to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-04-23T11:35:02.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-24T21:18:34.823" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I've noticed several times that an up-vote or a down-vote gets locked in (after 5 hours or something). Does the same thing happen with &quot;accept&quot;s as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhoo, I fail to see the logic behind this. Many times, I've been convinced prematurely by an answer or misinterpreted an answer so that I vote it the wrong way. I come back 5 hours later only to realize I can't change my opinion of the answer. What's the rationale behind having this lock-in time? Wouldn't it be a lot better to not have it at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a big issue really, but it would be neater to have &quot;correct&quot; answers at least look like they're popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1228" LastActivityDate="2011-04-24T21:18:34.823" Title="Is it reasonable to have a lock-in time for up-votes and down-votes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2011-04-24T21:32:03.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-25T14:08:56.550" Score="8" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a regular here, though I lurk a lot. I just wanted to drop a line to say that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4964/chemistry?referrer=s30-Mjm5p4wYaNpjIO5Bmg2&quot;&gt;Area51 proposal on Chemistry&lt;/a&gt; is nearing launch (91% commitment). If you're interested in it, please feel free to go read there and maybe help us by committing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2012-04-12T08:02:12.397" LastActivityDate="2012-04-12T08:02:12.397" Title="Area51 proposal on Chemistry is nearing launch" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="687" CreationDate="2011-04-27T16:49:20.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are at 11 % right now, any commitment would help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T16:49:20.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="690" CreationDate="2011-04-30T23:37:19.347" Score="2" ViewCount="734" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent questioner (perhaps subconsciously) posted a homework-type question in the &quot;physics forums&quot; standard format, I.e equations used, attempt at a solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if such questions are going to be asked anyway, why not include a format in the FAQ to see less poorly framed questions? I have nothing against Hw questions because they can be interesting if presented the right way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-05-06T12:42:55.247" LastActivityDate="2011-05-06T12:42:55.247" Title="Homework format" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="689" CreationDate="2011-05-01T01:02:05.247" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need a homework template here. The purpose of the template at Physics Forums is to try to enforce a bare minimum level of effort on the part of the questioner: basically it weeds out the equivalent of &quot;plz-send-teh-codez&quot; questions, where the poster is just trying to get someone to do the work for them. But here we have a somewhat stricter standard. We expect people asking about homework problems to narrow down the particular concept that is giving them trouble and ask about that specifically. That produces a question that is more relevant to others who might be having the same problem, as well as probably more interesting to answer, and as a side effect it shows that they're willing to put in the appropriate amount of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, once the questioner has identified the specific issue they're having trouble with, and phrased their question in terms of that, the question isn't so much a homework question anymore as it is a plain old physics question that happens to have arisen in the course of a homework assignment. So it shouldn't be treated that much differently than a normal question. The only significant difference would be that we would give a less complete answer than usual, so that we don't spoil the OP's chance to reason through it themselves (which is the value of doing homework).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-05-01T01:02:05.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="689" CreationDate="2011-05-01T05:24:51.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with David.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would go further; I prefer such questions be closed as too localized.  I want intro-to-physics level questions about pulleys, but I don't want to see twenty questions each with a slightly different combination of pulleys, inclined planes, scissors, floating balloons, bowling balls, cannons, cats and mice, magnifying glasses lighting candles, little alligators, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2011-05-01T05:24:51.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-03T18:01:38.303" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO, this should be in the faq's. I find the system as it is moderately confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having downvoted a Question or an Answer, I believe I can reverse my downvote by clicking the downvote button again, provided it's been less than 5 minutes. Is that correct? After 5 minutes, I can't change my vote, no matter what, until after the Question or Answer has been changed. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time I get myself in this position, it always seems natural to click the upvote button, but as far as I can tell, clicking the upvote button in this situation changes my -1 to +1, a change of +2, and also immediately freezes my vote as +1, so I can't fix my mistake. Very Frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the mechanics for reversing an upvote the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't downvote much, and I never downvote, as far as I remember, unless I can see a way to explain why. Precisely because I go to the trouble to explain, not infrequently I realize that the Question or Answer is not so bad, and I want to change my mind, but I find the mechanism for changing downvotes very unUseful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this is a feature-request if I ask for the upvote button and downvote buttons to go between -1,0,+1 by &lt;em&gt;addition&lt;/em&gt; instead of as currently. For example, clicking upvote successively would cause the transitions $-1\mapsto 0\mapsto +1\mapsto +1\mapsto +1...$ (without time limitation, the reason for which I do not understand). However, this is a change to a fairly low-level aspect of the user interface, which I presume will not be implemented without better reason than I've given here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I (the questioner) have voted to close this Question. I see a very similar one that the search didn't find was only just asked and closed because something like this is off-topic here and should have been put on the main meta site. I come to meta too rarely to be able to use it effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1588" LastEditorUserId="1588" LastEditDate="2011-05-03T18:55:37.837" LastActivityDate="2011-05-03T18:55:37.837" Title="Please can someone explain the precise mechanics of reversing a downvote?" Tags="|support|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2011-05-04T00:19:14.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-04T15:54:24.847" Score="8" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Shameless one-time call to participation to another S.E. site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tuesday, May 3rd was the first day for the public Beta of &lt;a href=&quot;http://music.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;music.SE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://music.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Music Practice and Performance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many interesting &lt;strong&gt;physics&lt;/strong&gt; questions are associated with musical instruments. Some fundamental physical concepts were born out of the investigation of sound, vibration, strings, tension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the current questions relevant to &lt;strong&gt;physics&lt;/strong&gt; in music.SE is this one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/q/74/48&quot;&gt;Why are violin bows longer than viola bows, than cello bows, than double-bass bows ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it would be nice that more questions about the physics of instruments and instrument playing be asked and answered on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe members from Physics.SE could valuably contribute to this new site, as physicists making this kind of questions and answers more precise and more informed and of course as musicians when this is the case, even as lurker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual, Physics accounts holders with at least 200 points who create an associated account through OpenID on music.SE will have a 100 point starting bonus on the new site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you are &lt;a href=&quot;http://music.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;welcome&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:36.503" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T15:54:24.847" Title="The new Music StackExchange Beta site could benefit from the Physics community" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-05-05T20:15:23.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-10T03:42:40.477" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question has been closed by a moderator. I wonder, why and can it be re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9651/new-kind-of-progress&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9651/new-kind-of-progress&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T04:20:45.747" Title="Why my question had been closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="696" CreationDate="2011-05-10T04:20:45.747" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although dmckee is the one who closed it, this case is obvious enough that I think I can answer: it was closed because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it wasn't formulated as an answerable question (you were just asking for opinions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it wasn't precise (you're asking how to do something which you haven't clearly defined)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's unsubstantiated (you allude to some silly-sounding claims about quantum mechanics without providing any believable references)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it has nothing to do with physics (that stuff about probability control or that &quot;everybody-wins lottery&quot; sounds totally bogus)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that you've attempted to address point #1, but that doesn't make it either an answerable question or on-topic. So no, it won't be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-05-10T04:20:45.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-13T17:45:07.497" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the list of &quot;related questions&quot;, is it possible to remove the links to closed questions, or at least demarcate them as closed in the list?  Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question X&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question Y&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question Z  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related but CLOSED:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question A&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question B  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are closed are closed for good reason (off topic, complete duplicate), and having to come across questions that are already recognized as poor is time consuming.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-05-22T23:09:45.680" LastActivityDate="2011-05-22T23:09:45.680" Title="Is it possible to move closed questions off of the &quot;related&quot; links?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2011-05-22T23:08:38.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2011-05-13T18:16:34.917" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sponsoring a booth at a big conference like the APS meetings might have a better impact, and reach a broader audience.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the goal is to boost interest in the site and increase the reach, at a booth you could present the site as it appears, provided you have an internet connection available, and more time to work interactively with interested parties to show off the benefits.  Plus, at said conference, you could always combine efforts and have some speakers use a minute of their talk to plug the site and then to direct people to the booth for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, sponsoring a booth is more expensive and requires more person-hours than a few well-placed plugs at the end of related talks (and nothing that comes with conferences is cheap), but it's something to consider.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be able even to apply for an NSF grant for funding because this dovetails nicely into the &quot;broader impacts&quot; criterion of bringing science to the masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastEditorUserId="2433" LastEditDate="2011-05-13T18:23:21.040" LastActivityDate="2011-05-13T18:23:21.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="704" CreationDate="2011-05-13T18:57:16.330" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I observed in the last 24 hours the following two bugs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I did not get the usual red banner notification when the reputation count surpassed a privilege limit. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also I by chance discovered a comment under a recent question, which was addressed in the standard way &quot;@user&quot; (without spelling-mistakes!) to me, but it did not show up in my &quot;response list&quot;, nor did I get the usual red notification icon on top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are others having the same bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-05-18T07:42:40.983" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T07:42:40.983" Title="Notifications suspended?" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="701" CreationDate="2011-05-18T07:42:33.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are not aware of any issues with responses at this time, and have no other reports of this network-wide AFAIK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-05-18T07:42:33.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="706" CreationDate="2011-05-19T15:08:54.923" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I down voted two days back on a closed question. Didn't lose any points.&#xA;Today I down voted yet another not closed question. Didn't lose any points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-05-19T16:10:39.510" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T16:10:39.510" Title="I am down voting and still not losing reputation?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="705" CreationDate="2011-05-19T15:12:47.697" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes on &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; no longer cost the voter any reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes on &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; still cost the caster 1 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-05-19T15:12:47.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2011-05-21T04:35:01.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you would be presenting Physics.SE to a mega meeting such as APS (people will come to the booth, no doubt. It stretches over days and has over a thousand particiapnts with lots of browsers who'll check out) I'd suggest someone sort of creates a pamphlet of sorts, compiling some of the best questions and answers. Seeing quality physics being exchanged on this server, lots of researchers might flood in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T04:35:01.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="709" CreationDate="2011-05-21T12:48:35.790" Score="0" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I don't understand the stack exchange well, does one automatically get points in a different stack exchange if they have points from other stack exchanges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3460" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T18:06:52.177" Title="How does someone get 50 points in physics stack exchange before asking or answering a single question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="708" CreationDate="2011-05-21T13:10:03.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, If you have at least 200 rep on any of the SE sites you are registered to, you get a 100 rep bonus each time you register to new SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every new user gets 1 rep for registration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blog post about this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/cross-site-account-associations/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/cross-site-account-associations/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T13:10:03.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-22T08:34:36.100" Score="0" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is rather strange, that question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9993/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-mathematics-in-physics&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9993/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-mathematics-in-physics&lt;/a&gt; that practically reproduces title of talk of (future - 4 years after the talk) Nobel Prize winner, Eugene Wigner  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html&lt;/a&gt; caused such a negative reaction (immediately closed and -3 votes – so it is not only a moderator opinion). Beside that, it was printed in a serious and refereed journal. Poincare, Feynman, et. al. also wrote deep works about that. The question itself is only couple of lines long and practically only clarifies title, so some additional flaws most likely could not be inserted there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3351" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T05:52:18.960" Title="Closed question" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="710" CreationDate="2011-05-22T08:38:27.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is discussion-provoking, and such are prohibited because they don't fit the flow of this site. You are free to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to discuss about the matter of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-05-22T09:33:14.237" LastActivityDate="2011-05-22T09:33:14.237" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="713" CreationDate="2011-05-22T17:44:39.717" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions are appearing on the main page with a blue background - what does this mean?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-05-22T23:10:04.933" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Question appears &quot;blue&quot;?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="712" CreationDate="2011-05-22T17:49:23.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74943/how-do-i-remove-a-frequented-tag&quot;&gt;encountered&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/stack-overflow-homepage-changes/&quot;&gt;&quot;frequented tags&quot;&lt;/a&gt; feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't set any &quot;interesting&quot; or &quot;ignored&quot; tags by hand the system will eventually attempt to guess what you are interested in from your history; these are your &quot;frequented tags&quot; and they are highlighted for you in the various question list views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make it go away by setting some tags as &quot;interesting&quot; or &quot;ignored&quot;, though that will give you a different type of highlighting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-05-22T17:49:23.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-24T21:46:49.207" Score="130" ViewCount="42837" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are homework questions allowed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I include in a homework question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T01:38:26.620" LastActivityDate="2022-04-25T23:40:59.443" Title="How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|faq|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-05-24T21:47:43.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2011-05-24T21:47:36.130" Score="71" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;homework question&amp;quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. This includes not just questions from actual homework assignments, but also self-study problems, puzzles, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, questions that come up in the course of doing a homework problem, but are separate from the main point of the problem, might not be considered homework questions. There's a bit of a judgment call to be made, depending on the context of the problem. If you're not sure, it's probably safer to treat your question as a homework question and later find out that it isn't, than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can I ask a homework question here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, but&lt;/strong&gt; there are a couple of things you need to make sure of first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, we do not discourage homework questions, as long as they are related to physics. But do keep in mind that &lt;strong&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is not primarily a homework help site&lt;/strong&gt;; it's a place to get specific &lt;strong&gt;conceptual physics questions&lt;/strong&gt; answered. The list in the following section will help you ask questions about your homework in a way that fits in with the site's philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, make sure you know whether your learning institution (middle school, high school, college, etc.) and your teacher or professor allow you to consult other people, or to post the exact question on the internet. This is usually addressed by your institution's honor code or rules and regulations, and any specific class policies. You should ask your teacher whether asking a homework question here is appropriate before posting your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How should I ask a homework question on this website?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See if an existing question helps you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check and see if someone has already asked a question that gives you the information you need. The search box at the top right corner of the page will be pretty useful here, but you can also try looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; that are relevant to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find a prior question that seems relevant but doesn't clear up your confusion, mention it when you write your own question. That gives the people answering a better idea of what kinds of explanations don't work for you, and what might be more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask about the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; concept that gives you trouble&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect you to narrow down the problem to the particular concept that's giving you trouble and ask about that specifically. That produces a question that is more relevant to others who might be having the same problem, as well as probably more interesting to answer. As a side effect it shows that you're not just being lazy and trying to get us to do your work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to produce a focused, specific question is to &lt;em&gt;show your work&lt;/em&gt;. Explain what you've been able to figure out so far and how you did it. Showing your work will help us gauge where you are having problems: if it is a technical thing near the end, a short to the point answer will suffice; if it is some fundamental problem with understanding the subject, somebody will then write a longer, more detailed response. It will also prevent people from spending a lot of time going over ground that you have already covered or understand well already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on. Of course, it's still good to include the text of your problem, just in case (more on that a few paragraphs down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don't just copy the exact problem&lt;/em&gt; from your homework assignment or textbook. In particular, when you are asking for help, writing in imperative mode (&amp;quot;Show that...&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Compute...&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Prove or find a counterexample: ...&amp;quot;) is at the very least impolite: you are, after all, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/faqs/smart-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trying to ask a question, not give an assignment&lt;/a&gt;. It also turns many people off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference the source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about a specific homework problem from a textbook, include the book and the problem number, so that someone trying to answer the question can go look it up themselves if they need to. If you're asking about a specific problem from a custom assignment prepared by the instructor, it helps if you quote the complete text of the problem in your post. Again, this shouldn't be the entire content of the post - you still need to ask about the specific issue that's confusing you, in addition to quoting the problem - but you never know when the person answering might need additional information from the original problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use the homework tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag on your question, in addition to any other tags that identify the kind of physics involved. This lets answerers know that you're looking for an answer which explains the underlying concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't include the tag, someone will usually add it for you. If that happens, don't think that we're accusing you of lying about whether your question is from a homework assignment! The tag is used for any question in which the point is to learn the method you're using to solve it, rather than just to get the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty well covered by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/415&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the Math Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing an answer that doesn't help&#xA;a student learn is not in the&#xA;student's own best interest, and if a&#xA;solution complete enough to be copied&#xA;verbatim and handed in is given&#xA;immediately, it will encourage more&#xA;people to use the site as a free&#xA;homework service. In the spirit of&#xA;creating a lasting resource of&#xA;mathematical knowledge, you may come&#xA;back after a suitable amount of time&#xA;and edit your response to include a&#xA;more complete answer. Or even better,&#xA;the student can post his own correct&#xA;answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer to a homework-type question that gives away a complete or near-complete solution, in most cases it will be temporarily deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules for how to properly post homework questions can be a bit confusing, so here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Good:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16182/use-the-relative-velocity-formula-to-find-v2f-in-terms-of-v1f&quot;&gt;Use the relative velocity formula to find $v_{2f}$ in terms of $v_{1f}$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14571/can-the-process-u-overlineu-rightarrow-s-overlines-be-mediated-by-the-em-i&quot;&gt;Can the process $u\overline{u} \rightarrow s\overline{s}$ be mediated by the EM interaction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13208/mechanics-thermodynamics-bouncing-ball&quot;&gt;Mechanics + Thermodynamics: Bouncing Ball&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7070/how-to-solve-this-schrodinger-equation&quot;&gt;How to solve this Schr&amp;#246;dinger equation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8975/which-trigonometric-ratio-should-be-used-to-describe-simple-harmonic-motion-as-a&quot;&gt;Which trigonometric ratio should be used to describe simple harmonic motion as a function of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23071/find-the-net-force-the-southern-hemisphere-of-a-uniformly-charged-sphere-exerts&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Find the net force the southern hemisphere of a uniformly charged sphere exerts on the northern hemisphere&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/701223/44126&quot;&gt;Peskin and Schroeder Exercise 10.2 - Yukawa Theory Renormalization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/705303/179151&quot;&gt;Equations of motion only have a solution for very specific initial conditions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good homework question states the problem clearly, shows an attempt to work through it, and identifies the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; issue that is giving the questioner trouble. These questions demonstrate that pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bad:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10315/moment-calculation&quot;&gt;Moment calculation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10006/physics-momentum-a-space-question&quot;&gt;physics- momentum ( a space question)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/acceleration-force&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/acceleration-force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10580/creating-an-ammeter&quot;&gt;Creating an ammeter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These homework questions don't show any effort put into solving the problem, and they are too specific to be of use to anybody except the person asking. That makes them inappropriate for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where else can I go?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question was closed as off-topic on this site, and you are unable to formulate it in the ways explained above, there are still other sites where you can ask for help. We keep a list on the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391&quot;&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Parts adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2022-04-25T23:40:59.443" LastActivityDate="2022-04-25T23:40:59.443" CommentCount="25" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-05-24T21:47:43.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="717" CreationDate="2011-05-26T00:16:16.310" Score="6" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10379/what-programming-languages-would-be-helpful-for-a-physicist-to-know&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which was closed for being off topic. I have been directed to two links by the moderator: (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38239/practices-for-programming-in-a-scientific-environment&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2734157/reproducibility-in-scientific-programming&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) . After going through both the links, I am posting a request here to reopen as they do not answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38239/practices-for-programming-in-a-scientific-environment/100103#100103&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; answer is from someone who has worked in a company involved with SciPy. He argued that  python is a lot less intimidating for physicists than C++. I stated that I already know C++ (all High Energy Physicists do, I guess) and asked if there are any additional benefits to learning Python. To give an example, Mark commented that if I use Sage then I am already using Python. Sage runs on the python platform but if I run into some functionality that is not in the library or need to customize, I should know python. What else might be the benefit, for physicists (i.e some important software is written in it, suited to some specific application, or simply no need to learn etc.) as opposed to compiled\interpreted, hardware specific\platform independent etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other issues most of the answers discuss are version control and  bug tracking, etc. I think these are programmer oriented (I might be wrong) and and are not my concern presently. The second link discussed reproducibility, which after reading it I realize is important. However, that lies outside the scope of my question and present level. (I am just assimilating a rudimentary toolkit right now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question I asked was if there was any advantage of learning functional as opposed to an iterative programming language in physics. This is not answered by either of the links. This external &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/01/eleven-reasons-to-use-haskell-as.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; makes a case for haskell to mathematicians. Does it have some similar utility in physics? Moreover my interest was peaked when I overheard at a conference that it was best for implementation of quantum algorithms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone commented, if these are too many questions feel free to edit it in order to make it approporiate. Then I can ask a narrower question later if it is not answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1671" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T06:09:45.093" Title="A request to reopen my question" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2011-05-26T00:45:22.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was my close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to be convinced that I have been overly hasty (or to be overruled by either of the other moderators if they disagree: feel free guys), but allow me to explain where I am coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you will forgive me if I argue in part by analogy with Stack Overflow (and I will accept that arguments about how Physics.SE could differ from SO are in play). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early days of Stack Overflow we had a small user base, few of the tools available today and few rules. Consequently we saw a very wide variety of question many of which were not about &quot;programming&quot; as such, but about programmers and the lifestyle and behaviors of this strange creature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at times they threatened to drown the actual programming discussion, and there was a lively debate about their appropriateness. When the community close option was first introduces (with a quorum of one!) these programming-related questions were the subject of many a close-and-reopen battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then followed an interval when not-quote-about-programming-as-such question were tolerated if they were community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They dominated the active board, the &quot;sort by votes&quot; tab showed almost nothing else for pages, and &lt;em&gt;every new user who dropped by tried to ask one&lt;/em&gt;. Not withstanding that they had arrived from google following a link to a actual answer to a actual technical question, it &lt;em&gt;looked like Stack Overflow was about socializing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually Jeff and Joel were convinced that this represented a problem, and thus was &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Programmers&lt;/a&gt; (originally called &quot;Not Programming Related&quot; after the close reason) conceived and Stack Exchange 2.0  (the earlier, commercial version have had very limited success) started and the Network as we know and love it came to be. Somewhere in there came the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;fun hating&lt;/a&gt; spoil-sports all along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;long story short&lt;/strong&gt;: when I saw the post in question this morning my reaction went something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh noes! Here comes a flood of &lt;em&gt;&quot;What [plural noun] would be helpful for physicist to [verb]?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I over-reacted. But I will ask you to convince me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps to convince David or mbq instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Concerning the Stack Overflow links I left in the comments:&lt;/strong&gt; Those certainly were not intended to replace the question, but were offered up as potentially interesting tidbits because I am not hostile to the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aside:&lt;/strong&gt; Just because you have a question, even if it is a good question in some philosophical sense does not guarantee that it has a place on any particular site on the Stack Exchange Network or even on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:31:51.443" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T00:51:08.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2011-05-28T04:01:44.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have thought about it from an answerer's perspective, did a lot more google searches, and I realize it is more of a matter of personal taste and necessity for a physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I read in a blog post of an experimentalist that he was doing some database management &quot;stuff&quot; (out of &lt;em&gt;neccisity&lt;/em&gt; to manage the experimental data in his lab) so he learnt whatever were the tools for it, discovered things could be made more efficient, wrote a modified program which was much improved (his claim), etc. Ill have though dig through my browswe history to get the link. But the point for me was, pursue whatever physics problem you're working on. Find out what what stuff's available, learn it, go on.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems it really is a learn-as-it-comes-up thing and and an essential list of prerequisites doesn't exist at such a stage as I am. So the lesson learnt is: if something's interesting, try it out and see what you get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the patience of the moderators for considering my request and presenting their arguments in detail (and the entertaining historical tidbit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are answers to my question, according to what I've learnt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Python or C++?&lt;/strong&gt;: Donno. If I'm ever looking for something on Sage and dont get it, Ill learn it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Functional programming better for physicists?&lt;/strong&gt;: I tried the first 10 euler problems (which I'd done earlier in C++) in haskell and I'm getting the hang and usefulness of it. I implement more and I'd develop some intuition as to which problem is better solved iteratively and which functionally.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I need to learn scripting etc?&lt;/strong&gt; Just started reading a book on bash. Supposed to give a quick and partially exhaustive overview. I'll know if I ever need it, once I do the exercises and know what its for.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1671" LastEditorUserId="1671" LastEditDate="2011-05-28T06:09:45.093" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T06:09:45.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-28T18:03:10.727" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16617/academia&quot;&gt;Academia.SE&lt;/a&gt; still is in the commitment phase, I'm asking this on a individual basis.  Hopefully it will be relevant (and interesting) enough to ask here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the way in which normally, when working in collaboration with other people, it is decided the authorship for a research paper?. Obviously, it varies widely, but it would be nice to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a fairer way to decide authorship or how would you like it to be decided? (In case you regard as the current standard way in your field, not so fair).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2011-05-28T18:03:10.727" Title="What is a fair way to assign authorship?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2011-05-28T18:19:04.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-01T02:54:30.440" Score="8" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new Area 51 proposal &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/32588/experimental-or-applied-physics&quot;&gt;&quot;Experimental or Applied Physics&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was recently created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I've looked at your FAQ, I don't know the field well enough to be comfortable making the call on my own—which brings me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can y'all review that proposal, and give your opinion here as to whether &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/32588?tab=ontopic&amp;amp;phase=definition#tab-top&quot;&gt;their on-topic questions&lt;/a&gt; would all be welcome on &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T10:25:26.803" Title="Does the Area 51 proposal &quot;Experimental or Applied Physics&quot; duplicate this site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="720" CreationDate="2011-06-01T04:25:00.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the proposal is brand new it is hard to be sure, but my first inclination is to guess that everything (or at least very nearly everything) that is on-topic for the proposal will also be on-topic for Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly the original  two examples with one vote each &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will photoresist [X] work in process [Y], and if not why? &lt;em&gt;(on-topic)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is your favorite way to bake a vacuum chamber? &lt;em&gt;(not a great example)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seem to in keeping with our practice on Physics.SE. The newly added example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I remove rust/stains from my optics table without compromising its flatness?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is well chosen to explore the possible seem between the two proposals. &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; would judge that to be on-topic on Physics&gt;SE, but I am an experimenter. How do other's feel about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will try to provide examples of several classes of experimental technique and applied physics questions from Physics.SE (and trying to select those that would be interesting to grad students and those further on in their careers in keeping with the proposal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Jargon (not generally discussed with undergrads)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1217/520&quot;&gt;What's the difference between inclusive and exclusive decays?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Instrumentation, calibration, and technique&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/9313/520&quot;&gt;How 'pure' is liquid nitrogen?&lt;/a&gt; (unanswered, however)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7898/520&quot;&gt;Fairly Broad Spectrum Light Source Options&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2398/520&quot;&gt;Do high/low pass lenses exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/10395/520&quot;&gt;What properties of Germanium make it suitable for Dark Matter detectors?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;added 5-Sept-2011&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/13123/520&quot;&gt;Measuring concentration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;added 5-Sept-2011&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14374/520&quot;&gt;Cleaning Already Mounted Microspheres on an AFM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Data analysis &amp;amp; Computation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/3346/520&quot;&gt;How small of a depletion signal can the best modern mass spectrometers detect?&lt;/a&gt; (might have gone in instrumentation as well but the answers dwell on the statistics of the measurement; only partially answered)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5769/520&quot;&gt;Efficiency of Metropolis algorithm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;added 5-Sept-2011&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/13408/520&quot;&gt;Fitting to a high density scatter plot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Collaboration skills and Culture&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/8122/520&quot;&gt;How to communicate institutional knowledge in a big physics collaboration?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2334/520&quot;&gt;Are the results from models considered “data”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5991/520&quot;&gt;Publication Authorship Credits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Physics Education at the Graduate Level and Up&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6052/520&quot;&gt;Starting a physics Ph.D. at 60?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7327/520&quot;&gt;Is it possible to restart formal higher education in physics at a later age?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly there is not as much there as I (an experimenter, after all) would have hoped, but I claim that we are welcoming of these matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't guess at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2979/akeshet&quot;&gt;akeshet&lt;/a&gt;'s motive for opening a new proposal (I fear that he dropped by during one of our outbreaks of pop-sci-quantum-philosophers), but I think the questions he envisions would be welcome here and that we have some expertise in these matters already on-baord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit 5-Sept-2011&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Since this discussion I have been trying to take note of those questions on Physics.SE that would be candidates for ExperimentalPhysics.SE (or whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technique&quot;&gt;experimental-technique&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sample-preparation&quot;&gt;sample-preparation&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-analysis&quot;&gt;data-analysis&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laboratory-safety&quot;&gt;laboratory-safety&lt;/a&gt;] which has only been applied to a question that predates this discussion and &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; really a graduate+ level question, but the tag would be applicable to some questions that are&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really know what light this sheds on the proposal. Clearly we are still getting very few greasy-handed practical experimental questions; whether that means there&#xA;are few that people want to ask the internet of Physics.SE has chased away everyone who wants to ask them I do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T21:01:45.323" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-06-01T04:25:38.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="720" CreationDate="2011-06-01T17:50:33.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't seem to have enough Physics reputation to make a &quot;comment&quot; here unfortunately, so I'll have to make it an &quot;answer&quot; (StackExchange's reputation system is nice an all, but it sure makes it hard to escape the initial cone of silence...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, thanks for being interested in the experimental physics proposal! I guess my main motive was that there are very few &quot;research-level&quot; questions at all on physics.SE. Which is fine, for a general-purpose general-public Q&amp;amp;A site. I've seen a meta discussion here asking where research level questions should go (Theoretical Physics? but that seems to by definition exclude experimental research-level questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an experimentalist, my day-to-day work mostly involves tackling problems that would be utterly irrelevant and uninteresting to professional theoretical physicists, or to general public enthusiasts (Will this kapton tape outgassing be a problem in my vacuum chamber? How can I identify damage to the the AR coating on this lens? How should I remove rust/stains from my optics table without compromising its flatness?). Nevertheless, I think there are a lot of other experimentalists &quot;out there&quot; somewhere, maybe far from stackexchange, who could share answers to these ubiquitous if prosaic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also try asking questions of that type here, and see what happens. But those example questions, though they are very relevant to experimentalists, hardly seem like &quot;Physics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2979" LastActivityDate="2011-06-01T17:50:33.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="724" CreationDate="2011-06-07T14:39:32.040" Score="10" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I am not only saying Lorentz Einstein and the 100,000 dead physicists and the&#xA;100,000 living physicists are wrong I am adding that the collective value of&#xA;relativity theory special and general and all of more than three dimensions based&#xA;physics is 1/2 rotten onion stinking onion.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10782/length-contraction-in-rotating-frame/10856#10856&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. No Latex (ok, newbie here I guess), poor grammar, and the (I think) arrogant tone of that sentence makes me think this guy doesn't want real discussion on his ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, his other answers don't seem to deal much with the questions being asked. In a discussion of Hooke's law he still irrelevantly brings up relativity and why it's wrong. Do you guys think he's just a troll/someone wanting to cause trouble here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: his answer has been deleted. Oh well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T15:17:53.017" Title="Do we have a troll here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="723" CreationDate="2011-06-07T15:17:53.017" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;He certainly is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remind the official way of dealing with trolls:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignore -- don't try to talk with such people, it is useless and only makes them troll more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote to notify other users about the quality of the post. Downvoting Qs is free, -1 for answer downvote have a great chance of being refunded (when the post is deleted).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag if the post is useless junk without discussion and can be safely removed. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-06-07T15:17:53.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-09T20:25:59.210" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there's a lot of overlap between physics and astronomy. It would be good to have some guidelines for what goes where now that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;astronomy beta&lt;/a&gt; is live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example questions for discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10933/why-do-we-say-that-the-earth-moves-around-the-sun&quot;&gt;Why do we say that the earth moves around the sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8502/questions-about-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;Questions about the solar system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2558/the-final-death-of-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;The final death of a black hole.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9201/what-is-meant-by-positive-and-negative-gravity-energy-spactimecurvature&quot;&gt;What is meant by positive and negative gravity/energy/spactimecurvature?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9456/would-a-submarine-float-in-the-atmosphere-of-jupiter&quot;&gt;Would a submarine float in the atmosphere of Jupiter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10670/what-nonlinear-deformations-will-a-fast-rotating-planet-exhibit&quot;&gt;What nonlinear deformations will a fast rotating planet exhibit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm leaving out really obviously astronomy questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/what-is-656-beagle&quot;&gt;What is 656 Beagle?&lt;/a&gt;. The big question marks are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classical mechanics/dynamics questions that are principally about astronomical objects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cosmology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General Relativity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do those go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T17:54:55.873" Title="What should be sent to astronomy.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="725" CreationDate="2011-06-09T20:55:29.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My usual position is that questions that are well suited to either site stay where the OP puts them. This &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have the side effect of creating duplicate question on the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I will suggest some principles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; astronomical objects (i.e. the X ray source in Cygnus as opposed to a general question about black hole emissions which could go to either site) belong on Astronomy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about astronomical observations, instruments (again &lt;em&gt;&quot;How telescopes work?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is good on either, &lt;em&gt;&quot;What are the current limits on angular resolution of ground based optical telescopes&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is astronomy specific) , and data sets belong on Astronomy. Likewise for questions about getting telescope time or other cultural issues (if you are accepting those).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions where the answer is in some sense wrapped up in the politics of the discipline (i.e. &lt;em&gt;&quot;What qualifies a body as a planet and why are these conditions important enough to justify demoting Pluto?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) got to Astronomy. {*}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I see that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/q/16/211&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;What should we do with questions which are really physics questions&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; entry on meta.astronomy, and it already hosts some suggests for the kinds of questions that should be moved here.&lt;/s&gt; That link pointed at a question on the meta of the first [astronomy.se] which dies in beta. The same numbered meta question on the current [astronomy.se] seems to be about naming the chatroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{*} Aside: I was lucky enough to talk to Clive Tombaugh a couple of times during the last years of his life. Seemed like a nice guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:52:10.693" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T17:54:55.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2011-06-10T21:26:39.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this thread and (existence of &quot;theoretical&quot; in Area 51) only some days ago. I regret that very much, because this thread explains a lot of things I did not understand. I am not qualified to write in there, but I will read and hopefully learn something. &#xA;This was my original intention here too, and I was very surprised that I could write here answers or correct even moderators in some cases. I learned too, but that was rare. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now with the thread above I understand more of the original intentions of this forum and &#xA;the reality which took place. (And why I was silly to fight that). The &quot;poll&quot; above, including that of the two or three main advocates of mediocrity for allowing low leves questions, made everything clear. Good luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2011-06-10T21:26:39.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="730" CreationDate="2011-06-12T23:38:03.543" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this the right place or shall I wait for the chemistry proposal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3241" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T01:43:16.253" Title="Can I ask question about electron configuration?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="729" CreationDate="2011-06-13T00:15:37.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to ask about Palladium atom. It has 18 electrons in the outer shell. Shouldn't it end with 17,1 instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that question should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rough guideline is that questions about isolated atoms are about physics and are probably okay on this site. Questions about compounds (molecules) or mixtures are likely to be about chemistry and would probably be off-topic here. Of course that's only a rough guideline; the decision has to be made on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-06-13T01:43:16.253" LastActivityDate="2011-06-13T01:43:16.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="761" CreationDate="2011-06-14T00:18:01.970" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;In light of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11067/what-is-international-service-of-weights-and-measures&quot;&gt;What is “International Service of Weights and Measures”?&lt;/a&gt;, I did a bit of searching for our policy on questions about units and measurement (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metrology&lt;/a&gt;)... but I don't think we really have one. So how should we handle these sorts of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, units and measurement are topics of relevance to all sorts of science and engineering, not just physics. But on the other hand, they often seem to be associated with physics, as the &quot;most basic&quot; of the physical sciences. Do we allow them or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2021/what-is-the-si-derived-unit-of-brix&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2021/what-is-the-si-derived-unit-of-brix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/353/why-were-the-si-base-quantities-chosen-as-such&quot;&gt;Why were the SI base quantities chosen as such?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-07-01T20:02:39.840" Title="Should we allow questions about units and metrology?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="732" CreationDate="2011-06-14T00:29:57.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few almost random thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/353/why-were-the-si-base-quantities-chosen-as-such&quot;&gt;Why were the SI base quantities chosen as such?&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/156/520&quot;&gt;a history question&lt;/a&gt;. I'm wishy-washy on it. The choice at any given time was wrapped up in the state of the science and especially the art of measurement; but it would require considerable writing to explain the tradeoff at any given time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2021/what-is-the-si-derived-unit-of-brix&quot;&gt;What is the SI Derived Unit of Brix?&lt;/a&gt; is a one-google general reference question and turns out to be more relevant to chemistry or bio-chemistry than physics (though I suppose sugar solution are optically active).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This new one--&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11067/what-is-international-service-of-weights-and-measures&quot;&gt;What is “International Service of Weights and Measures”?&lt;/a&gt;--is bothering me because I think &lt;em&gt;&quot;What was [formerly very important organization]?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; could possibly be relevant, but that this one is not. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T00:29:57.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-14T15:00:36.183" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two duplicate tags,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;solar.system&lt;br&gt;&#xA;solar-system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please correct&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="847" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-06-14T18:00:53.570" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T18:00:53.570" Title="Correct duplicate tags - solar.system and solar-system" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="734" CreationDate="2011-06-14T18:00:42.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for catching that. I merged the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T18:00:42.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="739" CreationDate="2011-06-17T14:28:10.990" Score="7" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that designs take time, and that there are many SE sites that need designs, but I am baffled at why, four months after the original design was withdrawn, a new one hasn't been proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like this will hinder the growth of the site, as we all know that sites without a finished design seem less credible here in 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a plan as to when a second design might be implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2759" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-06-17T15:12:33.823" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T19:30:34.407" Title="Is physics.stackexhange being punished for negative design feedback?" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="736" CreationDate="2011-06-17T15:27:05.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is of course a question to the team, but I doubt that this is a punishment -- rather Jin is just busy. You may also try contributing constructively to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/604/site-design-take-2&quot;&gt;design suggestion thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T15:27:05.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-06-17T15:33:07.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point, I'm feeling like (almost) anything is better than the current &quot;nothing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2759" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T15:33:07.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="736" CreationDate="2011-06-17T19:30:34.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no &quot;penalty&quot; -- it's just that I got the strong impression that the Physics community was happy with the sketchy design status quo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the Sketchy design a lot, so that's fine with me. I don't feel there are any negative implications to keeping this design for a while longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-06-17T19:30:34.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-20T18:59:51.623" Score="3" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that we have a new section on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; about notation and symbols. What should go in this section? Obviously we can't explain all the mathematical notation that physics uses, but are there any conventions peculiar to this site that we should include?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T02:20:50.750" Title="What notation and symbols are commonly used here?" Tags="|discussion|site-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="747" CreationDate="2011-06-20T22:24:44.953" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Programmers.SE recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1457/how-do-our-moderators-and-community-members-feel-about-cleaning-up-comment-nois&quot;&gt;adopted the following policy&lt;/a&gt; on comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We moderators will now be actively cleaning up questions and answers that have extended discussion in comments: any additional information teased out in the comments should be re-incorporated back into the question or answer, not left as a comment. Any extended discussion should go to our awesome chat system, built from the ground up explicitly for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see the original asker or answerer leave a comment instead of editing their post, you should edit it back in yourself: anyone can edit a post or suggest an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because comment deletions aren't very transparent, we will be leaving the following comment when comments are cleaned up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commenters:&lt;/strong&gt; comments are meant for seeking clarification, not for extended discussion. If you have a solution, leave an answer. If your solution is already posted, please upvote it. If you'd like to discuss this question with others, please use chat. See the FAQ for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the following has been added to our FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I use comments to discuss the topic of a post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are useful for getting clarifications, but extended discussions detract from the question and its answers. If you'd like to discuss anything related to programming with other expert programmers, please use our chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This more or less reflects the way I've been handling comments on this site, namely that any information important enough to be preserved should be in the posts, not in the comments, but I don't think we've ever really had an official policy on it - that is, comments just got deleted sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring to the quoted post, should we make this, or something similar, an &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; policy on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T21:22:52.617" Title="Should we make an official policy out of cleaning up comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="740" CreationDate="2011-06-21T08:06:10.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could try to settle for one convention where ambiguity exists, e.g. always using arrows for R³ vectors, * for complex conjugation etc. I don't know if editing posts with different conventions (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;bold vectors&lt;/strong&gt;) should be encouraged though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T08:06:10.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="759" CreationDate="2011-06-21T17:15:17.867" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been some arguments that the following two questions (and perhaps others like them) are off topic at this site, and perhaps should be migrated to electronics.SE. What does the community think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-causes-hard-working-growling-sound-in-a-heavily-loaded-electric-motor&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-causes-hard-working-growling-sound-in-a-heavily-loaded-electric-motor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11335/why-do-we-need-brushed-motors&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11335/why-do-we-need-brushed-motors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-06-29T14:19:39.700" Title="Are these electronics-related questions on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="744" CreationDate="2011-06-21T18:11:03.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be worth getting some feedback from Electronics.SE. They certainly have more of an engineering/design feel to them, but both of these particular questions could have been asked before the discovery of the electron, and thus predate &quot;electronics&quot; as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll pop over to their chat and ask people to have a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T18:11:03.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="744" CreationDate="2011-06-21T19:07:29.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one wouldn't think of this kind of question as out of place on Electronics.SE.  I would see physics as more theoretical, and E.SE as more practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4123" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T19:07:29.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="742" CreationDate="2011-06-21T21:22:52.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would expect to see a lot less of that here than on programmers, which is very discussiony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't mind relevant information being placed in comments, it's a form of annotation of the post. If there are 4 or 5 mildly discussiony comments, &lt;strong&gt;all with some nugget of information that enhances the post, even in some extremely small way,&lt;/strong&gt; that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do mind is &lt;em&gt;extended discussion&lt;/em&gt; in comments where there are 10-15 comments going back and forth between 2 or 3 people. We actually have a reminder now to avoid this and offer to one-click kick things to chat, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1764/can-we-get-a-simple-way-to-initiate-a-chat/1766#1766&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1764/can-we-get-a-simple-way-to-initiate-a-chat/1766#1766&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T08:26:45.000" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T21:22:52.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="753" CreationDate="2011-06-27T08:27:51.143" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been asking fairly general questions in this site related basic 12th standard physics but could get very little answers. I got delayed responses and still could not get some really workable answers. Even the number of solutions are very less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think people here should discuss ways to increase the number of participants in this site at this stage. Is it possible to attract people from other Q&amp;amp;A sites to this site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4131" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T16:33:24.627" Title="We need more people to participate in this site" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-06-27T18:43:42.580" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="604" CreationDate="2011-06-27T08:38:10.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess physics is really a very broad subject. Many of us who end up here dont know if their question can be asked on this site( at least the first impression was that for me). I suggest we can have at least a drawing/picture on top carrying the site name along with mini snaps/sketches of variety of physical experiments so as to convey some information to the reader on what this site is about. We can have sketches of&#xA;lasers, mirrors, hydron collider(mini), atom, solar system, Einstein(may be) etc. More can be added from different scopes of physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4131" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T08:38:10.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="748" CreationDate="2011-06-27T08:42:13.390" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to support &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Theorethical Phycics&lt;/a&gt; proposal, which will be a site 10.3x less crappy than this one, and thus will gather many more great answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T08:42:13.390" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-27T09:39:37.910" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we have email notifications similar to facebook? Its very hard to keep logged into stackexchange site waiting for relevant questions to come or to wait for answers for questions we post. Ultimately it may result in lowering of interest. Also all the time keeping logged in results in decreased productivity at work(I am kind of getting addicted). If we have a system of email notification(which may be controlled by proper settings), I think we will see increased response from people. People can select what subject( tags) they like to answer and chose them in the settings. This will inform them as soon as a question of their interest is posted on site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it will be great if we can answer/comment just by emailing (as done in fb). This will reduce the response time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4131" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2011-06-27T18:44:06.667" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Email notifications for updates" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="751" CreationDate="2011-06-27T15:49:28.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are limited email notification available already, and the topic has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?tab=relevance&amp;amp;q=email%20notification&quot;&gt;discussed heavily on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. You will find that the official policy is to use email as a backup form of communication, not as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14555/notify-more-frequently-than-once-a-day/14600#14600&quot;&gt;substitute for visiting the site&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25224/email-notifications-for-new-questions-matching-specific-tags/25225#25225&quot;&gt;the RSS feeds&lt;/a&gt; (available at the bottom of most pages on the site) to follow sites/questions/tags/users that interest you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T15:49:28.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="748" CreationDate="2011-06-27T15:59:14.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't speak for anyone else, you questions to date have not been very interesting to me. I haven't felt any drive to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Finding direction&quot; has an ill-specified title and can be answered out of an encycopedia, or with a few minutes doodling on a pad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How to place a mirror parallel to a wall&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;[without doing the obvious thing and measuring or shimming it]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; just made me shrug. Without explaining you motivation it just seems silly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is nature symmetric between particles and antiparticles?&quot; is general reference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How to find the principal point in an image?&quot; &lt;em&gt;Finally!&lt;/em&gt; This one is potentially interesting. But, I don't know the answer. &lt;em&gt;::sigh::&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-06-27T16:33:24.627" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T16:33:24.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2011-06-27T19:33:54.353" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that people of varied interests,/calibers are members of the physics.stackexchange. The level of complexity, assuming that inclusion of mathematics adds to complexity of a discussion in general, of questions/answers should be matching to that of the median audience. (median of mean/median/mode). Ideal situation is most of questions are of &quot;popular science&quot; level, few questions below that level, few above, and yet a few of advanced or esoteric levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3636" LastEditorUserId="3636" LastEditDate="2011-06-27T19:44:13.197" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T19:44:13.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="758" CreationDate="2011-06-27T21:29:25.853" Score="6" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book ABC there is the derivation of SOMETHING as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think argument XY is wrong, do you agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this kind of question is okay, would you mention the title of the book in the question title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4206" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-06-28T04:33:42.477" Title="Is it appropriate to ask about possible errors of a specific book?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="756" CreationDate="2011-06-27T22:12:04.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I think that such questions are probably OK (modulo the kinds of changes to the text that David suggests) when there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an error, I hate to have a bunch of them cluttering up the site when the argument was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Searching the internet for errata&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking in chat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;before you commit yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are going to post I think that the title and version of the books are necessary, but that you should carefully transcribe the argument into the text of the question (including referenced equations from earlier in the book) so that it is not necessary for user to find the actual book before they can help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-06-27T22:12:04.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="756" CreationDate="2011-06-27T22:12:11.867" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends. Generally speaking, yes, you can ask about what you think is an error in a book (or paper), but make sure you're asking an actual answerable question, rather than just looking for people to agree with you. The way you phrased the quote in your question, it falls under a couple of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;prohibitions in our FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, as a &lt;strike&gt;rule&lt;/strike&gt; guideline, any question that ends with &quot;do you agree?&quot; is probably not a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you phrase it more like this, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Book ABC contains this derivation of XXXXX:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to be correct because XXXXX. Is there an error in the book? If so, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it should be fine. In particular, make sure you ask something more substantial than just whether you are right in identifying the error or not. If you know that the proof is wrong but can't identify why, you could ask what the error is, as I did in this example; or if you know what the error is, you could ask for a proof that doesn't exhibit the error. Or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, if you're asking about a particular argument in a particular book (or paper), you should definitely give a specific reference somewhere in the question. Exactly which details you need to include depend on the reference, but usually it'll be something like the title, author(s), publication date, edition, and page number - basically enough information for someone else to look up the exact passage you're talking about if they need to. Those details don't necessarily need to be in the &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt; of the question, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-06-28T04:33:42.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="744" CreationDate="2011-06-29T14:19:39.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the migration of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/11335/520&quot;&gt;Why do we need brushed motors?&lt;/a&gt; from an electronics.SE moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question did alright, but Electronics.SE is about designing electronics and actually does not include mechanical issues such as motors except at a superficial level. We will see if that changes, but unless it is a good motor question, please do not migrate. – Kortuk &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we have at least one rule about things to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-06-29T14:19:39.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2011-06-30T13:46:30.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like the feature that Stack Exchange seems to let you do whatever.  Not only can you answer your own question, but you can answer it several times.  You can set bounties on things you've already selected an answer for, etc.  I believe you can even hold a bounty more than once for the same question.  I think it's nice that it doesn't &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; you what to do and doesn't assume that one approach fits all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure if this is the kind of contribution is intended for meta btw, let me know if it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T13:46:30.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="732" CreationDate="2011-07-01T20:02:39.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're still getting one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11779/whats-the-range-of-dimension-exponents-in-the-si-units-system&quot;&gt;these sorts of questions&lt;/a&gt; every once in a while and nobody seems to object to them too much, so it looks like we can say they're fine here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-07-01T20:02:39.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-04T16:09:13.110" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about obtaining a grad degree in the sciences and I was wondering if it fits on the site.  It's not a physics questions &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but I would consider it a question best asked of a physics community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="431" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T03:39:26.577" Title="Are questions about obtaining a degree on-topic?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="764" CreationDate="2011-07-04T16:57:34.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure other people will disagree, so don't consider this the official word just yet, but I would probably consider questions like that off topic. We've had a few in the past, but that was before the site really got into a groove. It might depend on exactly what your question is, though, so if you edit that into your post here, that would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, you're certainly welcome to bring it up in the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;: I'll throw this out here for people who may be reading it in the future: when deciding if a question is on topic, the criterion we look at is &quot;Is this question about physics?&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Are physicists the best people to answer this question?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-07-05T03:39:26.577" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T03:39:26.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="764" CreationDate="2011-07-04T18:21:45.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will be on topic on yet-to-come &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16617/academia&quot;&gt;Academia proposal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I agree that chat is a proper place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-07-04T18:21:45.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-05T06:00:22.770" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those do not mean the same of course, but AFAIK they are used interchangeably on this site (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optics&quot;&gt;optics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do you agree the merge is justified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T13:10:32.490" Title="Shall we merge optics and light?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="767" CreationDate="2011-07-05T12:00:11.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say &quot;no&quot;, though it is clear that the tags need a little work (and I'll be too busy to do it for several days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not like to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optics&lt;/a&gt; removed as it is a name with considerable history and a precise meaning to people working in the fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; serve beginners here, and they will mostly likely fell that their questions are about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-07-05T12:00:11.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="767" CreationDate="2011-07-06T13:10:32.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optics&lt;/a&gt;. I arrived at that position by asking, &quot;what possible question could there be that is about light, but is not an optics question?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None, that I can think of, with one caveat: the most fundamental description of light comes from QED, which is way beyond my background. A question about the QED description of a photon could be called an optics question only in the most pedantic sense. However, in practice somebody asking a question about photons in QED would be better off with a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/photon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;photon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;photon&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/qed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;qed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;qed&lt;/a&gt;. The term &quot;light&quot; generally refers to macroscopic phenomenon, so I don't think the overlap with QED is really an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As further justification I'd argue that by definition, any question about light in situations where QED is not required, even if some degree of quantum mechanics &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; required (eg. lasers or spectroscopy), falls under the domain of optics. As I said in the tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optics&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Optics is the study of light, and its interaction with matter.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T13:10:32.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-09T10:08:16.203" Score="6" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about a month ago. After about a week, activity stopped.  Now suddenly it is near the top of the list and the box says &quot;active today&quot;.  But I can find nothing dated today, and no obvious changes.  I have noticed a similar phenomenon on other old questions suddenly reappearing at the top of the list with no detectable dated changes.  Is there any way to search for and find recent changes?  If not, I think this is a desperately needed new capability.  Alternatively, Questions should not be made active for trivial or invisible changes. Or every answer and comment should have two dates, one  for originally posted, and one for last modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2013-07-22T12:18:29.213" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How can I find recent changes, or what does active mean?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="772" CreationDate="2011-07-09T10:28:43.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was unanswered, and such get poked randomly to give them another chance (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;see Community user profile&lt;/a&gt;). It may be prevented by accepting some answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for seeing all changes, you can click on the &quot;Edited...&quot; link (if the question was ever edited) or put its ID in such an URL &lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/&amp;lt;ID&amp;gt;/revisions&lt;/code&gt; to see recent changes. In case of the question I think you are asking about i it looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/10551/revisions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. However, as you can see, Community pokes are not visible there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T10:28:43.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="772" CreationDate="2011-07-09T10:31:31.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is by design. The StackExchange engine bumps questions up to front page periodically, if your question does not have answers with sufficient number of up-votes, and if your question does not have an accepted answer, and (if I remember correctly) if your question does not have a net negative vote. This is so that old questions may get exposed to new blood and maybe your question will receive an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="829" LastActivityDate="2011-07-09T10:31:31.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="781" CreationDate="2011-07-12T10:25:42.083" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that &quot;alternative energy&quot; is common US usage, compared to the UK say, where &quot;renewable energy&quot; is more common; and that the predominant language of the SE sites is US English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd like to nominate &quot;renewable-energy&quot; to be the primary tag, with &quot;alternative-energy&quot; as a secondary synonym, for the following reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_energy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says (&lt;em&gt;not because I consider Wikipedia a reliable source, but because in this case, I think it's right, and it says it quite well&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alternative energy is an umbrella term that refers to any source of&#xA;  usable energy intended to replace fuel sources without the undesired&#xA;  consequences of the replaced fuels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term &quot;alternative&quot; presupposes a set of undesirable energy&#xA;  technologies against which &quot;alternative energies&quot; are contrasted. As&#xA;  such, the list of energy technologies excluded is an indicator of&#xA;  which problems the alternative technologies are intended to address.&#xA;  Controversies regarding dominant sources of energy and their&#xA;  alternatives have a long history. The nature of what was regarded&#xA;  alternative energy sources has changed considerably over time, and&#xA;  today, because of the variety of energy choices and differing goals of&#xA;  their advocates, defining some energy types as &quot;alternative&quot; is highly&#xA;  controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &quot;renewable energy&quot; is reasonably well-defined, constant over time, and its definition is, relative to &quot;alternative energy&quot;, less controversial. So, it's clearer, more descriptive, and is less sensitive to the passage of time and changes in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't know whether it's good etiquette here just to go ahead and create the tag and then discuss, or raise it here first. I've gone for the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T17:18:11.233" Title="Can we make a new tag of renewable-energy, and make alternative-energy a secondary synonym to it?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-12T20:24:07.887" Score="-1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hope this isn't closed without explanation...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are sites like JustAnswer.com where customers can pay for in-depth answers to their questions by validated experts.  The experts are typically lawyers, doctors, repairmen and the like.  Some customers like the speed, privacy and convenience of this.  My question is ... could this work with physicists and scientists in general?  If you are a physicist, would you be willing to do your best to answer a question, say by an entrepreneur or another scientist, for a fee of around $70?  Do you think there are customers out there for the service? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4474" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T10:59:49.583" Title="Is there a potential market for paid answers to physics questions? If not, why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-13T15:53:46.287" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12240/why-2-distributions-can-not-be-multiplied?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed and migrated to Math.SE 20 minutes ago (as of this writing). User Marek posted an answer to this question 15 minutes ago. I thought question closure/migration locks the quesion from being answerable? How did that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="829" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T00:47:32.377" Title="Posting an answer after a question is closed and migrated?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="777" CreationDate="2011-07-14T04:35:04.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing does not necessarily block the question from getting answered, in that the server will accept answers but the UI generally tries to discourage this. See here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/79434/why-was-an-answer-allowed-on-a-question-that-was-merged-into-another-one&quot;&gt;Why was an answer allowed on a question that was merged into another one?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migration does, however, when the question is locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T04:35:04.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="776" CreationDate="2011-07-14T10:59:49.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so, for the reasons here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/06/the-vast-and-endless-sea.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/06/the-vast-and-endless-sea.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It turns out that traditional carrot-and-stick incentives are only useful for repetitive, mechanical tasks. The minute you have to do anything even slightly complex that requires even a little problem solving without a clear solution or rules -- those incentives not only don't work, they make things worse!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of research supporting this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T10:59:49.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-14T15:50:58.973" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a mechanism to &quot;vote to answer&quot;?  Some questions appear unanswered, but in several cases for rather pedestrian reasons like the original poster never visited the site again, in spite of several good answers posted.  In a sense, the good answers are upvoted, so in a way, we're already doing this, so a logical extension is to allow voting to declare a question &quot;answered&quot;, perhaps after some time of inaction on the part of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="vote to answer?" Tags="|feature-request|questions|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2011-07-14T17:18:11.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I merged the tags and created the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T17:18:11.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="780" CreationDate="2011-07-14T17:35:54.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer does &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; indicate that it is the best answer. It means it is the one the asker liked or used. Nothing more nothing less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular questions are not in any sense &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;open&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; until there is a green checkmark and &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;closed&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;answered&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; afterwards. Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/49/populist&quot;&gt;there is a badge explicitly for getting many more votes than the accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/ok-now-define-answered/&quot;&gt;formal definition of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; for the purposes of the unanswered tab&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;having no answers with net positive votes and no accepted answer&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense it is unfortunate that the site puts so much visual emphasis on accepted answers, because I prefer the current system but new users don't see a clear explanation of the meaning of acceptance and simply draw their own conclusions from the emphasis the site gives to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=community%20accept%20vote&quot;&gt;Suggestions to allow some form of community acceptance&lt;/a&gt; have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3669/would-it-be-possible-to-have-a-community-accepted-feature&quot;&gt;appeared&lt;/a&gt; on the mother meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/80319/vote-to-force-accept-an-answer-for-someone-elses-question-closed&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8600/community-vote-for-accepted-answer-rep-5000-only&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/82484/vote-to-accept-answers&quot;&gt;times&lt;/a&gt; without the team taking any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-07-14T17:41:48.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-18T03:47:14.930" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been (slightly) bugging me for a while that we have two tags for questions about reading material, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt;. I've never been quite clear about what the difference is, or should be. Do we even need both these tags? If so, what exactly would each of them be for, and how do we distinguish between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T03:47:27.317" Title="What are the meanings of &quot;books&quot; and &quot;reference-request&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="786" CreationDate="2011-07-18T03:47:27.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For reference, the meanings I've been using so far are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; is for questions asking &quot;What is a good book about X?&quot; or more generally, &quot;What should I read to learn about X?&quot;, typically where there is not a single authoritative reference. These sorts of questions have multiple answers and will acquire new answers as more books/papers are written on the subject, so they are almost universally community wiki material. Examples include anything listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; is basically for questions of the form &quot;What paper explains effect X?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11637/water-droplet-evaporation-due-to-humidity-and-temperature&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) or &quot;Where can I find the derivation of X?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10549/how-to-derive-the-karman-howarth-monin-relation-for-anisotropic-turbulence&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) or &quot;What is the original source for X?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10184/atomic-mass-of-copper-63&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;), etc... basically any question which is looking for one particular paper, or a short list of papers (or books). A decent but imperfect guideline seems to be that for these questions, all or nearly all of the references that could be posted as possible answers already exist at the time of the question being asked; we don't expect a steady increase in the number of valid answers as time goes on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; saying that this &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be the distinction between the two tags, but it is one possibility. I'm aware that these rules are not always completely clear, which might be a reason to reevaluate the meanings of these tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we go with this, an interesting borderline example would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10098/1-form-formulation-of-quantized-electromagnetism&quot;&gt;1-form formulation of quantized electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;; I'd be curious to know which of the two tags concerned people would apply to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T03:47:27.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-18T18:13:14.057" Score="13" ViewCount="854" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Update: The Theoretical Physics proposal will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be closed&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/816/theoretic-physic-proposal-back-underway&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Theoretical Physic Proposal Back Underway!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the last 8 months, I have watched an Area 51 proposal to create a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; site which would, effectively, split the &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; community into two separate branches of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can appreciate and understand both sides of the debate (focused vs. broader appeal). That's why I've been watching carefully the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Area 51 discussions&lt;/a&gt; and the development of Physics SE. The proposal has inched along slowly over 8 months while the Physics Stack Exchange continues to evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time, I feel strongly that splitting the field of physics between two separate sites would be materially harmful to both the proposed Theoretical site and the Physics SE. Having &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; related sites like that will only draw much-needed attention to the detriment of &lt;em&gt;both.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics SE has been doing fine in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;Area 51 analytics&lt;/a&gt;, but there have been concerns of &lt;strong&gt;steadily declining traffic and visitors&lt;/strong&gt;. If Physics SE had the &amp;quot;big city&amp;quot; problems of a Stack Overflow, there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have been merit to splitting up the community but, as it stands, I don't think this site can take the additional hit on its declining traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But traffic isn't the main reason &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to split up this site.&lt;/strong&gt; The Theoretical Physics proposal was created when this Physics site was very young. At the time, it wasn't clear if the two branches of study would benefit from being on the same site. But the Physics SE has made tremendous progress and, to their credit, this site seems to have successfully and harmoniously integrated these areas of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I feel that &lt;strong&gt;the scope of questions outlined in this proposal have a home on Physics SE.&lt;/strong&gt; That doesn't mean that we can never open another physics-based site. There may be a time where that makes sense. But I am planning on closing the Theoretical Physics proposal and wanted to let you know how I came to that decision and to see if there were any further issue I should consider before finally closing the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T17:47:36.453" Title="Disposition of Area 51 Proposal: Theoretical Physics" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-07-18T19:21:41.840" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not being a theorist I don't want to comment on the value &lt;em&gt;to the theory community&lt;/em&gt; of a separate site, but I strongly agree that Physics.SE has barely enough participation to hang on. A big hit might kill us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the level of discussion thing is what has been driving the push for a separate site (just a conjecture on my part, BTW) then I am open to suggestions about how to encourage a higher level of discussion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A conscience push to ask a lot of &quot;research level&quot; question in the course of a couple of week. Something like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/298/78&quot;&gt;First Periodic Premier Programming Puzzle Push&lt;/a&gt; I set up on CodeGolf.SE to considerable approval but mixed success.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start pushing a culture of &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/868/what-are-the-attributes-of-a-good-answer/881#881&quot;&gt;backing up answer with literature citations&lt;/a&gt; somewhat like the rule on Skeptics.SE. I imagine this would increase he average level of the discussion without ruling out fairly basic questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would some meat-space get togethers help? Are they even practical given that we have circa 100 users with 500+ rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:59.790" LastActivityDate="2011-07-18T19:21:41.840" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-07-19T02:56:04.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the assertion that the level of physicists on this site are too low to be professional  puzzling. Much of my hypothesis for bringing that proposal back into this community is based how successfully this Physics SE has become &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; tremendous, all-inclusive Physics resource, welcoming to all level of questions. The top on-topic questions from that proposal seem to be perfectly welcome here. I keep hearing how effective the Physics community has been in successfully integrated all the levels of Physics questions into &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To create a separate site, we would have to show that the bulk of question from that proposal do  not currently have a home on Stack Exchange. I read through the top on topic questions and the subjects seem to be doing fine on this site. I see no sign that a more professional scope of question questions are being put out based on these &quot;theoretical&quot; subjects and I don't find the level of question on this site an embarrassment to the professional community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2011-07-19T04:20:23.397" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T04:20:23.397" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="178" CreationDate="2011-07-19T11:34:23.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chemist here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that chemistry suffers in this regard for being the 'central science', bridging the disciplines of physics and biology. I'm a (novice) computational chemist looking at enzymatic catalysis and potential inorganic and heterogeneous cognates, so I'm in this weird borderland between quantum physics, chemistry, biology, condensed matter and computer science. Jack of all trades, master of none. I've many times started writing a physics-oriented question here only to give up on it, knowing that the &lt;em&gt;chemical context&lt;/em&gt; will probably see it shot down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chemistry is like an octopus, with a tentacle in every faculty. A lot of chemists work on the tentacles, where they can easily get thrown into a 'redirect loop' of 'that's really a physics question' ↔ 'that's really a chemistry question' and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be why we have journals like &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pubs.rsc.org/en/journals/journalissues/cp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, I'm a bit concerned that when chem.se reaches beta, it will stagnate as users jump to more specific sites for answers to their specific queries. Chemistry is a vast topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1876" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T11:34:23.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="793" CreationDate="2011-07-19T15:45:36.783" Score="-3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we have tags indicating the level of mathematical sophistication wanted in answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(almost) &quot;no maths&quot;.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;high-school level maths. (Simple algebra, geometry and a little calculus).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Normal level questions / physics undergraduate level stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics postgrad level maths.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to have a coffee plantation and a couple of life times to unpack that maths.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is loosely related to the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/429/429&quot;&gt;“No math, please” questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="429" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T17:25:05.150" Title="Tags for math level" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="792" CreationDate="2011-07-19T17:15:56.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say no, for a couple of reasons: first of all, tags are mostly supposed to indicate the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; of a question. The point is that people can follow tag X to stay informed of new questions about X, and also that you can easily search for questions about X. Tags aren't supposed to give general meta-information about questions. Admittedly, there are a couple of examples of tags that break this guideline, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, but we'd like to avoid coming up with new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other reason is that I would expect the quality of the site to suffer if we have constraints on what kind of math to use. As Lubos and dmckee and others said in the question you linked to, sometimes it's necessary to use math of a certain level to give a proper explanation of something; for example, any explanation of the Higgs mechanism that doesn't mention gauge covariant derivatives probably isn't doing it justice. And other times, the math gets in the way more than it helps. In many cases, there are answers of both types that can be posted, and I don't think it's a good idea to restrict any of them; in fact, multiple answers to a question at different levels of mathematical sophistication can be much more informative than each of them would be alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other other reason is that if a questioner is looking for a particular kind of mathematical background, they can just say so in the question. Of course, as I was saying in the previous paragraph, we may not be able to follow that recommendation, but the point is that even when we can, there doesn't need to be a tag for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other other other reason is that a lot of people don't use tags they way they're intended anyway ;-) usually because they're new to the site and haven't been around long enough to know our tagging conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T17:15:56.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="792" CreationDate="2011-07-19T17:25:05.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the network wide policy is well established in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Death of Meta Tags&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;level&quot; tags don't say &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; the question is about so out they go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the level of the poster's preparation is often apparent from the way the write the question, and I have no qualms at all about writing my answer to the poster's needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T17:25:05.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="797" CreationDate="2011-07-20T10:15:19.010" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question has arisen if shopping advice posts is off-topic and should be kept closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7898/2451&quot;&gt;Fairly Broad Spectrum Light Source Options&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12466/3694&quot;&gt;Refractive index liquids: Why hard to buy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/151437/2451&quot;&gt;Where can I get fluidics components?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that this is not a question &lt;em&gt;on physics&lt;/em&gt;, but how does one otherwise ask the fellow physicists for this kind of information? Experimental physics &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; to a large extent about choosing the right makers. Besides, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12466/3694&quot;&gt;question 12466&lt;/a&gt; is not just about &lt;em&gt;where to buy&lt;/em&gt; these liquids, but mainly about why they are so rare on the market. I have never worked with them, so do not know, and was asking for help. People experience in refractometry / microscopy might have been able to answer question 12466.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3694" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T20:26:40.687" Title="Is a shopping advice request off-topic in any case?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|request|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="795" CreationDate="2011-07-20T10:43:27.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shopping questions are generally disallowed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... however, all rules have exceptions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that some rare shopping questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be on topic if they:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are extremely specialized to your community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cover things that are difficult to find&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the utility and longevity of the question. Will this question be useful to someone in the US? the UK? South America? How about 5 years from now? This is where &quot;typical&quot; shopping questions fall apart, so if you can avoid those pitfalls, you're doing well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T10:43:27.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="795" CreationDate="2011-07-20T17:27:54.950" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think questions about specialist equipment and materials is on topic. (Though I am not enough of a specialist to judge whether refractive index fluids are that special.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am not an experimentalist myself, I do have a few in my family and close friends. And for a lot of the truly specialist objects the number of suppliers in the entire world can be counted on one's fingers. In this case if your familiar supplier takes a (possibly permanent) vacation, it can become difficult to find replacements. Further more, since these suppliers cater to special interest, there's relatively little point for them to make large advertising efforts (in trade magazines, on the internet, etc), since their potential customer pool is so small. All these combined means that the existence of these suppliers often pass &lt;strong&gt;by word of mouth&lt;/strong&gt;. In this case I would say none of the usual objections to &quot;shopping advice&quot; questions would apply, and in fact a Community-Wiki list for this may be a great use of the site and a great service to the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="829" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T17:27:54.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-07-20T23:00:54.003" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only just noticed this post since I stopped participating in this community after I had fulfilled my commitment. I strongly agree with Marek on this. The reason I no longer participate on this site is no secret: I simply have no faith that a question I ask will be answered correctly. The level of knowledge within the community as a whole is such that common misconceptions often become top answers, unless an opposing answer comes from Lubos. This isn't anyones fault, as far as I can tell, just an effect of the make-up of the community as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I don't quite understand the distinction you draw between academics and professionals in physics (in your answer and the comments). Most professional physicists &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; academics, with a smaller number working in industry. I find the current situation quite sad, because if you check my CSTheory profile you'll notice I'm one of the most active users (at least if rep is a measure of this), but I consider myself a physicist and would be in a far better position to contribute on a physics site. However, it's hard to put into words how off putting it is to see a correct answer heavily downvoted in favour of nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with trying to get this site to become a good venue for asking the type of questions that are likely useful to researchers is that because the site has such a large community interested in physics at a pop-sci or undergrad level, the number who can actually judge the merits of an answer to such a question is a very small fraction of the number of people voting on it (or even trying to answer it). Thus the basic premise of the good stuff floating to the top doesn't always hold for such questions. For this to work you need a community with a larger fraction of researchers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are people on here who I respect at a professional level. There simply aren't enough of them to for it to be worth me asking questions. (I don't mean to make this about me, I simply wanted to try to exlain how this looks from the position of someone who does fairly advanced physics for a living.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T23:00:54.003" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="795" CreationDate="2011-07-20T23:22:51.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I closed the question in question, I figure I should say something: my reasoning is that this is a site for questions &lt;em&gt;about physics&lt;/em&gt;. Asking where you can buy some product, regardless of what the product is, is not a question about physics. That's why I closed it. I wasn't thinking of the general prohibition on shopping recommendations on SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the proposal &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/32588/experimental-or-applied-physics&quot;&gt;Experimental or Applied Physics&lt;/a&gt; on Area 51 is intended for exactly these sorts of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community would like questions about obtaining lab equipment to on-topic here, I'm okay with that. It would represent a change from my existing moderation policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T23:22:51.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-07-21T15:05:51.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;PhysicsStackExchange and MathsStackExchange are approximately on the same level when it comes to questions and answers, so doesn't it follow that the users should therefore be of the same calibre? Browse the user profiles and it does look as if this is indeed the case with Arturo Magidin being to mathstackexchange what Lubos is to physicsstackexchange. You then have below them highly talented people at around PhD level in their 20s, together with the more experienced professionals in their 30s and 40s and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, questions at the cutting edge of research are not asked at mathstackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A physicsoverflow is needed to copy the success of mathoverflow and not another theoretical-physicsstackexchange to disintegrate a site that adequately performs a useful service as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2011-07-21T15:05:51.497" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-07-23T18:29:44.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think lack of potential traffic at the proposed tp.se site is going to make it very difficult to keep alive even in the short term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make a crude prediction of likely traffic at tp.se based upon that which exists for math.stackexchange and mathoverflow.net. The number of new questions asked within six hours for the sites are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;math.stackexchange 22, mathoverflow 4, physics.stackexchange 4, tp.stackexchange ? = 4*4/22&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes 3 high quality questions/day at the proposed site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2011-07-23T18:29:44.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-24T21:54:19.543" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it irritating to see a closed question on the questions page. It shouldn't be there, it spoils the smooth running of the site. It makes me want to... trample all over it. Perhaps a  tag could be put on the question and it put at the bottom of the questions queue so that people can find closed questions if they want. Perhaps there's another more elegant solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T18:52:13.617" Title="What can be done about Closed Questions spoiling the questions page?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="802" CreationDate="2011-07-24T23:07:19.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closures can be reversed (by a moderator or by 5 users with 3k+ reputation) and they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; happen error, so it is proper that they should receive some attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-07-24T23:07:19.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-25T20:43:53.927" Score="18" ViewCount="1893" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a number of questions in which the moderators change html equations into LaTeX, or else people writing in the comments that the site supports LaTeX.  Do we have a standard place where we can point people so they can learn how to typeset equations on the message board?  There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&quot;&gt;short section in the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but it probably isn't detailed enough for most people to learn what to do if they're not already familiar with LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T16:13:31.037" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T16:13:31.037" Title="Is there a standard place to point people to learn how to typeset their equations?" Tags="|support|faq|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2011-07-25T20:49:56.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. The people at math.SE did come up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1773/do-we-have-an-equation-editing-howto&quot;&gt;something&lt;/a&gt; but it's not really a guide, just a pointer to some resources. I think if we developed a short (but not as short as the built-in help) LaTeX guide here, it would make a great &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:21.967" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T20:49:56.450" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2011-07-25T22:16:33.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this page in Google once and it is quite good for a very start (it is &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; in the first place -- there is nothing better to convince someone that LaTeX is easy than a thousand-page user manual (= ): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haptonstahl.org/latex/basics_mathmode.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.haptonstahl.org/latex/basics_mathmode.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T22:16:33.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2011-07-26T12:25:52.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the this wikibook very good &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastActivityDate="2011-07-26T12:25:52.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-28T00:43:46.097" Score="12" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;When typing text with a lot of equations, the update is terribly slow in proportion to the number and complexity of the equations displayed. It even gets updated when typing in a single character. it's got to the point where I have to type the answer in a text editor and then pasted it into the text screen here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you get around this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T13:06:03.217" Title="How do you deal with the slow update for text with large numbers of complex equations?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="814" CreationDate="2011-07-28T11:27:59.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's more likely to be slowed by the specific browser you're using rather than computer speed, installing the latest browser (of your choice) should help. MathJax was recently implemented and discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/07/testing-mathjax.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt;. You may find some of the post and/or comments there useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1696" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T11:27:59.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-28T17:46:34.363" Score="25" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In reference to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/788/disposition-of-area-51-proposal-theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Disposition of Area 51 Proposal: Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The proposal for creating a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;&quot; site will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be closed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you to the Physics SE community &amp;mdash; You made a persuasive argument for &lt;em&gt;keeping&lt;/em&gt; the Theoretical Physics proposal alive and on course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found your arguments both convincing &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; refreshingly civil. It is my sincere hope that the dual Physics/Theoretical Physics community will become greater than the sum of its parts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-07-28T17:46:34.363" Title="The Theoretical Physic proposal is back underway!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="814" CreationDate="2011-07-29T09:36:52.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rendering of the preview, and of the MathJax latex equations, is all on the browser, so as @David Zaslavsky says, it's all down to the browser's javascript engine, with Chrome's being the fastest at time of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[edit]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that there used to be a 3-second delay between the end of typing and the re-rendering of the preview, and is now much shorter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how about changing the javascript preview, so that it actually times itself, measuring how long the whole preview-refresh takes, regardless of how many incidences of Mathjax markup there are? Then if it's slow, it can use the 3s delay ; if it's fast, it can use the 0.5s delay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[end edit]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it might be possible to implement a delay between the end of the last keypress, and a re-rendering of the preview, via a client-side script, in Greasemonkey or the Chrome / Opera user scripts, by hijacking the stackexchange preview function, building the delay in, and then handing back to the stackexchange javascript if the N seconds pass without further keypresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just had a prod around in the javascript source code. It seems that when there are five or more equations, it will build in a small delay before rendering. So maybe if you've got 4 equations, add an extra empty equation or two, and then just keep typing and don't leave more than half a second between keypresses (NB I haven't tried this out, so it may not work! I've just gleaned what appears to be supposed to be happening, from the source)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="4066" LastEditDate="2011-08-01T13:06:03.217" LastActivityDate="2011-08-01T13:06:03.217" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="819" CreationDate="2011-07-30T18:17:25.883" Score="16" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a major difference between the physics SE and the other SE sites.  People here are mean!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparatively, the other sites feel like a smorgasbord of up-voting.  I understand that the number of up-votes is tied to the traffic itself and the number of users, but the higher frequency of the down-votes is not explained by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like there are several workable explanations.  One is that it's possible to have an answer that has a singular fact that is objectively physically incorrect, so it's hard to speak correctly without a seemingly endless stream of qualifiers.  Another is that there is such a strong gradient of people with lots of experience and people with very little, but I generally don't believe this explication, and the reason is that I see so many people with lots of experience (it's not that hard to tell) with many down-voted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are other users justifying this phenomenon to themselves?  One major take away I have is that the reputation number means something entirely different here than it does on other sites.  Looking at the bigger picture, is physics as a topic &quot;special&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="1255" LastEditDate="2011-07-30T18:57:31.137" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T05:54:06.223" Title="Are stingy ratings just due to the nature of physics?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-07-30T18:33:30.420" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People here are mean!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were you around for the early days of Stack Overflow? Back is those time misted days SO had a couple of strongly opinionated down-voting specialists. The current situation on physics does not seem so different to me. The moderation team is trying to hold our current crop of these guy to civil bounds, but we are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; trying to dictate their evaluation of posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's possible to have an answer that has a singular fact that is objectively physically incorrect&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is. Perhaps more so than on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we also have a couple of phenomena that are much less prevalent than in programming, system administration, and the other topics that were the original Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of enthusiastic amateurs whose whole education on the topic comes from popular books. Frankly this is a crowd that we love to have around (because we always happy to see people take an interest), but are a little wary of interacting with (because they are often &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; misguided; there is a limit to how much education one can pack into a comment when the intended recipient clearly has none of the mathematical preparation and is misusing the specialized vocabulary of the field).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A small but more persistent group of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/340/520&quot;&gt;people who are strongly committed to non-standard theories&lt;/a&gt;. And very wordy on the subject.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I'll list &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; upvote to downvote ratio on some of the sites I'm active on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Stack Overflow   10:1&#xA;Super User       50:1&#xA;Physics           6:1&#xA;Unix             25:1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly I'm more critical here than elsewhere. I'll note that my Stack Overflow ratio is up (from 8:1) after a multiple month effort to cast &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the situation for me on physics is that without the option of casting a non-binding vote to close I have been substituting down votes on things that I was wishy-washy on closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-07-30T18:44:55.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-07-31T14:10:45.060" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I am downvoting only when the answer is wrong beyond repair and it is my opinion that we don't want such bogus answers around at all. If there are just technical mistakes or confusing statements that can be fixed, I point this out in comments (with possible down-vote that I remove upon correction). Do you consider this mean or do you have something else in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-07-31T14:10:45.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-03T19:31:12.333" Score="7" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen some rather philosophical or interpretational questions pop up lately. These questions tend to get closed very quickly. I'm wondering if this is neccessary, since such questions can have interesting or enlightening answers. This is not about purely philosophical questions, nor about speculative or esoteric stuff, but rather about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;philosophy of physics/science&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interpretational issues of physical theories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and to a lesser extent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;epistemological and philosphical issues, as long as they are relevant for physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the 'multiverse' critized as being non-physical?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is Bayesian 'degree of belief' subjective? If so, how can it be justified?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the universe infinite? (spatially, or in time)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why can't physics say something about X?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some real examples (admittedly not the best):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12137/825&quot;&gt;Is the quantum measurement problem merely a word game?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13122/are-there-any-confirmed-examples-of-epiphenomenalism&quot;&gt;Are there any confirmed examples of epiphenomenalism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8408/are-the-laws-of-physics-applied-mathematics&quot;&gt;Are the laws of physics applied mathematics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10240/is-the-wave-function-objective-or-subjective&quot;&gt;Is the wave function objective or subjective?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you find better examples, don't hesitate to append them / comment. I'm posting my opinion as an answer. If you disagree, please don't downvote this question, but the answer. Or better, post another answer. :-)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Edit: Added some fictional questions for clarity.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T14:42:54.080" Title="Should we allow philosophical / interpretational questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="821" CreationDate="2011-08-03T19:31:53.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd vote for &lt;strong&gt;keeping&lt;/strong&gt; such questions when in doubt - and if necessary editing them for clarification. My reasoning is the following: From a strictly positivist point of view, the only thing that counts it what I can calculate, and how well my models agree with my measurements. However, not every physicist subscribes to such a radical view. Discussions about whether e.g. wave functions are &quot;real&quot; or not might seem moot to some people, but are very important and interesting to others. It comes down to an argument between these two schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question makes a statement for one of these camps, without giving the other the opportunity to answer. I think such questions should not be decided on prematurely by an individual by the closing the question, but they should rather be debated in the answers. (&lt;em&gt;Debated&lt;/em&gt; in a form appropriate for a stackexchange site of course: not forum-like, but with two or three well formulated answers, that may take different points-of-view. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, such questions can be very important for the didactics of physics, which I believe also belongs here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, such &quot;philosophical&quot; views actually do influence the development of physics. Think about the question, which view of classical mechanics is more &quot;fundamental&quot;: a description in terms of forces (Newton's axioms) or in terms of energies (Lagrangian mechanics). As long as you are only dealing with simple cases such as inclined slopes, both seem identical. However, the &quot;energetic&quot; point of view, which was regarded as more elegant, turns out to be generalizable to much more complex cases. Or take the cosmological principle, that says that the earth has no special or privileged position in space and time. What might be seen as a philosophical prejudice, actually has a lot of implications for astrophysics. I can think of a lot of examples that have been dismissed as &quot;philosophical&quot; at first but turned out to give deep insights into nature later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T19:31:53.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="358" CreationDate="2011-08-03T19:57:50.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be sometimes be notoriously hard to find correct references. For example, I was going to mention a certain theory of extra dimensions in a paper (this is experimental particle physics). A colleague pointed out to me that the paper I was quoting was pretty derivative, and that there has been done equivalent, but more comprehensive work a couple of years earlier, although the theory had a different name back then. The newer paper wasn't quoting the older one (directly), and without expertise in this sub-field, I would have had a hard time finding the other papers. Now not everyone has a helpful colleague who seemingly knows all the literature, so I think this site can be a pretty good place to find references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd even go further and say, this site is pretty good to find &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt;. I know &lt;em&gt;such-and-such&lt;/em&gt;, but who said that and why is this so? This site helped me twice:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9258/why-are-the-third-generation-superpartners-lighter-than-the-other-sfermions-in-ms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; where I was pointed to a standard reference which I knew superficially, but didn't know that it answered my question, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11881/why-does-the-weak-force-distinguish-left-and-right-handedness&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; I had a silly idea, wondered if someone smarter had already thought about it, but I didn't know what to search for, and I got a tip that got me started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We just have to make sure that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This doesn't invite lazy people to let us do there homework for them ;-) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The references stay recent as the field develops and new papers come out. This can be done by posting new answers, or using the edit function (which seems rarely used).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T19:57:50.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="821" CreationDate="2011-08-03T21:41:22.540" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to say &lt;strong&gt;no, we should not allow philosophical questions&lt;/strong&gt; for the simple reason that philosophy is not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, we need to make it very clear that there is a distinction between philosophy and physics, and that the former is off topic here. People who are not familiar with what physics really is sometimes tend to ask questions which I believe any of us would agree are actually philosophical in nature and which physics cannot address, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/650/what-is-an-idea-in-terms-of-time-space-and-matter&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for questions which are more closely related to physics, those of a philosophical nature tend not to have definite answers. Those are not the kinds of questions we want here, not only because Stack Exchange aims to exclude them by design, but also because physics as a subject does not handle those sorts of questions well - again, by design. It's often said that something that isn't experimentally falsifiable is not science. We've (unofficially?) adopted a version of that guideline on this site because it works well at distinguishing overly abstract questions which are likely to lead to discussions rather than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T21:41:22.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2011-08-04T00:29:18.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are trying to make this site useful for actual physics work - much like Stack Overflow for programming work - then I'd say we should allow such questions to a reasonable extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might get a good answer to a Maple or Gnuplot problem on SuperUser or SO, but I doubt I'd get much help with programs like ROOT, Pythia, Athena (to name a few of the less exotic programs used at my place). Another example I just thought about: How to get LabView to work with some rare physicistic equipment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this would belong better at &lt;strong&gt;physicists&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com, but since that doesn't exist, this is the next best place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T00:29:18.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-08-04T00:58:16.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first impression was the opposite: that the level of questions was &lt;em&gt;almost to high&lt;/em&gt;. Granted, there are many silly questions, but there are also many daunting research-level questions. The problem is there is almost &lt;strong&gt;nothing in between&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very few university studies level questions (like what you would get as homework). These I could answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are almost no questions regarding actual day-to-day physics problems, say, of a grad student or a young postdoc. These I could answer, or use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then consider this: An good programming question can often be answered in a few minutes, and the answer easily applied. Some of the better physics questions around here - they tend to be hardcore quantum field theory - however seem to require weeks of research to answer, and an afternoon to understand, even for someone who works in a closely related field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we need is more people asking real day-to-day advanced questions, that someone who came along this problem before can answer in a few minutes, rather than big research frontier questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T00:58:16.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="821" CreationDate="2011-08-04T16:20:21.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, I have been following the philosophy SE, which is still in beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly agree with jdm that philosophical views influence the development of physics.  I certainly have the impression that quantum physics, for instance, has profoundly strong philosophical underpinnings.  Not only that, but the global Lorentz invariance is an extremely philosophical concept, epically when put in the context that it rules out almost every loop-quantum gravity theory that represents the universe with a finite number of nodes.  The philosophy board is also entertaining questions about &quot;is the universe isomorphic to a Turning machine?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is obvious overlap and some amount of overlap should be expected, but let me just get it out there that I think the Physics SE can intelligently answer most of these questions way better than the philosophy SE could, epically if it's about something like &lt;em&gt;the philosophy of quantum physics&lt;/em&gt;, a topic which I think would get closed quickly in the current state of things.  Thus my present vote would be that we &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; allow such questions.  The right balance is that of more philosophy than the current physics SE entertains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:18.480" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T16:20:21.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-08-05T03:40:46.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some more thoughts to share.  At the same time that I seem to get considerable down votes, I seem to get the occasional answer that I thought was absolutely nothing special, and then everybody loves it.  I suppose this is the reality of democracy, but seriously, if it had been up to me to evaluate and compare my answers irrelevant of the community feedback, more than one answer with a net negative score would be in my own top 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's very important for people to have an emotional hold on the fact that things like this will happen, which is a major reason I want to write this answer as an olive branch to other people who have felt similar things.  One reason forums are good is the very fact that people can be mildly combative as well as well-reasoned and intelligent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I've been paying attention to this, I notice that there is strong divergence from the ratios expressed by dmckee depending on the users.  One editor in particular with &gt;6k rep I calculate to have a up:down vote ratio of 1:4.  It's important for users to recognize that such voters are out there and take it in stride. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without it affecting the ambition of future answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without it affecting their own hostility&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To share some funny stories, I notice that there are questions that are quite popular, and almost entirely devoid of up votes.  For instance, the following one caught my eye.  I think very significant attention was paid to giving good answers, so what happened?  Maybe someone watches it and doesn't see what they came for.  Maybe there are lots of up and down votes.  Maybe it's just not the kind of question that leads to great answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13062/simple-friction-formula-for-a-car&quot;&gt;Simple friction formula for a car&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of my own answers, I am most baffled by votes on answers like the following one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11208/the-form-of-a-kettle/11359#11359&quot;&gt;the form of a kettle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feedback is good, but it's so easy to over analyze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-08-05T03:40:46.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-08-07T15:06:09.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this came up once more, I have to say that I have only down voted once, an answer, though I have made negative comments. I guess I inherently believe in positive reinforcement rather than carrot and stick, which is the norm here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have down voted some of my answers too;  if I cannot find a mistake, I consider them deluded :) or partisan to  their own version of reality in physics, and put it down to experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2011-08-07T15:06:09.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="821" CreationDate="2011-08-08T14:42:54.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that if there is any doubt about whether to close a philosophical question (and for some of the questions listed by the OP, I don't think there was any doubt - they were argumentative or biased and fishing for a specific answer), we should leave it open for a while. If there are no constructive answers after a reasonable period of time, and the question becomes a futile discussion, then we should close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T14:42:54.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="835" CreationDate="2011-08-08T17:18:13.653" Score="11" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to handle a case where a question was asked a long time ago and received several incorrect answers but no correct ones? To be more concrete, this was the situation with this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2229/if-photons-have-no-mass-how-can-they-have-momentum&quot;&gt;If photons have no mass, how can they have momentum?&lt;/a&gt; I've done the obvious things: (1) submitted a correct answer; (2) downvoted the incorrect answers; and (3) explained my downvotes in comments. However, the question is 9 months old, and one of the incorrect answers has been accepted and heavily upvoted. I would interpret this as a situation arising from the fact that physics.SE is relatively new, and is still in the process of attracting a critical mass of users. With a small number of users, someone can make an honest mistake in an answer and not have it corrected. The problem is that there are certain questions that are FAQs, and those FAQs got asked and answered early on. Now we're stuck with them. Students or other people without solid expertise of their own will come along and believe the incorrect answer, which has been upvoted and accepted and effectively frozen in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not about crackpottery, as discussed in this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/330/answers-they-are-a-changin&quot;&gt;Answers they are a-changin&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt; I'm talking about answers that are wrong, but not wrong in a crackpottish way. I'm sure the folks who gave these answers are competent at physics, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes, even people who are highly competent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How have the older, more mature SE sites dealt with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that once a question has sat around for 6 or 12 months, nobody is likely to participate in it anymore. It's off everyone's radar, and if its answers are broken, they aren't going to get fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, Wikipedia has mechanisms where you can try to attract people's interest in improving an article that needs work. For instance, you can nominate it as a good article, which initiates a review process; you can tag it as needing attention from an expert; you can nominate it for deletion; etc. SE, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any mechanism (that I know of) for getting up on a soapbox and alerting people that a certain question is broken and needs fixing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-09-07T16:48:56.197" Title="old questions with incorrect answers" Tags="|discussion|reputation|best-practices|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-08-08T21:22:34.470" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to physics.se after hanging out at math.se for a while.  Wow you guys are right this place is mean!  I posted a nice informative answer (with links and estimated errors) -- the answer was very quickly accepted but had a minor mistake at the end.  Rather than waiting for comments and then editing and correcting (which is what I have experienced at math.se) I got downvoted. This is not as fun at all!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At math.se there is meta discussion on encouraging junior members.  I think a number of us tend to more easily upvote questions and answers by junior members on purpose as those come back and stick with the community (stats even available on this by Qiaochu).  I have to admit I am getting no such warm fuzzy or welcoming feelings here ......   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4554" LastActivityDate="2011-08-08T21:22:34.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="833" CreationDate="2011-08-08T23:33:26.707" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SE, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any mechanism (that I know of) for getting up on a soapbox and alerting people that a certain question is broken and needs fixing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure it does! You're using it right now. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;provide an alternative correct(er) answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;gently point out the problems with the incorrect answer in comments, perhaps also followed by a downvote -- to be removed once the problems are corrected, naturally -- to adjust the sort order&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;raise the issue here on meta, as you have&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(optionally) edit the incorrect answer, if possible, to correct it; this will also naturally bump the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(optionally) flag the post for moderator attention, but that is unlikely to generate the votes you really need to correct the situation; I would only resort to mod flagging if the answer is &lt;em&gt;dangerously&lt;/em&gt; wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(possibly) Bring up the issue on the chat. With a little luck this puts in touch with some other experienced users, and it certainly provides you a forum to go back and forth until you figure out the exact nature of the error (and who has made it). Alas the physics is chat is often fairly dead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-08-09T02:59:54.017" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T02:59:54.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="839" CreationDate="2011-08-09T09:42:48.863" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user has just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/4460/revisions&quot;&gt;detagged&lt;/a&gt; a question I tagged. I haven't retagged: I suspect that this user would be all too happy with an edit war. It seems terribly trivial, but I've bumped into this user's snarkiness on more than one occasion previously. There didn't really seem a flag that was appropriate, other than &quot;other&quot;, so I thought I'd solicit opinion here on the best way to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T01:17:52.180" Title="what's the best way to handle tag edit-warring?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-08-09T13:02:09.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find myself uncertain that the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/renewable-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;renewable-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;renewable-energy&lt;/a&gt; has a lot place on a physics site, browsing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/renewable-energy&quot;&gt;current list of question so tagged&lt;/a&gt; suggests that many of them are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Really technology questions with little physics content. Presumable they were asked here because their authors could find no better place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Often very basic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only connected to renewable energy by motivation---I mean, the asker was &#xA;thinking about a renewable energy application and that brought up a physics question but the question isn't about power generation as such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case we seem to be looking at conditions 2 and 3. The only part of the question that is not physics 101 work is getting an estimate of the solar magnetic field strength and variation in the neighborhood of Earth's orbit. Basically this is a blue sky speculation by someone with little formal preparation; fun but not very enlightening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question has a place here, but the tag is marginal on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T13:02:09.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="833" CreationDate="2011-08-09T15:07:14.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an answer to this question, I would suggest giving a little more attention to the answer that is accepted and upvoted.  Although it may seem obviously wrong to you, other people still see merit in it that you may or may not have addressed, and I think this question in particular is a good example of this general type of conundrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of how I use physics SE, I quite often find myself referencing and talking about other answers.  This is more of a personal thing, and honestly I don't think this site is the best format to have a really major discussion and hashing out of the details of a problem from two competing perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of this photon mass problem, as someone with a seemingly conflicting physical perspective than you, I'll try to articulate what I find to be missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a general notion in what you write that concepts of gravity can not be applied to a &lt;em&gt;photon's relativistic mass&lt;/em&gt;.  This is exactly the question I asked previously here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10612/explain-how-or-if-a-box-full-of-photons-would-weigh-more-due-to-massless-photon&quot;&gt;Explain how (or if) a box full of photons would weigh more due to massless photons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if this discussion was off-topic then I would understand why we should &lt;em&gt;limit&lt;/em&gt; the discussion to special relativity.  However, go back to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an explanation of why a large gravitational field, such as a black hole, can bend light, I have heard that light has momentum. This is given as a solution to the problem of only massive objects being affected by gravity. However, momentum is the product of mass and velocity, so, by this definition, massless photons can not have momentum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question obviously shows interest in the relativistic mass of photons in the context of gravitational attraction, gravitational lensing, and that sort of thing.  Someone who wants to treat photons as gravitational attractors such as the questioner in this case, or myself, will be unsatisfied by limiting the problem to special relativity.  We want to know specifically why using $m= h / \lambda c$, and applying it in all other classical senses will screw things up.  I mean, I can take the above, say $F=dp/dt$, then plug and chug into Newtonian gravity all day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go into this detail to show why I wouldn't even downvote the main answer, meaning I don't see what is wrong about it, in addition to the fact it's useful to what I want to know.  Hopefully I'm also helping you to identify what burden of proof you have to show why some concept &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T15:07:14.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-08-09T16:19:29.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you more interested in how to handle tag edit wars in general, or just this specific one? If you want in general, what you did was best - do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reciprocate or rollback, and start a Meta discussion to get things settled with proper discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want specific feedback, well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/836/whats-the-best-way-to-handle-tag-edit-warring/837#837&quot;&gt;dmckee has that for you&lt;/a&gt;. ♪&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-08-09T16:19:29.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="842" CreationDate="2011-08-10T17:23:15.973" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal.force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal.force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal.force&lt;/a&gt; today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now clearly, that have a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; where we expect a &lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt;, so it needs to be fixed, but what &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; the tag be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other existing tide related tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal-effect&lt;/a&gt; which has the right form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tide&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tide&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal-force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal-effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;others??&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;more than one? If more than one what are the distinctions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-09-12T02:34:24.057" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T02:34:24.057" Title="What to do with tide related tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="841" CreationDate="2011-08-10T18:50:08.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physically, it seems like these are all referring to the same thing, so personally I'd be inclined to just merge them all into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tidal-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tidal-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tidal-effect&lt;/a&gt;. At least, I definitely wouldn't use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tide&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tide&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tide&lt;/a&gt; because that suggests ocean tides on the Earth, which is only one example of the tidal effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-08-10T18:50:08.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="846" CreationDate="2011-08-12T20:28:53.557" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;One user called Noldorin on the first page of weekly reputation points has a score of 74, even though he hasn't asked/answered a question since July. Maybe people automatically get reputation points in proportion to how much they already have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-08-13T06:54:48.100" LastActivityDate="2011-08-13T06:54:48.100" Title="Why do some absent users get a weekly reputation of over 50?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="845" CreationDate="2011-08-12T20:47:59.820" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions and answers a person posts can still get upvoted (thus earning them reputation) even if the person isn't active on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T20:47:59.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="845" CreationDate="2011-08-12T21:05:54.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;automatic&quot; reputation, but these sites are meant to provide a repository of good questions and answers which people can search for help; and when people find them often vote for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T21:05:54.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-14T03:07:11.013" Score="9" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;If not why would they devote so much time editing questions and so forth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do they get in return for these services?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4570" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-08-14T04:25:25.763" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T14:30:35.913" Title="Are moderators paid to moderate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="848" CreationDate="2011-08-14T03:09:07.130" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paid?&lt;/strong&gt; No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do I get?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, aside from the thrill of power there is the warm glow of a job well done and they sent me a Stack Exchange Tee-shirt so that all may know me for the geek I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update Dec, 2012&lt;/strong&gt; StackExchange is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/12/stack-exchange-gives-back-2011/&quot;&gt;making charitable donations in the names of community moderators&lt;/a&gt;, which feels like a kind of compensation to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-12-22T14:30:35.913" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T14:30:35.913" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="848" CreationDate="2011-08-14T04:26:16.017" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tBemt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;absolute power corrupts absolutely, but it also rocks absolutely.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But seriously, remember that community moderators &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;are democratically elected&lt;/a&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/stack-exchange-moderator-elections-begin/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/stack-exchange-moderator-elections-begin/&lt;/a&gt; for details on that. So you might well ask, &quot;why does anyone run for public office?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-14T04:26:16.017" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="852" CreationDate="2011-08-14T23:43:07.540" Score="14" ViewCount="5378" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the software used to run stackexchange open source? I haven't found any info on this in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/about&lt;/a&gt; . A related question is the status of its data. I understand that everything is CC-BY-SA licensed (which is great!), and that, e.g., mathoverflow posts dumps periodically at &lt;a href=&quot;http://dumps.mathoverflow.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dumps.mathoverflow.net/&lt;/a&gt; . If SE turned out to be unprofitable and Union Square Ventures didn't come through with more money, could sites like physics.se have their data preserved and be rebuilt with different hosting, or could everything just vanish into a black hole? If the software is proprietary, would such a rebuilding involve recreating all the software from scratch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/10/stackoverflow-shares-its-mojo.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/10/stackoverflow-shares-its-mojo.php&lt;/a&gt; , which seems to indicate that the software is being sold, although that doesn't necessarily mean it's closed-source (e.g., Red Hat sells a flavor of linux that's open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Is stackexchange open source?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="851" CreationDate="2011-08-14T23:57:16.330" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not open source. The &lt;em&gt;data&lt;/em&gt; is released under a CC license, but the software is proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link you found and included in your edit refers to an old program known as &quot;Stack Exchange 1.0&quot; under which Stack Overflow Inc. would effectively rent out the use of its software to third parties to create their own sites. As far as I know, the software would still run on Stack Overflow's servers, so the third parties never got direct access to it in either binary or source form. Anyway, the Stack Exchange 1.0 program has since been discontinued and replaced by the current system, under which sites are created at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If SE turned out to be unprofitable and Union Square Ventures didn't come through with more money, could sites like physics.se have their data preserved and be rebuilt with different hosting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, in principle, since SE releases &lt;strike&gt;monthly&lt;/strike&gt; periodic &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/&quot;&gt;data dumps&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the software is proprietary, would such a rebuilding involve recreating all the software from scratch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it would, although I believe there are a couple of open source projects that aim to create Stack Exchange &quot;clones&quot; which could, in principle, import data from one of the data dumps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, you can search on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; where this has already been asked a number of times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-11-20T22:26:47.083" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T22:26:47.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="851" CreationDate="2011-08-15T07:56:43.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As David said, it is proprietary. However, here is a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones&quot;&gt;OpenSource clones&lt;/a&gt; of the engine. IMO the most advanced are &lt;a href=&quot;http://shapado.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shapado&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.osqa.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSQA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T07:56:43.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="855" CreationDate="2011-08-15T17:35:25.967" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a question which has two parts. The 1st part can be answered independently from the 2nd, and it is easier to formulate the 2nd one once the 1st part is answered. However, both parts together give a better context for the question and may invite unanticipated answers that do not split the problem into part 1, part 2 the way I see it. Should I post a single question or two questions (for each part)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1739" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T17:48:25.033" Title="A question with two parts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="854" CreationDate="2011-08-15T17:48:25.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the second question depend on the answer to the first?&lt;/strong&gt; If so, I think you really have to wait until you have an answer to the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me to wonder: &lt;strong&gt;do you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the answer to the first question&lt;/strong&gt;; do you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you know it and simple want a reliable source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-08-15T17:48:25.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-18T20:36:02.987" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where and how would I ask a question such as: &quot;what do you consider to be the most profound question asked at stack.exchange.physics while you've been here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand I don't think it falls into the category of the sort of questions that should be asked since there is no right or wrong answer and is merely an opinion. Yet on the other hand, it seems to be similar to questions asked about book recommendations and could be tagged as wiki-community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would the moderators deal with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2011-08-18T21:59:35.823" LastActivityDate="2011-08-18T21:59:35.823" Title="where should questions about questions asked at stack physics exchange be asked?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="857" CreationDate="2011-08-18T20:46:06.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where should questions about questions asked at stack physics exchange be asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On meta, i.e. right here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular question you're asking about, though, is way too open-ended and not constructive, so it'd be a good candidate to get closed. Of course, we're not as active about &quot;policing&quot; meta questions as we are on the main site... still I think something like that would be best left in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-08-18T20:46:06.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="861" CreationDate="2011-08-21T19:18:03.933" Score="7" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/are-answers-that-just-contain-links-elsewhere-really-good-answers&quot;&gt;(admittedly old) question&lt;/a&gt; on meta.SO concerns the handling of answers which contain a link and essentially nothing else. There are some varied opinions on how to handle such answers, ranging from upvoting (the view that as long as the answer to the question can be found at the link, it's fine) to flagging as &quot;not an answer&quot; (the view that &quot;outsourcing&quot; the burden of answering to another site is effectively useless).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since physics is somewhat different from programming, it occurs to me that the discussion on meta.SO might not be &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; applicable to this site. &lt;strong&gt;What does the physics.SE community think of link-only answers?&lt;/strong&gt; Do we upvote them, edit them, downvote them, flag them, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-08-23T13:58:34.030" Title="Are link-only answers acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|answers|links|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="859" CreationDate="2011-08-21T22:51:48.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; been a fan a plain links. You need at least to summarize the gist of the what is on the other side, and if there is a figure, equation, table, or quote that is the main point &lt;em&gt;that content&lt;/em&gt; should be copied locally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proceeding is something I believe to be true all over the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is another issue on Physics.SE...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...maybe I'm just suffering from confirmation bias, but I have this feeling that a greater fraction of bare links go to...&lt;em&gt;ahem&lt;/em&gt;...unusual...&lt;em&gt;yeah&lt;/em&gt;...theories than we see in posts whose content is local.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-08-21T22:51:48.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="859" CreationDate="2011-08-23T05:29:59.720" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No -- they're not acceptable for the reasons covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt; --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link to a potential solution is always welcome, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have to &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; the link to get the core of the answer, that answer is ... really not a valid answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-08-23T05:29:59.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="859" CreationDate="2011-08-23T13:58:34.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed an interesting thing on Physics SE, which is that someone will have a link that answers the question very well and then just put it as a comment.  These comments often contain some context for the link as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason you could come up with for hesitating to post an answer and just posting a comment is that you're not at risk for negative reputation.  I do think that getting more answers would be better though.  I've had to tell people to make their comment into an answer before, and I think this site would be better if there were more answers to choose from, as long as people are vigilant about distributing their votes to the most productive answers.  After all, that's the value of the voting system in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all said, yes, context should be provided.  At minimum an answer should have a sentence justifying why the content at the link answers the question.  This is often not the case and they need to justify themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2011-08-23T13:58:34.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="864" CreationDate="2011-08-24T17:31:17.577" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13923/would-portal-style-portals-transmit-gravity&quot;&gt;Would Portal-style portals transmit gravity?&lt;/a&gt; was recently migrated from scifi.SE. Some people think it's off topic, some people don't, and I can kind of see both sides so I'm not quite sure what to do with it. On one hand, portals aren't real, and we can't meaningfully apply actual physics to a situation that can't arise. On the other hand, the physics of Portal is very &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; to being real, enough so that we could perhaps offer useful insights as to how it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; work; plus, it's not unprecedented for answers to make a &quot;best guess&quot; explanation for things seen in science fiction (the example that comes to mind is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10827/is-aluminium-magnetic/10832&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, because I posted it, though I believe there are others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T20:34:52.820" Title="Questions about (barely) hypothetical scenarios: on topic or not?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="863" CreationDate="2011-08-24T17:41:25.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I closed it (before I saw this post, not as a response to it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core problem is that the &quot;portals&quot; are not specified in physics. We don't know how they work, because no one ever bothered to figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This causes the question to be mathematically ill-posed: what is meant by &quot;transmit gravity&quot;? (Especially as in a GR picture gravity is the shape of space and that is the only possible mechanism for building a multiply-connected spacial topology.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the questions of &quot;almost science&quot; or speculative questions, I think there is a place for these if they are sufficiently well defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to think up a few example of things that are definitely &quot;in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dropping things (or people) through a bore-hole along a diameter of a planet (an old stand-by).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The consequences of discovering a magnetic monopoles and the technological implication of the same&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics relating to quantum black holes massive enough to hand around for a while (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hole_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hole Man&lt;/a&gt; or the Pluto solution in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Globe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Golden Globe&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We already have a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12834/520&quot;&gt;communication via modulated neutrino beams&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-08-24T20:34:52.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-08-25T16:53:08.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvote a lot, so I guess I should explain myself: there are places where you have a wrong answer accepted as correct, and with a billion up votes. I down vote and comment so that the original poster will pay attention that this is wrong, and irresponsible to leave up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some flat out wrong, ridiculously up-voted, accepted answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6086/how-does-this-thought-experiment-not-rule-out-black-holes/13781#13781&quot;&gt;How does this thought experiment not rule out black holes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13043/does-the-energy-catalyzer-generate-energy-by-converting-nickel-to-copper/13819#13819&quot;&gt;Does the &amp;quot;Energy Catalyzer&amp;quot; by Andrea Rossi et al. generate energy by converting Nickel to Copper?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some highly misleading answers, also ridiculously up-voted and accepted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7232/does-gr-provide-a-maximum-electric-field-limit/13906#13906&quot;&gt;Does GR provide a maximum electric field limit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13744/do-all-event-horizons-emit-radiation/13748#13748&quot;&gt;Do all event horizons emit radiation?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11039/what-does-it-mean-that-the-neutral-pion-is-a-mixture-of-quarks/13537#13537&quot;&gt;What does it mean that the neutral pion is a mixture of quarks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is naughty to ask a question when you already know the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13217/shaping-a-wire-such-that-a-bead-sliding-on-it-has-exactly-isochronous-oscillation&quot;&gt;Shaping a wire such that a bead sliding on it has exactly isochronous oscillations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that in physics there are objective answers, and wrong answers stick out sorely, much more than right answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-08-25T16:53:08.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="867" CreationDate="2011-08-27T03:56:56.493" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this annoying tag attached to one of my questions, for which I have no interest in accepting the one inadequate answer, nor of starting a bounty. What makes this tag appear? Can you make it go away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What's up with the &quot;Have you considered starting a bounty or accepting an answer&quot; tag?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="866" CreationDate="2011-08-27T08:14:08.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57707/a-suggestion-of-yes-no-button-in-front-of-this-have-you-considered-accepting-an&quot;&gt;This message will automatically go away after 60 days.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if nothing worth accepting shows up in that time, you'll at least be rid of it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-08-27T08:14:08.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="869" CreationDate="2011-08-28T00:46:07.283" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13367/theory-of-complex-spectra-applying-slater-condon-rules&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; is open and has a bounty. Nobody has attempted to answer it at the time of writing. I'm unable to answer it as it stands. Below you'll find a screenshot as I see it on mac os using the latest stable version of firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eZvvj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T00:56:44.183" Title="Why can't I answer my own question?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="868" CreationDate="2011-08-28T00:56:44.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, I see what's going on: you have to click the &quot;Answer Your Question&quot; button at the bottom. The site puts in that extra hurdle when you're viewing your own question because otherwise, new users tend to post comments or edits as answers to their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T00:56:44.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-28T20:27:53.997" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing a  lot of physics on Mathematica and am running into questions regarding the software. Are these ok to ask in the main section? Anywhere where they might be more appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1939" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T11:24:48.890" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T11:24:48.890" Title="Questions on Mathematica permissible?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|software-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2011-08-28T20:47:08.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, questions on Mathematica in general aren't really appropriate for this site because Mathematica is just a tool used to do physics. I'd suggest going to &lt;a href=&quot;http://superuser.com&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt;, or if what you're trying to do with Mathematica is complex enough to qualify as programming, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. That being said, there are a few Mathematica-related questions that would be appropriate here, because they are actually about the physics that motivates the calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like, you can bring this up in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; and someone can advise you on the best place to send your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T20:47:08.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2011-08-28T21:43:30.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note there is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/15787/mathematica&quot;&gt;Mathematica proposal on Area&lt;/a&gt;. Yet in a very early stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T21:43:30.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="874" CreationDate="2011-08-28T21:45:27.723" Score="9" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lubos Motl has fairly complained that the site has had an unfortunate number of questions which are of a pop-sci philsophical flavor (Why is there something rather than nothing? What came before the big bang?), and many homework style problems (What happens to this pully/weight system?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to allow these questions to get answers, but at the same time to allow people to ignore them, I had the following perhaps silly ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question can be answered in one line and involves nothing beyond Wikipedia facts: like &quot;How to visualize the difference in scale between the nucleus and the atom&quot;, perhaps one can answer with one line, &quot;The same difference as between a football field and a small kernel of corn&quot;, and close the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question cannot be given a logical positivist formulation, so that the answer is not clearly meaningful, perhaps it can be redirected to a different stackexchange, like philosophy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question is homework-ish, if its solution requires no concepts beyond what is standard in the undergraduate curriculum, it can be given the &quot;homework&quot; tag, and omitted from the site list by default (so that only users who choose specifically to see such questions will see them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question is pop-sci-ish (involving rubber sheets for General Relativity, or balloons for big bang), then tag it with &quot;pop-sci&quot; and omit it by default.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this website is more like &quot;math.stackexchange&quot; than &quot;math.overflow&quot;, but it is difficult to navigate the repetitive soup of pop-sci questions and homework. Perhaps it is possible to have one site which functions for all people, but I think that this means that the default questions you see should be the kinds of questions whose answer is not immediately obvious to all physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just throwing this out there, I am a new user, and this has probably been discussed before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-08-28T23:33:55.487" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T17:13:06.353" Title="Improving signal/noise ratio" Tags="|discussion|content-level|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2011-08-28T21:55:33.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can assure you that there will be no content omitted by default as this goes against our basic design (making it easy for people to find content). There is a working ignored-tags function for users who do not wish to see certain content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You proposal for the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is consistent with the practice on Stack Overflow, and is fine by me, noting that w&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/612/520&quot;&gt;e have already decided against allowing &lt;em&gt;&quot;solve this problem for me&quot;&lt;/em&gt; type problems in favor of &lt;em&gt;&quot;explain this physics 101 concept&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/520&quot;&gt;use of [homework] is already policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pop-sci&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pop-sci&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pop-sci&lt;/a&gt; is also fine with me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We've been trying to chase the worst of the philosophical stuff away. Could you provide some examples of still open question to which you believe this policy should be applied? Indeed, examples would be helpful in all categories. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there has always been some trouble with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, in that some users object when it is applied to their question---either because &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/234/520&quot;&gt;they came by this particular pedagogical question in some other context&lt;/a&gt; or because they feel it is pejorative. I imagine we can expect the same from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pop-sci&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pop-sci&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pop-sci&lt;/a&gt; though I'd suggest that people asking them just get over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-08-29T01:35:39.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2011-08-28T23:33:39.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with what dmckee said, in particular that you should try the ignored tags feature. But to add to that:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...that the site has had an unfortunate number of questions which are of a pop-sci philsophical flavor (Why is there something rather than nothing? What came before the big bang?)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions get closed pretty quickly, and people seem to be getting the idea that they are not appropriate here. We did have more of a problem of this in the early days of the site, but not so much any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...and many homework style problems (What happens to this pully/weight system?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much addressed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/520&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; dmckee linked to. Basically we don't exclude homework questions entirely, because this site is effectively a PR machine for physics (well, that's the goal anyway), but we have stricter requirements than something like Physics Forums in that homework questions asked here should be of some use to other people who aren't doing that particular problem. Right now homework questions do constitute a minority of the questions we get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question can be answered in one line and involves nothing beyond Wikipedia facts: like &quot;How to visualize the difference in scale between the nucleus and the atom&quot;, perhaps one can answer with one line, &quot;The same difference as between a football field and a small kernel of corn&quot;, and close the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is to be closed, it shouldn't be getting answers. The entire point of closing a question is to keep it from being answered (and more generally, from getting attention), so answering and then closing would be pretty useless. With some of these questions there can be useful things to say beyond just what one could look up in an encyclopedia, so I generally favor leaving them open and just not voting them up too much; of course, there aren't that many truly trivial questions on the site. If we had a lot more of them, I'd probably think differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question cannot be given a logical positivist formulation, so that the answer is not clearly meaningful, perhaps it can be redirected to a different stackexchange, like philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, we generally do that already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question is pop-sci-ish (involving rubber sheets for General Relativity, or balloons for big bang), then tag it with &quot;pop-sci&quot; and omit it by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look at these as an opportunity to explain things more accurately, to rid non-experts of some misconceptions they may have picked up due to these analogies. It fits into the role I see for the site as a PR thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2011-08-28T23:33:39.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2011-08-29T14:13:10.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally agree with Lubos and this seems a general problem to me on scientific SE proposals. I asked this question on AREA51&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2733/38770&quot;&gt;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2733/38770&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signal/Noise Ratio is the perfect term, thats why we have peer-review in top journals. This way important questions and information is highlighted to the scientific community. Why can proven experts like Lubos not have a higher vote count than 30 rep points lawman here? Doenst make any sense to me. I mainly search questions on any SE site by number of votes, but with current system on scientific sites with much less dynamics and user like huge stackoverflow the 1 user 1 vote system doesnt work to filter out these questions. My time is limited...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question to me is not how to avoid pop-sci-fi questions, you get them anyway. But how to highlight top-notch questions&lt;/strong&gt; Currently this is not possible by votes sorting nor tag sorting!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2011-08-29T14:13:10.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2011-08-30T17:40:00.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lubos Motl has fairly complained that the site has had an unfortunate number of questions which are of a pop-sci philsophical flavor &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused about this &quot;fair&quot; complaint when it seems that the entire point of stack exchange sites (altogether) is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's generally correct to note that better questions get higher ratings.  If someone wants to spend less of their time on this site while being more effective, why can't they just filter out all the the questions with below 5 votes or something like that?  If that sort of solution would be unacceptable, then I have to question if the problem is really a problem of site management or just a conflict of the knowledge levels of people using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed, btw, that many many physics and science oriented questions &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been finding their way to the philosophy SE, although you might not notice b/c people have learned to ask over there in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T17:40:00.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="802" CreationDate="2011-08-30T18:52:13.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would support closed questions to be tagged as closed, so people can put them into their ignored tags. If the question is reopened, the tag can be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2151" LastActivityDate="2011-08-30T18:52:13.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-30T22:45:58.817" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;on behalf of a small community of german scientists [physics &amp;amp; astrophysics, astronomy, not insiders in QG] and interested laymen I would like to compile a rather short questionlist regarding current status of LQG. The list should reflect current research topics [general questions, recent advances, major problems and open questions]. Our intention is not to start an own research program, it's just to get a brief overview and to understand better some arxiv papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be OK for you a) to support us compiling such a list [suggestions from our side] and b) to answer the questions from your perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best regards&#xA;Tom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5090" LastActivityDate="2011-08-31T00:43:08.923" Title="Questionlist regarding current status of LQG" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="879" CreationDate="2011-08-31T00:43:08.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I exactly understand what you have in mind. If you mean that you'd like to compile a list of questions and then get those questions answered on Physics Stack Exchange... it's certainly okay to ask the questions here (well, actually on &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the main site&lt;/a&gt;, not on this meta site), and hopefully people can answer them. But this would not be an appropriate place to post the list itself. You could, of course, compile a list of questions on a separate website if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you could do is look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-gravity&quot;&gt;quantum-gravity tag&lt;/a&gt;, which is an easy way to see all the questions that have been asked about quantum gravity. When you ask a question of your own, as long as you specify that tag when you ask the question, your question will show up in that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-08-31T00:43:08.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-31T08:27:32.113" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just answered this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14165/how-can-area-be-a-vector&quot;&gt;How can area be a vector?&lt;/a&gt; and included a couple of images. I think especially for novices a picture of what you just wrote can go a long way to explain the concept. I &quot;stole&quot; those from wikipedia. Is there a way to scale them down a bit from the original size, since they turned out a little too big.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-08-31T15:35:29.500" Title="Is there a way to scale images imported into answers?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="881" CreationDate="2011-08-31T14:35:56.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think markdown provides any help, but perhaps including the images with html tags and size attributes would do the trick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise you could copy the images to your machine, scale them with your favorite graphics tools and upload them from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-08-31T15:35:29.500" LastActivityDate="2011-08-31T15:35:29.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-31T15:09:43.007" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;A hypothesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spectrum of non-physical/-technical topics/proposals via AREA51 is exponentially growing. While this is a minor problem for insulated communities/topics, like programming/cstheory, popular scientific topics like phyiscs/philsophy attract alot hobby-interested laymen (which is good!). BUT, assuming a similar growth rate (probably mainly determined by social sharing functions here and time scales of a year, not montly meta discussion of fluctuating quality here!) for the small number of graduated experts or physics students here and the the much more interested laymen, the signal/noise ratio has to decrease with time, as a bigger number grows exp. faster than a smaller :( simple math.(probably the growth rate for new physics experts on SE is quite lower than average user if you look on progress of theophysics proposal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a 1 user - 1 upvote system IMHO this growth will induce serious signal/noise ratio problems here (lets face it, it gets like yahoo answers, digg, most other Q&amp;amp;A sites). Of course one can still regulate and close bad and off-topic questions, but good modern questions attracting experts will just go under in lawmen votes. Not every laymen can understand the implications of a top-notch question, if you explain it literally, the question gets so long, that no one will read it, so will always gain only a small number of expters upvotes. If you look on ArXiv, there are services like scirate.com to overcome this signal/noise ratio problem or citeulike.com. Rating of mainly experts or following expters. Or peer review. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with this hypothesis and its consequences? Where are flaws and fallacies? I dont care in this question about the crucial point, if SE owner want a fast growth or higher quality than on other Q&amp;amp;A sites. Thats anyway a matter of their personal compromise we cant argue about. &lt;strong&gt;The question here is what minimum level of signal you can establish to keep experts (which make this a more interesting place than other Q&amp;amp;A sites) and what tools/options you give them to filter growing noise.&lt;/strong&gt; Experts with a phd/master/diploma dont care about their rep count (alot laymen seem imho really addicted/biased to this game). They just leave when it gets a waste of time or you have to give them a insulated proposal like theophysics, cstheory or make migration places like &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4955/popular-natural-science&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4955/popular-natural-science&lt;/a&gt; for laymen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just looks to me that instead of solving this dilemma artificially by side-proposals it could be solved with SE own rating tools adapted to current state and topic of a community much easier, faster, better and more efficient. Pure democratic 1 user 1 vote works fine with only physicists/programmers(like stackoverflow) or people electing the political direction of a government. But for quality of a topic where serious long education/background knowledge is required &amp;amp; self-teaching doesnt work, it just has to fail. This gap cannot be filled by current set up of SE voting/moderation, esp. with growing laymen number in the long run...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there no technical option to implement something like user reputation &gt; 1000 = 2 upvotes per upvoted question, &gt; 10000 = 3 upvotes per upvoted question?&lt;/strong&gt; Voting strength for answers and downvoting questions keeps 1 for all users. Due to the commitment system you have much more experts here than on other Q&amp;amp;A site, but with ongoing exp. growth its my strong belief you will loose them in the long run on popular scientific SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dont worry, i will not hassle any more than this single time, cause it will basically define, if scientific proposals for experts&amp;amp;lawmen on SE have a future for me. Personally i prefer this to experts only proposals, as there is more percolation of topics &amp;amp; users and less divas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="3715" LastEditDate="2011-09-01T11:13:32.283" LastActivityDate="2011-09-01T11:13:32.283" Title="Is the signal/noise ratio here inherently linked to overall growth of the SE network sites?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-02T09:19:56.927" Score="9" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics?referrer=5_bBucz7A70DvVVb-6SmDQ2&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics SE&lt;/a&gt; is now rather close to launch, having a good number of participants committed. But, its &lt;em&gt;commitment score&lt;/em&gt; is rather low, in part because people committed over a long period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to help it be launched?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you committed, please refresh your commitment: uncommit then re-commit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you didn't commit, please consider it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2011-09-05 Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; thanks everyone, the commitment score is now much higher (gone from 76% to 90%), and we have a larger number of committers. We're gonna make it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nXPTv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Committers timeline&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-09-05T14:04:49.153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T14:04:49.153" Title="Theoretical Physics is close to launch" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="833" CreationDate="2011-09-07T16:39:42.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example--- the answer claims that a black hole which is less dense than water will not float in water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5888/how-can-super-massive-black-holes-have-a-lower-density-than-water/14309#comment-34649&quot;&gt;How can super massive black holes have a lower density than water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2011-09-07T16:48:56.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-07T21:53:03.533" Score="6" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some really bright, talented people here that I would love to know whether they have a PhD, teach etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to send someone a private message here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T08:45:52.353" Title="How do I send private messages?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="886" CreationDate="2011-09-07T21:58:57.407" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/4830/2509&quot;&gt;no&lt;/a&gt; private &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/57203/2509&quot;&gt;messaging&lt;/a&gt; system, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/85255/2509&quot;&gt;nor will there ever be&lt;/a&gt;. The team has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/431/2509&quot;&gt;quite firm&lt;/a&gt; on this. The mantra is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not a social network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57537/how-do-i-contact-other-users&quot;&gt;Options that are available to you&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@-tagging the user in a comment (which you should probably delete afterwards)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@-tagging the user in chat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looking in the user's profile: people who want to be contacted out-of-band can provide the means there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T08:45:52.353" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="896" CreationDate="2011-09-10T17:39:06.043" Score="6" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently we have entertained a new use on Physics.SE (and notably on Astronomy.SE) who has four times posted identical (or nearly so) question to both Physics and Astronomy in short order. (Not that this question is meant to pick on the user in question, just that seeing these posts has brought the situation to the forefront of my attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/725/what-should-be-sent-to-astronomy-stackexchange/726#726&quot;&gt;I've been known to defend the cross-site duplication of content&lt;/a&gt; in the past, but this feels distinctly different to me and offends sensibilities developed many years ago on the Usenet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole I feel we should discourage such intentional duplication, but I am interested to hear what other have to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14524/remnant-of-a-supernova&quot;&gt;Remnant of a supernova&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1194/211&quot;&gt;remnant of a supernova&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14254/520&quot;&gt;Rainbow around Sun&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1138/211&quot;&gt;Rainbow around Sun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14212/520&quot;&gt;the collision of Phobos&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1134/211&quot;&gt;The collision of Phobos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/13991/520&quot;&gt;two distant galaxies seen from earth&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1127/211&quot;&gt;Galaxies seen from earth&lt;/a&gt; (despite the difference in titles the text is the same)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Should users be cross-posting questions" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-12T02:35:11.170" Score="6" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nine questions were tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;color&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;color&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color&quot;&gt;seven related to the perceptual values of different frequencies of visible light&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color-charge&quot;&gt;two related to the characteristic charge of the strong nuclear force&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being I have re-tagged the latter as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color-charge&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;color-charge&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;color-charge&lt;/a&gt;, but I am interested in alternate opinions on the correct tagging. Does perceptual color have a well defined place in physics, and if not should we reserve &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;color&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;color&lt;/a&gt; for the quantum number of the quarks? Or is the casual usage so strongly fixed that we should keep the perceptual tag to avoid confusion for beginners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T02:44:19.613" Title="Ambiguity in the [color] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|content-level|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="889" CreationDate="2011-09-12T02:44:19.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I would be in favor of keeping &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;color&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;color&lt;/a&gt; to refer to the optical concept, mostly because doing otherwise is going to confuse the heck out of a lot of people who aren't familiar with QCD. Also, questions about SU(3) color charge usually can be identified well enough with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-chromodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-chromodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-chromodynamics&lt;/a&gt;, although I wouldn't be opposed to keeping &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color-charge&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;color-charge&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;color-charge&lt;/a&gt; around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I hope this is not the only answer to be posted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T02:44:19.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-12T04:21:12.513" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed there is a clear anomaly in how the site counts whether or not you've &quot;visited&quot; in a given day, as displayed on profiles in the visited xx days, xx consecutive part.  Some days that I visit the site it doesn't include it in the count.  Lately I've noticed a calender that shows specifically what days you did and didn't visit - and sure enough - there are recent days I went to the Physics SE bookmark and it didn't register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried this on other SE sites.  I made a bookmark folder that had SE sites for several accounts, and even though I'll visit them all, they will all read &quot;1 consecutive&quot; the next day.  However, if I click through several things and do several things, it registers the activity.  I do not know what it requires in order to count it or not count it and I'd like to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine some people hoping for the gold badge for 100 days visiting might be sourly surprised by site behavior on this account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2011-09-12T05:54:04.183" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T06:35:15.520" Title="How does SE decide to count user visits?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="891" CreationDate="2011-09-12T06:35:15.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;homepage visits are not counted toward this, you must visit an &quot;interior&quot; page&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;our day is UTC 00:00:00 to UTC 23:59:59&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T06:35:15.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-12T14:32:10.907" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is spam, it is written by a phony user, it is phrased in an obvious attempt to grab attention, using silly profane acronyms that you have to decipher, but it is asking a legitimate question, and there are interesting things to say about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10961/gdiwtfu-with-lattice-qcd-and-the-5th-dimension&quot;&gt;Lattice QCD and the 5th dimension&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be closed, or answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar questions can be asked about obvious commercial spam (answered, in this case, and probably of interest, but clearly written by an advertizing department):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14502/plenoptic-camera-and-display&quot;&gt;Plenoptic camera and display&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T19:59:23.383" Title="This question is obvious spam" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2011-09-12T15:57:24.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmmm...I had missed the money quote when I view this previously:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I buy a shirt that says: 5DLQCD or STFU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T15:57:24.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2011-09-12T19:59:23.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question in question is obvious spam, it's just not particularly well written. In a case like this I'd say edit it to clarify it (e.g. expand the acronyms, maybe remove some of the &quot;flowery&quot; language) and answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is so badly written that you can't even make sense of it, then voting to close it is probably more appropriate. If a question contains a completely irrelevant link or URL, use a spam flag instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-09-12T19:59:23.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="888" CreationDate="2011-09-13T03:28:55.710" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting questions across Stack Exchange sites is strongly discouraged. See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-it-possible-to-post-questions-across-a-couple-of-the-sites-because-its-debata/64073#64073&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing cross-posting [across the Stack Exchange network] is a slippery slope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you might have slightly better odds of getting an answer by posting it on two sites, well, by gum, why not maximize your odds by posting it on &lt;em&gt;twenty sites!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some questions which fall into grey areas between sites, and I think it's OK to &lt;strong&gt;ask and delete, then re-ask&lt;/strong&gt; if you feel you have asked on the wrong site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as a general rule, do not cross-post questions, please. Pick a site and go with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also ok to ask &lt;em&gt;two different versions&lt;/em&gt; of a question but you MUST tailor it to the audience on that site. Copying and pasting would put you on the road to account suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(there's also the issue of cross-posting on multiple websites that aren't Stack Exchange sites.. so long as you're willing to be &lt;em&gt;responsible&lt;/em&gt; for the question everywhere you asked it, this can be ok-ish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T03:28:55.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T20:22:38.917" Score="3" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do the moderators have any idea why the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/329/marek&quot;&gt;Marek&lt;/a&gt; has suddenly stopped contributing to physics stack exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really miss his brilliant answers and I'm just wondering if Lubos posting about him and Ron in a disrespecful way some time ago on his &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/08/unity-and-uniqueness-of-string-theory.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; might have had something to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T08:06:16.937" Title="Why has Marek stopped contributing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="897" CreationDate="2011-09-14T08:06:16.937" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because I am busy with quite a lot of stuff. But I might get back when things settle down a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Luboš, I don't mind in the slightest since I have been familiar with his overaggressive (at least on the internet) personality for some time now. But this is totally OT, just saying 'cause you asked ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T08:06:16.937" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="901" CreationDate="2011-09-14T15:29:26.440" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that the how-things-work site has been closed and in spite of some people wishing to raise the standard, there are a number of questions about the physics of how things such as common machines and appliances work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any consensus on a &quot;how things work&quot; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ps Not really a dupe of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/170/what-tag-should-we-use-to-indicate-how-does-x-work&quot;&gt;What tag should we use to indicate &amp;quot;how does X work?&amp;quot; ?&lt;/a&gt; - I'm intending this for a &quot;how does an air conditioner work&quot; not a &quot;how does gravity work&quot; type question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2525" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:10:53.507" Title="&quot;how things work&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="900" CreationDate="2011-09-14T19:10:53.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some (many?) of these questions will likely be off topic, in which case the tags probably don't matter... but for the rest, we do have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt; tag that I think should cover it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:10:53.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="903" CreationDate="2011-09-15T00:01:36.403" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question has been deleted. Please post it here so I could copy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember the name, but it was about scientific method and boundaries of science and selective measurement that makes the result to appear differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T00:20:09.600" Title="Please recover my closed question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="902" CreationDate="2011-09-15T00:07:53.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here you go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my opinion natural science is a collectivist tool of research,&#xA;  invented to improve human's ability to understand nature. Science&#xA;  gives people two main advantages which are impossible with other means&#xA;  of learning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) The possibility to share and exchange knowledge between researchers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) The possibility to construct advanced research instruments which&#xA;  would be impossible or difficult to construct individually or by&#xA;  individual's funding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus the natural science provides huge advantages to the researchers.&#xA;  But it seems that its collectivist nature actually limits its&#xA;  applicability and scope. Even more, there can be situations where&#xA;  scientific method leads to controversial and paradoxical results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, imagine the following setting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a group of researchers prepared to conduct an experiment with&#xA;  throwing a coin. But before the experiment each researcher is covertly&#xA;  cloned: an exact copy of him is created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then all researchers perform the experiment: a coin is thrown and they&#xA;  measure to which side the coin fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After the experiment one clone of each researcher in killed, depending&#xA;  on which throwing outcome they observed with those who observe the&#xA;  coin to fall to side A killed more often than those who observed the&#xA;  coin to fall to side B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After the experiment all survived copies of the researchers meet to&#xA;  discuss the results. Not knowing that they were cloned they would&#xA;  conclude that the coin has a potential field that makes it fall to one&#xA;  side more often than the other. They even can claim it is a new law of&#xA;  nature based on their experiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the assumption that the potential field exists they can calculate&#xA;  the potential energy of any configuration that involves the coin. But&#xA;  if the cloning of the researchers stops, the researchers will discover&#xA;  the disappearance on the apparent field and the violation of the&#xA;  conservation of energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) How from the point of view of the above-mentioned researchers&#xA;  explain the apparent violation of the conservation of energy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) Does the potential possibility of the above-mentioned&#xA;  result-censoring manipulation invalidate the trust into scientific&#xA;  method?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) How can we know that the fields and laws which we observe do in&#xA;  fact exist and are not actually illusions due to result selection?&#xA;  Namely, can we be confident that the second law of thermodynamics or&#xA;  statistical properties of radioactive decay are actually laws of&#xA;  nature rather than a systematic error due to proper selection of the&#xA;  outcomes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4) Does the very ineradicable fact that any quantum measurement&#xA;  affects the observer undermine the viability of the scientific method&#xA;  based on the consensus on the researchers at least in quantum&#xA;  mechanics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the future, if a question of yours gets closed I suggest you copy the text so you don't have to keep asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T00:07:53.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-17T19:57:37.753" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about research careers, or rather PhD programmes but I'm not sure if it is on or off topic. From several threads here on meta I gathered that there is no general consensus on these sort of questions yet and that the chat is a good place to ask first before posting a possibly off-topic question. Since however the chat is rather slow at the moment and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16617/academia&quot;&gt;academia proposal&lt;/a&gt; had not launched yet, I repost my question here. I would suggest posting answers to the question itself in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and answers as to wether my question is on or off topic in this thread.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(This is my first question on meta. I hope I'm doing this right.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on my Master's thesis in the field of Heavy Ion Physics. I did some work on a statistical model and am now learning about parton distribution functions, fragmentation functions and a tiny bit about the Color Glass Condensate framework. The goal is to try and apply that knowledge to Pb-Pb collisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very much interested in doing a PhD after I finnish. I would like to do my PhD in a country where I would be required to pay tuition and thus need a specific scholarship. I would be unable to do a PhD in that country without said (or equivalent) scholarship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: how common it is for physicists to 'change fields' (within physics) between their Master's degree and their PhD degree? I am of course looking for positions where I could do something similar to what I'm doing now. However, I'm open to alternatives. Would it be weird (&lt;em&gt;read: would it look weird on my application&lt;/em&gt;) to apply for a scholarship for a PhD in e.g. early universe cosmology? I have heard a lecture on GR and one on basic cosmology, but nothing deeper than that. The topic sounds interesting however and I would certainly be willing to learn the required methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4541" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T20:05:59.497" Title="Questions concerning a career in research on or off topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="905" CreationDate="2011-09-17T20:05:59.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a number of career related questions on the site already, mostly in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics-careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics-careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics-careers&lt;/a&gt;. They are a bit of mixed bag in terms of being open/closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm of mixed mind about them. I've answered several of them myself, but I would not like to see them become a regular feature of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Towards you question, if your country of interest is the USA then many (most?) positions in Ph.D. programs come with tuition support and/or a stipend of some kind or another. (Mind you, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; didn't have any support for the first year of my graduate studies, but that's on account of my undergrad GPA...) I think much of Europe is similar, though there seems to be considerable variation from country to country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T20:05:59.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-20T02:18:25.520" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18/astronomy-astrophyiscs-related-question-here&quot;&gt;sporadic discussions&lt;/a&gt; about how to determine the topic boundary between Astronomy.SE and Physics.SE and what kinds of questions should be transferred over to the astro site. They've also had some discussions on the same topic. So we thought it would be a good idea to get everyone together and work out how to draw the boundary between the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will be a chat event in the Astronomy chat room this Friday at 1600 UTC (noon EDT). If you're free at that time, please consider dropping in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/815/colloquium?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/815/colloquium?tab=schedule&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T20:26:37.293" Title="Astronomy / Physics discussion on topic distinction" Tags="|discussion|scope|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-24T01:34:45.077" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15021/the-bar-tender-says-we-dont-serve-tachyons-around-here&quot;&gt;we don't serve tachyons around here&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;closed? To me is seemed on topic because it asked about the physics in a joke that only physicists would appear to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-10-26T21:49:26.930" Title="why was this question closed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-09-24T18:29:31.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, it seems on topic to me. Not the most insightful question, to be sure, but it does take some knowledge of physics to provide a correct answer. I would like to know why dmckee chose to close it in the first place though (foul mood or not, everything gets done for some reason :-P).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T18:29:31.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-24T19:40:51.307" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday we had a question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15017/probablistic-problems-in-physics&quot;&gt;Probablistic problems in physics?&lt;/a&gt;, which I initially closed, but (as Ron pointed out) perhaps I shouldn't have. My reasoning was that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;these questions, or at least their answers, become out of date quickly as the problems are solved (as opposed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1453/great-unsolved-physics-problems&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1453/great-unsolved-physics-problems&lt;/a&gt;, student-level problems can't be all that difficult, so they don't last that long)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we should at least keep these lists organized and limited in number, to make it clear that these aren't the kinds of questions we want dominating the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking that if we allow questions about &quot;open problems in X&quot; for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; X it leads to a proliferation of questions, so there should be some limited set of topics that people can ask these questions about (kind of like how the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;book recommendations&lt;/a&gt; are organized by specific subject areas). Probability in physics seems unlikely to be one of those areas. We could have just one big list question for student-level problems in all areas, but it seems like that might be hard to search, especially for someone who has an idea of what area they want to work in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I wanted to get a few more people's input:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the fact that open problems won't be open all that long (my point #1) a reason to disallow &quot;open problems&quot; questions on the site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we be controlling the number of them by limiting them to certain broad subfields of physics? Or is it just anything goes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-09-25T08:03:54.577" Title="Questions about student-level problems" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="910" CreationDate="2011-09-25T08:03:54.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I thought it should stay open is because the listing of interesting &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; open problems is something that the usual literature is very bad at, because people tend to publish difficult conjectures, and just solve the easier ones. But some &quot;easy&quot; problems are very time consuming to solve, because they require simulation, or they require tedious exploration of phase spaces or models with huge case enumeration, and these problems tend to vanish in the literature muck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can serve a useful purpose by listing such problems, and giving people a heads-up where there is interesting work that can be done by someone who is not an expert. There are tons of such problems, they are everywhere around us, but they are hard to see with the blinders that come from years of specialization. So I think these type of questions are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they are open-ended, but I don't see why that is a problem--- you can make them community wiki, and let them grow naturally, like &quot;common false beliefs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2011-09-25T08:03:54.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T01:21:23.910" Score="3" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Zaslavsky has gone about wanting to delete substantive discussions in the comments surrounding certain answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14939/does-godel-preclude-a-workable-toe&quot;&gt;Does G&amp;#246;del preclude a workable ToE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15088/reproducing-the-opera-result&quot;&gt;Reproducing the OPERA result&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has decided that these discussions are somehow not appropriate. I don't agree with this assessment, but I also feel that it is annoying to delete comments that are not spam or completely off topic. Can somebody trusted decide to get rid of anything? Is this usual policy here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T04:56:40.137" Title="Deleting comments without consensus" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2011-09-28T02:55:37.143" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll link to the same thing I pointed out in chat and in one of the comment threads in question: as far as I know, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/614/how-can-we-improve-our-guidance-about-the-comment-practices/617#617&quot;&gt;post from Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt; on Christianity Meta details the Stack Exchange policy on comments. In particular, this paragraph is relevant here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But on Stack Exchange, routine cleanup of comments helps enforce the purpose of comments. Comments are there to discuss improvements to the post. When their purpose has been served, they are deleted. When comments drift into conversations, they should be deleted. &lt;strong&gt;It's all part of discouraging comments from becoming mini chat systems...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, unless the people in charge come here and post otherwise, comments are fair game for being deleted after a short time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to point out that the comment threads in question are prone to deletion simply because they developed into extended discussions, not because of any problem with their content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:03.140" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T02:55:37.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2011-09-28T04:56:40.137" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to preserve &quot;substantive discussions&quot; in comments goes against the grain of how Stack Exchange is designed. Stack Exchange is designed specifically to make discussions difficult as part of its core functionality. The Physics Stack Exchange is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a discussion forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some intriguing point is raised in the discourse of a comment thread, sure, you can pursue the question&amp;hellip; but it should be ask as part of another post. &lt;strong&gt;Stack Exchange is not about on-going, unbounded, threaded discussion&amp;hellip; and certainly not in comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators (and community) are acting properly when deleting those comment discussions. But to understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; comments are so transient and expendable, you have to understand the core &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of Stack Exchange's behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After someone asks a question, members of the community propose answers. Others vote on those answers. Very quickly, the best answers rise to the top. &lt;strong&gt;You don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the best answer.&lt;/strong&gt; If an answer can be improved, users can edit the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments help facilitate that wiki-style editing by allowing us to ask for a bit of clarification or otherwise help improve that post. &lt;em&gt;That's&lt;/em&gt; what comments are for. Period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When users start adding important, useful, and interesting information in the commentary, you break down that structure of &quot;one question, best answer.&quot; You have to comb through all the commentary for import addendums and corrections and partial answers and important bits of information spread throughout. That entirely defeats the purpose of having a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing inherently wrong with communities that that want free, open-ended discussion and back-and-forth debate. If traditional forums are your choice, there are certainly enough of them out there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on Stack Exchange, routine cleanup of comments helps enforce the &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of comments. Comments are there to discuss improvements to the post. When their purpose has been served, they are deleted. When comments drift into conversations, they should be deleted. And, as @David quoted in his post, it's all part of discouraging comments from becoming mini chat systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are asking simply is not what we do here&amp;hellip; and most like it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T04:56:40.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T18:42:53.923" Score="28" ViewCount="1254" Body="&lt;p&gt;Science proposals need your help! Consider committing to these, to make them successful &amp;amp; scientific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the long list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/7/science?tab=progress&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology?tab=progress&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; proposals on Area 51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Committers needed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/125068/synthetic-biology?referrer=ZjFlMTM2NWNkN2U0ZjFiMDUyZDIxYzJhMzZkYmIzYjhjMzJmNTIwYmUyMzEzMTE1MWE4ZTlhZTE0YzJjN2FiNRATnXrCkyDNwaFmmO_06_ohZ7NwxnP5gpEXcgUzxc8-0&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/125068.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;250&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Q&amp;A site proposal: Synthetic Biology&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Site definition needed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sites in beta&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/7/science?tab=beta&quot;&gt;Science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology?tab=beta&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt; sites currently in beta include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/122958/materials-modeling?referrer=M2UxZTQwZTkwYzZlMTlmNzkwNmFiNWJiY2NjN2MzYWMxYjRjZDYyYTBmMDczMmY0ZDQ5Y2Y4NTk5NTI5MTE0MP1yF5vq6CYpA5droatHF1JKh4_Kp0zvdwLyY7_HJQOC0&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/122958.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;250&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Q&amp;A site proposal: Materials Modeling&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/121892/operations-research?referrer=ODBkMmE3MDg4ZmMyYTJlYzg4MTZiODEyMjM5YjQ5Nzg4OTQ0ZDFjMDVlMGU5MGY2MzI5ZDdjODI0NTBmMzE5Y_W2PKxYABPRG8lBLmxS99vOCoUsHXn8AiZ8NoUGybKf0&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/121892.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;250&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Q&amp;A site proposal: Operations Research&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qpQZm.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FlxKZ.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; alt=&quot;Earth Science&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/353zN.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; alt=&quot;History of Science and Maths&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ei2RL.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; alt=&quot;Engineering&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/64216.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mathematics Educators&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/51674.png&quot; alt=&quot;Open Data&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://materials.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HPQC-LABS/Modeling_Matters/master/Logo/Anoop/BackgroundAndForegroundCombined.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is community wiki -- feel free to add other proposals worth mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="304544" LastEditDate="2021-06-15T16:10:09.313" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T16:10:09.313" Title="Consider supporting proposals of other SE science sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-09-28T18:42:53.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T20:33:30.290" Score="5" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just like to drop a note on who I am and what my team does. I'm Seth, a member of the CHAOS (community development and evangelism) team at SE headquarters in New York. We're in the SE sites learning about how awesome the communities are. Much of our efforts are directed towards promoting the site and growing the community in a high quality and organic way. Personally, I have a background in psychology and am excited about tech startups, social psych and progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post in the meta with ideas we have for promoting Physics and engaging new users. Feel free to send me a note any time with ideas for community events, promotions, problems or lunch ideas. Also, I will pop in to chat regularly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T20:33:30.290" Title="Who is this person with a Ψ character and what is the CHAOS team?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-29T13:06:29.897" Score="4" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is looking for students and teachers who might be interested in helping us kick off/formalize a university pizza ambassador-type program. Physics.StackExchange would like to sponsor university students (college or graduate) and faculty members who are excited about Physics, Stack Exchange and free food. Contact Seth Rogers (email seth at stackexchange or drop a note in chat) for more details about the program and to get involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Students at all levels learn from these type of gatherings; interesting questions help Physics as a discipline and Stack Exchange as a growing resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastEditorUserId="5450" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T19:21:09.303" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T19:21:09.303" Title="Introducing Physics.SE University Ambassadors Program: calling students and teachers" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T05:33:17.723" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questioner chooses what he considers answers his/her question with a tick. In my opinion, though the option of answering ones own question is good, because it allows for clarifications and new thought, the possibility of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14939/does-godel-preclude-a-workable-toe&quot;&gt;choosing your own answer&lt;/a&gt; as the best, seems to me, defeats the purpose of the question and answer forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly when the chosen answer is being only down voted by the community, while there is a highly approved other answer: it turns the whole thing into a farce. I think ticking one's own answer should not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-09-09T21:47:01.567" Title="Ticking/Accepting own question" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="918" CreationDate="2011-10-02T06:37:10.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, it's not a blog, it's a Q&amp;amp;A site. And self-answers should not be used for clarification or new thoughts; that's what the ability to edit is for. Answering a question is only for when you actually have an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of having an accepted answer is to indicate how the problem posed in the original question can be solved, for the benefit of future visitors. Sometimes it is the case that you're the first/only one to discover a working solution. In these cases, you have to be able to accept your own answer, otherwise it diminishes the usefulness of the page. Admittedly, this logic applies more readily to programming questions and the like, where problems are more specific to an individual situation and it's easy for the OP to verify whether an answer works or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that when you answer your own question, no reputation is awarded, and it doesn't affect placement of the answer in the list.  So there's no side benefit to self-answering, and in cases when it happens, future visitors to the page will still see the highest voted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T06:37:10.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T02:28:44.923" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Herb, physics is a natural science which studies processes whereby substances do not undergo change in their identity. For instance, melting ice is a physical process because it dies not change the identity of the substance water. You can go back and forth from water to ice and back without changing the identity of the substance water. You can even turn it into steam and then condense it back into liquid water. Identity is preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not so when chemical processes take place. Take for instance paper. You can burn it and what you get are ashes which are of a completely different identity compared to the paper you started with. No need to say that you can't convert ashes back to paper. Thus, chemistry is a natural science which studies processes which lead to change in the identities of substances unlike what happens as a result of physical processes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5070" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T02:28:44.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="923" CreationDate="2011-10-07T08:02:19.507" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;One area that I've noticed that is missing from our FAQ is an item about computational physics, and use of computers in doing physics research. So far we've been taking the view that general questions about computing are off topic here and should be sent to SO or SU, but that there are certain computing-related questions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/should-we-allow-computational-questions&quot;&gt;would be on topic&lt;/a&gt;. I'd like to add something to the FAQ to reflect that. Can anyone suggest a good wording that, as clearly as possible, delineates what kinds of computation-related questions we will accept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:29:56.137" Title="Computational science in the FAQ" Tags="|discussion|scope|software-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T08:18:24.400" Score="12" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just recently, &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics - Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; has entered the open beta phase. It is a research-level question site, so we aim at questions that cannot be answered by a standard textbook. We encourage users to, for the most part, ask question directly related to their scientific work. Mathematical, numerical and experimental questions are welcome, as long they are related to theoretical physics (in motivation or used tools).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested? Join now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of TP.SE is to reduplicate the success of &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, where leading edge questions can be asked... and are often answered. We want to create two-level model, to have relation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TP.SE&lt;/a&gt; as there is currently with &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;math.SE&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea was widely discussed (also on this meta site), see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105/where-should-research-level-questions-go-theoretical-physics-se-or-physics-resea&quot;&gt;Where should research-level questions go? Theoretical Physics SE or Physics Research SE?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/884/theoretical-physics-is-close-to-launch&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics is close to launch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/612/&quot;&gt;Two level model (MO/Math.SE) vs one level model (SO)&lt;/a&gt; (Area 51)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hope to have warm, and fruitful, relations on the line physics.SE/TP.SE. Participation in both sites is encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: Don't forget to spread the word amount your coworkers and collaborators!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T18:04:35.287" Title="Theoretical Physics SE - a place for research-level questions" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="921" CreationDate="2011-10-07T08:43:01.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact those topics do not fit too well on any current SE -- on SO there is a little place for science, on Physics/Stats/Maths is too little place for programming, for TCS this is waaay to trivial and SU is rather for how-to-turn-my-computer-ON questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why there is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28815/computational-science&quot;&gt;Area proposal&lt;/a&gt;, currently half-way in commitment. Since it is quite likely it will get to beta within few months, I think we should just wait -- those Qs are not making enough harm to be in rush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T08:43:01.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T19:27:57.787" Score="5" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange will be introducing a Fellowship Program awarding grants for original and independent research projects. Undergraduate Honors Theses, Independent Study Projects, Masters Theses, and Dissertations are eligible projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prospective fellows will be asked to demonstrate a commitment to the discipline, approval or guidance of faculty adviser, two page proposal of the project and abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before officially introducing the Fellowship Program and calling for applications, we need experienced community members to volunteer to review applicants' two page proposals and abstracts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange Fellows will be in the following subjects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested in being a reviewer? Contact Seth Rogers (seth at stackexchange dot com). Reviewers are honored as Committee Members and receive a small gift as our way of saying thank you. Keep in mind that this will not take significant amounts of your time as we are very respectful of everyone's busy schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastEditorUserId="5450" LastEditDate="2011-10-12T19:38:35.630" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T19:38:35.630" Title="Stack Exchange Fellowship and Grant Program: Looking for reviewers to assess thesis proposals" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="915" CreationDate="2011-10-10T01:06:38.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a proposal about future studies/futurology (forecasting roughly within 100 years range), but it has now been removed due to inactivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposer had said about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is based on personal interest and imho missing place on SE to ask questions concerning climate models (but hopefully climate modeling will just be on sub-topic of this site). It is not intended to ask questions, whether global warming exists etc. But to ask questions about underlying models of environmental/economic/demographic scenarios and assumptions (not more, not less) for forecasting of future developments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there wouldnt be math physics theophys sites on SE, i wouldnt have proposed it, as it would probably get a speculative mess with very low quality. So i would highly appreciate if some of the experts here would participate and help defining the site and draw the scope of answerable and good questions. Its hard, but imho for this topic can only work with a Q&amp;amp;A site with voting system. Ive posted a list of questions, feel free to copy paste some you agree with, so people can vote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im not sure how &lt;strong&gt;theoreticalphysics.SE&lt;/strong&gt; will deal with climate modeling theories/math. So maybe this gets a good place to migrate some questions and keeping tp.SE clean ;) from such (political) debates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="4066" LastEditDate="2012-02-16T06:43:52.920" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T06:43:52.920" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-10-10T01:06:38.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-13T19:33:35.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think something is too basic if a reasonably-informed Google search will turn up a valid answer on the first page.  I often wonder myself if some of my questions are too basic, like my last question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15678/is-mid-water-bouyancy-a-classic-example-of-a-balanced-but-unstable-system&quot;&gt;Is mid-water bouyancy a classic example of a balanced but unstable system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I wrote that, I discovered that Wikipedia does, in fact address it.  But the thing is, it's not addressed specific to what I had in mind, it's not as expansive or detailed as what I was asking for, and it would be hard for someone looking for it to find.  Because of this, I think there's still a lot of value coming out of my question.  But the question of whether or not something is too basic does occur to me a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T19:33:35.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="229" CreationDate="2011-10-13T19:36:41.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see what's wrong with cross-disciplinary questions, as long as someone is able to make a strong case for the relevance to physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T19:36:41.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-18T15:04:44.137" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do people think about Physics.SE engaging in some type of partnership with Physicsforums.com? Physics forums has over 3 million posts and 300,000 users and contains a great deal of relevant and high-level threads. SE allows for to the point and consensus-driven answers to targeted questions in an efficient way- conversely, the forums allow for discussion. Do you have any suggestions for a mutually beneficial relationship or object to the idea? Suggestions perhaps could include a chat room for physics forums users (I don't believe they have chat rooms) that would be non-invasive yet introduce individuals to Physics.SE or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestions, objections, no opinion? Of course, what everyone in the community wishes will rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2011-10-21T00:53:57.880" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Site partnership suggestions?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2011-10-18T17:47:24.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-should-we-promote-the-site/61#61&quot;&gt;considered&lt;/a&gt; reaching out to PF early in the site's development, but we got shut down by their moderators. Their opinion appears to be that any mention of a competing site constitutes an advertisement, which is against the rules there. If we could think of some way to create a partnership that they would actually be interested in, I'd certainly love to see that happen, but we haven't had any ideas that seem promising. Even so, I do occasionally send people over to PF when they have particularly discussion-y questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Forums does have a chat room of some sort (I've never participated), but they only open it up for a few hours at a time every few weeks because of the stress it puts on their server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I've been thinking of a couple of things we could possibly offer Physics Forums:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As in my comment, every once in a while I'll see someone asking a question on PF which is addressed quite well by a question on Physics.SE. In those cases it would be great to be able to post a link to the relevant PSE question in the PF thread.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PF occasionally gets people who, though not trained physics researchers, have ideas they are interested in publishing and are looking for feedback on the work. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=541503&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) Ever since their Independent Research subforum was shut down, there is no appropriate place on their site for those kinds of discussions, but some of them can be accommodated here. In particular, either this site or theoreticalphysics.SE could accept questions about what prior research has been done in a particular field, and our chat room could be a good place for people who are legitimately interested in getting feedback about their ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The General Discussion forum gets a number of non-physics-related questions that are (or could be) addressed by other Stack Exchange sites. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=541776&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, would be great for money.SE) Once people at PF are aware of the Stack Exchange network through this site, they might also be interested in making use of other SE sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making this community wiki so that other people can add items to the list as they think of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T23:37:53.337" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-10-18T23:25:24.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2011-10-20T16:58:48.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no Earthly what you are proposing, technically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, of course I'm in favor.  I'll go make an account right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T16:58:48.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-20T17:07:08.180" Score="7" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of you should be familiar with the theoretical physics stack exchange (and current beta), and are probably familiar with the arguments against that proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who's focused basically on classical physics, myself, I've been wondering if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a better way to break things up.  Firstly, a large part of the problem is that we have so many remedial level questions and homework questions.  I wonder if the needs for such a breakup could be better served by leaving &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; physics SE as the &quot;theoretical&quot; physics SE (and by many accounts, I think this is already the best term to describe it), and create a new stack exchange focused around exchanging and answering physics problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing this, we could expand the scope of physics in stack exchange (something I think is missing in the other proposal), meaning that we could loosen the acceptance criteria for physics problems.  I think that a physics problems stack exchange would have great utility to teachers as a problem bank, for students in classes, and for practice in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-05-14T16:02:15.490" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T09:19:24.297" Title="How about a &quot;physics problems&quot; stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2011-10-20T17:49:45.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a good idea, for two reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The physics community at Stack Exchange is already fragmented, and introducing a whole new site will just divide people's attention further. Alternatively, if one of this site or TP.SE is going to disappear, it's going to be this one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The kinds of problems you're talking about treating at this new site, namely homework-like problems, are really just not suitable for the Stack Exchange format, unless they're carefully written. Homework-like problems usually require a discussion, because students tend to be unsure of their work and you have to give them step-by-step hints and explanations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you say that we have a problem of too many remedial-level questions, but I don't think that's true. I look at the front page of the question list and I see very few questions which I'd consider &quot;remedial&quot; (i.e. so basic that they are of essentially no value). If you want to say that we have some low-level questions, then sure, we do, but that's not a problem. One of the goals of this site from day one has been that physics questions of any level are acceptable as long as they're well formulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T17:49:45.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-21T14:11:25.907" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16005/what-is-the-potential-difference-between-point-x-and-point-y/16010#16010&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; are potentially on-topic on Electrical Engineering. However, that question is a little too basic for most of our users, and we don't get a lot of homework questions as it seems you do per &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;this meta post on homework&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/209/yet-another-what-level-question-this-time-for-physics-101-homework/211#211&quot;&gt;&quot;no question is too basic, but we won't do your homework&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  We do occasionally get questions which seem to be from people learning about electricity in physics classes, though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that an example of a good, on-topic question on Physics?  Where do you draw the line between questions like this (which is just a voltage divider attached to some voltage sources) and off-topic problems better suited for another site like Electrical Engineering?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you want us to refer questions like this to your site, or do you want to refer questions like this to us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a heads up: that question just got &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/StackPhysics/status/127370402174472192&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tweeted&lt;/a&gt;, so make sure it's nice and pretty according to your standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4491" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T14:56:03.523" Title="Is this an example of a good electrical question on Physics?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|content-level|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2011-10-21T14:25:35.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw an ad in the top banner when I visited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gsdMM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could just as easily be an ad for this site.  If Physicsforums.com is an important site, sponsoring an ad there would be a good way to drive traffic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100137/what-is-the-meaning-of-chaos-is-it-related-to-the-psi-character&quot;&gt;CHAOS&lt;/a&gt; should get involved in this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4491" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T14:25:35.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2011-10-22T22:09:53.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing as how nobody else has piped in here: a question like this is &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; at this site, but &lt;strong&gt;not a good question&lt;/strong&gt;, at least not as of revision 2 (before I edited it just now). It was one of those questions which presents a homework problem and then basically says &quot;I'm confused&quot; without any attempt to explain what exactly is causing the confusion. My edit (based on information the OP provided in a comment) improves it enough to save it from being close-worthy IMO, but it's still not great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been my understanding that EE.SE is mostly for questions about building and analyzing systems out of complex electronic components, not just simple circuits. Given that simple circuits are discussed in most introductory electromagnetism (physics) classes, I would say it's generally fine for you to migrate questions about them over here. If they wind up having quality problems such that we need to edit them or close them, that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, by &quot;simple circuits&quot; I mean anything involving only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;batteries or other DC sources (though in physics &quot;battery&quot; is used to refer to a generic DC source)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;generators or other AC sources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;resistors (including devices which act as resistors, such as light bulbs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;capacitors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inductors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ammeters and voltmeters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, diodes and transistors are not treated in most physics classes, at least not as circuit elements. Questions about how those components work at the subatomic level are on topic here at PSE, but questions about the behavior of circuits which include transistors or diodes are likely not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any question which refers to a specific make and model of electronic component is also almost certainly off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not sure about something, you can always leave a message in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-10-22T22:17:25.333" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T22:17:25.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="937" CreationDate="2011-10-24T02:16:24.447" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I had a question closed, about some researches of Dr. Bruce de Palma, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16092/depalma-free-energy-fields&quot;&gt;Depalma Free Energy fields&lt;/a&gt;. The reason of closing the question was &quot;This work bears all the hallmarks of being completely bogus, and accordingly I think this needs to be closed as off topic. If people disagree, this can be discussed on Physics Meta.&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think the question should not be closed, due to what I really desired to discover is if these researches are or not false. There are uncountable unformal references to N-Machine by De Palma, but it's difficult to find formal references online in scientific databases (and sure they could be offline hidden in universities papers). Maybe I did not write the question clearly, so I could re-write it. So, is this site the right place for asking this kind of thing? Thank you for you time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5834" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T23:41:12.720" Title="Question about a not well-known researcher (Depalma Free Energy fields)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="936" CreationDate="2011-10-24T03:02:16.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never heard of of this person nor this machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That in and of itself means almost nothing, but combined with the web sites which appear to be self citations and the rather strong claim of &quot;free energy&quot; I am skeptical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Toward finding reputable references&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try arXiv.com for recent papers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the arXiv is not peer reviewed and has only the weakest of gate-keeping, so if you find some papers there look to see if they have attached publication data pointing to a reputable, peer reviewed journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also look at the cited-by list to find links from peer reviewed papers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T03:02:16.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2011-10-24T14:56:03.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's a good question because there's a lot of physics in a good answer to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what is potential difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how do we measure it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does a charge lose energy travelling through a resistance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can a charge be taken through a battery?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;why do we sum voltages to find the total voltage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T14:56:03.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="939" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="940" CreationDate="2011-10-24T22:59:58.483" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I report someone for going to each question I asked and downvoting then, because every question on every site I have asked has gotten down voted with in 5 minutes of each other.I mean just saying that if i even get a single more downvote on a question i'll probably lose the privlege of asking questions on some stuff  need help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5810" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="spamming users with downvotes" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="939" CreationDate="2011-10-24T23:07:55.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To copy from the comment I left you: the Stack Exchange system automatically reverses runs of apparent &quot;revenge downvoting&quot;. If the downvotes don't disappear within 36 hours, send an email to team@stackexchange.com identifying the questions that are still downvoted. There isn't anything that we (moderators) can do about it, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explained in more detail on the main meta site, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23005/preventing-users-from-downvoting-good-answers-to-bad-questions/23010#23010&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that you can't lose the privilege of asking questions due to reputation. All users, even those with 1 reputation, can ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T23:07:55.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-10-26T14:59:47.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have plenty of physics jokes to share myself, unfortunately, this isn't in the physics SE scope.  Your link doesn't work, but don't you have it backwards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bartender says &quot;we don't serve tachyons in this bar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tachyon walks into a bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2011-10-26T14:59:47.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-26T15:19:13.717" Score="7" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mission of Stack Exchange is to make the internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions. The Stack Exchange Fellowship Program aims to support students conducting research in subjects related to our academic Q&amp;amp;A sites in order to (a) increase the quality of information in a particular subject and (b) facilitate the exchange of information between experts in the field. Individual awards range from 250 to 1000 dollars (USD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applicants should be advanced undergraduate, graduate students or professionals pursuing research related to one the following Stack Exchange sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2077/13231&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/202/344&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/988/6064&quot;&gt;Statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/q/170/533&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/q/170/533&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis starting immediately. For more details and to apply, check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/SE%20Fellowship%20Application.docx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;application&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are also accepting volunteers from the community to help review applications. Volunteers should have some level of expertise in the subject area (professors and those who have or are pursuing advanced degrees are ideal candidates). Following the first wave of submissions, those selected to be Stack Exchange Fellows will be asked to review 3 to 4 new applications. To facilitate the review process, reviewers will rate applications on several scales instead of making judgments on funding. You can find the Reviewer Form &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/Reviewer%20Sheet.docx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewers and successful candidates are encouraged to customize the &quot;about me&quot; section of the user profile by including information on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Area of expertise and current occupation &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Key academic goals/milestones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Role in the Fellowship program (applicant, reviewer, fellow, both)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE grant project, if applicable &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions regarding the Fellowship Program, or would like more information about applying or becoming a reviewer, please email &lt;em&gt;academics@stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited: Applications accepted on a rolling basis until December 31, 2011. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.233" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T19:12:53.810" Title="Introducing Stack Exchange Research Support and Fellowship Program" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="945" CreationDate="2011-10-27T16:41:54.080" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every now and again we get good questions in the new theoretical physics site, which are nevertheless not part of our mandate. Those are questions that are not directly research-related, perhaps they are related to standard textbook material, or popular science articles or books, or something else which I feel (as a moderator) are outside the scope of our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I judge a question to be interesting and well-formed, but otherwise inappropriate, I'd like to be able to direct it to this site, and hope it will be treated well. I've done that once thus far, with this question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16149/what-are-some-predictions-from-string-theory-that-say-some-crystalline-materials&quot;&gt;What are some predictions from string theory that say some crystalline materials &amp;quot;will end up in one of many lowest-energy ground states?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which received no answers and one strange comment, but it is only a sample of one so far. Apparently, when I direct questions here they appear immediately, without the local moderator input. Therefore, before I continue to add to this site potentially large amount of unwanted material, I'd like some feedback from this community whether directing questions here in the future is welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user566" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T18:07:08.597" Title="Shall I direct questions here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="943" CreationDate="2011-10-27T17:04:45.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go on, but don't expect migrates in the opposite direction, since this site is still for questions from all levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T17:04:45.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="943" CreationDate="2011-10-27T17:51:41.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I'd say you can safely go ahead and migrate them. Since the domain of TP.SE is a subspace of that of Physics.SE, anything that is only slightly off topic on your site will almost certainly be on topic here. Honestly, from what I've seen so far on TP.SE I suspect it will be very rare that anything posted there will actually be inappropriate for migration to Physics (except for spam or obvious nonsense, which you can of course recognize as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if you do migrate something that for some reason is not appropriate, it's not hard to deal with; we can just close it, or reverse the migration by deleting the question here and clearing the migration history on TP. If there's something you're not sure about, you can always ask in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, or migrate it and flag the migrated question here on Physics for moderator attention. (I usually flag questions that I migrate to other sites as a courtesy to the moderators there, but it's not required)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The one question you migrated so far seems perfectly fine here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-10-27T18:07:08.597" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T18:07:08.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="936" CreationDate="2011-10-27T23:41:12.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about this and I haven't really been able to justify the closing to myself particularly well, so I went back and reopened it, but with some edits to clarify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to questions about bogus research, even just to ask whether the claims make sense. On one hand any mention of such research that isn't shut down immediately can be exploited by the crackpots to try to increase their legitimacy, but on the other hand it is nice to be able to inform people about the true nature of these claims. Ordinarily I've been on the side of letting the questions stay, but the way yours was written, it seemed especially iffy... I'm not sure exactly why though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T23:41:12.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-10-31T05:43:40.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't downvote much - I think the comment interface is very useful in pointing out errors and what can be sorted in improving the question or answer.  Most of my downvotes come on questions in response to a flagrant violation of the questioning rules, or a very poorly formatted or researched question, and this is mostly to attempt to correct the behavior of the questioner.  It is perhaps &quot;mean,&quot; but we work in a field where people are tasked with shooting us down all of the time, so we better get used to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side, I don't upvote very often either.  I try to limit my upvoting to only those answers which I could have answered myself.  When I first starting coming to SE, it seemed like quite a lot of the questions lived in string theory or high energy particle topics, which I have not studied, and am not expert in, so except in the clearest cases, I simply do not know without substantial side research (that I do not have time to conduct!) if someone is correct or not.  With physics becoming increasingly specialized, it becomes difficult to accrue points if others are not expert in your topic, and can't say with confidence if you are correct or not, and therefore don't upvote.  So, presuming others think like I, this could be a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastEditorUserId="2433" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T05:54:06.223" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T05:54:06.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2011-10-31T21:12:21.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking a Feynman diagram of Higgs decay or neutrinoless double beta decay would be &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; for the 404 page, if we get to customize it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Higgs to 4l decay via a top quark loop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sYvph.png&quot; alt=&quot;Higgs to 4l decay&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neutrinoless double beta decay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Double_beta_decay_feynman.svg/500px-Double_beta_decay_feynman.svg.png&quot; alt=&quot;neutrinoless double beta decay&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the former is my own creation, the latter is public domain from Wikipedia, so either of these could be used directly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dark matter or a magnetic monopole would also be decent possibilities but I can't think of a visual representation of either that carries as much &quot;punch&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T21:12:21.270" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-10-31T21:12:21.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-01T16:00:42.073" Score="5" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the favicon of the site supposed to represent? My initial impressions are that it looks like a partially unrolled condom. I'm not trying to be a troll, but I just don't see it making a good first impression. Am I missing something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2735" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-16T12:01:26.810" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T12:01:26.810" Title="What is the Physics SE logo supposed to be?" Tags="|discussion|design|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-11-01T16:12:41.900" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that it is intended to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breaking#Mathematical_example%3a_the_Mexican_hat_potential&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the so-called &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mexican hat&quot;&lt;/em&gt; potential&lt;/a&gt; that plays an important role in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstone_boson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Goldstone style spontaneous symmetry breaking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2011-11-01T16:12:41.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-02T21:34:48.653" Score="4" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question on the site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16474/is-there-any-anti-gravity-material&quot;&gt;Is there any anti-gravity material?&lt;/a&gt;, has been generating a lot of controversy as to whether it is appropriate or not. I'm personally a little torn on how a question like this should be handled, so I would like to pose the following questions to the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the question &lt;em&gt;as currently written&lt;/em&gt; inappropriate for the site? Should it be closed? If so, which of the existing close reasons (exact duplicate, off topic, not constructive, not a real question, too localized) applies to it, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, how could the question be written differently so that it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be acceptable? Or do you think we should not allow any questions about the possibility of a material that responds negatively to gravity? And why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Asking about anti-gravity: what is the problem?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="952" CreationDate="2011-11-02T22:41:58.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will duplicate here (some of) the comments I left in the physics moderation chat room:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think this goes right to the heart of &quot;Are there questions that are too simple?&quot;&#xA;  On Stack Overflow, Joel started us off with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta/19500#19500&quot;&gt;the Logo turtle question&lt;/a&gt; and the assertion that there are no such questions.&#xA;  But recently &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Jeff disagreed&lt;/a&gt;, and there seems to be a multi-site consensus forming that &quot;no research, no effort&quot; may mark a question too simple to grace our august pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind I am leaning toward too simple as currently formulated. That said, we have entertained &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3799/why-is-cold-fusion-considered-bogus&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6561/are-modified-theories-of-gravity-credible&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt; physics for which there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14968/superluminal-neutrinos&quot;&gt;sparse&lt;/a&gt; experimental evidence or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1112/520&quot;&gt;theoretical support&lt;/a&gt;. If this could be turned into a discussion of any actual claims or reports about anti-gravity experiments made in reputable (or even kinda-shady) venues, then I would not feel any need to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T06:31:41.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="952" CreationDate="2011-11-03T01:19:10.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Categorizing a question as &quot;too simple&quot; is not the way to go. Along the same lines, thumbing down somebody for a poorly formulated question is also not cool. If you don't want to answer, leave it alone, why berate somebody who is just here to learn? Some people don't do their homework, so what? Just point them in the right direction and call it a day. The question posed does allude to dubious experiments and dodgy science, but that does not mean that the question should not be explored? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would request re-opening that thread and editing the question if need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T01:19:10.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="952" CreationDate="2011-11-04T13:27:42.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe too simple is not quite the right category to exclude the question about anti-gravity. If the the problem is simple or not mostly depends on your level of knowledge in physics which can range almost from zero to graduate studies level. &lt;p&gt;Looking at the question the person asking it writes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am thinking of making flying vehicles which is made up of anti-gravity material so that it will not experience any gravity on it and can easily take off and more fuel efficient. Is there any such thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is implied that some thought went into this, but that is simply not true. Just typing &quot;anti-gravity&quot; into Google or Wikipedia and the first hit is a nice and well written article mentioning that no such material has been found and that there is currently a reward of 1 million US dollars for anybody finding such a material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion it is an abuse of this site to ask questions where it is obvious that no own thought or effort went into it at all. This is similar to the current disapproval of homework-like questions without any own effort. The physics part of stackexchange is in this aspect not so different to the other stackexchange sites. A question like &quot;I am thinking of creating my own OS but have trouble finding a processor which has a Ruby compiler builtin, is there a workaround?&quot; would certainly be downvoted or deleted because it clearly shows that you did not read anything at all about an operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be added to the FAQ of this site that question with show no own research effort will be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5931" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T13:27:42.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-07T08:37:09.997" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/720/does-the-area-51-proposal-experimental-or-applied-physics-duplicate-this-site&quot;&gt;Does the Area 51 proposal &amp;quot;Experimental or Applied Physics&amp;quot; duplicate this site?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(which could still use a consensus—hint, hint …)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an Area 51 proposal named &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6633/high-energy-physics&quot;&gt;High Energy Physics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I've looked at your FAQ, I don't know the field well enough to be comfortable making the call on my own—which brings me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can y'all review that proposal, and give your opinion as to whether it overlaps with or duplicates this site or &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T08:11:56.253" Title="Does the Area 51 proposal “High Energy Physics” overlap with this site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2011-11-07T10:22:39.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing this up, I'd actually wondered about it a while back... at this stage, I'm inclined to say &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, the High Energy Physics proposal overlaps with both this site and Theoretical Physics. Out of the top 20 non-closed example questions for the HEP proposal, 13 and a half could be asked here on Physics (and several of those could also be asked on Theoretical Physics). Several others seem like they would be good fits for &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28815/scientific-computing-was-computational-science&quot;&gt;Scientific Computing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm procrastinating, here are the specifics (at least in my personal judgment of what is on- and off-topic here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any robustly understood examples of theories that dynamically break a chiral symmetry but do not confine? (The opposite is well-known.)&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can someone give a summary of current phenomenological constraints for neutrino mass?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are good references to learn about Seiberg duality and its applications to particle physics?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I interface Pythia 8 with Rivet?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here, but probably a good fit for Scientific Computing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is the W boson mass measured at hadron colliders?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How much the PDF's uncertainties affect the LHC SUSY discovery potential?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is a &quot;jet energy scale correction&quot;?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How does one calculate the baryon- and lepton-number violation coming from instanton effects?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between analytical resummation and parton shower approximation?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is a sufficiently general ansatz for \Gamma_k in the exact renormalization flow equation of the standard model?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a CAS which supports anticommuting variables like spinors or Grassmann variables?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here, &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; on topic at Super User&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What LHC luminosity is needed to confirm/refute the standard model Higgs?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other first-principles calculations for QCD other than lattice QCD? For lattice QCD, are there any algorithms better than Metropolis?&lt;br/&gt;part 1 &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here, part 2 &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; (well, borderline) but appropriate for Scientific Computing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the &quot;Van der Meer scans&quot; used to get collider luminosity normalisation?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I run MC@NLO events through Herwig++?&lt;br/&gt;probably &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here but appropriate for Scientific Computing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I configure madevent/madgraph to simulate color octet scalars?&lt;br/&gt;probably &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here but appropriate for Scientific Computing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do underlying event, pile up and initial state radiation differ, both in their conception and their observable effects?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I implement finite collinear terms from the dipole subtraction?&lt;br/&gt;probably &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here but appropriate for Scientific Computing or Stack Overflow (depends on what exactly the question asks)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I build CERNLIB on [a modern machine]?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; here but probably appropriate for either Scientific Computing or Super User, depending on the specifics&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have any plausible direct experimental searches for a QCD axion with ~GUT-scale decay constant been proposed?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-11-16T08:11:56.253" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T08:11:56.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="720" CreationDate="2011-11-07T10:25:26.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the existing answers are perhaps a little unclear, let me post one that is and people can vote on it as necessary: &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, the Experimental and Applied Physics proposal does not duplicate this site. E&amp;amp;AP would be for questions about the tools and devices used to do experiments in physics, whereas this site is about the physical principles that underlie the experiments. We have closed a few questions here which I think would be right at home at E&amp;amp;AP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T10:25:26.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2011-11-07T18:21:52.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I largely second &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/956/does-the-area-51-proposal-high-energy-physics-overlap-with-this-site/957#957&quot;&gt;David's comments&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if there are a few leftover topics then they must be the sort that would also fit on the still pending &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/32588/experimental-or-applied-physics&quot;&gt;Experimental or Applied Physics&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that the HEP proposal is further along, but I think that dividing into  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High level theoretical &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nitty gritty experimental reality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everything else physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is more defensible that suggesting that every significant sub-field should have it's own site. Not only does that break the Stack Overflow model (where c, perl, haskel, postscript, c#, etc get along just fine on one site) but it reduces the possibility for useful cross-fertilization of skills between the disciplines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly I'm not entirely happy with three sites, but I certainly think that it is better than HEP and solid state and optics and AMO and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T18:21:52.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-08T15:18:07.070" Score="5" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I write a paper where I am the sole author, and the only person I have discussed the research with before publication is my non-physicist partner, is it appropriate to acknowledge my partner in the same way I would normally acknowledge a colleague? I.e. I thank &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; for useful discussions. Or similar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, if the answer is no to the above question, does it look bad if I have no acknowledgements at all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a question about actual physics, though it is relevant to physicists. I've asked a few people 'offline' and no-one is sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I should clarify: If I discuss the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; with a non-physicist, is it OK to acknowledge them? (I don't mean acknowledge them for support or anything like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3622" LastEditorUserId="3622" LastEditDate="2011-11-08T15:33:40.937" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T23:57:14.610" Title="Is the question &quot;Who is it appropriate to acknowledge in a journal paper?&quot; OK to go on the Physics Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2011-11-08T19:25:59.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the basis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5930/520&quot;&gt;Are collaborations needed to be productive in physics?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1599/520&quot;&gt;Can a web community write papers?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5991/520&quot;&gt;Publication Authorship Credits&lt;/a&gt;, I'd say that we &lt;em&gt;have been&lt;/em&gt; entertaining such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly this is a matter of culture that is specific to the physics community (other sciences have the same problem, but they (may) have different cultures to some degree, and therefore different answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that we might want a tag for this. Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/authorship&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;authorship&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;authorship&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question: as this is a fairly &quot;soft&quot; topic would it be appropriate to suggest that these questions should be Community Wiki? (Compare to book and journal recommendations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T22:22:40.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2011-11-08T22:44:38.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to provide an alternative to dmckee's answer, I'll put forth the position that &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, this would not be an on-topic question for the main site, since it does not relate to actual physical principles in any way. If this is our position, then the other questions dmckee linked to would probably be off topic under the same criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T22:44:38.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-10T21:21:28.687" Score="7" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the new monthly issues of your favorite journals are published, we want to remind you to ask those burning questions that pop into your head as you read through &lt;em&gt;novel approaches, methods and cutting edge or controversial findings&lt;/em&gt;. Stack Exchange consists of remarkably bright and talented researchers and our community benefits greatly from more current and relevant questions. &lt;strong&gt;When you flip through your favorite journal and are downright astonished by some findings or perplexed by a method, share that curiosity here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staying up to date in the field betters your own expertise and sharing those quandaries with your peers furthers the discipline as a whole. To encourage good ole fashioned journal reading (&lt;em&gt;winks at open access&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;users who ask questions about the current issues of whatever journal they like on the Stack are eligible for a drawing to win a year long subscription to a journal&lt;/strong&gt; of their choosing (excluding obscure journals only in print in Kazakhstan with a zillion dollar fee) or support to attend a conference. Before Christmas, all posts referencing (denoted with &quot;citation&quot;) a current publication will be entered in the drawing and a random winner of all winners will be announced (plus secondary prizes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Tag the post with &quot;citation&quot; and 'journal name/source'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Updated: Includes article preprints from arxiv or any similiar source. Award may include conference support instead of subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastEditorUserId="5450" LastEditDate="2011-11-16T14:21:06.283" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T14:21:06.283" Title="Upcoming journal editions: read 'em and ask on the Stack (and get prizes)" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-13T13:41:22.650" Score="8" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due probably to the policy rule &quot;if you downvote, please explain&quot;, I find that downvoted or trivial questions in the site are actually answered in the comments to the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is the contrary to &quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/627/pseudo-answers-are-the-enemy&quot;&gt;Pseudo-answers are the enemy&lt;/a&gt; &quot;. Real answers should be answers, no comments. But on other hand, it is arguable that a person actually wanting to downvote a question and suggest the OP to delete it, does not want to give an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in some cases I find that people just answer in comments just because they think their answer is too short or too humble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: So my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you find that answers in comments are a problem? If so, what measures should be taken to discourage that kind of answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1335" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T17:48:00.070" Title="Answering in comments" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2011-11-15T04:24:47.400" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you find that answers in comments are a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Any time &quot;answering information&quot; is posted as a comment instead of as an answer, it makes it more difficult for people to find, and we also lose access to the mechanism of voting as an indicator of the quality of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, what measures should be taken to discourage that kind of answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever you see someone post something as a comment that seems like it should be an answer, ask them to make it an answer. Or post it as an answer yourself. (It'd be good etiquette to give the commenter a chance to convert their comment into an answer first, but you have no obligation to do so. And it's good for the site to have things that are answers posted as answers.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes people post answering information, especially links, in a comment because they don't have time to make a full-fledged answer out of it. We should encourage people to make these posts as answers instead:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a partial answer - more than just a link, of course, but anything that actually does answer the question, no matter how short or lacking in detail - post it with a note that you'll come back and edit more detail in when you have time. (And of course, actually come back and edit more detail in when you have time.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you downvote a post where the author has indicated they are going to come back and improve it later, make sure to check back after a few days and adjust your vote accordingly. You may, if you wish, leave a comment to indicate that you will do so. This is a further incentive for the author to make the edit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you see that someone else has posted a link-only answer, as long as it seems relevant and not spammy, it's best to edit the answer to contain the relevant material from the link. If you can't easily identify what the relevant part of the linked content is, then go ahead and flag it as not-an-answer. The moderators will encourage the author to add in the relevant part of the content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remember that the criterion for downvoting answers is that they are not useful. If an answer is sparse on detail or less complete than you'd like, but still useful, don't downvote it. If the lack of detail causes it not to be useful, then sure, go ahead and downvote, but check back after a while to see if the answer has been edited, and change your vote if needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the moderators' side, we will continue deleting comments that exceed the scope of what comments are meant to be used for. &lt;strong&gt;This includes answers posted as comments&lt;/strong&gt;, although we do prefer to encourage the poster to convert the comment to an answer before we delete it. Still, be aware that if you post answering information as a comment, don't expect it to last.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T05:02:20.343" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T05:02:20.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2011-11-25T17:13:06.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A late answer, I know, but I feel that it is important. Most of the discussion has been around signal to noise in questions, but the same is true of answers. I've noticed a worrying trend that &lt;em&gt;longer&lt;/em&gt; answers are sometimes assumed to be true, and it seems that a few up-votes can generate a runaway effect in this SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be worthwhile setting some guidelines for a good answer. One thing in particular is that the single most important piece of advice I gave in my years as a TA, especially to the younger ones, was to &lt;strong&gt;draw a massive diagram&lt;/strong&gt;. It sounds silly, but a picture says a thousand words and it takes a few minutes to knock up a diagram in whatever package you favour. Even the most hardcore texts on field theory and the newest research papers use diagrams, so there is no excuse not to have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there could also be general guidelines on how to formulate a long answer when one is &lt;em&gt;absolutely necessary&lt;/em&gt;. This would be useful for the writers and editors to bring things into a format that can be understood and digested with less effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6221" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T17:13:06.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="969" CreationDate="2011-11-26T12:05:51.943" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some users have excellent answers and one likes to look for all their answers about any question they replied to. That is easy, but sometimes their answers is in form of comments, or sometimes they give interesting comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to find all the comments written by a certain user? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4521" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T10:51:45.080" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T10:51:45.080" Title="How to find all the comments written by some user?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="968" CreationDate="2011-11-26T16:32:33.277" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go to their profile, next to &quot;info&quot; you see the &quot;activity&quot; tab.  Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic?tab=activity&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic?tab=activity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has edits, answers, questions, and comments as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry to pick on you specifically Qmechanic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2011-11-26T16:32:33.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-27T13:38:35.003" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/712/question-appears-blue&quot;&gt;Question appears &amp;ldquo;blue&amp;rdquo;?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean that certain questions are highlighted by a transparent green background when I scroll on the main page through the &quot;active&quot; or &quot;newest&quot; list? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T13:43:46.373" Title="&quot;Highlighted&quot; Questions in the recent or newest list?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-11-27T15:32:58.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="970" CreationDate="2011-11-27T13:43:46.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those are the ones tagged with one of the tags you selected as favorite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T13:43:46.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-28T21:22:35.503" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/942/5450&quot;&gt;SE Research Support and Fellowship Program&lt;/a&gt; launched recently with our very own experienced and highly respected users reviewing fellowship applications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the program a success, we need your help. Announce the program and request for proposals on your blog, website or listserv. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let us know (academics@stackexchange.com) if you intend to call for applications so we can follow your announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5450" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.097" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T21:35:15.513" Title="Help us call for proposals for the SE Fellowship on your blog, site or listserv" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-29T16:18:07.717" Score="4" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two recent questions from one user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/17552/520&quot;&gt;What are some interesting calculus of variation problems?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/17624/520&quot;&gt;What are some interesting coupled harmonic oscillators problems?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my point of view these are &quot;make a list&quot;, so should certainly be Community Wiki, but moreover they don't seem to contribute very much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't seem to fit any of the explicitly allowed categories, nor are they &lt;em&gt;&quot;practical, answerable questions based on actual problems&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Instead the run to open-ended, collecting a book's worth of examples with no unifying theme, and they are a reasonable if inexact match for the &lt;em&gt;&quot;every answer is equally valid&quot;&lt;/em&gt; category of bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the generic formulation suggests that there will be no end to them and even if there are a few interesting ones, most will be pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments on their on-topicness and or Community Wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T03:06:02.203" Title="Are &quot;What are some intersting Foo problems?&quot; questions off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="973" CreationDate="2011-11-29T16:43:41.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why exclude them? They sound pretty interesting to me. They tend to be low-level, but we were all low-level once (&amp;amp; some still are :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastActivityDate="2011-11-29T16:43:41.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="973" CreationDate="2011-11-29T21:50:03.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On one hand I can understand how these questions can be useful to people. But on the other hand, they strike me as &lt;em&gt;forum&lt;/em&gt; topics. They have value, but they are not a good fit for the Stack Exchange model. (It is important to remember that SE is not trying to become a repository for every bit of useful information on the internet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been thinking about these questions, and at this point I'm inclined to just close them as off topic. Perhaps we can refer the questioners to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt;, which would be better able to accommodate these sorts of requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these questions do wind up remaining open here, I don't particularly care whether they are CW or not. The point of making list questions CW is so that they don't contribute to reputation, because the answers typically don't require much knowledge of physics, but I'm not sure if that is necessarily the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; We just had &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18098/real-world-examples-for-projectile-trown-upwards-or-downwards&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; posted on the main site, which I consider to be very well written and which I am reluctant to close despite it being an example of a question looking for a list of interesting problems. Perhaps the distinction in my mind is this: a question which is looking for a list of problems about X needs to explain in detail what qualifications the problems should have (i.e. don't just say &quot;interesting,&quot; explain what you consider to be interesting) and explain why existing problems about X are insufficient for the asker's purposes. I would welcome comments about this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T03:06:02.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-30T22:32:22.793" Score="38" ViewCount="8264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Physics.SE's have any way of dealing with users who are highly persistent, have kook beliefs, and sound impressive? Some of these folks seem to be very successful at racking up reputation points on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The characteristics that I've noticed include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some claim to be self-educated, some to work in other professions and some to be physicists&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some claim that the physics community is incompetent&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some have publication links to well known advocates of poorly received theories.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some claim affiliation with bodies that are named rather like highly respected organs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some are highly prolific posters. In the worst case the site often seems to be a forum for dialog between him and the people who correct his mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All three of these folks have high reputation or respectable scores on SE; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of them, occasionally provide correct answers to questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of them are skilled at stringing together impressive-sounding terminology in a way that makes them sound as though they are experts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't claim to know everything about physics, but I do have a PhD in the subject, I teach it for a living, and usually I know enough to know what it is that I don't know. Dealing with these users has pretty much eliminated my enthusiasm for participating in the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, SE's design, which made it a killer app in some fields (software and math) simply doesn't work well for physics. I would guess that it works more poorly for physics than for software simply because there are far more people out there who are experts at programming and/or computer science than there are who are experts in general relativity or quantum field theory. We did at one time have relativist Ted Bunn, for example, as an active member of physics.SE, but it appears that he is no longer active (hasn't posted since Oct 13). Physics.SE seems to have found the perfect recipe for driving away competent people like Ted Bunn, while retaining destructive ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-12-05T00:44:29.060" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T13:48:42.293" Title="physics.SE's inability to deal with users who are highly persistent, have kook beliefs, and sound impressive?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2012-04-08T19:25:27.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2011-11-30T22:48:19.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly the primary tool is voting them down; plus giving better answer and explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you noticed, such  a user &lt;em&gt;who has a decent knowledge of conventional physics&lt;/em&gt; can collect a lot of point making &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers to basic questions so it is easy for them to stay ahead, and at least some of these troubling users do that very thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of at least one of these users I don't know enough about the areas he claims to be expert in to debate him on most things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not be enough, but I don't have an outline for how to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'd like to go off on a mini-rant, if I may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see the biggest offenders have their pet ideas in the realms of theory most distant from experimental verification. Perhaps giving so much respect to ideas that are beyond testing for the foreseeable future is not such a great idea, eh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I think that string theorists---to pick a random example---aren't engaged in the scientific endeavor in some way; just that they should spend a bit more time figuring out how to bootstrap feasible experiments into some limits on their discipline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you go to string theory talks you never here someone say &lt;em&gt;&quot;that's ruled out by...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, it is always &lt;em&gt;&quot;what assumptions did you have to make that allow that?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;::sigh::&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another rantlet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The establishment of TheoreticalPhysics.SE seems to have moved some of our users better suited to talking to these people to put more energy in over there. Not sure what can be done about, nor that they would agree that anything &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-11-30T23:13:07.383" LastActivityDate="2011-11-30T23:13:07.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2011-12-01T01:49:30.303" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really sympathize with this, but I'm not sure what to do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem is that the &quot;kooks&quot; accuse the legitimate scientists of being wrong as much as the other way around, and even among qualified scientists, there are arguments in which various groups will accuse each other of spouting complete nonsense. And even though I may have a strong hunch as to who is correct and who isn't, as a moderator, I can't take sides in this sort of debate based merely on that hunch. So I can't, say, suspend one user just because another user accuses the first user of being a crank. I'd need to have overwhelming evidence, which means either a strong response from the community (typically in the form of large numbers of downvotes and flags), or I would have to personally be able to evaluate the posts in question to see that they are nonsense getting passed off as fact, and in many fields of physics I'm not knowledgeable enough to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderation aside, I could cast a lot of downvotes, but it doesn't feel appropriate to downvote something unless I understand something about why it's wrong. Besides, the system detects when one user casts a lot of downvotes against another and reverses the votes under certain conditions. That sort of behavior is frowned upon anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a post that is incorrect, the best thing to do is to downvote it, and better yet comment on it so that other people will know that the post is incorrect. It is indeed a major shortcoming of the site that we don't have enough people who are knowledgeable enough to evaluate answers in many of the &quot;specialty&quot; subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T01:49:30.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2011-12-01T19:47:46.460" Score="32" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Regarding The first version&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to state how ridiculous your statement is. The reason I have so many upvotes is because I answer questions that nobody else here is competent to answer. I don't make mistakes often, and when I do, I correct them or delete the answer. Just read my answers, they are not vague, usually they say precise things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Regarding the general question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are partly talking about me, and you do so without posting any links to any answer you think is wrong. Usually when somebody has a gripe about content they tell you what the content is. Point directly to bad content if you have a problem, don't make vague accusations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that you are not qualified to judge the content, you just have a feeling that it must be wrong, because it sounds so different from what you believe. But those people who &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; qualified to judge the content tell you that it is ok, and this is causing distress to you, because you have a PhD, and I do not, and you believe physicists are generally competent, and I am positive that they are mostly dimwits, and so my answers must be wrong, and yet they are upvoted and this is causing you distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, get used to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, somebody ignorantly downvoted this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17494/who-first-realized-the-uncertainty-principle-allows-for-virtual-particle-pair-pr/17496#17496&quot;&gt;Who first realized the uncertainty principle allows for virtual particle pair production?&lt;/a&gt; , without stating a reason. I think that a downvote should come with an explanation. In this case, the explanation is most likely &quot;I feel that something in here must be wrong, but I can't say exactly what it is, -1.&quot; If you downvote, say why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody here upvotes because they don't understand. In fact, most of the best answers, which are the most technically challenging, have a paucity of upvotes because nobody feels qualified to vote it up, because maybe there's a subtle error. This drives away people who are technically competent. When an answer has a lot of upvotes (at least nowadays), you can be sure that the people who voted it up actually read it &lt;em&gt;and understood it&lt;/em&gt;. There were times when any answer with formulas in it got upvotes automatically. No more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;pseudotensor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This whole thing began when you disagreed with my description of the stress energy pseudotensor in General Relativity. You claimed that the stress energy tensor of matter is the definition of stress energy in GR (which is only true in a locally freefalling frame) and that there is no other definition. I told you Einstein's definition was the pseudotensor, and you said it was not. This only tells me that you haven't read Einstein's papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Einstein in 1917 or thereabouts published the pseudotensor for stress energy in the gravitational field, including the gravitational field energy. It was one of Einstein's boldest ideas--- using a coordinate dependent pseudotensor for stress energy, and it was severely criticized by Schrodinger and others as completely wrongheaded, because it is coordinate dependent. It was never fully accepted. To this day, people are confused about stress-energy in GR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pseudotensor $t$ has the property that it is &lt;em&gt;coordinate&lt;/em&gt; conserved, meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\partial_\nu t^{\mu\nu} = 0 $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; covariantly conserved. This means that the conserved quantity is the coordinate construction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\int d^3x t^{\mu0} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is strange. The pseudotensor gives weird conservation laws, for flows of coordinate dependent stress energy across surfaces, but it is the right concept. The construction is partly explained in the Wikipedia page on Infraparticle, where Noether's theorem is applied to a gauge symmetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pseudotensor only works fully for asymptotically flat spacetime, where you can identify the asymptotic translations with actual physical translations. But when you have cosmological solution, this doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know anything about this, just ask a question. People will be happy to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T20:24:28.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-02T12:20:38.953" Score="15" ViewCount="895" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2810/community-promotion-ads-2013&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2013&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/980&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T13:02:16.130" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2012" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2012-12-10T15:15:37.427" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-12-02T12:20:38.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2011-12-02T15:45:15.827" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how those other relatively innocuous posters got lumped in to this discussion, but I'd really like to address the question of Ron Maimon. Is he being persecuted because he unselfconsciously posts a biography which lables him as an outsider? Yes, I find Ron Maimon to be at times annoying but certainly not obnoxious in the manner of such classic personalities as Jim Carr and ZapperZ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about Ron Maimon is he definitely comes here to talk about physics. I personally can't get into discussions with him for two reasons: first, he's so single-minded in his own point of view that you can't really communicate with him back and forth; secondly, the structure of this forum is simply not conducive to extended discussions. But he sometimes posts things that are so coherently argued and with such intricate detail that even if I can't understand them myself, I just can't believe he's simply pulling this stuff out of his ass. Consider his answer to the question of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14932/why-do-we-not-have-spin-greater-than-2/15164#15164&quot;&gt;Why do we not have particles of spin greater than 2?&lt;/a&gt; A guy who can write that is either (a) a genius or  (b) a total faker. I'm no fan of Ron Maimon but I think it's got to be (a), not (b). You just can't make that stuff up if it doesn't come from somewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone thinks Ron Maimon is a crank, then let him argue Ron down face-to-face on his actual physics. Don't tell me that Ron is unemployed and has no PhD. That doesn't prove anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T15:45:15.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2011-12-02T22:27:50.910" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm still new here and unfamiliar with the dynamics of the place/people/personalities. I would like to point out that folks here are a lot more touchy and on the edge than other forums. This drives away (new) members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T22:27:50.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2011-12-05T13:08:55.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to be too easy to gain reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you ask good questions, you gain reputation, but does that qualify you to give good answers? I think &quot;No.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you give good answers to questions in some fields, does that qualify you to give good answers to questions in other fields? I think &quot;No.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion for solving this isue is displaying modified reputation scores besides answers and comments (tooltip). This modified reputation score should only include reputation gained on answers in the main tag of the question. There would have to be the concept of a main tag in order to avoid gaining reputation on subtags, which you are knowledgeable in, without having a clue about the main tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes should subtract at least as much reputation as gained with upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6345" LastActivityDate="2011-12-05T13:08:55.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="973" CreationDate="2011-12-07T07:22:13.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions are important for teaching, because they give a list of examples for classes. This is a pain to come up with. The difference in quality of teaching, assuming the instructor knows the material, is mostly in the richness and depth of the examples. If anyone thinks these problems are low-level, give an answer! It's not so easy to do. This is why teaching is hard, and this site is primarily a teaching area, not a research area (now that theoreticalphysics exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T07:22:13.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2011-12-08T15:34:28.223" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5E3rC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-17T13:02:16.130" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T13:02:16.130" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-12-08T15:34:28.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-10T20:09:25.057" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is sort of meta, so here it is: Have admins noticed, in the last three weeks, an increasing of traffic into StackExchange coming from searches for higgs related topics? And a subtopic of it, could be, is there an increase on specific searches (say &quot;two photon decay&quot;) from research institutions as cern.ch, .edu, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that google &lt;a href=&quot;http://trends.google.com/trends?q=higgs,%20LHC,%20lepton,%20dilepton,%20cern&amp;amp;ctab=0&amp;amp;geo=all&amp;amp;date=mtd&amp;amp;sort=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;trends&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=higgs,%20LHC,cern,%20dilepton,higgs%20boson&amp;amp;date=today%201-m&amp;amp;cmpt=q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;insights&lt;/a&gt; are already detecting the news impact of the rumours; I would expect that the details of search engine hits into physics websites will have more detail, perhaps even some searches with &quot;xxx GeVs&quot; or &quot;yyy channel&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1335" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-12-11T02:19:26.807" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T02:42:54.497" Title="Are Higgs rumours increasing the traffic in physics websites, particularly SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="986" CreationDate="2011-12-11T02:42:54.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question! We (moderators) don't have access to traffic information in enough detail to determine whether the Higgs search is increasing traffic, but my best impression is that any such increase for this site at least is fairly small. In the list of searches that we get hits from, anything relating to the Higgs is pretty far down the list, and besides, the overall traffic level for the site has been pretty steady, or &lt;em&gt;slowly&lt;/em&gt; growing, over the past several months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way we can get a bigger piece of the action is to increase the number of questions on the site that relate to the Higgs boson. So if you have any ideas, ask away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T02:42:54.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-14T03:50:32.370" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do you down-vote a question? &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18250/how-do-physicists-justify-using-c2-in-equations&quot;&gt;For example&lt;/a&gt;. In my view, the so called &quot;bad&quot; questions are due to misconceptions of the OP. They may be ill-formulated, but I feel it is more productive to edit the question and elicit some clarity from the OP. Who knows, this could generate an insightful answer or two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is far off base or simply an attempt to troll, by all means lock it down. Hell, I will report it for admin review!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will never down-vote a question. Ever. What is your take on the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T23:24:58.090" Title="Down-voting questions: Please state your rationale" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="988" CreationDate="2011-12-14T23:14:19.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is often more &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;useful to the site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to accompany a down-vote with a comment this is &lt;em&gt;not required&lt;/em&gt;.{*}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/&quot;&gt;Down-votes are just as important as up-votes in making this site useful.&lt;/a&gt; Physics has it's share of bogus information and, indeed, of people pushing nonsense for their own reasons. A visitor coming to this site and finding material that she knows to be crap accepted will not be impressed, and visitors who &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know may be led astray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of down-votes you can signal the difference between only two levels of quality (say between good and not-particularly good). With down-votes you can now signal three classes of material (say good, unremarkable, and poor). More discriminating power &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;makes the site better&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I find that down-votes cast due to a single detail in an otherwise good post are the best candidates for comments because the writer can easily fix the problem an the caster then rescind the vote and perhaps even award at up-vote instead. Note that this process contributes to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;making the site better&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also sometimes comment when casting a down-vote on posts that are unrepairablly bad in hopes that the author will prefer to delete them---thus &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;making the site better&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular example you selected the OP wrote a question that a number of people found to be rude. Perhaps they cast down-votes out of pique. Well, that's what happens. Vote are plenary as long as you don't focus on another user as user and don't maintain sock-puppet accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should, perhaps, remark that this consideration &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; apply to questions as well as to answers. Visitors to the site's main page will see questions before they see answers and if they see a lot of poorly written, ill-thought out, derogatory, questions they may conclude that this site has little to offer them before they ever see how we &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with the (quite modest) required rep who think that they can improve questions are &lt;em&gt;encouraged to do so&lt;/em&gt; (there is even a little bit of rep in it until you reach 2000), as this is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;better way to improve the site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; than casting down-votes, but down-voting is still better than allowing a bad question to pass unremarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final remark: please do not cast votes on the basis of the current score (either pile-on votes or pity votes), but restrict yourself to making &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; best evaluation of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the tooltips for the voting arrows, they provide clear and simple guidance on when and how to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{*} Feature requests to require this have been turned down on the mother meta more time than I care to count, and for good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2011-12-14T23:24:58.090" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T23:24:58.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="991" CreationDate="2011-12-15T19:30:43.300" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;At electronics.SE we received this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/23761/representing-charges-in-computer-programming&quot;&gt;Representing charges in computer programming&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of the question comes from this paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can electric charges be represented in terms of programming? Do&#xA;  you have to simulate each and every ion or are there overall&#xA;  principles so you can calculate with &quot;whole&quot; charges? I could imagine&#xA;  Circuit simulations already implement some calculations with&#xA;  electrodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this community think it might fit in here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6693" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:06.300" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T16:43:37.707" Title="Do questions about modeling charges in programming fit here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2011-12-15T19:38:16.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much of anything about neuroelectrodynamics specifically, so I can't say for sure, but personally, my first impression is that it would not fit particularly well here. The question seems to be about representing a system in software, which is really more of a programming issue than a physics issue. There's a &lt;em&gt;chance&lt;/em&gt; it would fit on the beta &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;scientific computation&lt;/a&gt; site, or perhaps on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would suggest waiting a little while to see if someone with more knowledge in the field chimes in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T19:38:16.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2011-12-17T16:43:37.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel it can fit here because there is some physics involved. Most people who run simulations in the bio-physics area use coarse grained models where a complex molecule such as RNA is divided into coarser sub-units based on physical principles. A full molecular dynamics simulation is extremely intensive to perform. The physics comes in when you decide how to coarse grain your model? I am not an expert in the field, but from what little I know, the objective usually is to predict conformational changes or time evolution of structural features. They discuss this as a classical mechanics problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T16:43:37.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="995" CreationDate="2011-12-17T20:43:03.920" Score="3" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/paradox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;paradox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt; doesn't help characterize the physics content of a question. Sure, there are some questions that deal with (apparent) paradoxes, but I think it's enough that the question title or body mentions the paradox in question; there's no real need to make a tag out of it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else see a good use for this tag and would care to argue for keeping it? Or should we get rid of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2011-12-25T07:07:30.153" LastActivityDate="2011-12-25T07:07:30.153" Title="Can we burninate the &quot;paradox&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-19T20:03:12.243" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across this post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon&quot;&gt;Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon&lt;/a&gt; and think it would make a great science fair project for elementary and middle school students.  Are there other physics stackexchange questions that would serve a similar purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(also, I think this fits under meta since it is discussing questions but not physics directly, but I admit I don't know if it is really appropriate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5651" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2011-12-19T20:03:12.243" Title="What are the best questions that could be turned into science fair projects?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2011-12-20T20:45:03.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kill it with fire. Definitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T20:45:03.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="998" CreationDate="2011-12-21T22:49:53.830" Score="11" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18568/any-undergrad-exercises-about-nuclear-bomb-design&quot;&gt;question about exercises relating to nuclear bomb design&lt;/a&gt; prompted a couple of complaints about the kind of attention it might bring to the site. I wanted to open a question for community input on this issue. What should our policy be toward questions that involve or relate to potentially illegal or unethical activities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a parallel on the programming-related sites of the SE network, in that people will occasionally ask about software exploits. We can draw on their experience in deciding on our own policy. I'll add to this list as I find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/2246/questions-seeking-how-to-bypass-security-off-topic&quot;&gt;Ask Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/2290/legal-basis-for-restriction-of-discussions&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/533/handling-questions-clearly-trying-to-break-some-kind-of-policy-tos-etc&quot;&gt;#2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.serverfault.com/questions/1659/handling-illegal-immoral-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;Server Fault&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T16:01:14.227" Title="What is our stance on questions about legally or ethically questionable activities?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="996" CreationDate="2011-12-22T14:34:45.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was one of the people observing that a serious answer to such a question would draw unnecessary attention to the site, maybe I should expand on my ppoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of my life I have lived in Greece. Living in Greece is not an intellectual exercise only, though not as dangerous as living in Syria or Egypt at the moment. Living in Athens has meant that ordinary middle class people were caught and suffocated by a fire in a bank, started by a molotov bomb during demonstrations last year. And things will be getting worse rather than better. Now one cannot stop the hot blooded bent on vengeance in making a molotof bomb, since the exercise is simple. But Jeff's question raised the specter for me: how would it be if those masked misguided or guided  operators, who intervene in all peaceful demonstrations and turn them into mayhem, could &quot;easily&quot; make a nuclear gun? and instead of five dead people have hundreds and  entire suburbs contaminated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noting that in most countries it would be illegal to give an instruction manual of point by point creation of a nuclear weapon, the question is also ethical, if somebody used the instructions in the answers provided by the site which resulted in some death and destruction. I think such questions should be closed as not pertaining to physics but to weapons design, and kick the can to another board, engineering or weapons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point:&#xA;Any self respecting  government terrorist-hunting organization will be googling such terms and checking on who reads what in this free internet age. Jeff gave a link to an amazon.com book. I am sure all addresses and addressees are carefully scrutinized by somebody that we do not even suspect, from China to North Korea to US. Even Turkey. Can you imagine the Kurdish resistance with a nuclear gun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The insidious role of the question asked by Jeff is that it asks for a student exercise. An exercise will have numbers and brass tacks, which one cannot find in the run of the mill webpages on nuclear weapons: they waffle and talk of stuff any nuclear physicist knows, not the stuff that needs years of research and tests. Thus the question gave me the impression that it was asked masking a real intention of getting hands on construction instructions of such weapons. That is not innocent or naive. Hence my questioning whether his identity was hacked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T14:34:45.513" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="996" CreationDate="2011-12-22T16:31:44.033" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pretty unlikely that any organisation with the access to materials, technology and fabrication facilities to manufacture a &lt;em&gt;device&lt;/em&gt; would be seeking intro physics guidance on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another physics based forum had a strict rule on not explaining things that people could hurt themselves with, Van der Graff generators, electromagnetic rail guns, penny squeezers, etc - and that they could reasonably build. but it was OK to talk about much more dangerous experiments that they couldn't actually do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2525" LastEditorUserId="2525" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T16:01:14.227" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T16:01:14.227" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="996" CreationDate="2011-12-26T01:12:40.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seriously doubt anybody on this forum can even begin to comprehend the complexities involved in making a nuclear bomb, let alone make one! As Ron Miamon stated, entire nations, with their wealth and connections have been unsuccessful trying on their own. I would be very surprised if somebody made a bomb based on the expertise of SE:Physics. Perhaps, the only casualties by allowing the question would be those among us who die laughing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just remember that the jokers who are determined to cause mischief and mayhem will do so regardless of whether we ban them or not. Perhaps it is better served to let people who ask know that they are wasting their time on a ridiculous endeavor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree with Anna that some discussions such as making bombs from home chemicals (a la Steven Segal in Under Seige) are best left unanswered, or closed, or bumped off to SE:Chemistry. Those are not Physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the site admin has to decide on liability issues as there are always morons who try to sue at the drop of a hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2011-12-26T01:12:40.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-02T07:01:30.593" Score="14" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of questions on this site whose titles are not written as questions. Recent examples include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know how to start with this exercise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finding tension in strings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List of international, English language physics grad programs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schrodinger Equation - History&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. In and of itself, this is fine; after all, some of these are perfectly good titles. But some of them are not. And I've been getting the sense that on this site, the titles written as questions often &lt;em&gt;tend&lt;/em&gt; to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title&quot;&gt;better&lt;/a&gt; than the ones that are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Improving the quality of question titles is a good initiative that can boost the overall quality of our site. And if title quality really is correlated to asking a question, one way we can do that is by &lt;strong&gt;encouraging posters, especially new posters, to pose their titles as questions&lt;/strong&gt;. I think it's good for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Titles in question form tend to be more focused on what the person actually wants to know. You get a specific sense of what the question is about by looking at a question title, rather than just a vague sense of what topic is involved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps more importantly, we get a fair number of homework questions here, and in several of those cases the poster hasn't put in even the bare minimum of effort to make the question conceptual, as required by our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. Almost invariably, the titles of these questions are simple statements, like the first couple examples in the list above.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I believe that &lt;strong&gt;in the process of figuring out how to phrase their title as a question&lt;/strong&gt;, the people who post these sorts of questions will put in some thought that will &lt;strong&gt;help them write a better question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see us get into the habit of phrasing the titles to our own posts as questions, when we can do so without sacrificing quality. Similarly, let's edit the titles of questions by new posters to also be questions, again when we can do so without sacrificing quality. If we establish a &lt;em&gt;consistent&lt;/em&gt; pattern of titling posts with questions, it will encourage new posters to follow that trend when posting their own questions, which hopefully leads to better title quality overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; saying &quot;all titles should be questions.&quot; As I mentioned above, there are perfectly valid question titles which are not questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm also &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; saying that we should edit titles to be questions just for the sake of making them questions. After all, editing &quot;I don't know how to do this problem&quot; into &quot;How do I do this problem?&quot; does &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; to improve the quality of the title, and remember, title quality is what it's all about. But starting with &quot;I don't know how to do this problem,&quot; given the choice between &quot;Period of a pendulum&quot; and &quot;What's the formula for period of a pendulum?&quot;, I'd choose the latter. It shows exactly what the poster is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; asking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you agree?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not only posting this to encourage people to adopt this guideline but also looking for feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I do realize the irony of titling a question about titling questions with questions with a statement :-P Just go with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;There is a separate issue as to whether those questions demonstrate the bare minimum of effort required to meet our policy. The issue of whether those questions should  be closed is a separate one that I would be happy to discuss if anyone has input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T22:11:17.813" Title="Shouldn't we make (more of) our question titles actual questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2012-01-02T11:50:13.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree on that the title should be a question. Maybe one could program the requirement of a question mark for acceptance of the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for closed questions. I would be happy if there were a qualifier next to the word &quot;closed&quot; in the main list. For example &quot;closed/duplicate&quot; in the main list encourages people to open the question and find the link to the duplicate. &quot;closed, not a question&quot;, or &quot;closed, FAQ&quot;, will allow to skip in good conscience. &quot;closed/migrated&quot; would encourage opening the question to see where, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-07-27T22:11:17.813" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T22:11:17.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2012-01-03T00:08:39.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) Very good initiative! First of all, titles should be &lt;em&gt;informative&lt;/em&gt; about the physics question. When a user reads the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;frontpage&lt;/a&gt; of Physics.SE, he (or she) should at least have a general idea what a question is about before clicking on it. Usually it is good to pose the title as a question, but ultimately it is more important that it is informative about the physics topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Moreover, avoid &lt;em&gt;abbreviations&lt;/em&gt; in the title. If an abbreviation is only explained in the question formulation, one still has to click it to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is not directly related to the opening post, but rather a couple of scattered thoughts on how to write questions (which someone in the future may write up as, say, an extended version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#howtoask&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;em&gt;how to ask questions&lt;/em&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) In the question formulation, if you are reading a book, and there is something in that book you don't understand and you want to ask about, please give the &lt;em&gt;reference!&lt;/em&gt; In fact, in different areas of physics, notions can mean completely different things! By providing a reference, you ensure that the answers will be much more focused and useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) When linking to the arXiv, link to the abstract page rather than the pdf file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) When linking preferably use perma-links if possible to prevent &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2012-01-07T19:56:09.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2012-01-05T19:58:41.893" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are really two types of question titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Good titles that describe the content of the question in an accurate way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want #1, and definitely not #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to get there, but you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to start arbitrarily forcing everyone to prefix their questions with &quot;How do I..&quot; because that would actually harm the titles. See the excellent guidelines here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10648/1&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10648/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR -- you want &lt;em&gt;good, descriptive&lt;/em&gt; titles, a question title in the formal tone of a question can be every bit as bad as one that isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T19:58:41.893" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-05T20:21:46.333" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question on Stack Overflow, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8728759/need-some-help-to-understanding-the-formula&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8728759/need-some-help-to-understanding-the-formula&lt;/a&gt;, which is off topic there and is being considered for migration to Physics. Would it be appropriate on this site? I ask because, although the pinhole camera model itself could be classified under physics, the mathematical language which the question uses is decidedly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; something we use in physics (as far as I know). The math seems to be fairly standard for computer image processing, and since the question is asking about interpreting that math, I believe it would be best treated at a site where computer image processing is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you think?&lt;/strong&gt; Should this question, and more generally anything about the pinhole camera model regardless of what mathematical language it is phrased in, be on topic (or off topic) here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T15:48:16.043" Title="Is this question about the pinhole camera model appropriate for us?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2012-01-05T22:25:08.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see it as particularly good for Physics.SE: all the physics has already been done and the question is about the meaning of a particular mathematical notation that is very common in computer graphics circles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better on Math.SE, or just kept on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T22:25:08.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-01-06T01:17:30.717" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E4Rt6.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org -- open access to over 700 000 e-prints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-01-06T01:17:30.717" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-06T01:17:30.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-01-06T09:55:11.673" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://inspirehep.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XPxBl.png&quot; alt=&quot;INSPIRE -- literature database search for high-energy physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-01-06T09:55:11.673" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-06T09:55:11.673" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-07T04:25:30.607" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just me? I keep getting this error when I open physics.stackexchange.com (and, for that matter, it also happens in math.stackexchange.com):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MathJax no longer loads a default configuration file; you must specify such files explicitly. This page seems to use the older default config/MathJax.js file, and so needs to be updated. This is explained further at&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/help/configuration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mathjax.org/help/configuration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is that I can't see equations. Why is this happening? What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I have had this issue with Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox 7.0.1. Perhaps I should also mention that my internet connection is dial-up (slow @ ~ 33kbps). However, I have no problems with other websites, such as Wikipedia, which is also heavy on equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2015-01-27T17:28:59.613" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T18:17:05.353" Title="MathJax crashes in every page with equations" Tags="|bug|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2012-01-08T03:42:57.193" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to answer on 2 things you asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what to do: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Balance the users and community atmosphere, and SE is already doing this by limiting daily rep to 200 for exactly this reasons and personalities you list in your question. You can go further to limit rep gainable in a week/month, something I would recommend here. Does this site really need user who play this site and invests time in it like such one addicted 24/7 world or warcraft gamer? There would be enough other user to anwer questions if the rep-payout would only drive those people to write every 1 days only 1 answer here. For big sites like SO there are enough competitors and questions niches that the 200 limit works, but here and on small betas even more, dominance of very few rep-gamers makes many sites here uninteresting to me, for small topics you get much better and more perspectives on topics over at reddit or quora. That are the 2 sides of reputation, attracting egos like Motl or Ron clashing from time to time and yielding high quality answers by competition via the rep-voting system. But it is evident that discussions about phyics are on SE much harder then on other questions sites because of this system. Still I think SE should start to begin adapting at least rep-limit or voting strentgh on SE sites with diff. topics and community size. I have surfed for a while philosophy, history and economics.SE and it are always the same 2-3 user earning all rep or even voting themselves, these sites are so one-dimensional in their views and boring to read that you wish all high rep users where only allowed to answer 1 question a week simply to make more people contributing to such sites. It kills pretty much any community dynamics and the AREA51 only works if they set up the min. amount of commiters so that more competition exists in the first beta-months. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what I feel as a physicist when reading Ron's arrogant insulting Bio:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I wouldn't recommend a site to colleagues where (probably soon) the top-rep poster has such a arrogant Bio and insults all Physicists building the high-technology you use at the moment as completely incompetent. It's awkward that the mods here are obviously not willing to make this guy either changing his incomplete Bio or deactivating his account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Ron insults guys like me I may counter: Somebody unemployed with 38 sitting whole day in front of a PC to answer basic physics questions and dubbing others with his Real Name as idiots obviously failed pretty much in a social way in the research group after his graduation. Not able to work in a team or respect other people not wasting 70 hours a week on physics. Not able to understand that science more than ever is a social process of strengthening and falsifying paradigms instead of genius-like theoretical visions in these times. He lacks patience and tranquility obviously to work as a scholar, so sites like this are the only places to pet his ego, he writes answers longer than wikipedia articels and probably socially failed there too as a author in the discussions. He &quot;likes to spread his theories everywhere&quot;, well maybe he should enlighten then theophysics.SE and the whole scientifc community with some arxiv papers to boost scientific progress how only he can do it and less game this site, but probably the users over there are even more incompetent to understand his genius-like truths than here. If he completes his Bio with these unmentioned points I'm fine and he should keep it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why the mods here don't request the bio change, Georg account was deactivated for some months afaik for insulting comments (I agree with this, while I'm pretty direct and critical too I'm not dubbing people as embarrassing or incompetent) Ron's Bio is even more insulting to me and visible as a constant poster and high-rep user here. And with such users waiting on their RSS-feed to bombard this site with their knowledge or google-wizardry (which many physics graduate with so much time could easily do too), it becomes less and less interesting or valuable to contribute to this site. I'm not interested in the mostly correct views of one person on physics, I want competition, many answers and views (otherwise there is wiki or scholarpedia or personal blogs), without anti-thesis for the pure purpose, scientific progress ends. Too much of those rep-gamers and such sites or forums become a cabinet of vanities. That's why there is the 200 rep limit. And for physics this obviouly has to be adapted, the rate of  graduates thinking of themselves as omiscient is esp. in physics pretty high compared to other branches, explains why so many physicists write blogs. Thats a evident psychological pattern on many physicists I know. A rep system just perfectly matches the ego of such guys, writing wikipia articles as answers, so any prof. physicist will never try answer a qestion on his own lacking time. There is not really a chance and need to compete on attention with such fast appearing long answers, so prof. experts leave. It's of course hard to balance his, but I prefer rather a lot competition on lower quality and detail of answer than views of always the same 3-4 gamer here on top of every question. There is a voting-bias to such guys and I will personally more trust a heavy discussed wikipedia article than a single omniscient completely competent user, esp. in Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a edit to show that Ron noticed/responded to this answer, and &quot;changed&quot; his bio. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we all know physicists have their very own sense of humour (big bang theory) and worldviews. But, Ron, something to consider: I dont buy from you that you are unaware of how much reputation points your bio costs you. Many user here &quot;non-vote&quot; you because of this IMHO. The average vote sum on our answers seems to be significantly below lubos or other users. Its evident when I look on your christianity or ELU profiles where, funnily, you have the same bio :) and earn alot of downvotes, because user there dont get this kind of &quot;humour&quot; or dont know why you insult physicists (having a high standing on SE this way) on a non-physicist site. You could probably already have 30k rep here without that bio (now it makes probably not really a difference if you remove/change it or not). You can also replace physicists with biologists, priests, creationists,... Funnily here the physicists defend you while your earn downvotes on other sites. I will stop trying to understand this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know psychology is a pseudo-scientifc topic and not as interesting as physics, but I dont think understanding humour and human reactions is a matter of incompetence/ignorance. Your bio is just not that funny, more looks like tragedy or a crackpot-theorist (having no big standing on SE ;) )  I dont really want to continue that discussion, I just dont get how somebody so interested in rep and feedback can choose such a counter-productive bio. Maybe I should ask on cognitivesciences.se, but this seems to be a very special case...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="3715" LastEditDate="2012-03-22T17:46:47.303" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T17:46:47.303" CommentCount="34" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-08T13:03:03.270" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the FAQ it is said that &quot;do my homework&quot; questions are not welcome on physics.stackexchange. So far I was sure that I know what are that questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formulation of some non-conceptual problem: &quot;given A, find B&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No attempts to solve the problem or understand the conditions are shown in the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is &quot;what is B?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have flagged 4 questions using these criteria. The flags for two questions have been declined. These questions got some up-votes and answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18942/what-would-be-pressure-of-1-kg-of-photon-gas-at-room-temperature-put-in-a-volume&quot;&gt;What would be pressure of 1 kg of photon gas at room temperature put in a volume of 1 liter?&lt;/a&gt; - looks like it was just copied from some textbook without any editions. Criteria: 1, 2 and 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/19245/rolling-resistance-and-static-friction&quot;&gt;Rolling resistance and static friction&lt;/a&gt; - some useless &quot;I'm confused&quot; introduction and an exercise from another textbook. Criteria: 1 and 3 for sure. An attempt to avoid criterion 2 (IMHO, not successful).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion these questions are not worth neither the up-votes nor the good answers they got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something is wrong for sure in my criteria since those questions are neither edited nor closed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is wrong? What are the correct criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6671" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-01-08T13:55:13.113" Title="Objective criteria of &quot;do my homework&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1011" CreationDate="2012-01-08T13:55:13.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't the one who declined that flag, so I can't give you the full story, but that question was asked by a user who has contributed many answers and non-homework questions to the site, and who presumably knows our policies on homework well enough to tag a question as homework if the tag does indeed apply. With that in mind, I elected to give the user the benefit of the doubt and not close it for being a &quot;do-my-homework&quot; question (even though it admittedly does look like one). That may have been a mistake. If so, it is at least an isolated incident. If you flag similar questions in the future, it's unlikely those flags will be declined.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree that this problem meets criterion #1. Yes, the question could be better explained, but the poster is looking for an explanation of the underlying concept, namely the difference between the causes of rolling and static friction, and is merely posting the questions about FBDs and forces as a way to elucidate that difference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I think you have the right criteria in mind, you just happened to get unlucky in flagging a couple of borderline cases. But also wait to see what the other moderators have to say, if anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the past I've closed a lot of do-my-homework questions as &quot;off topic,&quot; but lately I tend to use &quot;too localized&quot; more so as not to give out the automatic downvote (which tends to discourage new users).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For future reference, if a question is essentially conceptual but just seems to have a few too many details, enough that it piques your &quot;homework question sense&quot; (as I suppose was the case in example #2 in your question), one thing you can do is edit out the specific details and make the question a little more generic, rather than flagging it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you're concerned about your flag weight, (1) don't be, nobody cares around here ;-) (2) as far as I'm concerned you can flag a couple things for nonsense reasons and I'll mark them valid.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-01-08T13:55:13.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-09T11:17:14.010" Score="7" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I had some questions and was going to post them here. While trying to find the best formulation for them I've found the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting questions with immediate answers is welcome e.g. on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, but this site is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure my questions are interesting and the answers can be useful for other people. Should I post them here? If yes, how to do that in the best way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49/is-it-okay-with-you-to-write-seed-questions&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; but I think the linked question is more about site promotion while mine is about knowledge sharing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to flood the site with question&amp;amp;answers invented specially to &quot;farm&quot; reputation. There are some problems that were puzzling me. If I was able to find the answers myself, so what? Should I just wait for other people to ask the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers given to the question linked above are essentially &quot;Pretend to not know the answer. People like answering questions&quot;. Well, I like answering questions too. Why not answer my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should I...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... post such questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... indicate that I already know the answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... post my own answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... give other people some time to answer the questions before posting my own answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6671" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T17:35:08.343" Title="Should I post a question if I know the answer? Should I answer my own questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|best-practices|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1013" CreationDate="2012-01-09T11:43:45.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeding the site with questions is not ok, because it makes it grow artificially; now, when the site is a grown-up, it is perfectly ok, as long as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you ask serious questions,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you won't flood the site with tens of them,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you will be fair with accepting best answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T19:28:39.293" LastActivityDate="2012-01-09T19:28:39.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1013" CreationDate="2012-01-10T17:35:08.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the same discussion on biology BETA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92/is-wikipedia-authoring-here-necessary-and-allowed&quot;&gt;https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92/is-wikipedia-authoring-here-necessary-and-allowed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO if you know you have solved a problem &lt;strong&gt;of general interest&lt;/strong&gt; correctly it's ok, but wait with accepting the answer. If you know there is no single answer to that question, wait before answering yourself, otherwise it will often look like rep-gaiming and more important kill competition and therefore number and quality of answers. Someone may find a even better answer than yours, if the question is still open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:46.603" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T17:35:08.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1019" CreationDate="2012-01-11T16:12:10.017" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask just what is in the title: How can I undo an accidental upvote of a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How can I undo an upvote of a comment?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-11T17:44:29.020" Score="22" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to present the community with a new final site design I've been working on. The goal is to keep the site clean and minimalistic, but at the same time give our physics site a unique branding. I gave the layout some extra spacing and line height for readability, also the colors have been tested for color blindness. I apologize for the first design, I learned my lesson the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/463/new-design-launched&quot;&gt;hard way&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Below are the mockups, please click on the images to see full resolution versions.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Home Page&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UIXbs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UIXbs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Homepage&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question Page&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/19fbD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/19fbD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Question page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community approves this design, I'll be converting it to CSS and hopefully launch the design next week. Also, I'll be creating top user swag (T-Shirt and stickers) and moderator cards soon. Below is a mockup of the shirt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iqkbf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics T-Shirt&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know what you think!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-01-19T12:53:19.547" Title="New Site Design" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1017" CreationDate="2012-01-11T18:53:06.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately there is no way to do this. It has been proposed as a feature request &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1170/should-i-be-able-to-cancel-my-up-vote-on-a-comment&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; and declined. Comments don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things anyway, so try not to worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T18:53:06.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2012-01-12T01:33:05.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking over this today, and yep, I still like it ;-) It reminds me that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/304/what-should-our-site-look-like&quot;&gt;the first time through&lt;/a&gt;, there were a lot of suggestions about cute ways to work physics concepts and notation into the design, but I think we'll be better off with a design like this that just gets out of the way, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd be quite happy with the exact design you've posted screenshots of, but I do have a few speculative thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The page footer seems insufficiently distinguished from the rest of the page. Maybe it's just me, but I think it would be nice to have some visual indication that the main content of the page has ended and that you're now looking at a generic footer. What about putting the same grid and gradient you use in the header, or perhaps a faded version of it, as a background for the footer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same goes for the right sidebar; it seems insufficiently distinguished from the main content of the page, though more so on the question list than the individual question page. Of course I'm not suggesting using the grid/gradient background for the sidebar, but perhaps there's something subtle that could be done there, like giving it a faint left border, or a slightly off-white background color, or fading the text, or whatever tricks you have up your sleeve for this sort of thing ;-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regarding the vertical alignment of the text of the site name and the page tabs on the right (questions, tags, etc.): when I look at it closely I do see that the baselines are aligned, but if I'm not focusing on that alignment specifically, it qualitatively seems just a little off. I'm wondering what it would look like if the names of those tabs were raised up by just a couple of pixels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The tags also seem to blend into the background a bit. What would you think about putting a thin border of a marginally darker shade on the left side of each tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, do we get a custom image on the 404 page? That's one place I think we could get away with having some cute physics joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T01:33:05.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2012-01-12T02:41:54.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elegant and visually pleasing, but as David notes it &quot;gets out of the way&quot; -- absolutely perfect for the site. On the other hand could we restart the search for a proper logo? I actually like the mexican hat favicon, but for the main image it's just a bit... lacking. Maybe it's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="791" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T02:41:54.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-12T06:09:11.927" Score="8" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;In conjunction with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/new-site-design&quot;&gt;new site design&lt;/a&gt; Jin has proposed, we may get to choose images to put on the 404 error and captcha pages. (I'm not sure if there are any other pages there are that we can customize, but if so, I hope someone else will edit them in.) The main theme is pretty clean and not very physics-specific, but these error pages are a good chance to work some inside jokes and physics references into the site design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few possibilities for the 404 page were proposed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/304/what-should-our-site-look-like&quot;&gt;original design thread&lt;/a&gt; (though &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of them&lt;/a&gt; may not be 404 material much longer :-P). We can reconsider those, and also collect new ones if anyone has them. So, what ideas do we have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T14:24:51.217" Title="Ideas for 404/error/captcha pages, take 2" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2012-01-12T21:02:51.203" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rons got a reputation of over 10,000 is that gulling to a professional physicist who have got lazy enough to not spend all day, arguing obscure points about physics. I'm sure it is. I was arguing Everett and QM in sci.physics and sci.physics.research back when I was undergrad and gradute getting his PhD, and me Ron where most on the same side then. I don't doubt that 20 years of learning and practicing arguing about physics will make you very strong at gaining rep on services like stack exchange. &#xA;Its a pity in fact that his gaining reputation isn't making him money. That lack of a PhD, probably means its very hard for him to get published on ArXiv, Journals or as a science Author. Stack Exchange works better than Technorati for reputation I think. 100 plus articles and I'm zero there, dispite having friends over at science 2.0, and a public name check by Lubos, I've still the Technorati authority of newbie, and only google love from SEO gaming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perphaps I'm a crank. I've followed 20+ years of arXiv (many phys-ph),  and generate occasional new theories, obviously this time clashes with being programmer, and social life. Imagine a professional physicist of 20 years, post doc to marriage to steady university position (one in who many PhDs) , have had there interesting new ideas cut down by collegues, and fail in practice, or its famous name whos working on it, so regularly they solidly conservative now. In fact zero people have cut down my new idea yet, apart from the rejection letter from Astroparticle physics, for being to constructive or it being well known, (notice not your math fails here, or reference to where else it was tried, not even for it being more than one step beyond current ideas. I.e. the principle that your allowed one new particle or force, but when you have to invoke two at time without a common prinicple, your pushing Bayes belief toward infinitessimal squared. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do your want public development of physics to go onwards, outside universities? These days I see much fewer undergrads using the net. You could quite easier destroy scientic development with a few reputation winners recanting on they're own subject. Not Even Wrong, and all. I went down the best student book shop in London yestaday, and the books on supersymmetry and supergravity had disappeared from the selves. This is very important sociologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did pick up, [TITLE]Orbiting the moons of pluto[/TITLE] at the bookshop though, solving Maxwells, Dirac and Schoedigers equations in 8d metrics (3,3i,-1,i) and 12d (3,3i, -3, 3i) and the sort of pheno that made me laugh out loud in several places. That's the sort of work that would disappear because of Stack Exchange. Lubos and Ron and other would probably down slap down with 3 time dimensions, your states will all be negative norm, and they'd be probilities would be ghosts. (And they'd say that without knowing the five BDOA loopholes what allow it to succeed in a perfect theory), and in a hundred years, they'd still probably believe it had failed where it could have been sucessful, just due to repetition gaming. I'm too lazy to check those loop holes, probably, and the world is very not encoraging. I here they's a bar mans job going somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3864" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T21:02:51.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2012-01-13T06:39:16.713" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idea for 404 page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We couldn't find that page. Maybe it's hiding in these extra dimensions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, try searching for... &lt;em&gt;[here goes the standard 404 page stuff]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aCalabi_yau.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Calabi_yau.jpg/460px-Calabi_yau.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Calabi-Yau manifold&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T06:39:16.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-13T07:35:26.263" Score="3" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to have become de facto policy that questions about fictional physics are off topic, unless they're sufficiently precisely written. I recently realized that wasn't mentioned in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; so I added the following blurb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Questions about physics of fictional worlds&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;i&gt;&quot;Could warp drive get you out of a black hole?&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Most questions about fictional physics are not addressed by existing theories or experiments, so we do not have the ability to answer them by applying physical laws. If your question falls under this category, it may be on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;i&gt;Exception:&lt;/i&gt; if a question is formulated specifically enough in terms of modifications to existing theories, it may be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we keep this, delete it, rewrite it, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T07:35:26.263" Title="What's our official position on fictional physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|site-faq|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2012-01-13T19:21:12.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Riffing off the Higg's answer, other no-see-ems include magnetic monopoles, sterile neutrinos, squarks and sleptons, gravitons, the many kinds of quasi-particles that inhabit particle physics books (reggions, instatons, etc...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building an amusing graphical motif out of these critters is a little tricky, however...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T19:21:12.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2012-01-14T15:50:49.193" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this has become focused on a specific person's bio, I have to say that as a retired physicist I do not find very offensive a statement like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the professionals are, for the most part, completely incompetent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though I would not use &quot;completely incompetent&quot; but rather &quot;civil service minded&quot;: pensions, perks, grants and schooling for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was a student, physics was a vocation, it was a burning desire for answers to questions and I was not alone, that is what most of the students of my graduate classes were feeling. We would spend enormous time discussing solutions of quantum mechanics problems, fighting about who was correct. Maybe I was lucky to be with a clutch of dedicated young physicists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first shock came when I was describing the research of our group to an audience of aspiring for a graduate scholarship students, and I got the first question &quot;and what is the insurance plan?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been inflation in the number of people studying physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is not incompetence I would accuse  many  current physicists of, but with lack of vocation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, considering that experiments need something like 3000 people to get going it is evident that a civil service mentality can keep such systems working. Vocation is left for the group leaders, but often they are not inspiring enough, having come up from the hoi polloi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to the time when a true physicist will be sitting at his/her computer and carry out experiments with robots :) . maybe in 300 years, if we do not blow ourselves up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2012-01-14T15:56:51.260" LastActivityDate="2012-01-14T15:56:51.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-15T02:28:02.647" Score="22" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many other StackExchange sites have a name for their chatroom.  MSO has &quot;The Tavern,&quot; SU has &quot;Root Access,&quot; SF has &quot;The Heap,&quot; etc.  Our chatroom here is &quot;Physics.&quot;  Lame.  We need a better name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose &quot;The h Bar.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6290" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T23:09:35.733" Title="What should we name our chat room?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-15T18:23:36.970" Score="2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has lain dormant for months. It wasn't bumped, nothing happened. Suddenly, I get three downvotes (and one up vote) within a 24 hour period. How can I be sure somebody isn't meat puppeting or sock puppeting? Can an admin review the votes and assure me that it was a legitimate coincidence? Is it even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16119/which-subjects-in-physics-should-i-choose-if-i-want-to-help-tackling-todays-ene/16138#16138&quot;&gt;Which subjects in physics should I choose if I want to help tackling today&amp;#39;s energy and environment related problems?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is cold fusion related, and it was at a (suprising) +1 before the current episode. It is possible that you have community vigilante patrols looking for oddball answers, I don't know. But it is not plausible that three votes come on a long dormant answer in a few hours. That has never happened before, and is unlikely considering the reduced traffic on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-01-15T20:11:19.297" Title="Sock puppetting? Meat puppetting? Vigilante Mobs? What's up here?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1029" CreationDate="2012-01-15T20:11:19.297" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I personally just wander about the site aimlessly.  And if I find a question that has had no traffic, or very little traffic, I may do some actions which will drive the question up on the land page (where questions are ordered by activity).  Once there, many other people may have seen it.  Actions such as an edit, an answer, or even a vote can put the question into an area of visibility that it may not have had for a while.  If you just answered that question, it popped up for notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, overall, due to the low quality of other question/answer sites, I think StackExchange is getting more and more users.  Having that happen now may have been part of what got it the votes.  And then if someone sees a -1 vote on a question, human nature would have others follow the leader in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, looking at your answer, it was not really one that is deserving of +1 votes.  The entire cold fusion fiasco was just that, a fiasco!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastActivityDate="2012-01-15T20:11:19.297" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-01-16T00:29:56.760" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YftRV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Contribute to a Physics Wikibook&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="429" LastActivityDate="2012-01-16T00:29:56.760" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-16T00:29:56.760" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-17T21:08:22.117" Score="10" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;new new design&quot; just went live, thanks for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/new-site-design&quot;&gt;feedback&lt;/a&gt;!. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any CSS glitches, &lt;strong&gt;please start a new post&lt;/strong&gt;, and tag it with &quot;Design&quot; and &quot;Bug&quot; so I can track them easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I'm using generic 404 and error images. I plan to make final ones based off &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1022/ideas-for-404-error-captcha-pages-take-2&quot;&gt;your ideas&lt;/a&gt;. So please feel free to submit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, congrats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T18:22:44.287" Title="New New Design Launched" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-17T21:28:46.620" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've given a wrong answer to a question and I'm not too sure how to correct it. Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Acknowledge the correctness of the comments and completely re-edit it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delete it and give a new correct answer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add another answer, acknowledging the incorrecness of my existing one?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T22:03:39.147" Title="Should wrong answers be edited or replaced?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2012-01-17T21:30:21.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the meta color scheme is better and I'd rather see that as the main site design.  Then it would be about perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my 2 cents!  Good job getting this done.  Any design is better than the standard one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T21:30:21.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1035" CreationDate="2012-01-17T22:03:39.147" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any point is leaving an answer you know to be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delete it or edit it to be correct. If you want to leave a visible trail f bread crumbs to explain the comments that is OK, but you don't have to...there is always the edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T22:03:39.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2012-01-17T23:29:08.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xc1cL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An idea for error page, a bit inspired by OPERA result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T14:24:51.217" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T14:24:51.217" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2012-01-18T02:03:12.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good job! Overall I love the clean look of the new design, the color scheme, all of it.  The only criticism I have is that the color on meta seem to have lower contrast now, specifically the light brown text. This makes it a little difficult (though not impossible!) for older eyes like mine to view the site with comfort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5379" LastEditorUserId="5379" LastEditDate="2012-01-18T02:13:32.807" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T02:13:32.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2012-01-18T07:32:38.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused. At present I see a changed current format already. In this one my only comment is that the yellow/gold used for links and names  is too faint for my laptop screen . The faded feeling does not attract clicking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mock up gives better contrast to the yellow and is fine as it uses little yellow/gold (none?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T07:32:38.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1042" CreationDate="2012-01-18T17:21:21.300" Score="2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can it happen that I suddenly lose an upvote on this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/19537/2751&quot;&gt;How can Kaluza-Klein particles be told apart from winding modes at the LHC?&lt;/a&gt; (I had 3) together with 5 reputation points? Upon clicking &quot;reputation&quot; on my profile I see no downvotes or any other reason for this ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T17:34:38.750" Title="Mysterious disappearance of an &quot;upvote&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1041" CreationDate="2012-01-18T17:34:38.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that somebody upvoted you and then later reversed the upvote. Votes can be reversed either within 5 minutes (I think) of their original casting, or any time after the post is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd gotten a downvote you would have lost 2 rep, not 5, and it would show up on your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T17:34:38.750" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-18T18:38:16.113" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to put this in the chat room, but SE seems to miss my login credentials when I go to the chat room, so please spirit this to the chat room if possible and appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to encourage the members of the PhysicsSE community that are from the USA to consider writing to their congressional delegations or to sign one of the many petitions circulating the internet today in regards to the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (Protect IP Act).  As written, these bills are vague, and potentially harmful to the internet as a whole.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, perhaps the most linked to site on this very SE, has gone dark in protest. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;EFF has identified a number of potential consequences&lt;/a&gt;, including potential severe restrictions on software distribution, and collaborative sites like this one.  I challenge members of the community to consider what would happen to a site like PhysicsSE, and the impact on your research and studies if these bills become law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastEditorUserId="2433" LastEditDate="2012-01-18T18:43:43.750" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T18:43:43.750" Title="Chat refuses to log me in; SOPA" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-02-08T06:14:26.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1018" CreationDate="2012-01-19T12:53:19.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, the contrast of the main page is far to low. Why not make the titles of the question a little darker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2012-01-19T12:53:19.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-25T22:30:01.710" Score="14" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in the early days of the site, there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339/can-we-please-let-the-community-close-questions&quot;&gt;a question about letting the community close questions&lt;/a&gt; through the normal 5-votes-to-close mechanism. That was a little impractical at the time because we had very few high-rep users, and three of those were moderators (whose close votes are automatically binding), so if we (moderators) left questions to be closed by the normal mechanism, it would take forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, though, things are different; we have 24 users with over 3000 reputation, the threshold required to vote to close questions, and several other users are close to reaching 3000 rep. So I would like to encourage high-rep members of the community to step up and vote to close questions that need to be closed. I know I close a lot of questions myself but I have been and will be trying to back off on that, to allow the normal community closure mechanism to work more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm at it, I'm curious about why it is that I don't see a whole lot of nonbinding close votes. Is it just that the moderators have been too quick to close questions, so other high-rep users don't get to vote on them? Or do high-rep users just not inclined to bother with that sort of thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;We do have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117/what-questions-should-be-considered-to-close-by-500-users&quot;&gt;meta question for candidate closures&lt;/a&gt; that we could use to list questions for 3000+ users to vote to close. I'll start posting some links there in lieu of actually voting to close myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T15:37:51.030" Title="Community, help us close questions!" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2012-01-26T20:38:01.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;David I just tried to vote to close as duplicate a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20047/is-the-stability-of-the-nucleus-due-to-pions-or-gluons&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; and could not do it after submitting the duplicate link. It was not possible to click on a link to finish the suggestion. The links to duplicate questions  are in the comments of Lubos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-01-26T20:38:01.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-26T22:48:29.913" Score="5" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;So one thing that came out of &lt;s&gt;our recent chat meeting&lt;/s&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/community-help-us-close-questions&quot;&gt;call to close questions&lt;/a&gt; was that some of our high rep members have been reluctant to cast close votes because it has been more or less unnecessary. Now that we're trying to get the community more involved in closing, I'm going to take this opportunity to &lt;s&gt;write up a guide here on meta&lt;/s&gt; blatantly rip off a guide to closing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://crypto.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/129/a-guide-to-moderating-crypto-stackexchange-yourself-close-voting&quot;&gt;Ninefingers' post on Cryptography meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:48:50.757" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T13:54:19.493" Title="A guide to moderating Physics Stack Exchange yourself: close voting" Tags="|discussion|faq-proposed|vote-to-close|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-26T22:48:54.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1048" CreationDate="2012-01-26T22:50:56.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://crypto.meta.stackexchange.com/a/130&quot;&gt;Cryptography meta&lt;/a&gt;, originally posted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://crypto.meta.stackexchange.com/users/46/ninefingers&quot;&gt;Ninefingers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale: why do we close questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are really two ways to do moderation. If you've been on any of the &lt;code&gt;.moderated&lt;/code&gt; newsgroups you'll be well aware that to get a post on there, it needs to undergo a review process first and be accepted. The aim is to keep problem discussions from arising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is slightly different - it works the other  way. &lt;em&gt;Anyone&lt;/em&gt; can ask a question on SE and closing a question is the equivalent of putting that question &lt;em&gt;back into review/improve mode&lt;/em&gt;. It's a feedback mechanism designed to react to problem cases only, so the usual business of asking and answering good questions can just... &lt;em&gt;happen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do we close a question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The philosophy of SE is that each site handles questions on &lt;em&gt;problems you face&lt;/em&gt; or things you are trying to understand. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;don't ask&lt;/a&gt; section of the FAQ gives you a good overview of things that don't work - to summarise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions invite arguments or extended debate that suck up time when members could be helping other people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions are too broad, too narrow or have other content problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions belong elsewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have been worked out over time and with a lot of experience from Stack Overflow and are, &lt;em&gt;broadly speaking&lt;/em&gt; true. Sometimes, exceptions are made - it is always a case-by-case thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is closing like deletion?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Actually, deletion is a different concept on SE. Closed questions are put &quot;into improve mode&quot; if you like, and are still visible for &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; to improve. That's the idea. Deleted questions are different - they have a red background and are invisible to all but high reputation users. So deletion is different and solves a slightly different problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the requirements for closing a question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have 3000 reputation on the site you can vote to close any question for the reasons above. More on that in a moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not have this level of reputation, you will find that under the flag menu, you have an option &quot;this question does not belong here&quot;. That will raise a flag for users who can vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why can anyone vote to close/reopen&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, anyone can vote to close or reopen (or flag as such) because it is &lt;em&gt;your site&lt;/em&gt;. This is really important - it's about expressing what you feel works and doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are moderators different?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderator close votes complete the required vote count immediately, no matter how many people have voted. This applies for both close/reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, as the reputation requirement rules out many users, you will see moderators doing most of the closing to guide the site and look after the content. As you gain in reputation, you get to join in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ok, so how does it work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qogGL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example close button&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, the important piece. Voting to close works like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Underneath the question, there will be a close link. When you click on this, you will be presented with a list of options from which you can pick a close reason most appropriate to the situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/THms0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Close vote reasons dialog&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If other people have voted, you will see blue numbers against the reason they chose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/69Kak.png&quot; alt=&quot;Other votes&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The exact duplicate page takes you to a page that allows you to specify a question to close as an exact duplicate against.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;off topic&quot; page will present you with two options - one to migrate here, to meta, and one just off topic. On SE betas, only moderators can send questions elsewhere, so feel free to cast a vote here and flag if you have a target in mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other options are straight out closes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once you pick your option and click &quot;close&quot;, your vote is registered. You cannot retract it at this stage, but nobody else, including moderators, will know it was you who voted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If five people agree, the question will be closed. You've seen the effect of these before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your name, and the name of other closers, will appear on the bottom of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3F4V.png&quot; alt=&quot;Close banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does vote to re-open work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closed question has a &quot;reopen&quot; link underneath it. If you click this, a dialog box will ask you if you are sure - click yes and your vote will be registered to re-open the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, you can see an example of the re-open link with two votes registered for re-opening (out of five).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/syw4O.png&quot; alt=&quot;Re-open link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happens if I make a mistake?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry! Unless five people agree, or a moderator agrees, the question won't be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I've seen a closed question and I disagree. What can I do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, one option is to use your re-open vote! You can also always raise a discussion here on meta to seek clarification on why a question is closed and hopefully either a resolution will be reached, or you will get an explanation for the closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My name appears on the bottom - isn't this going to cause problems with other users?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, surprisingly few closed questions generate any response at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you experience difficulties as a result of closing a question, you can and should contact a moderator via the flag mechanism (which is anonymous). We can then take any necessary action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I find questions I might need to close? What about re-opens?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually there are two tools for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;Review&lt;/a&gt;. Here, there are a number of options for seeing things that might need say editing. One of these is a tab for all questions with close votes. You are then free to look at the question and decide if you agree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;Tools&lt;/a&gt;. Commonly referred to as the &quot;10k tools&quot;, this page let's you see even more information - certain anonymous flags, re-open votes, delete votes etc. The important one for this is the re-open page. Here, you can see questions that might have been closed incorrectly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-01-26T22:55:46.040" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-26T22:50:56.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1051" CreationDate="2012-01-31T15:04:04.877" Score="5" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a clarifying discussion I see that my downvote was not necessary.&#xA;Do I have to wait until the post is edited and then upvote or is there another possibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-11-08T20:56:23.267" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T20:56:23.267" Title="How can I remove a downvote?" Tags="|support|editing|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1050" CreationDate="2012-01-31T16:09:49.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you catch it within 5 minutes of making the vote, yes, you have to wait until the post is edited. If you see something that can be improved about the post, you can suggest an edit yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T16:09:49.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1053" CreationDate="2012-02-06T03:38:31.533" Score="2" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few recent questions ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20593/magnetic-susceptibility-permeability&quot;&gt;Magnetic Susceptibility- Permeability&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16081/what-is-a-free-body-diagram&quot;&gt;What is a Free Body Diagram?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20622/how-to-compute-resting-position-given-initial-position-initial-velocity-and-dec&quot;&gt;How to compute drag coefficient given initial position, initial velocity and final resting position?&lt;/a&gt;) that are basically asking for information that could be easily looked up in any reference book (or website) on the appropriate subject. The distinguishing feature of these questions is that all you have to do to answer them is find such a reference book, look up the value or concept being requested, and copy it into the answer. One could make the argument that these questions don't belong on this site because what we copy out of the reference book may become out of date, so it's better to send people to the authoritative source directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The network overlords have considered implementing &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;a &quot;general reference&quot; close reason&lt;/a&gt; to deal with these sorts of questions, but they decided it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86043/introduce-a-general-reference-close-reason&quot;&gt;too easily abused&lt;/a&gt; to make permanent. So it's unlikely that we will be able to get that close reason added to our list here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, should we do anything about this, and if so, what? As I see it, the options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just leave these kinds of questions alone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave the ones about physics &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; alone (such as asking what a free body diagram is), but close the ones that simply ask one to look up a value&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close all questions that are asking for reference material (I don't like this option, because the answers to most physics questions can be found in a book or some reference, and so where would we draw the line?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close only those questions where the asker has not shown that they have made some effort to look up the answer before asking here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or perhaps some combination of the above. What do you think? In each case, we should probably add something to our FAQ to clarify what sort of questions are not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind when answering that one of the fundamental principles of Physics SE is that &lt;strong&gt;no physics topic is too elementary to ask about&lt;/strong&gt;. The idea of &quot;general reference&quot; has nothing to do with the topical content of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T20:41:44.577" Title="Should &quot;general reference&quot; questions be closed on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2012-02-06T04:21:45.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like proposal (4), with a modification. Before closing, we must make sure that the explanation is &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; available on the Net, and is &lt;em&gt;something the reader can understand&lt;/em&gt;. For example, the enwiki page for FBD is pretty easy to understand for a neophyte. On the other hand, some pages are full of jargon that confuses the reader. What we can do is provide a link to the relevant page, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MgSO4 question on permeability actually may be something we should keep, because I was not able to find any data on the Net. Maybe the asker wanted someone with access to this data (people with access to journals/&amp;amp;c). Now I'm new here so I don't know if those types of qns are wanted or not, but it;s something to think about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T04:21:45.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2012-02-06T04:23:51.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that closing the &quot;It a single lookup&quot; type questions would be a reasonable---but not absolutely obvious---extension of our homework policy; as with the homework situation we need a way to distinguish allowed from un-allowed content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose something like &lt;em&gt;&quot;If the answer would be a single [number|word|phrase]&quot;&lt;/em&gt; it is probably a bad question, but if it calls for a paragraph it is probably a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under that rule, I think the free-body-diagram question is OK: you have to tells them to draw all the parts, and place and label arrows for vector forces acting on/between all the parts you are trying to analyze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that rule the magnesium sulfate question is probably out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T04:23:51.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1056" CreationDate="2012-02-07T14:13:42.170" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to physics.SE, but I have been contributing to Wikipedia for a while. Now, Wikipedia has a space for people to ask questions: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aReference_desk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reference desk&lt;/a&gt;. I was wondering if we could collaborate with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aRDS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the science reference desk&lt;/a&gt;. By collaborate, I mean that we should also check for and help answer unanswered questions over there, while they may do the same for us (Ill ask there if we reach a decision here). Aside from that, we can detour out-of-scope questions to each other. I myself was introduced to stackexchange when my question was ignored at RDS and I was told to try SE. Aside from that, RDS gets a lot more discussion on more interesting conundrums. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-08-18T12:38:14.437" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T11:39:45.103" Title="Collaboration with Wikipedia Reference Desk for Science (WP:RDS)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1055" CreationDate="2012-02-07T18:23:17.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting idea. Our ability to set up an official collaboration is limited because (like Wikipedia) everyone who contributes here does so on a volunteer basis. However, we could certainly add RDS to the list of places that we can send people whose questions are too discussion-y here, and we could also encourage contributors here to also check out RDS from time to time and see if they can offer input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good first step while we figure out what else to do might be to create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/980/community-promotion-ads-2012&quot;&gt;community promotion ad&lt;/a&gt; for RDS to raise awareness among contributors to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T18:23:17.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-10T19:33:05.183" Score="6" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been almost a year since Physics Stack Exchange graduated from beta status - February 24, 2011, to be precise. Since we're coming up on our anniversary, it would be a great chance to do something special to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;celebrate nearly a year and a half of helping the internet with physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bring in more new posters to the site so our next year can be even better&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, we (moderators) are short on ideas for what a fitting way to celebrate our anniversary would be, and besides the ideas should come from you, the community. Other sites often run &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.superuser.com/2011/08/19/super-users-2nd-birthday-super-contest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;contests&lt;/a&gt; around the time of their anniversaries, but we could do anything practical, and if we come up with a good idea, we can get some support (financial or otherwise) from Stack Exchange to make it happen. So with that in mind, &lt;strong&gt;what are your ideas?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nobody posts feedback here, our anniversary may well pass without any recognition whatsoever...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T19:14:22.670" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T20:10:45.463" Title="What would be a good celebration of Physics SE's graduation anniversary?" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2012-04-24T20:24:04.673" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2012-02-14T09:03:27.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to start throwing ideas out: I would kind of like to see a contest with prizes for the best &lt;em&gt;new users&lt;/em&gt; especially. This could include recognition of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;best question posted by a new user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most upvotes accumulated on answer posted by a new user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;highest standing in the rep leagues for a new user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. Of course this wouldn't exclude also doing something to recognize the people who have been contributing for a long time as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T09:03:27.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2012-02-14T09:08:27.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An option might be having some kind of reward for people who go out and promote the site by posting links on other forums or social sites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, etc.). Perhaps just have a meta question to collect links, and give out a small reward to whoever posts one (and yes, I know this system is easily gamed, so maybe this isn't such a great idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T09:08:27.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1055" CreationDate="2012-02-16T06:12:42.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was also an avid Wikipedian for quite a while.  My area of contribution, however, was not physics, and of what I contribute here wouldn't have a place on Wikipedia in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That actually brings me to an important point.  Wikipedia and physics SE &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; duplicate a large amount of effort.  Our equations are in almost the exact format needed for Wikipedia.  This brings even more points to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license are contributions to Physics SE covered under?  Would it be technically possible to copy work from here to Wikipedia articles?  Would it then be admissible under Wikipedia policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My imagination is that the answer is certainly &quot;no&quot;, although it's interesting to consider since presumably the questions here are asked precisely because they can't be found on Wikipedia or other online texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I've skirted the actual proposal which is about help, I think.  I imagine the people at Wikipedia told you to take your questions &lt;em&gt;about physics&lt;/em&gt; to the physics SE because generally, a discussion page on Wikipedia is devoted to discussion about an article or project, as opposed to the subject matter of the article.  Similarly, the meta site here is for talking about the direction of the Physics SE site, not physics itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, a pet peeve of mine is that Wikipedia is too limited in focus.  If I went to WP:RDS, what would I find as the current goals?  The WP:OR policy in particular was frustrating to me.  It's hard to get a match between what people want and what people are willing to provide on Wikipedia, and I think that SE answers that very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I've rambled enough.  It is an interesting thing to bring up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T06:12:42.317" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1055" CreationDate="2012-02-16T06:59:22.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I'm thinking of for the community promotion ad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HQIff.png&quot; alt=&quot;Idea&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the fonts and drawing could be improved (any vector graphics whiz around?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T06:59:22.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-02-17T05:29:56.693" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gpp7T.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wikipedia Science Reference Desk&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T04:22:17.113" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T04:22:17.113" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-17T05:29:56.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1065" CreationDate="2012-02-19T16:47:51.147" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that may fit this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6446/7744&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7506/7744&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a number of sources (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.khanacademy.org/#physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;) that claim to teach (some part of) physics, some of which seem questionable.  If they are on-topic, should there be a tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7744" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T00:06:37.463" Title="Is asking about the credibility of an (online) physics course/tutorial on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1064" CreationDate="2012-02-19T17:30:14.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think asking about the credibility of &lt;em&gt;specific, individual results&lt;/em&gt; is fine (of course, if it's someone clearly trying to publicize their own cranky work then it should be closed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For specific results, there can be specific claims to support or strike down those results. On the other hand, the Khan academy videos claim to be teaching basic high-school physics and I doubt they are wrong -- if one has a question about a particular claim in one of the videos that's fine, but I don't think it's useful to ask about their credibility as a whole... Other than the assumed credibility of printed material, it's not so different from having a question for every textbook: &quot;Is Shankar's QM a credible resource?&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="791" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T17:30:14.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-19T21:11:33.803" Score="-1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using IE8, I don't see the login link at the top to enable me to log in, but with Chrome and Firefox I can. Anyone else have this problem and a solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="58972" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T00:00:34.733" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T00:01:21.327" Title="Cannot log in using IE 8?" Tags="|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2012-02-19T21:21:21.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IE8 generates &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=IE8&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;a fair number of complaints on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't see one exactly like this. The closest I've got is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/109618/2509.&quot;&gt;Autologin working sporadically?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this started recently after it was working for a while? The team does tinker with the code and this could be a regression if it is new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T21:21:21.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1071" CreationDate="2012-02-22T03:27:07.283" Score="6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;With our site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/what-would-be-a-good-celebration-of-physics-ses-graduation-anniversary&quot;&gt;&quot;birthday&quot; coming up&lt;/a&gt; in 3 days, I thought it would be kind of neat to put a candle on the site logo for the day, because the Mexican hat potential kind of looks like a cake if you don't think about it too hard. Can the SE design overlord (hi Jin) make this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T20:30:46.820" Title="Can we have a candle on our logo?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="117" CreationDate="2012-02-22T20:49:10.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, apparently trivial answers are now automatically converted to comments by the software. So if you want to post a link here, instead of posting it as a separate answer, just add it to the following list. Once a question has been closed, edit it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our chat room ever becomes more regularly active, we will move handling of close candidates there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23149/worksheets-for-khan-academy&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23149/worksheets-for-khan-academy&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Off topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22256/what-will-be-the-relative-speed-of-the-fly&quot;&gt;What will be the relative speed of the fly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possible duplicate as linked in comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21871/what-are-the-frameworks-of-physics&quot;&gt;What are the frameworks of physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possibly not constructive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21848/new-theories-and-publications&quot;&gt;New theories and publications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;not constructive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21376/2451&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the naming convention for position functions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a language question and it may be off topic, we'll need to decide as a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21702/4066&quot;&gt;Expected Energy Production From High Efficiency Solar Cells&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May be off topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T04:41:17.170" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-22T20:49:10.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1064" CreationDate="2012-02-24T00:06:37.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could try and post them (one item per answer) in one of our lists for online lectures, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/679/2451&quot;&gt;Learning physics online?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/10021/2451&quot;&gt;Online QFT video lectures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and let people vote them up or down, or comment. That should give you a hint about their credibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T00:06:37.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1068" CreationDate="2012-02-24T20:00:34.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not do small design tweaks for things like this.  Google might be able to do daily fun doodles, but it would get out of hand we did that here given the number of sites we have (and we keep growing!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the birthday celebrations, we're looking for the communities to come together with the initiative to put something together.  It isn't really for the purpose of just sending swag just to send swag.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1072/67&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We do that for other things already&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;... (:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T20:30:46.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-24T20:09:50.177" Score="16" ViewCount="904" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a thank you for &lt;em&gt;being awesome&lt;/em&gt;, if you have at least 1340 reputation (as of Feb 24) and are on page 1 or page 2 of &amp;hellip;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip; we'll be sending you a little care package shortly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics Stack Exchange t-shirt in your size&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics Stack Exchange die-cut, vinyl stickers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/collections/show/products/stack-exchange-sharpie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange sharpie&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-pens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange pen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-network-stickers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange stickers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can expect to get an email soon with details on how to confirm and provide your mailing address and size preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The t-shirt&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DKQzD.png&quot; alt=&quot;physics.stackexchange.com Tshirt&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The sticker&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYAZI.png&quot; alt=&quot;physics.stackexchange.com sticker&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the items you can view in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange store&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; direct links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/collections/show/products/stack-exchange-sharpie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sharpie&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-pens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pens&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-network-stickers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stickers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(for anyone else who wants this swag, but isn't on page 1 or page 2 of the all time top users -- the limited edition t-shirts and stickers will be available for purchase from the store as soon as we're able)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T16:39:30.513" Title="Physics swag for top users" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2014-01-07T13:07:57.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-26T16:34:20.137" Score="3" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dis2012.uni-bonn.de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2012 International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects&lt;/a&gt; in Bonn (Germany) is coming up at the end of next month. I'm scheduled to give a talk there, but my adviser has asked me to look for external sources of funding to cover the trip. So naturally I thought of Stack Exchange and its &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/supporting-community-conferences/&quot;&gt;speakers' bureau program&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this of interest to the community?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DIS 2012 will be attended by a lot of accomplished high-energy physicists. In particular, representatives of the major experiments at CERN and elsewhere will be presenting their latest results, so anyone who follows the latest trends in high-energy physics will be interested to know what is presented at the conference. I can write up daily updates and post them on my personal blog, and I can also make an effort to ask relevant questions on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the benefit to Stack Exchange?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the physicists there also have teaching duties, and there will also be graduate students and postdocs giving presentations (at least, I assume I won't be the only one there who's not a professor). Even if these people may not be the type to ask questions on this site, they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; in a great position to recommend us to their students or members of the public. So this is an opportunity to get more people aware of this site. I can also mention other related SE sites which may be of more interest to the conference attendees - I'm specifically thinking of &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do I need?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned at the top, I'm looking for any funding sources that can replace some of the grant money that (I assume) I can get through my university. Since the potential benefit to SE is not as great as if I were going to a conference &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; to promote this site, I wouldn't presume to ask for a full sponsorship of the trip, but even, say, a contribution toward the cost of the hotel would be helpful. I already plan to acknowledge selected Stack Exchange sites in my presentation, but I think the acknowledgement might carry more weight if I could say &quot;&lt;em&gt;sponsored&lt;/em&gt; by Stack Exchange, Inc.&quot; People's ears tend to perk up when they hear that money might be available somewhere ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physicists don't go to conferences expecting to collect T-shirts, but if I had some small things to hand out like business cards, pens or pencils, or maybe even stickers, I could probably send a few people home with reminders of our network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does the community think about this? Is it worthwhile? If not (or even if it is), I think we should keep in mind the possibility of sending someone as a representative of PSE to a more high-impact conference like next year's APS general meetings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Updates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Success! Stack Exchange will be partially sponsoring my trip to Bonn and I will do my best to involve the Physics.SE community, perhaps including posting updates on this meta question. More details will be coming.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swag has arrived :-) I have some stickers, pens, and markers to hand out at the conference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll be mainly posting updates on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsix.net/blog/tagged/DIS%202012.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;my blog&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twitter.com/ellipsix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, but I'll also add summaries to an answer to this meta question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-03-25T18:50:47.297" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T04:45:53.047" Title="DIS 2012 sponsorship proposal" Tags="|discussion|speakers-bureau|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1074" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-02-28T10:58:01.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/supporting-community-conferences/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List of all speakers-bureau tagged questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/filters/18816/meta-speakers-bureau&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T16:07:34.767" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T16:07:34.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1075" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-02-28T10:58:01.923" Score="0" Body="Requests for SE sponsorship to conferences. https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/supporting-community-conferences/. " OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T16:07:29.610" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T16:07:29.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1073" CreationDate="2012-02-28T11:09:32.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what Deep Inelastic Scattering is, but physics.SE could &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; do with some promotion (I dunno about the other sites, but a little promotion never hurt anyone). Compared to the other SEs, we have much less activity. And we need more specialists, as is evident from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T11:09:32.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1078" CreationDate="2012-02-29T01:46:48.240" Score="1" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that in several places, the tops of square root signs are missing. This behavior is almost, but not completely, consistent, e.g. in the screenshot below, the top of the symbol on sqrt(2) is fine, but the other two square roots are not - unfortunately that is exactly where the top of the symbol is most needed. Is anyone else seeing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chromium 17.0.963.56 on Kubuntu 11.10 (same behavior occurs with Chromium 18.0.1025.39 on Gentoo)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;About MathJax&quot; box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MathJax v2.0&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  using local STIX fonts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Log message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javascript:alert(MathJax.Message.Log())&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Loading [MathJax]/config/TeX-AMS_HTML.js&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/fonts/STIX/fontdata.js&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/fonts/STIX/fontdata-1.0.js&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/fonts/STIX/General/Regular/BBBold.js&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhqfy.png&quot; alt=&quot;erroneous square root&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Origin of screenshot for a test case: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/14702/7433&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/14702/7433&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T19:57:23.440" Title="Square root top does not display" Tags="|bug|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1077" CreationDate="2012-02-29T13:56:31.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like one of the fonts didn't load properly for you.  (The letters are not in italics as they should be and things like the + and - are in the wrong font -- note that the minus is a little too high, for example.)  But MathJax must &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the font is available, otherwise it would have switched over to image fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without that font, the browser will fall back on some other font (probably your browser's default font), but MathJax doesn't know the sizes of those characters, so it is still using the bounding-box information for its own fonts.  MathJax creates clipping regions based on those bounding boxes, so if they don't correspond to the actual fonts, things can go wrong.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that MathJax uses the minus sign to construct the line over the square root.  But we've already seen that the minus is a little higher than the minus in the usual MathJax font, and that means that the minuses are probably being generated, but are slightly above the clipping rectangle that MathJax uses for the square root, and so they are being cut off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, why aren't you getting the right font?  If this is something that is repeatable, would you right-click on the typeset equation to get the MathJax contextual menu and select &quot;About MathJax&quot;?  Let me know what font mode is listed just below the MathJax title and version number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then enter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javascript:alert(MathJax.Message.Log())&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into the URL location type-in area (and press RETURN) and let me know what this says.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if you have installed any of the MathJax fonts in your local fonts folder.  If you haven't put them all in place, that could account for this behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7901" LastActivityDate="2012-02-29T13:56:31.377" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1161" CreationDate="2012-03-01T02:16:39.127" Score="2" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;A month ago, when I right-clicked on mathjax equations, I was able to see the TeX source window. Now, a window does get opened (I see it in the taskbar), but I can't switch to it; no matter what I try. Alt-tab, clicking it, using taskmanager all don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this happen to others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Chrome+Windows 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I have fiddled around with mathjax recently, and installed it on the same machine in my Apache folder. But I doubt that that should make a difference, physics.SE mathjax gets its stuff from the mathjax site, not my computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T17:04:04.687" Title="MathJax hidden window on viewing TeX commands?" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-01T07:32:48.180" Score="7" ViewCount="746" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sort of crossposted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3845/mathjax-custom-commands&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3845/mathjax-custom-commands&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax allows the use of &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt; in TeX. For example, this command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\lorentz}[1]{\frac{#1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be pretty useful in lots of situations. If this was placed somewhere in the body (AFAIK before it is called), then &lt;code&gt;\lorentz{m_0}&lt;/code&gt; would give the expression for relativistic mass. &lt;code&gt;\lorentz{1}&lt;/code&gt; would give the normal lorentz factor. &lt;code&gt;lorentz{m_0c^2}&lt;/code&gt; gives us the expression for energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like this, I can think up quite a lot of TeXcodes that are tedious to type, but crop up often. &lt;code&gt;\frac{1}{2}&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}&lt;/code&gt; are some (smaller and less tedious) examples. A few more commands that quickly give expressions for the nabla operator, div, grad, curl would be nice as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, is there any way that we can have a user-dictated commandset? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, it's easy to code it, just keep &quot;$$ *insert commands here* $$&quot; at the top of the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;body&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag. Less easy to code would be the way to make it user-dictated, but I'm thinking something akin to the way &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/980/community-promotion-ads-2012&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2012&lt;/a&gt; works would be easy to implement, as the code is already there. Just modify it so that it takes all the mathjax in the body of an answer with enough upvotes and appends it to some div in the beginning of the body tag (set display:none just to be safe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? Suggestions? Rants? Cookies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T20:40:18.900" Title="MathJax custom commands" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1081" CreationDate="2012-03-01T16:55:32.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You face a significant problem here in that notation varies across sub-disciplines. In particular I can assure you that the Lorentz factor is &lt;code&gt;$\frac{1}{sqrt{1 - v^2}}$&lt;/code&gt; because everyone knows that &lt;code&gt;$c$&lt;/code&gt;---like &lt;code&gt;$G$&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;$\hbar$&lt;/code&gt;--is a dimensionless unit constant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T16:55:32.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4063" CreationDate="2012-03-01T20:48:33.867" Score="7" ViewCount="1059" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is prompted by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21376/&quot;&gt;What is the origin of the naming convention for position functions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which asks why &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is used as the letter for position. Here are some more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/27542/&quot;&gt;which letter to use for a CFT?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67928/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67928/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/91933/&quot;&gt;Why the letter $B$ for magnetic fields?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/98542/&quot;&gt;Why the speed of light is represented by $c$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/101920/&quot;&gt;Differentiating between mass number (A) and activity (A) in a nomenclature/glossary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/134412/&quot;&gt;Can the term &amp;#171;shadow&amp;#187; pertain to anything else than light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/139800/&quot;&gt;Is there any mathematical proof of Newton law of universal gravitation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/144079/&quot;&gt;How do you pronounce $\vec{A} \cdot \vec{B}$ and $\vec{A} \times \vec{B}$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/156879/&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the symbol behind Einstein&amp;#39;s head?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/159722/&quot;&gt;Semantics: alternative word for long-ranged interaction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/203720/&quot;&gt;What is the recommended symbol for Volumetric flow rate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/208870/&quot;&gt;Should these be called &amp;quot;weights&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;masses&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/211829/&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a good mnemonic for intensive and extensive properties?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/213214/&quot;&gt;Naming anti-electrons and anti-protons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/244010/&quot;&gt;Correct way to write Pauli matrices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Feel free to edit in more examples. Posts not prone to the auto-deletion script are preferred.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these questions on topic? They're not really about physical concepts, but they are about matters that are fairly specific to physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-10-02T20:58:15.457" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T20:58:15.457" Title="Are physics-related notation and terminology questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|faq|scope|soft-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1081" CreationDate="2012-03-01T20:54:16.327" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a set of commands you use frequently, perhaps just save &lt;code&gt;$ insert commands here $&lt;/code&gt; in a text file and copy it into the top of your post whenever you need it (I'm not sure if that works, but it's worth a try).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the SE people are amenable to site-specific customizations, though, I do have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/physymb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LaTeX package of physics symbols&lt;/a&gt; that contains a few things we might consider for inclusion. These would be a limited number of highly standardized notations, like &lt;code&gt;\ket{x}&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;|x\rangle&lt;/code&gt;, for instance, or &lt;code&gt;\ud{y}{x}&lt;/code&gt; for the derivative &lt;code&gt;\frac{\mathrm{d}y}{\mathrm{d}x}&lt;/code&gt;. It would also be fantastic to have the &lt;code&gt;\SI&lt;/code&gt; command from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/siunitx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;siunitx&lt;/a&gt;, though admittedly that is a large and complex package that is probably not practical to implement in MathJaX (at least not in a way that faithfully reproduces the original typesetting, though that wouldn't necessarily be a requirement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T20:54:16.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1080" CreationDate="2012-03-02T09:09:34.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Works for me on Srware Iron (Google Chrome derivative) v16.0.950.0 on Windows XP X-64.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the problem go away if you clear your browser cache, stop your Apache process, and try again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, select the mathjax popup window on the taskbar so that it's active; then press &lt;kbd&gt;Alt&lt;/kbd&gt;+&lt;kbd&gt;Space&lt;/kbd&gt;, &lt;kbd&gt;m&lt;/kbd&gt;, then &lt;kbd&gt;left-arrow&lt;/kbd&gt;, then waggle the mouse around a long way in each direction: this can help get errant windows back onto the main screen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-11-16T17:04:04.687" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T17:04:04.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2012-03-02T14:10:27.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, they should go to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since chat requires 20 rep, then I think that they should be allowed. math.SE seems to be fine with them (judging by a question about the various dels I asked there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't waste too much time answering them (hypocrisy on my part; I did a bit of Googling to get some details on the question you mentioned). If you know the answer, answer it. If you don't, don't research it yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, physics.SE is, among other things, a way to connect with people in sync with the physics world. If you don't have a friendly neighborhood physicist, this place is great for finding answers to little stuff that only these people know. I doubt anyone I know would have known that distance comes from &lt;em&gt;strecke&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T14:10:27.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T02:48:13.383" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a book that would be appropriate for advanced elementary school aged kids describing basics of physics (for those fluent in Russian, an English equivalent of the book &quot;почему вода мокрая&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure where to ask this - Literature.SE seems a bit far away expertise wise, and Physics SE may consider it off-topic. Thus this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2819" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T03:29:33.603" Title="Would the question about physics books recommendation for younger kids be on-topic?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1087" CreationDate="2012-03-03T03:13:41.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within some limits of being well-specified we've been allowing these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot;&gt;examples in our tag&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; and the meta-question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/786/520&quot;&gt;What are the meanings of “books” and “reference-request”?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T03:29:33.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T13:53:07.723" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a member of physics stack exchange and am able to access my account in it. But after chat was enabled on my account I could not log in as it said my account didn't exist. At the same time I am already logged in in the physics site of stack exchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5157" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T06:29:22.467" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T06:29:22.467" Title="How to log in in chat with existing account" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1089" CreationDate="2012-03-03T17:06:55.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which login type do you use? OpenID? SE account? Google account? Which?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T17:06:55.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1089" CreationDate="2012-03-03T18:00:18.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;the requisite reputation&lt;/a&gt; (and had it at the time this question was posted, too), so it should just work. Can you try again. Possibly the chat system didn't notice right away that you had enough rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that fails I'm out of my depth and we'll look for someone who knows more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T18:00:18.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T18:13:20.793" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the system user 'Community' bumps up un-accepted questions quite often. Now, the issue is that most of these questions have satisfactory answers, and the OP may even have indicated as in the comments that the question has been satisfactorily answered (example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/19000/how-do-i-find-the-tension-in-additional-strings-in-this-problem&quot;&gt;How do I find the tension in additional strings in this problem?&lt;/a&gt;). The OP just hasn't clicked the accept button (maybe it wasn't obvious to them?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions clutter up the main page and push new questions downwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that moderators(or xyz rep users) be allowed to semi-accept an answer that is most probably correct, it just hasn't been accepted by an inactive OP. The semi accept shouldn't have a rep bonus, its only functionality is to stop Community from bumping. Maybe we can have a flag option for semi accept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T18:20:28.883" Title="Semi-accept answers" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1092" CreationDate="2012-03-03T18:20:28.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notes from other moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shog9 tells me that it is already the case that questions with upvoted answers get the low rate of Community bumps, not the high rate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T18:20:28.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1095" CreationDate="2012-03-04T00:02:23.737" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&lt;/a&gt; says ''You can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day.'' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just curiuos: does this mean no more than 200 in any 24h time window, or in a specific one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latter case, it might be useful for strategically minded people to know when this time window begins and ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T02:49:16.940" Title="when does a reputation day begin and end?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1094" CreationDate="2012-03-04T00:14:32.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;day&quot; is defined by midnight-to-midnight UTC for all purposes on Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T00:14:32.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1102" CreationDate="2012-03-05T04:49:48.687" Score="17" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a newbie here and I've noticed that a lot of the questions are at a pretty high level. (I'm just starting a masters program in physics). Does this site have a philanthropic goal of speeding up the research process or is it merely an experiment in social media? Is it a site that aims to impact the way researchers work or is it like a hobby site, where you get what you want out of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience has been &quot;so far so good&quot; but I'm curious as to how far I can go with this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T22:45:02.033" Title="What is the ultimate purpose of physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-05T06:00:13.407" Score="4" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it a big nuisance that line feeds in writing a comment end the comment and post it. I habitually make many line feeds - then an incomplete comment is posted and I must hurry to fix it in the short time allowed for editing an already submitted comment. I like to have time to think about what I write in my comments. If I make a second or third line feed this is iterated and costs more valuable time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to treat the line feed like any other character, so that this kind of frequent ''surprises'' ino longer happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorDisplayName="user68" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T07:36:42.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Line feeds in comments" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1097" CreationDate="2012-03-05T06:14:57.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has already been proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63644/pressing-enter-in-comment-box-unexpectedly-submits-form&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. The way things are going, it seems unlikely to be implemented any time soon, but you should definitely add your vote to that proposal on MSO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T06:14:57.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-05T06:52:44.603" Score="-9" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the concept of reputation should be made more multidimensional. It is useful to have a frame of reference for how trustworthy a user is on this site, but it is also nice to have a frame of reference for how knowledgeable a person is in physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I post a question and receive an answer, I'd like to know the educational/technical background of the person so I have a fair idea of how authoritative their answer might be. An answer shouldn't bubble up to the top simply by virtue of how popular it is. It promotes a false sense of security in the answer. Some balance is crucial here, I think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T23:38:10.730" Title="More mandatorily-required user details would be useful" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1099" CreationDate="2012-03-05T07:36:11.600" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every user is able to provide whatever details they would like in the &quot;about me&quot; section of his/her profile. The full text can be viewed by visiting the user's profile.  If the user has earned enough Rep, we will show a summary of their profile when their usercard is hovered over as part of a user.  With this, we highlight more about a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange, and its voting system is designed such that the &quot;right&quot; answer floats to the top.  We focus on the content.  We don't really care about the background of a user, simply the content of their post. Vote based on that, and the best answers will continue to float to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T07:36:11.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1099" CreationDate="2012-03-05T07:54:25.803" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Rebecca's comments, the systems can be used to a very high degree by completely anonymous users. This is by design and has been true since the Beta of Stack Overflow (the model site which gave rise to the whole Stack Exchange network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By design this is not a social network; it's not about the users it's about the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T08:03:30.567" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T08:03:30.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1096" CreationDate="2012-03-05T08:02:46.933" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange sites are run by a for-profit company. Their ultimate goal is to make money by providing a service on the internet. The service is host question-&amp;amp;-answer sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The level of each site depends to some degree on decisions made by the user base. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (the original model) accepts questions starting from a very low, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;but not trivial level&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is pitched just a little higher than that: we discourage basic pedagogical questions (things that look like &quot;homework&quot;) in favor of a conceptual approach to the foundations of our discipline. Note that there &lt;s&gt;is&lt;/s&gt; also &lt;em&gt;used to be&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; which &lt;s&gt;is&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; targeted at &quot;research level&quot; theoretical and mathematical physics &lt;em&gt;but was deemed to be diying and merged with this site, look for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; to find that and related content&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other sites in the network, see the bottom of the page and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;area51&lt;/a&gt; (the place where &lt;em&gt;user input&lt;/em&gt; defines and launches new sites, and where you can find all the beta sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T22:45:02.033" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1099" CreationDate="2012-03-05T09:06:36.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually we (OK, me atleast) don't up/down vote an answer based on the person behind it; we do so based on whether or not it seems correct. Anyways, most of the users have their background in their usercard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out users ranked by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;all-time reputation&lt;/a&gt;. Extremely few of them on the first page have a usercard without any details on their background. Mine clearly states that I'm an engineering student so you shouldn't trust anything I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that answers are seen by quite a few people, of which a large percentage are physicists (or physics students). If they see something wrong or incomplete, they'll downvote, comment, and/or make an edit. I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20464/testing-conservation-laws-experimentally/20475#20475&quot;&gt;had&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21407/what-barriers-exist-to-prevent-us-from-turning-a-baryon-into-a-anti-baryon/21410#comment49654_21410&quot;&gt;all&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21572/whats-the-importance-of-noethers-theorem-in-physics/21574#comment50032_21574&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; happen to me. OK, the third one wasn't corrected by a physicist, but I hope you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T09:06:36.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-06T22:10:09.963" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In recent days, we've had a bunch of new (and not-so-new) users making great contributions to the site, and there has been a distinct uptick in meta activity. So I thought it would be a neat idea to capitalize on this by having a brief chat session where we - or at least, whoever's available - can all get together and share the latest news in the physics world and also hear updates about what is going on with the Stack Exchange network. Additionally, this will be a great chance for any new users to ask any questions about how the site works or anything you may want to know from the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I went ahead and scheduled an event for this Thursday, March 8, at 22:00 UTC (5 PM EST). This is listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/physics?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;chat room schedule&lt;/a&gt;, where you may register for the event - but that's totally optional, it's fine if you just pop into the chat room without registering in advance! I realize that time may not work for everyone, but I thought it'd be best to just get something scheduled. If this is a success, we could make it a repeating event, perhaps monthly, and in that case we'd vary the times so that different people can show up. Of course you can always post in the chat room at any time, and usually someone will get back to you after a few hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, since I don't have much of a plan for this first chat session, and I should probably make this a question, &lt;strong&gt;what do you want to talk about?&lt;/strong&gt; If you have anything that you would like brought up during the chat session, feel free to post it as an answer or comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: You need to have 20 reputation on any one site in the SE network to join the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T01:17:39.310" Title="Chat Event: News and Discussion" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1105" CreationDate="2012-03-07T01:17:39.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I may or may not be able to come--depends; but I'll try)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discuss some unanswered questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should we retain new users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discuss developments in physics (&quot;Oh darn; it was just a faulty cable!&quot; and all that =D )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How else can we build up chat activity?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe some of us can talk about their current research?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Puzzles! Yes, I know, we're not math.SE; but there are quite a few interesting conundrums to think about at varying levels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also take a peek at other SE chat sites and see what they do. Math.SE seems to do random stuff. There are so many SO chat rooms; most of them are doing general computer banter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T01:17:39.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-08T02:59:24.757" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;What other Physics Q&amp;amp;A sites are there? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you compare them to stackexchange? (Level of questions, size of user base, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7896" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T02:59:24.757" Title="Comparison of Q&amp;A Sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-08T05:53:33.520" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the point of having badges? Do we get any special privileges with certain badges? Or is it a feature that may be used in the future? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Do badges result in any privileges?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1109" CreationDate="2012-03-08T06:51:46.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No real point; there isn't any rep or anything. It's just something to strive for. You see all those badges and think &quot;I should get some more&quot;. Getting a badge on asking/answering a question (which is the first thing you do when you join) is a way to introduce the concept of badges. A new user sees that he got a badge, and investigates. He feels like getting more badges, so he works towards some of them. It benefits the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges are used by many online communities. It's a way of setting goals for the users; and helps retention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17853/how-do-badges-work&quot;&gt;How do &amp;quot;badges&amp;quot; work?&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T06:51:46.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1099" CreationDate="2012-03-08T14:09:25.747" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I've removed a down-vote by adding a +1 to the question. It is a bit silly to down-vote a question in this section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I would not be comfortable in revealing anything about myself on the internet. If the OP's proposal becomes a requirement, I will leave and never come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, dmckee's last statement exactly echo's my feelings. Let me also add that just having a PhD is meaningless. I've seen plenty of PhD's who are nothing more than glorified calculators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice to the OP would be to judge the answer on its own merit. Taking everything written here as the absolute truth is not the way to go. Use the answer as a guideline and do your own research/study. Don't believe anything without checking it for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T14:09:25.747" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-09T06:13:18.120" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the point of accepting an answer? Once all the answers are up, its a bit meaningless to say that you accept one particular answer. Perhaps the only reason to have an accept button is to close the question and put it in a &quot;resolved&quot; category. Is this its purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd appreciate it if someone could explain the whole dynamics behind this. Perhaps the person whose answer is accepted gets his/her reputation bumped-up? Etc..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why &quot;accept&quot; an answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1112" CreationDate="2012-03-09T06:50:06.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intent of this feature is that you accept the answer which actually solves your problem. This originated on Stack Overflow, and it makes sense there because for programming questions, it's easy for the original poster to try out various solutions and unambiguously determine which one actually works. For physics questions, on the other hand, the OP may not be in a position to judge which answer (if any) is correct, so accepting doesn't always make quite as much sense for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it does offer a way to show that you've gotten a satisfactory answer, and so accepting an answer can be thought of as a way to mark a question as &quot;resolved.&quot; It's not resolved in the sense you might see the term elsewhere, though - if a question has an accepted answer, that shouldn't discourage you from posting your own answer if you think it adds value. Questions with accepted answers should certainly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be considered &quot;closed&quot; in any sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you accept an answer to your question, the person who posted the answer gets 15 reputation, and you get 2 reputation. This is meant to encourage people to accept answers to their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5234/how-does-accepting-an-answer-work&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-03-09T06:50:06.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-09T23:44:48.360" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to undelete a question? I deleted it, and now when I try to re-post it, I cannot as the system recognizes it as a duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1695" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T06:34:33.353" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T06:34:33.353" Title="Is it possible to undelete a question?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1114" CreationDate="2012-03-09T23:47:27.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask a moderator ;-) I undeleted your question for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe you can do so yourself, though, because the system doesn't let you see deleted questions. If you could see them, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you would be able to undelete them. (Something to look forward to when you get 10k rep perhaps?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-09T23:47:27.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="740" CreationDate="2012-03-12T02:20:50.750" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I was going to ask this as a separate meta-question, but the helpful title box told me that someone had already done half the work for me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have a standard (not compulsory) set of notations to follow. One of the main benefits would be that instead of writing a whole paragraph explaining which standard symbols are which, we can link to an extensive list of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since symbols vary between fields, I'd say that we have a question with a separate CW answer for each field. I guess the question would be better placed on the main site as meta doesn't support mathjax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T02:20:50.750" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-12T11:48:56.897" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2955/color-scheme-and-the-colorblind&quot;&gt;Color scheme and the colorblind&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On a laptop, to someone who is red/green color-blind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;answered&quot; checkmark should take on a distinctly different color from the up/down arrows, to avoid confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6835" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.097" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T13:31:11.403" Title="The color difference between the &quot;answered&quot; checkmark and the &quot;unanswered&quot; one is barely discernable" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-01-07T02:10:01.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1117" CreationDate="2012-03-12T13:06:44.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather hackish, makes it into a dark green box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;javascript:$(&quot;.vote-accepted-on&quot;)[0].style.background=&quot;green&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put this in a bookmarklet (create a new bookmark with this code as the location), and click it on every phy.SE answer page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to click the bookmarklet on every page, then you may want to set it up as a userscript. Copy this to notepad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  // ==UserScript==&#xA;  // @match http://*physics.stackexchange.com/*&#xA;  // ==/UserScript==&#xA; function with_jquery(f) {&#xA;     var script = document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;);&#xA;     script.type = &quot;text/javascript&quot;;&#xA;     script.textContent = &quot;(&quot; + f.toString() + &quot;)(jQuery)&quot;;&#xA;     document.body.appendChild(script);&#xA; };&#xA;&#xA; with_jquery(function($){&#xA;        var acceptbutton=$(&quot;.vote-accepted-on&quot;);&#xA;        if(acceptbutton.length!=0){&#xA;          acceptbutton[0].style.background=&quot;green&quot;;&#xA;        }&#xA;&#xA;    });&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Save as &lt;code&gt;prominentaccept.user.js&lt;/code&gt; or something. Drag-drop this file into your browser. You will need to install &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Greasemonkey&lt;/a&gt; on Firefox. On chrome, it will prompt you and work straight out-of-the-box on physics.SE and meta.physics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-03-12T13:31:11.403" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T13:31:11.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-13T12:53:39.737" Score="16" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should/Can we have MathJax on meta? It would be useful to implement stuff like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1116/7433&quot;&gt;this proposal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know the argument that it makes pageloading slow, so I propose that it only be enabled if a post has &lt;code&gt;$turn_mathjax_on$&lt;/code&gt; or something on it. I wrote a simple script that accomplishes this. There are two versions: &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsfiddle.net/2tccA/1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jsfiddle.net/2tccA/1/&lt;/a&gt; (only gives the turn-mathjax-on ability for posts), and &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsfiddle.net/2tccA/2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jsfiddle.net/2tccA/2/&lt;/a&gt; (has an uncommentable option to enable it for comments as well). For some reason, the mathjax main server is down atm, so neither of these are currently working. They should work when &lt;a href=&quot;http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js&lt;/a&gt; no longer shown an error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, neither of these scripts work for the editing auto-update preview. I don't think it should be too hard to code it, though..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, any comments or arguments for/against?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-19T08:31:57.463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T08:31:57.463" Title="MathJax on Meta" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|mathjax|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-16T21:37:31.363" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pale blue colour used for the question titles is pretty hard to read.  It looks great but needs to be darkened a little bit in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh and one for the meta-meta: the colour used for the question titles used here on the meta site is worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6860" LastEditorUserId="58972" LastEditDate="2014-10-17T19:20:24.500" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:20:50.927" Title="Question title colour tough to read" Tags="|bug|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1125" CreationDate="2012-03-17T03:48:14.950" Score="3" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wondering: what is the longest answer ever given in physics.stackexchange.com ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible candidate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6438/what-if-the-lhc-doesnt-see-susy/6439#6439&quot;&gt;What if the LHC doesn&amp;#39;t see SUSY?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1814" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T04:00:37.977" Title="Longest answer ever?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1124" CreationDate="2012-03-17T04:00:37.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually that comes in at #13. You're looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18605/variation-of-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser/18612#18612&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/64341/the-longest-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/64341/the-longest-answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T04:00:37.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-18T21:22:17.983" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if given a tag one could find related tags (either subfields, superfields, or intersecting fields), especially if one needs to search for an appropriate tag from a large list. Thus it should be possible to define links in a related-graph, and be able to follow these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T21:22:17.983" Title="links to related tags" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1128" CreationDate="2012-03-18T23:09:52.873" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I`d just like to know what other people generally think about this ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T00:01:57.457" Title="Is it &quot;rude&quot; to delete my own answer if it has a (physics)  discussion below it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-03-19T00:01:57.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, if you want to delete your answer, I suppose it might be considered nice to wait until people stop posting comments... but really, you have no obligation to do so. If people want to have a discussion, they should be doing it on chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up: officially, there is nothing wrong with doing what you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T00:01:57.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1130" CreationDate="2012-03-19T06:16:30.197" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mainly in reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22398/direction-of-rotation-of-proton-in-magnetic-field-opposite-to-a-dipole&quot;&gt;Direction of rotation of proton in magnetic field--opposite to a dipole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a paradox question, and I got multiple answers that conflicted each other. The issue is that each one has good arguments that make sense, and the community seems undecided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(barring my CW answer), the vote counts are thus: (+3-2),(+2-1),(+1-1). Note that I had upvoted each answer as it came in, since while reading it it immediately made sense, though not so much later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from offering a bounty (which I shall do tomorrow or something), what else can one do in such a case? After all, there is no Grand Poohbah of physics on P.SE, or indeed anywhere. Neither is there a &quot;manual&quot;. So how can one know which answer is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, what is the admissibility of such &quot;paradox&quot; questions on this site? Paradoxes(-xi?) usually have multiple resolutions, but all the resolutions boil down to the same issue, so I personally feel that they aren't subjective. But I don't know what others' opinions are on this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T07:48:40.123" Title="What should one do when the community is undecided on a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1129" CreationDate="2012-03-19T07:48:40.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're not satisfied that any of the answers is correct, that's fine, just leave the question without an accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for paradox questions, what do you mean by that category? All the best questions on this site arise from some apparent contradiction in the laws of physics, so I don't see why it matters whether you call it a paradox or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T07:48:40.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1134" CreationDate="2012-03-19T23:27:43.460" Score="8" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I the only one who thinks the physics logo says &quot;sombrero&quot; louder than it says &quot;physics&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8232" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T13:38:51.693" Title="Physics logo sending confusing signals?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1133" CreationDate="2012-03-19T23:47:43.657" Score="9" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far the scope of Physics Stack Exchange has been defined to exclude experimental technology questions, which are those questions about the devices that one uses to do physics, rather than about the physical principles they use. Some of these questions fit on &lt;a href=&quot;http://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;, and there was a proposal on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/32588/experimental-or-applied-physics&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; that would have been a great home for these questions. However, that proposal is no more, and given that this site is well established with a steady flow of physical principles questions, &lt;strong&gt;is it time that we start to allow the questions about experimental technology?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a recent example that prompted this question: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22552/good-electronic-filters-against-50hz-mains-hum&quot;&gt;Strategies against 50&amp;#160;Hz mains hum on detector signals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/720/does-the-area-51-proposal-experimental-or-applied-physics-duplicate-this-site&quot;&gt;Does the Area 51 proposal &amp;quot;Experimental or Applied Physics&amp;quot; duplicate this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-04-01T12:08:58.590" Title="Experimental technology questions: on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1132" CreationDate="2012-03-20T12:54:39.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mains hum one was a relatively simple EE problem, which was simple enough to stay on the scope of physics (AC rejector circuits seem pretty OK to me). But yes, it would have found a better home on EE.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that these should stay on topic. Multiple reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the best place for them. (Experimental) physicists here will be familiar with experimental tech, and can provide detailed answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experimental physics is a large part of Physics. Experimental tech does not focus on any concept, but neither does experimental physics. We can not afford to ignore experimental physics/tech on a &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The general question of feasibility of a setup is a great one, and experimental tech is a large part of feasibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I have created  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-technology&lt;/a&gt; to hold such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-03-20T13:27:55.780" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T13:27:55.780" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1131" CreationDate="2012-03-20T13:38:51.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the well known (among physicists and enthusiasts) as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_hat_potential#A_pedagogical_example%3a_the_Mexican_hat_potential&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mexican hat potential&lt;/a&gt;. It's involved in the mechanism of the Higgs Boson/God Particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it looks like a sombrero...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, I've never seen a sombrero made of green mesh.. IMO, &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; that looks meshy is probably a graph. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about what most laymen would think, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T13:38:51.693" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="915" CreationDate="2012-03-22T12:02:10.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(merging from other meta thread I made about this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My area is not physics.  However, this was the best thing that Stack Exchange had to offer me, and I decided I really liked it, so I've been active here for a number of months (I mostly used the username zassounotsukushi).  Lately I started to think it might be worthwhile to make an Area 51 attempt for Nuclear Engineering, which is what I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/38647/nuclear-engineering&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/38647/nuclear-engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have a tag for it!  At 25 questions it's not much, but most nuclear questions are blatantly not relevant to Physics SE anyway, so I figure, who knows what you would get if you invited questions about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-engineering&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't yet, but I recognize that in order for the proposal to succeed I would need to plaster it around nuclear related listserves, message boards, maybe use fliers, and get other people to help it go viral as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could make arguments for why this may or may not work, but I could see it working.  The Electrical Engineering SE comes to mind, which is funny because I never found that to be very useful, just because the knowledge is so incredibly specific to the application and broad as well.  Nuclear is much more narrow, but if you allow fairly practical and specific (to regulations, designs, etc) then there's certainly no end to the obscurity of questions you could encounter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I would love to see lots of people from this site share what they think at the proposal.  I'm wondering if 200 people is more than we could hope to recruit, or if we could ever have a high enough volume of questions.  But the entire point of stack exchange kind of feels like controlled anarchy anyway, so might as well start it out and see what happens, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T12:02:10.150" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-03-22T12:02:10.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-23T18:22:07.570" Score="12" ViewCount="1545" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems somebody pursues me, downvoting all my questions and answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-2  28 mins ago     downvote    Is Mach's Principle Wrong?&#xA;-2  31 mins ago     downvote    Is it possible for information to be transmitted faster than light?&#xA;-2  32 mins ago     downvote    Is the universe a quantum computer - is light speed barrier a computational constraint&#xA;-2  34 mins ago     downvote    What do you think about teaching Standard Model in school?&#xA;-2  35 mins ago     downvote    Is solar wind positively charged?&#xA;-2  35 mins ago     downvote    Popular depictions of electromagnetic wave: is there an error?&#xA;-2  36 mins ago     downvote    Do all massive bodies emit Hawking radiation?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether such behavior should be filtered out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="7186" LastEditDate="2012-04-09T00:42:48.053" LastActivityDate="2012-04-09T00:42:48.053" Title="Attack on my account" Tags="|support|status-deferred|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1139" CreationDate="2012-03-24T05:04:54.313" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went through the answers and questions that were downvoted by hostile anon, and upvoted the ones I thought deserved it. This type of thing generally leads people to do the same, and is counterproductive for the downvoter. I like your questions and answers (even when they're wrong), because they have original critical thinking, and this is a precious resource. Hope you decide to stick around, despite the unavoidable occasional hostility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T05:04:54.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1143" CreationDate="2012-03-25T14:34:43.820" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to login at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/login&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/login&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;via StackExchange (leftmost item) gives the error message: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Third Party Cookies Appear To Be Disabled&#xA;This site depends on third-party cookies, please add an exception for https://openid.stackexchange.com/.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to add such an exception? (I am working with Mozilla Firefox 11.0 for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:37:55.943" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T09:52:47.547" Title="problem logging in at meta stack overflow" Tags="|support|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1141" CreationDate="2012-03-25T17:19:19.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you open the &quot;preferences&quot; (Mac) or &quot;options&quot; (Windows) tool, and look on the &quot;Privacy&quot; tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T17:19:19.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1073" CreationDate="2012-03-25T20:12:15.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Here's an idea I just came up with. In honor of the conference, I'll be putting bounties on between zero and two more DIS-related questions this week to increase their visibility and/or reward those who post good answers (with a preference toward new or low-rep users). So if you have a question on any topic related to the conference, this is the time to ask it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Shog9's request, I'll be posting some updates here as I put things up on my blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsix.net/blog/2012/03/what-is-deep-inelastic-scattering.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What is Deep Inelastic Scattering?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;I'm starting with a post that explains in basic terms what deep inelastic scattering is, as well as why it's important enough to have a conference named after it even if much of the subject matter of that conference is not directly related.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsix.net/blog/2012/03/day-1-plenary-sessions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Summary of plenary sessions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;I've posted an overview of some of the plenary session talks, including recent results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsix.net/blog/2012/03/midweek-report-parallel-sessions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Midweek report: Parallel Sessions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Here I just pointed to some potentially interesting presentations, but I'll have to come back and do analysis later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsix.net/blog/2012/03/day-5-plenary-sessions-again.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Day 5: plenary sessions (again!)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;There is a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; to summarize from this conference, but for now I've posted a quick overview of some of the relatively general-interest points brought up at the concluding summary talks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did manage to get the word out about Stack Exchange to a few people at the conference! I gave out a few pens and markers (the stickers were less appreciated, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-04-04T04:45:53.047" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T04:45:53.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1146" CreationDate="2012-03-25T20:13:38.200" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that I did not like it too much as it happend without explanation to me; but I promise that I will leave a corresponding comment. The comment is actually already there ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is do I have to click the upward arrow again or do I have to click the downward arrow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T20:18:24.090" Title="How do I retract an upvote?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2012-03-25T20:18:24.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You click the up-arrow again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you will not be allowed to retract a vote after a relatively short time unless the post has been edited in the interim (there was a problem with people gaming the voting system on Stack Overflow that resulted in this policy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are also asked not to edit a post solely so that you can retract a vote, though editing for that purpose is condoned if you substantially improve the post in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T20:18:24.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1139" CreationDate="2012-03-25T20:21:39.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The team has investigated the situation, and concluded that it does not constitute an &quot;attack&quot; under the current criteria. We have taken steps that should prevent this from being an on-going issue and are keeping an eye on the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T20:21:39.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-26T00:38:21.607" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether it was deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember the name, but it included a statement that the computers will be never capable to model and predict the behavior of all people, thus the suggested scenario of technological singularity is impossible because computers will not ever surpass all humans in intellect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The question asked about apparent worldlines of other people being an envelope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="1186" LastEditDate="2012-03-26T01:58:56.687" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T20:08:36.620" Title="I cannot find my question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1148" CreationDate="2012-03-26T21:21:08.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that question was deleted, although as I'm not the one who deleted it I can't comment on the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt; text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;In [this work][1] Thomas Breuer has shown that each observer will not see himself obeying the usual physical laws however a theory is. He also proved that the behavior of a system that contains observer himself is unpredictable for the observer because the initial states cannot be distinguished from each other by any measurement. The theorems concerning self-reference by Breuer are quite similar to Goedel's incompleteness theorem.&#xA;&#xA;This leads to some far reaching implications.&#xA;&#xA;1. The observer will see his own behavior not obeying the usual statistical patterns derived from studying the behavior of other people.&#xA;&#xA;2. Even if there possible to construct a computer that would predict the behavior of other people (at least statistically), a computer that predicts the behavior of the observer himself is impossible however powerful the computer is.&#xA;&#xA;The first thesis leads to a conclusion that even if we assume existence of several intelligent observers (as in Many-Worlds interpretation), and even assume they somehow occur in the same world, their worldlines will diverge just the next moment because their observations about themselves will be different. &#xA;&#xA;This means that the apparent behavior of another person which an observer observes is not actually an intelligent behavior of conscious observer, but envelope of worldlines of a series of intelligent observers which is tangent to the worldlines of some slightly different intelligent observers each moment, but always to a different one.&#xA;&#xA;This leads to a conclusion that the apparent behavior of other people **is not** the normal behavior of a conscious observer as if it behaved the same way as you do, the apparent behavior does not correspond to any intelligent(in the meaning described below) person whatsoever.&#xA;&#xA;The second thesis means that the machines will never excel in imitating all people. However good a computer is designed to imitate people, still will be at least one person (the observer himself for each observer) whom it could  neither predict nor imitate to the level of indistiguishability (or such imitation would need a hypercomputer, a hypothetical device exploiting the laws beyound the normal physical theory).&#xA;&#xA;That said we come to two concepts of &quot;intelligence&quot;. The first is just mechanical intelligence which CAN be imitated or predicted by a computer and which we also observe as **apparent** behavior of other people (actually observing only an envelope of natural worldlines of truly intelligent persons). &#xA;&#xA;The second concept is the &quot;true intelligence&quot;, i.e. the intelligence of the observer himself sees his own behavior. An object of such kind of intelligence is unique in the uneverse as observed by any given observer. This kind of intelligence cannot be imitated or predicted by a machine however powerful it is (unless a hypothetical hypercomputer or some help from outside of physical world is employed).&#xA;&#xA;So, my questions are&#xA;&#xA;- Whether this work and its implications really mean that the machines will be never made more intelligent than all people, other than by means involving hypothetical hypercomputing?&#xA;&#xA;- Whether the apparent world-lines of others are actually unnatural and differ from the behavior of an intelligent observer logging his own behavior from first-person perspective?&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://homepages.fhv.at/tb/cms/?download=tbDISS.pdf&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-03-30T20:08:36.620" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T20:08:36.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-29T05:44:53.577" Score="5" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the great things about P.SE is that &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=3778089#3778089&quot;&gt;in the process of writing answers, I learn a lot&lt;/a&gt;. In this spirit, I've posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=comments%20appreciated%20user:7433&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;many answers&lt;/a&gt; which I'm not completely sure about, along with a hatnote stating the same and &quot;Comments appreciated&quot;. Many of these have been extremely helpful to me; and I've learned lots of new stuff by posting such answers. But there's no guarantee that such answers are beneficial to the community--after all, they are more of a supplementary question at times. I know the argument &quot;ask it as a question instead&quot;, but I feel that it won't cover everything--I tend to have small misconceptions in my knowledge, which would be impossible to find via a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I just wanted to get a feel of what the community thinks of such answers and/or their (in)appropriateness according to policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T19:51:44.473" Title="How appropriate are &quot;I'm not sure of this&quot; posts?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-29T14:47:45.717" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to post a (certainly not too long) comment but as I tried to submit it, the number of characters left turned negative and red and the submission failed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m515w.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this happen to me? &#xA;Control C, delete the comment, and reinsert it with Control V did not change anything. And I am logged in of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The &quot;number of characters left&quot; was negative (-15) from the beginning before any character was typed into the comment ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="7186" LastEditDate="2012-04-03T01:32:31.570" LastActivityDate="2012-09-30T03:03:55.807" Title="Why am I not able to post a comment?" Tags="|support|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1151" CreationDate="2012-03-29T15:03:28.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of it as SE's implementation of Twitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a 500(iirc) character limit on comments. Its to prevent too much chattiness and stuff in comments, but its not directed solely at you ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either splice it intomultiple comments or post it in chat and link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T15:03:28.050" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1156" CreationDate="2012-03-30T03:38:58.380" Score="7" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=3751540#3751540&quot;&gt;Related chat snippet&lt;/a&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/3754680#3754680&quot;&gt;s&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple times, I see a question and feel &quot;oh, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;xyz&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; would be able to post a brilliant answer to this one&quot;. Quite a few nice questions get pushed down; out of the notice of the specialists. Sometimes I may want &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;xyz&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;s advice on a particular answer that I've seen. Aside from that, there are numerous other reasons where you may want to contact a specific user. For this, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/127333/allow-users-to-opt-in-to-being-superpinged-in-chat-by-anyone&quot;&gt;proposed a feature at MSO&lt;/a&gt;, but it probably won't go through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I propose is this:&#xA;A meta question, on which a user can post their username and specialties as a separate answer. A user need not be a specialist in anything(eg, me) to post. Maybe the question can be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; so that everyone gets a look-see at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of such a post will be to allow anyone to ping that user with P.SE related comments. It should be entirely opt-in, nobody's forcing anyone :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are spam issues and other stuff, so I want to see some of your thoughts on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="List of users with specialities who are willing to be pinged--should we do this?" Tags="|discussion|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1153" CreationDate="2012-03-30T03:58:51.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41474/request-a-specific-expert-on-a-subject-to-answer-your-question&quot;&gt;suggestions&lt;/a&gt; have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30564/how-to-ask-a-question-to-a-particular-user-of-stackoverflow-com&quot;&gt;been made&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/113561/asking-specific-people-to-answer-my-questions&quot;&gt;the mother&lt;/a&gt; meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16757/how-do-you-contact-a-stackoverflow-user&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; times, the official position is that user who wish to be contactable put contact information in the &lt;em&gt;About Me&lt;/em&gt; field of their profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintaining a list of such users would, of course, be fine--a question here on meat.physics would be perfect for that purpose--but the system isn't going to support your getting their attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T04:05:05.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1150" CreationDate="2012-03-30T09:01:20.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it there is nothing wrong with putting into an answer what you know about the topic asked and then improve it in the course of a discussion with other users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T09:01:20.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1153" CreationDate="2012-03-30T19:22:08.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, having a meta question where people can &quot;register&quot; their interest in being pinged sounds fine - at least, there's no rule against it. It wouldn't hurt to try it and see if it helps at all. It wouldn't be &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'featured'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; forever, but we could probably put &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; on it if you word it the right way (e.g. &quot;How can I ask someone specific to answer a question?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would encourage anyone who would be interested in participating in such a system to also do the following three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include your areas of expertise (those in which you would like to be &quot;pinged&quot; if a pinging system were available) in your profile text blurb. If you have enough reputation to have a &quot;user card&quot; (the thing that pops up when the mouse hovers over your gravatar), then make sure your areas of expertise show up there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also include those areas in your chat profile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stay logged into &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/physics&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt; as much as possible, and check it periodically to see if you've been &quot;requested.&quot; Let's make that the central place to recruit people to help with specific questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the best way to use the existing system to accomplish the goal here - and at worst, it's not going to interfere with the meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T19:22:08.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1150" CreationDate="2012-03-30T19:51:44.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For answers, I guess it's fine. If you post something you're not quite sure of, you run the risk of it being wrong and then it gets downvoted, but in that case the system takes care of it; we don't need an official policy on top of that. In fact, if we required that you have to be sure of everything you write, there are a lot of answers of mine that would never have been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the things that differentiates us from e.g. Skeptics, because on that site you have to provide references to support everything you write, but such a requirement would not be reasonable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T19:51:44.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1080" CreationDate="2012-04-01T11:24:02.580" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Still doesn't work in Chrome (beta), but it does work in canary. Meh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-04-01T11:24:02.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-01T11:48:52.033" Score="17" ViewCount="936" Body="&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original idea: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1153/list-of-users-with-specialities-who-are-willing-to-be-pinged-should-we-do-this&quot;&gt;List of users with specialities who are willing to be pinged--should we do this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a place where users can opt in to be pinged by other users regardless of their chat status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What sort of pings is this for?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to keep the ping related to P.SE . Some example uses of this would be to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a specific user for help on one of your question/answers. Try to wait for the rest of the community, only use this if you have gotten no response.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let a specific user know that they might enjoy answering &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;question&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let a specific user know about an unanswered question within their specialization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notify a user for SE-related miscellaneous stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Instructions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you would like to render yourself pingable&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post an answer to this question, indicating your specialties (if any). You may also list which types of questions you prefer to answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other stuff you can do to help: Keep your specialties in your profile text (preferably so that they show up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;your expanded usercard&lt;/a&gt;). Do the same for your chat profile. Also, try to stay  logged in to chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you would like to ping a user&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, check if that user is on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-coupling&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. Start typing their username in chat, and if it pops up, then notify them there. It's always preferable to use chat for such notifications. If the user is not on chat, &lt;em&gt;just comment on their post below with your message&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to delete the comment once you have recieved indication that the user has seen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T13:19:15.830" Title="Opt-in to be always pingable to answer questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|chat|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2012-04-01T13:48:53.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7433&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1212053.png&quot;&gt;enter link description here http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1212053.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specialities: None.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likes to answer: Stuff requiring analogies, electromagnetism, basic QM and relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm usually on chat anyways, but its better to keep this here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T14:22:37.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1080" CreationDate="2012-04-01T23:58:18.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like Chrome 18 has changed how it handles allowing javascript to resize a window (there are security issues with this), and so MathJax's window no longer opens properly.  I'm looking into it to see what can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7901" LastActivityDate="2012-04-01T23:58:18.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2012-04-02T12:44:33.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/373/frederic-grosshans&quot;&gt;Frédéric Grosshans&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specialities (research level): Quantum information (more specifically, quantum communication, quantum cryptography and quantum entanglement) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likes to answer: beyond the above, I have an interest in the links between physics and information theory, and I love to give original answer to general physics question, but I do not always have time to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T12:44:33.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2012-04-03T07:53:47.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4066/energynumbers&quot;&gt;&#xA;profile for EnergyNumbers on Physics.SE http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/339125.png&lt;/a&gt; Ping me on human uses of non-food energy:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/building-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;building-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;building-physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/climate-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;climate-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;climate-science&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electricity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electricity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electricity&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/photovoltaics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;photovoltaics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;photovoltaics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/power&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;power&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;power&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/renewable-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;renewable-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;renewable-energy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T09:15:15.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2012-04-06T13:16:34.087" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/48307&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/48307.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for F&amp;#39;x on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot; title=&quot;profile for F&amp;#39;x on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specialities: physical chemistry, thermodynamics, statistical physics of molecular systems&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T13:16:34.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-06T15:26:49.127" Score="7" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=3826410#3826410&quot;&gt;Chat link&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=4136095#4136095&quot;&gt;Another one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently retagging all questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since editing them all at once will flood the main page, I'll keep track of them here, and slowly work my way through them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to help! (try to do maximum 5 at a time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final destination is this synonym: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/visible-light/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/visible-light/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No need to vote for it, a mod will synonymify it once the retagging is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There now is a userscript for this &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/2994654&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gist.github.com/2994654&lt;/a&gt; (full details &lt;a href=&quot;http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121541&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; the synonym has been created, so the link &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt; doesn't work anymore. Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/75871/posts-tagged-light&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Data.SE query&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T11:11:18.913" Title="Tag cleanup--[light]" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1166" CreationDate="2012-04-06T15:34:12.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Working my way from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light?page=4&amp;amp;sort=newest&amp;amp;pagesize=50&quot;&gt;the back&lt;/a&gt; (first page from the back categorised)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that not all pages need to be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt;. Posts in the third section especially. Always read the post first--i've done the categorization based on the snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, try to improve the post wherever possible. And put other relevant tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I (and DavidZaslavsky) have finished retagging all posts on this page, will dig up more from the tag list and add another CW answer (to keep it neat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;To be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commented out for neatness' sake&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;To be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commented out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not really &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2187/what-does-the-optical-zoom-in-telescopes-do&quot;&gt;What does the optical zoom in telescopes do?&lt;/a&gt; DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2542/can-light-emitting-diodes-be-used-to-generate-uv-wavelengths&quot;&gt;Can light emitting diodes be used to generate UV wavelengths?&lt;/a&gt; DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2928/light-mirrors&quot;&gt;Do mirrors increase the amount of light in a room?&lt;/a&gt; DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7395/are-regular-light-bulbs-better-for-the-eyes-than-cfls-or-tube-lights&quot;&gt;Are regular light bulbs better for the eyes than CFLs or &amp;quot;tube lights&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Both?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/550/what-causes-hot-things-to-glow-and-at-what-temperature&quot;&gt;What causes hot things to glow, and at what temperature?&lt;/a&gt; DONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-04-20T06:12:05.477" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-06T15:34:12.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2012-04-07T05:59:40.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/23431/pratik-deoghare&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/23431.png&quot; width=&quot;208&quot; height=&quot;58&quot; alt=&quot;profile for Pratik Deoghare on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot; title=&quot;profile for Pratik Deoghare on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no specialities. But I am interested in (almost) everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2014-02-18T17:21:51.390" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T17:21:51.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4091" CreationDate="2012-04-08T13:12:33.743" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking that user in Physics.SE or other SE sites should know the current status for their eligibility for a badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For eg. say the gold badge &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/82/marshal&quot;&gt;Marshall&lt;/a&gt;, which has a silver counterpart &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/67/deputy&quot;&gt;Deputy&lt;/a&gt;. But as i don't know the my current status that after how many useful flags, I need more to get the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can such a feature be enabled in SE sites? I believe such a thing will be able to push users further to achieve their target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T14:53:18.653" Title="badges: current status" Tags="|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2012-04-08T13:48:42.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;People, please let's celebrate the essence of Physics. Science doesn't discriminate between whether you are a college educated person or a self educated. Either doesn't makes you more knowledgeable, rather an open and inquisitive mind does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself am an engineer in Computer Science, but does that makes me less credible than a physics graduate?? I really don't think so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and about kooks, isn't it needed in a community to have diversity? Don't get boggled up when others have different idea or opinions. Diversity is what makes physics interesting, rather do-able. I agree some things in physics are called &quot;sci-fi&quot; and &quot;fringe-science&quot;, but excluding those, rest of them deserve credibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4887" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T13:48:42.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1169" CreationDate="2012-04-08T15:35:22.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Variations of this request &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=badge%20progress&quot;&gt;have been made on the mother meta many times&lt;/a&gt; (or I'd migrate this there because this request is not specific to physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hunt around on &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;, you will find queries to report your progress on many badges, though I don't know if Deputy and Marshal are something that can be found that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Deputy and Marshal in particular, your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4887/vineet-menon&quot;&gt;user profile&lt;/a&gt; shows how many helpful flags you have made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DU5fW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T15:54:57.820" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1169" CreationDate="2012-04-08T19:46:04.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In additon to dmckee's post, it's always better to have an air of mystery around the badges. Otherwise, you'll end up working for the badges instead of the posts. Strive for the badges, but don't obsess about them. If you want a badge, work towards it, not for the badge, but for the site. The badge will follow on it's own :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T19:46:04.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-10T09:52:04.513" Score="8" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to be answering a lot of questions about basic ideas in physics. I get the impression that a lot of these come from people with no physics background who may have seen something on a TV science show and want to know a bit more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to answer these as I'm keen to encourage interest in physics and likewise to avoid discouraging it. But I wonder how appropriate such questions are for this &lt;s&gt;forum&lt;/s&gt; site, and if we need a tag to distinguish such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2012-04-10T11:39:03.320" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T09:06:55.553" Title="Beginners/non-physicists questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2012-04-10T12:23:02.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some random points that I came up with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Usually TV shows proliferate misconceptions. They may not be &lt;em&gt;saying&lt;/em&gt; wrong stuff, but lots of things are implied. Yes, it creates a nuisance but I feel that we should have a part in fixing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) We should always encourage interest in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Meta-tags are bad&lt;/a&gt;. So no &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/layman&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;layman&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;layman&lt;/a&gt;, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer to the actual question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they're OK. As long as we can give good conceptual answers, they fit our site. We don't want to be shunning the lower level questions--they surprisingly turn up good stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though obvious freaky questions should still be closed. I guess it's more on a per-question basis on what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12386/relativity-in-real-life&quot;&gt;Relativity in Real Life&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post isn't exactly physics-related--it's a tad on the psychology side. But its gotten some great answers! And it does provide some nifty concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-04-10T17:55:17.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-11T02:02:11.763" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently we've had some efforts to clean up the tags on the site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1166/tag-cleanup-light&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;), so I've created a chat event to collect any input that the community - that's you - may want to offer. It's scheduled for this Friday at &lt;s&gt;20:00&lt;/s&gt; 15:00 UTC (though that could be changed if more people speak up soon), and you can see the details and &quot;register&quot; by going to the chat room's &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-coupling?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;schedule page&lt;/a&gt;. Hope to see you there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is not a question in any way, just an announcement, but seeing as how there's no other way to get the word out, I thought it would be important.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T07:17:26.777" Title="Tag cleanup chat session" Tags="|discussion|chat|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1178" CreationDate="2012-04-11T03:13:55.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I myself live in IST, so 1:30 Saturday morning is a &lt;em&gt;tad&lt;/em&gt; too early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I don't think I have much input on this anyway--not found any strange tags recently. I'll look through the taglist and find vague stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing: We could use this to create tagwikiexcerpts. There are lots of vague tags that I've come across (I'll look for them), that lack excerpts. Since the excerpt tells you waht sort of questions belong there, you can't write the excerpts without, well, &lt;em&gt;knowing&lt;/em&gt; the excerpt :/. So it would be nice if the tag scopes are discussed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Dumping ground&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'll use this place to dump any tag-related stuff I find in the meantime--we can discuss these if necessary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Merges&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;--&amp;gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;--&amp;gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmospheric-sciences&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmospheric-sciences&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmospheric-sciences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aircraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aircraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aircraft&lt;/a&gt;&amp;lt;--&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/airplanes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;airplanes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;airplanes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rotational-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rotational-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rotational-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rotational-kinematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rotational-kinematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rotational-kinematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lagrangian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lagrangian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lagrangian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lagrangian-formulism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lagrangian-formulism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lagrangian-formulism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electric-circuits&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electric-circuits&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electric-circuits&lt;/a&gt;--&amp;gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electrical-engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electrical-engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electrical-engineering&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/electrical-engineering/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym as well&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Burninate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/air&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;air&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;air&lt;/a&gt; (dunno about this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beam&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beam&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sign-convention&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sign-convention&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sign-convention&lt;/a&gt; -- Sort of a meta tag; sign conventions can be anywhere. Dunno about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/matrix-elements&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;matrix-elements&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;matrix-elements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also lots of tiny tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/escape-velocity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;escape-velocity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;escape-velocity&lt;/a&gt;. If you look backwards from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags?page=18&amp;amp;tab=popular&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, you get quite a few of them.  Only one question, and probably won't be needed again. We may want to discuss what do do with these. I say we destroy them all :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In need of tagwikiexcerpt&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Split &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radiation&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thermal-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thermal-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thermal-radiation&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radioactivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radioactivity&lt;/a&gt; (with an option for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alpha-decay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alpha-decay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alpha-decay&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beta-decay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beta-decay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beta-decay&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-04-13T07:03:11.283" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1099" CreationDate="2012-04-15T23:38:10.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is multidimensionality on PhysicsSE insofar as one can look up what types of questions a person has answered. One can look at the tags section of the user page, click on a tag that is relevant to you (for a particular question, perhaps), and look, for example, at both the first page and last page of the answer list associated with that tag. If today you look at my page, you'll find that I've answered lots of questions on QM, with 15, 10, 7 upvotes at the head of the list, and with three -1's. In other words, I can sometimes be unconventional, but on elementary questions about technical matters I can usually answer a question on QM well enough. For someone else for a specific tag, you may find that their answers never have an aggregate number of downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is a newbie, there's nothing for it but to assess their answer for yourself and/or wait to see whether they get up-votes or down-votes and/or comments from other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tooltips on the tags page for a user gives numbers of questions and answers and the total reputation gathered, which gives faster but slightly less detailed clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not be a social network site, but one certainly gets to know and respect the strengths and weaknesses and views of some of the main questioners/answerers after a while, although user pages may be more or less completed. I think of this as a social endeavor site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1588" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T23:38:10.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2012-04-16T07:17:11.740" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specialties: quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, Lie algebras in physics, statistical physics, foundations of physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@EmilioPisanty: See my profile for availability.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="7924" LastEditDate="2015-04-23T13:19:15.830" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T13:19:15.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2012-04-16T09:06:55.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wathing science programmes on Discovery and such regularly and I see that translations to local language &lt;strong&gt;are often wrong&lt;/strong&gt;!  I tried to contact translation companies, to no avail.  I would be prepeare to check translations &lt;strong&gt;for free&lt;/strong&gt;, but nobody cares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8570" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T09:06:55.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1184" CreationDate="2012-04-18T18:44:26.887" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question (well, multiple questions, it is for a school project) about chemistry, and have committed to the proposal on Area 51.  Only catch is, it is for school, and needs to be asked soon.  Is Physics the correct place to ask a chemistry question before the actual chemistry site reaches beta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6789" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T19:53:59.483" Title="Question about Chemistry" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1183" CreationDate="2012-04-18T19:05:28.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is the correct place for &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there is some overlap between chemistry and physics in the study of the electron structure of atoms (and in some specialized places that of molecules) and in the discipline that we call &lt;em&gt;&quot;thermodynamics and statistical mechanics&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the chemists call &lt;em&gt;&quot;physical chemistry&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to ask the kinds of chemistry question that are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; physics questions, but please don't ask questions that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no guarantee that there is a correct place on the Stack Exchange network for any particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-04-18T19:27:43.970" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T19:27:43.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1183" CreationDate="2012-04-18T19:53:59.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is Physics the correct place to ask a chemistry question before the actual chemistry site reaches beta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the same thing dmckee said, but just to put it a different way: chemistry questions are not appropriate for Physics Stack Exchange, unless they are also physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think your question might be a physics question, then you can of course go ahead and ask it; just don't be too surprised if it gets closed as off topic. Consider it constructive feedback, not a personal insult - we won't think you're a terrible person or anything like that if you ask a question that gets closed. (If you repeatedly ask questions that get closed, then that's a different story, but just one or two borderline questions isn't a problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T19:53:59.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1166" CreationDate="2012-04-20T06:32:14.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is for the next bunch of cleanup items(too much clutter on one post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this classification is rough, just so that I can get an overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read the full post before retagging, and improve if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commented out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commented out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Both&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9799/do-and-can-phone-signals-come-inside-ac-car-which-is-glass-packed&quot;&gt;Do and can phone signals come inside AC car which is glass-packed&lt;/a&gt; DONE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T11:11:18.913" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-20T06:32:14.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1189" CreationDate="2012-04-23T19:04:41.130" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I'm new on &quot;Physics.SE&quot; and, I'd like to learn if we're allowed to ask, discuss and learn about the &quot;Atomic Structure&quot; and &quot;Electrons&quot; on the &quot;Physics&quot;? If so, I'd love to give it a try very soon and start to enjoy it... :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much!...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7465" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T01:41:57.653" Title="Questions about &quot;Atomic Structure&quot;" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2012-04-23T20:16:47.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;and welcome to the site! Generally speaking, atomic structure and electrons are within the scope of the site, so you can certainly go ahead and ask your questions. Of course, we can only tell whether any given question is appropriate on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-04-23T20:16:47.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2012-04-24T01:41:57.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some guidelines on what type of questions are generally acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8154" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T01:41:57.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-24T15:27:21.920" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to help Cyberike to define the problem given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24028/how-do-i-calculate-dc-motor-speed-for-a-given-load#comment56280_24028&quot;&gt;How do I calculate DC motor speed for a given load?&lt;/a&gt; so that there is a definite answer. As the discussion might take another few posts I wanted to move it to chat but the site says that this is not possible due to Cyberike's low reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other way? Should I just stick to the comments or what would you suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-05-24T16:17:46.270" Title="Move discussion to chat not possible because of reputation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1191" CreationDate="2012-04-24T15:33:04.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the system doesn't allow those with less than 20 reputation to participate in chat. If it's just a matter of one upvote to get someone to that 20-rep mark, then you can just upvote the question (as long as it doesn't suck) and take it to a chat room. Otherwise, just stick to the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see Cyberike now has 21 rep so you should be good to go with a chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T15:33:04.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-25T18:10:46.353" Score="42" ViewCount="1374" Body="&lt;p&gt;The younger brother &quot;Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange&quot; will abolished in a week or so, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/245/theoretical-physics-is-closing&quot;&gt;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/245/theoretical-physics-is-closing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;due to the low traffic figures and a general shortage of interest. The overall administrators are able to easily migrate all questions from the defunct Theoretical Physics SE site to Physics SE site but they think it could be viewed as an impolite step because the questions from a differently focused site could be viewed as &quot;intruders&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally believe that when it comes to the quality and the degree of relevance, pretty much all questions on the Theoretical Physics SE website are &quot;enough&quot; for Physics SE. Do the moderators of Physics SE agree with me? If they do, could you please agree about some common position, and if you happen to agree with me that the 413 Theoretical Physics SE questions should be uniformly saved and given asylum on Physics SE, could you please go to the page above and inform the meta-moderators of Stack Exchange that you consider the Theoretical Physics SE questions on the exodus to be welcome at Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really believe that there are many questions and answers whose value is vastly higher than those at Physics SE and they could be lost which would be unfortunate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1236" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-05-02T12:41:59.320" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T12:41:59.320" Title="Full migration of Theoretical Physics SE questions to Physics SE" Tags="|discussion|support|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1193" CreationDate="2012-04-25T18:28:05.723" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've not been following Theoretical Physics as I'm an experimenter, but I can't see how questions that qualified as good, research-level question on theoretical physics could fail to qualify as good questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of issues that might need consideration&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tagging&lt;/strong&gt; Are there many tags on Theoretical Physics that are more specific than the ones on Physics? If so should we import them, or re-tag to something more general Also, are there some tags that should be added wholesale to question for Theoretical Physics because there indicated something about the question (i.e. that's it is a theory question) that was assumable on Theoretical Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicates&lt;/strong&gt; How many will we generate if we simply import the whole Theoretical Physics question base? Of those how many are have really good answers on both sites and need merging?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-04-25T18:28:05.723" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1193" CreationDate="2012-04-25T19:02:59.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;More of a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest we &lt;s&gt;steal&lt;/s&gt; salvage stuff from Astro.SE as well.  A quick look-see turns up some good questions that could survive on P.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have a way to solve @dmckee's issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag all migrated questions as such (astro or TP), and we can later work through them at our leisure, looking for dupes/etc. Maybe keep a meta-post full of 'em, similar in principle to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1166/tag-cleanup-light&quot;&gt;Tag cleanup--[light]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone notified TP and astro meta yet? If so, please do. We'll need full cooperation for this (I would post, but typing on a phone is annoying :/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-04-25T19:02:59.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1193" CreationDate="2012-04-25T19:26:00.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about, as a default, migrating over all the questions that are &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt;: i.e. those that are neither closed nor deleted, from tp.SE to p.SE, and from astro.SE to p.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But only do that, at the end of the 1-week grace period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And use the 1-week grace period on those sites to close any questions that, for one reason or another, shouldn't be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could always have a (whisper it) &lt;strong&gt;temporary&lt;/strong&gt; tag for migrated questions, to enable post-migration clean-up and duplicate-spotting.  Yes, I know meta-tags are taboo, but every rule needs its exceptions ... and thinking about it further, the tag in question would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, which already exists, and has just four questions that use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to clarify, I'm not proposing delaying anything. What I'm proposing is that, starting now, any questions that shouldn't be migrated on tp.SE should be closed. And, at the end of the grace period, an automated migration should take place of all questions are still open (i.e. neither closed nor deleted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="4066" LastEditDate="2012-04-25T20:34:34.087" LastActivityDate="2012-04-25T20:34:34.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1199" CreationDate="2012-04-25T19:41:49.613" Score="29" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was recently announced that &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;several SE sites are closing&lt;/a&gt;, including Theoretical Physics and Astronomy. Given that our scope here is basically a superset of the scope of Theoretical Physics and that there is a lot of overlap between the sites, there is considerable support for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1193/full-migration-of-theoretical-physics-se-questions-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;migrating the entire content of that site to Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's also been mentioned in several places that there is a fair amount of overlap between Astronomy Stack Exchange and this site as well. Indeed, we get quite a few astronomy and cosmology questions posted here, and looking at the astronomy site I see a decent number of astrophysics-related questions. Certainly those questions can find a good home here. But since physics and astronomy are such closely related subjects, I think even the other, less physical questions from the astronomy site might be of interest to our audience. This raises the possibility of incorporating Astronomy.SE into this site as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we expand the scope of this site to include both physics and astronomy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, what I am proposing is that this site expands its scope to include anything that is currently on topic for Astronomy SE (including the non-physics-related questions) &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; anything that is currently on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this change were to happen, it might be appropriate to alter the name and/or design of the site accordingly. This is being addressed by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1222/change-name-faq-to-physicsastronomy&quot;&gt;separate question&lt;/a&gt;. Obviously, for this reason, the change in scope would be contingent on the approval of the Stack Exchange team. But I would also like to see whether there is community support for the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T15:55:14.737" Title="If it's possible, do we want to expand the scope of this site to include astronomy?" Tags="|discussion|scope|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-25T19:45:39.887" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;If it&amp;#39;s possible, do we want to expand the scope of this site to include astronomy?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Astronomy.SE is &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/170/astronomy-is-closing&quot;&gt;closing&lt;/a&gt;l and this SE seems like it could be a natural home for a significant fraction of the questions asked there.  Before taking the time to flag anything for migration the question of what would/not be accepted here needs to be resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6749" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:52:10.693" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T12:42:15.437" Title="Would astronomy or astrophysics questions be considered on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2012-04-25T19:50:03.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-04-25T20:08:00.157" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should we expand the scope of this site to include both physics and astronomy?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yep :-)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-04-25T20:08:00.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-04-26T04:41:34.417" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should we expand the scope of this site to include both physics and astronomy?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nope :O&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T04:41:34.417" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-26T04:41:34.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-26T16:49:57.700" Score="7" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hot accent color on accent color action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KiYZq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See it in the top right corner of &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-coupling&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6973" LastEditorUserId="6973" LastEditDate="2012-06-11T16:12:02.797" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T16:12:02.797" Title="Physics logo is almost invisible on the Site Rooms button in chat" Tags="|bug|design|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-26T19:14:35.107" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible (and useful) for the site to maintain LaTeX preferences/short-cuts, similar to style files, attached to usernames or topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or even better, to allow users to create a list of different &quot;style files&quot; which could be selected when answering any particular question. As an example, if a user wanted to write a long answer to a quantum mechanical question, they could select &quot;Dirac-Notation&quot; and then use handily created short-cuts like &lt;em&gt;\expectation{Operator}&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;\state{indices}&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would allow answerers to stop worrying about left and right brackets and pipes and various things: and therefore removing another barrier to giving fuller and clearer replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All comments welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8139" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T09:09:51.523" Title="User/Subject - specific LaTeX Customisation" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-04-28T19:28:24.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-26T20:18:41.210" Score="26" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, theoretical physics has failed (the site, not the discipline). We should make some effort to recapture whatever interest and audience it had. The easiest way to do that would be to introduce a &quot;research-grade&quot; tag. This idea has been raised many times before. It allows people who do not want to see pop-physics or physics 101 questions to subscribe only to this tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest we go forward with it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact idea I would suggest is  &lt;strong&gt;a tag for any question whose answer is not blindingly obvious to someone who has completed a graduate core curriculum&lt;/strong&gt;.  I think that this is basically the right criteria, rather than trying to say something about &quot;current research&quot; or the like. Remember, the point of this tag is to filter out questions that would  be pure chaff to an active researcher. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag would be policed aggressively, but erring on the side of being over-inclusive, since there is little harm in that. It would also have to be added aggressively to appropriate looking questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a suggested tag description&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;research-grade:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Any question requiring beyond an undergraduate level of physics understanding to answer. Questions involving summaries of current research for the lay audience are not appropriate. Please attempt to find an answer to your question in textbooks, wikipedia and arxiv before using this tag.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm honestly not very happy with that description, but the main idea is just to scare people away from using tags for questions like &quot;What if there is no Higgs boson?&quot;, &quot;What if dark matter is (&lt;em&gt;crazy idea&lt;/em&gt;)&quot;.  These questions involve current research, so the asker might be tempted to use a &quot;research&quot; tag, but are almost exactly what people would want filtered out. I would be glad for other suggestions.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To demonstrate, the only questions on the front page that would obviously  qualify for this on the front page at the moment are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/24423/3970&quot;&gt;Gauge invariance and form of the vacuum polarization tensor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/24453/3970&quot;&gt;What areas of physics should a mathematician learn to understand TQFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note these are not very hard questions. The idea is not to collect the world's hardest physics questions, which would be useless since no one could answer them. The idea is only  filter out the obvious chaff from the perspective of an active researcher, for those who would like such a filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag could also be reasonably applied to high level &quot;engineering-type&quot; questions such as &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/24436/3970&quot;&gt;Why are turbines built differently when a change of entropy or temperature is involved?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;. (I actually don't understand what that question is asking, but you get the idea). They are probably not what a lot of the theoreticalphysics crowd want, but it would be good for them to remember there is a real world. So I'm fine with that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's genuinely unclear to me why theoreticalphysics failed, when mathoverflow and cstheory have succeeded so well. Therefore I can't say that this tag will definitely be productive. It may simply be that no physicists want a Q&amp;amp;A site.  However, the effort required to put such a tagging system in place is small, so it should be tried. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very interested in hearing other's opinions. Hopefully we can develop a consensus quickly and put something in place soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As dmckee points out this would be a meta-tag, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;frowned upon by the stackexchange system&lt;/a&gt;. But I believe this situation is exceptional as evidenced by the fact that there were two separate physics sites in the stackexchange system.  If you read the comments to that post it is clear that they are not against meta-tags if they are performing a valid function. After all, if the meta-tags are performing a valid function, why shouldn't they be used? Further we actually have the meta-tag &quot;homework&quot;, which is an extremely important and useful tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the concern is that stackexchange would actively prevent the creation of such a tag, I find that unlikely, especially if there is some consensus about the issue. But that is a separate issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added 5/01/12&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have added this as a response to David's comment and just to clarify.  Although the tag is being called &quot;research-level&quot; or &quot;research-grade&quot; that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is a good description of its function. The function of the tag is to specify questions that might be of interest to &lt;em&gt;researchers&lt;/em&gt;.  To that end, I have suggested a very specific criterion for the use of tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a tag for any question whose answer is not blindingly obvious to someone who has completed a graduate core curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition is based on the one fact unifying the community of researchers - mastery of the core of known physics. The criterion is sufficiently precise, and definitely excludes the vast majority of questions on the site. It definitely includes the two questions I have linked, even though the answer to first one is contained in textbooks and is not a question under active research, and even though the second one is a purely pedagogical question. They are both not obvious to all researchers. That is the only criterion.  I agree there is some ambiguity in the criterion with the definitions of &quot;blindingly obvious&quot; and &quot;graduate core&quot;, but I would simply suggest that we be err on the side of inclusiveness since there is no cost to a small amount of overtagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree that the tag description and tag name do not suitably capture what I have suggested. I had a lot of trouble coming up with something. I would be glad for improved suggestions, but keep in mind the main function of the tag name and description would be to discourage low level questions from being tagged by the asker, simply because they thought it involved some aspect of current research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm here, let me take a step back and try to argue why we would want such a tag, and justify the criterion I suggested. I realize that in the initial post I simply jumped straight into the specifics of the suggestion without explanation. I should put it writing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason is simply pragmatic. There is a group of very smart people who at least say they would like to contribute to a stackexhange site, but who do not like the crosstalk from the lay audience. Their participation in the site would be very good. Therefore the creation of a tag tailored to the &quot;researcher audience&quot; might bring them into the site at very low cost, and therefore such a tag should be tried. Moreover, even for those who don't mind the jumble of questions of all levels such a tag would be very useful. So why not introduce it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underlying the pragmatic reason are a set of issues that were discussed heavily when theoretical physics was proposed. The physics site has multiple audiences crammed together (lay people interested in physics, undergraduate homework solvers, and researchers). Using tags to help separate these audiences is entirely consistent with the philosophy of stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, this post has received 11 upvotes as of 5/01, which indicates at least some support. I have not seen any fatal objections raised to the idea. I'll give it another 24 hours to stew. If nothing has changed by that point I will simply change the description of the existing research-level tag and start retagging old questions as appropriate. I believe that those changes will need to be approved because of my low reputation. Hopefully the mods will respect my initiative and let the idea play out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3970" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T08:26:49.520" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T08:26:49.520" Title="Capturing theoretical-physics crowd with Research Level Tag" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2012-04-26T20:20:05.237" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; would &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;be a meta-tag.&lt;/a&gt; These are strongly discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T20:20:05.237" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-26T21:27:47.313" Score="9" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may have heard, &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; will shortly be closing, and we are considering absorbing their questions into this site. We will soon be having a chat session (or perhaps multiple sessions) to discuss these potential merges, probably either Sunday or Monday. There are two questions I would like to pose here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What needs to be discussed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When should we have the chat session?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For #1, please put any ideas of what should be discussed in the chat session in answers. If you have a preference for time, please leave a comment on this question saying what times you could attend. I will figure out what a good time is tomorrow and update this question accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know this isn't really a proper meta question, I'm just trying to collect some information in the quickest way possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: it's official, &lt;strong&gt;5-6 PM EDT (9-10 PM UTC) Monday&lt;/strong&gt; is the time! I'd encourage anyone who plans on being there to register on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-coupling?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;chat room schedule page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I've just realized I can't be there until about 5:30, so whoever shows up will have to start without me. Some of the things we need to discuss are listed in the answers to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-05-02T18:16:59.743" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Chat session on merging sites" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|chat|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-04-27T03:49:12.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a fair bit of decent, so I'm going to put forward the third proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take most of the questions, but filter out the ones that really aren't on topic. Basically, don't take equipment, observational help, etc. I suspect that around 80% of the questions fit into this category, but there might be a few that get left behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some that I suspect should be left behind (All stolen from my own questions, so as to not offend anyone else;-): But most of them should be brought here, for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1573/71&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1573/71&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1901/71&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1901/71&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1434/71&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1434/71&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/93/71&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/93/71&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="871" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T03:49:12.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1205" CreationDate="2012-04-27T03:56:34.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as Astronomy, there's only one thing that I think is even a point. Do we want to take stuff that relations to observations? Black holes, planets, etc all seem to be very much on topic here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a chat is the best way to handle this in any case, unless it is somewhat of a work session to filter through questions. Meta tends to be much better at that kind of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="871" LastEditorUserId="871" LastEditDate="2012-04-27T04:03:34.133" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T04:03:34.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1205" CreationDate="2012-04-27T04:11:32.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like I told you, I won't be there. But I can throw out some ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure the Astro and TP community is well-represented. Bug them via meta and chat to come by and drop in. I suggest you work out timings so that at least one mod each is here. And of course, it would be nice if we hade more than one Phy.SE mod, so that decisions can be made immediately. Roping in an SE member (maybe CHAOS) would be great, though not sure if it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Discuss &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;If it&amp;#39;s possible, do we want to expand the scope of this site to include astronomy?&lt;/a&gt; . Also how far we are willing to go in expanding the scope. (&lt;em&gt;EDIT by DZ&lt;/em&gt;) The possibility of a name change should also be discussed, since it goes along with any possible changes in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Discuss if there are any TP questions unsuitable for this site (doubt it)&amp;amp;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Discuss how to address the (I think) prevalent &quot;we don't want our questions to be mixed with high school homework&quot;/&quot;Users who have gotten rep from easy questions(eg me) should not moderate our posts&quot; attitude at TP. Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;.See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/187/theoretical-physics-merge-with-physics&quot;&gt;Area51 discussion on TP&amp;amp;P.SE overlap&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/130388/178438&quot;&gt;post on MSO discussion on merger&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/capturing-theoretical-physics-crowd-with-research-level-tag&quot;&gt;Research-level tag proposal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe ask common community members to prepare a meta post on the differences(if any) that one must take note of between the two sites. Since most of the rep gets transferred, we don't want high rep users not knowing that we handle certian things differently here. Or just discuss the differences first and decide if this is necesssary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T18:27:56.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1205" CreationDate="2012-04-27T09:02:38.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe we can assess which tasks have to be done &quot;manually&quot; in the course of the merging processes and recrute some volunteers for getting stuff done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T09:02:38.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-28T10:13:17.110" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Explanation of issue:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The option to &quot;Show Source Code&quot; of rendered math blocks/lines doesn't work as expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Steps to reproduce:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Right click on any block/line of rendered math on any page and request either the MathML or TeX source code behind the rendering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A window flashes. An icon appears and remains on the taskbar. No window in view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As per request (May 4th '12)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No ad-blocking... &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google Chrome 18; no extensions concerning JS or MathJaX&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Windows 7 32-bit; SP1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Additional Info:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;I can bring the pop-up on screen by 'maximizing' it via task-manager then 'snapping' (in Win7) it to either half of the screen. I can't resize it however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS.&lt;/em&gt; I'm waiting for a solution but in the mean time, I don't see any reason to go after the issue so, apart from informing the SE team in the unlikely event the issue has roots in the engine, I thank you humbly for your help and I don't need anything else. If anyone wishes to add anything then it's their call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8889" LastEditorUserId="8889" LastEditDate="2012-05-04T20:38:47.333" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T20:38:47.333" Title="&quot;Show Code&quot; features (MathML/TeX) in the context menu don't work" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2013-10-31T17:58:04.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-29T19:17:05.947" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the space of 5 mins, two of my answers from other questions have been upvoted and all because I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24596/is-the-converse-of-noethers-first-theorem-true-every-conservation-law-has-a-sy&quot;&gt;good question&lt;/a&gt; today. It's very flattering, I must admit, but are there safe guards in place to prevent someone upvoting too many questions for one person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="benevolent attack on my account" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1211" CreationDate="2012-04-29T19:23:24.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a script that attempts to identify vote fraud (both for and against you) and will reverse any that it detects. If your fan has over-done it or has acted too quickly (i.e. without reading the answers) these votes may be removed when the script runs later today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details of what constitutes &quot;fraud&quot; from the scripts point of view are not public information, but the hints I've gotten from the team suggest that they are not as simple as &quot;counting&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1139/520&quot;&gt;Attack on my account&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-04-29T19:23:24.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1211" CreationDate="2012-04-29T20:02:29.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Serial upvoting is handled automatically and you don't need to get a moderator/Meta involved. In this case it's just two votes though, so I doubt it would be detected as fraud (it's usually many votes when fraud occurs, but there cut off isn't publicly known). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, don't worry about it. In this case it's doubtful they had any ill or improper intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6973" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-04-29T20:02:29.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1211" CreationDate="2012-04-30T12:34:21.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a particular contribution made me curious of the author, I often look up what else the author contributed, and of course finding something valuable there makes me vote accordingly. Thus there is nothing wrong with upvoting questions or answers to items one gets to read only because one first read another question or answer of an author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the upvotes should be deserved, but this can easily be judged by the upvoter within 5 minutes, so one need not be suspicious of two upvotes so close in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T12:34:21.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-30T18:20:13.657" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to publish/link to/include a guide or a reference to a preferred guide to writing LaTeX on the site so that (if possible) searching by formula would be easier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8889" LastEditorUserId="8889" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T18:40:21.840" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T18:40:21.840" Title="Standardizing $\latex$ use on the site to make searching for formulas easier" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-30T18:27:20.233" Score="-5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea is simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a &quot;Quality&quot; or &quot;Approved&quot; tag for questions complete with full, quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user (a beginner in physics, maybe) a basic question and get answers that (as a whole) would make for a good starting point on the concept. The mod-only tag would designate these questions as complete, high quality and accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe also a public tag to put a question into the attention of mods if the user has asked what s/he believes a question fitting the criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; A question about velocity (maybe) and how it differs in Vacuum from on Earth. Why velocity captures the direction beside the speed. And why a force on Earth's surface wouldn't always translate to a tangible acceleration because other factors speed-down the body; so force does actually increase the velocity of a body but not necessarily sustain its current one in all cases akin to what's visible to the layman on Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;^That's a pretty basic question and would as an excellent introduction to velocity. Furthermore, since it's so basic, it's unlikely that a similarly phrased question might need different answers than one already asked. A tag to designate these questions would make a very good index (of all questions tagged as such) for basic concepts as explained above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8889" LastEditorUserId="8889" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T20:07:01.747" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T01:44:26.863" Title="Proposing a &quot;Quality-Question&quot; or &quot;Complete-Concept&quot; mod-only tag for high quality-conceptual questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1218" CreationDate="2012-04-30T18:58:43.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I joined the site just to answer you. :) If I got it correctly, you're willing to have an index for Wiki questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, there is no need for a tag. Simply type &lt;code&gt;wiki:1&lt;/code&gt; in the search bar, et voilà! Same applies to closed questions, &lt;code&gt;closed:1&lt;/code&gt;, and if you can see them, deleted questions, &lt;code&gt;deleted:1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the &quot;request&quot;... You can &lt;strong&gt;flag your question for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt;, then choose &lt;strong&gt;other&lt;/strong&gt; and type your request; something like &quot;This should be a Community Wiki&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the CW tool is not for questions that otherwise would be Off Topic, Not Constructive, etc... But only for questions that deserve a special treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helped!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T18:58:43.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1218" CreationDate="2012-05-01T01:44:26.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, this is not a bad idea for a resource to have on the internet, but it has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;already been done elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, Stack Exchange does have the goal of creating a body of reference information that will be easily usable by others, but it is always question-driven. If we go beyond answering questions to trying to provide general reference information, then we are going beyond the scope of the Stack Exchange network and running up against other resources which are already established in that area, and there's no need for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T01:44:26.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2012-05-01T18:09:50.000" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The argument of the StackExchange folks against meta tags is reasonable in most cases, but it doesn't apply here in my opinion. Jeff Atwood quoted 2 arguments against meta tags &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but neither applies very well to this proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shog9 wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the [subjective] tag is useless at best and actively harmful at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useless, because for all the talk about filtering by or filtering out subjective questions using that tag, it’s a poor tool for the job simply because the criteria for its use are, well, subjective. I can tell you what a poll is, or a FAQ, or a list, or a getting-to-know-you (GTKY) question… But where the border lies for subjective I cannot say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And harmful, because there are some users who actually believe that, like community wiki, it’s some sort of magic that allows you to ignore the normal posting standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s been used pejoratively and defensively, without any real consistency, for a long long time now. Time to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not apply, because what is and is not research level is generally well-known to a large number of people. There's nothing subjective about it. There are borderline cases, but regardless of how these are treated, it would be useful for filtering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might claim that it will lead to a lot of mistags that mods will have to deal with, but I don't think this is a good argument. People incorrectly tag other things all the time. For example, I can think of a fair number of times on Math.SE where questions tagged as algebraic geometry were actually about high school level geometry. I can't see how this would be any different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aaronut wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s been a major uptick recently in tags that are not useful and just add noise. I want to stress that these are usually added in good faith, and I am not questioning anybody’s motivation – I know that they all mean well. But this particular category of tags is one that has been historically referred to as meta-tags on MSO, and these tags cause a lot of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta-tags are actually a subset of a larger problem that I usually call dependent tags. These are tags that don’t say anything by themselves – you can’t tell what the question is about unless they’re paired with some other tag (or several of them). These tags are a problem because people don’t realize this and will often use that as the question’s only tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that one can tag a question with a so-called meta tag and nothing else. I can't imagine that this would be common with a research-level tag. TP.SE hasn't had any problems with undertagging. If someone is at the level to ask research-level questions, which require a lot of time to ask and answer, they are pretty invested in the question and will likely spend the extra few seconds to add descriptive tags. Unlike with low-level questions it actually does improve the chances of getting an answer quickly. The fact that tagging was rarely an issue on TP.SE should be enough evidence that the subset of people who would use a research-level tag would be responsible with it, which is already more than can be said for the homework meta-tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4463" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T22:40:58.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-02T12:39:44.533" Score="0" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;If it&amp;#39;s possible, do we want to expand the scope of this site to include astronomy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related chat : &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/site-merging-chat-event&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/site-merging-chat-event&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that we have decided to take all Astro questions, &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; observational astro (though we are shunting astrophotography to photo.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the rest of the astro questions (all of them astrophysics questions) fall well within our scope and title, observational astro questions do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In lieu of this, let's discuss whether or not we should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the site name to Physics &amp;amp; Astronomy. Maybe keep physics.SE,astro.SE, and physicsandastronomy.SE as URL aliases (I'd say physics.SE should stay as the main one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt; Explicitly add astrophysics and observational astro to our faq &lt;/s&gt;(this has already been addressed in the related question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the final decision will be made &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the merger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T12:43:45.457" Title="Change name to Physics&amp;Astronomy?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1222" CreationDate="2012-05-02T12:51:58.393" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think changing the name is not needed because astrophysics (including the observational and experimental techniques) &lt;strong&gt;IS&lt;/strong&gt; physics ... ;-). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But expanding or updating the faq accordingly is probably a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T12:51:58.393" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1222" CreationDate="2012-05-02T13:00:14.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the chat transcript I found several tags with ~50-100 questions that appeared to be similarly far from &quot;core physics&quot; as observational astronomy is from astrophysics.  For that reason I don't think a renaming is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples I listed during the chat were:  education (100 questions); electric circuits (48 questions), or computational physics (41 questions).  The latter two straddle the gap between electrical engineering and the various cs/programming SE's.  If there was a teaching SE, the same would be true of the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6749" LastEditorUserId="6749" LastEditDate="2012-05-02T13:07:15.043" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T13:07:15.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-02T14:18:12.787" Score="6" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's currently a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;talk&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1193/full-migration-of-theoretical-physics-se-questions-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt; Physics.SE absorbing &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ThPhys.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Astro.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  How is this carried out? Who decides, and where, on what policy is to be executed?  Once it's decided, where, how and when is it carried out? Is there a top-down decision or is there a &quot;suggestions box&quot; of some sort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't seem to find any similar mass-migrations that have happened before, so apologies if this information is sitting in an obvious place I missed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4551" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T22:19:16.033" Title="How are merges with other SEs executed?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1225" CreationDate="2012-05-02T14:39:02.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE team secretly decides in their underground hideout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, though, they are taking input on &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is to be done, though probably not on ipthe internal details. Just ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt; (or here if it is Phy.SE related), and they ought to come by. If you're quick enough, @GraceNote is currently online on Physics chat, so you can ask her. Otherwise, you can probably find @Shog9 on the MSO Tavern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The changes will be discussed by the Phy.SE community, but the final decision rests in the hand of SE. But they (usually) listen to us, so practically &quot;we decide&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T14:39:02.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-05-02T15:51:50.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the Physics Stack Exchange is renamed into the Physics and Astronomy Stack Exchange, I actually would wonder - how much &quot;damage&quot; would be done if we also migrated over the questions related to equipment and observation help? Since the Astronomy SE was pretty much dead for a long time, I don't think that those questions would really clog up the Physics SE feed, and I'd hate to lose some of the good discussions that were on equipment/observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(am saying this as someone who didn't post anything related to equipment/observation help, as my interests in astronomy are purely theoretical). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1576" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T15:51:50.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1222" CreationDate="2012-05-02T16:00:03.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To present the alternate viewpoint from what others have addressed: the important thing is whether people who will potentially be asking questions on the site, i.e. new users, will understand (observational) astronomy to be within the scope when they just see &quot;Physics&quot; in the title, or not. I believe not. (At least, I would not expect a site that is just named &quot;physics&quot; to incorporate astronomy.) That's why I'm in favor of the name change. Probably very little would be involved, just adding a word to the site logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: since the merger I have seen at least these three examples of people who were confused about the fact that astronomy questions are now on topic for this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28452/solar-eclipse-viewing&quot;&gt;Solar Eclipse Viewing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28264/is-the-environment-around-an-asteroid-harsher-than-in-interplanetary-space&quot;&gt;Is the environment around an asteroid harsher than in interplanetary space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25467/when-do-natural-leap-years-occur-on-years-based-on-the-northern-winter-solstice&quot;&gt;When do natural leap years occur, on years based on the northern winter solstice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(in this case the confusion was expressed in a flag message)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these are just the people who thought astronomy was off topic and decided to post anyway. It stands to reason that there are others, perhaps a significant number, who see our site logo and name and decide not to post at all. How many potential questions are we driving away because our site name is misleading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T20:21:08.503" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-02T19:04:12.947" Score="16" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE: the migration is complete&lt;/strong&gt; so this is now old news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're reading this, you've probably heard that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; sites, among others, will be &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;shutting down this week&lt;/a&gt;. Since these two sites have a large overlap in scope with Physics, we are going to be &quot;adopting&quot; the entire content of both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1193/full-migration-of-theoretical-physics-se-questions-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;TP&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;Astro&lt;/a&gt;. Over the past week, the details of the migration have been discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/site-salvage&quot;&gt;on meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/site-merging-chat-event&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt;. I'm creating this post to address the important questions that the people involved should know about in the last few days before the migration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will the migration happen?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if a question doesn't belong on Physics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a member of one of the sites to be migrated, what do I need to do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a moderator of one of the sites to be migrated, what do I need to do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I deal with &quot;noise&quot; drowning out the questions I'm interested in?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will Physics Stack Exchange change after the merger?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What needs to be done after questions are merged?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What will happen to the Theoretical Physics and Astronomy domains?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What do you need to know about the upcoming mass migration?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-02T19:04:12.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1229" CreationDate="2012-05-02T19:05:31.337" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1225/how-are-merges-with-other-ses-executed&quot;&gt;How will the migration happen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Friday (barring any unexpected delays), the Stack Exchange team will take the Theoretical Physics and Astronomy sites offline, and will transfer all remaining questions &lt;em&gt;except for closed questions&lt;/em&gt; on them to Physics. The transfer will be done in a similar manner to a regular migration of a single question from one site to another, except that it will be handled by the developers using a special mechanism, so the migrated questions won't all show up on the front page. No involvement from the moderators or members of these sites will be necessary to migrate questions to Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What if a question doesn't belong on Physics?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two classes of questions which, while they may not be entirely off topic on Physics, would probably be better handled elsewhere, in the judgment of their respective communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From Theoretical Physics, questions about quantum computing are appropriate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;. This includes most or all of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-information&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantum-information&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantum-computing&lt;/a&gt; tags on TP. These questions will be manually migrated to TCS prior to the merge on Friday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From Astronomy, questions about astrophotography are appropriate for &lt;a href=&quot;http://photo.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Photography&lt;/a&gt;. This includes some/most of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophotography&quot;&gt;astrophotography&lt;/a&gt; tag. These questions will be manually migrated to Photography prior to the merge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;As a member of one of the sites to be migrated, what do I need to do?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a member of Theoretical Physics or Astronomy community, you don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to do anything. Any questions or answers you've posted will be automatically transferred, unless they get manually migrated to another site beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you don't have an account on this site, your profile and reputation on these sites will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be transferred. So there is one thing that we &lt;em&gt;recommend&lt;/em&gt; you do: &lt;strong&gt;sign up for an account on Physics!&lt;/strong&gt; And make sure that account is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18232/how-can-one-link-merge-combine-associate-two-accounts-users-anonymous-unregist&quot;&gt;associated&lt;/a&gt; with your existing one on either TP or Astro. When your posts are migrated over, they will not be linked to your profile any longer &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you make this association.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/4458837#4458837&quot;&gt;Note that bounties are reset&lt;/a&gt; (since the revision history is not migrated over)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many badges will be lost. You will keep vote-received-related badges (barring issues caused by the non-migrated closed posts). This will include the (nice|good|great)(question|answer) badges. You will also get vote chronology badges (like the Mortarboad series), but will probably lose vote-given badges like Electorate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag badges can be recovered if your posts get similarly retagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges like Yearling and  Fanatic will go down the drain. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/4449587#4449587&quot;&gt;Source for badge stuff--also contains &quot;what is migrated&quot;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, the revision history is not migrated (only the current version with credit to the OP), so edit-related badges disappear as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, since Physics will be expanding its scope to include all questions that were previously on topic for either Theoretical Physics or Astronomy, if you enjoyed contributing to either of those sites, you may want to continue contributing to Physics. And we would certainly love your help making this site great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will also help the process go more smoothly if you search your site for any questions that need to be sent anywhere other than Physics and flag them for moderator attention. In particular, take a look at any questions you have asked and think about whether they should be sent somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;As a moderator of one of the sites to be migrated, what do I need to do?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing that moderators of TP and Astro need to do is to identify any questions that don't belong on Physics and migrate them to the site they do belong on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I deal with &quot;noise&quot; drowning out the questions I'm interested in?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mainly a concern for the Theoretical Physics community: the research-level questions coming from that site will be swamped by the larger number of lower-level questions that Physics gets on a daily basis. It's still an open question what we will be doing about this, but there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/capturing-theoretical-physics-crowd-with-research-level-tag&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; to use a tag (probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;) to identify the sort of questions that are of interest to research physicists. If you have any comments or even just opinions about that proposal, your input would be very much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless we get more input on that question that changes the status quo, we will be going ahead with the implementation of this tag starting in the next couple of days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How will Physics Stack Exchange change after the merger?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope of Physics &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;will be expanding&lt;/a&gt; to include everything that is currently on topic on Astronomy. This includes observational astronomy questions (about using telescopes etc.), which may not normally be considered part of physics. This means that we will shortly be changing the FAQ to reflect these new topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1222/change-name-to-physicsastronomy&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; to change the name/logo of the site to reflect this change in scope. For now, if you have any comments or opinions on this, please contribute to the linked question! We will not be making a final decision on this until after the merger is complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What needs to be done after questions are merged?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions coming from Theoretical Physics and Astronomy will be imported using a different tagging scheme from what we are used to on this site. Accordingly, we will probably need to adjust the tags on many of these questions. There will be a list posted here on our meta of the questions that have been migrated and need to be examined for retagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What will happen to the Theoretical Physics and Astronomy domains?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The domains &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/130407/56541&quot;&gt;will be preserved for at least 6 months&lt;/a&gt; so that links which currently point to those sites will continue to work. However, after that time, usage of the domains may be discontinued (which means the links will break) if they are not getting enough activity to justify keeping them around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T02:19:11.280" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-02T19:05:31.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1225" CreationDate="2012-05-02T22:19:16.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The gist of it is as follows: on Friday, SE will automatically migrate all non-closed questions from TP and Astro to Physics, and then will take those other sites offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The migrated questions will presumably have to be retagged by us, which is going to be an extended effort we'll have to get into after the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T22:19:16.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-03T15:34:01.667" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;After having to add dollar signs and format SI  units countless times in the review section, I finally got fed up and wrote a script.{*}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It basically adds buttons to enclose the selected text in dollar symbols and &lt;code&gt;\mathrm&lt;/code&gt; SI unit formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;Here's the userscript&lt;/a&gt;. Installation instructions are there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*With some urging from chem.SE.people, otherwise it was going to be indefinitely in my todo list :P&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T15:55:34.370" Title="Math and SI formatting buttons" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1233" CreationDate="2012-05-03T20:25:42.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't comment (literally, I can't post comments) but I can say that although it's a bit limited in features, it's definitely a step forward for the editor!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the link you provided has dead download sub-links :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8889" LastActivityDate="2012-05-03T20:25:42.850" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-04T17:20:06.863" Score="13" ViewCount="1231" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;  from D.Z.: I'm hijacking Manishearth's question to organize the tag cleanup effort, because most of the links are already posted here. Here's how this is going to work: whenever you have time and feel so inclined, go through the lists below and pick out a few questions (maybe no more than 5 at a time) that you want to review. Make sure the tags are appropriate, edit them if not, and try to make any other improvements that are warranted. When retagging, keep in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a tag that was originally on the question doesn't exist here at Physics, but you think it would be appropriate (which it usually should be) check and see if we have a different tag with the same meaning. If not, feel free to recreate the same tag. If you don't have enough rep to create tags, just leave that post, or flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8/physics-subfield-tags-and-general-tag-rules&quot;&gt;subfield tags&lt;/a&gt; of which each post should probably have at least one. The list may be a little out of date, so consider it a guideline.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each time you review a question and finish any edits necessary, delete it from the list below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today(-ish), Astro.SE and TP.SE shall be mass-migrated to Phy.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the migration, we have retagging to consider--these questions will all be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot;&gt;list of questions that are &amp;quot;untagged&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that the questions need reviewing as well.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We shall be provided with a meta-post-list of the migrated questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How should we retag?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with retagging is that it bumps the post, flooding our poor main page (and drowning out 'normal' edits/posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to handle this is to just disregard the main page and have the joint communities go on a retagging spree, keeping track of it in a copy of the meta post list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other way is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1166/tag-cleanup-light&quot;&gt;Tag cleanup--[light]&lt;/a&gt;, and is much more relaxed on  the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Duplicate the meta post, maybe split into chunks for cleanliness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Start retagging. Make sure that you do few enough to not flood the main page. We'll have to decide exactly what 'few enough' means. (I use 5 at a time for the [light] cleanup)&#xA;-Remove retagged post links from the meta post. (or maybe mark as 'done'?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If our self-imposed 'rate limit' has been reached, then just go about adding tags to the entry in the meta post. That way, someone who knows less about the topic can still retag. (I can get you a &lt;code&gt;[tag:...]&lt;/code&gt; keyboard shortcut if you like the pretty tag formatting)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Try to improve the post as well.&lt;/strong&gt; Review it to fit our site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that's how I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it should be. We may want to work out the details--this is a big job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other issues with retagging&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The [research-level] tag is still under debate(I think). We may want to refrain from retagging TP questions till we decide on this. Or, we can go  ahead with normal retagging and let the SE folks auto add it to the listed questions if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New tags: All these questions may need new tags, especially Astro ones. We may want to first have a look at the questions and decide which tags to create. Unchecked, this can bloat our already-bloated tag list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site matter: we may not have that many users who know the subject well enough (eg me). These guys may not be able to &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; the tags, but they can do the actual retagging. We need to engage the Astro and TP communities here for choosing tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, I can write a script which compares the contents of the editor with  the tag list and suggests tags. Though that may take a while (few days, got other things to do atm)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we need to &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/discuss&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discuss&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discuss&lt;/a&gt; this and decide what steps, as a community, we shall take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T09:06:30.143" Title="How should we go about retagging the salvaged posts?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|site-salvage|retagging|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-04T21:01:20.410" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now &lt;em&gt;(May 4th '12 20:58 UTC),&lt;/em&gt; the main page either remains as I first opened it or continues to 'update' with tens of questions &lt;strong&gt;each second&lt;/strong&gt; coming to the top of the list. Once I refresh, it's gone and everything is back to how it was when I first opened it; a minute later and the same behavior shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The posts that come up are very old (mostly dated between &lt;em&gt;May '11&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Nov. '11&lt;/em&gt;) if that helps...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It only happens when I stay on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8889" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-05-05T00:49:28.930" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T00:49:28.930" Title="The main page acting strange and inconsistently" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-05-04T21:17:17.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're seeing is apparently noise from the mass imports from astronomy and theoretical physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1229/what-do-you-need-to-know-about-the-upcoming-mass-migration&quot;&gt;What do you need to know about the upcoming mass migration?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what you described apparently the mass import process was adding questions and then pulling them off the front page, instead of adding them in a way they never appeared there in the first place.  That's less than ideal; but for a very rarely used feature putting effort into fine tuning it probably doesn't make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6749" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T21:17:17.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-05-04T22:11:58.097" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over a thousand questions were imported from the now-closed Astronomy and Theoretical Physics sites. We did this as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, but for a short while there simply were a huge number of new posts entering the site and the activity monitor reacted accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is now completed, you should see no unusual activity... At least until folks start &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1235/how-should-we-go-about-retagging-the-salvaged-posts&quot;&gt;retagging&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T22:11:58.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1257" CreationDate="2012-05-05T11:55:48.703" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that Astronomy beta was merged into Physics, however, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot;&gt;many of my questions are now untagged&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way we can get all the tags on Astronomy moved over to Physics and applied to the questions that were migrated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3598" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T07:11:05.473" Title="Astronomy tags were not merged?" Tags="|bug|status-declined|tags|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1233" CreationDate="2012-05-05T15:55:34.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Note to users who installed it before 5/5/12 (3:51 PM UTC):&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script no longer needs to be updated (most updates include the addition of more sites/buttons and tweaks like tooltips). It auto-fetches the updates now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you uninstall/reinstall it to run this one-time update&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to uninstall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chrome: Settings&amp;gt;Tools&amp;gt;Extensions. Find the script and delete it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firefox: Open the GM settings and remove the script&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then re-install normally (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Manishearth/Manish-Codes/raw/master/StackExchange/MathJaxButtons.user.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;click here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T15:55:34.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-06T15:55:19.570" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're having a slight problem on chem.SE--we aren't getting many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was suggested on the meta that we ask Phy.SE and bio.SE for people willing to late-join the private beta. I can provide invites (I'll need your email address--alternatively you can send me a blank email on &lt;code&gt;manishearth[at]toolserver[dot] o r g&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how useful this post will be--I guess we already got all the chem experts from Physics. But it's worth a shot :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T15:55:19.570" Title="Chemistry.SE private beta invites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:33:46.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 1 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completed reviewing..! The original version can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1248/questions-imported-from-astronomy-and-theoretical-physics/1249#1249&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.157" LastActivityDate="2013-01-19T19:46:21.340" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:33:56.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 2 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Finished reviewing. The original list can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1248/questions-imported-from-astronomy-and-theoretical-physics/1253#1250&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T09:33:13.000" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:34:03.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 3 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Completed reviewing. The original set could be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1251&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T16:19:50.490" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:34:51.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 4 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Last batch of astro imports completed! The original list can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1248/questions-imported-from-astronomy-and-theoretical-physics/1252#1252&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T20:01:14.993" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:35:03.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 5 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Finished reviewing! The original list can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1248/questions-imported-from-astronomy-and-theoretical-physics/1253#1253&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T10:44:49.700" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:45:21.323" Score="7" ViewCount="824" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the answers below, you'll find links to all of the questions recently imported from Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, along with the tags they had on those sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imported questions retain only the tags that already exist on the destination site. Tags that do not exist may not be appropriate - please review before re-adding. Other changes may also be necessary. Take your time...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The raw data can be found here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astronomy exports (not just to Physics):&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/a/stackoverflow.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnuSKH8sLqgjdHBMRnZqQmNwRHNmVENmM3JNRVhZb1E#gid=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://docs.google.com/a/stackoverflow.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnuSKH8sLqgjdHBMRnZqQmNwRHNmVENmM3JNRVhZb1E#gid=0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theoretical Physics exports (not just to Physics):&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/a/stackoverflow.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnuSKH8sLqgjdGRKUWhPMzZKQVlVYmJ5WnQwdDU0NEE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://docs.google.com/a/stackoverflow.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnuSKH8sLqgjdGRKUWhPMzZKQVlVYmJ5WnQwdDU0NEE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-05-07T07:11:34.677" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T07:11:34.677" Title="Questions imported from Astronomy and Theoretical Physics" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|migration|retagging|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:46:00.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 1 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24850/best-periods-to-observe-magellanic-clouds&quot;&gt;Best periods to observe Magellanic Clouds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation cloud&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24934/do-all-black-holes-have-a-singularity&quot;&gt;Do all black holes have a singularity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes neutron-stars singularity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25019/what-does-f-4-6-mean-in-a-telescope-and-how-important-is-this-value&quot;&gt;What does f/4.6 mean in a telescope and how important is this value?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24944/what-is-the-typical-career-path-to-become-a-professional-astronomer&quot;&gt;What is the typical career path to become a professional Astronomer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;education career &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25024/lenses-refractor-or-mirrors-reflector-telescope&quot;&gt;Lenses (refractor) or mirrors (reflector) telescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes reflector refractor&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25191/what-is-exactly-a-dobsonian-and-what-are-the-differences-when-compared-with-sch&quot;&gt;What is exactly a Dobsonian, and what are the differences when compared with Schmidt-Casse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24912/can-the-apparent-equal-size-of-sun-and-moon-be-explained-or-is-this-a-coincidenc&quot;&gt;Can the apparent equal size of sun and moon be explained or is this a coincidence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun moon &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25159/how-can-i-judge-a-globular-cluster-on-the-shapley-sawyer-scale&quot;&gt;How can I judge a globular cluster on the Shapley &amp; Sawyer scale?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;globular-clusters visual-astronomy classification &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24859/which-is-the-strongest-meteor-shower-expected-in-the-next-years-in-the-northern&quot;&gt;Which is the strongest meteor shower expected in the next years in the Northern hemisphere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;meteor-showers &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24876/for-observing-planets-what-kind-of-telescope-offers-the-best-view&quot;&gt;For observing planets what kind of telescope offers the best view?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;visual-astronomy eyepieces reflector refractor planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25046/why-is-m42-red-in-the-pictures-but-green-when-observed-at-the-eyepiece&quot;&gt;Why is M42 red in the pictures, but green when observed at the eyepiece?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;nebula photography&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25209/why-dont-modern-spacecraft-use-nuclear-power&quot;&gt;Why don't modern spacecraft use nuclear power?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;voyager spacecraft exploration satellite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25175/how-are-cepheids-used-to-evaluate-their-distance&quot;&gt;How are Cepheids used to evaluate their distance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars distance&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24919/what-age-to-start-kids-with-astronomy&quot;&gt;What age to start kids with astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;visual-astronomy amateur-astronomy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25162/what-is-the-current-status-of-pluto&quot;&gt;What is the current status of Pluto?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets pluto &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24965/what-are-good-resources-for-someone-looking-to-become-an-amateur-astronomer&quot;&gt;What are good resources for someone looking to become an amateur astronomer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;amateur resources &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24987/what-objects-look-best-in-an-o-iii-filter&quot;&gt;What objects look best in an O-III filter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;visual-astronomy filters planetary-nebulae&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24993/where-can-i-find-public-domain-astronomical-pictures&quot;&gt;Where can I find public domain astronomical pictures?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;nebula stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24942/a-method-to-estimate-the-relative-magnitude-of-a-star-using-nearby-stars&quot;&gt;A method to estimate the relative magnitude of a star using nearby stars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;magnitude&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25145/observing-lunar-lander-and-footprints-on-the-moon&quot;&gt;Observing lunar lander and footprints on the moon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes the-moon aperture&#xA;&lt;a 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25118/are-solar-physics-images-of-use-to-the-night-time-community&quot;&gt;Are solar physics images of use to the night-time community?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25262/are-the-voyager-probes-still-sending-us-a-signal&quot;&gt;Are the Voyager probes still sending us a signal ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;voyager&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24975/how-are-newly-discovered-objects-stars-planets-galaxies-named&quot;&gt;How are newly discovered objects (stars, planets, galaxies...) named?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;professional-astronomy names &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24878/christoffel-symbols-and-affine-connection&quot;&gt;Christoffel symbols and affine connection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24955/what-happen-when-two-galaxies-collide&quot;&gt;What happen when two galaxies collide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24927/how-do-astronomers-measure-the-distance-to-a-star-or-other-celestial-object&quot;&gt;How do astronomers measure the distance to a star or other celestial object?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;distance stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24885/shapes-of-galaxies&quot;&gt;Shapes of galaxies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25094/what-frames-of-reference-are-used-to-measure-the-rotation-of-the-sun-around-th&quot;&gt;What frame(s) of reference are used to measure the rotation of the Sun around the galaxy ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun rotation galaxy milky-way&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25135/how-many-earth-sized-planets-have-been-discovered-outside-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;How many earth-sized planets have been discovered outside the solar system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;extrasolar-planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24940/mirror-lenses-and-dslr-astrophotography&quot;&gt;Mirror lenses and DSLR astrophotography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophotography&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24901/how-to-create-unusual-sundial&quot;&gt;How to create unusual sundial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;equipment sun physics time&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25041/why-cant-you-see-meteors-but-you-can-see-comets-from-the-moon&quot;&gt;Why can't you see meteors, 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long?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon eclipse&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25841/how-long-would-it-take-to-scan-the-visible-universe-for-unique-signals&quot;&gt;How long would it take to scan the visible universe for unique signals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes universe&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26696/how-do-we-determine-the-mass-of-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;How do we determine the mass of a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:46:00.323" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-06T17:46:00.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:46:28.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 2 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26555/what-if-our-sun-were-located-in-the-middle-of-a-globular-cluster&quot;&gt;What if our Sun were located in the middle of a globular cluster?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;globular-clusters&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26046/how-could-i-translate-a-field-of-view-value-into-a-magnification-value&quot;&gt;How could I translate a field of view value into a magnification value?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;equipment software stellarium&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26443/why-dont-we-have-a-better-telescope-than-the-hubble-space-telescope&quot;&gt;Why don't we have a better telescope than the Hubble Space Telescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26323/planets-capable-of-life-dead-or-still-alive&quot;&gt;Planets capable of life: dead or still alive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets exoplanets astrobiology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25978/two-planets-in-same-orbit-not-planets&quot;&gt;Two planets in same orbit - not planets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets orbit&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25766/what-would-happen-if-the-polar-ice-caps-of-mars-melted&quot;&gt;What would happen if the polar ice caps of Mars melted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;mars speculative&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25997/could-two-colliding-comets-near-earth-cause-devastation&quot;&gt;Could two colliding comets near Earth cause devastation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;comet speculative impact&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26034/sillicon-based-life&quot;&gt;Sillicon based life&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planetary-habitability astrobiology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25749/what-was-the-apparent-magnitude-of-the-june-15th-2011-lunar-eclipse&quot;&gt;What was the apparent magnitude of the June 15th 2011 lunar eclipse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon eclipse apparent-magnitude&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25544/is-it-possible-to-make-a-hydrogen-alpha-solar-scope&quot;&gt;Is it possible to make a hydrogen-alpha solar scope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-telescopes &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26334/why-are-binary-objects-so-critical-to-astronomy&quot;&gt;Why are binary objects so critical to astronomy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;binary-systems&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25667/impact-of-gravity-on-bone-structure&quot;&gt;Impact of gravity on bone structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity astrobiology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26011/has-everything-we-see-happened-in-the-past&quot;&gt;Has everything we see happened in the past?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;time light&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25414/color-variation-in-rr-lyrae&quot;&gt;Color Variation in RR Lyrae&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars color&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25290/what-is-a-trojan-moon&quot;&gt;What is a &quot;Trojan Moon&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26378/what-does-a-planet-look-like-in-the-infrared&quot;&gt;What does a planet look like in the infrared?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets infrared&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26110/could-dark-energy-be-the-effect-of-gravity-at-great-distances&quot;&gt;Could dark energy be the effect of gravity at great distances?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics amateur gravity dark-energy dark-matter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25375/study-of-exoplanets-reaching-saturation-point&quot;&gt;Study of exoplanets reaching saturation point&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25338/space-interferometry-mission-sim-cancellation&quot;&gt;Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) cancellation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26630/lack-of-exoplanet-missions-in-the-decadal-survey&quot;&gt;Lack of exoplanet missions in the decadal survey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25332/how-would-you-describe-a-black-hole-to-a-complete-layman&quot;&gt;How would you describe a black hole to a complete layman?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26216/how-to-find-the-andromeda-galaxy-without-using-a-go-to-telescope&quot;&gt;How to find the Andromeda galaxy without using a go-to telescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation galaxies&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25759/how-exactly-does-time-slow-down-near-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;How exactly does time slow down near a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes gravity time theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25650/why-is-the-universe-map-shaped-like-an-oval&quot;&gt;Why is the universe map shaped like an oval?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26549/why-is-the-universe-so-big&quot;&gt;Why is the universe so big?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology universe&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26588/advice-sought-on-choosing-a-camera-for-a-meade-lx10&quot;&gt;Advice sought on choosing a camera for a Meade LX10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes astrophotography&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26704/what-happens-to-light-and-mass-in-the-center-of-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;What happens to light and mass in the center of a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes gravity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-the-simplest-way-to-prove-the-earth-is-round&quot;&gt;What is the simplest way to prove the Earth is round?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;earth solar solar-system education&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25834/what-is-the-simplest-way-to-prove-that-the-earth-orbits-the-sun&quot;&gt;What is the simplest way to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;education solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25939/why-is-the-surface-of-venus-so-hot&quot;&gt;Why is the surface of Venus so hot?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26242/how-can-one-predict-the-length-of-the-synodic-month-why-is-it-irregular&quot;&gt;How can one predict the length of the Synodic month? Why is it irregular?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moon the-moon time&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26040/what-is-the-official-difference-between-a-planet-and-a-dwarf-planet&quot;&gt;What is the official difference between a planet and a dwarf planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25806/is-there-a-consensus-on-the-fate-of-our-universe&quot;&gt;Is there a consensus on the fate of our universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe big-bang universal-expansion &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26435/given-that-matter-cannot-escape-a-black-hole-how-did-the-big-bang-produce-the-u&quot;&gt;Given that matter cannot escape a black hole, how did the big bang produce the universe we&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;big-bang universal-expansion&#xA;&lt;a 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25883/why-is-there-still-radiation-left-from-the-big-bang-now&quot;&gt;Why is there still radiation left from the Big Bang now?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;big-bang cmb&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25387/is-there-evidence-of-a-larger-universe&quot;&gt;Is there evidence of a larger universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe universal-expansion&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26182/standards-for-scientific-metadata-in-common-use-image-formats&quot;&gt;Standards for scientific metadata in common-use image formats?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophotography&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26493/curiosity-rover-msl-specification-dimensions&quot;&gt;Curiosity Rover (MSL): specification / dimensions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;mars &#xA;&lt;a 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26283/what-is-the-most-convenient-rocket-engine-to-use-exclusively-in-space&quot;&gt;What is the most convenient rocket engine to use exclusively in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;space-flight&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26636/could-jupiters-gravity-destabilize-earths-artificial-satellites-over-a-long-ti&quot;&gt;Could Jupiter's gravity destabilize Earth's artificial satellites over a long timescale?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system jupiter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26574/are-we-capable-of-discovering-planets-in-the-andromeda-galaxy&quot;&gt;Are we capable of discovering planets in the Andromeda galaxy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes exoplanets &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26139/why-did-the-asteroid-belt-between-mars-and-jupiter-form-as-it-did&quot;&gt;Why did the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter form as it did?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system asteroid&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25896/are-there-formulae-for-calculating-stellar-luminosity-and-effective-temperature&quot;&gt;Are there formulae for calculating stellar luminosity and effective temperature as a funct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25462/which-is-the-heaviest-present-day-lifter-rocket-and-is-it-comparable-to-the-s&quot;&gt;Which is the heaviest present day lifter (rocket)? 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datase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;untagged&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26753/could-asteroseismology-have-a-significant-potential-to-unravel-the-mechanisms-of&quot;&gt;Could asteroseismology have a significant potential to unravel the mechanisms of solar cyc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25702/did-i-see-two-milky-ways-next-to-each-other&quot;&gt;Did I see two Milky Ways next to each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation milky-way amateur&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26490/funding-opportunities-for-an-independent-researcher&quot;&gt;Funding opportunities for an independent researcher&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;career &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25875/where-do-the-bipolar-jets-of-black-holes-come-from&quot;&gt;Where do the bipolar jets of black holes come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25268/assuming-that-the-sun-wouldnt-evolve-into-a-red-giant-how-long-would-the-earth&quot;&gt;Assuming that the Sun wouldn't evolve into a red giant, how long would the Earth's atmosph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26593/when-we-want-to-figure-out-the-long-term-evolution-of-a-planets-atmosphere-orbi&quot;&gt;When we want to figure out the long-term evolution of a planet's atmosphere/orbit, when is&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25428/which-citizen-science-astrophysics-and-astronomy-projects-currently-exist&quot;&gt;Which citizen-science astrophysics and astronomy projects currently exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;citizen-science amateur-astronomy &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26014/how-long-do-your-eyes-need-to-adapt-to-darkness-and-reach-full-contrast&quot;&gt;How long do your eyes need to adapt to darkness and reach full contrast?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes eyepieces eye-physiology &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26488/what-was-the-most-distant-supernova-spotted-by-a-amateur-astronomer-until-today&quot;&gt;What was the most distant supernova spotted by a amateur astronomer until today?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;amateur-astronomy limits &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25589/what-is-an-approximation-of-the-average-number-of-supernovae-every-century-in-th&quot;&gt;What is an approximation of the average number of supernovae every century in the Milky Wa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;milky-way supernova estimation approximation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26193/is-the-observable-region-of-the-universe-within-the-event-horizon-of-a-super-mas&quot;&gt;Is the observable region of the universe within the event horizon of a super-massive black&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26089/how-to-identify-the-objects-in-an-astrophoto-and-what-portion-of-the-sky-it-cov&quot;&gt;How to identify the objects in an astrophoto, and what portion of the sky it covers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophotography software&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25492/are-there-any-known-neutron-stars-just-below-the-tolmanoppenheimervolkoff-limi&quot;&gt;Are there any known neutron stars just below the Tolmanâ€“Oppenheimerâ€“Volkoff limit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;neutron-stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25881/do-stars-of-higher-metallicity-have-more-planets-in-highly-inclined-pluto-like-o&quot;&gt;Do stars of higher metallicity have more planets in highly-inclined Pluto-like orbits?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25865/could-dark-energy-be-linked-to-dark-flow&quot;&gt;Could dark energy be linked to dark flow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity dark-energy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25920/the-orbit-of-2010-tk7&quot;&gt;The orbit of 2010 TK7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit asteroid&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26029/what-free-software-is-there-for-observing-the-sky-sky-map-software&quot;&gt;What free software is there for observing the sky (sky map software)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;software stellarium&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25384/how-is-the-shape-of-the-universe-measured-by-scientists&quot;&gt;How is the shape of the universe measured by scientists?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26214/next-crescent-moon&quot;&gt;Next crescent moon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26287/what-would-a-rotating-black-hole-look-like-to-a-geo-stationary-observer-orbiti&quot;&gt;What would a rotating black-hole look like to a &quot;geo-stationary&quot; observer orbiting the bla&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes singularity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26341/what-exactly-is-the-definition-of-motion-and-its-relation-to-machs-conjecture&quot;&gt;What exactly is the definition of motion and its relation to Mach's conjecture? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;rotation special-relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25957/when-will-enceladus-run-out-of-water&quot;&gt;When will Enceladus run out of water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moons&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:46:28.590" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-06T17:46:28.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:46:49.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 3 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25739/a-fermi-question-are-there-more-stars-than-grains-of-sand&quot;&gt;A Fermi-question: Are there more stars than grains of sand?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe calculations approximation &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25741/what-objects-states-of-objects-with-absolute-magnitude-do-we-know-of&quot;&gt;What objects/states of objects with absolute magnitude do we know of?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;distance luminosity object &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26169/could-the-cosmic-microwave-background-radiation-cmbr-map-be-used-as-a-backup-f&quot;&gt;Could the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) map be used as a backup for GPS nav&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cmb&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26519/vision-vs-limiting-magnitude&quot;&gt;Vision vs. limiting magnitude&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation visual-astronomy optics apparent-magnitude&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25770/software-for-creating-custom-star-charts&quot;&gt;Software for Creating Custom Star Charts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;software &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26702/would-the-time-dilation-from-being-in-low-orbit-around-a-black-hole-delay-slow-t&quot;&gt;Would the time dilation from being in low orbit around a black hole delay/slow the effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes astrophysics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25888/all-significant-objects-in-the-universe&quot;&gt;All significant objects in the universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;unknown-object object classification&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26510/why-is-oxygen-the-third-most-abundant-element&quot;&gt;Why is oxygen the third most abundant element?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26521/how-did-micrometeorite-flux-change-with-the-age-of-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;How did micrometeorite flux change with the age of the solar system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system solar&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25787/is-co2-really-a-potent-greenhouse-gas-for-planets-around-m-dwarfs&quot;&gt;Is CO2 really a potent greenhouse gas for planets around M dwarfs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;atmosphere&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25382/how-can-we-be-sure-that-liquid-iron-titanium-droplets-can-form-around-particulat&quot;&gt;How can we be sure that liquid iron/titanium droplets can form around particulates on hot &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;atmosphere&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26278/what-is-the-mass-of-the-lego-figurines-being-launched-with-spacecraft-juno&quot;&gt;What is the mass of the LEGO figurines being launched with spacecraft Juno?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;jupiter nasa launch&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26021/how-does-the-average-mars-jupiter-distance-compare-with-the-average-earth-jupite&quot;&gt;How does the average Mars-Jupiter distance compare with the average Earth-Jupiter distance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26692/can-we-model-gravitation-as-a-repulsive-force&quot;&gt;Can we model gravitation as a repulsive force?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26148/how-are-interplanetary-trajectories-found&quot;&gt;How are interplanetary trajectories found?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spacecraft space-flight&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26352/meteorites-from-mars&quot;&gt;Meteorites from Mars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;mars meteorite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26157/is-there-any-way-to-judge-whether-a-bolide-might-produce-a-meteorite&quot;&gt;Is there any way to judge whether a bolide might produce a meteorite?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;meteorite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26175/what-determines-a-progenitors-fate-as-a-spiral-or-elliptical&quot;&gt;What determines a progenitor's fate as a spiral or elliptical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies star-formation angular-momentum&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26161/if-you-focus-in-on-one-image-is-combining-two-telescopes-through-optical-inter&quot;&gt;If you focus in on one image, is combining two telescopes (through optical interferometry)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25852/is-a-water-world-possible-and-for-how-long-could-it-be-stable&quot;&gt;Is a water world possible, and for how long could it be stable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets solar-system sun atmosphere&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25982/anti-matter-black-holes&quot;&gt;Anti-Matter Black Holes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes astrophysics anti-matter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25392/how-do-the-day-night-temperature-variations-of-moons-compare-to-those-of-their-p&quot;&gt;How do the day/night temperature variations of moons compare to those of their parent plan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25764/does-the-earth-help-stabilize-changes-in-the-moons-obliquity-as-well&quot;&gt;Does the Earth help stabilize changes in the moon's obliquity as well?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26399/are-meteorites-igneous-sedimentary-or-metamorphic-rocks&quot;&gt;Are meteorites igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic rocks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26264/what-is-the-format-for-local-catalog-files-used-by-jskycat&quot;&gt;What is the format for &quot;local catalog&quot; files used by JSkyCat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;software fits-files&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25847/do-red-galaxies-have-red-star-lit-skies&quot;&gt;Do red galaxies have red star-lit skies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars galaxies&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25811/are-there-any-earth-meteorites-on-earth&quot;&gt;Are there any Earth-Meteorites on Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;meteorite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26358/what-is-the-irregularity-of-uranus-orbit-caused-by-neptune&quot;&gt;What is the irregularity of Uranus orbit caused by Neptune?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit uranus&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26085/what-are-the-most-accurate-ways-to-find-the-average-distance-between-stars-in-th&quot;&gt;What are the most accurate ways to find the average distance between stars in the Milky Wa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars distance galaxy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25640/is-angular-resolution-especially-important-when-we-just-want-to-take-the-spectra&quot;&gt;Is angular resolution especially important when we just want to take the spectra of an Ear&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26473/for-resolving-different-objects-are-there-any-alternative-coefficients-to-the-o&quot;&gt;For resolving different objects, are there any alternative coefficients to the one used in&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25598/are-telescopes-with-a-concave-lens-useful-for-astronomy&quot;&gt;Are telescopes with a concave lens useful for astronomy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26165/how-are-galaxy-filaments-formed-and-do-they-have-any-analogues-in-stellar-forma&quot;&gt;How are galaxy filaments formed? And do they have any analogues in stellar formation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies large-scale-structure&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26622/what-are-some-molecules-stable-in-outer-space-that-are-unstable-under-terrestria&quot;&gt;What are some molecules stable in outer space that are unstable under terrestrial conditio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;untagged&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26117/what-distinguishes-a-moon-from-orbiting-space-debris-or-in-other-words-when-is&quot;&gt;What distinguishes a moon from orbiting space debris? Or in other words, when is a satelli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets moons&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26523/amateur-stargazing-30-degrees-n&quot;&gt;Amateur Stargazing (30 degrees N)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stargazing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25643/what-makes-us-think-we-can-actually-detect-gravitational-waves&quot;&gt;What makes us think we can actually detect gravitational waves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;untagged&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25674/how-much-energy-does-a-super-nova-generate&quot;&gt;How much energy does a super nova generate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics supernova estimation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26259/how-does-the-view-of-night-sky-change-as-the-sun-orbits-around-the-milky-way&quot;&gt;How does the view of night sky change as the Sun orbits around the Milky Way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun orbit milky-way&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26499/how-far-would-you-need-to-displace-your-eyes-to-get-meaningful-depth-perception&quot;&gt;How far would you need to displace your eyes to get meaningful depth perception of the sta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation distance&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25695/how-can-y-dwarf-stars-have-such-a-low-temperature&quot;&gt;How can Y-dwarf stars have such a low temperature?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25465/what-is-the-current-evaluation-of-a-sky-map-application-for-mobile-devices&quot;&gt;What is the current evaluation of a sky map application for mobile devices?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars observation instrument&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26083/why-are-our-planets-in-the-solar-system-all-on-the-same-disc-plane-layer&quot;&gt;Why are our planets in the solar system all on the same disc/plane/layer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system orbit planetary-motion&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26280/are-our-telescopes-capable-of-taking-actual-images-of-brown-dwarfs&quot;&gt;Are our telescopes capable of taking actual images of brown dwarfs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;brown-dwarf&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25399/what-conditions-should-an-asteroid-or-comet-impact-need-to-meet-in-order-to-star&quot;&gt;What conditions should an asteroid or comet impact need to meet in order to start an impac&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;asteroid comet impact &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26459/how-do-we-determine-what-distant-planets-stars-etc-are-made-of&quot;&gt;How do we determine what distant planets, stars etc are made of?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets stars spectroscopy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25317/assuming-an-observer-is-50-light-years-away-in-the-plane-of-the-solar-system-an&quot;&gt;Assuming an observer is 50 light years away, in the plane of the solar system and observin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25986/what-to-show-a-beginner&quot;&gt;What to show a beginner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;amateur beginner amateur-astronomy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25554/why-is-the-measured-distance-to-the-triangulum-galaxy-much-more-uncertain-than-t&quot;&gt;Why is the measured distance to the 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collision of Phobos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets moons mars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25718/rainbow-around-sun&quot;&gt;Rainbow around Sun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun light&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25437/why-do-we-always-see-the-same-side-of-the-moon&quot;&gt;Why do we always see the same side of the Moon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;earth the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26134/what-are-the-known-relationships-between-rotation-of-planets-moons-and-their-dis&quot;&gt;What are the known relationships between rotation of planets/moons and their distance to s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25950/why-are-some-galaxies-flat&quot;&gt;Why are some galaxies 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25394/get-time-from-sun-azimuth&quot;&gt;Get time from sun Azimuth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26190/telescope-blue-book&quot;&gt;Telescope &quot;blue book&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;equipment&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25504/is-dark-matter-around-the-milky-way-spread-in-a-spiral-shape-or-in-a-different&quot;&gt;Is dark matter around the Milky Way spread in a spiral shape (or, in a different shape)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics cosmology milky-way galaxy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26657/what-happens-when-astronomical-bodies-made-up-of-dark-matter-collapse-or-collide&quot;&gt;What happens when astronomical bodies made up of Dark Matter collapse or collide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics cosmology dark-matter&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:46:49.557" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-06T17:46:49.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:47:08.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 4 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25869/stellar-evolution-simulation-engine-or-software&quot;&gt;Stellar evolution simulation engine or software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;software star-formation simulation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25336/reverse-sun-position-algorithm&quot;&gt;Reverse Sun position algorithm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25634/illumination-calculations&quot;&gt;Illumination calculations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25435/formula-for-getting-time-of-sunrise-at-a-particular-location&quot;&gt;Formula for getting time of sunrise at a particular location?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar earth-science&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26643/why-arent-saturns-rings-clumping-into-moons&quot;&gt;Why Aren't Saturn's Rings Clumping into Moons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moons rings&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25860/how-do-you-transform-between-theoretical-hertzsprung-russell-diagrams-and-colour&quot;&gt;How do you transform between theoretical Hertzsprung-Russell Diagrams and Colour-Magnitude&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars color magnitude&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25626/why-isnt-sunset-time-in-sync-with-solstice&quot;&gt;Why isn't sunset time in sync with solstice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sunset solstice&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25275/why-is-this-radio-telescopes-reflector-spherical-and-not-parabolic&quot;&gt;Why is this radio telescope's reflector spherical and not parabolic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes radio-astronomy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26670/atmospheric-interference-and-ground-based-stellar-observations&quot;&gt;Atmospheric interference and ground based stellar observations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spectroscopy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25579/why-do-clusters-of-stars-eventually-dissipate&quot;&gt;Why do clusters of stars eventually dissipate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity stars globular-clusters&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25417/why-does-jupiter-emit-more-energy-than-it-receives&quot;&gt;Why does Jupiter emit more energy than it receives?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets gravity jupiter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25283/does-mercury-have-a-balmy-spot&quot;&gt;Does Mercury have a balmy spot?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;mercury&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26370/is-it-true-that-our-solar-system-belongs-to-another-galaxy-which-collides-with-t&quot;&gt;Is it true that our solar system belongs to another galaxy which collides with the milky w&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies 2012&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25512/what-is-a-good-introductory-text-to-astronomy&quot;&gt;What is a good introductory text to astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;beginner&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25533/creating-downloading-a-large-galaxy-dataset&quot;&gt;Creating/Downloading a large Galaxy Dataset&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies education&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26240/whats-the-most-accepted-theory-for-blue-stragglers-these-days&quot;&gt;What's the most accepted theory for Blue Stragglers These Days?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars globular-clusters blue-supergiants&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26367/is-there-any-way-to-anticipate-exceptional-aurora-borealis-viewing-conditions&quot;&gt;Is there any way to anticipate exceptional Aurora Borealis viewing conditions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun visual-astronomy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25930/2012-is-there-some-astronomical-event-happening&quot;&gt;2012: Is there some astronomical event happening?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25716/pulsar-beam-radiant-intensity-distribution&quot;&gt;Pulsar beam radiant intensity distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;pulsars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26080/how-bright-will-an-asteroid-be&quot;&gt;How bright will an asteroid be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation asteroid&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26566/where-can-i-find-a-list-of-when-i-can-see-something-in-the-sky&quot;&gt;Where can I find a list of when I can see something in the sky?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;visual-astronomy amateur-astronomy meteor-showers&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25937/are-there-trends-in-the-number-of-meteors-in-a-shower-year-on-year&quot;&gt;Are there trends in the number of meteors in a shower year on year?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;meteor-showers&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25928/is-the-cmb-rest-frame-special-where-does-it-come-from&quot;&gt;Is the CMB rest frame special? where does it come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cmb&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26356/transit-of-mercury-how-did-he-see-it&quot;&gt;Transit of Mercury: how did he see it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun mercury&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26362/difference-between-baryonic-inertial-and-gravitational-mass-and-relation-to-d&quot;&gt;Difference between baryonic, inertial and gravitational mass? (and relation to dark matter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;dark-matter mass&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25372/where-does-the-dust-on-the-moon-come-from&quot;&gt;Where does the dust on the moon come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25964/use-of-advanced-mathematics-in-astronomy-like-topology-abstract-algebra-or-ot&quot;&gt;Use of advanced mathematics in astronomy, like topology, abstract algebra, or others&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics universe equipment&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26102/how-do-i-find-the-time-for-pleiades-to-be-at-zenith-today&quot;&gt;How do I find the time for Pleiades to be at Zenith today&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26530/how-to-concisely-explain-apparent-retrograde-motions-of-planets&quot;&gt;How to concisely explain apparent retrograde motions of planets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets visual-astronomy orbit retrograde-motion&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26061/why-did-population-iii-stars-lack-planets&quot;&gt;Why did population III stars lack planets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26619/best-time-of-the-year-to-see-the-star-alpha-centauri-in-chile-santiago&quot;&gt;Best time of the year to see the star Alpha Centauri in Chile, Santiago&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars visual-astronomy observational-techniques&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26584/does-anybody-actually-do-astrometry-in-the-21st-century&quot;&gt;Does anybody actually do astrometry in the 21st century?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars planets time observational-techniques instruments&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26570/shadow-of-a-jovian-moon-over-the-great-red-spot&quot;&gt;Shadow of a Jovian moon over the Great Red Spot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;jupiter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25571/what-is-the-physical-origin-of-scintillation&quot;&gt;What is the physical origin of scintillation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes atmosphere seeing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26648/liquid-water-in-mid-ice-on-europa-mechanism&quot;&gt;Liquid Water in &quot;mid-ice&quot; on Europa. Mechanism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;jupiter europa exo-geology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26354/what-would-the-universe-look-like-if-it-started-out-without-any-irregularities&quot;&gt;What would the universe look like if it started out without any irregularities?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;big-bang&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26122/could-a-neutron-star-be-active-fusioning-neutrons-into-something-more-dense-and&quot;&gt;Could a neutron star be active, fusioning neutrons into something more dense and releasing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars neutron-stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25498/the-sun-as-a-gravitational-lens&quot;&gt;The Sun as a gravitational lens&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity gravitation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25681/is-the-apophis-asteroid-a-concern&quot;&gt;Is the Apophis asteroid a concern?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;asteroid&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25645/comet-versus-asteroids-versus-meteors&quot;&gt;Comet versus asteroids versus meteors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;asteroid comet meteorite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26562/if-we-were-to-travel-through-space-sci-fi-style-how-close-to-the-false-color&quot;&gt;If we were to travel through space (sci-fi style), how close to the false-color images wou&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies space-flight color&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25539/do-we-have-an-idea-about-the-amount-of-matter-in-the-universe&quot;&gt;Do we have an idea about the amount of matter in the universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe dark-matter mass&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26315/detecting-dim-objects&quot;&gt;Detecting dim objects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophotography satellite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26328/november-25th-2011-partial-solar-eclipse-visibility-from-christchurch-new-zeala&quot;&gt;November 25th 2011 partial solar eclipse visibility from Christchurch, New Zealand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation eclipse observational-techniques&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26301/the-bahtinov-focusing-mask&quot;&gt;The Bahtinov focusing mask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes visual-astronomy reflector focus&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26364/why-are-spacecraft-made-to-spin-after-launch&quot;&gt;Why are spacecraft made to &quot;spin&quot; after launch?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exploration launch nasa&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26656/code-to-sample-from-integrate-light-of-a-cluster&quot;&gt;Code to sample from &amp; integrate light of a cluster?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics imf&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25822/why-doesnt-a-close-comet-like-elenin-look-like-other-famous-comets-hale-bopp&quot;&gt;Why doesn't a close comet like Elenin look like other, famous comets (Hale Bopp, Halley...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation comet&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/what-are-the-facts-that-allow-accepting-the-oort-cloud-theory&quot;&gt;What are the facts that allow accepting the Oort cloud theory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system observation theory oort-cloud&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26497/did-penzias-and-wilson-use-weins-law-or-data-based-on-it-to-determine-the-tem&quot;&gt;Did Penzias and Wilson use Wein's law (or data based on it) to determine the temperature o&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cmb&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26448/how-plausible-is-a-subsurface-ocean-on-pluto&quot;&gt;How plausible is a subsurface ocean on Pluto?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;water pluto&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26628/why-can-there-be-fire-in-space-while-there-is-no-oxygen&quot;&gt;Why can there be fire in space while there is no oxygen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26019/what-is-the-best-evidence-theory-about-the-first-generation-of-stars&quot;&gt;What is the best evidence/theory about the first generation of stars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars big-bang star-formation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26100/why-doesnt-our-solar-system-run-into-other-solar-systems-over-billions-of-years&quot;&gt;Why doesn't our solar system run into other solar systems over billions of years?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system gravity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25720/how-are-exoplanets-confirmed&quot;&gt;How are exoplanets confirmed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26177/what-has-theoretical-physics-gotten-first&quot;&gt;What has theoretical physics gotten first?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;theory professional-astronomy string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25867/is-there-any-chance-we-could-eventually-observe-the-supernova-of-the-first-popu&quot;&gt;Is there any chance we could eventually observe the supernova of the first (Population III&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars supernova big-bang&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25305/how-is-the-hanbury-brown-and-twiss-effect-used-to-measure-the-size-of-stars&quot;&gt;How is the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss effect used to measure the size of stars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;distance instrument quantum-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25678/how-can-we-know-today-that-theres-something-from-100-light-years-from-here&quot;&gt;How can we know, today, that there's something from 100 light-years from here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25899/how-to-explain-the-moon-halo-phenomenon&quot;&gt;How to explain the Moon halo phenomenon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25328/universe-is-expanding-at-enormous-speed&quot;&gt;Universe is expanding at enormous speed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics universal-expansion physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25603/calculating-the-suns-vector-and-distance-from-the-earth-at-one-time&quot;&gt;Calculating the Suns vector and distance from the Earth at one time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system orbit calculations&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26723/is-there-more-mass-in-stars-or-interstellar-medium&quot;&gt;Is there more mass in stars or interstellar medium?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26332/how-does-space-affect-the-human-body-no-space-suit-no-space-craft&quot;&gt;How does space affect the human body (no space suit, no space craft)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;intergalactic-space&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26255/best-observing-techniques-for-a-total-lunar-eclipse&quot;&gt;Best observing techniques for a Total Lunar Eclipse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon eclipse&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25519/lumped-circuit-model-of-earth-and-sun-as-a-thermal-system&quot;&gt;Lumped circuit model of Earth and Sun as a thermal system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets sun earth simulation weather&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25618/how-many-pluto-sized-planetoids-have-been-discovered&quot;&gt;How many Pluto sized planetoids have been discovered?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26546/is-it-possible-to-look-into-the-beginning-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;Is it possible to look into the beginning of the Universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;big-bang&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26700/how-long-does-it-take-for-radio-or-light-waves-to-travel-from-earth-to-jupiter&quot;&gt;How long does it take for radio or light waves to travel from Earth to Jupiter, Saturn, Ur&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets solar-system distance light&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26582/is-there-an-established-standard-for-naming-exoplanets&quot;&gt;Is there an established standard for naming exoplanets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets names&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26388/is-there-reddening-on-objects-other-than-the-moon-upon-entry-into-earths-umbra&quot;&gt;Is There Reddening on Objects Other than the Moon Upon Entry into Earth's Umbra?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon orbit eclipse satellite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25369/why-cant-you-escape-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;Why can't you escape a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25687/polar-ice-deposits-on-the-moon-dispersed-in-permafrost-loose-rubble-or-also-m&quot;&gt;Polar ice deposits on the Moon - dispersed in permafrost loose rubble, or also massive/lay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moon water instruments&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25550/could-there-be-more-universes&quot;&gt;Could there be more universes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;universe big-bang time&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25419/how-can-voyager-1-escape-gravity-of-moons-and-planets&quot;&gt;How can Voyager 1 escape gravity of moons and planets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit gravity spacecraft voyager&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25713/which-direction-before-dawn-to-look-for-comet-lovejoy-c-2011-w3&quot;&gt;Which direction before dawn to look for Comet Lovejoy (C/2011 W3)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation comet&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25467/when-do-natural-leap-years-occur-on-years-based-on-the-northern-winter-solstice&quot;&gt;When do natural leap years occur, on years based on the northern winter solstice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit earth calculations spin&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26646/light-years-and-redshift-from-our-point-of-view-how-can-we-see-it&quot;&gt;Light years and redshift from our point of view. How can we see it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;big-bang universal-expansion&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26304/is-the-moon-a-planet&quot;&gt;Is the moon a planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;earth moon satellite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25789/what-is-the-fate-of-the-asteroid-belt&quot;&gt;What is the fate of the asteroid belt?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system asteroid asteroid-belt&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26535/novice-interested-in-buying-a-used-telescope-what-questions-should-i-ask&quot;&gt;Novice interested in buying a used telescope. What questions should I ask?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes amateur&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26776/does-a-reference-or-classification-standard-for-altitude-classifications-of-geoc&quot;&gt;Does a reference or classification standard for altitude classifications of geocentric orb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit classification&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25733/is-there-an-algorithm-to-find-the-time-when-the-sun-is-x-degrees-above-the-horiz&quot;&gt;Is there an Algorithm to find the time when the sun is X degrees above the horizon for a g&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26068/recommended-first-accessories-for-starblast-4-5&quot;&gt;Recommended first accessories for starblast 4.5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes visual-astronomy equipment&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25629/how-to-measure-the-diameter-of-a-star&quot;&gt;How to measure the diameter of a star?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25894/how-does-the-winter-solstice-relate-to-the-longest-night&quot;&gt;How does the winter solstice relate to the &quot;longest night&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;earth solstice&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25445/will-the-universe-reach-zero-mass&quot;&gt;Will the universe reach zero mass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25711/where-are-the-voyagers-going&quot;&gt;Where are the Voyagers going?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;voyager intergalactic-space interstellar-space&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26337/what-happens-to-light-that-falls-into-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;What happens to light that falls into a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;black-holes light singularity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26386/how-big-compared-to-our-moon-would-saturn-look-from-titans-surface&quot;&gt;How big (compared to our moon) would Saturn look from Titan's surface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets saturn titan&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25845/how-to-care-for-a-dobsonian-around-the-ocean&quot;&gt;How to care for a Dobsonian around the ocean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;dobsonian corrosion maintenance&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25815/should-i-be-concerned-about-spot-corrosion-on-a-telescopes-primary-mirror&quot;&gt;Should I be concerned about spot corrosion on a telescope's primary mirror?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes corrosion maintenance mirror&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26347/does-the-moon-affect-human-behaviour&quot;&gt;Does the moon affect human behaviour?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26542/why-does-the-debris-from-comets-and-former-comets-hang-around-so-long&quot;&gt;Why does the debris from comets and former comets hang around so long?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;meteor-showers&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26639/whats-in-my-box&quot;&gt;What's in my box?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;intergalactic-space interstellar-space&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26440/how-can-i-understand-einstein-space&quot;&gt;How can I understand Einstein Space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25560/quality-loss-when-adding-more-components-to-a-telescope&quot;&gt;Quality loss when adding more components to a telescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes astrophotography focus&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26226/gravity-of-a-disc&quot;&gt;Gravity of a disc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics gravity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26667/how-to-locate-the-orion-nebula&quot;&gt;How to locate the Orion Nebula?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes nebula&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25659/how-much-sky-do-we-see-at-any-one-moment&quot;&gt;How much sky do we see at any one moment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;meteor-showers eye-physiology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26390/determining-cloud-cover-from-observer-to-near-the-horizon&quot;&gt;Determining cloud cover from observer to near the horizon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes weather observing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26274/is-there-a-way-to-create-an-artificial-solar-eclipse&quot;&gt;Is there a way to create an artificial solar eclipse?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun eclipse physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25403/will-the-james-webb-space-telescope-be-able-to-capture-something-similar-to-or&quot;&gt;Will the James Webb Space Telescope be able to capture something similar to, or better tha&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes professional-astronomy deep-space space-telescope james-webb-telescope&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25935/cassini-what-information-could-be-gained-from-the-2017-impact-with-saturn&quot;&gt;Cassini: What information could be gained from the 2017 impact with Saturn?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spacecraft rings saturn&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26758/the-moon-during-the-day&quot;&gt;The Moon during the day&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26229/issues-with-celestron-130-slt-and-shaking&quot;&gt;Issues with Celestron 130 SLT and shaking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes astrophotography reflector&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26167/looking-for-a-resource-that-explains-all-colors-and-shapes-of-stars-and-galaxies&quot;&gt;Looking for a resource that explains all colors and shapes of stars and galaxies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies color&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25302/hartmann-mask-based-collimation&quot;&gt;Hartmann mask based collimation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophotography equipment&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25959/how-can-the-date-of-lunar-eclipses-be-calculated-by-hand&quot;&gt;How can the date of lunar eclipses be calculated by hand?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;eclipse moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26374/sky-watcher-skyhawk-1145p-synscan-az-goto&quot;&gt;Sky-Watcher Skyhawk 1145P SynScan AZ GOTO&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26755/does-celestia-take-the-lunar-orbit-precession-into-account&quot;&gt;Does Celestia take the lunar orbit precession into account?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26476/can-a-minimum-ultimate-tensile-strength-uts-for-an-asteroid-be-established-bas&quot;&gt;Can a minimum ultimate tensile strength (UTS) for an asteroid be established based on its &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;asteroid rotation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26538/why-doesnt-helium-start-to-fuse-while-there-is-still-hydrogen-fuel&quot;&gt;Why doesn't helium start to fuse while there is still hydrogen fuel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26312/confusing-description-of-orions-belt-could-someone-clarify&quot;&gt;Confusing description of Orions belt, could someone clarify?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;observation&#xA;&lt;a 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I&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25295/raising-altitude-by-using-magnetic-torquer-and-reaction-wheels&quot;&gt;Raising Altitude by using Magnetic Torquer and Reaction Wheels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;orbit satellite&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25962/what-is-lighting-up-space-shuttle-endeavours-main-engines&quot;&gt;What is lighting up Space Shuttle Endeavour's main engines?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;unknown-object ssme&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25915/what-proportion-of-a-stars-hydrogen-is-consumed-in-its-life&quot;&gt;What proportion of a star's hydrogen is consumed in its life?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;stars astrophysics sun&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25652/sun-moon-earth-anomaly&quot;&gt;sun-moon-earth anomaly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;the-moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26285/are-uranus-and-neptune-too-big-for-their-location&quot;&gt;Are Uranus and Neptune too big for their location?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;planets solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25692/what-is-stopping-us-from-stick-building-a-space-station&quot;&gt;What is stopping us from stick building a space station?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spacecraft&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25791/how-bright-are-auroras-aurorae&quot;&gt;How bright are auroras (aurorae)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophotography aurora&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26664/is-it-possible-that-i-just-saw-jupiters-moons&quot;&gt;Is it possible that I just saw Jupiter's moons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moons jupiter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26632/relation-between-isophotal-radius-and-virial-radius-in-spiral-galaxies&quot;&gt;Relation between isophotal radius and virial radius in spiral galaxies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25804/what-telescope-would-i-need-to-observe-marss-polar-caps&quot;&gt;What telescope would I need to observe Mars's polar caps?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes mars&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25324/how-to-stabilize-an-unstable-telescope&quot;&gt;How to stabilize an unstable telescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25509/how-far-into-space-does-one-have-to-travel-to-see-the-entire-face-of-earth&quot;&gt;How far into space does one have to travel to see the entire face of earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;earth spacecraft space-flight&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25735/does-the-dark-matter-halo-rotate-with-the-galaxy&quot;&gt;Does the dark matter halo rotate with the galaxy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology dark-matter galaxy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25485/automated-telescope-system&quot;&gt;Automated telescope system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes astrophotography&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25367/how-do-we-explain-the-phase-change-between-high-and-low-star-formation-rates&quot;&gt;How do we explain the phase change between high and low star formation rates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies galaxy star-formation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26203/is-it-safe-to-observe-the-sun-through-binoculars-with-welding-glass-in-front&quot;&gt;Is it safe to observe the sun through binoculars with welding glass in front?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun observation solar&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25862/why-are-there-no-images-of-faceted-crystals-outside-of-earth&quot;&gt;Why are there no images of faceted crystals outside of Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;earth mars water&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26768/does-the-sun-cross-over-a-given-meridian-line-every-day-at-the-same-time&quot;&gt;Does the sun cross over a given meridian line every day at the same time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26382/why-is-1-au-the-distance-between-the-sun-and-the-earth&quot;&gt;Why is 1 AU the distance between the Sun and the Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun earth distance&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:47:08.357" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-06T17:47:08.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:47:22.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Astronomy imports: 5 of 5&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Astronomy. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 5 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25947/identifying-objects-for-dummies&quot;&gt;Identifying objects, for dummies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;amateur-astronomy unknown-object&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25784/how-big-is-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;How big is the Solar System?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;solar-system&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26023/do-all-the-individual-stars-that-we-can-see-in-the-night-sky-belong-to-milky-way&quot;&gt;Do all the individual stars that we can see in the night sky belong to Milky Way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;milky-way stargazing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26221/what-will-we-see-between-the-cmb-and-the-current-oldest-object-seen&quot;&gt;What will we see between the CMB and the current oldest object seen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cmb&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25490/have-sterling-engines-been-used-in-outer-space&quot;&gt;Have Sterling Engines Been Used In Outer Space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;resources&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26470/how-to-adjust-feather-touch-focuser-for-collimation&quot;&gt;How to adjust feather touch focuser for collimation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;dobsonian collimation secondary-mirror focuser laser&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25909/missing-radio-source-coordinates-in-g-t-measurement-technique-itu-r-s-733-2&quot;&gt;Missing radio source coordinates in G/T measurement technique ITU-R S.733.2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;radio-astronomy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25365/agn-accretion-disk-vs-torus&quot;&gt;AGN accretion disk vs. torus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25573/how-to-make-a-moondial&quot;&gt;How to make a moondial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26145/need-help-buying-binoculars-online-for-astronomy-10x50&quot;&gt;Need help buying binoculars online for astronomy (10x50)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes beginner&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25577/stability-of-moons-around-tidally-locked-exoplanets&quot;&gt;Stability of moons around tidally locked exoplanets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;exoplanets&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26662/what-is-the-orbital-path-of-omega-centauri&quot;&gt;What is the orbital path of Omega Centauri?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;milky-way local-group&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26650/biggest-crater-in-the-solar-system&quot;&gt;Biggest crater in the Solar System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;mars crater collisions&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25977/was-aristarchos-method-to-compute-earth-sun-distance-ever-rediscovered-in-medie&quot;&gt;Was Aristarchos' method to compute Earth-Sun distance ever rediscovered in medieval or mod&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun earth distance moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26172/how-much-detail-can-telescopes-actually-provide&quot;&gt;How much detail can telescopes actually provide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes optics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25542/emission-line-width-units&quot;&gt;Emission line width units&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spectroscopy&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25728/galaxies-that-are-newer-than-our-own-one&quot;&gt;Galaxies that are newer than our own one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;galaxies light-years&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26066/why-is-there-a-limit-to-the-intensity-of-cosmic-rays-at-low-energies&quot;&gt;Why is there a limit to the intensity of cosmic rays at low energies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;particle-physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26120/from-computational-astrophysics-to-finance&quot;&gt;From Computational Astrophysics to 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26684/may-20th-annular-eclipse-duration-from-vancouver&quot;&gt;May 20th Annular Eclipse - Duration from Vancouver?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;eclipse observing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25585/what-is-behind-the-cosmological-horizon-barrier&quot;&gt;What is behind the cosmological horizon barrier?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;astrophysics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25582/figuring-out-which-moons-of-jupiter-i-saw-through-my-telescope&quot;&gt;Figuring out which moons of Jupiter I saw through my telescope&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;telescopes moon jupiter&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26087/at-what-distance-could-you-see-andromeda-with-the-naked-eye&quot;&gt;At what distance could you see andromeda with the naked 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26739/why-are-there-more-vertical-takeoff-than-horizontal-for-spacecrafts&quot;&gt;Why are there more vertical takeoff than horizontal for spacecrafts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spacecraft space-flight&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26785/whats-the-reason-for-the-seasons&quot;&gt;What's the reason for the seasons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun earth weather&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26728/why-dont-we-see-solar-and-lunar-eclipses-often&quot;&gt;Why don't we see solar and lunar eclipses often?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;sun earth moon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26798/calculations-of-apparent-magnitude&quot;&gt;Calculations of apparent magnitude&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" 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  <row Id="1254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:49:17.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Theoretical Physics imports: 1 of 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Theoretical Physics. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 3 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27751/what-is-known-about-the-classification-of-n-4-scfts-with-central-charge-6&quot;&gt;What is known about the classification of N=4 SCFTs with central charge 6?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;conformal-field-theory &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26875/superhiggs-mechanism-on-different-backgrounds-compactifications&quot;&gt;SuperHiggs Mechanism on different Backgrounds &amp; Compactifications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;supersymmetry string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27384/are-possible-gauge-fields-in-a-lagrangian-theory-always-determined-by-the-struct&quot;&gt;Are possible gauge fields in a Lagrangian theory always determined by the structure of the&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph gauge-theory symmetry quant-ph&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26939/models-of-higher-chern-simons-type&quot;&gt;models of higher Chern-Simons type&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory gauge-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27468/renormalization-group-for-non-equilibrium&quot;&gt;Renormalization Group for non-equilibrium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory cond-mat renormalization-group&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27780/theoretical-penetration-limit-for-evanescent-waves&quot;&gt;Theoretical penetration limit for evanescent waves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;classical-electrodynamics uncertainty-principle optics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27143/applications-of-delay-differential-equations&quot;&gt;Applications of delay differential equations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph differential-equations&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27262/mermin-wagner-theorem-in-the-presence-of-hard-core-interactions&quot;&gt;Mermin-Wagner theorem in the presence of hard-core interactions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph statistical-mechanics spin-model &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27453/technical-naturalness-of-yukawa-couplings&quot;&gt;Technical naturalness of Yukawa couplings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;higgs standard-model&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27776/do-gauge-theories-cfts-have-phase-transitions-as-the-t-hooft-coupling-is-vari&quot;&gt;Do Gauge Theories (CFTs) Have Phase Transitions as the 't Hooft Coupling is Varied?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;conformal-field-theory adscft&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26838/connections-and-applications-of-sle-in-physics&quot;&gt;Connections and applications of SLE in physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph statistical-mechanics conformal-field-theory probability&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27125/hypersingular-boundary-operator-in-physics&quot;&gt;Hypersingular Boundary Operator in Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph intuition&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27565/status-of-local-gauge-invariance-in-axiomatic-quantum-field-theory&quot;&gt;Status of local gauge invariance in axiomatic quantum field theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26804/what-is-the-current-state-of-research-into-v-representability&quot;&gt;What is the current state of research into $v$-representability?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph quant-ph chemical-physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27665/the-role-of-rigor&quot;&gt;The Role of Rigor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph history-overview &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27398/onsagers-regression-hypothesis-explained-and-demonstrated&quot;&gt;Onsager's Regression Hypothesis, Explained and Demonstrated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph statistical-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26950/extensions-of-dhr-superselection-theory-to-long-range-forces&quot;&gt;Extensions of DHR superselection theory to long range 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27593/which-is-the-coupling-between-the-photon-and-the-su2xu1-gauginos-before-sym&quot;&gt;Which is the coupling between the photon and the SU(2)xU(1) gauginos, before symmetry brea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;supersymmetry soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27286/metric-interpretation-of-self-adjoint-extensions&quot;&gt;Metric interpretation of self-adjoint extensions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics non-commutative-geometry&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27016/systematic-approach-to-deriving-equations-of-collective-field-theory-to-any-orde&quot;&gt;Systematic approach to deriving equations of collective field theory to any order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory statistical-mechanics gauge-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26915/can-the-cpt-theorem-be-valid-if-lorentz-invariance-is-only-spontaneously-broken&quot;&gt;Can the CPT theorem be valid if Lorentz invariance is only spontaneously broken?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory special-relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26805/counting-complete-sets-of-mutually-unbiased-bases-composed-of-stabilizer-states&quot;&gt;Counting complete sets of mutually unbiased bases composed of stabilizer states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-mechanics quantum-computing group-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27408/where-do-theta-functions-and-canonical-green-functions-appear-in-physics&quot;&gt;Where do theta functions and canonical Green functions appear in physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27156/what-is-the-importance-of-studying-degeneration-on-m-g&quot;&gt;What is the importance of studying degeneration on $M_g$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27527/other-processes-than-formal-power-series-expansions-in-quantum-field-theory-calc&quot;&gt;Other processes than formal power series expansions in quantum field theory calculations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26898/quasiparticles-in-bohmian-mechanics&quot;&gt;Quasiparticles in Bohmian mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27671/how-exactly-does-linear-regge-trajectories-imply-stability&quot;&gt;How Exactly Does Linear Regge Trajectories Imply 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27221/bps-states-mathematical-definition&quot;&gt;BPS states : Mathematical definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory hep-th string-theory supersymmetry&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27746/experimental-bounds-on-spacetime-torsion&quot;&gt;experimental bounds on spacetime torsion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26890/principle-behind-fidelity-balance-in-quantum-cloning&quot;&gt;Principle behind fidelity balance in quantum cloning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-mechanics quantum-computing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27699/orbits-of-maximally-entangled-mixed-states&quot;&gt;Orbits of maximally entangled mixed states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph group-theory entanglement&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26945/gauge-invariance-for-electromagnetic-potential-observables-in-test-function-form&quot;&gt;Gauge invariance for electromagnetic potential observables in test function form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory reference-request&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27700/quantum-field-theory-from-a-mathematical-point-of-view&quot;&gt;Quantum Field Theory from a mathematical point of view&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph reference-request&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26960/is-there-a-theorem-that-says-that-qft-reduces-to-qm-in-a-suitable-limit-a-theor&quot;&gt;Is there a theorem that says that QFT reduces to QM in a suitable limit? 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27466/connections-of-iterative-solvers-for-large-systems-of-equation-in-physics&quot;&gt;Connections of iterative solvers for large systems of equation in Physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;statistical-mechanics quantum-mechanics classical-electrodynamics hamiltonian-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27569/which-qfts-were-rigorously-constructed&quot;&gt;Which QFTs were rigorously constructed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph rigorous-qft&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27421/n-2-ssm-without-a-higgs&quot;&gt;N=2 SSM without a Higgs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;supersymmetry standard-model&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27251/what-methods-are-there-to-deal-with-quantum-spatiotemporal-chaos&quot;&gt;What methods are there to deal with quantum 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/analog-hawking-radiation&quot;&gt;Analog Hawking radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-gravity black-hole&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27289/uniqueness-of-the-5-string-theories&quot;&gt;Uniqueness of the 5 string theories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27266/string-landscape-in-different-dimensions&quot;&gt;String landscape in different dimensions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory string-landscape&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:49:17.417" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-06T17:49:17.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:50:03.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Theoretical Physics imports: 2 of 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Theoretical Physics. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 3 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27760/advanced-topics-in-string-theory&quot;&gt;Advanced topics in string theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27072/derivation-of-the-basic-equation-for-witten-diagrams&quot;&gt;Derivation of the basic equation for Witten diagrams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory adscft quantum-gravity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27419/wilson-loops-in-chern-simons-theory-with-non-compact-gauge-groups&quot;&gt;Wilson Loops in Chern-Simons theory with non-compact gauge groups&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory hep-th reference-request topological-qft&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27361/readable-books-on-advanced-topics&quot;&gt;Readable books on advanced topics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;soft-question book-recommendation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27356/torsion-and-gauge-invariant-em-kinetic-term&quot;&gt;Torsion and gauge invariant EM kinetic term&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity gauge-symmetry&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26887/stability-of-the-vacuum-state-of-interacting-quantum-fields&quot;&gt;Stability of the vacuum state of interacting quantum fields&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory thermal-qft classical-thermodynamics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27740/how-to-prove-equivalence-of-rg-flow-of-qft-coupling-constant-and-diagrammatic-re&quot;&gt;How to prove equivalence of RG flow of QFT coupling constant and diagrammatic resummation &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory renormalization-group&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27549/modular-invariance-for-higher-genus&quot;&gt;Modular invariance for higher genus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory conformal-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27581/pohlmeyer-reduction-of-string-theory-for-flat-and-ads-spaces&quot;&gt;Pohlmeyer reduction of string theory for flat and AdS spaces&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory adscft quantization&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27168/how-can-one-build-a-multi-scale-physics-model-of-fluid-flow-phenomena&quot;&gt;How can one build a multi-scale physics model of fluid flow phenomena?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;classical-thermodynamics simulation fluid-dynamics lattice-boltzmann&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26849/values-of-sm-parameters-at-one-certain-scale&quot;&gt;Values of SM parameters at one certain scale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory supersymmetry standard-model renormalization-group&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27291/povms-that-do-not-require-enlargement-of-the-hilbert-space&quot;&gt;POVMs that do not require enlargement of the Hilbert space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-foundations&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27636/functional-representations-of-free-quantum-fields&quot;&gt;functional representations of free quantum fields&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory reference-request&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27032/time-reversal-symmetry-and-t2-1&quot;&gt;Time reversal symmetry and T^2 = -1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27393/significance-of-massive-states-in-string-theory&quot;&gt;Significance of massive states in string theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27198/relativistic-center-of-mass&quot;&gt;Relativistic center of mass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;classical-field-theory special-relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27077/many-body-quantum-states-analyzed-as-probabilistic-sequences&quot;&gt;Many body quantum states analyzed as probabilistic sequences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics reference-request quantum-information spin-model locc&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26844/intuitive-sketch-of-the-correspondence-of-a-string-theory-to-its-limiting-quantu&quot;&gt;Intuitive sketch of the correspondence of a string theory to its limiting quantum field th&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27382/reduced-density-matrices-for-free-fermions-are-thermal&quot;&gt;Reduced density matrices for free fermions are thermal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;entanglement thermal-qft lattice-qft&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26914/random-matrix-ensembles-from-bmn-model&quot;&gt;random matrix ensembles from BMN model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics hep-th&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27045/interesting-topics-to-research-in-mathematical-physics-for-undergraduates&quot;&gt;Interesting topics to research in mathematical physics for undergraduates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27229/spectrum-of-a-quantum-relativistic-distance-squared-operator&quot;&gt;Spectrum of a quantum relativistic &quot;distance squared&quot; operator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics special-relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27611/string-theoretic-significance-of-extended-cft&quot;&gt;String-theoretic significance of extended CFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory conformal-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27620/different-kinds-of-s-matrices&quot;&gt;Different kinds of S-matrices?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory scattering&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27423/matlab-package-graphical-calculus-for-quantum-operations-esp-linear-optics&quot;&gt;Matlab package: graphical calculus for quantum operations (esp. linear optics)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-information quantum-optics software linear-optics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27094/spatial-and-polarizing-beam-splitters-in-a-graphical-calculus&quot;&gt;Spatial and polarizing beam splitters in a graphical calculus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-information quantum&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27695/colour-decomposition-of-n-gluon-tree-amplitude&quot;&gt;Colour decomposition of $n-$gluon tree amplitude&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory yang-mills-theory particle-physics scattering quantum-chromodynamics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27516/thermodynamic-limit-vs-the-method-of-steepest-descent&quot;&gt;Thermodynamic limit &quot;vs&quot; the method of steepest descent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph statistical-mechanics cond-mat cond-mathÃ»stat-mech&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26816/do-bipartite-spin-glasses-have-simple-relaxation-dynamics&quot;&gt;Do bipartite spin glasses have simple relaxation dynamics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;statistical-mechanics spin-model&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26966/poisson-structure-on-moduli-space-of-cfts&quot;&gt;Poisson structure on moduli space of CFTs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory conformal-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26868/what-is-the-upper-limit-on-intrinsic-heating-due-to-dark-matter&quot;&gt;What is the upper-limit on intrinsic heating due to dark matter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;particle-physics experimental-tests&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27129/papers-and-preprints-worth-reading-jan-midfeb-2012&quot;&gt;Papers and preprints worth reading, Jan-midFeb 2012&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;journal-club&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27004/fourier-methods-in-general-relativity&quot;&gt;Fourier Methods in General Relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;reference-request general-relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26931/a-solvable-model-for-the-finite-rectangular-potential-well-with-a-bump-in-the-mi&quot;&gt;A solvable model for the finite rectangular potential well with a bump in the middle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27525/do-thermodynamic-quantities-in-cft-correspond-to-something-different-in-ads-cft&quot;&gt;Do thermodynamic quantities in CFT correspond to something different in AdS/CFT?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;conformal-field-theory adscft&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27595/irrelevance-of-parastatistics-for-space-dimension-2&quot;&gt;Irrelevance of parastatistics for space dimension &gt; 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27281/quantum-mechanics-as-classical-field-theory&quot;&gt;Quantum mechanics as classical field theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics classical-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27257/discussions-of-the-axioms-of-aqft&quot;&gt;Discussions of the axioms of AQFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory reference-request&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27240/status-of-large-scale-structure-formation-within-cosmology-today&quot;&gt;Status of large-scale structure formation within cosmology today&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cosmology astrophysics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27637/mathematical-rigorous-introduction-to-solid-state-physics&quot;&gt;Mathematical rigorous introduction to solid state physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph book-recommendation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27023/unitarity-of-s-matrix-in-qft&quot;&gt;Unitarity of S-matrix in QFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory reference-request&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26812/some-questions-about-the-bcfw-reduction&quot;&gt;Some questions about the BCFW reduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory yang-mills-theory quantum-chromodynamics scattering&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26873/mu-p-t-pseudo-ensemble-why-is-it-not-a-proper-thermodynamic-ensemble&quot;&gt;$(\mu,P,T)$ pseudo-ensemble: why is it not a proper thermodynamic ensemble?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;physicsÃ»ed-ph cond-mathÃ»stat-mech classical-thermodynamics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27402/what-are-the-justifying-foundations-of-statistical-mechanics-without-appealing-t&quot;&gt;What are the justifying foundations of statistical mechanics without appealing to the ergo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;statistical-mechanics &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27473/continuum-theory-from-lattice-theory&quot;&gt;Continuum theory from lattice theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory renormalization lattice-gauge-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27224/why-isnt-the-gear-predictor-corrector-algorithm-for-integration-of-the-equation&quot;&gt;Why isn't the Gear predictor-corrector algorithm for integration of the equations of motio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;integration molecular-dynamics &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27439/vassiliev-higher-spin-theory-and-supersymmetry&quot;&gt;Vassiliev Higher Spin Theory and Supersymmetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory gravity supersymmetry hep-th gr-qc&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27186/is-there-a-majorana-like-representation-for-singlet-states&quot;&gt;Is there a Majorana-like representation for singlet states?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-mechanics permutation-symmetric majorana-representation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26881/limitations-in-using-flex-as-a-dmft-solver&quot;&gt;Limitations in using FLEX as a DMFT solver&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory perturbation-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27195/can-symmetry-generators-be-used-for-quantization&quot;&gt;Can symmetry generators be used for quantization?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph quantization group-theory hep-th&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27176/significance-of-the-hyperfinite-iii-1-factor-for-axiomatic-quantum-field-theor&quot;&gt;Significance of the hyperfinite $III_1$ factor for axiomatic quantum field theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26869/quantum-computing-and-quantum-control&quot;&gt;Quantum computing and quantum control&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-computing quantum-control&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27119/physical-interpretation-of-different-selfadjoint-extensions&quot;&gt;Physical interpretation of different selfadjoint extensions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph quant-ph quantum-mechanics hilbert-space functional-analysis&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26885/how-fundamental-is-spin-orbit-coupling-to-topological-insulators&quot;&gt;How Fundamental is Spin-Orbit Coupling to Topological Insulators?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;cond-mat&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27012/does-entropy-measure-extractable-work&quot;&gt;Does entropy measure extractable work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;statistical-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26892/does-4d-n-3-supersymmetry-exist&quot;&gt;Does 4D N = 3 supersymmetry exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph supersymmetry&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27459/kerr-geometry-separability-and-twistors&quot;&gt;Kerr Geometry, Separability and Twistors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity gr-qc&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27096/atlas-higgs-interpretation&quot;&gt;ATLAS Higgs Interpretation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;higgs standard-model &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26916/instantons-and-non-perturbative-amplitudes-in-gravity&quot;&gt;Instantons and Non Perturbative Amplitudes in 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27268/visualization-of-1d-spin-chain-wave-fuction&quot;&gt;Visualization of 1D spin chain wave fuction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics spin-model &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27209/what-do-theoretical-physicists-need-from-computer-scientists&quot;&gt;What do theoretical physicists need from computer scientists?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;computer-science soft-question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27315/applications-of-the-feynman-vernon-influence-functional&quot;&gt;Applications of the Feynman-Vernon Influence Functional&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory hep-th&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26912/what-is-a-good-introduction-to-integrable-models-in-physics&quot;&gt;What is a good introduction to integrable models in physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;book-recommendation &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26906/models-of-neutrinos-consistent-with-operas-results&quot;&gt;Models of neutrinos consistent with OPERA's results&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;hep-th &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27066/dual-pairs-in-four-dimensions&quot;&gt;Dual Pairs in Four Dimensions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;hep-th supersymmetry duality&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26817/6d-massive-gravity&quot;&gt;6d Massive Gravity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity reference-request &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27068/information-retrieval&quot;&gt;Information Retrieval&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph gr-qc &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27681/which-symmetric-pure-qudit-states-can-be-reached-within-local-operations&quot;&gt;Which symmetric pure qudit states can be reached within local operations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph permutation-symmetric majorana-representation group-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27260/are-lens-spaces-classified-via-a-weinberg-angle&quot;&gt;Are lens spaces classified via a Weinberg angle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;kaluza-klein compactification&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27161/relationship-between-weak-cosmic-censorship-and-topological-censorship&quot;&gt;Relationship between Weak Cosmic Censorship and Topological Censorship&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gravity gr-qc topology&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27272/stabilizer-formalism-for-symmetric-spin-states&quot;&gt;Stabilizer formalism for symmetric spin-states?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-computing&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27048/the-derivation-of-the-belinfante-rosenfeld-tensor&quot;&gt;The derivation of the Belinfante-Rosenfeld tensor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory classical-field-theory special-relativity&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26937/sub-and-super-multiplicativity-of-norms-for-understanding-non-locality&quot;&gt;Sub and super multiplicativity of norms for understanding non-locality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics nonlocality norms entanglement&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27170/phase-transition-in-the-ising-model-with-non-uniform-magnetic-field&quot;&gt;Phase Transition in the Ising Model with Non-Uniform Magnetic Field&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;statistical-mechanics spin-model phase-transition&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27600/canonical-averages-in-a-fermi-gas-aka-generalized-fermi-dirac-distribution&quot;&gt;Canonical averages in a Fermi gas aka generalized Fermi-Dirac distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;statistical-mechanics reference-request cond-mathÃ»stat-mech &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27126/uniqueness-of-supersymmetric-heterotic-string-theory&quot;&gt;Uniqueness of supersymmetric heterotic string theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;hep-th string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27078/choice-and-identification-of-vacuums-in-ads-cft&quot;&gt;Choice and identification of vacuums in AdS/CFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27477/cosmic-bubble-collision&quot;&gt;Cosmic bubble collision&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;gr-qc cosmology &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26895/random-walk-randomly-reflected&quot;&gt;Random Walk Randomly Reflected&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;probability &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27479/calculating-correlation-functions-of-exponentials-of-fields&quot;&gt;Calculating correlation functions of exponentials of fields&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a 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probabilistic theories (GPTs)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-information nonlocality&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27457/scherk-schwarz-and-other-compactifications&quot;&gt;Scherk-Schwarz and other compactifications?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory compactification&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27400/quivers-in-string-theory&quot;&gt;Quivers in String Theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory math-ph string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27141/some-questions-about-the-spectral-function&quot;&gt;Some questions about the spectral function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:50:03.093" CommentCount="0" 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  <row Id="1256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1248" CreationDate="2012-05-06T17:50:47.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Theoretical Physics imports: 3 of 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Theoretical Physics. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 3 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27627/master-equations-and-operator-sum-form&quot;&gt;Master Equations and Operator Sum Form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-information&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27634/accurate-quantum-state-estimation-via-keeping-the-experimentalist-honest&quot;&gt;Accurate quantum state estimation via &quot;Keeping the experimentalist honest&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quant-ph quantum-information quantum-estimation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27756/operator-norm-directly-from-phase-space-representation-of-photonic-quantum-opera&quot;&gt;Operator norm directly from phase space representation of photonic quantum operator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory quantum-information optics wigner-function norms&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27191/chsh-violation-and-entanglement-of-quantum-states&quot;&gt;CHSH violation and entanglement of quantum states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-information nonlocality entanglement&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27414/which-arguments-for-m-u-approx-0-are-still-in-the-market&quot;&gt;Which arguments for $m_u \approx 0$ are still in the market?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;particle-physics hep-ph&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27785/what-compactifications-of-the-poincare-group-have-been-studied&quot;&gt;what compactifications of the Poincare group have been studied?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;compactification poincare-group&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27492/rigorous-proof-of-bohr-sommerfeld-quantization&quot;&gt;Rigorous proof of Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph quantum-mechanics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27783/how-does-one-geometrically-quantize-the-bloch-equations&quot;&gt;How does one geometrically quantize the Bloch equations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics spin-model molecular-dynamics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27584/convexity-reference-request&quot;&gt;Convexity -- reference request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;reference-request quantum&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27217/is-this-a-simple-lie-algebra&quot;&gt;Is this a simple Lie algebra?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph particle-physics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27441/pauli-villars-regularisation-breaks-supersymmetry-how-to-see-that&quot;&gt;Pauli-Villars regularisation breaks supersymmetry. 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Why can't it be extended to the Sta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;kaluza-klein&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27237/virasoro-constraints-in-quantization-of-the-polyakov-action&quot;&gt;Virasoro constraints in quantization of the Polyakov action&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory quantization&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27523/higgs-field-is-its-discovery-truly-around-the-corner&quot;&gt;Higgs Field - Is its discovery truly &quot;around the corner&quot;? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;higgs standard-model&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27116/physical-interpretation-of-superstrings&quot;&gt;Physical interpretation of superstrings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27335/matrix-geometry-for-f-strings&quot;&gt;Matrix geometry for 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href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26992/spectrum-of-free-strings&quot;&gt;Spectrum of Free Strings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;string-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27429/pm-light-cone-notation-in-supersymmetry&quot;&gt;$\pm$ (light-cone?) notation in supersymmetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory supersymmetry&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27669/gravitating-sigma-models&quot;&gt;Gravitating sigma models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;math-ph gravity book-recommendation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27154/time-evolution-of-a-manifold-embedding&quot;&gt;Time Evolution of a Manifold Embedding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;reference-request gauge-theory quantum-gravity manifolds&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27735/heuristics-for-definitions-of-open-and-closed-quantum-dynamics&quot;&gt;Heuristics for definitions of open and closed quantum dynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics quantum-optics&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27118/asymptotic-completeness-generalized-free-fields-and-the-relationship-of-thermo&quot;&gt;Asymptotic Completeness, generalized free fields, and the relationship of thermodynamics w&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory wightman-fields&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27789/states-diagonal-in-the-tensor-product-of-bell-states&quot;&gt;States diagonal in the tensor product of Bell states.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;reference-request quantum-information&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27182/does-it-make-sense-to-speak-of-amplitudes-of-finite-closed-boundaries-in-qft&quot;&gt;Does it make sense to speak of amplitudes of finite closed boundaries in QFT?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory quantum-foundations&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27230/from-vertex-function-to-anomalous-dimension&quot;&gt;From vertex function to anomalous dimension&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory phase-transition&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27632/about-the-definition-motivation-properties-of-the-twisted-chiral-superfield-in&quot;&gt;About the definition/motivation/properties of the twisted chiral superfield in ${\cal N}=2&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory supersymmetry&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27231/the-paper-by-fateev-and-zamolodchikov&quot;&amp;gt;The Paper by Fateev and Zamolodchikov&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;reference-request citation&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27738/geometric-picture-behind-quantum-expanders&quot;&amp;gt;Geometric picture behind quantum expanders&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-information&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27183/could-motives-aid-in-the-study-of-the-navier-stokes-equations&quot;&amp;gt;Could motives aid in the study of the Navier-Stokes equations?&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory renormalization non-commutative-geometry fluid-dynamics&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27220/why-when-can-the-gauge-superfield-and-or-chiral-superfield-kinetic-term-in-2-2&quot;&amp;gt;Why/When can the gauge superfield and/or chiral superfield kinetic term in $(2,2)$ SUSY be&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory supersymmetry phase-transition&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27728/what-is-the-physical-difference-between-states-and-unital-completely-positive-ma&quot;&amp;gt;What is the physical difference between states and unital completely positive maps?&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics quantum-information intuition&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27019/is-the-lagrangian-of-a-quantum-field-really-a-functional&quot;&amp;gt;Is the Lagrangian of a quantum field really a functional?&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory hep-th functional-analysis&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27503/reference-request-susskind-glogower-original-paper&quot;&amp;gt;Reference request: Susskind-Glogower original paper&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;reference-request quantum-optics&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27433/looking-for-description-of-helstroms-measurement&quot;&amp;gt;Looking for description of Helstrom's measurement&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;reference-request quantum-information quantum-computing&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27539/qed-as-a-wightman-theory-of-observable-fields-with-a-collision-theory&quot;&amp;gt;QED as a Wightman theory of observable fields?  With a collision theory?&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27697/matrix-field-theory&quot;&amp;gt;matrix field theory&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory functional-analysis&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27656/comparison-of-different-ab-initio-codes&quot;&amp;gt;Comparison of different ab-initio codes&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics ab-initio-methods&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27248/advice-on-doing-physics-under-the-umbrella-of-mathematics-and-the-converse&quot;&amp;gt;Advice on doing physics under the umbrella of mathematics and the converse&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory string-theory math-ph soft-question math&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27577/analytic-continuation-of-imaginary-time-greens-function-in-the-time-domain&quot;&amp;gt;Analytic continuation of imaginary time Greens function in the time domain&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory cond-mat&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27781/partial-trace-with-sparse-matrices&quot;&amp;gt;partial trace with sparse matrices&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics quantum-information quantum-computing simulation&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27587/higgs-mass-and-the-hierarchy-problem&quot;&amp;gt;Higgs mass and the hierarchy problem&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory renormalization&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27163/fitting-free-qfts-into-the-haag-kastler-algebraic-formulation&quot;&amp;gt;fitting free QFTs into the Haag-Kastler algebraic formulation&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26932/what-is-a-hilbert-space-filter&quot;&amp;gt;What is a Hilbert space filter?&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-mechanics quantum-information quantum-key-distribution&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27753/baryon-asymmetry&quot;&amp;gt;Baryon asymmetry&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;cosmology&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26979/poincare-symmetry-in-qft&quot;&amp;gt;Poincare Symmetry in QFT&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory poincare-group&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27609/precise-definition-of-moduli-space&quot;&amp;gt;precise definition of &quot;moduli space&quot;&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27734/information-conservation-during-quantum-measurement-in-psi-epistemic-interpre&quot;&amp;gt;Information conservation during quantum measurement in $\psi$-epistemic interpretations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-foundations&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27002/instantons-anomalies-and-1-loop-effects&quot;&gt;instantons, anomalies, and 1-loop effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-field-theory&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27589/convert-state-vectors-to-bloch-sphere-angles&quot;&gt;Convert state Vectors to Bloch Sphere angles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;quantum-computing&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T17:50:47.073" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-06T17:50:47.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2012-05-06T18:00:58.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do this - the migration process &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt; strips tags that don't exist on the destination, to avoid polluting that site with tags that do not belong. In fact, questions currently marked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; would normally &lt;em&gt;fail migration&lt;/em&gt; without moderator intervention due to the lack of any tag overlap on the destination site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've previously noted, all of these questions will need to be reviewed eventually - that's a huge job, but there's no way around it: for as much overlap as they might have had, Astronomy and Theoretical Physics were separate sites with separate cultures and styles; integrating those questions is key to avoiding confusion for future readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to make this a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; easier though, by providing lists of all migrated questions &lt;em&gt;along with their original tags&lt;/em&gt;. I highly suggest splitting these up into &quot;bite-sized&quot; tasks and tackling them one by one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1248/questions-imported-from-astronomy-and-theoretical-physics/&quot;&gt;Questions imported from Astronomy and Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T18:00:58.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-07T03:20:53.763" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-computing&lt;/a&gt; questions from TP&gt;SE made their way out here by accident (I think they were supposed to be hand-flagged and migrated which may not have worked out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself don't know much about this topic, so I dunno which of them ought to be migrated. Also, we may want to consider migrating the non-TP questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-computing&lt;/a&gt; while we're at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Looks like there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-information&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-information&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-information&lt;/a&gt; questions as well. SInce there are 33-is QI questions migrated from TP, I used jQuery on the migrated questions list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;s=&quot;&quot;;$('pre')&#xA;  .contents()&#xA;  .filter(function() {&#xA;    return this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE;&#xA;  }).filter(function(){return !!this.data.match(/(quantum-computing)|(quantum-info)/ig)}).prev().each(function(){s+=this.href+&quot;\n\n&quot;;});&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods, here's the list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27077/many-body-quantum-states-analyzed-as-probabilistic-sequences&quot;&gt;Many body quantum states analyzed as probabilistic sequences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27423/matlab-package-graphical-calculus-for-quantum-operations-esp-linear-optics&quot;&gt;Matlab package: graphical calculus for quantum operations (esp. linear optics)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27094/spatial-and-polarizing-beam-splitters-in-a-graphical-calculus&quot;&gt;Spatial and polarizing beam splitters in a graphical calculus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26869/quantum-computing-and-quantum-control&quot;&gt;Quantum computing and quantum control&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27272/stabilizer-formalism-for-symmetric-spin-states&quot;&gt;Stabilizer formalism for symmetric spin-states?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27080/direct-sum-of-anyons&quot;&gt;direct sum of anyons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27533/rigorous-security-proof-for-wiesners-quantum-money&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27533/rigorous-security-proof-for-wiesners-quantum-money&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/s&gt; [MIGRATED]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27770/a-resource-theory-of-quantum-discord&quot;&gt;A resource theory of quantum discord?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26975/what-is-the-holevo-schumacher-westmoreland-capacity-of-a-pauli-channel&quot;&gt;What is the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland capacity of a Pauli channel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27657/explicit-construction-for-unitary-extensions-of-cptp-maps&quot;&gt;Explicit construction for unitary extensions of completely positive and trace preserving (CPTP) maps?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27043/state-of-matrix-product-states&quot;&gt;State of Matrix Product States&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27241/what-shannon-channel-capacity-bound-is-associated-to-two-coupled-spins&quot;&gt;What Shannon channel capacity bound is associated to two coupled spins?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27673/allowed-states-vis-a-vis-allowed-dynamics-in-generalized-probabilistic-theories&quot;&gt;Allowed states vis-a-vis allowed dynamics in generalized probabilistic theories (GPTs)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27627/master-equations-and-operator-sum-form&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27627/master-equations-and-operator-sum-form&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/s&gt; [MIGRATED]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27634/accurate-quantum-state-estimation-via-keeping-the-experimentalist-honest&quot;&gt;Accurate quantum state estimation via &amp;quot;Keeping the experimentalist honest&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27756/operator-norm-directly-from-phase-space-representation-of-photonic-quantum-opera&quot;&gt;Operator norm directly from phase space representation of photonic quantum operator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27191/chsh-violation-and-entanglement-of-quantum-states&quot;&gt;CHSH violation and entanglement of quantum states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26983/depolarizing-threshold-for-css-codes&quot;&gt;Depolarizing threshold for CSS codes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27451/can-the-concurrence-be-calculated-in-terms-of-the-entanglement-of-formation&quot;&gt;Can the concurrence be calculated in terms of the entanglement of formation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27445/constructing-a-cp-map-with-some-decaying-property&quot;&gt;Constructing a CP map with some decaying property&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27546/quantum-memories-what-are-they&quot;&gt;Quantum memories: What are they?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27723/unknown-quantum-state-with-promise-of-classical-data&quot;&gt;Unknown quantum state with promise of classical data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27484/entanglement-and-conservation&quot;&gt;Entanglement and conservation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27496/is-the-universe-a-quantum-computer-is-light-speed-barrier-a-computational-cons&quot;&gt;Is the universe a quantum computer - is light speed barrier a computational constraint&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/s&gt; [MERGED]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27766/monte-carlo-integration-over-space-of-quantum-states&quot;&gt;Monte Carlo integration over space of quantum states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27246/functional-relations-for-kochen-specker-proofs&quot;&gt;Functional relations for Kochen-Specker proofs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27789/states-diagonal-in-the-tensor-product-of-bell-states&quot;&gt;States diagonal in the tensor product of Bell states.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27738/geometric-picture-behind-quantum-expanders&quot;&gt;Geometric picture behind quantum expanders&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27728/what-is-the-physical-difference-between-states-and-unital-completely-positive-ma&quot;&gt;What is the physical difference between states and unital completely positive maps?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27433/looking-for-description-of-helstroms-measurement&quot;&gt;Looking for description of Helstrom&amp;#39;s measurement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27781/partial-trace-with-sparse-matrices&quot;&gt;partial trace with sparse matrices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26932/what-is-a-hilbert-space-filter&quot;&gt;What is a Hilbert space filter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27589/convert-state-vectors-to-bloch-sphere-angles&quot;&gt;Convert state Vectors to Bloch Sphere angles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26864/what-is-the-use-of-a-universal-not-gate&quot;&gt;What is the use of a Universal-NOT gate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26805/counting-complete-sets-of-mutually-unbiased-bases-composed-of-stabilizer-states&quot;&gt;Counting complete sets of mutually unbiased bases composed of stabilizer states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26890/principle-behind-fidelity-balance-in-quantum-cloning&quot;&gt;Principle behind fidelity balance in quantum cloning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27559/relevance-of-sic-povms-to-quantum-information&quot;&gt;Relevance of SIC-POVMs to quantum information&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27234/what-proof-techniques-have-failed-for-solving-the-sic-povm-problem-and-what-new&quot;&gt;What proof techniques have failed for solving the SIC-POVM problem and what new insights have been gleaned from them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26928/decoherence-and-measurement-in-nmr&quot;&gt;Decoherence and measurement in NMR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26856/examples-of-number-theory-showing-up-in-physics&quot;&gt;Examples of number theory showing up in physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T15:35:02.820" Title="Quantum computing questions from TP" Tags="|support|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1258" CreationDate="2012-05-07T07:04:58.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the questions identified, I think these ones are likely suitable for migration to TCS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27077/many-body-quantum-states-analyzed-as-probabilistic-sequences&quot;&gt;Many body quantum states analyzed as probabilistic sequences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27094/spatial-and-polarizing-beam-splitters-in-a-graphical-calculus&quot;&gt;Spatial and polarizing beam splitters in a graphical calculus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26869/quantum-computing-and-quantum-control&quot;&gt;Quantum computing and quantum control&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27272/stabilizer-formalism-for-symmetric-spin-states&quot;&gt;Stabilizer formalism for symmetric spin-states?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27770/a-resource-theory-of-quantum-discord&quot;&gt;A resource theory of quantum discord?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26975/what-is-the-holevo-schumacher-westmoreland-capacity-of-a-pauli-channel&quot;&gt;What is the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland capacity of a Pauli channel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27241/what-shannon-channel-capacity-bound-is-associated-to-two-coupled-spins&quot;&gt;What Shannon channel capacity bound is associated to two coupled spins?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27673/allowed-states-vis-a-vis-allowed-dynamics-in-generalized-probabilistic-theories&quot;&gt;Allowed states vis-a-vis allowed dynamics in generalized probabilistic theories (GPTs)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27634/accurate-quantum-state-estimation-via-keeping-the-experimentalist-honest&quot;&gt;Accurate quantum state estimation via &amp;quot;Keeping the experimentalist honest&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27191/chsh-violation-and-entanglement-of-quantum-states&quot;&gt;CHSH violation and entanglement of quantum states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26983/depolarizing-threshold-for-css-codes&quot;&gt;Depolarizing threshold for CSS codes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27451/can-the-concurrence-be-calculated-in-terms-of-the-entanglement-of-formation&quot;&gt;Can the concurrence be calculated in terms of the entanglement of formation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27445/constructing-a-cp-map-with-some-decaying-property&quot;&gt;Constructing a CP map with some decaying property&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27723/unknown-quantum-state-with-promise-of-classical-data&quot;&gt;Unknown quantum state with promise of classical data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27246/functional-relations-for-kochen-specker-proofs&quot;&gt;Functional relations for Kochen-Specker proofs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27789/states-diagonal-in-the-tensor-product-of-bell-states&quot;&gt;States diagonal in the tensor product of Bell states.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27738/geometric-picture-behind-quantum-expanders&quot;&gt;Geometric picture behind quantum expanders&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26932/what-is-a-hilbert-space-filter&quot;&gt;What is a Hilbert space filter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26864/what-is-the-use-of-a-universal-not-gate&quot;&gt;What is the use of a Universal-NOT gate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26805/counting-complete-sets-of-mutually-unbiased-bases-composed-of-stabilizer-states&quot;&gt;Counting complete sets of mutually unbiased bases composed of stabilizer states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26890/principle-behind-fidelity-balance-in-quantum-cloning&quot;&gt;Principle behind fidelity balance in quantum cloning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27559/relevance-of-sic-povms-to-quantum-information&quot;&gt;Relevance of SIC-POVMs to quantum information&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27234/what-proof-techniques-have-failed-for-solving-the-sic-povm-problem-and-what-new&quot;&gt;What proof techniques have failed for solving the SIC-POVM problem and what new insights have been gleaned from them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and these ones should remain with us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27080/direct-sum-of-anyons&quot;&gt;direct sum of anyons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27657/explicit-construction-for-unitary-extensions-of-cptp-maps&quot;&gt;Explicit construction for unitary extensions of completely positive and trace preserving (CPTP) maps?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27043/state-of-matrix-product-states&quot;&gt;State of Matrix Product States&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27756/operator-norm-directly-from-phase-space-representation-of-photonic-quantum-opera&quot;&gt;Operator norm directly from phase space representation of photonic quantum operator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27546/quantum-memories-what-are-they&quot;&gt;Quantum memories: What are they?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27484/entanglement-and-conservation&quot;&gt;Entanglement and conservation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27728/what-is-the-physical-difference-between-states-and-unital-completely-positive-ma&quot;&gt;What is the physical difference between states and unital completely positive maps?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27433/looking-for-description-of-helstroms-measurement&quot;&gt;Looking for description of Helstrom&amp;#39;s measurement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27589/convert-state-vectors-to-bloch-sphere-angles&quot;&gt;Convert state Vectors to Bloch Sphere angles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26928/decoherence-and-measurement-in-nmr&quot;&gt;Decoherence and measurement in NMR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26856/examples-of-number-theory-showing-up-in-physics&quot;&gt;Examples of number theory showing up in physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and these are miscellaneous cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27423/matlab-package-graphical-calculus-for-quantum-operations-esp-linear-optics&quot;&gt;Matlab package: graphical calculus for quantum operations (esp. linear optics)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;probably off topic for us, not sure if this should go to TCS or Computational Science or neither&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27781/partial-trace-with-sparse-matrices&quot;&gt;partial trace with sparse matrices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;off topic for us but appropriate for Computational Science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27766/monte-carlo-integration-over-space-of-quantum-states&quot;&gt;Monte Carlo integration over space of quantum states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;off topic for us but appropriate for Computational Science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T15:34:32.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1262" CreationDate="2012-05-08T03:51:15.807" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the wake of the migration from Astronomy, there are a couple of questions that may or may not be appropriate on this site, which I would like to get the community's feedback on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25185/who-should-i-contact-if-i-see-an-unknown-object-in-the-sky#question&quot;&gt;Who should I contact if I see an unknown object in the sky?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25188/ways-of-verifying-the-origin-of-a-meteorite#question&quot;&gt;Ways of verifying the origin of a meteorite?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T08:36:22.300" Title="Are these questions appropriate here?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1263" CreationDate="2012-05-08T03:51:42.733" Score="-1" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27968/how-is-it-possible-that-we-see-light-from-shortly-after-the-big-bang&quot;&gt;How is it possible that we see light from shortly after the big bang?&lt;/a&gt; originally presented a wrong theory bordering on nonsense, and asked &amp;quot;what's wrong with this theory&amp;quot;. no complaints, this is a tough call what to do with this stuff, but I thought this edit might work, and you locked the post before I had a chance to do it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title: Is the idea of a point explosion generating everything consistent with big-bang cosmology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought of the big bang as a point of infinite energy, which I theorize about using something I call &amp;quot;m&amp;quot; point. As &amp;quot;energy&amp;quot; is lost from this point, a bang occurs, converting lower forms of energy into matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this instant the &amp;quot;energy&amp;quot;at lower levels moves faster than &amp;quot;light as light has no mass. In-turn this bang creates a &amp;quot;slope of increasing mass&amp;quot;(space) moving in all directions(over time). I believe this explains both why we &amp;quot;see&amp;quot; light from the past from the same event that created us as light moved slower (was less likely to move away from the central point of energy than lower forms of energy that create mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this consistent with what is known?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is borderline, since the theory has no merit, but explaining why the idea has no merit allows you to explain some misconceptions about the light from the big bang. The question as rewritten does not get the main misconception across, it just asks &amp;quot;how can we see light from the explosion that created us?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be ok with the rephrased question, but what's up with the quick locking? The edit to the short question changed the subject entirely, and made my answer a non-sequitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T21:00:21.797" Title="What's up with locking this question?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1260" CreationDate="2012-05-08T03:55:36.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I agree with you that both are good for what it's worth. The closing of Astro means we need to pick up the slack, and that includes some pure astro questions. I didn't realize it was a migration due to site closing, so I said something else originally in comments, but I think that they are appropriate now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T03:55:36.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1261" CreationDate="2012-05-08T04:03:33.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quick locking is standard procedure in the case of an &quot;edit war&quot; as they're called. The intent is that we come to meta and work things out, exactly as we're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I don't think the edit you're proposing would be appropriate, precisely because the theory it presents is not defined well enough to be evaluated. Basically, it's still a nonsensical question. As I said, if you'd like this question to appear on the site, you can ask it yourself (phrased in such a way that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a sensible question, of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note that Argus edited his question down from the original version posted, which reflects his intent not to ask for a review of his original theory anymore, but rather to ask a simpler question which may help in understanding - as seen in revision 3 of the edit history. That simpler question is definitely much closer to being acceptable, and I thought it could be perfectly fine with basically just a change to the title and tags, and a grammar fix or two. That's the extent of the edits I made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the lock expires, then if Argus wants to revert the question to the original form, he's free to do that, though if that happens I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; vote to close it. (I wouldn't &quot;block&quot; your edit in that case.) Bottom line, though, it needs to be Argus's decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T04:03:33.980" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-08T06:03:09.937" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems as if there is no flexability to any questions I have asked. Lameness example I say in the example I am submerged in water that is so dense that I would be dead just by being there. I want to measure how much resistance this water would create for my arm. Instead of saying something like fluid resistance uses this equation *****+***=resistance. I get you could never be there to try and move your arm.  theory is all I am useing if I say the question wrong than the answer would be what you think I am asking and possible examples or not saying it could never happen. I believe nobody can ever stand at the center of a star but I can imagine that happening for the point of referring to energy escaping the star as you watch it from inside the star.. if I am out of line I guess I will just discontinue posting my questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I retract as Anna v has given a very awesome answer in a way that takes the question at face value. Very impressed as I have jumped to conclusions not only in my theories but as to the imagination of possible responders&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The path to a theory of everything closed for being too broad in scope.  All I wanted was enough chat to merit opening an actual discussion. The dimpliest form of my question would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What technologies and advances in current mathematical theory will be necessary to predict quantum probability with 100% Certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28040/how-to-communicate-properly-in-this-q-a-if-i-am-sitting-in-a-newtonian-world&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28040/how-to-communicate-properly-in-this-q-a-if-i-am-sitting-in-a-newtonian-world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since without 20 rep I can not open a proper discussion in chat I was forced to pose my &#xA;Discussion as a question as I learned it was much harder than I thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" OwnerDisplayName="Argus" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T03:20:05.010" Title="observation of my recent questions and answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2012-05-08T06:13:07.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is what you're asking about, but there is a provision in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about fictional physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Could warp drive get you out of a black hole?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Questions about physics of fictional worlds which are not sufficiently grounded in real physics are off topic here, but they may be on topic at Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, any question which is based on an impossible or nonsensical premise will probably not be well received here, because if the setup is forbidden by the laws of physics, then you can't use physics to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T06:13:07.787" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2012-05-08T06:25:45.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question about standing at the center of a black hole misunderstands the nature of space and time inside a black hole. The problem is not that our imagination is lacking in not being able to imagine you standing there, it is that your imagination does not allow for the center of the black hole to be so &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; from the exterior that the radial direction is the direction of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are standing near r=0, you would be straddling different values of r in your imagination, say you stick your left leg out along r, this is like saying &quot;what if I kick my left leg into yesterday, and kick you yesterday in the shin. This is not possible--- you don't move in time directions, you move in spatial directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This failure of imagination is what leads you to believe that your questions are not getting a fair answer--- you are missing something fundamental, that in the interior of the black hole the radial direction is timelike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T06:25:45.447" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-08T07:11:58.387" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bottom of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&quot;&gt;notation&lt;/a&gt; section contains this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't it be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#howtoask&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I came across this since I wanted to reuse the section for Chem.SE, of course expanding it for the &lt;code&gt;\ce{...}&lt;/code&gt; thingy, which lots of people are confused about.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T06:39:01.153" Title="Misplaced line in faq" Tags="|bug|site-faq|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1267" CreationDate="2012-05-08T08:01:22.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is out of place. It looks like it should be at the end of &quot;What kind of questions can I ask here?&quot;, just above the &quot;notation&quot; section. That's the first of the three options you presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8154" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T08:01:22.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1260" CreationDate="2012-05-08T08:36:22.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can see, both of these questions seem on topic for astro. This question:&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate that essentially all of astro is now within scope (with the exception of astrophotography). Is this correct? I haven't looked at chat sessions or anything, and it's quite possible that I missed another meta question related to this. If so, a pointer would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a final policy or at least rough consensus on what the new scope is? Is it (Physics U Astro) or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8154" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T08:36:22.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2012-05-08T13:53:55.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Test post to test something (see comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gibberishwaE RscSA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gibberish .......qawr ASDCSaASFAF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gibberish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Mars Is Earth.&lt;/s&gt; , Manish Earth wrote this post.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-22T10:18:25.603" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T10:18:25.603" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-08T13:53:55.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1272" CreationDate="2012-05-08T15:59:01.420" Score="1" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are David and dmckee the only two diamonds? When did we vote for them? Can I nominate anna v? David was being annoying today, locking and deleting stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean the borderline crackpot question, we agreed on that, but after that was finished, David went back to an old answer where I wanted to preserve a discussion (see this for a previous case: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/912/deleting-comments-without-consensus&quot;&gt;Deleting comments without consensus&lt;/a&gt; ), and deleted the discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24729/worlds-branching-or-diverging-in-many-worlds-interpretation/24738#comment62303_24738&quot;&gt;Worlds branching or diverging in Many-Worlds Interpretation?&lt;/a&gt; , and locked the post. This was extremely annoying, and a bit of show of power, and I don't like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his favor, the erasure was probably in line with general policy on stackexchange, but I really think enforcing policy takes maturity and judgement, and should not be based on personal issues. Sometimes, when you have philosophical things, like positivism and quantum mechanics, a long discussion is the only way to see the points of view, and to appreciate the subtleties. This came up before, regarding deleting comments, and I just preserved those comments up by copying into the body of the answer up to this point. But it seems that David changed his mind on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like it. I think it shows immature judgement, and I don't have confidence that this is a neutral application of policy, nor that it is a good idea for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the deleted material, so you can judge for yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Short discussion on positivism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Positivism is extremely counterintuitive, and this makes a lot of people reject it. This was a discussion in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schrodinger's Ghost: Not sure if I agree, have you read the papers? Divergent MWI explicitly states that whether I will see a X spin or Y spin has been determined since the big bang. I will not see both, only either X or Y and if it happens to be Y then thats because I was on the Y branch. In this view advocated by Saunders and Wilson we are in a separate parallel universe, there is no branching&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ron Maimon: I have not read the papers. The &quot;determined&quot; aspect is creating a fictious observer selection a postiori from the results of the measurements, and is only different in ontology from standard MWI. What &quot;you&quot; are is a computational entity, and computations don't embed in QM straightforwardly, since they require irreversible measurements, so you need a large-system limit, and decoherence. Whether you embed yourself in a branch that you back-propagate to the big-bang or that you back-propagate to the measurement is up to you, it doesn't change your perception or anyone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: But there is obviously a objective difference. In one view, the overlap branching view, you are numerically identical, you are part of the other worlds pre-branching. In the divergent view, you are only qualitatively identical, but the atoms that make up you exist on their own, seperate from the identical ones in another branch.... So for instance quantum suicide works in branching, but not in divergence. When you die in divergence, you really die, just as in a single universe interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: The difference is imagined. How do you know your perception is only stuck to one branch? Why can't it jump to another? Why do you think you don't really die if you die in a branching interpretation? Why do you attach your consciousness to you only, maybe your consciousness is located in North Dakota in the basement of some guy's house. These questions need to be formulated in a positivistic way to see which ones are meaningless, and in this case, all these questions, and the question of &quot;existence&quot; itself, are meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: No, the difference is not imagined, why would it be? If you clone yourself, do you magically become the clone? No. You are the consciousness that arise from the neurons in your brain, it doesn't matter if there exist identical ones, you don't magically jump from body to body, that would require a soul, which is not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: What if you clone by splitting your brain down the middle, and making a copy of the other half. Which way do you go? What if you clone by replacing half your neurons higgeldy-piggledy with electronic parts, and put these neurons in a new body, with different electronic parts replacing the other half? When you are cloned, you have a chance of jumping to the other body, the evidence is that if you ask the other body what happened, it would say &quot;I jumped!&quot; What the probability is is only determinable from the outside. This is only a &quot;soul&quot; to the extent that software is soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: These are all well known &quot;conundrums&quot; in philosophy surrounding personal identity, but even in your thought experiments there is no &quot;jumping&quot;, you simply create 2 consciousnesses from 1 brain. We know this from split-brain experiments... I fail to see how your argument supports the idea that you could jump between branches? Imagine in our single universe there is another identical solar system with a identical planet Earth. Do we &quot;jump&quot; between them because there exist 2 identical people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: How can you tell if there is jumping on not? In any circumstance where &quot;jumping&quot; is allowed, the two minds are exactly the same (if even there are two of them). This is the point--- when the two consciousnesses are the same, it is a meaningless question to ask if there are two or one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: No, there is no physics that allows magical &quot;jumping&quot;... There are 2 worlds separate, how is this so hard to understand for you? Just because something is identical does not merge them into 1 thing wtf??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: The reason it is &quot;hard to understand&quot; is because the notion of whether there are two &quot;consciousnesses&quot; or only one is not physics, it's pure philosophy. What experiment could tell me if jumping were occuring or not occuring? The only cases where jumping could be occuring, the two brains are identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: Why would jumping occur? Does 2 identical photons become 1? It's not pure philosophy, if the fact is that the branches all exist premeasurement, that is a objective fact about reality. You are making the claim of magic soul jumping, so the burden of proof lies on your shoulders. First prove the soul, then prove jumping mechanism, collect a ton of nobel prizes and I'll concede.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: It is not the same as photons, because there is a test which will tell you when you have two photons. What test can tell you if two branches &quot;exist&quot; before they diverge? There is no answer, even in principle, because there is no existence-meter which flashes when it sees existing stuff. So &quot;exist&quot; is not a useful word. I believe in the &quot;existence&quot; of the soul in the same way I believe in the &quot;existence&quot; of firefox (the program), even though what the &quot;firefox&quot; on my computer is exactly is not clear, nor if there is 1 or 2 copies, especially when the OS puts a copy in cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: Yes, you are right that there is no experiment that can answer it, so we have to resort to metaphysics. If divergence is better than branching as a theory, then it's rational to assume that divergence is most likely the true representation of reality. ...But you do then accept that although we can't determine the fact, there is a fact about which is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: No I don't accept that. There is no fact about the matter, there is no fact, there is no matter. The question is meaningless, you are asking nonsense. This is what &quot;positivism&quot; means. Two options are observationally identical means there is no difference between them, and it is a matter of convention which one you say when you speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: So you don't comprehend the difference between NUMERICALLY IDENTICAL worlds and QUALITATIVELY IDENTICAL ? You are the first person I've discussed this with who has not grasped this concept...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: I &quot;grasp&quot; the concept, I am telling you it is incoherent. There is no meaning to a question of pure metaphysics, you can make up whatever you like, there are no differences in observation, so by definition the two positions are identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: No. That's like saying solipsism and realism is identical because we can't do a experiment to verify which is correct... How the hell can you do science with such a mindset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: Solipsism and realism are identical! Indeed this is a puzzling but true consequence of positivism. It remains to see how you can translate ethical arguments, like &quot;I should buy life insurance&quot; into the solipsist perspective. That this can be done is surprising and weird. This is how you do science, positivism is essential. I should admit that philosophers don't like positivism, because it moots their favorite questions, and ethicists find it hard to swallow that any ethical argument must be persuasive to a solipsist too (although this is true).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG:I reject positivism, I thought most people abandoned that way of thinking in the 80s, wtf ? Anyways, there is no way you can claim that solipsism and realism are identical. ONE has to be true. Do you believe I am conscious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: Nearly all people abandoned positivism in the 70s-80s, and this was a terrible step backwards. The positivism was still working its magic in physics, to produce holography. I believe they are identical--- I don't even know if I am conscious, or if you take my internal sense of myself to be primitive, I don't know a sure meaning to the statement that I was conscious three minutes ago. I know there was an internal computation going on in myself, I can see the effects of it, and I can see that there is an internal computation going on in you. That's enough for all purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: I think it was a correct step and I would hate to see us step back to positivism. You are talking about computations taking place inside you and me, but then you are assuming realism. None of those concepts make sense in a solipsistic existence. You seem to have a rather radical way of interpreting the world. According to you the theory of gravity should not be preferred on any grounds (not even occam razor) to for instance a LSD induced idea of invisible gnomes pulling objects down to earth with invisible strings &quot;because they produce the same outcome they are identical&quot;&#xA;... I think we are done actually. In conclusion: Ron Maimon consider anything that can't be proven or disproven identical, including solipsism and realism. So the question I have posed is obviously, to him, incoherent. Hopefully someone else will respond&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: Everyone else in physics thinks the same way. Mach was the father of positivism, and Einstein and Bohr (and everyone after with a brief interlude from 1974-1995) embraced Mach's philosophy. This idea was central to relativity, quantum mechanics, S-matrix theory/string-theory, and everything else. It is not reasonable to ask whether there are little gnomes, you can introuce the little gnomes, or not introduce them, and there is no difference observationally. If the gnomes are useful as a figure of speech, go ahead!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...: I think your position has merit, by the way, it is very difficult to fix up philosophy to be correct for positivism. You need an ethics that doesn't care whether God exists or not, that doesn't care whether other people exist or not, that gives the same answers regardless of metaphysics, and this makes strong constraints. The solution to this is the theory of superrationality, proposed by physicist turned cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, which gives a positivistically meaningful metaphysics neutral definition of ethical behavior compatible with religious ethics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You claim everyone in physics thinks the same way. How is it then that this question I am asking here has been asked by several physicists? Not to mention the entire debate on Quantum Interpretations, since they all yield the same result, according to you: THEY ARE IDENTICAL. So why do you adhere to Everett instead of say...transactional interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: &quot;Transactional&quot; is mathematically incoherent to date, so perhaps the right question is &quot;Everett&quot; vs. &quot;Copehagen&quot;. There is very little positive difference between Everett and Copenhagen, the way I see it, exactly zero, so the two are identical, and this is the major reason interpretation of quantum mechanics is not discussed in physics anymore--- people accept that the formulations are generally identical. Bohm is different, because the mathematical structure has &quot;little gnomes&quot; which are the particle positions which might become physically identifiable in a new theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SG: Well, Bohm gives same outcome, so if you are really as dedicated to your philosophy as you claim, it too is identical. As for interpretation not discussed in physics anymore? Wrong It's discussed now more than ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: Everett's intepretation is important, however, for establishing that there is no paradox possible for large systems in using quantum mechanics as is. This is not clear in Bohr, where the outcomes of experiments are by classical variables which are not present in the microscopic theory. In Everett interpretation, these variables become the branch selectors, so they get different &quot;little gnomes&quot;. At the end of the day, the two ideas are completely identical, although Everett is clearer psychologically for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Bohm is identical as formulated, so I do consider it not new, as formulated. But Bohm is useless and obviously wrong as formulated, since it picks out a frame and a basis for Hilbert space. But a future theory could start with Bohm and modify it to make a new theory, and since the mathematical structure has gnomes, the particle positions, the modified gnomes would be different than the modified no-gnome theory. The wavefunction might become an average of particle position properties, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Everettians also has to pick a preferred basis, decoherence doesn't solve this. My main point is that you clearly recognize the differences in 2 ideas, but due to the inability to verify which is correct, you assume it's worthless to even ask. But you DO agree that divergence and branching can obviously not BOTH be true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RM: Decoherence doesn't solve it, but it says that it is consistent to do it. A theory consists of a mathematical formalism, and a map from the formalism to experience. You can modify the formalism, and modify the map, but if the result is the same experience, it's the same theory. The divergence and branching are equivalent so they are both true, in that you can believe one or the other, but you generally don't want to use the language of one when thinking about the other, because they have incompatible language, so you shouldn't speak in the two frames simultaneously.&#xA;... It's exactly like coordinate rotation: do you agree that if the x-axis is along the north-south direction, this is different than the x-axis along the current Earth sun direction? I mean, in one case, the planets change x and in the others not. So you can use any axes, just as long as you are consistent, and two axes are equivalent. The same way: use any metaphysics, your metaphysics is your coordinate system, and the results are the same if the sense-perceptions are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T04:08:58.250" Title="Who's the other diamond?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1271" CreationDate="2012-05-08T16:00:16.377" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;All those answers are at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mbq is the third moderator and we were all elected in April 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T16:00:16.377" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1267" CreationDate="2012-05-08T17:08:23.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Btw, near the &lt;em&gt;Please look around to see if your question has been asked before&lt;/em&gt; in the FAQ, perhaps there should be a link to a (preferably automatically updated) list of old Physics.SE questions, such that the first question on the list has caused the biggest number of other Physics.SE questions to be closed as duplicates because of it, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T17:08:23.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1271" CreationDate="2012-05-09T04:08:58.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes, when you have philosophical things, like positivism and quantum mechanics, a long discussion is the only way to see the points of view, and to appreciate the subtleties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the truest thing you said in your post above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange just isn't the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://dropbox.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dropbox&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://simplenoteapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Simple Note&lt;/a&gt; for free online text storage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5430" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T04:08:58.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1267" CreationDate="2012-05-09T06:39:01.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While we're at it, we can copy &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86/how-can-we-use-math-chemistry-formatting-out-here&quot;&gt;this mathjax tutorial&lt;/a&gt; to meta.Phy, request a mathjax enable, and add a link to it in the notation faq..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also change the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link in the editor help&lt;/a&gt;  to it, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;current one&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/82/tex-tutorial-too-intimidating-extensive&quot;&gt;is too intimidating&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:50:39.193" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T06:39:01.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-09T10:11:50.583" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a quick word to let you know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chemistry.SE&lt;/a&gt; has now launched into public beta!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T10:11:50.583" Title="Chemistry.SE is now in public beta!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-09-19T22:24:19.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-10T03:35:48.767" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;What technologies and advances in current mathematical theory will be necessary to predict quantum probability with 100% Certainty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not is this off topic in a specific way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the way this question is stated imply &quot;sci-fi&quot; technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the &quot;technologies&quot; part need to be left out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T06:20:21.020" Title="Any advice on how to modify or improve my question for improved clarity" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1261" CreationDate="2012-05-10T03:50:25.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Ron Maimon, As I have recently learned how to ask for help before asking questions to prevent myself from seeming like a looney tunes character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my original was asked correctly but under the wrong conditions it should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we see light from the explosion that created us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To specify please do not give me the opposite answer: such as you can not detect light from the creation event because etc. etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be a reasonable and acceptable question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, would I edit the original or have to open a new question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T03:50:25.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1277" CreationDate="2012-05-10T06:20:21.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, this site is for questions about physical principles, not specific technologies. We make these judgments on a case-by-case basis, so you may see some technology-related questions on the site that are perfectly fine, but this would not be one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I would have to wonder what you mean by &quot;predict quantum probability with 100% certainty.&quot; Are you asking about the ability to completely predict the behavior of a quantum system? That is impossible, so asking how to do it wouldn't be appropriate. (Although you can certainly ask &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is impossible.) Are you asking about the ability to predict the wavefunction? That we can already do, although it's impossible to compare it with measurements because you can't measure a wavefunction, at least not on a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; quantum system. That's another one where you shouldn't ask how to do it, but you can ask why we can't measure a wavefunction on a single system. Or are you asking something about the accuracy of calculations in perturbation theory? In that case you would have to be more specific, and say what physical system you are talking about, because some of them can be solved and some of them can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T06:20:21.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-11T05:42:02.450" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/capturing-theoretical-physics-crowd-with-research-level-tag&quot;&gt;Capturing theoretical-physics crowd with Research Level Tag&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the site closed, perhaps we can revive its usefulness by adding a &quot;theoretical physics&quot; tag and adding it to all questions which would be suitable for that site. This is already so for astronomy. This will make a defacto subset of the problems screenable for professionals, who will be put off by the elementary questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a &quot;layman&quot; tag, but the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-05-11T05:42:02.450" Title="Can we make a theoretical-physics tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2012-05-11T06:15:54.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-12T17:18:47.783" Score="-3" ViewCount="1161" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Zaslavsky is at it again: he has moved the (short) comment discussion here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28174/are-gravitomagnetic-monopoles-hypothesized/28199#comment62829_28199&quot;&gt;Are gravitomagnetic monopoles hypothesized?&lt;/a&gt; which he called &quot;inappropriate&quot;. I thought he deleted them, but he moved them to chat here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3410/discussion-between-mark-beadles-and-ron-maimon&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3410/discussion-between-mark-beadles-and-ron-maimon&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the comments say that a (completely wrong) answer is completely wrong, and are important, so that people will know why the answer is wrong, so it won't get upvoted more than it is, and so that it will get fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to be reverse-agist, but you have to have rocks in your head to put people under the age of 40 in positions of power. They are no good at this, as they lack maturity and are rule-oriented. Please make &lt;em&gt;old people&lt;/em&gt; diamonds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also lack judgement and maturity, but at least I don't have any power. Also can some other diamond restore the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT: I got this message from David&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your Physics - Stack Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've noticed that you have a pattern of engaging in lengthy discussions in comments, frequently consisting of responses involving multiple, back-to-back posts. Comments are intended as brief messages to provide feedback or ask for clarification on the content of the post. Lengthy clarifications should be edited into the post itself or posted separately as a new question or answer, and extended discussions should be taken to chat. Extensive comment threads tend to be a distraction for other readers. These lengthy discussions are often hard to follow, and can easily hide critical information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferring to argue with other users in comments over revising your questions and answers to address their concerns is a red flag to moderators, indicating you may not fully understand the purpose of Stack Exchange: our goal is to provide readers with expert questions and answers, not host discussion or debate. If you desire conversation, stop into the site's chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hope that you can work with the community on achieving our goals by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking specific, researched, relevant, on-topic questions&#xA;Providing clear, useful, accurate and well-researched information in answers&#xA;Treating others with respect and civility&#xA;Regards,&#xA;David Zaslavsky&#xA;Physics - Stack Exchange moderator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="David Zaslavsky moved comments, no good" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-05-12T21:13:12.357" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[David] has moved the (short) comment discussion here: Are gravitomagnetic monopoles hypothesized? which he called &amp;quot;inappropriate&amp;quot;. I thought he deleted them, but he moved them to chat here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3410/discussion-between-mark-beadles-and-ron-maimon&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3410/discussion-between-mark-beadles-and-ron-maimon&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Incorrect&lt;/strong&gt;. Moderators cannot move comments. Your discussion chain got too long that the engine offered you both to take it to chat and one of you clicked the link. There's no other way this could've happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment thread doesn't look like a civil discussion at all. Look at some of your comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: [...] Your whole answer is full of nonsense, please delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: [...] This answer is a summary of things you obviously don't understand, please delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3: [...] It cannot be fixed, and you are being dishonest that you claimed otherwise. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are clearly being belligerent and abusive towards the other user, who repeatedly told you that you cannot make demands — if it's wrong, say so and downvote it and move on. If you want to rub it in their face, then do so by providing a better and factually correct answer and let the community decide. By launching an attack on him, the discussion spiralled into one that was argumentative and unfruitful. Going by Mark's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] (replacing a comment that was a bit argumentative): [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing there were other inappropriate comments either by him or you that were deleted voluntarily. Given these red flags, David was highly justified in deleting them from under the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given your attitude here, towards the other user and your overall behaviour on the network, I would highly recommend that you be suspended for a while so that you can cool down and reflect on your actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T21:13:12.357" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-05-12T22:07:31.517" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ron, no disrespect meant to you but I feel far more at ease with David helping to moderate the site than you, regardless of age or knowledge. The problem is to do with your interpersonal skills here, rather than David's moderating skills. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you do have this tendency sometimes to make comments such as: &quot;this is nonsense, please delete this answer!&quot;, or &quot;how did this answer get upvoted? it's completely wrong!&quot;. In your comments with Mark Beadles you comment: &quot;Your whole answer is full of nonsense, please delete it.&quot;, &quot;You have misidentified and misinterpreted every bit of work in this area&quot;. Abusive, intimidating comments like that serve only the destructive personality of the one making them and that's probably why David moved them as inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise you didn't conclude &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/3321/discussion-between-john-mcvirgo-and-ron-maimon&quot;&gt;our&lt;/a&gt; discussion; either admitting you're wrong, explaining why you think I'm still wrong, or politely saying you don't have the time. It gives the impression that your 20k points has gone to your head and you think your demonstration of intellectual competence means you can trample all over the views of others without explaining yourself in a respectful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly hope you take on board what I've said and don't end up being suspended like another very competent guy that used to post here  because I've learnt a lot from most of your answers. But no one person is more important than the running of this site, regardless of the number of points they have by their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T22:07:31.517" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2012-05-13T02:04:41.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I definately do not like the background it seems too busy for my taste that is why i used this little trick to overlay a plain old solid background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internet explorer for windows and Konqueror for Linux support overlaying a solid background in there template area in setting. Just in-case assuming IE Open your Internet Options (either from the Tools menu in Internet Explorer, or from the Control Panel), then click the Colors and Accessibility buttons at the bottom to adjust the default colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any Linux buffs &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?q=http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kde-baseapps/konqueror/menubar.html&amp;amp;sa=U&amp;amp;ei=8BevT5WDNsXMtge79-DYCA&amp;amp;ved=0CB0QFjAD&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHB4xLlylBUmBXf8-ge7h2VP7yRkg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.com/url?q=http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kde-baseapps/konqueror/menubar.html&amp;amp;sa=U&amp;amp;ei=8BevT5WDNsXMtge79-DYCA&amp;amp;ved=0CB0QFjAD&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHB4xLlylBUmBXf8-ge7h2VP7yRkg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastEditorUserId="9082" LastEditDate="2012-05-15T19:22:08.560" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T19:22:08.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-05-13T02:24:45.187" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only add to &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; discussion with hesitation, since as I judge the discussion it's not about me, or about my answer. However, I would like to note, regarding the comments action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of Stack Exchange is that anyone can ask and anyone can answer. Upvotes and downvotes are the sole mechanisms for judging the answers. This works because a user's reputation score reflects how they've participated as &quot;judger&quot; or &quot;judgee&quot; of others in turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But comments don't participate in the reputation system, and so are not self-correcting. The sole automated control of comments seems to be the system offering to &quot;take a discussion to chat&quot;. I see there was some confusion about that, so to set the matter straight, I did click the offered link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the lack of self-correcting automated controls on comments, it makes sense to me that moderators may need to step in from time to time with human judgment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5379" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T02:24:45.187" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-13T02:34:55.390" Score="0" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possible duplicates:&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/capturing-theoretical-physics-crowd-with-research-level-tag&quot;&gt;Capturing theoretical-physics crowd with Research Level Tag&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Also&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1281/can-we-make-a-theoretical-physics-tag&quot;&gt;Can we make a theoretical-physics tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cane we capture the I was reading or I was watching a video and question crowd with a &quot;new idea&quot; tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T02:34:55.390" Title="Can we make a &quot;new idea&quot; tag possible duplicates" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-13T05:29:43.183" Score="4" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;When does that happen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1492/anna-v?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;a 4+ in my sum&lt;/a&gt;  and tried to see for what, and got &quot;user was removed&quot; instead of a link to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="user was removed" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1289" CreationDate="2012-05-13T05:31:54.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126470/what-does-user-was-removed-mean-and-why-did-my-reputation-change-because-of-it&quot;&gt;What does &quot;user was removed&quot; mean and why did my reputation change because of it?&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, when another user's account is deleted, any votes they may have cast for you are reverted and your reputation can change accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T06:49:08.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1292" CreationDate="2012-05-13T10:04:52.180" Score="-5" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;I`m just noting that since about yesterday, a number of people from other SE sites (philosophy, ect) who are not in the slightest interested in physics, abuse the meta part of physics.SE to persecute Ron Maimon, see for example this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1283/2751&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; and the comments below. &#xA;They abuse the possibility to register here and having 101 points of reputation from the start try to potronize OUR community and screw up the picture of how WE would like to deal with certain issues.&#xA;Answers, votes, comments, etc represent no longer the opinion and preferences of our physics community since these intruders started to meddle with things which are not their business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: What can we do about this? How can we prevent the physics community ressponse to certain questions being screwed up like this? How can we avoid that powerful people at superior positions in the overall SE network get a wrong picture about the needs of OUR community and in the worst case take wrong actions against users who do great contributions to physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T18:13:20.360" Title="Abuse of our Meta by people from other SE sites" Tags="|discussion|policy|spam|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-05-13T10:55:30.147" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ron has brought up topics which are SE-wide (David's possible abuse of his mod powers and the mechanics of comment management), thus he got a &lt;em&gt;feedback&lt;/em&gt; from SE-wide moderator community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, one of the basis of this network is that everybody can post both on sites and metae, thus your request cannot be realized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T10:55:30.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-05-13T11:27:10.933" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several misunderstandings in your question, I'd like to answer (&lt;em&gt;without sarcasm&lt;/em&gt;) to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abuse of our Meta by people from other SE sites&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abuse? The system explicitly gives me the right to respond there, so where is the abuse? I gained the reputation to have the 101 rep on other sites, I deserve the right to have and use it. Again, I see no abuse, personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I`m just noting that since about yesterday, a number of people from other SE sites (philosophy, ect) who are not in the slightest interested in physics, abuse the meta part of physics.SE to persecute Ron Maimon, see for example this answer and the comments below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;number of people&quot; you talk about are moderators and a SE Team member. Maybe we're not interested in Physics, and that's why I'm not posting on the Main site, for example, but Meta is not at all related to physics the subject, rather it's related to Physics &lt;strong&gt;the site&lt;/strong&gt;. Furthermore, I don't think I'm persecuting Ron; I would have posted regardless of the user fi the conditions were the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] and screw up the picture of how WE would like to deal with certain issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules are network-wide... Actually, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Netiquette&lt;/a&gt; is Internet-wide and exists since long time, long before the SE I think. But let's talk about the SE sites: the rules about proper behavior are not a site-specific issue, so you don't get your personal rules about behavior. The FAQ concerning that part is common to all SE sites, and for a simple reason: it's common for all sites. (It's a repetition eheh.) The content of Ron's answers is not being judged: I don't think I would have any clue of what he states in his answers that is physics-related, and the same goes for the other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain, again with no sarcasm, some mechanisms. Across the SE network, the system is users -&gt; moderators -&gt; Team members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users gain privileges through reputation, even &lt;em&gt;moderation privileges&lt;/em&gt;. Then you find moderators, with have more powers in their site but none in other sites, &lt;em&gt;although&lt;/em&gt; moderators  have mod-privileges across the Chat network. This means that I can mod even in this site chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you have Team members. They have more powers than anyone. They are moderators everywhere and they also have more powers than common moderators. So it's not that they have to &quot;mind their own business&quot;. This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; their own business, and if this thing has repercussions in other sites or if it's not a subject-related issue, also mods get to come here. Because this issues unavoidably attract the moderators' attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the Physics mods are perfectly good at their job and I wouldn't never tell them what to do, but I don't think they consider me as an intruder if I post or if a Team member decides to weigh in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T11:27:10.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-05-13T11:32:58.710" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What can we do about this? How can we prevent the physics community ressponse to certain questions being screwed up like this? How can we avoid that powerful people at superior positions in the overall SE network get a wrong picture about the needs of OUR community and in the worst case take wrong actions against users who do great contributions to physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing. If you don't want the visibility and exposure, don't post on Meta. This is a public Q&amp;amp;A site, not an exclusive country club.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1282/david-zaslavsky-moved-comments-no-good/1283#comment3075_1283&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; to the post you're citing specifically, this is not a physics-specific issue. It requires absolutely no knowledge of the subject domain. Rather, this is something that concerns the Stack Exchange engine that runs all of these sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These aren't physics-specific issues we're talking about. They're first and foremost &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;social&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; issues, and secondly, issues regarding the operation and ideology of the Stack Exchange network, on which this site operates. The fact its topic is physics is quite irrelevant to any discussion of its policies and procedures. As someone who is a diamond moderator on 2 sites, and holds upwards of 10k reputation on 2 sites, not the least of which being Meta Stack Overflow, the Q&amp;amp;A site for the Stack Exchange engine itself, I'd say that yoda is perfectly qualified to be answering this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your position appears to be that only the &quot;expert&quot; users who participate on the main site should be eligible for commenting on the meta site. In fact, I'd argue that you have that backwards. &lt;strong&gt;The &quot;experts&quot; on a meta site are those people who are experts on the Stack Exchange engine and the policies, procedures, and norms that apply across the entire network.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not sure where else you'd look for those people except for SE staff members and community moderators on other sites in the network. Objectively speaking, we're &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; the people whom you should want to weigh in on these types of discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth pointing out that the fact that experienced Stack Exchange moderators and members of the community team weighed in on this discussion does not in any way &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; regular members of the physics site from expressing their own opinions. The engine allows you to post multiple answers to a question for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the concern that someone is going to &quot;take wrong actions against users&quot; on the physics site is misplaced. The only people who have power to take these actions across the entire network are community team members, and they'll have a diamond after their user names even here. These, of course, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; &quot;powerful people at superior positions in the overall SE network&quot;, although they try not to interfere with individual communities by taking direct action except in cases where it is overtly warranted or where the elected community moderators ask them to step in. However, it is worth noting that moderators on various sites talk to one another. If a user is creating problems on &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; site in the network, then they are very likely to show up on our radar. There's nothing sinister about that; it's quite clear from all aspects of this site down to the URL itself that it is a member of the Stack Exchange network, and therefore subject to its policies, practices, and community norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip;a number of people from other SE sites (philosophy, ect) who are not in the slightest interested in physics&amp;hellip;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you specifically call out philosophy in your question, and I'm a moderator there, I can only assume that I'm one of the protagonists in your tale of abuse. Therefore, I'm not sure where and how you get the idea that I'm &quot;not in the slightest interested in physics&quot;, or even the impression that I don't know anything about physics. I haven't shared my qualifications or background with you because I don't think that's relevant. Stack Exchange doesn't have a qualification process for &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;, it has one for &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;—voting. If I were answering physics questions and my answers were wrong, you should downvote them. Likewise, If I'm answering meta questions and my answers are wrong, you should also downvote them. But let's not make assumptions about people you don't know, okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8929" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T11:40:27.610" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-05-13T15:35:30.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;there are many factual and insightful things you write, but then from time to time cringe-worthy statements I wouldn't expect from a student (&quot;you have to have rocks in your head to put people under the age of 40 in positions of power&quot;). I had a similar start like you on SE, some sites here like skeptics.se or philosophy.se don't fit at all my level of scientific skepticism and critical thinking. I left such sites instead of trying to improve them, it's pointless trying to yield my desired level on it by contributing q&amp;amp;a. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/130542&quot;&gt;I explained here &lt;/a&gt; why some proposal work and some not. The quality/level of a single site is strongly linked to the amount of experts attracted during area51 process. You can only make minor improvments to such sites by clever moderation and attracting more experts afterwards (&lt;strong&gt;e.g. theophys user don't want to participate here for the same reasons you try to improve this site&lt;/strong&gt;). The level of necessary background knowledge is just to different among user to waste here their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to have a usenet-background, I too. That is unfiltered anarchy, thats also the system most uni's run in my experience innofficially. But SE is democracy, hierarchy, filtering, ranking, sorting (&lt;strong&gt;why do you think there are no downvotes/rep for comments? To stop endless discussion and force competition and several answers. This is the most important non-feature of SE&lt;/strong&gt;), elections of poor and good mods,..... you know all this stuff that happens in democracy too. It's a imperfect system for imperfect people. But have you seen a better one for big communities? Why did you stop posting on usenet, wikipedia and joined this system. Ask and answer this yourself and I'm sure we all can save a lot meta time and useless discussion with/about you here. I already told you that your bio's (while entertaining on christianity and philosophy :D ) are not really productive for you. Also yelling for new mods on physics.se and phil.se is really naive, what do you expect. &quot;Hey our german 38 year old  vice-chancellor is  in my opinion not qualified for his job. Can we please try somebody else (I really think this)&quot;. But he was elected by the majority. Just stop this, how can a smart guy like you think this can/will work??? You're biting on granite and wasting your and our time here. Invent a better system. Contribute answers here, discuss in forums like usenet of physicsforums.com. There are physicists who don't like for mentioned reasons usenet (too much spam and crackpot-theorists), q&amp;amp;a boards (moderation, no discussion), forums (too lengthy discussions)... &lt;strong&gt;There is no perfect system that fits everybody's needs and philosophy of communication.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You look to me like on a crusade. Trying to correct all bad answers on SE sites whichs seems at a first glance admirable and worth supporting ) but also pretty naive if one knows a little bit about human and group psychology and has participated in internet discussions since a decade. &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92/is-wikipedia-authoring-here-necessary-and-allowed&quot;&gt;The problems of wikipedia authoring are well-known&lt;/a&gt;, lenghty discussions with arrogant mods, SE resolves this problem by competing answers. &lt;strong&gt;And with all your comments &amp;amp; corrections you are trying to re-introduce this wikipedia editing style here again&lt;/strong&gt;. Maybe unconsciously as you are still in your trained usenet and wikipedia modus operandi. Well, quit this, or you end like Georg. I'm sure a physics.se site with 10-20 Ron Maimons and Georg's wouldn't work (most agreed that tolerating the escapades of one Ron Maimon is ok) and would end in even worse overall level of tolerance and respect than on usenet and wikipedia due to the rep thing and real names, thats why I asked user here to think about if such bios are really helpful. You see how fast people can change their mind and ask you to calm down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made quite some meta posts on science SE sites recently. Because I would like to see open science really working and I'm interested if and how super-moderation of  autarchic communities can work, when become things uncommunicable, how can meta user and mods find common set of values, level and scope of a site (we make a similar experiment in germany currently, direct democracy with liquid feedback community software in the pirates party). SE and Quora are a important steps here. Maybe there will come even better hybrid systems. If you want to create high quality communities, you need a clever system like here (area51, voting, meta, filtering), ranting about content, bad and wrong answers here a lot is a drop in the bucket and even more in forums, usenet and wikipedia, where users like you already failed with their demands. &lt;strong&gt;I come to SE to read different views by different users, not wikipedias common denominator stuff, commenting or editing an answer towards subjective &quot;correct&quot; content here is the huge misconception you seemingly have and brought over here from your wikipedia days.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why you aren't blogging. Well I'm aware without publications, university position, PHD a physics blog doesn't attract a lot of comments/views nowadays anymore. You probably too. Without credentials only few would read Motl's blog imho. So this is probably the best place to invest your time. Nonetheless I'm still wondering why you didn't participate more in theophys.se if the quality of some answers here is so terrible? I begin to think you are trying to find out how much power your rep here gives you and the responses you get are not really surprising. May be start a Ron Maimon proposal? The SE system allows this ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T15:35:30.690" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-05-13T15:55:49.463" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the &quot;DavidZ moved comments&quot; meta post first, and was appalled by the whole drama that's been unfolding. (I'm off the Internet for a &lt;em&gt;day&lt;/em&gt; and I come back to see some drama on both meta.physics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; meta.chemistry? Wonderful.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I was slightly disturbed by your comments, telling SE members to basically get lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While physics.SE should be run by its community members, everyone has a say--including &quot;outsiders&quot;. Now, these &quot;outsiders&quot; usually don't &quot;meddle&quot; in our normal site-building decisions on meta, and it's no biggie if they do. Everyone's opinion is useful. But, when there is a general, non-physics issue--especially a serious one regarding moderator/user conduct. They probably swooped down on us because David must've asked for some guidance in the Teacher's Lounge. Or, it may be due to Ron's post on MSO(saw it a few days back, but it's deleted now). Anyway, these guys have a full right to put forth their opinions on matter of user conduct. Also, they're quite qualified to be taken seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cody Gray(The Establishment on MSO) is someone I've stumbled across on MSO quite often, and I respect his views (usually agree with him) He deals with a lot of user conduct issues on MSO(all the active users do), and has a nice approach to it. Additionally, he's a mod on Philosophy, so has some experience modding and knows what it's like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've stumbled across yoda as well--though not that often--and again, he's(she?) of the same sort. Plus he's a double mod and ought to have enough experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my question is: What can we do about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing. Neither &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; we do anything about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we prevent the physics community ressponse to certain questions being screwed up like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not being &quot;screwed up&quot;. User conduct is a seperate issue from the &quot;needs of the community&quot;. While I do agree that some issues are dealt with differently here, we still need to have the same rough rules as an SE site. Long time SE users like Cody and yoda know this and haven't gotten nitpicky--they've stuck to the rules that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; SE sites abide to while advising in their posts/comments/whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we avoid that powerful people at superior positions in the overall SE network get a wrong picture about the needs of OUR community and in the worst case take wrong actions against users who do great contributions to physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, they can't take any action. Except for Shog9, and he would probably consult our mods first. The others are in a purely advisory capacity, and have zero powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the community thingy, see the above snippet. Our needs aren't too different from the rest of the sites. Also, these posts had nothing to do with the needs of our community, rather they were discussing user conduct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T15:55:49.463" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-05-13T18:13:20.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no mod experiance and if you take a peek at most of my post I tend to be wrong but being wrong and intentionally trying to mislead someone are two seperate issues. I can be wrong all day I can even copy and past true information in a way that makes it seem correct but it is actually not again mostly intent if you do it on purpose a mod has to &quot;step in&quot; that is there job. Do determined malice and intentionally misleading information the mod does not &quot;care&quot; who says the information weither it be a mod or someone higher up on the food chain. It is a good policy not to single out individuals except in extreme cases. I often mis-state correct information and the response is not drastic all you need is downvote the answer and make an Answerer of your own. Every step David has taken since I have been a member seems slightly reserved that is he does not jump straight to throwing the book at someone he gives benifit of the doubt and usually gets input from experianced &quot;rule enforcing&quot; SE Members we are part of a larger community this is a team of SE sites working toward a common goal equality in spreading our &quot;opinion&quot; as long as our opinion is not stated as FACT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T18:13:20.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-14T06:00:34.583" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My last two revisions on the posting &quot;Is the Graveyard really so Serious?&quot; at [physics.stackexchange.com/Questions] has not figured in the TOP questions list to be accessed through the link: physics.stackexchange.com. One is 3 hours old and the other is about 10/12 minutes old. Five hour hold revisions/postings of other posters are there. I have reloaded/refreshed the page several times .But this is not showing results------the revised posting/question has not shown up amongst the top questions. Is there some serious problem with the software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had sent an email at team+physics@stakexchange.com, informing them of the situation that the revised posting did not appear in the TOP question's list. The answer came:Ahh. Chances are you're just seeing a lag in the cache updating. It happens, and it can appear slow. Sometimes a refresh is all that is needed, sometimes it takes a bit more. I assure you, sir, that what you saw was likely perfectly normal.&#xA;However, should you spot it again, please take note and report it to us again. Repeated issues may well be a bug lurking in our midst!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, thank you for your diligence. It is users like you who help us keep the Stack Exchange Network working at full steam. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&#xA;Warmest regards,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;That was 14th May 10:54 AM,Indian standard time.Later on further queries I was informed by email that low sore questions are not shown.That was 15 May,11:51&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6129" LastEditorUserId="6129" LastEditDate="2012-05-16T11:52:06.697" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Is it a Software Problem'?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1299" CreationDate="2012-05-14T13:06:51.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the question currently has a net score below -3 it will not appear on the  front page (&lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchage.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://physics.stackexchage.com/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find an authoritative source just now, but this is alluded to in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/62769/2509&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/62769/2509&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-05-14T13:06:51.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-16T18:16:40.420" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had posted on question to TP:SE, and the question was merged, but I don't seem to have the additional reputation points added (admittedly a small number).  My only evidence of missing the reputation is that I knew I was at a certain rep value for a long time because I was relatively inactive, and that value has only changed with one upvote (very recently).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, the question is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27193/consideration-of-static-atomic-displacements-in-electronic-structure-calculation&quot;&gt;Consideration of static atomic displacements in electronic structure calculations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My account was correctly associated between the two sites (as evidenced by the fact that I was properly associated with the question when it was merged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-19T01:49:52.153" Title="Reputation missing from TP merge?" Tags="|support|reputation|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1303" CreationDate="2012-05-16T18:45:07.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can see a complete history of your reputation on your profile, using the &quot;reputation&quot; tab. In particular, if you look &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2433/jen?tab=reputation&amp;amp;StartDate=2011-12-23&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, you will see all eight upvotes on that question explicitly accounted for. Now, if you know your pre-merge reputation and you're certain that it's the same as your post-merge reputation, I can't account for that. You could, in principle, go through the entire list on the reputation tab and verify that every vote you've received is accounted for there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T18:45:07.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1222" CreationDate="2012-05-17T04:56:12.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My only hesitation on physics&amp;amp;astronomy is that &quot;Physics&quot; includes many subsets much larger than &quot;astronomy&quot; and putting it in the title sort of gives it a large weight in proportion to its phase space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit after comment: what about &lt;strong&gt;Physics&amp;amp;Astro&lt;/strong&gt; which would include astrophysics and astronomy in the code, and bring to mind &quot;ad astris&quot; :). Also the &quot;eye impression&quot; phase space is more proportional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit2 after @Holowitz  What about like the PHYSICSmeta, have the log as PHYSICSfromAtoZ, with fromAtoZ in smaller fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2012-05-17T12:43:45.457" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T12:43:45.457" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1308" CreationDate="2012-05-20T18:34:47.493" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any condensed info on site usage, bulk statistics on new questions/votes/comments/users over time just like on a user page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4760" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T20:46:50.827" Title="site usage, bulk statistics on new questions/votes/comments/users over time" Tags="|feature-request|site-enhancement|site-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1307" CreationDate="2012-05-20T19:12:01.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is in the moderator tools. It is not made public on a on-going basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd have to do a little reading to recall what the policy on answering analytics questions is, but if there is something specific you're interested in knowing it would help if you would say what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should say that you can do a lot of your own analysis with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-dump-sep-11/&quot;&gt;the data dumps&lt;/a&gt; and/or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data explorer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T20:46:50.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T20:46:50.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-20T19:24:16.873" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28633/how-do-we-recognize-hardware-used-in-accelerator-physics&quot;&gt;How do we recognize hardware used in accelerator physics&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;has been closed. It is true, that no answer in closed form can be given. -but I still feel that it is a interesting question, and I was really looking forward to see some answers. -so sad...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5844" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T20:30:16.767" Title="Why is weak questions not allowed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2012-05-20T19:26:44.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a make-a-list question and is ill-suited to the question and answer format of Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I should have chosen &quot;Not constructive&quot; as the close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is not a good fit to our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;is a Stack Exchange wide policy&lt;/a&gt; and is encoded in the FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;section entitled &quot;What kind of questions should I not ask here?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;avoid asking subjective questions where [...] every answer is equally valid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T20:30:16.767" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-21T02:02:30.923" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In accepting an answer for a question, I just ended up pressing the &quot;accept&quot; button several times in a row as I didn't detect an obvious change in color. Admittedly I was doing other things at the time on other web pages, but I think this would be easier to use if the button would change to a new color more different from the previous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the marking as it stands:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pFcCq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of marking that will be obvious even to old people like me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KrLa9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T02:04:03.013" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T02:04:03.013" Title="accepted answer indication" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1313" CreationDate="2012-05-21T18:03:54.380" Score="0" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27973/newtons-law-of-gravitation-gauss-law-and-gr&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I made a quick comment that there is an analog of &quot;Gauss's law&quot; for GR at large distances, that it is called the definition of the &quot;Hawking mass&quot;. Further, I commented that it is not reasonable to expect Gauss's law to work in general, because the group is not commutative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I went back to turn this comment into an answer. I suspect David erased it. How am I supposed to know what else is being erased without me knowing about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the explanation for the missing comment? Somebody deleted it, and I don't think it was me. I wanted to have it as notes for a future answer, and now the future is here, and it's gone (although I remember what it said).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T19:06:29.533" Title="Has David (or someone else) been deleting my comments without warning?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1312" CreationDate="2012-05-21T18:14:53.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browsing the recent [1] history of moderation actions I don't find &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; action on that post at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possibly you're looking at the wrong post? Or could the comments been deleted quite some time ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I don't seem to have a full list, but it goes back at least to the beginning of May for the most active moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following Fabian's helpful comment, I have found deleted comments. Not sure how I missed them before and now I have to go idiot check myself. Your comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+1: This is a good question, the &quot;Gauss law&quot; of GR is often presented in the Weak field limit as the definition of the &quot;Hawking mass&quot; of a gravitating system. I am not sure about the inverse-square law, didn't check. Is there a link to the full unpublished paper? If you are looking for an &quot;integral form&quot; of Einstein's equations, it will be generally impossible, because even the nonabelian gauge field equation doesn't allow an integral form because of the non-abelian group is not commutative, so you don't get additive stuff over a big surface. This is a bit of a block to some geometrical ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T19:06:29.533" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T19:06:29.533" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-05-24T07:36:15.240" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mathematica.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d64R1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mathematica at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="5874" LastEditDate="2012-07-18T20:01:56.377" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T20:01:56.377" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-24T07:36:15.240" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-25T17:55:10.620" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this may seem like an odd suggestion, but over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Biblical Hermeneutic.SE&lt;/a&gt; we are running a &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/331/68&quot;&gt;challenge&lt;/a&gt; to ask new questions about astronomy in the Bible.  Like many &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Near_East&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient Near East&lt;/a&gt; cultures, the Hebrews were fascinated with the movement of planets and watched the stars for signs of great import such as supernova and comets.  This interest in the sky carried over to the early Christians who used astronomical phenomena as symbols and signs of what they believed would soon happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get an idea of the sort of questions we are looking for (and to see if you can provide answers to help us understand the Bible) take a look at the questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;.  We are generally open to all sorts of interpretations, but we do take the idea of understanding what the Bible means seriously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do you have any questions about the Bible and/or have any answers for the questions we've already raised?  If so, come on over!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:47.217" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T17:55:10.620" Title="Invitation to ask/answer astronomy-related Bible questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-07-21T21:05:43.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1318" CreationDate="2012-05-28T17:47:50.483" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have recently recieved a few rejections to proposed edits that i think are exactly the same &quot;value&quot; as other proposals with exactly the same amount and type of suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a peer review process planned or being discussed or already rejected for these situations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the sheer amount of edit reviews that need to be looked over are overwhelming. Is there a way to spread this burden out amoung the community or perhaps a post-review process for specific proposals that are in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T21:23:49.860" Title="Add the ability to have rejected &quot;edit proposals&quot; reviewed independantly or by vote" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1361" CreationDate="2012-05-28T22:51:42.920" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;my browser keeps saying there is an error displaying the webpage and it puts it into compatibility mode. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once in compatibility mode my entire control area ie login chat main about faq all dissapear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something I can do to fix this problem i am useing IE 8 with WinXP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T18:08:16.013" Title="Browser Forced into compatibilty mode" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1316" CreationDate="2012-05-28T23:11:59.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way to spread this burden out among the community or perhaps a post-review process for specific proposals that are in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewing edits is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;a power enabled for all users with at least 2000 reputation&lt;/a&gt;. Currently that is &lt;s&gt;15&lt;/s&gt; more than 160 users on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus any team members who drop by and decide to put in a little work on our site in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T21:23:49.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-30T00:18:09.973" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1117/the-color-difference-between-the-answered-checkmark-and-the-unanswered-one-i&quot;&gt;The color difference between the &amp;ldquo;answered&amp;rdquo; checkmark and the &amp;ldquo;unanswered&amp;rdquo; one is barely discernable&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's virtually impossible (at least on my LCD laptop screen) to tell the difference between an &quot;accepted&quot; checkmark and an &quot;unaccepted&quot; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6835" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T00:18:09.973" Title="&quot;Accept&quot; contrast draws a vacuum" Tags="|bug|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-05-30T00:34:46.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-30T14:24:43.597" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I opened &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2293/7441&quot;&gt;a question on this topic on meta.photography.se&lt;/a&gt; so that the proposed recipients can weight in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:03.183" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T14:24:43.597" Title="On possibily migrating astrophotography questions from Physics.SE to Photography.SE" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1323" CreationDate="2012-06-02T02:20:58.780" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am retagging the salvaged posts. I may not have the know how to edit the meat of the questions but I give it my best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just stop before I reach my denial limit and lose the ability altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2012-06-02T04:38:30.477" Title="Should I stop trying to retagg the salvaged posts?" Tags="|discussion|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1322" CreationDate="2012-06-02T04:38:30.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Denial limit? You mean the edit ban? Well, you could stop editing, but then you'd be imposing an edit ban on yourself... all in all, I don't see any reason for you to stop editing unless you want to. Editing is optional, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-02T04:38:30.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1326" CreationDate="2012-06-05T01:28:56.323" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In our comments and Answers Should we assume a proper level of safety precautions being taken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" OwnerDisplayName="Argus" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T02:02:07.370" Title="Assumed level of safety on the Home Experiment Tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1324" CreationDate="2012-06-05T01:38:21.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to keep in mind my own mixture competence and insane lack of regard for personal safety around my fourteenth birthday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically I look for work that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be done safely in a home environment and I try to specify what safety gear you should wear and/or have on hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T01:38:21.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1324" CreationDate="2012-06-05T02:02:07.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not our job to explain safety precautions to people, if that's what you're wondering. The answers here, when they describe experiments, are meant to be read as &quot;this is basically how X might be done&quot; rather than &quot;here is how to do X&quot; - in other words, we're just conveying knowledge about what is involved in running a particular experiment, not providing instructions on how to actually do it. If someone wants to carry out an experiment described in an answer, it's their responsibility to do whatever additional research is necessary to find or develop a proper set of instructions, including safety precautions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As sort of a corollary to that, if someone asks whether some particular procedure or effect is safe, or about how to do something safely, it's off topic for the site. We can answer questions about the effects of a certain amount of a physical phenomenon, though. For example, &quot;What are the effects of running current through a human body?&quot; is a fine question, but &quot;How much current can safely run through a human body?&quot; is not. If someone asks in a comment whether something is safe or not, it's best to either not answer, or just say you can't address that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T02:02:07.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1328" CreationDate="2012-06-05T10:10:24.707" Score="-2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this has been asked before (or possibly in other SEs), but a quick search didn't turn up anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14182/8563&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/3309/8563&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; are questions that ask about, roughly, what recent developments mean in the grand scheme, or about what the state of the art is in some particular problem. Following on that line, I feel it could be productive add the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/state-of-the-art&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;state-of-the-art&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;state-of-the-art&lt;/a&gt; to questions asking things like &quot;what's the best current ...&quot;, to put a marker on questions that will probably use a number of improved answers as time progresses and more physics is developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people's thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T18:34:29.237" Title="State-of-the-art tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1327" CreationDate="2012-06-05T18:34:29.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not be in favor of this. It is the nature of a Stack Exchange site that all questions are open to improved answers as time progresses. Besides, this tag sounds like a &quot;meta tag,&quot; meaning that it doesn't really classify the content of the question, and we try to keep such tags to a minimum. There are a few that have become established through usage or necessity, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;, but we should carefully consider the benefits before introducing new ones, and I just don't think this tag would do enough to justify its existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T18:34:29.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1331" CreationDate="2012-06-06T10:09:52.050" Score="3" ViewCount="8935" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally it is enough just to write &lt;code&gt;\dag&lt;/code&gt;, i.e. as in &lt;code&gt;A^{\dag}&lt;/code&gt;, but it doesn't work here:&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$A^{\dag}.$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8784" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T15:39:29.500" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T15:39:29.500" Title="Problem with the MathJax rendering of the Hermitian adjoint of an operator $\dagger$ when written as \dag" Tags="|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1329" CreationDate="2012-06-06T16:40:35.087" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all LaTeX commands are supported. We use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for LaTeX rendering, and the list of macros that are implemented is given on their website. In this case you can use &lt;code&gt;\dagger&lt;/code&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T16:40:35.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1329" CreationDate="2012-06-07T09:43:06.743" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you type &lt;code&gt;$\newcommand\dag\dagger$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\newcommand\dag\dagger$&lt;/span&gt; at the beginning of your post, you can type &lt;code&gt;$$a^\dag$$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$a^\dag$$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;code&gt;$$b^\dag$$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$b^\dag$$&lt;/span&gt; later. It will work as expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually use &lt;code&gt;$\newcommand\ket[1]{\left| #1 \right&amp;gt;}$&lt;/code&gt; quite often in quantum physics related posts, so I can confirm it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373" LastEditorUserId="373" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T18:50:58.093" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T18:50:58.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-06-09T05:14:00.157" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3eT2R.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chemistry - Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T10:20:12.040" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-06-09T05:14:00.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-11T23:46:48.927" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parts of the user account pages on physics.SE are &quot;out of alignment&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2qzA6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This effect appears to me on accounts other than my own, too, but only here on physics.SE (account pages on math.SE, for example, look fine). I'm using Chrome 19.0.1084.52 on Windows 7 64-bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same problem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1905/2285&quot;&gt;now being reported on SciFi.SE, IT Security.SE, and Bicycles.SE&lt;/a&gt;. I also see it on Electronics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:23.347" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T15:22:22.070" Title="User account pages seem to be slightly broken" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1337" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-06-11T23:57:16.323" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-06-11T23:57:16.323" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T23:57:16.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1338" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-06-11T23:57:16.323" Score="0" Body="Feedback relating to the appearance of the site." OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-06-11T23:57:16.323" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T23:57:16.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-06-13T04:32:41.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Theoretical Physics imports: 1 of 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Theoretical Physics. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 3 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Finished !&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2012-12-28T11:27:36.927" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T11:27:36.927" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-06-13T04:33:13.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Theoretical Physics imports: 2 of 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Theoretical Physics. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 3 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Finished !&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-01-17T12:28:33.317" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T12:28:33.317" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-06-13T04:33:46.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Theoretical Physics imports: 3 of 3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts were migrated here from Theoretical Physics. The original tags are listed below each link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Split among 3 answers due to length&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Finished !&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-02-08T12:34:22.353" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T12:34:22.353" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-09T06:01:51.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1028" CreationDate="2012-06-13T04:37:56.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since our chat room has been named &quot;The Coupling&quot; for a little while, I'm adding that as an option. Vote away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-13T04:37:56.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1344" CreationDate="2012-06-13T04:41:41.393" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to set up a regular series of chat sessions, to allow us to discuss events on the site or in the world of physics, and to boost our community spirit. Or something like that. Anyway, what time works for people? Please upvote any times that work for you, downvote any that don't, and if nothing works, post a suggestion as a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; in case you're too lazy to scroll down (I'm not judging!): the suggestion seems to have enough support, so we will be starting regular biweekly chat sessions &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; Tuesday, July 3, at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20120626T17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;4 PM UTC&lt;/a&gt;. It's now listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;chat room's schedule&lt;/a&gt;. If you're going to be there, feel free to click the link and register!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-06-30T05:05:56.650" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T05:05:56.650" Title="When should we have regular chat sessions?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1343" CreationDate="2012-06-13T04:43:59.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: 4-5 PM UTC on Tuesdays (noon-1 PM EDT). Upvote if this works for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-06-30T05:04:54.653" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T05:04:54.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1348" CreationDate="2012-06-16T22:51:24.003" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add the tag category theory or cateogorical quantum mechanics or something like categorical physics.  How can I ask to have this tag added?  There is a huge group at Oxford, there's Isham and Doering, and so many others.  We should add a tag so that we can just post to the general idea of using category theory in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6441" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T23:16:41.123" Title="How do we add a tag or vote for a new tag" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1347" CreationDate="2012-06-16T23:01:16.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;at least 300 reputation&lt;/a&gt;, you can just add the tag to any questions that should have it. There's an &quot;edit tags&quot; link that will appear (I think) if you hover your mouse just to the right of the existing tags, or you can just use the regular &quot;edit&quot; link if you have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T23:16:41.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1028" CreationDate="2012-06-19T08:38:55.323" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I add your excellent suggestion &amp;quot;the h-bar&amp;quot;, so that people can vote for it :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;　&lt;strong&gt;ℏ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T08:38:55.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-20T17:45:50.973" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd really like to fix a typo in this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/30433/2963&quot;&gt;Do we see color with higher frequency first?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for some reason only the 'link' and 'flag' options are visible to me (no 'edit' or 'retag'). I've looked around the SO faq a bit, but nothing jumped out at me as to why this is the case, can anyone explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2963" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What determines if a post is editable?" Tags="|support|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1353" CreationDate="2012-06-20T21:55:42.990" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126470/what-does-user-was-removed-mean-and-why-did-my-reputation-change-because-of-it&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;user was removed&amp;quot; mean and why did my reputation change because of it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I determine what user was removed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there a way to have the related up/down-votes listed to see what questions comments were effected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T22:19:09.253" Title="user removed, rep change" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1352" CreationDate="2012-06-20T22:19:09.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't -- one of the most fundamental rules of SE is that voting is confidential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can only see when and from what posts you gain/lose reputation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/9082/argus?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;in your profile&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T22:19:09.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-24T13:33:18.527" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be useful, I think, if comments that are directed &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; me could turn up in the RSS feed that is associated with my user page, because then my RSS reader would notify me that there is a comment on SE. Comments &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; me are there already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, is there already a way to be notified by SE of incoming comments (other than by e-mail every three hours or daily, which I don't want to do)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1588" LastActivityDate="2012-06-24T13:33:18.527" Title="Can the &quot;user&quot; RSS feed include comments that respond to that user?" Tags="|feature-request|rss|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-26T14:24:32.173" Score="10" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relatively frequently on this site there are questions of the general form &quot;How do I learn X knowing Y&quot; (X being things like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30670/study-quantum-mechanics-without-physics-background&quot; title=&quot;Quantum Mechanics&quot;&gt;Quantum Mechanics&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28573/where-do-i-start-with-non-euclidean-geometry?rq=1&quot;&gt;General Relativity&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16119/which-subjects-in-physics-should-i-choose-if-i-want-to-help-tackling-todays-ene?rq=1&quot;&gt;etc&lt;/a&gt; and Y being things like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27700/quantum-field-theory-from-a-mathematical-point-of-view&quot;&gt;lots of math&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30731/what-would-be-the-requirement-to-learn-matrix-mechanics&quot;&gt;no math&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20641/book-for-learning-about-constructing-correct-physical-modeling&quot;&gt;some physics&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; &quot;no physics,&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9935/should-i-begin-to-study-quantum-mechanics-or-wait-until-i-have-a-stronger-base-o?rq=1&quot;&gt;etc&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally don't like this questions since they go against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;principle&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these questions do have some value. Perhaps a community wiki tag would work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3018" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T04:00:50.620" Title="&quot;How do I learn X knowing Y&quot; and other user specific type questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1355" CreationDate="2012-06-27T04:00:50.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On one hand, these questions aren't about specific physics concepts, so I agree with you that having a large enough proportion of these questions does diminish the usefulness of the site. On the other hand, the questions themselves are useful to the people asking them, and perhaps to others who come along later. And they're not as chatty and open-ended as some other questions that show up from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me say just this: community wikification does not give a question license to be inappropriate anymore. Either a question is on topic and constructive, or it isn't. (Having a certain tag also doesn't make a question appropriate when it otherwise wouldn't be.) And in fact, we don't actually make questions CW anymore, except for the rare &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; case where a question's content is actually going to be &quot;community owned&quot; (whatever that means).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning these questions, I'm not really sure what to do. As long as they come in small enough numbers that they're not significantly displacing more substantive conceptual questions, I don't really have a problem with them in general. But we can always decide to close on a case-by-case basis, and perhaps have stricter standards for what sorts of &quot;learn X knowing Y&quot; questions are acceptable than for other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, if you think a question is off topic, vote to close it and/or flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T04:00:50.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1358" CreationDate="2012-06-27T22:32:18.603" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I am a huge fan of stackexchange for some types of questions (ie: computer programming, Mathematica, latex), I still go to physicsforums.com for physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the volume of questions and answers on this physics stackexchange site compare to that of physicsforums.com?  Is this site attracting enough of a following that people are &quot;defecting&quot; from physicsforums?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3621" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T22:41:51.110" Title="How does the volume of questions and answers on this site compare to physicsforums.com?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1357" CreationDate="2012-06-27T22:41:51.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a rough estimate, it seems like Physics Forums gets about 500 threads per day, although not all of those are physics questions. On this site we get around 20 questions a day, or perhaps a few more. So I'd say PF has roughly 20 times the meaningful traffic that we do. However, it's worth keeping in mind that most of the questions there are simplistic homework questions of the sort that we generally discourage here. If you wonder about the figure of how many questions are asked at PF that we would like to have asked here, I'm sure it's significantly less than 20 times this site's activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether people are &quot;defecting&quot; from PF to come here, but there's really no reason they need to - nothing stops someone from contributing to more than one Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T22:41:51.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-29T09:18:35.507" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to change my avatar picture into something nicer, but I did not succeed because this Gravatar thing is so annoying (I could not create an account/log in applying my usual login data, word press told me my user name is not available, etc ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could physics SE do something to simplify the procedure? I mean such that one can just upload a picture from the local desktop to replace the default Gravatar picture that was dished out to a new user as he first registered to physics SE? &#xA;It would be nice if there were a simplified alternative to using Gravatar in order to creat/change the avatar picture without need to register somewhere else ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T09:57:51.117" Title="Simplified method to change the avatar picture?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2012-06-29T09:57:51.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there's nothing we can do. The avatars are provided by Gravatar, which is a separate site that has no connection at all to Stack Exchange. Any problems you may have relating to changing your avatar, you'll have to take up with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Gravatar is the simplified alternative to SE managing the profile pictures itself, not the other way around. All you need to do is provide your email address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T09:57:51.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1317" CreationDate="2012-07-01T18:08:16.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To Stop compatibility view from recovering from page layout errors the Solution is simple.(although it took me awhile to figure out were the option was)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open &quot;Tools&quot; menu then go to &quot;Internet Options&quot;. Under the &quot;Advanced setting&quot; tab scroll down to The &quot;Browsing&quot; Section and Uncheck the option &quot;Automatically Recover From page layout errors with Combatibility View&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will not fix the layout incompatibilty with IE proprietary browsing visualization but there will be no unwanted loss of your individual Menu Items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T18:08:16.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-04T01:41:20.087" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current procedure for a closed as exact duplicate automatically insert the link to the question in duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This link is denoted as &quot;Possible Duplicate&quot; should this say &quot;Exact Duplicate&quot; as the question was peer reviewed and the decision to close was reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9082" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T16:07:39.377" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T16:07:39.377" Title="Exact duplicate (closed) questions and automatic link insertion" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|exact-duplicates|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-04T12:13:58.163" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to be able to see a display such as computer screen or mobile phone display in sunlight. This question is more about engineering so have to refine this somehow. It consists of novel ideas such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[?]&lt;/strong&gt; get a display that I can use in sun -light &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[optics, mechanics, other?]&lt;/strong&gt; develop glasses that helps to see in sunglight (no need to modify then displays). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[optics]&lt;/strong&gt; develop hat that blocks sun-light and somehow helps to see colors better&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[nano-technology, other?]&lt;/strong&gt; perhaps some nano-processed material that absorb certain frequency better?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[aberraction, reflection, optics, other?]&lt;/strong&gt; have the display in your glasses but reflection/aberration/etc problem still&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;other ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are hacks such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000FX4Z44&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but I would like to find a better solution. I am not sure whether it exist. How can I break this issue into parts to make it more appropriate to Physics.SE? Please, add fields in brackets to which the ideas may be related, thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="623" LastEditorUserId="623" LastEditDate="2012-07-04T12:22:31.027" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T12:22:31.027" Title="&quot;Develop method by which to see electronic display in sun-light&quot;, help me to make this engineering question into physics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1365" CreationDate="2012-07-05T09:27:27.443" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to ask about definition (explanation) of the word &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;bias&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. But I am wondering if it is a right question for Physic forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; describing what type of questions should be asked here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Explanations of observed physical or astronomical phenomena&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Why does one experience a short pull in the wrong direction when a vehicle stops?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experimental designs and results&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What is needed to claim the discovery of the Higgs boson ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;How to stabilize an unstable telescope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accepted and/or actively researched theories&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Why do we think there are only three generations of fundamental particles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mathematics and physics&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Number theory in physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, my question does not belong to any of these categories. So maybe I should rather ask at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; section since I am going to ask about a definition of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However what I seek is more like &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;practical example in physic for better understanding of the word.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which section is more suitable for such questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T22:33:13.610" Title="Are questions about practical definition allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1364" CreationDate="2012-07-05T10:55:09.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless your question is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; specific (which it probably isn't), try the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, yes, EL&amp;amp;U would be a better place to ask about a definition of such a general term - but they would expect you to check a dictionary and encyclopedia first, and to explain why the information you find there doesn't answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T10:55:09.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-05T14:04:10.413" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the feeling that there's been a marked increase in new questions, particularly about the Higgs - no surprise there - but also on other topics, which may be associated with an influx of people coming here to ask Higgs questions and sticking around for at least some more while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then again, maybe I'm imagining things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd therefore like to ask the people with access to that kind of statistics - is it real? if so, then maybe it's a good time to use this as a community to make a concerted effort at making sure as many newcomers as possible stick around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-12-12T09:13:46.107" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T09:13:46.107" Title="Did site activity grow noticeably as of summer 2012?" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1366" CreationDate="2012-07-05T14:08:26.537" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're actually just seeing a bunch of Higgs questions in the last 12 hours or so, not really much earlier than that. In any case, up to yesterday, the site's activity has been nearly constant (perhaps very &lt;em&gt;slowly&lt;/em&gt; growing) for quite a while. So no, the statistics don't reflect such a period of growth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T14:08:26.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1366" CreationDate="2012-07-05T14:37:35.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our pageviews are not significantly up suggesting that this is a transient phenomena associated with the CMS and Atlas announcements, but it could bring in more regular viewers. Only time will tell because right now we don't really have enough statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T14:37:35.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1364" CreationDate="2012-07-05T22:33:13.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bias&quot; is a funny word. There is an everyday meaning. There is a technical meaning in statistics. And there is a technical meaning in some areas of physics. There might be other fields that use the word, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning it has in physics relates to an underlying physical phenomenon, so I would expect that to be on topic here. The statistics meaning is completely different, but is sometimes used in physics. There is an important statistics concept underlying it, so it might be on topic there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T22:33:13.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1371" CreationDate="2012-07-06T07:17:00.410" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted this question because I thought its irrelevant: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31434/why-did-standard-model-never-sense-a-requirement-to-include-gravitational-quantu&quot;&gt;Why did Standard Model never sense a requirement to include gravitational quantum?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1492/anna-v&quot;&gt;someone&lt;/a&gt; from community told me that its reasonable. So, I want to undelete it. Unfortunately, I am unable to see it as I don't have 10k reputation.. so no luck in getting to undelete link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please undelete it if you have its permission?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2170" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T06:34:40.383" Title="Please undelete this question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1370" CreationDate="2012-07-06T16:16:27.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, I undeleted it. .................&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T16:16:27.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-06T19:27:40.983" Score="4" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pretty obvious when someone upvotes your question or answer they like it and the physics is reasonable or correct - but when someone downvotes its often ambiguous if they have a legitimate concern about the physics, or perhaps you just didn't answer their original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anyway we could requite someone to write a short explanation if they downvote? Perhaps anonymously if they wish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example sometimes if you are getting upvotes and downvotes on a single answer, its very unclear what the real response it got from the community - do people like it overall and there are a few other un-informed downvoters? Or visa-versa ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A huge part of physics (and science, art in general) is getting feedback and I for one would like to see something like this in place, or try something like it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8609" LastEditorUserId="8609" LastEditDate="2012-07-10T00:52:48.743" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T00:52:48.743" Title="Is there anyway we can require a person to write something to explain a downvote?" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-07T06:59:33.173" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-the-soft-question-tag-for&quot;&gt;What is the [soft-question] tag for?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen &quot;soft-question&quot; tag on main site. I want to know its purpose. And, why is it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2170" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-07-07T06:59:33.173" Title="When should I use &quot;soft-question&quot; tag?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-07-09T03:46:57.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-07T08:17:49.830" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question and later found a comment related to my question in another post, so I'd like to invite the comment-maker to say more in my post. So if I @ that user, will he/she be notified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6848" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T20:52:16.883" Title="If I @ a user not in the post, will that user be notified?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1372" CreationDate="2012-07-09T21:42:18.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read through a few of the threads that @dmckee linked to, and I'm happy to see that what makes sense to me seems to be the consensus. I only recently earned enough rep to even cast downvotes, so I only have a few downvotes (including the one that spawned this question). So while I agree with the reasons given for not requiring that a comment accompany a downvote, I think it is often good policy to include a comment explaining what is wrong with an answer. My primary concern is whether that comment will help make the answer better. If it will, then I'll leave it. If there doesn't appear to be any way to salvage the answer, I will simply cast the downvote with no comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2012-07-09T21:42:18.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1384" CreationDate="2012-07-10T16:37:42.397" Score="39" ViewCount="5679" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tZCJj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What violation caused this suspension? May I know the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10048" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What violation caused this suspension?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2012-09-17T17:51:47.463" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-07-10T17:22:10.220" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you may not. At least not from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a matter of privacy for the affected person. The suspended account-holder was contacted by email and by notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The affected individual can bring the matter up on meta after the suspension expires or they may contact the team directly and they will investigate what the moderation team has done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T17:22:10.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-07-10T19:20:13.333" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a ridiculous suspension--- it was to do with the back and forth between me and Sachin Shekhar over the last two days, where the other fellow said some insulting things (like &quot;you don't know anything!&quot; &quot;Who the heck are you&quot; blah blah) and I responded to try to get him to answer questions properly and not troll. I never insulted him, but I did say he was factually wrong here and there a few times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then both me and this trolling user were suspended for 24hrs. I imagine it was an issue of symmetry, why suspend one party be suspended and not the other? But I don't think a single comment of mine was inappropriate, although perhaps a few of the other guy's were (but they didn't bother me, and I would prefer if there was no administrative action against him). I renounce any privacy to anything--- what could possibly be private here? All the comments are up for all to see (none have been deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the email I got from dmckee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your Physics - Stack Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This account has been involved in several extended and acrimonious discussions in the comments recently. It seem that the style of interaction you employ in the comments invites conflict; often through sly implications that the other party is too stupid of ignorant to bother with. I am treating this as a violation of the &quot;Be nice&quot; injunction in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am issuing a one day suspension so that all parties to the most recent instance can cool down, and will be removing many comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards,&#xA;dmckee&#xA;Physics - Stack Exchange moderator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a comment to the above, I never make any implication, neither sly nor direct, that the party is too ignorant to bother with--- that would only be the case if I didn't say anything at all. I just wanted to make sure that Shekhar knew that people here don't just put up random gibberish, but they read and &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; what they write, and they are careful, and I asked him to do the same. I don't think I made any comment at all that disparaged him, beyond saying &quot;what you wrote in these answer is wrong, please fix it or delete the answer&quot;. I told him that he is capable to contributing honestly, and urged him to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T19:20:13.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1374" CreationDate="2012-07-10T20:52:16.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to make a &quot;Hey @poster&quot; comment on a post they've been on; just reply directly to their comment. you can't &quot;ping&quot; people that are have never touched a question (because it would be annoying and lead to lots of false positives if you were to &quot;@John&quot; and notify all Johns on the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, @user never works in questions/answers, only comments. Questions/answers aren't directed at specific users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6973" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T20:52:16.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-07-11T03:52:25.077" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ron's answers are always interesting. A bit of ego and edge makes science more fun. The suspension was unjust. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9162" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T03:52:25.077" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-12T04:13:55.877" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24817/a-quick-method-for-separating-liquids&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was asked recently. @dmckee and I both noted that it might work on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chem.SE&lt;/a&gt; as well as here. I then stared reading through the physical-chemistry tag, found a few questions, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24817/a-quick-method-for-separating-liquids&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which were (appropriately) closed as off topic. So I'm wondering, is there a good way to port these over there? I can't find a flag that I can use. Is there a good way to ping the user who asked the question? Is it acceptable for me to simply copy the question and ask it at Chem.SE if I understand it well enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T05:23:21.380" Title="How do I flag questions to move them to Chem.SE?" Tags="|feature-request|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1382" CreationDate="2012-07-12T04:43:12.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general way to get a question migrated is to flag for moderator attention or bring it up on meta. Migration is subject to some customary limits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We won't migrate without approval of the mods on the remove site unless we know that site very well. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a beta site we also rarely migrate open questions without the positive say-so of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coping a closed question to a better site is not a problem, but migration is better insofar as it leaves a trail of breadcrumbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of 24817, I'll ask the Chem mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the Chem mod says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just a note, we don't exactly include chemE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but still accepted it for migration. Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-07-12T05:23:21.380" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T05:23:21.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-07-12T17:30:19.143" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I've read quite a bit of speculation and misinformation in the comments here, and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139349/why-are-there-drastic-moderator-actions-that-take-effect-immediately-when-execut&quot;&gt;Dilaton's MSO thread&lt;/a&gt;, so please allow me to set the record straight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We try hard to avoid discussing suspensions publicly. The intention is to remove a member from the site &lt;em&gt;temporarily&lt;/em&gt; to give them and the moderators time to correct whatever behavior was causing problems. Nothing good comes of attaching a permanent stigma to someone for what might well have been a fleeting problem. As dmckee notes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1376/what-violation-caused-this-suspension/1377#1377&quot;&gt;moderators are instructed not to reveal the details of the suspension publicly&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that moderators don't have a &amp;quot;ban&amp;quot; button. All suspensions are temporary, and can be for as little as a day. When you do happen upon a suspended user, it's probably worth your time to click the link provided and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;read the rationale for having a suspension feature at all&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When users exhibit a pattern of either …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;No effort to learn and improve over time&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...&lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt;...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Disruptive behavior&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… these problem behaviors have to be dealt with. When they aren’t, it&#xA;takes up excessive moderator time that could be used for something&#xA;more productive — and, even worse, these behaviors begin to actively&#xA;turn people away from our community, stunting its growth and harming&#xA;everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not about public humiliation, it's not about driving folks from our midst. It's the exact opposite: a last-ditch effort to put a stop to poisonous, disruptive behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We - the moderators, and the staff of Stack Exchange Inc. - take suspension pretty seriously. All site moderators are copied on the private messages sent to or from suspended users, as are those of us on the Community team at SE. If a suspension is unwarranted, any of us can and will step in to lift it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a reminder: don't feed trolls. If you encounter someone who is obviously uninterested in learning, repeatedly posting answers or comments simply to push an agenda or get a rise out of others, post a good answer that corrects any misinformation, down-vote and/or flag the trollish posts for moderator attention, and &lt;em&gt;walk away&lt;/em&gt;. Nothing can be gained from stooping to the level of someone setting out to cause disruption and mayhem; there's an old saying: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Never wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty, but the pig will like it.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T17:30:19.143" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-15T14:00:56.533" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like the idea of using this site and its battery of questions as a way to check my own understanding of the physics that I am learning. However, the big problem is that I can't seem to filter out questions from high school, junior-undergrad, senior-undergrad, graduate and research-level questions. I think it would be a huge plus to have such a filtering mechanism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about it.. you could simply log in to stackexchange and pick out all senior-undergrad level questions in QM or classical physics and have a ball of a time the night before your exam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please look into this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T18:10:53.130" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T18:10:53.130" Title="Can we have a level-of-question tag please?" Tags="|feature-request|questions|tags|content-level|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1387" CreationDate="2012-07-15T15:31:52.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that would be a meta tag. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T15:31:52.597" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1387" CreationDate="2012-07-15T17:00:09.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta-tagness is enough, but there is also a practical problem with maintaining it -- making up for missing or wrong level labels is a lot of work and may lead to numerous redundant discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T17:00:09.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-07-19T15:05:48.680" Score="-21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am treating this as a violation of the &quot;Be nice&quot; injunction in the FAQ&quot;. Well dmckee should be congratulated for doing the right thing, although I wish He left the comments on so I and others can have a laugh at Ron going mad at people muddying the intellectual atmosphere of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone have a link to the comments that were deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T15:05:48.680" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1387" CreationDate="2012-07-21T19:02:13.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I pretty much gave up reading her at all with so much reddit oneliner alike badly tagged redundant highschool questions. On biology.se the community agreed to downvote and close such questions. Here it becomes more and more pointless even to find interesting stuff via votes or tags sorting. Seems the theoreticalphysics qsqa project was abandoned too. I welcome undergraduate student and good detailed high school questions, but reddit oneliners is the content that drives me away definitely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T19:02:13.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1395" CreationDate="2012-07-24T18:52:12.650" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11800/can-energy-be-taken-out-of-the-qft-vacuum&quot;&gt;question I asked a while ago&lt;/a&gt;, somebody set a bounty of 200 and awarded it to an answer. I can now not find who it was since it was awarded, and my memory is not so good on who set the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would be good to keep the name of the one offering the bounty by the answer chosen by him/her, next to the price, so that it is clear that  the original questioner did not set the bounty and the choice. It looks funny to have an answer awarded a bounty and not chosen by the questioner. Now it seems that the questioner has set the bounty awarded it and not chosen the awarded question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T12:37:52.820" Title="When a bounty is awarded where can one find who set the price after it has been awarded i?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1394" CreationDate="2012-07-24T19:09:58.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mouse over the bounty symbol (the +200) a tooltip will pop up showing who awarded the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T19:09:58.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1394" CreationDate="2012-07-25T12:37:52.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured you're not satisfied with the answers so far and so I actually set the bounty because you didn't choose and answer. When the week was over I awarded the answer with the most votes among the new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T12:37:52.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-25T13:54:53.973" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious: Is someone gaming the point system a bit here? I just got two rapid-fire down votes for recommending a very relevant section from Feynman's QED book, on a question about whether complex math is required for quantum physics. Even if you don't agree with Feynman's perspective, you'd certainly think that a Nobel prize winner's very clear opinion on the topic might be relevant! And no explanatory comments, hmm! Fascinating dynamics, that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is some case of aggressive gaming, is there a mechanism to moderate it? I don't know how often this problem arises, but it's an interesting one. If relevant references get fast-zinged on a regular basis, that can't be good for the overall answer quality of the group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7670" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T15:10:48.530" Title="Is someone gaming the point system for some reason?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1397" CreationDate="2012-07-25T15:10:48.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/32422/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt; for the relevant post shows only one recent downvote (2 points, natch) and no particular evidence of a misuse of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the voting on that question is turning on the &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; of words like &quot;fundamental&quot; and &quot;naturalness&quot; or somesuch. Makes me wish I'd closed it as &quot;not a real question&quot; which used to be labeled &quot;subjective and argumentative&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a case for moderator intervention here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW-- The &quot;timeline&quot; url is a a general construction that can be applied to any question to see what happened when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T15:10:48.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1404" CreationDate="2012-07-26T09:09:06.023" Score="2" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question did get wrongly and prematurely closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32806/can-physics-get-rid-of-the-continuum#comment72857_32806&quot;&gt;Can physics get rid of the continuum?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a good, valuable, and &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; question that fits in perfectly with the (more theoretical) content and purpose of our site, and has already some nice answers. The answers already there and the interesting discussions in the comments show that the question hits active research areas at the inteface between mathematics and physics. Asking such questions is often very beneficial to make progress, in particular in theoretical physics. It is neither &quot;off topic&quot; nor &quot;not consutructive&quot; or what else one could invoke as a pretext to close it. &#xA;But maybe the question could (and should ?) be shortened and put straight a little bit as Ron suggests in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initial mistagging (soft question only) or too much discussion are NOT legitimate reasons to close the question itself! A better way would have been to retag the question appropriately, make suggestions for improvements (as Ron did for example), move the comments to chat if needed, and then leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can the question be reopened please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T19:42:10.213" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T19:42:10.213" Title="Can this question (which was marked as 'not constructive') be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-07-26T09:11:20.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it should be reopened !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I write this as an answer because I do not have the priviledge to cast votes to reopen directly ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T09:11:20.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-07-26T14:21:50.210" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the text that accompanies the closure reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this question will likely solicit [...] extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the section of the FAQ referenced in my comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about &lt;strong&gt;__&lt;/strong&gt;”, then you should not be asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the question is a good and interesting one does not mean that it is well suited to the Stack Exchange format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way Stack Exchange orders and organizes posts and comments works very poorly for an extended back-and-forth, and that is exactly what was developing there. And it would only have gotten worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-07-26T14:37:42.267" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T14:37:42.267" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:12:16.143" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to see what topics the wikis cover, but I don't know how to find/locate them. I tried doing a tag search for &quot;community-wiki&quot; but it didn't show up anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-04-04T09:51:50.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T09:51:50.050" Title="How do I find community wikis?" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1402" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:15:27.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you mean the &lt;em&gt;tag wikis&lt;/em&gt; (which are different)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Community wiki&quot; means a state of a post (question or answer) that makes it easier for other users to edit. To search for wiki posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;use the &lt;code&gt;wiki:1&lt;/code&gt; search modifier&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tag wikis&quot; are  special posts that are attached to particular tags. To access them, click on a tag (either under a question, in the sidebar, or in the &quot;TAGS&quot; tab) and then select the link in the little box at the top.&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oBPSK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T17:21:12.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:36:06.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After editing I've reopened the question, although if it does turn out to generate inappropriate activity, it will be closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T17:36:06.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:37:54.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading from the moderator's justification of the closure of the question, he seems to argue about two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extended discussion and back-and-forth among answers are not suitable to the SE &lt;em&gt;format&lt;/em&gt; ;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which  promote an engaging discussion are explicitly forbidden (FAQ cite).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are pretty weak, because the only &lt;em&gt;intrinsic&lt;/em&gt; thing about a soft question is its lack of a technical, openly recognizable, single &quot;right&quot; answer, mainly because &lt;strong&gt;it's background its too general&lt;/strong&gt; and/or it involves assuming premises &lt;strong&gt;not yet settled by the scientific community as a hole&lt;/strong&gt;. The fact that the non-uniqueness of answers it may generate could induce further discussion among users, and also that this discussion may take place where the answers are written (and that this is not suited to the site format), is extrinsic to the question itself. Otherwise you should not allow more than a single answer per question for soft ones and eliminate the possibility of explicit non-agreement (and get it removed iff it is recognized as flawed, which would in principle be absurd by definition, unless the answer involves plain crackpottery); or allow nothing more than technical, &quot;textbook&quot; questions and answers, and eliminate the &quot;soft question&quot; tag entirely (even though, it's my personal opinion that there's nothing better than a textbook if you are looking for a textbook answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every mild stance about this, coupled with this kind of ad hoc moderation procedure, will probably involve arbitrary closing some questions and leaving others opened depending on the moderator's judging of &lt;em&gt;how much discussion and typing&lt;/em&gt; it may generate among users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I retagged the question and shortened the main body of the text, so as to make it more concise according to what I was advised by some good will users. But as the background -not the form- of the question wasn't changed, and this is what was actually criticized and qualified as unsuitable, I suppose that won't fit the bill either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10822" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T17:37:54.427" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-28T23:58:56.487" Score="9" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/a/293&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; a short analysis on why chemistry stats look bad (3rd bullet point). I believed with bio and phy.se existing, chemistry as connecting branch and huge overlap in research would be able to reach the &lt;strong&gt;critical mass&lt;/strong&gt; of user and questions for a self-sustaining growth by user on bio/phy.se joining the site. But it looks very bad compared to a other science sites I observed since its start, I don't see many bio/phy user registered at all on chem.se. I also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/141518/163173&quot;&gt;asked on MO&lt;/a&gt;, what can be done to help those science sites. The main reason is probably that many commiters left the site (lasted nearly 2 years, which is of course too long). But if it gets closed, because it doesnt grow, and I start to believe sites that never reach the critical mass ever yield a substantial growth to establish a community, thats a huge downer. No chemistry on SE?! I mean, really. &quot;Waiting for further growth&quot; when older sites like cognitivesciences.se or linguistics.se didn't grow for months looks like desperation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be done? A lot of the chemistry questions are very specialized and localized, as most of the underlying theory belongs to physics, but this makes me even more wondering why many of the probably existing chem students reading physics.se dont take notice of chem.se or ask/answer questions there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T15:26:18.293" Title="Is there anything physics.se can do to help chemistry.se growing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-29T00:00:25.167" Score="4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;As theoreticalphysics.se was closed and obviously isn''t continued further outside of SE, I was asking myself, how much experts (bachelor/master/phd) can a site like physics.se have &lt;strong&gt;at the same time&lt;/strong&gt; contributing  and therefore competing on reputation. I think this graduated established SE site has currently reached a limit of qestions/day (maybe increasable to 40questoins/day but thats probably the maximum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expert user compete on reputation (gamification), gainable reputation per day is limited of course by questions/day and amount of competitors. If the average amount of rep a user can gain during, say 1-3 months, is low and he therefore slowy gains privileges and reputation (moving the ladder up like in a scientific community), he decides to either only read ( take for example me lacking time as a professional and family father and always too late seeing a unanswered question here (most seem to be well answered within 1-2 hours which is excellent community property), comment here and there, leave the site, or gaiming it :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all fine, no critics, thats how SE was designed, while there are probably thousands of java experts in the world, probably only 100-1000 game on stackoverflow (the majority is passive), as there arent more questions and rep to feed all. But the question I asked myself therefore is, does that mean, that the diversification and level of very specialized java and physics questions (research, practical, laboratory questions) is therefore also limited to a maximum value and very highly specialized sites like theoreticalphysics or theoreticalbiology cannot work per se, as you can never attract the amount of experts and their expertise on measurement techniques etc. It needs to be able to answer very specialized questions in such fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The explanation of the SE masters for closing appliedphysics, nanotechnology, experimental physics proposals was, this topic already exists because of physics.se.&lt;/strong&gt; But following the reasoning above, I dont see how  &lt;strong&gt;enough&lt;/strong&gt; professional experts and expertise will ever contribute to phyiscs.se competing on reputation to answer very tricky and localized question with the current growth and reputation model. I was against moving astronomy and astrophysics in physics.se. &lt;strong&gt;Most of the top astronomy.se user left the site, didnt register to phyiscs.se which affirms my hypothesis above,&lt;/strong&gt; theoreticalcomputerscience.se wouldn't work and attract so much experts when integrated as tagged-only questions into SO. More competitors and limit of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts on this, I dont see how such questions and subfields can organically grow on physics.se due to limited rep, experts and attention these topics get. Resolving this problem by better and level-tagging also doesnt work. area51 proposals are closed. So take open-source SE software clone and do it yourself like biostar, mathoverflow or artificalintelligence.osqa? I think there is limit of thematic broadness, when you can reach only higher quality by starting a smaller specialized community, feeded by experts coming from the established site like SO --&gt; TCS. But for much more broader and trickier fields like physics, funnily this is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T00:28:23.510" Title="Is there a possible way within the SE network for highly localized and specialized questions in the field of physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1412" CreationDate="2012-07-29T00:02:02.310" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;just wanted to report this, probably gets deleted here immediately, but is there a way to keep such &quot;questions&quot; spam out of rss feed too, maybe delay time, till questions is added to front page and rss feed. Ironically, this is the first time I see spam in a SE feed/site, wondering how such a popular site managed it to delete all spam so fast, but felt remembered on old usenet days visiting my SE feed today :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3715" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T11:20:43.290" Title="sex spam and offenses of user in my rss feed" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1407" CreationDate="2012-07-29T00:28:23.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't agree that there is any kind of limit to the number of questions the site can manage in a day--just look at Stack Overflow--but there is a limit to the number the current &lt;em&gt;user base&lt;/em&gt; can manage in a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise the problem with getting answers to highly specialized questions is one of having &lt;em&gt;users who know that topic&lt;/em&gt;. Stack Overflow has managed that for a great many topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, I know of no general strategy for bringing in users but time and &lt;em&gt;good questions and answers&lt;/em&gt; so that we can creep up in Google's relevance metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T00:28:23.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1411" CreationDate="2012-07-30T15:36:08.523" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a question which is vaguely comprehending, but bordering on nonsense: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33082/is-the-chern-simons-integral-of-gauge-fields-over-black-hole-singularities-zero&quot;&gt;Is the Chern-Simons integral of gauge fields over black hole singularities zero?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets a total nonsense answer and mutual upvoting. Are Sprechen and les-trace independent accounts? This is a flag for mods, I don't need an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T15:58:53.383" Title="Sprechen and les-trace" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1410" CreationDate="2012-07-30T15:58:53.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither of these accounts has voting privileges as yet, so the votes are coming from elsewhere.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The account &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be sockpuppets, but I don't feel we have enough evidence to act: we don't want to do something drastic to real users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; There are times when I think we have some users on the site who vote up anything they don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-07-30T15:58:53.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-07-31T11:11:59.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you delayed the appearance of posts, then how could the community review them and take the appropriate action? If nobody sees it, then nobody flags as spam or offensive, and it'll eventually appear anyway, only to &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all users who saw the question you call &quot;sex spam&quot; (which it wasn't, but that doesn't make it any better) flagged it as offensive, so it was deleted automatically pretty quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that you rarely see something like this on the Stack Exchange sites &amp;ndash; despite it being posted; it turns out there are quite a few idiots on the internet &amp;ndash; is that the community has the tools to take care of these posts pretty quickly, without having to rely on a moderator being available immediately. The larger the site is (and thus the more crap it attracts), the more people there are that see the post and flag it as offensive, and thus the quicker it gets killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow (which is orders of magnitude larger), a post like the one in question here has a pretty good chance of being deleted in under 60 seconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that our automatic protection against spam &lt;em&gt;bots&lt;/em&gt; works pretty well; the problem is actual &lt;em&gt;humans&lt;/em&gt; littering on the site, and for those, technical solutions obviously only work so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On websites that allow user-generated content, we have to live with the fact that stupid people exist; all we can do is make sure the community is able to react quickly. Hiding new posts would be counterproductive to that, in addition to also punishing the vast majority of new posts that are legitimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastEditorUserId="90" LastEditDate="2012-07-31T11:20:43.290" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T11:20:43.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-01T15:37:42.497" Score="11" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know what the health of physics.stackexchange is in comparison to the other stackexchange sites. And other relevant details like is it continuing to grow? Etc.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The reason I'm asking this question is because I have to study a pretty tough physics curriculum to take an exam and I've been using this site to have my questions answered. It's been fantastic so far, and I'd like to know if I can count on it to stay around.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2021-12-19T20:49:18.287" Title="What's the health of physics.SE? And what does the future look like?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-01T16:31:55.173" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could we have some advanced filters for subscribing to multiple tags? For example, I want to subscribe to &quot;[classical-mechanics] AND [lagrangian-mechanics]&quot; (I'm talking about a logical AND operation) but not to either of them individually. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'd like to subscribe to specific keywords if possible. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T16:31:55.173" Title="Advanced filter for subscription to multiple tags" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1413" CreationDate="2012-08-01T16:33:13.427" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site has existed since November 2010 and we graduated from beta in February 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were strong on all the Area51 metrics when we graduated, which is a good place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;July 2012 approximate&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; change with respect to January 2012 for a few tracked quantities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions: even&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers: even&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Total views: +33%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of visits: +25%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're getting more hits from Google than from all other tracked source&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; which is important as Stack Exchange site don't take off unless they have a good search  profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We got more than 40 new registered users last month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken on the whole the site appears to be growing slowly but steadily. A lot of our metrics show a spiky aspect with a underling modest, linear growth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; approximate. I eyeballed them off the analytics data available to moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; This includes &quot;direct traffic&quot; which is presumably our regular users who come in on bookmarks and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T16:33:13.427" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1413" CreationDate="2012-08-04T06:48:22.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to @dmckee answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was 2 175 members of Physics.SE after beta, and now - about 8 000 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238" LastActivityDate="2012-08-04T06:48:22.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T13:52:10.427" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;When asking a question, only the body of the text is shown in the preview below the window where one enters the text.&#xA;It would be nice to have the title of the question included in the preview, such that it can be debugged easier too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be done or are there technical and / or other reasons that make such an extension of the preview for questions not feasable ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T13:52:10.427" Title="Preview the title when asking a question" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T14:00:53.540" Score="-1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33462/which-position-in-bus-we-sit-that-we-receive-least-damage-upon-accident#comment73953_33462&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about car crash is off topic or it is so stupid that no one would answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is so important to keep only one question in a question so that we can't answer question with different scenario, should we split the question in 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if I split the question in 3, are question okay? Wouldn't it be pretty stupid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4556" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T17:07:46.773" Title="Do I need to split the question in 3?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1420" CreationDate="2012-08-05T17:07:46.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, a question probably wouldn't get closed if it simply needed to be split. I believe that question is actually off topic, in that it can't be answered using physical principles. Any question about car crashes that would be appropriate on this site would have to be much more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T17:07:46.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T18:08:32.880" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a young student, I have decided to learn some Physics independently, before I get any higher-education. I love Stack Exchange, so I would like to use this site as my main source to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how can I use this site to learn basic and intermediate Physics at a structured pace, without overwhelming myself? Basically, in what ways can I use this site as a structured learning tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8884" LastEditorUserId="8884" LastEditDate="2012-08-06T14:24:26.803" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T14:24:26.803" Title="Learning by using the site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1422" CreationDate="2012-08-06T00:34:06.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, what you're trying to do is probably not going to work very well. The main reason is that Stack Exchange is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not an online tutorial. We don't arrange to have questions on the site covering all the material you would need to learn in an intro physics class. The focus here is on filling the gaps in what the standard resources have to offer, not rehashing the same material that you would find in those standard resources. This is why we ask people to do some prior research (e.g. searching Google and Wikipedia) before asking a question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issue is that Stack Exchange sites cater to an expert-level audience. What this means, in our case, is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that you need to have a degree in physics to ask a question, but generally, you do need have to have a basic understanding of the framework of the topic you're asking about. To put it another way, it comes back to the same point about prior research. Suppose you have a question about electromagnetism, maybe something like showing that traveling waves are solutions to Maxwell's equations. Before asking about it on this site, we'd expect you to look in a textbook or an equivalent website. If you don't understand what you find there at all (e.g. if you don't know what a differential equation is), then the question you'd be asking would probably not qualify as expert-level. If you were to attempt to teach yourself physics from this site alone, you would be asking a lot of those kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me summarize it like this. There are three components of a traditional physics class:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A textbook (or notes), which is your primary reference for learning the material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Office hours and study sessions where you can ask your teacher or your fellow students questions, which are your secondary reference for learning the material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homework problems to reinforce your understanding of the material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Stack Exchange site aims to be part of the second component, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the first. For that you will need something like a textbook or lecture. I'd recommend checking out some of the suggestions in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;book recommendation list&lt;/a&gt;, or you can also look for online courses and/or videos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T00:34:06.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-06T04:11:15.520" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning of putting up some A4 chem.SE posters in my institute, and I though that it would be useful if I had some for Physics as well (more useful, in fact, since I'm in the Physics  department)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster I'm using is this one (click to enlarge):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tn0Za.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tn0Zam.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131/how-do-we-promote-our-shiny-new-site.Use&quot;&gt;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131/how-do-we-promote-our-shiny-new-site.Use&lt;/a&gt; it for inspiration if you need any :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone feel up to making a similar poster for Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stuff to keep in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't forget a QR code! There are some easy QR generators online, just Google it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know if we are allowed to put the Phy.SE logo onto posters, etc--it's copyright, though this may count as fair use. You may have to ask on the mother meta, or just use a different image.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:50:39.193" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T04:11:15.520" Title="Make a poster!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-06T22:08:01.973" Score="13" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible for a Stack Exchange site to get a community powered blog, as done so by many sites seen on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&quot;&gt;SE&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;. To get our &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.blogoverflow.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;own&lt;/a&gt;, what we first need is &lt;em&gt;community support&lt;/em&gt;, since the blog will be run only by this site's users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this post is to answer the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does the Physics.SE community want their own blog?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to this is yes, the next things we need to address are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who would be willing to contribute?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would the blog be about?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would our schedule be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These, of course, will come in later discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I love the idea of a Stack Exchange site having a community blog. It helps in so many ways e.g. publicity. I am &quot;Blog Overlord&quot; over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.programmers.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Programmers.SE&lt;/a&gt;, and we've got an awesome &lt;a href=&quot;http://programmers.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; going over there. The best part is, users from the community are the ones writing the posts, developing the scope, and editing to reflect the view of the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So once again, before we go into details, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;does the Physics.SE community want their own blog?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogoverflow.com/getting-started/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Blog Overflow - Getting Started&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/blog-overflow/&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Blog - Blog Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8884" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-07-27T15:11:48.773" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T15:11:48.773" Title="What's the possibility of a Physics.SE community blog?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2012-08-09T05:33:48.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one will not be interested in a physics blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) I find it time consuming enough to follow the physics papers that &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.gr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lubos&lt;/a&gt; puts up in his blog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b)Physics is not literature. One has to spend grey cell time in deciphering the blog offers, and  I do not feel like investing effort in run of the mill physics  contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the negativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T05:33:48.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2012-08-09T15:24:13.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, the Physics.se community would benefit from one but there aren't enough people that do physics as a profession here, compared to the vast number of people that do programming for a living at Programmers.SE. You therefore aren't going to get good quality regular blogs worth reading, where the blogger speaks with authority. It will end up like the creation of theoreticalphysics.se in initially being supported with enthusiasm, only to slowly die over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T15:24:13.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-10T16:51:07.393" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very strange to upvote questions and then going back to vote sorting tab to see question which is one year old. It would be best to see good questions from past day, days week month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in current form upvoting a question makes no sense. To me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for thinking about this message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9173" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T04:08:13.340" Title="Best questions (by vote) from last day, days, week" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1429" CreationDate="2012-08-11T04:08:13.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can tolerate a less that fully up-to-date picture of the site, you can construct arbitrary queries on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data explorer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T04:08:13.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-12T09:36:04.960" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fundamental question for this site. I propose to get rid from reputation by by by making it INVISIBLE to other users :) What do you say? I think it will be better then now in many aspects. What should be visible i think is medals, badges and unlocked features. Reputation can stay there but should be invisible as a number. Something to think about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9173" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-08-13T00:21:48.793" LastActivityDate="2012-08-13T11:48:23.073" Title="Possiblty FAQ question - Getting rid from reputation" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2012-08-12T12:13:02.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of evidence across the StackExchange network that sites with publicly-visible reputation have produced a lot of useful content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say that hiding rep would be better, is an extraordinary claim, and so would require extraordinary evidence. To date, I've seen none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T12:13:02.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2012-08-13T11:48:23.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially in fields (like physics, but also languages) where it is easy to make up a lot of bollocks that could be wrong or misleading to non-experts, but sounds like it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be correct, reputation is a valuable indicator how reliable you can expect an answer to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for sites like StackOverflow where answers are often easy (well, easier) to verify (even for people with little domain knowledge) reputation is very helpful in determining credibility. But here; It's vital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastActivityDate="2012-08-13T11:48:23.073" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2012-08-14T02:05:47.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have dismissed this question, but then I discovered the list of stack exchange community blogs.  It seems that many of them are working to quite a productive ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/blogs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question at hand, I draw upon my experience as a Wikipedia editor.  The crucial lesson I learned is this: anything you create is only as good as the effort your content creators are willing to put into it.  In short, I would be perfectly supportive of the idea of a blog if there were a mass of physics enthusiasts wanting to write for it.  The rest of this discussion is a matter of perception of evidence, and I would currently maintain that sufficient enthusiasm for a blog does not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think it's a good possibility to bring up, since I've seen rather good work done in other SE network blogs, so I would suggest that we consider it tabled for now.  If someone has some good suggestions for the type of content Physics.SE would have on a blog, meta is the place to share it.  I, for one, don't see much added value over the current QA, but that's only because I'm not interested in putting in the effort ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T02:05:47.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-14T21:30:18.717" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In looking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/34193/520&quot;&gt;at a new question&lt;/a&gt; today I found it tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/accelerator-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accelerator-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accelerator-physics&lt;/a&gt;, which I removed as my understanding is that the phase is universally used to discuss the physics of beams in accelerators and of the accelerating devices themselves, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of experiments done using beams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the tag currently has no tag wiki and I find &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/accelerator-physics&quot;&gt;many questions tagged in what I would describe as the wrong way&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions from the floor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-08-16T01:32:02.733" Title="Can we have a consensus on the meaning of the [accelerator-physics] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1435" CreationDate="2012-08-15T13:24:58.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right. Questions like &quot;Could LEP II have discovered a 125GeV Higgs?&quot; might be &quot;collider physics&quot; or &quot;high-energy physics&quot;, but they're not &quot;accelerator physics&quot; despite being tagged as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T13:24:58.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1435" CreationDate="2012-08-16T01:32:02.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a tag wiki that reflect my understanding of the usage of the term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/accelerator-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accelerator-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accelerator-physics&lt;/a&gt; is appropriate for questions dealing with the physics of beams in accelerators; the ways in which beams are generated; the accelerating, bending and focusing equipment; and the intrinsic limits that arise in trying to manipulate beams. This tag should not generally be applied to questions that concern the use of the particle beams once they arrive in the experimental hall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and will begin working on the tagged question a few at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-08-16T01:32:02.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1446" CreationDate="2012-08-20T17:32:24.997" Score="6" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've already had some discussion about the possibility of changing our name and/or logo to reflect the fact that astronomy questions are on topic here, both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1222/change-name-to-physicsastronomy&quot;&gt;on meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/4414328#4414328&quot;&gt;in (1)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5211395#5211395&quot;&gt;chat (2)&lt;/a&gt;. Initially, people were opposed, but we seem to have settled on the prospect of adding the word &quot;astronomy&quot; to the logo which is now received more or less positively. I'm asking this meta question to get an official community consensus of the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reminder, the reason for doing this is that people who will potentially be asking questions on the site, i.e. new users, will not necessarily understand (observational) astronomy to be within the scope when they just see &quot;Physics&quot; in the title. Since the merger I have seen &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; these &lt;s&gt;three&lt;/s&gt; four examples of people who were confused about the fact that astronomy questions are now on topic for this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28452/solar-eclipse-viewing&quot;&gt;Solar Eclipse Viewing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28264/is-the-environment-around-an-asteroid-harsher-than-in-interplanetary-space&quot;&gt;Is the environment around an asteroid harsher than in interplanetary space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25467/when-do-natural-leap-years-occur-on-years-based-on-the-northern-winter-solstice&quot;&gt;When do natural leap years occur, on years based on the northern winter solstice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(in this case the confusion was expressed in a flag message)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/41059/1&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/41059/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these are just the people who thought astronomy was off topic and decided to post anyway. It stands to reason that there are others, perhaps a significant number, who see our site logo and name and decide not to post at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the only change would be adding the word &quot;astronomy&quot; to the logo, perhaps something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CEpx6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Modified logo (rough)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if this goes through, the actual design would be left to Jin, but this is simply a rough idea of what I'm proposing. If you have ideas about how the design should look, feel free to leave them as comments on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm adding one answer below to serve as an indicator of the community opinion: vote up if you agree, down if you disagree. Feel free to add another answer if you want, but don't forget to express your opinion on the one &quot;poll&quot; answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you have a reason not to add &quot;astronomy&quot; to the logo, please mention it either in a comment or answer!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T14:41:37.863" Title="Can we have &quot;Astronomy&quot; added to the logo? If not, why not?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2012-08-20T17:32:24.997" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be the official &quot;poll&quot; answer: vote this up if you agree that the logo should be changed, down if you disagree. In the latter case it would be great if you can express your reasons for disagreeing in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rough conception of what the modified logo &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; look like is provided in the question. This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a finalized design, so please do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; vote based on whether you like the way it looks. &lt;strong&gt;Your vote should &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; indicate whether you agree or disagree with adding the word &quot;astronomy&quot; to the logo.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-08-20T20:40:45.477" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T20:40:45.477" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1443" CreationDate="2012-08-20T22:59:22.520" Score="-4" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some users have in their info that they are faculty or post docs or working in other fields, other users have no info. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to locate/list all those users who are physics faculty/postdocs in academic institutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in reading the answers written by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&#xA;Let me be clear about a few points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1-I am looking only for users who said in their info that they are physics post docs or faculty, do not care about his/her name or about the name of their institution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2-I do not want to contact them, I only want to read the answers they post, since their posts will be more authentic (on average) than other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3-Since I cannot look at the info of every single user to see if he is an academic or not, that would take forever, I just thought that there is a way in the site by which one can search for users by being an academic or not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4521" LastEditorUserId="4521" LastEditDate="2012-08-20T23:34:11.247" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T21:54:30.817" Title="Which users are faculty/postdoc?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-20T23:04:36.473" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many occasions, one find more than one correct answer, or that 2 answers complete each others in such a way that both answer the question posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such situations one tend to mark both of them as accepted answers, unfortunately the system is designed to allow only 1 accepted answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can that be changed to allow 2 accepted answers instead of 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4521" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T23:04:36.473" Title="Why not make it possible to accept 2 answers instead of 1?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1441" CreationDate="2012-08-20T23:04:58.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users who want you to know that about them can (and I suppose generally will) put that information in their profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other cases you may be able to deduce their present employment somehow. For instance, you could find my current situation pretty easily by following the link in profile that leads to the inspire listing of my publications and working from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I do not wish to be contacted out of band which is why there is no explicit information about that in my profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The team are unlikely to provide support for this use case beyond making the data available in the data dumps/data-explorer because the focus is always on questions and answer rather than on users. The mantra here is &lt;em&gt;&quot;Stack Exchange is not a social network&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-08-20T23:24:01.347" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T23:24:01.347" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1454" CreationDate="2012-08-22T08:04:53.787" Score="35" ViewCount="4313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am afraid that David will delete comments of 'tHooft, and others, on threads where he has participated. I don't like to see any of 'tHooft's writing go anywhere, at least not for a long time, so please can he hold his horses? Same goes for other comment threads, which are actively going on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trigger-happy deletion has caused some consternation to users in the past. It is only reasonable for stale discussions, not for active things that are still being sorted out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T01:12:49.403" Title="Deleting 'tHooft's comments" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-08-22T08:08:15.390" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have said, you're free to copy the comments to your own notes or to a separate web page, or to any other arena where you want to continue the discussion (subject to the Creative Commons license). That way you can keep his writing as long as you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment system doesn't exist to support extended discussions. That doesn't change no matter what credentials the poster has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T08:08:15.390" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2012-08-22T10:43:40.817" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me personally it was always clear that astronomy (containing observational and theoretical astrophysics for example) IS physics, such that it would not be necessary to add it to the logo of physics SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after rethinking and discussing this a bit with my office mate (he is an astrophysicist), I'm no longer too opposed to adding astronomy to the logo since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) I like it to see astronomy questions and people interested in it being around here :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Looking at how astronomy is implemented in the academic landscape it is not the case everywhere that astronomy is treated as a subfield of physics. Here in Germany for example, we have universities with institutes explicitely named &quot;physics and astronomy&quot;, sometimes there exist distinct departments for physics and astronomy, or astronomy is listed as a part of the &quot;mathematical and natural sciences&quot; faculty, etc ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) so people from places in the world where astronomy is not treated as a subfield of physics generally might need some encouragement to ask astronomy questions here. Adding the word to the logo can be a nice way to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T10:43:40.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-08-22T13:26:04.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they persist long enough they will get included in a Data Dump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T13:26:04.977" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1441" CreationDate="2012-08-22T16:27:50.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether the answer comes from a postdoc or a professional is only mildly statistically correlated with the correctness and completeness of the answer. You could probably extract a positive correlation coefficient, but it's not overwhelming, and this is not the useful criterion by which to judge things as correct. You need to read it and make up your mind. There are users who usually say completely wacky things that have on occasion come up with original and interesting observations, and great physicists who made a mistake here or there. I don't see any authority filter which is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T16:27:50.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-08-22T20:12:16.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, on the advice of others in the SE network, I'll refrain from deleting those comment discussions in their entirety right away. Some of the comments posted have no useful physics content, and those will be deleted as normal, but the rest I'll leave alone at least until there has been ample time to incorporate any relevant physics into the questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I would like to remind everyone that the comment section isn't really meant for extended discussions like these. Ideally, the discussions should have been moved to a chat room before they got so long - it's as simple as posting &lt;code&gt;Let's take this to [chat]&lt;/code&gt; after the first 6 or 7 messages. Discussions that take place in chat are always preserved forever. Let's try to keep that in mind for the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-08-22T20:56:21.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T20:56:21.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1441" CreationDate="2012-08-24T21:54:30.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use three methods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Browse the difficult looking questions on the main page and look at the profiles of people with up-voted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;click on USERS on the main page and order them according to yearly, monthly, weekly votes. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;click BADGES on the main page, then gold/silver on the right, then &quot;good answer&quot; on the left, which will list users with outstanding answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do a Google search on the filtered user info using the above and you'll find there's one Nobel Laureate, a few teaching/researching at world class universities, a few ex-academics with PhDs/Masters etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T21:54:30.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1452" CreationDate="2012-08-26T16:24:29.510" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of unnecessary comments to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33542/why-are-radians-more-natural-than-any-other-angle-unit/33567#33567&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; which ideally should all be deleted IMO. So how do I do this or flag it for attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T11:25:58.070" Title="How do I flag a question or answer for comment pruning?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1451" CreationDate="2012-08-26T17:28:51.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click the &quot;flag&quot; link that you should find just below your answer, and you can write in the &quot;other&quot; field that the comments should be deleted. Or you can flag one of the comments and use the &quot;other&quot; option similarly. (&quot;too chatty&quot; could also work)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you do this, of course, I strongly suggest going through the comment thread to make sure that anything you might want to incorporate into your answer (or question), such as a clarification, has been taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T17:28:51.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1451" CreationDate="2012-08-27T03:30:17.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can just ask the other users involved to delete their comments, and then delete yours. This way it doesn't require outside intervention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T03:30:17.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-08-27T15:44:42.750" Score="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;deleting&quot; feature, however it works, is one of the biggest &quot;bugs&quot; on Stack Exchange.  In addition to the current controversy, in the past it has deleted very valuable references from the answers to some of my questions.  Now I cannot recover them.  I am highly displeased, to say the least. If there was an edit trail, or something, it might be tolerable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This kind of delete without memory should be reserved for abusive comments and the worst kind of spam, in my opinion.  It should never be applied to debates with significant physical content. Move, yes if you must. Even hide, if absolutely necessary. Delete without memory, only in the most flagrant cases.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My very passionate two cents worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T15:44:42.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-08-28T11:56:47.143" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked 31 questions on this site, and I have to say that the most valuable answers/insight (for me at least) are more often than not contained in the comments. This is because often (and I do not think I am alone in this), those who answer cannot read my mind, and so the answers that are given leave out some crucial insights that are at the core of my misunderstanding. I often have to &quot;tease out&quot; that answer in the comments. It would be great if always, once this happened, the author would edit their answer to reflect the additional clarifying details, but often they do not, and the real answer to my question, the thing I wish to return to if I ever look the question up again, is in the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Me:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Why is A?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Because of B!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Me:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;But what about C?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Ah, that is because of D!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Me:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Aha! Thank you! That was my sticking point!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I find it greatly distressing to learn that some of these comments might be deleted. It just seems to be fighting against all that is good and useful about this site. It seems, in practice, anti-educational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T11:56:47.143" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-08-28T15:40:16.647" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following comment got a lot of upvotes, so I'm posting it as an answer so it will be preserved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say I often hesitate to move discussions to chat because it's a much worse experience than comments. Primarily this is because of the lack of LaTeX, but also you get no information about whether you've crossed the character limit; if you come up with a new point a few days later you find you can't add it because the chat session has been frozen (why, why, why?); and while chat sessions are in theory preserved forever, I find it almost impossible to find old ones. Finally, it's an extra click away, meaning that other people are less likely to read it and weigh in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Jerry Schirmer added, &quot;I would also argue that I often find the comments threads on posts more enlightening than the posts themselves.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T15:40:16.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-29T10:59:09.270" Score="6" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bet you have noticed that recent outburst of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metaphysics&quot;&gt;metaphysics tagging&lt;/a&gt; by Anixx. Unfortunately the tag lacks description. What does '&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphysics&lt;/a&gt;' tag mean? Does it have the same meaning as '&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metamathematics&lt;/a&gt;'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I feel a bit uncomfortable about it, I want a clarification on its purposes and why do we need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4020" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T13:06:37.953" Title="Metaphysics tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1458" CreationDate="2012-08-29T14:55:00.540" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My default thought would be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metaphysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metaphysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metaphysics&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;off topic for this site.&quot; I would say the best thing to do is review the questions that have been assigned that tag and in each case, either remove the tag or close the question. I'll take a look at the list of questions later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T14:55:00.540" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1458" CreationDate="2012-08-29T15:02:49.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia says of metaphysics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which does not sound promising in terms of being on-topic. That said a little later it clarifies things a bit with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into the basic categories of being and how they relate to each other. Another central branch of metaphysics is cosmology, the study of the totality of all phenomena within the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which appears to lay claim to some areas of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, my observation is that mostly questions in metaphysics do not have answers, rather they are invitations to discuss. Discussions are not what we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T15:02:49.960" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1458" CreationDate="2012-08-30T12:52:15.167" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is how metaphysiscs is defined in &lt;em&gt;Metaphysics&lt;/em&gt; texbook by Peter van Inwagen (2009):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Metaphysics attempts to tell the ultimate truth about the World, about&#xA;everything. But what is it we want to know about the World? What are the ques-&#xA;tions whose answers would be the ultimate truth about things? There are, I sug-&#xA;gest, three such questions:&#xA;&#xA;1. What are the most general features of the World, and what sorts of things&#xA;   does it contain? What is the World like?&#xA;2. Why does a World exist—and, more speciﬁcally, why is there a World hav-&#xA;   ing the features and the content described in the answer to Question 1?&#xA;3. What is our place in the World? How do we human beings ﬁt into it?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I tagged those questions that asked, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What the cause the world exists and could it be different, what features of the world necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions related to Anthropic principle, whether observer is needed for things to exist&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions related to when was the beginning of time or whether time axis infinite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions are not physics, but since they were not deleted they should be properly tagged. It should be noted that metaphysics questions are not very welcome in Phylosophy.SE by their community and they often advise to ask in Physics.SE for a reason unknown to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why all those tags were removed. Please restore them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="1186" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T13:06:37.953" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T13:06:37.953" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-31T10:11:52.893" Score="-2" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that metaphysics questions are allowed, but tagging them as such sparks protests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This practice seems inconsistent to me. I will re-tag the questions with a metaphysics tag if there are no better proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions I mean to tag are those&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About anthropic principle, fine tuning, possible worlds and existence of things without an observer. This includes hypotheses about quantum immortality and alike&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About general properties of time, determinism/indeterminism, existence of the present, past, future, causality loops and eternity of the universe&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About self-reference in measurement theory, existence of universally-walid theories and subjective decoherence&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About limits of applicability of scientific method. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;As there is certain confusion about what the definition, here is how metaphysics destinguished and related to physical sciences by Peter van Inwagen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another sort of aid in understanding what is meant by ‘metaphysics’ is&#xA;  provided  by distinguishing metaphysics from the things it might be&#xA;  confused with. First, metaphysics must be distinguished from the most&#xA;  general and all-embracing of the physical sciences: cosmology and the&#xA;  physics of elementary particles. (...) These two ﬁelds of study have&#xA;  turned out to be closely connected and have, since the 1960s, produced&#xA;  results that are of the deepest signiﬁcance for metaphysics. Let us&#xA;  give the name “physical cosmology” to those scientiﬁc investigations&#xA;  that intimately involve both cosmology and the physics of elementary&#xA;  particles. Here is an example of the metaphysical sig- niﬁcance of&#xA;  physical cosmology. Physical cosmology seems to show that the phys-&#xA;  ical universe had a beginning in time (about fourteen thousand million&#xA;  years ago)—or at least that it does not have an inﬁnite past&#xA;  throughout which it has been much the same as it is now. If this is&#xA;  correct, all metaphysical speculations that pre- suppose an inﬁnite&#xA;  past during which the components of a universe much like the present&#xA;  universe have been eternally rearranging themselves—our second set of&#xA;  an- swers to our three metaphysical questions provides one important&#xA;  example of spec- ulations that make this presupposition—are incorrect.&#xA;  And this by itself is sufﬁcient to show the relevance of physical&#xA;  cosmology to metaphysics.&#xA;      But if physical cosmology is of the deepest signiﬁcance for metaphysics, it nevertheless does not and cannot answer all the&#xA;  questions metaphysics poses. For one thing, it cannot answer the&#xA;  question, Why does the World exist? (...) Physical cosmology,&#xA;  moreover, does not and cannot tell us whether the physical universe is&#xA;  all there is—whether there is more to the World than the physical&#xA;  universe. Scientists sometimes assert that the World is identical with&#xA;  the physical universe, as a famous astronomer, the late Carl Sagan,&#xA;  did in the opening words of his popular television series Cosmos, but&#xA;  the assertion is a metaphysical, not a scientiﬁc, assertion. It is&#xA;  certainly possible to argue that science will someday explain all&#xA;  observable phenomena and that one should therefore believe that the&#xA;  World is identical with the physical universe, since one should&#xA;  believe that nothing exists beyond those things science postulates in&#xA;  the course of giving its explanations. But this argument is—and any&#xA;  argument for the same conclusion will be—a metaphysical, not a&#xA;  scientiﬁc, argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="1186" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T12:56:29.667" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T05:06:24.737" Title="So what's on with the metaphysics questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1462" CreationDate="2012-08-31T11:36:34.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the main problem is reaching a consensus upon what metaphysics is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most would agree that metaphysics is a branch of &lt;strong&gt;philosophy&lt;/strong&gt; from the past that came before the development of science. It looked at those properties of the world that are immaterial such as being, love etc and tried to answer questions such as: Is there a purpose to the world? Does the world exist because I look at it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are modern books that give metaphysics a modern flavour such as: The Metaphysics of Quantum Theory by Henry Krips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a better idea would be to ask whether any philosophical questions on physics are allowed here, and if they are, then to propose the philosophy-of-physics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T11:36:34.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1462" CreationDate="2012-08-31T12:51:06.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was younger I  read a lot of modern metaphysics, including occult literature, from Castaneda to Seth to Emanuel to ... I forget now. Also physics of consciousness and the implicate and explicate order of Bohm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I do not support a metaphysics discussion on this board is that one of course can play with metaphysics, but one has to have very clear in one's head what is physics and what is metaphysics. Metaphysics borders science fiction, and would be science fiction if it were not that we, as conscious beings, are still inexplicable by our standard theories of physics: &lt;em&gt;we are born, we live, we propagate, we die.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a board like this, which is followed among others by confused teenagers and disoriented  nerds from all disciplines to give a metaphysics tag brings these fuzzy questions on par with the logical, rational and provable physics statements. This should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are interested so much in metaphysics per se, they should ask for a separate board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T12:51:06.493" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1462" CreationDate="2012-08-31T14:03:09.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that the word &quot;metaphysics&quot; can be interpreted in many ways, which is probably causing this confusion in the first place. A lot of metaphysics would be off-topic here IMO, but quite a bit of it may not be. For example, I feel that certain questions about the anthropic principle would be fine here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, if you are doing a mass retagging (mass= &gt;10 posts), it may be better to ask first. In this case, its even more crucial, since metaphysics is dicey when it comes to discussing on-topicness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems to me that metaphysics questions are allowed, but tagging them as such sparks protests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a question isn't closed doesn't mean it's allowed. I would say that we need to first sort out if it is on-topic, which doesn't seem to be done yet (Let's see what David turns up after looking through those questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will re-tag the questions with a metaphysics tag if there are no better proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't do that &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; we have reached consensus. Let's not start a tag war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T14:03:09.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1462" CreationDate="2012-08-31T16:53:39.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is high time now that somebody with a clear voice of reason stops this horrible attack on fundamental physics Anixx has started by insisting on either tagging valid questions as metaphysics or deleting/closing/migrating them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think physics SE should not let it happen, that a single very obstinate user starts to mess up with (by the community long ago accepted and answered) fundamental physics questions or succeeds in making future questions about fundamental physics off topic just for philosophical reasons. Physics is NOT a subfield of philosophy, so what is on/off topic here on physics SE should not be determined by philospohers but by real serious phyicists ...!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already explained in previous comments, by fundamental physics I mean theoretical physics (!) topics the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fundamentalphysicsprize.org/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Milner Prize&lt;/a&gt; is targeted at for example, which &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be and &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; addressed by (non fringe) theoretical physicists at present (or in the very near future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T17:14:16.460" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T17:14:16.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1462" CreationDate="2012-08-31T17:10:56.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think other people are saying the same thing in more detail, but my position is that metaphysics questions are not appropriate on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T17:10:56.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-31T18:03:11.450" Score="-2" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below I will post several questions about whether a certain philosophical topic should be allowed in Physics.SE. Please vote up to keep the questions belonging to a topic and vote down to close or migrate the questions belonging to the topic from Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a vote for general acceptability of certain topics. The questions can be still sorted out on case by case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T13:22:19.597" Title="Philosophical questions voting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1468" CreationDate="2012-08-31T18:03:38.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions, related to Anthropic principle, Final anthropic principle, quantum immortality, Boltzman brains, nececity of an observer &#xA;for things to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30989/is-the-only-diffeomorphism-invariant-anthropic-principle-the-final-anthropic-pri&quot;&gt;Is the only diffeomorphism invariant anthropic principle the final anthropic principle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32979/why-arent-we-boltzmann-brains-in-an-infinite-universe&quot;&gt;Why aren&amp;#39;t we Boltzmann brains in an infinite universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T13:22:19.597" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1468" CreationDate="2012-08-31T18:04:27.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions, related to the ultimate nature of time, presentism, eternalism, endurantism, perdurantism, &#xA;causation, infinity of time in past and future directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24018/how-can-something-happen-when-time-does-not-exist&quot;&gt;How can something happen when time does not exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26720/is-there-any-scientific-evidence-that-demonstrates-why-time-passes&quot;&gt;Is there any scientific evidence that demonstrates why time passes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23148/how-was-time-created&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23148/how-was-time-created&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16688/is-now-smeared-over-time&quot;&gt;Is &amp;#39;now&amp;#39; smeared over time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T13:22:04.730" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1468" CreationDate="2012-08-31T18:10:23.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions, related to self-reference in measurement theory, existence of universally-valid theories, subjective decoherence and limits of scientific method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4841/what-is-the-wavefunction-of-the-observer-himself&quot;&gt;What is the wavefunction of the observer himself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31068/certainty-in-science&quot;&gt;Can a scientific theory ever be absolutely proven?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T13:21:31.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1468" CreationDate="2012-08-31T18:25:11.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about choice between mathematically equivalent interpretations of quantum mechanics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10240/is-the-wave-function-objective-or-subjective&quot;&gt;Is the wave function objective or subjective?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T13:21:40.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1444" CreationDate="2012-09-02T01:12:49.403" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an easy solution to this. Why not display the most voted comment and have the reader click a link to unravel the rest of the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T01:12:49.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1475" CreationDate="2012-09-05T01:51:17.983" Score="6" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;In these sites, down-voting has become a passion to prove &lt;em&gt;intelligence&lt;/em&gt;. Yesterday, I got two upvoted answers &lt;strong&gt;downvoted simultaneously&lt;/strong&gt; (Someone has down-voted both within 1 min). I think they're too busy in leaving comments and reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#etiquette&quot;&gt;Etiquette&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why isn't there a rule: &quot;For Downvoting upvoted posts, comments are must&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The posted users don't know &quot;For which silly reason, they've been downvoted...&quot;&#xA;Then, how would we correct the answers? Only one choice left out: &quot;Answers must be deleted&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Down-voting and no comments" Tags="|support|feature-request|status-declined|down-votes|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1474" CreationDate="2012-09-05T05:05:52.290" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasons you're not required to leave a comment when downvoting, and why that is not going to change, are explained in detail in many questions on Meta Stack Overflow (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-down-votes&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you downvote a post, you're &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; (but never required) to explain what can be improved about it. Of course, this is also encouraged even if you don't downvote the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming at it from the other direction, when your post is downvoted and/or someone suggests an improvement, you have no obligation to do anything about it. Correcting the answer or deleting it are not your only choices. You can just leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T05:05:52.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-05T14:19:52.847" Score="-9" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think questions like this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8227/a-mirror-flips-left-and-right-but-not-up-and-down&quot;&gt;A mirror flips left and right, but not up and down&lt;/a&gt; (which is pure geometry) should be moved to Mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T19:11:57.413" Title="Purely mathematical questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1483" CreationDate="2012-09-06T18:00:39.373" Score="4" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some other sites in the SE network have recently been moving toward eliminating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. I think this would be useful for us to consider as well, particularly in light of questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35748/how-to-add-two-perpendicular-2d-vectors&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; - if you look at the comments, the OP says &quot;Also there is a homework tag so I assumed it does allow homework questions.&quot; That's one of the main arguments for removing the tag, both here and on other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the homework tag would not change our policy on what sorts of questions can be asked here. Specifically, it is now and will continue to be OK to ask a conceptual question that arises in the context of a homework assignment. Also our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;existing homework policy&lt;/a&gt; would be more or less unchanged, except that we would no longer ask posters to use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; for homework or self-study questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we go ahead with removing the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what exactly is the purpose of keeping it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T00:28:03.783" Title="Should we get rid of the homework tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-09-06T18:32:56.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have mixed feeling about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;. I personally answer pedagogical question in a leading manner and consider such answers to be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than complete answers in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to cause an inordinate amount of strife and hardfeelings so I wouldn't cry if we saw it go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-09-06T18:32:56.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-09-06T20:45:25.763" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think the homework tag should be removed because www.physicsforums.com already provides homework help brilliantly and so doesn't need to be encouraged here, given that physics.stackexchange.com wasn't designed to compete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, its straight foward to word a homework question in a way which is general and therefore compatible with the types of questions that the intended audience here will find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2012-09-06T20:45:25.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-09-07T12:00:33.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could remove it, once the FAQ is updated to reflect the underlying issues around homework-type questions, and once we're sure that most active answerers understand the policy of giving leading, conceptual, hint-rich, non-explicit answers to questions that look like homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to me that that won't happen, and the homework tag, and its associated wiki-tip and FAQ entry, are the cleanest and simplest way to communicate the policy on homework questions: a policy that, as I understand it, would remain the same with or without the homework tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2012-09-07T12:00:33.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1495" CreationDate="2012-09-09T05:36:06.697" Score="11" ViewCount="945" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to pollute the site with more discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metaphysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metaphysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metaphysics&lt;/a&gt; questions, but I'm genuinely confused by the community's response to this and I want to figure out what is going on. There were a couple of questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1458/metaphysics-tag&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1462/so-whats-on-with-the-metaphysics-questions&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) asking about whether metaphysics questions were appropriate on this site, and in each case, the votes are clearly in favor of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, metaphysics questions are not appropriate.&quot; But when the specific questions that prompted that discussion were named, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1468/philosophical-questions-voting&quot;&gt;community has voted that they are on topic&lt;/a&gt;. So what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like for us to resolve this one way or another - either we close all the offending questions, or we bring back the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/metaphysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;metaphysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;metaphysics&lt;/a&gt; tag for good. (I &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; support the first option.) Which shall it be, and why were the votes inconsistent in the earlier questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T18:03:59.443" Title="Once and for all, what is up with the metaphysics questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|tags|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-09T07:40:46.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, there is no and there never was an issue with metaphysics questios. Anixx just tried to mix things up, discredit fundamental physics, and get attention as it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1458/2751&quot;&gt;started&lt;/a&gt;. The negative votes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1462/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1468/philosophical-questions-voting&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, as well as the positive votes on his answers to the polling question, say that the communitiy disagrees with Anixx that there even is any general issue with philosphical questions on physics SE. Generally, most of the topics he meantioned are not (only) metaphysics or philosophy. Such issues are now investigated by serious theoretical physicists today. So questions asking about such things can well be incorporated into physics SE, if they are appropriately stated by alluding to the corresponding physics theories that deal with the issue, etc &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion, the only thing to do now is to close/delete (was there not the option of migrating too?) &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; questions about the topics Anixx mentioned &lt;strong&gt;if and only if&lt;/strong&gt; they have attracted enough close/delete votes or sparked a huge number of complaining flags and otherwise leave them alone. I thought the system deletes/closes questions automatically if enough votes from mods and high rep users have accumulated (?), so probably nothing has to be done.&#xA;There is certainly no reason to generally delete/close larger groups of questions or disallow certain topics in the future as Annix tried to achieve. Neither is a metaphysics tag, saying that certain questions are not physics, needed here. Off base questions should be dealt with case by case as they come in (and as it was done before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once and for all, things were just fine before Anixx started to create an artificial issue, so it would be best to leave things allone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to consider is that refering to fundamental physics questions, that are investigated by serious theoretical physicists today, as &quot;metaphysics&quot; or even worse condemning them as off topic here on physics SE would lend support to people who attack fundamental physics not only in the internet but actively try to prohibit research into it even in the &quot;real world&quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T09:59:36.453" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-09-09T09:21:51.517" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) In 99 percent of the cases, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag runs smoothly and as intended. In a few cases, OP does not agree with labeling his question with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag; often it's a new user that hasn't read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/homework/info&quot;&gt;wiki description&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/2451&quot;&gt;site policy&lt;/a&gt;, but sometimes OP is right and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag is removed again from the question with no further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) In the early days of Phys.SE, whenever there was posted a homework question without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, then the moderators would politely ask OP if this was homework or not? Typically, a couple of full answers to the homework were posted and accepted before the issue of whether or not to add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag was settled. Thus OP would succeed in getting a homework solution from our site, which in other respect is mainly dedicated to just &lt;em&gt;conceptional&lt;/em&gt; physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III) In the last year or so, the tagging practice was changed, and users with tagging privileges would now often add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag whenever they felt it was appropriate &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; first asking OP. The answers were now typically just hints, advices, outlines, etc., instead of full solutions. So the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag clearly had the desired effect. Moreover, this new practice didn't seem to spur repeated back-and-forth edit war over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. Typically it became clear to everybody whether or not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag would apply in a given case or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IV) &lt;em&gt;If it ain't broke, don't fix it.&lt;/em&gt; I fear that by banning the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, we in practice loose a useful user-based moderation option, and effectively turn this site into a homework help service. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V) Another aspect is that many of our readers use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag to decide whether or not to read a post. This goes both ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T18:58:55.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1474" CreationDate="2012-09-09T20:24:01.447" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvoting without a reason is plain stupid. I &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; upvote every single downvoted question that has no justification. For example, check this question--&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35928/a-different-lasing-medium/35936#35936&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the OP has a few misconceptions about Laser systems, so what? I tried to interpret the question as best as I could, but of course the motherfunkers who probably downvoted the OP downvoted me as well. Hazard of the internet I guess. You need to sort this out bro...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2012-09-09T20:24:01.447" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1505" CreationDate="2012-09-10T14:52:46.293" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched a bit to see if this had been asked before, but couldn't find it. Is there a way to customize the color that a question is shaded when it is tagged with one of my &quot;favorite tags?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is just me, but when I scroll down through the front page of questions, the shading is so light that I often miss them. I find this shading color infuriating. I often tilt my laptop to an absurd angle just so I can tell which ones are shaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Favorite tag color" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1493" CreationDate="2012-09-10T15:27:42.777" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would happen to closed questions..? (Are they deleted after some period?) I know that we could delete it after 2 days. But what if it has answers, It can't be deleted still..? How would I delete the closed question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T00:37:47.943" Title="How to Delete Closed Questions?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-09-10T19:11:57.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason this is not a good idea is because there is a lot of mathematical thinking which is done outside the mathematical community, because it has not acquired the proper rigorous embedding into standard axiomatic systems. Fluctuating quantum field theory is an example, but so is statistical theory of fields (like turbulence), mathematical topological models (like the topological field theories, which are easier to make mathematics because they have a smaller Hilbert space, but the embedding to mathematics is still not complete), and various cases where the best mathematical solution is not the most useful physical solution, for example, the flow of a fluid in a square duct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The physics approach to mathematical problems is to make whatever approximations work best given the physical context, so an exact solution, like the exact solution of the quadratic equation, is often inferior to a linearized solution. The mathematics site looks to the answer which gives the most insight into the formal structure of the problem, not the answer which gives the most insight to the physical structure of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would even tolerate pure math questions where physicists and mathematicians disagree on the best answers, because the disagreements reflect a different point of view regarding what are the important aspects of a well posed mathematical problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T19:11:57.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1485" CreationDate="2012-09-10T19:39:50.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to do this directly on the site, but you can do it using a user style sheet, which requires a browser extension like Stylish (for Firefox at least). You would need to set the &lt;code&gt;background-color&lt;/code&gt; property for the &lt;code&gt;tagged-interesting&lt;/code&gt; CSS class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been discussed a bit on MSO, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78849/allow-custom-colorization-of-tags&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68853/choose-background-and-text-color-on-so&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T19:39:50.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1492" CreationDate="2012-09-10T19:52:43.170" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Mathjax rendering broken on the main site, or is it just me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is cdn.mathjax,org timing out for others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="90" LastEditDate="2012-09-13T08:41:45.643" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T08:41:45.643" Title="Mathjax broken? Is it just me?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-10T20:21:20.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;when the specific questions that prompted that discussion were named, the community has voted that they are on topic. So what's going on? ... I would like for us to resolve this one way or another - either we close all the offending questions, or we bring back the metaphysics tag for good.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To have a coherent policy of closing metaphysics questions requires that you have a coherent definition of what is and what isn't metaphysics. There is no prospect of any such consensus. I believe the policy should be, no metaphysics &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;, and questions are closed or not on a case-by-case basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is to be a philosophy tag, it should be &quot;philosophy&quot;, not &quot;metaphysics&quot;. Metaphysics (or ontology) is a term of art in philosophy, and it makes no sense to have technical philosophical jargon in the tags on a physics Q&amp;amp;A forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. By the way, there is a user who has posted ravings about the anthropic principle and reality under at least a dozen different identities, most recently &quot;Curious boy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1486" LastEditorUserId="1486" LastEditDate="2012-09-10T21:07:41.057" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T21:07:41.057" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-10T20:56:24.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that while some questions may be philosophical in essence, they still are bordering some of the phisical topics such as quantum mechanics, cosmology and measurement theory. As such, it is more productive for these questions to be asked in Physics.SE so I support the second option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that are pure philosophy such as &quot;why there should be anything at all?&quot; should be moved to Philosophy.SE though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="1186" LastEditDate="2012-09-10T21:14:54.823" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T21:14:54.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1489" CreationDate="2012-09-10T22:24:00.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TeX might not render (GoDaddy was hacked) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is what is says on the Math SE page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Daddy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Daddy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On 10 September 2012 Go Daddy was hit by a severe denial-of-service attack (DoS) that caused all of its services to become unavailable for several hours. A member of the Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack that caused outages of thousands of websites&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their Twitter says they are working on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T22:24:00.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1486" CreationDate="2012-09-11T00:37:47.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed questions are not automatically deleted. They can be deleted by moderators, but we don't generally do that because, honestly, it doesn't seem like the best use of our time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different types of closed questions; in particular, there are questions which are unsuitable in their current form but are close to being fine, and then there are questions which are entirely inappropriate for the site. When we close a question of the first time, we do so with the hope that it will be edited into a form that makes it suitable for reopening. But questions of the second sort, e.g. those that are egregiously off topic or completely nonsensical, we don't hold out much hope for - in other words, once closed, we pretty much expect that they are going to stay closed. Those questions are the ones that would be more appropriate for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T00:37:47.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-11T16:26:03.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's a philosophical question that depends on or is closely related to a physical theory then it should be allowed I think. It should be up to the poster of the question to relate the question to physics. So, my take is those questions where no attempt has been made to reasonably relate them to physics should be out, but otherwise should be allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that philosophical debates often spark really important discoveries about physics, such as nonlocality and completeness of quantum physics which started out as a philosophical debate but has now reached the point where it actually has technical applications. We should therefore not stifle debate of philosophical issues unless it is clear that they are not in any way related to physics. It is better to err on the side of openness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11529" LastEditorUserId="11529" LastEditDate="2012-09-11T21:35:30.490" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T21:35:30.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-11T16:41:04.687" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be no either/or duality :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;either we close all the offending questions, or we bring back the metaphysics tag for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The degree of offense is what should be the criterion, and the voting and comments should help you as a moderator to gauge that. If some are offended it is OK, one cannot please everyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This philosophical definition of metaphysics that Anixx is introducing is confusing and disorienting to the purpose of this board. As physicists philosophy is optional and should not be a required prerequisite to understand the discussions on physics. So I am against a metaphysics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as I said elsewhere many students visit this site and it would be a pity to disorient them with fluff, as far as physics goes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T16:41:04.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-12T14:07:56.683" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;When and Why is an account not allowed to suggest edits..? (Not in META) Is there any limit for a day..? that after crossing it, the account wouldn't be allowed to suggest edits. Anyway most of the suggested edits are no accepted... Some get rejected and are edited by someone who reviews it..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why my account is locked from suggesting edits?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-12T14:10:28.660" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens many times (to me) in meta... (Now, it happened 5 times) What does it mean by &quot;Oops! This question cannot be submitted because, It doesn't meet our quality standards&quot;. And, at last, it's verifying me for a Robot? (Doesn't this irritate for comparing a humanoid?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's your quality standard? I mean, Is there any rules for asking &quot;Help Me..&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-09-14T01:21:10.347" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Quality standard... What is it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1462" CreationDate="2012-09-13T05:06:24.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a much more established concept is &quot;philosophy of science&quot; rather than &quot;metaphysics&quot;.  It has a whole swath of discourse within journaled philosophy, and should not be controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11696" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T05:06:24.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-09-13T08:18:07.450" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing that makes me pretty angry about Ron's behaviour is that he does not distinguish between common consensus belief and his own private research--this makes evaluating his claims hard for a third party not familar with physics.  I'm not going to make a definitive statement on his private conclusions, but they are decidedly non-orthodox, and a layperson is not necessarily clear on this.  This is magnified by the fact that the non-orthodox views are supported by what an academic would consider to be wildly insufficient claims to support the strength of the provided arguments.  Saying &quot;Newtonian physics supports the theory of planetary motion&quot; requires different evidence than &quot;all string theorists are stupid idiots who deserve no attention.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that stackexchange is not a forum that is suited to extensive citation, this is a problem--there's no natural system for citation, and the detail of your answer is as much as you want it to be, and the veracity of it is only as great as the people voting on it, which can be heavily influenced by a play to the audience.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347" LastActivityDate="2012-09-13T08:18:07.450" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1501" CreationDate="2012-09-14T01:15:07.857" Score="0" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why doesn't this question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35528/particular-detail-about-supernovae-remnant&quot;&gt;Supernova remnants&lt;/a&gt; get a helpful answer even though the bounty is awarded..? Don't anyone like this? or Is it that due to &quot;The question is silly and waste of time&quot;..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T14:49:54.800" Title="Bounty fails for Non-sense question?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1500" CreationDate="2012-09-14T01:19:40.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's always the risk that nobody will provide a helpful answer when you set a bounty. After all, it's only an extra incentive to answer, not a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I'm just seeing your question now but I'm not really sure what you're asking. It's quite possible that other people declined to answer for the same reason, i.e. because they thought your question was unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T01:19:40.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1497" CreationDate="2012-09-14T01:23:09.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92074/what-can-i-do-when-getting-it-does-not-meet-our-quality-standards&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the gist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure your question has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a clear title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a reasonable explanation of what your question is, sharing your research on the matter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;correct use of English and actual sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that's not an exhaustive list of what makes a good (or rather, non-bad) question, just some general guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T01:23:09.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1496" CreationDate="2012-09-14T01:24:59.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the relevant information on suggested edits can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/81681/why-is-the-edit-button-disabled&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; at Meta Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T01:24:59.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1500" CreationDate="2012-09-14T12:58:28.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know why it was downvoted without the comments, though it is indeed a bit unclear. I personally know nothing about the problem and I just skipped it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has an answer, twice upvoted. A possible reason why it doesn't have another is because other people thought it is already answered, since you haven't provide any feedback to state your dissatisfaction with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should counteract with answerers more to improve and clarify things. As a bonus, editing question and answer will pop the question to the top, showing your efforts, attracting attention of other people. That doubles the effect of the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4020" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T12:58:28.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1485" CreationDate="2012-09-14T15:42:07.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on clicking links from the links everyone else provided, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66592/define-your-own-color-of-tagged-interesting&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; accepted answer to be the only thing that actually helped me change it. I'm essentially CSS illiterate, so I needed it spelled out a little more thoroughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T15:42:07.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1507" CreationDate="2012-09-15T02:38:28.420" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question was closed because:&#xA;&quot;question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there is always a need for civility, what does it profit the community if debate and extended discussion is automatically discouraged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastActivityDate="2012-09-15T02:51:35.000" Title="Is debate bad when it relates to physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1506" CreationDate="2012-09-15T02:51:35.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question with a long, &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; history first on Stack Overflow and then over the &quot;trilogy&quot; and now over the Stack Exchange network as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic position is that Stack Exchange sites are &lt;em&gt;Question &amp;amp; Answer&lt;/em&gt; site, not a forum or a discussion site, and this decision was made way back in 2008 when Stack Overflow were conceived. Since then they have been designed, tweaked, twiddled and fixed to be really good at questions that have answers that the crowd can see are &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the engine is not very good at supporting discussion---a fact that is blaringly obvious every time meta.stackoverflow has a big argy-bargy---and we try to keep things on point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-09-15T02:51:35.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-15T20:03:28.233" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;there seems to be a problem going on with the site, list of questions are not being updated, and some of them are dissapearing, like this one: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/37516/does-positronium-have-a-stable-crystalline-phase&quot;&gt;Does positronium have a stable crystalline phase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T03:32:06.037" Title="can't post to physics SO" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-09-16T03:32:09.623" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1508" CreationDate="2012-09-15T20:17:15.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some maintanance of the Stack Exchange servers going on. There were notices on the sites for a while. Presumably everything hasn't gone perfectly smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-09-15T20:17:15.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1508" CreationDate="2012-09-16T03:32:00.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a side-effect of our database migration. We had to rebuild a few services after it, so things were down for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should be all good now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7186" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T03:32:00.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-17T04:18:12.247" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to hide personal information like email address in one's profile, since I do not want my email to be seen by others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12145" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-09-17T04:32:09.323" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How to hide personal information like email address in one's profile" Tags="|support|profile-page|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1511" CreationDate="2012-09-17T04:36:16.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is detailed in several questions on Meta Stack Overflow, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144553/account-privacy-and-search-engines&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the way to hide personal information is simply by not entering that information in the first place. Most fields of the profile are optional, so you enter only what you want people to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The email address is one of several exceptions. Your email address will never be visible to anyone except moderators. (And the SE moderator code of conduct prohibits us from revealing that information to anyone else.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T04:36:16.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-17T07:24:27.267" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I try to get &quot;All Questions&quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/a&gt; I get only the ones with a bonus flag. I use firefox and am logged in. With Chrome and IE  not logged in the same link gives all questions.  I logged in at IE and got again only the bounty questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whats up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T19:50:20.427" Title="why when I am logged in I cannot go to &quot;all questions&quot;" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1513" CreationDate="2012-09-17T09:11:41.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a bar like this just below the header: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IvtRE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you are likely on the featured tab. Change it to active to get the default filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T09:11:41.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1516" CreationDate="2012-09-17T10:27:36.550" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35851/are-here-and-now-diffeomorphism-invariant-concepts&quot;&gt;&quot;Are “here” and “now” diffeomorphism invariant concepts?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is being bumped from time to time by new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect users &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12013/multiverse-philosopher&quot;&gt;Multiverse Philosopher&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12228/nonsensical-ranter&quot;&gt;Nonsensical ranter&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12295/naughty-problem-child&quot;&gt;Naughty problem child&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12077/childish-boy&quot;&gt;Childish boy&lt;/a&gt; being the same person registering, leaving answers to his own question and unregistering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a policy on such a behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4020" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T17:51:28.480" Title="User constantly registering and unregistering" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2012-09-17T17:51:28.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the answers are all useful, it's not really a problem. There's nothing wrong with a single user having multiple accounts as long as they don't use those accounts to vote for each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you think you see something like this happening, flag it for moderator attention and we'll take a look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T17:51:28.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-09-17T20:57:03.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/43283/space-exploration-and-technology?referrer=xkTq6YaEeCR2lHaAoMu3_A2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LwCGY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Space Exploration and Technology&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="871" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T20:57:03.930" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-09-17T20:57:03.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-09-19T10:24:35.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://whystringtheory.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HE69T.png&quot; alt=&quot;Why String Theory? A Layman&amp;#39;s Journey to the Frontiers of Physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T10:24:35.880" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-09-19T10:24:35.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-21T16:04:36.443" Score="-3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;i thought this was a physics forum open to all,but it is very elitist and moderated to suit,your way or no way.i may not be able to speak the language of science naming certain &quot;laws and formulas&quot; but i understand most of what i read and find that with all your &quot;schooled learning&quot; you have lost the ability to think outside the box.i came here hopeing for some kind of input but got closed down,i thought &quot;science&quot; was open to everyone but it seems it is a closed circle here.does it hurt to give help to others who have no where else to go or perhaps helpful guidance?once you define something you put it in a box where it then loses its ability to grow.i am sorry to post this but i see this trend of group snobbery is growing into many areas and saddens me,i have time for everyone whoever or whatever they are.i am not closed to anything,without one piece you have an incomplete picture....i've had my say sorry again for polluting this ivory tower. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user12414" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T04:02:03.537" Title="&quot;VERY SUBJECTIVE&quot; this is now closed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1519" CreationDate="2012-09-21T16:43:50.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All I can do for you is direct you to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, I recommend to you the parts where &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;it says that you should not post questions&lt;/a&gt; that are &lt;em&gt;&quot;[p]itches for your own personal theories or work&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, where it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;says that you should stick to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&quot;practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and of course the part where it talks about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#close&quot;&gt;why some questions are closed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; open to all---and indeed to anonymous use for writing questions and answers--but we reserve the right to police it to maintain a focused and useful environment for other users. We have a community here that has done a lot of work to create a useful resource for getting physics questions answered. We'd like to keep it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T16:43:50.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1519" CreationDate="2012-09-21T16:46:23.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it's not a forum, it's a Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more importantly: while this site is open to everyone, in the sense that we don't require any particular academic or other qualifications to join, it is an expert level site. That means that we expect contributors to understand the physics relevant to the question they want to ask. In other words, when you want to contribute you have to do so using the language of science, or something close enough to it that we can understand what you're talking about. (See points 1 and 2, especially, of &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; for a more in-depth discussion of what I'm getting at.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a problem, there are some other physics sites on the web (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reddit Physics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt;) which &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have different standards for what they expect of contributors, so it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that you may get more useful feedback there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T16:46:23.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1519" CreationDate="2012-09-21T21:01:43.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mark, I can understand your frustration, and physics is sometimes very difficult even for trained professionals.  I would agree that sometimes the comments made could be done in softer tones, however, there are reasons why people who love physics get defensive.  First of all, knowledge is perishable, even in this day in age of instantaneous answers, noise can frequently obscure what has been shown as fact within certain structures of logical reasoning.  At some level that is what physics is, a structure of logical reasoning about the world.  I think most physicists actually strive everyday to be able to think of something new to say about the world, however they need to be respectful of all the facts that have been determined before.  My only word of advice is to not be discouraged.  I think if you really want to learn, people will do their best to help, however, there are certain things that people have shown actually work and have studied intensely and will not accept certain answers they know are wrong.  Just keep moving and eventually a lot of this will make sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastEditorUserId="11547" LastEditDate="2012-09-22T04:02:03.537" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T04:02:03.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1524" CreationDate="2012-09-23T09:17:51.863" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just adjusted the tags of one of my recent questions since from reading the answer, I understand now better what I was talking about than before asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I'm not sure if this was right since it bumpded the question without having added much to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally when is it appropriate to adjust the tags of a question and when should one better refrain from retagging because it adds no additional value but just bumps the question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T13:40:01.743" Title="When is it appropriate to adjust the tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1523" CreationDate="2012-09-23T13:40:01.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the new tagging better characterized the question then it is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to see a pattern of re-tagging a lot of question without a clear improvement to the description of then we might ask you to quit bumping, but an honest deeper understanding isn't going to come every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T13:40:01.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-23T13:55:33.183" Score="-7" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;who is moderator of this website, because my account is under attack&#xA;im pretty sure its just one person sending me these &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12377/muster-mark?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;too much vote down&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T15:53:41.580" Title="my account is under vote down attack" Tags="|support|down-votes|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2012-09-23T18:53:23.520" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As no single account can cast more than one down vote on any particular post it is clear that more than one person feels that some of your posts are not &lt;em&gt;&quot;useful and clear&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any one person is engaging in a pattern of arbitrary downvoting it will likely be reverse by an automatic process that exists for that exact purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T18:53:23.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-24T03:22:05.743" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38113/what-star-processes-throw-strange-matter-into-space&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the questioner by misremembering used &quot;quark&quot; instead of &quot;strange&quot;.  This was edited by a third party after my reply, and the admission in the comments by the questioner that a slip was made, and made my reply completely irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to delete my answer, because it was not wrong within the previous framework of the question. I am not familiar with &quot;strange matter&quot; and in any case it is an entirely different story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the protocol on this? In my opinion the question should be deleted by the owner if there are answers that will become irrelevant, and resubmitted in the correct format. This would delete any answers of course, which would be  hard if someone had worked hard on an answer. If there are no answers of course editing is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T23:13:42.563" Title="what are the rules for complete edit of title and purpose of question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2012-09-24T05:58:33.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, when a question is edited such that your answer no longer applies, you have the following options, in decreasing order of preference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit your answer such that it actually does answer the updated question (recommended)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete your answer (recommended if you don't feel that you can adequately answer the updated question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask the questioner if they would be willing to revert the edit, and perhaps post the new version of the question as its own post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave your answer in place, but in this case you run the risk of the answer being downvoted because it doesn't address the question in its current form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revert the edit yourself (not recommended unless the OP okays it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; cases, when a question is edited such that one or more answers no longer apply, if the edit is exceptionally disruptive, it would be appropriate to revert it. What counts as &quot;exceptionally disruptive&quot; is a judgment call made on a case-by-case basis, but in making that decision some of the factors that should be taken into account include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how much the edit changed the meaning of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the edit reflects a change in what the poster &lt;em&gt;intends&lt;/em&gt; the question to mean&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the edit was prompted by comments asking for clarifications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the quality of the original question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of answers that would be invalidated by the edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the quality of the answers that would be invalidated by the edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rough guideline, what I would consider &quot;exceptionally disruptive&quot; is something like: the OP has changed their mind about what they want to ask, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the question's meaning is changed significantly, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the original question was good quality, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; multiple upvote-worthy answers would be invalidated by the change. I've seen situations like this come up occasionally on the site, and I've reverted edits in those cases, but it's very rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: in this situation specifically, deleting your answer seems like the most appropriate course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T23:13:42.563" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T23:13:42.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2012-09-24T13:32:39.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to go with David's fourth option (leave the answer and run the risk), you might edit a prominent header onto you answer explaining what happened (i.e. &lt;em&gt;&quot;this was written as an answer to a early version of the question and does not apply to the current version&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T13:32:39.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-25T02:27:02.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philosophy has a well-developed arena for such questions, whole journals devoted to the topic.  Let them be placed there, and let the physics site keep a strict boundary of matter-energy/time-space relations.  If physicists want to speculate on such matters they can go to philosophy.SE and debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11696" LastEditorUserId="11696" LastEditDate="2012-09-25T14:56:23.933" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T14:56:23.933" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1481" CreationDate="2012-09-25T18:03:59.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A tag ''metaphysics'' is misleading, generally meaning ''non-physics''. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose to use &#xA;&lt;LI&gt;''foundations of physics'' (a physics journal has this name), or &#xA;&lt;LI&gt;''philosophy of science'' (The Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aip.org/pacs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.aip.org/pacs/&lt;/a&gt; has a classifier 01.70.+w for this area.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quite interested in thinking about serious questions in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T18:03:59.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-27T15:08:40.430" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/whats-the-possibility-of-a-physics-se-blog&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the possibility of a Physics.SE blog?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i recommend to open a site for free blogging in physics&#xA;for example:&#xA;physics-blogs.stackexchange.com&#xA;or&#xA;physics-blogger.stackexchange.com&#xA;or&#xA;physics-blogging.stackexchange.com&#xA;...etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched the whole internet but can not find a suitable site to blogging in physics.&#xA;i try to test wordpress and blogspot they are Too Complicated!. Furthermore, there are no reader! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user12567" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T17:18:24.347" Title="stackexchange site for free blogging in physics" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-09-27T17:18:31.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1535" CreationDate="2012-09-27T21:17:11.700" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was recently posted: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38439/how-to-find-poles-of-transfer-function-by-looking-at-the-step-response&quot;&gt;How to find poles of transfer function by looking at the step response?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that it needs to be migrated to signal processing stack exchange because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the community there will benefit more from the question&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;contains little physics content&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is being asked by someone probably doing a module in signal processing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other reasons why it should/should-not be asked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T23:29:33.227" Title="Should this question be migrated to signal processing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1534" CreationDate="2012-09-29T23:29:33.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, only your reason #2 is really a valid reason to migrate. That being said, nobody else seemed to have much of an opinion either way, so I went ahead and migrated it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T23:29:33.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-03T14:47:56.890" Score="3" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I like the answers posted by a user on Stack Exchange, is there a way to follow the user? like for example, set an alert so that whenever he asks a question or replies to a question, it is notified to my gmail account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6822" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T10:39:59.933" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T00:04:44.167" Title="Is it possible to follow a user on Stack Exchange?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1536" CreationDate="2012-10-03T15:12:07.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no internal concept of &quot;following&quot; a user because (all together now) this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110958/can-we-finally-have-some-social-networking-features-on-here&quot;&gt;is not a social network&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all is not lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are RSS feeds for users (and tag and question feeds). Click on the username to get to their profile page, choose the &quot;Activity&quot; tab, and look at the bottom left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-10-30T00:04:44.167" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T00:04:44.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1539" CreationDate="2012-10-04T05:10:47.580" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unable to edit any question in physics stackexchange. Will you tell me what should i do or what is happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12502" LastActivityDate="2012-10-04T13:30:05.300" Title="Unable to edit any question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2012-10-04T13:30:05.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As your account still seems to be the owner of your earlier questions my first guess would be that you have some corrupted javascript in your cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/cache/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a forced refresh of cached material&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearing your caches outright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible culprit is any userscripts you may have running. Try disabling those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all else fails, try a different browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still not working? Get back to us with your OS and browser stuff, and we'll pass it on to the team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-10-04T13:30:05.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1541" CreationDate="2012-10-05T08:30:29.407" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to move an existing discussion, that consists so far of just a few comments, to chat instead of deleting the comments that are off topic to the issue of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can something like this be done? And if so how does it work? Or should I just flag the first comment I´d like to move for moderator attention and ask the mods to move the discussion starting with this comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It once happend that a discussion I was taking part in was &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; moved to chat but now I'd like to know if it can be done &lt;em&gt;manually&lt;/em&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How can I &quot;manually&quot; move an existing discussion to chat?" Tags="|discussion|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1540" CreationDate="2012-10-05T08:41:39.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it cannot be done manually, not even by moderators, despite being a popular request on MSO (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100967/should-move-to-chat-be-provided-on-demand-as-a-button-perhaps&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93444/provide-a-tool-for-moderators-to-migrate-comments-to-chat&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, etc.). Unless and until we get this feature implemented, you have a couple of options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just post a comment asking to continue the discussion in the chat room (you can either use the site's main chat room or create a new chat room)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or keep the discussion going in the comments until the system gives you the automatic &quot;move to chat&quot; option. After you do that you can flag the first comment for a moderator to delete them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T08:41:39.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1543" CreationDate="2012-10-05T23:58:00.353" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted an interesting and specific question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39129/velocity-of-glass-bottle-in-space-after-contents-are-released&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39129/velocity-of-glass-bottle-in-space-after-contents-are-released&lt;/a&gt;, which had generated 2 upvotes (therefore interesting to some members of the community)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which was inspired by a users comment on another post, who thought the above question was interesting:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23588/if-i-take-a-bottle-of-air-into-space-and-open-it-where-does-it-go?rq=1&quot;&gt;If I take a bottle of air into space, and open it, where does it go?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the question was closed as being too specific.  So are questions that are specific in nature, but illustrate interesting concepts off-topic on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T00:05:45.140" Title="Are interesting, but specific questions off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1542" CreationDate="2012-10-06T00:05:45.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which instruct people to solve a problem without showing any work are not appropriate as per our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. That's why your question was closed. I used the &quot;too localized&quot; close reason out of habit, but &quot;off topic&quot; would apply equally well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could probably turn your question into something appropriate by going on to say something like &quot;I tried to solve this by doing XXX then YYY, but after that I got stuck because I don't see any way to calculate ZZZ from YYY. Is it possible to do this, and how?&quot; That makes it a conceptual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T00:05:45.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-07T01:49:22.137" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/47/very-minor-edits-e-g-punctuation&quot;&gt;Very minor edits, e.g. punctuation&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed a sign error in an old answer of mine. I wanted to fix it, but I don't really want to bring this old question to the top of the stack when there's fundamentally nothing new to read there. Is there a workaround for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T18:26:46.307" Title="Is there a way to make minor edits on old answers w/o bringing them to top of stack?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|editing|retagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2012-10-07T05:32:53.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1500" CreationDate="2012-10-07T14:49:54.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to answer this because it's a whole field--- the main thing you are missing is gravitational wave emission--- this has simulation data for the two black hole case now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are papers going back decades, it is very active now in astrophysics, and you need someone who is familiar enough with the literature to make comprehensive accurate summary. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. I have a vague idea of this stuff, but personally I wouldn't feel comfortable pontificating on it-- I need to know where all the folklore results come from and their limitations and confidence intervals. The question is just too ambitious, and it would probably get an answer if separated into smaller questions separately for neutron stars, black holes, and neutron star and black hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that two neutron stars would be able to merge without making a black hole, since they are close to the limit, but this is just a feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T14:49:54.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-10-07T18:44:13.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a homework tag is much less necessary here than on SO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A homework question is normally obvious. It typically includes specific numbers, a ball of mass m falls .... rather than asking about the path of a falling object. It's upto the individual members here to decide if they want to answer it with a simple answer, a hint or an explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physicsforums is better at homework since you can have a discussion with the questioner and lead them to an answer - the SO model doesn't work for teaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homework tag is very very useful on SO and I really don't understand why it was banned. If somebody asks eg. how to reverse a string - the 'correct' software engineering answer is to call the library function. But if the question is homework then the answer is different. Without the tag you have no way of knowing if they want the software engineering answer or the homework answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2525" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T18:44:13.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1547" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1548" CreationDate="2012-10-07T20:48:16.247" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there were anyway to have automatic stats on points/answer, points/question, etc on the site.  I didn't see it, so apologies if its there, but I think it would be beneficial to introduce some metrics into the user profiles.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T21:30:12.167" Title="Metrics for questions and answers" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1547" CreationDate="2012-10-07T20:59:21.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not automatic, but you can get numbers like this from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SE Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;. For example, I have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/47595/top-users-by-average-answer-vote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;query for top users by average answer score&lt;/a&gt;, and you can also browse other queries that people have created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, try checking &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;MSO&lt;/a&gt; to see if this has been requested there - it wouldn't surprise me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T20:59:21.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1547" CreationDate="2012-10-07T21:30:12.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange user leagues&lt;/a&gt; provide a limited contestesque view of user activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T21:30:12.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-11T22:39:50.680" Score="4" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to write that uncertainty $\Delta x$ is 12 angstroms. I wanted to use the symbol for angstrom instead of spelling it out entirely. How to write SI units on this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried the following and that doesn't work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;$\Delta x = \SI{12}{\angstrom}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5971" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T23:55:33.153" Title="How to write units in latex code for this website?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1555" CreationDate="2012-10-11T23:55:33.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for mathematical rendering on this website, and most LaTeX packages and commands (including siunitx) are not implemented in MathJax. You will need to use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\overset{\circ}{A}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to get an Angstrom symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T23:55:33.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1558" CreationDate="2012-10-12T20:22:02.883" Score="5" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about &lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://what-if.xkcd.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One one hand, the FAQ stands against them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where … we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is precedent, such as my own &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9456/would-a-submarine-float-in-the-atmosphere-of-jupiter&quot;&gt;Would a submarine float in the atmosphere of Jupiter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: Why wasn't my submarine question closed and/or deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3404" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T18:20:08.253" Title="Are outlandish XKCD style What If questions welcome here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1557" CreationDate="2012-10-12T20:36:14.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you literally just ask &quot;What if X happened?&quot;, that's too open ended - it's not asking for something specific, it's just inviting speculation. And if X is something that isn't physically possible, it'd also be too hypothetical. But your submarine question is not of that type. It's looking for a specific answer based on a physical argument, which makes it okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, the XKCD blog has looser standards than we do for what is acceptable, but many of the questions addressed on there would probably be okay here, as long as they are phrased properly. For example, a question phrased as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What if everyone on Earth pointed a laser at the moon?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; would be inappropriate here, but asking &quot;If everyone on Earth pointed a laser at the moon, would it look different?&quot; is fine. (And &quot;How much light would we need to shine at the moon to make it visibly brighter?&quot; would probably be even better.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T20:36:14.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1562" CreationDate="2012-10-14T12:47:05.983" Score="1" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/39712/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question as suggested by David Zaslavsky and Qmechanic to remove the topic of information since the consensus was it is better to ask it in a different post. Removing the information stuff would the presently closed question make appropriate for physics SE and it should be reopened after the edit as David Zaslavsky suggested. After the question is reopened, I wanted to put my answering comments into a propper answer and notice mods to remove the no longer needed, at the moment a bit cluttering, comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But EnergyNumbers prohibited this procedure on which I agreed with David Zaslavsky, Qmechanic, and the OP himself by &lt;strong&gt;wrongly&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/4609&quot;&gt;rejecting&lt;/a&gt; my edits, probably because he did not read the comments below the question, wherein the OP agrees with the question being edited in this way. Since he was never completely sure about the importance of the term &quot;information&quot; in this context, he even said that he wants it to leave for someone else to make these edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can my edits still be approved by a more reasonable reviewer, will I have to repeat  them, or is this case completely lost now because EnergyNumbers has prohibited the agreed on procedure ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T19:44:30.370" Title="My edits of a questions are wrongly rejected, what can be done about this?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1560" CreationDate="2012-10-14T13:23:16.000" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't need to re-open all closed questions. Often, closed questions can just stay closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to ask a question just about emergent phenomena, there's absolutely nothing stopping you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP asked about book recommendations for &lt;strong&gt;information and emergent phenomena&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no quota on the number of questions that can be asked, so I rejected your edit, because there was no good reason for you to hijack someone else's question to turn it into a different question, as I explained in the rejection note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, open-ended book questions are a pretty poor fit to a Q&amp;amp;A site that specialises in finding single, objective answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat could be a good place for these sorts of questions about book recommendations. It's also the right place for the extended discussion that clutters up this question, and others. And it would be the right place if you want to discuss this answer. Or indeed anything else. Q&amp;amp;A is not the place for discussion, chat is. Main Q&amp;amp;A and meta Q&amp;amp;A are for questions and answers. Chat is for chat &amp;amp; discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T13:23:16.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1560" CreationDate="2012-10-14T17:20:43.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On its own merits, i.e. without taking into consideration the comments on the question, that would have been an inappropriate edit. So we can't really blame EnergyNumbers for rejecting it - it's certainly not an abuse of the power to review edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it is a good idea to look at the comments on a question before deciding to reject an edit. When one does take the comments into account... in this case it could go either way. One could definitely argue that it should be the OP's prerogative whether to edit the question. But one could also argue that the OP can just revert any edit he/she doesn't like. Personally, in light of the comment discussion, I suppose I would have approved that edit, but it's not like it would be a great question either way so I don't feel we have suffered too much of a loss by not having the question edited and reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the OP can always make that edit and then the question would presumably be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-10-14T19:44:30.370" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T19:44:30.370" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1564" CreationDate="2012-10-16T12:57:48.480" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the author of a question ever selected an answer that was clearly wrong can a moderator ever de-select the wrong answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T13:02:26.657" Title="Just out of curiousty, can moderators ever deselect a wrongly selected answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1563" CreationDate="2012-10-16T13:02:26.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators cannnot change the accepted answer, but they can delete an accepted answer. In general, choosing the accepted answer is the decision of the user asking the question alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2012-10-16T13:02:26.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-19T01:04:03.620" Score="1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have looked around and haven't seen anything specifically addressing my question so please kindly point me in the right direction if I have overlooked anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the official policy for answers to astronomy and physics questions that include mention of, and/or results from, and experience in, astronomy and physics education? I have seen, and have experienced, some hostility toward educational issues here and I get the feeling that these matters are treated mostly as matters of personal opinion rather than as research-based problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know once and for all whether such answers are welcome. I have seen some patently incorrect answers given and marked as correct, but containing terminology errors and/or conceptual errors. If such answers are not welcome, that's fine. I just need to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11266" LastActivityDate="2015-06-01T18:52:09.457" Title="Official policy on astronomy and physics education cited in answers" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1567" CreationDate="2012-10-19T02:22:53.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Astronomy questions and answers are explicitly on topic. For a while there was a Astronomy.SE beta site and while it lived we did attempt to make a distinction between those question the definitely belonged on one site or the other (and necessarily recognized that some would be on topic on both). However, astro.se was ruled to be dying; its content was moved here and the site was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The matter of how people react to personal experience answers is entirely up to the people casting the votes. That's the deal with crowd-sourced evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure what you mean by &quot;physics education&quot; in this context---are you talking about &quot;physics education research&quot; (PER) in a formal sense, about the experience gained in teaching physics, or about the usual progression of the education of a physicist (bachelor's degree, grad school, maybe a some postdoctoral work...)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a explicit policy on PER questions at this time. Now, I attend quite a few talks and seminars given by these guys because I find the topic fascinating and would really like some guidance from them; however there are a fair number of questions in PER that I (speaking personally rather than as a moderator) would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; classify as on-topic here (and many that I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; classify as on-topic---it depends on how much &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; there is in the matter).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your personal experience as a teacher may be relevant, and you are welcome to answer on that basis. But see my point above about people being free to vote as they will.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a number of existing questions on the normal (and sometimes abnormal) education of physicists. Some have been well received and some have not. Many are closed for not meeting the usual guidelines with respect to &lt;em&gt;having answers&lt;/em&gt; and not being polls or discussion topics. A few have been made community wiki as a kind of compromise position.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have seen some patently incorrect answers given and marked as correct, but containing terminology errors and/or conceptual errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I trust that have downvoted these and left comments explaining how they are wrong? Oh, good. Because that is about all any one person can do about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you want to bring them up on chat, which might be worth a try as this is usually a low traffic site; when we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get bursts of activity stuff can fall off the front page pretty quickly. Then some questions can be missed by those users who only check in occasionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="74" LastEditDate="2015-06-01T18:52:09.457" LastActivityDate="2015-06-01T18:52:09.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1557" CreationDate="2012-10-21T16:27:34.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the difference is pretty well definable.  The xkcd comics are a good case-in-point, because they are fun to read precisely because the author &lt;em&gt;doesn't just&lt;/em&gt; answer the question.  Most of what is written is, in fact, a tangent.  Let's look at examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/14/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a perfectly valid question for Physics SE (and nice that the intuition is wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/15/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What if you exploded a nuclear bomb (say, the Tsar Bomba) at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not really a valid question.  The cynical obvious answer is &quot;a large bomb goes off in the Marianas Trench&quot;.  More to the point, there is no clear answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/12/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good case where both the question and the answer aren't really appropriate for Physics SE.  There are physics peppered in there, but at one point, I think it was talking about the lore and terror people were living in after the great kinematic destruction of a town by the giant raindrop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not the only problem.  Perhaps the &lt;em&gt;biggest&lt;/em&gt; problem is that the author had to &lt;em&gt;fill in&lt;/em&gt; so much about the question.  Physics requires good definition.  We are better off demanding solid definition (and thus quality) in the questions with our format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone was crystal clear that they were talking about a giant spherical ball of water with volume equal to a rainstorm materializing instantly above suburban America, then... I suppose we would have to allow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="1255" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T18:20:08.253" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T18:20:08.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-23T05:42:02.453" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the common practise for commenting users with their first questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some links (something except faq?). Or useful answers on Meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6735" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T01:14:48.227" Title="Common practise for first-time questions" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2012-10-23T07:09:30.717" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlIlq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T08:21:49.060" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T08:21:49.060" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-10-23T07:09:30.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-23T15:35:51.330" Score="-7" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this StackExchange existed before the suggestion of photons, many of the answers would be different, and they would be up-voted. This is unlike a Computer programming question regarding a specific protocol, where the design is known -- created by someone/people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I welcome trying Science-related SEs because they fill a huge gap in learning online. But inherently many of the answers are subjective -- something that is notoriously refused when recognized on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think Science-related SEs will work, and if so how, and if not what might we be able to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14295" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T18:42:45.503" Title="Science answers are unlike human-made answers, do you think this SE will work?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1572" CreationDate="2012-10-23T16:21:03.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange originates with Stack Overflow where the domain is programming---another field that is not static. Just in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; Stack Overflow tags, the last four years have seen new versions of c, c++ and python all of which have changed the best answer to some questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The engine has coped with this just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that it will cope with the march of physics well, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T16:21:03.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1572" CreationDate="2012-10-23T18:42:45.503" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you have a false impression of science. Science builds on previous data continuously. The tools may change, the theories may change but it is a matter of expanding knowledge, not a drastic demolition and rebuilding process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know about the photon since last century, and the knowledge was built on the knowledge of the century before that with Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, and the one before that where Newton postulated the corpuscular nature of light ( photons really).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the science is based on data and is not science fiction ( imaginary and manipulated data) it remains as part of the foundation, even though it might be outdated. The (in) famous epicycles are still there, in the planetarium programs when the geocentric system is assumed. Because they were an accumulation of observations fitted to a theory of that time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For scientific disciplines the SEs are useful to excite the interest and imagination of young new scientists entering the field, a forum for discussions of physics in our case and an opportunity to keep on learning, even after retirement or change of occupation due to work needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it will work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T18:42:45.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1570" CreationDate="2012-10-25T01:14:48.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't really any common practice. If you would like to leave a comment welcoming a new user to the site, that's fine, but it's not obligated or expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T01:14:48.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-30T15:06:29.437" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really, two related questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In physics in general, and quantum mechanics in particular, there is great interest, and substantial disagreement about fundamental, foundational issues.  These questions are at least sometimes deep and subtle.  A tag such as foundations-of-physics or fundamental-question or just &quot;foundations&quot; might be appropriate for questions related to these issues. What is the best tag for this type of question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But I am more concerned about a second, somewhat different sort of basic question.  In particular, I am concerned about very basic questions concerning basic concepts and definitions, or elementary procedures.  You would think that these questions would be easily answered by googling or consulting an elementary text book.   But I find it is amazing how many very elementary questions I cannot answer by those means, and so I turn to Physics SE.  These questions are not homework, and should not be treated as homework (i.e. hints instead of clear answers).  Often the purpose of the question is to clear up a misconception.  So the homework tag is very inapropriate for this type of question.  Perhaps basic-question would be an appropriate tag or even simpler-than-homework or some other such tag. I don't know how many others do, but I certainly feel the need for a tag of this type.  Comments and suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I just read the following, based on the automated suggestion, and have not changed my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/566/is-the-precautionary-closing-of-immature-questions-so-very-necessary&quot;&gt;Is the precautionary closing of immature questions so very necessary?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-basic-is-too-basic&quot;&gt;How basic is too basic?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T15:29:09.997" Title="New tag(s) for very basic questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1576" CreationDate="2012-10-30T15:27:09.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's necessary to have a tag to identify these types of questions. These types of tags (which give general metadata about a question instead of characterizing its subjects) are called &quot;meta tags,&quot; and there is plenty of discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (and even some on this meta site) about why they should be avoided. (In fact I personally think we could do without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, but the community seems to like it and it's too well-entrenched to get rid of now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions themselves, of course, are fine; I just don't think they need to be tagged in the way you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T15:27:09.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1576" CreationDate="2012-10-31T15:29:09.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/foundations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;foundations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;foundations&lt;/a&gt; (and it's not meta by any means). Just it is not used that much (yet?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you are addressing is very real, as &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of simple questions can be asked on totally different grounds, from a newbie to the most knowledgable person on that topic. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27303/negative-probabilities-in-quantum-physics&quot;&gt;Negative probabilities in quantum physics&lt;/a&gt; where I got some newbie answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-question&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag plus I guess that most of questions would need it, so it is a bad idea to introduce it (even though my approach to meta tags is very liberal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T15:29:09.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T13:49:37.607" Score="24" ViewCount="1214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just made a map of tags for &lt;strong&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: tag size is related to tag popularity and edges are related to tag co-occurrences in questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it looks as a &amp;quot;snapshot&amp;quot; of topics and scope of this SE site. So if you want to you it in any way to promote Physics.SE - feel free!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you have comments how to improve its usefulness or niceness to our community, I would appreciate them (but bear in mind that I have no color esthetics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V41Z6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tag Map for Physics.SE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Links:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/predict-closed-questions-on-stack-overflow/prospector#211&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An entry for StackExchange vis competition at Kaggle&lt;/a&gt; (please vote if you like it :), it ends on Nov 3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recipe, code and images at GitHub&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. tweak the plot to your taste; feel invited to co-develop)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T18:32:14.423" Title="Map of 64 Tags from Physics.SE" Tags="|discussion|tags|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1584" CreationDate="2012-11-04T05:26:53.633" Score="3" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to get an answer as to why Jed Rothwell's answer to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43060/what-are-the-challenges-to-achieving-cold-fusion&quot;&gt;What are the challenges to achieving cold fusion?&lt;/a&gt; was deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure that this is somewhat borderline, since the web page is his own, and there might be some conflict of interest, but in cases where you have hundreds of papers ignored by the mainstream community, with obvious political pressure you can &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt;, and no sound arguments beyond nonsense estimates from idiots, I think one must bend over backwards to avoid censorship and let people get heard (and perhaps downvoted, but that doesn't matter) without politics getting in the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One must be mindful that censorship is the enemy of science. The question is: is it appropriate to delete Rothwell's answer? Perhaps it may be undeleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T13:46:24.767" Title="Jed Rothwell's answer to cold fusion question" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2012-11-04T07:13:47.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To start with the closed  answer to the question should be reopened. I would have given a + to get it out of the danger zone ( if it happens automatically) but was asleep at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the list, not in depth. The papers in the usual journals for physics were theoretical papers. I did not find experimental papers except within their inner circle of conference publications. ( I may be wrong, and if you can give a link to a Nuclear Physics B or physics letters etc I will read it carefully).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that the field has been painted with a &quot;crackpot physics&quot; brush and it will be hard for an experimentalist to publish in the usual journals. That is why it is important not to censor the subject in this forum. An open mind to sincere search should be kept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was around when cold fusion hit the news. I do not know an experimental  physicist in my institute who did not drop everything and start to read about this for a few days. Some even experimented. People were excited and then felt let down, and turned against it when it was not consistently repeatable ( a lynch pin of experimental physics) and the energies not commensurate with fusion energies, though larger than run of the mill. I believe this disappointment is what turned the crowd against research in this field, and not the lack of theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in my answer there are now two commercial products down the pipe. If they are selling snake oil, it will become evident soon. If it is gold ( and better) that will also be transparent and a lot of people will eat their hats. Let us not make this site a hat eating site :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2012-11-04T15:09:18.227" LastActivityDate="2012-11-04T15:09:18.227" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2012-11-04T07:14:55.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deletion by Community indicates that it was automatically removed due to spam or offensive flags (in this case likely the former). The answer could be reposted if Jed makes it clear that he is linking to his own site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-11-04T07:14:55.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1586" CreationDate="2012-11-04T15:27:10.227" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I remember it correctly, unsuccessfully flagged regular posts appear explicitly in my flagging history, (marked as declined) and a message is left by the person who handled it, saying why the flag is declined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems not to happen for declined flags on comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I learn why a comment flag is declined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-11-04T17:02:43.850" Title="How can I see why my comment flag was declined?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1585" CreationDate="2012-11-04T17:02:43.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IIRC, comment flags add to your count, but they're not explicitly displayed in your flag list*. Furthermore, there is no option for mods to put a decline reason-- there's just a dialog asking &quot;helpful?&quot; or something similar. So, to find out what happened, your best bet would be to ask a mod :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;sup&gt;not only that, they're a bit masked on the mod side as well--certain comment flags are anonymous, and they show up with less details in the post flags page&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-11-04T17:02:43.850" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-04T18:12:40.947" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, Guys. Recently, I poked into this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/41814/&quot;&gt;James Webb Space Telescope&amp;#39;s halo orbit at Lagrange point L2&lt;/a&gt; asked by @Michael which is &lt;em&gt;pretty good&lt;/em&gt;. As it didn't get enough attention, I started a bounty on it. Seems like it doesn't get attention now either. I don't think, these &lt;em&gt;Physics guys&lt;/em&gt; are bored of seeing such a question. At the same time, we shouldn't expect equal interests from others. But, Is there any other reason for this question - &lt;em&gt;not getting  attention&lt;/em&gt;..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I think It'd get attention at least in meta :-)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T02:37:29.050" Title="Bounty for attention (though it's a good question)" Tags="|support|questions|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-11-02T05:57:04.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1587" CreationDate="2012-11-05T02:37:29.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This Q is +10 so it got quite a lot of attention and appreciation -- the fact that it has no answers is more connected to the fact it is a pretty tough question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T02:37:29.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2012-11-05T13:46:24.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked on the moderator's chat group about the handling of requests to undelete material that was killed by spam flags, and the consensus seems to be that the default answer is &quot;No.&quot;, and that exceptions should be made only for answer that clearly add a lot of value to site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jed's answer is little more than a link, and such answers are mostly discouraged in any case, so I'm going to leave things as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T13:46:24.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1581" CreationDate="2012-11-05T16:41:41.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it weird that QM is all alone in that corner there. Are there really so many QM-QI links to dwarf, say the QM-photons, light, QFT, etc., edges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T16:41:41.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-09T22:54:25.200" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/6385/discussion-between-frenchkheldar-and-mythealias?highlights=false&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the chat as one user mythealias helped figure out some of my issues related with my question. I feel like there are some valuable information from our back and forth. Should it be brought back to the question? Is the link to the chat in the comments sufficient? Should we just star the good bits? Part of my desire to bring things back is to either upvote or reward some of the material. But obviously, if I do it, I cannot upvote my summary, that would defeat the purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6456" LastActivityDate="2012-11-10T23:06:03.783" Title="What is the standard practice to bring back valuable information from the chat?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-11-09T23:19:41.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me speak about the rare exception and my thoughts on it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen both my questions and other people's questions fall into the trap of the homework tag due to the way it was asked, even though it was nothing of the sort.  The reason this happened (in the cases I'm thinking of) was because numbers were included in order to define the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An experienced editor will then see a new or relatively new user ask a question with numbers, and develop the expectation that the user asking wants to get an answer to complete an assignment.  Most of the time this is the case... but sometimes questions will get the homework tag even when it's completely absurd.  For example, problems that are so involved one couldn't expect an answer to return a value, or problems that simply don't have a straightforward answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem with communication IMO is that it's often hard to tell &lt;em&gt;why the person is asking&lt;/em&gt;.  Sometimes it's for the purpose of advancing the person's general knowledge, sometimes it's for a class, and sometimes the person is literally building a heat exchanger in their backyard and wants to get dimensions to cut (!!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The special cases are something to keep in mind, but the homework tag effectively serves a very important purpose most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2012-11-09T23:19:41.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2588" CreationDate="2012-11-09T23:33:01.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe a summary of the good stuff can be put into a new answer to the question. I think a user can give more than one answer to a question. With this the good stuff would be better visible to everybody than in a poorly titled chatroom and it would be upvotable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-11-09T23:33:01.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2588" CreationDate="2012-11-10T23:06:03.783" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the discussion in the chat room gives you ideas as to how to clarify your question, then do so by editing the question, and you can incorporate the content of the discussion that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the discussion in the chat room constitutes an answer to the question, or leads you to figure out an answer, then turn it into an answer and post it. Or you could ask that one of the other participants in the discussion post the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the discussion helps clarify an existing answer, then you could leave a comment pointing the author of that answer to the chat transcript, so they can incorporate the material if they want. Or you could post a separate answer with the clarified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. When I say &quot;turn it into an answer&quot; I don't mean that you should copy and paste the chat transcript into an answer. That'd be inappropriate. I mean that you should write an answer motivated by the things that were discussed in chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-11-10T23:06:03.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2638" CreationDate="2012-11-12T07:34:23.073" Score="11" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a few questions asked about cold fusion on this site, especially in recent days. Invariably they lead to extended arguments, which is not healthy for the site - the whole Stack Exchange system is built around avoiding that sort of content. Plus, as our FAQ says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the conclusion that cold fusion is bogus, whether right or wrong, is firmly established in mainstream physics. So I am proposing that we disallow cold fusion as a topic of posting on this site (unless and until it becomes established mainstream physics). We already have one &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3799/why-is-cold-fusion-considered-bogus&quot;&gt;good reference question&lt;/a&gt; about cold fusion, and I think that's enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are some users who have already made their feelings on this issue well known, but I'm interested in hearing arguments either way from the rest of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T19:52:20.597" Title="What should be the status of cold fusion on this site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-12T08:10:04.020" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;David, I have been following from afar the subject ever since it appeared. As I have said at that time most solid state and nuclear physicists were scrambling to understand and some reproduce the results. There was great disappointment in the community that the results could not be consistently reproduced ( which is the norm for accepting something in physics) and the marginalization of the field is a backlash to that initial enthusiasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should give the complete quote of the FAQ on physics.se&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here. Anything that couldn't be published in a reputable journal is probably not appropriate at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless there are a number of interesting and solid physical effects in the experiments connected with Low Energy Nuclear Fusion . T&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBossthermaland.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is something going on&lt;/a&gt; that may &lt;a href=&quot;http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/ICCF-17-Mosier-Boss-Its-Not-Low-Energy-Paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not be chemical&lt;/a&gt; as we know it, many  studies are published in reputable places, peer reviewed etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think censorship should not be imposed apriori, because physics is about thinking outside the box. If one forces everything into the box physics will stagnate, let alone this site. There is always an element of uncertainty in research. True, cold fusion seems a misleading path, but there are experimental effects that need an explanation by physicists. By no means should we close our minds to possibilities outside the box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if the moderators are aware and delete comments if they become incendiary or  even combative that is sufficient to keep a good level of discussion on this site. After all 3 or four questions have come up during the year and a half I have been following this here, that is not a great burden .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; in response to David's comment below who said :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever unexplained experimental evidence there is in favor of cold fusion can certainly be discussed and explained in the research community, but I don't believe there is any obligation for us to do so here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the following is not talking about research, what is it talking about?&#xA;From the FAQ on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experimental designs and results&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex: What is needed to claim the discovery of the Higgs boson ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could paraphrase :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is needed to claim the discovery of cold fusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is just expectations and probabilities in our heads that make the first question legitimate and the last one iffy. Fashion. But who determines the probabilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this forum it seems to me  the voting system  determines naturally  the probabilities on  how far from the standard physics model/expectations of the community a question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T20:33:13.287" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-12T14:28:34.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking for censorship, and this is not consistent with science. We do not prohibit &quot;non mainstream&quot; questions--- we answer them! I suppose you are annoyed because here is a &quot;non mainstream&quot; question which is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; easily rebutted. That's how you know when mainstream is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with censorship in the strongest terms: in case you haven't noticed from my pattern of questions/answers, the non-censored treatment of cold fusion is the only reason I participate on this site. I came here by googling for cold-fusion, I answered a few non cold fusion questions to establish credentials (I was worried my account would be summarily deleted), then I answered the cold fusion question with a completely novel theory, and to my surprise, people didn't delete my answer, or censor it, just up/down votes (lots and lots of each), and questions, and thinking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if this is adopted, or even seriously considered, I'm outta here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T14:28:34.123" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-13T00:09:58.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's good enough for NASA it has to be good enough for us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The next consideration is &quot;What is real? What is happening?&quot; For NASA Langley, the epiphany moment on LENR was the publication of the Widom-Larsen Weak Interaction LENR Theory. &lt;strong&gt;It is currently under study and experimental verification (or not) at Langley.&lt;/strong&gt; The theory appears to explain nearly all the various and often variegated experimental observations and shifted the LENR theoretical focus from some way of &quot;fooling&quot; Particle Nuclear Physics/The Strong Force to Condensed Matter Nuclear Physics, Collective Effects, The Weak Force and &quot;Heavy Electrons.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://futureinnovation.larc.nasa.gov/view/articles/futurism/bushnell/low-energy-nuclear-reactions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://futureinnovation.larc.nasa.gov/view/articles/futurism/bushnell/low-energy-nuclear-reactions.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand - trite polemics, crackpots, &amp;amp;c. should be dealt with as usual, downvotes and deletion if spam/flamebait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow the topic, moderate the (unacceptable) behaviours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T00:09:58.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-14T06:10:38.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am too junior to have a solid opinion, but I feel like I should say something. Regardless of what organization recognizes the topic at hand, and regardless how I may feel about it, I think it would be heavy handed to stop all conversation on it. I agree with @Sklivvz that we should merely delete unacceptable behavior. While it is extra work for the moderators, it is also ensuring that all things can be discussed in the SE setting. I thought this is what moderators were for, but I do understand it is quite the burdan for a single topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see that the topic is not in mainstream physics, and for reasons already addressed. I do not see the reason why it can not be discussed. I will say, if it starts to dominate the site (I highly doubt it) or if it becomes incredibly inflammatory and becomes more of a problem for the community, I think the heavy handed censorship can be brought up again for consideration; and adding a note to the FAQ about what 'main stream physics' is, topics we stay away from due to historical problems, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say try measures to control off hand discussion and discussion clearly off base about the topic, within Physics SE guidelines. If it does not work, I would say we should reconsider. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9174" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T06:10:38.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2604" CreationDate="2012-11-14T11:31:21.980" Score="-1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a great problem. While poking into a question yesterday, I thought I might answer (as it didn't get a lot of attention though). Today (I mean, NOW) I see my post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/44174&quot;&gt;under &quot;community wiki&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. I saw the revision history specifically saying, &quot;Post made community wiki by Crazy Buddy&quot;. I haven't done anything as such. I must agree that I try to &quot;type in&quot; fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any keyboard letter that triggers community wiki or could anyone trigger it except me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I know that community wiki votes are earned by the &quot;-1&quot; user. Would the &lt;em&gt;accepted answer&lt;/em&gt; vote also goes to him?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing special with that question and my answer though. Just a curiosity (maybe for later use - &lt;em&gt;like that&lt;/em&gt;) But, I have a suspicion that I would've done something &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt;. Machines don't lie. Do they? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T12:45:58.253" Title="The problem with community wiki" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2603" CreationDate="2012-11-14T12:42:45.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wiki flag removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems likely that you accidental clicked the community wiki check box on the edit screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, be aware that too many edits will force a post in wiki mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the threshold is currently 10 &lt;em&gt;logged&lt;/em&gt; revisions (there is a five minute grace period under which revisions are lumped together as one for this purpose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="11062" LastEditDate="2012-11-14T12:45:58.253" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T12:45:58.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2612" CreationDate="2012-11-16T11:02:10.657" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/44300/2751&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question, asking about how in string theory the quanta corresponding to the different elementary particles are related to the particular excitations of only one single fundamental string, has been wrongly and brutally closed before it was even an hour old for no good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is absolutally &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/44130/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, which deals only with the general properties of quanta in quantum mechanics. Conversely, it is a very different and quite good (as one can see by the 7 upvotes (and only 1 downvote) and 4 times marked as a favorite) specific string theory question.&#xA;I yesterday tried to explain this to dmckee, but it was in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can this question please be reopened, such that finally interesting answers can start to turn in (and the very stupid undeserved automatic downvote gets hopefully removed too ...) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T15:34:06.827" Title="Can this wrongly as a duplicate closed question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2605" CreationDate="2012-11-16T15:00:49.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted that question, because I thought it was a lousy question.  No evidence at all that the OP had done his homework. Reads like the OP is developing his own private language.  Generally not the sort of question I want to see more of on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2012-11-16T15:00:49.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2605" CreationDate="2012-11-16T20:22:10.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dilaton, I am sorry to say that I agree with @user1504, Ron's hamster. Neo does not seem to understand what a quantum is. He/she thinks it is an entity like a particle I guess, at least from the way he/she uses the word in his/her last edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In one word i'm asking about possibility of &lt;strong&gt;Quantum-String duality&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also shows that he/she did not understand or bother to understand my answer to his/her previous question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You think he/she is asking &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;about how in string theory the quanta corresponding to the different elementary particles are related to the particular excitations of only one single fundamental string,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but in my opinion he/she  is just enamored by the vocabulary of &quot;quantum&quot; .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit after noticing&lt;/strong&gt; 3 up and 2 down votes on my reply and 4 up 3 down in Ron's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta is supposed to exist so we can thresh out any disagreements, at least know where we disagree. It is not useful just down voting here. Is the disagreement on a matter of principle &lt;em&gt;&quot;all questions that are not incoherent should be left open&quot;&lt;/em&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be good to know if people see no problem with leaving questions which add apples to oranges as long as one could deduce a real question out of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please leave a comment if you down vote. It is not terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2012-11-17T09:37:26.260" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T09:37:26.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-17T10:04:53.697" Score="14" ViewCount="1343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask a Theoretical Physics question, then I found that the Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange site has been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16046" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T22:30:49.393" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T14:14:12.820" Title="Why was the Theoretical Physics site closed?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2609" CreationDate="2012-11-17T11:02:05.550" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep ask here, we like theoretical physics too ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that have been on the former theoretical physics SE site or new ones, that would have been appropriate for it, are labeled with the &quot;research-level&quot;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1248/2751&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can see (beside the Astronomy questions which we have saved too) a list of all the TP.SE questions that were imported. We have successfully saved all of them I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What went wrong with TP.SE was discussed for example at our meta by questions marked with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/site-salvage&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt; &quot;site-salvage&quot;. &#xA;In my opinion, the basic proplem was that the SE network does not allow for smaller, high quality content sites, which are of interest to a smaller community and therefore have lower, traffic, a slower growth rate, etc ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/q/1608/30967&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the content of the former Theoretical Physics SE site has been made human readable, editable, and reclaimable by its owners such that these discussions can continue or be taken up again in principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" OwnerDisplayName="Dilaton" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T16:07:44.083" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T16:07:44.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2609" CreationDate="2012-11-17T15:08:29.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please read &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;the Stack Exchange blog post &quot;When a Site Grows Quiet&quot;&lt;/a&gt; about the fate of TheoreticalPhysics.SE and Astronomy.SE. If, you still have questions, then meta, not the main site is the place to bring them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T15:08:29.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2605" CreationDate="2012-11-17T15:34:06.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the impassioned defense of the question as a sophisticated inquiry into the foundations of advanced physics, it still reads to me like a jumble of concepts from pop-sci presentation thrown together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that there are interesting question to be asked about string theory and about how the modes of strings might interact, but taking the language in the question at face value this is not a good question. No longer a duplicate of the OP's earlier question it is now a badly misinformed mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really recommend that the interesting question I identified in the comments be pulled out and re-asked without the baggage in the rest of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T15:34:06.827" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2609" CreationDate="2012-11-17T16:12:26.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretical physics was a site which attempted to produce a class-structure of &quot;high end&quot; and &quot;low end&quot; questions, so that people who are professionals won't have to mix with the hoi-polloi of students and laypeople. It is both taxing in terms of time and humiliating in terms of standing for professionals to be on an equal level with all others. They don't like it, as they spend a large fraction of their lives trying to acquire some sort of social standing that makes their proclamations more attention-worthy than that of the average person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like this, it really doesn't sit well with me. I think the social mechanism is no longer necessary, now that people can easily answer easy questions and easily discuss the tough ones. The best questions of a theoretical sort are often those which are so outlandish, that only outsiders are allowed to ask them at first. &quot;Is light a particle?&quot; would have been such a question in 1905, and Einstein's early realization that this is an important line of investigation made him a bit of a pariah for 15 years, as nobody else was able to see through the fog of political rejection of this idea, left over from the 18th/19th century form of the debate, which was closed by Fresnel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The openness has its problems, there are always more annoying questions which are not particularly informed, but it has the advantage of no political hierarchy to censor things, and the gains are greater than the loss in my opinion. This is why it is not a disaster that TP was closed, and it is also part of the reason I always felt uncomfortable there: there was a lot of throwing around of fancy terms on that site, although much of the topics overlapped. Also, it was &lt;em&gt;hard to write&lt;/em&gt; on that site, as the requirement of separation from this site required you to have something abstruse in an answer, so that you don't muck up the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is academic conventions for writing, and it is not really compatible with free exchange of ideas. Generally, it doesn't harm physics too much, since people eventually get the hang of the calculations and jargon, and then blend into a field. But this merging with the herd of professionals comes at the cost of intellectual independence, and there is this constant tension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So TP was closed, and merged with this site. Nearly all the professional physicists left. This is sad, but one can soldier on. The only thing is to arrange the upvotes appropriately, so that difficult research questions have a large number of upvotes, while easy homework questions are answered with a one-liner or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T16:12:26.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2615" CreationDate="2012-11-18T18:43:51.070" Score="3" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a (possible bad) habit of sometimes making a prime superscript in LaTeX with a 'hat' character in between, e.g.,  $x^'$ rather than  $x'$.  The LaTeX/MathJax rendering has worked fine either way for more than a year, right up to around yesterday, where I became aware that $x^'$ is not displayed correctly. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/33713/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What causes this problem to emerge now? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was there a recent change to MathJax? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to fix this problem without having to edit each and every post separately by hand?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-11-18T20:02:08.357" Title="A prime superscript in LaTeX/MathJax not displayed correctly" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2614" CreationDate="2012-11-18T20:02:08.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/2012/10/22/news/mathjax-v2-1-now-available/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;As of Oct. 23rd&lt;/a&gt;, MathJax 2.1 should be in use. I suspect (but haven't verified) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bug fixes&lt;/a&gt; to how primes and superscripts are handled may have caused the change in behavior you're seeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick search turns up only 7 posts illustrating this problem - I've listed them below: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38983/galilean-relativity-in-projectile-motion&quot;&gt;Galilean relativity in projectile motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28912/galilean-transformation-of-wave-equation&quot;&gt;Galilean transformation of wave equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33713/condition-for-circular-orbit&quot;&gt;Condition for circular orbit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35003/scattering-problem-finding-the-speed-of-the-scatterer-after-collision&quot;&gt;Collision problem: Finding the final speed of the collider&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/37833/relativistic-doppler-effect/37848#37848&quot;&gt;Relativistic Doppler effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35573/calculating-two-particle-position-and-velocity-with-each-other/35602#35602&quot;&gt;Calculating two particle position and velocity with each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38709/what-does-psi-jr-i-mean/38717#38717&quot;&gt;What does $\psi_j(r_i)$ mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-11-18T20:02:08.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-19T04:56:40.200" Score="-1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;My primary interest is in the philosophy of science, with an emphasis on science. I thought it would potentially be a good idea to link relevant philosophy.SE posts to questions on your board. I was going to do this by appending these links, sparingly, to the bottom of physics.SE questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first attempt was rejected. Here are the questions I tried to link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89/is-newtons-law-of-gravity-consistent-with-general-relativity&quot;&gt;Is Newton's Law of Gravity consistent with General Relativity?&lt;/a&gt; on physics.SE and &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/2602/have-there-really-been-paradigm-shifts&quot;&gt;Have there really been paradigm shifts?&lt;/a&gt; on philosophy.SE (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/6133&quot;&gt;suggested edit&lt;/a&gt;). The latter addresses the case of one theory being rejected for another--are the theories necessarily incompatible, and if they are not, what is their relationship to one another? Newtonian mechanics and GTR are referenced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that sharing a link is not a standard edit, but thought that the benefit to members of both communities would outweigh this (of course, lacking the requisite reputation points, I was not able to place it in the comments section like a normal person). Cross-pollination of ideas between forums is always interesting, and I think providing relevant &quot;exolinks&quot; would facilitate it. Would the physics.SE community reconsider allowing me to make such edits? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16058" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:18.480" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:16:23.623" Title="Adding relevant links to other forums onto questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2619" CreationDate="2012-11-19T05:21:30.833" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;e.g.  I reply to &quot;jim124&quot; by writing &quot;@jim124: Thank you for you answer, but… &quot;.  However, the result is &quot;Thank you for you answer, but… &quot; ignoring &quot;@jim124 &quot;. Is there anything wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16064" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:45:04.953" Title="Why am I not able to use @ to reply to some person?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2012-11-19T06:42:15.083" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emphatic yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is it is discouraging when you are confused enough about something to come on and ask and nobody will help because someone has jumped on your post and tagged it as homework but also because this is primarily a question and answer site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of questions on the physics stack exchange demonstrate that it is overly dominated by advanced questions. In my view it is not currently all that friendly to less advanced questions and users and I think this has a lot to do with the homework tag, or at least the way it is getting used at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastEditorUserId="10655" LastEditDate="2012-11-22T00:28:03.783" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T00:28:03.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2012-11-19T07:20:28.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need not @reply to a person while commenting on their posts. The owner of the post is always notified of a comment. So the system strips off the @reply in certain cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-11-19T17:45:04.953" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:45:04.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2616" CreationDate="2012-11-19T07:34:51.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally in-site cross linking can be done by putting a hatnote (using &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;), which makes the post look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Related: link link link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blah blah post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I guess the main issue here was the fact that you tried linking Physics and Philosophy. Sure, they're related and relevant -- but generally we don't go into metaphysics while dealing with physics. I really see no viable link between the two questions myself -- the philosophy one may mention the two theories, but the answer there isn't really helpful if one wants to understand the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, such &quot;related:&quot; headers are better posted in comments unless the relationship is clear-cut (and it's on the same site). It's not too hard to get 50 rep :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T07:34:51.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2616" CreationDate="2012-11-19T17:16:23.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Links of this nature are appropriate in comments, but inappropriate to be edited into the post itself. (Except that the original poster can always add any links or make any other edits they like.) So you will just have to wait until you get enough reputation to comment on any post - 50 rep I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is different from adding a link that clarifies (rather than adds to) the question. For example, converting a technical term used in the question into a link to the Wikipedia page for that term is generally okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T17:16:23.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2623" CreationDate="2012-11-20T12:51:57.817" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find the 'comment' button when i want to comment on others' questions or answers. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16064" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T13:10:54.013" Title="I can't find the 'comment' button, why?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2012-11-20T13:10:54.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;50 reputation to comment on posts other than your own&lt;/a&gt;. That is the reason why you don't see the comment link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T13:10:54.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2609" CreationDate="2012-11-22T00:31:50.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer but a hopeful comment: Maybe some of the most active individuals from the defunct Theoretical Physics stackexchange could form a similar page outside the .stackexchange domain, just like MathOverflow.net. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9058" LastEditorUserId="9058" LastEditDate="2012-11-22T00:39:29.793" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T00:39:29.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2609" CreationDate="2012-11-22T08:28:08.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TP.se was closed because of low traffic. That's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;strong&gt;.com&lt;/strong&gt; - it's about the $, not the \hbar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T08:28:08.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2627" CreationDate="2012-11-22T12:09:25.543" Score="2" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some answers in physics.stackexchange seem to me so extremely brilliant! I would like to join some of the best ones in a single document by copy-paste. How can I do that, preserving the LaTeX code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some of the gems happen even in very innocent questions... I don't know how many people have I already told in the last weeks, about that answer to the question &quot;why the kinetic energy goes as $v^{2}$ &quot; involving two pieces of clay and a thermometer...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="14182" LastEditDate="2012-11-22T12:14:33.523" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T18:51:56.433" Title="How can I copy-paste questions/answers with the latex symbols intact?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2626" CreationDate="2012-11-22T12:50:05.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Direct copy-paste works if it's an HTML document in Word. Sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, here's a trick: open &lt;code&gt;about:blank&lt;/code&gt; (URL bar), type &lt;code&gt;javascript:document.body.contentEditable=true&lt;/code&gt; in the URL bar and hit &lt;kbd&gt;Enter&lt;/kbd&gt;. Now, copy-paste the LaTeX-formatted stuff. It ought to work. You can type and modify stuff as well. Then, save the HTML document and/or print to pdf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3307/print-this-post&quot;&gt;This userscript may help in cleaning up posts for better copy-pasting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you should attribute the owner of each post (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want un-mathified LaTeX source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For individual equations: right click, &lt;code&gt;show math as&lt;/code&gt;&gt;TeX commands&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the whole post: Click &quot;edit&quot;, copy-paste the source code to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, see the preview.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T18:51:56.433" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2629" CreationDate="2012-11-22T14:42:11.763" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;In last few days, I edited some questions and did re-tagging. But they were rejected though they are  right.&#xA;Can anyone tell me what is happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12502" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T15:16:31.640" Title="Tagging is not accepted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2628" CreationDate="2012-11-23T01:35:30.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably because your edits are too minor. Whenever you make a suggested edit, two people have to go through it. It becomes quite a waste of time when this scales up, so minor suggested edits are discouraged. If you are going to edit the post, try to fix as much as possible. If you think there's only a small fix or two, then don't suggest the edit. Note that if you LaTeXify a post that needs it, it is &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; considered as a major edit, even if that's all you do. Though again, try and look for other parts which may be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, at 500 rep you'll be able to retag posts without going through the suggested edit system, so this will be less of a problem to you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T01:35:30.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-23T06:27:35.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just my two cents. I think it would be a good idea to &quot;disallow cold fusion as a topic of posting on this site (unless and until it becomes established mainstream physics).&quot; If somebody strongly believes cold fusion is good science, why doesn't (s)he raise money and produce electricity commercially, getting fabulously rich in the process? Cold fusion is no hot fusion, so (if true) it probably does not need gigantic installations. I cannot understand why people who hate censorship would visit a moderated forum. For example, I go to moderated forums because I do appreciate that moderators filter out noise for me: noise can actually kill any site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T06:27:35.340" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-23T14:13:40.033" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think SE prefers a single question that can be answered to a long discussion, or a stream of multiple related questions in a single post.  Questions are rated on whether they are &quot;clear&quot;.  But questions are also rated on whether they show research effort.  These two requirements are often at loggerheads, especially if the reseach has been inconclusive or confusing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is more important, a simple, clear question, or showing research effort, even if the research results are inconclusive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T12:04:42.780" Title="Short, clear questions vs. Show your work" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-23T15:26:26.750" Score="7" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how to completely leave this community. Please guide me. I have gone through FAQ section but of no use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15741" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T08:15:40.957" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T08:15:40.957" Title="How to quit physics.stackexchange.com completely?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2012-11-23T15:55:59.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/user-deletion&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/user-deletion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly why do you want to delete the account, though? Don't get discouraged due to a few downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T16:27:34.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2012-11-23T15:59:32.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to left only the Physics Stackexchange site then you should go &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/user-deletion&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and enter some of the reasons or problem due to which you are quitting it. After submit check your inbox and confirm the submission and this is how your account will be deleted. But do say good bye to all who had helped you in physics difficult questions. If there is any problem then you can comment on my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T15:59:32.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2631" CreationDate="2012-11-23T19:58:11.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To a large extent each user chooses for him- or her- (or its-) self what criteria are most important to them. Neither the moderators nor the team enforce any voting limits beyond the detection and reversal of voting rings and possible sockpuppets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I find that a little formatting emphasis on a &lt;em&gt;&quot;In short my question is...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; type line can help with clarity when you feel the need to write a lot describing how you came to the question. Make it stand out so that if I start to fade out on the wall of text I can &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T19:58:11.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-24T01:07:06.450" Score="-6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if 'text' games are allowed in any form on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;POSTER describes a physicist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LOOP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 -&gt; $n$ people guess. $n_i$ gets it right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$n_i$ describes a physicist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thought it would be a nice/fun way to learn about new physicists besides just reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-24T01:23:27.660" Title="Text Game allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-02-28T04:09:07.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2636" CreationDate="2012-11-24T01:23:27.660" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that we are building a catalog of answered questions about physics: a resource for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of game you are suggesting would be a good fit for chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-11-24T01:23:27.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-24T04:49:32.840" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote for keeping and maintaining (not completely freezing) a very small number of canonical answers. I do not think this particular forum will ever be able to provide a convergent answer regarding the various experiments loosely labeled under &quot;cold fusion.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had some wonderful opportunities to communicate and talk directly with solid researchers in this topic, at government-only facilities that I trust and respect. These are solid folks with strong publication records in unrelated materials science fields. I am familiar in particular with work done by good folks at both SPAWAR and NRL, who rather ironically do not always see eye to eye even with each other's published results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider Rob Duncan of Mizzou a personal friend and someone whose opinion I respect, although I have not interacted with him much since we co-presented a few years back on the physics of &quot;cold fusion.&quot; I have interacted with other players. Some I refuse to have anything to do with because they are quacks, by which I mean simply that they rely on marketing techniques over experimental evidence to promote their particular views. For the record, Ron Maimon's theorizing here in Physics SE is straightforward and honest, even if Ron can be rather adamant and tends to favor conspiracy theories a bit much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two reasons why this issue will never be resolved in this forum: (1) A certain subset of the reported results are quite real. I've talked to too many solid researchers who are getting data that makes no sense according to either chemistry or nuclear science, yet the data they are getting is self-consistent and detailed in ways that indicate that unknown underlying mechanisms more subtle than just &quot;making heat&quot; or &quot;fusing nuclei.&quot; (2) This subset of scientifically interesting results cannot be explained using any combination of known physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catch that second part? This is not complicated. You can theorize all you want about how to design a meter-wide wooden box capable of containing a nuclear explosion, but guess what? It won't work. Scale that down to atomic size and there is your problem for any theory that tries to combine chemical heat with nuclear reactions. The more persuasive reported results combine far too much energy release with too few ways to capture it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that sort of situation occurs in science -- and it does more often than you might expect -- it tends not to resolve itself very quickly. The emergence of quantum physics was arguably one of the most conspicuous and unexpected examples. Mechanical and electromagnetic theory were very mature around 1900, so they just did not have much obvious room for new ideas. However, a number of annoying experiments kept giving results that made no sense according to that same mature body of theory. It took two or three decades of bumbling around, often very ineptly at first, to finally get a clear handle on what was really going in those exceptions. It's a good thing they bothered, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, such situations in science always get very personal and sometimes quite nasty. There was a great story in the early history of molecular gases where one prominent figure accused another of &quot;sloppy experiments&quot; when the experimenter did not get results that match theory. This is the norm for such situations, not the exception, and it's not much fun for anyone involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, am I seriously suggesting that that some kind of dramatic revolution in fundamental physics will be needed to explain some of these results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, sure. But I cannot suggest where the opportunity for that resolution may lie. As in the 1900s for the narrower range of mechanics and electromagnetics, our understanding at the moment of the physical universe is very beautifully and quite elegantly buttoned down for just about every aspect and scale of our universe &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; these annoying excess heat results. Even tougher, any new theory must explain such odd results without discarding or distorting any significant aspect of current physical theory, since that theory is after all extraordinarily effective at describing our universe. Quantum theory in the early 1900s was a very non-intuitive extension of known mechanical and electromagnetic theory, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a replacement for it. The distinction between extension and replacement is critical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be fun to watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: A forum like Physics SE is about the worst possible forum for trying to resolve such an issue, because &lt;em&gt;the resolution does not yet exist&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please, don't try to resolve this mess here, because it just won't happen. Attempting to do so will only cause a lot more distress to everyone, again for the simple reason that you cannot entice someone to contribute an answer that does not yet exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, maintaining a small number of canonical answers describing why the problem refuses to go away is probably about the best that SE Physics can do. That's honest, and it minimizes the danger of this forum from turning into a racquetball court for lobbing new theories at bystanders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7670" LastActivityDate="2012-11-24T04:49:32.840" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2012-11-24T16:46:44.173" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two ways to go about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quit and keep your account&lt;/strong&gt;: Just stop visiting the site. That's all. As far as Stack Exchange is concerned, it's fine if your account sits around unused. Leaving your account intact allows you to change your mind and come back to the site in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On some other websites, a member who wants to take a break can ask for their account to be suspended to prevent them from accessing the site. But on this site, moderators generally will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; grant such requests.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quit and delete your account&lt;/strong&gt;: You can find &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/user-deletion&quot;&gt;instructions for deleting your account in the help center&lt;/a&gt;, as other answers have mentioned. &lt;strong&gt;Account deletion is irreversible&lt;/strong&gt;. Deleting your account means that your reputation and other accomplishments on the site, as well as your profile page, will be completely erased from public view. Your questions, answers, and comments will be anonymized - that is, your username and profile will no longer be associated with that content. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; come back and participate in the site in the future, but you will have to start from scratch with a separate account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the questions, answers, and comments you have contributed to the site do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; get deleted along with your account. The legal basis for continuing to display your submitted content after your account is deleted is provided by Stack Exchange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt;, which you agreed to prior to submitting the content in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you submit a request to delete your account following the directions in the help center, that request goes directly to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company/team#Community&quot;&gt;the Stack Exchange community team&lt;/a&gt;. They may ask you some questions about why you want to leave the site, which I believe are for information only. I don't &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; they will refuse your request to delete your account regardless of why you want it deleted, but I am not part of that team and I can't authoritatively speak on their behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderators on this site&lt;/a&gt; are not involved with the voluntary account deletion process in any way. We do not handle or even &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; account deletion requests. Although it is technically possible for a moderator to delete an account, we will not do so at the request of the account owner.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5999/how-can-i-delete-my-account&quot;&gt;corresponding FAQ post on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't really tell you anything useful beyond what you will find in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-07-10T00:53:07.070" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T00:53:07.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-25T16:19:36.157" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask the following question, and would like to know if it is allowed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the books similar to the books by David Griffiths, but in the following areas:&#xA;  Classical Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics, Mathematical Methods, Solid State, Atomic and Molecular Physics, Nuclear and Particle Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I like the style of Griffiths, and would like to learn the basics of every area with the least pain possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if it is appropriate for physics.SE or if I should post this in physics forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T15:47:13.237" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:47:13.237" Title="Is this question on book recommendations allowed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2640" CreationDate="2012-11-25T21:14:05.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope, too specific for this site. As the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;the recommendation question&lt;/a&gt; says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It should be of the form &quot;What are good books to learn/study [subject] at [level]?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is not of that form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could do, though, is check the book recommendation questions for the subjects you're asking about and see if anyone has mentioned about anything being in a similar style to Griffiths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T21:14:05.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-25T21:43:29.533" Score="11" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is doing an event this year in which... well, let me just use Aarthi's words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Winter Bash 2012&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Last year, on our Gaming site, we hosted an event called Hat Dash, where users earned &quot;hats&quot; for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions would trigger the user receiving a hat, which their gravatar could then &quot;wear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, editing a post would yield an editor-themed hat (fedora with pen) to the editor. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This year, we're expanding the promotion to all sites which choose to participate, and redesigning the hat selection to be more appropriate to the entire network (no severed Wampa heads). Some of it is holiday-themed, some of it is a bit silly, and all of it is (hopefully) fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Some Nitty-Gritty&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This event will run from 19 December 2012 to 4 January 2013. Users will be able to see their entire hat collection on &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterba.sh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://winterba.sh&lt;/a&gt;. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, and/or are generally  anti-hat will have an &quot;I hate hats&quot; option available, just as we had on Gaming last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only visual change to the site itself will be the presence of the hats and the &quot;I hate hats&quot; button in the footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot from last year's Hat Dash on Gaming SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8MFua.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the message says, this can be disabled for each individual site and for each individual user. So if this is something you individually would not be interested in, you can just opt out, but if it's something the whole community would be uninterested in, we can just decide as a site not to participate. What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T14:59:51.743" Title="Do we like hats?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-01-05T22:23:51.573" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2012-11-26T06:50:10.197" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the current policy of allowing questions on cold fusion makes your site invaluable.  Your adopting a policy that would restrict discussion on the topic to a narrow set of canonical questions would be a mistake in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little about me and why I feel this way:  I'm a software engineer whose last physics class was an introductory one in college.  It was a rigorous class, and I did well.  But my exposure to physics has been so limited in the interim that I struggle not to confuse the Augur process with internal conversion, and the only way I would even suspect that I was looking at a quantum field theory equation would be if I saw an H or bra-ket notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first saw a video about Rossi on the Internet about a year ago, I thought it was a great laugh; it looked exactly like what the production of a charlatan would look like.  But it piqued my interest in the general topic, and when I began to delve into the matter more, I started to have significant doubts that the book had been closed on the subject. The more I looked, the more I started to lose confidence in mainstream physics in this particular area; it started to seem to me like something might have broken down in 1989 and hadn't been fixed yet.  Articles like &lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; did not increase my confidence -- what I saw there was the emphatic promulgation of a set of a priori arguments that cold fusion was impossible, and little attempt to address the experimental evidence.  What I was looking for were cogent arguments that tackled specific empirical claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Articles like that one eventually brought me to physics.SE.  I wanted to see a more serious engagement of specific details.  What I appreciate about physics.SE is that there is a good mix of views for and against cold fusion.  Both those arguing for it and those arguing against it must defend their positions.  For whatever reason, it is very difficult to find this kind of engagement elsewhere on the Internet at this time.  Your site is practically the only one I have found where there is any kind of real discussion taking place between competent parties whose views span the full spectrum of positions.  In all other instances, the competent people are sequestered away with others of their persuasion.  I am an active participant on Vortex-L, for example, and I find the discussion there very interesting, but there is no one there who will take a strong position against cold fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some here who appear to become distressed at the thought of countenancing discussion on this and other heretical subjects, perhaps in part for fear of giving the wrong impression to people like me or young physics students that such topics are now becoming mainstream. I think the vigorous responses and the comments leave little doubt as to the tendentious status of these subjects. In other words, giving the wrong impression about the position of mainstream physics on cold fusion is not something to be worried about. Similarly, I see little harm in questions about N-Rays and polywater being addressed here, and I would not imagine that they were for that reason being accepted into mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been argued that this site is not the place to try to sort out such a broad question as cold fusion, and that this is really something that should be dealt with elsewhere.  Even if this is true, I see no harm done and much to be gained in allowing questions on specific points to be raised and their assumptions refuted if necessary.  Everyone will learn more physics in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6713" LastEditorUserId="6713" LastEditDate="2012-12-02T03:55:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T03:55:56.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2642" CreationDate="2012-11-26T09:05:01.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we choose what takes get reputation, or is it just an extension of the general upvote system? &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; it's combined with some improvement of the sites questions, I'm for it. Some threads could get a clear up, or some closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(What should be our hats though? I know Hilbert was wearing a prominent hat. Who else? Well there is of course &lt;a href=&quot;http://i.chzbgr.com/completestore/2012/2/25/42e726a5-d173-446e-96d8-d337612c0508.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Feynamn wearing a hat&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T09:05:01.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-26T20:03:31.083" Score="8" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2012 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T00:04:03.493" Title="2012 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-06-01T12:19:22.767" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-11-26T20:03:31.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2631" CreationDate="2012-11-27T12:04:42.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that research effort doesn't necessarily mean a tonne of equations to write out. If the answer is easily (for example) wikipedia-able, then that would show poor research effort. But if it's not one of those questions (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8227/a-mirror-flips-left-and-right-but-not-up-and-down&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one) which show that the OP has thought about it, but hasn't reached any consensus, that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I think physics.SE is looking to see that the person asking the question isn't using us as a tool to think. If it seems clear that he/she/them have thought about it, then that should be an acceptable question, regardless of how long/short it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, suggestions could be made to provide more/less detail, but as a rule of thumb this is valid, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T12:04:42.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-27T14:03:37.637" Score="7" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the moderator election 2012 is in progress, users (above 300 rep.) are invited to nominate themselves in the election. So, some users will ask themselves, &quot;Could I become a moderator?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that these four lines don't necessarily answer their questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A moderator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is patient and fair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;leads by example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;shows respect for their fellow community members in their actions and words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is open to some light but firm moderation to keep the community on track and resolve (hopefully) uncommon disputes and exceptions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly are the basic needs for physics users to become moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should they be experts in at least one of the fields of Physics (could be determined easily by reputation &amp;amp; badges)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could a 300 rep. user (who helps the community through meta) participate &amp;amp; be elected as a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why does &quot;moderator attention flags&quot;, &quot;participation in meta&quot; (along with its Q&amp;amp;A votes), etc. &lt;strong&gt;count&lt;/strong&gt; during an election? (Do they sort you by ranking ?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read all the answers. All are &lt;em&gt;amazing&lt;/em&gt;. I got some new &lt;em&gt;facts&lt;/em&gt;. Thanks to all, guys. I believe that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119111/moderator-cheat-sheet&quot;&gt;moderator cheat sheet&lt;/a&gt; would be very useful for a new moderator...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What are the basic characteristics for becoming a physics.SE moderator?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|moderation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2012-11-27T14:24:29.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were a mathematician, I would say that the pre-conditions stated in the grey box are neccessary but not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a science site, such as Physics SE for example, I think that it is important too that the moderators are knowledgable enough in the topic the site is about. The moderator team as a whole should be able to reasonably and in accordance with the current state of the mainstream art decide about what questions fit to the desirable content of the site, what is too fringe or even crackpot stuff, etc ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, moderators should have a good enough intuition for what the community likes and needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is just how I see it :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T14:24:29.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2012-11-27T14:28:09.803" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a moderator of another SE site I might be able to tell from my experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator has to make some difficult decisions that cannot be handled by the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;find users who are trying to cheat the system (multiple accounts, voting rings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;handle flags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contact users privately if there are any problems that cannot be solved otherwise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important part is understanding the informal rules of the system and put them into practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing physics (or whatever the topic of the site is) is not that important. Sure, it helps, but the decision if a question is on topic should be made by the community anyway via close votes, not primarily by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta participation and the flag count are indeed good indicators for that. They show how much the users cares already about the site and how familiar s/he is with the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Recommended reading&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119111/moderator-cheat-sheet&quot;&gt;Moderator Cheat Sheet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75189/who-are-the-diamond-moderators-and-what-is-their-role&quot;&gt;Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Moderator Blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16314" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:56.040" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T16:04:26.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2012-11-27T15:38:05.227" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was in a similar position during the time of the Chemistry pro tem moderator appointments. I clearly stated my unease with not having more than an advanced high-school level understanding of Chemistry, and I was told (repeatedly) that it wouldn't matter much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as my experience moderating Chem goes, not being familiar with the ins and outs of Chem doesn't harm my effectiveness as a moderator. It's never really needed. In cases where there's a question that I don't understand at all and have no clue what to do with (happened once or twice), I just ask the other two mods. But generally, even if I don't know enough chemistry to understand the question fully, I can still determine whether or not it's a good fit for the site. The other moderator tasks (flagging, etc) require even less knowledge of the topic, so no troubles there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, Chemistry is a much smaller site. So there &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be a need to have a good enough level of Physics to be effective as a moderator here. Since the moderators here don't unilaterally close questions as much, not much Physics knowledge is required on the &quot;closing&quot; front. While resolving content disputes, one may need to have an expert-level understanding of the topic involved. The few content disputes I've seen here &lt;em&gt;that require mod attention&lt;/em&gt; were of a pretty esoteric topic--there's a low probability &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; moderator would be proficient in that zone. So, my conclusion is still that we don't need &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt; to be moderators--just people familiar enough with the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more important is that the users are familiar with the site policies and have been around for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should they be an expert in atleast one of the fields in Physics (could be determined easily by reputation &amp;amp; badges)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answered above. Also, rep/badges!=expertise, rep is a rough measure of community trust and participation. Which is actually what I feel we need in moderators -- but this doesn't mean that you should vote by rep (Remember, rep is a &lt;em&gt;rough&lt;/em&gt; measure). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could a 300 rep. user (who helps the community through meta) participate &amp;amp; be elected as a mod. ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iffy. If the user is active on meta, that's pretty good. If the user has been active (&gt;2k) on some other sites (not including SO), then the user is probably knowledgeable of SE policies. So, a 300 rep user can make a good mod, as long as s/he is familiar enough with the SE model and policies. Though &amp;lt;1k rep generally does mean that the user is probably not that familiar with the local site rules and community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why does &quot;moderator attention flags&quot;, &quot;participation in meta&quot; (along with its Q&amp;amp;A votes), etc. count during an election? (Do they sort you by ranking ?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of sorting:no. During nomination, the users are sorted by &quot;time nominated&quot;, most recent at the top. During the next two phases, the posts are sorted randomly on reload.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These stats are there to help voters rank the nominees at a glance. Meta participation and flags show the user's participation in community building and cleanup, which is pretty essential for a mod. A more robust version of these stats can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://elections.stackexchange.com/#physics.stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T15:38:05.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2012-11-27T17:46:32.210" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good moderator will be someone who does the behind-the-scenes tasks like editing, flagging, and leaving helpful comments, even when it gets in the way of answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good moderator knows the community well enough to know who is knowledgeable and who isn't, and use the former people's comments (along with input from other moderators) to guide decisions. You can often read the response to a post to get a pretty good idea of whether it's on topic/appropriate or not, even without necessarily knowing the topic of the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good moderator recognizes the importance of rules, and has the self-control not to go around breaking them even when it seems like the right thing to do in the moment. (At least not unilaterally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good moderator cares about stopping or preventing disruptive behavior, not punishing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good moderator is a good communicator and knows how to be non-confrontational at all times (in public at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good moderator tries to make their own job unnecessary - as in teaching the community how to moderate itself (here I mean editing etc. not just dealing with disruptive behavior).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While anyone with 300 reputation can nominate themselves, I don't know that a user with 300 reputation would know the community well enough to be effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the statistics presented like flags and meta participation show whether any individual user has a history of taking the kinds of actions that most of the moderation job consists of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T17:46:32.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2012-11-27T18:19:48.653" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta participation and flag counts are there for informational purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe it or not, moderating a Q&amp;amp;A site on The Internet is not a particularly glamorous job. You don't get money for nothing, or chicks for free. You might get a branded Sharpie. You'll probably get insulted by folks who don't see 90% of what you do and think you're hanging around just to pick on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags are, for the most part, invisible. Meta participation is only visible to folks who bother reading meta. Both represent the sort of dirty, boring janitorial work that makes up most of what moderators spend their time doing: responding to cries for assistance and providing help and support to others in the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chances are, when you go to vote you'll vote for the folks with a big Reputation number next to their name. This is understandable. It's also somewhat misguided: why would you ask someone who's doing a great job answering questions to drop that and spend their time settling squabbles? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags and meta posts give you some other numbers... You might also be interested in: &lt;a href=&quot;http://elections.stackexchange.com/#physics.stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://elections.stackexchange.com/#physics.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2012-11-27T18:19:48.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-28T16:21:02.157" Score="7" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question today with a link... which was barely visible, even for me who posted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we change the color scheme so both &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;visited&lt;/strong&gt; link are more visible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this screenshot there is a link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FYvf3.png&quot; alt=&quot;link screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you get it at first glance? I suppose not. Even knowing where it is still remains hard to be seen. In a Beta site, it's much more visible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7CsTI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Beta site&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastEditorUserId="8966" LastEditDate="2012-11-28T16:28:05.407" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T19:31:28.187" Title="Can links be made more visible?" Tags="|feature-request|design|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2661" CreationDate="2012-11-28T19:03:10.597" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look into your web browser's configuration.  You can probably customize this for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T19:03:10.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="915" CreationDate="2012-11-28T23:52:25.463" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an astrophysicist, but I don't like at all the idea of having a separate site for astrophysics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, in astrophysics more than in any other branch, contents are strongly related to other fields. Just to mention a few of them: spectroscopy, plasma physics, numerical modelling, fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, Newtonian dynamics, General Relativity, Thermodynamics, particle physics... And so I am very interested in showing my questions to physicists from other branches. Cross-feeding is a source of richness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nearly absurd, and the moderators would have to be always deciding if the questions belong to the site or not... Nearly all branches of physics are related or directly involved in one or another topic in astrophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, although there are many users in physics SE, very few are high-level physicists. More fragmentation means loss of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate site for Astrophysics? No, thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T23:52:25.463" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-11-28T23:52:25.463" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-29T02:28:24.103" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2654&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the second election for moderators in Physics.SE. As Larian and Manish (and several others including &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;) are also nominating, I believe that we'd definitely have a lot of competition. Why is the community assigning only two positions for new moderators? (Not more than that?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because, Physics.SE has low users, less attentions, few questions (but a lot answers), etc. like that? Or, Are there some other reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T04:39:24.813" Title="Why so less moderators?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2666" CreationDate="2012-11-29T04:39:24.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why so &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; election on a site is for three moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elected moderators aren't &lt;em&gt;replaced&lt;/em&gt; unless they don't want to be moderators anymore (or, rarely, violate the moderator agreement or just stop showing up for whatever reason). So subsequent elections need only add enough new moderators to handle increasing demand for moderation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That usually means one, but can also mean (and in this case &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; mean) two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T04:39:24.813" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-29T15:16:07.757" Score="8" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Town Hall Chat session with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.  I will be working with candidates to determine a time for the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Town Hall Chat took place Wednesday the 5th at 01:00:00Z UTC / This is on Tuesday the 4th at 8:00 PM EST. A digest is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2768/2012-moderator-election-town-hall-chat-digest&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the details so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to schedule this towards the beginning of the primary phase.  This means that I am looking at the 3rd-5th of December. As soon as I coordinate with the existing moderators and candidates to find a best fit based on availability, I will edit this post with details on the &quot;when&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Town Hall Chat will be a one-hour event using our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat platform&lt;/a&gt;.  I will update this post with a direct link to the chat room once the event is scheduled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The format will be an open discussion.  Users are encouraged to pose questions to the candidates regarding their thoughts on moderation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Priority for scheduling is generally towards the greatest number of candidate openings as well as the earliest. Candidates who cannot show up during the live event will still be able to answer all questions posted, they will just do so at their earliest convenience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the chat session, a digest of the event will be permanently linked here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T11:28:28.997" Title="2012 Moderator Election: Town Hall Chat" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2706" CreationDate="2012-12-01T04:57:08.317" Score="3" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard that the first &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51/&quot;&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/a&gt; finally &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;merged with Physics.SE after private beta&lt;/a&gt;. But, the second &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40709&quot;&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/a&gt; is under a &lt;em&gt;hot progress&lt;/em&gt;. One question and it enters the commitment phase. We have two cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It succeeds the beta and the site is launched - If this happens, will we have to move (migrate) the astronomy, astrophysics and other related tags along with the questions over there ? I think it would be a &lt;em&gt;lot-of-work&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it could fail. (I strongly believe that this would happen.) Then, do we have to migrate the posts from there to here. It's perhaps a dirty situation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; I still support Astronomy.SE because I really like it. But as Eduardo says in the previous post, it wouldn't survive (compete) with Physics. What about migration then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update: &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/a&gt; beta phase was launched in 2013.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T18:17:41.280" Title="Do we really need to be concerned about the new Astronomy.SE?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2671" CreationDate="2012-12-01T05:18:33.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the first I'm hearing about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised that that proposal still exists - in general, proposals which duplicate existing SE sites are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-01T05:18:33.703" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-02T20:11:11.333" Score="-2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this issue raised a lot, anyway this is just a suggestion, because I think it is very un encouraging to be down voted for nothing, especially if after that multiple up voting happens (for the same question), it's seems to be a strange behavior of the community, and this makes voting similar to Facebook, the concept I believe far away of it's targeted purpose here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that writing down the reasons for down voting for each silly/illogical question is not an interesting approach, thus why we not add simply a drop down menu of famous reasons of down voting so one can has some idea for the reason of community action? and in the same time preserve the golden rule that voting should be anonymous..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S&#xA;As suggested Ron in comments, this may be applied for up voting too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12094" LastEditorUserId="12094" LastEditDate="2012-12-02T23:09:26.157" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T23:09:26.157" Title="Suggestion: Voting with strictly classified reasons" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2012-12-02T20:34:59.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's already a popup notification reminding people to leave comments. Given that that doesn't exist, I kind of doubt that having a menu of possible reasons would help that much, and more importantly I don't think downvote reasons can be classified that well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this is not something we can do on the site itself, it's something that the SE team would have to implement, so this is probably better proposed (if it hasn't already been) on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;MSO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T20:34:59.263" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2676" CreationDate="2012-12-02T20:52:08.450" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that my reputation in &quot;Physics Meta&quot; is differs from &quot;Physics&quot; (slightly lower) is this a bug or I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12094" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2012-12-07T22:16:13.843" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T22:16:13.843" Title="Inconsistancy between Meta and Main reputation" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2675" CreationDate="2012-12-02T20:56:42.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation is copied over from the main site to the meta site once per hour, it isn't always kept in sync. So this is to be expected, and the number will catch up soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T20:56:42.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2678" CreationDate="2012-12-02T22:04:38.377" Score="12" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;What can I do  if I observe that a wrong and misleading answer is the most upvoted one among all the answers to a question and commenting, downvoting, and writing a better answer does not help and the OP of the wrong answer insists in being right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T15:07:03.747" Title="Wrong upvoted answers" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2677" CreationDate="2012-12-02T22:41:16.790" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comment on it, and downvote. Post it in chat/meta if you feel it needs more scrutiny/discussion. DO NOT flag, flags aren't for wrong posts. Also, put a comment on the main question, asking the OP not to accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's already accepted, ask the OP to unaccept. But you can't do much more than that. This has come up &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=accepted%20answer%20wrong&quot;&gt;multiple times&lt;/a&gt; on the mother meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:37:55.943" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T22:41:16.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2012-12-02T22:44:45.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; and load it with comments relevant to downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE has made it pretty clear that they aren't going to add any more obstacles to the process of downvoting. It's for the better--one should feel as free to downvote as possible, otherwise less people will downvote. And downvotes are integral to SE's sorting mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T22:44:45.460" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2677" CreationDate="2012-12-03T00:29:08.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you see that an answer is wrong, you can downvote and leave a comment explaining why it's wrong, and of course write your own answer (not as a response to the other answer). But that's pretty much it. In particular, if you go to chat or meta and ask people to downvote it outright, that's not really appropriate. You can use the chat room to discuss it with other people, and explain your reasoning for why you think it's wrong, but don't send messages like &quot;This answer is wrong, you should downvote it.&quot; You're not forbidden to tell people how they should vote, but doing so is rather rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking the OP to unaccept the answer is likewise inappropriate, although it's sort of a gray area depending on how you phrase it. For example, if you post a comment saying &quot;Please unaccept this answer, it's wrong,&quot; that's not okay, but if you say &quot;I don't think this should be the accepted answer because ,&quot; that would probably be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T00:29:08.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-03T05:07:24.813" Score="4" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;My last posting relating to the finite/infinite content of the universe has been deleted without informing me.At least I can't find it.Its not there on the user page also.My current posting incidentally is &quot;On Parallel Transport&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6129" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2012-12-03T18:46:52.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="This is Quite Strange!" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2681" CreationDate="2012-12-03T13:55:29.567" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/42011/520&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; may have been the victim of an automated &quot;bad question&quot; reaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/2509&quot;&gt;qualification for automatic removal&lt;/a&gt; are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one month old&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negative vote total on the question and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not that I'm stumped as it does not appear to have been done by anyone (including Community who get the &quot;credit&quot; for closure due to spam flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T14:20:26.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2677" CreationDate="2012-12-03T15:07:03.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This very response will probably get me downvoted, but I don't care. I can say that after being shouted down for posting patently correct answers/explanations and essentially being accused of incompetence, I have decided to stop pointing out incorrect answers when I see them. The shouting down usually comes from one of two sources: grad students or researchers, neither of whom really take the time to think through better explanations to even the simplest of questions. There is far less subjectivity in explaining some things than we all want to believe or admit, and getting that point across is a struggle. Word choice matters because words influence thoughts, and that's where misconceptions can arise. I sometimes use anonymous examples from this site in class to illustrate such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, crowdsourcing correct answers by popular vote results in sites like this becoming unreliable resources for students (nevermind that the site may not have been conceived as being a reliable resource for students...we all know students at all levels come here). Although I'll stick around and use the site as a resource, I can never recommend it to even my best students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11266" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T15:07:03.747" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T15:47:51.497" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confused one candidate for another, and voted for him ignorantly.&#xA;I wanted to change my vote. How do I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T18:08:32.430" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T18:08:32.430" Title="How do I change my vote?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2686" CreationDate="2012-12-04T15:56:44.393" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can still go back to the election page and click on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice buttons of other candidates to change your vote. You can do this as many times as you want before the election period ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to vote for 3 different people, you can also select the same candidate for more than one of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. (It doesn't make your vote count any more than it would normally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T16:56:20.203" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T16:56:20.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T16:24:05.993" Score="6" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a negative comment to make about a candidate. Where is the appropriate place to post this today? Where does it go? Not a week ago. I checked the meta and the main a week ago, and I didn't see his name on the nominations list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T16:48:31.973" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T19:51:35.913" Title="Where is the place for negative comments on candidates?" Tags="|discussion|support|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2012-12-04T16:26:18.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an election oriented chat tonight (Tuesday) at 8pm EST.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A summary of the questions and answers will be posted to Meta following the conclusion of the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the summary is limited to the questions directed at the candidates and direct answers by the candidates, since collecting those is the entire purpose of the event. For more info, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2668/2012-moderator-election-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;2012 Moderator Election: Town Hall Chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T17:31:12.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2012-12-04T16:44:14.653" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess if you wanted to create a place for negative comments, you would have to also create a place for positive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anyone&lt;/strong&gt; can run for this - I even considered it. You &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; need to be a specialist in your field to be a moderator. You simply need to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be able to listen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;support the wider community (not necessarily a vocal individual)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;take actions when they are required&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;carry out janitorial tasks &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and generally help the community get along.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say he considers you a crackpot. You consider him an authoritarian. Both these views could be true (or maybe not - I don't know). Does this mean you should create a post attacking that individual? I don't think so!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will get to ask questions during the Town Hall tonight (or whenever it is in your timezone) but again - be polite while asking!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2498" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T16:44:14.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2012-12-04T19:35:54.417" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Ron's point of view and I'm a bit troubled by this whole election process. &#xA;There are finally enough decent candidates that I hope it will turn out well, but a few days ago I would not have liked to see any set of two new moderators chosen from what was available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have serious concerns about the future of the site if our new moderators turn out to be people with little knowledge of physics, reputation or time spent in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if someone with 40,000 reputation (earned by being a valuable contributing member to the site) has criticisms of a candidate, I think it would be smart to listen to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2963" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T19:35:54.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2012-12-04T19:51:35.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several ways to express your opinion of a specific candidate. The first one you missed, it happens during the nomination period where every Physics user can comment on the nomination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second major opportunity to critically examine the candidates is during the townhall meeting, which takes place in a few hours. Of course not everyone can attend, but if you have a specific question you want to ask the candidates, just post it in Physics chat and request that someone else asks your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you're after something else, you're not critically examining the history of a candidate on this site and asking them for their opinion on subject important to this site. You're trying to shout your opinion about this candidate at every opportunity you get, in chat on meta and even on the main site. Just because you're the loudest one right now doesn't mean your opinion deserves special consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the accusations of censorship, as already mentioned by SE employees, you're free to express your opinion as long as you don't resort to personal attacks and insults. You can criticize the actions and statements of a candidate as much as you want, but you don't get to just insult them. You're just plain wrong when you say that &quot;being a dick&quot; is required to have an honest discussion, you can be blunt and direct without ever insulting anyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are concerned about a specific candidate, ask targeted questions about your concerns at the town hall, or if you can't attend ask someone else to do that for you. Make it about actual concerns, not about your own opinion of the candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T19:51:35.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T20:54:56.977" Score="4" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am shocked to see that anyone with 150 reputation can cast a vote for moderator elections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the 100 rep bonus for linking another SE account, this is pretty much equivalent to allowing anyone at all to vote, and given how tiny the community is and how few users probably pay attention to elections it seems like it's asking to be gamed by users from other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See for instance the recent influx on meta of non-physics users here to argue with Ron).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't it be more sensible to restrict voting to 'Established' users (&gt;1000 rep)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2963" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T00:11:25.560" Title="Why is the required reputation for moderator voting so low?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2012-12-04T21:07:25.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that 150 is OK.  Earning the additional reputation still takes a bit of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raising the bar to 1000 would be rather undemocratic.  Some of our candidates would be unable to vote for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restriction you want could be more cleanly achieved by requiring that the user have actively participated in the site at least a month before the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T21:07:25.050" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2012-12-04T21:59:28.090" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally agree with this. There should be at least a minimum of 500 Rep to cast a vote. It is at the moment too easy to vote for moderators by people that have hardly any interaction or contribution to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T21:59:28.090" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2012-12-04T22:36:28.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to go this direction, you should also take into account recent activity. I just compared my recent activity to yours. Based on that, I think I have more of a right to vote than you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T22:36:28.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2012-12-04T23:24:31.130" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I absolutely agree with Zephyr's concerns (though a barrier of 1000 rep seems a bit too high to me), the new moderators should be voted exclusively by the genuine active Physics SE community. With the low amount of additional reputation needed to vote, in addition to the association bonus, this is absolutely not guaranteed, on the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observing the huge amount of moderators and people from other parts of the SE network suddenly flooding our (meta) site scares me and makes me fear that indeed the outcome of this election will not be determinded by our Physics SE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And reading the vigorous discussions I observe that it is mostly them who very vocally disagree with what people of our community, such as Ron, User1504, Zephyr, etc are saying ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2012-12-05T00:11:25.560" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T00:11:25.560" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2671" CreationDate="2012-12-05T02:47:13.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very concerned about this, because if it goes through there will be a direct competitor to Physics.SE.  Every time I look, the proposal has more support. Yet right now 4 of their top 5 example questions fit well within the scope of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already suffer from low traffic here, and a site solely dedicated to astronomy has proven to not be viable (probably because there are hundreds of good resources for amateur astronomy already out there, offering interactive sky charts, photo galleries, and day-to-day distillations of recent publications). Yet here they are trying to carve off a piece of physics to make another attempt, and it's not clear why. Note that I am in astrophysics, and I enjoy &quot;amateur&quot; activities more than most people in my field, but I can't condone driving a further wedge between Earth-based physics and everything that happens off this planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So regarding (1), donating material to the fledgling site, as charitable as it may seem, would be shooting ourselves in the foot. And as dmckee rightly points out, this probably won't be an issue anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (2), I suppose we should recover anything that fits within our scope that we don't already have, and I'd gladly help out. That said, it seems a little much for the powers that be to expect us to clean up for a &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; time after the same experiment fails again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd like to know if there's any way to formally bring these concerns to the SE powers, via a petition or something. (I never fully understood the enigmatic forces behind this whole network, but that says more about my ignorance than anything else.) Of course, if no one agrees with my concerns, I'm willing to go with the flow of an informed populace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[End rant fueled by years of exposure to passive-aggressiveness between physicists and astronomers.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T02:47:13.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T07:11:12.887" Score="4" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;To all candidates to moderator: what are you going to do regarding Ron's suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T07:22:31.167" Title="Candidates: What are you going to do regarding Ron's suspension?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2012-12-05T07:22:36.937" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T07:45:49.577" Score="8" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where is the place for respectful questions and comments on candidates to moderator &lt;em&gt;during these 5 days&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T08:09:28.820" Title="Where is the place for respectful questions and comments on candidates to moderator?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-12-05T08:09:28.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Mad Scientist said in a comment, you can pose questions to people &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt;. However, be aware that not all candidates visit the chat room, and so it may be impossible to get their attention that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also leave a comment somewhere where it'll get the candidate's attention, asking them to join you in the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T08:09:28.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2671" CreationDate="2012-12-05T11:33:49.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But as Eduardo says in the previous post, it wouldn't survive&#xA;  (compete) with Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if, as a non-native speaker, I may be not understanding this sentence well. But I don't say that Astrophysics.SE wouldn't survive with Physics. What I am trying to state is that the existence of Astrophysics.SE will be harmful for both Physics.SE and Astrophysics.SE itself. Because there is too much overlapping. Astrophysics touches nearly every field in physics, and so I consider very confusing to have two separate sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, for instance, that I have a question about General Relativity that arises in the context of FLRW Cosmology. Should I post it twice, in the two different sites simultaneously, so that I am sure that both cosmology astrophysicists and theoretical physicists will read my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is pretty easy to select only astronomy questions at a first sight in the list of Physics.SE. At the same time, every time I enter Physics.SE I read about questions and answers from other fields in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a waste of human resources. Your question will be less likely to be answered by someone competent, if you have two different sites. Let me quote here a chunk from my latter answer in the other post, I think it is relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In astrophysics more than in any other branch, contents are strongly&#xA;  related to other fields. Just to mention a few of them: spectroscopy,&#xA;  plasma physics, numerical modelling, fluid dynamics, nuclear physics,&#xA;  Newtonian dynamics, General Relativity, Thermodynamics, particle&#xA;  physics... And so I am very interested in showing my questions to&#xA;  physicists from other branches. Cross-feeding is a source of richness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be nearly absurd, and the moderators would have to be always&#xA;  deciding if the questions belong to the site or not... Nearly all&#xA;  branches of physics are related or directly involved in one or another&#xA;  topic in astrophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And, although there are many users in physics SE, very few are&#xA;  high-level physicists. More fragmentation means loss of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T11:33:49.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T15:57:21.510" Score="4" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm withdrawing from the election.  I entered initially because I was concerned that we didn't have enough candidates who had a history of participation in the site and an adequate background in physics.  This is clearly no longer the case, so I don't need to be a candidate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be pretty obvious which candidates have a philosophy of moderation which is similar to mine.  If you were considering voting for me, please vote for them instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt anyone is concerned, but no, I'm not leaving the site.  I'll continue participating.  And I will be more active in the future in flagging unconstructive questions and homework, cleaning up ones with potential, and helping to educate new users about our social norms.  Keeping this site healthy is everyone's responsibility, not just the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, while I have the microphone, a comment about the 'community vs outsiders' issue that's arisen during this election.  I think SE's employee's do genuinely have the best interests of the community at heart; their incentives are aligned with ours.  It's not completely clear to me that the same can be said for the volunteer moderators from other sites who've shown up during the Maimon-LeQuella kerfluffle.  But if you're worried about this sort of thing, the only recourse you have is to vote and continue participating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T16:11:25.740" Title="Withdrawing from the election" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2734" CreationDate="2012-12-05T16:11:25.740" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for letting us know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't remove your nomination at this stage of the election, but we will withdraw it when it comes the time to tally things up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as I said earlier, I'm sorry to hear about your decision, but I'm glad that you're sticking around on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7186" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T16:11:25.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T20:22:12.933" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have more than twenty reputation points though unable to post messages on chat rooms.Can anyone help me out? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16251" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T20:22:12.933" Title="Problem with loging in chat room" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T20:35:38.960" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;An hour or so ago I suggested an edit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45910/diamond-excellent-heat-conductor-due-to-phonons-explain&quot;&gt;this question about heat-conductance in diamonds&lt;/a&gt;. When I now browse to said question, I don’t see the block ‘your edit is being reviewed’ anymore, nor does it appear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12808/claudius?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&quot;&gt;the list of my suggestions&lt;/a&gt; where it definitely was listed half an hour ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to this suggestion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T20:35:38.960" Title="Edit Suggestion disappeared" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T22:03:30.790" Score="20" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just voting in community moderator elections over on Physics SE and looking through what I chose so far, and I think the layout is not very clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jlwFp.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot from community moderator elections&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A green bar around a blue button; my eyes are good, and I can see it, but it's not very easy to spot when quickly scrolling through the page. Can we have a visually better representation of the selected choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6319" OwnerDisplayName="gerrit" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T06:25:16.577" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T06:25:16.577" Title="In moderator elections, selection option should be visually more clear" Tags="|feature-request|design|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2671" CreationDate="2012-12-05T22:32:14.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the site does launch then there is absolutely no need to migrate existing astronomy and astrophysics questions to the site. There are several reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are still on topic for Physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migrating old (&gt; 60 day old) questions is no longer possible - not even for moderators.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dumping a whole load of questions onto a new site is not a nice thing to do to the new site. It distorts the reputation of the users on the site and potentially creates a bunch of high rep users who have no interest in using the site in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the questions were off topic in the past they are still off topic and should just remain closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happened with Programmers and old questions from Stack Overflow and it wasn't pleasant I can tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the astronomy and astrophysics site does look like it's going to succeed then we can have a discussion about tweaking the scope of Physics - but even then the rule about migrating old questions still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3948" LastEditorUserId="3948" LastEditDate="2016-01-14T09:33:34.003" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T09:33:34.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-06T14:50:13.507" Score="23" ViewCount="946" Body="&lt;p&gt;As recent events showed, there is a need for a mechanism that allows a ban of a very active community member to be reversed if it is deemed important by enough community members &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2716/7924&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2716/7924&lt;/a&gt;, bmike asked me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;I&gt;I'm asking for where you'd draw the line when someone repeatedly and vocally attacks another person (clearly making it about them and not their actions). Also - I'm not saying you are wrong until I hear what you propose. I'd like to know where you would draw the line. Do you vote on who gets to ignore the rules? Do you set it at a certain reputation? Do you give someone a free shot at a different person for each 1k reputation? Make a proposal we can debate if you'd like to change the rules.&lt;/I&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here my request (slightly modified compared to my reply there):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be possible to undo a ban upon the intervention of 5 users with enough reputation to merit the privilege of reversing a ban. This could for example taken to be at the level of 250 reps where one earns the privilege of voting to close, or at 2000 reps where one also earns the privilege to vote on edits; any other threshold would be ok, too.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the ban should be undone if 5 people pay a ransom of perhaps 500 reps (or any other reasonable amount, perhaps an amount proportional to the banning time) to show that they are serious about the need to have someone back. This would mean that the sin has been paid for, so justice has been done, as in ordinary life. If less ransom comes in, the ban time should be shortened according to the fraction received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T08:55:20.010" Title="Request for establishing a new privilege: to undo a ban" Tags="|feature-request|suspensions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2012-12-06T15:00:41.760" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suspensions are private, and in some cases like vote fraud most of the details have to remain private at all times. The users voting to undo a suspension don't have access to all the information about the incident, how are they supposed to make a reasoned judgement without knowing what exactly happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a user is suspended, a lot of the information that is based on is not available to regular users. This are e.g. deleted posts (which are available, but you can't find them easily), deleted comments, annotations about previous behaviour and information related to the vote fraud and sock puppet detection tools. You need all this information to judge whether the suspension is warranted, and most of this information can't be made public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T15:00:41.760" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2012-12-06T15:12:47.790" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;With all of the other vote-controlled mechanisms on SE, you have every bit of information you need to vote. For example, wrt closing and reopening, you can see the post and all the comments. You're not making a blind decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the suspension details (the warnings, the exact offence, etc) are private and only viewable by moderators (and the suspended party). Due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt;, this information cannot be released by the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without full knowledge of the situation, an un-ban would be a blind decision. Moderators are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;human exception handlers&lt;/a&gt;, they're the ones meant to deal with this. And they already have. There is no point (IMO) asking them to undo this, the ban was enacted by a community team member (according to Ron), and it was regarding network policy--upheld by the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T15:12:47.790" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2012-12-06T17:14:34.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid the problem that voting users don’t know why a person was banned, I would suggest giving the banned user a possibility to ‘Appeal to Community’, which would make the details of the ban public (at least to the users eligible to vote on the appeal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could take this a little further by first requiring one of these users to vouch for the banned person and then giving the banned person a choice to appeal publicly, appeal without making details public or not appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest the reputation threshold required to vote on such appeals to be at least 2k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T17:14:34.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2012-12-06T17:33:24.387" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bans and suspensions need to be carried out by moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no correlation between someone's ability to answer/ask physics questions and their social intelligence. Moderators, on the other hand, are usually judged by a community over a long period of time as possessing a character which enables them to consistently deal with people in a calm, fair and detached manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing stopping a person on the receiving end of abuse to appeal for the suspension to be lifted or reduced using the meta page anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T17:33:24.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2753" CreationDate="2012-12-06T17:38:31.357" Score="6" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reviewing edits there is text inviting to improve the edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approve, reject, or improve edits suggested by users. (less)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approve edits you know are correct&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Reject those you know are wrong&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Skip if you are not sure and want to go to the next suggested edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I see buttons only for approve, reject, and skip. How to improve the edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it makes a difference: I am using Firefox 16.0.2 (Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu canonical - 1.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why don't I see a button for &quot;improve&quot; on tag wiki edits?" Tags="|support|editing|review-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2012-12-06T17:43:23.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah! I think I figured it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The review queues have recently been changed to include some known bad posts as honeypots for detecting users who were mechanically reviewing in an effort to get the badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/157808/reviewing-low-quality-posts-that-are-baits-do-not-let-you-improve-edit-them&quot;&gt;these are currently detectable due to differences in the UI&lt;/a&gt;. Presumable the team is working on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmm ... what I see is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIgl5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the improve button right in the middle of the cluster on the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you getting something different? On just one suggested edit or consistently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T17:43:23.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2012-12-06T18:06:20.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're probably looking at an edit suggested to a &lt;em&gt;tag wiki&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot;&gt;the ability to &lt;em&gt;vote to approve&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; these edits, you haven't yet earned &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;the right to edit them &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - so the &quot;improve&quot; button is unavailable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2751/on-reviewing-edits/2752#2752&quot;&gt;dmckee, as a moderator&lt;/a&gt;, has all the rights and so sees the &quot;improve&quot; button regardless of his reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and yes, just removing/disabling the button is a bit weird, but the alternative would allow you to create a sort of chain of suggestions that would all have to be approved or rejected)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T18:06:20.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-06T21:52:46.060" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have an answer to a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/46134/6634&quot;&gt;like this one for example&lt;/a&gt;) where the explanation can have effectively two speeds: plain english, and very math heavy. I would like a way to do both at once, similar to the way &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooke%27s_law#Derivation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia hides these derivations&lt;/a&gt; or even something as simple as the &quot;show more&quot;/&quot;show less&quot; links on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to do either of those styles to help keep the answer short, concise, and as plain-english as possible but still provide the technical details for those interested? If not, can there be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T17:32:26.333" Title="Adding collapsable fields to answers" Tags="|feature-request|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2754" CreationDate="2012-12-06T21:57:47.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, no mechanism currently exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of curiosity, I present a cheap hack: MathJax in spoiler-boxes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; This is some spoiler text $$E = mc^2 .$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, it doesn't work, and even if it did the vertical space would be present all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T21:57:47.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2757" CreationDate="2012-12-06T21:57:54.007" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;the title says it all really. I know other SE sites are using the blog feature, but i don't understand yet what is the process for submission of articles. I don't see a physics blog site anywhere so i assume that needs to be deployed first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T04:42:05.030" Title="how do we submit articles for physics.SE blog?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2756" CreationDate="2012-12-06T22:10:37.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a Physics SE blog, and you can't really submit articles to something that doesn't exist ;-) So there is no way (for now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility of starting a site blog has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/whats-the-possibility-of-a-physics-se-blog&quot;&gt;previously discussed&lt;/a&gt; but there was not enough support for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T04:42:05.030" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-07T10:44:26.613" Score="12" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are suspension times determined?&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;BR&gt;&#xA;says it can be anywhere from 1 to 365 days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But unlike in real life, no rules are given for what penalty to expect for which kind of offence, or for repetition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the escalation scale first one day, then one month, then one year, then permanently? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="7924" LastEditDate="2012-12-07T13:35:52.660" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T20:06:04.830" Title="How are suspension times determined?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2758" CreationDate="2012-12-07T10:54:43.497" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suspension is in most cases not the first response to misbehavour by a user. The first steps are contacting the user and telling them what they are doing wrong, this can be formally via a moderator message or informally in a comment or chat message. For serious incidents, this might be skipped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidelines from SE on suspension lengths are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 days for the first offense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;30 days for the second offense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;365 days for the third offense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspensions by site moderators are limited to a one-year maximum, though if the user relapses in the problematic behaviour then they can be suspended again for a year. Longer suspensions (often across multiple sites) can be used by SE Community Managers if required; this does not happen frequently but cases do exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the predefined values available in the suspension dialog, but moderators can choose any other value if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot of the suspension part of the moderator message tool:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UrGmc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T20:06:04.830" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T20:06:04.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2754" CreationDate="2012-12-07T16:42:33.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a stylistic work around, you can use headings and thematic breaks (horizontal lines) to define clear sections for deep/shallow answers like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Plain English:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a quick, to the point explaination. It's at the top so people see it before the potentially overwhelming part to avoid &amp;quot;tl;dr&amp;quot;. It can also be useful to get the high-level overview before diving into the details even for people who want to read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In Depth explaination&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the part with lots of quotes, tiny details, formulas and whathaveyous. The horizontal bar and heading clearly separate it from the simpler explaination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can add headings by placing # before the text on a line and three --- on one line to make thematic breaks, or you can use the editing icons to insert them automatically. You can also make sub-headings by varying the number of #s before a line to make big headings for short/long sections, but you can keep subheadings for the longer explanation if the need arises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer this to spoiler text as spoilers aren't as discoverable and it's harder to edit a spoiler well. Plus they reduce contrast a bit due to the block quote style that's applied to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6973" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T17:26:08.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-07T19:59:27.570" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;User profile pages currently indicate the user's location, if they have added one. I've thought recently that it would be convenient to know what time it is for another user. If they mention the time, or I know their location, I can figure it out. But it would be simpler for me if this was calculated by the server and displayed on their page. Obviously, this would only exist if the user set their location (or maybe this could be implemented as a separate field for timezone). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be similar to the way ages are automatically calculated and displayed, while not displaying a user's actual birth date or year. I also know that this is done in email notifications I get regarding chat sessions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Can user profiles indicate the current time in that user's location?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2762" CreationDate="2012-12-07T22:17:57.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The location field is neither necessarily the user's actual location, nor is it force-validated. For example, my own personal location is listed as &quot;6&quot;, which is an in-joke from my first days on Meta Stack Overflow. This is probably less of an issue overall on Physics, as there's probably a greater portion of users who have valid locations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We once did an attempt last year to standardize location strings across profiles. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88217/location-in-profile-was-changed-without-edit-or-knowing/88220#88220&quot;&gt;That didn't go over too well&lt;/a&gt;, although it gave us the means to suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88306/where-is-the-documentation-for-the-correct-format-of-the-user-profiles-location&quot;&gt;a standardized format&lt;/a&gt; (as opposed to forcing it on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat timezone is not derived from your location field. Rather, it is derived from your machine itself, through JavaScript, and reflects what time your machine thinks it is. This lets it give you &quot;local&quot; time for you where-ever you are, no matter how much you may travel. We don't actually store this information, which prevents us from a proper means to relay these times to other users who would be, say, stopping at your profile page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think for now, the simplest implementation is that a user who opts to want their time zone known to others can add it into the &quot;About Me&quot; section of their profile. Or, even, right into the location field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T22:17:57.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2012-12-08T03:24:23.190" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The folks over at Math.SE have put together a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference?rq=1&quot;&gt;brief summary of what you can do with MathJax&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the only thing left out for people completely new to TeX-style markup is &lt;em&gt;emphasizing&lt;/em&gt; that all math is done in &quot;math mode&quot; delimited by one or two dollar signs. (Actually, I suppose &lt;code&gt;\begin{} ... \end{}&lt;/code&gt; environments are recognized too, but details...) Aside from that and a somewhat dense layout, I think it suffices for showing the basics. Plus, it's already on the SE network, so the MathJax implementation is (presumably) the same as ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:21.967" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T03:24:23.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2766" CreationDate="2012-12-08T08:49:22.207" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not that I loose sleep because of this, but I am curious. I posted an answer and it collected 4 upvotes yesterday, but my reputation hasn't changed. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-04-04T09:45:37.397" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why my recent upvotes haven't changed my reputation?" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-12-08T08:59:33.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably you are discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/46210/520&quot;&gt;your answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/46189/520&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How much of the universe is observable at visible wavelengths?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What has happened is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;you edited it so many times that it was automatically converted to a &quot;community wiki&quot; post&lt;/a&gt;. Note the different format of the user-card at the bottom right of the post:&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/msEif.png&quot; alt=&quot;user card example&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the automatic conversion feature is to (1) prevent the original poster for benefiting from a post that has been extensively edited by others and to discourage frivolous edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to de-wiki this one for you, but this is not something that you should count on happening again in the future. It is generally recommended that you work on your posts offline so that you will only make a few edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T10:52:26.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-08T11:20:38.203" Score="8" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was lamenting the (relative) lack of fluid dynamics questions in the chat yesterday, it was mentioned that I may not be the only one to feel that way given the number of people who answer those types of questions seems to greatly exceed the number who ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was also looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se-sites-except-the-3-biggest&quot;&gt;Map of all Stack Exchange sites (except the three biggest)&lt;/a&gt; because I am really interested in data analysis and visualization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, that got me to thinking -- has anybody ever looked at the distribution of users and the number of questions asked vs. answered? For instance, I've answered 22 and asked 0. On SO, it's 88 to 30. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1492/anna-v&quot;&gt;anna-v&lt;/a&gt; is 641-4, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic&quot;&gt;Qmechanic&lt;/a&gt; is 360-0. Obviously they are the big dogs and may not be representative of the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So has anybody looked at these kinds of trends? Are we &quot;top-heavy&quot; in the sense that we have many recurring experts ready to answer but (relatively) few recurring users ready to ask? &lt;strike&gt;Is it possible for anybody to get that kind of data (questions asked/answered, number of answers accepted, etc), and if so how?&lt;/strike&gt; (I answered my own question on this part with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wonder how physics would compare to other SE 2.0 sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a simple scatter plot to see what data we would be dealing with, the X axis is questions asked and Y is answers given. I'm looking for techniques on how to show all the different scales of data: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/45466/techniques-to-show-data-spanning-multiple-decades&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/45466/techniques-to-show-data-spanning-multiple-decades&lt;/a&gt; but it will give you an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, should anybody want to play around with the data and see what they can come up with, the query is &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/88269/question-answer-and-comment-counts-for-each-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/88269/question-answer-and-comment-counts-for-each-user&lt;/a&gt; It pulls out comments too, maybe there's a cool way to incorporate that information. Cooler than just doing a 3D scatter anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:17.117" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T06:22:00.387" Title="Distribution of answers and questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-08T11:59:49.953" Score="8" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a &quot;digest&quot; version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2668/2012-moderator-election-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;2012 Moderator Election Town Hall Chat&lt;/a&gt;. The format, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;as described on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, is one &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to this question &lt;em&gt;for every question&lt;/em&gt; asked in the Town Hall, containing all the candidate's answers to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To view the digest chronologically, please sort the answers by &quot;oldest&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions or comments about this, &lt;strong&gt;please do not answer this question&lt;/strong&gt; as the answers are designed to be used for the questions from the Town hall itself. Instead, please ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77831/how-can-we-improve-the-town-hall-digests&quot;&gt;the parent question&lt;/a&gt; or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/352/town-hall-discussion&quot;&gt;the Town Hall Discussion Room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any corrections which need to be made to this digest, or if you were a candidate who was unable to attend the town hall and would like your answers included, please @GraceNote or @TimStone &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/406/physics-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;in the chat room&lt;/a&gt; and let us know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:59:24.583" Title="2012 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat Digest" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="29" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T11:59:49.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132706#7132706&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What do you believe is or will be your biggest weakness as a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132712#7132712&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My lack of indepth physics knowledge to the point of most of the questions that are discussed here.  My field (in terms of physics) is astronomy/cosmology.  That said, I take my cues from the community, not by what I personally think is a right or wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132713#7132713&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  For one, I am only an undergrad student of physics. This means that I may not have the expertise to fully understand all posts. As a moderator, I know that I generally don't have to deal with such things, but if I do have to do with it, I may need the aid of a theory-savvy mod/community member&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132717#7132717&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  In deciding when to delete comments and how many to be cleaned up but still preserve the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132718#7132718&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; My weakness - Lets see... One big thing is I'm still an undergrad.  Several comments responded to my nomination, Rory's comment is good. Detecting good/bad questions. &quot;I see a question - I like it and vote it up. There's a probability for other users to vote it down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132722#7132722&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  How would I detect it? Maybe I have to discuss with someone about it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132721#7132721&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm likely to have a low tolerance for crackpot questions.  I've seen other physics discussion forums over the years have their signal to noise ratio degraded by too many crank questions, and I'd like to avoid that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T11:59:49.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:02:16.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132714#7132714&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do you think it is sufficient to listen to a mob to determine what photon rho mixing is? Or should you find out for yourself before moderating such a question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132724#7132724&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I would of course research it.  While I don't have indepth knowledge on a subject, I know where to find good information, and in this particular case I would discuss with the other mods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:02:16.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:05:11.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grace Note http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132723#7132723&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is one contribution you feel demonstrates that you can be a good moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132728#7132728&quot;&gt;asked for clarification&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Could you clarify: What do you mean by contribution?  As in an answer to the site, or a trait that I would bring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grace Note http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132731#7132731&quot;&gt;clarified&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Either way works. Whatever you think you bring to the table that best represents your capability as a great moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manishearth http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132736#7132736&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  (1) My activity on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/178438/manishearth&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt; and multiple child metas (Phy, Chem)--I like discussing policy and community building. (2) My moderatorship on Chem.SE -- no hitches till now :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132744#7132744&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'll always be around. Rather than cleaning up messes, helping other users, I have just now entered into &lt;em&gt;community-building&lt;/em&gt;. Like I say everytime, I'll follow the Etiquette and help with new users. I generally prefer not to vote down new guys&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132749#7132749&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My knowledge of physics and use of rigor in math, coupled to my nit-picking of tags and not having people demand homework solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132762#7132762&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I like that policy on homework! We get a lot of intro/freshman physics questions, with no thought added too them! No work, no conceptual questions! I've been guilty of answering a few.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132750#7132750&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  My experience modding Skeptics and Astronomy as far as having familiarity with the tools.  Also, I have a laize faire attitude to many types of mod activities as long as actual community standards are not violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;user1504 http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132755#7132755&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think you'll see if you look at my comments and contributions to meta that I try to calm down angry discussion while still helping to ensure that unpopular points of view are heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:37:55.943" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:05:11.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:07:19.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132727#7132727&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How important is it to you that people with absolutely no social skills are heard and protected from mob harassment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132732#7132732&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Irrelevant.  The answers should stand for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132766#7132766&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, it depends on the &quot;mob harassment&quot; in question. Generally, these things ought to be locked and discussed on meta, calling a community team member in if necessary. In the end, it depends on which party is breaking the rules. If it is a content dispute (I'm right! No, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; am!), then the dispute ought to be migrated to chat with possible post locking. Escalate to meta if it gets worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132787#7132787&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think it's important that they are heard when there's real content in their rantings.  There are some participants who add nothing though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:07:19.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:09:29.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Dylan Sabulsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132746#7132746&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Can you explain to us what your background in Astronomy and Cosmology is?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Dylan Sabulsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132746#7132746&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I think what expertise you DO have will be useful here; we see questions on astronomy, cosmology and orbital mechanics with decent frequency. We see we have a few passionate undergraduates here; I would like to be familiar with what your base knowledge is. I don't mean this as an inflammatory question; I think you can contribute and through this maybe you could answer some people's doubts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132768#7132768&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Undergradutae level with some graduate courses along with a storng hobbyist level&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Dylan Sabulsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132781#7132781&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  that sounds great. I think concerns about your prep may not be valid; you are at a level with many other candidates I would think! I'm satisfied, thanks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:09:29.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:11:31.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132747#7132747&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Is it sufficient to listen to a cross section of opinion to determine scientific truth, or must you understand it deeply yourself? If you don't understand it yourself, would you &lt;em&gt;butt out completely&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132757#7132757&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If I have no understanding of the subject matter, yes I will butt out.  If communityy standards are violated (i.e. You're being an unmitigated jerk) then I will take community level standard actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:11:31.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:13:33.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e2ddd2b0d8390a1e4976cf46abdf29f4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;zephyr&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29219/zephyr&quot;&gt;zephyr&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132758#7132758&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What would your moderatorship bring to the community which would compensate for the potential loss of our 2nd most active member?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132775#7132775&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't intend to do anything to drive Ron away.  Again, I never look at his questions or answers unless they are flagged by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:13:33.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:15:35.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132759#7132759&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Of the other candidates, who is the one user you think would be most qualified for the position of moderator, and why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132761#7132761&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Qmechanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132773#7132773&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  OK.. QMechanic (or Manish)... After seeing many comments - I wouldn't stand a chance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132778#7132778&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  EASY: Manishearth!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132784#7132784&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Qmechanic, he is an active theoretical physicist, and has already been doing a lot of janitorial work in the past. A lot. After that, Larian, due to his experience on Skeptics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:15:35.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:17:37.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132779#7132779&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What do you think of a &lt;em&gt;hands off policy&lt;/em&gt;, where you do nothing unless absolutely required?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132792#7132792&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Depends on what you mean by &quot;absolutely required&quot;. If a comment discussion gets heated, there's nothing that bad about migrating to chat. If people are concerned about the voting till the dispute is resolved (&quot;The wrong answer may get upvoted!&quot;), I'd be happy to templock the post. I would only voluntarily (without being asked) lock a post in the context of a content dispute if absolutely required--if the participants in the dispute aren't willing to move to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132805#7132805&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Why move them to chat at all? Why not ignore them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132840#7132840&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, SE policy dictates that comments are not for discussion (the medium is anyway inadequate). Chat manages this better. And keeps it off the main question. Remember, we still have to hold up SE policy, unless we are allowed to use a different site-only policy (ask meta for that)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:17:37.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:19:41.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132788#7132788&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;For candidates who are also moderators of other SE sites, how do you expect your duties on the other site to affect your ability to moderate physics.SE, especially with regard to the time commitments involved?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132798#7132798&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Please excuse me. I'm not discouraging this. But, other moderators - I say, They've already got their chance. Why greedy for more? If they're becoming, what would other users do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132804#7132804&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I figure that it will actually help.  It will give me more familiarity with tools and procedures.  Also, it will motivate me to check around more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132817#7132817&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Good point. I was thinking more with respect to time, if you have any comment on that (I edited my post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132822#7132822&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  As @Manishearth said, mod actions are much easier than answering questions!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132815#7132815&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I doubt it will affect it in any negative manner. Moderating Chem goes like this: Check front page, fix stuff, possibly close stuff, lurk. (And some discussion with other mods in the mod room). It takes very little time, so it won't interfere right now. If it does interfere later, I'll have to balance the two. A positive effect is that (1) I already am used to moderating a science site, (2) I can steal chemistry questions (j/k)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:19:41.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:21:43.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132819#7132819&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Suppose every other moderator agrees a question should be closed, but you think it should be reopened. Will you reopen after they all tell you not to?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132836#7132836&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I doubt that would ever happen. But the desired answer is 'no', as I am probably misunderstanding the legitimate reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132865#7132865&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Discuss with them in chat, if I haven't done that already. Maybe ask the  community via chat/meta. We will have 5/4 mods on this site--enough to be able to hash out a resolution. If I still disagree, I would ask meta, like I said, but I wouldn't go directly against their collective decision. That being said, I have reverted mod actions on Chem a few times--but that was after leaving a note to the other mod (and asking him/her to discuss it with me if necessary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132929#7132929&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No. We don't because we have meta, a private discussion zone (for moderators only) like that. What's that for? Maybe we'd discuss there and try not to reopen...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:21:43.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:23:44.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132824#7132824&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;I can see from your history that your activity in physics pretty much stopped after May 5.  Where have you been?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132841#7132841&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Astronomy SE closed back then, and it broke my heart.  I have been weeping quietly in a small celestial corner.  ;)  (In all seriousness, I actually was just taking a break for a while)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:23:44.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:25:47.053" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b0bad23e2b52443f8d2595e53c10f691?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;random&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/998/random&quot;&gt;random&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132825#7132825&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How would you handle a user who has a personal grudge against you and runs around with their hands in the air no matter what you do just for the sake of calling you out?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132850#7132850&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  In most cases, I would ask the user to take a break.  I'd ask other moderators if they saw the same problem I did.  In Ron's case, I'd be somewhat more careful.  He does control my food supply after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132851#7132851&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  hehe, does this have any specific meaning?  In all seriousness, I would need to confer with the other mods on something like that, and perhaps escalate it to the community directors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132858#7132858&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Maybe, trying to talk with him. But, a chit chat wouldn't work for a &quot;grudged&quot; guy. Talk with other moderators personally. Then handle him rightfully. Well, I believe moderators do have a lot weapons. They have the utmost power you know... Put him under a timed bin, etc. like that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132888#7132888&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I wouldn't. I'd let the other mods handle it, making a statement of my own if necessary. In such cases, I would take off my moderator hat and act like a normal user in the context of that meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:25:47.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:27:49.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132861#7132861&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to using the privileges available after reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132864#7132864&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Simply because I won't reach 10k in a desired time interval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132885#7132885&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Moderators don't require privilege because they are the ones who contribute themselves towards community-development. This means they are far more than &quot;trusted users&quot;. They've to do the clean-ups&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132894#7132894&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think my focus is not so much on answering questions here, but rather giving back to the community by keeping it useful (as opposed to a Yahoo!Ask setting).  Thus I doubt that I would get to those point levels.  I am a fan of the SE community, and as such want to give back to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132933#7132933&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm not sure that moderator powers would make me particularly more effective than having earned 20k+ reputation.   The moderator diamond conveys a little authority, but not as much as having earned the respect of your community.   In any case, the question is moot for me.  I'm not going to hit 10k any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132951#7132951&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, I am rather familiar with SE policy, like I said, so I can help enforce and build upon it as a moderator. I don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; 10/20k tools yet--and if I did,I still wouldn't be that effective with them--there are a lot of restrictions on those tools that make them useful only if used by all the &amp;gt;10ks. I don't think that's happening currently (I hope we can change that)--a lot of the 10k+s have no interest in cleaning up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:27:49.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:29:55.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132915#7132915&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Which of the mods is willing to buck the other mods on conscience, while being the odd man out? Anyone?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132943#7132943&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Since I wouldn't be discussing the content of an answer, but rather community standards, I would be more inclined to say that the rules themselves would determine my actions, not me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133128#7133128&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm not sure there's any point in doing this.  It's wasted effort if you lose the final vote anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:29:55.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:32:01.227" Score="-5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b0bad23e2b52443f8d2595e53c10f691?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;random&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/998/random&quot;&gt;random&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132928#7132928&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;As Ron Maimon's pet hamster, is there any collusion with his running around hammering another candidate again and again? Simply put, is he your Super PAC?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132956#7132956&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No, I do not collude with Ron.  My biography is meant to indicate my respect for him and in particular for the anti-authority, judge-for-yourself principles he espouses.  However, you should not believe anyone's claims about their identity on the internet.  I might well be a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:32:01.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:34:03.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132959#7132959&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do you agree that rules are bullshit, and that you need judgment and bending over backwards to make sure people aren't silenced?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132978#7132978&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Ron, rules exist for a reason.  You can't arbitrarily disregard or dismiss them for one person's sake.  However, i understand that you and I have a &quot;history&quot; and am totally fine with not touching any of your questions or answers, no matter how many flags pop up...  &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132989#7132989&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  That is a bad decision, a wrong decision, a stupid decision, and a decision that implies you should not be a moderator. QED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133041#7133041&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  While not a discussion it's something I cleared with Grace earlier.  I don't want to drive Ron away, and he is displaying a &quot;I'll take my ball and go home attitude towards me personally.  I have no feelings one way ort another towards Ron, but he appears to display a persecution complex in regards to anything I do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133067#7133067&quot;&gt;replied&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No, you could never have cleared this with Grace because it goes against the flow and purpose of SE. No one gets off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/4f0af2dc52e6ff228e4d69f7e1e8aa5a?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Shog9&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/3435/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133075#7133075&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  That's why there's more than one moderator per site...And also us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133090#7133090&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Moderators often agree to lay off users for a while in order to avoid the appearance of a personal grudge...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9100fb18460057e68cadc6132add0f7f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;dmckee&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/2015/dmckee&quot;&gt;dmckee&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133096#7133096&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; We are trying to &lt;em&gt;moderate&lt;/em&gt; and letting things get personal is counter productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133106#7133106&quot;&gt;replied&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Which is precisely why it is your duty to be objective and don't ignore a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e2ddd2b0d8390a1e4976cf46abdf29f4?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;zephyr&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29219/zephyr&quot;&gt;zephyr&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133055#7133055&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Does that not bother you? Doesn't it seem like the judgement of such a prominent community member should be given some weight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133100#7133100&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  No it doesn't really bother me because I have no stake in this.  There are rules and standards, and we are supposedly civilized human beings.  If someone has a personal problem with me, it is on their conscience, not mine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133081#7133081&quot;&gt;remarked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  This is totally unacceptable.  You're calling Ron a crackpot because gets a few points on a list that John Baez wrote for laughs?   Do you really think his physics answers are incorrect?  If so, you have no business moderating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133020#7133020&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think rules are very useful tools.  Some level of judgement is always required in applying them.  In the case of one user, a question probably deserves closure as &quot;not a real question&quot;.  In the case of another user, we may have a newbie struggling to ask a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133024#7133024&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, as  moderators we have to uphold the rules, so we can't really do that... If by &quot;people being silenced&quot;, you mean suspensions--then I must say I don't like suspending a user unless absolutely necessary. That being said, I do think that a few rules aren't that good (as you said, bullshit). I still will uphold these, though I will probably try to get a policy change via meta/MSO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133077#7133077&quot;&gt;replied&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; By people being silenced, I mean, some crazy guy asking a -11 voted question which asks &quot;does regge theory of linear trajectories explain why space time is curved?&quot; who has 20 knowledgable people saying that he is a crackpot. This is Joel Scherk. I want to know if you will you make sure the &lt;em&gt;theory is protected from deletion&lt;/em&gt;, and the comments and answers preserved, no matter how stupid and crazy it sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133137#7133137&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  In such cases, I'd ask for the help of the other mods and act after a group discussions. Remember, posting your own theories can be considered off topic (see the &quot;mainstream physics&quot; part of the faq). Such things ought to be locked, moved to chat for the time being, and unlocked when they get resolved. Maybe closed if they aren't mainstream&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:34:03.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:36:04.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Dylan Sabulsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132984#7132984&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How will you try to deal with the flow of strictly homework questions from Freshman physics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7132992#7132992&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Like David does always, I'm doing it still... Perhaps, indicate them our homework policy, making them aware of closing questions, explain them how should they ask, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133005#7133005&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It is immediately closed until they have demonstrated their attempts and confusions. And then the responders must not simply reveal the answer, but should only provide sufficient hints. QED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133007#7133007&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Which goes to my Yahoo!Answers comment earlier.  I think those should be closed due to the community standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133063#7133063&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Let it pass as long as they are conceptual questions; worry about it only if there are just too many. &quot;Solve this&quot; homework dumps should be commented on and closed (maybe with a time gap, though that's not really necessary since closing is a temporary state for improvement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133104#7133104&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  In most cases, I'd leave a warning that the question will be closed if it is not rewritten to very high standards.  Most of those homework questions are indistinguishable from spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:36:04.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:38:07.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133029#7133029&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133042#7133042&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Meaningless, and hence don't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133073#7133073&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I tend to be someone that is more lighthearted than most.  I figure it will at least make things more fun.  :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133079#7133079&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Maybe the old-time moral - you'll get every thing for what you have done :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133227#7133227&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I've certainly said some less temperate things in my time here.  If someone asked about them, I'd point out that the moderators would have been within their rights to close the egregious ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:38:07.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:40:14.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b0bad23e2b52443f8d2595e53c10f691?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;random&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/998/random&quot;&gt;random&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133139#7133139&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;How do you educate users who use the site as their own blog when they cling to a notion of freedom of speech to justify posting anything and everything regardless of scope and topic based on having a registered account?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133161#7133161&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  This is a stupid question. He by definition gets kicked off for not adhering to the scope and topic-based structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133165#7133165&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Try to advice them - through chat or somewhere - even a private message... Warn them of their activity. If not - WEAPONS away&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133193#7133193&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  It would be time for using moderator tools (i.e. the mod chat) to make sure that I am not misconstruing some community action.  I keep saying that I am liaze fiare (i.e. I leave things alone) unless there are flags.  In that case, I would probably defer to a community manager on grievous violations.  I don't do or take anything personally, but there could be appearances of that on anyone who has a persecution complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133221#7133221&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Discuss, notify via chat, notify via mod message, suspend if it continues. It's completely OK if the content is on topic, though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:40:14.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:42:20.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133169#7133169&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;As a moderator, what areas of site cleanup/site building do you plan to focus on?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133190#7133190&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  As stressed already, appropriate (de)tagging and appropriate steps to posting HW questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133212#7133212&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Astronomy and cosmology in terms of content.  Otherwise edits for grammar and spelling.  Also, if there are references, prevent link rot and quote relevant information, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133284#7133284&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'd love to see the duplicate questions more quickly closed.  We spend a lot of time answering the same questions.  I'd also like to deal with a certain set of cranks who've been making a lot of noise lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:42:20.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:44:24.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Dylan Sabulsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133171#7133171&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What can we expect new candidates to bring to our community in terms of answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/32a5d4290a26fd53017a8d958797b7ce?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Dylan Sabulsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/38950/dylan-sabulsky&quot;&gt;Dylan Sabulsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133171#7133171&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm interested in what the candidates will bring to our community. They will be on more and will hopefully also answer more questions along with their mod duties. I think @LarianLeQuella will add answers to astro and cosmo, @ChrisGerig to mathematical phys questions and perhaps heavy math quantum stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133200#7133200&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I doubt it matters much--my answers will be on basic undergrad physics. As a moderator, I personally would keep at my current pace of answering, maybe improve it to what it used to be. Remember that on the main site, the diamond &lt;em&gt;means nothing&lt;/em&gt; on an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133218#7133218&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Astronomy answers, like I did before my precious site was eaten.  ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133332#7133332&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I think our moderator duties are largely separate from answering questions.  But since you didn't include me in the list:  I know quite a bit about QM, QFT, stat mech, particle physics, and string theory.  I'm particularly interested in the mathematical details of these subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:44:24.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:46:29.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133186#7133186&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;If I remember correctly, you've said that you are not (yet!) a fluent English speaker. Do you think there is a chance of you misunderstanding people's comments while moderating, and if so, how would you prevent this from causing problems?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133210#7133210&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Yes, David. sometimes, I'd definitely get a misunderstanding. Just Maybe - I could ask help from other mods &lt;strong&gt;privately&lt;/strong&gt; like you or dmckee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:46:29.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:49:01.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133207#7133207&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;Would you disallow non-mainstream thoughts from the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133236#7133236&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Not sure... I probably would disallow such thoughts if it becomes a big issue (too many comment wars, etc). Otherwise, the community already handles these pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133244#7133244&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Would you censor cold fusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133277#7133277&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Since I am not too knowledgeable about it, I have not expressed any views upon it on meta yet--they have too little weight in this case. These decisions are best left to those mods/community members who know the topic well. My own opinion on the matter (which I haven't voiced yet, since it has little weight) is that these should be handled on a per-case basis. If the community objects OR if there is heated discussion, then worry about them, otherwise just keep a watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133289#7133289&quot;&gt;continued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If the community comes to a clear consensus on this, I shall follow the new policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133281#7133281&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I know not meant for me, but I don't censor answers or questions based on the subject. Remember, community standards.  Topics aren't really dictated by community standards as long as ON TOPIC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133301#7133301&quot;&gt;replied&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If there is consensus that all cold fusion should be deleted from the site, and everyone agrees, will you buck them all and say &quot;no way&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133326#7133326&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Nope. Unless there are arguments for keeping the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:49:01.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:51:04.853" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/706ad14d2e33372b999b059ed544031d?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Ron Maimon&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/23715/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133228#7133228&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Are any of you willing to say &quot;I will allow all thoughts, mainstream or not mainstream, to be heard without prejudice, determined only by technical accuracy inasmuch as I can determine for myself?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133251#7133251&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Ron, you don't dictate community  standards.  I cannot state that unequivocally.  I take it you have read the FAQ here, and there will be instances where rudeness and threats (and the like) will not be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133253#7133253&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Another stupid question. The point is, if there is no math there to back it up, then it is likely (and justified) to be prejudiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:51:04.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:53:07.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d47f855753f4f7f0876c7676035d5499?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Art Brown&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/41770/art-brown&quot;&gt;Art Brown&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133260#7133260&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Any thoughts on linking questions to relevant previous questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d47f855753f4f7f0876c7676035d5499?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Art Brown&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/41770/art-brown&quot;&gt;Art Brown&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133260#7133260&quot;&gt;added&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I have a terrible time finding old stuff here.  I've noticed qmechanic does a lot of linking.  I suppose it requires wide domain knowledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133285#7133285&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Just takes patience, and is obviously a good idea for those interested/willing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133288#7133288&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  we'd just need to follow flags and do cleanups. Linking is perhaps not necessary. Many would flag for us. If we have got some knowledge in the field, we'd be happy to do the relating job. Even the SE engine shows related questions in side bar. Moreover - who are we? we are the members. We should've read several related questions already...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133305#7133305&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I wish that SE had a function like the old (old) Digg site did when you submitted stories.  That would make it easier to do that.  In the case that I could find the linked question, I would allow that, however it may need a refresh on an answer, so keeping repeats open could be beneficial.  Again, community standards would drive the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133311#7133311&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, there's always the &quot;linked&quot; and &quot;related&quot; sidebars that do most of the work for you. I sometimes get some deja vu, and then do a search to find related questions to link/CV-dupe. But it';s a great idea that we should focus on crosslinking more, I may look into that the next time I check out new questions here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:53:07.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:55:18.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133310#7133310&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Is there something you think the current moderation team is doing wrong, that you would try to get changed if elected?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133327#7133327&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  The awareness of people simply answering homework-style questions, defeating the purpose of homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8b925a470b95b97bf25240f7a274d611?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;David Zaslavsky&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/1369/david-zaslavsky&quot;&gt;David Zaslavsky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133339#7133339&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Do you mean we should allow people to answer homework-like questions? Or are we not as strict about shutting them down as you think we should be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d2012b8a2aaf9b54319d87e14eeed1a8?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Chris Gerig&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/29429/chris-gerig&quot;&gt;Chris Gerig&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133343#7133343&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Latter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133341#7133341&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Not really. I would prefer if we were stricter regarding one-liner/link only answers, and maybe mandate that answers should have some concepts involved. (We already sorta do, but there are a lot of tiny answers in the LQ queue. No problem in deleting them, but our current policy disallows it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133345#7133345&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I don't think the current mod team is doing anything wrong.  I am surprised they aren't running again (or is there a rule against that, I haven't been a mod that long on Skeptics).  As for changes, isn't that handled by the community directors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3e6deb0a86e09f3d79d83d0187b78bbc?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Crazy Buddy&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/46626/crazy-buddy&quot;&gt;Crazy Buddy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133353#7133353&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;. I bet you're still doing the job. Once, I had a negative thought on dmckee. (seen through his harsh comments) the first time I joined (about some 3 months ago), but now - I give respect to his comments. So, No - I think current moderators are a good fit. They are &lt;strong&gt;physicists&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133389#7133389&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Generally, I think they're doing a fine job.  I've indicated elsewhere that I'd be a little more aggressive with some of the crank questions I've spotted, but other than that, I have no real complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:55:18.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:57:20.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/51bd0bf617a17a869d8cd77d96565667?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drake&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/44543/drake&quot;&gt;drake&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133406#7133406&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What do you think about the number of questions which are posted? Too many, too few?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133422#7133422&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Too many not-so-conceptual ones, too few really good ones. We nee to improve quality. Our community may not be able to handle more quantity yet. As graduated SE sites go, we're still pretty small, though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/51bd0bf617a17a869d8cd77d96565667?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;drake&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/44543/drake&quot;&gt;drake&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133441#7133441&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Are you going to do anything to improve the quality? What?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0a3069491bfded90cdf623341cadc1d1?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/31768/manishearth&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133450#7133450&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Commenting on new questions, asking that they clarify what concepts they are asking about and emphasize those. &lt;em&gt;Maybe&lt;/em&gt; move meta for stricter restrictions on qs. Though my primary focus (in the context of quality) would be on non-conceptual/tiny answers--like I said, current policy allows them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133435#7133435&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I have been absent for a while, so I can't fairly answer that question.  However, a quick perusal, I find myself in agreement with Manishearth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133444#7133444&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I'd like to see more high quality questions, and about the same number of questions overall at the moment.   I want to see questions which attract helpful and knowledgeable users, so that the community becomes stronger as it grows.   On the flip side, I'd like to see fewer questions which turn off these users.  None of which makes me unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:57:20.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2012-12-08T12:59:24.583" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1b643b1cabd740a5f4580f365b21407?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Grace Note&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/757/grace-note&quot;&gt;Grace Note&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133296#7133296&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Parting thoughts from the candidates?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/08f2eeded9d67d89d14a1939b11a9557?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;Larian LeQuella&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/10038/larian-lequella&quot;&gt;Larian LeQuella&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133324#7133324&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  I love the whole SE concept and community!  I am here to give back.  That is my only stated purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/174dd1e429d3eebcaa2e27341b9e342f?s=16&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;user1504&quot;&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/25180/user1504&quot;&gt;user1504&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7133527#7133527&quot;&gt;answered&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  If elected I will serve.  But you should consider voting for Chris Gerig or Manishearth.  I've been impressed by their answers tonight.  Chris, in particular, seems to have put a good deal of thought into how to deal with unconstructive questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16673" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T12:59:24.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2754" CreationDate="2012-12-08T17:32:26.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would not only be useful for answers, but also for questions. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/46289/12808&quot;&gt;this question on an ‘inverted HO’&lt;/a&gt; would IMHO look a &lt;em&gt;lot friendlier&lt;/em&gt; if it only showed the Hamiltonian and the three questions at the bottom per default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested users could then expand the boxes and see that the OP actually did quite some work (rather than asking for a homework problem without any effort), while not having to meddle through what feels like twenty pages of algebra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T17:32:26.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-09T15:35:41.637" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;While editing a little bit in the tag wiki lately, I noticed that the preview for MathJax is somewhat…strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it takes much longer for the preview to update in the tag wiki edit than in answer/question edits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\{$&lt;/code&gt; is not shown in the tag wiki preview&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it chokes when there appears to be markdown in a formula, such as in &lt;code&gt;$A_{ij} B_{kl}$&lt;/code&gt;; the &lt;code&gt;_&lt;/code&gt; are interpreted as meant to emphasise &lt;code&gt;{ij} B&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular reason the tag wiki behaves differently from the rest of PSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Opera 12.11 build 1661 on Debian Wheezy (amd64).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2014-01-31T17:53:58.330" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T17:53:58.330" Title="MathJax in Tag Wiki" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|tags|design|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2012-12-09T15:37:51.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note, it doesn't require just the &gt; 3K users of the site to help out in this endeavor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users that have less than 3K rep can flag the post for moderator attention if they believe that the post should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, this means that there are only &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; votes that are being used to close a question (the flag is in essence is a vote, as well as the moderator's vote that closes it), so it places a little more responsibility on the moderator making the call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note with this, while flagging isn't transparent to the entire community, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; logged (as well as the moderator's action for the flag).  SE staff and other moderators can see the results, so nothing is lost in the case of a contentious flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other benefit of this is that moderator flags don't decay, while close votes do, so if there's a question that &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; needs it, but not enough &gt; 3K users active to close it, other users can contribute to this effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9198" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T15:37:51.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-09T21:53:19.193" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/175/tag-synonyms-for-voting&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms for voting&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have three tags (and many others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;, covering everything that is governed by the classical Maxwell equations, such as the Lorentz force, magnets and most other things you can think of. It would include the Lorentz invariant treatment of electromagnetism and the first introduction of electromagnetism to quantum mechanics as classical fields. This fits what one gets when searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for ‘Electromagnetism’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would leave &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt; as the clear counterpart for the QED approach arising from QFT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electric-engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electric-engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electric-engineering&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electric-circuits&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electric-circuits&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electric-circuits&lt;/a&gt; (there is currently a synonym suggestion for them) would be unchanged, of course, and still make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T21:53:19.193" Title="tag:classical-electrodynamics and tag:electromagnetism" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2012-12-09T22:36:11.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T00:04:25.100" Score="23" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;second moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2451.png&quot; alt=&quot;Qmechanic&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/7433&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7433.png&quot; alt=&quot;Manishearth&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/about#moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T23:12:14.747" Title="2012 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2806" CreationDate="2012-12-10T00:08:26.503" Score="10" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;While going through some of the old astro.SE questions, I've noticed some astrobiology questions among them. They were certainly on-topic there, and I've seen threads that indicate most of what was on-topic there is to be taken as on-topic here, but there might be objections that it is more in the realm of biology than physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see three cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astrobiology is decidedly &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astrobiology is decidedly &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt;-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is best handled case-by-case. For instance, questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26034/sillicon-based-life&quot;&gt;non-carbon-based life&lt;/a&gt; are better handled by biologists, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25064/what-are-the-prerequisites-for-considering-any-other-planet-to-be-habitable&quot;&gt;other questions&lt;/a&gt; might deal more with the temperatures and solar winds we'd expect exoplanets to experience in certain environments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions? Was this already discussed elsewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T04:10:17.200" Title="What is our stance on astrobiology?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-12-10T00:21:54.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to the new community mods and &lt;em&gt;best of luck&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T00:21:54.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2804" CreationDate="2012-12-10T00:25:39.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If what I have learned about this history of the merger is correct, then anything that is on-topic for astronomy is on-topic here. Which to me means &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrobiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrobiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrobiology&lt;/a&gt; is on-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as always there are places that it might be more on topic if it doesn't deal with astronomy specifically. Life in microgravity isn't specific to astronomy per se and the biology world does extensive research on it here on Earth. So I think it may be like many of the &quot;How do I write a program to help me solve this complicated physics problem&quot; where it could be on topic here because it may relate to modeling but it might get more traffic on CompSci or StackOverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For existing questions the best choice may be to leave in place as on-topic. For new questions, it may be a judgment call because it is on-topic here but they might get a better answer on Biology. So it might be worth leaving a comment suggesting that but otherwise leaving it untouched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T00:25:39.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-12-10T03:48:36.577" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, congratulations to the two new moderators!  I had a suspicion that this is exactly how it would turn out.  Makes all the drama seem rather silly in the end.  ;)  I think the community made the perfectly correct choices in this, and I am very happy with the final result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T03:48:36.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2804" CreationDate="2012-12-10T04:10:17.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we had the Astro merge, anything on topic there is on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT, we may not have that good a bio/astrobiology community here, and these may get neglected. I propose we look at the questions case-by-case. We can't close as off topic, BUT, if they do not have too many votes, we may migrate&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. New questions on astrobiology, if any, probably should be migrated off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first choice for migration would be Bio. Chem...eh...not that much&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26034/sillicon-based-life&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, for example, is &quot;borderline&quot;. I would personally be reluctant to accept it, but I would discuss it with the other two mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. It isn't that good an idea to migrate posts with too many votes to beta sites. But it is up to the receiving site's mods whether or not to accept a question in the end.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2. Posts older than 6 months can't be migrated anyway. Generally it is better to only migrate new posts.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3. This is my official stance as a Chem mod.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T04:10:17.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-12-10T07:26:42.893" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good result.  Well done folks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T07:26:42.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T15:15:16.070" Score="10" ViewCount="1145" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is December 2012, we are now going to reset our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/2810&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T16:02:11.710" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2013" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-12-06T10:18:17.053" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T15:15:16.070" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-10T15:19:19.223" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fQztJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org -- open access to over 800 000 e-prints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2013-01-14T15:44:21.617" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T15:44:21.617" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T15:19:19.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-10T15:19:29.660" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3eT2R.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chemistry - Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T15:19:29.660" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T15:19:29.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-10T15:20:04.513" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlIlq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T15:20:04.513" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T15:20:04.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-10T15:20:23.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mathematica.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d64R1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mathematica at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T15:20:23.297" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T15:20:23.297" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2012-12-10T17:33:31.517" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/photon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;photon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;photon&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/photons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;photons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;photons&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/virtual-photons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;virtual-photons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;virtual-photons&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if all things related to propagating electromagnetic fields would be covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;. Additional tagging with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt; could then be used to distinguish between the classical and QFT description, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/particle-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;particle-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;particle-physics&lt;/a&gt; for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://example.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;High Energy Physics&quot;&gt;HEP&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning here is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/photon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;photon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;photon&lt;/a&gt; is not sufficient to distinguish between a classical and QFT treatment either. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thermal-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thermal-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thermal-radiation&lt;/a&gt; would still be a strict and helpful subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T17:33:31.517" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-27T10:40:11.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T22:28:13.337" Score="6" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by the fact I got downvoted for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44426/what-is-the-best-tool-for-simulating-vacuum-and-fluids-together/45159#45159&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer and cannot tell exactly why given the question was pretty vague and I don't think the OP was the one doing it either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am starting to think that it should be mandatory to comment on your downvotes. Now I am not saying I have never downvoted without a comment but that said, I do wonder whether sneaky downvoting is really in the spirit of improvement when it is not always obvious why it has been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ever constructive to just downvote people and not even tell them why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:03:51.770" Title="Should downvoters have to comment on why they did it?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2817" CreationDate="2012-12-10T22:48:42.627" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they should not. It is &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; you leave a comment (and undownvote if/when the user improves their post). But it is never mandated--and I really doubt it ever will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Privacy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes are supposed to be &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt;. If a comment is forced on a downvote, it's pretty easy to figure out who did it by looking through the comments. And users can get pretty vengeful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On StackOverflow, over a span of two days, I once downvoted ~50 bad posts, leaving a comment. I had 4-5 cases of revenge downvotes, 1-2 cases of enough &amp;quot;revenge voting&amp;quot; to trigger the auto vote invalidator, and a bunch of angry comments. Users should be free to vote without having to be afraid of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Smoothness&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is integral to the SE system, thus the process of downvoting needs to be smooth. A user need not have to jump through hoops to downvote, people will downvote less if it takes more time to do. And we can't have that, people &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your answer that was voted down, it really should be a comment (I converted it). A few points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Really short answers are discouraged here, it's always better to provide an intuitive explanation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers that only provide a link are even more discouraged--due to concerns of link rot/etc. You should summarize the link in your own words (few paragraphs-is) so that the answer can stand alone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments asking for improvement should go in the comments to the question. Click &amp;quot;add comment&amp;quot; out there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T23:14:57.650" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-12-10T23:17:30.127" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to post data from the results here?  I thought I might save other people some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a total count of the number of votes cast for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for each candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                    1   2   3   all&#xA;Chris Gerig         9   15  25  49&#xA;Qmechanic           134 38  11  183&#xA;Manishearth         23  79  28  130&#xA;user1504            5   11  19  35&#xA;Larian LeQuella     10  20  35  65&#xA;Crazy Buddy         4   8   25  37&#xA;MKB                 5   4   10  19&#xA;Total votes         190 175 153 518&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this misses the cross-correlations, which would be important for runoffs, but your method wouldn't matter much for this election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The average voter cast a vote for 2.726 candidates.  Total of 190 people voted, reflected in the first choice column because you can't vote without casting a first choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T23:17:30.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-11T13:21:27.493" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll start by saying that I really despise encouraging participation in things by awarding prizes, especially money. That to me is over the top, especially for things that are supposed to be community driven like this site. I was poking around several different meta's on the sites where I typically lurk and some of the smaller ones ran Topic of the Week contests to drive up participation and/or expand the scope of the site by encouraging questions on less-frequently used tags (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/topic-of-the-week-contest&quot;&gt;UX&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1138/topic-of-the-week-contest-updated-august-29&quot;&gt;SciFi&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1543/the-end-of-a-contest-and-beginning-of-something-else&quot;&gt;Cooking&lt;/a&gt;). The one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1215/weekly-topic-challenge-5772-41-week-of-pinchas-5772-rashi?cb=1&quot;&gt;Judiasm&lt;/a&gt; works without any prizes at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly am not advocating prize money, I think that's a terrible idea. And this site doesn't need it really. But would it be something worth doing/entertaining to have a Topic of the [time period] type of recurring event? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest I would say to a prize would be recognizing the questions and answers under the topic that got the highest votes during the time period -- the high voting gives rep points which is essentially the only reward system in place on the site. Or if individual sites can award unique badges, then a badge could be given for best answer/question under a specific topic contest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:48:15.790" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T15:32:37.073" Title="Topic of the week &quot;contest&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2823" CreationDate="2012-12-11T15:24:32.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;A bit on those contests&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those guys running the TOTW contests are SE Inc employees, part of the group known as CHAOS. These guys are assigned some sites and they help promote them (only a few sites have a CHAOS member assigned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Prizes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though cash prizes aren't a good idea, sometimes SE swag is a great way to motivate people to participate in contests. For example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1250/webapps-second-anniversary-contest&quot;&gt;the webapps second anniversary contest&lt;/a&gt;. But, we may want to hold off on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Contest for us&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm, I really like the idea. And I'd be willing to help organize it. BUT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need to have a sizeable portion of the community willing to participate in this.&lt;/strong&gt; To that end, we'll probably have to gauge the comminity's response to this post. Most of our community isn't that active on meta, so getting such things started may take time..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw, sites can't award unique badges :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T15:24:32.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2826" CreationDate="2012-12-11T16:03:12.967" Score="4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently migrated away &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46583/feynrules-vs-feyncalc-or-anything-else&quot;&gt;a Mathematica question&lt;/a&gt;. Now, our faq does not explicitly allow software questions so I assumed that it was off topic, and sent it away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT--it seems like this question &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be better suited for Physics.SE, since it deals with higher-end physics that most Mathematica.SE community members will not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we allow such questions? If not, should we allow them? Maybe add a line to the faq to that end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:31:40.637" Title="Should we allow software questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|site-faq|software-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2825" CreationDate="2012-12-11T16:16:02.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ includes &lt;em&gt;&quot;Computational questions&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;&quot;kinds of questions should not be asked here&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally try to sort out if SciComp or Stack Overflow would be best. Or I encourage the author to be clear if it is the physics or the computation that (s)he is asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wishy-washy about the one you've linked to. In a lot of ways it looks like a &quot;save me having to read the docs&quot; question, but I know from personal experience that that it is not always clear from the docs exactly where the limits of a complicated package may lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any way, it is definitely not a physics question, but it is a question about physics tools. On Stack Overflow programming tools are on topic, but I don't know if we have a really clearly stated policy on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T16:16:02.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2825" CreationDate="2012-12-11T16:29:43.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think about the physics questions involving computation should be decided case by case by giving the people knowledgable in the physics topics concerned some time to notice the question and see what they think about it, since they are the experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T16:29:43.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2825" CreationDate="2012-12-11T16:44:50.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to allow both computational as well as software questions as long as their origin is purely physical, or, in other words, as long as it can be assumed that someone completely disconnected from physics (say, in financial maths) could not answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, numerical integration sticks up its ugly head basically everywhere and is hence better of on CompSci, but &lt;em&gt;nobody who is not a physicist&lt;/em&gt; will even think about Feynman diagrams and ways on how to calculate them. Hence the former should be migrated on sight, whereas the latter should stay here (and made explicitly on-topic in the FAQ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To restate the criterium:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If it is sensible to assume that someone who is not part of a physics department, or similar institution focused on physics, will encounter a given, clearly computational/tools-related, question in his day-to-day work, then the question should be migrated to CompSci (or Mathematica).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12808" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T16:44:50.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-11T22:05:33.263" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the proper way of punctuating block formulae? There seem to be variance from “a mathematical text is, before everything else, a text” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/6675/periods-and-commas-in-mathematical-writing&quot;&gt;qtd. via MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;), to confusion whether parenthetically numbered equations follow the same rules, to publications like my current American physics textbook which uses none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I used to punctuate my formulae, just like I separate statements in my algebra and my programming with semi-colons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing is that in practical application within LaTeX environment, some insist that punctuation, as part of the text, should be styled like the rest of the text, and be outside, whereas formulae have their own styling. But on Physics.SE MathJAX pushes outside punctuation into the next paragraph (it parses formula as a separate &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; breaking up the flow of text regardless of carriage returns?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:54.500" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T22:19:15.903" Title="Punctuation in block formulae" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2012-12-11T22:16:20.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rule I was taught was that equations are just part of the text and that punctuation should never stand on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a block formatted equation comes immediately before punctuation you put the punctuation at the end of the formula. That means when I end a sentence with the quadratic equation I write &lt;code&gt;$$ x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} .$$&lt;/code&gt; That won't render on meta, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&quot;&gt;you can see how it looks in the Physics.SE FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Notice that the full stop occurs &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; equation markup delimiters (&lt;code&gt;$$&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a little OCD bonus you could use &lt;code&gt;$$ x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} \text{.}$$&lt;/code&gt;, but I don't generally bother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid confusion this necessitates not using periods as mathematical operators and being careful about where how you use commas in formulae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T22:16:20.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2012-12-11T22:19:15.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a single proper way to do it - at least, for this site, there is no enforced or recommended convention. The only thing I would suggest is that you not put punctuation after a display-style MathJax formula, like &lt;code&gt;$$x = y$$.&lt;/code&gt;, because that spoils the flow of the text. But whether you include punctuation, &lt;code&gt;$$x = y.$$&lt;/code&gt;, or don't, &lt;code&gt;$$x = y$$&lt;/code&gt;, is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-11T22:19:15.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2834" CreationDate="2012-12-12T22:03:52.263" Score="12" ViewCount="1052" Body="&lt;p&gt;Finals are going on for many, and we've had quite a few instances where a student posts a question from a take-home final exam (or something similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How ought we deal with this? Should we close these? Currently, we have no compulsion to close these unless they have other problems, though we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; squeeze them under &quot;too localized&quot; at times. Delete them? Lock? Or not worry about at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be clear, I'm asking what we should do, as a community and as moderators, if we &lt;em&gt;already know&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; that a post is part of a take-home exam (or something similar given to students under a honor code)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note: While we moderators have access to IP addresses and email IDs of users, we cannot, under any circumstances, reveal them. So, while we may report the incident to the professor conducting the course, we cannot help him/her verify the identity of the poster by providing these details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. and this information has been obtained using tools not exclusive to moderators --in other words, the method of obtaining this information does not conflict with &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy&quot;&gt;SE's privacy policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-12-27T23:12:08.757" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T23:12:08.757" Title="How should we deal with academic dishonesty?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|ethics|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-12T22:03:52.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that moderators should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be obliged to help uphold the rules of other institutions, and we should not use any on-site powers to deal with such issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I feel we should do is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be stricter and more vigilant in enforcing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; on such posts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add a comment linking to the paper that it is from.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvote (?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fire off an email to the relevant professor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The identification issue &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be circumvented, to a degree. There is a way to &lt;em&gt;verify&lt;/em&gt; if a user has a given email address (the URL of the avatar contains the md5 hash of the email), though this is not exactly reliable, as the email used to enter the gravatar can be changed without having to re-verify it. Also, it's complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T22:03:52.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-12T22:20:12.923" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me put up the counterpoint to Manishearth's answer: while we're certainly not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; by Stack Exchange to do anything about questions which violate a course policy, it's in the interest of our site to do so, within reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the community has been quite clear that we do not want this site to be known as a place where people can take the easy way out of learning. We try to encourage insightful conceptual questions and discourage do-my-homework questions, and accordingly we have what I think is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;strictest nontrivial policies on homework questions&lt;/a&gt; in the SE network. Similarly, we don't want this to become known as a place where people can easily cheat on their exams or other projects. So when we find out that someone is violating an academic policy, it's consistent with our overall vision to make it difficult for them to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I propose. If you see a question which seems to come from a current take-home exam or some equivalent project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you find the policy on outside help for the exam and it &lt;em&gt;does allow&lt;/em&gt; help from Q&amp;amp;A sites like this one,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a comment linking to &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the exam paper &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the policy that allows outside help from Q&amp;amp;A sites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you find the policy for the exam and it &lt;em&gt;does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allow&lt;/em&gt; help from sources like SE,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a comment linking to &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the exam paper &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the policy that forbids use of Q&amp;amp;A sites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the question for moderator attention. (If you are a moderator, close it and let the rest of us know in mod chat.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;Downvote&lt;/s&gt; (actually I don't care about this, your votes are your business)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optional: email the relevant professor to give them a link to the question. Make sure to comment on the question if you do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot find the policy on outside help for the exam, or if you do find it but you can't tell whether it allows or forbids help from Q&amp;amp;A sites,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a comment linking to the exam paper and saying that you couldn't find a relevant policy on outside help&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the question for moderator attention. (If you are a moderator, let the rest of us know in mod chat, but don't necessarily close it right away.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optional: email the relevant professor to give them a link to the question. Make sure to comment on the question if you do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latter two cases, I would definitely encourage people to be proactive about emailing the professor of the course. I say &quot;optional&quot; only because we can't and won't &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; anyone do it, but the professor is really the best person to deal with these incidents. And it doesn't have to be a moderator who lets them know. None of our special mod powers are particularly relevant when it comes to informing a professor about academic dishonesty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T00:59:26.490" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-13T13:17:28.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No worldly authority should be in the position to impose any regulation on an independend website on the internet. It's dangerous to reinforce an academic (or governmental, for what it's worth) imperative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems which come from being known to provide answers to exam questions are worked out in David Zaslavskys answer. I agree with the points there. Nevertheless, no StackExchange user is obliged to answer any question, and other users can point out the source about a question in the comments. If the question is about physics and in accordance with the estabilshed policies quality wise, then the question should be allowed to be answered. It's physics, not capitalism, not politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, downvoting would be rude - merely an indicator of the sites emerging normative moral system. Calling someone out for cheating goes to far, we have no responsibility to conform to any institution. I wouldn't even call it &quot;academic dishonesty&quot;, that's a suggestive term with a bias. Some users might go to a particular university, some might work for the apple company, some might be member of the russian military. Should the community follow the code of honesty of all of these? Is any of these worth more? Should we pic out particular users and consider their personal take on what's fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastEditorUserId="5374" LastEditDate="2012-12-13T13:53:13.940" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T13:53:13.940" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-13T17:37:32.057" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a professor who gives a take home exam on the honor system in this day and age of the internet is either very old or very naive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Repeating the &quot;warning&quot; that &lt;em&gt;this site does not solve homework problems&lt;/em&gt; but it is allowed to show progress of work and show where one is stuck, is within the honor system, because books are allowed in take home exams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers should give no more than what can be found in a book. So the instruction should be mainly for us who answer such questions. If we see that the problem is progressing well and the student is just stuck at a blind spot, one should answer with the appropriate question to unstick  from the blind spot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think the professors should be alerted, they have taken their chances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T17:37:32.057" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2839" CreationDate="2012-12-15T02:32:11.623" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;A certain valuable contributor in this community has been suspended for a month, partly because it was his second warning, perhaps there were other factors unknown to the rest of us. It's my hope that he won't have this second suspension hanging around his neck for the whole time while he's on here, since another outburst is almost inevitable sometime in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how long must a user be on good behaviour before past suspensions are wiped clean, and the user can start afresh with zero suspensions against their name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T03:02:50.093" Title="How often are past suspensions wiped clean for users?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2838" CreationDate="2012-12-15T03:02:50.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suspensions are never wiped clean in the sense that I think you mean. In other words, when moderators are determining how to handle some situation, we are not required to ignore suspensions older than X for any length of time X. We can and generally do take into account a user's entire history of activity on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &quot;entire history,&quot; that means good behavior too, though. The next suspension after, say, a 7 day suspension doesn't automatically &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to be a 30 day suspension. We use common sense. If a user has consistently exhibited good behavior for a long time, then the moderators can always downgrade a suspension from the length that would be recommended based on the number of prior suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me also mention that there is no &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; record of suspensions. The information about a user's suspension history is not visible to anyone except moderators. So for any purpose &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than future disciplinary action, a user's suspension history is wiped clean the moment their suspension is up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T03:02:50.093" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-15T12:57:13.603" Score="5" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have 10 new messages. The inbox icon lights up with &quot;10&quot;. Now, when I click into the inbox to read the first message, this lighting disappears. I have to manually keep track of how many I've read, because it doesn't show me unread messages separately. Can this please be fixed? It should show all unread messages marked clearly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7951" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T15:04:27.710" Title="Inbox needs to be fixed: Unread messages should be marked clearly until read" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2841" CreationDate="2012-12-15T15:04:27.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with this as well, it seems like a rather useful feature to have. And I've fallen afoul of this a few times before -- I don't notice some inbox messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My workaround is to just open all the inbox messages in new tabs, give them a precursory glance and deal with them one by one, closing tabs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you can just use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3778/stackinbox-a-chrome-firefox-extension-that-preserves-new-stack-exchange-inbox&quot;&gt;this Chrome Extension&lt;/a&gt; that does the checking for you:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T15:04:27.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-15T15:39:56.427" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eP1sD.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciFi &amp;amp; Fantasy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2383" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T15:39:56.427" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-15T15:39:56.427" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-15T15:40:37.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lvw9q.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciFi &amp;amp; Fantasy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2383" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T15:40:37.737" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-15T15:40:37.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-15T16:22:58.893" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please don't mistake me as &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt;. I was just wondering if other users have seen about this case...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start (for a day), I had 2980 rep. I just returned now, answered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/46927&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; here. The user up-voted me and chosen it as his answer. Then, I blinked at my user card showing 3005 rep. Then, something bugged the author (maybe a &lt;em&gt;formula&lt;/em&gt;), he deselected mine and selected the other one. Then, I see my rep. still showing 2980 and not 2990 as my answer still has the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; That 10 rep. is not a great deal though. But, I'm curious whether users have seen such a &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; (bug) around in SE..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T19:20:09.547" Title="Incorrect reputation being displayed" Tags="|support|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2845" CreationDate="2012-12-15T16:31:14.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try this: Go &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, scroll down, hit the &quot;trigger rep recalc&quot; button. That might fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, check that you have the &quot;show removed posts&quot; box ticked at the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/11062/crazy-buddy?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/11062/crazy-buddy?tab=reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZFa7g.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will show posts which have been deleted as well (deleted posts you had downvoted on/your deleted posts that others had voted on). This may account for the discrepancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both of these don't work, it's probably a bug&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-12-15T16:31:14.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-16T04:56:01.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not the job of the moderators or members to act as parents or policemen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T04:56:01.483" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-16T06:16:10.707" Score="-1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is also not a BIG issue (same as that of my previous question along with &lt;em&gt;disclaimer&lt;/em&gt;...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2845&quot;&gt;Incorrect reputation being displayed&lt;/a&gt; - where Manish explained me about &lt;em&gt;recalc'ing&lt;/em&gt; rep. But, there is some &lt;em&gt;mysterious&lt;/em&gt; problem regarding &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/11062/crazy-buddy/flair&quot;&gt;my flairs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; now..!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dark theme shows 49 badges while my other themes show 50. I know that my flair updates every now &amp;amp; then. But, what calc made it go mad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J5kZe.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flair&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T21:47:19.877" Title="How to recalc a Flair bug?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-16T07:48:30.300" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get into these &lt;em&gt;inactive&lt;/em&gt; questions sometime when I get bored (especially during the daytime of my &lt;strong&gt;IST&lt;/strong&gt;). So, I poke a lot of posts which have typos and erroneous tags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is now I've got a suspicion that,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Could normal users edit posts that are inactive for over an year..?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T08:04:20.627" Title="Could we users do some job?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2848" CreationDate="2012-12-16T07:59:27.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This time it's caching on your side. Your computer has saved a copy of the image locally so it doesn't have to download it again and again, it may download it only once a day or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my side I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JUnlB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, most others can see 50 in your badge count, and it'll probably update for you sooner or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T07:59:27.813" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2849" CreationDate="2012-12-16T08:04:20.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, you can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt;, when making any edits to a post not near the top of the main page, try to improve as much as possible. Especially if the post has answers and all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-12-16T08:04:20.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2012-12-17T14:13:38.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://whystringtheory.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HE69T.png&quot; alt=&quot;Why String Theory? A Layman&amp;#39;s Journey to the Frontiers of Physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T14:13:38.027" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-17T14:13:38.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-18T23:02:10.680" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked the FAQs to look for an answer without any luck. Forgive me if it is there and I overlooked it. I recently asked a question with the title: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47124/causality-in-a-gedanken-experiment-on-the-hydrogen-atom&quot;&gt;Causality in a gedanken experiment on the hydrogen atom&lt;/a&gt;, and John Rennie commented on it. In my response I simply put his name in the &lt;em&gt;text&lt;/em&gt;. I mean it was like &quot;Yes, John Rennie ...&quot; instead of &quot;@John Rennie Yes ...&quot; I have observed that the latter is pretty standard on this forum and I would like to learn how to do that. Could someone please tell me how that is done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14214" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Replying to a specific person's comment" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2012-12-18T23:18:08.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As dmckee wrote in a comment, the full details are at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-do-comment-replies-work&quot;&gt;this question on MSO&lt;/a&gt;, but I'll reproduce a rule of thumb here: all you have to do is put &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; before the name, and omit the spaces. You don't need to put it at the beginning of the comment. So to reply to John Rennie you could write &lt;code&gt;Yes @JohnRennie&lt;/code&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also omit characters after the first three. So &lt;code&gt;@Joh&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;@John&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;@JohnR&lt;/code&gt;, etc. all work equivalently to &lt;code&gt;@JohnRennie&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T23:18:08.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-19T08:25:37.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a bit over the top to inform a Professor. It's not in the site's interest to do so. It would just be a case of the site not minding their own business. It also allows for &quot;imposters&quot; to frame their peers by creating fake accounts in their peer's names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T08:25:37.233" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2859" CreationDate="2012-12-19T09:00:22.227" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having just crossed the 2k rep milestone, I decided to help out by using the new reviewing powers someone thought to grant noobs like me. &quot;Perhaps,&quot; I said to myself, &quot;I can help relieve that enormous backlog of low quality posts that never seems to vanish.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much to my surprise, most of these seem to have been reviewed, since I see comments left by high-rep people asking the author to reword the post. It seems, though, that often we get a one-time visitor who will never return to elaborate. I can't read minds, so I can't edit these to make them better. Yet they are not good enough to be accepted and cleared from the queue as-is. The third option is to delete (or vote to delete? I'm not sure how it works), but that seems a little harsh, especially as others have looked at this post and not deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is there anything for me to do here?&lt;/strong&gt; Or do we just wait indefinitely for users to make posts better? Also: &lt;strong&gt;Is there any way to segregate posts a reviewer has commented on from those no one has seen?&lt;/strong&gt; (Of course I expect the answer to that last one is &quot;no,&quot; but I ask it for discussion purposes anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T09:13:05.340" Title="What's with the low quality posts in perpetual limbo?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2858" CreationDate="2012-12-19T09:13:05.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, we can't &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; things which &lt;em&gt;answer the question&lt;/em&gt; (even if they're wrong or short/low quality). At least, not by current rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; downvote those posts. Also, you may flag as &quot;very low quality&quot;, and we moderators will deal with it (note: do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use flags to indicate wrong answers). &lt;em&gt;Never&lt;/em&gt; be afraid to flag. It's not too bad if you have a few declined flags, as long as the majority is &quot;helpful&quot; flags.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any way to segregate posts a reviewer has commented on from those no one has seen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/history&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/history&lt;/a&gt; . This lists the posts that people have seen. Not exactly what you wanted, though. It's still productive at times to sift through the list, re-checking things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, my &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; opinion is that posts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/46951/7433&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/47050/7433&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; ought to be deleted if not improved. (Yes, I keep tabs on the posts I've commented on that may need attention later ^.^). But we'd probably need a separate meta post for that&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pMwiD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The queues are separate for everyone-- what looks like a &quot;backlog&quot; to you is a cleared queue to me :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain actions in a queue --&quot;leave open&quot; in the close queue, &quot;no action needed&quot; (I think), &quot;Looks good&quot;, etc have the power to remove posts from a queue for everyone, but that only happens if 2-3 users select it for the same post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. You can check you flag history &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/10851&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. On your profile, there is a link underneath your email/etc to the number of helpful flags--if you have any declined flags, there will be a red number next to it. Whenever a flag is declined, go to the list of your flags, see the decline reason, and learn from it--but never be afraid to flag in the first place :)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2. I was planning on one to outline what can and can't be deleted, but I haven't had the time to draft it out. Feel free to do so yourself.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T09:13:05.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-19T10:40:04.023" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to ask a question about how a room temperature changes in certain conditions, but before asking I wanted to be sure of some things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it on topic? I suppose so since the main point is temperature, but I want to be sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What data should I provide in the question? I was thinking of: room size, shape, position of heater, position of door (and windows). Should I also include room position in the building? Other things?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything I'm forgetting? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T20:34:10.963" Title="Some advice on a question" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2012-12-19T11:12:43.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trick is to ask about physics &lt;strong&gt;concepts&lt;/strong&gt;.  So set out the relevant concepts that you &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; understand, and then ask about &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the concepts that you &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you shouldn't expect is a calculation unique to your room, because that would be too limited, too narrow in scope for our readership's interest (too localised, in the site parlance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you will get, all being well, is an explanation of how to use particular principles for you to do the calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given what you've written above, I think the two best answers to your question are going to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(best answer): do the experiment, and record the empirical data yourself&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(second-best answer): model the room in a building physics simulation model such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energyplus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;EnergyPlus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="4066" LastEditDate="2012-12-19T20:34:10.963" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T20:34:10.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2012-12-19T11:46:24.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the comment anyway because I tend to keep an eye on questions where there is an unresolved issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you type @ then start typing the name you should get a little popup suggesting a name. Click on the pop-up and it will fill in the correct name. I'm not sure how these names are created: for me just omit the space so type &quot;@JohnRennie&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW did you look at John Baez's article? I see you have a couple of answers, but it doesn't seem to me that either of them really address your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T11:46:24.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-19T11:54:00.353" Score="19" ViewCount="1350" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question was asked in a recent chat whether the Physics SE was getting ruder and/or unfriendlier. My immediate reaction was that it wasn't but then I was surprised to be criticised (in a constructive way) for being unfriendly in a comment. I had suggested I thought the question was a homework problem when it turned out not to be, but I didn't realise I'd given offence. Anyhow I'd be interested in whether people feel the site is welcoming or not, and if not whether we need to do something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the people most likely to feel intimidated are new members, many of whom won't read the meta so it may be the people I really need to hear from won't see this question. Still, I would be interested in people's overall impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T15:52:24.690" Title="Are we a basically friendly lot?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-19T12:23:53.793" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question resonates. When I first joined this forum I felt that people were not considerate enough of the young. I usually make a point of checking the profile and am much more lenient with the young and wish that others would be too. Maybe newbies should be encouraged to give their age in the profiles and old hands encouraged to read the profile if they intent to jump on somebody or downvote with a strict comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you have brought this up I will mention that I am wondering why there are so few women physicists joining our questions and answers. I know that in some countries a large percentage of physicists are women. So this could be one of the reasons, since women take things more to heart, so to speak, even in this virtual reality. Of course there are other reasons too for the gender difference : children and grandchildren occupy  women's extra curricular time very much. If my grandchildren lived close by I would have much rather spent my time teaching them physics and playing scientific games , as a woman colleague, also retired, does with her grandson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T12:23:53.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-19T13:13:32.177" Score="15" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;After hearing that homework questions are far too common one too many times, I decided to take the initiative and try to prove whether homework questions are now the primary new content of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/89343/homework-and-non-homework-tagged-question-counts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query in the Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; engine to pull out the number of questions asked each day with and without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag that are still open (as in, not closed). Then I plotted those counts per day. The results are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/alrt2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot was made in R, the code to repeat is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;library(ggplot2)&#xA;library(reshape2)&#xA;data &amp;lt;- read.csv('QueryResults.csv')&#xA;data$Date &amp;lt;- as.Date(data$Date, &quot;%Y.%m.%d&quot;)&#xA;melted &amp;lt;- melt(data[,c('Date','Homework','NotHomework')],id.vars=1)&#xA;ggplot(melted, aes(x = Date, y=value, fill=factor(variable))) + geom_bar(stat=&quot;identity&quot;) + ylab(&quot;Number of Questions&quot;) + scale_x_date(breaks = seq(min(melted$Date), max(melted$Date), 15)) + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=45, hjust=1, vjust=1))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A summary of the data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;gt; summary(data)&#xA;      Date               Homework       NotHomework   &#xA;  Min.   :2010-08-24   Min.   :0.0000   Min.   : 1.00  &#xA;  1st Qu.:2011-05-12   1st Qu.:0.0000   1st Qu.:11.00  &#xA;  Median :2011-11-22   Median :1.0000   Median :15.00  &#xA;  Mean   :2011-11-22   Mean   :0.9717   Mean   :15.56  &#xA;  3rd Qu.:2012-06-03   3rd Qu.:1.0000   3rd Qu.:19.00  &#xA;  Max.   :2012-12-15   Max.   :9.0000   Max.   :39.00&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what did I learn? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homework questions are trending upwards. &lt;strong&gt;But so are non-homework questions.&lt;/strong&gt; So more questions of all types is a good thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are noticeable spikes in the data that seem to correspond to the beginning and ending of semesters, when people need the most help. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without data to back up statements, it's just wasted time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is a Q&amp;amp;A site, let me get to my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you conclude from this data?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we please stop saying that homework questions are swamping out non-homework questions since the data doesn't support it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-12-27T14:25:58.260" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T14:25:58.260" Title="Are homework questions becoming more common?" Tags="|discussion|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2012-12-19T15:28:38.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Temperature and heat are fundamentally physics concepts. Oh, we let the chemists and engineer's play with our toys, but you are fine there...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big restriction is tht we don't like to answer anything that looks like it might have been copied from a homework assignment or out of a introdutory physics text. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to talk about the basic concepts there,  but we don't propose to work your exercise for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T15:28:38.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2869" CreationDate="2012-12-19T20:01:00.960" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47215/where-can-i-learn-about-transforming-uniform-random-distribution-into-other-dis?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47215/where-can-i-learn-about-transforming-uniform-random-distribution-into-other-dis?noredirect=1&lt;/a&gt; is on topic here. That exact question is asked and answered in courses titled &quot;Computational Physics&quot; when they discuss Monte Carlo methods. Anyone interested in that question is vastly more likely to be a physicist than a statistician. Finally, the question received two very answers from physicists. The probabilities involved in the problem are not particularly difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I think it is a physics question because it is about a commonly-used physics tool. As a comparison, I use a differential refractometer in my research. A question about the internal functioning of a refractometer would clearly be on-topic. I see questions about the internal functioning of Monte Carlo methods to be on the same level: a question about how a particular physics tool works. I agree, though, that it is on-topic for SciComp; if it's off-topic here, it would be better there than anywhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T00:09:35.337" Title="Can we un-migrate this question?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2867" CreationDate="2012-12-19T20:04:42.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes a question on topic here is not whether it is &lt;em&gt;of interest to physicists&lt;/em&gt;, but whether it is &lt;em&gt;about physics&lt;/em&gt;. I don't see any way in which that question is about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I would think that much (not all) of the content of a typical computational physics course, including Monte Carlo methods, would actually fall under the scope of &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:53.973" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T20:04:42.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2867" CreationDate="2012-12-20T00:09:35.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have generally---though admittedly not always---directed questions about the mathematical tools of physics to Math.SE when the phrasing of the question is divorced from it's physical context. Now I see sampling as a computational tool for doing physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I would personally suggest SciComp.SE, Math.SE or Stats.SE (and note that the general answer has been given repeated on StackOverflow in the context of many specific questions) in that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T00:09:35.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-20T13:45:14.473" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the whole Larian vs Ron fiasco highlighted something about this community as well.  While Ron was a fantastic contributor for physics, his personality can be seen as abrasive by some, and others have said he is incredibly rude to them.  Because of his high reputation, it seemed that the community tolerated him, and then even coddled him, letting him continue to get away with behavior that just isn't socially acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As time progressed, I think his kind of behavior started to get viewed as acceptable by other members, and it devolved from there.  Tone is actually a very important aspect of any community, and he was setting it for you.  I think that is one of the reasons I have really stopped coming here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This criticism aside, the StackExchange sites are a damn sight better than any Q&amp;amp;A sites I have ever seen.  The quality of questions and answers here are great.  However, there is a risk of becoming cliquish.  Having a clear FAQ for new users to become familiar with a site, as well as ensuring &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; on the site is held to the same rules should make it at least understandable to new folks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, mods could perhaps be community welcomers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5076" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T08:43:00.570" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T08:43:00.570" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-20T22:14:54.663" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a Q&amp;amp;A site and isn't meant to be used to socialise with people, so I don't think there is a need to be friendly, nor rude for that matter. There is also a hierachy defined by the community which is sensitive to attention seekers hogging the resource in a negative way. But that aside, I think the moderators are very generous when it comes to allowing people to make personal comments in the comments section, despite them not being there for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the &quot;unfriendliness&quot; comes from people familiar with the running of this site, using chat and the comments in a strictly cold Q&amp;amp;A format which is very different to other forums. There you can set up a profile which can display public messages received such as thanks and general small talk, to say nothing of the answers becoming a social discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T22:14:54.663" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-21T23:38:39.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, some of us definitely &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; to be friendly. But it's never possible to phrase a comment about a question closing/etc in a manner that you can be 100% sure that nobody will take offence to. The SE system isn't like normal forums, and it takes some time getting used to it. Something that's not really a serious issue on SE may be interpreted as one elsewhere (eg closing--on a traditional forum, closing means the death of a question. On SE, it's a temporary state for many posts.). So I wouldn't be too worried if some of my comments rubbed people the wrong way, though I certainly wouldn't &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; it. And of course I try to tailor my comments so that newbies can understand them better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me share my experience when I joined Phys.SE: I had recently gotten disillusioned with Wikipedia; there had been some pretty brutal meta-discussion on some policies&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Quite a few of the users I'd admired were participating in it, some were being constructive, some...not so constructive. I was disheartened by the whole episode, and I started (subconsciously, I didn't know it at the time) distancing myself from the 'pedia -- meta discussion and writing userscripts was what I mainly did, and seeing that side of meta discussion hit me hard. Of course, it didn't help that I had a lot of other commitments at that time, mainly academics. Nowadays I poke around sometimes&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I had come across physics.SE a few months later after a suggestion on &lt;a href=&quot;http://enwp.org/WP%3aRDS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the science reference desk&lt;/a&gt; that I ask my question here (I couldn't get any satisfactory answers then). So I did, and after browsing around, I got hooked :) Part of the reason behind this was that the community here (or what I had experienced of it at the time), was pretty helpful and nice. I became quite active here after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the community hadn't been friendly and had instead been rather rude), then I would have not stayed on after my question got answered. Maybe it's because I'm not a physicist. Maybe the Wikipedia issues had made me sensitive. Maybe I am sensitive in general. Either way, I'm pretty sure that I would have been scared off by this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not saying that I am a valuable member of the community. Nor am I saying that my contributions are any good. I am saying objectively that if, at the time, I got , you would have lost one user, who has gained 5k+ rep with 200+ answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, I make two conclusions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Friendliness is a must-have for our site. Lack of civility can scare users off. Not everyone has a thick skin, and more importantly, people without thick skins are prospective contributors as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We seem to be a by-and-large friendly lot. Most of the comments I see on flagged/closevoted posts are pretty OK (though they could be better). The improvements we ought to make are to tailor our comments/etc so that new users have little chance to feel offended. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. I was not a direct participant in these (except maybe a few comments here and there), just a fly on the wall. Quite a few people had gone into semi-retirement because of it. Looking back, I can't even remenber the specific issues--but there was a variety of them, being discussed more or less simultaneously.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2. A year ago (or was it two?) I did participate extensively in the cleanup of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aIndia_Education_Program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia India Education program fiasco&lt;/a&gt;, though. I still love Wikipedia--its goal and its community--but I have just moved on to what I feel is a &quot;better&quot; place for me personally to learn and grow. I&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2012-12-21T23:38:39.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-22T06:52:41.117" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a rank amateur, I can safely state from experience that even a question that could have been answered by one's own self with some effort (I lied when I said that I could not find the answer myself) is not laughed out of court on sight. Helpful people -- experts -- are on hand to patiently give explanations and clarify upon request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do find troubling is vicious commentary such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2832/how-should-we-deal-with-academic-dishonesty/2837#comment6158_2837&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with no action taken by moderators. I am also troubled by the personal attack on this page directed at a currently suspended contributor who has no means of responding to set the record straight (again, no action taken by moderators).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, I could feel comfortable with a general hands-off approach from moderators and staff... if it were applied fairly and evenhandedly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T06:52:41.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-22T12:53:50.760" Score="0" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed once or twice that a question that I have read in the morning, during the progress of the day appears with a different questioner. Example this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47379/what-is-the-weight-equation-through-general-relativity&quot;&gt;recent one&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;It started with a newbie user  Neo ( there have been several starters with this handle) and now it is Dirac. I do not know whether it will still be that by the time your read this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this be done, i.e. change the identity of the questioner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T21:51:35.730" Title="Change of user identity" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2877" CreationDate="2012-12-22T13:10:09.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is likely due to the fact that OP changed his profile info (username and email which determines the avatar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T13:10:09.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-22T16:04:44.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't think this community is as friendly as it could be. I have been a high rep user in the initial period of the site, but became disenfranchised with the site after about a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons are various:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lengthy, pointless, sometimes rude, but always annoying discussions in comments. Moderators do not care at all about cleaning them, and actually sometimes become a major part of the problem with them. I did not come to SE to have a chat in the comments. Comments are solely to discuss how to improve answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/3631/66&quot;&gt;Random example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34217/why-do-people-categorically-dismiss-some-simple-quantum-models&quot;&gt;another random example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/89664/posts-with-many-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;big list here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At times, I've spent considerable time answering a question, with some research behind it, and presented a comprehensive answer based on objective facts, just to be dissed and down voted by people who favour academic qualifications over factual correctness and would down vote anything they don't like or sounds wrong to them. Such episodes of fanboi-ism are quite jarring.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/21345/66&quot;&gt;Random example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;General ineffectiveness of the community and its moderators to, well, moderate. Questions which are obviously off topic do not get closed, flags are handled in days and happily refused, even the Ron fiasco was... telling.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books&quot;&gt;Random example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39216/why-are-we-talking-about-space-curvature-as-if-we-know-what-space-is&quot;&gt;another random example&lt;/a&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, I'd love to come back and help this community rebuild, but not unless there is some understanding of the problems and commitment to improve :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T16:04:44.423" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-22T21:20:59.183" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a proposal in Area 51 for a research library type of site. Just thought I'd tell you since I've done some here and also ask if you think you could benefit from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/48790/research-library?referrer=qfyY-JC7d58N5QfMOt5KEg2&quot;&gt;Research Library Proposal - Area 51&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T21:20:59.183" Title="Could a Research Library SE be useful?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2012-12-22T21:41:54.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-23T01:22:03.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of the rudest and most cynical boards I have ever been a part of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T01:22:03.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-23T05:38:57.830" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a layman question regarding string theory -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/37766&quot;&gt;Would string theory change everything?&lt;/a&gt; several months ago (just a month after joining SE) - when I was completely new to this field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely accept that it is pretty hard for some rude &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;physicists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; here to agree with my &lt;em&gt;very basic&lt;/em&gt; question. But, I didn't argue, chat or ask something wrong. It just came to my mind. After getting the responses, I just ignored the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;string-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;string-theory&lt;/a&gt; tag..!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, @Skliwz - after enjoying his revision to my post, stated that it isn't understandable. (He didn't respond to me in chat either) Then, Why did he do it? The question should've existed in its old cupboard. What the problem is - I get a lot of downvotes today. I think raged guys are just poking my old questions and downvote it. An example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38561/magnetic-field-lines/38570#38570&quot;&gt;Magnetic field lines&lt;/a&gt;. I have a thought that these downvotes would continue still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do someone have rage or hatred with me? - Please respond now...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T16:08:53.017" Title="Why so much drive-by's? What's wrong with Curiosity?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2012-12-25T14:36:17.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2882" CreationDate="2012-12-23T06:37:54.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end drive by downvotes are just part of the deal with Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each user will judge for themselves if a post shows effort is useful and clear or if it fails that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, an excess of attention (good or bad) directed at any single user will trip the vote fraud detection resulting in all votes along that graph edge being invalidated (and potentially attraction moderation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the old questions, they never become too old to be voted on and users are allowed to use your profile to find yout old stuff. In principle they should, of course, treat each post as an individual artifact and vote the content not the user; but there isn't any mechanism to enforce that beyond the vote fraud detection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T16:08:53.017" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T16:08:53.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2882" CreationDate="2012-12-23T11:25:46.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the question: I've edited it to the point I could understand it, but there were just too many questions there, hence the close vote. It puzzles me that you also voted to close it, so I don't understand the disagreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the down votes: I am not sure what you expect me to say, there? I am not down voting you on purpose, but I did go through the site at length yesterday, cleaning up stuff and voted extensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not vote based on the person who answers so I don't really know if I voted on your answers and if I did, whether the vote was up or down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not see your ping in chat btw. I would have answered otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T11:33:53.293" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T11:33:53.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-12-23T13:33:34.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering both the users name and email ID can both be hidden very easily on this site, informing the professor won't (in most cases) achieve anything other than alerting him/her to the fact that &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; student has broken the honour code. If the student is smart, both the name and email ID will be hidden. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, as @Nick Kidman said in her answer here - The purpose of this site is to answer physics based questions. We already have a strict homework policy, and homework-sounding questions are routinely closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the easiest way around this is to just be careful to strictly enforce the no-homework question policy. If the user is asking a conceptual question that is related to a question on the take home exam (and since it isn't a homework question) closing it will be in violation of our policy. I think it will be overstepping our boundary as a third party to inform the professor in such a case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is definitely useful to be on the lookout for &quot;suspicious&quot; looking homework questions, and generally be more strict/careful/aware/other-relevant-adjective with closing said homework questions. But informing the professor in question is going too far in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S - I don't know if closing a question prevents people from commenting on it as well... so perhaps we should consider preventing comments also on the suspicious questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T13:33:34.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2012-12-23T15:52:24.690" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was a professor (of computer science). I also have children and grandchildren. Because of this, I take the function of tutelage and encouragement very seriously. The name of the site is &quot;physics&quot;, not &quot;physics for experts only&quot;. When someone asks a question, it is because they want to learn something. When I ask a question, it is because I want to learn something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I almost never downvote. All it does is discourage someone, and I only want to encourage. If someone gives an answer that I disagree with or I think is wrong, I try to enlighten them, while also telling them where I think they are right, and &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; in a discouraging tone. There was an aphorism posted in my son's high school: &quot;Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; hurt me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is a marvelous invention, full of remarkable people. I consider it a privilege to be able to learn and contribute here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T15:52:24.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-23T15:57:33.403" Score="18" ViewCount="5770" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to number equations when posting questions at physics stack exchange, or any other stack exchange site enabled with MathJax?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried &lt;code&gt;\begin{equation} \end{equation}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11822" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T16:28:35.827" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T16:28:35.827" Title="Latex/MathJax question: How to number equations?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2887" CreationDate="2012-12-23T15:58:54.783" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a &lt;code&gt;\tag{}&lt;/code&gt; command. E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$ 1+1=2 \tag{1} $$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$  1+1=2 \tag{1} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T16:28:23.340" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T16:28:23.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-23T17:33:57.873" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to navigate our main site to find question and answers to improve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit posts which I can fix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Up and down vote what I can&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to close or reopen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag those lengthy comment threads and other broken windows for mod attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there seem to be no easy way of finding a &quot;random&quot; selection of posts to review holistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a script I can use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T20:42:22.550" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T21:32:37.443" Title="A &quot;random page&quot; user script useful to improve the site" Tags="|support|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2012-12-23T17:33:57.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, why, I am surprised you asked!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the very efficient &lt;em&gt;Random Post v0.1™&lt;/em&gt; user script!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Install the user script available &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/raw/4364586&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as a gist here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go fetch any &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notice the die on the top right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hUNdR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click on the die to go to a completely random post!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T17:33:57.873" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-23T18:17:05.713" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I come on the site today to see even more reputation docked off without reason, and then in my small activity window it says &quot;user was removed&quot;. This was nonetheless &quot;UnbanRonMaimon&quot;, who actually started going on my other posts and randomly docking points -- I am currently at 996 but was at 1006, corresponding to 5 downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I just have to endure this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[Edit]]: There has been further reputation docked by someone else on a few of my answers just now, some sort of emotional attack. &lt;strong&gt;This is outright inappropriate&lt;/strong&gt;. These include (just now):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/19127/can-a-system-entirely-of-photons-be-a-bose-einsten-condensate/19128#19128&quot;&gt;Can a system entirely of photons be a Bose-Einsten condensate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45653/newtons-third-law-why-does-anything-move-at-all/45656#45656&quot;&gt;With Newton&amp;#39;s third law, why are things capable of moving?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46506/how-can-these-fluid-dynamical-smoke-ring-phenomena-be-explained/46518#46518&quot;&gt;How can these fluid dynamical smoke-ring phenomena be explained?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What happened to me -- user suspended but docks my reputation repeatedly?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2845" CreationDate="2012-12-23T19:20:02.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can happen, though rarely as a race condition in the accept and upvote saving to the database at the same time.  This is an artifact of your reputation update being &lt;code&gt;=&lt;/code&gt; and not &lt;code&gt;+=&lt;/code&gt;, and the base amount loaded in overlapping requests.  This can't really go away completely until we get rid of Linq2SQL completely and that's a huge task we have to stop and do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, this &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; get cleaned up at night since the new reputation history table, a log of every single event &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; suffer from this symptom.  This allows us to do a summation and comparison every night, if there's a difference it'll fix your rep up, it's not perfect but it does ensure cases like this don't go ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="653" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T19:20:02.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2891" CreationDate="2012-12-23T21:24:37.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happened is that a user got deleted (normally this happens by their own request).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All their recent votes, given within a set number of days are undone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if overall they gave you reputation, it is taken away&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if they overall took reputation from you, it is restored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, for example, I had (I assume) one up vote and two down votes from the user, giving me a +6 of reputation. Today I have a &lt;code&gt;-6 user was removed&lt;/code&gt; message in my rep log.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the other 3 down votes, it looks like they are serial, however it's just three votes, I wouldn't get too upset about it :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126470/what-does-user-was-removed-mean-and-why-did-my-reputation-change-because-of-it&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;user was removed&amp;quot; mean and why did my reputation change because of it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the obligatory &quot;don't do that&quot; post is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/dont-throw-away-all-votes-when-a-user-is-deleted&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t throw away all votes when a user is deleted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T21:24:37.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2012-12-23T21:32:37.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While not a script, you can get much more targeted results through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are weekly refreshes, so if you're looking for anything less than a week old, it won't show up in the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, you want to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190348.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;newid()&lt;/code&gt; function in SQL&lt;/a&gt; to order by.  A new &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_unique_identifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GUID&lt;/a&gt; is produced for every single row (this expression is not evaluated one time and then cached).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that you can get a completely random set of questions every time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add the &lt;code&gt;[Post Link]&lt;/code&gt; and then you get a list of URLs that you can use to navigate to the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/revision/89715/105782/random-questions-on-a-site&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I've created the following query to be forked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select&#xA;    p.Id as [Post Link],&#xA;    p.* &#xA;from&#xA;    Posts as p with (nolock)&#xA;where&#xA;    --- Just questions for now&#xA;    p.PostTypeId in (1) &#xA;&#xA;    --- Add new filter criteria here&#xA;    --- to suit your needs.&#xA;&#xA;order by &#xA;    --- Randomize each time.&#xA;    newid()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the &lt;code&gt;--- Add new filter criteria here to suit your needs.&lt;/code&gt; comment.  You should adjust the filter in order to target the posts that you specifically want.  For example, you might check the &lt;code&gt;ClosedDate&lt;/code&gt; column is null to filter out closed posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that you can change this query to work on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; site by selecting &quot;Switch sites&quot; on by the &quot;Run Query&quot; button:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7JdFf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Switch sites option on Stack Exchange Data Explorer&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9198" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T21:32:37.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2848" CreationDate="2012-12-23T21:47:19.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We cache these at a few levels in some cases for up to 3 days, this is normal and expected.  We may optimize how flair works a bit later as some of the avatar discussions progress internally, we'll update meta.so with that if it any changes are made to improve user flair overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="653" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T21:47:19.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2907" CreationDate="2012-12-24T06:19:43.523" Score="9" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26264/what-is-the-format-for-local-catalog-files-used-by-jskycat&quot;&gt;What is the format for &amp;quot;local catalog&amp;quot; files used by JSkyCat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently it was migrated from Astronomy SE, and was on topic there according to the comments. But on the other hand, Physics has had a long-standing policy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/should-we-allow-computational-questions&quot;&gt;not allowing software questions&lt;/a&gt; like this one. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2825/should-we-allow-software-questions&quot;&gt;see also this&lt;/a&gt;) But as dmckee pointed out, there are some software questions about tools very specific to physics which would not get any useful reception on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we adjust our policy to keep this question (and others like it) about specialized software questions, or just close it in accordance with the existing policy? Or should we start allowing software-based questions more generally, as long as they are related to physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: Here is an example of the kind of question I would like us to decide about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47670/visualization-of-dynamics-of-a-scale-free-network-of-ising-spins&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47670/visualization-of-dynamics-of-a-scale-free-network-of-ising-spins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update to the update: actually it's not such a great example, because this is really a software &lt;em&gt;recommendation&lt;/em&gt; question, and recommendation questions of all sorts are generally off topic (except for a particular set of book recommendations). But it's still worth discussing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:24:01.063" Title="Should we allow software questions? (take 2)" Tags="|discussion|scope|software-questions|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-24T09:51:01.197" Score="6" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion (and others said so in the corresponding comments too) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/10361/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, asking about some difficulties that occur in investigating the string theory landscape (such as the measurement problem for example) has wrongly been closed. It asks about a valid topic in mainstream theoretical physics, which is actively investigated by esteemed physicists. The question adresses several points that highlight difficulties in investigating the string theory landscape. However, these points are so closely related that the whole set can easily be addressed by a single answer. These subquestions just give the details the OP is interested in and they can easily be adressed by a single coherent answer. The mere existance of such closely related subquestions in a post should not be a reason to close. I have seen tons of questions which eplained the topic they are interested in by closely related subquestions, and there was (rightly so) no need to close them; they got nice upvoted answers, etc &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as David Zaslavsky suggested in the comments to clarify the issue on meta, my question here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this question (after improvements if needed?) be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T15:15:06.613" Title="Can this string theory question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-12-24T19:56:15.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2012-12-24T09:51:55.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it should be reopened, it is a valid question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T09:51:55.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-24T10:10:33.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, we shouldn't allow such questions. While, I was revising &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1235/1245#1245&quot;&gt;Astronomy imports&lt;/a&gt;, I arrived at that one. I thought it was off-topic (and &lt;em&gt;indeed&lt;/em&gt;, the flag was mine). So, I voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need such questions. Because they're dealing with some kinda measuring &lt;em&gt;data-collection&lt;/em&gt;-like stuffs that we don't like. I think most of the users also won't like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could close it... I don't think a prepoll would be of so much importance :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really agree with dmckee's answer. Questions which are more likely &lt;em&gt;supporting&lt;/em&gt; Physics could be allowed. But, not the question which you've pointed out. It seems like It'd be understood and responded only by some 10s or 20s out of 16k users. I think we don't need such questions (like the above)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T15:20:34.830" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2012-12-24T10:41:07.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, allow me to remind you that usually in &quot;reopening requests&quot; it is asked that who posts the question should explain the reasoning why the question must be reopened. I mean, bring forth your arguments as to why it should be reopened (you have to convince the mods and the community after all and using arguments is your best bet). Your request will have more chances to be successful if you provide those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't really understand the topic of the question but it's clear, also considering the close reason, that it's certainly on topic for the site. So that's not the problem. But thanks to my moderator experience I can see at least a major one with the question: it has too many questions. There are 9 in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem because it makes the question too broad to be answered. According to the standard FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in my opinion this is the problem with the question. The question-points might be legit and all, but the question should be scoped. Also consider the answerers: In order to fully address the question, you have to answer 9 points completely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerers won't answer all of them. You'll have users focusing on some points, others focusing on other points, and most of the users ignoring the rest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question need to be scoped, so who answers will address any point of the question. While now it almost looks like a questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens in my sites, I usually suggest to split the question in multiple parts, grouping the questions that are related. So for example, 2/3 questions are highly related? Then ask a new question with those. If the questions are consequent, so that one question is based on the answer of the previous one, then those should better be asked in that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't answer why it was closed as Not Constructive, but I hope this helps. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T10:41:07.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2012-12-24T11:04:53.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've voted for a re-open, because I think it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a mainstream cosmology topic (regardless of people's opinion on this sort of field in cosmology).  However I agree that there are too many questions embedded.  I would just stop at the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  Maybe some subset of the others could be raised as separate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T11:04:53.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2899" CreationDate="2012-12-24T11:35:46.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closure is just a stop gap to get a question fixed, it's not a way to prevent a question from happening. In fact, it's still there, and we are debating it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the question salvageable? Yes, by all means! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by restricting it to the parts which are TP and not mere maths or philosophy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by reducing the scope to a reasonable size, one or two not overly broad questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did I vote to close and flag in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question had many parts but a very, very partial, completely mathematical answer. It was clearly not working on this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a user asks so many questions it's really hard to restrict by editing if you are not the one asking the questions, so I couldn't just fix it myself!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closure prevents further random answers while we debate and fix the question. If we decide to fix we will re-open with a better question. If we decide not to fix, we will eventually delete, but &lt;em&gt;closure is not deletion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, let's debate how to improve the question and &lt;em&gt;do it&lt;/em&gt;. There is no censorship or let alone some risible plan to shut down all TP questions (seriously?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question has now been edited and is valid. Whilst it's still to wishy-washy for my taste, I don't think it's a valid reason for closure so I've voted to reopen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Original Version: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/10361/1&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/10361/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Corrected Version: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/10361/6&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/10361/6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T15:15:06.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-24T16:36:24.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have accepted questions relating to the meaning of software objects in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=pythia&quot;&gt;particle physics Monte Carlo generator Pythia&lt;/a&gt;, and my feeling at the time was that this was a tool by- for- and of-physicists and of no interest to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question here becomes &quot;Is this JSkyCat thing of interest or use to anyone other than astronomers?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is &quot;No.&quot; then it is certainly a question for us. If the answer is yes, then we have to think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is it, any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T16:36:24.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-25T05:24:56.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that we should not allow any software questions -- I feel that our site ought to be mainly conceptual.  So I am completely against &lt;code&gt;Or should we start allowing software-based questions more generally, as long as they are related to physics?&lt;/code&gt;. Questions about software that is just related (and not confined to) physics are better asked on SU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I don't mind if we allow software qs on software that is only of use to physicists/astronomers/students of the two disciplines. But we should be careful about these, many such qs can be too localized. And they may detract from the site if there are too many of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2012-12-25T21:31:54.037" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T21:31:54.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-25T10:56:09.433" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I exactly agree with Dmckee, who says that questions about spezialized software used and of interest only for physicists should be kept and allowed, and therefore the Physics SE policy adjusted a little bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the Monte Carlo simulation example of such a spezialised program, &lt;a href=&quot;http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/08/15/from-string-theory-to-the-large-hadron-collider/#more-4244&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Prof Strassler&lt;/a&gt; explains what the &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3705&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Black Hat&lt;/a&gt; program does, which is used to calculate the standard model background in different evaluations of LHC data. It takes advantage of the new &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/01/twistor-minirevolution-goes-on.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;twistor methods&lt;/a&gt; to calculate amplitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure there could be found other exmples of such important spezialized programs needed by physicists in astronomy and other subfields of physics generally. It would not make sense to ask questions about these at a random programming/computational site, where people are by no means familiar (and probably not strongly interested in) with the physics context wherein such software is applied. So such questions about specialized software exlusively applied by physicists and no one else, should be allowed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T10:56:09.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-25T13:36:48.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a good idea to allow these kinds of questions, as long as they are local enough to physics. A few people have said that it is &quot;off topic&quot; and not relevant. But since this isn't an only theoretical physics site, I think questions relevant to the acquisition and storage of data are relevant. When most data analysis is performed on the computer, some questions which are 'software related' are bound to arise, and as dmckee pointed out, no one else can really answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Citing an example from experience... Astronomers tend to use a file format called FITS. Now there exists extensive documentation about FITS files, but unfortunately not about one tiny aspect of FITS files local to radio astronomy, and I had to extensively hunt through the web to figure it out. If a question like that is asked now, I don't think it should be closed. Frankly, I don't think anyone else apart from astronomers will be able to answer it accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be argued that questions like this are very specific to one branch of physics... but as a contrary, plenty of theoretical physics questions are relevant to only that branch of physics (For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27029/simple-question-on-the-foundations-of-spin-foam-formalism&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in favour of letting a (very narrow) range of software-related questions be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2012-12-25T13:36:48.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-26T07:11:24.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the spirit of the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/should-we-allow-computational-questions&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; you linked to wasn't so much &quot;should we allow software questions?&quot; as &quot;should we allow questions that are &lt;em&gt;only about computation&lt;/em&gt;, without any specific physics content?&quot; The answer to that question was &quot;no&quot;, but that doesn't mean we need a blanket &quot;no computation questions&quot; policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the FAQ says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about writing a simulation or other program, and it concerns the algorithms, execution, or presentation of the results (rather than the underlying physics), it is probably more appropriate at Computational Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a reasonable policy, but it should be interpreted such that questions are on topic if they're about software but &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; just concerned with algorithms, execution, or presentation of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26264/what-is-the-format-for-local-catalog-files-used-by-jskycat&quot;&gt;JSkyCat&lt;/a&gt; question should be allowed because although it isn't strictly about the physics as such, it's asking for knowledge that's quite specific to physicists (or rather astronomers) and for me that's enough to make it not just about algorithms, execution or presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T07:11:24.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2012-12-26T14:31:05.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most software questions are better off on StackOverflow and other related sites. The folks over there are far more knowledgeable about such things, even if the software employed is specialized. Migrating such questions would actually be more helpful to the user. Maybe asking the OP before moving the question would be the way to go. This gives the OP a heads-up and a chance for clarification if need be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T14:31:05.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-27T05:23:55.587" Score="2" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a community member uses another site to abuse another community member, but using links to this site, such as to posts and profiles etc. Should that member be brought to the attention of the moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T10:26:00.833" Title="Are community members disciplined over abusing other community members elsewhere using links to this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2012-12-27T05:30:54.733" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances stated, no. When we're considering disciplinary action, we don't care about anything that has happened outside this site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Physics Meta&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;main site chat room&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13775&quot;&gt;its alternate&lt;/a&gt;, and possibly but not necessarily any other associated chat rooms). Even if someone is linking to this site, that doesn't make it any business of ours. We can't and don't control what people link to from elsewhere on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any disciplinary action that may be necessary for something posted on another site is the responsibility of the people in charge on that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, we do care about things that have happened &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt;. If information posted elsewhere on the web helps the moderators understand something that is happening &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, then you certainly can bring that to our attention. Use a private channel: a custom flag, or if flagging isn't sufficient, you can ask to open a private chat room with the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In public - a meta post - it's a little more touchy. Technically it's not against the rules to mention things that go on elsewhere on the web, but if you're doing so in an attempt to shame the person whose behavior on another site is being discussed, that may qualify as a personal attack, which is definitely not appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T10:26:00.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2012-12-27T09:48:27.997" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should absolutely report it, but keep in mind that, as David says, mods can only take action for whatever happens on the site and not for what happens outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is obvious that people having arguments off-site is likely to have consequences on-site, and any warning is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: if one person accuses another off site of having sock puppets here, it's still relevant to &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt;! If someone is a known troll outside of this community, it's still relevant to &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt;! Etcetera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line is, warn mods &lt;em&gt;in private&lt;/em&gt;, via a flag or in a private chat room, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/help/other&quot;&gt;contact support&lt;/a&gt; if you think that something bad is happening out the site but about the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not post on meta though, to avoid unnecessary drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T10:50:57.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2012-12-27T10:57:40.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users will not be disciplined for activities off-site. As David said,  &lt;code&gt;Any disciplinary action that may be necessary for something posted on another site is the responsibility of the authorities on that site.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is nothing wrong with bringing it to our notice, as long as it is done &lt;em&gt;privately&lt;/em&gt; (custom flag a post of theirs or use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/other&quot;&gt;this form&lt;/a&gt;). Bringing it up on meta will cause unnecessary drama, and may be considered as a personal attack; an attempt to shame the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issues between two users on other sites may have repercussions here, so bringing it to our notice lets us investigate the situation on this side of the fence (look for revenge voting, offensive comments, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While bringing it to our notice, you need not even mention the site where you saw the user abusing the others, it's better if you just mention which two users are being talked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bottom line: Off-site activities alone do not merit any punishment, but you should bring them to our notice privately so we can investigate it on this site.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T20:30:10.057" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-27T12:34:24.813" Score="2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1052/should-general-reference-questions-be-closed-on-physics-se&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question already, but that deals with a slightly different case I think.&#xA;I'm wondering if questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26953/simulation-of-qed&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; should be allowed. Specifically, I'm wondering if requests for papers and/or reviews on something should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this strikes me as &quot;easily googleable&quot; more so because someone looking for a review is (most probably) affiliated to some institution or the other, and hence will presumably have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; journal access. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T12:45:44.077" Title="Do we allow paper/reference requests?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2918" CreationDate="2012-12-27T12:45:44.077" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paper and reference request questions have always been allowed and they should be allowed in the future too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answers to such questions should not just contain a link or the result of a google search, but roughly explain what is in the papers and references the answerer suggests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So such questions are legitimate, valid, valuable, and useful, in particular for people who want to familiarize themself with a new topic or who are doing research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disallowing new such questions suddenly or even start closing down the exixting ones would be wrong and a disfavor to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T12:45:44.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-27T23:10:36.493" Score="18" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1048/a-guide-to-moderating-physics-stack-exchange-yourself-close-voting&quot;&gt;A guide to moderating Physics Stack Exchange yourself: close voting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/community-help-us-close-questions&quot;&gt;Community, help us close questions!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first discovered community moderation on this site, I was pretty excited, but I noticed that very few users ever participated in it. Now, as a moderator, I'm on the other side of the fence. From here, I can see that this is still a big issue for our site, and should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is meant to encourage users to participate in community moderation, as well as introduce them to the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not be intimidated by the length of this post&lt;/strong&gt;, you may know about most of the stuff here already. Read the first section (and then maybe the section on flagging), and skim through the rest, looking for what you don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T17:05:18.533" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T11:11:42.153" Title="Community, help us moderate the site!" Tags="|discussion|faq|flagging|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2920" CreationDate="2012-12-27T23:10:36.493" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What is community moderation, and why should I care?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderation is the &amp;quot;cleaning up&amp;quot; of the site by users like you! It involves flagging, closing, commenting, editing, and sometimes deleting posts. It also involves &amp;quot;implicit&amp;quot; moderation — not doing anything considered inappropriate for this site (e.g. getting involved in long comment discussions which would be better off on chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should you care? Well, in the end, this is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; site. You are the community, and by and large you get to decide the path it will take. Helping out by participating in community moderation keeps this site on topic and clean, all in all a fun place to learn from. Neglect community moderation, and it slowly goes on to becoming more and more like most places on the Internet — an untamed wilderness that's no fun to be at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as moderators, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; our job to keep the site clean. But we cannot do it without participation from the community. We have too many posts coming in to be able to read through all of them, and we can't be in all places at once to keep an eye on things. This is where you come in — you keep a lookout for stuff that needs cleaning, etc., and do your best to address it. This may involve commenting, flagging, and/or closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, so how do I start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The basics of the community moderation tools&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Commenting&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;More information on when it is appropriate to use comments can be found in our &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;Comment Everywhere&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; privilege page.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are pretty simple to use, not much to see here. Later on in this post, I've explained what &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to use comments for, and also cases in which commenting on a post is good. I'd just like to leave this note here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When commenting on posts, &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt;. If it's a new user that you are commenting to, be &lt;em&gt;welcoming and helpful&lt;/em&gt;. Many times, without knowing it, our comments scare off new users, simply because the comments are &lt;em&gt;basically&lt;/em&gt; saying &amp;quot;You broke a rule!&amp;quot; — which may sound authoritarian. If you instead try helping them by explaining what went wrong and how to fix it (if it can't be fixed, explain how to avoid it) in a helpful manner, you will not only help keep the site clean, you will also help new users get on their feet. A win-win situation for everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Flagging&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There's some extra information on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let me explain what flagging is. &lt;em&gt;Any&lt;/em&gt; user with at least 15 rep, can flag a post. How do you flag? Simple: you click the &amp;quot;flag&amp;quot; link at the bottom of the page. You ought to get a menu like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OnZHm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OnZHm.png&quot; alt=&quot;answer flag, no votes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact options shown may vary; the above menu is what you get when you try to flag an answer with no votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there are quite a few options, and I'll explain when to use them in the sections following this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flag basically brings a post to the notice of other users. Custom flags (&amp;quot;it needs ♦ moderator attention&amp;quot;) and comment flags are visible only to moderators, and are treated with the strictest confidence. Other flags add an entry for the post in a review queue, where they are processed by users who've crossed certain reputation thresholds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you know if a flag has been acted on? Simple. The flag counts on your profile will update. If you have flagged some posts, you should see something like this on your profile's activity tab:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qoKwz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qoKwz.png&quot; alt=&quot;flag count on main site&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a flag has been &amp;quot;disputed&amp;quot;, declined, or not handled yet, it is not counted here. A flag is marked helpful when either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(For non-custom flags) The post is closed/deleted, depending upon the type of flag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A moderator marks it as helpful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flag is declined whenever a moderator feels that it is invalid. Do not be discouraged if your flags are declined; instead use the opportunity to learn when to flag and when not to flag. You can see some stats on your flags and with a list of your flags if you click on the number shown on your profile. You ought to see something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oZBr6.png&quot; alt=&quot;list of flagged posts&quot; title=&quot;list of flagged posts&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Declined flags have a reddish &amp;quot;declined&amp;quot; message next to them, as seen above. Be sure to check on these, and learn from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Declined flags aren't necessarily a bad thing — if you get too many (as compared to your helpful flags), the number of posts you can flag per day decreases, and your flags have a lower priority. If you get an insane amount of declined flags, the system starts ignoring that, but this is only in extreme cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be afraid of your flag getting declined. &lt;strong&gt;Flag often, and learn when &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to flag from your declined flags&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, see if you can improve the post yourself, or leave a comment. Don't leave all the work to the moderators ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/8/citizen-patrol&quot;&gt;There&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/67/deputy&quot;&gt;are&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/82/marshal&quot;&gt;shiny&lt;/a&gt; badges for flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Closing/Reopening&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You may also want to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As linked in the question, there is a good tutorial on question closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1048/a-guide-to-moderating-physics-stack-exchange-yourself-close-voting&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. So I'll just write a bit about closing in general here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike on most forums, on Stack Exchange closing is meant to be a &lt;em&gt;temporary&lt;/em&gt; state. It is a &amp;quot;time out box&amp;quot; for questions which cannot/should not be answered in their current form. Questions that are not salvageable get closed as well, though there is the option of deleting them after a while if they add nothing to the site. Closing a question prevents community members from wasting time in answering something that's not really useful to others — one of Stack Exchange's goals is to Make The Internet Better™ with relevant, informative posts that will be useful to many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be sure to leave a comment when you vote to close a question&lt;/strong&gt;. If the question is salvageable, explain how the user can improve it. If the question isn't, then help the user learn to ask better questions. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/question/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; are useful to link to in such cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not sure about closing a post, flag it. For that matter,  it's perfectly OK to flag &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; vote to close a question, at least for now. That way, moderators can help finish it off, though we can find these questions via the close vote review queue as well. Currently, we have a dearth of community moderation and flags, so we can handle extra close-flags. If we are successful in encouraging community moderation, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; it's better if you don't flag-to-close along with a vote-to-close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: &lt;strong&gt;if you can improve the post yourself, don't hesitate to do so!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After improving, if you feel that it is now up to the mark for the site, you may &lt;strong&gt;vote to reopen&lt;/strong&gt; (or ask for reopening in a custom flag). As mentioned before, closing is a temporary state in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What's considered as &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; here, and how should I deal with it?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of things that need to be dealt with. First, lets look at the close reasons. If you find posts that satisfy these criteria, vote to close/flag them as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, be sure to leave a comment when you vote/flag to post a q. You may want to add a &amp;quot;Welcome to Physics Stack Exchange!&amp;quot; for new users as well. If you cast the last close vote on a salvageable post, then leave a comment &amp;quot;If you do so-and-so, then you may flag this post for mod attention to ask for it to be reopened&amp;quot; or something like that. In many forums, what is known as &amp;quot;closing &amp;quot;is The End for a post, and many users feel it is the same here (and end up complaining instead of simply fixing the post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Exact duplicate&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question covers exactly the same content as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is pretty self explanatory. If two questions are essentially asking the same thing, and the answers apply in both cases, one can be closed as a duplicate of the other. You need not close according to which was posted second. If one of them has better answers, and/or is better phrased, close the other one as a dupe of it. If they both have good answers and are pretty much &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same question, flag the post with a custom message asking for a merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Off topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on Physics - Stack Exchange are expected to relate to physics within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question seems to go against:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (specifically the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#questions&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;third&lt;/a&gt;) sections&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;policy discussions on meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or your general idea of being on-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, then flag/vote to close as off topic. Comment on the reason it is off topic, and maybe tell them to read the FAQ and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;. Note that a quick way to add a link to the FAQ in comment is by typing &lt;code&gt;[faq]&lt;/code&gt; in the comment box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not Constructive&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is generally for questions that will end up having many equally valid answers, or those provoking too much discussion. A question should, in the end, have a few answers that are pretty much saying the same thing. Two or three opposing/radically different answers are OK as well, but not more. Examples of NC posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Make a list&amp;quot;-type questions - these end up with a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of equally valid answers and become a poll. Note that we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; allow book recommendation questions at the moment, as long as they specify the subtopic and level of understanding required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;What do you think about...?&amp;quot; - these promote too much discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;What is the best...?&amp;quot; - not all of these are NC, but some can be. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, if an NC question (of the &amp;quot;make a list&amp;quot; type) is made rather specific about the criteria, it becomes on topic. If you feel that it is this way, then leave a comment asking for the user to make the criteria more specific. You may still vote-to-close, though — remember, closing is a &lt;em&gt;temporary&lt;/em&gt; state for such posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's a good idea to leave a comment explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the post was closed, with some links. You may want to redirect the user to chat (&lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; in comments is another magic link), which is the best place for such discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not A Real Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is mainly about questions that, as mentioned, cannot be reasonably answered in their current form. If (channeling the FAQ, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;second section&lt;/a&gt;), an &lt;em&gt;entire book&lt;/em&gt; can be imagined that answers the  question, then  it ought to be closed as NARQ. Another case is when the OP has stuffed &amp;gt;3 questions in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NARQ also works for questions which are too vague/unclear/incomplete, as mentioned in the close message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NARQ can almost &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be reopened after some edits. See if you can make the edits yourself (generally it's nearly impossible — it involves some mind-reading). Vote/flag to close, and comment, telling the user that &amp;quot;The question is (too broad/vague/incomplete) at the moment, please (narrow it down/clarify it/complete it).&amp;quot; Or something like that. In the case of 20-million-questions-in-one, tell the OP to prune the list of questions down to a couple of main questions, and/or group the questions into related subgroups and ask as separate posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Too Localized&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most confusing of them all (in my experience, people understand this one the least), but it's actually rather easy to determine if a post is Too Localized once you get the basic spirit behind it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim of StackExchange is to Make The Internet Better™. This involves having great, informative posts, which will be found useful by many others in the future. If the possible answers to a question will be useful pretty much only to the OP, be useful to others for a short period of time, then the post is Too Localized. This includes many homework questions — if they don't follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, then they ought to be closed. I generally comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Physics! Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. We expect homework problems to have some effort put into them, and deal with conceptual issues. If you edit your question to explain (1) What you have tried, (2) the concept you have trouble with, and (3) your level of understanding, I'll be happy to reopen this. (Flag this message for ♦ attention with a custom message, or reply to me in the comments with &lt;code&gt;@Manishearth&lt;/code&gt; to notify me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on homework questions. Feel free to use that comment, minus the moderator parts, of course :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many times, such questions have good conceptual cores. In such cases, they are still not as useful to others, simply because they are hard to find (via Google/etc) — the question title/etc give no hint of the core concept. In such a case, see if you can bring out the conceptual part of the question by editing it. Or comment on it asking the OP to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other problem posts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to the other types of &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Things that don't answer the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer that seems to be meant as a comment or edit, flag it as &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; (leave a comment explaining how to comment/edit as well. Note that users with &amp;lt;50 rep cannot comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if the post is answering an &lt;em&gt;entirely different&lt;/em&gt; question (happens at times), this can also be flagged as NAA. Note that NAA is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for wrong answers. If you feel an answer is wrong, down vote and comment. Don't flag unless it has other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Very Low Quality posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question/answer has severe formatting or content problems. This question is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post is extremely short/is just gibberish/or is otherwise of very bad quality, then flag it as VLQ. Note that we generally don't delete short answers, though it's something that's better dealt with on a case-by-case basis, so flag away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link-only answers should be commented on and down voted. Nothing wring with flagging them, but we generally don't act on those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160071/what-to-do-when-plagiarism-is-discovered&quot;&gt;This post pretty much covers how you deal with plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;. A custom mod flag doesn't hurt here if you want us to look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Spam/Promotion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post is a blatant promotion of a site (and isn't really useful), flag it as spam. If the post is a valid answer but links to a blog post which seems to belong to the posting user, then comment, asking the user to reveal their affiliation, if any. You may want to link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#promotion&quot;&gt;this section of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. If too many of their posts are used to promote their blog, custom flag their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Offensive&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer contains content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flag the post as &amp;quot;not welcome in our community&amp;quot; if you feel that it satisfies the criteria above&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Comments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, about comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, comments are third-class citizens on this site. Their purpose is to aid the user in improving a post. If improvements from a comment have been made, or if the comment will not lead to more improvements, then they may be deleted. Long discussions ought to be sent to chat. The comment flag button is visible on the left of the comment when you hover over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chatty comments&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a comment is &amp;quot;chatty&amp;quot;, i.e., provoking irrelevant discussion and/or a &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot; comment, flag it as such. Stuff that praises the post/etc can be removed after the OP has had a chance to see it. Most of the comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14968/7433&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; can be considered &amp;quot;chatty&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Obsolete&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the result of a comment/comment thread has been edited into the post, you may flag the comment(s) as obsolete. You may alternatively custom flag a comment (or the post itself) requesting cleanup of obsolete comments when there are many of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rude/offensive&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self explanatory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not Constructive/Off topic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that the comment is off topic here (i.e., it's not related to the post/comments), then flag it as such. This option is also for comments which you feel would be better off deleted — they may provoke unnecessary drama/discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if there's something else wrong with a comment, you may always use this option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Finding posts that need attention and Review queues&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can find many such posts just by exploring the site (or by using the tools &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2889/a-random-page-user-script-useful-to-improve-the-site&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), and you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do this, there is a &amp;quot;fast track&amp;quot; of finding such posts, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these? Well, they are filled with posts that possibly need community attention, as determined by the system or other community users. You are shown these posts, one at a time, and you &amp;quot;review&amp;quot; them. Like flagging, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/106/custodian&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/85/reviewer&quot;&gt;are&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/107/steward&quot;&gt;badges&lt;/a&gt; for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what consists a &amp;quot;review&amp;quot;? It depends on the queue. The queues have one consistent option, though — the &amp;quot;skip&amp;quot; option. This permanently skips the post (you won't see it in the same review queue again), and is useful if you're not sure what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each user has their own copy of the queue — if you review a post in a queue, it is not necessarily removed from that queue for other users. It gets removed for all users after a few more reviews by other users (the exact amount depends upon the queue and review action done). For example, all my review queues are empty, because I have reviewed/skipped everything that was in them. This doesn't mean that the posts are removed from your queues as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Late Answers and First posts queue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are available to you once you get 125 rep on the site. The Late answers queue contains answers which were posted much later than the question (and thus don't get as much attention, the purpose of this queue is to give them attention). The First posts contains the first few posts asked by new users (who will probably need help learning to use the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, all you have to do is edit the post, flag it, up vote it, add a comment, or up vote a previously existing comment, and the &amp;quot;I'm done&amp;quot; option is unlocked. If you feel that the post is fine as it is, but you don't want to vote on it (you're not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; impressed with it, etc), then you can always choose the &amp;quot;no action needed&amp;quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to do as much as possible to improve the post — fix grammar/links/images/LaTeX, comment asking for more details, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a few users have reviewed a post (IIRC, it is 3). it is removed from the queue for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Low Quality queue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, low quality posts are listed. If you feel that a post is OK for the site and cannot be improved further, click &amp;quot;Looks good&amp;quot;. Else, edit/comment, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; click &amp;quot;looks good&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that it ought to be deleted, click the &amp;quot;delete&amp;quot; button. This pops up a menu that lets you choose a boilerplate comment to place. Use this option even if the post isn't really deletable, but is worthy of one of the boilerplate comments listed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For users with &amp;lt;10k rep, this doesn't really delete the post. It just prioritizes it in the queue for those who can (so don't be afraid of using it!). Those with 10k+ rep, when clicking this button, automatically cast a delete vote on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Close/Reopen vote queues&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get access to these at 3k rep, along with the privilege to vote to close/reopen posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that may need closing/reopening appear in these queues. Questions with open close votes/close flags show up in the close queue, and questions with open reopen votes, as well as questions which have been edited after closing appear in the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this queue, you have four options. You can try to fix a close-able post via the &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; button. You also can vote to close it. (In the case of the reopen queue, obviously the corresponding option is voting to reopen) You can, as usual, skip it. And finally, you can select &amp;quot;leave open&amp;quot;. What does this last option do? If two people vote to &amp;quot;leave open&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;leave closed&amp;quot;, the post is removed from the close/reopen queue(respectively) for everyone. This does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; clear close/reopen votes on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with the 10k moderator tools (see above), this is one of the best ways to find posts that need closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Suggested edit queue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 2k reputation, you can approve suggested edits on posts, and at 5k reputation, you can approve edits on tag wikis. Users without enough rep to edit have their edits placed in this queue. If two users approve an edit (if one rejects and one approves then it waits for more users to review it), then it is published. If you feel that the edit is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;too minor: not much added, the post was fine without the edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vandalism: it made the post worse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;radical change: it modified the post so that it may no longer be what the author meant it to be&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invalid: it was probably supposed to be a comment or an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copied: the edit is just a copy-paste from an external source without block-quoting and attribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then, reject it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also &amp;quot;improve&amp;quot; a suggested edit. This is when you notice that the post has other things which can be improved as well, and you get to edit the post. Here, you may also choose whether or not to mark the suggested edit as &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; (if not marked as such, the edit is rejected, though your &amp;quot;improve&amp;quot; edit still goes through). Too many rejected suggested edits block a user from suggesting more for a while; keep this in mind while rejecting edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one more queue, but it's not always visible and it isn't a community moderation thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Meta participation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, an aspect of community moderation(sort of) is &lt;em&gt;deciding&lt;/em&gt; site policies. This is done on this site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics Meta&lt;/a&gt;. Here, we have discussions about the site policies/etc (as well as help users who need it), and you are welcome to join in! Participating in meta familiarizes you with site policies, and you get to play an active part in formulating them You may want to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Meta FAQ&lt;/a&gt; first, though, especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/faq#vote-differences&quot;&gt;the section on voting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T11:11:42.153" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2920" CreationDate="2012-12-27T23:37:54.113" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would prefer it rather to see the community doing good questions and answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such an increase or additional amount of moderation by activities like closing, flagging, hunting artifically posts that could be not quite apprropriate etc really needed here ...? I think it would be better to concentrate on good physics, until really bad things happen that need action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that the closing business for example was going a bit too well recently, since some good, appropriate, and interesting questions were victims of this increased closings frequency too. Having to struggle that (wrongly) closed questions get reopend distracts one from doing and enjoying physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought doing physics is the main topic and purpose of Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2012-12-27T23:57:42.253" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T23:57:42.253" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2924" CreationDate="2012-12-28T08:54:01.173" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native speaker and I have this question for some time now. What articles and when should be placed with physical and mathematical concepts? General Rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a/the force&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a/the manifold&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a/the flux of a/the/() field&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be better to ask here rahther than on english.stackexchange.com because I believe here people know all the variants and cases of using the terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4020" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T13:08:33.660" Title="The proper use of articles (a/the) with physical concepts" Tags="|discussion|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2923" CreationDate="2012-12-28T13:08:33.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this could go on english.SE imo, but the big users there are pretty ardently against questions from non-native speakers these days. They don't want to clutter their site with lowbrow questions from people not tenured in the humanities. (Okay end of rant, I promise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, articles in English are very context dependent, and there are very few terms that are consistently preceded by one form or another. The definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; comes before any nouns somehow uniquely defined by the situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The force in this particular case...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; precedes nouns that are particular instances where more variety can be imagined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is probably an electromagnetic field of some sort worth considering...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used properly, articles can very well distinguish between unspecified instances of abstract notions and specific, well-defined examples of those notions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While a manifold is just a topological space locally homeomorphic to R^n, the manifold we will consider is the unique one-dimensional, compact, connected manifold without boundary (i.e. the circle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really aren't any better general rules, even for specific things in physics. (Sorry - I've heard English is one of the hardest languages to learn and master, and even as a native speaker I believe it.) That said, on the internet even native speakers (myself included) slip up in more egregious ways than using the wrong article, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T13:08:33.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:25:35.657" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to flag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44820/could-dark-energy-be-heat-could-dark-matter-be-stuff-that-is-not-seen-because-o#comment92237_44825&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; for removal on my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44820/could-dark-energy-be-heat-could-dark-matter-be-stuff-that-is-not-seen-because-o&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. The comment (made by Anna V) is obsolete, because I successfully managed to flag the other comments on the thread (the thread was about how to upload an image in an answer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I originally upvoted her comment, and now I'm unable to flag for deletion. Is this a bug or a &quot;feature&quot; (:P)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Deleting an upvoted comment" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2925" CreationDate="2012-12-28T15:45:08.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like it's a deficiency in the comment voting/flagging system, but it's not really worth improving. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104184/allow-flagging-a-comment-after-upvoting-it&quot;&gt;Allow flagging a comment after upvoting it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have three courses of action: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unupvote the comment (note that you can't reupvote if you do this). You can only unupvote if you've recently upvoted the comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the post with a custom flag asking for comment deletion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complain on meta about the comment being unflaggable ;-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;comment removed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T03:04:47.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2931" CreationDate="2012-12-29T19:08:05.723" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found few old posts in P SE in which asked questions are not clear. So no one has answered it or it has ambiguous answers in it. Is it possible for someone else other than the author to modify the contents of the post and re post it, so it can be useful to others. The reason I am asking this is- I don't think it is considered to be a good practice to change the content of the post without the permission of the author. But with little modification of the corresponding post it would be helpful to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not talking about edits for punctuation or grammar etc.. I am talking about the main content of the post. By asking 'Is it possible' I don't mean 'Is it possible?' I am asking the validity according to the etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7527" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T19:15:08.223" Title="Reposting an old post" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2927" CreationDate="2012-12-29T19:11:58.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible for someone else other than the author to modify the contents of the post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is possible and encouraged when appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and re post it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible, yes, but don't do that. It'll get closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like an old question to get attention, surely you can find something to improve in it. Fixing punctuation or grammar is always a good idea, of course; you can also check the tags, improve the title, etc. Very few (if any) questions are &quot;perfectly&quot; written. Making any edit of this sort will bump the question up to the front page so it can get renewed attention. Just make sure your edit actually improves the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also set a bounty on a post you would like to see get more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T19:11:58.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-29T19:12:02.327" Score="8" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through some old questions, where the accepted answers aren't usually the most thorough/best ones (in my opinion), which leads me to my suggestion - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible for other users to vote to change the &quot;correct&quot; answer? I can't seem to find the couple of questions I was looking at that spawned this idea, but I'll link to them once I find it. If more than some number of users think the right answer should be changed to something else, then we could award rep to the new accepted answer without taking it away from the original accepted answer (or something like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically because then the actual &quot;best&quot; answer will come up first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; After going through the Meta-SO questions, I eventually found (after stumbling on hundreds of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=jon%20skeet&quot;&gt;Jon Skeet&lt;/a&gt; questions) several threads relating to re-ordering of the questions based on votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/24403/should-the-system-automatically-modify-the-accepted-answer-when-another-answer-i&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt; (about changing the accepted answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7572/why-do-incorrect-answers-keep-getting-accepted&quot;&gt;This other one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95635/should-there-be-a-tab-to-see-anwers-with-much-higher-votes-than-the-accepted-ans&quot;&gt;Also this&lt;/a&gt; (Reordering the answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36195/accepted-answer-most-upvoted-answer-discrepancy&quot;&gt;And finally this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one seems to have really reached any form of a consensus on this issue (about re-ordering the questions). I doubt it's going to get resolved, but I thought I'd add these links here for anyone else who's interested in going through the debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T19:14:47.277" Title="Voting to change correct answer" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|voting|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2929" CreationDate="2012-12-29T19:13:57.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope. This or something like it has been brought up many times on MSO (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3669/would-it-be-possible-to-have-a-community-accepted-feature&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) and repeatedly declined, so you can be pretty confident it's not going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see it being useful in some cases, but (perhaps unfortunately), we're stuck with the way the system works here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the accepted answer is actually outright &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; or completely useless, then you can downvote it, and even post a link in chat to ask other people to review it. You can state your objections to it and ask people to vote as they see fit, but don't go as far as &lt;em&gt;telling&lt;/em&gt; people how to vote on a post - while it might not &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; be against the rules, it is bad etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T21:21:06.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2927" CreationDate="2012-12-29T19:15:08.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they're really old, go ahead and clarify them via edits. The edit will bump it to the front page, where it will get some attention. If the post is a closed post, flag it with a custom message asking for a reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get more attention for them, you may want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;place a bounty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still afraid of editing, you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; re-ask, make sure to link to the original in the comments and say that it isn't that well phrased. In such a case, we may close the older one (if it has no valuable answers) as a dupe of the new one. But I discourage doing this -- it should only be in cases where the question is extremely vague (and thus unclarifiable by anyone but the OP) and the answers are worthless. In this case, remember to flag the old question as &lt;code&gt;It doesn't belong here&lt;/code&gt;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Not A Real Question&lt;/code&gt; if it isn't closed already. (Actually, any vague/ambiguous/incomplete question you see should be flagged as such if you're not editing it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T19:15:08.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2929" CreationDate="2012-12-29T22:00:40.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2930/520&quot;&gt;David says&lt;/a&gt;, we are in some sense stuck with this concept in a context where it doesn't make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole Stack Exchange system started with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; which is for &lt;em&gt;programming questions&lt;/em&gt;, and the interpretation put on acceptance there was the asker stating &lt;em&gt;'I used this solution to my problem'&lt;/em&gt;. As such it is clear that acceptance is &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; in the gift of the asker because it simply means the accepted solution is the one the asker used, and the fact that they might choose a second best solution isn't a really big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on physics are questions are not often of the &lt;em&gt;'I've hit a snag in my work, what are my options'&lt;/em&gt; kind that Stack Overflow specializes in (though experimental technique questions could be of that kind) so that &lt;em&gt;this is what I did&lt;/em&gt; contotation doesn't often make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None the less, acceptance should not be interpreted as indicating correctness: it only indicates the asker's selection and one can take some comfort in the fact that these people are not always in the best position to select a correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do however, have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/49/populist&quot;&gt;a (gold!) badge for giving answers that the community prefers very much in comparison to a decent accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T22:00:40.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-31T08:13:18.677" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem much point in downvoting questions and answers that are deliberately offensive. Surely this is just drawing attention, which is probably what the troll wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember what the reputation requirement is for flagging questions as not welcome, but there are enough of us around that you can be sure an offensive post will be rapidly flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-01-02T23:06:38.633" Title="Downvoting deliberately offensive questions/answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2936" CreationDate="2012-12-31T08:46:09.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one, IIRC a spam/offensive flag gives an auto downvote (this also happens if a q is closed as off topic, NC, NARQ I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With 6 spam/offensive flags, the post is locked, deleted, and the user loses 100 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On sites where I don't moderate, I still downvote posts that I flag for deletion. I get the rep back later. I really didn't think about it as &quot;the troll got attention&quot;. But you do have a point there :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I agree, a flag ought to be enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note: as a 10k user, you can see most flags and counterflag them &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (you'll get a little yellow bubble on your topbar when the number of flags exceeds 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T08:46:09.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2936" CreationDate="2012-12-31T08:46:20.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes 15 reputation to be able to flag a post or comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I don't think downvoting really draws attention to a post. It doesn't bump the question, for example. Downvoted answers are pushed to the bottom of the list in the default viewing order, and sufficiently downvoted questions (score of -3 I think, or perhaps -5) are prevented from showing up on the main page of the site. But of course the best thing to do is always to flag an offensive post as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T08:46:20.373" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2012-12-31T13:23:25.713" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T13:23:25.713" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-31T13:23:25.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2941" CreationDate="2013-01-01T07:29:54.227" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a question involving GR that I'm positive I read on or around Dec. 22 and wanted to refer back to it but I can't find it now. It asked about an &quot;exact&quot; expression for either gravitational force or gravitational potential energy. It is NOT &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47783/what-is-the-exact-gravitational-force-between-two-masses-including-relativistic&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; because it was asked after I read the question I'm looking for and none of the answers is the answer to the question I'm looking for. So, have any GR questions been deleted recently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11266" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T08:01:56.917" Title="Have any GR questions been deleted since about Dec. 22?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2940" CreationDate="2013-01-01T07:35:41.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume that you are aware that you can get &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot;&gt;a tag specific list of questions&lt;/a&gt; to sort through by clicking on the tag anywhere you find it or by specifing &lt;code&gt;[general-relativity]&lt;/code&gt; in the search box? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bgeneral-relativity%5D%20exact&quot;&gt;Combining tag search with searching for &quot;exact&quot;&lt;/a&gt; might get you closer (and three undeleted and none pending ... we have such a placid site most of the time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=delete&amp;amp;daterange=last30days&quot;&gt;the 10k-tools page for deletions in the last 30 days&lt;/a&gt; reveals only three such posts (questions and answers), none of which appear to involve general relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T07:42:02.120" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2940" CreationDate="2013-01-01T08:01:56.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You read the question around Dec. 22 does not mean that this question was asked on this day. If you are using the default &quot;active&quot; view, then it might be asked much earlier than this date. There are many people retagging questions these days, so the old questions pop up often. What you might have seen might be questions being retagged. The retagging is not very professional, so you might not see general-relativity as a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questions your read is pretty high level, then it might probably be tagged as &lt;code&gt;[research-level]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="562" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T08:01:56.917" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-01T08:17:14.717" Score="8" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a heads up for those of you who have access to the so-called moderator tools (10k+), you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback/summary?filter=all&quot;&gt;various statistics&lt;/a&gt; related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130095/anonymous-user-feedback-about-my-posts&quot;&gt;anonymous feedback mechanism&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. that from persons of no account), and also see list of those post which recive better or worse anonymous feedback then votes and those that simple recieve very positive or negative anonymous feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a bit surprised today when I noticed that we have recieved more than 12k such votes which averages more than one per question and is almost 10% of the more usual sort of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those that can't see it right now, it is running about 2:1 positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/users/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sam.saffron&lt;/a&gt; has provided a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data explorer&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/60668/feedback-on-my-posts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query that can extract this data on a per user basis&lt;/a&gt; (which I believe gets around the 10k limit for the on-site pages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T15:49:28.513" Title="We have more than 12,000 anonymous feedback votes" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-01T16:05:26.307" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the Physics.SE FAQ is slightly outdated and could do with a little revision. Many questions by new users on this site are closed, and the various mismatches between the FAQ and the site's actual policy as practiced might be part of the reason for this. It would also be nice to have an up-to-date FAQ so that users could reference it in order to learn why their question was closed and what they can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I have listed a few places where the FAQ seems in need of updating. I hope that this thread can serve to turn up any others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FAQ does not mention book recommendation questions. (These seem to be treated as in-principle off-topic by the moderators.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FAQ (question 1) holds up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/414/number-theory-in-Physics&quot;&gt;a &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; question&lt;/a&gt; as an exemplar of an on-topic question. (These are also usually closed nowadays.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FAQ does not mention questions on observational astronomy. (When the astronomy.SE questions were merged into physics there was a consensus to allow such questions as on topic.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've held off on suggesting specific changes to the text because I'm not that active on meta and I'm not 100% sure what the most recent consensus on these issues actually is - but if the policy is clear and people can post links to the appropriate discussions, I'll be happy to contribute to writing them up in FAQ form if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T17:34:22.497" Title="Can we update the FAQ to match current policy?" Tags="|discussion|site-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2944" CreationDate="2013-01-01T16:48:41.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a note: Not all off-topic on-topic policy rules need to be in the faq. They may also be on meta (or on the main meta)..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ does not mention book recommendation questions. (These seem to be treated as in-principle off-topic by the moderators.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&lt;/a&gt; , specifically the &amp;quot;every answer is equally valid&amp;quot; part. I recall seeing a request on the mother meta to update this to explicitly include &amp;quot;make a list&amp;quot; questions, but I can't find it right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our current book recommendation policy allows such qs as long as they talk of a specific subtopic and level of understanding required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about we add (under &amp;quot;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&amp;quot;), the following point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Recommendation questions&lt;/em&gt;: Questions asking for recommendations are off topic, unless there are enough criteria defining what a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; recommendation is. Book recommendations are only on-topic if they are about a specific subtopic, and ask for a specific level (high school/undergrad/grad/etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ (question 1) holds up a &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; question as an exemplar of an on-topic question. (These are also usually closed nowadays.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you're talking about. Look closely ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ does not mention questions on observational astronomy. (When the astronomy.SE questions were merged into physics there was a consensus to allow such questions as on topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is already covered by &lt;code&gt;Explanations of observed physical or astronomical phenomena&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Experimental designs and results&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've held off on suggesting specific changes to the text because I'm not that active on meta and I'm not 100% sure what the most recent consensus on these issues actually is - but if the policy is clear and people can post links to the appropriate discussions, I'll be happy to contribute to writing them up in FAQ form if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, just suggest it. We can edit the top two sections of the faq, editing the ones below that takes some work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-01-01T17:34:22.497" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-02T18:21:42.943" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se-sites-except-the-3-biggest&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; really cool graph was posted onto meta.SO early December. Dunno how many over here have seen it... I thought it was super-fancy, so I'm sharing it here as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vaTIA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter link description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-01-02T18:24:45.027" Title="Tree of StackExchange Sites" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2936" CreationDate="2013-01-02T23:06:38.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure the examples you have in mind are offensive and there isn't much question, but it still helps to downvote and flag because a flag could be rejected and then your downvote is still important. You're still saying you don't think the question is a good one or belongs, which is why votes exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I like to do both in case a flag is rejected. I still get to express my opinion on the question quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-01-02T23:06:38.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-03T20:58:11.000" Score="9" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brought up by the flag and comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/44784/520&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to determine whether a large container is air-tight?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to address question in which the OP has run into a roadbump in build/calibrating/operating a piece of experimental apparatus, and the question is well defined in terms of fixing the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that this particular question is not a great example because the OP is not building an experiment,&lt;/strong&gt; but I would ask that the case for experimentaly realted question be examined separately from the fate of this particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A user has flagged suggesting that this particular case is an engineering problem and asks for a open ended list of suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David Z comments that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do think it's not constructive, as it's just asking for a list, not asking a specifically defined question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to argue below that this is exactly the kind of question which the Stack Excahnge engine is good at answering and should be explictly allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should also note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/720/does-the-area-51-proposal-experimental-or-applied-physics-duplicate-this-site&quot;&gt;attmepts to open a experimentally specific Stack have not been successful&lt;/a&gt; (you'll see that I argued that most such question &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on-topic for Physics.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vaguely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1132/520&quot;&gt;Experimental technology questions: on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T03:03:02.530" Title="Should &quot;How do I solve this experimental problem?&quot; questions be on-topic" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2948" CreationDate="2013-01-03T21:27:03.657" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to follow two threads in arguing that such questions are &lt;strong&gt;very well suited to Physics.SE&lt;/strong&gt;: firstly that stack exchange is well suited to these kinds of questions and secondly that these &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Prototypical questions that are well suited to our engine here have a small or medium number of distinct answer that are not wrong and can be well evaluated by users who are familiar with the question domain. Such questions can be either outright objective or &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;&quot;good subjective&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is going to be a list of answers. There are lists of answers to questions on Stack Overflow and to most of those on the main site (in fact many of o&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;ur most highly voted questions&lt;/a&gt; have 10 or more answers that take several approaches to answering the problem), but these list are characterized by a domain expert being able to say to each answer &lt;em&gt;&quot;this is correct&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;this is incorrect&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and any subjectivity that may enter is in terms of which answer is clearer or easier or more scalable or more pedogoically useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Managing, maintaining and running experimental apparatus constitutes a specific domain of knowledge in which experts &lt;em&gt;will know which answer are good, which might work and which are nonsense&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Experiment is, obviously, a pillar of the scientific inquiry co-equal with theory and phenomenolgy, and a substantial fraction of working scientists would describe themselves as an &quot;experimenter&quot; rather than a &quot;theorist&quot; or a &quot;phenomenlogist&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the actual work of an experimenter includes a lot of things from the design, construction, calibration, operation of experiments though data acquisition and analysis as well as writing up the results. In my personal experience a scientist in his or her early career will spend a substantial fraction of his or her time tinkering with and swearing over some piece of apparatus that &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; works or simple isn't working at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These are problems encountered and solved by physicists&lt;/strong&gt;, and because they revolve around experimental apparatus they are specific to the profession or to a small set of related professions. (Yes, I recognize that the leak test question is rather broader than that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to exclude the kinds of questions that experimental grad-students spend a lot of time on from consideration here send a message that experiment is not valuable to the physics community. Do we really want that?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T03:03:02.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2948" CreationDate="2013-01-03T22:50:45.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I exactly agree with Dmckee, questions that deal with issues specific to smaller or larger physics experiments or the analysis of experimental physics data should be in principle allowed and encouraged here. They are not just engineering questions! After all, physics SE is for the whole subject of physics; experimental, phenomenological, and theoretical question are equally good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And question with a countably finite number of answers, whose content can be evaluated if it is physically or scientifically right, are certainly not a problem either. The fact that a question has multiple answers (which have all there merit and right to be there) is not a reason to close it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T22:50:45.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2948" CreationDate="2013-01-04T00:07:33.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that questions about building experiments, if specific to our subject, should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, until they are about &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt;. A question about &quot;what type of concrete should I use to build my atom smasher&quot; is not about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point here is this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that work are questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;which are &lt;em&gt;best asked&lt;/em&gt; to a physicist (an experimental physicist in this case, but not a engineer or a mathematician)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;whose answers are &lt;em&gt;best judged&lt;/em&gt; by a physicist&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we fail to stick to this (obvious) principle, the consequences are going to be poor answers being given and bad answers being up voted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore the problem will struggle to self correct because it requires competence to determine poor answers. If someone answers with the wrong kind of concrete, to the example above, who would know better, or that we have a problem at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, that particular question is poor on many levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2013-01-04T00:15:31.273" LastActivityDate="2013-01-04T00:15:31.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2954" CreationDate="2013-01-05T21:25:21.810" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm scratching my head over this, but it says I need to be logged in, in order to write messages/comments, although I can access the chat page and read it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clues as to why this might be so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-01-07T15:30:16.587" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T15:30:16.587" Title="Why can't I write messages/comments in chat?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2953" CreationDate="2013-01-05T21:42:15.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat is public (well, the parts &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; see anyway), so anyone can read messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, you can be logged in to physics.SE but not chat.SE. You need to log in from &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/login/global&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If that doesn't work, you can see if your browser is incompatible(try the GlobalAuth test link on the page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you can first log in normally &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/login?returnurl=%2fusers%2fchat-login&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and then open chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T21:42:15.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-06T00:37:32.233" Score="13" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an active or knwoledgable user of SE Physics, but as person with a light form of color blindness (actually green/blue weakness), I wanted to bring this to Meta's attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Color scheme, while certainly pleasing, relies heavily on subtle hues and I have difficulty in discerning these differences.&#xA;I just clicked the &quot;accepted&quot; button for an answer five times because I have been unable to see a change, only the ALT-Text told me.&#xA;This is an extreme example, but if it affects me (I hardly ever have problems with colors) I guess that users with a stronger form of color blindness will even be more challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could probably be fixed easly by not only changing hues, but also changing the brightness of the color. It would make for a far mor readable experienced for us spectrally challenged folks ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I have to say. Have a good day!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I found the old question, but I explicitly wanted to state that it is not only the Accept Button I'm having problems with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16685" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-01-06T01:00:09.653" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T01:24:59.603" Title="Color scheme and the colorblind" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2955" CreationDate="2013-01-07T01:24:59.603" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have updated the accepted checkmark green color. The change will be rolled out to live server after our next production build (maybe after midnight EST or sometimes tomorrow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a preview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q5q3Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Check mark icon change&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I typically use &lt;a href=&quot;http://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sim Daltonism&lt;/a&gt;, a color blind test app for OSX to make sure the colors show up well. I just tested the new green color using it, under both Protanopia and Deuteranopia settings. But from experience, it's not bullet proof, since it doesn't take account for discrepancies in people's monitor gamma settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know if the new green is better for you! thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T01:24:59.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-07T17:50:15.697" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2918/do-we-allow-paper-reference-requests&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and the links to others within, there is some acceptance amongst the community when it comes to paper reference requests on a specific topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would questions related to good/representative &lt;em&gt;journals&lt;/em&gt; in a given field also be on topic? In some instances, for broad fields, the answer of &quot;What journals are good and why?&quot; are easily determined by things like the impact factor and number of citations. But for sub-fields, there is often a different set of journals that are better representative but are harder to find in the noise of the superset field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would a question like &quot;What are the highest quality journals in numerical weather/atmospheric simulation?&quot; be on-topic? It would need to be more than just a list-of-journals question of course. Some analysis would need to be done and say &quot;Well X is good at numerical methods, while Y is good for understanding physics and Z has papers on forecasting. In the area of hurricanes, journal A is cutting-edge...&quot; and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T22:06:04.977" Title="Are journal requests on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2957" CreationDate="2013-01-07T18:24:16.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they they should be on topic. Googling does not give value judgements and somebody who answers should do that. Value judgements with high scores would be useful for future users looking for similar sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T18:24:16.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2957" CreationDate="2013-01-07T18:36:18.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I see it, journal requests are basically equivalent to book recommendations, for a different kind of &quot;book&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official position of SEI is that such recommendation questions are not appropriate for Stack Exchange sites, and I kind of agree, because they can easily get out of hand. Right now, we do allow some book recommendations on the site, which hasn't caused problems because they are tightly controlled - we aggressively close those that don't fit into a particular pattern, or those that duplicate existing book recommendation questions. But having the book recommendations at all is really meant to be a temporary measure until we can transfer the information to the corresponding tag wikis, which is the best place for book lists. With that in mind, I think the tag wikis would also be the ideal place for listing journals. In the long term, each subfield tag could have sections for a list of books and a list of relevant journals within the field, and we can direct anyone looking for recommendations there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, my proposed answer is to not allow journal request questions, and just put the relevant information directly in the tag wikis from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm talking about requests of the form &quot;What journals are good for [topic]?&quot; Other, more specific forms of questions asking about journals, like &quot;Is [journal] a reliable source on [topic]?&quot; seem OK to me with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag, as long as we don't get swamped with them (which seems unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T18:36:18.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-08T13:46:42.477" Score="7" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/48298/2451&quot;&gt;How to calculate the effect of the earth&amp;#39;s magnetic field on a HZE particle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which after some more research I realized is at best unclear and at worst unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point if I reform the question the existing answer won't make sense. Should I delete it and ask a new one? or is it preferable to edit the existing question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6136" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-15T14:01:05.923" LastActivityDate="2019-12-15T14:01:05.923" Title="How to best to correct a poorly asked question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2960" CreationDate="2013-01-08T16:15:31.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You generally should not edit questions so as to change their nature. Especially after they have attracted answers. A new post is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you won't be able to delete the existing question on your own authority because it has an upvoted answer. If you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to delete it I can do that with my moderator superpowers, but I would suggest instead that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a new question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the existing on to put a prominant pointer to the new question at the top&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the old one Community Wiki if you are worried about future downvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T16:15:31.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2960" CreationDate="2013-01-08T17:32:07.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is (or was?) my understanding on how things are supposed to work: when editing, the key rule is &lt;strong&gt;don't change the main point of the question&lt;/strong&gt;. So whenever you want to make an edit, think about whether it would change the core of what the question is asking. If it would, then you should make a new question instead of editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this has nothing to do with whether you might invalidate the existing answers; you're not obligated to make your question conform to the answers that are posted. What happens reasonably often is that someone reads your question, doesn't correctly understand what you were asking (either because your question was unclear or they just misinterpreted it), and posts an answer that doesn't actually give you the information you wanted. In that case it's perfectly fine and highly encouraged to edit the question to make it clear what you were looking for and why the existing answer doesn't cut it. As always, the key is that you're &lt;em&gt;clarifying&lt;/em&gt; the question, not changing what it's asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens, it's really best if you stay on top of things and make the edits as soon as possible after the misinterpreting answer is posted, so that the poster of the answer can edit it, and so that future answerers won't do the same thing. If you let the question sit around with an inaccurate answer for more than a couple days, people are less likely to come back to it after you edit. And in that case, it might just be better to edit the question to ask what the answer answers, or perhaps request to have the question deleted (but we sort of shy away from that), and then post a new question with the clearer version of what you originally intended to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T17:32:07.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2960" CreationDate="2013-01-08T18:22:03.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides what dmckee and David Zaslavsky have said, OP could also add his own answer, explaining why the opening question cannot be satisfactorily answered in its current form, thereby completing the Q&amp;amp;A cyclus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(OP could make the answer a Community Wiki if he wishes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T18:22:03.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-08T21:41:44.247" Score="-2" ViewCount="977" Body="&lt;p&gt;We seem very undecided on main on whether magnetic monopole do, in fact, exist or not, or whether this question is settled at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem correct to me that to such a basic EM question we would give different answers all the time. The answers on main should be consisten and clear &amp;mdash; especially when the answers come from our top users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I have no reason to doubt the good faith and competence of all our esteemed answerers, however they can't all be correct at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we please review the answers to make sure they are correctly worded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Monopoles exist&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4792&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4792&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4785&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4785&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4814&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4814&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/5575&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/5575&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/34162&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/34162&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15417&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15417&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22754&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22754&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Monopoles do not exist&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/48659&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/48659&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4813&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4813&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1406&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1406&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;del&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/5585&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/5585&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/34133&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/34133&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/44867&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/44867&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/41681&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/41681&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Undecided&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/48658&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/48658&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4786&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/4786&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1403&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1403&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/3589&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/3589&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done in this case? What is the correct approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T05:27:56.967" Title="Please review our answers on magnetic monopoles" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2013-01-13T20:23:00.483" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2013-01-08T22:02:49.447" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation is actually pretty clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There have been exactly &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; observations that people believe. Read the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1403/520&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1403/520&lt;/a&gt; and you'll hear about one possible observation with a machine still being commissioned, which does make for fun speculation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are several distinct ways in which their actual existence would be &quot;beautiful&quot;, and many people carry some level of belief that they do exist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only a few people in the know use strong language in stating their belief, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15417/520&quot;&gt;such people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; exist&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those that are interested my personal position is a kind of weakly committed optimism, tempered with the knowledge that it doesn't matter unless we can get a hold of a few to play with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the linked answers are correct in that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;no&quot;s are addressing &lt;em&gt;observation&lt;/em&gt; and say so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;yes&quot;s are most in the subjunctive mood relying on some theory or state that they represent a preference rather than outright knowledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a lot of the &quot;undecided&quot;s try to express the subtleties of the situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What should we do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, what I do is downvote and comment on things that are outright wrong, but more or less the only thing that would qualify is a claim that there are confirmed observations of magnetic monopoles, and just comment on things that I think are too strongly stated (mostly claims that it is a theoretical certainty or conversely claims that the zero on the RHS of $\nabla B = 0$ proves that there are no monopoles rather than expressing the non-observation of them to date).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you think an answer is wrong, downvote it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you think an answer is misleading a comment or alternate answer should be used to clarify.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T18:38:59.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2013-01-08T23:21:34.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Magnetic monopoles are among the many beyond the standard model predictions of certain theories, which are at present not directly experimentally established but they are not experimentally ruled out either. In principle, they can exist even if it is (at present) not (by our technical means today) possible to detect them directly. Not the important difference between direct and indirect detection of beyond the standard model physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a natural thing that experimental physicists are often more sceptic about beyond the standard model physics, such as magnetic monopoles, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and other things then theoretical physicists. This explains the wide spectrum of different answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a wide spectrum of answers about not yet settled down issues. Finally, nature will tell us what is right and what is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion, absolutely nothing should be done about the different answers concerning magnetic monopoles and other beyond the standard model physics. Of course, trolling about such topics and attacking people who work experimentally and theoretically beyond the standard model physics should not be allowed on a serious physics question and answer site as Physics SE is supposed to be. However questioning such ideas for physical reasons is a good and healthy thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am strongly against any special treatment of questions and answers about magnetic monopoles, other BSM physics, certain cosmological topics, etc here on physics SE. We should trust the judgement of the community and let thing happen by votes exactly as it has always been done up to now. Just let things be as it is and as it has always been, these actively researched topics belong to the well accepted mainstream theoretical physics so they should not be singled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary: Absolutely nothing has to be or should be done, it is absolutely natural and legitimate for questions about open issues to have such a spectrum of answers as Lubos, Dmckee, and Qmechanic have explained.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-01-14T05:27:56.967" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T05:27:56.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2013-01-09T01:19:31.930" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As paradoxically as it may sound, the apparent discrepancy (on whether &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;magnetic monopoles&lt;/a&gt; exist or not) may to a large extent boil down to semantics and the use in different context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are we discussing 1) a model? 2) the actual universe? 3) only our local vicinity of the universe? 4)...?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;existence&lt;/a&gt;, do we e.g. mean 1) have been directly experimentally observed? 2) have in principle a non-zero (but so far unobserved) abundance? 3) could under the right conditions be created? 4)...?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, magnetic monopoles (and more generally dyons) have so far not been experimentally seen. On the other hand, many theoretical physicists have very little doubt that they exist. For instance, J. Polchinski writes in the conclusions of &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0304042&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; paper that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[...] the existence of magnetic monopoles seems like one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T21:48:05.030" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T21:48:05.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2013-01-09T09:19:03.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, this seems to be a subset of a larger question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;What do we consider as &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; on physics.SE?&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, here I see that some of BSM physics is considered to be perfectly valid by most theoretical physicists, while others feel that the absence of any experimental evidence means that they ought to be portrayed as &amp;quot;postulated&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that we should not put any policy regarding this. There is no strict &amp;quot;boundary&amp;quot; delineating &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;settled&amp;quot; questions in physics, people have different beliefs about this. Magnetic monopoles are an example of this. Even black holes are an example of this, at a stretch -- we have objects in the universe which we &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; are BHs, but we can't be 100% sure. Should we stop letting people say that BHs exist on this site? Certainly not. The same goes with magnetic monopoles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making our site adhere to a certain picture of &amp;quot;truth vs hypothesis&amp;quot; would be destructive for the site -- we generally strive to be agnostic in these matters when dealing with mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, what I suggest is the following. It is not a policy, it is just a courtesy that I suggest others follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When dealing with topics that are not widely accepted by the entire physics community in general, try avoiding absolute statements like &amp;quot;magnetic monopoles exist&amp;quot;. Instead, say that &amp;quot;MMs have been postulated to exist, due to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;reason&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. Assuming they exist, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;rest of answer&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;. This makes the answer clearer to others, and prevents misconceptions of its tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T09:19:03.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2013-01-09T14:26:52.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as one amateur, not only am I &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; confused by conflicting answers about physics at the forefront of research, I &lt;strong&gt;welcome&lt;/strong&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experts may disagree. This is true for horticulture, philately, linguistics, medicine... why should it be different for physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disagreement sparks efforts by proponents of a particular approach to clarify and amplify their reasoned point of view. This is a good thing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experts give &lt;strong&gt;opinions&lt;/strong&gt;, they do not demand that their word be taken as the gospel truth or else. An expert witness giving courtroom testimony is not dictating the outcome of a trial, she or he is offering an opinion to the best of her knowledge and belief. It is up to the jury or judge hearing the testimony to weigh the testimony of this and any other expert witnesses and make up their own mind. However, this is not a courtroom and no verdict is required, hence the supposed &quot;problem&quot; is pretty much a non-issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is possible that some visitors to a Q&amp;amp;A site come here expecting to find out only uncontested, &quot;official&quot; Answers (or alternatively, that any Answer not uniformly held by the expert community be prefaced by a qualifier such as &quot;speculative&quot;), this is an unreasonable expectation. On the contrary, the opportunity to find out that such naive expectations cannot be fulfilled is a valuable learning experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I propose that this question be &lt;strong&gt;closed&lt;/strong&gt; as unproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8143" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T14:26:52.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-09T15:31:53.697" Score="2" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within the past two hours, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;user&lt;/a&gt; has been downvoted nine times, twice on the same question. It looks to me that someone has an agenda against this person, so why hasn't this anomalous voting pattern been detected and nulled by the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T04:03:02.673" Title="Why didn't the amomalous voting detection algorithm seem to work for this user?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2972" CreationDate="2013-01-09T15:34:37.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not (yet?) significantly anomalous pattern according to the criteria used by the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user68" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T15:34:37.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2972" CreationDate="2013-01-09T15:47:30.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The engine would definitely detect this serial voting and will also reverse it for sure...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But, it takes up to a maximum of 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still have a doubt, you could have a look at my &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GOzJn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;profile&lt;/a&gt;. I was a bit confused on that &lt;em&gt;serial-upvoted&lt;/em&gt; day. The reversing thing made me laugh on the next day :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T15:47:30.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2972" CreationDate="2013-01-09T15:49:04.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The script runs at night (in the UTC timezone), so it hasn't run yet. Wait for tomorrow, then it should have run and likely invalidated the votes, if they are actual serial downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T15:49:04.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2972" CreationDate="2013-01-09T17:19:43.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the user in question has had a lot of votes already it will be a while before any new concerted effort will show up in the moderator tools. I'll look into it anyway, but I'm not optimistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, the script runs at pretty low frequency and we are advised to tell worried uses to wait two days before asking us to escalate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the team to look into it. They report nothing actionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was an attack involved and the responsible party continues it will eventually show up on some of our tracking tools. I'll keep an eye on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-01-11T04:03:02.673" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T04:03:02.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2013-01-10T06:39:07.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm late to the party here but I've had a chance to read through everything and here is my take on it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, first, something seems to be lost in translation. Yes, this particular topic is about magnetic monopoles. But I think that just happens to be used as an example -- I can make a list of questions about &quot;why do airplanes fly&quot; and there will likewise be contradictory answers, some of which are incorrect or speculative. I think this was chosen as an example of questions with contradictory answers and shouldn't be read-into as anything more than that. It's not an attack on theoretical physics, or cutting-edge science, or issues with BSM. It's just making a list that highlights a question that deserves some further thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, I see nothing wrong when a user finds a series of questions that have seemingly contradictory answers with that user posting a question just like this in meta and asking for a review from experts. The system is set up so good answers get upvoted, bad ones get downvoted, and experts answer the questions asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is absolutely no harm with posting a list of questions and saying &quot;Could somebody who knows what they are doing review these because they are not consistent.&quot; And people who know can go through and review, up/down vote accordingly, or post new, more correct, more up-to-date answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's no different from the &quot;re-tag old questions&quot; style of post that asks users to look at old questions and verify the tags are correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want a policy, my suggestion is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across a series of questions on a similar topic and you think they present contradictory information, post in meta the list of questions and ask for review by experts. These experts should review the questions and will let the system work the way it should work and all will be right in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No use trolling, or flaming anybody, or accusing people of attacks on a particular subject. That gets us nowhere as individuals or a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T06:39:07.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-10T18:01:12.413" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just want to know, usually at what time the most number of people come online, so I can have more interaction with them?When I am typing , I found very less people answering questions. People who uses this website are not equally distributed all over the globe. So there should be sometime where most of them are active in this website. Someone might be having this statistics. Share if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7527" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T20:15:56.243" Title="What is the peak time when most number of people are online in PSE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2013-01-10T18:09:13.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For real-time interaction, it's chat you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not this meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But chat. That's what it's there for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat info page&lt;/a&gt; for the chat room you're interested in (e.g. the main physics chat room), you can find statistics about number of visitors by hour of the day, and by day of the week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T18:09:13.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2013-01-10T20:00:51.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get information on the time of day when questions and answers are posted from the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, using e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/91524/activity-by-utc-hour#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. Based on this metric, the most active time is around 1600 UTC. It should also be possible to add in the times when comments are posted if you're interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no data available on page views with better than daily resolution, at least not through the tools SE provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T20:00:51.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2013-01-10T20:15:56.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a side note to David's answer: Trying to figure out when most people are online isn't really the best way to get answers to your questions. If you ask really nice questions, more people will vote/answer. You may want to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to ask&lt;/a&gt; to help improve your questions :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T20:15:56.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3981" CreationDate="2013-01-13T01:28:19.330" Score="7" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it was alluded to in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2898/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-2&quot;&gt;Should we allow software questions? (take 2)&lt;/a&gt; that software recommendation questions are &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; off-topic but as pointed out by @dmckee on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/50040/hydrodynamics-codes-for-nuclear-rocket-modelling&quot;&gt;neutron transport approximations for nuclear rocket modelling&lt;/a&gt; there is no clear policy regarding whether recommendations for physics-based software for a specific problem is considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General topics (ie. fluid dynamics) would become a list answer and should be off-topic. Book, and from the direction of the answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2957/are-journal-requests-on-topic&quot;&gt;on my other question&lt;/a&gt;, journal recommendations about general problems are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/50040/hydrodynamics-codes-for-nuclear-rocket-modelling&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; off-topic? Can we develop a clear policy on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit more research shows that David closed as off-topic the following recommendation questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5086/software-for-simulating-supersonic-aerodynamics&quot;&gt;Software for simulating supersonic aerodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39541/how-does-this-problems-are-solved-modeling-simulation&quot;&gt;How does this problems are solved (modeling/simulation)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this one remains open:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11246/what-software-can-i-use-to-simulate-supersonic-gas-particle-flow&quot;&gt;What software can I use to simulate supersonic gas particle flow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:23:52.157" Title="Should we allow software questions? (take 3)" Tags="|discussion|scope|software-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3980" CreationDate="2013-01-13T02:21:44.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is off topic - as evidenced by the fact that I've closed it ;-) You're right, recommendation questions are not on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last question on your list hadn't been touched since mid-2011, whereas the other two were closed in late 2012. So I think this is a case of our policies being vague in the early days of the site and then getting pinned down over time. I agree that the last question is another recommendation question and so I've closed that one as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T02:21:44.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3984" CreationDate="2013-01-13T02:28:06.720" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very minor thing here. These two questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48574/how-can-a-black-hole-produce-sound&quot;&gt;How can a black hole produce sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21075/why-does-a-window-at-night-become-a-mirror&quot;&gt;Why does a window become a mirror at night?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;reference each other under the &quot;linked&quot; sidebar. I thought that was curious, since they have nothing to do with one another. I searched both questions, and yet I could not find a link in the posts or comments of either one to the other. Am I just blind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My (probably wrong) understanding is that a question is listed under &quot;linked&quot; if and only if either there is a link inserted somewhere to that one, or somewhere on that page there is a link back to the question you are looking at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;is this a bug&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;is there some other mechanism for linking&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T11:34:38.723" Title="Why are these questions linked to each other?" Tags="|support|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3982" CreationDate="2013-01-13T02:31:03.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Linked&quot; sidebar lists all the other questions for which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is an outgoing link in to the question, answers or comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is an incoming link in from the question, answers or comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only way to know is to find the link that genertated the entry in the Linked sidebar and understand the context. Users being users these will often be relevant but &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be really off the wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmm...so far I haven't found such a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, now I've searched the respective page sources and still not found the link. Very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T02:31:03.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3982" CreationDate="2013-01-13T02:33:08.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48574/how-can-a-black-hole-produce-sound&quot;&gt;the first question&lt;/a&gt;, now deleted, which linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21075/why-does-a-window-at-night-become-a-mirror&quot;&gt;the second question&lt;/a&gt;. That's why those questions were added to each others' Linked sidebars in the first place. As for why the links are still there, I can only imagine that the list of linked questions is cached, and the cache has not been updated in the past few days since the comment was deleted. I'm not sure whether that is the expected behavior or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, your understanding of the linking mechanism is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T02:33:08.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-13T05:56:49.083" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since thought-experiments are so common in physics, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thought-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thought-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thought-experiment&lt;/a&gt; something we should create?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T06:15:32.750" Title="Is a thought-experiment tag appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3985" CreationDate="2013-01-13T06:15:32.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I'm against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thought-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thought-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thought-experiment&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't give you any data about the type of physics being considered, you'd still have to do a good job tagging the question with the &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of physics you are talking about that. In that sense this would be a meta-tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt;, however be very attractive the kind of poster whose entire understanding of physics comes from a couple of pop-sci books on quantum mechanics, black holes and cosmology. Indeed, I think that we'd get a a great many question tagged with &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; that tag. While I try not to get miffed by these posters I feel that their questions are rarely very good, and I have a vague hope that if they have to think to find some tags they may have to formulate their thoughts  little more clearly. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T06:15:32.750" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-13T20:13:41.040" Score="0" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of posts on the LHC - however, the experiments are still on-going and it's possible that some answers that were right at the time are now outdated. It's also possible that some &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; are now too localised (because they are very specific to a situation and a &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt; time) and need to be closed.&#xA;Finally some questions are explicitly &amp;quot;What if...&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What to do?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote according to the quality of the posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the answers if needed and possible, according to normal policy, to include updated information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide new answers if they need one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VTC questions which are completely obsolete (if you find any)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag completely obsolete answers for moderation attention or vote to delete&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've noticed some comments are obsolete too (delete them if yours or flag for a mod to delete).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example posts to review&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm including a few examples below, but the full list is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=lhc&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6379/lhc-big-bang-temperatures&quot;&gt;LHC Big Bang Temperatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13462/could-the-lhc-blind-a-satellite&quot;&gt;How much would the LHC beam be attenuated by the atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45203/higgs-boson-in-lhc&quot;&gt;Higgs boson in LHC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6438/what-if-the-lhc-doesnt-see-susy&quot;&gt;What if the LHC doesn&amp;#39;t see SUSY?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6482/what-if-lhc-finds-susy&quot;&gt;What if LHC finds SUSY?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46236/impact-of-lhc-on-other-science-and-technologies-in-particular-on-mathematics&quot;&gt;Impact of LHC on other science and technologies, in particular on mathematics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1014/how-relevant-is-lhc-to-quantum-gravity&quot;&gt;How relevant is LHC to quantum gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T08:57:16.313" Title="Please review our posts on the LHC" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3988" CreationDate="2013-01-13T22:05:37.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There  is absolutely nothing wrong with these questions and answers. They are commpletely valid and legitimate and absolutely nothing has to be done. They all are still relevant and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones listed in this meta question are still relevant at present and even if their should be others which are no longer completely up to date, they may still be worth reading and having them around is a godd thing. They do not hurt and no actions have to be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it is highly unlikely that questions and answers, which have initially been considered as legitimate, acceptable, or even good, have now suddenly turned closeworthy or have suddenly become so distracting and disturbing that even deleting them would be justified. Provided that the laws (or policies) on Physics SE have not suddenly changed drastically in the course of time ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-01-14T11:55:53.847" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T11:55:53.847" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3988" CreationDate="2013-01-15T05:17:11.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators please realize that if there is one aspect that will make this physics.se site useful for the future is its historical snapshots. It will be a &lt;strong&gt;grave mistake&lt;/strong&gt; to start deleting or modifying even answers which at the time the community accepted as valid by up voting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take as an example the bruhaha with the neutrino faster than light business. A sociologist could write a masters thesis on these data and the reaction of the wider physics community :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The experiment was corrected, but it will be wrong to go back in time and delete the history. In any case, anybody who feels strongly about changed results from old answers can also provide a new answer. There is no &quot;date by&quot; on ability to answer as far as a I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The format here is open, new questions can be asked and the matter set straight easily without deleting history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not forget that people who ignore history are bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. History should be left as registered as long as at the time it was correct physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paritcularly the LHC is a running experiment on a global scale and should not be retouched for cosmetic purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2013-01-15T05:22:41.083" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T05:22:41.083" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-15T09:58:27.543" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;While retagging, I get confused a lot as: &quot;which is which&quot;. This is bugging me for a while...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, the tag wiki definition of astronomy -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astronomy&lt;/strong&gt; is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth (such as cosmic background radiation). It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the formation and development of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, for astrophysics -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astrophysics:&lt;/strong&gt; Physics related to astronomical objects: stars, galaxies, nebulae, globular clusters, clusters and super-clusters of galaxies, white dwarf stars, neutron stars and pulsars, black holes, the inter-stellar medium, non-terrestrial planets, ring systems, MACHOs, the inter-galactic medium, the great voids, quasars, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like both the tags are having the same definition except that Astronomy is having additional objects like &quot;planets&quot; and Astrophysics is not... From the current definition of both tags, I see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; is dealing with a lot of things than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at cosmology now...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The study of the large-scale structure, history, and future of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, we could give this kind of definition from the last sentence of astronomy wiki def. Because, it covers the history and future with a single word &lt;code&gt;evolution&lt;/code&gt;. So,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt; = &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I don't like these tags to be inter-linked with each other. Each should have an unique definition. So, I've got three choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can use astronomy for observational purposes by merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the other way round. Now, Astrophysics and cosmology could be set free. I mean, all would've got different meanings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we wanna keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, then - we should necessarily merge the other two (astrophysics &amp;amp; cosmology) &lt;strong&gt;under&lt;/strong&gt; astronomy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the best choice I like. We redefine all the tags, or atleast astrophysics and astronomy and &lt;em&gt;finally&lt;/em&gt; arrive at a definition for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T00:44:50.510" Title="More or less - same definition for both tags..?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3993" CreationDate="2013-01-15T12:14:27.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine to have tags which are subtags of another tag. The purpose of tags is to allow easy categorization, searching, and filtering of questions. For example, if a user is interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, they should only have to favorite &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;. If, on the other hand, they are interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and nothing else, then they can favorite that tag. If &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; was merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, then someone wanting to favorite/search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; questions will have to find all the &quot;subtags&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;, etc). That makes it much harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to me, the current system is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T12:14:27.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3996" CreationDate="2013-01-15T14:29:53.913" Score="5" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally the posters should be applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/homework/info&quot;&gt;homework tag&lt;/a&gt; themselves, but if I see a question that looks like a homework question what should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10635" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T12:06:22.797" Title="What should I do if I see a homework-like question with no homework tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3995" CreationDate="2013-01-15T14:39:03.523" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may edit in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag (suggested edit if you don't have the rep) if you see a post like this. The important thing is that if the post looks homeworky to you, then check if it obeys &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;the homework policy&lt;/a&gt; (it should show some effort on the OP's side, highlight the concept, and mention the OP;s level of understanding). If it doesn't, flag as &quot;too localized&quot;, and leave a comment telling the OP how to make it fit the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the comment I generally leave (with an optional &quot;Welcome to Physics.SE!&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. We expect homework problems to have some effort put into them, and deal with conceptual issues. If you edit your question to explain (1) What you have tried, (2) the concept you have trouble with, and (3) your level of understanding, I'll be happy to reopen this. (Flag this message for ♦ attention with a custom message, or reply to me in the comments with &lt;code&gt;@Manishearth&lt;/code&gt; to notify me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that's a more moderator-y message, so I suggest you try something akin to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. We expect homework problems to have some effort put into them, and deal with conceptual issues. Could you please edit your question to explain (1) What you have tried, (2) the concept you have trouble with, and (3) your level of understanding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-01-15T17:06:27.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3993" CreationDate="2013-01-16T00:44:50.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, the astro community has not necessarily been clear on astronomy vs. astrophysics vs. cosmology, but from my perspective in the field, the trend that is emerging is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astrophysics&lt;/strong&gt; is the application of physical &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt; to celestial systems. For example, this includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stellar evolution - what are the stages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neutron stars - what is the equation of state of such matter?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nucleosynthesis - what processes make new elements?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Galactic dynamics - what forces act in spiral vs. elliptical galaxies?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orbital mechanics - how does the Kozai mechanism cause planet migration?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astronomy&lt;/strong&gt; is more on the &lt;em&gt;observational&lt;/em&gt; side of things - saying &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is out there rather than speculating about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. This includes questions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stellar evolution - what is this &quot;main sequence&quot; thing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neutron stars - what detections of their radii do we have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nucleosynthesis - what cosmic abundances do we see?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Galactic dynamics - which is more common, spirals or ellipticals?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orbital mechanics - why can't I see Saturn until the Spring?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cosmology&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of the &quot;big questions&quot; - how did the universe get to be like this, where will it end up, etc. There are different approaches to cosmology, though if you ask a cosmologist &quot;what is cosmology&quot; you are likely to only get one of the following as a response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Particle physics/QFT/strings applied to the early universe at energy scales we can never test experimentally (as a high-energy physicist would say)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General relativity and the expansion (or contraction) of spacetime on the largest of scales (as a GR person would say)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Imprinting and growth of structure - CMB, halo occupation number, even galaxy formation at high redshifts (this from an astrophysicist)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end there can certainly be overlap, but some questions only fall into one category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about how to use a telescope are not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the neutrino-producing processes in core-collapse supernovae are better in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and certainly don't belong in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dark matter and energy often apply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt; (though questions about &quot;can we ever see dark matter?&quot; go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;, and questions about &quot;can dark matter scattering cool stellar cores?&quot; go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there's the perennially frustrating tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt;. Honestly, if you have the astronomy/astrophysics distinction in place as I've described, then pretty much all of astronomy is observational by definition. Certainly the astronomy/astrophysics distinction is more important to make (analogous to experiment/theory in most fields of physics) than astronomy/observational-astronomy. Therefore I propose either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt; a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; (in the sense that the former gets silently replaced to be the latter)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep them, but only bother with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/observational-astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;observational-astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;observational-astronomy&lt;/a&gt; tag if the question is &lt;em&gt;really, honestly, actually&lt;/em&gt; about getting your hands dirty with equipment and &lt;em&gt;taking&lt;/em&gt; observations (either professionally or as an amateur I don't know) as opposed to just using the &lt;em&gt;data&lt;/em&gt; from observations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, I very much agree that the tag descriptions can use some tweaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T00:44:50.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-17T05:52:07.787" Score="6" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I accidentally went through the questions under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/telescopes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;telescopes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;telescopes&lt;/a&gt; tag and all questions confused me &lt;em&gt;totally&lt;/em&gt;. Looks like, there are many questions that seem to me like &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;. I've listed several questions (There are more). They're confusing me a lot... (on-topic or off-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could someone suggest me how they are ON (or OFF) and why..?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25052&quot;&gt;Telescopes to avoid as a beginner?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26037&quot;&gt;Is building your own reflector telescope worth it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25123&quot;&gt;How to determine what size telescope to buy&lt;/a&gt; (I'm wondering how this is on-topic even after my VTC)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24892&quot;&gt;How do you clean a dusty lens?&lt;/a&gt; (This is &lt;em&gt;too ridiculous&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25502&quot;&gt;Where can I find information for how to create amateur radio telescope?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26535&quot;&gt;Novice interested in buying a used telescope. What questions should I ask?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All are not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; off-topic or not constructive. Maybe someone could explain about the on-topic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T05:52:07.787" Title="What if we clean several shopping questions..?" Tags="|support|scope|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-17T13:54:15.363" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice a some questions that might be better for Photography.  These might be a justified merge, or is it?  Do we feel this fits with the Astronomy part of Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26535/novice-interested-in-buying-a-used-telescope-what-questions-should-i-ask&quot;&gt;Novice interested in buying a used telescope. What questions should I ask?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25052/telescopes-to-avoid-as-a-beginner&quot;&gt;Telescopes to avoid as a beginner?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one I know would just be closed if it did get migrated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24892/how-do-you-clean-a-dusty-lens&quot;&gt;How do you clean a dusty lens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct that if you think it would be closed in another site, then it should just be closed as it stands?  I still find the review options confusing, since it seems that to &quot;flag&quot; something is to bring it up on meta, and the close options only give &quot;off topic&quot; as an option if it's too old to migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Flag question to migrate to Photography?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3999" CreationDate="2013-01-17T19:34:00.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions were presumably on topic on Astronomy, and since we absorbed their scope, I think there is a solid argument to be made that they are on topic here. But the community can decide that they are off topic if desired - if enough people vote to close these questions, that effectively makes them off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't actually have vote-to-migrate enabled on this site (except for migrating to meta I think), so if you think something is off topic, just close it. You can leave a comment saying that you think the question might be appropriate on e.g. Photography, and if it's closed by a moderator, we'll check the comments and decide to migrate if it's appropriate. We don't really have to decide on our end whether the question is actually on topic for the target site, since once it's migrated, they get to review it and if it's off topic for them, they just close it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, to &quot;flag&quot; something means to actually cast a flag on it, not to bring it up on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T19:34:00.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3999" CreationDate="2013-01-18T11:41:33.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that photography.se will take them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/130342/178438&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, when Astro.SE was getting closed they did a migration of astrophotography questions over to Photo.SE, and any posts that photo.se would accept were migrated off. Astro.SE didn't have that many posts, so I believe the posts were individually reviewed and migrated. These weren't migrated, so I don't think we can do it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, (1) and (2) are Not Constructive anyway, so they shouldn't be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, we &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; migrate posts older than 60d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though if any new questions come up on astrophotography, I personally have no issue with allowing them as long as they don't have other issues (NC/NARQ/etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you &quot;flag&quot; something, you click the &quot;flag&quot; button and choose an option (the flag gets forwarded to mods). Bringing stuff up on meta is fine, but if your flag can achieve it, then that's easier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-01-18T11:41:33.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-23T12:48:31.000" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I click on &quot;edit&quot; and then copy the code. But it is full of problems... All I want to do is having an answer copied to a latex document, that I can then export to .pdf, copy, keep in my personal collection of documents... Isn't there any simple thing I can add to the header of the document, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\usepackage{document.from.stackexchange}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or perhaps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\documentclass[brilliant.and.funny.answer.from.stackexchange]{whatever}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so that the document compiles with all the stuff, formulas, links, etc ? This is frustrating...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastActivityDate="2013-03-01T05:33:25.630" Title="Horrible time when trying to copy-paste an answer to a LaTeX document" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4003" CreationDate="2013-01-23T12:53:11.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/3307/10098&quot;&gt;this userscript&lt;/a&gt; when I want to make a PDF. I first click the &quot;print&quot; button, then I print to pdf (In chrome, do &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt;-&lt;kbd&gt;P&lt;/kbd&gt; and the &quot;PDF&quot; or &quot;print to file&quot; option should be there)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you can Google &quot;MarkDown to LaTeX converter&quot; and use one of those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T12:53:11.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4003" CreationDate="2013-01-24T06:46:05.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ScrapBook&lt;/a&gt; addon to achieve these webpages. You can have (almost) exact local copy of them without the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you need to copy of the equation, you can click the edit and copy the latex equation, provided that the questions/answers have not deleted on the server. Even they are deleted, you still have the full information for you to type the equation yourself. I guess you wont need to copy their text as your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="562" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T06:46:05.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-01-24T19:09:45.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writelatex.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ip3i5.png&quot; alt=&quot;writeLaTeX.com - great for explaining physics, and works on your iPad too!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20209" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T19:09:45.217" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-01-24T19:09:45.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-25T01:02:13.920" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Best with an example: there is a tag in the Physics Stack called &quot;wavefunction&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any one who actually works on &quot;wavefunctions&quot;? Questions related to wavefunctions are questions about the Schrodinger equation or quantum mechanics (both of which have their own tags already). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more examples like this one in the tags repertoire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9058" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-01-25T12:58:18.503" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T19:13:47.260" Title="Are there too many and/or specific tags?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4007" CreationDate="2013-01-25T01:12:22.093" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) If one has enough reputation points, it is possible to directly propose tag synonyms. (Note in particular, that reputation points in the corresponding master tag are needed.) In OP's concrete example, one should go e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/schrodinger-equation/synonyms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/quantum-mechanics/synonyms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Alternatively, if one doesn't have enough reputation points, there is a meta post called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/175/2451&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tag synonyms for voting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There one can propose tag synonyms. In OP's concrete example, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wavefunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wavefunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wavefunctions&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/schrodinger-equation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;schrodinger-equation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;schrodinger-equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wavefunctions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wavefunctions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wavefunctions&lt;/a&gt; -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then users can vote the proposal up or down. If sufficiently many users upvote a proposal a moderator will create the new synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T19:13:47.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4007" CreationDate="2013-01-25T05:17:31.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;are there too many and/or specific tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, no, I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take this specific example, it doesn't matter whether anyone works on wavefunctions. That's not the criterion for what makes a proper tag. It's entirely plausible that someone might want to look through the questions we have about wavefunctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T05:17:31.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4011" CreationDate="2013-01-25T08:55:38.307" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got a nice answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52135/confusion-about-time-shift-in-special-relativity/52147#52147&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt;, and it occurs to me that it might be awesome if, when answering a question, someone could build simple animations.  I've never seen anything like this before and it would tend to increase the quality of experience for both askers and answerers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be willing to work on something like that, sort of like a mini Flash Editor but only in JavaScript, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; it doesn't already exist for free that is (hard to have an original thought in this world), but the question is a) do others think its a good idea b) would something like that have a chance of going live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could work on something like this for fun obviously, but it would be more motivating if I thought the result might get deployed on a site like this....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T09:09:22.030" Title="what about enahanced functionality to allow answers to have richer educational content?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4010" CreationDate="2013-01-25T09:09:22.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be useful, but I have my doubts that it would be deployed here because the SE team has been quite reluctant to add heavy Javascript dependencies. We already have one on the site, namely MathJax, so I don't think they would put in another. But I couldn't say for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, the way to get people talking about doing that would be to actually make it, and once you have a working demonstration, then ask whether it could be added to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T09:09:22.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-26T01:20:16.797" Score="-2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;my question on is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/50051/2451&quot;&gt;classical world an illusion&lt;/a&gt; is depressing me. I made a mistake in asking it and the replies are getting me down. Could the moderators please for me, delete the question or close it down. I asked it, I got a number of answers and now I want them to end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thank you for your appreciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lee Hudson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18777" OwnerDisplayName="lee hudson" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T10:37:01.563" Title="a request for the moderators please?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4284" CreationDate="2013-01-26T10:45:59.887" Score="13" ViewCount="1362" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people have tried in one way or another to ask about the mathematical prerequisites to study or understand string theory, but all their (up voted!) question have been and are being closed before they have a chance to get a nice answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;String theory (and generally large parts of modern fundamental and theoretical physics) is quite a mathematical topic and to understand the physics of it, one obviously has to understand some mathematics too, so the expectation that one should be allowed to ask about the mathematical prerequisites and where one can find good introductory material to get started on a physics site, seems not too unreasonable to me. On the contrary, it would be helpful for many people to hear from physicists already working on the subject about what is needed concerning mathematical prerequisites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed, people come here to ask about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/reference-for-mathematics-of-string-theory&quot;&gt;again&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/52170/2751&quot;&gt;again&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing all these questions before they have a fair chance to get a nice answer is discouraging for people interested in the physics topic itself too and looks not very welcoming to them. (Qmechanic at least left a nice comment that the topic is in principle ok here). Closing all questions asking this is too bad since there is no such question with a nice canonical standard answer here on physics SE, where people interested in the issue could be pointed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could an answer to the question, what are important mathematical prerequisites to understand string theory (which includes some pointers to good introductions) be worked out as an answer to this meta post (since it is obviously not allowed to give an answer directly on the main page), and then be attached to one of the closed questions about this issue by a moderator or another powerful enough user to &quot;migrate&quot; it? Future questions about this issue could then rightly so be closed as duplicates and people interested in the issue pointed to this canonical standard answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T10:40:51.217" Title="Why is it not allowed to ask about the mathematical prerequisites to understand string theory?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2013-01-26T20:47:39.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about putting the math requirements in the tag wiki? &quot;Study of string theory requires a strong background in X, Y, Z&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same solution that has been presented for what books/journals/papers are good in a field, why not pre-requisites for understanding the subject too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are asking questions about the math required for string theory. This is off-topic and shouldn't be allowed but it highlights that the tag is missing information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No tags should be missing information. All of them should have this background material covered so there is no need to ask questions about it. So the people who do know information need to go through and edit the tag wikis, &lt;strong&gt;regardless of whether somebody has asked a question about it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of things to include in the tag wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/205/what-to-do-with-tag-wikis&quot;&gt;has already been discussed&lt;/a&gt; and this is merely expanding it slightly to include pre-requisite background information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody who knows a lot about something comes on the site, they should take some time each day to edit a wiki. Just like we ask them to review questions and edits, check the tagging on migrated questions, etc.. So it falls on everybody in the community to take the action needed to populate the tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need to wait for somebody to ask about it. We should preemptively fill in the information &lt;strong&gt;so nobody has to ask the question to begin with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T19:17:24.323" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4012" CreationDate="2013-01-27T10:37:01.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, this site isn't &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; for you to get answers. The answers should be availible to others to read, and people should be able to contribute their own answers if they feel like something is missing. So we won't delete a good post just because you're finished with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; delete your own question if it has no positively voted answers, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of curiosity, could you elaborate why you want it to be deleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T10:37:01.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4019" CreationDate="2013-01-27T15:44:57.853" Score="6" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a substantial uptick in questions relating to practical implementation of physics in video game development. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+game&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a search link for such questions.) Some of these appear to be homework related, some of them border on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crowdsourcing&lt;/a&gt;.  Just wondering what the thoughts of the community are on these sorts of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T17:39:40.717" Title="Should we allow game development questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4017" CreationDate="2013-01-27T17:23:07.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ones asking for code are off topic and ought to be migrated to gamedev.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones which are just in the &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt; of writing a game are generally on topic (flag if unsure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT, the HW policy &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; apply to crowdsourcing questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52235/calculating-impulse-propagation-through-a-rigid-body-after-a-collision&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt;. The HW policy is about the type of question, not the context in which it crops up. Thus, if it doesn't follow the HW policy, it ought to be closed (or migrated if possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T17:23:07.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4017" CreationDate="2013-01-27T17:29:42.563" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to suggest some possible limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We only answer questions about &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt;. Implementation questions go elsewhere. Likewise questions about software toolkits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We only answer questions about &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; physics, but we include the various approximations that are common in physics teaching: neglecting friction, neglecting air resistance, linearizing nearly everything, simple impulse collisions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the asker's responsibility to identify the approximation regime they want to know about, and we don't advise them on how these decision will affect their implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We answer only about physics in the general sense and do not solve individual instances of problems--this is in keeping with out homework policy. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We police these &lt;em&gt;rigorously&lt;/em&gt; for duplicates, and identify those on the basis of the &quot;Same answer?&quot; criteria.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T17:29:42.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-27T20:48:29.873" Score="8" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I somehow tapped somewhere by mistake, and a list appeared with all the IP numbers and dates of my recent logins. Where can I find that again? It seems interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2013-05-15T04:46:29.777" LastActivityDate="2013-05-15T04:46:29.777" Title="How can I see the list of IP numbers I have been logging in with in recent times?" Tags="|support|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2013-01-27T23:57:30.540" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is for conceptual questions about physics, and asking what the mathematical prerequisites for something are is not a conceptual physics question. Asking what some particular piece of notation means is fine, as is asking for an explanation of how a particular result is derived (though these questions are sometimes better placed on Math SE), but just a general request for mathematical prerequisites is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As tpg2114 said, general information about mathematical prerequisites would be just fine in the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T23:57:30.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-30T06:47:37.230" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled across &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/323/policy-on-homework?&quot;&gt;this recent meta question&lt;/a&gt; on the computational science site. What struck me was one of the community associates pretty much declaring that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag should be abolished, since it is a &quot;meta&quot; tag that deals with the style of the question itself, not its objective content. He links &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; about getting rid of such tags, but that post was very specifically about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subjective&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subjective&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subjective&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/best-practices&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;best-practices&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;best-practices&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beginner&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beginner&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beginner&lt;/a&gt; on the original SO sites, with no mention of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;do we like having the homework tag to set apart questions&lt;/strong&gt; for pedagogical reasons? (Note this is independent of whether we like the quality of such questions; this is framed in the immutable context of such questions being allowed.) Also, &lt;strong&gt;is there a chance all our homework tags will one day be purged&lt;/strong&gt; for their... impurity... or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:32.117" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T18:15:38.733" Title="Just to be clear, we do support the homework tag, right?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-30T09:09:51.890" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what i know community is a bot, no human observes and decides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this inarticulate edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52530/difference-betwddddddddddddddddd&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52530/difference-betwddddddddddddddddd&lt;/a&gt;  and content &quot;pls help&quot; I sincerely hope that no real call for help has been denied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to add a comment to the effect &quot;go to a hospital emergency if you need help&quot; but am unable to do so now. It may be that the user had ingested some of those substances he listed in the first version of the question and really needed help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T09:16:21.793" Title="closed by community and deleted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4023" CreationDate="2013-01-30T09:16:21.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That was a spam flag deletion: someone flagged it as spam, and I counterflagged. Spam flags lead to the post being deleted/locked by Community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think he ingested anything -- I've seen this often on other sites -- a user defaces his own post after it is closed :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T09:16:21.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4022" CreationDate="2013-01-30T09:22:54.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current&lt;/strong&gt; Physics.SE policy is to allow it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1477/should-we-get-rid-of-the-homework-tag&quot;&gt;Should we get rid of the homework tag?&lt;/a&gt;). The reason for using it is simple -- it basically is a sign for the answerers, saying &quot;don't post full answers, otherwise your answer will be deleted&quot;, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/a/203/22&quot;&gt;posted on meta.chem&lt;/a&gt;, I &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; am ambivalent to removing the tag (on both sites). On one hand, it is an easy way to teach new users about the HW policy (&quot;see that tag there? If you see that on a question, don't post&quot;) -- remember, what constitutes an HW problem isn't that evident to most, especially since homeworky problems which aren't HW are also considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;it is a meta tag&lt;/a&gt;, explicitly disallowed across all sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We might get rid of it on chem soon, not sure)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, is there a chance all our homework tags will one day be purged for their... impurity... or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly. The community is probably still in support of the tag. We might be able to discuss this with the community team later. I plan to do so, just to find out &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the HW tag is &quot;bad&quot; -- unlike the other meta tags, it has a &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt;. Depending on the response I get, we can work forward from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:50:39.193" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T09:22:54.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-30T10:22:02.670" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some days ago I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52322/can-superluminal-communication-be-made-via-quantum-telepathy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; involving quantum teleportation. It have been closed by moderator for assuming new physics. However in fact it is a misunderstanding and I think I have clarified this. So could it be reopened now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9794" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T08:09:09.930" Title="Application for reopen a question" Tags="|discussion|request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2013-01-30T15:33:31.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see that you've clarified anything; you never edited the question after its original posting. Without editing, whatever problems there were with the original question still remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, the way you've framed the question puts it outside the scope of mainstream physics. In particular, when you talk about mental states being entangled, and in general the idea of the mind being represented by a quantum state, that is something that (I think) we don't deal with on this site. I can't make any guarantees, but if you reframe the question in terms of entangled single-particle states, or in terms of entangled states with known behavior, it would probably look a lot better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-01-30T16:25:05.047" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T16:25:05.047" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-31T14:10:43.993" Score="5" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, McMahon's QFT Demystified has lots of erratas... Suddenly, an equation is compatible with $c=1$ units, and in the next line another one appears with a factor $\frac{1}{c^2}$. I am not any more sure if a changed sign is an errata or if I have made a mistake when solving the exercise. But is worth the effort of correcting them, I think it is a fantastic introductory text for non-theoretical physicists, with very simple but illustrating solved problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this site a good place to open a wiki-question, so that anybody can post the typos he/she finds? Perhaps can anybody put me in the right track of where and how to open something like a blog for that purpose? I ask first here in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please notice how 'not-localized' I have made the question: errata for physics books in general...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I have just created this blog:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mcmahondemystifiederrata.wordpress.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://mcmahondemystifiederrata.wordpress.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;for posting errata, not only in QFT, but also for the other McMahon books (GR, QM and String Theory demystified). I have no idea on how to rule it, if it is visible, etc, it is the first time I create a blog, and I don't want to spend much time on it. I welcome any suggestions and help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="14182" LastEditDate="2013-01-31T15:14:49.527" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T15:14:49.527" Title="Any suggestion on how to make a cooperative effort for errata sheets for physics books?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4029" CreationDate="2013-01-31T14:16:12.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the site wouldn't be. The scope of that &quot;question&quot; is waaay too broad. Instead, create a chat room if you'd like and collaborate with others (You may want to use Google Docs or something for the draft). That would be an interesting project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T14:16:12.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4022" CreationDate="2013-02-01T18:15:38.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll just go ahead and post my opinion here: I would not mind seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; eliminated from the site. If the community agrees, we can get rid of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as Manishearth said, when we've discussed this in the past, the community has been in favor of keeping the tag, so that is our current policy. In most cases I don't think it's egregiously harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please don't upvote this unless you support eliminating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag from the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T18:15:38.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2013-02-02T11:28:08.527" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Information about mathematical prerequisits to study physics topics and subfields should be gathered in a new big list, in the same way as it has been done for useful &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12175/2751&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; at different levels. The two lists should be adequately curated and updated, as new questions are coming in and get answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simultanously&lt;/strong&gt;, as the (new) information about books and mathematical prerequisits accumulates, it can be smoothly transfered from the two big lists into the corresponding tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This solution would avoid the &lt;strong&gt;catch-22 problem&lt;/strong&gt; of the current practice, namely demanding that the tag wikis get &lt;strong&gt;DIRECTLY&lt;/strong&gt; edited whereas all question on the main page asking about books and mathematical prerequisits get closed immediately, no new information about these issues will ever be available to people who need it on this site, because obviously &lt;strong&gt;nobody&lt;/strong&gt; starts to write this information into the tag wikis without being asked to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That information about books and mathematical prerequisits is urgently needed by and very useful to (emerging) physicists can be seen from observing that people come here again and again to ask about it on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T20:54:15.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4037" CreationDate="2013-02-03T00:41:34.387" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is this site so inactive? In hours, a few questions pop up. Other SE sites are relatively active. Considering how wide physics is and how active other SE sites are, this seems terribly slow to me at least. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel so because I know, pretty high profile people were here. This must be a pretty thriving community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it because there is some pick hour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a comment, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question, is there any way, we can &lt;strong&gt;grow&lt;/strong&gt; this community? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16682" LastActivityDate="2013-02-07T00:33:43.000" Title="Just a comment-Why is this site so inactive?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4036" CreationDate="2013-02-03T01:48:18.243" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, we get on average 36 questions per day, which is typical or a bit above the median for &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;all sites in the SE network&lt;/a&gt;. I don't see much support for the assertion that most other SE sites are more active than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, growing the site is always something to think about, regardless of how well we are already doing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T01:48:18.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-03T14:59:52.117" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to have a split account. My user name has 2 addresses with 2 different profiles. User 20397 and 20270.&#xA;Can someone fix this for me please or let me know how I can fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the two links. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/20397/jitter&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/20397/jitter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/20270/jitter&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/20270/jitter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T15:36:09.947" Title="Split account question" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4038" CreationDate="2013-02-03T15:29:53.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your earlier account was unregistered, which means that Stack Exchange was keeping track of it by way of browser cookies which is fragile. Now that you have registered this should not happened again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference you could have flagged any one of your questions (from either account), used the &quot;other&quot; reason and explained there rather than opening a meta question. Not that this has done any harm, but it is a transient problem and there is no need for a public record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T15:29:53.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-04T16:21:00.617" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make a question about state-of-the-art mirror technology and beam divergence for space and astronomy applications. Since engineering questions seem to be, if not considered off-topic, at least frowned upon by the moderation (beats me why). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So i'm wondering what would be the best way to ask that question that would be deemed acceptable. Since the question has relationship with astronomy and space applications, i'm wondering if i can rely on that for making the question on-topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;link to the question in main: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/53048/955&quot;&gt;Mirrors and light beam divergence technology limits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T18:57:49.973" Title="state of the art technology questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-04T20:05:53.043" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see people write stuff like &lt;code&gt;$cos(\theta)$&lt;/code&gt;, were I'd like to a &lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt;. The system does not let me make such a tiny edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it so that the peer review queue is not filled with so many edits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5705" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T20:46:08.360" Title="Why are one letters edits frowned upon? I often have single letter fixes for LaTeX code" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4041" CreationDate="2013-02-04T20:46:08.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the larger sites, i.e. the original trilogy, then yes, that is probably the reason. On this site, it doesn't matter so much, but all the sites use the same code, and I don't think the team considers this important enough to allow one-letter edits here. In any case, there should always be something else you can edit at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T20:46:08.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4036" CreationDate="2013-02-07T00:33:43.000" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tumbleweed is a wonderfully worded &quot;forever alone&quot; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asked a question with no votes, no answers, no comments, and low views for a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to celebrate my accomplishment, and I thought it would be applicable to this question.  So I went to the badge page and copied them all into Excel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/21/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/21/tumbleweed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the data I just teased out a list of dates.  It then follows that a single tumbleweed was awarded in the course of every interval between one time stamp and the next.  What people really like to see is graphs with time as the x-axis, so we just add one tumbleweed to the total to get the total number of tumbleweeds at each time stamp value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x5BOu.png&quot; alt=&quot;tumbleweeds&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting!  What a unique metric the tumbleweeds are.  In a simple since, this represents the number of questions that fall by the wayside.  It's very much a &quot;long tail&quot; sort of occurrence, so I don't know that it really reflects anything about the user number or activity.  It's its own very unique thing.  It is interesting that the slope seemed to change sharply (like a 'hockey stick' graph) around the middle of 2012.  Sorry the years are a little bit difficult to read.  This graph's regions represent 2011, 2012, and 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at total traffic volume to compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quantcast.com/physics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.quantcast.com/physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qj4d5.png&quot; alt=&quot;traffic volume&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting, this also seems to show a behavior change around the middle of 2012.  You need to mentally shift your time scale to directly compare them.  How does this compare to the tumbleweeds?  It could be said to be consistent.  After all, if the number of questions went up around that time, the tumbleweeds might have followed proportionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So traffic is up.  However, these combined data sets suggest a novel explanation for the observation in the OP.  Maybe, while traffic is strong, attention to individual questions hasn't improved, and maybe some people feel like they get an echo when they throw something into the void.  I can imagine that people felt similar things when Stack Overflow was growing.  It seems like a contradiction, but it might make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-02-07T00:33:43.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-08T09:53:09.153" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question of mine got quickly &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/297807/&quot;&gt;migrated to maths.SE&lt;/a&gt;, partly for being mathsy and partly for being a big-list question. I'm not contesting the fact, but I must say that - having been warned by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt; tag description that these questions are discouraged - I looked in both the FAQ and this meta for specific guidelines and reasons for the policy, to no avail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the FAQ have a specific section on this? The policy on it should surely be immediately available by searching &quot;big list&quot; on both the FAQ and this meta, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T10:30:09.660" Title="Why exactly are big-list questions discouraged? Shouldn't the FAQ say this prominently?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4044" CreationDate="2013-02-08T10:30:09.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy on it should surely be immediately available by searching &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; on both the FAQ and this meta, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. While it is convenient, there isn't any reason the policy &lt;em&gt;has to&lt;/em&gt; be available by searching for a particular keyword. And if there was, it wouldn't be &amp;quot;big list.&amp;quot; The thing to search for would probably be &amp;quot;list question,&amp;quot; and you'd probably get results by doing it on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why these questions are not allowed, here are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;clues&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ultimately, the reason they're not allowed is that they break the Stack Exchange model. List questions are junk food for the site, in a way; they tend to be popular and attract a lot of attention, but they don't provide a basis for judging the correctness of answers (so the voting system is wasted on them) and they never really end, thus drawing attention away from other, better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T10:30:09.660" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-08T12:28:19.213" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;and a new one appeared of similar content &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/53380/inteaction-of-high-energy-particles&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/53380/inteaction-of-high-energy-particles&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No edits evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was there two hours ago and had a -2 when I added a comment. Usually because of my high reputation I can see the deleted posts off colored. This has completely disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whats up?puzzled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T12:47:46.040" Title="a question that has disappeared completely?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4046" CreationDate="2013-02-08T12:47:46.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;He deleted the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/53368/interaction-of-high-energy-particles-with-matter&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/53368/interaction-of-high-energy-particles-with-matter&lt;/a&gt; (10k+ only, should be visible to you), and then he re-posted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-02-08T12:47:46.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-11T00:10:52.603" Score="-5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see why adding visibility of users who down vote is bad for the site-- it leads to down voting wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about adding visability of users who up vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked some recent questions where some of the answers have got very high up votes for good technical content, even though they don't answer my questions at all. I find it intriguing to know who these up voters are, and whether they're respected users who know what they're up voting for, or simply users who can't read the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-02-16T22:33:07.047" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T22:33:07.047" Title="Can we add visibility of users who upvote?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4048" CreationDate="2013-02-11T01:25:20.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've asked some recent questions where some of the answers have got&#xA;  very high up votes for good technical content, even though they don't&#xA;  answer my questions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least from July until now, the only question you have made in which there is any unaccepted answer with some votes (although I wouldn't say &quot;very high up votes&quot;) is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52976/how-can-the-speed-of-light-be-a-dimensionless-constant/52980#52980&quot;&gt;How can the speed of light be a dimensionless constant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Readers can judge by themselves if that answer responds well to your question or not. I definitely think it does, and perfectly indeed. That is why it is receiving upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find it intriguing to know who these up voters are, and whether&#xA;  they're respected users who know what they're up voting for, or simply&#xA;  users who can't read the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how are you judge who is a &quot;respected user&quot; or somebody &quot;who can't read the question&quot;? You can perfectly have one day Edward Witten amusing himself here, in front of you under a false name, recently registered with barely 40 points... Would that be a &quot;respected user&quot; by your standards? There is no social status here, the answers are good or bad for their physics contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the point in knowing the name of the upvoters. The anonimity of the votes is one of the good things here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you suspect that somebody is downvoting you sistematically, it is very easy to confirm it. Every downvote subtracts points to the downvoter. By being aware of the reputation of whoever you suspect is taking the effort of systematically downvoting you (instead of having a life) in real time, you can get to know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T02:01:43.033" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4053" CreationDate="2013-02-13T01:22:27.567" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;So social media websites allow people to &quot;follow&quot; each other.  There are some people who post answers that are of considerable quality and its sometimes hard to keep track when there is a particularly good answer, is there any thought at stack exchange to give people the ability to &quot;follow&quot; each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-02-13T01:31:50.287" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Automating the ability to &quot;follow&quot; posters" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4052" CreationDate="2013-02-13T01:31:42.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this has been brought up many times &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/886/a-friends-list-on-stack-overflow-would-be-nice&quot;&gt;on MSO&lt;/a&gt; and you can read there all about why it won't be implemented. Basically, Stack Exchange is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a social network. (For the details you may have to read through the comments in the linked question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T01:31:42.207" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-14T21:59:52.720" Score="-5" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to get rid of the hyphens in the tags? If it is impossible to have spaces, could we not at least have the traditional underscores? This use of hyphens is a violation of modern English usage, although I see it all the time in papers written by foreigners, especially from the Continent, where it has to be corrected before publication....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-02-16T22:32:32.177" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T22:32:32.177" Title="Germanic use of hyphens" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4055" CreationDate="2013-02-14T22:20:04.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are not meant to be interpreted as single English words, so it's not a violation of modern English usage. Rather, a tag is an example of a &quot;slug,&quot; a condensed representation of a title or phrase used in a situation where a limited character set is allowed. The hyphen is the traditional word separator for slugs on websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the set of allowed characters in a tag is lowercase letters, digits, &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt;. Underscores are not permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-02-14T22:20:04.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-17T10:09:22.633" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes some old questions appear and are called &quot;active today&quot; , without any visible signs how they &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43610/question-about-de-broglie-waves&quot;&gt;were activated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought activation could happen by editing or community rotating it forward. What is the other method?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case no edits and no community; the questioner has not been seen since the days of his question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="when does &quot;active today&quot; appear?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4057" CreationDate="2013-02-17T10:17:39.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our good friend &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community ♦&lt;/a&gt; bumps old posts that are &quot;unanswered&quot;. An &quot;answered&quot; post is one that has at lease one answer with at least one upvote (or accept)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/178438&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/178438&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T10:17:39.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4060" CreationDate="2013-02-17T16:45:13.550" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about the feasibility of getting messages anytime an upvoted answer has been changed.  This would help if there is a substantial change in the answer, whether you would still want to keep it upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11547" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Changes in answers you have upvoted" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4059" CreationDate="2013-02-17T16:50:04.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/53585/how-do-favorite-questions-work&quot;&gt;star a post&lt;/a&gt;, then all edits to the post and its answers will be visible in your &quot;favorites&quot; tab (the tab gets an indicator on it whenever there are any changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding inbox notifications, that has been proposed many times (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68106/notify-me-of-edits-to-posts-ive-voted-on&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16662/add-notification-when-someone-comments-in-the-same-post-than-me&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt;) on the main meta, for various similar features. It's been declined most of the time, since it can get too noisy for active users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T16:50:04.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4052" CreationDate="2013-02-20T01:03:01.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend getting or making a third party extension instead of asking Stackexchange to provide an additional feature. For example, I wanted to hide other peoples reputation and my own reputation when veiwing stackexchange/stackoverflow etc. and I solved this using a tampermonkey script. You might even ask someone to make you a script if you don't know how to make one, probably you could ask in stackoverflow or something. Enjoy! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11833" LastActivityDate="2013-02-20T01:03:01.560" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2013-02-21T17:30:36.653" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the question. As a rule of thumb, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a question of the form  &lt;em&gt;What does this notation/terminology mean?&lt;/em&gt; is on-topic if it cannot immediately be answered by a simple Google search/Wikipedia lookup.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a question of the form &lt;em&gt;What is the standard notation for this quantity?&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Why do we use this notation?&lt;/em&gt; is off-topic/not constructive/primarily opinion-based, and should go to chat instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a question of the form &lt;em&gt;What is the historic origin/motivation of this notation/terminology?&lt;/em&gt; should go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: If the site gets swamped by linguistic/notational/terminology soft-questions instead of conceptional physics questions, we might want to rethink this policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:32.623" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T01:32:16.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2013-02-21T19:41:34.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in classical mechanics, SI units really are the only way to go in my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand people using CGS for EM problems. Though I've seen both SI and CGS in different courses here in Belgium and I can confirm that this causes the occasional confusion. This is why I think a universal system of units is vital for fluid communication. (not just on this website, also in the rest of society) However, for EM it's understandable to use CGS instead of SI, as long as it is always clear what system of units you're using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particle physics, natural units are the more natural (no pun intended) to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it depends on the branch of physics you're talking about and I wouldn't &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; a system of units, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; argue to try and use the dominant system in the particular branch of physics your question relates to. I think this is also clear from my discussion above: I would try to use SI in classical mechanics and preferably also in EM, natural units in particle physics, if desired CGS in EM, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T19:41:34.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4095" CreationDate="2013-02-23T23:59:33.690" Score="7" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen some posts show up on more than one category of the review panel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, say a new user posts a one-line answer to an old question. This will flag the post for the Late Answers and Low Quality Posts review queues (and maybe also First Posts). I might then deal with it as part of sorting the Late Answers queue, and &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; as part of the Low Quality Posts one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand and support that these posts get put on all relevant queues, I find it a bit weird and slightly annoying to be asked to deal with the same post more than once. (It doesn't help that such posts are usually annoying and/or hard to deal with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this by design or can it be avoided? i.e. could posts I've already taken action on be removed from my review queues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm aware that this may be more suited to the mother meta, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/153406/posts-come-up-in-multiple-review-queues&quot;&gt;it has come up already&lt;/a&gt; with no answers, hence my asking here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T00:34:33.907" Title="Why do some posts show up in more than one review queue? Could we stop it?" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-completed|review-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-24T15:02:39.243" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/54825/i-was-rejected-from-my-dream-graduate-school-what-should-i-do&quot;&gt;This soft question&lt;/a&gt; was migrated to academia.SE. As a result, comments are impossible at physics.se, and  I find comments to my answer that are  alerting me, but I cannot reply to them . I emphatically do not want to register on another site and I see that the questioner also cannot act there unless he/she registers. This is quite annoying and unnecessary for such a simple question. And I do not agree that this is a general question for academia. It is different for lawyers, for example, and all the money gathering disciplines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody who is registered there add to the citation request  for my statement that &quot;most original ideas come before the age of thirty&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the names of Newton, Maxwell and Feynman , as a start ?. This series of biographies of physicists also supports my statement: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phy.pmf.unizg.hr/~dpaar/fizicari/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.phy.pmf.unizg.hr/~dpaar/fizicari/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-02-24T21:41:00.033" Title="can a comment be transfered to academia.se?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4066" CreationDate="2013-02-24T21:41:00.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and I find comments to my answer that are alerting me, but I cannot reply to them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that shouldn't be happening, as the system no longer &quot;knows&quot; it was you who posted that answer. You'll still get notifications for comments made on your answer before it was migrated, but that should be all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if you consider it annoying to have to register on another site to comment there, you can do that, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; necessary. The alternative is either allowing unregistered users to comment, which is intentionally not the case for obvious reasons, or unifying the account system for all SE sites so that anyone with an account on one of them automatically has an account on all, which was a (reasonable IMO) design decision on the part of the SE team. Comments cannot be migrated, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether it's a general question for academia, that's up to the Academia.SE community to figure out. What we know is that it is not a question for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-02-24T21:41:00.033" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4069" CreationDate="2013-02-25T15:34:32.913" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a nice and pedagogical idea to add to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52976/how-can-the-speed-of-light-be-a-dimensionless-constant/52980#52980&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; but I am afraid that, by doing an additional edit now, it may turn into a wiki-thing, as once happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to do one additional edit. How can I know that? Yes, I know it is the policy of this site, but I prefer (as a personal taste I am not interested in discussing) not to edit it any more if it is going to be converted into an open answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How can I know if an additional edit is going to turn my answer into an open community-wiki (CW)?" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4068" CreationDate="2013-02-25T15:37:43.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;What are &amp;quot;Community Wiki&amp;quot; posts?&lt;/a&gt; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep, it will turn into CW at your next edit. Don't worry, if you want to un-CW-ify it just flag it (or reply to this post). CW is only when you want collaboration, just let us know whenever you get hit on the head with the 10-edit thing :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, try to batch up your edits, constant bumping to the main page isn't something we really want -- leads to clutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T16:25:36.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4068" CreationDate="2013-02-25T15:42:13.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/52980/revisions&quot;&gt;the edit history&lt;/a&gt; (get there by clicking the time stamp on the &quot;edited&quot; block beside your usercard) and compare to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/11741/2509&quot;&gt;the rules for automatic how community wiki works&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance it appears that a further edit &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; tip your answer into wiki status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T15:42:13.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4073" CreationDate="2013-02-26T02:10:23.087" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/10943/14182&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; in grey colour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if I erase any of my answers, nobody will see it anymore, is that right? I hope it is not shown in grey...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Third question: is there any way to completely erase, smash, destroy, pulverize, thermalize, dissociate, cause information loss forever in, one of my answers?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T01:44:09.647" Title="Why is that answer in grey colour? And, are erased answer invisible (I hope)?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4071" CreationDate="2013-02-26T02:14:40.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer that are sufficiently far into negative score territory are grayed out (lowlighted?) as a visual indication that they crowd considers them unreliable. I believe that -3 is the threshold for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T02:14:40.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4071" CreationDate="2013-02-26T02:51:54.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As dmckee said, posts voted down to -3 or lower are shown desaturated. It has nothing to do with deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you delete a question or answer using the &quot;delete&quot; link on the site, it's soft-deleted, which means it still exists in the database and can be seen by 10k users and moderators, but nobody else. (There are currently around 20 people in this category, including a number of SE employees who basically never visit the site.) It's also not included in the data dump, if I remember correctly. It may be accessible via &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt; after some time, I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post includes sensitive information, such as a person's real name, address, phone number, email address, etc. (if they have chosen not to reveal that information publicly on the site), or information which is subject to a separate nondisclosure agreement or confidentiality agreement, it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; in principle be removed permanently. To do so, edit the post to remove the sensitive information, then email the team (team@stackexchange.com) with a link to the revision that contains the information and ask them to remove it permanently. Or you can flag it for moderator attention and we'll make the edit and request for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that, while you can &lt;em&gt;request&lt;/em&gt; to have information permanently removed, as far as I know Stack Exchange is not obligated to grant the request, because the CC license under which all content is submitted is irrevocable. (Check the terms of service, linked in the site footer, to be sure.) So be careful what you submit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-02-27T01:44:09.647" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T01:44:09.647" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4075" CreationDate="2013-02-27T15:46:58.057" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;thefreedictionary.com has the following usage note under 'phenomenon':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usage Note: Phenomenon is the only singular form of this noun;&#xA;  phenomena is the usual plural. &lt;strong&gt;Phenomenons may also be used as the&#xA;  plural in nonscientific writing when the meaning is &quot;extraordinary&#xA;  things, occurrences, or persons&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;: They were phenomenons in the&#xA;  history of music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps then the tag 'phenomenons' should be renamed to 'phenomena'? I couldn't find a way to do that myself, I can only edit the wiki, not the tag name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20967" LastEditorUserId="20967" LastEditDate="2013-02-27T22:43:11.620" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T22:43:11.620" Title="is tag 'phenomenons' really appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4074" CreationDate="2013-02-27T16:00:11.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pure dreck, chosen because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the author didn't know the term for the subject they want to talk about  or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/54392/are-there-still-everyday-phenomena-unexplained-by-physics&quot;&gt;an abominable big-list question&lt;/a&gt; that is a poster boy for why those things should be killed with fire on sight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no one argues, I will remove the tag and close the list. Now that it has Terry's extensive answer I suppose I shouldn't delete it, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done. In a couple of days the tag will disappear from the list of tags used by the auto-completion system, and hopefully that will be that. If we want a actual ban we'd have to convince the team that it was needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T20:43:06.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2013-02-28T04:36:57.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another point:  astronomers and astrophysicists commonly use CGS units for general quantities when they aren't using other standard length/mass/energy measures (Such as $R_{sun}$, $M_{sun}$ $L_{sun}$).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In gravitational physics, geometric units where G=c=1 are commonly used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think units should be explicitly stated, but &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; not enforced to one global standard.  I think enforcing one standard of units within a question could be a good idea, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20513" LastActivityDate="2013-02-28T04:36:57.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4003" CreationDate="2013-03-01T05:33:25.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you are using a dodgy preamble. It is very hard to know without a minimal example of the kind of tex file you tried to compile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't you try asking this on &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;tex&lt;/a&gt; with an example of what you have tried?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastActivityDate="2013-03-01T05:33:25.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4081" CreationDate="2013-03-02T21:55:10.617" Score="7" ViewCount="6662" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found this site today and I asked a few questions but I didn't know how to use the latex syntax, so my questions were difficult to understand. Can anyone tell me how to use this Latex program? thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21549" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-12-01T17:28:27.153" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T17:28:27.153" Title="How to input using Latex?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-12-01T17:31:54.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2013-03-02T22:53:07.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expanding on Dilaton's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site (and most other stackexchange sites where such is appropriate) use the exact same implementation of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for Latex markup. Basically, just enclose tex within &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; (inline) or &lt;code&gt;$$&lt;/code&gt; (set apart equations). Most basic commands work, like &lt;code&gt;\frac&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\sin&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also begin some Latex environments without dollar signs. For example &lt;code&gt;\begin{align}...\end{align}&lt;/code&gt; is a valid construct that will have its contents parsed by the tex parser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to use Latex itself, independent of this site, well that is a large enough topic to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;its own stackexchange site&lt;/a&gt;. For basic stuff to get started, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/804/is-there-a-standard-place-to-point-people-to-learn-how-to-typeset-their-equation&quot;&gt;this other FAQ topic&lt;/a&gt;. For site-specific abilities, I can think of no better guide than what they have over at math.SE, found &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you can always click the &lt;code&gt;Edit&lt;/code&gt; button on any post to see how it was written. You are not committed to making any edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:34:29.613" LastActivityDate="2013-03-02T22:53:07.433" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4083" CreationDate="2013-03-03T10:29:22.553" Score="7" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I've spotted once again a question, that I thought I could write an answer to, but now it has already an accepted answer (which I quite like and +1ed by the way). So I am again thinking about the issue under what conditions it would be reasonable or &quot;constructive&quot; to add my new answer anyway. I guess it could in principle be not completely pointless to add a new answer if it &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;brings in alternative valid points of view or explanations&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;complements the accepted answer by mentioning additional points&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;gives more (technical) details about what is already said in the accepted answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it often happend to me that when adding a new answer because one or more of the points mentiond above apply, it got no votes which I interpret as it has not been useful for anybody, which makes me feel like a fool. I then think I should at most have left a complementary comment and better delete the useless answer again ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do other people think about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-03-13T10:25:41.537" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T10:25:41.537" Title="When does it make sense to add an additional answer to a question which has already an accepted answer?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2013-03-03T11:08:49.643" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it got no votes which I interpret as it has not been useful for anybody&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the wrong way to think about it. Just because an answer doesn't get voted on, it doesn't necessarily mean it was not useful to anyone - and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't mean it will not be useful to anyone in the future. If you post answers solely to get votes, you're on this site for the wrong reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can answer a question in a way that doesn't just duplicate an existing answer, then go ahead and post it as an answer. Don't post such things as comments, because that's not what comments are for. (They are limited in length and prone to deletion, remember.) And also, don't go back and delete answers just because they haven't been voted on. As I said, they may be useful to people in the future. There are preventative measures that the system will take against people who delete too many answers, for precisely that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T11:08:49.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4085" CreationDate="2013-03-03T22:51:49.263" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really frustrating to have -1 and -3 voted answers sit on top of a +99 voted answer. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/15/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;Please provide individual users the option to automatically arrange answers according to number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11833" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T19:16:02.217" Title="Option to arrange answers according to vote" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|accepted-answer|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4084" CreationDate="2013-03-03T23:32:25.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes I agree that the top up-voted answers should be positioned before the answers with less up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T23:32:25.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-04T09:20:18.313" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I received replies to two comments I'd made on different questions, but I didn't get a red &quot;1&quot; next to my inbox as usually happens. The notifications are there in my inbox, if I go to it by clicking on &quot;StackExchange&quot; and then &quot;inbox&quot;, but they appear as if they've already been read. Has something about this feature been changed recently, or is the problem on my end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T09:20:18.313" Title="Inbox notifications seem to have stopped" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-04T11:59:41.483" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently reviewed a suggested edit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/55817/8563&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and it told me that it needs additional reviews for this to go through. I have been reviewing suggested edits for some time and this is the first time I see this. Did this change recently? Is it applicable to all posts, or what are the criteria? What's the rationale for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why do some edits need more than one reviewer?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4087" CreationDate="2013-03-04T14:21:30.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151536/it-takes-two-to-tango/151586#151586&quot;&gt;This was changed last October&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59445/recent-feature-changes-to-stack-exchange/117903#117903&quot;&gt;Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (see the October entry)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current suggested edit algorithm for Physics.SE is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the reviewer is the post author, their action is binding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the reviewer is a mod, his action is binding (yay)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the reviewers are neither mods nor original authors, then the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; decision (approve/reject) to reach two supporters is taken into account.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, using the &quot;improve&quot;/&quot;edit&quot; button lets one bypass the double approval (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/9584&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; -- Community♦ steps in as a reviewer here) -- though you have to make an extra change to the post to do this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at your history, you seem to have come across the &quot;requires another approval&quot; block in the past &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/9578&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/12651&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. You probably didn't notice the &quot;needs another approval&quot; banner , that's all:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T14:21:30.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-05T05:02:09.737" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way for moderators to either promote a comment which contains an answer to an &quot;answer&quot;? I ask because of questions like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23383/light-ray-entropy&quot;&gt;light ray &amp;#39;entropy&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only been on this site formally for two days but I've browsed it for a few weeks and I've seen this happen several times. It would be nice if there was a clean way to move these out of &quot;Unanswered&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked around in the meta, but I didn't find anything directly about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please redirect me if there IS already a discussion on this, though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I have flagging rights yet, is this an option for a flag or could it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21595" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T05:09:52.527" Title="&quot;Unanswered Questions&quot; with several comments" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4089" CreationDate="2013-03-05T05:09:52.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope, we can't convert comments into answers, only the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed the same thing: people will often post something as a comment that really should be posted as an answer. When I see this, I usually leave a comment in reply suggesting that the original commenter post an answer. (Something like &quot;@person That would make a pretty good answer&quot;) Or, if it's an old question and the commenter is likely to be long gone or not to care, you can just take the content of the comment and post it as an answer yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you have the option of doing something about it yourself, this isn't a problem that needs moderator attention, so I'd say don't bother to flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T05:09:52.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1169" CreationDate="2013-03-05T14:53:18.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only just realized this, but if you hover over the progress badge of a review task, a &quot;badge progress&quot; pop-up appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dk2Y6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T14:53:18.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2013-03-06T02:20:35.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came over to Physics SE on a lark from clicking a link in the sidebar on another SE site I spend time on. In Stack Overflow, I often will answer already questions with accepted answers to help add my point of view. Specifically, I'm Googling for something and the question and answer help me figure out my situation. So, I'll add my answer in the event someone comes back to the question for the same reason you have. I have found my own answers helpful before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm here now because I saw this in the sidebar to a question I am debating internally whether to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21679" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T02:20:35.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-06T05:46:32.860" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Link to question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56027/why-do-bullets-in-a-magazine-go-up-instead-of-down&quot;&gt;Why do bullets in a magazine go up instead of down?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this question acceptable or not? The answers seem to suggest it is only based off of ergonomic choices, and I&quot;m not sure if this is the right site for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how should I tag it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T05:55:14.893" Title="Is this question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4093" CreationDate="2013-03-06T05:55:14.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think it's on topic here. It's not asking about a physics concept. But multiple people have posted answers and not VTC'd or flagged the question, indicating that they think it's on topic. We'll have to have some community discussion to figure this one out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the fact that you're not finding good tags for the question is probably a sign that it may not be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T05:55:14.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4065" CreationDate="2013-03-08T00:34:28.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is fixed now. You should no longer see the same post in the First Posts, Late Answers, and Low Quality review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still possible to come across the same post in the other queues though. For example, you might see something in Suggested Edits, and then later in the Reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T00:34:28.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-08T18:21:36.130" Score="19" ViewCount="1007" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted elsewhere, I have personally discontinued use of Physics.SE, since it seems to me that it no longer acts as a forum for research based physics Q&amp;amp;A. Over the past 12 months there has in my opinion been an ongoing deterioration, to the point that the site has almost been taken over by interested amateurs, semi-cranks, and overzealous moderators, that appear to prioritize forceful administration and control over intellectual inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stands in contrast to MathOverflow, which continues to grow, with very active participation from leading researchers across most branches of mathematics. On MO you will see leading researchers, sometimes even Fields medalists, ask questions at the edge of human knowledge, almost always quickly receiving highly qualified answers. This simply does not happen on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting Physics.SE/About: &quot;Physics [.SE] is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy&quot;. As I see it, this mission statement is no longer being fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please answer with recommendations for concrete measures to significantly improve Physics.SE as a Q&amp;amp;A forum for researchers, academics and students of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6605" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T11:47:47.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T13:34:15.787" Title="What can be done to improve Physics.SE as an active forum for physics researchers and student's?" Tags="|discussion|scope|content-level|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2013-03-08T20:35:15.727" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the OP has a point.  Many of the questions we get here about advanced topics (say, late undergrad and higher) are pretty low quality.  Some of the could be answered by a simple google search, some of them ask the reader to fill in elementary steps in research papers, some of them are so full of muddled thinking that one wonders if the person asking the question has a prayer of understanding the answer, some of them come from crackpots wanting attention,...   Really nice conceptual questions about high level physics seem to be few and far between.  This is unfortunate, because it means that people looking for a good place to ask &amp;amp; answer the kind of questions we (I, at least) want may not think that this looks like a good place to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I agree, the signal to noise ratio could be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said:  I don't agree that the moderators are imposing an unpleasant atmosphere.  It looks to me like they are generally doing the right thing, by closing lousy questions.  (If anything, I think they are too lenient about leaving bad questions open.  I'd be happier if the standard was &quot;would it be embarassing to ask this question at department tea?&quot;.)  What we need are more and better questions.  If you have any, please ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T20:35:15.727" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2013-03-08T21:59:11.410" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as users reward simple questions, simple questions will continue to be asked. It's as simple as that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now the user base is rewarding physics 101 questions and ill-informed speculations from a pop-sci foundation. Give me a consensus that those question don't belong and I'd be happy to close many of them.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Personally I am bored to tears by people by the pure number of people who believe that they have discovered a erstwhile unnoticed inconsistency in special relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particularly pernicious (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=reward%20finding%20duplicates&quot;&gt;unsolved)&lt;/a&gt; problem on Stack Exchange sites is established users answering duplicate questions because this is simply easier than finding the duplicates and the rep system rewards them for it; my unscientific observation is that this occurs most on very basic questions. Getting these questions closed without answers would go some way to convincing users that it was worth their while to search first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math Overflow has had a strong ethic for research level question from the beginning. Math.StackExchange did not (and in fact exists explicitly to be a place for lower-level math questions). They are both healthy, active sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no fundamental reason why a site (or this one in particular) needs to function at a highly esoteric level to be successful as a site.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things any particular user can do include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open a discussion on meta to try and reach a new consensus on what types of questions are off topic. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote uniformed speculation down, and cote to close if there is a plausible reason under the current rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ask some good questions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; That is harder then it sounds, but the only way to make people believe that there are good questions here is to get some good questions on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put some time and effort into providing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;good answer to good questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. To make it worth other peoples time to post good questions here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; In the mean time, I'm a little confused that I seem to be accused simultaneously of over-moderating and of letting all the crap in. (I agree that we field a lot of very basic questions and that quite of few of them are crap---but when I vote those down people write comments about how unfair that is and, it seems, up vote just to counter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; And in fact our analytics continue to look good. We are getting steadily stronger on page views, questions per day, answers per day, new users and so on and retaining our answers to questions ratio. In particular I note that there is no detectible change about December 2012 or Jan 2013. In terms of quantity that brewhaha was a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a site with a future we are doing fine. It just may not be the site you want it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:37:55.943" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T03:32:50.300" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2013-03-10T17:30:59.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excellent question and I think the downvotes speak volumes. I see several issues here. One is that sometimes, posters either do not or cannot discern when the question they have asked has been answered. Here is a superb example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56014/parallel-circuits-overall-resistance-decreases-with-additional-resistor&quot;&gt;Parallel circuits - Overall resistance decreases with additional resistor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster accepted an &quot;answer&quot; that did nothing more than restate the question in mathematical terms. There is at least one other really correct answer but no other was marked as accepted. (Disclaimer: I know one of the other answerers VERY well. LOL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suspect that one (of many) reason for this is that users see reputation as the end all to authority. It isn't, but I've seen other examples of people saying things that while not technically wrong, are misleading and yet those answers are selected as the correct ones while other, more enlightening answers, are sometimes even downvoted. These people collect more reputation, and the cycle repeats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem here I've seen is that certain questions are closed as being off topic except when a moderator chooses to declare it on topic even if it's off topic. One supposed reason is that the closed question is &quot;likely to solicit debate.&quot; Well, if that's true then most EVERY question must be closed for the very same reason. Correct answers do exist, you know. Every answer that isn't identical to someone (everyone?) else's must be considered a matter of &quot;debate&quot; and therefore the question MUST be closed. Silly? Yep. It speaks great volumes when &quot;experts&quot; can't agree on trivially simple answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem I see here is that too many students have the say so on what gets closed. That shouldn't happen. Students are....students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying very hard to like this site but there are too many inconsistencies in how it works for me to completely trust it or to recommend it to anyone else, especially my own students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11266" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user11266" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T17:38:00.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-10T20:00:49.687" Score="7" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question I'm asking is mathematical in content, but I suspect a physicist is more likely to know the answer. I've already asked the question in the math stackexchange, but I'd like physicists to see it. Is it reasonable to ask the question again in the physics stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20333" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T20:18:20.380" Title="If I ask a question in the math stackexchange, but I feel it is more likely to get an answer in physics, should I also ask it in physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4101" CreationDate="2013-03-10T20:18:10.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, don't do that. Cross-posting the same question to multiple SE sites is highly discouraged, and besides, questions which are essentially about math are off topic here, so your question would just get closed as such. What you can do is post a link to your question on math.SE in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; to point people to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if the question is judged off topic at Math SE, but is on topic for us, then it's fine to have it on this site - but even in that case, it should be migrated, you shouldn't repost it here. (You might occasionally have to flag the question on Math to ask for migration, but usually they'll catch it themselves.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T20:18:10.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4101" CreationDate="2013-03-10T20:18:20.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The preferred procedure is to not make simultaneous cross-postings, since it may waste potential answerer's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if e.g. the post hasn't received an acceptable answer after, say, a couple of days, OP could flag for migration. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;or e.g. if the question is on-topic on both sites, and OP wants a second opinion from the second site, he could, say, after a couple of days, make a cross-post on the second site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP cross-post, he should as a minimum mention the cross-post in links (on both sites!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T20:18:20.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4106" CreationDate="2013-03-12T12:41:15.200" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/56639/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which (apart from being not very good and even slightly spammy) has an email address for further contact. I have seen this before in other posts and it's always made me squirm a bit. Is this sort of thing OK? Should I flag the posts for moderator attention? Should I edit the email out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Should email addresses be allowed in posts?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4104" CreationDate="2013-03-12T12:55:50.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's not disallowed per se,  you are well within your limits if you choose to remove it. (Flagging this was the right action--when in doubt, flag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I highly doubt that that's mainstream physics (rather hard to tell, since I'm not entirely clear on what the user is trying to say -- and I haven't had time to read those links). If that is indeed the case, I (or another mod) can remove the post. For the time being I've added a &lt;code&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/code&gt; post notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing this to our attention! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T12:55:50.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4104" CreationDate="2013-03-12T17:53:13.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the more general issue of including email addresses in posts: this has come up several times on MSO, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132117/what-should-i-do-if-a-user-posts-sensitive-information-as-part-of-a-question-or&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and also see the &quot;Linked&quot; section in the sidebar. The gist of those answers is that, although there's technically no rule against having an email address in a post, there is no good reason for it to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you see an email address in a post, but the content of the post is otherwise worth keeping, I'd say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit it out&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the post for moderator attention so we can have the revision with the email address deleted from the revision history&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some debate on MSO as to whether you should leave a comment suggesting to the OP that they shouldn't put sensitive information like email addresses in their posts. It could be argued that it draws attention to the email, but I don't think that's such a big issue on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if the content of the post is not worth keeping, just treat it accordingly. Flag it for moderator attention, or as spam, if it looks like spam; and/or vote to close or delete it if you have enough reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T17:53:13.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-13T17:51:29.733" Score="-2" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once again, arbitrary &quot;moderation&quot; has risen. A perfectly on-topic question was asked but was then moved inappropriately to another board. If I could formally register a complaint, I would, but I've seen here that people are usually punished for speaking out. This forum consistently shows a disdain for anything related to educational aspects of physics and astronomy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unfathomable that a topic for which a tag exists can be considered topic. It is just as unfathomable that moderators can choose to ignore the established framework and throw out questions that they personally don't like or personally don't agree with. Simply.....staggering.....there is no stronger word I can think of for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be a consistent bias toward users with sky high reputations even though they give bad answers. It's very difficult around here for newcomers to establish reputation amidst the bias and arbitrariness and willingness to accept any answer without even knowing whether it answers the question that was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11266" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="moderator's personal opinions are irrelevant, or should be" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4107" CreationDate="2013-03-13T18:43:24.657" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's why this wasn't an example of arbitrary moderation: there were four people who expressed opinions that the question was off topic, another who was ambivalent about it, and one who strongly stated a belief that the question was on topic. If your definition of &quot;arbitrary moderation&quot; includes a consensus decision by four well-established users, it's a pretty useless definition. And what happened here is pretty nearly the &lt;em&gt;opposite&lt;/em&gt; of moderators ignoring the established framework and closing questions because of a personal disagreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to say that the opinions - not actions, but merely opinions - of some of those well-established users should be discarded simply because they happen to be moderators, well, that just doesn't make any sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I could formally register a complaint, I would,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can. Email team@stackexchange.com to provide feedback to Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but I've seen here that people are usually punished for speaking out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I can't recall a single instance where that has happened. Sometimes people are punished based on &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they say what they say (i.e. rudeness), but never simply for speaking out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This forum consistently shows a disdain for anything related to educational aspects of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, yeah. (It's not a forum, but) This is a site for conceptual physics questions; education questions are sort of a fringe topic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1567/official-policy-on-astronomy-and-physics-education-cited-in-answers&quot;&gt;Some of them are okay and some aren't&lt;/a&gt;. And in some cases, the question is unacceptable for reasons unrelated to whether it's on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T18:43:24.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4107" CreationDate="2013-03-13T19:36:47.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish I'd stuck my nose in earlier, though I would not have argued strongly against the migration. Still there are a few points that need to be made one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many physics departments now have programs in the field known as &quot;Physics Education Research&quot; (PER), and professors hired for their skill in that discipline are called &quot;physics professors&quot; (and indeed they generally have Ph.Ds in physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, no one argues that the discipline is &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt;, it is clearly a field in the study of education. You can go to their talk or chat them up in the hallway and come to understand that very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason PER is not in the College of Education is that those people have spectacularly failed us for generations. They have been unable to address the specific needs of technical disciplines in general and physics in particular. Not to mention a widespread feeling that their approach is not very scientific and a lot of their doctrine is nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The PER people &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; trying to understand the value and costs of particular turns of phase as well as pedagogical approaches (things like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is following the historical lines of development of physics useful or and unnecessary distraction?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;math separately or as you go along?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they actually have very sparse concrete answers in those parts of their field. The place where they've made the most reliable and helpful advances is in the structure of instruction. Clickers and demos to break up the presentation and re-focus the students; investigative rather than follow the steps lab; more lab and less lecture; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have to say that the original questions &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; about what it says in the title, because physics &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; taught using the phrases that the OP singles out for interest. Physics is conveyed in a general and non-technical way to the interest lay public using those words and metaphors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may seem like arguing of semantics, but I think it is important because popular science and science education have different audiences and different goals. You always tune your message to the audience and what you expect them to take away, and pop-sci is aimed at giving the intelligent non-specialist an overview of the results and the flavor of the theory; it is not intended to enable them to do physics at that level. Notwithstanding that a lot of us got &lt;em&gt;engaged&lt;/em&gt; and started down the road to being scientist from exactly such entertainment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, personally, I'd have left it where it was. The answer to the question are not going to be &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; answers, but to the extent that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; actual authoritative answer they will come from physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a fixed policy on PER questions that I'm aware of, and I don't have a sense of what would be a good one. It is a murky business where many of the topics of investigation are of generally applicability (sometimes to all technical subjects and sometimes to learning in general). We don't want to open the door to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question about educational technique as long as it has &quot;in teaching physics&quot; appending (those of you who were around in the early days of Stack Overflow may remember the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19487/2509&quot;&gt;boat programming&lt;/a&gt;&quot; question). But these means that allowing PER questions becomes a nightmare of trying to articulate well drawn lines. What fun that will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Acedamia.SE does a good job of answer that kind of question then it might be best to ship all there just for consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T21:18:19.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4111" CreationDate="2013-03-14T15:21:21.643" Score="6" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading about  exciton transfer between molecules in this book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volkhard May, Oliver Kühn - &lt;em&gt;Charge and Energy Transfer Dynamics in Molecular Systems&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd Edition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused about section 8.2, &quot;The Exciton Hamiltonian&quot;. I've been thinking about posting a question here, and I've been thinking really hard about what I can do to make the post as general as possible, so that it isn't specific to this book but rather a question about the theory used to describe intermolecular exciton transfer. But I don't know how to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be ok to ask the question, referring to the specific paragraphs in the book that I am having trouble with, so that someone else, more qualified than me, could edit the question into something more general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastActivityDate="2013-03-19T10:23:11.917" Title="How do I make a question about something I don't understand in a book I am reading?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4110" CreationDate="2013-03-14T18:25:46.537" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should just ask the question.  Try to focus on the physics which is confusing you, but don't worry too much about generalizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please do your best to keep the question self-contained. Better to type out a few equations than to ask your audience to read several pages off-site.  For one thing, the process of choosing what to include in the question can help you figure out exactly what's confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T18:25:46.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4110" CreationDate="2013-03-16T00:56:28.287" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;User1504's answer is great.  I would only add that you can (and should) continue to credit the author and book, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Charge and Energy Transfer Dynamics in Molecular Systems&quot;, 2nd Edition, authors Volkhard May and Oliver Kühn write that ....  They state that....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21402" LastActivityDate="2013-03-16T00:56:28.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4114" CreationDate="2013-03-17T11:10:50.407" Score="17" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moderator closed/migrated/deleted a post, and I disagree with this. How should I proceed in getting this reversed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T14:38:35.167" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T14:38:35.167" Title="How do I dispute a moderator's action?" Tags="|discussion|faq|closed-questions|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-17T11:11:05.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4113" CreationDate="2013-03-17T11:10:50.407" Score="20" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Posting on meta&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post gets closed/migrated/deleted, write up a meta post for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to the post in question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain why the post is on topic for our site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain why you disagree with the comments supporting the closing, if any&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to the meta post you just created in the comments on the post in question, if possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the ensuing discussion reaches a consensus that the action should be reversed, then we will reverse it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things to remember while participating in such discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The existence of a tag does not make a post on-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The amount of votes on a question does not make it on-topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closing isn't the end of the world. If a question can be edited to be clearer and on-topic, it can easily be reopened. Closing is meant to be an &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; state&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics.SE doesn't try to cater to all the types of questions which will be useful to physicists. While some things (like some types of recommendation questions) may be useful, Physics.SE isn't the place for them (however, many of these can be put into tag wikis).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which are not about physics concepts but would be best answered by physicists are not necessarily on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The best meta posts lay out useful guidelines for the future&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than  getting caught up on past cases (which may not be the norm, and may be based on an outdated policy). Keeping this in mind while formulating a meta post goes a long way towards improving our policies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Don't make it a political issue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, there have been quite a few posts where a user hotly complains about a moderator action, and focuses the post on maligning the moderator in question. Such posts rarely are constructive, and end up getting downvoted and sparking lots of drama. While the core of the post &amp;quot;Should this action have been done?&amp;quot; is a good meta post, the extra baggage hinders the post in getting a good, constructive decision/consensus on the actual closing/deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess one thing that folks haven't really thought of is that most mod actions are reversible. Basically, &lt;em&gt;a moderator action is not necessarily the &amp;quot;last word&amp;quot; on the matter&lt;/em&gt;.  Mod actions are reversible. If a moderator closes a post, he will happily reopen it if there are good enough arguments made on meta. A mod closing is no different from a 5-close-vote closing in this aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T05:17:10.673" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-17T11:11:05.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4110" CreationDate="2013-03-19T10:23:11.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do that a lot and I find that putting &quot;Author Book title Eq. number&quot; in the title together with modern search engines is a great way of keeping track of all the posts I had on specific questions. Many people read the same book on a subject and will recognize the implied question by the title + Eq. number. It even occurred once that the author of the book himself replied to a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10881" LastActivityDate="2013-03-19T10:23:11.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-20T09:30:31.733" Score="5" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4096/what-can-be-done-to-improve-physics-se-as-an-active-forum-for-physics-researcher&quot;&gt;What can be done to improve Physics.SE as an active forum for physics researchers and student&amp;#39;s?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I disagree with the motivation behind that question it does seem to me that there are a lot of frivolous and lazy questions at the moment. By this I mean questions that are either copied and pasted from homework texts, that would be answered by a quick Google or that would score high on John Baez's index.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site members can already vote to close a question, but we can't vote to delete (though we can flag for moderator attention). I wonder if we should have a facility to vote to delete in the way we can vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T16:28:30.533" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T16:28:30.533" Title="Should we delete questions more frequently?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4116" CreationDate="2013-03-20T10:15:19.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to see more frequent deletion of closed questions which are not going to be improved. Unfortunately, as the comments have mentioned, the system imposes very stringent rep requirements for this. It means that in practice, deletions can only really be done by moderators (until we get more high-rep users), and I for one am trying to be more hands-off. I don't like to make questions disappear unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess for now, the two things I would recommend are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you see a closed question where it seems very unlikely that the OP will come back and fix it up for reopening, either because it's old or because it's just a bad question that can't be fixed up, just flag it for a moderator to delete. That way we know at least one other person agrees on the deletion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote lots! (when warranted, of course) That way, eventually more people will have the 10k rep required to cast delete votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T10:15:19.527" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2013-03-20T10:48:30.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me this site can fulfil two roles. Firstly it can encourage collaboration between active researchers (postgrads, postdocs and academic staff) and secondly it can educate we lowly ones (undergrads, interested amateurs and the general public).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think both roles are laudable, but the first role on its own is not going to sustain the site, as the closure of the Theoretical Physics SE shows. The majority of the activity is going to be educational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you accept this, I don't see why the educational role should be restricted to undergraduates. If the Physics SE had been available when I was a schoolchild I would have used it enthusiastically. I'd probably have asked some silly questions but that would have stemmed from over-enthusiasm not indolence, and surely this is forgivable as long as it doesn't become excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find great curiosity about physics from non-physicist friends of mine. At dinner parties I'm frequently asked about some aspect of physics that has been on the news, a Horizon programme or Brian Cox's latest broadcast. Since I get invited back I assume the interest is real :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do get excessive numbers of frivolous and lazy questions (as defined &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4116/should-we-delete-questions-more-frequently&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) but I think the best way to deal with these is more active participation by site members. I very rarely see a question that is closed due to five votes to close by site members. Typically two to three of us can be bothered to VTC and we leave it to the poor old moderators to close the question. I would like site members to be able to vote to delete more easily, but that's out of our hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarise, I agree with the OP that it would be nice to make the forum better for researchers and students, but the way to do this is not to discourage Physics 101 questions from people who don't fall into these categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T10:48:30.913" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-20T12:12:45.463" Score="5" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mainly I'm thinking of the type of questions that pop up there every week: &lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://what-if.xkcd.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, which other SE site do you think it's appropriate for them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7743" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-03-20T12:16:55.577" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T14:17:05.263" Title="Are 'what would happen if' type questions appropriate for this site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4116" CreationDate="2013-03-20T13:41:45.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should, for some types of questions. See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Broken Windows Theory&lt;/a&gt;. Questions which are &lt;em&gt;unsalvageable&lt;/em&gt; (no way to fix) can easily be deleted. Leave a delete vote on them and we'll get rid of them (flag as well if you want&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;). Normal users: If you see a closed question with no way to be salvaged, flag it with a custom message asking for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For salvageable questions, wait a while. Encourage the OP to fix the question in a comment, and tell them how to fix it. If an old, salvageable question is closed, see if you can fix it yourself (this is for when it's obvious that the OP isn't coming back). If you can't, vote to delete/flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've heard that making per site changes to the privilege system is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; non trivial thing for SE, and we can safely assume that it won't happen. Flagging works well enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I check out the posts with delete votes now and then in &lt;code&gt;/tools&lt;/code&gt;, but this is rare&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T13:41:45.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4119" CreationDate="2013-03-20T18:22:23.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is literally just &quot;What if X?&quot; then no, it's not on topic here, or on any other SE site I can think of. A question like that is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; open-ended; it's not asking anything specific, and it invites a whole slew of speculative answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you were to ask a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question about an unusual situation, it should be fine. This week's what-if, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if you somehow managed to make a stereo travel at twice the speed of sound, would it sound backwards to someone who was just casually sitting somewhere as it flies by?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be an acceptable question for us. But if you want to ask a question like that, make it clear that you've looked into it and done some prior research yourself, or at least thought about it. If you just posted the question as I quoted it above, it would be only so-so, but posting it as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if you somehow managed to make a stereo travel at twice the speed of sound, would it sound backwards to someone who was just casually sitting somewhere as it flies by? I would think so, but then it occurred to me that &lt;em&gt;blah blah blah blah&lt;/em&gt; so maybe it wouldn't. I can't find anything about this online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(for example) makes it much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T18:22:23.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-20T19:55:09.363" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not yet have the Vote to Close privilege. As a result, whenever I come across a question that I would VTC, I have to flag it for moderator attention. What actually happens when my flag is accepted as useful? I've been assuming that it is only addressed by moderators; is that the case? When a moderator accepts the flag as useful, does the system then apply a close vote to the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T06:35:59.393" Title="What happens when I flag a post?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4122" CreationDate="2013-03-20T19:59:25.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we act on your flag (actually on any flag on that question at the same time) it is automatically accepted as helpful. We can also decline to do anything but nonetheless mark it helpful because we approve of your bringing the situation to our attention and want you to continue flagging in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, sometimes &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; happens except that one or more of us looked at the post you flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we mark a flag as unhelpful we have to provide a comment (either from a list or custom). These comments are available in the flag list you can from your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d2J4H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just click the number after &amp;quot;Helpful flags:&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T19:59:25.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4122" CreationDate="2013-03-21T04:37:02.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this isn't the case. For vote to close flags, if any 3k+ user votes to close, it gets marked as helpful. Otherwise, mods may manually mark as helpful (even if we take no action -- there are cases where we agree that the question is &quot;iffy&quot; but don't think it should be closed). If a post is closed/deleted (by a moderator or otherwise), all flags on it get auto marked as &quot;helpful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that flagging to close will push the flag to the close vote review queues (and we have at least 3 regulars there), so it generally accumulates a fair amount of close votes (and the flag is marked as helpful in the process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we decline a flag, we'll leave a message as mentioned in dmckee's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the flow for various flag types. Note that only mods can see who flagged what; 10k users only see the flag. Mods see all flags in their queue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Custom moderator flags: Only mods can see these in the main mod flag queue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VLQ/NAA flags: These go to the 10k queue as well as the mod queue. 10k users can see these flags, and vote to delete, counterflag as invalid, and/or counterflag with another flag of the same type or a custom flag or a spam flag. If three 10k users vote to delete (they can only do so on closed questions and downvoted answers), it gets marked as helpful. Counterflagging will push it up in priority in the mod queue (doesn't matter much, the mod queue is usually quite small). If a flag is counterflagged as invalid, it gets marked as &quot;disputed&quot;, and mods may make the final call on the post (however, we cannot mark these as helpful or declined)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag to close: These are pushed to the 10k queue and the close vote queue, and 10k users can counterflag/mark as invalid/vote to close in the 10k queue. A single vote to close will mark these as helpful, however this will not remove them from the close vote queue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spam/offensive: These go to the 10k queue, where users can counterflag as well as vote to delete. In addition, 3 spam flags banish a question from the main page). 6 spam flags (on a question or answer) lock the post, delete it, and give the user a hefty rep penalty (100 or 500, I forgot which). These are marked as helpful only when the post is deleted or a mod decides to mark them as helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-03-21T06:35:59.393" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T06:35:59.393" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-21T08:33:22.897" Score="-4" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;On March 19 2013 I asked a legitimate question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57378&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57378&lt;/a&gt;) about the scientific theoretical validity of Quantum Mechanics. This question was backed up with a scientific article, on which the moderator, nor Nobel laureate Prof. ‘t Hooft nor any other physicist was ever able to point out a falseness/error/mistake or whatever incorrectness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that scientists do not appreciate that their knowledge is questioned, but this cannot be used, and is certainly not a scientific argument, to suppress questions that point out possible mistakes in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can omissions in science be eliminate, when scientists do not allow substantiated articles or questions to be published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22181" OwnerDisplayName="Carel van der Togt" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T13:11:56.887" Title="Should this question have been closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4125" CreationDate="2013-03-21T09:18:17.007" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should mainly look at the comment of Qmechanic which points to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. The FAQ states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pitches for your own personal theories or work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here.&#xA;Anything that couldn't be published in a reputable journal is probably&#xA;not appropriate at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the key here is actually not on the latter part about mainstream physics (although many people would be inclined to look at that as well),  but on the first part about pitching your own work. You post the question as if it is `just a paper' but in fact it is YOUR paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20750" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T09:18:17.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4125" CreationDate="2013-03-21T09:58:52.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact your question was closed doesn't mean it isn't a valid question, it just means it's not appropriate for this site. The big difference between us and the myriad of physics forums out there is that this is not a discussion site. We restrict ourselves to well focussed questions that have a well focussed answer. Your post did not fit this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T09:58:52.930" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4125" CreationDate="2013-03-21T12:45:34.567" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is not a peer review site  for new theories and research results. It is a site where questions about current physics knowledge are addressed with references and links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is too much to ask of people here to review a paper purporting to change the current physics model, to the level of peer reviewing a paper. This is done in submissions to physics journals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also submissions to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;arxiv&lt;/a&gt; where there is no peer review, but the papers are checked for consistency. There is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://vixra.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;vixra&lt;/a&gt; where off the beaten track papers are accepted as long as they are coherent, and might draw the interest of similar researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a particle physics experimentalist I can see contradictions in your model: you use classical electrodynamics on particles, when particles are par excellence quantum mechanical entities. The only reason we know there are particles is because we can analyze their behavior with the rules of quantum mechanics, not of classical mechanics and electrodynamics which you are using. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you are asking for a peer review, and this site is not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T12:45:34.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4125" CreationDate="2013-03-21T13:11:56.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This website's policy prevents us from giving your work the review it deserves.  However, I'm sure that if you ask for comment at &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Reference Frame&lt;/a&gt;, then Lubos will give you an accurate and honest assessment of your ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T13:11:56.887" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-24T14:13:31.290" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56800/stripeless-cleaning-of-windows&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and given the number of upvotes and comments I think that there are quite some people interested. However, it seems from the comments and the lack of answers that the question might have a more chemical answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be ok to cross-post it on chemistry.SE and report the answers (if any) on physics.SE as well? Or should I perhaps flag for migration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am wondering about cross-posting is that, given the interest on physics.SE, it seems a bit illogical to migrate the questions, because the users at physics.SE can nog longer find the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20731" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Should I cross-post this question in chemistry.SE?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4133" CreationDate="2013-03-24T15:11:55.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/4377/stripeless-cleaning-of-windows&quot;&gt;undeleted your post on chem&lt;/a&gt;, for now. Stuff like this is exactly why I proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131950/asking-on-multiple-sites-soft-migration&quot;&gt;soft migration&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good fit for both sites, and cross posting isn't exactly forbidden, just discouraged. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/150615/why-is-quicksort-better-than-other-sorting-algorithms-in-practice&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/3/why-is-quicksort-better-than-other-sorting-algorithms-in-practice&quot;&gt;cases&lt;/a&gt; it even leads to great results. In this case, since Physics.SE has been quite enthusiastic about the question, I'm reluctant to follow the &quot;keep it on one site at a time&quot; rule. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/888/should-users-be-cross-posting-questions/896#896&quot;&gt;Jeff's objection&lt;/a&gt; to cross posting doesn't really apply here. And before you ask, you won't get suspended for having the same text in both posts -- it seems tailored equally well for both audiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll see if either version of the question gets answers. If one of them gets answers, then we can close the other and hat it with a &quot;answers be here&quot; link. Or leave it open; as long as they're linked to each other it doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T15:11:55.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-24T22:30:32.437" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this post is well published here. Well, it's a feedback after all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm killing my eyes reading the questions and answers on this website. I'm not sure, maybe I'm the only one to ask for this, but could be really fine if the presentation change to a fluid one instead of a static layout, such that I can make shorter lines with bigger letters, as on Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I want to be able to reflow the text of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I do that ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Apparently, the mobile version of StackExchange allows to read more easily. So far, I've been unable to notice the difference in the address (like the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; in front of the usual Wikipedia page for the mobile version for instance). So two other question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the mobile version really allow to reflow the text ?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to force the mobile version of SE on a computer   ?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="16689" LastEditDate="2013-05-08T04:11:50.173" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T04:11:50.173" Title="An other presentation for the posts?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4137" CreationDate="2013-03-25T05:01:16.520" Score="8" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an answer voted -5 to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7738/why-theres-a-whirl-when-you-drain-the-bathtub&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm not sure if I should delete it. On the one hand, it's completely wrong and ludicrous. Yet on the other, there's useful comments and links that explain why my answer is sheer nonsense, and therefore possibly helpful. Yet, it's got one of the lowest ratings ever :|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="When should authors voluntarily delete a post once it gets negative votes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2013-03-25T05:09:17.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as we're not talking about something that a moderator would delete (e.g. doesn't answer the question, is spam) - and you wouldn't post those things in the first place anyway - then it's really your call. You're not required to delete a post just because of its vote total, no matter how low that vote total may get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would delete the answer if I had become convinced that it was wrong and couldn't be fixed by editing. I wouldn't worry about preserving comments, because comments are meant to be transient. If you think there is useful information in the comments, edit it into your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T05:09:17.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2013-03-25T05:09:26.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;below a list of (more or less motivated) possible improvements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a starting tautology, if you want more research-inspired question, attract more researchers ! When I read some of you claiming they want pure theoretical discussion, I'm horrified. Physics is a science, and science means models AND experiments. Could be really fine to discuss more about experiments. I don't know how to do that, but restraining to pure theory of course restrain to less than the half of the physics community ! Note that attracting more experimental discussion may oblige experimentalist to discuss about their setups, and may resolve a lot of problem associated with this main-stream envy to publish only Science and Nature papers which usually do not contain enough materials for an experiment to be reproducible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: The next two paragraphs have been edited, after discussions with Dilaton who pointed their excessive (even insulting) character that I apologize for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've the feeling that some of the answers are not at the level of the questions. It seems to me -- especially in the field of QFT that I don't know well but I'm trying to learn more -- that the answers are sometimes too technical. I'm a condensed matter physicist interested in quantum field theory, and most of the time the answer I read about QFT sounds inconclusive and of pure semantic polemics. The questions I read in quantum information and condensed matter topic (topics that I know better indeed), looks for me much more friendly and pedagogical. Still the level of the question is not amazingly high in average. Maybe a good point to have better question is first to have better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still regarding the different topics related to different communities: I've the feeling that the level of the questions crucially depends on the topic. For instance (and this might well be once again because I'm poorly knwoledged in QFT) it sounds for me that some post in condensed matter are really good, instructive and well documented. In few words, the condensed matter topic might well be still preserved from the deseases mentionned in the above question. The question still remains on how to get higher standard of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the modo should be a little bit less stringent regarding the rules at the beginning of a new question (examples: &quot;you should add this in your answer, not as a post&quot;, &quot;this is not a new answer, this is a comment of the previous one&quot;, &quot;this is not a new question&quot; ..., which sounds time consuming for them and not really helpful I believe). A perfect (and pedagogical) method for me would be to let people answering the way they want at the beginning (in post, answer, comment or whatever, just sending a reference or starting calculating from scratch, stopping a calculation, coming back latter for improvement, etc... well in a messy way, as almost all physicist desks are, isn't it ?). When the author of the question understands the point, HE / SHE writes HIMSELF / HERSELF the answer. It obliges to 1) know better how the site works technically (i.e. how long and boring it is to write on a small 10-lines box a long answer :-), 2) be responsible for getting the answer, 3) improve the presentation and pedagogy of the site, since the author's answer can be displayed at the beginning of all the answer. Also, this method helps in cleaning the post. Of course it is not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand what you want. Do you want open problem question ? Sure, I can do that. It will take me an entire afternoon each time to write correct presentation of the problem(s), to type all the maths and correct them. But sure I can do that ! Will result long unanswered posts for sure. Is that what you want ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer for myself discuss with colleagues around me first, then discuss with friends in conferences, then think hard for years before saying I can not resolve a problem. I will always use this web-site for question that I know some of you can answer better than what I found so far in non-specific literature, to clarify a specific point, ... well, I'm using Physics.SE for pedagogical reason, to discover a new subject for instance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="16689" LastEditDate="2013-03-25T15:35:33.383" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T15:35:33.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2013-03-25T05:27:23.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking in general about a down-voted post, i.e. not necessarily about OP's actual post: If on one hand, one is worried about further deterioration of one's reputation tally, and if on the other hand, one really want to keep the down-voted answer, then making it a Community-Wiki (CW) may be a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-03-25T17:26:20.833" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T17:26:20.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2013-03-25T07:00:59.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As David says, there are only 4 things to keep in mind: your answer isn't &lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt;, isn't a spam, it's answering the question, it is of very good quality. (Well, &lt;em&gt;flagging an answer&lt;/em&gt; states only 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as QMech says, you can always revert your post to a CW if you want so that your reputation (&lt;em&gt;score&lt;/em&gt;) may not be affected in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no rule that says, you &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; delete your answer. It's your wish, unless you're raged by a bunch of guys always against you (happens around SO everyday). You're saying that the comments are useful. So, you've got your point. &lt;em&gt;Don't delete it&lt;/em&gt; if you don't want to. After all, it's worth a rep. score equivalent to a single answer. You can get it in the future, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, There are a lot of users who've got &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?page=439&amp;amp;tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer%20isaccepted%3ano%20score%3a-10&quot;&gt;more downvotes&lt;/a&gt; than you, and some users were lucky that their answer was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?page=172&amp;amp;tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer%20isaccepted%3ayes%20score%3a-10&quot;&gt;accepted&lt;/a&gt;. While on the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;there are&lt;/strong&gt; users who've deleted their 10+ voted answers when they got &lt;strong&gt;shot&lt;/strong&gt; by an investigation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83955/plagiarism-should-be-addressed-specifically-in-the-faq/134715#134715&quot;&gt;their cat art&lt;/a&gt;. Some mods should've seen a lot of voted answers deleted by this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; I've deleted many of my answers, due to these downvotes. In fact, I got raged by a guy &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt; and when he's gone, I got all my score back. But now, I can't search where my deleted answers are. The reason I deleted my answers, I didn't want a guy to search my profile and downvote my &lt;em&gt;downvoted&lt;/em&gt; post. But now, I don't delete my answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T07:00:59.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2013-03-25T08:34:21.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can write your own user stylesheet (using Stylish or another such browser plugin). While such a feature may be useful to some, I don't see a pressing need for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a suggestion: Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/3307/10098&quot;&gt;this script of mine&lt;/a&gt; (which takes a post and trips out everything surrounding it so that it can be printed). Then, use Ctrl-+ or Ctrl-Scroll to zoom in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T09:18:55.793" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-25T17:59:34.203" Score="19" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bit is highlighted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence has an obvious meaning, which is wrong. Almost none of the questions here deal with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/practical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;practical&lt;/a&gt; questions about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/actual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;actual&lt;/a&gt; problems that the OP faced. Rather, this bit is boilerplate text common to various stackexchange sites. On many of those sites the obvious meaning may well be appropriate, but here we should say something else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct? If so, what should it really say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16725" LastEditorUserId="16725" LastEditDate="2013-03-28T17:27:15.963" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What &quot;practical&quot; physics problems do you &quot;actually&quot; face?" Tags="|discussion|site-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-03-25T18:39:44.800" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164436/is-there-a-rule-of-thumb-for-objective-questions-asked-out-of-curiosity/164452#164452&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; says it all (and some of the other answers as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it's a rule that makes sense for the SOFU trilogy, and not for science sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T18:39:44.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-26T14:08:01.187" Score="7" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/507/can-we-get-a-migration-path-opened-to-math-se&quot;&gt;Can we get a migration path opened to math.SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we close &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; flag a question as &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, we have an option called &lt;code&gt;belongs to meta.physics.SE&lt;/code&gt;. We're also receiving questions that belong to Math.SE or Electronics.SE most of the time. So, it'd be easy for migration if there is a choice for &lt;code&gt;belongs to Math.SE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;belongs to Electronics.SE&lt;/code&gt;. Well, other sites do have that option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, we can take Android.SE. It's having a choice for &lt;code&gt;belongs to SO&lt;/code&gt;. I think superuser is also having such an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0mmnG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T10:40:16.783" Title="Additional choices for migration" Tags="|feature-request|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4144" CreationDate="2013-03-26T15:38:15.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IIRC we need to display a major need for such a closing path. Currently, we don't even have enough active close voters, so mods have to intervene in migrations anyway. Also, we get ~one migration every day on average. That's not much. I don't think that's enough to convince SE to give us the migration paths. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;  to get migration paths, I'd suggest Math, SciComp, EE, and Academia. Maybe not Academia. Nobody on Physics has managed to decipher their FAQ, so it's better to leave it out of the fray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a snapshot of the migration stats (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats&quot;&gt;link for 10k users&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M0mI6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T15:38:15.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-03-26T20:56:27.567" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28935/amount-flow-rate-of-n2-needed-to-cool-substrate&quot;&gt;Of&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;course, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22552/strategies-against-50hz-mains-hum-on-detector-signals&quot;&gt;us&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;experimental&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56074/laymans-method-to-sharpen-a-wire-stm-tip&quot;&gt;types&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;can&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34193/how-are-the-masses-of-unstable-elementary-particles-measured&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47304/experimental-technique-for-measuring-temperature-of-an-ant&quot;&gt;practical&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;physics &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38859/how-to-properly-bake-a-ultra-high-vacuum-chamber&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52105/ways-to-create-controlled-small-bubbles-in-water-within-plastic-tubing&quot;&gt;That's&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;because&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44784/how-to-determine-whether-a-large-container-is-air-tight&quot;&gt;we're&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;practical&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2160/physical-vapor-deposition-of-sio2&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15469/how-to-guess-the-correct-fitting-function-to-some-data&quot;&gt;Take&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;that &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13408/fitting-to-a-high-density-scatter-plot&quot;&gt;you&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;smarty-pants&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52805/improvements-on-a-makeshift-dessicator&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T21:12:00.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-29T20:54:49.370" Score="7" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one thing that really annoyed me about science-related forums: The constant change of the topic by a person, who is obviously just afraid that he'll/she'll look ignorant, incompetent or lazy if he'd/she'd admit that his/her problem was, in fact, solved. Everything turns into an unpleasant &quot;ego battle&quot; that obviously has nothing constructive and with learning quality approaching zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, isn't the &quot;Stack Exchange paradigm&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;supposed to deal with&lt;/a&gt; such a disruptive behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't want to point fingers, but my first attempt to participate on this (great, I must admit) site led to exactly the same kind of problems. After my answer, the question was totally changed. Also I was downvoted by the guy who asked -- not to complain, just to note that it is obviously just another &quot;ego issue&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are a lot of people who somehow make the site running without facing such issues. So I might conclude that the problem is actually in me, and the only thing that suits me is blogging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, maybe have someone faced a similar situation and thinks that it could be useful to have a restriction on the amount of re-editing of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22354" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-12-15T14:19:46.003" LastActivityDate="2019-12-15T14:19:46.003" Title="Should we disallow vast (self-)editing of a question, completely changing its meaning?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4147" CreationDate="2013-03-29T21:03:55.620" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general rule is that you should not edit the question in a way that invalidates the existing answers. Doing that causes a lot of problems and is rather unfair to the early answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some exceptions, e.g. if the question would otherwise be closed it can be justified to perform some radical edits even if they invalidate existing answers. Or if the question was too broad in the beginning and the OP provides more information later, this can also invalidate existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user completely changes the question in a fundamental way, just revert the edit. If the user does not accept that, flag for moderator attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T21:03:55.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-29T21:05:33.807" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be many reasons why one would want to do it for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the author framed the question in some weird way and hence it led to some unproductive conversations/answers but over time when the author understands the topic better it looks awkward to have that old naively framed question still available on the net.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1637" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T21:25:51.000" Title="Shouldn't there be a mechanism to allow the author to delete questions even after there are answers?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4149" CreationDate="2013-03-29T21:09:12.580" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a mechanism for that: flag for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can delete questions with upvoted answer, but they will require a good reason to do so. Being embarrassed about the question is not a good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts on SE sites are licensed under the CC licence, so you can't just take them back whenever you want. As an alternative you can request your post to be anonymized, so that your user name no longer appears as the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T21:09:12.580" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4149" CreationDate="2013-03-29T21:25:51.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Not if that would mean deleting a valuable answer&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why you can delete your own question as long as it has no answer with a positive total score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T21:25:51.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-30T14:49:02.693" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/59448&quot;&gt;Has there been a proposed explaination to the observation of wave-particle duality?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been closed as not a real question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the posting isn't particularly well formulated, the question itself can be meaningfully answered as various interpretations of quantum mechanics &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; give explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, the existing answers and comments lead to the impression that the question is either a philosophical one and thus off-topic, or that existing theories do not provide explanations, both of which I disagree with under the assumption that interpretations of QM are on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I've also written an answer I wanted to post but no longer can ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is my proposal for a re-write that's hopefully less confusing but still captures Outlier's intent and main points:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are there theories that &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; wave-particle duality?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused by the famous wave-particle duality mystery:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a particle is left unobserved, it acts like a wave and can explore all classically available particle trajectories simultaneously. By looking at it, you force it to decide on a single trajectory, like going through the left or right slit, or like Schrödinger's cat that ends up being either dead or alive; the wave-like characteristics are lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there theories that actually &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; this behaviour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should I go ahead and rewrite the question?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T22:25:09.993" Title="Should /q/59448 be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4154" CreationDate="2013-03-30T15:36:57.650" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the question was unclear for many people (and philosophical for others), so I closed it. If you think that there's a better way of phrasing the question so that it is clearer/unambiguously not philosophical, please go ahead, I'll reopen it then. The easiest way to do this is to look at your answer draft and think &quot;What question does this answer?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the meta community/other mods feel that it should be reopened, I don't mind that either :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T15:36:57.650" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-30T19:20:57.553" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I constructively dispute a declined flag, if I think that my flag was really legitimate and should not have been declined? I am interested to know what can be done generally in this case, but I would like to resolve the issues that concretely instigated some of my recent flags which were declined and therefore lead to my meta question, too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/6600/2751&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; &quot;answer&quot; does&#xA;not even try to answer the question asked, but tries in a very&#xA;confrontational manner to start a nonconstructive discussion. The OP&#xA;of this answer states in a very subjective manner his general&#xA;negative opinion about the physics subject of the question instead of&#xA;answering the question. It is not an answer and should at most have&#xA;been a comment, but I think such nonconstuctive off topic comments&#xA;should not be allowed here either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6086/2751&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; the same user&#xA;tries to advertise his own personal non mainstream theory which says&#xA;general relativity is wrong etc, without being really interested in&#xA;an answer the knowledgable people here could give him. So this&#xA;question is first of all off topic, since physics SE deals only with&#xA;mainstream physics and NOT with personal fringe theories of users,&#xA;and it is not a real question,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... ,as can be see from the fact that the OP only accepted his own&#xA;wrong &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/6383/2751&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; which&#xA;advertises his personal theory further and denies and dismisses all&#xA;of the physics arguments people have given him in the other answers&#xA;taking advantage of mainstream physics. Having such a bad and wrong&#xA;accepted (!) answer on a question that is off topic and not a real&#xA;question does make Physics SE looking not good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T23:00:35.093" Title="How can I dispute a declined flag?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4156" CreationDate="2013-03-30T19:41:46.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, pinging one of the mods in chat if they're around may make more sense before going off to meta :) But it's OK to ask directly on meta as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I declined those flags, mostly because I thought that you were just calling the posts wrong. &quot;The answer is wrong&quot; is not something to delete an answer by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding point 1: That was a mistake on my part--there were three flags from you on the same user, I went back and declined the wrong flag (which &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; explains why there was one flag extra on the same post that I thought that I had dealt with). Sorry about that, the answer has been deleted now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding that question/answer, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is entirely within its limits. It's perfectly OK to post a well-phrased thought experiment on Phys.SE and ask why it is wrong. This doesn't go against our guidelines on mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; ... eh, it's debatable. There isn't always a clear distinction between &quot;non-mainstream physics pushing&quot; and &quot;wrong answer&quot;. In this case, it's not as much a &quot;fringe theory&quot; as it is just an &quot;answer with wrong assumptions&quot;. To me, the OP has asked this in good faith, so I let it be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't had time to read all the comments and the other answers his rebuttal addresses, though. Also, I'm not well-versed with GTR, though I'm able to understand the question and answers well enough. So hopefully another mod will have a look at this as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T19:41:46.627" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-31T04:09:51.810" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've got this new option called &quot;No Action needed&quot;. I think this got rid of two things. I've got no evidence. But, &lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Skip:&lt;/strong&gt; I use this when I don't know what the post actually means. For example, I hate to look in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-field-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-field-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;string-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;string-theory&lt;/a&gt;, etc. So, I usually skip those posts, except if there's some spam / &lt;em&gt;wasting-time&lt;/em&gt; answers which we can easily recognize. Now, my usage of &quot;Skip&quot; has been drastically reduced by the introduction of this option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Upvoting:&lt;/strong&gt; A few months ago (before this option came into existence), I noticed that there was a &lt;em&gt;cruel upvoting&lt;/em&gt; by some guys (I think, it's from some reviewers). We can notice it in the first posts. When we're reviewing, we can see that it has already been upvoted. I don't think those answers deserve an upvote. But if the upvoter believes that it deserves, then I've got another point. Whenever there's a first post, it gets upvoted. And, we can notice that while reviewing. And now, there aren't posts with so &lt;em&gt;cruel upvotes&lt;/em&gt;. I had a chat with @tpg regarding that Okay, that's just a minor discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the definition of this option doesn't satisfy me. My question is: &quot;When do I use this option? Is there something wrong if I use it excessively?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;No action needed&quot; means - &lt;em&gt;&quot;It needs no action from me&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (which is somewhat rude, because many posts will go like that) or as it states as a popup - &lt;em&gt;&quot;This answer seems to be valid&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both definition bugs me. Can someone point me an MSO post regarding that option, or atleast tell me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Is my reviewing OKAY?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How should I use &quot;No Action Needed&quot; while reviewing in &quot;Physics.SE&quot;?" Tags="|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4158" CreationDate="2013-03-31T05:06:12.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161390/what-are-the-review-queues/161391#161391&quot;&gt;Been there, done that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Late Answers and First Posts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[....]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these queues, you can edit the post, flag it, upvote or downvote it, add a comment, or upvote a previously existing comment.  When you take one of these actions, the &lt;strong&gt;I'm Done&lt;/strong&gt; button becomes enabled, allowing you to complete review. If you feel that the post is fine as it is, but you don't want to vote on it (you're not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; impressed with it, etc), then you can always click the &lt;strong&gt;No Action Needed&lt;/strong&gt; button. If you're unsure about the post, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; use the &lt;strong&gt;Skip&lt;/strong&gt; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T05:06:12.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2013-04-01T00:38:47.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Write a new answer.  Give the correct reason for the phenomenon, based on your new understanding.  Then add a paragraph describing the wrong reason, and why  it's wrong, based on those comments from the earlier bad answer.   Explaining why frequently believed misinformation is wrong, is indeed educational.  After the new answer is in place, delete the older wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T00:38:47.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4162" CreationDate="2013-04-01T02:22:32.273" Score="14" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;An oddly large number of articles are titles with, or include in their opening line, a phrase like '&lt;em&gt;I have a doubt regarding gravity&lt;/em&gt;'; see the articles at the bottom, for examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, it doesn't seem that the OP actually '&lt;em&gt;doubts&lt;/em&gt;' that the physics in question are true.  Instead, they seem to mean that they are generally &lt;em&gt;confused&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular language which this usage transliterates from?  Possibly a particular thesaurus entry leading people astray?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/58148/intuition-behind-work&quot;&gt;Intuition behind Work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57907/electric-field-lines-for-continuous-distribution&quot;&gt;Electric Field Lines for Continuous Distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57436/doubt-in-kinematics&quot;&gt;Doubt in Kinematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/59628/why-propagation-of-uncertainty-is-linear&quot;&gt;Is propagation of uncertainties linear?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  See also (thanks to @Yrogirg)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3200/what-exactly-might-non-native-speakers-mean-by-doubt&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3200/what-exactly-might-non-native-speakers-mean-by-doubt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8521" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T15:44:45.860" Title="Why do so many posts use the term 'in doubt' or 'have a doubt' regarding established physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4161" CreationDate="2013-04-01T02:42:55.583" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a phrase, common to Indian English (and some other Asian dialects), that means &quot;I am confused&quot;. The word &quot;doubt&quot; is used as a noun here to mean &quot;a confusion&quot; or &quot;an issue&quot; or &quot;a question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fine if you edit this out, just don't proactively go looking for this to take it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-04-06T06:37:25.423" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T06:37:25.423" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4161" CreationDate="2013-04-01T11:34:13.713" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best synonym for this use of &quot;doubt&quot;, common in the Indian sub-continent, in British / American English is &quot;question&quot;: - &quot;I have a doubt&quot; is equivalent to &quot;I have a question&quot;. As such, it's padding, and should be edited out of questions, as part of a more substantial edit that removes chatty stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T11:34:13.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-01T15:41:17.013" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;After visiting a question I had posted on this site a few months back, I had noticed something strange with this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the bottom right corner appeared a black rectangle (respecting the general design of the site), that said &quot;Chat with an expert&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I opened it up out of curiosity, and connected with the &quot;expert&quot; itself: just as I had expected, it was a bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was exactly going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wild guess: is Stackoverflow at it again? (As in, doing some tests with various AI algorithms, which had already happened before.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5686" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="&quot;Chat with an expert&quot;" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4164" CreationDate="2013-04-01T15:43:21.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bot based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ELIZA&lt;/a&gt;, as an April Fools' Day joke:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/174407/what-is-chat-with-an-expert&quot;&gt;What is &amp;quot;chat with an expert&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T15:43:21.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4167" CreationDate="2013-04-02T16:46:48.453" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can i make a sum symbol to ask a math related physics question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean Riemann Sum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the short cut of Riemann sum or how can i ask a question that has mat symbols, formulas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6287" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T18:10:58.490" Title="Some Symbols to Ask Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4166" CreationDate="2013-04-02T17:03:52.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&quot;&gt;the section in the FAQ on symbols and notation&lt;/a&gt;, and then search the web for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=LaTeX%20math%20symbols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;help with LaTeX's mathmode symbols&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can find a post that &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; the symbol you're looking for and use the &quot;edit&quot;&#xA;button to get a look at the source ans see what they used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T17:03:52.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4166" CreationDate="2013-04-02T18:10:58.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or, you can try &lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Detexify&lt;/a&gt;. Just draw the symbol you are looking for, and this website will look it up in the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6982" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T18:10:58.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-03T05:41:43.247" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55264/how-to-measure-a-solid-solid-surface-energy&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; about the surface energy of solids when only the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/surface-tension&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;surface-tension&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;surface-tension&lt;/a&gt; tag was still available. Now there is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/surface-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;surface-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;surface-energy&lt;/a&gt; tag which is, in my opinion a more broad term which also includes effects in solids, but pretty much equivalent to surface-tension for liquids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a good idea to merge the tags in to 1 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/surface-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;surface-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;surface-energy&lt;/a&gt; tag, or make them synonyms?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20731" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T07:30:03.660" Title="When can tags be merged or made synonym?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4169" CreationDate="2013-04-03T07:30:03.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would just merge &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/surface-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;surface-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;surface-energy&lt;/a&gt; --&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/surface-tension&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;surface-tension&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;surface-tension&lt;/a&gt; with a synonym. No need for two tags talking about more or less the same phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'll wait for anyone who wants to object for now)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T07:30:03.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4173" CreationDate="2013-04-03T12:51:51.193" Score="1" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question has been closed and has been marked as inappropriate for this forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/59869/free-online-study-materials-and-codes-for-monte-carlo-simulation-in-statistical&quot;&gt;Free online study materials and codes for Monte Carlo simulation in statistical mechanics &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this question can be &lt;strong&gt;immensely&lt;/strong&gt; helpful to students who work in this field of &lt;strong&gt;Monte Carlo simulation in statistical physics&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, a similar and very useful question is this one .. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books&quot;&gt;List of freely available physics books&lt;/a&gt;, which was not marked as inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another user who also opposes the moderator's decision and posted comments in support of the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request you to reconsider your decision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22413" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Question marked as inappropriate and closed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4171" CreationDate="2013-04-03T13:00:15.910" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book question has been grandfathered in, that's all. Otherwise such questions are more or less off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommendation questions are off topic network wide (some reasons are given &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/174286/178438&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; -- basically they have caused problems in the past)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE does not try to be a resource for everything useful for physics students. We try to focus on closed-ended, conceptual questions here. You may want to try Quora or a similar website for that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T13:00:15.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4171" CreationDate="2013-04-03T13:22:43.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I do not agree with the reference request/books/study material policy here either, but unfortunately nothing can be done about it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/358/2751&quot;&gt;Reference requests&lt;/a&gt; should in principle be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2918/2751&quot;&gt;allowed&lt;/a&gt; whereas asking for books is absolutely not, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/786/2751&quot;&gt;definitions&lt;/a&gt; of what is a book or valid reference request are applied in a random and unpredictable manner. Valid reference request questions can get retagged and closed as book requests etc. It is a big shame that serious people are (no longer) allowed to ask for any material to (self) study/research physics of more or less advanced and well localized topics at different levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T13:22:43.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-04T21:31:05.377" Score="3" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question 6157 is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/08/pragmatic-programming.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/06/the-broken-window-theory.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;window&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6157/&quot;&gt;List of freely available physics books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were it asked today, it should get closed as Not a Real Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's being used to justify the asking of other bad open-ended questions : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4171/&quot;&gt;Question marked as inappropriate and closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we fix this broken window?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T19:06:24.830" Title="Question 6157: 'List of freely available physics books' -- A broken window that we should fix" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4174" CreationDate="2013-04-04T21:31:05.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that that question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6157/4066&quot;&gt;List of freely available physics books&lt;/a&gt;  be closed and locked; and that we move the answers' contents to a tag wiki, after which the question should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T21:31:05.377" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4174" CreationDate="2013-04-04T23:01:38.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I absolutely disagree with both, EnergyNumbers question and his answer and the from MSO imported term &quot;broken window&quot; he uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limited number of such big list questions about important study material for students and researchers should just be well curated, since the site is intended to be useful for students and researchers (according to what is written in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;About&lt;/a&gt;) who need to learn things and often have to familiarize themself with new topics in the course of their live as active and flexible researchers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on spezialized and/or well defined by the targetted level or otherwise localized study material (including books if needed), such as about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/36359/gentle-introduction-to-twistors&quot;&gt;twistors&lt;/a&gt; or other minor subjects such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/15803/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for example, for which not a large pedagogical literature and tons of books exist (as it is the case about broad topics such as statistical physics, quantum mechanics, qlassical mechanics, etc) exists, should be allowed and tolerated as it has always been the case until the end of 2012. Such well defined requests for study material are neither bad (their answer is helpful for many peopl) nor open-ended as EnergyNumbers claimes, since there simply to not exist that many books / turorials / lecture notes / introductions on Arxiv etc, that fit as answer to a well localized question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only issue (in fact a non-issue!) is, that somebody should take care of adding the new specialized questions about such study material to the corresponding lists, such that things are systematically ordered and well organized. Apart from this, there is absolutely nothig to &quot;fix&quot;. I could curate and regularly update the lists of study material and I would do it if it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-04-05T00:13:31.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-05T18:15:35.223" Score="-7" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you ask a research level question, don't you expect a research level answer.  Why would I ask a question that I could answer from a standard text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17623" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T13:56:51.100" Title="Why ask research level questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4177" CreationDate="2013-04-05T19:14:20.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really see what you mean here. (Assuming you're talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60150/is-the-spectral-pattern-for-hydrogen-related-to-how-the-sun-bends-or-gravitation#question&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60150/is-the-spectral-pattern-for-hydrogen-related-to-how-the-sun-bends-or-gravitation#question&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here. Anything that couldn't be published in a reputable journal is probably not appropriate at this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site, we ask and answer questions about established physics. &quot;According to X theory, how does Y work?&quot; is OK. &quot;I have theory X, is it correct?&quot; is not OK. We don't &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; research here; we only give information on established physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is more or less of that form (this is made clearer by seeing the comments) where you have a theory and you want the site to expand/validate it. That's not what Physics.SE is for :s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-04-05T19:14:20.207" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4180" CreationDate="2013-04-06T07:32:47.153" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Physics.SE and StackExchange in general.  I've been using the site for several days now and even answered a few questions.  By almost any measure though I'm amateur interested in physics but with no particular expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I'm not an expert, there are many questions where I think I can provide a nearly complete answer, especially when sophisticated math isn't needed for the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm trying to gauge is how &quot;useful&quot; I can be attempting to answer questions even when I know my answer isn't 100% complete.  I can tell some folks don't answer unless the question is in their specific area of expertise and others attempt to answer almost everything, even when their answer is often very incomplete or even slightly wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I start off answers with &quot;I'm not an expert but...&quot; or &quot;This doesn't completely address your question but...&quot; and then provide links and information for further research will I be providing any value to the community or should I simply not attempt to respond?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three example answers I've provided that demonstrate my non-expert answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60192/what-would-be-the-effect-of-an-excess-of-up-quarks-on-stellar-formation/60193#60193&quot;&gt;What would be the effect of an excess of up quarks on stellar formation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/59438/how-do-you-calculate-power-at-the-focal-point-of-a-mirror/59441#59441&quot;&gt;How do you calculate power at the focal point of a mirror?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57871/how-do-permanent-magnets-manage-to-focus-field-on-one-side/59258#59258&quot;&gt;How do permanent magnets manage to focus field on one side?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, should non-experts avoid answering unless they can come very close to a complete and correct answer?  Or is it considered okay to provide answers similar to the three I linked above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T16:59:28.383" Title="Gauging prefered expertise level for answering questions" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4179" CreationDate="2013-04-06T07:48:39.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, the only criterion to use when judging whether you should post an answer is this: can you answer the question asked? If so, then go ahead and post your answer. I know that's a pretty nebulous criterion, but it's kind of hard to define what makes a postable answer to any greater precision, and we don't want to have a complicated set of rules in place that stops people from answering any more than necessary. (For other things, there might be complicated rules, but asking and answering should be pretty straightforward.) Certainly, you don't have to be an expert in the field to post an answer. If your answer isn't correct, you'll probably get downvoted, but otherwise, no harm done. If your answer isn't complete, that's not ideal, but it's still probably okay to post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say this: if all you can do is post a link to a web page that contains the answer, or that would be a starting point for research that would get the OP to the answer, that link doesn't constitute an answer by itself. So if you find a relevant web page, if you can extract and quote or summarize the part that actually answers the question, then do so, but otherwise, that's material for a comment, not an answer. I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57871/how-do-permanent-magnets-manage-to-focus-field-on-one-side/59258#59258&quot;&gt;last of the three answers you posted&lt;/a&gt; probably falls under this criterion, and thus probably would have been better off as a comment. (But it's accepted now, so no big deal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other two of your answers that you linked are probably fine. Although for the first one, the question seems ill-defined to me and so I personally wouldn't answer it at all until it got edited, but that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T07:48:39.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4183" CreationDate="2013-04-08T05:33:43.363" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39226/lagrangian-dynamics-with-initial-conditions-motion-of-free-particle&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; probably has one of the best answers I have received on physics.stackexchange and I think the question itself was clear enough too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator who closed it for being &quot;too localised&quot;, simply says it is because he received a flag. Is that reason enough? Surely flags are just there to get a moderator to look at it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not consider it to be &quot;localised&quot; as it's quite a bog standard Lagrangian free particle problem. Perhaps I am wrong. What about this question is localised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: question is now open again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T14:54:29.777" Title="What makes this question too localised?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4181" CreationDate="2013-04-08T05:49:15.703" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: @ChrisWhite's edits make it much better, I reopened it. After all, closing is a temporary state that can usually be escaped by editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion after skimming through it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like a homework-type problem&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. You may want to see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to show what you have tried and your level of understanding before asking a homework problem. The &quot;too localised&quot; reason is just used as a proxy for &quot;does not follow homework policy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinion after reading it in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking closer, it seems like the question didn't make much sense. It was clear that you were confused about Lagrangian mechanics; but the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; was not exactly answerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of a question of a similar type where the problem is very, &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; accentuated: &quot;How do I add numbers in General Relativity?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a localized question; nobody else will ask that. It doesn't matter if the answer &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; contain a lot of conceptual details -- this counts as &quot;accidental&quot; learning. The bare minimum answer to the numbers question is &quot;just like in normal arithmetic&quot;. Which isn't really useful to anyone. Similarly, the bare minimum answer to yours is &quot;just like in Newtonian mechanics&quot; -- not too helpful an answer. This is basically why it was too localized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that since there's already a good answer, closing doesn't change much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since your main goal is to understand how to replace NM with LM, asking &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question (which @ChrisWhite did in his edit) may make it reopenable :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to listen to flags. However, in this case, the flag was a sensible one that made the problem with the post clear. (Unfortunately I can't tell you the details of the flag itself, that's private information)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Note that it doesn't have to be homework, it's just the type that matters&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T08:09:33.117" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4181" CreationDate="2013-04-08T06:58:41.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer: as the only person involved in answering the question so far, I may have some bias.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is a good one. It is asking how Lagrangians are actually &lt;em&gt;applied&lt;/em&gt; to real problems, plain and simple, without all the clutter of conservation laws and phase spaces and other things that get theorists excited but don't always have a use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reworded the question to emphasize this interpretation and submitted it for reopening, which will require either a mod or (I think) a consensus of some low number of high rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T06:58:41.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4174" CreationDate="2013-04-10T17:03:46.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the tag wikis accessible via a search engine? Because as of now, I imagine there are plenty of people who find the answer to this question after googling it or whatever. So if you put it into a tag wiki and it isn't easily findable that seems to defeat the purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you could just lock the question, but still keep it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T17:03:46.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4188" CreationDate="2013-04-10T17:55:25.767" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; section of the FAQ the Mathjax code is missing the &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; symbols ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19979" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T18:03:22.903" Title="Minor typo(ish) in the non-meta FAQ" Tags="|bug|status-completed|site-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-04-10T18:03:22.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/11361/revisions&quot;&gt;Fixed&lt;/a&gt;. In retrospect, I should have remembered that the Chem FAQ was copied from the Physics FAQ (by me!) when I fixed &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/220/typo-in-the-faq-list#comment344_221&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and fixed it here as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T18:03:22.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-11T07:33:58.683" Score="10" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to cite a StackExchange question, in a way similar to arXiv.org for instance ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For arXiv, I can just write &lt;strong&gt;arXiv:1303.6666&lt;/strong&gt; for the article at link &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6666&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6666&lt;/a&gt; and this is easier. I'm wondering if I can use something like &lt;strong&gt;physics.SE:60738&lt;/strong&gt; for the question at link &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/60738/&quot;&gt;Towing of asteroid&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Of course, I do not want to cite a SE question inside SE, but outside, on a paper, in a presentation or during a lecture for instance. Sorry for the possible confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RELATED QUESTION: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4191/&quot;&gt;Do we want the citation tool from Math.SE?&lt;/a&gt; Here we wonder if it exist a way to format citation without writing the full link, for instance to cite a question during a lecture or a presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T16:13:47.870" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T16:13:47.870" Title="How can I cite a question in SE?" Tags="|support|faq|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4189" CreationDate="2013-04-11T07:40:30.307" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Find the &quot;cite&quot; button underneath a post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H5uHK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H5uHK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then click it, and you'll get the BiBTeX and amsrefs source for citing a post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Aj9Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T18:19:49.050" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T18:19:49.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4209" CreationDate="2013-04-11T13:29:10.393" Score="17" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4189/how-can-i-cite-a-question-in-se&quot;&gt;How can I cite a question in SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt; has a citation tool. Basically, if you click &quot;share&quot; on a post, there's a little &quot;cite&quot; link:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0OrDR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking that, you get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yEnCA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lets one properly cite a Physics.SE post in a document by the attribution rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want this? While it may not be so useful for formal journal articles, I see how it could be useful for miscellaneous documents (remember, visitors can use it too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T19:37:41.290" Title="Do we want the citation tool from Math.SE?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-11T12:10:18.520" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can not login through mobile view of stackexchange website.&#xA;when i click over login, why there is no login option through some mobile browsers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23032" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2013-04-12T08:48:34.267" LastActivityDate="2013-04-12T08:48:34.267" Title="Stackexchange General login problem (meta)" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4191" CreationDate="2013-04-11T19:41:31.033" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely. I've only been helped a few times now, but I would want to professionally acknowledge some of the most interesting answers and posters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical point of view, it is also very useful. Say, for example, one of my audience members wants to dwell deeper to an answer that I cite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16035" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T19:41:31.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4191" CreationDate="2013-04-11T19:45:30.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;absolutely! This will encourage people to present their sources which is very very important imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20629" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T19:45:30.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4198" CreationDate="2013-04-13T09:42:17.237" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen that tags have synonyms of it under it's description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I suggest a tag synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T09:45:08.387" Title="How can we suggest synonyms to tags?" Tags="|support|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4197" CreationDate="2013-04-13T09:45:08.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;You need 2500 reputation&lt;/a&gt; to create and vote on tag synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's generally much easier to ping a mod in chat or propose it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/175/tag-synonyms-for-voting?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, since nobody really monitors the synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T09:45:08.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4191" CreationDate="2013-04-13T20:18:12.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a great idea. There are lots of places besides a journal article where a proper citation is appropriate, and there are lots of reasons to cite good discussions even if they don't contain &quot;original physics&quot;. For instance, I might cite a derivation given on SE in a set of review notes, or I might provide students with a reference to a post where the author did a really good job of asking for help with a homework problem. Attribution makes SE a better resource for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1727" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T20:18:12.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4202" CreationDate="2013-04-14T03:25:16.003" Score="7" ViewCount="772" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60391/how-to-teach-myself-physics-needed-at-undergraduate-electrical-engineer-level/60401#60401&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt; less worthy than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234/how-should-a-physics-student-study-mathematics?rq=1&quot;&gt;this very similar question&lt;/a&gt; that did not get closed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions are broad and open ended yet one gets a load of upvotes and the other gets shut down.  I personally can't see a point in closing either of these questions, but the lack of consistency here, is confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T15:55:38.103" Title="Yes another closed question, question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-04-14T03:32:41.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two and a half years of evolution in site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open question was asked in November 2010, early in our beta period, when the site was undergoing its initial burst of activity and its scope was still very much in flux. So it got a bunch of upvotes and then got forgotten. Since we don't go back and review old questions for closure, it just sat there until you noticed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question falls far short of being appropriate on the site according to our modern standards, and accordingly I've closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-04-14T03:32:41.810" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2013-04-14T08:57:07.067" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should reconsider if the old standard, where some reasonable (not too broad and open ended) educational questions and well defined (by topic, level, targetted audience) and localized questions about study material / references were accepted, is not still reasonable and appropriate for our site. &lt;strong&gt;Why do this policies have to change after all, who is/are the drive(r) behind this?&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From observeations during the past few months I got the impression that the driver behind these changes towards new policies is in particular David Zaslavsky (who for some reason has always been against any study material / educational questions, which is his personal right but is this attitude a good one as a moderator), Manishearth who strongly represents the overal SE point of view, and a few other people (some are not even physicists), such as EnergyNumbers who are more interested in policies and installing new rules then learning physics themself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I strongly doubt that these &quot;new standards&quot;, which are orthogonal to the original much more reasonable and helpful policies and rules physics SE followed up to some months ago and which worked well for almost two years, are what the large majority of the community wants. The much more restrictive and intolerant &quot;new standards&quot;, which look almost hostil towards people interested in learning new physics topics, are absolutely not needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May claim thatwhat David Zaslavsky and just a few very vocal people are doing is does not have to be what the whole community (including the many people who are exclusively active on the main page because they are interested only in learning physics, instead of policies and therefore hardly ever look on meta or chat) is suported by the changing results when looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4174/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question and the fact that people ofte disagree on the main page with the current null tolerance policies. Other people seem now to be are no chiming in at EnergeNumbers post by voting and posting, that are more active on the main page and have therefore seen it only recently. One can see that there is no community consensus towards the by a few people advocated &quot;new standards&quot; at all. The whole thing has become some kind of a &quot;ruling meta community&quot; against the &quot;main page physics community&quot; issue, since many people active on the main page consider things powerful meta people want to dissalow still useful and essential to studying and researching physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst thing one can do now is (what unfortunately seems to have been started by the advocates of new policies) going back and closing all these good and helpful questions, that were very valuable once and are appreciated as very helpful by most people learning physics still today. Instead, people in power should refrain or stop hardcore enforcing these &quot;new standards&quot;, which may not be supported by the large majority of the community (including people active only on the main page!),  by hardcore null tolerance policies until the consensus is really settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that these &quot;new standards&quot;, which make the site much less helpful and partly even hostil towards people interested in seriously learning physics, are not needed at all. Everything has been well with the original much more reasonable and helpful point of view and policies until recently and I dont see a reason why these things absolutely have to change. In my opinion there is none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T15:55:38.103" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-14T11:24:03.853" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I wanted to upvote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/60672/17609&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and so I did. However, half an hour later the upvote was registered to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/28216/17609&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. I upvoted the intended answer again. Then this appeared, suggesting I upvoted yet &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/20391/17609&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E1bWo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This time I didn't do anything and after a while, coming back, I got this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tSX3S.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I've encountered this problem before. I'm using Safari 6.0.3 (on a Mac with OS X 10.8.3) and have AdBlock 2.5.61 installed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-04-14T11:24:03.853" Title="Why are my upvotes displaced?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-15T00:21:02.323" Score="2" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through questions on the home page, and I noticed this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61126/does-entanglement-not-immediately-contradict-the-theory-of-special-relativity&quot;&gt;Does entanglement not immediately contradict the theory of special relativity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it's obvious from the way the poster posed his original question that the top answer is going to make almost no sense to him whatsoever; it's far too in depth and technical (there are ways of answering the question that are more Feynman-like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet for someone who already knows a bit of physics, the answer is going to be too shallow.  There's nothing new there that a graduate student, or even most undergraduates wouldn't know (possibly the no-go theorem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... who is the target audience of this answer?  I must admit; it's well written and looks like a lot of thought went into it.  I'm just confused who is going to get value out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="960" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T09:46:04.230" Title="Who is the target audience for these answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-15T17:48:25.887" Score="-2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/564/citations-are-the-source-code-of-physics-stackexchange&quot;&gt;It has been said&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;citations are the source code of Physics.SE&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References are how citations are added to a posting.  Should we recognize good citation/reference practices via:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a badge after a fixed number of answers, voted to N-score, each with at least X references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a badge when total citations in all answers exceed Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when a moderator awards Q or A with subjectively-good ('policy') references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 'counting citations', I mean &quot;counting the number of links that are included in the body of the question or answer&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11962" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T09:36:34.330" Title="Should we have a badge / recognition of well-cited answers? Questions?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|reputation|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4206" CreationDate="2013-04-17T09:36:34.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect tracking external citations would be impractical, but I quite like the idea of an internal citation count. Having said this, frequently cited questions tend to attract high scores so the author gets credit that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@NewAlexandria: you shouldn't interpret all the comments as a *hit-storm. Rather the reverse actually, as if a question attracts a lot of discussion it usually means it's a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T09:36:34.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4205" CreationDate="2013-04-17T09:46:04.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm writing an answer I'm conscious that the answer is going to be read by lots of people over the years, so it isn't just an answer to the OP. Of course the answer needs to answer the OP's question, but I generally try to provide as broad an answer as possible to increase its interest to other people as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I think there is a limit to how simple you can make an answer. Quantum physics is hard, and if you try to answer at too simple a level you end up being misleading or you fall into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/776.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;it all happens by magic&lt;/a&gt; trap that too many TV documentaries fall into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd probably agree that Ben Crowell's answer to the question you link was too advanced to be easily understood by the OP, but the answer and the comments to it would at least provide a starting point for the OP to do some reading around. Not answering is a far bigger sin that writing too hard an answer. Whether Ben's answer was too complicated is debatable, but it's far better that he answered than if he had shrugged and moved on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T09:46:04.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4191" CreationDate="2013-04-17T19:37:41.290" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been turned on for your site and is currently live. Cheers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6410" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T19:37:41.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2013-04-18T04:13:41.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, I like @manishearth's rule of thumb.   In practice, I put up an answer that was inadequate (not wrong, but not well cited/quantified - eg, bad but fixable), and got downvoted so quickly that I pulled it before it took all my rep.   As I'm a new user, I'm now below most privs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Would have added this as a comment below @manishearth, but guess what ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22632" LastEditorUserId="22632" LastEditDate="2013-04-18T04:20:17.027" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T04:20:17.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4212" CreationDate="2013-04-21T19:17:53.787" Score="0" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a couple of (probable) improvements I would like to suggest for this fantastic site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moving closed questions &lt;em&gt;with a high number of up votes&lt;/em&gt; (for example $&amp;gt;10$) to a dedicated StackExchange site, where they would receive a single tag indicating the site where they come from (in this case, the tag would be Physics). There, the question would be alive and could receive new answers, points, etc, together with (highly voted) closed questions from the other StackExchange sites. That would be a solution for certain questions that very clearly interest us (this nobody can deny, and that's what upvotes are saying) like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27101/what-papers-should-everyone-read&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (incidentally, I have read one of the recommended papers in the first answer, and it has nearly changed my life for good, both as researcher and as physics student -which you never stop being- as well).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvoters should be forced to leave an &lt;em&gt;anonymous&lt;/em&gt; comment, otherwise the vote should only have a value of 0.2 points or similar. Only downvotes with an anonymous comment should have full consideration. That would improve the quality of bad answers, sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question/answer is really crap, it receives anyway a rainfall of downvotes (well, not always) whereas sometimes somebody drops a -1 with no explanations like a passing bird leaving an excrement, and the OP has no clue of what he/she could improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I received for example a downvote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61547/what-is-the-mathematical-justification-for-the-quadratic-approximation-to-the-en&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I don't give a damn as long as my reputation stays above a dozen of points so that I am able to post images, and also I am using an anonymous profile. But what I find annoying is not having the less clue of what could be wrong with the question... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16873" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Two suggestions to improve the quality of this fantastic site" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4211" CreationDate="2013-04-21T19:44:57.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;2 has been proposed in many different forms, many times. (See the &quot;linked&quot; sidebar &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-down-votes&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1372/is-there-anyway-we-can-require-a-person-to-write-something-to-explain-a-downvote&quot;&gt;Is there anyway we can require a person to write something to explain a downvote?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=require+downvote+comment&amp;amp;submit=search&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=require+downvote+comment&amp;amp;submit=search&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoters are &lt;em&gt;urged&lt;/em&gt; to leave a comment. We cannot force them to. Votes are supposed to be private, so forcing a comment uncloaks this. And downvoting is integral to how the system works, so putting barriers will significantly reduce it's use (not what we want). Besides, sometimes others have left a comment that says what I want to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reducing the penalty makes some sense, but in the end it's just 2 rep. Not a big deal -- you can earn a week's worth of downvotes back with a couple of answer votes. And reducing it from it's already-low value will mean that folks won't have any motivation to fix their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About making it anonymous: This &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31302/proposal-require-anonymous-comment-with-downvotes&quot;&gt;has been proposed before&lt;/a&gt;, and the answer does make a lot of sense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, I don't think I should be required to justify my decisions to&#xA;  the world. Second, you can't force someone to type a meaninful&#xA;  comment, even if you force them to type a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I'm required to enter an anonymous comment I'll just type &quot;this is&#xA;  an anonymous comment&quot; or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is, drive by downvotes aren't a large problem. You get them once or twice, and that's it. Making the system complicated to fix them creates issues. The 0.2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, regarding point 1: Interesting idea, but I doubt it would happen (it would be better if you asked on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;, but again, I don't think it will gain any traction). As a platform, SE is ill suited for such questions, places like &lt;a href=&quot;http://quora.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt; are much better for such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these questions can be salvaged: For example, the one you linked to could be modified to one with a community wiki answer containing a list. The fact that it's closed just prevents further answers, it doesn't prevent edits. Not entirely sure if this is allowed, but it's an idea. Other recommendation questions can be similarly fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-04-21T19:44:57.220" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4215" CreationDate="2013-04-22T11:35:17.620" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;When should this community wiki button be ticked while answering or edit?&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Avun.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-04-04T09:50:28.127" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="When to use Community Wiki option?" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4214" CreationDate="2013-04-22T11:40:11.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/community-wiki&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/community-wiki&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When should I make my answers Community Wiki?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you want to enhance the &amp;quot;wiki&amp;quot; aspect of your post, so that it can be a continually evolving source of good information through&#xA;repeated editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you feel your post would benefit from less concern about voting affecting the reputation of those participating in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, when you want the post to be a collaborative one. Creating a CW post basically invites radical changes and additions -- unlike normal posts, where the wiki aspect is more in grammar/formatting/small tweaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-04-22T11:40:11.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4214" CreationDate="2013-04-22T14:14:40.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CW scheme is just when you want other users to help in revision of your post. &lt;em&gt;Not for formatting,etc.&lt;/em&gt; which is already done by the fellow users - but, for improving (additional information) of your post which shouldn't be normally done by fellow users. They can edit the post for clarification. But, they can't change the post by adding additional info. There's also this historical lock (which a mod can put on a post) for the prevention of edit wars...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The influences: When a post goes beyond 10 edits, it's automatically reverted to a CW. When the post is marked by CW, additional (+) or (-) votes doesn't influence &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; precious reputation. Be sure to check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-1&lt;/strong&gt;'d user&lt;/a&gt;..! Well, he's &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; -1 in every site. He owns the CWs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've got some time, consider reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/205334&quot;&gt;What are &amp;quot;Community Wiki&amp;quot; posts?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/55888/205334&quot;&gt;When to mark the &amp;#39;community wiki&amp;#39; checkbox on a new question?&lt;/a&gt; which are themselves CWs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-04-22T14:14:40.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4219" CreationDate="2013-04-22T20:24:47.067" Score="6" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other day this topic came up in chat, so I thought it would be good to have it settled officially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, if any, internet protocol should be encouraged for users inserting links into their posts? Each option has pros and cons, some of the most relevant being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;http&lt;/code&gt; is the old standard, most likely to work for a variety of users. It is less likely to run into trouble for non-techie users behind corporate firewalls for instance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;https&lt;/code&gt; is newer (but not cutting-edge). It is more secure in the sense that you are more sure that you are receiving data from a trusted source. At the same time, it can be &lt;em&gt;slightly&lt;/em&gt; slower.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of course, anyone pro enough to actually know how their browser works under the hood (yes, you, Manishearth) can easily have their own preferences override what the link says, or do all sorts of other black magic to dodge this problem altogether (and steal my credit card at the same time, no doubt).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't think anyone believes so strongly as to mandate one or the other, and I don't even see the issue as big enough to warrant changing old posts &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt;. I'm just wondering if there is a preferred style I should be using. If there is, I can also edit links accordingly while making other, more substantive changes to posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T04:00:55.527" Title="Link preferences: http vs. https" Tags="|discussion|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4217" CreationDate="2013-04-23T03:40:57.420" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, note that very few sites offer &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; HTTP and HTTPS. There's only one that I can think of -- Wikipedia. GMail used to; but we don't link to GMail on Phys.SE and it's pure HTTPS now anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is HTTPS, and how does it work?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/a/20833/7497&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; if you're interested to know more. Or, y'know, Google it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is simply a protocol that prevents snooping and manipulation by intermediate entities on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens is that when you ask for an https website, the first thing it does is hand you a certificate. The certificate basically says &amp;quot;I am who I am&amp;quot;, and is generally digitally &amp;quot;signed&amp;quot; by some trusted entity that your browser knows(many times there are intermediate signing entities). Note that due to the signing path, this cannot be spoofed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This certificate forms the basis of all the coming cryptography -- it acts as an initial transfer of public keys. Any further transfer of data will be hidden (except for the URLs you access) using this certificate and a prime number you generated as keys. Each party has a public and private key: Using &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; private key and (say) &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia's&lt;/em&gt; public key, I can encrypt a message that can only be decrypted using my public key and Wikipedia's private key. The reverse works as well. Since the intermediate parties only have the public keys, they cannot send fake messages, nor can they read the messages being sent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When is it necessary?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't want the information you're receiving to be modified: For example if I'm downloading Chrome, I wouldn't want an attacker to sit in the middle of my connection with Google, pretend to be Google, and hand me their version of Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't want the information being sent to be snooped/modified: The easiest example of this is credit card/bank details. If I submit a form containing these details, I probably should only do so on a trusted HTTPS connection where I trust the site, and they have a security certificate verifying their identity (Most browsers display a green lock and the title of the company in the address bar). If it's not on a trusted connection, my ISP, proxy servers, and other entities in between can read these and steal my money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it necessary for https Wikipedia links?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really, no. Unless you are blindly going to use the information given on Wikipedia to do something (run some code or mess around with chemicals: you don't want Wikipedia urging you to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/4624/please-explain-why-dioxygen-difluoride-is-so-dangerous&quot;&gt;FOOF&lt;/a&gt; to your baking soda and vinegar experiment), there isn't much point in using https when you are just reading stuff. URLs are visible to men in the middle anyway, so if your government hates Wikipedia, they'll still come to know. (You can bypass this using SSH tunneling or web proxies)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia HTTPS is really meant for those who edit/contribute to Wikipedia: They are submitting passwords and other stuff and would like it to stay secure. Plus, there are those with access to privately identifying information like IPs nad emails for whom it is a matter of trying to keep private info private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:HTTPS#But_still_very_useful&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other uses&lt;/a&gt; as well. Generally, those who use HTTPS for these reasons know how to tack an s onto the URL themselves :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Does https have any problems?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep. Firstly, as you noted, it's slightly slower. Not enough to make a difference while browsing Wikipedia, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, not all proxy servers like it. Using HTTPS over an HTTP proxy (which is what most institutes and workplaces use -- SOCKS proxies are rare) requires  a protocol-switching thing known as HTTP CONNECT, and not all proxies allow that on port 443 (where HTTPS runs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those behind such proxies &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; know how to deal with this -- just chop the s right out of the URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What should our policy be?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as I mentioned, those who need https know how to enable it for Wikipedia.  The reverse doesn't always work, since when https wikipedia fails to work behind a proxy, to many it just looks like Wikipedia is down (&amp;quot;Oh no! how will I ever complete my project now!&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while we shouldn't go actively editing https out, it's great if you try to use http in your Wikipedia links. And if you are editing a post, it's fine if you replace the https as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this applies only for Wikipedia -- most sites do not have both HTTP and HTTPS at the same time, so editing a link to HTTP may break it (always check)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T15:38:47.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9610" CreationDate="2013-04-23T05:05:46.537" Score="17" ViewCount="988" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a drag having to type things like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$1.38 \times 10^{-23} \, \mathrm{JK^{-1}}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all the time. Would it be possible to have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?as_q=siunitx+package+tex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;siunitx package&lt;/a&gt; installed on this site? Then we could get the same effect with just &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\SI{1.38e-23}{J.K^{-1}}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\SI{1.38e-23}{\joule\per\kelvin}$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead, which is more readable, easier to type, and gets all the spacing right first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T17:54:09.820" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T17:54:09.820" Title="siunitx LaTeX package?" Tags="|feature-request|status-deferred|mathjax|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4220" CreationDate="2013-04-23T06:28:35.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site is using MathJax which is LaTeX in JavaScript.  This question has been asked several times on several different StackExchange sites.  It just isn't an option right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T06:28:35.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4220" CreationDate="2013-04-23T07:37:05.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathjax doesn't seem to allow the &lt;code&gt;siunitx&lt;/code&gt; extension (there are a couple of pachages like &lt;code&gt;mhchem&lt;/code&gt; which can be enabled)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for SI units, I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;this userscript&lt;/a&gt;. It lets me enclose stuff with the dollar signs via &lt;kbd&gt;Alt&lt;/kbd&gt;-&lt;kbd&gt;M&lt;/kbd&gt;, and &lt;kbd&gt;Alt&lt;/kbd&gt;-&lt;kbd&gt;S&lt;/kbd&gt; does &lt;code&gt;\:\mathrm{&amp;lt;selected text here&amp;gt;}&lt;/code&gt; for SI units. (there also are options for vector fields and double-dollarifying)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also put a feature-request &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/447&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T08:13:09.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4224" CreationDate="2013-04-23T21:33:25.913" Score="25" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tell me this isn't happening... The &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40709/astronomy&quot;&gt;Astronomy and Astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; site is in the commitment phase at 65%. That site is going to bring fragmentation and general loss of quality to the Physics site. Just have a look at some of the Top Example Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if two black holes collide? (this is the top one!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do sunspots appear dark?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) prove the Big Bang?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are extrasolar planets detected?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why can't light escape from a black hole?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the Lagrangian (libration) points?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that site reaches 100% support and is created, what will happen with such questions? Will they be migrated there? Who will &lt;strong&gt;wrongly&lt;/strong&gt; decide that the collision between two black holes is not for theoretical physicists but for astrophysicists? What is wrong with this site we have now, for such questions? Why that fragmentation? Hey, and I am myself an astrophysicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me what can be my contribution in order to help that separate site not to be created. I can see there only options to join the supporters, but I want to do the opposite...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Later:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the suggestion of @Manishearth, I have made my contribution, by posting my opinion &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6222/why-wouldnt-this-just-be-part-of-the-existing-physics-stackexchange/10195#10195&quot;&gt;there in Area 51&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps this helps convincing some potential supporters. You are encouraged to post your opinions there too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T23:43:13.847" Title="How can I downvote or counteract in any (democratic) sense the creation of the Astronomy and Astrophysics site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4223" CreationDate="2013-04-23T22:13:23.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;A bit about site overlaps&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly: Sites can have overlap regions. In such cases, posts only get migrated if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP asks for migration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question does not get (good) answers for some number of days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a mod on both Physics and Chem, I come across this fairly regularly — there are posts which are on topic on two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this isn't a matter of &lt;em&gt;overlap&lt;/em&gt; of scope, it is a matter of being a complete &lt;em&gt;subset&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Do such sites succeed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathematica.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematica.SE&lt;/a&gt; succeeded even though it was a subset site because there were a staggeringly huge number of MMA users on SO who had no interest in the rest of SO. But &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TheoreticalPhysics&lt;/a&gt; (and, more recently, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arduino.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Arduino&lt;/a&gt;) didn't. There are a lot of situation-specific reasons for these failures, though. However, when there's an established place where you can ask stuff, there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the last Astro.SE was not a full subset of Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Will Astro.SE succeed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. Last time it failed due to low activity, and there's a high chance it will this time as well. Physics is a much larger site and tends to attract people better. I personally predict that it will be closed in private beta, but I could be grossly wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is it a threat?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not really. If it does succeed, it wouldn't really harm our site. Our scope would not change, so questions asked here would stay here. Maybe the number of questions we receive in the topic would be halved. Not much of an issue -- though the astronomy subcommunity (@ChrisWhite, you, etc) may be split. (When Mathematica.SE was launched in beta, the whole SO community moved over. This did not happen with Arduino or TheoreticalPhysics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's something that you, as an astrophysicist, may even want to look forward to. Currently it is not immediately clear that Astronomy is on topic for Physics.SE. Astrophysics — yes, but astronomy is not really a part of physics (in the minds of the general public).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it fails, Physics.SE would be happy to accept their posts as we did the last time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can we do anything about it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8345/52181&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Not that I want the site to fail, but if that was enough justification for the proposal to be closed (before it wasted a lot of time), so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The banner you see on the top is because one of us pinged a community team member about the scope subset&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xArjj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would help test if the site will be able to stand on it's own later -- if Physics.SE is a more lucrative option for those willing to commit, then this makes the site less likely to succeed. The community team is good at helping sites succeed, but they also are good at identifying ones which won't. They generally give such iffy cases a chance: they at least let them have a week of private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not much more we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do: You can always post your own answer on that discussion thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T22:13:23.947" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4223" CreationDate="2013-04-23T23:43:13.847" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[What follows is support for the OP's concerns. If it is answers you seek, I have none to give, but if you seek to know more about this issue from an astrophysicist's perspective, read on.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what is irking Eduardo, and certainly what irks me, about this proposal is how it splits off &lt;strong&gt;astrophysics&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;physics&lt;/strong&gt;. Sure, there can be a site about amateur observing, naming constellations, etc., assuming it succeeds. But if you want answers about the &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;, then that is a subset of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure there are plenty of hobbyists who are interested in the underlying physics of all the pretty pictures. But professional &lt;strong&gt;astrophysics&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;astronomy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; should be handled in a professional forum if one exists. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And one already does.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; You don't need to be an amateur hobbyist to tell people what a black hole is or explain the CMB. In fact, most people who understand these concepts &lt;em&gt;don't know how to work a personal telescope&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem was there used to be a site that focused on amateur issues, with the occasional hard science question asked there that should have been asked here instead. It failed due to low popularity. Instead of accepting that the Stackexchange platform just wasn't right for that group,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; they decided to steal subject matter from this site to expand their scope. How is this anything other than direct, adversarial competition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By what logic is this proceeding anyway? Do the powers-that-be really think better answers will come from a non-general-physics site? &lt;strong&gt;Perhaps we should split off string theory while we're at it&lt;/strong&gt; - after all, string theorists are less likely than astrophysicists to reside in their university's physics department. Wouldn't want any cross-contamination or exchange of ideas from other branches of physics, now would we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only think of two possible justifications. Either (1) there is a belief that astronomy and astrophysics are somehow at the fringes of physics proper, not really belonging, which &lt;em&gt;as an astrophysicist&lt;/em&gt; I can tell you is absurd, or (2) there is a belief that astro questions would get better answers on their own site. Yet if anything this new site would lean toward the pop-sci level of explanations, which we here at physics are constantly having to refute. If you want a place for really popular questions that attract hoards of people who prefer entertaining answers to factually grounded ones, well &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is a site already dedicated to that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, this isn't an answer to the question of &quot;how do I oppose this?&quot; I myself am seeking that answer. But indeed I don't think the outrage has been voiced quite enough. I hope at the very least I've shown why this new site is something that should be opposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Yes, both. Astronomy is to astrophysics as particle experiment is to particle theory, as condensed matter experiment is to condensed matter theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; My guess is this is probably due to the fact that there are already a large number of very enthusiastic amateur groups on and off the internet, so there is a crowding-out effect in the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T23:43:13.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2013-04-24T01:36:06.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding the word &lt;em&gt;Astronomy&lt;/em&gt; might discourage people posting stuff from other branches, but perhaps the Feynman diagram and the hut potential could be substituted by a drawing of Saturn with the rings, or any other explicitly astronomical thing. That would be enough to confirm people who are insecure about posting astronomy questions, that here is the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is now, the logo is nice but not very useful in that sense: Nobody interested in the Higgs is going to doubt whether a site called PHYSICS is the appropriate place, whereas I can understand that somebody with a question concerning, say, celestial mechanics or simply a change of coordinates from equatorial to horizontal, can think of the Maths site as more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="14182" LastEditDate="2013-04-26T16:08:06.673" LastActivityDate="2013-04-26T16:08:06.673" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4228" CreationDate="2013-04-24T13:44:26.697" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IXZxi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the question in the mid colored pink?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been watching this from about an hour or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-04-24T13:47:12.440" LastActivityDate="2013-04-24T13:49:39.110" Title="Why do i see a question in pink color?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4227" CreationDate="2013-04-24T13:49:39.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably one of your favorited or frequented tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y4I7N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have any favorite tags, it will auto-choose your frequented tags(I think this was fixed, not sure). Auto favorite a nonexistant tag (I do &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frequentedtagsfail&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frequentedtagsfail&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frequentedtagsfail&lt;/a&gt;) if you want the pink to go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-04-24T13:49:39.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2013-04-26T11:44:08.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NO&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About page already states that it is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;Physics and Astronomy Questions&lt;/a&gt; and also have a tag &lt;code&gt;Astronomy&lt;/code&gt;. So, no need to change the logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics must remain Physics, Just &lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-04-26T11:44:08.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4234" CreationDate="2013-04-27T13:53:55.033" Score="4" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried &lt;code&gt;$I = 1 v / R$&lt;/code&gt; but v looks like a factor rather than unit of measurement. Does tex work in meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16114" LastEditorUserId="16114" LastEditDate="2013-04-28T07:39:22.393" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T14:08:30.200" Title="How do I format a physical quantity (unit of measurement + numerical value)?" Tags="|discussion|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4233" CreationDate="2013-04-27T14:00:56.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;code&gt;\:\mathrm{&amp;lt;units go here&amp;gt;}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$E=120\:\mathrm{kgm^2s^{-2}}$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gives &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WqfPo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;this userscript&lt;/a&gt;. It lets me enclose stuff with the dollar signs via &lt;kbd&gt;Alt&lt;/kbd&gt;-&lt;kbd&gt;M&lt;/kbd&gt;, and &lt;kbd&gt;Alt&lt;/kbd&gt;-&lt;kbd&gt;S&lt;/kbd&gt; does &lt;code&gt;\:\mathrm{&amp;lt;selected text here&amp;gt;}&lt;/code&gt; for SI units. (there also are options for vector fields and double-dollarifying)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want mathjax on meta, upvote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1119/mathjax-on-meta&quot;&gt;MathJax on Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-04-27T14:00:56.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4233" CreationDate="2013-04-27T23:51:13.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a complement to Manishearth's answer, I'll note that there are 4 standard small amounts of space available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\,$&lt;/code&gt; is 3/16 of a &quot;quad&quot; (more or less the width of &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;, or at least that was the original idea),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\:$&lt;/code&gt; is 4/16 of a quad,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\;$&lt;/code&gt; is 5/16, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\⊔$&lt;/code&gt; (that's a backslash + space) is something like 6/16 and generally agrees the best with the local interword spacing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO this last option is easiest to type, makes the source look less cluttered, and leads to smoothly flowing spacing. But all options are available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For multiple units, you probably want to separate implicit multiplications, e.g. &lt;code&gt;$\mathrm{kg\:m/s^2}$&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;$\mathrm{kg{\cdot}m/s^2}$&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides units, manual spacing most often comes up when separating the &quot;dx&quot; part of the integral, especially for people like me who use upright d's. &lt;code&gt;$\int x^2\ \mathrm{d}x$&lt;/code&gt; tends to render well on this site, though some prefer a smaller space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-04-27T23:51:13.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1536" CreationDate="2013-04-28T08:55:34.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the point between &lt;em&gt;social network&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;following an user&lt;/em&gt; actually. Is there a commonly accepted definition for a &lt;em&gt;social network&lt;/em&gt; ? I've gone on this reference [ &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network&lt;/a&gt; ] and I found nothing about the use of email address for instance. Or I badly read this long page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I also would like to be able to &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; some other users. I propose to do that the same way it is implemented for the &lt;em&gt;favourite tags&lt;/em&gt; for instance: we have a list somewhere (actually in the right of the screen) and we can filter the questions clicking on a specific tag. That would be enough for me. Moreover, I've the feeling this has nothing to do with a social activity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a social activity for instance would be to ask some questions to some other people, and they answer you... well, what a discussion is about, isn't it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T08:55:34.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1202" CreationDate="2013-04-28T09:09:51.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I partially resolved this problem using an external LaTex compiler (console, whatever it's name, I'm using Lyx actually, which is free, open source and simple to use) to write my posts in SE before submitting them. It does not entirely solve the problem in the sense that the further edits are more complicated to implement that way though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T09:09:51.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2013-04-29T05:05:40.433" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly support this, but i ask a bit more; some stylist design updates, that includes something related to astrophysics. We have the Mexican Hat potential, but we need at least something else that suggests 'space'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T05:05:40.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2013-04-30T13:30:08.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's necessary to change the logo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't single out astronomy. I personally would say that it's a regular sub-discipline of physics. Some universities do have separate astronomy departments, but by the same logic we should also add &quot;geology&quot; or&quot;geophysics&quot; to the logo, because it's an organisationally separate department at my university.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think many people will be deterred from asking questions, just because it is not in the logo. If anything, people tend to post a lot &lt;em&gt;broader&lt;/em&gt; questions than the moderators would like, and the mods then close them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to post the following as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more I fear it might be true: If we make the label &quot;astronomy&quot; more prominent, people might think &quot;oh, astrology!&quot; and start posting questions about horoscopes. (I wonder if we get many metaphysics questions on meta.physics.SE?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T13:30:08.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-30T14:03:36.093" Score="0" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a couple of controversial suspensions or bans now on this site. Current rules prevent the moderators from giving details of suspensions. This is bad, because it raises suspicions and undermines the community's trust in the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not contesting any concrete suspension, but I believe such a drastic measure should only be applied completely transparently, for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm proposing the following change of rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In case of a suspension, the reasons of suspension must be clearly stated. Any posts that lead to the suspension shall be archived and publicly displayed, unless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They contain strongly insulting, inflammatory or illegal content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The suspended member wishes them to be removed (to respect his/her privacy).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another person mentioned or involved wishes to be redacted from the posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The accused user should be allowed a statement to be posted together with the reasons of suspension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally, all of this should be displayed on the suspended user's profile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As long this is not implemented in the SE software, a meta post shall be made in prominent cases, or on request of another SE user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The new procedure can be waived in cases of minor suspensions (not more than a few days), or quick bans (e.g. spam bots).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this conflicts the moderation agreement or any other document, that document shall be modified accordingly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I know that this might be in conflict with the moderation agreement. Still, if you sympathize with my suggestion, please upvote this. Rules can be changed. If you are a moderator, and &lt;em&gt;in principle&lt;/em&gt; support this suggestion, but feel bound by the moderation agreement at the moment, please state that you think so in a comment!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this change is necessary for a more civil and democratic atmosphere especially on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note this is not meant to be a public shaming or pilloring of the suspended user.&lt;/strong&gt; Quite the contrary, the idea is to give the user his or her voice back, and let them make a plea for there case. Of course, they have the option of keeping it low profile, and have the reasons for suspension remain undisclosed (as it's handled currently). But, they also have the option to state their point of view (and let users decide what they think), or even - god forbid - write an apology or something reconciling, if the dispute has been settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefit of putting the reasons out in the open by default is that it prevents toxic speculation and suspicion about the reasons of suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="825" LastEditDate="2013-04-30T14:41:54.130" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T02:01:14.710" Title="Change of policy: Make reasons for suspensions public" Tags="|discussion|policy|suspensions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4174" CreationDate="2013-04-30T14:17:34.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is indeed broken. It's locked, so we can't add new books. Also we can't vote on them. How to fix it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Break up the giant community wiki answer into multiple answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Split it up into different questions per topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unlock the question so people can add new content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let people vote on what they recommend. Good stuff floats towards the top.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T14:17:34.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4241" CreationDate="2013-04-30T14:18:55.270" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;So basically, you want everyone who makes a mistake and has to have their access blocked for a while to be publicly pilloried for the amusement of passers-by? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sounds like fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for folks you'd actually like to see return to the site in good standing, it's probably a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T14:18:55.270" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-01T00:56:55.243" Score="9" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen questions about how to study physics or how physics should be taught being dealt with in a variety of ways. Some get downvoted, some get closed by moderators while others are even answered by moderators. Examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/19852/16660&quot;&gt;Should linear algebra and vector calculus from traditional courses be replaced with `geometric algebra`?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5508/16660&quot;&gt;How to learn physics effectively and efficiently&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/20619/16660&quot;&gt;Why is introductory physics not taught in a more &amp;quot;axiomatic&amp;quot; way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, and no doubt to new users, this is confusing and I think it might hold people back from asking a particular question. As a matter of fact, this meta question was inspired by exactly such an experience: I was thinking about the course on non-linear dynamics I took this semester and how insightful it was. It got me wondering why we spend so much time in our physics curriculum linearizing everything and then hoping to capture the interesting non-linear physics through methods like perturbation theory. Non-linear dynamics should - in my opinion - at least be touched on at the Bachelor level (no idea what that level is called in countries like the US).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was on the verge of asking a question on this subject, probing for reasons why linearity is made so important in physics education, while there is no objective reason for nature to behave that way and indeed it rarely does (well I know one reason: we can solve linear problems analytically, non-linear problems are usually too difficult mathematically). But then I stopped and realized my question would probably be closed because it doesn't really have an objective answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand that it can be hard to distinguish between an acceptable question that cannot have a truly objective answer and a question that is just effectively pointless. It's a fine line to tread. One way to solve the problem is not to tread the line at all and steer away from all such questions. Another way is to define more clearly what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; allowed and what &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; section does a good job of this already, but it's arguable that these guidelines are not follow strictly (see the examples above). So perhaps more clarity is needed and that's why I've created this question. I'm sorry for the long intro, but here's the summary of it all: precisely what is the difference between a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/education&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;education&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;education&lt;/a&gt; question and a bad one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently some questions have also been migrated to the academia beta, like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/8586&quot;&gt;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/8586&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where exactly do we draw the line between their territory and ours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After considering the answer by Larry Harson and the comments by David Zaslavsky and Manishearth, I have slightly adjusted my thoughts on the subject. (I apologize for making this question even longer, but I think it's necessary to include my own thoughts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think questions asking for &lt;strong&gt;book recommendations&lt;/strong&gt; or methods for &lt;strong&gt;studying&lt;/strong&gt; physics should probably be discouraged &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;. In general, questions specific to one person/situation are already discouraged as &quot;not constructive&quot; so that's consistent. There are other places to ask those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a platform &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; exist for questions on how physics should (not) be &lt;strong&gt;taught&lt;/strong&gt;. Whether or not that platform is Physics.SE remains a tough question to answer in general, but I think most of those questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on topic. They are definitely questions that need to be asked, because the way physics is taught greatly affects both the amount of people that get interested in physics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the level of understanding that the physicists of tomorrow have. In a very significant way, it defines the direction we take in our investigation of the physical world. So for that reason, I certainly don't think we can disallow those questions in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, (the most important) questions about how physics should be taught would probably spark debates, which is a good thing by itself but unfitting of this site's format. Therefore, the acceptable questions are probably&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not purely hypothetical&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;should&quot;-questions like &quot;Should we do B?&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but instead &lt;strong&gt;argumentably comparative&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;why&quot;-questions like &quot;Why is A preferred over B?&quot;. (not &quot;Why &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; we do B?&quot; since that's just a hypothetical question in disguise)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are still intermediary cases with questions like &quot;Is it realistic/useful to teach some elementary quantum mechanics at the high-school level?&quot;. This &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be answered with some level of objectivity by teachers, but it doesn't really have a 'right' answer. Then again, the &quot;why&quot;-questions I mentioned earlier don't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; have one either, they're just (slightly?) less subjective than the &quot;should&quot;-questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is a clear and consistent distinction between good and bad &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/education&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;education&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;education&lt;/a&gt; questions even possible? And if my above assessment constitutes a reasonable distinction, what to do with the intermediary cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:49.200" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T11:50:53.973" Title="What kind of `[education]` questions should we allow?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4241" CreationDate="2013-05-01T15:43:53.177" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand why you want this: without it there is a lack of transparency and you have to take the good intentions and allegedly judicious meditations of the moderators on trust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while I could simply refer you to the team as our oversight that only pushes the problem back a level, which is exactly the whole &lt;em&gt;&quot;Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; dilemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are at least two reasons I disagree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To defend our actions would (at least sometimes) require making public &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; things that are usually handled on the QT: flags mostly, but sometime deleted comments and user's responses to moderator messages (and the messages themselves for that matter). So the request becomes one for complete openness. Which brings me to my other source of disagreement &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the job of a moderator includes &lt;em&gt;moderating&lt;/em&gt; the discussion. Calming things down. Smoothing over the roughest edges.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That task is not well served by bringing up past conflicts or actions taken by users in the heat of the moment. At some point to keep an on-going interaction civil requires forgetfulness of old slights. And the moderators help that along with our editing and deletion super-powers and sometimes by first asking users to participate and then by giving enforced time to think it over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking us to defend those action in public will have the side effect of defeating the very purpose of them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really see a way to satisfy you that won't be as bad as the disease it is meant to cure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point soon my life is going to get more complicated, and I may take a hiatus from moderation, and which time it may be necessary to elect some more &lt;s&gt;suckers&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;willing idiots&lt;/s&gt; janitors. Perhaps you'll get the opportunity to see the sausages being made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Always a problem with physicists who are at home with fairly frank and robust exchanges of views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-05-01T15:57:40.017" LastActivityDate="2013-05-01T15:57:40.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-05-01T17:49:38.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2013-05-01T17:49:38.043" LastActivityDate="2013-05-01T17:49:38.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-05-01T17:49:38.043" Score="0" Body="For discussions about the site's scope - what questions and topics should and should not be on-topic on the site." OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T18:24:25.380" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T18:24:25.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4244" CreationDate="2013-05-03T22:21:20.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key sentence in what you wrote is: &quot;But then I stopped and realized my question would probably be closed because it doesn't really have an objective answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So those education questions that have a realistic chance of being answered objectively should be allowed, meaning people can investigate the correctness of an answer independent of the view of the person who gave the answer in the first place. Using your example, an acceptable question would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the motives behind the teaching of linear physical models as opposed to non-linear ones?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can then up-vote the answers given by actual teachers who can give their motives, and down-vote those who haven't a clue why, but love to see their ignorant opinion on screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the questions under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/education&quot;&gt;education&lt;/a&gt; tag to get an idea of how to ask successfully here, such as mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can electromagnetic momentum be introduced at pre-university level as for electromagnetic energy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-05-03T22:21:20.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4217" CreationDate="2013-05-05T04:00:55.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably a useless plug since most of Physics.SE's users do not come from China, but in China the government packet-filters all &lt;em&gt;unencrypted&lt;/em&gt; overseas links, doing slow string-searching on them for keywords and RSTing the connection when sensitive stuff is detected. Obviously this big string-searching is the huge bottleneck on all the Chinese network gateways. HTTPS Wikipedia is &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; faster for me in China than the HTTP version, and won't suddenly get its connection dropped by a firewall due to some obscure thing mistaken for an anti-government word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21436" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T04:00:55.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-05T06:56:37.803" Score="1" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an answer to a question about temperature and dimensional analysis. I am skeptical about the motivations. I cannot see at the moment if it was not just a random downvote by someone having fun. However, if I have overlooked something an broken some vital law it would get appreciated if someone with a good eye for thermo could point that out to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is just because someone does not like the style of answer I can live with that. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to answer below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45785/dimensional-analysis/63324#63324&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t temperature measured in units of energy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: and another one... Unexplained. Must be a gift!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28212/how-is-the-dynamic-equilibrium-nature-of-fermi-dirac-distribution-of-particles-f/63724#63724&quot;&gt;How is the dynamic equilibrium nature of fermi-dirac distribution of particles facilitated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T06:30:13.040" Title="Why did this post get downvoted? Dodgy Physics?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4253" CreationDate="2013-05-05T07:04:39.750" Score="5" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I enjoy having this name. It makes me feel proud if someone handles it right.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name 't Hooft is quite often misspelled on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=tHooft&quot;&gt;At least 12 questions/answers with tHooft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=t%27Hooft&quot;&gt;At least 51 questions/answers with t'Hooft or T'Hooft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least 4 questions/answers with Hooft or hooft&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feynmann occurs in at least 23 questions/answers. Feinman once. Fynman once. Einstien five times. Hawkins (not a Nobel laureate) four times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should something be done about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/112362/misspellings-of-t-hooft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a query&lt;/a&gt; that should be able to find most of these. Note that it runs on data dumps, so fixing a post on the site will not guarantee its removal from this list for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; are some remarks on his name by 't Hooft. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9491_Thooft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;9491 Thooft&lt;/a&gt; is a notable exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T16:27:30.337" Title="Should something be done about the misspelling of (e.g., Nobel laureates') names?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4252" CreationDate="2013-05-05T08:37:40.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, just edit in the correct spelling, along with any other fixes required. (In most cases a question's title also stands to be improved, or a tag can be added, so that the edit is not just the spelling correction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not specific to Nobel laureates' names, by the way - it goes for any spelling corrections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T08:37:40.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4251" CreationDate="2013-05-05T08:41:18.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's just one downvote. That is hardly reason to conclude that you have &quot;broken some vital law&quot; or any such thing. Perhaps someone just thought your answer was unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find yourself getting 4 or 5 downvotes with no explanatory comments, then perhaps it's worth asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T08:41:18.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4241" CreationDate="2013-05-06T00:34:55.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note this is not meant to be a public shaming or pilloring of the suspended user. Quite the contrary, the idea is to give the user his or her voice back, and let them make a plea for there case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that suspending and unsuspending a user is a mod-only decision, allowing the whole community to debate the issue doesn't make any sense. It only satisfies some form of morbid curiosity, potentially results in shaming the suspended users and potentially enabling mobbing of the community moderators by a clique of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has a full voice already. They can reply to the relevant users that can help them, community managers and the moderators, and ask their case to be reevaluated if they think they have been mistreated. In rare cases suspensions &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been shortened after discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind that suspensions often involve more than one user. There may be a victim. There may be more than one user suspended, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2013-05-07T02:01:14.710" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T02:01:14.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4251" CreationDate="2013-05-06T10:33:46.993" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the question and disagree with the notion that spurious, capricious, not (by physics reasons) explained downvotes are just a &quot;nonissue&quot; here because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many people have noticed them recently and asked about them on meta, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4211/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. The number of capricious potentially not by physics reasons explainable downvotes HAS increased this year and can not be neglected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Capricious not explained downvotes on perfectly good sometimes even technical posts discourage new users or people who have not a large impenetrable self confidence from posting on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes of from a physics point of view correct posts bias the general picture of the site concerning what is a correct and legitimate question or answer. Admittedly, the same is true for upvotes of wrong posts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving votes of any sign without comments is a somehow intended feature of the system, even though explaining the downvote by pointing out the error or what is otherwise wrong with the post such that it can be corrected is encouraged I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice for people who get such unexplained downvotes, is to ask on chat or meta a broader audience about what is wrong with the question or answer from a physics point of view. If anything is wrong with the post after all ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T21:46:47.307" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4259" CreationDate="2013-05-06T10:58:55.993" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;What can I do, if I note that perfectly good questions are closevoted but still open, and I dont have access to the reopen / close queues? Having access to these higher rep review queues, I could simply review it and say &quot;leave open&quot;. But what can people do who have not enough rep for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of my head I see just the following possible things one could do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Flag the question to leave open&quot; explaing why I think it is a good and legitimate question which should not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Explain in a comment below the question explaining why it should not get closed&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Start a chat or mete discussion, which might however be a bit premature if the question is still open.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do other people think what lower rep users can do best in this case, to state the opinion that the question should be left open? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T11:06:26.937" Title="What can I do if I note closevotes on a perfectly good question but have no access to the reopen / close queues?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2013-05-06T11:06:26.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is actually a perfectly good question, the chances are high that the close votes will decay and it won't be closed. Any action would be premature in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is actually closed, you have all the usual tools from flags, reopen votes to meta posts at your disposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the question is fundamendally a good question, but maybe written in an unfortunate or easily misunderstood way, editing it to make it clearer can help a lot with preventing any further close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flag is not really appropriate as moderators can only reset close votes by using the very ugly workaround of closing and immediately reopening a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T11:06:26.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-06T16:41:54.187" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Post linked with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/179167/can-we-have-a-graphing-tool-for-math-se-and-physics-se&quot;&gt;this MSO&lt;/a&gt; post&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphing tool is very important for answering and asking some questions in Physics.&#xA;Graphing tool must include the function plotting and &lt;strong&gt;drawing some free shapes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is for further discussion on this and getting the comments and suggestions on this of Physics.SE users especially. As CrisF ♦  asked to post that on Site Meta. .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T16:20:48.367" Title="Can we have a graphing tool for Physics.SE?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4262" CreationDate="2013-05-07T05:33:45.617" Score="11" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;The past days spam appears under variable user names. Is there no way to block it? IP addresses? phone numbers in content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just got a response when i tried to post only the first sentence that :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post does not meet our quality standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could those stupidities pass quality standards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T05:39:14.063" Title="is there no way to block spam coming from variable new users with the same nonsense?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4261" CreationDate="2013-05-07T05:39:14.063" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I just woke up and saw this wall of spam. I'm killing it with fire now, and I've requested blacklisting/IP banning (whichever the comm team deems necessary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the quality standards are more lenient for longer posts. A short post is more likely to fail the quality standards. They probably &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; catch such posts, but these are after all just computer algorithms, and have limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to help, just spam flag these (6 spam flags leads to an auto deletion), or post in chat. I'll try to get as many as I can myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T05:39:14.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-07T18:19:26.717" Score="10" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a little dilemma. There is simple question that came up in my actual research that I'd like to ask, but I think it's forbidden by stackexchange rules, because it has more than one correct answer. The question (from exp. particle physics) would be something along:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What data-driven methods are there to estimate the QCD multijet background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two, max. three methods that are well-known and can be described succinctly (and with references). But there might be more methods I don't know of, and these would probably be even more useful to me. I don't know all the techniques - otherwise I wouldn't be asking - so I don't know the total number of answers. But it's not open ended, in the sense that there is a small, finite number of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usually, I'd just reformulate the question slightly and pretend I didn't know the question had multiple answers&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to estimate the QCD multijet background from data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does &lt;em&gt;the technique&lt;/em&gt; work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's of course silly, and it makes the question less useful because I have to play dumb and can put less information in it. Someone will post an answer saying I have a misconception and explain two methods, and somebody else might post the third, so I'll eventually get what I want. I see this on Stackoverflow all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A third option: demand that the correct answer contains &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; techniques known to mankind. This is true to the word of the law, since there is only &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; right answer, but it's even more silly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this question and its potential answer(s) are useful, yet I fear it will be closed and downvoted quickly. &lt;strong&gt;So, what should I do?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T18:44:36.773" Title="Question with two, three right answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4263" CreationDate="2013-05-07T18:44:36.773" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with a question having more than one answer. Many questions on SE sites do. The problem is with open-ended, soft questions, where there's a large and expanding or unbounded set of possible answers, and there is no metric to judge one against another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend asking your question like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to estimate the QCD multijet background from data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(in question body)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of method X, Y, and Z, but these don't work for me because &lt;em&gt;(details)&lt;/em&gt;. Is there a method that gets around that problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more accurate way to estimate the QCD multijet background from data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of method X, Y, and Z, but those give large uncertainties. &lt;em&gt;(details)&lt;/em&gt; Is there another method that does better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or some such thing - basically, identify why you're not satisfied with existing methods and ask for a better one. The trick is to phrase it so that you're looking for a solution to a problem you have, as opposed to phrasing it as though you're just trying to collect a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you were to ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What data-driven methods are there to estimate the QCD multijet background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it'd probably be more or less okay because there is a small set of methods which could be described or summarized in one answer. Note that you don't have to require that an answer contain &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; known methods. Someone can provide an incomplete answer listing some methods, and other people can then post their own answers that build on that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T18:44:36.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-08T11:14:33.030" Score="7" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;We seem to be getting a rush of spam this morning. I see the spams quickly earn lots of downvotes but remain present. Since only 6 spam flags are required to delete the post I'm a bit surprised they manage to attract e.g. 10 downvotes without a corresponding number of spam flags. Maybe we should consider lowering the reputation necessary to flag posts as spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does downvoting a spam post actually achieve anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T11:34:33.173" Title="What reputation is needed to flag as spam?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4265" CreationDate="2013-05-08T11:25:19.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone who can downvote (125 rep) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;certainly can flag posts&lt;/a&gt; (15 rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spam flags are accompanied by a free automatic downvote (which is different from the downvote one can choose to apply).  Closing works similarly, certain close reasons (off topic and NARQ if memory serves me right) carry an automatic -1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with a certain negative score (or 3 spam flags) disappear from the main page. That's all that is really important -- an invisible spam post is harmless and can be deleted at leisure. Note that as a 10k user you can still find unhandled spam posts (and other flags) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/flagged&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T11:34:33.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-08T22:23:43.367" Score="0" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an answer provides a link to a document , website , etc. that includes a &lt;strong&gt;complete and exact&lt;/strong&gt; treatment of the problem, but the answer itself has nothing in it's body (just the link), should I accept it? As an example , see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/63692/modelling-the-movement-and-jumps-of-a-chalk-while-drawing-a-dashed-line-on-a-bla/63803#63803&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23669" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T09:53:59.980" Title="Should I accept an answer that merely includes a link to a source for the (exact and detailed) solution?" Tags="|support|answers|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4268" CreationDate="2013-05-08T22:31:33.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer really is &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; a link: no, you shouldn't accept it. Answers are supposed to be self-contained, in that the content of the answer itself should be enough to answer the question without making you follow any links. (No matter how good the solution presented in the link, it is still behind a link, and is not part of the answer.) If you see a link-only answer, flag it as not an answer, and a moderator will convert it to a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nobody is going to &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; you from accepting a link only answer, or punish you if you do so. But if you care about keeping the site a good place to get questions answered, it's best not to encourage link-only answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the example you linked to counts as a link-only answer is another issue. I suppose it is, technically, but it does include &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; beyond just the link. With an answer like that, it's probably best if the poster edits some of the content of the link into the answer. If the poster is unwilling to do so, then it could be converted to a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-05-08T23:33:14.063" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T23:33:14.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4271" CreationDate="2013-05-09T09:33:29.250" Score="5" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, there is a big wave of questions from black-magic spammers. What if there could be an option like &lt;code&gt;auto-delete user&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;prevent-spammer&lt;/code&gt; as he tries to post phrases like &lt;em&gt;&quot;black-magic, +91 (number), love, marriage&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, etc. (and a few more can be gathered) in his spam. I know that mods delete such user accounts at the instant when they see. But, is there any other way to prevent them from posting or gather a few more phrases because, mods are not around sometime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that it takes a bunch of algorithm add-ups to the engine's clockwork. But, the cloud of spam has surrounded SE (I don't know about other sites) and there are atleast 5 spams per day flooding the active list (in the front page). &lt;em&gt;I don't think this would be good in MSO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T09:49:52.457" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T09:50:08.150" Title="Auto-delete spam" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-planned|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4270" CreationDate="2013-05-09T09:50:08.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There already is a feature like this, known as blacklisting (not available to mods). SE has been notified, they're trying to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T09:50:08.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4268" CreationDate="2013-05-09T09:53:59.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is up to you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which answer you want to accept. You are completely free and even encouraged to accept the answer that fits best your needs, helps you most, and you like best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the link given in the answer makes you perfectly happy and perfectly fits your needs, just accept this answer ;-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as David said it is generally better if answers explain a bit what can be found behind the link too, but it is not a prerequisit for an answer to get upvoted and accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T09:53:59.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4274" CreationDate="2013-05-10T04:11:14.230" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/16/beta&quot;&gt;BETA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; badge which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actively participated in the private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;active&quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What is definition of &quot;active&quot; during private beta phase?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4273" CreationDate="2013-05-10T04:32:17.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exact requirements are listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Beta&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;silver; awarded once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Participate actively in a site's private beta phase&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not just 3 bronze badges anymore, but the exact requirements not disclosed to prevent users from just doing the bare minimum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not awarded on Meta sites, including Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86/why-are-beta-badges-awarded-at-all/#comment-44251&quot;&gt;Jeff's comment to his own answer to &quot;Why are beta badges awarded at all?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, for this site it's a moot point as we are no longer in private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-05-10T04:32:17.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-10T14:03:42.847" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the most voted answer floats to the top. But somehow the green mark is indirectly telling the (specially casual, unregistered) reader something like &quot;this one is better&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be good to have another mark, say in blue, adding to the most voted answer that sort of &quot;visual quality mark&quot; that the green mark adds to the elected answer. You all know that it is not uncommon that the best answer (from the point of view of the reliability and correctness of the contents) is not the one that the OP elected, but the most voted. The fact that the most voted answer appears on top of the list merely enhances its visibility, but somehow I feel that this not &quot;validating&quot; enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am talking about something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8LRfa.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the green text would better be &quot;Accepted by the OP&quot;. But that is more or less the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually this is equivalent to a system of badges (though quite simple) for the answers, with different colors: accepted, most voted, and perhaps: more than X votes, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2013-06-17T17:29:33.843" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T17:29:33.843" Title="A distinctive mark for the most voted answer" Tags="|feature-request|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4278" CreationDate="2013-05-10T20:13:28.403" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to a ask a question in PSE and in other sites like Physics Forums?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that there shouldn't be any problem, but I can be thought as favouring the competence, althought Physics doesn't distinguish this trivialities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about asking a question also in MathSE if it's very related to Physics and Maths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2013-05-10T20:24:55.950" Title="Asking in several sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4277" CreationDate="2013-05-10T20:24:55.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't ask the same question on multiple Stack Exchange sites at the same time. If you have what seems like a crossover question, figure out what site it fits best and ask it there. If, after several days, you're not getting a good response and the question is on topic for another site, then you can post it to that other site as well, but make sure to link both &quot;versions&quot; of the question to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside the SE network, it doesn't really matter. I suppose the same procedure is useful for getting your questions answered (i.e. post it to one place first), but it's not like anybody checks. If you post a question here which has already been asked on e.g. Physics Forums, it would be useful to link to the PF thread from your post on this site. (But not the other way around, because last I checked they don't want people posting links to PSE on PF - they consider it advertising.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-05-10T20:24:55.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-11T16:50:30.510" Score="18" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I very often feel the need of posting a comment to simply say thanks for some idea in a comment, like a nice reference or a pedagogic suggestion, or simply to remark that the answer I accepted was the best one but anyway the other answer was helpful too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That comments are not physics, strictly speaking they are sort of noise. Provided that one tries to restrict them to a discreet minimum, are they bad and should be avoided? (Note that I already know that comments can be upvoted, though anonymously)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tha... sorry. You see? It's difficult...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16873" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T21:17:49.267" Title="Should I avoid posting comments to simply say &quot;Thanks&quot; or &quot;It has been helpful (+1)&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4279" CreationDate="2013-05-11T17:20:51.237" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of comments is to induce improvement into the answer. If a comment has no potential to do , it's deletable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So try to  &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; posting thank-yous willy nilly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I personally encourage leaving nice comments on an answer you  find particularly exceptional (unless there already are a bunch of such comments on said answer). I've received a couple of these on answers that I thought of as ordinary. Besides givng me a warm and fuzzy feeling, they have given me insights on how to write better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So restricting them to a discreet minimum seems OK to me :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:20:51.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4279" CreationDate="2013-05-11T17:28:33.013" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people dont like such comments and say it is noise because Physics SE is not a social network, etc. etc. indeed; but I personally think they make the site more friendly, human, nice and welcoming to everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking around at Meta Stack Overflow I note that some people consider being friendly to each other by posting some additional nonessential nice comments (and even reading them) a waste of time, nuisance, etc. If I get it right this is related to the awful term &quot;Big City Problem&quot;, by which these people justify having not the time to be nice, helpful, and patient to each other by reasoning that the site is no longer a small village and related arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy that this (in my eyes unfriendly) attitude and way of thinking has not taken over here up to now, and I hope it never will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion, comments saying thanks for helpful things and more generally being friendly to each other by a few nonessential additional comments should not be restricted or even forbidden. Too long (off topic) discussions can go to chat as usual of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-05-11T17:37:27.107" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:37:27.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4279" CreationDate="2013-05-11T20:54:43.590" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying it out on @Manishearth's answer, I came to the following rule.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Post a &quot;thank you&quot;-like comment if it is &quot;upvoteable&quot;, that is, if you consider it a comment that you might &quot;upvote&quot; yourself if it was posted by somebody else.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: You &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; &quot;upvote&quot; (because you felt the same way), and therefore &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+1 This is absolutely f***ing brilliant! Jeez, I never thought about it this way! You rule!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas you probably won't &quot;upvote&quot; (and therefore probably &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+1 Thanks, that solved my problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This being meta, the community can upvote or downvote on this answer, depending on whether they like this rule or not.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastEditorUserId="17609" LastEditDate="2013-05-11T21:17:49.267" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T21:17:49.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4279" CreationDate="2013-05-11T21:15:29.447" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The social aspect is always there, and a polite collaborative environment will make people stick around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just means that you need to &lt;em&gt;package&lt;/em&gt; your comments with physics.  If it's a fantastic answer then perhaps say &quot;this is a great answer, I had not even considered applying method X to the problem in the Y reference frame when I asked the question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I see the value in wrapping up a discussion.  If someone fixes the issue you had, it's good to leave a message explaining exactly how it wrapped it up and thank the person.  Think of comments as messages for whoever will be doing housekeeping.  You can help by clearly pointing them to what is important and not important.  It may also be helpful to say why you selected it as the answer or upvoted.  For instance &quot;I was really looking for Z method here, and this answer is the only one that provides it to the full extent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T21:15:29.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2013-05-12T10:40:51.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be definitely allowed to ask such questions. This is a kind of question that works well on stackexchange - where the answers are mostly objective, with a dash subjectiveness that is experience, not opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be argued that such a question is too subjective or argumentative. But in that case, a tag wiki would be a even worse place for it, since there you can't comment / vote / post alternatives. Also tag wikis are completely indiscoverable for people who want the information, and give no incentive for contributing to people who have the information as Dilaton pointed out - but thats a different discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no harm in allowing questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What math do I need to understand X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What courses should I take before Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site will not be swamped with millions of such questions. It will not turn into Yahoo Answers. The world will not end, and Mr. Atwood will not seek bloody revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the site might prove a valuable resource for a young person somewhere who is trying to learn a new field. That should be our main goal when deciding policy - to make the site a most useful resource for physicists and physics students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T10:40:51.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2013-05-13T09:29:50.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we can have many of these questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about classic excercises you find on problem sheets, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Movement of a bead on a wire (Lagrangian mechanics)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Prove that angular momentum is conserved in two-body problem&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gravitational field of a hollow spherical-symmetric shell &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Electromagnetic field of a certain charge configuration&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Calculate the density of states in 3D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These tend to be well-formulated problems. They have canonical answers that are not trivial, but not too long. Every physics student encounters them in their studies. But they are not &quot;trade secrets&quot;, since they are documented in many books, so posting them here will not do harm to the students or their tutors. Questions like this are an easy way to generate some quality content for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While yes, in principle there could be another site (like code golf for stackoverflow), I agree with David that there are not enough contributors, and not enough questions to carry two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not arguing to open the gates on all homework-type questions. We shouldn't allow &quot;do my work&quot; questions, but rather have people ask about the specific problems they're stuck with, as we do know. But there's a big difference between &quot;do my homework&quot; questions which tend to be sloppily written and too localized, and &quot;here is an interesting problem&quot;-type questions, that are polished and have an insightful and useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2013-05-13T09:29:50.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4275" CreationDate="2013-05-14T10:39:53.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I agree with this being necessary but let me do a premise: The accepted answer does not mean that &quot;this answer is better&quot;, but rather that it's the one that helped the OP in his question/problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean it's the best answer? Maybe, but maybe there's a solution the community likes more and that gets upvoted more. This doesn't mean the OP is compelled to accept it. He could but the other one is what probably solved the problem best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinctive mark is not a bad idea per se, but I think it would just add clutter to the interface. The most voted answer is usually listed second (when sorting by score) after the accepted one. I think this makes it pretty visible to users. Note that this is not true with self-accepted answers. In that case, the sorting is done purely by votes (ignoring the check mark).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most voted answer is already easy to locate: it has the most votes. So this is why I'm not really convinced an extra mark would add that much or solve a problem (which I don't see).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to &quot;mark&quot; the most voted answer, I'd say that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This feature should be automatically done by the system. If another answer gets upvoted more, you don't want to be there to change the mark &lt;em&gt;every time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A not intrusive way could be thought. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is: if the community really wants it and it gets implemented. But I'm not convinced it's really needed. &lt;strong&gt;What issue would it address? Would it really get rid of confusion without adding &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; of it in other ways?&lt;/strong&gt; Those are the questions I'd answer before adding the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastActivityDate="2013-05-14T10:39:53.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4289" CreationDate="2013-05-14T13:47:13.590" Score="7" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have answered a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27029/simple-question-on-the-foundations-of-spin-foam-formalism/27030#27030&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It is the only answer to a reasonably up-voted question (+7), but it has not been selected as the correct one. Short of tracking down the original poster, is there any way to 1) get it marked correct or 2) increase the chances of it getting marked correct in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How to get the only answer marked as correct" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2013-05-14T14:08:51.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope. Especially since the OP deleted his/her account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry about that; but the only person who can mark an answer as accepted is the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-14T14:08:51.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2013-05-14T16:59:14.960" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Accept&quot; - that little checkmark - does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;this answer is correct.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just means the author of the question accepted it. Hence the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folks &lt;em&gt;accept&lt;/em&gt; all kinds of things. Things they find helpful, or reassuring, or funny, or insightful, or don't like but are convinced are unavoidable...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, folks accept the truth. But there's no guarantee that something is true just because someone accepts it. In particular, if there's no &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164436/is-there-a-rule-of-thumb-for-objective-questions-asked-out-of-curiosity&quot;&gt;actual problem being solved&lt;/a&gt;, the asker's opinion on answers means very little. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the asker isn't the only arbiter. Anyone with a bit of useful participation on the site can vote on answers. If your answer is getting up-voted, that probably means a lot more than the checkmark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-05-14T16:59:14.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4020" CreationDate="2013-05-15T04:46:03.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nowhere on the site itself that you can find this information. It is logged internally, but not exposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you use Stack Exchange's own OpenID provider to log in (which you do), you can view your login history there: &lt;a href=&quot;https://openid.stackexchange.com/user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://openid.stackexchange.com/user&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a different authentication provider (such as Google or Facebook), you'll have to turn to them to find your login history and associated IPs (I know Google provides this information in some fashion; not sure about anyone else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-05-15T04:46:03.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-19T01:38:03.093" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know, the logo on the tabs. It starts to shimmer and look a bit more green for tabs on the main page when left too long. Is this an intentional design change? Or am I just sleep-deprived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-05-19T02:01:04.907" Title="Is it me or is the favicon shimmering?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4292" CreationDate="2013-05-19T02:00:17.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt it's intentional, you're just sleep-deprived ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-19T02:00:17.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4292" CreationDate="2013-05-19T02:01:04.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's just you.  I just checked the file and it's really just a static bitmap, not an animated icon.  Only one icon in the file too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2013-05-19T02:01:04.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4477" CreationDate="2013-05-20T10:33:23.597" Score="3" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just noted that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; tag. What is its purpose? Does it mean that the answers are expected to be pop science level, that just the question is pop science but the answers can nevertheless be technical for people other than the OP qho can stomach them, or is it meant to characterize questions that are popular level and should attain exclusively popular level answers too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this tag meant to be the converse of the research-level tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if I like this tag, it will depend on its purpose ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really nead this tag or should we dispense with it? An additional thought is that Physics SE is not meant to serve a lay audience explicitely, it is according to the faq targetted at academics, researchers, and students of physics and astronomy ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-05-20T16:03:12.647" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T12:09:29.833" Title="What is the purpose of the popular-science tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4295" CreationDate="2013-05-20T11:18:42.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a meta tag, I think it can be safely removed (I'll get to work on it later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An additional thought is that Physics SE is not meant to serve a lay audience explicitely, it is according to the faq targetted at academics, researchers, and students of physics and astronomy ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, while we aim to serve higher level physics, this is not an argument to not allow lower physics. Otherwise topics like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/suvat-equations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;suvat-equations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suvat-equations&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/home-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;home-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;home-experiment&lt;/a&gt; would be off topic. We do not &lt;em&gt;aim&lt;/em&gt; for a large number of low level questions, but neither do we shun them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-05-20T11:18:42.780" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4298" CreationDate="2013-05-21T07:49:45.327" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it not make life easier for moderators if a banner were displayed on the right requesting users to flag spam, making clear that six flags would get rid of the offending entry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2013-05-21T08:01:51.857" Title="adding a spam flag statement on the community collumn on the right" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4297" CreationDate="2013-05-21T08:01:51.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't get much actual spam here, so even if all spam was flagged by the community, it would only relieve a &lt;em&gt;tiny&lt;/em&gt; bit of the burden on moderators. While it certainly doesn't hurt to remind people to flag things, a notice about spam flagging specifically would be taking up space that I personally think is better used for other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(What would really help is having more 3k users casting close votes, when appropriate of course, so that when questions need to be closed, it can be done by the community without moderator intervention more often.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-05-21T08:01:51.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4295" CreationDate="2013-05-21T13:57:31.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May 21st 2013:&lt;/strong&gt; So far less than 20 questions have be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot;&gt;popular-science tag&lt;/a&gt; has mostly been non-systematically attached to questions, where either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OP explicitly asked for a simplified layman explanation, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OP's question was spurred after reading/watching a pop-sci source of information (i.e.  different from a physics textbook or  physics journal).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update July 8th, 2013:&lt;/strong&gt; So far around 80 question have be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;. It is a meta tag still without a precise unanimous definition yet. Different users seem to have different opinion about what it means. Some user seems to use it to brand/mark questions negatively. Moreover, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; retagging activity is beginning to be disruptive to the main site front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these issues are not properly addressed, I recommend that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; tag is burninated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T12:09:29.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-22T00:55:19.883" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/24409/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question to remomve the reference request issue and think it should be reopend now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T09:02:58.600" Title="Can this question about anomalous dimensions and operator mixing be reopend?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2013-05-22T01:01:28.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll copy my reasoning here: while it's certainly better than it was as a resource recommendation, the question is still unfocused. It says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am looking for an explanation about the idea of &quot;operator mixing&quot; and its associated concept about when anomalous dimension has to be thought of as a matrix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it does not specify what about operator mixing needs to be explained. What about operator mixing and anomalous dimensions does the OP want to know? The definitions? What they are used for? Some particular aspect of how they are used? Etc. We're waiting for clarification from the OP about what exactly he/she wants to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T01:01:28.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2013-05-22T09:02:58.600" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a first look, one could think that the question still asks too many things in a too incoherent manner, but Mitchell Porter was able to correctly understand the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, asking about two nearly related enough concepts such as operator mixing and anomalous dimension, giving an example of what one wants to better understand from knowing these concepts (the equation in the paper), plus investigating if these two concepts are known under other names in the literature (which could be confusing) too, is legitimate and makes a lot of sense to me too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T09:02:58.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2013-05-22T12:26:37.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a problem corner inside the Main Physics Stack Exchange Site will be extremely useful and convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons being&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same people who participate in the Physics Stack Exchange will also be interested in Homework problems, And it is not aimed at a different audience. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no issues with people asking Homework Problems, barring the fact that it would end up turning into a site where Assignments will be solved, and will dilute the purpose of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site as it currently works most homework like problems end up being closed, unless the user demonstrates he has attempted to solve the question and has got stuck at some place, criterion that is fairly arbitrary in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally I feel that the community would benefit from questions based on homework like problems, But it should be done in way so that it does not cause a distraction from the main activities of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I feel something like a &quot;Problem Corner&quot; inside the Main Site, would be a nice addition. It would keep questions segregated and As Homework problems are a fair chunk of this site, It is a pity to see them closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="12798" LastEditDate="2013-05-22T13:32:43.993" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T13:32:43.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4305" CreationDate="2013-05-22T12:58:24.440" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are we allowed to ask questions that pertain to the application of physics on this site? For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the advantages and disadvantages of a Bowstring Truss Bridge?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there a different Stack Exchange Site for more engineering-oriented questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22057" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-05-22T13:09:38.277" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T19:40:46.580" Title="Can we ask applied Physics questions?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2013-05-22T15:29:04.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a minimum the question must reduce to &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt;. That is, when striped of context it must be answerable in terms of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That implies that there are a lot of engineering questions which probably should not be on physics.se. Some examples of these would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about regulatory issues. Legality and limits of various parameters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about cost or cost/other-metric issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about engineering tradeoffs, as these necessarily involve decisions beyond physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does leave room for some engineering/design questions. Strength to weight ratios, buckling limits, maximum deflection and so on. However, such questions have generally received little attention in the past. Most of our users have had limited exposure to the complexities of real-world analysis in favor of deeper understanding of microscopic physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say most of us are physicists rather than engineers and though we share a lot of common preparation there is a big difference. Heck, there is a big difference even between the real-world preparation of you garden variety experimenter and a bog-standard theorist and the engineers and machinists I work with are always careful--when they first meet me to--to probe how much I know about the real world because they've met enough physicist who are simply &lt;em&gt;dumb&lt;/em&gt; about real-world stuff to be wary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="22494" LastEditDate="2013-05-22T19:40:46.580" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T19:40:46.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4307" CreationDate="2013-05-23T21:50:43.210" Score="20" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should I answer old questions (over a year), even if they have been already answered? I think that this practice is correct, but since in many forums it is discouraged I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T09:01:42.630" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T05:37:18.583" Title="Answering old questions" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|late-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2013-05-23T21:59:52.437" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are not forums, and many of the rules which are conventional among forums don't apply here. The rule against answering old questions is one of them. So yes, you can and should answer old questions when you feel you have something to contribute, just as you would do with new questions. (Even if a question already has an accepted answer, don't let that stop you from posting another answer of your own.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, one of the guiding principles behind the design of the Stack Exchange software is to allow old questions to receive new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-05-23T21:59:52.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-26T09:20:25.157" Score="-7" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;I observed math SE is more active than physics SE. They don't close problems. I think Physics SE should encourage problem solving. Moderator should not close homework problem. This will help community to think about harder one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16941" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-05-26T14:05:14.410" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T23:22:26.080" Title="Physics SE should emphasis on problem solving" Tags="|support|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4308" CreationDate="2013-05-26T12:03:04.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Precisely, they've stopped closing homeworks and our HWs are quite less compared to Math.SE and we've got enough active users (especially me) and actively rushing mods to close those things...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Over there in Math.SE...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I observed math SE is more active than physics SE. They don't close problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, you haven't observed it right. In fact, they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1803/70397&quot;&gt;their policy&lt;/a&gt; which is more or less very &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/11062&quot;&gt;similar to ours&lt;/a&gt;. They also do expect work from users...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Show your work:&lt;/em&gt; You should definitely include any partial work you have done. This will help bolster your claim that you are not just coming here asking other people to do your homework for you, and it will help the answerers to give more clinical responses. Showing your work will help us gauge where you are having problems: if it is a technical thing near the end, a short to the point answer will suffice; if it is some fundamental problem with understanding the subject, we will then write a longer, more detailed response. It will also prevent people from spending a lot of time going over ground that you have already covered or understand well already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Math.SE is huge (populated to around 50k users) and over 140k questions (where 14k are homeworks) How good can 8 mods and 400 users (who &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; VTC) manage those questions. I mean, how many users are there who wait for someone to post a &lt;em&gt;discouragable&lt;/em&gt; homework so that they can close it? We also don't know how many users are always interested like mods (for example, in Physics.SE - users who have VTC privileges don't participate in closing questions except some 10 guys). &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9201/70397&quot;&gt;They have another discussion&lt;/a&gt; which says that they &lt;s&gt;don't&lt;/s&gt; won't encourage questions which directly restates the problem statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that they support homework questions which ask politely without just &lt;em&gt;ordering&lt;/em&gt; users to solve the problem. How do they support? They provide a simple &lt;strong&gt;Hint&lt;/strong&gt; (which can be seen in bold for HWs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither do they close (I think this is the important point). Mostly all are possibly asking direct questions and the important thing - all are giving &lt;em&gt;hints&lt;/em&gt;, because they've &amp;quot;They don't provide direct answers&amp;quot;..!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How we differ?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Physics SE should encourage problem solving. Moderator should not close homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've told us that &lt;em&gt;we should encourage&lt;/em&gt;. But, you didn't say &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Like, if someone asks &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Tell me this formula, Explain step-by-step&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, etc... then, we shouldn't close it and just do it for him..? Then, this isn't the site for the homework author. The reason for us to close direct HW questions and expect work from users is because we think we should be a barrier to the asker's creative thinking. If we're doing his work, they there's no necessity for institutions to give HWs. We can forget that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you've expressed in your question makes me feel that we're guilty and merciless that we don't reopen it again and downvote it rudely. &lt;strong&gt;NO, WE DO FEEL FOR IT&lt;/strong&gt;. If you don't know before, I'll quote the words of Manish: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The actions of moderators are reversible&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (unless they're user deletions and suspensions). I have seen many question authors (after closing their HW) editing and pinging us and we &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; reopened those. For instance, have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/47071/11062&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/47071/revisions&quot;&gt;its revisions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can see my VTC &amp;amp; my VTR...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2 more to go...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't have so many users interested in answering HW questions (for example, we aren't interested to check the answers to HW too i.e. we neither encourage nor discourage the answers) All that we are interested is in conceptual Physics. We often &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; encourage basic questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/58136/11062&quot;&gt;Does the sun rotate?&lt;/a&gt; Because, In math (no offense), but that is what they all do - &lt;strong&gt;calculation&lt;/strong&gt;. Mostly, we keep ourselves out of calculations (as far as I've seen) unless it's an interesting topic (something like this) - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62222/11062&quot;&gt;Cancelling special &amp;amp; general relativistic effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To the &lt;strong&gt;comparison:&lt;/strong&gt; Physics.SE is small, totaling to users around 14k and questions around 20k (where only 2k or so are HWs - 1:7). Because of the diffuse number of uninterested HWs and active VTC users, we're closing HW questions..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-05-26T12:03:04.687" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4308" CreationDate="2013-05-26T13:57:12.280" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me draw your attention to the first sentence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;the &quot;About&quot; page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The level of the site is defined as being interesting to serious students of the discipline,and has been that way since its inception on Area51. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This level of professionalism is similar to that maintained at Stack Overflow for programming, and they don't have any problems with scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, many people feel that the current state is &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; permissive of basic questions. I can promise you that most of these people are not interested in thrashing over the basics again and again. Indeed, many of us do some (or a lot) of that in our &quot;real&quot; life. I, personally, would not be interested in participating in the site you envision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, Physics is the third or fourth largest and most active Stack Exchange site in the &quot;Science&quot; group (including Math.SE) and growing steadily. We regularly feature in the network wide &quot;hot questions&quot; tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-05-26T13:57:12.280" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4308" CreationDate="2013-05-27T23:22:26.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stopped participating in math.SE precisely because it was being overwhelmed with homework questions. Sometimes people will post stuff on mathoverflow that's a little short of research-level, and the response is often that that's OK, because the alternative would be math.SE, which is unusable because of the huge volume of homework questions. Homework questions are allowed on physics.SE, so I don't understand the complaint. If anything, I wish I could filter them out completely so I would never see them (not just dimmed but invisible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T23:22:26.080" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4314" CreationDate="2013-05-30T13:43:35.520" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received the &quot;Critic&quot; badge for my first downvote on Main, but I am quite sure I haven't downvoted any posts yet. Glitch in the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8143" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T13:54:20.197" Title="&quot;Critic&quot; badge without downvote?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4315" CreationDate="2013-05-31T09:59:24.160" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in understanding better what it needs for a question to be removed from the close queue for good, apart from the obvious closing or deleting it. I have heard about several things vaguely but I do not understand it wll enough. For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Close votes seem to have a finite lifetime, such that they can decay and do nothing in the end&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A moderator is probaly able to remove questions from the close queue ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I guess &quot;leave open&quot; statements and &quot;close&quot; statements somehow counteract each other. Do they exactly balance each other, such that 1 &quot;leave open&quot; statement annihilates 1 &quot;close&quot; statement? If the number of &quot;close&quot; statements equals the number of &quot;leave open&quot; statements, does the question then get removed from the close queue? And related, what happens if a question has 5 &quot;close&quot; statments and say 3 &quot;leave open&quot; statements, does it then get closed? I think it should not, because the &quot;close&quot; and &quot;leave open&quot; statements should have equal weight?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, what are the mechanisms that can remove a question from the close queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW the same question(s) could be asked concerning the reopen queue, what removes question from it, how the &quot;reopen&quot; and &quot;leave closed&quot; statements counteract each other there, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-05-31T12:44:58.387" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What are the mechanisms to remove a question from the close queue?" Tags="|support|vote-to-close|review-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4312" CreationDate="2013-05-31T13:54:20.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably you've downvoted a post and removed it quickly within the grace period/ removed it after the post was improved, you'll get the critic badge for clicking that down button:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qs844.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while your profile shows 0 downs .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges are never removed once awarded,so your [&lt;code&gt;critic&lt;/code&gt;] badge doesn't go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T13:54:20.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4313" CreationDate="2013-05-31T14:22:42.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Close votes can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136989/how-do-close-votes-age-away&quot;&gt;age away&lt;/a&gt;, at which point the voter won't be able to VTC on the same question again...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can remove questions from the queue by closing them or selecting &quot;Leave Open&quot;. In the latter case, the outstanding close votes remain on the question until the question is closed or the votes age away (see #1). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a certain number (currently three) of &quot;Leave Open&quot; responses are garnered in review, the question is removed from the queue without being closed, and the outstanding close votes become eligible for aging as described in #1. A given question will be dequeued as soon as it receives &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; 3 &quot;Leave Open&quot; responses or 5 &quot;Close&quot; votes. Since close votes are not immediately deleted, it is possible for a question to be dequeued via Leave Open responses and then closed anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions will be removed from the queue if a reviewer opts to edit them. Questions can also be removed from the queue if a bounty is added, if they are locked, or if they are deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T21:02:43.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4320" CreationDate="2013-06-01T12:12:28.353" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently improved some closed questions and flagged them to reopen after the edits. Looking at my flagging history, I observe that the number of flags waiting for review has decreased but the number of helpful and declined flags have stayed the samme. And of course, not a single question has been reopend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how can these flags just have disappeared? Can they evaporate without any impact as close / reopen votes can? Or is there a possibility for moderators to &quot;actively ignore&quot; them leading to this strange behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I appreciate it if flags to reopen do not count as declined flags, but this behavior still seems strange and I'd like to know what is happening here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-06-01T12:53:35.480" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T19:17:04.440" Title="How can flags to reopen just &quot;disappear&quot;?" Tags="|support|flagging|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4321" CreationDate="2013-06-01T13:52:53.803" Score="20" ViewCount="2789" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1236/lubos-motl&quot;&gt;Luboš Motl&lt;/a&gt; has become the first ever user on Physics.Stackexchange to get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags&amp;amp;filter=gold&quot;&gt;Gold Badge for  a particular topic&lt;/a&gt; . He has earned the Gold Badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/quantum-mechanics/topusers&quot;&gt;all time top user&lt;/a&gt; in the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers for his great achievement !!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luboš Motl,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your incomparable contribution to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-06-02T17:32:52.760" Title="Congratulations Luboš Motl" Tags="|discussion|tags|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ClosedDate="2013-06-04T00:20:10.637" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4318" CreationDate="2013-06-01T19:17:04.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can't make flags vanish, and neither can the flagging user himself. Once a flag is cast, there is no way to remove it. Moderators can either decline the flag or declare it as helpful. Either way there should be an entry for that flag in your flagging history with a notice on how the flag was handled exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T19:17:04.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4319" CreationDate="2013-06-02T17:32:52.760" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot for your warm and kind words, colleagues and e-pals. I hope that there will also be contributions in the future and many people will also be made happy and fewer people will be provoked by my (and other) answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And congratulations to quantum mechanics for having earned the gold badge – this sometimes underappreciated princess of the 20th century physics deserves it and it's really her achievement, too. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1236" LastActivityDate="2013-06-02T17:32:52.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4325" CreationDate="2013-06-03T02:28:52.420" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a tag has no questions related, or misspelled, or is not about physics, what can we do about it? Is there a way to flag it? Or to ask for deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mechancis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mechancis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mechancis&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quant-ph&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quant-ph&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quant-ph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: the mechancis tag seems to have been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24774" LastEditorUserId="24774" LastEditDate="2013-06-03T03:20:21.650" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T16:03:28.960" Title="What to do with unused, misspelled, or off-subject tags" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2013-06-03T03:30:06.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a tag is misspelled or otherwise inappropriate (e.g. not about physics) and is only on one question, just suggest an edit that changes the tag to the correct spelling, or removes it, or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an inappropriate tag is on two or three questions, you can just edit them all accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a misspelled tag, or a tag which needs to be &lt;em&gt;changed&lt;/em&gt; (not removed) for some other reason is on a lot of questions, there is a process by which you can suggest a tag synonym, and the community can vote on it. But that process is fairly well hidden. So in practice, the easiest thing to do is flag one of the questions for mod attention with a custom message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a tag needs to be removed outright from a large number of questions, without any replacement, that needs mod attention. So definitely flag in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T03:30:06.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-03T07:48:49.270" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;well I am having this problem while trying to write delta symbol in the question box. I have tries using two $ signs and delta between them. but nothing happened. Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23263" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T03:55:50.473" Title="how to write delta symbol in a question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4326" CreationDate="2013-06-03T09:51:27.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is like &lt;code&gt;$\delta$&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;$\Delta$&lt;/code&gt; for capital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq#notation&lt;/a&gt; for details .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.ift.uib.no/Teori/KURS/WRK/TeX/symALL.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.ift.uib.no/Teori/KURS/WRK/TeX/symALL.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T03:55:50.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-03T19:19:02.933" Score="4" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;What applies to &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1555/changing-the-godel-tag&quot;&gt;Gödel&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; may also apply to two Schrödinger tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/schrodinger-equation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;schrodinger-equation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;schrodinger-equation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-linear-schrodinger&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-linear-schrodinger&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-linear-schrodinger&lt;/a&gt;. The third one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/schroedingers-cat&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;schroedingers-cat&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;schroedingers-cat&lt;/a&gt;, being &quot;right&quot; already. So, whatever you may think of the umlaut, as it is now, it is being &quot;translated&quot; inconsistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a good use case for a tag synonym. Should we standardize on &lt;code&gt;oe&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt;? It probably should be the former, of course, but we could run into an issue with tag length. (I think not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, after a while, a mod may make a tag synonym and merge the tags into the properly spelled ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Ignore the comments over there.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:48:33.550" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T18:21:01.860" Title="schrodinger or schroedinger tags: please standardize" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-03T19:53:35.213" Score="-1" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss&amp;#39;s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gauss's law&lt;/a&gt;, not (the) Gauss Law. I'm relying on Wikipedia here (and elsewhere), which sticks adamantly to the former. Please correct me in a comment if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that to be consistent with all other such tags, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coulombs-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coulombs-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coulombs-law&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/greens-functions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;greens-functions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;greens-functions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machs-principle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machs-principle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machs-principle&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fermis-golden-rule&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fermis-golden-rule&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fermis-golden-rule&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/braggs-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;braggs-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;braggs-law&lt;/a&gt;, it should be tagged by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gausss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gausss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gausss-law&lt;/a&gt;, not the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauss-law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks a bit funny though. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please downvote (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauss-law&lt;/a&gt;) or upvote (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gausss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gausss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gausss-law&lt;/a&gt;) if you have an opinion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-04T11:56:32.230" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T11:56:32.230" Title="gauss-law or gausss-law tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4260" CreationDate="2013-06-03T22:45:56.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could we use Wolfram Alpha as a widget embedded in answers? is that legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid multiple hits of the Wolfram website, an image cache would be generated and stored on the SO server, and updated upon edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10531" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T22:45:56.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4329" CreationDate="2013-06-04T03:36:38.957" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's standardize with &lt;code&gt;oe&lt;/code&gt;. Vote up if you agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T03:36:38.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4329" CreationDate="2013-06-04T03:38:09.117" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's standardize with &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt;. Vote up if you agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T03:38:09.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4329" CreationDate="2013-06-04T03:40:07.953" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should push to have &lt;code&gt;ö&lt;/code&gt; enabled in tags so that we can standardize with that. Vote up if you agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T03:40:07.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4330" CreationDate="2013-06-04T04:15:29.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been thought of before. The tag is spelled as it is because it looks funny the other way, that's all. Of course if apostrophes were allowed in tag names, it would be a whole different matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T04:15:29.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4330" CreationDate="2013-06-04T11:46:24.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been thought of before! The tag should be spelled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gausss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gausss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gausss-law&lt;/a&gt; because 1) apostrophes and spaces aren't allowed in tag names and 2) it looks funny. That's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T11:46:24.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-04T11:48:56.997" Score="30" ViewCount="1543" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since quite some time, the amount of new incoming higher level questions is decaying and the number of very basic ones is increasing, but the current inflood of bad homeworks (the good ones I appreciate and upvote) and very basic questions of non physicists and people who have almost no physics knowledge of their own, is unprecedented I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67008/2751&quot;&gt;A (smart) way to map out the Brillouin zone of a 2-D material&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67012/2751&quot;&gt;Newtons Cannon ball problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/55965/2751&quot;&gt;Understanding on quantum entanglement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67017/2751&quot;&gt;How is a one position shift of an interferometer fringe pattern defined?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66976/2751&quot;&gt;How much torque does it take to turn a doorknob?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66941/2751&quot;&gt;Is play-dough liquid or solid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67022/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/67022/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66938/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66938/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66918/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66918/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66856/2751&quot;&gt;Is velocity of light constant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66855/2751&quot;&gt;What exactly is implied by Einstein&amp;#39;s insight in this scene from the NOVA series &amp;quot;$E=mc^2$ Einstein&amp;#39;s Big Idea?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66829/2751&quot;&gt;Simple pendulum and planet mass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66700/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66700/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66580/2751&quot;&gt;Dry Ice in Liquid States&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66460/2751&quot;&gt;What is the sensation by man carrying a water bucker with an object floating in it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66422/2751&quot;&gt;What is the time component of velocity of a light ray?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66434/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66434/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66449/2751&quot;&gt;Is it possible to calculate distance if non-constant acceleration is unknown?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66358/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66358/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66261/2751&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s gonna happen if a nuclear bomb explodes nearby?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66225/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66225/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66209/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66209/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66208/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66208/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65471/2751&quot;&gt;Calculate the distance between two points from iPhone Camera&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65475/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65475/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65491/2751&quot;&gt;Quantum field theory quote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65519/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65519/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65439/2751&quot;&gt;What is the difference between material fatigue test with 1 sec cycle and 1 hour cycle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65568/2751&quot;&gt;How long would it take for a container in vacuum to leak half of its air?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65570/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65570/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65669/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65669/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/23294/2751&quot;&gt;How much is 1 electron-volt (eV)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/56014/2751&quot;&gt;Parallel circuits - Overall resistance decreases with additional resistor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65772/2751&quot;&gt;Does one second exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65795/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65795/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65899/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65899/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65936/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65936/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65953/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65953/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65951/2751&quot;&gt;Question about weightlessness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62260/2751&quot;&gt;Is the result of (every) research on acceleration equivalent to gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65972/2751&quot;&gt;Help me check units&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66041/2751&quot;&gt;How does the formaldehyde leak into the food from bamboo cutting board?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66070/2751&quot;&gt;Calculate heat loss of aquifer with unknown shape&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62324/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62324/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66052/2751&quot;&gt;How do you calculate the Milky Way’s galactic year?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66058/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66058/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66030/2751&quot;&gt;Temperature gradient in body&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66073/2751&quot;&gt;What units are needed for the variables when I want the result to be in $erg$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66077/2751&quot;&gt;Gravity as a river&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66109/2751&quot;&gt;In what order should unit symbols appear?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66165/2751&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66165/2751&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66210/2751&quot;&gt;Is electronics a core topic in physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, parts of them get closed or migrated, if they are just posted on the wrong site here etc ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the really worrying thing is that a not negligible part of these homework and very low level questions get (even highly) upvoted and answered by very basic answers which are upvoted too by the present population of Physics SE, and sometimes even flags saying that these questions should not be here for the one or the other reason, get declined!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The About of Physics SE still says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Physics is a question and answer site for &lt;strong&gt;active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my main question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can be done to counteract the overtaking of Physics SE by homework, very basic, and laypeople questions to make it a better and more attractive place for active researchers, academics, and students of the site topic again?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that similar questions have been asked over and over again here on Physics meta. But obviously the issue has never been seriously addressed which is, as I guess, among the possible reason for the current flood of really low level stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who ask these low level questions seem to be less knowledgeable on physics or maths than the visitors of &lt;a href=&quot;http://profmattstrassler.com/about/about-this-site-and-how-to-use-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prof Strassler's&lt;/a&gt; site the purpose of which is explicitly to explain (particle) physics to laypeople. And the atmosphere of the site starts to be &quot;Quora-like&quot;, as (almost only) short, basic, equation free, and in popular language formulated posts get high upvotes, activity, and attendance whereas slightly higher level, more sophisticated, advanced topic, and in particular technical posts almost &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/21/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;tumbleweed&lt;/a&gt; meaning they get low views, low votes, no answers, etc ... these days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bad side effect of the current state is that if this keeps going, the site will be governed by people who like and prefer this increasing basic Q&amp;amp;A, because it is them who are gaining the most rep so it will be them who have the power to closevote and access to other moderation privileges, even if they have no (deep enough) physics knowledge of their own to decide what is a good legitimate physics question and what not for example, what the (intended to be community of physicists and students) needs, etc. whereas the initially targeted by the site audience and its needs gets pushed back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, if the targeted audience should still be the one described in the About, something has to be done.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What can be done about the (current) ongoing flood of homework and very basic questions overwhelming our site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T12:01:03.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see it from both sides of the fence, as a teacher of Physics (high school) as well as being a PhD atmospheric physics student (finishing this year).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what little my view is worth, allowing basic questions may spurn continued interest in those just starting out in physics, &lt;em&gt;on the other hand&lt;/em&gt;, I can see what you mean regarding the higher level questions are often not answered - I mean, it took me putting a bounty on my question for any answer to come about (and I still don't have the full picture).  Please note, I am not saying that my question was particularly 'high level'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some food for thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T12:01:03.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T12:30:19.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just something I have recently noted. Maybe the presentation of Physics SE to people who have no account or are not logged in, is not optimally choosen to represent what the site should be (How is this view determined anyway ...)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 10 featured tags indicating what topics we have are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-field-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-field-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newton-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newton-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newton-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thermodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thermodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/particle-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;particle-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;particle-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the 10 most poular tags, they are nice good physics topics, but featuring &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; at the prominent second position could leave the wrong impression that it is a very good idea to come here for homework help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of sample questions presented to not logged in readers of Physics SE, looks very unnatural to me; it is neither the hot, nor the newest, nor the active list. All questions presented are relatively highly upvoted, but it is clearly biased towards equestion free, non technical, rather everyday-life applied questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe these two features of the view presented to not logged in visitors could be costumized a bit if needed ...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I have just learned from &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9820/36639&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; maths meta post that SE has changed the front page for not logged in visitors at around midmonth of April to optimize it to attract people who are randomly visiting the site. The list of questions presented is seemingly something like the months view, that features questions with the most views, are hot and closed questions are left out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally agree with the mathematicians, that this is not a good change for the knowledgable about the site topic people who are already on the site since it does not represent the community and the content of the site very well, available options are reduced (chat and meta are not accessible for example), etc. In addition, since it is optimized to attract people who randomly visit the site, it is rather not well suited to attract people who have a good physics knowledge of their own (leaving alone experts), so that I suspect that this change could have contributed to the current flood of very low level questions we actually have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the content (question list, featured tags, HW should be taken out) can not be changed by the physics community, a feature request to make it customable might be appropriate indeed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have asked a corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/183321/184300&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on MSO if the frontpage presented to anonymous or not logged in users could be made configurable, in order to be able to exchange tags and questions in the corresponding lists. Any support for this feature request on MSO would be highly welcome and urgently needed I think :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T15:14:10.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T13:06:10.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will not solve much problem but can be taken into account for HW askers, if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding an additional box as soon as OP adds &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; asking to &quot;add the specific doubt along with the work they've done&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KRSpF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The major problem I've seen till now is in the cases when OP don't use HW tag and someone else add it afterwards. Then it would create much problem!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T13:06:10.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T15:57:03.603" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I disagree with the specific implementation, I think userØØ7's idea does have something to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we have the page respond to users entering the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag by showing a short homework FAQ and links to the canonical meta question?&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to have new users confronted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;the homework section of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/8563&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt; meta question as soon as there is any indication that this is a low-level homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal below has been posted as a separate feature request &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4357/8563&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and has was implemented shortly afterwards. The current sidebar looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bJjMz.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be good to have links to this on the &lt;code&gt;How to Ask&lt;/code&gt; sidebar that appears when the cursor is on the question title box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0NBB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a line like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all homework questions are allowed. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/8563&quot;&gt;see the homework guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the &lt;code&gt;How to Ask&lt;/code&gt; sidebar, at least for new users, may help stem the flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: I'm quite certain we have some access to the sidebar. Cooking.se, for example, has a line like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ea2rf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T07:56:17.010" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4323" CreationDate="2013-06-04T16:03:28.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As regards the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quant-ph&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quant-ph&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quant-ph&lt;/a&gt; tag, I see a link with a MathOverflow policy which &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/ask&quot;&gt;asks all users to tag their questions using at least one arXiv subject area&lt;/a&gt;. While we don't have any such policy, I suspect some MathOverflow user applied the tag once, and it stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:54.500" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T16:03:28.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4260" CreationDate="2013-06-04T16:20:48.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As regards free-body diagrams and the like, I think users will be better off with a client-based simulator as the range of possible requirements is probably too broad for a web-based tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/23676/8563&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has good links to physics simulators. I have used Algodoo and it seems to work well (plus, it's free).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T16:20:48.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T17:05:24.670" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just go to the main page, click questions, newest, and compare the current page one with other pages from the past. I certainly see no evidence of &quot;(current) flooding&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there's a flooding of the questions you want to see here with the ones that have always been encouraged in the FAQ and are of use to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T17:05:24.670" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T17:52:17.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am impressed at the saintly patience shown by Physics SE moderators and regulars to some of the homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question, can't find it right now, gave zero evidence that the asker had tried anything. It was just a verbatim reproduction of the assignment. And to top it off, they added &quot;Due tomorrow&quot; at the bottom. The sheer gall of it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe such questions should be ignored, meaning no answers and no comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't stop the influx of &quot;do my homework&quot; people, though. Maybe a split of your Stackexchange is in order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8143" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T17:52:17.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T19:17:42.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone that has provided answers to at least one of the questions in your list, I'd say I'm fine with unsuitable questions being closed sooner rather than later than they are currently being closed.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12951" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T19:17:42.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-04T19:25:27.240" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if everyone else knows about this stuff, but I can't find any information about it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see occasional comments about one user putting something on another user's &quot;talk page&quot;.  I have some questions for a particular user that don't rise to the level of an official question (but it's not a private matter), so I'd like to use this feature.  But I can't find it anywhere.  What is it?  Does it just mean that someone has opened a chat and invited or tagged the other user or something like that?  (If so, are there best practices for that?)  Or are they friends in some other venue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for asking this is that I really like one person's formalism and want to ask that particular person for references the she/he uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I understand that chat exists, but I particularly want this one person's input, and it looks like chat doesn't really have a mechanism for that.  I certainly don't mind if other people chime in with their opinions about references, but I would like to ask one person in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8007" LastEditorUserId="8007" LastEditDate="2013-06-04T22:13:05.993" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T22:13:05.993" Title="User &quot;talk pages&quot;" Tags="|support|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4347" CreationDate="2013-06-04T21:43:09.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Talk pages exist on Wikipedia, but not here. So I'm not sure what the comments you're talking about might have been referring to. If they actually said &quot;talk page&quot; they are using the wrong terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the Stack Exchange system is designed to keep communication public and exposed to the entire community as much as possible. If you have a question for a particular user, consider posing it to the community at large instead, for example in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T21:43:09.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-04T23:11:12.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be helpful to look at what physicsforums does: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=686781&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=686781&lt;/a&gt; . They have a specific template for homework problems. They also segregate the homework in a separate area of the site's hierarchy of topics, which unfortunately probably can't be done in SE's FIFO stack design. Many people who fall within &quot;academics&quot; and &quot;active researchers [...] of physics and astronomy&quot; will probably be immediately turned off by the huge number of homework questions. One can filter out the homework questions, but newcomers don't know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, it might make sense to split physics.SE into two parts, like math.SE and mathoverflow. However, the site is still quite small, so this might be like trying to propagate a tiny sprout by taking cuttings from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T23:11:12.320" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="80" CreationDate="2013-06-05T07:22:04.103" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;physics is asking questions about nature and giving mathematical models to explain it. Philosophy is asking questions about nature and giving abstract models to explain it. In the end its about asking the right questions and giving the right answers. Since both ask questions about nature, I think they are two sides of the same coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24705" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T07:22:04.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-05T10:40:45.983" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, you're asking &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; separate questions that need to be dealt with differently. One question has to do with HW posts, and another has to do with basic posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Data&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/117932/hw-vs-non-hw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the data&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nHZct.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/16lq8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I can't cook up a query that reliably separates basic and non-basic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Analysis&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last data point is incomplete (data.SE lags behind by ~a week, and anyway June just started), so it can be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another caveat is that downvoted closed questions get deleted after 6 months or so (and can't be queried by normal means), so we probably can increase the data from before 2012 by at least 50% to account for this (most HW questions seem to get closed/downvoted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind there seems to just be a local exam-time jump (if you look closely at the data this happens every year around May), not really a net increase. This has happened in the past, and levels returned to normal afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the number of deleted HW posts may not be as I predicted above. In such a case, this data is probably not analyzable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Is there a need for something to be done, and, if so, what can be done?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, a clarification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Clarification of the About:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line in the About says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and &lt;strong&gt;students&lt;/strong&gt; of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It applies to students of all levels, not just grad students and above. A 8th grader is still a student of physics. Also, this is the &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; audience. We hope for a large number of high-level questions, yes, but we will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; discourage low-level questions or questions targeted towards the layperson. There is a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; difference between &lt;em&gt;preferring&lt;/em&gt; that a level of question is less prominent on the site and actively making it go away. The about is all about what we prefer. We won't actively discourage an audience outside of the one listed in the about only because it has the misfortune of not being there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put clearly, &lt;strong&gt;the about cannot be used as a reason to discourage a type of question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should we do something about homework questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether or not HW is on the increase, I'd always prefer a reduction in such questions. Not because of the about, but because they tend to be less conceptual. HW seems to be around 15%±5% (counting deleted questions). I'd prefer for it to be around 5% (with a better question quality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What can be done?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One simple thing to do is to solve the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows problem&lt;/a&gt; of HW qs. Currently, the main page does show up a handful of HW questions (at times, it is much more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that have a score of -3 or less disappear from the main page. So one thing that can be done is that there can be more proactive downvoting of HW posts. Try not to downvote those that follow the policy (these are rather few), but, of course, it's your choice in the end. And of course, vote/flag to close were necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, we could try being a bit more quicker in deleting HW questions where the OP is obviously not coming back. A week ought to be OK. (This may remove HW from the popular tags list)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another solutions is to get rid of the HW tag altogether. Not the policy, just the tag (IIRC some sites like CS.SE have done this). This will remove it from the popular tags list in a much cleaner manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People use the tag for filtering, however, so this may not be a great idea..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should we do something about basic questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not directly. As mentioned before, the about isn't a reason to stop accepting basic questions. It's not even a reason to &lt;em&gt;worry&lt;/em&gt; about basic questions. Of course, this site has much more value when it has a good amount of high-level activity. And we should try to maintain and improve this activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this should be done in a constructive manner. &lt;strong&gt;Not by reducing the number of basic questions, but by attempting to increase the number of high-level questions independently&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reducing the number of basic questions has an on-paper benefit; that's it. There was an increase in the theoretical-to-basic ratio on the site on paper, but we haven't improved on the theoretical bit at all. And in the process we have lost a portion of the audience that was contributing constructively to the site&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. One could argue that this isn't a constructive contribution -- I myself don't know what to say to that unless a reason was given. From what I've seen, Physics.SE provides one of the best sources of conceptual explanations at all levels on the Internet. Quora does provide a lot of layman's explanations, but Phys.SE goes above and beyond layman's explanations even for basic questions.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T02:43:31.050" CommentCount="34" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-05T11:02:21.407" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that I am convinced that my post is not a 'homework' type, I am preparing an answer that will take some information from references found.  But, my question is, as it is relevant to my answer, is it allowable (or pretentious) to include a link to one of my own published papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T11:39:54.933" Title="including own published papers in answers" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4352" CreationDate="2013-06-05T11:05:30.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/behavior&quot;&gt;the relevant section of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must [explicitly] disclose your affiliation in your answers. [E.g. it is not enough that your name is mentioned in the link.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as your post doesn't look like one big advertisement or pitch for your work, and you disclose your affiliation, it's OK :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T11:39:54.933" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4352" CreationDate="2013-06-05T11:11:07.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything wrong with it. I would encourage you to make it clear on the post if you have written (or have other connections, i.e. personal, financial or otherwise, with) any of the resources you reference, but I would definitely encourage you to include any and all references you feel are relevant to the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you should avoid self-promotion, and if it comes across as that then the community is likely to downvote you, as Manishearth points out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T11:11:07.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4356" CreationDate="2013-06-05T15:05:41.560" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;This discussion is mainly intended to focus on supporting good answerers. There are already a decent amount of question badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking that we could introduce a bronze, silver, and gold badge that's intended to reward those that consistently provide good answers. The specifics are up for discussion, but I was thinking that we would reward the badge if someone has given 20/100/500 (numbers are really only an example) answers and X% of them have a score of, say, 5 or higher. Alternatively, we could look at average or total score over all those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is that this will dissuade answers from people who don't actually know what they are talking about. Or at least, it might encourage people to be more informed when posting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My secondary hope is that this might allow people to recognize who has a history of providing good answers. If you see someone with a gold badge for consistent good answers, it gives you extra incentive to trust their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I see people like our beloved QMechanic who have some ridiculously high number of answers (and 0 questions in his case, which makes it more impressive) and most of them are highly voted. I feel that they should be rewarded for always knowing what they're talking about and only answering when they're sure of it and can back up their claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of these things can also be applied to people that ask consitently good questions, but I don't like the idea of discouraging someone from asking a question because they think it won't be voted high enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does everyone else think? Would giving out badges for having consistently good answers be a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T15:28:21.770" Title="Should we have badges supporting consistently good answerers/askers?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4355" CreationDate="2013-06-05T15:28:21.770" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are already Nice/Good/Great Answer badges, given at 10, 25 and 100 votes respectively, which can be earned multiple times on multiple questions. Users with multiple such badges can be trusted to be &quot;consistently good answerers&quot; and have already been rewarded as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags&quot;&gt;tag badges&lt;/a&gt;, which are relatively rare and which are awarded at 100/400/1000 upvotes on 20/80/200 answers with the relevant tag. I have a lot of respect for anyone with a silver tag badge or with multiple bronze tag badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore don't see a need to institute new badges. A possibility along the direction you're asking about is to highlight a user's tag badges when they answer questions on those tags. I would give a cautious &quot;no&quot; vote to that; I feel it would needlessly clutter a neat interface that works well as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than that, the concept that you'd trust better (and therefore maybe upvote and accept) answers by salient users sounds like an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appeal to authority&lt;/a&gt; fallacy to me. Good answerers are that because their answers are good, and they should (continue to) earn their upvotes, rep and badges by producing good answers and having them critically evaluated by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T15:28:21.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4673" CreationDate="2013-06-06T14:37:52.840" Score="13" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4337/8563&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about what some of us feel is a large spike in low-level homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we include a specific link to our canonical homework meta question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;How to Ask&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; sidebar that shows up when the cursor is on the question title box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0NBB.png&quot; alt=&quot;How to Ask sidebar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we add the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all homework questions are allowed. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;see the homework guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; could also be useful if it doesn't make it bulkier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand from David Zaslavsky that the moderators do not have direct access to the sidebar, and probably we need to appeal to the Stack Exchange team for this. If so, it would be good to have a strong consensus that we do want this. (Which, based on the score of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4341/8563&quot;&gt;my answer to Dilaton's question&lt;/a&gt;, seems to be the case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is definitely possible to access this sidebar: the guys at &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Seasoned Advice&lt;/a&gt; have a line like it.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ea2rf.png&quot; alt=&quot;How to Ask sidebar in Seasoned Advice&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On the other hand, it just looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/q/940/18614&quot;&gt;they just went ahead and did it&lt;/a&gt;, without any indication of how.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;do you agree on this addition to the sidebar?&lt;/strong&gt; More generally, can you think of useful modifications or parallel measures to deal with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T01:37:57.403" Title="Can we include homework guidance in the How to Ask sidebar?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4357" CreationDate="2013-06-06T14:39:19.613" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, I agree that this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Obviously, upvote if you agree and downvote if you don't.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T14:39:19.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4357" CreationDate="2013-06-06T14:56:53.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm all for the general idea, but the current proposed text is a bit ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Shog9 put it, someone looking at this may think:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Not all homework questions are allowed&quot; ... ok; does that apply to my homework question? Naw, probably just other peoples'. Those guys homework questions are awful; they don't help me at all. Good job, site, disallowing those homework questions so folks can focus on mine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my proposed alternative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you wish to ask a homework question, be sure to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;include your work and highlight your conceptual confusion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A slightly better one (credit Shog9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Include your work and highlight the concept confusing you&lt;/a&gt; when asking homework-related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T15:09:10.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4357" CreationDate="2013-06-06T17:56:55.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something with a bit more &quot;teeth&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Non-conceptual homework questions are likely to be closed. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;read the homework guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T17:56:55.360" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4363" CreationDate="2013-06-06T21:04:22.520" Score="9" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking because I have seen a couple misconceptions floating around on Physics.SE, but in a way so that it would be semi off-topic to address in answers to the post, and it is a bit too complex to get into in the comments (and also frustrating to do repeatedly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the best way to treat this would be to post a well-designed question, provide a  thorough and cited answer and then be able to link to that when the question pops up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would of course hold out on accepting my own answer as a spur to others to provide better answers, but it would at least give the option to link to a more thorough discussion on SE. Would this be frowned upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1013/should-i-post-a-question-if-i-know-the-answer-should-i-answer-my-own-questions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but different enough that I think it can still bear a little talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17556" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T21:31:11.020" Title="Should I post a question with the intent to answer it myself?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4362" CreationDate="2013-06-06T21:31:11.020" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/self-answer&quot;&gt;perfectly fine to do so&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact you can post a question and its answer all at once:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/henRC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-exchange/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T21:31:11.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4366" CreationDate="2013-06-07T04:44:22.820" Score="-1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realised that suddenly, Physics.SE and meta have both gone plain text! Even LaTeX support has disappeared! What has happened? Is this a bug or was this done for a reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It is fine now. It had been like that for around half an hour, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="25992" LastEditDate="2013-06-19T04:02:04.520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T04:02:04.520" Title="Why is Physics Stack Exchange now plain text?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T10:17:35.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4365" CreationDate="2013-06-07T04:47:12.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;CDN may have failed for your location. Or your net connection is unstable. Or your JS/CSS cache got corrupted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing that can be fixed on our side, usually waiting it out for a while works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T04:47:12.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4369" CreationDate="2013-06-07T05:16:46.383" Score="-5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just realised that the questions on the site are too mixed up together. On the main page, a question about Newtonian Mechanics is often side-by-side with a question on the standard model/general relativity/string theory etc. I think this is quite messy so a classification would be quite good. Not by tags, but by categories. According to me, the following would be a good classification (but by no means am I suggesting to be final):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-Relativistic Classical Mechanics&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Newtonian Mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thermodynamics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe statistical mechanics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wave mechanics and oscillators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hamiltonian Mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lagrangian Mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Newtonian Gravitation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maxwellian Electromagnetism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relativity&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Special Relativity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General Relativity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatives to General Relativity (Einstein-Cartan theory, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum Mechanics&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old Quantum Theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heisenberg Matrix mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schrodinger Wave mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feynman Path Integral mechanics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scattering&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quantum Field Theory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relativistic Quantum Mechanics (Klein-Gordon Equation, Weyl Equation, Dirac Equation, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum Chromodynamics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electroweak theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum Electrodynamics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Higgs theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard model&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quantum Gravity and Unification theories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;String theory &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Loop Quantum Gravity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe Kaluza-Klein?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc. (GUTs, preon models, and other attempts to Quantum Gravity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-06-10T17:59:53.267" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Classification of the questions?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-07T05:22:53.617" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use firefox (latest version) with add-on programs like no-script and adblockplus for security reasons. The problem is that I am unable to see equations written in latex in Physics stack exchange. Even if I let no-script &quot;temporarily allow&quot; the current page, I am unable to see the latex equations in mathematical symbols, only the latex commands are seen like &quot;\sqrt{...}&quot;. Please suggest how I should configure no-script so that I can see the equations properly. Thanks.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16531" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T22:17:54.123" Title="How do I see equations in latex with certain add-on softwares with firefox?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4367" CreationDate="2013-06-07T05:33:16.240" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Not gonna happen.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is built to use tags for categorization rather than a hierarchy, and this is a good thing because tagging is more flexible than hierarchies which always suffer from problems relating to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;difficult to categorize questions &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions that span disciplines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several things that you can do to control the presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19173/what-do-favorite-tags-and-ignored-tags-do&quot;&gt;Favorite and Ignored tags&lt;/a&gt; mechanism, and view the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt; rather than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;questions page&lt;/a&gt; because the front page is weighted by your favorite tags (or by your &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108224/documentation-for-frequented-tags-feature&quot;&gt;frequented tags&lt;/a&gt; if you haven't specified your favorites)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/tag-favorites-and-tag-subscriptions/&quot;&gt;tag subscriptions&lt;/a&gt; or the  &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/stack-overflow-homepage-changes/&quot;&gt;RSS feeds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/searching&quot;&gt;Search by tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T06:34:25.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-07T09:54:30.597" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to comment on people's question but there is no such option of doing so. Do I need higher reputation ? If yes then how much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23263" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What is required for commenting in someone's question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2013-06-07T09:56:12.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;50 reputation&lt;/a&gt; to comment everywhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756/how-do-comments-work&quot;&gt;How do comments work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T09:56:12.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4370" CreationDate="2013-06-07T10:39:24.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see you are at 46 rep points, so what you need to do is to post an well thought out post, demonstrating what you have found so far on the particular topic with a clear and interesting question, and hope someone upvotes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T10:39:24.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-07T12:47:53.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure how this idea will go down - but maybe with homework questions, we could provide a basic link (to HyperPhysics etc), and suggest that they bookmark those type of pages (just as I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/67357/from-the-top-of-a-400-m-high-rock-by-the-sea-a-ball-is-shot-out-in-the-horizont/67359#67359&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Then close if necessary if they do not meet the requirements as per the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much providing them with the tools, a gentle but definite hint to use the tools to help them.  All the time, not doing their homework for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T12:47:53.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4368" CreationDate="2013-06-07T22:17:54.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will need to allow scripts from &lt;code&gt;stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;, which is controlled by Stack Exchange, and from &lt;code&gt;mathjax.org&lt;/code&gt;, which is controlled by the MathJax developers, in order to see equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The page also uses scripts from &lt;code&gt;sstatic.net&lt;/code&gt;, which is also controlled by Stack Exchange, and &lt;code&gt;ajax.googleapis.com&lt;/code&gt;, which is controlled by Google (but is not directly part of their tracking infrastructure). You don't need these for the equations to appear, but they do enable other functionality on the page so I recommend allowing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T22:17:54.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-08T11:22:36.793" Score="2" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as a most recent example (I could give many more posted by other users too), &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/18679/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; &quot;answer&quot; does not answer the question, brings up confused rhetoric intended to troll about fundamental physics generally, and the only logical interpretation of the link in this &quot;answer&quot; is that it is meant to troll about string theory, which is not even the topic of the question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/6032/zephir&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; user states in his profile, that he is a &quot;aether wave theorist&quot; which clearly says that he has his own by mainstream physicists not accepted personal nonsense theory, which he advertises indeed here on Physics SE as one can see when looking at his other &quot;not a real answers&quot; he posts to fundamental physics questions. From physics blogs, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://profmattstrassler.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prof Strassler&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://resonaances.blogspot.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Resonaances&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cosmic Variance&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.vixra.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Gibbs&lt;/a&gt;, etc as well as from his comments below popular news articles about fundamental physics, this particular user is well known for his &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trolling&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28Internet%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flaming&lt;/a&gt; to interrupt serious physics discussions and for his attack against mainstream physicists and their work as well as promoting his personal fringe theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples of questions, where people abuse the answer feature in the same way, as can for example be seen by looking at the answers with negative score of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/15/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/19089/2751&quot;&gt;&quot;answer&quot;&lt;/a&gt; of a user who calls himself Albert Z, another troll well known in the physics blogosphere, is even upvoted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I flag such posts, because they do not answer the question, are trolling about accepted mainstream physics and/or advertize personal nonsense theories, or because the particular user posts such things repeatedly at different questions too, my flags are often decline by a moderator who says &quot; &lt;em&gt;A moderator has looked at it but there is no evidence&lt;/em&gt; &quot; or something along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As the corresponding flags are declined, what else can I do to indicate that there is a problem with these posts and maybe even with a particular user who posts such &quot;not a real answers&quot; to different question about particular topics on the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Declining these flags and denying that there is a problem with these posts/user gives the (I really hope wrong!) impression that Physics SE tolerates and even protects (!) such a behavior. This impression is reinforced by noting that we have a not negligible number of people who even upvote such posts...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always thought that Physics SE is for doing physics seriously, and that in contrast to some blogs, forums, discussions below popular news articles, etc where it is ok for people to rather state their personal wrong/bad informed opinions, attack mainstream physics, advertize personal fringe theories, to troll and flame, etc should be kept out from Physics SE such that people seriously interested in learning about all (!) topics of physics can do so undisturbed by such negative, nonconstructive, and disruptive behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I getting wrong here? Is Physics SE really tolerating this bad behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are trolling questions too sometimes, but they can be flagged as not constructive, not a real question, offensive if they are really bad etc, but equivalent flagging options to point out such inappropriate behaviour in answers are missing...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T18:05:30.450" Title="What can I do if I note that answers are abused to troll, flame, and/or advertise personal nonsense theories?" Tags="|discussion|policy|best-practices|etiquette|ethics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4375" CreationDate="2013-06-08T13:00:55.580" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone is advertising a non-mainstream theory with their posts, flag it with a custom message. While it is not the job of moderators to sift correct from wrong, we do indeed delete material that advertises pet theories as per our faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the &quot;line of thought&quot; answer: It doesn't look like trolling to me, but it seems deletable (or converted to a comment) as not an answer. The xkcd comic is not an indication of trolling. I'll wait for input from the other mods on this one before doing anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding Albert Z's answer, again, it's not trolling. While his point may be tongue-in-cheek, it doesn't immediately come off as an attempt to troll. Of course, if you have come across this user before and know that he is a troll, your perception will be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We try not to let a users behavior off-site dictate how we deal with them here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same &quot;disprove string theory question&quot;, I deleted an answer that basically said &quot;no, because we'd need huge accelerators first&quot;. I didn't delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/41112/7433&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; because it may be wrong, but it isn't trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because a post is against a theory that you approve of doesn't make it trolling. In this case, it's not propagating non-mainstream physics, it is simply casting doubt on String theory. Perfectly OK, as long as it doesn't start a flamewar. I recall that you had complained about another question before as trolling, just because it partially casted doubt on the framework of physics. Simply casting doubt or attempting to understand by exposing weak points is NOT trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T13:00:55.580" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4375" CreationDate="2013-06-08T18:05:30.450" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I should point out that one of the canned reasons for declining a flag is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should vote wrong answers down. If this kind of nonsense is buried with net scores far into the negative range it simply doesn't matter if this guy is at all serious because no one will mistake the site for endorsing the material contained there in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T18:05:30.450" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2013-06-09T02:11:32.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made some points about a separate problem section, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/931/how-about-a-physics-problems-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How about a &amp;quot;physics problems&amp;quot; stack exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not wanting to repeat I will summerize, I think that a separated problem(Homework) section will, keep the site better organized. From Mannisheath graphs point to, percentage of Homework Question has reached roughly 20 pc and likely to Increase Further. I would like it to be separated from the Main site, to avoid clutter and the people who arnt interested Text Book like questions can safely skip them. Ofcourse, It does not make sense to start a new site for homework questions, as it does not address a very different audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.157" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T12:54:35.980" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-09T14:52:47.413" Score="4" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;As things stand at present, questions of people who have almost no physics knowledge of their own, who are looking for help in solving a particular problem (homeworky), are mixed up with questions of physics students (university level) up to research level questions on Physics SE, so things have become too messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably due to the fact, that two differenc kinds of audiences have developed on this site in the course of time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand we have nicely curious people who are not physicists, but who are interested to learn at a rather popular equation free level what physics is about, people who like to find answers to some applied everyday problems from a physics point of view, younger (not yet university level) students who have just started to build up a basic physics knowledge, and people who are looking for help in solving concrete problems they face (homeworky).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is an audience consisting of university level physics students, academics, and researchers, who like to do physics at a more advanced technical, mathematical, up to research level.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these two &quot;subaudiences&quot; seems to be very happy with the present situation since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People more interested in popular, basic Q&amp;amp;A of physics and problem solving, see their questions often closed and not that well recieved&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To people more interested in higher level, technical, up to research level questions, the site looks cluttered with too basic posts they are not interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That this is a real issue by now can be seen from relatively recent meta questions such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4308/2751&quot;&gt;Physics SE should emphasis on problem solving&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/931/2751&quot;&gt;How about a &amp;quot;physics problems&amp;quot; stack exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and most recently this one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4337/2751&quot;&gt;What can be done about the (current) ongoing flood of homework and very basic questions overwhelming our site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So can there, just for Physics SE, something like an internal tag filtered minisite* be implemented, to better structure and improve the perception and experience of the site for both of the two audiences?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &quot;subaudience&quot;, which makes up the larger part of the present overall community, could take the role of the main Physics SE, whereas the smaller &quot;subaudience&quot; could be sent to the internal minisite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With such an internal minisite implemented into Physics SE, people interested in more technical, higher level Q&amp;amp;A could focus on exactly this without having to dig through a large amount of posts they are not interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, the criteria on allowed problem (or homework) questions, and the previous knowledge expacted to come here could be relaxed for the other group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the present overall community is probably not large enough to be splitted into two full SE sites, the minisite approach would in my opinion be &lt;strong&gt;the perfect solution&lt;/strong&gt; to better serve both of the two audiences we now have on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**PS: I am not too sure how such a minisite works technically. Manishearth gave this short explanation of an example:  Basically: It's one minisite. Facebook had an agreement with SE that their developers would also help on questions regarding the FB API. With this agreement, SE made a tag-filtered facebook* website, so that FB devs could get their own place. If it works by putting everything with a certain tag on the minisite, it is hopfully not so complicated to implement this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Feature request: An internal minisite to help Physics SE better serve the two different audiences it now has" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4379" CreationDate="2013-06-09T18:24:47.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once again, there are two requests here. One is for a minisite separating basic questions from high level ones, and one is just a nohomework.physics.SE minisite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Separation of &amp;quot;basic&amp;quot; questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within SE rules, this isn't possible. tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/advanced&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;advanced&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;advanced&lt;/a&gt; are not allowed, as they are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tags&lt;/a&gt;. Even if it were allowed, it would involve massive retagging efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing it within the current tag system is not possible as topics can't easily be separated into &amp;quot;basic&amp;quot; &amp;quot;non basic&amp;quot;. Besides, the border is very fuzzy, and it varies from person to person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think this can be realistically implemented. A hidden &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/minisite&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;minisite&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;minisite&lt;/a&gt; tag could work, but it would require non-trivial changes from the devs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Separation of homework&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean that there will be a no-homework sub-site. I personally hope that a combination of minor changes (proactively deleting old closed HW, being a bit stricter on the policy, etc) may mitigate the issue enough without a subsite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A few more thoughts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of some of the discussions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/187/theoretical-physics-merge-with-physics&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Separating the communities can seem elitist to many, and I myself don't think that it's an ideal way to solve the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the flaws with this is that it gives off the impression that we are leaving the basic portion of the community to die as we go off to greener pastures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally am really wary of splitting the communities in any manner, even if its by minisite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T18:24:47.773" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4379" CreationDate="2013-06-09T18:59:58.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of discussion about splitting of communities, and I personally am not in favor of split communities. I would however like better organisation within the site itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so called elementary questions are very important to address. Each of you would have asked elementary questions in the past else you will not be in a position to answer more advanced questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is of concern is, the site is getting disorganized. The elementary questions are not getting enough attention and/or getting closed. I think every question that is well posed and precise must have a place in this Site, however elementary or advanced it maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, It is an unpleasant sight to see questions of the nature &quot;How does one derive keplers laws from newtons laws of gravitation?&quot;, which is a very valid and precise, mixed with current research topics. but if there is a clear segregation between more advanced and text book level questions that would help organization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, the intention is not to split the community, But rather to keep it together. I think  what will come out is elementary questions will be addressed with lot of patience from interested people. It would be really bad idea to split to community as people who can answer so called elementary question are the same ones who can answer the advanced questions. It an issue of organization of clutter in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="12798" LastEditDate="2013-06-09T19:28:10.070" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T19:28:10.070" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-09T20:29:42.637" Score="10" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a large number of threads recently(And not so recently) &#xA;like &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4337/&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4308/&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4367/&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4379/&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 Issues, As I see it, The homework Level questions are being closed by the moderators often, even if they are precisely posed and well defined.(Link 2)&#xA;And they do not get the attention they deserve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second is, The site is getting cluttered. On an average day it sees, ~40 questions and tends get very cluttered, and many interesting questions do not stay long enough for people to take notice.(Link 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some suggestions including my own( Link 3,4). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you think physics stack exchange will scale as time passes? Do you think it will be able to handle say twice or thrice the amount of traffic, Which is only a matter of time.(There has been a 3 fold increase in questions since 2011) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you find the site to be getting cluttered? If so, Can Something be done about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T21:58:16.903" Title="Is Physics Stack Exchange getting Cluttered?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4382" CreationDate="2013-06-09T21:58:16.903" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the clutter issue falls on the end user. By choosing favorite tags and ignored tags (and hiding the ignored tags if it pleases you), it's very easy for me to find what I would like, even though my interest area doesn't have many questions that come in (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluid-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one suggestion I would make is getting the &quot;Interesting&quot; tab on the physics.SE site (and honestly, on all of them) like there is on SO. This tab only pulls in questions that I would be interested in based on my tags and history. If that could be added to all SE sites, it should solve the problem provided end users set up their preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the first issue you raised, the idea that too many homework problems are being closed, I think the community has already resolved that. The link you posted is heavily downvoted indicating the community disagrees with the idea that more basic questions should be encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not here to help with homework problems. We are here, however, to assist people in understanding the concepts that are the foundation of all aspects of physics. So, some homework questions are allowed. But only if they show considerable effort on the part of the person asking, and only if they are limited to asking for help understanding the underlying physical principles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T21:58:16.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4385" CreationDate="2013-06-09T22:41:03.240" Score="13" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow has a tab for questions entitled &quot;Interesting&quot; that is based on favorited tags and history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uhYv2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Interesting tab&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to get said tab on physics.SE based on recent discussions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4382/is-physics-stack-exchange-getting-cluttered&quot;&gt;Is Physics Stack Exchange getting Cluttered?&lt;/a&gt; in order to help users organize the questions better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-06-10T04:18:16.917" Title="Add &quot;Interesting&quot; questions tab to front page" Tags="|feature-request|status-deferred|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4384" CreationDate="2013-06-10T04:18:16.917" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current setup for the &quot;interesting&quot; tab looks at the last 3,000 posts, using &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/stack-overflow-homepage-changes/&quot;&gt;various user- and post-specific metrics&lt;/a&gt; to display 90 personalized posts; that makes sense, since Stack Overflow gets over twice that every day. We could look at less than that, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...At 42 questions per day, Physics.SE's homepage already displays most recent activity on the site... to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;. The logic used for the &quot;interesting&quot; tab as it's currently set up wouldn't accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been looking at different ways to customize the homepage; &lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinmontrose.com/2013/05/22/your-future-on-stack-overflow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this is still very much experimental&lt;/a&gt;, but at some point we hope to have something better than either the current home page or SO's &quot;interesting&quot; tab. Until then...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-06-10T04:18:16.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-11T15:33:44.063" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a sudden increment in the close vote queue (minimum 10 per day, upto 15 or so) for the past few days. Maybe people (except a few) haven't noticed that mods are having a vacation. I can feel their absence in the active page. They haven't informed anything about this to the community...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manish told &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/9811294#9811294&quot;&gt;me&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/9825883#9825883&quot;&gt;Chris&lt;/a&gt; that they're off to see if the community is interested in reviewing close votes. As far as I've seen, only a few users are interested in reviewing close votes and even less members in reviewing reopen votes (as it requires somewhat deeper look into the post). They are right about the evaluation of community. As it looks like a good decision, I honor it. But, for how long?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are they doing now? (&lt;em&gt;Actually, where are they?&lt;/em&gt; :D) Is this some kind of &lt;em&gt;secret spying?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, a humble message to my fellow users...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;C'mon guys, Please spend a few minutes reviewing...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2921/11062&quot;&gt;We don't just ask &amp;amp; answer. We can help it grow&lt;/a&gt; ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T18:33:52.793" Title="Moderators enjoying their vacation? (especially without any message)" Tags="|discussion|moderators|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4386" CreationDate="2013-06-11T16:15:12.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to be one of the more active mods in the queues. When I went on my 1.5 week vacation, my binding vote was lost and thus many posts in the CV queues stayed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, it seems that the others withdrew a bit more from CVing. We've always tried to &quot;wait for a couple of CVs to trickle in&quot;; nothing new in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that there was any communication on this; it was more of a coincidence. I was away for that time, and one other mod was also quite busy. That may be enough to account for the jump of the queue to 40 when I got back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, after coming back I noticed that there had been quite a few community closes and a bunch of 4 vote qs as well. Which is quite good, I hadn't expected that. So I continued to ignore the CV queue. I would visit it now and then to take out a few questions, and I would sometimes act on some flags. But that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the other mods looked at it in the same manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn't really a communicated decision of the mods. If necessary, I don't have an issue with returning to the queue. I already am keeping it at a manageable level and completing 4-community-vote closes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this wasn't a communicated decision, &quot;how long&quot; isn't really known. It would be good to see how many community closes we can get in another week, IMO. If questions are taking less than a day to get community closed, then we may not need to actively VTC at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, if the community really feels that we should just actively close everything that needs to be, I personally don't mind doing it. Just that it will be harder to scale as the site grows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, it's a mods job to handle what the community can't. On most sites, closing is not done by mods, it is instead (mostly) done by the community. If we can get there, the mod can then focus on more important things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, we're still here. Doing various things -- there are other things to deal with than closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T16:15:12.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4386" CreationDate="2013-06-11T18:13:31.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're not on vacation (well, Qmechanic is this week, but that's unrelated). And this has actually been going on for more than a few days. It was actually a few weeks ago that I noticed, as did the other mods (I presume), that we started getting some questions closed with three, four, or five community votes. So we're backing off the closing intentionally, to push the burden of closure on to the community. (To some extent. It's a gradual process.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-06-11T18:33:52.793" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T18:33:52.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4390" CreationDate="2013-06-12T06:43:44.457" Score="2" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add the small &lt;a href=&quot;http://mirror.unl.edu/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/carlisle/slashed.sty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'slashed'&lt;/a&gt; package to the SE latex environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23339" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T07:18:02.537" Title="Addition of '\slashed{}' to Latex engine" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-06-12T07:18:09.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4389" CreationDate="2013-06-12T07:18:02.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not under our control. You can submit a new feature request for MathJax &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T07:18:02.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4392" CreationDate="2013-06-12T08:27:51.290" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question regarding a solution to a differential equation I came to when trying to solve the motion equation of a single body in a gravitational potential:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/415467/how-to-solve-the-differential-equation-for-the-motion-equation-of-a-body-in-a-gr&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/415467/how-to-solve-the-differential-equation-for-the-motion-equation-of-a-body-in-a-gr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I wanted to ask that question here, but since the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; arges to use Math.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG just because your question involves math! If your question is on simplification of a mathematical expression, please ask it at math.stackexchange.com Mathematical physics is the application of mathematics to problems in physics and mathematical methods suitable for such applications [...]. It also includes the study of problems inspired by physics within a mathematically rigorous framework [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the question in Math.SE, but the quaestion over-there isn't answered and doesn't get a lot of attention, I believe that it'll get better (any) answers here. Should I migrate the question from Math.SE to Physics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21536" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T09:04:47.490" Title="should I migrate my question from Math.SE here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4391" CreationDate="2013-06-12T09:04:47.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You seem to have managed the physics part, so the question is just asking for a solution to a given D.E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, &quot;how do I solve this&quot; is sort of off topic on Physics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insted, I suggest you place a bounty on the question on MSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T09:04:47.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-12T17:02:55.570" Score="5" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extremely niche thing here that hardly affects anyone at all, but seems worth reporting to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reviewing a suggested edit (number 3 in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/67765/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;) in side-by-side mode. One of the fixes had changed the source from something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$x = 3$ and $y = 5$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$x = 3$$ and $$y = 5$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The side-by-side display seems to miss the second and third &lt;code&gt;$$&lt;/code&gt; symbols, concatenating both equations and the &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; into a single equation, which makes it somewhat difficult to see what the change is doing. At first glance it looks like the edit ruined everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more dramatic effect can be seen in the second revision, where the side-by-side display thinks entire sentences are inside math mode and so makes everything look like line noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this display mode is trying to strike a tricky balance between displaying changes in source and showing things as formatted where possible, but in cases like this, it doesn't help at all in the review process. Is there any fix for the parsing so that the segregation between text and math is respected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T17:02:55.570" Title="Parsing of revisions involving insertion of dollar signs" Tags="|bug|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-12T18:40:36.733" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen that a tag &lt;em&gt;polarization&lt;/em&gt; exists. There is no definition associated with it. Unfortunately, it refers to a lot of different mechanisms, almost all of them having to do with classical electromagnetism, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization&lt;/a&gt; for instance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we fix this problem ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, most of the time the meaning is clear from the context. But it's still unsatisfactory, isn't it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, can we decide which tag's definition is the best ? I would vote for Polarization in the sense of light polarisation, like in this wiki page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)&lt;/a&gt; And Maybe add a tag Polarizability for the creation of dipolar moment ? Or keep the tag Dipole moment (which already exists) for this last one ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you ok with this ? (vote up if you are for instance, or comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="16689" LastEditDate="2013-06-12T18:55:17.327" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T21:13:13.953" Title="About the polarization tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4394" CreationDate="2013-06-12T18:47:22.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can (and are encouraged to: there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/53/tag-editor&quot;&gt;a badge for that&lt;/a&gt;) suggest a text for tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click the badge, then click the &quot;help us create it?&quot; link in the box at the top of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't you give us a definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T20:58:44.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4394" CreationDate="2013-06-12T21:13:13.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, done. Needs a referring.&#xA;Thanks for your participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T21:13:13.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4399" CreationDate="2013-06-12T23:38:46.240" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be very convenient to edit comments any time you want&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2013-06-13T00:22:34.110" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T00:22:34.110" Title="Why do comments have a 5 minute time window for editing?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-12T23:56:31.103" Score="15" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The close reasons have been finalized and implemented &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4506/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, please direct requests for new close reasons to a separate meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/184154/206562&quot;&gt;this meta.SO post&lt;/a&gt;, it appears an overhaul of the close system is underway. Of the numerous changes slated to take place,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not a real question&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not constructive&lt;/strong&gt;, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too localized&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will no longer be reasons for closing, replaced instead by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;unclear what you’re asking&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it appears &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; will now include sub-reasons for closing. As I understand it, this will include a site-specific standard list of reasons, though any close-voter can write in their own wording for that particular question (which will be subsequently turned into a comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What will our list of default &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; reasons be?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a network-wide starting list of reasons, or do we need to come up with something from scratch? In either case, it can't hurt to discuss amongst ourselves what would be best for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, what is not covered by the three new reasons (plus &lt;strong&gt;duplicate&lt;/strong&gt;, which is still in place)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I think we use the now-obsolete &lt;strong&gt;too localized&lt;/strong&gt; reason for closing copied-and-pasted homework questions. Certainly none of the new options seem to address that, so perhaps we need a we-don't-do-your-homework-for-you off-topic category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T13:08:11.397" Title="What will our list of close reasons look like?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4397" CreationDate="2013-06-13T00:00:11.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are not intended to be permanent, important or prominent. Allowing arbitrary editing would require keeping a edit history and making it available to people trying to sort out why the comments now seem to be confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are intended to be a lightweight mechanism for requesting clarification and suggesting minor corrections. Yes, they are used for other purposes, but the team have been adamant that those are off label uses that have no official status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T00:00:11.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4398" CreationDate="2013-06-13T07:00:25.477" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The top two close reasons ( &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; reasons, not the system reasons) that don't fit in unclear/broad/primarily-opinion-based (Great, now I have to remember new acronyms :S ) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homeworky (frequency: a bajillion times a day): &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433&quot;&gt;Our policy&lt;/a&gt; expects homework and homework-like problems to have some effort put into them, and deal with conceptual issues. Please edit your question to explain what you have tried and highlight the concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I prefer &quot;We expect&quot;, but I can't think of a place to stick the policy link without making it too long)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-mainstream physics(frequency: a batch every ~week. Usually a single user asks many such questions):&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here. Anything that couldn't be published in a reputable journal is not appropriate on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other common OT thing which seems to be around twice a week is pure math questions (or physics questions that seem to be clear on the physics) being asked. But these get migrated, so there's no need for a separate OT reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, I can't think of any reason that's frequently needed. For edge cases we have the custom OT close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T07:00:25.477" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-13T13:35:22.017" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the general policy for completing an answer from an other user ? Should I prefer to start an other answer, just saying &quot;As user:xxx said, blabbla, BUT I would like to add blabla...&quot; or should I edit the previous answer, with the possibility to severely annoy its author ? After all, that's her/his answer... so is it well accepted to edit the others' answers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, part of the answer should be wrong. Should I delete this part by myself, or make a comment to the author ? (I obviously prefer the second option, but the first one, if it become more accepted, could be time saving I believe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, an answer could be full of doubtful remarks like &quot;I believe that $x=y$... &quot;, but I know this is for sure. Should I edit the answer such that only &quot;$x=y$&quot; appears ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there are much more possibilities, I'm asking for your experience and knowledge about the edit of someone else's answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Which policy to complete an answer made by someone else ?" Tags="|discussion|editing|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4401" CreationDate="2013-06-13T13:41:35.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/28817/178438&quot;&gt;multiple&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/129513/edit-an-existing-answer-or-incorporate-existing-answer-into-a-new-one&quot;&gt;times&lt;/a&gt; on the main meta. In this case I'll just copy &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/129515/178438&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If its just a bit of more info (read:a paragraph), add it and leave a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If it's a completely new bundle of stuff, but is based on stuff gleaned from the answer, write an addendum answer as described above.&#xA;  Hat it with &quot;This is in addition to @JonSkeet's answer&quot;. You may also&#xA;  comment on the original answer and ask the poster to incorporate your&#xA;  answer if s/he wishes--and then delete your answer once the deal is&#xA;  done (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/28817/178438&quot;&gt;Something smilar could have happened here&lt;/a&gt;, though it&#xA;  didn't).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22303/factors-affecting-torque-and-rpm-of-a-motor/22317#22317&quot;&gt;Factors affecting torque and RPM of a motor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23197/how-can-one-imagine-curled-up-dimensions/23205#23205&quot;&gt;How can one imagine curled up dimensions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22125/penetration-versus-frequency/22134#22134&quot;&gt;Penetration versus Frequency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23824/will-an-emf-be-induced-across-the-ends-of-a-stationary-metal-rod-placed-in-a-tim/23895#23895&quot;&gt;Will an emf be induced across the ends of a stationary metal rod placed in a time-varying magnetic field?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of wrong answers (or parts of answers), leave a comment. Try not to make radical changes in edits -- you can tell the OP in a comment to make them himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-13T13:41:35.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-14T07:27:24.257" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as Environmental physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would these topics be considered on topic here - specifically, I am looking at instrumentation for monitoring and evaluation, as well as, for example - a comparison of UVA and UVB energy on the human skin and eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T13:49:48.433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T13:49:48.433" Title="Would topics of biophysics and medical physics be on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4403" CreationDate="2013-06-14T07:34:49.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly, it depends on the question. However, note that &lt;a href=&quot;http://biology.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Biology.SE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chemistry.SE&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://sustainability.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the Sustainable Living SE&lt;/a&gt; exist too. Look at their respective help centers (&quot;help&quot; link up top, see the &quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot; sections) and try to determine which site your question belongs on. If you end up asking on the wrong site, don't worry, it can be migrated (or improved to fit that site better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you ask the question first and link to it in this post. Usually one deals with choosing the right site for interdisciplinary questions on a per-case basis. Note that some questions can be on topic for more than one site; in which case you can ask on either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it looks like your question would be better on Biology.SE. It could be on topic here; but I doubt that you would get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T07:34:49.363" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-14T07:38:43.720" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized there is no tag about soft-matter, the branch of condensed matter / statistical physics. Would be great to add it, isn't it ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T08:00:58.907" Title="Creation of a soft-matter tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4405" CreationDate="2013-06-14T07:45:45.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you find a fair number of questions that belong to the topic, sure, go ahead! To create the tag just add it to the questions. (if there are many such questions don't do it all at once to avoid flooding the main page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T07:45:45.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4405" CreationDate="2013-06-14T07:45:56.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, but you don't have to ask on meta to create a tag. Just put it on a few questions. (Ones where it belongs, of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-06-14T08:00:58.907" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T08:00:58.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-14T17:36:41.253" Score="0" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first ever question on this site was shut down before I could answer apparent objections to it so I am posting my reply to the moderator here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I discovered this site when I googled a question regarding the physics of chemistry this morning and was enjoying surfing the various questions and answers my question had sparked when it occurred to me this might be the group to answer a REAL question I had from watching the Big Bang Theory, which claims it tries to get its physics right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion of scientist and engineers has always been very high and although I know some to be humor and satire-challenged, I nevertheless thought my question could be considered at least fun to speculate about. Much as Trekkers debate the physics of that show (with more than one book written on the subject by physicist). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am disappointed the reaction to my question was so instantly negative and, to a newbie non-scientist, kind of insulting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your explanation, Sir, and I understand the goal of your site. But come on, can you all lighten up just a little. Are you telling me none of you has ever challenge the science behind a movie or television show before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, iIf anyone is willing to shake this up a bit, my question still hasn't been answered. Is Sheldon Cooper's physics cutting edge? Could his theories win a Nobel Prize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25812" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T18:15:20.143" Title="Are Humorous But Sincere Questions for Non-Scoentists Not Welcome Here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4408" CreationDate="2013-06-14T18:15:20.143" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that the users of this site are humor and satire challenged. Most of us enjoy humor just as much as the next guy. In fact, I watch TBBT myself, and enjoy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is, the Q&amp;amp;A portion of the site is meant for serious physics. &quot;Fun&quot; questions are OK, but they need to still be about physics. Your question was asking for an opinion of whether or not a scientist (of whom we know very little when it comes to his research) would win the Nobel prize. Three problems with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's opinion-based; such questions are disallowed more or less network wide.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't really know much about Sheldon, so there's no way to really form an informed opinion on this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The requirements for Nobel prizes aren't on topic here (we deal with the concepts of physics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a TV show ever talked about correct physics (or partially correct physics), a question about that would be welcome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing against humor here either, just that it's very hard to write a humorous but &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; question on physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're welcome to discuss such things in  &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-14T18:15:20.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4411" CreationDate="2013-06-17T10:30:41.737" Score="8" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to answer as many questions as I can, and when I am not doing that, I am going to the 'review' section and doing what I can there and when that is done, I read through as many questions as possible (flagging if necessary, commenting as necessary) - is there anything else I can do to help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-24T11:45:13.953" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T11:45:13.953" Title="Is there any more I can do to help" Tags="|support|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4410" CreationDate="2013-06-17T10:46:49.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have time to waste, you may want to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2920/community-help-us-moderate-the-site&quot;&gt;this guide I wrote to helping moderate the site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you already are commenting/flagging things and going to /review, then you probably have that covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to try editing posts to improve grammar/formatting as well (I think you already do this too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the best thing to do is look for more questions to answer (or ask some good ones yourself!). Sometimes, scouring through &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?page=47&amp;amp;tab=votes&quot;&gt;the back end unanswered section sorted by votes&lt;/a&gt; helps; there are many good questions that got neglected by accident there in the later pages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're also welcome to participate in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. This doesn't help the site, but it's fun :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T10:46:49.213" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4413" CreationDate="2013-06-17T15:27:35.283" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer was posted twice by mistake, but I am allowed only to &quot;vote&quot; for deleting it.&#xA;is it because I dont have enough reputation? Why can't  I delete my answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25833" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T16:15:23.183" Title="why can't I delete my answer" Tags="|support|moderators|reputation|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2013-06-17T16:15:23.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WRJqj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks deleted to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users have a binding vote when it comes to deleting their own answers (it's a bit more complicated for questions). Similarly, they have a binding undelete vote &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they were the ones who deleted it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T16:15:23.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-17T19:51:09.443" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68120/how-is-suns-equatorial-circumference-measured/68125#68125&quot;&gt;This question about the sun's circumference&lt;/a&gt;, I answered with what I &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; was a helpful answer - it seems that a couple of others found it useful (2 upvotes), but I am getting grief about the answer being &quot;while strictly correct, but is enormously unsatisfying&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not then, if an answer is &quot;enormously unsatisfying&quot;, post n alternative answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What have I done wrong this time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T21:35:38.573" Title="What is wrong with my reply here" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2013-06-17T20:01:06.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess the unsatisfying bit is the inclusion of &quot;Distance from Earth to the Sun&quot; in the formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the question is a bit unclear in this aspect; I think it's trying to ask &quot;how was the Sun's diameter &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; measured&quot;. From this point of view, talking about the E-S distance just raises another question &quot;how was the E-S distance calculated?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a rough analogy&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, this is similar to being asked &quot;How can I calculate the circumference of the Earth&quot;, and answering &quot;Multiply the diameter by $\pi$&quot;. Again, this is strictly correct, but not really satisfying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. I've tried to make the issue clearer in this analogy by exaggerating the situation. I've found that folks sometimes easily get offended by such exaggerated analogies, so I'm just mentioning that I don't mean to offend here :)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T20:01:06.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2013-06-17T20:01:40.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody downvoted your answer. That indicates that nobody thought it was unhelpful; on the other hand, two people thought it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; helpful. So honestly, your complaint is without merit. If people actually think something is wrong with your answer, they'll downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that posting an unsatisfying (or unhelpful, wrong, etc.) answer is not technically &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, in the sense that it's not against the rules here. So you haven't &lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt; anything wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, keep in mind that if e.g. I find another person's answer unsatisfying, inadqeuate, wrong, or so on, that has no bearing on whether I should post my own answer. The argument &quot;don't criticize me if you can't do better&quot; holds no water on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T20:01:40.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2013-06-17T20:20:35.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only repeat what I wrote before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your answer is strictly correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But you have assumed the hard part of the historical problem has already been solved and answered with a basic geometric identity so I found your answer to be uninteresting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and emphasize that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I did not vote your answer down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No one else had voted your answer down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A couple of people had found it useful enough to vote up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm having a hard time understanding how you get from a +2/-0 result on an answer to understanding that you have &quot;done [] something wrong&quot; or &quot;stuffed up&quot;. You are ahead with that answer and there is no reason to expect that you will ever be behind---the answer is correct as far as it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T20:20:35.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2013-06-17T21:05:29.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confess to being one of those people.  I agree completely that you didn't need to delete your answer.  The pinhole camera suggestion meaningfully added to the discussion.  Reason is that you can't just take a protractor and measure the angle subtended by the sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the criticism was that we don't have a measurement of the distance to the sun.  I hope that you don't take this to mean that &lt;em&gt;you didn't contribute&lt;/em&gt; to answering the question, because you did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the root of the quibbling, however, was the fact that someone asked a fairly low level question that has an extremely difficult answer.  Why do you think no one else has added an answer after that discussion?  Probably several people looked into it and quickly realized the problem is more difficult than they thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using references on Earth, how do you establish an astronomical length scale?  That question is &lt;strong&gt;insanely&lt;/strong&gt; hard.  But is that what was asked?  To be nit-picky, yes, it was.  It was a simple question that stumbled on a really advanced and difficult question.  To answer that advanced question, one would still start out where you started out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T21:05:29.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-18T07:33:43.083" Score="-11" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68176/which-beam-splitting-ratio-has-uncoated-glass-for-420-nanometers-coherent-laserl&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68176/which-beam-splitting-ratio-has-uncoated-glass-for-420-nanometers-coherent-laserl&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question was closed as not a real question by a particular moderator yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to tell what is being asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot&#xA;be reasonably answered in its current form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want said moderator's closing rights to be removed. Now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T18:59:01.167" Title="I want a particular moderator's closing rights to be removed" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2013-06-18T08:58:18.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-18T10:08:12.143" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that - while browsing through questions and answers - I regularly come across an interesting question/answer but reading and understanding the answer or answering the question would take quite some time. That's fine, but we all have other things to do as well, don't we? So it happens that I think to myself: I should remember to come back here and fully try to understand this answer or write up an answer to this question when I have more time. (or even adjust an answer following a comment) However, I rarely do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is possible (and I have done this before) at the moment is to favourite such questions, but I don't think that's what the 'favourite' option is there for, is it? If it is, this is mostly a suggestion to alter some of its functionality (and add it next to answers as well). If it isn't, here's what I think we could use: something like a reminder, a literal note-to-self. Perhaps a 'Revisit' button, which gives you a similar alert to when people have mentioned you in a comment or something, only that the alert doesn't go away until you have removed it yourself by unclicking the 'Revisit' button for that particular question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="16660" LastEditDate="2013-06-18T10:37:40.650" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Can/should a reminder-type concept be introduced?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4423" CreationDate="2013-06-18T11:40:04.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;favorite&quot; feature is one that you can (ab)use as much as you want without any problems. When you favorite a question, you get updates delivered to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/16660/wouter?tab=favorites&quot;&gt;favorites tab on your profile.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quora has a nice &quot;save draft&quot; feature, which adds the question to an &quot;unanswered questions&quot; tab. I'd be happy if that were implemented, though I don't see that happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4719/add-answer-later-tab&quot;&gt;this has been proposed before&lt;/a&gt;. It's not &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;, so not officially declined yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T11:40:04.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4427" CreationDate="2013-06-18T18:51:31.840" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 33 points in physics SE. Not much but enough to make upvotes. I recently had a question on chemistry SE. What I found that Points don't  add up between the two sites so I can't upvote.  But as I know the two websites are linked.  In what way are they linked and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25833" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-06-18T18:54:49.913" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T19:03:06.807" Title="why aren't the points added up" Tags="|discussion|support|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4425" CreationDate="2013-06-18T18:58:21.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of reputation on Stack Exchange sites is mostly to codify the degree to which each site trusts each user. because the detailed rules differ from site to site rep is not transitive or transferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because the most basic features of the engine are the same from site to site, users that pass a basic threshold (200 rep) on one site can associate accounts to get a small bonus (100 rep) on all sites that will allow basic actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T18:58:21.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4425" CreationDate="2013-06-18T19:03:06.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sites are on the same network of sites -- the Stack Exchange network. Your accounts are linked network-wide as well; when you create a new account on another site using the same credentials; it gets added to your network account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, reputation doesn't add up. The communities on each site are separate, and so are the reputation values. Reputation is tied to the privilege system, which includes community moderation tools. Someone who knows the policies on closing question on Physics may not know the policies on Chemistry&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that once you get 200 reputation on any site, you get a +100 bonus on all sites you have an account on. In addition to that, if you join another site, you will start with 101 reputation (thus bypassing most new user restrictions -- you'll be able to upvote and comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as a Chemistry moderator, welcome to Chemistry.SE! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. That being said, in this case the two sites follow almost identical policies. But that won't apply for a pair of random network sites.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T19:03:06.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4429" CreationDate="2013-06-18T20:52:36.923" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the activity on Physics Stack exchange is increasing and steadily, It is getting difficult to browse through questions. Roughly ~ 9 hours or so, the questions disappear from the main page. One is forced to search either using tags, which is somewhat inconvenient and one is likely to miss interesting stuff as one cannot cover every tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly is there a way access older questions(~1-3 days) from the main page in an easy way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I propose adding previous and next buttons to the active section of the main page(and perhaps others ), preferably along with numbered pages(roughly covering a weeks activity) that will allow the user to access older questions with ease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2013-06-25T00:52:45.840" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T00:52:45.840" Title="Previous next buttons on the main page" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4428" CreationDate="2013-06-18T20:56:08.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Firstly is there a way access older questions(~1-3 days) from the main page in an easy way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=active&quot;&gt;The Questions tab, sorted by &quot;active&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Secondly, I propose adding previous and next buttons to the active section of the main page(and perhaps others ), preferably along with numbered pages(roughly covering a weeks activity) that will allow the user to access older questions with ease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pagination is already there on the Questions tab (no particular need for forward/back buttons imo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a particular need for this, besides, once you reach the end of the main page you already are presented with this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GtuIX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T20:56:08.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2013-06-18T21:35:38.573" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What have I done wrong this time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially being too sensitive to fair, constructive criticisim of your answer, that replaced one measurement with another, without explaining how the new measurement was to be carried out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did you do right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking on board the criticism in the comments and improving the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T21:35:38.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4432" CreationDate="2013-06-19T05:15:42.910" Score="3" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed some &quot;non-mainstream&quot; (it may be rude to say crackpot) questions and answers recently such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68508/mass-term-in-the-minkowski-metric-and-an-oscillation-model-in-lorentz-group&quot;&gt;Mass term in the Minkowski metric and an oscillation model in Lorentz group&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QdZRB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68503/help-me-test-and-prove-this-theory&quot;&gt;Help me test and prove this theory?&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uUeqT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26692/can-we-model-gravitation-as-a-repulsive-force&quot;&gt;Can we model gravitation as a repulsive force?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16227/what-is-the-kinematics-of-a-particle-with-complex-mass/18678#18678&quot;&gt;What is the kinematics of a particle with complex mass?&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/11AHg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18645/plausible-explanations-for-3-local-space-dimensions/18666#18666&quot;&gt;Plausible explanations for 3 large space dimensions&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y0c1l.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17939/what-if-we-could-give-photons-some-mass/18676#18676&quot;&gt;What if we could give photons some mass?&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2zn1V.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1869/what-reasons-are-there-to-suspect-string-theory-may-be-an-incorrect-theory/16655#16655&quot;&gt;What reasons are there to suspect string theory may be an incorrect theory?&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yM90H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;) (an instance of calling rather mainstream theory, string theory as fringe)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26906/models-of-neutrinos-consistent-with-operas-results/26909#26909&quot;&gt;Models of neutrinos consistent with OPERA&amp;#39;s results&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6F35j.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I am flagging these as &quot;spam&quot; because they are pretty much like advertisements but isn't it better to have a more specific flag associated with these, like &quot;Non-mainstream&quot;? Since &quot;Spam&quot; usually refers to answers like &quot;me too! I would like to thank so and so website for leading me here&quot; or &quot;me too! So and so company can help you!&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, has this &quot;Non-mainstream&quot; -flag been proposed before? And what are your thoughts about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T16:08:23.280" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T16:08:23.280" Title="A &quot;non-mainstream&quot; flag" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|flagging|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2013-06-19T05:27:42.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, this has already been proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4400/124&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and it'll be implemented as soon as we have custom close reasons enabled. That might be happening later this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the spam flag should only be used for actual spam, by which I mean purely promotional posts with no relevance to the site. Things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CIALIS VIAGRA PRON xxx.example.com!!!!1!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, I'm not very good at writing spam, but you get the idea. Posts about non-mainstream theories are not spam (in the sense of the flag) unless they link to some crackpot website promoting the theory and the purpose of the post is clearly nothing more than promotion of the site. Without that link, if non-mainstream posts are questions, flag them as off topic; if they are answers, downvote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T05:27:42.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2013-06-19T05:48:43.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Physics SE is about mainstream physics, you can flag such questions as off topic and it is best to clearly state in a comment on the question, that and maybe why you are sure it is not mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning answers containing non mainstream physics, it is a bit more complicated since for answers there is no off topic flag reason. In this case I always chose the flag option to call for moderator attention and say in the text field that this answer promotes non mainstream physics and is therefore off topic. Leaving a comment below the answer does not hurt too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T05:48:43.617" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4435" CreationDate="2013-06-20T09:39:53.393" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted this question over &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68571/why-cant-you-use-your-cellphone-on-an-airplane&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; , It was currently closed as off topic, I posted this question in order to know the impacts/effects related to physics while we using the mobile phones inside airplanes, so i choosed physics.se and posted it over here, Can anyone explain why my question is off topic here, as it basically covers about the physical effects while using phones inside airplanes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks In advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11376" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T10:12:32.687" Title="Why My question over here considered as off topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4434" CreationDate="2013-06-20T10:12:32.687" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68571/why-cant-you-use-your-cellphone-on-an-airplane#comment138625_68571&quot;&gt;In the end this is a question about policy and technology not about physics as such&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is partly electronics and partly bureaucracy. A pure physics answer would just be able to say &quot;there's a possibility of interference&quot;; there's not much more we can give here. Explaining the interference would be more of an electronics issue again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all of this would require a deep understanding of how the plane communication systems and sensors work. That's engineering, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it's not something that can be adequately answered here. If you look at the current answer, there's almost no physics involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page and the references therein&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T10:12:32.687" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4410" CreationDate="2013-06-20T21:29:57.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, it seems I am not even flagging right... that, on top of still not being sure whether to reply to a question as stated or what we perceive the question is asking, I will just do lead-in comments (unless I am screwing them up as well) and edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24901" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T21:29:57.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2013-06-21T17:05:43.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;What demonstrates a complete rejection of an idea better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A unilateral decision by a moderator to delete a answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A hail of downvotes from the community placing the answer deep in negative score territory. (And with questions a hail of downvotes plus a community close.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, given the number of times a week one moderator or another is accused of &quot;doing it wrong&quot; do you really want to encourage a culture in which we are aggressive about deleting content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a class of users who regularly offer correct answer to basic questions generating some rep for their account while at the same time promoting some--shall we say--&quot;unusual&quot; point of view on a more advanced topic. Downvoting rather than deleting their off-the-mainstream answers also serves to hold their rep down lest it fool a naive reader (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Oh look that guy has a pretty good rep, he must be on to something&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-06-21T20:49:31.223" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T20:49:31.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-22T14:04:29.070" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;My example is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68790/conceptual-doubts-in-em-waves-and-old-quantum-theory&quot;&gt;drastic edit to the question&lt;/a&gt; I had replied to, which is a drastic rewrite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the original questioners asked to approve of the change even though their reputation is below 10?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T18:09:41.867" Title="Are there limits to editing questions by third parties?" Tags="|discussion|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4441" CreationDate="2013-06-22T14:14:01.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding that particular question, it's not been drastically edited. Formatting and grammar has been improved, that's pretty much it. (look closely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general, radical edits get rejected as &quot;too radical&quot;. Note that the OP gets a notification of an edit or a suggested edit, so s/he can always rollback or reject it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T14:14:01.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4445" CreationDate="2013-06-23T07:02:31.360" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that often, when I flag questions, they are marked as &quot;helpful&quot;, but the question never gets closed, nor does it get any &quot;vote to close&quot; from those with &gt;3k rep. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29328/total-number-of-dimension-in-universe&quot;&gt;Total Number of Dimensions in the Universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66109/in-what-order-should-unit-symbols-appear&quot;&gt;In what order should unit symbols appear?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55440/could-all-strings-be-one-single-string-which-weaves-the-fabric-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;Could all strings be one single string which weaves the fabric of the universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4334/could-life-survive-a-pole-shift-caused-by-an-asteroid-collision&quot;&gt;Could life survive a pole shift caused by an asteroid collision?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason for this? Are the flags accidentally marked as &quot;helpful&quot;? But it seems too much of a coincidence that there are so many flags like that! Or maybe, the reviewers changed their mind later on ? And most of these questions are really questions that are very harmful to the site..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, sometimes, the converse is true. The flag is declined at first but the question is closed. That is good however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39216/why-are-we-talking-about-space-curvature-as-if-we-know-what-space-is&quot;&gt;Why are we talking about space curvature as if we know what space is?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Flags marked &quot;helpful&quot; but question not closed?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4443" CreationDate="2013-06-23T11:16:08.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105391/why-does-flag-marking-as-helpful-declined-not-always-correlate-with-moderator-ac&quot;&gt;Why does flag marking as helpful/declined not always correlate with moderator action?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, when the moderator sees a flag and has to think for a while over the flag, reading the post carefully (i.e., the action that should be taken is not immediately obvious), the flag gets marked as &quot;helpful&quot;, even if the post doesn't get closed/deleted. &quot;Helpful&quot; means &quot;While it may not have applied for this post, don't stop flagging posts for similar reasons&quot;. After all, each post is different, and we don't want to discourage you from flagging a similr post (where the flag may be valid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this, IIRC a close flag gets marked as helpful on the first close vote a post receives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your specific flags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29328/total-number-of-dimension-in-universe&quot;&gt;Total Number of Dimensions in the Universe?&lt;/a&gt;: While popular science-y, this is neither unclear nor off topic IMO. However, similar questions may tend to be of the same type.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66109/in-what-order-should-unit-symbols-appear&quot;&gt;In what order should unit symbols appear?&lt;/a&gt; This isn't off topic, questions about standards are OK here &lt;em&gt;as long as they aren't too localized&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55440/could-all-strings-be-one-single-string-which-weaves-the-fabric-of-the-universe#question&quot;&gt;Could all strings be one single string which weaves the fabric of the universe?&lt;/a&gt; In my opinion, this probably can be closed as non-mainstream since it effectively proposes a theory and asks for evaluation. However, I'll let the handling moderator deal with this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4334/could-life-survive-a-pole-shift-caused-by-an-asteroid-collision&quot;&gt;Could life survive a pole shift caused by an asteroid collision?&lt;/a&gt; Your flag here was marked as &quot;helpful&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchang.com/users/-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Community ♦&lt;/a&gt;, so it got &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/17508&quot;&gt;voted to close&lt;/a&gt; by a few users (the votes have now expired). I personally would have declined the flag: While the question does talk of a possibly crackpot theory, it is asking for evaluation of one point within the theory, and it's to a sufficient degree physical. (Of course, it would have helped if he replaced &quot;all life&quot; with &quot;most life&quot;, but that is clear from the context)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39216/why-are-we-talking-about-space-curvature-as-if-we-know-what-space-is&quot;&gt;Why are we talking about space curvature as if we know what space is?&lt;/a&gt; You seemed to want it deleted, not just closed. There's no reason to do that; downvoted closed posts get auto-deleted anyway, and there' no particular need to wipe such posts off Physics.SE (they don't show up on the main page)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-06-23T11:16:08.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-24T22:57:47.167" Score="12" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading a bit of the meta discussion going on about the question quality here at the Physics StackExchange (SE).  Especially in the wake of the demise of the TheoreticalPhysics SE, there is a bit of tension between people who want Physics SE to be primarily a place of high-quality/high-level questions, and those who want Physics SE to be much broader.  I have sympathies for both camps.  Here are some relevant meta discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/capturing-theoretical-physics-crowd-with-research-level-tag&quot;&gt;Capturing theoretical-physics crowd with Research Level Tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76/level-of-questions&quot;&gt;Level of questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4337/what-can-be-done-about-the-current-ongoing-flood-of-homework-and-very-basic-qu&quot;&gt;What can be done about the (current) ongoing flood of homework and very basic questions overwhelming our site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/29/differentiate-research-level-questions&quot;&gt;Differentiate research-level questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105/where-should-research-level-questions-go-theoretical-physics-se-or-physics-rese&quot;&gt;Where should research-level questions go? Theoretical Physics SE or Physics Research SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now&quot;&gt;Level of questions: what do we do now ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Research-level tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the continued usefulness of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, I believe Physics SE should consider emphasizing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; tag to help professional physicists extract high-level questions from the noise.  I went to the active list and selected the first 7 question that I judged to be research-level, or nearly so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/41589/reading-list-in-topological-qft&quot;&gt;Reading list in topological QFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61575/second-baryon-octet&quot;&gt;Second baryon octet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69062/forward-scattering-for-a-single-impurity-in-an-infinite-system&quot;&gt;Forward-scattering for a single impurity in an infinite system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69056/relation-of-higgs-couplings-to-masses-of-fundamental-particles&quot;&gt;Relation of Higgs couplings to masses of fundamental particles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69058/about-the-microscopic-form-of-magnetocrystalline-anisotropy&quot;&gt;About the microscopic form of magnetocrystalline anisotropy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38420/what-is-crystal-field-anisotropy-or-effect-it-forces-the-magnetic-moment-to-po&quot;&gt;What is crystal field anisotropy or effect ? It forces the magnetic moment to point in particular local direction.. &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30020/does-a-complete-theory-of-quantum-gravity-require-anthropic-post-selection&quot;&gt;Does a complete theory of quantum gravity require anthropic post-selection?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;None&lt;/em&gt; of these were tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, to the detriment of the community.  Only three questions got the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; tag this month.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what would be an appropriate way to emphasize this tag, but I don't think its unreasonable to consider changing the main banner of the website (currently &quot;Here's how it works...&quot;).  Other ideas: give it a place in the FAQ, or make it &quot;pinned&quot; to the list of frequent tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Popular-science tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current not-logged-in front page of Physics SE has these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proof that the Earth rotates?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surviving under water in air bubble&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a proton collision (collisions like in the LHC) visible to the human eye?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can Magnets be used to pick up pieces of metal when the force from a magnetic field does no work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is play-dough liquid or solid?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a car consume more fuel when it's raining?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the Earth truly rotating about/revolving around?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why myopic people see this picture differently?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do whips hurt so much?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my boss wrong about our mechanical advantage from our pulley system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the photoelectric effect be explained without photons?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can one black hole suck in another black hole?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Musical Pathway&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Noether charge of local symmetries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that most of the questions are definitely not homework, but also definitely not of professional interest to researchers.  I think most of them are captured by the idea of &quot;popular physics&quot;, e.g. &quot;Why is the sky blue?&quot;, &quot;Can anything escape a black-hole?&quot;, etc.  Some of these are great questions, and the internet would be a better place if there were definitive answers available on Physics SE for them, but they aren't of interest to researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag, but this refers to &quot;Questions that ask about some aspect of physics research or study which doesn't involve the actual physics.&quot;  For example, Q: Where can I find the lifetime of obscure particles? A: The PDG's Review of Particle Physics.  Incidentally, this tag appears to almost always be misused as a synonym for &quot;vague or crappy question&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dilaton has pointed out that we already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Currently, it only has 14 questions tagged.  I claim we should emphasize this tag just like we should emphasize &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;.  Furthermore, it is important that we develop a reasonably objective definition.  (@Manishearth worries that this tag might determined more by subjective &lt;em&gt;tone&lt;/em&gt; rather than content.)  I propose this definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Popular-science questions are accessible to a layman with minimal physics training.  They would be appropriate in a newspaper article or non-academic magazine.  Such question are distinct from research-level questions, which are of professional interest to physicists.  They are also distinct from homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have suggested this as the tag wiki excerpt, which is the short-definition of this tag and which appears as a tooltip when someone hovers over the tag. (Someone with 20k is needed to approve it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Discussion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; are pleasingly separate (that is, very little overlap) but should ideally capture about 15 % of the questions posted on the site, as the bulk of the questions are expected to be standard good conceptual physics questions that need no additional level tag*.  It's my hope that this simple categorization would enable researchers to co-exist peacefully with laymen, which may even encourage a bit of public outreach.  In Physics SE's current form, I expect that researchers are actively being driven away because of the difficulty in finding research-level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; tag was proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/capturing-theoretical-physics-crowd-with-research-level-tag&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  The consensus at the time is that it was a good idea.  dmckee's objected, citing &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;arguments against meta tags&lt;/a&gt; as advanced by StackExchange founder Jeff Atwood, but most did not find these arguments compelling.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reiterate why these arguments fail, in this context: First, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; distinction is not particular subjective.  Second, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; tags could not be used &quot;defensively&quot; to enable violation of the normal posting standards.  I think there is a danger of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag being used in the manner, but the consensus seems to be that this danger is manageable.  Third, none of these tags are likely to be used pejoratively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I emphasize that since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; tag would be mutually exclusive with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, it would not really contribute to any sort of &quot;tag explosion&quot; like you might worry about if we started adding other meta tags like &lt;code&gt;subjective&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;poll&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;philosophical&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarifying edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I change the percentage of questions that are rougly expected to need such a level tag at all from 95% to 15% as the bulk of the questions most probably falls into neither of these three categories. This point was for example discussed in the comments directly below this question, as well as in the comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4465/2751&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4744/2751&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This number means, that ideally  about 85% of the questions should have no level tag at all, maybe 5% should be shown to researchers (37 users follow currently research-level) who have a very specialized interest and knowledge, 5% to students who are looking for good additional example problems to prepare for an exam for example (there are 36 people following homework too) and 5% to people who want to learn about physics in a simplified weay without beeing bogged down by math an physic jargon they are not interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7911" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T18:15:12.793" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T18:15:12.793" Title="Can we encourage the &quot;research-level&quot; meta tag? What about a &quot;popular&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|content-level|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2013-06-24T23:32:12.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I exactly agree with the nice and helpful suggestions in this question. Categorizing the questions as suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; could very nicely help making the site better for people interested in all of these three mutually exclusive categories of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People could then not only filter topics they are interested in, but also the level of the posts they enjoy to read. I am quite sure this would help releasing a lot of the accumulated tension between the different groups with different knowledge and background on physics we now have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe people who know what a research-level questions in certain topics is could start attaching that tag as they see fit, people interested in obtaining nontechnical equation free answers could use the popular-science tag, and the homework tag is already getting put where appropriate anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-06-24T23:32:12.393" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2013-06-25T11:42:12.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; tag, I think there are two issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We haven't defined what exactly constitutes research level. Solution: Define it better by discussing on meta. (I don't know enough to contribute to that discussion)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't have enough people patrolling the main page retagging. Solution: Whenever you see a research level question on the main page, quickly retag it. That goes for everyone :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular&lt;/a&gt;: I am against this, for multiple reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, its a meta tag. Not exactly allowed in the first place. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; exists to better accomodate the TP community (and it's not exactly a meta tag in the first place, just a broad tag). &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; exists because the site will experience withdrawal symptoms if removed (a lot of people rely on it already).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it's a very unclear and subjective matter if something is popsci. Take a look at the current stuff tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; and you'll see what I mean. Popsci is usually confined to introductory relativity, String theory (and M theory), and QM explained in layman's terms. However, a lot of posts asked by laymen which have to do with other physics with have been tagged with this. So it's currently being used as a tag which denotes &quot;layman's terms&quot;. Too broad, and a complete meta tag. If we use it to mean the topics listed by me above, that could work, but I don't see much use of it then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, a lot of it depends on the tone the post is asked in. Tags should be on the basis of topic, not tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T11:42:12.983" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4454" CreationDate="2013-06-26T20:55:51.587" Score="8" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know the one I mean, T&lt;sub&gt;μν&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Is it the stress-energy tensor, or the energy-momentum tensor? This is for the purposes of tags, where having both is redundant. This was brought up in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/9961168#9961168&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, and there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4446&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; on our little-visited tag synonyms page. However, it was pointed out there that the idea of just combining everything into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stress-energy-momentum-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stress-energy-momentum-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stress-energy-momentum-tensor&lt;/a&gt; won't work due to character limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I dare anyone to claim with a straight face that they would &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; say &quot;stress-energy-momentum tensor&quot; in conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore propose that &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stress-energy-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stress-energy-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stress-energy-tensor&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy-momentum-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy-momentum-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy-momentum-tensor&lt;/a&gt; be taken to be &quot;standard,&quot; with the other made a synonym. My understanding is that either tag can then be applied, with the synonym silently being replaced, no harm done, no retagging effort necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than proposing a synonym on my own, only to have no one look at that page anyway,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I figure this proposal should get some community consensus as to which way the replacement should go. I personally grew up learning that &quot;stress-energy&quot; was a tensor and &quot;energy-momentum&quot; was a 4-vector, but perhaps I'm in the minority, or perhaps there's good reason to differentiate as much as possible the stress-energy tensor of relativity from the stress tensor of mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote below as you see appropriate, or add your own original thoughts in another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Yes, I am fully aware that string of symbols refers to an unspecified &lt;em&gt;component&lt;/em&gt; of a tensor, and not an actual tensor. Mathematically precise people, please don't hurt me. Everyone else, I still reserve the right to admonish you for conflating these two things :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/175&quot;&gt;plenty of other suggestions there&lt;/a&gt; - interested users should vote on them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T02:32:24.070" Title="That tensor from GR - what do we call it?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4453" CreationDate="2013-06-26T20:55:51.587" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stress-energy-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stress-energy-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stress-energy-tensor&lt;/a&gt; as the preferred version and administer the synonymization &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy-momentum-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy-momentum-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy-momentum-tensor&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stress-energy-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stress-energy-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stress-energy-tensor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22stress%E2%80%93energy+tensor%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number of unfiltered Google hits&lt;/a&gt;: About 117,000 hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-06-27T11:20:38.017" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T11:20:38.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4453" CreationDate="2013-06-26T20:57:02.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy-momentum-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy-momentum-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy-momentum-tensor&lt;/a&gt; as the preferred version and administer the synonymization &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stress-energy-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stress-energy-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stress-energy-tensor&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy-momentum-tensor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy-momentum-tensor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy-momentum-tensor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22energy-momentum+tensor%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number of unfiltered Google hits&lt;/a&gt;: About 1,560,000 hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-06-27T11:21:39.503" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T11:21:39.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4466" CreationDate="2013-06-27T14:04:04.050" Score="-3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; is supposed to be applied to questions which are not popular-science, which want technical answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think the name is very deterring to those who want to ask such questions. I (and I'm sure many others) haven't used the tag at all simply because it seems like a tag that means something on the lines of orignal-research. I have often been tempted to (but I didn't) remove the tag from other questions because it seemed like a misuse of the word &quot;research&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only yesterday did I see that it really refers to technical (i.e. non-popular-science) questions after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4449/can-we-encourage-the-research-level-meta-tag-what-about-a-popular-tag&quot;&gt;Can we encourage the &amp;quot;research-level&amp;quot; meta tag? What about a &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; tag?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this tag should be renamed first, so that users are encouraged to use it. Here are some proposals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/actual-physics-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;actual-physics-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;actual-physics-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/advanced-physics-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;advanced-physics-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;advanced-physics-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.157" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T16:30:03.797" Title="Changing the name of the [tag:research-level] tag?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4460" CreationDate="2013-06-27T14:09:56.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/technical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;technical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;technical&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/advanced&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;advanced&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;advanced&lt;/a&gt; are even more ambiguous, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/actual&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;actual&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;actual&lt;/a&gt; is demeaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only yesterday did I see that it really refers to technical (i.e. non-popular-science) questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this is wrong. It refers to &lt;em&gt;research level&lt;/em&gt; physics, the kind that was allowed on the erstwhile TheoreticalPhysics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T14:09:56.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4460" CreationDate="2013-06-27T14:44:29.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think when we use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; as defined in the &lt;strong&gt;tag-wiki&lt;/strong&gt; which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The research-level tag applies to questions that arise in graduate and post-secondary work. These questions often require domain-specific knowledge and could not be answered from a general source or may be beyond the level typically covered by Wikipedia and other popular sources. research-level questions should not require new or groundbreaking research and results to answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it can quite reasonably be used to mark higher-level / advanced / technical questions as it has been done up to now. These questions do not have to be about ground breaking original research. TP.SE was not primarly about original research either (even though it happend that people discussed what is in their actual new arxiv papers too sometimes) , but about high-level questions concerning theoretical physics topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-06-27T14:53:03.347" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T14:53:03.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4464" CreationDate="2013-06-27T16:35:39.777" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little while ago I answered this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66599/what-is-the-suns-spectral-series/66604#66604&quot;&gt;What is the sun&amp;#39;s spectral series?&lt;/a&gt;.  For whatever reason (I'm not exactly sure), I went well outside what was expected in answering it; I provided a lot of un-asked-for information. Personally, I'm quite proud of myself for the level of detail I put into it. However, I now feel that this answer would be better suited for a question that more directly asks for that information. I considered modifying the current question to better suit my answer, but that would change the essence of the question too much if you ask me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is if I can ask my own question that is tailored to this answer and can I (with some minor tweaks) re-post this answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to do this, would my question just be flagged as a duplicate? I fully intend to make a different enough question, but the answer would be more or less the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a win-win scenario here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T17:09:17.357" Title="Can I use one of my previous answers to answer another separate, but related question?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4463" CreationDate="2013-06-27T16:41:18.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the new question you would ask is similar enough to the old question that the same answer (verbatim) would apply to it, it would probably be a duplicate. So I would say no, don't make a new question for the express purpose of reposting your answer. The information in your answer already exists on the site, there's no reason to invent an excuse to put up another copy of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone else happens to post a new question to which your old answer would apply, you're technically within your rights to copy it and post it again. But I would suggest not actually doing that. Instead, post a new answer that refers to it - you could start out saying &quot;This is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4464/124&quot;&gt;this other answer that I wrote&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; and then go on to describe the relevant parts of your earlier answer. (As always, make sure a person doesn't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to click the link just to get the point of your answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T16:41:18.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4460" CreationDate="2013-06-27T16:49:45.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is ambiguity stemming from that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4449&quot;&gt;linked post&lt;/a&gt;. It could be interpreted as asserting that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions here should fall into exactly one of three categories: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation however is that this is not the case. There are non-homework questions that seek technical answers (rather than &quot;please explain the universe without math&quot;) but could be answered by just about any practicing physicist who puts some thought into it, and thus are not restricted to those with advanced knowledge in one specific subfield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the two questions I have asked on this site&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; fall into this category. They &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; be tagged with any of those three tags (and I will rollback any edits that attempt to do so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the benefit of allowing different coarseness of filtering. You can choose to &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, or you could choose to simply block &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; so that you see both domain-specific and generic, not-too-simple physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; Feel free to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; if you want to restrict answers to the level you would get if you asked the question of a specialist in the field. You yourself don't need to be publishing papers on the topic. After all, this sort of tag is more for the level of answers you want than the level of the question. (If the question were at the very cutting edge of research, why then by definition &lt;em&gt;no one&lt;/em&gt; would have an answer, and moreover anyone with the answer would publish a paper before posting to this site.) If you don't use the tag, no one is forcing your question to be relegated to popular science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62974/10851&quot;&gt;Neutrinos vs. Photons: Who wins the race across the galaxy?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/68306/10851&quot;&gt;Mars just collided with Earth! A question of eccentricity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T16:49:45.830" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4460" CreationDate="2013-06-27T23:23:13.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to note the criterion I suggested for research-level when I proposed the tag way back when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Excluding any question whose answer is &lt;em&gt;obvious to someone who has completed a standard graduate curriculum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually think this is the right criterion. It is the right criterion because (i) logically the graduate curriculum is more or less the common denominator amongst physics researchers (who are the target audience) and (ii) it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it cannot be made the tag wiki for reasons of niceness, objectivity and so on.. But it is something to keep in mind. And maybe the tag wiki is should be somehow rewritten, since as it stands a question from Jackson would count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3970" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T23:23:13.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2013-06-28T19:04:38.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem of Physics stack exchange not being conducive for research have been bought up time and again. I don't think any good solutions/suggestions have been put forth yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't think that reorganizing the site based on homework, popular science, and research level is an ideal solution. But encouraging tagging could help organization and segregation. And defining research level as graduate level physics and above should serve us well. It would certainly help, but I don't know if it would necessarily solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am highly in favor of separate homework section from the main site, as it forms a fair chunk of the site, and is needed to avoid flooding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="12798" LastEditDate="2013-06-28T22:58:44.387" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T22:58:44.387" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4453" CreationDate="2013-06-29T03:55:42.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's still wrong to hyphenate it that way.  It should be &quot;stress-energy tensor&quot;....sigh{{Citation needed}}&#xA;An underscore as is traditional in Unix should get the tag thing to work:&#xA;stress--energy_tensor.  And others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastEditorUserId="6432" LastEditDate="2016-04-09T02:32:24.070" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T02:32:24.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4475" CreationDate="2013-06-29T09:14:47.173" Score="-4" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69436/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, the OP asks about a statement concerning a particle physics topics, taken from a certain well known website. The answer nicely clarifies why this statement is wrong from a physics point of view, so far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the owner of this website is not an expert in the funtamental physics topics by training or education (particle physics, some cosmology, and reltated things), he often writes about, even though he often manages to pose as an expert in popular media such as newspagers, magazines, etc by deluding too gulible science journalists which lets him successfully negatively biase the view and percetption of fundamental physics in the public. &lt;a href=&quot;http://profmattstrassler.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prof. Strassler&lt;/a&gt; for example continuisly has to correct the from a physics point of view wrong, exagerated, biased, and otherwise inappropriate claims this blogger is cited for in popular mass media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real experts who actually work on the topics the website cited in the question often talks (or more appropriately rants) about, know that the aim of this site is not to deliver correct reliable physics information (it is even explicitely stated on that site in the text that describes what kind of comments are welcome, that its purpose is not to discuss physics!), but the owner has an agenda to harm research he dislikes and obviously does not properly understand not only by instigating flame wars in the internet, but to prevent that it gets properly funded in the real world too by making himself seen and heard in the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are all comments pointing out that there is a general problem with the credibility and appropriateness of such websites for exctracting correct physics informations, repeatedly deleted by I moderator? Why is it generally not allowed to judge the credibility of sources people take the information from to ask questions on physics SE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To physicists, it is well known that not all sources where one can find information about physics, are equally good and reliable and if certain sources mentioned are systematically problematic it should not only be allowed to point this out, Physics SE should even &quot;feel obliged&quot; to uncover these issues, if being a good place to learn about correct physics is still among its main goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T17:59:12.920" Title="Why is it not allowed to point out problems with the credibility of sources that are not appropriate to retrieve correct physics information?" Tags="|discussion|policy|ethics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4470" CreationDate="2013-06-29T09:42:29.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, comments are for improvements and possible clarifications of a post. Commenting &quot;The link you use is not reliable&quot; doesn't fit in to these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the statements you were making were libelous. That's not allowed here. Unless the post is effectively promoting a crank blog, we don't care about the reliability of the sources there. It's OK to say that &quot;the blog is wrong in this case&quot; -- that's fine. It's not OK to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Call the entire blog &quot;unreliable&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sweeping, libelous assumptions about &quot;the only purpose of his blog, book, maybe his life&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine what you would say if you saw similar comments directed towards Lenny Susskind or Terry Tao (Or even Motl for that matter) or some other great contemporary scientist with an Internet presence. It's safe to say that you'd want it removed. (And someone did take offence to your comments and ask for removal via a flag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't judge the correctness of anything, including external resources. Thus, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; such comments will be deleted. I don't care if it's correct or wrong, libel is libel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that you feel that &quot;The laypeople reading physics SE should properly be warned to not put any trust into this website&quot;. However, &lt;em&gt;this is not a platform&lt;/em&gt; for your views against a blog. If you wish to broadcast your views on this blog, do it elsewhere. Libel will not be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note: If you feel that the source in an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; is not too reliable, you are free to ask for a different source, saying that you personally (or many people) don't trust it. This happend with w3schools links on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T09:42:29.790" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4470" CreationDate="2013-06-29T10:06:51.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are you so concerned with the deletion of comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments &lt;em&gt;are deleted at will&lt;/em&gt;. They are fifth class citizens. Disposable. Nuke-able. Here today, gone tomorrow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;FSM-given right&lt;/em&gt; of any comment to live, at a fundamental level. Comments are only meant for discussing a post and how to improve it, and are typically deleted after they are addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you know, for example, that originally &lt;em&gt;there were no comments&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the morale is: don't put anything in there you wouldn't want deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a comment answers the question, make it an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's a faux-answer, or a meta-answer: Physics SE is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the place to discuss this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, these kinds of discussions have a place and a value, but not here on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a QUESTION and ANSWERS site. &amp;lt;-- i.e. we like QUESTIONS and ANSWERS.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is NOT a forum &amp;lt;-- i.e. we don't like comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one person contributes to the site mainly with comments, they are not helping the site grow that much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People come here with questions and want answers. If a question is valid, they don't want to be engaged in comments, they want an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, future visitors will typically come from a search engine, with a similar question. They really, really won't care about a debate (or even less, a rant) on how appropriate an external link is &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;. They simply want to know an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recipe of Stack Exchange, and the reason why we are reasonably successful, is to let the community focus on &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; by making everything else less important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We realize it's a recipe, an opinion. However, that's how we roll - there are plenty of forums, other Q&amp;amp;A sites, blogs and wikis if one wants to contribute differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I totally understand that in other places the law of the land is different, but you have been on this site for long enough to know how this site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2013-06-30T17:59:12.920" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T17:59:12.920" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4474" CreationDate="2013-06-29T15:22:55.223" Score="12" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/69449/8007&quot;&gt;an answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; that I'm a little surprised to find that anyone even noticed, I just discovered (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;as it says on the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;) that there is a daily cap of 200 rep (excepting bounties and accepts).  Which meant that ~16 upvotes on that answer did not accrue to my reputation.  This doesn't really bother me much, because I don't care about rep that much, and I'm mostly super happy to find that people liked my explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am left wondering what possible rationale there might be for that cap.  Why is it useful in any way?  It seems - if anything - to diminish the motivation for writing really good answers, or participating on a given day after you've reached the cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T19:32:26.447" Title="What is the logic behind the daily reputation cap of 200?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4473" CreationDate="2013-06-29T15:30:57.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation's main use in the site mechanics (as opposed to getting you addicted) is as a measure of the trust the system puts in you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we have a complicated system here and it takes time to learn it no matter how good you are at writing questions and answers. The rep cap throttles privilege advancement bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also levels out the huge differences in accrued rep that can appear if a question get link on a popular website and attract more attention than might otherwise be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that acceptances and bounties can accrue above the daily rep cap. The most successful users on Stack Overflow are able to maintain daily rep gains in the neighborhood of 300 points day in and day out on that basis. And yes, that means that you could reach 10000 (for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;access to the &quot;moderator tools&quot;&lt;/a&gt; which are not exactly the tools given to the elected ♦-enabled moderators) in about one month!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T16:17:33.663" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4470" CreationDate="2013-06-29T15:47:05.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A certain population of this site has taken to writing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;not mainstream physics&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as if those words were a magic wand that entitles the wielder to demand actions from the moderator and to ignore the (already very loose) civility requirements on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that kooks, cranks, wannabes and other species of attention seekers &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; try to use Physics.SE as a platform to further their views, but the way to indicate to the public what we think of those views is not by asking a privileged minority to silence them but by voting them into oblivion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application of moderator powers to remove kooky content will not make the kooks go away and it will not leave a trail that says &lt;em&gt;&quot;we as a community have judged this to be nonsense&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderation team is not (and is not expected to be) expert in all sub-fields and corners of physics. Our job is not to sort the wheat from the chaff: that is what the voting mechanism is for. &lt;em&gt;Vote.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Vote.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Both up &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular comments were deleted because, by attributing motives to another poster (and later to the moderators, again!) they&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Took the focus off of physics and onto people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invited personal response and further conflict of personalities instead of ideas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators job &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; include moderating the discussion, which means removing exactly that sort of content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will notice that other comments disputing the physics and not maligning the person were left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T15:47:05.400" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4460" CreationDate="2013-06-29T16:30:03.797" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's stupid (that's my feeling of course) to change the name of an existing tag. Perhaps I could agree on adding some synonyms if you really feel it's important. Maybe something like a &lt;em&gt;researcher-to-researcher&lt;/em&gt; tag, &lt;em&gt;professional question&lt;/em&gt;, or even &lt;em&gt;researcher&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T16:30:03.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4295" CreationDate="2013-06-29T16:46:28.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this tag could be used also for all these questions we really enjoy to resolve, like everyday paradoxes (the tea leafs paradox (unfortunately duplicated &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3244/vortex-in-liquid-collects-particles-in-center&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8918/mixing-a-cup-of-tea-and-break-of-centrifugal-force/8920#8920&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69122/what-forces-are-at-work-causing-sand-to-migrate-to-the-centre-of-a-spinning-buck&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;) is one of such paradox I discovered recently with a particular joy for instance), physics of toys (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12305/help-understanding-a-magnetic-levitation-physics-toy&quot;&gt;Help understanding a Magnetic Levitation &amp;quot;Physics Toy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; among a lot of examples that can be easily found), ... to give some examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that any other question asking for a popularisation of complicated concept (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17944/how-does-the-higgs-mechanism-work&quot;&gt;this question about Higgs&lt;/a&gt;) deserve a specific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the main interest of a &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; tag is that it attracts and encourage &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; ! It's fine for me to have some questions from the &lt;em&gt;civil society&lt;/em&gt;, say (I do not know if there's a better english word), like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11154/why-is-there-a-scarcity-of-lithium&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;popular-science tag is absolutely not a pejorative tag at all&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;popularising science is what every researcher should do sometimes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;science is good for people&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be very happy if a scientific journalist for instance cites a popular-science answer from physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS:&lt;/em&gt; At the time of writing, I obviously put all the examples I gave under the pop-science banner ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T16:59:17.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-30T07:00:33.973" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to edit the post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28984/big-bang-anybody?lq=1&quot;&gt;Big Bang Anybody?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by adding a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; tag to it.. While until now, even if I didn't edit the body of the post, I could still edit the tags. However, it seems like from today onwards, to edit the tags, I also need to add 6 characters to the text! At  first,  I thought of simply adding the followsing text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\mbox{ }$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I realised that then the edit would be rejected (since it is too trivial) and so will the tag edits . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why do we need to modify the text body just to edit the tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T16:16:27.967" Title="Editing tags not allowed because not 6 characters?" Tags="|support|status-norepro|editing|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-30T19:07:17.910" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a question about how light from an LED can be (and is often) diffused evenly across a surface, for example, as in back-lit LCD displays, or lit-up (shaped) panels of electrical appliances and so on. I want to know what materials, structures and design techniques (or generally, what solutions) are used to solve these kinds of problems. Would this be an acceptable question for physics.stackexchange.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10362" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T00:18:11.917" Title="Can I ask what solutions exist for design problems of a physical product?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4479" CreationDate="2013-07-01T00:18:11.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, as this is more of an engineering question than a physics question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you found out that material X somehow diffused the light and you wanted to ask &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; material X diffused the light, that would be on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T00:18:11.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4398" CreationDate="2013-07-01T06:43:16.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative wording I've found useful for certain HW's so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As per our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715&quot;&gt;recommendation on asking homework questions&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm noting this in case people think it should be one of our three. Its benefit is that this particular catch in the HW policy is somewhat buried, and may be missed by a cursory glance through the meta page. Note though that it is only for a &lt;em&gt;strict subset&lt;/em&gt; of closeable homework - those questions that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have work put in, but ultimately are just asking for verification of the symbol manipulation. As such, it is not general enough to work in all HW cases, and so may be too specific to warrant taking up one of three slots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, any and all are invited to copy/paste this and use/modify it as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T06:43:16.183" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-01T14:26:54.427" Score="7" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being subjective and rather vague, I propose that the intuition tag be done away with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2013-07-07T20:43:54.250" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T20:43:54.250" Title="Why do we have an intuition tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4486" CreationDate="2013-07-01T14:36:44.570" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/69682/revisions&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question was tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dimensional-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dimensional-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dimensional-analysis&lt;/a&gt; by the OP although it has nothing to do with dimensional analysis. All the tags tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dimensional-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dimensional-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dimensional-analysis&lt;/a&gt; have something to do with units, and that is how it should be. Therefore, I edited the post to remove the tag. However, it appears that the OP apparently reverted the edit even though I had stated in the edit reason that I did it because dimensional analysis is about manipulating units to obtain stuff *. However, since this edit reason is not visible publicly (since I only edited the tags), naturally, the OP did not understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not add in the tag again because I didn't want to cause an edit war, which is very common on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is do be done in such a situation? Do I just flag the question and inform the moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I couldn't write  a more specific word because it could be obtaining equations, constants etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T15:05:18.827" Title="Proper meaning of the dimensional-analysis tag?" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4483" CreationDate="2013-07-01T15:00:45.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes please. It's a meta tag, and a very vague one at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this gets consensus we'll see about getting it burninated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T15:00:45.387" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4484" CreationDate="2013-07-01T15:05:18.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removed. In such cases, leave  a comment explaining the issue to the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user persists in reverting your edits, flag for mod attention. We can give a more stern &quot;Stop it!&quot; comment and temporarily lock the post if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of an ambiguity, meta is the place to discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dimensional analysis&quot; is universally understood as pertaining to units, so the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dimensional-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dimensional-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dimensional-analysis&lt;/a&gt; is used in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've added a wiki excerpt (not a very good one), feel free to improve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T15:05:18.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="507" CreationDate="2013-07-01T16:54:09.977" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is done. The volume of migrations isn't &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt;, but there are enough of them to demonstrate a reasonable amount of overlap - so, no need to have to bother the moderators about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wnJ9U.png&quot; alt=&quot;the migrate to math.se option&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T16:54:09.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4398" CreationDate="2013-07-01T20:17:39.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so I've flagged two questions now that I felt were off-topic but none of the reasons we have in the list fit. We need to expand the list some... In both cases, the question was not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homework&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About math&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Outside the mainstream&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belonged on another SE site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, none of the reasons fit. But none of the other options fit either because it was very clear what was being asked, this just wasn't the correct place for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69347/isnt-this-wikipedia-equation-of-navier-stokes-actually-wrong&quot;&gt;Isn&amp;#39;t this wikipedia equation of navier-stokes actually wrong?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was clear, but not something that could be answered really on our network or anywhere else in SE, it was up to Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69738/which-alloys-hold-up-under-extreme-high-temperature-best&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69738/which-alloys-hold-up-under-extreme-high-temperature-best&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is primarily an engineering question (except the last question posed as I said in my comment). So it's clear, not homework, not math, definitely mainstream, not overly broad, but it doesn't belong on another SE site (engineering.SE doesn't exist yet). So I'm left stumped for what to flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need a normal, plain old &quot;Off-topic because it doesn't fit in the scope of the site&quot; still. We can't come up with every edge case for questions that don't meet the other criteria so we still need something to default to, some kind of &quot;Other...&quot; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T20:17:39.373" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4509" CreationDate="2013-07-02T14:41:47.510" Score="14" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;We occasionally get &quot;find me a PDF&quot; requests, where a user knows exactly the paper she needs and (presumably because of a paywall) asks how to obtain an electronic copy of it. This has typically been considered off-topic, and I agree that a site built around how to get behind paywalls is not a good thing to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/27503/8563&quot;&gt;this question of mine&lt;/a&gt;, which asked the former Theoretical Physics site about how one might obtain &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; copies of a particularly hard-to-obtain paper, has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/27503/revisions&quot;&gt;put on hold as off-topic&lt;/a&gt; for this reason. I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5232&quot;&gt;argued in the comments&lt;/a&gt;, and I repeat it here, that this is a question that requires an good knowledge of the physics literature and that future questions like this should definitely be allowed. If I am desperate to find a given paper, have the exact reference, and have looked everywhere, then I would be glad to be able to voice it in a gathering of physicists. I feel banning questions like this would devalue this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we decide to allow this, then we also need to define where to draw the line. If you (dis)agree on the general principle, (down)up-vote the main answer to this question, and voice your ideas for appropriate criteria!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T16:14:34.683" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T16:14:34.683" Title="How should we handle how-to-find-a-specific-reference requests?" Tags="|discussion|faq|scope|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4490" CreationDate="2013-07-02T14:41:47.510" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should allow some how-to-find-a-reference questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2013-07-02T19:13:00.900" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T19:13:00.900" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4529" CreationDate="2013-07-02T15:27:26.147" Score="12" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt; are either closed (because they are advertisements of non-mainstream ideas) or tagged very irrelevantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people like to pick on meta-tags, I've realised. But as for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt;, It is not &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt; a meta-tag. I know it is supposed to describe theoretical questions, but since &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the questions here are theoretical anyway (and in my opinion, that's how it should be).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt; is not a very good description since it makes people think that this is a very good site to come advertise their own non-mainstream ideas, which is not good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why not get rid of it? Or rename it as something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theoretical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theoretical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theoretical-physics&lt;/a&gt; but that isn't as useful as as the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-physics&lt;/a&gt;, since most questions are theoretical anyway, so it just reduces the limited number of  a maximum of 5 tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-04T11:36:18.230" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T11:36:18.230" Title="Getting rid of &quot;theory&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4490" CreationDate="2013-07-02T15:51:17.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;how do I find this paper,&quot; no matter the subject, probably has very similar answers. And most likely, it would be &quot;Go to a university library and talk to the librarian.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know in the US at most institutes, one could get any paper desired through the library. If they don't have it electronically or in print, through the Inter-Library Loan system, they'll get a copy from another library that does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would argue that even if the paper is about physics, from a physics journal, etc., this is really a question better suited elsewhere. I would think something like that would be at home on academia.SE, provided it's more general than &quot;How do I get the paper titled X&quot; as that's too localized on any site really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T15:51:17.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4233" CreationDate="2013-07-02T17:34:32.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\operatorname&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\mbox&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\mathrm&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\text&lt;/code&gt; achieve essentially the same purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also &lt;code&gt;\fbox&lt;/code&gt; (if you want an actual $\fbox{box}$), &lt;code&gt;\mathbf&lt;/code&gt; (which achieves this and bolds stuff too) and &lt;code&gt;\bf&lt;/code&gt; (essentially the same thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T14:08:30.200" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T14:08:30.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4473" CreationDate="2013-07-02T18:23:41.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click on the &quot;stack exchange&quot; dropdown menu in the upper left of your screen (meta or main, doesn't matter).  If you're not already there, click on the &quot;hot questions&quot; menu item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those hot questions get hotter because they're listed there.  This reflects an issue in the global dynamics of all Stack Exchange - that users with an established account in one subject can vote on questions in other subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a criteria for it to get listed in the hot questions to begin with, but it's not very good.  Once it starts to pick up steam and get referrals from the global network, its popularity is then &lt;em&gt;dictated by relative non-experts&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of my most upvoted answers aren't very good.  They're subject matter that appeals better to a layman.  That's why the 200 cap makes sense.  For physics, at least, there's basically no way to hit that limit on a single question with votes from the regular physics users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;161  avid users&#xA;2,175  total users&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the number of votes on a question or answer is in the neighborhood of 10 or so, that number stops giving much relevant information.  The traffic from regular users just isn't high enough to push it further, because we can all only vote once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I personally agree with it being a limit on user reputation in a day, because if you want to write 50 answers in one day, I don't see anything wrong with that.  But the cap approximates the issue I'm talking about sufficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="1255" LastEditDate="2013-07-02T19:32:26.447" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T19:32:26.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-03T01:12:08.527" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know how I am supposed to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the help system,&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt; , I am supposed to ask here to have my answer undeleted by vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an answer to question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69726/does-trade-affect-earths-rotation&quot;&gt;Does trade affect Earth&amp;#39;s rotation?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;At the time I wrote the answer the page contained several humorous comment.&#xA;Some have been deleted since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This induced me to write my answer in kind, though it was actually a serious answer as it was suggesting the most efficient way (not yet given by others) to actually do what the question asked. It is possible that my humor was too cryptic, as it was not understood, as the answer was deleted as irrelevant. Not knowing the system I did not try to edit it (as the help mentions that only for self-deletion), and I tried to explain in comments the problem and the meaning of the answer to have it undeleted.  Without any success, when a final remark made me understand, after several hours, that I was supposed to edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I did, and I do believe it is a sensible and useful answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/69746/revisions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/69746/revisions&lt;/a&gt;. It was edited 15 hours ago, but nothing is happening. I understand that some users can vote on this. Can you help.   Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: it should be said more clearly on the help page that a question is supposed to be edited before it can be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-07-03T01:17:59.207" Title="How can I get my answer undeleted" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-bydesign|answers|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2013-07-03T01:16:42.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would need to bring it's edited condition to the attention of the moderators. A flag would have done, but this post will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future a flag is preferred as there is no real reason to leave a public trail for this kind of day-to-day thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-07-03T01:16:42.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4493" CreationDate="2013-07-03T12:35:00.923" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes we should get rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-07-03T19:21:48.427" LastActivityDate="2013-07-03T19:21:48.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4493" CreationDate="2013-07-03T12:36:04.743" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt; tag should stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-07-03T19:21:58.537" LastActivityDate="2013-07-03T19:21:58.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-04T03:08:15.620" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across several questions along the lines of &quot;How do I complete this derivation?&quot; where the answer sometimes is just mathematical, but generally they need some sort of physical insight to go from the original equation to the final one where the authors of the book/paper/etc pull the classic &quot;And so it's obvious that...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more recent example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69953/solving-the-tov-equation&quot;&gt;Solving the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff (TOV) equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69309/vertical-wind-gradients-in-the-atmospheric-boundary-layer&quot;&gt;vertical wind gradients in the atmospheric boundary layer&lt;/a&gt; is actually an example that probably should be OT since it's purely a math question and no extra physical insight was needed... but I was feeling friendly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we tag these as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;? And more importantly, do we treat them as such and not provide the solution while also expecting the OP to include their work so far and where specifically he/she is stuck? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T07:49:52.230" Title="Are &quot;Help solve this equation&quot; questions &quot;homework&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2013-07-04T03:56:42.197" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, both these examples are suitable for migration to Math.SE. (I think so, anyway.) And in general, most questions where the OP is asking for help solving an equation should be migrated to Math, because the fact that they are asking about solving an equation means they've already done the physics which gets them to the equation. What's left is just math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is if someone is specifically interested in a way to constrain or find the solution using physical arguments, like scaling behavior or dimensional analysis, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; using normal mathematical methods. In those cases, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag is usually not needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-04T03:56:42.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-04T07:06:12.733" Score="4" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a bunch of proposed close reasons &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4398/what-will-our-list-of-close-reasons-look-like&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and there recently have been a few more good ones brought up there (Like Chris' alternative homework close reason or tpg's &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot; close reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to have some consensus for these, so we'll hold an extra chat session next Tuesday at 16:00UTC (same timing as our regular biweekly chat session, though we don't have that next week).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The agenda of the event is to discuss close reasons, and settle on a final set of three close reasons and their wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the timings are inconvenient, lease let me know. I'm open to changing it if enough people ask for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's OK if you have some points to make but won't be able to make it into the room. You can post those points on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4398/what-will-our-list-of-close-reasons-look-like&quot;&gt;close reasons thread&lt;/a&gt;, and we'll try to include that in our assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can register for the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (it also lists what time it will at in your timezone)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat session over: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/close-reason-discussion-part-1&quot;&gt;Part 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/close-reason-discussion-part-2&quot;&gt;Part 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have elected to remove the Math close reason, as we nw have a migration path to Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three proposed close reasons are below. If you would like to improve them or feel that they are counterproductive, please comment below them. (I suggest you check the bookmarked sub-discussion before commenting, the point may have been brought up)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the majority of the community feels that they are OK, these will probably be locked in tomorrow-ish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T06:55:51.973" Title="Chat session to discuss and possibly finalize close reasons" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|vote-to-close|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4490" CreationDate="2013-07-05T10:50:36.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edited the tag wiki to add&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is also for requests for where to find a resource when it has been demonstrated that that pdf has been hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question reopened (unless anyone has any objections), since it follows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to follow a few caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One per question. Don't dump your reading list and expect Physics.SE to gopher it for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must demonstrably be hard to find (you need to include more details on that in the question -- &quot;it's in journal X which is out of print&quot; or some such&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;). In other words, asking for a pdf of the EPR paper is not OK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we need to work out what happens with paywalls. Should we allow requests that ask for de-paywalling of an obscure paper? Or is it OK to link to the paywal landing page and be done with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO we shouldn't allow requests that ask for de-paywalling, however a request that asks for an obscure artcle which eventually is found hiding behind a paywall is OK as long as the answers link to the paywall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think requests for a book/article in a &lt;em&gt;nearby&lt;/em&gt; library  should not be allowed as it's just too localized. There's a &lt;em&gt;vary&lt;/em&gt; slim chance that someone else from that locality will be looking for the same resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Emilio's question doesn't demonstrate this thoroughly, but it's OK. The main point is that the paper should be hard to get, and there should be a bit explaining why.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T10:50:36.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4511" CreationDate="2013-07-05T15:05:03.403" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/70051/revisions&quot;&gt;This question on the Euler beta function&lt;/a&gt; shows a number of edits 'suggested' by Community. What exactly does this mean? Who made the edit/edit suggestions? Why is their name not displayed? If it is possible to anonymously suggest edits, how is this done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T15:12:23.000" Title="What does it mean if an edit is attributed to Community?" Tags="|discussion|editing|community-user|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2013-07-05T15:12:23.000" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question in a comment not too long ago and QMechanic responded...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means it's an edit suggested anonymously by somebody not logged in or not signed up for the site. If you log out and go to any question/answer, you can suggest edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T15:12:23.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-05T17:37:16.727" Score="-4" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in the habit of often specifying the license on what I write, for&#xA;many reasons.  This license is usually The Creative Commons license CC&#xA;BY-SA. It does not create any conflict with StackExchange because that&#xA;is precisely the license that is needed for StackExchange as specified&#xA;in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;. So the operation of StackExchange can in no way be disrupted by such a&#xA;license on a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in the Terms of Service, or anywhere that I could&#xA;see, that prohibits this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand that having a license on each little bit of&#xA;information can be bothersome for users of the site, and is not very&#xA;meaningful anyway. Hence I am refraining from using it on smaller&#xA;pieces of writing. On a larger piece, it is small enough that it is&#xA;hardly noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do I want to do it ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first reason is that a lot of people will copy a document without&#xA;thinking further about copyright issues.  They will usually keep the&#xA;license if it is there, but will not bother when it is implicit. Given&#xA;that I am using a pseudo, that quickly makes an orphan work with no&#xA;license on the web, which some people could appropriate through&#xA;specific legislations, and I do not want that. I have no certainty&#xA;that anyone, other than myself or close relatives, will want and have&#xA;the right in the future to preserve open access to what I write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second reason is educational. It is important in the digital world&#xA;that people understand the existence of licenses, and their role. It&#xA;is apparent to me that users of StackExchange do not. Licenses may&#xA;protect the rights and income of authors in some cases, but they may&#xA;also protect works and the right of all people to access and use them.&#xA;That form of awareness is socially extremely important, and scientists&#xA;should more than all others be aware of it as it is crucial for their&#xA;work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I remind the users of this community that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Declaration_on_Open_Access_to_Knowledge_in_the_Sciences_and_Humanities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;open access&#xA;movement&lt;/a&gt; is nowadays championned by the academic world in general, and&#xA;is &lt;a href=&quot;http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/signatoren/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;supported by the best universities and research centers&lt;/a&gt; in the&#xA;world (including several I worked for). In addition, its origins are&#xA;to be traced to the physics community and the work of physicist Paul&#xA;Ginsparg who created &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt;, the first open archive, at the Los Alamos&#xA;National Laboratory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This historical role of the physics community makes it all the more&#xA;worrisome to find out that many of its current members do not&#xA;understand the role and effect of the appropriate use of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last reason is simply to say thank you to people like Lawrence Lessig&#xA;and the whole Creative Commons community, and indirectly to Richard&#xA;M. Stallman who invented the type of licenses now used in&#xA;StackExchange and many other places to preserve everyone's access to&#xA;knowledge, éducation and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is customary, and even required, in the academic community to give&#xA;references to the works we have been using. We do use these licenses&#xA;all the time, and our work owes them more and more. It seems only&#xA;fitting to mention them regularly, without abusing it on minor&#xA;contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why am I saying this ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My remarks about the fact that many members of this community do not&#xA;understand the meaning and role of licenses is based on the exchange of comments&#xA;when I did include a license with one or two of my posts (I do spend&#xA;significant time on some). One user went so far as to edit my post to&#xA;remove the license, arguing that it was controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being controversial does not seem to me a sufficient reason to erase&#xA;something. Controversy is an essential ingredient of creation and&#xA;advancement of knowledge. Free speech was actually an academic&#xA;creation, and some universities still maintain an age-old tradition of&#xA;having (now symbolic) bodyguards for people defending their doctoral&#xA;dissertation, so that they can speak freely. Free speech is supposed&#xA;to be the rule, unless a clear problem can be identified, to say&#xA;things as loosely as possible. This was just this user's opinion&#xA;against mine, and though he may be a trusted user, that is obviously&#xA;not his kind of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, erasing a license or any kind of copyright&#xA;information from a work is generally an offense punishable by&#xA;law, probably in his country, certainly in mine, in the USA and in&#xA;most countries in the world. I do not mean this as any kind of threat,&#xA;but only as an example of general illiteracy in those matters, which&#xA;actually justifies my position above, especially in regard to&#xA;education. Actually he would have a good defense, the only possible&#xA;one: this is the license demanded on this site, so that he was not&#xA;really changing anything. But if that is the case, why erase it ? It&#xA;obviously is not controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-07-06T21:26:35.843" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T13:40:33.113" Title="About the inclusion of a license in a post" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-05T17:45:29.807" Score="2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who can explain me the strange things that happen all the way with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;my question about the Mendeleev table&lt;/a&gt; here? At the beginning I could not edit it or make comments after it. That's why I tried to give my own answers to it, but my first answer was deleted. I wrote another one, and today somebody deleted the chain of comments after it (my talk with the users with names dimension10 and Mitchell Porter). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd like to find out, what is the idea? If the person who does this wants to inspire me with something, I suggest him to do this openly. If I violate some rules, or do something wrong, it will be much more honest to tell me this directly, than to compel me to catch anonymous hints. If not, then I believe there is a very interesting explanation of this phenomena, that resembles discrimination so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T04:14:47.520" Title="What happens with &quot;the explanation of the Mendeleev table&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|editing|etiquette|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4512" CreationDate="2013-07-05T18:09:53.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that we don't understand the need for licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are two issues with having an explicit CC-BY-SA license on the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's completely unnecessary. The footer mentions CC-BY-SA 3.0. The people who actually follow licenses will look for it there. The people who ignore them, well, they would ignore it anyway  wherever you keep the license (of course you can put up a takedown request or ask SE to do so if you find improperly attributed material).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's misleading. It gives the impression that users are allowed to specify any license they want -- this is false, all of the content &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be CC-BY-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, erasing a license or any kind of copyright information from a work is generally an offense punishable by law, probably in his country, certainly in mine, in the USA and in most countries in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except that the license wasn't erased. The license was already there, in the footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My remarks about the fact that many members of this community do not understand the meaning and role of licenses is based on the exchange of comments when I did include a license with one or two of my posts (I do spend significant time on some)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you are basing your &quot;fact&quot; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/69245/7433&quot;&gt;this comment exchange&lt;/a&gt;: I (and most pobably the others) do indeed understand how licensing works, and have been using CC-BY-SA for a while now. We also know that SE &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; licenses all material as CC-BY-SA (3.0), so there was no need for the license blurb (and as mentioned above, it can be harmful too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T18:09:53.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4513" CreationDate="2013-07-05T18:29:03.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post had been migrated from TheoreticalPhysics.SE, and there must have been some glitch in the user account reassociation. That's why you couldn't comment initially (which was fixed later when this was brought to my attention)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your deleted post wasn't an answer, it was a remark, which is why it wa deleted. It should have been a comment or an edit to the question. Of course, at the time, you could do neither (you'll find that you can do both now), so it's understandable that this frustrated you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment thread was getting long and wasn't so constructive, which is probably why it got deleted. Your stance there was a bit aggressive as well, you seemed to be asserting that nobody but a mathematician would understand what you meant, which can be taken as offensive. This may have contributed to the reason for deletion. Please be nice on this network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for discussion. If you see something wrong or want to suggest an improvement, you use a comment. If a comment thread is becoming a discussion, or if you wish to hold one, you go to chat. On Stack Exchange, comments are considered third-class citizens -- can be deleted without reason. In this case, the bulk of the conversation had already been &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/9405/discussion-between-dimension10-and-sergei-akbarov&quot;&gt;moved to chat&lt;/a&gt;, so there shouldn't have been an issue deleting them. &lt;em&gt;Usually&lt;/em&gt;, comments are deleted when they can no longer serve their purpose, that is, they can no longer result in improvements to the post. This can happen if the author either incorporates the suggestions (or corrects the mistakes), or gives a refusal to do so&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &amp;quot;correction in tone&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics#comment142792_16648&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, that was my fault: Someone had flagged the comment, and I felt that it was best to tone it down a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. There's nothing wrong with refusing changes or corrections. However, many a time it renders the comments useless, so these things get deleted.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T18:29:03.180" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-06T03:45:12.753" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using the latest version of RSSOwl and the tag [general-relativity] does not load any questions. The feed sits next to the other feeds I have and actually looks for questions every time I try to update the feed, but no questions are loaded in the browser. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user756" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2013-07-10T13:23:30.140" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T13:23:30.140" Title="Tag for 'general-relativity' does not load in rss feeder" Tags="|support|tags|rss|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4512" CreationDate="2013-07-06T14:01:58.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish that physics.SE users would give as much thought to the copyright of third-party content as they do to this discussion. When I flagged the embedding of a photograph protected by copyright into a post, my flag was classified as &quot;helpful&quot; yet the image remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there should be regular reminders that only content from Wikimedia Commons (or equivalent websites if they exist) may be freely embedded into posts. For all other content protected by copyright, the right way to go about this is to put a link to the web page on which it resides. It's an inconvenience because readers then have to click on the link to view the content, but it's the only way to be sure that one does not run afoul of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fair Use&quot; is probably O.K. for quoting brief excerpts of a text, but I doubt it is O.K. as a justification for embedding a photograph or illustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8143" LastActivityDate="2013-07-06T14:01:58.973" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4512" CreationDate="2013-07-06T15:48:24.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4514/520&quot;&gt;Manishearth notes&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; are quite clear on how material on the site is licensed. If you don't want the material licensed that way then don't post it to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the copyright holder, you are obviously free to offer the material under another license if you want (the Creative Commons licenses being non-exclusive), but you don't get to do that on Stack Exchange's dime (by posting that offer on their websites); instead you should make that second offer in another venue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-07-05T13:24:46.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-06T17:59:23.910" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been viewing the physics stack for a year but recently I've been unable to log in using iPad Safari. I can on the same device using skyfire. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9162" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-07-06T18:17:51.700" LastActivityDate="2013-07-06T22:10:03.463" Title="Difficulty logging in with safari on iPad" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4524" CreationDate="2013-07-07T16:37:44.960" Score="4" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get most out of stackexchange by asking and answering, and as a human, I do go wrong. I am sure that the right way to point it out is by a downvote, and/or a comment, but then looking up my history, past answers, and downvoting them sequentially is a source of demotivation. I do not want to disclose the name in public, but what I do want to know is how do I get in touch with the right people, and seek help regarding this issue? I do think if this continues, it will be difficult to continue using this very excellent resource....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21843" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T16:41:44.047" Title="How do I Report Stalking?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4523" CreationDate="2013-07-07T16:41:44.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I Report Stalking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Custom flagging one of your own posts and mentioning the details is enough. This works too, however it is best to do these things in private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but then looking up my history, past answers, and downvoting them sequentially is a source of demotivation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not exactly stalking, though serial downvoting will be reversed. If the comments are constructive, if is OK, but if they are rude or otherwise non constructive, this is not good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rest assured, I am looking into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T16:41:44.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4526" CreationDate="2013-07-07T17:31:02.840" Score="-1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I dont want to take the credit (reputation) for a question, but answerer should still obtain the reputation they deserve, is there some kind of a &quot;question-only community wiki&quot; option I can invoke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing which comes to my mind that would serve the purpose is disassociating the question from my account after asking, but I have heard that people are not very fond of doing this without stringent reasons ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-21T15:49:50.903" LastActivityDate="2013-09-21T15:51:39.913" Title="How can I ask a &quot;community wiki&quot; question such that the answerers can still earn reputation?" Tags="|support|questions|answers|reputation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4525" CreationDate="2013-07-07T17:36:54.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope. Why would you want this though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, question-only CW will not be used for this. (For that matter, try not to use answer CW for this either, but it's not that bad a thing if you do)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T17:36:54.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4528" CreationDate="2013-07-07T17:42:01.067" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to save a draft of a not yet finished answer I am writing, such that I can shut down my computer and continue working on it later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My not obtimal sulotion for far for this problem is to &quot;hide&quot; the unfinished answer for users with &amp;lt;10000 rep, work on it as long as it takes me, and redisplay it for the full audience when I have finished it. But the bumping of the question with each edit even of hidden answers is some kind of annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a better solution supported by Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T17:46:29.880" Title="Is there a way to save a not yet finished answer such that I can shut down my PC and contimue working on it later?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4527" CreationDate="2013-07-07T17:46:29.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Drafts are automatically saved every few minutes; if you visit the page again the text will be available to you. IIRC you can only have one question draft and one answer draft at a time, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T17:46:29.880" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4493" CreationDate="2013-07-07T20:46:07.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M2qer.png&quot; alt=&quot;BURNINATED&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot;&gt;Please care for the widows and orphans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T20:46:07.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4531" CreationDate="2013-07-08T20:53:20.330" Score="-2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got in the habit on SO of removing thanks and signature lines (and greetings) during edits because they don't add to the question and are relatively unneeded. I think we should adopt the same policy here and remove them from questions where they appear (and ideally not include them when writing new questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind going through and editing questions to remove them, but I would like it to be something everybody does so when they re-tag or edit questions for other reasons, they can remove these lines too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find questions of this sort by searching:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;thanks closed:no is:question&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where you can replace thanks with whatever other words that could bring up things like greetings and signatures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, here is the MSO discussion on the same topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should &amp;#39;Hi&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;thanks&amp;#39;, taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T14:57:30.207" Title="Removing thanks/signature lines" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2015-02-10T14:07:22.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4530" CreationDate="2013-07-08T21:04:23.193" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stock answer is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, we like to remove greetings and sign offs but we prefer edits to address more than one issue at a time. Just removing the 'Thanks,' is a small edit and those are generally discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, sometime it is hard to find other things to improve, which puts you (and the edit reviewers) in a bit of a bind. That may be the case with some of the ones you have pending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, I have nothing better than the stock answer to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T21:04:23.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4530" CreationDate="2013-07-09T13:05:28.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't care either way. It's unneccessary to remove thanks and greetings, but it's also unneccessary to include them. I wouldn't encourage anyone to search for them to delete them. If you're editing the post anyway, you're free to remove them and streamline the writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases where I would encourage editing out the bylines is when they become overly prosaic or distracting. In small doses however, they do no harm, and can make the tone friendlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side remark: I often feel compelled to include a little &quot;thank you&quot; or similar, because I don't want the tone of the question to be demanding or unthankful. (From a utilitarian POV, I think you also get better answers if you ask nicely.) Because I know people are strange about salutations here, I often write something like &quot;any ideas&quot; or &quot;I'd appreciate&quot;, and wrap it in the middle of a sentence, so it's hard to edit out. I end up spending way to much time thinking about stuff like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd like a no-intervention policy on &quot;thank you&quot;s. Let them stand as the author wrote them, unless they are distracting. Feel free to remove elaborate &quot;Hello, I'm new here and let me as a question&quot;-introductions, and forum-style signatures. But while you're at it, try to improve the &lt;em&gt;actual question&lt;/em&gt;, because that's what's important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T13:05:28.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4506" CreationDate="2013-07-09T17:01:39.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reason #1: Homework&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/homework-close-reason-discussion&quot;&gt;Bookmarked chat converation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T18:16:22.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4506" CreationDate="2013-07-09T18:05:23.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reason #2: Non-mainstream physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/non-mainstream-physics-close-reason-discussion&quot;&gt;Bookmarked chat conversation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We deal with &lt;strong&gt;mainstream physics&lt;/strong&gt; here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/7433&quot;&gt;Is non mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T15:44:15.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4536" CreationDate="2013-07-09T19:23:52.453" Score="22" ViewCount="4678" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often we get questions of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do I build this particular device?&quot; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why was this design implemented in such-and-such product?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these questions appropriate for the Physics Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T08:54:24.710" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T08:59:52.783" Title="Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?" Tags="|discussion|faq|scope|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-09T19:24:24.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2013-07-09T19:23:52.453" Score="19" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What exactly is the relation between physics and engineering?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt; is a natural science. It seeks to study how and/or why nature works the way we observe. &lt;strong&gt;Engineering&lt;/strong&gt; applies our understanding of nature to specific, real-world problems, creating new devices, products, or processes to solve those problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While both physics and engineering often work together, using similar toolsets from mathematics, they have different goals. Put one way, physics seeks to break down the world around us into more modular parts and more fundamental relations, while engineering seeks to reassemble those pieces into a new form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So engineering is off-topic here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. When constructing a product for use in the world, there are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; considerations that go into the decision-making process. The underlying physical principles are only a part of this. The physics community, while often tangentially knowledgeable in these areas, is not the place to seek guidance when ease-of-use, manufacturing costs, material availabilities, etc. are also primary considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are any engineering questions allowed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions &lt;strong&gt;inspired by&lt;/strong&gt; engineering considerations can be on-topic on this site. For instance, it would be valid to ask if there is a fundamental &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; limit to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How well one could resolve an object with a telescope,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How energy-efficient a computer can be, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How small a current can flow through a wire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290/what-really-allows-airplanes-to-fly&quot;&gt;What really allows airplanes to fly?&lt;/a&gt; that ask how a man-made system works are also on topic, as long as they aren't too broad. Questions about the physical reasoning and analysis that lead to design decisions are on topic; questions seeking help designing or building something is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What about experimental physics and laboratory equipment?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is not just theoretical, and experimental physics is on topic here. This includes questions about the usage of laboratory equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If my question doesn't belong here, where can I ask it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are sites that allow certain types of engineering question on the Stackexchange Network. Your question may be suitable at one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://diy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Home Improvement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://robotics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Robotics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mechanics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Motor Vehicle Maintenance and Repair&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, that list does not cover all forms of engineering. You can always propose a new Stackexchange site or support a proposal over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;. For a quicker response, users with at least 20 reputation can always bring up a question in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;. Note that there is no guarantee that anyone there has any input, and The h Bar is not a Q&amp;amp;A unto itself, but still we physics enthusiasts tend to like problem solving in general, as well as interesting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:48.357" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T02:51:55.293" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-09T19:24:24.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4506" CreationDate="2013-07-09T20:00:58.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reason #3: Engineering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/engineering-close-reason-discussion&quot;&gt;Bookmarked chat conversation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about &lt;strong&gt;engineering&lt;/strong&gt;, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/7433&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Meta post, under construction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T15:43:18.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4539" CreationDate="2013-07-10T01:13:40.897" Score="33" ViewCount="6337" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is non-mainstream physics allowed here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What defines non-mainstream physics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sort of questions and answers are disallowed by this policy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I do if I see a question or answer containing non-mainstream physics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T13:19:16.180" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T13:19:16.180" Title="Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?" Tags="|support|faq|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-10T01:13:40.897" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4538" CreationDate="2013-07-10T01:13:40.897" Score="29" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Is non-mainstream physics allowed here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, questions and answers about non-mainstream physics are not allowed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not a substitute for peer-review, and cannot evaluate new theories. While some questions can lead to legitimate new theories, the question will need to be specific in order to fit this format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What defines mainstream physics?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community. In the case of modern physics, if a theory has not been published in a reputable journal, it is not considered mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What sort of questions and answers are disallowed by this policy?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any post that attempts to work within the bounds of what we have determined to be &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot; is considered on topic for this site barring any other issues. For example, a question that proposes a new concept or paradigm, but asks for evaluation of that concept within the framework of current (mainstream) physics is OK. Similarly, a wrong answer that makes false statements but claims to work within the bounds of a mainstream theory is also allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if a question or answer uses a non-mainstream theory as its premise and attempts to go forward in that direction, it can be safely closed or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What should I do if I see a question or answer containing non-mainstream physics?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, be certain that it is indeed off topic by the above rules. Note that if a post is simply &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, leave a constructive comment explaining why, and downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post is indeed non-mainstream, leave a comment stating the fact and linking to this meta post. For questions, flag or vote to close as non-mainstream. For answers, use a custom moderator flag mentioning that it is non-mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T19:02:07.653" CommentCount="22" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-10T01:13:40.897" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4541" CreationDate="2013-07-10T04:21:04.893" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the discussion related to whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Engineering questions are on topic&lt;/a&gt;, we also need to consider whether the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt; tag has any reason to exist. We discussed it in the chat room using the most recent questions, the transcript of which can be found at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/discussion-of-the-engineering-tag&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/discussion-of-the-engineering-tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt; tag exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T14:24:29.813" Title="What is the fate of the engineering tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4540" CreationDate="2013-07-10T04:22:17.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt; should remain. It does not add information to the questions that are very important for answering/categorizing it. Additionally, the existing questions that are on-topic don't need the tag while the ones that would rely on the tag are off-topic based on our discussions about engineering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T04:22:17.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2013-07-10T07:10:55.647" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK. I am an engineering physicist. And in my just-above-zero engineering experience, the application of physics is of paramount importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, asking questions like &quot;how to build this device? &quot;should be off topic. However, questions related to engineering where questions pertain to a physical concept that has to be used, should be welcomed. After all, that is the goal of physics-making things that don't exist and improving things that exist for the good of mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24705" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T08:55:35.407" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T08:55:35.407" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-10T07:10:55.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2013-07-11T20:47:04.990" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coordinate-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coordinate-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coordinate-systems&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-frame&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-frame&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-frame&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="60891" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T14:15:46.607" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T14:15:46.607" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-11T20:47:04.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-12T08:10:57.563" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4490/how-should-we-handle-how-to-find-a-reference-requests?cb=1&quot;&gt;Here an other post&lt;/a&gt; with a huge amount of comments below each post. I'm feeling annoyed by this: or I have to clic to let them appear if I want to read them all, or I have to scroll a lot for nothing if I do not care about the comments. Is there a way to overcome this issue ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose some ways to resolve the problem: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;allow some posts (especially in the meta part) to be more forum-like (no comment allowed for instance). That could be something like the &lt;em&gt;Wiki community&lt;/em&gt; option.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;add a small floating on the bottom of the page link going to the next answer (for those who knows Gmail, a link like &lt;em&gt;go to the next discussion message&lt;/em&gt; on Gmail)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;add a link to expand / discard &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the comment of a given page (close to  the &lt;em&gt;comment, edit, share&lt;/em&gt; buttons)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or eventually all of these options ! Please tell me what you think about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T08:37:47.007" Title="About the long comment list" Tags="|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4544" CreationDate="2013-07-12T08:36:21.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, Metas have their heart buried in comments. That's why the system doesn't disturb you often to &lt;em&gt;go to chat&lt;/em&gt; while commenting in meta. Second, our meta is barely flooded. I suggest you to go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;MSO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at some upvoted question, it will be flooded with comments. Moderation over there is very difficult due to their over-population. I don't say that we don't need it. But, mods will definitely take some action if they see obsolete/offensive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it's just a discussion. So, we can keep it as it is. It isn't that much annoying...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T08:36:21.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4544" CreationDate="2013-07-12T08:37:47.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case of the main site, there shouldn't be long comment discussions in the first place. If you see this happening, just flag it and ask the participants to move the discussion to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of the meta site, a &quot;hide comments&quot; feature would be useful (also the &quot;next post --I like that idea&quot; , but IMO on meta comments are something that need reading too, sometimes they contain vauable points. Sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW I think that the amount of comments by default shown on that meta post is ridiculous, usually only 5 or so get shown and the rest are hidden. Maybe it's because the comments are longer than usual that I'm noticing this , but usually the bulk of the comments are well hidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T08:37:47.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-12T08:46:02.773" Score="-1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;My comment got deleted in the topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/70808/2451&quot;&gt;Aspiring scientist&lt;/a&gt;. It got deleted - fine. But I don't see who did it? Is it normal here, is it norm? I would like to be aware of moderators who do that without leaving a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9173" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T11:20:50.523" Title="Deleted comment" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4547" CreationDate="2013-07-12T09:05:26.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are ephermal, in general they can be deleted without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the link was possibly non mainstrean and had been flagged (we disallow non mainstream physics here), and besides it had no potential of improving the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please only use comments to point out mistakes, ask for clarification, or suggest improvements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T09:05:26.890" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4540" CreationDate="2013-07-12T14:24:29.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done. The tag has been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zm85C.png&quot; alt=&quot;stupidest game I ever played&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is now in the tag blacklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T14:24:29.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4490" CreationDate="2013-07-13T03:40:03.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me just comment on a very limited, but possibly important aspect of this issue. I don't think we should mess with copyright, but articles that are behind the paywall often have copies on the Internet that are posted legally: a lot of journals allow the authors to post copies (sometimes slightly modified) of their articles at the author's site, at the author's institution's site, or in the arxiv. For example, there are a couple of my articles at my personal site, and they are posted there in compliance with the policies of the journals. I guess (requests for) links to such copies should be allowed at Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2013-07-13T03:40:03.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-13T13:47:44.387" Score="6" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a thought that this question is off-topic. But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the day I joined here, I was active (though I had low-quality answers, I was still actively answering) for almost 8 months. Then, I had a vacation (can't use internet that much) when I stopped answering. I (am) still visited (visiting) each day, read &amp;amp; voted a lot of posts. Once I came back, I can't participate actively like I did before. A few days later, I had another vacation when internet was sufficiently available. At that time, I can't control myself from answering questions. So, I started again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I had a terrible 1 month (diffusely avail. internet) vacation, when I stopped answering again. I don't know why I'm getting tired (bored) of answering stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still read many interesting Q&amp;amp;As, vote many posts, edit &amp;amp; review a few things, etc. But, I can't get back into the lane of answering questions. Does this happen to users often? or, Am I spending more time starring at these font over-and-over again which got me bored? (I can't figure this out)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an opinion: For the first few months, I was giving utmost priority to rep. score, visiting the users list many time finding my position in the list (pardon me, but I did do that). Maybe that's why I answered a lot. Now, I don't even care to look at the &quot;just-another-number&quot; in my profile. I had figured out (at the start of this year) that rep. isn't determining how much knowledge someone has. Maybe, that could be a reason why I stopped answering. But, I do feel guilty for stopping my answers. I'm very much aware that no one is gonna worry for someone stopping answering questions. Still, I can't find a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a discussion. I need a few opinions and advice from users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T01:16:08.270" Title="Is it true that Physics.SE gets bored often?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4551" CreationDate="2013-07-13T15:37:52.043" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not just boredom. My participation tends to ebb and flow with my research workload, and in particular the way I participate depends on what other work I have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waiting for something to compile? I'll edit or flag questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waiting for some files to transfer? I'll look around for questions I can comment on to help either figure out what the person is asking or to help list out what I think would make a good answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoiding working all together because I have so much it's overwhelming? I'll hop into the chat, edit a whole bunch of tag wikis, and answer questions (ie. the past week). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately your participation is up to you. We each have an objective in participation. For some it's to learn; others to teach. I personally would like to get enough rep to cast close and reopen votes to help relieve some of the moderators' workload. I most often only have time to help moderate and improve posts rather than contributing original content, but right now I can only do that by flagging (and until recently, I could only suggest edits). I'm not a fan of pushing my work onto others to act on and would rather be able to do it directly. But getting the rep is hard because I don't have the time to generate original content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C'est la vie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the point is, don't feel guilty, don't feel like you're obligated to participate one way or another. You do what you want to do, what you have time for, and what you enjoy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-07-13T15:37:52.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4554" CreationDate="2013-07-13T21:38:57.717" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered a question with a bounty &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69731/floating-a-ping-pong-ball-in-the-air-just-using-a-pen/70371#70371&quot;&gt;Floating a ping pong ball in the air just using a pen!&lt;/a&gt;, received 4 upvotes, and was awarded the bounty; I got +150 karma from the bounty as usual, but have not got any &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; from the upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug, or a feature limiting &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; from upvotes that I missed reading about in the FAQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T23:05:49.863" Title="No *reputation* from upvotes - is this a bug?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4553" CreationDate="2013-07-13T22:33:32.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, it's &quot;reputation&quot;, not &quot;karma&quot; ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, that post is (was) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;Community Wiki mode&lt;/a&gt;. It does not accrue reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-13T22:53:52.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-07-14T04:18:00.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://astrobites.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jaRuC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astrobites&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T04:18:00.507" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-14T04:18:00.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4557" CreationDate="2013-07-14T12:20:01.637" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just noted that when writing a technical &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71056/2751&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on the main page, a blue popup window appears telling me that the question I am writing is too subjective and will probably be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What distracting nonsense is this? Can this unneeded new feature be turned of on Physics SE? At least should the algorithm used to recognize inappropriate questions while they are written be debugged, such that it is not triggered when people are for example writing technical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People on sites like MathOverflow, CS Theory, etc will not be happy about such new features too I guess&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T12:33:49.400" Title="Distracting popup window that appears when writing a question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4556" CreationDate="2013-07-14T12:33:49.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across it a couple of times too -- it has very few false alarms, and usually comes up when you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; asking for opinions (Type &quot;what do you think&quot; in the topbar). I don't see why it's so annoying, it has a very useful feature and the couple of times you come across it, you can check your question for subjectiveness and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a new feature. It's always been there, afaict. The fact that you, a user who has asked 80-odd questions, have &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; noticed it is testament to it not having too many false alarms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I doubt it will be turned off because it is extremely good at catching subjective questions (at least, ones I can come up with to test against it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, it's saying this (it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; calling your question as &quot;too subjective&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a &quot;maybe&quot; statement, and all it's saying is that there's a chance that the question is subjective. It basically tells newbies that subjective questions are disallowed -- many don't know about that. If you think your question isn't subjective, go ahead and post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T12:33:49.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-14T15:22:48.000" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is currently a proposal for a mathematical modeling stackexchange on Area51:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling?referrer=B5TWQ70QNWlDGxDR-o9vQA2&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling?referrer=B5TWQ70QNWlDGxDR-o9vQA2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intended to have no overlap with physicsSE; questions that are on-topic on one site should be off topic on the other. With that said, the site is still in the definition phase, so it needs people to post suggested mathematical modeling questions that they would like to see answered in the future. These questions can then be voted on by others (a 5 vote limit) to decide what the site should be about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should help with any questions that are too experience based for MathSE and too mathematical or too localized for PhysicsSE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16371" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T15:22:48.000" Title="Mathematical modeling stackexchange" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-15T04:31:43.890" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was putting a bounty on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62918/10851&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; for the first time, and the text window started bugging out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IR0v4.png&quot; alt=&quot;bounty error&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, some of the prompt is cut off on the left-hand side (the &quot;E&quot; in &quot;Enter&quot;, the &quot;Ar&quot; in &quot;Are&quot;). More frustratingly, &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; text was altered in the middle of typing. What I actually typed began &quot;This is a great question&quot; and ended &quot;based on&quot;, but the substitutions &lt;code&gt;T&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;(&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change seemed to be associated with the linewrap in the text box. Also, the final version came out fine, it was just my display that was wrong at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, this occurred running Firefox 22.0 on a Windows machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T12:34:58.280" Title="Cut-off display and wrong displayed text in posting bounty" Tags="|bug|design|bounty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-15T05:26:16.123" Score="22" ViewCount="1506" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model does not work well for &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; questions, and these are banned network-wide for good reason. However, many of the other Stack Exchange sites allow or even encourage list questions that do not fall under the &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Physics.SE currently has a &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; policy against list questions of any kind, even if they are quite limited in scope and technical in nature. I know I'm not the only user who finds this frustrating, and so I would like to open this policy up for discussion. In particular, I would like to propose that we make a distinction between unhelpful &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; questions and more productive &amp;quot;good list&amp;quot; questions that should be allowed on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good starting point for this is the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;good subjective, bad subjective&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; post on the Stack Exchange blog. Although it doesn't mention lists specifically, it makes the helpful point that subjectivity in itself does not make a question unsuitable for the Stack Exchange model, and if a subjective question follows an appropriate set of guidelines then it can be productive. I believe the same to be true of list questions. In fact many of the guidelines for subjective questions in general could be carried over to list questions in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;good subjective, bad subjective&amp;quot; blog post gives the following set of guidelines for subjective posts. I think this will need some modification beyond just replacing &amp;quot;subjective&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;list&amp;quot;, but it gives us a start in coming up with a suitable set of guidelines for list questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”&#xA;2. Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers&#xA;3. Great subjective questions have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&#xA;4. Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions&#xA;5. Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&#xA;6. Great subjective questions are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For list questions on physics, I think the most important requirements should be that they are based on &lt;strong&gt;facts and not opinions&lt;/strong&gt;, and that they be sufficiently &lt;strong&gt;limited in scope&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., not likely to produce and endless string of answers, none of which is any better than the others. Of course, the latter is a judgement call, and we need to discuss the criteria used to make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good list questions could include (for example) lists of applications of a particular theory; references to support a particular claim; or ways to determine a particular empirical quantity. In each case we have to be careful about scope (&amp;quot;What are some applications of Newton's second law?&amp;quot; would be a bad list question), but appropriately restrictive list questions of these kinds could be a useful and productive thing to have on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be very grateful if anyone would like to update this question with some links to examples. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71019/&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a recent one that sparked some &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/9648/discussion-between-david-zaslavsky-and-dilaton&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;, but I know there have been many other good examples over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-29T08:35:15.127" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T08:46:50.180" Title="Good list, bad list" Tags="|discussion|questions|scope|policy|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-07-15T05:40:06.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on this, and I'll expand it some more when I think about it more, is that there is a very clear good list/bad list distinction. But most of the questions people argue are good lists, I don't agree are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what makes a bad list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single answer is unlikely to be complete on its own. The question you cited that prompted this post also falls on the bad subjective side -- what one considers an &quot;important problem&quot; in the field may not be what others consider.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An answer must be continually updated. Again, the cited question falls in this category. Even if somehow we determined a complete list of &quot;important problems,&quot; that could change tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lists of things that fall outside of those two primary issues I think would be good lists. But I'm a bit hard-pressed to come up with what those would be, and I don't recall any questions that I think would fall in that category, but that's not to say they aren't out there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as we discussed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2957/are-journal-requests-on-topic&quot;&gt;finding journals&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; tag, I think questions like the one you cited are best posed in chat or on meta to &lt;strong&gt;indicate the tag-wiki needs to be updated to reflect the answer&lt;/strong&gt;. For instance, the tag-wiki on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plasma-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;plasma-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;plasma-physics&lt;/a&gt; could be updated to reflect current research areas, including key papers, journals, and reviews. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need for a question/answer, that's what the tag wiki's should be used to communicate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T05:40:06.480" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4564" CreationDate="2013-07-15T06:43:51.287" Score="3" ViewCount="1024" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently editing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;string-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;string-theory&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki, and I am adding some links to freely downloadable, copyrighted books at some illegal pirate resources located in third parties.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is this considered a violation of copyright policy of stack exchange? Is it allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T11:40:25.283" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T11:40:25.283" Title="Is linking to an illegal pirate site for freely downloading copyrighted books a violation of copyright here?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4563" CreationDate="2013-07-15T07:00:01.450" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't address the legal issues (because I'm not qualified), but in general, it's not a violation of any SE policy to &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; to anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the interest of maintaining professionalism, I would &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; that if you want to identify a specific book, you should link to the Amazon product page or some similar canonical identifier, not to a site that offers the book's content for download. The exception is if the file is made available at no cost (and with no login requirements or other access restrictions) by the copyright holder (author or publisher), then you can link to the page where this authorized copy is available for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a courtesy to users of the site, you should link not to a PDF file itself, but to a &quot;landing page&quot; which includes a link to the actual PDF file. (Or whatever the actual file is, if it's not a PDF.) This is analogous to how, when linking to papers on arXiv, you always link to the abstract page, not the PDF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T07:00:01.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-07-15T07:16:15.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since my comment may have been part of sparking this I should probably say a few more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sympathetic to the position that carefully limited, actively curated, reasonably objective list questions can be a good thing (tm) for the site. I really am. But I don't believe that those conditions can be reliably met and I know from bitter experience that allowing list questions to proliferate pollutes a good Q&amp;amp;A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my opinion---personal not speaking &lt;em&gt;ex cathedra&lt;/em&gt; here---is to shut them all down with extreme prejudice. Kill them with fire kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None-the-less I will stand by a community decision--like I did during the period when &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; was on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let me register my pleas that if you will have these &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that limits be set and enforced that keep us from having an endless procession of make-a-list-like-that-other-list-question-but-with-one-more-adjective-or-restriction questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that subjective ideas like &quot;important&quot; be kicked to the side of the road (and &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; this means kill that stupid important-plasma-problems-not-including-the-most-important-plasma-problem question not just with fire, but with bolt after bold of highly ionized gas)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that we not accept every list question that someone who has read a couple of pop-sci books can think up, nor even those that will occur to an average undergrad: those things are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; well covered in endless books and will be treated in any course of study&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there you have my list of fun-hating conditions, and now you can all get off my lawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T07:16:15.323" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-07-15T09:59:49.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I exactly agree with Nathaniel that good lists reasonably defined as has started doing it in this meta question should be allowed on Physics SE, as it is done on other sites in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the good points already made, when considering if a list is too big or good and reasonably narrowed in scope it would be appropriate to judge things from a physics point of view too, instead of focusing on some language issues that could hint (if one wants to interpret the question like this) to a too big list. To give an example for what I mean, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/56918/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question got first closed as a (big) list question because of such language issues, even though when looking at and thinking about it from a physics point of view, it is clear that there simply can not be an infinite or big number of ways the uncertainty principle can be modified in accordance with the the current experimental and theoretical physics knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the two points brought up in tpg2114's answer constitute no obstruction to allow good list questions as defined in Nathaniel's question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning point 1, even many conceptual and technical questions can have more than one answer for good reasons, for example there exist complementary ways to look at or understand a physics issue. Looking at things from different points of view is not a bad thing in physics, on the contrary as many well known physicists agree it furthers a deeper understanding of the problem at hand and is therefore a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning point 2, I think Physics SE should model itself on other sites in the network, which are targetted exclusively or inclusively at an audience of researchers. For example on Mathoverflow, CS Theory, and the former Theoretical Physics SE, questions about the current state or actual problems of a well defined enough topic or subject have always been allowed and never deemed problematic, they are even supported and appreciated by the communities of researchers there. So this second point should not constitute an obstruction to allow good list questions either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So in summary I am all for an adjustment of the current list question policy as suggested by Nathaniel's nice post&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T10:06:53.190" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-07-15T10:33:35.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158809/why-are-shopping-list-questions-bad&quot;&gt;Why are &amp;quot;shopping list&amp;quot; questions bad?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do feel that our book/list policy can be revised. Not removed, but loosened up considerably. For book questions, this can be done by making sure that answers include a sketch of the book -- what prerequisites are assumed, the style of the book, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll first start out by listing the problems that can occur with such questions. If we can fix most of these, we may have a chance. Note that by &quot;fix&quot;, I'm talking about formulating a policy that effectively mitigates these issues. I'm quite certain that SE wont implement any features specifically to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The problems&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of things that irk me about list questions in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, and as such a list item is not an &quot;answer&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They tend to be less conceptual. One of the reasons why I like Physics.SE over Quora and PhysicsForums is that questions here are invariably about &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They may attract a lower-level crowd (like &quot;list of Physics jokes&quot;, etc). Quora has this problem -- it's got a lot of list questions and very few high level ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single answer is almost never complete. This gets to me a lot, because it's so different in nature from other Q&amp;amp;As here. I can very well read the top or top 2 answers of a Q&amp;amp;A and learn enough. That doesn't work on list questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thy end up as a popularity contest. It's not &quot;best answer gets voted to the top&quot;, it's &quot;most popular answer gets voted to the top&quot;. Voting doesn't indicate the best answer, it indicates:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The oldest answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most popular answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point #3 and partially point #4 don't really apply to book recommendations, not always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, book recommendation questions are unmoderatable. Unlike conceptual answers, which can be easily checked for non mainstreamness and pitching, book recommendations are hotbeds for people pitching their own publications. And also pitching irrelevant or non-mainstream books. It's not easy to moderate this, because, as moderators, we would have to read the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that the following problems do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; occur with book recommendations on Physics (which do occur with shopping recs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Price issues: From what I've seen, nobody cares about price with book recommendations on Physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Outdatedness: Griffiths has been used ever since Man discovered fire. Same goes for Resnick-Halliday-* and Kreyzig and the rest. While new physics books come up all the time, existing ones don't get outdated, not really. There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/10287880#10287880&quot;&gt;exceptions&lt;/a&gt;, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More about book questions, and a proposed policy to allow them&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that happens with book questions is that the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; question being asked is &quot;Please teach me about X&quot;. Whenever a question is narrow enough such that the topic X can be reasonably explained in a single post with links to additional reading, I feel that we should convert the post with an edit (with or without the OPs consent -- currently we have done this but only if the OP consents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of broader topics, here's what I propose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Only&lt;/em&gt; allow descriptive answers. There are lots of Physics books on a topic that can be found by an Amazon search. The question is, which one is appropriate to read? When trying to learn GTR on my own, I went ahead and borrowed Misner-Thorne-Wheeler. Big mistake. It is one of the best books in the field, but it's more of a reference -- there are better books to study from if you want to teach yourself. Thing is, you need to know what a book covers, and, more importantly, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it covers it. Does it explain tensor calculus or does it simply expect you to know it? These sorts of things are important. I've heard people talk for more than 15 minutes on the merits/demerits, style, et cetera of a physics book, so I'm sure that it's not unreasonable to ask for this. This actually makes the post really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; useful -- the reader knows his/her needs better than we do, and giving information on the style of books is a better way for the reader to determine which book to finally use. Information is always better than advice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question should mention the level of understanding of the student. The topic should not be too broad, either. Also, we ought to edit in a mention of the previous point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We place a boilerplate banner on each question linking to a book policy and mentioning (in short) what is to be expected of answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will need the community to actively help curate book questions and enforce these policies. This is important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These should be made CW. Reasons? See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list#comment12208_4565&quot;&gt;Chris' comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is an optional point: We maintain a single Community Wiki answer per question, and all other answers are incorporated and deleted as they come in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these policies are in place, the major problems with books questions are reduced. They're much more relevant and useful now. They also are less &quot;all answers are equally valid&quot;-y. They're still not conceptual, though, but this isn't so important if the answers are explanatory. I guess we could find a way to work in the non mainstream policy without forcing mods to read each book. Or just use downvotes for bad books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;List questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure how to make these work. As such many of these can be improved by tweaking the language -- the language is important because changing it attracts different types of answers. A question asking for a &quot;List of ways to measure the weight of one's head &lt;em&gt;sans&lt;/em&gt; decapitation&quot; will attract one-line or list-like answers with little to no explanation. When asked for a list, one's mind is focused on generating as many points as possible, without expanding on the individual points (horizontal thinking). When asked &quot;how can I measure the weight of my head&quot;, one's mind will focus on getting a single complete solution, and post that (vertical thinking). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these can't be &quot;fixed&quot;. &quot;List of unsolved problems in plasma Physics&quot; -- somehow I feel that this is more suitable for a Wikipedia page. You don't learn anything from this and as such it's not conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see scope for improvement in the list question policy, but I'm not yet sure how to codify this. I'll mull over it and update this post when I figure something out (I'll probably have a look at past list questions etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T13:15:44.540" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-15T12:00:24.490" Score="0" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current 404 page is very plain. I know there was a question for a better 404 page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1022/ideas-for-404-error-captcha-pages-take-2&quot;&gt;Ideas for 404/error/captcha pages, take 2&lt;/a&gt;. However, it was not  implemented in the end. Maybe, it was forgotten, or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we try to have a better 404 page? Some suggestions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it was removed by the author&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QMutr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The author was non-zero so this Loperator aninhilated his stated post.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qMOs9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The author became a covariant derivative has killed his metric post.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/clSPm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it was deleted by moderators.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The page was killed to ensure that the site is free of torsion.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5emvd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sorry! D' Alembert has killed the page, perhaps because it was in a massless state.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think this is a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I know &quot;State&quot; isn't accurate in (4), but it is kind of boring to say &quot;The page was in a massless field&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or... we could put text saying &quot;LQG&quot;,  since LQG is ill-defined ? : )    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T15:44:20.177" Title="How about a better 404 page?" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4605" CreationDate="2013-07-15T17:03:50.050" Score="48" ViewCount="1553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been kicking around this site for a little while now and I've realized that I'm very rarely even tempted to post a question. I'm an astronomy grad student with a background in physics, so naturally as I go about my life and work questions relevant to physics occur to me; it's one of my main areas of interest, after all. However, I feel like that same background/interests prevents me from actually wanting to post questions here. There is a very limited set of questions that (i) I think of and (ii) I can't reason out a plausible answer to, this is after all what my training as a physicist is supposed to make me capable of... or (iii) I can't find an answer to with a bit of research, another skill I think any self-respecting physicist possesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems I'm in good company. Most of the top answer authors on this site seem to have a ratio of questions to answers in the range of 1:100 or 1:1000. I wondered if this might be particular to Physics.SE (and other SE's where the topic is one that will naturally attract problem-solvers), and got sort of mixed results. SO's top answer authors barely ask anything, and likewise on Math.SE. Photography.SE, which I'd describe as a non-problem solving based topic, is similar as well. Bicycles.SE has somewhat more even Q:A ratios amongst its top users. Top users from Gaming.SE and RPG.SE ask a lot of questions, and I think I'd describe gamers as keen problem solvers. So hmm, not a lot of support for that hypothesis. It's probably a lot simpler; it's a lot easier to answer questions than to ask (good) questions, especially in the volume required to end up at the top of the rep scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great questions can come from anywhere, and sometimes a simple question that anyone can ask can turn out to be very interesting and complex (my favourite example here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8227/a-mirror-flips-left-and-right-but-not-up-and-down&quot;&gt;A mirror flips left and right, but not up and down&lt;/a&gt;). But a piece of old wisdom goes that the more things you know about, the more things you find that you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know about. An expert (I use the term loosely, what I really mean in the context of Physics.SE is anyone with about the equivalent knowledge required for a bachelor's degree in physics) should have some advantages when putting together a question, though. They should understand the basic physics underlying the topic, so they can really zero in on the concept they want to ask about. They know where to look for reliable information and can understand and evaluate the validity of whatever background material they come across. And I'm sure there are more reasons. Of course there are also potential drawbacks to being an expert trying to write a question, which I sort of outlined above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;strong&gt;Why do you think many clearly knowledgeable users don't ask more questions? Can we/should we/how can we encourage them/help them to ask more?&lt;/strong&gt; I feel like there may be an untapped wealth of great questions lurking out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T14:55:58.043" Title="Question self-destruction: why don't experts ask more questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-15T17:29:48.280" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you identified the reason already:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a very limited set of questions that (i) I think of and (ii) I can't reason out a plausible answer to, this is after all what my training as a physicist is supposed to make me capable of... or (iii) I can't find an answer to with a bit of research, another skill I think any self-respecting physicist possesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &quot;middle class&quot; of questions where the person asking doesn't have the expertise to answer them, but somebody else does, but in order to make such questions &quot;profitable&quot; to ask on the site, we need to have a wide variety of topical experts, many many more than we do now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T17:29:48.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-15T17:33:31.490" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because writing a good question is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;. New users post questions that aren't so good -- not as much effort is put into it, etc etc. Veteran users are more careful about what they ask because they know hat it's like to be on the other side and will want to ask a question well-tailored to get answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm no expert, I certainly have my times hen I get a physics question and I'm like &quot;I'd better post this on SE&quot;. But I first sit and mull over how I'd phrase it. And then I make sure that I'v tried all I can to solve it by myself. In doing so, I usually solve the question on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be beneficial is if experts self-answer tough, relevant conceptual confusions that they encounter and solve on their own. Instead of encouraging them to ask questions, which isn't exactly feasible due to what I mentioned above, we can encourage them to make more use of the &quot;answer own question&quot; feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I almost did that with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/23895/7433&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. I and my friends had been discussing the apparent paradox, and later on I worked it out on my own. I was thinking of self-answering this, except my friend (to whom I had recommended the site), posted the question first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this, there's always the uncertainty that a question won't &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; an answer (See @DavidZaslavsky's answer). This doesn't apply to me as much as it applies to the experts here -- I'm reasonably certain that any questions I ask here would get a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T17:33:31.490" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-15T18:14:18.820" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, if I have a question, I usually do the research myself and since I'm in grad school, I can use my library to get any paper I want to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the other side of the coin is that I'm &lt;strong&gt;paid&lt;/strong&gt; to ask questions and answer them. That's what research is about. And in my field, the competition for money is fierce and we have to be very careful to protect not just our results but the questions we are thinking about so we don't get sniped by our competition. So I &lt;strong&gt;can't&lt;/strong&gt; ask my questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so I resort to answering questions rather than asking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T18:14:18.820" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4551" CreationDate="2013-07-15T19:07:29.663" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think many (most?) people here approach the participation like I do, namely as a hobby.  Like all hobbies, sometimes you have a lot of time for it, sometimes not, so your participation/enthusiasm naturally changes with time.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rep thing is just a bit of fun.  It doesn't earn you any more money and it won't influence your chances of getting an academic post.  So not to be taken too seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T19:07:29.663" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-15T19:24:40.177" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to improve &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47141/name-of-experiment&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, I was trying to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-KCN0vmahqCw/UZq0xvR6D4I/AAAAAAAAAe4/KKYHhD2jwEY/w800-h800/INKrGUS.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this picture&lt;/a&gt;(it doesn't load here either) to it ; but what I get is:&quot;For security reasons, framing is not allowed; click OK to remove the frames.&quot; And then I'm redirected to another page with a big &lt;em&gt;Oops&lt;/em&gt; in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? I thought it might be because of the descriptions below the photo, so I removed them and tried again, without any success. Can anyone help me with this regard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will upload some pictures of the sequence of what happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZO0hX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qM4DD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fH5Fp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3XfX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24791" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T20:55:02.237" Title="Adding picture, what is framing?" Tags="|bug|status-reproduced|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-15T20:26:45.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A view from the other side: why &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; I ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71184/are-quantum-effects-significant-in-lens-design&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; here? As with others, I am/was an &quot;expert&quot; (PhD in astrophysics, although that was 10 years ago and I left academia directly after it). However, that doesn't mean I know everything about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore when an interesting (to me, anyway) debate was occurring on Photography.SE about classical vs quantum optics, the obvious thing to do was to send it over here, where people who are better at optics than I am would be able to help out. Sure, I probably &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have done the research myself (and I had a strong suspicion as to the answer), but if there are friendly, clever folk here who will help me to confirm my thoughts, why not take advantage of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, it probably helps that I both have a more than passing knowledge of the subject matter and am also an experienced user across other bits of Stack Exchange, so writing a &quot;good&quot; question was relatively easy for me. However, I'm not going to be unique in this - there are going to be other physicists who want answers to a question from a different area of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T20:26:45.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4577" CreationDate="2013-07-15T20:47:38.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently it throws this exception on large animated GIFs. I took a screencap of a certain anime I'm watching and converted it to a GIF &lt;a href=&quot;http://manishearth.anapnea.net/anim.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It's over 7 megabytes and gives the same error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrome Stable on Ubuntu 13.04&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, this exception comes from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;frame buster&lt;/a&gt; used to prevent &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clickjacking&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CSRF&lt;/a&gt;, and the like. Basically, it prevents you from putting an SE site within an HTML frame on a different domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image uploader does indeed use iframes, the response is delivered in a same-domain iframe which then calls a callback function in the parent frame&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. However, being same-domain, that error should not get thrown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that the large image is breaking something, causing the inner page to seem to load on a different domain (abut:blank maybe, that's what it looks like)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. I'm not entirely sure why they haven't used a simple POST request here, but they probably have their reasons.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T20:55:02.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-15T21:59:14.877" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I am in the minority of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;high rep&lt;/a&gt; users who ask a lot of questions.  I've asked 65 questions, and this is high compared to the next 5 users ahead of me, who've asked 3, 2, 20, 29, and 2 questions.  When someone writes 200 answers and asks 2 questions, then after all the time they've spent on the site, it's pretty obvious to call it a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do so many advanced users ask few, if any, questions?  And why am I an exception?  Easy - I'm an engineer, not a physicist.  Ok, I'm sure we have plenty of engineers and otherwise non-professional physicists here, and among the ranks of the high rep users.  Myself, I've just always had pent up angst against physics, since I started out excelling in it, but specialized in more lucrative directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, about my working theory for why high rep users don't ask questions... it's because &lt;strong&gt;you can never form a question that can't be improved&lt;/strong&gt;.  If we lived in a world with limited resources this wouldn't be true, but this site isn't like asking your colleague a quick question.  You are offering a typed question (with access to LaTeX and formatting) to be immortalized forever in Google results.  The browser you already have up has the capability for further research.  But let's say you're at the extent of available resources.  You've found an equation in a textbook that might have something wrong, but might not.  Even if you ask the perfect question, almost no one will be able to answer it!  By the time your question reaches the state of perfection, you're probably the most qualified person to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of a random thought experiment I had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/51908/why-arent-gas-planets-and-stars-fuzzy&quot;&gt;Why aren&amp;#39;t gas planets and stars fuzzy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In retrospect, it's fairly trivial.  But yet, it's a highly upvoted question.  If you share a curiosity with a genuine technical basis, other people will find it interesting.  Being extremely difficult to answer isn't a requirement for questions here.  If you're not willing to occasionally throw your hands up and say &quot;why not, I'll do a question&quot;, then you'll rarely ever post one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experts would ask more questions if it was more &quot;banter&quot; than questions because their thoughts can be expanded on by all parties.  Of course that has issues of scope.  Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A format is a way of enforcing good structure and scope, and even so, we go outside that scope all the time.  New questions are often answered by an answer on an old question that went off topic... and thus answered the new question.  Seriously, it can get to be a problem with close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T21:59:14.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4585" CreationDate="2013-07-16T09:24:51.207" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post is about Zephir's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16227/what-is-the-kinematics-of-a-particle-with-complex-mass/18678#18678&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  To quote him,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In AWT (dense aether model)&lt;/strong&gt; all particles have &lt;strong&gt;complex mass terms due the quantum fluctuations.&lt;/strong&gt; A the case of &lt;strong&gt;photons and neutrinos the complex mass becomes pronounced&lt;/strong&gt;. With respect to high density of atom nuclei the mesons are have complex mass too. These particles are doing &lt;strong&gt;tachyonic &amp;quot;jumps&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in space-time and they undergo quantum decoherence and oscillations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the bolded words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The idea he is basing his claims on is &amp;quot;AWT&amp;quot;, Aether Wave Theory, a non-mainstream idea. . If you check his profile, he is the one who started this non-mainstream busisness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post is clearly a promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The logic is fully flawed, and non-mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I flagged it (a long time back) as non-mainstream. However, the flag was declined (during my suspension, or just before, so I couldn't refute earlier.) saying that I was pointing  out &amp;quot;technical innacuracies in the post&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this supposed to indicate? That the answer was mainstream? I would like an explanation for how advertising one's own non-mainstream ideas is mainstream, or acceptable? Does this mean that non-mainstream ideas in answers are acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T16:11:09.090" Title="A non mainstream answer for complex mass particle kinematics" Tags="|discussion|scope|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4584" CreationDate="2013-07-16T09:38:45.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This makes sense, deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this may have been during the period of time when a couple of members of this site (you included) were generating a lot of incorrect non-mainstream flags (about wrong posts, not non mainstream posts). Basically it was a &quot;crying wolf&quot; situation. At first glance this does indeed look like a &quot;wrong&quot; post if you don't know that AWT is non mainstream. I'm going through Zephir's profile now and checking for more such posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T14:14:21.133" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T14:14:21.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4588" CreationDate="2013-07-16T15:55:09.127" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question header more or less sums it up. If I had in mind that I wanted a question to be visible to a google search using particular keywords, would it be sufficient to just include those words in a question body? Is there anything on the SE end that affects this? Or is it purely up to the search engine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T15:58:48.833" Title="What affects visibility of a question on google?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4587" CreationDate="2013-07-16T15:58:48.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE does some search engine optimization by including a relevant tag in the page title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, yes, just use the keywords in the post. The search engine does the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T15:58:48.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4584" CreationDate="2013-07-16T16:11:09.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The declining of the flag was supposed to indicate that answers which are wrong (including not being about non-mainstream physics) should be downvoted, not flagged. It didn't have a link or otherwise recommend a book or website etc., so it's not spam; it's merely wrong, and wrong answers shouldn't get deleted simply for being wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T16:11:09.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-16T19:36:10.823" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have reputation to spare, and notice good questions, throw a bounty. It saves the good questions from being lost in the flood. Currently there is only one bounty, which is unusually low activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably will also eventually earn back your bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="12798" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T02:25:10.820" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T02:25:10.820" Title="Use bounties more often" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4592" CreationDate="2013-07-16T20:09:11.657" Score="-2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted post up it became +3 then i changed my mind &#xA;and decided to remove my vote -- it became 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please fix it. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9173" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T12:37:59.207" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T12:37:59.207" Title="Bug with voting up and then down" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4591" CreationDate="2013-07-17T09:01:35.400" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the expected behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have upvoted, then to clear your upvote click the upvote button again i.e. it acts as a toggle. If you click the downvote button it (a) undoes the upvote then (b) registers a downvote. Hence the -2 change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T09:01:35.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4551" CreationDate="2013-07-17T16:39:26.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually experience something remarkably similar to what you describe here, and i have found a few points that may be worth keeping in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My most important point is &lt;strong&gt;Don't do anything differently!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first noticed i sometimes dropped off a lot, being reclusive to just the chat but still reviewing and answering only in bursts on The Workplace. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried analyzing what i answered to find out if i only answered specific questions or questions about specific problems, i found some false positives (mainly because i tend to only answer thing i know about so that correlation was due to my knowledge, not to my activity) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After spotting this i realized a pattern, it fit almost perfectly into the way i play games, read books or watch TV. In bursts, sporadically, when the fancy takes me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arming myself with this knowledge i noticed that you don't need to be answering constantly, it is a creative process, trying to force yourself into always answering wont work, this isn't a job that you need to work at 24/7. You don't need to answer every question, that's why this is a community, we work together to achieve what one person couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say its because it has 'become boring' or because the quality is changing or the community is changing, it seems perfectly natural, and is something i've seen happen to hundreds of users on just about every one of these sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it is true that physics get bored often, but it is also true for Stack Overflow, The Workplace, Academia, Gamedev...etc. Because answering questions in an informative manner is a creative process its like painting, or writing a book, you don't do it 100% of the time your entire life, you go where your creativity takes you and accept that you sometimes need downtime to try other things&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17607" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T17:01:53.297" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T17:01:53.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-17T23:43:03.497" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a PhD in physics and teach the subject at a community college, so I guess I would count as an expert. However, my expertise is concentrated in a couple of areas. My Q:A ratio is 29:262. Sometimes I ask questions about subjects I don't know as much about, e.g., field theory. Sometimes I ask questions and get zero answers, which is discouraging. I recently offered a small bounty on a question and still got zero answers. Other times I'm very, very happy with the answers I get, e.g.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/65068/radio-antennas-that-are-much-shorter-than-the-wavelength&quot;&gt;Radio antennas that are much shorter than the wavelength&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/62619/what-determines-the-angle-of-the-cushion-on-a-pool-table&quot;&gt;What determines the angle of the cushion on a pool table?&lt;/a&gt; . (In the latter, the answer was given in a comment -- this seems to happen more with nontrivial questions, maybe because people are less sure their answers are right.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T23:43:03.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4551" CreationDate="2013-07-18T01:16:08.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many things that make me uncomfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I would like to have more exchanges, but with email, not chat. I&#xA;want time to think.  Exchanging through comments is very inconvenient,&#xA;and answers are not meant for that.  But email seems a no for most&#xA;people, even when I give mine. Once a problem is sorted out, it can go&#xA;online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the systems discourages repeating questions. Why not. But the&#xA;problem is old questions hardly interest anyone.  I spent considerable&#xA;time answering old questions (not so much on physics) on which I do&#xA;have expertise.  I consider myself lucky when I have one reader.&#xA;Workng with no feed back is discouraging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then one can get lots of rep with fast answers.  But that is no way to&#xA;work decently.  But if I try to pursue a topic that did attract much&#xA;interest, to get something out of it, the heat is down and I find&#xA;myself alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are answers that get upvoted though they include serious&#xA;mistakes. I do not even see the point of downvoting. I do point out&#xA;the mistake though, with little effect. I make mistakes too, but I do&#xA;correct (visibly if useful) any mistake I am aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do learn some stuff, and it can be fun, even though I am not a&#xA;physicist. I do what I can ... from what memories I have left.&#xA;And I like to understand and explain.&#xA;But I get tired of useless efforts for serious contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I am responsible and not listening enough. I wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T01:16:08.270" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4597" CreationDate="2013-07-18T09:54:14.120" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Wiki Pedia, for example, when you make an edit (to the source) , there is a box called &quot;Common edit summaries.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o35Es.png&quot; alt=&quot;Common Edit Summaries&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also minor edit summaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ox2Ti.png&quot; alt=&quot;Common Minor Edit Summaries&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that many common edits can be given quick summaries, to save time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that important at Wiki (since edit summaries aren't compulsoury), but I guess it would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;very useful here at Physics.SE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  Not just for edits, but for comments, also. For example, I find that I'm often repeating the same comment: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Homework Policy&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Please show more effort while asking homework questions. Don't expect anyone to do your work for you.&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Non-mainstream questions are not allowed here.&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Does your &quot;theory&quot; have any mathematics? What does it predict? What can I calculate with it? Please don't promote your own non-mainstream ideas here.&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;+1 Nice question!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;+1 Nice answer!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Huh? This is very unclear?! What are you even talking about?&quot; . &#xA;  / . . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means coming to meta ($ \geq $ 1 min waiting time), searching for [faq] ($ \geq 30 $ seconds waiting time), then clicking ($ \geq 30 $ seconds waiting time),  Linking to it and parsing the link and adding the text ($ \geq 1 $ minute typing time), which amounts to 4 minutes. Well, that's not that long, but this same process is repeated for multiple, multiple posts. So, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question 1.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Could there be a feature &quot;Common coments&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for the edits. Till recently,  I would just write something like, because its quick: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;SNJDSJDWIEE21!!!!S';DSDJSJDJUQJIDUFDNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111111........    &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something like that. Recently, for some reason, I got bored of typing nonsense, so I just type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Added homework tag.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Added popular-science tag.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Corrected LaTeX.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Don't use big-list tag.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It seems as if the homework tag applies even if it isn't real homework.&quot; (Yup, that's copied from Qmechanic.)     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant tags.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant tag.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant reference-request tag.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant string-theory tag. This is a kinematics question.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant string theory tag.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant research-level tag.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed irrelevant Mathematical Physics tag.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Added LaTeX.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Removed unnecessary Controversial statements.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fixed grammar.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And such things. It is quite monotonous to repeatedly write this, so &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question 2:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Could the same feature as requested in Q1 be applied to Edit Summaries too? (It would be even better if the system would detect the tags which have been changed, like if I add a pop-sci tag, for e.g., then it has in the common edit summaries, &quot;Added Popular-Science tag.&quot;, but perhaps that's just too much.)    .&#xA;   . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt; This is useful only to &amp;lt; 2k reputation users.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks. ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T14:52:52.280" Title="How about common edit summaries and common comments?" Tags="|feature-request|editing|comments|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2013-07-18T10:14:11.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For &quot;common comments&quot;, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;this userscript&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never really felt the need for edit summaries when I was a &amp;lt;2k user. Wikipedia has a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; larger need as you have a few thousand edits in a question history and finding a particular edit can be annoying. (FWIW the &quot;common edit summaries&quot; feature wasn't there a year ago). Over here, the purpose of the summary is to explain to the reviewer what you are doing. In this case, it is better to be verbose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have, but, again, I don't see much of a need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the proposal for automatically adding a tag edit summary for the case of tag-only edits. Till recently, users with 5k rep could edit tags without approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T10:14:11.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-18T11:02:06.893" Score="13" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see regular questions that could be answered by some basic Googling. Examples would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71406/in-a-large-city-how-much-hotter-on-average-is-it-outside-due-to-the-air-conditio&quot;&gt;In a large city how much hotter on average is it outside due to the air conditioning of all the buildings?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71475/quantum-annealing-computing&quot;&gt;Quantum annealing computing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be charitable, newcomers to physics may not know where to start and what terms to search for, and a suitable answer might be to point them at a few introductory articles. However in many cases it looks as if the OP simply can't be bothered to put any effort in. Do we have a policy for closing (or not closing) such questions. For homework we have the &quot;off topic/need to show some effort&quot; reason, but most of the questions of this sort aren't obviously homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I just being excessively grumpy? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T18:37:14.517" Title="Questions that show insufficient effort by the OP" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4601" CreationDate="2013-07-18T16:14:46.053" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm under the impression that a user may post a question with as many questions inside the main post as they wish, providing they're relevant to the main question. However, I've come across recent comments stating that posting more than four questions within a post is against the rules here. So just one question for now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many questions may a user ask within one post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T15:46:34.440" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T15:46:34.440" Title="How many questions may a user ask within one post?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2013-07-18T16:47:50.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;strong&gt;no hard limit&lt;/strong&gt;. The only policy is that &lt;strong&gt;sufficiently unrelated questions should be asked in separate posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;sufficiently unrelated&quot; mean here? Basically, questions should only be grouped together if you can reasonably imagine someone else who has one of those questions in mind would likely be &lt;em&gt;simultaneously&lt;/em&gt; wondering about the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks a question about neutrino absorption cross sections in lead, it is reasonable that they ask about the cross sections for each of the three generations of neutrinos. However, if some student just lists five thoughts that occurred to them while taking intro EM this past semester, that would probably warrant splitting into separate posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that a good discriminant is whether or not the questions are (or could easily have been) formatted into a bullet-point list. A list of questions is unlikely to have a strong conceptual underpinning uniting them, and is probably a sign that the questions are not sufficiently alike to be kept together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, multiple questions that flow with the problem statement are often good - they tend to ask about the same underlying physics from different angles. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62974/10851&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt; has 5 question marks spread throughout the body, but they are all driving at the same underlying issue. Answering just one would be insufficient for settling the matter, and it would be difficult to answer one without simultaneously answering the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T16:47:50.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2013-07-18T17:15:53.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How many questions may a user ask within one post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there is some flexibility in how you define a &quot;question.&quot; I'm not saying that you can only have one question mark in a post, or anything like that. It's fine to ask about different aspects of what is essentially the same underlying problem. But everything in your post should be about one conceptual issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good guideline is that you should be able to pose one question as the post title, and everything in the body should relate to that one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T17:15:53.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4598" CreationDate="2013-07-18T18:19:27.027" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you hover your mouse over the downvote button, you get this tip: &quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&quot; The help section &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;&quot;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; does not say anything about insufficient research effort. This suggests to me that ofeeshul policy is to downvote these, not close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I normally leave a comment explaining my downvote, quoting or paraphrasing the text in the downvote button's tip. If I don't do this, the OP will probably have no idea that I downvoted and will not learn that (IMO) there was a problem with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO there is nothing wrong with having questions and answers that cover exactly the same information that's available somewhere else like Wikipedia. WP is not perfect, and WP is a different type of collaborative environment than SE, with different strengths and weaknesses. Many seemingly obvious, trivial questions are FAQs, and one of the strengths of SE is that we have mechanisms for collecting correct answers to FAQs in a single place and then avoiding wasting our time by answering those FAQs again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T18:37:14.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4608" CreationDate="2013-07-18T18:24:55.207" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt; tag? Most questions using it are generally because it's a popular science question and the OP doesn't know which to use &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; because the OP used it along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not get rid of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T12:25:21.210" Title="Do we need the relativity tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-18T18:35:48.260" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can we/should we/how can we encourage them/help them to ask more? I feel like there may be an untapped wealth of great questions lurking out there.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should encourage expert users to ask more questions in their area of expertise. I agree with you that the proportion of good questions would be greater if the experts shared more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are five suggestions for experts considering contributing a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  Answer your own questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)  Write questions for an audience of physicists trained outside your specialty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3)  Share the big, significant, important questions in your field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4)  Elaborate on the scientific news that does manage to get attention in the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5)  Ask questions with answers that actually matter to the quality of life for people on our planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6)  Be an example of reason, scientific methodology, and professionalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons to contribute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  We become what we write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)  There are too few examples of scientific thinking available to people outside a university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3)  Good posts have a feedback effect by encouraging others – making physics.se more fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12951" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T18:35:48.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2013-07-18T23:06:53.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Graduate physics students, and postdocs, often are in the position of having to design and build their own experimental apparatus.  Questions about 'engineering' experimental apparatus for research seem on-topic to me.  Questions about 'engineering' something intended for commercial use seems off-topic because there are people paid to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12951" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T23:06:53.003" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-18T23:06:53.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4604" CreationDate="2013-07-19T05:36:01.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be fine with removing it. I've always been somewhat in favor of getting rid of this tag (just not enough to do anything about it), because posts which both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt; apply to can just be tagged with both of those, and otherwise we just use one or the other as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The potentially difficult thing about this will be going through all the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt; and sorting them out into GR or SR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T05:36:01.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4604" CreationDate="2013-07-19T09:00:14.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Brelativity%5D%20-%5Bspecial-relativity%5D%20-%5Bgeneral-relativity%5D%20is:question&quot;&gt;103 questions&lt;/a&gt;  tagged with &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Brelativity%5D+%5Bgeneral-relativity%5D+-%5Bspecial-relativity%5D++is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;9 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt; but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Brelativity%5D+%5Bspecial-relativity%5D+-%5Bgeneral-relativity%5D++is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;16 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt; but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Brelativity%5D%20%5Bgeneral-relativity%5D%20%5Bspecial-relativity%5D%20is:question&quot;&gt;10 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged with all three. I've noticed that most of our relativity questions are about general relativity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best solution here is to go through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Brelativity%5D%20-%5Bgeneral-relativity%5D%20is:question&quot;&gt;118 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt; but not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt;, and look for ones without GR on them. Then merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind keeping the tag, either. FWIW it may be worth merging the SR and GR tags into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativity&lt;/a&gt;, but that may lead to a broad tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T09:00:14.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-19T16:00:50.997" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just do not know where to write this remark. Apologies if this is the wrong place. Also I do not know whether the discussions about tag creation are available. I did not find the one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hydrostatics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hydrostatics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hydrostatics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to have a specialized tag, when a more general tag is missing. What I mean is that there is no tag covering &lt;em&gt;fluid statics&lt;/em&gt; which might include both &lt;em&gt;hydrostatics&lt;/em&gt; (a bad name, since there is more than water to it ...) and statics of gas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &quot;statics&quot; is not appropriate to fill the gap, given its definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-07-19T17:08:50.880" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T17:08:50.880" Title="Is hydrostatics the appropriate tag?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-19T17:39:05.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71598/8563&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; precisely in the spirit to have more &quot;expert&quot; questions, and I'd like to share this thought while it is still fresh in my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading a paper related to my research prompted a tangential question that became my Question. It took remarkably little time to form and emerged very clear and crisp in its full form. Essentially: &quot;Oh, that's curious! It's not important here, but surely one can do better experiments now. I wonder what one would see then? What's the theory behind that, anyway?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, actually posting the question on the site was a pretty laborious effort of phrasing it correctly, furnishing it with the appropriate context for it to be answerable, and the mechanics of digging for the images and links and references. In this instance that effort was probably &quot;cheaper&quot; than trying to figure out an answer (which would involve some digging for the state-of-the-art on that measurement, at least, and I'm not in the mood for &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; papers), but this is probably rare. I also have rather faint hopes of that question getting an answer here, as I feel there are few molecular physicists around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T17:39:05.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-19T21:45:10.173" Score="8" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't help noticing that hosting homework questions from textbooks borders on copyright infringement. Especially when &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46805/rotational-dynamics-problem-rod-slipping-against-block?rq=1&quot;&gt;pictures of diagrams are used&lt;/a&gt;. Is/should there be a policy promoting citing the textbook of origin, Chapter/section and question number? This might make it easier for others searching the internet for other problems in the same book as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2843" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T01:48:29.410" Title="Should Homework Questions Cite Their Textbook When Relevant?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4612" CreationDate="2013-07-19T21:57:23.927" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a matter of copyright/plagiarism, then yes, whenever material is quoted verbatim from a textbook, or from anywhere really, the source should be identified. I think that is mentioned in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, but if not, it should be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not expect this to be a &quot;prosecutable&quot; violation of copyright law, since quoting part or all of a homework problem for the purpose of getting help solving it probably falls under the fair use exception. (But I'm not a lawyer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T01:48:29.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-19T22:24:44.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a complaint, just a thought and an observation ... ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe experts prefer helping others by answering questions and do not ask much here, because Physics SE is not an &quot;expert-level&quot; site. The number of people who could answer their questions at the same level might be too small. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To better explain what I mean, when Lubos Motl reads in interesting paper concerning his own subject, thinks about it and comes up with some interesting thoughts and questions he rather posts an article on his blog as he did for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.de/2013/06/finding-and-abandoning-incorrect.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to obtain a better response than he would get when posting a corresponding question here. And think about it, who should answer, if people like Qmechanic have a question about something they do not understand concerning their own research subject? There are simply not enough physicists of this calliber here who could appreciate or even answer such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, if one wants to have questions from experts (about their own subject at least), the size of the community of fellow researchers who can appreciate and answer such questions must not fall below a certain critical value.&#xA;For example on sites with a higher number of researchers like TP.SE experts did, and on MathOverflow they still do ask more questions themself. With tpg2114's objections concerning the TP.SE example I disagree. This was a nice small extremely high quality site and it only died because the SE network is not appropriate to support such small communities and maybe they could have lowered the bar to ask questions a little bit as I said &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2610/2751&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary I would say, if we want to have more questions from experts about physics issues they are working on (?), we should first of all try to attract more experts and researchers to the site and make them feel at home here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T10:36:38.137" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4616" CreationDate="2013-07-20T07:15:06.620" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed some of my comments disappearing without me triggering this (at least not that I am aware of). Example: placed a comment in reaction to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71582/is-it-possible-to-have-a-geostationary-satellite-over-the-poles&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. It's now gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone an idea what is happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1268" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T13:14:44.807" Title="Disappearing comments" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4615" CreationDate="2013-07-20T07:25:34.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are meant to be temporary: to solicit clarification or point out potential edits, that sort of thing. So they tend to get deleted. If a comment doesn't really add anything substantial, it's liable to be deleted more quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, if your comments disappear, don't worry, that's just the system working as intended. If you have something to say that is worth preserving, something that you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to disappear after a while, put it in an answer. (Obviously, it should be something that actually does constitute an answer to the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T07:25:34.163" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-20T09:53:26.517" Score="0" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many questions here that ask about how GR comes out of string theory. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44782/how-do-the-einsteins-equations-come-out-of-string-theory&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70060/the-general-relativity-from-string-theory-point-of-view?lq=1&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1073/how-does-classical-gr-concept-of-space-time-emerge-from-string-theory?lq=1&quot;&gt;this also&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44732/is-string-theory-formulated-in-flat-or-curved-spacetime?lq=1&quot;&gt;that also&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44711/what-is-classical-limit-of-string-theory&quot;&gt;even this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30005/how-does-string-theory-predict-gravity?rq=1&quot;&gt;even that&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/54317/in-what-limit-does-string-theory-reproduce-general-relativity?lq=1&quot;&gt;(finally) and again&lt;/a&gt;.  And almost all of the comments on those posts are &quot;Related: ...&quot;, &quot;Possible Duplicate: ...&quot;, &quot;Duplicate: ...&quot; (of course if you pick any Question A and Question B out of the 7 questions, then Post A would have a comment &quot;Possible Duplicate: B&quot; and B would have a comment &quot;Possible Duplicate: A&quot;, or &quot;Related: ...&quot; or &quot;Duplicate: ...&quot; or &quot;You cheater! Didn't you check this question: ...&quot; or whatever.)  . Maybe this question should be tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;? . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;      Full list here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4653/faq-questions-on-the-main-site/4654#4654&quot;&gt;FAQ questions (on the main site)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T17:16:57.323" Title="Should &quot;How do the Einstein's equations come out of string theory?&quot; be FAQ?" Tags="|discussion|questions|site-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-20T13:44:24.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like this kind of question. I will not really try to answer it, since I consider Mark Rovetta already answered it perfectly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4605/16689&quot;&gt;somewhere else on this page&lt;/a&gt;. Instead I will give my feeling and experience, as a user of this website from a research-like perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like first to say that I already elaborated &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4138/16689&quot;&gt;somewhere else&lt;/a&gt; that the quality of the questions and answers sounds to me to depend on the topic. I pretty much like the condensed matter questions and answers on this website, as well as the quantum information ones for instance. And that's great because that's my research topics ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a background in superconductivity and quantum optics. So, as far as I can, I've tried to answer -- since less than one year I'm using SE -- the questions on superconductivity which were unanswered, and more generally on condensed matter when I know the answer. It appeared to me that the quantum optics questions are most of the time correctly answered, so I've nothing to add about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since one year, I'm trying to learn -- as a post-doc -- more about topological issues in both condensed matter and quantum information topics. Clearly, I will not ask question here like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey guys, I want to write an article about this or that, please do that for me !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would be ridiculous. But at the same time, it's pretty hard to understand the problems at the edge of two topics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How I'm using this site is as follow: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes I just want to test some ideas with other communities people (especially high-energy physicists for instance) to compare their point of view with my poor-condensed-matter vision (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/46324/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65767/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes I want easy access to a stream of articles, for which I would spend a lot of time finding relevant ones (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69358/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), and which are related to my current problems. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes I would like to understand in more details a point I've no time to stop on at the moment (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71151/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), since it's just an aside of what I'm thinking at the moment. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes I want to point out something I consider not well discussed in literature (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69141/16689&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62282/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the questions are just something I consider funny when I think about them, and which could be interesting for someone else (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71587/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), but I've neither time nor interest to keep on thinking of.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And yes, sometimes I'm asking purely fantasy, bulls... questions which are completely stupid (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/68456/16689&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, I try to make &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; questions, not &lt;em&gt;clever&lt;/em&gt; ones. I mean, I'm trying to ask questions which could be useful for others, not specifically dedicated to my problems of the moment. I'm usually writing on a piece of paper some questions I would like to answer, just inspired by the time I'm thinking about, most of the time after reading some papers. I feel some of them could be interesting for the SE community, so I try to publish them on this website. I do not think more than that ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The funny part is that two colleagues at my lab are using SE, too. We sometimes discuss the questions/answers together, to try to improve our understanding about specific staff for instance. What I want to point out here is that a researcher needs to discuss a lot in order to (un)validate her/his ideas, especially at the early stage of the elaboration of a new concept. To try to collect as much as possible opinions is the key I believe. This website is really useful for me in that respect. But still it's highly time consuming. As anything you have to type, you need to think about, read, write, clarify, read, write, think about ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to promote SE as much as I can around me (in the real life I mean). The most important reason why researchers do not use this website more often or as a working tool is simple I believe: &lt;strong&gt;they don't have time&lt;/strong&gt; ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T13:51:25.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-21T04:46:15.157" Score="6" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the &quot;homework&quot; close reason looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we get quite a lot of posts where someone posts a homework question, and then writes their attempt at a solution (without any real explanation, just the equations and numbers they used) and asks whether it's correct. Such &quot;check my work&quot; questions are also off topic according to the linked meta post, but the phrase &quot;show some effort to work through the problem&quot; could be taken as encouraging them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we change the wording to make this policy clearer? Perhaps something like this (suggestions for improvements are welcome):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to understand the problem. The question must be about understanding the concept; questions that just ask us to check your work are off topic. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would make me feel better about voting to close such questions, because the user gets a clearer explanation of what they did wrong and how they can improve their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T08:06:10.447" Title="Wording of the homework close reason" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2013-07-21T06:48:23.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; is in bold for exactly this reason. Close reasons need to be fairly short if they're going to be useful, and accordingly the wording of the existing close reasons has been carefully tuned to say what needs to be said without using more words than necessary. In that respect, I don't think this change helps. We already have the big homework policy meta post to explain all the details of what an acceptable homework question looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not saying the existing reasons are perfect, but we did put quite a bit of thought into them - they were extensively discussed in a chat session, and then posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4506/chat-session-to-discuss-and-possibly-finalize-close-reasons&quot;&gt;for community feedback on meta&lt;/a&gt; (and earlier, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4398/what-will-our-list-of-close-reasons-look-like&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). When a few days passed without any additional comments, we decided the close reasons were good enough and implemented them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the close reasons is not something we should be doing often or on a whim; in particular, a small change like this isn't enough to justify it. If there is a &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt; omission from one of the close reasons, then we can discuss it and change it to fix that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T06:48:23.607" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2013-07-21T09:05:43.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a character limit on close reason, and that close reasons surpasses it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close reasons are supposed to be short, because the longer it is, the less likely someone is to read it. FWIW, while discussing the close reasons some users were against making it even that long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in this case I don't see how someone who can't be bothered to read both bolded parts will read the extra unbolded sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not too averse to removing the &quot;show your work&quot; bit entirely, it's really not as important. Homework posts that ask a conceptual question aren't really homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T09:05:43.207" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2013-07-21T15:53:18.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some other suggestions for how the wording could be changed. The most minimal change would be this: (replacing &quot;work through the problem&quot; with &quot;understand the problem&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to understand the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would prefer to be a bit more explicit about it: (This is the version in my original post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to understand the problem. The question must be about understanding the concept; questions that just ask us to check your work are off topic. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manishearth suggested just getting rid of the &quot;work through the question part&quot; entirely, which I'd be happy with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or again being more explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions that simply quote a homework problem or just ask us to check your working are off topic. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or shorter and not losing much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions that simply quote a homework problem or just ask us to check your working are off topic. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T15:53:18.247" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4626" CreationDate="2013-07-21T18:03:06.050" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;In two days, &lt;a href=&quot;http://space.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Space Exploration SE&lt;/a&gt; is going public. How will the migration of space-related questions proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: it is not my fault that the folks have chosen this moniker. After all, we have IT Security.SE (Sec.SE) and nobody complains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22254" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T23:57:45.530" Title="Will space-related questions be migrated to SEx.SE (Space Exploration) after it goes public?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2013-07-21T18:09:48.503" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There won't be any:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migration to beta sites is discouraged -- beta sites should grow as organically as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migration of old questions is also discouraged&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We won't migrate questions which are on-topic here. In the case of a site scope overlap, questions stay where asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T18:09:48.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-21T19:25:18.333" Score="8" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71455/8563&quot;&gt;question on the precise meaning of &quot;clockwise&quot;&lt;/a&gt; has received a ton of close-votes and downvotes (partly, I think, because of the original tone of the question). As @babou and I have argued, this is a valid, nontrivial, on-topic, valuable question, and it should really be pulled out of the administrative hole it's in. So: c'mon, upvote it and unclosevote it! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Manishearth's benefit, I quote my comment to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Clockwise&quot; is an important, ubiquitous technical term in the physical literature, and it is perfectly fine to have questions about their specific meaning and the conventions that surround such technical terms. Conventions are not physical insight but they are a crucial part of transmitting and understanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;ubiquitous&quot;, babou did the numbers to find that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word &quot;clockwise&quot; is used more than 800 times on physics.stackexchange.com according to the very approximative figures of google (I used: clockwise site:physics.stackexchange.com). This adverb must have some relevance to physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the question is about conventions. But asking what the common conventions in physics are, and how to use them, is what we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conventions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conventions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conventions&lt;/a&gt; tag to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T11:09:28.840" Title="C'mon, let's rescue the &quot;clockwise&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4627" CreationDate="2013-07-21T20:18:55.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, FSM!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense the question turns on the same (mis)understanding that leads to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8227/a-mirror-flips-left-and-right-but-not-up-and-down&quot;&gt;why a mirror reverses left and right but not up and down&lt;/a&gt;: one party views the clock from their own POV, the other promotes the clock to effective personhood and looks from &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; POV. In either case if they would &lt;em&gt;say what they mean&lt;/em&gt; they could agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this is why physicist and engineer use &quot;into the wall&quot; and &quot;out of the wall&quot;. The usual clock rotates into the the wall, and the deal in most card games rotates into the table. Alas when you say that in other company people think you are even weirder than is actually the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On reviewing the question I think there are some good answers there, and would not oppose re-opening, but I am among the crowd that feels &lt;em&gt;&quot;Physicists don't use that term other than casually because we have a more precise vocabulary; it's an English question&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, so I am not going to use my moderator super powers to re-open it either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T20:39:16.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-07-21T20:57:25.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/index.php?langue=en&amp;amp;halsid=h80sqt9oe4cj9came4tqtgted1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UoUIy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27320" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-07-27T03:49:59.320" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T03:49:59.320" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-21T20:57:25.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2013-07-21T23:57:45.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well I was just about to post my own topic about this.  Space Exploration is being infected by physics questions.  Out of the most recent 10 questions, I can count about 4 or 5 that could be questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to let everyone know that we're getting new activity partly because of traffic from there.  I've linked to a number of physics questions, because Space Exploration produces things are repeats from here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let me say that the astronomy detail is quite confusing.  Space exploration and astronomy are quite heavily intertwined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T23:57:45.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4631" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-07-22T11:20:00.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Applies to meta questions about &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'homework'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; questions on the main site.    Do not post your homework metaphysics questions here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-25T14:30:53.403" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T14:30:53.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-07-22T11:20:00.937" Score="0" Body="Applies to meta questions about &quot;homework&quot;-tagged     questions on the main site.   " OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-18T17:34:06.780" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T17:34:06.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2013-07-22T14:55:58.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a longer answer, but I will limit it to this, for what it is worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do write many more answers than questions. I answer only relatively&#xA;simple questions, as my math is no longer what it used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no expert in physics, but I am a scientist, and I can&#xA;often find my own answers. I also learn by answering questions&#xA;(typically what I did about the working of ABS brakes, on which I knew&#xA;practically nothing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did ask a very decent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69677/&quot;&gt;question of physics&lt;/a&gt;, for which I was downvoted&#xA;(-1) for no reason I could identify (52 views). A few comments, but no&#xA;answer. I provided an answer myself (read apparently by no one). The&#xA;purpose of the question was to understand how people make assumptions,&#xA;as the answer to that question contradicted assumptions made in a&#xA;previous one that was referenced. I still believe it was a good&#xA;question, even though the purpose of it was (barely) hidden. I think&#xA;understanding methods of reasonning is also part of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not encouraging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have questions to ask. But I let them ripen. I feel that I will&#xA;not (should not ?) get many chances of asking, and I better ask the&#xA;right questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T14:55:58.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4635" CreationDate="2013-07-22T17:36:16.577" Score="9" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are  two questions that do not make sense, while reading them:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71887/&quot;&gt;At CERN - What do you call the moment (event) particles crash together in the particle accelerator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71823/&quot;&gt;Is there a proof of existence of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My observation is that second question doesn't get better if you read the answers. I didn't learn anything new from the answers. It just looked to me like a philosophical exercise in renaming things for the sake of renaming things.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand the first question actually did got better when I read the answer. I've learnt something new. I've got better understanding of the particle physics experiment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bugs me is the moderator response to both situations. It was the first question that was blocked -- not the second one. I think that something is wrong with that. And I think that it has something to do with the standard complaint about &quot;not enough experts&quot; that you guys have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22354" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T17:58:13.277" Title="Questions that look like senseless, but with sensible answers" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4634" CreationDate="2013-07-22T17:53:00.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First one had one close vote, two comment upvotes (other than mine), and a flag. It was brought to our attention by the flag, and I closed it -- it made sense because it isn't really about physics concepts, and that's what we more or less deal with here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, answers do not justify the question. The question effectively asked for one word, but it got a more elaborate and interesting answer. For that matter, any question can get an elaborate and interesting answer. Closing in this case doesn't lead to deletion, all it does is prevent more answers and not invite similar questions. Nothing wrong with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think any of the mods even saw the second question. However, at first glance it's not a well-worded question, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; asking something sensible. It's effectively asking if physics allows for the notion that time is an illusion. I'm open to arguments about it's unsuitability though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T17:53:00.913" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2013-07-23T02:59:41.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't so much a full answer as an extended comment...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the things we realized in our (incredibly long, there-goes-my-productivity-for-the-day) &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/homework-close-reason-discussion&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; is that just about any wording we choose can be misinterpreted or at the very least mis-emphasized in the OP's mind. This is &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; likely when the wording mentions some corner case that just doesn't apply.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I don't worry too much about covering &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the corner cases anymore as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one used to have the exact same qualm about &quot;here's my work, where did I go wrong?&quot; questions - that the OP would miss the key sentence in the linked faq - and I even suggested a wording for that specific case &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4482&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. While I don't advocate that being a default close reason, I copy/paste it as a custom close reason in these situations, where the OP actually does some work but in the end is using us as a computer algebra system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than trying to find a close reason that covers everything, I've personally settled for having a couple specific alternate wordings on hand for certain cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For a contrived example: OP has a practice exam with solution set, but the solution set just has equations but no concepts. OP posts a question and the given answer and says &quot;huh?&quot; We put on hold with our standard &quot;homework must show effort&quot; clause. If the OP reads a sentence saying &quot;don't post equations and ask us to check them,&quot; it may be taken as &quot;this question would be fine but for the fact that you posted too many equations,&quot; which is not at all the message we wanted to send.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T03:12:02.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4749" CreationDate="2013-07-23T07:56:22.263" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title sums it well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;code&gt;Beyond Standard Model&lt;/code&gt; is an active area in physics(Check &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+model+AND+Beyond+standard/0/1/0/all/0/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arxiv&lt;/a&gt;, there are more than displayable results), we don't have a tag for it. I basically wanted to use it for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71967/proton-radius-puzzle&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, but I couldn't find anything related to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24791" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T12:21:08.810" Title="Tag Request, Beyond Standard Model" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2013-07-23T08:06:10.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please up/down vote this answer according to whether you think the wording should be changed to the following. (This is option 1 in my other answer - it's the same as the old wording, but changes &quot;work through the problem&quot; to &quot;understand the problem.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to understand the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See [our meta site][1] for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T08:06:10.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4637" CreationDate="2013-07-23T13:43:28.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diversity of possible theories and possible observation that our Beyond the Standard Model (tm) is enormous, and the tag would be so broad that it would provide little characterization of the question. Consider that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5118/why-are-neutrino-oscillations-considered-to-be-beyond-the-standard-model&quot;&gt;it is non-unreasonable to consider neutrino oscillation as &quot;beyond the standard model&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Dilaton noted in the comments we are better served by a set of more specific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T13:43:28.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2013-07-23T15:27:27.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag, which are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;strongly discouraged in the SE system&lt;/a&gt; unless they demonstrably and widely serve a useful (crucial?) function for a particular site. (The only meta tag in wide use here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, which is definitely critical.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless someone can argue convincingly that this is a useful tag (which would probably require identifying and retagging many of the relevant questions for it to be useful; the current six questions don't help much) then it probably ought to be exorcized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I can think of a reason: if the list in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; were kept updated, trim, complete and relevant, then it would significantly speed and ease the process of pointing people to their question's duplicate, and possibly help them find it before they ask. However, that's a high-maintenance task, and I don't see that it's worth the extra clutter it will introduce.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to initially populate such a tag could be to do a graph analysis on all posts and see which questions have lots of links towards them, or trying to identify cliques. Are there tools available for this sort of thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2013-07-26T12:50:01.247" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T12:50:01.247" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4643" CreationDate="2013-07-23T20:53:57.540" Score="7" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a number of users from Russia, for example, decided to create a room discussing Russian physics and physicists, and they decided to converse in the Russian language. This would unintentionally exclude most people from here participating and learning from the conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the guide lines, if any, on where non-English can be used on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T15:51:36.930" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="When can non-English be used on this site?" Tags="|discussion|chat|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4642" CreationDate="2013-07-23T21:05:16.467" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, we don't care what happens in chat rooms associated with the site, so if some users want to set up a chat room for discussion in a foreign language, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92996&quot;&gt;should be okay&lt;/a&gt;. However, if chat moderators have reason to suspect that the foreign language is being used to disguise communication that would otherwise be unacceptable (e.g. insults), they'll have to deal with that, and shutting down the chat room is one of the possible consequences (in extreme cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, meta site, and in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;main site chat room&lt;/a&gt;, all content should be in English. (Or more precisely, all content should be understandable to English speakers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T21:05:16.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-07-24T13:35:29.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://inspirehep.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XPxBl.png&quot; alt=&quot;INSPIRE -- literature database search for high-energy physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-07-27T04:47:38.350" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T04:47:38.350" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-24T13:35:29.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-07-25T11:36:48.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ted.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NZg62.png&quot; alt=&quot;TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24791" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T11:36:48.267" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-25T11:36:48.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2013-07-25T11:48:46.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should be done with these questions is that some moderator should &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;find the best answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, migrate them all to one of these questions, and close all the others as duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T11:48:46.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4627" CreationDate="2013-07-26T00:56:38.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathise very much with Emilio's feeling about this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know whether the question needs reopening. Trying to sponge a&#xA;mess will often spread it to a worse mess. The real problem is that it&#xA;became a mess to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that it was a perfectly valid question, asked candidly by&#xA;a user who wanted to be sure in the face of some opposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is about an adverb often used technically by physicists, on this&#xA;site too (as I tried to show).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three respondents were in agreement with this. My own answer was&#xA;probably hard to follow as I had misread John Rennie's answer&#xA;(because, as I explained later, he was using the more complex to&#xA;explain the simpler, in my view. I now understand his intent and reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem was, and is often, with the downvote system. There was&#xA;absolutely no reason to downvote this question. It was unjustified&#xA;technically, and it was rude to the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting on scientific issues is a rather strange idea (whether for or&#xA;against). Voting without having to justify the vote is just an open&#xA;door for the kind of mess we have seen. I know that has already been&#xA;discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to clean the mess, and many other questions, would be to&#xA;write a common synthesis of what was said.  But if we start on that&#xA;path, we will not finish soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have individually the possibility of rewriting the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we will still be treating a symptom, not the illness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something is not worth seeing, it should not be there. If it is&#xA;nevertheless kept, it can only be as an example of what is not worth&#xA;seeing. But that is useful only if a reason is given, even an&#xA;anonymous one. The reason is needed by the public as much as it is&#xA;desired by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T00:56:38.593" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-07-26T13:49:23.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://boinc.berkeley.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BOz24.png&quot; alt=&quot;BOINC volunteer distributed computing&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T13:49:23.710" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-07-26T13:49:23.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-26T22:11:30.237" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we have a tag for questions related to atomic, molecular and optical physics? I'd suggest &quot;AMO-Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, how many tags we have here match APS subject tags? Perhaps it would be a good idea to include APS subject classification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this specific question has been brought up before. I am just too lazy to look it up. Sorry. :]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &#xA;APS = American Physical Society. I mean take a look at Phys.Rev.Letters or Europhysics Letters and see how editors categorize subfields. Perhaps we could simply include that categorization as tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AMO is pretty much a catch-all phrase for laser cooling, ion trapping, optical lattices, BEC studies, Atom Magnetometry and tons more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastEditorUserId="5827" LastEditDate="2013-07-26T22:57:32.700" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T22:57:32.700" Title="AMO tag [Do we have one?]" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-27T09:31:16.493" Score="7" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many questions which should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; on the main site in my opinion. So I'm starting this meta post  to vote on questions  which could become &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;.  Add answers to propose faq questions, and vote on them, . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-09T10:16:23.580" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:22:13.617" Title="FAQ questions (on the main site)" Tags="|discussion|tags|site-faq|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-09T10:02:30.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-07-27T09:36:39.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44782/how-do-einsteins-field-equations-come-out-of-string-theory&quot;&gt;How do Einstein&amp;#39;s field equations come out of string theory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70060/the-general-relativity-from-string-theory-point-of-view?lq=1&quot;&gt;The General Relativity from String Theory Point of View&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1073/how-does-classical-gr-concept-of-space-time-emerge-from-string-theory?lq=1&quot;&gt;How does classical GR concept of space-time emerge from string theory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44732/is-string-theory-formulated-in-flat-or-curved-spacetime?lq=1&quot;&gt;Is String Theory formulated in flat or curved spacetime?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30005/how-does-string-theory-predict-gravity?rq=1&quot;&gt;How does String Theory predict Gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/54317/in-what-limit-does-string-theory-reproduce-general-relativity?lq=1&quot;&gt;In what limit does string theory reproduce general relativity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T14:36:18.733" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T14:36:18.733" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-09T10:02:30.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-07-27T09:40:20.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69982/variational-derivation-of-schrodinger-equation&quot;&gt;Variational Derivation of Schrodinger Equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15242/lagrangian-of-schrodinger-field?lq=1&quot;&gt;Lagrangian of Schrodinger field&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55622/how-would-a-lagrangian-be-used-to-recover-the-schrodinger-equation?lq=1&quot;&gt;How would a Lagrangian be used to recover the Schrodinger equation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:10:13.610" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:10:13.610" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-09T10:02:30.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-27T11:32:08.540" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I had 1693 rep, but when I logged on today I had only 1689 left. I went in to see if I'd gotten any downvotes. There weren't any, but I did have a &lt;em&gt;&quot;post was removed&quot;&lt;/em&gt; notice - I ticked the &lt;em&gt;&quot;show removed posts&quot;&lt;/em&gt; box at the bottom of the page because I've come across this before (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2845/incorrect-reputation-being-displayed&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1352/user-removed-rep-change&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question helped me figure things out then, I've already done the rep recalculation trigger).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that only accounts for a loss of 2 rep points and I seem to have lost 4. Is there anything else that can explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the amount of rep we're talking about is ludicrously small. So it's not the rep itself that bothers me, but the fact that I have no idea where it went.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T11:32:08.540" Title="More rep has changed than I can account for" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-27T12:38:04.747" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag reasons are outdated: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&lt;/a&gt;.   It still has &quot;too localised&quot; and others. Shouldn't it be updated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: just a bump to the front page, as this is still outdated. Should this be taken up to Meta Stack Overflow?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T20:52:48.400" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T20:52:48.400" Title="Outdated flag reasons" Tags="|bug|status-completed|close-reasons|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-07-27T19:17:33.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48016/how-exactly-do-superstrings-reduce-the-number-of-dimensions-in-bosonic-string-th&quot;&gt;How exactly do superstrings reduce the number of dimensions in bosonic string theory from 26 to 10 and remove the tachyons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66930/is-this-explanation-of-why-nine-space-dimensions-correct?lq=1&quot;&gt;Is this explanation of &amp;quot;Why nine space dimensions?&amp;quot; correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10527/why-are-extra-dimensions-necessary?lq=1&quot;&gt;Why are extra dimensions necessary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10075/compactification-of-dimensions?rq=1&quot;&gt;Compactification of dimensions in string theory: Why our Universe has 3 large spatial dimensions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31882/why-does-string-theory-require-9-dimensions-of-space-and-one-dimension-of-time?rq=1&quot;&gt;Why does string theory require 9 dimensions of space and one dimension of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38722/limit-on-space-time-dimension-from-susy?rq=1&quot;&gt;Limit on space-time dimension from susy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:11:22.980" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:11:22.980" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-09T10:02:30.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4627" CreationDate="2013-07-28T11:09:28.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the question to be fair and John's Rennie's answer to be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word clockwise can only be used along with a well defined axis, and had to clarified to the user. I see no reason, why such a question must be closed, as cross products requires an unambiguous definition of the word clockwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request reopening of the question, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T11:09:28.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4665" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-07-28T15:17:05.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this to request/propose that a tag be burninated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PLEASE POST YOUR BURNINATION PROPOSAL AS AN ANSWER TO &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4768/tag-burninate-requests-for-voting&quot;&gt;THIS CANONICAL POST&lt;/a&gt; INSTEAD OF POSTING A FRESH QUESTION FOR EVERY BURNINATION REQUEST.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2019-12-08T17:43:44.300" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T17:43:44.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4666" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-07-28T15:17:05.963" Score="0" Body="PLEASE POST YOUR BURNINATION PROPOSAL AS AN ANSWER TO THIS CANONICAL POST: https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4768/tag-burninate-requests-for-voting INSTEAD OF POSTING A FRESH QUESTION FOR EVERY BURNINATION REQUEST." OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2019-12-08T17:43:35.337" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T17:43:35.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4670" CreationDate="2013-07-29T09:07:08.443" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just today, I flagged the first nonconstructive trolling comment below a legitimate &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/72589/2751&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; as not constructive. When going to my flagging history, I see that the flag is nether declined nor deemed helpful, but there is a yellow blob saying that it is &quot;active&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never seen this before, what does it mean for a flag to be &quot;active&quot;? Does it mean that the flag is still active because it has not yet been handled? However, it is no longer listed among the flags waiting for moderator attention in the right side bar ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T10:43:04.640" Title="What does the status &quot;active&quot; of a flag mean?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4669" CreationDate="2013-07-29T10:43:04.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it mean that the flag is still active because it has not yet been handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. I think. (the flag system has been changed internally a bit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, it is no longer listed among the flags waiting for moderator attention in the right side bar .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umm, where? There never was a &quot;# of flags waiting for attention&quot; bar on the side. Also, comment flags behave a bit differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW that comment isn't trolling, but it's not constructive either (I purged the thread). And we'd appreciate it if you didn't attack commenters about their comments and effectively call them trolls. That puts you in the wrong too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T10:43:04.640" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4672" CreationDate="2013-07-29T20:25:31.477" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to post a question, but not sure that I should post it either here or Space Exploration.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why an asteroid doesn't make a sonic bang while entering the atmosphere?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24900" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T21:05:13.310" Title="Does this question belong here?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4671" CreationDate="2013-07-29T21:05:13.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's physics question, so that belongs on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T21:05:13.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4357" CreationDate="2013-07-30T01:37:57.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you now have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4398/what-will-our-list-of-close-reasons-look-like&quot;&gt;a specific off-topic close reason&lt;/a&gt; for these, I re-used that to update the sidebar guidance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bJjMz.png&quot; alt=&quot;ask question sidebar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;b&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/b&gt; and &lt;b&gt;show some effort&lt;/b&gt; to work through the problem. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;homework guidance&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T01:37:57.403" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-30T06:42:53.330" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realised that a bunch of LaTeX symbols actually cannot be used in stackexchange, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\right)$$ gives me nothing...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way around this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12985" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T07:09:37.440" Title="LaTeX symbols for physics" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4674" CreationDate="2013-07-30T07:09:37.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pair it with a left parenthesis? :-P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\left( stuff \right)$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; piece of LaTeX syntax is supported if you use it correctly, there are many others that are not. The system this site uses for typesetting math is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJaX&lt;/a&gt;, which implements a set of commands that correspond to a subset of LaTeX syntax. You can see which commands are supported in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJaX documentation&lt;/a&gt;. As a general rule, if you try to do anything especially tricky that would work in LaTeX, don't count on it working in MathJaX, but the simple stuff should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T07:09:37.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-31T01:11:41.740" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was casually going through the list of tags, I noticed several whose pluralization stood out as... off. It seems to me that for non-unique things (so I'm excluding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sun&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sun&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sun&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earth&lt;/a&gt;, etc.) that are not &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mass nouns&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. concepts, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy&lt;/a&gt; or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simulation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simulation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simulation&lt;/a&gt;), the plural form of the word should be used. By and large this is the case already, but there are a few sore thumbs I suggest replacing. In particular, I suggest the replacements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroid&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroid&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroid&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroids&lt;/a&gt; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteoroids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteoroids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteoroids&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteors&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meteorites&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meteorites&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meteorites&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exoplanet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exoplanet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exoplanet&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exoplanets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exoplanets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exoplanets&lt;/a&gt; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nebula&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nebula&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nebula&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nebulae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nebulae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nebulae&lt;/a&gt; (it's not like we live in &quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Nebula&quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/star&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;star&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;star&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stars&lt;/a&gt; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neutron-stars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neutron-stars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neutron-stars&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x-ray&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x-ray&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x-ray&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x-rays&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x-rays&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x-rays&lt;/a&gt; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gamma-rays&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gamma-rays&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gamma-rays&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/microwaves&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;microwaves&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;microwaves&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last one &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted as an adjective and thus correct as-is, but the examples show we are being inconsistent at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, there is one that seems unnecessarily pluralized. I suggest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stellar-winds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stellar-winds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stellar-winds&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stellar-wind&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stellar-wind&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stellar-wind&lt;/a&gt; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-wind&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-wind&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-wind&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atmosphere&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;atmosphere&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;atmosphere&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; should these changes be made? If so, &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; should they be implemented via tag creation/synonymization, or can a mod just silently rename the tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-08-01T21:03:55.140" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T21:03:55.140" Title="Tag cleanup - pluralization" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-31T01:20:42.773" Score="11" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my recent perusal of the tags, I came across a couple that seemed unnecessary. Can we get rid of the following tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proof-that-1-plus-1-is-2&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proof-that-1-plus-1-is-2&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proof-that-1-plus-1-is-2&lt;/a&gt; Seriously, why? Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have this as a tag. Also, there are no questions attached to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun-stuff&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fun-stuff&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fun-stuff&lt;/a&gt; This seems to be a meta-tag that invites silliness. I'm all for a little lightheartedness in asking questions, but having this tag seems like it invites off-topic posts. Alternatively, we could make the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun-stuff&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fun-stuff&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fun-stuff&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T02:32:30.790" Title="Tag cleanup - burnination" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4677" CreationDate="2013-07-31T01:39:33.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This can be done with the mod synonymification tool - no need to go through the whole process of proposing a suggestion when it's such an obvious correspondence. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave this for a day or so just in case anyone does have comments, and then make the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mmm, synonymification :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T01:39:33.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4681" CreationDate="2013-08-01T18:58:04.863" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me how do I paste a hyperlink into an coment? I always dislike long hyperlinks like this one: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=int_%28-0.1%29%5E%280.1%29+1.06%5E2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=int_%28-0.1%29%5E%280.1%29+1.06%5E2&lt;/a&gt;*x%5E2*e%5E%28-x%5E2%2F1%29+dx&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also see, that the above isn't fully reckognized (a bug or simply it all stops when the page wants to edit the link in italic) - only half of a hyperlink is infact a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6764" LastEditorUserId="27166" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T11:11:57.417" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T11:11:57.417" Title="Inline hyperlink in a comment" Tags="|support|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4680" CreationDate="2013-08-01T19:18:18.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained at the bottom of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;formatting help page&lt;/a&gt; you use &lt;code&gt;[link text](url)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;a more detailed help page just for comment formatting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T19:18:18.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4683" CreationDate="2013-08-01T21:35:53.163" Score="5" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point, I have answered quite a few questions on physics.SE, and it would be very helpful to have the ability to search them.  Is there a way to restrict the physics.SE native search to only my answers?  If not, has adding such functionality been considered thus far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="11062" LastEditDate="2013-08-04T05:38:02.317" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T05:38:02.317" Title="Searching my answers" Tags="|feature-request|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4682" CreationDate="2013-08-01T21:42:12.770" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, just include &lt;code&gt;user:me&lt;/code&gt; in your search query. You can also use something like &lt;code&gt;user:19976&lt;/code&gt; to restrict the results to any particular user's posts, where &lt;code&gt;19976&lt;/code&gt; should be replaced by the ID of the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to restrict your search to only answers (as opposed to questions and answers), you can also include &lt;code&gt;is:answer&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several other search operators that you can see by doing a search and looking at the right side of the results page for &quot;Advanced Search Tips&quot;. (Or see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T21:42:12.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4685" CreationDate="2013-08-02T15:15:58.967" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rest-mass&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rest-mass&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rest-mass&lt;/a&gt; for? It's probably &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; specific. Why not burinate it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-03T10:56:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T10:56:11.357" Title="What's the rest mass tag for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4684" CreationDate="2013-08-02T15:23:19.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rest-mass&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rest-mass&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rest-mass&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym to (or merged with) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mass&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mass&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mass&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T15:23:19.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4693" CreationDate="2013-08-04T09:48:13.853" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I check &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, it says that there' is a suggested edit queue. But aren't suggested edits disallowed on meta? Where did this come from? Is it outdated?. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:50:02.533" Title="Suggested edits on meta?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|suggested-edits|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4692" CreationDate="2013-08-04T12:35:10.600" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discrete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discrete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discrete&lt;/a&gt;? Seriously? What kind of a tag is that?     Too broad .   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-04T13:32:37.020" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T15:07:11.723" Title="The &quot;discrete&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2013-08-04T13:26:17.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discrete&lt;/a&gt; means as opposed to &lt;em&gt;continuous.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For, instance, people may ask questions about discrete electric charges, discrete spacetime, discrete energies, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If discretization is vital/essential to the question then tag it with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discrete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discrete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discrete&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently there is 37 questions tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discrete&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discrete&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discrete&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related tag (in case of quantum theory) is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantization&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-04T15:07:11.723" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T15:07:11.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4687" CreationDate="2013-08-04T14:33:26.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's for tag wiki suggestions. Those still work on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T14:33:26.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-04T17:52:24.593" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;While flagging questions, there is a detailed system explaining exactly what each option means, but there is no such thing while flagging comments. The help section also does not give any specific examples. Can a system for flagging comments be created just like the one for flagging questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25907" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T18:06:17.793" Title="Flagging comments" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4694" CreationDate="2013-08-04T18:06:17.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because comments are designed to be ephemeral and second-class objects, we don't maintain nearly as much formality in dealing with them. Take you best guess and go with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It bears repeating: any comment can be deleted at any time for any reason or none. Nothing important should be left in the comments: important ideas should make their way into first class posts lest they be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T18:06:17.793" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4698" CreationDate="2013-08-05T16:01:38.157" Score="36" ViewCount="5317" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the policy on asking for recommendations of books or resources on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is a resource recommendation question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sort of resource recommendation questions are allowed here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I answer a resource recommendation question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a community member, how should I treat resource recommendations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T19:25:36.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T19:25:36.173" Title="Are resource recommendations allowed?" Tags="|discussion|faq|policy|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4697" CreationDate="2013-08-05T16:01:38.157" Score="27" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4567/7433&quot;&gt;my answer here&lt;/a&gt; for the rationale behind this policy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;this will require some community members to commit to curating the resource recommendations&lt;/strong&gt; by flagging for post notice addition, flagging+commenting on bad answers, etc. This can't go through unless we get enough people who are willing to patrol for resource recommendation questions and spruce them up to fit policy. If you wish to help, just say so in a comment below this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using the word &amp;quot;resource&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; here, as this policy can apply to requests for websites as well. Note that reference requests are different, these usually have one or two answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is a resource recommendation question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A resource recommendation question is one that asks for a resource (which can be a book, website, or other resource) to learn a topic from. It should have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the same as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; question, which asks for a specific paper in which a derivation or concept is explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What sort of resource recommendation questions are allowed here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendations must ask for descriptive answers. It's not enough to ask for a list of books that cover topic X — a simple Amazon search can provide that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you should ask for recommendations, which specify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the book covers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How it covers it — is it rigorous? Intuitive? How is the writer's style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the prerequisites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, this becomes more of a constraint on &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to resource recommendation questions, which brings us to the next point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How should I answer a resource recommendation question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to answer a resource recommendation question, the answer should be substantive, and give as much information about the book as possible. Try to explain the style of the author, as well as listing the topics it covers well and the topics which it isn't so thorough with. Try to list the prerequisites too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples that show what good answers to resource recommendation questions should look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/376&quot;&gt;Getting started general relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/27711&quot;&gt;Quantum Field Theory from a mathematical point of view&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/71275&quot;&gt;Dark matter references&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;As a community member, how should I treat resource recommendations?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a rather narrow resource recommendation, see if you can convert it into a question about the concept the OP really wants to know, rather than a request for resources that explain the concept.&#xA;Such questions are much more useful to the OP and the site in general, because the explanation is on-site and the reader need not go elsewhere to learn. So, if a resource recommendation looks directly answerable with a reasonable-length answer, then convert it to such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, flag the post for moderator attention asking for the resource recommendation post notice to be applied. Here's the text of the post notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before answering, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698&quot;&gt;our policy&lt;/a&gt; on resource recommendation questions.&lt;/strong&gt; Please write substantial answers that detail the style, content, and prerequisites of the book, paper or other resource. Explain the nature of the resource so that readers can decide which one is best suited for them rather than relying on the opinions of others. &lt;strong&gt;Answers containing only a reference to a book or paper will be removed!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, if you see answers which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; just suggestions of a book or paper without explanation, flag them so they can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Dealing with old recommendation posts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across an old recommendation post, move all of the answers that are against policy into a community wiki list answer, and give it the following banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer contains some additional resources that may be useful. &lt;strong&gt;Please note that answers which simply list resources but provide no details are strongly discouraged by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;the site's policy on resource recommendation questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This answer is left here to contain additional links that do not yet have commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This answer contains some additional resources that may be useful. **Please note&#xA;that answers which simply list resources but provide no details are strongly&#xA;discouraged by [the site's policy on resource recommendation&#xA;questions](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed)**.&#xA;This answer is left here to contain additional links that do not yet have&#xA;commentary.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T09:40:41.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4743" CreationDate="2013-08-05T17:32:09.813" Score="11" ViewCount="854" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4295/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-popular-science-tag&quot;&gt;What is the purpose of the popular-science tag?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4449/can-we-encourage-the-research-level-meta-tag-what-about-a-popular-tag&quot;&gt;Can we encourage the &amp;quot;research-level&amp;quot; meta tag? What about a &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have a tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;. It's basically for questions which demand a layman explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4451/7433&quot;&gt;as mentioned here&lt;/a&gt; it has problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's fundamentally &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;a meta tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's ambiguous. I've been seeing many edits in the queue that retag to the popsci tag, and I've seen many other older questions tagged with it &amp;mdash; it seems that everyone has a different interpretation of it. This is quite harmful because it degenerates into being applied much more broadly than intended and there's confusion all around. The tag wiki is already pretty unambiguous, however it still seems like the tag is being interpeted differently. A tag called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laymans-terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laymans-terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laymans-terms&lt;/a&gt; could work but it would probably have similar issues. &lt;strong&gt;The basic issue with level filtering is that people look at the tag as &quot;Hey, that's the tag with all the bad questions&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; (Not &quot;that's the topic I don't like&quot;, the focus remains on the &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;). And then it gets applied more broadly because everyone has their opinion of what sort of questions they don't like. This is already currently happening, as mentioned before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Level filtering has a rather harmful effect in that it opens the tag to abuse. We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; which has this problem&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and I'm not keen on having another. Basically, this tag(popular-science) can be used to get a question &quot;ignored&quot; by many users here; it's a softer form of deletion in a sense. Sure, people will still notice it, but there's a reasonable chance that the people who would have otherwise answered it won't. Couple this with the ambiguity issue and it's much worse -- it's hard to even detect such abuse because of the ambiguity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that having a tag for it is usually taken as  a sign that we welcome all such questions. While we don't disallow such posts, we don't want to actively encourage them either. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; really help in the first place? Questions asking for a layman explanation usually mention it in the title. They're easy to ignore, there aren't many of them. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/home-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;home-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;home-experiment&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt; questions coming in though, and ignoring these may clean up your main page much more significantly than ignoring popsci if you don't enjoy layman questions. There are approx &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/127366/popular-science-questions-per-month-in-layman-tags#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3 questions per month&lt;/a&gt; in the tag (ignore the last data point, recently there has been tons of retagging in that tag, not all of it fitting the description). I don't see a pressing need to filter these out. There just aren't that many. Applying the tag more broadly to catch more popsci questions-- well, then you get a very broad tag, which is probably more ambiguous. And in this case favourite tags would serve you better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tlLvl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we get it burninated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Not entirely, though. Usually, on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; questions don't need the tag in the first place.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Getting rid of the popular science tag" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2013-08-05T18:24:13.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Manishearth said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; is together with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; one of the three level tags needed to realize the by Jess Riedel suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4449/2751&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; to give people a method to filter not only the topics they are interested in, but to in addition choose the appropriate level too. The current audience of Physics SE has such a wide spread range of physics knowledge, ranging from almost none, to research-level, that this proposal is a good and needed help for people to order things in accordance with their needs and retrieve what they are interested in from the otherwise too chaotic mix of questions. Why I (and obviously others who expressed their opinion by corresponding upvotes of the level-filtering proposal, its answers and by comments) think this is a very good and helpful idea, I expressed already in my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4450/2751&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I disagree with the suggested burnication of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;, because it effectively shoots down the level-filtering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4449/2751&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt;. Looking at the high number of upvotes the level-filtering proposal has obtained, it seems the community has reached consensus that this concept is helpful and a good thing to improve the site for everybody. So it should not be negatively affected or even prevented by burnicating one of the level tags needed to implement and maintain this idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seriously doubt that people who belong to the SE stuff or team care for or would even bother to actively deny people here on physics SE the very helpful possibility to filter questions along an additional second &quot;level dimension&quot;, just because for this a very small number of exactly 3 level tags (also called meta tags) is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as already explained elsewhere, I disagree with the point of view that ignore-filtering one of these level tags is equivalent to deleting questions tagged with it. Ignore-filtering any tag affects only the view of the main page of people who have explicitely set the corresponding preferences in their profile. For the large majority of the people this does not impact the view of the page. In addition, I think that any concerns that, due to level-filtering questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; will not get enough views, votes, answers, or more generally love and appreciation by the community, are not substantiated by facts. Since quite some time now it is rather the case that nontechnical questions and their answers get higher votes and generally more positive attention than technical questions. I doubt that the level-filtering changes anything about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dont think that the majority of people sees popular-science as a bad question tag. On the contraty, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4477/2751&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt; who see it completely positive and very different from what Manishearth fears. I think some of these questions are really fun too. The agreement about what kind of questions should naturally have a certain tag, is natural and the intended way how appropriate tagging works, it is nothing specific or characteristic for level tags, so in my opinion it is therefore neutral and there is nothing bad going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me personally, the definition of popular-science in Jess Riedel's proposal or the description in the tag-wiki are good enough for its purpose. But if anything should be done, I would rather suggest to adjust the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; such that the most people in the community is happy or can at least live with it, than completely burnicate this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T04:51:46.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-05T18:53:05.233" Score="14" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue has been bugging me for a while now. I suppose it's more appropriate for the main SE site, but I want to know how others feel about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it very annoying that the 'active questions' thread gets cluttered with older posts that received minor edits: LaTeX formatting, fixed grammar, a few words changed, and especially, retagging. There are a few prolific editors on this site; nothing wrong with that, but their edits are pushing recent answers off the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that new or substantially improved answers deserve to remain visible on the main page as long as possible, and they shouldn't get mixed with older posts that haven't changed significantly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related problem is that the 'active' thread doesn't show any information about when the question was posted, or what has changed: you have to click on the question to see how old it is, and whether someone posted a new answer or whether it was just a retag or a small edit. I find that frustrating, and a waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand that any change shouldn't go unnoticed. So my suggestion would be to split the 'active' thread in two: one 'active questions' thread for new questions, new answers, major edits (say, e.g. more than 50 characters altered), and perhaps also new comments, which currently don't bump questions. In addition, there could be a new 'edited questions' thread that keeps track of retagging and minor edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'd like to know what the rest of you think.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastEditorUserId="24142" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T05:48:12.800" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T05:50:49.703" Title="Minor edits should not make questions 'active'" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|design|editing|retagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-05T23:11:37.407" Score="20" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a user on physics.SE with the name michio kaku &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/27903/michio-kaku&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/27903/michio-kaku&lt;/a&gt; who I strongly doubt is the real michio kaku given his response here &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73297/a-question-for-the-generalization-of-gauge-transformation-with-two-antisymmetric&quot;&gt;A question for the generalization of gauge transformation with two antisymmetric indices&lt;/a&gt; which was promptly removed by David Z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me thinking about how it would be nice if we could somehow make certain that names of faculty at research universities could be protected as usernames as a means of retaining such people in the physics.SE community.  Perhaps this is antithetical to SE values?  Furthermore, it would be interesting (and useful I think) to have a means of verifying that these people are who they claim to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that physics.SE needs to be inclusive, but I personally think that attracting/retaining users who are researchers could lend legitimacy to the site and might enhance the quality and scope of both questions, and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T23:11:37.407" Title="Regulating user names: protecting researchers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2013-08-06T18:45:32.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is me listing the reasons I'm pro popsci tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, if I may address its similarity to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/home-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;home-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;home-experiment&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt;. It's true, a good amount of what's listed in popsci is also in these tags. However, this tag is certainly useful for questions like: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/73358/23473&quot;&gt;What generates such a huge amount of gravitational attraction in a black hole?&lt;/a&gt; where it is clearly not a home-experiment (I hope!) nor a part of everyday life. The popsci tag is different from the other two because it is purely specific to science that the layman would have heard of. One could imagine asking a question about some part of everyday life that would be deeply complicated. For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1077/23473&quot;&gt;How can I stand on the ground? EM or/and Pauli?&lt;/a&gt; It isn't tagged as everyday-life, but I wouldn't argue if it were; I stand on the ground most days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for level filtering, it will always be a problem no matter what. If you aren't going to ban those types of questions and if you don't eliminate the tag system entirely, then there will have to be a way of identifying those questions as easy, no-brainers. I say &quot;have to&quot; because there will always be people like me that like to log on every so often and answer a couple easy questions. Tags like popsci help me do that. No matter what the tag indicating easy questions is, people will take advantage of it because each person defines what constitutes main-stream science or an &quot;easy&quot; question differently. Thus, no matter what, some people will love the tag and some people will hate the tag; this is just something that we must accept about layman science questions. Furthermore, if someone decides that they don't like an entire tag so much as to ignore all questions tagged by it, that is their loss more than ours. Personally, I don't ignore any tags; you never know where a great question might pop up and the extra 10 seconds I have to spend looking through ones I don't like is worth it if I know I'm not ignoring a potentially good question. But that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: I want my &quot;this is an easy question and should take maybe 30 seconds to answer it&quot; tag :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T13:16:16.840" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4708" CreationDate="2013-08-07T23:04:27.537" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to link an answer from question 1, say, to question 2 if answer 1 works or enhances all or part of question 2?  I see many questions that have essentially the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user27777" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T05:02:09.487" Title="linking answers: suppose several questions have essentially the same answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4707" CreationDate="2013-08-07T23:17:39.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there isn't. But if you find that an existing answer to one question also applies to another question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check and see if the questions are duplicates, and if so, flag one as a duplicate of the other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, you can quote the relevant parts of an answer (whether yours or someone else's) and include a link to it in your answer, just as you would quote the relevant parts of, and link to, an external website. (Of course make sure your answer is self-contained so that people don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to click on the link to get the point.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-08-08T05:02:09.487" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T05:02:09.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4710" CreationDate="2013-08-08T00:57:38.350" Score="9" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was googling earlier and I found one of my physics.sx answers plagiarized word for word on another site. I do not want to send them traffic so I'm only going to post screenshots of it; the address is pretty clear from the logo, with a dot in between, but I would urge people to not give them the traffic unless they really need to go there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gzRiD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jb1ky.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\quad$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also clear from their sidebar,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rHC6D.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that they have plenty of other physics.sx q&amp;amp;a's on display. If this is as yet undetected I suspect there's going to be sparks flying in places, but I also suspect it can come in handy if I say it: I am uncomfortable with content I generated for this site being displayed elsewhere. If this has already been detected and measures have already been taken to no effect, then... bummer, I guess, and thanks for letting me vent a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Plagiarism from other sites" Tags="|support|moderators|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4709" CreationDate="2013-08-08T02:49:35.820" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;content of all Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt; is licensed &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike&lt;/a&gt;. If the terms are met, then they are allowed to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the terms are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; met, the centralized place for reporting violations of the license is on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/131846/2509&quot;&gt;the mother meta thread for such things&lt;/a&gt;. And I see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/163974/2509&quot;&gt;the first answer there is this very site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T02:49:35.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4709" CreationDate="2013-08-08T02:52:33.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license under which Stack Exchange distributes user-contributed content, CC-BY-SA 2.5, does allow other sites to reuse that content as long as they follow the attribution guidelines in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt;. If you're uncomfortable with your content being displayed elsewhere even when the guidelines are followed, then honestly you should probably stop contributing here because it is a prerequisite of posting that you agree to let SE and other sites redistribute your contributions in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site you're pointing out does not follow the attribution guidelines, then that's illegal, and you should check that it is reported in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131846/report-sites-that-use-stack-exchange-content-without-following-attribution-rules&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T02:52:33.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-08T10:57:12.273" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;What mechanism determines which meta posts or blog articles are featured in the Community Bulltin on the main page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning blog articles, I would guess that the newest ones are featured. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the mechanisms to determine which meta question is featured, is completely unclear to me. Is it automatically decided by criteria that describe the activity and popularity of the meta question for example, such as votes, views, date of posting, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it the moderators of our site who determine &quot;by hand&quot; which meta question is featured in the community bulltin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering about this because currently, the meta post dedicated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/2751&quot;&gt;reevaluate the book policy&lt;/a&gt; is featured in the Community Bulltin, whereas the meta post requesting to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4699/2751&quot;&gt;burnicate&lt;/a&gt; the popular-science tag does not appear in the Community Bulltin on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The date of posting of both of these two quite recent meta questions differes only by a few hours, and both of them are very important for the community and concern important political issues of Physics SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all meta question looking for community input to find consensus about important site political issues should be featured in the Community Bulltin, such that the people who are mostly active on the main page and dont click meta too often, have a better chance to take note of them too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if the featuring of meta questions in the Community Bulltin can be done &quot;by hand&quot; by an appropriate site moderator action, can the burnicate request of the popular science tag be featured there too? I request featuring this meta question too there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The burnicate request is very important for everybody too and has a huge impact on how people will be able to use the site in the future, and it has the potential to annihilate the by the community appreciated level proposel. It is much more important and has a higher impact on the community than for example the currently featured regulating user names or the miner edit post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T11:16:02.557" Title="What mechanism determines what is featured in the Community Bulltin on the main page?" Tags="|support|feature-request|request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4712" CreationDate="2013-08-08T11:06:34.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not by hand, it depends on the vote score and other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods can add community events to the bulletin and can mark meta posts as featured if necessary, but we don't control the automatically shown stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind marking the book request post as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'featured'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; (would have to discuss that with other mods), as it could be a rather major policy change but the burninate request isn't something that really qualifies to be featured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T11:06:34.820" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2013-08-08T13:21:53.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After seeing a large amount of debate on this topic, I've decided to post another answer. Whereas my previous post was decidedly pro-popsci, I hope to present this post in a more neutral tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite clear that there are two almost evenly populated and completely contrasting sides on this issue. Seeing as mutual collaboration is not possible, in determining the next course of action we need not continue the considering of reasons relevant to each side's point of view. Put another way, we are at a stalemate; however, I believe that if we can calm down and analyze this using the logical skills that we scientists are graciously stereotyped with having, we should be able to agree on what, inevitably, the correct action should be; at least, until a majority opinion can be established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many excellent points made on both sides of the debate. As such, arguing them will lead to nothing more than a bickering stalemate. I suggest ignoring them for now. Instead, let us consider the outcome of our actions. If we were to &quot;burninate&quot; the popsci tag, aside from making half of the people upset (either action inevitably will do that), it will add a slight to moderate inconvenience to the users who currently rely in part on the use of that tag. On the other hand, if we leave the tag in place, it has been argued that we would create the potential for a slight future inconvenience for some users (many of whom would identify in the other mentioned category).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When deciding the correct action in this case, I believe we can all agree that the action which produces the most net benefit for the population as a whole is the most correct. Keeping in mind that future actions can always be taken when and if the opinion of the majority shifts to one side or the other, I propose the following: Since removing the tag would definitely inconvenience some users now &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in the future - whereas leaving it may or may not (there is a non-zero probability that it would cause no problems) inconvenience about the same number of users at a point in the future and since leaving the tag could not create any net negative effects in the present (as nothing would change from the immediate past until now), without any foreknowledge of the future, I am forced to conclude that removing the tag would carry less net benefit for the population of users as a whole than leaving the tag in place. Thus, if my premises and postulate are valid, I must conclude that at this time, &lt;strong&gt;the best course of action would be to allow the tag to remain&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may now downvote me and pelt me with criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T13:21:53.193" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-08T14:39:32.563" Score="-2" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why Physics Stack Exchange don't create and application for mobile devices?, I understand that all people have a web browser inntheir device to check all the stuff, but, with an mobile application you can create a whole lot of options, like use the keyboard to write equations like wolfram alpha do, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27244" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="App for iPad and Android" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4702" CreationDate="2013-08-08T14:50:13.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I definitely agree that some minor edits shouldn't make questions active. The one in particular, as you mentioned, is retagging. Why does this even make a question active in the first place? When you retag, the question itself is not changed, so in what sense is it &quot;active&quot;? I have not seen one situation when a retagged question deserved to be made active simply because it was retagged. Plus everytime someone makes a new tag, they retag a whole bunch of past questions with it and that effectively wipes the active board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs to me that retagging being made active is only good for people that have favourited that tag; then they notice that a new question has been added to a favourite tag of theirs. But that could easily be solved if instead of making it an active question, it showed up in the new questions section for that particular tag. Then people could just check new questions for a favourite tag rather than forcing everyone to see that an old question hasn't changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kinda went off topic here, but retagging is the only minor edit I strongly (← key word) believe shouldn't make a question active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T14:50:13.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4715" CreationDate="2013-08-08T15:44:34.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be done at the Stack Exchange level, and in fact &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/190200/help-us-test-the-alpha-version-of-our-android-app&quot;&gt;they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; working on an Android tool&lt;/a&gt;. Don't know if or when a iOS version might be in the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T15:44:34.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-09T12:20:00.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8477/why-cant-light-escape-from-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;Why can&amp;#39;t light escape from a classical black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28297/why-is-a-black-hole-black&quot;&gt;Why is a black hole black?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/41930/if-nothing-in-the-universe-can-travel-faster-than-light-how-come-light-cant-es?lq=1&quot;&gt;If nothing in the universe can travel faster than light, how come light can&amp;#39;t escape a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T14:37:42.070" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T14:37:42.070" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-09T12:20:00.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-09T13:42:25.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15371/understanding-time-is-time-simply-the-rate-change&quot;&gt;understanding time: Is time simply the rate change?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17056/time-what-is-it?lq=1&quot;&gt;Time, what is it?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32155/what-is-a-clock?lq=1&quot;&gt;What is a clock?&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T14:38:32.030" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T14:38:32.030" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-09T13:42:25.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2013-08-09T21:22:55.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I look at the questions currently tagged as popular science, I think it is highly reasonable to apply this tag to questions like(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73619/how-can-i-explain-or-demonstrate-the-lorentz-force-to-a-12-year-old&quot;&gt;how-can-i-explain-or-demonstrate-the-lorentz-force-to-a-12-year-old&lt;/a&gt;). I also notice that there have been instances of what can be called misuse of the tag(in my personal opinion), and questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73258/why-does-a-glass-breaks-when-subject-to-very-sharp-sound-like-in-opera&quot;&gt;Why does a glass breaks when subject to very sharp sound like in opera?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69525/physical-difference-between-a-and-b&quot;&gt;physical difference between A and B&lt;/a&gt; are examples. In these questions I feel the the author wishes to see a technically precise answer and had not  explicitly asked for a layman's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a considerable ambiguity about where the popular science tag can be used, and this ambiguity is perhaps being exploited to tag questions which do not qualify for the tag. This is, perhaps seen by some as an effective way of keeping questions out of a main page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this I suggest we continue to use the tag for a few months, and use this period to define the tag in a way that is agreeable to a fair number of people in community. Even after this, if the tag is not being used responsibly, if there is consent from the community then it can be burniated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again I would like to point out that, this problem is only a manifestation of a larger problem, which is the site is getting too large for the current scheme of organization to work effectively.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T23:23:46.300" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-09T21:48:04.717" Score="-4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest, that we introduce a High-School-Level Tag, as opposed to Graduate Level Physics(Currently Called Research-Level), To Bring a Basic Level Filtering system into action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some ambiguity about what qualifies as High school(depending on where you studied), For most purposes, there will be little confusion on when It can be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of sample questions that this tag can be applied to, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70626/calculating-a-torque&quot;&gt;calculating-a-torque&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73672/centrifugal-force&quot;&gt;centrifugal-force&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73622/understanding-the-basics-of-electromagnetic-induction&quot;&gt;understanding-the-basics-of-electromagnetic-induction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73473/density-of-air-in-a-balloon&quot;&gt;density-of-air-in-a-balloon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T18:04:54.063" Title="Tag Request - Highschool Level Physics" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-10T03:20:47.273" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31882/why-does-string-theory-require-9-dimensions-of-space-and-one-dimension-of-time?rq=1&quot;&gt;Why does string theory require 9 dimensions of space and one dimension of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10527/why-are-extra-dimensions-necessary/10654#10654&quot;&gt;Why are extra dimensions necessary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66930/is-this-explanation-of-why-nine-space-dimensions-correct&quot;&gt;Is this explanation of &amp;quot;Why nine space dimensions?&amp;quot; correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:07:59.430" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:07:59.430" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-10T03:20:47.273" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4702" CreationDate="2013-08-10T03:33:08.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doing this would open up a huge can of worms: suddenly, there's an arbitrary threshold for &quot;activity&quot; that divides posts being worked on. Yes, it's easy to come up with individual changes that most folks probably agree don't warrant much oversight, but applying such simple rules broadly can have disastrous results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's examine retagging, since that seems to be the primary focus here: it's true, most tag edits are fairly uninteresting...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless you happen to be following the tag that was added...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...or the tag that was removed...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...or someone decides that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; is used too carelessly, and replaces it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fake-quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fake-quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fake-quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; on all the questions they don't care for...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...or decides that their profile page is too hard for their fans to find, and adds &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shog-answered-this&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shog-answered-this&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shog-answered-this&lt;/a&gt; to all the questions they've answered...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't hypothetical examples; folks make bad tag edits all the time. Heck, y'all have been arguing over &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4699/getting-rid-of-the-popular-science-tag&quot;&gt;certain tags&lt;/a&gt; fairly regularly here - kinda hard to read that and then come back and claim tag-edits are &lt;em&gt;guaranteed&lt;/em&gt; to be minor or unworthy of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And once you start trying to decide whether or not a &lt;em&gt;body edit&lt;/em&gt; is major or minor, it just gets worse - &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; if you hope to base your decision on something as simple as the &lt;em&gt;number of characters changed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;active&quot; lists have one purpose: to show questions that have had recent activity (or more precisely, to order questions according to their last activity date). There are other filters and sort orders available, and we've been working on better ones for some time now - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=interesting&quot;&gt;try this one out&lt;/a&gt;. We even have plans to replace the rather unhelpful &quot;modified&quot; indicator with something slightly more descriptive. So let's not make things more confusing than they need to be by changing the self-descriptive &quot;active&quot; to &quot;active enough for &lt;em&gt;someone's&lt;/em&gt; taste&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T03:33:08.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T04:09:07.337" Score="-3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of tags which are too oddly specific and not really about a specific idea in physics, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/temperature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;temperature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;temperature&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coulomb-branch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coulomb-branch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coulomb-branch&lt;/a&gt;      &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pressure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pressure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pressure&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speed&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceleration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceleration&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceleration&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/capacitance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;capacitance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;capacitance&lt;/a&gt;       &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/angular-momentum&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;angular-momentum&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;angular-momentum&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/momentum&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;momentum&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;momentum&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mass&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mass&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mass&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x-ray&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x-ray&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x-ray&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mole&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mole&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need a name for every thermodynamic and kinematical variable.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T10:04:45.807" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T10:04:45.807" Title="Redundant tags I" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2013-08-25T08:35:25.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-10T05:01:52.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-gravity-escape-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;How does gravity escape a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69651/in-which-direction-do-gravitons-travel-do-they-originate-from-mass-or-are-they&quot;&gt;In which direction do gravitons travel? Do they originate from mass or are they collected by masses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45999/nothing-escapes-bhs-gravitons-mediate-gravity-so-why-do-bhs-gravitate&quot;&gt;Nothing escapes BHs, gravitons mediate gravity, so why do BHs gravitate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35861/why-a-black-hole-sucks-nearly-everything-but-emits-gravitons&quot;&gt;Why a black hole sucks nearly everything, but emits gravitons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/937?lq=1&quot;&gt;more...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:09:32.743" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:09:32.743" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-10T05:01:52.310" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T05:17:24.000" Score="-5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/redundant-too-specific-tags-about-specific-variables-etc&quot;&gt;Redundant tags I&lt;/a&gt; has  been made more specific to overtly specific tags. Here are some which don't even seem to be about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x-ray-crystallography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x-ray-crystallography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x-ray-crystallography&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laws-of-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laws-of-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laws-of-physics&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/approximations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;approximations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;approximations&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/complex-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;complex-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;complex-number&lt;/a&gt;     &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/affine-lie-algebra&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;affine-lie-algebra&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;affine-lie-algebra&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laboratory-safety&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laboratory-safety&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laboratory-safety&lt;/a&gt;                                                                       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T10:08:43.127" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T10:08:43.127" Title="Redundant tags II" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-08-25T08:35:34.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T05:18:33.600" Score="-3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;After &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/redundant-too-specific-tags?rq=1&quot;&gt;Redundant tags I&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/redundant-tags-ii&quot;&gt;Redundant tags II&lt;/a&gt;, Redundant tags III is about tags about specific objects, meaningless to tag a question with .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphene&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;graphene&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;graphene&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/air&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;air&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;air&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;water&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;water&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earthquake&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earthquake&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earthquake&lt;/a&gt;      &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nebulae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nebulae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nebulae&lt;/a&gt;      &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroids&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aircraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aircraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aircraft&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauss-law&lt;/a&gt; (this is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; maxwell equation tag we have. This is the closest redundant tags                                                                I could post     put this on .    )                     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T14:07:58.027" Title="Redundant tags III" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-08-28T12:55:16.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4702" CreationDate="2013-08-10T05:50:49.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read Shog9's post, I have a very simple suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the 'active' tab as it is, although it would be nice to see more info, such as the date at which the question was posted, and the type of modification (edit, retag, new question, new answer).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a new tab with only the newest answers, just like there's a tab for the newest questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be very helpful, and it requires no major design changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T05:50:49.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4733" CreationDate="2013-08-10T06:23:04.900" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphene&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;graphene&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;graphene&lt;/a&gt; is a pretty big field in solid state physics. It has applications in the implementation of quantum computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/air&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;air&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;air&lt;/a&gt; probably isn't necessary and can be merged with one of the fluid tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/water&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;water&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;water&lt;/a&gt; ditto&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/earthquake&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;earthquake&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;earthquake&lt;/a&gt; merge with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geophysics&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nebulae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nebulae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nebulae&lt;/a&gt; this isn't really a specific object as nebulae are quite a vast topic in astrophysics. If this tag were to be deleted, it would be because we aren't getting many questions about this (not always a good reason to delete a tag imo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asteroids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asteroids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asteroids&lt;/a&gt; ditto. And in this case we are getting questions about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aircraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aircraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aircraft&lt;/a&gt; A rather vast topic in fluid dynamics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauss-law&lt;/a&gt; We get enough questions about this. If there were more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faradays-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faradays-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faradays-law&lt;/a&gt; questions, that tag could be created too, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T06:23:04.900" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2013-08-10T06:31:08.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x-ray-crystallography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x-ray-crystallography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x-ray-crystallography&lt;/a&gt; This isn't very specific. Common technique in experimental physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laws-of-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laws-of-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laws-of-physics&lt;/a&gt; Slightly metaphysics-y, but not that bad a tag. it's ambiguous though, I guess we could get rid of it. Not too certain about that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/approximations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;approximations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;approximations&lt;/a&gt; Sort of a meta tag in the sense that it doesn't denote a topic (however that doesn't seem to be the tpe of met tag that's disallowed, since most other sites have similar tags). But otherwise approximations are there in many different physics topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/complex-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;complex-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;complex-number&lt;/a&gt; similar as above. Used in many places (circuit analysis, optics are two examples I can come up with)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/affine-lie-algebra&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;affine-lie-algebra&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;affine-lie-algebra&lt;/a&gt; Probably too specific as it has only 2 questions. I don't know how broad the topic/application is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laboratory-safety&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laboratory-safety&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laboratory-safety&lt;/a&gt; is on topic (I think), and a pretty interesting tag to have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T06:31:08.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4738" CreationDate="2013-08-10T08:13:54.697" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the &quot;disputed&quot; status of a flag mean?  E.g.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IV9LD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that the moderators couldn't decide whether the flag should be accepted or declined ?  .   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T09:42:34.760" Title="What does the &quot;disputed&quot; status of a flag mean?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4737" CreationDate="2013-08-10T09:42:34.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It basically means that non mods disagreed on the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/21044&quot;&gt;was marked as &quot;looks good&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in the review queue. Which seems correct to me because it's not deletable and can be improved (VLQ is for non salvageable stuff)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T09:42:34.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-10T11:39:49.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5456/the-speed-of-gravity&quot;&gt;How fast does gravity propagate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/176157/what-is-the-speed-of-gravity&quot;&gt;What is the speed of gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26742/does-gravity-travel-at-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Does gravity travel at the speed of light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/80442/how-faster-is-the-effect-of-force-exerted-by-gravity&quot;&gt;How faster is the effect of force exerted by gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/104301/gravity-propagation-speed&quot;&gt;Gravity propagation speed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93795/time-delays-in-general-relativity&quot;&gt;Time Delays in General Relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12736/does-gravity-spread-instantly&quot;&gt;Does gravity spread instantly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/103729/does-gravity-act-instantaneously&quot;&gt;Does gravity act instantaneously?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/114798/consequences-of-inverse-square-law-with-vast-distances-gravity-in-addition&quot;&gt;Consequences of inverse square law with vast distances (Gravity); (in addition, is light speed broken)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170001/is-gravity-instantaneous&quot;&gt;Is gravity instantaneous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87835/gravitational-effect-versus-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Gravitational Effect Versus the Speed of Light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142144/how-quickly-does-gravity-extend-from-created-mass&quot;&gt;How quickly does gravity extend from created mass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/118472/will-we-feel-the-gravity-of-a-star-10-light-years-away-for-the-next-10-years-if&quot;&gt;Will we feel the gravity of a star 10 light years away for the next 10 years if, somehow, it vanishes today from its position?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/51646/time-taken-for-gravity-of-a-distant-object-to-interact-with-a-newly-created-part&quot;&gt;Time taken for gravity of a distant object to interact with a newly created particle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/193937/how-fast-does-gravitational-information-travel&quot;&gt;How fast does gravitational information travel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60790/solar-catastrophe&quot;&gt;Solar Catastrophe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134446/gravity-concept-question&quot;&gt;Gravity Concept Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370058/is-the-curvature-of-spacetime-in-general-relativity-instantaneous&quot;&gt;Is the curvature of spacetime in General Relativity instantaneous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/169501/is-the-influence-of-gravity-greater-than-light&quot;&gt;Is the influence of gravity greater than light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/331108/if-sun-disappeared-and-we-wouldnt-notice-until-8-mins-later-then-would-we-noti&quot;&gt;If Sun disappeared and we wouldn&amp;#39;t notice until 8 mins later, then would we notice the gravitational force sudden disappearance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/40968/do-the-changes-of-gravity-travel-across-distances-instantly-or-limited-to-the-sp&quot;&gt;Do the changes of gravity travel across distances instantly or limited to the speed of light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55731/how-much-time-does-it-take-to-affect&quot;&gt;How much time does it take to affect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7041/speed-of-gravity-and-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Speed&amp;quot; of Gravity and Speed of Light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/374583/why-does-gravity-travel-at-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Why does gravity travel at the speed of light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235450/do-gravitational-waves-travel-faster-than-light&quot;&gt;Do gravitational waves travel faster than light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107798/speed-of-gravitational-waves&quot;&gt;speed of gravitational waves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/254628/speed-of-gravitational-waves-vs-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Speed of gravitational waves vs speed of light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/282738/is-the-speed-of-propagation-of-einsteins-gravitational-waves-unique&quot;&gt;Is the speed of propagation of Einstein&amp;#39;s gravitational waves unique?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also related: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/143646/what-is-the-rate-at-which-the-field-of-an-electron-spreads&quot;&gt;What is the rate at which the field of an electron spreads?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/356426/speed-of-a-graviton&quot;&gt;Speed of a Graviton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75196/does-the-reaction-force-appear-without-delay&quot;&gt;Does the reaction force appear without delay?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38525/faster-than-light-communication-using-gravity&quot;&gt;Faster Than Light Communication Using Gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/62565/is-earths-orbit-around-the-sun-affected-by-the-8-minutes-light-delay&quot;&gt;Is Earth&amp;#39;s orbit around the Sun affected by the ~8 minutes light delay?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39260/what-is-the-status-of-existing-measurements-of-the-speed-of-gravity&quot;&gt;What is the status of existing measurements of the speed of gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/187398/what-is-the-speed-of-newtonian-gravity&quot;&gt;What is the speed of Newtonian gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57137/how-soon-that-a-force-affect-another-object&quot;&gt;How soon that a force affect another object?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270444/is-there-a-delay-in-the-effect-of-the-gravitational-or-electromagnetic-force-if&quot;&gt;Is there a delay in the effect of the gravitational or electromagnetic force if a secondary body suddenly appears?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60037/do-all-the-4-forces-of-nature-act-at-the-same-speed&quot;&gt;Do all the 4 forces of nature act at the same speed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23760/is-it-sure-that-gravitons-are-massless-bosons&quot;&gt;Is it sure that gravitons are massless bosons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:07:27.513" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:07:27.513" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-10T11:39:49.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2013-08-10T12:07:52.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here I do not quite agree that all of the tags mentioned in this question should be burnicated (generally I think all the tags we have should denote meaningful physics terms):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x-ray-cristallography&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x-ray-cristallography&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x-ray-cristallography&lt;/a&gt; is a meaningful method to investage the&#xA;structure of materials in the field of material sciences, so it seems&#xA;a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laws-of-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laws-of-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laws-of-physics&lt;/a&gt; seems a bit unspecific&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/approximations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;approximations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;approximations&lt;/a&gt; seems ok for questions that ask about about&lt;br&gt;&#xA;particular approximations needed in different contexts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/affine-lie-algebra&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;affine-lie-algebra&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;affine-lie-algebra&lt;/a&gt; is a good meaningful technical tag for&lt;br&gt;&#xA;technical questions (it came from TP.SE), even though it is not&lt;br&gt;&#xA;heavily populated I still dont give up that the kind of questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;that needs this kind of tags will increas again ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/labor-savety&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;labor-savety&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;labor-savety&lt;/a&gt; looks slightly off topic to me ..&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T12:07:52.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2013-08-10T12:26:28.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/45/2751&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer and the idea, that the tags we have should denote subfields of physics or meaningful keywords as applied by physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But tags just denoting thermodynamic or kinematic variables, basic quantities used in certain subfields, etc look to me not meaningful enough to categorize qustions. In addition, creating such tags for every thermodynamic and kinematic variable or for every basic quantity applied in any subfield would largely inflate the number of tags we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the particular tags listed here, it seems to me that the thermodynamic variables are already covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thermodynmaics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thermodynmaics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thermodynmaics&lt;/a&gt;, the kinematic variables by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kinematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kinematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kinematics&lt;/a&gt;, capacitance by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electrostatics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electrostatics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electrostatics&lt;/a&gt;, etc ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T12:26:28.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2013-08-10T16:00:00.957" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been an awful lot said here already, so I'm gonna cut to the chase: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; is clearly a meta tag,&lt;/strong&gt; in the same way that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag - it can't stand alone when describing a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; mean it's bad or should be removed though. [popular-science], like [homework] has value in describing the sorts of &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that can be found on a question... or should be provided to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT THAT ONLY WORKS IF FOLKS ARE CONSISTENT IN HOW THEY USE IT.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After years of support and many thousands of questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147100/the-homework-tag-is-now-officially-deprecated&quot;&gt;we had to burn [homework] on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;because folks were using it as a club to beat others over the head with.&lt;/em&gt; When folks are regularly getting into fights over a &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;, that tag has become a liability and must be removed - &lt;em&gt;regardless&lt;/em&gt; of how nice it might be in theory. And before you say &quot;it can't happen here&quot;, open your eyes - it already &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I sympathize with Jim and others who wish to classify these questions, Manishearth is dead right with regard to the ambiguities and potential for abuse: these are the reasons why meta tags are discouraged. If this tag is going to remain in use, three conditions &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This should go without saying, but... Y'all have to &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; pop-sci questions on this site. I don't mean &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; questions - I mean questions that demand answers written for a general audience: no post-highschool physics knowledge required (if even that). Answers you could give to your 8 year old when she asks an annoying string of &quot;why&quot; questions. You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; just disallow these questions entirely and side-step the whole issue; not saying that's a good idea, but if folks really hate them then that's an option. If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want them, and want them tagged as such, then...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;...You need to be &lt;em&gt;ruthlessly&lt;/em&gt; consistent in how the tag is used. If a given question doesn't explicitly ask for &lt;em&gt;and receive&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;general audience&quot; answer, then it's not a pop-sci question. You may think it's too simple, that the author doesn't have sufficient knowledge to understand the answer he's asking for, or just detest the topic, but... Tough cookies; down-vote or vote to close it as appropriate. &lt;strong&gt;Unless the asker states&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;I don't know any physics, please give me an answer that doesn't require it&quot; or the equivalent of it... You must not use this tag. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be the only tag on any question. If there's no clearly identifiable topic beyond &quot;I want a layman's explanation for something&quot;, then the question is either poorly-written, off-topic, or badly-tagged - so if it's not closed or deleted, you need to tag it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is already failing this condition - there are 24 posts with no other tag. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most importantly, &lt;strong&gt;you cannot fight about this.&lt;/strong&gt; Tags should be obvious to anyone reading the question, not a point of controversy. If you find folks engaging in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-great-edit-wars/&quot;&gt;edit wars&lt;/a&gt; over whether or not this tag is appropriate, point them to this post; if they continue to misuse it, they will be blocked; if the problem becomes widespread, &lt;strong&gt;the tag will be removed with no further discussion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T16:00:00.957" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:23:33.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I note that popular-science, research-level, and homework are pleasingly separate (that is, very little overlap) but should capture 95% of the questions posted on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should bother you. Here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GIpVA.png&quot; alt=&quot;first page of tags&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;first tags page&lt;/a&gt; looks like right now. It indicates a healthy site, catering to a broad range of interests. Note that with a few exceptions it mostly &lt;em&gt;describes what this site is about&lt;/em&gt;. If your interest or expertise falls into one of the areas described by those tags, you'll likely find a reason to keep you here on the site. You can follow topics that interest you, ignore those that don't, and even get customized lists of questions that match your specific interests. A host of tools in the software itself make use of this information, and it's clear which topics are popular here, and which ones are less well-served. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now picture a site where the top three tags are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, with the tags that describe specific topics trailing off behind them. (Let's imagine y'all ignore &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4699/getting-rid-of-the-popular-science-tag/4743#4743&quot;&gt;my advice&lt;/a&gt; and start slapping [popular-science] on any question you don't think falls into either [homework] or [research-level]). You might imagine this would result in the same list pictured above, with a couple of extra tags at the start - you would be wrong. &lt;strong&gt;Every time we've seen this done,&lt;/strong&gt; it has resulted in topic-specific tags being neglected in favor of the broad, easy categories. The bigger the category gets, the more poorly-tagged questions result...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse yet, it carves the site up into separate districts based on fairly subjective criteria that have little or nothing to do with the actual subjects being asked and answered. They may &lt;em&gt;start out&lt;/em&gt; &quot;separate but equal&quot;, but... That never lasts. Pretty soon, one or more tags develop a reputation for being... Let's say &quot;dirty&quot;. You don't want this tag on &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; question. You do want it on questions you don't like, since then you can ignore it. No need to put effort into editing or closing bad questions - just shove them in the ghetto and pretend they don't exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagging is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a tool for moderation; they are a tool for &lt;em&gt;organization&lt;/em&gt;. The categories that a question falls into should be obvious based on the question itself - if a 3rd-party is required to arbitrate, then tagging has failed. Leave tags for &lt;em&gt;topics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you know better than to suggest there are only three topics here on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T17:23:33.410" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:48:53.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/redundant-tags-i#comment12934_4728&quot;&gt;I tend to agree with @Qmechanic here&lt;/a&gt;: if there is &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; need for discussion, lumping all these tags into one post becomes unwieldy. I'm sure not gonna burn a big pile of tags like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4007/are-there-too-many-and-or-specific-tags/4009#4009&quot;&gt;David Z here&lt;/a&gt; - if a tag describes part of the topic of a question, then it's a good tag. There aren't &lt;em&gt;too many&lt;/em&gt;; you're not gonna &lt;em&gt;run out&lt;/em&gt;. This notion that everything on the site should be lumped into a tiny handful of tags is somewhere between misguided and harmfully stupid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a good reason to believe that a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; tag is unnecessary or harmful, post about it here - folks will discuss it if necessary and then it can be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T17:48:53.023" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4724" CreationDate="2013-08-10T18:04:45.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few reasons not to do this, some social, some technical, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is some ambiguity about what qualifies as High school(depending on where you studied)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That alone is reason enough not to put any more thought into it. You should be able to read a question and &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; which tags apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T18:04:45.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T22:09:19.137" Score="51" ViewCount="1011" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dearest Physics&lt;sub&gt;meta&lt;/sub&gt; Stack Exchange readers,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just got done reading through &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4699/getting-rid-of-the-popular-science-tag&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt;, its many supporting discussions, its answers, their comments, the answers to the supporting questions and &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; comments. And I &lt;em&gt;gotta&lt;/em&gt; tell ya, &lt;strong&gt;you talk too much...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...without actually &lt;em&gt;saying&lt;/em&gt; very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of people requested that I research this issue (and a few related issues) and give my opinion, since apparently there've been some hurt feelings here and there over some of this. That's a shame. The whole point of meta is to give folks a voice in how the community is run - if you're writing this much and still feeling unheard, something is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I have a few suggestions for the more... enthusiastic... participants in these discussions, a few things I've picked up over the years that'll make these go a lot smoother for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have fun.&lt;/strong&gt; I don't know why you're here, but I'm guessing it &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; isn't your job to argue about minutia on The Internet all day&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Even if the questions you ask/answer &lt;em&gt;on Physics.SE&lt;/em&gt; are crucial to your work, meta debates probably aren't. Hopefully, we're all here because we love the site and want it to be even better - so if this is starting to feel like a drag, go for a walk or something instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Try to read more than you write.&lt;/strong&gt; If you find yourself dominating a conversation (or &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; conversations simultaneously), chances are it is becoming increasingly hard for other folks to keep up with what you're trying to say; they might very well just start ignoring you. Ironically, you can end up being unheard because you talk to much! You also risk giving the impression that you don't really care about what anyone else has to say, being too busy writing your rebuttal to really understand what you're responding to. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Know when a comment discussion isn't working.&lt;/strong&gt; Comments are a great way to ask for or provide clarifications, raise concerns, or provide simple criticisms. But they can be exceedingly tedious for others to read, and not everyone has time to involve themselves in a prolonged discussion. If you find yourself going back and forth at for any significant length of time, chances are you're not getting your point across - maybe you'd be better off writing or updating an answer where you have room to expand your argument... or even taking the conversation to chat. &lt;strong&gt;Hint:&lt;/strong&gt; if you find yourself posting two comments back-to-back because your response won't fit into one, you're probably doing it wrong. &lt;strong&gt;Stop and write an answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recognize that the people you disagree with probably are not Pure Evil.&lt;/strong&gt; Sure, dividing up a happy community into tag-ghettos sounds like something that Hitler or Stalin would do, and I'm sure Pol Pot would've &lt;em&gt;loved&lt;/em&gt; the idea of throwing tags he didn't like into a mass grave and setting them on fire. But consider: if those guys had limited themselves to bullying bits around on The Internet&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, we probably wouldn't hate them so much. Try to limit the hyperbole and focus on the topic at hand; if you're having trouble doing that, maybe take a break and have a nice cup of tea instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evidence trumps speculation.&lt;/strong&gt; Afraid that &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; will be the death of the site? You might be right. But... Prove it. Or at least, provide &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; to back up your assertion. Has &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;  been tried elsewhere and failed? Say that. Is there evidence on the site itself that &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is causing problems? Link to it. If the sky is falling, then stop running around screaming and &lt;em&gt;show us a piece of it!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remember that there are an awful lot of people on the site who just want to ask and answer physics questions.&lt;/strong&gt; A discussion here on Meta is just that: a way for interested parties to lay out their arguments; it's not guaranteed to reflect the opinion of the greater community. Most of the time, discussions are never really &lt;em&gt;concluded&lt;/em&gt; here - it's always possible for someone to come in with a new answer, and ultimately what actually matters is what happens &lt;em&gt;on the main site itself&lt;/em&gt;. Meta gives you a podium&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't spend too much of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; time here either.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; If you spend all of your time here on Meta, it becomes very easy to forget the reasons why you came here in the first place, place undue importance on trivial arguments, and stop having fun. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be patient.&lt;/strong&gt; Change takes time, and remember: a lot of folks aren't as enthusiastic about following every meta conversation as you are (See #6). If things aren't happening fast enough for your taste, starting &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; discussions on the subject may be counter-productive (See #2). And if you're too busy hand-wringing on meta to actually follow your own advice when participating on the main site, then you're missing the chance to set an example for others to follow (#7). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, remember that you elected moderators to &lt;em&gt;help out&lt;/em&gt; on the site, &lt;em&gt;settle&lt;/em&gt; intractable arguments, and &lt;em&gt;enact&lt;/em&gt; the policies hashed out here and elsewhere. They're strongly encouraged to be active here on meta, but... They don't actually &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to respond to every discussion or involve themselves in every debate. If you want their input and assistance, try to make it a bit easier for them to provide that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Because that's &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; job, and you can't have it! Just kidding, we're &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/hiring&quot;&gt;hiring&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I'll bet a lot fewer people have starved to death because of Collectivist Farmville.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Or maybe a soapbox. A podium sounds like something Hitler would want.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; Again, my job not yers.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.663" LastActivityDate="2013-11-06T06:06:34.630" Title="How to conduct a discussion on meta and not kill everyone in trying" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|meta|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4637" CreationDate="2013-08-11T11:28:01.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I first did not see much use of a BSM tag too, but no I think it can be useful and we should have one for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I agree with what Matt Reece said in his comment: there's some effect&#xA;which is not present in the SM and a question about what it means and&#xA;how it can be interpreted, not linked to any particular model.&#xA;General things like questions involving bounds on higher-dimension&#xA;operators---of which the proton charge radius is, more or less, an&#xA;example---would be a good use of this tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the LHC, in addition to very specific searches for BSM physics&#xA;which can clearly be ascribed to a particular theory/concept/model&#xA;such as supersymmetry or string theory, people do more general&#xA;broader searches for BSM physics effects which can not be uniquely&#xA;related to a single known theoretical idea, such as extra&#xA;dimensions, violations of fundamental symmetries, or more generally&#xA;for deviations from the SM one would not yet know how to interpret&#xA;them at present, too. Questions dealing with such issues could not be&#xA;tagged with string-theory, supersymmetry, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly to fill this gap, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bsm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bsm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bsm&lt;/a&gt; is usefull and it would be useful for people who want to ask and/or look for questions which deal with more general BSM phenomenology including more exotic effects, which are not covered by the specific tags denoting BSM theories and concepts we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2013-08-11T12:21:08.810" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T12:21:08.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-11T15:01:58.700" Score="-9" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't flags indicate technical innacuracies? Given the large number of &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; wrong answers (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/35677/23119&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/35677/23119&lt;/a&gt; (totally fails to understand QM), &lt;br&gt;&amp;lt;--- Calamities &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15/what-experiment-would-disprove-string-theory/48#48&quot;&gt;What experiment would disprove string theory?&lt;/a&gt; (totally fails to understand    falsification), &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15/what-experiment-would-disprove-string-theory/19089#19089&quot;&gt;What experiment would disprove string theory?&lt;/a&gt;          (totally fails to understand ST), &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/69545/23119&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/69545/23119&lt;/a&gt; (it's just wrong, not how real nature works, fortunately or unfortunately, since EM only curves spacetime due to the gravitational energy of it.), see also more answers listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/865/23119&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;            etc.), I propose that  flags indicating completely wrong answers should be accepted.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In QM, time is continuous. Falsification does not say that if it isn't experimentally verified by the next &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; years, i        t isn't correct.  String theory does predict scattering amplitudes, obviously.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Currently:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fhqS5.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forecast:&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I decline to give the  forecast? Or that it is predicted that this will be declined?  .                                &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Flags and technical innacuracies" Tags="|feature-request|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2013-08-11T15:27:13.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/7931/205334&quot;&gt;This would've been covered by our overall site FAQ&lt;/a&gt; under the topic &lt;strong&gt;Moderation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags don't work like that. Flagging should be done only when moderators require some intervention with the post. For instance, someone is spamming around, uses offensive words, posting bad questions that need to be closed, etc. can be handled by a mod. Other cases...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If some asker accepts some answer, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's correct. It means that he's satisfied with it. You shouldn't flag it and say it's wrong. Because, a mod shouldn't switch accepted answers, that are only provided for askers. If that's the case, he can go around accepting answers by himself. And, something in your point of view may be different from others' point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) An answer gets large number of upvotes (&lt;em&gt;that too&lt;/em&gt;...) doesn't mean that it's correct. It's accepted and agreed as a worthy answer by the overall community. Mod can't interrupt the community's evaluation of answers. That's the reason why downvoted answers are still under questions. If the wrong answer is related to Physics (just some misunderstanding), we can keep it to indicate others that it's wrong...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your question goes to the author. Just comment below it, indicating what's wrong there. Mods can't do everything. They're just our people. Feel free to interact with them. Why do you need mods as some connecting bridges? Again, your thought that &lt;em&gt;answers should be deleted by mods once they're flagged&lt;/em&gt; is really a misconception...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T15:27:13.887" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2013-08-11T16:30:42.347" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;And what would such a flag &lt;em&gt;do?&lt;/em&gt; Alert the moderators? What if they lack sufficient expertise in the flagged topic to make a good call? Alert high-rep users? So that they can... criticize the post for you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a better idea would be to just indicate publicly that the post was flagged. We could even maintain a count of the number of such flags, and display that next to the post, thereby indicating the number of people who found the post to be inaccurate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be a bit controversial, but... Since your concern is primarily with &quot;&lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; wrong answers&quot;, we could potentially reduce the score of the post by one for every &quot;inaccurate&quot; flag cast on it, thereby giving flaggers a direct way to combat overrated posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T16:30:42.347" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4755" CreationDate="2013-08-11T17:25:59.253" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to flag a comment, but accidentally upvoted it, and I can't remove the upvote because I have only 1 minute to remove it, which I've only recently discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I flag a comment I've accidentally upvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T15:52:21.197" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How do I flag a comment I've accidentally upvoted?" Tags="|support|comments|flagging|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4754" CreationDate="2013-08-11T19:27:46.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104184/allow-flagging-a-comment-after-upvoting-it&quot;&gt;Already been reported, not yet been fixed&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the best thing to do is to flag the corresponding post with a custom flag, mentioning that you're unable to flag the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T19:27:46.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-12T03:51:13.243" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;code&gt;star&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;stars&lt;/code&gt; are two separate tags and there's not good reason for them to be so, especially when the latter is only used 4 times. I suggest to merge both into &lt;code&gt;star&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27204" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T13:51:52.770" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T13:51:52.770" Title="Tag merging: &quot;Star: and &quot;Stars&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2013-08-12T06:25:58.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the community just gets it wrong, if there is a plausible-looking answer, many users will just upvote it even if it is outside their expertise and they can't actually evaluate the correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to prevent such wrong, but plausible answers to rise to the top is to specifically commment on them and explain why they are wrong, preferably with some references to back up your claim. Users are far less likely to just upvote if they see that the answer is controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another very important point is that bad answers are much more likely to get upvoted if there are no better answers around. Posting a good answer that contradicts the bad answer should be the top priority if there is no good answer yet on that question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you see an upvoted bad answer, comment on it to point out the error (constructively, just commenting &quot;this answer sucks&quot; doesn' help at all) and post a better answer as competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem with the idea of flags for incorrect answers is that it puts the burden to evaluate the correctness on a single person, in this case a moderator. Moderators don't necessarily have the expertise in every area that is on-topic here, they are not primarily selected for their domain knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if you would suggest something like the top users evaluating those flags, they still can be wrong and leaving the decision in the hand of a single or a few users could be worse than leaving it in the hands of the community. If you look at my only answer I posted on Physics, this was posted as a response to the current most-upvoted answer. That answer is just plainly missing the point of the question in one part, it is completely wrong in one important aspect and it was posted by the user with the highest reputation on Physics. Even high-reputation users are occasionally wrong, evaluating the correctness is not something we should put in the hands of a single user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T06:25:58.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4760" CreationDate="2013-08-12T16:13:59.630" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4699/getting-rid-of-the-popular-science-tag&quot;&gt;Getting rid of the popular science tag&lt;/a&gt;, Shog9's (rather reasonable, in my opinion) was accepted.    So here, I think we should  standardise the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answers are technical, but the question was phrased in a pop-sci way,  should it be tagged as popular science?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the questioner asks for something evidently beyond their level (assuming they're a layman),    should it be tagged  a pop-sci? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question arose from a pop-sci text, e.g. one of Kaku's pop-sci books, but asks for a technical   answer (e.g. Kaku says that it's possible to find the probability of X happening but as it was in the context of a pop-sci book, so he didn't elaborate any further. How is that done?&quot; , should it be tagged as pop-sci?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are      questions about, say, &quot;Which is the fastest  way to cool a beaker of water?&quot; to be tagged as pop-sci?     Or is it just stuff like &quot;How  can a graviton escape a black hole?&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;From the comments:&lt;/em&gt;      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just suggestions - the intent is for people to suggest a good definition in the answers, the community votes on these answers, and the most upvoted one after a reasonable amount of time has past will be the one we apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that whatever definition you come up with &lt;strong&gt;needs to be objective&lt;/strong&gt;. Otherwise we're back where we've started on the tag. &quot;Question was phrased in a pop sci way&quot; is ambiguous.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T16:40:34.083" Title="Criteria for the popular-science tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|retagging|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4759" CreationDate="2013-08-12T17:14:37.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the best argument for even &lt;em&gt;having&lt;/em&gt; this tag is that it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a fairly common and well-understood term&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Popular science, sometimes called literature of science, is interpretation of science intended for a general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deviating from that introduces ambiguity and creates the potential for confusion if the tag is applied to questions where answers are decidedly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; written for a general audience. Why would any answers here be written for a general audience? Usually because &lt;em&gt;that's what the asker asked for&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;can someone give me a layman's explanation?&quot;, &quot;how would I explain this to a 12 year old?&quot;, etc. &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, I recommend the following criteria:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; Questions in this tag must be answered in a manner that can be understood by a general audience with at most a basic understanding of physics, mathematics and related sciences. &lt;strong&gt;Apply it to questions where the asker clearly requests such answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for instance, these are clearly pop-sci questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73564/explaining-to-a-five-year-old-why-dont-bubbles-run-like-water&quot;&gt;Explaining to a five year old - why don&amp;#39;t bubbles run like water&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73619/how-can-i-explain-or-demonstrate-the-lorentz-force-to-a-12-year-old&quot;&gt;How can I explain or demonstrate the Lorentz Force to a 12 year old?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/64530/why-cant-supersonic-planes-just-fly-higher-to-go-faster-while-maintaining-cos&quot;&gt;Why can&amp;#39;t supersonic planes &amp;quot;just fly higher&amp;quot; to go faster while maintaining cost?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...while these are probably not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69651/in-which-direction-do-gravitons-travel-do-they-originate-from-mass-or-are-they&quot;&gt;In which direction do gravitons travel? Do they originate from mass or are they collected by masses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55440/could-all-strings-be-one-single-string-which-weaves-the-fabric-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;Could all strings be one single string which weaves the fabric of the universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a lot of questions have been retagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; in the past month or so, but not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of them comply with the definition above - in particular, there are a few questions where the tag seems to have been added based on the perceived difficulty or &quot;softness&quot; of the question rather than any explicit desire on the part of the asker for a broadly-accessible answer (much less the existence of such an answer on the question). Some of these will need to be retagged again to avoid setting a bad example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T18:21:17.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4563" CreationDate="2013-08-12T19:22:27.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Open-source&quot; isn't the same thing as &quot;doesn't cost money.&quot; For example, if my friend lets me smoke some of his marijuana for free, that doesn't make it open-source marijuana. Open source, in the software world, means that you can look at the source code of the program (not just the compiled version), and the source code is also either public domain or available under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative, opensource.org. When applied to books, the term would imply something similar, except that instead of source code we mean something like a format that is designed to be edited (e.g., LaTeX) and whose specs are sufficiently open that there are open-source software implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By these definitions, sites like gen.lib.rus.ec have nothing to do with open source. Here is a site I run that catalogs books that actually are legally free and/or open-source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://theassayer.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://theassayer.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is this considered a violation of copyright/bla-bla-bla policy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most countries, linking is not a violation of copyright, even if the site you're linking to violates copyright. And of course if the site you're linking to really is a source that carries open-source books, then there is nothing illegal going on whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I would suggest is to be honest about what's going on, and not to call it open source if it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T19:22:27.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-12T21:26:46.197" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to visually include Mathematica code in a response?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am almost done writing one right now, and I'd like to include a small amount of code which shows a computation demonstrating a result I claim in the response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is art of what the code.  I realized that of I right clicked on the code and chose Copy As &gt; MathML then I would pretty much get what I wanted (see below).  Is this the best I can do?  I mean, I guess the only more I could want is to have the text set in Courier so it looks more &quot;code-ish.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA; &#xA;  &#xA;   Rx&#xA;   [&#xA;   &amp;#952;_&#xA;   ]&#xA;  &#xA;  :=&#xA;  &#xA;   {&#xA;   &#xA;    &#xA;     {&#xA;     &#xA;      1&#xA;      ,&#xA;      0&#xA;      ,&#xA;      0&#xA;     &#xA;     }&#xA;    &#xA;    ,&#xA;    &#xA;     {&#xA;     &#xA;      0&#xA;      ,&#xA;      &#xA;       Cos&#xA;       [&#xA;       &amp;#952;&#xA;       ]&#xA;      &#xA;      ,&#xA;      &#xA;       Sin&#xA;       [&#xA;       &amp;#952;&#xA;       ]&#xA;      &#xA;     &#xA;     }&#xA;    &#xA;    ,&#xA;    &#xA;     {&#xA;     &#xA;      0&#xA;      ,&#xA;      &#xA;       -&#xA;       &#xA;        Sin&#xA;        [&#xA;        &amp;#952;&#xA;        ]&#xA;       &#xA;      &#xA;      ,&#xA;      &#xA;       Cos&#xA;       [&#xA;       &amp;#952;&#xA;       ]&#xA;      &#xA;     &#xA;     }&#xA;    &#xA;   &#xA;   }&#xA;  &#xA; &#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="19976" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T02:21:40.597" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T19:07:14.563" Title="Including Mathematica code in a response" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4762" CreationDate="2013-08-12T21:35:47.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The '{}' button at the top of the editor or pressing Control-k will indent a selected block by 4-spaces putting it in code block mode. Like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Rx[θ_] := {{1, 0, 0}, {0, Cos[θ], Sin[θ]}, {0, -Sin[θ], Cos[θ]}}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T02:30:34.603" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T02:30:34.603" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4767" CreationDate="2013-08-13T14:03:05.177" Score="8" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed a joke post; a user intentionally asked and answered a question that was a very subtle mockery of research-level physics papers and had no application as an actual question on this site. I've got a sense of humour, it was pretty funny, so I thought &quot;we can let this slide. Close the question, but enjoy the joke while it's here&quot; But I checked out his account anyway. It seems this user (not going to name names for privacy's sake, and [redacted] other reasons) has maybe 1 or 2 out of about 40 posts that are remotely serious. All of his posts are &quot;jokes&quot; aimed at intentionally misleading, asking nonsensical questions, or generally mocking physics in some way. If reading one of his answers, it is important to keep in mind the entire time that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a joke. Some answers can seem very sane an reasonable because of his ability to use jargon. The important thing is that upon closer inspection, many of them say nothing or say the wrong thing seemingly intentionally. Granted, some of them are pretty funny, but the fact remains that it's damaging to have someone running around giving false facts or generally making us look bad/disreputable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thus, I'd love to have the discussion about at what point we decide something should be done and what to do in the case that they are way out of line.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start it off, obviously we're all a big fan of something that's funny. So I assume it goes without saying that if you want to throw some jokes into a question or answer, feel free. I just think there should still be some serious content. Sometimes, an answer can be entirely silly and still be acceptable, an example being &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/70851/23473&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/70851/23473&lt;/a&gt; where the top answer is entirely silly. But I think it becomes unaccpetable when, instead of a one-time thing, a user is constantly posting questions/answers that do more harm than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what to do when one is found, to that I have no answer. What would you say would be the appropriate action for an intentionally disruptive user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T17:50:28.927" Title="Policy regarding intentionally counter-productive users" Tags="|discussion|policy|users|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4762" CreationDate="2013-08-13T14:56:51.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best option is to use the &lt;code&gt;{}&lt;/code&gt; button, or &lt;code&gt;Ctrl + k&lt;/code&gt;, to create four indenting spaces which will format code like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;this,&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as dmckee pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would generally recommend &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; altering the Mathematica code. When posting any code on the site, it should be in a form that it will run directly after being copied and pasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as it happens, Mathematica will automatically turn Greek ASCII characters, like &lt;code&gt;θ&lt;/code&gt;, directly to their InputForm representation (i.e. &lt;code&gt;\[Theta]&lt;/code&gt;) immediately upon pasting. It is therefore OK to change those characters to their ASCII representation. This is, in fact, what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/additional-useful-buttons-for-our-m-se-editor&quot;&gt;mathematica.se prettify userscript&lt;/a&gt; does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, though, you can't expect &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; your Mathematica code to be made completely clear. Take, for example, this piece of code,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sound[{Play[Re[E^(-((10000 I)/(4 10^-6 I + 60 t)))/Sqrt[10^-6 - 15 I t]], {t, 0, 15}]}]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I posted recently in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/63798/slinky-reverb-the-origin-of-the-iconic-star-wars-blaster-sound&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. It lost quite a bit of formatting (fraction, square root, exponential) in the transcription process, but I can't put that in and &lt;strong&gt;I definitely shouldn't do something that compromises the code upon copy-paste.&lt;/strong&gt; Thus I left it like that; if a clearer exposition of what the code is saying is necessary then I'd recommend adding a LaTeX'd version of what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T19:07:14.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-14T00:52:31.093" Score="13" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a significant overlap between physics and chemistry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10320/explanation-of-thermite-vs-ice-explosion&quot;&gt;Explanation of &amp;quot;thermite vs ice&amp;quot; explosion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I suggest that questions tagged &quot;chemistry&quot; on physics.se be displayed and editable on both chemistry.se and physics.se. The reverse would also be beneficial: questions on chemistry.se tagged physics could appear here as well as there and be editable by both communities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question immediately arises, should we collaborate on other tags? I would suggest that only tags involving the word chemistry  or physics respectively should be cross-communal projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edit]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a question on SO meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131950/asking-on-multiple-sites-soft-migration&quot;&gt;Asking on Multiple Sites: &amp;quot;Soft-Migration&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which points out how it is mostly the sciences that would benefit from this feature. I guess that means it is &quot;too specific,&quot; since we are relatively small. Democracy baby!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2843" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Collaborate With Chemistry.se?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4764" CreationDate="2013-08-14T04:53:13.153" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wrong answers and bad questions are supposed to be dealt with using downvotes. Antisocial behavior is AFAIK supposed to be dealt with by moderators using measures like warnings and suspensions. These measures aren't always effective, but from what I've seen, the cases where they don't work commonly seem to involve people who are persistent posters but don't seem able to recognize the limits of their own expertise. I haven't seen much evidence that the system's failures include a lot of people who are trolls or merry pranksters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T04:53:13.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-14T11:26:22.743" Score="9" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested by Natheniel in   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4728/redundant-tags-i&quot;&gt;Redundant tags I&lt;/a&gt;,    I'll make a single question and let people vote on the answers (containing redundant tags to burninate.).               &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T18:26:41.820" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:15:46.390" Title="Tag burninate &amp; blacklist requests for voting" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4768" CreationDate="2013-08-14T12:59:22.223" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;PLEASE BURNINATE &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aircraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aircraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aircraft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag does not describe a physics subfield, method, concept, nor a keyword that is useful to and applied by physicists, but denotes just a means of travel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asking about the physics of airplanes and aircrafts should be tagged with real physics tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluid-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aerodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aerodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aerodynamics&lt;/a&gt;, or whatever applies in the respective case instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-09-28T06:36:56.197" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T06:36:56.197" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4768" CreationDate="2013-08-14T18:08:04.070" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics-careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics-careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics-careers&lt;/a&gt; tag seems redundant and confusing, since questions asking for career advice are off-topic and I see little other uses for it. It also (weakly) suggests career advice questions are &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; here, which may have led to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/74183/16660&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; being asked recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we get rid of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T06:37:07.650" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-14T18:17:12.073" Score="5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why when someone retags a question (and also when he or she suggests an edit, I think) that question becomes the first in the list of 'active' questions???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very inconvenient — I hate it — because it puts back questions that are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; active (with new answers, for example). Retagging doesn't sufficiently change a question to put it in the first position. The list of active questions should be reserved for questions containing real changes rather than minor, irrelevant changes such as one more or one less tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn't a problem for me until certain user started to retag questions permanently. For example, in the last two hours he has made 16 suggestions or editions (and often the number is even larger). I'm not against his editions or suggestions, I am against the questions he edits appear in the first position in the list of active question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T18:30:48.650" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T19:53:18.413" Title="Retagging and suggesting edits" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|editing|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4790" CreationDate="2013-08-14T19:08:10.743" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, what can be done about overpopulation of minor edits on the front page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not bringing minor edits to the front page has already been declined many times, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/47/2451&quot;&gt;Very minor edits, e.g. punctuation&lt;/a&gt; and links therein.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;User Pulsar has very recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4702/2451&quot;&gt;proposed&lt;/a&gt; in a comment to have an extra tab of &lt;em&gt;active posts sans minor edits.&lt;/em&gt; This is an interesting idea if such a list is feasible to implement in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rule of thumb advice for potential editors is to limit mass edits of &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; posts, i.e, so that only a handful of their &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; post edits appear on the front page at the same time. [An &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; post is by definition here a post not appearing on the front page. There are no limit to edits of &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; (=front page) posts.]  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[This is not really a solution to the underlying problem, but you might find it useful anyway:] Alternatively, if you are mainly interested in recent questions, you might consider to instead browse the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;newest question tab&lt;/a&gt; rather than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt;. This way of browsing avoids all the edits, but the downside is that you will miss all the new answers to older questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T19:53:18.413" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4764" CreationDate="2013-08-14T21:11:54.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of his posts are &quot;jokes&quot; aimed at intentionally misleading, asking nonsensical questions, or generally mocking physics in some way. [...] The important thing is that upon closer inspection, many of them say nothing or say the wrong thing seemingly intentionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely what downvotes are to be used for. Note that the criterion for downvoting an answer is &quot;This answer is not &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;  It's not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; based on correctness. So if an answer (or question) is obscured by jargon, that alone could be sufficient cause to downvote it even if it's technically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an account has a large proportion of highly downvoted questions or answers, that can lead to moderator action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T21:11:54.013" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4800" CreationDate="2013-08-15T09:42:28.417" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics-careers&quot;&gt;physics-careers&lt;/a&gt; tag contains almost all questions also tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;. Those which don't are deemed off-topic and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions ask about the details of working in some specific field. For eg.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30140/current-scope-of-chaos-theory-and-non-linear-dynamics&quot;&gt;Current scope of Chaos theory and non-linear dynamics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45315/how-can-some-one-independently-do-research-in-particle-physics&quot;&gt;How can some-one independently do research in particle physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we really need a specific tag about physics-careers? If so, what kind of &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; questions would this tag describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10896" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T18:16:03.403" Title="What can be done about a tag which is a complete subset of another?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-15T12:56:27.997" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to this forum, I was wondering how to write neat formulas in the post/question?&#xA;Do I have to use MathXML and code everything in XML or is there an editor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27829" OwnerDisplayName="Luther" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-08-15T13:34:43.693" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T13:34:43.693" Title="How to write formulas/maths expressions in the forum?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-08-15T13:30:59.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-15T13:40:58.603" Score="4" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a second revision based on Manishearth's response below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He pointed out that there is this &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/filters/46870/favorite-tags&quot;&gt;feature&lt;/a&gt; on the network wide site, to filter out questions based on tag groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I will be very happy to use this feature on the network wide site, I propose that we inherit this feature directly into Physics Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a few advantages if this feature is introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will be within the site itself, and users don't have to go anywhere else to access his feature. Its a rather obscure place to look for right now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each set of people with common interests(thus tags) have a place of their own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People will be not on be on each others throats for space on the main page. The string theorists for example will not have to bother all about what the homework guys are doing on their side of the digital space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would make the site much easier to use and add a lot of flexibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People interested in serious research, would have a much easier time. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A box on the left(or right) with tag groups that you have created would be an ideal interface. Once you click on a group you will see the usual options(Active, Hot, Week, Month) relevant to the tags you selected. There will be an edit button to make new tag groups and modify or delete existing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ofcourse this would only work to complement the Main Page, Which in recent times has become rather tedious to browse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="12798" LastEditDate="2013-08-15T17:01:04.267" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T17:01:04.267" Title="Tag Groups and search filters" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4797" CreationDate="2013-08-15T13:44:40.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/filters/46870/favorite-tags&quot;&gt;Here?&lt;/a&gt; Note that it's an aggregate of qs from your network-wide favorite tags. Of course, you can create your own filter and copy-paste the list of favorite tags into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T13:44:40.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4768" CreationDate="2013-08-15T16:01:47.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;PLEASE BURNINATE &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag does not describe a physics subfield, method, concept, nor a keyword that is useful to and applied by physicists, but denotes just an everyday object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asking about the physics of a fan should be tagged with the proper real physics tags such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluid-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aerodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aerodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aerodynamics&lt;/a&gt;, or whatever applies in the respective case instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-09-28T06:35:57.330" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T06:35:57.330" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4793" CreationDate="2013-08-15T18:16:03.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general there's nothing wrong with having a tag that is a subset of another. After all, we do have broad subfield tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-field-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-field-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/a&gt; that many other tags will fit under. It's still useful to have those more specific tags to make it easier for people to filter posts as they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics-careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics-careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics-careers&lt;/a&gt; questions may well be off topic on the site. I don't know if we have an explicit discussion about it on meta but I don't believe there's any particular justification for them to be on topic. That's a separate issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T18:16:03.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4766" CreationDate="2013-08-16T08:25:04.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator on both the sites involved, I sort of support this -- this was the reason I proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131950/asking-on-multiple-sites-soft-migration&quot;&gt;soft migration&lt;/a&gt; in the first place. Note that soft migration is less complicated than your proposal -- we don't need editing and all, just that the posts should turn up on the main page and in searches. Allowing editing would probably be complicated in the implementation&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; as the privileges would need to get carried over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had already added a ticker chatroom feed for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physical-chemistry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physical-chemistry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physical-chemistry&lt;/a&gt; (and I just added one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;) in the Phy.SE chatroom. If nobody has any objections I can convert it to a chat message feed (every new post is posted in the chatroom). It shouldn't cause too much clutter as Chem.SE doesn't have that much activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. These things always &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; easy to implement, but a large app like SE usually has complications in implementing such things. One great example is HTTPS -- to most, turning on HTTPS can be done with the flip of a switch. But for something like SE, &lt;a href=&quot;http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/04/23/stackoverflow-com-the-road-to-ssl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's not so easy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T08:25:04.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4804" CreationDate="2013-08-16T09:53:04.543" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;We seem to be missing an off-topic close reason. I think. Unless I'm missing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I select off-topic, I can choose from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;homework with insufficient research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;engineering&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fringe rather than mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;belongs on math.SE or meta.physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are potentially plenty of off-topic questions which don't fall neatly into one of those four boxes, so I'd have to use the option of flagging a diamond mod with a custom reason. Which seems like overkill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think this is turning into a feature request for a new close reason (one that will also appear on the flagging screen): &quot;this question is not about physics concepts&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Are we missing an off-topic close reason" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4803" CreationDate="2013-08-16T11:43:57.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a freeform off topic reason*, but that's only for 3k users. These users get to type an &quot;other&quot; close reason. This becomes a comment on the question. Subsequent closevoters get the additional option to choose the same close reason (which results in a comment upvote). When the question is closed, it gets the default off topic wording (&quot;this is off topic for Physics because it doesn't fit the scope defined in the help center&quot; or something like that), and the comment stays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't available to flaggers, though. However, the off topic subreason you choose is not visible to anyone (even mods) -- the flag is always counted as &quot;off topic&quot; from the POV of reviewers and mods. So my advice would be to just pick a random offtopic subreason when none fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises the question &quot;if it isn't visible, why make flaggers choose?&quot;. Well, these subreasons subtly teach new flaggers &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is flaggable. This happened to me on SO, I didn't know that certain types of questions could be closed until the flag changes came out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do feel that this system is slightly unweildy though, and have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/188106/178438&quot;&gt;proposed a change to it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Known hereabouts as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n8CSK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trolley car close reason&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T11:43:57.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-17T11:42:36.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3009/how-exactly-does-curved-space-time-describe-the-force-of-gravity&quot;&gt;How exactly does curved space-time describe the force of gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7781/does-the-curvature-of-spacetime-theory-assume-gravity/69092#69092&quot;&gt;Does the curvature of spacetime theory assume gravity?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45307/how-do-the-einsteins-differential-equation-of-the-curvature-of-spacetime-come-o/71454#71454&quot;&gt;How do the Einstein&amp;#39;s differential equation of the curvature of spacetime come out of Einstein&amp;#39;s field equation?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:11:42.770" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:11:42.770" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-17T11:42:36.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-19T04:26:31.813" Score="-5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74425/power-loss-from-chain-and-sprocket-combinations-of-equal-ratios&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74425/power-loss-from-chain-and-sprocket-combinations-of-equal-ratios&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm simply asking what the difference of power would be to make an atv with a 13t sprocket accelerate the same as one with a 11t sprocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I asking to be engineered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't or don't want to answer the question, that's fine.  But don't say its about engineering for a means to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T05:25:59.560" Title="How is my question about engineering?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4803" CreationDate="2013-08-19T04:36:55.420" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &quot;Because I don't feel like answering this question&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26382" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T04:36:55.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4808" CreationDate="2013-08-19T05:19:44.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue is you are not asking &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; something works, but rather for the final answer. The only question you ask is &quot;Would you agree its easier to accelerate the chain on the smaller sprocket than the larger?&quot; which is not a physics question. The rest of your post is either background information or a &quot;check my calculation&quot; section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like your question re-opened, I would suggest that you find ways to pose it in a way that is looking for an understanding of what the physical differences might be between the two systems. Even removing the bulk of the information might help, the question can be as simple as &quot;Why does power decrease as cogs become smaller at a constant gear ratio?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers don't matter from the physics standpoint, nor does the application. But if you can phrase it as a &quot;Why does this work the way it does&quot; question, it &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be on topic and would (hopefully) give you the understanding of the problem to solve for the numbers yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my two cents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2013-08-19T05:25:59.560" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T05:25:59.560" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-19T12:43:22.077" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have rep on that site so could someone consider moving &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/79447/can-a-circuit-be-powered-from-earth-with-a-return-ground-on-mars&quot;&gt;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/79447/can-a-circuit-be-powered-from-earth-with-a-return-ground-on-mars&lt;/a&gt; to physics SE? It seems like a really good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25907" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:06.300" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T17:33:55.237" Title="Transfer question from electrical engineering" Tags="|feature-request|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-20T08:14:50.050" Score="4" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, the book policy has been reevaluated, and Manishearth's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698/2751&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; how to change it seems to be well enough accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is still missing for the new book policy to become reality, is some people, who are willing to help with editing the new incoming questions and controlling the answers, such that they conform with the needes of the new policy as expl]ained &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698/2751&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So please come forward and write a short answer, if you are willing to help with this :-)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a big job, as the expected average rate of new incoming such questions when allowed again by the new policy, is about one question per two weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just 2 more people are needed for the policy to succeed.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T23:58:34.310" Title="Please volunteer for help editing recommendation questions" Tags="|discussion|policy|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-11-15T07:16:06.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2013-08-20T08:16:25.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am willing to help with editing the recommendation questions and controlling their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T08:16:25.367" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-21T11:53:11.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4818" CreationDate="2013-08-20T12:18:52.877" Score="0" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question :&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74639/boeing-747-crashes-into-a-solid-diamond-skyscraper&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74639/boeing-747-crashes-into-a-solid-diamond-skyscraper&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;was highly downvoted, and put on hold recently giving a reason &quot;Primarily opinion based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were no comments whatsoever, as to why this was opinion based or to explain the down-votes. Is this kind of behavior appropriate on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10896" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Is Such a behaviour appropriate?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-20T12:51:21.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will only address the closure, not the down votes in this meta answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I closed OP's question (v4) as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based,&lt;/em&gt; not because there isn't a definite scientific answer that &lt;em&gt;in principle&lt;/em&gt; could be reach, but because to reach a scientific sound conclusion would mean to perform a tremendous amount of rigorous analysis, which almost certainly does not exist in the literature, which would be too much work to lay on potential answerers, which would be technical rather than conceptional in nature, with a too&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; localized scope, which cannot be easily generalized to other situations, to be interesting or enlightening to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of such scientific rigorous answers, the &lt;em&gt;answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions,&lt;/em&gt; as indicated in the reason for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This does not imply that one is not allowed to ask difficult  advanced research questions at Phys.SE that might take a lot of work to answer fully. But there should be a reasonable potential scientific or intellectual payoff, which is completely lacking in this case, cf. comment below by Nathaniel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-20T16:08:02.630" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T16:08:02.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4764" CreationDate="2013-08-20T15:27:37.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, I think you did the right thing by posting here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user [redacted] has either been trolling the site, or has written a lot of posts that are unintentionally very low quality (as someone mentioned elsewhere - any sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinuishable from trolling); either way, it's time for that to stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having drawn it to the attention of general posters like me, I hope that the bad questions and answers will continue to receive downvotes - and that's down to people reading this, to review the user [redacted]'s Q &amp;amp; A, and upvote or downvote (not in batches, as serial voting will get reversed automatically) as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I trust that the moderators will take appropriate action against the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T17:50:28.927" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T17:50:28.927" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-20T15:35:36.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what happened here is that the post was deemed &quot;Not Constructive&quot;, and was closed with the &quot;modern&quot; analogue of that close reason, &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;. POB doesn't apply as well as NC does here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may ask, &quot;what's wrong with the post then&quot;? Well, it's basically what's called an &quot;idle curiosity&quot; question -- you're not really aiming to learn something specific out of it, rather you're hoping to get some &quot;accidental learning&quot; from the post. It's not really focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That in itself isn't that much of a problem on this SE site&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, however there's another issue: It's not specific enough. There's not enough information about the system to get a meaningful answer&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; (alternatively, a good answer would require tons of analysis to get anywhere), which is sort of supported by this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've asked many Physics teachers and each has their own theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once it doesn't have a definitive answer and it's not really focused towards a concept, it &lt;em&gt;basically&lt;/em&gt; becomes a discussion. Such questions are great to discuss in person. You do indeed learn a lot by seeing the approaches of others. But the question itself doesn't really focus on any concept -- the learning value derives from the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of one of the answers  teaching you a good concept. Coupled with it being discussiony, that makes it rather unsuitable for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. While most SE sites deal with &quot;problems you actually face&quot;, the science sites don't (Well, not exactly), as explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164436/is-there-a-rule-of-thumb-for-objective-questions-asked-out-of-curiosity/164452#164452&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2. I suspect that supplying enough information to fix this would then just convert this to a homework/engineering problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T16:02:46.190" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-20T15:39:09.297" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to start by commenting the word &quot;appropriate&quot; in the context of getting downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People sometimes seem to come to meta looking for a ruling that the crowd was wrong, but that is not how it works. We &lt;em&gt;rely&lt;/em&gt; on the crowd to get things right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes (up and down) are plenary: excepting vote fraud people are empowered to vote &lt;em&gt;any way they like&lt;/em&gt;. Nor are down votes a bad thing: they are an integral part of the evaluation this site does on posted material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people also seem to be of the opinion that downvotes are intrinsically rude. Well, I disagree: there are things in this world that are not any good at all; that fail to meet even lax and minimum standards for quality. A correct evaluation of them &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; conclude that they are bad. On Stack Exchange sites posts which don't meet a minimum standard &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be downvoted. I'd go so far as to say that if you don't cast several percent of your votes as down (when you have the power), then you are not doing your part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance I suspect that the OP is being punished for either being insensitive or for sensationalism. In either case that is the privilege of the people doing the voting. Of &lt;em&gt;course&lt;/em&gt; it is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the close reason, I don't like &quot;Opinion based&quot; for this very much because a correct answer &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; arrived out after much simulation using a large cluster or supercomputer and person months of specialized materials simulation physicist or engineers. On the other hand, no one has done that work so you are in &lt;em&gt;practice&lt;/em&gt; inviting people to guess or to have a &quot;conversation&quot; on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not be reopening this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-08-20T15:49:05.690" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T15:49:05.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-20T19:24:04.377" Score="8" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;Online resources, including Wikipedia articles, arXiv articles and other web pages are often cited and used in answers and questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers on this site are expected to help future visitors. But, many of these online webpages are subject to change, modification or even removal. For example, Wikipedia articles may change significantly and do not contain (exactly) the cited material any more and arXiv articles may also change duo to uploading a newer version. The problem is much more severe with other web pages, where their address may change or the whole page may be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Wikipedia and arXiv articles, a &lt;em&gt;permanent link&lt;/em&gt; to each version is provided by the site itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (many) other pages, the solution is to use a web archiving service, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://webcitation.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WebCite&lt;/a&gt; to prevent link rot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't we use permanent links/archived versions of cited online resources in questions/answers? I know that questions and answers are expected to be self-contained as much as possible, but citing a &lt;em&gt;more comprehensive&lt;/em&gt; online source is usually unavoidable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it can be done automatically by a bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For a discussion on the same issue on Wikipedia, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aLink_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20898" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T16:43:17.150" Title="Should we use permanent links when citing online sources?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-20T19:28:14.743" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I might not be capable of answering this question, the question itself has been extremely well posed, I think it should have a well defined answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the correct analysis of the stress required to fracture a material must be involved in some way. This question is not very different atleast conceptually from a slightly different question, &quot;How much force do I need to apply on a diamond rod to break it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons I request reopening of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that the OP must clarify what the mass of the plane is and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T19:28:14.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4820" CreationDate="2013-08-20T19:31:19.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We certainly endorse that users amend their posts with relevant links, as long as the post is self-contained, and not just a link farm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Permalinks&lt;/a&gt; should not be demanded, but it should definitely be encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phys.SE is still less than 3 years old, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt; may become a problem in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-21T20:35:39.303" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T20:35:39.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4820" CreationDate="2013-08-20T22:21:14.550" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is not a particularly big problem given the nature of most common links in this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your two examples, Wikipedia and arXiv updates are natural and linking to an old version is bad practice. If the Wikipedia edits are radical enough that the original point is lost then there is always the edit history both on their side and ours that it's possible to reconstruct what the original link was. ArXiv edits are very rarely substantive enough to remove crucial information, and if they are it is a strong indication that that content was unreliable (and, again, there is the edit history to fall back on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other links, it's more of a case-by-case thing. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt; now enables visitors to archive pages (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unless forbidden by the site's robots.txt file&lt;/a&gt;), and &lt;strong&gt;it is generally good practice to make sure that the Wayback Machine has a suitable copy&lt;/strong&gt; archived before linking to a webpage on this site, and particularly if the link looks susceptible to link rot. However, the link should always point to the current live version. If the link rots in the future, or the target page changes, then the link can be re-directed to the archived version if and when than happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another class of links which is more fragile (if relatively less common on this site) is YouTube videos, which can disappear for a variety of reasons and leave &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzyv-sUTgag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essentially no traces behind them&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/heUah.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stable image&lt;/a&gt;). If you're linking to a video, make sure that the video's title is preserved either in your post or in an archived version of the page. Archival services, in general, won't archive the video, but they make it possible to understand what the link was and, if there is an equivalent video available, to redirect the link to the new location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in general, here are some guidelines for when and how to take active steps to prevent link rot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Always use DOI links when linking to online articles.&lt;/strong&gt; A Digital Object Identifier is a permanent link and will always follow the document, while journal website urls can change and even be inaccessible to users in other locations. Find the DOI marker on the page, e.g. &lt;code&gt;doi:10.1038/nature12422&lt;/code&gt;, and link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12422&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12422&lt;/a&gt;. For books that don't have DOI's, a good alternative is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://openlibrary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Library&lt;/a&gt; url.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While we're at this, when linking to the arXiv, link to the abstract page (arxiv.org/abs/...) and not directly to the pdf. This is a courtesy to users on lower bandwidths and mobile browsers (which can automatically redirect to separate pdf viewer apps), who can then evaluate, from the abstract page, whether they want to actually download the paper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the paper has been published (which will be noted on the arXiv abstract), include a link to the journal version, even if it's paywalled, if only as a courtesy to the referees' hard work. In some fields of physics it is standard practice to upload the last, published version to the arXiv, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/12052&quot;&gt;this is not true in all fields&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, journals collect download and usage statistics and make them available to the authors, which the arXiv does not do. In any case, linking to the official, journal version (as well as the arXiv!) helps the author by improving the search engine ranking of their paper, and it probably helps us in that regard as well. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If citing a pdf of a paper or similar that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; on the arXiv or a similar repository (e.g. a university repository), &lt;strong&gt;use a web citation service to protect it&lt;/strong&gt;, ideally the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;, or at least make a local copy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When citing Wikipedia or the arXiv, &lt;strong&gt;always cite the most recent version&lt;/strong&gt;. Revisions will most likely be improvements, and if it is unclear what the reference was for there is enough edit history to reconstruct that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When citing external websites, always cite the page's current position, and make sure that there is an appropriate version of the page in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When linking to YouTube or similar services, make sure that the title and other information of the content are preserved in your post, to make the linked content easier to trace if it vanishes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Demanding permanent links is rather too harsh and will slow down the site, particularly with new users. If someone posts a particularly fragile link, change it to a more permanent one (using WebCite, the Wayback Machine, or similar if appropriate) and refer them to this question. More experienced users should be proactive in editing such links when they look fragile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:49.200" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T16:43:17.150" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-20T22:21:14.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-21T07:22:49.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the assumptions, I believe the question is well posed. In the real engineering world, this type of calculation is frequently performed and simulated, and the results are far from &quot;opinion based.&quot; It seems most people that are against this question are more inclined to theoretical physics / high level math. While I'm sure this question can have a highly-theoretical answer, it's most likely best answered as you answer &quot;how much torque can I apply to this beam before it breaks.&quot; You answer it with having some material properties of the material (which were found by experimentation). A very good &quot;engineering&quot; way to answer the question would be to do pen-and-paper calculations using Mohr's circles and check to see if anything exceeds diamond's ultimate shear/tensile stresses (which should be straight-forward on a rectangular structure) and &quot;check&quot; the results by simulating it in a FEA program such as Catia, assuming you know the diamond properties and just model the plane crash as a impact force... and see what happens. I don't see how that result would be &quot;opinion based.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28212" LastEditorUserId="28212" LastEditDate="2013-08-21T07:36:54.740" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T07:36:54.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-21T08:18:20.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the first downvoter on the question and I downvoted it now, again after the question was edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the downvote is that the poster seems to have no compassion to the relatives of those who perished 12 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, I don't have to explain the reasoning behind my downvotes. But for this one, I think an exception is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post this as a comment to the main question as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22254" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T08:18:20.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-21T13:12:27.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the sensitive nature of the question, I've decided that it is now beyond the point of repair. I made the mistake of including sensitive details, which were too closely linked with the events of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing my question to make it less descriptive would simply ruin it's purpose. I have for those reasons decided to delete the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stand corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28442" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T13:12:27.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4820" CreationDate="2013-08-21T19:28:47.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permalinks to frozen versions of references should be actively discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a WP article changes, the change is probably an improvement (or at least this is true to the extent that WP is a system that manages to work as intended). When a paper on arxiv changes, the change is almost certainly an improvement. If we point people to out of date versions, the most common effect will be none whatsoever, while the second most common effect will be to make their lives worse by, e.g., letting them take an equation out of a paper without realizing that there was a wrong factor of 2 -- the factor of 2 being irrelevant to the SE discussion, but potentially a source of pain and suffering for the unwitting user of the permalink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wikipedia articles may change significantly and do not contain (exactly) the cited material any more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But everybody understands this and won't be particularly surprised. There might be more of an issue if we were using WP as a definitive source of information that would settle any argument for once and for all -- but of course we're not doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not referencing historical documents or holy texts. SE answers are supposed to be self-contained and valid on their own merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An option that deserves serious consideration is that if you have a PDF of a paper, you can put it on the web for others to use. This could be legal or illegal (depending on your country's laws on fair use, etc.), moral or immoral (depending on your opinion of the morality of the current copyright regime). I sometimes put papers, especially historical ones, on scribd.com. When I link to them from SE, I try to remember to warn people of the potential copyright issue if they click through on the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorDisplayName="user4552" LastEditDate="2013-08-21T23:13:28.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T23:13:28.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2013-08-22T01:55:00.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't even aware of this situation when it happened, and I'm not sure how I personally would have voted/dealt with close votes, but consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our close reasons often overlap, and the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; consensus could probably have been phrased in terms of our engineering close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about &lt;strong&gt;engineering&lt;/strong&gt;, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt;, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems where the solution depends on too many variables, or where the variables are not particularly constrained or even fully defined, are considered off-topic by association with engineering. The reason is, the correctness of any answer given depends sensitively on all sorts of extra information, much of it not necessarily related to any particular physics concept. For example, the scaling for how a beam deflects under a load &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be a valid physics question, but a question that relies on the exact dimensions and material properties of some particular beam is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the problem goes beyond universally-accepted underlying physical concepts, the only way to generate any solution at all is to make a number of assumptions. Thus engineering questions are generally also off-topic as opinion-based, simply by virtue of the fact that they ask a bunch of physicists/physics enthusiasts for their opinions to fill in the blanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned elsewhere, there were plenty of downvotes and surrounding controversy. I suspect the wording of the question was such as to amplify whatever response it was going to get anyway, and as I've explained above, the response was likely to be &quot;this doesn't belong here&quot; for one reason or another. This isn't to say that a little whimsy or an attempt to connect to current events/the Zeitgeist isn't allowed (I'm certainly guilty of titling questions so as to make them more attention grabbing), but understand that this method will amplify negative reactions as much as positive and so is inherently risky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T01:55:00.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-22T16:58:20.213" Score="4" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't point this specifically on anyone, But, err...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we had this scheme of &lt;em&gt;automated close reason&lt;/em&gt; insertion, I've seen Physics.SE people suggest new users (who ask questions &lt;em&gt;vaguely&lt;/em&gt; or badly or whatever) on how to ask questions here. At least, they've pointed out what's wrong with a particular question. Nowadays, I barely see such constructive comments. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/74926/11062&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. Recently, we had a discussion on this. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4815/#comment13410_4815&quot;&gt;And, I said&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The automated close reason is for the purpose that users don't necessarily have to add comments :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite happy that I added &lt;em&gt;&quot;necessarily&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in that phrase. So, have we &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; stopped constructive commenting? I know there's no necessity that you should insert comments. But, inserting comments would help a lot. And, stopping &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; isn't such a good idea. It'd make things worse...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T18:26:19.600" Title="Why have we stopped leaving comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4830" CreationDate="2013-08-22T18:42:31.213" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're seeing fewer comments because the close reasons are now more specific, and they explain what needs to be improved about the question, which is what we used to use comments for. If you would write a comment that simply restates what is in the close reason, there's no point in doing that. Of course if you have something to say above and beyond what the close reason includes, then you can certainly still use a comment for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T18:42:31.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4834" CreationDate="2013-08-23T19:03:28.940" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few questions recently which are off-topic here and belong to Chemistry.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we add that to the migrate options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. question : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75081/soap-like-chemical-causing-the-water-to-evacuate&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75081/soap-like-chemical-causing-the-water-to-evacuate&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10896" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T17:45:24.987" Title="Add an off-topic migrate to Chemistry.SE close reason" Tags="|feature-request|migration|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4833" CreationDate="2013-08-23T19:04:33.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chemistry is a beta site, and as a rule we shouldn't really be migrating to beta sites. So I don't see this happening. Once Chemistry graduates to full site status, then sure, we can reconsider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, if a question seems like it should be migrated to a beta site, just flag it as off topic or vote to close as off topic if you have sufficient reputation. When the questions accumulates 3 or 4 close votes, a moderator will take care of migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-08-23T19:04:33.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2013-08-24T14:52:53.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I will try to help; based on my own state of knowledge though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24791" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-24T15:33:51.920" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T15:33:51.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4830" CreationDate="2013-08-24T18:26:19.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a thought - perhaps this is an unintended side effect of having more close voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously, 1 or 2 votes would accumulate, and a mod would then cast a binding vote and perhaps feel obliged to explain it more (to try to diffuse the perceived threatening nature of having a mod near-unilaterally close your post, as would be disheartening on any internet site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now more of these close votes come from us regular users who, as 1 of 5, feel the responsibility doesn't rest squarely on our shoulders to communicate with the OP. In this case, it seems responsibility is not conserved - the more it is shared, the more it is diminished overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T18:26:19.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4839" CreationDate="2013-08-24T18:44:24.347" Score="7" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74912/accidental-unplanned-breakthroughs-in-physics&quot;&gt;Accidental, unplanned breakthroughs in physics&lt;/a&gt; which you have probably seen if you're reading this. It's attracted a lot of positive attention, but I cannot for the life of me figure out any reason it should be an appropriate question for the site. Consider these excerpts from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is not based on an actual problem, but it is open-ended pretty much by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;breakthroughs&amp;quot; question hits all three of these points on the nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one doesn't, it's just assembling a list without any specific prompt for information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naming a breakthrough is not a long answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4044/why-exactly-are-big-list-questions-discouraged-shouldnt-the-faq-say-this-promi&quot;&gt;elsewhere on meta&lt;/a&gt;, questions with these attributes fail to increase the quality of the site at best, and actively pollute it at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;active discussion&lt;/a&gt; (in a long-term sense) on list questions, but even looking at the suggestions made in that question and answers, nothing seems to allow an all-encompassing list of breakthroughs. A common opinion is that list questions of limited scope are likely to be okay, but this is absolutely not one of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here's my question, primarily to people who upvoted or reopen-voted the &amp;quot;breakthroughs&amp;quot; question: in doing so, it seems that you're suggesting we ignore fully half a page of the help center &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; an emerging consensus on list questions from this site itself. &lt;strong&gt;Why?&lt;/strong&gt; What are your arguments that these policies don't apply to this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T22:22:44.190" Title="Why should the &quot;list of breakthroughs in physics&quot; be allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2013-08-24T21:29:05.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems people are arguing that this question has the potential to elicit answers containing fairly high-level and interesting physics. Of course I agree it's interesting and enjoyable to read about accidental discoveries of important phenomena or physical principles/laws. And as pointed out in the comments to the question, such answers &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; indeed encourage experts to join the site (more so than, say, simple kinematics questions or copy-paste homework ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are undoubtedly entire books devoted (completely or in part) to such discoveries. Furthermore I think the experts-argument is insufficient. Not only is it a vague way to judge whether or not a question should be allowed, I think it's far worse to undermine current policy than it is to close one question that may or may not attract good new users. Of course, if the policy changed, it could become an allowed question. So I would encourage people to focus their energy on finding a good new list policy that &lt;strong&gt;includes&lt;/strong&gt; positive, interesting list questions (like this one, perhaps altered slightly) but &lt;strong&gt;excludes&lt;/strong&gt; the problematic ones - instead of putting it all into battles about specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I agree that certain list questions have the potential to be acceptable and attract good new users, experts. But I also believe we should not undermine current policy and instead try to improve it if possible. David is right when he points out how this specific questions fails to pass the current filter, so it should be closed. Therefore I re-iterate: please focus your energy on developing an improved lists policy. It's more difficult than semi-anarchistically fighting specific battles, but it is very important and far more useful. &lt;em&gt;Lose one in the short run, save a thousand in the long.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T21:29:05.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2013-08-24T22:22:44.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I voted to reopen because I felt this particular question would be a valuable resource and a positive addition to the site. I understand many of your concerns and agree that it would be a blatant exception to current policy; I also agree with Wouter that communal energies are best directed to the design and implementation of a more comprehensive list policy that will not lead to site pollution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I must say I am disappointed that this question was closed by moderation action and that it took this long for a moderator to bring this to meta. The review queue is by now very efficient: out of the 50 newest closed questions, 33 were closed with at least four people involved. The post was in the review queue and would have been dealt with by the community, with a woulda-coulda-shoulda outcome that's useless to speculate upon now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the question had been voted off the review queue, I would have appreciated a post like this before, or at least shortly after the moderator closure. Note that I'm not in any way advocating such discussion for all moderator actions and I speak exclusively of this question: it was a well-phrased question (if somewhat naive to the policies of this site) that attracted positive attention, in the form of upvotes and answers, and it was clear that a lot of people were watching. I feel this question was an exception enough that it warranted a more open, discussed and justified closure process. (A similar feeling may have motivated the other upvoters and reopen-voters, I think.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There, I've said my piece. Now I'll go have a think about list question policies, instead of brooding about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T22:22:44.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T11:02:43.900" Score="-6" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since list questions aren't  allowed here, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74912/accidental-unplanned-breakthroughs-in-physics&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and recieve imediate closing, even locking, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4838/why-should-the-list-of-breakthroughs-in-physics-be-allowed&quot;&gt;a meta post against it&lt;/a&gt;,  maybe such questions could be migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathoverflow.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Math Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, where such questions are taken well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote up or down if you support this or do not.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T13:07:17.960" Title="A migration path to Math Overflow?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|closed-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4843" CreationDate="2013-08-25T11:45:22.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site is about physics, Math Overflow is about research-level mathematics. I can't imagine many questions that would be posted here that would be welcome on MO. Just because they allow certain list questions doesn't mean that they'll take &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; list questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asking for a migration path it is pretty much required to demonstrate the need for this migration path. You should be able to point to a significant number of migrations performed by mods, or show a list of questions that should have been migrated to MO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also rather certain that MO would not welcome this migration path, they have been rather cautious about the topic of migrations towards their site. Any site can request to have a migration path shut down if it causes more trouble than it is worth. And MO has an agreement with SE that grants them more independence, so I'm pretty sure you'd have to ask them first if they want a migration path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T11:45:22.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4843" CreationDate="2013-08-25T13:07:17.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74912/accidental-unplanned-breakthroughs-in-physics&quot;&gt;breakthroughs in physics&lt;/a&gt; question would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be on topic in Math Overflow. This is mostly because they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; welcome physics questions (happy as they are to take high-level mathematics questions with roots in physics), but you are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/search?page=1&amp;amp;tab=votes&amp;amp;q=closed%3a1&quot;&gt;mistaken&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/133203/explanations-for-mathematicians-about-the-falsifiability-or-not-of-string-the&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/13682/which-mathematical-ideas-have-done-most-to-change-history&quot;&gt;they&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/18100/theorems-with-unexpected-conclusions&quot;&gt;generically&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/23478/examples-of-common-false-beliefs-in-mathematics&quot;&gt;welcome&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-legends&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/8846/proofs-without-words&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of railing against the closure, why not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4839/8563&quot;&gt;listen to Wouter&lt;/a&gt; and propose a list question policy that will allow the questions you find interesting and at the same time protects the site from &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-exist&quot;&gt;&quot;ooooh, I have one!&quot;&lt;/a&gt; questions polluting the front page (and, specifically, addresses the concerns in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4045/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4565/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and others to that same question, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;). You might actually find it hard!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:54.500" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T13:07:17.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T15:49:01.130" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just lost 10 reputation points and in my history, all it says was &quot;user was removed&quot;. Can someone explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3253" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-08-26T01:53:34.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How did I lose 10 reputation points yesterday?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-08-28T12:56:15.950" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4847" CreationDate="2013-08-25T16:30:29.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has already been addressed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126471/205334&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. Some guy has voted your answer and you gained a +10 for that. Now, the buddy has removed his account and his votes have been revoked. Whatever he had voted (as a member of this site), will be reversed (once he removes his account), which means &lt;em&gt;not only you&lt;/em&gt;, but anyone who were voted by him will be affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a pretty interesting scheme. Even for an user who has cast more than 5000 votes, once he removes his account, all those votes are &lt;em&gt;gone&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T16:30:29.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-26T14:38:09.460" Score="-5" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has not been many days since I joined this site. I thought of using this as to clarify my doubts while doing problems or increase my knowledge in physics. I put questions and ask just to give me hints on doing them and try my maximum to solve those before posting them here. But my questions always gets on hold because it is off-topic. I don't understand what is off-topic in my questions(except one on philosophical cosmology). All of them are pure applications of physics. Finally, when I put a question on relativity, going deep into physics so that it is not flagged off due to off-topic content there is no one to answer.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23742" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T15:38:42.153" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T15:38:42.153" Title="Asking purely physics questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4850" CreationDate="2013-08-26T15:14:12.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I put questions and ask just to give me hints on doing them and try my maximum to solve those before posting them here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only see evidence of that in your latest question, and that was a &quot;check my work&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, we only permit homework-like questions when they are asking for something conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75132/philosophical-cosmology-is-there-something-called-god&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, philosophy/&quot;new&quot; physics is off topic here because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a discussion forum. We try to make a repository of useful questions and answers. Discussions are fun to participate in, but their content is generally not useful to others. We have &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;a chat room&lt;/a&gt; for discussions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if &quot;physicists are philosophers&quot;, physicists use more precise methods and have a different way of approaching the problem than the general philosopher. Metaphysics and philosophy is off topic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question wasn't a question in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your relativity question is rather unclear. I think I've understood it (and may provide an answer if I get the time), but I doubt many have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T15:14:12.087" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-27T20:41:08.800" Score="7" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I flag a duplicate it's usually because I've found an older question with substantial topical overlap and an answer that covers the new question completely. Sometimes I hesitate because the new question is actually asking the same thing as the old question, but much more clearly. So I'm confronted with a &quot;bad&quot; (poorly worded/formatted/developed) question with &quot;good&quot; answers and a &quot;good&quot; question with potentially &quot;bad&quot; answers, no answers or also some &quot;good&quot; answers. What's the best practice here? Is it the responsibility of the moderators handling the flag to attempt to merge (I could then suggest it when I flag)? If the questions are similar enough, should I suggest an edit completely replacing the &quot;bad&quot; question with the &quot;good&quot; one? This robs the author of the &quot;good&quot; question of any rep from votes and could wreak havoc on any comment discussion. Anyone have some insight on saving these &quot;good&quot; duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is some related discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/648/liberal-definition-of-duplicate-questions-and-the-health-of-physics-stack-exchan&quot;&gt;Liberal definition of duplicate questions and the health of physics stack exchange.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T15:47:14.860" Title="Merging duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-27T21:49:00.240" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;This bug happened to me when I created an account, and it went like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I already had a Google subscription in another site affiliate to the StackExchange network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I posted a question in physics anonymously, and posted using a hotmail address.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I then realized the ocurred and tried registering on the site, trough the same Google e-mail. The website merged my two profiles in the two websites but the guest profile was still existing in separate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I tried answering the e-mail I received at my hotmail account for registration, but for some reason It did not created the hotmail account, and everytime I logged in trough hotmail account it logged into the gmail account.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Result: The 'guest account' was unregisterable and still remained 'guest' nomatter wich e-mail I used for login. As my account was not the questioner and I didnt had enough points I couldnt reply to anything. I had to contact an operator to merge the two accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27318" LastEditorUserId="27318" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T02:22:27.200" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T02:22:27.200" Title="Bug - Asking question anomally and then registering problem" Tags="|bug|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4856" CreationDate="2013-08-28T10:50:42.527" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer: please explain why you're recommending it as a solution. Answers that don't explain anything will be deleted. See Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears at the bottom of certain questions; but not all. What determines whethere it does , or not ? .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T11:34:45.077" Title="We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer:" Tags="|support|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4855" CreationDate="2013-08-28T11:34:45.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a post notice that moderators can apply, they were originally created for Skeptics (the &quot;citation needed&quot; notice) and for some of the more subjective sites where such short and lazy answers were a significant problem. But they are occasionally used on other sites as well, though not all that much because they are a mod-only feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T11:34:45.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4853" CreationDate="2013-08-28T12:53:41.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the general question &quot;how do I get a question merged&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we usually don't merge duplicates questions unless they're &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicates (in terms of what is asked), or one is a subset of the other. That need not always be the case, though. It depends on the answers currently present on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that two questions should be merged, just use a custom flag. Duplicate flags are no longer directly routed to mods, so there's a chance that it may be missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the specific question &quot;What should be done when there is a question which is a dupe of an older, answered question but is written in a much better manner&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates need not be in chronological order. Multiple times, I have closed an older question as a dupe of a newer one, and merged the answers because the older one is close to being closeable as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T12:53:41.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T18:04:44.950" Score="8" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose we can't change the way reputation works on just our site so eventually if this became a serious proposal change it would have to happen on the mother Meta. But before I go and get flamed there, I figured I'd start a discussion here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that on our site in particular, we don't have a hard time generating high quality answers but it's hard to find high quality questions. When a question is upvoted, the asker gets 5 rep. When an answer is upvoted, the asker gets 10 rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to imply that answers are worth more than questions. In some sense I agree, answers take a lot of work to put together. But a good question often times takes more work to put together than a good answer, particular in physics. We have previously discussed (&lt;em&gt;ad nauseum&lt;/em&gt;) the fact that there are people who only answer questions and don't ask, and that there are many more lower quality questions coming in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would changing the reputation earned (and lost) on questions to match answers encourage more questions? Or would it just inflate reputations because the majority of people wouldn't change their habits? Would we want to encourage more questions (which by default would also bring in more lower-quality questions as well)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What would it look like if rep for questions counted the same/more than answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|reputation|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2013-08-28T19:33:33.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Stack Overflow launched the scoring was the same for questions and answers. This eventually became a bit of a cause for concern when a number of users who had &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;never offered an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mostly had zero or negative net scores on their very many poor questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but were still accumulating enough rep to access some important site privileges. There rose &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7322/should-the-weight-of-downvotes-be-increased&quot;&gt;a movement to increase the power of down votes on questions&lt;/a&gt;, which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt; for some time after which &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/42763/2509&quot;&gt;the team suddenly decided to reduce the upvote value on questions instead&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that this slightly &lt;em&gt;increased&lt;/em&gt; the quality of questions on Stack Overflow (mostly by discouraging hoards of bad questions, rather than by generating a lot of really good ones), but it was a small thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my expectation based on that ancient history on a different site is that while this proposal might bring in a few more good questions it would also bring in many more bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we have more tools for dealing with problem users now, so maybe would could handle it, but I don't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T19:33:33.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T21:23:52.257" Score="7" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted an answer to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75082/why-are-magnetic-fields-only-produced-by-moving-charges/75085#75085&quot;&gt;Why are magnetic fields only produced by moving charges?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was marked as a duplicate of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/51346/no-magnetic-field-from-a-static-charge-is-there-a-simple-physical-argument-to&quot;&gt;No magnetic field from a static charge - Is there a simple physical argument to show why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that (2) has a really satisfactory answer.  In any case, I think that my answer to (1) would contribute non-trivially to (2).  What are the physics.SE norms/policies about re-posting my answer from (1) as a response to (2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T17:02:28.663" Title="Repeating answers in duplicate questions" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2013-08-28T21:34:54.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a merge is not in order (and I don't think that one is), then re-using your own material is reasonable and proper. I hesitate to suggest verbatim coping of an answer, because most of the time we treat that as a sign of possible abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does posting a substantially similar answer that has refocused for the slightly different emphasis of the two question appeal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DavdZ's suggesting in the comments to delete on the &quot;duplicate&quot; is also very reasonable, especially if you haven't accumulated points for that answer yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T21:34:54.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2013-08-29T02:21:15.977" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't ask questions or refrain from asking questions on SE based on the amount of rep I will gain. I ask a question if I want to know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High levels of activity are not necessarily a sign of health, so it's not obvious to me that a low number of good questions is a bad thing, to be remedied by fiddling with rules. One of the reasons I stopped being very active on WP and physicsforums.com is that the structure of both of those sites seemed to encourage a lot of &quot;churn.&quot; Physicsforums probably has 20 threads on the Ehrenfest paradox, each with 300 posts. This is not a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that on our site in particular, we don't have a hard time generating high quality answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure I agree with this. Easy questions get good answers. Hard questions often don't. This is just the logic of the bell curve. There are few experts in the world and many novices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T02:21:15.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-29T21:04:00.877" Score="-4" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not read user agreement - maybe you did? &lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;!, does the content of the answers belongs to a given user as intellectual property? Such, that when user is suspended he can demand to remove his answers from the site in order to be fair? Interesting topic for a website with private ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up long and interesting discussion below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE is licensed under a CC-wiki license with Attribution required.&#xA;You can read it at &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a post on S[OFU] about same topic with more details:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/13976&quot;&gt;Who owns the copyright to S[OFU] content?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange &lt;em&gt;can use&lt;/em&gt; your work (user-generated content) to &lt;em&gt;earn&lt;/em&gt; money.&#xA;This is written in the short summary of the license hyperlinked above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Effectively you retain only &lt;em&gt;credits&lt;/em&gt; on your work. But not the rights to remove it from circulation or issue a new license which will &lt;em&gt;contradict&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;constrain&lt;/em&gt; CC-wiki (this part is declared in termination section of CC-wiki).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License is effectively &lt;em&gt;infinite&lt;/em&gt; (up to the limits of international law, about 60 years)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; to terminate this license by the will of the creators (users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update II&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good news. If we look at the UK CC license (lest assume our user lives in UK), we read the following (&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/legalcode&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;2.3. This License does not affect any rights that the User may have under any applicable law, including fair use, fair dealing or any other legally recognized limitation or exception to copyright infringement.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I understand correctly - when a user gets &lt;em&gt;banned&lt;/em&gt; from this website he can remove all his work from here. At least in the UK. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9173" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T09:23:35.073" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T09:23:35.073" Title="Intellectual property on Physics SE" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4863" CreationDate="2013-08-29T21:13:35.687" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The owner retains the copyright for what is written, but by submitting it to the site he/she irrevocably allows StackExchange to use, modify, and create derivative work from it forever. This is why anybody is allowed to edit questions/answers without the original poster's consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, a user may not demand that SE take down data he/she has posted. The user may ask but SE is not obligated in any way to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least that's my interpretation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, let's pretend that this is the conversation that happens when you submit something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Hi StackExchange, I've created this awesome answer and would like to post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StackExchange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Great job User! Just so you know, if you submit this to me, you own the copyright of what you post. But, you do agree that I can use it forever, and I can modify or share it, but I always have to attribute it to you if I do. That also means that anybody else who uses it may do so also, but they have to attribute it as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: So if I want to reuse what I post here, I can?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StackExchange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; Yes, you own the copy right. The license even allows waivers of clauses if the copyright holder agrees. This means you don't need to attribute it to yourself if you don't want to. It also means you can derive other work from it and you don't need to use Creative Commons if you do. But I have to use Creative Commons if I derive anything from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: But what if I want my content removed? Can that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StackExchange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: You let me use it forever in any way I see fit. So if you want it removed, you may ask politely but I am not obligated to remove it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: I get it now! Here is my awesome answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2013-08-29T21:25:39.007" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T21:25:39.007" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2013-08-29T23:53:53.463" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe you should give a summary of and a link to your answer to the duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T23:53:53.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4868" CreationDate="2013-08-30T02:40:52.617" Score="-11" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wonder why the questions are duplicated (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75524/the-sound-change-the-light?noredirect=1#comment156943_75524&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75524/the-sound-change-the-light?noredirect=1#comment156943_75524&lt;/a&gt; ) ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I ask physics things in physics site (even       less quoting, and edited it as a physics problem),       and English questions in English site (ELL.SE).        Can't SE change? Am I running against a wall of obstinacy?                 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28807" OwnerDisplayName="Lincoln" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T15:51:01.533" Title="Can't se change? Am I running against a wall of obstinacy?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4866" CreationDate="2013-08-30T03:04:49.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mere fact that you read something strange does not qualify it as a physics question. People can write anything they like, and no one and nothing stops them from writing unphysical nonsense. In fact, some of us read unphysical nonsense for entertainment, so we &lt;em&gt;pay&lt;/em&gt; them to write unphysical nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not feel obligated to answer question about such writings, however, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;and even say so&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; (note the bit about &quot;fictional physics&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, long answer short: your question is off-topic, and there is no version you can ask that will be answered here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;am i running against a wall of obstinacy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you are not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, on the other hand, are. You reposted that question twice, despite being told clearly and repeated that it was off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem bound and determined to push on us a question that clearly falls outside the bounds of what we accept. You are in the wrong on this, and the only polite thing for you to do is &lt;em&gt;quit it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites, like Physics.SE are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; open forums where anything goes. We maintain high standards by enforcing tight bounds on what kind of content we accept and then using a crowd-sourced evaluation to sort content by quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We intend to continue maintaining those standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T03:23:41.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4866" CreationDate="2013-08-30T03:29:50.880" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is for questions about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics means observations of the way nature behaves , note: observations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rumble thing you are obsessing about is not an observation. It is a figment from the imagination of the author you have quoted. Physics.SE is not about interpreting dreams or visualizations or fairy land propositions or .... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have also latched onto sonic weapons in your comments. Whales die because of sonic weapons so they do have strong effects. You could form a question on the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can sonic weapons create waves? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can a sonic boom move walls , made out of wood? stone? glass?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w2AsGazCcg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The answer to this last&lt;/a&gt; is observational from the meteor that fell in Russia a while ago. Yes, they can have a lot of energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are physics questions.Rumbles in the imagination of a writer are not, unless boundary conditions are strictly given, and then one can talk of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gedanken_experiment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gedanken experiment.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Rumbles and oily sheens&lt;/em&gt; are not boundary conditions for problem solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T03:29:50.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-30T15:25:01.870" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;When flagging a question as needing migration to academia, electronics, signal processing, chemistry, philosophy etc, I end up at Flagging&gt;Closing&gt;Off-Topic&gt;Migration which offers me just two options for migration: math stack exchange, or meta physics stack exchange. I then have to go all the way back to flagging it again, choosing the &quot;other&quot; option, and then typing in the migration site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it therefore be possible to replace the two migration options with a general box where people can type in the site they think the question needs to be migrated to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T18:50:44.557" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Can the flag for migration be generalized?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|flagging|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4869" CreationDate="2013-08-30T18:50:35.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96205/more-options-when-flagging-for-migration&quot;&gt;the link dmckee gave in the comments&lt;/a&gt;, in which the exact same feature was proposed on MSO and declined. Migrations to sites other than Math are sufficiently rare that there's no particular need to let ordinary users vote for them. (Moderators have always been able to do this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the first thing to decide when considering whether to migrate a question is, do you think it's off topic here? If you see a question that is off topic, flag it as such, or vote to close if you have that privilege. If you think the question would be appropriate at another site, other than the options given (Meta and Math), leave a comment on the question to indicate that. Alternatively, you can custom-flag the question as &quot;Off topic and possibly suitable for migration to X&quot; or some such thing. &lt;strong&gt;Don't suggest a question for migration unless you believe it's off topic on this site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T18:50:35.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-30T19:47:20.633" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title really says it all: would a question asking for examples of unobservable &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;posits&lt;/a&gt; in physical theories be appropriate for this SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that requests for lists are generally frowned upon. Is this question fine as is? If not, is there some way to reformulate it into an acceptable one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17408" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-08-31T00:25:13.513" LastActivityDate="2013-08-31T02:20:17.590" Title="Would a question asking for examples of unobservable posits in physical theories be appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4871" CreationDate="2013-08-30T22:55:20.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably it would not be appropriate. You could bring it up in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T22:55:20.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4871" CreationDate="2013-08-31T02:20:17.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As DavidZ pointed out to me on another answer of mine, we can't say whether something is on or off topic until we see the question's wording. So if you don't get what you need in chat, edit your question here with the wording of what you intend to ask and we can help shape it if it can be shaped or tell you to bugger off :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, even if I post something that says &quot;Yeah, looks great!&quot; that really can only say it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be on-topic, it's up to the community to really decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-08-31T02:20:17.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-08-31T04:08:58.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55431/why-one-dimensional-strings-but-not-higher-dimensional-shells-membranes&quot;&gt;Why one-dimensional strings, but not higher-dimensional shells/membranes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73808/does-string-m-theory-address-higher-dimensional-membrane-vibration-modes?lq=1&quot;&gt;Does string/M-theory address higher-dimensional membrane vibration modes?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66948/string-theory-why-not-use-n-dimensional-blocks-objects-branes?lq=1&quot;&gt;String theory: why not use $n$-dimensional blocks/objects/branes?&lt;/a&gt;     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:08:23.967" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:08:23.967" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-31T04:08:58.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2013-08-31T19:34:04.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My problem with this discussion is that I wonder about the correlation between votes and quality. Admittedly I can only read fairly elementary topics. But I find that questions that give me a lot to think just get downvoted, and I also find wrong answers at the top of the votes. And the vote ordering is often not the quality ordering (when I think I can estimate it with fair reliability).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that science has never been a matter of opinion, or of vote. The usefulness of vote is more sociological than scientific. Interestingly, the rep gives you a right to manage, not to decide on scientific issues, which is probably a good thing. But it is also a bit of a problem since users can confuse rep and scientific reliability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the problem that quality is not easily measured. So many users think that a formula is an explanation  ...  sometimes they do not even bother defining notation, assuming some universality of it. Ther is also the opposite: answers by someone who has an opinion though he does not really know anything on the topic and does not have half an argument to back his opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as I said, I can only read the more elementary topics, and I have been wondering whether the situation is the same for the more advanced questions.&#xA;My guess is that one can talk nonsense at any level, but what is it actually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding specifically the quality of questions&lt;/strong&gt;, what matters most is&#xA;the sexyness-entertaining quality of the question, not actual content&#xA;or preparatory work. I will take the example of two questions that are&#xA;exactly on the same topic, but were not flagged as such:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66746/&quot;&gt;Origin of motion and relative speed of bodies in the universe&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73654/&quot;&gt;Why are there no asteroids or meteoroids with relativistic speeds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question was mine, actually my fist post on physics.SE after&#xA;doing no physics for more decades than I care to tell.&#xA;It took me a long time to write that question as I was trying to&#xA;understand first what issues could matter, what kind of data and&#xA;question might be sensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was very lucky to be upvoted once, and to get a nice answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question was asked 2 month later. It is exactly the same&#xA;issue, presented as a disaster movie. It was not detected as&#xA;duplicate and attracted much attention and 20 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should I try to ask questions as a scientist, or as a showman ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issue, directly related, is the questions removed as&#xA;duplicate. First, it is inconsistant (see above) and sometimes&#xA;inaccurate.  Answering old questions is a waste of time. I know as I&#xA;did it more than my share. Thoses answers do not get votes or&#xA;comments, and I personnally hate writing for a black hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the practice of stopping duplicate question is just the best way to&#xA;ensure that further input will not come, of that a different&#xA;perspective will be avoided. &lt;strong&gt;What would have happened if the second question above had been detected as duplicate, as it should have ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I am really wondering what is the purpose, and the dangers, of&#xA;such a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T14:02:23.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4863" CreationDate="2013-09-01T00:20:39.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a practical user-ship perspective, you can not delete your contributions which are questions or answers.  There are ways that you could try to fight this.  Particularly, there was once a user who &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; all their questions and answers to be blank as a protest to the banning of a different user.  I do not know what the resolution of that, but it would be consistent with policy that moderators reverted all those edits - and that is what you should expect if you do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is privy to concerns of privacy and online reputation.  Deleting your account takes moderator action, but it's a rubber stamp.  Anyone may delete their account, and their username will be removed from all their Qs and As.  This is important, because maybe someone wants to carefully manage the type of content on their stack exchange network, and they don't feel that contributions somewhere were not in keeping with the decorum of their online reputation.  They can remove their identity, but their contributions remain as a nameless Qs and As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's basically all I wanted to add.  Redacting your contributions is both legally and &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; impossible, but Stack Exchange does allow withdrawal of credit (which is legally at their discretion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T00:20:39.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-01T02:28:07.497" Score="16" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;In any difficult field of endeavor -- ballet, mountaineering, violin-playing, physics -- there are going to be far more people in the world who have devoted a relatively small number of hours to the field than there are who have spent a big chunk of time to it. On physics.SE, non-novice users are in short supply. Is there any way to tell whether the number of currently active, non-novice users on physics.SE is going down or going up? We have certainly lost some non-novice users such as Arnold Neumaier and Ted Bunn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose a quantifiable way of defining this would be the number of high-rep users. Although rep doesn't really correlate very tightly with competence on an individual basis, and high-rep users may get suspended for being naughty, I would think that the number of high-rep users would be worth looking at on a statistical basis. Of course it won't tell us anything about whether we're retaining new non-novice users, such as ZeroTheHero, who appears to be a non-novice but just showed up today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-01T03:54:25.083" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T12:26:36.893" Title="Are we gaining or losing non-novice users?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4880" CreationDate="2013-09-01T09:04:19.453" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Created some queries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/133973/number-of-active-users-in-a-set-of-tags-month-wise?Threshhold=2#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number of active users in a tag month wise&lt;/a&gt;: This graphs the number of users who have made more than &lt;code&gt;threshhold&lt;/code&gt; (this can be edited) posts in the list of tags in a given month, over all months.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/133974/monthwise-streaks-in-a-tag?TagName=quantum-mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monthwise streaks in a tag&lt;/a&gt;: This was an intermediate query I created which is used in the one above. It tabulates the number of posts per month per user in a given tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first query, for &lt;code&gt;threshhold=2&lt;/code&gt; (So each user needs to have at least 3 posts in the tag list to qualify), I get this graph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rR25h.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We seem to be on an overall increase, but local decline(since April). Probably due to seasonal fluctuations, note that there was a similar drop in the summer of 2011. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to make a better query that shows retention later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-09-01T10:18:18.273" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T10:18:18.273" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4880" CreationDate="2013-09-01T12:26:36.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ill speak for myself, thought I wouldn't call my self non-novice or anything else. I am among the people thinking of leaving the site after being here for about a year. The reason is It stopped being interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I rarely posted, I used to enjoy reading answers, but off-late nothing in the site seems to interest me(I am student of theoretical physics). I do find good question/answers occasionally(often by the same set of 3-4 people), which is why I continue to check the site and sometimes the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is nothing like what it was when I joined a year ago. Perhaps it is a personal view, but it might be shared by a few other people. I would be very much interested in a dedicated TP site. I also have no idea when and why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2751/dilaton&quot;&gt;Dilaton&lt;/a&gt; got banned, but that was going to happen eventually I guess. There are discussions linked in Dilaton's page about starting a new site, I would definitely be curious to see how it turns up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T12:26:36.893" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-01T17:35:08.047" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just curious why my answer was removed.  I asked the poster some questions about his problem then provided two principles to solve his situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75809/help-making-a-solenoid-engine&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75809/help-making-a-solenoid-engine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A(deleted):Do you have something in series with the wire to limit the current? A 2m wire connected directly to 12V should pull a lot more current than 20 mA. What kind of 12V battery is this? Is the battery voltage staying at 12V when you connect it? Batteries tend not to survive long with wires connected directly across their terminals, perhaps it is dead or dieing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two ways to increase the magnetic field: more current and/or more wire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway my second concern is that this is just one example where someone is obviously trying to experiment and learn something without help.  Yet rather than just let the question stand they see some back and forth about the site policy and the question gets closed.  I've seen this on other questions too.  It bothers me because I would rather encourage people to try rather than just close their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25069" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T18:12:49.060" Title="Curious why my answer was removed and dissapointed with discouraging newbies" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2013-09-01T18:12:49.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for your answer, It does not &lt;em&gt;majorly&lt;/em&gt; contribute to answering the question in any way. I appreciate that you were trying to encourage the OP into researching some more, but your answer looks more like it is asking for clarification. We have comments for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why the question was closed, the close reason specifically says that the question is about engineering, something which is off-topic on this site. There is another SE site :&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt; for such questions. According to me, the question would be answered better there, as the users there must be having hands-on experience about making such things work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS someone should have left a comment telling the OP about such a site, and instead of closing, the question could have been migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10896" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:06.300" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T18:12:49.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-03T13:11:52.007" Score="0" ViewCount="873" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2713/&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; been deleted? What is the reason for this censorship? Is it merely so that future visitors don't find out what has happened? Or was it accidental? Please undelete it.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why was a meta discussion about another user's suspension deleted?" Tags="|discussion|meta|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2013-09-03T13:58:40.853" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the question shouldn't have been asked in the first place, there's no real point to discussing suspensions on meta in the way outlined by the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such posts basically serve as a public shaming. It's a record that a user had done something bad; which we really don't need to have around. As mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197072/178438&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, it's best to discuss actions, not users; behaviors, not people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there were &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/2715/revisions&quot;&gt;some unnecessary edits&lt;/a&gt; made to one of the answers. Twice in the past week. They gave the impression that it still was an open issue. It isn't. There was no point whatsoever to bump the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T17:26:12.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2013-09-03T21:06:20.023" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should never have been. Too bad. I was reading usenet news stuff long before my children learned computers .... And I am old enough that they learned them from me. I was on BBS and I was a member of AOL when it was Compuserve. &#xA;Never was this hard. We are only trading characters on mostly intellectual endeavor. Why do we need ban these fine folk or deny a few pages of text.. Certainly is getting pretty annoying ... I started a scientist but ended up a lawyer. You are free to do what you want with your site. But you will regret, I suspect, with these authoritarian approaches&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12811" LastActivityDate="2013-09-03T21:06:20.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T07:41:22.233" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't post questions on the website, I click post and it takes me to the &quot;/questions/ask/submit&quot; page. Nothing happens after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24357" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T13:01:42.807" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T13:01:42.807" Title="I cannot post questions" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T12:52:43.603" Score="7" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arnold Neumaier pointed out, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2751/8563&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; from some months ago, that there is no &quot;Improve&quot; button for tag wiki edits that show up in the Suggested Edits review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This affects users between 5k and 20k rep (as they can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;approve tag wiki edits but must have their own edits peer reviewed&lt;/a&gt;), so not everyone will see this. This population is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;30 users&lt;/a&gt;: admittedly not that many, but then only ~ eight other users can currently review edits (mods or &gt;20k).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Shog9 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2753/8563&quot;&gt;pointed out&lt;/a&gt; in his reply to Arnold, the alternative would be a cascade of edits to the tag wiki that would then need to be approved by someone else, and I understand this. However, this leaves a huge gap in the review process: &lt;strong&gt;what should I do if I see an edit I partly agree with but would like to improve?&lt;/strong&gt; In the past I've approved them and tried to submit a new edit, but the system locks the tag wikis until a second reviewer approves the pending edit: I get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5m85h.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and clicking on &lt;code&gt;edit pending&lt;/code&gt; sends me to the history page of my review of the edit,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/91jSg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only option, then, is to sit around and wait until someone else comes along and clears the edit. This is impractical because &lt;strong&gt;the tag wiki Suggested Edits queue is very slow.&lt;/strong&gt; It is much slower than the corresponding post queue because ~100 users can access that. While I can see this is probably not an issue in SO, I imagine most of the smaller sites are in similar situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has not usually been much of a problem, either, but the tag wiki editing activity recently increased by quite a bit. While I commend Dimension10's efforts to get me and a few others a Reviewer badge, this level of activity is not necessarily sustainable with the current tools this site has available. This is an issue because few people can review tag wiki edits and fewer of them actually do. Further, each reviewer can only do 20 posts per day, and I've already maxed out on that a couple of times. If you propose a tag wiki edit that takes ages to go through, that may be one possible reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore ask two things. On the site design front, &lt;strong&gt;is there a way to have multiple edits to the same tag wiki in the review queue?&lt;/strong&gt; This would ideally be available as an &quot;Improve&quot; button directly on the tag edit (though possibly with text warning to make sparse use of it because of the reviewing limitations). Future reviewers might be presented all the reviews to the same tag wiki, either simultaneously or one after the other, to make reviewing simpler. A cap on the maximum number of pending edits would also be reasonable, as would making this feature site-specific so it gets turned off after the tag wiki review queue speeds up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the community side, on the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;if you have more than 5k rep, please review all the Suggested Edits you can.&lt;/strong&gt; This keeps that specific queue faster and allows a faster community dialog about what we want our tag wikis to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy to take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; to the Mother Meta, but as this is mostly a local issue I thought I'd ask here and get some local support before I go there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T13:25:25.973" Title="It is hard to improve suggested edits to tag wikis" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4890" CreationDate="2013-09-04T13:00:07.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the past I've approved them and tried to submit a new edit, but the system locks the tag wikis until a second reviewer approves the pending edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ouch, I didn't know that the system did that. I've had similar experiences when I (as a non mod) approve an edit and then realize that I want to improve it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the current system, that's pretty much the best you can do. I agree that this can be improved; but in the meantime it's OK to bug me (or anyone else who doesn't mind) in chat to fast-track a single review because you want to make more changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T13:00:07.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T15:31:38.637" Score="3" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything is very conveniently hidden behind the Moderator Agreement. I Understand that there are Privacy Issues, especially In cases where there is use of abusive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While precise details of the Suspension need not be disclosed, I think even a line offering the basic reason is necessary so that the community can know exactly why, Such as &quot;Use of abusive language&quot; or &quot;Intentional and repeated spamming&quot; or &quot;Unfounded Allegations against Moderators&quot; or whatever the reason is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4241/change-of-policy-make-reasons-for-suspensions-public&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; Which asks for a lot more to be disclosed. But I only ask for a one line reason available to the Public, Especially if you are Imposing 6 Month - 1 Year suspensions to users who are otherwise friendly atleast to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T12:51:30.010" Title="One line Reason for Suspension" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|suspensions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4892" CreationDate="2013-09-04T15:52:25.540" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We give the short indication on the profile to avoid &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Streisand effect&lt;/a&gt;, so other users get a general idea of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; an account was suspended. The user that was suspended is always welcome to contact us (the Stack Exchange team) to let us know if they feel the suspension was unwarranted or excessive. There are checks and balances on &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; that community moderators can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving too much more detail would border on violating the user's privacy - remember that search engines see profile pages and that text, so less there is definitely better. The system provides enough so that those interested in recent events the user was involved in can &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; determine what happened, and we're respectful of the user's privacy in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9789" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T15:52:25.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T16:57:42.450" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do moderators have additional privileges to edit comments after the usual 5 minute cutoff?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because in the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76162/double-slit-experiment-how-do-scientists-ensure-that-theres-only-one-photon#comment158548_76162&quot;&gt;Double Slit Experiment: How do scientists ensure that there&amp;#39;s only one photon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could have sworn that Qmechanic's original comment was &quot;possible duplicate,&quot; which is why I had responded that I didn't think it was a duplicate.  This makes my response comment look rather silly, but I'm mainly curious because it's bothering me that my memory is failing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T11:53:41.140" Title="Comment edit cutoff time for moderators" Tags="|support|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4894" CreationDate="2013-09-04T17:00:02.553" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes,&lt;/em&gt; moderators can edit comments after the usual 5 minute window has ended, even comments by other users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case, there is a pencil icon behind my comment, so I did edit something, I might have written &lt;em&gt;possible duplicate&lt;/em&gt; first, I don't remember now, but I'm pretty sure I changed it to &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; within 5 minutes. Your reply comment is only 2 minutes after mine. Moreover, a comment edit is not instantly updated on another user's screen unless he manually refreshes/reloads the page, so it is entirely plausible that we have unintentionally overlapped in our comments. Later I noticed a red notification button in the upper left corner of my brouwser (caused by the &lt;em&gt;@Qmechanic&lt;/em&gt; in your reply comment), but I did not change anything because of the notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T11:53:41.140" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T11:53:41.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4894" CreationDate="2013-09-04T17:01:43.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. We can edit all comments without a time limit. This is mainly supposed to be used for editing profanities (or other things) out of an otherwise useful comment. There's no special exception in the software to prevent moderators from editing their &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; comments after the 5 minute window, and it's not particularly necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it usually isn't intentional, we do tend to overshoot the 5 minute limit at times since we get no notification about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T17:01:43.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4898" CreationDate="2013-09-04T17:24:13.487" Score="4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is currently a flood of boring questions by new users. It has been a while since I have seen some interesting questions. But then I realised many of the recent interesting questions might get lost to the bottom of the &quot;newest&quot; tab in the current flood of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I can sort out these &quot;Good&quot; questions which are recent enough(A week old)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &quot;frequent&quot; or &quot;votes&quot; tabs don't help because they don't sort out the recent ones. And the &quot;newest&quot; tab doesn't help because it doesn't sort out the good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Though it doesn't need specifying, &quot;good&quot; questions are defined by votes and/or activity(views, comments, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10896" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-18T15:52:10.073" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T15:52:10.073" Title="How to sort Good+Recent questions" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4897" CreationDate="2013-09-04T17:33:10.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the search box at the top right, you can write &lt;code&gt;is:question score:3&lt;/code&gt; and then sort the results by &quot;newest&quot;. This will give you a list of all questions with net score 3 or higher, sorted from newest to oldest. You can, of course, change the number 3 to some other value to suit your definition of a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also search operators for views and number of answers and other things, if you would like to incorporate those; full details are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;in the help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Don't forget that you can help limit the number of boring questions (and the visibility of the ones we do get) by downvoting and/or flagging them when it's appropriate to do so. Downvotes and flags, properly used, are an essential part of keeping the site's quality up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T17:44:30.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4897" CreationDate="2013-09-04T17:33:38.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the &lt;code&gt;score:&lt;/code&gt; search operator to filter by score, and then sort the results by &quot;newest&quot; or &quot;active&quot;. Try &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=score:3%20is:question&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; search (modify the number 3 if you wish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also is a &lt;code&gt;views:&lt;/code&gt; operator (and an &lt;code&gt;answers:&lt;/code&gt; operator) that works similarly. Both operators search for posts with score/views greater than or equal to a given number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T17:33:38.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4892" CreationDate="2013-09-04T21:44:03.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Treat this as a way of expression that I am unhappy with such long suspensions being imposed. Since I don't know why it happened, perhaps you have a reason and I won't pursue. It certainly involved people who I enjoyed listening to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="12798" LastEditDate="2013-09-06T07:44:51.093" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T07:44:51.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4902" CreationDate="2013-09-05T04:23:22.110" Score="8" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been logging in to SE using openid, provided by MyOpenID.com. Now MyOpenID says they're going to stop hosting openid in February. I only use openid for SE. I don't do social media. What is my most hassle-free option for keeping my SE accounts open and continuing to log in to them? Can I switch to Stackexchange as my openid provider, and if so, how do I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following info, which I don't actually understand, may be relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4167495&amp;amp;cid=44762189&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4167495&amp;amp;cid=44762189&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4167495&amp;amp;cid=44761869&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4167495&amp;amp;cid=44761869&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorDisplayName="user4552" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T15:26:59.243" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T19:08:55.067" Title="How to switch away from MyOpenID?" Tags="|discussion|support|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4901" CreationDate="2013-09-05T04:38:15.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can. To do this, go to your profile page on the main site and click on &amp;quot;my logins&amp;quot; at the top right. It will bring up a dialog showing the OpenIDs currently associated with your Stack Exchange account. Click the link at the bottom that says &amp;quot;add more logins.&amp;quot; Then, at the bottom of that page, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To create a new Stack Exchange account&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;click here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the link, then fill in your email address and chosen password (and your name if you like), and click the button to submit and that should be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this process is separate from any accounts you have on SE sites. To put it another way, Stack Exchange the OpenID provider (&amp;quot;SE-OpenID&amp;quot;) is separate from Stack Exchange the Q&amp;amp;A site (&amp;quot;SE-Q&amp;amp;A&amp;quot;). When the page says &amp;quot;To create a new Stack Exchange account&amp;quot; it's talking about creating a new SE-OpenID account. Your SE-Q&amp;amp;A account (which holds your reputation and whatever information you've entered on your profile page on this site) will not be affected, except to have the new SE-OpenID account associated with it. In particular, the name and email address you enter in the form while creating your SE-OpenID account will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be copied to your profile on Physics SE or any other SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T19:08:55.067" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4853" CreationDate="2013-09-05T15:44:22.303" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing duplicate is certainly a problem, as a variation in the way&#xA;the question is asked can suggest very different answers, and&#xA;sometimes much better ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are closed, the only alternative is to answer the old&#xA;question, which I know from experience is mostly a waste of time&#xA;because you start at the bottom of a list that is supposed to&#xA;order for quality and not for date. I hate writing for a black hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that duplicate policies are inconsistent, bordering&#xA;arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here, I will just copy a part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4858#4876&quot;&gt;my answer to another question&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;about the quality of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding specifically the quality of questions&lt;/strong&gt;, what matters most&#xA;is the sexyness-entertaining quality of the question, not actual&#xA;content or preparatory work. I will take the example of two questions&#xA;that are exactly on the same topic, but were not flagged as such:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66746/&quot;&gt;Origin of motion and relative speed of bodies in the universe&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73654/&quot;&gt;Why are there no asteroids or meteoroids with relativistic speeds?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question was mine, actually my fist post on physics.SE after doing no physics for more decades than I care to tell. It took me a long time to write that question as I was trying to understand first what issues could matter, what kind of data and question might be sensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was very lucky to be upvoted once, and to get a nice answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question was asked 2 month later. It is exactly the same issue, presented as a disaster movie. It was not detected as duplicate and attracted much attention and 20 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should I try to ask questions as a scientist, or as a showman ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issue, directly related, is the questions removed as duplicate. First, it is inconsistant (see above) and sometimes inaccurate. Answering old questions is a waste of time. I know as I did it more than my share. Thoses answers do not get votes or comments, and I personnally hate writing for a black hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the practice of stopping duplicate question is just the best way to ensure that further input will not come, of that a different perspective will be avoided. &lt;strong&gt;What would have happened if the second question above had been detected as duplicate, as it should have ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T15:44:22.303" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-06T12:50:04.110" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page, there are many &quot;pending&quot; tag synonyms.  I' have noticed that very few people bother voting on tag synonyms.  This post is like a request for people to  vote on tag synonyms.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have at least 5 reputation on a particular tag (you can see how much reputation you have on a particular tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/23119?tab=tags&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, replacing &quot;23119&quot; with   your own    user id.),              please consider voting on tag synonyms.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, if you also have 2500 reputation, consider proposing tag synonyms (this is a little hard, because  the synonym needs to exist first.).                   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T15:36:29.520" Title="Please vote on tag synonyms." Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4907" CreationDate="2013-09-06T15:14:11.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've got the requirements wrong, they're slightly stricter. &lt;s&gt;Firstly, 2.5k rep is needed for voting, too.&lt;/s&gt; In addition, it's a &lt;em&gt;score&lt;/em&gt; (upvotes-downvotes) of five from answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;As a result we usually (depends on the tag) don't have the requisite number of people to get synonyms  by community voting&lt;/s&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syn page isn't too visible and there's not much of a chance to discuss. Instead, the synonyms usually get proposed on the other meta thread, and mod approved if there seems to be consensus. Yes, there are a couple of upvoted ones there that need to be looked at, I'll do that soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW I don't like the abbreviation-synonyms you proposed there as much, I don't see a need for them. The particle-&gt;particle-physics is an iffy one too; the word has a broader meaning. But the tags are usually used to mean the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-09-06T15:36:29.520" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T15:36:29.520" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4853" CreationDate="2013-09-07T15:47:14.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merging two posts is often a quite delicate and time-consuming job. E.g. even two questions, which are essentially duplicates of each others, can be worded slightly different, and the merged answers may have to be adjusted accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unfortunately an experimental fact that a new answer (to one of two duplicate questions) gains more exposure and votes if it belongs to the newer entry. But please please please do consider answering the older entry instead so that (in most cases) newer duplicate entries can be closed with minimal grief and heartache. And do never-ever submit the same answer twice to two duplicate entries!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also please help locate duplicates, e.g. in the following frequently-asked-topics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=twin+paradox&quot;&gt;twin paradox in SR&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/double-slit-experiment&quot;&gt;Young double slit experiment in QM&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=projectile&quot;&gt;parabolic motion in Newtonian mechanics&lt;/a&gt;; and other typical homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if a question formulation is unclear, please improve it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T15:47:14.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2013-09-08T07:24:13.727" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question can be found in the answers to the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why has Ron Maimon recently been suspended for a year?&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why is there no academic freedom on Physics.SE&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6605" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T07:24:13.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-09-08T16:02:30.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-entanglement-faster-than-speed-of-light/&quot;&gt;Quantum entanglement faster than speed of light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and its multiple duplicates. We should choose a canonical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:22:13.617" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:22:13.617" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-08T16:02:30.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2013-09-08T19:21:15.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's too much banging of people's heads againts brick walls that we know won't budge around here. There are network-wide policies in place about suspensions which are there for a reason and we should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be asking for exceptional insider access for any particular one - any user of this site may well wind up thanking those policies, either from within a suspension or because of someone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that isn't to say that there is a community that cares about Ron Maimon's presence. Yes, he was very often curt, to say the least. But he did some great physics. And many of us appreciate the physics he did on this site. The deleted question is a testament to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just reached 10k rep today. I am offering a small testament to the great physics that Ron did &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/41721/8563&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It isn't much, but I've been bugged by the pure complaining for some time. Thanks for the great physics, Ron, and hopefully see you around here next year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T19:21:15.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-09T15:17:57.500" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/196074/184688&quot;&gt;Lots of questions in the reopen queue&lt;/a&gt; at meta.stackoverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The review queue for reopen votes is currently at an exceptional high. Did something happen system-side to bring this on? A lot of the posts currently in that queue are minor edits, sometimes from quite a while ago (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/22801&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which was edited July 17). Normally this should not come up on the review queue (or at least not now). What is going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try and do my 20 reviews' worth today, but this thing needs at least six people-days of flat-out reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="There is currently a flood in the Reopen Votes review queue" Tags="|support|review|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4916" CreationDate="2013-09-09T15:27:17.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196074/lots-of-questions-in-the-reopen-queue/196078#196078&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Currently, this means that a closed question will automatically be&#xA;  added to the reopen queue when it is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Edited (body edits only) within 5 days of closure by the author. Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Edited (body edits only) within 5 days of closure by a 3rd-party, provided the editor has not also flagged the question or voted to&#xA;  delete it. Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Sufficiently popular, where popularity is calculated based on question score, top answer score, or views per month. We're still&#xA;  tweaking the exact thresholds for these, but right now they're fairly&#xA;  generous - however, the most popular closed questions are being added&#xA;  to the queue &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably an initial flood of questions, once we clear it out the queue ought to stay empty (like how all the queues were above 100 when they were introduced). There are edits from July there, so they probably allowed the algorithm to retroactively apply itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but this thing needs at least six people-days of flat-out reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not if I can do anything about it :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T15:27:17.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-09T23:30:14.697" Score="16" ViewCount="1075" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two recent questions that I would consider low in quality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76692/&quot;&gt;Is coherent light required for interference in the Young double slit experiment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76800/&quot;&gt;What theories explain the wave-particle duality as traveling-standing waves duality?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both refer to videos. The first one is a single sentence with a link to a very lengthy video. The second says he saw the video somewhere but can't find the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there are multiple problems that apply to almost all questions that are asked about videos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They usually don't take the trouble to write up what they think is going on in the video, so in order to answer the question, people would have to watch the video, which is very time-consuming. The asker usually doesn't even give a time index that can be skipped to for the relevant part.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The other problem with people failing to write up anything is that the question no longer stands on its own. The video will at some point stop being available on youtube, or youtube will be superseded by something else, or whatever...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is supposed to be for &quot;active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy,&quot; i.e., for people who are somewhat serious about the subject. People who show up here saying, &quot;I saw this video...&quot; are typically not at all serious about the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The video medium itself is just not well suited to presenting complex ideas. This also tends to drag down the level of the questions to something below what I perceive as the intended level of physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are exceptions to all of the above. For example, some people watch a video of a physics lecture online and show up here with a useful question, e.g., &quot;At 3:47, Feynman writes the equation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=-\nabla\phi+\partial A/\partial t$&lt;/span&gt;, but isn't the sign of the second term wrong? It disagrees with the sign in Jackson, but is this just a different sign convention?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the more common case where the questions are of low quality, would it be helpful to set some kind of standard policy and/or consensus for how to respond to the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-01T04:09:30.620" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T04:09:30.620" Title="How to deal with questions based on videos?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|links|content-level|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2013-09-10T00:04:55.610" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good points, and I agree that these questions need some particular handling. My general rule for linked resources is this: &lt;strong&gt;judge the question as if the links weren't there&lt;/strong&gt;, at least for purposes of deciding whether to downvote or vote to close it. Specifically, don't click on the link to the video and see whether the question still makes sense. In some cases it will be fine; in other cases it won't make any sense at all (and in that case &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; is likely to be an appropriate close reason), and there will also be cases between those two extremes where I would probably consider a downvote to be appropriate. A helpful comment explaining the downvote is also nice, but of course nobody is &lt;em&gt;obligated&lt;/em&gt; to explain their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &quot;very low quality&quot; flag doesn't apply to cases like this. It's meant to be for questions (and answers) which are barely coherent, or otherwise have &lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt; quality problems of a non-technical nature. The presence or absence of a linked resource is not likely to make the difference between VLQ or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-01-10T04:24:36.887" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T04:24:36.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T06:06:39.253" Score="3" ViewCount="2314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to input equations with special characters in a question, is there some way to do that? Is there like some program or some code to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29208" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T11:38:48.753" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T11:48:47.290" Title="How to write equations?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4920" CreationDate="2013-09-10T08:09:27.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use LaTeX here (powered by MathJax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a small tutorial &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86/how-can-i-format-math-chemistry-expressions-here&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on using LaTeX in posts. There are more links below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/117/24293&quot;&gt;This tutorial&lt;/a&gt; is also pretty nice. We have a short FAQ entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T08:28:58.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:13:52.443" Score="3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;When are next moderator elections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many moderator positions will be available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When does the current moderators' term of office conclude?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T16:49:58.283" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="When are next moderator elections?" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4923" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:16:59.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/984/should-community-moderators-be-elected-for-life-or-have-terms&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, moderators are not limited to terms. The next moderator election will be whenever the community and the SE team decide that the moderation workload on the site exceeds what the current moderators can do, and the number of positions available will be determined by the need. It's usually 1 or 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T17:04:16.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4923" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:17:49.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When are next moderator elections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How many moderator positions will be available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know, elections are on a as-needed basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When does the current moderators' term of office conclude?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't one. We can step down or be removed by SE, but otherwise it's a life term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T16:17:49.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:35:02.990" Score="2" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this answer &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4923/when-are-next-moderator-elections/4924#4924&quot;&gt;When are next moderator elections?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The next moderator election will be whenever &lt;strong&gt;the community&lt;/strong&gt; and the SE&#xA;  team decide that the site needs more moderators&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the community can decide when next moderator election will take place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that we need moderator elections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think so. I don't trust some of the current moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T12:49:25.677" Title="Do you think that we need moderator elections?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4926" CreationDate="2013-09-10T17:09:16.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't clear about this in the answer you quoted (which is now edited), but moderator elections actually happen whenever the workload becomes too much for the current number of moderators - whether because of growth of the site, or the resignation/removal of one or more existing moderators. The community gets to provide input about whether moderation tasks are being done, and in that sense the community can contribute to the decision to hold a moderator election, but just saying &quot;I don't like the current moderators, so let's get new ones&quot; isn't how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can express your concerns about a current moderator in a meta post or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;privately to the SE team&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T17:23:44.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4926" CreationDate="2013-09-10T19:04:14.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a note on your last comment. If you have any specific complaints about a moderator action which you are unhappy with, this meta is the place to voice them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to be polite and reasonable, provide evidence for all your allegations, and keep the discussion civil. Additionally, you also need to understand that some moderators (which notably include user suspensions) are a private matter between the individuals involved &lt;em&gt;and should be like this as part of the privacy policy that also protects you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, there are no repercussions for conducting a constructive discussion in meta. &lt;strong&gt;If you are unhappy about specific incidents, please express that in this meta!&lt;/strong&gt; It does not help if you bottle it up until you wind up being blanket unhappy with a certain person. Improving this site begins with the everyday process of helping moderators understand what the community's opinions are. If you bring a specific issue to meta in a civilized way, you stand to gain a community discussion or even re-evaluation of site policy or at least a good understanding of what the issues are and why the policies are as they are. (And, if you're unhappy with policy, you can again bring that up, though if the community disagrees with you then you'll have to settle with agree-to-disagree.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In here as in real life, don't wait until elections to exercise democracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T19:04:14.220" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-11T12:02:25.193" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose ,I have asked a question in physics.stackexchange.Lets say that the question remains unanswered for a long period of time or say I don't obtain any satisfactory answers to that question.In such a case if I know few users who, I believe or hope can answer the question then how can I invite them to answer that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4812" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T15:38:24.237" Title="Inviting known users to answer my question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-09-14T12:13:29.023" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4929" CreationDate="2013-09-11T12:42:12.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no tool to bring a specific question to the attention to specific users, and all suggestions that there should be have been roundly and firmly rejected on the mother-meta. Stack Exchange is not a social network and there is no way to push content at individual users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, if you have enough rep, offer a bounty to (hopefully, there are no guarantees) draw more attention to your question in a general way. This, too is not guaranteed. The last bounty I offered expired without eliciting a single additional answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-09-11T15:38:24.237" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T15:38:24.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4929" CreationDate="2013-09-11T12:50:38.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can't put a bounty on your questions &lt;em&gt;yet&lt;/em&gt;, you can just ping the required user in chat (if he's available), or just use comments under any of his posts&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; I've done this methodology once (a change, for thanking a guy). I don't think this is a nice way for getting answers. So before you're gonna do this, keep in mind that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You shouldn't go around disturbing him, by commenting below all of his posts (which would lead to moderation). I commented below his post. The next day, I visited his profile. I noted the &lt;code&gt;seen&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;&quot;xx hours ago&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I was quite sure that he had visited the site after I had commented. Though there's no guarantee of him &lt;em&gt;seeing it&lt;/em&gt;, there's a larger chance that he'd have seen it. Because, SE provides you with an inbox by which you'll definitely get notified, which is quite helpful that you don't have to go to your post to see a comment. Again, you shouldn't disturb that particular user. You can't force someone when he's not interested into, or unable to provide an answer for your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments should be useful to a particular post. As you're violating it, make sure that you delete your comment after visiting his profile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, don't go around jumping from user after user, for answering your post. It's likely to work for 1 or maybe 2 (max.), but I would never suggest you to disturb everyone like this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T12:50:38.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-11T19:35:53.740" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; at Meta.StackOverflow, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/196775/184688&quot;&gt;The flag counter in the 10k tools should reflect the posts I can actually see&lt;/a&gt;. Show it some love!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently gained access to the 10k tools and the flag page looks buggy to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the flag count on the top right often shows a count for flags that are not present. The page can also be completely empty, with a nonzero counter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ic2aU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/187231/184688&quot;&gt;come up on the mother meta already&lt;/a&gt;, but since it has been marked &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c48J5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; there I thought I'd bring it up here as there may be relevant site differences. The bug in the main question there, which Jarred Dixon's answer addresses, also seems to be a bit different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also puzzled by the nature of these flags. Jarrod Dixon implies that these are flags meant for moderators ♦, but the breakdown on the right-hand sidebar sits rather ill with this interpretation. An auto-generated low-quality flag that's only for moderator eyes? (would &quot;only for ♦.♦&quot; be the right abbreviation of that, by the way?) It sounds unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone from the dev team comment on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T14:55:07.667" Title="10k tools show flag counts for flags I can't see" Tags="|support|10k-tools|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4932" CreationDate="2013-09-11T19:50:43.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm also puzzled by the nature of these flags. Jarred Dixon implies that these are flags meant for moderators ♦, but the breakdown on the right-hand sidebar sits rather ill with this interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two similar-looking flag queues. One is for 10k users which contain all flags except the ♦ flags and certain auto flags, and one is for mods which contains all flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the number shown at the top of the screen (you may not see it unless there are &gt;5 flags) and at the top of the tab is cached, so it may stay stuck for a while even when a flag disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, one of the posts had already been flagged by you (afaict), so it didn't appear in your queue but added up to the number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There still is something fishy here, though. Probably just caching. I currently see the tab indicator as 2, with the breakdown as 2NAA and 1VLQ. There is one post with an NAA flag (from 2 users, one of them is you), and another with an NAA (from you) and a VLQ flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;♦.♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T19:50:43.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2013-09-12T05:04:39.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point two things out about the deleted discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It started nine months ago, and was closed 8 months ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP of this question was not a member of SE when that discussion took place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion should probably end there. But since it hasn't, I will say that these discussions are never useful. That particular question was essentially an invitation for users to discuss how wonderful and useful a particular user was, and to object to his suspension solely on the basis of how wonderful and useful he was. Many users obliged. They argued essentially that that particular user should not have been suspended because of his reputation and value to he community. Never mind that the mods found him to be engaging in antisocial activity. The mods are not allowed to discuss the reason for that suspension, and they are the only people with that information. So it's really a one-sided discussion. Unless some other, non-privileged, user has some pertinent information, there really isn't any point to discussing the case. There was also another user suspended at the same time. No one complained about that suspension, which makes me think these arguments were either not in good faith, or were not fully thought through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a line of thinking that there is something wrong with a particular suspension. That is a really odd way to think about it, though. The mods don't suspend users arbitrarily: they have to either see the bad behavior themselves, or it has to be reported to them by another user. We have 5 mods currently. I haven't seen one of them in some time, so maybe we only have 4 active mods. They all come to a consensus on suspensions. So if you think there is something wrong with a suspension, you're saying that they all screwed up. And that can happen, I suppose. If you think that happened, you can write to the SE Community team. I have seen at least three of them around. They out-rank our local mods. Ultimately, there are several levels of review that a suspension will go through. If you think all of those check don't work, or that all of those people are engaged in a conspiracy, then you think this system really doesn't work. Since you're still using the system, I don't believe that you really think these checks aren't working. This paragraph applies to everyone complaining about this particular suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit that, whenever I see a suspended account anywhere on SE, I will engage in a bit of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubbernecking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rubbernecking&lt;/a&gt;. This usually consists of looking at the offending user's Activity page to see what they were writing before they were suspended. Sometimes I can guess, sometimes I can't; the mods usually scrub most of the offending material. In this particular case, it was really obvious. I believe that the mods are actually incapable of removing the evidence of the wrongdoing in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="9719" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T12:15:37.550" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T12:15:37.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4932" CreationDate="2013-09-12T12:48:25.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two posts with flags on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One you have flagged, but so have others - you are seeing the count of others on it, but you can't see it because you have flagged it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one also has a couple of flags on it, but one of those is a moderator flag. The count includes the non-moderator flag, but the moderator flag prevents you from seeing the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... the count is that of current non-moderator flags (minus yours), the posts don't show up in your list for two different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23068" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T12:48:25.487" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4926" CreationDate="2013-09-12T12:49:25.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The current moderation team is doing just fine.&lt;/strong&gt; We officially have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;5 mods&lt;/a&gt;: David Z, dmckee, Manishearth, mbq, and Qmechanic. mbq's activity has been sporadic recently, but I see all 4 of the others every single day. So maybe we really have 4 active mods. That seems to be working well for now. Maybe we could use another mod, but I could go either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm skeptical of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't trust some of the current moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be much more effective to discuss your specific concerns, rather than vaguely insinuating that something isn't working. If you are not comfortable discussing it more specifically, then that is symptomatic of a larger distrust with the entire SE system. Simply by being here, and asking this question, you are expressing at least some trust that the system still works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/10522/drake?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=all&quot;&gt;your activity&lt;/a&gt; that you have been less active in the last couple of weeks. Is that because of your distrust of the mods, or is this just part of the normal ebb and flow of time and energy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T12:49:25.677" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4938" CreationDate="2013-09-12T15:32:21.200" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to finally go ahead start using the ignored tags feature. So I added &quot;homework&quot; as an ignored tag - but the homework questions are still there on the main page, they're just greyed out, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cQF1D.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to make them disappear entirely? This is a last-ditch attempt to filter out some of the noise on this site and make it seem interesting again, and if I still have to scroll past all the greyed-out homework questions it's not going to be as effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T15:51:51.843" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T15:51:51.843" Title="Can I actually ignore my ignored tags?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4937" CreationDate="2013-09-12T15:46:34.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, this seems to be a preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/preferences/current&quot;&gt;your preferences page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tick the &quot;hide ignored posts&quot; checkbox  near the bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UfNGH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this hides &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; posts tagged &quot;homework&quot;, even if they are tagged with your favorited tags. Probably desired behavior in this case :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T15:46:34.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4941" CreationDate="2013-09-13T20:02:29.283" Score="7" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/77228/&quot;&gt;Resistance of circle of wire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is part of an active contest.  I don't know what the policy is for these cases but this person is trying to cheat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  For those arguing allowing the questions for the intellectual reasons I should point out that after the contest is closed the solutions are made public by the exam authors.  So if this person asking the question was really sincere about learning they could just wait to see the results after the contest is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25069" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T18:08:24.057" Title="Question is part of a contest" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4940" CreationDate="2013-09-13T20:08:12.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the question that addresses this situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2832/how-should-we-deal-with-academic-dishonesty&quot;&gt;How should we deal with academic dishonesty?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;em&gt;summarize&lt;/em&gt; from the answer there, we need to verify that the questions are actually from a contest (which is done) and also that the rules of the contest forbid seeking outside help (I'm looking into this). Once that's done, one of us moderators will close the question, or non-moderators can also vote to close it if they're sufficiently convinced that the question violates the contest rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, read the answer at that other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T20:08:12.987" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4940" CreationDate="2013-09-13T20:29:50.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) The Phys.SE question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/77228/&quot;&gt;Resistance of circle of wire&lt;/a&gt; indeed seems to be question B2 of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://fks.sk/archiv/2013_14/29knizkaZima1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homework assignment&lt;/a&gt; with due date 30.09.2013 from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://fks.sk/english/english.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FKS secondary school competition&lt;/a&gt; in Slovakia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google translator from Slovak -&gt; English produced this translation of &lt;a href=&quot;http://fks.sk/archiv/2013_14/29knizkaZima1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the pdf file&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;B2 - Nákružnica (9 points)&#xA;  Tinka is seeking revenge, as it pulled beetroot (and gave them Katka). Therefore, pulled out of the lab resistance wire with resistance R and produced from it earring. Sealed iron ends so as to form circle of uniform cross-section. She felt while resistance and resistance earrings a measured so that the earring Conn. ohmmeter between terminals. What minimum and maximum resistance to Tinka measure? What resistance values ​​when the clamps squeezed from the middle of the circle angle α.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is moreover specifically stated next to a warning skull in the pdf document that &lt;em&gt;Úlohy rieš samostatne!,&lt;/em&gt; i.e. the &lt;em&gt;problems should be solved separately.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) The Phys.SE questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76016/2451&quot;&gt;Bubble in a pipeline&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76080/2451&quot;&gt;Ice cube in a pool&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76091/2451&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76091/2451&lt;/a&gt; seem to be problem I.3, I.4, and I.Exp, respectively, of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://fykos.org/problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first round of problems&lt;/a&gt; with due date 14.10.2013 from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://fykos.org/about-us/about-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FYKOS high school competition&lt;/a&gt; in Czech Republic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T12:57:40.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4943" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-14T10:31:11.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before posting your own question, please consult these questions to see if there is already an answer that solves your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are often policies.         &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-14T12:12:39.393" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T12:12:39.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4944" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-14T10:31:11.217" Score="0" Body="These questions are the most frequently asked and answered questions on Meta. They are often policies.       " OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-14T12:12:45.220" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T12:12:45.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2013-09-14T11:20:34.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17651/is-it-possible-to-recover-classical-mechanics-from-schrodingers-equation&quot;&gt;Is it possible to recover Classical Mechanics from Schr&amp;#246;dinger&amp;#39;s equation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/108222/from-quantum-mechanics-to-classical-mechanics&quot;&gt;From Quantum Mechanics to Classical Mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74333/can-the-laws-of-classical-mechanics-be-derived-from-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;Can the laws of classical mechanics be derived from quantum mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44926/how-to-go-from-quantum-world-to-classical-world&quot;&gt;How to go from Quantum World to Classical World?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32112/classical-limit-of-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;Classical limit of quantum mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56151/when-does-hbar-rightarrow-0-provide-a-valid-transition-from-quantum-to-class&quot;&gt;When does $\hbar \rightarrow 0$ provide a valid transition from quantum to classcial mechanics? When and why does it fail?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/218523/why-do-we-obtain-classical-physics-by-taking-the-limit-of-plancks-constant-to-z&quot;&gt;Why do we obtain classical physics by taking the limit of Planck&amp;#39;s constant to zero?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/102082/does-limit-hbar-rightarrow-0-in-quantum-mechanics-mean-anything&quot;&gt;Does limit $\hbar \rightarrow 0$ in Quantum Mechanics mean anything?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33767/classical-limit-of-schrodinger-equation&quot;&gt;Classical Limit of Schrodinger Equation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82962/classical-limit-in-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;Classical Limit in Quantum Mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/65964/can-newtons-laws-be-explained-by-quantum-physics&quot;&gt;Can Newton&amp;#39;s laws be explained by Quantum Physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/77294/how-to-prove-newtons-second-law-with-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;How to prove Newton&amp;#39;s second law with quantum mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T15:15:45.393" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T15:15:45.393" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-14T11:20:34.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2013-09-14T20:00:52.860" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am more than happy to answer most General Relativity questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T20:00:52.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-14T23:41:29.727" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just approved two edits removing the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun-stuff&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fun-stuff&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fun-stuff&lt;/a&gt; from the two only posts that currently have it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/64524/what-are-the-limitations-of-performing-music-in-space&quot;&gt;What are the limitations of performing music in space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10701/how-much-force-is-in-a-keystroke-estimated-of-course&quot;&gt;How much force is in a keystroke? (estimated, of course)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, it seems pointless to have such a small tag. On top of that, it definitely pushes the limits of on-topic (though a bit of fun never hurt anyone, really). On the other hand, it wasn't really hurting anyone as the question count was minimal.* All in all I'm pretty neutral about this, so I approved the edit. I just thought this should come up in meta before we lose the tag. (Tags with no questions get deleted shortly, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19753/what-happens-to-zombie-tags&quot;&gt;this MSO question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's it gonna be? Tag burnination? Tag rescue with tens of volunteers turning up all these fun questions that really needed that tag? Or my personal favourite, a long, slow slide of this question down the meta front page, faced with stone-cold utter indifference? (hey, I could even get a tumbleweed outta that...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Yes, I know &quot;minimal&quot; is only one question per tag. Go take this up in math if you feel that strongly about it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T09:48:05.390" Title="Is [fun-stuff] on topic?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|scope|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4947" CreationDate="2013-09-15T01:05:40.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag doesn't add any extra information and is an unnecessary meta-tag. Burn it at the stake! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T01:05:40.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2013-09-15T01:54:29.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have expressed mainly by my edits on such posts, video-based questions can indeed be rescued to give, I think, fairly high-quality content. This is definitely time-consuming and should only be done if you think the end product will be worth it, but I think the end results can be quite good, such as these two, in their before-and-after shots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/75709/revisions&quot;&gt;Rotor panorama&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/76692/revisions&quot;&gt;Is coherent light required for interference in Young's double slit experiment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, it is extremely unhelpful to come to a post that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; is confusing, please explain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and nothing more. If you have the time, see the video and decide whether it's worth keeping into a full Q&amp;amp;A. If it is, and you have the time and capacity, take the appropriate stills from the video, describe what's happening, and fill out the question. If you don't, then leave a comment to the OP explaining that they need to flesh out their post and set out a question that is not dependent on the video.* Refer them to this meta thread, too, to drive home the message that if they don't change their post soon then its likely future is lots of downvotes and no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have time to look at the video, then also leave a comment and also refer them to this meta thread, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=videos&quot;&gt;easy to find&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Please avoid drive-by downvoting&lt;/strong&gt;, though, unless there already is an appropriate comment: it does little to help the site and very little to help the OP improve their post and get an answer to their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I note, though, that for users without image-upload privileges the whole thing is an uphill climb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T20:59:02.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-15T07:06:29.823" Score="3" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that the account of a formerly-active user whom I hadn't seen active since he was suspended a while back has been suspended again for a period of one year. He is not even participating on this site anymore so I don't understand the reason for this suspension. Will my account too be closed if I stop participating? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10001" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T13:44:51.250" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T12:37:12.127" Title="Will my account be closed if i stop participating on Physics SE?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|suspensions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4951" CreationDate="2013-09-15T07:09:51.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is not even participating on this site anymore so i don't understand the reason for this suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was participating, slightly. I can't provide details on the exact reasons for suspension&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, but I can tell you that he was suspended for his participation (more accurately, something he did in the course of that participation), not for his lack of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will my account too be closed if i stop participating ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. People are free to come and go from the site if they don't break any other rules. We don't suspend accounts for inactivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Moderators are bound by common decency to not discuss the details behind a suspension of a person who by definition isn't here to defend themselves. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2013-09-15T21:04:10.440" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T21:04:10.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2013-09-15T08:21:33.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me check if the sandbox at -8 goes to the front meta page if I add a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="270704" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T05:49:29.460" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T05:49:29.460" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-15T08:21:33.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4954" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-15T08:54:31.757" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-15T08:54:31.757" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T08:54:31.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4955" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-15T08:54:31.757" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-15T08:54:31.757" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T08:54:31.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4947" CreationDate="2013-09-15T09:48:05.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fire it from a cannon, launch several cyber-nukes at it, and send the ashen remains into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...in other words, burninate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29350" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T09:48:05.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-15T14:36:43.460" Score="9" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a trend lately of old meta posts brought up to the front page because of retagging or other minor edits. While this happens all the time on the main site and is OK and encouraged in mild doses, the situation in meta is somewhat different. Meta is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; slow compared to the main site, by a factor of about 50. (It takes ~7 hours for an inactive post to slide down the main but ~2 weeks in meta.) I would therefore like to bring this up here. If we're OK with this, then we're OK, but if we're not then we need a policy to stick to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that bringing an old post to the front page gives the impression that the discussion is still active, and this can be very confusing. Old support posts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/579/why-do-i-still-see-the-beta-css&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; become meaningless when a tide of changes completely washes over the issue. Old policy discussions (which I won't link to) do not gain anything from the extra attention, and we have seen this have tragic consequences for certain questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, though, I think there's no real reason to be fiddling with the tags on old discussions. They are in the archive and can be found easily enough. They often discuss quite topical issues for the specific time they were asked in and now have only historical value. (A lot of it in some cases.) They do not belong on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me take a stance, then, so people can up/down-vote. &lt;strong&gt;Please keep edits of old meta posts to a minimum.&lt;/strong&gt; Use retag edits on them only when they would be impossible to find otherwise. If you feel a certain discussion should be revived, then &lt;strong&gt;give an alternative answer&lt;/strong&gt;, or better yet &lt;strong&gt;ask a new question&lt;/strong&gt; that's appropriate for the site's current conditions. If you don't have anything to add to such a thread, then maybe it's in the cold archives for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some tags deserve special attention. The meta tags &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt; can only be applied by moderators. If you feel a question needs one of these tags and doesn't have it, &lt;strong&gt;flag a moderator&lt;/strong&gt; and tell them that, instead of inventing new tags for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T16:21:07.437" Title="Editing old meta questions" Tags="|discussion|editing|policy|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4959" CreationDate="2013-09-15T16:21:07.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree completely and am annoyed by it as well... Answering old questions is fine, expanding old questions is fine, retagging or minor (ie. doesn't add substantially to it but still bumps it to the front page) no so much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T16:21:07.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4962" CreationDate="2013-09-16T09:59:22.190" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question and i want to offer bounty, how do I do it.&#xA;And what exactly is bounty?Is it giving away your reputation to somebody&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29660" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T15:40:01.347" Title="How to offer bounty to a person who answers my question?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4961" CreationDate="2013-09-16T10:12:11.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is all &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;explained in the help pages&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;You'll need to have at least 75 reputation to set a bounty&lt;/a&gt;.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T15:40:01.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-09-16T20:55:48.660" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qIjvZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Space Exploration Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:50.550" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T00:19:15.937" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-16T20:55:48.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4967" CreationDate="2013-09-17T06:40:59.980" Score="-1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to create a new tag which I didn't find in the tag list. It might be an important tag.&#xA;I also want to create it to earn a badge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29660" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T07:10:08.947" Title="How to create a new tag" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-09-21T08:00:36.943" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4966" CreationDate="2013-09-17T07:10:08.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One needs &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;300 reputation&lt;/a&gt; to create tags. At that stage, just using a new tag on a question creates it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try not to make narrow/redundant/meta tags, though. It's best not to look at it from a badges point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T07:10:08.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4951" CreationDate="2013-09-17T11:48:08.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; measures in place to suspend registered accounts (with rep&gt;1) that do pause their participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you &lt;strong&gt;wish&lt;/strong&gt; to be suspended, then flag one of your own questions for a diamond moderator, and ask them (ideally you'd ask politely) to suspend you. There's no need to create extra work for the mods by forcing a suspension through repeatedly breaking the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw some of the material that led to the suspension in question. Those comments have been deleted now, as they broke the site rules. That was the reason for the suspension: not inactivity, but rather rule-breaking activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster has explicitly insisted that he would go on breaking the rules until he was suspended. He's done that on more than one StackExchange site, and that's been his &quot;personal policy&quot; for over a year now, so this wasn't a one-off event in time or in location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's now suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prosper, the site needs enforcement of the rules. This poster wanted to be suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now, the rules are enforced, and the poster is suspended. So we've all got what we need. If anyone has a problem with the suspension, then they should address their complaints to the poster himself, who actively sought out and engineered the necessity for the suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="4066" LastEditDate="2013-09-17T12:37:12.127" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T12:37:12.127" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4970" CreationDate="2013-09-18T06:59:04.830" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one looks at the more basic topics, we have dozens of tags for any one    these topics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kinematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kinematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kinematics&lt;/a&gt;     :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;{ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/motion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;motion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;motion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/velocity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;velocity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;velocity&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceleration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceleration&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceleration&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/suvat-equations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;suvat-equations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suvat-equations&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/jerk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;jerk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;jerk&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/position&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;position&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;position&lt;/a&gt; etc. } &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;  : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forces&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forces&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forces&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/momentum&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;momentum&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;momentum&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/velocity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;velocity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;velocity&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acceleration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acceleration&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acceleration&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/motion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;motion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;motion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lagrangian-formalism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lagrangian-formalism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lagrangian-formalism&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hamiltonian-formalism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hamiltonian-formalism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hamiltonian-formalism&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hamiltonian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hamiltonian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hamiltonian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/equations-of-motion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;equations-of-motion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;equations-of-motion&lt;/a&gt; etc. }      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/maxwell-equations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;maxwell-equations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;maxwell-equations&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electricity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electricity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electricity&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magnetism&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magnetic-fields&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magnetic-fields&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magnetic-fields&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electric-field&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electric-field&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electric-field&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauss-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauss-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauss-law&lt;/a&gt; etc. }&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for more advanced topics, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;string-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;string-theory&lt;/a&gt;, we have just one tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we supposed to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge all the more specific tags for basic subjects?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add new tags   for advanced subjects?    &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T07:02:50.723" Title="Specific tags; broad tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4969" CreationDate="2013-09-18T07:02:50.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Add new tags. Try not to make them too specific, but add new tags. Try not to bump with this, work with newer posts instead of older ones&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really depends, in a way. Are there many (&gt;10) questions being asked about that topic or physical/mathematical object/concept? Then make a tag. Otherwise, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T07:02:50.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-18T08:32:42.400" Score="6" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question on meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4951/&quot;&gt;&quot;Will my account be closed like that of [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] if I stop participating on Physics SE?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It was being downvoted so I added a comment below it &quot;why downvotes?&quot;. This was followed by a (peaceful) discussion between me and Manishearth. During this discussion Manishearth told me that my question broke no rules and so (on this basis) i refused to change the title of my question. However then one of the moderators (Shog9; who, as I just knew, is also a stack exchange employee) came and deleted all the comments also changed the title and main body of my question. I further added a comment that the changed title was not what i asked, to which he only replied after two days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know the rules moderators/stack employees follow in deleting comments in an ongoing discussion. Manishearth in his answer below says that there are no rules which, if true, is ridiculous because you can never question the action of a moderator even if s/he deletes some comment which is very useful to the discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What rules do moderators follow in deleting comments in an ongoing discussion?" Tags="|feature-request|moderators|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4972" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4976" CreationDate="2013-09-18T11:46:07.533" Score="-6" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to share a link to a question that was visited by 25 unique IP addresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want this to earn the announcer badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29660" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-18T12:59:31.540" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How to get Announcer badge?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4971" CreationDate="2013-09-18T11:48:57.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, yes, comments can be deleted at will, so there are no rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, we refrain from deleting comments on meta if there's an ongoing discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, meta comments will be deleted if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They serve their purpose by eliciting a modification to the post (Which is what happened with the comments that were deleted). This is generally followed on main as well, comments flagged as obsolete get removed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They go off topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &quot;please explain the downvotes&quot; is a rather pointless comment, especially on Meta, where downvotes can express disagreement (So the downvote just means that someone disagrees with the post or its premise)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T11:48:57.433" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4972" CreationDate="2013-09-18T11:50:49.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find the full badge description &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to use the &quot;share&quot; link and share the question with others (Sharing it on an SE site will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; work). This is usually done via Twitter/Facebook/etc. If enough people click on it, you get a badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T11:50:49.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4971" CreationDate="2013-09-18T13:10:33.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no rules that set the limits of what cannot be deleted, so any comment is fair target for deletion. That's because comments are, &lt;strong&gt;by design&lt;/strong&gt;, second-class material, ephemeral and disposable. They are there to seek clarification on questions and answers. Once they've served that purpose, they can be disposed of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments that are used to try to subvert a Stack Exchange site into being a medium for discussion, rather than Q&amp;amp;A, are &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; fair target for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are rules that set out what must be deleted: material that is illegal, offensive, or that breaks the sites rules. The comment-flagging box gives you a good guide to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ihnfz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in short, never put in comments something that you should put in a question or an answer: if it's got merit, put it in a first-class container (Q&amp;amp;A), not an ephemeral, disposable second-class container (comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6634/tpg2114&quot;&gt;tgp2114&lt;/a&gt; for their comment that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;long comment chains are sometimes allowed on Meta when they are constructive, but Meta is the exception not the &quot;rule&quot; ... So one may see long comment threads here, but &lt;strong&gt;they may be deleted at any time for any reason&lt;/strong&gt;. Particularly when they are not on topic any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T14:11:53.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4972" CreationDate="2013-09-18T15:58:36.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click on the &quot;share&quot; button below a question or an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Ls0W.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will bring up the standard share buttons for Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter, which will place a link to the post on your Plus page / timeline / feed. You will also be able to copy a link to the question that identifies you as the person who shared it; these &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/114621/184688&quot;&gt;look like this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/q/&amp;lt;question-id&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;user-id&amp;gt;&#xA;http://stackoverflow.com/a/&amp;lt;answer-id&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;user-id&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;user-id&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is your user ID. (You can get this by going to your profile and looking at the search bar on the top right.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will get the Announcer badge, for example, if 25 unique IP addresses click on any of such links. Be aware, though, that there are mechanisms in place to detect &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sock puppeting&lt;/a&gt; so if you try to access it yourself from 25 different computers the system may detect that and discount those visits. Also, as EnergyNumbers points out, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/114608/184688&quot;&gt;links shared within the SE network do not count towards referral badges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T15:58:36.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6144" CreationDate="2013-09-18T16:40:03.517" Score="39" ViewCount="1370" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;homework&quot; tag is often controversial among new users who complain that their question isn't from a homework assignment (so they get offended, so edit wars happen, and posts get blocked -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/68546&quot;&gt;e.g.&lt;/a&gt;, which is unfortunate, because there actually some good homework-tagged questions here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that we rename it (for example, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt; -- or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt;. as suggested by David Z).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me emphasize that I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; here suggesting to change the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; for homework-like questions, nor whether or not we should have a tag for homework-like questions. The scope and policy have been discussed in several other meta questions. Here I'm only asking whether we should change the &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; of the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T16:00:45.530" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T04:22:09.100" Title="Should we rename the homework tag as &quot;problem-solving&quot;, or such?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4971" CreationDate="2013-09-18T18:44:41.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have some good answers here already, but since I was the one who deleted the comments I'll take a few minutes to explain why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all started &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197060/members-discussing-other-members&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - someone mentioned Physics, and upon visiting the meta here I saw 4 different threads calling out a specific user. As mentioned in the thread I linked to, this is something we generally try to avoid: there's nothing to be gained from publicly humiliating someone, &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; someone who isn't here to defend themselves. While a certain amount of curiosity is understandable, leaving these threads up long-term to be indexed by Google is kinda cruel; we frequently get emails from folks who are concerned about their online reputation and looking to distance themselves from mistakes in their past - no need to add to that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I deleted or edited these threads. While doing so, I observed numerous bitter, unproductive, tangential conversations - as EnergyNumbers notes, such comments are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4971/what-rules-do-moderators-follow-in-deleting-comments-in-an-ongoing-discussion/4975#4975&quot;&gt;subject to removal without notice&lt;/a&gt;, so I removed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, this is the guidance I gave the moderators at the time: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know I've said this before, but... Try not to let threads discussing someone's suspension hang around forever. They rarely lead to anything good. Either edit to generalize them, or remove them once they've quieted down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate goal here should always be to provide something of value to future readers. I doubt you're the only one who'll ever be concerned about suspensions - therefore, it's worth providing a clear, easy-to-follow discussion for those that follow. Lengthy comment threads hinder this goal - they are distracting and push actual &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; further down the page. Comments that speculate on offenses committed by another user are particularly unhelpful - common decency dictates that one should address others directly with complaints rather than talking about them behind their backs. Expect the current comments on that question to be removed at some point as well, once the current discussion is concluded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T18:44:41.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2013-09-18T19:06:26.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a fantastic idea. I fully support it. I have noticed the same behavior you have: people don't like calling their question &quot;homework,&quot; especially if it isn't part of an assignment. I have taken to saying &quot;Homework tag applies, even if this isn't actual homework&quot; in my edit summaries when I apply the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. This proposal would better describe what kinds of questions are acceptable, and would encourage better tagging of such questions. And as tpg2114 says in his comment, this would be nearly trivial to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T19:06:26.610" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2013-09-18T19:34:19.293" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree with a strong caveat.&lt;/strong&gt; The tag wiki excerpt must function as an exceptionally well-tuned tool to catch the great homework/problem-solving questions, turn the borderline cases into good questions, and prevent bad questions as far as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way tag synonyms work at Ask a Question time is the following. You type in the tag you think you should use (say, &quot;sound&quot;) and presto! A very visible prompt appears with the strong suggestion that the tag to use is, in fact, acoustics - &lt;em&gt;and it flashes a blurb at them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YWXIw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, say we have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopia.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;myopic user&lt;/a&gt; who did not read the guidance in the sidebar. They see they're asked for tags and, saying &quot;hey&quot;, they type in &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt;. They are then presented with the suggestion that in fact they meant &quot;problem solving,&quot; as well as a text that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Problem-solving refers to questions whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. This includes conceptual questions about homework assignments, although not all homework questions are allowed. PLEASE CLICK LEARN MORE BEFORE POSTING HOMEWORK QUESTIONS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;learn more&lt;/code&gt; link would then take them to a tag wiki with a succinct summary of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/8563&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; and numerous links to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main advantage of this, as I see it, is that it encourages the right sort of homework-like questions we want, whilst taking (a probably small, but nonzero) action to prevent the bad ones from getting asked in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't think we're at the fighting-ourselves-to-oblivion-over-homework-tags kind of stage that SO reached some time ago, and I have not seen anyone railing against a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag that did not yield to the first comment of &quot;The tag applies to all homework-like questions&quot; and subsequent referral to meta. I think our biggest problem is still fighting the constant tide of low-quality homework questions, and if we do this right it can help in that respect. If it helps in making the homework-like askers a bit happier about it then all to the better, but then that's only because yes, &quot;problem-solving&quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; encapsulate so much better what we want in good homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T19:34:19.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2013-09-18T21:32:45.697" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, I've thought that this might be useful. I just didn't have any particularly good ideas for what the new tag should be. I was thinking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt;, so let this answer be the proposal for that. (Although to be honest, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt; sounds better.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T21:32:45.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2013-09-19T02:39:59.397" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is one real (or at least, really potential) issue with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt;: it could be applied to almost every question on the site. Presumably people wouldn't go around editing it in willy-nilly, but it is likely that new users will apply it without discrimination to their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking &lt;em&gt;&quot;Oh, I have a problem, and I'd like it solved&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It could be worse that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; in terms of misapplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T02:39:59.397" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4984" CreationDate="2013-09-19T04:56:49.027" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something tells me this question is a duplicate of something.&#xA;I noticed somewhere that accounts can be suspended for 'low-quality contributions'. Could you point out what constitutes a 'low-quality' contribution and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28244" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T11:59:23.937" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T11:59:23.937" Title="What qualifies as a 'low-quality contribution' on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|suspensions|quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4983" CreationDate="2013-09-19T05:12:45.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suspensions for low quality contributions are generally tied to a large number of downvoted and/or closed questions (relative to the total number of questions the user has asked, of course). So if you want to know this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could you point out the questions that constitute a 'low-quality' contribution and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would throw the question back at you: which of these questions would you downvote, and furthermore which of them would you expect the rest of the community to downvote as well? Which ones would you vote to close and expect others to vote to close?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we suspend for low quality contributions, it is generally the community that has judged the contributions to be low quality, not (only) the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T05:12:45.883" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4987" CreationDate="2013-09-19T09:08:48.420" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question if I may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy here about deletion of not so good questions that may have good, well researched answers attached?  Are they deleted eventually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well researched answers often take considerable amount of time to research/write and would certainly be a contribution to the site.  Are these lost if the not so good question is eventually deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be prudent for the answerer to submit an edit to the question in order to improve on it, hence not close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29350" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T11:50:25.753" Title="not so good questions with well researched answers" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-12-17T01:48:26.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4985" CreationDate="2013-09-19T11:37:11.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a specific policy &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; deleting questions that have good answers. Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;the 10k privileges page&lt;/a&gt;: from the Deleting Posts section,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When should I delete questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions that are of no lasting value whatsoever should be flagged and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before voting to delete, please check that there are &lt;strong&gt;no good answers&lt;/strong&gt;; if so, then the question should be flagged for moderator attention as a potential merge candidate. We don't like to lose great answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the e-ground it is of course always more or less of a judgement call on the part of the community, but there need to be 3 or more 10k users that vote deletion, or a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that a question was deleted wrongly, bring it up in meta. (This is of course a tricky matter because you usually can't see them. 10k users can, though, so anything obviously wrong will eventually get picked up on.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T11:37:11.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4985" CreationDate="2013-09-19T11:50:25.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, such questions shouldn't be answered in the first place. Instead, flag for closure, and leave a comment on how it can be improved. If the question is improved, it can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the policy here about deletion of not so good questions that may have good, well researched answers attached? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They get closed, but that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are they deleted eventually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope. See Emilio's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be prudent for the answerer to submit an edit to the question in order to improve on it, hence not close it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, it's fine to edit a closed (or an about-to-be-closed) question to change it to something more constructive so that it matches the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T11:50:25.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-09-19T22:58:12.023" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://space.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWTVN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Space Exploration Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20703" LastEditorDisplayName="user20703" LastEditDate="2013-09-21T00:06:51.353" LastActivityDate="2013-09-21T00:06:51.353" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-19T22:58:12.023" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2013-09-20T01:18:24.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the name of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag should be changed, but I also agree with some commenters that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt; isn't the best name for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/exercise&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exercise&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exercise&lt;/a&gt; as an alternative. It's broader than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; but still specific enough to be useful, and hopefully it would be less offensive to people who are doing exercises in their own time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T01:18:24.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4992" CreationDate="2013-09-20T05:54:12.453" Score="-8" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often when working my way through a question or answer there are several links in the middle of the text for references.  It would be nice if I could click on that and not lose my place on the page I was reading but rather have the link open up in a new window.  Is this something that can be easily configured on SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  For people with poor internet connections this is a nice feature because I often have to abandon a page because it takes too long to load and if I accidentally just close it I have to start all over again.  I had no idea it was unpopular because it is a common feature on almost every forum or other site I use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25069" LastEditorUserId="25069" LastEditDate="2013-09-21T03:23:57.677" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T10:28:59.307" Title="A request to allow links to be opened in a new tab" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2013-09-20T06:03:26.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, SE doesn't have a setting to allow this. I recommend holding down Ctrl (on a non-Mac) or Command (on a Mac) while clicking a link to get it to open in a new tab. Alternatively, you could check and see if your browser has a setting to do this by default, or if there is an extension/addon that will let you configure it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-09-20T07:54:20.540" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T07:54:20.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2013-09-20T13:32:43.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, you have the choice of opening in the current tab or a new one (e.g. middle click, ctrl click). Your idea would only permit the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T10:28:59.307" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T10:28:59.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4525" CreationDate="2013-09-21T15:51:39.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that it is possible,.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is community wiki because you've edited it at least 10 times, or because at least 5 different people have edited it (as opposed to a moderator making it community wiki), then the answers &lt;strong&gt;do not automatically&lt;/strong&gt; become Community Wiki. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c.f.            &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30052/how-much-water-must-flow-trough-canal-to-maintain-a-constant-water-deep&quot;&gt;How much water must flow trough canal to maintain a constant water deep?&lt;/a&gt;       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-21T15:51:39.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4997" CreationDate="2013-09-23T14:01:42.117" Score="6" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems there are the beginnings of an edit war going on with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/78191&quot;&gt;how can counting the number of cracks in glass tell you about the speed of imact?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question has a few problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't stand particularly well on its own, requiring reading an external link for background.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't discuss the question in such a way as to guide answers to the desired level of detail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is partially phrased in the imperative, rather than the interrogative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, as far as I can tell, &lt;strong&gt;it has nothing to do with homework&lt;/strong&gt;, either in actuality or conceptually. Someone was reading a scientific news article and had a question about the physics behind a phenomenon. It certainly doesn't sound like someone wants a particular problem solved - I read it as asking for the concepts behind some claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;why was this tagged as homework?&lt;/strong&gt; Is the new policy to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; to filter out questions certain users don't particularly like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T23:53:17.040" Title="Does the homework tag now apply to any question without much research?" Tags="|discussion|tags|policy|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2013-09-23T15:08:02.773" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on this is two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, don't start edit wars. If you put something on a question, and somebody later removes it, don't just go back in and put it back again and leave comments about it. Take it to meta, take it to chat, and actually discuss it rather than take it out to 7 revisions. When people disagree, use the channels we have to resolve it face-to-face (or I suppose keyboard-to-keyboard). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I do not think that is a homework question. Not just in the strict sense but in the sense we defined. OP is looking for a physical concept that is not understood to be explained. It's no different than the myriad of questions about how we know gravity exists, why there are only 4 dimensions in space-time, etc.. To me, the OP doesn't understand the physical correlation between impact velocity and fracture in glass and would like an understanding of the concepts behind it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I do not think it should be tagged as homework. All that said, I think the question is poorly formed because it doesn't mention what part is confusing, asks answers to go read an article rather than summarize it, and shows very little effort. It should be downvoted, maybe closed, but that's a different conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T15:08:02.773" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2013-09-23T22:28:43.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dimension10 has given the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to where the policy is laid out clearly in David's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;homework question&amp;quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. This includes not just questions from actual homework assignments, but also self-study problems, puzzles, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, questions that come up in the course of doing a homework problem, but are separate from the main point of the problem, might not be considered homework questions. There's a bit of a judgment call to be made, depending on the context of the problem. If you're not sure, it's probably safer to treat your question as a homework question and later find out that it isn't, than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which points out that the dividing line is rather vague, and therefore could make most of the questions here homework if we relied on this definition, rather than our own personal view based upon common experience&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the whole point of the homework tag is to enable people to filter out the tedious &lt;strong&gt;unoriginal&lt;/strong&gt; questions found in most text books. Therefore, I don't think any problem thought up by someone for themselves should be tagged homework, unless it's universally recognized as a standard text book problem designed for students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;update:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that the main purpose behind the homework tag is to prevent students cheating on their homework assignments, which should make things considerably clearer on when to tag a question as homework: &lt;strong&gt;Does this question look as if it could be given to a student by a teacher as a graded exercise?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T23:53:17.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-24T13:36:23.500" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why aren't badges removed in some cases?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example,when I downvote a question and remove the downvote I get the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/badges/7/critic&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WBjhi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26600" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T06:44:35.567" Title="Why aren't badges removed?" Tags="|support|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2013-09-24T15:51:13.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm late to the party but I want to say this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original phrasing for this question closely matched a very common pattern seen in real homework questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Statement of a homework or other textbook problem.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solve this please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of variations of this (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/763/amount-of-2-amperage&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/77769/how-can-you-prove-generalised-jacobi-identity&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69991/what-is-the-alternative-of-pmg-permanent-magnet-generator-in-a-horizontal-axis&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question) but they generally give a feeling of entitlement: the OP &lt;em&gt;demands&lt;/em&gt; (even if they do it politely) that some expert drop what she's doing and give him exactly the explanation - without overdoing it and using only the right hints - that will get them an A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think this should have the homework tag on it, but I can definitely understand a certain trigger-happiness on the part of the people that wanted that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T15:51:13.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5012" CreationDate="2013-09-24T16:58:15.293" Score="1" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, editing the (long inactive) question to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add trivial tags, like &lt;em&gt;faq&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change tags to synonymous tags, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Classical Mechanics&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Newtonian Mechanics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Correct insignificant grammatical errors, e.g. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why did the Earth &lt;em&gt;cooled&lt;/em&gt; down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why did the Earth &lt;em&gt;cool&lt;/em&gt; down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing substantial portions of other answers, summarizing the edit as &lt;em&gt;removed crap&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11484" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-09-25T14:08:22.083" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T14:17:51.747" Title="Why does the community allow or even encourage seemingly meaningless edits to questions and answers?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5002" CreationDate="2013-09-24T17:15:48.250" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't, really. People shouldn't make edits unless they represent a nontrivial improvement to the question. But note that tag changes are often nontrivial, because people use tags for filtering and also for understanding the context of a question, so it's relatively important to have accurate tags on questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing tags are chosen as they are for a reason, generally; for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; is more general than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;. The former encompasses Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, and is used in particular when one wants to indicate non-quantum mechanics. So even something that may look like a trivial edit, i.e. changing one of those tags to the other, often isn't. If you think you see two synonymous tags, you can ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; or here on meta to see if they should be merged, but there's a decent chance they are separate for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T17:15:48.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-26T05:19:31.500" Score="-21" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5002/why-does-the-community-allow-or-even-encourage-seemingly-meaningless-edits-to-qu&quot;&gt;Well, the community really doesn't like editing, even good ones&lt;/a&gt;, and now supports  crackpottery, there;'s no point of the editing feature. Please disable it to avoid such nonsense in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, until (or if not) this feature is incorporated, I'll continue editing though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I'm only suggesting this for Phys.SE, not the entire SE network.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T21:10:58.113" Title="Please disable the editing feature" Tags="|feature-request|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5002" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:09:07.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I really discouraged from correcting spelling and grammatical mistakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78610/why-comets-have-tails&quot;&gt;changing &quot;tale&quot; to &quot;tail&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is trivial in the sense that it doesn't affect the meaning of the question, but it makes a big difference to the way visitors will perceive this site. Do we really wish to encourage the stereotype that scientists are illiterate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:09:07.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:29:08.310" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE sites are intended to act as a reservoir of knowledge, and I find them pretty good in this respect. The best answers are almost blog articles in that they don't just answer the question but explain the issues around the answer and sometimes even related material. It takes a lot of time and effort to write a really good answer and it continually astonishes me that busy academics are willing to take the time out of trying to do their day job. I won't name any names to spare your blushes, but you know who you are :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, everyone makes silly mistakes when typing answers, especially since the pressures of real life mean answers are sometimes rushed. My answers are often edited to correct spelling and grammatical errors, and I will edit answers whenever I notice such errors. Such editing is an important part of making the site useful for future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rarer that I'll edit the meat of an answer since that seems a bit rude. Typically I'd ping the author and suggest clarifications or corrections. I'd almost never edit a question I perceived as lazy or crackpottery because I think such questions are best ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So good edits are an &lt;strong&gt;essential&lt;/strong&gt; part of how this site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is obviously part of the ongoing campaign against the lazy and crackpot. I find such questions just as annoying as everyone else does, but there are a huge army of the lazy and crackpot out there, and anyone who thinks edits are a useful weapon against them is sadly deluded. Just downvote, or if you have the reputation vote to close, and don't do anything that going to bring attention to unsatisfactory questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think we should have a &quot;could be answered in 5 seconds using Google&quot; tag and reason for closing, but that's a meta post for another day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:29:08.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5000" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:32:22.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A badge is a reward for taking the time and effort to make the site better. Removing a downvote does not negate the effort you've put in, so you still deserve the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:32:22.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:38:44.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ability to edit any post is one of the major features of the Stack Exchange system, disabling it would make the site much worse. There is virtually no chance at all that SE would disable editing entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even though the ability to edit is very useful in general, there are certain types of edits that have more drawbacks than advantages. Every edit adds some overhead as it bumps the question to the frontpage for review. A high frequency of edits can drown out the actual new content on the frontpage, in such a case even if the edits themselves are good, the effect of all the edits at once in a short time is negative as it makes the frontpage useless for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a question is still new and on the frontpage, there is no disadvantage to bumping it for even a minor edit. Though one should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; try to fix everything about a post, and not fix a typo while leaving other large errors unfixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For old questions the situation changes a bit. Significant edits are always welcome, but there is some disagreement about minor fixes. Personally I still think that fixing typos and grammar mistakes is worth it for old questions, with the restriction that I would not go and hunt for this kind of stuff to fix, and that I would be especially careful to try and fix every problem in that post to avoid further, unnecessary bumps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions that are likely to be deleted anyway should not be edited at all. Unless you make an edit that would fix the question and make it fit for reopening, one should not edit closed questions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radical edits are generally discouraged. If you disagree strongly with an answer, just post another answer yourself and downvote (or even flag/vote to delete) the other answer. The exception are questions that would be closed if they stay unedited. Drastic edits to make a question follow the site rules is generally acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:38:44.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2013-09-26T13:57:21.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nah, editing is good. Editing is nice. The real problem here is with what's displayed on the home page. The questions and answers with the most recent activity are displayed. This 'activity' is too broad. Here's what I propose (someone must have probably proposed the same thing in the past):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone edits a question or its answers, let there be a checkbox discussing the nature of his edit. It could have options like:&#xA;&quot;Fixed formula in answer&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Minor typo fixed in question&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Retagged for more clarity&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the field he checked in the box, pages can be considered 'active' or not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28244" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T13:57:21.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5002" CreationDate="2013-09-26T13:59:28.083" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Some notes on the application of site privileges&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All site privileges should be used judiciously.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a long term goal we &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; like to see good grammar, usage and spelling predominate on the site. However, we also don't want to see an endless stream of one-word edits. This is a major reason for the six-character minimum on suggested edits: to accustom users to the idea that edits should be generally be significant in size as well as correct in what they edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other users may not want to see the stylistic feel of their work changed by another person simply because the editor has a different personal style. It doesn't need to be &lt;em&gt;the way you would have done&lt;/em&gt; it needs to be &lt;em&gt;correct and clear&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't start a fight over it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone rolls back an edit &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; reinstate it. Doing so makes it about the egos of the people involved. Let it go: it does not reflect on your personal worth. If you think the edit really was necessary, flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't take it personally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone fixing your spelling errors isn't personal. Neither is someone rolling back an edit. Nor their posting some unscientific nonsense. Again, this does not reflect on your personal worth. We have mechanisms for handing these problems without needing to get your dander up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't try to make some kind of subtle statement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tagging of questions is not a system for rating them. Nor for marking which questions are interesting and which boring. It is purely a system for categorizing the kinds of physics content each question touches on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither edits nor the edit messages should be used as a place to express your opinion about a post. You rate posts for quality by &lt;em&gt;voting&lt;/em&gt;. You rate a post's appropriateness by voting or not voting to close (assuming you have that power) or by flagging spam and offensive dreck.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be professional&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site aims to be a milieu for professional scientists, skilled and capable amateurs and those aspiring to be one. That calls for a certain amount of decorum, and certainly for grown-up behavior. If you wouldn't want your mom or the hiring committee at your next job to see, think twice before doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-09-26T14:17:51.747" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T14:17:51.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2013-09-26T21:10:58.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I am posting as one of the community, not on their behalf though only on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a community member, I appreciate substantial and effective edits to any post, and especially on my own.  By substantial and effective,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what I mean&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is a plethora of grammatical, spelling etc errors - making it readable&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without changing the meaning of the post, fixing terminology&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what it does not and NEVER will mean&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;changing the meaning because someone disagrees with the notion put forward&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vandalism of any kind&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;putting meanings that should be included in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a way of bumping inactive posts to the front.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as a &lt;strong&gt;member of the community&lt;/strong&gt;, I do want edits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29350" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T21:10:58.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-28T11:51:01.097" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using Chrome (Version 29.0.1547.76 m), and lately whether I'm on physics.stackexchange, or on mathematica.stackexchange, when I'm writing a long question, usually with a lot of equations in latex, my browser freezes for a couple of seconds, and crashes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily I can just go back, and forward and the question is still there, but my title is gone, so I need to put that again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still it's kinda annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any of you have similar problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3416" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-09-28T12:09:02.900" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T12:09:02.900" Title="Does anybody experience freezing and chrashing of browser while on SE?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5018" CreationDate="2013-09-28T13:51:49.687" Score="2" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; has deleted my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65942/23119&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, Community only deletes questions upon a certain number (6?) of  &quot;Spam&quot; and &quot;Offensive&quot; flags. What's so spam-like or offensive about that post? Here's the content for those with less than 10k099 rep and non-mods:       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Why isn't there a Heterotic string theory which tensors the fermionic state with the Type II state?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Heterotic (HO and HE) string is found by tensoring the left movers&#xA;  of the bosonic string theory state and the right movers of the Type II&#xA;  string theory state: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$|ψ_H⟩=|ψ_B⟩⊗|ψ_{II}⟩$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bosonic state is of course based on the Polyakov Action. Now, what&#xA;  if we had another state (I'll call it the k-heterotic state) which is&#xA;  formed by tensoring the fermionic string theory state and the type II&#xA;  state. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$|ψ_H⟩=|ψ_F⟩⊗|ψ_II⟩$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fermionic string theory state is based on&#xA;  the Dirac Action: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$S_F=S_{RNS}−S_B$$ &#xA;  Why is this theory not consistent?&#xA;  Whether the bosonic state is chosen or the fermionic state, how does&#xA;  that matter? Is it because the Dirac Action is imaginary (since it has&#xA;  an i outside the integral if one expands out the Dirac matrix&#xA;  fermionic field product)? Does it have anything to do with that?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I wonder if these flaggers were sockpuppets of each other, because I had suddenly started to get 4 downvotes on the mentioned question since  a couple of (20?) days back, which is surprising, because it was initially quite upvoted. So I wonder if the same people had maybe serial flagged this post   and gotten it deleted??? Indicating to me some sort of sockpuppetry...               &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p3BpV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, these serial downvotes have occured on some others of  my posts, so I hope they don't get deleted too?  Or have they already?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially strange (and dangerous), because it doesn't turn up in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/23119&quot;&gt;recent deleted questions&lt;/a&gt; either,...      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Please undelete this question on String Theory" Tags="|support|status-completed|questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5017" CreationDate="2013-09-28T16:41:56.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently it was automatically deleted (cf &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/78048/&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have undeleted it, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/198710/should-we-really-have-removedeadquestions-on-smaller-sites&quot;&gt;also requested that this particular autodelete functionality be turned off for smaller sites.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T16:41:56.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="772" CreationDate="2013-09-28T22:20:43.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a user called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; that undertakes a number of useful background tasks, like take possession of up- and down-votes from deleted users (for more detail see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19738/who-is-the-community-user&quot;&gt;Who is the Community user?&lt;/a&gt;). In particular, the system bumps old unanswered questions to the top of the front page every so often to help them get answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens, the link to the question will show Community as the last active user on that question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o7iws.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is some other name, then the question has had some activity recently. To be taken to the last active post in that thread, click on the timestamp:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e3Cq7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T22:20:43.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T01:04:26.767" Score="7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just stumbled on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/94000/184688&quot;&gt;this fantastic list of magic shortcuts&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supported magic links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[meta]&lt;/code&gt; – link to the current site's Meta; link text is the site name (e.g. &amp;quot;Super User Meta&amp;quot;). Does nothing if the site doesn't have (or already is) a Meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[main]&lt;/code&gt; – like [meta], just the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt; – link to the edit page for the post the comment is on, i.e. /posts/{id}/edit. Link text is &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; (capitalization is respected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ ... ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ask]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[answer]&lt;/code&gt; – link to the &amp;quot;How to Ask&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;How to Answer&amp;quot; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[something.se]&lt;/code&gt; – link to something.stackexchange.com, if that site exists. Link text is the site name. Use &lt;code&gt;[ubuntu.se]&lt;/code&gt; for Ask Ubuntu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[edit]&lt;/code&gt;, and with the addition of &lt;code&gt;[chat-faq]&lt;/code&gt;, these also work in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and they do, in fact, render correctly (see comments below). This makes me think of one particular link I keep giving to people: the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we have [homework-policy] magicize to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/&quot;&gt;Homework Policy&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T06:48:56.763" Title="Can we have a magic link to the homework policy?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|links|markdown|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5020" CreationDate="2013-09-29T03:02:40.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Magic links are only implemented for standard URLs that are present on every site, so unless we hear otherwise from the developers, I would not expect this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T03:02:40.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5023" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-29T05:08:04.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T05:08:04.983" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T05:08:04.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5024" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-29T05:08:04.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T05:08:04.983" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T05:08:04.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5020" CreationDate="2013-09-29T06:16:40.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from David's answer, I  use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; for linking to the policy. I've saved a comment with the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please see [our homework policy](http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/a/715/7433). We expect homework and homework-like problems to have some effort put into them, and deal with conceptual issues. If you edit your question to explain (1) What you have tried, (2) the concept you have trouble with, and (3) your level of understanding, I'll be happy to reopen this. (Flag this message for ♦ attention with a custom message, or reply to me in the comments with `@Manishearth` to notify me)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the close reason covers much of this now (indeed, one of the reasons for the close reason was to  incorporate the boilerplate comments into the system, enabling users to focus on the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; problem in the question), I still use this for getting the link to the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T06:16:40.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T12:27:40.700" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this questions are off topic (they might fit in CogSci).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first asks if brightness is physichological, which of course is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/66883/is-light-brightness-subjective-or-can-it-be-quantified&quot;&gt;Is light brightness subjective or can it be quantified?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second asks about time perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68117/why-do-we-feel-the-passing-of-time&quot;&gt;Why do we feel the passing of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T00:45:20.603" Title="Should subjective questions be closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T12:33:28.107" Score="1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question hit me when I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2378/what-is-our-location-relative-to-the-big-bang&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which I know two brilliant youtube answers for it. I already posted my answer, but it would be much nicer if I could embed and include the videos in my answer, so there would be no need to open another link to get the whole answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking around in the mother meta, I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66397/provide-a-way-to-embed-videos-in-answers&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;; and in an answer there is pointed that embedding videos has been enabled in some sites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;music&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;scifi&lt;/a&gt;. Can we discuss the pros and cons of allowing videos on Physics SE, and make a decision &#xA;about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24791" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:11.907" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T23:57:59.927" Title="Should we allow embedding videos in questions or answers?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5027" CreationDate="2013-09-29T12:36:23.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Subjective questions are closed; but neither of these are subjective. The first is a terminology question (it's phrased badly but I guess it could pass).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is a physics question, though some of the answers are biological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T14:01:08.697" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T14:01:08.697" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5027" CreationDate="2013-09-29T13:48:13.353" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm always uneasy when these types of question get closed. The problem is that for us, as experienced physicists, it's obvious that they have a strong subjective element - but for a novice this isn't obvious at all, and so it seems to the OP as if they are asking a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason I think the correct thing to do is to write an answer explaining the specific reasons why the phenomenon in question has more to do with biology and perception than with physics. A good answer along these lines will be helpful to other physics novices as well, and hence it's a constructive thing to have on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-09-30T00:45:20.603" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T00:45:20.603" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T16:00:27.990" Score="8" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the current policy about questions which are easily answered googling?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This question is probably a duplicate but I'm trying to find a definitive answer since most of them are quite old).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have this doubt because I've seen so many questions that can be answered with I'm feeling lucky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78698/what-is-the-deepest-man-made-underground-tunnel&quot;&gt;What is the deepest man-made underground tunnel?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68109/what-processes-occur-when-a-meteor-enters-the-atmosphere&quot;&gt;What processes occur when a meteor enters the atmosphere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68588/how-does-the-ocean-polarize-light&quot;&gt;How does the Ocean polarize light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78908/difference-between-fraunhofer-and-fresnel-diffraction/78913#78913&quot;&gt;Difference Between Fraunhofer and Fresnel Diffraction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any consensus about low effort questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people are against asking them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In fact, asking a question on Stack Overflow is the absolute &lt;strong&gt;last thing you ever want to do&lt;/strong&gt;. You want to avoid it at all costs. You want to think of it as a horrible shame1 that will forever haunt you and pass down from you to your descendants. You want very much to find your answer some other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others think the opposite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the contrary, &lt;strong&gt;you should ask first before googling&lt;/strong&gt;, so that the information gets here :) you don't even need to search SO first, just as you're asking check the list of possible duplicates&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Search SO first&#xA;  If no answer, then Google&#xA;  If answer found, post community wiki&#xA;  If no answer is found post question on SO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No question is too trivial or too &quot;newbie&quot;. (&lt;em&gt;This has been removed from the FAQ&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it's not on Stack Overflow already, then ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with posting questions that are easily Googled. I've sometimes found answers to my questions with Google and still gone to SO to ask. How will SO have the answer for future Googlers to find if nobody asks the questions? There are two FAQ entries about that, too: one and two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the case they are discouraged but can't be flagged what should we do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote and comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer quoting Google's first result and include keywords&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is ridiculous to encourage them and still apply 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Correct flagging&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen that this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78706/how-was-the-speed-of-light-discovered&quot;&gt;How Was the Speed of Light Discovered?&lt;/a&gt;) was closed as off-topic. I think that the selected flag was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework-like&lt;/strong&gt; questions should ask about a specific physics concept and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this applies only to homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to create a new flag like &lt;strong&gt;no research effort&lt;/strong&gt; (which is much more clear)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry for asking this question :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18620/do-you-google-before-asking-on-stackoverflow?rq=1&quot;&gt;Do you google before asking on StackOverflow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5280/embrace-the-non-googlers&quot;&gt;Embrace the non-Googlers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8724/how-should-we-deal-with-google-questions&quot;&gt;How should we deal with Google questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22034/to-google-or-not-to-google-complexity-of-so-questions&quot;&gt;To Google or not to Google...Complexity of SO questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8724/how-should-we-deal-with-google-questions&quot;&gt;How should we deal with Google questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/182266/how-much-research-effort-is-expected-of-stack-overflow-users&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/182266/how-much-research-effort-is-expected-of-stack-overflow-users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94/level-of-questions-what-do-we-do-now?rq=1&quot;&gt;Level of questions: what do we do now ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14/wikipedia-like-questions/121#121&quot;&gt;Wikipedia like questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-basic-is-too-basic/9#9&quot;&gt;How basic is too basic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/&quot;&gt;Are some questions too simple?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T14:53:15.160" Title="What is the current policy about questions which are easily answered googling?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5033" CreationDate="2013-09-29T16:12:20.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't like when questions are easily found with a search on Google. But I recall reading something on SO's meta where they wanted an answer from the SE network to always be the first one that shows up on Google when people search. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you found the info on Google on another site, you should reproduce (without copying obviously) the answer here so the SE answer &lt;strong&gt;becomes&lt;/strong&gt; the easily Google'd answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that's SE's view -- they want to always be the first link. I still personally don't know that I agree, but I usually just happily skip those questions (usually with a downvote) or I will leave a comment that says &quot;Have you tried typing [really obvious search term] into your favorite search engine?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That usually gets the point across. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T16:12:20.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5033" CreationDate="2013-09-29T19:23:14.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's a really basic Google search that yields the answer - as in, you copy and paste the question title into Google and the answer is in the top 4 or 5 results then I'd say a downvote is warranted. After all, the tooltip that pops up when you hover over the downvote button includes a statement about insufficient research effort, which is exactly what you're talking about. But beyond that, I don't know that there's a policy about it. In addition to the downvote, you can of course comment or answer the question, as tpg2114 suggested. If a close reason happens to apply, certainly vote to close (and don't answer in that case), but I don't think any of the close reasons apply to insufficient research specifically, and I'm not sure that's the sort of thing closing is meant to address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T19:23:14.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5033" CreationDate="2013-09-30T05:31:31.980" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree in with the principle here, I tend to err on the side of &quot;sure, Google can say &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; but does it actually lead to a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; answer?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, someone could very well show how the long-compared-to-focal-length limit turns the Fresnel equations into Fraunhofer ones, and maybe give a great physically intuitive reason why Fraunhofer diffraction leads to Fourier transforms (I've seen it done). Or take that meteor question. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76045/why-do-meteors-explode&quot;&gt;very similar one&lt;/a&gt; was asked by another user, with about as much prior research being done, but several great answers resulted anyway. Maybe it was more than the OP &quot;deserved,&quot; but I certainly had fun researching an answer for that, and the end result is a synthesis of ideas that was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; found in the first page of Google hits, and indeed may not have been written quite like that anywhere else on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, we want to encourage better questions. But at the same time I feel bad neglecting a good scientific inquiry just because the first person to ask it here did so flippantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that, unlike SO, we deal more with conceptual issues (&quot;why?&quot; &quot;how?&quot;) rather than one-word answers (&quot;what is the name of the function...?&quot; &quot;which package has...?&quot;). Or at least that seems like a reasonable ideal. Look-up questions should probably deserve more scrutiny, since if the number is easily found (such as &quot;depth of the deepest mine&quot;) there is little more we can add. Difficult-to-locate numbers are better (&quot;what is the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; limit on Lorentz violation from astronomical observations?&quot;); actual &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; are still best, though, as even if these can be found using a simple search, there's always room for giving a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; exposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T05:31:31.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5038" CreationDate="2013-09-30T07:02:21.880" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to ask the OP of a question to select your answer as the selected answer when you know that s/he has entirely understood your answer and that s/he is satisifed by it in the comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/76572/29011&quot;&gt;in this answer&lt;/a&gt; I completely explained the mechanics of the pulley sliding on the table and one can see that this accurately answers the OP's questions from the comments. Is it okay for me to remind the OP to choose my answer as the selected answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29011" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T12:14:54.350" Title="Soliciting Selected Answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5037" CreationDate="2013-09-30T07:41:06.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly fine and even encouraged to remind a poster of SE etiquette, in particular that they should upvote helpful answers and accept the best one that directly answered their question, if there is one. But it's not OK to &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; someone how to vote or which answer to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take the actual example from the answer you're asking about, the comment you posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, since you've understood the answer, mark this as this as the accepted answer by clicking the checkbox on side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not appropriate. But this would be fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you think this is the best answer, could you mark it as the accepted answer by clicking the checkbox on the side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't something that gets you in trouble just for doing it once, but if we notice someone &lt;em&gt;repeatedly&lt;/em&gt; making the former sort of comment (telling people how to vote), that will probably be the basis for some sort of disciplinary action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T07:41:06.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5033" CreationDate="2013-09-30T21:04:22.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, OP should before asking his question X on Phys.SE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Google &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Check Wikipedia. In practice this means Goggle &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=X+wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's it! The two internet searches (1) and (2) constitute a sufficient research effort for a question on Phys.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The rest of this answer is meant as helpful suggestions to potential questioners, and should not be considered mandatory.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great (but optional) if OP would also: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Search Phys.SE for related posts: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+X&quot;&gt;is:q X&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chances are that [with OP's knowledge from the above queries (1-3)] he will able to pose a better and more focused question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Finally, OP could pepper his question post with relevant links (from in and outside Phys.SE), spell out abbreviations, etc., to make it accessible to the reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T14:53:15.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-01T17:18:49.947" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know what the parameter's on which a question asked by a user is marked as off-topic or put on hold for example look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/79002/launch-angle-with-only-intial-velocity-and-time&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much I know this question was related to physics problem and it also contains the all required tag which specifies what the question is related to so how it is off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the below reason for question to be off-topic was as followed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as much I think the question was not up to the mark of the site's standard for question to be asked but how it is off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9023" OwnerDisplayName="Akash" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T19:16:08.327" Title="What is the point for placing a question on hold or marking it as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2013-10-01T19:16:08.327" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Off-topic&quot; means more than just laterally off-topic. It also encompasses the concept of &quot;too low-level&quot; or &quot;this flavor question doesn't belong here.&quot; So there are at least three broad categories of off-topicness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lateral:&lt;/strong&gt; The subject matter doesn't even belong here. Maybe it's engineering, maybe it's pure math, maybe it's about programming. It might have been inspired by physics, but in fact there's no more physics left to be done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low level:&lt;/strong&gt; By this I don't necessarily mean the subject matter itself is low level (as far as I know we don't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; have a lower limit on content level), but rather that the question itself doesn't show any work. Saying &quot;I don't get something, please make me understand&quot; just doesn't cut it here. If a person is really that lost on, e.g., a homework assignment, the teacher should be sought out for extra explanation. Or a personal tutor may be needed. Or really just more work needs to be put in.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wrong flavor:&lt;/strong&gt; Off-topic might also mean that that the question asked is a question only in the technical syntactic sense, but that really it is being used as an open invitation for users to talk about a topic. Even if the subject is physics, any question that asks &quot;hey, what do y'all think of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;cool thing&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&quot; is decidedly off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular question suffers from the second point - it gives the setup, and then says something like &quot;help, what do I do with this?&quot; Yes we could give the answer, but &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; would be served by that. Even the OP wouldn't actually have learned anything; at best he could say he's memorized how to solve this particular problem and is one step closer to that stage in life so many people aim for where they never have to think for themselves again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, &quot;off-topic&quot; should be interpreted more broadly than &quot;not having to do with physics.&quot; Perhaps we could use different terms to distinguish these ideas, but eventually we would end up with an overabundance of specific &quot;bad question&quot; categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I'm a firm believer that students are &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; truly learning unless they are challenged to the point where they struggle with the concepts. After all, learning is about &lt;em&gt;thinking&lt;/em&gt; in new ways, not about memorizing facts, formulas, or even procedures for solving problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T19:16:08.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-02T19:53:27.080" Score="-9" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know why [user] is suspended again, this time until Ago 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody explain to me what happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T19:21:24.690" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T19:21:24.690" Title="Why is [user] again suspended?" Tags="|discussion|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5042" CreationDate="2013-10-02T20:01:45.903" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we have said repeatedly, we (moderators) do not share information about specific suspensions with anyone except other moderators and the SE team.* This means that the moderators will not explain to you what happened, and nobody else on this site knows what happened. While other non-moderator users may be able to give you examples of behavior that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have led to a suspension, they don't know what actually &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; lead to the suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for the Stack Exchange team, although I highly doubt they will discuss specific cases, either. Though they do frequently &lt;em&gt;review&lt;/em&gt; suspensions internally, to make sure nothing untoward is going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, though, I will say that suspensions are imposed for violations of the site rules as outlined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. The first two items on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;behavior page&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;be honest&quot; and &quot;be nice&quot;) cover most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*If a suspended user decides to reveal information about their own suspension, the moderators may then be permitted to respond. But as a rule, we tend not to do so because we've found that it rarely leads to anything productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T20:35:01.840" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-03T03:57:25.147" Score="5" ViewCount="473" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/79313/is-everything-in-the-universe-discrete&quot;&gt;is everything in the universe discrete&lt;/a&gt;&quot; was quite rapidly put on hold as a duplicate of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9720/does-the-planck-scale-imply-that-spacetime-is-discrete&quot;&gt;does the Planck scale imply that spacetime is discrete&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. I understand my question might have other issues as well, but it was closed for being a duplicate, so I would like to address that directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited the question and posted comments to explain why I don't think they are the same question, but I don't think anybody saw them. There was no discussion, no attention to the question; just closed, moved on, and forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on the situation is that my question is more general than the planck-scale question. The planck-scale is asking if spacetime specifically is discrete. And the questions and answers there are even more specific than that, they are talking about how the Planck scale is related to spacetime being discrete. My question is asking if everything in the universe is discrete, which is not equivalent, at least as much as I understand it. I did not find the answer to my question in the planck-scale question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my question a duplicate? If yes, please help me to understand why, because I don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26239" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T09:53:28.563" Title="Is my question &quot;Is everything in the universe discrete&quot; a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2013-10-03T07:36:32.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) A general advice if you feel that your question Y is not a duplicate of question X (and your question Y is not receiving any responds from the Phys.SE community), would be to explain better and give more concrete examples of Y which do not belong to X. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) Questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is &lt;strong&gt;everything&lt;/strong&gt; in the universe discrete&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt; in the universe that we know with relative certainty is not discrete?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are formulated too broad and vague, and your post runs the risk of not being taken seriously from the very beginning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III) Moreover, I would suggest to be more specific than, say,  &lt;em&gt;quantization of classical theories often leads to observables which take discrete values,&lt;/em&gt; since the subject of quantization is by itself broad and already covered in many posts on Phys.SE. For instance, various aspects of mass quantization is asked e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/122/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/4238/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6461/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T09:13:59.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-03T19:22:01.367" Score="-4" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;What/who determines if some questions are homework or not? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's not quite clear that which one is homework like and which one is not! Therefore the mechanism by which some questions are marked as closed or on hold should be modified to prevent probable mistakes of considering some questions as homework like. &#xA;When some one tag a question as homework like and put it on hold it can't be answered anymore. And because of new questions, after a short while it'll be removed from the first page of newest questions. I think, in relation to a question on SE, normally most views (Or let me say the highest rate of the views ) occur at first hours of asking it , which is nearer to the time at which it has been asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't it mean if we put a question on hold by mistake, it will reduce the chance of finding the answer for that question as quick as possible?&#xA;Shouldn't some rules be defined and established to prevent this and similar instances? &#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29374" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T21:27:56.760" Title="who says this question really look like a homework?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5046" CreationDate="2013-10-03T19:59:51.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meta question (v1) addresses really two separate and independent issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When to close a question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When to tag a question with the homework tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are in principle two separate and independent decisions and actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reasons for closure are discussed in many places on meta. [If I find a good link I will include it here later. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1048/2451&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; is currently not quite up to date.] &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Concerning whether a question should be tagged with the homework tag, let me first of all say, that I think the issue is too minor to e.g. start a back-and-forth edit war over. The usual practice is that if the question looks like homework, it will be tagged with the homework tag, if not directly by OP himself, then by someone from the community. Sometimes OP disagrees with this. Then he will usually be made aware of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. However, the final decision about tags is usually left for OP to decide for himself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T21:27:56.760" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5046" CreationDate="2013-10-03T21:27:47.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address one of the confusions in this question, tagging questions as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; and closing them as off-topic are independent concepts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bhomework%5D+closed%3Ano&quot;&gt;Searching the main site for non-closed homework questions&lt;/a&gt; currently turns up a healthy ~1800 such questions. (For comparison, only &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; beats that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T21:27:47.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5050" CreationDate="2013-10-04T05:20:21.377" Score="6" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last time I asked for a book in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76484/book-on-optics-in-curved-space-time&quot;&gt;Book on optics in curved space-time&lt;/a&gt; , the question was closed as being 'primarily opinion-based'. David Z explained clearly why it was not appropriate and suggested I reword it. He said a change in the book policy might cause a shift in the present policy. I see many questions here being closed for similar reasons. But each question carries a unique story and a context. Every book recommendation given still constitutes a definite answer to the question. In spite of the question being closed, I still see people responding in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can appreciate where the moderators are coming from, I have found that other SE websites like the Math SE are more welcoming of such questions. The book list is not really sufficient. While I imagine most people can get what they want in this list, it is insufficient for more specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoy collecting valuable (both pedagogically and historically) works in science and mathematics (even more than reading them :D). So sometimes my requirements might be specific.  So I have to ask, if the requirements are not easily met by the book list, is there anything I can gain from Physics.SE (without compromising the specificity of my requirements)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28244" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T05:28:12.943" Title="The present status on the book policy" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5049" CreationDate="2013-10-04T05:28:12.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we allowed every little variation on a book recommendation, those questions could easily overwhelm the site. We don't want that to happen, because this is a site for technical content, not for reading lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, even though every book recommendation question carries its own context and you might think that'd be enough to differentiate them, there are large classes of these questions that wind up with the same set of answers. For example, a question that asks about black holes will collect the same answers (or a subset of the answers) as a question that asks about general relativity, and that's why the former is typically closed as a duplicate of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, we are approaching a consensus on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/reevaluating-the-book-policy&quot;&gt;new policy&lt;/a&gt; which will allow a vastly expanded set of book recommendation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T05:28:12.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-05T07:44:39.363" Score="12" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions here are about the content, and not about the layout of the site. (Which is good, content &gt;&gt; layout, in terms of importance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new in SE, as you can probably see, however, I have a few recommendations, hopefully they're not frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is, when one clicks on a topic in physics.SE, the title (in the main site) changes color. That happens so one can see if we clicked on a topic already or not. However, that change in color is almost unnoticeable. Is it me only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to change the color of clicked topics (&lt;code&gt;a:visited&lt;/code&gt;)? Would you want to have it changed, as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29953" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-10-06T06:17:52.367" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T06:17:52.367" Title="Physics.SE color layout change" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-05T10:08:42.443" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following thing has happened to me a couple of times recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I come across a question that looks good but has a few minor errors. Someone has suggested an edit which address some of them, so I accept it. It then says that the edit has to be approved by one other person before it will be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit later on I realise that there are some other things that should be improved, so I try to make an edit of my own - but I can't, because when I click on edit I just see the diff of the suggested edit, with a sign saying it needs to be approved by other users before it can be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems a bit strange to me, because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) I have enough rep to edit questions without it needing to be reviewed, so if I just rejected the suggested edits and made the same changes myself, they would happen instantly (but that would of course be mean); and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Approving someone else's edit seems to lock me out of being able to make my own edits or even view the edit history until someone else also approves it, which is just weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these things seems to create a strange disincentive to approve edits from other users. So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the rationale for this behaviour? Why do I have the power to make my own edits without needing approval but not the power to approve someone else's edits without further approval?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I really completely locked out of editing the post in such a case, or is there some other way I can make my own edit or look at the edit history?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Steps to reproduce&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe part of the problem is a bug, or at least an unintended consequence of the rep system. Since it's not easy to explain in writing, here is a series of screenshots illustrating the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a question with a suggested edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LhNrA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I click on &quot;edit (1)&quot; to see the suggested edit, and I see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EQaSA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a minor cosmetic change, but the question is only 5 hours old, so this seems appropriate and I press &quot;Approve&quot;, which gives me the following message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lxaIy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I close the message and go back to the question. I refreshed the page at this point, just to make sure that wasn't the issue. The question now looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/84TAx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. exactly the same as before, because the suggested edit hasn't been approved yet. So far so good. But suppose I now spot a more serious issue with the question that I'd missed before. I want to fix it, so again I click on &quot;edit (1)&quot;, but &lt;strong&gt;this does not take me to the edit queue&lt;/strong&gt;. Instead I see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6sQJy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't able to fit the whole dialogue box into the screen shot, but there is no link to the edit queue at the bottom. Clicking &quot;(more)&quot; just reveals some stats but no link to the edit queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I mean by being &quot;locked out of editing&quot;. The edit queue is replaced by this dialogue, with no option to edit the post in any way, until another user approves the suggested edit. Sklivvz commented that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if there is a pending suggested edit, one can get to the review queue by clicking on the &quot;edit(1)&quot; at the bottom of the post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is the intended behaviour then the current behaviour is a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T01:43:07.847" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T01:43:07.847" Title="Is it possible to edit a question if you've already approved someone else's edit?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-05T11:06:43.850" Score="8" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to use the site to see if your ideas are plausible? The questions I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/79690/&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(1)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/79709/&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(2)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; don't contain any hypothetical technologies or physics, only hypothetical planets, but since I am trying to figure out if a specific scenario is possible according to physics they end up reading a bit like homework questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know how to do math, but I don't know much Physics. When asking these questions I am hoping people can explain the relationship between the variables related to the phenomena and perhaps suggest the variables that have an effect that I hadn't considered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing that concerns me is that I am looking for the answer of a question that I don't quite now how to ask, other than to be very specific. However I also think that were the relationships explained adequately it wouldn't be very difficult for me to reword the question in more general terms that someone else might search for and would have also satisfied me had it been in the search results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly I've been trying to read more about homework policy than science fiction policy because when I give all the specifics, to a layman like myself, it looks as if it came straight out of a text book, though someone more versed in the subject might immediately spot some naive assumptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way I am posting these questions knowing that they will be likely altered at least to make more sense if not also to be generalized. But the system has no way of verifying of my intent, and it might look like I am asking someone else to do my work for me. So I am curious as to how much tolerance there is for very specific problems in the context of research for science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far though it looks like at the level of specificity in my examples they are fine, as no one has complained or downvoted either of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30594" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T18:02:01.033" Title="May I ask questions I come across while attempting to write science fiction?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5052" CreationDate="2013-10-05T12:01:47.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're not locked. Think of it this way. The SE engine can't just rely on one guy, believing solely on his arbitration. That's why it does this 50% believing on an user's decision on review queues. It &lt;em&gt;varies&lt;/em&gt;. For instance, it's 20% for VTC queue, 33% on LQ queue (I've seen that one time, when I've recommended deleting the post, while two reviewers before me, also did the same - &lt;em&gt;fishy&lt;/em&gt;), etc. In case of mods, the engine's policy breaks down. They being the arbiters, the system has to put its 100% belief on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, now you approve some edit, you fill the 50% belief. And someone rejects it, the 50% belief is gone and now, 2 more persons have to fill it up. If on the contrary, both persons rejected it and the belief goes to -100%, the suggested edit is declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the way it is, because &lt;em&gt;(sometimes)&lt;/em&gt; a &gt;2k user might think that some edit is good, while the next guy (and the following guys) may think that it isn't (maybe &lt;em&gt;too minor&lt;/em&gt; or something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, that's not the end of story. You have an &lt;strong&gt;IMPROVE&lt;/strong&gt; button sandwiched between Reject &amp;amp; Skip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cW0Np.png&quot; alt=&quot;Improve&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You click it, and you'll get into editing the suggested users' revision. If you wanna clear some stuff, or improve it &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; (being an enthusiast), you do that. There's also a check box, asking you whether that guy has helped you in editing or, he messed things up. You check it, and he gets the &quot;+2&quot; he's been waiting for. You deselect it (it's selected as default), he has to wait forever...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h6X7I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Helpful&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I've done some naughty things. You know this immortal guy, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/&quot;&gt;community user&lt;/a&gt;. Don't you? He has helped me a lot of times. I'm always fond of decoding users' writings. Sometimes, I get the chance to review a &lt;em&gt;too minor&lt;/em&gt; suggested edit. It's less likely that I get transformed into a fool (blind). But if that happens, I click &lt;strong&gt;Approve&lt;/strong&gt;. Then, I blame myself for doing it accidentally. One day, I sneaked into the post (which I had approved by then) and edited it (just replace the &quot;questions&quot; in the hyperlink to &quot;posts&quot; and after that ID, you put &quot;edit&quot;). Now that you've gone into the post (which was the &lt;em&gt;tricky&lt;/em&gt; part), make your revision and save it. &lt;strong&gt;You're done&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, get into the revisions of the post and you'll see that the immortal guy has rejected the edit. What you've done is normal. This is what you do when you're reviewing. If you deselect the &quot;helpful&quot; check box, this is what's gonna happen. The &quot;-1&quot; guy rejects it. There's a difference in both cases. In the first case, it's registered as &lt;strong&gt;Improve&lt;/strong&gt; near your name, while in the second case, it's registered as &lt;strong&gt;Approve&lt;/strong&gt;. And below it, the community user and near that name, it's &lt;strong&gt;Reject&lt;/strong&gt;. This is where &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; users struggle to understand what's going on, where they think...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A &gt;2k user has approved the edit and the &quot;Community&quot; mod bot has rejected it? When did it start to think? How dare the thing reject it?&quot;, etc. all that kinds of of problematic thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: We do have some reviewer-spies, who shadow reviewers all time (no offense) and IMHO, it's a good habit. We can't blame people for their curiosity (in that way, our room can be active all the time). And also, the smarty guys (who've suggested the edit), who peek into the queue and check whether their edits get approved or not..!!! (so that they can have an argument with the reviewer when &lt;em&gt;time comes&lt;/em&gt;, which is a good way to subject the reviewer into test)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T12:01:47.353" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5053" CreationDate="2013-10-05T14:36:04.643" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sticking with the core idea in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/287/520&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/286/520&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Are questions related to science fiction acceptable?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: the fact that your motivation concerns writing is immaterial to the topicality of a question. As long as it is on-topic, it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't like the atmosphere question very much. Far too much going on about your plans and not enough focus on the &lt;em&gt;physics question&lt;/em&gt;. The question about getting between co-plantets(?) is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up my answer is: &lt;strong&gt;stick to the physics&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T18:02:01.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5058" CreationDate="2013-10-05T18:31:10.777" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the time I have been active in this site, I have flagged this or that comment from time to time, adding my explanation of why I did that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have never received any answer. I thought it was normal, but from reading some comments now, it seems that one should naturally expect some answer from somebody (moderators?). I have looked for any kind of menu within my profile, but I don't find any option such as an &quot;Inbox&quot; or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the moderators (or whoever) answering to my flags but I am missing them? If that is the case, how do I read such answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-12-23T03:29:27.890" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T03:29:27.890" Title="Am I missing answers to my flags? Why?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5057" CreationDate="2013-10-05T18:52:51.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should see a item &quot;helpful flags&quot; (and sometimes some unhelpful ones) in the fully informative version of your profile summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sFfz6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't see it, you probably need to view the full information. Use &quot;more info&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QeFW1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you can see it, click on the number of flags for a detailed list of how they were handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can go directly to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/[your user ID]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T18:52:51.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5044" CreationDate="2013-10-06T09:53:28.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of those flagging the question as a duplicate, so I guess I should justify my actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question isn't identical to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9720/does-the-planck-scale-imply-that-spacetime-is-discrete&quot;&gt;Does the Planck scale imply that spacetime is discrete?&lt;/a&gt;, but I felt that the physics underlying it is the same physics talked about in the other question, and if you read the answers to the other question, maybe supplemented with a bit of Googling, you'd have an answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question (and yours is a good question) rarely just has a one line answer. Typically the answer will discuss the underlying physics needed to understand the one line answer. If I answered your question my answer would have a large overlap with Luboš Motl's answer to the previous question, so it's more a case of the answer being a duplicate rather than the question being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If other users of the site disagree with the close flag they can flag to reopen the question, and if there are enough reflags the question will indeed be reopened. The fact it hasn't been suggests the other site users agree with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still interested in the subject I'd say examine the answers to the other question and try and pin down the specific issues that you feel are unresolved. Then post a new question specifically asking about those points, and if i can answer I will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T09:53:28.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2013-10-06T11:47:30.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there are no official restrictions put on &quot;Conspiracy theorists&quot; or a strict margin on when a question becomes &quot;Stupid&quot;, we could safely assume that questions are judged and authorized currently in an affable way.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Besides that, the question word &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; is not the only type that might lead to a purposeless question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How're people ok with this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't you guys think this is stupid?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What were they thinking?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When will NASA start listening to me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, you get the point.&lt;br&gt; In my opinion, Just doing all those things we could with those tools provided to us, in the absence of which moderators could be notified, would ensure a genuine silly-question could be taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user26988" LastActivityDate="2013-10-06T11:47:30.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T20:06:16.843" Score="9" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every so often we get a question that goes more or less like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm a masters/bachelor/highschool student and I really like physics and I'm really interested in (some broad physics field)/(all of physics) and I have to do a research project / would like to start a PhD in that field. What are some important/interesting/open problems in that area?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/79934/beginner-projects-in-nmr-quantum-computing&quot;&gt;Beginner projects in NMR quantum computing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These, together with most other physics careers questions, have generally been considered off-topic, with some of the more general of them being migrated or otherwise redirected to academia.se. I agree that they should be considered off-topic on the main site: they are always too specific to be of use to future visitors, they significantly diminish the S:N ratio, and they are fundamentally unanswerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Why? because implicit in these questions is a highly subjective appraisal of which topics are interesting or not. The difficulty of finding good open highschool/bachelor's/masters/PhD-level research topics aside, if you're looking to ask a question like that, ask yourself whether any of us is likely to really know what will make you 'tick' when working on a research project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However:&lt;/strong&gt; it does feel a bit like a shame that we are turning these questions down without really offering the posters any place to turn. So, therefore, I'd like to set up this thread to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) see if we can come up with some space to help people with these sort of questions (which does feel unlikely to me), or at least&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) collect some helpful ways of facing this quandary, so we can refer posters to places where they can start working towards this choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is sounding more and more like an academia.se question. What are people's thoughts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T21:46:42.950" Title="&quot;What's a good research topic?&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5061" CreationDate="2013-10-07T21:46:42.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do always have the chat room, where such questions are perfectly appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://reddit.com/r/Physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reddit's /r/Physics&lt;/a&gt; are both somewhat looser about their scope, so that such &quot;soft&quot; questions would likely be welcome there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T21:46:42.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5066" CreationDate="2013-10-15T10:14:16.630" Score="12" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/80465/are-stephen-crothers-claims-legitimate&quot;&gt;Are Stephen Crothers&amp;#39; claims legitimate?&lt;/a&gt; has made me very uneasy. I will explain why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First of all, this question is too open ended. I visited Crothers' website, looked through a lot of the papers and correspondence (mostly for my amusement) and discovered that he has a LONG list of arguments against the existence of Black Holes, the Big Bang and tonnes of other mainstream ideas in astrophysics and cosmology. I saw the first video the OP linked too and there were many claims made there too. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems the OP desires a simple explanation. This is almost impossible without going into technicalities of the Schwarzschild solution and other concepts in GTR, owing to the nature of Crothers' arguments. One can just look through the exchanges Crothers' had with many scientists, some of whom took great effort to dissect counter his arguments, to see how time-consuming this will be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beginners looking at this question will see: &#xA;i) Videos and papers of a man putting forth his 'bold' arguments.&#xA;ii) No answer technically detailed enough to dissect all the claims given in the links.&#xA;This will give beginners the impression that Crothers' has a legitimate claim to make in completely dismissing and trashing the foundations of black holes and cosmology. This could potentially mislead beginners.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE is ranked high in Google searches. This will create more publicity for Crothers' and Co. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried flagging the question. Manish told me that he would appreciate a discussion on this topic before deciding what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I have nothing against Crothers' and Co. personally and it is only after reading his emails exchange, papers and watching his videos have I come to realize the true danger of giving too much attention to people like him (who are totally closed-minded). I only hope my question on Meta doesn't publicize him further. If it does, I will probably delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28244" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-10-17T13:34:31.013" Title="Is this question admissable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5065" CreationDate="2013-10-15T17:21:36.463" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question is definitely close-able under the rubric of &quot;Unclear what you are asking,&quot; in addition to &quot;too open-ended.&quot; In the comments to that question, Ben Crowell points to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4918/how-to-deal-with-low-quality-questions-based-on-videos&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; he posed about this exact sort of thing: a link to a video, followed by the question, &quot;What's wrong with this?&quot; That's not really an answerable question, because there simply isn't enough information provided to determine what is bothering the OP about Crothers's ideas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Manishearth says, it's asking for a mainstream analysis of Crothers's ideas, so it could be salvaged by focusing on a specific aspect of Crothers's argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to that, there is the problem of some possible dishonesty of the OP of that question. In one comment, they imply that they are &quot;just a layman,&quot; but later claims to have read Schwarschild's original paper and seems to know a lot about the history of GR. To me, that discrepency is a big red flag that suggest that the OP isn't really askingthe question in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T17:21:36.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5068" CreationDate="2013-10-16T15:41:51.353" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/26988/python-student&quot;&gt;This is the user&lt;/a&gt;. (I don't think whether this can be discussed here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's quite offensive (if he doesn't like the rules, he can always go to Yahoo answers or any other forum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T13:09:18.083" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:09:18.083" Title="Should this profile description be removed?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5067" CreationDate="2013-10-16T16:21:17.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removed, and thank you for bringing that to our attention. You could also have flagged any of the user's posts and used the custom reason to explain the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T16:21:17.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5065" CreationDate="2013-10-16T17:09:24.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer was probably asked in good faith. I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/30918/stupid&quot;&gt;Stupid&lt;/a&gt; was claiming to have read Schwarzschild's paper. He was just repeating a claim on Crothers' site that Schwarzschild's paper didn't predict black holes. The claim is wrong of course: Crothers has committed the beginner's error of thinking that because a solution is expressed in different coordinates it's a different solution, but let us skip lightly over this without comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a point to be made though, and I almost posted a meta question on the subject. We all love the heroic underdog figure, and if you watch the video linked in the question Crothers is an entertaining and plausible speaker. Although the question was phrased in neutral terms Stupid was obviously predisposed to believe Crothers was correct and we wicked physicists were maliciously ignoring him. In the face of this prejudice, and without being able to resort to mathematics, how can we make a cogent argument? I wish now I had simply ignored the question. It was a bit like wrestling a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar-Baby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tar baby&lt;/a&gt; - with every attempt to disentangle myself I just got more deeply mired :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T17:09:24.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5074" CreationDate="2013-10-18T09:25:18.097" Score="10" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you wrote an answer, and people ask in the comments for details: so you answer the details in form of comments, but then, when you no longer can edit them, you would like your comments to be part now of your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to do that, without having to write the LaTeX again?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I mean, I'm not asking for being able to edit the comments, but for every user to be able to extract the code of her/his own comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9662" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-10-18T12:58:59.240" LastActivityDate="2013-10-18T12:58:59.240" Title="Accessing a LaTeX code from comments to incorporate it in the answer" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5073" CreationDate="2013-10-18T12:55:17.347" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right click on the LaTeX. Click &lt;code&gt;Show Math As&lt;/code&gt;&gt;&lt;code&gt;TeX Commands&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kibjf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-18T12:55:17.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-10-20T19:52:39.160" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gTfnh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;MIT Open Courseware&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29727" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T19:52:39.160" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-10-20T19:52:39.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2013-10-20T19:54:20.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J8rVV.png&quot; alt=&quot;KhanAcademy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29727" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T19:54:20.183" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-10-20T19:54:20.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5078" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5079" CreationDate="2013-10-22T16:55:19.213" Score="6" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/81794/29011&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to my own question to make it more polite? Around 50% of that answer criticizes my question. What is the SE policy to dealing with such answers? Should they be flagged (perhaps not this case, but in more extreme cases) or edited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29011" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-10-22T16:59:41.050" Title="Impolite answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5078" CreationDate="2013-10-22T16:59:41.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right, that was inappropriate - relatively mildly so, compared to some of what we get, but still inappropriate. I edited it to fix it. (The original is of course still visible as revision 1.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, you can edit it yourself, or you can flag it if you're not sure. Just keep in mind the cardinal rule of editing, that you should not change the essential meaning of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-10-22T16:59:41.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-23T15:52:24.670" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Serial upvoting of a single user's questions I have little doubt are detectable and reversed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about dumping the daily allotment of 40 votes in a short amount of time on many questions from many users, a method that I should add, can earn someone 4 different participation badges (including a gold one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why isn't there flood protection on voting, just like on commenting? Are those voting related badges helpful (Suffrage, Vox Populi, Civic Duty, Electorate) in the way they are currently designed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29118" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T04:42:32.053" Title="Why aren't serial upvoting of questions reversed" Tags="|discussion|badges|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5080" CreationDate="2013-10-23T15:54:57.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are reversed, just after a period of maximum 24 hours. The serial upvoting detection script is a heavy one and is run daily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find such a case that is not reversed, let the moderators know in a custom flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T15:54:57.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5080" CreationDate="2013-10-24T04:42:32.053" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, that's &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you only get 40 per day - before that restriction was put in place, folks were abusing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, we do encounter someone doing something crazy with their 40/day, but generally-speaking votes are the voter's to do with as he wishes - even if that means squandering them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T04:42:32.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-25T15:53:47.213" Score="7" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently lost commenting permissions due to offering a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I've noticed that when reading answers with comments, clicking on the &quot;add / show 1 more comments&quot; link doesn't reveal the recently added comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2rrCA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This link appears when a new comment is added to the discussion after you've loaded the page. It worked while I had commenting permissions. It doesn't work now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense to not allow me to actually &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; a comment, but I shouldn't be prevented from &lt;em&gt;showing&lt;/em&gt; the recently added comment, especially because I can view it if I reload the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I confirmed that it isn't a problem local to my browser by visiting this question from a different browser as a non-logged in user and I could reproduce the issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zYzEw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;add / show 1 more comments&quot; link doesn't work when you don't have comment permissions or are not logged in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steps to reproduce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open a second browser that doesn't have you logged into stackexchange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As your logged in user, here, in this browser window, add a comment to this question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notice the &quot;add / show 1 more comments&quot; link appear in the other browswer, that you're not logged in with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on that link.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31346" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-10-26T21:41:01.043" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T22:26:15.763" Title="The &quot;add / show 1 more comments&quot; link doesn't do anything if you don't have comment permissions" Tags="|bug|status-reproduced|design|comments|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5083" CreationDate="2013-10-25T18:41:35.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally when the site starts acting up the problem is local to your browser. Trying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;forcibly reloading the page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if that fails clearing your caches&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There shouldn't be a connection between the ability to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; comments and the ability to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T18:41:35.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5088" CreationDate="2013-10-26T16:58:34.220" Score="-2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one is gonna sound absoultely nuts, but as far as I know this here is the best site to discuss and develop mainstream physics had there been some facility to remotely do experiments on good equipment science would be developing and progressing right here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions is that even though we have developed such a fantastic community for researchers, teachers and students why aren't some really famous scientists &quot;the mainstream scientists&quot; here among us ? Are we doing something wrong ? I know that they have a community of highly qualified people in actual life but why aren't these great communities merging already ? We also have many reasearch students and scientists here, but the names of people with actual fame does not shine along some good question here and there, Is it lack of publicity or lack of standard, decorum or what ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T17:55:26.027" Title="Mainstream scientists and physics SE" Tags="|discussion|community-user|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-26T17:07:02.170" Score="1" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand we deal with mainstream physics here but as physics has been developed from philosophy only why are questions based on speculations and those which are related to looking for possibilities discouraged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: this is more what i see philosophy as: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of academic degrees, the term &quot;philosophy&quot; does not refer solely to the field of philosophy, but is used in a broader sense in accordance with its original Greek meaning, which is &quot;love of wisdom&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T08:33:47.340" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T08:33:47.340" Title="Physics vs philosophy" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5086" CreationDate="2013-10-26T17:26:37.250" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;discuss and develop mainstream physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, no, we do not &lt;em&gt;develop&lt;/em&gt; physics here. We deal with established physics.  Nor do we discuss too much (except for &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt;); the main site is not for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why aren't some really famous scientists &quot;the mainstream scientists&quot; here among us ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we do have 't Hooft, Shor, and Motl, to name a few major scientists in their respective fields. I have seen a couple others, though I can't recall which ones off the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most established scientists probably do not have the time to participate in a site like this. Plus, many may find the concept of answering questions unappealing &amp;mdash; they have better things to do with their time. When one is an expert in their field, a site like this doesn't help them as much. As a student, I find the site helpful as there are many things to learn and answering questions leads to a clarification of my own confusions. But all this requires there to be people better at physics than me to be around. From an expert's POV, there is less motivation to participate here as there are fewer people of similar knowledge and calibre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T17:26:37.250" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5086" CreationDate="2013-10-26T17:55:26.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may say so, it is easy to see why you would like to have field leading experts participate in our little community, it is not clear what we have to offer those folks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been (professionally) close enough to enough narrow gauge experts to get a sense of what their lives are like. What they want to do research; talk to their peers---by which I mean people who know as much or more than them in some subject that interests them---and read papers that might be related to what they are interested in. A few of them also like to teach, but they want to teach people &lt;em&gt;who will become their peers&lt;/em&gt;, not just anyone off the street. Competing with that are the things that they have to do: raise money for research, talk to a lot of colleagues who &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have something to offer them, provide patronage for former students, weigh in on &lt;em&gt;&quot;where do we want the field to go&quot;&lt;/em&gt; discussions&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, give talks and so on. There are a lot of demands on their time, and they barely have time to do the stuff they love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of these people are the kind of hyper-capable, super-productive people we all want to be, but their lives are packed to the gills, so you have to offer them something substantive---something &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; value---to get their attention to an enterprise like ours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; There has just been a big one of these in particle physics and the sheer number of expert-person hours that went into it was staggering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T17:55:26.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2013-10-26T18:03:57.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as physics has been developed from philosophy &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, physics may have been &lt;em&gt;called&lt;/em&gt; philosophy in the early past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The methods of physics are radically different from philosophy, and most physicists attempt to stay well within the realm of &quot;physics&quot; without straying into philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metaphysical questions usually lead to opinionated debate and are thus not constructive for the site. Besides, such speculation many a time falls in the realm of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;non mainstream physics&lt;/a&gt; as people start theorizing outside the established framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T18:03:57.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-26T22:11:30.960" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't we say thank you or leave other comments when someone edits our post (those that are done without approval) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-10-26T22:22:23.827" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T22:22:23.827" Title="Thank you for editing" Tags="|support|comments|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5091" CreationDate="2013-10-26T22:22:07.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can, actually, @replying to an editor works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, usually &quot;thanks!&quot; comments are discouraged as they leads to clutter and in most cases are better expressed by acceptance ticks or upvotes. However, if you feel that an edit was particularly helpful in improving your post, feel free to thank the editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T22:22:07.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-27T04:11:21.650" Score="-3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have any of you read the book &quot;The Joy of x&quot;? Or &quot;How things work&quot;? Many people find these to be fascinating &amp;amp; eye-opening, and sometimes the first time they found these topics to be interesting and approachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about such a feature here on stackexchange: not so much a question/answer, but a sharing of useful, valuable, and eye-opening insights and explanations in physics and its amazing existence in the world around us. Unique approaches that you feel no else has thought of, or an explanation that lends a sudden intuitive clarity previously lacking. (Well, something along those lines. I'm not quite sure of the words to express the exact feature I am looking for, but think of book &quot;The Joy of x&quot; for example.) These in turn could be voted on for their actual value, clarity, and ability to bring to light a unique facet of physics. Obviously, it would be important that they don't go about pointing out 1+1=2 or anything already covered or blindingly obvious and lacking in any value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But top rated topics would in affect be answering so many questions people often have by presenting them in an a uniquely approachable light. Or simply revealing the hidden world around us, kind of like Einstein did when he pointed out E=mc^2. Isn't that part of the joy of physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the users here have what to share and what to add... but if only someone would ask it. How about if they could share without being asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31641" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T05:47:17.847" Title="Feature: A section for sharing observations and explanations in a non-question format" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5093" CreationDate="2013-10-27T05:45:16.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question and answer site. So anything other than questions and answers is out of our scope. This is by design; a lot of what keeps people coming to Stack Exchange sites is that they don't have to sift through junk that isn't questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a more discussion-oriented environment, we do have the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; (and you can also make your own, separate chat rooms), but otherwise you'd have to look to a different website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T05:45:16.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5093" CreationDate="2013-10-27T05:47:17.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add to DavidZ's answer, if you have something you want to share, and if you can phrase it as an answer to what would be a good, on-topic question for the site, then you can ask-and answer your own question simultaneously using the &quot;answer your own question&quot; checkbox on the Ask Question page.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T05:47:17.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5097" CreationDate="2013-10-27T07:19:55.173" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82329/inducing-thoughts-with-brain-waves&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82329/inducing-thoughts-with-brain-waves&lt;/a&gt;) and mentioned that if this was too off-topic, I would be willing to close it, it was even closed but is still getting downvoted. Could someone delete this post entirely, as I understand that deleting too many of your own posts can create trouble for asking questions in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T08:53:19.477" Title="Can this post be completely removed?" Tags="|support|status-completed|questions|request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5096" CreationDate="2013-10-27T08:53:19.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting your own posts only really causes problems if the community feels that they have value. While a closed post can be improved and get reopened, it is OK if you feel that it is unsalvageable and delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that on Stack Overflow (and Programmers, Super User, and Server Fault), having too many deleted questions can lead to a question ban. However, this happens even if someone else deletes them. The question ban is not enabled for Physics as we do not have much flooding of substandard questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T08:53:19.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5099" CreationDate="2013-10-27T09:29:50.750" Score="6" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This is a favorite question (click again to undo)&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is what you get if you position the mouse pointer on that star that appears besides each question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What effect does that star have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-11-21T12:46:32.597" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T12:46:33.747" Title="What is the mark &quot;favorite question&quot; for?" Tags="|support|questions|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5098" CreationDate="2013-10-27T09:35:17.893" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It lets you track the question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=favorites&quot;&gt;your favorites tab&lt;/a&gt;. In this case, updates to the question (answers, etc) will increment the red counter above the tab (the counter isn't visible if there have been no changes since your last visit), and the updated question will be highlighted yellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effectively, it's a way of &quot;watching&quot; the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use it to bookmark questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=favorites&quot;&gt;a page where you can view your network-wide favorites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These pages are both tabs on your site and netw0rk-wide profiles. You can get to your network profile by clicking the &quot;network profile&quot; link (it has the SE logo next to it) on  your site profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-05-09T12:46:33.747" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T12:46:33.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-27T17:39:57.023" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some days ago I had an argument with a user about tension being a force on a post, since then I am constantly receiving at least one downvote on all my posts, maybe it is not related but I believe that the person is deliberately down voting all my quetions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-10-27T22:59:44.697" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T22:59:44.697" Title="Is someone deliberating downvoting my posts?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5100" CreationDate="2013-10-27T17:43:51.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two features of the engine designed to combat this kind of thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a script which detects and reverses short-term voting sprees over some threshold (but it only runs once a day, so you do have to be patient with it).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The moderators have a tool that will show such a pattern in the long run. As of this post you do not appear in the summary nor do the details look actionable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T17:43:51.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-27T18:15:00.793" Score="35" ViewCount="2867" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back, we had &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4880/are-we-gaining-or-losing-non-novice-users&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; discussion in which we tried to measure quantitatively whether the site was gaining or losing non-novice users. Since then, I've had the distinct subjective impression that the quality of discussion on the site has gone down markedly. I went through some of my own questions to which I'd accepted an answer, figuring that the people who wrote those answers would be the kind of competent and knowledgeable users who would make my own experience here better. We do seem to have lost some, including Cristi Stoica (inactive) and Luboš Motl (very low activity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried using some database queries to test this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/133973/number-of-active-users-in-a-set-of-tags-month-wise?Threshhold=2#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is Manishearth's query that he formed as part of the previous discussion. It attempts to measure the number of users who are not novices, based on whether they post multiple times in a month in certain tagged areas. Re-running the query now shows that the level of such users seems to have been stagnant for about the last year or more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/144725/number-of-users-posting-in-homework?Threshhold=2#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the number of users posting in homework. It shows strong growth over the last year.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/144711/number-of-active-users?Threshhold=2#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the total number of active users. It also shows a strong, steady trend of growth.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm using the term &quot;critical mass&quot; in the title of this question is that the critical mass of, say, uranium-235 depends on concentration. If you take a given number of 235U atoms and dilute them, you can make a critical mass into something that's not a critical mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjectively, I'm finding that I've been spending my time on the site in unenjoyable activities like arguing with angry and belligerent beginners about friction and Newton's third law. I've decided to become inactive on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T13:09:05.417" Title="Have we lost the necessary critical mass of professional physicists?" Tags="|discussion|content-level|users|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-27T18:59:56.377" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really sorry to hear your decision; I've enjoyed reading many of your answers here and would have loved to read new ones as they come along. I hope you reconsider your decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may wish to avoid beginners by ignoring the tags they tend to post in; or just stepping out when a novice gets argumentative. I've done that more than once myself. Argumentative users can just be ignored, you are never under any obligation to reply. As tpg mentioned, your decision to leave the site exacerbates the problem; while it's entirely your decision to leave (obviously), I hope you take that into account :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still with to leave, good luck on whatever you decide to spend your time on! It's been good having you here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The queries&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the queries, to me the active users and homework graph are actually displaying almost the same trend. The thing with homework questions is that most get closed, and later deleted (we currently have almost 2000 deleted homework posts). Deleted posts don't turn up in the queries, so there is an apparent increase in posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the trends from April to now are more or less the same (the HW trend is still more stark), and there's a steady drop in the HW posts as we go back (which is not there in the higher level tags because stuff there rarely gets deleted.). The recent Oct-Nov increase in HW is due to the slowly approaching exams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that there's still been an increase in HW and a drop of quality, not that drastic, but still could be a problem. I'm open to ideas to bolster up the quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T18:59:56.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-27T19:09:47.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I don't think we ever had a critical mass of professional physicists. I do seem to have noticed that several of the well-qualified people who used to post regularly don't do so any more, but that's natural over time. Some of them will come back, and we'll also get new well-qualified posters over time. Of course we can always do more with actively recruiting new people to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subjectively, I'm finding that I've been spending my time on the site in unenjoyable activities like arguing with angry and belligerent beginners about friction and Newton's third law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's kind of a separate issue, and one that the moderators are here to help with. A contributor getting angry and belligerent should never be tolerated on this site. As a moderator I get the sense that this is happening much more than we hear about it, i.e. people aren't casting enough flags. So my point would be, whenever you start to see an argument like this emerge, it will probably make things a lot easier on you if you just flag the comment and back out. It's not worth your time to get involved in that sort of thing, as you know, but that's what we (mods) are here for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T19:09:47.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-27T22:02:35.837" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the others I am very saddened to hear that you will scale back you activity. Permit me to hope that this is a hiatus rather than an end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can sympathize with your complaint about belligerent beginners, as I also feel we've had more of them of late; as well as another uptick in the number of people who want to ask high level questions from a preparation that appears to consist almost solely of pop-sci reading (or for that matter pop-sci youtubing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in the comments, however, I think that more intensive moderator intervention is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the answer. We have to have a more active and demanding community that is willing to say &lt;em&gt;&quot;Here is the line, meet this level or go do some reading before you ask.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (in the nicest possible tones and phrasing, of course) or we will be forever mired in homework, personal theories and vague pop-sci hand-waving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T22:02:35.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-27T22:38:35.340" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subjectively, I'm finding that I've been spending my time on the site&#xA;  in unenjoyable activities like arguing with angry and belligerent&#xA;  beginners about friction and Newton's third law. I've decided to&#xA;  become inactive on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all due respect, and you've earned a lot of it here, I don't see that your decision logically follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the first sentence, the first question I have is &quot;Why? Why engage in such unenjoyable activities?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, this site offers an opportunity to &lt;em&gt;trade value for value&lt;/em&gt;.  If you spot an interesting question and you take the time to work up an answer, either you gained a value from doing so or you didn't &lt;em&gt;period&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn't gain any value, you shouldn't have answered the question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did, then &lt;em&gt;why bother arguing with imbeciles if they disagree with your answer&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let it go&lt;/em&gt; unless, and once again, you believe there is value in arguing a point with someone, i.e., &lt;em&gt;that you both may profit from the exchange&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, I do value your contributions and if your decision is final, I respect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if you find value in simply composing your thoughts to answer an interesting question then please consider continuing that and &lt;em&gt;simply ignore the unteachable that frequent here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T22:38:35.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-28T07:15:54.883" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm no professional or expert, I think what's working against Physics SE is, ironically, what makes it so effective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are being spoonfed all the time here. Like Google, Q&amp;amp;A websites have become magical 'wishing fountains' to millions of people. Stupid questions about Newton's Laws and classical mechanics are being asked by people all the time here. Why? Because the internet is neutering the intellect and common sense of millions (mostly of school kids), while giving them access to vasts stores of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that many experts, Ben in particular, end up answering loads of duplicates. Improving the Physics SE's search engine for questions will take a lot of the load off experts and moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I predict that the number of Homework questions will explode in coming years. At some point, 9 out of every 10 questions asked daily will be duplicates. So finding an effective way of dealing with duplicates is really the main hurdle facing this site. It will also lower the amount of spoonfeeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28244" LastEditorUserId="28244" LastEditDate="2013-10-28T13:09:43.263" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T13:09:43.263" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5109" CreationDate="2013-10-28T09:20:33.277" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82488/understanding-forces-in-qft&quot;&gt;Understanding forces in QFT&lt;/a&gt; and as far as I could possibly think I concluded thag yes my question was within the site's giidelines of a good question, as I was asking about a physical observation (force) and what is the explanation provided for it by modern science using force carriers or force fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially started searching on internet and found out that forcd carriers are virtual particles and do not actually exist and that force fields are generally defined as force per unit charge/mass etx and hence implying that they are not the cause of themselves ( since they are derived from force only) being confused i posted my question as mentioned above and only got downvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I ask questions better in future( or even improve this one ) to better meet the sites standards/guidelines ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T16:23:41.677" Title="improving quality of my questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5108" CreationDate="2013-10-28T10:30:21.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't downvote, although I didn't like much the question (maybe because it's a bit vague and saying &lt;em&gt;Another source disproving fields existence&lt;/em&gt;, like if you know everything, doesn't help). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, your question is rather philosophical and controversial, so it doesn't fit very well in the Q/A format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to improve your questions, you should also worry about presentation (boldface is always welcome) and grammar (I found at least five spelling errors in this question). And dont forget to start your question with capital letters (&quot;Improving quality of my questions&quot;)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T10:30:21.687" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-28T13:17:31.623" Score="8" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is an offshoot of Ben Crowell's question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists&quot;&gt;Have we lost the necessary critical mass of professional physicists?&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm asking it separately to help avoid multi-threaded comment discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists?noredirect=1#comment14673_5102&quot;&gt;a comment of dmckee&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think that we (that is the mods) &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be in the business of closing a lot of questions with our super-powers anymore. There are enough 3k users (81) that they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be able to carry the bulk of the load. My impression, however, is that a relatively small fraction of the eligible users apply their power with any regularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in that thread, I think this is a specific enough question that we can find the relevant statistics to give an answer to it. I must add that I agree with dmckee's impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the specific question: Is it possible to confirm this statement from publicly available data, hopefully through the data explorer? If so, what, exactly, are the relevant statistics to ask for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To kick off the discussion, and to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists?noredirect=1#comment14703_5102&quot;&gt;Manishearth's comment&lt;/a&gt;, I think the relevant tables to look at are not the per-question close-votes, but the publicly available per-user &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/8563/emilio-pisanty?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=reviews&quot;&gt;log of the review activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, so it looks we may need to ask the dev team for these statistics. In this case, &lt;strong&gt;what, exactly, are the relevant statistics to ask for?&lt;/strong&gt; I'll make a proposal shortly but please try and think of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T16:55:14.843" Title="How much are 3k+ users moderating through the review queue?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|review|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5112" CreationDate="2013-10-28T13:39:12.207" Score="-1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I'm not the only one who regrets Ben Crowell's decision to become unactive on PSE. He stated the reason for his departure in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5102/16660&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; addressing the ratio of professional physicist users to beginners, pop-sci philosophers and other 'lower level users'. A big part of that reason seems to have been that he finds himself &lt;em&gt;&quot;spending my time on the site in unenjoyable activities like arguing with angry and belligerent beginners about friction and Newton's third law&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can sympathize, I feel like this is something everyone determines for themselves. You don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to argue about these topics with these users. Then again, it is alarming that these discussions seem to have become more frequent, also in my experience (which, granted, is not as long-term as Ben Crowell's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, an idea popped up in my head which might help restore the balance somewhat or at least halt the dilution of the uranium-235 in Ben's analogy. It might also be unrealistic, but I wanted to bounce this idea off the community and see what everyone thinks. Who knows, perhaps it sparks a new, better idea in someone else's head. So here it comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still pretty much a vague idea, but perhaps an entry exam of some sort can help. Not to increase the number of experts per se, but to decrease the number of pop-sci philosophers and no-effort homework posters. Nothing too fancy or long, just a single question requiring a certain level of insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps &lt;strong&gt;a couple&lt;/strong&gt; of questions requiring &lt;strong&gt;varying&lt;/strong&gt; levels of insight/knowledge. Still not taking too much time or long calculations though, that will decrease the number of new users on all levels of expertise. But their answers to these few questions can then be used to roughly assert the level of the new user and perhaps award a badge corresponding to this level. This way the inquiry ('exam') sort of seems worth the trouble (little more than without the badge anyway) and other users can also more easily determine on roughly what level to answer this new user's question and to what degree to trust their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T12:33:48.867" Title="Would the level of PSE benefit from an 'entry exam' of sorts?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5111" CreationDate="2013-10-28T14:02:51.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the outset it sounds like a good idea, however there's a problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We do regularly get good low-level conceptual questions, and some good pop-sci questions. While these are no substitute for expert questions, we should not actively put them down by making the OPs unwelcome. The proposal seems to make the site insular &quot;Physicists only, please&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What level questions can we ask? Just to give an example, if we ask basic newton's laws of motion questions, we will still have the folks who ask rotational dynamics questions. If we ask them questions of that level, we prematurely exclude many who would otherwise have asked a good question. Of course, this can be fixed with your &quot;varied level&quot; proposal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I doubt SE would be amenable to a change that denies certain users a the ability to participate on the site before they even post anything. Most of the prevention mechanisms on SE are to allow people to post almost anything but have the community quickly dispatch unwanted stuff (via closing). This one contradicts that. Instead, if we focus on getting rid of the bad questions quickly and on not entertaining beginner theorists who think they are the next Einstein, we may manage to keep the signal/noise ratio in check. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We might even &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; possible new experts this way. Most people want site registration to be as hassle-free as possible. I myself would never have joined if the site started asking me questions first; I would have taken my questions/answers to Quora or PhysicsForums. You see, while good questions come from those willing to put effort into them, if they have an easier way out which requires less effort but, on the outset, seems to lead to comparable results, they will take it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to also note that Math.SE &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; homework questions and still has a good amount of high level questions and experts. They've been around longer than us, if they've not been hurt by this model; I don't see why we can't do better by reducing the number of HW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T14:02:51.730" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5111" CreationDate="2013-10-28T14:39:10.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; thing StackExchange mentions at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Centre&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;Anybody can ask a question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, at &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our Q &amp;amp; A site are free and open to everyone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At StackExchange, the focus is on the questions and answers, not on the people. We judge each question or answer on its own, not the person asking it (aside from their reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes are the method by which to rate the quality of a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get bogged down by &quot;homework&quot; style questions; just downvote, flag, and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31346" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T14:39:10.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5108" CreationDate="2013-10-28T16:16:16.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll add a couple more points to jinawee's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should consider &lt;em&gt;accepting&lt;/em&gt; more answers to your previous questions.  The fact that you generally don't accept any answers implies that you're more interested in soliciting an open-ended discussion, which is frowned-upon here.  Accepting an answer also demonstrates that you've successfully understood the subject material, and are ready to move on to your next question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Looking at many of your questions, it seems like you can answer most of them yourself, with just a little more research effort. Try reading a Wikipedia entry on the subject, or glance at a textbook, or indeed search Physics SE for similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point is my biggest reason for downvoting questions (not necessarily yours, but in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10334" LastEditorUserId="10334" LastEditDate="2013-10-28T16:23:41.677" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T16:23:41.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2013-10-28T16:55:14.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To test the hypothesis &quot;there is only a small core of users that use the review queues regularly&quot;, my first naive attempt would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the users with close-vote powers, during &lt;code&gt;month=October 2013&lt;/code&gt;, how many users made &lt;code&gt;range_1=0&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;range_2=[1,5]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;range_3=[6,20]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;range_4=[21,50]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;range_5=[51,∞]&lt;/code&gt; reviews in the &lt;code&gt;review_queue=close_votes&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the ranges are of course adjustable, and &lt;code&gt;month&lt;/code&gt; should then be varied over the past six months or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is in fact the case that the hypothesis is true, then the data above doesn't get us very far as to why some people don't use the review queues, or how the site might motivate them to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible reason I can think of this is activity on the site (the dependence on which must in any case be substracted from any other possible explanations). I can think of two queries to try and get at this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the average reputation earned during &lt;code&gt;month=October 2013&lt;/code&gt; by the users that made &lt;code&gt;range_1=0&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;range_2=[1,5]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;range_3=[6,20]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;range_4=[21,50]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;range_5=[51,∞]&lt;/code&gt; reviews in the &lt;code&gt;review_queue=close_votes&lt;/code&gt; in that period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are the reputation earned during &lt;code&gt;month=October 2013&lt;/code&gt; and the number of reviews made in the &lt;code&gt;review_queue=close_votes&lt;/code&gt; in that period correlated? Is there a positive correlation? How does a scatter plot look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I don't want to put off users who are simply using the site without going into the review-queue quagmire.* But if we find that there's some specific measures we can do to encourage close-voters to review and to close-vote low-level questions to get them in the queue in the first place, then we should do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;*Not really! It's not that bad!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T16:55:14.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5118" CreationDate="2013-10-28T18:21:21.993" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does it make any sense to edit a question which I have flagged and will probably be closed?7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be to add the [homework] tag to a bad homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T20:56:55.480" Title="Is it useless to edit a bad question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5116" CreationDate="2013-10-28T19:02:14.747" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can still be useful for people who come across the question later and may look to it as an example of how to ask their own questions. So I wouldn't call it a bad idea. But it's not as important to edit a question which is going to be closed as it is to edit those which are going to stay open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T19:02:14.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5116" CreationDate="2013-10-28T20:56:55.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your example, &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, I would say always edit the tags on good and bad questions if appropriate. After all, you may flag it but it might not get closed for awhile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call my approach to bad &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; specifically the DEF method -- Downvote, Edit, Flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T20:56:55.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-28T21:05:02.563" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody has mentioned yet the core reason for the sad loss of quality of this site. You can do whatever statistical analysis you want to do, based on the number of new users, fraction of homework question, analogies with Uranium...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Face it. Don't avoid mentioning it. Please, let's honestly face the truth. It is written with &quot;R&quot; like &quot;Ron&quot; and &quot;M&quot; like &quot;Maimon&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ron Maimon left the site in december 2012 after being banned and censored. After him, others followed, both professionals and simple readers who had enjoyed the site mainly because of Ron's posts, or simply because that incident revealed a level of moderators control they don't want to accept.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you can downvote this, some moderator can say for the nth time &quot;oh, no, nothing is happening, this is normal&quot;, and you can even do Bayesian inference with the number of new users, their eye color or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site had a golden age that ended abruptly in December 2012. In plain words, that's it, period. Neumeier and others quickly lost interest after Ron's departure. Hey, even Gerard 't Hooft himself was here!. Now Lubos is probably getting bored because he is almost alone here. When he is eventually gone, we'd better rename this site as &quot;Physics Homework StackExchange&quot; and change the Hut Potential of the logo into some diagram from an Elementary School textbook. (Edit: Qmechanic is another valuable member I should acknowledge, still active, but one always forgets him, probably because he is anonymous, always humble and he doesn't usually take part in comment discussions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a research institution, people are free to communicate with each other in the way they desire to, because they are mature adults. Only if things become really really bad in a discussion, would a third person try to calm them down. In elementary school it is just the opposite: teachers urge the children to behave nicely towards others, and punish any rude words or behaviour. Well, which of the two examples does moderation resemble here, a research institution or an elementary school? There you have it. Now, don't complain if the site resembles more and more everyday a repository of elementary school homework questions. You get what you pay for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="14182" LastEditDate="2013-10-29T12:31:02.603" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T12:31:02.603" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-29T05:28:57.967" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am repeating Eduardo's last paragraph here because it is an insightful observation, separable from suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a research institution, people are free to communicate with each other in the way they desire to, because they are mature adults. Only if things become really really bad in a discussion, would a third person try to calm them down. In elementary school it is just the opposite: teachers urge the children to behave nicely towards others, and punish any rude words or behaviour. Well, which of the two examples does moderation resemble here, a research institution or an elementary school? There you have it. Now, don't complain if the site resembles more and more everyday a repository of elementary school homework questions. You get what you pay for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interactive forum, not a conference, where fights would be unacceptable, or a lecture. If you want to keep high level people involved it should be treated as a working group where confrontations can get out of hand sometimes, if people feel strongly. If the message is &quot;children play nice-nice&quot; it will become a bland forum, because it will not keep the interest of high level people : they can discuss in their own blogs where they can thunder and throw lightning  as they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the element of the attention span of people, which I have found tends to focus for a while and then gets removed to new more exciting offerings. That is natural, and people will  always be leaving and new ones coming. A nice-nice  playground though will not attract new ones to replace them at that level. Physics is not about &quot;nice&quot;, it is about &quot;correct&quot;, and I can understand people blasting away at misunderstandings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Correct&quot; should be a necessary and sufficient condition in physics discussions, imo. &quot;Nice&quot; is mixing apples and oranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2013-10-29T06:22:50.020" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T06:22:50.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-29T13:44:25.687" Score="7" ViewCount="1270" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vanishing of the whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2713/2451&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Do we agree with [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named]'s Suspension?&quot; has been for me the straw that broke the camel's back. I had shared my thoughts there, together with other physicists, and we deserve some respect. I can't remember the slightest thing that could be wrong there, no rude language, nothing wrong at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me more and more everyday, a personal crusade of a specific moderator against a specific user. And now the traces are being covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not one of the great users here. I don't pretend to be one of them, and of course I don't expect my decision to have any impact. It is only that I cannot accept this any more. I leave the site. Thanks to those who answered my questions and discussed some ideas with me. I hope that my few humble answers were useful to somebody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="I leave Physics SE. This is my good-bye note" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5122" CreationDate="2013-10-29T14:52:17.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I recall, user DImension10 Abhimanyu made some comments there to which I replied to, you then made a comment about me that I flagged, and the whole thread then got deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess the moderator(s) decided that the thread was being resurrected and adding to an already ridiculous amount of discussion in the comments, leading to a bad atmosphere where people could end up getting suspended. As usual, the right thing seems to have been done under the circumstances, IMO. But this is my take on the matter, and I don't know the facts for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, I hope you can see that the moderators are fair and very skilled in dealing with stuff like this, and there's no need for you to leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T14:52:17.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-29T15:37:05.790" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many others I am saddened to see Ben leave, and I hope it is a temporary hiatus, but I certainly understand his decision. I haven't been very active either lately, and there are several reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lack of high-quality questions. I don't know why this is happening, but for some reason we're seeing an increase in low-level questions. Perhaps it is simply the case that the best questions have already been asked, and that the quality inevitably goes downhill after a while. But the decline seems to be too sudden for this explanation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The amount of duplicate questions. This is related to the first remark: the most obvious questions have already been asked. And it's quite irritating when new users can't seem to be bothered to use the search function. These little irritations build up over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Astronomy SE site. This really bothers me. I wouldn't mind the existence of that site if it was only meant for amateur astronomy. But they also accept astrophysics and cosmology questions. I just cannot understand why SE allows this. First of all, Physics SE is too small to be split up into smaller categories. This is drawing people away from our site, while Astronomy SE will never obtain a critical mass themselves: this fragmentation is damaging everyone. Second, they don't have enough experts (yet) to address those questions, resulting in low-quality answers. Also, they're reinventing the wheel, because the astrophysicists on this site already have built a very useful database of answers. But most importantly, I find this very disrespectful to the astrophysicists here. It feels like our work is just being dismissed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lack of social interaction. By design, SE is not a forum. And I think this is a mistake. SE doesn't have the tools for interaction between long-term members (no, the chat function is no substitute). This makes the participation on this site impersonal, which makes it harder for people to stay motivated enough to come back. When you have a community, like a forum does, it's much easier to keep people interested and get through times when the activity is temporarily less. More importantly, it's just more fun. The whole reputation system can be entertaining for a while, but I feel much more satisfied to hear a &quot;thank you&quot; than get an anonymous upvote. We are human beings, after all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, and directly related to my previous point, we've seen some animosity between several members. This is a direct consequence of the lack of a forum. We don't really have the tools to settle disputes, or to talk to members when we feel they're not behaving as we'd like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our work here is purely voluntary. That means that this site can only survive if we feel that our work is being appreciated and worth the time we put into it, and that we enjoy doing it. Well, I haven't been enjoying myself lately. But despite this, I am determined to stick around, and hope for better times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T15:37:05.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5122" CreationDate="2013-10-29T16:43:21.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry to see you go, though I don't quite sympathize with the reasons you have listed in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't remember the slightest thing that could be wrong there, no rude language, nothing wrong at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was wrong was that it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/197060/members-discussing-other-members/197072#197072&quot;&gt;a public discussion about another user&lt;/a&gt;, one who wasn't even around. It was deleted due to that. Not to remove any discussion -- there are plenty of posts mentioning the suspension that are still around (some of them yours).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This seems to me more and more everyday, a personal crusade of a specific moderator against a specific user. And now the traces are being covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user wasn't even suspended by the same mod each time. As mentioned before, it's about the site rules, not any personal vendetta. And I think there has been enough discussion about the rules, though if you want them changed then you'd have to bring them up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;the main meta&lt;/a&gt; (where I think it's been brought up before, not sure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this was done to cover the traces of anything. Not in the sense you mean, at any rate. We had a good member who is no longer here. Is there any point leaving a post around that discusses his suspension? One that contains various dissections of his character? And things that border on personal attacks to him? Is that &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; something we should preserve? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't think that the suspension was wrongly carried out&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and the mods will never claim that the user in question was never suspended (and we know that the community will remember). With this in mind, there isn't any reason for us to do this to cover our tracks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not one of the great users here. I don't pretend to be one of them, and of course I don't expect my decision to have any impact. It is only that I cannot accept this any more. I leave the site. Thanks to those who answered my questions and discussed some ideas with me. I hope that my few humble answers were useful to somebody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, sorry to see you go. Thank you for your contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. This is not the place to discuss this, please don't.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T18:36:41.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2013-10-30T11:00:16.220" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting thread. I read all the answers and comments and want to formulate something which is maybe implied by other comments but which I haven't seen put like that: &#xA;I'd say the amount of low level questions just directly correlates with the fact that the SE portal is more known now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hang around in a hackerspace sometimes, which is filled with hobbyists and professional programmers, non-academics, people who do Khan academy and the Euler project, know how to build microcontrolers but which have never heard about the lambda calculus, the arXiv or the Gamma function. And now - as opposed to 2 years ago - these kind of communities know about StackExchange. People now know that there are &quot;forums&quot; on the internet, which pretty accurately can be described as &quot;like google, but you can also ask a question if you don't get the answer the first time&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The StackOverflow sites started as a programming site. I came to know StackExchange via the first spin of MathOverflow as a late physics undergrad as &quot;hey, check this out! There is a Q&amp;amp;A site on the web where you can get TERRENCE TAO, the cute fields medalist, to answer your math questions!&quot;. Today the existence of the StackExchange sites are &quot;public&quot; and you must consider that every one of the 200 different engineering degrees have bad introductory physics courses, where they force people to learn 200 years of physics insights in two times 4 months. Of course they will come here, and of course, they will not check beforehand if their questions have already been formulated here in some similar way. (I'd even say they are rational in not doing the latter - there isn't a global community moral, where you put your interests last, just to not disturb the efficiency of a commercial website. People want their questions cleared and it's without consequences if they piss off the virtual community circle of others.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my conclusion is, if you don't want the indian engineers to take over the physics site (disclaimer: that's not supposed to be any offence in any way! It's just a huge bulk of people), then you can't display SE Physics as a web site where they will get their second semester answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastEditorUserId="5374" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T13:09:05.417" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T13:09:05.417" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-30T11:26:29.480" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1176/beginners-non-physicists-questions&quot;&gt;asked if we needed a tag to distinguish questions asked by beginners&lt;/a&gt;. The answer was &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; on the grounds that a &lt;em&gt;layman&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;beginner&lt;/em&gt; tag would be a meta tag and these were &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;frowned on&lt;/a&gt;. However we now have a &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; tag, and it seems to me that a &lt;em&gt;layman&lt;/em&gt; tag is no more meta than the &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; tag (both of them being meta tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem remains the same as it was when I posted back in April 2012, or if anything it has got worse as the site has become more popular. People are understandably enthused by some mind blowing fact from a popular science TV programme and ask a question about it here. The questions are inevitably ill-informed and badly phrased. This is not intended as a criticism since I have been guilty of just the same when asking questions on SE sites outside my expertise - the guys at the Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange were polite but quite firm in telling me so :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the low quality of the questions inevitably irritates and frustrates even the most good natured of us. The temptation to be less than polite is great, and the result can be ill feeling and the departure of site members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we need a tag that means the OP should go off and do some Googling around the area then come back and ask a more focussed question. To call the tag &lt;em&gt;beginner&lt;/em&gt; seems a bit derogatory, but &lt;em&gt;layman&lt;/em&gt; seems reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T23:45:14.197" Title="Do we need a Beginners tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5135" CreationDate="2013-10-30T13:10:00.157" Score="4" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to be honest, I am seriously unsure as to whether applied/experimental physics questions would be welcomed here. There are a lot involved in theoretical physics (which is great), but, would applied and experimental physics just be looked down upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am NOT talking about homework based experiments, I mean questions that relate to experimental and applied research. I am not seeing a great deal of support for this equally valid side of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29350" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T08:21:11.097" Title="applied physics based questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5128" CreationDate="2013-10-30T13:34:21.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I have two ways of interpreting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beginner&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beginner&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beginner&lt;/a&gt; tag. I may switch between both interpretations in this post to cover all bases, one interpretation is &amp;quot;questions in beginner physics&amp;quot;, and another is similar to the one you ask &amp;quot;questions where the OP is in over his head&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Blast from the past&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; about all the discussions we had about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;. The major issue with such meta tags is that they're vague. So, allowing them means that each user applies the tag with their own definition of the tag. And it rapidly devolves into a &amp;quot;I-don't like this post&amp;quot; tag which each person uses differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one user may consider the entire body of classical mechanics to be beginner level, one may not. The same goes for, say, newtonian mechanics. There are plenty of nontrivial problems that get asked in NM, too, and some may hide them with the tag while other tag users may not want that. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4699/getting-rid-of-the-popular-science-tag&quot;&gt;Quoting Shog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's been an awful lot said here already, so I'm gonna cut to the&#xA;chase: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; is clearly a meta tag,&lt;/strong&gt; in the same&#xA;way that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag - it can't stand alone when&#xA;describing a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; mean it's bad or should be removed though.&#xA;[popular-science], like [homework] has value in describing the sorts&#xA;of &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; that can be found on a question... or should be provided&#xA;to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT THAT ONLY WORKS IF FOLKS ARE CONSISTENT IN HOW THEY USE IT.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After years of support and many thousands of questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4699/getting-rid-of-the-popular-science-tag&quot;&gt;we had to&#xA;burn [homework] on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;because folks were using it&#xA;as a club to beat others over the head with.&lt;/em&gt; When folks are regularly&#xA;getting into fights over a &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;, that tag has become a liability and&#xA;must be removed - &lt;em&gt;regardless&lt;/em&gt; of how nice it might be in theory. And&#xA;before you say &amp;quot;it can't happen here&amp;quot;, open your eyes - it already&#xA;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I sympathize with Jim and others who wish to classify these&#xA;questions, Manishearth is dead right with regard to the ambiguities&#xA;and potential for abuse: these are the reasons why meta tags are&#xA;discouraged. If this tag is going to remain in use, three conditions&#xA;&lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(see that post for the conditions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the homework tag works well is that the tag is well-defined. I personally am uneasy about having a meta tag like that on the site, but after thinking about it, it seems to not be causing problems and would cause far bigger problems if removed anyway :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Close them!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, do not despair, there are better solutions to this specific problem. I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are inevitably ill-informed and badly phrased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we need a tag that means the OP should go off and do some Googling around the area then come back and ask a more focussed question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ill-formed and badly-phrased? Flag/vote for closure as Unclear What You Are Asking&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. And comment to try to get the OP to do the Googling, if you're in the mood for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Apply &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (and only if) the user asks explicitly for a layman answer (and I bet there is a significant amount of overlap between such questions and the type you dub &amp;quot;beginner&amp;quot;), then we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;, which has the following excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions in this tag must be answered in a manner that can be understood by a general audience with at most a basic understanding of physics, mathematics and related sciences. &lt;strong&gt;Apply it to questions where the asker clearly requests such answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Individual tag ignores&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is concerned about the level of questions, it's pretty easy to ignore tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; and company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come to think of it, we have many such tags. It may be good to have a meta community wiki post listing such tags in approximate increasing order of average expertise. Then, people can easily copy paste the tags they wish to ignore. (feel free to start this post if you wish)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that (veering a bit off topic here into related ground), ignoring &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; seems to get rid of a lot of the crap. Note that if you see a homework question that needs closing, vote to close &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; downvote. Closed posts that aren't downvoted still appear on the main page, and contribute to making our site look like a place to get homework help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. If you think that the closing system takes to long and have lost faith in it, let us know. Currently, the mods are holding back from the queue, but we increase our participation there as a temporary measure if there are problems. 3k+ users can help be part of the long term solutions by actively checking out the review queues and handling at least a couple questions from the close queue every day, if even 10 users do that we'd have a very fast system.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T13:34:21.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2013-10-30T14:13:38.070" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are allowed and encouraged. People just tend not to ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a recent example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82739/can-a-discrete-dynode-mass-spec-detector-get-tired&quot;&gt;an excellent experimental question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T14:13:38.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-30T16:48:36.580" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82262/are-matter-waves-transverse-and-can-they-be-polarized&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate, the flag is marked as helpful. But it didn't get closed, I commented in chat and it's still open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T17:07:42.533" Title="Why isn't this duplicate closed?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5132" CreationDate="2013-10-30T17:07:42.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Close flags are marked as helpful the first time someone close votes. In this case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/25718&quot;&gt;one user close voted and three others didn't&lt;/a&gt; , so the flag was marked helpful even if the post didn't get closed, and the review item was dequeued due to the majority of do-not-close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;helpful&quot; flag means that the flag had some worth and you should not be discouraged from raising flags in similar cases later on, even if the flag is not acted on. When it comes to close flags, if a user agrees with you, that usually means that the flag has some merit and should be marked helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance, they probably should be closed, but I'd like to see the opinions of other community members on the matter first given that at least three people feel that it is not a dupe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T17:07:42.533" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2013-10-31T01:25:11.463" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While they are not particularly active we have a number explicitly experimental tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-physics&lt;/a&gt;: The largest (by number of posts) of these tags. Rather a grab-bag in my opinion, with a number of superb questions and some abysmal ones as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technique&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-technique&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-technique&lt;/a&gt;: I think this tag has an unusually high fraction of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; questions, but as they tend to be technical, involved and specialized there are a high proportion of unanswered questions here as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-technology&lt;/a&gt;: I've never been quite sure what this tag is supposed to be. Cross-tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technique&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-technique&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-technique&lt;/a&gt; in places.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/home-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;home-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;home-experiment&lt;/a&gt;: How to do something interesting with minimal kit, a low budget and a high degree of safety. Fun questions and some of them are surprisingly deep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experimental physics is every bit as hard as theory and rather less glamorous (though easier to get a lucrative job with), so it does not attract as much attention from excitable, earnest beginners. Frankly, though it is far too small a community to sustain a separate site I think the experimental community here is actually &lt;em&gt;achieving&lt;/em&gt; the level of sustained sophistication and quality that we'd like to see for the whole site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T06:44:56.263" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T06:44:56.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5138" CreationDate="2013-10-31T07:29:04.077" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I post this on the main site? There is a sweater involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what would be the appropriate tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=543675909045560&amp;amp;set=a.110374005709088.19294.105628429516979&amp;amp;type=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xL7s0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Click picture for the link.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: The deadline almost certainly refers to Central European Time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastEditorUserId="17609" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T07:42:46.797" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T07:46:28.683" Title="Can I post this on the main site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|tags|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5129" CreationDate="2013-10-31T07:37:21.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is encouraging, very encouraging.  Thank you for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the advice I will take from the replies here are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a reasonably strong experimental physics, this is where I will focus on (and on any other question that I feel confident answering).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a minority of people who have the ignorant low view of experimental physics, they are irrelevant to me, but they are always welcome to ask/answer as always.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The true cross section of the members are here for the physics (experimental and theoretical) and not to be drawn in to the nonsense drama.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some won't like this, but that is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29350" LastEditorDisplayName="user29350" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T08:21:11.097" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T08:21:11.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5136" CreationDate="2013-10-31T07:46:28.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know that this works as a main-site question, per se. After all, just asking for someone to do the calculations runs afoul of the HW policy, and asking for people to submit solutions that are expected to vary may even run afoul of big lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a hypothetical site where this is on-topic as-is would be to Physics.SE as Codegolf.SE is to SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's a cute problem, and it reminds me of the types of things we were expected to figure out at the drop of a hat in an order-of-magnitude physics class I took as an undergrad (one of the best and hardest classes I've ever taken). I think it'd be fun to discuss in chat if nowhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, any question that gets down to the &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; at work here (&quot;Could vortices have reduced the naive estimate of pressure?&quot; &quot;Is this method for finding the elastic limit of metal sound?&quot;) &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be welcome on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T07:46:28.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-31T17:28:50.840" Score="19" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of members have recently noticed a drop in the net question quality on this site. Many of us feel that this is fixable, so I'm trying to take steps in that direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly, what we need to do is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stem the inflow of homework questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attract more expert users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make participation more enjoyable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think can be done to achieve any of these goals? Robust proposals welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Please don't bring up stuff that's been declined before unless you are reformulating it to be a better proposal.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T23:03:33.597" Title="How can we improve participation on Physics.SE?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|retention|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-31T17:39:35.630" Score="10" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5139/how-can-we-improve-participation-on-physics-se&quot;&gt;How can we improve participation on Physics.SE?&lt;/a&gt; (Not a dupe, this is about what a user can do to improve his/her &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; experience, and that is about more global changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is meant to help users smoothen their own Physics.SE experience. Later on it will be turned into a community wiki meta-&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post, but for now please post any constructive suggestions you have on this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T10:35:10.717" Title="As a user of Physics.SE, how do I make my own experience smoother and more enjoyable?" Tags="|discussion|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5139" CreationDate="2013-10-31T17:53:10.890" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We talked about it briefly in chat about starting a Topic of the Week event, akin to what is done at &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/123/topic-of-the-week-cmb-cosmic-microwave-background-radiation&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/373/topic-of-the-week-colonization&quot;&gt;Space&lt;/a&gt; SE. I had proposed something similar &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2823/topic-of-the-week-contest&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; previously based on what was done at other SE sites discussed therein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how about we look at a just-for-fun Topic (or Tag) of the Week? Here's some of the things that would need to be decided/fleshed out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How long does each topic run?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the precedent is a week. But sometimes it takes longer to come up with really good questions or answers about highly technical aspects. Maybe two weeks would be better, but then we run the risk of getting tired of the topic in the middle. So I propose a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What's the point?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three goals this serves. First, it promotes the asking and answering of questions the community deems interesting. Tired of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;? Suggest something else you are interested in and get some questions and answers! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it could be used to attract higher-level participants. If there are things experienced members would like to focus on, decide and participate accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, it's something fun to do and will get many people outside of their comfort zones. I don't know anything about most of the tags here, but I would be encouraged to do some digging and ask a question about them if I knew it would get answered by people who know about it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How are topics/tags chosen?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the preceding month, a question will be posted here on meta to take nominations for the 4 topics of the next month. Each nomination should be it's own answer and ideally should contain at least one sample question already on the site pertaining to it. The 4 answers with the highest votes at the close of the voting period will be chosen -- let's say the voting period is 3 weeks. If topics should fit in a particular week of the next month, that should be noted; for instance, if a big announcement from CERN will be made in the first week of December, it might be good to put the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/particle-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;particle-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;particle-physics&lt;/a&gt; topic during that week or the week after. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the timeline look like? Assuming we get started soon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nov 1 - Nov 23&lt;/strong&gt;: Topic proposal and voting period for December's topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nov 23&lt;/strong&gt;: December's topic proposal question locked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nov 27&lt;/strong&gt;: Topic schedule for December released&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dec 1&lt;/strong&gt;: First topic week begins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dec 1 - Dec 20&lt;/strong&gt;: Topic proposal and voting period for January's topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What constitutes a community decision?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highest voted topics get chosen. Well, let's say the highest of the 0-or-greater votes. If all the topics are positive and there's a tie, the mods will split the tie up and feel free to nominate again for the next month. If all the topics are at 0 then there is no interest in continuing and we give up. If we can't get 4 positively voted topics, we give up. If all topics are negative, we give up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, we can only do what the cross-section of community here tells us to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What tags should be nominated?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, tags that you find interesting. The second goal may be to propose tags in which there is relatively low participation as a means to promote questions and answers in that topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What tags should not be nominated?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances should a meta-type tag be nominated! So no &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;. Whatever tag is nominated could have questions from all three of those categories asked during that time, so let's not limit the level of the question, just the scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would avoid overly broad and overly specific tags as well. Something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; is very broad and there's already a lot of questions on it so it probably doesn't need to be made a topic (although this is a guideline, not a rule so it could be -- the community will decide whether to use it or not). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why should I participate?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No seriously, why not? Do you know everything conceivable in your field? Do you know everything about every other field? Why not take the chance to read about something new or dig a little deeper into something old? Why not use the site as it's intended -- to pose questions you would like answered, or to answer questions you have the knowledge to answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:52:10.693" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T17:53:10.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5140" CreationDate="2013-10-31T18:02:53.047" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering setting up a meta-list of tags that show some categories of tags, as well as a bunch of beginner-level tags roughly sorted by difficulty for easy favoriting/ignoring. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Favoriting and ignoring tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions having your favorite tags appear highlighted on the front page (and most other question lists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions having your ignored tags are hidden from the main page, and greyed out in other question lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can edit these from the side of the main page, or from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/preferences/current&quot;&gt;your preferences&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YlvL7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T18:02:53.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5140" CreationDate="2013-10-31T18:06:39.607" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Making your own main page&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search feature is pretty useful to create your own main page, if you're only interested in a particular set of tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for &lt;code&gt;[research-level] or [mathematical-physics] or [string-theory] -[homework]&lt;/code&gt;, for example, takes you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level+or+mathematical-physics+or+string-theory+-homework&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which shows the questions tagged by at least one of those three tags and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. Using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level+or+mathematical-physics+or+string-theory+-homework?sort=active&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;active&amp;quot; tab&lt;/a&gt; on the search page, we get a page which behaves very similar to the main page in that one can see question bumps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bookmark the search page link you just created and use it instead of the main page!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T18:06:39.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-31T18:31:31.830" Score="27" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;This idea is not totally original: there was at least an attempt at a journal club in chat &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/305/physics-journal-club-on-chat&quot;&gt;in 2011&lt;/a&gt;. That, in turn, was inspired by mbq's (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/674/first-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;) idea, which seems to have happened at least twice. We already have users do this, so I'm really just suggesting that we more actively encourage this. So here's some ideas I have. Feel free to add ideas for the process, suggest ideas for papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What do you mean by a journal club?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many physics departments have informal meetings where (mostly) graduate students meet for one or two hours with coffee, beer, and/or pizza, and discuss a recent research paper. Some departments even require their students to do this. Typically, someone will choose the paper for that week's meeting, everyone will read it before they meet and come up with questions for discussion. Then the group discusses the paper in some detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why would we want to do this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As several people have noted, and Manishearth has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5139/how-can-we-improve-participation-on-physics-se&quot;&gt;summarized&lt;/a&gt;, we've been having some difficulty recently with long-term, highly-respected users leaving or cutting back their involvement. We are also seeing a lot of homework questions that are either too basic for the regular users' tastes, or simply don't show any work at all. I hope that this idea will help fix both of those. First, by providing more interesting questions of a higher technical level, I hope that we can both retain our current users' interest and make the site more inviting for professional physicists who aren't already here. Second, this will help populate the front page with questions that aren't homework, which should help discourage students from asking for help on their homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So how would that work here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone finds a research paper they think is interesting. They develop a question about that paper, and post it to the main site. For a theory paper, this might be about a missing step in a derivation. For an experimental paper, this might be about the experimental setup. For a computational paper, this might be about the approximations underlying the computational model. &lt;strong&gt;Regardless of the kind of paper, the question should otherwise be a valid, on-topic question for Physics.SE.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to that, we will also invite suggestions for papers. People can add papers to this question as Answers, and others can vote those papers up or down. Other users can then use those votes as a gauge of how interested people will be to see a question about a particular paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, there will be no restriction on the number of questions that can be asked about a particular paper. After all, any good physics paper &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; invite several questions. Some questions will be distinct enough that they can be asked in parallel, while other questions will be generated from the answer to a previous question. We may even want to suggest a time-period (say a week) where people try to focus on one particular paper, and dissect it with many questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What sort of papers should I be looking for?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any paper, past or present, that is within the scope of the site. They can be historical, current, in your sub-discipline, something you need for your research, something only of passing interest to you, whatever. The only real limitation is that it should be published in a real journal or posted on a real pre-print server. This journal club will not be a place to ask for feedback on a manuscript you are working on, and it really won't be appropriate for discussing some crank's magnum opus about the earth sitting on top of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an infinite tower of turtles&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should I worry about Open Access?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. Not everyone here has access to many journals, so if you ask about a non-OA paper, you are excluding those who can't get a copy of that paper. That will presumably lower the quality of the response you get. On the other hand, some of the more prestigious journals &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt; Open Access, and many sub-disciplines of physics just haven't picked up on OA yet. So there are many papers that will produces good questions that just aren't OA papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, feel free to base your voting and preference on the accessibility of a paper, but don't feel obligated to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should I tag such questions as journal-club, or something like that?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;. Tag these questions as you normally would. We will compile a list of these questions here so people can find them easily. But creating a new tag for this project isn't useful; it would be a meta-tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ok. This sounds great. What can I do to help?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggest papers here as answers. Vote on papers that you like. If you want to skip the whole suggestion-vote-ask process, just go ahead and ask a question about your paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;This sound okay, but it would be even better if you did...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have suggestions for improvements, please feel free to add them, either as an answer/comment to this question, or by editing this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T17:01:46.307" Title="Let's have a journal club" Tags="|discussion|retention|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5139" CreationDate="2013-10-31T18:40:04.450" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;A journal club!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(While I assumed this was going to be as an answer to this post, Colin posted it as a separate question. Linking to it here just for completeness)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What do you mean by a journal club?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many physics departments have informal meetings where (mostly)&#xA;graduate students meet for one or two hours with coffee, beer, and/or&#xA;pizza, and discuss a recent research paper. Some departments even&#xA;require their students to do this. Typically, someone will choose the&#xA;paper for that week's meeting, everyone will read it before they meet&#xA;and come up with questions for discussion. Then the group discusses&#xA;the paper in some detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5144/lets-have-a-journal-club?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More details, and main post here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T18:40:04.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5140" CreationDate="2013-10-31T19:31:02.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's OK to step back&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, one gets caught in unsavory, long discussions with users who aren't quite getting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to stay caught up in these discussions. You have a right to step out of the discussion, and you should feel free to exercise it whenever the discussion is getting too annoying for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are feeling that the user is harassing you, mention it in a custom flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T19:31:02.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5140" CreationDate="2013-10-31T20:25:57.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Use chat&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many times I see long discussions on the main site being conducted in real time, in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a rather non ideal way of communicating&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; as many a time one is still typing a long comment and receives multiple replies while doing so, making it confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/new&quot;&gt;create a room in chat&lt;/a&gt; and link to it in the comments. You can have much more free discussion in this environment. It doesn't get cluttered like the comments, and it's more amenable to back-and-forth conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, it works for non-realtime discussions as well, and works for many users chatting just as well as 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, discussing in chat means that there's no worrying about the comments getting deleted later on. Chat discussions are preserved)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides chat rooms for individual discussions, we do have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;main chat room&lt;/a&gt; that is reasonably active. This is usually just a place to hang out and discuss physics, the site, or pretty much anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. besides not really being allowed; while short discussions are OK, long discussions shouldn't really happen in the comments.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T20:25:57.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5139" CreationDate="2013-10-31T20:47:31.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Boot up the new book policy&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommendation questions are great sources of traffic from students of varying levels, and we may want to start accepting them again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the SE model usually doesn't work well with recommendation questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/reevaluating-the-book-policy&quot;&gt;I believe that we may be able to handle them in a way that doesn't exhibit most of the shortcomings of recommendation questions on SE, while not impinging on their quality&lt;/a&gt; (indeed, this may improve their quality a lot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we need people to volunteer to curate book questions! The proposed policy involves editing the questions into a certain format, and keeping an eye on the answers to ensure that they stick to the policy. If answers are not doing this, they should be flagged and commented on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4812/please-volunteer-for-help-editing-recommendation-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Volunteer to help with the policy here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T20:47:31.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5144" CreationDate="2013-10-31T21:46:05.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper that partially inspired this idea was a letter in the October 24 Nature regarding a new method for using NMR to measure the temperature in a chemical reactor (It's Nature, so not Open Access, but here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12568&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DOI&lt;/a&gt;). I'm not totally sure I understand how they convert the NMR signal into temperature. I'm going to give it another read, and I should have a question or two about it in the next few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T21:46:05.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5139" CreationDate="2013-10-31T23:02:17.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I don't think there is a need to improve participation here anymore than with the Math and Chemistry sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem lies with the attitude of some people who started out thinking that Physics Stack Exchange would somehow be the next Math Overflow. Instead, it's ended up ticking over nicely just like other popular academic sites on the Stack Exchange network, open to a wide range of people including enthusiasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you want to &quot;improve&quot; participation more towards Math Over Flow level, then alienate those at the lower level by excluding them from asking questions, and banning homework questions. That way you'll improve participation of professionals , while reducing &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;questions/day&lt;/a&gt; and therefore overall participation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;2nd place Mathematics Q&amp;amp;A for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields &lt;strong&gt;494 questions/day&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;17th place MathOverflow&#xA;MathOverflow Q&amp;amp;A for professional mathematicians &lt;strong&gt;42 questions/day&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite physics not being as popular as mathematics, it's still placed 9th, and I don't think there is a need to improve participation in its current form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9th place Physics Q&amp;amp;A for active researchers, academics and students of physics &lt;strong&gt;51 questions/day&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="2146" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T23:34:02.230" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T23:34:02.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2013-10-31T23:58:34.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am happy to help in the time I have.  Given that my 2 day-to-day jobs are involved in academia and teaching, which include this kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29350" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T23:58:34.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-01T05:53:20.503" Score="37" ViewCount="1803" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site gets a lot of low-quality homework questions. Since I ignored the homework tag a few months ago, my experience of the site has been much more pleasant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; is nice, but the questions that actually obey it are few. I think this is because if you've put the effort in to identify the concept you're having difficulty with, it's then easy enough to take the &quot;homework&quot; part out of the question and just ask about the concept itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, and since we're &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5139/how-can-we-improve-participation-on-physics-se&quot;&gt;looking for ways to improve the site's quality&lt;/a&gt;, I wanted to put the following idea forward to see how people respond to it: why don't we just ban homework altogether? The homework policy would be changed to say that we can only help with homework-like questions if you can phrase them in a way that they're only about the concepts and not about the actual assignment. Potentially we might lose a few good questions, but we'd also lose a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not 100% I agree with this proposal myself, but I'm curious to see how people feel about it, and it seems like it might be worth having the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T13:02:01.017" Title="Why don't we just ban homework altogether?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5154" CreationDate="2013-11-01T07:05:43.527" Score="1" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should I try to raise my reputation? How should I do this? Can I remove this ban by deleting my all posts questions, etc., or should I make a new account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T01:15:34.053" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T01:15:34.053" Title="Why can't I answer any question now on physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|support|answers|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5153" CreationDate="2013-11-01T07:25:41.300" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you get hit with the automatic answer block, you get linked to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/answer-bans&quot;&gt;page that describes how your situation and how to get out of it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Read it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, improve your existing answers. You have some deleted link-only answers; elaborate on them and undelete. Don't ask questions or leave comments in  the answer box, such stuff gets flagged and deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; delete your posts, it will exacerbate the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; create a new account, it will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, please do not ask homework-like questions on this site. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T07:25:41.300" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5139" CreationDate="2013-11-01T07:31:06.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Ban homework altogether&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See Nathaniel's post here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current homework policy is nice, but the questions that actually&#xA;obey it are few. I think this is because if you've put the effort in&#xA;to identify the concept you're having difficulty with, it's then easy&#xA;enough to take the &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; part out of the question and just ask&#xA;about the concept itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, and since we're looking for ways to improve the&#xA;site's quality, I wanted to put the following idea forward to see how&#xA;people respond to it: why don't we just ban homework altogether? The&#xA;homework policy would be changed to say that we can only help with&#xA;homework-like questions if you can phrase them in a way that they're&#xA;only about the concepts and not about the actual assignment.&#xA;Potentially we might lose a few good questions, but we'd also lose a&#xA;lot of bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T07:31:06.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-01T08:30:15.977" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, as I understand it, that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; already the case. Almost. But we can improve it somewhat to make it more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thoughts on the current policy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, the way I see it is that a post that follows the homework policy really doesn't need the tag in the first place. My thoughts resonate with what you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is because if you've put the effort in to identify the concept you're having difficulty with, it's then easy enough to take the &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; part out of the question and just ask about the concept itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of making the primary focus of the question the homework problem, it's easier to just ask for the concept and maybe include the problem to exhibit your thought process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I once said in chat,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/10552277#10552277&quot;&gt;IMO an &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; HW question is indistinguishable from a normal question when the &amp;quot;this is HW&amp;quot; part is excised.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that the &amp;quot;show some effort&amp;quot; bit of the homework policy is much less important than the &amp;quot;ask about a specific concept&amp;quot;, though it is more objectively determined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The current state of questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I see on this site, the majority of closed HW questions don't get improved. Some people add effort, but most of these still aren't conceptual, and arguably never will be as many are essentially asking for help with algebra or some such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think 1 in 30 HW questions get reopened, and that too usually because they become borderline (not because they get improved significantly). Some stats on this would be good, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned that you ignored that tag and it felt nicer. I'm pretty sure that the questions you missed seeing were eventually closed, at least most of them. It's just a matter of speed, and that's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5110/how-much-are-3k-users-moderating-through-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;different issue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So, what can we improve?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I said at the top, this is almost already the case. Almost. We can still improve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there still are some HW posts that get reopened because they added effort. We can try to be more strict when it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this, from the policy POV, the semantics of the current policy is that &amp;quot;Homework is OK, just read this long post to learn all the caveats&amp;quot;. Changing it to &amp;quot;Homework is not OK, but here is how you may be able to convert your HW question to a good one&amp;quot; may lead to some good results. Ditto with the close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we consistently change the semantics of our hw policy across the site, and instead of telling users to improve their hw question (the wording means that it will most probably still stay an hw question), we tell them to &lt;em&gt;convert&lt;/em&gt; it into a conceptual question (which brings home the point that the question needs a major change of POV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a way to conclude this post at the moment, I may do so later after thinking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T03:24:03.293" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5140" CreationDate="2013-11-01T10:35:10.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Level up your communication ninja powers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure your questions, answers and comments are clear, understandable by the audience and on-topic. Use proper English. Be reasonably polite in tone (as you would be with a professor you like).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never fight with other people, or discuss their intentions. &lt;em&gt;They&lt;/em&gt; are not wrong, &lt;em&gt;their posts&lt;/em&gt; are. Understand the difference! It's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; personal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you posting more than 1 or 2 comments on a post? Forget about it, it's time to move on to do something else. It's seriously not worth your time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most people here are really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; smart and they are really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; into physics. Always assume your counterpart is &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; as smart as you and/or as knowledgeable as you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good content is favored by time and voting. Give it time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't have conversations with other people on the site. Honestly, conversations are nice, but this site is about asking and answering questions. Keep it in mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't try to answer in a 600 letters comment! If you disagree with an answer, write a better one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It takes time and effort to learn how to be effective on the Stack Exchange network, that's why we have a point system. Learn about the system before complaining it's all wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This site is not only about physics. It's about &lt;em&gt;communicating&lt;/em&gt; physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This site is &lt;em&gt;not a forum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T10:35:10.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5159" CreationDate="2013-11-01T12:04:58.270" Score="-1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question isn't duplicate anymore. Why do people criticize beginners?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82672/what-is-the-length-of-a-photon&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82672/what-is-the-length-of-a-photon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T13:41:14.563" Title="Why was this question marked as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5158" CreationDate="2013-11-01T12:27:52.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're not criticizing anyone here. Please don't misunderstand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing is reversible. In case you've asked for something else and we've misunderstood you, the question can be reopened. But, it's you who should make it clear. Express it to us, by editing your question to add, how your question isn't a duplicate, what exactly you were trying to ask, and more specifically, think whether it's meaningful in its current form, etc. Once you've edited, the votes would also attain &lt;em&gt;reversibility&lt;/em&gt;. Had your question transformed into a good one, people will revoke their downvotes (for sure). No one's angry...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Hey, what's the length of a photon?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. And, we said, &quot;Hmm... We've already got a more generalized question on the size of quantum particles, where yours might be a proper subset&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then, you say, &lt;em&gt;&quot;No, it's not..!!!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More simply, telling us &quot;NO, NO, NO&quot; isn't gonna work it out. Instead, you should explain why it's not a duplicate in its current form... ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T12:27:52.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-01T14:27:17.080" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, please, please ban homework altogether. Allowing homework has resulted in a deluge of questions from users with a reputation of 1 asking us to do their work for them. Yes, we can tag then ignore homework questions, but (a) that requires us to be continually editing tags and (b) it makes the site look rubbish for anyone not au fait with filtering by tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with anyone trying to learn and using the site as a teaching aid, but just copying and pasting homework questions isn't going to achieve either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T14:27:17.080" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-01T21:43:31.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a need for a ban on even basic homework questions, because the system we have in place at the moment seems to be working well IMO. A recent example is the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83128/cylinder-on-an-inclined-plane-held-in-equilibrium&quot;&gt;cylinder on an inclined plane held in equilibrium&lt;/a&gt;. This was flagged, and put on hold with the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;put on hold as off-topic by tpg2114, Crazy Buddy, Sklivvz♦ 49 mins ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&amp;quot; – tpg2114, Crazy Buddy, Sklivvz&#xA;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question or leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as users flag bad homework questions, the system in place should be adequate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T21:43:31.273" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-02T01:33:37.853" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The homework policy would be changed to say that we can only help with homework-like questions if you can phrase them in a way that they're only about the concepts and not about the actual assignment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, that's exactly what the current homework policy &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; say!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of reasons you might have thought otherwise: first, the homework policy is probably not as clear as it could be on this. But the quoted bit is definitely the intent, and I'd certainly approve of a rewording to make that more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more importantly, no matter what policies we put in place, &lt;strong&gt;we can't actually &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; people from posting homework questions&lt;/strong&gt;. It's the nature of a physics Q&amp;amp;A site that lots of people will show up asking for help on their homework without bothering to check whether doing so is appropriate. The best we can do is use the policy as justification to close such questions as quickly as they come in. The moderators (well, some of us) try to do this, but we're only a few people, and it gets exhausting. We need more community involvement, specifically close voting and flagging (and &lt;em&gt;not answering&lt;/em&gt;) low-quality homework questions. (There has been a significant increase in flags over the past few days, which is great, but more is still better.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, something we could consider is removing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;, thus making it considerably more explicit to new posters that homework questions are not welcome here unless they can be reformulated in such a way as to make them conceptual. You wouldn't be the first to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1477/should-we-get-rid-of-the-homework-tag&quot;&gt;suggest this&lt;/a&gt;, but each time it's been brought up, the community has come out in support of keeping the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some historical context may help explain why that happens. In the early days of the site, we didn't have a homework policy, and thus people posted homework questions and got them answered. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag became one of our most popular tags rather quickly. There were several &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/38/the-canonical-homework-question&quot;&gt;discussions&lt;/a&gt; about whether this was okay, and largely people thought that it was, for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the founding principles of the site was that we did not want to reject questions for being too low-level. In other words, we didn't want to be the physics version of Math Overflow. Now, there's a difference between being low-level and low-effort, and in particular excluding homework questions is not the same as excluding low-level questions, but in those early days our standards for homework-related questions were perhaps not as strict as they are now precisely because we wanted to show that we were inclusive of all levels of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We were taking cues from &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which already had a homework policy that seemed to be working well. You'll notice that the wording of our homework policy is closely based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question/1804#1804&quot;&gt;theirs&lt;/a&gt;. Since they accept homework questions on Math, our default position was to do the same here. Of course, it emerged over time that their policy is loosely enforced (at least, that seems to be the case as far as I can tell).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Honestly, we were worried that the site would never reach critical mass if we put a blanket ban on homework questions. Currently, I'm fairly sure this is not something we have to worry about, because we have a steady stream of non-homework, conceptual questions, but in the early days it wasn't so clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As time went on, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag became more and more well established as a feature of the site and of the homework policy, and people who wanted to see higher-level questions grew accustomed to using it to filter those questions out. At this point, it has a tremendous amount of inertia, in the sense that we've grown accustomed to a certain way of operating which does involve use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, and as much as there are some of us who would like to see it (and its associated questions) go, there are probably more people who want to keep it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T01:33:37.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-02T22:00:31.510" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to put this out there, here's an idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nuke questions that are &quot;Solve this problem for me&quot; type questions that should be nuked even under the current policy. This will take some work to go through the roughly 2600 questions tagged homework to evaluate which are good examples and which are bad. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nuke the HW tag (not the remaining questions themselves, just the tag).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the FAQ: &quot;Can I ask about homework here? No, this site is not intended to do homework for users. We are here to educate about concepts in physics&quot; or something along those lines. That way it makes it clear we don't want to do anybody's work for them but if they can formulate it as a conceptual question we'll answer it. In other words, it's the same as what we have now but we say &quot;No but&quot; instead of &quot;Yes but...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users need to step up and help close things down that violate the &quot;we won't do your work for you&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't be fun to do it, and to enforce it, but it has to be done by the users and not just the moderators if it will ever work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T22:00:31.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-03T13:14:35.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it makes a lot of sense to ban homework questions. It's not that we shouldn't help students who are having trouble with their assignments. But we should help them to grasp the concept, we should &lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt; be doing their work. If the student actually identifies the concept he's having trouble with and asks a conceptual question about this concept, then everything's fine, that's what the site's for. The existence of the homework tag, and the nature of the questions associated with this tag, simply invite students to ask their assignment flat out. Eliminating the homework tag might help fix this issue. After all, a conceptual question really doesn't need to be tagged homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about what the homework tag is really there for. The tag description reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Applies to questions of primarily educational value - not only questions that arise from actual homework assignments, but any&#xA;  question where it is preferable to guide the asker to the answer&#xA;  rather than giving it away outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to ask a proper homework question - that is a question which focuses on the concept I'm having trouble with rather than the details of the assignment - I &lt;em&gt;DO&lt;/em&gt; want an outright answer; I shouldn't be led on when it comes to understanding the concept. So '&lt;em&gt;guiding the asker to the answer rather than giving it away outright&lt;/em&gt;' really only applies to questions which simply restate the assignment. So implicitly, the tag description is encouraging unresearched, unconceptual, dumb homework-assingment-questions. The homework tag &lt;em&gt;only makes sense&lt;/em&gt; for those types of questions. Getting rid of it would in my opinion be the correct course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above would go too far for some people, this might be an alternative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All questions tagged as homework will appear in a review queue, and will be hidden from the main page by default. They will only be shown on the main page when the question has been reviewed and accepted by several users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All homework questions that are not tagged as a homework question will be immediately retagged to a homework question (thus becoming hidden and entering the review stage), or closed right away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete all old homework questions (and their answers) that are not up to the standard we expect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together, this should ensure that the main page isn't flooded by low-quality questions, thus discouraging prospective users from asking such questions. Deleting old low-quality questions will go to some length to discourage low-quality questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the main page will be populated by interesting high-level questions, and some high-quality homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this approach does require some new features in the SE website(s), and makes the homework question a very special tag (even on a merely technical level).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27746" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T13:14:35.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-03T15:09:05.037" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As much as I sympathize with the move to ban homework-like (HWL) questions because of front page clutter, we should realize that people will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; stop posting HWL question. They are sometimes desperate, say, with an upcoming exam tomorrow. Realistically, the only thing we can do is to minimize the time that such HWL posts appear open on the front page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast closing requires help from the community to flag around the clock, and especially +3k users to review and cast votes-to-close. It is possible that HW policy formulations should be strengthen to provide people with the necessary mandate/tools for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But closure is not all. The posts still appear on the front page for a while unless it is downvoted to -4. Note however that traditionally, the unwritten rule is to not massively downvote new posters, but rather leaving constructive comments. If you decide to downvote a HWL question, please first check OP's userpage, to see if he has a repeated pattern of posing bad HWL questions.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in the search of methods to stop HWL questions, the status of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag will unavoidably be questioned. The pros and cons of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag have been discussed many times before in other meta posts, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1477/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4022/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Here I will only address what potential benefit the retirement of the homework tag would have on the incoming stream of HWL questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be against removing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag for various reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is instrumental in identifying HWL questions in the first place that such posts are tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; stop posting HWL questions, no matter how many policies that we write, no matter how many tags that we ban, and no matter how many duplicates of the question that there already exist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely doubt any broken-window theory that the homework tag causes more HWL questions to be asked than without the tag, cf. point 2 above. On the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag helps the community to quickly identify and close HWL questions, cf. point 1 above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T21:13:33.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5111" CreationDate="2013-11-04T12:33:48.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem identified is that some users don't enjoy tedious  discussions with &lt;em&gt;&quot;pop-sci philosophers and no-effort homework posters.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The obvious and easy solution is don't do it then. Do the things you do like!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed solution, that we reject the successful SE model, is impracticable and, in any case, unwarranted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T12:33:48.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-04T17:45:13.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been noticing another trend that brings up a counter-point to my &quot;let's nuke it&quot; answer I posted previously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many homework-like questions are answered by lower-rep users. It would be a case of beginners helping beginners, which actually means that the answerer does in fact get something out of helping -- the best way to learn is to teach after all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also means that the budding physicists who start out on the site by answering homework questions learn as they go along; not just about how to teach and the basics that (at the time) are not so basic to them but about how to interact with the site and with the community at large. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, homework-like questions may not be so bad because, just like the goal of giving homework, it's training both questioner and answerer alike to be better members of the community as they progress through the study of physics. Maybe what we need is not a decrease in homework questions but an increase in advanced questions -- let the beginners work together on the homework-like questions and the experts work together on the expert questions. And while the experts may not learn much from the homework-like questions (although everybody stands to learn from attempting to explain things in different ways to different people), the beginners get experience with the easy questions and can learn advanced topics by reading the advanced ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody wins, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T17:45:13.030" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-05T08:41:39.463" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought it would be worth distilling my thoughts into a concrete proposal. This is essentially what Manishearth already proposed - I'm just hoping to make the idea clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many ways it is not a big change to the current policy, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a big change to the way the policy is presented, and I think it would have a lot of benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current homework policy is formatted something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q: &lt;strong&gt;How can I ask a homework question on Physics.SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: You can ask homework questions, but you have to do a couple of things to make it OK. (Show some effort and ask about a concept.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal is to change it to something more like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q: &lt;strong&gt;Can I ask a homework question on Physics.SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, we don't accept homework questions here. However, if you can identify the concept you're having trouble with and ask about that, then it won't be a homework question and we'll be happy to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be best to keep the &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; tag, at least at first, so that people can continue to filter it. It would become similar to the &lt;code&gt;big-list&lt;/code&gt; tag, in that any question that's legitimately tagged with it would almost certainly be closed (hopefully by the community). Later, if we're successful in stemming the tide, perhaps it could be phased out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this change as having two main benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's less encouraging to people considering asking a homework question. It doesn't give the impression that just adding an attempt at the working, or asking &quot;what physics concept do I need to solve this problem?&quot; will make it okay. On the flip side it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; encourage doing enough work to turn the question into a genuinely concept-based one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more importantly, it gives the community a stronger mandate to close non-conceptual homework questions. I admit that I'm one of the high-rep users that doesn't participate much in this. This is partly because I find the review queues to be generally depressing places to hang out, but more saliently, it's also because I often don't quite feel justified in casting a close vote. I tend to find myself thinking &quot;well, the policy does say homework is allowed, and this person's made a &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; of an effort to show some working, and you can see they've &lt;em&gt;kind of&lt;/em&gt; tried to ask about a concept, even if they haven't really done a good job, so maybe closing it would be a bit mean.&quot; Under the new system it would be much simpler: &quot;this is a homework-like question, so it should be closed&quot;. There would be no reason to feel bad about it, which would make it much easier to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this relatively small change would make the policy much clearer, and could potentially result in smaller numbers of low-quality homework questions, while also encouraging participation from the community in closing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-11-05T09:09:39.040" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T09:09:39.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5144" CreationDate="2013-11-06T16:09:49.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose we start the journal club by reading&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three Classes of Newtonian Three-Body Planar Periodic Orbits. Milovan Šuvakov and V. Dmitrašinović. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.114301&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phys. Rev. Lett.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;110&lt;/strong&gt; no. 11, 114301 (2013)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:1303.0181&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm certainly interested in that paper. Why not give it a go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions about this paper on-site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82511/details-of-the-new-solutions-to-the-three-body-problem&quot;&gt;Details of the new solutions to the three-body problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83633/how-trustworthy-are-numerically-obtained-periodic-solutions-to-the-three-body-pr&quot;&gt;How trustworthy are numerically-obtained periodic solutions to the three body problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other commentaries and resources on the paper&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013/03/physicists-discover-whopping-13-new-solutions-three-body-problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body Problem&lt;/a&gt;, ScienceNow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.cz/2013/03/13-new-periodic-solutions-to-3-body.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;13 new periodic solutions to the 3-body problem&lt;/a&gt;, Luboš Motl's blog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a nice &lt;a href=&quot;http://suki.ipb.ac.rs/3body/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gallery with animations of the solutions&lt;/a&gt; at Šuvakov's website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11169" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T17:01:46.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-08T02:53:12.327" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that our ultimate goal should be the burnination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;. But I agree with several others who have said that that is unworkable in the short term. My experience with questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is that they fall into a few categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Please do my homework for me. I have put no effort into it at all.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83399/finding-the-final-velocity&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I have completed this homework problem. Please check my work and/or where did I go wrong?&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83627/elastic-potential-energy-of-a-spring-when-compressed&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possibly not a good question as written, but the OP is trying. There might be a conceptual question somewhere. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83618/rotational-inertia-of-a-sphere-and-a-cube&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55584/canonical-partition-of-a-boson-gas&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hard problems that come either directly from the research literature, or from upper-level courses. These usually have an easy to identify conceptual question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82506/conservation-of-energy-in-a-quantum-harmonic-oscillator-after-a-sudden-change-in&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76994/polchinskys-evaluation-of-the-one-loop-string-path-integral&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 and 2 are easy; we just want to close them and get on with real questions. 3 is probably the most difficult category, both to identify, and to actually address. I think we want most of the questions in 4, but it is sometimes difficult to separate out the physics and the math in those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just favorited &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, sort of in the spirit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5143/9719&quot;&gt;Manish's suggestion&lt;/a&gt; and have been going through those questions (if anyone has seen a lot of homework questions in the review queue recently, that's me). I haven't seen a single question yet where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homeowrk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homeowrk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homeowrk&lt;/a&gt; tag actually &lt;em&gt;helps&lt;/em&gt; the question: they're all either on-topic or off-topic. It really is a meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best argument I can come up with to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is that people can use it to filter out questions they don't want to see. I have two replies to that. First, it's not a very good filter. I suspect people who want to ignore &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; are trying to filter out categories 1 and 2, and possibly 3. But they're also ignoring questions that fit into 4, and I'm not sure they want to do that. My other reply is that we really do need everyone's help to close the really bad homework questions when they come up. I feel a little conflicted about saying that; it is essentially telling other users how they should use the site, and the low-level BS homework questions are exactly the sort of things that drives away the higher-end users we're trying to keep/attract. On the other hand, I worry that part of the problem we're having with closing the bad homework questions is that not enough of our 3000+ users are seeing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-11-08T02:53:12.327" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-11T12:42:54.873" Score="21" ViewCount="1104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1096/what-is-the-ultimate-purpose-of-physics-stackexchange&quot;&gt;What is the ultimate purpose of physics.stackexchange?&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to me that the accepted answer doesn't answer the question. I have no special wish to get excessively philosophical, but I think being clear what we're trying to achieve will help clarify vexed issues like homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside what SE are trying to achieve (profit presumably), it seems to me that good reasons for the effort we put into this site include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encouraging interest in physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Education&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experience suggests that research will only ever be a tiny part of site activity because there are too few research physicists interested in participating. Let's also leave aside &lt;em&gt;Fun&lt;/em&gt; because it's a given - few people will do things that aren't fun unless they're paid or forced to. If you're with me so far that means we basically have two aims, to encourage interest and to educate. Arguably &lt;em&gt;encouraging interest&lt;/em&gt; is also educating, but at a popular science level, in which case our sole purpose in life is education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is supposed to be a question rather than just a diatribe, I guess my question is whether you agree with my analysis and if not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T12:18:57.680" Title="What is the ultimate purpose of physics.stackexchange - revisited" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2013-11-11T20:03:17.240" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; purpose is to &quot;Make The Internet a Better Place™&quot;. What this means is that the Q&amp;amp;As should be of the form that are useful to others. People searching for a conceptual explanation or the resolution of an apparent paradox should find this site and be helped here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a long history. If you've ever googled for help with something and come across a forum, you might have been frustrated by the signal-to-noise ratio on that forum. I recall coming across tons of tangential discussion, and sometimes pages and pages of discourse which reaches no resolution. Besides that, many of these are cluttered with duplicates and one-time problems that are really too specific for anyone else to benefit. Forums are useful to the people asking questions and the handful of community members participating in the discussion. But the wider audience from the Internet has a hard time with forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange tries to do away with that, by keeping posts focused and only allowing posts that will help many people. This was the essence behind the &quot;Too Localized&quot; close reason that many of you may remember, &amp;mdash; the point was that while the answers may help the OP, there's a very little chance of it helping anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also one of the main reasons why we close homework. Besides the no-effort-please-do-my-work-for-me, homework questions don't help any other visitors. While the answers may be conceptual, it is pretty hard for someone with the conceptual question to find the homework problem via Google or otherwise, as the question focuses on the problem, not the concept &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. As for people who want help with the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; homework problem, well, that's pretty rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the main purpose is to also help people &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than the OP, people who will come to the Q&amp;amp;A after searching related terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's just the primary purpose. As you mentioned, fun is another factor&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, as is encouraging interest and &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; education. The &quot;fun&quot; bit extends itself; I personally don't participate just because it's &quot;fun&quot;. I write answers because my own understanding is strengthened by doing so&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, not just to help the OP and the other readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not intending to say that we aren't here to help each other. We are. The community feeling is a great thing, and helping each other learn physics is a good goal. But one should try to have a look a the larger picture, helping a couple of people on site is dwarfed by the countless other non-members we help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Research&lt;/em&gt; is a different beast. Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/7433&quot;&gt;non mainstream policy&lt;/a&gt;, in its attempts to be as objective as possible to avoid unnecessary arguments, stops us from &lt;em&gt;developing&lt;/em&gt; new physics&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;. I guess this is OK, because frankly speaking, the people here have better channels to develop new physics; by discussing with colleagues and collaborators. The ones who choose to try to develop the theory here are usually the type that are proposing some non mainstream ideas. Besides all this, the limitation of discussion on the main site is a damper here, though that is easily remedied with chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is in no way saying that research &lt;em&gt;level&lt;/em&gt; questions are discouraged, just that using the site as a platform to develop new theories collaboratively is discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Which is why we encourage making HW question conceptual; people will actually &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; the question then&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2. Don't let &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; tell you otherwise ;-)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3. The act of codifying nebulous thoughts on a topic into clear English is something that seems to immediately highlight one's own conceptual misunderstandings and inadequacies.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4. &lt;s&gt;Neither does MathOverflow, they have a policy against open questions and the like, and they still maintain a good level of research-level questions.&lt;/s&gt; MathOverflow disallows well known open problems, but they don't seem to have any research being done on site, even if the posts may inspire research.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T05:36:36.067" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2013-11-12T03:41:32.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sticky content that allows SE to get lots of hits. That allows the investors and owners to make money. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12811" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T03:41:32.323" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2013-11-12T22:56:08.880" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, John, it's actually pretty simple from my perspective.  The &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of this site is to promote the creation and trading of value for value for those interested in thinking about and doing physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, in my opinion, is the only valid reason for this site's existence.  I've learned a good bit here from other's answers as well as through composing my own answers; a process which forces me to think very clearly about the particular topic and, in so doing, sharpens my own thinking and deepens my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that I'm not special in any way and thus that others desire to create and trade value here in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly feel no obligation to participate here for some &quot;larger cause&quot;.  My participation is for a purely selfish reason:  I profit from it (in the larger, &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; sense of the word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that is the reason others volunteer here to answer and moderate; that they too find value and profit for themselves in doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2013-11-12T23:02:35.327" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T23:02:35.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2013-11-13T00:38:51.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &quot;Encouraging interest in physics&quot; and &quot;Education&quot;, an important part of most SE sites is also to get real feedback on both questions and answers. This is what allows some of us to learn provide clearer answers and ask more focused questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4846" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T00:38:51.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2013-11-13T03:17:24.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't possible for there to be a single ultimate purpose, since the existence of Physics Stack Exchange depends upon a diverse range of purposes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;those within the community contributing to the site, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the unpaid moderators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the company financing the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;the motive of the founders&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other people and group motives I'm not aware of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a better question would be to ask: &lt;strong&gt;What's the purpose behind you being here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the fundamental reason is given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5173/what-is-the-ultimate-purpose-of-physics-stackexchange-revisited/5176#5176&quot;&gt;Alfred Centauri's answer.&lt;/a&gt; I liked the idea of contributing to the site, putting it down on my CV as one of my interests, and the interviewer could take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7738/why-theres-a-whirl-when-you-drain-the-bathtub/7752#7752&quot;&gt;some of my answers&lt;/a&gt; and hire me. Now that I'm more aware of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6934/what-is-the-source-of-high-frequency-squeal-in-faulty-crt-monitors-and-tv-and-w/6968#6968&quot;&gt;incompetence&lt;/a&gt;, I use the site more passively to learn from others, in the hope I might actually get round to asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52976/how-can-the-speed-of-light-be-a-dimensionless-constant&quot;&gt;good questions&lt;/a&gt; more regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T03:17:24.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:28:14.057" Score="26" ViewCount="767" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;proposed recently on meta&lt;/a&gt; that, as part of a broader programme of increasing the site quality, we ban homework questions altogether. This proposal seems to have really quite strong support. On the other hand, it was pointed out quite persuasively, mostly by David Z and Manishearth, and mostly well upvoted, that the current policy is already much like this in that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; questions that stay open tend to be conceptual questions that don't really need the tag. This means that the final change will mostly be one of documentation and presentation. Finally, it's pretty clear that we need to keep the tag itself, as an aid for users who ignore that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the really-quite-settled state of that discussion, it seems to me that it's time to move forward on it. This involves generating a consensus that we do want this, and developing the corresponding documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, then, I think the consensus on what the core of the policy should be is something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Homework questions are not allowed on this site, but it is acceptable to ask conceptual questions which are based on a set assignment.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;vote this question up if you agree with the change, and vote it down if you disagree&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned above, it seems the main change that needs to happen is one of documentation. There are a fair few pieces of documentation relating to this issue around the site, and they would all need to be changed. Specifically, I can identify the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy on this meta site: the question and its answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The How to Ask sidebar on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Ask a Question&lt;/a&gt; page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki excerpt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework close reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am posting answers to this question with proposals for each of these, so they can be discussed independently. Please vote each answer up or down according to whether you agree to the change to that specific wording. I am making all of them community wiki: if you have suggestions for improvement, post them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must note that I came up against quite a few rough edges in writing this documentation when it came to describing the tag itself. I believe this is because it is pretty inconsistent to keep and actively use a 'homework' tag if the front-line message we're sending is that homework is off-topic. I'll post a separate thread about it shortly. For now, I propose we use the tag much as we're using it now: it should describe questions based on set problems (homework, textbook, etc.) as well as the old &quot;questions whose value lies in understanding the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself&quot;, though that seems weird now (are those not just... questions?). I propose, to begin with, at least, that we &lt;em&gt;keep the tag and the close reason separate&lt;/em&gt;, as described in the documentation below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm also adding an answer with some thoughts on enforcement of this policy, which is the &lt;em&gt;truly crucial&lt;/em&gt; ingredient of driving down the amount of low-level homework questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Banning homework: vote and documentation" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:28:14.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy: the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are homework questions allowed on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are homework questions allowed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I do if I want to ask a homework question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T14:28:14.057" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:28:14.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:28:48.390" Score="9" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The tag wiki excerpt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a crucial part of the policy. This is what gets seen by users who try to tag a question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ey2CI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon mouseover, a link saying &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/homework/info&quot;&gt;learn more&lt;/a&gt; appears, which leads to the homework tag wiki. This is, I think, a crucial place to catch potential low-level homework questions and stop them being asked in that form. My proposal is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HOMEWORK QUESTIONS ARE NOT ALLOWED unless they're about a specific concept. If you have a homework question, please read the guidance in meta, the tag info, or click 'learn more' to help you convert it to a conceptual question. Use this tag for questions based on set problems as well as questions whose value lies in understanding the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T14:28:48.390" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:28:48.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:29:03.360" Score="11" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The close reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework questions are not allowed on this site.&lt;/strong&gt; See our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;meta site&lt;/a&gt; to help you convert your post to a conceptual question that is useful to the broader community and to future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T14:29:03.360" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:29:03.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:29:39.533" Score="15" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;How to Ask&lt;/a&gt; sidebar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework questions are not allowed&lt;/strong&gt; on this site. You should ask about &lt;strong&gt;specific concepts&lt;/strong&gt;. See our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T14:29:39.533" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:29:39.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:30:46.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The tag wiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Homework questions are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allowed on Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for &lt;strong&gt;specific conceptual physics questions&lt;/strong&gt;, and not a homework help site. Questions about a specific concept that originate in homework problems are OK, but questions asking us to check your work or asking for pointers or hints about a problem are likely to be closed. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;see the details on our meta site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is considered a homework question here?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is a question about a set problem instead of the concepts behind it. This includes questions from actual homework assignments as well as homework-like problems from textbooks, self-study problems, puzzles, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What should I do if I want to ask a homework question?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is crucial that you ask about the specific concept that's giving you trouble.&lt;/strong&gt; If your question originates in a homework assignment, you should provide the problem in full as well as all your working so far, to provide context. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;see the details on our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is this tag used for?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag describes homework-like questions based on a set problem, such as textbook and self-study problems, puzzles, and actual homework assignments. It also covers problem-solving questions whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes on-topic conceptual questions that are based on such problems, as well as off-topic questions which are purely for homework help. &lt;em&gt;Having the homework tag is independent of being on-topic&lt;/em&gt;. If you see off-topic homework questions, the appropriate action is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flag the question for closure&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;vote to close it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T17:09:04.887" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:30:46.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:31:25.230" Score="10" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy: the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The short version:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework questions are not allowed on this site. If you can identify the concept you're having trouble with and ask a question about it, then we'll be happy to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is a question about a set problem instead of the concepts behind it. This includes questions from actual homework assignments and textbooks, as well as self-study problems, puzzles, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself, may also be considered homework, though this is somewhat of a judgement call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some problems come up in the course of doing a homework or self-study problem, but are separate from the main point of the problem. There's a bit of a judgement call on whether such questions are homework or not, but as long as you stick to asking about a concept you should be safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can I ask a homework question here?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for &lt;strong&gt;specific conceptual physics questions&lt;/strong&gt;. It is OK to ask a conceptual question if it comes up while doing a homework or self-study problem, but questions about such assignments are generally off-topic. Keep in mind that &lt;strong&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is not a homework help site&lt;/strong&gt;, and it takes more than just showing your working for your question to be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What should I do if I want to ask a homework question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Identify the concept you're having trouble with&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is crucial that you ask about the specific concept that's giving you trouble. Questions asking us to check your work, asking for hints, tips, or how to solve a homework-like question, or which simply re-state a textbook problem, are not well received and are very likely to be closed. If you ask about the concept, instead, you produce a resource that is more relevant to others who might have the same problem later, and additionally you provide grounds for a more interesting answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find you can't change your question into one that's about the topic you're studying, rather than the specific problem you're trying to solve, you may need to go back to your textbook or teacher to look for a general explanation. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See if an existing question helps you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check and see if someone has already asked a question that gives you the information you need. The search box at the top right corner of the page will be pretty useful here. You can also try looking at tags that are relevant to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find a prior question that seems relevant but doesn't clear up your confusion, mention it and provide a link when you write your own question. That gives the people answering a better idea of what kinds of explanations don't work for you, and what might be more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference the source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a conceptual question that's based on a homework problem, you should still provide the original problem. This is to provide context to your question, and makes it easier to answer. If this comes from a textbook you should include the book and the problem number. Quote the original problem in full, as it may provide crucial information that you might have missed. Again, this should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be the entire content of the post, but rather a useful piece of context for your real question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is OK to ask a conceptual question that is embedded in your solution to a homework problem and depends on that context. You should provide your working to the problem, and you should ensure that you make clear what your conceptual question is. Do this &lt;em&gt;visually&lt;/em&gt; as well: it will do wonders in helping answerers navigate your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about a homework assignment, or any sort of work under a honor code, you should check with your instructor and with your learning institution (middle school, high school, college, etc.) whether it's OK to consult other people before posting your question. Your institution may also have an honor code or rules and regulations, as well as specific class policies, on whether you can post the exact question on the internet, and you should check before you post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use the homework tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After adding the tags that identify the kind of physics involved, add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag to your question. This helps answerers understand where you're coming from, and it makes it easier for us to help you improve your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't include the tag, someone else might add it for you. (Other people &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;can edit your posts&lt;/a&gt;.) If this happens, don't take it too hard. We're not accusing you of lying about whether your question comes from a homework assignment! The tag describes questions based on set problems, as well as  problem-solving questions whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the homework tag does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that a question will be closed. Instead, it will helps us help you bring out the conceptual parts of your question to make it more useful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What should I do if my question was put on hold, or closed, as homework?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question was put on hold, or closed, as homework, you will see the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework questions are not allowed on this site. See our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;meta site&lt;/a&gt; to help you convert your post to a conceptual question that is useful to the broader community and to future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This usually happens if the conceptual question you're having trouble with is not clear, or if it looks like you're asking us to 'do your homework for you'. In this case, you should do all you can to make it crystal clear what concept you're struggling with. It can also happen that it simply isn't clear what you want us to answer, in which case you should make that clear as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't understand why your question was put on hold or closed, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;leave a comment&lt;/a&gt; below your question asking for clarification. (You can always comment on your questions and any of their answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Examples&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Good:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14571/can-the-process-u-overlineu-rightarrow-s-overlines-be-mediated-by-the-em&quot;&gt;Can the process $u\overline{u} \rightarrow s\overline{s}$ be mediated by the EM interaction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/86289/probability-of-different-states-canonical-ensemble-partition-function&quot;&gt;Probability of Different States - Canonical Ensemble - Partition Function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13208/mechanics-thermodynamics-bouncing-ball&quot;&gt;Mechanics + Thermodynamics: Bouncing Ball&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23071/find-the-net-force-the-southern-hemisphere-of-a-uniformly-charged-sphere-exerts&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Find the net force the southern hemisphere of a uniformly charged sphere exerts on the northern hemisphere&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/62669/trace-and-adjoint-representation-of-sun&quot;&gt;Trace and adjoint representation of $SU(N)$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3705/charge-density-in-concentric-spheres&quot;&gt;Charge density in concentric spheres&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57261/find-x-operator-given-p&quot;&gt;Find $\hat{x}$ operator given $\hat{p}$ operator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are based on homework problems but they make it clear what the specific conceptual question is that they're about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bad:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/79669/basic-physics-question&quot;&gt;Basic Physics Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83317/are-dc-and-ac-currents-produce-electric-field&quot;&gt;Are dc and ac currents produce electric field?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31832/lennard-jones-potential-equilibrium&quot;&gt;Lennard-Jones potential - equilibrium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20828/evaluating-transition-probability-between-different-states-of-hydrogen-atom&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20828/evaluating-transition-probability-between-different-states-of-hydrogen-atom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20763/force-and-laws-of-motion&quot;&gt;Force and Laws of Motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17852/basic-free-fall-problem&quot;&gt;Basic Free Fall Problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are simply restatements of homework problems, don't show any effort put into solving the problem, and don't go beyond obtaining a solution to the set assignment. They are too specific to be of use to anybody except the person asking, and that makes them inappropriate for this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Parts adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T00:19:10.670" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:31:25.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2013-11-13T14:32:04.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some thoughts on enforcement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5156/8563&quot;&gt;Manishearth's&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5165/8563&quot;&gt;QMechanic's&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5162/8563&quot;&gt;David Z's&lt;/a&gt; answers in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether/&quot;&gt;the recent discussion on banning homework&lt;/a&gt;, the current policy is already pretty close to &quot;homework is banned&quot;, and the real changes that need to happen are (i) changes in semantics and documentation, and (ii) an increase in community moderation. The latter is the part that's actually important, and what determines how many low-level homework questions are there to clutter the front page of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to realize that regardless of what the homework policy is, there will always be users who post homework questions anyway. (Users are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopia.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very myopic!&lt;/a&gt;) It is therefore up to us to make sure that the clutter is swept away quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a homework question which you think is off-topic and does not ask a conceptual question, then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag it as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This will make it easier to detect and it will help other users know what to look for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Flag the question for closure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or (if you  have 3k+ reputation) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;vote to close it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It is very, very, very important that people flag questions if they're off-topic. It pushes them onto a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt; in which users with 3k+ reputation and moderators can see them and close them if appropriate. This works fairly well, but the main thing is getting low-level homework questions into the review queue quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consider downvoting it&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions with a score of &lt;strong&gt;-4&lt;/strong&gt; are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/62769/184688&quot;&gt;hidden from the front page&lt;/a&gt;, and no longer contribute to the clutter. (On the other hand, if it's already at -4 consider the impact on the OP of further downvotes.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Think twice before answering.&lt;/strong&gt; In any &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows theory&lt;/a&gt; of homework questions, answers play a crucial role. If open low-level homework questions invite other low-level questions, open low-level homework quesitons &lt;em&gt;with answers&lt;/em&gt; do so much, much more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5184/8563&quot;&gt;on-topic, conceptual questions that follow the tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; as soon as you see them if they're not already tagged as such. (You can always &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;edit posts&lt;/a&gt;, though they will pass through a review queue &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;until you have 2k rep&lt;/a&gt;. As a bonus, you get +2 reputation!) This helps other users detect and help improve homework questions more easily. It also improves the user experience of the users who choose to ignore &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; homework questions, the possibility of which I think is an important selling point we should keep in trying to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists&quot;&gt;retain&lt;/a&gt; and increase our expert user base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;strong&gt;use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt; as much as you can!&lt;/strong&gt; Community moderation is the name of the game here. There isn't really all that much to be done (compare e.g. with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/review&quot;&gt;SO&lt;/a&gt;) but it's important that this moderation be done as fast as possible and that it requires as little moderator input as possible. It sends a much stronger message of off-topic-ness if a question is closed by a mass of five different people &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/86169/&quot;&gt;(example)&lt;/a&gt; than by a single moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7353/&quot;&gt;(example)&lt;/a&gt;. There's good documentation on what the review queues are and how to use them at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161390/what-are-the-review-queues&quot;&gt;this MSO thread&lt;/a&gt;. There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/106/custodian&quot;&gt;three badges&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/85/reviewer&quot;&gt;to be had&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/107/steward&quot;&gt;per revision queue&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the close-votes queue requires 3k+, but there is a &lt;em&gt;ton&lt;/em&gt; of useful community moderation you can do before that. You can access the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/late-answers/28023&quot;&gt;Late Answers&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts&quot;&gt;First Posts&lt;/a&gt; review queues at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;500 rep&lt;/a&gt;, and these contain many of the low-level homework questions that we want on the close-vote review queue and off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T17:01:02.303" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-13T14:32:04.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2013-11-14T04:02:38.570" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of physics stack exchange is simply to allow students from across the world to ask their homework questions, and for students and experts to gain personal fulfillment from answering other's people's homework questions, improving assignment grades around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T04:02:38.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-14T13:09:50.107" Score="0" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;What will happen if I lose all my reputation by asking bullshit question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16941" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-11-14T13:23:26.840" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What will happen if I lose all my reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5190" CreationDate="2013-11-14T13:18:58.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your reputation will go to 1, and you won't be able to do anything except post, suggest edits, and accept answers. If you ask too many low quality questions after being asked not to, there's a chance you will get suspended, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't deliberately ask bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T13:18:58.833" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5190" CreationDate="2013-11-14T18:39:04.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's actually pretty hard to lose all of your reputation.  There is a major imbalance between reputation gains and losses.  For example, if a question gets upvoted you get 5 reputation but if it gets downvoted you only lose 2.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;How does &amp;quot;Reputation&amp;quot; work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd have to put in a lot more effort to lose reputation than you have to put in to gain it.  You'd get suspended way before that happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T18:39:04.030" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-15T04:56:47.247" Score="5" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;suggestion about changing the homework policy&lt;/a&gt; gathered quite a bit of support, and a specific proposal for a new policy is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;currently being thrashed out&lt;/a&gt;. The new policy is basically just a rephrasing of the old one, effectively changing &quot;you can ask homework questions, but only if they're about concepts&quot; to &quot;you can't ask homework questions, but you can ask questions about concepts.&quot; This will involve changes to the homework close reason, as well as the homework policy documentation on meta, the tag wiki, and a few other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; we decide to change the homework policy, we have to decide what the new version will say about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This entails two distinct choices: first we have to decide whether any  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;  questions should be on topic; if not, then we have to decide whether to keep the tag. This makes a total of three options, and I will post answers corresponding to each of them so that we can vote on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;none of these changes will happen unless the proposed policy change goes ahead&lt;/strong&gt;. If you're for or against the policy change itself, &lt;strong&gt;please express this by voting on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policy opition 1: some homework is on topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This entails keeping the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, and keeping its meaning separate from the homework close reason. This means some questions will be classed as homework, but also still be on topic, as is the case with the current policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed policy (in its present form) takes this approach, but (in comparison to the current policy) raises the bar in terms of what's required for an on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policy option 2: all homework is off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option is a policy that defines &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; homework as off-topic. This has the advantage of making the policy simpler to apply, hopefully encouraging more people to join in with closing homework questions. However, it will take some work to convert &quot;good&quot; homework questions into non-homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take this approach there are two options for what to do with the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, but let it be synonymous with the close reason, i.e. if a question is legitimately tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; then it should be closed. Keeping the tag means that people can still ignore it. If the new policy is successful in increasing the rate at which homework questions are closed, we would later have a discussion about getting rid of the tag altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delete (&quot;burninate&quot;) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag shortly after the new policy is introduced. This can be justified on the grounds that option 2 would be tag abuse, which is generally frowned upon. From a more pragmatic standpoint, if people can't ignore homework questions they're more likely to participate in closing them. However, this is quite a radical step to take. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T13:31:26.397" Title="Fine-tuning the proposed homework policy: what to do with the tag if the policy is changed?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2013-11-15T04:58:22.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer for voting: option 1&lt;/strong&gt; We should go with &lt;strong&gt;policy option 1&lt;/strong&gt;, the least-radical change. We should keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, and some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; questions would be on topic, as is currently the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-11-17T04:26:27.083" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T04:26:27.083" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-15T04:58:22.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2013-11-15T05:00:05.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer for voting: option 2.1&lt;/strong&gt; We should go with &lt;strong&gt;policy option 2&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;keep the tag&lt;/strong&gt; for now. Questions legitimately tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; would always be candidates for closing. &lt;strong&gt;We would have the option to discuss removing the tag at a later date.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-11-17T04:27:52.027" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T04:27:52.027" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-15T05:00:05.957" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2013-11-15T05:02:50.203" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer for voting: option 2.2&lt;/strong&gt; We should go with &lt;strong&gt;policy option 2&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;immediately burninate the tag&lt;/strong&gt;. There would be no specific tag for homework questions, and we would instead rely on all homework questions being rapidly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2013-11-17T04:27:25.243" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T04:27:25.243" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-15T05:02:50.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2013-11-15T05:10:27.977" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer for voting:&lt;/strong&gt; we should do &lt;strong&gt;none of the above&lt;/strong&gt; but instead keep the current policy, or make some other change not covered by the proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T05:10:27.977" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-15T05:10:27.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2013-11-15T13:45:30.380" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Policy Number 3:&lt;/strong&gt;  We let the community decide which homework questions to close by looking at vote counts.  Homework posts which reach a score of -3 get closed.  This is proposed because I believe some specific problems encountered in high level research or graduate studies may still be a good fit for this site, because in such instances it may not be possible to ask about a general concept without asking the specific problem that is faced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T13:45:30.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-15T15:46:02.553" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;a new book/resource recommendation policy&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is of a form that it can only be applied to &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; questions. We have many old questions with answers that do not satisfy the policy, what should we do about them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="New book policy: What should we do about the old questions?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5199" CreationDate="2013-11-15T15:46:02.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that we edit the resource recommendation banner into these questions, making the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; follow the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the answers, those which do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; follow the policy can be collected into a single Community Wiki answer. Maybe with a disclaimer about how it is no longer considered a good answer to a recommendation question. We could alternatively historical lock it, though the historical lock post notice seems to talk about questions even when applied to an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, there aren't any broken windows, but the content is preserved. This requires some effort, though. I don't mind doing it myself, but I'll have to start a week from now. This isn't something urgent, so we can handle it at our leisure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rather like @Emilio's banner for the community wiki questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This answer contains some additional resources that may be useful. **Please note that answers which simply list resources but provide no details are strongly discouraged by [the site's policy on resource recommendation questions](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed)**. This answer is left here to contain additional links that do not yet have commentary.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer contains some additional resources that may be useful. &lt;strong&gt;Please note that answers which simply list resources but provide no details are strongly discouraged by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;the site's policy on resource recommendation questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This answer is left here to contain additional links that do not yet have commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T06:39:50.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5199" CreationDate="2013-11-15T15:48:40.473" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Kept this answer here for voting, I don't agree with this myself)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternate idea is to simply (permanently) historical lock all the old questions. This has the disadvantage of disallowing new answers&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, however it is less effort, especially as many of these are already locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. This can be partially remedied by allowing users to repost the question conforming to the new policy. That causes some unnecessary duplication of content though.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-11-15T20:37:37.900" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T20:37:37.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-15T18:41:05.710" Score="10" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;With all the current discussions about homework and changing site rules, I'd think we're missing something in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How to ask FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and I'd be interested to hear the members' views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the single most important thing about the question is that some effort has gone into writing it. That is, we expect the OP to have done some Googling or other background reading and made an effort to make their question well posed i.e. clear and obvious what they're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions tend to be the most egregious violators of this principle, but we also get the &quot;tell me about relativity&quot; type questions. At the risk of picking on someone &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/86681/blackhole-radiation-and-white-dwarfs&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is a recent example of an OP who hasn't done even basic research before asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, being well researched is more of an issue than being homework - after all a well researched homework question is almost inevitably about concepts rather than specifics, and therefore qualifies as a good question. So I suggest that rather than worrying about what exactly constitutes homework, we make our close/delete decisions on how well researched the question is. We should update the How to ask FAQ accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T12:19:32.443" Title="Updating the *How to ask* FAQ" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5199" CreationDate="2013-11-15T21:00:04.863" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Move the content into the relevant tag wikis, then delete the old questions. Those who have volunteered to be custodians of book questions (or at least, that subset who aren't currently suspended) should do this tag-wiki curation before any new book questions are started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, no useful content is lost, and we find out if there's genuine maintenance commitment or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T21:00:04.863" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-15T21:19:25.450" Score="4" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that bother me the most about book* recommendation requests is the endless stream of similar requests that can spout around any specific topic, for all the different possible reader levels and prerequisites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm an undergrad and I want to learn QM&amp;quot; says someone. &amp;quot;Me too, but can you keep it to minimal functional analysis?&amp;quot; says someone else. &amp;quot;Actually, can you cut down on the linear algebra?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I haven't taken analytical mechanics, so could you go easy on the hamiltonians and lagrangians?&amp;quot; say two more people...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and on and on it goes. It is completely impractical to have a new thread for each such request: we should have a single, canonical book-recommendation thread for, say, ~undergraduate quantum mechanics, and close all the requests in the paragraph above as duplicates of the main thread. I see this as absolutely necessary to avoid the quality dilution and the clutter that would come otherwise, and which led us to ban the tag to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is unfair on people coming to this site for book recommendations to give them no voice regarding what level of books are present in the answers to the canonical thread. If I do find the main thread and find it to be full of books that need no functional analysis, but I can't handle the linear algebra in them, I should still be able to invite answers at that level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand I'm a little late to the game, but I was busy working on other policy for the site. (And, you know, my PhD.) I nevertheless would like to propose a change in how the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;recently adopted policy&lt;/a&gt; works on the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; side of the affair. (The answer side is, on the other hand, well dealt with, I think.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I propose we keep a single thread per topic, and that the specific requests of level be included as edits and comments to the answer.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in this scheme all the requests above would be merged into a single thread which would be formatted along the following lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Good undergraduate quantum mechanics books&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are good books or online resources to learn quantum mechanics at an undergraduate level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Level of resources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for resources in this topic but you find the answers in this page too advanced or too basic, add a request in this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there good books that use minimal functional analysis?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like resources with very little linear algebra.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are books with little resource to lagrangians and hamiltonians? My analytical mechanics is a little shaky.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal does require additional curatorial attention, in deleting parts of the resource-level list as they get addressed and newer requests are added. However, I feel that this is quite small in comparison with the bulk of work of curating the answers. It provides input to the people who have very specific requests, while keeping the answers condensed into one big resource that's useful for future visitors, instead of scattered into lots of small, specific lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, policy changes are only half policy changes if they don't come with a documentation proposal. Thus, this change could come with the following paragraph added to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I ask a resource recommendation question?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?&quot;&gt;search the site&lt;/a&gt; to see if the topic has been asked before. Adding the tag &lt;code&gt;[books]&lt;/code&gt; to your search may be useful. If the topic has not been covered, start a new question. Keep it general! We want questions and answers to be useful for future visitors. Ask for a specific topic. If you have a specific level or set of prerequisites that you'd like answers to address, add it, separately, at the end of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the topic &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; been covered, don't ask a new question! If the resources in that thread are too advanced or too basic for you, or you have some specific set of prerequisites that the current answers don't address, edit the current question to request it. Add your request to the list provided, or start one like the one in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What say ye?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*To appease the purists, throughout this post &amp;quot;book recommendation&amp;quot; should be understood to mean &amp;quot;resource recommendation&amp;quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T20:26:09.360" Title="Dealing with level of resources in requests" Tags="|discussion|policy|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-11-15T21:33:25.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Can we please keep it to one-resource-per-answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of the answers referenced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;our recent policy for resource recommendations&lt;/a&gt; have long answers that include multiple resources, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/363/getting-started-general-relativity/376#376&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. While this keeps things compact in a way, it makes it difficult for people to upvote specific resources. This substantially under-uses the capabilities of our platform, which is great for good answers to float up and OK ones to stay further down in the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: can we make it policy that answers to resource recommendations include only one resource per answer? This involves, of course, the possibility of as many answers per user as necessary on each thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two thoughts on dealing with the consequences. First, doing this opens the door to huge reputation farming. This would make a bit of an argument for making all answers community wiki - though if you come up with multiple good books and provide good reviews of them, why should you not have some rep? Secondly, it would add some initial and long-term curatorial stress in separating multi-resource answers, but I don't think this is unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T21:33:25.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-18T20:51:56.657" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would I be allowed to post question relating to seismic image processing on Physics SE under the &quot;Geophysics&quot; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34141" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-11-19T15:55:23.280" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T15:55:23.280" Title="Seismic image processing questions on Physics SE" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5210" CreationDate="2013-11-18T23:08:38.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't say anything for sure without seeing the question itself, but probably not. Remember, questions posted on this site have to be about physics. Image processing doesn't really fall under that scope. The tags exist only to &lt;em&gt;classify&lt;/em&gt; questions, not to tell you which ones are on topic and which ones aren't. (Though a lack of appropriate tags does tend to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; that a question is off topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions of this nature are on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;DSP&lt;/a&gt;, so you could check there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:24.537" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T23:08:38.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5210" CreationDate="2013-11-19T00:13:18.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard without knowing what you want to do and, indeed, without seeing the question. Depending on its content it may be on topic at DSP, or possibly Computational Science. However, you can always ask  the question here and find out later that it's not a good fit for this site; seeing the question will help us direct you to a better home for it if it isn't. (If you do, of course, link to it here and to this discussion from there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T00:13:18.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-19T16:28:48.777" Score="11" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year, we had the &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterba.sh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter Bash&lt;/a&gt; on Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who weren't around or don't remember, the event is one where completing various achievements on the site earns you different hats that can be &quot;worn&quot; on site; appearing on top of your gravatar wherever it is shown on the site. They're basically badges that you can wear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to let the team know whether or not we want to participate as a site this year. So, what say? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that individuals can opt out if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: Given the response, I've submitted the form for enabling it on our site. Those who didn't want hats, let us know if you are having trouble disabling it (note: it's only going to be around for the last week of December). Those who want hats, here's something to satiate your hunger for hats until the Winter Bash:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZN824.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-11-20T18:45:39.340" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T18:45:39.340" Title="Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaats?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5213" CreationDate="2013-11-19T16:28:56.713" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In other words, upvote this if you want hats)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-11-20T03:19:29.243" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T03:19:29.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5213" CreationDate="2013-11-19T16:30:04.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that Physics.SE as a whole should participate in this event. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2013-11-20T06:12:13.167" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T06:12:13.167" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5217" CreationDate="2013-11-20T18:04:06.423" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that I am correct in thinking that the site does not support discussing personal research, is there some online place where we can discuss our research ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this question here cause I could not find any such place on google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T22:38:52.163" Title="discussing personal research" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2013-11-20T18:14:00.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if one comes across an issue while doing research, they are welcome to ask it as long as the question is working within the framework of modern mainstream physics. However, especially since discussion questions are not allowed here, discussing one's research usually leads to a question that is either open ended, broad, or non mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We sometimes discuss research in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, though we rarely talk of the exact details&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; of the research that is being done, people are free to do so. (Just don't annoy people)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Modern cutting-edge research is usually of the kind that one needs an appreciable depth of knowledge in that subfield to understand it.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T18:14:00.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2013-11-20T22:38:52.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing I like to say to people with questions like this is that you keep explaining why you would like to have your question on Physics.SE (and we get that, we really do), but you have not explained why Physics.SE would benefit by hosting your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how good &lt;em&gt;your question&lt;/em&gt; might be, to allow this category would be to open our doors to an endless stream of low quality musing by every Tom Dick and Harry who thinks he knows something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T22:38:52.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-21T08:25:13.717" Score="-5" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87249/electro-gravito-generator?noredirect=1#&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87249/electro-gravito-generator?noredirect=1#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited the question to clarify the problem, but still it has been marked as question not clear and hold. Can it possibly be spared from the hold tag now ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T20:12:11.937" Title="Could this question be put off hold now?" Tags="|support|request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5219" CreationDate="2013-11-21T10:39:24.980" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You started off that post with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now I know that the site frowns on homebrew research&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...I think you already should know why it's on hold/closed then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perpetual motion machines (and other similar devices like free energy machines) are (almost always) off topic on the main site because usually they arise from some flaw of assuming ideality. The same goes for yours. As I mentioned in response to your other post, original research isn't allowed, so even if the post is unclear, it should be closed as non mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T10:39:24.980" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2013-11-21T13:02:01.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand the motivation behind this well, and if this is the majority's wish, then so be it of course. However, I personally believe this is a big mistake. Let me try to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As someone who is about to complete his PhD, I consider myself to be already a good physicist in my field, but an &lt;em&gt;expert&lt;/em&gt; only in homework and problem sheets :-). I have been spending a large fraction of the past decade doing those! I believe I am in good company there.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By banning every kind of homework, we don't necessarily increase the quality of contributions to the site. &lt;strong&gt;We just reduce the audience.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We should distinguish between bad and good homework questions. I wholeheartedly agree that the kind of bad questions that tend to swamp the front page should be banned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Badly worded, confusing questions, Grammar/spelling mistakes, no caps, no TeX.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Give me the solution / check my calculation / I'm stuck&quot; kind of questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Really specialized obscure calculation details a la &quot;how do I solve this integral&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good homework questions in my opinion would be &lt;strong&gt;canonical, polished, clear problem sheet excercises&lt;/strong&gt;, that we all have encountered at some point, and that can teach you a lot by going through them. Examples from the top of my head: &quot;Calculate the gravity field inside a hollow sphere&quot;, &quot;Reflection/Transmission of a wavefunction on a potential&quot;, &quot;Calculate the density of states in a nucleus / a metal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer would be more high- than low-level. (#1: &quot;The problem becomes much easier when you choose spherical coordinates. Or compare the mass in a cone behind and in front of you.&quot;) Maybe one could put calcuational details in a spoiler box (as used on other SE sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the old policy has been encouraging the bad kind of question. &lt;em&gt;Don't post the whole problem, but break it down into small steps. Ask about the specific step where you are stuck. Ask about specific concepts that give you difficulties.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that a physics learner &lt;strong&gt;doesn't know yet which concepts to apply&lt;/strong&gt;. If they don't understand the problem, of course their questions will be bad! They would benefit much much more from a bird's eye view of the excercise solution, than from help in the gritty details. This brings me to the final point:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have to consider how physics is taught at universities. There are lectures, which are more for exposition in my experience. You don't learn much by just consuming lectures. There are textbooks for working through the topics in detail. But you learn by far the most by doing the excercises (and lab courses); ideally in a study group with your fellow students. By doing lots of excercises again and again, you develop a feeling for which concepts and techniques to apply when. And I believe there is value in not just finding the solution, but learning a canonical, elegant way of solving the problem.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;If physics is martial arts, problem sheets are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kata&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; As such an integral part of physics, I believe they have to be a part of a physics Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T13:02:01.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2013-11-21T13:31:26.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the policy, I'd burninate* it, but for different reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a meta-tag, and not very useful for searching. (It might be good for ignoring, but since homework questions are about to be banned anyway, it shouldn't be necessary in the future.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Currently, it just means &amp;quot;don't give the OP a full answer&amp;quot;. Or worse, &amp;quot;answer only in riddles, or as if you were talking to a student&amp;quot;. I'd personally perceive it as condescending to see that tag added to one of my questions without asking me. From the tag wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applies to questions of primarily educational value - not only questions that arise from actual homework assignments, but any question where &lt;strong&gt;it is preferable to guide the asker to the answer rather than giving it away outright&lt;/strong&gt;. Please READ THE GUIDANCE IN META before asking homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*) never thought I'd use that word!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T13:31:26.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5219" CreationDate="2013-11-21T20:12:11.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of an analogous &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;-topic question about &lt;em&gt;perpetuum mobiles&lt;/em&gt;, which was phrased in a way that did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; bring in non-mainstream physics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75471/what-prevents-this-magnetic-perpetuum-mobile-from-working/&quot;&gt;What prevents this magnetic perpetuum mobile from working?&lt;/a&gt;. Three points to note for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That question is on topic, and it got good answers, mostly because of the tone it was asked in. If you're asking us to do your work, then we probably have more interesting things to do. If you present us with an interesting puzzle, then some of us will be more interested. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additionally, that question makes it clear that this is within mainstream physics. Perpetuum mobile proposals are off-topic in this site because they always have, and always will, turn out hollow. If you're trying to convince us that yours works, you're barking up the wrong tree, and our patience is likely to run short quite quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The method given in my answer, and the associated physics, will to hold in a modified form for the device you propose. The electrostatic and gravitational fields are conservative, so your pendulum bob will respond to some specific, conservative, potential energy landscape, which is on you to calculate. You will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be able to harvest energy simply from gravitational and electrostatic forces.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, I have little interest in following up on your proposal. As DumspterDoofus explained, there's a general theorem that disqualifies your device. You're doing something wrong and it's on you to figure out what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T20:12:11.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5225" CreationDate="2013-11-22T05:09:40.723" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, when I ask a question and I'm not sure how to word it, as is often the reason why I must ask the community in the first place, I miss some information or other important details.  This is the result of not really knowing what I was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87460/write-a-parabolic-equation-in-kinematics/87463?noredirect=1#87463&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, in which I needed a way to turn my kinematic details into a parabolic equation.  In short, I made a mistake in quoting the standard form and didn't notice it until the answerer kindly pointed it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have already edited the question once and I have a best answer.  I know about editing old questions and I get the feeling that the community doesn't much care if I elaborate upon the question, but this would be a minor edit to correct some misinformation.  It would bump the question to the main page again (for what I know) and inadvertently &lt;em&gt;take away&lt;/em&gt; from other questions, if nothing else.  So, even if the user base doesn't mind seeing the same question again for a frivolous edit, it still pushes more relevant questions down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is, should I make this small edit or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I don't, the question will have misinformation (probably not harmful, however).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I do, the question will be bumped to the main page and affect more recent questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T06:11:57.193" Title="Editing a question for a small edit after having a best answer" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5224" CreationDate="2013-11-22T06:11:57.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasional minor edits are fine. Don't worry about bumping your question to the front page; there's nothing wrong with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we do frown on is making a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of minor edits, especially over a short period, or making trivial edits that don't improve the quality of the question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T06:11:57.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5228" CreationDate="2013-11-22T17:31:36.933" Score="7" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is our policy on &lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lmgtfy&lt;/a&gt; links? Some questions show no research effort by the OP, and while most of the times, it is sufficient to suggest a google search, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87519/what-is-hydel-electricity&quot;&gt;some questions&lt;/a&gt; seem to be begging for a lmgtfy comment. Is it acceptable, or is it considered rude / inappropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11484" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Policy on lmgtfy links" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5226" CreationDate="2013-11-22T17:35:49.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don't make any lmgtfy comments. They will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15650/ban-lmgtfy-let-me-google-that-for-you-links&quot;&gt;Ban LMGTFY (let me google that for you) links&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109713/is-lmgtfy-frowned-upon&quot;&gt;Is LMGTFY frowned upon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T17:35:49.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5226" CreationDate="2013-11-22T18:51:21.463" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The overarching &quot;Be nice&quot; directive means that LMGTFY links are right out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some people are unselfconsciously out to take advantage of us, and yes this is very, &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; annoying. None-the-less we're going to be the better people here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to vote to close such question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;when you have the privilege&lt;/a&gt;. Or to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flag them&lt;/a&gt; if you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T12:06:31.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5230" CreationDate="2013-11-24T01:32:48.827" Score="13" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t we just ban homework altogether?&lt;/a&gt; my initial reaction was &quot;hell yeah!&quot;.  As I've thought about the issue more though, I wonder if banning homework will do Physics.SE more harm in the long-run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5162/22494&quot;&gt;David's answer&lt;/a&gt; is particularly apt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps more importantly, no matter what policies we put in place, &lt;strong&gt;we can't actually &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; people from posting homework questions&lt;/strong&gt;. It's the nature of a physics Q&amp;amp;A site that lots of people will show up asking for help on their homework without bothering to check whether doing so is appropriate. The best we can do is use the policy as justification to close such questions as quickly as they come in. The moderators (well, some of us) try to do this, but we're only a few people, and it gets exhausting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David is absolutely right that no matter what our Homework Policy ends up being, we can't stop homework questions from being posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is another, possibly more important issue though.  This is a small community and if we don't bring in new members at a healthy rate the membership will decay over time.  It can already be hard for inexperienced members to find questions to answer or ways to gain reputation and feel like they're a part of the community.  I suspect banning homework and aggressively closing homework questions will alienate some new users that we actually want to have stick around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions are already &quot;essentially banned&quot; and it's a lot of work to close them.  I don't really see how changing our policy to more explicitly state that they are banded will do anything meaningful to help the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If instead, we actually relaxed our homework policy we could aggressively tag homework questions and tell all members that don't like them to put the tag in their ignore filter.  I don't see any harm in letting homework questions go ignored and unanswered and doing so would allow inexperienced users a chance to try their hand answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With banned homework we're essentially telling potential users to go get experience somewhere else and come back when they're ready.  Could we adjust our homework policy to give these users a chance to get experience here while also not frustrating our veteran users that hate homework questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, does banning homework do long-term harm for only short-term gain?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T18:25:43.260" Title="Does banning homework do long-term harm for only short-term gain?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5229" CreationDate="2013-11-24T03:25:26.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it is possible to write a set of restrictions on question that would impede growth and chase beginners away to get their experience elsewhere (and thereby transfer their loyalties), but we don't just need more users we need &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And good users mean one who can write &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; posts. So let me counter with another quote from the same thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IMO an on topic HW question is indistinguishable from a normal question when the &quot;this is HW&quot; part is excised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; homework versus not &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; homework, it is questions that show some level of thought and preparation versus those that do not. Personally I don't want to spend my time on site full of rotten no-effort questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've having rather a it of trouble with that kind of thing right now and it is &lt;em&gt;pissing me off&lt;/em&gt;. At times it is all I can do to to remain civil on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Do my homework for me&quot; is just one of several red flags for a bad question, but bad questions are bad and they should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beginner's questions should be allowed but we should &lt;em&gt;insist&lt;/em&gt; that they be good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of your proposal is a suggestion that are skilled and experienced users should ignore the junk. That arrangement would allow the junk to proliferate without bound. In my opinion it is the very worst thing we could do because visitors and new user &lt;em&gt;will see all the junk&lt;/em&gt;. Indeed they we see a site dominated by crap, and they will form the obvious opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had this argument out on Stack Overflow. The inclusionists were ascendant for a couple of years, but many of them came around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that we can or would attempt to stop any user form applying what filters they would, but making it policy to ignore the crap is simply a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T03:25:26.983" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5229" CreationDate="2013-11-25T08:27:57.287" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some sympathy with Brandon's point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit concerned we'll end up seeming an unfriendly and elitist site. The moderators are admirably tactful in dealing with homework questions, but I see comments to homework questions that while justified strike me as a bit bitchy. I worry these will put new users off - it's easy for us old timers to forget how intimidating asking your first question can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other point that strikes me is that I see various questions about esoteric subjects like supersymmetry that look awfully like homework set by a PhD supervisor, but of course the level is far higher than the usual homework question. These tend not to be tagged as homework (possibly because few of understand them :-) so presumable there is some ill defined cut-off point where homework ceases to be homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picking up on a point made in David's answer, it seems to me the most important thing is the amount of effort that's been put into writing the question. This is what I was getting at in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5203/updating-the-how-to-ask-faq&quot;&gt;Updating the *How to ask* FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. At the moment we have a &lt;em&gt;Homework&lt;/em&gt; tag and we have a close reason that says &lt;em&gt;Homework like questions ... should show some effort&lt;/em&gt;. The homework tag works fine, but I think the close reason should be unrelated to whether the the question is homework. The close reason should be that the OP hasn't made sufficient effort. This would be applied to homework, but would also be applied to questions like &lt;em&gt;Tell me about the Standard Model&lt;/em&gt; that we get from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T08:27:57.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4490" CreationDate="2013-11-25T12:21:43.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer contains the discussion in the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27503/reference-request-susskind-glogower-original-paper&quot;&gt;the question that sparked this discussion&lt;/a&gt;, which was originally posted at the (now defunct) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; site. I have moved them here because they belong to this discussion more than they do to that question. Comment vote counts, at the time of transfer, are in brackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requests to find a PDF or print copy of a paper when the exact citation information is already known are off topic. – David Z♦ Jul 1 at 20:11. (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...apparently custom close reasons get posted as comments. Anyway, we've generally held &quot;find me a PDF&quot; and similar requests to be off topic, but that could be opened up for discussion, if people think questions like this should be on topic. – David Z♦ Jul 1 at 20:15&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@DavidZaslavsky I have to disagree, strongly, for this case. This paper is outstandingly hard to find in either print or electronic copies and it was only through this question that I found one (unlike many people that cite it (!), I suspect). While I would generally think &quot;find me a pdf&quot; questions to be off-topic, some such requests can, would and do require an in-depth knowledge of the physics literature, and there are very precious few places on the internet to find physicists that can answer them. – Emilio Pisanty Jul 2 at 0:12. (4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is not usually used as a criterion on this site, I often find MathOverflow's criterion &quot;would I ask this at a seminar?&quot; to also work well here. In this case, my answer would be an emphatic yes: if I really need a paper, have looked for ages and can't find it, and really need a physicist to point out alternatives, a physics seminar is about the first place I'd ask. (I did.) – Emilio Pisanty Jul 2 at 0:18. (3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this site disallows questions like that then it risks failing people who put in effort to write answers when they have a question, and we really should be moving in the opposite direction to that, fostering high-quality questions and keeping our good users. – Emilio Pisanty Jul 2 at 0:22. (3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Emilio (3 comments up) yeah, I was thinking along the same lines myself. If we want to allow some questions of this sort, we (the community) can work out a guideline for what is allowed and what isn't. But as of now, that guideline, which would presumably allow this particular question, isn't in place. – David Z♦ Jul 2 at 0:54. (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4490/8563&quot;&gt;relevant question on meta&lt;/a&gt;. – Emilio Pisanty Jul 2 at 14:42. (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T12:21:43.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-25T15:06:53.893" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was recently bumped to the front page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9874/video-documentaries-about-physics&quot;&gt;Video documentaries about physics?&lt;/a&gt;. It lay dormant for many years, which explains why it wasn't closed under the previous absolutely-not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; policy. Now that we have a more permissive policy on resource recommendation requests, the question is in principle on-topic, but I feel that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;this question is too broad to be a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the idea of asking for documentaries is, I think, quite nice, such threads ought to be confined to much more specific topics. Otherwise,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What say ye?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T09:05:31.043" Title="Isn't &quot;video documentaries about physics?&quot; too broad?" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5203" CreationDate="2013-11-25T16:38:46.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that effort is the main decider between a good question and a bad one. Since my thoughts seem to be very close to yours, this answer is essentially the same idea expressed differently. Hopefully it can also make this meta post more active, because it seems to have slipped right past me to be honest, while I think it's a very important one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good questions show effort, regardless of the level at which they are asked. Be it about a layman's explanation of black holes, a particular problem from a syllabus posing problems to a student, a random everyday phenomenon noticed by a perceptive/curious mind or a research-level pondering of a professional physicist. If the question shows clear effort from the OP, outlining the problem and their own thoughts, it's likely going to be a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way such a question could still be considered bad is if it falls outside the scope, it's offensive, it's a duplicate (which can also point to low research effort) or if it's not a question at all. A question about some crazy theory connecting the female menstrual cycle to minute trembles in the earth's crust is obviously off-topic. A question à la &quot;Pay only 500$ and find your perfect partner.&quot; is not a question and obviously spam. I won't give an example of an offensive question, but I recall there has been at least one incident in the past where a single user got very personal and offensive toward another user in questions specifically asked for this purpose. Obviously this is intolerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: questions which show &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; effort should, if I haven't missed anything, be easy to classify as either good or bad on the basis of other clear features. Questions which show little to no effort should be put on hold with a close reason pointing out the insufficient effort, with no mention of homework. Of course the homework policy can still be maintained, but it just becomes part of a larger idea, which should clearly shine through to people asking a question. This idea is obviously already present in the close reason for homework, but there should really just be a general close reason for low effort question. This way, questions like &quot;Explain relativity to me&quot; are also included - as John already pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: a question should not be categorized according to whether it is a challenge to the people viewing it, it should be categorized according to whether the person to whom it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a challenge has made sufficient effort in describing the what and why of this challenge and their own thoughts/attempted solutions. Copy-paste homework questions are mindbendingly irritating because of the copy-paste part, not the homework part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first way to make this idea of sufficient effort clear for all questions is to put it into the text on the right-hand side of the ASK QUESTION page. This should be editable since a little text about homework is written there, with a link to the meta post dealing with our homework policy. The second way is to change the homework close reason to a general low-effort close reason, which will include cases of low-effort homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T16:38:46.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5233" CreationDate="2013-11-25T19:15:43.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, for all the reasons you listed. I have flagged and voted accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T19:15:43.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5243" CreationDate="2013-11-25T19:39:41.910" Score="6" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a minor point about the implementation of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed/4698#4698&quot;&gt;new book policy&lt;/a&gt;. One of the points it describes is the addition of a banner reading&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before answering, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698&quot;&gt;our policy&lt;/a&gt; on&#xA;  resource recommendation questions. Please try to give substantial answers that detail the&#xA;  style, content, and prerequisites of the book or paper (or other resource). Explain what the&#xA;  resource is like as much as you can; that way the reader can decide which one is most suited&#xA;  for them rather than relying on the suggestions of others. Answers which just suggest a book&#xA;  or paper will be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into the &lt;strong&gt;top&lt;/strong&gt; of each on-topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the first few lines of each question are quite important and they make into quite a few places to help users decide whether to click through or not. Two examples are the mouseover text in the front page,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PACBr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and more importantly the description of questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KEI1p.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the banner at the top of all such questions is a nice way to get attention to the message that books questions are not like regular questions in that, under the current policy, not all answers are allowed out-of-line answers may be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I feel that having the banner intrude into a place reserved for content - as opposed to administrative text - is a no-no. Imagine the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot;&gt;Newest 'books' Questions&lt;/a&gt; page with every description changed to the start of the banner! The information content of the page drops dramatically and it gives completely the wrong impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Should we change the policy to put this at the bottom?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Up/Down]vote this question if you [/Dis]agree, or voice any concerns in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Books banner: top or bottom?" Tags="|discussion|policy|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5237" CreationDate="2013-11-25T21:32:26.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, I think having it in the preview makes perfect sense and just helps reinforce the point. The title should be sufficient to tell what kind of book the person is looking for (at least the subject area) and having the banner in the preview just makes it so the person who might answer it sees the banner before even reading the page. I think that's much more useful that seeing somebody's first sentence or two that just repeats what the title says anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the title and tags don't reveal the subject matter, then they should be fixed anyway. Keeping the banner at the top, and keeping it in the preview, means that people who answer it are hit twice with the requirements as opposed to one or potentially zero times if they don't read to the bottom of the question. And since the banner is detailing rules for how to answer, I think that's a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T21:32:26.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5240" CreationDate="2013-11-26T05:21:01.920" Score="1" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I answered the question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87205/electric-heating-rod/87221#87221&quot;&gt;Electric heating rod&lt;/a&gt; .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon my answer got downvoted and other community users started to explain the dangers involved with that equipment(&lt;strong&gt;electric heating heating rod&lt;/strong&gt;). I didn't find the tag &lt;em&gt;laboratory-safety&lt;/em&gt; or any of such kind attached to the question. &#xA;But the people who posted the comments and answers are highly reputed so I think that I misunderstood the question and I too explained a bit about the safety of that equipment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After I edited my answer it got another downvote. I think my answer is not appropriate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the author of question asked about the physics concept involved  in getting electric current through his body.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am new to this site please give any suggestions how I can improve my answer. Should I explain the dangers involved or should I explain the reason why OP felt current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T16:26:29.720" Title="Is there any Home safety precaution tag on physics.stackexchange" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5239" CreationDate="2013-11-26T05:36:05.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't say why your answer was being downvoted, but in case this is what you're asking: the rule is that people should not take safety advice from this site. This is spelled out in section 5 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;TOS&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the fullest extent allowed by law, Stack Exchange disclaims any liability or responsibility for the accuracy, reliability, availability, completeness, legality or operability of the material or services provided on this Network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, legally speaking, that means people &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; post safety recommendations (things like &quot;yes, it is safe to put your heating iron in a bucket of water&quot;) and it's our readers' obligation to know that they should not take that advice. But there's another issue at hand, which is that this is a site about &lt;em&gt;physics concepts&lt;/em&gt;, and that's pretty much mutually exclusive with safety advice. So our informal policy has been that if an answer (or even a comment) says something is safe or unsafe, that's going outside the scope of the information we are supposed to provide. I don't think that's ever really been written down anywhere, but it's been de facto &quot;enforced&quot; by stern comments. We could definitely make a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post about that, though, if people think it would be necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the bottom line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were right not to address the safety concerns in your answer. It is not our job to warn people of the dangers of procedures they ask about. I think the reason you're getting downvoted is something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T05:36:05.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5233" CreationDate="2013-11-26T06:19:06.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I immediately voted &quot;too broad&quot; when I saw it.  I think our aggressive closing of closing of homework questions has made us twitchy about closing things.  A lot of the questions are interesting but off topic questions that would be closed (rightly so) by today's standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="22494" LastEditDate="2013-11-26T06:37:31.367" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T06:37:31.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5239" CreationDate="2013-11-27T00:31:09.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laboratory-safety&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laboratory-safety&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laboratory-safety&lt;/a&gt; tag, though it has very few applications. I don't see any reason it could not be applied to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/home-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;home-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;home-experiment&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm wary of getting into the business of making definitive safety statements on the site. Despite the disclaimer that David Z. talks about, many jurisdictions do not allow the disclaiming or waiver of &lt;em&gt;negligence&lt;/em&gt; and sufficiently bad advice could be construed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="22494" LastEditDate="2013-11-27T00:32:26.720" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T00:32:26.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5237" CreationDate="2013-11-27T03:03:29.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, this looks terrible. Not only does it waste the preview, it gets in the way of the question, and can easily end up being longer than the question itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zYQwc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Top-edited banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/102363/support-for-banners&quot;&gt;a system for attaching permanent banners&lt;/a&gt; to posts that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; get in the way of viewing the question. I've added one for book recommendations based on your template; if you see a question with the top-banner on it, flag it for moderator attention and ask that the post notice be added instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find an example of this notice &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87917/reference-request-for-exactly-solved-models&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KbbdZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Post notice at the bottom&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T03:03:29.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5245" CreationDate="2013-11-27T07:04:47.143" Score="5" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged some comments and answers as technically wrong but these flags were declined and moderator's reply was:&quot;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How I am supposed to notify the technical inaccuracies? I have got privilege to comment everywhere and I left some comments on the answers which have some technical inaccuracies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it ok to leave such a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T16:24:05.797" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T16:24:05.797" Title="Are technically wrong answers and comments allowed on physics.SE?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2013-11-27T07:18:07.813" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way you indicate that an answer is wrong is by commenting to point out why it's wrong, as you did, and by downvoting, which requires 125 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to indicate that a comment is wrong, if it's a recent comment, is to post a followup comment explaining why. If it's an old comment, you might as well just flag it as obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T07:18:07.813" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2013-11-27T07:21:10.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you spot something wrong, you have a few options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it's a wrong answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you see a way of fixing the answer without changing it much, you&#xA;can edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you don't see an easy way of fixing it you can comment on it, or&#xA;downvote, preferably both.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can post a correct answer and if appropriate, address what was&#xA;wrong about the other answer(s).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it's a wrong comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can respond to the comment with a comment (use your best judgment&#xA;with this).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you think you can answer the question and comment address the comment, leave an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it's a wrong question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you see a way of editing the question to fix it without breaking the original question, consider editing it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could leave a comment explaining what's wrong with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could flag the question or vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could search the site for related or duplicate questions and leave them in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could leave an answer explaining why the question is wrong but addressing the general idea of the question if appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T07:21:10.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5249" CreationDate="2013-11-27T08:44:26.373" Score="16" ViewCount="479" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a few clever and funny jokes from time to time in the comments, so I thought I'd test the waters with my own comment joke (on topic and technically an answer) and it was popular.  However I logged on the next day and noticed the comment was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25069" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-11-27T12:48:12.117" LastActivityDate="2013-12-04T14:03:49.047" Title="Are jokes in comments not allowed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5248" CreationDate="2013-11-27T08:52:04.440" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're allowed, in the sense that you don't get in trouble for posting them. (Within reason of course. If somebody e.g. spams joke comments on many posts then that's a separate issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But comments are prone to deletion, and those which don't offer a substantive contribution to the physics are &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; prone to deletion. They do tend to attract flags, too, so we often notice them quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice: don't read too much into it when your comments get removed. If you were doing something &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; with comments, such that you should actually refrain from posting such comments in the future, we would tell you so directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T08:52:04.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5203" CreationDate="2013-11-27T08:53:12.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose the first paragraph of the How to ask FAQ be updated to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To get the best answer it's a good idea to do some background research before you post and try and make your question as precise as possible. Any questions that could be easily answered, or at least clarified, by some determined Googling are unlikely to be well received. Questions that look like they've been copied and pasted from your homework are also likely to be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please treat this as a first attempt and feel free to suggest changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T08:53:12.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-28T08:31:03.250" Score="2" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I saw a message &quot;+14 Serial downvoting reversed&quot; in my profile. It seems someone unintentionally downvoted most of my posts in a small span of time but I am not sure why someone did this.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My question is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Are my posts of low quality, unclear etc etc..&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am not specialized in &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt;. English isn't my first language. I am improving my posts continuously.  If to someone my posts seems unclear he/she should downvote my posts slowly so that next time I won't get my reputation back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request the reader to leave some concise comments with constructive criticism on my posts so I could further improve the quality of my posts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the reader hasn't spare time to write any comment on individual posts which he/she wants to downvote please leave a small comment here or if the reason is wide then you may put it as an  answer to this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the serial downvoting was due to my some disrespectful comment of mine then I am extremely sorry. &#xA;Now onwards I will not put any vague comment on SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="31782" LastEditDate="2014-06-11T15:43:03.813" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T15:43:03.813" Title="Why someone serially downvoted most of my posts?" Tags="|discussion|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5252" CreationDate="2013-11-28T08:43:56.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone was serially downvoting your posts, it usually means they were trying to annoy you, not because of anything wrong with your posts. You should ignore this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T08:43:56.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1351" CreationDate="2013-11-30T22:18:19.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll restate here Jeff's answer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/81681/why-is-the-edit-button-disabled&quot;&gt;the analogous question in the mother meta&lt;/a&gt; for the benefit of any future users searching this meta with the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a handful of conditions where we will stop accepting edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A large number of suggested edits by you were rejected in the last day (absolute value) - if banned you will be banned for a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are out of empty slots in the queue (currently 20 120 200)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is an edit to a particular post that was not approved yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are not logged in and the post is less than 10 minutes old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past no &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; link would be shown at all; since July 2012 the edit link is disabled and the mouse hover tooltip will explain why an edit cannot be suggested, like &amp;quot;Account is not allowed to suggest edits&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T22:18:19.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-01T17:00:03.210" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I write fractions in my answers and questions? How do I write any mathematical expression ? I have tried using x/y type of expressions but it does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me how to do it. Will it need any special HTML code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to the site, so please be a bit expletive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35051" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-12-01T17:08:21.170" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T17:08:21.170" Title="About providing fractions" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-12-01T17:26:17.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5248" CreationDate="2013-12-02T05:19:45.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by @David  above summarizes it well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I attempt to see what constitutes a good comment and in what situations a funny comment would be appreciated in any discussion. &lt;em&gt;Sorry for the long post!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Equating a SE question to a classroom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Teacher poses a question and students are free to collaborate on&#xA;the answers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A student attempts to answer the question and others may&#xA;comment with an objective to improve the answer, highlight that the&#xA;answer does not cover all aspects of the Q, or just may have&#xA;questions to help them better understand the answer itself, and so&#xA;on... &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now assume that there is no urgency in finding the answer; so&#xA;if a student were to joke at this point, however distracting it may&#xA;be from the topic it would in most likelihood not be met with disapproval, and&#xA;may even be appreciated by some :).   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However with a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;time constraint&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; such as 5 mins more till the lecture&#xA;ends, the lecturer may not appreciate this and would limit the&#xA;discussion to just constructive comments. Of course nothing beats a&#xA;humorous insight (something constructive AND funny!) but that is&#xA;indeed very rare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Space/Time Constraints on SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On SE we do have a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;minimal time constraint&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; where questions not given enough attention are pushed lower over time while newer/trending questions get more eyeballs - based on some algorithm... So the goal is to showcase a good question and encourage more users to contribute by engaging them with a constructive and serious discuss in the comments. Example: If I am not serious about my question I will not have researched it well enough and this will not attract users to contribute to the solution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More importantly, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;SE has a space constraint&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; where the comments are limited in number and size, also questions are encouraged to be more precise and well formatted. The aim being to allow users to collaborate and find answers in the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;most optimal way possible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. For this same reason many comments are deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typical forums do not have these constraints and so have some negatives like cross-posting, post/comments that are way longer than the quality matter they provide, ... all of these aspects are missing in SE sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jokes are very subjective so only some may get the joke; others may just find it distracting... So &lt;strong&gt;for the greater good&lt;/strong&gt; it makes sense for moderators to trim the flagged comments to just constructive ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So finally... a joke in a comment &lt;em&gt;is most likely to survive&lt;/em&gt; the onslaught of the moderator's trusty &lt;code&gt;delete&lt;/code&gt; if it includes some information that adds some meaning to the discussion... and if you can't do that then just get Chuck Norris to post it for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24596" LastEditorUserId="24596" LastEditDate="2013-12-04T14:03:49.047" LastActivityDate="2013-12-04T14:03:49.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-03T01:02:40.810" Score="10" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88572/how-do-you-show-that-gamma5-dagger-gamma5&quot;&gt;Can one show that ${\gamma^5}^\dagger = \gamma^5$ directly from the anticommutation relations?&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed as homework-like. I agree that this is in somewhat of a grey area as far as ontopicness here goes, but I think this is because the core of this question is a maths question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is it possible to prove such-and-such-a-fact using only this-and-that-hypothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of that fact, and because the question is in fact quite good, shouldn't this question be migrated (after appropriate modification if needed) to math.se?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T18:48:22.563" Title="The gamma^5 question" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|migration|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5260" CreationDate="2013-12-03T16:18:56.587" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a number of posts recently that I wanted to mark for migration to the scicomp.SE site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/88854/&quot;&gt;this recent one on RK4&lt;/a&gt;), but the only options for migration are this meta site and the math.SE site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually just leave a comment suggesting the OP ask on the scicomp site, but should there be a migration option for scicomp?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-03T17:08:39.597" Title="SciComp migration option?" Tags="|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2013-12-03T17:08:39.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Computational Science is a beta site, so I don't think it makes sense to have that migration option yet. We want to be really careful about migrating to beta sites because the questions there could potentially be lost at any point. That being said, if you think a question is off topic here &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; seems like it should go to scicomp.SE, flag it for moderator attention with a suggestion that it be migrated. For 3k-ers, I don't know if the system will let you vote to close as off topic as well, but if it does, you should do that too, in addition to casting a custom flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever scicomp.SE graduates, we can reconsider this proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-03T17:08:39.597" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-04T23:19:51.773" Score="14" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you probably noticed, there is a new top bar implemented on this site. This is part of a network-wide experiment in... UI design I guess? Details on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/207420&quot;&gt;The new top bar is out on meta. Consider it a beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not complaining about or complimenting the way the features are implemented (not here, anyway - you can always check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/top-bar?sort=newest&quot;&gt;Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt;), but I &lt;strong&gt;request that the color scheme be changed&lt;/strong&gt;. The current off-black clashes quite harshly with our light-blues-on-white scheme. It looks like some sinister cloud, ever reminding us of our network overlords' presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current color may work well on certain sites, but certainly not all. This is not surprising, because &lt;strong&gt;no one color scheme could possibly work&lt;/strong&gt; on dozens of individual sites with their own customized appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, we're not the only site that seems to have a clash. Just check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://christianity.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Christianity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathematica.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematica&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://judaism.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://programmers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Programmers&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt;, for example. (As I'm not a particularly active member of any other site, I'm not formally requesting those sites be changed, which is why I'm not asking on Mother Meta. Also, there is at least one such global request: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/210012&quot;&gt;Would it be possible to lighten the color of the new top bar?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can we get something that fits our color scheme, please? And no, saying I should userscript it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a valid answer - I'm considering how the site looks to everyone else too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T11:53:40.177" Title="Help! There's a giant ugly thing on top of the page!" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-06T10:17:10.333" Score="20" ViewCount="3285" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the time of the year again, namely it is December 2013, and so we shall now refresh our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5263&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T04:45:45.377" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2014" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="40" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-01-01T03:09:33.640" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T10:17:10.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T10:17:10.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/#!/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5E3rC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T10:17:10.333" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T10:17:10.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T10:52:32.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://astrobites.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jaRuC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astrobites&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T10:52:32.507" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T10:52:32.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T12:09:07.367" Score="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2G8JO.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org -- open access to over 800 000 e-prints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2013-12-11T14:18:52.480" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T14:18:52.480" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T12:09:07.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T12:11:41.363" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3eT2R.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chemistry Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T12:11:41.363" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T12:11:41.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="5269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:05:29.543" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writelatex.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ip3i5.png&quot; alt=&quot;writeLaTeX.com - great for explaining physics, and works on your iPad too!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T16:05:29.543" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:05:29.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:07:14.723" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sagemath.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4LfYL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Try Sage open-source mathematical software system&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T16:07:14.723" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:07:14.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:16:33.130" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EbnRL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify2 - LaTeX symbol classifier&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T16:16:33.130" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:16:33.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:17:56.560" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sharelatex.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vrkV5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Free online collaborative $\LaTeX$ editor&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorDisplayName="user29727" LastEditDate="2013-12-07T13:57:51.977" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T13:57:51.977" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:17:56.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:19:00.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0468s.png&quot; alt=&quot;Magma Computational Algebra System&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T16:19:00.003" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:19:00.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:39:49.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KYkEt.png&quot; alt=&quot;WorldCat - the online catalogue of the world&amp;#39;s libraries, online&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T16:39:49.823" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:39:49.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T16:58:11.197" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d64R1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29727" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:35.310" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T16:58:11.197" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T16:58:11.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T17:00:09.770" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gTfnh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;MIT&amp;#39;s Open Courseware&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29727" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T17:00:09.770" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T17:00:09.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T17:12:06.563" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J8rVV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Khan|Academy&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29727" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T17:12:06.563" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T17:12:06.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T17:21:03.670" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwOs5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Digital Library of Mathematical Functions&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T17:41:33.680" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T17:21:03.670" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-06T17:24:33.880" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qIjvZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Space Exploration Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:50.550" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T17:24:33.880" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T17:24:33.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5282" CreationDate="2013-12-07T22:45:01.800" Score="7" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center page about site scope&lt;/a&gt; includes the phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little while ago it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88190/the-commutator-of-scalar-field#comment180297_88190&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/interpretation-of-should-and-must&quot;&gt;further discussed&lt;/a&gt;) that the use of &quot;should&quot; implies that the following items are to be interpreted as soft guidelines, not rules, i.e. that exceptions are not uncommon. But I believe that was not the intent of the policy. My understanding is that the types of questions listed on that page are &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; on topic on this site. Is that accurate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, should we change the wording of that part of the help center, perhaps to something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions are inappropriate for this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions must not be asked here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to reduce the chance of confusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T14:53:16.930" Title="Should we use stronger wording in the help center's on topic page?" Tags="|discussion|scope|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6216" CreationDate="2013-12-07T22:54:33.647" Score="9" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;new recommendation policy&lt;/a&gt; is in effect, I would like to propose a change that I think will alleviate some misuse of the associated tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this better captures the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/786/what-are-the-meanings-of-books-and-reference-request&quot;&gt;intended meaning of the tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? Better suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T17:31:18.427" Title="Should we rename the books and reference-request tags?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5280" CreationDate="2013-12-08T02:57:43.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree that this is accurate. Any question that fits any of those four descriptions should rightfully be closed. There are grey areas around them - there always will be - but you have to be really far from those descriptions to be on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like your first suggestion, though I would actually strengthen it to the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions are inappropriate for this site, and will likely be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt; or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;deleted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T14:53:16.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-08T06:54:52.660" Score="15" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I was eyeballing other people's badges because, you know, badges, and I came upon something of a curious observation. If you look at the answer badges - specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/great-answer&quot;&gt;Nice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/good-answer&quot;&gt;Good&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/great-answer&quot;&gt;Great&lt;/a&gt; Answer, there is a clear sense that, even for the bronze badge, established users of the site - and particularly users with, say, 1k+ rep - get a lot of the badges. However, if you look at the users who have earned the gold question badges, the picture is completely different: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/37/famous-question&quot;&gt;Famous Question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/42/great-question&quot;&gt;Great Question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/51/stellar-question&quot;&gt;Stellar Question&lt;/a&gt; have been earned overwhelmingly by &amp;lt;1k rep users; ditto for the silvers and bronzes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course not news. This was discussed in depth in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/question-self-destruction-why-dont-experts-ask-more-questions&quot;&gt;Question self-destruction: why don&amp;#39;t experts ask more questions?&lt;/a&gt;. It is also not a surprise in any sense that more questions come from lower-rep users and more answers come from higher-rep users - that's to be expected in some form in any Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm quite struck at how we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have a pretty big set of really nice questions, and that they were mostly asked by quite low-rep users. While it is natural that questions will tend to be asked by lower-rep users, it is not a given that the good questions will come from that end of the scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore decided to explore this theme a bit and, in the meantime, dredge up what's left of my SQL skills after ten years (!) of rust. I came up with this query for the Stack Exchange Data Explorer: &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/152438/what-reputation-do-people-with-popular-notable-famous-question-badges-typically-h?viewsThreshold=10000&amp;amp;repThreshold=100000#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What reputation do people with Popular/Notable/Famous Question badges typically have?&lt;/a&gt;. It produces a cumulative-distribution-function-like plot of the number of users below reputation &lt;code&gt;rep&lt;/code&gt; that have asked a question with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;viewsThreshold&lt;/code&gt; views. For the gold badge, the plot is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1pPol.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over 90% of such questions were asked by users who (even now) have less than 1k. There are a few between 1k and 2k, and really not much other than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/401/what-software-programs-are-used-to-draw-physics-diagrams-and-what-are-their-rel&quot;&gt;this great (cw) question of Mark Eichenlaub&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1135/what-is-the-difference-between-kinematics-and-dynamics&quot;&gt;this one of nibot's&lt;/a&gt;. I genuinely think this is surprising and really puts the nail on what we knew all along: 'expert' users need to start asking more questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also raises an interesting question as regards why this happens: can it really simply be explained by low-rep users &quot;stumbling&quot; on the good nuggets of question space, as part of the huge body of questions asked by the overwhelming majority of users that have &amp;lt;1k rep? Looking at, say, the questions that earned the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/41/good-question&quot;&gt;Good&lt;/a&gt; sobriquet, I think there is something else at stake. Those questions have a simplicity, and therefore a generality, that I think tends to be lacking in the questions asked by more established users. What do people think about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, I have also cooked up the corresponding query for the Nice/Good/Great Answer badge series, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/152446/what-reputation-do-people-with-nice-good-great-answer-badges-typically-have?scoreThreshold=25&amp;amp;repThreshold=1000000#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What reputation do people with Nice/Good/Great Answer badges typically have?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;. There aren't enough Great Answers to give a smooth enough plot, but the silver earners, at 25+ votes, are distributed like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iViBP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: (1) the horizontal scale is very different, (2) the slope is much shallower, and (3) only 20% of silver-earning answers come from &amp;lt;1k users. (And, also, multiple good answers from Luboš M, John R, Anna V, David Z, and Mark E.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, for completeness, here are the corresponding queries for the other two question badge series: &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/152450/what-reputation-do-people-with-nice-good-great-question-badges-typically-have?scoreThreshold=10&amp;amp;repThreshold=1000000#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What reputation do people with Nice/Good/Great Question badges typically have?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/152452/what-reputation-do-people-with-favorite-stellar-question-badges-typically-have?FavoriteCountThreshold=25&amp;amp;repThreshold=1000000#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What reputation do people with Favorite/Stellar Question badges typically have?&lt;/a&gt;. Both have, as far as I can tell, the same behaviour as the views-based series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm well aware, of course, that so far I've been talking a lot but there aren't many actual questions. The main motivation of this post is to share this observation and the (moderately hard and solid) statistics that back it up. I guess the real question is something like: what do people make of this? Does this correspond to the image this community has of the site? Or is there something missing from this analysis. What are the core reasons for this to happen? Is it simply a volume thing - i.e. the bulk of questions tends to come from lower-rep users than higher-rep ones - or is there indeed some core simplicity and accessibility to those great questions that eludes many of our great answerers? (I think there's quite a bit to that. And, in that case, we should really go and learn how to ask from those great questions.) If this is happening, is it a good thing? Is it a neutral, that's-how-things-are, thing? Or is it something we should try to counter-act? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to the comments and the Pulsar's and Manishearth's answers I'd like to say two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that &lt;em&gt;of course&lt;/em&gt; question score is only an approximate, stand-in metric to the completely undefinable &quot;question quality&quot;. However, I feel it is not entirely a bad metric, particularly at the high end of the scale: most of the badge-earning questions are indeed good questions. (That's not to say, on the other hand, that all our good questions get high score, and particularly so for high-end questions.) But there's nothing wrong with a highly-voted, low-level question: if it gets good physics across to a lot of people, at a level where they can understand it, what else could you ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on this site, mostly, to refine my &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_outreach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;outreach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-fu#Suffix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-fu&lt;/a&gt;, and I suspect most high-end users are here at least partly for that. As I see it, these questions are a very valuable resource. Seriously: go read our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/41/good-question&quot;&gt;Good Answers&lt;/a&gt; and tell me you didn't have fun. And, at least, it's something we can and should learn from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T18:33:45.487" Title="Our best questions come from non-expert users" Tags="|discussion|questions|users|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5280" CreationDate="2013-12-08T10:42:30.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give an opposing view, I believe there is some value in being ambiguous there. Site rules should not be fast and hard rules, but rather guidelines. I wouldn't want to close a useful and interesting question just because it might formally violate the rules. Rather, it should be decided on a case-by-case basis whether this question brings value to the site or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of which, I don't understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88190/the-commutator-of-scalar-field#comment180297_88190&quot;&gt;the question mentioned above&lt;/a&gt; was closed. Well, OK, I understand the mechanics of what happened. It's a homework question, it was decided that homework questions are not wanted, and thus the question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is why the mechanics were blindly applied. Do people think the concrete question is bad, or it's harmful to answer it? Imagine the asker was trying to write a paper, and not doing homework. Would the question still be closed? Probably yes. That would mean that computational / derivational questions are no longer allowed. I'm just worried that we are narrowing the scope of the site down and down until we can only ask the most high-level vauge conceptional questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T10:42:30.207" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-08T12:09:18.790" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://robotics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QpWDJ.gif&quot; alt=&quot;robotics stack exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5445" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T12:09:18.790" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-08T12:09:18.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-08T12:12:37.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://robotics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6uoa.gif&quot; alt=&quot;robotics stack exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5445" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T12:12:37.803" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-08T12:12:37.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2013-12-08T13:36:23.073" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that the number of upvotes on a question or an answer are not necessarily a sign of quality, but rather of &lt;em&gt;popularity&lt;/em&gt;. You could write a great question or answer, but if nobody pays attention to them, they won't get upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed myself that some of my most-upvoted answers took me the least effort to write, and conversely some answers that took me lots of time got barely any attention at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T13:36:23.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-08T15:37:32.037" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;No really, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522171/data-mining-reveals-the-secret-to-getting-good-answers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;scientists have proved it&lt;/a&gt; using our fellows over at Stack Overflow as guinea pigs. I wonder if there's enough questions on the PhysicsSE for a similar analysis to be meaningful ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T15:37:32.037" Title="To get good answers ask a good question!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2013-12-08T16:53:31.143" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nice graphs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally thought this would be obvious though. If we use votes as a way of measuring &quot;best&quot; (far from accurate), then the posts with the most votes will be the ones that more people can understand and appreciate. Popular posts cater to this perfectly, and thus get the most votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really good higher level questions are (a) hard to find as more experienced people ask less questions, and (b) understood by less prospective voters. So there will be very few high level posts with a lot of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish we had a better way of gauging post quality than votes, especially for higher level posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T16:53:31.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2013-12-08T18:10:34.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Training and expertise change how your neural circuitry processes data about the world, causing your interpretation of much of the data about the world to become so rapid and automatic that it can become very difficult even to see why certain questions are even meaningful, let alone &quot;interesting.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not just a training issue. The ability to discard many forms of data very quickly appears to be innate in how complex biological neural systems manage to process what would otherwise be a fatal overloads of sensory data -- and I do mean fatal, e.g. via driving a car without such data reductions in effect. This is not just some sloppy form of ignoring data at random, either. Brains in general have an absolutely amazing ability to identify and discard unnecessary data before it gums up the limited processing available, allowing them to focus (foveate) quickly on the much smaller subset of clues and data that is truly critical for survival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this comes into play in understanding why experts ask fewer questions because higher-level intelligence -- sentience -- seems to use these same mechanisms to create largely sensory-isolated loops that can revisit data many times without requiring the data to play again in the real world. Your internal &quot;thought voice&quot; is perhaps the most extreme example, since it is independent of any real external voices. (The bumper sticker version of that might be &quot;I hallucinate, therefore I am.&quot;) Insight becomes a matter of applying smart data reduction not to what you are seeing, but to what you are thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall result is an abstract view of the world that can become highly disconnected from the reality shouted at us by our senses, guided by mechanisms that become so deeply reflexive that we barely even see other options, let alone question them. That's a good thing in cases such as science or engineering, for which first-order sensory reality often turns out to be a remarkably poor indicator of what is really going on. It's a bad thing when it enables people to abstract away reality in a way that disconnects them from the very data to which they should be paying the most attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; need to give examples of the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of science -- what science means at the biological level -- is to balance our ability to abstract data rapidly (&quot;expertise&quot;) with the realization that such abstractions are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; dangerous, even when applied even slightly beyond the original data. We must never confuse the brain-generated emotion of confidence with experiment-based confirmation from the physical world that those abstractions are still valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, given all of that, it's time to go back to your fascinating data and charts showing a strong inverse relationship between how many interesting questions get asked and level of expertise of those asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because experts develop and frequently use complex abstraction structures for interpreting questions and data quickly and decisively, those abstraction structures inevitably begin to make heavy use of the fast-discard capabilities of complex biological neural systems. For that very reason, it also becomes more and more difficult without special training for them even to &quot;see&quot; questions or data that fall within the scope of expertise. Thus they are less inclined to dwell on them much or ask many questions about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, relative novices have no such rapid-discard structures in space, so even small discrepancies or obscurities in the overall structure tend to jump out at them, sometimes very starkly. The concept of &quot;present&quot; is a straightforward example. To many relativists and quantum field theorists, the idea of &quot;block time&quot; -- that is, that that the universe preexists from start to finish as a bundle of worldlines -- seems almost inevitable, for reasons too numerable to mention here. Yet to almost anyone not trained in those reasons, the idea of block time often sounds either insane, a flat-out contraction of everything that a person sees in their own lives, or like some form of extreme religious belief. As a result, the questions they will ask about such an issue will be very different from those that an expert might ask, and will also have very different emotional weighting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not easy resolution to all of this, since we are very much products of our own brains. However, with that said, it is nonetheless emphatically possible and very much desirable to train ourselves to be &lt;em&gt;aware&lt;/em&gt; of our own limitation, and how to minimize their impacts in our overall analytical approach to understanding the universe. The colloquial phase for it is humility, but it's a form of humility that needs to be sharpened and structured as finely as the flowing patterns of a Damascus sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7670" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T18:10:34.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2013-12-08T18:35:53.030" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not neglect the degree to which the &quot;level&quot; of a question determines the audience that will be interested. There are more laymen than beginners that journymen than masters, and than means that there are more people to be impressed by basic questions than by esoteric, expert level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is that it is the really good basic questions and the really good answers to basic questions that get the largest number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/520/dmckee?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;answers that I have given&lt;/a&gt;, both here and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/2509/dmckee?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. My highest voted posts are pretty decent answers to fairly basic questions. I've written a few answers on both sites that I consider to be good, expert level work, but they are not the one that the crowd loves. Simply because the crowd that can appreciate them is much small than the one that can appreciate the basic coolness of bootstrapping a complex tool or the idea of huge-scale, slow-motion acoustics in a near-vacuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: the thing that votes measure is a convolution of the &quot;quality&quot; of a post with the size of the audience that can appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T18:35:53.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5261" CreationDate="2013-12-09T18:30:45.593" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you'll all get used to this &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt; - it's a pretty big change, but realistically I find the top bar isn't usually visible while I'm reading or answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If y'all had &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/447/design-for-physics-se&quot;&gt;kept the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; design&lt;/a&gt; this bar would've matched up &lt;em&gt;perfectly&lt;/em&gt;... ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T18:30:45.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-10T14:20:49.140" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to answer this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9551/applications-of-the-spectral-theorem-to-quantum-mechanics?rq=1&quot;&gt;Applications of the Spectral Theorem to Quantum Mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I cannot. I insert my answer in the form &quot;Your Answer&quot;, I click on &quot;Post Your Answer&quot; and then after a while (even 5 minutes) I receive an error message.&#xA;Could someone help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35354" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:12:45.970" Title="Error with the form &quot;Your Answer&quot;" Tags="|bug|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5261" CreationDate="2013-12-10T14:44:19.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to rail about this when it came out, but I decided to give it a few more days like the team asked. Well, it's been a few days, and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strike&gt;I still don't like it.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;I don't like the black bar being black. One of the reasons I use chrome is that it respects the very valuable real estate at the top of the browser window. It packs the maximum of information into just three bars. The black bar increases this space, which I like to be as minimal as possible, by a whopping 30%.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rl6d7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;I don't like the bright blue logo at all. Why have colours in there in the first place? They're bound to clash with &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; site design, no matter what you choose. Why not have it the same shade of grey as the inbox sign? As it is, it clashes horribly with the greenish turquoise of our main site. In meta it's even worse, and on a question page it has far and away the biggest chroma of the whole page. If you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; keep it, why not damp it down to grey?&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some credit to the UI designers:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like it now. It took a bit of a while to sink in but I think pretty much everyone has gotten used to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T11:53:40.177" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T11:53:40.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-10T15:39:53.343" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HQ5S2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28199" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:39:53.343" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-10T15:39:53.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-10T20:27:41.380" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;Current Physics Stack Exchange bounties http://stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/physics.stackexchange.com/bounty.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29727" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T14:16:39.593" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-10T20:27:41.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5261" CreationDate="2013-12-11T09:38:06.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least one other site now has a customised top bar: the one at &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction and Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; has been made slightly translucent in order to make it fit better with their site. Obviously translucency wouldn't be appropriate in our case, but a similarly subtle change in colour scheme would make it a lot less visually jarring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://askubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;Ask Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt; also has a customised bar. It's the same colour scheme as our one, but has been moved to fit into the layout in a different way. (It still looks like a compromise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is now precedent on two other sites for customising the top bar, I hope the request to do so on ours will be genuinely considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:11.907" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T02:19:34.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-11T11:34:47.227" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;update:&lt;/strong&gt; this issue is connected with Chrome's text zoom feature - see the bottom of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite often see this sort of thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ql3OS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when I reload the page, the equations will go back to being centred where they should be - but sometimes not. This is with Google Chrome (31.0.1650.57, though it's been an issue for a while) under OS X 10.8.5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is with the Math renderer set to &quot;SVG&quot;, because I like my equations to be pretty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is not specific to multiline equations. Here is an example with a single-line one, albeit a rather long one:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mdZ66.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems not to happen with all equations, but I'm not sure what the pattern is. I'd say it occurs with more than 50% of them though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I habitually browse with Chrome's zoom level set to one or two, because my eyesight is quite poor. This problem doesn't occur with the zoom set to the default level, and it also immediately disappears if I change the zoom level, so as a workaround I can quickly change the zoom to something else and back again (&lt;code&gt;option&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;option&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; on my Mac) to get the correct formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T07:33:48.497" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T07:33:48.497" Title="MathJax alignment issue" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-11T14:20:41.397" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VoMdO.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org: the biggest open-access e-print repository for maths and physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2014-01-17T12:50:06.220" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T12:50:06.220" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-11T14:20:41.397" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5301" CreationDate="2013-12-11T14:59:31.070" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moderator declined two of my flagged comments and I disagree with this. How should I proceed in getting this reversed?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T16:23:56.490" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T16:23:56.490" Title="How do I dispute a moderator's diclination of two of my flags that I raised?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5300" CreationDate="2013-12-11T16:53:58.403" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You post here (on meta) explaining what you flagged and what the response was, and ask why the decision was made that way and whether it was the right decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there is no guarantee the decision will be reversed, but if not, you'll get an explanation on why it was the right decision in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T16:53:58.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5303" CreationDate="2013-12-11T17:06:04.203" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if the mathematical physics tag would be appropriate for this post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/89922/&quot;&gt;Can You Obtain New Physics from the use of Fractional Derivatives?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34705" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T20:59:46.443" Title="Is the mathematical physics tag appropriate for this post?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5302" CreationDate="2013-12-11T17:19:08.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) &lt;em&gt;Yes,&lt;/em&gt; it seems the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag applies to fractional derivatives, in particular since &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_calculus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fractional calculus&lt;/a&gt; is a relatively advanced mathematical discipline, which is rarely covered in a standard university curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) More generally, for the most common tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insert-tagname-here&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insert-tagname-here&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insert-tagname-here&lt;/a&gt;, there is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a short pop-up wiki tag excerpt available by hovering the mouse over the tag in the main Phys.SE site, or &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a longer wiki tag description at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/insert-tagname-here/info&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/insert-tagname-here/info&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where one can learn more about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/insert-tagname-here&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;insert-tagname-here&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;insert-tagname-here&lt;/a&gt; tag. If not, then users are encouraged to create a wiki tag description (or improve an existing wiki tag description).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T20:59:46.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-11T17:33:55.507" Score="-1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89374/velocity-at-the-very-moment-of-collision&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89374/velocity-at-the-very-moment-of-collision&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some comments are posted on this question out of which I flagged these two: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 The last part is a duplicate of: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35177/… – jinawee  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2 An addendum to @ja72's comment is that all composite objects must in reality &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; the store and release business . – dmckee♦.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the comment no 1 two times, first because I had edited my question and explained that the last part of my question was duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82464/can-a-photon-survive-a-collision-if-so-is-it-at-rest-during-the-process&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question not that &quot;jinawee&quot; mentioned but my flag was declined.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I again edited my question and removed the duplicate part, after editing I again flagged comment no 1 as obsolete but it was again declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged comment no 2 as &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt; because I don't find it related to the question one time and it was declined. And after this, the comment was rephrased with minor improvement of &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; replaced with &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;. As &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An addendum to @ja72's comment is that all composite objects must in reality &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; the store and release business. – dmckee♦ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were my flags to these comments declined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T03:29:21.817" Title="Why were some of my flags got declined?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5300" CreationDate="2013-12-11T18:24:33.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't set too much store by declined flags. If you look on MSO, it happens relatively often that flags are declined and yet the action gets taken. There's two outcomes that can come out of this sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First of all, did the action get taken? If it did, then no worries. If it didn't, what was it? If you were asking for removal of comments, then don't worry too much about it - comments are temporary anyway. If you don't like a comment but it's not offensive or anything, well, shucks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only thing a declined flag really does is it slightly affects your &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/84859/we-dont-need-to-see-flag-weight&quot;&gt;flag weight&lt;/a&gt; - that is, your total helpful vs. declined flags. This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; something to worry about unless a really large percentage of your flags get declined. This is used by mods as a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; rough measure to help gauge the importance of flags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, there's not all that much to decry about a declined flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T18:24:33.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5304" CreationDate="2013-12-11T18:39:14.547" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a moderator, but FWIW I found jinawee's comment useful as it linked to an article that was related if not an exact duplicate. I would not want the comment deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dmckee's comment expands on ja72's to point out that special relativity demands any composite object cannot be rigid. This also seems to me to be a useful point and again my view is that the comment should stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Emilio says above, you can add a comment yourself to point out problems with someone else's comment, but those comments would normally not be deleted unless they are offensive or gratuitously pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response to comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question, during the collision the ball has no single well defined velocity because it is an elastic object and as it deforms different parts of the ball are moving at different speeds. So it isn't clear what is meant by the velocity at the moment of the collision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might ask could we have a perfectly rigid ball, but special relativity sets an upper limit on the rigidity of macroscopic objects because pressure waves in the object cannot move faster than light. Therefore no perfectly rigid objects can exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dmckee was pointing out that all real balls must deform and store energy as they hit the wall, then go back to their original shape and release energy as they bounce off the wall. Hence the impact takes a finite time and we have the problem of an ill defined velocity during the collision. In his comment the word &lt;em&gt;business&lt;/em&gt; just means &lt;em&gt;activity&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;what happens&lt;/em&gt; rather than some commercial enterprise. I'm afraid it's another example of English being a confusing language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T17:26:40.233" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T17:26:40.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-13T12:51:19.547" Score="14" ViewCount="1654" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current tag wiki for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; - now &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; - tag includes, in its final paragraph, the request that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, please add your question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;the book list&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just gave that tag wiki a make-over to bring it in line with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed/&quot;&gt;new books policy&lt;/a&gt;, and I erased that paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;books list question&lt;/a&gt; is not a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; question as per the new policy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't see that much value in having the question as opposed to simply &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;looking for questions with that tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It adds to the curatorial load in dealing with new questions and adds a big backlog to go over.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unreasonable to expect of every asker of resource recommendation questions to edit their question into the big list.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are two things that come to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;books list question&lt;/a&gt; on topic now?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, should we link to it from the tag wiki?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T17:53:44.350" Title="Do we need/want an overarching books question?" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2013-12-14T17:36:06.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IYbBr.png&quot; alt=&quot;THE NET ADVANCE OF PHYSICS&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20898" LastEditorUserId="20898" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T16:34:32.350" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T16:34:32.350" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-14T17:36:06.023" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-15T12:28:54.850" Score="6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7819/why-does-venus-rotate-the-opposite-direction-as-other-planets&quot;&gt;An answer by Ubuntu was deleted,&lt;/a&gt; wrongly, in my opinion, as not being an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is offering an alternative answer which can be discussed as to how probable it is for Venus to be captured as is. He starts with a polite preamble but that is no reason to jump and delete the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To those with &amp;lt; 10 k, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U3rLz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U3rLz.png&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T18:39:40.713" Title="Why was this beginner's answer deleted ?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5309" CreationDate="2013-12-15T13:16:13.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the way the answer was written has caused some confusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed there is some answer in the text Ubuntu wrote, namely the innate spinning meteor theory. Most of the text however, especially the last sentence (&quot;if you do not answer I will understand&quot;), suggests that Ubuntu is rather asking a question. Or, really assuming the worst*, even hijack someone elses question for a question on his own theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can imagine that Qmechanic decided to delete it mainly based on the last part of the post, maybe without noticing the attempt at an answer in the first part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I am quite sure that he didn't mean to do that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20731" LastEditorUserId="20731" LastEditDate="2013-12-15T13:24:02.700" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T13:24:02.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5309" CreationDate="2013-12-15T15:10:07.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ups, yes, I read it pretty quickly, and mostly noticed what seemed like a question at the end. I have no time to deal with it, so I'm just going to undelete the answer for now, removing the question and the greeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T15:10:07.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5309" CreationDate="2013-12-15T18:39:40.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading version 1 of the answer, my impression is that it was intended as a response to other answers (and comments). Sure, it includes something that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be construed as an answer to the question, but that answer is quite speculative, and not the kind of informed response we want to encourage. So I would also have deleted that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T18:39:40.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2013-12-15T23:06:40.687" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I agree with the proposal to get rid of the books question, or at least put a historical lock on it. I would rather have that information in the tag wiki anyway. Not that every resource recommendation should be linked in the tag wiki, but some of the ones on major topics that people are likely to reference frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T23:06:40.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-16T20:54:21.397" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;When edit a question in the close queue, it automatically skips to the next question. So I have to open the question in a new tab to VTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any direct way to achive this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there any particular reason why this cannot be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T02:15:07.160" Title="Editing and closing in the close queue" Tags="|support|editing|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-16T23:09:35.777" Score="9" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent attempt on my part to re-open an estimation question has failed, so I thought it might be worthwhile to continue the discussion on meta. The original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55598/estimate-number-of-hairs-on-human-head&quot;&gt;Estimate number of hairs on human head&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was marked as off-topic since physicists should not care about the number of hairs on a human head. I will resist the urge to answer that physics = everything, since then we will start getting questions about the economy on here...but I think that estimation questions should be allowed for three main reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Every single physics textbook contains them. If chapter 1 of an introductory physics textbook is &quot;off-topic&quot;, then how can we determine that anything is on-topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Physicists have a long tradition of estimation. The phrase &quot;Back-of-the-envelope&quot; originated in the hard sciences, and any googling on the issue will immediately tell you these kinds of problems are referred to as &quot;Fermi problems&quot; because he was so good at them (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem&lt;/a&gt;). He used them to solve physical problems - like estimating the size of nuclear explosions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) They are a key part of the working physicists toolkit. During seminars/conferences, questions of the form &quot;it seems like that value is too large&quot; are important discussion points, and originate with such estimation techniques. They allow us to study the mechanisms behind physical phenomena and processes which we may not be able to understand from first principles ( i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Drake equation&lt;/a&gt;). If someone is running a machine (accelerator, telescope, SEM, SQUID...) they will be required to make on-the-fly decisions based on estimations of physical parameters of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can someone tell me why these questions are not allowed? To me they are really characteristic of problems in physics. I hate using quotes to prove arguments, but I'm going to do so in this case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Never make a calculation until you know the answer: make an estimate before every calculation, try a simple physical argument (symmetry! invariance! conservation!) before every derivation, guess the answer to every puzzle.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                         Wheeler and Taylor, Spacetime Physics (1966).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T23:44:54.677" Title="Why are estimation questions off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5316" CreationDate="2013-12-16T23:25:43.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume the question, even in it's current form, were asked today. I have a feeling it would be closed under the homework policy because it shows no effort, doesn't ask about a physical concept, and essentially boils down to a copy-paste of the question asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I suppose one could argue that the close reason there is not the correct one, I still think it wouldn't be open anyway. I would vote to close it at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T23:25:43.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5316" CreationDate="2013-12-16T23:36:36.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multiple reasons why it should stay closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You've made a very radical edit to it, completely changing what was asked. Ask it separately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a practical Fermi problem as there is no starting ground. The classic piano tuner problem has a base of numbers that can be easily estimated. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a tool, yes, but ultimately not a &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; question. &quot;How does one solve the Fermi problem of estimating the number of binary stars in an area&quot; is an OK question. This is not. One could similarly reason that programming questions are on topic, since programming is a tool which is widely used in physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T23:36:36.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5316" CreationDate="2013-12-16T23:42:13.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would add to the other answers that you seem to be taking the wrong principle away from this. Just because the question was about order-of-magnitude estimation, and it got closed, doesn't mean questions about estimation are off topic. So what you're asking here is not really a problem that needs to be solved: estimation questions are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; off topic as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no-effort homework-like questions in which someone asks us to solve a problem for them &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; off topic, and also questions which ask for an answer rather than about a physical concept are off topic. (Kind of the same thing.) This question about hairs on a head is precisely that type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T23:42:13.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5316" CreationDate="2013-12-16T23:44:54.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reluctantly approved your radical edit to the question because I thought you put a lot of effort into it and I didn't entirely disagree with your main point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue I see with the question as it is worded now is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About 80% of the question text is defending the general idea of estimation as a valid tool in physics&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question itself (how many hairs on a human head) has almost no value to the community&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against estimation questions but I think a question should be about the estimation technique or have some value to the overall community.  If the goal is to have a good demonstration of estimation then we could have any question, not just human hair, be the stand-in-question that demos the technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this could be one of the cases when posting a question about estimation and then answering your own question would be a valuable contribution to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T23:44:54.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5315" CreationDate="2013-12-17T01:53:17.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find this annoying too.  I often see a question that should be cleaned up AND closed.  I recently re-read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;close-vote guidance&lt;/a&gt; to figure this out.  This is the pertinent few sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Editing the question or gathering enough Leave Open votes will automatically kick the question out of the queue and immediately begin aging the close votes (no matter the number of views). If the question receives another close vote after being kicked out, it will re-enter the queue for further review. Questions with vote to close as a duplicate will also list each possible duplicate in a tab at the top for easy reviewing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems editing is viewed as an implicit &quot;leave open&quot; vote.  I assume the rational behind that is that if the question is worth closing it isn't worth editing and if it is worth editing, it's worth leaving open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I've been handling this is to open a new tab, edit the question, and then cast a close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do this because I want our closed questions to be searchable so that in the future we can find them for duplicate marking or even to help discourage more poor questions from being asked by new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T01:53:17.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5315" CreationDate="2013-12-17T02:15:07.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess the &quot;edit&quot; buttons placed in the review queues are meant to bring the question back into our scope. Because, it has popped into the review queue due to its &lt;em&gt;off-topicness&lt;/em&gt; or its low quality or some flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so far (in my 3k user lifetime), I've done the same believing my hypothesis...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T02:15:07.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-17T05:33:46.037" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that the tags Info page is somehow hard to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be useful to have a simple pictures to illustrate the tag like the Wikipedia pages, for example putting the figure on the right hand side of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Special relativity&lt;/a&gt; to our corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/special-relativity/info&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it would be easier to visualize the relation between tags rather than just list all of them out, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/classical-mechanics/info&quot;&gt;Classical mechanics&lt;/a&gt;. Is there way to generate those graphs so that we can put them there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="562" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T05:33:46.037" Title="Illustrative pictures for the tags Info page" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-18T00:31:45.267" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we have &lt;strong&gt;User feed&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Question feed&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;emails notification&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do not, can we promote to have these features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. It is &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; asking about off-site service. What I wonder is whether there is an email notification service for &lt;strong&gt;a specific User&lt;/strong&gt; feed or &lt;strong&gt;a specific question&lt;/strong&gt; feed provided by Phys SE. There is this service for question Tags on a particular category. But NOT for &lt;strong&gt;a specific User&lt;/strong&gt; feed or &lt;strong&gt;a specific question&lt;/strong&gt; feed. Why &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt;? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12813" LastEditorUserId="12813" LastEditDate="2013-12-23T01:57:06.660" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T06:30:55.610" Title="User feed and Question feed" Tags="|support|user-interface|notifications|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-18T11:03:25.677" Score="7" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know Astronomy.SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;merged&lt;/a&gt; into Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I asked this astronomy related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89350/when-venus-is-the-brightest-when-viewed-from-earth&quot;&gt;When Venus is the brightest when viewed from Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I got a moderator comment that it would better fit in astronomy.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's up? Will the site split again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T12:51:01.720" Title="Did Astronomy.SE reopen?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2013-12-18T11:07:28.727" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site was restarted. Old questions merged with Physics stay here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, since our scope was expanded, everything on topic on Astro &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on topic here, though for observational astronomy there is a chance that you may get better answers on Astro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there are no plans of splitting up the scope again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T11:07:28.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2013-12-18T12:51:01.720" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking, it is not reopened. Rather it is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40709/astronomy&quot;&gt;new&lt;/a&gt; SE proposal with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51/astronomy&quot;&gt;same name&lt;/a&gt;, although it might be difficult to tell &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6222/40978&quot;&gt;the difference in scope&lt;/a&gt;. So in practice: &lt;em&gt;Yeah,&lt;/em&gt; it reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T12:51:01.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5329" CreationDate="2013-12-20T01:41:19.830" Score="2" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really would like to refrain from whining and so whilst I have been downvoted to -5 or less before, I haven't really bothered to complain about it.  I truly do not want to be that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like some criticism to why my question received -3 because in my eyes it is perfectly valid: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90347/proof-that-the-ground-pushes-you-up&quot;&gt;Proof that the ground pushes you up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just asks about why the ground is expected to push back when you try to jump; the answer of which is as simple as compression and decompression (hence elasticity) of the surface on a nanoscopic level.  I mentioned that I'm new to physics and gave my opinion on what I thought was happening.  I got answers and -3 votes but nobody said anything out of the ordinary and when I asked, nobody bothered answering me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could somebody please explain what I am doing wrong in my question?  Is it the way I asked it, the content itself, or perhaps is it too low-level for the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17361" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T01:10:47.893" Title="Post downvoting am I doing something wrong?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5328" CreationDate="2013-12-20T04:44:33.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is, there's a little of both involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of resources online, including other questions on this very site, on the topic of how the normal force happens. You haven't given any indication that you looked at any of those resources, and thus it appears as though you haven't put much of any research effort into your question. Any post like that is not likely to be well received.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also, the question is written in a way that's characteristic of someone who isn't familiar with even the basic physics required to understand the answer. (And the fact that you identify yourself as a newbie to physics doesn't help.) Remember that this is primarily an &quot;expert-level&quot; site. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone is supposed to be a physics expert (like a grad student or researcher), but what it does mean is that we expect people asking questions to either already have the appropriate level of physics knowledge required to understand the answer to their question, or to be willing to go out and learn it after they get that answer. Your question is written in a way that kind of implies you're looking for a layperson-level, highly simplified explanation. There's nothing wrong with &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; those kinds of questions, but when you want that kind of an explanation, this site isn't meant to be the place to get them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding to those reasons, here are some things you can do to improve future questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, put some effort into searching for the answer to your question, and show that you've done so. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type the question title into Google (and/or another good-quality search engine) and look at the top few results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also search a few combinations of key words, and again look at the top few results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify what physics concepts are involved and look at the relevant Wikipedia pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look in a textbook or equivalent resource on the appropriate subject. Remember, since this is an expert-level site, you should have the capacity to educate yourself enough to understand the answers you get, and as part of that educational program you should have some textbook-like resource available to you. Make sure to use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're asking a more advanced question which concerns current research, look for relevant papers, including checking on arXiv.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And of course, search on this site! Use the search box in the top right to check for relevant keywords and tags, and also, when you're typing your question in the form, look at the suggested similar questions the system shows you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to explicitly list all the steps you go through to do prior research - like, you don't have to say which search terms you used - but you should give some indication that you put some effort into this. Basically, if someone reads your question and immediately finds a standard resource (Google search, Wikipedia, HyperPhysics, another SE question) that answers it, you should have found it yourself and already put an explanation in the question of why that resource doesn't give you the answer you want. Bear in mind that this is a requirement of questions at &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; levels. It has nothing to do with whether your question may be too simple or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing (but it's kind of the same thing) that works against you is that you ask a question, present a hypothesis about the answer... and then that's it. It's fine (even preferred) to have your own hypothesis about the answer to your question - as long as your hypothesis is grounded in solid physics, of course - but then you need to go out and check that hypothesis yourself. Maybe it'll be correct, and then you don't need to post the question in the first place. Or if it's incorrect, you'll learn something that might help you better understand the question or its eventual answer. The point is, if you just say &quot;My hypothesis is that XXXX.&quot; and leave it at that, it comes across as laziness. If you instead write &quot;My hypothesis is that XXXX, but that doesn't seem correct because Wikipedia says YYYYY,&quot; and so on, that shows research effort and makes a better question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T19:26:32.397" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T19:26:32.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5328" CreationDate="2013-12-20T11:25:09.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's annoying and even upsetting to receive downvotes; I certainly don't like it when it happens to me! However a downvote isn't an insult, and it's not a personal criticism. A downvote just means the downvoter doesn't think the question is suitable for this site. Three or more downvotes stop a question from appearing on the home page, so there is a reason for downvoting i.e. to reduce (perceived) clutter on the home page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I don't think your question warranted downvotes. It is a duplicate, but even I find it hard to spot duplicates for questions and for a new user of the site it must be even harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one of the key features of the Physics Stack Exchange that we strive to protect is it's high signal to noise ratio. Right from the early days of Usenet a big problem with Physics discussion sites has been that all types of junk gets posted on them, from would be scientists trying to promote their own theories to zealots claiming Einstein was wrong and even people who just like vandalising web sites. The aim of the Physics SE is that all the questions and answers will be interesting and informative to anyone interested in Physics. As a result we expect people to have done some research before posting their question, and questions that are naive tend to attract downvotes as a result. By taking this approach we run the risk of being elitist and putting off newcomers trying to learn Physics. It's a tightrope we have to walk, and I think we generally get it about right though the treatment of your question was a bit harsh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T11:25:09.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5328" CreationDate="2013-12-21T01:10:47.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I was the first downvote which was based on the original version of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;proof that the ground pushes you up&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Excuse me if this is obvious because I am new to physics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has been said that when you try to jump you are exerting your force on the ground and the ground pushes you up. I was wondering if this was an over-simplification or not. If so, what's the full explanation? Otherwise, I would like to know the derivation of this proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a couple issues with the question.  First, you were asking for &quot;proof&quot; and the fact that you don't fall through the ground and that you can jump sure seems like great proof to me.  Second, you didn't really ask about the source of the normal force or any details of the interaction.  Third, there are many very similar or identical questions on the site and it doesn't seem like you did any effort to search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;tool tip&quot; when you hover over the downvote button reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your original formulation and the downvote guidance that my downvote was called for.  You've since edited the question and improved it.  I don't think the downvote is as appropriate now so I've reverted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as an aside, this site is about getting the best answers to the best questions.  This is one of the reasons why questions and answers can be edited by anyone.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/90347/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; show you fighting with editors (in my opinion) inappropriately.  There are times where edits should be reverted or fixed but I don't see any examples of that in the edits to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T01:10:47.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5333" CreationDate="2013-12-21T07:27:00.973" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90336/is-there-a-minimum-mass-is-required-for-light-to-be-noticeably-bent&quot;&gt;Is there a minimum mass is required for light to be noticeably bent?&lt;/a&gt; popped up in my review queue because it has a few close votes/flags.  One is for &quot;&lt;em&gt;Unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and the other is &quot;&lt;em&gt;Primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  I thought about hitting &quot;&lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt;&quot; but ultimately I decided to vote &quot;&lt;em&gt;Leave Open&lt;/em&gt;&quot; because I don't think either of those votes is accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I feel guilty and I wonder if choosing anything other than &quot;&lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt;&quot; was a conflict of interest.  I have an up-voted answer in response to the question and I think that makes me a really poor judge of where the question should be closed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a generally accepted convention about conflicts of interest like in this case?  Should I have chosen &quot;&lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T03:13:30.017" Title="Is it a conflict of interest to review &quot;votes to close&quot; on questions you've answered?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5332" CreationDate="2013-12-21T09:58:01.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing the question doesn't prevent your answer being upvoted and indeed accepted, so the only effect on your reputation would be the peripheral one that site users may not look at a question if they see it has been closed. So any conflict of interest you may have is pretty minor. I would not lose any sleep over the issue :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T09:58:01.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5332" CreationDate="2013-12-21T18:17:48.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a generally accepted convention about conflicts of interest like in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but I think in practice we just trust people to be more or less objective. And you're not making a unilateral decision so the impact of any potential conflict of interest is limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T18:17:48.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5332" CreationDate="2013-12-22T03:13:30.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To go a bit further, I tend to see it this way when it comes up: if you think the question is worthy of an answer, then it most likely deserves to be left open. You've thought enough about the question to decide that it is on-topic and to provide an answer. Stand up for it and vote to leave open! (If that is, of course, what you think should be done.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T03:13:30.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5337" CreationDate="2013-12-23T07:05:20.223" Score="2" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I include a diagram that will simplify my question, mostly in concepts like kinematic or Newton's Laws of Motions? I searched the site but didn't find a way to include it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If this question has already been asked and has an answer, please add a link and close this one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31337" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T15:22:30.533" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T15:22:30.533" Title="Procedure to include a diagram/image/picture in a post" Tags="|support|links|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5336" CreationDate="2013-12-23T08:07:21.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To insert pictures, you can click the handy &quot;Image&quot; button above the question/answer field:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lO6nf.png&quot; alt=&quot;image button&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will prompt you to locate the picture either on your computer or on the internet. It will upload it to StackExchange's special imgur account&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and insert the appropriate formatted link in the text field. Note that you are encouraged to replace the highlighted text with some image description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SytVf.png&quot; alt=&quot;pre-formatted image link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;making&lt;/em&gt; diagrams, there is no particular toolset on the site.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; We do have many &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/401&quot;&gt;suggestions&lt;/a&gt;, though, for standalone tools. Use whichever you want, and upload the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why nothing integrated into the site? You can make a request, but as you'll see in that last link, there are many different opinions about what works best. Besides, whatever option there is has to be amenable to integrating into websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; You should do this rather than just format an appropriate link to the image. This way the picture is permanently stored even if there is link rot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Unlike, for instance &lt;a href=&quot;http://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;, which has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2708&quot;&gt;tool for making circuit diagrams&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T08:07:21.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5342" CreationDate="2013-12-23T16:19:38.057" Score="4" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to downvote an answer when the user refused to use &lt;code&gt;LaTeX&lt;/code&gt; math formatting and instead wrote out all equations in &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; text or worse no formatting at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example answer:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/82028/392&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/82028/392&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. There is a little known FAQ on math formatting here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference?rq=1&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference?rq=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T21:02:37.457" Title="Downvoting an answer not using math formatting" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2013-12-23T16:22:06.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally you should fix easy things like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can also expect posters to learn from their mistakes and not do the same thing in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T16:22:06.270" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2013-12-23T16:34:07.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't downvote if the answer is not complicated to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you should leave a comment to new users and edit it if you have time. For instance, @annav doesn't use LaTex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T16:34:07.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5344" CreationDate="2013-12-23T20:23:05.597" Score="7" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't see the difference bewteen &lt;em&gt;very low quality&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;. The flag descriptions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it is not an answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it is very low quality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that an useful comment should be flagged as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;. But when the answer is just nonsense, is it &lt;em&gt;very low quality&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how do questions get to the &lt;em&gt;low quality&lt;/em&gt; queue, since there is no  &lt;em&gt;low quality question&lt;/em&gt; flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why do we have the &quot;very low quality&quot; flag?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2013-12-23T20:23:14.363" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically you can downvote for whatever reason you want. (Any reason based on the content of the post, that is. If you downvote because of who posted it, that's not okay.) So if you want to downvote a post because it doesn't use MathJax for the formulas, that is, strictly speaking, okay. It may or may not be a good idea, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is sometimes an argument in favor of doing this. The main reason you're supposed to downvote an answer is that it's not useful. But an answer can be not useful for a variety of reasons: it's wrong, it's unclear, it doesn't justify its conclusions, or it's just difficult to read. (Or others.) And an answer with a lot of math which is formatted using plain text, not MathJax, qualifies as &quot;difficult to read&quot; as far as I'm concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, of course, it's an easy edit to put in the proper MathJax formatting. So when I come across an answer of this type, I'll usually just edit it, rather than downvoting. And in general, whenever the reason you would downvote is something that can be fixed in a fairly obvious way by an edit which doesn't change the meaning of the post, it's preferable to edit rather than downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2013-12-24T21:02:37.457" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T21:02:37.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5341" CreationDate="2013-12-23T20:31:21.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very low quality presumably present a nominal answer, it is just that it is very badly written or presented to a unresolvable extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not an answer says that it is for new questions, comments and responses to other answers; that is things which don't even pretend to provide an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the low quality queue is filled only with posts flagged by the automatic post-quality heuristics. These are usually very short or consisting mainly of a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T20:31:21.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5341" CreationDate="2013-12-23T20:47:50.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93595/is-the-very-low-quality-flag-too-ambiguous&quot;&gt;this MSO question&lt;/a&gt; addresses that. To quote from the top answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VLQ means the flagger thinks this post is beyond saving -- no amount of editing or polishing will turn this particular turd into gold. It is a call for a pooper-scooper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Essentially this is synonymous with &lt;strong&gt;flag for removal&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, it's quite rare that I see a post which I would consider an appropriate use of the VLQ flag. It pretty much has to be actual gibberish. (Needless to say, as a moderator I delete such posts; if I weren't a moderator, I would VLQ-flag them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The not-an-answer flag, on the other hand, is intended for content which is legible, perhaps understandable, and may even constitute a useful contribution of some sort, but simply does not answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it makes little difference to us (moderators) which kind of flag you use, so don't spend much time agonizing over whether you should flag something as very low quality or as not an answer. If you're not sure, pick either one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T07:40:30.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5348" CreationDate="2013-12-24T05:14:47.763" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the standard time of Physics SE and Physics meta.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the clock gauging our profile &quot;&lt;strong&gt;visited X days, Y consecutive&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg. in arXiv, we have arXiv time like this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/localtime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/localtime&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How about Physics SE and Physics meta? Is that EST, the same of New York City?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This matters, whether &lt;strong&gt;Y consecutive&lt;/strong&gt; depends on the mark of date-changing line? &lt;strong&gt;Is it 00:00 of EST?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12813" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T12:20:42.043" Title="What is the standard time (clock) of Physics SE and Physics meta?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2013-12-24T05:15:32.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All Stack Exchange sites run on UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T05:15:32.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5350" CreationDate="2013-12-24T12:09:28.333" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have I done enough to improve &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90372/is-optical-illusion-responsible-for-loch-ness-monster&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; to get it reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Coda:&lt;/strong&gt;  If the first comment by &lt;code&gt;WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance&lt;/code&gt; had been posted as an answer, I would have accepted it and we wouldn't be having this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15901" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T09:18:52.670" Title="Can the Loch Ness monster question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2013-12-24T12:20:42.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;dmckee's answer is correct, but note that if you want to see UTC time, you can go to the &lt;strong&gt;achivements tab&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jfWa9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T12:20:42.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-25T14:20:56.270" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it nice to link to other Q&amp;amp;A sites when answering questions? I know that we don't have expectations as skeptics people. But, I have a bad feeling when we come up with an answer based on someone's saying elsewhere in the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/91245/1&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; might be a &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; example (I've edited it now, with a better link from @dmckee). The answerer cites the phrase to some guy at some other Q&amp;amp;A site. Saying by its looks, that's a low quality site for sure. For instance, we don't even know who the guy, or what his specialty in our field is....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site is a high-quality Q&amp;amp;A site. We usually come to the conclusion, from each others' answers, based on agreement of previously known facts. And, I'm convinced that this answer is okay with it. I mean, it says that the viscosity of vodkas vary with brands. With some common sense, we all can agree with that. So, the citing doesn't matter here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about a technical one? Wouldn't the same &quot;citing to another Q&amp;amp;A site&quot; (well, most are pretty much low quality when compared to us) reduce the quality of our answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T09:27:02.770" Title="Is is good/bad to cite to posts in other Q&amp;A sites?" Tags="|discussion|answers|links|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5347" CreationDate="2013-12-25T16:59:56.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you had a question about fluid dynamics and wave formation then that's physics. Why waves might look like mythical creatures is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T16:59:56.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5349" CreationDate="2013-12-25T17:16:28.670" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you're answering a question about an observation like settling in fluid there are two parts to the answer. One is an explanation of the mathematical model used, and the second is the estimation of numerical values for constants used in your calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mathetical model rarely needs citations, except possibly you're using a citation to skip the gory details, as it should be fairly obvious if the maths makes sense. Finding numerical values is far harder. Taking the question you linked, I also tried to look up the viscosity of vodka and rather surprisingly Google failed to find anything useful. Even the simpler search for the viscosity of water/ethanol mixtures took some searching. Under these circumstances you may be reduced to quoting figures from some questionable source. That doesn't necessarily matter if it's clear how you're using the data and how possible errors in the numerical values may affect your conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit unfair to point to a particular question, but if you look at my and Joe Hilton's answers then actually neither is very good, since neither of us give a model for the settling of gold leaf flakes in a fluid. In fact, as Bernhard points out, a naive calculation using Stoke's law gives an unrealistically high settling rate, and it's not immediately obvious to me how to model the settling of such unusually shaped and flexible particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my point is that citations from dubious sources are not in themselves a problem as it depends on the context and what exactly the citation is being used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T17:16:28.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-26T13:45:08.063" Score="-1" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/212433/should-employees-with-head-injuries-be-allowed-to-post-on-meta&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/212781/christmas-hat-haiku&quot;&gt;couple&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/208393/i-would-like-a-mug-please&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt; impromptu contests on Meta where one has to write a relevant poem or something. Some have been just for fun, some have been for swag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not have an informal (no prizes, unfortunately) competition on this Meta for some Christmas fun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inspiration is &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=12793773#12793773&quot;&gt;this chat message&lt;/a&gt; on the Physics GRE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the physics one basically just tests whether you've sat through a &quot;modern physics for freshman poets&quot; course&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accuracy of the above statement aside, one can have quite a bit of fun writing physics poems that could find a place in a quiz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poem must either be a question, or a question+answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No restrictions on the specific form of poetry. Preferably rhyming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T19:11:26.427" Title="Write a &quot;Physics GRE&quot; poem!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5352" CreationDate="2013-12-26T13:45:08.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to get this started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the music that is sung&#xA;   when an electron is far flung?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, you idiotic pile of dung, &#xA;   the answer is bremsstrahlung!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By root of oak and stem of clove where do photons get the shove?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The intriguing answer, by Jove is most certainly Cerenkov&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Apologies for the cold-blooded murder of meter)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T13:45:08.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5352" CreationDate="2013-12-26T14:43:54.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;YAY!!! Let's enjoy the last few days of 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How's mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens when a sparkler becomes a hurdler?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's very easy, niggler. It's certainly Doppler..!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this too...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we all sprang out from a bang?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a stupid whizbang. It's the Big Bang!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T11:30:33.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5352" CreationDate="2013-12-26T16:01:30.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bright stars out at day?&#xA;It must be supernovae!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and two...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The missing part of decay we know,&#xA;is a little bitty neutrino&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possibly some more coming later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T16:01:30.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5352" CreationDate="2013-12-26T21:39:35.497" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why two beams of light are a-racing; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    In that way exactly they're facing. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    In accord with GR &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Once they've traveled quite far &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6197/do-two-beams-of-light-attract-each-other-in-general-theory-of-relativity&quot;&gt;Will gravity change their true spacing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There once was a piece of spaghetti &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Quite dry and uncooked and not sweaty. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Too much it was bent; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Away the shards went. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71661/why-does-dry-spaghetti-break-into-three-pieces-as-opposed-to-only-two&quot;&gt;But why did it break like confetti?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25328/universe-is-expanding-at-enormous-speed&quot;&gt;universe&lt;/a&gt; keeps on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20056/superluminal-expansion-of-the-early-universe-how-is-this-possible&quot;&gt;expanding&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30037/will-acceleration-rate-of-expansion-of-space-become-faster-than-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;everyone's&lt;/a&gt; always &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/41058/is-the-cosmic-horizon-related-to-the-big-bang-event&quot;&gt;demanding&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Much &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44386/is-2-5x-speed-of-light-possible-between-two-objects&quot;&gt;faster than light&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/50061/time-for-light-to-travel-from-most-distant-objects-in-universe&quot;&gt;sure&lt;/a&gt; it's not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/59803/galaxies-moving-away-at-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;right&lt;/a&gt;! &lt;br&gt;&#xA;    But &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60519/can-space-expand-with-unlimited-speed&quot;&gt;where&lt;/a&gt; is my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90440/how-is-it-possible-the-universe-expanded-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-during-i&quot;&gt;misunderstanding&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T21:39:35.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5358" CreationDate="2013-12-27T18:24:02.093" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just downvoted an answer. (In this case because it was more of a comment than an answer.) As soon as I downvoted, I got a -1 in my reputation. Is it supposed to be like this, or is it some technical fault?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T05:16:45.380" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T05:16:45.380" Title="Does downvoting cost reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5357" CreationDate="2013-12-27T18:27:51.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a 1 rep point hit for downvoting answers.  There isn't any reputation hit for downvoting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that &lt;em&gt;really bad&lt;/em&gt; answers tend to attract 3-4 downvotes and then the author is motivated to remove the answer.  When an answer that you downvoted is removed you get your reputation back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reputation loss does make you think twice about downvoting an answer but don't let it discourage you.  Wrong or poor answers need to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T18:27:51.533" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-27T21:28:46.287" Score="-11" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definition of bias from Google:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that all &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;SE&lt;/a&gt; sites tend to show only the highly voted, rated, or otherwise answered questions (or a combination thereof). It seems to me that this is meeting the definition of bias in these areas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.It is favoring good questions, and trying to convey that bad ones don't exist, &lt;em&gt;or are not to be seen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Bad questions are going to be asked anywhere! Why present questions as if bad questions are non-existent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.It is also prejudice to questions which might be interesting, but from which nobody has voted up. It is possible that a good question may not be voted up immediately, and other questions get asked and push it down more and more(especially in a high-traffic site). With this in mind, it eliminates the potential from &lt;em&gt;other than non-preferred questions to be visible&lt;/em&gt; from the home page of a site(even if those questions may have been good in one way or another, but didn't get the chance to be featured). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand that the site wants to give off a good vibe, but it is bias and prejudice to &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; show favored questions in the front page. Perhaps a few bad questions here and there would show more realism and less bias, I would say. Also, as mentioned before, good questions aren't always voted, hence, they could be skewed by and never get their front page view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose a theory that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Maybe the front page should &lt;strong&gt;sometimes&lt;/strong&gt; show non-voted questions, or even down-voted questions to give a sense of realism, and reduce the bias outlook of the site by not only favoring voted questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Maybe the page should divide the voted/bad/average questions all on the front page in separate rows/columns to portray more than just the biased &quot;good&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't be the only one who thinks this, can I? I understand that image is important in business, but it's simply &lt;strong&gt;bias, prejudice, and falsehood&lt;/strong&gt; to try and make the site seem perfect by only featuring voted marks or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20456" LastEditorUserId="20456" LastEditDate="2019-04-17T20:29:35.507" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T20:29:35.507" Title="Isn't it bias to only show good quality/rated questions on the main page?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5359" CreationDate="2013-12-27T21:56:04.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The comments are getting crowded so I'll post as an answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's correct that anything other than a uniform random selection of questions is biased in some way.  That's fine.  That's even &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange doesn't claim or even aim to be a statistically unbiased representation of (physics) questions.  That's why there is a democratic system in place to allow the community to rate questions and answers and why those votes are used to determine what gets shown to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will continue participate in the site if they have questions others find interesting or if there are interesting questions to answer.  Without a democratic voting system it would be much harder to find the interesting content and many people would lose interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A biased selection isn't the sign of totalitarian oppression.  It's the sign of a working democracy.  Your vote is worth the same as my vote or anyone else's vote so if you see questions you think are underrated, be sure to upvote them.  By the same token, if you see questions that are overrated, downvote them.  The site will be steered in the direction of the collective community feeling.  You're a part of the community so do your part by voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T21:56:04.333" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5359" CreationDate="2013-12-27T22:07:44.993" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets take you points one at a time &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Only good content is shown.&lt;/strong&gt; This is simply false. Content with scores of -2 upwards are shown on &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; content is shown on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that un-voted questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; featured on the front-page, and that randomly selected (subject to a net score higher than -3) older questions are occasionally bumped to the front-page by the community user.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An allegation that this is disingenuous or advertising.&lt;/strong&gt; Frankly that is nonsense. The vast bulk of our users find us from searches which take them directly to relevant content. The tuning of the front-page (which takes into account both score and you tag preferences) is designed as a convenience to the &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A claim that we have a obligation to treat all content alike.&lt;/strong&gt; Again, nonsense. These site are designed to &lt;em&gt;&quot;make the internet a better place&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. That does not mean highlighting crap, it means highlighting the good stuff. And &quot;good&quot; is chosen by the users at large.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that the high-rep users do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; dominate the voting, there are many, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; more low-rep user than high-rep ones and they have the same voting power as anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noting that bad questions are going to be asked.&lt;/strong&gt; Well, yes they are. But we are not going to encourage that. We are, in fact, going to discourage that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; biased against crap and we are proud of that fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T22:07:44.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5359" CreationDate="2013-12-27T23:25:25.390" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I see, your main concern is that low-voted questions are not shown in the front page. So this means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Down-voted questions won't get an answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's gives a false image&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;bias&lt;/em&gt; (which is implicitly bad)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know you, but for me, the Stackechange network is one of the best places in the Internet. I get quick and good answers (in most cases it has already been answered). But in other forums it's useless to use the search options, because there are so many duplicates, spam, silly discussions, no tags... Once a question is asked, &lt;em&gt;it will be lost like tears in the rain&lt;/em&gt; (and if you find an unanswered question, you're not even supposed to answer). Moderation doesn't even exist (spam may stay weeks before it's deleted). And forget about &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; discussion, if you don't like the rules, you must shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stackexchange network solves most of these problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with mass media technologies is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;information overload&lt;/a&gt;. Too much information is no information at all (that why I don't read newspapers and watch TV anymore). So the vote system is supposed to reduce the noise. Sure, some good questions will be lost, but this is a tiny disadvantage compared to the benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to bias you've arrived to this site (if Google sorted his results in any order, Internet would be almost useless), you're biasing people all the time, books, sports, countries... You can't have it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if this site sucks, I like it (and millions more do) and I should have the option to use it (we aren't doing anything illegal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I don't see the problem of not showing bad questions. When I visit a website I want to see the best of it, not the hall of shame. I doubt that people will have a heartattack when they realize we are not perfect (everyone should already know that perfection doesn't exist). Should we also warn that the computers which people are visiting the site with are financing wars, rapes, hunger and many other crimes in the Third World? And if you log in you'll see all the crap you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't treat all content the same in some regard, that is unfair, unjust, and bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Justice is not treating everyone in the same way, but in the way they deserve. Bad questions (to the community standards) won't be favoured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that any system will be unfair because there are people who can't afford an Internet connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to give some answers to your comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're saying that what community members decide to show to other people, other people will see? That's simply wrong. Why should a &amp;quot;community member&amp;quot; decide what me, a passerby, may want to see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that you don't like the voting system. It's the problem democracy always had, that some &lt;em&gt;stupid&lt;/em&gt; person can vote, when &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;em&gt;superior&lt;/em&gt; person should be the only one to decide (the problem is that in most cases, you would be in the base of the pyramid and if you criticize the system you might even get killed). But experience has proven that democracy is far better than a dictatorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this isn't a totalitarian system, why do you have the power (yes, power) to remove me from this site, but I can't even say I don't like you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Brandon can't remove you from the system and, aren't you expressing your opinions freely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is relative to racism, sexism, and social prejudice against other classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're going too far...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proved that I follow a just system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one? You've just said that you don't follow this system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you want me to start a website like this (I'm a programmer, I can), and implement my own system? We can then see which one works better(I can back the site as well, and know others who will). Is this a challenge towards my morality? Are you doing that right now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see how nice StackExchange looks when I write about it in my blog which has thousands of followers, and write an article on Ezine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that you're taking this too personally. You're free to do anything. In fact, I encourage you to do it, if you like. One must follow his convictions, we only live once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot; Talking about morals? Give me the power to vote down your question like you did mine, and then tell me a thing about morals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one is talking about morals (morality is something more important than this, which is done in real life, where people really need help, not in the Internet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T07:49:00.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5359" CreationDate="2013-12-28T02:50:48.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how much of an answer this is going to be, but have you seen google ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search results are decided on their relevance and popularity in the entire Internet.  That does not throw people off as bias, it does mean that when you search &quot;popular science&quot; it will give you the official popular science site and not your own blog which has a lousy comment on their biased nature. Do you also go to google's blog and criticize them of being such a biased community ? I dont think so, it is this feature only that gets results and gets them fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it may offend the ego of many people to get their questions downvoted and then thrown off the front page, but that is usually not because people are not finding your questions interesting, it is because people find your questions lacking something which make them suitable for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T02:50:48.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-28T05:29:09.907" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard recently that we should not discuss new theories here. Why we should not discuss new theories when they are very closely resembling the existing accepted theories but with slight modification. After all even if we fail with new theory, we end up learing the old established theory in a better way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="540" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-12-28T10:25:34.710" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T10:25:34.710" Title="Why we should not discuss new theories?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-12-28T17:55:09.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5364" CreationDate="2013-12-28T07:45:49.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say the key point emerges in your comment above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is there any physics forum to discuss new theories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a discussion forum - it is a question and answer site. It's hard to see how you could ask a question about a new theory without it turning into a discussion. That doesn't mean we hate and revile speculation, just that this isn't the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit I'm a bit uncomfortable with the phrase &quot;non-mainstream physics&quot; because I'm sure that's how Pope Urban VIII would have described Galileo. Actually I think the wording on the vote to close dialog is pretty good when it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T07:45:49.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-28T09:26:33.713" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone answers a question but refers to a Wikipedia link as a definitive source for the answer, should that answer be deleted or flagged somehow? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reasons and explanation for my question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The academic use section on Wikipedia states &quot;However, citation of Wikipedia in research papers may be considered unacceptable, because Wikipedia is not considered a credible or authoritative source&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use&lt;/a&gt;). Please do not cite the irony of my linking to wikipedia for this source as it is probably not a community-driven page and it is what Wikipedia itself states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is useful to refer somebody to Wikipedia to give them a general idea of some problem they may be considering, but it is another matter to use Wikipedia as an authoritative, definitive source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that when somebody gives an answer to a question and that answer depends on the authority of others then any link treated as authoritative ought to refer to a credible source that has a process for peer review and is not simply editable by the community at large. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason why I am asking this is to make sure I do not answer any questions in a way that negatively impacts the community here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36248" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T09:28:28.760" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T09:28:28.760" Title="Should answers that link to Wikipedia be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|links|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2013-12-28T11:11:16.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize that non-mainstream physics is off-topic, but I would hope that moderators err on the side of inclusion; I went through all of the OP's links and learned a lot imagination/conjecture-wise, without being swayed into joining any shady physics cults ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly, sourced rebuttals and elucidations present in answers on those topics do a lot to show me what is going on with some of the higher reaches of physics without climbing those crags myself. I'm not exactly sure how you would get the same result without questions of this kind to complete such a &quot;Socratic method&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say what you will about the wackiness of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75706/could-we-see-a-lower-dimension-within-our-universe/75787#75787&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for example, but I learned a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; from the comments and the sole answer, and it was equally worth it to untangle what the OP was asking despite it being ill-formed, and, if the answerer is right, pointing at a non-mainstream theory (braneworld).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36146" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T11:11:16.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-28T11:30:12.697" Score="21" ViewCount="802" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know, I know, it's yet another Meta post about our homework policy. Feel free to downvote and write abusive comments if you're heartily sick of posts about the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still with me: the &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; classification for closing questions has never literally meant that your teacher or professor set the question as part of your homework. It's meant to cover basically simple questions where the OP can't be bothered to go off and do some work for themselves. But as you progress and questions get harder it's increasingly hard to Google useful stuff, and I think there comes a point where a question shouldn't be treated as homework even if it was actually set by your professor. I'm thinking of the sort of questions you'd find in a graduate level book. These, or at least the better examples of the breed, are intended to enhance your understanding of the subject and this is surely what we should be trying to do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my proposal is that if a question is graduate level or above it should never be closed as &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;. I think we should leave it up to site members to decide whether to answer. In any case only a small subset of site members can answer questions at this level, and since they are among the more experienced users we should leave the decision whether to answer to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2013-12-28T12:13:41.980" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T18:54:21.990" Title="Graduate and above level questions aren't homework" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5369" CreationDate="2013-12-28T12:19:43.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had had some talks with Dilaton on this before, never got the time to formulate a proposal. It was also brought up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; multiple times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, most high level posts that have been asked to the student by a professor are not homework by the policy. The tag/policy name &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; is a misnomer, the origin of the question has no part in the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's meant to cover basically simple questions where the OP can't be bothered to go off and do some work for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;isn't entirely correct either, mainly the &amp;quot;basically simple&amp;quot; part. Not-so-simple questions can be homeworky too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/83260/7433&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/63867/calculating-the-branching-ratio-of-higgs-for-decay-to-two-photons&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69636/the-metric-tensor-inside-a-massive-shell&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87974/in-the-static-spacetime-the-extrinsic-curvature-of-hypersurface-t-constant-is&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, these are the minority. But I have seen a lot of questions that ask for a proof to be filled in or effectively need help with the mathematics of the question. Most haven't been closed, but they are on shaky ground at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is, how many others will be helped by these posts? If you've ever compared the votes on a good high level question with the views, you'll notice that the views far outnumber the votes. This indicates that most of the visitors were not from the site. Even if we assume that a fraction of these actually understand the post&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, the number of visitors who are helped by the post usually outnumbers the number of SE members. This is one rather important bit of the SE model; questions and answers are of the sort that should help the most people, and that means focusing on making posts useful for visitors. Most &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; posts are of the form that only the OP is benefited -- the question is localized so it won't turn up in anyone's search, and only a couple other site members will get helped by the post.This can happen with grad-level questions too -- I doubt that there will be many people stuck on the same step of a proof in a textbook. Contrast this with questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/64592/flavour-diagonal-susy-breaking&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; which probably will be searched for by others, helping them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; going by localized-ness might be a bit extreme and we would end up closing a lot of good questions if we had that strict a localized-ness requirement. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to help the OP too, and there are many good questions that would be rarely searched for but are very informative nevertheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some compromise is needed. I did have a look at many high level homework questions before, and I came to the conclusion that most did not need closing (most were not closed in the first place). Most grad students would not willingly post a low-effort question, so that eliminates one kind of HW question. As for localized HW questions -- these were still found in my searches. Not that many, but there were some that were on the borderline of closeability (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/70577/7433&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we should not be so aggressive for high level questions, but we shouldn't give them all a free pass either. The current and proposed policies both seem to be allowing most of the currently existing high level questions that are tagged homework, so I doubt this is a problem we need to worry about. If someone can find enough examples of high level posts that were closed as homework, then we might need to investigate further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm talking about the &lt;em&gt;policy&lt;/em&gt; in this post. The tag is applied haphazardly — it always has been. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5184/7433&quot;&gt;seems to be about the type of question&lt;/a&gt; (it was in the past policy too), but it seemingly implies something about the origin, so this haphazardness is understandable as each person tags with their own interpretation. We probably should get more objective guidelines for the tag and figure out a way to make the community use it consistently. But since this is a different issue and will probably cause a four-sided argument&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, it's best if we don't investigate this on this particular meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just realized this, one of the other reasons the HW policy was put up in the start was that users did not want this site to be seen as a place where you can get your homework done for you&amp;quot; (which accounts for the tag confusion as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are people still concerned about this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will allowing low effort grad level hw affect this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. It won't be a small fraction, most of the higher level questions are of the form that a novice won't accidentally turn it up via Google.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2. Some folks want the tag burninated, some want it phased out, some want it only for low level questions, some want it for all types of questions, etc, etc. Best not to muddy the waters here with this discussion&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T18:14:53.200" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5367" CreationDate="2013-12-28T17:42:08.283" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Treating Wikipedia as authoritative (i.e. &lt;em&gt;&quot;Wikipedia say X and that settles it!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) would be laughably silly, but Wikipedia is a fairly reliable source for all kinds of basic and widely available knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several uses of Wikkipedia that are (in my opinion, with my moderators hat taken off) completely appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To support a argument or derivation only sketched in the answer&lt;/strong&gt; I regularly point to Wikipedia when I'm going to skips some steps and am not sure the OP has the preparation to follow the jump unaided, thus hopefully avoid the bit where some authors (I'm looking at you, J.D. Jackson) says &lt;em&gt;&quot;it is obvious that&quot;&lt;/em&gt; just before a line that seems to have nothing in common with the proceeding argument.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To set a lower limit on the preparation expected&lt;/strong&gt; Questions that can be answered directly out of the Wikipedia page are suspect as too lazy and unresearched for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a source for basic tabulated input to work&lt;/strong&gt; For the purposes of Physics.SE, the values of, say, coefficients of linear thermal expansion listed in the Wikipedia are fine. Say where you got them and if someone whats to be &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; sure they can dig up a &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Chemistry and Physics&lt;/em&gt; themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer that exist merely to provide a redirect are always bad answers &lt;em&gt;no matter what they link to&lt;/em&gt; and will eventually be deleted or converted to a comment by moderator action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T17:42:08.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-28T18:23:36.467" Score="8" ViewCount="658" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by Colin McFauls very reasonable &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5172/2751&quot;&gt;classification&lt;/a&gt; of questions tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; due to the very broad notion of the term  &quot;homework-like&quot; currently applied at  Physics SE, and  can be considered as a follow up of John Rennie's meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5369/2751&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; asking for graduate-level upward questions not getting closed as homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I basically agree  with John Rennie that gruaduate-level upward (technical) questions should not be closed as homework and want to go even farther by proposing that, refering to Colin McFauls classification, category 3 (not yet a good question but salvagable) and even more so category 4 (high-level problems) should not even be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the very broad notion of &quot;homework-like&quot; as currently applied, be narrowed down to not include technical advanced topic questions that come up from reading higher-level textbooks, following advanced courses, or even from reading research papers (graduate-level upward for short)?&#xA;And can then these advanced technical questions (not all of them at once of course) be detagged from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; (after appropriate edits if needed for category 3 questions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of advanced technical questions that should not be considered homework and therefore either directly or after an improving edit, detagged. I am not trying to sharply distinguish between category 3 and category 4 of Colin McFaul's classification at the moment, and this list is by no means comprehensive but contains just a few examples to show what I am talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/82336/2751&quot;&gt;Conserved topological charge for d=3 Yang-Mills. G=U(2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/57973/2751&quot;&gt;Correlators in String Theory (Green Schwarz Witten)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/73297/2751&quot;&gt;A question for the generalization of gauge transformation with two antisymmetric indices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76207/2751&quot;&gt;Simple argument for unexpected behavior in SUSY model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69163/2751&quot;&gt;Einstein action as a functional of the tetrad (first order formulation of gravity)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/75896/2751&quot;&gt;Twist of null Killing fields&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/89489/2751&quot;&gt;Causality for the Dirac Field&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/80556/2751&quot;&gt;Deriving Virasoro algebra question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/46703/2751&quot;&gt;few fermions in a harmonic trap — position density matrix from diagrammatics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/57253/2751&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Redshifting&amp;quot; of forces in stationary spacetime&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T18:49:17.807" Title="Can we please stop applying the homework tag (and policy) to very advanced questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|tags|policy|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5372" CreationDate="2013-12-28T18:41:26.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we need to eventually have a critical look at what we really mean by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag; as I mentioned in an answer to John's post, the tag means different things to different people and it's being used to mean all kinds of things. So much that I've stopped applying the tag (I still close posts as homework, though) in entirety because I'd rather not add to the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific question, I agree, almost(?) all of the high level questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; really don't need the tag. They are obviously not closeable, and they don't look like questions that people would want to filter out. Many of them are a bit localized, but they still have a lot of worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this just makes me wonder why we have the tag in the first place. It's displaying the same issues as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt;, namely lack of consistency, and they are more pronounced because the tag is one of the largest on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we could rename it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt; or some such? Or just remove it entirely. Questions are getting closed reasonably quickly now, without too much mod intervention. We might be close to a point where the tag can be quietly phased out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T18:41:26.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5369" CreationDate="2013-12-28T18:45:24.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with this. Graduate-level questions are &lt;em&gt;rarely&lt;/em&gt; homework-like, true, but not &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason we close questions as homework-like is to make it clear that we will not help students cheat at this site. When I say &quot;cheat&quot; here, I don't mean only violation of explicit policies on seeking outside help set by an instructor. For purposes of this answer (and the homework policy in general), I take &quot;cheating&quot; to be anything that completely or almost completely negates the educational value of the problem. &lt;strong&gt;The homework-like close reason is for questions where, if we provide the OP with the information they request, we would be negating the intended educational value of the problem for them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our (well, my) de facto rule for closing questions as homework-like is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the problem is &quot;artificially&quot; constructed in a way that suggests its intended value is learning the method rather than getting the answer, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the OP asks for the answer or to be shown the method in full detail, or fails to demonstrate a willingness to put some effort into the problem themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These criteria are an empirical way of identifying questions where the OP is trying to cheat. The criteria are not necessarily perfect, of course, so there is some room to apply common sense. The ultimate goal is to close exactly those questions which satisfy the bolded statement in the previous paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as to what this has to do with your proposal: graduate-level questions can still have educational value. And therefore, it is still possible for posters to try to bypass the educational value of such questions by asking for the answer outright, or just posting the question and saying &quot;I don't know what to do,&quot; or so on. It happens rarely, and certainly when evaluating a question for closing, if the question is at a high level, I do think about it a lot more carefully before voting to close as homework-like (and I would certainly encourage others to do the same). But it has happened in the past, and it can happen again in the future. And that's why I don't think it's a good idea to make an absolute rule that graduate-level questions can &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be closed as homework-like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T18:45:24.713" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-28T18:45:27.523" Score="6" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t we just ban homework altogether?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;Banning homework: vote and documentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're having some more recent discussions on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. A month ago, there was a flurry of activity involving a tightening up of the policy. Unfortunately, I was really busy after that and later on was out of town.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that there are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5369/graduate-and-above-level-questions-arent-homework&quot;&gt;residual issues about high-level homework&lt;/a&gt; (something that I'd been planning to address but didn't have the time). I'm pretty sure we can sort these out in parallel or even after installing the new policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the current status of the policy? Should we be pushing forward with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T04:55:18.917" Title="What's the current status of the homework policy?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5375" CreationDate="2013-12-28T18:57:04.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Officially nothing has changed about the policy yet, i.e. the old one is still in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unofficially, my impression is that we are converging on a change in which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Homework questions&quot; per se would no longer be allowed on the site, as suggested in the questions you linked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; would be changed to describe how people can modify their homework questions to conceptual questions to make them acceptable here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be entirely removed as part of this. We haven't yet fully discussed that, I believe. (I would like to see this happen.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should definitely push forward with this; there is no particular rush, but we are getting close enough that it would be a shame not to see this through to the end. We need to decide what to do about the tag, and I don't know if there are any other unresolved issues to handle before we put these changes in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T18:57:04.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-29T05:22:11.333" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27129/papers-and-preprints-worth-reading-jan-midfeb-2012&quot;&gt;Papers and preprints worth reading, Jan-midFeb 2012&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; question imported from the now-defunct Theoretical Physics site. I don't think it is constructive or that it should be reopened, and it is far from being in line with the current books policy. However, I'm quite curious as to whether it's part of a series and what the motivation for it, and discussions about it, were. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question cites a meta.TP thread &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/234/journal-club-like-thing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Journal club-like thing&quot;&lt;/a&gt; but the link is dead. Is it still possible to access that page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T05:22:11.333" Title="Is this meta.TP post still extant?" Tags="|discussion|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-29T05:51:32.747" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received a notification for a comment made by Emilio Pisanty on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2687/modern-references-for-continuum-mechanics/2762?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;question &lt;/a&gt; asking for an update of my answer in order to comply with the current policy on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;resource recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can verify, I wasn't the only one who received the same comment. I was wondering if it is wise to try to enforce a current policy on very old contributions. I feel it is too much to ask for a huge amount of users. Maybe this is our online version of retroactivity in law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T06:01:43.870" Title="Enforcing new policies to old questions/answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5378" CreationDate="2013-12-29T06:01:43.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book policy is only retroactive in a fashion. Answers which do not follow the current policy are deleted and replaced with a community wiki list having the same contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to comment on every answer and ask for it to be fixed -- if you want you can do that, of course, and if the answer is deleted before you get a chance to fix it you can post a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have yet to go through all the old questions and new-ify them, I have only done this for a couple of posts so far. I'll get to it this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Emilio to be clear, there is no need to comment but the rest of what you did on the post seems about right, carry on :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T06:01:43.870" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5375" CreationDate="2013-12-29T12:50:34.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about we simply say that for a trial period (a month?) the moderators don't close any homework questions, and we close them only due to 5 VTCs from site members. That's a small change since I don't think the mods close many homework questions anyway. Mods should still close for other reasons, and of course can VTC just like everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision about what should and shouldn't be on the site is then just down to the site members. I don't want to tell site members what to do and I can't anyway, so everyone should VTC as they see fit, though I reserve the write to post pleas for mercy if I think a question has been closed unnecessarily :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not fussed about the homework tag, though I won't be using it myself. If enough of us VTC quickly the homework tag should become unnecessary anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If after a month we're all happy with the way things are going we could start updating the text in the VTC dialog and the guidelines. Only at that point do we have to agree on exactly what we're going to say is acceptable or unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T12:50:34.557" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5375" CreationDate="2014-01-01T04:50:11.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my point of view, I would like to make a new proposal for the wording of the new policy, which would reflect the consensus described in David Z's answer (i.e. it would be at heart a &quot;no homework&quot; policy rather than a &quot;some homework&quot; one) while also addressing the issue of high-level homework questions in a way that I think most people would find acceptable. (With the right definition of homework many of these will be excluded, and the rest can easily be converted into non-homework questions.) This is dependent on me finding time to write it though, which I haven't had much luck with the last few weeks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course if someone else wants to do that then great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2014-01-01T04:55:18.917" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T04:55:18.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-03T02:40:43.237" Score="3" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;So &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5261/help-theres-a-giant-ugly-thing-on-top-of-the-page&quot;&gt;many of us agree&lt;/a&gt; that the new not-black topbar looks awful on Physics.SE. One solution to this would be to change the top-bar to reduce the discord, as has been done on &lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;scifi.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://askubuntu.com&quot;&gt;askubuntu.com&lt;/a&gt; (and possibly other sites). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, another possibility would be to rethink the design of Physics.SE itself. Personally, I find the current design a little uninspiring anyway, and since many of the other Stack Exchange sites have really excellent designs I was wondering if it might be time to give ours another look. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a design expert, but I've never been a fan of the colour scheme, which somehow seems to say &quot;company that makes elastic bands or something&quot; rather than &quot;community of academic experts and enthusiasts&quot;. Since one of the main problems with the top bar is the clash between the Stack Exchange logo and the main colours of our site, perhaps this would be a good time to think about changing our colour scheme. If we could also have a more modern-looking design with some (off-)black elements rather than just light blues and greens then the top bar might not look out of place at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how likely this is to happen, but I thought it might be worth putting the idea out there to see if it gets any reaction from Stack Exchange and/or the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really wouldn't require a big change. The following is not a serious suggestion (as I said I'm no designer) but here is the result of spending a couple of minutes applying colour curves in GIMP, to reduce the amount of green and red in the colour scheme, while leaving the top bar untouched:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S3L4X.png&quot; alt=&quot;modified screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see the colour clash against the Stack Exchange logo is greatly reduced, and the overall darker colour scheme lessens the impact of the bar itself. A proper designer could do a much better job, but the point is that a few gentle tweaks could make it look a lot less bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T18:18:28.987" Title="Is our site due for a redesign?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5369" CreationDate="2014-01-03T18:54:21.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree with this.  It's just as lazy and stupid to repost a problem from Jackson, Wald, Peskin &amp;amp; Schroder and the like as it is to repost your introductory high school level question.  And when I see a question that I recognize, or a question that is of the same lazy sort of caliber without the effort to show why it is interesting or relevant, I at least tag as homework, and usually vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T18:54:21.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5372" CreationDate="2014-01-04T02:18:07.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; tag should be renamed to &lt;code&gt;exercise&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;questions should be evaluated on the basis of whether they are likely to be useful for further visitors who are genuinely interested in the subject or not&lt;/strong&gt;. Of course, posting an actual homework without any effort is unethical and should be prohibited by policy, but we(you) don't need to be that harsh in enforcing that. Who cares? Those fools find their way to cheat anyway. Also, if there was no &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; tag I would expect &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; actual homework questions posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the site would be better this way, but the community shall decide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31422" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T02:18:07.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-04T07:50:58.700" Score="17" ViewCount="1226" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have several questions asking for recommendations of books for beginner-level quantum mechanics. Many of them are closed as duplicates of this one: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33215/what-is-a-good-introductory-book-on-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;What is a good introductory book on quantum mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;. It is our canonical such question and it just earned its asker a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/37/famous-question?userid=10970&quot;&gt;Famous Question badge&lt;/a&gt;, so it's been seen 10k times over a year and a half and will continue to accumulate them. It is also in line with our new resource recommendation policy. However, it is still closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Should it be reopened?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already voted to reopen at some point, so I can't put it into the queue. How about we show this question some community love?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T12:00:01.053" Title="The intro-to-QM books question: reopen?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|resource-recommendation|reopen|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5387" CreationDate="2014-01-04T19:27:53.183" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I think that makes sense. The question in its current form seems like just the kind of thing the new recommendation policy is designed to encourage, and we should definitely have one open question about intro QM books. (Of course we also have to make sure the answers are in shape, but that can happen whenever.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is an active meta discussion I won't unilaterally reopen it just yet. I think the community can take care of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T19:27:53.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5384" CreationDate="2014-01-07T15:58:21.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please can we not change it. It works perfectly fine and looks nice to me. That's my vote. Cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23635" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T15:58:21.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5392" CreationDate="2014-01-08T11:13:42.110" Score="5" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was recently bumped to the top of the front page by a new answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13020/books-that-every-layman-should-read/&quot;&gt;Books that every layman should read&lt;/a&gt;. I originally wanted to just recommend the new answer be deleted, but the question is so bad that I think it should be closed as primarily opinion-based, and then put under a historical lock. Or something to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is an everyone-add-your-favourite-book question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/98366/184688&quot;&gt;everything a bad list question is&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its answers provide no commentary or detail about the books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its sister question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/884/books-that-every-physicist-should-read&quot;&gt;Books that every physicist should read&lt;/a&gt;, already has a well-earned historical lock on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people's views on this one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T17:19:23.257" Title="The Layman books question" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5391" CreationDate="2014-01-08T12:09:11.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote the historical lock. I don't think the question has any real value, but some future non-physicist people might find it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; (sorry for delay, had things to do)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAICR, the new resource recommendation policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;clearly states&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendations must ask for descriptive answers. It's not enough to ask for a list of books that cover topic X-- a simple Amazon search can provide that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you should ask for recommendations, which specify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the book covers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How it covers it — is it rigorous? Intuitive? How is the writer's style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the prerequisites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post being discussed &lt;strong&gt;does not request any of these topics&lt;/strong&gt;, it simply asks for &lt;strong&gt;a list of books&lt;/strong&gt;. The vast majority of the answers to the question also appear to fail the recommended answering policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the answer should be substantive, and give as much information about the book as possible. Try to explain the style of the author, as well as listing the topics it covers well and the topics which it isn't so thorough with. Try to list the prerequisites too&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anupam and Satwick's answers at least mention topics covered, but don't really  hit the other points (where the book isn't thorough or the prerequisites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that it does not really fit the model of the Stack Exchange network (which has a general ban on list questions anyway) and that it does not even fit our book policy, the only two options I see are (a) complete deletion and (b) historical lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that (a) should be considered just because there is the possibility that &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; could find some of the books are useful. Thus, the only good option is the historical lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T17:19:23.257" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5391" CreationDate="2014-01-08T16:26:56.483" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see absolutely no point in people going after old open book questions, as we have now the new books policy. Instead, open old books questions should be flagged for moderators to put in Shog9 s banner, and closed old book questions should be flagged to put in the banner too and reopend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with the question in this meta question, even on MathOverflow and TP.SE which have / had much higher standards than a for all levels sites such as Physics, such resource questions are / have been highly tollerated depending on the exact issue at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T16:26:56.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-08T19:22:02.227" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;OS - Windows 7&#xA;Browser - Firefox v26.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the past few days I have been unable to log into physics.stackexchange.com using OpenID. The error I get is below. Strangely, I can log in by browsing to the root site stackexchange.com and using OpenID. Then I can go to physics.stackexchange.com and get logged in automatically because I was already logged into the root site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unable to log in with your OpenID provider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The openid.return_to parameter&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/authenticate/?s=c15344d4-17e8-49a4-a903-a295ec4a5128&amp;amp;dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/authenticate/?s=c15344d4-17e8-49a4-a903-a295ec4a5128&amp;amp;dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;  does not match the actual URL&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/authenticate/?s=c15344d4-17e8-49a4-a903-a295ec4a5128&amp;amp;dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.claimed_id=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.identity=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.sig=C1VsVB5URdaZprZo0tRqzDwgmFSwk8kVDxM7mAW8lEw%3D&amp;amp;openid.signed=claimed_id%2Cidentity%2Cassoc_handle%2Cop_endpoint%2Creturn_to%2Cresponse_nonce%2Cns.alias3%2Calias3.mode%2Calias3.type.alias1%2Calias3.value.alias1%2Calias3.type.alias2%2Calias3.value.alias2&amp;amp;openid.assoc_handle=1Ltb%21IAAAALcYO9mOn_QMDQzJxGqxsg6Af5QghCn_8YIfu4gxKkOZQQAAAAGFmCfvbxvG3B3afcDveMh7dJMqemvMnVxTW1EOwFaj1sT3wDW7Pi3jk0LZzSM3rNRvArAyenOrXkCm8fgPNk76&amp;amp;openid.op_endpoint=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fopenid%2Fprovider&amp;amp;openid.return_to=http%3A%2F%2Fphysics.stackexchange.com%2Fusers%2Fauthenticate%2F%3Fs%3Dc15344d4-17e8-49a4-a903-a295ec4a5128%26dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fopenid.stackexchange.com%252Fuser%252F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.response_nonce=2014-01-08T19%3A15%3A35ZnevwToP9&amp;amp;openid.mode=id_res&amp;amp;openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&amp;amp;openid.ns.alias3=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&amp;amp;openid.alias3.mode=fetch_response&amp;amp;openid.alias3.type.alias1=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&amp;amp;openid.alias3.value.alias1=gilg%40stanford.edu&amp;amp;openid.alias3.type.alias2=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2FnamePerson&amp;amp;openid.alias3.value.alias2=Isopycnal%20Oscillation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/authenticate/?s=c15344d4-17e8-49a4-a903-a295ec4a5128&amp;amp;dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.claimed_id=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.identity=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fuser%2F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.sig=C1VsVB5URdaZprZo0tRqzDwgmFSwk8kVDxM7mAW8lEw%3D&amp;amp;openid.signed=claimed_id%2Cidentity%2Cassoc_handle%2Cop_endpoint%2Creturn_to%2Cresponse_nonce%2Cns.alias3%2Calias3.mode%2Calias3.type.alias1%2Calias3.value.alias1%2Calias3.type.alias2%2Calias3.value.alias2&amp;amp;openid.assoc_handle=1Ltb%21IAAAALcYO9mOn_QMDQzJxGqxsg6Af5QghCn_8YIfu4gxKkOZQQAAAAGFmCfvbxvG3B3afcDveMh7dJMqemvMnVxTW1EOwFaj1sT3wDW7Pi3jk0LZzSM3rNRvArAyenOrXkCm8fgPNk76&amp;amp;openid.op_endpoint=https%3A%2F%2Fopenid.stackexchange.com%2Fopenid%2Fprovider&amp;amp;openid.return_to=http%3A%2F%2Fphysics.stackexchange.com%2Fusers%2Fauthenticate%2F%3Fs%3Dc15344d4-17e8-49a4-a903-a295ec4a5128%26dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fopenid.stackexchange.com%252Fuser%252F6605b47a-8e5f-40af-8d04-e838c8675845&amp;amp;openid.response_nonce=2014-01-08T19%3A15%3A35ZnevwToP9&amp;amp;openid.mode=id_res&amp;amp;openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&amp;amp;openid.ns.alias3=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&amp;amp;openid.alias3.mode=fetch_response&amp;amp;openid.alias3.type.alias1=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&amp;amp;openid.alias3.value.alias1=gilg%40stanford.edu&amp;amp;openid.alias3.type.alias2=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2FnamePerson&amp;amp;openid.alias3.value.alias2=Isopycnal%20Oscillation&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;  the request was made with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22302" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-01-12T16:54:33.340" Title="Persistent error logging into physics.stackexchange.com with OpenID (Unable to log in with your OpenID provider)" Tags="|support|login|openid|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5397" CreationDate="2014-01-09T10:29:49.003" Score="11" ViewCount="3186" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using an equation in an question or an answer, it is sometimes useful to give it a number and refer to it in the text. The &lt;code&gt;\tag&lt;/code&gt; command works : if you add &lt;code&gt;\tag{1}&lt;/code&gt; in the equation environment, a nice &quot;(1)&quot; shows up on the right hand side of the equation. But how can one refer to it in the text in another way than typing &lt;code&gt;(1)&lt;/code&gt; ? I have tried to use &lt;code&gt;\eqref{1}&lt;/code&gt; but this only shows &quot;(???)&quot;. Using the command &lt;code&gt;\label{1}&lt;/code&gt; in the equation solves the &lt;code&gt;\eqref&lt;/code&gt; issue, but the equation is not displayed correctly anymore, only the LaTeX code appears in the preview window. Is there a way to have &lt;code&gt;\eqref&lt;/code&gt; work and &lt;code&gt;\label&lt;/code&gt; as well ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35964" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2014-01-09T11:23:12.757" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T22:09:54.743" Title="Using labels with mathJax?" Tags="|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5396" CreationDate="2014-01-09T22:09:54.743" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;code&gt;\tag&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\label&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;\eqref&lt;/code&gt; all play different roles in the process, and you would need to use all three to accomplish your goal.  The &lt;code&gt;\tag{x}&lt;/code&gt; macro adds an equation number that appears at the right of the equation; it does not create any symbolic name for use with &lt;code&gt;\eqref&lt;/code&gt;.  That is done through &lt;code&gt;\label{y}&lt;/code&gt; which assigns the name &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt; to the tag that is used in the equation where &lt;code&gt;\label{y}&lt;/code&gt; appears.  Note that &lt;code&gt;\label{y}&lt;/code&gt; does not create an equation number, and so if you use &lt;code&gt;\label&lt;/code&gt; without a &lt;code&gt;\tag&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;\eqref&lt;/code&gt; will have no number to refer to, and you get the &lt;code&gt;(???)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that you are having trouble with labels in question and answer previews is that the preview code reprocesses all the math every time that you type a new character.  That means that the &lt;code&gt;\label&lt;/code&gt; commands are processed over and over again.  Since a label name can only be used once, when a label is processed a second time, MathJax throws an error (which is trapped and shown as the TeX code in a box).  If you finish answer and post it, it would work properly, since when the page is shown, each label is only used once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the StackExchange sites don't use automatic equation numbering, you have to give an explicit &lt;code&gt;\tag&lt;/code&gt;, so there is really no need to use &lt;code&gt;\label&lt;/code&gt; (unless you plan to change the tags after the fact), because you know what the equation tag is already.  So you might as well use the explicit references by typing &lt;code&gt;(1)&lt;/code&gt; as you suggest above.  If you want a link to the equation (the other thing that &lt;code&gt;\eqref&lt;/code&gt; provides), then you can make one explicitly.  For example, if you use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$E=mc^2\tag{1}$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you can use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[(1)](url-to-this-question#mjx-eq-1)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to link to the tagged equation (where &lt;code&gt;url-to-this-question&lt;/code&gt; is replaced by the URL to the current question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7901" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T22:09:54.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2014-01-11T18:33:45.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you observe the top/highest voted questions &#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon&quot;&gt;Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8227/a-mirror-flips-left-and-right-but-not-up-and-down&quot;&gt;A mirror flips left and right, but not up and down&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87107/why-dont-metals-bond-when-touched-together&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t metals bond when touched together?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it is safe to presume that these questions are not those which would be poupular just amongst layman but also among physicists. But at the same time we can say that experts would already be knowing such things. As the site deals with existing physics and related questions, i believe that the experts have a good grasp on it and have learnt most stuff. At the same time when beginners ask questions which experts woupd already be knowing they get high votes and hence have these sair badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T18:33:45.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5401" CreationDate="2014-01-13T09:39:06.090" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I accidentally created the tag &quot;angu&quot; on the main site. I tried looking for a delete button a little bit but I didn't find it. How do I delete it? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21904" LastEditorUserId="21904" LastEditDate="2014-01-13T09:46:45.260" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T12:05:18.423" Title="How do you delete a tag?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5400" CreationDate="2014-01-13T12:05:18.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags that don't have questions get automatically deleted within 24 hours. Simply remove the tag from the question and wait for a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T12:05:18.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-13T19:20:04.573" Score="8" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously the question concerning edits of 6 characters was asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4478/editing-tags-not-allowed-because-not-6-characters&quot;&gt;Editing tags not allowed because not 6 characters?&lt;/a&gt;, however the answers provided were not satisfactory for the question. It is often the case that a single sign needs to be changed or a trivial typo disrupts the flow. In addition some edits are made in series as the question/answer are read over. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically I am writing to make a change to the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17944/how-does-the-higgs-mechanism-work/17964#17964&quot;&gt;How does the Higgs mechanism work?&lt;/a&gt;. My concern is an edit of lambda squared to lambda in the Lagrangian under the header putting it all together. This matches the quartic interaction as typically written and correspondingly as the potential as defined above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34564" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T19:20:04.573" Title="Edits must be 6 characters long" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T02:33:23.780" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to add a tikz diagram to one of my questions, but the website doesn't seem to compile. Some help please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28355" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T08:05:00.603" Title="Tikz in the question" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5403" CreationDate="2014-01-14T08:05:00.603" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathjax doesn't support TikZ, and it would be a very heavy script even if it did. Remember that mathjax is compiled on the client side so putting heavy code in it will just end up in making your answer take a lot of time to load.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, make the diagram in LaTeX (&lt;code&gt;\documentclass[standalone]&lt;/code&gt; is good for this), and upload the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T08:05:00.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5412" CreationDate="2014-01-14T10:46:35.437" Score="4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;For every question, there is a number of views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean ? How many times a question has been viewed/opened ? How many times it has been opened by a unique member of community ? Or something else ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it determined ? Is a log of IP addresses visiting the question kept ? If it is, who all can access it ? If not, then how is it determined ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How is no of views determined?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5408" CreationDate="2014-01-14T18:09:29.093" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add something like F&lt;sub&gt;A&lt;/sub&gt; (the force at point A.), I've been doing it this way:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;$F$&amp;lt;sub&gt;$A$&amp;lt;/sub&gt; but inside an equation starting with 2 dollar signs(I want it to be written on a separate line Like:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;$$F&amp;amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;A&amp;amp;lt;/sub&amp;gt;$$  this is causing some troubles, and it seems that it couldn't be done this way, so how can I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25814" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T18:19:57.507" Title="How to add a subscript character inside an equation" Tags="|support|markdown|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5406" CreationDate="2014-01-14T18:19:27.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tool we use for math rendering is called MathJax. It provides a close simulation of LaTeX math-mode. The subscript operator is &lt;code&gt;_&lt;/code&gt;, so you write &lt;code&gt;F_A&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T18:19:27.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5406" CreationDate="2014-01-14T18:19:57.507" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Underscore.  &lt;code&gt;F_A&lt;/code&gt; in TeX is $F_A$.  For longer strings use &lt;code&gt;{}&lt;/code&gt; groups like &lt;code&gt;F_{10}&lt;/code&gt;: $F_{10}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T18:19:57.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-15T08:27:27.297" Score="13" ViewCount="594" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/93707/26076&quot;&gt;Is it physically possible to convert matter into the electromagnetic spectrum(specifically x-rays)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I put in the title is in part rhetorical, for I am sure that there are many users on this site who would agree with its sentiment, a conclusion I reach from seeing the great deal of loving work many users put into their answers, particularly to answers that are patently almost ridiculously well within the writer's level of competence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if people agree that the answer to my question is &quot;yes&quot;, then why do people vote to close questions like the one I cited? Is there something in this site's policies that I am overlooking? It's not simply about this question: I cite it only as an example. Let me list what it is about this question that is important for this post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It bespeaks a reasonably intelligent user with a smattering of knowledge about physical science and who is speculating with this knowledge to reach conclusions that are clearly wrong and patently so to someone with a physics background;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A google or Wikipedia search would not readily show why these conclusions are wrong - at least from the standpoint of &lt;em&gt;a reasonably intelligent person without a physics background&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My cited question is clearly not someone seeking to publish their pet, peer-review-less theory on this site. There are two very fundamental reasons why the answer to the question is no: firstly that (1) we have no way of encoding the complex quantum state of something like a cell or a brain in the interactions between photons, aside from by turning the quantum state into a colossal document and sending it by digital communications and secondly that (2) &quot;quantum teleportation&quot;, as I understand it, so far has the highly specific meaning of quantum state transmission from one system to another of the same kind: e.g. atom states are &quot;teleported&quot; to states of the same kind of atoms through entanglement combined with classical information transmission. So there are two key pieces of knowledge here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An understanding of the idea of &lt;em&gt;state&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A rough knowledge of the kinds of quantum teleportation that are actively researched.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point here is that it is hard for someone not of a physics background to latch onto these two concepts as search terms for google and Wikipedia. If one looks at the quantum teleportation wiki without a good understanding of QM, I can well imagine that once could read this article and not see any obvious reason why Star Trek teleportation won't work, at least as far as we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given my title of this question, what is wrong with dispelling someone's ignorance and giving them a few pointers to their future research? Some will find such questions irritating, but surely the dispelling of ignorance that a good answer to this question is a &lt;em&gt;win for science&lt;/em&gt;. I despair these days at the lack of scientific literacy throughout society, and this lack is positively dangerous when it underpins appallingly ill informed policy decisions of powerful entities like governments and influential corporations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I'll stop banging on: I guess a reader can guess that I'm pretty passionate about &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; closing this question and shall keep applying the principles stated in my future reviews. I'll sign of with an exhortation: if a question is not showing obvious laziness, &lt;em&gt;please try (1) to imagine things from the standpoint of someone not as skilled as you in physics and ask yourself the question (2) is an well placed answer a chance to dispel ignorance and further the scientific literacy in our world?&lt;/em&gt; before voting to close and repeat my question: what are the main reasons why people do vote to close these questions and how can we better apply the principles of spreading our knowledge around if people agree that such an endeavour is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T11:00:52.433" Title="Is it part of this site's charter to dispel ignorance and raise awareness of science?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5409" CreationDate="2014-01-15T14:42:34.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;this particular case&lt;/strong&gt;, I think the only thing that was done wrong was not linking the OP to the multiple questions about quantum teleportation and instead voting to close it as off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/could-teleportation-ever-really-happen&quot;&gt;Could teleportation ever really happen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39363/using-quantum-teleportation-in-a-way-to-have-the-effect-of-matter-teleportation&quot;&gt;Using quantum teleportation in a way to have the effect of matter teleportation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/77760/quantum-teleportation-the-alternative-to-destroying-atoms&quot;&gt;Quantum teleportation - the alternative to destroying atoms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14276/why-cant-quantum-teleportation-be-used-to-transport-information&quot;&gt;Why can't quantum teleportation be used to transport information&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=teleportation&quot;&gt;And so on&lt;/a&gt;. Surely these would have dispelled the ignorance and raised awareness of science to the OP and the future readers, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T14:42:34.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5409" CreationDate="2014-01-15T15:48:07.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it part of this site's charter to dispel ignorance and raise awareness of science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is part of this site's charter (not that we officially have a charter) is to provide a platform for people to ask expert-level physics questions and provide high-quality answers to those questions. If, in the process of doing that, we happen to dispel ignorance and raise awareness of science, then sure, that's a nice side effect. But it's not our primary mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, we generally expect askers to have enough of a background in physics that they can ask questions in a way which is meaningful to experts, and understand the answers. While the asker of the question about converting matter into EM waves or whatever may be intelligent, they clearly don't have the level of familiarity with physics that is required to ask about this topic and understand the answers they'd be likely to get. As a consequence, the question is highly unlikely to be useful to future visitors (I'm talking about people with some physics knowledge), which makes it not a good fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of other physics Q&amp;amp;A sites, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt;, that can more readily cater to layperson questions. We distinguish ourselves by trying to operate at a slightly higher level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, note that when I say &quot;expert level&quot; I'm not saying one must be e.g. a grad student or above to ask a question here. As I said, it's about having an appropriate level of understanding of physics to pose a meaningful question and understand the answers. It is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to do this as a beginning student of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T15:48:07.123" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5405" CreationDate="2014-01-15T16:22:08.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, the number of views is determined by the IP addresses of individual users, who had viewed the question in the past. It's just a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/188348/205334&quot;&gt;timed counter to measure roughly &quot;how popular the question is&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean by &quot;timed intervals&quot; is that, say you view a question today. And, (let's say) after a week or so, you view it again. Refresh the page, and you'll find out that the views have increased by one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While mods don't have any privy information regarding the views, it's really obvious that the site-developers can view almost anything. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/66/sklivvz&quot;&gt;Sklivvz&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2911/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog&lt;/a&gt; are examples, as they visit us often (:P).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T16:22:08.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5409" CreationDate="2014-01-16T11:00:52.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that the site has or needs a &lt;em&gt;charter&lt;/em&gt;, but the site content is what we the site users choose it to be. I suppose SE would have the sanction of closing the site if they wanted, but aside from such nuclear sanctions we decide what goes hereabouts (anyone who disagrees should hurry up and get enough rep to vote me down :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view is that education, encouragement and indeed making Physics exciting is an important part of this site - I wish a site like this had been available to me when I was a spotty youth back in the seventies! All we had was Horizon and the occasional James Burke documentary. If I spot a question that looks like one I might have asked as a 14 year old I will look hard to see if it can be answered usefully, even if it's a naive question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do sympathise with David's position when he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, we generally expect askers to have enough of a background in physics that they can ask questions in a way which is meaningful to experts, and understand the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are plenty of other physics Q&amp;amp;A sites, like Physics Forums, that can more readily cater to layperson questions. We distinguish ourselves by trying to operate at a slightly higher level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a blog site - it's a question and answer site. If a question is so poorly phrased that it needs an expository essay to answer it then that isn't a question we should be addressing here. Furthermore I will only answer a naive question if I can do so in a way that is rigorous and not misleading. We do no-one any favours by (to take a silly example) claiming that General Relativity &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/b8566ba5a110&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;can be explained with a rubber sheet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure it's fair to single out questions, but the question that sparked this discussion basically amounts to &lt;em&gt;Can we build a Star Trek type transporter?&lt;/em&gt;. Although I couldn't bring myself to vote to close, I don't think we can usefully answer that question here. I don't see that linking to quantum teleportation addresses more than a fraction of the question. You'd need a huge answer to really do the question justice, and that's not appropriate for this site. So I don't have any problems with the question being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T11:00:52.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-16T20:18:45.220" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community♦&lt;/a&gt;'s page if says and I quote : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What algorithm is used for this &lt;strong&gt;random&lt;/strong&gt; throws of questions ? Does it bring up useful questions only ? How ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T12:43:04.220" Title="Community♦ Gifted questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|community-user|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-01-17T10:36:31.407" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.desmos.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nwLGb.png&quot; alt=&quot;A beautiful, free online graphing calculator&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20898" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T10:36:31.407" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-17T10:36:31.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-01-18T23:11:48.910" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onlinescienceolympiads.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWwNz.png&quot; alt=&quot;iphooichoo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26687" LastActivityDate="2014-01-18T23:11:48.910" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-18T23:11:48.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-20T17:38:54.267" Score="-10" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there has been a lot in the media about how to get more females into studying the sciences, especially physics and mathematics.  I have three related questions that I think may help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you a female with tertiary scientific qualifications visiting this site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you a female without any tertiary scientific qualifications visiting this site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What first gave you an interest in science?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are many males here without any qualifications and on every other science site. They all love to read and answer questions. Some are even helpful with their answers and have learnt a lot by just visiting science sites. I know females love to read and learn too so I am intersted to see how many answer yes to question 2 and what got them to first visit this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20270" OwnerDisplayName="Jitter" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-01-20T17:52:47.280" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T18:37:06.507" Title="How many females visit this site?" Tags="|discussion|statistics|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-01-20T17:58:53.597" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zotero.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LSRYV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero reference manager: free and open source&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T17:58:53.597" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-20T17:58:53.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5418" CreationDate="2014-01-20T20:03:36.530" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll get the ball rolling, here are my answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cartoons and supermarionation about space mainly and the Why is it so program. ( The host appealed to me as a child)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20270" LastEditorUserId="20270" LastEditDate="2014-01-20T20:10:04.453" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T20:10:04.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5418" CreationDate="2014-01-20T20:57:29.130" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;yes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jules Verne at age 8,  a good math teacher in highschool and a bad physics teacher so I had to think through his parroted statements.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2014-01-26T18:37:06.507" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T18:37:06.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5418" CreationDate="2014-01-21T02:01:07.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how you would believe anyone at all. This is internet dude, an environment for virtual interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I say I'm a girl? (Actually, I'm a boy). Now, do you really &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; &quot;what am I&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;believe anyone's appearance in the internet, especially when you've never seen them in your life?&lt;/a&gt; If you're an &lt;em&gt;amateur&lt;/em&gt; physicist, you'll be skeptical here. So, the questions (1) &amp;amp; (2) are unreliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastActivityDate="2014-01-21T02:01:07.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-23T06:56:56.530" Score="9" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I visit this question,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/94471/&quot;&gt;How do I explain to a six year old why people on the other side of the Earth don&amp;#39;t fall off?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, I see this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;protected by dmckee♦ 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is protected to prevent &amp;quot;thanks!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;me too!&amp;quot;, or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have currently 101 rep points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that my 100 &amp;quot;association bonus&amp;quot; points doesn't count towards this requirement. Is this the reason I can't answer? If it's the case, wouldn't be relevant to let this a little more explicit in the message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38037" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T07:43:24.403" Title="Does minimum rep to answer protected question includes association points?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5424" CreationDate="2014-01-23T07:43:24.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this the reason I can't answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it's the case, wouldn't be relevant to let this a little more explicit in the message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning behind this is that when it comes to site-specific policies, someone with 101 rep is not much more knowledgeable than someone with 1 rep. Popular questions tend to attract attention from the network, and most won't know if their answer is really appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T07:43:24.403" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5418" CreationDate="2014-01-23T14:53:12.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a pointless question that at best satisfies curiosity, but at worst results in more misguided pressure to &quot;fix&quot; things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every person is different.  Physical differences are obvious to us all.  Clearly there are substantial mental differences too, even if they are usually not as immediately obvious from casual observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should therefore not be any surprise that we can come up with various metrics to classify people into two groups, and that some occupations or disciplines are then comprised laregely of one group.  Since the male/female classification covers a number of large differences, it should be expected that there are occupations and disciplines made up largely of one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do about this?  Wrong question.  The obvious presumption is that this is a natural and expected outcome, so that there is nothing wrong.  The burden of proof is with someone claiming there is a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are all also individuals, and humans in particular have large individual variations that can often have a higher amplitude than broad catagories and trends.  For example, let's say that in 8th grade girls on average do better at subject A than boys.  This does NOT mean that any one boy will be worse at A than any one girl, only that on a broad average this will be true.  This of course should not surprise anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Male and female brains clearly have differences, and it should be expected that there will be subjects one is &lt;i&gt;generally&lt;/i&gt; more adept at than the other.  This is no different than discovering that those taller than 5&amp;frac12; feet are better at basketball than those shorter.  The only difference is that the feature likely to be the cause of this outcome is obvious from casual observation.  However, this again does not mean that any one person 5.6 feet tall will be better at basketball than one 5.4 feet tall, only that on &lt;i&gt;average&lt;/i&gt; this is &lt;i&gt;likely&lt;/i&gt; to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong here as long as we don't make the mistake of judging the capabilities of individual people based on which broad catagories they fit in.  The important thing to strive for is that all individuals have equal &lt;i&gt;opportunities&lt;/i&gt;, not equal outcomes.  Unequal outcomes should the expected cause of all of us having unequal abilities.  Therefore trying to measure outcome, as this question is doing, is pointless and will only lead to data that is easily misinterpreted.  That, in addition with the small sample size and self-selected samples makes any answer here only a anecdote at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been envolved with trying to augment science and technology education of the K-12 grade students in our town.  One of the laments I have heard, predominantly from women but not exclusively so, is that there are not enough girls going into science.  The fact that there are less women in science than men is somehow taken as evidence of a problem that needs to be fixed.  You may think this is a pointless academic argument, but it's not since real action has been taken as a result.  There are two programs I am aware of available to students in our town that aim to address this &quot;problem&quot;.  One is a &lt;i&gt;take your daughter to work&lt;/i&gt; day, and another is a private organization that sponsor a &lt;i&gt;women in science&lt;/i&gt; event for girls.  In other words, real resources are being expended.  And no, there is not a comparable &lt;i&gt;take your son to work&lt;/i&gt; day or a &lt;i&gt;men in science&lt;/i&gt; event for boys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both these programs are run by private organizations that are privately funded, so I agree they have a right to exist and carry out these programs.  However, that doesn't make them a good idea or that the overall expenditure of resources is doing some larger good.  Once again what we should all be striving for is equal opportunity for all, not trying to skew the opportunities to cause a more equal outcome simply because that is believed to be better somehow.  It is meaningless results produced by questions like this that lead to such deliberate unequal opportunities and discrimination.  Non-science like this causes real harm (I am hoping we can agree that discrimination is harm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all need to be vigilant and vocal against meaningless anecdotes leading to statistics, that masquerade as science, that effect public policy, that eventually cause real harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T14:53:12.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-24T11:29:59.927" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has a 3d grid looking like a sombrero as a logo. Does it represent some specific physical phenomenon or is it just art?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38123" OwnerDisplayName="user2979713" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2014-01-24T12:54:12.240" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T05:46:22.190" Title="Sombrero / grid logo" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-02-09T00:52:10.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5427" CreationDate="2014-01-24T11:34:16.890" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the original motivation of the author, but I reckon it could represent a wave on a membrane or the wave function of a particle for a symmetrical condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36995" OwnerDisplayName="Zado" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T11:34:16.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5427" CreationDate="2014-01-24T11:36:44.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could very well be the diagram that is always drawn for spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB)! SSB is quite an important phenomenon, and its sort of the foundation for the Higgs mechanism that got a Nobel prize this past October.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33475" OwnerDisplayName="tanzhongm" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T11:36:44.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-25T10:37:39.857" Score="15" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/94471/28097&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about explaining gravity to a 6 year old and it  made it into the &quot;Hot Network Questions&quot; list. It generated a lot of discussion and has some very good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, a moderator commented on the question, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The point of this site is not to educate people, it's to allow people to ask high quality physics questions and get high quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if the question is of &lt;strong&gt;high quality&lt;/strong&gt;. Probably not. But I've seen similar questions here before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73564/explaining-to-a-five-year-old-why-dont-bubbles-run-like-water&quot;&gt;Explaining to a five year old - why don&amp;#39;t bubbles run like water&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76650/explaining-uv-radiation-to-a-6-year-old&quot;&gt;Explaining UV radiation to a 6 year old&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/77191/explaining-newtons-laws-of-motion-to-a-6-year-old&quot;&gt;Explaining Newton&amp;#39;s Laws of motion to a 6 year old&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/how-do-you-explain-spinning-tops-to-a-nine-year-old&quot;&gt;How do you explain spinning tops to a nine year old?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question off-topic? If so, why? I'd like some constructive feedback on this - I think it will help me ask better questions in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any way I can improve the question without invalidating all the current answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T13:57:30.160" Title="Is the question 'explaining gravity to a six-year-old' off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5430" CreationDate="2014-01-25T17:32:55.203" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak for the other moderators, but my concern with this question and the other like it is that very often the answers that such questions attract are not about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case that are at least a half a dozen answers that are frankly terrible that have received lots of upvotes. &quot;Explanations&quot; in terms of other forces might shut the kid up, but they are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bad physics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and on a site about physics that makes them &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bad answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Yet, because of the popularity of the question they are voted up, which makes our community look unprofessional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brandon's this point almost from the very beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While great, this question is off topic for Physics.SE. It isn't about physics, it's about education and childhood cognition with a few physics metaphors sprinkled in. A large portion of any answer to this question could also answer &quot;How do you explain  to a 6 year old?&quot; which makes this question about education. The rest of the answer is about simple gravity / falling / symmetry metaphors which makes this question too broad. – Brandon Enright Jan 20 at 19:55 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-01-25T18:04:50.003" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T18:04:50.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5433" CreationDate="2014-01-25T16:22:05.123" Score="8" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5430/is-this-question-off-topic&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on meta.physics.stackexchange.com, and one hour later, the question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/5430/revisions&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt;, but I wasn't notified of the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other sites, I'm notified when an edit is made to any of my questions / answers. But on meta.physics.SE, I'm not. Why is this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28097" OwnerDisplayName="Amal Murali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Not notified of new edits on meta.physics.SE" Tags="|support|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5432" CreationDate="2014-01-25T19:48:01.637" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe this is a bug, but rather it is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the edit notification system is currently designed, users are not notified when a minor edit is made to one of their own posts.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134906/what-type-of-notifications-do-we-have/135411#comment378020_135411&quot;&gt;The exact criteria are&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a non-trivial edit is one which changes at least 10 characters (this is using a diff algorithm, so it's not a simple add/delete; and is naturally a little fuzzy). For the &quot;technical&quot; sites (where code highlighting is enabled) changes to code of at least 2 characters are considered non-trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this, changes to tags are considered trivial and will not generate a notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38203" OwnerDisplayName="psubsee2003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T18:39:02.270" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5435" CreationDate="2014-01-26T03:21:30.510" Score="7" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators are appointed for life as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4923/when-are-next-moderator-elections&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post.  Not having a term limit seems reasonable, but is there no way for a moderator to be recalled by the community?  No reelection and no recall authority seems rather like a dictatorship.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35024" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="How does a moderator lose his diamond?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5434" CreationDate="2014-01-26T03:27:02.717" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think a moderator is out of line use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;&quot;contact us&quot; link&lt;/a&gt; at the bottom of the page to explain your position to the team. Moderators have been removed in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/151633/2509&quot;&gt;Other moderators can ask to have a colleague removed.&lt;/a&gt; This is the officially sanctioned process for &quot;normal&quot; removal of a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beta site get &lt;em&gt;pro tem&lt;/em&gt; moderators appointed by the team rather than elected and they have to run for election to retain their position after the site launches. And permanent moderators have been known to resign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time that is it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T03:27:02.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5427" CreationDate="2014-01-26T05:46:22.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst I can almost guarantee the author of the logo did not have this in mind when creating it; a physical phenomenon that &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be described via such a potential is the Two-Level-System (TLS) defects we see in superconducting circuitry that involve Josephson junctions. In a &lt;a href=&quot;http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i7/e077002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recent paper&lt;/a&gt; we describe what occurs when an oxygen atom delocalises around an Al-Al bond axis. The potential of the rotationally symmetric case is a &quot;mexican hat&quot; - exactly like the logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T05:46:22.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5028" CreationDate="2014-01-27T23:57:59.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing that makes me very reluctant to pursue this is that people seems to have no sense for the amount of time they are asking readers (well, viewers) to invest when they link to videos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes they seem to be saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, yeah. Just watch this [47 minute] clip and I'm sure I recall it being in there somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More aware users, of course post that you can find the answer around [time hash], which is helpful, but I rarely want to follow such links anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm sure there are people who would try to take this as license to post what are in effect link-only answer. Or worse, link-only &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;. Heck, we have some of that already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T23:57:59.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-29T04:14:39.210" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mathematical modeling SE proposal (&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling&lt;/a&gt;) is closer to becoming a real site, but it needs more work. This site is for questions that are about models for real life phenomena. For instance, I was at a math talk yesterday where they described a PDE modelling bacteria with flagella, and they described how the model gave incorrect results until they ellipsoids instead of spheres and incorporated random 'tumbling'. This site is for people to ask questions about such models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any new site requires 60 followers (there are now 80+) and 40 'sample questions'. These are not meant to be answered; everyone who visits the site adds up to 5 questions (each &amp;lt;150 characters, the size of a tweet) and others vote on those they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because many of the followers (including me) are theoretical mathematicians, we have trouble writing expert-level or even graduate-level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you can think of an interesting question on mathematical models (versions of TQFT, improvements on mean field theory, Einstein's treatment of viscosity for spheres) of 150 characters or less, please follow this link, scroll to the bottom, and ask your questions: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions of overlap with other sites are discussed on this site as well. This proposal has support from mathoverflow, mathSE and scicomp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16371" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T14:22:17.623" Title="Update on mathematical modeling stackexchange-Writing interesting questions in 150 characters or less" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5438" CreationDate="2014-01-29T04:21:14.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The area 51 process doesn't require you to post a full question in 140 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just have to post a title of a question. Similar to how the title of a question on a full Stack Exchange site is limited by 140 characters, this is too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this stage of site development, the focus is on what &lt;em&gt;types&lt;/em&gt; of questions will be asked (which can be gleaned from the title), instead of the full content of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no need to ask for people to come up with short questions. Ask people to come up with good questions with titles that say something about the question. Not as hard :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck with your site proposal!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T04:21:14.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-30T13:52:30.240" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well I can read the reason why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95832/ideal-rocket-motion&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot; ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I wonder if that would be the good action for questions like these. I honestly did a lot already, however everything I always saw was just &quot;beating around the point&quot;. And I &lt;strong&gt;knew&lt;/strong&gt; I missed a simple fact from the text in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment already gave the answer (as I showed), which was simply that if the thrust to weight is constant, the accelleration is also constant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I did no realise this, and without this one can't beat the question. I started the question thus with &quot;I have no idea how to start this...&quot;, simply because I saw that in whatever I would do I would miss a value - and any extra information would determine which method to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this question could both be answered easily as well as helps understanding. I could point all things I did already, and then you would all look into a mistake in my calculations or something. But I knew that wasn't the problem (and thus a waste of everyone's time) and I knew the problem was misinterpreting the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is closing really good for actual questions about &quot;understanding information given&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T12:14:17.837" Title="Why is this question on rocket motion on hold?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5438" CreationDate="2014-01-30T14:22:17.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to bash your Area 51 proposal, and I do see that it can take up the sort of chunk of knowledge-space that applied mathematics departments take up in many universities. However, when it comes to physics, I have a hard time distinguishing &quot;a mathematical model of a physical situation&quot; from... physics, you know? I would consider questions about the maths of the models you quote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;versions of TQFT, improvements on mean field theory, Einstein's treatment of viscosity for spheres&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as legitimately parts of physics, and I would expect they would be entirely on-topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of take are you guys thinking of taking about these sort of models? What sort of questions would be off-topic here but more destined for such a site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T14:22:17.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5440" CreationDate="2014-01-31T12:14:17.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The aim of this site is to become a resource of useful information for future students of Physics or indeed anyone wanting to learn more about Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with homework questions is that they are generally only of interest to one person i.e. the person doing the homework. So this type of question doesn't contribute anything useful to the site. That's why your question got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T12:14:17.837" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5445" CreationDate="2014-02-01T06:21:49.103" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read in the help that an edit should be &lt;em&gt;to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But my question is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this the ultimate policy for the time being.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some policies which are decided on meta and aren't mentioned abstractly on help page e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.  If there are more details on the editing policy mentioned somewhere on meta please provide that link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More specifically can we change any question which is merely a resource recommendation to a conceptual question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Last but not the least if editing policy is mentioned somewhere please give me a link of that. If not then please mention it as an answer to my question..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T16:25:45.627" Title="What is the current policy of making an edit?" Tags="|support|editing|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5444" CreationDate="2014-02-01T09:14:24.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edits are meant to transform posts into better posts, but only as long as doing so does not misrepresent the intent of the person the post is credited to. In most cases, that does mean clarifying but not changing the post's meaning. Changing a resource recommendation into a conceptual question is usually an example of that: the person really wants to know about the concept, but decides to ask for resources for some reason (perhaps because they think it will make them look less lazy), and so an editor is able to make the question better by changing it to ask what the person directly wants to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes an edit can be a little more drastic. This is for when a post is inappropriate in its current form and would otherwise be closed, but it's fairly clear how to edit it in a way that makes it appropriate. Usually the editor in such a situation is experienced and knowledgeable, and the original poster is new to the site, and so may not know how to make a good edit themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, any official policies on meta are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;, so between the help center and those questions, you can get all the information you should need about policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-01T09:14:24.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-01T22:47:34.483" Score="9" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the purpose of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; tag? Every question is supposed to be about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried removing some myself but new users keep using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2014-02-03T20:32:21.957" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Burninate the &quot;physics&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-02T09:00:01.830" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re the answer review page you reach by clicking on the number in this yellow square:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSkAQ.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Review&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see a &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt; option. The only way I can make answers disappear from this page is by flagging them in some way. At the moment there are a slew of answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/94471/how-do-i-explain-to-a-6-year-old-why-people-on-the-other-side-of-the-earth-dont&quot;&gt;How do I explain to a six year old why people on the other side of the Earth don&amp;#39;t fall off?&lt;/a&gt; that I don't feel need flagging and I can't get rid of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing some obvious way to get them off this page? If not, can we have a &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt; option on this page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Can we get a 'skip flag' button in the 10k review tools?" Tags="|feature-request|review|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5446" CreationDate="2014-02-02T15:28:36.183" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is indeed some room for debate on whether all questions on this site must absolutely be about physics, or whether some non-physics astronomy questions are a good fit here. But this debate is irrelevant: questions on this site do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have to specify that they're about physics. The tag conveys no information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, it leaves the option for new users to use &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; that tag, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/95068/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Chances are, if no other tag applies, that the question is off-topic here. The existence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; tag makes that less evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Please burninate and blacklist it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T15:28:36.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2014-02-02T16:16:36.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some confusion here, so let me clear some things up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;Review queues&lt;/a&gt; are accessible &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;from 500 reputation&lt;/a&gt;. This starts with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/late-answers&quot;&gt;Late Answers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts&quot;&gt;First Posts&lt;/a&gt; review queues, gets augmented by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;Suggested Edits&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts&quot;&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/a&gt; queues at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;2,000 rep&lt;/a&gt;, and finally &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close&quot;&gt;Close Votes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen&quot;&gt;Reopen Votes&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;3,000 rep&lt;/a&gt;. It is easily accessible by a link that says &lt;code&gt;review&lt;/code&gt; on the top bar, between your gravatar and the search bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSkAQ.gif&quot; alt=&quot;review link on top bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each review queue, you are given the option to skip each question you consider using a button on the upper right corner, which is next to the other 'action buttons'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4nBxo.png&quot; alt=&quot;skip button on review queues&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;Moderator tools&lt;/a&gt; are available to users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10k reputation&lt;/a&gt; and above. These tools include lists of posts with extreme votes, comments, views and edits, in-depth views at the closure, deletion and migration processes, and a few sundries. Most importantly (for this question), it also includes a page for dealing with certain types of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NGg8a.png&quot; alt=&quot;Moderator tools flags page&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes &lt;code&gt;Not an answer&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Very low quality&lt;/code&gt; flags on answers, and certain system-generated flags. I do not know for sure whether &lt;code&gt;Spam&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Offensive, abusive, or hate speech&lt;/code&gt; flags make it to this queue; I can't recall seeing one but they appear in the flagging dialog so they must end up there as well. &lt;code&gt;Flag to close&lt;/code&gt; flags send the question straight to the Close Votes review queue, which can be seen by &gt;3k users. &lt;code&gt;Other (needs ♦ moderator attention)&lt;/code&gt; flags are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; visible by 10k users; they are confidential and can only be seen by moderators ♦ and certain members of the Stack Exchange team ♦.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=flags&quot;&gt;Flags page&lt;/a&gt; can also be accessed by clicking on the &lt;em&gt;yellow&lt;/em&gt; number that sometimes appears between your gravatar and the &lt;code&gt;review&lt;/code&gt; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSkAQ.gif&quot; alt=&quot;review link on top bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(An orange number can also appear, which links to the Suggested Edits review queue when it is not empty.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags in this page can be confirmed - you can re-flag the post, with either the same flag or a different one - or they can be deemed invalid. These are 'soft' votes: they are there to help moderators when they deal with the original flag (for more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/96475&quot;&gt;this MSO thread&lt;/a&gt;), but of course that makes them no less useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/72HaR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, and in answer to John Rennie's question: no, it is not possible at present to skip flags. I imagine this is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;, as there is no real reason to skip such flags. If you don't want to deal with them, simply don't go to that page. If you think they're invalid, mark them as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a skip button makes particular sense in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/review&quot;&gt;places with a review queue overload problem&lt;/a&gt;. Each reviewer has a finite number of votes per queue, and if a queue is overloaded it makes no sense to have reviewers spend time on posts they don't understand. Having a skip button streamlines the job by helping reviewers get to posts they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; review quicker and not forcing them to deal with posts they &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; deal with. This is mostly due to the linear, one-post-at-a-time way the review queues are presented. The flags page, on the other hand, shows all of them at once, so that flags you don't want to deal with are not in the way of fresh ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, there &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a problem with the flags review queue, and it is that it takes a long time after you've handled a flag for the annoying yellow number in the top bar to go away. I first reported this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4932/10k-tools-show-flag-counts-for-flags-i-cant-see&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and then in MSO &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196775/the-flag-counter-in-the-10k-tools-should-reflect-the-posts-i-can-actually-see&quot;&gt;back in September&lt;/a&gt; as a bug in the flags page, and then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/212375/remove-the-flag-notification-in-the-top-bar-when-i-have-done-my-job-with-it/216113#216113&quot;&gt;when the yellow number appeared in the top bar&lt;/a&gt;. If you find this notification annoying, please go and show those threads some love!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T02:51:54.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5452" CreationDate="2014-02-03T19:36:22.367" Score="4" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is just me (my browser/OS?), but many mathjax symbols (sums, integrals) are showing up off-centre vertically for me, and overlapping their limits. In general just very ugly. Since I can't find anyone else asking about this, I assume it's not global...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Firefox 26.0 on Fedora 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, integrals in this question look all wrong: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/96033/is-there-a-physically-motivated-trick-to-evaluate-this-convolution&quot;&gt;Is there a physically motivated &amp;quot;trick&amp;quot; to evaluate this convolution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone know what might be going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: this code: \rho(r,\epsilon) = \frac{3\epsilon^2}{2}\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}dz\int_0^{\infty}dRR\frac{\rho\left(\sqrt{R^2+z^2}\right)}{(R^2+(z-r)^2+\epsilon^2)^{5/2}}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;produces this result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J8IzR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice not only the ugly integrals, but also \left( and \right) seem to be poorly behaved as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T17:51:44.293" Title="Mathjax looks horrible?" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5446" CreationDate="2014-02-03T20:32:14.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; is now an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/181772/enable-the-intrinsic-sitename-tag-blacklist-on-older-sites&quot;&gt;intrinsic&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T20:32:14.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5450" CreationDate="2014-02-03T22:34:58.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is with the STIX fonts on your system.  STIX comes in several forms.  The original form was a set of 29 fonts with names like &lt;code&gt;STIXGeneral&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;STIXVariants&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;STIXSizeOneSym&lt;/code&gt;, each in its own font family.  Recently, they were repackaged into a set of 5 fonts in families &lt;code&gt;STIX&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;STIXMath&lt;/code&gt; that are designed to work with Microsoft Word.  Unfortunately, this repackaging makes them unusable by MathJax (many of the important characters are no longer accessible from within a web browser).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, MathJax will ignore the repackaged fonts and use its web fonts instead.  But it appears that Fedora installations now ship with the STIX Word fonts, but have aliased the original font names to point to the new STIX Word fonts.  This is an error, in my opinion, as they are not interchangeable.  For example, the &lt;code&gt;STIXSizeOneSym&lt;/code&gt; font had larger versions of the integrals, sums, parentheses, etc, at their usual unicode positions, but STIX Word has normal sized characters at those locations, and the larger sizes are inaccessible to the browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are seeing is the result of that font aliasing.  Your Linux is telling MathJax that it has the original STIX fonts, but really all it has is the STIX Word fonts.  MathJax goes ahead and uses the fonts that it is told are available, but the characters are not correct, so the results are not what they should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several possible solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Disable the STIX fonts on your system.  This way MathJax won't find them, and will use its web fonts as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove the alias for &lt;code&gt;STIXSizeOneSym&lt;/code&gt;, which is the font that MathJax uses to determine if the STIX fonts are available.  If that one is not found, MathJax will not use local STIX fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Install local copies of the MathJax fonts; these are used in preference to local STIX fonts.  There may be a package for MathJax fonts for your Linux already, so that would make it easy to install them.  If not, you can download them directly from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/tree/master/fonts/HTML-CSS/TeX/otf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJax GitHub repository&lt;/a&gt;.  Note that you will have to download them each individually (you may have to use the &quot;Raw&quot; button at the upper right after clicking on a font name), and install the complete set (I think there are 26).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a &quot;hidden&quot; menu that you could use to select the font to be used.  Use your browser's console window to type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MathJax.Menu.showFontMenu(true);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will add a &lt;code&gt;Font Preferences&lt;/code&gt; menu to the &lt;code&gt;Math Settings&lt;/code&gt; submenu of the MathJax contextual menu (right click on any equation to get the menu).  The font menu lets you select any of MathJax' font options.  Select &lt;code&gt;TeX (web)&lt;/code&gt;.  Note that this will cause the page to reload.  The menu will no longer be available, so if you want to change back, you will need to give the command above again.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope one of those does the trick for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7901" LastEditorUserId="7901" LastEditDate="2014-02-03T23:05:01.093" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T23:05:01.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-05T03:34:30.870" Score="8" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted an answer to the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/96074/how-do-we-know-that-heat-is-a-differential-form/96095#96095&quot;&gt;How do we know that heat is a differential form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there were a large number of comments on my answer.  I wanted to add another comment just now to ask those who had been involved in the discussion whether they thought that the answer could be improved in a particular way (by correcting a possible mathematical error) but found that all comments are gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit sad because I thought (certain parts of) the discussion in the comments was illuminating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the likely reason that the comments were deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T03:12:07.357" Title="Under what conditions are all comments on an answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-05T03:40:13.797" Score="7" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title says it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to think back to recall whether I have ever been notified when an answer to one of my questions was edited, but I can't recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T04:06:18.223" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T04:07:58.980" Title="Are users automatically notified when an answer to their question is edited?" Tags="|support|inbox|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5453" CreationDate="2014-02-05T03:49:12.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't have long discussions in the comments, instead create a room in chat. I can give you a screenshot of the comments if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, it looks like you did that. However, the comments were still there and were cleared by a moderator -- they still cause clutter and reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. If there is useful information in the comments, the best thing to do is to incorporate it into the post; comments aren't as permanent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ogvr8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; are the deleted comments, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment discussions can be deleted if they get long. We usually wait a couple of days for a discussion to settle before doing this, though there are cases when we ask an active thread to move to chat and clear it if it ignores the request. However, if you want to recover the deleted comments, I don't mind providing them in most cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T03:49:12.947" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5453" CreationDate="2014-02-05T15:51:45.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A direct answer your question would be kind of tricky because the effective &quot;algorithm&quot; used to decide whether to delete all comments on a post involves a balance between the number of comments, the relevance of the content of the comments, when they were posted, and so on, and ultimately it comes down to each individual moderator's judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself, I'm likely to delete all comments when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are a large number of them (enough that the &quot;add/show N more comments&quot; message appears)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the comment discussion is inactive (nobody has commented for a day or two)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the information in the comments is not essential to the post; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the comments are all old, like on the order of weeks or more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my attention is drawn to the post by a flag on the post or a comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general, you should act as though comments can be deleted at any time for any reason. In particular, any information in comments that is useful to readers of the parent post should be incorporated into that post or another answer. And any time you find yourself going back and forth with someone in the comments, you should move the discussion to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T15:51:45.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5454" CreationDate="2014-02-06T04:07:58.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, no notifications are generated if an answer to one of your questions is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you go to your profile and sort your questions by Activity, recent edits to answers will cause questions to rank more highly in that list (as will new answers, edits to the question itself, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T04:07:58.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5464" CreationDate="2014-02-06T19:41:08.103" Score="-7" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be better that there is only marking up for the questions asked to eliminate the probability that some people would just like to vote others down no matter what the answer? The best answers would be judged by the amount of positive votes. Would it be a good idea for the developers of this website to make a petition for all users to see how many people favour voting down or no voting down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38269" OwnerDisplayName="Heisenberg" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2014-02-10T07:45:15.260" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T08:15:32.053" Title="Why is there a down voting option on this website?" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5462" CreationDate="2014-02-06T19:57:19.183" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting down is a judgment of quality (although on meta it's more about whether people agree or disagree with you since questions can be opinions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, you vote up answers that are correct and useful. You vote down questions that are not correct or not useful. If downvotes were eliminated, then it just means the scale will shift and a score of 0 means not useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But downvoting also counter-acts incorrect upvotes. Maybe people voted up an answer or question without knowing whether it was completely accurate. There needs to be a way for those who do know to counter-act that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, things with many downvotes become grayed out or removed from view to indicate that they aren't to be trusted. Without downvotes, bad answers may stay at 0 but good ones also start out at 0 so there's no way to distinguish between bad and just not-yet-upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you have a + there has to be - for the universe to balance out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T19:57:19.183" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5462" CreationDate="2014-02-06T19:57:29.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that it &lt;em&gt;costs&lt;/em&gt; reputation points to vote down. So, users cannot just mark down everything in sight &lt;em&gt;ad infinitum&lt;/em&gt;; they'll eventually run out of karma. And as Al mentioned, the moderators can remove abusive voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the motivation behind the feature, it is so that people who have established their reputation in the community can use their judgement to suppress excessive upvotes (or just to bury plain bad content). This also prevents users who are asking bad questions or giving bad answers from gaining reputation on the site. It takes less minimum reputation to upvote a question than to downvote; so the downvotes should be coming from more experienced members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose someone asks a question like &quot;what if you shoot a bullet from a spaceship going at the speed of light?&quot; Some new members might think that's a really neat and original question, and vote it up. But more experienced members will know that this question has been asked numerous times before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11659" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T19:57:29.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-06T22:17:08.963" Score="-4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are lengthy discussions &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; allowed in comments?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2014-02-08T03:51:58.197" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T03:51:58.197" Title="Why are lengthy discussions now allowed in comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5466" CreationDate="2014-02-07T00:35:12.570" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope Manishearth won't mind if I steal his comment, but they're not. The reason it seems like they might be is that we usually don't get around to cleaning them up unless someone flags them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more precise: Stack Exchange gives us (moderators) some slightly contradictory guidance on comments. On one hand, the intent of comments on main sites is that they are supposed to be transient, and used for suggestions, corrections and clarifications, not for discussion. However, we're also advised not to indiscriminately delete comments unless they've degenerated into an argument. As you can tell, these two guidelines aren't quite compatible with each other. Different moderators and different sites have chosen different approaches to dealing with comments, within this spectrum, and our compromise here is to remove comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5453/under-what-conditions-are-all-comments-on-an-answer-deleted&quot;&gt;when their usefulness has passed and they are brought to our attention&lt;/a&gt;, but otherwise not to look too hard for comment discussions to delete. We rely on the community and the system to find the cases where comments really need to be cleaned up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T00:35:12.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-10T23:58:21.400" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Link to the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98637/learning-roadmap-for-picking-up-enough-mathematical-know-how-in-order-to-model&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98637/learning-roadmap-for-picking-up-enough-mathematical-know-how-in-order-to-model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, where &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; I go in order to have such a question answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user38621" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T08:23:21.930" Title="Why is the following question &quot;on-hold&quot; worthy, and how could I improve it?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5469" CreationDate="2014-02-11T00:32:37.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the question is exceedingly broad. We usually deal with specific, conceptual questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, we just don't do &quot;getting started&quot; questions. A subset of book recommendation questions are allowed, but they need to be reasonably specific too. (See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;meta thread on resource recommendations&lt;/a&gt; to see how to ask one of those.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm not really sure if it can be fixed while still being useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try asking around in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T08:23:21.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2014-02-11T08:20:55.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good place to document a nice SE Data Explorer query I cooked up recently. (This is not a direct answer to the question, but it does provide some useful data to inform decisions.) The query &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/revision/161237/205482/timeline-of-posts-closed-as-homework&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Timeline of posts closed as homework&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; plots the accumulation plot of questions created in the past 3 months (or some other period you specify) which were closed as Off-Topic and were tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; (or some other tag you specify). Currently the data shows a sharp increase in the rate of homework closures at about the start of term (I complained about it in chat &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13290286#13290286&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which also has a graph as of January 20).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cz8Qc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old data, though, must be taken with a grain of salt, because many of the relevant questions (and particularly the more annoying ones) are automatically deleted by the system. For more details, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that/5222#5222&quot;&gt;the post deletion documentation on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;, but in short, questions closed as Off-Topic can get deleted as soon as 9 days after their last edit if they have score ≤0 and no upvoted or accepted answers. This thinning down of the data is evident upon comparing the graph in this post with the one in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T08:20:55.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5453" CreationDate="2014-02-11T21:04:55.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same happened for another question yesterday: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98505/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98505/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the comments were deleted by @dmckee.  I am aware that the exchange was bordering the absurd, But I was interested in trying to analyze the intellectual mismatch that caused it. I would very much like to have a copy, if it is at all possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the deletion, but it would be nice to have advance warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the interesting part can be the exchange itself, rather than whatever science may be in it.  But I know this view runs contrary to local policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not only not right, it's not even wrong. – David H 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you know the story of this big truck that was carrying a hole for the foundation of a new house? There was a bump on the road and the hole fell off the truck. When he noticed he had lost the hole, the driver backed up to fetch it and reload it. But he failed to be careful and was never heard of again. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - By the way, what is the question you want to ask? There is no question in your text. – babou 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i was originally looking for logical answers to the question is space nothing. I do like your response not only not right its not even wrong though. The story of the dump truck is not logical by any stretch though. It makes since that the &quot;void&quot; that is between everything from the largest of things to the smallest of sub atomic particles is what is generally thought of when using the word &quot;space&quot;. Hence everything is in nothing and that nothing is referenced as space. Infinite and immeasurable in its greatness. It is where everything that is...is. – pjameslamar 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question appears to be entirely philosophically-based and thus doesn't belong on a physics Q&amp;amp;A site. Also, it doesn't make any sort of logical sense whatsoever to say, nothing is where everything that is exists. There is no relation without relata. – Kyle Kanos 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel that the eternal nothingness debate is some kind of philosophical juggling of language. Wouldn't the mere action of talking about nothing make it something? I think that this type of questions are above human understanding and we must remain silent. – jinawee 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Heart Sutra? Form is empty. Emptiness is form.Form itself is emptiness; emptiness itself is form. So too are feeling, cognition, formation, and consciousness...the new physics? ;-) – V. Moretti 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is, BTW, a site dedicated to Philosophy. – dmckee♦ 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Kyle categorize my question about physics any way you like but because it is about physics it is a physics question anyway you slice it. I am simply asking is space literally the void that is between all particles no matter how great or small. My children come home from school spewing information given to them as science that has no logical foundation. If the void is something then it is not space as i or any logical person sees it. Everything that exists, exists in this void we call space and this space is literally nothing. yes or no? – pjameslamar 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@jinawee talking about nothing doesn't make it something, my wife does it relentlessly...:)The argument that nothing is something is definitely beyond my understanding but the argument that nothing is nothing is quite logical. Like saying time is nothing but we reference it without thought all our lives. Time does not exist any more than and inch or a foot or a yard or meter....they are simply measurements. – pjameslamar 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@V.Moretti that makes no since. Emptiness is containing nothing and form is the shape and structure of something. Like the hole in the dump truck babou mentioned above. – pjameslamar 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@david z i had to ask the question as i did because of the rules of the site. My question is...is the area void of matter that exists between all matter space? It is a simple physics question so far void of logical answers. My physics question seems to be being classified as philosophical when its not. What i am seeing in discussion so far is a refusal to answer a simple physics question about the area between matter. A question easily understood but avoided by everyone so far. Everyone else knows good and well what it is im asking but you claim its unclear? – pjameslamar 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@ dmckee there should be one for logical answers about simple physics. – pjameslamar 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is the area void of matter that exists between all matter space? Was it so difficult to ask it this way? The answer to your question is yes, althought space in some sense will never be void, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_state. – jinawee 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My children come home from school spewing information given to them as science that has no logical foundation Or perhaps it is the case that you don't understand the logic behind the information. If this troubles you, you can always ask the teacher for guidance (or you can ask the question on the relevant website). – Kyle Kanos 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe the point of my truck story is that emptyness (nothingness if you prefer) is not something that is. But never mind. Another answer to your question may be that very simple questions may be hardest to answer, or to make sense of, or to explain. Would you accept the idea that an event can occur from within what you thought of being nothing. But then, is it nothing if it can give birth to observable events? So it may be that not a single stretch of space may be considered nothing. Maybe that means that space cannot exists without whatever fills it, whatever its name. – babou 2 days ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@jinawee thank you. It was difficult to ask because the sight will not let one ask a question it thinks has previously been asked. To your answer you answered the question yes but then muddied the water saying it will never be void. Space itself is the void and matter of any type while in space does not completely fill this vast void we call space. To say space itself is something or that space is matter would mean that space has atomic definition and two atoms can not be in the same place simultaneously. They can be adjacent to each other but not simultaneously occupy the same place. – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@kyle kanos thanks. The teacher finally just stated &quot;that's what the book says&quot; Logic too is a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration. So don't be snotty with me for asking a physics question. You are not the question police. Answer it or don't. It is a simple logical question many ask and just as many build careers on answering. You seem to be building your career on policing the question instead of answering it. The other gentlemen have answered. Do you have one? – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My answer to your post was given in my first comment: this is a (bad) philosophic statement and there is no physics question here. – Kyle Kanos yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@babou thank you.Yes an event can occur within nothing. The observable events occurring within nothing (space) is the matter in space reacting with each other. There has to be space between the matter or the matter is always touching something else. On a grand scale or a minuscule scale. Space is mechanically necessary for the formation of matter. There has to be space to form atoms and molecules or everything would be one big mass. Matter can not exist without the space around it, the areas void of matter of any kind. Space is not anything. No atoms can simultaneously occupy the same place. – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@kyle kanos again, you judged my question but never answered it. You apparently are not good at judging questions nor good at answering them. Several other gentlemen saw fit to answer the question even in its original form. You continue to argue my question is in the wrong place. I submit that if you can reason it is in the wrong place you too can then reason what i am asking. I then reason that the problem is that you just are not able to answer and thus want the question moved because you feel obliged to answer as long as it is here. Answer the question or not? – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What question is there to answer? I see seven sentences. – Kyle Kanos yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Kyle Kanos, come on Kyle. Everyone else found the question. Its at the top. Is everything in nothing? Then followed by a short statement as the site requires. Many have argued that space itself is actually something. I simply argue that is illogical, improbable and impossible. &quot;Space&quot; is the area, void of all matter, that all matter exists in. Regardless the size of the matter. Others here have disagreed. Some agree but muddy the water with a however or a but. You must see the question, regardless of its form. Answer it or don't. You have the last word. – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question &quot;Is everything in nothing?&quot; makes no sense. Something being (existing) in what is defined as not anything literally is nonsense. You are trying to defy the law of non-contradiction, which is just absurd. – Kyle Kanos yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@kyle you understood it enough to say it was not a physics question. Now you argue it is contradictory? Let me help you. Everything is all matter. Nothing is the area (space) in which matter exists. Matter is something right? There is space, void of matter between all matter or else everything touches something else. Without space (area void of matter)there could be no specific things because all atoms and molecules would touch something else. Is everything in nothing? if yes end of discussion. If no then what is everything in? Nothing is &quot;space&quot;. – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you read some physics instead of saying it's all wrong, you would learn that fields are more important than matter, that the concept of to touch is ill-defined, etc. Einstein's theory make GPS work, we can measure the vaccum... Unless you make an specific model where you can predict observed phenomena, your theory is useless. All the greatest developments in Science were done in this way. If you want, you can say that the Spaghetti moster created us, but this is not the place. – jinawee yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You sidestepped my question. Would you accept the idea that an event can occur from within what you thought of being nothing. That is you consider a stretch of space where there is nothing (you asserted yourself such stretches exist). No matter or anything else enters it from outside it, and yet an event is taking place from within that void. Can you still consider that this stretch is nothing ? Can you consider that it was nothing before the event, yet gave birth to an event with no outside input? – babou yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@jinawee because something is written doesn't make it so. Lots of folks worshiped Newton and i believe Einstein stated he was not entirely correct either. Doesn't make Einstein absolute nor does it make Newton useless either. I never mentioned the spaghetti monster you did. LOL You and everyone else may disagree with my thought and im not offended. You saying i am wrong does not make me wrong. I will say a lot of proffered physics does not pass the science of logic. That is like saying something is invisible because you can not see it. Answer my question or not. It is legitimate. – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@babou thanks again for humoring me. Its kind of you. Again, yes, i accept the idea an event can occur withing nothing. I am thinking of all area where there is zero matter is &quot;space&quot;. I think you think i am thinking in terms of a jar with a lid where ideally nothing can enter and this is not correct. The tiny area between atomic particles is space. The infinite vastness in which galaxies exist is the space i refer to also. Atoms exist in this space, so do planets and this space can not be a fabric of any kind. Like an idea. We all have them yet they don't physically exist yet they are. – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I read the first two lines and I stopped. You disagree with Physics and you say your theory is correct. Thank goodness that this is not that is not the way science works, we would be in the Middle Ages. I can only answer you from the current view of Physics, if not, people could answer that reality doesn't exist and all is made of rainbows... I don't say you're wrong, just that to accept your theory you have to destroy our current laws of Physics (and they are the main contribution for human progress). So I won't answer you more. Hope that at least you let your kids enjoy Science! Good luck! – jinawee yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@jinawee thanks for reading the first two lines. Im no Einstein and i love science and logic equally. Did Einstein agree with everything Newton put forth? – pjameslamar yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T03:12:07.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-12T12:40:36.227" Score="13" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that asking pure math questions on the physics site is discouraged and I've seen many questions moved over to math. However, often times such questions are more suited for physicists to answer since they encounter those types of questions more often. Furthermore, they are more likely to answer the question using tools that a physicist would be familiar with. This is certainly the case for example is in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98877/evaluate-1-loop-contribution-to-the-4-point-greens-function?noredirect=1#comment201657_98877&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; and there are many other similar examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it really be disallowed to ask a math questions on the physics stackexchange if you would like a physicist's perspective on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: I just wanted to give an example for what my issue was. I recently needed some help with a math question from my QFT book, so I posted it &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/672619/vector-delta-function-identity&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. However, the response I got was (as I expected) very formal, and not the approach a physics student would normally take. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28958" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T03:34:24.717" Title="Asking math questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5480" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:00:38.753" Score="11" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98899/can-quantum-angular-momentum-l-be-zero&quot;&gt;Can (quantum) angular momentum $L$ be zero?&lt;/a&gt; I tried to @PPG, but it won't let me. Presumably the conditions for whether or not I can ping someone are listed somewhere ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="What are the rules for pinging someone in comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5474" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:09:39.917" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The owner of a post is always pinged, so you don't need to explicitly mention it (and thus autocomplete doesn't work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, editors of a post, closing moderators (not 3k users), and bounty-givers can also be pinged, though they don't turn up in the autocomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T16:09:39.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5473" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:17:54.373" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the question. Many a time, the physics of the question is already done, and the mathematics is jut regular math, which can be handled equally well (or better) by those on Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are those questions which are really physics-math and not math-math (eg some kinds of theoretical physics), and afaict they aren't migrated unless they have other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a snapshot of the recent migrated questions, to paint a better picture of the migrating practices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(10ks can have a look at the page directly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/away&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v0MSp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T16:17:54.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5473" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:24:10.953" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The criterion for a question to be on topic here is that is is &lt;strong&gt;about physics&lt;/strong&gt;. That's all. So yes, if a question is about math and not about physics, it shouldn't be allowed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merely being more suited for a physicist to answer isn't really relevant; for one thing, if that were our criterion, it would allow many other kinds of questions that I think everyone would agree are off topic here. We've seen this happen in the early days of Stack Overflow, where people would ask questions that weren't about programming simply because they thought programmers would have the right perspective to answer. They were widely considered to be &quot;polluting&quot; the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there is a fine line between advanced theoretical physics and pure math. To that end, there are certain topics, which one might consider purely mathematical, but which the community has effectively decided to include in the scope of physics, including renormalization and group theory. So sometimes it's a bit of a judgment call. But overall, the principle is that the question must be about physics to be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T16:24:10.953" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5479" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:41:05.953" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to find out how close you are to the Epic and Legendary badges, that is how many times you've hit the daily limit? I've seen clever things done with queries so I'm guess there is a way to calculate this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="22494" LastEditDate="2014-02-12T17:24:09.173" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Is there a way to find out how close you are to the Epic and Legendary badges?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5478" CreationDate="2014-02-12T16:45:17.337" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Head to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt; for your reputation stats.  Near the bottom you'll see something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;days represented 197&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; on 3 days&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;earned at least 200 reputation on 4 days&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;earned 250 reputation from suggested edits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me if the &amp;quot;upvotes only&amp;quot; number is used or if the potentially larger 200 rep number is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T16:45:17.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5474" CreationDate="2014-02-12T18:10:08.287" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rather lengthy conditions are given on Meta.SO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43019&quot;&gt;How do comment @replies work?&lt;/a&gt; In particular, these two points explain that &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt;-pinging is both unnecessary and auto-deleted in your case - both you and the author of that post will ping each other automatically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user comments on their own post and there is only one person who has previously commented, then that person is also notified if @name is forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first author of the question or answer will always be notified of any new comment. There is no need to use @name to notify them. (You may still use it for clarity, if needed; however if only you and the author have been commenting on the post so far, the @name will be automatically removed from the beginning of the comment, as it adds no value.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T18:10:08.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5473" CreationDate="2014-02-12T18:39:59.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, the language of physics is mathematics, and the more advanced the topic considered, the more math is needed to understand and talk about it at a technical level. So IMHO Physics SE is currently way too aggressively voting to close for and migrating technical questions involving mathematical concepts and ideas which are of paramount importance to understand advanced physics, away (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/648665/36639&quot;&gt;sometimes&lt;/a&gt; even against the judgment of established experts on the topic at hand)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular in theoretical physics, no clear separation can often reasonably be drawn, mathematical and physical ideas strongly interact and overlap. I would appreciate reviewers to refrain from too strictly separating things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, questions involving mathematical topics/concepts the &quot;smell&quot; too physicsy are often ignored on Math SE, as said for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13722481#13722481&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; such that they find no answers if they have not already obtained some before being migrated, as the mathematicians there are not too interested in maths that is mostly useful for physicists. It also has to be considered that mathematicians often use different language/terminology, strategies to approach a problem (mathematicians consider physicists often to be sloppy, whereas the very rigorous point of view of mathematicians is often not directly useful for a physicist to solve his issue if interest), etc. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T21:01:21.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5483" CreationDate="2014-02-12T23:53:28.260" Score="-1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not allowed to create a new tag, please make an appropriate one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask a question someone answers it. The design of the stackexchange sites (the reward system of earning points) ensures that good answers and even more importantly correct answers are distinguished from all the other answers to that question. Can we do more? What do I mean by more? Imagine a course on Quantum Mechanics, by course I mean lectures notes, exercises, a complete guide that has all the contents to take and mentor a beginning university student right up to post graduate level. Essentially it would take a novice and enable them to understand what is going on at the frontiers of that field. A dream set of lecture-notes/guide/book written by the thousands of users of this site. Keep in mind that this is no replacement for the formal process of studying at a university, but rather a resource that students can use.  Wikipedia has individual articles, but it can be edited by anyone. There are more strict measures in place here. These can be made even more strict by imposing conditions that only graduate students and researchers (lecturers, professors I have seen plenty of them answering questions here) affiliated with recognized institutions can edit the course notes. There would be people who need to approve of any additions before they become part of the course. You get what I am trying to propose here right? Now physics.stackexchange may not be the place this is carried out, an affiliate or sister site could be proposed. Am I dreaming too big?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%&#xA;In light of the comments and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A set of 'dream notes' that everyone contributes to will surely be superior to anything available on the arxiv as Chris White suggested.  Kyle Kanos suggesting that I string together tags, I can't take this response seriously. My idea for the notes/exercises to be contributed to by everyone is because the final product will be based not on my style of teaching but a concoction of everyone's and will likely be understood by a large class of students, because every student learns differently. I want everyone to act as mentors/coaches not just one person, or a small group of people. (Lecture notes on arxiv is almost always by individuals). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brandon Enright suggesting that I take free courses online or watch youtube lectures is not good enough. Right now sure individuals do exactly that. You can find tutorials on programming languages to physical sciences on youtube. The problem is each individual does that but it does not save the next guy any time. Imagine we had the proposed 'dream notes'. It would be a complete guide, with exercises and everything. &quot;What you propose just isn't within the scope of what SE was designed to do or can do or should do.&quot; I don't get the last or should do part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dmckee's answer makes sense. I need to make a proposal on the mother meta and polish and clarify my ideas. My ideas here are not entirely clear, because I posted the question on a whim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly  are the down votes for me not posting the question on the correct platform or are they for suggesting something that others find outrageous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30376" OwnerDisplayName="user1318806" LastEditorUserId="30376" LastEditDate="2014-02-13T06:32:20.363" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T06:32:20.363" Title="Is physics stackexchange limited to answering questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2014-02-13T00:18:45.150" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are built on a questions and answer model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find many suggestions for adding other features on the mother meta, but they have all been turned down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T00:18:45.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2014-02-13T00:19:05.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Wikipedia can be edited by anyone&quot; criticism is tired &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FUD&lt;/a&gt;.  Yes you will be able to find examples of errors, edit wars, and false information.  You can find the same stuff here.  The SE platform is designed for Q&amp;amp;A and it works well for that.  Voting and editing is what keeps the quality up and makes the good stuff stand out from the bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a good physics resource, take a free online course, or buy a physics book, or check out Wikipedia, or ask questions here, or watch a bunch of lectures on YouTube, or [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you propose just isn't within the scope of what SE was designed to do or can do or should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T00:19:05.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-13T03:11:30.190" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using Firefox 26.0 on most recent Ubuntu. Math formulas surrounded with the dollar sign are not being rendered as formulas, just as plain text. I can't pinpoint when it stopped working, because I am just an sporadic user of math enabled StackExchange sites, but some time ago they used to be displayed as nicely rendered LaTeX formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28646" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2014-02-13T21:25:36.497" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T20:10:55.127" Title="Why is math not being rendered here on my browser?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5485" CreationDate="2014-02-13T03:27:38.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I figured it out. HTTPS Everywhere extension was messing with my ability to have math rendered. Probably a bug on them...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28646" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T03:27:38.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5478" CreationDate="2014-02-13T09:04:47.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The one-stop shop for tracking your badge progress (not that you should really be doing that) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3230/badge-progress-reports/143653#143653&quot;&gt;this answer to Badge Progress Reports on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. There are  usually a few relevant queries in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; to choose from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I can't find one that looks reliable; the mother meta thread points to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;the reputation page&lt;/a&gt; that Brandon pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're feeling competitive, though, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/160805/legendary-badge-advancement-topcount&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Legendary Badge advancement TopCount&lt;/a&gt; will show the leaderboard: the number of days users have reached the daily cap, from über-legendary to mortarboard. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/129639/top-users-by-the-number-of-times-they-earned-200-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Top users by the number of times they earned 200/day&#xA;&lt;/a&gt; does the same, though there's a slight discrepancy with the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're wondering exactly what the criterion is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/88526&quot;&gt;this answer by Nick Craver&lt;/a&gt;, and his comments below it, confirms that you only need 200 reputation total in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/42184/&quot;&gt;one day&lt;/a&gt; to add a count towards these badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T09:04:47.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-14T02:09:27.880" Score="21" ViewCount="926" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5380/124&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; it was suggested that it might be good for moderators to refrain from unilaterally closing homework (or homework-like) questions for a while, so that we can get a better sense of what people consider to be on topic and off topic regarding homework here. So we're going to do that for a trial period next week. (We may extend it longer than a week if it seems like that will be useful)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Sunday 2/16 to Saturday 2/22 (&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; and maybe for a couple more days), moderators will not cast any close votes using the homework close reason, except as the 5th vote on a question that we think should be closed. Effectively, we'll do our best to act like regular 3k users when it comes to closing homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The objective of this is to get a better sense of what kinds of questions should and shouldn't be prohibited under our new and improved homework policy (which will come into existence at some time in the future). Accordingly, while this experiment is going on, here is what close voters (i.e. those with 3k+ rep) should do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider the existing homework policy more of a guideline than a rule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instead of voting to close questions because they break the policy (as you normally would), only vote to close those questions which you would like to see prohibited by our new, to-be-written homework policy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While you're doing it, think about why you are voting to close certain questions and not others, and try to come up with some description of what makes a homework-like question closeworthy for you. Post your feedback on this meta post (as comments or answers, as appropriate) and/or in the chat room.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this trial period ends, we'll take the feedback into account when working toward drafting a new homework policy. As always, reasoned arguments will be given more weight than something pithy that gets a lot of votes. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T05:49:19.337" Title="A week of community closing: what should be disallowed homework?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-14T16:19:48.157" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still agree with the point of view, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5369/2751&quot;&gt;graduate level (upward) questions are not homework&lt;/a&gt;. Technical questions, as they come up from studying advanced textbooks, following advanced courses, or even more so from reading research papers, should neither be tagged nor closed as homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is, that the future homework policy will finally narrow down the currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5372/2751&quot;&gt;way too broad notion of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;homework-like&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; down to a more reasonable definition of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;homework&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, that excludes the above mentioned kind of technical questions from being considered homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The often brought up objection against (advanced) questions involving a (mathematical) derivations / explanations, calculations, or a proof of something, claiming that they are exclusively useful to the OP, is IMHO not valid. Such technical questions are useful and helpful to everybody who wants to learn and understand the (advanced) topic or concepts at hand at a more serious (deeper than equation free popular) level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T16:19:48.157" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-14T16:30:15.860" Score="2" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; arose out of a time with a lot of discussion on meta about how this site could be improved; it was proposed that we ban homework and this question explored how that would look like and whether people agreed to a concrete form or not. This question gathered a lot of votes (currently +25/-7 on the question, and 13/1, 11/1, 9/0, 7/0, 7/0 and 6/0 on the answers), but my impression is that there wasn't really enough consensus to implement this policy, or at least in this form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, the debate has slowed somewhat (as in e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5375/whats-the-current-status-of-the-homework-policy/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;) and it has drifted off into other directions (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5229/does-banning-homework-do-long-term-harm-for-only-short-term-gain&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;). In particular, next week &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5488/a-week-of-community-closing-what-should-be-disallowed-homework&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;moderators will leave all homework closures to the community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as a way to try and find out what we, as a community, think should and should not be on this site. I regard this as a much healthier approach to the problem, and I think it should lead to this document becoming obsolete: we should reformulate the policy in terms of what we actually want and do, instead of some idealized construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add a bit more food for thought to the meta table, I'd like to set down some retrospective thoughts on this proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I must say I regard this as an experiment in writing and large parts of it as not very successful. It was proposed elsewhere that we ban homework questions but still keep the homework tag, at least temporarily. This policy proposal was an attempt to see whether such a policy could be realized in a concrete example, and I tried very hard to reconcile the two conflicting directions. I do not think I was very successful, and the policy below has several sticky points that must be resolved using judgement calls; I think this is a sign of fundamental contradictions at the heart of such a policy, and I'm doubtful that more successful implementations of the same core policy can be written while still retaining the homework tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The key point that sparked this was the claim/observation by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5162/8563&quot;&gt;David Z&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5156/8563&quot;&gt;Manishearth&lt;/a&gt; that homework is already essentially banned. I'm less convinced now that that's the case (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=[homework]+closed:no+score:3&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt;), but this was an exercise at seeing whether such an 'effective policy' could be set down into words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certain parts of this thread definitely still read nicely. I particularly like the emphasis on driving people away from homework-like questions and onto more conceptual ones, the shift to &quot;what should I do if I want to ask a homework question?&quot;, and the introduction of sections on what to do if your question has been closed or put on hold or has close-votes on it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another contradiction is to tell people to drop the dependence of their question on the problem (&quot;it should be useful to someone who's not staring at the same problem&quot;) but still telling them it is crucial that they 'reference the source' and provide the full context of their question. I'm not saying that we should drop either requirement, but I do think this merits a lot of thought as to how to reconcile the two once they're on (e)paper.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One useful practicality is that there are in fact a lot of small places where users with homework questions come into contact with the policy, which is reflected in the six different answers here. These should all be considered with a view on an eventual reformulation of formal policy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll shut up now, as this page is already long enough. I just wanted to set these thoughts down, particularly since we're coming up on community closing. Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T22:51:33.330" Title="About the proposal to ban homework" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5490" CreationDate="2014-02-14T16:53:21.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good points; I've thought a lot about these myself in the past and come to think of it, never really resolved them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First of all, I must say I regard this as an experiment and large parts of it as not very successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I not sure if the experiment was ever launched. We never really changed the policy; the &quot;new&quot; HW policy hasn't yet seen the light of the day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yes, if you mean the meta discussions, those haven't been really successful. There is support for &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt; the policy, and a lot of support for the proposed draft, but there are still kinks and a arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm less convinced now that that's the case (see e.g. this search), but this was an exercise at seeing whether such an 'effective policy' could be set down into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the search:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the HW tag is a different beast from the policy. It gets applied willy-nilly and I personally just avoid dealing with it. A successful implementation of a homework policy (with active 3k participation) should end up in the tag bein totally redundant, but that's not the case yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many of those seem to be more technical questions, which are currently under debate when it comes to homeworkiness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another contradiction is to tell people to drop the dependence of their question on the problem (&quot;it should be useful to someone who's not staring at the same problem&quot;) but still telling them it is crucial that they 'reference the source' and provide the full context of their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basically has to do with wording. It should be clear as to what the primary, &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; issue is, and the rest can be given as an addendum or example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as my own closing habits go, I usually look through the question to check for what it's asking; I don't expect the user to write perfectly organized questions, and IMO that shouldn't be necessary for an on topic question (just highly desirable). This extends to moderation habits, I only mod message (and suspend on further infraction) users who dump no-effort homework problems on us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might want to convert this into a suggestion, instead of a part of the policy. Also ask reviewers to identify and reorganize such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T16:53:21.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-15T14:08:56.827" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still don't like this idea. It's unfair to the people asking the questions to have them closed arbitrarily at users' whims, instead of according to a written policy. Also it's hard to see how this can really help to form the policy. All you'll get is some questions closed and not others, but probably without much consistency, and with no consensus on the reasons why. There's a reason why we have discussions on meta instead of just letting people close-vote as they choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least the homework-policy meta post should be replaced with an explanation of the situation before this starts. It's ludicrous to have a specific set of written rules while at the same time encouraging people to close-vote without regard to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-02-15T14:08:56.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-15T15:27:52.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have the mods done much closing since my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5375/whats-the-current-status-of-the-homework-policy/5380#5380&quot;&gt;original suggestion&lt;/a&gt;? The impression I have is that over the last month most of the closing has been done by the users. At the moment I'm reasonably happy with the status quo. It seems to me that most of the questions that have been closed were fairly obviously homework, and we have let through more advanced &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; of the sort that Dilaton mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a sort of protocol emerging that we still close the more blatant of homework questions but provide hints in the comments. This keeps the homework questions off the home page but (hopefully) still provides a bit of help and encouragement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I recently did a quick count and 20% of all questions on the site were being closed. 20%! Mind you, amongst the more forum like sites having 80% of all questions worth while would be a huge step up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-02-15T15:27:52.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-16T00:37:14.317" Score="7" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/65204/history-of-science-and-mathematics/&quot;&gt;a new proposal&lt;/a&gt; on Area 51 for a Stack Exchange focusing on the history of mathematics and science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a math student, I am &lt;em&gt;constantly&lt;/em&gt; studying the history of the subject. I feel that ultimately, it's the only way to really get a sense of that all important holy grail of mathematics learning: &lt;em&gt;motivation&lt;/em&gt;. As for science, studying the history of the subject overlaps very strongly with appreciating the evidence for modern science, since all of the experiments and mathematical arguments were done a long time ago and are seldom mentioned nowadays outside of histories of the subject. And all of this is aside from the fact that the history of science is inherently interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, mining the literature alone can be very difficult at times, and an SE would be really beneficial. I also hope that this SE might promote the study of the history of science and math among both students and teachers, since I (and hopefully you, too!) really think it's almost crucial if you want to really understanding either subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This SE is different to history.SE&lt;/strong&gt; firstly because it's more specialized, but more importantly because answering or asking questions about the history of science will usually require knowledge of &lt;em&gt;science&lt;/em&gt; (or math) as well as just history. Asking about the early development of quantum field theory is unlikely to get you anywhere on a site full of people who are primarily interested in history and not science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This SE is different to math.SE or physics.SE&lt;/strong&gt; because an interest in history (let alone an in depth knowledge of it) isn't necessarily standard among math or physics experts, so a question about any even slightly obscure topic in history is unlikely to get a very good answer unless the right person happens by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I invite anyone interested in the history of math and science to follow the proposal on Area 51, vote up example questions that you find interesting, and post your own example questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Area 51 link: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/65204/history-of-science-and-mathematics/&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/65204/history-of-science-and-mathematics/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12773/area-51-proposal-history-of-mathematics-and-science&quot;&gt;Meta discussion on math.SE&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1496/area-51-proposal-history-of-science-and-mathematics?cb=1&quot;&gt;Meta discussion on MO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:04.363" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T11:53:33.340" Title="Area 51 proposal: History of Science And Mathematics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-02-24T20:29:14.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-17T11:59:58.170" Score="18" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for everyone's attention, a nice question has popped up in the MathOverflow meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1485/formatting-citations-to-the-literature-on-mathoverflow?cb=1&quot;&gt;Formatting citations to the literature on MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, shooting towards a button that will insert a formatted citation given a DOI or arxiv link, or even pop up a search window to connect with some back end. It looks pretty preliminary but it's something to keep an eye on if it goes through, and maybe it's a nice project for some of our better coders (though I don't want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/7433/manishearth&quot;&gt;point fingers&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your convenience, here's the question text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We'd like to make it easier to cite articles from the literature, on MathOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I propose adding a single button to the edit toolbar while writing posts, which will pop up a search dialog, allow the user to select a result, and then insert a nicely formatted link to the paper back into the edit box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The button would appear next to the current four icons for inserting hyperlinks, blockquotes, preformatted text, and images. (We could insert this button ourselves, via our allowed javascript footer, but eventually we'd want SE to insert it natively.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To get a sense of how the search dialog might work, please look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://semorrison.github.io/citation-search/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this prototype&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;  (Obviously this would need some polishing; suggestions for improvements welcome.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once a search result has been selected, I propose inserting into the edit box something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&#xA;       &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/2222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A mathematics paper&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;which will render simply as the hyperlink &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/2222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A mathematics paper&lt;/a&gt;. The hyperlink should be the 'best available URL', e.g. the DOI resolution address, a direct link to the published version, or the link to the corresponding record on MathSciNet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to include the extra &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag around the actual hyperlink for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;it makes the extra citation data available, in case the user wants to also show the authors or journal reference in the text,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;it allows us to render citation links differently via the CSS selector &lt;code&gt;.citation&lt;/code&gt; if desired,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;it allows us to programmatically detect and reformat citation links after the fact, if desired (e.g. to provide links to your local library's resolver).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are a number of things we'll need to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;verify we really can add a button to the edit interface&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;pick a 'backend' for the search dialog (the prototype above is a hack; it would be nice to run off MathSciNet or Zentralblatt, etc, but this may require a lot of coordination)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;design and build the search dialog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;beta test with some users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T11:59:58.170" Title="A &quot;cite this paper, will you?&quot; button?" Tags="|discussion|user-interface|citation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-18T19:00:04.153" Score="-3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens if some ground breaking, novel, Nobel prize winning ideas are posted in this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the person posting the idea get credit ? Is there a risk of ideas being stolen from this website and plagiarized ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40862" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T20:23:25.537" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T20:23:25.537" Title="What happens if some ground breaking, novel, Nobel prize winning ideas are posted in this website?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5498" CreationDate="2014-02-18T19:15:20.593" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the most part you should not post new work here. This is a question and answer site, not a publication venue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you do, you  can rely on the site to establish priority. That's not ideal, but it will suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T19:15:20.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-18T23:23:56.980" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/99731/differentiating-a-vector-product&quot;&gt;Differentiating a vector product&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and although I don't think it's written in the clearest possible way, I (and another answerer) had no trouble understanding the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was nonetheless put on hold (due to the votes of a number of users) for being unclear.  I'm pretty confused by this to be honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is what the OP is asking really sufficiently unclear for it to be closed?  He pretty clearly states that he just wants to know how the derivative operator was &quot;factored out&quot; of a particular expression.  I would be much less confused if, for example, the question had been moved to math.SE instead of being closed as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I'm just clairvoyant and I don't know it?  Perhaps I'm just confused about the SE definition of &quot;clarity&quot;?  I dunno.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T17:49:18.080" Title="Question &quot;clarity&quot; confusion" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-19T08:02:30.610" Score="8" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am turning to the community to determine a means by which I can limit my incessant desire to participate on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone, especially one of the more active users (you know who you are), have any constructive suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="19976" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T08:38:20.157" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Determining a way to regulate my physics.SE participation" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-02-19T08:12:36.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the extend to which you want to remove yourself, you could either get yourself banned or make going online a reward. I mean just look up self-help sites on online addiction in general, sure they'll cover the basic strategies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastEditorUserId="5374" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T09:00:30.530" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T09:00:30.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5506" CreationDate="2014-02-19T16:50:52.210" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I some time ago posted a question twice (I was new and never experienced this kind of website)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I did so because I wanted desired attention to that question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but as I experienced this website I think that posting duplicate questions is bad&lt;br&gt;&#xA;my question is that  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what should I do with that duplicate post ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I should delete that post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38236" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T18:10:22.170" Title="What should I do when I by mistake post a duplicate question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5503" CreationDate="2014-02-19T16:51:34.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to get attention to older questions, place a bounty on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T16:51:34.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5500" CreationDate="2014-02-19T17:49:18.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record I thought the question was perfectly clear and in fact I was halfway through my own answer when the dreaded &lt;em&gt;There is a new answer to the question&lt;/em&gt; banner appeared. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised that the question got closed, but then that's democracy for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen when I got the chance and I see the question has been reopened, but then that's democracy for you :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't attach too much significance to the affair. As the number of active &gt;3k users increases we're going to get more statistical fluctuations, but you just wait for the statistics to build up, which is exactly what happened in this case. I've made some close votes that were in retrospect not warranted, and I'm now quite glad that cooler heads outvoted me. The whole point of requiring 5 votes to close (and 5 to reopen?) is that individual aberrations will eventually get overruled by the site members as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T17:49:18.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5503" CreationDate="2014-02-19T18:10:22.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing the duplicate you're thinking of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7340/water-rocket-physics&quot;&gt;Water rocket physics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking as a non-moderator I don't think duplicate questions are necessarily a problem because often apparent duplicates are highlighting different aspects of the problem. In your case your new question is focussing on the nozzle design while the duplicate is more general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have sometimes answered questions I knew to be duplicates because I wanted to write about a particular aspect of the question and the older duplicate was different enough that my answer would have seemed a bit off topic there. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71126/why-does-the-refractive-index-depend-on-wavelength&quot;&gt;Why does the refractive index depend on wavelength?&lt;/a&gt; is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/65812/why-do-prisms-work-why-is-refraction-frequency-dependent&quot;&gt;Why do prisms work (why is refraction frequency dependent)?&lt;/a&gt;, but I answered the former because I could pick up on some of the points mentioned by the OP and I felt my answer would be better there than on the duplicate. My answer got upvoted a few times so I guess others agree with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to your question, actually I think it's more engineering than physics and I'd be surprised if anyone can answer it without going off and doing the experiments. If anyone does know the answer I bet it's because they have already gone off and done the experiments. Still, I wouldn't rush to delete the question - wait and see what the site members think. If the question gets closed and attracts a lot of downvotes you might want to delete it because that cancels out the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T18:10:22.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-02-19T18:23:28.640" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are some unnecessarily cynical views in Nikolaj's answer and the comments to it. It's human nature to like approval from your peers, and upvotes are a proxy for approval - a virtual pat on the back if you will. Of course the flip side is that downvotes are really quite wounding - I hate being downvoted and won't downvote others without serious provocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, if you find yourself addicted to this site it's because it's more enjoyable than your everyday life. The solution is to look at your everyday life and figure out how to improve it. In my case I'm semi retired and only work for a few hours in the mornings. The alternative to the Physics SE is doing the gardening or some DIY. I mean, come on, what would you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record I hate your answers because you invariably get in just before me (often when I've nearly finished typing up my answer) and then you rub salt into the wound by making your answer better. You should immediately quit the Physics SE and never come back :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T18:23:28.640" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-02-19T18:32:52.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well you could always join reddit ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(reddit's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;/r/askscience&lt;/a&gt; is actually another very good place for experts to share their scientific knowledge)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously though, there are some techniques out there to limit your internet browsing, usually involving some program that will block access to designated websites outside of a preconfigured period of time. I've never used them myself, because if I did, I would waste more time figuring out creative ways to get around the block than I would have on the site it was blocking, but if you don't suffer from that problem you could try this method. Alternatively, if you want to completely shut yourself off from this site for an extended period, you could edit your computer's HOSTS file to point &lt;code&gt;physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;127.0.0.1&lt;/code&gt;. Again, it's easily worked around, but I guess that works for some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative, as Nikolaj suggested, is to get your account suspended. I think there's a precedent for this but I'm not sure what the relevant policies are. You don't have to do something bad on the site that would actually deserve a suspension (and we'd rather you didn't), just ask a moderator in chat or something and we'll look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option, which sounds like (and mostly is) a joke but actually has something to it if you think about it, is to become a moderator. Moderators do a lot more janitorial work - editing, reviewing, closing and reopening posts, and other things which can be handled in 10-second chunks - and a lot less asking and answering, so although it doesn't directly force you to spend less time on the site, it does alter how you'd be spending your time here, making it a lot easier to pop in for just a minute or two between your real-life obligations. Plus, you will get thoroughly sick of handling flags after a while. Of course, this would require demonstrating the need for a new moderator election and then winning that election, so it's not straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, though, it has to come down to your own willpower. As we've learned from handling trolls and spammers, there is no foolproof way to keep someone off the site if they really want to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T18:32:52.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-02-19T19:26:20.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been retired from active research since 2001 and for me this site is a way not to forget my  physics by enjoying the answers and answering where I can without using too many formulas. I have not learned how to use the codes for  them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise you to start reading in depth one of your subjects in your graduate studies. Try to focus your attention  on problems that are hard, worry them like a dog with a bone. I believe then you will find  that most of  the questions arising on this board will seem irrelevant to your interest and you will reduce your participation, which I do enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T19:26:20.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-19T19:27:04.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am noticing something that will likely crop up later and leave the results of this inconclusive... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of low-level homework questions coming in and getting closed. These are the types of questions that I think we all agree shouldn't be allowed and the week results will show that it's the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But high-level homework questions aren't really coming in, so there is no opportunity for the trial voting period to suss out how the community actually feels about them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few more days left, but I wouldn't be surprised if the results just show what we can all agree to already and we'll be back to speculating and arguing over high-level homework questions because no/few opportunities were presented to vote on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T19:27:04.957" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-20T03:00:17.917" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/99897/which-kind-of-exhaust-should-i-use&quot;&gt;asked by me&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they say that this question belongs to engineering and not physics.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where should i ask this question ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit : how can i modify the question so that my post is back from [ON HOLD] ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38236" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T15:37:42.110" Title="Where should i ask this question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5511" CreationDate="2014-02-20T03:20:43.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, there is no place to ask this question. However, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/60453/engineering&quot;&gt;Engineering site proposed in Area 51&lt;/a&gt; that you might want to support. They will not answer any questions at this point (still in the &quot;Definition&quot; stage), but this seems like it'd be on-topic on that site (if it goes live).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T03:20:43.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5514" CreationDate="2014-02-20T03:20:51.613" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I some time ago asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/96366/why-does-a-fluorescent-tube-lamp-flicker-before-lighting-up&quot;&gt;This Question&lt;/a&gt; but i also want to ask &quot;Why it makes sound like 'ting', 'ting' before lighting up ?&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should I modify the post or post a new question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38236" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T15:54:54.363" Title="Should I ask new Question or modify my old post?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5513" CreationDate="2014-02-20T06:00:27.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a separate issue from what you were asking about in the earlier question, so you should post it separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T06:00:27.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2014-02-20T15:14:55.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biophysics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every biology question should be about the physics part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T15:14:55.633" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-02-20T15:14:55.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5511" CreationDate="2014-02-20T23:48:55.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite honestly, I think it is a perfectly legitimate question for this site since the answer will be based on fluid mechanics.  It doesn't take that many votes to close a question however, and we have a lot of theorists/purists around here. If your approach showed a little more personal effort to understand the effect of the bottle's neck on the exhaust, then it likely would have received an answer and/or not have been closed.  Also, it wouldn't hurt to cast the question in the language of fluid mechanics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are trying to build a repository of quality questions, and questions which can be typed out in 30 seconds will often be closed; the reason for doing so is somewhat arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35024" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T23:48:55.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-21T05:46:46.213" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100056/why-do-electrons-and-protons-attract-each-other&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as duplicate. It is a duplicate as a question  and when one goes to the link one finds a good answer in fairly theoretical terms, the first part not really geared towards the level of the question, and certainly not of the question made duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition it offers what I call a &quot; platonic physics view&quot;, i.e. beautiful theories have been found and are the miraculous mold on which nature is poured.  One reason I keep my attention on this site is because it is dominated by theorists and graduate students of theory and the answers are geared towards the &quot;platonic&quot;. ( the other is that I seem to be the only woman physicist here with some reputation :) and do not want to let the side down ). I try to inject the experimentalist's view.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the platonic view may be the correct view and vindicated if we find a TOE finally. I.e. :&quot;Mathematics molds the world&quot;. But it is not the view we have now. The view we have now is continuously testing the mathematics against the data, and the only real, imo answer to such questions is that &lt;strong&gt;this is what observations tell us&lt;/strong&gt; and we have modeled them mathematically successfully .  I would not mind if the site was from graduate students up, but such type of questions come from enthusiastic young aspiring physicists and answers always biased towards theory are not a good guide for them. They must realize that data and experiments are what inspire the theories and a theory in the air is just mathematics. It is the kind of thinking,  &quot;if I think deeply I will solve the equations of the world&quot; without a strong basis on the data base ,that generates the cranks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I tend to answer such questions , but I do not get to them fast enough before they become duplicate. Maybe the duplicate should be signaled for one day or two before making it impossible to answer a simple question with a simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T05:46:46.213" Title="Policy on closing/holding/duplicate questions of the type &quot;why positve and negative charges attract&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-21T13:52:19.397" Score="9" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have very serious doubts from my experience here (albeit, limited).  Two things that I have rightly or wrongly observed from the responses (and lack thereof) to my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer I got was only provided when I offered the bounty - without the bounty, I am sure it never would have been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other questions I posted are not even worth being researched it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I researched for questions that were out of my subject area, despite being hellishly busy, and naively thought that others would do the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36538" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T00:57:59.740" Title="Realistically, are atmospheric physics questions on topic and acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2014-02-21T14:03:26.930" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they weren't closed, then they are on-topic and acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lack of answers just means lack of interest or expertise from others. As I've said many times, the only way to attract people with those interests or expertise is to have something for them to do here and to tell them about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've done the first, now they just need to find out there are things to do here and come do them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't or don't want to wait, that's on you. But if your questions stayed open then you didn't violate a policy and if they didn't get answered then you didn't excite the right people or the right people aren't here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T14:03:26.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5511" CreationDate="2014-02-21T14:33:20.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You did ask a engineering question, although it could have probably been a reasonable physics question if asked properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site seems to be largely about theoretical physics.  There is a gray area between engineering and applied physics, but I have noticed that questions that aren't about advanced theoretical physics are treated a lot less well than more advanced questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would have probably voted to close your question too, not because of the level of physics or the fact that is about applied physics (I personally enjoy those), but because:&lt;ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;The title (&lt;i&gt;Which kind of exhaust should I use?&lt;/i&gt;) makes no sense.  I can see asking about the type of bottle or the type of proplellent, but the &quot;kind of exhaust&quot;?  Huh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;The disrespect shown with the very first letter is not a good start.  The first letters of English sentences are capitalized.  It's a arbitrary but well known and basic rule.  Regardless of how unfamiliar you are with English, that is so basic a rule that there is no excuse.  You are saying &lt;i&gt;&quot;I don't care about your silly language conventions and how annoying it may be for you if others don't follow them.  I'm more important than you are, so you'll just have to put up with it&quot;&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;The whole question is just a homework problem dumped on us without any effort on your part.  &lt;i&gt;&quot;Here, solve this for me while I go off and do more important things.  And no, I'm not interested in the physics, I just need the answer to hand in to get my grade.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;Which kind of bottle exhaust&quot;&lt;/i&gt; Huh?  The pictures imply you are asking about the bottle, but then what is &quot;bottle exhaust&quot; supposed to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;You can't imagine any practical difference between the bottles shown yourself at all?  Really!!?  It never even occurred to you that size, pressure capability, and weight might have some bearing on the problem?  Frankly if you haven't even &lt;i&gt;thought&lt;/i&gt; about those issues as possibly being relevant, then you really are at too low a level to ask a question here.  How are you going to understand any of the possible answers, other than &quot;Use that one.&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastEditorUserId="20848" LastEditDate="2014-02-21T15:37:42.110" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T15:37:42.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5524" CreationDate="2014-02-22T10:55:10.363" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the options I have, to revert a community edit? I don't want to simply edit my question; I was looking for something similar to a roll-back option where the approvers are notified that I wish to reject their proposed edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be missing out on some obvious existing way to do it but help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/75052/revisions&quot;&gt;Case in point&lt;/a&gt; (3rd edit changed the question to something that doesn't make sense any more)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26633" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T11:03:25.970" Title="How do I go about reverting a Community edit?" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5523" CreationDate="2014-02-22T11:03:25.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a rollback option, but it doesn't notify anyone, just creates the reverse edit. You can find it on the bar for the second (and first) revision of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Community edit is just one that was suggested by an anonymous user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T11:03:25.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2014-02-22T20:40:21.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope atmospheric physics -as well as all other geophysics- remains on topic somewhere on SE. I think there is less difference between the various disciplines of physical science than the ways we tend to group ourselves. I like the idea of a earth sciences group, but expect it may be too thin. We should use the available tags more effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12951" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T20:40:21.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-22T23:00:25.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it interesting that people are voting to close questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100331/if-an-object-moved-5-meters-in-a-second-how-can-its-velocity-be-10-m-s&quot;&gt;If an object moved 5 meters in a second, how can its velocity be 10 m/s?&lt;/a&gt; because this strikes me as a textbook example of a conceptual question, the kind of thing that our existing homework policy was specifically made to allow. I wonder if this is just an isolated case, or have questions like this been accumulating close votes all week? And if so, does this really mean that the community doesn't want conceptual questions on simple topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T23:00:25.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T01:54:44.697" Score="1" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100236/which-component-shows-spin-squeezing-under-twisting-hamiltonian&quot;&gt;Which component shows spin squeezing under twisting Hamiltonian?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a contentious debate emerging about whether this question, currently at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/100236/5&quot;&gt;revision 5&lt;/a&gt;, should be open or not. Standard practice is to bring the discussion to meta, so here we are to discuss: is it right for revision 5 to be on hold or not, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: I think there's agreement that the question should be on hold according to the current homework policy. Here we should address whether whatever new policy we come up with should also put such questions on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T05:29:30.963" Title="Should this question be on hold?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5527" CreationDate="2014-02-23T02:24:12.017" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was rightfully closed in the first place. As it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/100236/1&quot;&gt;originally written&lt;/a&gt;, it had every appearance of a graduate-level &lt;strong&gt;but zero effort&lt;/strong&gt; homework problem.  After it was closed, OP added a couple relevant links to papers that contained the answer (as pointed out by me). Seems to me that it's &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; a zero-effort homework problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T02:24:12.017" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5527" CreationDate="2014-02-23T07:13:41.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asking about some properties of a twisted Hamiltonian system &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;  conceptual, even though it asks about the issue at a technical level. It not less conceptual than the more basic question brought up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5526/2751&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and who's attracting closevotes is questioned too, but the twisted Hamiltonian question is about a more advanced topic and at a higher level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already said &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5489/2751&quot;&gt;several times&lt;/a&gt; (and please dont ignore the fact that my answer there is the one with the highest net scoere so there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; people who agree with this even on meta) elsewhere, technical questions, as they come up from reading books about advanced topics, following higher level courses, or even from studying research papers should not be prohibited. Forbidding such technical questions about advanced topics is detrimental for people who want to learn physics at a beyond popular equation free technial level, and it would be bad for the originally targetted audience of the site (researchers, academics, and students of physics and astronomy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The twisted Hamiltonian question is a legitimate technical question too, it is even conceptual, so IMHO the closevoters have been wrong. In summary, this particular question should not be closed, but allowed to attract nice and interesting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T07:48:50.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5527" CreationDate="2014-02-23T10:06:35.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question seems mostly to be within a quote block, but I can't tell whether it's a quote from somewhere (e.g. a textbook or past exam paper) or whether the user just randomly put quotes around the question for no reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;: the quote block was edited in by someone other than the OP. I've now removed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the former then it obviously should be closed according to the current policy. I don't think there's any room for debate there. The policy says that homework questions should show some effort, which clearly isn't the case here, with the question in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; room for debate about whether it should be allowed by any future policy (honestly I'm on the fence about that), but since the new policy isn't in effect yet I'd say it should stay closed, at least until the user can reword it so it doesn't look like a verbatim quote from somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if this is just a case of &quot;random quotation marks&quot; then there's no problem except the formatting. In that case it's a conceptual question and the user has made some effort to specify it clearly, and it should be easy enough for the OP to edit so that it doesn't give the impression of being a copy-and-paste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2014-02-23T10:26:54.927" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T10:26:54.927" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-23T14:35:35.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to say a few words about the graduate student experience as I lived it and have watched friends and mentees live it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every graduate student, bar none, at some point asks a friend or teacher or adviser to help them derive some line from a text book that they haven't gotten, only to say the equivalent of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Well, that was obvious!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; when shown the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needed and seeking out help is not, in and of itself, rare or anything to be ashamed of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every successful physicist is loathe to ask for help with this kind of thing in their own sub-field. They'll look in others texts, and attack the problem from multiple angles on their own first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When dabbling in someone else's discipline that they have no intention of mastering, all bets are off. The first thing to do is find a subject expert willing to walk you past the road-blocks. But you'll come away have been shown the work, not having learned the work. And successful physicists know the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, anyone who makes a habit of asking for help with reading material in their chosen sub-field &lt;em&gt;isn't going to make it&lt;/em&gt;. The biggest thing that happens (or should happen) in grad school is a sorting of those who can make progress without supervision and guidance from those who basically can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heck, quite a large fraction of people who can make progress on their own are not going to &quot;make it&quot; if you define that phase by nailing down a tenured R1 position of a staff scientist job at a major laboratory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the upshot of all of this is that I think making it &lt;em&gt;too easy&lt;/em&gt; (and anonymous, none the less) to get that kind of help does budding scientists a bad turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this position is not popular and not even consistent with what Stack Exchange is about, but I stand by the idea that &lt;em&gt;&quot;Help me derive line #.## out of Author&quot;&lt;/em&gt; question should not be allowed. Nor exercises typically assigned in upper-division and graduate course work. I am quite sure that all the professionals here can &lt;em&gt;smell&lt;/em&gt; a homework problem and that the difference between them and a question asked by a student reading ahead is generally quite clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always I argue for a firm hand on this: &lt;strong&gt;let's treat students with respect and help them to get the education that they deserve by not doing their damn work for them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T14:35:35.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T14:39:12.353" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why you must login to ask a question in &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;while other sites are free and open to everyone?&#xA;Link: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;How does it work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;strong&gt;you can ask or answer questions without even bothering of register&lt;/strong&gt;...&#xA;  Why Phys.SE is out of scope of Stackexchange!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Error" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T03:12:41.173" Title="Why you must login to ask a question in physics.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5533" CreationDate="2014-02-23T14:51:43.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know this is mistaken. Physics Stack Exchange should be just like every other stack exchange in basic mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T14:51:43.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T16:19:52.543" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98731/effects-of-microwaves&quot;&gt;Effects of microwaves on optical properties of human eye&lt;/a&gt;  a few days ago. I really asked some offtopic things but now i've edited it appropriately. But it is still closed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; So how should edit this to make it on topic?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: I have edited my question further, is it on topic now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T08:39:09.293" Title="How can I make my question On topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5535" CreationDate="2014-02-23T16:27:47.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal pet peeve here is that you &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; have four distinct questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One question per &quot;question&quot;, already!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is &quot;teach me an entire sub-discipline&quot; properly scoped for a Stack Exchange site, and that seems to be the nature of your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T16:27:47.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5535" CreationDate="2014-02-23T16:48:40.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions 1 and 2 are biology, not physics. We can put upper bounds on the physical effects of something, but it is up to biologists to determine if that is harmful to the organism. These questions are also marginally on-topic for &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/718650/paranoid-parent-wifi-safe-for-baby&quot;&gt;at least one technical site&lt;/a&gt; and definitely on-topic for &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1178/are-wifi-waves-harmful&quot;&gt;the local site for general skeptical inquiries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions 3 and 4 can be made on-topic here, but they should be &lt;strong&gt;separate&lt;/strong&gt; questions. 3 should be phrased in a way to ask about conceptually how microwaves heat living (i.e. water-rich, organic) material. 4 should ask about whether such frequencies are focused by the eye (note that the vitreous humor is at least as important as the lens proper in humans, the former being essentially water as far as physics is concerned, the latter a crystal in some sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it is not for physics to say what the harm is, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you provide the biology necessary for that judgment. For example, if you give a correspondence between electrons ejected from DNA and cancer rate, a physicist can tell you something like &quot;sitting next to a cell tower will cause XXX excess displaced electrons per DNA strand per day due to thermal motions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make no guarantees though that these questions have not been asked already. You should check those linked questions in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:37.237" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T16:48:40.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5527" CreationDate="2014-02-23T17:48:30.870" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way the question is worded seems to me to be indicative of being copied and pasted out of a textbook or a problem set. In particular, the phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you answer this without assumptions on the initial state?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is characteristic of how one would write a homework problem, but not how one would ask an honest conceptual question. Therefore I think it should be on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has clarified that this is not copied from somewhere, in this case, although I think the more general point about the phrasing stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-02-23T18:50:11.710" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T18:50:11.710" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5533" CreationDate="2014-02-24T02:27:36.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also observe this behaviour. Visiting the site on incognito chrome and trying to ask a question prompts me directly for a log in. From a random smattering of sites from the bottom of this page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;TeX, Web Applications, Webmasters, Game Development (and presumably most sites) show visitors straight to the Ask a Question page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow, Programmers, and possibly others, directly prompt you for a log in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ServerFault (and others?) sends users to &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/questions/ask/advice&quot;&gt;a pretty nice How to Ask page&lt;/a&gt;, including a prominent search bar, that won't let you proceed to the question page until you promise to &quot;keep these tips in mind when asking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why the log-in prompt is enabled for this site. &lt;strong&gt;It should be disabled&lt;/strong&gt; as we do not really have much of a spam problem. At most, we should have the ServerFault version, but I should think even that is unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:14:54.067" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T02:27:36.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5527" CreationDate="2014-02-24T05:16:12.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this type of question  should not be closed. It is not wrong/out-of-present-day-physics, or incoherent or without a reference for context. Even if I might think that this is homework for a graduate level course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that at graduate level a physicist will stand or fall by the research he/she can do and the purpose of this board should not be to teach diligence/the-honor-system to graduate students. It seems to me  that the site aims to be a web  repository of knowledge where somebody googling for &quot;twisting Hamiltonian&quot; will find a relevant answer and links to the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be a pity if it ends up a repository on simple conceptual problems in physics ( these I can easily answer because my mathematical tools are rusty). I have lost count on how many times I have contributed to answer the &quot;wave particle duality&quot; connundrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2014-02-24T05:29:30.963" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T05:29:30.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5488" CreationDate="2014-02-24T05:49:19.337" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will not be able to follow the chat discussion on this because the time is way past my bedtime even if it is east coast time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The type of  questions that I think it is fair to close are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highschool level homework with no effort towards the solution, and this with a kind explanation in the comments, so that the kid does not become discouraged by an inimical physicists front,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wrong/out-of-present-day-physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;incoherent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without a reference for context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that at graduate level a physicist will stand or fall by the research he/she can do, not the homework he/she can solve. IMO the purpose of this board should not be to teach diligence/the-honor-system to graduate students. It seems to me that the site aims to be a web repository of knowledge where somebody googling even for a graduate level question in mathematical formulations, will find a relevant answer and links to the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a mathematical/theoretical question is not answered that is an answer in itself, that the general physics community was not interested enough to spend the effort to answer it.  The site will reach the limit of its competence in answering questions, or the limit of the width of the mathematically/theoretically oriented people following the site and willing to spend the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be a pity if the site ends up just a repository on simple conceptual problems in physics ( these I can easily answer because my mathematical tools are rusty). I have lost count on how many times I have contributed to answer the &quot;wave particle duality&quot; conundrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T05:49:19.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-02-24T20:03:33.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this has been brought up a few times, here's the available info on requesting a temporary suspension of one's account to help with site overuse issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest I can remember is a comment of Shog9's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have seen more than one person request a suspension voluntarily due to realizing they were unable to balance their time on the site with other responsibilities... – Shog9♦ Dec 6 '12 at 17:36&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though he quickly would &quot;generally suggest other ways of temporarily revoking your own access&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has come up a few times, from what I can tell, in MSO, and particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106604/can-an-account-be-self-suspended&quot;&gt;Can an account be self-suspended&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32299/ban-myself-button-in-user-profiles&quot;&gt;&quot;Ban myself&quot; button in user profiles&lt;/a&gt;. The useful-looking &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21774/how-do-you-escape-an-addiction-to-stackoverflow-or-other-it-sites&quot;&gt;How do you escape an addiction to Stack Overflow?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed for some reason. It has definitely happened occasionally but it is my impression that the SE team is in general not particularly in favour of this. In this site, it would come down to whether our mod team think it's the most appropriate course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that like most other artificial devices to stop your participation - chrome nanny, userscripts, host file modifications - it is easy to circumvent by setting up a new account. It does have the advantage that your reputation is and privileges are locked away from you, but if you've managed to sidestep the ban then all you've accomplished as a whole is to make your experience of the site more miserable and more guilt-ridden than before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I don't think this is really the way to go. I don't agree with Nikolaj's tone, but if you find you can't stop coming here, you should see it, at least for the sake of self-analysis, as an addiction, and learn to come to grips with it that way. Find out what triggers you, personally, to come here instead of working on your research, and change those triggers. Or simply drive them down to an acceptable level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be a shame to watch you go, though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T20:26:44.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-25T09:19:12.897" Score="10" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that this question was migrated to the new Astronomy beta site: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1845/&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1845/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding was that since the merger with the old astronomy site, all astronomy questions were on topic here, including practical, non-physicsy ones like this. In practice we don't really see much of this type of question, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally if a question is on topic it won't be migrated (unless the OP asks for it, which I guess could have happened here), but this one was migrated very rapidly, so I was wondering whether our policy on this type of question has changed now that the new site is online. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only asking out of curiosity. Such a change in policy would be very reasonable under the circumstances - I just didn't see any discussion of it on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T17:20:22.407" Title="Has our policy on astronomy questions changed now that Astronomy beta is open?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5543" CreationDate="2014-02-25T13:38:06.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to first point out that the Astronomy is in Beta and doesn't seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40709/astronomy&quot;&gt;doing too great&lt;/a&gt;, so if you have an interest in it: go and participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40709?phase=definition&quot;&gt;Definitions section&lt;/a&gt; of the Area51 proposal for Astronomy, most of the answers to the proposal questions and the &lt;em&gt;Example Questions&lt;/em&gt; themselves suggest that the site is supposed to be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an academic site about the observation and scientific study of celestial objects.&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11467/94239&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that questions about observing something in space should be migrated over there, while questions about the physics of something in space would be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T13:38:06.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4568" CreationDate="2014-02-25T15:44:20.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the current 404 page is relatively boring, but I quite dislike the idea of having a formula, and particularly one with such localized meanings as those. The reason for my dislike is that it can only ever speak to a very narrow population, and it will bug other physicists and alienate non-physicist visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, as was mentioned in the comments, it is by default not possible, and should not be something to aim for, to have different error pages depending on what happened to the post. The point of the 404 page is that it's what you get when the page isn't there, i.e. when you've put in a corrupted address, and this should be the main thrust of the design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the system does provide a custom page when the page exists but has been deleted; indeed it will go as far as giving you the question title even if you ask only by numeric ID: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/99313&quot;&gt;physics.se:99313&lt;/a&gt;. This page does distinguish between questions &quot;removed for reasons of moderation&quot; (automatic and moderator deletions) and posts removed by their author (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/94485/is-there-an-ideal-white-body&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;). However, this should be seen as a secondary feature; altering the design only adds stigma to deletions. I'm not even sure that it can be done; finding deleted posts is nigh-impossible, by design, unless you're 10k+ on that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the design, here are some interesting ones from across the network to see if anyone comes up with ideas: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://travel.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Travel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Bicycles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dba.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Database Administrators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Mathematica&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Unix &amp;amp; Linux&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Ask Different&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/donkey&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:35.310" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T15:44:20.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-25T19:10:39.573" Score="7" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently misread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100816/whats-wrong-with-this-faster-than-light-gedankenexperiment&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and wrote a nice answer for what turned out not to be the question at all. I then proceeded to look quite carefully for the question I had actually answered, and I found that we don't really have a question (or answers) about the specific scheme described in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100864/the-choice-of-measurement-basis-on-one-half-of-an-entangled-state-affects-the-ot/&quot;&gt;The choice of measurement basis on one half of an entangled state affects the other half. Can this be used to communicate faster than light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore went ahead and posted it as a self-answered Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know we have had a ton of similar questions, and we have certainly touched on it edgewise (as in e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/2209/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;), but I could not find this specific scheme, which is otherwise quite a popular misconception about entanglement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest related question, I think, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55028/epr-type-experiments-and-faster-than-light-communication-using-interference-effe&quot;&gt;EPR-type experiments and faster-than-light communication using interference effects as signaling mechanism&lt;/a&gt;, but this question (a) uses collapse and not measurement as a proposed method, and (b) is unclear and not particularly helpful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread does not serve any particular purpose, but I set it up to avoid long discussions in comments. If you have proposed duplicates, I would be interested in seeing them and discussing whether they are indeed or not. I do feel, though, that we need a nice, simple and understandable canonical question for this scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T19:10:39.573" Title="Yet another quantum-entanglement-gives-faster-than-light-communication question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5543" CreationDate="2014-02-25T19:15:50.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My understanding was that since the merger with the old astronomy site, all astronomy questions were on topic here, including practical, non-physicsy ones like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was my understanding as well: that everything on topic for the new astronomy site is on topic for us, and thus we should never be migrating questions to that site. Evidently some other people don't think the same, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T19:15:50.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5543" CreationDate="2014-02-25T20:40:07.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) As for the general principles, when the old Astro.SE was closed, it was decided on Phys.SE that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;astronomy questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1197/2451&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1248/2451&quot;&gt;import&lt;/a&gt; all posts from the old Astro.SE to Phys.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally there is also a SE rule which states that migration of a post (from one SE sister site to another) should only be considered if it is deemed off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) As for the particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/1845&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;, I was the moderator that migrated it. I guess I in a weak moment thought that it should be migrated to Astro.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T20:40:07.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-25T22:29:19.877" Score="1" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderating Physics.SE is clearly a lot of work.  We attract a lot of off-topic posts and crazy crackpot theories.  I don't see a lot of thanks or appreciation going to our moderators either.  &lt;strong&gt;Thank you to all of our hard working moderators for handling all of the work our site creates!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if we had more moderators the load would be better balanced.  On of our moderators, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt; hasn't been active in quite a while.  Even if we don't need to increase the total number of moderators, it seems reasonable to discuss shifting mbq's moderator role to a more active member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly I think we should look into increasing our number of active moderators.  I don't have any data to back me up and I can't read our active moderators minds to know how burnt out they are but I think we should consider reclaiming at least on moderator role and possibly adding another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community think?  Do we need to do anything?  Should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T23:46:59.563" Title="Is it time to review and update our moderators?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5549" CreationDate="2014-02-25T22:58:07.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dont agree with this at all, community moderation has increased a lot in the past months and I often got the impression that some reviewers (in particular close voters) are even a bit too eager at times. There is no need for &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; moderators on the site. And I personally think the last few days with moderators refraining from unilaterally closing non obviously bad/spammy/offensive etc questions have done the site a lot of good. If mods only clean up obviously bad things and leave everything else to the community, there is no need to increase their number for them being able to reduce their workload.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T22:58:07.093" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5549" CreationDate="2014-02-25T23:46:59.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I certainly wouldn't mind having an additional moderator to reduce the load, but I don't feel a pressing need to add someone to the crew either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the bigger need is for more 3k users. We have reasonable policies on what sorts of questions to put on hold, and we have a community which is able to revise those policies and create new ones as needed; where we seem to be lacking is having enough people to enforce those policies in a timely manner by casting enough close votes within the first minutes or hours of a hold-worthy question being posted. Of course having an additional moderator would help with that, but the better solution to this problem is more responsible users with more reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T23:46:59.563" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-26T12:27:26.857" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I raised a flag on meta.Phys.SE. Practically the flag was declined, that is no action was taken by the moderators. But the strange thing is that it is not declined officially. It is marked as &lt;strong&gt;disputed&lt;/strong&gt;. What does it mean? I don't want to know about this particular flag. I want to know about this in general i.e. how are and why some flags disputed? Can flags on the main site too be disputed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-06-13T23:11:21.543" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T23:11:21.543" Title="How is a flag disputed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-02-26T21:09:21.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-26T17:08:56.440" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we have a close reason for engineering questions because selection of materials for building that ultralight in the garage are off-topic. But where is the line drawn between engineering and experimental design? The question I'm thinking of specifically is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88165/pressure-applied-to-flat-plate&quot;&gt;Pressure applied to flat plate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without any context, the asker could be designing a vacuum cleaner and this would be off-topic as an engineering question. Or OP could be setting up a shock-tube experiment, or a low-pressure chamber to study some particles or something, in which case it would be on-topic as an experimental design question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So without any context, how does one draw the line? Even with context, does the engineering close reason indicate we no longer want questions about building experiments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T19:04:17.347" Title="What is engineering and what is experimental design?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5553" CreationDate="2014-02-26T19:47:05.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hm... after thinking about it, this is rather complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a rule of thumb that might work: physics experiments generally involve some sort of extreme condition that makes normal, everyday materials or building techniques unsuitable. If the question identifies a specific requirement of that type, and displays prior research showing that the OP has verified that normal materials are unsuitable, it should be fine, because the properties of materials under extreme conditions is within the domain of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, questions about what materials or building techniques are commonly used in physics experiments, even the more ordinary ones, are fine. In this case the question would have to identify that it is actually about a physics experiment. For example, &quot;what are muon scintillators normally filled with?&quot; would be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which ask how to calculate properties of a material, like the one you linked, are also fine. But the key here is that the question needs to ask &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to do the calculation, not just &quot;calculate this for me,&quot; for the same reason we don't allow no-effort homework questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-02-26T19:47:05.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5559" CreationDate="2014-02-27T10:07:34.607" Score="-4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a little nervous to saying about this for fear of losing rep points but, I feel that users with more reputation should lose more reputation for making the same &quot;mistakes&quot; as newbies (like me). For instance, if I got a couple down votes on this question I would not be allowed to comment anymore. If a user with 3k+ votes gets twice as many down votes as I do, nothing changes for them. It (at least for me) discourages me from trying to answer questions and fully participate on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point: Users with more rep points can throw around bad answers without much repercussions, while newer users get smashed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this doesn't sound like a fair thing for more experienced users. And in no way am I trying to criticize SE. In fact I am very pleased with the way physics SE is run and I believe that its current style of operation is the most beneficial to the physics community. I just think new users should be treated (point wise) less harshly as experienced users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40580" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Opinion for bracketed point system for users" Tags="|discussion|reputation|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5556" CreationDate="2014-02-27T11:02:31.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't matter how much reputation you have, you should always prevent answers which are downvoted. Since we are not dealing with opinion based questions, downvotes are given for bad answers. (Of course, sometimes there are those unjustified downvotes, but I guess (I hope), it happens rarely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what would prevent you from giving bad answers? A higher penalty if you have a higher reputation? Maybe. That's the same discussion with progressive taxes, some call it fair, some not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen users with 100k+ asking about why they got downvoted and they justified their downvoted answer, so they cared about the downvotes. Since the system works, I don't see a reason to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26044" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T11:02:31.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-02-27T11:43:20.343" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latexsearch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9NapU.png&quot; alt=&quot;LaTeX Search&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17440" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T11:43:20.343" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-02-27T11:43:20.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5556" CreationDate="2014-02-27T12:34:41.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that your point, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;users with more rep points can throw around bad answers without much repercussions, while newer users get smashed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is wrong on both counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an 'established user', posting an egregiously wrong answer and getting called out on it is a lot more visible, and a lot more embarrassing, than for new users. Further, people will be more focused on helping new users understand why their answer is wrong, and they will be less forgiving with more established users, tending to simply point out where the mistake is and why it is fatal if it is.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even as a new user, it is actually very hard to get &quot;smashed&quot; by a wrong answer. I definitely empathize with the feeling, as a new user, that every bit of rep is precious as you try to climb the privileges ladder; all of us felt the same at some point. However, downvotes are very light! It takes five downvotes to undo the rep from a single upvote. It would take thirteen downvotes to make you drop down the shortest privilege gap after 15 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are a feedback mechanism. They are a way for the community to tell you that your content is incorrect, and they are an opportunity for you to use the community to help you fix it. You should of course be open-minded and reasonable, but if you are then you will either end up with a correct answer or an understanding of why your previous thoughts were wrong. Either way, in real-world terms you come out ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you manage to fix your answer, then you will start getting upvotes. If the answer is fundamentally flawed, there is nothing wrong with deleting it! There is no shame in it and very few people will even know it's there. It will also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/2638/184688&quot;&gt;restore your reputation&lt;/a&gt;: you can force a recalculation of your rep on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;reputation page&lt;/a&gt; (or it will happen automatically with some regularity) and this will not count downvotes on deleted questions. Reputation-wise, you're back to where you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we're speaking about downvotes: don't be afraid to post things like these in meta, either. Downvotes here do not affect your reputation, and tend to be an indication of whether people agree with your proposals or the premises of your question. As long as you're polite and open-minded, and follow the usual civility rules, nothing much can happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T12:34:41.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-27T23:17:25.440" Score="14" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this proposal is off-topic here but I thought I would give it a try. I apologize in advance if this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've begun watching video lectures on Effective Field Theory with a focus on particle physics from &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-851-effective-field-theory-spring-2013/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; and going through the homework. I thought it would be fun to go through them at the same pace with other users on the site. That way we could ask questions the with regards to the lectures and the homework on Stackexchange and someone would likely be able to answer them. I think it would be good for the site and encourage high level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea for the book club is to do 2 lectures a week and follow with the HW. I like to TeX notes for courses that I take so I'll provide lecture notes. If you would be interested in the idea let me know and I will put together a more firm proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if you are not interested in joining but have any input on how such an idea would work best on the site, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; There are 26 lectures in total. I propose we aim for 2 lectures a week except on weeks where we do the homework, starting next week (have the first 2 lectures watched by the 17th). I think its best to make Monday as the &amp;quot;meeting day&amp;quot; and aim to have the lectures and HW done for this day each week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've watched the first couple lectures and I saw that the first HW should be done after the 3rd lecture. Please let me know if you think the plan needs some modification or have any ideas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post lecture notes on my &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/%7Eajd268/Notes.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; under Effective Field Theory link. Dilaton has been kind enough to open a chatroom for us over &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13401/effective-field-theory&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If you would like to follow along please post so we know you exist! The goal is to have the first two lectures watched by Monday, March 17th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28958" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T20:40:09.947" Title="Effective Field Theory book club" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5560" CreationDate="2014-02-27T23:33:51.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think in terms of making it work on the site, your best bet would be to set up a chat room for those following along to discuss etc informally. When questions come up that are conceptual in nature and are a good fit for the site, it would be good to put them in as questions and answer them on the main site. But for other questions, particularly ones about how to work through the homework assignments, those would probably best be handled informally in a chat room. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T23:33:51.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-01T04:19:27.363" Score="4" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really just posted to get the conversation rolling and please don't infer my view on the topic from the question -- I'll post an answer when I have some time that will reflect my opinion on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there was a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt; question seeking to create a massive compilation of reading materials:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101187/best-sets-of-physics-lecture-notes-and-articles&quot;&gt;Best Sets of Physics Lecture Notes and Articles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed because it definitely does not conform with our current policies concerning &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4044/why-exactly-are-big-list-questions-discouraged-shouldnt-the-faq-say-this-promi&quot;&gt;big-list questions&lt;/a&gt; nor those concerning &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;reference-request questions&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5205/dealing-with-level-of-resources-in-requests&quot;&gt;related discussion&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite clearly not conforming to any of the established policies, the question has attracted 3 reopen votes. I have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/96510/software-for-calculating-feynman-diagrams#comment197589_96510&quot;&gt;admonished in the past&lt;/a&gt; for voting to close against the prevalent opinion described on Meta, so I would like to find out why reopen votes are being cast on a question that so clearly violates all of the established policies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the discussion here is really about whether we still feel the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt; questions are off-topic or not and more specifically whether the question linked above should be opened despite it being against existing policies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T07:17:08.157" Title="Big list resource questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-01T08:44:10.747" Score="8" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26034/silicon-based-life&quot;&gt;Silicon-based life&lt;/a&gt; was closed  for being off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possibly an astrobiology question, and was migrated from the old Astronomy.SE. In which case it is on topic by current rules. Probably. (we might want to have a more critical look into exactly which topics from Astro we have made on topic, as of now it's just the hard-to-verify &quot;what used to be on topic is on topic&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was reopened by five people, due to the reason above. It was closed again due to it being broad, and possibly still off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do with this post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three points to be addressed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should astrobiology be on topic? To what extent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the mentioned post count as acceptable astrobiology?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the mentioned post too broad? (this point is independent of the other two)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be clear as to what you're addressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T19:19:20.360" Title="Should this astrobiology question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5562" CreationDate="2014-03-01T09:14:26.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Voting to close/reopen against policy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dilaton's correct &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/96510/software-for-calculating-feynman-diagrams#comment197589_96510&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@tpg2114 and others, we agreed in meta that questions about software exclusively used by and useful for physicists purpose are allowed. So there is no need to close this question, voted to leave open. Please do not overrule that agreement like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One should not silently oppose policies via the vote to close / vote to reopen buttons. While there is an intentional degree of subjectivity in the closing policies, there is a limit to it and if a post is objectively closeable (or non-closeable), one should not use the 3k tools against that. Too much of this might lead to a review ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one wishes to overrule these policies, they are free to discuss it on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is important for you to cast your votes according to your own assessment of the question. This is especially important when there is a great deal of subjectivity involved, either due to an intentionally subjective policy or the lack of a policy altogether. It's OK to vote against popular opinion on a post -- it helps give a true assessment of what the policies ought to be. But this only applies to cases where there is some subjectivity involved, not when you know that the post is objectively off topic by current policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, vote by the policy, not what you feel the policy should be. When there is subjective leeway offered by the policy or a lack of policy, vote according to what you feel and not what everyone else feels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Best Sets of Physics Lecture Notes and Articles&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the resources post, that seems to be the one &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-reccomendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-reccomendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-reccomendation&lt;/a&gt; to rule them all. Extremely broad, since it more or less is a resource-rec for all physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can do, however, is move the answers into the community wiki historical answers on the older, converted, book questions. I'm not sure if all have been converted yet (Emilio and I had managed a couple, not sure how many the volunteers managed to clear up), but if so we can just move the answers over. And possibly create new book questions for the ones where there aren't answers yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or move to the tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T09:14:26.253" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5563" CreationDate="2014-03-01T10:02:40.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a fundamentally interdisciplinary question. Physicists, chemists, biologists and astronomers will all have their own take on it, so it makes sense for it to be on topic for all four sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could surely argue that it isn't strictly about physics (five people felt that way), but one could equally argue that it is (five people felt that way as well). It certainly isn't so blatantly obviously off topic that it requires a moderator to overrule the community's decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2014-03-01T11:29:34.460" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T11:29:34.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5563" CreationDate="2014-03-01T15:04:35.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What can I say guys, I've seen this topic raised many times in many contexts (Isaac Asimov even wrote on it once), but the answers have &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; been chemistry answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is a interesting--event fascinating topic--but interesting does not imply topicality on physics.se. Nor does utility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to be able to &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; new users that there are limits to what kinds of question we accept here and leaving old posts open simply because they interest us, rather than because they &lt;em&gt;belong&lt;/em&gt; works against that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one I am not going to apologize for: it's a biology question and while they need interdisciplinary input that input comes almost entirely from chemistry. The broadness is a secondary issue as far as I am concern (though &quot;Let me write a list of questions and call it a singular question&quot; is certainly a pet peeve of mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T15:04:35.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-01T16:18:16.180" Score="5" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that we have a &quot;regularization&quot; tag, but I don't think this is the same as dimensional regularization. I've only just started learning about these concepts, so I'm not 100% sure, but I believe regularization is the idea of finding divergencies in integrals. Dimensional regularization is a certain method to regularize integrals almost always corresponding to Feynman diagrams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the distinction between the two is large enough that it justifies the &quot;dimensional regularization&quot; tag. Especially, because &quot;dimensional regularization&quot; plays such an important role in quantum field theory. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26169" LastEditorUserId="26169" LastEditDate="2014-03-01T19:36:23.340" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T19:36:23.340" Title="Would it be useful to have a &quot;dimensional regularization&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5562" CreationDate="2014-03-01T17:11:03.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would really like for it to be possible to have one wiki message that contains a massive list of lecture notes that users find particularly useful. My suggestion is that we allow for on such message where people can add any website/notes that they find useful. However, I would suggest that every set of notes &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; have one or two lines pointing out what particular subject they address and why these note are so good. I believe this rule will ensure that people have actually used the notes themselves, instead of just googling, say, &quot;quantum mechanics&quot; and randomly add notes to the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only disadvantage (I can think of) is that some of the links will die after some time. But I don't think this is the end of the world, and the pros will outweigh the cons .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26169" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T17:11:03.067" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5563" CreationDate="2014-03-01T17:38:04.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things that upset me quite a bit about this business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The role of moderators is to enact community consensus. When there isn't one, their role is to bring the question formally for community consideration on this meta site, so that a communal decision can be taken. A good example of what I consider successful moderator handling of such a situation is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4838/why-should-the-list-of-breakthroughs-in-physics-be-allowed/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular instance, five people voted to close and five people voted to reopen. Neither of these is an indication that the question is on- or off-topic here; rather, they must be taken together as an indication that there is no consensus. Unilateral moderator action in these conditions is, I feel, out of line. This is regardless of whether the question was, or turns out to be, off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I simply do not see the point of closing old questions, and particularly ones which already have answers. If the motivation for that is to keep them from cluttering the front page, or out of a broken-windows approach, I believe closing them is in fact detrimental, and just brings more attention to them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular question is on two gray areas but I would strongly dispute that either of them merits closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is an astrobiology question and as such it is best answered by biologists, or possibly chemists. Indeed, if it were asked today, I would recommend direct migration to biology.se. However, this question was asked on the old astronomy beta and, having been on topic there, it should be taken as on topic here. It is now too old to be migrated, and there are very good reasons for that age limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further than that, the reason we close questions as off-topic is because they clutter and take up the attention of people who do not have the expertise to answer them. This question has two perfectly good answers that quite patently satisfied the OP and are good resources for anyone who lands on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other reason we close questions as off-topic is so that they don't invite new questions like them which, again, clutter the front page. I do not think this question does that. Anyone looking to ask such things would more naturally ask it in the new astronomy beta. If someone does ask it here, we can simply migrate to biology or astronomy as appropriate. If we ever get inundated with those then we can rethink closing old questions which create the impression that biology is on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed slightly too broad for the SE model. However, it has answers that address essentially every point raised. The reason we close questions as too broad is that they are simply unlikely to attract good answers and their broadness undermines their future usefulness. This question has attracted good answers which are short, concise and to the point. I do not think it is even a broken window, and its broadness harms no one. To put it clearly, I do not think it should be closed as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that closing astronomy-related questions sends the message that any astronomy questions are off-topic here. This goes against (1) the discussions at the time of the merger, (2) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2665/8563&quot;&gt;loud objections on this meta site&lt;/a&gt; to the opening of the new astronomy beta, and (3) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6222/why-wouldnt-this-just-be-part-of-the-existing-physics-stack-exchange-site&quot;&gt;loud objections by many phycisists&lt;/a&gt; on the new astronomy beta's discussion page to the reopening of a parallel site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having addressed this particular question, I do think that astrobiology questions have much better venues than this site. Unless the question really does involve physics, at least on the side of the astrobiology, we should point the posters to the biology, astronomy or chemistry betas, and migrate the questions there after consultation with the poster and the target site moderators. We do not get anywhere near enough of these to make the process unfeasibly long or complicated, and this should really be done on a case-by-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the fate of this particular question, I think it is a perfectly valid question and should not be closed, though it is arguably on the wrong site and is too old to be migrated. To keep consistency, and to satiate the moderator thirst &quot;to &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; new users that there are limits to what kinds of question we accept here&quot;, I propose that the question be reopened but that the following banner be added, as a quote, to the end of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note that astrobiology questions are typically not on topic on this site unless they address specific physics issues. If you have a similar question, please consider posting it on our &lt;a href=&quot;http://biology.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; sister sites. For more information, please refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5563/should-this-astrobiology-question-be-reopened&quot;&gt;the discussion on Physics Meta about this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T19:19:20.360" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-03-01T20:00:40.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ovzu6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T00:13:45.377" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-03-01T20:00:40.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-03-02T00:52:15.087" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5263/community-promotion-ads-2014&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8yg4s.png&quot; alt=&quot;Community Promotion Ads are proposed and voted on by the Physics SE community&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T02:49:59.060" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-03-02T00:52:15.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5562" CreationDate="2014-03-02T06:29:56.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I have been more or less happy following this site because it is about PHYSICS. I had a professor in College whose face would light up just by saying &quot;Physics&quot; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly I am aware that this has a long term goal of being a repository of interesting questions and answers to be found by future searches on the topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly I am aware that in education, as in most human organized goals, there are two tendencies a) follow the rules and you cannot go wrong, b) nurture the student and the knowledge will root and flower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually the happy medium is the best in education. There should be rules and goals to challenge and channel, and there should be nurturing to generate spontaneous creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site wants to be a web educational resource it should also keep the happy medium. Following strictly the rules is for games like football and cricket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leave everything ambient and impulsive may be good for poetry and the arts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But physics at its best is stifled by football rules and regulations because the best physics comes out of creativity as great as the one Shakespeare showed in writing his plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am trying to say is that strictly sticking to rules stifles creativity, and educating physicists, who are mainly boys and mostly trained to follow the rules should have enough leeway to allow creativity to emerge. For example: closing &quot;stupid&quot; questions of young boys without looking at their profile or guessing their age, or leaving a kind comment, stifles creativity, no matter the rules, and discourages young people from following the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one reason I would &quot;bend the rules&quot; because we are not playing chess here. We are teaching and learning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for this specific closure, that is not even reviewable, I think the blind following of rules is not useful. An aspiring young physicist googling for &quot;best physics lecture notes&quot; will get this on the search. Does it reflect well on the site to have it &quot;closed as out of topic?&quot; Would it attract him/her to have a look and contribute to the site? I think it would be enough to keep it locked so that it does not pop up on first page, and leave it at that. Not many people come out with &quot;best physics lecture notes&quot; questions to make it a problem, and if they do they can be referred to the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Balance is everything, and remember, it is not a site for football games judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="22494" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T07:17:08.157" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T07:17:08.157" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T07:15:40.160" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently started partaking in the joys of SE. And at first I aspired to have thousands of rep points and badges, so I started answering questions and asking questions. But now I don't care about the rep points I just like knowing that I am helping someone, the same way some SE user has helped me in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said I have recently found myself checking SE frequently and answering the questions right as they come in before most others probably had the chance to. Is this wrong? Should I back off a little and let others answer the questions? I mostly answer the easier ones :$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40580" LastEditorUserId="22494" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T07:22:01.973" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Is it rude to answer too quickly?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5573" CreationDate="2014-03-02T07:24:42.567" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time isn't really (or isn't intended to be) a factor on the SE platform.  The goal is to get the best answers to the best questions.  If you see a question that you can answer, you should answer it.  It doesn't matter if the question is a minute old or a year old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, for the sake of the questioner, the sooner they get a (good) answer, the better.  Overall though, we want questions and answers that are useful to more than one person so answers aren't meant to just help the original questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T07:24:42.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T09:58:32.100" Score="4" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like just giving an answer or asking a question someone doesn't like causes you to lose reputation yet the people who downvote are not required to list why they did so. At this point after only using the site for a day I am regretting signing up. Most people on here seem nice and provide awesome answers, they explain things don't just answer the question for you. Yet on one of my posts someone directly gave me the answer and I got down votes for it even though he walked through the problem in addition a question I asked got put on hold for seemingly no reason and none of the people who put it there would deign to answer the question of why it was put on hold if an answer hadn't already been provided I would have been extremely upset at the rudeness of not one but 5 people with apparently a great deal of experience with the site. In addition people seem to assume either the worst or the people who tend to vote questions down seem to only give them a cursory glance as such I really wish people would provide a detailed answer as to why they are voting it down instead of giving a stock message.&#xA;I would like to point out that this question has been edited by a moderator I assume as I did not have the ability to check off on the edits. I would like to reaffirm the the political in the title and i dislike the inclusion of my as I was using those as examples however I have seen it happen to a couple of other questions as well. This is another example of what I don't like no comment left on the hows an whys for the change. This wa posted in the meta area and was tagged as discussion. It was neither harming nor damning, nor did it contain anything that violated the rules of the site but was edited without permission anyway. I understand this when it comes to the question part of the site but the meta side really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41607" LastEditorUserId="41607" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T10:33:23.297" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T16:53:09.447" Title="Why are questions downvoted without an explanation?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5575" CreationDate="2014-03-02T13:42:00.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your closed / downvoted questions, have a look at the banner below them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D8i4e.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, which explains why the question is off topic in great detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the banner was put there is that closevoters need not explain themselves every time they see a homework question. If the post is closed with a banner, you are expected to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is for the post, not the user. Don't take downvotes personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the title edit, you're addressing a rather different issue than the one in the post, so the title was edited. There's nothing political here, the question was closed according to established policy. Talking about politicalness would spark unnecessary side discussions and derail the main point, so it was edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T13:42:00.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5575" CreationDate="2014-03-02T13:48:47.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One situation when people vote to close without leaving comments is for homework questions. This site is not a homework help forum; it is a place to ask conceptual questions that are useful for future visitors, and homework questions are rarely that. You should really read our homework guidance on this meta site before asking new ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason few people comment on those is that (1) they are often trawling through ten or so similar questions I  a review queue, and mostly that (2) the homework closure reason,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was painstakingly worked out over a long time, essentially says it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also note that there was recently a strong movement towards a much stricter (at least formally) policy. This is a long term, ongoing discussion, and you can find most of it easily by searching for the homework and discussion tags on this meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dislike of homework questions, and particularly of of those that look copy-pasted from a book or assignment, may explain the downvotes. Those are secret by design and schemes to force downvoters to comment have been brought up and rejected multiple times. If you ask politely for input on how to improve your question,  in the comments, it will probably be enough for someone to stop by and help. Drive-by downvotes can be annoying to us all but they are a net positive feature of this site, as they are everyone's way of expressing that they found a question 'unclear or not useful'. Make sure that yours are not, and you'll be safer from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your comments about this meta thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was indeed edited by a moderator, though 2k+ users also have the ability to validate edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what you mean by &quot;political&quot; but the term has come to have very specific meanings on this meta, through many very ugly discussions which you probably don't want to get dragged into. Honestly, I don't see why you used the term at all. The moderator intervention was probably meant to defuse confrontations, though I agree that a message explaining why would have been helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, there is never any permanent harm done, as you can always re-edit. (On the other hand, avoid direct rollbacks without good reason and appropriate discussion.) I like your new title best of all three, in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T13:48:47.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5579" CreationDate="2014-03-02T21:35:07.007" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one distinguish between any of the following reasons why he or she has not received a response to his or her question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The question is unnoticed by many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Not many feel confident or qualified to provide an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) The question is too trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) The question is too confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) No one is interested in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have posted two questions already. Feel free to investigate them and suggest improvements for them to invoke better feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40289" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T15:07:51.000" Title="How tell the difference between the following modes of unresponsiveness to your question: unnoticed, unanswerable, trivial, confusing, or apathetic?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5578" CreationDate="2014-03-02T22:17:37.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell/predict:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a &quot;view&quot; counter for each question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No way of knowing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It'd likely be closed if its too trivial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone would likely comment that it's confusing, a close vote for &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; would also likely come&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No way of knowing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that if you really want an answer to a question, you can always add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; to the question (though this requires 75+ rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T15:07:51.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5578" CreationDate="2014-03-03T01:25:21.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address your questions in particular: they are quite advanced technical questions, which immediately means only a small subset of the site's user base will be able to answer them. It's possible that such people might miss your questions. When you have more rep you can offer a bounty, which will help with this. Or, if you feel you can improve the questions, editing them will bump them back to the front page. (But please don't make small edits just for the sake of bumping - an edit should always make a substantial improvement to the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, your questions have been up-voted (especially the first one), and both of them have been favourited by four people. (The favorite button is the star underneath the up and down vote buttons. The small number underneath it is the number of people who have used it.) This suggests that in your case, people are interested in the questions but don't know the answer. For specific technical questions like this, you shouldn't be too surprised if it takes a little while for an answer to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T01:25:21.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5573" CreationDate="2014-03-03T03:32:23.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go forth and answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are some sites where this can lead to issues. For example, on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; a number of users &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem&quot;&gt;race to be the first to post minimally helpful links&lt;/a&gt;, since that gets the most reputation per unit effort, resulting in a bunch of decidedly unhelpful tidbits that look like they were drawn from a live help session. As long as you are posting good, thorough answers, this isn't a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another concern on &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt; is that there is a very small core of very good answerers (mostly the people who developed TeX and its brethren), and if they answer all the easy questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1867/should-high-rep-users-hang-back-a-little&quot;&gt;new users will be discouraged from participating in the community&lt;/a&gt;. I doubt we will ever have that problem here. Between the number of questions we get and the breadth of topics they cover, no small group of people could answer them all (at least not well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other catch I'll mention is that you should not just blindly answer things. Take a look around at what established users take to be good questions. For example, if someone posts their homework assignment expecting us to just do it for them, we (high-rep users) &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; close it, and probably throw a few downvotes at it too. Our efforts at keeping up the quality and integrity of this site are made more difficult when new users quickly post solutions to these questions before we react.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should keep up your enthusiasm. My own experience is that after reaching 10k rep I grew far more picky in terms of which questions I would spend time answering. There are certainly posts where I know I could write a good answer, but I'm tired of explaining the same topic (e.g. the expansion of the universe) for the umpteenth time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T03:32:23.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5583" CreationDate="2014-03-03T14:17:26.567" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{align}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a = b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\label{my equation}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\end{align}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equation \ref{my equation} is my equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on editing my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101464/alternative-representation-of-the-covariant-derivative&quot;&gt;Alternative representation of the covariant derivative?&lt;/a&gt; to make it more compact and concise, but it would be nice to save time and not have to renumber all of the equations &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2887/2451&quot;&gt;manually&lt;/a&gt; a third time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40289" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T15:28:47.870" Title="How to write equations with automatic equation numbering like \label{ref} in latex?" Tags="|support|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-03-03T16:01:08.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5582" CreationDate="2014-03-03T15:28:47.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\tag{something to refer back to}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ C^2 = A^2 + B^2 \,. \tag{PT} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then later you write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring back to (PT) we see that side the length of the hypotenuse is clearly 13.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to type the refernces yourself. I tend to use &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;**&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;$\dag$&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;$\ddag$&lt;/code&gt;, or (as above) mnemonics for Physics SE posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T15:28:47.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5553" CreationDate="2014-03-04T19:04:17.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also think it is valuable to have some place that sometimes posts 'real-life' examples of work physicists are doing outside of academic physics.  For example, medical physics, aeronautics, and computer science - which may actually be engineering problems - but may employ more persons that have physics degrees than universities. There are likely students that read here that know better than to flat-out ask &quot;What can I do with a degree in Physics?&quot; but that are very interested in formulating an answer to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a second criterion for including or closing an 'engineering' question might be whether the contribution of a trained physicist is likely necessary for its solution in a real-life situation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12951" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T19:04:17.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-04T19:33:10.510" Score="10" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has there been any feedback on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5488/a-week-of-community-closing-what-should-be-disallowed-homework&quot;&gt;A week of community closing: what should be disallowed homework?&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that it was all a bit underwhelming and the close ratio was largely unaffected. Has there been any discussions amongst the mods, and if so what conclusions did you reach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T08:16:07.780" Title="Feedback on the &quot;no close&quot; week" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5585" CreationDate="2014-03-05T08:16:07.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been no private discussion among the moderators about this, and we're not planning on having any. Nothing about the results of the experiment really needs to be kept private, so whatever discussion we have will be on meta posts or in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; and thus everyone can read it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I've been very busy for the past week and haven't had a chance to think about it much, but I have been hoping to see some hard statistics on closures during the week the moderators were avoiding closing homework questions. (And perhaps also afterwards, since I think I've only closed a couple of HW questions myself even since the trial ended.) My impression, to the extent I noticed anything different, was that there was little difference in what types of questions got closed, it just took longer to do it, but I wasn't keeping a particularly close eye on the site so I'm not particularly confident in that assessment. If that impression turns out to be correct, it would mean there are no significant changes that need to be made to the scope section of the homework policy, except perhaps with regard to graduate-level HW questions, which we didn't get a chance to examine during that week (simply because nobody asked any, that I know of).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T08:16:07.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5590" CreationDate="2014-03-05T09:07:19.250" Score="2" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have very recently started participating in SE, and I have (embarrassingly) answered some the HW questions. After seeing some the meta posts of the more experienced users and mods, I now feel pretty bad about answering HW questions (Sorry!!). I have never posted any HW questions either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is who is the worst offender, the asker or the answerer? I am assuming it's the answerer because they are presumably more experienced and should know better than to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I have stopped answering HW questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40580" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T23:33:41.450" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T07:46:19.687" Title="What's Worse: Posting a HW Question or Answering a HW Question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5587" CreationDate="2014-03-05T09:21:14.390" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both are bad, the answerers are probably worse. But it's not always completely clear where to draw the line, to me at least, where homework ends where &quot;proper&quot; questions start. (I'm not quite sure if that your question here is a real question suited for the meta board either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's good if you feel bad for a while as it will prevent you from doing it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T09:21:14.390" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-05T17:11:32.197" Score="4" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a bunch of disputed not-an-answer flags in the queue recently. While it's great that people are actively flagging things, this trend does suggest some disagreement on or misunderstanding of what these flags should be used for. Is that really the case? &lt;strong&gt;Are people clear on the purpose of the not-an-answer flag, and if not, is there anything we should be doing to make it more clear?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a first step, let's try something. All of the following were flagged as not an answer by multiple high-rep users, and the flag was disputed, often by multiple high-rep users. What I'd like to hear from you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you would flag any of these as not-an-answer, what's your justification for doing so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you would dispute an existing not-an-answer flag on any of these, what's your justification for doing so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd like to get at least one opinion on each side for each answer. The point is not to correctly guess whether each of these is NAA, so even if (&lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; if) your justification turns out to be &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; I still want to hear it. The point is for us moderators to understand whether, and how, people are misunderstanding the purpose of the NAA flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101895&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question should more accurately have been, &amp;quot;Why does sound travel faster in solid iron than in liquid mercury even though mercury has higher density?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were the question phrased that way, the answer would be more obvious. At temperatures at which both metals are liquid or both metals are solid, sound travels faster in the denser metal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101563&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chemical bonds in the dye would be broken by high energy UV photons from the sun - the moon has no atmosphere or ozone layer to protect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why so cheap? Remember NASA in the 60s was a different organisation, led by an engineering challenge to get to the moon and back, nothing else mattered. Need a flag? Just get whatever fits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more modern Nasa would have had an entire division of flag-ness populated by PR professionals and managers. With nationwide competitions for k12 children, a careful check that the flag supplier employed a suitable number of disabled veterans and each star made by a different agency in each state. All resulting in a $5,000,000 flag with it's own twitter following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it wouldn't have any scientists and engineers to actually get it to the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26193&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say the black hole would need to be incredibly huge for this to be possible, are you thinking of it's size from the perspective of our universe? This seems wrong to me because the black hole would have to be located in another much much larger universe than our own. So even though from our perspective it would seem huge, in the universe where the black hole exists it could be average sized. Kind of like m-theory but instead of equal sized branes an infinite progression of smaller and smaller (or bigger and bigger) universes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60195&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The birds must feel something, because they usually sit on the ground wire, not the high voltage wires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing special about these answers; they're simply the latest ones. But I've been seeing this pattern for quite a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Are we clear on what the &quot;not an answer&quot; flag is for?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5587" CreationDate="2014-03-05T17:47:05.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no objective way of answering that, and I see little point in apportioning, and much less measuring, blame over homework questions. You shouldn't really be seeing either as 'offenders', and they cannot be compared to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, answering homework questions does indeed actively do damage to the level of the site. Every homework question that a new user gets answered encourages them to post another one; every homework question that a new user sees with an answer encourages them to sign up and post their own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the impulse to answer, but it is important that off-topic questions remain &lt;em&gt;operationally&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, and that means that they not get answered in the few hours before they get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: don't feel you're &quot;worse&quot; than homework askers - just stop answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this is a perfectly fine question to bring up on meta. This part of the site is for discussing the site itself and for clarifying any questions you have about it and the community. Another viable venue is the chat room, but for a question like this, where a more permanent record is helpful to more people, meta is the recommended choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T17:47:05.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5589" CreationDate="2014-03-05T18:03:44.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just looked at my flagging history and I did indeed go through those four examples. I flagged two of them as Not An Answer, and I disputed the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/101572/8563&quot;&gt;the moon flag one&lt;/a&gt;, because it is more of a rant than anything, and most of all it does not address the core of the question, as to how bleaching might be avoided, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26193/is-the-observable-region-of-the-universe-within-the-event-horizon-of-a-super-mas/101622#101622&quot;&gt;the observable-universe one&lt;/a&gt;, because it is confusing, doesn't really say much, and simply piles on speculation on an already large helping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disputed the other two. Looking at them again, I guess they do fall on the wrong side of the line. I'm not very sure why I flagged like that, to be honest; it may partly have been a desire to not be too harsh on new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101895/why-does-sound-travel-faster-in-iron-than-mercury-even-though-mercury-has-a-high/101914#101914&quot;&gt;The sound-speed-in-mercury one&lt;/a&gt; is, I think, not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; far from an (incorrect) attempt at an answer. It happens fairly often that someone takes a bad question and reformulates so that it has an answer; this looks like a failed attempt at that. I still see it in a bit of a gray area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60195/how-much-of-current-flows-through-a-bird-sitting-on-a-power-line/101807#101807&quot;&gt;the current-through-birds one&lt;/a&gt;, I felt if they could back up their assertions it might eventually become a full answer, even if incorrect. I guess I also acted partly to balance out the other comments, which seemed out of proportion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your more general question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;not very much.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags are hard to handle. In particular, it has happened to me a few times that I see a very bad answer and flag it, and it gets declined with the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were on answers with very limited value to anyone (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/99507/theoretical-space-station-components/99515#99515&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30501/why-does-a-gas-inside-a-closed-container-experience-atmosperic-pressure-when-the/97819#97819&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). If it turns out that the Very Low Quality flag does not cover those answers, what &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; it cover? This sort of thing has made me quite jumpy at the time of flagging posts, and it tends to make me err on the side of forgiveness rather than harshness. I note now that this was, I think, only for the VLQ queue and not for the Not An Answer one, but I can't really separate the two in my mind / recollections all that clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T18:03:44.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-05T21:11:34.977" Score="7" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts from new users often requiring edits that add LaTeX code. When I review edits from users that add such code, all I see on the LHS and RHS are the raw LaTeX codes, such as &lt;code&gt;$a_y=g$&lt;/code&gt;. This is the case even after I select the &quot;rendered&quot; view button. I'd rather just compare the two rendered outputs. Admittedly I have only noticed this on my Mac's Safari, and haven't tried other browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to view rendered LaTeX when reviewing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29216" LastEditorUserId="29216" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T21:53:59.830" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T00:29:48.640" Title="How can I see rendered MathJax/LaTeX when reviewing edits?" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5592" CreationDate="2014-03-05T21:15:30.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just run the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1088/should-chat-have-tex-support&quot;&gt;chatjax&lt;/a&gt; bookmarklet on the diff. It usually works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess showing a rendered diff of math is a rather non-trivial problem, so they just show the latex diff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T21:15:30.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5589" CreationDate="2014-03-05T23:24:58.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Disputed:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101895/why-does-sound-travel-faster-in-iron-than-mercury-even-though-mercury-has-a-high/101914#101914&quot;&gt;Sound speed in mercury&lt;/a&gt;: I felt this correctly pointed out (albeit in a roundabout way) that apples were being compared to oranges, and so the density-sound speed relation shouldn't even be expected to hold. Sure it might be incomplete, but the OP didn't give any specific direction for ways to go, so I can't say this isn't an answer. I feel &lt;strong&gt;answers that could be better are still answers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Flagged:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26193/is-the-observable-region-of-the-universe-within-the-event-horizon-of-a-super-mas/101622#101622&quot;&gt;Universe as a black hole&lt;/a&gt;: Seemed like it was &lt;strong&gt;asking for clarification&lt;/strong&gt;, and as such was a comment, not an answer. I tried to come to this decision without worrying about the correctness/non-mainstreamness of the answer.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60195/how-much-of-current-flows-through-a-bird-sitting-on-a-power-line/101807#101807&quot;&gt;Birds on a power line&lt;/a&gt;: This didn't answer the question asked. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; the OP had asked &quot;Can birds detect electricity flowing through power lines?&quot; &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; this would be an acceptable answer. Again, it may be factually wrong, but it answers the question in that case. However, the &lt;strong&gt;OP asked for a quantitative result, and this only gives a qualitative answer&lt;/strong&gt;. In that way it is a comment, not an answer. A qualitative answer that explains &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a quantitative result would be nigh impossible would be acceptable, but this post doesn't support itself at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Untouched:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101563/is-it-possible-to-avoid-the-radiation-that-caused-the-american-flag-turned-into/101572#101572&quot;&gt;Flag on the Moon&lt;/a&gt;: I agree it's an out-of-place rant that went a bit too long. Mitigating circumstance: The OP asked for it (&quot;Why so cheap? Didn't NASA know...?&quot;). Also, if left by itself, the first sentence would count as &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; sort of answer (at about the same level of completeness as the sound speed case above). Question: &lt;strong&gt;Can a post with an answer be deemed &quot;not an answer&quot; due to other stuff in it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the overall purpose of NAA: I feel I know how I use it, in the sense that I have self-consistent criteria that I apply objectively. And I feel my flagging states suggest I'm mostly in line with the moderators and broader community on this: 159/176 (90%) NAA/invalid/moderator attention flags deemed helpful. And my own feeling is that the flags I see from others aren't far off from what I would judge myself. The first page of my flagging history has 46 NAA's I've issued and only 5 invalids. So again, ~90% agreement.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; If &quot;not an answer&quot; applied to posts that were completely wrong, based on a grave misunderstanding of basic principles, well then we should flag most of the posts on this site that use the word &quot;horizon.&quot; But that's an exasperation for another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Caveat: I will sometimes be on the border and ignore something in the flag queue until it goes away. So there is missing data in a sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T23:24:58.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5592" CreationDate="2014-03-06T00:29:48.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean like the third paragraph in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/35315&quot;&gt;this edit&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kgjie.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's kind of a tricky case.  The problem is that the change is &lt;em&gt;in the middle of&lt;/em&gt; an equation, so the diff engine sticks some extra markup in there to highlight it, causing MathJax not to recognize it as a valid equation at all.  To fix it, either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a) the SE diff generator would need be changed to treat MathJax sections as atomic blocks (which would have the unfortunate side effect of always showing the entire equation as changed, even if the actual change was to a tiny part of it), or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;b) MathJax itself would have to be somehow tweaked to recognize the diff markup and replicate it in the rendered equation.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4130/the-scope-of-newcommand-is-the-entire-page/12502#12502&quot;&gt;I've done a bit of MathJax hacking myself&lt;/a&gt;, but that sounds way beyond my skills.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the first option above would be the more practical one, but I can't really tell &amp;mdash; AFAIK, the diff generation is done on the server side, so only SE developers actually know how the code works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4646" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T00:29:48.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5589" CreationDate="2014-03-06T01:45:28.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;NOTE: When I write up the first part of this, I am referring only to the context provided at the questions and answers themselves, at the time I am writing v1 of this answer. In the second part of this answer, I will address other comments provided here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Iron/Mercury sound:&lt;/strong&gt; I would flag as Not an Answer. That answer just says, &quot;If you asked this slightly different question, then the answer would be trivial.&quot; I would be okay with that, if the answer provided an explanation of why the original question doesn't make sense, and why that re-interpretation of the question is natural or needed. I would also be okay with that if, in addition to that, also answered the question as actually asked (in fact, I frequently do this myself). But the answer doesn't provide any of that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag on Moon:&lt;/strong&gt; I would not flag. I would dispute an NaA flag. The third paragraph is not helpful, and should not be there. By itself, it would be Not an Answer. But the rest of the answer actually does address the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Universe in black hole:&lt;/strong&gt; I would not flag. I would dispute an NaA flag. I read this answer as an attempt to interpret the question so it makes sense, and answer what the answerer regards as the question. I contrast this with the Iron/Mercury question because the answer here explains why he thinks he needs to apply his understanding to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Birds on a wire:&lt;/strong&gt; I would not flag. Without the comments provided there by Emilio and Brandon, I would dispute a flag. The comments point out the the premise of the answer is incorrect or needs to be justified. If the premise of the answer is incorrect, I regard it as Not an Answer (though I don't always flag such answers). I would not dispute an NaA flag if I saw either of those comments attached to the flag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reactions to other answers here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;strong&gt;Can a post with an answer be deemed &quot;not an answer&quot; due to other stuff in it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say that, in theory, an answer could contain enough off-topic content for me to regard it as Not an Answer. In that case, the off-topic content would have to overwhelm the on-topic content to such an extent that it becomes difficult to find the on-topic answer. I don't see that in this case. I'm sure I've seen that happen in the past, but I can't think of any examples. UPDATE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15006/9719&quot;&gt;Ron Maimon's answer&lt;/a&gt; to a GR resource request question is a perfect example of what I mean by this. The first sentence should just be a comment, and the rest of the answer doesn't even attempt to answer the question. I have just flagged it as Not An Answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If &quot;not an answer&quot; applied to posts that were completely wrong, based on a grave misunderstanding of basic principles [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it has happened to me a few times that I see a very bad answer and flag it, and it gets declined with the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, I have flagged things that I found so egregiously wrong or incoherent from a physics standpoint that I regarded them as not answers. And I have see that reply from whoever answered my flag. The result is that I am slower to flag things as NaA than I used to be. The answers I gave above about what I would have flagged (not necessarily about what I would have disputed) are, I believe, in line with what the team and the mods intend for that flag to mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NAA is for posts that are a separate question or a comment, or otherwise make no attempt whatsoever to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are two points where I disagree with what I think is the official intent of the NAA flag. One is the Birds on a wire answer.I believe the intent of the flag is not to include that answer as NaA, and leave it to voting to sort out the value of that answer. But I don't consider that an attempt to answer the question unless/until the author adds a justification for the premise of that answer. And I think we should consider deleting some answers like that if they don't add that justification after some time. The second point is that some answers are attempts to answer the question in a way, but the actual physics content is just incoherent. These answers are not just wrong, they're Not Even Wrong. Again, my understanding is that the official intent is to downvote those into oblivion, but I think we should consider deleting content that is physically incoherent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T16:11:34.780" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2014-03-06T03:05:35.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radio-frequency&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radio-frequency&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radio-frequency&lt;/a&gt;→&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radio&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radio&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radio&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;24 vs. 54 questions tagged; no wikis for either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36804" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T03:05:35.737" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-03-06T03:05:35.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-06T17:54:09.443" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101663/object-at-incline-and-forces-acting-on-it&quot;&gt;Where do these formulas for an object being pushed up an incline come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I showed enough effort, I am not asking someone to do my homework, I am not asking someone to check my answers, and I am not being unclear on what I am having problems with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main idea of my question is I have a book which has two formulas; I am trying to prove them to see how the author arrived at them and I need help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if my question should be closed. If so I'll gladly delete it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38153" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T08:35:46.937" Title="Should my question really be on hold?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5600" CreationDate="2014-03-06T18:44:29.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is certainly better than a lot of the low-quality homework questions we get here, but at its core, what you're asking is &quot;where do these formulas come from?&quot; That's not a conceptual question. What we mean by asking about a specific physics concept is something like &quot;What does the sin(theta) in this equation represent?&quot; or &quot;Is it valid to set w cos(theta) = 0 here?&quot; (where you would present reasons why you think it might not be but you're not sure) or even &quot;Why is this block able to slide up the incline when my calculations show that it shouldn't be able to?&quot; Basically, you're supposed to dig down into your work and identify the one specific idea that you can't understand or figure out, which is keeping you from proceeding with the problem. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to ask your one question in the title, and it shouldn't be &quot;how do I derive this?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the bottom line is, no, you haven't showed enough effort. You're fairly close, though. With a little discussion here on meta we could probably help you figure out how to edit your question so that it would be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T18:44:29.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-07T08:33:37.150" Score="13" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time of typing this we have exactly 30,000 questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a lot of effort by both askers and answerers. Well done to everybody concerned! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T08:33:37.150" Title="We have 30,000 questions!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2014-03-09T15:49:38.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5623" CreationDate="2014-03-07T22:13:08.077" Score="7" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently we've been discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/102109/numerical-ising-model-wolff-algorithm-and-correlations&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; whether questions on numerical algorithms should be allowed when the context is a physics problem.  The last time this was discussed on Meta seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2898/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-2&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/should-we-allow-computational-questions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), which implies that such questions should be allowed. However, computational questions have historically beenoff topic according to the definition of our scope in the help center, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/921/computational-science-in-the-faq&quot;&gt;last time I proposed changing that&lt;/a&gt;, the only response was to wait until the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computational Science site&lt;/a&gt; had taken off and reevaluate the decision then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, now Computational Science is well established, and nevertheless it seems we are of the opinion that numerical algorithms in a physical context should be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this assessment accurate? Does the community want questions on numerical algorithms in a physical context to be on topic for us? (this is just a last opportunity for anyone who disagrees to speak out)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How should we word the item that would need to be added to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center's on-topic page&lt;/a&gt; under the &quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot; heading to reflect this?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:29:46.077" Title="Adding computational science to the list of on-topic items in the Help Center" Tags="|discussion|scope|software-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5603" CreationDate="2014-03-08T04:43:47.603" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly support adding computational topics to our site, but where we draw the line needs to be very clear. Here is where I would draw it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we can't do&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot answer programming questions (How does one implement X method for Y equation?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot debug code (I programmed Crank-Nicholson but it's not working, what did I do wrong?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot optimize code (My matrix inversion routine used for Crank-Nicholson is running slow, how can I speed it up?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot advise on libraries/languages/compilers/etc (Should I use PETSc or Trillinos for my code? or Is Fortran better for scientific programming? or Should I use OpenMP or MPI to make my code parallel?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What we can do&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can advise on numerical methods &lt;em&gt;when tied to a physical problem and not a generic P/ODE&lt;/em&gt; (I am studying shock-turbulence interaction, is WENO or AUSM better? or What methods would one use to solve diffusion problems?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can discuss scheme quality/limitations (What makes the original Murman-Cole scheme not conservative in transonic potential flows?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can discuss scheme design (How does one determine if a scheme is conservative?) &lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: This one may be controversial here as that might be better in SciComp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The punchline&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say we include it but with the caveat that it needs to be tied to physical problems and not to programming. No implementation issues, no optimization, no CODE. Just concepts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T04:43:47.603" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-03-08T22:18:01.060" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;Browse through our unanswered questions! http://mma-se-ads.herokuapp.com/static/physics/unanswered.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T22:18:01.060" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-03-08T22:18:01.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-09T07:58:46.870" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing after the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5563/should-this-astrobiology-question-be-reopened&quot;&gt;astrobiology discussion&lt;/a&gt; was clear: our policy that &quot;anything on topic on the old astrophysics site is on topic here&quot; seems to be a bit vague and under question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the wording does not make it clear, this was the &lt;em&gt;initial&lt;/em&gt; meaning behind this policy: &quot;The &lt;em&gt;topics&lt;/em&gt; which are allowed on the old astronomy site are on topic here too&quot;, with no statement about the other factors (broadness, etc) which can get a question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts on this interpretation? Does it need to be tweaked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, we might want to review this rather vague-in-retrospect policy and come up with a definitive replacement. Something like &quot;astrophotography, observational astronomy, and astrobiology&quot; are on topic, with a definition for what we count as &quot;astrophotography / etc&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5563/should-this-astrobiology-question-be-reopened#comment16344_5566&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; raises a valid point: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+1 for pointing out that this is biology, not physics. Astrobiology deals with things like &quot;What signatures does photosynthesis imprint in planetary spectra?&quot; or &quot;Do we know of any organisms that could withstand the UV radiation in the habitable zone of an M dwarf?&quot; And yes, I'm speaking as an astrophysicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of that discussion revolved around the question being astrobiology and thus on topic, however the above point seems to throw a wrench in the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that such confusions exist, I suggest we come with definitive criteria as to what is considered &quot;on topic astronomy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or possibly have a second look at this policy in general, since the &quot;we are an astronomy and physics&quot; site never really took off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-06-08T16:31:42.797" Title="Let's refine our definition of what scope we import from Astronomy.SE" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5608" CreationDate="2014-03-09T14:57:54.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; this answer addresses a previous version of the question, which contained an error that caused me to misinterpret it. It's mostly irrelevant now, but I'm keeping it around because I want to pick up the discussion later, in another post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not massively in favour of trying to come up with a definition of &quot;on-topic astrobiology&quot;. I'd much rather just be a bit more inclusive in general about what we consider on topic. I mean, so what if the only physics input to that question comes from chemistry? Isn't chemistry a sub-field of physics, especially when you're talking about something as basic as the difference between carbon and silicon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently we have this situation where the mantra is, it has to be &quot;about physics&quot; to be on topic. This is said to be defined in the help centre, but it isn't really. All the help centre does is give a list of types of question, each of which is defined in terms of physics. So it's &quot;about physics&quot; if it's on topic, and it's on topic if it's &quot;about physics&quot;, and the only way this can really be determined is through a body of vaguely worded case law that's scattered through a thousand meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a far better solution would be to re-think this whole &quot;about physics&quot; business. The quality of questions on this site has dropped massively over the past couple of years, so we're desperately in need of more good ones. I'm not saying that we should be inclusive when it comes to low quality or non-productive questions, but I do think we should lighten up a bit when it comes to the &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; of questions. Arbitrarily lopping off whole sub-fields just because some people feel they belong in a different discipline just seems to be shooting ourselves in the foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2014-03-10T06:58:34.353" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T06:58:34.353" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-11T05:29:05.973" Score="1" ViewCount="756" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find instruction anywhere on how to use Mathjax or whatever it is called to correctly format equations etc. I remember seeing a list but can't locate it on the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28987" OwnerDisplayName="user88720" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-03-11T08:15:12.573" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T08:15:12.573" Title="How to use Mathjax?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-03-11T20:34:04.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5610" CreationDate="2014-03-11T05:41:06.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathjax is pretty similar to Latex I believe. I would recommend learning Latex since it is more comprehensive and will be more helpful in the long run. However, it is not really necessary. Math SE has good references regarding Mathjax&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36047" OwnerDisplayName="user97554" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:21.967" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T05:41:06.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-03-11T21:05:58.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other commitments in your life will be sufficient to regulate your participation on this site; you just have to ensure that you're not ignoring other opportunities that can help you live your life more fully the way you want to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is my participation optimized for the sort of life I could live?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I was passionate about research and hoping to go into teaching later on, I'd be using the site to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look at every question and answer here, to get a good idea about how&#xA;people think about typical problems  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Practice my latex and writing&#xA;skills, to make writing a research paper easier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wade through the trivia that may unearth an item of knowledge that might help me or a colleague later on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look at the activity of the talented users here, so I may learn something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, me coming on to the site becomes a problem if it undermines the sort of life I can lead, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;logging on every five minutes out of fear that I might not answer a question before everyone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;re-reading the same questions and answers over again, without improving them in some way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T21:05:58.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5620" CreationDate="2014-03-13T16:07:10.103" Score="14" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have observed .3k users creating a lot of new tags that often in the end have to be manually remove again, which are time consuming for editors, and which, in turn, create unnecessary extra traffic on the front page. Phys.SE is now 3.3 years old. It seems reasonable to assume that we already have most of the tags that we need now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should we raise the privilege limit for tag creation from .3k to 1k?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt; has recently done this. For users without enough reputation, it will still be possible to suggest/propose new tags, e.g., via meta posts or in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this meta post is only about the privilege limit to &lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt; new tags. The post is not about merging/synonymizing/deleting tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T22:04:53.527" Title="Raising the privilege limit for tag creation from 300 to 1k?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-13T17:44:24.637" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has autocompletion been discussed for the search at the top right of a stackexchange sight? I'm relatively new to stackexchange in that my oldest account is 5 months old, so I am not sure if this has been suggested before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature would seem to be useful for physics, since we are often typing the same words into search, i.e. &quot;Feynman path integral&quot; &quot;covering group&quot; etc. Additionally an autocomplete feature for search might be of aid to beginning users of the sight (beginning physics exploration), who might not know what to query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how the task of subdividing the code to build the autocompletion would go, but that seems secondary right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;main question&lt;/strong&gt; is whether users of the sight would find the feature of autocompletion for search useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34564" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T17:44:24.637" Title="Adding an autocomplete for search" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-14T11:42:03.097" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a few questions on this website. I always try to answer questions which I can.  I never wrote any of my questions hastily. I have read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&lt;/a&gt; help page many a times. Nearly 5 or 6 of my questions have been deleted by the &quot;community moderator&quot; because they were silently downvoted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My 3 questions are still alive which are downvoted silently.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/86526/ac-through-a-pure-inductor&quot;&gt;AC through a pure inductor&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90858/what-is-the-aperture-in-the-hydraulic-analogy-of-ohms-law&quot;&gt;What is the aperture in the hydraulic analogy of Ohm&amp;#39;s law&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82464/can-a-photon-survive-a-collision-if-so-is-it-at-rest-during-the-process&quot;&gt;Can a photon survive a collision? If so, is it at rest during the process?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why  were my questions downvoted silently?&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 6 answers are also downvoted. These are:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/99377/relationship-between-stopping-potential-and-work-function/99385#99385&quot;&gt;Relationship between stopping potential and work function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/94032/using-sin-or-cos-for-computing-shm/94096#94096&quot;&gt;Using $\sin()$ or $\cos()$ for computing SHM?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89496/centripetal-force-in-frame-of-reference-of-body-moving-in-a-circle/89500#89500&quot;&gt;Centripetal force in frame of reference of body moving In a circle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82828/explain-what-happens-to-object-in-lift/82831#82831&quot;&gt;Explain what happens to object in lift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95636/elastic-potential-energy/95642#95642&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95636/elastic-potential-energy/95642#95642&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87057/angular-displacement/87066#87066&quot;&gt;Angular Displacement&lt;/a&gt; ,I will never forget this one, I spend 2 days in finding the reference book.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Why were my answers downvoted silently.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: If my posts are downvoted silently due to the grammatical and formatting mistakes then I want to tell the community one important thing:- I have the privilege to downvote, keep downvoting, I have started to find posts which have minor grammatical and spelling mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T23:12:12.643" Title="Why were my posts downvoted and closed?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5618" CreationDate="2014-03-14T12:43:31.190" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will only address your last comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar and formatting matter.&lt;/strong&gt; It is important that you recognize this site not only as a place to learn physics, but also (primarily?) as a place to learn to &lt;em&gt;communicate&lt;/em&gt; physics. It is not enough to have it clear in your own head, and you also need to communicate it correctly. An answer that has serious grammar issues can be so hard to read that it is simply easier to give up, and particularly so for the parts of your audience that do not speak fluent English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formatting can also be harmful to an answer to the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;point of rendering it unreadable. Answers which have unadjusted para-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;graph lengths which have&lt;br&gt;&#xA;you chasing the line all over the place are very tiring to read and will often cause downvotes simply in self-defense. It is important that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;each paragraph contain one point and one point only and that it be visually&lt;br&gt;&#xA;separated from the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;other paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange text editor was built by web designers who have thought about such things for a long time. Let the editor do its job! Do not hijack its formatting like I did above. Enter each paragraph in a single go, without any unnecessary line breaks (which is essentially only equations), and leave an empty line in the text editor between different paragraphs. Finally, always use displayed equations (double dollar signs) whenever an equation deserves it own line. Isn't this a lot easier to read than the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that threatening to downvote other posts is not as constructive as, say, asking for help as to how to better format your material. So you have found other posts with grammar and spelling mistakes? Good! Go and edit them so that they are better and easier for everyone to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a counter-argument, you may ask why people don't edit &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; posts for spelling and formatting. There may be many reasons for that. One is that you do seem to have gone to extra lengths to make your formatting hard to read, and it is sometimes felt as unpolite to go and undo your work, even if it is completely in the wrong direction. Another reason is that sometimes the edits would be too minor and would not merit bumping the thread up. Finally, when the edits are major enough to merit that, they usually render the answer essentially impossible to understand and they would make for an unreasonable amount of work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note, let me say that it is important to not take down-votes personally. Because any question or answer always takes in some amount of work, a downvote always tends to sting; this happens to everyone. However, when people downvote, it is as an indication that the post is &lt;code&gt;not useful&lt;/code&gt;, as the tooltip says. If you get a downvote, take it as an invitation to reconsider the physics content of your post, and to make sure that the presentation is optimal for transmitting said content to people who do not know it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T12:43:31.190" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5616" CreationDate="2014-03-14T22:04:53.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Let's look at some data:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past 365 days, 15 tags have been created by users with less than 1000 reputation at the time of creation and then used more than once:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Name                      Used User Link                      Created    RepOnCreation &#xA;------------------------- ---- ------------------------------ ---------- ------------- &#xA;klein-gordon-equation     70   Dimensio1n0                    6/26/2013  675           &#xA;absorption                18   MahderT                        10/15/2013 686           &#xA;optical-materials         15   WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance 7/26/2013  712           &#xA;coupled-oscillators       11   yankeefan11                    11/20/2013 357           &#xA;scale-invariance          10   user6818                       4/24/2013  737           &#xA;leptons                   6    riemannium                     9/9/2013   520           &#xA;soft-matter               6    FraSchelle                     6/14/2013  801           &#xA;ballistics                6    Adnan                          9/30/2013  574           &#xA;humidity                  4    Adnan                          9/30/2013  574           &#xA;laser-interaction         4    MahderT                        10/15/2013 686           &#xA;nucleation                4    Nanite                         12/11/2013 425           &#xA;anderson-localization     3    becko                          4/18/2013  680           &#xA;blackbody                 2    garyp                          3/4/2014   533           &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 additional tags created in this period by users with &amp;lt; 1000 reputation currently exist but are only used once on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For contrast, here are the 30 tags created during the same time period and used more than once by users with &amp;gt;= 1000 reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Name                      Used User Link       Created    RepOnCreation &#xA;------------------------- ---- --------------- ---------- ------------- &#xA;resource-recommendations  340  Qmechanic       12/10/2013 24196         &#xA;resistance                143  Qmechanic       8/20/2013  19452         &#xA;stars                     133  Qmechanic       8/1/2013   19212         &#xA;exoplanets                36   Qmechanic       8/1/2013   19212         &#xA;pions                     20   Ben Crowell     5/4/2013   4632          &#xA;beyond-the-standard-model 19   Ali             7/23/2013  1028          &#xA;conductors                16   Emilio Pisanty  10/21/2013 11691         &#xA;born-rule                 15   Dan             8/7/2013   3162          &#xA;dirac-matrices            15   Emilio Pisanty  12/3/2013  13517         &#xA;thought-experiment        14   udiboy          10/24/2013 2088          &#xA;black-hole-firewall       13   Brandon Enright 5/3/2013   1340          &#xA;time-dilation             12   Emilio Pisanty  2/6/2014   15455         &#xA;identical-particles       8    Qmechanic       11/1/2013  22626         &#xA;short-circuits            6    Emilio Pisanty  9/4/2013   9667          &#xA;charge-conjugation        6    Emilio Pisanty  10/3/2013  11272         &#xA;plasmon                   5    JoeHobbit       3/31/2013  1198          &#xA;image-processing          4    Dan             7/3/2013   2913          &#xA;type-i-string             4    Dimensio1n0     9/18/2013  2711          &#xA;zener-diodes              4    Emilio Pisanty  10/13/2013 11489         &#xA;ionization-energy         4    Anthony         10/17/2013 1102          &#xA;canonical-conjugation     3    Emilio Pisanty  10/29/2013 11828         &#xA;deformation-quantization  3    Qmechanic       9/7/2013   20027         &#xA;dimensional-reg           3    Hunter          3/1/2014   1368          &#xA;ground-state              2    Idear           1/8/2014   1132          &#xA;heterotic-string          2    Dimensio1n0     9/18/2013  2711          &#xA;nebulae                   2    Qmechanic       8/1/2013   19212         &#xA;affine-lie-algebra        2    user6818        3/25/2013  1166          &#xA;non-linear-schroedinger   2    Dan             3/28/2013  1839          &#xA;enthalpy                  2    Mostafa         10/21/2013 2051          &#xA;large-n                   2    user6818        2/9/2014   1208          &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;13 additional tags created in this period by users with &amp;gt;= 1000 reputation currently exist but are only used once on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A total of 316 tags were destroyed during the same time period. I've no good way of determining when they were created or who created them, however it is reasonable to assume that &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; were created during the same time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My thoughts:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High-rep users are already handling the bulk of the tag creation. We could raise this limit with only a minor negative impact, provided users with the privilege are able to step up and handle cases where a question is posted without an appropriately-specific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've raised it. &lt;strong&gt;Step up!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T22:04:53.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5622" CreationDate="2014-03-15T01:12:55.500" Score="3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Brandon Enright for putting the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98513/is-there-a-field-equation-which-can-reduce-into-all-three-flavors-of-spin-zero&quot;&gt;Is there a field equation which can reduce into all three flavors of spin (zero, one, one half)?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; on the featured list by placing a bounty on it. Since the bounty ran out, the question is no longer on the featured list and still remains unanswered. What is the next evolutionary stage of the question? Will it be cast into the sea of forgotten unanswered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40289" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-15T01:19:27.550" Title="What happens next if a question is unanswered after the bounty is dropped and is removed from the featured list?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5621" CreationDate="2014-03-15T01:19:27.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It stays open. You can put another bounty on it if you wish, though it is advisable to try and improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being &quot;cast into the sea of forgotten unanswered questions&quot; isn't something done deliberately, it just happens. But these do get found and answered, if good, eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-03-15T01:19:27.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5603" CreationDate="2014-03-16T02:47:54.223" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would word the help-centre item like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the list of &amp;quot;on topic&amp;quot; things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Computational physics&lt;/strong&gt; [[followed by a link to an exemplary question]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the list of &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Implementation details&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While computational physics is on topic, we are not a programming site. If your question is about &lt;em&gt;implementing&lt;/em&gt; computational code - in particular, if it's about writing, compiling, debugging or optimising code, or about a specific language or library - then it is off topic. It may be suitable for &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding a good exemplary question for computational physics is tricky due to them being off topic up to now. Perhaps we'd have to wait until a great one came along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've left out the issue of software questions (e.g. how to I do X in package Y), because it seems like a somewhat separate issue to me. We could always put an additional &amp;quot;software issues&amp;quot; item in the &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; list if we feel it's important enough to mention explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T03:41:45.460" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-16T16:51:14.183" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/103561/when-i-stretch-a-rubber-band-it-breaks-when-i-hold-the-broken-ends-together-w/103565?noredirect=1#comment211682_103565&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; here, I posted a link to the famous xkcd. What is weird is, the link is broken, with a 404 error. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you remove the trailing &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt; from the link it goes to the page correctly, even though the browser adds &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt; anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/54/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is a sample link&lt;/a&gt; which works. It is to the same page. &lt;strong&gt;Probable bug report&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-20T05:46:56.973" Title="Link in comment returns false 404" Tags="|support|comments|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5627" CreationDate="2014-03-16T16:53:40.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using my moderator superpowers I have removed the trailing slashes. There also seemed to be some invisible characters there. In any case, both links seem to work now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T16:53:40.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5630" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5632" CreationDate="2014-03-18T02:48:59.690" Score="4" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;After finding precedence &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5527/should-this-question-be-on-hold&quot;&gt;Should this question be on hold?&lt;/a&gt; I'd like to bring a question that I wrote to attention. Namely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/102447/quantum-computing-records&quot;&gt;Quantum computing records (entangled qubits)&lt;/a&gt; is currently marked as closed, but was modified after being placed on hold to limit the scope of answers. The last time a similar question was asked occured 3 years ago, and the field of quantum computing has undergone vast changes since then!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has three short sub questions that can be answered with 2-4 sentences each with a paper or link backing up claims. Originally, I had asked if the answers could include more records that might be of interest, and that is where I believe the question became too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short I am asking that the question be looked at again for opening (preferably brought back) as it has been modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34564" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T03:50:19.333" Title="Bringing a question back to life" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5633" CreationDate="2014-03-18T03:29:37.470" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89423/lagrangian-of-phi-4-theory&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has been deleted. To me, the question was quite interesting. Can I have a screenshot of the entire question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T05:31:54.733" Title="Can I have a screenshot of &quot;Lagrangian of $\phi^4$ theory&quot;?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5630" CreationDate="2014-03-18T03:50:19.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so I posted these as comments but I thought about it some more and figured I should just turn it into an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question stands, I don't feel it's too broad. But I also don't feel like it's a good question. It doesn't educate anybody about anything, other than some trivia and 3 numbers. That doesn't mean you couldn't get your numbers and make a good question though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think this could be split into 3 questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the current record for entangled qubits &lt;em&gt;and how has the number been increased&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This asks for the number but also looks for some analysis about the progress in the field. What cool things did people come up with to increase the number? Or did nothing change except time and money? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the longest storage time of a qubit at room temperature &lt;em&gt;and what breakthroughs led to the increase&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's tying it back to &quot;what physics makes this result possible&quot; rather than &quot;Just give me a number and a reference.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the longest storage time of a qubit at any temperature &lt;em&gt;and how does the temperature influence the storage time?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same trend -- tie it back to what is physically happening and what governs the numbers that are appearing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of those could be their own questions. They almost have to be, all together it would be too broad again. But one at a time, they are answerable with detail and references and give some insight into physics rather than just listing trivia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As always on questions like this, I can only represent my opinion and I can't guarantee others agree.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T03:50:19.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5631" CreationDate="2014-03-18T05:31:54.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope it's appropriate to post this. I can't think why it wouldn't be, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwCmu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T05:31:54.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-18T13:45:05.280" Score="-4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that stack overflow as an advertised career 2.0. I assume users on that site receive some type of career boost? Is there an equivalent for Physics Exchange? If not, could we make one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40289" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T14:30:51.387" Title="Is there a Physics Exchange Career 2.0?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5634" CreationDate="2014-03-18T14:30:51.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Careers 2.0 is an exclusive place for those with good Stack Overflow / GitHub profiles, where employers can put job listings from this pool of &quot;good&quot; candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Employment in physics works very differently, and besides our community is small, so I doubt it would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T14:30:51.387" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5485" CreationDate="2014-03-18T20:10:55.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When accessing a pages with MathJax via the HTTPS protocol, we now use the CDN specified by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/resources/faqs/#problem-https&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I access the MathJax CDN using a https secure connection?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MathJax CDN utilizes Rackspace’s CDN service. Unfortunately, this currently does not offer https support for the default address cdn.mathjax.org. However, as an alternative, you can use the following unmapped address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://c328740.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://c328740.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not as appealing as cdn.mathjax.org, this address is stable and safe to use. For more information, see our documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So everyone should now be able to enjoy the beauty of quality mathematics notation whichever protocol they prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T20:10:55.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2014-03-21T00:22:24.460" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't it nice to get someone to ask a basic question? After all , everyone of us learned the basics some day. I think it is nice that the beginner has different sources of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem is that of sifting. if we can categorize questions in to basic and advanced then it will be a relief to people who are irritated and embarrassed  at being in the same forum where mere mortals who are grappling with quantum entanglement. Those guys can get to the advanced area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However this classification has to be very crude, May be some can appear in both sections. It is nice to see things out of your field of specialization, it helps a lot in developing  lateral thinking patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one should not worry too much about the basic questions, Human brain is really good at spotting what it wants in 'noisy ' situations. ELITISM should not be welcomed and tolerated anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42939" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T00:22:24.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5639" CreationDate="2014-03-21T05:11:11.890" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that I make mistakes and do not follow the conventions and know nothing about the codes used for formulae so it is good when somebody edits my post. But I am curious, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/37484&quot;&gt;this editing&lt;/a&gt; some real mistakes were corrected but also some words deleted and inserted as they were, at least in my browser (Firefox).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that in other browsers some everyday characters are interpreted differently? For example, I see no difference in the spelling and settings for &quot;telescope&quot; and &quot;the&quot; in the first line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As sometimes the spell checker does that too, I am wondering if my keyboard does something funny (it is also a greek keyboard) that others can see who do not have greek in their browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T05:50:05.910" Title="Invisible changes in my post?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5638" CreationDate="2014-03-21T05:45:10.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the diff in the default &quot;rendered output&quot; view, you see words like &quot;telescope&quot; and &quot;the&quot; are highlighted like they've been changed but you can't see the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you switch to the &quot;markdown&quot; view though, you can see what changed.  In both cases you used two spaces before the words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a&amp;lt;space&amp;gt;&amp;lt;space&amp;gt;telescope focusing&amp;lt;space&amp;gt;&amp;lt;space&amp;gt;the&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple spaces in a row are not rendered so they look like one space in rendered output even though they are more than one space in markup.  So when your answer was edited and the extra spaces removed, no visible change was made but the diff engine still detected the change and highlighted it for you.  This is why it looks like no change was made but there are still words highlighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22494" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T05:45:10.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5589" CreationDate="2014-03-21T09:20:21.327" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a quick note on a relevant development at MSO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226092/lets-get-rid-of-the-10k-flag-queue&quot;&gt;Let's get rid of the 10K flag queue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, if it goes through, much of this discussion would be obsolete. I quite like it, by the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T09:20:21.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5642" CreationDate="2014-03-22T18:41:41.557" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to delete a question but I got a message saying that I can't because it has answers, and asked me to flag this for a moderator attention so this is what I did but then I got a message saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did I do wrong? Doesn't this problem need moderator intervention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See here is my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68911/why-do-current-and-electrons-flow-in-opposite-directions&quot;&gt;Why do current and electrons flow in opposite directions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which has 10700 views while the other one which my question is closed as duplicate of only has 3000 views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is distracting from the other one for that I want to delete it. Also I have three badges I've earned can you please undo them because they are illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for asking the duplicate question but I didn't know it was a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25833" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T20:17:24.807" Title="Why was my flag to delete my question declined?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5641" CreationDate="2014-03-22T20:17:24.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I merged the two for you. Requesting a merge makes sense here, if you request deletion the moderator will look at the post from that POV and decline it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always, try to be specific in flags, it really helps especially when there are a lot of flags to go through :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T20:17:24.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5646" CreationDate="2014-03-23T05:10:30.467" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice today, I have accidentally clicked “add comment” and unable to find a cancel button, closed the browser tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41680" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T07:06:40.583" Title="How do you cancel a comment?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-23T05:17:15.420" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did comment on a comment, but since what I wrote isn’t there, either I forgot to post it or it was deleted.  Neither of those would explain fifty points suddenly appearing as associated with that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41680" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T05:31:08.107" Title="Why do I get fifty rep for apparently doing nothing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5644" CreationDate="2014-03-23T05:31:08.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only activity your account shows in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/101650/520&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which has attracted five upvotes to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T05:31:08.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5643" CreationDate="2014-03-23T07:06:40.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can delete a comment you create, there's a little &quot;x&quot; next to an added comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T07:06:40.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2014-03-23T23:29:02.803" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should simply be considered on topic. Notation questions are useful and occasionally interesting, and I see no tangible benefit in not having them on the site. (Unless of course they have other problems, such as being too broad, unclear etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T23:29:02.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-24T10:26:11.343" Score="9" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently asked a few questions about QFT in curved spacetime, and have noticed that there is no existing tag for this topic. I looked around the forum some more and found that there are several questions which would fall under this category, so I think it could be a useful addition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I tried to create a tag I was told that tags can not exceed 25 characters. This makes perfect sense, but then it becomes quite hard to create an appropriate tag. Therefore, I was wondering: What would be a good tag name for questions like these? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T22:39:26.343" Title="A tag for QFT in curved spacetime?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2014-03-24T20:29:57.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a good use case for a combination of tags, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-field-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-field-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/curvature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;curvature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;curvature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-03-24T20:29:57.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-25T16:16:43.700" Score="6" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;23 downvotes on different questions in a 1 minute period (around 15:30 GMT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose most active members will have suffered this at some point, but it's my first and it's surprisingly annoying. I trust the serial downvote detector will be along at some point to reverse this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2014-03-25T16:56:51.447" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Got my first serial downvote" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5650" CreationDate="2014-03-25T21:51:28.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the votes should be reversed within 24 hours. If they're not, then it's time to let a moderator know, on meta or chat or by a custom flag on one of the affected posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further information see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/212332/what-should-you-do-if-youre-serial-downvoted-it-isnt-automatically-reversed&quot;&gt;this post on meta.SO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T21:51:28.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2014-03-25T22:39:26.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe quantum field theory in curved spacetime is too specific.  Maybe we can broaden it up a little to something like &quot;qft-in-classical-background&quot; intending to capture all topics involving some sort of (non-trivial) background fields including gravitational ones...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would envision questions concerning Hawking radiation, Unruh effect, Schwinger effect, fermion non-conservation by Monopoles, or Instantons &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt; to all carry such a tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10456" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T22:39:26.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T20:56:13.373" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105347/contravariant-and-covariant-vectors-conceptual-problem&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; just made me look at the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt;, and I didn't like what I saw. The tag is a mismatched collection of questions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lorentz covariance of theories in relativity,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;covariance of a physical quantity under Lorentz transformations,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;covariant derivatives,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the differences between covariant and contravariant vectors, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;statistical covariance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a tag to be useful it needs to refer to a coherent set of connected questions; by that metric this tag is useless. I therefore propose we instate the tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/relativistic-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;relativistic-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;relativistic-covariance&lt;/a&gt; for the first two,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariant-derivative&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariant-derivative&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariant-derivative&lt;/a&gt; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covectors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covectors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covectors&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_matrix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statistical covariance&lt;/a&gt; has huge traction in physics (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1869&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23719/autocorrelation-functions-pair-correlation-functions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is our only statistics covariance question and it's hardly about that, so I propose that tag be dropped. If needed further down, the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-covariance&lt;/a&gt; can be introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will implement these changes over the weekend (so I don't dump forty questions on the front page in one go) unless there are any objections or better proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help prevent this happening again, I also propose we blacklist the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt; tag. Setting up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariant-vectors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariant-vectors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariant-vectors&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covectors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covectors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covectors&lt;/a&gt; will ensure it will come up when someone tries to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt;, and having appropriate tag wiki excerpts for the tags should help guide people to the correct tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T18:21:23.737" Title="What's with the [covariance] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5654" CreationDate="2014-03-27T21:20:33.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) Specifically about covariance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt; tag is supposed to cover whatever-notion-the-physical-system-in-the-question-is-covariant-under, typically relativistic covariance, but also more abstractly, e.g., contravariant and covariant tensors not necessarily in the context of relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other uses of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt; tag than the above are wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Covariant derivatives in differential geometry should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differential-geometry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differential-geometry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differential-geometry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauge-invariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauge-invariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauge-invariance&lt;/a&gt; and perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differentiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differentiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differentiation&lt;/a&gt;. (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt; tag could apply here if the main topic of the question is point 1.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Gauge Covariant derivatives should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauge-invariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauge-invariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauge-invariance&lt;/a&gt; and perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gauge-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gauge-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gauge-theory&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differentiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differentiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differentiation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Covector, bivector, differential forms, etc, should typically be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differential-geometry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differential-geometry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differential-geometry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tensors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tensors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tensors&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) Statistical covariance, average, etc, should be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; (which in turn should only be used for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; in the mathematical sense. E.g. Fermi-Dirac statistics etc. go under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-statistics&lt;/a&gt; and perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, while the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spin-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spin-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spin-statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag is ideally reserved for issues related to the spin-statistics theorem). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) More generally, the issue of tagging is non-trivial and difficult to make perfect. Since the system doesn't know which tags are close, and which tags are far apart in tag space (the metric is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DiscreteMetric.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discrete metric&lt;/a&gt;), it is often better to have broad tags with simple rules rather than specific tags that nobody else will use consistently or have heard about. In plain English: it might be better to compromise and either (i) tag dromedary questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/camel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;camel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;camel&lt;/a&gt; tag rather than introducing a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dromedary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dromedary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dromedary&lt;/a&gt; tag with the consequence that the system will no longer recognize that posts with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dromedary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dromedary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dromedary&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/camel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;camel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;camel&lt;/a&gt; are likely very similar; or (ii) make &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dromedary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dromedary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dromedary&lt;/a&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/camel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;camel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;camel&lt;/a&gt; tag, with the consequence that questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dromedary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dromedary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dromedary&lt;/a&gt; would automatically be retagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/camel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;camel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;camel&lt;/a&gt; by the system, even if experts of dromedaries would strongly object to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will likely continue to be tags that cause various problems. E.g. the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; are often applied wrongly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-descriptive tags, such as, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/differential-equations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;differential-equations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;differential-equations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/equations-of-motion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;equations-of-motion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;equations-of-motion&lt;/a&gt;, etc, should be avoided as they serve little purpose. (Many questions on Phys.SE involve differential equations and equations of motion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ambiguous tag, such as, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; should either be replaced by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geometry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;geometry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;geometry&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spacetime&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spacetime&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spacetime&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/vacuum&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vacuum&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vacuum&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-travel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-travel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-travel&lt;/a&gt;, etc, depending on context. Or the proper use of an ambiguous tag should be spelled out in the corresponding tag wiki. E.g. use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distributions&lt;/a&gt; tag is explained in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T18:21:23.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-28T20:12:37.757" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lists of questions etc show links to select the count of items per page on the lower right. Next to it, there is a separate describing label with the text &quot;per page&quot;.&#xA;Because the label has just the same design as the links nearby, it looks to me like another similar link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From the relation to the other links, I expected that it provides a way to specify other item counts not covered by the links, eg. &quot;200&quot; or &quot;all&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the label be changed to look different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like on meta.stackoverflow.com, where the &quot;per page&quot; label uses just plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See below for an example of the relevant lower part of a question list page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mQCXD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example of the relevant lower part of a question list page&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the design of the label &quot;per page&quot; and the related number links with this example from meta.stackoverflow.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zezQi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example similar to proposed change&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42975" LastEditorUserId="42975" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T20:57:10.917" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T20:57:10.917" Title="Can the label &quot;per page&quot; on lists made look different than the links next to it?" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5658" CreationDate="2014-03-29T01:47:56.550" Score="9" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;In physics forums, I created two accounts (actually for myself, for not being able to change my photograph), then I was suspended from the site. Now, as my sister is forcing me to create an account for her also, can create another for her? Why I asked is that, I should not get suspended even here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29762" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T18:12:29.387" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T18:12:29.387" Title="Can I create two accounts?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5657" CreationDate="2014-03-29T02:42:02.640" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you're allowed to create multiple accounts, but there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57682/how-should-sockpuppets-be-handled-on-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;some restrictions on how you can use them&lt;/a&gt;. Let me quote the key part of that answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;if the second account allows you to do something on the site that your normal account would be prevented from doing, it is abuse.&lt;/strong&gt;  Examples of this include (but are not limited to):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Voting on your own posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Casting multiple votes on others' posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Supporting your own arguments (&lt;em&gt;&quot;+1: shog is right, don't know why the rest of you don't realize this&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Using bounties to circumvent the rep cap&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Circumventing suspensions, quality bans, or the rate limits on posting questions / answers / comments / etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the evidence available to moderators is suggestive of any of these activities, we'll take whatever corrective action is necessary. Usually that means merging and suspending the accounts, but of course it could vary on a case by case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to create multiple accounts and use them regularly, I'd suggest thinking carefully about why you want to do so, and whether you really need to. Although, as I said, it is &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; to create and regularly use multiple accounts, it's not very common to have a good reason for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, Physics Forums is a completely different kind of site. In general, anything you may know about their policies won't necessarily apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T02:42:02.640" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5663" CreationDate="2014-03-30T07:08:06.357" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new user and I have already answered 19 questions. What annoys me is that in most cases the person who has asked the question does not revert back to accept an answer. I am pretty sure that if not all, most of my answers were pretty helpful. This is most relevant especially in cases where only I answered the question. Shouldn't this be monitored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42733" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-01T16:59:13.690" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T16:59:13.690" Title="Questions with no accepted answers?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5660" CreationDate="2014-03-30T17:58:58.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is monitored, sort of. The community tends to self-police (at least on other SE sites, I haven't seen it too often here but I could just be missing it). In other words, person A asks a question and somebody comes along and leaves a comment &quot;Hey, I would like to answer your question but you have a history of leaving answers unaccepted. If you accept answers on other questions, somebody might be more interested in answering this one.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if somebody consistently doesn't accept an answer, then stop answering their questions (and if you post a friendly suggestion as a comment, others may stop answering also). And the person may correct their behavior and accept good answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also post a comment like Kyle suggested. Just be polite while posting the reminder. Assume the user is just a beginner who is unaware of how the site works rather than the user is lazy or abusive and maliciously leaves things unaccepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's sometimes easy to identify questioners unlikely to accept an answer. Do they have many unaccepted questions? Are their questions homework? Do they answer other peoples' questions? There's probably a lot more clues than that to figure it out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So -- if you find yourself consistently getting burned by answering questions that never have any answers accepted, consider changing which questions you answer. Of course, that's if it bothers you at all. Maybe you're just happy to contribute to increasing knowledge for others who visit the question. Then it shouldn't matter whether it is accepted or not. All that matters is the usefulness of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T17:58:58.733" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-31T04:26:09.730" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got an announcement that by getting 2000 rep, I can edit questions and answers without review.  The title bar shows my rep as 1990.  I clicked on my icon in the title bar to see if that would cause an update, but it didn't.  It is probably a difference in update times for the different pieces of the site, but it has persisted for a while.  More amusement than a real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3257" LastEditorUserId="27166" LastEditDate="2014-03-31T11:19:00.450" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Reputation display" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5664" CreationDate="2014-03-31T09:19:27.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to force a recalculation of your reputation, the reputation page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will give you an exhaustive breakdown and force a recalc. I currently see your reputation  at 2,010, so you're above that threshold, but as dmckee notes it is perfectly plausible for someone to have upvoted one of your answers, triggering the announcement, and then retracted the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes can be retracted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/34323/im-getting-your-vote-is-too-old-to-be-changed-for-a-vote-i-made-less-than&quot;&gt;within the first five minutes after they're cast&lt;/a&gt;, in which case they do not show up in your reputation history. They can also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19235/is-this-a-bug-in-voting-or-is-it-supposed-to-work-like-this&quot;&gt;be retracted if the post is edited&lt;/a&gt;, in which case you will get a corresponding &lt;code&gt;-10&lt;/code&gt; on your reputation history, with the explanation &lt;code&gt;unupvote&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tNPNP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5212/what-are-the-limits-on-how-i-can-cast-change-and-retract-votes&quot;&gt;What are the limits on how I can cast, change, and retract votes?&lt;/a&gt; at the mother meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T09:19:27.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5501" CreationDate="2014-03-31T18:21:01.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone love this site. Some might ask more questions, some might answer more questions, some might do both, they enjoy doing these. This make them to visit the site often, me too.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a bad thing to visit the site often, it will help you develop your reasoning, your ability to question in a clear way, answer the questions in a better way, in the sense confining the large matter to a shorter paragraph, to make one not to loss the significance in the bulk and every other things.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, it will harm your performance in the exams, your participation in the SE will confine you to use your limited time to learn only some concepts, but you would had learned them in depth. The question papers contain only those questions, which are not in depth, but the questions which are easy. But, as one wouldn't had learnt all the concepts because of his non-economical use of time, he drops from his standards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are going in depth about physics asking questions and answering which are unanswered (rather answering/asking easy questions), it is worth spending time here, as I can assure that you are going to be our next Noble prize winner:) It makes you proud that you are different from others.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its worth spending time to focus on your course and also participate here, both have some advantages and disadvantages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing you could do is that you could visit this site only once in a day for 45 minutes (if you could utilize this long time), or visit this site thrice, each of 15 minutes period. I have tried the latter, but I desire to spend more and I go on. So I would suggest you to follow the former.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29762" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T18:21:01.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5669" CreationDate="2014-04-01T17:58:09.367" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I click on an option it is not accepted, what option should I choose to buy some unicoins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like the effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25833" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T09:14:35.387" Title="Why can't I buy Unicoins?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2014-04-12T21:44:56.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-01T18:14:11.540" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I continue to be befuddled by what exactly one is supposed to do with flags in the 10k tools, and I'm quite relieved to know &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226092/lets-get-rid-of-the-10k-flag-queue&quot;&gt;they're going away soon&lt;/a&gt;. In the meantime, though, here's a stumper I just came across in my flagging history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mzWH9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/104304/without-seeing-the-lightning-can-you-tell-how-far-away-it-struck-by-how-the-thu/104308#104308&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which came up flagged as Not an Answer if I remember correctly. I understand why someone would flag this - it was only a sort-of good fit to the question to begin with - but I disagree that it failed to address the original intent of the OP. Particularly, I felt it did answer the question in its state at the time, with a less specific title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, given the current state of the question, I can understand that it might best be classed as Not an Answer. Given that, I can understand that my &lt;code&gt;invalid flags&lt;/code&gt; is disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm completely stumped, however, at the message. &lt;code&gt;Flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&lt;/code&gt;? That has absolutely nothing to do with why I flagged this way. The technical content of the post was never an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone elucidate what on Earth this message means and how it came into being?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T19:57:07.857" Title="Invalid flags → disputed → flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies. What?" Tags="|support|flagging|10k-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5667" CreationDate="2014-04-01T18:23:43.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unicoins are at present functional in certain features of the site. You can obtain them by mining them on the same applet window where you can spend them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xj9yK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it appears most monetary means to obtain Unicoins are taking some time to go online. That means that at present there is no way to obtain them other than mining. If you feel strongly about it, there are ways to automate the mining so that your browser will do the work for you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about Unicoins in general, as well as said automation methods, see the Meta StackOverflow question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/227363/what-are-stack-overflow-unicoins&quot;&gt;What are Stack Overflow unicoins?&lt;/a&gt;. I should also mention that if you like Unicoins you should hurry to make the best of them, as certain commentators have hinted that this feature &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;may be available for a limited time only&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T18:23:43.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5672" CreationDate="2014-04-01T19:34:13.250" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105984/friction-influencing-the-motion-of-a-mass-and-non-inertial-frame-of-reference/&quot;&gt;Friction influencing the motion of a mass and non-inertial frame of reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105653/kirchoffs-rules-and-rc-circuits/&quot;&gt;Kirchoff&amp;#39;s rules and RC circuits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty apparent that in both of these questions, the user was legitimately asking for help after he/she tried the problem him/herself. I understand if the questions are closed if it just directly asks the community to solve everything, but why these? I just don't understand why the moderators would put them on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and both of them were closed after I answered, did that have anything to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't say that they don't contribute anything to the community. Does that mean reading solved problems can't teach you anything? I guess all the Physics textbooks should stop printing solved examples then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42733" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T20:03:03.677" Title="Why were these homework questions closed?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5668" CreationDate="2014-04-01T19:57:07.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Invalid flags are dismissed with the same reason as the original ones. So they automatically get marked as disputed -- this means the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; flag was disputed, not your invalid flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happened here was: User A flagged a post. You invalid flag-flagged it. Then, a moderator declined the original flag (automatically declining the invalid flag), with that message. If a 10k user marks as invalid, the final outcome is always &quot;disputed&quot;, IIRC. It's confusing, yes, but going away soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T19:57:07.857" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5670" CreationDate="2014-04-01T20:03:03.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty apparent that in both of these questions, the user was legitimately asking for help after he/she tried the problem him/herself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current status of the HW policy is that even if work is shown, it still needs to be conceptual. Quoting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;summary at the top of the policy,&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't say that they don't contribute anything to the community. Does that mean reading solved problems can't teach you anything? I guess all the Physics textbooks should stop printing solved examples then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not a physics textbook. People don't read it like one, they come to it by searches and homework problems are rarely found in the same form (the generic titles don't help), so these are pretty useless for this site. What may be useful for a textbook need not be useful for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the questions can be rewritten to be explicitly conceptual (instead of just showing a problem and a partial solution), then they can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and both of them were closed after I answered, did that have anything to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but you shouldn't answer such questions in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T20:03:03.677" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-02T03:56:21.383" Score="10" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it seems the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226092/lets-get-rid-of-the-10k-flag-queue&quot;&gt;10k flag queue is being removed&lt;/a&gt; with essentially no replacement. The general consensus over at SO (or at least my own reading of it) seems to be that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators ignored 10k feedback in dealing with flags, and in fact this feedback was an encumbrance to them; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10k users have better things to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises a few Physics-specific questions. Regarding (1), &lt;strong&gt;do the moderators here not use (or minimally use) the feedback 10k users provide via flags?&lt;/strong&gt; If that information was never useful, then there is no loss here, though in the future it would be nice to be told &quot;ignore that feature; we don't want you to add flags.&quot; If it was useful, are we losing functionality with the imminent change, and is there any way to recover it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding (2), &lt;strong&gt;what else can I be doing as a 10k user?&lt;/strong&gt; I understand there are several information overviews tabulating migrations, voting trends, comment activity, etc. But these seem to be more for my own personal consumption; it's not clear how to use this information to &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; anything. A perfectly valid answer might be &quot;nothing - 10k users are just like any other user who can vote to close (3k) but can't vote to delete (20k),&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; but if that's the case this should really be spelled out clearly somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Well okay, tag wiki approval (5k) and protecting questions (15k) are in that range too, but these are pretty lightly used features here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T04:20:07.243" Title="What exactly should 10k users be doing to help the site?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|10k-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5673" CreationDate="2014-04-02T07:40:01.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll be honest, I never really paid much attention to anything that happened in the various review queues. But I do know that when a post is flagged by multiple people, or when a flag is disputed - really, any time multiple people weigh in, the more the better - it's &lt;em&gt;tremendously&lt;/em&gt; useful to me when deciding how to handle the flag. If that came from the 10k flag queue, then I will be sad to see it go.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again, I'm not really sure what 10k users are able to do, but the biggest task, for anyone who has the privilege, has been and continues to be voting to put questions on hold as appropriate. So yeah, there's not much that should change at 10k. But that situation may be somewhat specific to our site and others in this range of activity. Perhaps a meta post would be useful; I don't think it's necessarily something we can expect to appear in the help center.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T07:40:01.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5676" CreationDate="2014-04-02T21:40:29.903" Score="11" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that posts often come up for deletion in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;low quality posts review queue&lt;/a&gt; which are clearly 'bad' answers but answers nonetheless.  The answers are often 'bad' because they are short but not blatantly incorrect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to recommend deletion for such answers?  Isn't the point of the voting system to sort bad and good answers?  Is deletion of such answers an inappropriate form of censorship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35024" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T00:47:02.223" Title="Is it appropriate to use the low quality review system to get rid of 'bad' answers?" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5675" CreationDate="2014-04-03T00:47:02.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The options for Low Quality posts are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No comment needed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commentary on another post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &quot;Thank you&quot; comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm having this problem too&quot; comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different question than posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link-only answer (and not spam)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This is a bad answer&quot; does not appear on the list, so voting to delete such an answer would be a bad practice, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T00:47:02.223" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5673" CreationDate="2014-04-03T04:20:07.243" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to clarify a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; still help handle flags, via /review. Yes, lots of other people can do this too - but that doesn't mean they'll do as good a job as you would.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag handling has never been the &quot;big&quot; 10K privilege, IMHO. It got a lot of focus, because for a long time it was the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; way ordinary users could directly help shoulder the support burden... But it often wasn't really the best use of your abilities. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you poke around in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;/tools&lt;/a&gt;, you'll quickly notice that most of what's found there isn't directly actionable - it's &lt;em&gt;informational!&lt;/em&gt; What you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; with that information is up to you: hopefully, you've been around long enough now that you have some idea of how you want the site to be run, and are able to make good use of the information presented. Here are a few ideas, based on how &lt;em&gt;I've&lt;/em&gt; used the 10K tools:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find problems that've been overlooked and fix them if you can, or bring them to the attention of the moderators if you can't. The stats page is a gold mine for outliers that might benefit from a bit of attention from a wise, aged site veteran such as yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find awesome stuff that reminds you of why you like coming here. The stats page is a good one for this too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sanity-check the stuff that other people are doing, and offer guidance and correction where necessary: new tags, new answers, suggested edits, questions being migrated or closed, posts being deleted... Outside of /tools, you also get a full history of actions taken by others in /review, which can be helpful in identifying problems there too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as a 10K+ member of the site your opinions likely carry quite a bit of weight with your peers: if you see a trend that you think is worth calling attention to, don't hesitate to do it - having access to more data makes it easier to back up your arguments. And that's the most valuable &quot;10K privilege&quot; in my book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T04:20:07.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5683" CreationDate="2014-04-04T07:28:36.940" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to report a bug when I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2765/why-my-recent-upvotes-havent-changed-my-reputation&quot;&gt;why my recent upvotes haven't changed my reputation&lt;/a&gt;. I heavily edit my answers as I am trying to develop technical writing skills, upvotes with low reputation would be a better figure of merit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would wikifying most of my answers cause problems? &#xA;If so at what number of edits does a post wikify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T14:25:35.910" Title="Would it be a problem if I wikify all my answers?" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2014-04-04T10:05:01.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As to when a post automatically becomes community wiki the rules are set out here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/community-wiki&quot;&gt;Create Wiki Posts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are also several ways a question or answer can automatically enter community wiki mode. In these cases, we believe that the post is de-facto wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the body of the post has been edited by at least &lt;strong&gt;5&lt;/strong&gt; different users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the post has been edited &lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt; times by the original owner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you answer a question marked community wiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a question generates more than &lt;strong&gt;30&lt;/strong&gt; answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your case I'd try to make each edit more significant to reduce the total number of edits. If you spot a spelling mistake or think you can express something better then take a bit more time to review the whole post so you don't have to repeat the process later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3948" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T10:05:01.873" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-04T10:42:13.457" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of conceptual questions in physics cannot be asked in few sentences. Because the idea or image of the subject  in questioner's mind which is the actual root of the problem is never projected in few lines. So is a discussion possible on this site? where one can better understand other's problems. Otherwise the questioner remains unsatisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43830" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T14:16:33.827" Title="A request for Discussion" Tags="|discussion|request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5680" CreationDate="2014-04-04T10:58:56.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site isn't intended for discussions. In fact avoiding long rambling discussions is a key aim of the Stack Exchange group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't focus your problem into a reasonably concise question then you need to go off and research the area. The internet is such a rich resource that there's really no excuse for not doing your own leg work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean you can't ask conceptual questions, but they have to be well specified ones and the anticipated answer has to be reasonably concise as well. If the answer to your question would effectively be a blog post then you should search the web for a blog post instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all this, you can always ask your question anyway and see if anyone answers it. The worst that will happen is that it gets downvoted and closed, and you can always delete it to remove the stain!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T10:58:56.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5680" CreationDate="2014-04-04T14:16:33.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a difference between discussion and asking a question in a few lines. You can certainly ask questions that are longer than that; in fact, the ideal question length is probably 15-30 lines, and there are plenty of examples of well-written questions that are longer than that. The key is that it should be &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt;: your question should be able to be addressed by a single post from someone else (which can also be long). It should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require a back-and-forth discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, sometimes you need to ask for clarification on an answer (or others need to ask for clarification on your question), which is why we have comments, but the content of the comments is supposed to be incorporated into the post. At the end, we should wind up with one question and some number of answers that directly address the question, and that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T14:16:33.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2014-04-04T14:25:35.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would wikifying most of my answers cause problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically no; it doesn't &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; cause any problem with the functionality of the site. But reputation is a measure of how much the community trusts you, and to that end it's useful to other people as well as yourself. So it is better for the community if you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; intentionally wikify your posts. And it doesn't give you any benefit to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, community wiki mode is a signal that edits from others are especially welcome; it's meant for the few posts that are really supposed to be collectively written by multiple people. Normal questions and answers don't fit that qualification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if you want to go ahead and wikify your posts, it's not something you would get in trouble for (i.e. we wouldn't suspend someone just for that, unless it causes some sort of serious problem in a way we haven't foreseen). But also bear in mind that we will not go through and reverse wiki mode on a large number of posts if you change your mind later. If you decide to make a post community wiki, it will be stuck that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T14:25:35.910" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-04T15:40:52.940" Score="2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/106605/what-is-charge-actually-how-to-define-it&quot;&gt;What is charge actually? How to define it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question, the asker explicitly specified that he wanted an intuitive explanation of charge, without using &quot;quantum mechanics or advanced particle models.&quot; The response by PhotonicBoom fit these criteria well, but the one by JamalS referenced QED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, I feel that high-level answers on &quot;low-level&quot; questions (e.g. JamalS's answer) do not respond to the question, since the user explicitly did not want a complex answer. On the other hand, the answer provides insight to other members of the community. Is it acceptable to provide answers which surpass the difficulty level requested by the user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11012" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T04:26:28.107" Title="Is it appropriate to provide responses which too difficult or easy for the asker?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5684" CreationDate="2014-04-04T15:48:44.373" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers on Stack Exchange site are not &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; for the asker. Posts will remain around, be indexed by search engines and visited by many people over the years (Google is responsible roughly one-quarter of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; Physics SE traffic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, answers that lie outside the OP's skill range are acceptable. You can assume the OP won't accept them, but the crowd will still judge them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T15:48:44.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5684" CreationDate="2014-04-05T19:15:10.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;But other questions shouldn't necessarily be automatically closed as dupes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered one simple question on the reason light slows down in a medium, with a simple classical picture of the absorption and delayed retransmission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was marked as a dupe and the accepted answer on the dupe link immediately launched into a calculus notation packed answer about Poynting vectors. For the person asking the question this is not only about as useful as an answer in Chinese - it gives the impression that mere mortals aren't supposed to ask questions about physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless this site is simply going to be the Phys Rev Let hangout, we need to allow simple questions and answers  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2525" LastEditorUserId="2525" LastEditDate="2014-04-06T04:26:28.107" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T04:26:28.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5689" CreationDate="2014-04-06T07:59:02.670" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107091/soft-question-the-best-way-to-learn-physics-road-map&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107091/soft-question-the-best-way-to-learn-physics-road-map&lt;/a&gt; was marked as a duplicate to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5508/how-to-learn-physics-effectively-and-efficiently&quot;&gt;How to learn physics effectively and efficiently&lt;/a&gt; when I have clearly mentioned why it is not, in the question itself. Will Qmechanic or someone else please explain why it was closed? Do the moderators even care to read the question before closing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42733" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T10:52:13.660" Title="Marked as duplicate when it is not a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5688" CreationDate="2014-04-06T10:47:34.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;QMechanic's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107091/soft-question-the-best-way-to-learn-physics-road-map#comment218659_107091&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; really says it all. You are correct that your question is not an exact duplicate (and the moderator made this explicit, so accusing them of not reading the question is hardly the type of constructive discussion we expect in meta). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your question is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; poor fit for this site, for a number of reasons. This format works best when questions have something like a unique answer, when there is some sort of objective criterion to determine whether a given answer is correct, and hopefully one to determine which of two answers is better, and when expected answers contain facts and experiences instead of opinions. Your question fails miserably on all counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, no one, at all, ever learns physics 'in order'; everyone learns a few things at a time. Secondly, there isn't really any way to tell one way is better than another. Voting becomes meaningless in such a question. Thirdly, one never learns all of physics, and you will be hard-pressed to find someone who can tell you both in what order to take quantum optics and quantum information, and what plasma courses to take befor learning astrophysics. Relatedly, you yourself won't learn all of physics, so that large parts of any answer would likely be irrelevant. Moreover, since you presumably have already started learning, what would you do with the answers? What if I told you that the best way is to learn math all the way up to functional analysis and then derive all of each field from its basic principles? Would you implement that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more general guidance, you should refer to the Meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;, and to the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good subjective, bad subjective&lt;/a&gt;. In this site, list questions are unlikely to prosper unless you make very specific requirements of the answers, and take care to avoid all the pitfalls I mentioned and in those two links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let me clearly thank QMechanic for closing that question in a timely fashion before more people became invested in it. It was an open-and-shut primarily-opinion-based, too-broad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T10:47:34.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-06T14:51:52.037" Score="12" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;So for those of us who can vote to close, we all know what the close vote system looks like. Particularly, under &quot;off topic&quot; you have homework, personal theories, engineering, other StackExchange, and other. The other StackExchange site options are Physics Meta and Math. Quite frankly, I think this covers everything and I have no issues with the occasional typing a reason into &quot;other&quot;. However, I see numerous questions that belong on other StackExchange sites with close-votes as homework or personal theories when they clearly aren't. Most often it is questions asking for help with a circuit being closed as homework. Students aren't the only ones who build circuits; this sort of question really should belong on the electrical engineering SE. I realize we have the &quot;this is engineering&quot; option, but I feel that should be reserved for cases that are about using physics to solve a problem, not for stuff like making circuits. When I see these questions, I always take the extra 14 seconds to type &quot;This question belongs on electrical engineering SE&quot; in the other box. But I feel if there were an option for EE-SE under the other SE site option, it would be used more often and the homework option would be abused less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just focusing on electrical engineering because it's the one I see more often. If you think there are other SE sites we should add to the close-vote system, feel free to mention them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you might say a close vote is a close vote. That's simply not true. When we vote to close something, we owe it to the asker to provide an adequate reason. If there is some keen young student or an electrical engineer out there that needs help for something that is not homework, then it is not a valid reason to close the question as homework. We can't force all our 3k+ users to take 14 seconds to write the proper reason, but we can make it easier for them by including other SE sites in the option list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, clearly we cannot include all the other SE sites. We have Math.SE because of how often it comes up. IMO electrical engineering makes an appearance fairly frequently. What do you think? Would expanding the list be worthwhile? If so, what sites would you like to see added? If not, I'd love to hear your point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I took a closer look at all of the related posts about this. (Thanks for the duplicate votes, by the way. But there were several other questions this was closer to a duplicate of; why that one?) Anyway, it seems that the question has been raised before about various other SE sites. For the majority, the answer seemed to be that those other sites were all betas. EE.SE is not a beta site, so I still think this is a valid discussion. Additionally, and it should be noted that this is an inference I am making, it seems from answer like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4145/23473&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; that I am not the only one who would be in favour of adding an EE.SE migration link. Especially since even last year it was the #2 site that questions were migrated to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2 years later:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, I'm no longer sure whether or not it would be beneficial to have EE.SE as another migration option. I now know that, when I originally posted this, it was not worthwhile to make it an additional option; the rate of migrations that weren't rejected by EE.SE was too low. However, as it stands, in the last 90 days from the time I'm writing this, 39 posts were migrated to Math.SE with 2 rejections and 19 posts were migrated to EE.SE with 5 rejections. That's a total of 37 accepted migrations to Math and 14 to EE; a bit under half as many as Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I wasn't around when our site went up and the option to migrate to Math.SE was already available when I started. But at what point will we admit there is sufficient volume to make a new option? What was the rate of migration to Math when we first decided to add that as a migration option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a couple years since I first, naively, proposed this. But in that time, the rate of successful migration to EE.SE has grown noticeably. This leaves me unclear. Should we reconsider making EE.SE its own option under the migration close reasons? Is it worthwhile now? If not, at the current rate of increase, there's no question that one day it will merit becoming a new option in the list. The only question you have to ask yourselves (and answer here) is whether or not we have reached that point yet. This I just don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T19:00:50.653" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T19:00:50.653" Title="Should we include other StackExchange sites in the close vote options?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|close-reasons|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5690" CreationDate="2014-04-06T22:52:53.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with this scheme is that, while our 3k users know what's off-topic here, they will in general not know if it's a good fit to the target site. Is the level of this homeworky circuits question appropriate for EE? No idea! We definitely dont want to dump all our low-level circuits questions on them. In the past 90 days we've migrated 11 questions thar way, and 2 got closed there (18%). This ratio is high enough that we shouldn't be blanket migrating stuff that way, and the total numbers are low enough that they can be dealt with by hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that this has historically been the bane of migration across the network. After a special SO&gt;SU channel was opened, the superuser mods were none too happy about the flood of low quality stuff that went that way. Just something to bear in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T22:52:53.610" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-07T10:53:26.063" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;This idea popped into my head because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/107258/where-can-i-find-this-book&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but it is something that I've thought about before: Don't we need a new option when flagging a question, saying &quot;Off topic because... it is simply not a question about physics, and therefore not appropriate for this forum.&quot; or something to the same effect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel questions that would merit this flag occur quite often, and given the current options I always have a hard time deciding what to flag them for... If I'm wrong and there is an established procedure for questions like this, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T12:58:50.077" Title="A new &quot;Off-topic because...&quot; option for flags?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5693" CreationDate="2014-04-07T11:03:21.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't really matter which off topic subflag you use, the subflags are just indicators and the option you pick isn't displayed anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different when voting to close (&gt;3k rep), here the reason is displayed, and you also have an option where you can give a custom close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T11:03:21.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5696" CreationDate="2014-04-07T20:37:31.317" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of migrating this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/81842/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/81842/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the migrate option doesn't appear. Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T12:26:00.003" Title="Why can't I vote to migrate this question?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5695" CreationDate="2014-04-07T21:04:42.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's too old. Questions more than 60 days old can't be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T21:04:42.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5701" CreationDate="2014-04-08T10:22:52.730" Score="28" ViewCount="1901" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking through the new &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Overflow beta&lt;/a&gt;¹ and looking back at some of the discussion about the closure of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics SE&lt;/a&gt;. From a purely personal perspective I would prefer research level questions to be asked here because though it's very unlikely I could answer any it's interesting to see other peoples answers. However I appreciate that active physicists don't want to wade through acres of basic questions from non-physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time there are lots of non-physicists interested in physics as shown by the proliferation of science programmes on TV, and I believe strongly that there should be a site for anyone interested in physics to get clear and authoritative answers to questions at this level. I think Stack Exchange is the best place for such a site because it's designed to reduce the junk and advocacy that swamps other less regulated fora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The approach taken by the Theoretical Physics SE, and now the Physics Overflow, is to split off the most advanced questions, but history shows you end up with a site with very low traffic. I wonder if it would be better to split off the low level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my perfect world that would leave the Physics SE at a higher level and hopefully manage to both attract back the higher level users and keep the traffic high enough to keep the site vibrant. The Popular Physics SE would provide interested bystanders with their answers, and maybe it could take a more lenient attitude to homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My perfect world doesn't exist, of course, and there are obvious problems such as how to decide which site to post questions on. My suggestion would be to use Physics SE for undergraduate and above level questions and Popular Physics for everything below this. I note the blurb for the Physics SE still says &lt;em&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for &lt;strong&gt;active researchers, academics and students&lt;/strong&gt; (my emphasis)&lt;/em&gt;. Assuming we treat the sites as siblings, migration between them (mostly from Physics to Popular Physics I'd guess) would be less of a big deal than attempting migration to unrelated sites like the Math SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's about it - I will be very interested to hear other views on the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Note that the Physics Overflow is not part of the Stack Exchange network  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-04-12T20:21:08.333" Title="Should we have a Popular Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5697" CreationDate="2014-04-08T13:50:36.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I somehow don't like the idea of a split; I think the site is stronger together, and sometimes basic, naive questions actually have advanced answers, that might not be intelligible to the original poster, but are interesting for other people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be made easier to filter/hide popular physics questions? A clear button near the top of the page, &quot;Hide basic questions&quot; that removes all traces of basic physics for the user would suffice? To me, that is much more palatable than a physics overflow style breakaway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, it would be much simpler than your suggestion, though it would require every new question to be assigned basic or advanced status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T13:50:36.400" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5697" CreationDate="2014-04-08T19:33:23.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one aspect that is fundamentally different on the science sites on SE compared to many other sites on the network. Non-programmers generally don't ask questions on Stack Overflow, but a significant part of the questions on Physics, Chemistry and Biology are from a laymen perspective. This is inherent in the topics I suspect, programming just doesn't lend itself to this kind of questions from non-programmers, while many people are curious about basic facts and concepts from physics, chemistry or biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rather dislike the idea of splitting a site according to some more or less arbitrary question level or difficulty. The practical problems of defining the boundary between sites alone are a huge headache. I think Math Overflow showed that this concept can work well at the very top of the question level, but I am not convinced that it would work as well if you add such separations at lower levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be very, very careful in examining what we want to achieve when we discuss splitting off a part of the site at the lower level. This can easily end up as a site that just gets all the trash from the higher-level site dumped onto it. A site that is created simply to get rid of certain questions we don't want here is doomed to fail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that a Popular Physics site couldn't work, I actually do think that something like a Popular Science site could work if approached correctly. But such a site must have a positive definition of what it should be, it can't start as a category of questions we don't want here. I'd also include all natural sciences, I think just physics would be too narrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of popular science is not really about difficulty level or effort in the question. The big difference is that such questions are asked by people without substantial education in the subject. This not only changes the question, but it also changes how answers should be written. This is also one aspect that would benefit the most from a separate site, as there it would be clear that answers need to be understandable by the general public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But homework questions are not popular science questions. They are an entirely different category and I think making a popular science site into a homework dumping ground would doom it from the beginning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a moderator on Skeptics, and Skeptics is to some extent already a popular science site. We're more restrictive, but we often explain current scientific research in laymen terms. So I certainly think that such an effort is worthwhile, I don't regard popular science questions as somehow lower quality, but they need a different approach than questions from a scientist or student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be very careful about migration, it is often misused as a softer alternative to closing, and that would result in this site just dumping all the crap on the popular physics site. If such a site is created, it would have to prove that it works without any migration path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T19:33:23.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5697" CreationDate="2014-04-08T20:21:43.180" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phys.SE is currently 3.5 years old and has the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#science-traffic&quot;&gt;second-most traffic of all the science sites at SE&lt;/a&gt; (with Math.SE being number one), so at least in that sense it is quite successful[1]. Also Phys.SE receives a lot of Google hits and is quite visible on the Internet. So Phys.SE has in many ways found a robust formula, which is spelled out on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help pages&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. We welcome questions of all levels, but please stick to the following topics [...]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not let events outside Phys.SE (which might be just a flash in the pan, like the previous &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;TP.SE&lt;/a&gt;) dictate what is and what is not the purpose of Phys.SE. We welcomed all levels before, and we should continue to welcome all levels. By splitting up Phys.SE in many parts, we may very well destroy the formula, which has worked in the past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the theoretical reasons to keep all levels at Phys.SE, there might also be practical reasons: It may be practically impossible to establish an unanimous definition of what constitutes high, medium, and low level, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning high-level questions: You can still ask high-level questions on Phys.SE! We are open 24/7 and it is business as usual. One thing that we learned from the TP.SE failure (with its unfortunate slow traffic) is that if you ask a high-level question, there might only be a few experts in the world that can answer on the spot. Many more experts would be able to answer after &quot;doing the calculation themselves&quot;, however they often haven't the time. But if they are curious enough they might do it anyway! So long story short: One should expect that high-level quality answers take time. Phys.SE offers a visible platform on the Internet and has many active (and also some more dormant) experts in all corners of physics. If you have a high-level question in physics, then Phys.SE is definitely one of the best places to ask it, in terms of receiving a useful answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning low-level questions: We should continue to enforce that questions should preferably be conceptional. E.g. low-level homework questions should follow certain &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/2451&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, some basic/minimal research of the topic (like googling before asking) is generally expected, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5033/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. As for a discussion of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/58070/popular-science&quot;&gt;Popular Physics site&lt;/a&gt;, that seems to belong to &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt; rather than on Phys.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] In fact one interpretation of the large traffic volume is that we are drowning in success: The front page currently changes every 6 hours (or so), which means that it is easier to overlook a post nowadays, relatively speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T12:54:36.000" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5697" CreationDate="2014-04-09T13:41:50.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;24 hours on, and whatever the rights and wrongs of my suggestion it's clear that the site members as a whole don't feel strongly about the issue. Only ten votes have been cast on my question, and at the time of writing the most active answer only has six votes (three up and three down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting a new SE site, or even reviving Dilaton's Area 51 proposal would be a great deal of work, and there clearly isn't any enthusiasm for this. That makes the project a non-starter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess most of the site members just don't think there's a problem, so agonising on how to address it is pointless. Unless anyone else wants to shout now, I'll leave it a day or so then accept this as the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T13:41:50.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5704" CreationDate="2014-04-09T17:28:35.217" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two of my answers were downvoted recently and the reason was that though they gave quite a bit of information, all of it wasn't entirely accurate and had a few errors. The main cause of this is because I type most of my answers myself without doing a lot of research. I try to explain the answer by using the knowledge that I already have and don't check if what I know is 100% accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I feel that I should do some research before posting my answers. I just want to know what you guys do when you answer a question. Do you google the question first and foremost? I've seen some huge answers by high rep users which seem like they've come right out of a textbook. Do you actually type all of that? Or do you open different sources and copy-paste the appropriate information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is very frustrating to be voted down after taking so much time in typing an answer. Why don't people just say what the error is so that I can edit the answer and fix it? I don't think you should downvote answers at all unless they are completely bullshit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user42733" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T20:37:53.967" Title="How exactly do you answer questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5702" CreationDate="2014-04-09T17:48:07.667" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are to let other users know that the answer contains errors or wasn't useful. Once you've edited the answer to correct the errors, users who have downvoted can change their downvote to an upvote (assuming your edits have amended the errors). It should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be used only for answers that &lt;em&gt;are completely bullshit&lt;/em&gt;, it should be used for &lt;em&gt;any wrong answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I usually use Wikipedia for references for relevant articles and Google for image searches. Outside of that, I pull things from memory or my textbooks at my desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, at some point you're going to stop caring about downvotes. You might want to consider stopping caring now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T17:48:07.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5702" CreationDate="2014-04-09T19:06:51.007" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are an unavoidable effect of having an answer that is not accurate, and they should remain that way. Downvotes are not a criticism on the poster, they are the way to keep good answers on the top and inaccurate answers (duly indicated as such in the comments, ideally) further down; it's what makes this site good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One strategy to answer questions is what you describe: post what you know and let the community tell you when it's wrong. In that case, you should be prepared for exactly that: the community will tell you it's wrong by downvoting it. If that happens, the onus is on you to figure out why and to fix it. You can politely request explanations for the votes, and if your tone is right then people will stop by and help, but they are not obliged to. Drive-by downvoting hurts but it is necessary and has been gone over a million times in this and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid those downvotes, the answer is simple: don't post inaccurate answers. If you're not 100% sure of the material you're posting, do your homework, investigate, check, and revise whatever needs revising, before you post. This is, I feel, how many of us approach answers, and it has the huge advantage that it lets you learn while you answer. Indeed, it is probably the reason many of us are here: we learn by answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as jinawee pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5702/how-exactly-do-you-answer-questions#comment16743_5702&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt;, lifting text straight out of different sources without proper attribution is straight-up plagiarism and should be removed from the site if present. If you find text that looks 'taken out of a textbook', google it and find out. If you do find such an instance, the correct procedure is to edit the post yourself: include links to the original sources, and indicate whatever text has been copied by the use of inline quotation marks and quote blocks for longer stretches. Do this regardless of the poster's reputation, and particularly so for high-rep users, who should know better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I do not think anyone does this and have &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; seen an instance on the site. Most people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; type all of that. They either know it already - which is exactly what we want, a site where experts can take fifteen minutes to explain what they know and save you many hours of research - or they find it out, in which case they learned as much as you did in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T19:06:51.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5702" CreationDate="2014-04-09T20:37:53.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll suggest that comments are a really useful way to help get a question answered if you are unsure you have a good answer yourself. You don't get a lot of rep for that, but I think it improves the site and helps people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I see a question that I'm fairly sure could be answered by a web search, but its also clear the person asking lacks the critical term (word) needed to find what they are looking for.  If I know a good term, I'll share it in a comment, and give the person a chance to do some leg-work themselves to answer or improve their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not condescending to the person to constructively help in this way, but IMO you should do it in a comment rather than answer - and you should not be marked down for it.  If you feel you do have answer, then use the answer functionality and you can also include links to supporting resources.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12951" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T20:37:53.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5697" CreationDate="2014-04-10T09:53:58.570" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a popular physics site would be a bad idea within the format of voting  and assuming that a highly voted questions will be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Most of the people voting will be non physicists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) few knowledgable physicists will be consistently checking every day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will result in arbitrary votes and even wrong ones, not exactly cranks but half informed people pushing successfully their half informed opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truth in science is not arrived at by consensus of the hoi polloi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way this might work would be if the people answering were high reputation people from physics.SE and the popularphysics.SE registered users would not be allowed to answer, only to comment maybe. Anyway this is outside the format of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Let me add some thoughts here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the two+ years I have been following physics.SE the level of physics has fallen. I was first alerted to the existence of the site by Lubos and in the beginning there were a number of good answers to questions that stretched my little grey cells( well women are supposed to have white ones  :) , so treat it as a saying ). A lot of people with a better knowledge of physics than I have left for various reasons the site, or are completely inactive. Very few questions appear in my area of expertise ( experimental particle physics) and the reason I persist is in order to exercise my teaching muscles over the repetitive naive questions of young students ( and keep those grey cells active in my retirement). Better than scrabble after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I hope the physicsoverflow  will be successful even if not jumping with activity, where I can follow something challenging and new.I am essentially saying that the format of voting, when the numbers become large and experts become a small percentage of the populace essentialy leads to a popularphysics  ambiance. You cannot ask that everybody participating has a physics degree after all,because the SE objectives include students in highschool. physics overflow explicity puts the limit at graduate level upward questions so I hope it will succeed in keeping a high level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2014-04-10T12:38:22.207" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T12:38:22.207" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5709" CreationDate="2014-04-10T16:10:23.847" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Until a couple of days ago, the answers to questions would always be ordered based on the number of votes they received and the answer that was accepted. However, recently this has changed for my browser, see for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G1GOs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I the only one who if suffering from this (assuming this is a bug)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26169" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2014-04-10T18:08:40.593" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T18:08:40.593" Title="The answers are not ordered anymore based on the number of votes?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5708" CreationDate="2014-04-10T16:17:24.777" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you selected the tab &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; on the right, just above the answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eWz42.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T16:17:24.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-11T13:55:51.693" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &quot;skipped&quot; a proposed edit in the review on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/107909/42975&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/107909/42975&lt;/a&gt; because I was editing myself quite a lot.&#xA;Now, I want to manually apply the useful fixes from it, but can not find the skipped edit diff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where to look?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, I found the edit again - but without noticing why, and how it ended up on my screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while my current motivating instance of the problem was solved by chance - I could read the diff, and applly changes manually by a standard edit (of my own post) - the problem still exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It even seems like both parts of the confusion are related to a common cause, making it more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the problem be related to hiding parts of UI and feature set based on reputation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(My rep. was about 650 at the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42975" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-11T23:46:49.613" Title="Can not find edit request that I had skipped" Tags="|support|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-12T20:15:28.457" Score="5" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that since we can only upvote comments, it leads to skew, where comments, even if they are unhelpful or inaccurate cannot be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the whole mechanics of this website is, more-or-less &quot;people vote for things and the good things rise to the top, while the bad fall to the bottom&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would you use this as your model, but clearly ignore it in one place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44257" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-04-12T20:19:19.113" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T09:46:52.203" Title="Why can we not downvote comments, when we can upvote them?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5711" CreationDate="2014-04-12T20:21:48.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The upvotes just sort the comments for collapsing so that the software can determine which comments to show. If an entire comment thread fits, then there's no point in collapsing any comments. So why would we need a downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment thread doesn't fit, a non-upvoted comment and a downvoted comment would have the same effect anyway -- hidden by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What effect do you propose for downvoted comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-12T20:21:48.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5717" CreationDate="2014-04-12T20:39:17.143" Score="16" ViewCount="1526" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've previously had &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5473/asking-math-questions&quot;&gt;some discussion&lt;/a&gt; about the suitability of pure math questions for this site. Currently, pure math questions - by which I mean those that have no physics content, even if they arise in a physical context - are off topic. We migrate those to &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;. Here are some recent examples, mostly taken from the list of recently migrated questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/774831/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/774831/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/765211/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/765211/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/764631/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/764631/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/761917/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/761917/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/754449/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/754449/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/747413/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/747413/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/746432/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/746432/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/744131/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/744131/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/735556/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/735556/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/726177/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/726177/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/722339/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/722339/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/718567/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/718567/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/702646/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/702646/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/688794/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/688794/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/672816/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/672816/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/668792/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/668792/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/667502/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/667502/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/660457/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/660457/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/659664/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/659664/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/285642/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/285642/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Most of the above examples were typically migrated after 5 off-topic votes from +3k users and moderators via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/507/2451&quot;&gt;Math.SE migration path&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5473/asking-math-questions&quot;&gt;Last time the topic was brought up on meta&lt;/a&gt;, the community seemed in favor of changing our scope to make pure math questions on topic. If we decide to go ahead with it, it would be an easy change. So I thought I'd put forth this formal proposal: &lt;strong&gt;shall we make pure math questions on topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, answers should offer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a set of criteria (the more precise, the better) for determining which pure math questions should be on topic for us. The extremes of the spectrum are &quot;all math questions are on topic&quot; (essentially absorbing math.SE's scope into our own - they wouldn't like that though) and &quot;only questions which are about physics are on topic&quot; which is what we have now; answers can suggest anything in between. This &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; form the basis of an &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; meta question in the future, if necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an improved wording for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center scope page&lt;/a&gt; that briefly summarizes what sorts of mathematical questions are on topic and which ones aren't&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote up the answers you think are good, vote down those which you think are bad, and in either case &lt;strong&gt;comment to explain why&lt;/strong&gt;. As always, reasoned arguments will carry more weight than vote counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When (or if) a consensus emerges, we will take it into account and act accordingly. (I'm being vague because I can't &lt;em&gt;guarantee&lt;/em&gt; that our site scope will change to reflect the consensus here; we'll also have to come to an agreement with the math.SE community and the SE team.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T22:23:43.727" Title="Should pure math questions be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-12T21:03:26.163" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, purely-maths topics should not be on topic here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have a very clear scope: questions which ask about physics concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we start blurring that by saying some maths questions are on topic, and some are not, then we lose the clarity of the present scope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we extend the scope to be &quot;any maths or physics question&quot;, then we've effectively absorbed maths.se, and both physics.se and maths.se lose out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarity of scope is enormously important. It helps new and established contributors have an unambiguous rule about what is on topic, and what is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be muddied if the scope is no longer simply &quot;physics concepts&quot;, but includes some or all maths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so I'm proposing that the present wording on the Help Center Scope Page is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4066" LastEditorUserId="4066" LastEditDate="2014-04-13T01:37:58.310" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T01:37:58.310" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-12T23:25:37.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Math questions relevant to physics should be allowed, even encouraged.  To quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gell-Mann&lt;/a&gt; (as related in &quot;The Second Creation&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But, you know, the way they teach math is so abstract and peculiar, it's very hard for a student to know what's going on.  Mathematicians tend to present things in such a - what is the word? - such a &lt;em&gt;nonconstructive&lt;/em&gt; way.  They like to prove that there is something, but not actually &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; you what it is.  When they give examples, they are so trivial that you don't learn anything from them.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8338" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-04-13T17:32:26.047" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T17:32:26.047" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-13T04:43:23.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There exists the middle road in this question, and it is similar to the one used for homework, i.e. ask for context.  Pure mathematical questions at all levels should be discouraged if they have no physics context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naive example from an experimentalist :  I am thinking of using &quot;this mathematical tool&quot; in the context of string theories but I cannot find the set of its symmetry groups. Instead of &quot;what are the symmetry groups of &quot;this&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that a physicist has a hunch that a certain mathematical tool will be useful in a specific physical context and does not want to reveal it before it has matured into a full preprint ( for obvious reasons). Then mathematics.se and its conceptual difficulties should be faced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T04:43:23.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-13T08:00:37.743" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions devoid of any physics content (or reference to physics), which focus entirely on mathematical details should be migrated to the mathematics SE. If the question is regarding a mathematical method applied to a physics problem, then it is appropriate for the physics SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, a question which focuses entirely on mathematical details, whilst perhaps appropriate for the mathematics SE, should be kept on the physics SE if it is motivated by physics, even though it may not necessarily be regarding how it is precisely applied to a physics problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An example:&lt;/strong&gt; there was a question regarding how to compute the normals given a metric, and potentially its embeddings. The question did not feature a particular example from a physics problem, but it was on the physics SE because it was motivated by physics (specifically, because the normals are used to compute the extrinsic curvature which is part of the gravitational action boundary term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the requirements and expectations of the OP should be partially kept into consideration. It may be although the question is highly mathematical, the OP desires a physicist's perspective or approach, which may have subtle differences from a mathematics SE answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T08:00:37.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-13T21:45:29.717" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: This site is about &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt;. Questions posted here should &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be about physics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;About page&lt;/a&gt; states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to &lt;strong&gt;every question about physics, astronomy and astrophysics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis my own (neglect of link also mine). Similarly, the Math.StackExchange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;About page&lt;/a&gt; states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mathematics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to &lt;strong&gt;every question about math.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis again my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DavidZ comments in the original post,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Currently, pure math questions - by which I mean those that have no physics content, even if they arise in a physical context - are off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that of &lt;strong&gt;pure&lt;/strong&gt; math questions. Obviously questions that &lt;em&gt;contain physical contexts&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;no one is disputing that&lt;/em&gt;. It should be patently obvious that questions &lt;em&gt;devoid of physics&lt;/em&gt; should be off-topic, &lt;em&gt;whether it is about mathematics or not&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer: The following is indicative of the American University system as a whole. I can make no statements regarding University systems elsewhere in the wordl&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every physicist I have ever met must have taken the following courses in University:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further, many solid state physicists must take advanced courses in chemistry so as to make better solid state devices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, any question about Chemistry should be on topic on Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6426/literature&quot;&gt;English Literature&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, any question about Literature should be on topic on Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further, many physicists require computers to do their research on &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;computational physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, any question about Programming should be on topic on Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some physicists even pride themselves on knowing a lot of historical facts (a professor of mine made it a point to memorize every physicists full names)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, any question about History should be on topic on Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foreign Langauges (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some cases, becoming fluent in a foreign language is a necessity to communicate to collaborators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, any question about Foreign languages should be on topic on Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the list goes on once you get into the elective portion of the general requirements. If you jump into the electives within physics, we diversify even more (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;electronics&lt;/a&gt;, the now-closed &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; site, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a great site that is dedicated to questions and answers that are about physics and its subfields. Mathematics is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a subfield of physics (surely Mathematical Physics &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a subfield of physics, but these are high-level maths that are full of physics concepts that are &lt;strong&gt;decidedly &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; topic&lt;/strong&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not need to muddy our waters with questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algebra-precalculus&quot;&gt;algebra &amp;amp; trigonometry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geometry&quot;&gt;geometry&lt;/a&gt; that have &lt;strong&gt;nothing to do with physics&lt;/strong&gt;. Which is the point here, we're not talking about questions about group theory and tensor calculus that have deep physical meaning in advanced topics, we're talking about questions that are rudimentary mathematical questions that have no basis on physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:26.583" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T00:55:50.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-14T00:19:44.477" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Again, simple as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was very supprised and disapointed that these questions are locked. I think for students and mathematicans who may want to enter the field these questions are great and could be very insparational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really think that these lists can have something to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that many of the answers were simply un-detailed lists of a half-dozen books, but it is not the fault of the question nor the question-poser that the answers given were not in line with the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, can we open the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/884/2451&quot;&gt;Every Physicist Books&lt;/a&gt; question and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/13020/2451&quot;&gt;Layman Books&lt;/a&gt; question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44257" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T02:21:25.630" Title="Can we open &quot;The Every Physicist Books Question&quot; &amp; &quot;The Layman Books Question&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|soft-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2014-04-14T02:21:25.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I agree that many of the answers were simply un-detailed lists of a half-dozen books, but it is not the fault of the question nor the question-poser that the answers given were not in line with the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True, but the questions weren't locked because of their answers, they were locked because they - the questions themselves - are not good content for a Stack Exchange site. (That's a general rule, by the way. Whenever a question is locked or closed, it's not because of any answers it may have received.) As dmckee said in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, these things could be valuable in and of themselves, but they break sites. No, really, they do. The easy-to-ask, easy-to-participate-in cruft drives out the real content that makes the site different from the rest of the internet. They ruin the one thing that makes Stack Exchange sites different and better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that Stack Exchange sites are not trying to be your one-stop resource to find all useful information on a particular subject. We are trying to be the best place to ask specific questions and get accurate answers. Accordingly, we don't want to deal with anything that's not a specific question or an accurate answer. I'm not saying all that other content is useless; on the contrary, some of it is very useful. But it's not what we're trying to collect here. There are plenty of other places online where that other content can find a good home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-ended lists fall into that category of non-SE content. So no, we will not unlock those questions. They're useful, sure, but this site is not the place for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T02:21:25.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5711" CreationDate="2014-04-14T09:46:52.203" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is that answers are ranked by score, and comments are ranked by time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful answers get upvotes and move to the top&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bad answers get dowvotes and move to the bottom&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;average answers stay in the middle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, downvotes help the best quality emerge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments have upvotes to express agreement and avoid multiple &quot;I agree with the previous&quot; comments. There is no score ranking in comments, besides choosing comments to show when there are too many, so downvotes are not needed for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not answers which can be right or wrong. Comments are opinions, and we like different opinions to coexist, whereas we want wrong answers to go away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you think a comment is &lt;em&gt;really bad&lt;/em&gt; then you can flag it - with enough flags it will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T09:46:52.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-14T11:14:40.207" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, math questions should be on topic, when they are questions about mathematical concepts that are more used and known by physicists than mathematicians. In my view, the rationale should always be &quot;on which site would a particular question have the best chance to get an answer?&quot; Surely our primarily goal is to help an OP as much as we can?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, certain math questions would get more attention on this site than on math SE; the average physicist will know more about vector analysis, tensor analysis, certain aspects of group theory, certain differential equations, special functions, Legendre polynomials, Fourier analysis, integral transforms and calculus of variations than the average mathematician. The well-known textbook &lt;em&gt;Mathematical Methods For Physicists&lt;/em&gt; can serve as a rough guide. Moreover, a physicist will often solve these questions in a different way than a mathematician would, which sometimes might be more helpful to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/673318/laplaces-equation-in-spherical-coordinates/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Laplace's Equation in Spherical Coordinates, which the OP encountered in Griffith's EM. Despite the fact that the question was answered here and my answer was accepted, a mod still decided to migrate it to math SE, where, not surprisingly, it didn't get any attention whatsoever. So what was the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I don't like self-imposed arbitrary rules to decide which topics are supposedly on-topic or not. I favour a much more pragmatic approach when dealing with 'borderline' cases: just wait and see if a question gets enough attention, and when it doesn't, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; consider a migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T11:38:52.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-04-14T22:24:43.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mathematics : Physics = Grammar : Literature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While many writers may be very good at grammar, one would not ask a pure grammar question to a writer, but to a linguist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a big difference between a question of mathematics as applied to physics and a question of pure mathematics. While many physicists are good at applying mathematics, only a few of them have the breadth or depth of knowledge that a mathematician has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My fear is that pure mathematical questions would not receive as good answers here ans on math.se or mathoverflow and my very strong suspicion is that they would not receive a good peer review because of course pure mathematics is a larger set of concepts and skills as compared to the subset used in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to &lt;em&gt;maximize usefulness of the network&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;minimize effort of the communities&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where would someone likely go to look for an answer to this question? Differential equations are very useful in physics, but most DE questions probably live in our maths sites. We don't want to have the same question in two places, or worse, questions randomly spread between the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, remember that if you can answer a question &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, you can also do so &lt;em&gt;on the maths sites&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;migrate pure maths questions to the appropriate level mathematics site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;criterion to define &quot;pure maths&quot;: if answering the question &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; physics knowledge, then keep the question; if answering the question &lt;em&gt;does not require&lt;/em&gt; any physics knowledge, migrate away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2014-04-15T15:43:56.530" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T15:43:56.530" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5690" CreationDate="2014-04-15T05:32:36.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just throwing this out there, maybe, as discussed in the comments on Emilios answers, it is too much hassle to go through for the number of occurences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree that migration channels can have value, but that it opens up the possibility that low-level junk gets dumped to a different SE site and closed there. The main reason is, as Emilio mentioned, that many 3k+ users that are allowed to give close votes at physics.se, have little knowledge of the site they are voting to migrate towards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now comes the idea: the stackexchange rep system allows us to check that knowledge! We already have a system in place that allows us to check whether a physics.se user has enough rep to close vote; we already have a system that allows us to check whether a ee.se user (just as example) has enough rep to close vote. We could make the 'migrate to' option only available to people that have sufficient rep BOTH on the sending as well as on the receiving stackexchange site. Maybe it doesn't have to be the full close vote rep minimum on the receiving site, I'm note sure, but at least this makes sure that users that vote to migrate actually have knowledge of the site the question is migrated to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20731" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T05:32:36.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5690" CreationDate="2014-04-15T13:19:55.790" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the real problem here?  A user couldn't be bothered to read the rules and blurts out his question on the wrong site.  Why should it be our responsibility to move it to the right site?  Our job here is protecting the site, not helping other users to find the right place for his question.  Someone that can't figure that out probably won't be contributing anything useful to another site either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never use any of the migration options when voting to close, here or elsewhere.  Often I don't feel I know enough about the target site to be sure, but the main reason is that it's simply not my job nor my problem, and I don't want reward a user who posts in the wrong place by getting them a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T14:20:20.990" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T14:20:20.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-14T13:55:35.020" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Help!  I contribute to the Physics Stack Exchange.  I use Chrome (on OS X), and I don't use any extensions with stack exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the last several days, when I attempt to leave a comment on a post, Chrome has been automatically filling the comment space with text that I submitted as a comment days ago.  Editing is a nightmare, because with every edit &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the text I entered is deleted, and that old text is inserted in its place.  Practically anything I do in the comment field causes all text to be deleted, and that old scrap of text to be inserted.  Any help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" OwnerDisplayName="garyp" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T04:58:28.420" Title="Chrome automatically fills in Stack Exchange comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5726" CreationDate="2014-04-14T18:36:48.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check your browser auto-fill settings, it certainly isn't the stack exchange, must be the browser (or browser extension).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try removing extensions one at a time, re-checking if  the issue exists after each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44701" OwnerDisplayName="JoyalToTheWorld" LastActivityDate="2014-04-14T20:00:53.007" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-16T09:06:18.017" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I perform a strikethrough on some text I've posted in a question ? I've tried \sout and a few others to no avail. The advanced help page in the editor doesnt provide any assistance either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we potentially add how to do a strikethrough to the advanced help section in the question editor ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23583" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T12:44:26.100" Title="Strikethrough in Jatex" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5728" CreationDate="2014-04-16T10:58:06.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;s&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;s&gt;striking&lt;/s&gt; text. Not sure if there are any supported strikethrough methods in the subset of LaTeX we use here, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T10:58:06.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5728" CreationDate="2014-04-16T12:44:26.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing you need to do is to include the &lt;em&gt;cancel&lt;/em&gt; package into your TeX by writing the following in your code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;\require{cancel}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After, it's relatively easy to cancel something by just writing: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;\cancel{\displaystyle\int\mathrm d^4x\,\text{whathever}}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can also use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;\cancelto{to whathever}{whathever}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NvHFG.png&quot; alt=&quot;hope this helps!!!&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25589" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T12:44:26.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5732" CreationDate="2014-04-19T14:18:30.183" Score="-1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question:&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/82238/31782&quot;&gt;Why does a bicycle come to rest after travelling a distance?&lt;/a&gt; has been downvoted too much. Why  is it  so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO OP seems to know that there should be some force which brings the bicycle to rest and is just asking for if this is true or there is some other concept involved. Since the OP does not make it clear my speculation might be wrong.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T16:29:23.273" Title="Why is this question downvoted too much?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5731" CreationDate="2014-04-19T14:55:05.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/82238/1&quot;&gt;the way the question was first posted&lt;/a&gt;, one can't expect anything better than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82238/#comment171089_82238&quot;&gt;@ja72's comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We usually downvote because upvotes/downvotes are basically meant for whether a post is showing some &lt;strong&gt;research effort&lt;/strong&gt; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XttEC.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question, (it appears, from its looks that) the OP didn't bother to do some research on his question. I might guess that that's probably the reason behind the other downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-19T14:55:05.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-04-19T15:06:30.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PXirF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="184" LastEditDate="2014-07-21T10:01:04.827" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T10:01:04.827" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-04-19T15:06:30.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-19T21:04:48.303" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is to announce that the History of Math and Science StackExchange proposal on Area 51 has entered the &quot;commit&quot; stage. You can read more about the proposal &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5494/area-51-proposal-history-of-science-and-mathematics?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and see the proposal itself &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/65204/history-of-science-and-mathematics/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the commitment stage, a certain number of users must &quot;commit&quot; to using the site, which is simply a pledge to use it when the beta launches. Once enough people have done this, the beta version of the site will launch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the top physics example questions on the proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exactly what kind of data did Kepler work out his laws from?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What type of instrumentation was used to produce monofrequency light sources at the period of JC Maxwell?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When was it recognized by scientists that the surface temperature of Venus must be extremely high compared to the earth? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10549" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T13:24:53.510" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T13:24:53.510" Title="History of Math and Science proposal is in commit stage" Tags="|discussion|history|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-06-15T19:07:23.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5731" CreationDate="2014-04-19T21:39:28.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my take: the questioner effectively says, right in the question, that they know that an object's velocity won't change without a force acting on it. Then they ask whether the fact that an object (the bicycle) is changing its velocity implies that a force is acting on it. This reflects a failure to apply basic logic. And the entire core of the question is based on that logical failure. So it's not a good question for us; there's no interesting physics in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-04-19T21:39:28.523" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-20T06:14:44.570" Score="0" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some stack exchanges sites have different policies as compared to the stackoverflow.com. e.g. Math.SE has completely different policies for &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12743/103816&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1803/103816&quot;&gt;home-work&lt;/a&gt; questions.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the policy of Phys.SE for asking beginner level questions, that is can unintelligent persons ask questions here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is this site mainly for expert level questions?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not talking of home-work type questions. suppose  I want to ask a very simple, basic question which is a result of a simple logical failure or a misunderstanding or ignorance. I do some research but do not get the answer. Are those question on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:21.967" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T23:10:39.670" Title="Is Phys.SE mainly for expert-level questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5736" CreationDate="2014-04-20T09:35:10.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not at all! We've got 2014  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; questions. And I bet most of the users have average intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the homework, there are tons of posts here on meta. You can see that unlike Math.SE, where no effort is required at all, here you must have worked and only the conceptual part. No questions like: &lt;em&gt;Why is my solution wrong?&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;I'm  stuck, how do I continue?&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing about questions is that you must have thought about it, and a Google search before asking would be useful. Of course, some understanding of the fundamental concepts is necessary, you can't ask to explain how to calculte a Feynman diagram when you even don't know quantum mechanics. But some questions are good if they can be explained easily, even if it's covered in textbooks, like: &lt;em&gt;Is energy conserved in GR?&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;What is negative temperature?&lt;/em&gt;... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are still interesting basic questions yet to asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T09:35:10.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5736" CreationDate="2014-04-20T11:51:11.977" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fantastic thing about the Stack Exchange generally, and the Physics SE in particular is that it gives you access to people who are expert in their area. This is an extraordinary resource, and I would have loved it to be available back in the 70s when I was a teenage science nerd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But working physicists are busy people with mortgages to pay and families to feed. If you want them to answer your question then you have to make it interesting and rewarding to answer. That means putting in the Google legwork to research your question and work out what the important physics behind your question is and how best to phrase the question. We see a lot of beginners' questions that give the impression little effort has been put into them, and in these days of the Internet there is no excuse for this. It gives the impression the OP doesn't really care, and in that case why should busy physicists make the (considerable) effort to write a detailed answer? Asking on the Physics SE shouldn't be the first option - it should be the last option and only used after easy options like blog articles have failed to provide an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a fan of banning questions, and if beginners want to ask questions that they have not thoroughly researched then let them ask. However they shouldn't be surprised if the questions are ignored by the more experienced members of the site. Such questions also attract downvotes, though my own view is that this is rather petty and I only rarely downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re homework: this discussion has rumbled on and on. If someone wants to learn some physics in order to do their homework then I'm happy to help because I think learning physics is good. If they're just trying to get their homework done then I would probably vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T11:51:11.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5741" CreationDate="2014-04-21T16:21:41.503" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had some recent discussions on whether pure maths questions be on topic (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5473/asking-math-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5713/should-pure-math-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). It seems that the majority want to make the policies less strict, and so my question is: will the moderators change the policies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this question is not meant to spark the discussion on whether pure maths questions should be on topic or not. If someone want to share their opinion about this, then please post them in the aforementioned discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26169" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-21T19:11:08.497" Title="Maths question on physics SE; how to proceed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5739" CreationDate="2014-04-21T17:33:49.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where you got the idea that &lt;em&gt;the majority want to make the policies less strict&lt;/em&gt; from DavidZ's meta post, given that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The  most &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5717/25301&quot;&gt;highly voted answer&lt;/a&gt; opens with the statement,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions devoid of any physics content (or reference to physics), which focus entirely on mathematical details should be migrated to the mathematics SE. If the question is regarding a mathematical method applied to a physics problem, then it is appropriate for the physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The remaining answers echoed the sentiments above (and were oddly given roughly equal mixtures of +1 and -1 votes), with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5722/25301&quot;&gt;single answer&lt;/a&gt; saying that we should absorb Math.SE's scope into our own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, I'm not sure that anything really needs to be done to what the majority actually voted. As far as I can tell, this is already done here on physics.SE (as evidenced by the list of migrated questions that DavidZ presented).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-21T17:33:49.110" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5739" CreationDate="2014-04-21T19:11:08.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm waiting for tomorrow's chat session to see what points are brought up there, and then we'll figure out the consensus and adjust the content of the help center if necessary to reflect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-04-21T19:11:08.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-21T20:21:10.093" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why this my question has been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109273/is-this-picture-of-the-universe-valid&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109273/is-this-picture-of-the-universe-valid&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-21T20:21:10.093" Title="Why this question has been closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-22T13:26:19.380" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment, someone posted a URL that went directly to a particular answer to a certain question.  How does one find the URL of a particular answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T13:33:11.567" Title="What is the URL of an individual answer?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5743" CreationDate="2014-04-22T13:33:11.567" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at the bottom of each post (question or answer). See the gray-text links (&quot;edit&quot; &quot;flag&quot; and &quot;share&quot;)? Those are hot-links and &quot;share&quot; has the permalink address. Use your browser to copy it's URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comments you can get a permalink from the time-stamp (but be aware that comments are not very permanent and can be deleted without warning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T13:33:11.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-23T20:26:18.057" Score="7" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;So a week or so ago, I made the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; tag; made a tag-wiki for it too. Recently, a certain someone (not relevant who) made it a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;. For the record, it is currently the only synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;. I think this was not valid. I'd like to state my disagreement with this action and request that it be undone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cosmology is a broad field that applies to a very large number of topics. It is true that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; would be a subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;, but it is not a synonym. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; only applies to topics that include a scale factor, are about the GR model of the universe we live in, and make some reference to the slightly more advance concepts like Friedmann equations, Hubble radius, co-moving quantities, or the like. Whereas cosmology can be applied to a much broader range, such as AdS/CFT, Schwarzschild space, asymptotically de Sitter solutions, and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could have a question that asks about the problem with using de Sitter space as a model for the universe we live in. That would be tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;, but it should not be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt;. Similarily, a question asking about cosmological redshift is a cosmology question and it is probably within an FRW-universe, but the question shouldn't be tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; any more than a question about radioisotope dating should be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/standard-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;standard-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;standard-model&lt;/a&gt; Additionally, a question that asks about finding the Ricci tensor for a higher-dimensional FRW metric could be tagged under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; (albeit, it would be more appropriate as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-metric&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-metric&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-metric&lt;/a&gt;, but those would more likely be synonyms) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt;, but I wouldn't necessarily put it under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if this is a simple case that 99% of the time when &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; is used, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt; will also be used, then I'd like to point out the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dark-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dark-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dark-energy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-expansion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;space-expansion&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-bang&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-bang&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-bang&lt;/a&gt;, or possibly the worst for that particular crime: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmological-inflation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmological-inflation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmological-inflation&lt;/a&gt;. These are all allowed and often used without being recast as synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on all this, I think the synonymizing should be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T21:32:13.760" Title="Possible bad tag synonym" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5745" CreationDate="2014-04-23T21:32:13.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the Phys.SE community thinks a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; tag would be useful, and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if somebody would like to be custodian over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; tag, then it seems like a good idea to undo the synonym. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world you are right: Let's tag all the questions as precise as possible. The problem is that we are only allowed to use 5 tags. And many users would not know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frw-universe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frw-universe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frw-universe&lt;/a&gt; tag, and not use it. The fact is that currently almost none of the FRW-related questions are tagged as such. Thus it would require a custodian to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;initially find all the FRW-related questions and tag them appropriately, and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in the future to tag new FRW-related questions consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T21:32:13.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-24T13:35:48.240" Score="9" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;When voting for closing , the reasons one can check are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;duplicate, off topic, unclear, too broad, primarily opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109812/what-might-be-the-reason-that-more-dense-materials-are-better-at-shielding&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; though  is just too low level in physics and displays a lack of physics background and even if answered the person who asked would probably not understand the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might call the new choice &quot;OP needs  to read a basic physics course&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I answer such questions because usually some equally ignorant of basic physics  replies with irrelevant points, and it brings the level of the site down to a popular science one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T18:00:45.403" Title="add another reason for closing" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5747" CreationDate="2014-04-24T15:17:00.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually I think the linked question is not a bad one. I would have closed it, but I would have closed it because it's homework not because it's a silly question. I'd guess most of us did the experiment of seeing what materials would stop gamma rays at school, and that's what the OP is asking about. There's some interesting physics behind this that's readily explainable to school children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, this takes us back to the point I raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5697/should-we-have-a-popular-physics-se&quot;&gt;Should we have a Popular Physics SE?&lt;/a&gt; and the response of the community was clearly &quot;No!&quot; (which, in hindsight, I agree with). If a question is so badly stated as to be unanswerable then just close and who cares exactly what reason you choose. If the question is answerable then it's up to you to choose whether to answer it. If you don't bother answering then you can't criticise someone who does make the effort. If an answer is wrong then explain why in a comment, or if you're feeling vindictive downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T15:17:00.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5747" CreationDate="2014-04-24T18:00:45.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're only allowed three custom close reasons*, which will all necessarily be sub-reasons of &quot;off topic.&quot; So if we were to add another custom close reason for a lack of sufficient preparation (or whatever we would call it), it would have to replace one of the existing reasons. I don't dispute that this would probably be a good close reason to have, but the question is, is it more important than the ones we have there right now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current close reasons - homework-like, non-mainstream, and engineering - were chosen because, roughly speaking, we (mods and others who offered input) thought they were the three most common types of questions we wanted to most actively discourage. Or more precisely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are used reasonably often&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's useful to have specific, standardized wording for them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we want to actively remind people that questions of that nature are not on topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they tend not to overlap&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perhaps&lt;/em&gt; lack of preparation meets these criteria better than one of the current reasons, but I'm not entirely convinced that it does. In particular, I think a lot of these questions also fall under homework-like (including the example you linked to) or too broad, and can be closed as such. For those that don't, you can always type in a custom close reason which will be posted as a comment. And I think that ability is sufficient to handle these sorts of questions. I could be wrong, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could definitely see myself changing my mind if someone can come up with a wording for the new close reason that would be reasonably objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*actually it is technically possible to have up to 5, but all sites other than Stack Overflow are limited to 3 and we would have to petition the SE team with a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; strong case to get them to increase our allotment.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a separate note, I always &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; questions that show a lack of appropriate preparation. This relates to the issue in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5736&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt;: I consider this site to be for expert-level questions in the sense that an asker must have adequate preparation in physics to coherently formulate their question and understand the answer they are seeking. Questions that don't satisfy that criterion demonstrate a lack of research effort (in a sense) and are sometimes also unclear, which is the criterion to cast a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T18:00:45.403" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5751" CreationDate="2014-04-25T07:17:45.770" Score="8" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this question is suitable for discussing here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been hanging around on PSE, I found the text editor of this site is very good and simple(Markdown+Mathjax). I hope to find an online editor just as PSE, with a preview pane, the syntax is same, support math equations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want that I can save the manuscript on the server and get the sharing links so that I can send it to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, what I wanted is writing a post on PSE however this post would not bother anyone unless I share the link with them. Because some question may be too specific and no need to be seen to all the people, or maybe sometimes I want to discuss a questions with my friends privately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if PSE can offer this feature or anyone know a free online website fits all my requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24452" LastEditorUserId="26169" LastEditDate="2014-04-25T08:54:05.157" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T08:54:05.157" Title="I am looking for a online text editor just like physics stack exchange" Tags="|feature-request|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5750" CreationDate="2014-04-25T07:21:11.710" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackedit.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;StackEdit&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://pagedown.googlecode.com/hg/demo/browser/demo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PageDown&lt;/a&gt;. The latter is the open source engine that SE uses, the former is an editor based on SE's flavor of markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T07:21:11.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-25T11:00:48.013" Score="1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a  question about the relation between mathematics and physics a few days ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109506/a-relation-between-the-law-of-multiplication-with-average-velocity-and-time&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109506/a-relation-between-the-law-of-multiplication-with-average-velocity-and-time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I did edit it and left a comment after it was closed. I do not know how much time it takes for a question to get reviewed. It seems that my question is still off-topic. So  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should I explain more how my question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109506/a-relation-between-the-law-of-multiplication-with-average-velocity-and-time#comment224114_109506&quot;&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Mathematical Physics&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should I quote the whole article from the referred book?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It might that I have some illusion or my mental ability is dull. If this is the case then would anyone tell me to which subject my question belongs?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is my question a bad question, why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T16:24:14.983" Title="How can I make my question On topic? 2" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5752" CreationDate="2014-04-25T12:42:11.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close your question because you posed it as an experiment on Physics.SE users and not physics (you've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/109506/revisions&quot;&gt;twice now eliminated the disclaimer&lt;/a&gt; stating &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/109506/4&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you've re-written it, it appears that your question is merely, &lt;em&gt;Why did the author assume the commutative &amp;amp; associative properties at this point?&lt;/em&gt; The answer may not be known (especially without looking at the ~70 year old book) or it might be a guessing game. Either way, I do not think it is worth re-opening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;What should I do now?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot expedite the process, so the best you can do is hope that your pleas sway 3k+ voters to re-open it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Should I explain more how my question is about Physics?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how it's about physics period, it appears to me to be purely about the associative &amp;amp; commutative laws of algebra. You probably could post it on Math.SE for a reasonable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Should I quote the whole artical [sic] from the referred book?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might be a case of &lt;em&gt;Too Long; Didn't Read&lt;/em&gt; (TL;DR). Personally, I think you've done enough to show what the article is stating, I just think it's a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;It might that I have some illusion or my mental ability is dull. If this is the case then would anyone tell me to which subject my question belongs?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated above, probably Math.SE because it's not about physics (at least as far as I can read into it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T12:57:38.400" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-25T14:06:34.523" Score="5" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;User profiles in Stack Exchange have typically been a very personal thing and the attitude towards them has been the most laissez-faire in the spectrum of SE policy. It is usual for user profiles to include links to external sites, as this is e.g. the place for users to link to their personal webpages or blogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any specific content which should not be placed in that area, or which could lead to a suspension? Should I refrain from e.g. promoting Quora in that space? What about Physics Overflow? If such links are allowed, how does this match with the existence of suspensions for 'promotional content'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T13:10:26.983" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:10:26.983" Title="Is promoting external websites in user profiles forbidden?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|profile-page|suspensions|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5754" CreationDate="2014-04-25T14:11:13.237" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can put whatever you want in your profile. (barring NSFW or generally offensive material, though the rules are pretty lax on that too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, feel free to link to Quora there :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T14:11:13.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5754" CreationDate="2014-04-25T20:57:23.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on what Manishearth said and address the last part of the question: the guidelines on what constitutes excessive self-promotion are outlined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid overt self-promotion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a large percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Our advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for details. We also offer free community promotion ads for open source projects and non-profit organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspensions for promotional content are issued when people behave in a way that violates these guidelines, are warned about it*, and don't stop. In particular, you need to make a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of posts (questions, answers, comments, or chat messages) with only marginally relevant (or irrelevant) links to get suspended for that reason. No matter how many links you put in your profile, they only appear in one place, and it's a place that people actually have to actively seek out in order to see what you put there. So I'm fairly certain that nobody will ever get suspended for posting promotional content solely due to something they put in their profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that none of this depends on which site is being linked to, except to the extent that the target of the links determines whether they are relevant. (Linking to a porn site will probably never be relevant; linking to e.g. Quora could be, but it depends on the target and context of the link.) In particular, we don't have any rules of the form &amp;quot;no linking to [specific website],&amp;quot; whether in profiles or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I should clarify that we do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have any policy saying that you must have been warned about certain behavior prior to being suspended for that behavior. But as a courtesy, we (moderators) usually try to verify that a user who behaves in a way that warrants a suspension is aware that they are doing so, and has a chance to stop, before actually issuing a suspension. There's usually not much point in suspending someone who doesn't realize they're breaking a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T22:17:50.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5752" CreationDate="2014-04-26T08:17:49.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you originally phrased your question it seemed as if you weren't really that interested in an answer and the point was to see if if got closed. I suspect the original question is beyond recovery and if you're really interested you should pose it as a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally the answer is that you're mixing up the &lt;em&gt;perception of the flow of time&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;time&lt;/em&gt;. Time is just a coordinate that extends to the positive and negative of some arbitrarily chosen point (as is space). If you wish to &lt;em&gt;experience&lt;/em&gt; time moving from 0 to -5 you can do, and of course you would see the direction of motion reversed, but this doesn't change the sign of quantities like &lt;em&gt;dx/dt&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-04-26T08:17:49.317" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5761" CreationDate="2014-04-29T11:35:49.570" Score="3" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110475/can-you-give-example-of-some-problems-with-solutions-in-each-of-newtonian-lagra&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed as &lt;code&gt;Too broad&lt;/code&gt;. While I see how that would be the case if the question is interpreted as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Explain the entire theories of Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question that's being asked is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do the differences in these three methods manifest themselves the solving of a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that seems to me like a decent question which could probably be addressed in a reasonably sized answer. In fact, I was half-way through writing an answer when the question was closed. I must say it was slightly disappointing to think my time on that answer was wasted, so perhaps I am prejudiced. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you see this? Is the question too broad? If so, can it be rephrased (I've already made a humble attempt myself) or is it unsalvageable without significantly altering the core question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T19:45:21.053" Title="Is this question too broad and if so, can it be fixed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2014-04-29T12:52:36.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a little broad, but mostly because the OP wants examples of solving the same problem done in the three methods which can take up quite some space (especially if you chose a problem that is rather complicated in one method to show the power of the others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we neglected that aspect, the question would then be,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the key differences between Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian dynamics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; could be answered easily and quickly enough, but it might be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5747/add-another-reason-for-closing&quot;&gt;&quot;insufficient effort&quot;&lt;/a&gt; type question and remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T12:52:36.697" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2014-04-29T15:11:45.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to answer that question my answer would look something like what appears below. The problem I see with that kind of answer is that it is only useful if you already have experience with these methods so that you can relate to the amount of work (and level of creativity/cleverness) each step demands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternate approach is to claim that Newtonian physics is concerned with forces, Lagrangian with energies and Hamiltonian with momenta, but again that is not helpful unless the reader has a framework to hang the explanation on and beginning students may incorrectly feel that I mean the treatment of energy and momenta in the Newtonian mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the problem is that the reader has to understand before they can understand and that calls for an entire chapter with exercises in a textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Problem solving steps in each formalism&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Newtonian&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draw picture, choose coordinate system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify forces (i.e. free body diagrams go here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write the algebraic relationships between various quantities in the system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bash the algebra and calculus until you get to the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Lagrangian&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draw picture, choose generalized coordinates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write down the kinetic and potential energies in terms of the generalized coordinate (and thereby get the Lagrangian). Identify what form (1st, 2nd, undetermined multiplies) you want to use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extract derivatives and write down Equations of Motion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bash the system of PDEs until you have solved the system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hamiltonian&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draw picture, choose generalized coordinates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write down the kinetic and potential energies in terms of the generalized coordinate (and thereby get the Lagrangian).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extract the generalized momenta from the Lagrangian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invert the momenta and write down the Hamiltonian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extract the derivatives of the Hamiltonian thus arriving at the remaining Equations of Motion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bash the system of PDEs until you have solved the system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T15:11:45.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2014-04-29T18:16:59.923" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key statement of the original question (v1) is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you show me a problem and solved with basic characteristics of Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian methods. like&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Problem : ........................&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Solution with Newtonian : ....................&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Solution with Lagrangian : ........................&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Solution with Hamiltonian : ......................&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons I think this is a bad question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any time someone says effectively &quot;answer the question in this format,&quot; it's a strong (though not definite) indicator of an asker who wants to be spoon-fed, and is not going to put in the effort to understand a reasonable answer. This is supported by the lack of any reference to an attempt by the OP to answer the question themselves, or even to look up a suitable problem and solutions in a textbook or problem book. So I think it's very clear that the OP has not put in anywhere close to sufficient effort to craft a good question for this site. As far as I'm concerned, this warrants a downvote, and one &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue also closure under the homework-like reason (though that could be a bit of a stretch). If we were to have an &quot;insufficient effort&quot; close reason then this would certainly qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question, and in particular the way in which the question is asked, suggests it's being asked by someone who has not studied Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. And in fact the poster says as much earlier in the question. That means they won't have the expertise required to make sense of the kind of answer we'd give them. What they need for this particular misunderstanding is a textbook or a course in classical mechanics, not a question on this site, and thus any useful answer to their question is likely to be very long (in an attempt to incorporate much of the material that a class would cover). That's part of the description of the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say this is a site for expert-level questions, this is the kind of thing I mean to exclude, and thus for this reason as well I'm inclined to downvote the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, the question is very much non-specific. It doesn't give us any indication of what the asker is really confused about, and in particular it doesn't address any sort of conceptual misunderstanding. Without that information, it will be a shot in the dark for us to provide a problem and solutions that are actually helpful. This qualifies it to be closed as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And finally, there's an endless list of possible answers, which is one of the criteria mentioned &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; in the description for the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason. Now, of course any question can have a large number of possible answers, if you go by word-for-word comparison, but usually there is something in the question that will cause all possible &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers to basically be saying the same thing. In this case, if the OP had identified some aspect of the various formalisms that they were confused about (as I mentioned in the previous bullet point), that would give the answers something to address and perhaps excuse the question from being too broad, but in this revision there is nothing of the sort.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rephrased version (v3): the key statement is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you use an example to outline the basic characteristics (and key differences) of Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian methods in their approach to classical mechanics problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is certainly an improvement over v1, as it addresses the formatting issue from the first bullet point above, and &lt;em&gt;partially&lt;/em&gt; the third, in the sense that it &lt;em&gt;starts&lt;/em&gt; to give a clue as to why the asker is confused. But the second and fourth, and part of the third, still stand. In particular, the question is still being asked by someone who is not prepared to receive a reasonable answer, and there's still nothing sufficiently specific identifying a particular concept that confuses the OP. Any edit we could make to remedy that would involve a significant amount of guessing on the editors' part as to what the OP really wanted to know. So &lt;strong&gt;I don't think it's possible to fix this question through editing without intervention by the OP&lt;/strong&gt;, and thus I think this should remain on hold unless and until the OP does edit it in a way that addresses these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-04-29T19:45:21.053" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T19:45:21.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-30T12:45:14.837" Score="8" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean this change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wMTDj.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Taskbar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically the number in the orange square, which is related in some vague to the number of posts that have needed review in the last day or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it shows &quot;20&quot; this implies to me that there are 20 outstanding reviews required. Only there aren't. When I click the &quot;20&quot; or the &quot;review&quot; link there are no reviews pending. This used to show the number of edits pending, and I can see the case for making it show the number of pending reviews of all kinds. However I can't see the case for making it show effectively random numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2014-04-30T19:36:26.610" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T20:38:06.677" Title="The change to the taskbar is massively annoying" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5762" CreationDate="2014-04-30T19:41:50.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're not random: if the bar shows 20, then there are actually 20 pending review tasks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, unlike the numbers shown to you and everyone else in /review, this number counts &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; - including tasks you aren't personally eligible to review. This includes tasks you've already done, tasks you've skipped, and tasks that the system expects you might not be sufficiently impartial to review (e.g., things you've already flagged or posted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;the 10K tools&lt;/a&gt;, this is intended to be &lt;em&gt;informational,&lt;/em&gt; something to give you a high-level overview of what's happening on your site. If the number is getting bigger, there's a problem &lt;em&gt;even if you personally are reviewing everything you can!&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-04-30T19:41:50.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-01T05:46:15.450" Score="6" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was digging into my old posts to see if I could improve them. There was a question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/82449/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/82449/&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it is deleted but the high rep users might be able to read it.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I do not understand is that what was wrong with this post?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After it was deleted by the community mod I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/595538/&quot;&gt;the same question on Math.SE&lt;/a&gt; and got an excellent answer that I was looking for. It could be that it is more a mathematical question but if this was the case why wasn't it closed or migrated? Neither the question was closed as &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;. Was it downvoted because it is a beginner question? Why was this question not well received by the physics community? I do not see some severe grammatical mistakes beside capitalization.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am asking this question only because I want to understand how should I present my posts to the physics community so that they be well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T23:11:46.710" Title="Why was this question hated by the community?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5764" CreationDate="2014-05-01T10:23:26.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first version required the user to find a book and read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has anyone read e.spenke's book? what's mathematical definition of mean free time for metal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one was very unclear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;E.spenke:-&quot;if on the average, a time T elapsed between two collisions&#xA;  of an electron, dt/T terminal points of such times fall on average&#xA;  into the time interval dt. thus an electron suffers in the interval dt&#xA;  on the average dt/T collisions, and N electrons suffer N.dt/T&#xA;  collisions. thus collisions eliminate in an interval dt on the average&#xA;  dN= N.dt/T electrons from a group with uniform velocity hence decrease&#xA;  exponentialy with time: N=N(0).e^(-t/T)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i think dt/T is the probability of an electron to collide here. but&#xA;  can it be shown mathematically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also was rather badly formatted, and this makes people less likely to read it. Someone improved it for you, though, and you made further improvements to it. However, it was a bit late by then, and people had already seen the post and may not have checked again for improvements. (also, if it has a score &amp;lt;-3, it gets hidden from the main page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suggest you keep titles descriptive of the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-05-01T10:23:26.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5767" CreationDate="2014-05-03T20:18:16.283" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I requested for a deletion of my account for Physics.SE, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleting-account&quot;&gt;this help page&lt;/a&gt;. It's been more than six hours and apparently no action has been taken yet. Can anyone tell me how long a deletion process normally needs to finish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T15:46:37.563" Title="How long does it take to get an account deleted?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5766" CreationDate="2014-05-04T00:15:45.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone at Stack Exchange HQ will need to verify and process your request, so you will probably need to wait &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; until Monday during business hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T00:15:45.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-04T18:56:50.063" Score="6" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5673/what-exactly-should-10k-users-be-doing-to-help-the-site&quot;&gt;What exactly should 10k users be doing to help the site?&lt;/a&gt; the flag review queue has disappeared, but it isn't clear to me whether flagging answers is still useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With questions, the implication of the the above question is that it's better to put effort into voting to close and downvoting as appropriate. With answers there is no vote to close, so for answers that are really comments, or spam, or whatever flagging and downvoting are the only options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is whether it's helpful to the moderators if we flag answers, or should we just downvote them? If the answer is that flagging is helpful, are all the flags helpful or just the more extreme ones like &lt;em&gt;offensive, abusive or hate speech&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T02:55:45.257" Title="Should we still be flagging answers?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5768" CreationDate="2014-05-05T02:42:11.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely. &lt;em&gt;Flagging&lt;/em&gt; is no less useful now than it was before; only the process by which flags are &lt;em&gt;handled&lt;/em&gt; has changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/19104/how-do-metallic-objects-interfere-with-x-rays/111106#111106&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I ask then what is the comparable &amp;quot;blocking&amp;quot; ability of lead, zinc and regular carbon steel (ie steel used in general construction), In simple terms, for example 1mm of lead is the same as ?mm zinc and ??mm steel????&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an answer. Flagging it as such puts it in front of the moderators &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; other users via /review/low-quality-posts. If multiple people flag the same answer, it gets pushed toward the top of the moderator queue. It &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; gets a bit of additional weight on the side of &amp;quot;delete&amp;quot; in /review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, either moderators or reviewers can delete the answer - this means the flag will be handled regardless of whether or not there are moderators or reviewers active on the site - the post will be dealt with by whoever gets to it first. In this case, &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; queues contributed to handling the flag, with a reviewer leaving a comment explaining why this was not an appropriate answer and a moderator following up by deleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other cases, the flag may not be able to be handled by reviewers. These flags enter the moderator queue &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;, and remain there until a moderator is able to respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;a 10K user&lt;/a&gt;, you're now kept abreast of the state of /review via &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5762/the-change-to-the-taskbar-is-massively-annoying/5763#5763&quot;&gt;the number at the top of the page&lt;/a&gt;; if that number isn't budging for days at a time, neither moderators nor reviewers are keeping up and flagging isn't working - maybe ask around and try to find out why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A pocket guide to flags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reminder, the following flags are available in various situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Very Low Quality:&lt;/strong&gt; used to call out a question or answer that is &lt;em&gt;abysmally&lt;/em&gt; bad - not necessarily even incorrect, but impossible to understand or utterly irrelevant. The sort of post that would embarrass you if it showed up when you were showing off the site to a peer. Each &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; VLQ flag comes with an automatic downvote, compliments of the system. Only available for posts scoring &amp;lt;=0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not an answer:&lt;/strong&gt; used to call attention to posts that do not even attempt to answer the question they're posted in response to. Follow-up questions, commentary on other answers, rants, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Offensive:&lt;/strong&gt; posts that shock the proverbial conscience. Generally, such posts will have other problems as well, which might otherwise result in them being closed or deleted - but in this case the author has gone out of his way to make his work odious. Each flag generates an immediate downvote from the system, which will be retracted if the flag is declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spam:&lt;/strong&gt; overt self-promotion. Can be anything from mechanically-generated offers of discount handbags, to someone obnoxiously pushing their tangentially-relevant blog in lieu of actually answering questions. Like Offensive, you'll know it when you see it. Also generates an automatic downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A sufficient number of either Spam or Offensive flags on a post will cause it to be instantly removed, locked, and the author's reputation docked 100 points. If you find spam inherently offensive, just pick whichever option seems more appropriate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other:&lt;/strong&gt; You're not quite sure how to categorize it, but &lt;em&gt;something is rotten in the state of Denmark&lt;/em&gt;. Hopefully, an experienced moderator will be able to sort it out. Requires entering a description of the problem - &lt;em&gt;be specific!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T02:42:11.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5771" CreationDate="2014-05-05T18:13:53.483" Score="9" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I use the search bar to perform a keyword search for previous questions, is it possible (for example) to append something to my keywords so that my search will include questions that have been put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T22:25:18.943" Title="Is it possible to search for questions that have been put on hold?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5770" CreationDate="2014-05-05T18:47:57.273" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be no direct way to only search for questions 'on hold', but one can use the search word &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3ayes&quot;&gt;closed:yes&lt;/a&gt; to find all closed questions (that haven't been deleted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an indirect way to only search for questions 'on hold', one could try the search &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=closed%3ayes%20duplicate%3ano%20migrated%3ano&quot;&gt;closed:yes duplicate:no migrated:no&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, to learn how to search, click on &lt;em&gt;Advanced Search Tips&lt;/em&gt; in the right margin of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Phys.SE search box&lt;/a&gt; page, or visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; for a more complete set of search options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T22:25:18.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2014-05-05T21:04:42.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a solid criterion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mathematical questions may be asked, but only in the context of predicting some physical phenomena.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the use of mathematics in physics, and what separates it from mathematics for good'ole mathematics sake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40394" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T03:45:07.557" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T03:45:07.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-06T13:15:31.047" Score="9" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a bounty awarded for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/111006/how-does-light-bend-around-my-finger-tip/111238#111238&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;.  (Thanks, Ruslan!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I went to look at it, though, I noticed that the bounty marker icon looked kind of awkward, like it didn't really &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to be there, shuffling off to one side and huddling uncomfortably close to the accepted answer checkmark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iugkU.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot 1: awkwardly placed bounty marker icon&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should give our bounty icon a little more grace and confidence, make it be proud of itself!  And I think I know just the CSS rule to do it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.vote .bounty-award {&#xA;     margin: 5px auto;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The &lt;code&gt;.vote&lt;/code&gt; is there just to make this rule more specific than the existing bounty margin rule, which, for some strange reason, specifies a 5 pixel &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; margin and nothing else.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this new CSS rule added, the bounty icon looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLAqH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot 2: improved bounty marker icon placement&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Yes, I got an upvote while testing this.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That looks a lot better, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the awkward bounty marker placement doesn't seem to be limited just to physics.SE, although it's more obvious here than one many other SE sites.  As far as I can tell, the CSS rule I suggested above seems to improve (or have no visible effect on) the bounty marker appearance on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange sites I've so far tested it on, so I'd suggest it as a general CSS change to all the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I'm posting this bug report / suggestion here, rather than on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;, because the problem is most noticeable here on physics.SE.  (And because per-site metas just don't get enough love in general.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4646" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T20:25:44.943" Title="Bounty icon is poorly placed" Tags="|bug|design|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5776" CreationDate="2014-05-08T06:50:18.670" Score="2" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/kzFljxq.png&quot; alt=&quot;I am in danger!&quot;&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally a warning banner has been installed to tell users that they are going to be banned to ask questions. This is very good. It saved me for getting banned again.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The banner says:&quot;&lt;em&gt;...edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Which questions should I edit? Should I edit my deleted questions Or my present undeleted questions? Or should I improve all of my questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we mean my &lt;em&gt;&quot;well received&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? Do questions  to whom I haven't accepted an answer are called &quot;&lt;em&gt;not well recieved&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or only which are downvoted? Or which are closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:55:37.723" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:55:37.723" Title="I am in danger of being blocked from asking any more questions" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5775" CreationDate="2014-05-08T06:57:40.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hm, this warning has been around for a while it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Not well received&quot; means downvoted, closed, or deleted, with different weightages for the three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undelete your deleted questions if you self deleted them, and fix them. Also, fix your downvoted ones, take feedback from the people in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; in that banner lists how you can improve your questions and avoid a ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T06:57:40.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-08T19:34:24.003" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about a whole family of grey questions that the SE structure kind of makes difficult to answer. If there are problems which overlap with two areas, say Physics and one of the Engineering sites, and require expertise in both fields, should there be a mechanism to create a multi-forum question. Questions like these may not be suitable to just migrate over but still contribute to the Physics discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example here is a question I asked:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109875/ricci-tensor-calculus-and-matrix-calculus&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109875/ricci-tensor-calculus-and-matrix-calculus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's as relevant to physics as it is to engineering and math. That being said it would be difficult to get a satisfying question unless you have people from the math and engineering area who also prowl the Physics forum. It's on topic and a satisfying answer would help refine an understanding of Physics vs. Engineering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking it would be interesting to see different SE forums being able to host the same question with the responses from all the forums it is in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T19:34:24.003" Title="Linked Questions across different StackExchange" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5779" CreationDate="2014-05-10T04:56:13.457" Score="46" ViewCount="2736" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Physics Stack Exchange, people asking questions are expected to demonstrate that they've put a certain amount of effort into answering the question themselves. What exactly counts as sufficient effort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T13:19:10.620" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T13:19:10.620" Title="What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?" Tags="|discussion|faq|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5778" CreationDate="2014-05-10T04:56:13.457" Score="28" Body="&lt;h1&gt;What research do I need to do before asking a question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the general rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Before asking a question, do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; else you can think of that might get you the answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, you should probably do &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of the following before asking here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Think&lt;/em&gt; about the question. What do you already know that relates to it? Narrow it down to the specific physics concept you are really asking about or are confused by.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type the question title into &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; (and/or another good-quality search engine) and look at the top few (at least 5-10) results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also search a few combinations of key words, and again look at the top few results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify what physics concepts are involved and look at the relevant &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; pages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look in a textbook or equivalent resource on the appropriate subject. If you don't have actual textbooks, there are plenty of online resources, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyperphysics&lt;/a&gt;, that you can use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're asking a more advanced question which concerns current research, look for relevant papers, including checking on &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt;. You may find it useful to use a dedicated scientific search engine, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://inspirehep.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;INSPIRE&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://adsabs.harvard.edu/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ADS&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the search box in the top right to check this site for similar questions. Also, when you're typing your question in the form, look at the suggested similar questions the system shows you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have friends, colleagues, teachers, or so on who would know something about your question, ask them for input.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And anything else you can think of that you think has a reasonable chance of getting you the information you're looking for. (For example, if your question is about a calculation, try working through the math yourself.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find the answer to your question while doing all this research, great! You can, if you want, post your question here (if it's not already on the site) along with your own answer describing what you found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;OK, I didn't find the answer. Now what?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your prior research didn't give the answer you were looking for, &lt;strong&gt;tell us what you checked&lt;/strong&gt;. Don't explicitly list each one of the steps above to say that you followed it, but do mention anything you found that is close to the topic of your question, and point out why it didn't give you the answer you wanted. If someone reads your question and immediately finds a standard resource (Google search, Wikipedia, HyperPhysics, another SE question) that seems to answer it, it's going to look like you didn't do your research, unless you explain why that resource doesn't actually contain the information you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What if I think I know what the answer is?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a guess or hypothesis about the answer to your question (one that is grounded in solid physics), that's fine, but you should go out and check that hypothesis yourself. Maybe it'll be correct, in which case you can post the question here with your hypothesis (and the evidence that shows it's correct) as an answer. If you think it's incorrect, on the other hand, mention it in the question and say why you think it's wrong. A question that just ends on &quot;My hypothesis is XXXX&quot; comes across as lazy, but if you instead write &quot;My hypothesis is XXXX, but that doesn't seem correct because Wikipedia says YYYYY,&quot; and so on, that shows research effort and makes a better question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What happens if I don't follow these guidelines?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People trying to answer your question will follow the steps in the first section: they'll search Google, check on Wikipedia, on Hyperphysics, in textbooks, and do some simple calculations if it's that type of question. If, by doing so, they find the answer to your question, they're likely to downvote your question for not showing research effort. You may also get comments pointing you to the answer on Wikipedia or a top search result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that show a particular lack of research effort &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6001/closing-insufficient-effort-questions&quot;&gt;may be put on hold (or &quot;closed&quot;)&lt;/a&gt;. In many of these cases, the advice in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; may be useful in improving the question enough to have it reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T10:29:30.957" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-05-10T19:22:04.293" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-05-10T10:52:20.487" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TG2kD.png&quot; alt=&quot;PhysicsOverflow: a graduate-level upward physics site&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2014-05-24T14:17:10.087" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T14:17:10.087" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-05-10T10:52:20.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-10T14:16:36.080" Score="-3" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I had posted two questions (fortunately &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/112099/a-question-on-vectors#112099&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; is there to show you), but the response which I received from the community was too irritating. And what is wrong with the homework tag (why isn't the community removing it if you don't want any so-called &quot;homework&quot; questions in this community*)? Total crap.. whenever users (the ones with huge rep) see questions that beginners ask they just add the tag 'homework'.. What the. I mean even they were beginners at some point or the other. Instead of answering those simple (but damn to imp for the beginners) questions they community forces students like me to remove the questions. I would seriously recommend the community to check out mathSE's response to homework tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I am not targeting homework tag here, but the term has entered this question only because of those users who really don't want to answer the questions and demoralize the young enthusiastic brains. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel homework tag is being used over here (in phySE) &lt;em&gt;to spread the message that the question is being asked by a beginner&lt;/em&gt; (or maybe &quot;noob&quot;) &lt;em&gt;so please downvote it&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;flag it&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;teach him/her how to use the homework tag&lt;/em&gt; and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really need a response. These guys (with high rep) must learn how to help others before they continue their journey on this site. Seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42115" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T14:29:48.047" Title="Why does Physics SE community get irritated when a small doubt / general question is asked by students?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5781" CreationDate="2014-05-10T14:29:48.047" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework tag is primarily there so that uninterested people can choose to not see a certain class of questions. Unfortunately, the tag name does not accurately reflect its meaning, the meaning includes homework-like questions which are not homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; about such questions, and while there are questions which can be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; and are still on topic, &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of them are not. This is why the tag exists, but most such questions are not well received by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community is more interested in conceptual questions (where the concept is highlighted, not when the concept ma or may not be deeply hidden inside) over problem solving. There are other forums out there if you want to discuss problem solving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T14:29:48.047" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5773" CreationDate="2014-05-11T20:25:44.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the following set of CSS styles (applied on top of the existing styles on each SE site) seems to work even better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.vote .bounty-award-container {&#xA;     margin: 13px 0;&#xA;     text-align: center;&#xA;}&#xA;.vote .bounty-award, span.bounty-award {&#xA;     margin: 0;&#xA;     display: inline-block;&#xA;     padding: 0.2em 0.5em;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules allow the width of the bounty marker to adapt to the bounty amount, while keeping it centered and leaving a reasonable margin between it and any other post icons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H9dR1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Bounty marker icon with extra styles as above&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The funny selector for the second rule above is to let it apply both to the left bar icons for awarded bounties and to the notice box for active bounties (where the current 5px right margin also looks pretty ugly) while still keeping it more specific than existing site style sheets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have included the CSS styles above in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/stack-overflow-unofficial-patch&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch&lt;/a&gt; v1.14 user script.  After some testing, I decided to enable them on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; SE sites.  On the original trilogy sites (SO, SU, SF) they have very little effect, as they strongly resemble the existing styles, and the few differences are overridden by &lt;code&gt;!important&lt;/code&gt; rules in the site style sheet.  On most other SE sites (as far as I've tested) they seem to improve the bounty icon appearance anywhere from slightly to significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4646" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T20:25:44.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T16:21:55.617" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/112015/&quot;&gt;why popcorns become soft after popping&lt;/a&gt; the tag &lt;code&gt;popcorn&lt;/code&gt; was suggested. I think it would be nice to have a more general &lt;code&gt;everyday physics&lt;/code&gt;, or a better name that you could come up with, to collect the explanations of everyday phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is not &lt;code&gt;popular-science&lt;/code&gt;, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4699/&quot;&gt;was&lt;/a&gt; not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4295/&quot;&gt;liked&lt;/a&gt; by the community. It is not &quot;explain in simple words what QFT is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be interesting? In the interest of archives, if approved, should we go through old questions and re-tag them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41729" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T16:10:35.457" Title="Everyday physics tag?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5784" CreationDate="2014-05-12T17:05:27.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have such a tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt;. I personally don't think it's all that useful, but in any case it does exist and I guess this is the sort of thing it was meant for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T17:05:27.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5784" CreationDate="2014-05-12T20:17:57.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the one who made the comment about adding a &quot;popcorn&quot; tag. I was actually making a joke when I said it; the point of the humor was to highlight the ridiculousness of making a tag for such a specific concept, but apparently the OP thought I was being serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say &quot;garbage in, garbage out&quot;, but considering that I am a dumpster, that would probably be hypocritical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30717" LastEditorUserId="30717" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T22:22:48.903" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T22:22:48.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5778" CreationDate="2014-05-13T16:07:01.733" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, people shouldn't just blurt out whatever question pops into their minds without thinking about it and making at least some attempt to find the answer.  The real question is how much is enough?  What is a reasonable level of research?  How do we measure that or even decide how much research was actually done?  Should the bar be lower for a more beginner question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the sentiment here, but I think our implementation sometimes goes too far.  My answer here was brought about by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/112466/20848&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  John Rennie wanted to close the question.  His comment got 4 upvotes, and 3 close votes have accumulated so far.  On the other hand, my comment saying it was a good question got 3 upvotes and the question itself got 9 upvotes, no downvotes, and three answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the real problem is that this is a rather &quot;low level&quot; physics question, and people are really responding to that.  That's short sighted and will eventually leave only experts here with nothing to say to each other because nobody has anything to ask.  With enough research, any question could be answered without asking here.  This site is trying to be a repository of good questions with good answers.  This can't happen if we refuse to answer anything that isn't answerable by other means.  Even if the answer is out there elsewhere, for some questions we want this site to be where people go to do the reasearch and find the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site shouldn't be only about high-falutin physics.  We aren't here for stupid questions either, but there is a important distinction between stupid and ignorant.  The question I linked to above was ignorant but not stupid.  It was well asked and actually about a clever observation for someone that doesn't already know the answer.  That makes it a good question.  Just because the answer doesn't require invoking relativity or quantum mechanics, doesn't make it a bad question or not useful to include in the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lighten up a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Added in Response to Comment:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Z points out that this answer doesn't really answer the original question.  That's strictly speaking correct.  This was somewhat of a comment, but too long to be a comment.  But, another point was that this is impossible to measure in a reasonable way and therefore will always be very subjective.  To put it more directly, my points relative to the original question are:&lt;ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;Whatever we say is the minimum level of research will be impossible to quantify by any standard metric, so will always be mostly subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;Even if there was some quantifiable measure we could all agree on, it will be difficult to determine whether that minimum level of research was actually performed.  In cases of blatant laziness it could be easy to show, like by entering the question title into Google and finding the first hit being a direct answer.  However, most of the time there won't be a nice and easy smoking gun like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;The level of dilligence must necessarily depend on the questioner's level of physics knowledge.  A professor of physics would know where to look up things and has access to such resources.  A high school student can't be expected to know about any physics journals, and probably doesn't have access to them anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;It can be hard to know where to look if you don't already know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;We &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; the research.  Asking here is part of finding a answer to a physics question.  It shouldn't be the first knee-jerk reaction, but ultimately that's what we're here for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is what I suggest someone should do before asking:&lt;ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;i&gt;Think&lt;/i&gt; about the question a little bit.  What do you already know that relates to it?  Try to identify what physics concept you are really asking about or are confused by.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the missing step that make too many &quot;homework&quot; questions so bad.  It's not that they are contrived or assigned questions, but that the asker hasn't bothered to identify what part exactly they are having trouble with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;See rule #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;See rule #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;Do at least a basic keyword search.  Sometimes you get lucky and you will find the answer easily.  Sometimes you don't find the answer but learn a few things anyway.  That's all good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we also realize that finding the right keywords is not obvious when you don't already know the answer and know what things are called.  Even then, it can be easy to have the search swamped with hits that match other uses of the same words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So definitely give it a try, but don't sweat it too much.  I'd say 5-10 minutes of honest effort is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;Ask around if you have someone to ask.  Unlike the previous rules, this is not a requirement since not everyone has someone they can ask or has access to them.  If you're a high school student at school, you should ask your physics teacher.  But if it's the weekend, that's not going to help.  We don't expect you to wait until Monday morning to get a basic physics answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;If you are more advanced in physics, then you will be held to a higher standard.  This includes various search engines, textbooks, and the like that you should be familiar with that ordinary folks aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;li&gt;When you've gotten to the point of deciding to ask here, use the search feature &lt;i&gt;on this site&lt;/i&gt;.  You might be surprised how many people have had the same question before you and that there are already some good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there is a bare minimum amount of research anyone should do, but the appropriate level depends a lot on how advanced you are in the topic.  The most important points are 1-3.  After that it's mostly to ask a good question &lt;i&gt;for your level&lt;/i&gt; that is self-consistant with that level, and to write the question properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's OK to be ignorant, but never OK to be stupid.  There is also never any excuse for sloppiness.  Taking some care includes breaking thoughts into sentences, capitalizing the first letter of sentences, capitalizing the word &quot;I&quot;, and never ever ever using text-speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that you are asking a bunch of people to volunteer their time to answer your question.  If you keep that and rule #1 in mind, and show the appropriate respect by doing the simple things that have nothing to do with level of physics knowledge, you'll most likely do fine.  Go ahead and ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T18:15:55.733" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4538" CreationDate="2014-05-14T12:47:02.033" Score="-11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something one would expect in some &quot;social&quot; or even &quot;humanitarian&quot; branches of science (although i &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; say that this is scientific, but it is indeed mainstream presently)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it strikes me as very odd that positive branches of science (physics, mathematics, biology etc..) have to take such &quot;measures&quot; to guard a forum or a community from error or &quot;heresy&quot; or &quot;non-mainstream-ness&quot; (if i may use such a term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems as if mathematics or even physics is a result of voting of which law is valid and is not a matter of natural reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is as if some very wicked (but clever) person can divert the innocent viewers of this forum and make them believe other physical laws (by a mere manipulation of text and voting systems) hold in natural reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course in such a case &quot;extreme measures&quot; must be taken, the &quot;natural&quot; processes must be guarded from falling from their natural/realist (or should i say mainstream) status by voting them down or up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A recommendation:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the forum's name to &lt;strong&gt;&quot;mainstream physics&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; , since a definition of &lt;em&gt;&quot;mainstream&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is in place it would indeed be &lt;strong&gt;valid&lt;/strong&gt; and reflect the site's &lt;strong&gt;purpose and content&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead &lt;em&gt;leave&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;physics&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; site name as &lt;strong&gt;non-reflecting&lt;/strong&gt; the site's purpose and content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would lead to &lt;em&gt;misunderstanding&lt;/em&gt; as encompassing talks / theories and discussions about actual physics (as in &lt;em&gt;nature&lt;/em&gt; ) and hypotheses about physics etc.. instead of &quot;mainstream physics&quot; as some people want to frame it as &lt;em&gt;THE PHYSICS&lt;/em&gt; (please nothing personal here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course changing the name would immediately make apparent the fact that it is &lt;strong&gt;non-encompassing&lt;/strong&gt; all physics or formulations or alternative hypotheses except what is &lt;em&gt;sponsored&lt;/em&gt; (with a grain of salt) as &quot;mainstream&quot;. This would beat the purpose of the mainstream (but not of physics) as trying to frame the talk around physics (and science)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One should not buy into that or accept that framing merely on mainstream authority.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44176" LastEditorUserId="44176" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T14:32:36.297" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T14:32:36.297" CommentCount="22" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-05-14T12:47:02.033" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-18T20:57:48.963" Score="49" ViewCount="2033" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there's this careers course thing I'm going to this week as part of some graduate school requirement, and I've been asked to prepare a curriculum vitae for it. I'm probably going to include something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Active on Physics Stack Exchange (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/8563/emilio-pisanty&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/8563/emilio-pisanty&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because, after all, I think I've written up some pretty nice physics over time on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, though, what people's attitude towards this is. So: if you're a professional physicist, is your participation on the site on your CV? If yes, then what did you include and how does it look like? If 'depends', then what sorts of CV use-cases do you include it in for and for which ones do you leave it out? If not, and you have a brag-about-able profile, what made you leave it out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T17:05:26.897" Title="Is Physics SE on your CV?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5789" CreationDate="2014-05-18T21:33:17.197" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the software industry, a high-reputation Stack Overflow profile is seen as a sign of competence, because you have to use the same technical knowledge and research skills required by your job to answer questions there. But in academia, people - at least, the people who make up the majority (though perhaps not the entirety) of tenure and grant review committees, funding agencies, and research directors - tend to see anything that's not actual research as a distraction from research. For that reason participation on this site doesn't play the same role to a professional physicist as participation on Stack Overflow does to a professional developer. Participation in Physics SE is probably best framed as a service activity, like other kinds of community outreach or volunteer work (not that you would put non-physics-related volunteer work on your CV), rather than as a demonstration of your knowledge of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professors reviewing CVs do look for some amount of service activities, but in many cases they do so only grudgingly, as a concession to the requirements of running a department and/or pressure from university administrators. (And something analogous applies to those in a non-academic environment.) This tends to be somewhat correlated with age, so that e.g. younger professors are a little more likely to look favorably on things like having a blog or contributing to Physics SE. As a graduate student, I don't think it can really hurt you that much to include it, but at later stages of your career (if you go for a career in academia) I think it's important to make it clear that this is not something that consumes a lot of your time, otherwise it probably could hurt your prospects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what exactly to include: I'd put something a little more substantial than what you've quoted. A brief paragraph (2, maybe 3 sentences) that explains what Physics SE is and/or what you do here is probably going to be useful. (I don't have easy access to my own CV at the moment otherwise I'd give you an example, though I doubt that example would be any better than what you'd come up with on your own.) But again, don't play up the amount of time you've invested in the site; better to frame it as something that you use as a resource to improve your education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure this has also been pondered extensively on &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt; so you could check there for more thoughts, not specific to physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:49.200" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T09:20:26.550" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5789" CreationDate="2014-05-21T09:06:22.847" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as a professional physicist &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in academia, I would say that what you do here is seen more as a hobby (extracurricular interest) than a professional achievement. That said - when you are applying for a job, people are likely to Google you. If your profile links to your real name, your activity on PSE is likely to show up in search results. In your case, your profile is the second hit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QxMK2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means the cat is firmly out of the bag - even if you don't include it on your CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I look at a resume, I assume that the things people mention are the things &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; find impressive: that tells me a lot about their thought processes. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone with a very high reputation probably spends a lot of time on this site: you might wonder whether this would distract that person from their &quot;real job&quot; - are they refreshing the question list every five minutes while at work to distract them from their task at hand? A constant need for &quot;upvotes&quot; is considered by some an unhealthy addiction (of which I am guilty).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A highly upvoted answer on this site does not carry the same weight as a highly cited peer reviewed publication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said - if you have written some answers you are particularly proud of, you might link to them from a blog; then point to this blog to give people an indication of (a) your &quot;informal&quot; communication style (how you write when you are not writing for a peer reviewed journal) - this is an EXTREMELY important skill; and (b) your willingness to &quot;give back&quot; to your community - again, something that is highly appreciated by most employers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line - everything you do online becomes a visible part of your record of achievements. Make sure that it projects the right perception of who you are - and why you would be a valuable member of whatever organization you would like to be hired by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T09:06:22.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5793" CreationDate="2014-05-21T09:48:44.127" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physicists are also people and can appreciate nice wording, politeness and paradoxes. I am asking specifically about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/112277/i-find-a-problem-in-the-law-of-angular-momentum-conservation&quot;&gt;this imprecise question&lt;/a&gt; which appears amusing because it is not strictly defined. The actual question in that case is &lt;strong&gt;what am I missing in my description of the system&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;how does it work&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we push to straighten out the question?  As-is it leaves ample room for nice dissertations on the laws of physics (already present in the answers, expect more to come). If reworked to be clear, the question will become its own answer and the correct bare-bones answer will look almost trivial, not at all noteworthy. Do we foster amusing site content generation so that visitors have more prose (and poetry) to read, or trim it down to formula for formula, measurement for measurement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46971" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T21:40:10.393" Title="Has the entertainment aspect of a question any value besides dry logic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5792" CreationDate="2014-05-21T21:40:10.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like you're asking two things here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does it have any value if a question is entertaining? I suppose it does, but &lt;em&gt;not at the expense of being clear and on-topic&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, a boring but clearly written, well-researched, and insightful question is better than an entertaining question that is unclear, or not well-researched, or not insightful. So if you want to make your question entertaining, make sure you are not making it worse in other ways by doing so. And bear in mind that this is very difficult. So I would suggest that you not try to make your questions entertaining; it usually (but not always) winds up doing more harm than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should the &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; question you linked to be edited to define it more clearly? The guideline for that is to always stick to information provided by the original poster. If the OP contributed extra information in a comment that would clarify the question, sure, edit that in. If part of the question is unclear and you can make it clear (without adding additional information that the OP might not know), go ahead and do that too. But if the question is unclear and you can't figure out how to clarify it without guessing something, you need to wait for the OP to make that edit. In the meantime, you should downvote the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, editing the question so that it contains its own answer is pretty much never a good idea. When doing so, you inevitably wind up adding some information that the OP did not have access to (because if they did, they wouldn't have asked the question in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T21:40:10.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5798" CreationDate="2014-05-23T16:49:09.677" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found myself in a position where I posted quite an elaborated answer, but got no notice from the OP. Let's say the question remains open and no comments from the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I feel prone to at least comment on some answers whenever I post a question - even if any of those I choose as accepted answer - merely because I see the user has put a lot of effort on it and may be even clarified some aspects of the question but not completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have a way to implement that, assuming comments are not supposed to be used with this aim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of question where I received zero feedback from OP &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/2427/when-will-all-eight-planets-in-our-solar-system-align/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (belongs to astronomy.stackexchange.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of an answer I felt the need to provide feedback as OP, because of the amount of work the user put into it, despite me not choosing it as the accepted answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/114054/45735&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45735" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T07:02:25.223" Title="Giving feedback to elaborated or useful answers" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5794" CreationDate="2014-05-23T17:34:02.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you expect people to say. Drive-by askers happen. You take that risk when you write the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can expect to accumulate some love from the greater community over time, but how much depends on the quality of the question as well as the quality of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All requests to install a feature allowing you to bug people have been firmly and correctly shot down and will not be acted upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-05-23T17:46:36.503" LastActivityDate="2014-05-23T17:46:36.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5794" CreationDate="2014-05-23T18:17:45.783" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hard truth is that sometimes you can't expect to get any praise, gratitude, or even feedback from the OP. In our Q&amp;amp;A format, all that the site really needs is that a question is asked and an answer is given. Everything else is just added bonuses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important thing to remember in those circumstances is that your answer is not meant only to help the OP, but to help everybody asking the same question, especially googlers. It may be tough when the OP does not recognize that you put effort into answering, but I can tell you that the rest of us at Physics.SE appreciate you taking the time to be thorough and accurate. And if your answer is decent, take comfort that it will probably be enjoyed by the community and rewarded with upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot and would not institute a forced feedback system. There is nothing anyone can do to force an asked to give feedback. Regardless what is implemented, it will always be possible for someone to post a question and then never log in to the site again. Furthermore, how can we define what is a decent answer? If someone posts a good question and the first and/or only answer they get is a drive-by crackpot answer, then how can we force them to give feedback when they might just want to ignore it? Or if an answer is really kind of meh but there's no way you know to make it better, what would you force someone to say? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hey, thanks for answering but this isn't a great answer and I doubt you can make it better&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that would be terrible for so many reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while the rest of us appreciate and applaud your time and effort in posting the elaborate answers, feedback from the OP is one of those things you can't always expect to get nor can it be forced out of them. Just smile, be happy when you get feedback, and remember that you write such great answers not just for the OP but for the whole community. And some other nonsense about a good deed being its own reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-05-23T18:17:45.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5794" CreationDate="2014-05-23T23:42:51.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have a way to implement that, assuming comments are not supposed to be used with this aim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvoting. That's literally &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what upvoting is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, even though it says that comments are not supposed to be used to leave compliments, we don't really care &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much if you do. After all, we don't have a huge volume of comments on this site, the way they do on e.g. Stack Overflow, so usually having a complimentary comment or two doesn't get in the way much. Just be aware that comments are transient, so your comment may wind up being deleted after a little while. (In fact, good etiquette would be to come back and delete it yourself, if you are able to establish that the OP has probably read it, or is not going to read it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-05-23T23:42:51.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5794" CreationDate="2014-05-24T07:02:25.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like it when the OP comments to my answer to say thanks. Even though it's not the main aim of this site I see teaching as an important by product, and it's nice when you get a comment saying &lt;em&gt;thanks, now I understand&lt;/em&gt; or words to that effect. Without such feedback it's hard to know how clear your answer is (my answers always make sense to me, but I suspect not always to anyone else :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As David says, we're a fairly civilised lot hereabouts and I don't think the mild abuse of the comments system does any harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T07:02:25.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5800" CreationDate="2014-05-24T21:30:58.853" Score="8" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;In deciding whether a question should be closed, moderators and users of sufficient reputation refer to the official physics S.E. policy, and act accordingly. In law, if a particular decision is approved in a case, it may provide a precedent for future cases. Suppose a question on the physics S.E. is by the policy off-topic, but a previous question many years ago, which was upvoted, untouched by moderators, and answered is off-topic by the same argument applied to the present question. Does the fact that the question was allowed previously provide precedent? If not, should it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; the question is purely a 'thought experiment,' or perhaps more appropriately &lt;strong&gt;hypothetical&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm interested in hearing different perspectives on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T16:54:44.133" Title="The role of precedents in closing questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5799" CreationDate="2014-05-24T21:40:13.790" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not necessarily, for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The scope of the site and our sense of what constitutes an appropriate question has changed over time. So if you find an old question that is not closed but seems like it should be, it's possible that the question was considered appropriate at the time it was asked, but our policy has changed since then. In a case like that, please flag the question so a moderator can close it (or you can vote to close and then ask in chat for other 3k users to also review it for closure).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators and 3k members don't necessarily see every question. Sometimes a question which should be closed simply gets missed by everyone and stays open for that reason. Again, in this case, vote to close it, or if it's an older question you can flag for moderator attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I would say that decisions about whether to close any given question should be made on a case-by-case basis. Citing precedent can help guide that decision by clarifying the reason the question should or should not be closed, but it is not itself a reason to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T21:40:13.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5799" CreationDate="2014-05-24T22:19:09.577" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5800/520&quot;&gt;David Z. covered the question about formal precedent pretty well&lt;/a&gt;, but I'd like to explore another aspect of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do use precedent as the basis for arguing about what the policy &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be. This has been done several times. That is someone asks meta &lt;em&gt;&quot;Do we have a policy about Foo?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and people with some memory &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2905/520&quot;&gt;drag out earlier questions that are more or less like the one under discussion&lt;/a&gt; and use those to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/733/520&quot;&gt;suggest what the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; policy has been&lt;/a&gt; and as a spring board for discussion what they think the policy &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you want to re-open a policy discussion that has been established for a while it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; helps to have some concrete examples to hang your arguments on. Looking at the existing precedents is a fine way to show what you think the costs of the current policy are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T16:54:44.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-27T09:19:50.047" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by the heated debate that went down here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/114511/is-there-physics-behind-the-layout-of-a-piano-keyboard&quot;&gt;Is there physics behind the layout of a piano keyboard?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself is fascinating to me, and I'd love to see a long and comprehensive answer to it. However, after some contemplation it seems to me that the matter of deciding where this question would be best at home (restricting ourselves to the SE network) is quite a subtle one. By means of this question I would like to ask all of you what your opinions on this matter are. Here are some of the things that I have considered thus far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Music.SE: Not a good place because it focuses on practicing and experiencing music rather than the science behind it all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics.SE: A reasonable option, but the debate on the question from my link shows that there is no agreement no whether this is on-topic here. It's quite a broad question that will certainly have to incorporate some non-physics aspects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Biology.SE: Perhaps this might work, but I'm quite skeptical that there will be anyone who knows a lot about acoustics over there, as the inevitable biology component to the sought-after answer is quite far removed from the technicalities of understanding the associated waves. I have better hopes that someone from physics.SE will understand the biology part, at least at a level sufficient to properly answer the question, than vice versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Math.SE: Not a good place. The question simply isn't all that mathematical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas? Should this question be on-topic in physics.SE? Is there a better site within the SE network? What do the mods think? Let's discuss!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, let's try to refrain from petty/'smartass' remarks as much as possible. We're all here for fun &amp;amp; physics, after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T23:57:13.483" Title="The appropriate place for a question about the science behind music" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5802" CreationDate="2014-05-27T14:24:31.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't say I have ever understood why people want this kind of topic to be &quot;physics&quot;. Certainly sound is waves and waves are physics, but &quot;sounds good&quot; is a physiology topic which turns out to be defined by the math of small integers. Fascinating stuff with a very interesting history, and something a physicist should know about. But it has only a peripheral claim to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we have a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions on the site which are really about the response of the human sensory apparatus, rather than about physics proper. I think it has to be that way because unless you know the answer it seems like it ought to be a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly I don't close questions on this border &lt;em&gt;despite&lt;/em&gt; their being off topic. On the other hand, I don't open them either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T14:24:31.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5802" CreationDate="2014-05-28T23:57:13.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(More of an extended comment so down vote if you must...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the title question of the post: &quot;Is there physics behind the layout of the piano keyboard?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the answer is simply and plainly &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; then, it seems to me, an appropriate answer would succinctly explain this, the OP would accept it, and that would be that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if the answer is plainly &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; then, you know the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer isn't plainly yes or no, then there is the problem of how to proceed (close? migrate? ...) but, even then, there is potential value in the thought process behind this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;em&gt;I still do not understand the motivation for the down votes to this question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one thing to vote to close and I have &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; problem with that but I just cannot imagine downvoting this simple, honest and, perhaps for some, thought provoking question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Is&lt;/strong&gt; there physics behind the layout of the piano keyboard?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a far more interesting question than many here of late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T23:57:13.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5807" CreationDate="2014-05-29T07:20:43.040" Score="9" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been exploring the website a little bit, and I notice that most of the users vote for highly rated members (imagine that) when they pick their answer choice. Clearly, there is very good reason for this (in fact I notice a strong correlation between brilliant answers and member rating), yet I am wondering how to answer someone's question, and get chosen as an answer choice ; this poses a problem, considering a low rated member's opinion is more than likely to be eclipsed by a more notable user (clearly, there is good reason for this). &#xA;I really like this website, and I would like to use it in order to educate myself, and help others educate themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: What do you find to be the most effective method to answer a person's question? What idiosyncrasies separate good answers from great ones? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user47408" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2014-05-29T08:09:54.543" LastActivityDate="2014-06-03T17:29:20.703" Title="A question for the high rated members: Best way to answer a physics question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T08:10:36.120" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Physics.SE or other SE sites have this feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they don't, I suggest a new feature. Can we have the questions and answers available as downloads. We can simply save the html file but it's tiresome when one wants to download too many questions. Can we have a topic-wise(or should I say tag-wise) collection of different questions? It maybe be a great help to students and teachers as it can show the wide range of questions which can arise out of a topic and it can also address some common misconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can have it like a separate set of files for questions related to a particular phenomenon. For, example all questions related to Hawking Radiation available as download. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackprinter.com/deleted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page is an archive of deleted popular questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40382" LastEditorUserId="40382" LastEditDate="2014-05-29T15:30:39.263" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T20:41:38.837" Title="Questions and Answers as Downloads" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5805" CreationDate="2014-05-29T08:35:02.983" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't answer a question if there is already a correct answer. If I think the existing answer could be clarified I sometimes add an answer but make it clear it's just a footnote to the existing answer. So you needn't feel concerned I'll trample over your answers. I suspect this applies to most of the high rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that people do seem to vote up high rep users even when their answers aren't especially good. I've even had answers upvoted when I've subsequently decided the answer was actually wrong and deleted it. Quite why this happens I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a good answer is a clear answer that explains the underlying physics, preferably with equations to make it absolutely clear how the physics works. I see no end of answers that are vague and arm waving. Unless you can write down the equations behind the physics, then work through them to show how the answer emerges I don't think you understand the problem well enough to explain it to someone else. If your answer is clear and logical it will get upvoted whatever your reputation - we all started with a reputation of 1 (or 101 if we came from another SE site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As jinawee comments, reputation shouldn't be your principal motivation for answering questions. I found that answering questions forces me to learn about areas of physics that I'd ignored in the 30 years (!) since leaving university and it's always enjoyable to feel you are learning something. It's also nice when someone leaves comments like &lt;em&gt;thanks, I understand it better now&lt;/em&gt; - we all like to make the world a better place :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T08:35:02.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5806" CreationDate="2014-05-29T12:38:12.640" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a guess, but this would probably defeat the purpose of this site, which is to provide eyeballs to view ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best a download would include the ads you would have seen at that time.  However, there is no way to track new views, and the ads could go stale.  In the case of rotating ads, whichever one you got with your snapshot would get all the future views and the other paying advertisers would get none.  You'd also not see the results of new voting, new answers, or other updates to the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE needs you to come back to the live site whenever you want to look at some question or answer again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T12:38:12.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T19:41:37.797" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who can tell me why I am cut off from leaving comments? Spending the time to compose a comment then nothing showing up is rather irritating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37182" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T05:55:55.047" Title="Can not leave comments" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T20:09:22.867" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/114921/26969&quot;&gt;answering a homework question&lt;/a&gt;, and wanted to include some &quot;hidden answers&quot; to give the OP a chance to work it out bit by bit. Some of the layout etc. of the equations is different in preview - it was OK in the actual answer.  For example, in preview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9l7WX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zyloY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the actual answer. Clearly the preview is left aligned, but the equations become centered in the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were other issues in preview - some text followed by a block of multi-line equations &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;This is a problem: $$..\\..\\..$$&lt;/code&gt; ended up on the same line during preview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qe9iC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preview is such an important feature - especially when you do things like equations. It would be nice if it would work together with the &quot;hidden answer&quot; feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T20:09:22.867" Title="Preview hidden equation - alignment is broken" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5813" CreationDate="2014-05-30T14:59:43.947" Score="8" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once managed to chat with someone instead of writing a lot of comments because the site proposed that to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a really hard time finding and using the chat on this site. Maybe one could make this very useful feature more readily available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23339" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-05-30T18:15:20.383" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T07:51:19.147" Title="How do I find the chat room?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5812" CreationDate="2014-05-30T15:43:02.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A direct link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;hbar chat room&lt;/a&gt; appears e.g. in the right margin on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the front page&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;physics meta site&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;hbar chat room&lt;/a&gt; can be &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;sort=active&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;found&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; page on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;physics main site&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;physics meta site&lt;/a&gt;, single-click on the word 'StackExchange' in the upper left corner of the page. A menu should open. A click on the word 'chat' near the top of the menu brings you to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. Continue with item 2. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oG882.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T07:51:19.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5805" CreationDate="2014-05-31T00:29:51.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, ask yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Does my answer have something new to say that is not provided by the other answers?  (For instance, you have a theoretical approach to something that is answered empirically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Do I know a clear path from first principles to an answer?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely look at the author until after I've upvoted.  And I've certainly written wrong answers before (and seen the same effect John Rennie describes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you keep on writing correct things, you'll find yourself with reputation soon enough.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T00:29:51.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-31T05:11:28.320" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked a question in physics stack exchange a while back, but never got an answer. It surprisingly was never closed nor anyone had any comments. I feel like people are thinking, &quot;ugh, another superluminal scheme...&quot; and never bothered to even consider it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps its more appropriate to ask it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105009/thought-experiment-using-quantum-entanglement-in-position-and-its-effects&quot;&gt;Thought experiment using quantum entanglement in position and its effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-06-01T15:22:42.440" Title="Thought experiment using quantum entanglement in position and its effects" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5809" CreationDate="2014-05-31T05:55:55.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problem &quot;solved&quot;. Disable new &quot;Mathjax Buttons&quot; I loaded from a description on the right of the questions page. Fixes two different commenting problems here and on ElectronicsSE plus fixes problem with the Stackexchange pull-down menu to go to other SE pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to find how to reach the Mathjax Buttons author.....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37182" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T05:55:55.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5815" CreationDate="2014-06-01T02:22:16.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it would not be appropriate to ask this question here on meta. It's not a question about the PSE website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without any feedback, I don't think you're justified to make any &lt;em&gt;assumption&lt;/em&gt; about what people are thinking - the best you can do is speculate, but you never know if your speculation is right without hearing from others. I will say this: the question is a little on the long side, which is not a bad thing (in fact it's of an appropriate length to potentially be a pretty good question) but it does mean only a limited number of people will be willing to read and understand the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-06-01T15:22:42.440" LastActivityDate="2014-06-01T15:22:42.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5805" CreationDate="2014-06-03T17:29:20.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;People come to this site for &lt;em&gt;understanding&lt;/em&gt; of physics (and sometimes for homework help, but that's a topic for another day...). One of the things that sets a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; answer apart from an &lt;em&gt;OK&lt;/em&gt; answer is the ability to &lt;em&gt;bridge the gap in understanding&lt;/em&gt; that led to the question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that great answers often include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An intuitive explanation of the concept&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diagram (or several) that explains what is going on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;rigorous&lt;/em&gt; (and correct!) analysis of the underlying physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;References to &quot;further reading&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people read an answer like that, they appreciate &quot;yes, that's really how it is; my understanding of physics just improved&quot; - and the answer has some lasting value. Visitors recognize that, and they will reward it regardless of your current reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry about the reputation of others. If you strive to follow the above principles, you will come up with some great answers, and soon you will get the rep points you deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2014-06-03T17:29:20.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5824" CreationDate="2014-06-04T13:51:11.497" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen self learning tag in mathematics Stack Exchange. But this tag is not there in physics Stack Excahnge. I think there are many students who are learning new stuff by there own without help of any institution (like me). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;normally it happens that when i ask some question, other users add homework tag. so i think if there is self learning tag, so they know other can know that whether it is homework question or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46239" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-06-04T21:51:23.400" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T21:51:23.400" Title="Should there be self learning tag?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5823" CreationDate="2014-06-04T14:29:06.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't actually matter whether or not the asker was assigned the problem as homework. The homework tag is for homework-like questions. These are questions whose purpose are not about resolving a conceptual difficulty, but instead about getting the right answer to a specific problem. Thus you can assign the homework tag without knowing if the problem actually is homework; homework-likeness is a property of the problem, not the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think people on this site care about whether or not you attend a university and I don't think they care about whether your question stems from a homework assignment or random curiosity. What they do care about is that your question addresses a conceptual issue that can be applied to many situations, so that the answer is useful to a wide audience and writing an answer is a good investment of time. The homework tag is supposed to indicate whether or not this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think we need a self-learner tag, because we don't care whether you go to a university or not, and we wouldn't need an &quot;actual-homework&quot; tag, because we don't care whether the problem is actually homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some links to recent discussion about the homework tag for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5490/23785&quot;&gt;About the proposal to ban homework&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5375/23785&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the current status of the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23785" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T14:29:06.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5823" CreationDate="2014-06-04T14:55:45.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-learning&lt;/a&gt; would be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta-tag&lt;/a&gt;, and those are discouraged. In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a meta-tag, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5490/23785&quot;&gt;the site has voted to keep it&lt;/a&gt;, and given it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5375/23785&quot;&gt;somewhat unusual meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that a couple of those links are the same ones that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5824/520&quot;&gt;NowIGetTo... used&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T16:02:56.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5827" CreationDate="2014-06-04T19:55:25.400" Score="16" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I answered a question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/116608/how-exactly-does-gravity-work/116610#116610&quot;&gt;How exactly does gravity work?&lt;/a&gt;, which received as of now, 30 upvotes, and I am glad that the community found the answer helpful, and of above average quality. However, many of my other answers, in my opinion, have been much better in both content, length, style, approach, etc. Yet, those received a few votes, whilst the aforementioned a phenomenal 30!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I ask, does anyone have any theories or input they'd like to share regarding what they think serial upvoted answers have that make them distinct from others? Or perhaps is it less deterministic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just puzzled as to how I got 30 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; this is in no way a rant about other answers not receiving votes; I'm simply curious. Also, it's certainly not a complaint! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T18:11:55.587" Title="Unusual Upvote Trends (Discussion)" Tags="|discussion|questions|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2014-06-04T20:15:49.583" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the right of every page is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt; list. If you note the list carefully, you'll find the question you linked to appear on the list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wVkuP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not the clearest picture (looks better on my screen even after cropping it), there's your answer and the hot question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88145/why-are-rockets-so-big/88155#88155&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/108971/why-does-a-nuclear-explosion-have-directionality/108976#108976&quot;&gt;such&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/80159/why-has-earths-core-not-become-solid/80169#80169&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; (3 links there) to my name due to the HNQ-effect, and I know I'm not the only one who's seen this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T20:15:49.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-05T10:08:02.557" Score="6" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4523/how-do-i-report-stalking&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5080/why-arent-serial-upvoting-of-questions-reversed&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; questions, I am a little unsure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several other grad students on the website that are taking similar specialisations to me, and so naturally there is a large overlap between their questions and ones that I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twice even I have even given the exact same answer to a question as another clever fellow within a matter of seconds after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these other grad students I have looked up, and they have questions that I have not actively thought about before, but when I see them I thikn they're great, and upvote accordingly, read the answers, and (hopefully!) learn something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I was supprised to see in the answer to the first question, that while the action in that question was deemed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;not exactly stalking&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it did say that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;serial downvoting will be reversed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as for the case of the second question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Serial Upvotes] are reversed, just after a period of maximum 24 hours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, are we indeed allowed to look through similar people's history and read their questions, and vote accordingly? Or is this not to be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is the definition of &quot;serial&quot; here? If I'm upvoting their questions, because they deserve upvotes, it would be a shame if the machine came along and took all my votes back. How can I avoid this happening? If a question deserves votes I don't want them to be undone due to a mistake on my part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, In principle I don't see the diference between doing this, and for someone to critic another persons questions, though I understand that there is the scope for this to be done in mallace, which would of course be wrong, but doing it where 'justified' should be fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, this doesn't bother me too much here, but it is a quite related question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this may also apply to a persons history of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am neither so interested in this case here, since the answers to a persons questions are ususally given by other different people, and so even if I vote on lots of answers, the votes will be more 'spread out' accross lots of different people. I expect that this would not get the unwanted notice of the vote-reversing script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should have mentioned, I am only talking about three or four votes here and there, when I'm taking a break from my own work, by the way. It is not as if I am suggesting systematically going through every single one of another persons questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I still think it is helpful to try to find out the bounds for this, in order to avoid doing anything wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44257" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T04:35:28.820" Title="'Stalking', Reverse-Voting and the scope of &quot;Serial Downvoting&quot; Confusion" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|voting|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2014-06-05T10:18:27.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go through the profile of a user to find interesting posts, you should try to avoid voting on their posts. Because you're selecting posts by user, this distorts the voting compared to when you would find questions via other means. This creates a pattern that is almost indistinguishable from vote fraud and is likely to be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no problem if you encounter the posts naturally, e.g. because you're active in the same tags as another user.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T10:18:27.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2014-06-05T11:17:36.537" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's nothing! I got 24 votes for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/37772/why-doesnt-a-fly-fall-off-the-wall/37773#37773&quot;&gt;picture of a fly's foot&lt;/a&gt; :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the vast majority of the site members are &lt;em&gt;interested amateurs&lt;/em&gt; rather than physics students or people being paid to do physics. As an (ex) scientist my favourite answers are the ones that are right at the edge of what I know, but these are exactly the answers that are going to be uninteresting to most other people. My experience is that you get the most votes when you take a question that everyone can understand and provide an answer that everyone can understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I agree that it certainly helps if the question you're answering makes the hot questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T11:17:36.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2014-06-05T16:21:19.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure on the algorithm exactly but I have a feeling if you go to a link, read the question carefully, read all the answers carefully, and then vote up the answers that are useful and vote down the answers that are not, the algorithm wouldn't catch it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because &lt;strong&gt;this is normal voting behavior&lt;/strong&gt;. You shouldn't cast a vote from the name alone, you shouldn't be seeking out to vote rapidly and frequently. You should be reading questions and answers and voting up the good and down the bad. This takes at least a minute or two (and quite possibly longer) on each question. It doesn't matter how you arrive at the question or answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So vote properly and you should be fine. Just don't spend 12 hours a day doing it and make sure you are considering the content before casting votes and it should be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T16:21:19.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2014-06-05T17:25:32.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty much rehashing what everyone else has said, but what is the point of a discussion if not to repeat the same few points that everyone agrees with in many different ways?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many contributing factors to how many votes an answer might get. The most obvious and influential being whether or not the answer is correct and complete. However, it is far from unheard of that a masterfully made answer with just the right information presented in an easy to understand way might get few or even no votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote-hunting (that's a new term I just made up) is a skill; sadly one I am not very adept at, but I am an adept pattern recognizer so I see the trends. Beyond being correct and easily understood, it particularly helps if the question has a simple title; one most users could understand and most non-physicists would think &quot;hey, that sounds pretty cool!&quot; That said, too simple and it's likely to be ignored by everyone. The question you gave as an example is perfect for this. &quot;How exactly does gravity work?&quot; That type of title will definitely bring the viewers. The other thing that helps is if a question has a lot of up votes. That tells users that most people like the question and find it interesting. This makes them more interested in seeing what the answer to it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once they've clicked in, you want the viewer to stay. To that end, the question needs to be well worded, easily followable, and interesting to novices and at least undergrad level as well. You might consider editing the format or grammar of the question if you feel it needs improvement in those areas but remember &lt;strong&gt;do not make any substantive changes to the content of the question unless it is your own&lt;/strong&gt;. Also, consider improving the tags to include not only subjects mentioned in the question, but also subjects you know would have to be mentioned in any correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will all lure in users and make them wanting to find out the right answer. Right off the bat, users usually upvote the accepted answer before moving to others. So if yours is accepted, great! If not, this is an uphill battle; your answer will need to be really good. I find that when there are a lot of answers at around the same vote level (say 5 with 0 or 1 vote), a really good answer can get muddled and lost. At this point, adding pictures really helps bring votes to you. If you can set your answer apart from the others visually, people are more likely to read yours, especially if all the answers are on the long side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medium to long answers usually are more correct than short answers and so they tend to be read first and upvoted. But too long and nobody wants to take the time. This is also true with math-heavy answers, answers that aren't segmented with short, manageable paragraphs, or answer that start with things like &quot;This is just my opinion, I really don't know for sure...&quot; Sometimes, a lot of math is called for, so then it's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, try to make it fun to read. Put a little piece of unexpected humour right in the middle of your answer, use wild and/or silly scenarios for thought experiments, be creative. Also, images. Let me restate that. Images. When you have a nice image with a splash of colour, that makes people want to read it. If you can find an image that could pretty much answer the question by itself and you pair it up with a nice written explanation that adds additional info for the more curious readers, then you're gold. Answers like that might win you the populist badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid the use of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all well and good for telling people that you fixed a problem or added in missing info, but it's exhausting for a reader. It may get you points from a few expert users, but novices rarely recognize the original need for the edit and I've seen it happen many times where the votes abruptly stop coming in once someone has added the edit line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on about the content and format of your answer, but I don't want to risk giving too much advice that isn't always true. The next thing that influences number of votes is the time of day that a question appears on the active page. We all live in different time zones, but a majority of our users are in North America. If you do your edits or post your answers during daylight/business hours for North America, you will get more instantaneous views and a higher chance of fast upvotes, which gets you onto the &quot;hot topics&quot; list. However, it also means that you will be off the active front page relatively quickly. There's a trade off there. In the reverse time slot, you'll stay on the active page longer, but you'll definitely get less views. In your case, you might have hit a sweet spot time-wise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is much more that goes into how many upvotes an answer gets. And what makes vote-hunting hardest is that these factors have varying impacts on number of upvotes such that it is very difficult to predict whether a question will be a hit or a miss. It's more of an experience-based instinct that some users will have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2014-06-06T13:40:32.780" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T13:40:32.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2014-06-06T04:18:43.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my question is, are we indeed allowed to look through similar people's history and read their questions, and vote accordingly? Or is this not to be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, you shouldn't do that. In determining which posts to vote on and how to vote on them (up or down), the author of the post should not be a factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, it's not such a big deal. If you look at someone's profile and vote on a &lt;em&gt;few&lt;/em&gt; of their posts, probably nothing will come of it. Voting on &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; of the same person's posts, especially in quick succession, is likely to be reversed by the serial voting script, and then it will be forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T04:18:43.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5835" CreationDate="2014-06-06T06:35:16.687" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;after about 10 comments to and fro in a short time, SE suggest to &quot;take the discussion to a chat&quot;. Often, that would have been useful about 10 comments earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to make this appear earlier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23339" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T07:11:05.950" Title="Option &quot;take this to the chat&quot; earlier" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5834" CreationDate="2014-06-06T07:11:05.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been requests for this on the mother meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93444/provide-a-tool-for-moderators-to-migrate-comments-to-chat&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) but so far nothing has been implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, of course, go to chat, create a room, and invite the other user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T07:11:05.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-06T09:22:27.647" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but I'm experiencing rather strange behavior of MathJax in Google Chrome. On some stackexchange sites the LateX equations don't render. On Physics I can see only the source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vxLCV.png&quot; alt=&quot;What I see on physics SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However on math.stackexchange.com I can see it perfectly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U2TLv.png&quot; alt=&quot;what I see on math SE&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These 2 screenshots were taken in the very same browser (Google Chrome under Windows 7) during the same session. Each site is open on different tab - one is working, the other one is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When viewing in Firefox, everything is fine. Just Chrome refuses to display equations on physics (and sone other SE sites). Also I tried Chrome on other computers and everything is fine there as well. So the problem must be partially tied to my specific Chrome installation and also somehow tied to certain SE sites (because the same Chromw browser can display equtaions on Math SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have an idea why this could be happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34521" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-06-07T00:19:53.030" LastActivityDate="2014-06-07T00:19:53.030" Title="MathJax not working in some cases" Tags="|support|status-norepro|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2014-06-06T16:57:06.607" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my question is, are we indeed allowed to look through similar&#xA;  people's history and read their questions, and vote accordingly? Or is&#xA;  this not to be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vote button &lt;em&gt;pop up&lt;/em&gt; descriptions provide a general guide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vnQ1f.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt;, the question should deal with a topic which is accesible to some part of the physics community. The question is &lt;strong&gt;clear&lt;/strong&gt; if proper notation is employed, with correct formatting and grammar; the necessary background which introduces the question should be present, and ideas communicated in a coherent and logical fashion. Finally, the question should show &lt;strong&gt;research effort&lt;/strong&gt; which demonstrates the original poster has demonstrated some attempt to find an answer elsewhere. On the other hand, if the question doesn't meet any of the above criteria, one should potentially vote down. Nevertheless, these are general guidelines and do not apply to all cases. In fact, I only vote positively if my own personal criteria are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should merit either an &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; vote or &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt; vote based solely on its contents, and should not be influenced by, for example, the status of the user, or any information which may be garnered on his/her profile or elsewhere. As to whether it is just to go through others' questions and answers from the past, and voting - well that should be totally acceptable, providing the voting is based on a &lt;em&gt;careful analysis of the question or answer&lt;/em&gt;. Obviously, creating aptly called &lt;em&gt;sock puppet&lt;/em&gt; accounts to serial up/down vote a specific question is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T16:57:06.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5840" CreationDate="2014-06-06T19:14:39.653" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple question, maybe even a simpler answer that is just escaping me:  for the autobiographer badge I am supposed to fill out all the user profile fields.  Where are these user profile fields?  I can't find them in my profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25680" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T13:07:46.870" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:07:46.870" Title="Where are user profile fields?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5838" CreationDate="2014-06-06T19:39:46.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I image that you expected to provide something for &quot;age&quot;, &quot;location&quot; and &quot;website&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is nothing that enforces honesty in these values (e.g. my location) or that they are particularly important to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T19:39:46.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5838" CreationDate="2014-06-06T19:39:51.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on your profile on the topbar (whilst on main page, not meta)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &quot;edit&quot; located under &quot;Questions&quot; (same line as your name)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fill out items as necessary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-06-06T19:39:51.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-08T07:54:50.713" Score="8" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be just &lt;code&gt;photon-emission&lt;/code&gt; but there is also a misspelling of the tag.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lViUv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one go about reporting this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42481" LastActivityDate="2014-06-08T11:43:37.723" Title="Duplicate misspelled tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5841" CreationDate="2014-06-08T11:36:45.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, to report minor things like misspellings, etc, which do not require that the community should make a decision of principles, but it is clear what needs to be done, then one could just mention the problem in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-06-08T11:43:37.723" LastActivityDate="2014-06-08T11:43:37.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2014-06-09T04:35:28.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard reference for this is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt; at Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note in particular that it does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; give specifics on what will and will not trigger a serial-voting detection by the system. &lt;strong&gt;This is intentional.&lt;/strong&gt; The more information that is available, the easier it is to game the system. In particular, if the information you are asking for were available, it would be easier to stagger serial downvoting attacks over multiple days in ways that the algorithm wouldn't pick up but could still cause some serious damage to posts that do not deserve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ethos behind this policy is that it is good questions and good answers that should be rewarded, and not good users &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. This may sound strange at first but I think it is, in the end, quite reasonable. This shouldn't discourage you from looking for interesting threads in the profile of a user whose posts you like, but if you do this be sure to pay due attention to all the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; posts on those threads and vote accordingly. This is only fair on all the other people who made an effort to contribute to those threads!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if your votes &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; reversed, don't take it too hard. If you come across a post that you had upvoted in the past and your vote is no longer there, all you need to do is upvote it again. If the threads are really that good, it's likely you'll revisit them at some point and this will show up if it's happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T04:35:28.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5845" CreationDate="2014-06-10T06:29:37.460" Score="6" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;The badges section mentions that when someone earns ''at least 100 total score for at least 20 non-community wiki answers'' in a specific tag, he/she gets a bronze badge for that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the meaning of this string ''non-community wiki answers'' is not elaborated here. Maybe it could be edited, or one can add a link if that info is hosted elsewhere, but what exactly does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T16:31:46.827" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T16:31:46.827" Title="Meaning of non-community wiki answers?" Tags="|discussion|support|badges|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5844" CreationDate="2014-06-10T08:37:33.553" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certain posts are marked as &lt;em&gt;community wiki&lt;/em&gt;, for a variety of reasons. Essentially, if you mark one of your answers as community wiki, it is very easy for other users to edit your post and contribute content to it, and it is taken as an encouragement on others to do so. Because of this, certain 'benefits', including reputation, are suspended in community wiki posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;What are &amp;quot;Community Wiki&amp;quot; posts?&lt;/a&gt; at Meta Stack Exchange. It is my understanding that most people feel this information is visible enough and does not need further highlighting - it is only one search query away at the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T08:37:33.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-11T08:53:20.130" Score="0" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to be able to make matrices with column and row names using &lt;code&gt;\bordermatrix{}&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Producing something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kU3hk.gif&quot; alt=&quot;bordermatrix&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has also been requested on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/809/bordermatrix-in-mathjax&quot;&gt;Cross Validated meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it hasn't been added yet I think. Any tips for making this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47268" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.273" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T08:53:20.130" Title="Bordermatrix in MathJaX" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5849" CreationDate="2014-06-11T15:16:04.083" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the number in parentheses randomly changing on my chrome tab?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My chrome tab reads &quot;(1) Physics Stack Exchange&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then a few minutes later is reads...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My chrome tab reads &quot;(2) Physics Stack Exchange&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46853" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T20:40:05.597" Title="What is the number in parentheses randomly changing on my chrome tab?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-06-11T19:08:21.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://perfectexplanations.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zlOkk.png&quot; alt=&quot;Find perfect Explanations at PerfectExplanations.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37286" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T19:08:21.340" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-06-11T19:08:21.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5847" CreationDate="2014-06-11T20:40:05.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's the number of questions with new activity since you last refreshed the page. If you click over to that tab, the top of the questions list will have a gray box with the message &quot;1 question with new activity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T20:40:05.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-06-12T04:40:03.733" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n4PMq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Internet Archive&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T04:40:03.733" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-06-12T04:40:03.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5860" CreationDate="2014-06-12T17:11:34.707" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under what circumstances, could a StackExchange user win an association bonus? I tried to find it out, but could not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22387" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T04:53:31.387" Title="What is an association bonus?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5854" CreationDate="2014-06-12T18:28:49.830" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/117391/find-out-the-dimension-of-fracab&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; before 3 days and it was put on hold. After that i have done all the required editing in the question and also put the comment but till now it haven't been reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think after edit, the question is up to the standard because before editing question had got -2 votes but now after editing it has got 3 votes up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the question will not be closed!!   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46239" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T18:51:51.657" Title="How much time will it take to review ON HOLD questions?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|policy|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5852" CreationDate="2014-06-12T18:45:36.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once edited, questions that are &lt;code&gt;on-hold&lt;/code&gt; are put into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;Review queue&lt;/a&gt; for reopening. It takes 5 people with reputation greater than 3,000 to accept a re-open. You can find more information &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your question &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; asks us to check your work for you, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;not something we do here&lt;/a&gt;. It could be that &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of this styled question, no one seems to want to re-open your question (as you have zero re-open nominations on your question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T18:45:36.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5852" CreationDate="2014-06-12T18:51:51.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your post was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/46001&quot;&gt;already reviewed&lt;/a&gt;, with a unanimous decision to keep closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are still things to be improved, read the homework policy carefully. The summary up top captures the problem with your question well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On holded questions are no different from closed questions, the wording switches over automatically in five days. There is no actual difference between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T18:51:51.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-12T22:14:35.407" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a very old question, [How many stablised qubits have been achieved in Quantum Computing?], from 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a much more recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/102447/quantum-computing-records-entangled-qubits&quot;&gt;Quantum computing records (entangled qubits)&lt;/a&gt;, from this past March.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, these are basically asking the same question. But the answer posted and accepted for the earlier question obviously isn't relevant for the second question. The most obvious thing I can think of is to have one definitive question about qubit records, and add answers periodically that update the record (using some phrasing like &quot;As of June 2014, the record is --&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an appropriate use of the FAQ feature? If we applied that idea here, would we need to make everything Community Wiki? And how would we go about updating the accepted answer? (is that even possible?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there just a much easier solution to this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine several questions that would be subject to a similar difficulty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9719" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T04:39:22.820" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T04:39:22.820" Title="Is a question with a time-dependent answer a good use of the FAQ feature?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-07-27T19:25:00.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5856" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5858" CreationDate="2014-06-13T02:49:35.747" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just ran into the following link &lt;a href=&quot;http://mob.rqna.net/qna/rxquhz-creating-large-aspheric-lens-profile-for-cnc-cutting-out-of-acrylic-plastic-for-huge-camera-obscura.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mob.rqna.net/qna/rxquhz-creating-large-aspheric-lens-profile-for-cnc-cutting-out-of-acrylic-plastic-for-huge-camera-obscura.html&lt;/a&gt; which seems to be a exact copy of the question-and-answer from earlier today on physics.se : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/118998/creating-large-aspheric-lens-profile-for-cnc-cutting-out-of-acrylic-plastic-for/119011?noredirect=1#comment243027_119011&quot;&gt;Creating large aspheric lens profile for CNC cutting out of Acrylic plastic for huge Camera Obscura&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a known problem? Is it even considered a problem? I was quite surprised!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T03:07:53.643" Title="Someone is stealing my answer?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5856" CreationDate="2014-06-13T03:03:19.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reported them. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/updated-procedure-for-reporting-scrapers&quot;&gt;details&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While your content is licensed under CC-BY-SA and can be used on any website provided they follow certain attribution rules (&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;see section 2 here&lt;/a&gt;), this site doesn't do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T03:03:19.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5856" CreationDate="2014-06-13T03:06:08.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you posted you licensed your content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;legal link&lt;/a&gt; at the bottom of each page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of content so-licensed without proper attribution is a network wide issue, and is addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/200177/2509&quot;&gt;Updated procedure for reporting SCRAPERs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short version:&lt;/strong&gt; Report violations directly to the Stack Exchange team using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us link&lt;/a&gt; at the bottom of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one time the team was also interested in hearing about copiers who meet both of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; provide proper attributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have their content rank higher than the original Stack Exchange content on Google&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for SEO purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't prove to myself that they still want to hear about such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T03:06:08.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2014-06-14T09:19:24.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like your idea very much. We are well aware, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange#comment16570_715&quot;&gt;for whom Phys.SE is for&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've proposed a new website named &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/69198/physics-problems?referrer=jpFTJqd3z6Dqi4sXlAyGiw2&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Physics Problems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Area51. The targeted audience is not required to be a &lt;em&gt;student&lt;/em&gt; of Physics.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, in no way favour to help verbatim homework questions. My sole purpose is to make a platform, where people, who do not have access of teacher or peers etc, could get help for learning Physics.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/69198/physics-problems?referrer=jpFTJqd3z6Dqi4sXlAyGiw2&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A site proposal: Physics problems http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/69198.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T09:19:24.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5851" CreationDate="2014-06-15T04:53:31.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Next time, search &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are an experienced Stack Exchange network user with 200 or more reputation on at least one site, you will receive a starting +100 reputation bonus to get you past basic new user restrictions. This will happen automatically on all current Stack Exchange sites where you have an account, and on any other Stack Exchange sites at the time you log in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T04:53:31.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-15T17:37:38.370" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question stands in general, as stated in the title:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;How are &quot;disputes about content of a question&quot; resolved, while the particular question is locked, disabling submission of comments or answers there?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specificly, my question arises regarding the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100442/what-would-happen-if-some-signal-could-move-faster-than-light&quot;&gt;What would happen if some signal could move faster than light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since commenting there is presently disabled I submit my corresponding comment draft (and related question) hereby:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@dmckee dmckee: &quot;&lt;em&gt;locked by dmckee [ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/520/dmckee&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/520/dmckee&lt;/a&gt; ] yesterday [Jun 14, 2014] This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta [ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; ].&lt;/em&gt;&quot; -- &lt;b&gt;Would you please point out the specific page or forum where &quot;&lt;em&gt;disputes about its [this question's] content&lt;/em&gt;&quot; would be resolved in public?&lt;/b&gt; (Having visited &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; I've been unable to recognize any &lt;strong&gt;recent&lt;/strong&gt; relevant discussion there; and I'm curious which &quot;&lt;em&gt;disputes about content&lt;/em&gt;&quot; couldn't take place here [ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100442/what-would-happen-if-some-signal-could-move-faster-than-light&quot;&gt;What would happen if some signal could move faster than light?&lt;/a&gt; ], as usual, by means of answers and/or comments.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T01:06:24.470" Title="How are &quot;disputes about content of a question&quot; resolved, while the particular question is locked, disabling submission of answers or comments there?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5861" CreationDate="2014-06-15T19:04:22.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak with no moderatorial authority, but it seems to me the question has been locked because of repeated edits and rollbacks. Specifically OP of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/100442/2451&quot;&gt;question 100442&lt;/a&gt; keep trying to add a &quot;thank you&quot; line. This is certainly polite, but we take it for granted everyone is grateful for any help received and &lt;em&gt;thank yous in advance&lt;/em&gt; just clutter up questions so they are routinely removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the removal of the &lt;em&gt;thank you&lt;/em&gt; isn't a show stopper I would guess it can be removed and the question unlocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T20:52:32.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5861" CreationDate="2014-06-15T19:59:02.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question and others were repeatedly edited to include a &quot;Thank you&quot; in violation of the guidelines in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; section on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;behavior expected of users&lt;/a&gt; despite polite correction by other users and moderators. They were locked simply to prevent repetition of the behavior while things have some time to cool off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequent and pointless edits bump old material to the front page, and while we understand and respect the desire to be polite, posts are treated as archival material rather than on-going live interactions. Thanks are expressed by accepting and up-voting useful replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T20:50:49.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-16T09:32:59.657" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently encountered a question about Black Holes, marked as a duplicate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/103670/do-black-holes-exist&quot;&gt;Do black holes exist?&lt;/a&gt; The question asks whether black holes have information inside and if no, how a hollow sphere can be considered a black hole. The question is marked as duplicate of the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/102202/how-long-does-it-take-for-a-black-hole-to-form&quot;&gt;How long does it take for a black hole to form?&lt;/a&gt; which is totally different and concerned with the time it takes for a black hole formation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, this question is about information inside, the linked question is about formation time, they cannot be duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know why people voted to close it, possibly they only read the tite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T07:03:03.987" Title="Not a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5864" CreationDate="2014-06-16T10:06:16.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question asks whether black holes have information inside and if no, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not what it looks like to me. The information bit seems to be an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's indeed what the question is asking, it should be clearer. Currently it's a rather vague question that most people are interpreting as &quot;Does a black hole have matter inside or not?&quot; in a rough way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T10:06:16.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5861" CreationDate="2014-06-17T01:06:24.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me address your general question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are &quot;disputes about content of a question&quot; resolved, while the particular question is locked, disabling submission of comments or answers there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You come here, to meta, and either contribute to an existing post about the question, or make a new post if one does not already exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are several reasons a question can be locked, but generally, it will happen because someone was using either comments or edits inappropriately. Locking isn't granular, though; there's only one way to lock a post, and it prevents both commenting and editing. So in cases like this, where the post was locked to prevent edits, it also prevents commenting as an undesired side effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would also point out that comments are mostly meant for suggesting corrections and bringing peoples' attention to relevant related content, not for extended discussion. So they're not really the proper venue to resolve a serious dispute about a question's content. That's what this meta site is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T01:06:24.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5895" CreationDate="2014-06-17T05:40:03.573" Score="10" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/shm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;shm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;shm&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/harmonic-oscillator&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;harmonic-oscillator&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;harmonic-oscillator&lt;/a&gt;? I don't think the distinction is worth having two separate tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: the purpose of this question is so that if anyone has objections, they will be made public. If there are no objections in a few days, we'll go ahead and make the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or vote on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/harmonic-oscillator/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym proposal&lt;/a&gt; Qmechanic made, if you are able to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T22:45:48.150" Title="Tag rename: shm to harmonic-oscillator" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5876" CreationDate="2014-06-17T11:47:58.853" Score="10" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found multiple times the closing of questions about the topic of general relativity/solutions of the einstein field equations. Examples are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/113034/where-is-the-way-on-a-rotating-black-hole-to-another-universe/113041#113041&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119562/light-in-another-universe&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. These judgement was: &quot;not mainstream&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High reputated physicists on the list seem to agree with my opinion (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1325/john-rennie&quot;&gt;John Rennie's&lt;/a&gt; comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119562/light-in-another-universe&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; 2 hours ago, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/44257/flint72&quot;&gt;Flint22&lt;/a&gt;'s comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/113034/where-is-the-way-on-a-rotating-black-hole-to-another-universe/113041#113041&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)). Their opinions were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I don't think this is off-topic. If you draw the Penrose diagram for e.g. a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole there are null geodesics that allow light from other universes to be seen.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;While I agree that to answer this question would be pure speculation, I absolutely disagree that the Kerr Metric is non-mainstream. It is a well studied solution to the Einstein equations which is to be found in any graduate lecture course on Black Hole Mechanics.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current suggestion were to change this de-facto policy, and repair its damages on the site by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the removal of the lock from the questions,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and to do a scan in the currently held/deleted questions, and do the same if there is the same case. Partially I could help in this, although I can't see the already deleted questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T09:15:40.207" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T09:15:40.207" Title="Why were well-known, valid solutions of the GR &quot;off-topic&quot; or &quot;non-mainstream&quot;? (suggestion)" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5868" CreationDate="2014-06-17T13:12:58.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/113034/where-is-the-way-on-a-rotating-black-hole-to-another-universe&quot;&gt;Where is the way on a rotating black hole to another Universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree that its non mainstream, but I find it too unclear and closeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, even if the Kerr Metric is mainstream (which it is, afaict), Flint's comment does classify the question as not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/113034/where-is-the-way-on-a-rotating-black-hole-to-another-universe/113041#comment232569_113034&quot;&gt;&amp;gt; While I agree that to answer this question would be pure speculation, I absolutely disagree that the Kerr Metric is non-mainstream.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speculative questions fall afoul of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site/4539#4539&quot;&gt;mainstream physics policy&lt;/a&gt; since the answers won't be accepted physics. (Which is what Brandon meant when he said &amp;quot;partially non maisntream&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119562/light-in-another-universe&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119562/light-in-another-universe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it is unclear, but not to the extent that it is closeable. It has a speculative tone about it, but it seems mainstream to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The general issue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen many questions mis-closed as non mainstream. The community usually manages to pick these up well, however if the question is unclear it's really the OP's fault. The best way to get these opened is to get the OP to edit them. I left a comment on the Penrose Diagram one to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T13:12:58.860" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5872" CreationDate="2014-06-17T14:00:07.763" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment to my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119593/is-it-true-that-gravitational-lensing-only-occurs-for-objects-made-of-plasma/119596#119596&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; I was asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and can you provide source for that this forum is only for mainstream physics, what is mainstream?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that this was written in the help page, but cannot find it. It is sort of implied in the list of appropriate questions but there is no discouragement of crackpot theory type discussions in the red x list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it my impression that somewhere the &quot;mainstream physics&quot; was emphasized? Anyway why isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T09:13:04.610" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T09:13:04.610" Title="Concerning appropriate questions: Where is &quot;mainstream physics&quot; emphasized?" Tags="|discussion|scope|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5870" CreationDate="2014-06-17T14:06:54.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at the second set of bullet point in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; page of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A partial quote reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pitches for your own personal theories or work&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  We deal with mainstream physics here. Anything that couldn't be &#xA;  published in a reputable journal is not appropriate on this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about fictional physics&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Could a warp drive get you out of a black hole?&quot;&#xA;  Questions about physics of fictional worlds which are not sufficiently grounded in real physics are off topic here, but they may be on topic at Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bit about &lt;em&gt;&quot;[a]nything that could not be published in a reputable journal&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the key, and I suppose that this is the standard to use in judging the extent of &quot;mainstream&quot;-ness required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, remember that some theories that are widely considered to be unlikely are none-the-less publishable. People did MOND for decades despite a near consensus that the work was doomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T14:06:54.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5870" CreationDate="2014-06-17T16:23:08.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a new user joins, they are shown the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; page. I added a link and explicitly mentioned non-mainstream there. That should help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T16:23:08.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-17T18:17:46.620" Score="-3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my opinion, the current question voting/deleting mechanism is bad, because it often closes(deletes) valid questions as well. But it is my opinion only - until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've found an idea to get &lt;em&gt;evidence&lt;/em&gt; to prove that. I can see a possibility to &lt;em&gt;audit the question closing/deleting system.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very simple: First, I sample the site for closed, but good-looking questions. On my own experience, especially the questions dealing with the solutions of the Einstein Field Theories are somehow disliked by some voting machine, but probably there are other, misteriously disliked areas as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I get good physics question with google from believable sources. For example, &lt;em&gt;I ask things to which I already found an answer on arxiv&lt;/em&gt; (of course only in old and well-referenced papers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I put them on the site as my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hiphotesis is, that these questions will be closed(deleted) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my actual question were: if I did this, were it an acceptable behavior, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T10:14:37.340" Title="Suggestion: an idea to audit the question close/delete mechanism without any moderation privilege" Tags="|discussion|moderation|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5873" CreationDate="2014-06-18T02:46:52.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really doubt that there are some &quot;mysteriously disliked&quot; fields. Especially general relativity and the EFEs; that's one of the most popular topics on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's acceptable to test the waters with your own questions, but try not to jump to conclusions when a question is closed. It may not have been closed for the reason you think, Physics.SE has a lot of policies when it comes to the types of allowed questions to maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio, it may have hit one of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10k+ users have access to overall review history. While I'm not as active now, in the past I used to go through this and look for any places where the review system failed, so far I haven't found any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T02:46:52.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5879" CreationDate="2014-06-18T06:21:47.250" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday my reputation was 64 but when today is displaying 60 but not showing where my i lost my reputation! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to refresh page twice but no change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46239" LastEditorUserId="653" LastEditDate="2014-06-21T12:11:01.943" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T12:11:01.943" Title="Reputation display" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5868" CreationDate="2014-06-18T10:06:49.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite my comment I didn't vote to reopen the question you mention. This is because after an initial burst of enthusiasm I took a closer look at the question and decided it didn't make sense. I suspect there is a language difficulty and result is that as it stands the question can't be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did consider editing the question to make it clearer, but it was at that point I realised I could be sure what the OP was actually asking. So I decided to leave it closed on the grounds it's unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although I think the close reason &lt;em&gt;non-mainstream&lt;/em&gt; was wrong, I still think the question should be closed. I obviously don't know the thought processes of those who voted to close, but given how confusing the question is I'm reluctant to censure them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/113034/where-is-the-way-on-a-rotating-black-hole-to-another-universe&quot;&gt;Where is the way on a rotating black hole to another Universe?&lt;/a&gt; has probably been closed unfairly, but again it's a poorly written question and I feel no great urge to attempt an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T10:06:49.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5873" CreationDate="2014-06-18T10:14:37.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be very annoyed to be presented with &lt;em&gt;test questions&lt;/em&gt;. I put a lot of effort into answering people's questions because I would have loved someone to do that when I was a spotty kid interested in physics¹. The thought that all that effort was just to prove a point about the suitability or otherwise of question subject matter is not a welcome one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ this would have meant inventing the Stack Exchange back in the 60s but who knows, CTCs may one day make this possible :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T10:14:37.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5875" CreationDate="2014-06-18T13:39:57.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click the &quot;show removed posts&quot; tick at the bottom of the page. A couple old, closed questions with 0 or less net votes were removed, and suggested edit rep from the same was lost in the process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j7JFM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T13:39:57.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5868" CreationDate="2014-06-19T05:10:51.623" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to point out one aspect of the question closure procedure which is relevant here but is not apparent to &amp;lt;3k users (and even then takes a while to realize). When voting to close a question, one gets to choose between the multiple options, but after you have five close votes the question gets closed regardless of what the mix of options is. (That is, three non-mainstream votes and two unclear votes will cause a question to be closed.) Further, &lt;strong&gt;only the reason with the most votes gets reported, and the other ones are not visible&lt;/strong&gt;, either publicly or to 3k+ or 10k+ users.* It is therefore possible that those questions  have, say, two non-mainstream votes, two unclear votes, and one too-broad vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that question closure mostly reflects that the community thinks a question is closable, but the reason stated is slightly more of an indicative thing and does not necessarily reflect a consensus among the close-voters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* At some point, I think after this answer was written, it became possible to see which close-voting users actually used the reported reason, as shown &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2dLmY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Unless such a tagline is shown, then it is not appropriate to attribute closure reasons to any individual close voter in the absence of further evidence.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T18:48:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T18:48:57.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-19T20:55:24.613" Score="6" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119578/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question by Freudian Slip was voted off-topic. The reason of the vote is that this question is about the optimal classical strategy to win the CHSH game, and needs only logic and no physic to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the CHSH game is a game invented by physicists, to look at physics problems (nonlocality and how quantum physics or other theories could beat it). I have only ever heard about this game in discussion about physics, and I think it is totally boring without physics, whether quantum or post-quantum (with PR-boxes). Such games have become a common tool in quantum information this century, and the optimal classical strategy defines a classical/quantum boundary, which is a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question is off topic because “You could remove all references to QM from this question without changing what it's asking”, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52547/&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13341/&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; questions about differential equations (and many others) is also off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other word, I don’t understand why this question is not &lt;em&gt;mathematics in the context of physics&lt;/em&gt;, as advised at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, since the CHSH-game only make sense “in the context of physics”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T07:04:33.060" Title="Are questions on quantum-information inspired games on topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-20T10:39:31.330" Score="7" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to discuss the relevance (&quot;on-topicness&quot;) of questions regarding the effects of physical influence on biologic organisms, specifically humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, there have been these two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119806/is-wifi-safe-for-humans&quot;&gt;Is WiFi safe for humans?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119999/is-it-possible-to-kill-a-human-with-a-powerful-magnet&quot;&gt;Is it possible to kill a human with a powerful magnet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one was closed for being off-topic (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; for showing little effort to find a solution on Google). The second one has not been touched. I fail to see the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is problematic to give medical advice on StackExchange but that's not the point. I could except closing the questions on those grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that the evaluation of the effects of radiation or strong fields is part of physical research. There are questions involved regarding the penetration depth and the scattering or interaction rates when radiation travels through organic tissue. For example, we have a group at our physics department doing simulations of the absorption of radiation emitted by cell phones with different antenna designs in the human body. Those things are beyond the scope of what biology can do and there are physicists working on it so I fail to see how that just isn't physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26875" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T10:51:33.033" Title="Relevance of biology-related questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-20T16:05:29.760" Score="9" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently created a question on Physics SE and learned that this site is not suited for questions that could be more opinion based. Since this is the case, could you suggest other places where people can ask these more opinion-based questions so as to reduce the number of them on Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36195" OwnerDisplayName="okarin" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T14:25:31.300" Title="What is a good place to ask more opinion-based questions instead of Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|soft-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5884" CreationDate="2014-06-20T18:09:18.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One suggestion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an informal place where a number of regular users can be found from time to time. We discuss all manner of things, and we're quite willing to give our opinions on physics-related issues. Just remember standard chat etiquette - no one is forced to respond to your solicitation for opinions. But likely someone will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;scheduled chat sessions&lt;/a&gt; every other week, where we try to gather around the same time (and where we sometimes have a site-maintenance agenda).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note one needs &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;20 reputation&lt;/a&gt; to participate on SE chats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other sites on the internet.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This space intentionally left blank.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't personally venture out much into the wilds of cyberspace. Hopefully other answers will be posted recommending forums that might match your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A word of caution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the philosophy of not allowing opinion-based questions on the main site here is that we want to provide objectively correct information, and we can't really verify the correctness of opinions. Throw in anonymity and a lack of face-to-face communication and it's entirely possible to be misled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you might stumble upon a community of physicists who are disillusioned with academia and who will tell you to study physics on your own without formal training, but you can't tell they're in the minority. Or you might find opinions from mathematicians claiming to be physicists who will tell you to not bother with lab work if you want to be a theorist, whereas another community might give the opposite response. Or you might meet someone like me telling you most of your standard textbooks in physics are garbage, but perhaps those books are actually best for you personally. So wherever you gather opinions, always critically evaluate what you're being told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T18:33:47.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-20T18:47:47.167" Score="31" ViewCount="1293" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3454/dont-signal-your-edits-in-text&quot;&gt;this meta post on RPG.SE&lt;/a&gt;: I think we should keep in mind that posts with lots of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; sections are a bit hard to read from beginning to end, and we should strive to avoid this style (which I'm certainly guilty of using from time to time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sometimes we need to change what we've written. But the revision history for the post contains all past versions in case anyone is curious. And most future visitors probably aren't interested in the full history of how a great question or answer got to where it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is a call for us all to try to make smooth-flowing posts whenever we edit new information into them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if editing another post for whatever reason, editors should feel free to incorporate updates smoothly into the post. (This last bit might be a bit more controversial here on Physics, where it seems most of us are loath to edit others' posts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a good idea? Am I missing some reason why physics posts should read like revision histories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:25.870" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T14:42:04.223" Title="Let's not have posts look like revision histories" Tags="|discussion|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5881" CreationDate="2014-06-20T23:35:54.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author of the original question being argued over, I am probably the last person anybody wants to hear on this subject since I'm severely biased, but here I go anyways.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of asking any question (in a Q&amp;amp;A site) is to generate an answer.  A question must adequately describe the desired response, along with any (and preferably all) information needed to give the desired answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In isolation, the context of a question alone should not determine whether it is on- or off-topic.  &lt;strong&gt;What should determine whether it's on-topic or not should purely depend on whether you need knowledge of the topic in order to correctly answer the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if, as David Z suggests in the comments of my question, &quot;You could remove all references to QM from this question without changing what it's asking&quot;, then that would imply that even though the &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt; was QM, the actual content of the question had no dependencies on knowledge of QM, and he would be correct that the topic of the question wasn't QM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original question is kind of a perfect storm. I was looking for a reason in the source QM theory about why a non-QM condition was invalid, and the answer ended up having absolutely nothing to do with QM (to an almost embarrassing degree).  Add to this the fact that the response I expected did not fully state what I was looking for (at the end I only asked &quot;where am I wrong?&quot;), and it's totally understandable that people would misinterpret my question as being &quot;Look how smart I am, you guys missed this obvious solution to this QM-Inspired card game&quot; instead of what I was hoping for, which was actual QM theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50606" LastEditorUserId="50606" LastEditDate="2014-06-21T07:04:33.060" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T07:04:33.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-21T07:44:53.157" Score="-7" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these answers and comments below have been a truly learning experience for me. I was told a lot of useful and important things, for instance that I can write an answer myself, that I can upvote or downvote, that any comment can always be deleted. Now I know, thank you. &lt;strong&gt;Pity that the only thing I still don't know is why certain comments get deleted and some not.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should anyone try to tell me that content counts, I recommend comparing my deleted comment - which I described below (and which was removed after just a few hours) - and those two comments that are still there after almost 2 days:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I skimmed the blog. Wow, just wow.&lt;/em&gt; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;+1 for including a short and long answer.&lt;/em&gt; (we all know that +1-type comments are highly recommended on stackexchange)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I guess further downvoting my question will give me the lesson I deserve.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why have moderators removed my comments&lt;/strong&gt; (and a few others) here in this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/120163/is-gravity-just-electromagnetic-attraction&quot;&gt;Is gravity just electromagnetic attraction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Rennie said there (this comment is now gone) that the blog the question was based on is nonsense and to justify his opinion he linked another question about the speed of gravity. I pointed out that the 2 top scoring answers to the question he referred to give no evidence to support their claim about the speed of gravity being c, and that one answer showed some links and commented that the dispute is at best unresolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was it removed?!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to prove that moderation follows weird policy regarding answers and comments - the top scoring (18 votes now) answer to the question I am talking about is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Short answer: No.&#xA;Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.&#xA;Moral of the story: Gravity and EM are two very different things that look similar to some people because they both fall off like 1r2. Be careful what you trust. When someone makes a claim like that, check their references. If there are no references, ignore it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How come this is considered a valid answer while my comment is considered invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. You know, I'm from Poland - a country where people have learned all too well what censorship leads to. I have never suspected I might be the subject of such practices in the so-called &quot;free world&quot; - be it US or the Internet. It's just so sad ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Should someone think I am a lunatic or otherwise obsessive, I will show a better example of what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime at the beginning of my presence here at physics.stackexchange, I wrote this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110703/do-photons-occupy-space/110707#110707&quot;&gt;Do photons occupy space?&lt;/a&gt;. It's actually only a quotation that experiments show that photon seems to have real spin. After that I not only received immediate downvotes, but also a number of derogatory comments calling me naive and such. When I responded accordingly (but not overtly), my comment was removed, while the original offensive comments were left intact. Only after I asked why moderation was unfair, the other comments were removed too. Apparently, moderation didn't mind offensive comments as long as they supported the &quot;right concepts&quot;. (Notice, I didn't develop any lengthy concepts or theories considered non-mainstream. I only pointed out to a fact provided by scientists from regular university). Since then there were a number of cases where I could see that certain comments are not welcome. So this time it was just too much and I decided to react.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T08:06:26.840" Title="Guru's are always right? Censorship in place of scientific arguments" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5888" CreationDate="2014-06-21T09:01:14.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why have moderators removed my comments?&lt;/em&gt; The basic rule of StackExchange is that comments can be removed once you give the message to the poster. If you don't want your ideas to be removed post an answer or say it in chat. I'm not a moderator, but I guess that was the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How come this is considered a valid answer while my comment is considered invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the answer is awful nonsense, every answer is allowed (in this case I think is a good answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I pointed out that the 2 top scoring answers to the question he referred give no evidence to support their claim about the speed of gravity being c&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explained in any General Relativity book, so no need to give references. If you think otherwise, you should back it up with solid references: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt; (and I think the question should have been closed under this policy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your comment, come on, don't compare goverment censorship to comment removal. And note that the comments weren't removed by the Goverment (they have better things to do). StackExchange is a private company, so this would be more like when someone is saying something you don't like in your house, you have the right to tell him to stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final remark, mods don't apply the removing policy too strictly when they should be supposed to remove +1 comments and that stuff. But since it doesn't cause mayor troubles, I think it's ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T09:15:38.530" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5888" CreationDate="2014-06-21T09:55:32.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all Stack Exchange sites, including Physics, comments are regarded as transient and may be deleted at any point. The site encourages anyone who wants to address a question to put the time and effort into writing a comprehensive and high quality answer. While answers can be deleted this is normally only done in extreme circumstances e.g. when someone posts obscene or spam material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking comments shouldn't be used to answer questions. I have to confess I sometimes use comments to provide an answer, but only when I don't want to put in the time and effort to write a proper answer. In those circumstances I'm quite happy that my comment might be deleted as I don't regard it as an important contribution to the site that I want preserved for posterity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments also shouldn't be used to discuss answers. You can comment to suggest changes. For example I always read comments to my answers, and if I think the comment makes a good point I will edit my answer accordingly or event delete it. If I think the comment is wrong or irrelevant I will not. Either way, the comment only plays a transient role in advising me of possible issues and having done this it can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe an answer is wrong or confusing, and the OP ignores your comments, then the correct course is to write your own answer. That answer can then be read by future site members along with the one you object to. Comments are not intended to provide a permanent commentry on answers and shouldn't be used for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the above is general, but you refer to a particular question. I didn't see the comments before they were deleted so I can't comment on why some were deleted and others weren't. I wouldn't be upset if my comments were deleted (for the reasons discussed above) though I note they have been heavily upvoted so presumably site members agree with them and/or find them helpful. I stand by them; I even have just gone back and reread the blog article to make sure I had not misjudged it, and I stand by my original opinion. If you wish to object you should write an answer analysing the blog article and pointing out its strengths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2014-06-21T10:04:01.360" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T10:04:01.360" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5888" CreationDate="2014-06-21T13:12:46.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write it in a post.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reliable way to insure that what you have to say is not removed as a noise comment is to write an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; official use-case for comments is to work toward improving the post they are attached to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toward that end, comments are transient and subject to removal. If what you write is not a throw-away comment, don't leave it in a &amp;quot;comment&amp;quot;, find a way to make a post of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particularly pernicious mis-use of comments seems to be as a way to write unpopular opinions and out-of-the-mainstream assertions without being subject to the publicly visible evaluation implicit in the up-and-down voting mechanism that applies to posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the removal of comments &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; involve a judgement call on the part of the moderators. We're doing our best, but we're not going to agonize over ever decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T13:12:46.557" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5884" CreationDate="2014-06-22T14:25:31.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about it, but isn't Quora less strict on opinion-based answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I personally have strongly mixed feelings towards opinion-based answers. Opinion-based discussions can be very enlightening as well, but they tend to only be that if all the people involved know what they're talking about. When &lt;strong&gt;asking&lt;/strong&gt; for opinions, you most likely don't really know what you're talking about, which is fine because it's the reason you're asking. And what's more: on the internet, you can't be sure the people answering &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; in fact know what they're talking about. Not to mention the representational value of these people. (see the word of caution in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5885/16660&quot;&gt;Chris White's answer&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whenever you're asking for people's opinions, you should be aware of your own (perhaps partially developed) opinion and prejudices and the expectation bias they bring. You have to be very cautious to avoid doing what makes me personally so suspicious of social sciences: connecting conclusions to experiments with bad statistical properties. Physics SE is the only physics website that I'm aware of which has reasonable statistics, where you can have a fair amount of confidence in the bulk of the answers. The system is far from perfect, but it's as close as I've seen. And a big part of the reason, &lt;em&gt;in my opinion&lt;/em&gt;, is the 'no-opinions' policy. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T14:25:31.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5352" CreationDate="2014-06-22T19:11:26.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a brilliant poem, &lt;em&gt;An Ode to the Unity of Space and Time&lt;/em&gt;, by Shing-Tung Yau, in the standard textbook, &lt;em&gt;String Theory and M-Theory&lt;/em&gt; by Becker, Becker and Schwarz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time, ah, time,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how you go off like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physical things, a things,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so abundant you are!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ruo's waters are three thousand,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how can they not have the same source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time and space are one body,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mind and things sustain each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time, o time,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does not time come again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heaven, o heaven,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how many are the appearances of heaven!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From ancient days constantly shifting on,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;black holes flaring up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time and space are one body,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is it without end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great indeed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the riddle of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beautiful indeed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the source of truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quantize space and time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the smartest are nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To measure the Great Universe with a long thin tube,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the learning is vast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T19:11:26.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-23T22:38:50.063" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the userpage for [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] who recently offered a bounty of 150 on a question and seemed to have a reputation of just 16. I was curious what made somebody quite so generous / desperate for a good answer to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In recent reputation changes I noticed a -150 for awarding a bounty and a +99 &quot;rep change&quot;. Looking at the reputation history since then, it appears that the award of a 150 rep bounty caused the account to go overdrawn, and it got &quot;rebalanced&quot; to 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leads to my question: under what circumstances can one offer a bounty that exceeds ones reputation? Is there a limit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-06-24T11:06:21.687" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T14:14:08.840" Title="Awarding bounty greater than reputation?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5867" CreationDate="2014-06-23T22:45:48.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags have been merged. This is a dummy answer to prevent the question from showing up in the unanswered list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T22:45:48.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2014-06-24T11:09:21.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes please. Many of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22update+2%22&quot;&gt;these posts&lt;/a&gt; are very difficult to read for no good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T11:09:21.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2014-06-24T13:31:37.020" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe one reason for using these marked revisions is when the question itself is edited by the OP in a significant way, which necessitates an important change in the answer. The answer may have been a good answer to the original question, and the answerer is reluctant to suppress it altogether : he'll rather add an appendix answering the new question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that, in such edits, it is often the main text of the question which is edited, not the title: thus the answer remains a good answer for those who've been attracted there by the title, not by the particulars the OP has added since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus a side question would be also, when the original question is relevant and gets answered, should the OP be allowed to modify significantly his question or should he be directed to post another question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43588" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T13:31:37.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5894" CreationDate="2014-06-24T22:46:38.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators are not allowed to comment on specific cases due to privacy concerns, but let me say in general that missing reputation is often associated with: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;deleted user accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;invalidated reputation due to voting irregularities (read: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_puppetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sock puppetry&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that gaming the reputation system may in general lead to suspension (if that wasn't obvious).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-06-25T14:14:08.840" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T14:14:08.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5901" CreationDate="2014-06-26T04:06:51.657" Score="6" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to put a physics problem that pertains to a certain subject, and answer that problem so other people can understand the concept? I think doing this would help other people so that they won't be confused with what they're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46156" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T09:18:39.230" Title="Are Problem Explanations Allowed in Physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5900" CreationDate="2014-06-26T04:21:40.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have a rule against problem explanations &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt;, but I think there's a decent chance these sorts of questions would run afoul of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. You don't get any special consideration because you're the one posting both the question and the answer; in other words, your question and answer will be examined for compliance with the homework policy the same as if they had been posted by different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really depends on how you ask the question, though. If your question asks about a concept, and presents the problem only as an example of how the concept might be applied (rather than asking for the answer to the problem), it might well be fine. And if your answer only shows how to apply the concept in the context of the problem, rather than giving a full solution, again, it could be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T04:21:40.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2014-06-26T06:10:25.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not to argue in favour of the practice, but I think one reason people do it is to make clear what the new part is. For example, you post a long answer, but the OP raises a point they didn't understand that needs to be addressed. You could just edit it seamlessly into the answer, but then it would be hard for the OP to find the part that refers to their specific point. Under these circumstances I sometimes put an &quot;update&quot; heading as a sign to the OP that this is the part they should be looking at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the OP could just look at the edit history in this situation, but I have a feeling that most people don't do this, and even if they do they have to extract the relevant information from a diff, which isn't always ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this isn't a proper answer, it's just one reason why it sometimes happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T06:10:25.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5904" CreationDate="2014-06-26T07:30:20.427" Score="6" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this place does cannot peer review the many &quot;pet theories&quot; out there. These things get asked here quite a lot. Information about this is detailed in the wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am asking is: should we have something for those who do not do mainstream physics? Or should it be a separate site altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really want to see alternative theories and thought experiments easily (and this is a good platform for it, though I know this this is intended to be a Q&amp;amp;A site - though the Q&amp;amp;A style could only be reserved for the mainstream physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51948" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-06-26T20:40:06.090" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T01:02:31.627" Title="Should there be a special section for non-mainstream physics?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5903" CreationDate="2014-06-26T07:46:05.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Part of the appeal of Stack Exchange sites is their reputation for quality. When you come to an SE site you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; you're going to see (mostly) good content, for a certain definition of &quot;good&quot; that is fairly well associated with the mainstream of whatever the subject of the site is. And this is not arbitrarily chosen; we select for this particular kind of content because people want to see it. Opening up the site to non-mainstream physics (in the sense that I think you mean) would trash our reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it may be true that the platform would be a good one to use for discussing non-mainstream physics. If you think that's a niche that needs to be filled, you're welcome to find some software equivalent to what SE runs (there are several options) and start your own site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the reason we're not going to do it here is for the protection of the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me point out, though, that pretty much anything is fair game in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-06-27T01:02:31.627" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T01:02:31.627" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5900" CreationDate="2014-06-26T09:18:39.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did something very like this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/how-long-would-it-take-me-to-travel-to-a-distant-star&quot;&gt;How long would it take me to travel to a distant star?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking how to calculate the travel time to a star could be a homework problem - I bet it's been set as course work many times. However in this case the emphasis is on understanding the physics involved rather than just giving an answer. If you were thinking of something along these lines then I'd say give it a go. You can always delete your question and answer if it's not well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T09:18:39.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2014-06-26T14:42:04.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the actual answer changes with time, like BICEP2 more or less retracting their detection of gravitational waves, neutrios found not to be superluminal, the astronomical unit is redefined as a contant, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases I like to see an updated answer (possibly years later) along with the original answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/103898/what-was-the-major-discovery-on-gravitational-waves-made-march-17th-2014-in-th/103902#103902&quot;&gt;What was the major discovery on gravitational waves made March 17th, 2014, in the BICEP2 experiment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T14:42:04.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5868" CreationDate="2014-06-26T20:34:25.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only one of the two linked questions in the OP was closed as &quot;not mainstream&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;light in another universe&quot; question was voted &quot;not mainsteam&quot; by Alfred Centauri, Brandon Enright and Qmechanic and two others voted to close for other reasons.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;rotating black hole&quot; question had at least one customized reason that mentioned not being mainstream, but I don't seen any evidence that anyone (else) voted &quot;not mainstream&quot;.  I voted to close because I didn't think it was clear what was being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41072" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T20:34:25.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5910" CreationDate="2014-06-28T07:47:50.107" Score="22" ViewCount="1222" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121879/can-i-compute-the-mass-of-a-coin-based-on-the-sound-of-its-fall&quot;&gt;Can I compute the mass of a coin based on the sound of its fall?&lt;/a&gt; has appeared on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/PhysicsToday/posts/10154354597660164&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Today Facebook page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well done to all who contributed to that question. It has to be good for the Physics SE to get this sort of publicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been periodically annoyed by the 200 rep/day limit, but poor alemi has been stung by it big time - that limit has cost over 1000 rep points. Can the mods pull a string somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T06:49:21.423" Title="We're in Physics Today!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-28T12:43:26.213" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not complaining, neither I am any kind of rebel here. I am just asking that isn't physics all about the physical phenomenon that used to happen everyday, every second around us. Isn't it's about the application of mathematics in our daily life to build something what we really refer as engineering. Then why we can't ask the numerical based question on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last time when I asked a question based on Electrostatics which was having a capacitor circuit and we'll have to find some of the information of the circuit which included power, current through the capacitors and other information. But the following day my question was closed saying that &quot;this question is user specific and can't help other user to get their answer....blah...blah!&quot;. I didn't understand that what is meaning of physics if we keep it limited to Einstein's theory of relativity, instead we should try to come up to use physics in such a way which can help us in simplifying our way of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please&lt;/strong&gt; note that here I am not trying to promote the low grade numerical based question that we could by just applying some famous physicists formula. Rather numerical are beyond that, believe me. We should cope with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rather need your views on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12513" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-06-28T16:32:27.360" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T15:02:11.570" Title="Isn't physics is all about application" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5908" CreationDate="2014-06-28T16:25:57.903" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the question part of this: no, there are no strings we can pull; the only way to get someone a large amount of reputation exceeding the 200/day limit is a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T16:25:57.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5913" CreationDate="2014-06-28T17:52:01.043" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had two questions put on hold so far.  One eventually got closed (for an arguably good reason), but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121867/can-a-difference-in-the-speed-of-time-introduce-acceleration/&quot;&gt;other one&lt;/a&gt; is still on hold.  I've made edits to the question and left a comment pointing this out, but how do I know when my changes have been reviewed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, since I obviously have difficulty wording my questions in such a way that accurately reflect the answer I'm trying to get, when I get a canned (copy/pasted from the help center) message that my question isn't about mainstream physics, but my intent was to learn the mainstream physics, how can I find out what exactly in my question lead to the conclusion that put it on hold in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T18:18:32.697" Title="How can you tell when a question that's been put on hold has been reviewed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5909" CreationDate="2014-06-28T17:56:51.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you will allow me the indulgence of addressing this answer to what I perceive your situation to be, I think we might make some progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging for your posts I'd guess that you are near the beginning of your studies in physics--and presumably doing well because the conceptual understanding embedded in your writing is quite good for a beginner---and that colors how you think about physics just as my situation colors mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post that you are describing as &lt;em&gt;&quot;applications&quot;&lt;/em&gt; I would describe as &lt;em&gt;&quot;textbook conceptual question&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. They are solved immediately by anyone who understands the relationships between the abstract representations that we use and the physical reality that goes with them. You gave a perfectly good answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/115170/520&quot;&gt;the capacitance question&lt;/a&gt;, but it consists of connecting the verbal representation of the problem (&lt;em&gt;&quot;charge drawn from a battery&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) to the mathematical representation (&quot;Q \propto C_{eq}&quot;). The accepted answer to the same question connects the verbal version with a pictorial version and is also correct and useful to the asker. It is typical that there are at least three useful representations of every physics concept and moving between them is sometimes difficult for beginners but is generally very easy for more experienced practitioners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you continue in your studies you will find that fluent moves between multiple representations of a single problem are a foundation skill. In fact I know at least one Physic Education Researcher who &lt;em&gt;defines&lt;/em&gt; upper-division level thinking in terms of fluency with multiple representations and differing levels of abstraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the difference between that capacitance questions and the recent one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/115170/520&quot;&gt;the relationship between coin masses and the noise they make on hitting a hard surface&lt;/a&gt; (that is a pretty advanced example, but it is to make the point). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more posts with which to exhibit different levels of sophistication:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90837/observations-in-the-cathode-ray-tube-experiement&quot;&gt;Observations in the cathode ray tube experiement&lt;/a&gt; Here the asker is having trouble applying what they know (or should) know about atoms and cathode rays to a real world problem. The explanation requires an understanding of the environment inside a CRT, and the integration of three physical concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/43177/520&quot;&gt;How to choose a α, β, γ measurement detector?&lt;/a&gt; This question is about the strategy for apply physics knowledge to a design problem and is really too broad. My &quot;answer&quot; simply explains how big the field is and give a couple of vague generalities. People build industry careers on knowing how to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/83055/520&quot;&gt;How can scintillation gamma-spectrometers work given that track length is different for different angles?&lt;/a&gt; A practical application question for which the answers are well known. This would be a textbook question for a student just beginning to study the experimental aspects of nuclear or high-energy physics. Again, the answer required knowing several physics facts: how gammas interact with matter: how light propagates in scintillation counters and is converted to latchable electronic signals, something about the geometric limitations of hodoscopes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/34193/520&quot;&gt;How are the masses of unstable elementary particles measured?&lt;/a&gt; Another experimental particle-physics question. There are several different answers and knowing which ones to use is a matter of experience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/60356/520&quot;&gt;How quark electric charge directly have been measured?&lt;/a&gt; An application question at a moderately high level of sophistication; this requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of experimental particle physics technique and theory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5545/520&quot;&gt;Solar neutrino predictions&lt;/a&gt; Not really a &quot;application&quot; questions but a &quot;state of the discipline&quot; one. Requires lots of familiarity with what has been done, but not a lot of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I've taken these examples from my area of expertise because I knew I could find them quickly, but the site has examples at many levels of sophistication from many different areas of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T15:02:11.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2014-06-28T18:18:32.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One eventually got closed &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed and on hold are the same state, except for the wording. On hold questions are automatically closed in 5 days (iirc). The wording change is to avoid people getting caught up in the finality of the term &quot;closed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when I get a canned (copy/pasted from the help center) message that my question isn't about mainstream physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't copy pasted. It's one of the options available to the close voters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but how do I know when my changes have been reviewed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not directly through the system, but you can ask a mod in chat. In this case, the reopen review is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/47217&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, a unanimous &quot;Leave Closed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how can I find out what exactly in my question lead to the conclusion that put it on hold in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask the commenters, or ask in chat. (Or on meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you were starting off with a &quot;hypothetical&quot; system forbidden by established physics (or, at least, hard to justify unless you specify the metric behind it). Idealized hypotheticals are okay, but ones which disobey physics are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appending a non mainstream question with an EDIT block that asks a completely different question doesn't make sense either. Just ask a new question, though I suggest you clarify the paragraph at the end with what you mean when you talk of components. Preferably with a bit of mathematics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T18:18:32.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5916" CreationDate="2014-06-28T20:50:10.137" Score="5" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is asked that (in good faith) has to do with physics, but the actual answer ends up being that the assumptions that led up to the question being asked were wrong in a way that had nothing to do with physics (and thus the answer had nothing to do with physics), should the question be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of people felt that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/119578/why-isnt-the-best-case-classical-solution-to-the-chsh-game-100&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I asked had nothing to do with physics, enough so that it's currently closed.  I had been wanting an answer that would tell me more about Bell's Theory, but worded my question in such a way that many people thought I was suggesting an alternative strategy to the CHSH game.  I've edited it a couple of times (most recently just now) in an attempt to clearly state what the actual question was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answer turned out to be that I had made a mistake in calculating the effectiveness of my strategy, and that it wasn't better than the one used in the original.  It had nothing to do with a restriction in Bell's theory like I thought it did when I posted the original question.  So ultimately the answer was &quot;User's error&quot; and had nothing to do with physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should I just delete it, or should I keep it alive so anybody else that makes the same mistake as I did can see it and not bother asking the same question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T02:57:57.420" Title="Should a question whose answer ends up not having anything to do with physics be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5914" CreationDate="2014-06-28T22:17:55.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to address your specific situation, but will answer the title questions directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should a question whose answer ends up not having anything to do with physics be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, but ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain questions which look naively like physics questions, and questions like that are going to get asked again and again. In those cases we want a high-quality clear and definitive answer to point askers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite category of these is questions about color and about certain optical illusions. In many cases the answers are really biological or brain-science related, but naive askers will very often ask them on Physics SE because &quot;light is physics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T22:17:55.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5914" CreationDate="2014-06-29T03:18:50.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just my personal opinion, informed by experience, but not a reflection of any official policy: I don't think there are &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; circumstances under which the original poster of a question should feel obligated to delete it. And there are very few circumstances under which a question should be deleted at all; in those few cases, the question &lt;em&gt;very obviously&lt;/em&gt; never should have been posted in the first place. When that happens, one of us moderators will delete the question directly, or the system will take care of it (e.g. if a question gets enough spam flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as far as I'm concerned, you can delete the question if you want (and if the system will let you), but you shouldn't feel like you have to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people may think differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-06-30T02:57:57.420" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T02:57:57.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5868" CreationDate="2014-06-29T05:11:47.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think both questions are definite cases of &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;. I don't know what either of them really wants to know, to the extent that it's questionable whether they're really asking about the Kerr metric at all. So I think it's right that they're closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I really wish that both community members and (on other questions) moderators would avoid selecting &quot;off topic&quot; as the close reason in such cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, closing something as &quot;off topic&quot; sends a message that says &quot;we don't want &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; questions on this topic, even if they are otherwise excellent questions and have no other issues.&quot; If you close a question as off topic then you're saying that the &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; is the primary issue, and this implicitly restricts what can be discussed on the site in future. So please, please, please, if a question has multiple issues, close it as something other than &quot;off topic&quot; unless it really is the case that no question on a similar subject could possibly ever be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T05:11:47.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5925" CreationDate="2014-07-01T16:20:52.487" Score="2" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Area 51 Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I've found that &quot;&lt;em&gt;The Theoretical Physics site didn't have enough activity during the beta. It has been closed, and its content has been merged into Physics&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. But when I've done a question in the Physics exchange about other universes &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/119562/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;closed as off-topic by Alfred Centauri, Brandon Enright, Kyle, Chris&#xA;  White, Qmechanic♦ Jun 17 at 5:02.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in Physics exchange can't I ask questions about other universes, where is the place to do this? And if the content of the closed Theoretical Physics was merged into Physics, why can't I ask questions in that exchange account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the questions of Theoretical Physics should by into the Physics exchange tagged as Theoretical Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43426" OwnerDisplayName="Hector" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T16:18:19.277" Title="Question about Other Universes in Physics Exchange" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2014-07-01T16:39:12.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We allow theoretical physics here. But only the mainstream kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposing new theories or talking about physics which hasn't been peer-validated is not allowed, to avoid making this site a hotbed for kook theorists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/7433&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; from the close reason for more information. Others have already mentioned how the post can be improved in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T16:39:12.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2014-07-01T16:40:56.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the place to ask questions about theoretical physics. You can't assume that just because your question was closed, it means that theoretical physics is off topic; if that were the case, the post notice explaining why it was closed would say &quot;This question is off topic because it is about theoretical physics.&quot; Notice that it doesn't say that. (Also notice that almost every other question on the site is about theoretical physics.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notice displayed below your post gives you a brief summary of reason it was considered off topic. You can generally find more information about it in the comments. That being said, it's fine to ask for more detail here on meta, and perhaps one of the people who closed it will chime in to provide more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T16:40:56.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5923" CreationDate="2014-07-01T18:49:30.000" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I ask &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;theoretical physics&lt;/a&gt; questions on physics.stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52582" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-07-01T19:42:05.330" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T20:01:49.157" Title="Can I ask theoretical physics questions on physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5922" CreationDate="2014-07-01T19:15:57.607" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure. Phys.SE is for all areas of physics, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theoretical&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;experimental&lt;/a&gt; physics. To get a quick idea of various topics of physics, see e.g. the list in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/12176/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Phys.SE answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note that the words 'theoretical' and 'theory' have specific meanings in physics, which differ from the more common use as, say, 'wildly speculative'; see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T20:01:49.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5926" CreationDate="2014-07-02T05:07:02.043" Score="13" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/122570/&quot;&gt;&quot;Which Is More Fundamental, Fields or Particles?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; essentially by explaining what second quantization is and why it makes so much more sense than first quantization. The answer has been well received suggesting that some users benefited from a good explanation of second quantization. However, if I search &quot;what is second quantization&quot; I do not find my answer. This is not surprising because the question I answered does not have &quot;second quantization&quot; in the title or tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when a user posts a question asking &quot;Why X?&quot;, the best answer involves explaining topic Y. A user may post a good explanation of Y. If X and Y share no meaningful key words, users searching for the answer to &quot;What is Y?&quot; may not find the answer. Therefore, what should be done in this situation to help future users wondering about Y find the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T15:57:49.377" Title="Making good posts discoverable when the original question isn't obviously related" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2014-07-02T16:18:19.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question (well, my interpretation of it) is within the scope of the site and was closed unfairly, and the number of likes my comment got suggests others agree with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, but, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking a technical question about how metrics like the Reissner-Nordstom or Kerr have null geodesics that allow light from other universes to reach ours then that's a fair question, because I can write down equations to demonstrate it. If on the other hand you're about to propose something more appropriate to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Sci-Fi SE&lt;/a&gt; then you're unlikely to get a warm reception here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the real reason your question was closed is that it wasn't clear what you were asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:11.907" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T16:18:19.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5924" CreationDate="2014-07-02T16:38:10.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's reasonable to edit the question, including the title and tags, a bit. I think the clearest form of a question can only be written by someone who already knows the answer. You have to be careful not to post an answer to a different question, then edit the question so that it asks the question that you answer (this would be a bit rude to the OP). But the worst that can happen is that people will disagree with your added interpretation of the question and the edit will be rolled back, so I don't think there's much harm in trying, provided you make a reasonable effort to keep the original intent of the question intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revision: it now seems to be explicitly encouraged to edit questions that you answer to improve them, as evidenced by the existence of the Explainer/Refiner/Illuminator badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="11053" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T15:57:49.377" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T15:57:49.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-02T20:44:15.417" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got the following achievement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You've earned the &quot;Curious&quot; badge (Asked a good question on 5 separate days, and maintains a positive question record.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed curious, and I am curious too. I am wondering why I received it a bit more than 9 months after my last question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that duration rings a bell, but I somehow doubt it is the real reason.&#xA;Anyone knows more ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastEditorUserId="9426" LastEditDate="2014-07-02T20:57:16.710" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T20:57:16.710" Title="How long the pregnancy to produce a &quot;Curious&quot; badge?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5927" CreationDate="2014-07-02T20:56:07.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you got the badge retroactively today because we just implemented it today.  See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234259/asking-days-badges&quot;&gt;Asking days badges&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, the badges will be awarded shortly after the criteria is met. Since the criteria involves votes and closed question and such, it might still be a while after asking your last question, however. Suppose you had 4 days of asking well-received questions and one day asking a question with no votes. If I come along 9 months later and upvote that question, the criteria will be met and the badge awarded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T20:56:07.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5931" CreationDate="2014-07-03T09:29:28.303" Score="1" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I understand, repairing means work. Clicking only for &quot;close&quot; is much simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is worsened by that people over 2k don't get +2 reputation for an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current system actively encourages high-reputated reviewers to destroy things, instead of making them better. It is the problem of the rewarding system, which don't seems to change in the near future. The only option if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, highly reputated reviewer, try to make your job more cooperatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a big part of such questions have very low quality. But it is not always so. They are often fixable, because they contain good content, but with bad grammar/spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, now you will probably close this &quot;question&quot; as &quot;it is not a question&quot;. Yes, it isn't. It is an... ask. I ask you to click more on &quot;edit&quot; as to &quot;close&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And now you can click to the &quot;close&quot; link - on this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2014-07-03T11:00:23.013" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T22:47:31.533" Title="Please, don't close questions as unclear because of bad english. Repair them instead" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5933" CreationDate="2014-07-03T09:33:37.003" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;three new badges&lt;/a&gt; have been introduced here - Curious, Inquisitive and Socratic, which are intended to appreciate asking good questions. (Good is interpreted in terms of how well received the question is, which though debatable, still should work well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the significance of the clause ''on separate days'' in the defining statement? Why are we discouraging people from asking two good questions on a single day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T16:05:29.813" Title="Significance of ''separate days'' in the new badges?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5929" CreationDate="2014-07-03T11:42:35.073" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually closure (as unclear) is meant as a temporary status. This is why it's called &quot;on hold&quot; for the first five days. The question gets put on hold, edited, and then reopened once it's been clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where it's obvious how to edit the question to improve it, such as spelling mistakes, then sure, just editing is the best thing to do. But in those cases, the question isn't really unclear in the sense of the close reason. When a question is &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; unclear, in a way that can't be clarified without the OP's input, then voting to put it on hold is the thing to do. That prompts the asker to come back and edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T11:42:35.073" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5929" CreationDate="2014-07-03T13:35:34.173" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a post on the mother meta which already addresses this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226338/too-quick-with-the-close-button-for-unclear-what-youre-asking/&quot;&gt;Too quick with the Close button for &amp;quot;Unclear what you&amp;#39;re asking&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the problems with questions with bad English is that they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; unclear, even when you get past the grammar issues. Because bad grammar usually leads to loss of clarity, and you're left wondering what the person is asking about. We usually don't make edits that decide what the question means, we let the OP fix it. Crystal balling the question is not or job, and more often than not we get the wrong interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, closing/on-holding is a temporary state. It means that the question needs improvement, and will be opened when it gets improved. People who close questions also patrol the reopen queues and often reopen such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a +2 rep for editing for everyone would really help here. If the user is still motivated by rep, then they probably will go for the easier edits. If not (which is pretty likely), then stuff will continue as usual. Fixing an unclear post is one of the harder things to do, especially because you have to try and figure out the poster's intentions. People here have better things to do with their time, usually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T13:35:34.173" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5930" CreationDate="2014-07-03T16:05:29.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. The initial idea for the badges was simply to give them based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/228844/should-we-add-more-badges-for-asking-questions&quot;&gt;number of questions asked&lt;/a&gt;. For most sites, that would probably have been a fine choice. But a &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;few sites&lt;/a&gt; (notably our flagship, Stack Overflow) get more questions than they can reasonably handle each day. The &quot;on separate days&quot; requirement exists to encourage pacing oneself and make questions count. (Most of the other requirements are intended to encourage more interesting, not just more, questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On smaller sites, it can actually be useful to spread questions out a bit. I conducted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.meta.stackexchange.com/q/665/4521&quot;&gt;contest on Parenting&lt;/a&gt; and found that it's harder to care about answers if you are trying generate questions for reasons other than curiousity. My experience on other sites is the same: if I try too hard to ask questions, the answers don't tend to matter as much to me. Also, it can be annoying to see the front page cluttered with the questions of just one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should feel lucky I didn't get my first idea to solve the problem: &quot;on separate &lt;em&gt;weeks&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The trouble with that pace is that people would need to wait up to 7 days to ask their next question if they didn't want to &quot;waste&quot; it. I called that behavior &quot;just-too-late asking&quot;. A day didn't seem like too much time to wait in contrast. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, there's no reason to not ask a second question on a second day, if you don't care about the badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T16:05:29.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5929" CreationDate="2014-07-03T22:16:59.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I have no qualms about voting to re-open a question that I either perceive was closed unfairly (this is usually obvious from reading comments if I can't judge it for myself), or has undergone a substantial edit to address the close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the majority of things I see in the re-open queue are either edits of a few characters, a bit of cleaning up of language or a restatement of the question (often awkwardly pasted in with the original formulation) that doesn't address the close reason. Minor edit -&gt; no change to reasoning for closing in the first place -&gt; leave closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind that a substantial edit doesn't &lt;em&gt;entitle&lt;/em&gt; a question to be re-opened. If the question is still fraught with problems (I've noticed that substantial edits occasionally make things &lt;em&gt;worse&lt;/em&gt; by adding many more poorly framed sub-questions to a question) -&gt; leave closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's probably a bit of a difference between writing an adequate question that doesn't get closed in the first place (a bit easier), and writing a question good enough to get re-opened (a bit harder). But I think this is fine. If anything I think we should be closing more questions that are merely adequate and demanding that they be edited to be 'good questions' to be re-opened. Writing good questions takes effort and time, just like writing a good answer. Many OPs forget this, which we get away with thanks to answerers that fill in all the missing detail from the question in their answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T22:16:59.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5929" CreationDate="2014-07-03T22:47:31.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a mechanism in place that you're probably not aware of, but which you should research well and think about. Any time that a closed question is edited, it is put into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt; called Reopen Votes, for which the options are Leave Closed, Edit and Reopen, and Reopen. If a question gets three 'Leave closed' votes, then it gets taken out of the queue - which means that three independent people think that the edits are not enough to warrant reopening. It also means that they get to see and comment on the post, if there is evidence that the OP is on the track to clarify their ideas but still needs some help - and this does happen very often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see this Mother Meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140893/add-a-review-posts-with-reopen-votes-review-task&quot;&gt;Add a &amp;quot;Review posts with reopen votes&amp;quot; review task?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your assertion that 'a closing vote can never be removed' is incorrect - it takes equal amounts of people to reopen as it does to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I cannot account for the actions of other reviewers on that queue, but I can assure you that each question I see there receives a good look at both the changes and how they address the closure reason, as well as whether the new version by itself is a closable question or not. Unfortunately, I agree completely with Kyle in that the content of this queue is very often minor edits which do not address the closure reason at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To browse through the last few questions on the queue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122940/dipole-charge-attractions-while-one-of-them-is-turning-around-other&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122940/dipole-charge-attractions-while-one-of-them-is-turning-around-other&lt;/a&gt; is an improvement but it is still on the border line as regards the homework policy, and the 2/2 votes reflect this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122956/spherical-shell-with-mass-of-the-earth&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122956/spherical-shell-with-mass-of-the-earth&lt;/a&gt; only has style improvements since the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122890/string-theory-and-how-it-works&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122890/string-theory-and-how-it-works&lt;/a&gt; is actually a fair improvement on the previous version but it is still miles away from on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122727/explosive-energy-in-a-container&quot;&gt;Explosive energy in a container&lt;/a&gt; is an improvement but it is still unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122506/michelson-morley-interferometer-in-space-without-rods&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122506/michelson-morley-interferometer-in-space-without-rods&lt;/a&gt; is a better description of a confused thought process which it is still very hard to make sense of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122070/chanddrasekhar-limit&quot;&gt;Chandrasekhar Limit&lt;/a&gt;  is, I think, still on the borderline of the homework policy, and it has attracted attention from thoughtful users who work in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Against this background, a substantial edit which has clearer language or a longer posts immediately demands attention, and it is easy to detect when the OP has put in a good bit of work to clarify their post. If they have clarified it to the point that the core of the question is now clear, I will usually edit it into shape and vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is very seldom the case. Most often, the lack of clarity in the language leads to ambiguities in what the question actually is (if not a complete puzzle as to what was going on inside the OP's head). In the (relatively frequent) cases where one can identify two or three candidate questions that the OP may be thinking of, it is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; a disservice to the OP to directly edit that in, because we do not know what they wanted to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, beware of making generalizations based on your own personal experience of the site, as I can tell you - from experience - that it is very easy to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; see stuff that does go on. Unless you have followed up on &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; post that was closed as unclear, and seen that all of them get worked on by their OPs and still get 'robo-voted' down, how can you be sure that you've not simply been seeing the closure part of the process, without being around for the reopening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T22:47:31.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5937" CreationDate="2014-07-04T09:52:37.330" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;When flagging a question Physics SE, one can select&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then one further has the options to choose from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta.physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it make sense to add&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;philosophy.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to that list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26044" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T10:39:11.423" Title="Flagging question as belonging to another SE site" Tags="|feature-request|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5936" CreationDate="2014-07-04T10:15:02.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migration options are rarely added unless a site has a track record of a lot of migrations to the other site, the majority of which are successful. This is to prevent uninformed migrations to sites where the question is actually off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just use a custom flag, a moderator will migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T10:15:02.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-04T18:46:51.777" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noticed a bit of strange behavior around the rep cap yesterday. I had an answer to a hot network question that got a bunch of upvotes, so I hit the cap [+200], then some more upvotes [still +200], then someone retracted their upvote [+190] (no idea if this was one of the votes from before or after I hit the cap, but that might be related to the cause of the bug), then some further upvotes [still +190].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the rep cap intended to be on net change, or on positive contribution? I guess it might make sense to have down-votes lower the cap, but a retracted upvote seems like it shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not too fussed about the 10 rep, but it would be a bit unfortunate if this disqualified the day from counting toward things like Epic (not that I'm ever likely to be Epic, but it's the principle!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AwIZI.png&quot; alt=&quot;rep changes from yesterday&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T19:06:13.300" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T19:06:13.300" Title="Odd rep cap behavior?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5938" CreationDate="2014-07-04T19:03:31.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;dmckee♦ is correct, this seems to be due to a slow cache. Changes shown at physics.stackexchange.com/reputation show +200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 (10)&#xA; 2    122790 [10]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 2     74691 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 16     1659 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA; 2    122790 [0]&#xA;-- 2014-07-03 rep +200  = 3384&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T19:03:31.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-05T15:51:52.033" Score="21" ViewCount="1133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that this question from a new user,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121879/can-i-compute-the-mass-of-a-coin-based-on-the-sound-of-its-fall&quot;&gt;Can I compute the mass of a coin based on the sound of its fall?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;went viral, attracting tens of thousands of views and hundreds of votes. The numbers speak for themselves - there is no doubt that the question was a good one, though, of course, questions covering a range of topics and difficulties are desirable. Worryingly, however, our initial responses to the question were rather negative; the question was downvoted to a negative rating and comments indicated that the question was of no value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this not suggest that our response to questions can be too quick and too harsh? Are we too officious/bureaucratic? We initially discouraged one of the most successful questions of all time. Do we need to be more careful? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T10:33:34.417" Title="Mass of a coin question went viral, despite inital downvotes and negative comments" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2014-07-05T19:56:37.130" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also recall the question went to a net -2 score early on, hence my comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's any cause for soul searching though. All questions will have some site members who approve and some who don't. It just so happened that the disapprovers were first on the scene this time. It didn't take long for the rest of us to get there and start voting it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should bear in mind that it's actually not a great question - it just had some great answers. I think the question's upvotes flatter it a bit. I suspect it's basking in the aura of the upvotes attracted by alemi and Floris' answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-07-05T19:56:37.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2014-07-06T04:32:57.800" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember the question having a net -2 score early on as well.  The initial question was in broken english, which I suspect added to the early poor reception.  I knew the question had potential and was worried it was quickly going to get buried, so I edited the question for english grammar as quick as I could [14:58] and started working on my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me a bit to get my initial results, and I had other things going on, so by the time I was ready to post [18:30], Floris had already answered with his first dimensional analysis results [15:05], so I amended my answer a bit in light of his answer and posted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there, Floris and I kept commenting and editing our own posts based on the updates of the other's.  I really think the reason we ended up with such a great pair of answers was because we both kept working off each other's improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are a few lessons to draw from the question.  The first is that people should try not to judge questions negatively based solely on english grammar, it is easy enough to edit a question if you think it still has potential.  The second is that answers can feed off one another and lead to mutual improvement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I'll mention that I was afraid the question was going to get closed.  I know it wasn't in this case but I was afraid of it nonetheless.  One because it was in broken english and I think we can agree that as a whole the site isn't the most friendly towards non native english speakers, and second the question was broad, and I feel the site is a little harsh on broad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize I've only been a member for a little while.  I've been lurking for quite a while and only recently decided to pull the trigger and start contributing.  Just my observations and food for thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51994" LastEditorUserId="51994" LastEditDate="2014-07-06T04:39:15.827" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T04:39:15.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2014-07-06T06:10:14.223" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to echo one of John Rennie's points, but more forcefully. Really &lt;strong&gt;it is not a great &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It hit upon a great topic, and allowed for some really great answers, but the question itself does no &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;prior research&lt;/a&gt;, nor does it give any indication about what direction the answers should take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's phrased like the questions at the top of &lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xkcd: What If&lt;/a&gt; posts, but keep in mind the author there plenty of options and only deals with the questions that lead to the most amusing discussion. There is already filtering going on. Because &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions posted here first before downvotes and closevotes, our filtering process is more transparent, but that doesn't mean we're doing any more filtering than any other quality site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also note my own response &lt;em&gt;to the question&lt;/em&gt;. I saw it only after it was edited for grammar, so grammar wasn't even an issue. Even after seeing the answers, I still posted a comment (which has since been nuked), saying something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you're asking. Do you want an answer based only on theory (which the current answers are telling you is difficult and complicated), or do you want to set up an experiment? If the latter, the answer is trivial if you only have a finite number of coin types and you pre-record the sound each makes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still stand by this comment. The OP has never specified if they are seeking a first-principles calculation, or if they're willing to just accept empirical data points. Perhaps the thought is &quot;if I measure just a dime and a quarter, can I infer the acoustic properties of the intermediate coins?&quot; &lt;em&gt;But this was never explicitly stated&lt;/em&gt; so we can only guess at the OP's intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be tempting to jump in and expound on a familiar topic vaguely related to what the OP asked, and maybe that even leads to a great post that reveals lots of nuanced physics. But I for one won't upvote a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; that leaves so much guesswork to the answerers. And in my experience, the vast majority of similarly vague questions do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; get good answers. We should encourage questions to be good in and of themselves, rather than reward lucky shots in the dark ex post facto. After all, what kind of incentive structure do you want upvotes to induce?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T06:10:14.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4512" CreationDate="2014-07-07T13:40:33.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another reason for not adding your own license to post here is that it gives the impression that other posts are not similarly licensed, and that authors here get to pick their license terms.  Neither of those are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T13:40:33.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-07T22:36:35.710" Score="8" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123255/question-about-an-integration-by-parts-in-feynmans-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold recently (and answered in the comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; question the decision but would appreciate further guidance about the particular reason so I can adjust future questions accordingly. Also I am not requesting the question be re-opened.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not homework (I cannot tell whether it is &quot;homework-like&quot;). It is a simple calculation-oriented question so maybe that qualifies. It is certainly about physics and requests a definite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments were helpful and the point seemed to be that I must come to grips with prerequisites before dealing with a topic that depends on them. Point taken. But that doesn't really apply to the question as much as it does to me. The question was well edited by Qmechanic (who actually went to the book and added the original equation numbers) and it seemed to me that a straightforward answer might be helpful to others who jumped into Feynman's book even if they did have the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parenthetically, I did not show my own work because I didn't think it would help anyone to do so. My hope was that by seeing the answer I could make some necessary inferences about the topic (variational calculus and Lagrangians) and proceed further. Of course Feynman gives many hints in his text to allow this to some extent anyway but an authoritative answer can lend one confidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also parenthetically, this doesn't mean I didn't do work before posting the question. I am not working in an academic setting so I don't have professors or fellow students to consult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any further guidance about the specific deficiencies of the question would be appreciated. The question was answered generously in the comments so it's more or less moot but I would like to have a clear sense of what is not acceptable so I can steer clear of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12214" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T15:52:27.413" Title="Request for further clarification on question on hold" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5945" CreationDate="2014-07-07T23:01:16.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with that question is that it really didn't have anything to do with Feynman's book or quantum mechanics (as indicated by Qmechanic's tag edits). And I agree that someone not being &quot;classically educated&quot; in physics cannot necessarily see this, but the question is really about variational calculus as it is applied everywhere in physics from the first introduction of the Lagrangian formulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the deficiency of the question is that it does not ask about the right thing - you ask for an explicit derivation because you do not know what deeper principle is behind it. Essentially, you ask &quot;How does variational calculus work in the Lagrangian formulation?&quot;, which is something most classical textbooks are happy to answer (and which every quantum mechanics textbook presupposes you know). Admittedly, if you had asked that thing, it would almost surely have been a duplicate or been also answered by &quot;Did you read any introduction to Lagrangian formalism?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question shows that you did not learn the prerequisites (as commonly understood by the physics community) for the given topic, and as such, it is off-topic. This does not invalidate your desire to learn about physics, it does only invalidate the &lt;em&gt;angle&lt;/em&gt; from which you tried it. Ask about things of which you are sure that they are not commonplace anywhere where you could have found it with decent effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T23:01:16.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5945" CreationDate="2014-07-07T23:32:05.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're one of the few people to handle a homework closing the right way (more or less). Kudos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is not homework (I cannot tell whether it is &quot;homework-like&quot;). It is a simple calculation-oriented question so maybe that qualifies. It is certainly about physics and requests a definite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homework-like bit comes from the fact that essentially you want us to work out some steps and show them to you. (&quot;I think if I saw it done once methodically it would clarify a lot.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can convert the question into something ansking for physical concepts, that would fix it. Something that asks the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123255/question-about-an-integration-by-parts-in-feynmans-quantum-mechanics#comment250499_123255&quot;&gt;this comment begins to answer&lt;/a&gt; would be good. (I'd give a sample of a conceptual question like that that you can adapt, but I've got to go and it's best if it comes from you since you know your own needs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The comments were helpful and the point seemed to be that I must come to grips with prerequisites before dealing with a topic that depends on them. Point taken. But that doesn't really apply to the question as much as it does to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to give a very extreme example, someone with no understanding of subtraction might ask a mathematical question on ... say .. special relativity. It is possible to give an answer to it (in this extreme case let's ignore the length of the answer). But that answer won't really be useful to anyone, people requiring conceptual help in special relativity. It's localized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's part of the reason why &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; knowledge is necessary to be known -- we should have to spend less time explaining prereqs, and the answer should be useful to others as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T23:32:05.277" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5949" CreationDate="2014-07-08T18:35:59.133" Score="3" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes find myself searching for policy on something so that I can point a poster to the policy, or refer to it myself for guidance.  Usually this is the homework policy, but sometimes it's something else such the policy on questions related to experimental physics.   But I seem to re-invent the wheel of finding the policy each time I need it, and for me the search does not go smoothly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of central location for policies?  Or can you provide advice on how to find these things quickly?  It always seems to take me many clicks and many pages to find what I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T21:07:26.860" Title="Quickly finding policy on Xxxxx" Tags="|support|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5948" CreationDate="2014-07-08T21:07:26.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the comments pointed out, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; tag on meta are the canonical sources. There's also a lot of site-agnostic information in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;faq tag on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, which is mostly just clarifications of the stuff in the help center, but I would still consider that to be part of our policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that you don't find in one of those sources, you can ask here on meta or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, although it's worth doing a quick search of meta to see if you can find any prior discussion about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T21:07:26.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2014-07-08T21:18:16.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also recall the question was poorly received - lots of &quot;no it can't be done&quot; comments. Pretty sure it was still in the negative when I wrote my first answer (which I knew was wrong - I just couldn't see where my mistake was.  @alemi helpfully pointed out the mistake, and from there on out our answers kept building off each other, and the votes kept coming. See the edit history.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance the link on Reddit probably helped significantly to make the question go viral, and the upvotes that it generated represent that &quot;the internet&quot; liked this question - more than &quot;the denizens of physics.SE&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have the tools or skills to get at the data, but I suspect that a large number of votes came from new-ish users. Maybe folks who were already regulars on other SE sites and who decided to join just to vote. It would be interesting to see if there was a &quot;membership enrollment blip&quot; in the days after the Reddit cross link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This episode treminded me of several things:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- there is cool physics all around us&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- sometimes you need a nudge to find it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- judge less, encourage more&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said - OP got three gold badges for his question. That qualifies as &quot;winning the lottery&quot; in my books. I had a good time answering it, so I'm not complaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T21:18:16.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5952" CreationDate="2014-07-11T09:31:52.633" Score="19" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moment ago, I wanted to ask a question on this SE about the amount of energy in human blood, but it warned me that I'm in risk of no longer being able to ask questions on this account due to a large amount of low-quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I've only asked 2 questions on here so far, I find this extremely weird. While it's true that both of my questions were problematic, I'm surprised that I'm already getting this warning, considering I also have an accepted answer with 2 upvotes, and have 2 upvotes on each of my 2 questions. It even says it right on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;question bans FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One or two bad posts will not cause you to be blocked from using the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering deleting both of these questions, not to try and circumvent this ban, but because of self-curation: if these questions are bad enough to warrant closing and don't have an answer, they're not really a good fit for this website. the problem is that the duplicate question already has an answer (which fits more as a comment, I think), which means that deleting it warns me that it ALSO counts against my questions ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why I'm getting these results. I find it disheartening to see that a mere 2 lower-quality questions can get me into this trouble, even though the FAQ explicitly mentions this shouldn't be the case. Should I start to get worried?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40357" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:45:14.170" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:45:14.170" Title="Why am I in risk of a questions ban after one duplicate and one closed question?" Tags="|support|questions|closed-questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2014-07-11T10:38:32.827" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deleting the questions will make it worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One or two bad posts will not cause you to be blocked from using the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely correct, you are not yet blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact algorithm is secret, but from what I see one more bad question won't affect you. The warning is more of a way to provide you with the links to improve your subsequent questions, the actual ban is rather far off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T10:38:32.827" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-11T23:21:39.550" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why this question is closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121205/how-does-spacetime-interval-emerge-from-strings-theory&quot;&gt;How does Spacetime interval emerge from Strings theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26665" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T15:52:05.020" Title="Why this question is closed?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5953" CreationDate="2014-07-12T01:32:49.450" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it says so right in the closing notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You gave neither a level of detail/math at which you would like the possible answer to be, nor did you indicate which parts of GR and string theory are you at all familiar with. A rigorous answer adressing someone without prior in-depth knowledge of both topic would possibly fill some pages (to state it mildly), while there might be many different and inconsistent non-rigorous handwaves people could give you. As it stand, the question reads basically: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Explain string theory to me and how it could produce GR results&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  People spend entire &lt;strong&gt;lecture series&lt;/strong&gt; on this, so it is definitely not a narrow enough question for our Q&amp;amp;A format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-07-12T01:32:49.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5957" CreationDate="2014-07-13T07:40:27.123" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the second time my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/126208/38674&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; is edited this week. I have no problem with peer reviewing as long as it improve the answer not denaturing it. So I re-edited twice the answer in order to keep desired and correct modifications bit I restored the original meaning of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Last edit contained wrong information!&lt;/strong&gt; Further it has been done by an user with no activity in Physics SE. How can I prevent other people to modify my answer with wrong knowledge? Why am I not able to validate (accept/deny) modifications. There are various tools to improve quality of answer (vote, flags). And other users may write their own answers or downvote mine if they do not agree with. Is there a way to lock this answer before it happens again? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T16:19:41.943" Title="What can we do when other users denature your answer by editing it?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5955" CreationDate="2014-07-13T09:15:30.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first edit seemed okay to me, actually. V is the invariant here, and V^2/R for small R will lead to high power -- that's what Jerry was trying to say. With I^2R it's not immediately obvious if the high I will overcome the low R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, if you feel an edit was mistaken, feel free to roll it back or engage the editor in the comments (pinging a user who has edited the post works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the second edit, that was a suggested edit from a low rep user and you should have gotten a notification asking for review. Others approved it, but you can still roll it back. I don't see much of an issue with it, though, I&gt;5A is indeed unusual for normal wires, and current usually is of the order of a few hundred mA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T09:15:30.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5955" CreationDate="2014-07-13T15:03:20.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A basic rule of Stack Exchange is that people can edit your work here. The edit history allows readers to sort out who is actually responsible for which words, but even so we are sensitive to the possible appearance that people are putting words in your mouth. That is part of why you should get notified every time your one of your posts is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have the power to re-edit or to roll-back changes you don't like. If an edit war begins to develop, don't engage with the other user, just flag the post using a custom flag reason and explain your point of view. A moderator will try to sort things out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the edits other users make to &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; posts are improvements in my mind as well as theirs. In most of the exceptions they things they worked on &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; was a deficiency, I just don't like how they tried to fix it and I re-fix it to my own satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is that ability to re-intervene if I don't like what they have done that lets me remain unperturbed by the ability of other users to edit my posts. I hope that it will do the same for you in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing specifically the matter of low rep users introducing edits: those edits are not applied until after a edit review proccess in which they are seen by no few than two users with un-reviewed editing privileges. In this case the first two user to review the edit approved it and it was applied. This took approximately 5 minutes in this case, though I have seen edits pending for hours in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Low rep users whose edits are routinely turned down can lose the privilege of suggesting edits and reviewer can lose that privilege as well if &lt;s&gt;(1) they fail enough review audits or (2) &lt;/s&gt;(seems review audits are not enabled on Physics SE right now) they come to the moderators attention for bad reviews too often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, again, the correct action if you think a edit that was made to one of your posts was improper is to flag the post so that a moderator (or several) will look at the situation. Even if we don't take action that time it can lead to our seeing a pattern and practice that might eventually lead to action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I think the low-rep editor was genuinely trying to help clarify some murky bits in you text and the reviewers agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning these particular edits, I have to say that reasoning like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Current is the reason why it is heating, voltage is the cause.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is suspect and often the cause of confusion. To truly understand any given case you have to look carefully at what is constant in the situation and what is subject to case-by-case variation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many supplies in the everyday world (batteries, line power, etc) are approximately fixed voltage supplies. In those case the current is a &lt;em&gt;consequence&lt;/em&gt; of the voltage and resistance. The form V^2/R give the best intuition for how the inputs (voltage and resistance across the short) affect the heat produced. Notice how you can read directly that lower resistance causes more power and that higher supply voltage causes the power to grow quadratically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the usual form IV is correct, but you lose the intuition about the actual situation on the ground by suggesting that the current is something you have control of directly rather than being something you have to adjust by effectively turning another dial. In other words this is to some degree a choice made to help engineer things, rather than a fundamental choice, but there is widespread expert agreement on the matter. Jerry's edit improved your post, and you hurt it's quality by putting it back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There do exist good approximations to fixed-current supplies and in those cases the form I^2 R give the best intuition. These mostly show up in electronics and I'm weak enough in the subject to not try to provide an example off the cuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-07-14T16:19:41.943" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T16:19:41.943" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-14T23:51:02.920" Score="25" ViewCount="1776" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, meta posts about &quot;homework&quot; keep on coming, but we still don't seem to have a solution that sticks, so I'll give it another shot. For what it's worth I think the current system isn't so bad that we need to go back to the drawing board, but that there's also room for improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to use this question as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post answers containing a short, self-contained statement on the topic of the homework policy.&lt;/strong&gt; Keep these as close to one line as possible. I'll put up a couple of my own to show the format I have in mind and get the ball rolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote according to whether you agree or disagree with the statement.&lt;/strong&gt; This is of course the normal voting process for meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is that this can break up the question of homework policy into bite-sized chunks. Some items we will have good agreement on - these can be either implemented in the case of positive agreement, or discarded in the case of negative agreement. Other items will be debated - these can go to other meta-questions for further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T16:56:21.020" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T02:07:01.703" Title="Bite-sizing homework" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-14T23:51:02.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;please check my work&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;OFF topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="11053" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T16:24:20.057" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T16:24:20.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-14T23:52:23.883" Score="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;please solve this exercise&quot; or &quot;please plug these numbers into an equation for me&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;OFF topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="11053" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T16:24:08.213" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T16:24:08.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-14T23:53:40.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;here a problem and my solution with my reasoning for each step, where has my reasoning gone wrong?&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;ON topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="11053" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T16:24:51.577" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T16:24:51.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-14T23:54:59.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The close reason as stated does not emphasize that we do not answer &quot;check my work&quot; questions enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T23:54:59.240" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-15T02:55:26.877" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;I was working on X and didn't understand why Y isn't the case&quot; or similar are &lt;strong&gt;ON topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="11053" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T16:24:33.630" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T16:24:33.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-15T17:04:04.567" Score="-5" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases, a homework has a much shorter time limit. If it is longer, it needs also a lot of work, which won't be done here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, if a such question could be answered with a such delay, it were practically impossible to mis-use the site for cheating, and thus eliminated the main reason behind the actually harsh homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T17:31:46.340" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T17:31:46.340" Title="Proposal: putting homework questions on hold - but only for a week" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5964" CreationDate="2014-07-15T17:30:28.060" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I gather, whether students use Physics.SE to cheat or not has never been our primary concern when considering the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason behind the &quot;harsh&quot; homework policy is that the SE is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a forum where nice people come around and solve your problems for you. It is intended to be a community of more or less knowledgeable physicists answering each other's questions &lt;em&gt;so that other people asking themselves the same thing may learn from it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not primarily about helping the OP, though a heartfelt thank you can make the day of an answerer. We are about answering questions in a way that might be useful to other physicists or interested laypersons as well, and solving problem No. 34.23(iii) from some book is not going to do that. That's also the reason for the &quot;harsh&quot; requirement that an allowed homework question should ask about a &lt;strong&gt;conceptual&lt;/strong&gt; problem, not the solution as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T17:30:28.060" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5967" CreationDate="2014-07-15T18:04:33.233" Score="8" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed several posts (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/126471/can-an-object-reverse-its-direction-of-acceleration-even-though-it-continues-to&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;) lately that are extremely simple questions. In this question, the OP asked for an explanation as well as some examples. At the time of this writing, the accepted answer only has 21 votes while a comment on the question has 31. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer provides both an explanation and an illustrated example while the comment only provides an example (granted a good one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, when should simple questions be given answers like this in the comments? My understanding is that answers should never be given in the comments but here is a fairly popular question (near 2k views) where a commenter was more rewarded than an answer. Any clarification would be great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52768" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T15:07:35.783" Title="Give an answer or Comment instead?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5966" CreationDate="2014-07-15T20:03:40.377" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when should simple questions be given answers like this in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEVER&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For at least two reasons: comments can be (and often are) deleted, and comments can't be downvoted, so our ability to deal with wrong information in comments is limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is not something we moderators enforce too aggressively, because if someone posts a good answer as a comment, they miss out on all the reputation they could get from upvotes on that answer. So, in the short term at least, they're mostly &quot;hurting&quot; themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see that someone else has posted something in a comment which should be an answer, the polite thing to do is post a comment in reply saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@[user] that should probably be an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or similar. But you're not obligated to do so, and in fact you are &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; to take their comment and post it as your own answer, in which case you get the reputation. Just make sure to attribute it (e.g. &quot;As [user] said in a comment,&quot;) and use a quote block if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I'm not actually so sure the comment should have been an answer. It offered an example where the question really wanted an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T20:03:40.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-15T20:20:04.407" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;Please explicitly derive this equation/law for me&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;OFF topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T20:20:04.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-15T20:23:05.530" Score="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;Please explain what this aspect of a solution/derivation means or why it makes sense&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;ON topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T20:23:05.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5966" CreationDate="2014-07-15T20:51:44.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most people will tell you that you should never leave an answer as a comment. What they mean is if you know the answer, don't simply leave it as a comment. That I can agree with. However, what often happens (and something I am certainly guilty of) is that users aren't entirely sure of the correct answer or if the answer they think is complete. Additionally, someone may know the answer but not have references or further information to back it up and explain it. In these cases, users might leave a comment containing the gist of what they think the answer is in the hopes that it will help someone who either knows more, has more time, or has the additional insight needed to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, one user's comment can start a comments discussion where the correct answer is eventually arrived at and agreed upon. In these cases, it usually starts as someone posting a comment answer or the like without having all the insight into the problem they feel is necessary to form an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if you know the answer, write an answer. If you partially know an answer (but not sure or informed enough to have faith in it as a posted answer) or think you know something that someone else could build off of or could help another answerer, then write a comment. That way you can be corrected without penalty if you're wrong or you could help to make a future answer better if you're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T20:51:44.157" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-15T23:10:49.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here at Physics.SE, we prefer questions that are &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;. Questions about homework that indicate the asker finds the question uninteresting (&quot;please solve this problem, I have no idea how&quot;; &quot;please check my work, I have no idea whether it's right&quot;) will probably be closed. Questions which demonstrate why the asker finds the question interesting (&quot;I tried X, expecting to find Y, but instead found Z and am stuck&quot;) are more likely to arouse the interest of the community and get good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T23:10:49.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5966" CreationDate="2014-07-16T07:10:28.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;With elementary questions it's sometimes hard to know whether to answer the question or whether to vote to close it on the grounds that 30 seconds Googling will find the answer. In such cases I find myself between two stools. I don't want to criticise because I don't want to discourage a beginner who may be genuinely interested. However an answer would appear to encourage/reward a question that I think really shouldn't have been asked in the first place. In those circumstances I tend to provide a brief answer in a comment as a compromise - there is an extent to which answering in a comment is a thinly veiled criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you cite will seem blindingly obvious to any working physicist, and I suspect that by answering in a comment ACuriousMind is expressing some degree of contempt for a question that really shouldn't have been asked. I don't mean this as a criticism of ACuriousMind because I very nearly did the same, and indeed 34 (at the time of writing this) other site members agree with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end I decided to answer, and the answer turned out to be vastly more popular than I expected and indeed vastly more popular than my answer merits. Oh well, the 26 upvotes are especially welcome since I discovered you could exchange SE points for Air Miles :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T07:10:28.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5864" CreationDate="2014-07-17T07:03:03.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last comment by the author says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm asking if it is correct to say that black holes exists from our point of reference, because from our point of reference nothing is inside them. Nothing is inside them, as I understand it, because nothing ever goes through the event horizon from our point of reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this makes it very clear that this is just another recurrence of the many, many &quot;infinite time to reach the event horizon&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T07:03:03.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2014-07-17T10:33:34.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read the other answers here, and the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two authors (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5950/45649&quot;&gt;Floris&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5942/45649&quot;&gt;Alemi&lt;/a&gt;) of the (excellent) highly voted answers to the original Coin Question have replied here, and I think that they have useful insights. It's interesting that their answers on this meta question are the lowest rated at the time of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Horses for courses&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suspicion is that one person's good question is not another's good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some, a nicely clear unambiguous question is a good one. Ideally one showing the asker's research and a statement of why they couldn't proceed, or their uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a professional software engineer, primarily using Stack Overflow rather than Phy.S.E., these are certainly the kinds of questions that I like to answer and hope to ask. Stack Overflow's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt; covers this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regular users are likely to prefer this kind of question. Those working in the field, and the enthusiasts with an interest in Physics that hang about here and get in the way, like me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for others, a simple interesting question with excellent answers that teaches them something, is a good question. Answers that encourage them to feel science is something that they can do, participate in, use, and understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5950/45649&quot;&gt;Floris's answer&lt;/a&gt; mentions a link on Reddit, and I would think this is the kind of question that would appeal to someone happening on the site from a link and having a kind of &amp;quot;popular science&amp;quot; interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that a well written question, in a case like this, might not be as successful as the quick carelessly written one. As a populist pedagogic tool, it might be less likely to pull the masses in, because an outsider, reading a well written question, won't feel that is something that they, personally, would ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Is it a problem?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think that the first kind of question is the better kind, but I think the second kind has its place and use, as it helps provide a fascination with science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others may feel differently if they would rather keep Phy.S.E. as a fairly highbrow tool for learning and answering professional queries – I'm not judging that as a bad thing: having relatively uninformed people about can be annoying, particularly if they reduce the signal to noise ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something to worry about? There I'm not sure. Voting is useful because it provide a mechanism to resolve disputes like this where people have different needs and desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the experienced physicist and teachers here might have a good sense of when a &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; question can be a good tool, and so, in a way, becomes a good question. You probably also need a sense of whether it will have popular appeal, which is hard to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I would say that if you want Phy.S.E to be a place that reaches out to the popular science crowd and gives them an insight to what it is to experiment  and use science, then support what &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5942/45649&quot;&gt;Alemi&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5950/45649&quot;&gt;Floris&lt;/a&gt; say. Edit questions to improve grammar, spelling and general readability. Go easy on questions that haven't put in the ground work but sound interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T10:33:34.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-17T13:40:22.283" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;I want to solve this problem but do not know how. What relevant physics do I need to research/learn to solve it?&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;ON topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T13:40:22.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-17T22:57:28.117" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which can be summarized as &quot;This is the statement of an example problem. (Perhaps the &lt;i&gt;&quot;simplest&quot;&lt;/i&gt; and/or the &lt;i&gt;&quot;most interesting&quot;&lt;/i&gt; case I have been able to think of at the moment.) Rather than solving it (which I may or may not be able to do myself) I'd like you to point out some useful &lt;i&gt;&quot;standard&quot;, &quot;technical&quot;&lt;/i&gt;  terminology, including some name for the general class of problems to which my specific example case belongs, such that I can educate myself further.&quot; are &lt;b&gt; ON topic &lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12262" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T22:57:28.117" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-18T02:04:40.470" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;ask about a specific physics concept&quot; is ambiguous in meaning, and is not being correctly understood by the majority of homework posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T02:04:40.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5958" CreationDate="2014-07-18T02:07:01.703" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current policy is summarised as &quot;&lt;em&gt;we do accept homework questions, but only if X, Y, Z&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. It would be better to move to a policy that says &quot;&lt;em&gt;we do not accept homework questions. However, if you do X, Y and Z it will not be a homework question any more and we can accept it.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T02:07:01.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5981" CreationDate="2014-07-18T22:33:29.570" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I asked a question. I recieved an answer but didn't like it entirely. I offered a bounty. The days went and I recieved no answer. One day I happened to go to the question and the previous answer had been substantially improved and I hadn't been notified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that  notifying askers when an answer has been modified might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this has the downside that every little edit ( gramatical mistakes for example) might be annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, this could be easily solved giving to the one who makes the edit the possibility to decide whether or not it is worthy notifying the edit to the asker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27384" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T04:19:01.013" Title="Should we be notified when an edit has been made to an answer we have recieved?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5980" CreationDate="2014-07-18T23:18:09.840" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative way to accomplish this is to simply &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/53585/how-do-favorite-questions-work&quot;&gt;mark your questions as Favorites&lt;/a&gt;. In that way, they will come up on the Favorites &gt; activity tab on your profile when they are edited. The people who want this information can then access it, and everyone else is left &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; a bunch of annoying notifications, and particularly so the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/44871/top-question-askers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;people with many tens of questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T23:18:09.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-07-20T14:55:22.290" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LyjNt.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciRate&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T14:55:22.290" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-07-20T14:55:22.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5980" CreationDate="2014-07-21T04:19:01.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would certainly be helpful if the one who gives an answer has the ability to make the edit significant enough to be notified the asker. Informing about the edits to the answer cannot be dropped of course, because it can lead to loads of misinformation. A simple typo of leaving out 'not' can significantly change the meaning of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5787" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T04:19:01.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-22T21:50:30.537" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;What will happen with my SE account after my death? Is there something that eg. warn foture users not to try contact with me, because I'm dead? Would my account be deleted for preserving servers memory? Could my family make something memorial with this account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other meta problems are generated by death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46147" LastActivityDate="2014-07-22T21:50:30.537" Title="What happens after death?" Tags="|support|feature-request|policy|user-accounts|community-user|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5966" CreationDate="2014-07-23T15:07:35.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, one should never answer a question in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A counterexample: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123685/effect-of-small-variable-transverse-force-on-satellite-orbital-precession#comment258543_123685&quot;&gt;My comment&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123685/effect-of-small-variable-transverse-force-on-satellite-orbital-precession&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the answer is lurking somewhere in the Gauss planetary equations, Lagrange planetary equations, Delauney planetary equations, or Hill planetary equations. But where, and in which ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that teasing out an answer from those planetary equations can be a nightmarish time drain. I just don't want to take the time to do it for this specific question. Maybe my comment pushed the questioner in the right direction. At the very least, my comment gave him terms to search for with his preferred search engine. On the other hand, maybe my comment didn't do a thing. It certainly was not an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T15:07:35.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-24T06:57:40.410" Score="9" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently David Z &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/16754771#16754771&quot;&gt;said in chat&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's good to keep in mind that people are less likely to read a longer answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering: How true is it that length can work against you in an answer? While we can't directly measure the number of users who do read individual answers, surely there is some &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data&lt;/a&gt; we can dig up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll post my own findings. Everyone else should feel free to contradict me with better statistics (not a hard thing to do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T06:57:40.410" Title="Are question and answer scores correlated with post length?" Tags="|discussion|voting|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5986" CreationDate="2014-07-24T06:57:40.410" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Raw Scores&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, here are some queries asking how questions and answers score as a function of their lengths (in raw input characters, no sophisticated parsing here), with the associated graphs replicated here for convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/210041/question-score-as-a-function-of-length&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Question score as a function of length&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SEI9v.png&quot; alt=&quot;question score as a function of length&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/210042/answer-score-as-a-function-of-length&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answer score as a function of length&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ifWXF.png&quot; alt=&quot;answer score as a function of length&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases the mean score in each bin is shown together with +1-sigma and -1-sigma scores. There might be a slight upward trend for answers, but there is not really any trend to speak of for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Normalized Scores&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perhaps&lt;/em&gt; a better measure is (score) / (page views). At least this way we are closer to answering the question &quot;of those who looked at this question/answer, what fraction thought it was good?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/210043/question-score-as-a-function-of-length-normalized-by-views&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Question score as a function of length, normalized by views&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2w609.png&quot; alt=&quot;question score as a function of length, normalized by views&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/210046/answer-score-as-a-function-of-length-normalized-by-views&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answer score as a function of length, normalized by views&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PjbwA.png&quot; alt=&quot;answer score as a function of length, normalized by views&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voters don't seem to care much about a post's length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Accepted vs. Not Accepted Answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could there be a difference in voting patterns as a function of post length between these two populations of answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/210058/answer-score-as-a-function-of-length-and-acceptance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answer score as a function of length and acceptance&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GYc5v.png&quot; alt=&quot;answer score as a function of length and acceptance&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a busy plot, but I don't see a trend in either population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, at least in this rough analysis, it seems post length really doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;when it comes to votes&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, some of my answers I'm most proud of are rather long expositions on rich topics, so I'm not saying we should all write one-sentence answers to maximize votes per unit effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I leave this last graph that has nothing to do with post length. It's not really surprising; it shows that answer score is correlated with (the absolute value of) question score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/210069/answer-score-as-a-function-of-question-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answer score as a function of question score&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FPkw3.png&quot; alt=&quot;answer score as a function of question score&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T06:57:40.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-26T18:27:51.663" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before marking as duplicate, please read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've set up a chat room, and I cannot find the link/button or whatever to invite a specific user to join.  A search of meta, and the help system suggests this is possible.  Instructions say variously, &quot;from the chat room itself&quot;, or &quot;from the info link&quot;.  I cannot find the buttons to push.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please be explicit about what the procedure is, and where on the screen the links/buttons/whatever are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FWIW [not much] this is yet another instance of me not being able to easily find instructions on using SE features.  I don't know what to do about that...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T17:43:46.370" Title="Invite a user to chat" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-26T21:29:26.260" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just wonder if a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoscopic_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mesoscopic physics&lt;/a&gt; should be welcome? I guess so :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoy up/down-voting for this forgotten topic :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples found those days: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/128054/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/128054/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/127972/&quot;&gt;Regimes of Josephson junction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and all the questions about Josephson junctions actually are questions about mesoscopic. I nevertheless think a tag &quot;Josephson&quot; would be too restrictive. Also, questions about superconducting qubits, nano-devices in general, transport problems in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/topological-insulators&quot;&gt;topological insulator&lt;/a&gt; and so on, ... are all eligible as &quot;mesoscopic&quot; I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T21:54:06.803" Title="Tag for mesoscopic physics?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5991" CreationDate="2014-07-27T09:29:41.910" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;i did'nt asked any homework question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead i asked the validity of a given formula &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/128207/how-to-derive-this-formula&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51979" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T12:38:04.743" Title="why was my question closed ? i did'nt asked any homework question" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5990" CreationDate="2014-07-27T12:38:04.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adapted from my comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/16660&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; of the links in the homework close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you&#xA;  understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than&#xA;  getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely your question asks exactly that: how do I solve/prove this? So we've established that it falls under the homework-category, right? Now how do you get the question reopened? By showing what you have done to try and get the answer: links to websites you've visited (with some explanation of what's on there) and of course your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T12:38:04.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-28T07:20:29.133" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;in this question I asked a specific concept and I have shown all my works and efforts behind it even though it was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to know where am I going wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/128223/getting-two-different-answers-for-the-same-question&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and more over i think that i am just asking a mathematical concept that which step would the particle hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so according to this post on meta.physics.stackexchange.com &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask about the specific concept that gives you trouble&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We expect you to narrow down the problem to the particular concept&#xA;  that's giving you trouble and ask about that specifically. That&#xA;  produces a question that is more relevant to others who might be&#xA;  having the same problem, as well as probably more interesting to&#xA;  answer. As a side effect it shows that you're not just being lazy and&#xA;  trying to get us to do your work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best way to produce a focused, specific question is to show your&#xA;  work. Explain what you've been able to figure out so far and how you&#xA;  did it. Showing your work will help us gauge where you are having&#xA;  problems: if it is a technical thing near the end, a short to the&#xA;  point answer will suffice; if it is some fundamental problem with&#xA;  understanding the subject, somebody will then write a longer, more&#xA;  detailed response. It will also prevent people from spending a lot of&#xA;  time going over ground that you have already covered or understand&#xA;  well already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51979" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T15:29:55.993" Title="why was this question marked as off-topic even though i find nothing wrong in it" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5992" CreationDate="2014-07-28T12:55:29.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll pour the comment I made below &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5991/16660&quot;&gt;my answer to your other question&lt;/a&gt; into an answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think despite the effort you've shown in the question at hand, the two main reasons for closing it were probably&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that you don't seem to have studied any classical mechanics and should probably do that first instead of asking here (for your own benefit). In a way, that's also what we mean by &quot;effort&quot;. You should realize that to solve classical mechanics problems, one obviously needs to study a bit of classical mechanics first. It doesn't appear to me that you have done so. That's fine, but then you should understand that you might not (yet!!) have all the skills and insights needed. I don't know what books to recommend because I disliked the one book that I ever bought on classical physics but perhaps others can suggest a few.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the question doesn't really ask about a physical concept. You state you want the concept you're missing, but then I'm afraid the answer is simply &quot;classical mechanics&quot;. Not that you would need the entire subject to solve those questions, but if you had studied &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; classical mechanics you would immediately know what type of question you were dealing with and how to go about solving it. I mean, I'm not saying this to discourage you, because we all started out not knowing it, but I really suggest getting a good book or other resource on classical mechanics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do feel this question is better than your other one that got closed recently in that it shows your effort. It's just that your effort displays a lack of knowledge about classical mechanics or even just particle trajectories, which would mean that an answer would be either a full course on this subject (which no-one will and should do, there are plenty of books and other resources) or very specific, only getting you to the solution of this particular question (which would mean you're likely to return soon with a similar question because you haven't understood the actual physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16660" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T12:55:29.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5992" CreationDate="2014-07-28T13:53:11.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's wrong with your post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to homework questions, there is a lot of discussion here on the Meta site. A more recent attempt to tackle the homework issue is a discussion titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bite-sizing homework&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Among the dozen answers in that post are the following two answers with votes in parenthesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &amp;quot;please check my work&amp;quot; are &lt;strong&gt;OFF topic&lt;/strong&gt;. (+19/-7) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/25301&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &amp;quot;here a problem and my solution with my reasoning for each step, where has my reasoning gone wrong?&amp;quot; are &lt;strong&gt;ON topic&lt;/strong&gt;. (+9/-7) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5961/25301&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that your question follows the first of the two which seems to be decidedly off-topic (net score of +12). You could argue that it is the latter of the two, in which case it is split among voters (net score of +2), but if enough people with 3,000+ rep see it the latter way and think it is off-topic, it can be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not actually see any specific physics concept in your question, you want to know if your answer is correct: does the ball hit the 5th step. This is, in my opinion, clearly following the first of the two above quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;More on Homework&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; states in point #2 under the heading &lt;em&gt;How should I ask a homework question on this website?&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. &lt;strong&gt;If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher.&lt;/strong&gt; As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on. Of course, it's still good to include the text of your problem, just in case (more on that a few paragraphs down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What you can do to fix it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make the question &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;, you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to tune it to the following spec (also taken from the afore-mentioned Bite-sizing homework post):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &amp;quot;Please explain what this aspect of a solution/derivation means or why it makes sense&amp;quot; are &lt;strong&gt;ON topic&lt;/strong&gt;. (+23/-1) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5969/25301&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This will take some serious effort from you to make it decidedly on-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; It may also be the case that you figure out your answer while trying to re-write the question. If that is the case, I still recommend completing the re-write so that your question can be re-opened &amp;amp; answered to be useful for future visitors with a similar struggle in the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T13:53:11.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-28T14:37:42.850" Score="9" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every so often, an answer like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/36263/23473&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; shows up in the low-quality review queue (that one showed up today for me). When it does, we are presented with the familiar choices: &quot;Looks OK&quot;, &quot;Edit&quot;, &quot;Recommend Deletion&quot;, and &quot;Skip&quot;. Now as per a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5675/23473&quot;&gt;previous meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;, questions like this shouldn't be deleted since they don't meet that criteria. The post itself is an attempt at an answer, but in general, it can be unclear, wrong, too short, or horribly written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, I can downvote it and maybe leave a comment if I'm able, but that doesn't remove it from my review queue. I refuse to hit &quot;Looks OK&quot; because let's face it, there are posts like this that simply do not look OK. If I knew what the poster was trying to say, I'd consider editing it, but sometimes you know they are &quot;answering&quot; the question but you're just not sure what they're trying to say or you know it's completely wrong. So no hitting &quot;Edit&quot;. We already vetoed &quot;Recommend Deletion&quot;. So all I have left is &quot;Skip&quot;. I can always hit the &quot;Skip&quot; button, let someone else worry about it. But there are times when a post is really bad and you want to do something about it, not just pass it off to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd like to open up the floor to discussion. What does everyone else do when faced with a truly low-quality post that can't be edited or deleted? And feel free to suggest new features for the low-quality review stack too; those are always fun to consider. Just remember that if you do and people start to think it's a good idea, Shog9 will quickly come here to tell us all exactly why the current low-quality review setup is the smartest and most effective design we could have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an addendum after having read a couple of answers to this, everyone go to an answer you know of with zero or less up-votes and hit the flag button. Notice it has the &quot;very low quality&quot; flag option that says &quot;This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now supposedly, one could flag an answer with that and (if I'm not mistaken) that sends it to the LQ review queue. That's one of the reasons why if I see a post that is technically an answer but I can't see a way of saving it through edits, I hesitate to hit the &quot;Looks OK&quot; option. An answer might fulfill the requirements of using that flag option but then also be marked as &quot;OK&quot; by the queue reviewers. 20 goto 10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T15:24:51.633" Title="What to do with Low Quality posts that you just can't delete" Tags="|discussion|review-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5995" CreationDate="2014-07-28T15:00:16.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel your pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, formally, &quot;Looks OK&quot; is the only way to go. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an attempt to answer the question. Perhaps it's horrible, not useful, confused or whatever else, but it is a valid, if ugly, contribution. The best course of action is: &lt;strong&gt;Downvote it into oblivion.&lt;/strong&gt; (then hit &quot;Looks OK&quot;, feeling slightly guilty)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A button expressing something like &quot;Not OK, but not suited for deletion either&quot; would not convey useful information, in my opinion. Either it should be deleted, or it is fit to remain on the site. Attempts to answer are not fit for deletion as per the meta post you linked, so they are OK in the sense of the review queue. Sometimes we have to supress our aesthetical opinions and suffer the cognitive dissonance of hitting &quot;Looks OK&quot; that we personally would never really &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T15:00:16.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5995" CreationDate="2014-07-28T15:06:50.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My checklist that I try following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I understand the original question?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No? Select &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes? Downvote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments exist already?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No? &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I guide the poster to a more-correct answer?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes? Do so, then select &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No? Select &lt;em&gt;Skip&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes? &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the comment explain the error?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes? Select &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No? Explain why it's wrong, select &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt; button &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266428/low-quality-review-queue-meaning-of-looks-ok&quot;&gt;the appropriate response&lt;/a&gt; for incorrect answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:31.813" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T15:18:10.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5806" CreationDate="2014-07-28T20:41:38.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure exactly what you're asking for, but this is indeed available on a site-wide scale. This is done via the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Dump.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a collection of all the questions and answers in each Stack Exchange site, which is updated on every ~3 months if I remember correctly. This is publicly available to download, and its use is governed by the same &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; license that governs Stack Exchange user contributions. For more information see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/&quot;&gt;this SE blog post&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on the migration to the Internet Archive, and of course &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schema-documentation-for-the-public-data-dump-and-sede&quot;&gt;the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm at this, I should note that this database can be accessed directly by anyone with SQL skills at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49424/stack-exchange-data-explorer&quot;&gt;description in the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;), which is a goldmine for site usage statistics among other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'm not sure exactly what the OP is asking for, but this is mostly a reply to the question title, meant for people that are looking for exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T20:41:38.837" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6005" CreationDate="2014-07-29T17:18:29.387" Score="19" ViewCount="930" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4598/questions-that-show-insufficient-effort-by-the-op&quot;&gt;John Rennie asked&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...in many cases it looks as if the OP simply can't be bothered to put any effort in. Do we have a policy for closing (or not closing) such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Meta question has received not a downvote (12/0 at time of writing). The answer by Ben Crowell says (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The help section &quot;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&quot; does not say anything about insufficient research effort. &lt;strong&gt;This suggests to me that ofeeshul policy is to downvote these, not close.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer also received no downvotes (7/0 currently), suggesting the community agrees that this correct: insufficient effort questions should be &lt;em&gt;downvoted&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, several 3k+ users have voted to close questions due to &quot;insufficient effort.&quot; This leads to the question at hand: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we change current policy on insufficient effort questions&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T18:46:01.967" Title="Closing &quot;Insufficient Effort&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-07-29T17:29:12.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless the question falls into one of the existing close reasons by virtue of being poorly researched - unclear what you're asking comes to mind - I think a downvote + comment explanation is better. To me the guidance when you start a custom close reason &quot;This question appears to be off-topic because it is about...&quot; draws a reasonable line - if I have to backspace to write &quot;This question does not demonstrate sufficient research effort.&quot; I'm kind of getting away from the idea of it being &quot;off-topic&quot;. If I was trying to be witty I might call this an off-topic-off-topic close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T17:29:12.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-07-29T17:39:37.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, at first I was pro-VTC based on insufficient effort. However, then I remembered something Shog9 wrote in a different meta post (and for the life of me I can't seem to recall what the post was about to find it). And I know, if I and/or many others were to be for this as a VTC reason, he would come back saying the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of it I got from it was this: Where does it end? What is insufficient research? Sure, there may be some questions that are blatantly not enough research that everyone can agree with, but it's too slippery a slope to actually make it a VTC reason. Once we start judging some questions as insufficient research, some users will inevitably start using that reason as a bludgeon to suppress questions they don't like. And how do we determine where the cutoff is? How is it fair for anyone to decide that a certain level represents the cutoff of too little prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point is, though, it just comes down to the fact that there is too much room for this to be abused as a VTC reason. And even though we all hate to see some new user asking a question that hasn't been researched, it is also too unwelcoming to new and uninformed users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you can disagree with me all you want, but I guarantee that if this ever starts gaining ground, we'll have a mod from SO like Shog9 come and tell us the same thing. This is too subjective to be properly, fairly, and safely implemented&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T17:39:37.557" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-07-30T07:13:38.377" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between downvoting and closing is that it's impossible to reply to a closed question. If I downvote a question I'm saying I don't like it, but if others want to reply to it that's fine. If I vote to close I'm saying &lt;em&gt;this question shouldn't be here and no-one should reply to it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We VTC homework questions because if we didn't people would keep getting replies to them and they would carry on asking homework questions. So voting to close rather than just downvoting is an important part of deterring homework questions. I think this principle is generally accepted, though where we draw the line continues to be a matter for debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to questions that (I think) show insufficient effort, the principle is whether we should reward these by answering them or not. I very much doubt that the OP posted the question as a malicious attempt to waste our time, and closing the question may seem an unnecessarily harsh criticism. But if we answer questions that have not been properly thought through then we encourage the asking of those questions and we will get more of them. That's why I sometimes vote to close if I think the OP has dashed out the question without thinking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site works well because we have a population of skilled physicists who are willing to spend time and effort answering questions. I think it's fair to require that OP's invest a similar amount of time and effort in asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T07:13:38.377" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6007" CreationDate="2014-07-30T07:54:23.153" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;This concerns the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;create new tags privilege&lt;/a&gt; that comes with 1K reputation. In particular, an excerpt from the link reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on some sites, new tags will be automatically culled and removed from the system if they are not used by at least 1 other question in a 6 month period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear here is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) If I create a new tag, and use it for the question that I want to use it for, and be done with it. Neither I, nor anyone else uses it for 6 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) I use it twice in my (original) questions, but no one else uses it for 6 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C) I use it once in a original question, then start to look for the other places where it can be used, and re-tag existing questions (which existed with some tags even before I created this new tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, the tag would be culled in case A). But what about cases B and C?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In particular, is case C) a legitimate way of bending around the rules?&lt;/strong&gt; I mean, will I invite anyone's wrath if I do it, or is it considered inappropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T10:31:30.867" Title="''Automatic culling'' of tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6006" CreationDate="2014-07-30T10:31:30.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is okay to use your new tag on older questions, as long as you do not flood the main page in your retagging or apply the tag wrongly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be worthwhile to ask in chat if the tag follows the tag rules before doing this though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T10:31:30.867" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-30T09:12:14.347" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am teaching and doing research work in Solid State Electronic Devices and Materials, which is a subset of Materials Science &amp;amp; Engineering - a branch of Applied Physics. I want to know if this falls within the domain of Physics Stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56345" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T13:13:06.983" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T03:09:43.480" Title="Any help available for Solid State Electronic Devices and Materials?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6008" CreationDate="2014-07-30T09:17:04.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes of course, Condensed Matter Physics in general is one of the largest single subfields of Physics. I am guessing then you would start with an introductory course in Solid State Physics. So feel free to bring up your questions here in physics stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55751" OwnerDisplayName="Phonon" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T09:17:04.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6012" CreationDate="2014-07-30T13:28:08.740" Score="13" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a strong aversion to having edits applied to my work without my approval. Because of that, I don't do that to what others have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should be done with obviously wrong answers? I really don't want to edit them; that goes very much against my personal principles. I don't mind fixing an obvious typo or poor choice of wording. But fundamentally changing what a person wrote? That is just wrong to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why I don't like unapproved revisions:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Long ago I had a very bad experience at work in that regard. Our team had spent over a year doing an analysis for NASA. We wrote that work up in a multi-volume white paper that used extravehicular activities (EVAs) as a central, organizing theme. Corporate HQ decided our white paper needed external review because the distribution list had some very high level people on it. Their editor didn't think that &quot;extravehicular&quot; was a word and changed every occurrence of &quot;extravehicular activity&quot; to &quot;activity with extra vehicles&quot; (and then he changed the acronym to AEV). He then sent the &quot;corrected&quot; paper straight to the printer because &quot;except for a few minor grammatical errors, the paper was very good.&quot; He turned our report into a joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T20:00:39.320" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T20:00:39.320" Title="Correcting incorrect answers" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6010" CreationDate="2014-07-30T13:49:28.903" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Low-reputation users whose edits go into the approval queue see an edit page with  a box of advice like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to Edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;► fix grammatical or spelling errors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;► clarify meaning without changing it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;► correct minor mistakes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;► add related resources or links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;► always respect the original author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that these instructions are consistent with your instincts about editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right response to a wrong answer, as I understand it, is to downvote, comment, and/or post a correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T13:49:28.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6010" CreationDate="2014-07-30T13:58:23.367" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that edits of another user's post should be reserved for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;typographical errors (e.g., grammar, LaTeX formatting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adding/modifying relevant links (e.g., updating broken links)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word choices (e.g., using &lt;em&gt;liquids&lt;/em&gt; as a generalized replacement for &lt;em&gt;fluids&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These edits are minor, changing the superficial appearance while leaving alone the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits that turn an incorrect answer into a correct one is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;drastic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; change and should not be done by anyone. Leaving a comment about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the answer is incorrect and downvoting are the correct response to seeing bad answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T13:58:23.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6008" CreationDate="2014-07-31T03:09:43.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes! Solid state physics is physics, and is therefore on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are more conditions on whether or not an individual question fits the site besides just the general field of study. In particular, note that what we call &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;engineering questions&lt;/a&gt; are off topic, so something like &quot;What's the most cost efficient material to use in this application?&quot; is probably off topic. &quot;How do I fabricate this device?&quot; is a gray area - it might be on topic, it might not, and it probably warrants more discussion if it comes up. I mention this not to be intimidating, but just because solid state electronics are studied both from a pure science standpoint and an engineering one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for such a large field, solid state/condensed matter/materials science is IMO quite underrepresented on the site at the moment. Don't be discouraged if at first it seems like the community consists entirely of particle physicists and general relativists. Hopefully we can attract a larger user base with some good questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T03:09:43.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6015" CreationDate="2014-08-05T07:52:31.870" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just today, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/129494/26969&quot;&gt;answered an interesting question about the intensity of sunrise in Australia vs Asia&lt;/a&gt;. When my accepted answer hit the 10 upvotes, I received (&quot;instantly&quot;, or so it seemed) the &quot;nice answer&quot; badge. But since it was an accepted answer, I would have thought I hit the conditions for the &quot;Enlightened&quot; badge at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why would I be awarded one badge, and not the other? What algorithm / mechanism would cause the delay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I am not coming across as whining - I'm sure it will show up eventually - but I was curious about the inner workings of the SE machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T11:54:45.780" Title="Delay in awarding two badges for same event" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6014" CreationDate="2014-08-05T11:54:45.780" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badges are awarded by a periodic script, since it's too much load to check for them on every action. Badges that require heavier queries to calculate are run less often (some of them have a period of one day). Also, badges with the same period may or may not run in sync (in the same phase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you get such delays. Don't worry about it unles s&gt;24 hours have passed without you getting the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T11:54:45.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-06T12:18:38.547" Score="-6" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a newcomer, I'd like to give you my contribution to improve this wonderful site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;em&gt;homework help&lt;/em&gt; is the gold mine of such sites, you do not shows statistics, but the sites that do that show  that guests are 30-50 times more numerous than regular members and homework subforums take 80% of the views.&#xA;I have seen the discussion on this topic and I strongly &lt;em&gt;suggest that you do not exclude&lt;/em&gt; homework questions.&#xA;.....&#xA;But as long as you accept them you probably should improve the service.&#xA;The system of putting questions 'on hold' is probably authomatic (at least I hope) as it is rather superficial and unsatisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been myself the victim of such a mechanism (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/129521/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/129521/&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;my request to know &lt;strong&gt;if there exists a formula&lt;/strong&gt; has been blocked. Since when &lt;strong&gt;a formula&lt;/strong&gt; is considered 'homework'? And I did not even ask for it, but just to know &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; it existed.&#xA;I have given the result of the problem and later offered to add any further explanation in order to unblock the question, but to no avail, and I was not even considered worthy of a reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'like also to call your attention to another question on hold (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/129580/&quot;&gt;Average Velocity of a body moving in a circle with constant speed $v$&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;here &lt;em&gt;Tesla&lt;/em&gt; has done his homework, as far as I Know, in a flawless manner, has showed it and is asking for help because the received result is probably wrong.&#xA;What is the sense of blocking such a neat question?&#xA;I was not allowed to comment as I had not yet 50 points, now I reached that benchmark and will leave a comment and reassure him.&#xA;I thank you for your attention, and hope my remarks can be of any use to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Jim,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you want to have a site for an élite of scholars you'd better drop the &lt;em&gt;Homework question&lt;/em&gt; altogether, if you want to widen your audience and raise a new generation of physicists without driving out the scholars, you can have a separate forum for homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;you can't have it both ways&lt;/strong&gt;, that was the gist of my contribution.&#xA;I was pointing out what probably escapes you from your perspective: that your current policy appears non-consistent, and probably is. I hope you get the following as a sincere attempt to help you and not as criticism (or &lt;em&gt;Cicero pro domo sua&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tesla has done some impeccable homework, his result doesn't match and he calls for help:&#xA;what is your response? you first let someone give him  a &lt;strong&gt;wrong answer&lt;/strong&gt;/advice and then block the questions commenting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific &lt;strong&gt;physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem. We want our&#xA;  questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, for one, was intrigued by this &lt;em&gt;(rather silly)&lt;/em&gt; concept: he asked about &lt;em&gt;'average velocity in circular motion'&lt;/em&gt; and did an excellent job. You do not think so?, fair enough, then be consistent: close/eliminate/&lt;strong&gt;delete the useless question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you can agree that keeping it &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; forever with a wrong answer attached, is not a wise decision, is a &lt;strong&gt;botched-up compromise&lt;/strong&gt;, confuses, &lt;strong&gt;misleads&lt;/strong&gt; less competent readers and does not leave a good impression. Can you let me give the &lt;strong&gt;correct answer&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably I'll be showered again with down-votes, but I articulated and argumented my post, you give me the short-shift with a click. I felt it my duty to tell you what impression a student gets, and I promise will abstain in future, if you think I am a nuisance. &#xA;Keep up the good work.!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T01:33:34.760" Title="Homework questions, on hold" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6016" CreationDate="2014-08-06T14:10:26.483" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;On Hold&quot; is not automatic. Users such as myself with over 3000 reputation review new questions and determine if they fall within the spirit of the site, if they are understandable, if they have been asked before, and if we think they are answerable. If a question fails any one of those tests, a user will vote to put a question on hold. If at least 4 other users agree, then the question is put on hold. You can call this system superficial and unsatisfactory, but it is the system we choose to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about homework like the ones you linked to are not within the spirit of the site. We recognize that the number of members and visitors to the site would dramatically increase if we were to answer all homework questions, but that is not what we are here for. There are many posts in the physics meta that discuss our policy and the reasoning behind it concerning homework-like questions. So I will not go into it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all this, thank you for your effort to improve the site. Your intent is noted and appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having also read your updated post, I want to respond in order of how you said it; so please forgive me if I repeat myself or if it seems disorderly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact we can and do have it both ways. We encourage homework-like questions that ask about the physics concepts pertinent to the question. We discourage questions that ask us to solve someone's problem for them. What we like and don't like is, of course, entirely up to us (meaning a majority of our trusted users) to decide. You can see our decisions at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5958/23473&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. The appearance of non-consistence may (and I stress the &quot;may&quot; since I cannot be sure about anyone's understanding but my own) be due to a difference between how you understand what we accept and what/why our standards for question are and how we understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I do recognize that this is a sincere attempt to fix a problem that you feel we may be overlooking. It is a criticism, but a constructive criticism. As I stated before, we do appreciate the effort you put into this. The downvotes are not a dislike of your post as in the main site, they represent the opinions of our users; by downvoting, they are disagreeing with your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions is continually an issue we discuss. We recognize that there are some homework-like questions that are very well posed and have answers that would be valuable to a wide range of readers. What you must recognize is that we are trying to allow homework questions that teach the physics of it, we do not want this site to be one where little Jimmy can come to have a professional physicist solve question 2.18 from his grade 10 physics textbook for him. Similarly, we want our answers to be useful to more than just the asker. I won't deny that occasionally a question is closed that shouldn't be, but no community is perfect and we strive to reopen questions that we feel shouldn't be closed. However, we had to make guidelines that could cover most of the potential types of homework-like questions. These guidelines &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; occasionally make a useful question be put on-hold, but overall they do more good than harm and we are still always re-evaluating them to ensure that we allow the maximum number of HW questions while still maintaining as best we can the ideal of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving along, you seem to misunderstand the concept of &quot;On-Hold&quot;. A question is not put on hold indefinitely. After a few days, the [On Hold] status turns to [Closed]. After more time, closed question are often deleted. The reason we put questions [On Hold] initially is because the word &quot;Closed&quot; seem kind of onerous and permanent. The fact is, the [On Hold] status is meant to encourage the asker to improve the question. Any time a closed question is edited, it becomes visible to all 3k+ rep users and we vote whether or not to reopen the question. On-Hold is a temporary status that means a question should be edited to fit the site's requirements. Once we feel it is better, we often do vote to reopen a question. Alternatively, if you feel a closed question should not be closed, you can flag it for reopening. Five high-rep users must agree on reopening just as five must agree on closing. So you see, we do not leave questions on-hold forever. Just until we think they are sufficiently improved. If they aren't, the question is closed and/or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me close with this:&#xA;This site is not intended for just elite scholars. It is also not intended to widen the audience and raise a new generation of scholars. It is also not a forum as the word is commonly used nowadays. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site. We strive to answer questions about physics; mainstream physics. The idea is that someone can come to the site wondering about anything from the physics behind an everyday phenomenon or about the principles needed to work through a high-level research problem and we &lt;em&gt;volunteer&lt;/em&gt; to strive to answer their questions and answer in a way that everyone else reading it might learn something new or interesting from it. There are a myriad of HW questions that fall under this description; but Jimmy asking how to solve problem 2.18 does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not looked at Tesla's question because it isn't relevant here. If you want to start a new meta post discussing how you think Tesla's question falls within the scope of the site, that's one thing; it's possible it was unfairly closed, I don't know. But you are finding so much opposition here because we have worked hard on our homework policy and we feel there is no simple way of making it better while still maintaining the ideal of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't think you are a nuisance. However, I will admit that at least I personally feel you have perhaps been too quick to form an opinion on our overall policy when it seems you don't have a full understanding of it. But thank you regardless for the effort to improve the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T14:22:47.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6016" CreationDate="2014-08-06T15:56:06.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;On homework:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; has the link &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; half-way down this list is a short summary of questions that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Do my homework&amp;quot;-type physics questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;A 4kg ball is traveling at 8m/s in the x direction, how do I find...&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Physics - Stack Exchange is not a homework help site. If you have a question about a homework problem, or any problem of an educational nature, narrow it down to the specific concept that is giving you trouble and ask about that. You can find more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;information about acceptable homework questions&lt;/a&gt; on our meta site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-mainstream physics, including pitches for personal theories&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site/4539#4539&quot;&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here.&lt;/a&gt; Anything that couldn't be published in a reputable journal is not appropriate on this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about fictional physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Could a warp drive get you out of a black hole?&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions about physics of fictional worlds which are not sufficiently grounded in real physics are off topic here, but they may be on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Implementation details of computational tasks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While computational physics is on topic, we are not a programming site. If your question is about implementing computational code - in particular, if it's about writing, compiling, debugging or optimizing code, or about a specific language or library - then it is off topic. It may be suitable for &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, however.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As linked in the comments, homework questions are overwhelmingly rejected again and again as part of the site's content. Note also that homework isn't simply &amp;quot;Problem X.Y from ,&amp;quot; we have carefully crafted the following meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;homework question&amp;quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. This includes not just questions from actual homework assignments, but also self-study problems, puzzles, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a question put on-hold does not make you a &amp;quot;victim&amp;quot; of anything. It means that your question was deemed not to be within the bounds of the site's desired content. Note that this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an automatic thing, requiring &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;5 votes from users with 3,000 or larger reputation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; 1 vote from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;moderator&lt;/a&gt; (which happened for your case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any edit you make puts the question into the review queue for the 3,000+ rep users to review and judge whether it is still off-topic or has been changed enough to be on-topic. Simply adding an edit that says, &amp;quot;This &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; homework&amp;quot; isn't enough to get a question reopened, you need to change the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of the question to make it on-topic (this will likely take a lot of work &amp;amp; effort on your part, and it may even be the case that you find your answer while doing the rewrite--though, if this does happen, I heartily encourage you to still rewrite the question so that future visitors to the site can learn from you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On site traffic:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is an issue. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;StackExchange's All-site traffic page&lt;/a&gt;, we have averaged over 25,000 visitors per day the last two weeks (putting us at #25) with an average of 53 questions asked per day (#9 overall) over that same time-span.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T15:56:06.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6016" CreationDate="2014-08-06T17:31:24.510" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;em&gt;homework help&lt;/em&gt; is the gold mine of such sites,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a pretty good argument that homework help drives out the real experts and prevents the site from hosting large numbers of really good questions and answers that will continue to help others in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you believe that argument or not the users of Physics SE have made a conscious and deliberate decision not to be a homework help site in the sense that you are using the phrase.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; You have already received several links to meta discussions surrounding that decision. We also consciously include &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is my solution right?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions in the homework-like category. Both the closures that you use as examples are in accordance with site policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; get help with introductory physics, but you are going to be required to pull the underlying concept out of the context of the question in front of you and present it in a clear by widely applicable context. Take note that &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is there a formula for ...?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;What is the formula for ...?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; will almost never be acceptable. At a workshop for early-career physics professors that I attended this summer someone said &lt;em&gt;&quot;Students ask about formulas, professors ask about principles.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the more I have reflected on that and paid attention to the dialog of my students and colleagues the more truth I have seen in that line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it comes down to is that Physics SE expects you to approach your question more like a professional than like a student, even if you are a raw beginner. That's going to be pretty tough at first, but I believe the exercise will help you rather a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; And the site has continued to grow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-08-06T17:36:36.887" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T17:36:36.887" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-07T03:38:57.307" Score="5" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a long time, I've admired &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Kapitsa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kapitza&lt;/a&gt;'s Problems in Physics &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~aalemi/challenge/Kapitza.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[pdf]&lt;/a&gt;.  It is a collection of 224 questions Kapitza and colleagues used to form the focus of a postdoc candidate oral exams.  They really are a treat.  I encourage everyone to read Kapitza's introductions of the problems in the first few pages of the linked pdf, but I'll quote some of the relevant parts here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In compiling these problems I had a certain objective in mind, which explains their unconventional formulation.  The following explanation will make their solution of greater interest to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Problem solving is of particular importance in the study of the exact sciences such as mathematics, mechanics, physics, etc. It enables the student to apply his own knowledge to the solution of practical questions.  [...] It is well known that fruitful scientific work requires not only knowledge and understanding but also a capacity for independent analytical and creative thinking. In effect, these problems were compiled as a useful means for the discovery, evaluation and cultivation of these qualities during the teaching process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I strove to achieve this end by formulating the majority of the questions in the following manner. A small problem is presented, and the student, using the known laws of physics, must analyse and describe quantitatively the natural phenomenon involved. These natural phenomena were selected in terms of their scientific or practical interest within the scope of the students' level of knowledge. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the problems allow a number of approaches to their solution in order to reveal the students' individuality. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A characteristic feature of the problems is that they have no definite answer because the student is allowed to proceed further and further with the analysis of the problem posed, depending on his own abilities and inclinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, here are some of my favorite examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Astronomical observations show that the planet Venus is entirely covered in cloud, so that the Venusians are unable to observe the heavenly bodes, Describe how they could accurately measure the length of their day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;11) Explain why, for a bow of a given size, there is a certain size of arrow which yields the longest flight. Estimate this size for a bow of a given shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;19) Why can the movement of a bicycle be controlled in 'no hands' riding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;38) Determine the maximum range of audibility of a conversation in open air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;83) Estimate the time for a pond to freeze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;89) Estimate the thermodynamic efficiency of the firing of cannon and hand-guns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;127) Describe the electrical effects caused by the earth's magnetic field when water having an electrical conductivity flows in rivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;200) Two satellites have a head-on collision. Describe the subsequent events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;202) Estimate the height to which a person can pole vault. Determine the cross-section of the pole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;210) A student comes late into a lecture-room. She is wearing a strong perfume, Estimate the time that elapses before the lecturer can detect the scent of the perfume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that almost all of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;highest voted questions&lt;/a&gt; are of this same spirit. (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122785/could-legolas-actually-see-that-far&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70839/how-can-you-weigh-your-own-head-in-an-accurate-way&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1077/how-can-i-stand-on-the-ground-em-or-and-pauli&quot;&gt;[3]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/114525/how-does-hot-water-clean-better-than-cold-water&quot;&gt;[4]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61174/what-makes-running-so-much-less-energy-efficient-than-bicycling&quot;&gt;[5]&lt;/a&gt;)  In fact, the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121879/can-i-compute-the-mass-of-a-coin-based-on-the-sound-of-its-fall&quot;&gt;mass of a coin question&lt;/a&gt; serves as a perfect example of a Kapitza style question, the question itself being rather short and ambiguous.  The answers really embraced the nature of a kapitza question, and building off one another ended up with a fairly compelling analysis.  But, the question itself was poorly received (initially), as discussed in this recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5940/mass-of-a-coin-question-went-viral-despite-inital-downvotes-and-negative-commen&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;.  There, the community points out that the question is not a good question, as we currently define a good question.  Other seemingly valid 'kapitza' type questions pop up and are closed as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;engineering&lt;/em&gt; fairly regularly, and probably rightfully so, given our current definition of a good question.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3Ayes+duplicate%3Ano+migrated%3Ano+is%3Aquestion+score%3A2&quot;&gt;This search&lt;/a&gt; returns an approximate list of such candidates, some examples that stood out to me include: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/129758/what-is-the-airspeed-velocity-of-an-unladen-swallow&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/127975/can-a-semi-transparent-object-appear-white&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/128626/how-much-more-efficient-is-a-road-bike-than-a-mountain-bike&quot;&gt;[3]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/111342/why-mountain-roads-are-winded-up-rather-than-keeping-them-straight&quot;&gt;[4]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/104832/why-is-my-restaurant-silverware-magnetized&quot;&gt;[5]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proposal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to the actual proposal.  The proposal would be to dedicate a new tag, either 'kapitza' or 'challenge' to mark these kinds of questions.  Simple, ambiguous, open ended questions without prior research, but in an attempt to try to foster this kind of collaborative, quantitative modeling challenge.  True 'kaptiza' questions would be evaluated on the criteria Kapitza himself outlines in the introductory pages of his problems.  So, much like our current &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, the rules for 'kapitza' questions would be a little tweaked, the questions would be evaluated by a different metric than standard questions. The goal of the question being not to find &lt;em&gt;the one authoritative answer&lt;/em&gt; as the questions are designed not necessarily to have one, but to really challenge our contributors to try to collectively create interesting content introducing a wide array of physics topics.  Think of it as a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;codegolf.SE&lt;/a&gt; section for the physics.SE, but much more pedagogical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this would require little else than a dedicated tag and explanatory wiki page (and corresponding evolution in community behavior associated with the tag). For the tag name, I would volunteer 'kapitza', a unique tag, to mark the questions as similarly unique, but with the disadvantage that it doesn't mean anything unless you know what they are, or take the time to read the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this new tag would be a way to codify some of the observable trends we have already, namely the kinds of questions and answers that people like to upvote, making it easier to discover and contribute to other, similar questions.  I think this would help also to alleviate some of the tension we have between some questions getting closed early as too broad, while some similar questions becoming our most highly voted.  A dedicated tag would also enable those uninterested to block the tag from their view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51994" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T03:41:01.470" Title="Proposal: Kapitza Tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6020" CreationDate="2014-08-07T07:17:23.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My main motivation for answering a question is that I believe the OP is really interested in the answer. I only ask questions when it's a problem that is really bugging me. So my interest in questions that seem to be the physics equivalent of crossword puzzles is going to be minimal at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't deny the value of such problems as part of the learning process. I'm not familar with the Kapitza problems, but I recall the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/physics/general-and-classical-physics/cavendish-problems-classical-physics-2nd-edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cavendish Problems in Classical Physics&lt;/a&gt; with some affection. The foreword to this book makes the excellent analogy that they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a set of exercises to develop the technique, like the five finger exercises that are an indispensable basis of concert-hall mastery&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All quite worthy, though while I still own the book I haven't opened it for around thirty years and have no plans to do so in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then lots of people are interested in crossword puzzles, and my views expressed here shouldn't put off anyone who wants to ask or answer such problems here. I'm just not convinced it would make the site a more interesting place to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T07:17:23.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6020" CreationDate="2014-08-07T07:34:57.550" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt; doesn't really have special rules. Rather, homework-like &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; have special rules, one of which is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag should be applied to them - but the presence or absence of the tag doesn't particularly affect how we treat the question. And in fact, the homework rules are not that special. They're a special case of the general rule that questions should be conceptual, reasonably well researched, and be asked in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point in saying all this is that I don't like the idea of having special tags with special rules. Yes, in practice &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is a little bit like this, and so is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, but managing those two is already a handful, and we only really keep them around for historical reasons anyway. I'm opposed to the creation of any new special tags or special categories of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T07:34:57.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6020" CreationDate="2014-08-07T09:29:43.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag you are proposing is what is known as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;. These are in general discouraged, though if there are good reasons for making one then they can fulfil useful and specific functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues to keep in mind are well described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/434/please-zap-the-meta-tags-and-dependent-tags&quot;&gt;this meta.cooking.se post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta-tags are actually a subset of a larger problem that I usually call dependent tags. These are tags that don’t say anything by themselves – you can’t tell what the question is about unless they’re paired with some other tag (or several of them). These tags are a problem because people don’t realize this and will often use that as the question’s only tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags of this sort generally end up being hard to maintain, as people use them in many unexpected ways which are not really their original intent. We have three such tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;; they all perform specific functions and they all require maintenance. Adding a new one is doable (though it adds to the moderator load) but it does need to be worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, for a tag of this sort, and particularly if you expect users to behave differently when it's present, it needs to be something immediately recognizable by essentially all of the site's audience, or it will inevitably get misused. I have to say that it's not the case for Kapitza - I hadn't heard the name until this thread - and I don't think there's any other similar alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T13:20:03.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T04:45:20.723" Score="-11" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does every post here gets downvoted and disregarded, even though many users here are not even professional physicists? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much condescension and feeling of self value, for someone as partial, don't you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29663" OwnerDisplayName="Bak1139" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T07:23:45.037" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T07:23:45.037" Title="Why does every post here gets downvoted and disregarded?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6024" CreationDate="2014-08-08T06:11:03.040" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick glance at the question page or the front page shows more upvoted than downvoted posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics SE has high standards for questions (and answers) but my observation is that most users are hesitant to use downvotes, with one expception. The exception is posts that violate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. Especially second and subsequent posts by the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand that this site is of and by physicists&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and while we welcome beginners to our group, we expect them to be willing to take part &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem, to have gotten a mistaken impression of what we do here and what the site is for. Perhaps just observing for a few days might make things a little more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Some professionals, some future professionals and some plain old amateurs, but all physicsist or putting on a convincing impression thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.663" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T06:11:03.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6024" CreationDate="2014-08-08T06:55:47.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is meant as a sympathetic comment, not an answer, but it grew too long for the comment box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the main, there are lots and lots of very good questions that get upvoted and stay around, and there's a healthy population of poor questions that get downvoted and removed. Any system for differentiating the two will make mistakes sometimes. That's okay. It's just a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There certainly are days when the confines beyond which questions are closed as &quot;not physics&quot; are so narrow that it baffles me; I've been tempted to retaliate by leaving close votes on good questions that say &quot;this question is about the motion of charged particles in electromagnetic fields and not about physics.&quot; (I probably wouldn't do something so petty, but closures like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/128968/44126&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; put me in the mood.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the OP's question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/96229/44126&quot;&gt;temperatures at different latitudes&lt;/a&gt;. There's a very simple physical explanation why you get more insolation and low latitudes than at high latitudes — the angle of incidence — and it appeared in an answer just two hours after the question was asked. I agree with the sentiment at that question that meteorology and climate science are broad topics which are not properly a subset of physics, and the question was muddled by the asker's misconceptions. But on the whole it was probably a question that could have stayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T06:55:47.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6020" CreationDate="2014-08-08T18:54:20.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;On changing policy&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a new tag is a secondary issue here; the primary issue is a suggested policy change. Should we allow these open-ended style inquiries&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; if they would otherwise fall afoul of the policies we have in place? (Of course anything that is on topic can be asked, whether it's Kapitza-esque or not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be &lt;strong&gt;against changing the policy&lt;/strong&gt; to make exceptions for such questions, for these reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions whose purpose is to challenge others are fundamentally different from those who are asked out of genuine interest. Yes, &lt;a href=&quot;http://codegolf.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Code Golf&lt;/a&gt; exists, but it is an entirely different style of site. Many of the experts here get no small amount of satisfaction from explaining an answer in such a way that &lt;em&gt;students actually learn something from it&lt;/em&gt;. We might enjoy having to work for a good answer, but there's something about a pure challenge that's rather offputting to me. I want the person asking the question to be interested in the answer, not in how well &lt;em&gt;I personally&lt;/em&gt; handle the problem.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1'. Challenges shift at least some of the focus away from pure physics and onto the people doing the physics. And how many researchers would see such questions and think, &quot;If I only wanted a challenge, I would focus on my research instead of laymen throwing questions at me like people throw bananas at monkeys in the zoo.&quot;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; There may be a use for a place on the internet where physics students can get together and have lots of back-and-forth on their approaches, but this isn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; the place for that.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are too broad really are too broad. Consider &lt;code&gt;#200: Satellite collisions&lt;/code&gt;: Are you looking for change in orbital parameters? Breaking up of the material? Something else? Without further constraints, this becomes directionless musing. How can I objectively evaluate answers? Someone might state something physically true but also uninteresting? Does that deserve an upvote or a downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They don't on their own specify a level of an answer. Do you want a high school level zeroth-order answer? A graduate level third-order analysis? Good questions in physics are pitched at a well-defined level.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; We are constantly asking new users what level they are so that we can provide &lt;em&gt;appropriate&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Examples of how these questions can be made to work (to their benefit)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, many of these questions have potential, and &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be asked on the site, &lt;strong&gt;with refinement&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, &lt;code&gt;#83: Freezing pond&lt;/code&gt; could have three variants, &lt;em&gt;shortened&lt;/em&gt; versions of which might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I know water takes time to freeze, even once it's 0 degrees. Is there some way of predicting that time? Say I have a liquid pond at 0, and it's -10 outside. The pond will freeze, but is it at a random time or is there some fixed time it takes to get rid of its heat?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/27939&quot;&gt;Before a once-warm lake starts to freeze, must its temperature be 4°C throughout at some point?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rate of cooling of a pond depends strongly on how efficiently convection above its surface carries heat away. Let's ignore conduction through the ground. How can I determine how convectively unstable the air over a cooling body of water is. I know in astrophysics we have the Schwarzschild criterion that tells us if the air is linearly unstable to convection. But maybe the Ledoux criterion is more appropriate, since there will be a humidity gradient? On a related note, can I take the mixing length as a lower bound on the size of the pond for which the plane-parallel assumption holds?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question guides the answers toward some well-specified goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On votes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the kinds of questions and answers that people like to upvote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the tension we have between some questions getting closed early as too broad, while some similar questions becoming our most highly voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to emphasize that &lt;strong&gt;virality is a poor indicator of quality&lt;/strong&gt;. I could post a question or answer that's just gratuitously pornographic while only giving physics lip service. We could dredge up all manner of voters from the dark corners of the internet who would love it, but we shouldn't think it's good just because a large number of people with no vested interest in the site as is like the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can always reduce standards and eliminate barriers to become more popular. But this site isn't about becoming the most visited place on the internet with &quot;physics&quot; in the url. It is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; and it achieves its purpose at least in part thanks to being exclusionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than adjusting policies to match the votes of the masses, I'd like to see discussion on encouraging voters to appreciate some of the great but not-so-sexy physics that goes almost unnoticed around here. Personally, the answers I've contributed that I feel are the &quot;best&quot; in the sense of explaining something really well for others are all at &amp;lt; 5 score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On the tag&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others discuss creating a meta-tag already. I just want to respond to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A dedicated tag would also enable those uninterested to block the tag from their view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's an unhealthy sign to have tags whose purpose is to block questions from some users' view. Whenever that happens, it's an &lt;em&gt;indication&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; those questions shouldn't be here at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;In undergrad, we had a course, Physics 101, that dealt exclusively with techniques to solve such &quot;order-of-magnitude&quot; problems (even when we were expected to get the right answer to better than an order of magnitude). It was a great experience, and all physics students should test their mettle in such situations, so I'm not against such questions per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Anecdote from my childhood: At a pretty young age it became obvious that I was very good at mental arithmetic. As a result, it was a common pastime of my classmates to challenge me with difficult arithmetic problems to see how quickly and accurately I could solve them. No one was interested in the result; they only cared about deriving entertainment from me. I was content with it for a while, because showing off is something children like to do. But I don't participate in Physics.SE to be others' entertainment. Nor do I participate in order to publicly boast about my own problem-solving ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;Not that I would be so cruel to monkeys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;Going back to my Ph 101 example, I had lots of fun comparing how I did things with others, and then extending the given problems and going even further in depth. But I wouldn't involve the professor at every step. Part of the &lt;em&gt;student&lt;/em&gt; experience value in these problems was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; having experts give the &quot;correct&quot; answer right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;I would go so far as to say one of the most important arts in physics is being able to evaluate the effective range of theories: Where do they work? Where do they fail? The inverse question is of course &quot;Given a tolerance for the final answer, what's the (minimal) amount of physics I need to employ to get the answer (for the right reasons).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T18:54:20.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T20:46:15.777" Score="-2" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel bad for asking such a question, because I know there is probably a simple answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I feel baited after reading a conversation of the meta thread about what questions were and weren't appropriate. I felt offended when I read that questions which didn't have answers, e.g. speculative questions, could not be asked. &#xA;How can we not ask questions about challenging, interesting, and speculative aspects of life and reality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newton and all the greats created theories solely on circumspection, analyzing of phenomena, asking questions no one had before. Einstein was stubborn, and always asked questions, questions that brought the body of science forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to be overly controversial, but I mean that life is wonderful, reality is complex, and limiting questions only to what has been asked and answered before is limiting to natural human creativity and analyzing ability that would better the body of scientific work. It is exactly opposite to the heart of physics, which is all about understanding the nature of phenomena, enjoying it, exploring it, and getting interested in it. Without asking questions, one is looking at everything in the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am deeply hurt by the implications and perhaps my emotionalism is bringing me to a place where I do not see the rule clearly. I worry about this limitation of these types of interesting questions. Peer review sounds good. Perhaps it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link I am referring to is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: as I read this my mind thinks &quot;Abuse, abuse, abuse.&quot; The reason we probably do not allow such an exchange is abuse by poor practitioners. Nonetheless, the nature of the post seems to stand. We must worry about taking steps to bring physics forward over time, not leaving it as it is. That wouldn't be fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55446" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T21:38:43.500" Title="No speculation? What is wrong with speculation? Can't we ask questions about all things, not solely understood things?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6028" CreationDate="2014-08-08T21:11:49.583" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Physics.SE is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to be a forum for people to discuss their idea about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Physics.SE is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to advance the current frontier of science in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Physics.SE is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to encompass all that life and reality can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of Physics.SE &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; to be a place where &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;questions about established physics&lt;/em&gt; can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean that the question is not &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; if it cannot be asked here. Neither does it mean that it is not &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt;. It does simply mean that we do not want it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, one reason for the mainstream policy is that we do not want to be inundated with the personal pet theories of crackpots. But closing a question as non-mainstream does not make any statement about the asker, it simply says: We do not deal with such questions here. And that is because we are &lt;em&gt;not a forum&lt;/em&gt;, and speculative questions would necessarily have to be &lt;em&gt;discussed&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt;. And that is just not what Physics.SE is intended to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2014-08-11T21:38:43.500" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T21:38:43.500" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-09T09:54:35.167" Score="-3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 19/08/2015&lt;/strong&gt; I just recently found the &lt;em&gt;thought-experiment&lt;/em&gt; tag which is identical to the one I was discouraged from in my proposal below. Did something change in the arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to bring this issue to your attention and it would be very nice to know other position and comments on this, I think something useful can come out of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation&lt;/strong&gt;: After reading many questions and comments I have seen that several questions are oriented to better understanding the principles and corollaries of a theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I see is that they receive lots of comments which point out irrelevant observations, I mean in relation to real purpose of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, comments adding information from other areas of physics, or pointing out the infeasibility of the experiment. Nevertheless, when discussing about a certain theory, pointing a paradox or drawing conclusion from it, even if the scenario proposed includes other phenomena not explained by this theory, the relevant discussion might not always need the detailed knowledge of those phenomena which might render this scenario impossible, and the question still be a very valid one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;: Let us think about Einstein's famous gedanken, or thought experiment, of the relativistic train and the 2 observers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is aimed to better understand consequences the theory of relativity and is completely valid. Comments or answers focusing on how the mechanisms for switching light on would work, or how the persons can not see something passing at these speeds, etc., all are arguably valid but out of scope in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the point is, assuming all conditions imposed in the scenario, and not contained in the theory, hold: how do the we explain/understand the consequences and their relation to the theory postulates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: Using this tag would have the benefits of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;clarify the type of answer desired&lt;/strong&gt;: this separates questions wanting details, numbers, technicalities, from those exploring underlying principles, or reflecting misunderstandings of a theory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;preventing out of scope comments and answers&lt;/strong&gt;: the people will only contribute with posts of relevant aspects, when they have a clear idea of what they are talking about and not bring to attention their knowledge on tangential-to-question subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41376" LastEditorUserId="41376" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T13:18:41.587" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T13:18:41.587" Title="Proposal: Gedanken tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6030" CreationDate="2014-08-09T14:22:01.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, that would be a meta tag, unrelated to actual content of the question. As has been discussed here on meta at length, such tags are bad because they tell you nothing about whether or not the question might interest you, and thus convey no useful information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you seem to imply that this tag should restrict the &quot;allowed&quot; answers to the one the OP wishes to hear. That's not how we roll, since the primary goal of answering a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to tell the OP what they wish to hear, but to answer the question in a way that is useful and relevant to everyone asking themselves the same or a similar question. And it is wholly possible that though the OP wishes &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to hear technical discussions of this particular Gedankenexperiment, answers/comments providing these could be of use to others thinking about them. After all, proposing a Gedankenexperiment is somewhat contingent on that it is not, &lt;em&gt;in principle&lt;/em&gt;, impossible to realize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, OPs &lt;em&gt;are already&lt;/em&gt; allowed to ask for a particular &quot;species&quot; of explanation - at least, I see nothing prohibiting that. But I think it is not something we should &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; by creating such a tag, since if you do not know the answer to a question, how could you ever compentently predict of what kind the &lt;em&gt;actual answer&lt;/em&gt; resolving whatever problem occurs has to be? For example, there are many questions - thought experiments and otherwise - that ask things like &lt;em&gt;How can it be?&lt;/em&gt; asking for an &lt;em&gt;explanation&lt;/em&gt; of a &lt;em&gt;supposedly occuring phenomenon&lt;/em&gt;, and the answer does not explain the phenomenon at all, but instead shows that the very &lt;em&gt;premise&lt;/em&gt; of the question is flawed, which can very well be a quite technical and &quot;non-intuitive&quot; thing to show. But these are the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; answers, not the argumentative answers the OP might have expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: Meta tags are bad. Also, it should not be forbidden to provide answers outside of what the OP &lt;em&gt;thought/said&lt;/em&gt; they were seeking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2014-08-09T14:29:19.387" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T14:29:19.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6034" CreationDate="2014-08-09T17:48:37.850" Score="5" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so we have the question VTC reason of &quot;we deal with mainstream physics...&quot; yadda yadda yadda. And everyone is grateful for it. But what about answers? Surely everyone would agree that we don't want to see someone answer a valid question with non-mainstream physics and/or unpublished (crackpot) personal theories even if they are an attempt to answer the question. At the moment, we can and do severely downvote these answers, just like when a question like that is posted. But we have no analogous VTC reason for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When answers that are clearly non-mainstream have popped up, I sometimes custom flag them for mods with a statement like &quot;This answer should be deleted due to the 'non-mainstream/unpublished theories' reason&quot;. And usually, the mods will delete the answer fairly quickly (thanks mods :D). But when going through the VLQ review queue, the reasons listed for recommending an answer be deleted don't include anything even interpretable as &quot;non-mainstream/unpublished theories&quot;. There is also no specific flag for this reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we're okay with this kind of answer being deleted, should we formalize this? Add the &quot;We deal with mainstream physics.....&quot; reason to the VLQ queue list? Or at least a separate flag for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe, this might be an example of a case where we're doing what we shouldn't? Should we just be downvoting these into oblivion? Is deleting even the right action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm in favour of deleting these answers. They may attempt to answer the question, but we don't allow non-mainstream questions and so we shouldn't allow non-mainstream answers. I'd be in favour of adding a flag option and a recommend deletion reason to encompass this phenomenon. Otherwise, to delete these posts we'll be stuck with just bugging the mods with them all the time. Don't get me wrong, non-mainstream answers are the primary reason I think I even have a chance at the deputy badge. But I'm willing to give that up because I think we need an easier and more formalized way of removing these answer that (I think) everyone wants removed than bugging the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about everyone else? Yea/Nay on deleting them? Yea/Nay to new flag option? Yea/Nay to new deletion reason in VLQ queue? Other suggestions/ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T22:11:05.887" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T06:00:44.960" Title="Adding &quot;Non-mainstream physics&quot; to the answer deletion/flag reasons" Tags="|feature-request|answers|flagging|review-tools|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6028" CreationDate="2014-08-09T20:42:11.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should keep in mind that this policy is a response to a very specific problem, and it tends to be used in a pretty well-focused way. Specifically, we get a steady stream of posts about wild theories about how if you allow for repulsive gravity then you fix both relativity and quantum mechanics, usually from people who have hardly bothered to learn the theories they pretend to debunk or the experimental evidence that their theory would need to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a problem that's unique to this site. Established researchers tend to get a large volume of unsolicited email with this sort of thing, and they used to get it by post before the e-epoch. (To get a taste for the stuff, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;John Baez's Crackpot Index&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The defining characteristic of these posts, as I see it, is that they take as a premise something that's either unverifiable, has been proved wrong, or has no evidence backing it, and is not present in the literature, and then proceed to ask a question without accepting the possibility that the premise is flawed as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sort of posts visibly diminish the quality of the site and they make it a lot harder to keep the experts here (they have enough of it on their own inbox). To make things worse, it can be very hard to argue with the posters of these questions, and it's a demanding exercise with little actual gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is OK, on the other hand, to ask speculative questions of the sort of &quot;what if X?&quot;, or preferably, &quot;how does X fit in with our current theoretical/experimental understanding of Y?&quot;. If you do post a question like that, then please be careful with your tone and phrasing, and keep an open mind throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T20:42:11.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6032" CreationDate="2014-08-09T22:38:32.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to change the flag/VTC reasons, other than the few custom reasons that appear under &quot;off topic&quot; (and that's only for questions). I mean, it would be &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; possible, but the feature doesn't exist in the SE system. So I think we can safely conclude that adding a custom flag reason to catch non-mainstream answers won't happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;FAQ post&lt;/a&gt; specifying that non-mainstream answers should be deleted, so if you see one, you can just flag it. According to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6374/124&quot;&gt;guidance on flag use&lt;/a&gt;, a custom flag for moderator attention is the one to use for a non-mainstream answer that legitimately attempts to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it can happen that a person posts an answer which promotes a non-mainstream theory but is utterly and &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; unrelated to the question, and in those cases flagging as &quot;not an answer&quot; is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I don't like the idea of deleting non-mainstream answers; I don't think there's a clear line between &quot;non-mainstream&quot; and &quot;wrong&quot;, and the latter is definitely supposed to just be downvoted. But that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the reason you can't carry over the reasoning from questions (&quot;we have a non-mainstream close reason, why not delete non-mainstream answers?&quot;) is that, first of all, answers are not questions. They fill different roles in the site and there's no reason to expect the same sets of rules to apply to both. Beyond that, our non-mainstream close reason is mostly meant to curtail a specific kind of request: that where someone posts their pet theory that is going to overthrow relativity (or whatever) and challenges us to find something wrong with it. Requests like this are a drain on the attention of professional physicists and grad students (check your spam folder :-p), and we don't want to entertain them on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.663" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T06:00:44.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6036" CreationDate="2014-08-10T19:28:38.640" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just the &quot;victim&quot; of a large number of upvotes - which I suspect the script will catch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6veP2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't imaging how you can upvote that quickly - 9 votes in 23 seconds is spectacular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question I have: if one ends up running into the rep cap for the day, and subsequent upvotes get no rep, then do these &quot;uncounted&quot; votes become counted votes after a serial voting reversal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was curious how the system works - I might not hit the cap today, otherwise I could just do the wait-and-see experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T19:54:02.803" Title="serial upvoting reversal reputation cap" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6035" CreationDate="2014-08-10T19:54:02.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also relevant: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124842/how-to-act-when-youre-being-serial-upvoted&quot;&gt;How to act when you&amp;#39;re being serial upvoted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What else should I know about this subject?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reversals trigger a reputation recalculation.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever serial voting gets reversed, all days involved in the serial voting will be recalculated as if the serial votes had never happened, and any reputation you might have lost due to those serial votes hitting the reputation cap will be given to you at that time. &lt;strong&gt;Serial voters will not prevent you from gaining reputation that you deserve&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51994" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T19:54:02.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6044" CreationDate="2014-08-11T07:34:07.917" Score="-4" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to read this question and its interesting answers:&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5940/mass-of-a-coin-question-went-viral-despite-inital-downvotes-and-negative-commen?answertab=oldest#tab-top&quot;&gt;Mass of a coin question went viral, despite inital downvotes and negative comments&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many names to explain that phenomenon : &quot;bandwagon effect&quot;, &quot;nothing succeds like success&quot; etc , but I think for this :&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon&quot;&gt;Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon&lt;/a&gt; ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we might have to resort to &lt;strong&gt;mass hysteria&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is obvious that when one item stays at the top of a list for some time it will stay there forever and grow up beyond control. It is obvious that out of 129 000 viewers 344 will feel compelled to take an active role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered a way to prevent that this uncontrollable human behaviour affects the reputation of a member, changing the computing formula from linear to logarithmic or other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose everyone will agree that it is utterly unfair that a member who works hard for months asking, anwering, editing, etc. hundreds of posts reaches say, 500 pts. of rep, while another one, just asking a rather silly but viral question, gets 3 times as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update wrt Pisanty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This goes a long way towards curbing the 'bandwagon' effect that you&#xA;  note. When questions and answers go viral, &lt;strong&gt;they get a lot of their&#xA;  votes in a short period, and this stops the worst of the effect&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cap is an illusion (200 is a &lt;strong&gt;huge figure&lt;/strong&gt;), what you say is simply not true, at least wrt to the question I mentioned. You can easily check &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1942/fortran&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cap has &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; been applied, was ineffective, even during the 'peak', in the first 2 days all votes were counted, the question has afterwards been gaining rep &lt;strong&gt;ever since Feb 2011&lt;/strong&gt; and (3 and half years later!!!) on Jul 17 last, has reaped a fat score of 25 pts.&#xA;I was shocked to see that in so many years the user has posted no answer and only that single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you may support the current policy or the policy you like. But please acknowledge that if the cap has been useless in this limit case, it is completely useless and the relation is linear, a hard fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you think it is rational or fair, I respect your ideas. It is mainly a problem of &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;: if you had called (like other sites) LIKES it would be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they called it REPUTATION, when a reader sees an answer signed by a 2000-Rep member, he has the right to know that the member is a great scholar that has given loads of intelligent/competent answers etc., and not to be misled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;limiting the rep cap further would hurt the prolific users who post&#xA;  many small things every day that get upvoted perhaps twice or thrice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let get this straight: I have never criticized the cap, I am not concerned. To make my proposal clear and banal: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for each Question/ Answer-to-the-question (x 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1-10 votes  =&gt; 5 pt. every vote, &#xA;11-100 votes =&gt; 1 pt. every 5 votes, &#xA;101-1000 votes =&gt; 1 pt. every 100 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By these criteria the quoted question  would get a respectable score of &lt;strong&gt;70 pts.&lt;/strong&gt;, and its most voted answer &lt;strong&gt;140&lt;/strong&gt;. But this is just a silly example.&#xA;I hope you do not mind this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my last update, as there seems to be some confusion and misunderstanding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I really don't see why &lt;strong&gt;you dislike that question&lt;/strong&gt; so much.&#xA;  ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if it is the case that you believe that the members here that&#xA;  actively answer questions do it primarily for reputation points,&#xA;  perhaps it is time &lt;strong&gt;to check your premises&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, the silly question &lt;strong&gt;attracted a lot more people&lt;/strong&gt; to the website,&#xA;  that is also worth something. Also, for&amp;lt;2k rep you also get awarded&#xA;  for editting questions. &lt;strong&gt;I do not really see&lt;/strong&gt; the problem you are trying&#xA;  to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These ,and many others, are unwarranted conclusions you are jumping to. I think I expressed my view in a clear way: if one reads an answer signed by a rep-4000 member one doesn't know if he is a great scholar who gave lots of competent answer or he just gave one single answer to tell that if you want to cool off your coffee you have to stir it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that downvotes in the Meta just indicate disagreement with your&#xA;  views, not that it's a stupid question. I think your question is a&#xA;  perfectly reasonable one, and my downvote indicates only &lt;strong&gt;that I don't&#xA;  agree&lt;/strong&gt; with your view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a post has a tag &quot;discussion&quot; you should argument your dissent, the up/down vote is&#xA;a lazy solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T05:44:59.577" Title="Is it wise to keep the relation between votes and rep linear?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2014-08-11T10:57:46.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relationship between votes and reputation is indeed nonlinear. This is implemented by means of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reputation cap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which restricts the total reputation you can get from upvotes&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; during one day&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; to 200 rep. This is designed to prevent exactly that problem; you should note that this is a lot worse on sites like StackOverflow with a lot more traffic than us. This is a lot more nonlinear than a logarithmic relation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9KT93.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mathematica graphics&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes a long way towards curbing the 'bandwagon' effect that you note. When questions and answers go viral, they get a lot of their votes in a short period, and this stops the worst of the effect. Consider, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/121905/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the mass-of-a-coin question, and note the number of votes that did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; accrue the poster any rep, despite the considerable effort that went into that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/47tS3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the rep cap works fairly well at its job. Admittedly, the rep level of the cap (i.e. 200) is tuned for sites like StackOverflow with a lot more traffic, but it tends to work well here, particularly because it's very rare for users to post more than one wonder-hit question or answer without actually deserving a good bit of rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to see the real effect of the rep cap, you should use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/204782/top-users-by-reputation-with-rep-cap-and-member-for-days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Stack Exchange Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt;, which gives all the users that have hit the rep cap, ordered by how many times they have done so. If you find the days when they did, you will mostly see very good answers that deserved a good bit of rep. Having a lower rep cap would only make it harder to get rep by posting good content. Having the sort of nonlinear relation you propose would also make it harder to do exactly that - instead, it would reward merely &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/45/nice-answer&quot;&gt;nice&lt;/a&gt; answers instead of the really &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/great-answer&quot;&gt;great&lt;/a&gt; ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;This excludes bounties and answer accepts, which are reasonable enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Midnight-to-midnight on UTC time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T17:07:38.997" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="38" CreationDate="2014-08-11T11:07:51.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This thread is (as of August 2014) pretty outdated. This site's official homework policy is found at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For recent discussions about possible changes to this policy, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework&quot;&gt;Bite-sizing homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t we just ban homework altogether?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;Banning homework: vote and documentation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5229/does-banning-homework-do-long-term-harm-for-only-short-term-gain&quot;&gt;Does banning homework do long-term harm for only short-term gain?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5488/a-week-of-community-closing-what-should-be-disallowed-homework&quot;&gt;A week of community closing: what should be disallowed homework?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5372/2751&quot;&gt;Can we please stop applying the homework tag (and policy) to very advanced questions?&lt;/a&gt;, and links therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, also, that as of July 30 2014, math.SE has &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16425/fate-of-the-homework-tag-the-community-voted-now-what&quot;&gt;banned the (homework) tag&lt;/a&gt;, though homework questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question&quot;&gt;apparently still on-topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T11:59:24.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2014-08-11T16:53:34.567" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me specifically address the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon&quot;&gt;Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon&lt;/a&gt;. This is an atypical example and should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be taken as a prototype for policies affecting the whole site. The fact that something funny is going on there is immediately evident from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1942/fortran?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;the OP's reputation graph&lt;/a&gt; (which gives directly the rep he got from it as he has no other posts):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CodW3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there are two distinct events where the OP reached the rep cap, separated by over two years. This is highly unsusual. A good tool to dig a bit deeper is to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/5265/timeline&quot;&gt;the post's timeline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. On that day, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon#comment176355_5510&quot;&gt;pointed out by Manishearth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/71/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the thread was linked to on what-if.xkcd&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having such a link is usually the cue for an avalanche of votes and that is indeed what happened. However, I'm actually quite surprised that even a link that big poured so little rep into the site. I actually think this is good evidence that we should keep things as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I really don't see why you dislike that question so much. It is a well-phrased, properly-posed question about an interesting everyday phenomenon, and it is without a doubt one of our better entry-points into the site for the physics-interested public. Plus, its answer is a model of responding to idle queries with the appropriate experimentation instead of further idle speculation. The OP did get a fair bit of rep from a flashy question, but he has not made any misuse of his moderation privileges since - and indeed has not been seen on the site since accepting Rhodes' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I really don't think you can use this post as a model for the rest of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Post timelines are a useful but undocumented tool. To see them, go to physics.stackexchange.com/ posts/####/timeline, where &lt;code&gt;####&lt;/code&gt; is the post ID. For more info see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36303/feedback-request-new-timeline-question-view&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and for why it's only accessible this way see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/180594/184688&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T16:53:34.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2014-08-12T00:58:14.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suppose &lt;strong&gt;everyone&lt;/strong&gt; will agree that it is utterly unfair that a member&#xA;  who works hard for months asking, anwering, editing etc. hundreds of&#xA;  posts reaches say, 500 pts. of rep, while another one, just asking a&#xA;  rather silly but viral question, gets 3 times as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You suppose incorrectly since, at least, &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; do not agree and I suspect that many active participants here don't agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, if it is the case that you believe that the members here that actively answer questions &lt;em&gt;do it primarily for reputation points&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps it is time &lt;em&gt;to check your premises&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider that, in fact, those that actively answer questions here have relatively little concern that someone else &quot;gets 3 times as much&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What concerns &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; most, and I suspect this holds for many here, &lt;em&gt;is that the question is interesting and that the process of focusing my thoughts to answer the question is profitable &lt;strong&gt;in itself&lt;/strong&gt;, regardless of the up-votes my answer gets.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, up-votes are nice but do consider the possibility that they are not the primary concern to, shall we say, the &lt;em&gt;adults&lt;/em&gt; that participate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update to address edited question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think I expressed my view in a clear way: if one reads an answer&#xA;  signed by a rep-4000 member &lt;strong&gt;one doesn't know&lt;/strong&gt; if he is a great scholar&#xA;  who gave lots of competent answer &lt;strong&gt;or he just gave one single answer&lt;/strong&gt; to&#xA;  tell that if you want to cool off your coffee you have to stir it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can simply click on the user name at the bottom of the answer which takes one to the user's profile page where one can readily determine if the user is a 'one hit wonder' or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WDwCl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2014-08-12T12:09:15.217" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T12:09:15.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2014-08-12T05:59:32.453" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes a fairly highly motivated person to put in all that effort to learn physics, and in general highly motivated people are going to be competitive. That means no matter how much we claim reputation doesn't really matter, the reality is that it is an important motivator. Hence the enthusiastic response to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless REPUTATION DOESN'T REALLY MATTER!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expending lots of effort in trying to formulate the perfect reputation system is like trying to formulate the perfect electoral system. It's an entertaining pastime, but it's a doomed quest because there is no such perfect system. As long as the system mostly works well most of the time that's good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one point of bobie's that I think warrants close inspection is the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if one reads an answer signed by a rep-4000 member one doesn't know if he is a great scholar who gave lots of competent answer or he just gave one single answer to tell that if you want to cool off your coffee you have to stir it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the key thing about the Physics SE is that we don't just give answers, we give explanations. A good answer will not only give the final result but also explain the working to get that result and possibly also some of the broader principles involved. The way you judge the worth of an answer is whether it's been clearly enough explained that you can understand it, and not by the reputation of the answerer. If you don't understand an answer, but accept it anyway because the anwerer has a high reputation, you are doing both yourself and this site a disservice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T05:59:32.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-08-12T17:04:45.827" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We should vote to close “Insufficient Effort” questions.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Offered bare to take a poll&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51994" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T17:04:45.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-08-12T17:06:53.337" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We should downvote “Insufficient Effort” questions, but not vote to close&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Offered bare to take a poll&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51994" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T17:06:53.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-12T18:15:23.170" Score="0" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;I up-voted a Luboš Motl answer and thought I might be the first to humbly see his score the first to tick over past 100K. But it seems to be stuck on 99,996.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the system has gone haywire over a few people thinking the same as me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T05:20:19.303" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T05:20:19.303" Title="Why is Luboš Motl's reputation stuck at 99,996?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-08-12T18:36:34.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who are unaware, particularly unloved questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006&quot;&gt;automatically deleted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question with a -1 score or lower and no answers gets deleted in 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that is closed (not as duplicate), has no answers with score &gt;0 (or accepted) and has not been edited in 9 days is deleted after 9 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in terms of keeping the site clean, for a majority of the types of questions  we are talking about, the difference is getting it deleted only 21 days sooner if we vote to close rather than downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that is enough of a benefit to argue against the intrinsic subjectivity that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6003/51994&quot;&gt;Jim mentions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51994" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T18:36:34.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6053" CreationDate="2014-08-12T23:27:31.393" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had to compute a Laurent series, and happened to obtain a correct result by certain manipulations that mathematicians (and even many physicists) would completely disapprove. I suspected that there must be a deeper reason for this, and asked it in Math. SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/894704/an-outrageous-way-to-derive-a-laurent-series-why-does-this-work&quot;&gt;An outrageous way to derive a Laurent series: why does this work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, in one of the comments, it has been brought up that physicists may have better insights to this kind of issue. I agreed with this suggestion, and considered posting the same question in Phys. SE; however, I thought it may be off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what are other members' opinions on whether I should copy-paste this question to Phys. SE or leave it in Math. SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T00:24:44.957" Title="What would be a reasonable way to gain attention of Phys. SE members on a question I posted in Math. SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6051" CreationDate="2014-08-12T23:37:55.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it has no connection to physics, it can stay where it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because some physicists are good at getting the right answers by the wrong means, this does not mean that we are the ones to ask for such means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;list of on-topics&lt;/a&gt; (not an actual term) lists &lt;em&gt;pure mathematics&lt;/em&gt; only in the presence of physics. If there's no physical motivation for what you want to compute and how you compute it, I would vote to migrate such a question to math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the matter of drawing attention to your question on physics.SE, I believe you just achieved that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T23:37:55.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6051" CreationDate="2014-08-12T23:49:44.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably the best way to draw attention to a question on another site is to post a link in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a meta post which happens to link to the question (as you did) also does achieve that result. But (for future posters) if there's nothing more to the post than &quot;check out this question on another site,&quot; I don't think that's a good use of meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T00:04:32.190" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T00:04:32.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6051" CreationDate="2014-08-13T00:24:44.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Side note: There are certain cases (this is probably not one of them, as mentioned elsewhere, since it is &lt;em&gt;pure&lt;/em&gt; math) where a question can be on topic on two different sites, and moreover the ways of looking at the question are significantly different between the two fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, once you have responses on one site you may want to post (a possibly reworded variant of) the question on a second site, in order to get a different perspective. However, you should make sure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It really is on topic on the site;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are interested in different approaches, not just in having a different group of people verify what has already been done;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You link to the old question, so new answerers are aware of what has been said and don't duplicate any work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I would avoid cross-posting simultaneously; post once, get some feedback, then post somewhere else if warranted. Also note that it is all too easy to abuse cross-posting. If you only are looking for one answer, any answer, then pushing your query to multiple communities merely to improve the odds of getting an answer is frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note most of what I say here is for future visitors who come across this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T00:24:44.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6049" CreationDate="2014-08-13T05:19:47.920" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to confess I did exactly the same (my apologies to DavidZ) with the same lack of effect. However I see Luboš is now on 100,026 so we have our first 100k user! Congratulations to Luboš (he said through gritted teeth :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T05:19:47.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-08-13T23:54:46.390" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to consider is that it is very frustrating when you're in the process of writing an answer, put quite some effort in it, and then you find that it has been closed in the mean time, and all your effort was wasted (and possibly another frustration if it gets reopened later and you recognize that you should have copied your text somewhere to save it, but didn't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such frustration in tendency drives away people willing and able to answer, or at least makes them put less effort into their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when considering to close, always keep in mind that you not only affect the one who asks, but also those who answer. While the effect on the questions will likely be higher quality, the effect on the answers will likely be lower quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7142" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T23:54:46.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2014-08-14T17:32:51.727" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, this is not a homework help site, so I don't see what all the fuss is about here. People who post questions should not have to put in any effort attempting to answer their own questions. What is helpful is if they can formulate their questions clearly enough for it to be addressed properly (which may in some cases imply that the poster does have to put in some effort, but this really depends on the question that is asked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To deal with the problem of students who abuse this site to get their homework done by us, other measures need to be taken. If someone frequently posts questions about the same topic that are all suspiciously homework like problems then one can ask the poster to stop asking questions about that topic and block the account if the poster refuses to comply with this demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Students should, however, be free to post homework questions here, but they should be honest about this and in that case it is reasoanble to demand that the student shows a significant amount of effort. But it is unreasonbable for this site that it not primarily a homework helo site to treat every question as if it were a homework question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T17:32:51.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-14T20:02:38.673" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently found this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12784/fractals-in-physics-suggest-book-titles&quot;&gt;Fractals in physics. Suggest book titles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is currently deleted (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FMCTR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;). I'm not sure it's a great question but it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/16686/fractals-in-physics-suggest-book-titles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seems to matter to some people&lt;/a&gt;. When it was closed it was off-topic by the then-current &lt;code&gt;books&lt;/code&gt; policy, but it is now a fixable question. I'm not sure why it was deleted - is there something I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, this question should be undeleted, have the books banner added, and have its answers collected into the usual CW collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T19:29:09.330" Title="Books for fractals in physics - question undelete" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|deleted-questions|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6062" CreationDate="2014-08-14T21:05:57.927" Score="15" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a proposal that has been discussed to some extent in the h bar chat (especially with @ACuriousMind and @alemi), and a meta post to gauge the response of the rest of the community is long overdue, so here we go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All long-time SE users are aware that there are always a number of questions that come up again and again. Physics.SE is no different in this respect: Who hasn’t sighed at the sight of yet another variation of the twin paradox from SRT? This is a proposal to try to deal with this phenomenon in a thorough way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;: We, as a community, create a set of ‘canonical questions’, well written and comprehensive questions which cover the essential points of questions that come up frequently. These canonical questions must have a &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt; of good answers. The answers to the canonical questions should address the questions at different level, with answers ideally ranging from high school to graduate school (and up!) level, where possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main ways that these canonical questions can be created. Firstly, we can edit existing popular questions (many candidate canonical questions can be found in the ‘frequent’ tab of questions) to make them more comprehensive, and add more/improve existing answers so they become even more useful. Secondly, we can make a couple of new questions with the express purpose of canonizing them. This would be similar to what John Rennie did &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/how-long-would-it-take-me-to-travel-to-a-distant-star&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, except with more answers, and perhaps a more thorough formulation of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody interested should probably scan these relevant blog posts: (thanks, alemi, for the excellent research):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and most recently, one that seems very encouraging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/putting-the-community-back-in-wiki/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/putting-the-community-back-in-wiki/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I am mainly looking for answers that address the following questions: Do you think we need this, and is it worth the effort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reception in chat was quite positive, but maybe some of you have reasons to believe that this might be a bad idea, or perhaps just too much effort…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: We initially considered using the ‘faq’ tag - but DavidZ has made it clear that this tag should not be used, because it really should be burninated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T15:03:10.353" Title="Do we want and need a set of canonical questions with canonical answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|site-faq|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2014-08-15T00:47:40.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've already got one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/how-long-would-it-take-me-to-travel-to-a-distant-star&quot;&gt;How long would it take me to travel to a distant star?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Rennie posted that because there wasn't a good covers everything answer (if I recall correctly, if this is wrong, please correct me) about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be okay with these types of questions &amp;amp; answers, but I think that they should be made a &lt;strong&gt;community wiki&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T00:47:40.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2014-08-15T10:00:45.547" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no objection to the proposal so I'm not going to vote it down, however I'm not sure how well this is going to work in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the Q/A of mine that you link, I wrote this mainly for personal reasons. I had finally got around to working though the analysis of acceleration in Chapter 6 of Gravitation and was feeling really proud that I'd successfully worked through all the derivations that the authors assume are obvious. It was on this wave of smugness that I decided I just had to share my new found understanding. While I'd like to say it was to create a valuable resource for the site, this was a fringe benefit rather than a prime motivator. I have several times linked the question as a duplicate, but only &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; times, not hundreds of times, so I'm not sure it's made that much difference to the day to day working of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that I think we'll only get really good Q/A blogettes if someone decides they're on a mission to write them. I'm not sure that trying to draw up a list of potential subjects will work. Certainly, my response to being handed some random subject to write a Q/A on would be lukewarm at best. Particularly if it was going to be a Community article and I wouldn't even get any rep points for my efforts (the Q/A I wrote took me the better part of a whole day if you include all the tinkering with trial calculations in spreadsheets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it would be great to see more of this type of Q/A I think we should leave it to people to decide that they just can't live without writing about their current obsession. By all means provide encouragement, but I just don't think writing by committee will produce great articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, a Q/A about time dilation and the twin paradox has been simmering away in a corner of my mind for some time now ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T10:00:45.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6060" CreationDate="2014-08-16T08:55:44.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s physics. There are not so much repeated (actually) questions, but there are several topics prone to misconceptions, such as:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Time and mass in Special Relativity.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Electric charge vs electric potential.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Field potential vs field strength (mainly E-M and gravity).&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Charge carriers in conductors and semiconductors – a bunch of misconceptions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Mass number of a nucleus vs its mass vs the atom’s mass.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Temperature vs energy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Singularity of the spacetime vs event horizon.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Field superposition vs quantum superposition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Coherent quantum superposition vs mixed states (statistical superposition).&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • State vector reduction a.k.a. wave function collapse – a bunch of misconceptions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Transition between quantum states.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Continuous operator spectrum and eigenvectors/eigenfunctions/eigenstates.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • Composite particles and the size of a particle – a bunch of misconceptions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Although such misconceptions are known to develop with a high probability, we can’t predict in which exactly form such a misconception will be submitted as a question.&#xA;Why don’t have an index of misconceptions with brief explanations and links to relevant educational resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56960" LastActivityDate="2014-08-16T08:55:44.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-19T13:47:33.030" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the proper format to ask debunking questions without being marked as off-topic, yet be able to step through the entire theory logically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I am looking at Wallace Kluck's claim on &lt;a href=&quot;http://decuity.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;decuity.com&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Light is an inertial particle not a wave.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rotating electron is treated as a charged ring with its radius as the radius of gyration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Total kinetic energy is divided equally into linear kinetic energy or rotational kinetic energy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The total kinetic energy, linear and rotational, of each particle increases to mc^2 while the charge of the electron decreases to zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall theory looks simple, I just need better minds than mine to help elucidate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57527" OwnerDisplayName="miniscule" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-08-20T02:41:06.970" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T07:20:32.207" Title="How to ask debunking questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-19T23:06:32.050" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this the preferred page to comment or ask questions about management issues (editing, deleting, culture, etc.) with the Physics-stackexchange.com site?  Or is there a more direct path to communicate with the administrators/monitors/managers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56561" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T03:07:23.383" Title="How to address comments/questions to the site's operatives?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6066" CreationDate="2014-08-19T23:11:56.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;With 15 rep you can flag posts&lt;/a&gt; with a custom flag reason, and there is always the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;contact us&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; link at the bottom of every page to contact the operators of the Stack Exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your current rep range you can post to meta but not issue flags, so your choices are limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that you have only one post on the main site, and it has been deleted---by me, none-the-less---some I'm going to guess that this is the cause of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are a bit different from a lot of other sites on the internet.&#xA;We use a &quot;question &amp;amp; answer&quot; model instead of a &quot;threaded conversation&quot; model, and you should not post a followup question &quot;under&quot; an existing question. Those &quot;under&quot; posts are called &quot;answers&quot; and should only be used to &lt;em&gt;answer the question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a different question you should use the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;ASK QUESTION&lt;/a&gt;&quot; button at the top of the page. You can certainly link to the previous question to explain your motivation if you think that is helpful (keeping in mind that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;until you have 10 rep you can only put two links in a single post&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T23:17:34.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2014-08-20T02:50:06.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to say that questions of this sort are off topic, period. Remember that this is an &quot;expert-level&quot; site, not in the sense of being limited to professional physicists or anything like that, but we expect that any question asked should display a certain level of, shall I say, not being total nonsense. Even if the total nonsense originates from someone else and you're merely trying to make sense of it, I still think that falls outside our scope. Distinguishing crackpot theories from real ones is not what we do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can certainly ask on chat if anyone would perform such an analysis in return for a fee or an external reward - but of course such an arrangement would be entirely separate from this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T02:50:06.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6066" CreationDate="2014-08-20T03:07:23.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this the preferred page to comment or ask questions about management issues (editing, deleting, culture, etc.) with the Physics-stackexchange.com site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is exactly the place to ask general questions about why posts are edited or deleted and about the site culture, because you can get the answers from other users of the site. You don't need to contact an administrator or moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think someone's post is inappropriate, or you have reason to believe another member is engaging in behavior that is not allowed, you should generally flag the relevant post instead of posting here on meta. Flagging requires that you have 15 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or is there a more direct path to communicate with the administrators/monitors/managers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should know that there are two levels of oversight for Stack Exchange sites. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; are members of the site who have been elected to clean up obsolete or gibberish posts, handle disputes, and so on. The flags I mentioned above are processed by the moderators, so if you want to bring a post to our attention, flagging is the way to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above the moderators are the Stack Exchange team. Under most circumstances, you don't need to contact them directly. If you do need to for some reason, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T03:07:23.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2014-08-20T08:45:10.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are (at least) a couple of reasons why working physicists feel little motivation for debunking articles like the one you link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the believers of such articles typically hold such beliefs for reasons unrelated to physics - e.g. they like to believe in conspiracy theories, or that they are being persecuted. That means arguing with them is futile.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it's easy to come up with a farrago of plausible physical terms, but it's much harder and takes a lot of effort to detangle it and demonstrate why it's wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess the general view (it's certainly my view) is that if people want to learn about physics we're happy to go out of our way to help. But if all they want is to have their own views vindicated then, well, it's a free world but they're on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you're thinking about asking a question, consider whether the answer would require us to go off and read the web site. If it would, then your question has no place here. On the other hand if you want to ask a question about physics that we can answer without having to go off and read some crackpot website then please go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T08:45:10.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-20T12:40:18.510" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators @Qmechanic and @dmckee marked it as a duplicate, but it is not so (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32498/how-is-angular-momentum-measured-in-experiments-in-practice#comment268412_32498&quot;&gt;How is angular momentum measured in experiments/in practice?&lt;/a&gt; ). Linked questions are restricted to &lt;strong&gt;fundamental&lt;/strong&gt; particles, whereas angular momentum is a concept applicable to any system. I now can’t post an answer about composite particles (currently at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11197/how-does-one-experimentally-determine-chirality-helicity-spin-and-angular-mome/131711&quot;&gt;How does one experimentally determine chirality, helicity, spin and angular momentum of a fundamental particle?&lt;/a&gt; ) into &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56960" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T12:50:37.017" Title="Reopen the «How is angular momentum measured in experiments/in practice?» topic" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2014-08-20T19:04:02.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6446/the-schwarzschild-proton-paper-is-the-science-valid&quot;&gt;entertained debunking questions before&lt;/a&gt;, but the community has become steadily more opposed to them over time. I don't think you're going to get a lot of support right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem is that there is no limit to how many there could be and none of them have a lot of value going into the future. They just don't add to the repository of quality answers to good questions that we are trying to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T07:20:32.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6071" CreationDate="2014-08-21T12:50:37.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the marked duplicates cover well enough the intent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32498/how-is-angular-momentum-measured-in-experiments-in-practice&quot;&gt;the question you mentioned&lt;/a&gt;. They are indeed slightly more focused, but there's nothing in the closed one to indicate the level of generality that's being requested. Opening it up because it sort-of also covers composite particles would mean that the question really asked 'how is angular momentum measured in &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; conceivable experimental system', and that is really much too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a good answer and you want to find a good home for it, you should note that &lt;strong&gt;it is perfectly OK to ask a question and answer it&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, many of our best questions were written this way, because this gets past the fact that the questioner often doesn't know enough about the topic to ask the really interesting questions. For some samples see the ≲1k results in &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/revision/219610/287619/self-answers-that-were-self-answered-from-the-start&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Self answers that were self-answered from the start&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T12:50:37.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-21T18:57:59.867" Score="2" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the case of a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/131738/44176&quot;&gt;Explanation for this type of (magic-trick) suspension? (on hold)&lt;/a&gt; (of course not the only one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five people (a moderator among them) voted to close the question, which had an (accepted) answer and plus was highly up-voted (let me note in bold &lt;strong&gt;by members of this site&lt;/strong&gt;) which were an order of magnitufe more than the five people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some brief comments with the moderator (@DavidZ) after the issue was raised (by me @NikosM, who btw did not post an answer). It was mentioned that posts may be off-topic regardless of how many up-votes they have. i replied, shortly, that certainly the people who up-voted do not consider this to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems a &lt;strong&gt;very serious issue here&lt;/strong&gt;, especially when (as you can see in the screenshot below) there is &lt;strong&gt;no way provided for (other) members to request or vote for re-opening&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dINky.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44176" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T20:55:42.507" Title="Issue when people who close a question are (an order of magnitude) less than those who accepted and up-voted question and answers" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6075" CreationDate="2014-08-21T19:24:59.280" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;privilege of voting to close and/or reopen&lt;/a&gt; is gained at 3000 reputuation. At the time of this writing, there are 132 such users, most active on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for restricting the privilege is that wisdom in guiding the site comes from experience. In particular, as users spend more time here, they realize that &lt;strong&gt;not all interesting questions belong here&lt;/strong&gt;. This is not Quora, where anything and everything can be asked. New or very casual users do tend to vote based on the sole criterion &quot;Did this pique my interest?&quot; Those of us who've been around for a while know that just allowing any and all questions that pique someone's interest would dilute the quality away from our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;stated purpose&lt;/a&gt; of being &quot;a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the site guidelines even differentiate between up/downvotes and close/reopen votes. We vote to close because of &lt;strong&gt;off-topicness&lt;/strong&gt;, we downvote because &quot;&lt;strong&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to keep in mind: after 5 close votes come in, the question is closed and no more may be cast. Thus it is entirely possible, and indeed likely, that more would have voted to close than just those first 5. Furthermore, while the question is in the close vote queue, those of us who can cast such votes are given the option of voting to leave open. In this case, not enough 3k users thought the question should be left open, but that possibility does indeed exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T19:24:59.280" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6075" CreationDate="2014-08-21T19:43:21.330" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the issue can be summed up into a single sentence (a paraphrase of DavidZ's comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Votes do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; reflect the on-topicness of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attention the post received was because discerning the source of magic tricks is a popular topic among the populace. This question is not actually about physics, it is about determining how a magic trick is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T20:55:42.507" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T20:55:42.507" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6075" CreationDate="2014-08-21T19:54:30.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in my comment, regardless of whether or not people liked the question in question, and regardless of its on-topicness, the question should still have been closed as having been primarily opinion based. A magician's illusions can be explained by physics, but first one needs to know exactly how an illusion is performed. So without the magician revealing his secrets (and I'm led to believe there's a common saying indicating they generally don't), we can only speculate what possible methods are used to enact the illusion. This means that any answers would be based on the answerer's opinion of what possible methods were used. And although very liked, questions whose answers are primarily based on opinion are not a good fit for the site and should be closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T19:54:30.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6075" CreationDate="2014-08-21T23:15:15.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to argue that the question (as phrased in the last paragraph) had a clear physics-based character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So the question is : Is this &lt;strong&gt;related to the electrical charge of a magnet&lt;/strong&gt; or a cheap trick ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer that was posted (which got 33 votes as of the time I write this) exposed it as &quot;most likely a cheap trick&quot; - but this was speculation, and I agree could be argued as off topic for the site (because not about the physics of the situation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I would argue that the answer which I posted (17 votes at the time of writing) explores the physics of the question: &quot;could this be done with electrical charges or with magnets?&quot; The community seems to believe that I did an OK job estimating whether this could be done, and rewarded me with a rep-cap day...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an answer such as mine had not been posted after a day or two, I could understand the question being closed; but as it is, I have sympathy for Nikos's position that this seems like a strange decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T23:15:15.780" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6075" CreationDate="2014-08-22T03:35:06.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that popularity and on-topicness are orthogonal, but in this case I think the question as asked was reasonably enough on topic.  There is perhaps a valid issue due to all answers would necessarily be speculation, but that doesn't take away from the physicsness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically the question is how a trick was done, which you can argue is off topic if you really want to on the grounds of speculation.  However, with the minor modification of asking whether the physics of magnetism or electrostatics could be applied to create the observed effect, it would be clearly on topic.  This was what the asker was asking, and what Floris answered in a excellent way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of how this question would have been perceived if indeed electric or magnetic fields turned out to be plasible explanations.  I doubt there would have been much objection.  It seems unfair that we are closing a honest question only because the answer &lt;i&gt;turned out&lt;/i&gt; not to require much physics.  However, the asker didn't know that, this being essentially his question.  Those that closed the question are basically requiring the asker to have known the answer to the question and thereby know it was off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;i&gt;question&lt;/i&gt; was therefore reasonable.  If my answer, which didn't contain any real physics, were the only one after a couple of days or so, I could see the point in closing the question and have it eventually be automatically purged from the site.  However, we ended up with a great discussion of the physics that showed how the observed phenomenon could not be the result of magnetic and electric fields.  That seems just as valid to me as the same physics analisys in a different situation showing that it is possible.  A negative result is still a valid and useful result.  It's still good physics analisys whether the result shows something is or isn't possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the question instead showed a photograph of one of those pens being suspended in air in a special pen holder, and the question asked how that was done?  I doubt anyone would feel that was off topic.  Floris' answer would be almost the same, except this time the numbers would show that magnetic fields could indeed explain the observed phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T03:35:06.927" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2014-08-23T15:13:40.333" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to say I object against the tag in general, but current wording and practices seem inconsistent to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s start from the upper constrain. First of all, where the wording “research-level questions should not require new or groundbreaking research and results to answer” came from? I quote the current (August 23, 2014) tag description, and I do not see where was it discussed. Of course, it would not be reasonable to expect that one would make a &lt;em&gt;groundbreaking&lt;/em&gt; research only to answer a question posted at an Internet site. But using some amount of original research, or possibly results of some researches that are underway (but, say, are not published) shouldn’t be discouraged. Here is not Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the lower constrain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A]nswer is not blindingly obvious to someone who has completed a graduate core curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, “blindingly obvious” questions may not be labelled as research-level. But there are many questions, even about everyday life, that are far from being blindingly obvious even for a scientist with a degree. Should &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; non-obvious questions become research-level? I think most of them shouldn’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I propose to change the formulation to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An unambiguous answer to a research-level question cannot be easily inferred from the body of widely-known and available scientific knowledge expressed in literary form&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;(I mean textbooks, research-level books and papers, Wikipedia and other reputable Web resources…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know my English is awkward, but I hope there will be wordsmiths who will improve the proposed wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56960" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T15:13:40.333" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-08-23T20:04:44.767" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.qiqqa.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z9tAx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Qiqqa: Essential software for PDF and research management&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T20:04:44.767" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-08-23T20:04:44.767" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6085" CreationDate="2014-08-24T14:03:25.017" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could not find clarification in help pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, what are the milestones or such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24124" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T14:05:19.433" Title="Does the comment length limit depend on reputation?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6084" CreationDate="2014-08-24T14:05:19.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's 600 characters for every one of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T14:05:19.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6089" CreationDate="2014-08-26T12:43:00.003" Score="5" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to vote to close the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/131799/20848&quot;&gt;How to measure the energy consumption class of a home appliance?&lt;/a&gt; because it is squarely about engineering and not about physics.  However, it told me something like &quot;questions with open bounties can't be closed&quot;.  That seems like a odd rule.  A bounty doesn't change whether something is off topic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the point is that it would be wrong to force the bounty to be wasted, but if that is really the intent then the bounty could be refunded when the question is closed.  Actually in this case I think it could be migrated to EE, but that doesn't change the fact that it is off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a unintended interaction, or is there really a logical reason behind this that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T13:40:26.993" Title="Can't close question with open bounty?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2014-08-26T12:47:04.307" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mods can cancel (refund) the bounty and close it. If enough people agree, I'll do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T12:47:04.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2014-08-26T13:33:25.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allowing the community to refund bounties would enable some ways to exploit the bounty system. If the reputation was removed entirely when a question is closed, it would allow users to directly impact the reputation of another user in a rather large way. Not to speak of  the edge case when a question gets then reopened. If the bounty was refunded, this would allow users to gain the attention for their question a bounty brings, and then avoid paying for it by getting it closed before the bounty runs out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation is pretty rare because bad questions are usually closed in the first two days, and bounties can only be started after that time. Because of the low volume and the rather large consequences the decision has, letting only moderators make these decisions is the safest way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T13:33:25.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2014-08-26T13:40:26.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Checked on meta.SE, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/121448/262980&quot;&gt;Allow users to vote to close bountied questions&lt;/a&gt; and related posts therein. It makes sense. Essentially, it says that a bounty is a contract that offers additional exposure for additional reputation. Refunding a bounty should only be done in extraordinary circumstances and that exactly falls under the purview of moderator actions. It further says that having a VTC system set-up that auto-generates a moderator flag is a lot of work for something that is seldom seen. Bounties can be used to keep bad questions open, but it isn't frequent enough to necessitate new features. It is infrequent enough that it again is something aptly suited for the custom mod-flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But about the question in question, I agree it's not really about physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T13:40:26.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-26T18:00:23.437" Score="-4" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this might be unusual since people usually ask the opposite question, but I simply have to ask this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/132114/can-a-superhuman-move-so-fast-as-to-be-invisible&quot;&gt;Can a human size object move so fast that it ceases to be observable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really think that this question belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; (maybe &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://biology.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; since it also includes the neuroscience tag). Also I think it should have been put on hold in order to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;It's about perception.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the question wants to know whether &quot;regular audiences&quot; or a &quot;normal person&quot; can see it or not, the author isn't asking whether it's detectable by other physical means. To be fair, there are some physical considerations that we have to worry about here but I can't see how a physicist could conclude the issue, it has to come to the issue of human visual perception and that's not physics. The visual system is far from an idealized camera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) The questions is badly posed.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the title is very misleading, it's clearly not about the moving object, it's about the observer. And I don't see how it helps if the object is superhuman and if we have the exact dimensions of the space in which the superhuman is confined. The motion is practically arbitrary, only limited by special relativity and the object's only limitation is it's approximate size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can safely say that the question can be translated into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it possible for an everyday-sized easily visible object to evade human visual perception by moving sufficiently fast in a confined space?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you put it this way, I think it's even more clear that a physicist cannot give a final word here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20250" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:15.457" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T01:47:04.650" Title="Why wasn't this question moved or put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-26T22:24:37.127" Score="5" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to ask a question on the website today when I saw a message saying: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have only ever asked 2 questions, one with 3 upvotes and one with 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26406" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T22:24:37.127" Title="Bad Question Warning" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-08-28T00:25:26.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6090" CreationDate="2014-08-27T01:47:04.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question wasn't moved or put on hold because the community consensus is that it is on topic and reasonably well written. (bearing in mind that &quot;reasonably well written&quot; in this context is not a particularly high bar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think what you really want to know is why other people don't agree with you that the question is off topic and/or badly posed. For starters, it's not clear that the original poster was asking about the behavior of the human visual system. Sure, there are allusions to human sight, but that's not a clear indicator that the question is about perception. From the perspective of a layperson, there are (at least) two possible reasons a fast-moving object might be invisible: the amount of light it reflects may be diminished because of its motion, or the human eye might be incapable of picking up that reflected light. The latter of these is a matter of perception, sure, but the former is physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases like these where a question is partly about physics and partly not, it often takes just a minor edit to refocus the question primarily on the physical aspects, and that's preferable to going through the whole hold-edit-reopen cycle. You may notice that the title has been edited in exactly that manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T01:47:04.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6097" CreationDate="2014-08-28T06:31:20.557" Score="30" ViewCount="9428" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's long overdue that I make this post revisiting our policy on &quot;check-my-work&quot; questions. These are questions, often (but not necessarily) homework-like, that present a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; mathematical or logical derivation and ask whether it's correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; has rendered check-my-work questions off topic. However, we're currently in the (very long) process of revisiting that policy. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework&quot;&gt;poll on homework close reasons&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/124&quot;&gt;answer 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5961/124&quot;&gt;answer 2&lt;/a&gt;), the community seems to be generally in favor of keeping such questions off topic, although not &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was brought up in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/check-my-work-chat&quot;&gt;chat session&lt;/a&gt; a while ago that perhaps people would support making only certain kinds of check-my-work questions on topic. When deciding whether a given check-my-work question is on topic, we might take into account factors such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the level of the question (basic or advanced)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how much prior research the asker has demonstrated (have they tried asking colleagues?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether they have a reason to believe they have made a mistake at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether they have an idea of what the mistake might be&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and others to be suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point of this question is to resolve the issue for whenever our homework policy gets revamped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should any kinds of check-my-work questions be on topic?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, how do we distinguish the on-topic ones from the off-topic ones?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T03:50:12.227" LastActivityDate="2022-03-12T18:10:09.543" Title="Should any check-my-work questions be made on topic?" Tags="|discussion|faq|scope|policy|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2014-08-28T13:03:07.417" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll offer up my other view on this since I am undecided in some respects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking of mathematical derivations only should always be off topic. We're not TA's here, we shouldn't need to hold office hours for people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, when people ask a question that really can be rephrased as &quot;Did I include all of the relevant physics?&quot; then I think it's okay. In that sense, even basic questions like the equation of motion for a mass-spring system could be verified -- does gravity matter in the model for example. Obviously higher-level questions would fit into this naturally as they involve more physical concepts that need to be included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, we aren't separating based on &quot;high&quot; or &quot;low&quot; level, which I strongly object to, because these are entirely subjective to the background. I've said it previously -- I never encountered Lagrangians until grad school so in my background, even &quot;basic&quot; questions about deriving one is &quot;graduate&quot; level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, we are deciding based on whether we are &lt;strong&gt;checking that the relevant physics is included&lt;/strong&gt; in the work and we go no further. If all the physics is present but the derivation made a mistake/sign error/math error along the way, take it to office hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T13:03:07.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2014-08-28T14:33:18.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me quote part of the homework-like close reason... Ahem...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Powerful words. So when it comes to checking someone's work, most of the time the question and answer will be specific to that user and not very useful to the broader community. This includes all levels of questions, research-level too. Little Susie's question about what mistake she might have made in question 16.8 of Scherrer's textbook might be off-topic for more reasons than Billy's question about where he went wrong in deriving the equation of state parameter for a universe filled with dark matter that is weakly coupled to gluons and photons, but the fact that they are both too specific to be at all useful to the broader community or future users makes both of them equally off-topic (it's really a binary state, thus &quot;equally&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I did say &quot;most of the time&quot;. Based on that phrasing, it stands to reason that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the time these questions are on-topic. And that's where it get's into a grey area. There's really no easy way of making a catch-all statement for when they are on-topic. If we feel that the question describes a commonly seen method and that the mistake is one that we might expect a lot of people to run into, then I think it is useful to the broader community and that we should give an appropriate answer to what they've done wrong at least once (that is assuming, of course, that the question isn't off-topic or closeable for some reason other than its specificity). But we should make sure to reword the question such that anytime someone else comes along having run into the same problem, we can link to that question as a duplicate (obviously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T14:33:18.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2014-08-28T15:44:54.223" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Check my work&lt;/em&gt; question should always be off-topic. Those that can be rephrased &lt;em&gt;should be rephrased&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Am I right?&quot;, &quot;Is this correct?&quot; or something else is always only of use to people who did the &lt;em&gt;exact same derivation&lt;/em&gt;, and this is definitely &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the bullet points in order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The level of the question should be utterly irrelevant. I have no more desire to correct a multiplication error in a basic kinematics derivation that I have to hunt sign errors in an advanced QFT calculation. Aside from my desire, neither will be of use to people who have not committed the &lt;em&gt;exact same error&lt;/em&gt;, so it is definitely &lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt; either way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking colleagues or anything else like that is nothing we could read. The close-worthiness of a question must not be influenced by a statement like &lt;em&gt;&quot;I asked my prof and he didn't know either&quot;&lt;/em&gt; since we have no way to know whether that is even true or not, or whether that prof even &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have known, etc. Prior research that I would expect is &lt;em&gt;finding out the correct answer (preferably with derivation)&lt;/em&gt; or, if that cannot/has not been done, &lt;em&gt;finding similar problems or techniques&lt;/em&gt; and briefly explaining why they are of no use in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;crucial&lt;/em&gt;. If it is simply &lt;em&gt;&quot;Am I right?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, a probably full and complete answer is &lt;em&gt;&quot;Yes.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which is too short to even submit it as an answer, which shows unequivocally that we as a SE do not want such questions. Asking &lt;em&gt;&quot;Where's the mistake?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is better, but...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only kind of &quot;check my work&quot; I think we should allow is the one where a derivation is presented, leading to a wrong result, and the question is &lt;em&gt;&quot;It seems as if step X is wrong? But it should be right because of Y, so why is this not the case?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. There must be a reasonable explanation (by established physics, of course) of why the derivation is expected to work in the eye of the asker, and then the answer pointing out the flaw in the reasoning can actually be &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;, since the question is then essentially &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why is the physical principle Y not applicable here?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; The question &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; also be edited to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is still possible that questions of the latter type are essentially based on a sign error or somesuch, because we all are sometimes blind. Point it out in a comment, VTC the question (or not, that must probably be left to individual judgement, but that's what the close/reopen queues are for), and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T15:44:54.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2014-08-28T15:55:43.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Check my work&quot; type questions should &lt;strong&gt;remain off topic&lt;/strong&gt; for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They do not ask for clarification of &lt;em&gt;physics concepts&lt;/em&gt;, they ask for clarification on the &lt;em&gt;mathematical solution&lt;/em&gt; to a &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/25301&quot;&gt;&quot;How do I as homework question&quot; post&lt;/a&gt;, it states that Physics.StackExchange&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is not primarily a homework help site&lt;/strong&gt;; it's a place to get specific &lt;strong&gt;conceptual physics questions&lt;/strong&gt; answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question will likely only help the original poster and not future visitors to the site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is likely &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; true for the more advanced topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is likely that some of these &quot;Check my work&quot; questions can be reformulated to be an on-topic question, e.g. reworded so as to fit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5963/25301&quot;&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;I was working on X and didn't understand why Y isn't the case&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt; criterion. However, note that changing the question ourselves would constitute a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6012/25301&quot;&gt;drastic change&lt;/a&gt; in the intent/meaning of the question, which should be left for the OP to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T15:55:43.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2014-08-28T17:01:50.347" Score="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the stated goal of the site is to provide a knowledge base, and I know that every time I rant on about the importance of teaching I get told that isn't the main purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless I think teaching is important, and doing worked examples is an important part of teaching. I'm not saying I want the site to fill up with posts asking how to do a worked example, but I think answering such questions can illustrate important concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A blatant &quot;spot my deliberate mistake&quot; question is always going to be off topic, but I would urge site members to consider whether the mistake is conceptual rather than arithmetical. If it's a conceptual mistake I think there is some justification for answering the question as long as your answer is mainly concerned with the concepts involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T17:01:50.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-08-29T06:10:11.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twis.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qX4Jd.png&quot; alt=&quot;This Week in Science – The Kickass Science Podcast &quot; title=&quot;The Kickass Science Podcast&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6292" LastActivityDate="2014-08-29T06:10:11.543" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-08-29T06:10:11.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6103" CreationDate="2014-08-29T15:07:52.207" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;is there a way I can close my own question once I have received a satisfactory answer? I don't want to completely delete it as I might need to access it later. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user58110" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T16:50:21.730" Title="Can I close my own question without deleting it?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4119" CreationDate="2014-08-29T18:25:46.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to revisit this, with context to an Area 51 proposal which seems to be attractive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/75912/scientific-imagination?referrer=Le-GdDM0b9wFuP7v0aO_3g2&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A site proposal: Scientific Imagination http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/75912.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site proposal proposed by a user Krumia, is also based on XKCD What-If book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal is attractive, but I guess not enough to propose an entirely new SE site for the purpose. So I proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/17695/104857&quot;&gt;Can we make “what-if” questions locally on-topic on their respective sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also discussed this in the Physics chat room starting from &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/17415835#17415835&quot;&gt;this message&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; support for such questions. Some specific ones which can be answered through little to no discussion but with supportive and established facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to see if the community is willing to accept questions like the ones in the Example Questions list of that proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all the three Science sites (Physics, Chemistry and Biology) agree to this, the proposal would be closed right here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41957" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:40:57.463" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T14:17:05.263" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6101" CreationDate="2014-08-30T05:15:52.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there's no way to do this, and that's intentional. A question shouldn't be closed because it has received a satisfactory answer. Closure - or putting &quot;on hold&quot; (same thing) - means that a question was &lt;em&gt;inappropriate&lt;/em&gt; in some way and should not have been asked in its current form. (In most cases, it can be edited to make it appropriate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing you thought of this because you wanted a way to mark that your question has been resolved, like how forum posts often get &lt;code&gt;[SOLVED]&lt;/code&gt; edited into the title? If so, you should do that by accepting the answer that resolved your problem. Click the little green checkmark to the left of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Chris White brought up in the comments, there is an internal algorithm that tracks the overall quality of posts made by new users. Having your question closed is a significant strike against you in that algorithm. It's a bad thing, and not something you should do voluntarily just because your question was answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, since you mentioned deleting your question, you shouldn't do that either. Deletion, like closing, is intended for posts that are inappropriate for the site, but in this case they're so bad that there is no value in even keeping them visible on the site at all. This is a fate meant for the very bottom of the question barrel, and the post quality algorithm treats deleted questions accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T05:15:52.767" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-30T08:56:01.250" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can people be able to increase the amount of bounty after they put the bounty on a question? If there isn't, I think it should be because when a question still stays unanswered after you put a bounty on it, you should be able to add more bounty to get the question answered more quickly. Isn't the objective of bounties inducing people to answer the questions? All in all, there should be a command to add more bounty to a question that has already been offered a bounty. Because, it would be time saving since you have to wait a week to offer more bounty on the question with this system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52949" LastEditorUserId="52949" LastEditDate="2014-08-30T14:23:12.510" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T15:07:31.990" Title="Can I increase the bounty amount over time?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6104" CreationDate="2014-08-30T14:34:24.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems we must have violated causality (only logical explanation) because almost a year ago someone posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/203902/262980&quot;&gt;suspiciously similar&lt;/a&gt; feature request on the mother meta that includes the stuff we talked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't look like any mods really looked it over thoroughly and I didn't see many persuasive arguments against it. So with that in mind, I'd be for allowing people to feed-the-meter as long as protective measures like an increasing minimum rep payment is implemented. Perhaps also, the any rep from the bounty that is 7 days old should be treated like 7 day old bounties in the current system to prevent users from building up questions with 5000 rep bounties, which could effectively bypass the rep cap to let them do all sorts of things (get their friends to trusted status in a week, for example). Or there should be a maximum rep cap on bounties that's, say, 3X the current max rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are just ideas, I'm for it until I hear a good argument against it. The details can be worked out by people more motivated than I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T14:34:24.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6101" CreationDate="2014-08-30T16:50:21.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth saying a few words about the meaning of &quot;closed&quot; in the Stack Exchange system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Closed&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; mean &quot;complete&quot; or &quot;dealt with&quot; the way it does in a issue-tracking or work-ticket system. Because Stack Exchange sites are mostly trying to accumulate databases of well answered questions to &lt;em&gt;help other people in the future&lt;/em&gt; the mere fact that the original asker is satisfied does not mean that a question is somehow done. New answers are welcome and sometimes they can rise to be more highly voted than the old answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Closed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; mean that the question has been found to be undesired for some reason. It might be bad on it's own merits (incoherent, based on disastrously false assumptions, a rant rather than a questions ...) or a good questions that does not fit well in the rigors of the Q&amp;amp;A format we use here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &quot;closed&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T16:50:21.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-30T18:38:19.250" Score="-5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spend most of my time on the TeX.SE and venture to other SE sites when looking for help.  However, the atmosphere here seems to be going the way of the &quot;old&quot; stackoverflow SE.  By old, I mean about 5months or so ago.  SO was becoming extremely hostile and unfriendly to those trying to learn programming and asking basic questions.  Instead of directing new members to duplicate questions or helping them understand the rules and that they should use search feature first, they were being mistreated in the comments and down voted to oblivion which can prevent them from asking questions. However, SO finally changed their course and it has become a better place to ask questions for beginners and those not as skilled in programming in my eyes.  You can go through their meta to see the many discussions on rampant hostility from that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been skimming through physics meta and have seen an unsettling trend.  Post on banning homework type questions, no basic questions, we want conceptually higher level questions only, etc, etc.  This how it started on their meta.  What do we do about this question or that.  It just perpetuates the anger and it boils over from the members more skilled in physics to those trying to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this isn't route physics.SE is looking to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25274" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-08-30T20:00:27.307" LastActivityDate="2014-08-31T06:49:20.633" Title="Thoughts on meta post on homework question handling and basic questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6107" CreationDate="2014-08-30T19:08:33.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess there isn't really a question to answer here but it's more of a discussion thing than anything else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind each Stack setting its own policies is that each one can be tailored to a specific community, and that community establishes its own guidelines and procedures. And, as different members come and go, the community adapts and the policies adapt accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arguments made on Meta here are very repetitive and common and despite all the discussion, our policies and actions tend to remain pretty consistent. There are two camps -- those who come in and want help on homework problems and think that we should be answering every question that comes in and those who want to outlaw all basic questions or things that are not very high level or specialized in advanced content. The two extremes are very vocal while it tends to be the trend of the majority to take a more even approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both sides have their points but ultimately it is up to the community to decide what kind of community they want. The tendency to ban homework questions is grounded in trying to keep the community that is here happy. Many (not all, but many) of the people who drop in to ask homework questions are only looking for a quick answer and have no desire to participate in the community. They ask their very specific question, get an answer, never accept answers or vote and then disappear until they need another homework question answered. These people have no intention of being part of the community and so we don't look highly upon their questions, and we actively do what we can to suppress them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument made by those who only want high level, advanced questions is that homework questions &quot;drown&quot; out the &quot;good&quot; questions and they have to sort through the 500th question on why F = ma and they miss the questions they are interested in. Personally, I don't buy into this since there's ways to sort and search by tags etc.. But there is some validity to how they feel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, only taking very specialized questions limits to people who are interested in, or capable of, participating. And small communities like that don't function well within the Stack Exchange universe. But the people who want this say &quot;Who cares what SE wants, we want our community!&quot; The solution, whether they like it or not, is to go make their own community because this place just won't work that way. And they have made efforts to go do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So coming back to your main point. If you read the posts on Meta and the arguments, it's easy to think we're all a bunch of jerks who are mean and blast people into oblivion. But (now anyway, there is a lot of drama surrounding the topic of politeness on our site), we are actually relatively friendly. Yes, we will downvote homework questions and vote to close them (I did both on your most recent question). But we will not tolerate attacks on people, nor will we post comments on homework questions insulting people etc.. That is not okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our hostility is not very hostile, but when it is, it's confined to Meta (usually) and it's directed between experienced people here (typically). And mostly it's because we know each other. On the main site, when people post things that break policies, the majority of the experienced users are very civil. The anger and hostility usually starts with people who are not part of the community who get upset about the downvote, or upset about a question being put on hold, etc.. And they get upset and start lashing out because the site doesn't work the way they want it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said it in chat before and I'll say it again now -- for some reason, on the internet in general, but specifically on the Stacks -- there is a mentality where people show up to play in our sandbox and then get really angry with how we play in our sandbox and tell us we should do it their way. But the thing is, SE as a whole and each Stack specifically, isn't designed to cater to every person on the internet. It's designed to generate high quality questions with high quality answers from experts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And our experience is that the vast majority of homework-like questions are not high quality. And the vast majority of people asking those questions do not become high quality members of the community. There are ways to phrase homework-like questions so they are on topic, and high quality, and useful to others. And that's what we're looking for. And we will help those who want to get to that point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your question on non-linear springs for example, if you could explain the steps you took and why you think those are the right steps &lt;em&gt;from a physics standpoint&lt;/em&gt;, we would keep it open. We would be able to say &quot;Well, you assumed X is physically correct but the physics say Y&quot; which would lead you to your answer. But just putting an equation and saying &quot;I don't know where to start&quot; doesn't help you, it doesn't help (or interest) our members, and the answer won't help anybody other than you. Whereas, breaking down to the physics of your question and why you think a spring force should work a certain way, will help others who may be confused about their spring problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T19:08:33.240" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6107" CreationDate="2014-08-30T20:01:26.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bulk of the users of this site have consistently voted for a site that is welcoming to beginners &lt;em&gt;provided&lt;/em&gt; that they are able to frame their questions in a physicist-like way. That is, the site is welcoming to beginning scientists, but not to students who have not yet begun to think like physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing new about this, it's been this way for two and a half years or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't overlook the fact that the re-re-re-&quot;can we be nicer to the noobs&quot; movement on Stack Overflow (which comes up every 18-24 months)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; wasn't about changing the rules about what was allowed, it was about changing the nature of the comments and improving the close-reason texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is not accepting of &quot;teach me to program&quot; type questions, so it is neither strange nor exceptional that Physics SE is not particularly accepting of &quot;help me with my physics 101 homework&quot; questions. To be sure Math SE &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; friendly to their equivalent of such questions, but that's a different choice and it generates a different (to my mind less useful) kind of site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It is, perhaps, worth exploring &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the comments drift toward hostile over time and need an occasional course adjustment. Stack Overflow (and to a lesser extent, Physics SE) has become a premiere, go-to resource for help in it's domain. Not surprisingly, that attracts the attentions of &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt;, including the vast hoards of people who can't be arsed to do any work for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is predictable: a large fraction of the questions asked are of very low quality and are often duplicates. Maintaining a high quality site means that these things &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be dealt with and on Stack Exchange sites most of that burden falls on users with 3000+ reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those users see examples of a couple-dozen types are no-effort questions and questions from people whose preparation isn't up to meeting the minimum requirements of the site &lt;em&gt;over and over and over and over&lt;/em&gt;. This is frustrating and from time to time someone takes it out on a new poster. It's not really fair because usually &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; poster hasn't disobeyed the basic rules dozens of times, but none-the-less he or she is part of a hoard that is (generally unintentionally) &lt;em&gt;attacking the quality of the site&lt;/em&gt;. The attack is real, it has the potential to destroy the value of the site, and it goes on day in and day out without let up. So the frustration is real too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning to handle it without exploding is a process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-08-30T20:01:26.107" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6107" CreationDate="2014-08-31T06:49:20.633" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; gets mentioned over and over in these discussions, and for me that is essential feature of the Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a teenage SciFi reading physics nerd back in the early 70s just about the time the Standard Model was reaching its final form. This was a fantastically exciting time, but if you lived in a small town in rural Somerset there was no-one to talk to about it. &lt;strong&gt;No-one&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a newcomer to the site wants to ask a basic question I will go to some trouble to write a detailed answer. This doesn't just mean answering their question, but maybe exploring related physics and trying to show what's so interesting about the physics behind it. I was going to cite a couple of such answers, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1325/john-rennie?tab=answers&quot;&gt;looking through my answers&lt;/a&gt; there are so many answers of this type it hardly seems pulling out one or two as examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that I have to believe you're¹ really interested in the problem, and you'll be interested enough to read my answer and take it further by doing your own research. Since I can't read your mind I have to go by what you wrote in your question. That means your question has to show me you've thought about the problem and tried to Google it yourself, and that you're only asking here because you've come to a dead end. If this is the case then I don't care how basic your question is: if I think I can provide an interesting and informative answer then I will. Hopefully as you learn more about physics you'll start answering other people's questions yourself - there are plenty of examples on the site of this happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I appreciate I'm on the evangelist wing of this community, but while I suspect many members will regard my views as a little naive I suspect the vast majority agree with the basic principle. If you're interested and prepared to put some effort in we won't turn you away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flip side of this is that if you can't be arsed² then neither can I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;¹ this the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;royal &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, not you personnally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² © dmckee, 2014 - I thought this was a British expression. Shouldn't you colonials be saying &lt;em&gt;can't be assed&lt;/em&gt;? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-08-31T06:49:20.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-01T21:24:31.420" Score="3" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user recently asked if a certain computation she/he saw in Weinberg's QM was in error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/133522/&quot;&gt;Rate of change of a normalised wave function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found other typos/errors in the same book, and I think having a single question in which users write &quot;answers&quot; in which they point out an apparent error (and then get feedback on whether or not it is an error) might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a post be allowed on this site?  I imagine that it could be tagged &quot;education,&quot; but I'm not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such a thing existed, I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be concerned that if someone were to want to point out a new error, then her/his concern would get lost if there were a single location for a particular book's errors, but perhaps that location could simply serve as a place to compile all of the errors, and when new errors are posted as new questions, they can simply be added to the master location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T18:46:41.250" Title="Compiling a book's errors in a single question" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6111" CreationDate="2014-09-02T23:30:55.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I should get the obvious out of the way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Such a question would not be on topic on this site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say that for several reasons : It's not a question about physics concepts. It will become a &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; type question that gets populated over time. It's something that will require constant maintenance as new versions of the book come out, as new errors are found, and so on. It's also not a good fit for the &amp;quot;I have a question&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Here is the answer&amp;quot; format; it's more of a thing for a wiki or a blog or something along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of those things make it off topic from what we have discussed and decided before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the less obvious part, and what I consider your question to really be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should such a question be on-topic here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here I will say that &lt;strong&gt;No, it should not be.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a great idea, it's a noble cause, and it's something that would be helpful to people who study that subject. However, the scope of the site is more narrow than that and we're not here to be a repository of every single idea, topic, or fact that somebody studying physics may want answered. I don't think expanding the scope of the site to include a single, curated errata for a text book is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am in favor of people coming in and asking questions that say &amp;quot;My book says X but I think it should be Y&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;provided&lt;/strong&gt; there is an explanation as to why it should be Y. Just like we were discussing with the &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; questions. Because the answer could be &amp;quot;Well, if it really were a negative sign, this would be a production term and not a dissipation term -- so we know the book is incorrect.&amp;quot; In other words, we can provide physical (or logical/intuitive) reasons to help the questioner &lt;strong&gt;understand&lt;/strong&gt; why what is there is right or wrong and how to diagnose potential errors using logic, reasoning and physical insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can't be done easily in a &amp;quot;big list of errata&amp;quot; format. So while a single list would make it easier for somebody to find the errata of some book, I think it doesn't serve the purpose of what we're trying to do here, and it's better to have the questions about potential errors come in as they are now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking through the list of topics in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, I would not be comfortable adding &amp;quot;Potential errors and mistakes in your textbooks&amp;quot; to the list of topics that we say people should stick to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T18:46:41.250" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T18:46:41.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6115" CreationDate="2014-09-06T06:13:41.420" Score="20" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since earlier this month, the main toolbar of the site (with links to Questions, Tags, Users, Badges, Unanswered and Ask Question) has changed, distinctly for the worse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UlYyx.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Toolbar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The font looks blocky and ugly, the shaded rectangle is shifted down so that it overlaps with the question titles. This looks amateurish and mostly just wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue is present in Chrome but (apparently) not in other browsers. Is this by design, or is it a bug? If so, how can I fix it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T16:27:22.670" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T16:28:40.330" Title="The site toolbar looks broken in Chrome. How can I fix it?" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-bydesign|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6114" CreationDate="2014-09-06T08:37:00.710" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I struggled with this too. It seems that it's due to a &lt;em&gt;Chrome&lt;/em&gt; update. To undo this nonsense, type &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;about:flags &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in your URL bar and click 'Enable' on the Disable DirectWrite Windows option (4th from above). This fixed it, for me at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P4efo.png&quot; alt=&quot;Crappy Update&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be necessary to close and reopen Chrome, or to visit &lt;code&gt;chrome://restart&lt;/code&gt; on a new tab, to make this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T16:28:40.330" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T16:28:40.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6117" CreationDate="2014-09-07T08:46:30.797" Score="10" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been registered with Physics SE for almost two months, I am not a physicist (programmer) and here not to get my homework done, but more of curious person. I have asked 8 questions so far, 3 zero score 5 positive. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/133263/what-distance-does-one-travels-in-his-lifetime&quot;&gt;One of questions&lt;/a&gt; is closed due to lack of effort, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/131810/what-makes-us-move-in-time&quot;&gt;one is duplicate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Today when I wanted to ask a question I got a warning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and&#xA;  you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For help formulating a clear, useful question, see: How do I ask a&#xA;  good question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;reading that to get unbanned to ask questions&lt;/a&gt; I have go contribute in other ways (presumedly answer questions which I would rather not as I am incompetent in physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I ask anymore questions (and possibly get banned), I wanted to know &lt;strong&gt;what is the threshold of getting banned from asking more questions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52647" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:49:20.707" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:49:20.707" Title="What is threshold to get ban on asking questions?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6116" CreationDate="2014-09-07T10:00:07.690" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's secret, and that message is sent rather early on in most cases so you have plenty of time to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you seem to actively be trying to improve, by reading the policies and cross checking, it shouldn't hit you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-09-07T10:00:07.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2014-09-07T22:48:26.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Want to post an answer in agreement with David Z and because this is an old thread, so maybe a new post will spark life into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm for a renaming, but I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt; would be more appropriate. dmckee pointed out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt; would be misused and pasted on too many questions. That might be worst case scenario, but it's definitely believable. Whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt; would still get the message across about the type of question, but we'd also remove the problem of all the new users editing in the phrase &quot;Edit: This is not part of my homework! I am just interested in finding out about it&quot; or something like that. And seeing as there's an edit war going on right this second as I'm writing this over the inclusion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; because the OP keeps saying it's not part of his homework, I think clarifying to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-like&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-like&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt; could save us all some future headaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2014-09-23T18:10:53.510" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T18:10:53.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-08T13:41:25.257" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently took a bit of stick for suggesting that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134417/is-special-relativity-a-special-case-of-general-relativity-qualitatively/134422#134422&quot;&gt;Minkowski metric was an easy way to understand special relativity&lt;/a&gt;, and this morning I suspect I've managed to be more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110669/is-gravitational-time-dilation-different-from-other-forms-of-time-dilation/110675#comment275598_110675&quot;&gt;confusing than helpful discussing this with Floris&lt;/a&gt;. I wonder if this is the sort of issue that site members would be interested in discussing in a chat session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only reservation is that I'm not sure how well suited the SE chat is to this sort of thing; for example does it allow the posting of equations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming there's any appetite for the idea, I wonder if there's a better way to do it than the SE chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T13:41:25.257" Title="Chat tutorials?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6121" CreationDate="2014-09-09T06:39:46.770" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I joined I found &lt;em&gt;this possibility&lt;/em&gt; interesting but asked myself if it is ever used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But three days ago I asked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134242/how-is-weight-distributed-when-legs-are-astride&quot;&gt;How is weight distributed when legs are astride?&lt;/a&gt; ? and got 0 answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I needed the information I did some research and found a possible answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-I suppose that after 3 days I can answer my question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that if I post it I cannot upvote it, but, &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it remains the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; answer, what happens? I suppose I cannot accept my own answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Technical Note&lt;/em&gt;: probably it's my poor eyesight, but at Physics. SE when a word is linked to an URL, it is terribly difficult for me to notice it. I keep swinging the mouse on every word to check if the colour changes.&#xA;Is it possible to make it more visible, as it happens in other sites of SE, making it of  a different colour &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; the mouse touches it? Even here at Meta it looks better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The only reservation I have is that your question is rather elementary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I discovered it is, the point is that there are always doubts, when physics is concerned, anyway  we both answered such an &lt;em&gt;elementary&lt;/em&gt; question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/132860/why-is-acceleration-constant-in-this-example&quot;&gt;Why is acceleration constant in this example?&lt;/a&gt; or such a &lt;em&gt;silly&lt;/em&gt; one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/132680/describing-objects-in-the-first-dimension&quot;&gt;Describing Objects in the First Dimension&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably for you it is an exception, but, as I am more ignorant than a student, answering simple question is for me ordinary run of the mill: race between hare and tortoise,  etc,,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/133833/two-runners-on-two-different-tracks/133860#133860&quot;&gt;Two runners on two different tracks&lt;/a&gt;, etc. This last is really elementary, but it sparked of an interesting controversy nobody will ever settle. And what about this:&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134468/determining-the-decay-constant-for-a-damped-wave&quot;&gt;Determining the decay constant for a damped wave&lt;/a&gt;, is it less elementary than mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I delete my question?, but &lt;em&gt;I thought this practice is discouraged&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I am content with my solution I do not need to post it for other members. If future viewers will have same proble, will post same question again. (btw: the horizontal friction it is not easy, unless you are an engineer). It seems that our average viewer is worried by spaghetti and meatballs and how you can run away fron your shadow!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2014-09-09T14:28:45.933" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T14:28:45.933" Title="Answering own question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6120" CreationDate="2014-09-09T07:01:14.983" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't upvote your own answer but you can accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for answering your own question would be that you think it would be interesting/useful to the Physics SE community. If you think this would be the case then yes you should go ahead and write the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reservation I have is that your question is rather elementary. You calculate the forces by taking moments about the points where the feet touch the ground, and (in the UK) this is something you get taught in basic mechanics from around age 16. I don't know what the demographics of the Physics SE community look like, but I'd be surprised if many members didn't already know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you think it would be interesting and rewarding to write your own answer you should ignore old duffers like me and go ahead and do it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T07:01:14.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-10T04:32:27.913" Score="8" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read the meta questions on duplicates. This question may well be a duplicate, but there are some unlearned lessons in those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions prompted me to raise this issue in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7359/&quot;&gt;If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Apparently this question is used so often as a link target for other questions that a rather large bounty was given to provide better answers. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/134356/&quot;&gt;Special Relativity, 2nd Postulate — Why?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This question was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/34024/&quot;&gt;Special Relativity Second Postulate&lt;/a&gt;. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is a poorly formed question. It asks four distinct questions at once, and the answers are subpar as a result. A google search on &quot;what is the universe expanding into&quot; will yield a number of well-written answers. Our site should be on that list! Each of the four questions raised in that one question should be a question of its own. In fact, some of those questions have been asked individually, and those individually asked questions have received better answers. But yet they are marked as duplicates of the cited poorly written question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the second question, the only thing the two questions have in common are that they both ask about Einstein's second postulate of special relativity. The older question asks whether that postulate truly does mean that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. The newer one asks what motivated Einstein to choose that axiom. These are not duplicates. The older question did not ask the latter question, and none of the answers to that older question broach the subject raised in the newer question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before marking a question as a duplicate of another one should ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this new question really a duplicate of the target question? Do the answers to the target question answer the question posed in the new question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the answer is no, this question is not a duplicate. Don't mark it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the target question well posed? Are the answers to the target question well written?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the answer is no, and particularly if the new question is much better posed than the target, don't mark the new question as a duplicate. Close the old question as trash instead of giving a massive bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T16:56:18.653" Title="Duplicate meta-question on duplicate questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2014-09-10T11:16:20.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re (1): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers&quot;&gt;Danu suggested a while back&lt;/a&gt; that we should have a set of canonical questions that could be used as targets for duplicates. I'd guess Chris' bounty is an attempt to get such a canonical answer. Maybe the effort would be better spent on writing a new and clearer question/answer. If so Chris could ask the mods to refund the bounty and then write a new question - I guess that's up to Chris. Whatever the case, if a really good answer to the current question emerges that has to be a useful step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re (2): when questions are a little ill posed I often try to provide a broader answer than the one actually requested. Of course I'll answer the question, but I'll usually also try to put it in context and expand around it. So although you're correct that the two questions are different I think they basically have the same answer(s) and can usefully be regarded as duplicates. We seem to differ about what the key features of that answer is, but that's physics I guess :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T11:16:20.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-10T11:28:43.217" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at this question on physics.stackexchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134705/what-are-washers-for&quot;&gt;What are washers for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highlighted heading (Questions) looks odd. I'm not logged in to that site and I'm using Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AJwbW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Odd styling screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58881" OwnerDisplayName="ForkandBeard" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T11:31:15.013" Title="Physics stack exchange styling issue in Chrome when not logged in" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2014-09-10T15:49:19.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T21:32:38.120" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I am sorry if this question is repeated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to send a private message to a user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58771" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2014-09-12T05:07:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T23:26:56.590" Title="Can I send &quot;private messages'' to a user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-10-13T08:41:20.680" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6125" CreationDate="2014-09-11T21:43:09.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no private message facility and the team has regularly and robustly turned down all such suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get another user's attention by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-do-comment-replies-work&quot;&gt;tagging them in the comments&lt;/a&gt; (though they need to have participated in the discussion or editing of a post for that to work), and you can (with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat-rooms&quot;&gt;sufficient rep&lt;/a&gt;) open a chat room for holding a conversation. That last suggestion isn't private in the sense that others are excluded but you probably won't have a lot of people poking their noses in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mantra is &quot;This is not a social network!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some Physics SE user find this to be insufficiently friendly and have responded with the meta.physics most &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1159/520&quot;&gt;&quot;Opt-in to be always pingable to answer questions&quot;&lt;/a&gt; where you are explicitly invited to ping them in order to direct their attention to other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T23:26:56.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-09-12T15:52:19.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxitics.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IL75b.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv Analytics: specialized web portal dedicated to reading &amp;amp; discussing arXiv eprints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16015" LastEditorUserId="16015" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T04:45:45.377" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T04:45:45.377" CommentCount="11" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-09-12T15:52:19.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-12T19:26:27.163" Score="4" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I hit the rep cap thanks to some unexpectedly well received answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I don't understand: I got three answers accepted, which I thought should give me 45 &quot;cap free&quot; points. Add to that 200 &quot;capped&quot; points should get me to 245 - but somehow I was capped at 235 (with a lot of upvotes that carried no points but got me two &quot;nice answer&quot; and one &quot;enlightened&quot; badges).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my question: I saw there was a &quot;late in the day&quot; vote reversal which removed 10 points - but this reversal did not &quot;promote&quot; a previously uncounted +10 ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this expected behavior? I don't want to appear like I'm whining (OK I probably failed there) - I just want to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; screenshot of rep tab &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/26969/floris?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/26969/floris?tab=reputation&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SXKeT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt; shows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134932 (10)&#xA; 2    134932 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134935 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 1    134932 (15)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    134953 (10)&#xA; 2    135024 (10)&#xA; 2    135024 (10)&#xA; 2    134793 (10)&#xA; 2    134793 [10]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 1    135024 [15]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    134793 [0]&#xA; 2    134791 [0]&#xA; 2    134793 [0]&#xA; 2    134953 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    134953 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    134932 [0]&#xA; 2    134953 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    134793 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135078 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135078 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    135078 [0]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA; 2    134793 [0]&#xA; 1    134793 [15]&#xA; 2    135024 [0]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-- 2014-09-11 rep +245  = 10335     &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did the sum of rep increments on the entire file - and it looks like I did indeed get credited with 245 points although the reputation tab says I got 235.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words - I have to (re)tag this as a bug, not a discussion...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T22:45:51.150" Title="rep cap and accepted answers" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6168" CreationDate="2014-09-13T21:11:07.187" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be really really useful. This is a problem with a lot of SE sites, but let's fix this here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If real estate on the front page is the issue, how about a small link: &quot;scope of this site&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2014-09-13T21:28:01.387" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T23:42:49.897" Title="Why isn't a description of Physics SE's scope on the front page?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6129" CreationDate="2014-09-13T21:25:24.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that it is not on the front page because space on that page is &lt;em&gt;valuable&lt;/em&gt;, and most people don't have cause to reference the scope on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T21:25:24.770" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-14T00:24:48.290" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/135249/whats-the-relation-between-output-voltage-and-time-to-boil-water-given-the-same&quot;&gt;Physics SE post&lt;/a&gt;.  I maintain that it doesn't violate the homework policy for someone to provide a complete answer because (1) the OP attempted the question and got it wrong (2) the OP has the answer key and posted the correct answer.  They are missing something conceptually and trying to understand why they got the wrong answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any reason why a complete answer would be conducive to cheating.  In my opinion, the moderators applied the HW policy without consideration of these details, simply because a complete answer was provided to a &quot;homework&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53091" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T11:15:43.937" Title="This question shouldn't violate the homework policy" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2014-09-14T00:38:28.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak for anyone else here, but my reason for wanting to discouraging homework-like questions is two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firstly because if we don't that will be all the site does&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondly because people &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; learn from being told. They learn from figuring things out. If you must answer, then provide them with a leading answer so that they still have to have the realization themselves: that is where the learning happens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But frankly, if left to my own preferences, we just wouldn't entertain homework-like questions at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T00:38:28.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2014-09-14T04:58:23.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me expand upon the argument that I first put forth in the comments on that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why the homework policy applies&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; specifies what sorts of questions it applies to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;homework question&amp;quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intentionally somewhat vague; it speaks to the intent behind the policy (see below for more on this intent) rather than giving an objective procedure for determining whether a question is homework-like, because frankly, we haven't been able to come up with such a procedure. In practice we rely on our high-reputation members' intuition for how homework questions are written to determine which questions it should apply to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the relevant part of the question we're discussing reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An electric kettle rated 220V, 2000W needed 10 minutes to boil water when it is half filled with water in Singapore where the output voltage is 220V. Estimate the amount of time needed to do the same task if the kettle was brought to the USA where the output voltage is 110V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain how 40 minutes was derived in the question above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope we all agree that this question &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; satisfy the criterion presented in the first sentence of the policy, and thus that the homework policy is applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why the question was closed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant part of the homework policy for this point is this (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect you to narrow down the problem to the particular concept that's giving you trouble and &lt;strong&gt;ask about that specifically&lt;/strong&gt;. That produces a question that is more relevant to others who might be having the same problem,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let me quote again the core question from the post being discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain how 40 minutes was derived in the question above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's quite clear that this core question, considered in isolation, is not about a conceptual issue that was encountered while trying to solve the problem, it's asking for a complete explanation of the solution. But of course there was more in the post than just that core question and the quotation of the homework problem. Between them is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer to this question is Option 3 (20 minutes) because I thought that since output voltage is the USA is 2 times less than that of Singapore, it would take twice as long to do the same task of boiling water half filled. However, the answer key was Option 4 (40 minutes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However this part does not actually &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; anything, nor does it modify what the core question is about. Accordingly it doesn't change the fact that the question is asking for a complete solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also this piece:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I don't quite understand what it is meant by &amp;quot; An electric kettle rated 220V, 2000W&amp;quot; ??? I get that 2000W means the kettle uses 2000J/s and V means work done by kettle/charge. But what is the difference between the 2 (power and charge of the kettle)? And how does the V of kettle differ from output voltage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I don't believe is relevant for two reasons: first of all, it shouldn't be possible to sneak a request for a complete solution through by also asking something else in the same question. To implement that, posts which primarily ask for a complete solution but include some other supplementary questions should still be closed. Besides, &amp;quot;P.S.&amp;quot; explicitly indicates that the following material is not the main focus of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding these two points,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the OP attempted the question and got it wrong (2) the OP has the answer key and posted the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say again that the homework policy requires an asker to narrow down their question to the specific conceptual issue that is giving them trouble. Both points (1) and (2) are true but they do not change the fact that the OP in this case is not asking about a specific conceptual issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why the answer was deleted&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply, this excerpt from the homework policy covers it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer to a homework-type question that gives away a complete or near-complete solution, in most cases it will be temporarily deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I maintain that the answer which I deleted gives away a near-complete solution, in that it explains how one would derive the given answer of 40 seconds. Yes, it does identify that the question is a poor one, but that doesn't change the fact that the answer gives away a near-complete solution. (For now I'm refraining from posting that near-complete solution here, but if it becomes important I'll edit it in.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is the intent of the homework policy?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the above discussion has addressed why (I think) the question should be closed and the answer deleted under the &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt; of the homework policy, but not under its &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt;. In particular, let's consider the argument that, regardless of what the HW policy actually says, its intent is to prevent cheating and a complete answer isn't conducive to cheating in this case. I don't agree, for two reasons. First, because the value of the problem lies in the OP working through it step by step, doing as much of it as possible, so as to learn the method. By giving away a complete explanation of how the answer is achieved, we rob the OP of that value. And second, because any time we provide a complete or near-complete answer to a homework-like question, it pushes our site's reputation a tiny bit toward that of a place where people can come and get their homework problems explained to them. We don't want that. This is supposed to be a site primarily geared toward physics research and applications, not a homework help site. And we already get too many homework-like questions despite &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; having the reputation of a site that welcomes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is expressed in other words in the following quote from a Math Meta post, which is also quoted in our homework policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing an answer that doesn't help a student learn is not in the student's own best interest, and if a solution complete enough to be copied verbatim and handed in is given immediately, it will encourage more people to use the site as a free homework service. In the spirit of creating a lasting resource of mathematical knowledge, you may come back after a suitable amount of time and edit your response to include a more complete answer. Or even better, the student can post his own correct answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T04:58:23.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2014-09-14T11:15:43.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see your point, that the question is about what related power to voltage, but as it stands the question is a check my work question and ripe for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have attempted to rework the question into a conceptual one that stands a chance of being reopened. I note there is a deleted answer that addresses my reworked version of the question. If the consensus is that the question is now OK maybe the answer could be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general comment: if you feel strongly that a question should be reopened then editing it and voting to reopen is the best way forward. All users with enough rep will see the reopen request appear in the review queue, and if your edit is persuasive enough they will vote to reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T11:15:43.937" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6136" CreationDate="2014-09-14T15:04:39.090" Score="33" ViewCount="1628" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that most of us are &quot;paper theorists,&quot; but I think we need to remember that experimental physics is physics too!  We have several tags for experimental physics (with tag excerpts):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technology&quot;&gt;experimental-technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions pertaining to the limits, management, and operation of equipment necessary to experimental physics. This tag is not intended for &quot;does this thing I heard about actually work&quot; type questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-physics&quot;&gt;experimental-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for questions about design, process, data, or analysis of experiments and observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technique&quot;&gt;experimental-technique&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;filling in the unspecified details of elegant-sounding descriptions of experimental methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of us are a little quick to close questions that seem to be engineering (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/135259/how-can-i-make-a-dry-dilution-refrigerator-quiet&quot;&gt;How can I make a dry dilution refrigerator quiet?&lt;/a&gt; that was closed and even downvoted--and also the cause for this Meta post). This merely begs the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt; separates &lt;strong&gt;engineering&lt;/strong&gt; questions from &lt;strong&gt;experimental physics&lt;/strong&gt; ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1132/experimental-technology-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;Experimental technology questions: on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/720/does-the-area-51-proposal-experimental-or-applied-physics-duplicate-this-site&quot;&gt;Does the Area 51 proposal &amp;quot;Experimental or Applied Physics&amp;quot; duplicate this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2948/should-how-do-i-solve-this-experimental-problem-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;Should &amp;quot;How do I solve this experimental problem?&amp;quot; questions be on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5553/what-is-engineering-and-what-is-experimental-design&quot;&gt;What is engineering and what is experimental design?&lt;/a&gt; (of which this might be a possible duplicate?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T06:37:20.160" Title="Experimental Physics &amp; Engineering" Tags="|discussion|scope|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6135" CreationDate="2014-09-14T18:52:16.377" Score="28" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What objectively separates &lt;strong&gt;engineering&lt;/strong&gt; questions from &lt;strong&gt;experimental&lt;/strong&gt; physics ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will argue that trying to formulate such a distinction is not the correct way to attack the problem of deciding what questions should and shouldn't be considered on-topic for this site.&#xA;A better approach is to ask whether or not physics or engineering flavor is more appropriate in the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;It's a question of answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to build a waveguide resonator with low dielectric loss.&#xA;I could post the following question to either Physics SE or Electrical Engineering SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I design the geometry of a waveguide resonator so that it has the minimal dielectric loss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I pose this question to an electrical engineer, I will likely get design rules, possibly in the form of immediately useful formulae.&#xA;If I pose it to a physicist, I may learn something about the physics of electromagnetic fields near dielectric boundaries, diverging fields at conductor corners, and maybe even something about conformal mapping.&#xA;Heck, if I pose it to the right person I might learn about numerical recipes to solve electrostatics problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example illustrates that the appropriate place for a question can depend on what kind of answer the person posing question wants.&#xA;It would be wise to keep this in mind when judging the appropriateness of questions on this site.&#xA;Before knee-jerk voting to close a question, we must ask ourselves if the asker may have had a reason to post it here instead of somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Who is reading your question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our capacity as experimental physicists, my colleagues and I spend &gt;99% of our time building equipment, fixing equipment, and programming a computer.&#xA;These are all activities which could be classified as &quot;engineering&quot;, yet we identify as physicists.&#xA;I frequent Physics SE and not Electrical Engineering SE.&#xA;This is not without reason: I am far more qualified to answer questions here than I am on Electrical Engineering and, even when I'm asking an engineeringy question, I would rather get the benefit of people who work in similar environments and with similar equipment as myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that another important aspect to deciding whether a question should be categorized as &quot;engineering&quot; is the readership of the site.&#xA;If I ask a question about a machine, the Physics Lab Quizzwopper 2000X, nobody on Electrical Engineering SE will ever have heard of it.&#xA;So, while a theorist might find a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; about equipment off-topic, an experimentalist will not, because the experimentalist wants the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; which only a physicists can give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Audiences aren't well delineated&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I use the symmetries of physical system XYZ in order to vectorize my simulation program in computer memory for optimal performance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to objectively categorize this &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;physics&quot; or &quot;engineering&quot;.&#xA;All we can say is that the person most like to give a useful &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to this question is someone who has solved a similar problem in the past.&#xA;This could be a &quot;physicist&quot; who had to learn some programming or an &quot;engineer&quot; who had to solve a physics problem.&#xA;In this case, it's probably reasonable to let the question sit wherever the asker put it, and if it doesn't get any attention, that person can move it somewhere else and try again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I have avoided proposing an objective criterion by which to decide whether a given question is appropriate for this site, as that issue is not strictly within the scope of the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T06:37:20.160" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T06:37:20.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6138" CreationDate="2014-09-19T11:13:51.867" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance take a look at this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/135764/what-technology-can-result-from-such-expensive-experiment-as-undertaken-in-cern&quot;&gt;What technology can result from such expensive experiment as undertaken in CERN?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the top most answer has just 2 upvotes while a couple of 30-odd upvoted answers and even a 50 upvote answer is simply hidden away at the bottom. I'm finding this a recurring feature in several questions and it always puzzles me! Why doesn't Physics SE sort answers the same way as other SE sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29011" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T11:51:05.177" Title="Why is Physics SE so bad at sorting answers?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6137" CreationDate="2014-09-19T11:21:56.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have probably accidentally clicked the feature where the answers are ordered according to activity rather than votes. To order according to votes, click on the 'votes' icon (rather than the 'active' and 'oldest' icons) at the place where the question ends and the answers begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vQ1FF.png&quot; alt=&quot;sorting answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2014-09-19T11:51:05.177" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T11:51:05.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T16:03:39.660" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen several questions, already inactive, for which an answer was given which was useful to the user asking, but not marked as the answer. It was easy to see they were useful from the comments and flags from the user asking. But since they seem long time inactive, I wonder what happens with these questions ultimately? Do they get closed? And also it seems they are even abandoned by the rest of the users, no new votes or flags. It would be strange that they are not visited any more by anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a strategy to deal with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of what I mention...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3488/why-do-things-that-are-far-away-seem-smaller&quot;&gt;Example Question 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3505/free-electrons-and-energy-states&quot;&gt;Example Question 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3554/whats-a-good-reference-for-this-classical-picture-feynmans-talking-about&quot;&gt;Example Question 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3688/why-does-pressure-act-as-a-source-for-the-gravitational-field&quot;&gt;Example Question 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3563/the-source-of-the-light-we-see-from-the-sun&quot;&gt;Example Question 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41376" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T16:03:39.660" Title="No marked answer when user found it usefull" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-10-16T14:25:51.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-20T15:13:48.647" Score="3" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone recently asked a question about whether you could observe beat frequencies of light. I think it was within the last week. Can anyone remember the question? Despite what I think are obvious search terms I'm unable to find the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because a &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2384&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper has just appeared on the Arxiv demonstrating exactly this effect&lt;/a&gt; and I think this would make a nice answer to the question if only I could find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T15:13:48.647" Title="Question about beat frequencies of light" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-21T05:18:48.880" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;The styling on my navbar buttons is a bit off. The font is a bit strange and the highlighted area overlaps the sort-by tabs. Mucking around in the DOM/Style inspector, if I uncheck the &lt;code&gt;font-family&lt;/code&gt; property of &lt;code&gt;.nav a&lt;/code&gt; it is magically fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've hit Ctrl-F5 (cacheless refresh) to no avail.  Not sure if this is just my browser screwing up or if I'm being AB tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x2O2f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x2O2f.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="431" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T05:18:48.880" Title="Nav buttons (Questions, Tags, Users...) styling seems screwed up" Tags="|support|style|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-09-21T06:02:57.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2014-09-21T17:50:19.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pedagogical-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pedagogical-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pedagogical-question&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not my idea, but I thought I should add it as an answer. I did immediately think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pedagogical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pedagogical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pedagogical&lt;/a&gt; would be better than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-solving&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problem-solving&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problem-solving&lt;/a&gt;, but somehow the lone &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pedagogical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pedagogical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pedagogical&lt;/a&gt; also sounds demeaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8533" LastEditorUserId="8533" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T17:57:04.427" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T17:57:04.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2014-09-22T21:02:17.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The truth is that the homework tag is being used for questions that are NOT homework but &quot;Applies to questions of primarily educational value&quot; regardless of whether it relates to school and the educational system or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is mainly that if you are NOT in school and DON'T have the option to ask a teacher or classmate (because you don't have a teacher or classmates because you are not in school), then what results is you will exclude a lot of answers who don't want to do others' homework thinking you are asking for homework help (which implies SCHOOL homework), when in reality you are just trying to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way, the &quot;homework&quot; tag excludes at-home diy-ers who have a physics question from getting a good answer, or in many cases from getting an answer at all, because answerers will overlook their question thinking it's related to SCHOOL homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem here appears to be that the TAG &quot;homework&quot; means &quot;educational(learning) value/purpose&quot; but the WORD implies &quot;educational SYSTEM (NOT necessarily for the purpose of learning)&quot; which is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it all comes down to specificity. There should be two tags, or synonym tags, that include specificity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;school-homework&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;diy-physics-help&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where both are synonyms of the &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; tag,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but only &lt;code&gt;school-homework&lt;/code&gt; actually means the &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; tag, because to anyone who reads &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt;, what they see in their mind is really &lt;code&gt;school-homework&lt;/code&gt; regardless of tag intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true, that it could be abused, but that's what we have moderators for.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It seems to me that the benefit from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not excluding people&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from the site who could be valuable contributors is greater than the &lt;em&gt;potential for abuse&lt;/em&gt;, which we have moderators in place to help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it will be obvious, over time, who are homework cheaters and who are honest DIY-ers. It seems to me, that someone cheating on their homework will not spend the time and effort to answer any questions or contribute anything to the site, and this pattern can be recognized rather quickly in most cases. &lt;strong&gt;DIY-ers with physics questions, on the other hand, are the polar opposite&lt;/strong&gt;. By nature, these people have a desire to learn, and most people with a desire to learn have an unusually high desire to also help others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By specifying &lt;code&gt;SCHOOL-homework&lt;/code&gt;, there is no doubt as to whether the question is in regards to the educational system or not. It's a matter of clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do take note that several people in this thread already have clearly said &lt;strong&gt;they skip over homework questions because they don't want to do other people's homework&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, by not forcing anyone just wanting to learn (who are NOT asking school homework questions) into using a prohibitive &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; tag (at least without specifying that it is NOT related to the educational system), you will not be excluding some of the most valuable potential contributors to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59604" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T21:02:17.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2014-09-22T23:18:10.043" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;? It is self-explanatory, and that way we still &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;call a spade a spade&lt;/a&gt; while simultaneously leave open the possibility that it might not be actual homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T23:18:10.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6148" CreationDate="2014-09-23T05:20:32.123" Score="14" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, no, as well all know. However this misapprehension comes up time and time again, and surprisingly there doesn't seem to be a single question addressing precisely this issue (though it's covered by lots of related questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we need a Danuesque &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers&quot;&gt;canonical question and answer(s)&lt;/a&gt; with the title above so we can point people to it? If the consensus is yes then I hereby volunteer to create a community wiki question and a trial answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've missed an obvious Q/A that already covers this then shout and I'll delete this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T20:21:27.963" Title="Did the Big Bang happen at a point?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-23T20:13:48.800" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I open the site in Chrome - either main or meta I get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QtBSj.png&quot; alt=&quot;the top bar in chrome&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rather than this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyI4x.png&quot; alt=&quot;the top bar in Firefox/IE&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; this is the CSS used to display the elements in the list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;line-height: 1;&#xA;text-align: center;&#xA;color: #444;&#xA;font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;&#xA;font-size: 13px;&#xA;background-color: #fff;&#xA;min-width: 1010px;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3948" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T20:13:48.800" Title="The navigation is borked in Chrome" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-09-23T20:19:19.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6146" CreationDate="2014-09-24T05:58:35.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for completeness I'll post an answer. I've posted my proposed Q/A as a community Wiki at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136860/did-the-big-bang-happen-at-a-point&quot;&gt;Did the Big Bang happen at a point?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reception seems favourable, but that shouldn't stop you if you have any ideas for improving it. For example I'm contemplating adding a second answer for &lt;em&gt;gifted amateurs&lt;/em&gt; that goes into a lot more detail on the points I glossed over in the main answer. All such contributions are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T05:58:35.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T08:32:28.030" Score="-1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137171/lsz-reduction-vs-adiabatic-hypothesis-in-perburbative-calculation-of-interacting&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is a math question.&#xA;It may use equations which are commonly found in physics, and it may refer to non-linear terms as &quot;interactions&quot;, but the question itself is purely about math.&#xA;It was not put on hold or marked as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137131/evaluate-langle-mathbfp-1-hatr-mathbfp-rangle&quot;&gt;another purely math question&lt;/a&gt; which was not put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137121/how-is-the-method-of-lagrange-multipliers-used-for-multiple-constraints-of-multi&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which is also a math question, was put on hold as off-topic.&#xA;The difference in this latter question is that the asker focused directly onto the mathematics, stripping away whatever physics may have been at hand in when they identified the mathematical problem at the heart of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between these questions is cosmetic.&#xA;There is no substantive reason to consider the first or second questions &quot;physics&quot; other than the fact that the math questions represented there was encountered in a physics textbook.&#xA;For all we know, the same may be true for the latter question, and is in fact likely given that the asker came here rather than to the math SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you think one of these questions was put on hold while the other was not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I think the answer is pretty obviously that there are more users here who are familiar with the math relevant to the first two questions than the third.&#xA;Is this a good reason to close the third question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T17:36:04.873" Title="Why are cosmetic trappings of physics enough to make math questions considered on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6153" CreationDate="2014-09-25T09:38:19.813" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are questions in one's mind which he needs answering but those are just confusion in his own mind not any homework question or any question he read in a book. But to explain the question better that person uses diagrams and examples, and all of the community declares it a &lt;em&gt;homework question&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest there should be a simple rule to decide if that question is acceptable or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the questions gives a problem to the community and asks others to solve it for him it is unacceptable and considered as homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question asks explanation of the underlying physics in a case &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the user makes an effort by himself to understand it is considered a &quot;&lt;em&gt;physics problem&lt;/em&gt;&quot; not a &quot;&lt;em&gt;homework question&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/135340/velocity-of-satellites-greater-than-required-velocity&quot;&gt;Velocity of satellites greater than required velocity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This question discusses a case in which velocity of satellites gets greater than required velocity and asks what happens and why?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This question is definitely not a homework question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136874/a-problem-of-thermodynamics&quot;&gt;A problem of thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The text of the question goes like this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A rigid tank contains a hot fluid that is cooled while being stirred by a paddle wheel.&#xA;  Initially the internal energy of the fluid is 800KJ, during the cooling process, the &gt;fluid loses 500KJ of heat, and the paddle wheel does 100KJ of work on the fluid: &gt;determine the final internal energy of the fluid, neglect the energy stored in the paddle &gt;wheel&#xA;  Can you help me solve this?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question the user asks a physics problem from book or somewhere else and expects an answer which is worked solution and calculation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is clearly a homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58326" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T21:54:53.950" Title="Rules regarding home-work questions" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6150" CreationDate="2014-09-25T13:57:15.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to bother looking at the questions you linked, not because I think it's not worth my time (something I couldn't judge without looking at the questions), but because the general issue you're addressing can be answered without referring to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions posted on Physics.SE deal purely with mathematics, no sane person can deny that without being facetious. The reason we allow some and not others is because physicists are more suited to helping with some math problems. There are some problems we as physicists see over and over again, and on top of that, we have our own ways of solving and interpreting these problems that is different from the methods and interpretations of mathematicians or engineers. Thus, if some of these questions arise that cover purely mathematical problems but they approach it from a physicist's perspective (or that is to say, they have applied physics cosmetics), then it's more likely we will leave it open because there's a good chance that the solution might be more helpful coming from a physicist rather than  a pure mathematician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions where all the physics has been stripped away, we usually take that as a sign that the OP is not interested in the unique methods or interpretations that physicists use and that they are purely interested in the mathematical approach to the problem. For this kind of question, a mathematician is better suited, what with it being their expertise and all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while cosmology may be important in physics, cosmetology is important in asking physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T13:57:15.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2014-09-25T14:08:54.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; really just signifies that the question is useful for studying the basics of physics either through solving problems and exercises, examining derivations, or understanding the concepts behind a solution. It does not mean something that necessarily is homework, just examples or problems that are useful for supplementing what one learns in a classroom, which includes questions from someone learning physics in their spare time; homework-like questions. We realize how misleading the name of the tag is; the featured post on meta right now is actually discussing changing the name of the tag to avoid the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for deciding if a question is acceptable, the homework policy lays it out very clearly. Now, that doesn't mean we don't ever change our minds if we think it doesn't work as well as it could. The homework policy is probably the most re-examined, re-evaluated, and even re-written policy on this site. One of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5958/23473&quot;&gt;recently featured meta threads&lt;/a&gt; was specifically about defining the homework policy in small chunks and allowing everyone to vote on what it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T14:08:54.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2014-09-25T14:10:40.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;QMechanic's idea is excellent (as 'problem-solving' has a different meaning), but doesn't eliminate the too-specific word &lt;strong&gt;'homework'&lt;/strong&gt;, sometimes it is not really homework ( I personally had 2 sad experiences that are still smarting, I can't get over it, as I &lt;em&gt;am no student&lt;/em&gt;). Why not use a broader term that includes 'homework'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These below are quasi-synonyms of 'homework' and sound nice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about:&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problems-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;problems-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;problems-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T15:04:18.433" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T15:04:18.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2014-09-25T21:54:53.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have this rule in place, or something very much like it. It's encapsulated in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; and the close reason used on unacceptable homework-like questions. So as far as I can tell, it's a good idea but it's not anything new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T21:54:53.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6150" CreationDate="2014-09-25T22:00:45.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; the closed question was closed: it was because of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, specifically the part that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this closure has nothing to do with whether it should be considered a physics question or a math question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T22:00:45.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6158" CreationDate="2014-09-26T06:20:23.297" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15443/do-we-need-maxwells-equations-since-they-fail-to-account-for-an-experimental-fa&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question sits on a +2 -18 vote status, but has +100 bounty on it, from &quot;Community&quot;. Digging further into it leads me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to suggest that Community is a kind of a bot. However - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a bot and, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) has 1 rep, what is the source of the bounty amount?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) how does it write that human-like comment in the bounty notice - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That guy was just confused. Why so many downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Community really a bot, or some SE moderator disguised as a bot? Does it really work as per some algorithms, or is there a human touch to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Except of course that algorithm might be written by a human, but is that comment algorithm generated?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T12:47:52.363" Title="A bounty set by the Community user?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|bounty|community-user|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6157" CreationDate="2014-09-26T06:35:06.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For that question, the bounty was issued by a user with 100+ reputation. The user has (been) deleted the account after that. The only purpose for the bounty is to raise the attention of the most downvoted question as said in the bounty description. As I remember, the user is from other SE and get 100 association bonus so it is not surprised that the user disappear after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community is a bot, and it will take over anything that is not associated to anyone anymore. Mod can tell you more on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="562" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T06:35:06.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6161" CreationDate="2014-09-26T18:10:16.983" Score="2" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an outgrowth of the discussion in chat, following &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6150/why-are-cosmetic-trappings-of-physics-enough-to-make-math-questions-considered-o?noredirect=1#comment19559_6150&quot;&gt;this earlier question by Daniel Sank&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we, as a community, agree (for the most part) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;&quot;please check my work&quot;-type questions are &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; here&lt;/a&gt;. I (among others) have observed the trend that these questions tend to get closed under the &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; close reason. However, when this does lead to the closure of a question, there is no part in the appearing block of text (which is supposed to explain the reason of closure) which refers to the &quot;please check my work&quot; clause we have established. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we need to incorporate a clause like this in the homework close reason, should we make a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; close reason, or is everything fine as is?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do we actually implement the decision of part 1 of this question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the current &quot;homework&quot; close reason is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T19:46:33.280" Title="(How) do we make it explicit that &quot;please check my work&quot;-type questions are off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6159" CreationDate="2014-09-26T18:13:57.643" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An option that seems particularly attractive to me is the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer to part 1: We modify the &quot;homework&quot; close reason, adding a clause that specifically refers to &quot;please check my work&quot;-type questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer to part 2: There should be a slight modification to both the text that shows up in the review queue under the &quot;homework&quot; close reason, and the grey block of text that appears after a question has been closed. As far as I'm concerned, this can be as basic as adding the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On this site, questions that essentially boil down to &quot;can you please check my work&quot; are also grouped under &quot;homework-like&quot; and considered off-topic cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T18:19:36.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6159" CreationDate="2014-09-26T18:43:07.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The close reason was never meant to be (and in fact &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be, because of a 400-character limit, of which we already use 339) a complete listing of what kinds of low-effort and/or homework-like questions are not allowed. It presents a high-level summary and then links to the meta question, which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; provide the full details of what questions are not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree that anything needs to be changed, for two reasons. First, the close reason refers to the meta post precisely because it applies to all categories of questions that are prohibited by that meta post. It's the full homework policy that determines which questions are inappropriate, not the 400-character summary. The argument that a specific case is not a valid reason for closure because it didn't make it into the summary is just not practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And second, perhaps more importantly, questions which just ask for us to check the OP's work are not asking about a &lt;strong&gt;specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;. That's one of the big reasons we put the word &quot;concept&quot; in the close reason in the first place, to exclude check-my-work questions. So I would argue that check-my-work questions actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; covered by the language of the existing close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of our long-term plan to revamp the homework policy (and tag), assuming that plan ever comes to fruition, the close reason will be changed. So while we're crafting the new one, whenever it comes to that, we can take into account feedback that arises out of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T18:43:07.273" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6159" CreationDate="2014-09-26T19:46:33.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some history and background, too long for a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time the close reasons were universal across all SE sites. But different sites saw different types of problem questions, and so we were granted a set of universal reasons plus custom off-topic reasons. The question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4398/what-will-our-list-of-close-reasons-look-like&quot;&gt;what should our off-topic reasons be?&lt;/a&gt;. Especially of note is that we would get three reasons, no more (except maybe by asking higher powers &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; nicely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People looking for us to solve their homework for them have always been a problem around here, so we were pretty much in agreement one of the reasons should be about homework. This ultimately left two reasons to use on non-mainstream stuff and engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/close-reason-discussion-part-1&quot;&gt;lengthy discussion&lt;/a&gt; covering &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/homework-close-reason-discussion&quot;&gt;multiple bookmarked chats&lt;/a&gt; about wording the homework reason. I think we largely felt that what we came up with was the best compromise. We couldn't cover every detail in 400 characters, nor would we necessarily want to. People not showing any effort and not asking about concepts were the two biggest problem then, and that influenced the wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it seems people are noticing an increase in &quot;this is physics; here is my extensive work; please check it and tell me if I'm off by a factor of 2&quot; questions. Even back when we came up with the close reason, we noticed these things and moved the obscured&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;up to the top of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, but those words didn't make it to the close reason. &lt;em&gt;Perhaps&lt;/em&gt; we need them there; I'm not sure. There will have to be compromises, and we don't want to burden the bulk of people receiving this message with corner cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, if you can cast close votes then you can fill out a custom off-topic reason. Even back before we had this ability, I would sometimes leave comments making it clear how the question violated our policy. In particular I used the wording now found at the top of our policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As per our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715&quot;&gt;recommendation on asking homework questions&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can copy and paste this if you want into a custom close reason or even just a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;As per our [recommendation on asking homework questions](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715), &quot;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T19:46:33.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-27T17:22:31.623" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;So here is what the locked and closed question banner say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locked questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;locked&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;username&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;♦ &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;date&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; at &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;time&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question exists because it has historical significance, but it &lt;strong&gt;is&#xA;  not considered a good, on-topic question for this site&lt;/strong&gt;, so please do&#xA;  not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This&#xA;  question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed. More info:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;closed&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;blah blah&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;username&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;♦ &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;date&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; at &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;date&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A&#xA;  format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or&#xA;  expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments,&#xA;  polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be&#xA;  improved and possibly reopened, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;visit the help center&lt;/a&gt; for guidance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;  please edit the question or leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably some of the most loathing notification for the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So moderator lock a particular question because the question is not considered a good, on-topic question for the given SE site then why locking the question transfers the question in community wiki? I mean I used to thought that community wiki have a collection of good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T18:45:46.900" Title="Why frozen and locked topics becomes community wiki" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6163" CreationDate="2014-09-27T18:45:46.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;locked&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;community wiki&lt;/code&gt; status of a question are completely independent, and it is perfectly possible for a post to be locked without being community wiki. An example of this is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10580/creating-an-ammeter&quot;&gt;Creating an ammeter?&lt;/a&gt; (currently locked and attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/3044/mathsstudent&quot;&gt;MathsStudent&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, this doesn't mean that they're not &lt;em&gt;correlated&lt;/em&gt;, and it is indeed true that many posts which are locked are also community wiki. A good way to see this is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?q=This%20question%20exists%20because%20it%20has%20historical%20significance%2C%20but%20it%20is%20not%20considered%20a%20good%2C%20on-topic%20question%20for%20this%20site%20site%3Aphysics.stackexchange.com#q=This+question+exists+because+it+has+historical+significance%2C+but+it+is+not+considered+a+good%2C+on-topic+question+for+this+site+site%3Aphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google the lock banner text for this site&lt;/a&gt;. There are indeed a lot of such results; on example is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13020/books-that-every-layman-should-read&quot;&gt;Books that every layman should read&lt;/a&gt; (currently locked and community wiki).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is that 'big-list' questions were indeed allowed early in this site's history. However, they generate a lot of hits and therefore a lot of reputation for answers which may in themselves not be really that valuable (i.e. their main merit is being posted in the right thread at the right time), with the addition of a large snowball effect. This was deemed undesirable so most of these threads were put on community wiki. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, though, big-list posts were deemed off-topic, which is still the policy today. (Roughly, it's because those posts are the fast food of Q&amp;amp;A sites. They're entertaining for a while but they're perennially active and they detract attention from more valuable threads.) Closing them is a bad half-measure because edits can keep them active. Deleting them is too much because they do have valuable content. Hence they were put on historical lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, your question is a bit confusing and it's hard to know what you mean without the specific examples that made you ask this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T18:45:46.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6167" CreationDate="2014-09-28T01:33:49.627" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been numerous questions put on hold as showing &quot;insufficient effort&quot;, generally in cases where the question has a simple, easily-found-out answer. But there are also a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions that are marked as &quot;duplicate&quot; of other questions on Physics SE. Out of curiosity, can (note: not a request) duplicate questions be closed as showing &quot;insufficient effort&quot;, especially if the question(s) they duplicate come up easily on a site search? That is, if one can easily answer the question by browsing through the site, does that question show &quot;insufficient effort&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T11:46:51.103" Title="Does &quot;insufficient effort&quot; cover previous SE questions?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6135" CreationDate="2014-09-28T03:18:26.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to think of &quot;what kind of person is most likely to have the answer to this question&quot;? If the answer is an experimental physicist, or a physicist, then I am very loathe to close any question, no matter how &quot;engineering&quot; it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a question recently where some poor user asked why she was getting essentially a link error in building a piece of software to do scattering amplitude calculations. The software was written by CERN and the question was closed as being &quot;software engineering&quot;. I really thought we'd done the user a disservice: she linked the home page for the software (so she'd more than likely sought an answer from the right sources), and, from what she was doing, clearly had the intelligence to know well in advance the answer that she would have gotten from Stack Exchange. &quot;You're missing a library&quot;, or someone hasn't defined a symbol in extant libraries (highly unlikely in released software!) are the only two possible correct answers. Well, DUH, I think such an answer would simply insult the user's intelligence - if she can wield Mellin-Barnes integrals she would surely know this. I notice she hasn't been active since and I don't blame her. Someone of her obvious knowledge was likely to be an asset to Physics SE, so we lost out in closing this question. What of course she was looking for was someone with experience with that particular piece of software, or someone who could point her towards other resources. That person, unquestionably, had to be a physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hasten to add that, for me, the engineering-out screening is important: I come here to think about fundamental problems and not be bothered by engineering problems. The latter are pretty much my day job. I come here to get away from them. I'm not disparaging them, but I'm not lucky enough (at this time) to be working in physics, so when I'm not at work I want to be either spending time with my children, or working on the mathematics and physics that I love. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also appreciate John Rennie's reason for closing: we want the site to have use to not simply one person. But it's conceivable that other people want to use this particular software. Also, one would have to wonder how many times such a question would be asked. Allowing the odd question like this might help the physics community a little more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26076" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T03:18:26.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6165" CreationDate="2014-09-28T16:49:25.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that, yes a duplicate question would count as insufficient prior research. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=&quot;&gt;search engine&lt;/a&gt; built into this site for a few reasons, one of which is to prevent duplicates. This site is also indexed favorably by Google (don't use others, so I cannot point to their efficacy), so searching that would &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; also bring searchers to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would also argue that it is &lt;strong&gt;irrelevant&lt;/strong&gt; at that point because the question ought to be closed as a &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; and not due to the homework aspect of &quot;insufficient evidence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T16:49:25.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6129" CreationDate="2014-09-28T23:42:49.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a way, it is. Users who visit the site's front page and are not logged in see a very prominent banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ArF8F.png&quot; alt=&quot;front page banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that points them to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site tour&lt;/a&gt;. As part of the tour, we give a high-level overview of what kinds of questions are appropriate to ask and what kinds are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a visitor wants to find out more details about what kinds of questions are appropriate, that information is a little more difficult to find. Perhaps we should consider linking to it from the tour page. People probably won't read the links at first, but the fact that there are links may at least suggest that there are more details to be read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could make the argument that it would be useful to show this banner to logged-in users as well (who are interested enough in the site that they have actively chosen to make an account). I don't believe that is a good use of the available space on the home page though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T23:42:49.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6146" CreationDate="2014-09-29T20:21:27.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it may be worth mentioning that if you conformally map the standard cosmological spacetime to Minkowski spacetime you find it doesn't map to the whole of Minkowski spacetime. In the conformal map can be extended so the big bang singularity can be mapped to a standard spatial slice of Minkowski spacetime (i.e. it remains spatially infinite) and only the observable Universe at t=0 shrinks to a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it doesn't mean that the Universe was actually infinite at the big bang, the singular nature of the big bang prevent a meaningful answer to the question, but it is useful when understanding why the particle horizon exists even though by rewinding back in time you can make any comoving point arbitrarily close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38010" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T20:21:27.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-30T05:43:31.867" Score="5" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little while ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6150/why-are-cosmetic-trappings-of-physics-enough-to-make-math-questions-considered-o&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was posted to Meta, highlighting an apparent inconsistency between the handling of these two main site questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(A) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137121/how-is-the-method-of-lagrange-multipliers-used-for-multiple-constraints-of-multi&quot;&gt;How is the method of Lagrange multipliers used for multiple constraints of multiple variables?&lt;/a&gt; was closed under our homework policy, specifically for being a check-my-work question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(B) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137131/evaluate-langle-mathbfp-1-hatr-mathbfp-rangle&quot;&gt;Evaluate $\langle \mathbf{p} | 1/\hat{r} | \mathbf{p}&amp;#39; \rangle$&lt;/a&gt; remains open, even though it has been asserted that it is also a check-my-work question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we got distracted from the real issue there by arguments over whether the questions were too purely mathematical, so I wanted to raise the issue again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a chat discussion it came out that some people interpret question (B) as a check-my-work question, and others don't. Some people interpret it as a purely mathematical question, and others consider it to have sufficient physical context. To me, that's a sign of an unclear question. There seem to be three - well, four - positions on what should be done with that question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it on hold for being a check-my-work question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it on hold for being unclear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it on hold for being purely mathematical (I think the previous Meta question ruled this out)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't put it on hold because it's fine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who looked at question (B) prior to this meta post and declined to vote to close it (or flag it): &lt;strong&gt;can you elaborate on why you thought option 1 or 2 (or 3) would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be an appropriate course of action?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of the aforementioned chat discussion between DanielSank and myself, if I understood correctly, is that he thinks we should recognize that there is ambiguity in questions like (B), and (A), and refrain from voting to close them, since there is (or may be?) an interpretation that allows the question to be appropriate for this site. On the other hand, I think we should actively put questions on hold unless and until it is &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; that they are appropriate. That disagreement may be material for a followup meta question, depending on the outcome of this one. (If you have thoughts on this issue, feel free to comment on this question to say so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T13:02:57.883" Title="Why shouldn't a question be on hold? (no, really, I'm curious)" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6171" CreationDate="2014-09-30T13:02:57.883" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stand by position &lt;code&gt;4. Don't put it on hold because it's fine&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137131/evaluate-langle-mathbfp-1-hatr-mathbfp-rangle&quot;&gt;question (B)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a check-my-work question, though admittedly this is a subtle point. The OP has found a textbook problem and has presumably worked out the solution, but the question is not about solving the textbook problem. More specifically, the textbook problem is of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prove property P(A) for arbitrary objects A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(where A is, in that case the function F). The OP's question has little to do with the proof; instead, the OP asks whether the property even makes sense. The post is of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I found an object A1 such that the property P(A1) doesn't make sense. Is this known/expected? How do I deal with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, the handling of that singularity is not trivial, and needs the proper framework to work well. This means a level of mathematical sophistication that is not very usual in intro-to-QM books (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Quantum_mechanics_I.html?id=BKfvAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Galindo &amp;amp; Pascual&lt;/a&gt; being the only exception I know of), or a set of heuristics which involve not caring about specific infinities and singularities. These heuristics are particular to physics and form the core of any good answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a similar vein, I don't think this question is a maths question. The heuristics are particular to physics and a mathematician would either (a) throw a fit at the nonchalant use of divergent integrals, or (b) have a particularly hard time phrasing their explanation in terms that a physicist would find useful. The process in (b) is in fact that of turning mathematics into physics. Hence the question is physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I stated before, calling a question &quot;that's just pure maths&quot; just because it has mathematical formulae in it is not productive, not least because that encompasses all of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't find it particularly unclear, but it's not a model of clarity either. It was clear enough that it found an answer within 24 hours, so I think it definitely deserved the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I claim that &lt;em&gt;as regards questions that are unclear&lt;/em&gt;, we as a community do tend to give the benefit of the doubt to users, and particularly newcomers. I think the review queues do a good job of putting unclear questions on the plate of the people best suited to work with the OPs to clarify them and make them answerable, when that is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would of course be willing to consider data beyond my personal experience. This, however, is a separate issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put things in contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137121/how-is-the-method-of-lagrange-multipliers-used-for-multiple-constraints-of-multi&quot;&gt;question (A)&lt;/a&gt; is very different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It too starts with a textbook(-style) problem, which reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given objects B, and C, what is property Q(B, C)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the OPs question is exclusively &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what is property Q(B, C)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why question (A) is a check-my-work problem. I don't find it that terrible, because of the level of sophistication of the problem and the given solution, but I still agree that (i) it is closable under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;the current policy&lt;/a&gt; and (ii) it should be closed for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the question of whether question (A) is too close to pure math for this site, I think it is close to the fence that it's on-topic both here and at maths.SE, but its content is still relevant enough to undergraduate-level analytical mechanics that it's on topic here (as far as the physics/maths divide goes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main confusion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6150/why-are-cosmetic-trappings-of-physics-enough-to-make-math-questions-considered-o&quot;&gt;DanielSank's question&lt;/a&gt; is that this is even an issue. I don't think anyone, on the whole discussion, ever claimed that this question was off-topic for being too mathsy. (Of course, I'll be glad to set straight on this if someone has done so.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, I don't think the questions under consideration show any inconsistency in our current closure practices. This doesn't mean that we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; perfectly consistent, but I think perfect consistency is a little too much to ask of a system run by many individuals with varying opinions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is probably more room in the system for more detailed comments on questions by people voting to close. This has also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6159/how-do-we-make-it-explicit-that-please-check-my-work-type-questions-are-off&quot;&gt;come up recently&lt;/a&gt; on a related topic. More detailed comments on why a question is getting closed helps the OP in improving their post (or understanding the scope of the site), and it improves the site in making it clear to future users why some content is on-topic and other content is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our review queue is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;quiet enough&lt;/a&gt;, and we don't have the sort of problem that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/review&quot;&gt;SO has&lt;/a&gt;. We have a big enough pool of reviewers that we can spare the extra time for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, sorting through the queue on busy times can be a bit of a dull job, and I would ask that some consideration be shown to reviewers, as it's hard to really grok the process until you see it in action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T13:02:57.883" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-01T06:24:45.853" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt; I argued that the decision of whether or not a question should live on Physics SE is best approached by judging whether &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to that question would be likely to come from and be useful to other physicists.&#xA;At the time, we were discussion questions with engineering or experimental flavour.&#xA;However, I would argue that this approach should be used for all types of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/934057/complex-integration-by-shifting-the-contour&quot;&gt;a question about moving poles around in the complex plane&lt;/a&gt; was migrated to Math SE, presumably because it was judged too mathematical for Physics SE.&#xA;Interestingly, not only did my answer to that question use physics concepts to answer the question, but another Physics SE user commented that the question should be here rather than on Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this illustrates the point I was trying to make in the meta post linked above.&#xA;Because the question was &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt; with physics, the nature of the information contained therein is relevant and interesting to other users of this site.&#xA;Certainly one could have been given a purely mathematical answer, but a physics one was given and was deemed helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Should that question be migrated back to Physics SE?&#xA;This suggests the further question: should we allow posts to accrue some answers before migrating/holding/closing them in order to see if physics will emerge where we may have expected pure math?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Apparently the original reason for that question to be on Math SE was that the OP cross posted it on physics and math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T06:59:47.027" Title="Should we allow answers to show up before migrating/holding/closing questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2014-10-01T16:31:16.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This suggests the further question: should we allow posts to accrue some answers before migrating/holding/closing them in order to see if physics will emerge where we may have expected pure math?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely not.&lt;/strong&gt; That defeats the entire point of putting posts on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this is a site for questions &lt;em&gt;about physics&lt;/em&gt;, not questions which are best answered by physicists or questions where the answers are going to be useful to physicists. It's been that way for a long time, and I don't think the latter should be the sole criterion for judging whether a question is appropriate here. If we do that, it opens the door to a lot of &quot;soft&quot; questions that we know we don't want on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding this specific case, that question &lt;em&gt;ordinarily&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't have been migrated. It's a special case because the OP posted it on both sites, Math and Physics, essentially simultaneously. We don't want the same questions to be simultaneously cross-posted on multiple SE sites because it splits answerers' effort and hides useful answers for people who find it on one site but not the other, so one or the other version of the question was &lt;em&gt;going&lt;/em&gt; to be migrated. I coordinated with one of the math moderators and we decided to send it to their site rather than here. I think the essential nature of the question is mathematical, and while it does have a physical context such that it ordinarily would be on topic here, given that it should only continue to exist on one site or the other, we thought that site should be Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong or even unusual about providing a physically-motivated answer to a question on math.SE, by the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T16:31:16.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2014-10-01T18:20:09.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning OP's specific question: The question was originally cross-posted within 4 minutes on both Phys.SE and Math.SE. A request from a Math.SE moderator to merge the two posts lead to the migration to Math.SE in the first place. Today I asked the Math.SE moderators if we exceptionally could get the post back, to which they agreed. It is now again on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/138217/2451&quot;&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T18:26:28.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6178" CreationDate="2014-10-02T09:37:34.140" Score="11" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/138309/an-operator-identity-relating-to-trace&quot;&gt;An Operator Identity relating to Trace&lt;/a&gt; the close banner states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;marked as duplicate by John Rennie, Brandon Enright, Danu, Qmechanic♦ 38 mins ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I didn't vote to close as a duplicate, I voted to close as &lt;em&gt;Off-topic/Homework-like&lt;/em&gt;. The SE obviously just takes the majority decision and then attributes it to everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, it doesn't really matter and there are far more important things in life to be worrying about. However it would be nice if the SE didn't misrepresent my opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T23:56:02.260" Title="The SE is misrepresenting my close votes" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6177" CreationDate="2014-10-02T12:05:03.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been a (highly upvoted/bountied) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/54917/263383&quot;&gt;feature request&lt;/a&gt; on mother meta for four years, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/926/263383&quot;&gt;even&lt;/a&gt; there &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/2519/263383&quot;&gt;more than once&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one of these is marked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt;, so it seems there's not really consensus about whether or not SE may one day implement distiguishing close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T13:45:51.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6177" CreationDate="2014-10-02T23:56:02.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; saying I agree with the current design, but I think I can justify it somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point of putting questions on hold, or closing them, is to disincentivize people from asking questions that are inappropriate (&quot;bad&quot;) for the site. We do this by cutting off their main reward: the answers. It's a form of operant conditioning. Strictly speaking, to employ operant conditioning we don't need to have close reasons at all; if we just indicate &quot;good&quot; (open) or &quot;bad&quot; (on hold) for each question, people learn over time what constitutes an appropriate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, of course, that would take forever, and we don't want people to have to ask a thousand practice questions to figure out what our scope is. So we help them along with an explanation of why the question is &quot;bad&quot;. That explanation could be left in a comment, but if you've ever tried leaving comments to indicate the problems with questions, you find that you wind up using more or less the same few comments 95% of the time. Close reasons replace those comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, consider things from the point of view of a new asker. A list of different people's names with different unfamiliar phrases is going to be a lot more confusing than a single reason that says &quot;your question is not appropriate because [reason].&quot; Basically, by narrowing down to a single close reason, we give askers of &quot;bad&quot; questions a specific target for the effort they're (hopefully) going to put in to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are inappropriate for multiple reasons, and in those cases the preceding argument doesn't apply quite so well. But I think it still helps to show one main reason the question is inappropriate at first, and have the asker focus on improving that. Additional, secondary problems can be identified through comments. It fits into the natural back-and-forth process that tends to accompany a question being edited and improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T23:56:02.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-03T13:01:09.043" Score="-3" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a question just an &lt;em&gt;opinion and a suggestion&lt;/em&gt;. As soon as I joined I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6039/is-it-wise-to-keep-the-relation-between-votes-and-rep-linear&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I was shocked as it was taken in a very negative way: a dozen of downvotes, later mitigated, and many unfavourable comments. I did not really care about the votes, but I was disappointed, and you can read, by the superficiality and condescendence with wich such a delicate and vital issue was treated: just a click to say 'humbug!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the &lt;em&gt;legendary John Rennie&lt;/em&gt; seemed to appreciate the validity of my arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The one point of bobie's that I think warrants close inspection is the&#xA;  point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if one reads an answer signed by a rep-4000 member one doesn't know if&#xA;  he is a great scholar who gave lots of competent answer or he just&#xA;  gave one single answer to tell that if you want to cool off your&#xA;  coffee you have to stir it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That post made me acquainted with a nice ubermod, who showed some interest. I am writing here and not emailing him as here it is easier to quote, and as I'd like to extend my reflections to the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a month or so, &lt;strong&gt;I can understand now&lt;/strong&gt; why the suggestion was unpopular. I have personally experienced the thrill of earning 680 pts. of rep at ELU  in a couple of minutes, just for mentioning '&lt;em&gt;thingummyjig&lt;/em&gt;'. But I have not changed my opinion, I feel rather ashamed of that, even it may be considered a &lt;em&gt;fair compensation&lt;/em&gt; for posts that required the knowledge of synchronic, diachronic, comparative linguistics, psycholinguistics and the command of four languages, which earned a meagre upvote, if they were not downvoted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing because also here I feel embarassed that such a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/133201/why-do-stickers-curl/133203#133203&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;silly answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; could make me earn 280 pts. in 1 minute, whereas it took me dozens of hours to earn as much, editing 140 posts written in an impossible English. But that is an everyday event, all right, it excites laymen's curiosity; &lt;strong&gt;what I really cannot understand&lt;/strong&gt;, being myself a layman in a community of scientists and physicists, why such a silly and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136880/is-it-possible-to-have-a-rate-of-change-of-acceleration/136882#136882&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;basic notion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that even an ignorant &lt;em&gt;'student' (whose profound questions are considered as homework&lt;/em&gt;), such as I, possesses can get 11 (uptade 12!) upvotes and fetch 110 pts. I'll be grateful if anyone of you has a rational explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that an answer (and a question) should be assessed, evaluated and rated on a scale, say from -2 to 10, (or any value you choose) and that only these votes should be authomatically turned into rep. Then you can have a '&lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;' vote that can be any figure, which can measure along with the '&lt;em&gt;views&lt;/em&gt;' the popularity of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why this?&lt;/strong&gt; Last time the '&lt;em&gt;rep-cap&lt;/em&gt;' was mentioned as a remedy. It doesn't work: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2121/drhodes&quot;&gt;look here&lt;/a&gt;, instead of 4000 this user earned 3500. In almost 4 years he has posted just one single answer (I dare say rather banal) and no question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the problem?&lt;/strong&gt; That answer is so simple that the user might be a foreign high-school/junior student, and nevertheless by that he earned so many priviledges that he can close questions, make uncontrolled edits etc., &#xA;with only 2 and a half such popular questions he can earn mod priviledges: &lt;em&gt;is this rational?&lt;/em&gt;. I happened to notice at Maths SE that the whole site is ruled by a clique of semi-adolescents who act under the influence of adrenalin and ...other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last time &lt;em&gt;ubermod&lt;/em&gt; said that changing current policy might be disruptive, I disagree: compiling an &lt;em&gt;adequate program&lt;/em&gt; all reps would be topologically scaled down. I am sure that John wouldn't mind having less than 100k, and I wouldn't mind my 200 or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thank you all for putting up with a nuisance such as I for 2 months, there are some awsome/terrific people amongst you, and I have a few dear friends. If you want to downvote also this post, I do not mind, if you articulate and argument your dissent I will appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would ...&#xA;  accomplish? &lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;It will just take longer.&lt;/em&gt;.. to get to the&#xA;  privileges, .. if  highly&#xA;  upvoted posters are &lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;underserving&lt;/em&gt; .. This will not hinder popular but &lt;strong&gt;3)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;trivial posts&#xA;  from accruing much more rep&lt;/em&gt; than obscure but elaborate ones.&#xA;  ...&lt;strong&gt;4)&lt;/strong&gt; scaling down rep will lead to &lt;em&gt;a loss of reviewing&#xA;  abilities&lt;/em&gt;  –  ACuriousMind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I summed up all possible objections in two words '&lt;strong&gt;adequate program&lt;/strong&gt;' as I am presenting just a &lt;em&gt;basic principle&lt;/em&gt; and am not elaborating a &lt;em&gt;whole strategy&lt;/em&gt;, if the principle is to be implemented, &lt;em&gt;checks and balances&lt;/em&gt; must be calculated, thresholds and priviledges updated and collaboration from top users needed. But some of your conclusions are not true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1) it will not just take longer, time will be &lt;strong&gt;different&lt;/strong&gt; for me and Rennie(/Motl/Floris/Kale etc) because most of their answers would be rated from 7 to &lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt; and my '&lt;em&gt;jerk'&lt;/em&gt; would be rated 1 or 2 at most, even by myself: if I saw that I collected 3 votes, I would downvote it, if I knew that my valid posts were fairly rated. Collaboration is needed from senior members, most of whom seldom exercise their right to vote, and &lt;strong&gt;rarely upvote newcomers' good answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2) that is not my worry, I am stating principles. He should have &lt;em&gt;at most&lt;/em&gt; 10 pts. , just because that is what he deserves. Full stop.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3) this will not happen as shown above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4) of course all thresholds ought to be revisited. But editing priviledges should &lt;strong&gt;not in any way&lt;/strong&gt; be related to rep, that is not rational. I myself ( I suppose it is patent) am not a native speaker, and might be a 15-year-old student from China, Zambia or Chile, the fact that I asked a '&lt;em&gt;popular question&lt;/em&gt;' or that I gave several '&lt;em&gt;elaborate answers&lt;/em&gt;' should &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; give me the right to forcefully edit John's posts (which goal sometime I will achieve :).)&#xA;Editing priviledges ought to be acquired &lt;em&gt;only through edits,&lt;/em&gt; just as a rough example:&#xA;after 200 edits with 99% edits approved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while we're on the subject, I proposed to @QMechanic (and got no reply): it is advisable to modify the program so that &lt;em&gt;trivial edits&lt;/em&gt; of 1-3 characters (tags typos, punctuation, etc) &lt;em&gt;do not make the question bump&lt;/em&gt; to the front page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;another intelligent measure that would help voters to make a fair and unbiassed assessment is : &lt;em&gt;to keep the answer anonymous&lt;/em&gt; for the first week or so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So even though you cite me in your question as &lt;strong&gt;appreciating the&#xA;  validity of your arguments,&lt;/strong&gt; let me make it very clear that I&#xA;  comprehensively &lt;strong&gt;disagree with the views expressed in your question&lt;/strong&gt;. - John Rennie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this proposition had been written by anyone else I would not comment it, as it is /gives the impression of being &lt;em&gt;self-contradictory&lt;/em&gt;. I expressed a lot of views, but if your disagreements regards them all, then &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would apply. I hope it is not so and thatyou specify which views you do not share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your pshychological motivation, that of course is true, but you make a basic mistake: &lt;em&gt;the 'drive' is competition&lt;/em&gt;, sure, but you are wrong assigning importance to the &lt;em&gt;absolute&lt;/em&gt; value of rep. &lt;strong&gt;In competitions what matters is relative value&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;I want to be/make &lt;em&gt;better than&lt;/em&gt; John... and I'll post 200 answer a day&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that happens with any scale: if you increase the points (yours) to 1M and (mine) to 25k you will not 'attract' more people, nor motivate them further; likewise, if you scale them down respectively to &lt;em&gt;20K&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;200&lt;/em&gt;, the psychological motivation does not change at all. It's the same with money and inflation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the &lt;em&gt;thrill&lt;/em&gt;, you should quote the whole sentence: I added that &lt;em&gt;I feel ashamed of that&lt;/em&gt; and that I consider that rep honestly earned (as a compensation for) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189095/why-is-herself-required-in-this-particular-sentence/191771#191771&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;by another answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, (in an upside-down world/site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;somebody could rather easily get moderator tools and then run amok...&#xA;  even granting the point that it might be,  -- &lt;strong&gt;that's a very easy fix&lt;/strong&gt; . - tpg2114&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that is a hasty conclusion &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the risk of people gaining undeserved moderatorial rights.... &lt;strong&gt;this simply isn't a problem.&lt;/strong&gt; Rather the reverse&#xA;  really -  - John Rennie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John, you are a great guy and are good-natured. You are, as you said, a pre-web kid, and I am a pre-war one. Probably it is impossible for you, (who lived in the '60s when an idylliac vision of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Noble savage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Island&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coral Island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was possible), to imagine how vicious kids can be on the Internet, how many teen-aged girls have been pushed to suicide on the web, making the dystopian &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord of the flies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; a reality. I'm sure you read this amazing book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is alright when there is an isolated case. &lt;strong&gt;You do not realize&lt;/strong&gt; that 5-10 organized class-/school-mates can easily gain partial or full control of a site. I collected evidence on other sites, but I do not want to make this post too long. When ignorant and mean people get a massive access to priviledges, more &lt;em&gt;competent members are progressively discouraged from joining it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;if you think that&lt;/strong&gt; the users of this site are &lt;em&gt;neither civil&lt;/em&gt; nor&#xA;  reasonable, then why stay here at all?. -&lt;strong&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No comment&lt;/strong&gt;. But if your mind is &lt;em&gt;Curious&lt;/em&gt; indeed, read &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;strawman&lt;/em&gt; is the meanest of fallacies, as the &lt;em&gt;manipulation is extended from the proposition to the person&lt;/em&gt;) and draw your conclusions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;conclusions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vote&lt;/strong&gt; button: answers/questions should be rated according to its quality. If you think 100k rep is necessary to feel motivated, than rating may vary from -10 to 100. I think that is unwieldy, a scale from -2 to 10 is more manageable, or (probably best) from &lt;strong&gt;-5 to 20&lt;/strong&gt;. Rating can be tuned in a way to insure 100k (or 1M, 1G..) to top users. If &lt;em&gt;answers were kept anonymous&lt;/em&gt; for a while 'new users' could get a better deal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; button: along with the vote a star might express that you liked it even if it is not a great answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;views&lt;/strong&gt;: that would tell how many guests have visioned it, but doesn't say if they liked it or not It ought to be possible to order/ classify questions according to each of these criteria&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;accept&lt;/strong&gt;: if no answer is accepted, after a month the community should be allowed to choose the best answer. That would considerably reduce the number of '&lt;em&gt;unanswered questions'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;editors&lt;/strong&gt; should qualify only through successful edits. In the Italian site, for example, non native speakers with priviledges &lt;em&gt;wrongly&lt;/em&gt; edited a qualified teacher's post, making her furious and abandon the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edits&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;trivial edits&lt;/em&gt; of 1-3 characters (tags typos, punctuation, etc) should not make the question bump to the front page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thank you all for your answers and comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not accept any answer because mine, as clearly stated, was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a question. It is being downvoted &lt;em&gt;(while, oddly enough, the old one is being upvoted)&lt;/em&gt;, and this is comprehensible as the &lt;em&gt;suggestion is not popular with the notables&lt;/em&gt;. I posted it again because in between I made a lot of experience on other sites, and &lt;strong&gt;most of all&lt;/strong&gt; because I myself benefitted by the current system: last time a mean reader might think I was envious, jealous of other members' luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time a mean (&lt;em&gt;or hasty&lt;/em&gt;) reader may think I am not happy with this site, whereas *I clearly stated the opposite from the very beginning: &#xA;this is probably the best SE site, there are really kind people, and even our '&lt;em&gt;kids&lt;/em&gt;' are fantastic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time, I thought, my best intentions are clear as I am condemning also an overrated banal answer of mine. Last time the proposal was considered interesting but with disruptive consequences: I posted again to show that &lt;em&gt;a more rational and fair system is possible without impairing top reps&lt;/em&gt;. Thanks again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:09.447" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T07:15:20.963" Title="Answers should be rated. A suggestion to the Team" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6180" CreationDate="2014-10-03T20:41:34.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't recall which question here on the Meta this was discussed (and it may have been yours now that I think about it) but there's some difficult things that go on with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; reputation system. But particularly those on a site like Physics which draws people from a wide range of backgrounds. A site like StackOverflow suffers a little less from it because there's no &quot;pop-programming&quot; TV shows that try to &quot;educate&quot; people like we see in the hard sciences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Recap of other discussions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you'll find here that relatively basic or trivial questions and answers get huge numbers of votes. I think the main reason behind it, especially now that we have that little Hot bar on the side of the Stack Exchange sites, is that the trivial questions often bring easy-to-understand, simple, plain-English answers that are accessible to untrained people. So you'll get a lot more votes from people who go &quot;Oh, I always wondered why steam rises, now I get it!&quot; There's far, far fewer people who will come in and say &quot;Oh, I always wondered why the wave function collapses! I'm glad I read the 45 lines of equations to understand it!&quot; In other words, votes are, for better or worse, a measure of supply and demand. There are far more people looking for accessible explanations of common phenomenon than there are ultra-specialist experts looking to discuss something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, as John suggested in his answer, reputation is not exactly a great measurement of knowledge. In comments on another thread, I mentioned that really, at best, reputation is a proxy measurement for knowledge. Just like SAT or GRE scores are a proxy measurement for IQ -- the reputation is a proxy measurement for the knowledge of a user. Maybe more precisely, a proxy measurement for how much the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; trusts the knowledge of a user. But since the community is rather fluid and ill-defined, that's still a tough way to pin it down. But just like standardized testing, you'll find people with awesome scores but when you read their content it just isn't very good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, things like edits, retagging, etc are really janitorial tasks. I can go through and make correct edits for grammar and spelling on a topic I know absolutely nothing about and earn some rep for it. But it is, and should be, disproportionately less than reputation than I earn for questions and/or answers. Because I'm not proving my knowledge, but rather my willingness to be part of the community. One could argue using reputation for things like edits makes my 2nd point about reputation invalid. It may no longer be thought of as a proxy measurement of knowledge. To some extent this may be true; however, the amount of rep is very small (which is likely only included for the psychological &quot;gamification&quot; effect that gets people addicted to things) and it also stops once you reach a certain reputation threshold. I no longer earn rep for edits, but I do them anyway because I want to perform a service for the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, and I suppose the end of my numbered list, each community works differently and it seems our community really doesn't downvote all that much. We flag, we close, we leave comments, but there's really not a lot of downvoting that happens. We should be more liberal with our votes, both up and down, and actually vote for great answers and downvote ones that are lacking. This would go a long way to &quot;fixing&quot; the run-away reputation for trivial things. But honestly, there's so many trivial questions that I will never even look at, so I won't be up or down voting them because I'm not interested in reading them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Potential damages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You raise a concern that somebody could rather easily get moderator tools and then run amok. I've been here a long time and I haven't gotten moderator tools for the 10000 rep point yet so it's not really all that easy. But even granting the point that it might be, if a user went through and started going nuts and closing things willy-nilly, defacing posts, whatever -- that's a very easy fix. The user would be suspended, all the changes made would be rolled back, and all would go on well. There are checks and balances for exactly this reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's almost like going from a &quot;gateway&quot; method of software development, where a central user has to approve and propagate all changes, to a &quot;distributed&quot; method of software development. In the distributed model, everybody has a copy of the code, everybody has access to the version control, and everybody can restore the code to any state should somebody else mess it up. It's tough to let others have the tools sometimes, but there's always the roll-back option to fix things. This is why the site has moderators, and why the Stack Exchange team fields complaints about the moderators. There's checks and balances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your anecdote about Math.SE is an example of where this sort of struggles sometimes. But ultimately each community votes for their moderators and those moderators represent the community. My father likes to joke about the US Congress -- everybody in the US complains the system is broken because we just elect a bunch of crooks and idiots to Congress. But ultimately it means the system works exactly like it should, because the majority elected the people who are just like them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation is a hybrid (together with badges and privileges) -- it's a proxy measurement of knowledge, and a way to turn content contributions into a game to get people hooked on doing it. Parts of it are fair, parts of it are not, and just like anything else one does in life, it's really easy to work hard and feel like progress is slow but to see somebody do nothing and get all the benefits. It's true for money, cars, family, happiness, and apparently SE reputation. And just like those other things, the best advice I can give &lt;strong&gt;is to not care about keeping up with the others and take pride in what you do&lt;/strong&gt;. I can't change that somebody else is going to get rep by something trivial. And it doesn't bother me anymore. I'm going to ask and answer the things that interest me at the time and enjoy the process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the final thing I really can say about our system and I'll paraphrase Winston Churchill to do it -- StackExchange (and reputation) is the worst system of internet Q&amp;amp;A sites, except for all the others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T20:41:34.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6180" CreationDate="2014-10-04T04:14:54.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that drhodes, while in principle armed with &quot;dangerous privileges&quot;, doesn't really ever come onto the site - a person who earns privileges with a single &quot;long tailed&quot; question, but never uses them is not really much of a threat to the stability of the community, I think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say that I am sometimes surprised by the variability in upvotes that my own answers collect (I don't spend time dissecting others' performance), and agree that &quot;popular science&quot; answers often do better than the deep quality ones we would like to see more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a solution but I would add that questions with &quot;enduring appeal&quot; (like the coffee question) seem to be able to keep getting a few votes a day, while some of my own 40+ questions have at times gotten me very few rep points because all the votes came in a short time - they might have &quot;instant&quot; appeal of the &quot;wow I never knew that&quot; kind, but people don't actively seek those answers, so they soon disappear from view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short - I think the system works reasonably well. Any change would have to be replicated across the entire SE &quot;mother site&quot; and I don't think it's sufficiently broken here to warrant that. If we end up with a rogue editor, David Z, dmckee, Manishearth or Qmechanic (the current &quot;diamonds&quot;) will surely take them down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-reading this, I seem to be repeating a lot of points that were already made in tgp2114's answer. Consider this an elaborate upvote (don't worry, I'll put a real one in too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="26969" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T05:17:31.567" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T05:17:31.567" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6180" CreationDate="2014-10-04T05:36:48.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main role of the reputation system is to encourage people to participate. There is something competitive within all of us that just loves being awarded points, even when they have no real value. You yourself say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have personally experienced the thrill of earning 680 pts. of rep at ELU in a couple of minutes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key word being &lt;em&gt;thrill&lt;/em&gt;. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just human nature, and the end result is that people are willing to devote large chunks of their time to writing some truly fantastic answers. This is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, but you have to have grown up in the pre-Internet era to realise what an astonishing resource the Physics SE is for enthusiastic young physicists like I was forty years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the current reputation system is very, very good at doing what it's designed to do i.e. motivating people to take part. If you start making changes that are perceived as obstructing the path to yet more points I fear you will start demotivating exactly the sort of people who make this site such as a success. It's not that people will storm off in a huff, but faced with the choice of writing yet another answer on Lorentz transformations or sitting down to enjoy the large pile of new SF books that are screaming for my attention, you start making the latter look more attractive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of your question seems to be the risk of people gaining undeserved moderatorial rights. But experience shows that this simply isn't a problem. Rather the reverse really - it often takes 12 hours to close the most egregious of homework questions because we don't have enough people actively using their moderatorial privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though you cite me in your question as &lt;em&gt;appreciating the validity of your arguments&lt;/em&gt;, let me make it very clear that I comprehensively disagree with the views expressed in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2014-10-06T13:28:16.483" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T13:28:16.483" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-05T04:41:11.287" Score="7" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;For any question, if you start a bounty, the first pop-up link has a learn more... link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link points to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounties&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounties&lt;/a&gt; which gives a 404.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25907" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T15:35:28.443" Title="start a bounty --&gt; learn more... gives a 404" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6192" CreationDate="2014-10-05T07:34:05.423" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/138565/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which was initially poorly stated. However, I tried to revise the question continually (about ten times) to make my question clearer. But yet the revisions to the question did not push it to the 'active' or the 'newest' list even though the question was improved to a large extent. Neither did it appear in any other 'list'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I added a few comments to the question to try to make it appear in the 'active' list.  Still, the question did not appear in any of the lists. Now, I do not want to utilize my reputation for a bounty as it is already less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me how to attract more attention for my question without placing a bounty on it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do take a look at my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57075" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T11:10:02.557" Title="How to attract more attention for my question without placing a bounty?" Tags="|discussion|answers|unanswered-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6180" CreationDate="2014-10-05T13:57:02.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You talk a lot about what happened in other communites (from your point of view), and you seem honestly concerned that we might be &quot;taken over&quot; by incompetent - or worse, malicious - site users. To prevent this, you want to revise the reputation system, which really lies &lt;em&gt;at the heart&lt;/em&gt; of how SE sites work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, maybe, if our site is taken over by incompentent, malicious or deranged people, it's our fault. Not the systems fault. This is why we have moderators. This is why we can and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; downvote bad content. This is why we close inappropriate questions and delete non-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say someone gains moderatorial power through few, and effortless, but popular posts and starts rampaging. They will be banned in the blink of an eye, and no one will shed a tear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say someone starts nonsensical edits after gaining 2k (which is far easier than 10k). Their actions will be flagged, and either they will cease their activity or be banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are you afraid of? The only reason to fear these &quot;takeovers&quot; is if you do not trust in the larger community and the moderators to act in the best interest of the site. And if you do not trust the community, why participate here at all? There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; measures in place to prevent such hostile takeovers, and they all draw from one source - the community. From the power and privileges we all have gained through accruing reputation, and from our will to use them to make this site what we want it to be. And though we are always fighting over the details, and never quite of one mind (what a terrible thing that would be!), the fact that most questions that are closed stay closed (and that some are, indeed reopened unchanged but not closed again) show that, all in all, most actively moderating users &lt;em&gt;agree&lt;/em&gt; on what this site should and should not harbor and that they are not vindictively engaging in edit wars or closing/reopening wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the way it is. And changing the rep system to only grant privileges to the &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt; and those with brillant exposition skills would devalue the many low- and mid-level contributions that are made on this site as well. Nobody guarantees that the most brillant physicist in the world, earning all the rep, might not be a giant asshole. And nobody can be sure that the undergraduate answering &quot;trivial&quot; questions from everyday life and intro physics is not more than able to improve the quality of other posts and sensibly decide on matters of moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are individuals, forming a community that has grown over time. If the mere granting of privileges through &quot;undeserved&quot; reputation can destroy that, then we deserve to be destroyed. We have all the tools - rollback, bans, flags, close/reopen votes - to defend our version of this community against those who want to change it with malicious intent (I'm still not convinced these people exist, by the way). Changing the reputation system means saying that we don't &lt;em&gt;trust&lt;/em&gt; each other to be civil and reasonable with the privileges granted. And if you think that the users of this site are neither civil nor reasonable, then why stay here at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T13:57:02.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6190" CreationDate="2014-10-05T19:00:09.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits do bump posts, and all questions are on equal footing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time a question is asked, an answer is posted, or either a question or an answer is edited, the question is bumped to the top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=active&quot;&gt;active tab&lt;/a&gt;, which is also probably what you see when you just go to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;main site&lt;/a&gt;. A question will only appear once in that list, based on the most recent modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we get about &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;66 new questions per day&lt;/a&gt;, the eighth highest across the network. Posts don't linger on any list of &quot;most recently modified&quot; because too many questions, answers, and edits are occurring. Imagine the chaos if every person who asked a question were in competition to keep their question at the top of such a list. Consider also that the reason edits bump posts at all is so more people can vet them and make sure there is no vandalism or quality degradation going on behind our backs, and we don't want to be flooded with unnecessary edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus there is a crowding-out effect -- you cannot keep your question more visible without reducing some other question's visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not edit just to bump posts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, there is a fixed amount of attention the users of the site have, and making them notice your question necessarily detracts from other questions' views. There used to be a built-in safeguard: After a certain number of edits, the system automatically made your post community-wiki, meaning you no longer earned rep on it from upvotes. That feature has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/putting-the-community-back-in-wiki&quot;&gt;done away with&lt;/a&gt;, though, for entirely unrelated reasons, so we are left to trust that users won't abuse the side effect of bumping that comes with editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, making the question &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; is not a problem. If an edit substantially improves things (and remember, more is not always better), feel free to make it. But if you just want attention...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's what bounties are for.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes they can be expensive when you are a new user, but that is intentional design. Bounties let you get that attention, but they make sure you really are dedicated to getting an answer, since it will necessarily detract from the attention others get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bounty keeps the question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=featured&quot;&gt;featured tab&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;questions page&lt;/a&gt; for a week, where a number of users check to find particularly worthwhile questions to invest their time answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are other channels that help unanswered questions get answered.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the featured tab and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=active&quot;&gt;active tab&lt;/a&gt; (which is the same content as the main page), the questions page also has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;newest tab&lt;/a&gt;, which simply displays all questions ordered only by when they were asked. Your question will be visible here for a longer time, as answers and edits do not count. There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=newest&quot;&gt;newest tab&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered questions page&lt;/a&gt;. A number of users, myself included, will check this list when looking for stuff to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answerers are people too, with their own motives.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's useful to remember that we all have our own interests, and thus have topics we're not as interested in helping students with (or don't know enough to do so). Add to that the fact that professional physicists may not want to spend &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; their free time answering low-level questions they've seen hundreds of times before, and you see that not everyone is in a position to serve you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, most people have a particular weekly schedule in real life. Perhaps you post a question at the beginning of the weekend, while the users most eager to answer your style of question only visit on weekdays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give the question some time. Unlike Stack Overflow, we are not about rapid-fire replies that fix the problem you're being paid to fix with the minimal amount of information needed to get the job done. Answers here are often very well thought-out and considered, and they tend to trickle in over several days at least. In fact, if someone accepts an answer I give too soon, I usually tell them they shouldn't be so quick to consider the issue settled, since even better answers may very well be provided in due time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T19:00:09.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-06T04:07:20.133" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this site is the appropriate place but my question is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stackwise application for Ipad lets me visit all my favorite stackexchange sites. However, it doesn't seem to run latex and equations are seen as a bunch of code. I don't know latex yet. Has anyone had similar problems, or know how to solve this one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46740" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T04:59:22.660" Title="Stackwise application for Ipad" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6193" CreationDate="2014-10-06T04:59:22.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stackwise/id556308691?ls=1&amp;amp;mt=8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stackwise App&lt;/a&gt; appears to be third-party -- you should file a bug report with its developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the Stack Exchange team is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239250/help-us-test-the-new-stack-exchange-ipad-app&quot;&gt;alpha-testing its official iPad app&lt;/a&gt;, and you can sign up to participate. My very limited understanding is that this is just a superficial change to the already-existing iOS app for optimal display on an iPad. Since the iOS app already displays latex properly (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/222868/please-add-tex-rendering-on-the-ios-app&quot;&gt;I requested it myself&lt;/a&gt;), I suspect it won't be an issue there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference, bug reports and feature requests for official apps at least should probably go to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;main meta&lt;/a&gt; and tagged appropriately. Even for latex it's not like Physics is the only Stack Exchange site that uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T04:59:22.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6187" CreationDate="2014-10-06T15:05:09.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems to be fixed on all sites as of 2014-10-06.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25907" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T15:05:09.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6198" CreationDate="2014-10-07T04:43:56.860" Score="55" ViewCount="5795" Body="&lt;p&gt;A community ad caught my eye, and I visited &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.physicsoverflow.org&lt;/a&gt;. What are the links between Physics SE and Physics Overflow and how are they different from each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22254" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T15:07:21.153" Title="What is Physics Overflow and how is it linked to Physics.SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6196" CreationDate="2014-10-07T05:19:30.767" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;PhysicsOverflow was started by a number of users that were not content with the way the SE network works - especially in terms of moderation. They are not affiliated with the SE network. Furthermore, PO is more strict about the level of questions, accepting only questions of graduate level or higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T05:19:30.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6196" CreationDate="2014-10-07T07:46:36.287" Score="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;PhysicsOverflow is meant to be some kind of a rebirth of the untimely passed away &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics SE&lt;/a&gt; and a little physics brother of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared to the former theoretical physics site, we have slightly lowered the bar to ask questions to graduate-level upward and broadened the scope to include experimental physics and phenomenology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the high-level Q&amp;amp;A, PhysicsOverflow offers also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/4657#a4807&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reviews section&lt;/a&gt;, dedicated to discuss and peer review (mostly ArXiv but other sources can be considered too) papers publicly and &quot;in real time&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PhysicsOverflow was built outside the SE network to not have to fullfill any externally prescribed activity criteria for graduation (Area51 statistics). As Danu hinted at, this also allows us to avoid having to obey the &quot;SE model&quot; or SE rules, policies, and guidelines where they would clash with the goals of a high-level academic community (MathOverflow negociated a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow/970#970&quot;&gt;special agreement&lt;/a&gt; with SE before joining the network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a full description of the site in our &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and a short summary of its purpose in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live&quot;&gt;official announcement&lt;/a&gt; on MathOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:04.363" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T15:07:21.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2014-10-08T20:05:18.753" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.physicsforums.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main reasons people might go to physicsforums instead of physics stack exchange. First, they are a forum so if you want more of a back and forth discussion, that will be a better format than stack exchange. Second, homework questions are on topic and they are glad to help. Students &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; show their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics stack exchange is better at quickly getting a straight answer. So if you don’t need a discussion then you may be better served here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both communities have lots of experts on a wide variety of technical topics, and there is a lot of crossover. Both communities have rather little patience for personal theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="204834" LastEditDate="2023-12-31T21:46:05.097" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T21:46:05.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2014-10-08T20:05:53.027" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/Physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.quora.com/Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T20:05:53.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2014-10-08T20:07:57.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T20:07:57.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-08T20:59:20.073" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a &quot;check my work&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/139278/26969&quot;&gt;question asked yesterday&lt;/a&gt; with an unusual characteristic: the OP had really gone through the problem carefully, checking units and magnitudes along the way. She had made a rather silly mistake in the mathematics along the way resulting in an answer that was a factor 10x off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my dilemma. On the one hand, it was a &quot;check my work&quot; homework question. On the other hand, it was an unusually good one. I had left a comment about not closing it, and it attracted no downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when, after leaving the comment, I went through the work and discovered it all came down to a single typo, I wondered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;should this question be closed as being &quot;too local and not interesting to future visitors&quot;, or should we leave it open as an example of a &quot;OK&quot; form of a check-my-work homework question? I couldn't decide, even after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5914/26969&quot;&gt;the answers to this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of you know that on the homework spectrum I lean towards the &quot;helpful&quot; over the &quot;discouraging&quot; end of the distribution, so I would like to hear the community's thought on this one. But I'd gladly give up my 15 rep points if it's decided this post has no further value on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T21:16:37.253" Title="Should this question be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6202" CreationDate="2014-10-08T21:16:37.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say to delete it. Deletion is meant only for things that very obviously shouldn't have been posted in the first place: non-answers posted as answers, unintelligible gibberish, spam, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I do absolutely believe it should be &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;. The reasons for making check-my-work questions off topic are unrelated to the quality of the post; accordingly, there is no such thing as an OK check-my-work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T21:16:37.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-09T17:44:13.220" Score="3" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us take as an &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/139532/&quot;&gt;this question.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Consider whether you think it should be considered off-topic (for being purely mathematical in nature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should one's opinion on whether a mathematical question be closed be based on what one finds interesting, the specific written rules of this site, a combination, or something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think this question is trivially answered by referring to the site tour (see KyleKanos's comment below) because the tour says that what's allowed is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mathematics in the context of physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on mathematical details outside of physical context are off topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem seems to be that there is enormous room for interpretation.&#xA;A pure math question may have obvious physical implications even if the question doesn't explicitly reference those implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One approach is to take the question at face value and not allow for any benefit of the doubt with respect to implicit relevance to physics.&#xA;With this approach, the example question linked above would be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to consider whether the mathematics in the question is directly relevant to physics or might simply be so common in physics settings that other users of the site would find it interesting and useful.&#xA;From this perspective, the example question might be kept open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T23:39:36.280" Title="By what criteria do you judge whether mathy questions should or should not be considered off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6206" CreationDate="2014-10-09T23:39:36.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My procedure is the following when faced with a math question with no physical context given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quite hesitant to migrate questions to math.SE and proceed in the following order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is closeable under the homework policy here, I'll vote to close it as &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;. People too lazy to read our policies before posting should not be given the convenience of migration to a site that will answer their question, since that does not discourage them from just posting here again next time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I know the physical motivation for the question, I'll leave a comment asking the OP if that was their motivation, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; vote to close it. (In the question you cite, I didn't do that since the physical relevance of SU(N) representations is something I considered implicitly understood.) It would probably be best to make a habit of editing it in myself, but that would often change the original post considerably and thus be time-consuming.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I don't know the physical motivation, I'll vote for migration to math. (Sometimes leaving a comment asking the OP to add physical relevance)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it is obvious that 2. and 3. depend on my personal knowledge (as most close votes do, at some point). But migrating away questions that I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; to be connected to physics is just not the right thing to do, in my opinion. Nevertheless, we are told to judge questions as written, improve those we can, and close those we can't, so the cases in 3. must be voted to migrate by me even if there's some motivation behind them I cannot fathom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to remark that I don't consider this process to be any more subjective than other close votes, especially &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;, where the spectrum from &quot;lenient&quot; to &quot;harsh&quot; close-voters is quite broad on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T23:39:36.280" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5768" CreationDate="2014-10-10T02:55:45.257" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm giving up on flagging. The system is flawed and broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rejected flags are punished. There's a big difference between bad behavior with regard to flagging and a mere difference of opinion. There's no leeway. Moderators have two choices. They can either accept my flag, in which case I'm awarded a meaningless brownie point, or they can reject my flag, in which case that rejection does count against me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's no way to retract a flag. I've mistakenly flagged the wrong item once, an answer instead of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last straw: I flagged an obviously garbage answer as spam. My flag was rejected, and yet the answer was deleted. WTF?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave up on flagging at the stackoverflow for more or less the same reason. It's a flawed and broken system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T02:55:45.257" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2014-10-10T20:22:47.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not always a clear distinction between physics and philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretations of quantum mechanics are not empirically testable, so they could be considered philosophy, and yet the people who work on this kind of things are typically physicists who publish in physics journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are people who work on the philosophy of science. For example, Norton's dome was originally brought up in a philosophical critique of the notion of causality,[Norton] but a lot of the literature that came after Norton's original paper smells more like physics  or mathematics [Laraudogoitia 2012],[Korolev 2006].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People's opinions on what constitutes physics are themselves philosophical stances. For example, many physicists have attitudes that could generally be described as operationalist, and these attitudes influence what they would define as a valid physics question as opposed to a philosophy question. But operationalism is itself a philosophical idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, I don't think it's practical to prohibit philosophy questions on the site, if they're also physics questions. If there is very little scientific content and it's mainly philosophy, then we could certainly suggest they move their question to philosophy.SE. There are certain topics that are basically FAQs where people imagine that something has a conclusive physics answer, but in fact it doesn't. Examples are the block universe and interpretations of quantum mechanics. This can be handled simply by writing good answers that say exactly that. For example, if someone is under the illusion that physicists actually study whether the block universe concept is valid or correct, it's only a physicist who can authoritatively tell them that this &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; what we study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korolev, &quot;Indeterminism, asymptotic reasoning, and time irreversibility in classical physics,&quot; 2006, &lt;a href=&quot;http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3003/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3003/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norton, &quot;Causation as Folk Science,&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1214/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1214/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jon Pérez Laraudogoitia, &quot;On Norton’s dome,&quot; Synthese, 2012 &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11229-012-0105-z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11229-012-0105-z&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T20:22:47.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-10-11T02:47:48.043" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ljt1P.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Fun Physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60884" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:35.647" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T02:47:48.043" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-11T02:47:48.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-11T09:13:27.437" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the old days, I used to stay logged in to Physics.SE (and other Stack Exchange sites) for many weeks at a time. Only very occasionally would I find myself mysteriously logged out, and have to log back in again. But nowadays it seems to happen at least once a day. Why is this, and can I do anything about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T09:13:27.437" Title="Why do I keep getting logged out all the time these days?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6196" CreationDate="2014-10-15T11:13:16.333" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to keep in mind, which was mentioned comments that are now &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/18110760#18110760&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt;, is that the moderation policies and atmosphere at Physics Overflow do not necessarily match the ones here at Physics Stack Exchange. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending of your opinion of the atmosphere thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference, in my understanding, is that (as PO sees it), they will not moderate 'frankness' in speech when used to convey physics content. This is something the Physics Overflow organizers and community seem to feel happens here; to quote from their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/faq#a4811&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange discourages and censors scientific criticism, and has admitted to have been systematically blocking frankness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A less charitable view is that PO will let slide a good bit more unpoliteness than you'll see here. It is certainly the case that their stance towards abuse is relatively hazy. The main thing that worries me about PO is well encapsulated by the question &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/22389/will-there-be-politeness-policies-on-physics-overflow?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Will there be politeness policies on physics overflow?&lt;/a&gt;. As Dilaton pointed out, Arnold Neumaier's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/22389/will-there-be-politeness-policies-on-physics-overflow?show=22410#a22410&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; there is quite moderate,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not necessary to be rude, and paying a little attention to one's tone is certainly better than just writing from one's gut feelings. A moderate language is one of the many facets of perfection, to be aspired even if not always attained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is the highest-voted answer. However, that answer is hardly conclusive, and it seems that the hard stance is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are no rudeness rules, and there will never be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/22389/will-there-be-politeness-policies-on-physics-overflow?show=22396#c22396&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; by a PO moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do have a section &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/faq#a8304&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What can I do if I observe bad things?&lt;/a&gt; on their FAQ, which I feel is hazy regarding abuse on the site, directing readers to a contact link. Mostly, they really shy away from providing any guidelines on what sort of behaviour is and is not acceptable on the site. Personally, I would be worried that certain types of very cutting &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks - of the kind that has been observed and frowned upon on this site before - will be given a lot of free rein on PO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, PO moderators have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se/6213?noredirect=1#comment20823_6213&quot;&gt;stated informally&lt;/a&gt; that abuse will not be tolerated there, but I'm not sure how that squares with the comment above. At the very least, this is unclear and confusing as a PO user; personally, I would expect that some pretty bad stuff will inevitably slip through the cracks of that lack of clarity. I do not, however, advise people curious about PO to stay away from the site - instead, be aware of these points and make up your own mind whether you want to be part of that community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For contrast, you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback&quot;&gt;the &quot;Be Nice&quot; policy at Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240594/proposed-new-code-of-conduct-for-all-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;previous one&lt;/a&gt; (active until October 2014). I, for one, do not see anything there that even hints at scientific censorship. It sure feels good to use belittling language when critiquing work that I feel is technically incorrect, but in the end (I think) it only diminishes the quality of my writing, its value to its readers, and the chances that it will be taken seriously. But then, that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would like PO to adopt an approach like &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxitics.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv Analytics&lt;/a&gt;, which states on its front page, in crisp and clear language, that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We encourage frank, open, and constructive conversation, but frankness doesn't mean lack of civility or lack of respect for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems, though, that they're still reluctant to put any qualifiers behind 'frankness is allowed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T12:26:32.177" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6215" CreationDate="2014-10-15T12:39:33.660" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/resource-recommendations/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; contains the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Contrast this with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is for questions that ask for a specific resource, instead of any resource explaining a particular topic. The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; are &#xA;  mutually exclusive; they should never both be applied to the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; is a tag synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T15:11:18.307" Title="The tag wiki for resource recommendations contradicts existing tag synonyms" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6214" CreationDate="2014-10-15T12:46:55.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good catch. I submitted an edit replacing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T12:46:55.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5281" CreationDate="2014-10-15T17:28:30.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the current synonyms have been changed from the proposal; since July 2014, &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; map to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;. This is intended to catch a large number of users who were using the &lt;code&gt;reference-request&lt;/code&gt; tag when the post is best described by the &lt;code&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/code&gt; flavour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;specific-reference&lt;/code&gt; flavour, on the other hand, is rarer, and can be re-tagged by hand if needed. So if you see something that should have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; tag and doesn't yet, add it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T17:31:18.427" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T17:31:18.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-15T19:59:27.273" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that there are a few different options to sort questions based on popularity, views, tags etc etc. These options give the same list to anyone who uses them at that moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is there any option which learns from my past activities (views, votes cast, votes received etc etc) to curate and sort a personalized list of questions? Is there a proposal to bring such a thing, not just for physics but other SE forums too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5459" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T21:06:50.433" Title="Are the list of questions that I am seeing curated based on my past activities?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6217" CreationDate="2014-10-15T21:06:50.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The algorithm for the front-page display (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;) uses your &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19173/what-do-favorite-tags-and-ignored-tags-do&quot;&gt;favorite and ignored tags&lt;/a&gt; to sort out new or recently active questions that might be interesting to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/138187/2509&quot;&gt;If you do not set your favorite and ignored tags it will use your frequented tags instead.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T21:06:50.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6221" CreationDate="2014-10-15T21:14:34.283" Score="5" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a simple grammatical error in an answer that I was trying to fix.  Unfortunately, it only involved modifying 3 characters.  So, I quickly lightly copy-edited the remainder of the answer making 2 other minor changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit suggestion was than quickly rejected.  Is there any way to just tell the reviewer / author the issue, so he can fix himself if he prefers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/59239&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/59239&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T14:29:40.210" Title="Is there any way to communicate with an edit reviewer?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6219" CreationDate="2014-10-16T02:17:58.497" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rejected your edit to my post because I thought the only thing worth changing was deleting the additional &lt;code&gt;is&lt;/code&gt; in the first sentence; the other changes you suggested were not what I wanted to say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens again, the easiest thing to do is use the comments to question the author about the particular choice of language or blatant errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a slightly related note, the StackExchange team have decided to change the canned responses for rejecting edits. Sadly, the &lt;strong&gt;too minor&lt;/strong&gt; category (which I would have used) has been replaced with &lt;strong&gt;no improvement whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt;. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/238333/what-guidance-should-be-given-when-edits-are-rejected/239950#239950&quot;&gt;read more about it here&lt;/a&gt;. I personally do not like the language used (it seems rather confrontational), but it's what reviewers have to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T02:17:58.497" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2014-10-17T00:01:21.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing this up. Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/71208/262550&quot;&gt;our official supported browsers wiki&lt;/a&gt;, we do not support IE8. Therefore, I recommend that you upgrade your browser (it's likely that you have by now, 2+ years later) to ensure an optimal experience on our sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T00:01:21.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1123" CreationDate="2014-10-17T19:20:50.927" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing this up. I am declining this request as the colors in the current build of our network sites seem to be sufficient, high-contrast, and easy to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58972" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T19:20:50.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6231" CreationDate="2014-10-17T20:23:03.003" Score="6" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I direct your attention to the physics SE question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136604/philosophy-enquiry-of-string-theory&quot;&gt;Philosophical Interpretation of String Theory&lt;/a&gt;. Verbatim questions from the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to explain all the mathematical structure that arises in string&#xA;  theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does one know what one derives is math and what is physics? Where&#xA;  is the boundary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is extremely broad; string theory incorporates many aspects of mathematics. Secondly, the 'boundary' between whether something derived is mathematics or physics is primarily opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has added other questions, and I feel other than being too broad and opinion-based in some aspects, the post should be split into separate questions. For example, one discusses the possibility of string theory as being some effective field theory, or approximation of a more fundamental framework, which is not related to the two questions above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, a bounty has been offered, and the question cannot be closed (at least not by normal users). How has this question slipped passed us for two days, and not been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T16:41:51.690" Title="Why has 'philosophy enquiry of string theory' not been closed?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6224" CreationDate="2014-10-17T20:36:22.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It hasn't been closed because it did not accumulate five close votes from 3k+ users. (Or four votes, at least, with a moderator picking up the fifth.) That's really all there is to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; voted to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that it has a bounty and doesn't allow close votes, if anyone does strongly believe it should be closed, flag it accordingly, and we (mods) will interpret that as a proxy for a close vote. I'm not sure if the system lets you flag as off topic, but if not, use a generic flag for moderator attention and give your reasoning for why it should be closed in the flag description. If there is strong community support for closing it, we can still cancel the bounty and close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T20:36:22.447" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-18T00:29:14.960" Score="0" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;2 days ago a group of people Listed here:&quot;Red Act, Brandon Enright, Danu, JamalS [and] John Rennie&quot; put my question on hold as off topic. I refuted their claim that I was off topic and gave 2 quotes from this very website stating a question like mine was indeed on topic and have gotten no response whatsoever ever. I find it extraordinary that a wrongly accused questioned stay on hold and unreviewed for so long especially considering after 5 days the question gets permanently closed. I now have less than 3 days until it's closed so if an authority figure such as an admin could review my question on behalf of the website I would greatly appreciate the correction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/141390/the-atom-solid-or-liquid&quot;&gt;The atom, solid or liquid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40971" LastEditorUserId="40971" LastEditDate="2014-10-18T00:36:04.360" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T15:29:49.730" Title="My on-hold Question not being reviewed or responded to after edit and 2 comments I made" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2014-10-18T00:43:49.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was reviewed by a moderator, whose decision - leaving it on-hold - reflects that the question still suffers from the problem for which it was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unusual for further information to be left in these cases; unless there's something specific that you could do to alter the question such that it would be allowed here, there's really nothing more to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T00:43:49.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2014-10-18T10:33:14.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interests:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-field-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-field-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-field-theory&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;string-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;string-theory&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, I'm open to responding to other inquiries, but these are my dominant interests.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T10:33:14.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2014-10-18T13:26:38.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with your question is that it deals with counterfactual physics. These are only on-topic in a few cases but this is far from that. There is no way to answer your question because the situation you ask about would not happen within real physics. To get an answer you'd have to extend the laws of physics to that case and the are multiple, non-unique ways to do that. Hence your question is more about science fiction than science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the review procedure, it worked pretty much as intended. Your edit was really minor and does not really warrant a specific response. You do have to assume that after a day or so (but usually a few hours), your edit has been seen and deemed insufficient. Your options then are to continue editing, or ask on meta for further guidance, which you did. (That said, a less confrontational attitude where you simply ask why exactly your question was thought off-topic, and how you can fix it, will be a lot easier to work with and will make less people not bother with a confrontational post.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that the closure text does not completely cover what's wrong with your question. This is by design: we have a small number of canned closure reasons and we get more personal theories than counterfactual queries. In a case like this it is good practice to leave a comment explaining why it's off-topic, which Red Act did, before the question was closed. Until you had actually addressed that, there's little point in providing further input. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T13:26:38.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2014-10-18T15:29:49.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an on-hold question is updated it goes into the review queue and all users with &gt;3k rep see it. I did see your question in the review queue and I voted to leave it closed. I would guess the same applies to all the other reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why I voted to close your question, then voted against reopening it, is that it can't be answered using the laws of physics because you propose a physically impossible situation. Your question even concedes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I were to &lt;strong&gt;break the laws of the universe&lt;/strong&gt; and shrink down to the size of a nucleus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long term aim of this site is to provide a definitive searchable resource for anyone interested in Physics. That means we expect answers to be based on impeccable physical reasoning and we downvote and close answers that do not meet this standard. It is impossible to answer your question whilst maintaining the standards expected of answers posted here, and that's why your question was closed and remains closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T15:29:49.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6224" CreationDate="2014-10-18T16:41:51.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments to the new version of Phys.SE question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/136604/2451&quot;&gt;Philosophical Interpretation of String Theory&lt;/a&gt; (v5): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question has now been considerably changed, so that many of the initial flags do possibly no longer apply. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have therefore cancelled the flags. If you still think the latest version should be flagged, submit a new flag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have cancelled the bounty to give the community a chance to review the latest version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OP should wait at least 3 days before setting a new bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T16:41:51.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6233" CreationDate="2014-10-19T11:06:05.343" Score="11" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the title says all. What is the meaning of a student of Physics as per this community? I ask this because there are students at many levels: 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th graders, undergraduates, graduates etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;REASON FOR THIS QUESTION&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a 10th grader. I posted a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/140924/&quot;&gt;Tension in a pulley system&lt;/a&gt;) and it was put on hold, despite receiving an upvote. I understand, that for 99% people here, the question would take less than 10 seconds to solve. I also understand, that there are many answered questions, similar to my question, and their answers fully apply to my question. However, the answers begin with the very part that I have a doubt in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize it's because of lack of concept clarity (about tension) that I am not able to understand. &#xA;Realizing that the community rules wanted me to include my efforts at solving the question and a specific thing which I wanted to ask, I edited the question, and in the comments, wrote to two people who chose to vote for putting the question on hold to review and open the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after a few days, the question was closed, without a comment from any one explaining what was it lacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if these questions are too trivial for people here, should I leave this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: OK, I will open a new question on the main site. Discussion over from my side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61946" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T21:21:26.743" Title="What does this community mean by students?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6232" CreationDate="2014-10-19T15:26:25.430" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Introductory remarks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First some remarks to address specific points or misconceptions in your post, then I'll try to pick apart this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is an agreed definition of &lt;em&gt;&quot;student&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I take the word to mean any one who is seriously studying the subject. Being in secondary school certainly is no barrier to be a full participant on Physics SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key word (in my personal (not moderator powered) opinion) is &lt;em&gt;&quot;seriously&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It doesn't mean you have to be an expert, but it does mean you have to be acting as physicist: taking basic concepts and applying them to build a understanding.  You should also use the discipline specific vocabulary and the usual techniques in terms of drawing and labeling figures to help you along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll discuss my understanding of your question a little more in a further down.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As I've remarked before there isn't an actual difference between &lt;em&gt;&quot;on hold&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;closed&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. They represent the same condition in the database that backs the site and the different words are only there to indicate to new users that this condition is not irrevocable. The code that writes the messages uses a threshold time in that state to decide which phrase to use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you edit a held question it gets put into the review queue for higher rep users to look at (I think this only happens the first time you edit after the question is held). People did see your question and both votes cast were to leave it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just showing what you have tried is not enough to rescue a homework-like question. You have to render the question into a form where it has general applicability rather than being useful only for solving the question in front of you. You accomplish this by making the question about the &lt;em&gt;physics concept&lt;/em&gt; where you are stuck (I almost wrote &quot;concepts&quot;, but that would have been a mistake because each question should address &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; concept).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this can be difficult and that you may not have a clear idea of what that request even means.  I teach a lot of introductory physics courses and &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; students don't &quot;get it&quot; even after I bang away at the problem for a whole semester. But I'd like to offer a piece of advice: if the words &lt;em&gt;&quot;formula&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;equation&quot;&lt;/em&gt; enters into your question then you haven't yet got it down to physics concepts but are still treating the mathematical representation which is case specific.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About your post&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all the question seems to have changed steadily as you repeatedly edited it. You need to be careful to understand the action of higher rep users in terms of the version(s) they knew about when they took those action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent version is much closer to a good (for the site) question than the early versions which were both unclear and addressed only the specific example in front of you. Alas the pure number of edits you made works against you: people develop a fatigue about these things; when you post came back to the top of the active queue for the fifth time they sighed and thought &quot;Not that again!&quot; and moved on without even looking at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be very helpful to know what you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get. I mean, I'd be temped to offer two different very short answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Well, draw a free-body diagram for each block already!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Each block is in equilibrium, right? So what does that imply about the forces acting on them?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't even know if these response would help you because your question is &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; basic (and the exercise you are working on so oddly stated) that I'm not sure what tools you have at your disposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the most recent addition your post is (imho) either re-openable or close to it because the focus has come be on a procedure for working out the tension which is actually a fairly general thing. I'm not going to vote on it because as a moderator my single vote is binding and it is desirable to have the community weight in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-10-19T15:36:23.310" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T15:36:23.310" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-19T15:32:56.397" Score="0" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was put on hold and closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/140955/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/140955/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason given was: &quot;We deal with mainstream physics here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kyle Kanos agrees with me that the elements I use in my question are mainstream physics but he thinks the combination of them is not. Sure, it won't be possible in the near or even quite distant future, but IMO it's a valid question and I've seen equally theoretical questions, even one about black hole power plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please review my question and reopen it if it's on topic here. Please also read the comments of Alan Rominger and Hypnosifl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T13:01:53.293" Title="Off topic review: How to feed a small black hole against 1 TW Hawking radiation pressure?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-19T15:42:31.687" Score="-3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should also encourage good comment, since not everyone is willing to write a long detailed answer, they may provide thoughts which is also very important. Also comment is the start of a deeper discussion, so I think we should encourage a little bit of good comment by giving some reputation to the corresponding person who writes a voted up comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine the loss of some great points by the some people who may think the question is not worthwhile to write an answer, or they are too busy or too lazy to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24452" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-10-23T03:31:33.017" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T03:31:33.017" Title="Why no reputation for good comment?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6235" CreationDate="2014-10-19T15:51:38.323" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are &lt;em&gt;not a forum&lt;/em&gt;, but a question and answer site. It is not the aim of the SE model to encourage debate, but to provide (more or less) definite answers to definite questions. Though comments may contain worthwhile information, reputation is granted for contributions towards good questions and answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are transient by design, and subject to deletion at any time. They are not made to stay, and should not be used to state vital information - everything that is crucial should be edited into the existing questions and answers, or be written into another answer. Making comments grant reputation disincentivizes good edits and answers, which is contrary to the goal of creating good Q&amp;amp;As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T15:51:38.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2014-10-19T16:27:07.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in the comments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5053/may-i-ask-questions-i-come-across-while-attempting-to-write-science-fiction?rq=1&quot;&gt;this topic in meta&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate that questions asking what mainstream theories would predict about a science-fictional scenario are on-topic (assuming the premises of the scenario don't themselves violate any physical laws, of course). And certainly mainstream physicists write papers analyzing physical solutions in general relativity that are unlikely to occur naturally and have science-fictional associations, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1563966530&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;traversable wormholes&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alcubierre warp bubble&lt;/a&gt;, discussions about these ideas are not typically closed. Likewise the theoretical possibility of an advanced civilization extracting rotational energy from a rotating black hole is sometimes discussed in textbooks, see the page &lt;a href=&quot;http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/nagasawa2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; discussing two theoretical processes that have been discussed in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59406" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T16:27:07.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2014-10-19T16:38:00.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to take seriously any question that starts with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe some life will evolve into electronic beings which can repair their bodies and potentially live as long as they have an energy source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I think it's an interesting question to ask whether a small black hole in some specified pressure of gas would come to an equilibrium where the outgoing Hawking radiation would balance the rate of infalling gas. The problem is that at the moment the serious physics in your question is overwhelmed by the science fiction fluff and that makes me reluctant to vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T16:38:00.147" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6232" CreationDate="2014-10-20T02:53:08.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address your actual question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of a student of Physics as per this community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does it matter? As far as I know, nowhere in the rules and policies and guidelines of this site, nor anywhere in the discussions here on meta, does it say anything specific to students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we've ever bothered to come up with a precise definition of &quot;student&quot; for this community, simply because - as I explained in the previous paragraph - we've never really needed one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want one, I think the definition dmckee gave in his answer is reasonable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I take the word to mean any one who is seriously studying the subject.... The key word (in my personal (not moderator powered) opinion) is &quot;seriously&quot;. It doesn't mean you have to be an expert, but it does mean you have to be acting as physicist: taking basic concepts and applying them to build a understanding. You should also use the discipline specific vocabulary and the usual techniques in terms of drawing and labeling figures to help you along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, how the community here responds to you depends on the quality of the content you post, not on who you are or what your relationship to physics is (student, teacher, researcher, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T02:53:08.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2014-10-21T14:16:17.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specialties&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inflation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inflation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inflation&lt;/a&gt; (actually pretty much all cosmology topics), &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rocket-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rocket-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rocket-science&lt;/a&gt; (and/or satellites/space tech), &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/engineering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;engineering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, I always try to answer in a fun way at the appropriate level. My students always tell me I make them like physics again (except the physics majors, who obviously already like physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T14:16:17.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6232" CreationDate="2014-10-21T15:02:38.100" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is not that you are a 10th grade student.  Unfortunately, there are too many physics experts on this site that have forgotten that they weren't born knowing all that stuff either.  Too often I see simple questions get closed because they are simple.  There is also a somewhat religious aversion to homework problems here.  I see the point, and I too vote to close those question that simply dump a homework problem on us here.  But, helping someone work thru a contrived problem, as long as they are trying within the apparent limits of their knowledge, should be part of the function of this site.  However, all that is somewhat of a digression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem in this particular case is that your question was crap.  This is not about the content, but the way the question was written and the problem explained.  Unfortunately, all too often teachers will give you leeway in formatting, presentation quality, clarity, and overall neatness.  This is doing you a disservice, since the real world gives no such leeway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may think, what does it matter how it looks as long it says what it needs to say?  It may be smudged pencil scrawls, but you can still see what it says.  Wrong.  Such things are annoying to read, and in some cases take extra time to decipher.  You saved yourself a little trouble in writing, but that is at the expense of the reader.  Think about what that says, which is &lt;i&gt;&quot;I'm more important than you are.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;.  That's not a smart thing to say to someone you want to get a good grade from, a admissions dean you are trying to impress, someone you hope will hire you, or volunteers you are asking a favor from to help you with your problem on a web site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attitude and respect matter.  A lot.  Nobody wants to help some ingrate who can't even be bothered to write a comprehensible question.  Screw that.  There is absolutely no excuse for not getting the little things right, like capitalizing the first word of each sentence, capitalizing the word &quot;I&quot;, one thought per sentence, and presenting information with the context of the reader in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just looked at your original question, and your problem was mostly a confused and very poorly thought out presentation of the question.  Here is your question interspresed with my thoughts as I'm reading it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;In the question,&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Huh?  What question.  No question has been previously introduced.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;a block having mass M is suspended from a fixed support using a wire of length L.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;OK, I think I can form a mental picture of this.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Due to the mass M, the an elongation of l is produced in the wire.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;The an&quot;?  Really?  You think so little of us that you can't even be bothered to proofread what you wrote once?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Elongation is produced&quot; is awkward and leaves confusion.  Is l the additional length the wire is stretched after M is supsended from it compared to its unstretched length?  But if so, how does that reconcile with you stating earlier that the length was L.  Is L before or after M is suspended?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Now, this mass M is removed,&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Now I'm picturing a wire dangling from something.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;and a pulley is suspended using the same wire. Assume the mass of the pulley to be negligible. Now two blocks of mass M (M is the same mass as in the first case) are suspended on opposite ends of the pulley. What will be the elongation of the wire in this case?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I think I sortof see this.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Options: A. 4l B. 2l C. l D. l/2&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Huh?  Oh, these are apparently choices of a multiple choice answer labeled A-D.  That was confusing.  That would have been much clearer in tabular form.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;I have no idea about mechanical advantage and its usage to solve such problems,&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;What does mechanical advantage have to do with anything?  That was never mentioned in the problem and appears to be irrelevant.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;nor have I done anything related to pulleys.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;So let me get this straight.  This question clearly contains a pulley, but yet this guy has done nothing with pulleys!?  He hasn't even bothered to look up the basics or read the chapter in his book before asking the question?  Does he need us to change his diaper and burp him too?  If he'd said the book says xxx, but I don't see how to apply that here because yyy, I'd be all over this trying to help him.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;I don't know how to calculate the total mass of the pulley and masses system.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;OK, but what has this guy done to try to figure it out?  I can't tell what specifically he is stuck on to try to help him past the mental block or misconception.  I'm happy to help someone trying to learn, but this ingrate just wants the answer and hasn't even tried to figure anything out himself.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;This question is from a competitive test&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;How on earth is that relevant?  Why am I supposed to give a crap where this question came from?  Is this supposed to give his question higher priority?  Oh, it's from a competitive test (as apposed to what, a uncompetetive test?), so we'll hop to it and get right on that.  Yeah, right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's see, confusing writing, no diagram when it is obvious that would be useful, hasn't shown any work, and arrogant attitude.  Screw this.  Voting to close on account of just being homework dumped on us, and downvoting for good measure as a kick in the butt on the way out the door.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You had one chance to make your first impression, and you blew it by being lazy, sloppy, and therefore arrogant.  The question as it stands now (I don't remember seeing the original) is actually somewhat reasonable.  If I came across that on its own, I'd probably try to answer.  However, now that the history has been pointed out, I don't feel motivated to spend my free time on this particular question.  I know the SE system was recently changed so that questions are now &quot;on hold&quot; instead of &quot;closed&quot; initially.  But, that's a bunch of PC crap I don't agree with.  It makes it seem OK to make a mess first and then be allowed to fix it later.  Not on my free time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I could vote to reopen it, and it probably deserves it according to the SE rules, but it's my vote and I'm not going to.  You need to be taught a lesson that respect, carefully thinking out what you want to say, presentation quality, and attention to detail matter.  You seem to think proper writing is something that only applies in English class.  Wrong.  Not on my free time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T15:02:38.100" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6243" CreationDate="2014-10-22T01:44:39.503" Score="4" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm clearly not the first to voice concerns regarding homework questions. Most people here know this is not a check-my-work or give-me-the-answer site, and so don't ask  poorly-phrased homework questions that aren't about a physics concept. But we still have a lot, especially from new users. There's been a lot of effort put into making sure people know about the homework policy, from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;. But there are still issues, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142489/how-to-find-the-moments-of-a-and-b&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, on which I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the OP's core issue was - only to have him/her suddenly announce that s/he knew the answer. Why, given all the effort that's been put in to the contrary, are we still seeing poor homework questions? Is there any way we can fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T09:04:47.940" Title="Why are there still poor homework questions?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6242" CreationDate="2014-10-22T09:04:47.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework questions are predominantly from new users. They probably didn't bother to read any of the info about the site (does anyone? :-), and in any case they have nothing to lose by posting the homework question. There's no meaningful penalty and in any case often (too often) someone answers it. Just look at the number of questions closed as homework that have answers: many with accepted answers. As things stand, the posting of homework questions is an inevitable result of the existance of physics students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to stop homework questions would be to bar new users from posting questions directly. One possibility would be to require questions from new users to be approved by the 3k users, or another would be to block questions entirely until new users had earned some reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess both options would require changes by Stack Exchange. I would also guess that the Physics SE is unusual in its disapproval of homework. As a result I doubt the SE would be willing to make those changes. It would be worth searching the mother meta as I bet the issue of approving questions has been raised before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T09:04:47.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4977" CreationDate="2014-10-22T16:20:45.220" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the main purpose of the &quot;Homework&quot; tag is to inform respondants that this question must NOT be answered explicitly without explanation.  It should only be answered in a way that encourages the requestor to think--it should help him solve the problem and not solve it for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think it's a good idea to switch away from this context--if someone saw a &quot;problem-solving&quot; tag would they still be as likely to remember not to directly answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &quot;Educational&quot; or &quot;Learning&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I think that part of the reason some people object to the &quot;Homework&quot; tag on their posts is that they are actually trying to get the internet to do their homework for them and they dislike the tag because it stops people from directly answering a question in such a way that that they can copy and paste it into their homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3113" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T16:20:45.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-24T15:52:52.253" Score="4" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the problems with homework questions is that they often get an answer before the question can be closed. So the vile perpetrator gets the answer they want, and the subsequent downvotes don't hurt them because their rep is probably already just 1 and they may not be planning to come back anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure anyone posting answers to homework questions is just trying to be helpful, and I doubt they have the destruction of the site in mind, but I wonder if some sanction would be appropriate. The obvious one would be that upvotes for answers to questions closed as &lt;em&gt;Off-topic&lt;/em&gt; would be excluded from the rep (I wouldn't exclude the upvotes from the rep for other close reasons because some questions closed as duplicates have good answers). Could we ask SE if they can do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T18:22:52.787" Title="Sanction for answering a homework question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2014-10-24T16:23:40.063" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is going too far.  I also think some people, you included if I remember right, are on a vendetta against homework problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People shouldn't be just dumping homework problems on us.  I have no problem with those getting closed and downvoted to oblivion.  If someone answers one, you can downvote the answer with a comment explaining why.  That should eventually get the point across.  You don't need any new SE features for that.  It's your vote, use it as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we seem to be excessively strict about any homework-like problem.  It should be OK to state the problem, then ask something like &lt;i&gt;I can figure out xxx is yyy, but I don't see how to get zzz from that&lt;/i&gt;, or &lt;i&gt;I solved it like this, am I on the right track?&lt;/i&gt;, etc.  Everyone had to learn this stuff somehow, and working thru problems, whether deliberately contrived for the purpose or not, is a useful part of that process.  As long as someone is trying &lt;i&gt;within the limits of their apparent knowledge&lt;/i&gt;, we should be helping them learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing answers to these types of problems should never do is simply give the answer.  The point in these cases is to teach physics.  Sometimes it helps illuminate the concepts to show the answer at the end, but just giving the answer without teaching the physics does nothing useful for anyone.  Go ahead and digitally tar and feather any such answer.  However, no new SE features are needed for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20848" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T16:23:40.063" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-25T09:47:17.600" Score="-8" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Unification of energy and mass ”, when explained carelessly, becomes one of the most dangerous heresies. Ī don’t point my finger to anybody, but many otherwise knowledgeable guys easily write a rubbish with roughly “Special Relativity abolished the difference between energy  and mass, hallelujah Einstein, hallelujah &lt;em&gt;E&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; ” meaning. Of course we, “adult” guys, understand that Special Relativity actually &lt;em&gt;separated&lt;/em&gt; two masses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An essence susceptible to forces and creating gravitational forces (the same as energy or, if you like, 4-momentum &lt;em&gt;vector&lt;/em&gt; or its projection).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mass, an &lt;strong&gt;intrinsic&lt;/strong&gt; quantitative property of a body (said the &lt;em&gt;rest mass&lt;/em&gt; or, more generally, &lt;em&gt;invariant mass&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;magnitude&lt;/em&gt; of 4-momentum).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are, of course, related, but are not more the same thing than “distance” and “length” are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal: any answer suggesting “energy and mass are the same thing” without any specification about &lt;strong&gt;which definition of mass is assumed&lt;/strong&gt; ought to be summarily downvoted on sight. The same about “photons do not effect gravity” visionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: answers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/91501/what-keeps-mass-from-turning-into-energy/91503#91503&quot;&gt;What keeps mass from turning into energy?&lt;/a&gt; were assumed, although it is hard to find this misconception in such concentrated form on psysics.SE. And it likely became a moot question for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56960" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T13:48:07.740" Title="“Mass in Special Relativity” misconception" Tags="|discussion|answers|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6232" CreationDate="2014-10-26T21:21:26.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the merits of the original offending question, I do think it is difficult sometimes to gauge the level of explanation someone is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many folks on the forum launch into the full gruesome mathematics of a solution, and whilst that may suit a certain fraction of the readership and possibly impress their peers, I can't help thinking that it is often of little use to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better if those working at undergraduate level and below would identify themselves as such, or indicate in some other way the complexity and depth of the answers being sought. Sometimes it's obvious from the questions being asked, but often it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T21:21:26.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6248" CreationDate="2014-10-27T08:19:49.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to confess that I don't understand the distinction between the two types of masses made by the OP. I certainly agree that mass and energy are not the same, though they are interchangeable. However a more detailed discussion of the issue is probably inappropriate for the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main point is that the tone of the post strikes me as inappropriate. No-one is paid for contributing to this site. We do so entirely out of good will. I don't like the idea of punishing members for answers. Unless an answer is obviously lazy or careless the correct response to a misleading answer is to (tactfully) point out the error and/or post a better answer yourself. Answering questions is just as much a learning process as posting them, and few of us can claim all our answers are beyond improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note Incnis' profile states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This site is supposedly useful for “active researchers, academics and students of physics”. If you want science, then never rely on such self-governed Internet sites (Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, or whatever), that are not supervised by an academic organization. They are all flawed. You can find some valuable insights here, but you may not trust assessments made by this community. Use reputable sources, available experts, and your own intellect to verify all this stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well yes, but that applies to everything in life and academic organizations are far from beyond reproach. I think the Physics SE stands head and shoulders above any comparable site I have ever seen. It is everything that peer review should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Re the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/6248/revisions&quot;&gt;edit to the question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; I wouldn't use phrases like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not that mass and energy &quot;can change back and forth&quot;. They are literally equivalent ways of talking about the same thing &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though a minor edit to &lt;em&gt;they are different forms of the same thing&lt;/em&gt; would be fine by me, and I'd guess that's what the author really meant. However I think far worse crimes against physics are committed. Is this really such a big issue as to warrant its own meta post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T13:48:07.740" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-27T09:46:04.857" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/143087/sum-of-energy-from-torques-of-several-disks-in-double-rotation&quot;&gt;Sum of energy from torques of several disks in double rotation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is on hold, but I don't find another forum or question where this problem is resolved. It's possible to use lower number of disks, 16 at least, but I can't think with 2 or 3 disks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62456" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T12:57:59.123" Title="Why my question is hold on?" Tags="|support|scope|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6251" CreationDate="2014-10-27T10:11:47.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closing notice tells you &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; why your question is on hold, and links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt; - what more do you want to know? Please also have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583&quot;&gt;our stance on check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That you cannot find the solution to your problem elsewhere is unfortunate, but that does not mean that we have to solve it for you (or check your solution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T10:11:47.917" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2014-10-29T16:31:55.073" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the problem with the homework questions, but I don't like your suggestion because it is not a remedy to the actual the problem. The actual problem, as far as I understand, is that the questions get asked, not that they are sometimes answered. As you say, most of these questions are asked by one-time visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we need some power users on the homework-tag, because they have the single-handed option (like mods) to close questions. Otherwise, we need more people in general with VTC privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, would it be useful to support a physics-learning proposal on Area 51, (&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&lt;/a&gt;). In that case, you can move most of these over there, without losing any content (where they could still be closed for insufficient quality what-so-ever). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6982" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T16:31:55.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-11-03T10:39:03.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/75912/scientific-imagination?referrer=IPIEcsN2huMFuP7v0aO_3g2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/coftu.png&quot; alt=&quot;For the geeks interested in fun science questions and answers.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55683" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T10:39:03.150" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-03T10:39:03.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2014-11-03T18:22:52.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you noted, the answerers are just trying to be helpful, and we don't want to discourage them from doing so (in general, of course!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we don't want to punish people because of a closure that happens after they answered! That seems unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, closures are temporary. Questions can be reopened. Communities often disagree on borderline cases. Involving rep loss in this is ...not wise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - there's not much we can feasibly do to stop users from answering &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; a question is closed, and we already prevent answers on closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do, and we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; do, is prevent repeat offenders who &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; bad questions from asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In case of repeated multiple consecutive closed questions, mods are informed that there's something happening via a flag. This is usually enough on smaller sites where mods can contact every user they need to, and help them correct their style&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, users are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;autobanned&lt;/a&gt; from asking after they display a pattern of bad questions asked (multiple closed, heavily downvoted, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; do, is affect first-time offenders, that would not be welcoming to people that err in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T18:22:52.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T21:27:56.190" Score="-1" ViewCount="1673" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your attempt to edit my post better, and I appreciate every edit you make. However please keep in mind that I intentionally use &lt;em&gt;lagrangian&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;Lagrangian&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;em&gt;Lagrangian&lt;/em&gt; is widely accepted and if I write it differently, you will find something not right, and you have the itch to fix it. When you read the words, you are not spelling every character it has, but recognizing it as a whole gesture. By remember the whole gesture, your speed of reading will be enhanced, therefore your brain saves the energy for other task, such as truly understanding the text. That's why misspelling words are irritated because it interrupts your reading flows. Seeing it lowercased while you expecting it uppercased makes you feel the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have my own rationale. &lt;em&gt;Google&lt;/em&gt; is a company name, a proper noun, but &lt;em&gt;google&lt;/em&gt; is a verb; &lt;em&gt;Fermi&lt;/em&gt; is a person name, a proper noun, but &lt;em&gt;fermion&lt;/em&gt; is a noun. I think writing &lt;em&gt;lagrangian&lt;/em&gt; in lowercase is not wrong; In his book, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integral, Feynmann also wrote &lt;em&gt;lagrangian&lt;/em&gt; in lowercase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that you are absolutely wrong, nor I'm absolutely right. There is no wrong or right in languages, just majority and minority. Therefore I don't mind if seeing &lt;em&gt;Lagrangian&lt;/em&gt;. However, please let me write it in the way I feel right. Thank you for your understanding and sorry if this makes any inconvenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind if you downvote this. I preset this line below so that every time I foresee that someone will uppercase &lt;em&gt;lagrangian&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hamiltonian&lt;/em&gt;, etc, all I need is just copy this line into my post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-NOTE: I intentionally write &quot;lagrangian&quot; in lowercase. See http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/6257/41634-&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="41634" LastEditDate="2015-11-15T10:06:00.700" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T13:01:41.177" Title="Thanks to let me write &quot;lagrangian&quot; in lowercase" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6257" CreationDate="2014-11-03T21:40:52.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For starters, check this link for the Wikipedia entry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lagrangian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Then press &lt;code&gt;CTRL+F&lt;/code&gt; and type in &lt;code&gt;lagrangian&lt;/code&gt;. Scroll through the page and count the number of times you see the lower-case version of the word. The hidden value below gives you the total number of times it's found, in case you were not interested in doing the experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; There are 0 (&lt;strong&gt;zero&lt;/strong&gt;) instances of the lower-case version of the word &quot;lagrangian&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar results are found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath523/kmath523.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Lagrangian.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nyu.edu/classes/tuckerman/stat.mech/lectures/lecture_1/node3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and so on. Note also that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lagrangian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster dictionary capitalizes it as well&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, if you feel that strongly about using the wrong case, you can always re-edit the question to make it the (incorrect) lower-case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T21:40:52.577" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6260" CreationDate="2014-11-04T13:45:38.107" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Nov 1st I was fortunate enough to earn 215 rep points (which was capped). I have not received a mortarboard badge for this. Anyone know why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T14:26:43.553" Title="Delayed/absent mortarboard badge?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6259" CreationDate="2014-11-04T14:26:43.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mortarboard badge is only awarded one time per user. You already have received this badge on Oct 26th. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T14:26:43.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T15:02:03.387" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few features in Stack Exchange that I can never remember how to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I move a discussion that has started in an exchange of comments to a chat, while copying the existing discussion to the chat as well?   I've seen it done, and I've even done it myself, but I always struggle to figure out how it's done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T15:02:03.387" Title="Starting a chat, including existing comments" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6263" CreationDate="2014-11-05T03:35:05.370" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;While editing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/144887/planetary-motion&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed that we have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planet&lt;/a&gt; as well as one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;. A slightly deeper than superficial look indicates that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planet&lt;/a&gt; is apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/planets/synonyms&quot;&gt;a synonym&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;--it appears it was used once and then later linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planets&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planets&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planets&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it seems completely unnecessary, can we merge the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planet&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T11:27:01.867" Title="Merge the &quot;planet&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6262" CreationDate="2014-11-05T06:57:50.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure. Done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future just raise such non-controversial merge requests&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; in chat (as opposed to meta), and a moderator will take action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that synonyms are reversible while merges are irreversible (=hard to unshuffle). This is why we often hesitate to perform merges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I changed OP's original wording &lt;em&gt;burninate request&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;merge request,&lt;/em&gt; because that is technically the relevant term for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;planet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;planet&lt;/a&gt; tag. More generally, a (typically non-existent) tag name is burninated to prevent its potential future creation if the Phys.SE community decides so. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5446/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/993/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta posts. In contrast to a merge request, a burninate request requires intervention from the SE team outside Phys.SE to be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T11:27:01.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-07T01:23:07.420" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6114/the-site-toolbar-looks-broken-in-chrome-how-can-i-fix-it&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but there's yet another formatting problem in Chrome. I'm seldom one to argue for doing it so it works vs. doing it right, but there needs to be some pragmatism: the number of Windows Chrome users strike me as a not-so-insignificant chunk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2n4XY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2n4XY.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="431" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T01:23:07.420" Title="Wide Chrome (&gt;2406 px) breaks horizontal alignment" Tags="|bug|style|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-07T05:44:40.190" Score="7" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a mad scientist, skilled with his hands. I build my own tools, in many cases. I think would be very useful if can ask about contruction of tools related to the Physical (in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(contruction mean: procedures, materials, and other stuff)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; say that &quot;How to stabilize an unstable telescope?&quot; is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about &quot;How to build a solar filter for my telescope?&quot; Would that be on-topic? Or, &quot;How to build a neutron source?&quot; Would that be on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57823" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T08:08:39.623" Title="Is it on-topic to ask about homemade construction of tools?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2014-11-07T15:38:47.053" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to say there isn't a way of asking those questions that would be on-topic. With the right wording, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; manage to get away with asking them. But it's risky business. Engineering questions are generally off-topic here and asking how to build tools for science is definitely more of an engineering topic. My advice would be to avoid the trouble and not ask them, but if you think you can make the questions enough about physics and less about how to build something, then try your luck and we'll see what the reviewers think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T15:38:47.053" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2014-11-07T16:35:09.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say this is more an engineering question, which in general is off-topic; see this topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is currently no general engineering SE site, but there is one in commitment phase: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/60453/engineering?referrer=KcfjUC9wdeJUZvrx04eTvg2&quot;&gt;Area 51 - Engineering&lt;/a&gt;. So I'd suggest you wait until it matures or even commit to the proposed site yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T16:35:09.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2014-11-07T18:56:57.077" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As another answer mentioned engineering &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; physics (use the same models, same domain, same principles). I would say engineering is practical physics (associated in some part to experimental physics as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So engineering as &lt;strong&gt;practical physics&lt;/strong&gt; is certainly &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many times, &lt;strong&gt;real-world examples or analogies&lt;/strong&gt; are used in physics (they are used in mathematics for crying out loud), to make concepts more intuitive or applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem solving is not only for engineers. Physicists (and mathematicians and other domains) actually solve problems (and I mean practical problems as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R. Feynman and his diagrams were considered as &lt;em&gt;less than physics&lt;/em&gt; (actually Schwinger considered them to be engineering &quot;&lt;em&gt;..all S and T lines and rays..&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, reference: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Genius, the life of R. Feynman&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure some people will disagree with providing intuition and real-world analogies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus I would like to mention that some sites actually &lt;strong&gt;forbid&lt;/strong&gt; (explicitly or implicitly) practical questions about physics. Personally I strongly disagree with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point is &lt;strong&gt;not memorisation of given rules&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;actual comprehension of the why and how to the point of actual application&lt;/strong&gt; (and even beyond).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44176" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T08:59:52.783" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T08:59:52.783" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-07T18:56:57.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2014-11-07T19:46:04.277" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd (personally, not as a moderator) go with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The design and construction of instruments that you can not easily buy---either because there is no commercial supply, because each one is necessarily unique or because you're jury-rigging a basic instrument for a home-experiment---might be on-topic. The design and construction of instruments that compete directly with commercially available instruments is off-topic as engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T19:46:04.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2014-11-11T23:05:41.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Others gave nice answers (with which personaly generaly agree), will add one more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions having to do with application based on physical principles (or &lt;em&gt;practical physics&lt;/em&gt;) should be on-topic. Even if these questions involve making things or measuring things or assessing things, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if one wants to build a telescope, the physical principles are what is relevant to build a working telescope. This involves the mathematical relations that are relevant to telescopes, the materials and their properties, the compensating factors for atmospheric effects, parallax calculations and all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one wants to assess personaly the efficiency of an already made telescope (either home-made or purchased) using physical principles, this should also be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if one wants the locations of the materials for making a telescope or extensive research about a specific material over another material for building a telescope. i would say this cannot be done correctly and effectively here. And this indeed involves engineering research which can be extensive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless the physical principles remain the same, even for assessing the various materials, but any furher investigation would be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44176" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T23:05:41.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6274" CreationDate="2014-11-12T12:38:08.820" Score="19" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are questions like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/146255/why-does-objects-with-zero-acceleraton-move/&quot;&gt;Why does objects with zero acceleraton move?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it seems like a person genuinely wanting to understand a physical concept and coming here for help. It just bothers me that apparently people have decided not to help those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen remarks on meta like 'This site is for professionals', suggesting that the question is too 'stupid' or low-level, but if that is truly the case, homework questions should also not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid misconceptions: I am perfectly ok with downvoting low-level or homework questions if the person has not put any effort in, or wants us to solve their problems. I am only talking about the cases where people are, in my perception, genuinely looking for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43574" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T08:40:32.497" Title="Why are simple questions downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2014-11-12T13:44:13.153" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've seen remarks on meta like 'This site is for professionals',&#xA;  suggesting that the question is too 'stupid' or low-level, but if that&#xA;  is truly the case, homework questions should also not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not follow how 'this site is for professionals' implies homework or homework-like questions should not be allowed. Regardless, notice the rather large banner when first visiting the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P9MHI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Researchers, academics and students of physics&lt;/em&gt; are all welcome on the stack exchange, as are their questions providing they adhere to the guidelines, as determined by the users and moderators. If a homework-like question adheres to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presents the question clearly, with all required details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demonstrates an explicit attempt, whether conceptual or computational&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discusses clearly what the issue the OP is having&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poses a question sufficiently broad, i.e. at least partially beyond the homework context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;give or take a few more points (outlined in the site's guidelines), it's &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; though &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; guaranteed that it will be well-received, and attract posts of good quality. If the question is too 'low level' as you describe, it may be easily answerable by a quick Google search, in which case the question may be closed for insufficient prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T13:44:13.153" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2014-11-12T14:43:03.190" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I've seen, simple questions are not downvoted. One of our most upvoted questions is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3534/dont-heavier-objects-actually-fall-faster-because-they-exert-their-own-gravity&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t heavier objects actually fall faster because they exert their own gravity?&lt;/a&gt; A simple question if ever there was one. And the all-time most up-voted question on our site is about the best way to cool a cup of coffee with a spoon. If posed right, the simplest questions get the most upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question you cite, it didn't make much sense to begin with and the answer is fairly obvious and presented in any text that teaches about Newton's laws. It's also a question easily answered by parents, teachers, whatever. The downvote was most likely because the question showed little to no prior effort. We do enjoy teaching physics to interested people, but we expect to be met halfway. We are supplements to learning, not primary sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as stated, one downvote does not establish a trend. It happens on some &quot;simple&quot; questions, but that's not so much due to their simplicity as it is due to their unclear/imprecise wording, lack of effort, or other such reasons. I assure you that there are high-level questions that get downvoted as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T14:43:03.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6278" CreationDate="2014-11-13T19:46:19.097" Score="10" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed several (&gt;~3) times over the past few months that the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5490/about-the-proposal-to-ban-homework&quot;&gt;About the proposal to ban homework&lt;/a&gt; has been bumped up the front page of Meta, on separate occasions. I don't think it happens that often at all, and I'm not sure whether it's a good thing on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way to see which questions have been bumped up by this process? Is this going on at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On a related note, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;user page for Community on Meta&lt;/a&gt; states that it pokes up questions every hour. This is definitely false on Meta, so maybe it can be fixed?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T15:39:57.777" Title="(Why) does this particular question keep getting bumped up by Community?" Tags="|discussion|support|community-user|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6276" CreationDate="2014-11-13T19:49:36.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post was likely bumped every month or so by the community bot because the post didn't have an upvoted answer. The post was bumped on Nov 12th, which is close to a multiple of 30 days from the original post on Feb 14th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-11-14T15:39:57.777" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T15:39:57.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6276" CreationDate="2014-11-13T20:07:45.507" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(On a related note, the user page for Community on Meta states that it pokes up questions every hour. This is definitely false on Meta, so maybe it can be fixed?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true - with the caveat that it doesn't bump if there's nothing to bump. If there's only 1 question on the site that meets the criteria for bumping, then Community will bump it and &lt;em&gt;touch nothing else&lt;/em&gt; for the next 30 days until it becomes eligible again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6276/why-does-this-particular-question-keep-getting-bumped-up-by-community/6277#6277&quot;&gt;as Qmechanic notes&lt;/a&gt;, it rather appears that this is the only question that's been eligible for some time... And now even it isn't eligible anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T20:07:45.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-15T10:38:01.367" Score="5" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stopped editing because it makes posts bump on the front page, but I am still trying to do my whack to improve the site. I'd like to know what is the exact policy regarding flags, please answer with a clear Yes/No to each question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;avoid comments like '+1' or 'thanks&lt;/strong&gt;' &quot;,  is this just a recommendation or any comment including &quot; +/-1 &quot; should be flagged?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;are generic positive comments like 'nice post', '&lt;em&gt;this is an interesting/ useful answer&lt;/em&gt;' acceptable or any such comment should be flagged?.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;are generic unsubstantiated negative comments without explanations or correction like '&lt;em&gt;this is not true&lt;/em&gt;' acceptable or any such comment should be flagged?.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;are negative comments justified by subjective or generic explanations like ' you &lt;em&gt;say it is red, I think it is pink&lt;/em&gt;' acceptable or any such comment should be flagged?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;should one refrain from flagging comments by users with 10k+ rep, are they allowed to handle flags to their own posts?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;can anyone, besides mods, delete comments? Someone has been lately deleting positive comments to my answers and it does not seem accidental.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience I have noticed tha DavidZ is delegated to deal with flags, but probably any mod can answer these questions. I hope that they share a common policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This mother meta post is a bit undecided on the matter, but generally advises against leaving such comments, and&#xA;  encourages flagging them. The thing it boils down to is that comments&#xA;  should be signal, not noise. &quot;+1, great post!&quot; is noise ....&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;there's no 100% clear cut policy,&lt;/em&gt; and no one will tar and feather you&#xA;  for leaving generic &quot;+1 comments&quot;. - ACuriousMind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what I noticed, ACuriousMind, &lt;em&gt;discretionary&lt;/em&gt; judgement calls. I personally would approve of leaving generic positive comments, as it is a right tribute to the poster and his effort. But, as I said, I just had the impression that some top member [with whom I had divergence of opinions, not you, :) , anyway] was trying to influence of the readers deleting positive comments and my replies to negative comments. I asked DavidZ to restore them, but he declined my request. I draw the conclusion that generic positive comments are not acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I understand that positive comments are left to the discretion of mods, even though this makes a lottery offlagging, but I ask:&quot; &lt;strong&gt;can anyone delete the reply, the refutation of a negative comment&lt;/strong&gt; at his own discretion?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T11:32:41.610" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T06:24:42.487" Title="Precise directives re flagging" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6279" CreationDate="2014-11-15T14:19:04.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;+1/-1 comments and noise&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/15290/263383&quot;&gt;This mother meta post&lt;/a&gt; is a bit undecided on the matter, but generally advises &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; leaving such comments, and &lt;em&gt;encourages&lt;/em&gt; flagging them. The thing it boils down to is that comments should be &lt;em&gt;signal&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;noise&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;+1, great post!&quot; is noise. &quot;-1, this is false&quot; is also noise. Comments containing &quot;+1&quot; but citing a &lt;em&gt;specific reason&lt;/em&gt; for the upvote, pointing out what was particularly worthy about the post contain at least a minimum of signal. Comments containing &quot;-1&quot; but citing a &lt;em&gt;specific reason&lt;/em&gt; for the downvote are definitely signal, since they tell others what is wrong about the post. So, there's no 100% clear cut policy, and no one will tar and feather you for leving generic &quot;+1 comments&quot;. Yet, sooner or later, such a comment will probably be removed as noise, and you are similarily encouraged to flag noise when you see it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flags and deletion&lt;/em&gt;: A comment is removed when either &quot;enough&quot; flags have been cast on it &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; when a mod removes it, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/17365/263383&quot;&gt;this mother meta post&lt;/a&gt;. Note that authors can also delete their comments at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;10k users and flags&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;Never&lt;/strong&gt; refrain from doing anything to a post just because the person owning the post/comment is a high reputation user. There &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/226092/263383&quot;&gt;is no 10k flag queue&lt;/a&gt; anymore, only moderators can see flags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Subjective negative comments&lt;/em&gt;: Saying &quot;I think this is not true&quot; carries no information other than that someone, somewhere disagrees. This is noise, and should be treated as such (i.e. be flagged if you feel strongly about it).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T14:19:04.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6279" CreationDate="2014-11-15T17:45:11.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally I advise against writing &quot;+1&quot; or &quot;-1&quot; or any other explicit indication of how you voted. Your &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt; already did that. Votes are anonymous in the Stack Exchange system to encourage them to reflect the voters judgement rather than membership in some clique or bandwagon. Likewise comments of approval or disapproval that do not explain, expand-on, or dissect the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explaining why you think a post is wrong is a good comment, adding a &quot;-1&quot; makes it more likely the author will take it as an attack.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise expanding on a author's thoughts or emphasizing the importance of something in a post carries the message of approve, but just writing &quot;Nice post.&quot; doesn't say anything that your vote didn't already say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons I am more likely to take the time to trim a comment thread if I see explicit mention of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Treated in (1)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Treated in (1)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use your judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10k users are just like anybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments can be removed by anyone with moderation powers (i.e. moderators and certain SE employees), by the comment's author, or by accumulating enough comment flags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2014-11-28T06:24:42.487" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T06:24:42.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6283" CreationDate="2014-11-15T19:43:35.397" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw a post (a question) where the edits made were as follows (no link, do not want to single out):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit 2 (suggested, approved) was numerous but minor grammar / capitalization fixes; the question was already readable prior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit 3 (privileged) added a missing space between two words in the title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit 4 (suggested, approved) changed an &quot;it's&quot; to &quot;its&quot; in the title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The edits were made by different users). I am not active on Physics. I am active on SO. On SO these would be considered too minor. I would actually probably flag the question and point out that edit 2 and 4 should not have been approved to help spot potential robo-editors/-reviewers (these flags have, so far, been generally marked as helpful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know how Physics feels about these kinds of things though. Here, are the above edits OK? If not, is it helpful to flag them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41010" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T20:08:18.720" Title="How do you guys feel about minor edits?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6282" CreationDate="2014-11-15T20:08:18.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar/spelling changes are fine. Particularly if the person editing made an effort to get all of them at once. Even if a question is readable, it's okay to edit it to fix all the remaining mistakes at once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single space is pretty minor, but since it's on a title it's also sort of important to get right. It just looks bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poor grammar in the title for a single word, I wouldn't approve that change unless there were other things to change as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would say Edit 2 is fine, Edit 3 is okay but not great -- titles are important though and readability matters. Edit 4 I wouldn't have approved but I also don't think I would flag as too minor (I would have rejected it as too minor however).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have a problem with robo-reviewers like SO does. We're a much smaller community and the people who typically do the approval are drawn from a small group of active users. So it's less about robots and more about bumping questions to the front page when there is little reason to. Which is certainly annoying, but not mission-critical to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T20:08:18.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6287" CreationDate="2014-11-15T22:28:45.497" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general I would like to know if there is some criteria to consider certain thought experiments or questions to be better suited for philosophical discussion rather than physics discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/146794/2451&quot;&gt;Is a Thomson&amp;#39;s lamp physically realistic?&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold for being off topic. I am not clear why that is the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the question is philosophically motivated but I think it is suitable for physical considerations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can answer the question in a non philosophical manner. The question ask for some physical argumentation in favour or against a possible outcome  in a thought experiment. Even, the possibility of the thought experiment can  be argued on physical grounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question would require to at least elaborate in the following topics: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experimental designs and results&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepted and/or actively researched theories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are some other questions (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5150/did-spacetime-start-with-the-big-bang&quot;&gt;Did spacetime start with the Big bang?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;) which I will regard as highly philosophical but again I understand them being open as all the answers are in some sense physics oriented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking to consider the reopening of the former question, but as a second plea. My main request is if someone would mind to point me some general guideline about when is a question too philosophical and not suitable for the site. Even if the guidelines are time dependent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T00:14:47.163" Title="When is a question too philosphical?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-16T03:39:03.043" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is so depressing. Yesterday, I opened up my account and found it had some 620 rep. Today it came down to 517. I was shocked at first. But then : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2WcGS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these serial voters must be removed. They cause &lt;strong&gt;mental trauma&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user49111" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T03:47:25.470" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T05:45:47.070" Title="Serial Up-voting problem" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6285" CreationDate="2014-11-16T03:47:36.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant users have gotten a suspension and/or have been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for bringing this to our notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T03:47:36.587" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6284" CreationDate="2014-11-16T03:47:37.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the case that 5 individual contributors to this site decided to close this question.  This is a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, everything else is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It very well may be the case that, on a different day (month, year), this question would not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site (composed of moderators, contributors with voting rights etc.) is not time invariant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, regardless of what you think &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be the case, if essentially no one here is interested in the question, it doesn't matter if it is closed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, bottom line, it isn't the policy &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;; it is up to &lt;em&gt;the OP&lt;/em&gt; to phrase the question in a way that is interesting &lt;em&gt;enough&lt;/em&gt; to those that contribute here &lt;em&gt;at this particular time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could say more but it is late.  I'll refine and amplify later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you mind expanding a little bit on how can I phrase the question&#xA;  in a way that is interesting enough to those that contribute here at&#xA;  this particular time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you're referring to the Thomson's lamp question.  If the question is about a genuine philosophical &lt;em&gt;puzzle&lt;/em&gt;, it is certainly beyond the scope of physics to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way, if physics can decide the problem, the problem isn't a philosophical puzzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, in your question, you write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sum of this infinite series of time intervals is &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; two&#xA;  minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intentionally emphasized the word &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;.  Think about the &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; implication of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in relation to this puzzle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2014-11-19T00:14:47.163" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T00:14:47.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6291" CreationDate="2014-11-16T03:59:07.917" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been on stack exchange for months, but still haven't figured out how to start a new line. The usual Latex double slash or \newline doesn't seem to work here. Could anyone help? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57961" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T10:28:48.860" Title="layout of the text" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6288" CreationDate="2014-11-16T07:35:50.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little surprised you've been around for months without having noticed that StackExchange doesn't use LaTeX ;-) Posts here are composed in a variant of &lt;a href=&quot;http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt;, and as dmckee pointed out in a comment there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;editing help page&lt;/a&gt; that explains most features of Markdown syntax, or the particular variant SE uses. Right at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help#linebreaks&quot;&gt;top of the page&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;End a line with two spaces to add a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; linebreak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T07:35:50.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6288" CreationDate="2014-11-16T21:49:28.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Line breaks are easy: just leave a blank line between two paragraphs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...like this. (Helpful tip: to see how any given post was formatted, click on the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; button to the left of the signature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also force line breaks by using the HTML tag &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. However, I would strongly advise you not to abuse this and to &lt;br&gt; let the Stack Exchange Markdown compiler do its thing. Just write your paragraphs, separate them with a blank line, and you're good to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a line break within a math block, then you need to use the &lt;code&gt;align&lt;/code&gt; environment, where line breaks are implemented by the usual LaTeX double backslash:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$&#xA;    \begin{align}&#xA;    a+b &amp;amp; =c \\&#xA;    d+e &amp;amp; =f&#xA;    \end{align}&#xA;    $$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2014-11-17T10:28:48.860" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T10:28:48.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6294" CreationDate="2014-11-20T05:03:49.650" Score="2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is that when I &lt;strong&gt;down vote&lt;/strong&gt; a post then &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; of my reputation gets deducted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63384" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T07:29:32.160" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T14:26:08.227" Title="After Down Vote, my reputation gets less" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6292" CreationDate="2014-11-20T05:55:30.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's the way the system works.  You should have a look at the available help pages, e.g. this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You lose 2 points when someone downvotes one of your questions or answers and you lose 1 point when you downvote someone else's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T05:55:30.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6292" CreationDate="2014-11-20T14:05:00.630" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You lose 1 point for downvoting an answer and none for downvoting a question. This is because downvoting hurts the post's owner. We want you to only downvote when you seriously believe it deserves it. We don't want people to downvote simply because they feel like it or don't like the author or don't like that they used &quot;your&quot; instead of &quot;you're&quot; somewhere in a 1000 word post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is only a loss of 1 rep point for downvoting an answer because we realize that reputation is hard-earned and we don't want to discourage free expression of opinions; 1 rep point is not much at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting is not to be taken lightly, so this is status-by-design because we want you to take it seriously but not be discouraged from using it. -1 for downvoting a post gets the point across but doesn't hurt too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T14:05:00.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6292" CreationDate="2014-11-20T14:26:08.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A downvote symbolizes your disagreement with someone's work. It is literally saying, &lt;em&gt;This answer is not useful&lt;/em&gt; (hover your mouse over the downvote, that is the alt-text that pops up). The loss of 2 rep for you suggests that the decision to downvote should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be taken lightly (i.e., just downvoting for the heck of it) that you should truly judge whether the post really is wrong or misguided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, you gain 10 rep when your answer is upvoted and 5 when your question is upvoted. Unless you are downvoting &gt;5 answers for each answer-upvote (or &gt;2 answers for each question-upvote) you receive, you are still going to gain reputation based on simple math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T14:26:08.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6298" CreationDate="2014-11-20T14:47:57.427" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have flaged &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; posts and my profile says that all the flags are helpful(i.e. &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; posts flaged, &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; helpful flags). But when I tried to flag one more post, I saw that I had only &lt;strong&gt;8&lt;/strong&gt; flags remaining. Even though &lt;strong&gt;all my flags were deemed as helpful&lt;/strong&gt;. I want to know why two of my flags were gone,even though they were helpful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63384" LastEditorUserId="27166" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T17:30:24.150" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T17:30:24.150" Title="Flags mentioned as helpful, but still my remaining flags are reduced" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6296" CreationDate="2014-11-20T15:02:06.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many flags do I have?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you start out, you are allotted 10 flags per day. This number may increase to up to 100 flags per day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get one bonus flag per 2000 reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are awarded additional bonus flags when you flag correctly - one bonus flag for every ten net helpful flags (helpful flags minus declined flags).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T15:02:06.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6296" CreationDate="2014-11-20T15:03:08.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You get 10 flags a day when you start out. Once used up, you have to wait until the next day to flag more posts. This is done to prevent new users from flagging everything they see and abusing the system. For every 10 helpful flags you have, you get allotted one more opportunity to flag a post each day. So don't worry, you'll get another 12 or so tomorrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T15:03:08.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-23T07:25:39.930" Score="18" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does some &lt;em&gt;concrete&lt;/em&gt; evidence exist that the physics.SE site offers any help with research? (Note that research in physics &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6081/56960&quot;&gt;may not be confused with theoretical physics, that is a specific thing&lt;/a&gt;.) Were new works published there that later obtained recognition from the professional scientific community? Did anybody obtain key insights that prompted his/her research to succeed? Or, possibly, some in-deep reviews of pre-existing papers and textbooks did arise from discussions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56960" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T10:11:26.930" Title="Does physics.SE help research?" Tags="|discussion|content-level|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-24T07:41:38.390" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer here was recently deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/148332/by-what-force-does-a-man-attract-earth/148336?noredirect=1#comment309273_148336&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/148332/by-what-force-does-a-man-attract-earth/148336?noredirect=1#comment309273_148336&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never encountered such forceful thing on any Stack Exchange site before. It was neither spam nor offensive post (the situations in which answers are deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it all about? Yes, I did write 800N, but the answer also had useful concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2170" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T12:19:34.077" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T12:19:34.077" Title="Why was my answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|support|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-24T08:03:08.697" Score="5" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6114&quot;&gt;The site toolbar looks broken in Chrome. How can I fix it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the same problem but in Opera. I've read in one comment that this isn't a problem in Opera but it's for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: This is really disturbing because in this form, the clickable area of the buttons is on the upper half of them and each time I want to click on them I've to go through the same confusion and bewilderment again and again until I remember what's going on in here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XwzAF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64978" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T10:22:13.577" Title="The site toolbar looks broken in Opera" Tags="|discussion|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6300" CreationDate="2014-11-24T09:05:37.477" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quote the comment I left on your answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm temporarily deleting this in accordance with our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. Please don't post complete answers to homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why. I'm not sure what to add to that. (Maybe if you can elaborate on why you were confused by that message, I can provide something more useful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T09:05:37.477" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-26T12:04:19.387" Score="69" ViewCount="2693" Body="&lt;p&gt;... obviously to answer simple questions about everyday life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/148953/&quot;&gt;Why are dishwasher washed glasses &amp;quot;squeaky clean&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I wish to be ungrateful, but I put far more effort, and found it far more interesting, to write an answer explaining where the idea that black holes are gateways to other universes originated, and that answer has so far scored just a single upvote&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that as the site attracts a wider audience the answers that get the most upvotes are going to be the simple ones that everyone can understand. It does detract a bit from the usefulness of the reputation system though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response to NikolajK's comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The very nature of StackOverflow's structure has it such that only those who answer simple questions of the most popular programming languages will get a reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the reward for participating in the Physics SE is just the rep points you get then, well, each to his own but I think this is a poor way to approach the Physics SE and probably life in general. Yes I'm a bit frustrated that what I consider my better answers don't attract as much attention as the more obvious ones (people just don't appreciate my genius) but that isn't going to drive me off the Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of people around here put lots of effort in for effectively no reward, and the moderators not only get no reward but have to put up with criticism every time someone disagrees with their actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And long may it remain so. As long as the world is a better place with the Physics SE than it would be without it then you can count me in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that isn't going to stop me moaning :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; which could of course just mean it's a crap answer :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T06:55:11.647" Title="The secret to getting a massive reputation is ___" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="39" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6310" CreationDate="2014-11-26T16:00:21.407" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Related questions&quot; list does a great job in presenting the most upvoted (and whatever other parameters are used) questions related to a subject, and the subgroup of linked questions, when present, is even better. However, given the amount of high quality questions and answers that are present in physics.se I wonder if there isn't something more that can be done to &lt;em&gt;index&lt;/em&gt; the best-of of the various topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm thinking of are list-questions (probably community wiki) presenting the most upvoted, frequently asked, high-quality questions/answers. Eventually with a tree structure with links to similar list-questions on more specific topics. Something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Common questions on: Quantum mechanics:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General scope:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46015/why-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;Why quantum mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/77030/what-is-quantization&quot;&gt;What is Quantization?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8062/about-the-complex-nature-of-the-wave-function&quot;&gt;About the complex nature of the wave function?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Link to common questions on interpretations of quantum mechanics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Link to common questions on Schroedinger equation:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Link to common questions on group theory applied to quantum mechanics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on, I think you got the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would something like this be compatible with the policies/doable? I'm not meaning this in a somewhat abstract way: &lt;em&gt;if I create a community wiki post on the lines described above, would this be considered inappropriate/off topic?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of cons/pros that I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Cons:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Who decides which are the &quot;best-quality&quot; questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to be worth putting in such lists? For high-rated questions with lots of views this would not be too much of a problem, but in other situations the choice may be more subjective. A poll in these cases would be appropriate, but we can't create a (probably meta) post for any such choice. However, it may be feasible to have a twin-question on meta for each such list-question where to decide these things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Who can create/modify these lists?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Making them community wiki enhances the problem lowering the rep needed to modify them lower. Still, the fact that most of the edits by newer users must be peer-reviewed eases this problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It would be time-demanding to mantain such lists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Yes it probably would. However it would also, if well played, help people to quickly find what they are looking for if something similar has already been discussed, thus lowering the duplicate questions asked and allowing to not reinventing the same wheel endless times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;They would become extremely large&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This is easily prevented by appropriate &quot;directory structures&quot;, with links to sub-lists when one contains too much links to be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Pros:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It would provide a peer reviewed list of valuable discussions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. All the indexing systems (related/linked questions, tags, advanced search capabilities) provided by the stackexchange network are very good, but they have intrinsic limitations: with more and more questions asked it can become hard to locate the treasures hidden in the sea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Less duplicates&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: for a new user it may not be so easy to navigate between questions to find what he is looking for. The proposed kind of lists would definitely help on this (of course provided they are visible enough. Maybe they could even be linked in tag wikis to do that?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Easier to link OP to similar discussions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It would improve the overall quality of physics.SE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Ok, this is maybe not really a pro but my subjective take on the whole proposal. Still, wouldn't it be great? :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:56:32.750" Title="&quot;Questions&quot; containing links to the most relevant questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2014-11-27T09:51:37.727" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is correct that the more popular subjects will get more attention than the best questions and answers on less popular subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to write the best book ever written on the subject of fluid mechanics, the definite &lt;em&gt;sine qua non&lt;/em&gt; of this vital subject, and it got rave reviews from the top scientists in the field, I'd still have to be satisfied with book sales in the low thousands, perhaps hundreds.  In the meantime, the current NY Times bestseller list features the #1 bestseller at the moment as: &lt;em&gt;41&lt;/em&gt;, by George W. Bush. The 43rd president’s portrait of his father, George H. W. Bush, the 41st.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same thing when it comes to Library Science.  To become a professional librarian generally requires a master's degree, and this requires about 6 years of education.  And your starting salary will be exceeded by that of an associate degree recipient who studied computer programming.  The world simply needs more programmers; librarians?  Meh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this fair?  It is just?  Perhaps not, but it is reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you must learn to be satisfied with your own work, if it is what gives you the greatest satisfaction, and forget that your reputation doesn't grow as fast as someone else's, who chooses to answer the easy questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5279" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T09:51:37.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2014-11-28T07:31:59.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...Not that I wish to be ungrateful, but I put far more effort, and&#xA;  found it far more interesting, to write an answer explaining where the&#xA;  idea that black holes are gateways to other universes originated, and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;that answer has so far scored just a single upvote&lt;/strong&gt;.... &#xA;  I guess that as the site attracts a wider audience the answers that&#xA;  get the &lt;strong&gt;most upvotes are going to be the simple ones&lt;/strong&gt; that everyone can&#xA;  understand. It does detract a bit from the usefulness of the&#xA;  reputation system though.&#xA;   ... &lt;strong&gt;Yes I'm a bit frustrated that what I consider my better answers&#xA;  don't attract as much attention&lt;/strong&gt; as the more obvious ones (people just&#xA;  don't appreciate my genius) but that isn't going to drive me off the&#xA;  Physics SE... &#xA;  ...&#xA;  Of course, that isn't going to stop me moaning :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very fond of John Rennie, and I have expressed my great esteem for him in many occasions. He his the first figure one comes to know and appreciate, as soon as one joins this site. He is not so active now, but, when I joined in Summer, I could see at 8 o'clock sharp a whole string of excellent, clear and interesting answers in impeccable British English, signed by a photo of a distinguished figure that reminded me of a XIX century Squire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I cannot avoid to poind out how this post of his is a contradiction of the position he held when I first exposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6039/is-it-wise-to-keep-the-relation-between-votes-and-rep-linear&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and when I offered &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/answers-should-be-rated-a-suggestion-to-the-team/6184#6184&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a solution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. My posts where heavily downvoted, and probably he too downvoted them, now his post has 10 upvotes, so far. Congrats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be simple and effective to &lt;em&gt;put a rep cap to questions (and answers) bearing the tag 'everyday-life'&lt;/em&gt;, why don't you propose or just do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion was more far-reaching than this. It would give a solution to all the other problems, including the one &lt;em&gt;dmckee&lt;/em&gt; was hinting to here, of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6279/precise-directives-re-flagging/6281#6281&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cliques&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, fans, followers and supporters (sometime: worshippers). There are some members that get &lt;strong&gt;anyway&lt;/strong&gt; dozens of votes, &lt;strong&gt;no matter they write&lt;/strong&gt;, even if they &lt;em&gt;do not answer the OP question&lt;/em&gt; , or just write simple answers for which another member would get (at most) a couple of votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give you one of the hundreds of examples &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/148656/why-dont-stars-have-keplerian-orbits/148670#148670&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this simple answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has got only 30 words (made to look longer repeating the question and adding the tag: the answer is simple), is not the first and is not better that the others, yet, it fetches 22 votes &lt;em&gt;(almost one-word-one-vote&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, I must ask John: why don't you do something in concrete, instead of &lt;em&gt;moaning&lt;/em&gt; :) , to back up my proposal that &lt;strong&gt;answers should be rated&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The key word being thrill&lt;/strong&gt;... the end&#xA;  result is that people are willing to devote large chunks of their time&#xA;  to writing some truly fantastic answers. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the current reputation system is very, very good.&lt;/strong&gt;.. If you&#xA;  start making changes .. I fear you will start demotivating exactly the&#xA;  sort of people who make this site such as a success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So even though you cite me in your question as appreciating the&#xA;  validity of your arguments, let me make it very clear that I&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;comprehensively disagree&lt;/strong&gt; with the views expressed in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes &lt;strong&gt;I'm a bit frustrated&lt;/strong&gt; that what I consider my better answers don't&#xA;  attract as much attention as the more obvious ones (people just don't&#xA;  appreciate my genius) but that isn't going to drive me off the Physics&#xA;  SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;thrill of easy rep&lt;/em&gt; is compensated by the &lt;em&gt;frustration&lt;/em&gt; of seeing one's merit not appreciated. That's life, John, you can't have it both ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;: This time &lt;strong&gt;it'll be amusing&lt;/strong&gt; to see how the &lt;em&gt;farcical carousel&lt;/em&gt; of downvoting/upvoting will develop, since I have only quoted &lt;em&gt;verbatim&lt;/em&gt; John's statements. I couldn't possible attribute a downvote to me, as I just recorded a contradiction, or I hope, a change of opinion, which I welcome! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T06:21:05.440" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6308" CreationDate="2014-11-29T14:52:38.840" Score="8" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Always do I have seen most of the homework tagged questions are hold, with a close reason to show minimal effort. I thought Phys.SE wanted the asker to show his attempt. But recently, I got amazed when my homework-tagged question was put on hold by a moderator (I am not disrespecting him!). For what? The same reason. That question was an off-topic and that I haven't showed any effort. Really? See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/149421&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;. Is this not an effort? Why was it put on hold? What is, then, effort actually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T16:12:43.590" Title="What is the meaning of **effort** that Phys.SE wants in homework questions?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6307" CreationDate="2014-11-29T15:34:15.220" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple criteria for a homework-like question to be acceptable here, as detailed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our policy&lt;/a&gt;. In no particular order three of the most important criteria (the ones I feel are most often not met) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show some &lt;strong&gt;effort&lt;/strong&gt;. Don't just dump your work in our laps for us to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask about something &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt;. There are many issues that can arise in trying to solve a problem, and we can't read your mind to see what you do and don't understand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask about a physical &lt;strong&gt;concept&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point is where your question fails. Lately we've seen a lot of this, where users focus on my point (1), showing a whole lot of effort, and forget about point (3). It's unfortunate, because when you put that much work into something it naturally feels like you deserve an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But alas, &lt;strong&gt;we are not a homework help service&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular, as the policy notes right in the summary,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking about sign errors (like your question) or missing factors of 2 are the paradigmatic examples of things we don't allow, since ultimately they are just about a symbol manipulation mistake rather than something &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt;. It's not just about effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you can try to turn the question into something that is acceptable. There are conceptual physical questions related to what you asked, for example, &quot;Can the moment of inertia be negative?&quot; My general suggestion for questions of this type is to go through the steps, try to figure out the boundary where &quot;everything before this is definitely right, and everything after this has something wrong&quot; and see if you can ask something along the lines of &quot;I thought this quantity was calculated this way, but that conflicts with my feeling that the quantity should be positive, so is my intuition right?&quot; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community feels a revised version of the question no longer conflicts with our policies, they will reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T15:34:15.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6307" CreationDate="2014-11-29T16:12:43.590" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give you two answers, one to the question you actually asked and one to the question that I think you actually wanted to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What you asked: what counts as effort?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Working through a homework problem is like exploring the branches of a tree, or walking through a maze. You start at the problem statement - the ground, or the entrance - and you try taking some step that you think will get you closer to the answer. Maybe it turns out not to work, in which case you back up and try another tactic. Or if it does work, then you look for another step that will get you even closer to the answer. As you proceed through the problem, you'll accumulate a bunch of &quot;dead ends&quot; corresponding to problem-solving strategies that didn't work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Showing effort basically amounts to telling us about those dead ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of reasons for this. First, we only like to help people who help themselves. If you don't put any effort into answering your own question, why should anyone else put effort into answering it for you? (Sometimes there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; such reasons; maybe the question is really interesting and people answer it for their own amusement, but homework-like questions are generally not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more importantly, showing us the dead ends you've hit lets us give answers that will actually &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; you, rather than duplicating work you've already done. Maybe you missed some strategy you could have tried. Maybe one of the dead ends actually works, but you made a mistake and concluded that it didn't. Or if nothing else, showing what you tried is one of the best ways to convey your level of knowledge, so people can write level-appropriate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; gives some general guidelines on what sort of preparation one should do before asking a question here. It applies to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions, not just homework questions, but most of the things listed there are problem-solving strategies that should be in your list of &quot;dead ends&quot; before you post your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have to list out &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; you tried, but you do have to give potential answerers enough information to understand how you got from the problem statement up to the point at which you were unable to proceed further, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; how you tried to work past it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some things that generally do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; count as sufficient effort, and will get your question put on hold very quickly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any variation of the phrase &quot;I don't know where to start&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any variation of &quot;What do I do next?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happen to think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7070/how-to-solve-this-schr%C3%B6dinger-equation&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is a very good example of how to show effort. So is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8975/simple-harmonic-motion-problem&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (and it's actually quite a short question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What you actually want to know: why is my question on hold?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the &lt;em&gt;main&lt;/em&gt; reason your question is on hold has nothing to do with how much effort you showed (or didn't show).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the close reason for homework says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and show some effort to work through the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions should ask about the &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt; that confuses you. Isolate the reason you got stuck, and ask how to work past it (after showing some attempts to do so yourself, as I discussed earlier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some things that do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; count as asking about a specific physics concept, and will generally get your question put on hold very quickly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any variation of the phrase &quot;I don't know where to start&quot; (yes, this qualifies under both parts of the homework close reason)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most variations of &quot;What do I do next?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any variation of &quot;What did I do wrong?&quot; (&lt;em&gt;this is your case&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T16:12:43.590" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6304" CreationDate="2014-11-29T17:09:53.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;if I create a community wiki post on the lines described above, would this be considered inappropriate/off topic?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah. It's not a question, so it shouldn't be posted as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, what you're describing here is precisely the reason tag wikis (and tags themselves) exist. As Emilio pointed out in the comments, going to a tag page and sorting by votes already gives a fairly good idea of what the community considers to be the best questions about that topic. And a curated list of common questions is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the kind of thing that would help to make a tag wiki great. If you look at the best-maintained tag wikis on Stack Overflow, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/c%2b%2b/info&quot;&gt;C++&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/php/info&quot;&gt;PHP&lt;/a&gt;, they already include links to good questions and other good resources. (Keep in mind that those tag wikis are the result of many people collaborating, so if you're writing a tag wiki on your own, don't feel any pressure to come up with something that detailed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel motivated to create something like this, I'd encourage you to head over to the tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; or whichever one you want to work on, and get started!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:56:32.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6312" CreationDate="2014-11-29T17:30:31.587" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged a question thinking that it deserved it, but later I realised that the &lt;strong&gt;flag&lt;/strong&gt; wasn't needed. So my question is can we &lt;strong&gt;undo a flag&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63384" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T17:44:27.193" Title="Can we Undo Flags?" Tags="|support|feature-request|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6311" CreationDate="2014-11-29T17:44:27.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, no, you can't. But there aren't really any consequences to casting a flag that turns out not to be needed. If the flag is declined, you might see a notice next time you cast a flag that prompts you to look at why it was declined, but that's about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who &lt;em&gt;consistently&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;frequently&lt;/em&gt; cast invalid flags may face some consequences, but you'd really have to be trying to run into that situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T17:44:27.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2014-11-30T17:26:56.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation is fun to get and I think serves a very useful purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the end of the day I think the point of this site is to help people with useful answers and learn new stuff by seeing the way other people approach problems, by thinking about the questions that are asked and by asking questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from my point of view it is more important to engage in a good discussion through questions and answers and comments - I think this is more important than reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in answer to the question posed - yes I agree that popular science questions often get lots of attention and it may be a way to 'gain reputation', but I think our motivation in contributing here should be to engage in good scientific discussion about physics rather than just to gain reputation. If our motivation is to engage in discussion then issues about reputation are perhaps not so important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is a bit like Cyberherbalist's good answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T17:26:56.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-30T19:01:10.010" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question relating to how I have approached a problem. My reason for asking the question was my answers seem to be unrealistic. The question is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/149667/&quot;&gt;How to calculate force on a string pinned to a spinning object&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was put on hold reasonably soon after I asked the question. I just want to confirm if what the reason for it being put on hold was so I can better phrase the question. The reason give was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept&#xA;  and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our&#xA;  questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users.&#xA;  See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to&#xA;  make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was clearly about a specific physics concept, and I've clearly found and tried to apply an equation to work through the problem (not that it's homework). I've also reduced my problem to the simplest model I could so it was useful to the broader community. So I'm not sure the given reason really applies. Clarification/advice on what changes would be appropriate would be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T23:18:54.757" Title="Are questions asking for confirmation of a method off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6316" CreationDate="2014-11-30T23:03:02.030" Score="5" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any guidance on reviewing the first post of a new user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked in meta and could not find a similar question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can think of at the moment is to compare with guidance on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;quesiton help here&lt;/a&gt; if it is a question and compare with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;guidance on answering&lt;/a&gt; if it is an answer and maybe it is simply that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry maybe this is very obvious to all except me. I know that I appreciated the helpful comments and edits I got from various people the first time I posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T22:21:13.417" Title="Guidelines for the First Posts review queue" Tags="|discussion|review|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6315" CreationDate="2014-12-01T01:31:12.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reviewing really comes from experience, and that's partly why it is limited to users who have reached enough reputation. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules written down anywhere on what to look for because the expectation is that users performing the reviews have established themselves in the community and know what is expected, or not acceptable, on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we do tend to have some tricky rules if you haven't been really active on meta. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Resource/book recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5603/adding-computational-science-to-the-list-of-on-topic-items-in-the-help-center&quot;&gt;computational&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering&quot;&gt;experimental&lt;/a&gt; questions all have very specific policies that have many subtleties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from those, the usual correction of grammar, formatting, MathJax, removing greetings/thanks/superfluous information, and proper tagging are always safe and a good way for new reviewers to help new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T07:30:45.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-01T10:16:41.690" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Below follows the explicit case that spurred this meta question in the first place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot access my account because I forgot my username, can you send me the email on my profile that is not public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contacted stack exchange several times because I had to make a duplicate account and I want to merge them. I have not still received any response after abunch of emails acros about a week. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mt problem is that when I created my google account I misspelled it. I do remember the password, but not the username, and gogle doesnt help because I do not have an alternative email phone. &#xA;The two accounts are for users: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/65081/wolphram-jonny&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/65081/wolphram-jonny&lt;/a&gt;, for which I have no longer access, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/65396/wolprhram-jonny&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/65396/wolprhram-jonny&lt;/a&gt;, for which I do have login access. &#xA;If you look at the history after the second account was created all activity from the first account stopped. Plus tte similarities in the answers and other caracteristics pose no doubt I am the same user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Is there any way to bring this to the attention of some moderator that can help me? I onlt need to know the mispelled username that is private in my profile. Once I have access to both account I will be able to ask for a standard merge, which require a confirmation email sent to both accounts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The problem has been fixed now, thanks a lot!!!!! (the problem was apparently a backlog due to the holidays weekend)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user65081" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-12-05T07:03:38.943" Title="I cannot access my Phys.SE account because I forgot my username/password. What to do?" Tags="|support|status-completed|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6317" CreationDate="2014-12-01T10:51:05.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way to bring it to the attention of a moderator is to post here (or ping one of us in chat), but we can't help you in this way. Revealing personal information like this would be a violation of the moderator agreement. What we can do is bug the SE team to make sure they are working on your merge request, which I will go do right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T10:51:05.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6317" CreationDate="2014-12-01T14:57:29.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I work for Stack Exchange)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us directly&lt;/a&gt; to handle this. Fixing it requires us asking you for additional information that needs to be given privately, so it's best handled via email. Give us up to 24 hours to take care of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T14:57:29.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-01T15:18:31.513" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/149004/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/149004/&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold as too broad, but edited the same day. Now it's been on hold for a few days. Is it still too broad? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T15:31:10.413" Title="Is this question still too broad?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6320" CreationDate="2014-12-01T15:29:48.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that are edited after they are closed enter the reopen queue. There has not been a single reopen queue cast on that question, indicating that the reviewers still thought it too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal view is that this is a mixture between &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;non-mainstream&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just throw the matrix exponential in there and essentially ask &quot;Is this a wavefunction?&quot;. I bet one can write down something looking like a wave equation to which that exponential would be the solution, but what do you &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;&quot;[...]is there a natural way to extend the previous wavefunction interpretation[...]&lt;/em&gt;&quot;? What &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the previous wavefunction interpretation? (Just writing down an exponential doesn't make it a &quot;wavefunction&quot;!) Why would you expect the matrix exponential to have the same interpretation? What system are you trying to model? It's really not a very focused question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T15:29:48.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-02T01:45:33.973" Score="13" ViewCount="1326" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious, do we have any Nobel prize winner on this SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I want to follow some big shots, or the topics they are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5326" LastEditorUserId="5326" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T01:50:38.840" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T20:09:00.260" Title="Do we have Nobel prize winners on this SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6322" CreationDate="2014-12-02T01:54:35.270" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorta. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/11205/g-t-hooft&quot;&gt;Gerard ’t Hooft&lt;/a&gt; has an account here and has answered a few questions (16, according to his profile). However, he hasn't been very active lately, last stopping by back in February 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are others, I'm not aware of them (or they're not making themselves known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T01:58:09.073" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2014-12-02T15:58:48.223" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the rep system is working. The way I see it, rep you should get rep for helping people. If you write a poor answer that doesn't give any useful information, then you won't help anyone and you shouldn't get rep. If you write a good answer to a very narrowly focused question that only 10 people care about, then you should get some rep because you helped some people. On the other hand, if you write a good answer to a popular question that 1000 people care about, then you should get a lot of rep because you helped a lot of people. This system encourages people to write answers that will help the most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ultimately this is a good thing. We are all sad that not everybody is an expert in physics. I think the best way we can help change that is to write good answers to the &quot;simple&quot; questions that make non-experts say &quot;aha!&quot;, and teaches them some simple physics concepts. The more questions like this that are answered on this site, the more physics people will be able to learn on their own, and the higher the general public's knowledge of physics will be. Then there will be a greater interest in the higher-level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23785" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T15:58:48.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-02T23:37:51.873" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184108/what-is-syntax-highlighting-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;this code sample from meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-js --&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;    var a = 3;&#xA;    while( !(a &amp;lt; 0)){&#xA;        alert(&quot;JavaScript code &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;goes&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; here.&quot;);&#xA;        a--;&#xA;    }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written it below (the first line is recognized, processed and eaten by the SE syntax parser):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;var a = 3;&#xA;while( !(a &amp;lt; 0)){&#xA;    alert(&quot;JavaScript code &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;goes&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; here.&quot;);&#xA;    a--;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no syntax highlighting (i.e. colours) where I should. Having written one or two posts on physics.SE where I did use code, highlighting would've been much appreciated. Is this a bug and could it perhaps be amended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46304" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T05:29:41.507" Title="Code syntax highlighting" Tags="|feature-request|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6325" CreationDate="2014-12-03T05:29:41.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a site for questions about physics concepts, not about code. The community has decided that &quot;physics concepts&quot; extends to high-level descriptions of algorithms or procedures for physics-related computation, but not to implementation details. In practice, this usually means that most questions shouldn't have code samples in them, and the few that do should be written so that they would still make sense if the code were omitted. In light of that I don't think the benefit of syntax highlighting is worth the cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T05:29:41.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6322" CreationDate="2014-12-04T03:11:17.393" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/399/peter-shor&quot;&gt;Peter Shor&lt;/a&gt; has an active account (as of this posting). He's not a Nobel prize winner but he developed/has a famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantum algorithm&lt;/a&gt; named after him, which I think qualifies him as a &quot;big shot.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T03:11:17.393" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-04T16:08:52.740" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;When browsing answers, occasionally you will find an answer a very good answer that has a factually incorrect statement in it. I have always operated under the philosophy that we want to stay true to the intent of an author's answer, but that it's unlikely they intended to be factually incorrect. If the comments yield a consensus that the statement is indeed incorrect and should be fixed (that is to say, the error isn't so detrimental to the answer that you should abandon the answer and create a new one), what would be the most appropriate action to take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make the edit (or suggested edit if you lack the reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leave a comment for the author to make the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvote and explain the downvote is because of the error and what needs to be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Something else I'm not thinking of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, I've usually done the first option on Stack Exchange, but I want to make sure that I follow the same kinds of protocols the Physics site does when I'm browsing questions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I apologize if I'm &quot;leading the question&quot; because of my opinion that the first option is the correct one. I tried to make the question as neutral as possible, but bias always slips through. =(&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1954" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T16:13:19.480" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T16:13:19.480" Title="Is it appropriate to fix factual errors without the author's &quot;permission&quot;?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-12-04T17:04:12.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-06T10:02:45.237" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a pretty standard rule on SE sites (and on this site, in particular) that you shouldn't delete a question and then repost essentially the same question as a new post; instead, you should just edit the original post. (cf. MSE questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/168017&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/176612&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/175110&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/7046&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But events of today got me thinking. Suppose you ask a question, then decide the question wasn't ready to be posted, but you think you might be able to get it ready for posting with a few days or weeks of additional time. (Like if you're busy and can't get to it right away.) The course of action I would think to suggest to you in that case (if you didn't already know what to do) would be to delete the question, come back in a week or whenever, and edit it into shape. But non-moderators can only see &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt; deleted questions, if they even know where to look, and it seems kind of silly to expect a poster to always go hunting through their history of deleted questions to find one they've already asked on the topic. In a case like this, it doesn't seem so bad to just post a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what I'm asking here is twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this situation is deleting and reposting okay? (i.e. you post a question, delete it, then come back after a significant amount of time and want to ask the question again in better form)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming it is, what makes the boundary between an acceptable and unacceptable delete-and-repost? I suppose it depends on just why this sort of thing is not allowed in most cases in the first place. (I think I know why, but I won't say it yet so as to avoid influencing the responses.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course one should always make an effort not to post a question unless you really do think it's ready, but everyone makes mistakes on this from time to time. I'm also assuming the first posting of the question got no answers and no upvotes so that there is little to no apparent harm in deleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T20:19:01.487" Title="Are there acceptable circumstances to delete and repost questions? What are they?" Tags="|discussion|questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6330" CreationDate="2014-12-06T11:06:07.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's rare that an old question revives and starts attracting good answers. My own instinctive (and illogical) reaction is that new questions are inherently more interesting than old ones, and given a limited lifespan I commit what free time I do have to answering new questions. I can't speak for other members, but I suspect I'm not alone in this. Indeed, if an old question is edited then reopened I may not even realise, since I generally sort questions chronologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may well also be the case that a closed question is fundamentally flawed. Yes, it could be comprehensively rewritten, but then isn't that really a new question rather than an edit of the old?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't obvious to me why deleting questions is such a bad thing anyway. I suppose I'd be annoyed if I put a lot of work into answering, only to have my answer deleted along with the question, but then you're proposing deletion only if there are no upvotes or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have no problem with allowing questions to be deleted and a similar question reposted. It should be fairly obvious if a user is abusing the privilege, and in fact I'm sure we've seen such behaviour before and the sky hasn't fallen (though the offenders are no longer with us :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T11:06:07.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2014-12-07T13:54:11.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Txu0Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Forums&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T13:54:11.660" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-12-07T13:54:11.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6334" CreationDate="2014-12-07T14:37:54.497" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once, what happened is I answered a question which obviously I thought as an appropriate answer to that question. But after some time, the question was edited by the 'asker' itself. The edit changed the slight meaning of the question. Although it didn't affect the question much. But what about my answer?. I got many down-votes for my answer (which was appropriate before the editing of the question). This is something &lt;strong&gt;unfair&lt;/strong&gt; and shouldn't happen. Now, what can one do if He/She is in my position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63384" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-12-07T15:14:40.487" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T19:17:29.017" Title="What happens if a question is edited after we answer it?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6333" CreationDate="2014-12-07T19:17:29.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you can (and should) do is edit your answer to match the updated question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the question is edited &lt;em&gt;drastically&lt;/em&gt;, so much that it's asking something &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; different and thus invalidates any answers that have been posted, that's a different story. That's not supposed to happen. So in that case you can roll back the edit to the question. If you're not sure whether the edit is drastic enough to qualify for rolling back, you can ask for a second opinion in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; or here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T19:17:29.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2014-12-08T11:43:01.577" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we all share your experiences John. Like you, on the whole I don't mind a bit: I also gain as much as I give simply in reading other people's responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed there is a sense wherein this experience is definitely a good thing. Let me try to demonstrate this by telling the kind of situation in which I am shamelessly seeking reputation by answering exactly the kind of popular question you speak of. I do do this (or try from time to time - I'm not often successful) and here's why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my many reasons for becoming active on this site is that I saw it as a place not only to test and hone my knowledge of physics, but also to test and improve my ability as a technical writer. I am not at a University and have no formal experience in teaching, but I am doing more and more volunteer work at my daughter's school and other places and am interested in what makes a good technical writer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole, the answers I am proudest of score 2, 3 or 4 at the very very most, are accepted by the OP and the OP makes a comment or two that shows that they have learnt something from my efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes I see a question that I think &quot;there's something I see people having misconceptions with, and I think I can write an answer that most competent and open laypeople would get&quot; - and this is when I really do shamelessly measure the worth of my answer by how many upvotes I get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only does the world need good scientists, it desperately needs those who can convey their ideas well and effectively. Remember Richard Feynman, accepting the challenge of explaining the spin statistics theorem and saying &quot;I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it&quot; and then, a week later conceding that he couldn't do it and thus concluding that this means we (the physics community) don't really understand the SST. I admire Feynman enormously, his life and his work, but this is probably the anecdote about him that pierced into me most deeply. So in this sense I see it as altogether appropriate that the popular questions should be the ones to score well even though I fully understand your frustration. This doesn't mean the others are without worth - I think like you if this site were only popular questions I wouldn't be here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26076" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T11:43:01.577" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-11T03:49:31.030" Score="-17" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;It makes no sense to require such high reputation just to add comments. It's possible that trolls can study enough physics to stick around a few days and get good reputation by asking interesting question, give best answer, etc., and then start being &quot;bad&quot; on this site after they get to 50. Higher reputation isn't assurance that only good quality answers come from the person in question who has achieved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is like voting a president and then they can lead the country to the floor afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would like the reputation changed to perhaps 10 or 20 at most, as that's more fair and logical, reasonable, and achievable in a respectable amount of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel it's an insult against me personally if the reputation is too high, like putting me underneath the users who have the power to post comments anywhere and anything they want. Consequently, I ask that you please lower it and be fair for everyone here, not keep it at 50 to keep the elite users in control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66335" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T05:08:07.513" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T15:05:51.627" Title="Why do you need 50 reputation to comment on other posts?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|reputation|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6322" CreationDate="2014-12-11T04:20:37.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This place is teeming with physics Nobel prize winners. But except for Prof. 't Hooft who won the prize in the past, they will win it in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T04:20:37.117" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6340" CreationDate="2014-12-11T09:25:47.833" Score="9" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I go to the site banner and click on &quot;help&quot; and then &quot;help center&quot;.&#xA;I see a search box which promises to search the help pages.&#xA;I type in &quot;TeX&quot; and hit &lt;code&gt;Search&lt;/code&gt;.&#xA;No results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would seem to be a barrier for n00bs (I'm making this post because someone is asking me for a reference on how TeX works on this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we improve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T10:09:57.967" Title="Can we make TeX instructions easier to find?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6339" CreationDate="2014-12-11T10:09:57.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You stumbled on the unfortunate fact that our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;notation help page&lt;/a&gt; did not include the word &quot;TeX&quot;. It did include both &quot;LaTeX&quot; and &quot;MathJax&quot; so searching for either of those would have found it. Anyway, I've fixed that by expanding the help page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T10:09:57.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-11T10:22:46.217" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frustrating! The new CAPTCHA  really begger's description. First, they want to type a number for verification, then they ask to copy a big code and to paste it. Then what?? Nothing happens! 2 minuites within had I pasted it. But nothing happens then; the page remains same;-( &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been thus able to post nothing for the past 2 days! Previously it didn't happen. Just type a number and then pressing &lt;strong&gt;verify&lt;/strong&gt; button, your quo/ans is posted.  But what's going on now? There is no &lt;strong&gt;verify&lt;/strong&gt; button in the 2nd page. So, what should I do after posting the code?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's causing the problem?? I am using Nokia 2700c and my browser is Opera; &lt;strong&gt;does using this outdated mobile a sin?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[N.B. : How did I post this question? Actually I also don't know. I have 2 browsers: Opera 7; the pre-installed Opera Mini. When I tried to post a quo on the former, it would ask for human verification and sometimes not. The same does happen for the later! God knows why it happens so:-|. Call it my luck or so, when I posted this question, I didn't get human verification. And so I could post this quo:-x ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T10:42:31.933" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T10:42:31.933" Title="Why is the new CAPTCHA troubling me from posting questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|login|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6337" CreationDate="2014-12-12T15:05:51.627" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate to hear that you are so personally offended. I assure you that the people who implemented this policy were probably not aware of your existence when they made it, so I hope that knowledge helps to lessen the amount you feel personally insulted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sad reality is that this policy works extremely well. 50 reputation points is not difficult to come by for any users that intend to contribute more than one or two opinions. It is not restricting commenting to the elite users since any user that spends a day or three on this site could easily accumulate the necessary reputation if they wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you seem very avid to have this policy changed to something more to your own personal liking, you need to realize that there are a significant number of other people that use this network; majority of whom enjoy this policy. That means that in order you to change this policy to what you want it to be, the owners of the site would have to change it away from what the vast majority wants it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked in your post that we be fair to everyone here and you imply that the reputation requirement be fair, logical, and achievable in a reasonable amount of time. That is a noble request. It's understandably impossible to be fair towards everyone all of the time, but we can strive for fairness to the majority. The current policy satisfies the wants of the majority; it is in place to decrease the occurrence of spam, trolling, etc; the necessary rep is low enough that it can be earned by writing one or two good posts or through 25 approved edits; and it is widely agreed that it works well and does not exclude anyone unnecessarily. These make it fulfill the requirements of your request. In trying to be logical, reasonable, and fair towards the greatest number of people, it is a good idea for us to leave the policy as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you may still view this as unfair or unacceptable. If so, the only thing I can tell you is that some things in life will seem unfair to you and some things can not be made to change simply because you disapprove. Learning to live with and not be angered by minor inconveniences (and that is exactly what this is; not being able to post a comment on Physics.SE is no more than a minor inconvenience in your life) is something we all must do. Life sometimes isn't fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T15:05:51.627" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6345" CreationDate="2014-12-12T17:44:55.757" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there already a pre-defined feature in SE that allows one to print a post along with its answers and comments in a readable format? I have tried printing the page just via the browser, but it cuts through sentences and answers, and the outputs are usually very ugly (poor formatting). Since there are many many valuable and complete answers on physics.SE, it would be really nice if there was a print option that would keep the formatting of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62173" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T18:04:00.537" Title="Is there a printable version of posts in SE?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6344" CreationDate="2014-12-12T18:04:00.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22877/printing-out-stack-overflow-questions&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;, you can try&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackprinter.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.stackprinter.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you need is the site name (Physics, in this case) and the question ID. The latter is found by clicking the link of the question and finding the number after &lt;code&gt;questions&lt;/code&gt;, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/152937/what-am-i-doing-wrong-heredynamicsthey-should-give-the-same-answer &#xA;                                           ^ here&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you can print it off. It does keep all the latex and images (the link I chose above I know has some images and latex and it looks fine in my print-view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T18:04:00.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6347" CreationDate="2014-12-12T22:26:28.107" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a couple of dates my reputation is not being updated. Do you have some policy on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66236" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T06:59:29.010" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T06:59:29.010" Title="Reputation not changing over time though questions answered" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6346" CreationDate="2014-12-12T22:33:22.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/66236/sakhan?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;Looking at your profile&lt;/a&gt;, it seems you simply didn't get any upvotes on your recent answers, so they didn't net you any reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T22:33:22.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6350" CreationDate="2014-12-13T00:07:59.663" Score="1" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we write MathJax commands in comments (and in chat)? If not, I believe we should add such a feature...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65616" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T00:41:11.680" Title="Can we use MathJax in comments?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6351" CreationDate="2014-12-13T00:19:22.193" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just checking the First Posts review queue, and I found this post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/146862/many-body-quantum-rotors#&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/146862/many-body-quantum-rotors#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strange that it should be there, given that it's from mid-November and I haven't seen it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an idea why it was there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T08:25:50.623" Title="Old-ish first post showed up in review queue" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6348" CreationDate="2014-12-13T00:21:22.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, we can use MathJax in comments. You use the regular dollar signs and notation. Be wary, though, of how many dollar signs you use, as choosing the wrong number in a given scenario tends to make the posts harder to read. However, it doesn't seem to work anywhere on meta (note even on questions and answers!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For chat, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1088/should-chat-have-tex-support/3297#3297&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T00:41:11.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2014-12-13T00:29:10.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/145449/general-gaussian-distribution-relation&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; first post&lt;/a&gt; was migrated to a different site some time ago, and the system just now got around to cleaning up the stub. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes the &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; post from that author the new first. Which is why you were presented with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is reasonably common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T00:29:10.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2014-12-13T04:55:20.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, another easy way to get reputation is to create a FAQ and answer it yourself, like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136056/how-does-the-hubble-parameter-change-with-the-age-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;How does the Hubble parameter change with the age of the universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;:-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joking aside, I share the frustration that basic questions get far more attention than advanced ones. When I look at my own most-upvoted answers, I also see that many of them are answers that took me the least effort to write, while complex answers on which I spent a significant amount of time hardly got any votes at all. Now, this is of course perfectly logical, and I'm OK with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's one 'feature' of SE that sticks out like a sore thumb: once a popular question gets enough views, it ends up in the 'Hot Network Questions' queue. If that happens, the views (and votes) are boosted up enormously, far higher than it usually deserves. I find this very unfair; there already is a significant discrepancy in the rewards given to answering 'popular' and 'specialized' questions, and this arbitrary feature increases it even more. I think this can discourage people from devoting their precious time to write high-quality answers on advanced subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't know how this can be fixed. One could argue to simply get rid of the 'Hot Network Questions' list. But I admit that I quite like reading what's going on on the various SE sites. It makes fun reading, and one such question has actually prompted me to become a member of another SE site. It's a very effective way to promote the network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, some sort of restriction might be put on the upvotes of these questions; but such measures would also be arbitrary and somewhat unfair. And of course, there are other ways in which a question can suddenly gain a lot of publicity: for example, the views will also increase substantially if the question is linked to on a popular external site like Reddit. These 'outside' influences are even harder to control, and frankly they shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've been thinking about another way to counter this effect, namely by rewarding 'advanced' answers. Perhaps we can devise a method to measure the quality of someone's answers, in addition to the amount of votes they get. I have such an idea, and I would be interested in everyone's opinion, so I will post it as a separate topic. Stay tuned...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T04:55:20.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-13T06:48:31.067" Score="2" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up post on John Rennie's topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6303/&quot;&gt;The secret to getting a massive reputation is ___&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6352/24142&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think many of us have at some point been dispirited, when an answer on an advanced topic that took a lot of effort to write received very few upvotes; and answers on basic subjects that took much less effort are upvoted far more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've been wondering if it is possible to implement an additional reputation score that rewards high-quality answers more than basic answers. I have such a proposal, and I'm interested in what everyone thinks about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is as follows: the standard reputation system treats every vote the same: each vote counts as 10 points. That's all very nice and democratic, but it doesn't reflect the quality of an answer; the score depends heavily on the popularity of the question. But perhaps we can also give answers a &lt;em&gt;weighted&lt;/em&gt; vote, such that the score you get not only depends on how many votes you received, but also on &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; has given the upvotes. In particular, a vote from a high-rep user will give you a higher score than a vote from a low-rep user. Now, I'm not in favour of having this 'quality score' displayed on every individual answer, because that might influence other voters. Instead, I'd prefer for each user to have an 'overall quality score', calculated from all their received votes combined, updated once a day, and displayed next to their total reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale behind this is that the high-rep users are knowledgeable on a broad range of subjects, including specialized topics. So they will likely also read and vote on these more advanced subjects. Therefore, while these topics attract less votes, those votes are more likely to come from high-rep users (though not always; there are also specialists who have not built up a high reputation. No system is perfect). On the other hand, more basic questions will attract more casual users with lower reputations. Also, high-rep users have more experience with the site, and will more often recognize and appreciate a high-quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next problem is then to decide how the votes should be weighted. There are of course a lot of possible ways, so I'll just give a simple example. Consider the following distribution: The horizontal axis has all the users who have voted at least once, sorted according to their reputation, from highest to lowest. The vertical axis has the total amount of upvotes given by each user. Then divide this distribution into 9 areas, representing 9 user groups, such that the total amount of votes that each group has given is roughly the same (some rounding off is needed so that each user falls into one group). The upvotes of the group of highest-rep users are worth a score of 18; the votes of users of group 2 are worth a score of 16; the votes of users in groups 3 to 9 are worth 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2, respectively. In this manner, the average score of all the votes of the entire site will be 10 (rounded off).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if you get an upvote from someone in group 1 (the top users), you get 18 points. If you get an upvote from someone in group 9 (the lowest-rep users), you get 2 points, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can refine this system further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assign an additional quality score to a received bounty;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assign a higher quality score to votes from people who have posted an answer to the same question. After all, a vote from a 'competitor' is an acknowledgement that your answer is of high quality;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvotes can also be taken into account.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would there be any interest in this feature? Is it worth doing? Is it actually doable? Do you have alternative ideas? I look forward to your feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T23:24:52.323" Title="The secret to getting rewarded for high-quality answers is ___" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|answers|reputation|voting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2014-12-13T10:18:12.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rationale behind this is that the high-rep users are knowledgeable on a broad range of subjects, including specialized topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where I think the argument breaks. High reputation comes from experience using the site, not necessarily knowledge about the subject area, so I wouldn't expect that high-rep users are more qualified to judge the correctness of an answer than low- or moderate-rep users. They may be more qualified than the average &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; user (someone who has posted perhaps one or two times, if that), but most of that group probably doesn't vote anyway so I don't think this proposal would make a difference in that respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to weight votes by the expertise of the person casting them, I think the statistic that would make sense to look at is the number of highly upvoted answers, and to some extent the level to which they are upvoted, on questions that share a tag with the question being answered. That way people who have demonstrated expertise in the topic(s) of the question get to cast the most influential votes. But that would be a complicated calculation, and I don't know if SE's servers could handle it in real time or near real time, and in any case who knows if it would really do any better. It'd be an interesting quantity to compute offline, but you can't do it without access to individual vote data (which is not released).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, what you're proposing is basically applying &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PageRank&lt;/a&gt; to answers. Google's history shows that it's not difficult for users to adjust their voting and posting behavior to game this system, and that leads to a whole new set of problems which become considerably more complex to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T10:18:12.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2014-12-13T23:54:27.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think many of us have at some point been dispirited, when an answer&#xA;  on an advanced topic that took a lot of effort to write received very&#xA;  few upvotes; and answers on basic subjects that took much less effort&#xA;  are upvoted far more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I stopped reading right there and perhaps you'll stop reading right here - or maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, when you focus your mind and put in the effort to write an answer on an advanced topic that you're proud of, &lt;em&gt;isn't that the most valuable reward&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that there are actually relatively few here whose upvotes are meaningful in any significant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, when you write an answer on an advanced topic, relatively few will be able to judge if it is a helpful answer or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you think carefully about this, you should &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; that advanced topic answers, no matter how wonderful, will receive less upvotes than 'off-the-cuff' answers to basic questions that happen to get a lot of page views and upvotes from those that could not begin to appreciate the advanced topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, one should not be dispirited by this perfectly understandable state of affairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T23:54:27.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2014-12-14T11:55:36.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a great answer (note I'm not saying &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; great answer since there can be more than one) to a question has a few qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;distinct&lt;/strong&gt;, in the sense either it goes about answering the question in a novel way other answers don't, or it just outperforms other people's explanations using the same methodologies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;accessible&lt;/strong&gt;, if many people can look at your answer and pull something of value from it then it's a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;organized&lt;/strong&gt;, and people can extract the information they need in an organized manner without much extra effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;hard to ignore&lt;/strong&gt;, it's got some kind of eye-catching flair to it that draws in the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and most importantly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;enriches the conversation&lt;/strong&gt;, you may even ending up deviating some from the actual question but for the sake of enriching the conversation, providing greater context, or providing a new insight that &lt;em&gt;the question would benefit from&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least that's my five cents...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theres always a constant tug of war between these angles but ultimately popular questions will usually have some kind of ratio of these different ingredients that makes them appealing to large numbers of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34274" LastEditorUserId="34274" LastEditDate="2014-12-14T23:24:52.323" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T23:24:52.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6358" CreationDate="2014-12-15T07:01:09.120" Score="11" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take it the Christmas hat season has opened? Watch out you werewolves!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why no announcement this year? I guess SE do it every year, so maybe it's now just taken as routine. However I'm surprised there was no fanfare at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Later:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really a comment, but I don't know how to put pictures in comments. Some of the effects we're getting with hats on the default user images are quite striking. Look at this one (user id concealed to protect the guilty):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cKHmD.gif&quot; alt=&quot;User icon&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the effect was deliberate or not, but I'd love to see that character on Star Trek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2014-12-19T07:09:47.597" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T07:09:47.597" Title="A hat! I've got a hat!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6357" CreationDate="2014-12-15T07:31:47.113" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we've posted in the past is not an announcement, really, but a request to find out whether the community wants hats. But the hats have been so well-received in the past that we figured there was no need to ask this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess an announcement would have been a good idea. We'll keep that in mind for next year. (Yes, it is an annual tradition, or at least we have every reason to expect hats will return each December for the foreseeable future.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T07:31:47.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6360" CreationDate="2014-12-16T00:18:59.773" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question I have regarding profile views as shown on my homepage. If a person views a profile twice then will the homepage mentioned it as two profile views or one ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66236" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T03:29:50.040" Title="Profile check and number" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6359" CreationDate="2014-12-16T03:29:50.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with most queries about the StackExchange engine, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132688/how-are-profile-views-counted&quot;&gt;you go to Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is always caching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the person views it &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the cache has been cleared (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2869800/how-long-are-files-usually-kept-in-a-browsers-cache&quot;&gt;say 15-20 minutes&lt;/a&gt;, depending on your usage), then it seems to count as a second view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T03:29:50.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6364" CreationDate="2014-12-19T01:02:16.420" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently wanted to ask about a series of questions relating to pretty much the same topic. It was a pretty narrow topic, but I had too many questions to put in one major post. Therefore, I was thinking that I instead write something like this for each title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Topic question 1&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Topic question 2&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Topic question 3&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this work in this forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65616" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-12-19T21:40:26.013" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T21:40:26.013" Title="Can I ask a series of questions in enumerated subsequent posts?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2014-12-19T01:27:09.047" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: the StackExchange network is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a forum, it is a &lt;em&gt;Question &amp;amp; Answer&lt;/em&gt; site. A forum allows discussion between many people and answers tend to get buried deep in threads (if it's ever answered). Here, we allow only questions and answers (the comments are really meant for cleaning up misunderstandings or pointing out incorrect statements or similar such things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: There is a great Meta.StackExchange post titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/writing-a-good-title&quot;&gt;Writing a Good Title&lt;/a&gt; that's worth the read. A title that's simply a &lt;em&gt;label&lt;/em&gt; is not descriptive, likely to be ignored, though usually someone would come along and edit it to something meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third: Since each question has a timestamp attached, we'd be able to see the temporal order which would make labeling them fruitless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two alternative suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Start with something along the lines with&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;This is question 1 of a series (see [Q2 here](link1) and [Q3 here](link2))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask your &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; first question and get some answers. It might be that those answers guide you to (maybe even give you outright) the answer to the subsequent questions (which asking &amp;amp; answering those anyway are totally okay)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T01:27:09.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2014-12-19T02:37:46.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Topic question 1&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Topic question 2&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Topic question 3&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, these are terrible titles. (A good rule of thumb is that any title which includes the word &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; is probably a terrible title.) They do not say what is actually being asked. That's how you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; title your questions: ask the thing that is actually being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's really no need to indicate that the questions are related. For each question, just write a title that asks your question and then put the complete question in the body, as you normally would. If you think it is useful to reference a previous question, you can mention it and link to it in the body of the new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T02:37:46.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-20T05:11:06.513" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154145/is-imaginary-time-a-fifth-dimension&quot;&gt;is imagary time a fifth dimension&lt;/a&gt; may indeed have been asked before, but the referenced post is not it. That earlier one concerns Hawking's cup to avoid the point in the cone. This one involves the expression of the metric in Minkowsky spacetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't interact with the banner where this was marked and agreed to by someone, so I bring it up here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59208" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T11:03:23.257" Title="Not a duplicate as marked" Tags="|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6369" CreationDate="2014-12-20T17:16:58.270" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just earned the Solstice hat! Huzzah! And I see that several others have earned it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as far as I know from reading its requirement, that hat is earned by posting a comment on 12/21. Today is 12/20 in UTC time. What's up with this? Is it a bug? Have I discovered time travel? Should I not be pointing this out so that I can keep the hat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2014-12-20T17:28:53.530" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T17:28:53.530" Title="I'm a time traveller! You are too!" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6366" CreationDate="2014-12-20T17:21:47.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree; the original question doesn't say that it's asking specifically about Hawking's use of the idea. It just asks what imaginary time is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if the closed question really is different, it should be edited to explain why it differs from other questions (including the linked duplicate). Then it could be reopened. I would note that this kind of edit is very difficult to make without changing the apparent meaning of the question, so usually it needs to be made by the original asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T17:21:47.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6367" CreationDate="2014-12-20T17:22:49.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Had I done my homework, I'd have easily found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/245123/262980&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta.SE post. But let's put it here for all the others that might be tempted to ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time-based hats are given a leeway of about 12 hours before and after the UTC day. That's to allow people in different parts of the world to fulfill the requirements during that day where they are on Earth. Since it's extra work to check where someone is and calculate the limits for them, everyone gets an extra 24 hour window. Yay! Thanks SE team!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T17:22:49.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-22T04:04:33.717" Score="15" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154420/lightning-strikes-causing-nudity&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; had been worded like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is it physically plausible that a lightning strike could make your sweat boil and cause your clothes to explode off your body&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would it still have been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T06:34:41.820" Title="Can a question be made on-topic by hiding the real reason the OP is asking it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6370" CreationDate="2014-12-22T10:58:55.920" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with questions like this is that they're like asking &lt;em&gt;can an elephant fly?&lt;/em&gt; The answer is yes if you're allowed to start at the top of a cliff and your definition of &lt;em&gt;flight&lt;/em&gt; includes trajectories normal to the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that the question is not answerable from first principles in any useful way. You might say yes your clothes could be blown off if you were coated in a continuous film of sweat with a high enough conductivity and there was enough power in the lightning to vaporise all the sweat and your clothes were impermeable enough for a high pressure to be built up. But that doesn't tell us anything useful, hedged around as it is with numerous conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to approach the question would be to examine actual lightning strikes to try and establish whether the phenomenon happened, and if so what factors were common to all occurrences. At this point it might be useful to approach a physicist and try to model the specific phenomena involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think Kyle's response is spot on. Post on the Skeptics SE in the hope someone can point you to the sort of evidence mentioned above. As it stands the question isn't appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T10:58:55.920" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6366" CreationDate="2014-12-22T11:03:23.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is based on a misapprehension then I think it is fair to close it as a duplicate of a question that explains the physics involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case a Q/A explaining what physicists mean by imaginary time is not strictly speaking an answer to the question &lt;em&gt;Is imaginary time a fifth dimension?&lt;/em&gt;, but it answers the question indirectly by explaining imaginary time. That makes it a good candidate to be linked as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case flagging the duplicate worked, as I note the OP posted in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ok, I think I'm starting to get it. Imaginary time is the result of a transformation applied to time that makes it act like a spatial dimension mathematically. Imaginary time and &quot;real time&quot; aren't two coordinates of a complex number, they're just two different ways of looking at the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T11:03:23.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-23T02:42:07.493" Score="7" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the right way to post a self-answered question on a topic which underlies many existing questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider in particular a case wherein many questions have been posed about Topic X.&#xA;These questions are not particularly well written because the askers are not themselves experts in Topic X and so don't really know what they're asking about.&#xA;Answers have been given, but for the most part suffer a lack of precision inherited from the relatively aimless nature of the questions themselves.&#xA;How does one post a self answered question on Topic X, designed to provide a clear and unifying response to those poorly posed questions, without violating the duplicate rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T17:10:33.860" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T17:10:33.860" Title="How to respond to a pool of existing poorly worded questions without creating a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6375" CreationDate="2014-12-23T08:17:51.443" Score="7" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other than off topic flags, there are several different types of flags that one can cast on a question, answer, or comment. What are each of these flags for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question and answer flags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spam&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;offensive/abusive/hate speech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very low quality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment flags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rude or abusive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no longer needed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in need of moderator intervention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It often happens that the same post will be flagged with 2 or 3 or more different reasons. This suggests that people are not clear about what some of the flags are meant for. I'm making this post to help people understand what the intended uses of the different flags are; this will cover only the types of answers that should &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; be flagged for one particular reason, not the borderline cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T20:28:02.047" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T02:44:35.387" Title="Which flag do I use for an inappropriate post?" Tags="|support|flagging|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6374" CreationDate="2014-12-23T08:17:51.443" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Question and answer flags&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Spam&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;spam&quot; flag is for content which is both promotional &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; irrelevant to the post, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;links to commercial websites unrelated to physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for anything which is not promotional, or which constitutes an answer, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers relevant to the question which reference a relevant physics paper or publication (including blog posts), even if the poster is the author of the publication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;offensive content (see below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wrong answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers based on non-mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of posts that should be flagged as spam:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online poker sign up&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt;! win money in your spare time! Top players use our site for quick money&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;International Symposium on Imaginary Physics Call For Papers&lt;/strong&gt; We invite you and your colleagues to submit papers to a new symposium for experts in the field of Imaginary Physics. &lt;a href=&quot;http://example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; to access the signup form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rude or abusive&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flag is for content that does not constitute an answer &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; which a reasonable person would consider egregiously offensive, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hate speech directed against a race, gender, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;direct threats of violence against a specific person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exposing sensitive personal information (real name, location, mailing address, email address, phone number, age, gender, etc.) against the owner's wishes - what other sites often call &quot;doxxing&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;content which could reasonably be considered abuse &lt;em&gt;of the system&lt;/em&gt; like nonsensical gibberish (though you can also use &quot;very low quality&quot; or &quot;not an answer&quot; for this sort of thing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wrong answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers based on non-mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mild insults&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;isolated instances of swear words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;legitimate answers which can be edited to not be offensive while preserving the meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hiding the examples in spoiler tags in case anyone would rather not read them. Hover over the quote boxes to see sample offensive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; all these shitty answers you get when you let chinese on the site, you asked for this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; If you do not accept this answer I will come to your house at 333 Quantum Road, Hilbertsville and murder a member of your family within one year&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Very Low Quality&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;very low quality&quot; flag is for answers which are complete nonsense, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;incoherent gibberish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything not parseable as English text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers posted in another language (although if you can edit in a translation, you're encouraged to do so instead of flagging)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wrong answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers based on non-mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;followup questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;jaafjajrefaseoifjaeijfoaisnsdoj ajfauenwofjasndifnaowjnefoaijw3oeiosafaw3efnaso aksdj vaosjdfoa dfoajw efjas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not An Answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;not an answer&quot; flag is for anything posted as an answer which does not constitute so much as an &lt;em&gt;attempt&lt;/em&gt; to answer that question, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers to completely different questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;followup questions, including requests for clarification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for anything that answers the question or represents a good-faith attempt to answer the question, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wrong answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers based on non-mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers which just barely fail to address the question due to an honest misunderstanding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything the poster honestly thinks is a legitimate answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If gravity is $+9.8$, does that mean the train goes up in the air? I thought up was positive. Can you explain what happens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Bohr's answer is good but it doesn't explain why only these certain orbits are allowed. What if you hit an electron slightly, just enough to push it out of its orbit but not into the next one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;other&quot; flag, or the &quot;flag for moderator attention&quot;, is for anything that does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fit into one of the above categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Comment flags&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general note: if you find yourself wanting to flag many comments on the same post, it's enough to just flag one or two. When handling a comment flag, we normally look at all other comments on the post and delete them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rude or abusive&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this flag for anything that violates the &quot;be nice&quot; rule, including anything that a reasonable person would consider egregiously offensive (much like the &quot;offensive&quot; flag for answers). In particular, valid uses of this flag include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hate speech directed against a race, gender, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;direct threats of violence against a specific person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exposing sensitive personal information (real name, location, mailing address, email address, phone number, age, gender, etc.) against the owner's wishes (a.k.a. &quot;doxxing&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;content which could reasonably be considered abuse &lt;em&gt;of the system&lt;/em&gt; like nonsensical gibberish (though you can also use &quot;no longer needed&quot; for this sort of thing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;isolated instances of swear words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comments you simply disagree with&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't believe you consider yourself competent to post about string theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The examples from the &quot;offensive&quot; question/answer flag (see above) would also apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;No longer needed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;no longer needed&quot; flag is for any comments which do not help clarify or improve their parent post. It combines what used to be &quot;obsolete&quot;, &quot;not constructive&quot;, and &quot;too chatty&quot; (which were always kind of hard to distinguish anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the name, this flag should be used both for comments that used to be useful, but are not anymore, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; for comments that were never useful in the first place. Here is a nonexhaustive list of comment types you should use this flag for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;+1 great post!&quot; or &quot;-1 this is wrong&quot; or anything along those lines given &lt;em&gt;without further explanation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;greetings, thanks, and pleasantries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anecdotes, stories, jokes, links to XKCD comics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suggestions for changes which &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been incorporated into the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suggestions which the poster has explicitly declined to make&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requests for clarification which have been answered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clarifications given in response to such requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;back-and-forth discussions which are no longer active&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;responses to any comments which have been deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pretty much any comment older than a week or so (which is an implicit indication that the poster has declined to act on the comment)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;followup questions which should be asked independently&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;links to related resources or potential duplicate questions where the comments are less than a week old&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suggestions for improving the post which are less than a week old and which the poster has not yet responded to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;active discussions which are expected to result in a suggestion for improving the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything where the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; reason for flagging is that you disagree with it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the only correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're not a physicist, why should I believe anything you write?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I joined this site just to upvote your post. Great job!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for the upvote!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Moderator intervention&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;in need of moderator intervention&quot; flag is for any comment that needs flagging and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fit into one of the above categories. These will be rare. Spam is the main example I can think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any comments simply because you disagree with them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What if I misuse a flag?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your flag gets declined. This is not a big deal. It just reflects a difference of opinion between the flagger and the handling moderator. (Plus the mods &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; accidentally click the wrong button from time to time.) Everybody gets flags declined from time to time, and there are no lasting consequences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you are warned that you're flagging incorrectly, and you continue to do it repeatedly, frequently, and intentionally (as far as the mods can tell). Then you'd be subject to the same disciplinary measures we use against anyone else who seriously abuses their privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples in this post are not real, but are meant to be representative of actual contributed content that would be a valid use of the respective flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T02:44:35.387" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T02:44:35.387" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-12-24T04:46:53.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6373" CreationDate="2014-12-23T09:56:34.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exactly what the official SE line is I'm not sure, but I'm personnally not that fussed about duplicates. Apparent duplicates often stress different aspects of a problem, and I'm not sure it does any harm to have separate questions and answers with different perspectives on a problem. I've even occasionally flagged a question as a duplicate of a question that has itself been closed as a duplicate because I thought it had a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would go ahead and write your canonical question and answer. The worst that will happen is that it gets ignored, and the best that it will provide a valuable synthesis of previous related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is the issue of wave particle duality. Even though there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46237/is-the-wave-particle-duality-a-real-duality&quot;&gt;question specifically devoted to asking what it is&lt;/a&gt; (with 9 answers!), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=wave%20particle%20duality&quot;&gt;numerous other related questions&lt;/a&gt;, I still don't feel there is a perfect Q/A for the interested amateur. Maybe one day I shall attempt to write one :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T09:56:34.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2014-12-24T16:46:22.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's unwise of me to re-open an issue that's essentially settled here, but maybe it's relevant again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, you've heard of the new site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;. Danu, and LoganM and I are the pro-tem mods, and perhaps we'll admit to a little shameless promoting here and there on questions on various SEs that might be good on HSM. This, however, is not one of those instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DavidZ wrote, perhaps eloquently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as a rule, physicists tend not to care about it in the sense that a historian would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may be true. On the flip side, historians tend not to care about it in the sense that a scientist would. In other words, we're in between everybody, although perhaps we've been leaning a little towards the historian side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics has long said that history questions are usually on-topic. The same seems to be the case here. I'm not quite sure about how Biology, Chemistry, and Earth Science, etc. are leaning, but it's probably not a huge issue. History has decided that science questions there are absolutely on topic, and we at HSM informally rejected two migrated questions that someone shunted from History to HSM (to the consternation of just about everybody who cared).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be questions that are on-topic on HSM that are not on-topic at any of the other science or math sites. For example, take this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/9/why-was-evariste-galois-killed&quot;&gt;Why was Evariste Galois killed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/are-questions-about-mathematicians-and-scientists-lives-on-topic&quot;&gt;a meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the topic, with the resounding consensus that all questions about historical figures &lt;em&gt;must relate to the work of those figures.&lt;/em&gt; A question about whether or not Albert Einstein liked Wiener Schnitzel would clearly be off-topic (and no, I have no idea). This sort of implies that many questions on HSM would be on-topic on the other science sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the same, though, questions that are less geared towards scientific/mathematical concepts and more towards the historical influence are possibly better for HSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note: There seems to be a growing trend on Mathematics of people saying that a given question would be good for HSM. This is actually a problem, as there have been a couple cross-posting incidents. I have also noted once or twice that a question here would be good on HSM. Please, &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; cross-post on HSM. It gets a bit messy, and is a pain for everyone. If you feel that your question is better on HSM, talk with the moderators here, as well as the pro-tem mods from HSM. I'm sure we can figure out if the question is suitable for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:32.623" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T16:46:22.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-25T14:44:22.597" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every now and then someone asks a &quot;homework&quot; and &quot;mathy&quot; question which gets held or closed because it's homework and math.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/154920/&quot;&gt;Here's a recent example&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;As worded the question is definitely a &quot;do my homework for me&quot; question and should be held.&#xA;However, when I read it I think&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gee, yeah, I it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be nice to have some resources on this site about how to approach problems like this. As a physicist, I frequently have to deal with mathematical expressions like this one and it's super convenient to have some basic formulae and guiding words lying around so I know what direction to go in and not waste four hours going down blind alleys. In short, as a physicist, I want an answer to this &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of question at my fingertips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do we do?&#xA;It's not obvious how to record this information as a question which conforms to the site rules.&#xA;One imagines asking something like &quot;what is the BCH formula used for?&quot;, but that's too vague and doesn't have a well defined correct answer.&#xA;You could try &quot;What &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of formula should I use to solve this &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of expression?&quot; but that's not a physics question.&#xA;One could then try to artificially inject physics into what is really a math question, but that degrades the clarity of the information and not calling a spade a spade makes my pedagogy hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T17:52:00.410" Title="Is there a way incorporate mathematical expressions/tricks crucial to physicists on our site?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6378" CreationDate="2014-12-25T17:52:00.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we do nothing. After all, this site is not trying to be a one-stop comprehensive resource for information about physics. There are some things people should be looking elsewhere for - &quot;elsewhere&quot; may include textbooks, class notes, Wikipedia, Hyperphysics, and all those other &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;resources we tell people to check before asking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For homework questions in particular, the people who are asking these questions are not really our intended audience. (Leaving aside the occasional high-level homework question from a grad student in a QFT class or something like that.) This site is meant primarily for academics, researchers, and serious students, not for intro-level physics students who just want homework help. One of the ways we keep the intro-level students from overwhelming the site is by not providing the information they're looking for. We &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; them to go to other sites for that information, sites which do want to help people with their homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T17:52:00.410" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6135" CreationDate="2014-12-29T22:30:43.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an experimental physicist (&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an engineer) and a Physics teacher.  More often than not, I am denigrated for this in real life, as one theoretical physicist stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Experimental, and especially physics teachers are the lowest on the research totem pole&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is rubbish, utter rubbish, insulting and says more about the one said it than his target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experimental Physics = Theoretical Physics = Physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit of background, I have a PhD in Physics (not Experimental Physics etc), and am published internationally. Due to circumstances currently beyond my control, I teach Physics to pay the bills, and my experiments use equipment that is often self made or borrowed, and are performed at a local lookout, or in the school science lab or on my kitchen bench.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing as grand as CERN, my research is based on what I can get from the hardware and electronics store and put together and calibrate with the borrowed 'standard' equipment.  It is often referred to as &quot;Backyard Physics&quot; - but is no less valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To put it succinctly:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To effectively make useful homemade tools for use in experimental 'backyard' physics, physics principles must be understood and applied as the major underlying principles for the functionality (and as I have found in publishing work, the validity) of the tool.  I fear that questions that are of this nature will just be closed as 'engineering' akin to 'toolmaking' - however, a question about the application of physics principles for an aspect of the tool's use is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; engineering, but is applied physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/155666/microtops-sunphotometer-sun-target-optics&quot;&gt;Microtops sunphotometer sun target optics&lt;/a&gt;, I am clearly asking about the optics principles involved (applied physics) - not asking about how to build a sun target (engineering).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user60063" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T04:44:47.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2014-12-30T05:19:15.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my own (not necessary unique) experience as a 'Backyard Physicist' (note - this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the same as 'hobbyist'), I &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; make my own tools a lot of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The division between applied physics and engineering, to me at least, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;asking about the specific physics principles involved with the specific aspect of the tool &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; questions about the measurement of a particular specific parameter are &lt;strong&gt;applied physics&lt;/strong&gt; and ought to be on-topic as these questions seek to apply the theoretical physics principles to a practical situation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;asking how a tool could be made is &lt;strong&gt;engineering&lt;/strong&gt; and ought to be off topic&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless a question &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; asks for the 2nd case, it should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be assumed that they are asking for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60063" LastEditorDisplayName="user60063" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T05:30:19.897" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T05:30:19.897" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-12-30T05:19:15.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-30T20:14:46.873" Score="-1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this, or is this not, a question AND ANSWER site? What is the value in commenting to 'answer it yourself', 'calculate it yourself', etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is a Q&amp;amp;A site, the way I perceive this is to either provide an answer, improve the question, or move along. I found this hostile and quite unhelpful in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154816/could-this-planetary-superalignment-happen&quot;&gt;a question I asked&lt;/a&gt;, and now see it again from the same user in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/155805/why-two-equal-resistors-cut-voltage-in-half&quot;&gt;another user's question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community cannot be 'bothered' to calculate anything or offer up answers, then why not reframe it into a 'we'll guide you to answer your own questions' site instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this behavior makes the community seem hostile and unwelcoming, and can be a great hindrance to new users, as well as an annoyance to regular users like myself. I come here to ask questions expecting answers, not snarky 'do it yourself' comments, and do my best to fully address the questions of others without this hostility or resistance to doing work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8850" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T08:55:45.720" Title="What is the value in making OPs 'answer it yourself'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6383" CreationDate="2014-12-30T21:06:56.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, note that asking us to do the math for you is actually considered &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; here. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5960/25301&quot;&gt;top-rated answer&lt;/a&gt; (52 upvotes, 0 downvotes at the time of writing) on the meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958&quot;&gt;Bite-sizing homework&lt;/a&gt; states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that can be summarized as &quot;please solve this exercise&quot; or &quot;please plug these numbers into an equation for me&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;OFF topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You had an equation (cf. your 2nd comment) and some numbers, yet you asked us to do it for you. So according to site policy, your question is actually off-topic (possibly the reason Qmechanic left the comment about reading the HW policy) and should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, asking why you hadn't done the math is certainly a reasonable request because it will give clues as to the direction an answer should take. The difference between a simple math problem (off-topic) and the reason behind the phenomena (on-topic) is vast. Diagnosing the issue of the mathematical aspect can help keep your question open or help further its closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T21:06:56.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6383" CreationDate="2014-12-31T08:55:45.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First some general preamble not specifically related to your question: the description of the site from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;first page of the tour&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret this fairly loosely because I consider everyone who wants to learn about physics a student regardless of whether they're in a formal course or not. So for me the key issue is whether the OP is interested to learn and is willing to put in the effort that learning requires. If I think they just want some gee whizz facts with which to impress their friends I'm likely to ignore the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's consider the accusations you level. Your statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the community cannot be 'bothered' to calculate anything or offer up answers, then why not reframe it into a 'we'll guide you to answer your own questions' site instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;strikes me as petty and ill-informed. Every day I see busy working physicists putting in considerable amounts of their time for free to answer questions. It's all very well for me because I'm retired and have free time to burn, but I see answers from people who have to work (as physicists) to pay their mortgages or to pass their exams. To dismiss the contribution these people make with the phrase &lt;em&gt;cannot be 'bothered' to calculate anything or offer up answers&lt;/em&gt; is exceedingly ungracious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's consider your question. I think it's a pretty good question, but the first part of it is one that I would expect anyone interested in physics to be able to answer themselves. After all, you just need Newton's law of gravity and the radii of the planetary orbits, which you can get from Google. If I were presented with this in a tutorial I would require the student to answer it themselves and I would provide hints only as required. Rereading the comments now, CuriousOne responded more or less exactly as I would in a tutorial. Admittedly that's in a formal teaching context, but then I tend to view the Physics SE as an informal teaching context and the same rules apply. So in this and similar circumstances I think it's entirely reasonable to make comments to the effect that you should answer the question yourself because that will benefit you more than just answering the question. Maybe that sounds a bit patronising, but isn't any teaching essentially patronage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of your question strikes me as fascinating and bloody difficult. In principle you can just take the orbital periods and current positions and try to calculate when the planets will line up. However one of the points in Schwern's answer is that the Solar System is dynamic and not just some clockwork mechanism, and there may well be effects that prevent a near perfect alignment and will gently perturb the orbits to avoid it. I didn't attempt an answer to this because I can't answer it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally some footnotes that are entirely my personal opinion and unsupported by logical argument. What motivates me and others to put in so much effort isn't entirely clear to me. But then what motivates scientists in general isn't obvious - it's certainly not the money :-) But what demotivates people is clearer, and being taken for granted is one of the things. If I'm going to put in the work to answer a question I expect a reciprocal input from the student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T08:55:45.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6387" CreationDate="2014-12-31T20:51:43.703" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;My original question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/155931/the-scientific-method-and-model-selection-in-physics&quot;&gt;Model Selection in Physics&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold because it was too broad. I  understand the reasons behind the decision, and have updated the question subsequently with several edits to make it hopefully narrower in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the recommended way to proceed for after making such edits? Has Physics SE established a site-specific process to ask for a review of such decisions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1527" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T00:47:59.367" Title="What is the recommended process to ask for a review of an updated question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6386" CreationDate="2015-01-01T00:47:59.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Kyle mentioned in a comment, each edit after your post is put on hold automatically pushes it into the review queue. So the recommended way to proceed is to &lt;strong&gt;wait&lt;/strong&gt; for enough high-rep site members to review your post. If you've fixed the problems that caused it to be put on hold in the first place, it will be reopened by their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is accessible to non-moderators, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/67754&quot;&gt;here is the outcome of the most recent review on your post&lt;/a&gt;. You have made some edits since then, so right now your post is back in the queue awaiting additional reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T00:47:59.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-01T03:09:11.460" Score="17" ViewCount="2893" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/6388&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T20:15:07.487" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2015" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="26" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-02-02T15:19:54.057" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T03:09:11.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-01T03:09:11.460" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/spBJn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="4826" LastEditDate="2015-05-26T02:28:56.520" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T02:28:56.520" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T03:09:11.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-01T14:56:56.947" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/155663/why-does-a-pitcher-with-lemon-juice-have-foam-while-one-with-pure-water-does-no&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; and got two answers which &lt;strong&gt;seem&lt;/strong&gt; to be correct (I am not a chemist / biologist and the answers deal with chemical proprieties of lemons. They both make sense, though and ultimately point to the same physical property).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I accept an answer if I do not have the knowledge to decide which on is correct (and there is no clear winner via the upvotes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38751" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T15:36:18.597" Title="How to accept an answer if several seem fine?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6390" CreationDate="2015-01-01T15:36:18.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your problem is that in the absence of a specialist in lemon juice your question can't be answered. Most of the answers (we can pass mercifully over the one suggesting the bubbles contained methane) point out that wherever there is a foam there is a surface active agent stabilising it. But all the answers can only suggest what that agent might be, and unless someone finds a paper analysing the foam and pinpointing the active ingredient no-one here can say conclusively what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're happy with the conclusion that it's due to a surfactant then accept whichever question seems to you to explain things most clearly. If you're unhappy with not knowing exactly what the chmical involved is then accept none of the answers. It may seem untidy to leave a question with no accepted answer, but open questions can and do get answered months or years after they have been posted. You're just waiting for the right person to come along and see the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T15:36:18.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-01T20:13:23.050" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ovzu6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T20:13:23.050" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T20:13:23.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-01T20:17:34.547" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HQ5S2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T20:17:34.547" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T20:17:34.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-02T01:40:58.093" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wSP7m.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org -- open access to over 800 000 e-prints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-05-09T11:13:35.400" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T11:13:35.400" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T01:40:58.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-02T01:43:51.853" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EbnRL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify2 - LaTeX symbol classifier&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T01:43:51.853" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T01:43:51.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-02T01:47:18.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Txu0Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Forums&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T01:47:18.330" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T01:47:18.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-02T01:49:14.743" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;Current Physics Stack Exchange bounties http://stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/physics.stackexchange.com/bounty.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T01:49:14.743" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T01:49:14.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-02T10:15:37.617" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TG2kD.png&quot; alt=&quot;PhysicsOverflow: a graduate-level upward physics site&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6848" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T10:15:37.617" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T10:15:37.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-02T16:37:12.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ljt1P.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Fun Physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:35.647" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T16:37:12.430" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-02T16:37:12.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-03T01:32:27.667" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlIlq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T01:32:27.667" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-03T01:32:27.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6403" CreationDate="2015-01-03T15:01:31.760" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is a way to check more or less quickly if your comments where voted. I specifically had the problem that I wanted to check how far away I was from the &quot;pundit&quot; medal, that requires 10 comments with score of 5 or more. The only way to check that I found is to go through the comments one by one, but this is not practical if you have hundreds of comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user65081" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T15:16:00.400" Title="Is there a way to check voted comments?" Tags="|support|comments|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6402" CreationDate="2015-01-03T15:16:00.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/238582/comments-and-votes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here you go&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enter your user ID and run the query, it will list all your comments, beginning with the highest voted, so you can easily count how many you have over 5 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T15:16:00.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-03T18:05:42.117" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://space.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWTVN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Space Exploration Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21740" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T18:05:42.117" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-03T18:05:42.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-04T02:44:42.857" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g4t53.png&quot; alt=&quot;HSM&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:32.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T00:38:46.630" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-04T02:44:42.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-04T04:29:26.887" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxitics.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IL75b.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv Analytics: specialized web portal dedicated to reading &amp;amp; discussing arXiv eprints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16015" LastEditorUserId="16015" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T04:42:59.207" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T04:42:59.207" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-04T04:29:26.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6409" CreationDate="2015-01-04T06:42:33.220" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;:  I couldn't find an explanation &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/bounty-reasons-and-post-notices/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to start a bounty (on a question that already received 4 answers) because: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;The current answers do not contain enough detail..&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you clarify these points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are the answers posted before the bounty is started excluded from the bounty?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what happens if no new answer is posted, since the existing ones are not considered satisfactory?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is more than one new good answer, can I divide the bounty between them? How do I do it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; after the answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there are two more possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what happens if I do not choose an answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if I do not get any new answer and I post an answer, could I give to bounty to my own answer, even though this does not seem a great solution?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T07:47:20.703" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T20:52:47.870" Title="Starting a bounty" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6408" CreationDate="2015-01-04T06:59:49.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, you may award the bounty to them as well. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By default, the bounty will not go to anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, you cannot divide the bounty and a user can only place one bounty per question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20599" LastEditorUserId="20599" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T20:52:47.870" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T20:52:47.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6414" CreationDate="2015-01-04T17:02:54.730" Score="31" ViewCount="7069" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing a good title can require some thought.&#xA;A title, while short, must help other users get an idea of what your question will ask so they can decide whether or not to click and read the entire thing.&#xA;How should users of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;physics.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; construct good titles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/shouldnt-we-make-more-of-our-question-titles-actual-questions&quot;&gt;Related meta post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T14:40:50.383" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T14:40:50.383" Title="How do we write good question titles?" Tags="|discussion|faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6413" CreationDate="2015-01-04T17:02:54.730" Score="26" Body="&lt;h1&gt;An example&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we want to ask how to find the electric field outside of a uniform sphere of charge Q and radius R.&#xA;Consider these possible titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electrostatics question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electric field from charge distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electric field outside of uniformly charged sphere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Title #1&lt;/strong&gt; is bad.&#xA;A person reading this title knows only that the question has to do with electrostatics.&#xA;Electrostatics is a very broad subject and the reader cannot tell from this title whether or not he/she will be able to provide an answer.&#xA;Another serious problem with title #1 is that it is grammatically confusing.&#xA;The title itself is a phrase rather than a full sentence, which is ok, but as such it should not have a question mark at the end.&#xA;When the human language parser sees the question mark it gets ready to parse a question, but none is found.&#xA;This wastes computing cycles of the brain, is unpleasant, and should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Title #2&lt;/strong&gt; is better.&#xA;Already from this title the reader knows that in order to answer the question he/she must remember how to compute electric fields given a charge distribution.&#xA;That's probably enough for the reader to decide whether or not to click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Title #3&lt;/strong&gt; is even better.&#xA;The title itself provides all the information the reader needs to write a complete answer!&#xA;This title &lt;em&gt;respects the reader&lt;/em&gt; by offering him/her enough information to make a decision about how to spend his/her time just by reading your title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some bad titles (and how to fix a couple of them)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few question titles from the front page over the last two days:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/156541/ohms-law-question&quot;&gt;Ohms Law Question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/104543/black-hole-classical-or-quantum&quot;&gt;Black hole (classical or quantum?)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/156116/boomerang-physics-and-aerodynamics&quot;&gt;Boomerang physics and aerodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/156548/su3-antiquark-triplet-transformation&quot;&gt;SU(3) antiquark triplet transformation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/156551/question-about-deriving-gausss-law&quot;&gt;Question about deriving Gauss's Law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/183696/need-help-solving-physics-problem&quot;&gt;Need help solving physics problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with &lt;strong&gt;title #1&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;This title suffers three problems.&#xA;First, it does not give the reader enough information about what the question really asks.&#xA;Here's the actual question text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since V=IR, if you were to have say a 5v source connected directly to ground, no components in the circuit at all, you would need to add resistance for the current to flow? Or is there something I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a question involving Ohm's law, we can be much more specific in the title.&#xA;A simple improvement would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ohm's law when voltage source is connected directly to ground&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that title I immediately know why the person asking the question is confused, and I can decide whether or not I want to write an explanation about the limits of model equations and the realities of internal resistance of voltage sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem with the title is that 1/3 of the words in it are wasted.&#xA;Every question posted on StackExchange sites is a question, so there's no need to tell the reader that your question is a question in the title.&#xA;One way to avoid this error is to ask yourself whether or not each word in the title conveys information to the reader.&#xA;Telling the reader that your question is a question does not convey information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third and final problem is that the question mark should not be there.&#xA;The phrase &quot;Ohm's Law Question&quot; is not an English question, so there is no place for a question mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at &lt;strong&gt;title #4&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;This title mentions more advanced physics and as such it is easy to give it more lenience than is given to titles of more basic questions.&#xA;However, title #4 suffers the same problems as others in the list.&#xA;I can see that the question will have something to do with antiquark triplet transformations, but I have no idea what the actual question is.&#xA;Here's a short excerpt from the question text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, what is the real reason we can't create an antiquark triplet that transforms like the quark triplet, i.e. if q is the 3 and transforms like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based solely on that excerpt we can already choose a much better title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why can't we create an antiquark triplet which transforms like a quark triplet?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Titles matter: they help readers decide what questions to click on and steer the reader's mind set as they read your question.&#xA;Strive to make titles clear, specific, and concise.&#xA;Titles which only state the general field of the question are not helpful.&#xA;Titles which actually &lt;em&gt;state the question&lt;/em&gt; are very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Quick tips&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check that your title is actually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/20730/why-do-my-how-to-questions-often-get-renamed-to-how-do-i&quot;&gt;grammatically well-formed question&lt;/a&gt; if you put a question mark at the end of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Review each word of your title and decide whether or not it conveys information to the reader.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your title is a phrase, re-read your question text and check that the phrase you choose is as specific as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are not writing a suspense novel. There is no reason to hide the true nature of your question by writing a broad title and then specifying at the end of the question text. Common wisdom is to get the point as soon as possible, and nothing comes sooner than the title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no need to manually type tags into your title. For example, don't do this: &quot;[Quantum mechanics] How do I compute hydrogen atom energy levels?&quot;. Just add the quantum-mechanics tag and leave the bracketed stuff out of the title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capitalize only the first word and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proper nouns&lt;/a&gt; in the title. Do not capitalize other words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Homework for newer users&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review the linked questions above and edit their titles, making them better according to guidelines put forth in this post.&#xA;This is good practice and helps the site :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer could probably use some improvements to tighten the discussion. I welcome edits warmly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:11.747" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T03:56:04.410" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-12-08T21:16:55.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6416" CreationDate="2015-01-05T03:29:52.380" Score="14" ViewCount="1136" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/community-promotion-ads-2015&quot;&gt;2015 community ad proposal thread&lt;/a&gt;, I posted an ad for physicsoverflow. Then I posted a comment under it to provide some extra information. Here I'll try to reconstruct the deletions in chronological order from memory, if there is anything not factual, I welcome corrections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First time I commented &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm surprised by the number of downvotes, in case of misinformation and with no intention to start a debate, here's a mathoverflow link containing a brief  introduction:&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live&quot;&gt;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above comment disappeared when I checked the page a few hours later, and I assumed it was an error, so I posted a comment again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live&quot;&gt;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got deleted again. So I made the inquiry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to know in accordance to which rule my comments got deleted twice with no notification, whereas for other ads some comments adding information are perfectly ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time I monitored my post, and this inquiry got deleted in a few minutes after I posted it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence here I'd like to use this meta post to make a formal inquiry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) In accordance to which rule my comments got deleted thrice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Is it common practice for moderators to delete comments without notifications to the author? Is it justified by any policy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Followup: According the answer by David Z and Kyle Kanos, the reason is Qmechanic posted a link and asked people not to discuss under the ad. To defend myself I must say I did not ignore Qmechanic's comment, the reasons I posted my comment despite it are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Qmechanic's link is not the mathoverflow link I gave, and I do think mathoverflow information has more merit since people there are more experienced with a research-level site. And if my memories serve, originally Qmechanic did not post the link of the PSE meta post and only the chat room was given, only after the deletion of my first comment did he post the link of PSE meta post. Please correct me if this is not factual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)I did not consider my link to be a &quot;discussion&quot;, but only an announcement. But I won't tangle with you on this, I am willing to follow your definition of &quot;discussion&quot; and let it go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3)To me notifications have usually been given before deletion on PSE, but now I know that's out of courtesy, and I guess there's a difference between the PSE main site and meta. I'm fine as long as it is written in the rules, thanks for the clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the  clarifications, now what makes me curious is &lt;strong&gt;why my ad deserves the special treatment? That there is no such mandate like Qmechanic's imposed on other ads?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addition:&lt;/strong&gt; After the conversation with Kyle Kanos, it becomes clear that moderators are not violating any rule set by Stackexchange; what is also made clear is that moderators have unlimited power at comment zone with 0 restriction, in accordance to the rule. This is a very unjust rule, and it would be humane for moderators to refrain from wielding this power. However, the current situation suggests the unreasonable(but again, not illegitimate) power is being very actively exercised. I rest my case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6848" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:04.363" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T17:29:32.007" Title="Why did my comments under the community ad for physicsoverflow get deleted thrice?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6415" CreationDate="2015-01-05T03:38:02.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/community-promotion-ads-2015#comment22500_6399&quot;&gt;comment directly&lt;/a&gt; under your post from Qmechanic that states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please avoid discussion and comments here. Use instead the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;related meta post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17799/discussion-on-question-by-deer-hunter-what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-lin&quot;&gt;its chat room&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, you were asked to use the two linked resources to discuss anything, rather than the Community Ads thread, and you ignored that message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that comments are considered &quot;second class&quot; citizens and can be deleted without approval/consent of the posted user. You can read more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/914/25301&quot;&gt;about it here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, questions involving Physics Overflow quickly degrade into &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback&quot;&gt;&quot;not so nice&quot;&lt;/a&gt; comment threads. Qmechanic's comment was a warning to &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; such a new thread from occurring by diverting people to a channel where it is more appropriate (i.e., chat). As an aside, the Meta post gives some information about Physics Overflow written by one of their founders, who also wrote the MathOverflow post you wanted to link.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;None of the other posted Ads recommend such a controversial topic, so no similar warnings are necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T12:42:08.750" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6415" CreationDate="2015-01-05T03:39:28.917" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rule under which your comments got deleted is the following, which was posted right there on the post which you were commenting on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please avoid discussion and comments here. Use instead the related meta post and its chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, but when a moderator leaves direct instructions not to do something and you go ahead and do it anyway, you're probably not going to like the outcome. (Same goes for when a site policy says not to do something and you do it anyway, although in that case you might at least have the excuse that you didn't know about the policy.) The proper way to ask why your comments were being deleted was to bring it up on meta, as you did, or to ask in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model is that any information worth keeping belongs in a question or answer; comments are meant to be ephemeral. Consequently, we (moderators) often delete comments for a variety of reasons. You're also encouraged to delete your own comments once they have served their purpose. You will find the following in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756/how-do-comments-work&quot;&gt;the relevant Meta SE FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are disposable: unlike posts, there's no revision history, and they can be deleted without warning by their authors, by moderators, and in response to flags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T03:39:28.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-05T09:15:49.860" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it is impossible to post a comment: if I open a box and start writing both the ping and the text I try to write do not appear in the box. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only some red waves appear, the waves that usually underline mistakes in spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all started over a month ago, and it usually happens only in the late afternoon or evening GMT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a problem of my browser or PC or has someone experienced the same problem lately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T09:15:49.860" Title="Comment box glitch" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-07T11:03:49.230" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bhistory%5D+closed%3Ano+migrated%3Ano&quot;&gt;quick search&lt;/a&gt; for not-closed not-migrated &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; questions shows a handful of results. Given that newly asked questions about history are usually migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;hsm.se&lt;/a&gt;, should old (i.e., more than 2 month old) questions be migrated too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related discussion is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/156/58382&quot;&gt;Are history of physics questions allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58382" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T13:24:32.190" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T13:24:32.190" Title="Should old questions about history of physics be migrated to hsm.se?" Tags="|discussion|tags|migration|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6421" CreationDate="2015-01-07T22:57:20.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old questions (older than 90 days I think) can't be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, we haven't even established that history questions are off topic here in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T22:57:20.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6421" CreationDate="2015-01-08T00:00:29.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The big problem here is what DavidZ mentioned - questions eventually become too old to be migrated, though I believe the limit is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151890/disable-migration-for-questions-older-than-60-days&quot;&gt;60 days&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this discussed before on Mathematics Meta, and the consensus was what I think should be the policy on Physics - and what I think is the unofficial policy here - which is that history questions are &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take, for example, this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/158079/who-first-discussed-the-lorentz-force-w-r-t-special-relativity&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/158079/who-first-discussed-the-lorentz-force-w-r-t-special-relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; to see this on HSM, and I think that we'd accept a migration of it to HSM. It clearly deals with history, and is, from what I can tell, 95% history and 5% physics. That 5%, by the way, is gratuitous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, history of physics is still on-topic on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/158079/who-first-discussed-the-lorentz-force-w-r-t-special-relativity#comment331015_158079&quot;&gt;The comment&lt;/a&gt; left below the question, by alarge, seems to be rather typical in this post-HSM-launch era:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Might hsm.stackexchange.com be a better home for this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Better&quot; is the key word here. The comments below a history question may be laid out the same, but the word &quot;better&quot; is always used. History questions are okay here. Also,  there have been quality answers to many of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, while we're trying to increase traffic and question rate on HSM, we don't want to artificially increase it. This was discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/116/should-math-se-seed-hsm-with-some-history-of-mathematics-questions&quot;&gt;a while ago&lt;/a&gt;, and we reached the conclusion that there's no reason to do it because these history questions have done so well on other sites. We want to &quot;homegrow&quot; questions and traffic - in other words, we would like to attract users and questions on our own, without this kind of artificial stimulus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, we can't handle the migration of all these unanswered questions at once - we simply don't yet have the user base* - and slowly &quot;weaning&quot; the other SEs off of unused history questions would be unproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also - as a pro-tem mod on HSM - don't want to have to manually re-tag and edit hundreds of questions - taking into account history questions from all the science and math sites, as well as science questions from History. :-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T03:28:40.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-08T02:07:52.923" Score="-7" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doesn't it make no sense? Why do people say you need 20 points to enter chat to prevent trolls from jumping in? Basically, a troll could just simply ask questions here for infinity and even if you ban them, it takes no more than a few seconds to start again. The system is wired stupidly if you look at it like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We require points so members can become reputable in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trolls don't care about reputation as a &quot;good&quot; person in the community, and they can come by and disrupt what's available to them first then, be it spamming/attacking others in questions, or leading people on with semi-legit questions just to take people for a ride and waste everyone's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You need 20 points in chat to prevent trolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there such an anti-troll establishment in chat but not in normal question asking? Why not require everyone gives photo ID and their physical address so you can go and kill them if you troll you? Simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The needs of the many only outweigh the few because that's what people &lt;em&gt;think is right&lt;/em&gt;. Whether it is is up for debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules are not set in stone. They are variables on the server that can be changed by hitting a few keys. It's not like it's hard. If I felt like hacking the community, I eventually could, but if fools will change it back, it's not worth it. So what do you gain by creating foolish rules to prevent trolls when by the very nature of this site breeds them because any outlet is good enough for a troll, even if just questioning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a simpler sense for some, if you can't completely stop trolls, why waste time setting up blocks in the road that makes it harder for them? You can't stop them in the first place. If you want no trolling, don't start a community; communities always have trolls. Trolls are not stopped by points. As stated before, a troll can earn the reputation and then proceed to disrupt and destroy as much as possible right after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66335" LastEditorUserId="66335" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T07:05:41.060" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T07:05:41.060" Title="What is the purpose of limiting certain features for &quot;fear of trolls&quot; when trolls can still ask questions?" Tags="|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6425" CreationDate="2015-01-08T02:36:16.507" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Why the minimum rep is fine enough to prevent trolling&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is effectively answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74086/so-chat-why-is-it-that-only-members-of-stack-overflow-with-at-least-20-reputat&quot;&gt;on the Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt;. The answers there are probably not sufficient for you, so I'm going to continue with a few extra points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chat is a place where people who spend their time answer questions here can hang out and respond to each other &lt;em&gt;in real time&lt;/em&gt; (that's important). Allowing any &amp;quot;troll&amp;quot; in would probably ruin our fun there. I think that's a perfectly valid reason to have the 20-rep minimum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A new user can certainly post questions, but until they hit 50 rep, they cannot  comment on &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; threads so their trolling is contained to their own posts. If they are indeed trolling, they'll soon enough find their question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any user who writes multiple poorly-received (i.e., heavily downvoted) questions can get a temporary ban from asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who takes the time to earn 50 rep in order to troll has a lot of free time. They'll quickly find their posts getting downvoted, dropping their rep by 2 each vote. Once they get under 50, they'll no longer be able to comment and under 20, they cannot enter chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a simpler sense for some, if you can't completely stop trolls, why waste time setting up blocks in the road that makes it harder for them? You can't stop them in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trolls are people who just want to bother other people for no good reason. As long as people like this exist, we will set up whatever road blocks are necessary to keep them at bay, simply because they are annoying. If you want to put up with trolls, feel free to take it to a place where trolls are readily accepted (there are places like that on the internets); here, we prefer to prevent them as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What happens if a troll &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; get the minimum rep &amp;amp; trolls chat&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange dev team have two ways of managing trolls:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users in chat can &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#mute&quot;&gt;mute the abusing member&lt;/a&gt;. This allows users to &lt;em&gt;not see&lt;/em&gt; the trolling posts in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; chat room.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users in the chat can &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#nice&quot;&gt;flag the post&lt;/a&gt; as inappropriate. With enough flags (or a present moderator), the user will get a ban from participating in chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a troll does manage to get the required reputation, there are ways to block them from persisting in being a troll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People here are afraid to make things work my way because my way is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your way would require us to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6337/why-do-you-need-50-reputation-to-comment-on-other-posts&quot;&gt;little-to-no blockage against trolls&lt;/a&gt; by lowering/eliminating reputation limits. It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; out of fear that these limits are imposed, it is out of &lt;em&gt;rationalized&lt;/em&gt; thinking and &lt;em&gt;experimental&lt;/em&gt; evidence. We &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to be annoyed or bothered by a subset of internet-capable people who &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; annoying and bothersome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T17:31:09.540" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6425" CreationDate="2015-01-08T08:12:51.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physicists tend to be more impressed by experimental evidence than theoretical reasoning, and the experimental evidence is that we are keeping trolling under control. If this was being achieved at the cost of widespead repression I might be concerned, but my experience is that we're a pretty liberal bunch hereabouts. So I can't see any urgency to review the various restrictions we have placed on low rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I see the low incidence of trolling as evidence that the site is working well. Trolling is most effectively when issues are a matter of opinion, and physics is rarely a matter of opinion. Generally speaking a question about physics will have a correct answer, and our answerers do a good job of not just giving the correct answer but explaining why it's correct. In the face of such clear exposition trolls get reduced to posting obscenities, and since this achieves little more than the raising of eyebrows and rapid deletion I suspect it's unsatisfying for the trolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T08:12:51.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-08T16:06:13.910" Score="5" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alongside each question there's a list of related questions, which are often relevant and interesting. For some reason, their scores appear in grey boxes even if the questions have been answered. Surely it would be more helpful if they were colour coded as happens elsewhere on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the advantages as follows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you've just answered a question on a topic, you probably know something about it. Therefore you're probably well positioned to answer related unanswered questions. If would be really useful to see at a glance whether there are any!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you've just asked or read a question, you might be interested in reading round the subject. Therefore you'll probably want to check out other answered questions on the same topic. Hence the need for this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine it wouldn't be very hard to implement, given that the code must exist elsewhere on the site. Perhaps upvote this if you think it would be useful, and someone can escalate it as a feature request to SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T16:06:13.910" Title="Related Questions - How To Tell If They've Been Answered" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-09T09:04:31.417" Score="-1" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;My post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/155372/2451&quot;&gt;Gravitational shifts of frequency in general relativity and classical physics&lt;/a&gt; was first closed by five users, and finally deleted as “off-topic”. This post has consisted in a comparison between relativistic and classical solutions for three kinds of frequency shifts noticed in gravitational field, all of them well-known for a long time, therefore indisputably inside PSE &lt;em&gt;mainstream&lt;/em&gt; physics. Downright fanny, my previous post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/153194/2451&quot;&gt;A proof for Newtonian origin of residual perihelion advances in solar system&lt;/a&gt; has also consisted in a comparison between relativistic and classical solutions for another phenomenon claimed to be an experimental test of general relativity, but nobody considered it as “off-topic”, although in this case the classical solution has been indeed somewhat a novelty.&#xA;As in my opinion the ill-will of my censors is evident, I ask for undeleting my post abusively removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T14:15:54.473" Title="Undeleting my removed post" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-12T06:53:35.873" Score="-20" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I have found this community to be very close-minded and unaccepting of any good feature changes. It is like a local-government allowing people to vote, only to later make a decision on their own merit entirely. In other words, it's like talking to a wall. I have outlined some features that should be changed and have made them clear as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Participating in chat should only require 5 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Blocking of users from certain IPs/IP ranges should never be automatic; instead; always manual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.Commenting on any question/answer on the site should only require 10 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to prove that you're open-minded as a community, I challenge you to make one of the latter changes active within the next two weeks. If you wish to prove to me that you still continue to refuse and ignore my requests, please be honest and admit the dark truth about your community as I've mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't make a change nor admit your community as I've mentioned, I ask that you promise you can keep me from using this site; &lt;strong&gt;actually, I dare it&lt;/strong&gt;. If you fail to keep that promise, I will never stop coming back, and every time I come back and let you know it, that's a loss of face value and reputation for this entire community and what it stands for. I am here to only prove the facts. If I'm gone, I &lt;strong&gt;can't&lt;/strong&gt; prove them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make me leave and prove you are right. If I keep coming back, you can't stop me nor retain face value. Your community will be gradually exposed for what it is, and you will be liars who shall live in shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's it going to be? If this question is simply deleted, I'll just come back and open it again, unless you can prove me wrong. If you can't prove me wrong, we all know what that proves, don't we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66335" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T09:28:17.140" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T17:44:12.397" Title="How to improve this site for the greater good" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6429" CreationDate="2015-01-12T14:15:54.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The deletion of your post happened &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt;, since it is &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;, has no answers, a negative score, and was closed more than 9 days ago. This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/263383&quot;&gt;automatic deletion routine&lt;/a&gt; running across all SE sites, and represents no particular ill-will towards your question in particular, and hence, even if undeleted, it will be deleted again when this routine runs the next time (it runs once every day, I think).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T14:15:54.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6433" CreationDate="2015-01-12T17:44:12.397" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to improve this site for the greater good is to provide answers to questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All else is secondary. Providing answers that use appropriate principles of physics to answer in a quantitative way is what makes this such a great site. Bonus marks if you can manage the &lt;em&gt;common touch&lt;/em&gt; and make the answers intuitively obvious as well as rigorous. If you find you have time to agonise over the fine details of who can do what, when and to whom then you aren't answering enough questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T17:44:12.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-14T09:57:11.577" Score="10" ViewCount="897" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start this meta question as place where people can put links to &lt;strong&gt;well asked homework-like questions&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that if not so good questions are asked then we will have a meta question to point people to - so they can go and see well asked questions. Qmechanic, Jim and others are very good at highlighting well asked questions, but I found it hard to search for them - so I thought we could add links here... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kyle provided a useful link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises?sort=votes&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;homework and excercise&lt;/em&gt; questions that have been voted up the most on Physics SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers below have links to well asked &lt;em&gt;homework and exercise&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB: Only one link per answer please!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T17:58:20.893" Title="Examples of good homework questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6442" CreationDate="2015-01-14T14:12:05.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a good example of a well asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/156943/why-do-we-need-to-know-the-shape-of-the-slide-to-find-the-time-to-slide-down-it/&quot;&gt;question about mechanics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good because of the work that the OP has put into the question and it is very clear exactly what is being asked and how far the OP has got working through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-01-14T14:12:05.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6442" CreationDate="2015-01-15T07:15:36.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not normally considered a member of the homework question supporter's club, but I did decide to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/159411/problem-regarding-archimedes-principle&quot;&gt;Problem regarding Archimedes Principle&lt;/a&gt;, or at least provide a partial answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's good that the Physics SE has an educational role. This doesn't mean answering all homework questions, but every now and then I see a question that I think many aspiring young physicists would benefit from. In this case the question was about a thinly disguised simple harmonic oscillator. Every physics student is going to encounter a dozen questions about thinly disguised SHOs, and it's important they know how to recognise and approach them. In principle the same may happen during a research career, though I must admit I can't remember ever having to model one of the systems I studied as an SHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now closed, and I'm not complaining about that since it's blatantly homework. It also doesn't have a terribly helpful title so I doubt many aspiring young physicists will ever read it, let alone take away valuable lessons about simple harmonic oscillators. Nevertheless this is the sort of question where an answer can be helpful to many people, and I don't regret the time taken to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T07:15:36.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T12:15:37.067" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to center a picture added in a question on the SE sites? I can not find any centering option on the help pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4962" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T13:38:26.283" Title="Centering a picture" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6446" CreationDate="2015-01-15T13:38:26.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25835/is-it-possible-to-horizontally-center-an-image-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;This was answered on Meta.StackExchange a number of years ago&lt;/a&gt;. There are two answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Method 1&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags to manually position the HTML image call (in this case, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img src=&amp;quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ETl.png alt=&amp;quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ETl.png&amp;quot; title=&amp;quot;CENTERED!&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;). As an example, look here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;                      &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ETl.png&quot; alt=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ETl.png&quot; title=&quot;CENTERED!&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I had to &lt;em&gt;manually&lt;/em&gt; add the 22 spaces to center that (it looks centered on my monitor at least!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Method 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using many &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&lt;/code&gt;'s in front of the image (in this case &lt;code&gt;![alt text][1]&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ETl.png&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                   &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ETl.png&quot; alt=&quot;this is my profile image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 35 of those &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;nbsp;&lt;/code&gt; in that line to center it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T13:38:26.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T15:32:14.220" Score="4" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go to the Physics.SE main page and look at the community promotion ad. Do it now, I'll wait.......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back yet? Okay, was it advertising Physics Overflow? Because every time I visit the main page, it's advertising PO. Last I checked, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/community-promotion-ads-2015/6399#6399&quot;&gt;wasn't rated high enough&lt;/a&gt; to be featured on our community ads. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/246453/old-community-promotion-ads-still-showing-up&quot;&gt;according to meta&lt;/a&gt; they should be using the 2015 ads now. Furthermore, every time I refresh I believe (and others are in this belief too) that it should randomly select a new ad to show, but I always get PO being advertised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems wrong. Conveniently and suspiciously wrong to boot. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T23:05:43.267" Title="Do we really love PO that much?" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2015-01-15T18:25:47.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alas, I was a little optimistic in saying that the new ad threads would be live by now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I switched Physics over to the 2015 post, so barring any caching issues, you should be seeing new ads shortly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7186" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T18:25:47.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6451" CreationDate="2015-01-15T18:29:54.340" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is a way that I can search and view a list of answers that is sorted by vote scores, in such a way that I can determine which answers have the lowest scores?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T20:34:11.220" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T21:48:59.120" Title="How can I view which answers have the lowest vote scores?" Tags="|support|answers|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6450" CreationDate="2015-01-15T18:41:23.777" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can figure this out yourself; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer%20score%3a..-1&quot;&gt;just search&lt;/a&gt;  and then go to the last page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, one would tend to assume that answers with the absolute &lt;em&gt;lowest scores&lt;/em&gt; have probably been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T21:48:59.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2015-01-15T19:04:24.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're not the first to notice this trend; actually, we had some discussion about it in the moderator chat room a few months ago. So I collected some data. Sampling which community ad is displayed on the home page at 10-minute intervals for a couple weeks shows that the distribution among different ads is roughly Gaussian, with no significant outliers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;12 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/6211?url=http%3a%2f%2fworldbuilding.stackexchange.com%2f&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;22 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5982?url=https%3a%2f%2fscirate.com%2f&quot;&gt;SciRate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;46 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5571?url=http%3a%2f%2fmeta.physics.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f5263%2fcommunity-promotion-ads-2014&quot;&gt;community ad thread&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;59 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5570?url=http%3a%2f%2fstackapps.com%2fquestions%2f3373%2fmathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;MathJax buttons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;68 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5279?url=http%3a%2f%2fspace.stackexchange.com%2f&quot;&gt;Space SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;72 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5276?url=http%3a%2f%2focw.mit.edu%2fcourses%2f%23physics&quot;&gt;MIT OCW&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;73 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5275?url=http%3a%2f%2fmathematica.stackexchange.com%2f&quot;&gt;Mathematica SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;77 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5266?url=http%3a%2f%2farxiv.org%2f&quot;&gt;arXiv (1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;81 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5607?url=http%3a%2f%2fphysics.stackexchange.com%2funanswered&quot;&gt;Unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;82 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5295?url=http%3a%2f%2fastronomy.stackexchange.com%2f&quot;&gt;Astronomy SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;84 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5420?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.zotero.org&quot;&gt;Zotero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;85 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5278?url=http%3a%2f%2fdlmf.nist.gov%2f&quot;&gt;NIST DLMF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;87 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5277?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.khanacademy.org%2f&quot;&gt;Khan Academy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;87 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5780?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.physicsoverflow.org&quot;&gt;Physics Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;88 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5296?url=http%3a%2f%2fphysics.stackexchange.com%2f%3ftab%3dfeatured&quot;&gt;featured questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;90 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5558?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.latexsearch.com%2f&quot;&gt;LaTeX Search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;95 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5415?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.desmos.com%2f&quot;&gt;Desmos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;97 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5272?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.sharelatex.com%2f&quot;&gt;ShareLaTeX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;97 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/ct/5299?url=http%3a%2f%2farxiv.org&quot;&gt;arXiv (2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3WJq.png&quot; alt=&quot;histogram of ad frequency&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this omits the ad for the site's newsletter) The Physics Overflow ad was displayed more than average, but was certainly far from being the most common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at the actual samples shows that the same community ad is displayed for a run of several hours. The exact length of the run changes according to some pattern I couldn't figure out (perhaps randomly), but the ad is not randomly chosen on each page view. I presume this is done to allow better caching. Anyway, I think this contributes to the &lt;em&gt;impression&lt;/em&gt; that the PO ad was being displayed more than it should be. If you tend to notice one ad more than the others, then when you see it the first time, you're more likely to register it when you visit the page in the future. While that ad is the current one, then it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; being displayed more often than it would be if the ads were randomly chosen at each page load, and your brain registers something fishy about that. On the other hand, during a run of any other ad, you don't notice it at all and your brain doesn't register the fact that you're going a long time without seeing the ad you focus on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T23:05:43.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-01-16T12:06:04.363" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LyjNt.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciRate&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T12:06:04.363" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-16T12:06:04.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T16:51:22.603" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/158299/theory-of-black-holes-producing-matter-or-antimatter&quot;&gt;I recently asked a question&lt;/a&gt; about a theory proposed by someone I know. It is not a scientifically known one, but it is not so obviously true or false that one can avoid speculating on it, to reason out why it should be false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit, it was not a &quot;mainstream&quot; question as required by the site. My question got closed with the reason that it was not mainstream, and theories can be discussed only if they have already been researched, new work is not allowed on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, before its closing, there was a person who commented that they could discuss it according to the known facts. There was 1 upvote on it. Someone else countered him by saying that the same could be done with any off-topic question, hence that was not a valid reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, it shows that there are people willing to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be a good idea to create an &quot;off-stream&quot; tag, where unpublished theories can be discussed scientifically. Those who don't like the idea could just avoid browsing through such questions, instead of banning them from the site altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45195" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T17:51:02.067" Title="Can we allow non-mainstream questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-01-18T21:51:04.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T22:55:24.367" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone please clarify this for me? I flagged this question earlier today as abusive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/160129/question-about-how-smoke-and-combustion-works?noredirect=1#comment336085_160129&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/160129/question-about-how-smoke-and-combustion-works?noredirect=1#comment336085_160129&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it had a drugs reference (which seemed to be unnecessary and not particularly related to physics). However, another user (I won't name names) with a higher rep than me posts a comment telling me to &quot;take my personal views on drug use out of here&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say I'm a bit confused. I was only trying to help and I would have thought that, given this site is supposedly accessible to all age groups, we would want to keep things fairly 'family friendly'. I mean, technically one could describe the recipe for crystal meth as 'science', but would posting that be appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look through the posting guidelines, but couldn't find anything related to this specific issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T22:55:24.367" Title="What is the site policy on (illegal) drug-related questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ClosedDate="2015-01-19T06:27:28.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-19T22:39:27.290" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was nothing in them that could have reasonably been considered offensive; furthermore, there was no notification about their removal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59591" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T02:03:52.547" Title="Why were my recent postings removed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6457" CreationDate="2015-01-19T23:40:17.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have misunderstood the communications model we use on Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've been using &quot;Answer&quot; posts to comment on or amend your questions (as if this were the USENET or a threaded-conversation forum). That's not how things work here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are reserved for &lt;em&gt;answering the question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To amend or extend a post please use the edit facility (modulo not changing a post beyond recognition or rendering existing answer invalid.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T23:40:17.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6457" CreationDate="2015-01-20T02:03:52.547" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You were told exactly why below the posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is found in both of your deleted posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uqtuJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;heaviside01&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/160072/25301&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;, requires 10k+ rep)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CxMPr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/156041/25301&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;, requires 10k+ rep)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are additional &lt;em&gt;thoughts&lt;/em&gt; to your post. As such, they belong &lt;em&gt;in the question post&lt;/em&gt; and not as &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; to your query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T02:03:52.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6462" CreationDate="2015-01-20T19:57:41.960" Score="7" ViewCount="9879" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some equations have nested fractions and radicals e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qDkSM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Temperature_relation_between_a_planet_and_its_star&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which is the relationship of temperature between a planet and a star based on a radiative energy balance&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathjax renders the equation this size:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LARSY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which makes it hard to read some variables. I am wondering: is any way to increase the size of the font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T13:34:33.843" Title="Is there a way to control the font size of MathJax equations?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6461" CreationDate="2015-01-20T20:13:45.743" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems MathJax supports &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/latex/ltx-178.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;size Latex commands&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;\tiny&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\scriptsize&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\footnotesize&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\small&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\normalsize&lt;/code&gt; (default), &lt;code&gt;\large&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\Large&lt;/code&gt; (capital &quot;L&quot;), &lt;code&gt;\LARGE&lt;/code&gt; (all caps), &lt;code&gt;\huge&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\Huge&lt;/code&gt; (capital &quot;H&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which go from smallest to largest. A quick test showed that &lt;code&gt;\large&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;\Large&lt;/code&gt; worked rather well for the equation you have above (getting larger might be just too much).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a temporary fix (for you only) is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Right click on any MathJax equations in any post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select &lt;code&gt;Math Settings&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select the last option, &lt;code&gt;Scale all math...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enter any number you want in the pop-up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this applies site-wide (I believe that it edits your JavaScript file) but, again,  for you only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2015-01-20T20:25:57.417" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T20:25:57.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6464" CreationDate="2015-01-23T10:44:00.520" Score="2" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/160574/what-relative-masses-are-required-for-them-to-collide-n-times-in-this-scenario/160641#160641&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, I needed to multiply three matrices - which obviously involves writing them on the same line. I tried a couple of things, none of which worked, so my question is - how do you write collinear matrices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67847" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T21:52:51.293" Title="MathJax: How do I write matrices on the same line?" Tags="|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6463" CreationDate="2015-01-23T12:13:20.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It works the same way you did it earlier in the answer, when you had a matrix and vector: just write the markup for the matrices one after another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\begin{pmatrix}...\end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix}...\end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix}...\end{pmatrix}$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't all have to be on the same line, but as with any other MathJax expression, you can't have a blank line between the starting and ending &lt;code&gt;$$&lt;/code&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and fixed the markup in the answer for you, as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T12:13:20.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-24T11:45:56.987" Score="9" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone explain how does the vote: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;close/leave-open&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; work in the context of review tasks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, please, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/70801&quot;&gt;this example&lt;/a&gt;: there are 6 votes there (4-close and 2-leave-open), and the question has been put on hold as &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/70809&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; there are 6 votes (3-3) and the question has not been declared off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I knew that it takes 5 votes to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1) What I'd like to know is if my vote to &lt;strong&gt;leave-open&lt;/strong&gt; has &lt;em&gt;any value or meaning&lt;/em&gt;. In both cases, will the question be closed &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; when there are 5 votes to close, as if 2 or 3 votes to &lt;em&gt;leave-open&lt;/em&gt;  had not been cast?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, do you think it would be more rational and advisable to close a question when the &lt;strong&gt;net balance&lt;/strong&gt; is 5 votes to one or to the other effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2) Can you also explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/135&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;at &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; only one vote to &lt;strong&gt;leave closed&lt;/strong&gt; is enough to declare that &lt;em&gt;item no longer reviewable&lt;/em&gt;? and if/how that question can ever be reopened?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; after the answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: if 4 members think a question should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be closed, 5 members can &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; close that question, and the four contrary votes are absolutely irrelevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone answer also the second question? There were a couple of &lt;strong&gt;reopen&lt;/strong&gt; votes at that post, which have disappered now: on what conditions can it be reopened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why one member that has closed that question can vote again to prevent people from reopening it, and why only one vote (his) is enough to make that &lt;em&gt;item no longer reviewable&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that only some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/stats&quot;&gt;20 members&lt;/a&gt; (out of 100/150) are actively engaging in &lt;strong&gt;reopen&lt;/strong&gt; votes and that 5+5 were involved in the closures, it seems that it is practically impossible to reopen that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.663" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T06:51:06.720" Title="Voting to close in review tasks" Tags="|discussion|questions|review-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2015-01-24T19:12:42.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question will be closed whenever there are five Close votes on it, unless one of those is a moderator (in which case the question is closed immediately). It's important to note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136989/how-do-close-votes-age-away&quot;&gt;close votes age away&lt;/a&gt; if no new votes are being added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of Leave Open votes is to take the question out of the review queue: if (# of Leave Open reviews) is three or more, the question will not be shown to new reviewers on the queue. This does not affect the number of Close votes on the question (except by triggering the start of close vote aging - see link above), so it can still be closed if people find it independently and vote to close it, or if a moderator sees it and closes it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel strongly about a question staying open, you should comment below it stating the reasons why you think so. Close-voters may simply express their disagreement via their votes, but at the very least this helps the OP in knowing where the strengths of their posts are, which will hopefully help them reopen it later on. Alternatively, you can post here on meta if it exceeds the dimensions of a comment thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two ways for a question to enter the review queue. One is for a user with close-vote privileges to vote to close, and the other is for someone &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; the privilege to flag it as off-topic. The former is the more common of the two, and in that case there will be that additional vote in the count, so the review count will show four Close votes from the review; this is the case for the first question you linked. The total count of close votes on a question is shown in parenthesis next to the close link below the question body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An identical system is in place for the Reopen review queue: enough Leave Closed votes will knock a question out of the queue, but will not cancel the existing Reopen votes. A question will be removed from the queue when it is reopened, when it attracts 3 or more Leave Closed reviews, or when all outstanding reopen votes age away (see link in first paragraph - this is what happened in the example you linked to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-or-on-hold-question&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; in the mother meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-01-24T22:23:58.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-25T08:17:37.647" Score="-3" ViewCount="1014" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see a few comments engaged in a pointless discussion and try to flag them in a quick succession, you'll notice that the system will slow you down: you are compelled to &lt;strong&gt;wait 5 seconds&lt;/strong&gt; before you can flag another comment. I imagine that it is not casual and suppose you agree that it is a wise precaution, to prevent anyone from carelessly flagging comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can easily verify that there is no restriction if you up/down vote questions or answers without even reading them (or if you vote to close a question). If this policy is not casual, it is contradictory and inexplicable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1) Can anyone explain why the software is structured in this manner?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2) do you think this restricting policy should be extended?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the purpose of this post is to draw your attention to another problem: &lt;strong&gt;Careless serial voting in review tasks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been monitoring the review queues for a couple of weeks and here are some facts: when you complete a review &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the page goes blank for a [couple of] seconds (1s), when you click the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; button ([1+]1 s) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you are offered a choice of 5 options ([1+1+]1 s). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) If you click &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; you are offered one [choice of many] similar question you must read in order to decide if it is a duplicate ([1+1+1+]3 = 6 sec)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) If you click the &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; button you are offered another choice of 5 options ([1+1+1+]1 = 4s) (and if you chose the &lt;em&gt;another site&lt;/em&gt; button you are offered another choice (+1 = 5 sec)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;then you have to click &lt;em&gt;vote to close&lt;/em&gt; (+ 1 sec)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have considered excellent reflexes and eyesight and the shortest time possible, which is on average &lt;strong&gt;7 seconds per question&lt;/strong&gt;, just for the mere concrete technical/manual operations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have monitored the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; review queue for a while and cast myself some 250 votes, and I have registered that quite often members vote several questions in the same minute (I imagine the recording log-system is accurate). Just to cite a recent example, 3 days ago (Jan 22) one member voted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/34382/jamals?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=reviews&amp;amp;page=2&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;close 7 questions in a row&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in one minute or so, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/34382/jamals?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=reviews&amp;amp;page=1&quot;&gt;19h ago&lt;/a&gt; cast up to &lt;strong&gt;8&lt;/strong&gt; close-votes in a row: I couldn't check if also those were voted in one minute or so, but probably some of you can. You can also see there that over 95% of votes are close/leave closed votes, which is really a huge merciless percentage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, subtracting (7* 6/7 sec) 36/49 seconds to one (or even 2 minutes) we realize that it is not possible to read 7 questions with enough care to decide if it is unclear, duplicate or &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;. All those reviews had one or more contrary votes and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/70764&quot;&gt;in one case&lt;/a&gt; the vote was by John Rennie. The issue becomes even more serious when a question is judged as &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt;, because I have personally ascertained that over 50% of those questions are clear enough if you take the trouble to read them carefully for a few minutes or to correct the faulty grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/161166/load-resistance-adding-with-minimized-power-and-voltage-constraint&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is an eloquent example: even if you are an expert, it takes a few minutes to read it properly and control the equations. &lt;em&gt;BrandonEnright, ACuriousMind,JamaIS&lt;/em&gt; were the first to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/71054&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; it and voted to &lt;em&gt;close it as it had not shown some effort&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;RobJeffries&lt;/em&gt; was more careful and voted to &lt;em&gt;leave-open&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Fibonatic&lt;/em&gt; was conscientious, read the post carefully, checked the equations, found a mistake, signalled it to OP and rightfully concluded that the question should &lt;strong&gt;not be closed&lt;/strong&gt;. An hour later &lt;em&gt;PranavHosnagadi&lt;/em&gt; arrives, ignores Fibonatic's comment, hastily reads the post and determines its definitive closure. OP is comprehensibly disappointed and comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The reason for this being put on hold isn't valid in my opinion. I&#xA;  believe I showed considerable effort, and I asked for a critique of my&#xA;  approach and possible other approaches. –  Arturo Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having one's question closed is always a humiliating/shocking experience for a newcomer, some are frustrated, some outraged, but very few know how to react or that they can post a question at Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I offered a sensible solution to a concrete problem in the past I have been showered with downvotes, this time I ask &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; a very simple question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3) Do you think we are being nice/fair to newcomers? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4) do you think we should do something to be more considerate and respectful to students, and at least try to prevent careless, irresponsible &lt;em&gt;voting to close&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?page=15&amp;amp;tab=votes&amp;amp;q=closed%3a1&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;over 5 700&lt;/strong&gt; questions&lt;/a&gt; have been closed, and over 750 of them have more than 2 upvotes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is one member that has cast &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;over &lt;strong&gt;4200&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; votes only in the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; queue (over 10,000 in total), if he had taken an average of 5 mins to examine and assess posts in a scrupulous manner he should have spent some 350 hours. (850 in total, which makes over 100 days working 9 to 5 without a coffee-break).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T02:46:27.943" Title="Careless (serial) voting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6467" CreationDate="2015-01-25T16:35:26.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;StackExchange does not like &quot;noise&quot; (i.e., bad questions, duplicates, etc). Adding a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10890/let-questions-stay-open-for-a-minimum-amount-of-time-before-being-closed&quot;&gt;delay only serves to increase that noise&lt;/a&gt; and distracts us from answering the good questions that help fulfill our goal of being the canonical source of information about physics on the internet. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, there should not be any restriction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As someone with over &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;3000 reviews in the close queue&lt;/a&gt;, I can assure you that around 90% of questions in the queue can be voted one way or the other in about 10 seconds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This site, as is the case for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; StackExchange sites, is not about &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; user. It is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about the 1 user asking &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; particular question, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's about the 100 who wonder the same question at another point in time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (youtube link to a ~45 min lecture by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/4/joel-spolsky&quot;&gt;Joel Spolsky&lt;/a&gt; from 2012) and will come to our site to find the &lt;em&gt;canonical answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By allowing &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; questions (dupes, non-mainstream, no-effort HW, etc) for the sake of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; new user, we would &lt;strong&gt;actually doing a &lt;em&gt;disservice&lt;/em&gt; to the community now and to visitors in the future&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that I think &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be needed is more comments explaining how a post &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be improved (obviously duplicates don't really need improvement since (a) the proposed duplicate is automatically left as a comment and (b) their wanted answer is given elsewhere). Many of us do this already, but a call for more action on this isn't harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that your &quot;eloquent example&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/25301&quot;&gt;explicitly off-topic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;as decided by the community&lt;/em&gt;; it's a &quot;check my work&quot; question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714&quot;&gt;We are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a homework help site&lt;/a&gt;, so if we &quot;lose&quot; people who think we are a homework help site, I'm not terribly concerned.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've stated elsewhere (on this Meta &amp;amp; in chat) that we can make mistakes in closing questions, the powers-that-be on StackExchange are well aware of our humanity, hence the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/stats&quot;&gt;Reopen Queue&lt;/a&gt;. They've also implemented a rule that if 3 people vote &quot;Leave Open&quot; then the question is pulled from the Close Queue (though it does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; retract the close-votes already obtained). Thus, there are already some checks-and-balances implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, and this has been mentioned several times in the past to you, if you really want the &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; changed (as implied in questions #1 &amp;amp; #2), take it to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and see what the &lt;em&gt;developers&lt;/em&gt; (and the broader SE community) think about your proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T18:52:08.140" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6467" CreationDate="2015-01-27T07:32:12.383" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deliberately asked only questions in my post: from now on I want to separate the issues, the problems from &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; suggestions, which (legitimately) may not be popular or may be downright wrong, and should be mercilessly downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must specify also that &lt;strong&gt;my posts at Meta are addressed to the SE Team who monitor the various sites, or, eventually, to its real owners&lt;/strong&gt;, who care about the welfare of the network, and are not meant to gain popularity. You probably all know that &lt;strong&gt;I had the cheek to refute Newton&lt;/strong&gt; himself (and Wikipedia) in a few answers of mine, which are extremely unpopular with the top users of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is rather sad to see that a post asking four questions about the correct functioning of the site can be flagged to close or locked: it is &lt;em&gt;shameful and shameless&lt;/em&gt; to respond to questions not with sound arguments/ intelligent answers but with censure or censorship. It is also sad to see how self-referential and circular is the logic of the response. I have not offered solutions in my question, I was only drawing your attention to some hard facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have documented that some members cast up to 7-8 VTC in a minute. This truth has not been questioned, nay,  to my surprise the right to VTC a question in 10 seconds has been proudly claimed. Probably I am too old and my reflexes are dimmed as my eyesight and moreover my modest abilities and competence do not allow me to conscientiously review a question in 10 seconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1) unclear: it is impossible to honestly reject a question (by a non-native speaker) in less than a few minutes. Even if the grammar is correct, anyway, it is not easy for a student to clearly frame his question. Nobody can ever be bothered even to correct typos or basic mistakes, to help non-native reviewers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2) duplicate: it takes a few minutes to read a question and the linked possible duplicate[s]. Than you have to be very careful to understand if it is really a duplicate or is different in a subtle way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2a) sometimes the question to be closed has already received more, and more-useful/detailed/interesting answers. Closed questions are eventually deleted, is it right to eliminate the better question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3) no effort-HW. There is nothing wrong in banning HW-questions. I wrote my first post on that issue here. But there is nothing more despicable than incoherent, contradictory, schizophrenic behaviour. &lt;strong&gt;If you state that HW are good if one shows some effort, you have to be consequently patient&lt;/strong&gt; and carefully analyze the post and check if OP has done some/enough effort. And that takes much longer than 10 seconds.&#xA;I've stated elsewhere (on this Meta &amp;amp; in chat) that we can make mistakes in closing questions, the powers-that-be on StackExchange are well aware of our humanity, hence the Reopen Queue.... your &quot;eloquent example&quot; is explicitly off-topic as decided by the community.. - Kyle Kanos&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worse aspect of the issue is that the so-called community is identified with just a select group (roughly a dozen members from the 3k+ club), who have the effrontery to claim the right (or superpowers) to assess 7-8 posts in one minute, do not acknowledge they make lots of mistakes (casually, that is the usual number of downvotes a question gets here when it is felt as a threat to the status quo) and, even if some do, it is practically impossible to reopen a question, because same members who voted the closure are allowed to decide its reopening and are even allowed to declare off-topic the questions that criticize their careless behaviour. What happened to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134831/newtons-first-law-is-his-concept-of-force-of-inertia-still-useful-and-used&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (marked as unclear) is really indicative of the contempt the community has for newcomers and the reluctance to redress a blatant wrong. All members who pretended not to understand it or insulted the poster refused to give a justification or even an explanation , and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/159880/is-it-possible-to-determine-the-outcome-of-any-impact-knowing-only-the-ratio-of&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is indicative of the discrimination of newcomers: two identical &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6467/careless-serial-voting#comment23893_6467&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; were closed and deleted (marked as HW-off-topic) when the OP was a newbie, and became perfectly on-topic (when posted &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt;) last week. Isn't that eloquent enough?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am still waiting for a reply to the second question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6465/voting-to-close-in-review-tasks&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to see how the &lt;em&gt;awareness of our humanity&lt;/em&gt; works in reality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is therefore my answer to the questions&lt;/strong&gt;? I think we are not being enough fair to students, and our &lt;em&gt;comprehension&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;humanity&lt;/em&gt; should be greater. My suggestion is articulate and you can choose any bit you approve, or mix them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions by newcomers (or users who already posted bad questions) might not be published immediately, they might be put in a separate queue, just as we are doing with &lt;strong&gt;First post&lt;/strong&gt;/ answer. There the posts by non-natives might be corrected and made more clear for non-native reviewers, who sometime have problems with comprehension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the same queue the really bad questions might get a first screening and be put on hold, preventing people from answering, giving time to the reviewers to take a conscientious decision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nobody should ever be allowed to cast more than a VTC in one minute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;members who voted &lt;em&gt;to close&lt;/em&gt; should not be allowed to vote same question to &lt;em&gt;leave it closed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obviously enough, reviewers criticized for wrongly closing a question should not be allowed to close the Meta-question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question at Meta should never be closed when they criticize policies or actions. If the post contains rude words only those words should be eliminated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T13:03:20.533" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1009" CreationDate="2015-01-27T17:29:13.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be resolved with the latest version of MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T17:29:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-27T18:15:56.047" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was going through and flagging new answers to old questions (because that's fun) and it dawned on me, are opinions really answers? The obvious answer is &quot;yes&quot; and that wrong opinions should be downvoted. But let me present an example and then I'll open the floor for discussion and laying of guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example question that I just thought up (no doubt it's been asked before but that isn't the point of this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; How can two massless photons interact to form a massive particle-antiparticle pair? And where does all that extra energy for the new masses come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there's three distinct types of answers you can get for this. First, there's the answer based on physics, expertise, and referencing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A1:&lt;/strong&gt; Pair production occurs through multiple processes. The zero-loop Feynman diagrams (shown below) for this process show the most common of them. The energy for the final pair comes from......... (You get the idea)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second type of answer combines knowledge and opinion. It is usually from someone that doesn't know the exact physics, but knows enough to make it up as they go along (although it may not be right):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A2:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not a particle physicist but I think it probably has to do with quantum mechanics and the energy of photons. Quantum mechanics says anything that can happen does happen and this is something that can happen with a non-zero probability. The energy for the final pair probably comes from the energy of the photons transferred to mass by E=mc^2. And then the momentum of the new particles must be whatever's left over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third type of answer is purely opinion and rarely has anything to do with physics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A3:&lt;/strong&gt; I thought about this myself and it's my personal belief, which seems fairly obvious once you think about it, is that God had to make all the particles at some point, so he allowed this to be possible so he could get the energy from somewhere. That's the simplest answer, the physicists just have made it all confused to hide that they can't quite grasp how it really works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, here's my analysis. A1 isn't in question; no opinion, all answer. A2 uses opinion but it also uses physics and intuition to form, what I'd call, a valid if not completely correct answer. A3 is pure opinion. Obviously the thing to do is downvote it and maybe leave a comment to the effect of &quot;this isn't a place for personal opinions&quot;. But is it truly an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to hear what everyone thinks on whether things like A3 are really answers (N.B. By &quot;like A3&quot; I'm not referring specifically to religious stuff. Anything that's so obviously pure opinion and no physics). To start off the discussion, I'll provide two points of view, one for and one against. Perhaps we can discuss and, if necessary, amend guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, they're answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the easiest to argue, A3 attempts to answer the question. It asks how the process can happen and it gives an answer. The answer is admittedly unscientific, wrong, and generally poor, but it presents an idea that, if true, would sate the asker's curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To call it not an answer would mean we could flag it and remove it as such. This opens us up to a wide range of potential abuse. Where do we draw the line between purely opinion and an acceptable mix of opinion and physics? This should be downvoted, but not deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, they're not answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer to the question must do just that; answer the question. The question is asking &quot;How does this happen?&quot;, not &quot;What is your opinion of how this happens?&quot;. If I asked &quot;Why is the sky blue?&quot; and you responded with &quot;In my opinion, it's blue because it reflects the ocean.&quot; I'd say &quot;I didn't ask you what your opinion was, nor do I care what it is. I want to know the accepted explanation, your opinion is irrelevant.&quot; (And then I might literally bite your head off too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the essence of what I'm saying. If it asks for the physics explanation, does it really count as an answer if someone gives their opinion? Shouldn't A3 be flagged as not an answer? After all, the appropriate comment to be made is &quot;The OP asked for the explanation of this process not your opinion of what it might actually be.&quot; If the question were &quot;What is your opinion of &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;, it would be closed as primarily opinion-based. Doesn't that suggest the question &quot;How does &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; work?&quot; is sufficiently different and that a valid answer to the former would be sufficiently different from a valid answer to the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, there's two points of view. I think both have their strengths. I'm leaning on the side of &quot;Yes&quot;, but I wouldn't be making this post if I didn't have strong enough doubts to seriously consider &quot;No&quot;. So let's have a fun discussion (no heated debates, please). What do you think? And if you also think A2 shouldn't be considered an answer, I especially want to hear from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T22:25:21.390" Title="Opinions: When are or are not they answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6474" CreationDate="2015-01-27T19:28:02.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really hate opinion type answers, and indeed many of the more banal answers I post are because I considered an existing answer inadequate and I didn't want the OP to go away with the wrong impression. Since I'm philosophically opposed to downvoting, posting a better answer is usually the only way to show my displeasure with the current answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just in case it's not clear, I consider both A2 and A3 wholly unacceptable. People come to us for an authoritative answer from an expert in their field. That it's possible for a young physics nerd, as I was forty (!!!) years ago, to get answers from a working string thorist is frankly astonishing. Indeed, in my days as a teen physics nerd it was utterly inconceivable. Given what a fantastic service we offer I feel we should strongly resist diluting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I would not downvote or otherwise sanction any answer given in good faith, unless it was grossly incorrect in which case I normally vote to delete it. If an answer is unsatisfactory then the very best solution is to post a better answer and show how it should be done. If you do this you are not just educating the OP, but you are also educating the person posting the unsatisfactory answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T19:28:02.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6474" CreationDate="2015-01-27T20:36:40.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Speaking with my moderator hat on ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been acting on examples of A2 or cases that are borderline between A2 and A3: that's up to the community to establish by consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outright example of A3 I delete after they have accumulated a net score of around -4 and no significant upvote contribution. That is, those that the community has shown it's disapproval of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Speaking with my user hat on ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I down-vote A3s.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often mercilessly, though I've been known to hold back if I think the post suggests the users (1) didn't know and better and (2) can be taught. Whether I vote or not I am likely to leave a comment summarizing where the answer goes wrong or to upvote and existing comment of that kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to strongly discourage these kinds of posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I'd like to downvote many A2s, but I don't always.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to be lenient if it is the first answer to a question that has gone unanswered for several hours, or if the poster provides a reasonably well reasoned argument for why an analogy with some other physics makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to discourage these posts if better answers are present, but if no expert answer is available an example of how another kind of physicists would approach the problem is better than letting it languish unattended for days or weeks. Or so it seems to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T20:52:11.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6474" CreationDate="2015-01-27T20:58:24.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My comment under the original question highlights why A2 answers &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be acceptable. I asked OP to classify my answer to the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/160443/time-length-molecular-dynamics/160449#160449&quot;&gt;Time length molecular dynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would call it an A2 answer. OP ranked it as an A1.5 or A1.8 type answer (in other words, opinion/speculation but fairly strongly supported by evidence from another area). I'm an engineer, and I'm going to say 1.5 and 1.8 have too many significant digits and just call it an A2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this exercise serves to illustrate that things aren't always clear cut with that middle classification of answers. Because it's possible something is 100% correct and if you removed the &quot;I am not certain but...&quot; from the start of the answer, one may never know that the author didn't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue A2 are still answers, and possibly good ones, but they require close scrutiny from the community. This is where John Rennie's opposition to downvoting I think is flawed. It's precisely answers like this that &lt;strong&gt;require up, and down, votes to establish accuracy&lt;/strong&gt;. In my example answer above, the information is correct and accurate (particularly for a &quot;here's an overview to a topic you don't know must about&quot; level of sophistication). But it could just as easily been inaccurate. And people with domain-specific knowledge need to vote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvotes are particularly important. OP may have upvoted an A2 answer that was not completely accurate because they don't know any better and it sounds close enough. Maybe other people with marginal knowledge of the domain also upvoted for similar reasons. So people with actual, in depth knowledge, &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; downvote if it is inaccurate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I will agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6475/6634&quot;&gt;John Rennie for the rest of his response&lt;/a&gt; -- A2 answers should be supplanted by A1 answers from domain experts to fill in the real, gritty details that tend to be glossed over in A2 answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding A3 answers, I would flag as low quality (or not a real answer depending on the specific wording), downvote, and go about my day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T20:58:24.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6474" CreationDate="2015-01-27T21:16:17.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;A2&lt;/strong&gt; is an acceptable answer. The votes (up or down) depend on the accuracy (which probably requires knowledge on the actual answer to the question), but I think leaving comments along the lines of &lt;em&gt;This answer could be better if ...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would be helpful to the OP and to future readers (again, this probably requires knowledge on the actual answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;A3&lt;/strong&gt; is an unacceptable answer; it should be downvoted to oblivion. I am hesitant to say that it should be deleted because &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5676/25301&quot;&gt;our LQ deletion reasons are&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A3 doesn't quite fit here because it is an &quot;attempt&quot; to answer the question, it's just fundamentally wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thanks:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also does not apply as the user is not thanking the OP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New Question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does not apply&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;URL only:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Usually not the case, but can be sometimes applied&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No comment necessary:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This, to me, is supposed to be used when &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; has already left a delete-comment as above&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;. So this one too doesn't seem to apply either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nothing, as far as I can read into it, in the LQ delete reasons can justify deleting the answer. The Official policy is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266428/low-quality-review-queue-meaning-of-looks-ok&quot;&gt;supposed to be &quot;Looks Okay&quot;&lt;/a&gt; when reviewing these (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5995&quot;&gt;What to do with Low Quality posts that you just can&amp;#39;t delete&lt;/a&gt;, asked here on Physics by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/23473/jim&quot;&gt;Jim&lt;/a&gt;, and the link before the LQ delete reasons.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;*Though I have done it in the past, I think using this as a means to &quot;get around&quot; the other comments and delete &lt;strong&gt;A3&lt;/strong&gt; answers is a little underhanded--unless the community feels this is an appropriate course of action.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:37:55.943" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T02:45:05.270" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-28T09:32:35.620" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; proposing to change the software or criticizing the current policy. &#xA;I always wanted to ask this question since a joined, since it is a glaring asymmetry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having raised over a thousand useful flags now, and consequently having read thousands of comments, I have noticed that (probably as a consequence) many of them are pointless or completely wrong, but nevertheless they always influence the reader (especially when the poster has a substantial reputation) and the only way to contrast them is to wait for a comment that refutes them and upvote the latter. When a posters is embarassed he can always delete it, and make the response incomprehensible, but, if nobody notices it (or is not able to refute it), it remains there forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure that everybody is aware of this phenomenon, to some extent. I'd like to know what is the rationale of this decision, what are the arguments that can be/ are brought to prefer/justify this option. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="56578" LastEditDate="2015-01-28T15:18:12.627" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T16:06:06.003" Title="Why can't comments be downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2015-01-28T17:30:47.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6479" CreationDate="2015-01-28T15:58:36.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is simple. They are not answers or questions but comments. Don't you know what the comment exactly means? It mean a verbal or written remark expressing an opinion or reaction. So in my view, it is really absurd to vote down someone's opinion. An opinion is only a thought. Thoughts are responsible to create questions, answers and rulings. Hope you understand.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume:&#xA;If I say, &quot;I think there is gonna be end of physics when string theory is gonna proved&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is comment and it may only needs a correction from expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if I say, &quot;I know that string theory is the last theory and the end of physics&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be a foolish assertion that can be voted down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can say that there is always an opportunity for an opinion to be non-foolproof or to be.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user66452" LastEditorDisplayName="user66452" LastEditDate="2015-01-28T16:06:06.003" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T16:06:06.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-02T13:57:52.157" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain exactly when this badge is awarded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Highest scoring answer (&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;) that outscored an accepted answer (&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;) with score of&#xA;  more than 10 by more than 2x&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that (being a the most upvoted answer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &gt; [2 * A] + 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &gt; 10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if that is correct, if  A &amp;lt; 5, an answer a with 11 votes  should get the badge if there is no higher score?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/116608/how-exactly-does-gravity-work/116610#116610&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; a = 38 &gt; 10, A = 20, a &amp;lt; (2*20+1) 41&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does that imply that when the badge was awarded A was &amp;lt; 17?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T21:30:58.670" Title="The 'populist' badge" Tags="|support|specific-question|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6487" CreationDate="2015-02-02T14:20:27.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using your notation, the requirements for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/49/populist&quot;&gt;populist badge&lt;/a&gt; are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &gt; 2 * &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; &gt; 10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not as you have it. So if &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;= 10, the badge cannot be awarded. At bare minimum &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; would need to have 23 upvotes to &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; having 11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does that imply that when the badge was awarded A was &amp;lt; 17?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/116608/timeline?asc=True&quot;&gt;timeline page&lt;/a&gt;, it seems Jamal's post was upvoted 25 times to ooker's 11 on the first day (in which ooker's was also accepted then). So it seems to have just barely met the qualifications for the badge on the first day, and yes, A &amp;lt; 17 appears to be the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T14:20:27.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6487" CreationDate="2015-02-02T14:20:42.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way to parse the condition is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Highest scoring answer that outscored (an accepted answer with score of more than 10) by more than 2x.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the conditions for an answer of score &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; to be awarded the populist badge is for there to be an accepted answer of score &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;, where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &gt; 2 &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; &gt; 10, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are no other answers with score &gt; &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In turn, this requires that &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;≥23=2(10+1)+1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are trying to dissect the history of a given post or badge, a useful tool is to use the post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108337/timeline-of-question-post-question-edits-answer-and-answer-edits&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;*, which is of the form &lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/1234/timeline&lt;/code&gt;. For the particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/116608/how-exactly-does-gravity-work/116610#116610&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; you mentioned, the conditions were fulfilled at the end of June 3, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/116616/8563&quot;&gt;Ooker's answer&lt;/a&gt; accepted at score &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;=+11 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/116610/8563&quot;&gt;JamalS's answer&lt;/a&gt; at score &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;=+25. It is often the case that badge-awarding scripts run daily in the wee hours of the UTC morning, which seems to be the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another nice tool for exploring this sort of things is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schema-documentation-for-the-public-data-dump-and-sede&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;, where you can pose all sorts of SQL questions to the site database. To explore the populist badge, for example, you could use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/269815/populist-badge-candidate-users-and-posts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;, freshly baked by yours truly, which turns up the posts which currently fulfil the badge criteria. It comes up, at the moment, with 16 rows, with two extraneous results (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/92050/do-gravitational-lenses-have-a-focus-point/92056#92056&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15/what-experiment-would-disprove-string-theory/3180#3180&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) that can be easily detected as outscored duplicates on the list. This is six posts short of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/49/populist&quot;&gt;20 badges currently awarded&lt;/a&gt;, and these no longer satisfy the conditions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/116608/how-exactly-does-gravity-work/116610#116610&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109897/does-electricity-flow-on-the-surface-of-a-wire-or-in-the-interior/109908#109908&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95974/why-is-acceleration-expressed-as-m-s-s/95975#95975&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76162/double-slit-experiment-how-do-scientists-ensure-that-theres-only-one-photon/76167#76167&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/535/why-does-kinetic-energy-increase-quadratically-not-linearly-with-speed/14752#14752&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon/5315#5315&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;), for various reasons that can be investigated via the post timelines. Just as an example of ways to test how the site works (and get some SQL practice along the way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* Not particularly accessible or well documented. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126447/add-a-link-to-the-timeline-of-a-post&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for an explanation and/or to complain about it.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T21:30:58.670" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-02T16:45:14.507" Score="6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;This struck me as rather odd. The Bounties section of any given profile, for any of the three tabs (active, offered and earned), contains a list of post links with the amount of rep of the bounty in question. It also has a tagline that indicates, as far as I can tell, the same 'activity' link that's on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3MF3H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this a weird place for such a link. If A awarded B a bounty, I'm not really that interested in whether C or D edited their answer later on. I'm more interested in when the bounty was awarded and links to B (resp. A) on A (resp. B)'s profile. (To the extent I'm interested in anything on that row, that is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some specific rationale for this? Or is this just standard code for question lookup?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T16:45:14.507" Title="What's the purpose of the tagline in the Bounties section of the profile?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6495" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6497" CreationDate="2015-02-06T15:01:02.110" Score="-1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back when we sorted out the book recommendation and resource recommendation requests, we made it so there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5237/books-banner-top-or-bottom&quot;&gt;permanent banner&lt;/a&gt; instructing those answering to abide by our policies regarding the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we get so many homework questions, can (or should) we have a similar banner for those? The arguments for why it is good here are the same as for why it was good on the book/reference request ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will also potentially serve as a reminder to the OP to check the policies. Right now, Kyle Kanos is pretty good about posting a standard comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Physics! Please note that Physics.StackExchange is not a homework help site. Please see this Meta post on asking homework questions and this Meta post for &quot;check my work&quot; problems –  Kyle Kanos 1 hour ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with appropriate links. This comment is directed only at OP, but our banner could include similar wording plus directions to those who answer about not actually providing the full answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it might seem unclear &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; exactly such a banner would be targeted towards, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/19931754#19931754&quot;&gt;here is a link&lt;/a&gt; to an explanation that occurred in the chat room. I will try to summarize it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For good, properly posed homework questions, the OP doesn't need to be reminded about the policies. However, those who &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; the question should be reminded. For instance, somebody can show an example problem, explain what &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt; they are stuck on, and ask for help understanding the concept. That's a great homework question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody can then come along and say &quot;Here's how this concept works. And when you do that, you get the answer X.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the person who &lt;strong&gt;answered&lt;/strong&gt; the question violated the HW policy by going too far in the explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The banner would be targeted to the answerer more than the questioner, although the questioner (and future people who come to the site) will also see the banner and get links/information on the policy. Everybody wins. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the book recommendation policy and banner. Somebody comes along an asks for a recommendation, perfectly on-topic and valid. We put the banner up reminding those who &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; the question that recommendations must explain why it is appropriate and not just give a link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Books banner tells people who answer that they need to provide more information to abide by the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework banner tells people they should provide less information to abide by the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see them as equivalent and helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, since adding a banner requires a moderator, it can sometimes be annoying. Although QMechanic does a pretty good job reviewing almost every question on the site for appropriate tags so it probably wouldn't be that hard to add the banner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great if we can ask the SE team to make it so questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; get the banner automatically. And if the tag is removed, the banner is removed. Although that's something that probably isn't trivial and shouldn't affect whether we have the banner now or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T19:13:27.883" Title="Can (or should) we have a banner for homework questions?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6495" CreationDate="2015-02-06T15:34:00.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment is usually helpful only when questions are running foul of the homework policy, or pretty close to. As such, the banner would mostly be duplicating the work of the homework close reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kyle's nice comment is useful because it can be added immediately without waiting for five close votes (thus giving the OP enough information to hopefully get them to fix their post before it's closed if that's possible) and because it has a personal touch with a direct way to respond which makes it less off-putting than the close message. An institutionalized banner with a canned message that needs to be added manually by a moderator would serve neither of those purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a banner automatically when the tag is applied would only serve to make the tag contentious again. The change from &lt;code&gt;homework&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/code&gt; has, I think, worked wonders in stopping newcomers from saying &quot;this is not a homework question!&quot; the minute the tag was applied. Having the tag automatically suggest to everyone, including those with on-topic HW questions, that they are unduly using the site as a homework help site - that does not seem constructive to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T15:34:00.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6499" CreationDate="2015-02-07T22:44:27.523" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/158231/48823&quot;&gt;What parameters control the amount of thermal energy an object must possess for it to be detectable in space?&lt;/a&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not a homework question, and I do not know enough physics to be able to make it more descriptive/specific. Can you help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48823" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T23:52:48.413" Title="How can I improve a specific question which has been closed for being &quot;homework-like, and not showing enough effort&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6498" CreationDate="2015-02-07T22:54:29.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the conceptual basis of the question is wrong at a level that poses a real problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And there are vocabulary issues that confuse things: say &quot;thermal energy&quot; not &quot;heat energy&quot;, please. Heat is a property of interactions not of objects.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked detectability as a function of something that is not directly (or even closely) related to detectability. To be sure, a good answer would start by setting you straight on that , but it still leaves the question of which of the several ways to proceed from where you started to a answerable question should be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not among the close-voters, but I would have chosen &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; if I had evaluated the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main step to fix it would be to figure out what you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to ask about. Possibilities include &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Temperature for blackbody objects (are you assuming a size?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Total radiated power assuming isotropic radiation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Radiated intensity along our line of site (for non-isotropic cases)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T22:54:29.013" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6498" CreationDate="2015-02-07T23:45:01.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I closed the question because you're just asking us to do a calculation for you. That kind of question is not what this site is for. Simply asking us to calculate something is one big marker for what we call &quot;homework-like&quot; questions, even though not all calculation requests are actually homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had shown some effort to do the calculation yourself and identified the step at which you got stuck, and asked about the reason you weren't able to proceed past that step rather than just asking us to do the calculation for you, then I would not have closed the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, this wasn't the clearest case, but I stand by my belief that the question is not appropriate for the site as is. And none of the edits you've made (as I write this) change the body of the question, so there is no reason my decision would be any different for the current version of the question as opposed to its original form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-02-07T23:52:48.413" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T23:52:48.413" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6502" CreationDate="2015-02-09T02:14:45.857" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions are regularly closed here because they are considered engineering questions.  The current close vote option for this reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is off-topic because it appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see this meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many of you probably know, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;engineering SE&lt;/a&gt; has recently started its beta phase.  Should the close vote system be updated to migrate the question similar to what is now done with mathematics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason I can think of not to do so is that the engineering SE is still in the beta phase and may not graduate to become a full fledged site.  If that is the case, should close-voters agree to take it upon themselves to leave it in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35024" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:48.357" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T22:17:48.960" Title="Should the engineering close vote be changed in light of the new engineering SE site" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6501" CreationDate="2015-02-09T02:39:57.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system doesn't allow for full-fledged migration paths to beta sites. This is done to prevent young beta sites from being overwhelmed by the potentially large number of posts migrated away from a mature site. You normally wouldn't want the new site to be defined just by what the older site throws out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this rule was probably developed with Stack Overflow in mind -- its sheer volume &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; overwhelm related sites. I don't have stats on how many engineering-closed questions we've had lately, but given that we've only migrated 4 questions this past month to Electrical Engineering, it probably isn't an overwhelming volume. Still, the system is what it is, so normal users cannot &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formally request that our moderators migrate most such questions to Engineering. This would be a burden on the mods, and it would be circumventing the spirit of the &quot;don't migrate to betas&quot; policy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Continue as usual, with Physics users made aware that there is an Engineering site up and running. We could comment on posts we vote to close, directing the posters to the other site. If the question is &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; good and &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; on-topic for Engineering, we could ourselves flag for moderation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to go with option 2. I would add that since engineering is so new (you don't even have temporary mods yet!), it itself hasn't fully defined what constitutes a good question. Eagerness is all well and good, but perhaps Engineering should get a better sense of itself first before we start throwing questions at it, especially since the typical Physics user with enough rep to vote to close will have even &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; of an idea of what Engineering wants than most Engineering users themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add that engineering sites should be edited into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/10851&quot;&gt;our FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, which is linked in the close notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T06:45:58.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-10T17:53:38.750" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/163574/can-ice-freeze&quot;&gt;Can ice freeze?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question is about explaining physical laws and physical chemistry and  also related to &quot;Accepted and/or actively researched theories&quot; which are on-topic. I believe I gave enough details also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was put on hold after a long time and after I got a good answer that I was willing to accept but I was waiting for a while if I can get any other good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the reason to put on-hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, I also added &quot;further clarification&quot; section. I can clarify further if it is needed but one of the aims of the question is getting a clarification also. There are also related questions, it is not only one question. The question is, of course, asking for a detailed, well-documented answer which I got also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it be re-opened please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72479" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T18:10:40.140" Title="Can this question about ice be re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6503" CreationDate="2015-02-10T18:10:40.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still think the question, as posed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the end, can we say that different crystalline forms have different solid states? Can ice freeze further by transforming into a different crystalline form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is unclear. You demonstrate that you are aware of the possibility of different crystal lattices (hexagonal vs. cubic ice is your example), which consequently have different material properties. But then you ask whether ice &quot;freezes further&quot;, and what is happening when it does so, as if you were &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; aware of different crystal structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't get what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T18:10:40.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-02-10T19:35:37.683" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yjIbH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Engineering Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:48.357" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T19:56:26.727" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-10T19:35:37.683" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6501" CreationDate="2015-02-10T22:17:48.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a beta site as young as this one, trigger-happy migration is generally a bad idea: it's not great for them, and it risks stranding good questions on a site that subsequently folds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, if a question looks likely to be declared off-topic here, or if it's on-topic but unlikely to find a qualified answerer, the most appropriate action is often a comment pointing the OP to the target site. I often simply ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would this question be more appropriate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Engineering Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, in copyable form &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Would this question be more appropriate for &#xA;[Engineering Stack Exchange](https://engineering.stackexchange.com/)?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep things friendly and polite, and do this case-by-case and tailored to the specific question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, if Engineering takes off and it turns out that they can indeed take many of our engineering questions, we can think about a more formal channel. In truth, though, there are really rather few such questions on this site in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:48.357" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T22:17:48.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-11T06:07:04.320" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/164215/how-can-i-show-the-time-derivative-of-an-energy-functional&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold recently, which was reedited and adjusted by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not question the decision but would appreciate any discuss on this issue. Also I would like to apply the question to be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not a homework (I am not sure whether it is &quot;homework-like&quot;). It is a calculation-oriented question based on fluid physics (I also cited a particular paper) so maybe that qualifies. It is certainly about physics and requests a definite proof or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60688" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T13:53:26.090" Title="How can I apply for an &quot;on hold&quot; problem to be re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|support|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2015-02-11T08:10:12.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no need to apply anything, or apply for anything, if that's what you meant. Questions on hold that are edited are automatically placed in a queue to be reviewed by high-reputation users for taking off hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its current form as I write this, I expect that the outcome of the review will be to leave the question on hold. Your question doesn't actually ask anything. All it says is &quot;any hints will be appreciated&quot;, but that's not a question. (This is one of the common characteristics of bad homework-like questions.) You need to actually identify the concept that is confusing you and ask about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T08:10:12.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6518" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:16:23.193" Score="11" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this question on topic? Or should it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/164511/how-come-people-are-claiming-that-the-big-bang-never-happened&quot;&gt;How come some people are claiming that the Big Bang never happened?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually had the same question (namely how valid is the conclusion) but felt it would be opinion based so I asked it in chat. Now that it's on the main page (and the &quot;Hot Questions&quot; bar) we started discussing whether it is on topic or not. No close votes have been cast at the moment, but I thought it might be worth clarifying here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons it might be off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primarily opinion based. It asks if the assumptions and conclusions are valid.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers are mostly discussion. You can see in the comments that it is actually mirroring the same discussion we had in chat about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-mainstream physics. It's a new theory (although it is a peer-reviewed, published one now) that has not yet been verified and goes against the prevailing scientific opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons those reasons may not be good ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because it has been peer-reviewed, there must be some validity to their claims. Even if it is limited to universes located within spherical cows.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although it seems the answers are mostly discussion, they are all kind of presenting the same answer. And I know in the past that I have said that answers cannot make a question on topic so I personally have some mixed opinions about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although non-mainstream in the sense it goes against prevailing opinion, I think this is exactly the kind of non-mainstream question we should allow. It is a &quot;How and why does this buck the trend&quot; question. It is also a &quot;Are these assumptions valid to make&quot; question if you really drill into the physics of the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that said, how does everybody feel about it being on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T20:29:34.370" Title="Is this question about a recent paper on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:21:08.160" Score="24" ViewCount="1760" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: This contest is currently inactive. It may be resumed again in the future.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there has been a recent influx of new Jims (meaning maybe 2 in a while). Now, we all know that I am the one true Jim, lord of all other Jims, but nonetheless it gets confusing when someone pings Jim and Jim gets pinged as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's just extra fluff. As supreme leader of the kingdom of Jims, I'm offering, as a diplomatic envoy to the rest of Physics.SE, the chance for us to decide the title of Jims' fearless leader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the appropriate setting. Suggest your new name, something with Jim in it, and everyone will vote on it. The most popular name will be my new identifier each month for twelve months. One whole year &lt;em&gt;[insert subtle reference to the appropriateness of the title here]&lt;/em&gt;. After that, I will step down and resume my title of Jim (unless a public outcry keeps me in office). If another name rises to be the most popular, I'll switch to that name for the remaining time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll make some suggestions to give you an idea of what is possible. Be creative or don't, &lt;em&gt;so long as it's clearly a &lt;strong&gt;Jim&lt;/strong&gt; name&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. has &quot;Jim&quot; in it; &quot;James&quot; doesn't count).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh yeah, this post isn't strictly on-topic for meta. But it's a chance to have some fun. Close it if you must (but if you're name is Jim, be prepared to face the wrath of your king).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important update: It seems I can only change my display name once a month. So each month I'll switch to the new most popular (if it changes so far in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first winner was: &lt;strong&gt;Jimnosperm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second winner was: &lt;strong&gt;ACuriousJim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third winner was: &lt;strong&gt;Jim the Enchanter&lt;/strong&gt; (with a nice profile pic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth winner was: &lt;strong&gt;Jims Bond&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fifth winner was: &lt;strong&gt;Jimself&lt;/strong&gt; (by a technicality)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next name change (if it happens) will occur whenever I'm convinced to start this up again. After that, all answers will be edited to allow votes to be changed if so desired. At present, my name is going to remain as &lt;strong&gt;Jim&lt;/strong&gt; while this is dormant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T15:54:36.950" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T18:24:47.013" Title="A Jim for all seasons" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="42" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:22:18.747" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimdalf the Grey  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:07.463" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:07.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:24:05.847" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim the Enchanter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yalfO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would have to be my profile pic if this name is chosen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:26:18.777" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:28:48.970" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;High King of Jimtopia&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:30:54.123" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:30:54.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:40:48.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about Jim &quot;your surname&quot;. I've noticed that most people seem to be satisfied with that as an identifier.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14105" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:29:36.223" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:36.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:43:56.900" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose &lt;em&gt;ACuriousJim&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:26:27.390" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:26:27.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T17:57:31.703" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will also suggest &quot;The Jim&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14105" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:27:03.577" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:27:03.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T18:11:37.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimnasium&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(play on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gymnasium&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:27:43.633" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:27:43.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6509" CreationDate="2015-02-11T20:33:18.633" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't have that much patience for this sort of hullaballoo, which seems to come and go periodically. Nevertheless we do play a role in it, and I think it's important that we respond to these sorts of questions appropriately. The flow goes something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Scientist comes up with crazy idea, and (a bit surprisingly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;actually comes up with some plausible-looking maths that merit a closer look, so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they send it off to a journal, and it passes peer-review with referee comments along the lines of &amp;quot;don't think it will take off, but this much is technically sound and worth publishing so people can find why exactly it won't work, maybe we'll learn something in the process&amp;quot;. However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the journal's publicity department doesn't see the referee report and, caught by the trendy title and snazzy possibilities in the abstract, ships it off to a trendy news outlet mentioning the snazzy possibilities and dropping all the qualifiers behind the result, so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it gets reported on some credible news site, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a bunch of readers get confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our role is to stop it right there. Point out that it depends on frictionless cows and spherical surfaces. Give precise pointers to why the Established Theory does work and to the Mountain of Evidence that supports it. Explain why the new theory needs to explain a substantial fraction of that Mountain of Evidence before we'll start taking it as a real candidate for What Actually Happens in the World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, we sort of need to interrupt the science news cycle pointed out by PhD Comics' Jorge Cham,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zM20b.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Science News Cycle - from PhD Comics&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;about halfway through. We want it to look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zj2qJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the paper in question is indeed a peer-reviewed journal publication, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the paper in question does initially contradict a well established theory,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we should be a bit more lax in terms of keeping these questions open. A few comments on the usual close reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;It's non-mainstream&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't hold if it's actually in a peer-reviewed publication, because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;how we structure that in the first place&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's unclear what you're asking&lt;/strong&gt; is a pretty high bar for something like this. It's often the case that &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; as professional physicists are confused by one of these, and it takes us time to get to grips with what the paper is saying. For a student or someone in the general public, we should set a slightly lower bar if they see something in mainstream media which is backed up by a peer-reviewed publication, and are simply confused about how credible it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; and it most likely will remain so, with anything that's speculative like this. We do need to make an effort to keep it concise and to the point, but I think this is effort we need to make on keeping the answers trim and as low on discussion as possible, rather than something that makes us close the question immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies for the long, rambly post. Feel free to shoot me down with reasoned arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T20:29:34.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-11T22:16:14.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/9789/tim-post&quot;&gt;Jim Post&lt;/a&gt;. To get rid of the multiple-Jims confusion and replace it with confusion for those who have no idea who Tim Post is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:46.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-12T03:15:08.587" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went with Jiminion, and I'm stuck with it for a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44881" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-05-14T13:52:19.180" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T13:52:19.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-13T07:34:10.950" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimnosperm (not that I wish to start any rumours).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will that do as a tree level approximation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just been pointed out to me that &lt;a href=&quot;http://nurturestore.co.uk/pine-cone-math-station&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jimnosperm's have light¹ cones&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;¹ 10-100g depending on the species&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:26:37.567" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:26:37.567" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-13T18:15:58.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimothy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtXxkXGK1rQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;good reference here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:18.307" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:18.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-13T20:55:01.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about Jimmy Dodger - a play on &quot;Jammy Dodger&quot; which is a word with many meanings. Including a delicious biscuit that's a favorite (or favourite?) of the Doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:29:25.017" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:25.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-15T15:51:37.233" Score="32" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a graph of tags from Stack Exchange sites (including Physics.SE), &lt;a href=&quot;http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=physics&amp;amp;size=32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TagOverflow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an interactive version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1581/map-of-64-tags-from-physics-se&quot;&gt;Map of 64 Tags from Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;, with always up-to-date data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nodes represent the most popular tags, with their area being proportional to the number of questions with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edges represent relation between tags. Their width is related to the number of questions with both tags, while their shade - how much more often they occur than one should expect by random chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Default coloring is due to community detection - automated splitting of a graph into densely connected subgraphs. Positions of the nodes are due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;D3.js force layout&lt;/a&gt;. That is, nodes connected via an edge attract each other. The strength of such attraction depends on the strength of an edge. Plus, all nodes repeal each other at a short distance to prevent overlaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Physics.SE is a (relatively) big place, it may be interesting to do conditional graphs (i.e. graphs restricted to question with a given tag), e.g. to get &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=physics&amp;amp;size=32&amp;amp;tag=quantum-mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TagOveflow: Physics: quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=physics&amp;amp;size=32&amp;amp;tag=homework-and-exercises&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TagOveflow: Physics: homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stared/tagoverflow#tagoverflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Code and a more detailed description is on GitHub&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;check tag grouping - i.e. for the sake of eliminating synonyms or poorly-defined tags,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;try to infer the structure of physics from Physics.SE :).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides looking at the graph, you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;get interesting information per tag (e.g. top questions and users),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;get some statistics (like average score for these tags).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you enjoy it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wcYsL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are there any findings on Physics.SE tags you find insightful and would like to share?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do you have ideas how to improve its usefulness or niceness to our community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T18:40:41.707" Title="TagOverflow - an interactive graph of Physics.SE tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6529" CreationDate="2015-02-16T01:07:02.263" Score="2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed a new &quot;diamond&quot; moderator. Welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself? It doesn't appear that you have been active on physics.SE before; we'd like to know a bit more about you than is shown in your profile. How did you become a moderator on this site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-02-16T17:14:46.850" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T17:14:46.850" Title="Diamond (♦) moderators with low reputation on this site?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-16T08:40:31.340" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of questions here on meta.physics (namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2887/58382&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5396/58382&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; that I could find) already asked for how to use tags on Phys.SE. The answers to these questions seemed to imply that it is not possible to &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; number the equations, like what happens in standard Latex for example with the &lt;code&gt;equation&lt;/code&gt; envinronment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked if this feature is possible on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;, and it turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/tex.html?highlight=equationnumbers#automatic-equation-numbering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it already exists in MathJax&lt;/a&gt;, as you can see from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/248597/276202&quot;&gt;the answer to my question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an extract from the answer linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This functionality already exists in MathJax. To enable it on an SE site, one would need to include either&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;equationNumbers: { autoNumber: &quot;AMS&quot; }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;equationNumbers: { autoNumber: &quot;all&quot; }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;in the TeX part of MathJax configuration options. I think the second option would be too aggressive: it would automatically number all displayed formulas in all posts on the site, which would often go against the intent of authors who created some equation numbers manually.&#xA;The first option is reasonable: it would apply only to the displayed equations entered as AMS-LaTeX environments, e.g.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\begin{equation}&#xA;y=x^2 &#xA;\end{equation} &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There aren't that many of those.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question now belongs here: should/could this feature be enabled on Phys.SE, to avoid painstakingly renumbering all equations in a post when adding/removing one in the middle of a text and similar things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also think that an automatic numbering of equations by default would be useful as it would allow to easily reference not manually tagged equations posted by the OP, but this is probably not possible now as it would, if I understood correcly, mess up all the already manually numbered equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58382" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T20:04:49.117" Title="Enabling automatic numbering of equations on physics.SE" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6527" CreationDate="2015-02-16T12:25:23.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a situation where someone asks for clarification about equation (4) in a comment, and then the post author adds a definition to clarify it just above it. Since the comment cannot be edited, the record will be confusing for newcomers and would be a not-really-worth-it pain to disentangle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Automatic numbering works when you also have &lt;code&gt;\label&lt;/code&gt;-ing and automatic &lt;code&gt;\ref&lt;/code&gt;-erencing which can consistently point to the correct objects even when the equation numbers change. I think this is a bad idea on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, note that there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=begin%7Bequation%7D&quot;&gt;close to 1k posts that already use the &lt;code&gt;\begin{equation}&lt;/code&gt; notation&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22begin%7Balign%7D%22&quot;&gt;1.6k that use &lt;code&gt;\begin{align}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. We do not know whether their authors would like the tags, which could be quite intrusive. I have a few of those myself,  and I'd not be that keen on this: when I use the &lt;code&gt;align&lt;/code&gt; notation I'm half the time tagging things myself, and having automatic tags detracts from the emphasis given to the important equations by the manual tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, though, I just don't think there's a need. A long post might have 10-20 equations but only a couple of them are really worth numbering, and that's at the extremes and can be dealt with using manual &lt;code&gt;\tag&lt;/code&gt;s. I think we're getting along just fine and there isn't a use case for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T17:07:01.120" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6526" CreationDate="2015-02-16T15:40:32.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in comments, the new diamond moderator is a SE team member, not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;Phys.SE moderator&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/team&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of SE team members (using real names rather than usernames).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most moderating on Phys.SE is done by Phys.SE moderators, but &#xA;SE team members do help out from time to time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE team members also have other tasks, such as, e.g. developing SE software and finding bugs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record: Currently Phys.SE moderators have handled around 10k flags, while SE team members have handled around 70 flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T16:06:51.563" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6527" CreationDate="2015-02-16T17:20:12.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally dislike auto-numbering of equations. They are not all important, and I only want to number the ones I refer back to. When you do that the fact that they have a tag gives the reader a head's up that this relation is not only useful in passing but will be back to &lt;s&gt;haunt us&lt;/s&gt; illuminate another issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; like is to be able to refer to equations by label or tag. I know how to arrange that in real LaTeX, but haven't looked into how well it works in MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-02-16T20:04:49.117" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T20:04:49.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6525" CreationDate="2015-02-16T18:40:41.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Minor issue&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems you have a link error. If you select a tag (I chose &lt;code&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/code&gt;, but it works for others I've tested, including other SE sites), the link at the top, e.g., &lt;code&gt;Physics:&amp;lt;tag&amp;gt; (&amp;lt;question_number&amp;gt;)&lt;/code&gt;, leads to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tagged/fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which does not exist. It should be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick look in main.js on your github page shows that &lt;code&gt;/questions/&lt;/code&gt; should be included (see line 315):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.attr('href', seSiteData.siteData.site_url + &quot;/questions/tagged/&quot; + tagName)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suspect the problem is elsewhere, but didn't investigate more since I'm not really well-versed (read: at all) in JavaScript.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Feature request&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to make a tag-graph of a particular user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T18:40:41.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-18T01:27:26.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earthworm Jim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slim Jim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jimiroquai&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72047" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-05-14T13:51:32.777" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T13:51:32.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-18T16:29:10.667" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dread Pirate Jimbeard &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:30:44.963" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:30:44.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-18T19:19:35.167" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimself&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68551" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:26:47.947" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:26:47.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-19T22:24:13.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those of you who have been on StackOverflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Jim Skeet&quot;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49024" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:27:27.310" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:27:27.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-19T22:32:52.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about,&quot;Lord Jim&quot;? .........&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49024" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:30:31.707" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:30:31.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-19T22:54:31.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimperator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/imperator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the most apt&lt;/a&gt; title for the leader of Jims&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:25.440" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:25.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-20T01:01:45.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Jimtimidator is another option...&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49024" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:27:34.923" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:27:34.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-20T05:46:40.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jimeese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, it's Jim and cheese combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like cheese, and I'm sure you do too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just thought of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could simplify Jimeese into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jeese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jeez.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But as the owner of this thread said, Jimeese sound more like Jim language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56321" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:52.787" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:52.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-20T09:23:53.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(with the period spoken explicitly, as &quot;Jim - Period!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23339" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:29:00.273" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:00.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-20T17:35:35.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep it simple: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt6kKhlX8vU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jimbo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:29:54.407" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:54.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6544" CreationDate="2015-02-20T20:20:35.167" Score="2" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post is in regards to events occurring with the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/166095/do-tachyons-move-faster-than-light&quot;&gt;Do tachyons move faster than light&lt;/a&gt; (see also chat starting &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/20169987#20169987&quot;&gt;around here&lt;/a&gt;), but the question is to be applied to a site-wide policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aforementioned post contained a bad question that was quickly closed as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. A set of high-rep users then edited the question to be something entirely different, which was then reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/218183/reviewing-suggested-edits-what-is-an-invalid-incorrect-or-radical-edit&quot;&gt;this Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt; about editing posts,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are all adding/changing the content of the post, the intended meaning of the author. That is not appropriate for an edit. (Unless the post is Community Wiki.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of edits is to allow readers to more effectively understand the authors original intent. They are not there to change the author's intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edits made to the post in question appear to change the intended meaning of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6010/correcting-incorrect-answers&quot;&gt;discussed radical edits before&lt;/a&gt; in regards to incorrect answers, in which my answer (highly voted + accepted, though the 2nd answer says the same thing &amp;amp; is also highly-voted) says that such edits that change the intended meaning should not be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Should we change our policy on editing (which, AFAIK, is aligned with the SE network policy cited above), to allow for such radical changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a follow up, if we should keep the existing policy, what should occur to the post in question? Should it be reverted and closed, or should it be left as is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T16:23:05.153" Title="Radically editing closed questions" Tags="|discussion|editing|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6543" CreationDate="2015-02-20T20:57:23.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question: Should we change our policy on editing (which, AFAIK, is aligned with the SE network policy cited above), to allow for such radical changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, no, no no, no no no, no no no no no no no no, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike e.g. Wikipedia, the Stack Exchange software attaches the original poster's name to every question and answer (and comment), except community wiki posts, and it's therefore reasonable to expect that the content of that post reflects the named poster's intent. Radical changes therefore &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be allowed without the original poster's approval. If people do think the question should be radically different, they can always post a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we have previous meta Q&amp;amp;A on this issue I may as well also mention that I don't believe anything relevant has changed since those other questions and answers were posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T20:57:23.383" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6543" CreationDate="2015-02-20T21:03:44.357" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a subtlety to the guidelines for editing here that many people (even some aged, veteran users) don't quite pick up on... So I'll try a different approach here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a famous interview with Richard Feynman&lt;/a&gt;, where he was asked the question, &amp;quot;how do two magnets attract or repel each other?&amp;quot; To which he responded,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and then went on to list how he might answer the question &lt;em&gt;if someone else were asking it.&lt;/em&gt; This is a brilliant response, precisely because it illustrates a consideration that so many educators skip: &lt;strong&gt;understanding the intentions of your student.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic guidelines for editing are listed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/1/edit&quot;&gt;the full edit page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iRPet.png&quot; alt=&quot;always respect the original author&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that they say &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; about the &amp;quot;intended&amp;quot; meaning of the post; you're expected to clarify the meaning, which you can hopefully learn by reading the post... but the only way to know if you've preserved the asker's &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; is to make the edit and see if he's satisfied with the results. When in doubt, &lt;strong&gt;talk to the author:&lt;/strong&gt; a comment paired with the edit expressing &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; intent and requesting feedback on your edit can go a long way toward ensuring that your edits are helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The critical guideline here is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; respect the original author:&lt;/strong&gt; edit with his best interest in mind, strive to make him look good, &lt;strong&gt;write a question that'll get him the help he needs!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watching some editors debate this reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_talents_or_minas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an old story&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also who had received the one talent came and said, &amp;quot;Lord, I knew you that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter. I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the earth. Behold, you have what is yours.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But his master answered him, &amp;quot;You wicked and slothful servant. You knew that I reap where I didn't sow, and gather where I didn't scatter. You ought therefore to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received back my own with interest. Take away therefore the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who doesn't have, even that which he has will be taken away. Throw out the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Matthew 25:24–30, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_English_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World English Bible&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's always &lt;em&gt;safe&lt;/em&gt; to edit a question in a way that does not change the literal meaning; after all, who can criticize you when you haven't &lt;em&gt;done anything?&lt;/em&gt; But when you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; understand the intent, and yet, out of an overabundance of caution, do nothing to alter the meaning even if by doing so you could better reflect the author's intention &lt;em&gt;and potentially provide a way for him to obtain assistance here&lt;/em&gt;, then you're hardly respecting the author; like the cynical servant or a weary teacher who no longer cares if his students can absorb the information he regurgitates, you've wasted an opportunity and squandered the attention of your audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you edit a question, or when you review the edits of others, ask yourself this question: &lt;strong&gt;does this edit make it more likely that the asker will obtain the information he needs?&lt;/strong&gt; The answer you give yourself to this question should provide you with a foundation for any discussion that might follow from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T16:23:05.153" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-20T22:49:49.100" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised nobody suggested... Jims Bond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57666" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:26:07.107" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:26:07.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-21T00:01:21.397" Score="3" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love using RSS-feed and I wanted to use it for this site too. The problem is that my RSS-Reader does not render Latex so I get the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; of Latex and trying to render Latex in my head is not so easy! Wouldn't it be better if the Latex formulas are sent as pictures so that the RSS-Reader can do a better job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also open to suggestions of an RSS-Reader (for linux), which can render Latex or Mathjax or whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68030" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T00:01:21.397" Title="RSS-Feed and Latex" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|rss|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-21T09:08:04.097" Score="18" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a general sense among a number of users, myself included, that simplistic, almost throwaway answers can get very high scores, while thoroughly researched, high-level answers can languish with few to no votes. See the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6303/the-secret-to-getting-a-massive-reputation-is&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To what extent is this backed by data?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I set out to answer this question, if not once and for all then at least to begin to shed some light on it. To that extend I wrote a very minimal Python script, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/c-white/stackexchange_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uploaded to GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, for crunching some numbers and making some plots.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script needs two pieces of input to run. First, it expects a local copy of the CSV file associated with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/273688/scores-for-my-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt;. Simply run it with your user ID and click the &quot;Download CSV&quot; link. The other requirement is much more labor intensive: A file with the post IDs of all your answers and a &quot;quality score&quot; for each. For my purposes, I used a 6-point scale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;0. It might actually be beneficial for this answer to be deleted.&#xA;1. Just a quick answer to an easy question, one that required essentially no work.&#xA;2. A not-so-great answer that was nonetheless not entirely trivial.&#xA;3. A run-of-the-mill good answer.&#xA;4. A solid, well-researched answer that provides thorough insight into the problem at hand.&#xA;5. An outstanding answer, the kind about which songs will be sung many generations hence.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really unavoidable for my scheme. In order to measure the correlation between &quot;quality&quot; and score, we need to actually have &quot;quality&quot; numbers on hand. I did my best to rate all my 400 or so answers to date, trying not to let the answer's votes sway my feelings about its &quot;quality&quot; one way or the other. It took the better part of a lazy afternoon to go through them all, in case anyone wants a time estimate for doing this themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some plots and conclusions are given an an answer below. However, this is just the analysis of &lt;em&gt;my own opinion&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;my own answers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;More data would be great&lt;/strong&gt;, so I encourage others to use the tools mentioned above (or their own tools) for analyzing this sort of data.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to post your own data or your alternate analysis of my data as answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Bug reports, feature requests, and support inquiries welcome. I'll try my best, but I cannot guarantee a timely response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;My personal data dump and self-rankings are included in the repository, in case you want to jump right in and play with data without ranking answers. In particular, the query returns more information than the script currently uses, such as dates and question scores, so a better analysis can certainly be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T05:25:39.240" Title="What is the correlation between answer quality and score?" Tags="|discussion|content-level|voting|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2015-02-21T09:08:04.097" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that can be done is to group answers by quality and look at the distribution of answer scores within each group. Below is a plot of the means (circles) and 25-75 percentiles (error bars) for the six quality groups mentioned above. From quality 0 to quality 5, the numbers of answers I put into each category are 43, 79, 80, 137, 46, and 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ZgzC.png&quot; alt=&quot;trend&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat surprisingly, there does seem to be a positive correlation: &quot;better&quot; answers get more upvotes. It's not a particularly strong correlation compared to how wildly my answers vary in quality, but it's there. Note I haven't done any sophisticated fits to this data, this is all just qualitative visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to better capture the underlying distributions being summarized above, I also plotted histograms of answer scores for each group, shown below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5f1G7.png&quot; alt=&quot;histogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some explanation is warranted. I chose to use logarithmic abscissas.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; If there were N answers with a score of A, I took this to mean an amount N was distributed uniformly on (A-1/2, A+1/2). This distribution was then split up into the appropriate logarithmic bins based on how much they intersected the interval. Anything with a negative score was put into the separate bar on the left. Anything that would have been put into a bin below my cutoff (10^0) is also put in the separate bar, including all scores of 0 (since (-1/2, 1/2) lies below 10^0) and some scores of 1 (since part of (1/2, 3/2) lies below 10^0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I reach a similar conclusion: &lt;strong&gt;quality is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; negatively correlated with score&lt;/strong&gt;, and in fact it's a little bit positively correlated. Sure, 1 out of 19 of my personal &quot;best&quot; answers has been sitting for months with a score of 1, but a couple of them have done somewhat well. And a lot of my in-my-estimation-worthless answers have received the scores they deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also apparent that at least my answer score distributions have awkward long, low tails to the right. This is probably a signature of a small fraction of answers going viral and getting lots of votes. We tend to focus on the low quality answers that get scattered into the very high bins, but this happens at all quality levels. In fact, the distributions truncated above 10^1 have a nice quality-score correlation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Perhaps because I'm an astronomer, and we love using unintuitive axes for all our plots. Just be grateful I didn't make the x-axis run from right to left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2015-02-21T18:45:48.617" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T18:45:48.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-22T20:28:37.133" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sweep all before you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JimJimjeree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and next month it could be...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JimJimjeroo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:26:56.773" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:26:56.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-22T22:16:40.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim_me_boy (hawkins) with pirate accent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:29:08.113" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:08.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-22T22:18:44.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimronimo - this is my proposal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:33.657" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:33.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-23T01:36:49.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jiminy Cricket, for a childhood throwback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58234" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:40.893" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:40.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-23T13:54:27.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimb.   The b is silent.  And pronounced like &quot;climb&quot; instead of &quot;limb&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44881" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:30:25.090" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:30:25.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-23T14:22:54.780" Score="0" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously, I wrote the following question &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/9300/has-anyone-formally-tested-josh-pellicers-theory-on-human-sexual-behavior&quot;&gt;Has anyone formally tested Josh Pellicer's theory on human sexual behavior?&lt;/a&gt;. This was a question I wrote with a lot of material from the work in question. This question contained 6 sub-questions to answer for an overarching one question. Oddly enough, the question received great attention, so I placed a bounty on it, and then I received a very well thought out answer which answered all sub-questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the Curious George that I am, I wrote another question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/166310/what-are-the-limitations-of-superconductors&quot;&gt;What are the limitations of superconductors?&lt;/a&gt;, then I got into a lot of trouble. Mostly because I made an inappropriate comment: &quot;Let's get inquisitive.&quot; I am sorry, I was listening to a lot of funky music over the weekend, while I was learning to program, and then I found myself getting down on my keyboard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think either the question did not have enough supporting material, no bounty placed, nonproductive commenting, or too many sub-questions. I know the question is on hold, so I will be unable to fix it in time, so what should I do in the future to avoid this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40289" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:15.457" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T16:12:42.583" Title="I asked way too many questions at once, now I must pay the price" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6556" CreationDate="2015-02-23T14:38:44.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing a question doesn't mean you are in trouble. It means that your question, in its current state, does not meet the standards of the site. This label can be removed if you edit your question. I also don't think anyone was influenced by your &quot;lets get inquisitive&quot; comment, though I do not believe that's really an appropriate response to glance's comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I voted to close your question as Too Broad because you've got 7 questions, some of which can actually be found with a simple Google search (which suggests you just rushed out and asked without trying to find the information in the normal means). We prefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13/can-i-ask-several-related-questions-in-a-single-thread&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;one question per post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, though we sometimes loosen this rule and allow one or two &lt;em&gt;closely related&lt;/em&gt; questions in a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reduced the list of questions to the aforementioned one or two &lt;em&gt;closely related&lt;/em&gt; ones, I'd be willing to nominate it for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T14:38:44.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6556" CreationDate="2015-02-23T16:12:42.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately you've run into the &quot;problems&quot; that arise by letting each community set its own standards. Your question on cogsci.SE was allowed and well received despite having multiple questions because that's how that community responds. This community, however, does not generally keep open posts with several questions in them (unless the questions are so inter-related that asking them independently would mean none of them make sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the questions you asked could be asked as independent questions. That is not to say anything about the quality of them as individual questions nor is it to say whether they would be considered good or not (just copy-pasting each one into its own question would not be good, it's basically just trivia and not asking about the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the numbers are what they are). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for being in trouble, having the question on hold, etc. there is no need to repeat what &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6557/6634&quot;&gt;Kyle said in his answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T16:12:42.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-02-24T07:16:55.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about LEEEEROY JIMKINS for a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65136" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:28:00.227" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:28:00.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-25T16:08:20.563" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123603/how-does-a-magnetic-field-cause-objects-to-move/167018#167018&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that community brought up, because the question had a score of 5, and the two answers were not getting any hits and I considered they were not answering well the simple question which got these 5 votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I checked and the user who asked the question came only on July 8,  2014 and has not been seen since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe Community should check , and if there is no interest on the part of the questioner to look for answers , it is a one off, and the answers have not gotten any up votes  the question should not be brought up again ,and maybe even deleted ?. I am suggesting deletion because such simple minded questions with wishy washy answers ( maybe mine too) do not reflect well on the site, with search engines, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T20:33:15.867" Title="a suggestion for community updates" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2015-02-25T18:23:05.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, now that your answer has been upvoted by somebody, at least &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question won't be bumped anymore. Not that that addresses the problem at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do usually look at community bumped questions to see if there actually is an answer that deserves an upvote and just never got one. In some ways, that means it serves a purpose even if the original poster is long gone and no longer interested in returning. It would be a shame for a great question with an awesome answer that went unnoticed at the time to never be noticed again just because the person who asked it disappeared without a trace. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also like to take the time when community bumps something to evaluate whether we just missed a reason to close it earlier. Maybe it is a homework question, or maybe it's a duplicate (and it's possible a newer question asks the same thing and got good answers, so the bumped one should be closed -- chronological order isn't required for deciding which in a set to close). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess what I'm trying to say is that community bumping questions gives all of us an opportunity to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decide if the question is on topic/not duplicate/etc when it may have been missed before;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer a question that may have been unanswered before or had mediocre answers;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote a great answer that may have been missed at the time but deserves to be upvoted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of those things depend on whether the original poster(s) are still around. In some ways, I see community bumps as another type of review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T18:23:05.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2015-02-25T20:33:15.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual line is that answer are not just for the OP, but also for people who find the question later---and given that the majority of our traffic comes from search engines that is potentially a lot of people. SO the argument goes on to suggest that un-answered questions are a blemish, and  even if the asker will never return again and getting some kind of up-vote worthy answer is an improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that the argument really holds for particularly poor questions, but it is true of &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; long-unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T20:33:15.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6565" CreationDate="2015-02-26T04:46:20.800" Score="8" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got an accept from an older question :&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/156132/what-is-a-good-definition-of-time/156180#156180&quot;&gt;What is a good definition of 'time'? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curious I went to the duplicate,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17056/time-what-is-it&quot;&gt;Time, what is it? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;, and see that it is closed with the explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a logical inconsistency here of pointing to a duplicate that is closed with such a reason. Either the original should have been closed or it should not have been marked duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit after I read the comments that led to the duplicate assignment. The second link provided in QMECHANIC's comment is fine and should be subsituted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T15:50:22.877" Title="consistencies in closures" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6564" CreationDate="2015-02-26T07:25:35.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should strive to choose the most appropriate/specific close reasons when we vote to close. It is extra important in cases like this because the duplicate question close message encourages users to ask a new question if the answers on the duplicate don't address their specific concerns. But we don't want somebody to ask a new question about something that is off-topic to begin with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure consistency and to avoid problems like this, the process of reviewing a question should be something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evaluate whether the question is on- or off-topic. If it is off-topic, &lt;strong&gt;vote to close&lt;/strong&gt; based on the most appropriate off-topic close reason. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is on-topic, look at the content of the question:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has the question been asked before? Many times, I can find a duplicate in the &quot;Related questions&quot; bar on the right side. If I can't find it there, and I think &quot;Surely this is something I've seen before&quot; or &quot;There's no way this hasn't been asked before,&quot; I'll search for possible duplicates. If a possible duplicate is found, &lt;strong&gt;vote to close as a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; and move to the next question. If no duplicate is found, continue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question show research effort, is it clear and useful? &lt;strong&gt;Upvote&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is on-topic but just a bad question (not useful to anybody else, no research, etc.) -- &lt;strong&gt;downvote&lt;/strong&gt; and move on to the next question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we follow that type of flow, we would avoid situations when we say &quot;Hey User, your question already has an answer! Oh wait, but we closed it because it's off-topic...&quot; Instead, we just say &quot;This is off-topic because X&quot; and it doesn't matter if it's been asked 100 times before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some may disagree on the whole upvote/downvote thing. But regardless of your views on that, I think it makes the most sense to decide if something is on-topic before looking for potential duplicates. It seems silly to chase down potential duplicates to off-topic questions (wastes our time) and it also presents a strange message to people not familiar with how our site, or StackExchange in general, works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T07:25:35.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6564" CreationDate="2015-02-26T14:40:39.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem with the &quot;inconsistency&quot; as viewed by some is the fact that &lt;strong&gt;close states are not permanent&lt;/strong&gt;, yet they are being viewed as a permanent state. This is simply not true; any post can be re-opened at any time. In light of this point of view, it should be clear that there isn't any inconsistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that close states also do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; at all suggest that the question itself is &quot;not physics.&quot; What it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; suggest is that the question does not &lt;em&gt;fit the site&lt;/em&gt; in its &lt;strong&gt;current form&lt;/strong&gt; under &lt;strong&gt;current policies&lt;/strong&gt;. A closed question may be a perfectly valid physics question; case in point: homework questions. We view these as off-topic, even though they certainly are valid physics questions. And since policies can change, there is no reason to suspect that an off-topic question will remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I do note though that, on occasion, there are questions asked here that aren't actually physics (e.g., some people asking engineering, philosophy or chemistry questions). This does not mean that the close state &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; indicates that the question is not physics.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also has been discussed on Mother Meta before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173431/what-should-i-do-with-a-question-that-has-an-exact-duplicate-closed-as-off-topic&quot;&gt;What should I do with a question that has an exact duplicate closed as off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/186706/can-we-prevent-questions-from-being-closed-as-duplicates-of-closed-questions&quot;&gt;Can we prevent questions from being closed as duplicates of closed questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115125/should-duplicates-of-closed-questions-be-closed-as-duplicates-or-closed-for-the&quot;&gt;Should duplicates of closed questions be closed as duplicates or closed for the same reason as their parent question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution is mixed between the answers (so obviously no consensus, not even highly upvoted answers), but two points were brought up there that we ought to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if we later decide that the closed-original is on-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if we later decide that an unclosed-original is off-topic? What should we do to the questions closed as duplicate of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; one? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, your issue disappears because the close-state isn't permanent. This should suggest that closing as a duplicate of a closed question should not present any problems/inconsistencies because of the fact that the original can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, we have the opposite case you present. Should we then go through all the duplicates and re-label them as off-topic? That would be quite a lot of &lt;em&gt;unnecessary&lt;/em&gt; work (because it brings us right back to (1)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6565/25301&quot;&gt;tgp2114's evaluation process&lt;/a&gt;; the reasoning should be in this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has the question been asked before?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close as duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the question off-topic (HW, engineering, etc)? Too broad? Opinion based?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close appropriately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can't tell &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; disagree&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Skip &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; Leave Open&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should not matter if the proposed duplicate is also closed as off-topic because, again, it can get out of that state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T15:50:22.877" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-27T03:20:23.557" Score="4" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know very little about physics compared to most users of physics StackExchange. Even so, if I knew a grain more than what I know now, I wouldn't care to answer the questions of others. I'd rather focus on answering my questions. What motivates users of this site to answer questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do most of you recognize that for your questions to be answered, you'll need others to want to use the site. To want others to use the site, you'll have to answer their questions. Is this the goodwill that motivates all of you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59168" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T16:53:21.597" Title="Why do users answer questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6567" CreationDate="2015-02-27T03:38:18.877" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/question-self-destruction-why-dont-experts-ask-more-questions&quot;&gt;discussed this before&lt;/a&gt; although that question is only tangentially related to this one. Based on that question though, you should find that the most active people who answer questions have some of the fewest questions asked. For the most part, the community is split into two broad groups -- those who ask questions and rarely answer (which seems to be where you would place yourself) and those who answer questions and rarely ask (which is where many of the people who will likely respond to this meta post would place themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for everybody so I'm sure I will miss individual motivations. But I know for some, they answer questions because they like to teach others. These folks tend to be current or retired academics. Which makes sense, they are making/have made a career out of educating others. And of course, there are those who plan on going into academics and would like to make a career out of teaching others so they could be in that group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are those who see answering others' questions as a way to learn more themselves. I know I have learned quite a bit by answering questions I am not an expert &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; in but my knowledge of my field has allowed me to bring a particular perspective. And in those cases, I answer something but I also learn from the resulting votes/comments (was I right? did I miss something?) and in some cases has actually led me to ask questions of my own. I also get to see how others reach a conclusion/answer and I almost always learn something from the other answers even if I &quot;knew&quot; it. Turns out, there's usually more than one way to think about something and I wouldn't know how my thought process is different than somebody elses' without having first outlined mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also say that I fit into a category where I want to encourage others to ask questions and understand how the universe works. It's just a nice thing to do, and maybe that's the goodwill/altruism you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the game aspect of it. You ask good questions, you get rep; you post good answers, you get rep. You get badges. You &quot;level up&quot; and get new permissions. It's sometimes fun to play the game for some people. Answers get more rep than questions so that's a good way to advance faster if you're good at it. Plus there's always that &quot;Yay, somebody liked my post!&quot; when you get an upvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side of the coin, like you said about yourself, I spend a lot of time answering my own questions. But that's because I'm in grad school and I need to develop the skills to both develop my own questions and then answer them. Things that I have questions about, I can't openly ask questions about -- they are things I am being paid to research and I could get scooped if I start revealing what I'm doing to the world before it's done. My field is specific enough that what seems to be relatively general/generic questions would turn up in a search engine and it would be easy to piece together things. Of course, by the time I finish working on it enough that it could be public, that's because &lt;em&gt;I've already answered a bunch of my own questions and have new ones that are my next paper&lt;/em&gt;! So it's not easy, nor appropriate, for me to be asking questions that directly benefit my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions tend to be curiosity about things. And I ask them here and not somewhere else because I have gotten to know the users here through my interactions (either in the chat room, here on meta, or through the Q&amp;amp;A themselves) and I like them. I know that I can ask something and I usually have a pretty good idea who will attempt to answer it based on what the question is about. And I know I can trust the resulting answers or trust the comments that point out my misconceptions or point me to the right answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T03:38:18.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6567" CreationDate="2015-02-27T05:19:34.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by tpg2114 is general enough to make up a questioner for ticking :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, my broad reasons as a retired experimentalist for  answering, more or less in order of importance, are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Physics is fun  ( a professor of mine used to say that with a big grin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)little white ( women are supposed to have more white brain cells than grey) cells have to be  exercised &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Whenever I start to think , &quot;maybe it is getting boring&quot;, due to the appearance of repetitive questions, or too engineering like, or not enough in my field (experimental particle physics) and the lowering of physics level, I stay keeping up the feminist flag. If you notice there are very few women ( explicitly stating gender) that appear here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T05:19:34.170" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6571" CreationDate="2015-02-27T12:41:21.510" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any difference between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;hide posts&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;ignore this user  (everywhere)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference in their scope and if so what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6719" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-02-27T18:18:02.823" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T18:18:02.823" Title="What is the difference between: &quot;hide posts&quot; and &quot;ignore this user (everywhere)&quot; in chatrooms?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6570" CreationDate="2015-02-27T13:39:07.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/156160/in-chat-what-is-the-difference-between-hide-posts-and-ignore-this-user&quot;&gt;This was asked &amp;amp; answered Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt;. Direct copy-pasta of (the relevant portion of) their answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hide posts&amp;quot; just hides them for that 'session' (i.e. you refresh and they are back!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ignore this user everywhere&amp;quot; is persistent across rooms / sessions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both actions will hide the user; clicking &amp;quot;show posts&amp;quot; will undo both actions. So the difference is the persistence. The latter, of course, requiring you to select them back whereas the former will do it for your next browser refresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T13:39:07.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-01T19:21:56.597" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that there are many questions which are marked as Unanswered but when checked , are usually ones of homework questions where a user comments the OP's mistake and the problem is solved .&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Shouldnt these questions be deleted as no external user will find it useful ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-01T19:21:56.597" Title="Unanswered Questions where OP gets the answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6567" CreationDate="2015-03-02T00:11:28.660" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What motivates users of this site to answer questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speak for myself.  My motivation for answering questions is purely selfish - answering questions here benefits &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;.  As soon as that is not the case, I will no longer participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that others may find value in some of the answers I compose is not the primary reason I participate but it is nonetheless a value to me too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, focusing one's mind to write a good answer to an interesting question almost always improves one's own understanding of the material.  In some cases, it simply reinforces or refreshes your understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, answering a question &lt;em&gt;wrongly&lt;/em&gt; can be valuable.  Indeed, identifying and correcting an error in your understanding might be the most valuable reward of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T00:11:28.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6567" CreationDate="2015-03-02T16:53:21.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There used to be a time (i.e. August) when I asked a lot more than I answered. Looking at my earliest questions (&lt;em&gt;wince&lt;/em&gt;), I was extremely inexperienced (and I still am). I mean, there's naïveté and then there are the kind of questions I was asking. At least the first few. They got a bit better as time went on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this the goodwill that motivates all of you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goodwill, schmoodwill. Not to sound a bit like Scrooge, but I'm not motivated by goodwill. I mean, I enjoy helping people - I really do - but if I decide to answer a question, it's not because I want to help the person asking it. In most cases, it's because &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; want to know the answer, and I don't want to wait around for someone else to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like tpg2114, I often learn when I answer questions. But for me, it's surprisingly often. Perhaps this is true more on other SEs, since I generally answer only basic questions on Physics, but many times I have no idea what the heck my answer will be when I sit down to write it - or even if I'll be able to learn enough to write an answer. Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142800/why-do-vapour-cones-form-around-jet-fighters/142808#142808&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. Before doing the research (yes, &lt;em&gt;beyond&lt;/em&gt; Wikipedia), I couldn't even pronounce &quot;Prandtl–Glauert singularity&quot;, let alone understand what it's about. But that question was bugging me, so I upvoted, did the research, and explained it to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason I answer questions is because of those questions in August (and beyond). When I was wrong about something, I was corrected by the more experienced users. They were pretty nice about my mistakes, too, which I valued quite a bit. I'm not nearly as experienced as them, but I do my best to try to help the people who are like I was in August - trying to understand something cool but hard to explain. I like to give back answers for the answers I received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more mundane note, I also answer questions when I'm bored. I can assure you that taking a break to research sound waves is infinitely more interesting than doing some vocabulary questions for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T16:53:21.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2015-03-02T17:01:48.987" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, answers in comments are not a problem.  If you are looking for an answer to a problem and find a question that seems to relate to your problem, you will comb the comments to find your answer anyway, so not really a problem.  So no, not really a problem to people going to the site to get answers to their problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a third party looking at the question to find an answer, having an answer in the comments does not materially affect their ability to find an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the poor quality of the Stack Exchange searching mechanism/metric is a much bigger problem in that relevant and pertinent questions are not found in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44881" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T17:01:48.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2015-03-03T03:42:07.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you find that answers in comments are a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, there isn't a simple answer to this question.  Comments are intended to be a means to interact with the OP and others to, e.g., refine the question or an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, as such, comments are &lt;em&gt;transient&lt;/em&gt;.  On that view, a comment &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is the case that on some occasions, a comment contains a legitimate answer to a question.  But that doesn't mean that such occasions should be discouraged in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, comments are often a way to determine precisely what it is the OP is looking for and if it is determined that a comment is an answer, then other comments to the effect that &quot;isn't that an answer?&quot; can be posted and then, I've observed, the comments are often expanded into an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would anyone want to discourage this discovery process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T15:20:29.757" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T15:20:29.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6588" CreationDate="2015-03-06T16:50:45.527" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that there's a way to share  questions from SE in Twitter, fb, g+ etc. Is there any way to share a question to the users of SE? I can't use none of the available options because I do not have accounts in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60846" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T03:14:31.937" Title="Share question within SE users" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-06T18:35:03.237" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JRO39.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I observe. Watching from an ASUS laptop; an i5 intel CPU, and a chrome web browser (latest version). Well, I found an screenshot from a physics.SE user and it looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UIXbs.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So apparently the code renders incorrectly in my Chrome. I can give further info about the system that I use. Note that I'm a guest while visiting the site. (if it helps)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74736" OwnerDisplayName="MARamezani" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T18:52:21.753" Title="Navigation on the anonymous homepage is styled wrong" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-03-06T22:06:59.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2865" CreationDate="2015-03-07T05:20:51.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it seems like you already have the answer: both types of questions are increasing, showing a growth in the site, not one question replacing the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74685" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T05:20:51.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6583" CreationDate="2015-03-07T09:20:34.633" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reputation earlier today was 2007. Suddenly it became 1997. 10 reputation losses within an hour. Why? I checked &amp;amp; found that my old questions that were greatly appreciated are simultaneously being downvoted.  My old questions are suddenly continuously getting downvoted for no reason. No comments &amp;amp; no feedback. This seems to be frustating as they were good questions; it is a slap in my face. What step should I take now? The two of those questions are:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136880&quot;&gt;Is it possible to have a rate of change of acceleration?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/146488&quot;&gt;Why do the storms of Jupiter have long life unlike that of Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T11:01:10.120" Title="Why are my 6-months old questions suddenly being getting downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6582" CreationDate="2015-03-07T11:01:10.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should we know? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are known to no one except the people who downvote. If this is a single user voting many of your posts down, the system will reverse the votes on its own. If this are several voters that just decided, for whatever reason, to give you some downvotes, then there's nothing to be done - voting is completely up to the discretion of the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T11:01:10.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-07T15:34:56.693" Score="-2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/75420&quot;&gt;The edit in question&lt;/a&gt;. Fixing 3 different spelling mistakes and added some italics to make the post a bit easier to read and tried to clean up where the author was using quotation marks to refer to &quot;see&quot; as a word and where he used them to put special emphasis on the word (might have gotten one wrong after a second close reading, but I doubt that's the reason it got rejected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason I think of is both reviewers being from the USA and thus not being aware of the fact that 1) the user used UK spelling more often in his post than US spelling 2) metre being the spelling used outside the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T16:14:35.560" Title="Why in the world (not US) did this suggested edit get rejected?" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6584" CreationDate="2015-03-07T16:14:35.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rejected it for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The edits your proposed didn't actually improve the post, specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changing &lt;code&gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changing &quot;quotes&quot; to &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;don't actually make the post easier to read, they are superfluous changes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding italics to certain words that weren't in quote marks originally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point #2 seemed to be adding your own flavor to Martin's post, which appeared to me to deviate from his choice of language, leading me to choose the latter choice (&quot;clearly deviates...&quot;) instead of the Pranav's choice (&quot;does not make it easier to read...&quot;)--though I was strongly considering this first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This had nothing to do with the choice of metre versus meter; it has to do with the fact that your edits were just considered to be not good ones by the two people who happened to review it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T16:14:35.560" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-07T19:01:20.040" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a question and I am in dire need for the answer to that question . Let's say that question fails to attract answers or attentions. But there are some users who I believe can answer that question . Is there any way by which I can request them to post an answer ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73927" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T19:01:20.040" Title="inviting people to answer questions" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-03-08T06:58:10.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6577" CreationDate="2015-03-09T03:14:31.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange network &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65261/is-stack-overflow-a-social-networking-site&quot;&gt;is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a social network&lt;/a&gt;. And the idea of pushing your question onto others has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/103086/how-could-i-notify-stack-overflows-expert-users-about-my-new-question&quot;&gt;strongly rejected&lt;/a&gt;. No expert would choose to participate in a site in which any user could nag them effortlessly to personally solve every problem that arises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your question to have more visibility to everyone (on the site, not the whole network), you can do so, but there is a price. You must &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;offer a nonrefundable bounty&lt;/a&gt; of your own reputation on the question. Open bounties are summarized in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;featured tab&lt;/a&gt;, and some (but not all) users check there to see if there are questions they can answer given the extra incentive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T03:14:31.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-10T12:49:30.160" Score="25" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation is a rough measure of a user's experience with the site. It can also be used as a (not very accurate) proxy for their overall expertise in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our user population consists of people who ask lots of questions and answer few of them, experts who answer lots of questions and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/question-self-destruction-why-dont-experts-ask-more-questions&quot;&gt;typically ask few of them&lt;/a&gt;, and people in between. A good measure of a given user's position in this spectrum is the number of questions they've asked over the number of answers they've posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a correlation between these two metrics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T19:52:07.103" Title="Does reputation correlate with the question-to-answer ratio?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6589" CreationDate="2015-03-10T12:49:30.160" Score="31" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, it does.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried exploring this using &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/284478/question-and-answer-counts-vs-reputation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;, whose results go something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nl98u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a log-log plot and it shows two distinct regimes, with a definite linear correlation in the higher-rep side. This means that the site's user base really does consist of two different populations with very different behaviours: novice users with reps below ~200 for whom there's no correlation between reputation and question/answer ratio, and more experienced users who ask noticeably less questions at higher reputations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependence in this regime is roughly Q/A = 1/rep, with r squared of about 0.25. I'll leave more detailed statistics to people who can do them right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important thing to note is that the query returns results for only 3579 users, which is about 5% of our total of ~72k users, because it only reports on users that have ≥1 answer and ≥1 question. This could be a bug in the SQL, and it's something to keep an eye on. Maybe someone can extend this to cover those cases? It's not clear to me how you'd include those users in the log-log plot below, where they'd form a 'ceiling' at Q/A=∞ of pure askers and a 'floor' at Q/A=0 of pure answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T16:44:52.437" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6592" CreationDate="2015-03-10T15:14:01.753" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/169209/is-there-an-infinite-amount-of-wavelengths-of-light-is-the-em-spectrum-continuo&quot;&gt;Is there an infinite amount of wavelengths of light? Is the EM spectrum continuous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no Answer button.  At the bottom of the question is this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;protected by Qmechanic♦ yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have 102 reputation points at this time.  I have not participated on physics.se yet; the points are awarded to me automatically due to my reputation on ell.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's due to a requirement to &lt;em&gt;earn&lt;/em&gt; the points, wouldn't it be relevant to make &lt;em&gt;earned&lt;/em&gt; explicit in the message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T15:51:02.777" Title="Cannot Answer a Question. System says I &quot;need 10 points&quot;. I have 102" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-03-15T17:54:23.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6591" CreationDate="2015-03-10T15:15:52.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The banner you see is the one that appears when a question has been &quot;protected&quot;. The requirement is that you have 10 rep that was &lt;em&gt;earned on this site&lt;/em&gt;. That is, the association bonus is not counted toward that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T15:21:39.037" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T15:21:39.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2015-03-13T05:25:39.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I took the tour through my old answers and assigned qualities to every one of them as Chris suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I couldn't bring myself to assign a 5 to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of my answers, my scale is effectively one point shorter than his original scale, and I also deleted all of the answers I assigned 0 to except for those I couldn't because they were accepted answers, so that data point is also effectively worthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have 2, 116, 84, 132 and 12 answers in the quality categories 0-4, in ascending order, with mean votes of 0, 3.6, 3.7, 5.2 and 4.0, respectively. I might have missed some answers when manually assigning quality scores, but not more than ten, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find no evident correlation at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdRRZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IFmTk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T05:25:39.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T05:39:20.723" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just joined a week ago and wondering how homework questions should be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is covered already but I noticed a sizeable amount of kids are getting sharp &quot;don't bother me&quot; type answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I would like to see them treated better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are thousands of kid friendly physics sites but they are on SE now and we have to deal with that fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions for one kid friendly page that provides links to more suitable sites for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this already exists but I can't find it. We  don't want to lose the next potential Dirac Einstein etc because of a sharp retort or curt reply from a busy lecturer or teacher. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure who will get this but could they tell me how SE deals with problems like this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74893" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-13T07:05:07.323" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T11:45:36.727" Title="Homework questions physics" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6594" CreationDate="2015-03-13T11:45:36.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To summarize the myriad of homework meta questions that dmckee linked to, as well as to editorialize a little, I think the issue that most of us have is with &lt;em&gt;no-effort&lt;/em&gt; homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a help page on the main Physics.SE site that includes an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;explanation of what's considered on topic&lt;/a&gt;.  That page briefly states that homework questions are off-topic, and then links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;this more detailed meta post&lt;/a&gt; about what constitutes an acceptable homework question. Also, when you create a Physics.SE account, you have the option to take a very brief tour of the site, and IIRC it at least covers that list of what is on topic.  As a result, if users aren't following the guidelines of what's on-topic, it's because they are ignoring information that was easily put in their reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe it or not, some of the best questions I've seen on this site have been tagged &quot;homework-and-exercises&quot;, but they need to be asked the right way.  In general, the two-prong test is that the question has to boil down to a specific conceptual question that would also be helpful to other uses, and the question has to include any attempted work.  However, there are a lot of questions on here where the question text is &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the homework question with &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; additional information or input from the user.  On the other hand, other askers will ask their question, and then punctuate it with a &quot;Due tomorrow&quot; or &quot;Show all work&quot;.  This isn't just oblivious to the rules of the site, it's selfish and imposing.  In the real world, all of these students will either continue in higher education or enter the world of work, and a life lesson that they should learn as soon as possible is that oftentimes, people want to help you (otherwise we wouldn't answer questions on here in the first place) but you have to be willing to put in the work yourself.  The reality, it's academically dishonest for us to just do a kid's homework for him, who will no doubt claim it as his/her own.  Additionally, students will likely get more out of the process of asking a question if they first spend some time analyzing what exactly they aren't understanding about a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr:  We welcome good homework questions here, but they have to follow certain guidelines, both for the good of the community and the OP.  We hope you stick around to contribute to the site, but hopefully the more truly atrocious homework questions you see, the more you'll understand why there have to be guidelines in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60201" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T11:45:36.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T21:26:33.360" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/168649/&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; on Phys.SE and the question was closed as off-topic. As a matter of fact I did a mistake when selecting the tags, since I used the homework tag. When I realized that I did a mistake I modified the tag, however the question was closed as off-topic. I really would get an answer to my question, so have I to post the question once more ? Why it wasn't enough to modify the tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74669" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T12:38:06.103" Title="Off-topic question" Tags="|support|scope|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6596" CreationDate="2015-03-13T22:19:35.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question appears to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/520&quot;&gt;fit within the definition of homework-like&lt;/a&gt; used on the site, the tag should be applied and the question (in its current state) should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the question I've just linked you to and at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;the one linked in the close message&lt;/a&gt;, you may find some guidance for render your question into a form suitable for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the sophistication of the work you exhibit I would be unsurprised if you were able to retool to a question we'd accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T00:01:35.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-15T07:13:54.690" Score="-4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say that we have a user who has insufficient amount of reputation so as to put a bounty . Can we have a system or what are the pros and cons of a system which facilitates borrowing and lending of reputation ? The lenders of reputation can be repaid in a certain fixed time interval by the burrower . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73927" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T07:49:55.120" Title="Reputation Banking" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6598" CreationDate="2015-03-15T07:49:55.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;People &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; lend rep at zero cost to you. You don't even have to pay them back. How cool is that!  If someone likes your question, they can set a bounty on your question. What you cannot do is &lt;em&gt;request&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;negotiate&lt;/em&gt; for someone to put a bounty on your question. And that is intentional. We don't want people trying to negotiate for other people's rep points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need 75 points to set bounties. 2 answers with 4 upvotes gets you 80 points. 3 questions with 5 upvotes gets you 75 points. I think any user with enough useful knowledge to contribute to the site can put in a little effort an earn the reputation to be able to set bounties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need a quick answer and it's your first time using the site, you may think bounties are some fast way to encourage a response. But it's not like bounties have some elite status or something. A bounty is just an extra incentive to answer, but many people answer questions just because they are interested in the topic, or they like to answer, or many reasons not related to earning points. So really you don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; a bounty in order to get a good response. That's why SE is awesome. Anyone can ask and answer without having rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66165" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T07:49:55.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6601" CreationDate="2015-03-15T08:04:19.140" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spend most of my time on my mobile and do most of my SE stuff on it. I chat, I ask, I comment -- all of it on my mobile. But when I try to decide whether to ask or answer a question, I unfortunately don't have any way on my mobile to see if there are related questions already on SE. Sure I can google, but this is unreasonable for a variety of reasons (e.g. if I've typed something in an answer box in chrome and change to a tab google, what I typed often gets deleted when I return because the tab refreshes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so it would really be convenient if I could have access to the related question information on my mobile. sure it might have to be fitted for mobile format but I think that would be really helpful. Then if a question exists with an answer, I don't have to ask it. I also can avoid answering one if I knew the question already had an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66165" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T14:30:01.740" Title="can we get some mobile version of the related questions box / panel that I find on SE on my laptop web browser?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6600" CreationDate="2015-03-15T14:30:01.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regards to the mobile site (via the browser), &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240733/why-arent-related-questions-shown-on-the-mobile-interface&quot;&gt;the &quot;official&quot; answer is&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't really see us adding lists of questions to the mobile web views at this point since they'd come off largely too cluttered, and the views aren't designed to fully mimic the desktop version in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, in the comments, it is suggested that there &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be a link for it, but no such designs have come through (otherwise you'd not be asking ;) ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the app interface, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/246153/related-questions-when-asking&quot;&gt;this one was asked and the answer&lt;/a&gt; (via comments) is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It doesn't exist today but it's a good idea. I don't think the API has an endpoint for it yet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically it seems you are out of luck at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T14:30:01.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-15T17:01:01.760" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;This a soft question and I can try the chat rooms with it, if that's the consensus for the best place to discuss it. Comments from previous questions I have asked could also sort it out for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I post an answer to an OP saying &quot;your problem is currently impossible to answer because we have not yet been able to directly test our theory&quot;, is that &lt;strong&gt;in purely formal terms&lt;/strong&gt; a more correct answer than &quot;YES/NO&quot; based on pure theory. If you look at the fairly straightforward &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170502/will-an-object-always-fall-at-an-infinite-speed-in-a-black-hole/170504#170504&quot;&gt;Object Falling At Infinite Speed&lt;/a&gt;, you might see what I am getting at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you understand my motivation here, I really do accept that GPS use, Hulse Taylor, Gravity Probe B etc.. all support G.R.) I also accept that the other answer in the link given above is 99.99999.....% probably correct. But we still have not done a direct test to confirm or refute the particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely self study and I don't have any formal background so I don't know much about how the formal science systems works. My motivation for this question is purely to learn more in order to better phrase future questions and answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74893" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T14:32:26.640" Title="How To Improve Questions and Answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6602" CreationDate="2015-03-15T18:10:35.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;the most effective way is to present the theory and brief outline of the experimental evidence supporting it if appropriate (and if its that type of question, rather than nuts and bolts definite physical problem). Actually, thinking about it, the key concept is &quot;useful answer&quot; more than anything else, i'm bit slow on the uptake there but that settles it for me question answered  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74893" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T18:10:35.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6602" CreationDate="2015-03-16T09:36:50.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key point about an answer is that it should be useful and informative, not only for the person asking the question but for anyone else interested enough to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the question you link as an example. The tone of the question suggests the OP has learned some facts about black holes (I would from popular science books/TV programmes) but doesn't have any real knowledge of general relativity. My aim when answering was to answer the question, but also try and explain why we get that answer and explain some of the background. The idea is that anyone reading my answer will leave feeling wiser. Actually I'm not sure I've really achieved this since I did kind of just trot out some formulae and graph them - I really must go back to the answer and add more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to just say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nobody, not the best people we have, nobody, knows what goes on inside a black hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is massively unhelpful. It's true that we don't have a nearby black hole to do experiments on, so all our theories are just theories. However there are lots of tests of GR and it's well enough establshed that we ca feel confident about using it to make predictions (like the graphs I drew). It's also true that the region of spacetime inside the event horizon is causally disconnected from the region outside, so we'll never have experimental tests of what happens inside it. But we have coordinate systems that cross the event horizon smoothly so (apart from the wilder excesses of string theorists) there is no reason to suppose that general relativity stops working at the event horizon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer had said &lt;em&gt;we don't know&lt;/em&gt;, but then gone on to make the points I've raised above then it would be a reasonable answer but still less informative than it could be. As it is, your answer is true but leaves the reader no better off for having read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a satisfaction in having learned and/or understood something that was new and opaque. Everyone feels this, not just us nerds, which is how the Discovery Channel makes its money. A good answer on this site should fulfill this need - hopefully more rigorously than the Discovery Channel does. Admittedly, many readers will simply take away a new &quot;gee whizz it's like magic&quot; fact to impress their friends with, and I have no problem with that. But maybe a few readers will have a genuine interest sparked, and even one day become physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T09:36:50.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6608" CreationDate="2015-03-17T13:56:17.720" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it happens that you answer a particular question (or set of related questions) that ends up creating in the OP the impression that you have become their personal tutor, and they ask for your email address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few approaches one can use: ignore, be rude, be polite, give in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lean towards &quot;be polite but say no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a site policy I could point to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T15:00:17.570" Title="How to handle request for email address" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6607" CreationDate="2015-03-17T14:34:29.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138788/can-i-give-my-email-id-in-reply-to-user-comment&quot;&gt;This Mother Meta post&lt;/a&gt; says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; give it if you are so inclined, but by no means you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's highly unorthodox to ask for someone's E-Mail address, and often it's to bug you for free one-on-one support. Which you are absolutely not obliged to give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's basically your choice to do that, there isn't a rule forbidding or forcing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not want to give out your email, then I would err on the side of caution and politely respond with something like, &lt;em&gt;I would rather not give out my personal email address, but if you do have further questions, go ahead and post it here, where I, and others, will be able to see it and answer you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to point out that some of us do include our email addresses in the &lt;code&gt;About Me&lt;/code&gt; section of the profile page. I have included mine there since I signed up almost 2 years ago and I think it's been used by a grand total of 4 users (on 8-10 emails, none of which were actually homework related, just side discussions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T15:00:17.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T10:15:42.753" Score="3" ViewCount="616" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you know the package physics in LaTeX but it is a really good one especially if one writes something about physics. e.g. I hate writing &lt;code&gt;|\Psi\rangle\&lt;/code&gt; which is as simple as &lt;code&gt;\ket(\Psi)&lt;/code&gt; in this package or &lt;code&gt;\left( \right)&lt;/code&gt; which is just &lt;code&gt;\qty()&lt;/code&gt;. I know that we are using MathJax and not LaTeX while rendering stuff in the answers or questions but I thought that it would be good to give it a shot if it is at all possible to implement these features in MathJax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68030" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T11:57:08.600" Title="Is it possible to implement the physics package of latex into mathjax?" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2015-03-18T11:57:08.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably technically &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt;, but nobody has bothered to do so yet because it would (presumably) be quite difficult. But all it really needs is for someone to undertake the work of porting the package, and then to convince either the SE dev team or the MathJax developers to include it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T11:57:08.600" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T21:11:01.877" Score="2" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of us have, to some degree, experienced an antagonistic situation in which we feel our answer was harshly criticized or in which we are charged with unfair criticism of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, these situations rapidly escalate, and despite knowing that I shouldn't, I've been drawn into destructive exchanges in these situations. In these instances, I've been slightly disappointed by my own behaviour and come away irritated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered whether there was a code of conduct or a policy in these situations? If not, I propose the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel someone's comment on your answer was inappropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the comment is bigoted, slanderous, or otherwise gratuitously offensive, report it and don't further engage with that user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-read the comment - was it so bad? Did the commenter address a problem with your answer? If so, ignoring the provocative nature of the comment, politely respond.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the user persists in making comments that you feel are offensive or provocative, stop interacting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might feel irritated that unfounded objections in a comment are there for all to see, but a competent physicist will see beyond those comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone's feels your comment on an answer was inappropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-read your comment. Was it unnecessarily rude or provocative? If so, amend or delete the comment. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you feel the comment was reasonable, don't escalate or write further comments. You've raised your objection to the answer - your warning will be seen. There is no merit in a further series of destructive comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the offender user persists in contacting you, ignore them and/or report the behaviour to a moderator.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, this can be my personal code of conduct. If I followed it in the past, I think it would have avoided unpleasant situations. This isn't the final word on this topic; I'm sure there may be many helpful alterations and additions to my rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T04:52:49.320" Title="Policy on disagreements about &quot;harsh&quot; critiscism?" Tags="|discussion|comments|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-03-19T14:36:14.310" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Rennie, the first disciple of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1325/john-rennie&quot;&gt;the one and only&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:27:50.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6589" CreationDate="2015-03-19T19:42:45.133" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the story is both more complicated and more simple, and it helps to look at questions and answers separately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/re5UV.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The superimposed curves are very strongly smoothed versions of the data, using a cubic smoothing spline (Matlab's &lt;code&gt;csaps&lt;/code&gt; with parameter p = 0.1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this, with increasing reputation a user has more and more questions, but at some point (about 2000) this increase levels off towards about 10 questions. The smoothed curve is not a particularly good description of the data though. (I'm ignoring the little dip for reputation &amp;lt; 3, which is driven by users with 1 reputation and several questions. Similar for answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For answers vs reputation, the initial increase is similar, but instead of leveling off it becomes a linear relationship in the log-log plot, which implies a power law behavior. The exponent is about 1.11, which means the increase is only slightly faster than linear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparison of the two smooth curves suggests that increase in Reputation is more driven by questions for small reputation, but more driven by answers for high Reputation, with a crossing point at about 370 Reputation and 4.5 both Questions and Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the picture when looking at questions/answers vs reputation. Until a reputation of about 100, the ratio increases slowly up to a value of 1.4, and then decreases faster and faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;third population&quot; speculated about in the comments might appear due to the fact that both the number of Questions and the number of answers vary wildly in the &quot;medium&quot; range of Reputation around 1000. It would be interesting to see whether these relations observed across users also describe the evolution of users over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this suggests that the number of answers alone is a better match for reputation that the ratio questions/answers, since the smoothed relationship is  monotonous starting from a reputation of about 8.5, i.e. across 94% of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37612" LastEditorUserId="37612" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T19:52:07.103" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T19:52:07.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6611" CreationDate="2015-03-20T04:52:49.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a policy (of sorts), namely the one from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.) For convenience, I'll repeat (quote) the main points from those pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rudeness and belittling language are not okay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't be a jerk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's really a need to make an &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; policy on this. But guidance on specific ways to avoid breaking the policy (or the spirit of the policy) probably couldn't hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T04:52:49.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T06:07:33.360" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a button to find the most voted questions, is there a way to find the most voted answers?&#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user75736" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2015-03-25T09:13:22.697" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T09:08:15.947" Title="Is it possible to find the most voted answers?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T08:30:46.043" Score="-5" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because when it comes to real practical advice on specialist experimental techniques I may as well be talking to myself. It seems to be singularly useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T11:55:48.077" Title="Is this about Physics, or just theoretical armchair physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6616" CreationDate="2015-03-20T11:31:22.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite easily with data.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've composed a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/291096/highest-voted-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;query here&lt;/a&gt; for you (and others interested I suppose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can enter in the number of answers you want returned with the numAnswers variable. For example, numAnswers=10 will give you the top 10 highest voted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also switch the site to query so you can find the top answers on whichever site you like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T11:31:22.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6617" CreationDate="2015-03-20T11:49:52.947" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's always amusing when (insert branch of physics here) complains about how few (insert branch of physics here) experts there are and we're just overrun with (insert opposite branch of physics here) questions/people. The theoretical folks complain(ed) all the time there was too much applied physics and not enough theory. The people who want homework help complain there is too much advanced physics. Experimentalists complain there's too much theoretical physics. Maybe if I get motivated, I'll go through meta in the past 2 years and pull together all the various times this comes up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'll address the idea you are raising rather than the (albeit mild-mannered) rant in the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are disappointingly few experimental physicists on the site. And many experimental questions go unanswered or get threatened with close reasons as being too engineering, or not about physics, or whatever by people who don't conduct experiments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate for sure, &lt;strong&gt;but we want experimental physics questions just as much as other areas&lt;/strong&gt;. We simply don't have the people here yet in a critical mass to make it work well. We have the tags for it, we have a few people excited to answer questions about it, but it also has to be questions about experiments we can answer. I would love to answer questions about experiments in fluids (analyzing results, measurement techniques, etc) but I would be completely useless to answer particle physics experiment questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are two things that people who want to discuss experimental work should do. First, &lt;strong&gt;get other people who conduct experiments involved&lt;/strong&gt;. If you are actually conducting experiments, odds are good that you have colleagues you share lab space/equipment with. &lt;strong&gt;Get them on the site too&lt;/strong&gt; so that way we start building an experimental sub-community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, the second thing you can do is be proactive in defending your question and make sure you include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-physics&lt;/a&gt; on it. Don't say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What kind of filter should I use to record XXXnm wavelengths?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and leave it at that. Because to many people, that would be off topic (and to the rest of us, a poor question). Instead, say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am designing an experiment to measure Y under conditions X. I know it radiates at A, B, C frequencies and I want to capture phenomenon D which occurs primarily at wavelength XXXnm. How do I set up my camera to record this?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because then it clearly communicates that you're looking for an answer to a physics experiment and not just trying to come up with some new app that's a &lt;em&gt;Instagram-Clash of Clans-selfie stick&lt;/em&gt; integration tool (this post hereby counts as me establishing priority for copyright on such a tool!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It opens up some good avenues of discussion because experts can give advice on the experiment overall -- maybe there's better ways to set it up or other things to consider (like maybe all the glass in the world happens to filter that particular wavelength and you need to do something special). And experimentalists who are researching how to conduct similar work can find the answer here and say &quot;Wow, a place to ask/answer experimental questions? Awesome!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having an awesome repository of questions and answers is what draws theoretical (and for better or worse, homework) questions and experts, so let's build up the same repository for experimental ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2015-03-20T11:55:48.077" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T11:55:48.077" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6622" CreationDate="2015-03-23T05:31:18.480" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;My brother has opened an account at this wonderful site, I heard it is allowed to have different accounts, as long as you do not interact and do not upvote each other.&#xA;Can you confirm this is perfectly OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, so can you tell me how to log out? I can't find a button&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user75736" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T07:15:39.773" Title="How can I log out?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6623" CreationDate="2015-03-23T06:18:07.937" Score="3" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got a -70, yesterday. I had looked at all the answers previously because the count was way over the average. In all those answers I had been getting negative votes. So it was somebody agreeing with my point of view to mitigate the negatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this happen with negative votes too? It is checked when somebody votes in a series for or against a person? what are the parameters? within a day? an hour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I do not mind , and it is reasonable that I will get negative votes if people do not agree with my statements, though I do look at downvotes in case I have made a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user who is not so often present now, would, it seems,  downvote any answer of mine , as some matter of principle, so I wonder how the check is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T09:16:43.297" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T07:40:48.427" Title="Serial up- or down-voting reversed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6620" CreationDate="2015-03-23T07:15:39.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having two accounts from the same household is fine. In fact, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; vote on each other's posts if you come across them, but you should be sure to vote only based on content, not based on who made the post. And you shouldn't intentionally look for each other's posts. This is covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/175374/what-is-the-procedure-for-having-my-spouse-significant-other-as-a-member-of-the&quot;&gt;What is the procedure for having my spouse/significant other as a member of the same SE site?&lt;/a&gt; If you're worried about being impartial, then just don't vote on each other's posts at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, even one person &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; have multiple accounts. In this case the connection should probably be disclosed, and the accounts most certainly should not vote for each other. I've seen this done where, for instance, a high-rep user or moderator wants a less-privileged account to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; edits or closures, rather than &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for logging out, look to the top bar, on the left:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dmDMi.png&quot; alt=&quot;first click&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a logout option in the menu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLcvg.png&quot; alt=&quot;second click&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T07:15:39.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2015-03-23T09:33:27.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Qmechanic said, the precise parameters are not known, for good reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;more or less&quot; description is that if you get too many downvotes/upvotes in a short time span, then the system will recognise those and revert them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reverts abusive negative voting, such as people downvoting you because they don't like &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (rather than your posts), but also the upvoting, which would happen for example if a friend or someone else upvoted your posts regardless of the merits in the individual answers/questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, don't worry about it, the system will revert it by itself. If it fails to do so, then flag one of your posts using the custom reason and state your concern. If needed, moderators can ask the CM, i.e. the developers, to manually invalidate the voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;Why do I have a reputation change on my reputation page that says &quot;serial upvoting/downvoting reversed&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;em&gt;Reputation &amp;amp; Moderation&lt;/em&gt; in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8966" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T07:31:25.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6621" CreationDate="2015-03-23T10:28:03.123" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new here (and enthusiast), and I do not know if that refers to me, but I am asking anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am exploring the site: in all Q&amp;amp;A sites you have favourites, not posts, but users. &lt;strong&gt;This is very useful&lt;/strong&gt;, you surely know: if you appreciate some subject or the way somebody replies, you are informed of the new answer , you can send them a PM , etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, like every new member I suppose, have been impressed by the quality an clarity of some members: John Rennie, Lubos Motl, AnnaV, Rob Jeffries etc., usually I vote a good post, go to the profile, and explore the answers I like. I know you must vote the post and not the person, but I do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; vote all posts, just the ones I like. What is wrong with that? Why should one vote one post, wait for an hour and come back to read another? That would make life very complicated, wouldn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that I noticed some posts scoring less than -1, which I found interesting, and I thought that it's inappropriate to humiliate a scientist and a lady with more than one negative vote. -1 would alert readers that someone disagrees and thinks you should take it with a pinch of salt, but that's all! am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But.. I am sure that I upvoted many more posts by John Rennie than by Anna and those votes, surely double have not been reversed, so I think the program must be faulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember which posts I voted, and of course in a few weeks it will be absolutely impossible. I wonder what happens if by chance I should vote again a post that has been reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I am asking if it is a problem to vote (deliberately or not) again a post on which a vote has been reverses. Of course now I'll vote a post after an hour or so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I am sorry if I was not clear or if I have been misunderstood, I'll try to express a few opinions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a pity one cannot have favorites (persons) and follow as one likes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not see the reason to give &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15443/do-we-need-maxwells-equations-since-they-fail-to-account-for-an-experimental-fa&quot;&gt;a question*&lt;/a&gt; 16 negative votes. This is in itself an exaggeration, I think, but that becomes absurd when the answer gets 27 positive votes. So, the question was not so not-useful/stupid, after all? And if it was stupid, how stupid can a question get? A proverb tells: &quot;&lt;em&gt;the only stupid question is the one you never asked&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Again, I think, and I may be wrong or you may disagree, I think that is a superfluous humiliation &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can find an answer interesting even if, for an expert or a specialist, it has some minor or major mistake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vote-reversing system is an illusion, because naive voters like me are checked, while voters in ill-faith know how to elude the program, voting after some time or I do not know when/how. I hope this is clear and that can be agreed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In other sites there is a list of well-defined rules, if I have overlooked it , tell me where it is , if there is not, it should be made so that newcomers can know exactly what to do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks, you have been very helpful and understanding!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it was recommended in a comment, I'll post some remarks as a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user75736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user75736" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T07:40:48.427" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-24T06:13:57.520" Score="12" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170230/how-to-use-the-born-rule-to-find-the-expected-outcome-of-this-simple-stern-gerla&quot;&gt;&quot;How to use the born rule to find...&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and it was closed for being a homework-like question. Now this was not a homework question. It's also not the case that I am lazy. I own multiple QM texts and have read through them trying to figure out how to solve these kinds of problems. I've also gone through physics grad school and I never learned how to solve these kinds of problems, which is surprising because of how simple they are. I suspect you do learn how to solve these kinds of problems if you go into certain fields like QM information. But in any case I think it is true that nowhere do typical QM texts cover how to answer these kinds particular kinds of problems. This feels like a very frustrating catch-22. Also, to make it even clearer that this was not a homework question, it was a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/169939/looking-for-a-simple-example-of-generating-unequal-probabilities-in-qm&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me how I can re-word the question? I thought I was being helpful by drawing a diagram and making a specific example that was complex enough to capture the salient points of how to solve these kinds of problems, but I realize that kind of specificity may make it look like a homework problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T19:40:48.370" Title="I asked a non-homework question that was closed for being homework. How do I re-word it?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6625" CreationDate="2015-03-24T07:02:00.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few different reasons this can happen, but in this case, your best bet is probably to follow the same advice we give to askers of homework-like questions: show what you've tried and change the question to ask about the specific physics concept that you're confused about as you try to work through the problem yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that our &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; is called a homework policy, the recommendations we give there are not so different from the expectations we have of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T07:02:00.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-24T13:08:56.127" Score="7" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last couple of weeks, once in a while, MathJax has not rendered on my system (OS X).  In both Chrome and Firefox I see the markup rather than the rendered equations.  Is this a problem of my system, and if so is there a fix?  Or does the problem reside elsewhere, outside of my control?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five hours after my OP, things are working again.  Must be an issue elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="5739" LastEditDate="2015-03-24T18:48:32.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T09:38:53.757" Title="Sporadic MathJax failure" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-07-19T08:33:55.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6625" CreationDate="2015-03-24T19:40:48.370" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with that, that most of the homework questions have a very low quality, is asked by an unknown user who never gets again back. I think it would be very improductive to provide them essentially a free, unpaid problem solving service, despite I must mention: the math SE &lt;em&gt;does this&lt;/em&gt;, they solve nearly every question if its quality is enough to decipher them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem with such questions that they confront academian ethics. Many of the well-respected site users are educating undergrad physicsists as their daily job, and enforce their ethical system doing that. They surely won't take part its exact opposite as their hobby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite none of these problems are exactly mentioned in @DavidZ 's reasoing and his refered meta posts, I think these are the reasons why homework questions aren't really liked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site users don't have any opportunity to check if your question was a actually homework question, or only it looked as if it would be. Thus, the exact meaning of the &quot;homework questions policy&quot; is that &quot;homework-looking questions policy&quot;. Not the hw is forbid here, but asking questions looking hw questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After your question was closed, theoritally you could &quot;fix&quot; and reopen it. Practically, your chances are nearly negligible for that. And getting useful answers after that are doubly negligible, because most view hits the youngest questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the rules you confronted here, are relatively easily cheated. Most of the long-term close-voters here doing his task highly algorithmically, and most question &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be formulated to avoid their close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your place I did this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would read DavidZ's link, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; is how you shoud formulate your hw question to survive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I tried to edit and reopen the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After it doesn't happen, silently deleted the closed question,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And later I would ask this again, in a heavily transformed form, which avoids the rules of the close-voters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T19:40:48.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6627" CreationDate="2015-03-24T20:22:57.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2015/03/30&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/f0nt7qzwln27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CloudFlare reports&lt;/a&gt; that the issues have been resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter from the MathJax team here. Our CDN provider has been experiencing attacks on some of its DNS servers (see also this &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mathjax-users/kR6qnNLoiIA/79IfdXOpVbIJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thread on the MathJax User Group&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This attack leads to erratic DNS resolution failures. We're sorry for the inconvenience this is causing users and we'll send out an update as soon as we get any news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16085" LastEditorUserId="16085" LastEditDate="2015-03-30T09:38:53.757" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T09:38:53.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-25T08:46:44.063" Score="15" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;During yesterday's Physics Chat we had an, erm, lively &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=20716748#20716748&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; about the evergreen subject of homework questions, and I think we reached as near a consensus as a motley crew of physics nerds is ever likely to achieve. I thought it would be worth posting (what I think is) the consensus view here in case anyone who missed that chat wants to comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who just wants to get on with their lives the tl;dr version is &quot;no change&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key concern everyone has is that once students get the idea they can post homework here and get answers we'll be swamped by homework questions. All the interesting questions will be lost in the flood and all the most active answerers will get bored and leave. And that will be the end of the site as a useful and authoritative source for physics. We all agree this is a &lt;strong&gt;bad thing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, many (not all) of us feel that where a student is showing some effort it would be nice to post an answer giving hints and discussing the concepts involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that if a homework question is not closed immediately someone will give the sort of explicit answer we want to discourage. Once this happens it doesn't matter if the question is subsequently closed, because the student will have the answer they want and we'll have exactly the problem we started with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there really isn't any alternative to closing homework questions ASAP. This doesn't mean we're being nasty and unhelpful, it's just the only way to avoid us turning into yet another homework help site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of us have an unofficial strategy of voting to close homework questions then providing hints as comments. This doesn't seem an ideal solution to me, but it's probably the best solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has views on the above I'd like to hear them, but please bear in mind the subject &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=homework&quot;&gt;has been discussed to death&lt;/a&gt;, so please only post if you have a point that hasn't been raised in any of the previous discussions of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T14:49:55.720" Title="Homework - the view from the chat session" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6616" CreationDate="2015-03-25T09:13:09.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use search for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aanswer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more help on the search operators in the search page (click on &quot;Advanced Search&quot;) or in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T09:08:15.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6635" CreationDate="2015-03-25T17:55:57.327" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2597/10968&quot;&gt;2-year old meta post here&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems most of the answers saying that it should be on-topic (as theoretical physics) as science should answer non-mainstream questions to avoid censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it's still not clear for me and I know that there was some long debate on this and many people left.&#xA;So to simplify this, what's the current status of this topic on this site? If not, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10968" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T21:05:13.123" Title="Are cold fusion questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6634" CreationDate="2015-03-25T21:05:13.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cold fusion, to my knowledge, is and should not be treated differently than any other topic on the &quot;fringe&quot; of mainstream science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/50583&quot;&gt;questions about non-mainstream science are off-topic&lt;/a&gt;. It should be stressed that this does not imply that non-mainstream theories are entirely without merit (though they very often are), it merely says that &lt;em&gt;we as a community&lt;/em&gt; do not want to have such debates on this site, as they are contrary to the Q&amp;amp;A formula of SE sites where it is expected that question have at least one correct answer based in currently accepeted expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, asking whether X is possible within currently accepted physical theories, or what things forbid X from happening is on-topic. Presenting your own personal theory about X and asking for comments is off-topic, as well as questions asked in bad faith where it is evident that the asker will just keep moving the goalposts so that no answer is ever satisfactory, as well as questions of the kind &lt;em&gt;&quot;Isn't physics wrong about X?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter what kind of &quot;non-mainstream&quot; science X is here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T21:05:13.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6637" CreationDate="2015-03-26T17:32:17.327" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I edit my own questions and answers for example, give the symbols for pi, integration, and draw diagrams&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75397" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-03-26T18:16:35.737" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T18:16:35.737" Title="How can I edit my own questions and answers?" Tags="|support|editing|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2015-03-26T17:55:54.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;the Notation page&lt;/a&gt;. It provides a mini-tutorial on the use of inline equations and centered equations. For pi, you want \pi and for integrals, you want \int (I'd wrap those with $ to start MathJax, but it is not enabled on Meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, there is no method to draw figures via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.texample.net/tikz/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tikz&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Importing_Graphics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;\includegraphics&lt;/a&gt; in the normal Latex methods. However, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/formatting&quot;&gt;button to include the graphics&lt;/a&gt; (circled below):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8zcSs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which can be used to pull an image from a website or from your computer. Also sadly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6446/centering-a-picture/6447#6447&quot;&gt;there is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an easy way to center the image&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T17:55:54.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-27T18:24:40.560" Score="-2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point on the idea of question as a knowledge resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has come to my knowledge that understanding a subject, especially Physics, requires experience with as many questions as possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading many solutions of expert members of the Physics site may indeed help many students to understand Physics better.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that each person may contribute its own point of view and &lt;em&gt;technique&lt;/em&gt; for solving a problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the policy that I experienced on this site actually discourages questions as such:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Many of my questions have 0 (zero) votes, therefore I received a warning that alerts me from asking more questions (which would probably get 0 votes, due to their 'homework' classification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By changing the policy and gaining questions, students will be able to understand physics merely by reading Q&amp;amp;A on SE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer to &quot;&lt;strong&gt;dmckee&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; which is relevant for everyone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, essentially, you are correct! I think so too: &#xA;A student must make an effort to solve a question - this is exactly what I do for each homework question that I receive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though what happens when you're stuck on a question for 2 hours? 4 hours? Gave it another try in the following day? Tried every possible way that you can think of?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Eventually there's a deadline for every exercise, thus time is priceless - therefore a solution is needful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31746" LastEditorUserId="31746" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T21:43:27.673" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T21:43:27.673" Title="Homework questions as a knowledge resource" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6639" CreationDate="2015-03-27T18:51:40.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pedagogical research is very firm on this. Seeing someone's solution or even watching them solve questions and explain what they are thinking as they do it is a very inefficient way to learn physics. And yes, I know that you are convinced otherwise. All students are convinced otherwise. I was convinced otherwise. I was also wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the pedagogical research suggest &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; work is understanding concepts and placing them in a correct framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is that the homework policy we thrashed out is actually also about the most pedagogically sound one we could have come to. If you are stuck reduce your perplexity to a &lt;em&gt;conceptual question&lt;/em&gt; and ask that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T19:03:29.053" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T19:03:29.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-28T06:51:42.520" Score="-3" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are over 6,500 questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=noanswers&quot;&gt;no answer&lt;/a&gt; here, and over 8,000 practically unanswered. I tried one, but I have seen that nobody even takes a look at old questions. Do you know why? How does the date influence the usefulness of a question/answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have an interest that most questions be properly answered, here? Why should one waste time answering an old question if he knows that, if he is lucky, he will get one vote and is sure that, even if his answer is right, he has no chance of seeing it accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At other sites questions with no accept are awarded by the community, when the OP can't be bothered to accept an answer other members decide the accept. Old-question OP's here are usually long inactive, do you know why isn't that policy followed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had prepared some data, but I realized that probably you are right, I am in the wrong site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user76031" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user76031" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T04:57:36.973" Title="Why should one answer a no-answer question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2015-03-28T07:03:01.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you know why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because each person can only look at so many questions, and people generally tend to look at the questions with recent activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the date influence the usefulness of a question/answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably after some time the question is no longer useful to the original poster (although this is not guaranteed). But it can still be useful to other people. I often look at old questions in the course of my research, or while answering new questions, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have no interest that most questions be properly answered, here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly not the case. We would like as many questions to be answered (well) as possible. Old, new, it makes no difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why should one waste time answering an old question if he knows that , if he is lucky, he will get one vote and is sure that, even if his answer is right, he has no chance of seeing it accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Waste&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you justify the conclusion that you will get one vote if you're lucky? If your answer is good, it will probably get a few votes. The age of the question has little to do with this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you consider it a waste of time to answer a question unless that answer will get accepted, then you're probably here for the wrong reasons. This site is not meant for people who want validation. It is meant for people who want to share knowledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At other sites questions with no accept are awarded by the community, why is not that policy implemented here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you mean. The top position in the answer list is automatically given to the answer with the highest vote total - that is, the one that the community thinks is best - unless the question asker overrides that by accepting another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T07:03:01.387" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2015-03-28T18:46:22.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;DavidZ and other mods/higher-rep guys are better placed than me to provide an appropriate answer to your first two paragraphs. But I want to make a small point concerning the feasibility of the last part of your question, namely &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... when the OP can't be bothered to accept an answer other members decide the accept ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to draw your attention towards the fact that there is a message that prompts up when you bring your cursor near the 'accept' mark in an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aSWcP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Accept Message&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparison, if you bring it close to the upvote arrow, the message reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHgnn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Upvote Message&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly therefore, the scope of an 'upvote' is different from that of 'accept'. If I am not the OP (asker), and I upvote an answer, it only means that I found the answer useful (or informative, or that I learned something from this). But only the OP can tell whether or not it solved his/her problem, and addressed everything he/she wanted addressed, up to his/her complete satisfaction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, no one other than the OP can, in principle, &quot;decide the accept&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T18:46:22.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2015-03-28T19:13:44.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I remembered having seen some discussion of this. It's in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/780/vote-to-answer&quot;&gt;vote to answer?&lt;/a&gt;, though that's not a very search friendly title so no surprise it took me some time to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a read through dmckee's answer to this question, and in particular follow the links to the mother meta. Although there has never been a definitive statement by the Stack Exchange team they have not implemented a &lt;em&gt;community accept&lt;/em&gt; feature despite numerous highly upvoted pleas for one. This suggests it's not a feature they regard as a priority. Maybe it will be implemented one day, though I wouldn't hold your breath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time note that answering an old question will bump the question up the rankings, though I don't know how big an effect this is. Answers to old questions also show in the review queue for users with enough rep, and I do upvote any such answers I consider good (though sadly many answers to old questions are, well, rubbish). The upvotes boost the question rankings and further enhance the visibility of your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a Necromancer badge for answering a question more than 60 days old, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/44/necromancer&quot;&gt;475 of these badges have been awarded&lt;/a&gt;. So not only is there considerable activity in the answering of old questions, but since award of the badge requires at least 5 upvotes there is clearly considerable rewards to be had by doing so. On a side note I note that both David and myself, arch villains though we may be, both have the Necromancer badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly, I think we need to distinguish between questions that have no answer and questions that have answers but no accepted answer. The latter normally means the OP is AWOL or just doesn't care, and in these cases there is little we can do. While the OCD side of me deplores perfectly good answers being left unaccepted this doesn't lessen the value of the site to the physics community. Accepting an answer doesn't mean it's right - it just means the OP thought that was the most helpful answer. A more reliable guide is the number of upvotes the answer has attracted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question has no answers that probably means either the question is really hard or that it's really uninteresting. Anyone giving a good answer to an old hard question is likely to find themselves amply rewarded (as the number of Necromancer badges shows). Conversely, if the question is uninteresting it's likely your answer will be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T19:13:44.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6646" CreationDate="2015-03-29T02:03:21.263" Score="9" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;HT to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/24653/danu&quot;&gt;Danu&lt;/a&gt; on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there was this recent post inquiring about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6641/&quot;&gt;answering 0-answer questions&lt;/a&gt; in which a comment read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not evident that votes on answers to old questions are fewer than on new ones&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, elsewhere on the site, it was mentioned that late answers are typically either really amazing or really bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are either of these statements true? Do older questions get fewer votes? Is there a bi-modality of score in late answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T21:30:44.047" Title="Age - Score Relation" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6645" CreationDate="2015-03-29T02:08:44.407" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Are there fewer votes on old answers?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/293815/age-score-correlation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my recent Data Query &lt;em&gt;Age-Score correlation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I gathered the average net scores of answers as a function of the number of days between the answer posting date and the question posting date. The figure below&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; shows the result of the query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JL9WV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a slope at the early part (t ~&amp;lt; 200), suggesting that the most upvotes come when the answer is posted nearest to when the question is posted (which makes sense, especially when thinking about the Hot Network Question Effect). There is also a relatively flat net &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; score for t &amp;gt;~ 200, with obvious outliers all  over the place&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zooming in to the  -5 &amp;lt; y &amp;lt; 5 range, we see a rather vacuous region that I can only presume is populated by those who have deleted their answer after a few negative votes early on&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, while the bottom right is populated by those who've likely left one crack-pot answer &amp;amp; never came back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/93WR5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring back to either figure, we can see the long &amp;quot;stripes&amp;quot; appearing in the data. This is due to the fact that there are fewer answers that are also down/upvoted less than early on. &lt;strong&gt;So this appears to me that there &lt;em&gt;are indeed&lt;/em&gt; fewer votes for older answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Are the Late Answers either really bad or really good?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a 300 day delay between Q &amp;amp; A, there are a grand total of 633 answers with a net positive score, 158 with a net negative score and 498 answers with zero score. Those nonzero scores drop to 385 answers with &amp;gt;= 1 and 77 with &amp;lt;= -1, leaving 329 mostly okay answers (that is, most of those remaining have a score between 0 and 1)--that's an 39.2% and 51.3% decrease in answer count, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that slightly more than half the Late Answers have a score &amp;gt; |1|. Those nonzero score counts decrease to 143 net positive and 26 net negative when using |Score|&amp;gt;2 as the metric (a 77% and 83% reduction). So it appears to me that there is no clear bimodality, based on the numbers&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the log of the delay between Q &amp;amp; A, we can see a slightly different picture (also using the -5 &amp;lt; y &amp;lt; +5 range):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSkv2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to suggest the same thing as above: there are lots of &amp;quot;just okay&amp;quot; answers, few really bad ones, and a fair number of really good ones. But since bad ones tend to get deleted, it's kinda hard (for me at least) to completely rule out a complete bimodality, so I'll say this one is &lt;strong&gt;plausible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I've posted my (really simple) Python script for plotting this on my&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kylekanos/Age-Score-Correlation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 The eye-catching (311,20) is entirely due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/14752/25301&quot;&gt;this post by Ron Maimon&lt;/a&gt;. You can easily (fork and) modify &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/293752/answers-to-old-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Data Query&lt;/a&gt; to catch for whatever &lt;code&gt;AnswerScore=N&lt;/code&gt; or age you want--be warned though, this can fail due to sheer volume of results. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 Though it seems strange that there are so few values close to 0 net upvotes in the t &amp;lt; 200 range &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4 Admittedly, we have some heavily downvoted Late Answers that are deleted and thus cannot be accounted for in this mini-study.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T21:30:44.047" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-30T05:53:20.063" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you tell me if it is allowed to borrow a diagram from another post in this site?&#xA;Is it necessary to cite both the source and the post from which it was borrowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user76123" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-03-31T05:52:49.443" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T16:23:20.490" Title="Borrowing images" Tags="|support|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6647" CreationDate="2015-03-30T06:13:49.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Answer updated by including Moderator inputs)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All user contributions on Physics.SE are licensed with the following stipulation, as may be seen from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; (Section 3), which specify the exact attribution requirements for reusing content outside of the Stack Exchange network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same may also be seen by scrolling to the bottom of this page, which is a mere reminder of the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, attribution is required, i.e. you should cite the source. Once you do that, reusing (&quot;borrowing&quot;) images is allowed, which is consistent with this site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;policy on plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, that's also true as a safe, general practice in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T16:23:20.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6650" CreationDate="2015-03-30T18:48:44.547" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a (for me) unusual spate of unpleasant back and forth with several users, I decided to delete an answer I wrote although it had a +11-1 vote count. However I am not seeing the negative impact on rep count that I was expecting. I just hit the rep cap for the day - which is why the timing of when the - 108 points would happen is of some interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I expect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T20:36:39.050" Title="Deleted question with positive score: when does my rep update" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6649" CreationDate="2015-03-30T20:30:16.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, it took me way too long to find this considering how simple it was. If you are logged in, visit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/reputation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it will update your reputation plus give you the actual info on how it is calculated. Waaaay down at the bottom is a summary of reputation changes. This should, hopefully, fix the caching issue and trigger the correct calculation of your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/236420/when-will-my-reputation-update&quot;&gt;on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt; which seems to indicate a bug existed ~8 months ago in the update script when users hit the rep cap and then lost some votes somewhere. The answer there says the bug is/was acknowledged but I haven't found whether it has been fixed or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If manually updating the reputation doesn't fix it, maybe there is still a problem somewhere and this needs to be escalated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's above my pay grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading into that mother meta question, particularly the comments under it, it seems that the manual refresh button was removed from that reputation page I gave and the only way to trigger a recalc (at that time) was to delete/undelete one of your own answers. Again, no idea if this bug is still around or not, but you could always give that a shot and see if things update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T20:36:39.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-31T05:14:20.887" Score="-2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted these question as an answer and probably is better to ask a new question:&#xA;Could you explain what is the sense of giving a post (question/answer) more than a couple of negative votes, if the purpose is only to alert the reader that that post is not particularly useful, or is incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the sense of giving &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15443/do-we-need-maxwells-equations-since-they-fail-to-account-for-an-experimental-fa&quot;&gt;a question*&lt;/a&gt; 16 negative votes. This is in itself an exaggeration, but that becomes incomprehensible when the answer gets 27 positive votes and makes the answerer ( I think a mod) earn a precious badge?. So, the question was not so &lt;em&gt;not-useful&lt;/em&gt;/stupid, after all? And if it was stupid, how stupid can a question get? A proverb tells: &quot;&lt;em&gt;the only stupid question is the one you never asked&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Again, I think, and I may be wrong or you may disagree, But, isn't that a superfluous humiliation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I see that since last week after my post, the negative votes have increased to 17, what is the sense of this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed, also, that a duplicate usually carries a negative vote: is it a shame in itself if one, without realizing, asks a question that has already asked? I have heard one should evaluate just &lt;em&gt;the post&lt;/em&gt;, its content, is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is, how can a post be worth -3 and its exact duplicate +8?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user75736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T17:55:50.817" Title="The policy of downvoting" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2015-03-31T13:09:45.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this post is just a pile of loaded questions meant to attempt to discredit our way of doing things here. Despite the glaring warning sign that I shouldn't, I'm going to attempt a response in case OP is actually genuine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only three points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The alt-text of the up/down votes say something like, &quot;This post is/isn't useful.&quot; So downvoting is a way to say the post is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; useful. If 20+ people think that the post you mention is not useful or shows no research effort, who are we to complain about it? It is &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; vote (See #2).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;em&gt;appropriate&lt;/em&gt; action (when finding heavily downvoted posts) would be to try cleaning up the text to make it more useful (e.g., make it less of a troll post)--but you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; respect the author and keep the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; intact while changing the body.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No matter how much you disagree with it, you cannot change our ways about how we will vote (there shouldn't be any  reason for you to &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; that we change to your whim anyways). We are &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; to vote entirely as we please, up or down and for whatever dumb reason we want (whether the post is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obvious troll being obvious&lt;/a&gt; or because we simply don't like the person).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(This one is a counter-point) There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=score%3A100&quot;&gt;many posts with greater than 100 votes&lt;/a&gt;. What is the point of that? Aren't the votes superfluous after only a few? What is the difference between +12 and +13 and +17? Why continue to upvote it up to &gt;100 after that? Why also bother upvoting other answers that are posted alongside the over-voted one, it's already got a good answer?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Seriously, why complain about downvotes when upvotes are equally as abused?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in short, the policy of downvoting is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;vote as you please and stop caring what other people think of it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T13:09:45.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2015-03-31T14:06:55.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit like a consensus poll. Some questions are really off the present day physics consensus, like perpetual motion proposals. If there are positive and negative votes in large numbers, as in your example, (+10/-27 at the moment) this  denotes either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a)that some wrong premises are used in the question , in this case ignoring the postulate of the lorenz transformation which in tandem with maxwell's equations have described all data up to now and hav great predictive power. The negatives are to emphasize this. The positives must be from students or people not very grounded in electrodynamics who have the same question as the questioner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b)Or sometimes it is completely a cranky theory somebody is advocating and the negatives emphasize this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The votes show a sample of how many people agree and how many disagree as a guide for the reader who found the question by googling, he/she  will be aware of the agreement or not with current physics concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense the large number of down votes are useful, because this is also a site where research type questions may be asked. These may get a few negatives because the subject is still open . These should be contrasted to what most physicists believe is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course physics is not done by consensus, but this site is for questions on current physics , not for proposing new untested or controversial subjects. There are other fora for publishing own research, apart of course of the usual peer reviewed journals; for example vixra.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T14:06:55.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2015-03-31T17:55:50.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few specifics: I agree that more than three downvotes has no function. I also agree that downvoting a duplicate just because it's a duplicate is excessive (downvoting a lazy duplicate is fine IMHO). Finally I agree that downvoting should be a dispassionate activity based only on the contents of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not underestimate how much work people have put in to making this site a success, and for no reward other than the approval of their peers. And you should appreciate just what an extraordinarily valuable resource this site is. As a teen physics nerd in the 70s it was inconceivable that I could have a question answered by a real life theoretical physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But keeping a site like this relevant is a continual battle against the forces of entropy. In this case &lt;em&gt;entropy&lt;/em&gt; consists of the fanatical, the opinionated, the lazy and the merely mischievous. At any one time there is only a small population of knowledgable answerers, and it would be easy to swamp the posts that make sense with posts that don't. This is not just my opinion or a merely theoretical statement. This has happened to every physics site I've been part of, starting at the very dawn of the Internet with the physics newsgroups. This site is so far unique in keeping a high quality of questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But back to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I disapprove of downvoting by more a than a few downvotes, and yes I disapprove of downvoting duplicates, and yes we shouldn't downvote just because we're annoyed by a post. But I am not going to criticise people for doing so when they put in so much work to keep this site successful, and I don't think you should do so either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T17:55:50.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6658" CreationDate="2015-04-01T00:06:55.433" Score="14" ViewCount="1386" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously thinking of quitting this site for good (well, not really).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T22:37:25.257" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T22:37:25.257" Title="What the hell, I just lost 582 reputation points" Tags="|discussion|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6655" CreationDate="2015-04-01T02:29:49.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am afraid that, as usual, we can't comment on moderation actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will echo tpg2114's comment that users are only ever removed because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They explicitly request it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence of breaking the terms of service&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Meta StackExchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; on the matter is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126470/2509&quot;&gt;What does “user was removed” mean and why did my reputation change because of it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HDE 226868 asks &lt;em&gt;&quot;Isn't there something in place to keep the votes of such high-voting users?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I believe that the deletion of high-rep, longtime members is handled very carefully on a case-by-case basis to avoid---well situations very much like we have here. As far as I can tell there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; about that on Meta StackExchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I'd hate to see you go because you bring a considerable expertise on a subject I don't know nearly enough about. I can appreciate that sudden changes of that magnitude are a heck of a shock and break the immersive nature of the gamification, and I couldn't blame you if you decided to give the site a rest for a while. But I still hope that you'll be back some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T02:37:16.083" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6655" CreationDate="2015-04-01T06:03:18.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whoa, 1,741 votes removed! (How on Earth did they manage to upvote me the 1 rep point?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that over the last few weeks I've been getting lots of upvotes on old questions, and in her answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6621/serial-up-or-down-voting-reversed&quot;&gt;Serial up- or down-voting reversed&lt;/a&gt; Gwen said she had been reading old questions and upvoting the ones she liked. I also note she's no longer a member, so that's an obvious contribution to the debit. If so I can't really complain as they were upvotes I hadn't really earned anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From various comments I wonder if there has been a group of friends recently join the site and vote in similar ways. If so that might explain the mass defection (I should make it clear this is just mischievous speculation not inside knowledge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T09:17:22.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6655" CreationDate="2015-04-01T13:37:56.600" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, &lt;em&gt;normally&lt;/em&gt; we don't comment on moderation actions, but given the scope of what happened (and, really, the fact that you all figured it out anyway), we thought a brief statement is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For quite some time we've been investigating a pattern of fraudulent activity involving multiple accounts. When we deleted several accounts which were engaged in vote fraud, it also wiped out the votes they cast. If you were the recipient of any of those votes, you'll see a reputation change reversing the effect of the votes, along with the message &quot;user was removed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for something completely general: I believe it's public information (somewhere on the site or &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt;, but I forget where) that &quot;fraudulent activity&quot; includes various ways in which one person uses multiple accounts to do things they couldn't do with a single account. Things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;upvoting their own posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;casting multiple votes on other people's posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;chiming in on discussions of site policy to artificially inflate the support for one side&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. The point is that when you lose reputation due to the deletion of an account, it's usually reputation that was not fairly earned in the first place - not through any fault of your own, but because someone else cheated the system to give it to you. And if the activity has been going on for a while, the amounts of reputation involved can be pretty large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this is enough to satisfy people's concerns. We would like the community to return to the status quo of not discussing details of individual moderator actions, but at the same time we want everyone to be clear that we (mods, SE, the computers... hopefully) are not up to anything nefarious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xkcd.com/455/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/hats.png&quot; alt=&quot;Hats&quot; title=&quot;...&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T13:37:56.600" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6645" CreationDate="2015-04-01T16:00:24.677" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seemed like an interesting question, so I figured I'd do some research, too.  I started with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/293815/age-score-correlation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kyle's SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;, and made a few changes to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the original question was about answering old questions with no answers yet, I figured it would be more meaningful to only look at the &lt;em&gt;first answer&lt;/em&gt; to each question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kyle's query bins the ages by day, but doesn't show how many answers go into each bin.  That was easy enough to add, so I did.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, the age distribution is &lt;em&gt;heavily&lt;/em&gt; skewed to the left, with almost &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; first answers being posted during the first day (and thus falling into a single bin in Kyle's plot), while the higher bins often had just one answer in them, and so ended up with a lot of noise.  To make the binning more reasonable, I switched to a logarithmic age scale, taking the base-10 logarithm of the difference between question and answer ages, and binning it at intervals of 0.1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to check how much variation I was averaging over, I also added the sample &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard deviation&lt;/a&gt; for each bin into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/295447/age-score-correlation-first-answers-only-logarithmic-binning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The modified query is here.&lt;/a&gt;  Saving the output as CSV and playing with it in Excel produced the following bubble plot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tZWLl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Plot of average first answer score vs. time since the question was asked on Physics Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The area of each bubble is proportional to the number of answers in the bin.  The dotted trend line is autogenerated by Excel, and I suspect it doesn't actually account for the weight in each bin, but even just eyeballing the bubbles does confirm a clear downward trend (after the first 5 minutes or so, anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the unweighted trend line shown above is perhaps more relevant anyway, if we're mostly interested in answers to old questions (i.e. the right-hand side of the plot); a weighted trend line would be dominated by the age range between 5 minutes and 1 day, during which most first answers are posted, and would probably show an even &lt;em&gt;stronger&lt;/em&gt; downward trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, it's worth keeping in mind that these averages conceal a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of noise.  To show how much, here's the same plot with &amp;pm;1 s.d. error bars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/djreI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Same plot as above, with one sigma error bars&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And keep in mind that those are just 1&amp;sigma; error bars, meaning that (assuming a roughly normal score distribution, which may or may not be valid), almost one third of all first answers lie even further away from the mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I would say that, qualitatively, these results confirm Kyle's general conclusion: there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a downward trend in answer score as a function of question age.  That said, clearly there's also a lot of variation &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; explained by age alone &amp;mdash; good answers still get more upvotes than bad ones, regardless of how old the question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ps.&lt;/strong&gt; Just for comparison, here's a combined plot showing the same query results for Physics.SE, &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/in8It.png&quot; alt=&quot;Average first answer score vs. logarithmic question age for Physics.SE, Math.SE and SO&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bubble sizes for SO have been scaled down by a factor of 10 compared to the other sites; SO is just that big.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, especially for SO, there are some funny outlier data points that fall of the left and/or top edge of the plot, but the sizes of those bins are so small that they may be mostly just noise.  Still, it's kind of curious to note that there are, apparently, 82 first answers on SO posted (almost) exactly 10 seconds after the question, with an average score of 49.73(!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pps.&lt;/strong&gt; It seems that the huge average scores, mentioned above, for first answers posted just a few seconds after the question are mostly due to self-answers.  Apparently, before SE added the feature to allow you to post a question and an answer at the same time, what some people used to do was to write the answer in advance, save a copy locally, write and post their question and then immediately answer it afterwards.  Clearly, these answers were often excellent, and thus gained a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went and updated the SEDE query to exclude self-answers and re-ran it, but it turns out that, above one minute (&amp;approx; 10&lt;sup&gt;1.8&lt;/sup&gt; seconds) or so, the differences are minimal.  Evidently, the sharp downward trend between 1 and 5 minutes, especially on SO, is due to other causes.  Anyway, the last plot above now excludes self-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ppps.&lt;/strong&gt; I compared the plots more carefully, and noticed that excluding self-answers &lt;em&gt;raises&lt;/em&gt; the average first answer score in the 10&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; seconds (&amp;approx; 1 day) to 10&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt; seconds (&amp;approx; 3 months) range noticeably (by about 0.1 to 0.2 points or so) on Math.SE and SO.  Apparently, there's a non-negligible fraction of users on those sites who, if they don't get any answer to their question, will eventually post a self-answer that is often poorly received.  The effect here on Physics.SE is less clear, but that may be simply due to the smaller number of answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4646" LastEditorUserId="4646" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T20:31:04.927" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T20:31:04.927" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-04-04T08:00:54.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Invert it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIJ&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the central problem was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it gets confusing when someone pings Jim and Jim gets pinged as well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will work unless one of the other Jims also lands up on this post! This is because there is no uniqueness theorem for usernames on the site, so MIJ's already taken doesn't mean it can't be taken again. But I guess that holds for every single of the suggestions above and below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think inverted usernames are employed on this site. e.g. inverting &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50546/yuggib&quot;&gt;yuggib&lt;/a&gt; gives bigguy, which makes sense as a username!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:30:12.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-04-04T10:07:11.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flip it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ɯᴉſ&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can be hard to ping, but who cares. It's &lt;em&gt;awesome&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57370" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:27:16.810" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:27:16.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-04T19:27:19.687" Score="11" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tag for some time now, and it led me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/174047/&quot;&gt;this Phys.SE question&lt;/a&gt;, which was recently closed. While the cited reason was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about physics within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a more telling clue was the four upvotes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/174047/was-there-a-period-of-doubt-in-the-history-of-the-higgs-mechanism#comment368971_174047&quot;&gt;John Rennie's comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it concerns the history of science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The six upvotes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/174047/was-there-a-period-of-doubt-in-the-history-of-the-higgs-mechanism#comment368795_174047&quot;&gt;Marcel Köpke's comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;maybe give it a try here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;hsm.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also seem to send a message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/156/&quot;&gt;discussions&lt;/a&gt; (also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6421/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) on meta about this, and the consensus is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; is on-topic. But times may have changed, and I see a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; questions along the lines of &quot;This might be better for HSM.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as circumstances have changed, I suggest we revisit the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; questions be on-topic on Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;For what it's worth, I see nothing wrong with keeping history questions on-topic here, as other science sites (and Mathematics) have done. At the same time, despite my jokes about more traffic on HSM being more work for me, more questions there would certainly help. Also, given that mathematics is our top category (by far), physics questions would dilute the flow. Questions can absolutely be on-topic on multiple sites, though. I'm neutral on the issue.&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T13:26:27.437" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T13:26:27.437" Title="Revisiting history" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6666" CreationDate="2015-04-05T05:15:06.817" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/173987/how-can-i-relate-linear-and-angular-motion-using-a-single-formula&quot;&gt;interesting pickle&lt;/a&gt;. So, on the brink of what seemed to be covering angular motion entirely, I realized that I had &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;big misconceptions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any sane individual would do in this case, I knocked out my Physics teacher with a brick, ran to the nearest computer and logged into StackExchange Physic to ask my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there were some wrong answers. I &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; a wrong answer. And now I can't take back my upvote. At the time of upvoting, I had assumed that the answer would be right due to the upvotes it had received, but now realize that I should've asked for citations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/174100/37236&quot;&gt;This is the wrong answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do I do now? How can I take back my vote? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37236" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T08:54:55.567" Title="How do I take back my vote now?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6663" CreationDate="2015-04-05T05:37:05.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can click again on the up arrow to remove an upvote, though I think this is only possible for a limited time. I see you have accepted the answer - you can click again on the tick to un-accept the answer and there is no time limit on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should un-accept the answer if it isn't an answer to your question, but I wouldn't worry about the stray upvote. After all, the person posting the answer has put a lot of effort into it, and even if the effort was misdirected it deserves some recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T05:37:05.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6662" CreationDate="2015-04-05T05:58:08.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The magical thing about physics is that I can write down an equation that will tell me how the universe is going to behave (well, at least in principle :-). We're all used to this, so we take it for granted, but if you stop to think about it the fact we mere humans can do this is absolutely amazing. This activity, the writing down of equations that describe the universe, is the core activity of physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the perfect physics question is one that I can answer by writing down an equation that describes the universe. Imperfect but still excellent physics questions concern the interpretation or clarification of such equations. Actually I'm happy to answer any question as long as ultimately the answer depends on a mathematical model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about how human beings came to formulate such models can still be physics if they depend on understanding, or at least appreciating, earlier simpler models. I think this is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/160/1325&quot;&gt;dmckee was getting at in his answer&lt;/a&gt;. Physics is still central to such discussions even though it may not be the core concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But move any farther away from what seems to me to be our core activity and I don't think it's a question about physics, and therefore peripheral to this site. I don't rend my clothes and tear my hair when I see such questions, but since we have a perfectly good &lt;a href=&quot;http://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;history of science SE&lt;/a&gt; why post such questions here? I did vote to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2127/was-there-a-period-of-doubt-in-the-history-of-the-higgs-mechanism&quot;&gt;the question that prompted this debate&lt;/a&gt;, but I considered my vote as a personal preference of little importance unless four other people expressed similar preferences (which they did :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:32.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T15:42:31.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6663" CreationDate="2015-04-05T08:20:54.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I take back my vote? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As John's answer said, you can change your vote within 5 minutes of casting it. After that, it's locked in until the answer is edited. So something you can do is edit the answer so that you can change your vote. Of course, don't make a &lt;em&gt;frivolous&lt;/em&gt; edit, but nearly every answer has &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; you can fix up (maybe the math syntax, or adding paragraph breaks, fixing spelling, etc.) which would improve the answer and justify a good edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something else you can do is post a link to the question or answer in chat, or here on Meta if you have some reason to ask a meta question about it, and that will draw more attention and more votes to the answer. (Of course that's exactly what you did in this case.) If downvoting the answer is justified, presumably it will tend to get more downvotes the more attention it receives. Conversely if upvoting is justified, it will tend to get more upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-04-05T08:54:55.567" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T08:54:55.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-05T10:58:33.133" Score="-2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this forum should not replace a good bibliographic research, but... It is quite useful to know which book or paper or tutorial or any other external source of information that people have in mind when they explain advanced physical concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, having quickly a common background on a topic by giving explicit references may facilitate further constructive discussion or avoid &quot;(apparently) stupid questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to others opinion, I think that giving explicit references and sources may help students to develop their autonomy. It gives them the example of what is a good source of information, incite them to read and show them the importance of references in research. It is always a good thing to enhance this culture, even among experienced researchers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;strong&gt;I think that Physics stack should promote explicit source citing. Users should be rewarded for giving explicit references and other should be able to vote for the pertinence of the given sources.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74058" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:10:32.867" Title="Explicit references matter!" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|best-practices|site-enhancement|citation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6667" CreationDate="2015-04-05T11:10:24.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already do this: an answer which is referenced is, in general, more likely to receive more upvotes than one which is not. Voting is the incentive to reference sources as needed. Not to mention, an answer which has relevant links just &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; like a better answer, even from the perspective of the one writing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we're not going to &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; references (or I should say, I strongly oppose doing so), the way Wikipedia or &lt;a href=&quot;//skeptics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Skeptics SE&lt;/a&gt; does. For one thing, finding a good source for something you already know well takes a lot of time. Also, we care more about being right, and to a slightly lesser extent, being credible, than about having a trail of references that everyone can check. There are other ways to establish credibility besides referencing, and also, being referenced is not the same as being right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T11:10:24.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6671" CreationDate="2015-04-05T14:57:00.667" Score="8" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking this in relation to confirmation of assumption types questions from self study people only, with no access to formal teaching resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I ask a question, and the answer is either yes or no, is this allowed under the rules of the site?  If it is not, then I accept that as valid but I am left confused by some of the answers I see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, that the range of answers provided to what initially seems like a simple confirmation type question can help to teach self study students the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. That their assumption is correct and provide confidence to carry on self studying.&#xA;It can also help clarify the particular point in the self student's mind as he/she is writing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.  The range of answers provided can also provide additional assistance to the self study student by referring to additional resources or areas to study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c.  I have seen that often a simple question from a person with little background in the subject can produce lots of answers, ranging from the low level to the higher level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;imo, this site  greatly benefits from the range of answers given and these answers are the backbone of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, my question: should I, given the points listed above,  refrain from&lt;br&gt;&#xA;looking for confirmation even though to me, it is a perfectly valid question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74893" LastEditorDisplayName="user74893" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T15:43:44.153" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T15:43:44.153" Title="Self Study Students: Confirmation Type Questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6667" CreationDate="2015-04-05T15:10:32.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is my vote, and I will vote as I please.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I want to downvote your question/answer, I will. If I want to upvote your question/answer, I will. If I want to do nothing to your question/answer, I will. Same thing for everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6652/25301&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6651/25301&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No matter how much you disagree with it, you cannot change our ways about how we will vote (there shouldn't be any  reason for you to &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; that we change to your whim anyways). We are &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; to vote entirely as we please, up or down and for whatever dumb reason we want (whether the post is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obvious troll being obvious&lt;/a&gt; or because we simply don't like the person).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you honestly feel that an answer without citations&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; is not useful&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, feel free to vote as you please. Just don't tell me that I should vote your way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1 I would say that for &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; of the questions posted here, it would be entirely unnecessary to need one in an answer&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_text_for_images&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alt-text&lt;/a&gt; over the up and down buttons for answers say &lt;em&gt;This answer is useful.&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;This answer is not useful&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, so my language there matches&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:10:32.867" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6669" CreationDate="2015-04-05T15:14:47.760" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The danger in such questions is exactly what ACuriousMind pointed out -- if the answer is simply &quot;Yup, you're right&quot; then it really isn't a good fit for our site. On the other hand, if the answer is &quot;No, here's where your thinking is flawed and the physics/concepts/math behind the right answer&quot; then it is useful to the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it's not a great policy to wait for an answer to make a question good/on-topic or bad/off-topic. There needs to be a way to express a question such that no matter what the answer is, the question and answer are useful to others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some ways, it is just a matter of rephrasing the question. Rather than asking &quot;Am I correct in these assumptions?&quot; one could ask &quot;What are the assumptions that make this correct?&quot; In that way, if what you think is correct, you'll see an answer that explains what you were thinking anyway. And if you are wrong, you'll see an answer that explains what the right answer is. And then you could even make follow-up questions where you say &quot;Here's what I thought, but this answer says otherwise, why am I wrong?&quot; and we end up with a much better body of knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't post questions that could just be answered by &quot;Yes&quot; or &quot;No.&quot; Always look to rephrase them so you get what you want (a &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; that you are right), but that no matter the outcome there is an answer that has technical content that benefits everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:14:47.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6669" CreationDate="2015-04-05T15:27:46.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is literally asking for a yes/no answer, then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd downvote because it's a terrible question. Beyond the fact that answers have a minimum character count (meaning the answer &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be more than &quot;Yes&quot; or &quot;No&quot;), there is no added benefit to the collection of questions &amp;amp; answers to this site for that type of question and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd vote to close because &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/25301&quot;&gt;check my work problems&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this type of question is &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; molded into an appropriate question for this site. For example, rather than saying, &lt;em&gt;Am I right?&lt;/em&gt;, you could say, &lt;em&gt;Why is this the case?&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Under what conditions does this not work?&lt;/em&gt; I think that doing something like this will both &lt;em&gt;confirm&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;extend&lt;/em&gt; your understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T15:27:46.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6662" CreationDate="2015-04-07T13:38:53.897" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've definitely agreed before that (at least some) historical questions are &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt;, and I would urge close voters to refrain from closing such questions simply for being historical &lt;strong&gt;unless and until policy changes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know from my own experience monitoring astro questions that a nonnegligible number of people seem to think a question can only belong in one place, and that if there is a more specific site that caters to the topic, the question should be migrated away from here. However this is simply not the case. Combined with the intrinsic bias of looking at comment votes (they can't be voted down!) and the fact that most people prowling the review queues are doing so &lt;em&gt;intent on closing questions&lt;/em&gt;, and I think it's fair to say some upvoted &quot;history is off topic&quot; comments do not in themselves constitute policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I have no problem with us deciding to make history off-topic, and I have no problem with this decision being made solely because we now have an HSM site. The questions would hopefully flourish there, and everyone on this site who thinks history is irrelevant can continue happily living in their bubble in which all the right answers are known from on high right from the beginning.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, though, we would have to consider several points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should we do with old history questions? They're too old to migrate, and we wouldn't want to flood HSM with a bunch of them all at once anyway. Systematically close them all? Leave them around? &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;Lock them as historical?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users would have to be informed about the policy. This means a definitive FAQ meta post, a deprecation warning in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tag, and/or a special close reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if HSM fails? Do we go back to accepting historical questions? Do we import their physics questions? This isn't just about contingency planning per se; I think an answer to this question will help define &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we do not want history here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Strong words, I know. But I maintain that anyone who thinks physics is nothing more than learning presently-accepted facts out of a book is deluding themselves. In order to &lt;em&gt;be a physicist&lt;/em&gt;, one must learn how to build &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; theories and experiments. Historical context can, ideally, provide some insight into how to think when you don't already know the answer. Of course, I don't insist that this site cater to every facet of training physicists, otherwise we'd be morally obliged to become a homework help service too.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T13:38:53.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-08T14:59:58.170" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether it's a bug or not. But if you hover over the menu below banner labelled 'Physics', the background changes to light blue, however, that background comes behind the written texts on the page. This kind of makes the design look a bit untidy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the rest of the page be lowered or the background's height be reduced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DTreR.png&quot; alt=&quot;The banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;code&gt;forum appear cluttered&lt;/code&gt;? That! It looks a bit messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50419" LastEditorUserId="50419" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T17:28:58.547" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T17:28:58.547" Title="Bug Fix: the tabs in the Physics forum appear cluttered" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-04-08T20:05:39.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6677" CreationDate="2015-04-09T09:46:04.193" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I am not logged in, I see this on the front page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7HGhG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds good. But when I hit the &quot;ask a question&quot; button, I see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nyEai.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't that a contradiction? Maybe people find it dubious if there's &lt;em&gt;no registration required&lt;/em&gt; yet they have to sign up in order to use the service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76233" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2015-04-10T08:49:20.730" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T13:02:28.003" Title="Is there really &quot;no registration required&quot;?" Tags="|support|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6676" CreationDate="2015-04-09T13:00:26.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120707/clarify-the-no-registration-required-message&quot;&gt;Asked and answered on Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of it is that the original meaning of &lt;em&gt;no registration&lt;/em&gt; was that other, similar Q&amp;amp;A sites required you to register &lt;em&gt;just to &lt;strong&gt;see&lt;/strong&gt; the answers&lt;/em&gt;; this is not the case here. You should be able to answer questions without registering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is more explicitly stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (specifically the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/why-register&quot;&gt;Why should I create an account?&lt;/a&gt; under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/account&quot;&gt;My Account&lt;/a&gt; header)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Registration is not required to participate on Stack Exchange; you can read, answer, and suggest edits as an anonymous user, much like on Wikipedia. There are some things you won’t be able to do on the site without registering, however, such as vote. Registering is easy, and once logged in, you can gain other key privileges by earning reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original policy &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; no registration required, but the original site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;) was receiving &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;several &lt;em&gt;thousand&lt;/em&gt; questions per day&lt;/a&gt; (QPD), many of which were &lt;em&gt;low quality&lt;/em&gt;. So the creator of the site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;, changed it to require registration for &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; questions (in attempts to stave off the sheer number of bad questions). The comment thread under Jeff's answer is worth the read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T13:02:28.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-09T15:49:43.000" Score="13" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;Naming no names, but please can we have a ban on using lmgtfy.com in comments. I appreciate how frustrating it can be that users post questions without having done the most basic Google search. But pointing them at lmgtfy.com is just snide and unbecoming of an august company such as ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just downvote, vote to close and then imagine yourself interviewing the offender for a job at your university in years to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Later&lt;/strong&gt;: doh, I showed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;insufficient effort&lt;/a&gt; in checking for duplicates. This was discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5226/policy-on-lmgtfy-links&quot;&gt;Policy on lmgtfy links&lt;/a&gt;. Oh well, it probably doesn't hurt to jog memories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T09:09:03.763" Title="Use of lmgtfy.com" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2015-04-09T15:55:52.880" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Come on John, &lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Ameta.stackexchange.com+lmgtfy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;haven't you done a google search&lt;/a&gt;? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously though, as Qmechanic linked to in the comments on your question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5226/policy-on-lmgtfy-links&quot;&gt;the &quot;be nice&quot; policy&lt;/a&gt; basically tells people to not to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15650/ban-lmgtfy-let-me-google-that-for-you-links&quot;&gt;post on mother meta&lt;/a&gt; says that banning it will just incur performance penalties and instead you should leave a comment telling that person they should be nicer. They take the approach that people being disrespectful will just be disrespectful in &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; ways, and so banning the links doesn't really help anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T16:03:01.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-10T08:29:02.577" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier I posted a question which is flagged as it is inappropriate and I could not delete it due to answered. Now I changed both the title and content see link below, my question is since the new question is entirely different from the original flagged question is this recycling of question allowed? The comments and answer posted for original question is irrelevant to the new question is there any advise what to do with them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/171818/is-negative-energy-a-consequence-of-gravitational-energy&quot;&gt;Is negative energy a consequence of gravitational energy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75502" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T09:12:02.983" Title="How do I recycle my earlier question which is flagged?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6680" CreationDate="2015-04-10T09:12:02.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this sort of recycling is not allowed. In general, any edit which completely changes the essential nature of a question is not allowed, because - as you noticed - it invalidates existing answers, and it also messes things up for people who may have bookmarked the question to come back to it later, and so on. If you want to completely change a question, just post a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing an answer to change it completely is not so bad, but only if you are the one who originally posted the answer, and it's rather discourteous if someone else's answer references yours. So, let's say, try not to do that very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time an edit invalidates &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt;, that's fine. Just flag one of the comments as obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case you should also roll back the edit that completely changed your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T09:12:02.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-10T16:10:46.493" Score="17" ViewCount="627" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very curious and like to understand physical concepts. So I search the internet and ask questions on the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a problem: my understanding isn't complete about the subject sometimes I don't even know what concepts I need to look up. The internet is running low on easy to understand texts and figures when I'm trying to understand something in the more advanced fields like the general relativity and quantum field theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when I ask a question, and I get a highly technical answer that uses lots of advanced mathematical concepts I don't understand yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that it's a correct answer, because it receives upvotes. But the answer doesn't give me that &quot;Aha!&quot; moment, and makes me feel dumb. Probably I'd need to spend weeks or months to look up all the concepts to fully understand the response I got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I do when face a response like this? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I ask my question that invites an easy to understand answer? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7743" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T18:09:42.577" Title="How should I ask a question to understand the answer I will get?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6682" CreationDate="2015-04-10T18:09:42.577" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should I do when face a response like this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote it up if you find it useful, don't if you don't (although I would implore you to not vote it down unless you find it &lt;em&gt;needlessly&lt;/em&gt; obfuscated), and if it doesn't satisfy you, don't accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be good if you left a comment like &quot;I was looking for something less technical&quot;. While not every answerer will be willing (or able, since it might not even be possible) to provide a toned down version, I am sure many will be happy to provide one if they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should I ask my question that invites an easy to understand answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nothing stops you from saying something like: &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'm looking for an intuitive understanding&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or include your level of competence into the question, giving the potential answerers a clue about what you will or will not understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, I don't think you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do that. The Q&amp;amp;As of SE are not meant to primarily help the asker, but to also provide insights to all the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people who read the question. Therefore, I believe it is not desirable to restrict to a particular level at which answers might be given - this just leads to potentially many different questions asking the same thing, but at a different level. It is far more elegant to have all the answers to &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; question, and every reader may find the answer that is best suited to their level on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T18:09:42.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6686" CreationDate="2015-04-10T21:03:58.687" Score="-3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to make your question pop back up in the front/top again, so that more people see it? I get upset because if your question is not answered in the first second it will never get answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76778" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T04:38:28.103" Title="Refreshing your question" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2015-04-11T02:46:53.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Several of us have an unofficial strategy of voting to close homework questions then providing hints as comments. This doesn't seem an ideal solution to me, but it's probably the best solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the 2nd time of reading this post (shortly after it was posted), the above pair of lines are what I stared at and couldn't get out of my head for a couple days. At first, it was because I wanted to find the best solution. Then, as I thought about it some more, I realized that &quot;hints via comments&quot; was not actually a solution, but &lt;em&gt;a problem.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, a person who is not really interested in physics and just wants an answer to their homework probably also doesn't give two $%^&amp;amp;$ about rep on this site or what we want to do on a volunteer basis. They just want their answer. We do our best to deny that undeserved answer, but we cannot close unilaterally (a good thing) and so, sometimes, answers slip in. I'm okay with this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've come to realize is this:  Giving a downvote is saying, &lt;em&gt;I don't like this question.&lt;/em&gt; Voting to close is saying, &lt;em&gt;Your question should not have the opportunity to get an answer (because it doesn't fit our site).&lt;/em&gt; And giving hints in the comments is then saying, &lt;em&gt;We want to help you.&lt;/em&gt; The third action &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;contradicts&lt;/strong&gt; the first two; in some stretch, it is probably &lt;em&gt;worse&lt;/em&gt; than posting the answer because it is giving an &lt;em&gt;implicit approval&lt;/em&gt; to something that is &lt;em&gt;readily rejected&lt;/em&gt; from us answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And once they get their answer via the comments, guess what's the next thing they'll do: tell their friends about the &quot;Great homework help site&quot; that they found. Consider this comment after a high-rep member of our site gave a hint about solving their homework question, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; commenting about the lack of OP's question with the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/175385/rotating-rod-assembly-finding-the-force-reactions-at-the-bearings#comment371929_175385&quot;&gt;A friend told me about the site told me I'd likely be able to get help with physics on here. Thanks for the help tho.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first time I've seen comments like this. And any bets on the commenter ever asking a question again? Or fixing their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; If we &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't want to become a homework help service, we really ought to &lt;em&gt;stop helping&lt;/em&gt;. Which means hints via comments really should stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Sorry this is coming so late, I've was a tad busy the last few weeks but that's almost all over and done with now.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T02:46:53.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6684" CreationDate="2015-04-11T04:38:28.103" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main way to do this is to offer a bounty. You will need to earn some more rep before you are able to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question will also pop back to the top if you edit it. But you should not do that unless the edit will substantially improve the question, e.g. by adding more information or making it clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T04:38:28.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2015-04-11T05:51:06.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a comment to Kyle's answer, but I decided to make it an answer because I wanted to give site members the chance to downvote if they disagree (and please do so - I'm genuinely interested in people's views on the subject). The key points I want to make are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) My view is that if a student solves a problem as a result of hints we've given then we've left that student a better physicist because they will have learned something. And that's a good thing for the student, the future of physics and of course our karma :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) If we just give a student the answer we will have left them a worse physicist because all they will have learned is to be lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I (now) always vote to close all homework questions is to avoid (B) i.e. to stop someone coming along and (innocently) supplying an explicit answer that leaves everyone worse off. I have no problem with (A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe the site will be swamped by homework questions if we require students to work for their answer. As long as we can deter the more parasitic life forms I think we'll be fine. And actually I have no problem with Floris' comment to the question you link. I think it was well judged, and the student clearly doesn't feel they've just been handed the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T05:51:06.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2015-04-11T14:38:22.443" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't like the notion of students asking for help on a homework-problem or similar problems being a &lt;em&gt;plague&lt;/em&gt; for this site (in the sense that if &quot;we don't &lt;em&gt;eradicate&lt;/em&gt; homework questions there will be a huge flood incomming&quot;). Everybody has the opportunity to just ignore certain tags in questions. If one does not choose to ignore the &quot;homework-tag&quot;, that's his or her personal issue. I'd say it comes all down to tagging a question the right way. Therefore I propose this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a new user joins this site, the homework tag is defaulted on all his questions until he reaches a certain reputation score (something high, that would account for at least a month of real activity).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The new (!) user can choose to untag the homework-tag, but if this causes a retag by moderators or closing of the question there should be a reset of his reputation score or maybe even deletion of his account. Something severe, that tells the user: &quot;You didn't play by the rules, therefore you're out!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For all users, there should be a reputation penalty if a question was not taged as homework but got edited/moderated to add the homework-tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75518" LastEditorUserId="75518" LastEditDate="2015-04-11T14:49:55.720" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T14:49:55.720" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6691" CreationDate="2015-04-13T22:34:11.710" Score="4" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/165627/when-does-paulis-exclusion-principle-kick-in/165651#165651&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; some time ago and, after reading the answers and thinking the problem on my own, I realized that my question wasn't clear enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now have a better way to ask the question and also know the answer (knowing the right question leads to the right answer). Should I edit my question and add an answer myself? I worry that this would leave the answers which are already there a bit out of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a good way to proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T01:13:44.223" Title="Clarifying an answered question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6689" CreationDate="2015-04-14T01:13:44.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I edit my question and add an answer myself? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this can found with this question: &lt;em&gt;If you update your post with your new/actual question, do the existing answers still answer your query?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they do answer the new question, feel free to edit it in. If they do not answer the new question, make a new post (and reference the original and emphasize how it is different, as some might want to close as a duplicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I edit my question and add an answer myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first half, as above; for the second half, absolutely. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;Self-answered questions&lt;/a&gt; are (almost&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;) always welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Caveats include off-topic questions, such as homework or non-mainstream physics.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T01:13:44.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-04-14T12:43:24.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimulhu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recognition of Jim being part of the great Cthulhu diaspora&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user77400" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T14:29:17.360" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:29:17.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6706" CreationDate="2015-04-14T16:15:00.510" Score="-2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't know why but all &quot;check-my-work&quot; questions should not be considered off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you do some exercises or questions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Can you enhance your knowledge without them?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you don't make mistakes and find them, then how will you learn?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Your flaws in conceptual understanding can be removed by doing what?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you people are not willing to help someone remove his conceptual weaknesses then who'd (I am self learning usually.)?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &quot;check-my-work&quot; questions are considered off-topic, but I am saying that consider only those off-topic which are not useful to the wider audience, not the conceptual mistak-ed ones.&#xA;I realize that mathematical error-ed questions are fit to be closed but some people are just so '&lt;em&gt;lakeer ka fakeer&lt;/em&gt;' they just see a &quot;check-my-work&quot; type, and then, close! Wait! Look and then decide. Please this is my request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25605" LastEditorUserId="25605" LastEditDate="2015-04-14T16:31:04.620" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T14:14:58.640" Title="Homework Questions # Treatment" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T14:07:50.947" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently using stack exchange using my iPhone 4s. How can I upload a diagram to this site from the camera roll?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75397" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T16:37:30.400" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T16:37:30.400" Title="Uploading diagrams using iPhone 4s" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6697" CreationDate="2015-04-16T01:08:08.793" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics is left-justified on Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it intentional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5829" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T02:11:24.187" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T02:11:33.950" Title="Can you please center the site like all other StackExchange sites?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6696" CreationDate="2015-04-16T02:11:33.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/253555/130213&quot;&gt;A fix for this is rolling out now.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T02:11:33.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6699" CreationDate="2015-04-16T18:45:31.957" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning quantum information/computation, and while reading my textbook, naturally some questions arise. Whenever I am stuck on an exercise or have a doubt I post my question on physics stack exchange. But most of my doubts are purely mathematical and, consequently, I am asked to migrate the question on [math.se]. But most of my doubts, although being mathematical in nature, are formulated in terms of Dirac (braket) notation and thus, when I post the question on math I am often asked to migrate it to physics stack exchange as it involves braket notation. Where  should such questions be posted, which are purely mathematical but involve some physics notation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58482" LastEditorUserId="58482" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T19:05:01.063" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T20:01:40.133" Title="Do pure math questions with physics notation belong on physics stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-04-16T20:33:20.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6698" CreationDate="2015-04-16T20:01:40.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following Kyle Kanos' suggestion I'll turn my comment into an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that most of your questions are linear algebra related, which means it should be perfectly acceptable to post them on math SE, and in order to clarify possible notation issues (those more commonly used in physics), try to add a bit of explanation to the notation you're using so everyone can follow. E.g. if you use the bra-ket notation for an inner product then you can explain as (or simply ref. a link that explains it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yw34x.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there are a lot of purely linear algebra (mainly QM related) posts on physics stackexchange, e.g. questions about diagonalisation, trace properties, self-adjointness, unitarity, etc. So in principle if you also establish the physical context in your post, it should be fine on physics SE as well (with appropriate choice of tags). There's not really more to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55751" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T20:01:40.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6702" CreationDate="2015-04-17T00:26:04.083" Score="-2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I get and upvote sometimes it adds 5 points and other times it adds 10 points. Why does this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76778" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T00:39:36.857" Title="Why do I sometimes get +5 points on upvotes and other times I get +10?" Tags="|discussion|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6700" CreationDate="2015-04-17T00:38:14.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the help pages on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;voting up&lt;/a&gt;. In summary, upvotes on your &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; get you 5 points, while upvotes on &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; get you 10. If your answer is accepted you get 15. This is the case across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T00:38:14.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6700" CreationDate="2015-04-17T00:39:36.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;Help Center on Reputation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You gain reputation when:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question is voted up: +5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answer is voted up: +10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you've been getting upvotes on questions (5 pts) and answers (10 pts), that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T00:39:36.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6705" CreationDate="2015-04-17T12:08:33.513" Score="2" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wanted to ensure something. I am new to this website. I am in high school and preparing for physics olympiads. So suppose I face some problem or have a question while solving numericals for books like Irodov Or HC Verma can I ask my question here? Will that be considered homework problem? Of course I have read through the homework policies and everything and surely I'll provide my approach and show my efforts whenever I post a question. But are such numerical based questions entertained here or are they considered homework? How should I frame my questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74370" LastEditorDisplayName="user74370" LastEditDate="2015-04-17T12:45:17.290" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T13:48:34.143" Title="How should I ask general physics questions about numericals?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6703" CreationDate="2015-04-17T13:48:34.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;questions about numericals&quot;, I imagine you mean questions like this one from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irodov&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z42g2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Irodov problem 3.147&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite a general pattern in homework set questions: a (fairly artificial) setup is proposed, with numerical values for properties &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;, ... , &lt;em&gt;p&lt;sub&gt;n&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and you're asked to give a numerical value for property &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;+1&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For such sorts of questions, and regardless of whether your motivation for solving them is self-study or formal homework set by an instructor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you post a question that only has the problem and asks &quot;what do I do?&quot;, it will get shot down pretty much immediately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you post a question that quotes the problem, provides your working for the problem, notes that your final value is not what it's supposed to be, and asks for help, then you are asking a check-my-work question, which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/8563&quot;&gt;usually considered off topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, if your post crucially depends on the specific numerical values set by some textbook author, then it is unlikely to find a good reception here. We want conceptual questions which are useful to people that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; staring at the same specific set problem in the same specific edition of the same specific textbook that you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me provide an example to try and clarify what we mean by that. For the problem quoted above, there are two main steps you need to do: you need the charge density of the cylinder, and you need to transform that into the current. There are thus two main conceptual questions which would be on topic for this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I get the charge density of a cylinder from the electric field on its surface?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the &quot;convection current&quot; for a moving charge distribution of density &lt;em&gt;ρ&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that both of these questions demonstrate that you've thought about the problem and you have identified the concepts that are important for solving it - we can then help you grapple with those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T13:48:34.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6693" CreationDate="2015-04-17T14:14:58.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a homework help site, it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; meant to be a resource to teach people physics, and it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a resource intended to help right conceptual misconceptions in students. When it was originally created, this site was meant to be a place where active physicists doing active research could come and ask/answer questions. It was intended to be a resource for physicists to be able to find answers to common questions they may want to ask. Much like how SO is most useful to programmers that are trying to program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since its creation, the population of Physics.SE has opened the site up to be more available to a broader audience. No longer is it specifically catering to professional physicists. The site is now a place where you can ask a question about physics, its concepts and explanations, and get an answer. We do enjoy it when we end up teaching something, however that is still &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the objective. The objective is to answer physics questions that are broadly useful to physicists. If we choose to answer a question that roughly teaches the physics behind an everyday phenomenon or introduces the basic concepts of some advanced physics concept, that is our prerogative. And we expect that these answers will be useful in some way to active physicists. They may refresh concepts and ideas for those who are teaching them, remind others of stuff they learned long ago, or help out when a physicist is starting to research in a new area/field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we choose to answer a question such that the layman would benefit most from it, that is our prerogative as well. We have chosen to extend the range of usefulness to include offering a conceptual understanding to students and non-physicists, but there is no mandate for us to do this. The site is still primarily by physicists and of physicists and for physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many homework-like questions and, in particular, check my work questions can and very well may be helpful to students. We don't care. Our goal is not to teach students or ensure that they learn; it is to help physicists. Check-my-work questions do not help physicists, they only waste the time of the answerer. The question may be able to be reformed such that it is asking about the concepts of a problem, and that could help a physicist in teaching a class or brushing up on their own understanding. Even if the mistake is a conceptual error, the question is still only specific to students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though it is possible that some of these questions could be reworked into a form that we'd find acceptable, the general form of check-my-work questions is undesirable and off-topic to us. Therefore, we want to discourage all of these questions from being posed in the first place. When someone posts such a question, the likelihood is that they do not know what the problem is, whether it is math or conceptual. If they see that some check-my-work questions are allowed because of what the resolution was, then, not knowing what theirs may be, they will always post their question and we will continue getting questions that are just plain wrong for this site. If they see that &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; check-my-work questions are allowed, at best they will not post their question at all and perhaps on average they will rework their question to fit into what we might consider an acceptable format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you must still keep in mind that no check-my-work questions, no matter the difficulty the OP has, are in line with the spirit of this site. We exist to provide physicists with a database of helpful questions and answers. We choose to also provide physical insight and explanations into common questions for the layman and students because we are very nice people, not because we have to. Most homework help questions have no use to physicists and so we do not accept most of them. Where we choose to draw the line in how much we will cater to non-physicists is entirely up to the collective body of users on this site. You cannot say we are wrong for choosing not to accept these questions. We have no requirement to help students with homework-like problems, so if we decide that we will not do so, the only thing to say is &quot;Have it your way&quot; and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: We aren't here to help students, so there's no use in being upset when we choose not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T14:14:58.640" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6709" CreationDate="2015-04-18T07:54:43.597" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask if there is a room for questions regarding physics and philosophy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) On an epistemological basis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) On a purely philosophical basis, that is, questions about the connection of physics with philosophical thinking(for example a question about consciousness and Martin Heidegger or Wittgenstein or a question regarding the phenomenology of thermodynamics and it' s connection to phenomenology or existentialism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is partly yes, what is the type of questions i have the right to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T11:16:48.523" Title="About Physics and philosophy" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6710" CreationDate="2015-04-18T10:08:24.350" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found this question about potential energy  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/103377/what-is-potential-energy-truly&quot;&gt;What is potential energy truly?&lt;/a&gt;. I can not make comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask a question supplementary to this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T11:17:59.190" Title="Can I ask a question that is supplementary to another's users question?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6707" CreationDate="2015-04-18T11:16:48.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to say no, such questions are generally off topic here. Some of them may fit on &lt;a href=&quot;//philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Philosophy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T11:16:48.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6708" CreationDate="2015-04-18T11:17:59.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you have a follow-up question you can ask it as a separate question. Make sure to be very clear about why the question you ask is different from the original question. It's probably a good idea to link to the original question to help provide context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T11:17:59.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6712" CreationDate="2015-04-20T15:59:23.300" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions concerning &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_brain_dynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quantum Brain Dynamics&lt;/a&gt; theories or questions regarding physics used for analysis of the brain (example: applications of classical EM field theory in brain or other areas of physics involved with the brain) on-topic at Phys.SE, or should questions like this go to cognitive science? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-04-20T16:04:53.687" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T16:50:59.077" Title="Quantum Brain Dynamics and brain-physics questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6711" CreationDate="2015-04-20T16:50:59.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like anything else that's multidisciplinary in nature, &lt;strong&gt;it will depend on the question&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is about the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; of what is going on, it's fine to post here. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is about the &lt;em&gt;implications&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;results&lt;/em&gt; of the physics (ie. biological/chemical response, metaphysical implications, etc) then it should not be here. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So without seeing the actual text of a question, we can't say. But so long as it is about the physics of the problem and not something like &quot;How does the brain form memories under the theory of Quantum Brain Dynamics&quot; it is possibly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T16:50:59.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6715" CreationDate="2015-04-20T21:33:14.573" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that 3 reputation points is nothing, but I randomly lost three reputation points and under my reputation in my account it does not say why I lost these three points. Does anybody know why I would lose three points? It seems very awkward, because usually you lose 2 points, 5 points, 10 points or etc. but not an odd number(except for 5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76778" LastEditorUserId="7186" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T22:37:42.983" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T22:37:42.983" Title="Random loss of three reputation points" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6714" CreationDate="2015-04-20T21:37:32.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;community&lt;/a&gt; deleted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/175196/2451&quot;&gt;one of your questions&lt;/a&gt; with 1 upvote (+5 rep. pts.) and 1 downvote (-2 rep. pts.), leading to a net change of -3 rep. pts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, the question was deleted automatically because it was closed, had no net upvotes, and had not been edited for 9 days prior to the deletion. For more details see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;. (Hat tip: Emilio Pisanty.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T20:44:37.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T10:41:23.437" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title is maybe in need of modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is this: If I have found a question I'm not in position to answer(because of lack of knowledge), but have found something interesting in the web that I think it might be helpful for the question posted and understandable for those interested, should I just give the link as a comment or should I copy and paste the script that could be helpful as an answer with a reference to the link? Or maybe should I make a comment to someone else reffering the link of the site I have found so that he could post an answer(but I find this rather off limits)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T10:59:53.707" Title="About answering questions with pasting from other sources when not knowing the answer and have found might-helpful info in the web" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2015-04-21T10:59:53.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all you can contribute is the link, you should post it as a comment under the question. Posting an answer that only contains a link - commonly referred to as a link-only answer - is frowned upon and such an answer will generally get flagged as Not an Answer. (The reason for this is that such answers are very susceptible to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_link&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt; and they bring the overall quality of the site down. The goal is to become a repository of answers, not a repository of unreliable links to relevant documents.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to post an answer, you should study the link and summarize its important points in a way that actually answers the question. If you do not have the time or the ability to do this, you should simply post the link as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, before posting a link it is a good idea to ensure that the page is archived in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;, so that the archived version is there in case the live website moves or goes down. (Don't link directly to the wayback machine, though - it's polite to the website creators to actually direct traffic to their site instead of an archived mirror.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T10:59:53.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6723" CreationDate="2015-04-21T13:28:28.713" Score="-7" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an example look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/177468/why-arent-we-affected-by-radium&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioner is a 13 year old according to profile, and the chosen answer is by a 13 year old. For the age group it is not a bad show, but is it appropriate for the site ? Already Jimmy has gathered negatives probably from people who have not checked the age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I answered after Jimmy360's was chosen is because the site is supposed to have a level at least of college physics. The search engines often bring up Physics.SE answers and leaving it at the level of 13 year olds seems to me not desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I would be happier if in Physics.SE the level of physics knowledge was checked at registration and shown when one submits a question. This could be done with a user when registering, and the person given a code, a subscript, according the physics background example: &quot;beginner&quot;  gets a _b , college level _c, graduate level  _g .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T05:31:34.233" Title="What about questions asked by 13 year old kids (or people with low knowledge of physics)" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6718" CreationDate="2015-04-21T17:54:33.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to mention this at this afternoon's Physics Chat, but we got carried away discussing physics (entanglement) - typical! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this raises an issue about what this site is for. I suspect our founding fathers intended the site to be like the Math Overflow, but the repeated failures of attempts to get a Physics-Overflow-a-like site going show there just isn't a big enough audience to sustain the site. We've ended up (until now - see below) somewhere around the undergrad/postgrad interface, and we've been chugging along quite happily at this level for a while. And that's good! I think many of us, including me, like reading and supplying answers at this level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a limited number of undergrad/postgrads interested in our site, especially once we've weeded out the ones who just want us to do their homework. And there is a much, much larger population of non-physicists interested enough to want a bit more than the latest Michio Kaku documentary gives them. This includes the &lt;em&gt;excitable schoolchild&lt;/em&gt; market segment that Anna refers to. As the Physics SE becomes more widely known we're going to see more and more non-physicists, and the question is what reception we give them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I really don't know what is the best course. From exchanges in the chat I'm aware that some valued members of the site are completely uninterested in the, shall we say, &lt;em&gt;less informed&lt;/em&gt; questioners. I have a lot of sympathy for this view - there is a limit to how many times I will find it interesting explaining why nothing can travel faster than light. If we get swamped by basic questions all the experts are going to get fed up and leave, and when that happens we lose the unique feature that distinguishes us from all the other physics sites on the web. On the other hand, I find the thought of saying to someone &quot;go away, you're too ignorant to post here&quot; is appalling (even if done politely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the best course is just to muddle along and see what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Later:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having read dmckee's answer I think he has clearly articulated something I was thinking about but couldn't put into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An apparently superficial question may have a deep answer. Now I think about it, I have answered a lot of very simple questions where I thought it gave me the opportunity to explain concepts that I thought were important and interesting. The problem is not superficial questions but superficial answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still not an enthusiastic downvoter, but I do vote to delete any answers that I don't think contribute anything useful. We should probably encourage site members to be more active at both downvoting and deleting where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-04-22T05:31:34.233" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T05:31:34.233" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T21:27:13.203" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a resource request. For questions and comments see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/177194/75644&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/177194/75644&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it's not appropriate for this forum then the question is : &#xA;Where on the internet can I hope to get some decent responses to my original question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75644" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T12:45:21.830" Title="Why was my question, on dynamics demonstrations videos, closed?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6720" CreationDate="2015-04-21T22:02:58.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will just recap what has happened so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A loosely formulated two-line resource recommendation question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/177194/revisions&quot;&gt;v2&lt;/a&gt;) was closed by me. It appeared to be a request for online video lectures, cf. e.g. the answer by Jake Lebovic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators do often leave comments about reasons for closure, but please note that they do not always have the time, as initially in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that resource recommendation questions are tightly regulated on Phys.SE.&#xA;See e.g. various meta posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and links therein.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You later improved the question (v5). This is precisely the right thing to do, so that it enters the reviewing queue. It now became clear that you were &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; looking for online lecture videos. It is then in principle up to the reviewers (3k+ users) to decide the further fate of your question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T10:58:44.567" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6718" CreationDate="2015-04-21T23:41:10.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ack! I see I completely missed the chat session! This would have been an interesting topic to bring up. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/what-about-questions-asked-by-13-year-old-kids/6719#6719&quot;&gt;It looks like I only missed actual physics, though&lt;/a&gt; (darn!), so I still have a chance to discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's just me getting touchy about the age issue again, but I still am - and have always been - against the idea of judging users by their age. I'll admit that I've seen many posts (I'm ignoring the post that was brought up, actually) written by kids that are pretty bad. At the same time, I've seen grownups write a lot of really poor stuff, too. It's often tough to tell just who's behind the really crappy stuff, because in many cases they don't care enough to take any of this seriously - I'm talking about &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, generic poster of crackpot theories of spam! - but I would assume that not all of them are kids; perhaps kids only constitute a small minority. We have no way of knowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that despite Anna's use of &quot;13-year-old&quot; a lot in this post, and the example at hand, the meat of the question isn't about age: it's about expertise. Is there a correlation between the two? I would bet all my rep - and some of other people's, too! - that an increase in age means an increase in expertise, unless you subscribe to the view that science is a game of the young. I think we can all agree that that isn't the case, however; without calling anyone old, there are a lot of folks who are older than the rest but are incredibly knowledgeable. So there's a correlation. But in science, a correlation isn't enough. A &lt;em&gt;causal relationship&lt;/em&gt; is what's needed to truly supply good evidence to a theory. And I think that there is one, at least at the level of kids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting back on-topic, the reason I'm concerned is a little bit self-centered. Where do &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; fit in? The most I know about quantum mechanics isn't too far beyond E=hv (I know, it's nu, not v, but there's no MathJax on meta), and the most I know about general relativity is what a metric is. Same goes for a bunch of other branches of physics. I would absolutely have a _b for them. But I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know a lot more about astronomy than the average kid my age, and much of the stuff I read is college level. I'm not arrogant enough to give myself a full _c, but I'm probably not a _b, either. Chances are, I won't be asking _b-level questions. Where do I fit in? And for my overall physics average, what am I? A _b-and-a-quarter? And there are certain areas of astronomy I know more about than others. How do I describe &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;? Moreover, I won't be asking questions about quantum mechanics and general relativity, because of how much of a novice I am. In a couple of years, that could change, but for know, I'll stay away from those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This - the difficulties arising from categorization - seems to be a large problem, especially at the beginner level - sort of. There are a variety of different levels of physics knowledge. There are those who don't have a good working knowledge of &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; they're asking about, those who are studying stuff at school and sort of understand it - how do we differentiate among them? The same phenomenon is active in college (and, I'd warrant, graduate school) - a lot can change over four years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the whole point of this is that there's no set way to lump a group of people together without getting extremely specific. Is that better than just blindly shoving them on Stack Exchange? Perhaps. But the &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; and level of the questions themselves are probably a better indicator of what level a person is at - and they can show changes over time. I know considerably more than what I did 8 months ago (and mostly from outside Stack Exchange!). Would that be enough to take me a level up (in the _b, _c, etc. system)? Oh, dear, absolutely not. But it would certainly matter in terms of my participation on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:59.520" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T23:41:10.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6718" CreationDate="2015-04-22T02:43:52.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say that I don't really want the site to be about the ``excitable school child'' demographic, but our big rule for defending against the un-serious---that they must ask conceptual questions---admits this demographic just fine. People at that level don't have the tools to do computation of any complexity so most of their questions are &quot;conceptual&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had a background of questions from these users for as long as I've been with the site, and it hasn't done us any real harm. So I'm not in a hurry to &quot;do&quot; something about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is not a &quot;low level questioner&quot; one, but a overeager-with-the-accept one. The OP got a basic (even superficial) answer couched in language that (s)he understood and simply accepted it because (s)he was happy. All before any other answers (or even comments) came in and before any significant voting had occurred. The current state of the answers to the question would show any reader (including the OP if (s)he looks in again) that the accepted answer has problems, but the OP didn't wait long enough to find out before hitting the Big Green Checkmark (tm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A secondary problem is that we seem to be tolerating superficial answers in a lot of cases. Sometimes even ones that are so shallow and incomplete as to be more wrong that right. I understand the impulse---I'm guilty of not wanting to feel like an ogre because my up-to-down vote ration is hovering slightly about 2 as it is---but we may not be doing ourselves any favors by letting users think that they will be rewarded for substantially incomplete and under-researched answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; The best response is twofold: write good answer to basic questions and vote down superficial or incomplete answers where ever you find the on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T02:43:52.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2015-04-22T09:09:03.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's never any need to use LMGTFY in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[LMGTFY]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;translates as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am (please check all that apply):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;]&amp;nbsp;annoyed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;]&amp;nbsp;frustrated&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;]&amp;nbsp;stressed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;]&amp;nbsp;an asshole,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;]&amp;nbsp;having a bad day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answer to your question can easily be found using a search engine so please do that. If you can't understand what you find, or why it answers your question, please ask a more specific question about the parts you don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commenter's mood or disposition are irrelevant to the question and likely to change, rendering the comment partially obsolete. Therfore, they should be omitted, leaving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answer to your question can easily be found using a search engine so please do that. If you can't understand what you find, or why it answers your question, please ask a more specific question about the parts you don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40456" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T09:09:03.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6196" CreationDate="2015-04-22T16:52:04.233" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preamble:-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I don't really have any hard feelings against SE any longer; I honestly do understand their point of view and way of functioning. It's just that the goals of PO are very different from those of StackExchange. I also figured out that a lot of my complaints when active here were unjustified (I'm talking about the &quot;wrong answers should be deleted&quot; nonsense that I liked to spread).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are fundamental differences between PhysicsOverflow and Physics Stack Exchange, besides just the scope and level. Dilaton has already mentioned the difference in scope and level, but received a lot of flak for not mentioning what I initially thought were minor differences in policy, but upon further thought are actually important to point out, as mentioned by Emilio Pisanty and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main goal of PO is to support academic communities. SE's main goal is to support a library of interesting content (as their unofficial motto says, to &quot;make the internet better&quot;. I think both points of view are perfectly reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fundamental difference is from where a lot of the policy differences come from. For instance, PhysicsOverflow has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsoverflow.org/user-rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;user rights&lt;/a&gt; document, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_ra1Ss1E-rWN3cyRC1zalAtT1U/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;moderator manual&lt;/a&gt; is made public and prominent from the PO homepage, and so on. PO's reviews section is a completely original idea, although there's also ArXiV-Analytics, but there are subtle differences which means the two aren't competitors either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are viewed as first-class citizens on PO, as they are important for an open discussion forum. Stack Exchange views them as somewhat inferior forms of content, again, because they do hinder the goal of forming neat Q&amp;amp;A libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also true that PO does not have strict rules against rudeness. We have, however, recently adopted some guidelines that &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; politeness, although don't mandate them. It's a surprising kind of propaganda spread in a number of places that we somehow &quot;encourage&quot; rudeness. We absolutely don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments about &quot;what if sexism/racism arises? will that be removed?&quot; seem to be a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;appeal to emotion&lt;/a&gt;, but anyway - such content rarely arises on a professional physics site, and is illegal in a number of countries, including the European Union where PO's servers are hosted, and where PO's registrant lives, and therefore does become a natural exception to the user rights. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the relationship between the two sites, PhysicsOverflow has zero issues with PSE. Links to answers on PSE are completely welcome (although it is preferred to link to an imported copy, as those tend too have more content), and PhysicsOverflow very much does want to maintain at least a neutral, if not a cordial relationship with Physics.SE. In fact, we even link to Physics.SE in the email we send to newly registered users, the relevant section is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Popular physics questions and Undergraduate/K-12 level questions are better suited on Quora or Physics Stack Exchange; Purely mathematical questions (that are not relevant for physicists) will be better received on MathOverflow if research-level, and Mathematics Stack Exchange if not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this feeling is not reciprocated from the other side. While I understand the reason for my ban for &quot;promotional content&quot; (although I would have preferred a warning beforehand), I really do not understand the reason for Dilaton's ban for the same stated pretext; Dilaton only posted links to PO threads once the questions were actually answered, yet was suspended for a year for doing so. I wonder if SE would have a similiar reaction, if a user posted links to Wikipedia, or Quora, or Physicsforums, or another Stack Exchange site repeatedly. Is it so bad to post some useful links to help the OP and other people interested in the question? I mean, you guys even made a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/182817/find-physicoverflow-comment-spam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;script&lt;/a&gt; to delete all links to PO here! What was that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope to see these issues resolved soon, because unlike say, PF, PO is not intended to be a competitor to PSE at all, rather a completely different platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="23119" LastEditDate="2015-04-25T08:36:28.730" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T08:36:28.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-22T17:25:22.017" Score="3" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preamble:-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; This is not related to my 1-year suspension which just expired, I understand the reasons for that, because my comments were really spam (because I posted links to PO threads before they were answered there. Note that I'm also not asking for the reasons for any suspension, but rather asking for some clarification regarding a policy that doesn't seem clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2751/dilaton&quot;&gt;Dilaton&lt;/a&gt; was suspended for posting links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhysicsOverflow&lt;/a&gt; threads that answers questions posted here on Physics.SE. Dilaton took explicit care to only post links to answers on PO which already had a positive number of upvotes, learning from my experience (because the moderator who had banned me had stated that it's OK to link to already-answered questions on PO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am completely sure that this is the precise reason for his/her suspension, because I know from communication with him/her, the precise warnings that Dilaton received and the correspondence that went through. A moderator also tried to get some community support (although he failed to do so) for this decision beforehand by asking people in the hbar for their opinions. Furthermore, another moderator even created a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/182817/find-physicoverflow-comment-spam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;script&lt;/a&gt; to delete all mentions of PhysicsOverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it not acceptable to post links in comments? Or is it not acceptable to post links to the same site in comments? Would it be OK if I, say posted links to answers on PO, but also to some on Quora, Wikipedia, etc. which SE considers uncontroversial? Would this also result in a suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is there a list/blacklist of such &quot;controversial&quot; sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit after Kyle Kanos's clarifications:-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; It seems that the policy is that no links to other Q&amp;amp;A sites is allowed. This is a bizarre policy to say the least, but I will take it to be policy, since no moderator has corrected him. So I ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is this policy documented? Where can I read the details of the policy? Specifically, I'm interested why comments (often posted by moderators here) like &quot;Cross-posted to PhysicsForums&quot; are allowed, even without the guarantee of any useful additional information being present on the linked site (showing a sharp contrast with the links to PhysicsOverflow threads, which already contain direct answers to the question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has this policy been implemented in the past? For example, if Anton Geraschenko had linked to a post on MathOverflow that answers the OP's question, would he also have faced a suspension?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if I leave some other comments, too? Would the links to PO then still be considered spam?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'd like to clarify, that the issue is absolutely not &quot;advertisements of other Q&amp;amp;A sites&quot; - rather, it's about posting links to direct answers to a particular question asked here. It's not too different from posting links to a wikipedia article that answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It simply isn't advertising - I know the statistics of how useful the comments are for PO, and it's hardly noticeable. It would be pretty silly of me to post such comments to advertise PO, when it achieves little or nothing for PO (but it helps the OP), don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T06:23:13.463" Title="Is it inappropriate behaviour to post links?" Tags="|support|comments|links|suspensions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6727" CreationDate="2015-04-22T21:38:56.577" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I certainly don't see anything wrong with links per se or repeatedly posting links to helpful webpages (e.g. wiki). I doubt that there's a blacklist of forbidden links, but you should not post links to offensive/inappropriate material or even irrelevant material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aspect of your question regarding links to sites in which you hold a vested interest is partially covered by Jeff Atwood's answer to the mother-meta question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57497/limits-for-self-promotion-in-answers&quot;&gt;Limits for self-promotion in answers&lt;/a&gt;. He answered that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;May I promote products I am affiliated with here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The community generally frowns on overt self-promotion and tends to vote it down and flag it as spam, so be careful. Post good, relevant&#xA;  answers, and if they happen to be about your product, so be it.&#xA;  However, you must disclose your affiliation with the product in your&#xA;  answers. Also, if a huge percentage of your posts include a mention of&#xA;  your product, you're clearly here for the wrong reasons. Our&#xA;  advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for&#xA;  details. We also offer free vote-based advertising for open source&#xA;  projects.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there appeared to be consensus behind this sentiment, it is stated that it became a site policy (though I can't find any more details). This, admittedly, is slightly ambiguous; it leaves open the question of whether a user who predominantly promotes a site in which they hold a vested interest and is here &quot;for the wrong reasons&quot; ought to be stopped. Although this policy is limited to answers, I think a similar policy ought to apply to comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know anything about dilaton or much about Physics Overflow - my answer has no subtextual meaning or references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that if a particular comment is an example of self-promotion and of limited help, flag it and it should be deleted. If it's helpful - and even if that user posts other links that aren't helpful - then it's a small but welcome contribution. Of course, full answers on this site are much preferred over links to external websites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose in rare cases in which a user repeatedly flouts the community guidelines and sentiments re self-promotion, their comments would have to be judged en masse and we would have to apply the ordinary warnings and penalties for dealing with users who persist in breaking rules - I don't think self-promotion needs to be a special case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T21:50:35.907" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6727" CreationDate="2015-04-23T01:27:04.017" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it not acceptable to post links in comments? Or is it not acceptable to post links to the same site in comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting links in comments is not banned, nor should it ever &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; banned. What &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be banned is the &lt;em&gt;repeated&lt;/em&gt; posting of a link  to an alternative physics Q&amp;amp;A site (such as PO, PF, Quora, etc)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. It is the  &lt;em&gt;repetitive&lt;/em&gt; nature of the act that is considered  as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spam&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Electronic spamming is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited messages (spam), especially advertising, as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The leaving of the comments acts as a source of free advertising&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; for the alternative site while (possibly) detracting users from our site. This is a lose-lose situation for SE and should not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be OK if I, say posted links to answers on PO, but also to some on Quora, Wikipedia, etc. which SE considers uncontroversial? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a Q&amp;amp;A site, I have no idea why it is being categorized alongside Quora &amp;amp; PO as some sort of viable alternative to a Q&amp;amp;A site. Links to Wiki are uncontroversial simply because it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a competitor in any sense of the word&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Q&amp;amp;A sites, such as Quora, Physics Overflow &amp;amp; Physics Forums, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;, by their very nature, competitors to the SE network. So if your only actions were posting comments that led users to &lt;em&gt;competitor&lt;/em&gt; sites, then yes it should be banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would this also result in a suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is up to the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I feel it necessary to point out that it was I who noticed the fact that Dilaton's &lt;em&gt;sole action for &lt;strong&gt;many&lt;/strong&gt; days&lt;/em&gt; was leaving promotional comments for PO (i.e., spamming) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/18462499#18462499&quot;&gt;asked a mod in chat&lt;/a&gt; about it; the situation died rather quickly in chat with an inconclusive resolution. The suspension that arose from that comment was not my goal at any point in time, despite that &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/18504893#18504893&quot;&gt;claim to the contrary&lt;/a&gt;; it even took me about an hour &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/18506109#18506109&quot;&gt;to catch on what he was getting at&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 AFAIK, our advertising is free anyways, we &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/community-promotion-ads-2015&quot;&gt;simply prefer to have a vote on it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 A similar argument can be made for arXiv that you &amp;amp; Dilaton somehow view as equivalent to Quora, PO &amp;amp; PF, even though it is simply a hosting platform for scientific publications and not in any way a Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T01:27:04.017" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T05:31:07.850" Score="-2" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;note:&lt;/strong&gt; this is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/is-it-inappropriate-behaviour-to-post-links&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it inappropriate behaviour to post links?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; I am now asking for a debate on the existing policy, rather than asking whether the policy exists. I would be fine if this is closed, but only after a moderator confirms what tpg2114 says below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/is-it-inappropriate-behaviour-to-post-links/6729#6729&quot;&gt;Kyle Kanos's answer&lt;/a&gt; to the forementioned thread claims that it is not allowed to post links to other Q&amp;amp;A sites outside the Stackexchange network, and that it's up to a moderator to suspend a user for doing so. While he has not been able to cite the link to this policy, no moderator has corrected him, and his answer is gaining upvotes, so I'll assume that this is indeed policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this is a bizarre policy to have. What's the reason to maintain such a policy? Is it a network-wide policy, and is it irrevocable like &quot;Be Nice&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T04:13:10.373" Title="Should linking to competitor sites really get you suspended?" Tags="|discussion|comments|links|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2015-04-26T19:01:12.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6730" CreationDate="2015-04-23T05:40:04.287" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've read his answer many times now and I don't see how you reach the conclusion you reached here. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Posting links in comments is not banned, nor should it ever be banned.&#xA;  What should be banned is the repeated posting of a link to an&#xA;  alternative physics Q&amp;amp;A site (such as PO, PF, Quora, etc)1. It is the&#xA;  repetitive nature of the act that is considered as spam,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is lost in the formatting here, but he even emphasized &quot;repeated&quot; twice as the problem. Since the italics didn't seem to convey the message, I will just repeat it here using bold instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting links in comments is not banned, nor should it ever be banned.&#xA;What should be banned is the &lt;strong&gt;repeated&lt;/strong&gt; posting of a link to an&#xA;alternative physics Q&amp;amp;A site (such as PO, PF, Quora, etc). It is the&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;repetitive&lt;/strong&gt; nature of the act that is considered as spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully bold makes it clear for you. The problem is doing it &lt;strong&gt;repeatedly&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;as the bulk of your contributions without disclosing your affiliation&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your question there focused on Q&amp;amp;A sites, he mentioned Q&amp;amp;A sites. I would say that &lt;strong&gt;repeated&lt;/strong&gt; posting of links to &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; other site is spam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T05:40:04.287" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6727" CreationDate="2015-04-23T10:21:06.700" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Physics SE is a community, and like all communities it needs everyone to pull together to keep it vibrant. The two most important things we expect of site members are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ask interesting and informed questions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;provide interesting and informed answers&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course other supporting activities like processing the review queues, up and downvoting, flagging and probably others I haven't thought of, but these are background activities not immediately visible to site users. What the users see are the questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of us agree that &lt;em&gt;link only&lt;/em&gt; answers are bad because they run the risk of link rot and they detract from the site's aim of being a repository of searchable information. If I repeatedly posted link only answers I'd expect to be censured for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also agree that providing answers in comments is deprecated, because if you're going to post an answer it should be a properly thought out and written answer that is both interesting and informative. Comments are just for clarification, suggesting corrections and possibly providing background information about questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is it controversial that providing link only answers in comments is a bad thing? At best it shows you're too idle to write a proper answer and at worst it sucks the lifeblood out of the site, as users wander off to other sites instead of devoting their energies to make the Physics SE a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of making this personal, ask yourself why you are a member of this site. If you want to ask good questions or provide good answers then you're most welcome, as indeed is anyone else who shows that commitment. If the only activity you plan is to lurk in the background and post links to other Q/A sites as comments to questions, then you are contributing nothing to the site and you are actively hurting it by diverting resource away to other sites. At the risk of using emotive language, that behaviour is parasitic and offensive to everyone who does work hard to make this site a good place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T10:21:06.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6727" CreationDate="2015-04-23T15:39:54.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, if a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contains a link to information that is directly pertinent to the OP's question, and to any future visitors interested in the post, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it should be deleted. I do not think that repeated postings of such comments should be cause for concern, with the strong proviso that each and every comment must link to content specifically tailored to the post above it. I do not think that this practice is grounds for a suspension, really. I am troubled by the existence of programmatic ways to hunt for this type of links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is a problem in terms of PO 'stealing' audience from this site as yet. If it does become a 'problem' - if PO does become much better than PSE at providing answers to PSE questions - then it is a sign of success on their part, so more power to them! If it becomes a problem in terms of this site losing audience and experts to a competitor, then it is this site's problem: the problem of becoming a better venue for its content and its community. The links themselves are not it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you're being disingenuous by pretending that this is the only thing that is happening. A cursory look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2751/dilaton?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=comments&quot;&gt;Dilaton's comment history&lt;/a&gt; shows a bigger picture. For the majority of those posts, the timeline appears to be as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PSE user Alice posts a question on this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PO user Bob posts a link to the question on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/4536/import-queue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PO import queue&lt;/a&gt; meta thread.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PO moderator Charlie imports the post from PSE to PO.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PO user Dave posts an answer on PO.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PO user Ed posts a link to the answer under the question on PSE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is perfectly legal, as Alice's post was licensed under CC-BY-SA and PO complies with the attribution requirements. However, it is a lot harder not to characterize this pattern as antisocial. One thing that makes this hard to evaluate is because it's hard to distinguish whether the pairs (Bob, Dave), (Bob, Ed) and (Charlie, Ed) are the same person, as there is no public record on PO of who actually imported the content; it is also hard to see how many imports were directly initiated by Charlie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel it was perfectly OK for PO to kick-start its content trove with imported content from PSE, particularly since a large chunk of it came from the unsuccessful Theoretical Physics site. However, importing PSE content posted &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; PO really got rolling is different, and I don't find it a welcome addition to the mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me turn the tables a bit, and tell me how you'd feel about this perfectly legal coda to the above timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PSE user Frank sees Ed's link and follows it. He sees Dave's answer and thinks &quot;This is brilliant! It's exactly what Alice was looking for! You know what, I'll go back to PSE and turn Ed's link-only-answer-turned-comment into the full thing.&quot; He then returns to PSE and adds a CW answer which contains Dave's PO post verbatim, with an addendum inside &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags at the bottom linking Dave's PO profile and Dave's PO post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this is something Ed might have done, but didn't do. One could argue that this is what Ed should have done if s/he simply wanted to help Alice and had no other interests at play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all of this going on, I don't see how you can expect this site not to see this behaviour as antisocial. You are in effect actively trying to co-opt audience that came specifically to this site, and I do not see why you should expect this site's support for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the timeline above pokes big holes in the claims that &lt;code&gt;PO and PSE are not competitors, they are simply different communities&lt;/code&gt; and that &lt;code&gt;PO is self-sustaining in terms of users and content&lt;/code&gt;. If either of them were the case, PO wouldn't &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; be importing content from PSE. It also leaves statements like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not too different from posting links to a Wikipedia article that answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;out in the cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue is something that I think should really be addressed by PO in terms of what its mission is before you demand a resolution from this side. Is its purpose to aggressively take over from PSE? In that case, please don't fault the PSE community for finding such behaviour antisocial. Is it part of the PO mission to answer interesting questions from PSE? This can easily be done by answering directly in PSE. Is this sort of thing only to provide a home for content that was not well received in PSE? Then limit it to closed and tumbleweed questions, instead of pulling content that's less than a day old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all of this, I &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; don't think it's a good idea to remove those links. If there are gray-area cross-posted versions of PSE content on other sites, it is in PSE's interest to keep links to those versions around, instead of pretending that they simply don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T15:39:54.140" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6736" CreationDate="2015-04-23T17:56:15.280" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I ask from someone ,through a comment, who gave an answer to a question relevant to a another question of mine, to check my question and tell me his opinion commenting or if he wishes answering it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T18:21:09.743" Title="About comments to questions relative to others" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6735" CreationDate="2015-04-23T18:21:09.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no mechanism for contacting users about a post if they have not already participated in that post, and for good reason. This is not meant to be a social network, and there is a real concern that relatively famous users would get so many unsolicited requests for help they would simply leave the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if the two questions are really very closely linked, it would be okay to leave a comment like &quot;you might want to have a look at this related question of mine.&quot; But don't make a habit of it, and try not to focus on a select few users. The key is to not pester anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, most questions that can be answered can be answered by many users here, and if you always seek out one person in particular, while flattering for that person, can come off as a bit dismissive of everyone else's ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an exception to the &quot;don't go around asking particular people to solve your problems&quot; rule, and that is our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1159/opt-in-to-be-always-pingable-to-answer-questions&quot;&gt;list of pingable users&lt;/a&gt;. If anyone has listed themselves there, they are okay with being notified of questions in their topics of interest. That said, I'm fairly certain very few people utilize that resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T18:21:09.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6738" CreationDate="2015-04-25T16:29:52.690" Score="6" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to one of the answers to my post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is not a homework help site, it is not meant to be a resource to teach people physics, and it is not a resource intended to help right conceptual misconceptions in students. When it was originally created, this site was meant to be a place where active physicists doing active research could come and ask/answer questions. It was intended to be a resource for physicists to be able to find answers to common questions they may want to ask. Much like how SO is most useful to programmers that are trying to program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that means we need another site (newly from Area 51) or any other existing site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that really means we need or I need a different place as a student to help me get my doubts cleared?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;According to the anawers I am thinking that probably one these two would be then useful for me (I'm following both). I hope people will help these, as they still are in definiton &lt;code&gt;:(&lt;/code&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/77677.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics homework questions Q&amp;amp;A&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/86609/competitive-exams?referrer=uQtcXaMCGQOGlwjYmelKJA2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhyRT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Competitive Exams&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25605" LastEditorUserId="25605" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T03:07:18.610" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T03:07:18.610" Title="Clarification regarding conceptual doubts" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6737" CreationDate="2015-04-26T01:04:41.637" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we are not a homework help site; there are other venues for that (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/a&gt; for more details), if that is what you really need/want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the SE level, each SE site has their own self-given rules about what is on-topic and what is off-topic. While &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; might approve of doing someone else's homework, we don't. And we're not really interested in opening the flood gates for that, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=homework+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;you can read in the many posts here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want some physics homework help on SE &quot;turf,&quot; there is an area51 proposal already active to this end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a long way to go (40 Q's with &gt;9 score and 42 more people following it), but it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; happen &lt;em&gt;if it gathers momentum&lt;/em&gt;. This could only happen if people who &lt;em&gt;want it&lt;/em&gt; will go out and &lt;em&gt;promote it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So that really means we need or I need a different place as a student to help me get my doubts cleared?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your doubts are numerically based (e.g., &lt;em&gt;I entered &quot;this&quot; into my equation and got the wrong answer! Help me!&lt;/em&gt;) then yes. If your doubts are conceptually based (e.g., &lt;em&gt;How can quasars emit anything if they are black holes?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;), then you are at the correct spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many (but likely not all) of the numerically based questions &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be turned into a decent conceptual question, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; (big stress there) the OP takes the time to think about &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is troubling them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Asked and answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/137837/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T01:04:41.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-04-26T12:08:50.327" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/77677.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics homework questions Q&amp;amp;A&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T12:08:50.327" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-26T12:08:50.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2015-04-26T14:20:49.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thephysicsforum.com/forum.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thephysicsforum.com/forum.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78777" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T14:20:49.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2015-04-26T14:23:47.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://physicshelpforum.com/physics-help-forum.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://physicshelpforum.com/physics-help-forum.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78777" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T14:23:47.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-26T19:21:51.537" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I typing my post MathJax re-render the preview after each key press, leading to an annoying flicker in the preview area as I'm typing. When there are lots of formulas it also slows down the entire thing making my characters appear in the editing window with a noticeable delay as it renders. My computer isn't a recent fast one so it's quite annoying when my post contains lots of formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add some delay so it re-renders it let's say a second after the last keypress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Operating system: Linux &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Results of &lt;code&gt;uname -a&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Linux calmarius-desktop 3.2.0-80-generic #116-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 23 17:11:03 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The browser is Google Chrome 42.0.2311.90 (64-bit) without addons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7743" LastEditorUserId="7743" LastEditDate="2015-04-26T19:56:38.643" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T19:56:38.643" Title="Formulas are flickering in the preview as I type" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-27T11:13:05.543" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centripetal-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centripetal-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centripetal-force&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/centrifugal-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;centrifugal-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;centrifugal-force&lt;/a&gt; are currently separate tags. Should they be linked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2447" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-04-27T11:14:52.787" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T12:53:41.997" Title="Should tags centripetal-force and centrifugal-force be linked?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2015-04-27T12:53:41.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to keep them separate, since they're different concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//xkcd.com/123/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;//imgs.xkcd.com/comics/centrifugal_force.png&quot; alt=&quot;XKCD 123&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T12:53:41.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-04-28T02:46:40.557" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/86609/competitive-exams?referrer=uQtcXaMCGQOGlwjYmelKJA2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhyRT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Competitive Exams&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25605" LastEditorUserId="25605" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T03:05:30.907" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T03:05:30.907" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-28T02:46:40.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6720" CreationDate="2015-04-28T11:07:23.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this was closed again, this time as Too Broad. I disagree with this: the question is perfectly well posed with a concise (and quite demanding) set of requirements on its possible answers. Yes, it could conceivably receive more than one answer, but so do many questions on this site. If it starts receiving a plethora of answers, then we can put them all into a single CW answer (which in fact is probably a good idea anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't vote to reopen again but I really disagree with this closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T11:07:23.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6749" CreationDate="2015-04-28T11:12:19.537" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was trying to update &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6442/examples-of-good-homework-questions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; with a link to another well asked question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/178722/determining-straining-force-and-reaction-forces-on-a-beam#comment379180_178722&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - I tried twice, but each time my answer did not appear- I am wondering if it is being checked because I asked the original question and already posted one answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the idea was to post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6442/examples-of-good-homework-questions&quot;&gt;good examples of homework questions&lt;/a&gt; as separate answers, which is why I want to add a second answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea what is going on? I typed out an answer twice and both hit post both times, but nothing seemed to appear....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T11:30:48.067" Title="Problems trying to post a second answer to question (second from same user)" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6748" CreationDate="2015-04-28T11:30:48.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably caused by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/202805&quot;&gt;SE script&lt;/a&gt; that automatically converts short answers into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6442/examples-of-good-homework-questions#comment25159_6442&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T11:30:48.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6753" CreationDate="2015-04-28T12:12:58.277" Score="0" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the situation of having a long answer but no question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/178833/how-to-find-the-height-where-the-collision-of-two-balls-occurs?noredirect=1#comment379181_178833&quot;&gt;regarding this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can discard the answer so nobody has any benefit from it and the time I spent writing it is deemed wasted.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Or&lt;/strong&gt; I could post that answer somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did the later, asking for verification of my answer.&#xA;It got put on hold, because it should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;should ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;, which it does: a height&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt;, which is plain wrong and a bit of an insult&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an attempt to explain these unfitting probably predefined statements, I receive this comment from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/8563/emilio-pisanty&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;check-my-work questions are not really on topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank for the clarification Emilio, it is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I get it. If the source of a question is stigmatised with the possibility of being homework, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;treat it differently as discussed here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves me wondering what I should have been doing differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point of posting the answer was that I thought that there could be some value for the community in it. Being told to be unspecific, lacking effort and off topic as a response is &lt;strong&gt;not exactly encouraging to create exhaustive answers in the future and provide such to this community&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do in a situation like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76233" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T06:49:28.077" Title="What should I do with long exhaustive answers in lack of a question and in general?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6750" CreationDate="2015-04-28T13:20:24.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with this type of question is that it is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; unlikely to be helpful to anyone who has not been staring for half an hour at the precise same problem that you have. The problem itself is pretty artificial and the only reason to care about that height is because you saw it in a book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In addition, your working is extremely hard to read and is unlikely to be helpful even to someone with the same problem, as it takes a good bit of decoding. It is never enough to just provide a long list of equations that sort of go somewhere; you need to provide some connecting tissue to tell the reader what you're doing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't be offended at the 'show some effort' bit. This is an automatic message that needs to cover a wide range of cases. Its purpose is to give users a sense of what's wrong with their question and redirect them to more detailed information - which you did find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a conceptual question. Saying that it is about &quot;a height&quot; is not enough - all questions &lt;em&gt;include&lt;/em&gt; concepts, but this does not equate to be asking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; them. The problem in your question is a routine calculation with no conceptual content. For more information, please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our guidelines&lt;/a&gt; carefully. To get a more detailed breakdown of this community's attitudes towards homework(-like) questions, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework&quot;&gt;Bite-sizing homework&lt;/a&gt; thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T13:20:24.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6442" CreationDate="2015-04-28T23:11:04.113" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a well asked question about mechanics and forces &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/178722/determining-straining-force-and-reaction-forces-on-a-beam&quot;&gt;see determining-straining-force-and-reaction-forces-on-a-beam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I particularly like about the question is that it is clearly laid out and it is possible to see the thought process of the person asking the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit arfter great comment from @KyleKanos.... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.... The question is well laid out and clear, but narrowly focuses on one aspect of a problem so it may not be helpful to other people to look at.. Probably it is for this reason that the question has been closed now. Generally homework type questions should ask about particular concepts of physics that will be useful to other people in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T17:47:10.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6750" CreationDate="2015-04-29T06:49:28.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would reinforce what Emilio says. In this particular case the answer is unlikely to be a valuable long term resource for the site. However, to provide a more general answer to the question: exactly the same thing happened to me, and my response was basically the same as yours i.e. I posted a fresh question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136056/how-does-the-hubble-parameter-change-with-the-age-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;How does the Hubble parameter change with the age of the universe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then posted the answer I'd spent all that time writing. The Physics SE supports, and indeed encourages, the posting of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers&quot;&gt;canonical questions and answers&lt;/a&gt; where these will be helpful to the Physics community. You'll note that when you're posting a new question there is a tick box labelled &lt;em&gt;Answer your own question&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;a link to explain the principles involved&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T06:49:28.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T09:34:41.270" Score="83" ViewCount="3550" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/179002/&quot;&gt;Dark matter clumping&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an excellent question and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/174983/1325&quot;&gt;the answer is not at all obvious&lt;/a&gt;. I assume it was downvoted just because it's a duplicate, but is this really appropriate? Downvoting can be used to make questions disappear from the home page, and also to deter people from answering, but neither of those reasons apply in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re Danu's answer: I mention this question because it's the one that caught my eye most recently, but it seems to me I see an increasing trend of downvoting questions that I don't think deserve it. It also seems to me that once a question has attracted the first downvote a slew of bandwagon downvotes rapidly follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't really a question, more a rant, so it doesn't really have an answer. But while I'm here ranting let me urge site members to consider whether their downvote will actually achieve anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2023-12-07T19:37:33.323" Title="We seem to be over-eager to downvote" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-29T10:00:28.940" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if you're trying to make a broader argument here, but I don't really see any serious issue with the question you've linked. It was only downvoted once, which may just as well be explained in a number of different ways (e.g. someone thinking dark matter is a myth, personally disliking the OP or other kinds of uninteresting stuff). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's simply too little evidence to draw any serious conclusions from: Every experienced user knows that unexplained and seemingly unreasonable downvotes are part of the game, and that's just how it is. To me, it seems clear that there was no excessively negative response to the question. If you think that we're dealing with a larger trend here, then maybe it would be a good idea to address that in another meta post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T10:00:28.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-29T15:24:22.660" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;The mentioned question does not have my downvote, so this is not a response to that. I only flagged it as a duplicate and moved on.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While any individual user can not (and &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt;) create an official voting policy which is followed (in general) by others, I would still like to advance my personal viewpoint regarding voting on (obvious) duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is reasonable to suggest that duplicate questions should be sitting on a positive score. Using the search bar on right-top is intended to be a precondition before posting a question, and in the case of obvious duplicates, going through this procedure would lead them to the answer that they want. If that doesn't address the OP concerns completely, he/she can always post a follow-up question (liking to the original, of course). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people start upvoting (obvious) duplicates, based on the argument that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is an excellent question and the answer is not at all obvious, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it creates a possibility of gaining unfair reputation from the system in the following manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 1 - I use the search bar to find &quot;&lt;em&gt;excellent&lt;/em&gt;&quot; questions, let us say of around 3 years back (so that only a few (old) users have seen them before. Others can only use the search bar to find out whether that has been asked before, but that's extra effort, which most people won't do. So, chances of being caught reduce.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 2 - I rephrase them in my own words, making them the proverbial &lt;em&gt;old wine in new bottle&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 3 - Wait for John Rennie to visit my post! There will be at least one upvote. (And/or) If an occasional answer comes along, even better. I'll upvote it/accept it, and the post won't be deleted then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, by carrying out the above procedure, I have shown no research effort, yet I get a positive score (+5, or +7, depending on whether or not it got answered.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat - maybe if I keep posting duplicates, I could be in trouble with some automatic scripts on SE. But all such scripts come with certain thresholds, and one such &quot;game&quot; post, followed by three/four normal posts, can always escape detection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note - When I say duplicate questions should not be sitting on a positive score, I am not suggesting that they deserve to be sitting at -1 or -2 either. The right score for them is 0, no gain and no loss. Therefore, the best policy here seems to be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag, and move on!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T15:24:22.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T18:18:37.270" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask if questions about connections between different interpretations of physical theories can be posted(let me be exact: an example of a question like that is &quot;What are the connections between Relational and Bohmian Quantum Mechanics?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T18:37:19.477" Title="Connections between interpretations of theories" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6757" CreationDate="2015-04-29T18:37:19.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's potential for such a question to be too broad or opinion-based. But as long as you keep it concise and on-topic, it should be fine. There isn't anything wrong with the type of question per se. Just be careful with what and how you ask things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T18:37:19.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-29T20:10:51.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a controversial opinion about this. I think there isn't any harm in answering questions that have been answered before. There are usually multiple ways to answer and many different styles of presentation. But it should be acknowledged that the question was answered before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78910" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T20:10:51.277" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-29T23:17:43.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't enough experience on Stack to have formed a view about down-voting in general, but as personal testimony I was really put off Stack for quite a while - I've only just returned today - by a down-voting event I was at the receiving end of. I will obviously link to the question I had asked at the bottom, and for that reason I won't give details that are available there, and will assume anyone taking an interest in my answer will obviously want to check my account by looking at the question itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened was I asked a question that was commented on by a user with significant reputation effectively dismissing the question. The user had already been given a significant ++points for his comment, and my question and been down-voted and stood at -1. When I returned, I pointed out that I was literally quoting (well, paraphrasing) a very senior cosmologist and provided the YouTube link. I also pointed out that my question actually supposed what the cosmologist said had to be false and gave my reasons. So even without clarifying, just in the question itself, there were no grounds at all for being dismissed. This matter got sorted out in the question/answer process, in that the answers all confirmed the cosmologist's position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that was fine. But my negative down-vote was not corrected - even back to 0. Nor were the generous number of points awarded the initial commenter who got it totally wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt like this totally invaded and violated my integrity. OK I'm just making that up tee hee.....if an isolated event it's doesn't really matter I can see that. But the reason I suspect it isn't, is because that kind of patter, I would imagine, corresponds to one aspect of the negative dimension to any kind of social reputation system. Which o the whole is obviously a great idea and even if it wasn't, it's just a reality for humans anyway. But there are down-sides that should be well understood and taken serious so as to minimize their effects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is over-trusting people with higher reputation. Not a problem for beginners and casuals...but becomes a potential problem for more senior people, such as those with moderating rights in context of StackExchange, if they have the power to down-vote beginner questions based on high-value users if they comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is - and this is relevant to the question above - a kind of statistical tendency for people to play it too safe. Reason being there's a lot of cranks and agendas out there, that aren't really very scientific at basis. So there's a need to keep StackExchange scientific in line with its goals, and that tends to make it necessary to quote consensus positions only. And this then tends to intersect with the reputation system with the result the basis of reputation, the higher up you go, becomes all the more squeezed into very conservative non-risk taking positions. Which leaves a lot of questions unanswered or answered in a way that implicitly rewrites the question to exclude components that speculate beyond what is safe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to really emphasise here, that in hindsight I think leaving stack for weeks over this was an over-reaction. I think the system is really fabulous and I haven't observed a single incident involving a moderator or anyone else that can reasonably be called 'badly motivated' Everyone wants to teach and learn and share and that's terrific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for that reason I want to conclude by suggestion a solution based on the above personal experience - which may be biased and probably is so please go look - and personal thoughts about 'reputation' which may be wrong and probably is. Furthermore my solutions, for all I know are already in place, in which case....whatever! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is for three new workflow components. Both of these changes assume the good-will and best intentions of moderators and others, which I've observed. It's still down to their personal judgement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alter the Stack-exchange application, such that a 'down-vote' action is changed from a simple control event, into a process that begins with the down-voting event, and completes a few days later when the task shows up on the same person's 'to-do' list, to simply review the decision based on subsequent events if any. At that point they can either confirm the down-vote, mark it for second-opinion, reverse the decision, change it, whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have a new status for questions that defaults to something like &quot;answerable within consensus&quot;, but other statuses like &quot;speculative/risky&quot; and then &quot;tagged for deletion&quot;. Include an explanation about the reality of the world being full of non-scientific explanations and agendas and the need for stack-exchange to maintain scientific integrity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;add a new status to individual comments/answers that corresponds to the status of the question at the time. So in other words, it becomes possible to give a risky answer to a risky question. It's still going to be more risky than answering within consensus, and there are good reasons why it should be. But it will allow people to take measured risks...in the knowledge that anyone judging will have sight of the context that the question itself was risky. It's still down to personal judgement, how risky is reasonable, and how much is too much. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concluding remarks&#xA;I think changes like this will have a small but compounding effect. Over time and over many many events and people, the impact will continue to grow and eventually it will become dramatic/striking. This is because it directly mitigates the down-side of reputation without diluting reputation. And reputation is fundamental to human society, so the impacts are larger over larger intervals. Thank you for reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The promised link: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170937/why-are-orbits-around-black-holes-stable&quot;&gt;Why are orbits around black holes stable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T23:17:43.387" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-29T23:50:09.113" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't an answer, but I can't post it as a comment. Danu's comment &quot;I think it's simply too little evidence to draw any serious conclusions from&quot; reminded me of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4190/tex-se-really-are-nicer-voters&quot;&gt;earlier post on meta.tex.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidence is pretty easy to get using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/159549/meaness-of-site&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DataExplorer Query&lt;/a&gt;. Here are some statistics on &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                neg     zero        pos         total       %neg            %zero           %pos&#xA;tex             313     15317       189068      204698      0.1529081867    7.482730657     92.36436116&#xA;mathoveflow     1582    12921       145288      159791      0.990043244     8.086187583     90.92376917&#xA;ux              811     14175       47473       62459       1.298451784     22.69488785     76.00666037&#xA;math            14317   262857      779308      1056482     1.355157968     24.88040497     73.76443707&#xA;biology         260     2342        16344       18946       1.372321334     12.36144833     86.26623034&#xA;chemistry       411     2913        15248       18572       2.21300883      15.684902       82.10208917&#xA;super user      15751   252728      410831      679310      2.318676304     37.2036331      60.4776906&#xA;programmers     4917    28655       132933      166505      2.953064473     17.2096934      79.83724212&#xA;stackoverflow   738773  10471867    13648708    24859348    2.97181165      42.1244636      54.9072475&#xA;physics         4700    29547       101190      135437      3.47024816      21.81604731     74.71370453&#xA;English         10230   38334       136987      185551      5.513309009     20.65954913     73.82714186&#xA;&#xA;(Data collected 4/29/2015.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes: physics.stackexchange users down vote questions more often than other &quot;technical&quot; stack exchanges. [Of course, that isn't necessarily bad, but it might be...I don't know!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:39.803" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T14:30:26.350" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-04-30T03:01:01.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't usually downvote a duplicate, but it seems to me that people should be checking for duplicates first, before they upvote any question. I've been trying to do that more myself recently. In response to The Dark Side's point: if a question is flagged as a duplicate, then are any reputation gains for upvotes on the question reversed? If not, maybe they should be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T03:01:01.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T15:05:40.527" Score="1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an extremely curious question relating to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-travel&quot;&gt;time-travel&lt;/a&gt; paradoxes which I believe has not been thought of before. Can I ask it in the main site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T17:16:36.133" Title="Can we ask time-travel questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6765" CreationDate="2015-05-01T15:41:15.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can ask questions on time travel in the framework of relativity or some other accepted theory, but you can't just ask about &quot;time travel&quot; in general. You need to be working in the framework of some theory. If it has absolutely nothing to do with an accepted theory in physics, it might still be relevant on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the scifi stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;. If your question starts out with, &quot;say you have a time machine&quot;, it probably isn't a good fit for physics stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that if you ask it, it will be voted up. There are are a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions on this site about the &quot;paradoxes&quot; of special relativity already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user12029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:11.907" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T15:41:15.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-05-03T12:55:41.920" Score="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alright, everyone, I'm the bad guy: With 2314 downvotes I am the user on this SE &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/302120/top-100-users-with-most-downvotes?MinDownVotes=100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;with the most downvotes&lt;/a&gt;, not counting the Community bot. In only 10 months of activity I've cast more downvotes than any single one of you. I've also cast 1126 upvotes, for whatever it's worth. So I'll tell you why and how I vote, and you may decide if &quot;we&quot; are indeed overky eager to downvote. But let me tell you from the start:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;strong&gt;we are too reluctant to downvote and too eager to upvote low-quality questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, votes are &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; indicators. When I pass through and see a highly upvoted question, I think &lt;em&gt;&quot;Oh, nice, this is what physics is about, what physicists find interesting and how questions here should be&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. When I see a highly upvoted answer (without fights in the comments), I think: &lt;em&gt;&quot;This is probably correct and/or a useful way to think about the question - why else would they all upvote it?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; What votes are emphatically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; are judgements of the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it may be disheartening to get downvotes, but votes are, not counting revenge voters and other &quot;illegal&quot; schemes, really just relating to the post they are cast on. They are no judgement of the user as a whole, and not casting a downvote because you are afraid of the effect it might have on the user just defeats the whole purpose of downvoting in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You let content you do not actually believe to be a good fit for the site slide by without an indicator (the -1) saying so. This, in turn, might invite more questions like it (since people can see similar questions have not been badly received). Additionally, it makes low positive vote counts essentially meaningless - if almost no downvotes are cast, votes in the 1-4 ranges are quite meaningless, because one or two upvotes are often quickly cast on almost all types of questions, even the blatantly off-topic and the really bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By making downvotes rare, you &lt;em&gt;intensify&lt;/em&gt; the psychological effect a downvote has when it is actually cast, leading to &quot;&lt;em&gt;Why -1, step forward, cowardly downvoter!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;-type comments and accusations for merely casting a downvote. This, in turn, leads to people thinking it is actually a grave decision to cast a downvote (since other don't seem to cast them lightly), and they might grow to use them more sparingly themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it is clear from this why I think that not downvoting because of the effect on the user is a &lt;em&gt;Bad Idea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;TM&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me finish with personal anecdote time for too eagerly upvoting low-quality questions (just as John's opening post is also rather anecdotal ;) ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I very often see &lt;em&gt;blatant&lt;/em&gt; homework questions which are just the exercise text pasted into the question box with a &lt;em&gt;&quot;What do I do?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; tagged on that have one or even more upvotes. My propensity to downvote is partly so that a positive score might tell me that a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of this type. (To be fair, such blatant do-my-work questions usually end up at a negative score, but the fact that they are upvoted at all still bothers me.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The general vote score on questions that are technical (or &quot;high-level&quot;, but I don't want to use that notion) is &lt;em&gt;very low&lt;/em&gt;, and I've seen many worthy questions sit only at +2 or +3. At the same time, I have seen absolutely crap technical questions (no research effort whatsoever, no indication what the question is actually about if you don't already know it, etc.) &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; at +2 or +3. This is another reason I am quick to downvote - if I, personally, can make a score difference of 2 between these questions, then it is best that I do. That one vote cast is an up- and the other a downvote is tangential.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T12:55:41.920" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-05-03T21:30:57.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is subjective, but as I'm human, I appreciate being down-voted because I ask stupid questions all the time.  I drove my college professors crazy, along with the other students. Should my question be real stinker, I delete it quickly.  It is a means of providing feedback to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26071" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T21:30:57.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6770" CreationDate="2015-05-07T08:34:03.127" Score="15" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that other stack exchange sites have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244238/&quot;&gt;new style of user profile&lt;/a&gt;. The new style has a different layout, as well as more statistics, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244534/&quot;&gt;&quot;people reached&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is interesting. Is the new style coming to physics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My profile pages on other stack exchange sites have the new template, but my physics one doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T16:20:04.130" Title="Is the new profile style on SE coming to Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|design|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6769" CreationDate="2015-05-07T08:57:40.240" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Edited to reflect the current situation) We now have the new CSS and profile page layout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to this, nobody knew when it was coming (except &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; the design team, but I'm not sure if their scheduling algorithm is any more sophisticated than &quot;what site do we feel like working on today?&quot;). There is/was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253359/list-of-communities-with-base-css-updates-completed&quot;&gt;a list of sites which have had the update and those which have not&lt;/a&gt;, but it was kept in random order without any indication of when the remaining sites would get their design update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T16:20:04.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6772" CreationDate="2015-05-08T12:46:09.487" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just lost 13 reputation points due to a user being removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears though that the [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] has not been removed. And equally strange is that I only gained 2 reputation through him or her because I upvoted their answer so how did I loose even more than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71413" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-05-08T21:11:11.680" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T21:11:11.680" Title="Bug with user removal?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6771" CreationDate="2015-05-08T13:17:15.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your loss through &quot;User removed&quot; has been 15 reputation points. This means someone who upvoted three of your questions or one question and one answer has been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how you concluded that this should be the user you link to, but it evidently isn't - there is no way to tell for us ordinary users which user removal your reputation lass was caused by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T13:17:15.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-05-09T20:32:59.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't be afraid to downvote. Downvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quickly notify someone that their post is not good, and enough downvotes should get them to either:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove a bad question/answer, thereby cleaning this site up of clutter, or hopefully;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit their post to be more suitable, and appreciated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should encourage more thought put into an answer or question the next time. Hopefully people learn from their mistakes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously some people will be a bit too sensitive, and take umbrage. I have on occasion, especially when I first joined, but hopefully they will develop a thicker skin, pick themselves up and continue using the site, but be a better poster for it. In extreme cases, they may be scared off, which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a shame, but you can't pander to everyone's sensibilities. There are lots of new visitors each day, so if some get lost in downvotes then so be it, they will be replaced, and maybe they can find a home on some other site, where they feel more comfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes without saying that downvotes should always be accompanied by a comment, else how will people know what they have done wrong. However, if a suitable comment has already been left pointing out the error, I see no harm in adding to the downvote cont, without having to repeat the comment, unless more info can be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74103" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T20:32:59.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-05-09T21:56:47.313" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/Worldbuilding-Workshop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X2gkr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Worldbuilding Workshop - building worlds so you don&amp;#39;t have to&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62614" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T21:56:47.313" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-09T21:56:47.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-05-09T22:58:04.770" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contradictions, contradictions everywhere!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, note that this is a forum, not a scientific institution. The majority of people use a forum because they want to obtain a solution to a certain problem in cooperation with other people. Facts and solution to most exercises or other scientific data can be found on databases, books etc. If merely I wanted to obtain a solution to a problem there is no need for a forum like this. It is far more valuable to work out the solution under guideance of experienced people step by step, than rather looking it up. It is the responsibility of the commenter not to give a way too much of the solution, but let the questioner think and get the solution himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what is wrong about discussions? Again, for example I for myself, joined this forum to discuss and to solve problems with other people. The topics I have seen already in Physics or Mathematics are mostly basic undergraduate matter which can be looked up easily. It indeed are discussions itself and getting to know the view of other, maybe more experience members, that make forums useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And people who downvote a question, not formulated perfectly: Every thought about people posting who are, say 14 years old and go to school? Formulating questions and answers understandably for others also needs some pratice. People who try to contribute or extent their knowledge are discouraged if they see like 5 downvotes on their posts. How about teaching or showing them their mistakes and helping them to formulate their questions correctly? This also is a valuable process of learning. Or have you written your first publication with perfect style and experience? If yes, I would really appreciate reading it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning duplicates: If the question is not completely identical, why downvote it? The above said applies and by the means of a forum, help them people solve it step by step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have joined various scientific forums and the quality of the answers are comparable, if not better, although no downvote system is implemented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80827" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T22:58:04.770" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2015-05-10T01:38:59.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the content of the Physics Stack Exchange may be the reason for the &amp;quot;unusual&amp;quot; down-vote percentage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, I think the Physics Stack Exchange is going to attract more quacks posting personal theories and unanswerable questions than, say, the Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange for obvious reasons. This could be what increases down-voting relative to other technical Forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, Physics is also a common &amp;quot;difficult&amp;quot; subject in school and this increases the number of worthless do-my-homework-style question post, which also increases the number of down-votes relative to other forums regarding subjects with typically less difficult homework in corresponding subject courses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2023-12-07T19:37:33.323" LastActivityDate="2023-12-07T19:37:33.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6781" CreationDate="2015-05-10T21:07:58.153" Score="4" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today as I was answering a question I noticed that $\oiint$ doesn't work in Physics SE. Is it some kind of a bug or am I missing something obvious? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68030" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-11-01T04:33:05.113" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T19:29:54.593" Title="\oiint doesn't seem to work" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-12T05:25:37.300" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/77473/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; and its answer are an example of what I mean .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is interesting and it will be caught by a search engine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do Physics concepts build on top of other concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content is about difficulties of a student, answered adequately in the comments.  There is one answer that is not a real answer to the title and a wishy washy  for the content of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition the questioner has not appeared in the site since 2013 a week after asking this question and the answerer has over a year to appear on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the final objective is to have a good reference for physics questions for future aspiring physicist coming up with such a question/answer defeats the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might answer the title question but a searcher might come up with just the question and dismiss it because it is obvious a student question, and never, look at the more general answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some judicial moderation would be useful, deleting similar fluff?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T12:54:28.723" Title="Should some questions revived by community be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6779" CreationDate="2015-05-12T05:42:18.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed this as well. As stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9975/1190&quot;&gt;answer to the Math Meta post dmckee linked&lt;/a&gt;, MathJax simply does not support this symbol. You could consider it a bug in MathJax if you want - or more accurately, a feature request - but it's not something for Stack Exchange to handle. So the place to report this would be on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathjax.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the MathJax website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless and until this is implemented in MathJax, I would recommend just using &lt;code&gt;\oint&lt;/code&gt;, which gets the point across. It's quite common anyway for physicists to use a single integral symbol regardless of how many dimensions the integration region has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T05:42:18.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6780" CreationDate="2015-05-12T05:48:53.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking on behalf of the moderators: in general, we try not to delete things (questions and answers) manually, unless they are spam or offensive. The system will automatically delete posts satisfying certain criteria, and we think those criteria are good ones to use to draw the line about what should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best way to have questions like this deleted is to downvote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, there could be occasional exceptions. Off the top of my head, I'd say probably having a meta post about it, or mentioning it in chat, is a good idea, so that anyone who can think of a reason not to delete it can speak up, and then if there are no objections after a little while, we can go ahead and delete the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T06:19:28.123" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T06:19:28.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T19:20:02.643" Score="14" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is on topic on meta but we don't have a meta-meta to ask whether it is appropriate to ask this on meta. Anyway my question is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much time do you spend on average on Physics SE per day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68030" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T13:54:37.523" Title="Time you spend on Physics SE" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6784" CreationDate="2015-05-15T05:51:32.860" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very variable. I check the questions in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening, but how long I spend on the site depends on whether any of the questions catch my eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can take a surprisingly long time to write a thorough answer, especially since the answers that are most fun are the ones at the edge of my knowledge, so I have to spend time researching them. It's not unusual for me to spend an hour on an involved answer. Some of the canonical Q/As I've written have taken a day or more, but that's a special case as it's more akin to writing an article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the reason we so often see experienced site members posting brief answers as comments is because it can take such an investment in time to write a proper answer. I trust the OPs appreciate just how much effort is put in on their behalf :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T05:51:32.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6784" CreationDate="2015-05-15T13:54:37.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just take a look at the stats page of each of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review pages&lt;/a&gt; (or my 4 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/107/steward?userid=25301&quot;&gt;Steward badges&lt;/a&gt;) and my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/82/marshal?userid=25301&quot;&gt;Marshal badge&lt;/a&gt; and you can see &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; I spend most of my time on Physics.SE (which is also a subtle hint for those with 2k+ rep to start reviewing what you can &amp;amp; those with 3k+ rep to start reviewing the close queue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually spend about 20-30 minutes in the morning (while cooking breakfast &amp;amp; drinking coffee) on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stackexchange.marvin&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Android) mobile app&lt;/a&gt; looking at questions that were posted (trying to manually review, since there isn't a review page on the app) and voting up/down as I see fit. I typically spend another hour or so in the afternoon (during the kids' nap time) and at night (after the kids' bed time) reviewing and answering/commenting what I can. All tolled, that's between &lt;strong&gt;2 and 3 hours per day&lt;/strong&gt; and less on weekends that I actually spend time doing things on the site.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like John, if I find a question that interests me I'll think about the answer for a bit (usually while reviewing and doing daily duties) and spend at least 20 minutes writing one up (usually longer if I need to find links or if the wife and/or kids need attention)--this number is subtracted from the time spent on reviews, so the net 2-3 hours is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1 The numbers quoted here are for my &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; time on Physics; the tab is open in the background in my browser always, so once the computer is un-suspended (re-animated?) I'm technically &quot;on.&quot; In this case, the number is probably closer to 6 hours a day (and longer when I was still a student working 10 hours days).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T13:54:37.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6788" CreationDate="2015-05-16T08:19:41.947" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw this show up in my reputation timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+2 7 hours ago removed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/165545/2451&quot;&gt;How is the average particle density defined in condensed matter physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me why this was removed? It does not show up as revently deleted post. Do i have any means of looking at it? I don't want to loose stuff i post here. I am not sure if this was a question i answered myself but if so i would really regret not being able to look at it if i need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So were can I see what that was and can anyone give a hint why it was deleted, for general couriosity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one point more. Do i need to be afraid posts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/165924/contructive-proof-of-2nd-quantization-form-of-operators&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; can be deleted? Where i answered myself so no votes and no accepted answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71413" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T12:06:06.567" Title="Why delete this post?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6787" CreationDate="2015-05-16T11:28:43.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;FYI, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/165545/2451&quot;&gt;OP's question&lt;/a&gt; was deleted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt; user following &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; SE rules. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/165924/2451&quot;&gt;this question of OP&lt;/a&gt; is not deleted by the same SE rules, since e.g. it has an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T12:06:06.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-05-16T17:17:13.343" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B2pJJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Haikus are awesome/ Chemistry is more so/ Ask straight away!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T17:17:13.343" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-16T17:17:13.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6792" CreationDate="2015-05-17T17:47:01.473" Score="23" ViewCount="1799" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that we're somewhere in the queue for a site CSS adjustment, accompanied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244238/profile-page-makeover-part-3-the-prototype-returns&quot;&gt;the new profile pages&lt;/a&gt;. Since the CSS is getting a makeover, I would like to float this idea: can we change the font to something that gets along better with the MathJax font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, posts with MathJax look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/89LAr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/184087/buckingham-pi-theorem-application-the-case-of-only-0-or-1-dimensionless-grou/184099#184099&quot;&gt;this example&lt;/a&gt;). Note how the math tends to stick out like a sore thumb, to the point that I often do things like &lt;code&gt;10&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;-9&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt; s&lt;/code&gt; to keep the text streamlined, unless I really need the maths. Ideally, within the LaTeX paradigm - i.e. in the style used by all serious physics journals - the math will blend in perfectly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cp7e6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know that this is quite a lot to ask, since the site font is currently very sans-serif, but over in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chemistry SE's gorgeous new design&lt;/a&gt; it does work much better (with a serif font):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dl3i2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: can we move over in that direction somewhat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:01.710" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T18:26:37.643" Title="Can we have a font which harmonizes better with MathJax?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|design|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6790" CreationDate="2015-05-18T03:16:58.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not much of an answer to the real question because (a) it's a single-user solution rather than the whole user-base of Physics and (b) it applies to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; websites and not just this one&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, but you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; change the font yourself. For Firefox, for example, you can select&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Edit &amp;gt; Preferences&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then under the &lt;code&gt;Content&lt;/code&gt; tab, select &lt;code&gt;Advanced&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jrFfT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the bottom is the option &lt;em&gt;Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z8g1d.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you unselect that, then you can choose whatever font you want &amp;amp; have the same fonts as Chemistry. Thus, your example becomes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q8kcC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't use Chrome, but I suspect that there is a similar option hidden somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. I've not tested it, but this &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/527774/replace-fonts-in-firefox-on-only-certain-websites-and-only-certain-fonts&quot;&gt;SuperUser post&lt;/a&gt; says that there is a work-around for particular sites that involves writing a CSS and enabling Firefox to see it.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:04:28.313" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T03:24:16.817" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6790" CreationDate="2015-05-18T14:20:18.350" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask and you shall receive. This site is in line for CSS conversion, and, while we're in there, we'll make sure that we match the serif font in the body like Chemistry SE and Math SE. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81537" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T14:20:18.350" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-18T15:37:06.577" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if I appear to whining, but it appears to me that we don't have a clear policy about reporting cross-posting. This is prompted by the following instances/examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QP2jc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image_1&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lAgNS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image_2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ekucq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image_3&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wP5Gq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image_4&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably isn't right to draw conclusions from a sample space of 1 (I don't remember there being any other instance of a cross-post reporting flag being declined). Also, it makes no statistical difference to me whether a flag is helpful or declined, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/82/marshal?userid=46399&quot;&gt;especially now&lt;/a&gt;, but after you have been around for as long as I have been, getting a policy incorrect seems alarming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the undercurrent here seems to be that I am (we are ?) not very clear about what the official policy about reporting cross-posting on another site is. The three issues that need to be clarified here are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a user, if I find an instance of cross-posting, am I supposed to flag, or simply comment and leave it there? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer to Q1 change is there is an existing comment already? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If somebody else 'catches it' before me, am I supposed to do nothing about this (except probably upvote that comment)? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T12:52:25.110" Title="Reporting cross-posting" Tags="|discussion|policy|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6793" CreationDate="2015-05-18T18:47:23.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting is not a violation of any written rule. It's kinda rude (if not done correctly, ie. targeting the question to the specific audience, making clear that it's posted multiple places, and looking for domain-specific answers from each specific site), I don't like it, and we as a community generally frown upon it, but it's not breaking a rule really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why flagging isn't appropriate. The moderators don't need to &quot;deal&quot; with cross-posting, other than alerting the community that it is cross-posted. That's done through a comment. So what your flag is doing is basically saying &quot;Hey moderator, this is cross-posted, please post a comment saying it's cross-posted.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in general, you're better off just cutting out the middle-man and not giving the mods extra work and post the comment yourself. The same amount of typing that goes into your flag, but now everybody can see it! And if you see somebody already commented saying it's a cross-post, you can upvote the comment if you want, or you can answer the question here and on the cross-post, or you can do what I do and ignore the question entirely because I consider it rude. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T18:47:23.923" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-18T18:48:16.763" Score="16" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, I pass over a question merely because I don't understand an abbreviation or acronym.  I wonder if the instructions should encourage the definition of these things in the body of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes acronyms are well known, QFT and SHM are examples.  Others are less well known, or perhaps known to people in particular geographic regions, or graduates of certain schools.  An example I saw recently is &quot;SM&quot;.    Even after reading the question and having some understanding that I was out of my league on that one (and quickly eliminating &quot;Statistical Mechanics&quot;), I couldn't figure out SM.  Finally Standard Model came to mind, and I'm guessing that that's the correct meaning.  Even if that's the correct meaning, it's still certainly the first time I've ever seen that abbreviation.    Another recent example is &quot;IVP&quot;, for which I fully understood the question but still don't understand the abbreviation.   And some things are known by different names: KVL to some is the loop rule to others.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there is the case where the abbreviation is well-known to those practiced in the art, in which case it doesn't matter at all if I don't understand the question.  In any event, in all the above cases, I'm annoyed that the original poster (OP) couldn't be bothered to be more clear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this worth a mention in the help/instructions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="58382" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T10:22:34.020" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T10:22:34.020" Title="Should abbreviations and acronyms be discouraged?" Tags="|discussion|faq|editing|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6795" CreationDate="2015-05-18T18:57:47.507" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would look at it like giving a technical presentation to experts in my field (because this site is, afterall, a place to ask questions from experts in the field of the question). So if I stood up in a front of a room of my peers and said &quot;Here is the CFL number for my simulation,&quot; nobody would think twice about it and know exactly what I meant. The janitor walking down the hall who overheard it may not know what that means, but I don't care -- that's not the intended target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's the same thing here. If somebody posts a question like &quot;When X happens and we get the ASLKJYF effect, is that right?&quot; -- I don't care if I know what that means if it's not my field. But if somebody posts a question with acronyms and terms I have never seen before in a question about fluid dynamics, I will take a quick search to make sure it's not something I just don't know and if a quick search reveals nothing, I'll ask for clarification. This happens often with people saying &quot;In a paper I read, the authors say f(x) = 10 but I don't know how they got it&quot; and I have to go back and ask for which paper and which authors if it's not something commonplace. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we are not really supposed to be a general audience site but we are supposed to be a site for technical questions in an area to get answered by experts in that same area, if an acronym is common and known amongst experts, no further explanation should be required. If I see an acronym in a field I don't know, I don't mind that it's there because I don't know it. If I see one I don't know in my own field and I look it up and can't immediately understand what it means, I'll ask for details of where it comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T18:57:47.507" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6795" CreationDate="2015-05-19T00:59:01.900" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abbreviations and acronyms should be explained, especially if in the title. Avoid abbreviations in titles, such as, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/158625/2451&quot;&gt;TDR&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66989/2451&quot;&gt;BGK&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/159611/2451&quot;&gt;GTO&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/162105/2451&quot;&gt;EFE&lt;/a&gt;, etc. Spell them out instead (as editors have later done in some of the above examples). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe it or not, but the most important part of the Phys.SE community is actually not the questioners nor the answerers but the readers. The readers are what keeps this site alive. If the only persons who read a post is the asker and the answerers, this site would not survive. In fact, it is likely what killed e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;TP.SE&lt;/a&gt;: No readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, by making the title incomprehensible, a reader browsing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt; is forced to click the question to read the main body, which defeats the purpose of having a title in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the Phys.SE community has some pretty smart users around, who might be able to answer, even if they are not from exactly the same subfield. So as an asker, why shoot yourself in the foot by unnecessarily limit your potential answerers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T14:40:14.033" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T14:40:14.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-22T04:22:36.740" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I accidentally clicked the flag button while on mobile. I have done this twice now and it would be nice to be able to undo the flag within a 5 minute window or something if I accidentally clicked it. Just like I can edit comments within 5 minutes before it's locked in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been discussion of this here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87500/cancel-misclicked-flags&quot;&gt;Cancel misclicked flags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96950/can-we-have-a-way-to-undo-a-flag&quot;&gt;Can we have a way to undo a flag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the status on this issue? Some of these feature requests are quite old. Why hasn't it been added? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T04:22:36.740" Title="Can I undo a flag? Has this feature been added?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-05-22T07:25:56.590" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://earthscience.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q4Y6D.png&quot; alt=&quot;If you want down-to-earth answers to your questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67944" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T07:25:56.590" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-22T07:25:56.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-22T17:12:08.680" Score="8" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just got &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; EmDrive question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/185380/emdrive-in-relation-to-newest-nasa-article-does-it-extract-energy-out-of-the-q&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/185380/emdrive-in-relation-to-newest-nasa-article-does-it-extract-energy-out-of-the-q&lt;/a&gt;, and much as you would expect it swiftly got closed and an OP probably went away feeling fairly upset. I feel we get enough EmDrive questions that this is something we ought to handle with more care and specificity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts on the subject seem to be along several different lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;could it possibly work?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;how do its proponents claim it works?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;do those claims have merit?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;if not, how do they fail?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;assuming that it works, how does it do so?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at them like that, they are not really all that bad. The problem is that posters tend to pretty much always ask that final question, and that tips the question definitely into the territory &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site/4539#4539&quot;&gt;discouraged by our non-mainstream physics guidelines&lt;/a&gt;. The third question is on the boundary (we are not here to evaluate pet theories) but if the question is appropriately phrased, for something this recurrent, I feel we're better off showing a bit more flexibility and allowing a few canonical questions about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what I propose is separating these different components, which will help us better address the ones that we can, and cleanly close the ones that we can't. I have therefore asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/185437/what-are-the-proposed-theoretical-explanations-for-the-emdrive&quot;&gt;What are the proposed theoretical explanations for the EmDrive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and provided a basic answer. (I do not think, though, that there are any more worthwhile references. The ones I did find are singularly thin on the theory even by my low prior expectations. However, if you can find more references, by all means add them in.) This addresses question (2) above. With this in place, questions asking what the claims are can be referred there. If they don't find the resources there sufficient - i.e. if they don't find this community's response to be thorough enough in helping them scour the web for references - well, tough luck. They can look for their own and add them there, or they can offer a bounty on it to try and draw attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23725/is-the-emdrive-or-relativity-drive-possible&quot;&gt;Is the EmDrive, or &amp;quot;Relativity Drive&amp;quot; possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does a very good job at addressing (1). In the absence of multiple peer-reviewed tests performed in vacuum and published in reputable journals, question (5) is very clearly off-topic. Questions (3) and (4) can be evaluated on a case-by-case basis but are almost certainly off-topic as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T17:12:08.680" Title="Splitting EmDrive questions into reference-request and reference analysis" Tags="|discussion|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-23T16:17:11.360" Score="5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question is asked on the wrong site, it can be migrated to another site via the flagging function. Why is this migration limited to only a few sites? It should rather be a list of all sites to choose between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, from my point of view a specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/185468/how-can-i-measure-a-length-of-over-4-feet-to-an-accuracy-of-1-100th-of-an-inch&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is better off on the Engineering SE site. But I only have the math SE site and the meta site as possibilities for migration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mpH0q.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4962" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T19:21:09.610" Title="Why is question-migration limited?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6801" CreationDate="2015-05-23T23:24:41.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main concerns here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Migrating questions to beta sites is strongly discouraged. This is mostly because beta sites are still in testing and there is no guarantee that they will succeed. Many of them do, but some (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt;) don't really generate enough traffic, questions, experts, and overall liveliness to make a sustainable critical mass. Migrating questions to a site that then gets closed is a poor service to the OP. For some sites, like Chemistry, this was not really an issue (and indeed Chemistry just graduated to a full site), but Engineering is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; new (about four months), so migrating content over there should be done on a case-by-case, as-needed basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional reason for this is that if the migration channel gets too big, even a small fraction of the questions from a big site can be overwhelming for a small beta site. We want the community behind Engineering to come up with a site flavour of their own, not to build a site around Physics exports.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More generally, though, default migration channels are generally quite tightly controlled, because flaggers will know what's off-topic &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, but they don't necessarily know what is or is not on-topic on the target site. Within the SE network this is a bigger issue with large sites like Stack Overflow and Super User, but as a result the SE team is very reluctant to add default migration pathways to any site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not mean it's impossible to migrate content. Moderators can migrate to any site and will do so if you flag the question and the migration is appropriate. There is at present a low load of migration candidates and it can be managed well by the moderators. Within the past 90 days there have been 39 migrations to math, 19 to electronics (with 15% rejected), 9 to History of Science and Maths (with one rejected), 8 to Chemistry (with 2 rejected), and 5 to Engineering. It's really not worth it to set up a default channel - even for Chemistry, which is already graduated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T23:24:41.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-24T11:37:40.570" Score="1" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; comparing my experiences in physics stack exchange and at physics overflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was clearly an answer the question &quot;how are they different from each other?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is written purely from my point of view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were suggestions for improvement to Physics stack exchange. Which if ignored may further deteriorate the site. I will post my answer separately on this page. And I want the community to review its appropriateness. &lt;strong&gt;Moderators please do not interfere&lt;/strong&gt;. Seemingly there is insecurity about handling criticism. I find this kind of behaviour completely out of line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was deleted by a moderator on the grounds that it does not answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users please review my answer and tell me if it was inappropriate for the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I sort of eventually drifted into physics overflow. While I enjoyed&#xA;  reading and posting on Stack exchange, there were a few instances&#xA;  which clearly disappointed me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One is moderation(Especially in the context of banning) being done&#xA;  behind closed doors and details being kept completely confidential,&#xA;  and suggestions of political motives lingering everywhere on the site.&#xA;  A lot of people who I had otherwise normal conversations with were&#xA;  banned on the site, for absolutely unclear reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For one thing this site bans people for really long periods of time,&#xA;  and for seemingly silly reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second reason I did not like the site but I put up with it was, I had&#xA;  to explain to the moderators what the intent behind my questions, and&#xA;  I had to word them in the manner in which they wanted me to express.&#xA;  There were instances I had to fight to keep my question open even&#xA;  though other users were interested in answering them and had&#xA;  understood my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The moderators used very vague and prelisted reasons. It did not help&#xA;  at all. Eventually I just gave up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While this was not generally true, There were instances of this kind&#xA;  of abuse in the site, wherein Moderators moods and temperaments played&#xA;  a role in whether a question would be allowed or not. It happened both&#xA;  personally and with other users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was frustrating to deal with (some)moderators at (some)times and&#xA;  their requests for modification on some questions seemed completely&#xA;  unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have not been in the site for a while, so perhaps things have&#xA;  changed around here, atleast that was my experience with the site at&#xA;  one point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do enjoy the freedom of posting freely on Physics Overflow. And bad&#xA;  content is weeded out simply by review and discussion, with little&#xA;  interference from the moderators. It has been established clearly by&#xA;  now that there will be no compromise when it comes to integrity of&#xA;  scientific content.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT1:&lt;/strong&gt; Please note the following, On this thread I don't want to discuss if my answer is biased and so on. It was On topic to the question &quot;how are they different from each other?&quot;, that is all that matters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am interested in talking about why a viewpoint must be deleted if a select members of the community disagree with it. If you want to talk about that then please participate in this discussion. Moderators are requested to delete any off topic comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T12:37:58.750" Title="Problem of unnecessary censorship in Physics stack exchange" Tags="|discussion|moderation|meta|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2015-05-24T12:46:41.167" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your rant about your personal experiences here and on PhysicsOverflow is in no way an objective answer what the differences and similarities between Physics.SE and PhysicsOverflow are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing your anecdotal evidence to the other answers to the question (which do a good job of being rather objective and level-headed even if their authors are not &quot;neutral&quot;), it seems that you did not add any actual information at all. Using insults like &quot;abuse&quot; to describe the actions that you observed is also not appropriate, in my opinion, unless you can actually substantiate that claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, such a post would be sent into the Low Quality review queue and the reviewers would decide whether it is to be deleted or not, and in that case the unilateral deletion by a moderator would have been a bit overkill, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On meta, there is no LQ review queue, and all flags go directly for moderator review, as far as I can see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under that circumstance, I think deletion of a post that does not actually add something the question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; is phrased in a defamatory way is a defensible action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T12:46:41.167" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2015-05-24T12:49:28.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is not an answer. Part of the reason is its appearance - rant-like and one-sided. There are clearly moderation differences between the two sites, which have been discussed before. At this point, its best to avoid them altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You focused &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; on Physics Stack Exchange in the answer, aside from one paragraph at the end about Physics Overflow. &lt;em&gt;It reads a lot like a rant.&lt;/em&gt; A better answer would contrast the two in depth. As it stands, this is pretty much one-sided.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; And given that most users here know about what Physics Stack Exchange, it's not too productive to describe it in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for a simpler test of &quot;Not an Answer&quot;, look at the question title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is Physics Overflow and how is it linked to Physics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer would not tell me anything about Physics Overflow, while the others would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;This logic would still hold if you wrote an answer that was polarized in the other direction, i.e. ranting against Physics Overflow. Neither one would be productive.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T12:49:28.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6196" CreationDate="2015-05-24T17:44:52.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon forceful deletion of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/problem-of-unnecessary-censorship-in-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;previous answer&lt;/a&gt;, by some users I will be reviewing once again some differences between Physics overflow and stack exchange. I will be brief in my answer, factual and less passionate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Physics Stack Exchange imposes,(Sometimes even year long) suspensions of accounts. The details of the which are kept hidden from the users. It is only the moderators, and members of the stack exchange family who make the decisions, and it has happened despite protest from the larger userbase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics overflow does not allow for this kind of closed door policies, and as yet there have been no instances of banning users in the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Physics overflow, operates with the policy that a User's content will be be protected in the form that the user wishes to preserve. It makes exceptions for spam and other severe or legal abuses. Users or moderators cannot remove any disagreeable content, and Bad content is subject to review through discussion and not through unilateral deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics stack exchange allows for moderators to close questions directly, If they find the content to be disagreeable. Its relies on the trust its places on the moderators to be fair with their judgements. Any disagreeable content(an example being my previous answer) is removed, without allowing for the natural process of peer review, down-voting etc, if the moderators(or other high reputation users) feel it to be appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Physics Overflow Implements Rotating of moderator positions(currently 1 yr cycle), to facilitate the process of understanding the position of both the moderators and users from a practical point of view.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange implements Life time moderatorship. Some reasons being listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/984/should-community-moderators-be-elected-for-life-or-have-terms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are some of the differences between the sites, apart from obvious ones such as their intended audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T22:00:39.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6812" CreationDate="2015-05-24T17:51:03.217" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44647/physics-based-derivation-of-the-formula-for-entropy&quot;&gt;Physics-based derivation of the formula for entropy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have complied with David Z request indicated in the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T01:12:21.107" Title="Requesting reopening of question" Tags="|support|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-25T00:17:02.530" Score="7" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get a holistic picture of the users' opinions on the site. Both positive and negative reviews are welcome. Being a reasonably broad topic, I will pose some specific questions. Feel free to include in your answers other things that I may fail to mention. Of course you don't have to answer all the questions posed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you happy with the kind of question being posed on the site? Do you find that the site gives satisfactory answers to the questions asked, and has the requisite people to engage you in an interesting discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a well-balanced demographic? Do you find it to be the case that the site targets(perhaps unintentionally) a specific audience, if so which one? If you have been an old user has the demographic of the site shifted in some particular direction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you satisfied with moderation on the site? Have you ever been unfairly treated? Have you noticed instances of other users being unfairly treated? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you comfortable with the implementation of network-wide policy? Is there any particular network-wide policy that you wished was different and not applied to Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you find it to be the case that some people whose answers you enjoyed reading have abruptly left the site due to issues that originated within the site? Do you it was due to an issue that can be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone's account been suspended unfairly? Or for a much longer duration then you would find reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the site satisfy a researcher's interest, such as finding new topics and problems to learn about? Does it have a sufficient mass of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists&quot;&gt;professional physicists&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be honest and direct in your reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T20:46:31.990" Title="How would you review your experiences at Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-25T01:07:54.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll bite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, I am happy with the questions asked here, zero-effort homework questions being the obvious candidate for 'wish we didn't have those...' The answers are usually more than satisfactory &amp;amp; provide for good resources for my own learning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The demographics seem to be split as 'under-grad', 'grad-student', and 'post-grad' (meaning graduated from grad school with the MS or PhD and working). Seems to be well-balanced to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the moderators do a fantastic job here. I've never been unfairly treated, nor have I ever seen anyone being treated unfairly. The mods do a fantastic job at what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am comfortable with the implementation of Network Wide policies (which ultimately boils down to 'Be nice.').&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am not disturbed by anyone's life choices surrounding any internet site, be it here, Google+, Twitch, or whatever. If &lt;em&gt;[insert known user]&lt;/em&gt; left because of (what appears to be) their own problems that they had with authority &amp;amp; civil conduct with society, so be it. The only person who can 'fix the issue' is &lt;em&gt;[&#xA;insert known user]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, no one has been suspended unfairly. SE policies on bans are progressive (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/174118/&quot;&gt;1 day, 1 week, 1 month, &amp;amp; possibly 1 year&lt;/a&gt;, with each longer date requiring a previous suspension as well as continued inappropriate behavior in a 30 day window). The policies of suspensions are very reasonable (because it expects people to actually learn from mistakes, rather than keep making the same stupid ones over &amp;amp; over again)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this site satisfies my research interests. There are many questions on my field of expertise, as well as some outside my expertise that I'm interested in learning (specifically, GR). I think there are plenty of professional physicists, just need more active reviewers to help keep up the closing of unfit questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T01:07:54.923" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6809" CreationDate="2015-05-25T01:12:21.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After gaining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/44647/revisions&quot;&gt;necessary 5 votes&lt;/a&gt;, the question is now reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that you can force a closed question into the automatic review queues by making edits to the question. Making a separate Meta post is not a necessity (though, in this case, it is possible that the age of the question might have prevented that?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T01:12:21.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2015-05-25T10:29:40.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the deletion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6802/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; was indeed one-sided and was completely mishandled. Deleting content on meta without any indication to the poster of what is wrong with it is as aggressive as it sounds and does nothing to further reasonable discussion on this (meta) forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is, indeed, not great. However, it has a very honest account of a user's (negative) experience on this site, which this site and its community should take very seriously, not least because these points have been raised several times before. If people felt that that post was in an inappropriate location, then that should have been the feedback (i.e. &quot;Please post this as a separate discussion&quot;). If people felt that the content was uncomfortable - well, shucks. If people felt that this was not an answer, then the correct course of action was to comment on the post to give the poster a chance to respond. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally on the main site flagging as Not An Answer will put the post on the Low Quality Posts review queue. (This will not leave any visible mark for the OP; this is necessary for flags to be anonymous, which is a crucial feature for the flagging system to work.) Beyond this, though, if reviewers further flag the post as Not AN Answer this will post a canned comment which reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives the OP time to respond while the review process is carried out. (Further, since reviews are public this does not jeopardize anonymity.) On main, there is a process in place to let posters know that there are issues with their posts and allow them to respond or edit their posts before they are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On meta things are different. For good reasons, flags do not go to a community-manned review queue and are instead handled exclusively by moderators. However, because moderator actions are binding, they are under the obligation to allow users to respond before they take these binding actions - to do otherwise is what ends up being rightly noticed as &quot;unilateral action&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;It was wrong for a moderator to delete this post without giving the OP a chance to respond.&lt;/strong&gt; Regardless of the existence of previous flags, this is a unilateral action. Moderators are meant to &lt;em&gt;mediate&lt;/em&gt; disputes and bring flag wars down to reasonable discourse. Direct closure without a chance to respond is none of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond all of this, I feel the post under discussion does answer the question. It lists a number of things which Physics Overflow is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, which I find to be descriptive enough. If the description of PSE offered fits you, then PO may be for you; if not then maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T10:29:40.037" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-25T14:19:51.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with almost all of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6810/how-would-you-review-your-experiences-at-physics-stack-exchange/6811#6811&quot;&gt;Kyle Kanos' answer&lt;/a&gt;, but I have one or two slightly different points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a very good spread of questions - both in level and topic - across the site. Homework questions have been extensively discussed, and even have their own meta &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;. There are those people who would like to do away with homework questions altogether, those who think we should welcome them, and those (perhaps the majority) who are somewhere in between. Homework questions don't, in my opinion, detract from the overall question quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the second part of #1: Yes, I've always been satisfied with the answers I get. Very few of my questions go unanswered, even some of the basic ones. Roughly two thirds of my questions are answered, and comments on some of the others have helped enormously.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Judging from some questions, there seems to be a decent number of users asking at the high school level. They make up a certainly non-negligible amount of users. However, there are many users who are at the college or graduate level (or beyond). The demographics seem to be pretty well balanced.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have yet to have a problem with moderators or community members doing moderation tasks - on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site. Moderation can be a tough job; they often get hit with the brunt of blame in some conflicts with users, because of their responsibilities (deleting rude comments/posts, unilaterally closing questions, etc.), and moderators on Stack Exchange - and certainly Physics - do well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with any Stack Exchange policies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I really have no comment here, because while users have left the site, I have not interacted with them, nor was I around when they left.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, no comment on any specific situations; I have not interacted to a significant extent with any user(s) who was/were suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;suspensions are between the moderators and the suspended user.&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes, it is easy to guess at the reason for the suspension - often repeated rude comments, spam, vandalism, etc. Other times, it comes from a conflict behind the scenes. It is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; best to not get nosy about this; keeping out of this can save the user some embarrassment and avoid large conflicts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;A related Meta post - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98467/this-account-is-temporarily-suspended-for-voting-irregularities/98470#98470&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;This account is temporarily suspended for voting irregularities.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. My primary area of interest is astronomy - and, as such, I participate on &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. I find that it has higher traffic than the Physics tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; do. Neither the tags nor Astronomy.SE has a lot of traffic. I tend to ask questions about astronomy on Astronomy.SE, simply because there is a larger audience there than on Physics - at least, in terms of users who ask and answer questions (though there is some overlap), so it's harder for me to judge on questions on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being completely frank, I don't think I see a high number of general &quot;research-level&quot; questions on either site. I can answer a decent amount of them on Astronomy, and many on Physics, though I tend to hold off on some because there are better answers already there. The importance of this is that I'm a high school student. If I can say this without sounding a bit arrogant, I do know a lot more about astronomy than the average high-schooler. But if a well-read high-schooler can answer many of the questions in either place, what does that say about the level of questions, on average?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; asked questions related to research I'm doing on Astronomy, and they have attracted low-to-moderate attention; I think it's possible to extrapolate that and say that there might be about the same amount of attention on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;A related Physics meta post - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;If it&amp;#39;s possible, do we want to expand the scope of this site to include astronomy?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, but on a general note, yes, there are &lt;em&gt;plenty&lt;/em&gt; of professional physicists here. And you can't say &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; about many places on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also mention that I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; equation research-level with published papers; the one does not imply the other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T17:32:49.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-25T15:43:46.707" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a non-multiple of 5 rep points for an answer (specifically, 18).  I assume that is due to 2 positive votes and one negative, but there was no comment explaining the down vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look back at the answer, I see it has a total of +1, but there doesn't seem to be a way to view the individual votes.  Is there a way to view them?  I don't know that it would serve any important purpose other than to satisfy curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T16:42:12.700" Title="How can I view the breakdown of votes on an answer versus the simple total?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6815" CreationDate="2015-05-25T16:42:12.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only possible with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Established User&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; privilege at 1,000 rep. Click on the post's score and you'll see the upvote/downvote breakdown. On occasion, this can be quite useful - particularly on meta for things like polls. (As an extreme example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6399/&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, currently at +24-21.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &amp;lt;1k rep users, you can find out the vote counts on your own posts via &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&quot;&gt;the reputation tab of your profile&lt;/a&gt;, which will show the net upvotes and downvotes for each post, per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T16:42:12.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-05-26T13:27:40.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TreQA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46239" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T13:27:40.217" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-05-26T13:27:40.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-27T09:24:12.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can see a lot of activity on the homework front, but the tags I am mostly interested in (quantum mechanics and mathematical physics) do have a fair amount of interesting questions and good answers. I can also learn something from other research-level tags. But I believe there is a very big flaw with your question here: You ask &quot;Has [the site] the requisite people to engage you in an interesting discussion&quot;. This site is not about discussion. It is a question/answer site. If I want to truly discuss a matter, I can either go to chat or to other sites. Of course I can ask for clarification and leave comments, but it is not supposed to be a whole discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are people of all audience, the people with more reputation have usually more experience, so yes, I believe the demographic to be sufficiently balanced. For my taste, there could be a few more researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Never been unfairly treated, my interaction with moderators was minimal so far. To be honest, nearly always when I see people upset, it's because they ask questions not fit for this site. We agreed we wanted conceptual questions and many people don't really understand that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my eyes, everything seems to work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are people that have left that I enjoy reading, mostly before I arrived. From what I can see, the site works for most valuable users and there are problem with at most a few of them. Every area where a number of people interact has these problems, so it is not necessarily a problem of the site, but the interaction with the site and some user personalities (NB: this is not judging the user personalities, it's just a description of what happens). If there were no tries to resolve problems, this would be a problem. However, it seems that moderators/the community do try to resolve issues, so that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think I don't have the information to comment on this. It is a conscious decision (community + site owners) that certain discussions are not open for everyone. If you don't agree, that's your, not the site's problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For my field of expertise (quantum information), I know at least three highly prolific researchers who regularly visit the site. That's not too much and I sometimes wish there were more, but it's not nothing. This usually means that all questions that I find interesting and can't answer myself do get answers - and good ones. It would be nice to have something like MO for physics, but I don't see participation to be much greater from the physicists in total. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30247" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T09:24:12.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-27T11:21:27.570" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last few days I've been logging in only first thing in the morning (I'm on holiday, and the family get annoyed if I'm on the Physics SE all day :-) and there have been more than 20  questions with close votes in the review queue. So all my 20 close votes get used up before I've even finished the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can argue about the close policy, but that's a separate issue. Given our current policy on closing I have too few close votes to effectively implement the site policy. I don't know if the number of close votes is SE wide, or whether it's tweakable on a site by site basis, but given the Physics SE (probably) closes more questions than any other SE it would be nice if we could have more votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the flaming starts, please note that I am not commenting on whether our policies on closing questions are right or wrong. I'm just saying that 20 close votes per &gt;3k user is insufficient to implement those policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T14:43:10.330" Title="Can we have more close votes?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6819" CreationDate="2015-05-27T14:08:12.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a difference between close votes and close vote reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other sites give people more than 24 close votes per day (for example, the number was bumped from 24 to 50 on ServerFault a couple of months ago).  But I think StackOverflow is the only site that gives people more than 20 reviews per day (and even for SO, I'm not positive it's more than 20).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So more close votes per day can be increased on a per-site basis, and has been on sites with lots of questions, but reviews per day is unlikely to be increased.  The main reason has been mentioned in comments - instead of a few people doing more reviews, more people should be doing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7894" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-05-28T15:46:23.090" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T15:46:23.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-27T14:46:18.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This started as a comment but it got too long. I will not attempt to answer the original questionnaire, but you can take the following as a partial answer to question 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me try to bring back some of the nuance which &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6810/how-would-you-review-your-experiences-at-physics-stack-exchange?noredirect=1#comment26466_6810&quot;&gt;some users&lt;/a&gt; seem determined to strip away. I consider MO to be a very successful site as a forum for mathematicians to discuss research-level mathematics. There are several independent measures of this success. A non-exhaustive list of success measures includes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mathematicians can take high-level questions which come up in their work to MO and resolve them quickly;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mathematicians seem to find the content on MO to be stimulating and thought-provoking at a level commensurate with e.g. attending a research seminar;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a nontrivial fraction of the online discussion of research-level mathematics takes place on MO;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;discussions on MO have sparked a significant number of off-MO collaborations which their participants have found to be rewarding research projects;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some of these collaborations have published their findings. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These measures are related but ultimately independent. I would like PSE to be all of this and more. Some of this does happen, but I feel that we are not at the level of MO or anywhere near it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing, though, is that this is obviously field-dependent. As regards the parts of physics where I do most of my research, the activity on this site is very low, and I do not feel I can successfully bring here a high-level question related to my work and resolve it quickly. (One example should do: take &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=high+harmonic+generation&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt; and exclude my contributions.) I find this site to be useful and often very thought-provoking, but I do not consider it a useful tool for my research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, others may find that PSE does cater much more to their research interests. There are a number of different ways in which PSE can be helpful for a researcher, and I'd be interested to know, for the people that do find it useful for their research, how exactly they find it so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T15:39:20.830" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-29T21:48:06.880" Score="-4" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a lot of discussion in the past in regard to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a page &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Physics homework questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77677/physics-homework-questions&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that page you will find a suggestion, to change the name of the site to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Physics Learners&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very good idea to keep well understood and text book level physics separate from current research topics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The precise details may arrived at through a discussion, however what you think of the general premise of the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This is an example of the kind of questions that I definitely want to separate out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186624/units-about-weight&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, I hope it will help making my point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note technically this is not a homework question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is not to say this is a bad question, I am sure everyone has asked that at some point in their life. But really is a distraction to a research community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit2:&lt;/strong&gt; If we make a new site, question such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/183575/can-you-take-the-cutoff-to-infinity-at-a-conformal-fixed-point&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; would have receive ample attention, as it would stay on the main page for much longer and so on, it would not be lost in a flood of questions of the former type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-05-30T22:31:02.653" Title="Revisiting the creation of a new site: Physics Learners" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6822" CreationDate="2015-05-29T22:04:15.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I think this is a very good idea to keep well understood and text book level physics separate from current research topics.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is a horrible idea. Why keep them separate? We answer both. Our highest upvoted question is about cooling tea down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74685" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T22:04:15.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6822" CreationDate="2015-05-29T22:17:20.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two objections, one practical and one more subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical point of view, I think low-level questions would receive less attention under your proposal. I think I probably quite often answer questions that you would filter to Physics Learners. If high- and low-level questions were separated, I doubt I'd ever look at Physics Learners or answer questions there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm certainly not saying that my contributions are at all significant, but I suspect that a lot of people who might answer such questions might behave similarly to me, and ignore them if they are streamed into a separate site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a subjective point of view, I like the diversity of questions, users and backgrounds on Physics Stack Exchange - I think your proposal would damage the atmosphere and ethos behind the site. I enjoy a mixture of high- and low-level questions - even low-level questions can be quite stimulating, uncovering a new detail that I didn't know, or making me brush-up on something I once knew and have forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T22:17:20.617" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-30T05:48:49.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can really go either way if you ask me, but generally its good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The type of questions can be pretty interesting or just good for enlightening other newbies but I feel like a few of the mods are too quick to start acting belligerent if they don't particularly like the question. There's always room for improvement on that front but sometimes there are really bad judgement calls being made and there is a bit of a mental inertia that some of the mods refuse to overcome. I'd rather see a good few real rebuttals to the various sub-questions of the EmDrive then a million closed questions that mods respond are duplicates of other closed questions. If NASA is talking about it it's not exactly fringe anymore so at least we should get the EmDrive out of our system. As a whole I think if moderation got a bit laxer the site would benefit alot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34274" LastActivityDate="2015-05-30T05:48:49.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-30T15:21:31.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I do miss [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] who answered most of my questions during the late 14 - early 15. Suddenly I saw he was banished due to some sort of problems for one year! I'm not complaining against the moderation, but yes if he were here, it would be different:(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderation is really good here. But it does depend, or you can say, the perspective of each of the individuals. See you can't seek a utopian scheme but we do want more. Take me; On an average, I remain on the site for over 3 hrs &amp;amp; during that hour, I come to junk questions like &quot;solve this, urgent&quot;; &quot;can you check this?&quot;....Day in &amp;amp; day out , we advise to please show some effort &amp;amp; even cite the meta link but of no avail. They have no eager to read even the advice on the right side of the &quot;ask question&quot; page.It becomes really bothering to me; this site isn't for dumping waste. Another that really bothers me is the indifferent attitude of the person who asks the question. Though I ask most of the times(hey I'm still a student!), I try my best to contribute something to the site &amp;amp; answer questions that are competent.Take this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/184966/can-ke-and-pe-of-a-small-element-of-a-transverse-progressive-wave-be-maximum-sim/184982#184982&quot;&gt;quo&lt;/a&gt;; I answered this &amp;amp; got decent votes, but the asker never came again! This is irritating!! Then why ask, if you are negligent to your very own query??? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, to me the horrendous one, problem is the abuse of downvoting. If you have the time to downvote, you ought have time to write the cause. Though a notification appears, but this doesn't stop him/her to downvote without presenting the cause. I have no problem with downvoting; this is essential but it is the duty to make aware of the flaw which attracted downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the moderation, I would say again that it is really pretty here: just think about them: they've taken a part of the time to devote here &amp;amp; make it a part-&amp;amp;-parcel of their lives. Salute to them. At some point, I thought they are really rude, but then could comprehend &quot;yes, it was my fault&quot; Compromise?? Yes/No! But in the long run it is really comfortable. However there are some members , who are really not at all happy with this &quot;moderation-atmosphere&quot;, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon&quot;&gt;him&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/Are-Math-Overflow-and-Math-Stack-Exchange-more-successful-than-Physics-Overflow-Physics-Stack-Exchange-If-so-why&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as one of the founders of Physics Overflow wrote his allegations. However, I do respect their predicament:) And so do everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As that of professional physicists, they themselves know much about that as expressed in the other answers. There is even another &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;counterpart&lt;/a&gt; that deals with the interest of them. However, to me, this is the place where I get &lt;strong&gt;moksha&lt;/strong&gt; from the evils of &lt;strong&gt;confusion, uncomprehandable stuffs&lt;/strong&gt; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For man may come, &amp;amp; man may go, I'll will come here forever!&lt;/strong&gt; (sorry Alfred Tennyson!!) This will evidently reflect my attitude towards this wonderful community:) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T13:50:54.237" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2865" CreationDate="2015-05-31T00:26:07.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;YES YES YES.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean just homework question but very simple questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the current moment I am writing this answer there is exactly one question on Quantum Field theory on the main page, that is ignoring homework-and-exercises electric-circuits nuclear-physics nuclear-engineering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/112689/calculating-mathrmtr-log-delta-f&quot;&gt;That question&lt;/a&gt; was asked 1 year ago and bumped up by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;community&lt;/a&gt;. Good question however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 questions on GR both are essentially not very novel, One has been asked a million times in physics literature and we still don't have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186858/what-happens-when-an-object-passes-through-the-event-horizon-of-a-black-hole-in&quot;&gt;full answer&lt;/a&gt; yet, Good question however. The other make some wrong assumptions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52481/could-an-ultra-relativistic-particle-tunnel-directly-through-a-stellar-mass-blac&quot;&gt;lorentz transformations&lt;/a&gt; and makes bad conjunctures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186790/quark-gluon-plasma-status&quot;&gt;popular&lt;/a&gt; question on String theory,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention Zero questions on Supersymmetry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was time when questions here would really interest me, and challenge me. Now there are hardly any questions like this. And the few are lost in a swarm of essentially trivial question. This site need a revival if it wants to hold a reseach community. The only idea I could think of was heavily &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6822/revisiting-the-creation-of-a-new-site-physics-learners&quot;&gt;downvoted&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Really is it only me who is complaining about this.&lt;/strong&gt; This was never true about the site for instance in 2012. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Don't ponce on the specific choice of subjects, it was meant as a mere representative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T00:56:41.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-31T05:18:22.840" Score="2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am of the impression that we want the questions and answers to be searchable and provide a good reference for physics students and above when using search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist questions asked by ~15 year old kids and answered by the same age group, and checked as correct within a very short time. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186885/stopping-a-body-travelling-at-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a recent  example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have great sympathy for all these young kids enthusiastic about physics, who should not be discouraged. But the level is sliding downwards, because often checked answers might not be looked at by somebody with more experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the moderators checking the content of checked answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order not to discourage the young I would be willing to add a more sophisticated answer to bring up the level, and have often done it, but these are one off cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think maybe there could be a list of questions, regardless if they are checked or not, for the attention for more senior physicists, as with  &quot;unanswered questions&quot;, example: &quot;new  answers useful&quot;. Then one  could have a look if one could contribute something better, raising the physics sophistication level of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T20:02:26.833" Title="Point of this site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6829" CreationDate="2015-05-31T10:36:58.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question, if it is one, is part of recurring trend of (a few) users worrying about the level of physics questions at this site. I find your particular worry strange - the ages of our users ought to have no bearing on whether we judge their questions or contributions as valuable. It shouldn't matter whether a user is 15, 50 or 500 years old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example you cite is a strange one - it's a question about an infinite mass moving at the speed of light. The question is now on-hold as non-mainstream, but, in the meantime, received answers that I found quite reasonable. The original poster didn't accept an answer immediately - he decided to, in his own words, &quot;wait for more answers to clear the confusion. And, then accordingly choose the wisest answer.&quot; You are willing to write a more sophisticated answer - what exactly would you say? I find nothing problematic about that example - everything is operating as it should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I'm often amazed that simple questions receive sophisticated answers, probably unintelligible to the original poster but of interest to the broader community here. I haven't seen any evidence that the level of physics is sliding downwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for review, first-posts are already reviewed and I see no reason why accepted answers need the approval of a moderator. The conventional stack exchange system of voting seems to be working just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T10:36:58.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-31T15:18:40.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. Are you happy with the kind of question being posed on the site?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not totally. I thought this was a site for physicists, but there seems to be an awful lot of high-school kids asking homework questions.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you find that the site gives satisfactory answers to the questions asked, and has the requisite people to engage you in an interesting discussion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answers are very good, some not so good. Ditto for the people. The only issue I've noticed is a tendency for some people to close down questions they can't answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Is there a well-balanced demographic?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not bad, but see 1 above.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. Are you satisfied with moderation on the site? Have you ever been unfairly treated? Have you noticed instances of other users being unfairly treated?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, no, no.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. Are you comfortable with the implementation of network-wide policy?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. Do you find it to be the case that some people whose answers you enjoyed reading have abruptly left the site...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. But I am relatively new here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;6. Has anyone's account been suspended unfairly?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to my knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;7. Does the site satisfy a researcher's interest, such as finding new topics and problems to learn about? Does it have a sufficient mass of professional physicists?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO no, because there's too many homework and/or naïve questions drowning out the good stuff. If there was another site where there wasn't, I'd be interested to hear about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T15:18:40.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6829" CreationDate="2015-05-31T19:51:18.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diamond moderators don't have any more control over checked answers than unprivileged users (i.e. we can accept answers to our own questions). So the answer to that part of your question is &quot;No, not as such.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only realistic response to a poor accepted answer is to downvote it and either upvote an existing better answer or if no better answers exists to provide one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent this situation from developing in the first place the correct procedure would seem to one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closing questions which don't conform to the site guidelines with respect to style and content as quickly as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Providing correct answer to questions which do conform to the guidelines. My very unscientific observation is that these young askers will uncritically accept &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; if it is the only answer they get, but at least sometime will exhibit a bit more caution if they have more than one answer, especially if they are contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously no single user can make this happen: it is going to take a broadbased commitment to policing the site while on-line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a consistent, if modest sized, majority of users who don't want to put some kind of hard limit on the level of acceptable questions, so we're going to continuing seeing these grade-school pop-sci queries. We can insist that they live up to the &quot;framed like a scientist&quot; expectation and we can try to emulate John R. and the other expert users who write really accessible but &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answers to these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-05-31T20:02:26.833" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T20:02:26.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-31T23:21:40.720" Score="12" ViewCount="658" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Background&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a lot of posts asking several related but independent questions [1].&#xA;Often the posts are even formatted as enumerated lists, making it clear that the author knows that he/she is asking more than one question.&#xA;I believe that the quality of the question/answer system increases if each post contains a single focused question.&#xA;It's my understanding that other users generally agree with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site tour&lt;/a&gt; does not particularly emphasize the importance of focusing on one question per post.&#xA;Is there a way for us to make it more obvious to new users that posts should focus on a single question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Notes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the specific rules of the site, I would point out that asking more than one question at a time frequently indicates that further effort by the asker to identify what in his/her own mind is actually unclear would greatly improve the question/answer process.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site tour is somewhat saturated with fancy animations and has a low amount of information per screen space. This may be related to the main focus of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186992/questions-concerning-bcs-theory-particularly-the-pairing-hamiltonian&quot;&gt;Here's a recent example&lt;/a&gt;. Note that in the original version the list contained &lt;em&gt;six&lt;/em&gt; items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T09:32:38.983" Title="Is there a way to make it more obvious that each post should contain *one* question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-05-31T23:28:58.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, yes. I do wish there were more post-graduates around and more folks well versed in things like quantum noise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The demographic is massively skewed towards theorists, and it seems particularly folks interested in field theory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;AFAICT the site is fair because it's based on up/down votes and what questions people think are interesing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No comment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think there are not enough professional physicists in my field. As far as I know there's only one other user who can give good answers to questions I really care about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T23:28:58.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-02T23:05:04.207" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my review queue, I have been seeing a lot of questions and comments put as answers. How can we make it clear were these things should go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74685" LastEditorUserId="74685" LastEditDate="2015-06-03T00:30:47.327" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T04:57:16.123" Title="Comments and questions as answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2015-06-03T04:48:53.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am much more active on math than physics, though my degree (long ago) is physics.  I see a huge contrast in reaction to homework problems between the two sites.  The stated policies are similar, but physics is much quicker to close anything that looks like homework than math, even if the poster has shown effort and isolated the problem s/he is having.  That may reflect the fact that math has many more readers, some of whom are eager to show off what they know.  On math, many (far from all) homework problems get solved before they are closed, even if OP has not shown any effort.  I try to give hints and am often frustrated that somebody else solves it completely. That said, I feel physics is poorer for its behavior.  Homework problems are usually more carefully stated than others because the textbook author has given serious thought to making a problem with a clear answer.  They are also often designed to illustrate some point.  I have learned a lot reading/hinting/trying to solve homework problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3257" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T04:48:53.817" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6836" CreationDate="2015-06-03T04:57:16.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a good way to do it. All we can really do to &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mis-posting&quot; is expose new members to instructions telling them what should and shouldn't be posted as an answer, but most of them aren't going to read instructions. I think the best we can do in practice is stay on top of the moderation: watch out for non-answers in the queues and while browsing questions, and flag them as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T04:57:16.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6833" CreationDate="2015-06-04T10:26:07.373" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My experience on other Stack Exchange sites is that the problem of getting a lot of questions that break guidelines is essentially insoluble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most people don't read the tour or the help centre before posting so editing the text there can only have a minor effect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science SE&lt;/a&gt;, only research-level questions are on topic. To try to reduce the number of undergrads asking for homework help on CS questions that weren't even necessarily theoretical, we changed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;title text prompt for new questions&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;What's your research-level theoretical computer science question? Be specific&quot;, I guess about a year ago. I didn't notice that having any effect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://aviation.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1588/add-tag-specific-popup-to-accidents&quot;&gt;warning messages when specific tags are used&lt;/a&gt;. That would probably be useful for specific subjects that attract a lot of bad questions but doesn't help in this case, since the issue is with the form of the question, not its subject.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, prevention isn't feasible. The focus needs to be on improving or closing inappropriate questions. Improvements, ideally, need to be done quickly. On a recent question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/&quot;&gt;Computer Science SE&lt;/a&gt;, I edited out a paragraph that added a vaguely related but independent question and left a comment saying it was a great question and encouraging them to ask it separately, explaining how they could retrieve the text from the edit history. Unfortunately, somebody had already provided a sketchy answer to that part of the question on the back of an excellent answer to the main question, so the asker never bothered to repost it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40456" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:38.257" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T10:26:07.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6841" CreationDate="2015-06-04T15:11:52.103" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I improved the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/147243/how-to-get-result-3-otimes-3-6-oplus-bar3-for-su3-irreducible-repre/187561#187561&quot;&gt;very detailed answer&lt;/a&gt; in which a vector (column) is wrongly written as a 3 by 3 matrix and which has internal links to some equations that don't work in math stackexchange (one sees (???)), and that I put by hand. Why is this rejected, did someone even check that the corrections were true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also did other minor changes. Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/86049&quot;&gt;&quot;edit rejected&quot;&lt;/a&gt; page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T15:24:56.790" Title="Community rejected that edit even though it is correcting obvious mistakes" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6840" CreationDate="2015-06-04T15:24:56.790" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;edit rejected&quot; page actually tells you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;This edit conflicted with a subsequent edit.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning that the post has been edited (in this case by its owner) since you submitted the edit. If a post is edited, all other suggested edits for it are automatically discarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T15:24:56.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6833" CreationDate="2015-06-04T22:03:36.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't mind If a post contains more than one but essentially related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance if a questioner asks &#xA;Is there a phase transition in So and So model of statistical mechanics?&#xA;What is the Order Parameter that drives the phase transition, if any?&#xA;Does any thermodynamic quantity diverge at the phase transition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&#xA;I would not like such a question split for sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question referenced, clearly Question 2 Had to be a separate one because it was completely orthogonal to the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go either way about separating 1 and 3, I would lean towards not breaking it up because it asks why this interaction and not that, which is related to why this coupling constant and not that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now regarding stack exchange's model of accepting answers, I would accept the most helpful answer, that's all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T22:03:36.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-06T05:50:03.750" Score="15" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;p&gt;I refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/187569/26076&quot;&gt;this deleted question&lt;/a&gt; and my question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why was this question deleted rather than migrated to History of Science and Mathematics SE?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the deleted question: cites this book &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B004ZSC3QM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;How Einstein Ruined Physics&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Roger Schlafly, one of whose main premises seems to be the notion that Einstein was a fraud because Poincaré, Lorentz (not to mention, unwittingly, Maxwell himself) and others made important contributions to STR that were unacknowledged by Einstein at the time. The OP asked for an opinion as to how valid this viewpoint is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question was probably against the rules of this site owing to its opinion-dependent nature, but I was rather concerned that it was deleted as &quot;Offensive&quot; instead of being migrated to History of Science and Mathematics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this question was trolling. Maybe it was genuine. Either way, the notion of Einstein's fraud can be soundly repudiated by discussion, not censorship. I wrote an answer that was upvoted thrice very swiftly: I emphasize that I really don't give the nether end of a rat about the reputation, but I do care that the arguments against a fairly fashionable idea in some circles couldn't be put, either by me or by someone else - I really don't care. The upvotes seem to say that people had valid thoughts on this question. Moreover, after I wrote my answer, several people made highly valid comments that I hadn't thought of and should also have been put to repudiate what the OP seemed to be implying (or seeking confirmation of). Like it or not, many lay people read this site and form opinions about science grounded on its practices. Some will take from this question's deletion the impression that bad ideas are censored rather than rationally repudiated and &lt;em&gt;shown&lt;/em&gt;, with evidence, to be bad ideas as should, IMO, be the wont of scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In deleting the question, we lost the chance to describe an important aspect of the scientific method. That is, science is a culture and we all benefit from the ideas of our forerunners. Hopefully we cite these other ideas, but sometimes they become deeply enmeshed in the culture and body of knowledge that we forget that there was a time before them. Add to this Einstein's  odd, intense, somewhat isolated personality that lead to his being &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; stuck in his building's elevator many cycles lost in his thoughts before realizing it was time to get off, you have someone who was perhaps a little less adept at citation than he might have been. Einstein - crucially - lived in a world where communication was very different from today and it was not as easy to keep abreast of ideas. I recall a sign in my faculty library in the 1980s advertising a course in Dialog (an ancient forerunner to the WWW) bearing the slogan &quot;Information Revolution Got You Down?&quot; In those days I certainly felt this way, much more so than now where, thanks to the WWW and decent search engines, I do not feel overwhelmed by information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So science is a culture that shares ideas that everyone benefits from. Einstein was no different from any other scientist in this way. Does that make Einstein a fraud? Absolutely not: without the protagonists, including Einstein, there is NO culture and there is NO science. The author of the book in question as a professional geometer liked Poincaré's insights into special relativity and the geometric / group theoretic description more than Einstein's. If the truth be known, probably I do too. So what. We all think differently. My understanding of the history is that Einstein was first to uniquely take time dilation as just that: a real effect on time itself rather than arising from Lorentz's &quot;local time&quot; which was not taken as being &quot;true&quot; or &quot;real&quot;: Poincaré himself described it as having no meaning by itself and resulting only from convention. Moreover, as one commenter pithily put it, Einstein's contribution was hardly only special relativity, or even only GTR and STR put together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the viewpoint that the question was not a good fit for this site. I disagree that challenges such as the OP's to mainstream viewpoints can be offensive. He/She attacked no-one personally on this site. I disagree with the question's deletion and believe that it should have been migrated to History of Science and Mathematics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've banged on enough, so could someone please give any further insight into why this question was deleted rather than migrated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T02:29:08.960" Title="Concern about question deletion: Science can look after itself and repudiate &quot;offensive&quot; questions by rational repudiation and evidence" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6843" CreationDate="2015-06-06T12:52:09.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange isn't the place to ask questions about the history or sociology of physics. A question about a priority dispute in special relativity is definitely off-topic, even if we could, as you suggest, demonstrate &quot;the scientific method&quot; by rebutting claims in the question. Science can indeed (usually) look after itself, but this just isn't a question about science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, it doesn't sound offensive, though I haven't read the original question, only your description. I think that the question was rightly deleted but for the wrong reason. The OP is free to ask his question elsewhere, including on other SE sites (let's hope that the history of science is equally adept at looking after itself ;)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just don't see much here to be particularly concerned about - we recorded the wrong reason for closing a question, and that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T12:52:09.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-06-06T12:56:48.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://health.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B0mml.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2015-06-06T17:46:23.907" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T17:46:23.907" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-06T12:56:48.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6843" CreationDate="2015-06-06T13:10:03.827" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/187567/&quot;&gt;before by the same user&lt;/a&gt;, in mostly the same form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contained references to the &quot;Jewish Media&quot;. This is a common phrase slung about in anti-semitic contexts, and is a marker for bigotry and other such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the post is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About a likely anti-semitic book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Completely off topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open ended anyway (&quot;What do you think of this book&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally inappropriate for any Stack Exchange site. &lt;em&gt;Perhaps&lt;/em&gt; okay for HSM, but the first and third points still sort of apply. And we are under no obligation to migrate; the user can repost to that site if they want. Migrations should not be used as a way to shovel garbage (or non-garbage mediocre stuff) off the site; only use it if the other site really wants the question. We don't think they will, so we won't migrate. The OP can repost if they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T13:52:49.140" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6843" CreationDate="2015-06-08T00:07:00.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might as well follow up on the possibility of a migration to HSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the version provided by John Rennie, and considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6843/concern-about-question-deletion-science-can-look-after-itself-and-repudiate-of/6846#6846&quot;&gt;Manishearth's three points&lt;/a&gt;, I'll say . . . it would be okay for HSM. Posting it, even just to see what the reaction would be, probably wouldn't harm anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Applying Manishearth's ideas to HSM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book may be anti-Semitic. That is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; okay, as has been established. Not. At. All. However, the question doesn't seem to be based off of anti-Semitism. I had to dig a bit deeper to see that Schlafly does seem to be a wee bit biased against Judaism. The fact that I couldn't tell that just by reading the question, though - and was surprised to learn - indicates that the question itself isn't anti-Semitic. Perhaps - and this is speculation - the idea was based firmly on anti-Semitism, courtesy of Schlafly. But a solid answer wouldn't have to venture anywhere near that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So point number one isn't a killer here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I won't go into whether or not that's on-topic for Physics, but I'll talk about HSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we boil it down to &quot;Could Schlafly's point about Einstein not responsible for the majority of relativity theory accurate?&quot;, then I think it's okay. Is there some opinion in there? Perhaps. But a good answer would analyze the historical background behind the theory - talking about Poincare and any others. That works. We have answers that have gone into depths like that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; open-ended, but I am concerned by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you read the book what do you think of Schlafly's claims, and was&#xA;  Einstein a fraud?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please also comment if you haven't read the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that the question is purely about the book. That is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; good. The best answers on HSM use many sources; it's our unofficial policy to back things up as much as possible. Have I seen good ones that use only a few, or even one? Yes. But more sources generally indicates reliability. Schlafly is probably biased, meaning that he could be a &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt; source to use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why was this question deleted rather than migrated to History of Science and Mathematics SE?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that the question was not migrated directly to HSM without any warning. Generally, moderators on STEM sites communicate with us if there is the possibility of a migration, given that there are many sites - the vast majority, in fact, or probably all of them - on which &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; is not explicitly off topic. So they ask for the opinions of HSM mods. This is very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the question was a bit iffy for reasons exceeding scope, chucking it to HSM could have violated a soft version of the &quot;Don't Migrate Crap&quot; policy, as Manishearth indicated. Now, could they have talked to us and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; possibly migrated? Sure. But it's not their obligation, as has been said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user wants it on HSM, s/he can re-post it there, and the community there will take a look at it. No harm done, I would think. It's fine for one community to deal with an issue without bringing another community in. It can be helpful to notify the other community, but it's not mandatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some more thinking, I'm seriously reconsidering my original position. I've done some reading, and Schlafly is not someone I would want to cite in, say, anything. The guy's biased, to say the least. In order to have a good question, one would have to assume that the information it is based off is accurate and neutral. I wouldn't feel safe making that assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T02:29:08.960" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6851" CreationDate="2015-06-08T12:51:18.007" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make some homemade magnets (the stronger the better), but am not sure whether these types of questions are really welcomed on this site. Any other site's suggested if I should not post it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to make some strong homemade magnets to use in science experiments, what process would I follow and what materials would I need to use? Bearing in mind of course that only materials readily to the layman can be used, so not any rare earth metals etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28955" LastEditorUserId="28955" LastEditDate="2015-06-08T14:38:59.913" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T16:28:27.130" Title="Would a &quot;How to make magnets&quot; question be allowed on this site?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6819" CreationDate="2015-06-08T14:43:10.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange model for solving these sorts of problems seems to be to turn them into a game and give out badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reviews we already have the custodian/reviewer/steward badge series, which awards the total number of reviews over the lifetime of an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here seems to be that we want more people to spend more time reviewing the queues.  You could cultivate that habit in people by awarding a bronze badge for exhausting all your review tasks for a day (á la the &quot;mortarboard&quot; for getting the maximum number of points in a day).  Next step up might be a silver badge for using all your review tasks on five consecutive days, and a gold badge for using all your review tasks on thirty consecutive days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T14:43:10.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6848" CreationDate="2015-06-08T14:51:28.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and ask the question!  If it's not on topic, you will get suggestions for improving it, and/or advice about a better place to ask it.  It might get downvoted or closed, which would be annoying but otherwise harmless, or it might get upvoted because you are asking your question in a new or interesting way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T14:51:28.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6848" CreationDate="2015-06-08T15:51:38.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so I'll preface this like I always do -- my answer here is my personal opinion and does not reflect what may actually happen. It takes 5 votes to close something and I would just be one. Likewise, it takes 5 to reopen something and I would just be one there too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I will wager that this question as worded would be off-topic under the engineering close reason, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see this meta post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your question kind of hits the very definition of using physics to construct a solution to a very specific problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is something that you could certainly ask about in the chat room and people might be willing to help there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On further thought, you might actually be able to ask some engineering-like questions from this because it is used for a scientific experiment. I know it gets tricky to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5553/what-is-engineering-and-what-is-experimental-design&quot;&gt;figure out what is engineering and what is experimental design&lt;/a&gt;. I still think that asking how to build the magnetic would be off-topic. But once you have a design in mind, asking things related to the construction &lt;em&gt;as it pertains to the experiment&lt;/em&gt; might be okay. For instance, maybe questions about how to isolate the magnet from the sensors to prevent/eliminate interference would be okay. Or maybe... I dunno, I guess we would have to know what your actual experiment was like to know what kinds of questions come up. But if you can frame your question about building something where your experiment imposes unique constraints or challenges, it may be on topic again. So it's a fine line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll close by saying that the best way to do this is to build an electromagnet. I did this back in high school physics -- I found a 2&quot; iron bar about 2 feet long, hooked it up to a lathe so I could quickly wrap a ridiculous quantity of wire around it and then I went to every Radio Shack in a 50 mile radius of my house to buy up every single 12V lantern battery I could find. I didn't think ahead about how much heat it would generate and melted my first iron bar, but then I did it again and got my teacher to let me pump liquid nitrogen around the rod and we were able to lift about 500lbs. The magnet could have done more, but we weren't strong enough to hold up much more on the end of it and we didn't build a giant rig to deal with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So -- electromagnets. Go read up on those and I bet if you have specific questions about construction, the folks over at the Electrical Engineering SE may be interested in helping. And if you have questions about &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; they work, there's probably a dozen questions you could ask on here to help you with that bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T16:28:27.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6853" CreationDate="2015-06-08T19:00:00.750" Score="6" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I have absolutely no idea of how difficult it is to change the wording of the question box on PhysicsSE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, as in the title, (and as a newbie) is to seek other (more experienced) opinions on trying to balance two possibly opposing aspects of the site: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP was asked to provide an indication of their knowledge/study background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answers would be more appropriate to the background of the OP and this may save a lot of time and effort in the use of the comments section, trying to establish information that the OP could easily provide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Against this idea, is that, to me, the value of this website is the &lt;strong&gt;range&lt;/strong&gt; of answers provided for each question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for other users with more background and / or experience, they may gain a lot from looking through the differing level of answers  and I do appreciate that this element of the website is crucial, so I would guess that anything that potentially  limits this aspect of PhysicsSE is not a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81619" LastEditorDisplayName="user81619" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T16:14:27.197" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T09:00:27.407" Title="Why does the question box not ask, &quot;at what level are you at in study&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2015-06-09T04:41:25.720" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two things are important in my view&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally questions and answers on Stack Exchange sites are not just about the OP. They are very much also about other visitors who come along later who may be of all different levels of preparation, so it is actually advantageous to have answers to a single question covering several levels of sophstication.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If We had &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why is water wet (for fifth graders)&quot;&lt;/em&gt; then We'd need &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why is water wet (for eights graders)&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why is water wet (for college physics)&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and so on. Yeach!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, The users of the site have regularly said that this is a site mainly for physicists and that it is not a &quot;learn physics here&quot; resource. I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, because many new users seem to conceive of Physics as a learning resource, but that not how most of the regulars see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T04:41:25.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2015-06-10T06:47:18.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/half-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;half-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;half-life&lt;/a&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radioactivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radioactivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radioactivity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/half-life&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;half-life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; introduced is really a subset, and radioactivity is sufficient for identification purposes and subsuming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="60891" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T14:15:07.020" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T14:15:07.020" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-10T06:47:18.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-14T16:57:51.293" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just lost 55 reputation because a user was removed. I know that there is not much that I can do about this, but is there anyway that I could see which user was removed or at least from what posts my reputation loss came from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74685" LastEditorUserId="74685" LastEditDate="2015-06-14T17:30:25.327" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T20:13:01.650" Title="Finding which user was removed" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6855" CreationDate="2015-06-14T17:18:08.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140063/user-was-removed-need-to-show-which-answer-question-loses-its-reputation&quot;&gt;This Mother Meta post&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;User was removed need to show which answer/question loses its reputation&lt;/em&gt;) seems to be relevant with the answer including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Flexo pointed out in comments, this would also undermine the anonymity of voting. I don't see that sufficient advantage is gained by showing this information to offset this problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in the posts you lost the rep on, the Android App (as of the latest version) shows, on the rep notification, the posts that were upvoted by the removed user (so &lt;code&gt;-10 &amp;lt;post name&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; appears). There was a Mother Meta post on this, but I can't find it at the moment; I'm also unsure if this is possible on the Apple App.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T20:13:01.650" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-17T14:33:53.303" Score="-4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/189249/total-charge-on-grounded-conducting-plane-with-electric-dipole-point-charge&quot;&gt;Method of image charges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is considered off topic and was put on hold. Why?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably it seems like &quot;fix my homework&quot;, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I invested quite an effort, including a descriptive image which I created.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I asked regarding a specific physics concept which is normally solved with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_image_charges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Method of image charges&lt;/a&gt;. So, in contrast to most students, who simply hear a proof and nod for agreement - I tried to prove it - to actually show that it works! How on earth that could be bad for this site? &lt;em&gt;I didn't need to do this for the homework&lt;/em&gt; - I simply wanted to see how the proof works.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Really, don't you think you're overreacting? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T16:13:46.890" Title="My question is off topic - though I asked about proof of a specific concept" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6857" CreationDate="2015-06-17T16:13:46.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To explain the difference between between patching the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please explain why the method of image charges makes sense in this scenario?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;onto the end of a check-my-work problem and Jim's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5969/520&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please explain what this aspect of a solution/derivation means or why it makes sense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;consider that the answer to &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; Why is the Method-of-Images-appropriate question is &lt;em&gt;&quot;Because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniqueness_theorem_for_Poisson%27s_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the uniqueness theorem for solutions to Poisson's equation&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said there is a conceptual question that you could usefully ask here. To find it, you have have to think about what you do and don't understand about what you are trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just guessing, but you seem to understand that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are going to install some virtual charges on the other side of the conductor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; understand &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that this is to get the electric field at the conductor to have the right properties (everywhere perpendicular) while still maintaining Gauss's Law on &quot;real&quot; side&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but you don't seem to understand &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to deduce the amount of the resulting surface charge without going through a lot of tedious and error-prone math.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ask about the thing that is actually giving you trouble, already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sheesh!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T16:13:46.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-06-19T03:51:24.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Moriarty&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bakerstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Jim_Moriarty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bakerstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Jim_Moriarty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59444" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T03:51:24.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-19T15:47:26.830" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Calorimetry is still one of the most important aspects of experimental physics, despite being boring. A tumbleweed topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T00:17:06.817" Title="Why no &quot;Calorimetry&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6862" CreationDate="2015-06-20T00:17:06.817" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;have the privilege to create tags&lt;/a&gt;. If there are questions in the archive which could usefully be grouped together under the heading of &quot;calorimetry,&quot; then tag them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no such questions, then ask them! (and then tag them!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T00:17:06.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6866" CreationDate="2015-06-20T19:52:26.023" Score="1" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please reopen the following question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/190222/generalization-of-de-rham-cohomology-for-spinor-fields&quot;&gt;Generalization of De Rham cohomology for spinor fields&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have suitably edited it to suit the interest of the audience in the site. In specific highlighted possible application in the study of topological solitons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is no longer the same question as I had posted on MSE or MO. So it can no longer be considered as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, @DavidBarMoshe has something to say, and I would be interested in listening to that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do consider that rules are only meant as guidelines to benefit the community, hence the interest of the community must be taken into due weight, rather than a literal interpretation of the rules in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T22:34:43.123" Title="Please reopen this question of mine" Tags="|discussion|support|status-completed|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6865" CreationDate="2015-06-20T20:21:00.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that it has been three days since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/1329146/&quot;&gt;math version&lt;/a&gt; and two since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/209604/generalization-of-de-rham-cohomology-for-spinor-fields&quot;&gt;mathoverflow version&lt;/a&gt;, both with no replies as yet. It's getting on toward the time when trying it on a new site makes sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an old guy---old enough to have used the USENET before there was a web---and some of my attitudes are, perhaps, shaped by the culture of the pre-web internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those attitudes say that cross-posting is a form of prioritizing your desire for a large audience ahead of the desire of other users to see only a selected fraction of the available traffic as indicated by their choice of which [usenet groups|stack exchange sites] to read. That was historically interpreted as a kind of rudeness---putting ones own desired first it ones of the core attributes of rudeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Stack Exchange isn't usenet, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;the users have been polled on their opinions on this issue&lt;/a&gt;, and it is clear that the usenetesque view is dominant on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We understand that you don't agree. Well, there is no harm in disagreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings us to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have suitably edited it to suit the interest of the audience in the site. In specific highlighted possible application in the study of topological solitons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is no longer the same question as I had posted on MSE or MO. So it can no longer be considered as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly I disagree. You've made a fairly minimal set of textual changes, but you are still asking the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you don't get an answer elsewhere I'll reopen it sometime tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:54.500" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T22:55:49.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6868" CreationDate="2015-06-23T08:02:26.060" Score="23" ViewCount="811" Body="&lt;p&gt;In SE sites other than SO, there is a less strict &quot;policy&quot;. Less down-votes, easier to up-vote, more &quot;caring&quot; people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt; upside for an SE site to being less strict: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it promotes growth. Not displeasing users will make them come more often.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Terrible:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is a &lt;strong&gt;huge&lt;/strong&gt; downside to it: &lt;strong&gt;Quality goes down.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users that have no understanding of physics get easily voting rights,&#xA;because  most of their questions will get up-voted.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then they ll proceed to up-vote any answer they see in a post since&#xA;&quot;it looked like the writer knows what he is talking about&quot;. As a consequence, &lt;em&gt;actual scientists will be disheartened by the low quality and many of them will never come back&lt;/em&gt;, lowering quality even further. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The damage will be long lasting, or even worse, permanent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have even seen moderators that protect questions because of a 1 rep user posting a useless answer, without commenting on it and (seeing the answer had 0 score and the user had 1 rep) I assume he didn't down-vote either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What makes you avoid casting a down-vote or commenting on a bad answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 1:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is great content here, I am not implying the opposite. But there is also bad content, more than there should be and this is what bothers me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 2:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Down-vote statistics are of no use since there are many factors that can't be quantified. E.g. we might be having a higher down-vote ratio than other SO, but then again we could be getting much more low quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6754/we-seem-to-be-over-eager-to-downvote&quot;&gt;Related 1&lt;/a&gt;: Pretty much the opposite of this &quot;question&quot;, and perhaps my &quot;question&quot; could have been an answer there. However, I decided to post it as a question to encourage others to down-vote more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/627/pseudo-answers-are-the-enemy?rq=1&quot;&gt;Related 2&lt;/a&gt;: A good post on what should be done (more frequently) with bad answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71860" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T04:34:13.050" Title="Why isn't bad content downvoted and commented on enough" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6867" CreationDate="2015-06-23T14:45:36.313" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Voting is one of the things that makes the SE sites work (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;review queues&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; being another big one); if you aren't downvoting, you are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; helping this place work; so downvote on the bad answers as you see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What makes you avoid casting a down-vote or commenting on a bad answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpreting &quot;you&quot; here as plural (rather than me specifically), I can think of three reasons why one would avoid downvoting: (1) time (2) knowledge (3) low score. For commenting, only (1) and (2) apply and for similar reasons to what I'll write below, so I'll be skipping out commenting (unless someone cannot infer correctly, then I guess I'll edit it in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;(1) Time&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are almost 56,000 questions asked on this site. At &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;almost 3 answers per question&lt;/a&gt;, that's around 150,000 answers to scroll through. Since we're only allowed to vote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;30 posts per day&lt;/a&gt; (combined up &amp;amp; down, there are 10 extra votes for questions-only, however) and assuming that 20% of the answers are &quot;bad,&quot; that's still 30,000 answers and at a maximum of 30 answers per day, it'd take almost 3 years to downvote each of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while we're never actually going to get to downvoting &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the bad answers on this site, however &lt;strong&gt;we should still downvote the bad answers as we see them&lt;/strong&gt;; it is, after all, the means by which we let future visitors know what is a good/correct answer and what is a bad/incorrect answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;(2) Knowledge&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that bandwagon&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; voting is bad way to vote, but it is something we have to live with on this Q&amp;amp;A site (e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5826/unusual-upvote-trends-discussion/5827#5827&quot;&gt;hot-network-question effect&lt;/a&gt;). So the best (only?) way to vote on a post is to have some knowledge on the subject being asked; if you don't have the knowledge you probably shouldn't vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem to contradict the previous assertion to downvote bad answers, but I'd say it does not contradict it because in order to discern what makes a bad answer, you need to have knowledge in the subject matter. So, again, &lt;strong&gt;downvote the answers you know are wrong&lt;/strong&gt; as you see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;(3) Low Score&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers with less than &lt;code&gt;-2&lt;/code&gt; net score are faded to suggest that the answer is bad and could/should be ignored. Some people may think that downvoting it beyond that mark isn't necessary because it's already in an &quot;ignorable&quot; state. However, there are a small subset of users on this site who make it their goal to upvote all posts &lt;em&gt;especially heavily downvoted ones&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We should not let a &amp;lt;-3 score stop us from downvoting&lt;/strong&gt; an answer we know to be bad; it's a bad answer and the (minimal) appropriate response is downvoting. Similarly, we should not let a &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; score affect our voting; if it's wrong, it's wrong and should be downvoted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm not suggesting that we downvote to -infinity here, only that the &lt;em&gt;current score&lt;/em&gt; on a question should not be a deterrent from our voting (this goes for up as well as down); the basis of our vote should be on the quality &amp;amp; content of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 A bandwagon vote is one in which a person votes (either direction) simply because that is the &quot;popular&quot; consensus&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 The thought is that the arbitrary scoring system of a website can, somehow, be psychologically damaging to the user; upvotes are some sort of positive reinforcement. There is no evidence for this position, despite continued requests for some (other sites that use voting systems, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imgur.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imgur&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reddit&lt;/a&gt;, do not seem to have this &quot;problem;&quot; users often make fun of themselves for getting downvoted).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T13:58:50.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6867" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:15:57.203" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy to become too focused on specific issues like downvoting, and as a result lose sight of what we are trying to achieve. Downvoting is after all just a means to an end, and not an end in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I'm not sure a &lt;em&gt;mission statement&lt;/em&gt; for the site exists apart from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;relatively anodyne statement in the tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. ... With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about physics, astronomy and astrophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I suspect that most of the hardcore users would agree that we want the site to be a definitive collection of information about physics, for people who are serious about physics. So the key points are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have to be serious about physics: beginners questions are welcome, but you need to be prepared to put some real work into researching and writing your question, and probably some real work into understanding the answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the questions have to be about physics: science fiction may be fun, and you'll find many of this site's members on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Science Fiction Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but questions and answers here have to deal with established physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the answers have to be definitive: answers have to be well enough written to be unambiguously understood by anyone knowledgable (though not necessarily expert) in physics, and of course they have to be correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting is one of the ways we try and ensure posts on this site meet these goals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvoting questions is a way of saying &lt;em&gt;this question is wasting the time of site members&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downvoting answers is a way of saying &lt;em&gt;this answer is inadequate, misleading or just plain wrong, don't trust it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you're still with me, the original question then becomes &lt;em&gt;Are we downvoting and commenting enough to meet these goals?&lt;/em&gt;. And I think that generally speaking we are. I certainly find that if I post an answer that others consider misleading or oversimplified it will very quickly be commented on to point out my error. I rarely see bad answers that haven't received some attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are a slightly different matter, because we aren't going to dissuade people from asking bad questions no matter what we do. The best we can do is close and downvote them quickly then let the automatic deletion do it's work. The key task is getting the question closed as fast as possible to stop it being answered. The limit here is not enough people willing to vote to close. Downvoting is good because it gets the question off the home page, but I'm not sure I'd go along with Kyle's view of downvoting to infinity. IIRC a -3 score is all it takes to get the question off the home page, and any negative score will qualify a question for automatic deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on the whole I think we are downvoting enough. In fact, as I have mentioned before &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6754/we-seem-to-be-over-eager-to-downvote&quot;&gt;I think we are over eager to downvote questions&lt;/a&gt;. The priority should be to get the question closed, and I don't think vast numbers of downvotes achieve anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T20:41:18.833" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T20:41:18.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6871" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:53:21.530" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer got me thinking :&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/191025/57075&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/191025/57075&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's actually supposed to be a comment on some other guy's answer, but the guy doesn't have enough rep to comment. Maybe it's a valuable critique to the other guy's answer. Should I flag such answers or not ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57075" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:50:59.710" Title="Line of action for special cases of an answer supposed to be a comment" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6870" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:11:17.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are comments, not answers.  Flag them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T09:11:17.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6870" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:50:59.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I feel this is indeed an answer. Not particularly complete, but an answer nonetheless. In general, though, if it looks like a comment, flag it as such. If the comment is still valuable then a mod can convert it to a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:50:59.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6867" CreationDate="2015-06-24T23:09:39.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What makes you avoid casting a down-vote or commenting on a bad&#xA;  answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing makes me avoid casting downvotes on bad answers but keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; is subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt if any of the regulars here &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; casting downvotes on answers they believe to be &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What one regular considers bad 'enough' for a downvote may not be for another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as others have pointed out, one must first find the questions and answers interesting enough to read and evaluate before the question of whether to downvote or not comes into context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T23:09:39.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6875" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:35:00.377" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;During reviewing, I stumbled upon the following situation as e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10606/explicit-variation-of-gibbons-hawking-york-boundary-term&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question was asked, answered and accepted. Now somebody else posts an answer which actually is somewhat of a follow-up to the existing answer. Of course one could flag it as not being an answer and ask for a separate question (which is a fine option to have). On the other hand, the original question is refined through this answer. If the user, who posted the second question as answer, would edit the original question, it would be fine according to the site rules. Yet (if I understood it correctly), the original author would potentially be credited for a nice question, which was actually later created by somebody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a way to combine the two questions, so that all questions and answers show up on one page, with shared credits for both asking users?&#xA;Somehow it sounds appealing to me as everything would be in one place rather than having another question on the same or a very similar topic, which probably just looks like a duplicate and would potentially need to be answered with a copy of the original answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's best practice in such a situation as reviewer? Strictly flagging it as a non-answer? Suggesting an edit to the original question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53062" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T16:40:59.843" Title="Is there or should there be a way to combine or append to existing questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6874" CreationDate="2015-06-25T16:40:59.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet (if I understood it correctly), the original author would potentially be credited for a nice question, which was actually later created by somebody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a non-issue &amp;amp; not sure why it was raised in the first place. If someone wants reputation and/or badges for a question, they should ask it themselves, rather than hedging it'd be poorly received &amp;amp; editing someone else's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to your points on the topic of the post itself,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would be a valid edit to the original question (which was really asking for a source to the derivation) because it's asking for more information about the cancellation of a term, which would be best served as a comment to Robert's post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If he takes my suggestion from the comments, he could link to the question if he felt it necessary. This would be the better option, as far as I can tell, compared to merging two questions or editing in. Two caveats on the new post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems to me that it'd be pretty close to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5968/25301&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;derive this equation/law for me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;-type question that we've deemed off-topic and could be closed (if 5 people agree to this view). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closing it as a duplicate because both questions are about the HGY boundary term might be a little bit of a stretch; I would think it'd be closed for the previous bullet than duplicate, but I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your job as the reviewer is to decide whether the post answers the question or is meant to be something else (comment, new question, spam, etc). If you think the post itself answers the question, then you can hit &quot;No Review Needed&quot;. I personally thought it was not an answer and commented &amp;amp; flagged it as such when I reviewed it in the &lt;em&gt;Late Answers&lt;/em&gt; queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a way to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158066/what-are-merged-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;merge&lt;/em&gt; posts&lt;/a&gt; (can be done by moderators only), but, from my understanding, it is somewhat complicated/involved and is rarely done on this site. I do not think it would be necessary in the case that MatterFr posts a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T16:40:59.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6877" CreationDate="2015-06-25T17:02:38.547" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new imgur-based image dropper is not working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image URL works (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6tI9Q.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6tI9Q.jpg&lt;/a&gt;), but the embedded link does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See my post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/191324/advantages-of-a-deadblow-hammer&quot;&gt;Advantages of a deadblow hammer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57925" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T15:23:48.140" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T15:23:48.140" Title="New image dropper is not working" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|links|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6876" CreationDate="2015-06-25T17:27:49.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding 4 spaces to the beginning of a line makes it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22186/how-do-i-format-my-code-blocks&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;code block&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Click 'edit' to see the four spaces before this line.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is useful on the programming sites (e.g., StackOverflow) where there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184108/what-is-syntax-highlighting-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;syntax highlighting&lt;/a&gt; enabled on those (something we don't have/need here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've deleted those 4 spaces &amp;amp; the picture now appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:27:49.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6879" CreationDate="2015-06-25T18:51:33.300" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry but I'm quite new to the inner workings of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer from @fibonatic here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/108640/what-is-an-intuitive-explanation-using-forces-for-the-equatorial-bulge&quot;&gt;What is an intuitive explanation using forces for the equatorial bulge?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the bottom it mentions that any value inbetween 0/90 degrees it would be positive, but this is untrue - just keep taking psi smaller until the second term in the denominator dominates. Unfortunately I can't comment to let him know since I lack reputation, can't PM since there is no function to, and I don't want to edit his answer because I don't know what the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; answer is. I just want to make him aware so it gets changed correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84334" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T21:22:38.267" Title="Contacting a user over a mistake in his answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2015-06-25T19:15:00.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you notice a mistake and know how to fix it, submit an edit to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If don't know how to fix it, leave a comment (requires 50 rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have enough rep to comment, ask someone who has enough rep to do it via &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt; (requires 20 rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have enough rep to use chat, answer or ask good questions to get more rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T19:15:00.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6867" CreationDate="2015-06-26T08:51:38.440" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never downvote questions, and in many cases questions that are in the negative I will upvote unless they are so stupid I don't bother. IMHO too many questions that are quite reasonable from a non-scientist perspective get downvoted because they are not framed in the approved language of science. Or you get comments like &quot;I have no idea what the question is about&quot; (downvote) when it is quite clear to me what is being asked, albeit in an unorthodox manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T08:51:38.440" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6852" CreationDate="2015-06-26T09:00:27.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another answer is that people like me, an electronics and s/w engineer, come here for specific information not generally available elsewhere (or cannot be found). Now, I have a degree in physics, but my overall knowledge of physics varies from &quot;forgotten all that decades ago&quot; to &quot;I am now working on the cutting edge of some obscure experimental physics&quot;. In this case, education level is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T09:00:27.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T21:50:18.920" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to comment that the atmosphere takes about 1/3 to 1/2 the mussel velocity based on my 1987 paper on the Flight of Passive Launch Vehicles. I am about to re-do the paper and am working from memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try but get the note I need 50 Reputation to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I get this reputation to do so? If it is more than a day’s work forget it and don’t reply this email. This is in relation to sweep / survey research (who’s doing work in the field now) not home base research to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours truly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ed Wilson, P. Eng., M.Sc., P.E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user84562" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T23:54:21.397" Title="How do I get 50 Reputation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2015-06-26T22:55:31.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask questions about physics, or answer them: people upvote your posts to give you reputation. It should take less than 10 decent posts to get 50 reputation. Note: the amount of upvotes you get and hence reputation is as much related to how popular the question is as how good of an answer you give and whether there are competing answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2843" LastEditorUserId="62726" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T23:25:23.770" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T23:25:23.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:54:21.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pick a tag you know something about (fluid mechanics perhaps?). Find an interesting question that you can answer. Write a good answer (diagrams, references). See if comments / questions come back. Respond, improve your answer. If you pick up just four upvotes and an accept you will collect 55 rep points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may not happen with your first or second answer but soon you will hit a good one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Half an hour a day for three days ought to be more than enough if you follow the site rules (be polite etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T23:54:21.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6886" CreationDate="2015-06-27T16:00:13.170" Score="15" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past days I've encountered a particular user who has made a &quot;serial answering&quot;: he has answered several different (even uncorrelated) question with almost the same answer and the same sketches. The problem is that some things in those answer are misleading, and some others plainly wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first saw one of these post, I downvoted it and left a comment explaining the downvote. Then encountered (by chance) other similar answer, and I find that very weird. So I looked the profile of this user, and I found that at least three more answer have the same content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that all of these post are worth downvoting (and that this user's actitude of spreading the same answer only makes it worse). But I don't want to commit serial downvoting. What should I do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T22:24:49.150" Title="Downvoting serial answers without serial downvoting" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6885" CreationDate="2015-06-27T17:24:42.507" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think the answers are incorrect, downvote and comment are the correct actions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flagging as &lt;em&gt;not an answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; could apply, if it's way off base to the question). No one knows what the formula for serial downvoting is, but I would think that a few in a day &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; isn't going to trigger it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T01:12:47.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6885" CreationDate="2015-06-27T17:53:42.843" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6886/520&quot;&gt;what Kyle said&lt;/a&gt;, feel free to flag one instance for moderator attention with a custom flag reason. Giving us some links to the others in the flag is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll look at them for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;appropriateness to individual questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the degree to which they might constitute spam.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the possibility that if they really are warranted on those several question we should be merging the questions as duplicates (and then killing the duplicated answers).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to add that the policy of voting the content and not the user is usually interpreted as implying that you should not single out a single user for down-votes. If you find yourself using the &quot;all actions&quot; tab in another user's profile to hunt down post to dislike you are straying into the dark side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote the posts that you see as you judge them and trust in the crowd to do the right thing in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T22:24:49.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T04:36:15.663" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently wanted to post an answer to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/191425/&quot;&gt;Is it possible to build a thermoelectric nuclear power plant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at the bottom of the page, I saw the following notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, I have 60 reputation, unless I'm misunderstanding what &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; means in this context (I clicked on the link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; and as far as I can tell I'm not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &quot;duplicate&quot; post shows a different message. In that message, the intent is clear (you must have &lt;em&gt;earned&lt;/em&gt; reputation). I got a different, erroneous message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE: posted on Meta SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/259878/incorrect-wording-in-protected-question-status&quot;&gt;Incorrect wording in protected question status&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30877" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T22:59:41.190" Title="Message incorrectly claims I need 10 reputation points to answer, when I already have 10 points" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|answers|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-06-29T06:19:37.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6888" CreationDate="2015-06-28T11:46:57.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/30877/quant?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=time&quot;&gt;reputation history&lt;/a&gt; then 51 p comes from 100 p association bonus minus 50 p bounty plus 1 initial p, which do not count as points earned on Phys.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So effectively you have earned 60 p - 51 p = 9 p on Phys.SE. So it seems that you indeed were blocked by the 10 p protection. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5424/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6591/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; related meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T14:07:21.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-29T07:32:21.580" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it has an accepted answer.&#xA;Now suppose another user posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why X? Specifically, what is the mathematical description of X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might go ahead and mark the second question as a duplicate of the first.&#xA;However, I'm not certain this is the best thing to do from a utilitarian point of view. The author of the second question does not seem to have a way of getting the mathematical perspective on X via the existing question for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He/she cannot accept a different answer on that question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Wrong! see below)&lt;/strong&gt; He/she cannot draw attention to it by setting a bounty because there's already an accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Posting a comment on the first question would get the attention only of the first question's author.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if the author of the second question could draw attention to his/her desire for a mathematical perspective, people are less likely to take time to write a nice new answer to the first question because there is less rep to be gained.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether questions asking for a specific perspective on X should be allowed even if X has been explained previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out you can set bounties on questions with accepted answers. Perhaps this is the best way to get new/different answers to these questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T09:20:33.297" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T12:06:21.683" Title="Should we allow questions asking for a specific perspective on something which has already been more generically explained?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6890" CreationDate="2015-06-29T12:06:21.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a purely personal viewpoint, and not a comment on the site rules, but unless a question is an exact duplicate I'm not sure it does any harm to allow it through. With potential duplicates it's often the case that the second question has a different emphasis to the first and as a result will attract different answers. I have answered a question knowing that it's a duplicate (though not an exact one) because I thought I could make a point that wouldn't be appropriate for the first answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site's long term aim is to be a searchable repository of knowledge. If we ended up with dozens of duplicate questions and answers then that makes searching hard, because it makes it hard to find the best or most definitive answer. If it's just a single duplicate, or a few duplicates, and they have a different emphasis then I think that makes it more likely the searcher will find exactly what they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case I would look at both questions. You've obviously given rather abbreviated examples so it's hard to tell how different they are, but in real life the first question would probably be from a beginner wanting a simple explanation and the second from a more advanced student wanting a more rigorous answer. If so my instinct would be to allow both. That way a future searcher of the site would find exactly the question they want whether they are a beginner or an advanced student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T12:06:21.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-29T17:41:23.877" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I downvoted an answer, then after the OP had edited it I retracted my downvote. In between I had hit the daily rep limit of 215 (including one accept) and now after retracting my downvote I find I have 216 rep for the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the determined gamer's strategy should be to make lots of downvotes early in the day then retract them all at the end of the day :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T13:45:38.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T13:45:38.423" Title="Bug in the daily rep limit code?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6885" CreationDate="2015-06-29T20:57:41.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you downvote with a valid explanation, I really don't think you will fall foul of serial downvoting. There's so many questions on the site that concern say electromagnetism that we're bound to see some similar answers. It's a fact of life. And of course, you could always refer &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; those similar answers. In addition you could spread your activity over a few days. On top of that it might help if you could refer here to examples of this &quot;serial answering&quot; so people can gauge the situation for themselves. Do note that answering questions is what Physics Stack Exchange is all about.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you could consider is giving a better answer that explains things in a superior fashion. If your answer has sufficient clarity and logic it will surely show  why the other answer is wrong without any descent into unseemly unprofessional animosity. I would urge you to put some effort into this, because in my experience it can be most rewarding. Feynman was known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/#q=feynman+great+explainer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the great explainer&lt;/a&gt;, and there's a saying which is sometimes attributed to Einstein: &lt;em&gt;&quot;You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother&quot;.&lt;/em&gt; I think it's true. We might think we understand something, but if we can't actually explain it, then we don't. So if you find yourself struggling, you need to stop and think. Particularly if the other answer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; clear and simple, and refers to Maxwell/Minkowski/Einstein/Jackson/etc. If your answer is as clear as mud, or is full of &quot;it just is&quot; mathematics that confuses field and force, or says these guys are wrong, it's possible that &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; answer is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't discount this possibility. We are all wrong from time to time. Knowing this and admitting to the possibility is what distinguishes the scientific community from a medieval theocracy. Indeed, it's why we have scientific progress. Remember: it's the Physics Stack Exchange. Not the Spanish Inquisition.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T04:52:29.763" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T04:52:29.763" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-07-01T04:39:02.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suggest Jim then. If it's most popular, who am I to argue –  Jim Feb 11 at 17:52 [&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6510/a-jim-for-all-seasons?page=1&amp;amp;tab=votes#comment24160_6514&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T04:39:02.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:11:55.653" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen several dangerous suggestions on Physics and Chemistry Stack Exchange, and normally what happens when this is pointed out, is that the suggestor thanks people for their concern about safety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/192108/51934&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks how to test a robot under a simulated depth of 40ft of water. Several answers have mentioned pressure vessels, either mentioning caution from the outset or editing it in when concern was raised. However the poster of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/192129/51934&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; has told both myself and another commentor that we need to get a &quot;sense of perspective.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He advocates getting a reject propane tank, half filling it with water and pressurizing it with an air compressor. I have pointed out to him that there would be approximately 240kJ of stored energy in the compressed air in the tank, which would be extremely dangerous if the vessel were to fail: I have even pointed him to a video of an exploding beer bottle (admittedly at higher pressure, but much smaller volume and total energy.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He correctly points out that the design pressure of a propane tank is much higher than the pressure required, but even so, when considering a reject tank, this is playing Russian roulette.  It's not the likelihood of something going wrong that concerns me - it's the potential consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've pointed out in the comments and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/192146/51934&quot;&gt;my own answer&lt;/a&gt; that the safe way to do this is to completely fill the tank with an incompressible fluid such as water before pressurizing in order to eliminate all air and hence the possibility of stored energy (I have professional experience with testing pressure vessels and that is how we prefer to do it: test failures with water are safe events, provided air is fully eliminated from the vessel.) This is completely compatible with what the OP wanted to do but the answer poster continues to argue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy on answers suggesting something dangerous? Should they be downvoted? Flagged? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure deletion would be helpful, I think the discussion in the comments on the answer is in a way quite useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T15:31:16.370" Title="What to do when an answer suggests something dangerous?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-07-02T15:35:03.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T13:15:31.080" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/85027&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; user. His needs nuking. Can a mod do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84046" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:53:34.073" Title="Reset username for user" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6897" CreationDate="2015-07-03T13:20:38.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;they can,&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;let's wait for one to come.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;o.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user was destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T13:30:24.280" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-07-03T13:53:49.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimbiwan Kenobi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The Jim is strong with this one&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T13:53:49.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6933" CreationDate="2015-07-03T19:38:55.327" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this on meta because I'm not entirely sure if this is the site for it. The sidebar suggested I that this was the place to put it, so I'm doing here. &lt;em&gt;Is this question appropriate for this stack exchange? If not, where ought this question go?&lt;/em&gt; Mouse over to see the questionable question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; I have an item which is made of some magnetic metal. Obviously, testing if a metal is magnetic or not eliminates many alloys and metals (such as Al), but it does not let me know the grade or quality and composition of the metal. I would like to know if it is a stainless steel or a carbon steel (and if it is a mid or high carbon steel)! What tests can I run at home to determine what metal this item is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44216" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T15:59:19.300" Title="Identifying Metals at Home" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6902" CreationDate="2015-07-05T05:47:01.420" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to either: draw an analogy between quantum mechanics and real life or get to a point where I'm not able to create an analogy anymore and I give up.  Odds are I'll be in the second boat :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My background:  I'm now a Software Engineer.  My coursework was in Computational Mathematics.  I generally like any topic so long that its interesting.  I want to understand where the break between quantum mechanics and my understanding of the world is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping this will be the kind of thing where I will say:  this is my understanding at the high level, and I think this analogy accurately fits what is happening at the quantum level.  Then, someone with actual knowledge about quantum mechanics will say &quot;No, your analogy fails at this point&quot; And they will explain to me why my analogy doesn't correspond to quantum.  Then I will either change my analogy to suite what quantum mechanics says, dispute the point in which they say my analogy doesn't match quantum, or agree that that is correct and I'm unable to create an analogy with the real world to match what is observed at the quantum level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this type of question appropriate for this forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62521" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T06:36:53.853" Title="Is this question appropriate for this forum?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6901" CreationDate="2015-07-05T06:36:53.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not. It sounds like you're looking for a back-and-forth discussion, rather than a specific question that can be answered. You might try &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, or a more traditional forum where people can reply to you repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T06:36:53.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6904" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-05T21:22:02.447" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember posting some comments under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/192567/27367&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, but they aren't there now (in particular there was a comment about question edit and another that lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/192561/how-does-the-heat-death-looks-like-from-inside-the-system#comment410044_192567&quot;&gt;this reply&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure I didn't delete them myself, there were a few of them and they are all gone. Hence, I suspect moderator action. As I am new to the physics.SE community I would like to ask why these comments were removed, or more importantly why there was no note left. I tried searching help center and meta for some info or policies, but to no avail. I did find that &quot;moderators reserve right to delete comments without notice&quot; and I'm aware of general SE policy that &quot;comments are ephemeral in nature&quot;, but removing several comments from a new member without any note just seems not right (I participate a bit in other SE communities being &quot;trusted user&quot; in two and I don't remember any such thing happening).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could somebody let me know what happened? Is this a standard thing here? Is there any community norm help page so that I can read it and avoid at least a part of stepping on your toes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27367" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T04:42:38.667" Title="Missing comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6904" CreationDate="2015-07-05T23:55:44.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case I deleted three comments because they seemed to represent a completed exchange starting with suggestions to improve the post, an indication that the improvements had been made and an acknowledgement from the person making the suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mission accomplished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T23:55:44.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6904" CreationDate="2015-07-06T04:42:38.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6905/46399&quot;&gt;dmckee gave a very succinct answer&lt;/a&gt;, but perhaps he was short on time or likewise, so that answer is not self contained. I am including the part that he left out.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6374/which-flag-do-i-use-for-an-inappropriate-post&quot;&gt;this guide-post&lt;/a&gt; regarding flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the valid comment flags is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;obsolete&amp;quot; flag is for comments that have served their purpose or outlived their usefulness, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;suggestions for changes which have been incorporated into the post, or which the poster has explicitly declined to make&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;requests for clarification which have been answered, and their answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;back-and-forth discussions which are no longer active&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;responses to comments which have been deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pretty much any comment older than a week or so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading dmckee's answer in this light,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I deleted three comments because they seemed to represent a completed exchange starting with suggestions to improve the post, an indication that the improvements had been made and an acknowledgement from the person making the suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which means the reason above the bullets directly applies here, and coupled with the ephemeral nature of the comments, they could be deleted as normal cleanup on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mission accomplished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T04:42:38.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T05:09:15.537" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to close (*) a meta question simply because &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6906/define-what-an-unclear-question-is#comment26953_6906&quot;&gt;the OP is not interested in the answer?&lt;/a&gt; Why don't you consider the utility of the post for other people (yourself)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) example here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6906/define-what-an-unclear-question-is&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6906/define-what-an-unclear-question-is&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user74563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T19:55:49.267" Title="When to close a meta question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T06:24:20.833" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I intend to ask the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I install &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geant4.org/geant4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geant4&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geant4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;) alongside GEANT-3 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEANT-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;) on my Ubuntu 15.04? I have already installed GEANT3. How can I install Geant4 without making any problems?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask the question on Physics StackExchange?&#xA;May be we should introduce a tag or site for computing packages and resources for physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already asked similar question on StackOverflow Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/298562/3623705&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46907" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:31.813" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:22:06.593" Title="Installing Geant4 alongside GEANT3: Question for Physics StackExchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|software-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2015-07-06T13:00:19.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why don't you consider the utility of the post for other people (yourself)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, there isn't any long-term utility to care about. The question part of your post &#xA;was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between an unclear question and a question you are unable to answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody in here closes questions because an answer is not immediately obvious. You can click on the unanswered tab of questions, and find enough examples to the same effect. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6906/define-what-an-unclear-question-is#comment26960_6906&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; best clarifies the stance people have regarding the question which got closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the rest of that meta post, and the comments below that post, are just an extended rant. We get it, everybody feels upset when their question gets closed, and having been on this site for more than an year, I have seen many of them resort to angry ranting in chat or meta. When you are in chat, you can still get away with it, but content-less rants in meta, and especially those accompanied by statements like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not really interested in your answer. I simply think that it would be [in principle, theoretically] useful for you to write down an answer [of course you will sort of &quot;copy and paste&quot; another wrong answer, so it won't be useful at all].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;really provide no lasting retention value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relax. It is an internet community of anonymous strangers, and you are an anonymous user too. A question got closed, ego felt bruised probably, but its no big deal. You will get over it in a day or too. But if you keep spamming meta with more and more content-less rants, you potentially risk being deemed an angry spammer, and would perhaps eventually face a &lt;em&gt;cool-down suspension&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I advise you to relax, and take some time off. A question by an anonymous user, getting closed, is really no big deal. But making a mess out of it, is!    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T13:00:19.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2015-07-06T13:11:34.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of this specific question: The definition of what is meant by an &quot;unclear&quot; question is quite explicitly laid out in many places around the meta site and in the banner that appears on a question closed as such. This means that the only reason to discuss what it means would be context specific; we would discuss it only in terms of the linked question and only clarify it insofar as the OP or whoever is confused requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the OP of the meta post indicated quite clearly that they are not actually interested in any clarifying answer, there is not much to be done on this post. In its current form, the only way to answer the question would be with a general outline of what makes a question unclear enough to close. There are so many meta posts about this already and plenty of meta posts on the mother meta site that address what makes a question unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feedback on the closed question itself reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be more clear? That indicates that, regardless what the OP may think, at least 5 3k+ users (or a combination of &amp;lt; 5 3k+ users and 1 mod) thought the wording of the question was sufficiently unclear that they couldn't be sure what it asked and how an answer to it should be formed. That is the general case on what separates a clear question from an unclear one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing left after that is to ask what specifically makes a given question unclear, which the OP of this meta post explicitly indicates is not what they are interested in. That means there really isn't anything being asked by the post. At best, this becomes a duplicate of any number of &quot;What does unclear mean for a question?&quot; posts. But this question also requests us to give the distinction between closing as &quot;unclear&quot; and closing as &quot;unable to answer&quot;. Since there is no such thing or any occurrences of a closing as &quot;unable to answer&quot;, that makes this meta post, at worst, itself unclear (which would be a tad ironic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would have found a nice duplicate for it rather than closing it as off-topic, but the question was closed already. I'm not going to have it reopened just so I can close it properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T13:11:34.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2015-07-06T19:44:41.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an earlier age of the this site the moderators allowed certain parties to use meta questions as a forum for sly insinuations---one that they knew we wouldn't answer because of the moderator agreement---and other forms of character assassination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly I got sick of it, so I'm not very bothered that you were prevented from launching a rant with no actual purpose beyond venting your pique. Sorry, but that is how it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to what defines an unclear question, that is mind bogglingly simple: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a quorum of users vote to close it as unclear and no quorum votes to re-open it then it qualifies as unclear for the purposes of closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the whole shebang because this is a crowd sourced platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T19:55:49.267" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T19:55:49.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6867" CreationDate="2015-07-07T06:07:49.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Couldn't something like &quot;verified accounts&quot; help? If an account could be verified as belonging to someone holding a PhD in physics, either the daily voting limit could be extended or the weight of the vote could be increased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be people who would see this as &quot;undemocratic&quot;, but the main purpose of Stackexchange is not to simulate a direct democracy. In science, the answer of a (verified) expert should have more weight than the opinion of a random user with possibly no understanding in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14088" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T06:07:49.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-07T12:52:35.333" Score="-4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know you could just leave a comment, but not in this case I couldn't. I just found this awesome app while researching on my passion, physics. I stumbled across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90745/gravity-on-the-international-space-station-general-relativity-perspective/192950#192950&quot;&gt;a question about time dilation&lt;/a&gt;, not the easiest concept to grasp, and a commenter had his own question within his comment, just wasn't  looking at the answer correctly. So, I stared at this screen, going to different links forever and it was impossible since I have no, &quot;points&quot;, since I just signed up. I clicked on, &quot;answer&quot; and FINALLY, it let me speak. Intellectual curiosity is an amazing thing. Well, next thing I know, I got my first comment and flag all in one. All you scientists know how important it is for more and more people to have a scientific world view if we're planning on living on this planet for much longer. So I gave him an easy layman's answer to fully understand the answer.  We all know you don't have to know the math to have that burning curiosity of the unknown, and the want to understand and wrap your mind around things you had no idea was wrappable. I believe I gave this user a just as valid answer as the mathematical answer. Do you? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85295" OwnerDisplayName="Nicolle Dransfeldt" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T00:39:50.070" Title="Is helping others grasp difficult ideas, concepts or theories not considered giving an answer?" Tags="|discussion|soft-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6914" CreationDate="2015-07-07T14:18:28.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anything which answers the posted question should be posted as an answer; anything which does not, should not. It's that simple. (Although there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; cases in which it's debatable whether a post answers the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post you made &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/192950/124&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (which I'm guessing is the one you are asking about) does not answer the question, and should not have been posted as an answer. The fact that you addressed your post to someone who is not the asker is a dead giveaway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:18:28.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6914" CreationDate="2015-07-07T14:26:10.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know why you are making a non-issue an issue. I probably guess that you have answered to the asker who haven't actually asked the question &amp;amp; a question that actually wasn't matching the OP's question. You have every right to explain the physics to a layman _ we are not having a problem with that, nor we discourage anyone to answer anyone's question. However, since the question was not the same to that of OP, you could probably comment to him/her; oh! you are a new user - then you have to &lt;em&gt;bid&lt;/em&gt; your time:) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T14:31:39.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:31:39.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-10T06:56:13.520" Score="-3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lind-i.com/Docs/EconomicCircuitry.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and a couple other related papers and I'd like to discuss, where should I go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85543" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T11:27:33.370" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:27:33.370" Title="Where should I ask a question about abstract physics/economics/information theory that I invented?" Tags="|discussion|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6919" CreationDate="2015-07-10T09:13:06.107" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not here, and probably not anywhere on Stack Exchange. These sites are not for discussion. You should find some place that admits reviews of original research. (Well, &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; what you should do is try to get it published, but that's a whole separate issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try bringing it up in &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; to see if anyone would care to discuss it with you, but no guarantees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T09:13:06.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6922" CreationDate="2015-07-15T13:17:36.530" Score="10" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once in while, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;someone will insist that dark matter is not particles (which is totally possible but not likely) and insist curved space (or &lt;em&gt;[insert theory here]&lt;/em&gt;) is the only thing possible. When you explain the accepted physics of it to him or her, they will reply with something totally irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is why they so insist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do with posts like that? Only downvote? These people are really making the atmosphere not good. Downvoting, so far, seems not to be working very effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28745" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T12:51:49.733" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T12:51:49.733" Title="Why do some people insist on one unlikely possibility?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6921" CreationDate="2015-07-15T14:17:11.980" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few different types of users that can be known to behave like this. Some we can do something about, some we can't, and some we can but shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first type of user likely to exhibit this behaviour is the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;next Einstein&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; user; one that is not well-studied in physics and has thought up their own &quot;theory&quot; concerning the issue. Often times, they will learn some idea from pop-science that is either wrong or misunderstood. The theory they create will be, to them at least, simple, intuitive, and obvious, yet still based on the incorrect physics ideas. When you confront them about it and give reasons why their way of thinking is either wrong or not the only way of thinking, they &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; cite meaningless examples or ideas and claim you are missing the point of their genius. These users are easy to deal with and sometimes fun to engage. Often, their posts are non-mainstream and can be closed. Their answers don't usually attempt to answer the question and can be deleted. If they do have a valid attempt at an answer, it can be downvoted if wrong. Basically, treat their posts like any others and don't let it bother you that they won't be swayed. Next Einstein users will always be a problem, you just have to learn to live with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next type of user likely to exhibit this behaviour is a &lt;strong&gt;technically proficient troll&lt;/strong&gt;. These users know enough about the subject matter to be able to answer questions, but they choose to do so in ways that are deliberately misleading and/or obfuscating. Sadly, there's not much we can do about them. Do not engage these users. That way lies madness. A technically proficient troll knows how to work the system so that they don't get banned and their answers don't get deleted. Just ignore them if you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next type of user is what I call a &lt;strong&gt;fringe physicist&lt;/strong&gt;. These users are people that know the physics fully well, but they seem to strongly dislike adhering to mainstream viewpoints. This may be because they secretly cling to their own theories, which skews their perspective of the real physics, or perhaps because they are simply the physics version of hipsters. It doesn't really matter. These users are arguably the most annoying of the bunch because they will always find a way to argue with you about accepted physics and will always make their posts emphasize the fringe or less accepted theories (with the occasional reference to their own unsubstantiated viewpoints) and will always try to downplay or cast doubt on accepted theories. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; attempt to reason with these users, and that is their redeeming quality. Usually they will accept that you are trying to showcase the accepted mainstream viewpoints so long as you give the fringe ideas an honorable mention. But when you confront them about a post and tell them they should omit personal viewpoints or mention the more accepted theories, they will usually mention some unrelated details and complicate the issue. Sadly, there is not much that can be done here. If you disagree with how they present their answer, downvote it, that is all. I don't like it any more than you when someone that knows the physics focuses on fringe or non-mainstream ideas to explain a simple concept to someone. It's misleading and it makes physics look like it has no clue what it is doing (and I suspect some of them are trying to get exactly that message across). These users will likely accuse you of being dogmatic and of having a restrictive view of the world. Don't let it bother you. This site is primarily meant to showcase the accepted and mainstream views of physics, not explore or emphasize fringe ideas. They just don't seem to remember that fact most of the time. However, these users are still valuable members of the community because in a majority of cases they will present answers to questions where there are no fringe theories and, knowing their stuff, they will get it right. Fringe physicists are all around. You will have to deal with many of them and learn how to get along. Do not let them push you around and be vigilant to make sure they do not lead people too far astray. But in general, avoid them if you know they will be acting fringey and be friendly all the other times. These people have chosen a valid point of view, it's just a bit grating at times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last type of user I can think of is the &lt;strong&gt;active researcher&lt;/strong&gt;; an actual physicist working on a paper or research of some kind in that area. For instance, if a physicist is working heavily on $f(R)$ theories or on massive gravity, they might be more likely to focus only on those alternatives to dark energy/dark matter. This is fine. They can provide valuable insight into alternative theories about a topic. Unlike the previous class of users, these ones have excellent reasons for wanting to focus solely on the alternatives to mainstream. They will likely not hesitate to briefly mention the mainstream theories if pressed, but it's probable that they are leaving it out of their posts so that someone more experienced with them can write about them. We absolutely like these users and even if we could do something about them, we shouldn't. Physicists working on not-yet-mainstream research should be encouraged but sometimes reminded that their work is not the only solution. They can forget that sometimes; it happens to the best of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, however, treat a post like any other. If you don't agree with it, downvote it and leave a nice comment explaining what you dislike (DON'T engage the technically proficient troll!). If it's irrelevant or not a fit for where it was posted, flag it for close/deletion. If you explain yourself and make it clear they haven't included a mainstream viewpoint but they still insist their view is the only possible solution, ignore them. Unless you know how to deal with this situation, it's usually best to ignore  it. Don't wear yourself out trying to convince people, just address their errors, downvote it, do what you can, then move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T12:55:44.343" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T12:55:44.343" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T18:11:32.013" Score="9" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have an answer which gets 30 upvotes. After a time I realize the answer is wrong. Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a) delete the answer?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b) edit the answer to be correct?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern with the approach in b) is that whatever I write in my new answer will not be vetted by the 30 people who upvoted my original answer. Since they aren't notified of the changes, I don't think it is fair to keep their stamp of approval attached to whatever I write. That would amount to the 30 upvotes being an endorsement of me as a knowledge source rather than an endorsement of the ideas in the original answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;help page on editing&lt;/a&gt;, edits are to be used for correcting minor mistakes or clarifications which &lt;em&gt;do not change the meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the post. I believe the reasoning behind that is to address the above concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please treat the scope of this question as general, but the discussion was spurred by  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7668/fundamental-question-about-dimensional-analysis&quot;&gt;Fundamental question about dimensional analysis&lt;/a&gt; as suggested by dmckee. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T01:49:20.997" Title="If I have a highly upvoted answer that I realize to be wrong, should I delete it or edit it to be correct?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6923" CreationDate="2015-07-15T18:35:30.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just deleting a wrong answer is not good, especially if it is far from obvious that the answer is wrong. Silently correcting the answer is not much better either. You could instead leave the original answer basically untouched, add a warning at the begin that the answer is wrong, and possibly add an appendix explaining why the answer is wrong, and how this might be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is also what dmckee did initially (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/7673/5&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/7673/5&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum:&lt;/strong&gt; It has been brought to my attention that the argument herein is specious.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed1000476&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DOI: 10.1021/ed1000476&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Can One Take the Logarithm or the Sine of a Dimensioned Quantity or a Unit? Dimensional Analysis Involving Transcendental Functions&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When later comments asked for more details about why the argument is specious, he made the answer a community wiki, such that somebody else could add these details, if he cares enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruslan cared enough to provide those details. Funnily enough, he initially also provided an argument why the cited paper is wrong and the original answer is correct. He later weakened this to saying that the cited paper is only physically wrong, but mathematically correct. My guess is that the paper is just wrong, but Ruslan is unsure how to nail down the mathematical mistake, so he tries to stay on the safe side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4846" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T19:55:24.550" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6923" CreationDate="2015-07-15T19:21:01.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar case was addressed in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/155049/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mother Meta post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (does not mention &quot;high vote,&quot; but I expect that the answer is the same regardless). The accepted answer there says that you should &lt;strong&gt;edit it&lt;/strong&gt; if there is no existing correct answer and &lt;strong&gt;delete it&lt;/strong&gt; if there is an existing correct answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even further, Shawn Chin states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Better yet, to keep the post clean, replace the wrong answer with an footnote which mentions your previous answer and include a link to the relevant revision of your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because revision histories are public, anyone (even unregistered users) can see them, so why not give them a direct link to the old wrong answer&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. This will let future visitors see the history of what was the original answer, if they so desire, but keep the &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answer present for all to see first (which is more important).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer has been accepted by the OP, you cannot delete it without moderator intervention. What you can do here is try asking the OP to unaccept your answer (comments under their question would probably be best) so that you could then attack it as above (edit if no correct answer is there, delete if a correct answer exists). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; respond then you're in a bit of a pickle: do you (a) edit it for future viewers, OP's non-acceptance be damned or (b) post a new, correct answer, and never get the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; answer accepted&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;? This, of course, is the dilemma we face here, as the OP in the question in question has not visited the site since September of 2011 (and has only asked &lt;em&gt;that one&lt;/em&gt; question). I'd probably lean towards (a) myself, but it really is a judgement call best left to the answerer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1 Like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/e18511b1-8c14-44d6-874f-f4a75b5dfdcf/view-source&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; for this particular post. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 Technically speaking, the accepted answer only indicates that that answer helped OP the most. Contrary to the opinion held by many people on this site, it does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; signify correctness of the answer. So really this point is kinda a non-issue.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T01:49:20.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6923" CreationDate="2015-07-15T20:12:49.433" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are allowed to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;without changing the meaning&lt;/a&gt; of our posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because if I espouse Theory A and you upvote my post and then I realize Theory A is wrong and change my post to say Theory B is right, then it appears that the community supports Theory B. Regardless of whether Theory B is actually right or not, the community &lt;em&gt;never got to vote on Theory B&lt;/em&gt;, and that is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I believe we should recommend that if an OP realizes their answer is wrong that they delete it and post the correct answer separately (if they know it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T20:56:39.990" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T15:39:45.633" Score="0" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;A month or so ago, we had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u2uvj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (credit to Kyle Kanos for the screenshot) stemming from legal interests. The question mostly follows the site's guidelines, and it doesn't seem promotional in content. But certain characteristics of the questions make it seem of an interest not those of &quot;active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy&quot; as specified in the site definition. The question was later closed as off-topic due to the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question might have some educational value useful for the community, but making use of the sincere services of users who want to contribute to society, for something else is not fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these questions challenge the very definition of Physics and other sites. Therefore, should we modify the guidelines of the site to formally indicate utilisation of the site for such interests are not encouraged ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57075" LastEditorUserId="57075" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T04:02:10.403" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T04:02:10.403" Title="Should we modify the site guidelines to deal with people utilising Physics for interests other than that specified in the site definition?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6927" CreationDate="2015-07-16T16:49:01.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a subtype of 'solve my exam for me' questions. Legally binding opinions are off-topic on most Stack Exchange sites, and &quot;do my work for free&quot; is quickly closed anyway. In ye olde days, it was 'too localized', now it can be closed as 'Blatantly off-topic'. Until the poster appeals on meta, I can see no reason to change the FAQ/on-topic blurbs. BTW, upvoted your post this time, although you could inline the image for &lt;em&gt;more clarity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22254" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T16:49:01.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6927" CreationDate="2015-07-17T05:40:17.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much as I'd like to make it a capital offence, we can't stop people posting inappropriate questions (or answers). We just have to put in place the mechanisms for dealing with them. And it seems to me these worked well in this case. The question was closed in about eight hours, and subsequently &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;automatically deleted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a shame it took eight hours to close what was obviously an inappropriate question, but we only have a limited number of members who are active reviewers, and some of them have real lives. The way to improve the site is to encourage wider participation in reviewing. You only need 3,000 rep to take part in reviewing, though the 10,000 rep needed to vote to delete is a bit more ambitious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T05:40:17.143" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6931" CreationDate="2015-07-19T23:46:52.943" Score="10" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's always been a bit of fuzz around the issue of on-topic-ness of math (and engineering, but that's a discussion for another day) type questions on our site.&#xA;Many questions which are in content strictly mathematical would best be answered by a physicist because either the math topic is known mostly to physicists, because the asker is interested in the mathematics mostly as it relates to a physical system, or because the asker wants a physicist's perspective on the math itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From one point of view, the fact that a physicist's answer is wanted doesn't matter; math questions belong on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;This is unsatisfying though, as those who frequent Physics.SE do not necessarily frequent Math.SE, so good answers for the type of question described above may be difficult to obtain if we just post such questions to Math.SE (or migrate them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What combination of the following strategies should we use to draw attention to their physics-oriented, yet strictly mathematical in content, questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post to Math.SE and advertise the question in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Campaign to get users of Physics.SE to subscribe to the Physics and Mathematical-Physics tags on Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide a link on Physics.SE to Physics tagged questions on Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;or any other ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, what can we do to keep strictly math questions off Physics.SE while encouraging our users to answer those questions on Math.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T15:22:39.927" Title="How can we encourage our users to answer physics oriented math questions on Math.SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6930" CreationDate="2015-07-20T06:14:51.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Choice (1), linking to the question in chat, is an old standby and usually works pretty well. These links often get starred so they draw attention even after they've rotated out of the main chat window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choice (3) is feasible through a community ad, which could link to the relevant tag pages on Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choice (2) could be handled on chat - it'd be a decent topic for our biweekly chat sessions, i.e. highlighting recent physics-themed questions of interest on Math.SE. But the main site doesn't really provide a good venue for this sort of campaign. (By design.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T06:14:51.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-07-20T12:08:26.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jimtrinsic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where jimtrinsic qualities are the Jim-like qualities every Jim inherently possesses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T12:08:26.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6900" CreationDate="2015-07-20T15:59:19.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the interest of keeping meta clear of unanswered questions: I suspect this would not be appropriate. If you were to justify why this needs to be done in the context of a research-level physics experiment, then it might be acceptable, but in general I'd expect it to get closed if you post it on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T15:59:19.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6930" CreationDate="2015-07-21T15:22:39.927" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never liked how rude the tone here becomes if one asks question about a mathematical concept that is used in a physical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who exactly decided and more importantly why, that mathematical concepts which are used exclusively by physicists nowadays shouldn't be discussed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematicians and almost everyone at Math.SE care about different things than physicist. Even if one gets an answer at Math.SE it is seldom satisfactory for a physicists. Many topics that are very important for physicists aren't interesting for mathematicians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tag, which makes clear that a question is about a specific mathematical concept that is used in a physical theory/framework, would be a much better solution than writing comments below every such questions: &quot;This belongs to Math.SE&quot; etc. Everyone who dislikes such questions can then block this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37286" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T15:22:39.927" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6936" CreationDate="2015-07-23T16:54:17.503" Score="13" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen several answers that I would like to add to a set of handouts or a departmentally generated text.&#xA;1) How do I get permission, or is it granted automatically by the nature of this site?&#xA;2) How do I give credit, especially if the author uses a pseudonym?&#xA;2a) Is there a way to notify an author you would like to contact them offsite without giving others (the general population) your direct contact info?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T15:59:22.330" Title="Getting permission to reproduce an answer (with authorship credit) for a class handout/text" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6935" CreationDate="2015-07-23T16:59:11.587" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license is set out in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;legal&lt;/a&gt;&quot; link to be found in the footer of every page. It's a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. I believe that the Creative Commons people feel that crediting a pseudonym covers the attribution requirement, and it is at least conceivable that a pseudonymous author may not want their real identity associated with the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can attempt to contact individual authors on the site, or you can look in their profile for other contact information. You can assume that users who don't put contact info in their profiles probably don't want to be bothered. In my case you could work out my real contact info from a little digging, but I don't want to be pestered; so, please, only contact me directly for issues of import.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T17:05:29.447" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T17:05:29.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6442" CreationDate="2015-07-23T17:58:20.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/195610/newtons-second-law&quot;&gt;Why is friction force negative in ice skater problem?&lt;/a&gt; is awesome. It gives the problem, what the OP did to solve it, and then it asks a conceptual question about something that didn't make sense to the OP. They got the answer correctly and the question shows a clear desire to learn more about the actual physics. This is the ideal we all look for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.827" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T17:58:20.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-07-24T01:05:30.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;|JimUp&gt;+|JimDown&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, each time someone pings you in chat you have to collapse to either |JimUp&gt; or |JimDown&gt; for the rest of the session :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T01:05:30.533" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-26T12:43:22.693" Score="-6" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not migrate the low-level &quot;check my answer&quot; type questions to math.se where they are receptive to them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Economics&quot; Stackexchange never made it out of Beta: there were so many beginner's level questions that no experts could stand the place. &#xA;The &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quant.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;quantitative finance&lt;/a&gt;&quot; site however has such an intimidating name that it successfully scares off the homework &quot;check my answer&quot; type people that regularly encounter the &quot;closed as off topic&quot; homework tag here on Physics.SE &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we appear too approachable. Maybe something more intimidating like &quot;Quantitative Science&quot; might scare off unwanted questions. Till then, why not migrate the &quot;check my answer&quot; questions to math.se where they are receptive to them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I believe that the Mechanical Engineering SE Beta failed for the same reason as Economics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2843" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:22.390" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T13:36:47.420" Title="Migrate Homework to Math.SE instead of close?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6939" CreationDate="2015-07-26T13:36:47.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is really very simple: This is a bad idea, because &lt;em&gt;not all physics homework exercises are on-topic on a different site&lt;/em&gt; (in fact, I suspect most aren't). If a question is about physics, it makes zero sense to migrate it to Math.SE. As for homework-type questions that are purely mathematical in nature, I believe we're &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; migrating those to Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T13:36:47.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T15:34:22.943" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics (PSE) often gets questions from beginner physics students that would easily be answered in person, and are basic physics contained in a text: &quot;How do I calculate the potential 3 cm from a point charge?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless PSE is trying to become a compendium of introductory textbook physics, I wonder if a better answer would be &quot;go ask your teacher&quot; because then the user could easily answer related follow-up questions without cluttering the comment stream.  (Admittedly, I've never shifted things to a chat room because I don't like on-line live conversations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really mind answering the basics of a first basic question, but when follow-ups begin flowing, and it's obvious the questioner needs a lot of help, I believe that in-person face-to-face interaction would be better for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or an alternate response could be: That's a related, but separate question. Post it as a new question.  But if it is a student, why aren't they asking their teacher?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; I wonder if some students are uncomfortable with human interaction. Or maybe teachers don't like answering questions and &quot;telegraph&quot; that to their students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="63690" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T15:45:22.267" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T05:03:59.587" Title="Is it appropriate to tell someone to ask their teacher first?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6935" CreationDate="2015-07-27T15:59:22.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The re-use of all the user-provided content on this site is permitted and encouraged. If you found the answers here helpful and you want to share them with your students, then by all means do so! We only ask that you attribute the content appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More technically, the legal conditions for reuse are spelled out on the footer of every page on the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;user contributions licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cc by-sa 3.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;attribution required&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific requirements of attribution are given in the second link. Specifically, and quoting from there, you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in some way. It doesn't have to be obnoxious, a discreet text blurb is fine; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Show the author names for every question and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, if you publish this content online, you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., &lt;code&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/code&gt;); and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., &lt;code&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally you should include the URLs also in printed content. For more details see section 3 (Subscriber Content) of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal#attribution&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;, which is available under &lt;code&gt;legal&lt;/code&gt; on the footer of every page on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an additional requirement from the CC BY-SA license, which is a bit fuzzier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you remix the content or you edit parts of it, you must do so in a way which makes that evident and which enables your audience to find the author's original version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding pseudonyms, if a user's profile allows you to personally identify them, then it is indeed nice to provide both the name they publish under and their Stack Exchange pseudonym when giving credit. If the user has not provided their name, then it is perfectly OK to simply attribute the pseudonym: the user contributed the content in the understanding that it was available to all under CC BY-SA with attribution set to the pseudonym. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you nevertheless want to attribute someone personally, it is OK to attempt to contact them as long as you don't do so too often. The first port of call is checking whether the user is available over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h bar&lt;/a&gt;, our chatroom. If they are not, a short and polite comment under the answer you want to re-use is acceptable. As D. McKee mentioned, doing minor detective work to find the real-life identity of users is generally OK, but please use a good deal of caution and do not pester users off-site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T15:59:22.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2015-07-27T16:31:21.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Joyce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/James_Joyce_28_Campden_Grove_blue_plaque.jpg/257px-James_Joyce_28_Campden_Grove_blue_plaque.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T16:31:21.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6946" CreationDate="2015-07-27T18:15:10.857" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, if it's difficult to understand a question due to poor wording or grammar, then that would be an appropriate edit. What about edits that change the wording, or alter the writing style without changing the underlying meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point, what about edits that alter the intent or emphasis of the post? e.g. An editor thinks that a certain interpretation is important, and changes an existing answer to emphasize that interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26539" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T19:59:46.457" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:07:17.183" Title="Are edits that change writing style or stylistic voice appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-28T13:27:11.130" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I lost reputation worth 30 points because 'user was removed'.Why should my reputation be lost if someone else's account is deleted.I had give correct answer to the question for which I had initially gained reputation. Why did this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78126" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T13:38:09.053" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T13:38:09.053" Title="Reputation lost" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-28T13:58:01.100" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6944" CreationDate="2015-07-28T14:07:17.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about edits that change the wording, or alter the writing style without changing the underlying meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that changing the writing style (or wording) is not &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; a reason for an edit to be inappropriate. But it's not a reason to edit either. Yes, if a question is outright &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; because of the writing style, go ahead and fix that, but if it is perfectly understandable and you simply don't like the style, leave it alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another point, what about edits that alter the intent or emphasis of the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This I'd be more wary of because the choice of emphasis in a post can be a reflection of an author's intent. For example, there are cases where a perfectly valid answer already exists on a question, but I don't feel that it emphasizes the right point, so I post another answer that does emphasize what I think is the important part. If the choice of emphasis is a valid reason to post an entirely separate answer, it follows that altering the choice of emphasis could change an answer from one that represents the OP's intent to one that does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:07:17.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6941" CreationDate="2015-07-28T14:28:31.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How do I calculate the potential 3 cm from a point charge?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this are the sort of thing we do not want to encourage on this site, for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that's literally just what the poster asks, it's quite lazy, and we don't want to encourage that. (This community has a strong sense of justice, in the sense that if you want someone to help you, you earn it by helping yourself first.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If people ask a lot of these questions on this site, they'll swamp out interesting higher-level or more intricate questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As you said, often people who post these questions need more back-and-forth interaction than we are set up to provide. So they'll receive better help from their teacher, or at least from a traditional forum with a discussion-based posting model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, in many cases it is appropriate to tell someone to ask their teacher first, or to refer them to another site like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt; which has a dedicated homework help section. If you're going to do this, I would suggest doing so &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; getting involved in the question. Ideally, flag it for closure, if it qualifies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:28:31.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6941" CreationDate="2015-07-28T15:48:10.053" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago a meta post clarified what we expect from members in the way of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;prior research&lt;/a&gt;. Armed with this very detailed and precise discussion I now vote to close questions if I think they show insufficient prior research. This has in the past raised some controversy, though more recently the site members have either come to agree with me or have got bored with telling me not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all contribute our time and the sweat of our brows for free because we think it makes the world of physics a better place. In return all we ask is that questioners don't take the piss. When they do, their questions simply don't deserve to be on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't apply this rule dogmatically because, well, we were all enthusiastic youngsters at one time and enthusiasm can lead you to post first and think second. I'm generally happy to answer a simple question if I think it's been asked out of a genuine interest in the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T05:03:59.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-29T07:48:30.050" Score="17" ViewCount="787" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every now and then, there are very interesting science questions being posted on the Physics StackExchange. Some of these questions concern very up-to-date research. Does anyone know if any publication has resulted from a post on Physics StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83359" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T05:03:28.050" Title="Has any new physics problem been solved as a result of discussion on Physics StackExchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2015-07-30T15:45:50.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the book question should be kept and any question on resource recommendations should be automatically linked to it.&#xA;It is an extremely useful question as it allows for a person to find books on &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78057" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T15:45:50.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6952" CreationDate="2015-08-02T06:43:16.610" Score="7" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;When writing quantum mechanics answers I typically start with something like this at the top:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\renewcommand{ket}[1]{\left| #1 \right\rangle}$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a custom macro like this means that I can type \ket{\Psi} instead of \left| \Psi \right\rangle when I want to indicate a quantum state.&#xA;This has several benefits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Less typing for me, and I'm less likely to make a mistake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Easier for other people to edit my post because it's easier for them to read the TeX.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other folks editing the TeX may learn something new about TeX!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to add a note explaining the use of \renewcommand (or \newcommand) to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;help center page on MathJax&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T10:48:41.703" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T10:48:41.703" Title="Should we indicate the use of \renewcommand in the help center?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2015-08-02T07:33:47.883" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This answer is outdated, and does not reflect the current behaviour of the Stack Exchange software. Since January 2019, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/29621&quot;&gt;the MathJax environment is limited to every individual post&lt;/a&gt; instead of the complete question-and-answer thread. As such, the concerns voiced in this answer are no longer a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &lt;code&gt;\renewcommand&lt;/code&gt; really shouldn't be used at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because the title, question, answers, and comments on a page are not in separate MathJax environments. If you use &lt;code&gt;\renewcommand&lt;/code&gt; (or even &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;, though that's not quite as bad) you risk clobbering others' contributions. All of a sudden their text will be rendered differently from what they were shown in the preview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you check that no one else has used the command, you've silently altered the MathJax environment for any future posters. Imagine the frustration from a user unfamiliar with this feature when faced with their answer giving rendering errors in one place that are not reproduceable elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\renewcommand&lt;/code&gt; in a multi-user, evolving environment is the equivalent of re&lt;code&gt;#define&lt;/code&gt;ing key parts of a language in a public header file. Anyone who loads the file will be unknowingly using your personal variant of the language rather than the standard one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want &lt;code&gt;\ket&lt;/code&gt; to have some particular meaning, the first step is to have this as a MathJax package (I don't know whether or not this exists), and the second step is to convince the SE team to automatically load this package on physics pages. The other option is to have the team somehow implement MathJax in isolated environments, one per post. (I don't even know if this is feasible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, a little verbosity never hurt anyone. Besides, I'm not sure adding another layer of obfuscation via macros is the best way to help newcomers learn a language. It seems more like giving them a fish (&amp;quot;here, just use this header; don't ask what's in it&amp;quot;) than teaching them to fish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the side, I don't think the proposed definition of &lt;code&gt;\ket&lt;/code&gt; is itself bad (aside from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498/mid-vertical-bar-vert-lvert-rvert-divides&quot;&gt;erroneous use&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;code&gt;|&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;\lvert&lt;/code&gt;...). It's just that this sets a precedent for others to develop more and more complicated macros, probably just copying and pasting from an ever-growing file of personal preferences with more and more ways to potentially break things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T10:48:02.080" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T10:48:02.080" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6897" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:53:34.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For future reference: if you see a user with a username you consider offensive, the correct procedure is probably to flag the post with a custom flag explaining it. Moderator action will probably follow quickly. As a second avenue, try &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, and if both of those are unavailable then raise the matter on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:53:34.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2015-08-03T17:06:43.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll say this here in case it's useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax is unlike TeX in that it recognizes as valid characters a bunch of unicode junk that TeX will rightfully call out as jibberish. This includes greek letters, used to great effect &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/additional-useful-buttons-for-our-m-se-editor&quot;&gt;on Mathematica.SE&lt;/a&gt;, clever sundries like ≠ and ±, and the ever useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;⟨ and ⟩.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My solution for easy bra-ket input is to have ⟨ and ⟩ hard keylinks on my keyboard (AltGr+[ and AltGr+], if you're wondering). Typing something like &lt;code&gt;⟨\phi|\psi⟩&lt;/code&gt; takes more keystrokes on the meat than on the bread, which is as it should be, and it gets rendered correctly. You can argue that this is terrible form, but it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example in action see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/8c98cc5f-9e0d-4f0a-bf78-3691797605d0/view-source&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/197509/8563&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T17:06:43.713" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T19:34:42.933" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a minor quibble but since the site's CSS is in review I thought I'd bring it up. I just found out, via &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/79754/184688&quot;&gt;this MSE answer&lt;/a&gt;, that if you ask a question and then comment on the answers below it, your username gets a slight background shading. I was surprised to hear this since in three years of using the site I'd never seen anything like it but if you look closely it is indeed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look, for example, at an example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/197491/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7EqUY.png&quot; width=&quot;500&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shading is so slight it's essentially useless. Maybe trim the CSS to give it a bit more contrast? Otherwise just turn it off, there's not much point in having invisible features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we're at this, I thought I'd open up the floor: are there other much-too-subtle changes in colouring which you think should get a fortifier on the CSS overhaul?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:34:42.933" Title="Can the OP comment highlighting be turned up a bit?" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2015-08-04T02:10:14.250" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site actively discourages the kind of back-and-forth argumentation that is essential to the problem-sovling process (at least the way I solve problems). I solved some pretty good physics problem back when I used to go to physicsforums.com until the jackasses who oversee the site got me banned for life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-decoherence-not-fully-solve-the-measurement-problem.385341/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; illustrates the kind of horrifying argumentation that the guardians of this site are determined to avoid. But the reality is that I need the human element to get me stimulated. Without the hysterical insulting behavior of my correspondents at physicsforums.com, I probably woulnd't have been driven to come up with the explanation of how the light from a distant star can drive the transition on an ordinary photographic plate (&lt;a href=&quot;http://marty-green.blogspot.ca/2014/12/wave-function-collapse-explained-by.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;quantum siphoning&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: This question has been up for a week and no one has posted a single example of a problem that's been solved thanks to a discussion on this site. I've posted an explanation of WHY no one is solving problems hear, and I've got eight downvotes so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't this tell you people anything? I'm cheating to get some discussion going here by posting this as an edit rather than a comment. But that's why nothing gets solved here...because there's no format for discussion. And don't tell me about the chat room...I'm not fourteen years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3253" LastEditorUserId="3253" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T20:23:44.987" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T20:23:44.987" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2015-08-08T00:48:30.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question is just an assertion that none of the posted questions are genuinely new. Here's one that is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/197941/what-is-the-smallest-possible-electronic-transistor&quot;&gt;What is the smallest possible electronic transistor?&lt;/a&gt; I do have in mind a 'radically different technique' for building it which has been posted (elsewhere) but the linked question is about the design/possibility of such a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T05:03:28.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6960" CreationDate="2015-08-08T02:48:00.387" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that other people can use superscript in comments but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;text&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;doesn't work so how do they do it? I can't find the answer anywhere...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60894" LastEditorDisplayName="user60894" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T04:29:24.363" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T12:47:49.023" Title="Why are formatting methods different for comments?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6959" CreationDate="2015-08-08T03:11:23.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two possibilities here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are using &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which enables the Latex-like markdown, is enabled in comments. Specifically, using &lt;code&gt;$^{2}$&lt;/code&gt; in the comment box would get the appropriate superscript (NB: MathJax is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; enabled on this Meta site, so you cannot test it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unicode&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to get the appropriate superscript, e.g. getting x² straight from the linked Wikipedia page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you know all of the Unicode commands or have a link accessible for copy+paste, it's probably easier to use Option #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261080/&quot;&gt;this Meta.StackExchange post&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2115/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T12:47:49.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6962" CreationDate="2015-08-08T18:18:01.693" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;All my other accounts have newer stackexchange profiles and better websites. why are we still only using the older version of stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65616" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T18:35:45.147" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T18:35:45.147" Title="Why aren't we using the new stackexchange" Tags="|discussion|design|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-08-10T11:19:20.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2015-08-08T18:31:18.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The profile rollout is gradual across Stack Exchange IIRC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T18:31:18.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T14:36:34.847" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to draw attention to the users here at Physics.SE to a question I posted in StackOverflow. It borders the line of being a pure physics question rather than a programming one, and a mathematical solution would be sufficient (as opposed to an answer with code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this question on-topic for Physics.SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I cross-post, and if so, what is the proper way of doing it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/31889513/890899&quot;&gt;link to the question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16039" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T20:41:05.223" Title="Cross Post From StackOverflow" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2015-08-09T15:21:37.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange in general does not encourage cross-posting as such---pick the site you think mostly like to get a good answer and try there, then if you don't get an answer in a couple of days try another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you certainly shouldn't post a non-question intended as a re-direct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best bet may well be to draw attention to it in our main chat room: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h bar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T15:21:37.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2015-08-09T15:34:07.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically cross-posting is the copy-paste of your question on multiple sites (where it may or may not border on-topicness) within a short period of time (e.g., within one day). The question you have on SO is a programming question, so a direct copy-paste is obviously not going to work here and it would be quickly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question appears to be about describing the motion of stars in a field of view as functions of x,y, so you should ask about that can be described mathematically. You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; want to provide the SO link as a reference, but it isn't required (and probably not needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that we do have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;homework policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that applies also to not-in-class-assigned-problems (and saying &quot;This isn't homework!&quot; doesn't help prevent closure). So you need to carefully construct your question to as to comply with the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T20:41:05.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T15:18:36.780" Score="6" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine if when reading a question about a theory or paper by Michio Kaku, you scrolled down to see an answer &quot;When I wrote this theory, [...]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always thought it'd be neat to see something like that here - has it happened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, has any question, citing a specific theory or work recieved an answer by someone who self-identifies as being the author of the work / theory in question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75876" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T17:34:21.727" Title="Has any physicist answered a question citing his own work on PhysicsSE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6966" CreationDate="2015-08-11T15:54:43.737" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A pretty famous guy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/11205/g-t-hooft&quot;&gt;G. 't Hooft&lt;/a&gt;, wrote a response about one of his papers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18586/deterministic-quantum-mechanics/160193#160193&quot;&gt;Deterministic quantum mechanics&lt;/a&gt; on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing a search of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22my+paper%22&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;my paper&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; presents a few more users who have at least cited their works in their answers (discounting vixra because it's usually not reputable works hosted there), though not usually the case that the question itself is about their works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/9444/xiao-gang-wen&quot;&gt;Xiao-Gang Wen&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A9444+my+paper&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A9444+my+paper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/7924/arnold-neumaier&quot;&gt;Arnold Neumaier&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A7924+my+paper&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A7924+my+paper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1236/lubo%C5%A1-motl&quot;&gt;Luboš Motl&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A1236+my+paper&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A1236+my+paper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T17:34:21.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T05:26:21.203" Score="9" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps somebody may know the time (of a specific timezone) where most people are online and offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88907" LastEditorUserId="88907" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T22:07:02.480" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T15:55:52.540" Title="What would be the best and worst time to ask questions on Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6970" CreationDate="2015-08-12T14:08:39.943" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would this question be allowed to migrate to Physics.Main?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21815/what-are-the-specs-of-the-components-i-would-need-to-make-a-1050-kph-non-rocket&quot;&gt;What are the specs of the components I would need to make a 1050 kph, non-rocket-propelled motorbike?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm allowed to migrate, would/could I get answers like this? Keeping in mind that this is the kind of answer that I want...:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming a flat, asphalt road, and a rider that weighs X kg/lb/[Whatever], to get your motorcycle moving, your wheels need T torque, which means your engine needs to output E [Energy or CCs or whatever...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's assuming that everything is 100% efficient. If it's not, then your engine needs more power, and that power is dependent on the efficiency of engine to wheel torque, Z. The equation for the power needed for an inefficient engine, is E/Z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; assuming that your chassis is weightless. If your chassis has weight W, [explain equation for motor energy for that scenario...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the material of your wheel has to do this and that... [Stuff]...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the material of your chassis has to do [Stuff] to handle moving at 1050 mph...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can anyone spoiler the following?&lt;/strong&gt; Like with this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13736/hierarchical-spoilers/13738#13738&quot;&gt;Achille Hui's spoiler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Okay... this seems really silly now... 'Cause the initial idea for this question was to figure out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If such a motorcycle is possible, what has to change about physics?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which led to this chain of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What the requirements for those motorcycle parts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are any of those requirements achievable by real-world physics, and for the parts that aren't, what bits of physics would need to change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would the implications of those physics changes be on the capabilities of technology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.5. How do I have humans live in a world with those physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those last two questions seem to be reasonable worldbuilding questions, if the changes weren't too broad...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in combination, that's a big jumble of theoretical physics and worldbuilding... And even the initial questions seem a bit much for a SE site... &lt;em&gt;One facepalm is not enough...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T15:49:23.827" Title="Would this question be allowed to migrate to Physics.Main?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6969" CreationDate="2015-08-12T15:49:23.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short version:&lt;/strong&gt; No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question would fall firmly under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4535/520&quot;&gt;our policy on engineering question&lt;/a&gt;. You're not concerned with anything fundamental about how parts work or with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2948/520&quot;&gt;building an experimental apparatus&lt;/a&gt;, so while many physicist would find the question fascinating, it is not a &lt;em&gt;physics question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T15:49:23.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6974" CreationDate="2015-08-14T06:09:31.223" Score="21" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is the following post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/200111/hookes-law-and-bungee-jumping&quot;&gt;Hooke's Law and Bungee Jumping&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the revision history can be viewed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/200111/revisions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one can see from the revision history, the post owner himself/herself vandalized the post, removing the entire content, and replacing it with a stream of &quot;aaaaaa...&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/93456&quot;&gt;this edit&lt;/a&gt; was suggested by another user, which merely reverted to an earlier version of the question. I was one of the two people who reviewed this, and instinctively, went for the approve button (as did the other reviewer), since the edit was setting right, what was messed up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, thinking about it afterwards, this edit was &lt;em&gt;clearly in conflict with the OP's intentions&lt;/em&gt;, which were, ummm... &lt;em&gt;deliberately destructive&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises two questions - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Does being the post owner entitle you to self-destruct your posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) In the event of suggested edits like these, as a reviewer, am I supposed to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Approve it, because it cures self-vandalism?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reject it, because it conflicts with the OP's intentions?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T17:40:17.737" Title="What to do regarding suggested edits that cure self-vandalism by post owners?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6971" CreationDate="2015-08-14T09:52:28.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand why the OP would vandalize his/her own post. If his intention is to eliminate the question, he can delete it instead of self-vandalizing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the aim of this site is to help anyone who have the same question, not only the OP. Therefore, in my opinion the rollback is the best option for the whole community. Maybe you should also a comment to the OP explaining the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T09:52:28.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6975" CreationDate="2015-08-14T11:29:24.863" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a gold badge in a tag then you can immediately close as a duplicate any question that has that tag. So for example I have a gold badge in [general-relativity] and [newtonian-mechanics] and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be able to close as duplicates any questions tagged with these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I just VTC'd as duplicate the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/200346/what-would-be-gravity-in-one-spatial-dimension&quot;&gt;What would be gravity in one spatial dimension?&lt;/a&gt; and it didn't close. The question has the [general-relativity] tag, but it was added (before my VTC) by Qmechanic, so the question wasn't originally tagged with [general-relativity].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recently VTC'd as duplicate the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/200330/&quot;&gt;What makes neutron heavier than a proton?&lt;/a&gt; and it did immediately close even though it has neither the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-relativity&lt;/a&gt; nor &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; tags. However I note that it did originally have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; tag but this was removed (before my VTC) by Qmechanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks to me as if the immediate close as duplicate code looks at the tags the question originally had, and not any changes made after the question was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is just to stop me randomly closing any question by editing the tags before voting to close :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T12:58:12.670" Title="Bug in closing as duplicate?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6971" CreationDate="2015-08-14T11:48:06.727" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that you can't delete a question that has an accepted or upvoted answer, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/&quot;&gt;this Mother Meta FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. In this particular case, then, the post owner seems to have tried to delete the question and, when that failed, they vandalized the post. This is supported by a detailed breakdown in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/200111/timeline&quot;&gt;question timeline&lt;/a&gt;: The question is already upvoted when the OP comments &quot;Don't worry, I solved it :)&quot; and vandalizes the post four minutes later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, being the post owner does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; entitle you to vandalize your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From a legal perspective, you have granted a CC-CY-SA license to the site to display any and all the versions you post. While the site generally respects the OP's wishes as to which version will be displayed, by posting you do cede a measure of control over your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From a moral perspective, if you post you are soliciting work from others in the community, and if you receive an answer then you are receiving work from community members. This is freely given, with the payback being shiny internet points and having their content up. By deleting a question, you deprive the people who worked to give you an answer of the chance to have their content displayed, and to gain more shiny internet points in the future. This is why you can't delete questions that have upvoted answers, and it works exactly the same for vandalism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you encounter a self-vandalized post, you should roll it back to the last working version. If you see edit suggestions that cure self-vandalism, you should approve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T13:16:02.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6973" CreationDate="2015-08-14T11:57:49.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a bug.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The gold badge privilege is described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders/231212#231212&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can instantly close &lt;em&gt;as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt; any question that was &lt;strong&gt;originally&lt;/strong&gt; asked with a tag you have a gold badge for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can instantly reopen any question &lt;em&gt;closed as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt; that was &lt;strong&gt;originally&lt;/strong&gt; asked with a tag you have a gold badge for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a question has a tag where you have a gold badge, and it was part of the &lt;strong&gt;original set of tags&lt;/strong&gt; applied to the question, you can mark it as a duplicate with a single vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Likewise, if you have a gold tag badge in one of the &lt;strong&gt;original tags&lt;/strong&gt; of something marked as a duplicate and feel a mistake was made, you can re-open it with a single vote and (optionally) mark it as a duplicate of another (theoretically better) question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59991" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T11:57:49.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-14T23:09:06.610" Score="3" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the main difference between questions asked on The 'Physics StackExchange' website, and those asked on the 'Physicsoverflow.org' website - it seems to me that 'Physics Overflow' is more detailed higher level Physics, but I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62834" OwnerDisplayName="zordman" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T23:32:16.227" Title="How should you decide whether to post on 'Physics.stackexchange.com' or on 'Physicsoverflow.org'?" Tags="|discussion|soft-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-08-15T00:15:36.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-16T08:02:18.410" Score="7" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions that have totally incorrect premises, ask for &quot;a formula&quot; for something where no such formula exists (e.g. &quot;given the gravitational acceleration, what is the formula for position?&quot;), or don't even make syntactic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several times, I've responded to these questions with an answer that directly addresses what the OP might have been thinking about. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/200663/function-of-observables-in-mathematical-words&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; an example. I notice the following things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody else ever does the same thing: either they post a comment saying the question is bad, or occasionally they post an extremely long answer that beautifully generalizes OP's question into something that makes physical sense, and answers that question using some very high-powered math. (I don't do this because I don't think it would help the OP in any way.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody has ever given me any feedback, good or bad, on any such answers I've written.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I committing a huge faux pas by shooting out these short, two-sentence answers? Is it better for the site to write those answers in a comment instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T16:27:29.313" Title="How should one respond to ill-formed questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6979" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6980" CreationDate="2015-08-16T11:13:34.347" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/1399099/&quot;&gt;Why is any number divided by 0 is infinite?&lt;/a&gt;; it was rather too short, I confess [but correct], &amp;amp; this might prompted someone to downvote me; my rep got decreased by 2. Then I thought, why to waste my rep?? I deleted my answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I saw, it was migrated to MSE. I thought to extend my answer &amp;amp; explain OP elaborately. The answer was accepted &amp;amp; I got +25. But then I noticed my PSE rep still showed a decrease of 2! I checked my profile &amp;amp; saw it was the same downvote to the answer of the same question I deleted. I don't know why it is so:( What is the logic for continuing the downvote to a &lt;strong&gt;deleted&lt;/strong&gt; answer? Can anyone explain why it happened? Is there any to avert it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T11:53:54.917" Title="Why does the downvote still persist even after I removed my downvoted answer?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6979" CreationDate="2015-08-16T11:35:25.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/200680/2451&quot;&gt;original phys.SE thread&lt;/a&gt; still exists for some overlap period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the migration is successful, the original physics thread will eventually be deleted, with corresponding changes in the Phys.SE reputation for the users involved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the migration is rejected, the original physics thread will remain, thereby keeping its Phys.SE reputation scores.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case, the migration will likely be rejected by Math.SE due to multiple duplicates. It will then turn into a closed thread on Phys.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T11:38:26.563" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6978" CreationDate="2015-08-16T13:33:57.840" Score="10" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are actually answering the question as it is posed, it is completely fine to write an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is actually so unclear that you don't know what it is asking and would be just guessing what it is that confuses the asker, you should flag (or vote, if you have more than 3k reputation) for closure as &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5966/50583&quot;&gt;Strictly speaking, you should never answer in a comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T13:33:57.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-16T23:59:58.957" Score="8" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my experience with the stack exchange network, this issue is quite unique to physics stack exchange (probably because my physics intuition is still not as good despite the undergrad courses I have taken in my uni result in errors and overlooking things):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I am seeing the warning banner that I will be blocked from asking anymore questions due to a recent downvote in response to my recent edit to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/197655/why-the-nonexistence-of-a-one-sentence-layman-phrase-for-the-de-broglie-relation&quot;&gt;(fortunately) now answered question&lt;/a&gt; which I suspect my recent edit (changing the title) make my question become &amp;quot;unreadable&amp;quot; to the down voter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my records, since 2015, I have 3 questions (all being answered, either in the comments or as an actual answer, in the span of one month) in total:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the above (Answered in a discussion which I then summarise the results)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;another pop science question that ask about dimensions due to a TEDxBoulder video (answered by a guy that pointed out my wrong premise and the correct meaning of dimensions in physics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and a question that ask about an evolutionary mechanism that applies to the universe (answered by John Rennie in the comments who referred me to a book that talked about related ideas)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;have either received down votes (-1 to -2) and/or closed by moderators (usually John Rennie, Kyle Kanos and David Z). Questions 2 and 3 were later deleted by the community due to how the SE system works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put on hold as unclear what you're asking by (skipped)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&#xA;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue that suffer from these 3 questions is that, &lt;strong&gt;the premise is either wrong or already found to be implicity violated some SE rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e.g. I am made aware that the multiverse is considered highly speculative to PSE (hence question closure attracting) only when question 3 was closed then deleted by SE, e.g. I don't know that the guy in that TEDxBoulder video that form my basis for question 2. is a crank and thus I should not have asked about the 'physics' of that video, which cause that question to be branded an &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; flag before being deleted by community)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thus even if they can be edited, they cannot be fixed because they are already broken from the start&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given obviously my level in physics is still not very steady, attempting to answer questions to prevent myself from getting question banned by PSE is not an option&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can do about this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do from now on, besides careful proofreading of my questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB There's actually a 4th question which I suspect will be of this type in the pipeline (something to do with interpreting the second law as wavefunction degeneracy using De Broglie relations as a premise), which fortunately thanks to ACuriousMind help clarified question 1 thus shooting down the premise needed to ask that question 4, it is prevented from being asked. Otherwise I think I will be in deep trouble&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64669" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T17:20:17.220" Title="How to fix unfixable questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2015-08-18T17:20:17.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my advice on how to make your questions more presentable. I can't guarantee it will help, but it works for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Make sure you are clear and concise. It is vitally important that we can understand what exactly you are trying to ask; clarity is of primary import. However, do not write a novel. Be concise and try to ask your question in as short a post as possible. If it takes 2 hours to read your question, nobody will read your question. They will skip through most of it, likely find it unclear (not having read it all) and judge it as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Provide details. There's a trade off between providing the right amount of detail and keeping a post appropriately short. Not too long, but sufficient detail. Strive for that. If you ask &quot;Why is this light red?&quot; That's unclear. Provide details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Check your facts. Many times, we'll close a question as unclear because it asks about something that just doesn't happen. For instance, if you thought somehow that gravity made things fall up and asked us &quot;Why do things fall up?&quot;, we'd close the question as unclear. Things don't generally fall up, so we have no idea what you're asking about when you imply they do. This can be solved two ways. Check your facts first. If you find things don't generally fall up, revise your question to &quot;I thought that gravity makes things fall up in general, but it turns out they fall down. Why do things fall down? Or why don't they fall up?&quot;. Alternatively, you can add context and details. &quot;Why do things, like balloons, fall up?&quot;. But always check your facts. Do prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Spelling and grammar. Use punctuation. Period. Make sure you spell things properly. spell like u r irl cuz i and evry1 else h8s and wont read chatspeak. Make sure sentences have nouns AND verbs (and whatever else they may need). Bad spelling and grammar can easily make a question impossible to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) Check the site for related questions. For instance, we don't need another question asking how the twin paradox is resolved. If you have a question, first check to make sure it wasn't asked and answered somewhere else. That way you can avoid having a question closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should cover the essentials. Here's a few tips, just for consideration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;try to avoid posting links to videos. Sometimes our users work in offices or libraries and can't have videos playing. Some of them just don't want to have to watch through an entire video just to get the context of your question. It's like posting articles. Avoid it if possible and include a brief summary of relevant material if you have to post a link. This also avoids the problem of dead links.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;don't be discouraged by downvotes, we all get those. Just ask how to improve your post. If they say make it more clear or they say it has a faulty premise, fix it. Add detail, be more concise, and turn your question around to ask why that premise is faulty (and how that affects the whole system if that's the core of your question), rather than why it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;don't include your own speculation or theories in a question. Don't. I'm not saying you do or that I think you would, I'm just saying don't because that's something that I always want to ensure people know not to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T17:20:17.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6968" CreationDate="2015-08-18T17:42:07.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've tried to chart when questions usually get more views and answers or when answers of my own get more attention. It seems to have little to do with time. There are usually a fair number of users online at all times. There is a rise and fall in activity on the site and the rate of asked/answered/modified posts through the day, however I never could find a significant relationship between the time and the probability of a question getting a good answer or an answer getting a decent amount of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During peak activity, there are more users, but posts become buried in the active page quicker. During the least active times, there are less users but posts stay on the active page longer. Not only this, but there are good answering users available all through the day. However, the best users to answer your question (based on the topic of the question) may or may not be online at any given time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that since it is a diurnal cycle of activity, after about a day (based on my observations and controlled for quality of the thread) you have about the same amount of activity for a question no matter when it was posted. Good questions will be upvoted, viewed, and answered. Bad questions will be downvoted, closed, and/or ignored. In all cases, you usually get 1 to 2 days of activity for a given question. Unless it's a HNQ, which can get &lt;em&gt;up to&lt;/em&gt; a week extra on our site. After that, only editing the posts will get it a few more views (this is all for average posts. Posts at either ends of the curve will obviously be susceptible to irregular activity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T17:42:07.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-18T22:07:58.927" Score="-5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics is a field that should be up for interpretation always, and consistently being challenged by people who can think differently. Just as Galilean relativity was improved by Einstein's theory of relativity, and Newtonian (Classical) mechanics was added on by the ever-growing field of Quantum Mechanics, there is a large probability that the way we visualize how the world works today may be completely different to how people 200-300 years from now will see it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It truly is a scary thought to think that most of our ideas we believe today will just be abandoned. Far beyond our lifetime, newer concepts will be accepted over older ones that will bring even more light to the scope of what science enables humanity to see. The more amazing thought, though, is to be a part of the community of people who can bring more light to the areas of physics that are not fully understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;DISCUSSIONS&lt;/strong&gt; section next to the &lt;strong&gt;QUESTIONS&lt;/strong&gt; section of this website would influence people to question areas of science that aren't fully accepted, and even areas that are conventionally accepted by the science community. I understand that there is already a chat section on this website, but it is generally not a formal way to discuss sophisticated and intricate topics. These discussions should be unfocused on people having a wide knowledge of terminology, and rather focus more on intellectual reasoning. As well, it is essential to make a comfortable environment for people to feel unworried about challenging a generally accepted concept with a more refined one, or to bring up an entirely new concept to explain a specific phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP would be posting a &lt;strong&gt;topic of discussion&lt;/strong&gt;. People can discuss about the topic with either: &lt;strong&gt;Agree&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Disagree&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;Append&lt;/strong&gt;. These responses are the same as an answer to a question, but geared towards discussing why the topic may be true, why it can't be true, and how the topic should rather be looked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a response gets enough up-votes, they will be taken to the top of the discussion, where people will more likely be able to see it, similar to how the most up-voted answer typically goes to the top. Although, if an append response gets 10 more up-votes than the topic of discussion made by the OP, the appending response will take over the topic of discussion. The original poster's post (, as well as anybody else's appending post that got appended over,) will be available to anybody by clicking on &lt;strong&gt;Show Previous Poster(s)&lt;/strong&gt; at the top of the current topic of discussion. As well, you can see the previous discussions associated with those poster's topic of discussion by pressing on &lt;strong&gt;Show Discussion&lt;/strong&gt; on the specific previous person's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The newer topic of discussion has a new slate in which people can then Agree, Disagree, or Append. The topic of discussion's title will always stay the same, unless there could be a method of requesting it to be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discussion's section would allow for the community to be able to develop their idea's upon intellect rather than pure logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All of this is up for interpretation, but is a general idea of what is possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell me what you think about this idea. I do understand that there are many related posts to this, I am just tackling it from a different angle. Finally, don't let my reputation influence what you think about this, I still am a human being with intellectual thoughts just like anyone else on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88907" LastEditorUserId="88907" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T22:13:14.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T14:00:47.767" Title="DISCUSSIONS section" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6985" CreationDate="2015-08-19T02:01:27.163" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll find that resistance to setting up a discussion section has a long a storied history on Stack Exchange sites going right back to Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core problem is that the engine is not well suited to holding a proper discussion. Oh, we press the engine into that service on the meta sites whenever there is a big decision needed, but it works very poorly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it stay confined to a single question (which it rarely does) the discussion ends up scattered through&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A bunch of answers, whose sort order is user selectable and therefore not consistent (and the default value of votes first gives no hints on temporal ordering), and each of which may have been edited one or more times since being originally written further muddying the temporal picture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A bunch of comment threads. And while each thread is in chronological order once expanded, (a) they can be collapsed bringing up-ticked comments to the fore in a list where they may have no visible context and (b) there is no way to see the time-ordering of comments under different posts except a laborious manual reconstruction, which &lt;em&gt;no one&lt;/em&gt; does when you start talking about discussion with hundreds of different context items (posts and comments).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, long story short: the stack exchange engine is a really crappy discussion engine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is because it is optimized as a Q&amp;amp;A engine, and &lt;em&gt;that is not going to change&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T03:15:57.963" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T03:15:57.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6985" CreationDate="2015-08-19T08:52:24.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first paragraph is certainly true, but you underestimate just how far physics has come and how far away the leading edge is from most of us. To get even a basic understanding of the current frontiers in physics requires years of work and is beyond the vast majority of us (it's certainly beyond me :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your idea that a discussion section here would usefully contribute to the advancement of physics is a pipe dream. In practice a discussion section would become full of questions from interested amateurs wanting to learn more of established physics and crackpots wanting to air their latest fantasies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are already various places on the Internet where you can discuss physics, but you'll find they all provide an unsatisfactory experience (unless of course you are a crackpot wanting to air your latest fantasies). The Stack Exchange is unique in managing to attract and retain experienced physicsts willing to put in considerable effort (for free!) to answer physics questions, but it has managed that only by being tightly focussed and strictly regulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T08:52:24.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6985" CreationDate="2015-08-19T14:00:47.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, the Stack Exchange Network does not host forums. This site is not a forum for discussion nor is it at all the intention for this site to be a place for discussion. This site is a question and answer site that is meant to allow physicists to ask other physicists questions and answer them. The content on this site is not meant to push the frontiers of physics at all. The physics we present on this site is restricted to published, accepted, and/or mainstream viewpoints. This is the case because we want this to be a repository of information where physicists can find the current or accepted physics about any given topic. As John Rennie pointed out, this narrow approach to our purpose is what has kept our site relevant and what allows us to establish ourselves as an authority on the internet. If you like, there are other sites that can allow for physics discussions. I won't go so far as to say that is not a great idea, it may well be; however, our site is only to be a Q&amp;amp;A about physics. That's the way we want it. That's the way the entire Stack Exchange Network operates. It is a Q&amp;amp;A network about various topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that we feel your idea necessarily wouldn't work; it's just not what the site is about. We intend for this to be a place where there is no new physics; just explanations of current physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T14:00:47.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6993" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:04:53.173" Score="10" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to make a suggested edit for a post&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; that was otherwise great, but the OP had made a single-character typo. When I tried to correct the typo, I was told that the edit needed to be 6 characters. As it was, the OP had an image there with the default  &lt;code&gt;[image description goes here]&lt;/code&gt; text, so I just deleted that as unnecessary, but what is the correct way to do this? The comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5402/edits-must-be-6-characters-long&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; seem to suggest that you should just add some random unprinted nonsense to the question or something, but that can't possibly be right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is to be done? Seems like the options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do nothing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suggest the edit and do something to circumvent the 6-character restriction (e.g. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!--add a comment--&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave a comment so the OP or someone with higher rep might make the fix themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try and find something else more significant to &quot;improve&quot; about the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like the first bullet is not a desirable outcome for the community, the second one can't possibly be the right recommendation, the third is apt to leave pointless detritus in the comments section, and the fourth is probably not always possible or desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I don't want to call it out specifically because I don't want there to be a big public-facing record talking about a 1-character typo in an interesting and informative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22623" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T03:59:54.200" Title="How to suggest an edit to fix a 1-character typo" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6989" CreationDate="2015-08-20T03:16:55.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My best advice is to look for other ways to improve it first. Can you find a picture that illustrates a concept in the post? Can you add links to definitions of words that are used in it? Can you reformat equations to make them more readable? Can you fix a passive voice sentence? Maybe a split infinitive? Did they use &quot;which&quot; and &quot;that&quot; clauses correctly and include the comma if needed? Unless they have written an answer worthy of Annual Reviews in X-topic, can you add references for further reading?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the off chance that you really did find a perfect answer where even Strunk himself couldn't find an issue to improve upon, then fix your 1 character and find a trivial way to alter 5 more characters. But I bet you could always find something else to change or an improvement/definition to add. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T03:16:55.707" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6968" CreationDate="2015-08-20T03:37:10.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well there's actually a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/352479/best-time-for-an-answer?MaxTimeDiff=1440&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Query for that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. The results of which are seen below. The y-axis is the average time (in minutes) between the question posting and the answer posted, the x-axis is the day &amp;amp; hour binning of the week in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UTC time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KFZzi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Plot of mean time between question posted &amp;amp; answer given&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top 8 days, hours &amp;amp; time difference for the shortest times between question posted and answer given (and for the last year) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Day  |  Hour  |  Time difference&#xA;------------------------------------&#xA;  Sun  |  1300  |     78 min&#xA;  Sat  |  1700  |     83 min&#xA;  Tue  |  1600  |     86 min&#xA;  Thu  |  1200  |     88 min&#xA;  Mon  |  1400  |     91 min&#xA;  Mon  |  1300  |     91 min&#xA;  Sun  |  1100  |     91 min&#xA;  Fri  |  2000  |     92 min&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mean time across the week is &lt;strong&gt;170 minutes&lt;/strong&gt; (or 2 hours, 50 minutes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I stated in a comment, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answers are what you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be wanting, not &lt;em&gt;fastest&lt;/em&gt; answers. In this case, you may be waiting some time (hours into days into weeks) for a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I've modified &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/155028/best-time-to-ask-questions-on-stackexchange-get-answer-faster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original version&lt;/a&gt; to eliminate some, IMO, goofy options&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2  Here is a handy &lt;a href=&quot;http://time.unitarium.com/utc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UTC Time Now calculator&lt;/a&gt; in case you don't know what your local time is in UTC.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T15:55:52.540" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T15:55:52.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6989" CreationDate="2015-08-20T03:53:54.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After noting that one-character mistake, your &lt;em&gt;first action&lt;/em&gt; should be to look for more mistakes &amp;amp; correct those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all you can find is that one-character edit, then you need to think about whether that one character makes all the difference. If, for instance, the post writes that the kinetic energy is &lt;code&gt;$$T=\frac{1}{2}kx2$$&lt;/code&gt; (i.e. , no caret), then clearly suggesting the &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt; would be wise. But if it's merely changing the &lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt; of a word &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; suggest it. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; you feel strongly about it, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; leave a comment&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; with the suggestion, but please don't waste reviewers time with trivial edits like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you should think about it this way: does changing &lt;em&gt;that one character&lt;/em&gt; make the post any more readable &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; make the post correct? If it does not change the readability of the post, you shouldn't make it. If it doesn't change the correctness of the post, you shouldn't make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Commenting does require &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;more than 50 rep&lt;/a&gt; on the site. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T03:53:54.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6989" CreationDate="2015-08-20T03:59:54.200" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6990/10851&quot;&gt;tpg2114 makes a good point&lt;/a&gt; that there is pretty much always extra improvement to be done. However I would suggest that in the rare case no other improvement can be found, then the right thing to do is leave the post alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some background about how the site works: Edits bump a post to the front page. &lt;em&gt;Any&lt;/em&gt; edits, no matter how small. This is intentional. The idea is that changes shouldn't go on behind the scene; they should be visible to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there is a cost associated with edits (if nothing else the opportunity cost of users' attention that could be given to other posts), there is a lower limit to how small an edit is deemed acceptable. This is why the system doesn't allow small changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's not a system that should be circumvented. The fact is, this is the internet, not an immutable, copy-edited production. Typos happen. In fact, I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; of typos in some of my own posts, and I don't bother to correct them because the posts are on the whole as good as they are going to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception is if the typo critically alters the post (e.g. omission of &quot;not,&quot; or some important factor of 2 misplaced). Then feel free to leave a comment to the post owner if there are not enough worthwhile changes to be suggested. It's okay to leave such comments (and you can even delete them yourself once the change has been made), and this is preferable to forcing changes for the sake of bypassing the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, when you see &lt;code&gt;[image description goes here]&lt;/code&gt;, a good change would be to replace it with an actual description. This can be used for, e.g., visually impaired people, or for text-based browser types (ok, so only one of these groups should really be accommodated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T03:59:54.200" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-21T02:54:04.433" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this a good question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How come Land Speed Records for Cars get higher speeds than motorcycles? (Even though they're less aerodynamic?) Is it because more rocket can be packed onto a car, as compared to a motorbike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posted, and flagged for a move to Engineering: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/201819/what-are-the-biggest-reasons-that-land-speed-records-for-cars-are-than-motorcycl&quot;&gt;What are the biggest reasons that Cars get higher Land Speed Records than motorcycles&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T22:38:14.280" Title="Is this a good question? - How come Land Speed Records for Cars get higher speeds than motorcycles? (Even though they're less aerodynamic?)" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6994" CreationDate="2015-08-21T07:35:31.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a question would probably fall afoul of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;engineering policy&lt;/a&gt;. There are many, many factors to consider, a number of which are simply not physics. In fact you've already covered the physics -- the aerodynamics. Factors such as difficulty of construction and human safety (do &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; want to be going at supersonic speeds with just a leather jacket protecting you?) would be needed to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T07:35:31.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6999" CreationDate="2015-08-22T15:07:25.623" Score="2" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I ask a Fermi question on Physics Stack Exchange and looking for creative and plausible answers? Even that may sound silly? Such as: How much sea level will it rise if you pee at the sea? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28745" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T16:18:42.187" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T00:25:29.837" Title="Can I ask silly Fermi questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6996" CreationDate="2015-08-23T05:19:45.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to say no. This probably falls under the part in the help center where it talks about asking practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face; now, that's not meant to be interpreted &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; literally, but the reason it says that is to discourage precisely these sorts of just-for-fun puzzle-type questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:19:45.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6996" CreationDate="2015-08-24T08:02:35.397" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two problems with Fermi problems here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, this site isn't meant to have open-ended questions, or challenge questions. Answerers aren't meant to be competing against one another for the most interesting solution. Rather, we answer questions in order to build up a knowledge base and help disseminate facts and results in physics. Many Fermi problems have multiple acceptable answers depending on what assumptions are made, and this platform simply isn't designed to handle such cases. Remember, there can exist insightful/entertaining/good things in life that are nonetheless off-topic for this site, and there is nothing that needs fixing with this state of affairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, and more subtly, many Fermi problems simply aren't physics. The classic &quot;how many piano tuners are in Chicago?&quot; is a prime example of this. The solution is to make educated guesses for some input parameters, and then perform simple stoichiometry to convert units. This might demonstrate rational thinking, and it might require a decent background in everyday life, but it really isn't physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Fermi question is objectively answerable, is not posed as a quiz for the site's userbase, and is actually about a physics concept, then it is okay. The question must stand on its own; taking the form of idle musing purportedly had by some long-dead physicist is not sufficient to make a post on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T08:02:35.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-26T05:23:25.447" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I post a free body diagram or any rough sketch in a question? Is there a code or something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84725" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T05:47:47.923" Title="How do I post diagrams in a question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7000" CreationDate="2015-08-26T05:47:47.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I draw my diagrams using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drawings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Draw&lt;/a&gt;, then I screengrab the picture and paste it into my favourite image editor (Paint Shop Pro), tidy it up and save it as a GIF. The GIF can then be inserted into your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T05:47:47.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7003" CreationDate="2015-08-26T20:21:57.373" Score="-1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just interested in what happened, why would someone delete their accepted answer to my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/201952/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that actually helped me?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And isn't ACuriousMind's comment just wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71413" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T08:41:23.857" Title="Where did this answer go?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7002" CreationDate="2015-08-26T20:40:38.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer was deleted by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderator&lt;/a&gt; in accordance with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/2451&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, under which full/explicit answers to homework-like questions get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T08:40:33.667" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T18:33:53.883" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question comes up in the re-open queue because it was edited, the default is to show the side-by-side comparison of the pre- and post- edit. There is another 'tab' available that will show the question as it appears after the edit. The view highlighting the changes is fine, and probably what I want to look at first, but there is a key piece of information missing, which is why the question was closed in the first place. This substantially increases the required effort to review the question, since I first need to try to assess why the question is closed by either skimming it or switching tabs to see the close reason and comments, then go on to assess whether the edit makes enough difference to warrant re-opening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To those who may protest &quot;but you should spend enough time to thoroughly assess the question no matter what&quot;, I assure you that I do give each question I review a fair assessment, however some reviews would be much speeded along if I started off knowing why the question was closed in the first place. Particularly for edits that simply add a paragraph to the end of the question (about half the questions I see in re-open, I'd estimate), it's usually straightforward to see whether the new paragraph makes the question more on-topic, or more clear, or narrower, but if I conclude that the edit makes the question clearer then realize the question is a duplicate, it's just frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would it be possible to add the close reason somewhere on the default view of the re-open queue? For instance, there is a banner that says something like &quot;this question was edited after it was closed, should it be re-opened?&quot;; that could read &quot;this question was edited after it was closed for being off-topic (homework/engineering/non-mainstream)/too broad/duplicate/etc.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is better suited to mother-meta could migrate it there, but as close-reasons are on a per-site basis, presumably this needs some consideration on a per-site basis as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T20:28:56.040" Title="Re-open review queue default tab" Tags="|feature-request|review|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7004" CreationDate="2015-08-27T18:52:28.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, it shouldn't matter what the close reason was (unless it was closed as a duplicate, in which case that information &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; visible on the default page). No matter why it was closed, when you review a question for reopen, you should read through the post and assess whether or not you think the question is suitable to be open on our site based on its current state and nothing more. Understandably, it is sometimes necessary to get input from others or to figure out if the new version of the question has addressed the problems that originally had it closed, but checking things like this should be done only after you have assessed it yourself and decided it is a good fit (if you think it should be closed, no point to check why it was closed already).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Displaying the close reason right away can add a bias to a reviewer's decision. We want reviewers to review fairly and objectively. To that end, it makes more sense for the original close reason to not be immediately apparent. You may say that you aren't influenced by how others voted or by the original reason for closure, and perhaps that's true; however, some reviewers are and by hiding the close reason, we allow those reviewers to pass judgement without that being a possible source of bias. If you want, you can click a button and check for yourself. This gives everyone the option to go without knowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not ashamed to admit that while I usually address each reopen vote fairly, there have been a few times where I realized I was letting the close reason affect my judgement and was being unfairly harsh or lenient because of it. Because that's always a possibility, I now always make sure to judge a question's content &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; looking at the close reason, just to ensure that cannot ever be a source of bias in my decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is (with the exception of duplicates, which usually shouldn't be changed significantly enough to warrant reopening), the close reason should be hidden to allow reviewers to choose whether or not they want to know it before deciding if a question should be closed or not. Putting the close reason in the top banner effectively removes the option of not seeing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T18:52:28.057" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6978" CreationDate="2015-08-28T16:27:29.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While ACuriousMind's answer covers most cases, there is one other that I occasionally come across - where you seem to be the only one to be able to understand the OP's post (at least of people who have read it and/or commented). Perhaps this is because you're intimately familiar with the topic, giving you some extra insight, or because the OP's first language is the same as yours helping you see what may have been lost in translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're confident that you understand the question, but that it may be unclear to others, it's acceptable to edit the question (often substantially) yourself, at which point you can reasonably post an answer. When I do this I usually leave a note to the OP asking that they check that I haven't misinterpreted them, and instructions on how to roll back the edit if they don't like it. Presumably this is encouraged behaviour since you can get &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1219/illuminator&quot;&gt;a few dozen yellow pixels&lt;/a&gt; if you do it enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T16:27:29.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-29T00:42:08.613" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;While not all of my questions are the best, I often find they stay at very low views for longer periods with neither up votes nor down votes and after a while they simply get buried with no chance of every being found due to the way questions are arranged. Is there any way individuals can increase chances of their question being spotted by a possible answerer beyond accurate title and tags or anything they can do once it is buried and is there anything we can do as community to avoid questions getting buried? Note: I am aware of bounties, I'm looking for other possible solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56521" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T01:58:12.960" Title="How to handle questions getting buried?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2015-08-29T01:58:12.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On reviewing your questions I recall seeing some of them, finding the titles intriguing enough to warrant a quick read of the question and then moving on without leaving a comment of answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that you have moved beyond the mindset of most beginners (and congratulations), but haven't fully internalized the lessons of introductory coursework yet (no surprise there, it takes a while). That makes your text read like it was written by a physicist, but means your questions are not particularly interesting to me. At the same time, the presentation may be going over the heads of some users who would find the questions both interesting and answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Possible suggestion:&lt;/em&gt; spend some more time trying to answer questions; attempt to write lengthy and complete answers to basic questions. In the processes you may uncover some weak spots in your own understanding of the basics. Then (search the site and if you don't find answers) ask after those weaknesses in particular. There tend to be patterns in the blind-spots and misunderstandings that people develop as they go along and asking a carefully crafted question about one of those will resonate with both teachers and students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T01:58:12.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-29T08:08:59.213" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the anonymous suggested edits I've seen till now are something of this sort (might be my misfortune.): &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XRPbR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XRPbR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I've seen, most SE members here are active enough and keep editing stuff that needs to be edited. Are anonymous edits useful at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63547" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T17:39:12.190" Title="Why do we allow anonymous users to suggest edits?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7010" CreationDate="2015-08-29T10:43:49.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, anonymous edits are useful. There are two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are SE user on another SE subsite, but not on Physics.SE, your edits will show up as anonymous (as far as I know). I, for example, sometimes read interesting questions on subsites on which I do not have an account. If I see questions or answer where multiple issues can be improved (language, style, etc), then I will suggest an edit to improve the question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people will end up on Physics.SE via search engines. They do not have an account, but may be very familiar with the field. If they spot mistakes in a post, they should not be discouraged to correct them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, examples as you show are just vandalism, but in my experience they are not so common. It is one of the reasons we do have the review queue, so that edits do not show up immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6982" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T10:43:49.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7013" CreationDate="2015-08-29T14:28:50.007" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203089/how-to-solve-the-following-question-about-quantum-mechanical-wave-function&quot;&gt;This question was asked nearly 24 h ago&lt;/a&gt; and didn’t receive an answer so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was downvoted 6 times, presumably because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It’s homework and the OP didn’t show any effort at working out an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was poorly formatted (mostly a screenshot of an exam/homework site).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP was also unresponsive to comments made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve tried working out the problem but haven’t come up with anything worthy of an answer. But I’m very interested to see if this problem has a solution and if so which is it? For that reason I’d like to post the question again, as my own, properly formatted and with partial workings out because I believe posted that it that way, may attract those who may know how to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But I’m afraid the new question would be flagged as a duplicate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other possibility is to heavily edit the existing question but there’s the risk that this will be interpreted as not in the spirit of the OP’s question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another possibility is to allow more time, hoping someone will provide an answer but considering the &lt;em&gt;6 down votes and the hold status&lt;/em&gt; that seems unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advice would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86889" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T15:10:25.143" Title="Is it permissible to re-post another member’s unanswered question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7012" CreationDate="2015-08-29T15:10:25.143" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Points 1 and 2 are precisely why I downvoted the post in question (which will likely be auto-deleted soon, so I've saved the screenshot and linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I8onD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it here&lt;/a&gt;); I suspect that the same reasons are why it was closed as well (though more for 1 than 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; question would mean that you are running afoul of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;homework policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; duplicating the question; both would get your question closed (I'd lean more towards the HW reason if I saw it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as much as people say it in comments, adding your effort doesn't actually prevent your homework question from being closed as homework. Note that the &lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; on the HW policy says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is quite in line with the community's opinion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;check my work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that said, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; repost the question yourself &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; you make it about the &lt;em&gt;particular physical concept&lt;/em&gt;, and not &quot;How is this question solved?&quot; that it currently is posed as. This will probably take some thinking on your part on how to phrase it such that it doesn't violate the site policies, but I imagine it can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T15:10:25.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7010" CreationDate="2015-08-29T17:39:12.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, anonymous edits are not useful.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone can't be bothered to register an account (with anonymity! they can be user137103820382), they are unlikely to care about the well-being of the site. Moreover, they are almost certainly unaware of the site's culture and policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most every anonymous edit I've seen has been vandalism. And the few that were good-intentioned were things that should be rejected as too minor, or things that too drastically deviated from the author's intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of noise is detrimental to the site. Especially because poor edits &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; leak through the review. We have a number of users who auto-approve every edit they review, and my own experiences tell me careful reviewers are outnumbered by the careless on the site (I've had to reverse a number of harmful edits to my own posts -- edits that were approved so fast I never even saw them pending.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T17:39:12.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-30T08:00:10.273" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often, commenters will respond to a specific previous comment by commenter 'Bob' like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;@Bob: Good idea, but ther's a problem.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some months later, Bob changes his name to 'Bobby'. Now, his comments will be signed with 'Bobby', but the  comment referring to his still reads '@Bob'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the administrators refactor the site, so all @Bob references get changed to @Bobby?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue can become confusing or even indecipherable in a comment discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27232" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T04:07:20.987" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T04:07:20.987" Title="Name changes don't get fixed in comments" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7015" CreationDate="2015-08-31T02:59:48.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an admin, but I suspect if you ask them, they would say no, for the following reason: comments are ephemeral. They're meant for requesting clarification or suggesting changes, both of which are inherently temporary purposes. By the time a few months pass, a comment will have outlived its usefulness, and if it contains a confusing reference to another member, the better solution is to just delete the comment. (Corollary: please flag such comments!) Keeping all comments updated with name changes would be a waste of a considerable amount of computing power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note that we don't &lt;em&gt;actively&lt;/em&gt; enforce the rules on what comments can be used for (i.e. clarification and changes), but still, this feature would only be relevant for comments that should be deleted anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T02:59:48.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T08:18:13.517" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just bumped into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154793/does-it-matter-which-blanket-i-take-below-and-which-one-above-when-i-cover-mysel&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was closed shortly after being posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was definitely a badly-written, super ambiguous question. But somebody provided a really nice answer: one that was practically useful, comprehensible to the layman, and nontrivial to nonlaymen. I feel like the community lost something by closing this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I believe &quot;naive&quot; layman questions about everyday life, phrased in everyday language, are better than the majority of questions on this site. They're certainly better than the flood of nonsense 'if the Higgs boson, then does time exist' questions, or the 'help me do exercise #28' questions; they also have better odds of producing interesting answers. Why do such questions get closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T08:56:47.687" Title="What's the policy on ill-formed, laymen questions that have interesting answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7018" CreationDate="2015-08-31T08:56:47.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would first note that this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They're certainly better than the flood of nonsense 'if the Higgs boson, then does time exist' questions, or the 'help me do exercise #28' questions; they also have better odds of producing interesting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a justification for keeping interesting layperson questions around, because interesting layperson questions and bad layperson questions are not mutually exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is supposed to be an expert-level site, which basically means we want to retain a core community of experts and keep the site interesting for them. Regardless of whether we actually do that effectively, that is the goal. Having a core community of experts doesn't exclude participation by non-specialists, but they are not the target audience and if their participation is detrimental to the core goal of maintaining a community of experts, then it's in our interest to regulate or restrict that participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These layperson questions, even when they are interesting, are often considered some of the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; detrimental questions on the site by many well-established members. Sure, they're not as bad as the no-effort homework help questions or the like, but they tend to become very popular, much more so than more advanced questions which &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; contain interesting physics and are the sort of questions we really want to dominate the site. So what we tend to do is require non-specialist questions to be particularly well-formed and interesting to our experts; otherwise they get closed. That way, even the questions which do become popular still capture experts' interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T08:56:47.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7021" CreationDate="2015-09-01T10:34:27.483" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a certain question correctly on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;p-n-p transistors and doping&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the answer was accepted and voted up. I got +25 reputation for that. Today I came to know that the question has been migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Electrical Engineering.SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; community. Side by side, I have lost 25 reputation for no valid reason. Are the events interlinked? Can the reputation be somehow gained back or is it lost forever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T10:58:01.757" Title="What happens to reputation earned when question is migrated?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7020" CreationDate="2015-09-01T10:58:01.757" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can regain the migrated reputation by creating an account on EE.SE that is linked to your Phys.SE account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T10:58:01.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7023" CreationDate="2015-09-01T11:06:27.723" Score="5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question got upvoted on Meta but I got no reputation for that. All of my questions which got upvoted on Phy.SE gave me reputation. Any plausible reason for that not happening in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T15:45:26.350" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T15:45:26.350" Title="Can one earn reputation on Physics Meta?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2015-09-01T11:30:56.460" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta is for discussion and support for the main site, and questions and answers here are not based on physical expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you don't get any reputation here (but you also don't lose reputation for getting downvoted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case for all per-site-metas, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/136091/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;. Meta.SE is the only meta-like site on the network which has reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T17:55:53.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-01T16:24:10.570" Score="15" ViewCount="867" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a certain number of users of the site who have been here for some time, but still retain their original username of the form userXXXX. I find it relatively annoying as I'm never sure whether I've interacted with them or not, so they all sort of blend into a single user. I wanted to test how much of a thing this is, and the resulting query,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/343307/anonymous-users-userxxxx-by-reputation-last-access-date-and-time-since-creati&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Anonymous users (userXXXX) by reputation, last access date, and time since creation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;took me a bit by surprise. There are 18 userXXXXs with 1k rep or more, generally with over a year on the site, and they total between them almost 50k rep. At the lower bar of 300 rep there's over 60 such users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To users with such usernames: please consider changing your username to something more distinctive. If nothing else, it will make it easier for other users to interact with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the rest of the community: are these numbers bigger than we'd like? If so, how can we encourage people away from this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T19:43:44.177" Title="(How) can we encourage non-newbie users to change away from userXXXX?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7024" CreationDate="2015-09-02T14:47:54.757" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm undecided on whether or not it is desirable to have people change away from &lt;code&gt;user&amp;lt;userID&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. Here are some points to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SE is about questions and answers, not about people&lt;/strong&gt;: We should judge questions and answers on the basis of their actual content, not on the basis of who has written them. However, the fact that we aren't &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;user&amp;lt;userID&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; means we do not consider identifiability to be absolutely detrimental to that (and it can perhaps lend credibility to an answer if you know the user has reliably answers similar questions in the past).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We are/aim to be a community&lt;/strong&gt;: We want to be a community of physicists of all kinds. It's difficult to be a community if you don't know if you've seen the other person around or not every time you meet someone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The choice to be anonymous should be respected&lt;/strong&gt;: There are many valid reasons to want to remain anonymous, and even if you don't have a &quot;valid reason&quot;, it's still everyone's own &lt;em&gt;choice&lt;/em&gt; to reveal something about themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...I dunno, we could say to them &lt;em&gt;&quot;Hey, it would be nice if you chose a username we can recognize&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but I don't think we should put particular pressure/encouragement into it - if they &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to be &lt;code&gt;user&amp;lt;userID&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, it's completely fine. So, unless there is a large number of such users who don't &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; they could pick a new name, I don't think we can (or should) do anything to change the portion of anonymous users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T14:47:54.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7024" CreationDate="2015-09-02T16:14:03.583" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Instead of making unique names an opt-in feature, it should be default. New users can get a unique name, such as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;random adjective&amp;gt; &amp;lt;random verb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;random noun&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. That would allow privacy-oriented people to keep their Stack activity divorced from their identity while being recognizable on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users don't want to be recognizable, they can manually set their name to userXXXX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90736" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T16:14:03.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7030" CreationDate="2015-09-03T14:41:56.977" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my profile page, there is a section below &quot;&lt;em&gt;bio&lt;/em&gt;&quot;,&quot;&lt;em&gt;visit&lt;/em&gt;&quot;,&quot;&lt;em&gt;stats&lt;/em&gt;&quot; named &quot;&lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. This part contains 2 things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Real name&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Email&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other users, I find that there is no such &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; when I view their profiles.&#xA;So mainly for privacy, I tried to erase my real name and also my email via &quot;&lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. But it still remained. Can anyone tell me if this &quot;&lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt;&quot; exists for all and only the user himself can view this? Or is it that there is some kind of an option to do so which others have used but I cannot find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2015-09-05T08:51:08.813" LastActivityDate="2015-09-05T08:51:08.813" Title="Is the private part present on every profile?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7029" CreationDate="2015-09-03T15:18:52.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me if this &quot;private&quot; exists for all and only the user himself can view this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, exactly. That's what &quot;private&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, moderators (those with a diamond after their names) and select Stack Exchange employees with privileged access can also view the information you enter there. So it's not &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; you. But site members at large cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T15:18:52.210" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-03T19:46:21.917" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7024&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt; (and following comments) the problem is identified that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;some in the community are bugged [or] annoyed by&lt;/em&gt;&quot; the particular appearance or choice of display names of some users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, for any particular alphanumeric string there may some reason be found for it being imperfect or inappropriate as display name of a particular PSE user. (Even the real name of any user, which cannot itself be deemed objectionable by anyone as a matter of principle, may nevertheless fail to satisfy demands of anonymity.) Therefore the possibility can and must be entertained that there may be members of the community for whom &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; particular selection of display name is annoying to some in the community (possibly themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if any one particular selection cannot satisfy everyone, then why not let everyone set their own individual preference?:     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let each specific user select a preferred display name (as it is presently possible already) as default;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but, moreover, &lt;strong&gt;give everyone else in the community the individual option to substitute&lt;/strong&gt; this default display name (of any specific user under consideration) by a name string of their own preference (separately for each specific user under consideration) for display &lt;strong&gt;in their individual view&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concretely, given &lt;code&gt;userABC&lt;/code&gt;'s default setting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;ABC_display_name := &quot;&amp;lt;call_me_ABC&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;any other &lt;code&gt;userXYZ&lt;/code&gt;'s optional setting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;XYZ_replacement_display_name_for_ABC := &quot;&amp;lt;XYZ_rather_calls_you_ABC_substitute&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;,     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then any text which &lt;code&gt;userABC&lt;/code&gt; (wrote and) views as containing occurences of the string &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;call_me_ABC&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;userXYZ&lt;/code&gt; would view as text with the string &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;XYZ_rather_calls_you_ABC_substitute&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; substituted in place of &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;call_me_ABC&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;,     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and any other &lt;code&gt;userHJK&lt;/code&gt; who didn't customize the individual &lt;code&gt;HJK_replacement_display_name_for_ABC&lt;/code&gt; preference option, or anyone who isn't logged in, would view the text with the occurences of string &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;call_me_ABC&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, just as &lt;code&gt;userABC&lt;/code&gt; does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In turn, any text which &lt;code&gt;userXYZ&lt;/code&gt; (wrote and) views as text containing occurences of the string &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;XYZ_rather_calls_you_ABC_substitute&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;would be viewed by &lt;code&gt;userABC&lt;/code&gt; as well as by any default user as text with the string &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;call_me_ABC&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; substituted in place of &lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;XYZ_rather_calls_you_ABC_substitute&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It might be advantageous, however, if these substutions are suppressed for occurances of these strings under consideration which are enclosed in suitable escape characters, such as in pairs of backticks: &amp;#96;&lt;code&gt;&quot;&amp;lt;...&amp;gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&amp;#96;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be implemented, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T03:22:32.683" Title="Can we make the appearance of the display name of any user an individual preference option for each viewer?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2015-09-04T03:22:32.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're talking about are aliases, which are used by some social media sites and other systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not the one with the power to decide whether this gets implemented, but I &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; doubt those who do have that power would seriously consider it. There just isn't a good justification for it. If you would simply prefer to see one username rather than another, well... you're not going to like everything you read on the internet. That's just the way it is. And if you make the argument that having customizable username aliases would make it easier to distinguish different members, that's true, but SE is about the content, not the people, so you don't really need to distinguish different members anyway. (So the argument goes. This could be debated, I guess, in the sense that distinguishing users is important for building a community.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T03:22:32.683" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7035" CreationDate="2015-09-04T19:05:34.820" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see suggested edits need to be reviewed for them to get applied on the post. How many such reviews are needed for every edit? Does this anyhow depend on the post(question/answer), or the reputation of the asker/respondant, or the reputation of the reviewer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently found an edit of mine already approved by one but still pending review. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T15:05:18.990" Title="How many approved reviews are required to get an edit applied for a question/answer?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7033" CreationDate="2015-09-04T21:21:33.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a &quot;best of three&quot; system, i.e. 2 approvals means it gets implemented, while 2 rejections means it gets discarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T21:21:33.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7033" CreationDate="2015-09-04T23:34:50.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt; (specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/76284/274942&quot;&gt;the answer&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Two (or three on SO) accept or reject votes are required to remove the suggested edit from the queue and either apply the edit to the post or discard it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/151586/59303&quot;&gt;It used to be a single vote (two on SO)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An edit will get approved if two out of three reviewers approve it, and rejected if two out of three reviewers reject it. The exception is if one of the reviewers is the original poster, in which case they can singlehandedly approve or reject the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T15:05:18.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7037" CreationDate="2015-09-07T16:23:03.453" Score="11" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of today there's a pretty neat new privilege, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;site analytics&lt;/a&gt;, that lets you see a couple of neat graphs. I was playing around with it and noticed something odd: a very strong spike in downvotes in May 2013. Here it is in its glory: the weekly total of downvotes since the site's graduation in February 2011:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r8NqL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Downvotes for Jan 2012 - Jan 2015&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains 972 downvotes for that week, with current totals around 650. It's concentrated on the 6th and 7th, with 233 and 282 votes, and with 143 and 147 on the 8th and 9th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dug around the data explorer and didn't find anything, which makes me suspect the offending posts have been deleted (and therefore makes me hesitate to ask this question) but I'm still curious. Can anyone pinpoint the origin of this thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The localized nature of the spike suggests that it's one or two related posts driving it (in which case they totalled 3x as many downvotes as the rest of the site's average) or e.g. a sockpuppet racket, in which case the data should not really include them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That said, I might as well make this useful and urge others with the privilege to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&quot;&gt;go look&lt;/a&gt;, and to encourage those in the 10-25k range to keep going. Also, kudos to joshphysics for referring to the site more traffic than MO and just under half the traffic from reddit!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T15:02:18.197" Title="A weird spike in downvotes in May 2013" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7036" CreationDate="2015-09-08T14:10:28.860" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this downvoting peak was caused by the infamous (and very persistent) love spammer, who offered solutions to everybody's love lives, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/9308818#9308818&quot;&gt;records&lt;/a&gt; from May 7th, 2013. (Link only accessible to moderators and SE team). The spammer used multiple Phys.SE accounts, such as, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/24107&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/24076&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incident spurred &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4270/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4297/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T15:02:18.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7024" CreationDate="2015-09-09T06:48:17.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me it is important that I can recognize a user in deciding whether I should chime in with an answer or not. I tend to have in my head a data base of trust in the physics level for certain users, that their answer will not be wrong or quirky or even personal theory based. These random numbers after user do not help in this. And often they are new people with even cranky proposals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would greatly prefer nicknames as they are memory friendly, and I do not see why they are not obligatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do not like the many Jims  etc, and I do not understand why the system does not number them sequentially on order of appearance, so as to keep the individuality evident in the answers. After all there will not be 15000 jims answering here,  numbers up to four digits are not too bad for memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T06:48:17.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7041" CreationDate="2015-09-09T22:06:16.170" Score="13" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we've had this debate before. Unfortunately, there's no definite consensus to be found about their community wiki status:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/50583&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; (from July 2013) has the top voted answer (with a meager +11/-2) saying that book recommendation questions need to be &lt;em&gt;actively moderated by the community&lt;/em&gt; and should be made community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The faq post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/50583&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt; (from August 2013) implements the &lt;em&gt;&quot;Good list, bad list&quot;&lt;/em&gt; top scored answer by setting rules for what a good res. rec. answer must contain, and that all answers &lt;em&gt;prior to that policy&lt;/em&gt; should be moved to one single community wiki answer that gets an additional notice. No mention of making the question or its policy-conforming answers community wiki is made.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5307/50583&quot;&gt;Do we need/want an overarching books question?&lt;/a&gt; (from December 2013, about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12175/50583&quot;&gt;great book list&lt;/a&gt;) has no answers of positive score. The great book list itself is closed and has a single large community wiki answer that does not conform to the answer policy, but also lacks the additional notice mentioned in the faq post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, already the three main questions I can find on the book recommendation questions disagree on how to exactly handle these questions, or have just largely been ignored. It gets even more confusing when looking into practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We currently have &lt;strong&gt;762&lt;/strong&gt; questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;. Many of them are closed as duplicate of the big book list, others as primarily opinion-based, but only &lt;strong&gt;174&lt;/strong&gt; of them have been made community wiki. No pattern as to which ones are made wiki and which ones are not is evident to me.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No pattern as to which ones are closed as &lt;em&gt;duplicates of the book list&lt;/em&gt;, which ones are closed as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; and which ones are left open is readily apparent, although the ones to be closed as duplicates of the book list tend to be rather unspecific.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;1.063&lt;/strong&gt; answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions, of which &lt;strong&gt;544&lt;/strong&gt; are community wiki. This indicates that it's mostly the &lt;em&gt;closed questions&lt;/em&gt; which are not made community wiki, because the percentage of answers that are wiki is much higher than that of the questions. But again, no clear policy is apparent. Also, I have been unable to find the &quot;additional notice&quot; from the faq post on any old answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The amount of answers conforming to the policy set in the faq post is surely debatable, but I'd say at least some of these answers are too short to be considered descriptive evaluations of the books in question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it appears no clear policy exists, or at least, none is enforced in practice. The topic of this meta discussion is therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should resource recommendation questions be on-topic, on-topic but community wiki, or off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;To search for wiki/non-wiki questions, add &lt;code&gt;wiki:yes&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;wiki:no&lt;/code&gt; to your query. Combine with &lt;code&gt;is:q&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;is:a&lt;/code&gt; to get only questions or only answers.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;I have purposefully tried to refrain from making an argument for either case in the question, so that people can vote on the respective answers with their argumentation as they come in.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-03-27T19:08:06.997" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T19:08:06.997" Title="Book recommendations: On-topic, on-topic but community wiki, or off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|policy|resource-recommendation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2015-09-09T23:06:13.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I think there is a clear precedence order among these posts. I may as well give the full ordering as I see it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The help center&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The canonical (generally, top) answer in an &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post on this meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The canonical answer in an &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com/tags/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is not an FAQ post on the topic, answers in non-FAQ posts on this meta, with answers to later questions overriding those to earlier questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As in #4, but for answers on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommendations and discussions on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange blog&lt;/a&gt;, and any other sources that come directly from the SE team, don't really &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt; policy, but they should be taken into account when interpreting policies or deciding how to handle situations that aren't explicitly covered by an FAQ post. If I had to place them in the list I'd put them roughly between steps 3 and 4, but in a fuzzy way that indicates their influence on all five levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the questions you linked, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/50583&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt; is the only one with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; tag, and thus (as far as I'm concerned) it sets the site policy on the matter, since there's nothing relevant in the help center. It says nothing about making resource recommendation questions community wiki, therefore I don't make them community wiki. If we want to change that, we should build a consensus as a community (as we might do with this question) and then edit (or, in more extreme cases, replace) the relevant &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think we should change that. The reason I hold that view is fairly well summarized by &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackexchange.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SE blog post&lt;/a&gt; (also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackexchange.com/2014/04/putting-the-community-back-in-wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this more recent one&lt;/a&gt; which continues the same argument). In short, there should be no such thing as a question which is good enough to be on the site, but not good enough to earn reputation for its asker. We want to host good questions &lt;em&gt;and only good questions&lt;/em&gt;, and it makes sense to reward people for asking good questions. That is what reputation is for. Take away reputation, and you take away the incentive to keep question quality high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR book recommendations should be on topic (subject to guidelines) and not community wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we do have some inconsistencies in how this is handled in practice, as you pointed out. (The following is to be considered descriptive and not part of the recommendation that constitutes the first part of my post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...No pattern as to which ones are made wiki and which ones are not is evident to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably has more to do with which moderator took action on the post than anything else. We haven't gotten together to hash out an agreement about whether those posts should be wikified or not. Actually until recently I didn't know that anyone was still making questions CW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No pattern as to which ones are closed as duplicates of the book list, which ones are closed as primarily opinion-based and which ones are left open is readily apparent, although the ones to be closed as duplicates of the book list tend to be rather unspecific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally close questions as duplicates of the book list when they're asking for books that would also be listed under &lt;em&gt;more than one&lt;/em&gt; of the &quot;standard&quot; book recommendation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are 1.063 answers to resource-recommendation questions, of which 544 are community wiki.... Also, I have been unable to find the &quot;additional notice&quot; from the faq post on any old answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers are an entirely different issue. Posters still have the option to wikify their own answers if they want, to indicate that those answers should reflect contributions from multiple people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the recommendation post notice is for questions, not answers. If you meant questions, a lot of old questions don't have it because we don't go back and systematically add the post notice to all of them. If you see one, flag it as needing the recommendation notice and we'll add it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The amount of answers conforming to the policy set in the faq post is surely debatable, but I'd say at least some of these answers are too short to be considered descriptive evaluations of the books in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep, probably. I'd say flag them, probably as NAA but a custom flag works too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T23:06:13.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2015-09-10T00:13:29.647" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendation questions should be &lt;strong&gt;on-topic, but community wiki&lt;/strong&gt; (and with the same expectation for the content of the answers as currently set in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post should be altered to reflect that both old and new &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions should be turned into community wiki posts, as indicated in the top-voted answer of &quot;Good list, bad list&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendation questions cost no effort to ask. There is not much research one can do for them (since disallowing certain recommendations just because asker has already looked at them would be very strange, considering questions should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; merely be about helping the asker, but anyone finding the question). One can't write them particularly well, since they're always going to follow the same scheme. Upvotes will indicate the popularity of the topic that is being asked about, but nothing else. For this, one should not get or lose reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendation answers are easy to write - pick your favourite book on the subject and describe why you like it, what it contains, and why it is appropriate for the topic being asked about. Expertise in the topic would be &lt;em&gt;ideal&lt;/em&gt;, but is in no way required for recommending a book. Upvotes and downvotes indicate not &quot;factual correctness&quot; of the answer nor the effort poured into it, but how much the userbase likes or dislikes the particular book being recommended. One should not gain or lose reputation based on how much other people like one particular book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, resource recommendation questions provide a valuable...resource for people trying to find books or other sources on specific topics. Unlike reviews at book stores or the like, Physics.SE provides the unique possibility to source those recommendations from a community of physicists. This is why they should not be entirely off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we would take a &lt;em&gt;principled stance&lt;/em&gt; against making &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; questions CW by policy (which &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackexchange.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SE blog post&lt;/a&gt; also linked by DavidZ seems to indicate), then resource recommendation questions should be off-topic, since for the reasons above one should not gain or lose reputation from them. However, this policy, though talked about in the blog, is not implemented network-wide: At least &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; still habitually makes questions community wiki which are &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;, but nevertheless considered worthwhile by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:54.500" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T13:36:26.657" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T10:09:01.130" Score="17" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the question linked to below meets all the criteria for homework questions listed at the Physics Stack Exchange meta site, and that therefore it has been inappropriately put on hold. In a comment I left on the question I asked the people who put it on hold to explain their actions and they have not answered. I have seen this kind of thing on the Physics Stack Exchange before, and I don't like it. I thought this was a place where beginners could seek help, but it is also a place where they get bullied by people who have a lot of time to garner points and power on the Physics Stack Exchange. Unless the hold is removed from this question, I intend to remove myself (for a second time) from the Physics Stack Exchange, only this time permanently, which would be a loss for you, because (to the best of my knowledge) there is no one alive better qualified to answer questions about The Feynman Lectures on Physics (without speculation) than I, it's editor for 15 years, publisher of the online edition, and coauthor of its official supplement. I have no desire to participate in or to be associated with a community that ostracizes young people who are sincerely trying to learn physics. Such treatment  discourages, rather than nourishes, youthful interests, and is antithetical to my pedagogical philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/205689/water-evaporation-problem-exercise-from-feynmans-lectures&quot;&gt;Water evaporation problem. Exercise from Feynman&amp;#39;s lectures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mike Gottlieb / Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics New Millennium Edition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84305" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T10:33:24.543" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:04:48.170" Title="Question put on hold for no clear reason" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7042" CreationDate="2015-09-10T11:41:32.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start by saying that sometimes questions get put on hold by mistake. In those cases you can bring the discussion to meta, as you did, or post about it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt; (an &quot;appeal&quot; in a sense) and make your case that the question shouldn't be on hold. Those cases tend to be resolved quickly and you either get enough attention drawn to the post to reopen it, or you get a reasonably detailed explanation of why (most people believe) it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; appropriate for it to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; help your case is threatening to leave. Doing so makes me think as follows: if a single mistaken closure is enough to prompt you to quit contributing, you will probably have a hard time with our consensus-based governance and maybe you'd be happier if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; just leave. And now I'm much less motivated to fix whatever issue led you to complain in the first place. See how that works? Now, to be clear, I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; saying you &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be unhapppy here, and I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; saying you should leave the site - just that it's not a very effective threat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought this was a place where beginners could seek help, but it is also a place where they get bullied by people who have a lot of time to garner points and power on the Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... it is a place where beginners &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; seek help, but it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a site &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; beginners. We are trying to be an expert-level site, and that means doing what it takes to retain experts. Part of that is expecting our average question to be interesting and show effort on the part of the asker, and expecting the asker to have the appropriate physics background to understand answers. We've had multiple experts leave in the past because they thought we had too many questions that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; meet that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the issue is, does the question you linked to meet the standard? Maybe, maybe not. If it does, then we reopen it. If not, hopefully one or more of the close voters will contribute an answer that explains why, and the votes will show if the community generally agrees with it. As I mentioned above I'm not all that motivated to form an opinion on the matter since you may be on the verge of leaving anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a place where they get bullied by people who have a lot of time to garner points and power on the Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say this: if you honestly consider putting a question on hold to be bullying, you probably will not be comfortable here. In that case I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; recommend that you take your expertise elsewhere - to be clear, this is not me &lt;em&gt;telling&lt;/em&gt; you to leave, just pointing out a possible reason why it may be in your best interest to do so. If you do decide to leave the site, we wish you well helping people learn physics elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T11:43:07.087" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T11:43:07.087" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:09:20.550" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the 'disagreement' you talk about. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; is general and its conclusions are supported and made specific by the faq post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;. On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5307&quot;&gt;Do we need/want an overarching books question?&lt;/a&gt; asks about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12175&quot;&gt;one specific question&lt;/a&gt; and has no bearing on general &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We currently have &lt;strong&gt;762&lt;/strong&gt; questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; [...] but only &lt;strong&gt;174&lt;/strong&gt; of them have been made community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because re-processing old threads is a labour-intensive manual process that cannot be done in intense bursts, and we simply haven't done all of them. As you correctly point out, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; does not indicate whether old questions should be made community wiki. &lt;strong&gt;In general, they should&lt;/strong&gt;, to conform with current practice, and because of the reasons &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7041&quot;&gt;you outlined&lt;/a&gt;. (Some cases, though, are not so clear. Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/108649&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; be forbidden from earning rep?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For old questions, the procedure is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Check that the existing answers conform to the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consolidate the ones that don't into a single CW answer with the banner from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Overall spelling / formatting checks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag for the banner on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the moderator will also turn the question into CW unless there's some specific reason not to. If it's already been processed but it's not CW, flag it for a moderator to CWify it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bumps the old post to the front page, so it should be done sparingly (i.e. no more than five at a time or so) to avoid flooding the front page. There's currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bresource-recommendations%5D+is%3Aq+wiki%3Ano+closed%3Ano+duplicate%3Ano&quot;&gt;some three hundred&lt;/a&gt; open non-CW resource recommendations questions, so there's still plenty of room for keen-eyed eager volunteers to reprocess old posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T12:09:20.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T16:11:01.987" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an unclear or otherwise lacking question is posted on this site, it often happens that one of the more experienced users posts a comment asking for clarification. Fairly often, the asker responds in a comment to the original post, attempting to clarify or otherwise improve the question. With the additional information, the question may (or may not...) become significantly clearer/better. However, the original post is often left unedited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an issue concerning this situation that I've bumped into many times: When reviewing (in the sense of the site's &lt;em&gt;review queues&lt;/em&gt;) a question where something like this has happened, should a reviewer take the information contained exclusively in the comments into account when deciding whether to e.g. cast a vote to close the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to establish an &quot;official course of action&quot; for this type of scenario. Feel free to post your suggestion as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T16:23:35.947" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T01:21:32.953" Title="Should information provided in the comments be taken into account when evaluating the merits of a question?" Tags="|discussion|comments|vote-to-close|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7045" CreationDate="2015-09-10T16:16:17.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;, information that is only presented in a comment should not be taken into account when judging whether to close a question. Comments are meant to be &lt;em&gt;temporary&lt;/em&gt; and thus should not be used to hold any vital information that could (or &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt;) make a difference to the quality of the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that it is important to tell askers to &lt;em&gt;edit their post&lt;/em&gt; whenever they discover that they would like to add any useful information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T16:16:17.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7045" CreationDate="2015-09-11T01:21:32.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the comments from OP add clarity, and if they are new users, I would personally edit the comments into the question myself. I would then leave a comment to the effect of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@OP I took the liberty of editing the clarifications from your comments into the question. Please let me know if I did not represent your intentions correctly. On future questions, please use the comments as a guide and include the recommendations and clarifications from them in the post yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefit is that if OP disappears, the information is preserved. If it's a totally new user, they may not know that they can edit questions or how to do so. Or even why they should (the whole comments are temporary thing). It's also a nice way to show new users that this is a collaborative community and that we may ask questions and challenge assumptions, but it is only to suss out the real intent and to avoid &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;XY problems&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a more experienced user, it's okay to be a bit more... terse?... and ask them to edit it in themselves. But after having done so, it might be a good idea to wait a bit and if it isn't done, do it yourself. After all, if the information really did make it better, then it needs to be moved lest it be lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T01:21:32.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-11T05:41:12.207" Score="4" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I was waiting for answer to my newly posted question, I noticed one question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/194141/&quot;&gt;A confusion regarding an example in The Feynman Lectures&lt;/a&gt;; there [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] posted an excellent answer; I cherished his answer especially for the amazing pics he used. But there it was written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answer deleted by [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] in order to comply to the site policy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was amazed &amp;amp; asked why he did that but got no response; I wandered what he was actually talking of 'to comply to the site policy'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I noticed that he has actually done this to many of his answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/201462/&quot;&gt;Obtain the Lagrangian from the system of coupled equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/191296/&quot;&gt;Is $\left|\frac{d\vec{r}}{dt}\right| = \frac{d|\vec{r}|}{dt}\;$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/190303/&quot;&gt;How is quantization related to commutation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/189924/&quot;&gt;Why the induced field is ignored in Faraday&amp;#39;s law?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;citing the same reason &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] in order to comply to the site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't know why he did this, what was his reason or so; it is simply his decision to delete his answer. But actually he didn't delete it rather cited the reason 'in order to comply to the site policy'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please explain which &lt;em&gt;site policy&lt;/em&gt; did compel him to partially delete many of his answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His last words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I know what is going on? –  user36790&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@user36790 Many thanks for all comments, approvals and support. In 2-3 hours we can't contact each other any more. Good Luck to your personal and scientific life. –  [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T17:51:43.220" Title="Why is [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] deleting his answers citing 'in order to comply to the site policy'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2015-09-11T07:24:36.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is @_________ deleting his answers citing 'in order to comply to the site policy'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that at the moment, the user stands temporarily suspended for a day, &quot;to cool down&quot;&#xA;it most likely appears that he/she is pissed for some reason (most likely the site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, which appears controversial to many users), and has taken to self-vandalism of his/her posts, perhaps as a mark of protest/retaliation. He/she could personally divulge the reasons behind this action (i.e. if he/she &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; to divulge them), after the suspension period is over, when he/she can again use the site as before. Please note that moderators can not reveal the same information (generically, details of individual suspensions), as they have repeatedly stressed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, regarding the issue of self-vandalism of his/her posts, the community had recently observed, in response to my question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6971/&quot;&gt;What to do regarding suggested edits that cure self-vandalism by post owners?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that by posting, one is ceding some measure of control over one's posts to the site, and that being the post owner does NOT entitle one to self-vandalize one's posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of the above, and as was suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6974/46399&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty, in his answer&lt;/a&gt; to the above question, the correct course of action for the &gt; 2k rep members of the community, is to edit-back those posts to the last working version. This shall restore all content.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T12:16:47.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2015-09-11T07:26:47.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm as confused as you are. Certainly there is no site policy that requires deleting an answer, and I can't even think of any policy that could be &lt;em&gt;misinterpreted&lt;/em&gt; to justify this. Of course, in my experience, once people go far enough down the road of misinterpreting policies, there is no logic in their actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, what this user did was itself a violation of our policies on vandalism. You're not allowed to completely gut the content of your post with an edit. (If you want to delete a post, do it using the &quot;delete&quot; link below the post.) &lt;s&gt;So these posts will almost certainly be restored very soon, either by 2k+ users or by moderators.&lt;/s&gt; The edits have now been reverted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-09-11T15:48:40.483" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T15:48:40.483" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7052" CreationDate="2015-09-11T12:14:26.763" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;When experienced users make the first comment on a &quot;bad&quot; question, they are often condescending. This is fair enough, if the question is bad. However, this discourages other, less experienced users with less reputation, from attempting to answer the question. Particularly if the question is an interesting one and the &quot;experienced user&quot; who initially commented, has perhaps misunderstood it. The example I use is here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206440/does-a-gun-exert-enough-gravity-on-the-bullet-it-fired-to-stop-it&quot;&gt;Does a gun exert enough gravity on the bullet it fired to stop it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of anyone's opinion on the example mentioned, my question is whether there should be some process for flagging unnecessarily condescending and useless comments, particularly from experienced contributors, which may discourage other users from answering, or encourage less experienced users to &quot;jump on the bandwagon&quot; simply because of the reputation of the comment writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T12:58:08.617" Title="Should there be a way to flag comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7051" CreationDate="2015-09-11T12:28:47.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a process: click the flag that shows up when you &lt;strong&gt;hover over the left side of a comment&lt;/strong&gt;, and flag the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zZYI1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zZYI1.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of a comment with the flag visible&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(there's nothing wrong with this particular comment except that it's old)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6375/124&quot;&gt;This meta post&lt;/a&gt; lists the different kinds of comment flags and what they should be used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that if a question is bad, those high-reputation users may be &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt; trying to discourage people from answering it. Of course, the proper way to do that is by voting to close, but sometimes a comment gives a little extra boost to that effort before the question does get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T12:28:47.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7055" CreationDate="2015-09-11T14:08:58.410" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is written in the '&lt;strong&gt;Badges&lt;/strong&gt;' page that the '&lt;strong&gt;Cleanup&lt;/strong&gt;' badge is awarded for the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;first rollback&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. What does this mean? I could not understand. Can anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T17:09:19.850" Title="What is the Cleanup badge awarded for?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2015-09-11T14:43:22.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When somebody makes an edit to a post that is bad (wrong, defacing, spam, etc), somebody can come along and &quot;rollback&quot; the version to a previous one. Essentially throw out the edit and go back to a &quot;good&quot; version of the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature appears under the revision history of a post. You can view the revision history of a post by clicking on the circled link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LnDL4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LnDL4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you click on that link, you will be shown the revision history for the post. The latest version and a difference of changes is shown. Previous versions include a &quot;rollback&quot; link which allows you to revert to that version. This is circled here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uBmw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uBmw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't shown here, but the mouse over text for the link says that this will make an older version the current one, undoing all changes newer and this is done to revert an &quot;offensive&quot; post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2015-09-11T17:09:19.850" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T17:09:19.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-12T06:37:35.317" Score="6" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, today, saw one new thing below my question &lt;code&gt;cite&lt;/code&gt; . I pressed it &amp;amp; this appeared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Example citation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;user36790 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&lt;/a&gt;), Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?, URL (version: 2015-07-31): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/197101&quot;&gt;Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BibTeX  amsrefs &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@MISC {197101,&#xA;      TITLE = {Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?},&#xA;      AUTHOR = {user36790 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&lt;/a&gt;)},&#xA;      HOWPUBLISHED = {Physics Stack Exchange},&#xA;      NOTE = {URL:&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/197101&quot;&gt;Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?&lt;/a&gt; (version: 2015-07-31)},&#xA;      EPRINT = {&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/197101&quot;&gt;Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?&lt;/a&gt;},&#xA;      URL = {&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/197101&quot;&gt;Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?&lt;/a&gt;}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;\bib{197101}{misc}{&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      title={Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?},&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      author={user36790 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&lt;/a&gt;)},&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      note={URL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/197101&quot;&gt;Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?&lt;/a&gt; (version: 2015-07-31)},&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      eprint={&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/197101&quot;&gt;Why does Hamiltonian follow the property $H^*_{ij} = H_{ji} $?&lt;/a&gt;},&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      organization={Physics Stack Exchange}&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  }&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even yesterday I didn't see it. I really don't know what these mean; I am really ignorant of these stuffs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain what this &lt;code&gt;cite&lt;/code&gt; is actually meant for? What is its function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Es3TKEihtBI/VfPLp1FFdEI/AAAAAAAAAEY/veZc6zGwmLs/s912-Ic42/screenshot-physics.stackexchange.com%2525202015-09-12%25252012-15-29.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image without &amp;quot;cite&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-v6UQ-mixcDA/VfPNPFGwXhI/AAAAAAAAAEk/7T0xMJTVL0w/s912-Ic42/_1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image with &amp;quot;cite&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T15:26:00.487" Title="What is the function of `cite` below each question &amp; answer?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7056" CreationDate="2015-09-12T07:49:58.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised SE didn't post something about it themselves...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you check &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/a/2436/35355&quot;&gt;this answer to a post on meta.Mathoverflow,&lt;/a&gt; it looks like having a &quot;cite&quot; link originated on Mathoverflow, back in the SE 1.0 days.  SE recently changed the way the cite link is laid out (based on comments/complaints about it 2 years ago) and applied the change to MO, Phys.SE and a couple other SE sites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:04.363" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T07:49:58.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7056" CreationDate="2015-09-12T15:26:00.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The posts made on any StackExchange site are licensed by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-SA-3.0&lt;/a&gt; license with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution required&lt;/a&gt;. This means if you use the content, or derive from the content, on the site you must provide a link to the original and to the original user (essentially -- I summarized, go read those links for more information).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did this on a website, that's pretty easy to manually include the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags and do what you need to do. However, if you are writing lecture notes, or a journal article, or a thesis, or something like that, it isn't always as easy. The &lt;code&gt;cite&lt;/code&gt; button that you refer to gives you a citation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BibTeX&lt;/a&gt; format as well as a LaTeX &lt;code&gt;bibitem&lt;/code&gt; format. One can use these when typesetting a document using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LaTeX&lt;/a&gt; and a citation will occur where desired and the bibliography will contain the full information required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T15:26:00.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7042" CreationDate="2015-09-12T22:59:35.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Perhaps the discussion is dead and gone, but there are still reopen votes on the question being discussed, and&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I'd like to bring in a few additional points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I suggest looking at the question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/205689/4&quot;&gt;v4&lt;/a&gt;), the last version prior to the question's closure. A decent explanation is provided for the motivation for the question, as well as the process leading up to the question. However, look at the third-to-last sentence of this revision, the heart of the question itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I don't know velocity of this molecule that I need for calculating rate of evaporation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds an awful lot like another way of asking the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I find the velocity of this molecule in order to calculate the rate of evaporation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would certainly vote to close that if I saw it (I was not one of the original reviewers, by the way) as violating &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;. I've read through your comments, Michael, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/question-put-on-hold-for-no-clear-reason#comment27478_7043&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, in which you state quite clearly that parts (a) and (b) were not intended to be solved analytically. Yet it seems to me that this is indeed an analytic task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, more important, at the moment, is the current state of the question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/205689/11&quot;&gt;v11&lt;/a&gt;). The asker seems to have switched the focus to something that is decidedly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; quantitative or analytic, and more like what you were describing as the intended way for the student to solve the problem. For this reason, I have voted to reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can stop reading there if you want; the rest of this answer is largely unimportant in comparison. But I'd like to say a few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, take a look (if you haven't already) at &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24011002#24011002&quot;&gt;this chat message&lt;/a&gt;, which quotes &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/question-put-on-hold-for-no-clear-reason#comment27467_7042&quot;&gt;this (deleted) comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@MichaelA.Gottlieb from your comments I wonder if you may be confused about the purpose of putting questions on hold? It doesn't (usually) mean &quot;we don't want this&quot;, it means &quot;this needs improvement&quot;, and should be accompanied by some information about what needs to be improved. We often hold comment discussions with the poster to work out how to improve the question while it's on hold, and then the hold gets removed afterwards. Also: your old reputation (&quot;points&quot;) isn't lost, it's out there in your old account and we can merge it into your current one. — David Z ♦ 5 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've reviewed many more close vote suggestions than reopen vote suggestions, most likely by an order of magnitude. The reason isn't because I take sadistic pleasure from closing lots of questions, but because I would be that &lt;em&gt;most closed questions aren't improved&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the reason? I don't know. It's clear how you can get your question reopened (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36415/how-do-you-reopen-a-closed-question&quot;&gt;How do you reopen a closed question?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204582/nudge-users-to-fix-their-closed-questions-themselves-before-calling-others-to-re&quot;&gt;Nudge users to fix their closed questions themselves before calling others to reopen it&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120372/make-the-faq-clear-on-how-a-question-can-be-reopened&quot;&gt;Make the FAQ clear on how a question can be reopened&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/152026/274942&quot;&gt;One theory&lt;/a&gt; as to why this happens posits that many users don't pay attention to some of these warnings. I won't speculate as to the forces at work here, but I would bet that my hypothesis that most closed questions are not reopened isn't the fault of the reviewers, but the askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the asked of this question did an admirable job of working to improve the question, so kudos to him for that. I do hope that the question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second and final point (I think) is that I think you over-reacted. I specifically dislike the line in your question that goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have no desire to participate in or to be associated with a community that ostracizes young people who are sincerely trying to learn physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I qualify as a young person (16 years old), and I've found no such issues here.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; My first posts on Physics Stack Exchange were a bit . . . naïve, I suppose - well, my questions were. But even though my questions weren't the best, nobody tried to kick me off. I was far from an expert, and I'm still very, far away from being one. Yet my experience has been quite good. Was I lucky? I don't think so. I've know others who have had essentially the same experience that I had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you've seen in the past, as I guess from allusions in your question that you deleted a previous account. But I think that you overreacted to what happened. The user in question was not bullied nor ostracized. Please don't leave the site because of something minor like this. Experts like you are the key to making Physics Stack Exchange as good a site as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually do have an unrelated third point, by the way. On a technical note, reviewers cannot be pinged in comments (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/223054/274942&quot;&gt;this Meta answer&lt;/a&gt;). Perhaps that should be a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;, but at the moment, you'll have to contact reviewers in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 The question has now been reopened.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 I also agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/question-put-on-hold-for-no-clear-reason#comment27500_7043&quot;&gt;a comment by Zach466920&lt;/a&gt; (just to give some support from a similar user).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:04:48.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2015-09-13T13:29:22.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T16:40:58.077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:40:58.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2015-09-13T13:53:40.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=131&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89073" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T13:53:40.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7064" CreationDate="2015-09-13T15:15:39.547" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me the significance of these badges:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Precognitive&lt;/strong&gt; : Followed the &lt;em&gt;Area 51&lt;/em&gt; proposal for this site before it entered the commitment phase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Beta&lt;/strong&gt; : Voted 10 times, added 3 posts score &gt; 0, and visited the site on 3 separate days during the private beta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is this &lt;strong&gt;private beta&lt;/strong&gt;? Is it meta ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I went to the &lt;em&gt;Area 51&lt;/em&gt; link but understood nothing about what the badge is awarded for. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone pitch in with an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T15:29:56.523" Title="Why are Precognitive and Beta badges awarded?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7063" CreationDate="2015-09-13T15:25:52.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt; is where new sites are incubated. Sites proposals have several phases, and user can &quot;follow&quot; a proposal while it is still being defined, then commit to it. When enough people commit, it will launch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Launched sites are initially (seven days) available only to people who committed to the proposal. That initial period is called the private beta. It is followed by an open beta when anyone can join.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, both these badges are awarded for participating in the creation process of a site and can not be earned by users who join later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Exchange/Meta Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User are exception to that flow as they predate Area51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T15:29:56.523" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T15:29:56.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2015-09-13T17:51:43.220" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't know why he did this, what was his reason or so; it is simply his decision to delete his answer. But actually he didn't delete it rather cited the reason 'in order to comply to the site policy'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please explain which site policy did compel him to partially delete many of his answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the very difficult &lt;strong&gt;policies on homework-like questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is Stack? What is PSE?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack system is a dynamic community FAQ which works by a combination of the psychological &amp;quot;rush&amp;quot; of earning points (even if those points are, so to speak, pointless), community reviews of popular questions, and having an unusually low impedance for both questions and answers. Traditionally a FAQ grows by a community finally getting upset that the same questions get asked so many times of its members, and someone rises to the occasion to create one document which others can link. The biggest curiosity in all of this is that the causality is flipped from  &amp;quot;community nuisance → FAQ&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;FAQ → community nuisance,&amp;quot; as the community in question does not actually exist for any other reason than to participate in the making of the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics has three properties, at least, which complicate this mission:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is deeply technical. Physics tersely summarizes the world in a specialized language which takes years to speak fluently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is intrinsically popular, or maybe &amp;quot;popularizable&amp;quot; is a better term. It is popular in the sense that translations of its terse summaries are deeply interesting to people who do not speak the language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is required. Everybody in a civilized society is expected to learn some of the basics of the language and some of the most common idioms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Stack Overflow, which the Stack system was designed for, only has about half of property (1) to deal with, and none of properties (2) or (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to these, there are generally fewer qualified answerers than askers, and a lot of questions which are fundamentally the same (they depend on the same grammar error in different sentences) appear as very different-sounding questions with no easy way to mark them as &amp;quot;duplicates&amp;quot; of each other. Furthermore, we get a lot of 'pop-sci' questions which cannot easily be answered, as well as a lot of homework questions from a lot of unspecified textbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack is not a very suitable match for the latter two, and degenerates essentially into Yahoo! Answers: one-on-one tutoring that may potentially be seen by some other people, but is not long-term in the way that a FAQ is meant to be long-term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, though it is hard to measure, it means that our &lt;code&gt;(qualified answerer)/asker&lt;/code&gt; ratio at any given skill-level is much lower than that for Stack Overflow. This makes qualified answerers a rarer commodity, and more precious. Probably it should be a community goal to make people who can answer the tough questions feel like royalty; I would hope at least that people like Emilio Pisanty (just as an example, I could write several paragraphs of names that I respect here!) know that people like me look up to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What are the policies and why do they complicate things for answerers?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two basic homework policies: first off, we close homework-like questions for not &amp;quot;putting some thought into it&amp;quot;; this is a way of simply setting a floor of minimum competency-with-the-language before allowing a question to be asked, trying to improve the ratio. (We might want to consider a similar policy for pop-science posts!). Usually this doesn't disturb the answerers, though if they've already written out a good answer it may rob them of a +15-point psychological reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, we sometimes delete answers to homework-like questions for getting &lt;em&gt;too close to the answer&lt;/em&gt;. This is &lt;em&gt;unbelievably irritating.&lt;/em&gt; Like, even if you know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this policy exists (to further discourage those homework questions, and to get qualified answerers to spend more time on meatier questions), it still takes the form of telling our qualified answerers &amp;quot;you did something wrong!&amp;quot; and it is probably what induced the above rage-quit.&#xA;It caused me to rage-quit for a while when I was starting out, too. Fundamentally it says &amp;quot;that hour you poured into this question has hereby been wasted by administrative vote.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first problem with this policy is that it is intrinsically &lt;em&gt;vague&lt;/em&gt;, which is probably why the user in question just started &lt;em&gt;deleting everything&lt;/em&gt;. He writes (wrote?) lots of very visual, long, comprehensive answers: and if he poured several hours into a post which was then deleted, essentially because he poured too much time into it, it's no wonder that he goes back to everything that he's poured a lot of time into, editing them all to say &amp;quot;Hey, apparently I spent too much time on this which means that rather than editing down the answer, site policy requires us to delete it all.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the other big problem for me is that I feel disrespected as a &lt;em&gt;volunteer&lt;/em&gt; when this happens. I feel like it is my right to make the choice up-front of &amp;quot;I'm going to pour some time into this,&amp;quot; a right that is only taken away by closing the question before I get to it. By deleting my answer after I've already sunk my time into it moderators are effectively saying &amp;quot;your voluntary effort here was garbage.&amp;quot; It's very tempting to respond to those feelings of disrespect with a, &amp;quot;that's fine, I'll just volunteer somewhere else where people actually respect my contributions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have had no involvement in this particular user's case, but that's my first thought of why the user would think that all of their contributions were illegal according to site policy: it's that they &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; if you judge the vague policy broadly enough, and probably they were upset that it was being judged just broadly enough to delete something that he'd poured several hours of his time into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T17:51:43.220" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-14T05:08:27.087" Score="8" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206448/do-we-know-if-the-human-brain-follows-moores-law&quot;&gt;Do we know if the human brain follows Moore's Law?&lt;/a&gt; was volunteered for deletion by its author, and I guess one or two other members also think it's worth deleting. But I'm hesitant to actually delete it, for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's off topic, sure, but other than that there's nothing special about it, as far as I can tell. It's not particularly different from many other off topic questions we have that &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More importantly, I don't like unilaterally deleting things unless they're actively damaging to the site (spam, severe trolling, sensitive personal information, and so on). By way of justification, we want to have limits on acceptable moderator actions that don't lead reasonable people to worry about censorship, and that's where I think the line falls for deletion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with questions being deleted by the community (3 votes from 20k+ members), and I'm fine with deletions done by the automatic scripts that SE runs. My hesitation only applies to unilateral deletion by moderators. (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4116/should-we-delete-questions-more-frequently&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt;. This paragraph echoes my answer there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which have been closed for 9 days, have zero score, no upvoted answers, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/177675/56541&quot;&gt;meeting several other criteria&lt;/a&gt; are already deleted automatically. But what about other closed questions, which don't meet the criteria for automatic deletion? For example, those that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have upvoted answers (like the one that prompted this post)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have upvotes themselves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are recently posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are recently closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have reopen votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, should we (moderators) be deleting these questions, even when they wouldn't automatically be deleted? Or some subset of them? (e.g. delete all closed questions more than 9 days old regardless of other factors) If so, how can we proactively keep the community's trust that we're not deleting stuff prematurely or inappropriately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to think about: deleting a question that has upvotes and/or upvoted answers, simply because it's closed, is especially tricky because several people expressed a belief that the post is useful - either on its own merits, or because it inspired a useful answer. Now, it is a common occurrence that &quot;upvotes lie&quot; - in other words, we know that people &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; upvote some things that are bad fits for the site. But I don't think it should be part of the moderators' regular job to make the distinction between &quot;popular and useful&quot; and &quot;popular but bad for the site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T13:51:27.790" Title="Should moderators manually delete closed questions? Under what circumstances?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7066" CreationDate="2015-09-14T06:04:12.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been in the position of asking a question on an SE site (not this one) that I subsequently realised was inappropriate for that site. In that case I asked the mods to delete it and they did, for which I was grateful as I was a bit embarrassed to have posted the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe you should accede to the OP's request and delete the question. This is what I would want were I in the OP's position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question were a valuable one then there might be an argument for refusing i.e. that it would harm the site to do so. I don't think this question (or any of the answers) falls into that category. It's true that Siraj R Khan and Ernie will lose reputation as a result of the deletion, but while this would be annoying if it happened to me it's one of the things you have to live with on the SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T06:04:12.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-14T16:54:03.800" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;My highest voted question on this site involves the skipping of rocks &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/176108/equation-derivation-for-skipping-rocks&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It sits at 11 up votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second most up voted question actually has multiple candidates. However, in the spirit of fairness, I choose &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/196315/how-was-this-one-probability-amplitude-derived-by-mattuck&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. It had a bounty, and was a question involving the derivation of a probability amplitude in QFT. It stands at 2 up votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/201348/is-stress-a-property-only-relevant-on-surfaces&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; candidate. It involves a more intuitive question about the stress tensor on a surface. It also has two up votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally prefer to get answers over up votes/comments. From my own experience on this site however, most of the attention given to answering questions goes to questions that involve little to no advanced mathematics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in my first question, a moderator informed me that it'd be best if I &lt;em&gt;hadn't&lt;/em&gt; asked about the physical validity of the mathematical model I had constructed. After removing this from my question, I lost interest in having it answered on this site. This was because the question was no longer about the model &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; had guessed. It was now about why rocks skip across water, with an addendum showing my guess work. Still a good question, but not at all what I had intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my other examples, I ask inherently mathematical questions about physical processes. However, I receive little to no attention in these questions. For instance, in the QFT question, I had to place a bounty to get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Point:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a site good for asking semi-technical questions about the mathematics involved behind physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm under the opinion that this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the case. I believe that this site has a bias towards questions that can be answered &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; mathematics, and involve pictures and other diagrams in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my premise is correct, how do we fix this? It seems odd to have a physics site where you can't directly discuss things such as the validity and improvement of physical model, i.e. the skipping rocks question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not correct, what should I change about how I ask questions, to get better answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note on meaning:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say that this site has a bias towards not using mathematics, I mean that questions and answers rarely make mathematical/logical arguments towards a solution. Instead, they will only reference mathematical properties and describe things in &quot;every-day&quot; language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77452" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T10:51:56.603" Title="Is this site primarily for asking mathmatical physics questions, questions on intuition, or something else?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7068" CreationDate="2015-09-14T17:47:43.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this site primarily for asking mathmatical physics questions, questions on intuition, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a preference for most users. All questions that fit within the rules are more than welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe that this site has a bias towards questions that can be answered without mathematics, and involve pictures and other diagrams in the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is an obvious reason why some questions attract (much) more attention. The more people understand the question, the more upvotes it will get. Questions that I do not really understand, I will routinely skip, and of course not upvote. &quot;Easier&quot; question has a much larger potential base of users who can answer the question, and thus will quickly attract some answers. If you are in a rare outskirt of physics, your question may be easily overlooked by the few expert, because there are many question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If my premise is correct, how do we fix this? It seems odd to have a physics site where you can't directly discuss things such as the validity and improvement of physical model, i.e. the skipping rocks question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we need to fix this? StackExchange is a question and answer site, not a discussion platform. So if you want an extensive discussion on your model, you can go to the chatroom, but the site itself does not offer the right platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6982" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T18:04:26.200" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T18:04:26.200" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7066" CreationDate="2015-09-14T21:30:16.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;David, thanks for posting this on meta.  Like many other users I am anonymous, so although I completely cringe when I see my question, personally it's not going to affect me in a week's  time. But the reputation of the site would suffer if many more superficially coherent, (I say this because it had 3 up votes at the start and was answered) but actually badly worded / unchecked / nonsense questions like mine were left up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean no offence of any kind to the people that answered, they did realise the mess I had made of it and tried to help me in a diplomatic  and friendly way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's actually easier to find duplicates and questions posted on this site using Google than the internal site search engine itself, which affects the reputation of the site for potential new users finding the site through Google, then reading posts such as mine and understandably  moving on quickly when they realise they are reading rubbish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got stuck on rules that worked against both of us in sorting this out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly the rollback process eliminated my apology and plea to ignore the post that I had edited in when I realised the mess I had made of it and attempted to clean it up .Then the  word  vandalism just increased my panic, TBH,  as that was the opposite of what I thought I was doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the edit lock prevented me from trying to apologise again on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was left with no option but to try to reply to each individual comment pointing out the error, which is not as effective as writing directly on the post, as you can see from the number of up flags on the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In hindsight, rather than panic, I should have asked the initial answerer, (if that's a word) to remove his answer then attempted to delete the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the comments on the post, I accept the rules of the site and that it put you in a difficult position, but overall if the reputation of the site will suffer,  then that should be the criterion to delete, at least temporarily, a post such as mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the harm in having the power to &lt;strong&gt;temporarily&lt;/strong&gt; suspend posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on a personal note, I changed my user name to count to ten, as a reminder to do exactly that before future posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81619" LastEditorDisplayName="user81619" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T21:43:13.200" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T21:43:13.200" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7066" CreationDate="2015-09-15T13:51:27.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of keeping the site clean, I think the current situation does just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of solicited deletions, then I think the example you give is pretty much the only contentious issue - questions with upvoted answers which the OP would like to delete. In particular, in this situation the accepted answer represents 20% of its poster's rep, so you are balancing the OP's embarrassment with their post versus the reward to the answerers' efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think that in such cases you should err on the side of keeping the question.&lt;/strong&gt; The OP's asked something embarrassing but in receiving answers they lost a measure of control over the thread. Specifically, they have solicited input from the community and those community members have put in work to give that input. The OP owes it to them to keep those answers up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some posts do cause embarrassment, to be sure. However, a notice saying 'sorry, I didn't think this through' is surely enough - particularly for someone posting pseudonymously. I don't think it reflects negatively on the site, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular example, you might say 'well, the answers simply point out the obvious', but answering the question as posed is taking a risk that the OP will turn intransigent and argumentative (which, to their credit, they didn't). It reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44017/have-i-discovered-how-to-calculate-the-protons-mass-using-only-integers&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (which if I recall correctly generated many more comments than currently displayed) - I'm slightly embarrassed at earning so much rep from stating the obvious, but it did end up becoming a bit of a grind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T13:51:27.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7024" CreationDate="2015-09-15T19:43:44.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm of the opposite of your opinion. All names should blend in and people should acquire points just to obtain features, not for public display. &#xA;Foremostly, it would be very good if points for answers were given without people knowing who answered. Answers would be judged for their content, not because well-known-10k-user answered it and people just trust it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T19:43:44.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7075" CreationDate="2015-09-15T23:12:49.733" Score="9" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interests primarily pertain to Astrophysics (and Astrochemistry). This subject appears to have two masters: Physics SE and Astronomy SE. How do I decide where to post, and how would you characterize the astrophysics sub-community on each SE? Does double posting of Q's make sense? I will be posting this meta-Q on the other meta-SE also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92732" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2015-09-16T05:05:02.200" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T13:16:24.970" Title="Are sophisticated Astrophysics Q's better asked in the Physics SE or Astronomy SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7074" CreationDate="2015-09-15T23:58:16.587" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what the question is about. I sometimes have to make this choice, because I'm reasonably active on both sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a substantial amount of temptation to go where the user base is. There are, without question, more astronomers and astrophysicists studying at an advanced/professional level and actively answering questions on Physics Stack Exchange than there are on Astronomy Stack Exchange. Most of these spend their time exclusively on Physics, although the one notable exception is Rob Jeffries, who joined Astronomy this past year and has been avidly answering questions ever since. So it's possible that you're more likely to get a question answered by a professional if you ask it on Physics than if you ask it on Astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Well, the relative sizes of the sites is certainly the major factor. It's evident in other ways, too: Physics has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics?page=3&amp;amp;sort=newest&amp;amp;pagesize=15&quot;&gt;783 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;, while Astronomy has &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot;&gt;48 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;. Even taking into account the fact that Physics is older, it still has a higher rate of astrophysics questions coming in (although it has a higher percentage of unanswered questions, though not by much).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I decide where to post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is your call. However, I would recommend going to Physics from a purely chance-of-getting-the-question-answered standpoint.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For astronomy questions, though, I would absolutely recommend Astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how would you characterize the astrophysics sub-community on each SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The astrophysics community is stronger on Physics than on Astronomy. Same with chat, by the way. I often take minor astronomy/astrophysics questions to the Physics chat room instead of the Astronomy chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does double posting of Q's make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been said in the comments that this is a bad thing, so I'll just reiterate: In most situations, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu?rq=1&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cross-posting is a bad idea&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will be posting this meta-Q on the other meta-SE also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if agree with this. Having two discussions will help get the input of both communities, but it also splits up the advice you'll get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 That said, more astrophysics questions would certainly help Astronomy. . .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T13:16:24.970" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7068" CreationDate="2015-09-16T10:51:56.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Site members are free to answer whatever questions they want. The answers that give me most satisfaction are detailed quantitative answers to hard questions (typically about GR) but those are a lot of work. By &lt;em&gt;a lot of work&lt;/em&gt; I mean it can take me an hour before I'm satisfied with an answer. That's a long time for people who have to work to pay for a living. By contrast &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/207295/when-i-boil-a-kettle-what-stops-all-the-water-from-turning-exploding-in-to-s&quot;&gt;a simple answer can be dashed off in a few seconds&lt;/a&gt;, and (there being no justice) can often accumulate far more rep than a hard answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time management expert will warn strongly against doing the quick easy tasks first and neglecting the long hard ones, but we're only human and none of us are being paid for this. I frequently succumb to the temptation to dash off an easy answer, and given the manifest lack of god-like forebearance on the part of the other frequent answerers I'm sure they do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point is that if you post a hard mathematical physics question I will look at it but there's a far chance that either it's outside my area of expertise or I don't have the time to do it justice. Hopefully someone will respond, but inevitably only a small fraction of the site members will have the knowledge to answer a hard question, and they too may not have the free time at that moment. You can always put a bounty on the question if you want to attract more attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T10:51:56.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7078" CreationDate="2015-09-17T02:00:39.470" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I've been awarded the Enthusiast badge because I visited Physics Stack Exchange 30 days in a row (31 days now). However when I click on the &quot;Recent achievements&quot; icon, I can see that the next badge is the &quot;Enthusiast Badge&quot; and that it's completed at 30/30. Is this intended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot attached: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CXZfU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CXZfU.png&quot; alt=&quot;bug?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75916" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T06:05:11.853" Title="Bug about the Enthusiast Badge?" Tags="|bug|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7077" CreationDate="2015-09-17T05:56:29.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The next badge info is indeed buggy. My display tells me my next badge is the [black-holes] badge but I earned that four days ago. I would guess that tpg2114 is correct and the data is only updated intermittently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note there are similar questions on the main Meta, for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/261008/user-profile-badge-progress-bar-shows-a-completed-bar-not-the-next-one-to-get&quot;&gt;User profile Badge progress bar shows a completed bar, not the next one to get&lt;/a&gt;. The question hasn't been answered, but the comments suggest that it's because cached data is being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few questions on the main meta related to the badge progress display. This is a new feature and it appears to be still a work in progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T06:05:11.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T18:58:13.783" Score="-1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I edited a post and it was approved by the COMMUNITY. But some other user(I won't mention the name) felt the edit was not perfect and re-edited it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Till now, it is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I felt that this re-edit was unnecessary. So I went for a rollback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again , fine till now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I found that this rollback of mine was REJECTED. Okay I might be wrong in my edit opinion. &lt;strong&gt;BUT I WAS REJECTED BY THE SAME USER WHO HAD DONE THE RE-EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;.How is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite obvious that a person will favour his own edit more than mine and reject mine (with or without bias). You can check it from these 2 pages:&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/98181&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/207551/escape-velocity-of-an-object-from-the-surface-of-the-moon&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is my question. How can a reviewer also be the editor of the same post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there not be some kind of a feature prohibiting this kind of thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No offence to anyone,please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T19:29:06.633" Title="How can a reviewer also be the editor of the same post?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7079" CreationDate="2015-09-17T19:15:44.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With reputation come certain privileges - including the privilege to edit without review, and the privilege to review others' edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that higher-reputation folks have earned that reputation - something the FAQ calls &quot;a measure of how much the community trusts you&quot;. So I think it's a deliberate design choice - not a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the case of the edit in question - using $\times$ instead of $\cdot$ is indeed generally considered wrong; it's not something to get into an edit war over. Especially when the question has many downvotes and is closed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally - as far as I can tell from the edit history, when Sebastian encountered your edit, he did not approve it; instead he improved (in his opinion) your edit. Since he has sufficient reputation, his edit was automatically approved (by &quot;Community&quot; - that is a bot of sorts). Thus, your edit never really &quot;made it&quot;; it was the edit of the edit that really was approved (but this showed up as two separate edits, so that your own effort was still visible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="26969" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T19:29:06.633" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T19:29:06.633" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-18T12:13:23.757" Score="5" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a question about the Hierarchy Problem and I searched for previous questions. Each of the duplicates has 1 single answer each, and none of the answers is pitched at my own level, (which is somewhere between the end of a QM course and the lowest slopes of QFT.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the way it goes on this site sometimes, and that's ok, I am just unlucky enough not to get the spread of answers that some other questions get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can rephrase the title, but essentially I am asking the same question, just looking for a startup (simpler) answer until, if ever, I can follow the current answers on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if I missed a question that IS at my level, I just could not see one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81619" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditorDisplayName="user81619" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T17:08:06.353" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T17:08:06.353" Title="Can I ask a question that has duplicates, with answers none of which I can understand?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7081" CreationDate="2015-09-18T12:20:26.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can. If you have that problem then there is a significant chance that others will in the future, and having a thread at that level will make the site a better resource overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you need to be very careful to explain how your question is different from the previous iterations - in this case in terms of level. Carefully explain what you do and do not know about the topic. List all the previous iterations that you can find, and for each of them explain why you find them confusing and particularly where you got lost - that will make it easier for your answerers to know what level to pitch their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T12:20:26.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7081" CreationDate="2015-09-18T20:44:23.287" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One other thought is that, if it's essentially the same question as one already posted &amp;amp; answered but at a higher level than what you want, then you can always &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;offer a bounty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on the question with the specific request of a lower level answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T20:44:23.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-18T21:29:51.050" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask this having already read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6282/how-do-you-guys-feel-about-minor-edits&quot;&gt;a question about minor edits.&lt;/a&gt; I've seen several edits in which the only change was replacing capital letters in a title with lower-case letters.  This seems, to me, to not improve the post enough to accept as a worthy edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there enough consensus about not having capital letters in a title that this type of edit should be accepted? (appearance is important?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the edit so minor that it should not be accepted (user scrounging for rep points)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do we really care one way or another?  (I lie in the &quot;too minor to accept&quot; camp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:30:49.667" Title="Are capital letters in titles annoying or innocuous?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7085" CreationDate="2015-09-18T23:14:16.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Needless or wrong use of capitalisation make me read the words with emphasises.  E.g. &quot;How do I Do This&quot; will be read as &quot;How do.&quot; &quot;I.&quot; &quot;Do&quot; &quot;This.&quot;. This makes it much harder to interpreted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if I have a legit reason to edit then I will also correct bad capitalisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find one or two erroneous capitals in a title is too minor to correct though, but it most certainly is annoying or worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21345" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T23:14:16.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7085" CreationDate="2015-09-19T04:39:46.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See item #6 in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;FAQ on writing question titles&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Improper punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and formatting make questions harder to read.&#xA;In my opinion, clear, and most importantly &lt;em&gt;consistent&lt;/em&gt; formatting in a medium like this is critical as it helps would-be answerers spend as little brain power as possible parsing the written word and therefore as much as possible digesting the content and composing a useful response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fix capitalization errors in titles a lot.&#xA;When lower rep users put in proposed edits to fix title capitalization I will accept it every time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T04:39:46.610" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-19T15:08:36.087" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was put on hold 5 days ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206880/the-mechanics-of-accelerating-a-massive-body-in-a-vacuum&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206880/the-mechanics-of-accelerating-a-massive-body-in-a-vacuum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The mechanics of accelerating a massive body in a Vacuum [closed]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did edit the question as I was told that it was on hold because it was too vague.(and that I should amend it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hoped I had narrowed the question to make it more answerable .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I waited 5 days   to be told whether I would get an answer to my now edited question but the question has just passed from &quot;on hold&quot; to &quot;closed&quot; without an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91948" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T15:55:35.803" Title="Why was my question closed?" Tags="|discussion|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7088" CreationDate="2015-09-19T15:18:01.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reviewers &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/97726&quot;&gt;do evidently not agree with you&lt;/a&gt; (one voted to reopen, three voted to leave closed) that you narrowed down the question sufficiently. In my view, it still asks for a list of possible propulsion methods, adding &quot;in a vacuum&quot; does not remove that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T15:18:01.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7088" CreationDate="2015-09-19T15:18:21.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasoning is because it IS too vague. What kind of massive body? What's your definition of massive? Cars are pretty massive. Just put it in neutral and start pushing down a hill. You wouldn't even require a vacuum for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90134" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T15:18:21.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7088" CreationDate="2015-09-19T15:55:35.803" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are actually quite a few reasons this question isn't appropriate for the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's too broad. You're asking for an open-ended list.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's an engineering question (you're asking how to accomplish some task, presumably by building a device), not a physics question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's so blatantly not physics, in fact, that people may be assuming you must be describing a physics question and simply doing a really bad job of it. Under that assumption, it's not clear what is the actual &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; you're asking about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't really think of a way to fix your question without fundamentally changing what it's asking, and that sort of a change will have to come from you. It may be best to just give up on this question. You can keep trying to fix it up if you like, but I just don't know what to tell you about how to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T15:55:35.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-20T08:14:20.470" Score="12" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I add a comment, then realise I've forgotten to add the @fred to ping a user I can either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit my comment and put in the @fred&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;delete the comment and retype it with the @fred&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Fred get pinged in both cases? Specifically, in case (1) if I edit an existing comment and add the @fred does that cause Fred to be pinged when I save the changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there's a corollary: if I edit the comment as many times as I can in the 5 minutes allowed can I generate multiple pings and really annoy Fred?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-09-20T15:51:49.917" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T07:00:46.673" Title="Pinging a user in a comment" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2015-09-20T18:22:35.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the main confusion is between &quot;full communiti wiki&quot;, driving to only one collective answer, and partial community wiki: each resource goes to an answer, so people can still vote to order them, but all the resource descriptions can be edited. Here I would like to propose to use the second method:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question is community wiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers separate, one by resource&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers which are no community wiki should generically not be upvoted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Resource&quot; can be actually a collective resource: website, all the books of an author, all the work in a research branch, etc... the glanularity should be specified in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1335" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:22:35.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7085" CreationDate="2015-09-20T18:30:49.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I tend to have a much lower bar for the amount of improvement to approve or implement edits in the title. This is because question titles appear in many more places than just the question itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The front page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On-site search results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related and Linked sidebars on other questions on this site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hot Network Questions on this site and others in the Stack Exchange Networks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having well-groomed titles is important. Fixes like LaTeX improvements, bad grammar, picky grammar issues (e.g. 'How to X' → 'How do I X'), spelling, and so on are definitely worthwhile. Larger fixes (like making the question title accurately describe the actual question in sufficient detail) are a must.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, having title case is... pretty much not a problem for me. Things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the Physical Meaning of Commutators in Quantum Mechanics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;read just fine and don't jolt the reader too much into a 'hmm, what's with the language there?' note (I tend to find). I don't fix such titles and would tend to reject as Too Minor if that is really the only possible improvement on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a quick perusal of the current front page indicates that the questions whose titles lend themselves to the use of title case (currently the only one being &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/208042/a-confusion-in-rotational-dynamics&quot;&gt;A Confusion in Rotational Dynamics&lt;/a&gt;) have the sorts of titles which are not particularly descriptive of the question. Longer, full-sentence titles which actually ask a question will tend to look weirder in title case than short statements about what area the question is generally in. In such cases, the question is better off getting a completely new title which actually describes what is being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:30:49.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-20T20:23:41.410" Score="6" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering as to the exact policy of flagging answers. I have flagged answers which promote non mainstream science four times. Of these four times, the first three times the flag was accepted. However, the fourth time the flag was declined with the following message: &quot;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer.&quot; I am thus wondering why the first three flags were accepted instead of declined with this reason. What is the exact ruling with regards to flagging answers involving non mainstream science? Has there been a change in flagging policy (and what is the relevant meta post), or should the first three flags have been declined.? Thanks for any clarifications on the ruling, I will for now &lt;em&gt;down vote instead of flag answers&lt;/em&gt; outside the mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the relevant flags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TR8OX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TR8OX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TdEJx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TdEJx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oclHE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oclHE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78466" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T08:42:37.770" Title="Question about flagging policies" Tags="|discussion|flagging|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-21T01:13:17.047" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a small point, but a lot of my vote to close choices have been about homework questions. &#xA;Is it possible to have that homework option come up on the first page of the &quot;Why should this question be closed&quot;, page,  rather than go to another screen to vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea of the split between  the reasons for closing votes, but I guess homework would be a significant number, again I appreciate that this is not a major issue, just a suggestion to save time, for possibly lots of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81619" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-09-21T15:04:19.407" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T15:04:19.407" Title="Streamlining the vote to close homework option page" Tags="|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7096" CreationDate="2015-09-21T05:41:15.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All Stack Exchange site have the same primary options in the closing dialog: only the off-topic subgroup is site-specific. So, it's extremely unlikely that this request will be implemented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a surrogate, I suggest using my bookmarklet &lt;a href=&quot;http://normalhuman.github.io/stackmarklets/#closeOT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Close as OT reason #1&lt;/a&gt;: just drag it to the browser toolbar, and you will be able to close homework questions with &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; click on the bookmark. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus: it works in Close Review and Low Quality Review, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T05:41:15.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7095" CreationDate="2015-09-21T08:42:37.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: my answer is about the site and how it works/should work; it is NOT about any user or group of users.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, wrong answers and non-mainstream answers are completely different, and should be dealt with differently. The definition of non-mainstream physics given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/78942&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What defines mainstream physics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community. In the case of modern physics, if a theory has not been published in a reputable journal, it is not considered mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is rather objective: the papers backing your answer either do exist or do not exist. It's not subjective, and has nothing to do with squaring with personal views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, personally, think that bad answers should be &lt;em&gt;downvoted&lt;/em&gt; and non-mainstream answers should be &lt;em&gt;flagged&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The scope of this site (as discused in the tour, the help center and several meta posts) is only &lt;em&gt;mainstream physics&lt;/em&gt;, not physics in general. Therefore, any non-mainstream answer is off-topic, and should be removed. On the other hand, a wrong answer is perfectly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-mainstream answers harm this site. Imagine that someone answers that &quot;the Earth is flat&quot;, and that answer is not deleted. It will attract some downvotes and will be grayed out, I know, but it will be still hosted by our site, and with our logo as a kind of &lt;em&gt;seal of approval&lt;/em&gt;. This site is a reference of good content, and has a potential audience of thousands of people. We are saying to that audience that the whole community (except the few downvoters, who disagree) regard the &quot;flat Earth theory&quot; as acceptable for our site. If non-mainstream physics proliferate, the reputation of the site will suffer, and we won't be a useful resource anymore. &lt;strong&gt;Non-mainstream physics is an attack against Physics.SE, and the community should defend itself&lt;/strong&gt;, and that's the purpose of flags. On the other hand, a wrong answer, marked as such, can have an educational value (showing common pitfalls, teaching something to both OP and answerers...), and be benefical for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting has a cost (yeah, I know, only one little shiny internet point, but that's the point of gamification...) which discourages downvoting. In the case of wrong answers it makes sense: you have to ponder if the answer is bad enough for a downvote, or if it needs only a comment. But pointing non-mainstream answers &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; helps the community, and shouldn't be punished. Using flags seems to be the best option (better that meta or chat, that are too public for sensible matters).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People who get downvotes tend to regard them as personal attacks. Non-mainstream answers usually attract lots of downvotes, and they might think that that is the result of some sort of non-existent collusion. If their posts are dealt with by the site instead of some of the users, that (hopefully) would ease their mind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T08:42:37.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2015-09-22T12:23:01.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We close list-based question as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;. We also close questions asking for opinion as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;. Resource recommendations are a hybrid of these two types of questions: they're posted to get one's &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; about which of &lt;em&gt;many options&lt;/em&gt; to pick from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also argue that there isn't any physics content to a resource recommendation question. While the subject matter may be &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; physics, the question asked is about what someone should read and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about the physics itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, we should make resource recommendation questions &lt;strong&gt;completely off topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, while it might prove to be useful to include a &quot;top few&quot; key books for each subject within the relevant tag wikis, I think it to be impractical to define, develop &amp;amp; maintain that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T12:23:01.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-22T16:33:09.233" Score="8" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/208410/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; that was wrongly  marked as duplicate (has been reopened since) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/188015/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The marked one asks &quot;How can the unstable particles of the standard model be considered particles in their own right if they immediately decay into stable particles?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the suggested original &quot;What is the essential difference between a resonance and a particle? &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to the last do not address the problem. The Z and W mesons are more than  resonances, they are elementary particles of the standard model . The  &quot;duplicate&quot; asks if the elementary particles could be excitations . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two different problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the moderators have a look?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: question is open with votes. see my comment below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T17:04:26.990" Title="Wrongly marked as duplicate" Tags="|support|status-completed|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7100" CreationDate="2015-09-23T06:29:11.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just posting so that this doesn't count as unanswered: the question was reopened by the community. (As it should be. This isn't something that really &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; moderator intervention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T06:29:11.110" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-23T06:29:11.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-23T11:43:42.277" Score="-1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just musing -- there are a measurable number of questions which, while more or less physics-related, are a much better fit for what-if.xkcd.   Is it worth creating a &quot;what-if&quot; tag for these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1557&quot;&gt;Are outlandish XKCD style What If questions welcome here?&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest at least some interest in this type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29202" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T09:41:39.733" Title="How about a what-if tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7102" CreationDate="2015-09-23T17:26:18.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No because it would necessarily be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;, which is generally discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; specifically states that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so these &quot;what-if&quot; style questions are actually off-topic, according to current policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T17:26:18.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7105" CreationDate="2015-09-24T15:09:50.403" Score="8" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the past few days I have noticed that for no reason that my reputation is decreasing. I mean to say that when I am logging out one day, I see a certain reputation and when I log in the next day, I see my reputation has decreased by about 20 points or so and in my reputation change bar, there is no such change visible. I further checked but found no downvoting of question nor answer or any other things(migration). I don't have exact records but I can show you one proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to what I came to know, one gets to review first posts and late answers after getting a reputation of 500 at least. Now if you read my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/history?userId=89965&quot;&gt;Review&lt;/a&gt; history you will see that I started reviewing on 20th Sept. 2015. But my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/89965/aniket?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;Reputation change&lt;/a&gt; history will show you that I attained 500 rep only on 21st Sept. And I am quite confident that it is no minor computer or server error. This thing is happening to me for the last two to three days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody tell me what is wrong? Is there any other way of losing rep that I don't know or have not considered? It may be that some user might have deleted his/her account. But I was not informed about it or my rep loss concerning his account removal.Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T15:33:50.110" Title="Reputation decreases without reason" Tags="|discussion|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7104" CreationDate="2015-09-24T15:30:14.130" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are editing a lot of posts which are closed and have a negative score. Such questions are regularly deleted by an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/263383&quot;&gt;automatic deletion routine&lt;/a&gt; (often termed the &quot;roomba&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is deleted, all associated reputation gains and losses are reversed. In particular, the 2 reputation you gained from suggesting an edit that was subsequently approved are lost. I don't believe that there is an indication in the reputation history that this happens - the +2 from a week ago or so simply vanish from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want this to happen, don't make edits to posts that do not fix the reasons for closure/deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason for losing reputation is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1289/50583&quot;&gt;users that are removed&lt;/a&gt; and have upvoted you, but this is usually indicated by a &lt;code&gt;user was removed&lt;/code&gt; in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/89965/aniket?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation tab&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T15:30:14.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-25T10:13:05.853" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are certain concepts I think I know but I am not sure if that's the right way to understand it, so is it acceptable question on physics stack exchange. And how should that question be framed, should be it be sort of yes-no, or should it have an element of discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73136" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T10:13:05.853" Title="Is it okay to ask question to which you know the answer but not sure of it?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-09-25T12:35:34.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7109" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7110" CreationDate="2015-09-26T09:10:43.290" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've been eagerly waiting for an answer to my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/207766/&quot;&gt;Solving the quantum an-harmonic oscillator pertubatively?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, for some reason I haven't got it ... What is the general procedure to transfer a question to another stackexchange like Math-stackexchange (after my bounty expires)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27939" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T07:25:23.333" Title="Procedure to migrate a question to another stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7109" CreationDate="2015-09-26T12:13:56.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general procedure for getting your question migrated to another stack exchange site is to flag it yourself, with a custom flag explaining the situation. The moderators will typically oblige (&lt;strong&gt;disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: These flags are handled on a case-by-case basis, so the moderators will assess if your request is reasonable before acting). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2015-09-27T07:25:23.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T07:25:23.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7119" CreationDate="2015-09-26T19:47:04.973" Score="-3" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has become clear to me that the CPR idea redacted below is &lt;em&gt;waaay&lt;/em&gt; too complex to succeed. The less ambitious &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5144/lets-have-a-journal-club&quot;&gt;&quot;Journal Club&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; idea of 2 years ago was enthusiastically received, then fizzled. I feel that was too ambitious also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More realistically, I would propose that there can be questions based on particular papers, preprints or articles that can only be sensibly answered if that paper has been read. Perhaps with a &lt;em&gt;research-paper&lt;/em&gt; tag? The question can be as basic as &quot;what do you think of this paper?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could achieve some of the goals of a &quot;Journal Club&quot;, such as providing higher level content, without the off-putting procedural overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92732" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T02:51:33.333" Title="Would Q's that require reading a particular paper be useful to Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|scope|tags|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-27T20:02:01.627" Score="0" ViewCount="616" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it antithetical to the spirit of learning that many questions on this forum are approached by the regular users with an air of intellectual arrogance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to leave my comment in response to the unwarranted animosity towards an admitted layperson for their question on why relative velocity causes time dilation, but was halted by yet another example of exclusion in the form of not having the required &quot;reputation points&quot;.&#xA;So I must gain some reputation before I'm allowed to share ideas? Interesting approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone, learned or otherwise, has come to a forum of this nature asking questions, they obviously have some desire to understand, and your regular users are doing humanity a disservice by scoffing at requests to simplify things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a person not allowed to be curious without needing to take a university physics course just to receive respect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly expect this comment to be removed, but maybe some admin will actually hear what I'm saying and not censor criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86531" OwnerDisplayName="Rigel Stewart" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T15:15:09.937" Title="Why do many users on this forum approach laypeople with arrogance?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7114" CreationDate="2015-09-27T20:12:07.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have a claim on the time and effort of the community here unless and until you are willing and able to follow the group norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really that simple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you would like an answer to something that has been bothering you doesn't empower you to demand that a particular gathering of people give their time to providing that answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internet sites have cultures and mores every bit as much as gathering in physical space. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ours are laid out in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and especially in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; pages about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what to ask&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what not to ask&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wouldn't barge into a church and demand that people doing advanced bible study tale time out to recount to you the story of the flood, would you? Nor storm into the lunch room at a major nuclear physics lab walk up to a table and ask the people there to do your homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you approach nicely, when other things are not going on, you might get a positive response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T20:12:07.373" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7114" CreationDate="2015-09-27T20:20:38.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a site for beginners, it's just not. When people who don't know what they're talking about try to ask big questions which clearly don't have any real basis in knowledge it makes them very difficult to answer. It also often makes the person who's trying to help come off as arrogant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of vouching for the &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; impact of the community here, I'm a Maths undergrad who recently moved to do a placement in reasonably involved nuclear physics. My physics when I started was slim on the ground, and still is. Many of my posts, I'm sure, were viewed as reasonably basic. However, in basically every occasion I got a good answer and, also, good reading material with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone trots up to a Mathematician and says &quot;What's a group?&quot; When they only did algebra up to GCSE, they're going to have a tough time. That &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; mean that I'm saying that beginners should not ask questions. You should just ask reasonable questions for your level of knowledge I guess. The point to note however is that if beginners have questions, the answers are almost always out there already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89073" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T20:20:38.827" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7114" CreationDate="2015-09-27T20:23:17.150" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;User X joins Physics Stack Exchange, creates an account, and starts perusing the site. Unbeknownst to everyone else, User X is a spammer, and will do everything he can to add spam links, rude language, and offensive messages wherever he goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the 50 reputation barrier for posting comments, it's fair to say that User X has the ability to completely ruin a good portion of the site in about 30 minutes, especially if one of the moderators isn't around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User Y joins Physics Stack Exchange. User Y cares about physics and about helping people. He's also curious, and wants to ask questions. Yet when User Y begins exploring, he sees the work of User X and other spammers everywhere. Saddened that Physics Stack Exchange has become one more crappy Internet forum, User Y leaves forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try that again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User X joins Physics Stack Exchange, creates an account, and starts perusing the site. Unbeknownst to everyone else, User X is a spammer, and will do everything he can to add spam links, rude language, and offensive messages wherever he goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User X tries to comment, but quickly learns that he must first gain 50 rep. He decides to start asking and answering questions with lots of spam. It is harder for him to do so because high-rep users can delete posts that are offensive/spam/not-made-in-good-will&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; (the same is not true for comments). User X is frustrated and soon leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User Y joins Physics Stack Exchange. User Y cares about physics and about helping people. He's also curious, and wants to ask questions. He realizes that he needs to gain 50 rep to comment, and so he asks and answers questions, like he planned. Within a day, he has gained that amount and much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T20:28:46.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7113" CreationDate="2015-09-28T08:33:12.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proposal as it currently stands (v12) is pretty much vacuous: The type of questions that you propose is &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; on-topic on this site. They typically do not attract much attention or a great answer, because the chances that someone here has read [insert random arXiv paper] is pretty small, and most people wouldn't read an entire paper just to answer a question on this site. However, they're definitely allowed and thus you're not proposing anything new. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/189617/question-about-blandford-znajek-original-paper&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a typical example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T08:33:12.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T21:31:28.603" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not entirely sure whether this can be asked here, however I will give it a go. I have seen that most of the SE sections have very pretty designs for the up-down vote arrow buttons, that are most of the times related to the subject the page deals with. Physics should pave the way for that, but we seem not to have a particular fancy one. Has this been a choice to maintain sobriety or is there any idea to modify them in the early future? What do you think about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84488" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T21:53:18.333" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T00:15:17.423" Title="Design for up-down buttons" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7120" CreationDate="2015-09-29T00:15:17.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you check out some of the related questions at the right, you can see the history of how we came to our current design. A few people proposed ideas for themed upvote/downvote buttons, but none of them were particularly compelling. And after our first site design (which was considerably more physics-themed) turned out to be difficult to read and use, the community at the time decided we preferred a simpler, more generic design that stays out of the way and lets us focus on the questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, I think the reasons for not having themed voting arrows still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T00:15:17.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-29T05:48:36.257" Score="4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have question in Computational Physics, I sometimes feel more comfortable putting up this question in compsci.SE, but nevertheless the response at that site is extremely slow and poor (since its a beta version and there are few users). Therefore, sometimes I am compelled to post the same question on Physics.SE, is this a problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS : I would suggest that it will be nice, if there can be a option to put up a question in more than one SE sites (with may be one as primary), such that certain questions lie in the intersection of more than one domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35952" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T04:44:23.590" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T04:44:23.590" Title="Cross-posting similar/same question on two SE sites" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7122" CreationDate="2015-09-29T06:37:54.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is a problem: the same question shouldn't be posted to multiple SE sites because it tends to result in duplication of effort and different answerers missing each others' contributions. If we find that a question has been cross-posted, we'll consolidate it on one of the sites where it is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question that is on topic on more than one site, there are a couple things you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Split it into two questions; ask the computational part on the computational science site and the physics part on this site. Most questions that you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; fit on multiple sites actually don't, because they're too broad and should be split up this way. The communities of related sites usually coordinate to make sure their scope are split in this way, i.e. so that there's very little overlap. (Usually; not always.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question really is on topic on both of the sites, choose one or the other to post it on. Make sure to adapt the question to the audience of that site - for example, if you're asking a computational physics question here, make sure it reads like a physics question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The facilities for handling questions that cross multiple sites' scopes are not the best. People have raised this issue often on &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt;, so I'd suggest checking there if you want to support better cross-posting or multi-posting features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T06:37:54.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7114" CreationDate="2015-09-29T07:14:55.877" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't acceptable to be discourteous in an answer or a comment, but it's something we're all prey to for two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly answering a layman's question is much, much harder than answering a question from another physicist. With another physicist we can answer using maths and that's clear and unambiguous. With a layman we have to find some way of converting really hard concepts (like proper time in this case) to something a layman can understand. This requires a lot of thought and a lot of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, every layman asking yet another question about time dilation is asking that question for the first time. But for us long time site members we're seeing the question for the thousandth time, and a certain degree of frustration is inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination of these two means that when we see yet another minor variant of a question that's a lot of effort to answer it's hard not to get frustrated. If we all had the patience of an angel our answers would always be sweetness and light, but angels tend not to become physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have a lot of sympathy with your position. But you also need to have sympathy with ours. We put a great deal of effort into this site for no material reward. It's true that we need to consider the feelings of the laymen, but the laymen also need to consider our feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-09-29T15:15:09.937" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T15:15:09.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7126" CreationDate="2015-09-29T14:41:37.087" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a thing that is bugging me for the time being. I just discovered that there is an option called &quot;&lt;strong&gt;show removed posts&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. And when I enabled it, I saw (-2) rep corresponding to several of my posts.... check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/89965/aniket?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&amp;amp;StartDate=2015-09-29%2014:18:32Z&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt; here. Yes I know that when a post edited by me gets deleted or removed, I lose the 2 rep I got for the edit. But now on seeing the linked page, I am confused if this means that apart from losing the 2 rep I had got for the edit, I also lose an additional 2 rep for editing a post that got removed. I don't know but is this speculation of mine true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean that the rep written beside a particular post usually denotes the &lt;strong&gt;net rep gained from it&lt;/strong&gt;. So (-2) rep must mean that I have lost 2 rep in total...whereas it should have been so that I lost the 2 rep I gained from the post...that is the net rep beside the removed posts must be 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So am I right? What is actually happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T14:56:06.850" Title="Net reputation from removed posts" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7125" CreationDate="2015-09-29T14:56:06.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no reputation penalty for editing a post that gets removed. Your reputation is simply adjusted to what it would have been without that edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, I don't think the number beside a post in the rep list denotes the &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; reputation gained from it. What you see in the list is mostly individual reputation-change events - individual upvotes, downvotes, accepts, edits, bounties, etc. But when a post is deleted or a user is removed, your reputation is adjusted to what it would have been without that post or user, and the adjustment is a single event no matter how many events contributed to giving you that reputation in the first place. (For example, if a post of yours gets upvoted 5 times and then deleted, you see 5 upvote events giving +10 rep each but only one removal event giving -50 rep.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T14:56:06.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7128" CreationDate="2015-09-29T20:38:42.993" Score="8" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;So all of a sudden today the Late Answer review queue exploded to more than 500 posts. All that I looked at were not new, but something kicked them back in to play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a still newish person here, what happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastEditorUserId="9426" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T17:15:12.837" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T17:15:12.837" Title="Late Answer review queue explosion?" Tags="|discussion|late-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7127" CreationDate="2015-09-30T11:09:30.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/late-answers&quot;&gt;Late Answers Review Queue&lt;/a&gt; contains answers which were posted by new users much later than when the question was asked. Late answers tend to be seen by fewer people than answers posted soon after the question was asked, so the review queue helps ensure that these answers meet the same quality standards as all other answers.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;[source]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/266696/271002&quot;&gt;meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;the decision threshold for late answers to enter the Late Answers Review Queue has been raised from 10 to 50 reputation.&lt;/strong&gt; This applies to all sites, not just physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to this change, many old answers retroactively entered the Late Answers Review Queue. This caused a spike in the number of answers in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59991" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T11:09:30.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2015-09-30T16:13:24.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the absence of an answer from on high, a few experiments were attempted during the last physics chat. It appears that if you initially omit the ping, then edit the comment and add the ping, a notification is generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issues that have been left unresolved include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you edit the comment and change the ping to a different user does that user get a notification?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you repeatedly edit out then edit in the ping does the victim, err, user get repeated notifications?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T16:13:24.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-02T08:05:14.453" Score="4" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there is an argument for a separate group for experimentalist. I have found the standard physics group to be far too theoretically oriented and where easily answered trivia comes to dominate discussion. To the extent that working physicists (and engineers) such as myself find it almost useless from a professional POV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-10-02T09:28:12.480" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T20:01:35.410" Title="A separate SE site for experimental physics?" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7130" CreationDate="2015-10-02T08:45:19.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone can start a new SE site on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;. However I suspect your chances of ending up with a viable group are small. It take a lot of commitment to get a Stack Exchange site going and I doubt there is enough interest from experimentalists for the site to succeed. Still, you will never know unless you try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T08:45:19.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7130" CreationDate="2015-10-02T08:53:49.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this: if experimentalists are not motivated to post here, where their questions would be well received (given that they are, in fact, about experimental physics), what would make them motivated to post on a separate site which would have even less of a community at first? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this I think starting a new site is less productive than trying to improve participation here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm assuming that by &quot;group&quot; you mean a Stack Exchange site.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T08:53:49.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7130" CreationDate="2015-10-02T13:19:37.510" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good suggestion. It's been obvious for a number of years that the culture on physics stack exchange is not representative or welcoming of ideas in condensed matter, computational or experimental physics, at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theoretical questions and answers are not a problem in themselves, but for the apparent sense of entitlement I see among the established order of the 'community' who seem to want to impose their culture on everyone who seeks to ask and answer physics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the current community are not willing to share this space with others, then all we can do is set up a new one which is more inclusive of those interested in solving real world physics problems, beginners and those &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7114/why-do-many-users-on-this-forum-approach-laypeople-with-arrogance/7124?noredirect=1#comment27890_7124&quot;&gt;layman&lt;/a&gt;&quot; who should be able to have somewhere to ask conceptual questions on physics. I'd support an &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;area 51&lt;/a&gt; proposal like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T13:19:37.510" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7136" CreationDate="2015-10-02T14:16:48.233" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;While editing, I have often come across re-edits by the 2k+ rep members like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/100529&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;(&lt;em&gt;just an example&lt;/em&gt;) where I have seen minor editing changes like the one in given &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/210254/revisions&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;. I know the raw &lt;em&gt;(the one containing the TEX language&lt;/em&gt;) version of the post looks quite bad with the type of editing I have done in the stated case but the actual output i.e. the post (&lt;em&gt;the one viewed by everybody&lt;/em&gt;) looks the same in both the cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can give another example. I don't remember the post but I am illustrating the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to write 5 m/s using TEX. In that case, both the following write-ups have the same output: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;$5$ $m/s$ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;$5 \,\mathrm{m/s}$&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So my question is&lt;/em&gt;: Why is this re-edit important? I know there must be some reason. But since the final result is the same in such cases, I don't see these edits as that much important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; Nothing to do with page linked. Please do not come up with answers like ACuriousMind is right and you are wrong and so on. I know I am wrong and ACuriousMind has been here for a longer time than I have been. I just want the logic, nothing else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T14:42:28.380" Title="Why need to edit when edited and unedited versions have the same final look but different TEX?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7134" CreationDate="2015-10-02T14:30:47.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final look is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not include text in a &lt;code&gt;\text{}&lt;/code&gt;, then the standard math mode rendering of TeX means that the text will be rendered as &lt;em&gt;individual, italicized letters&lt;/em&gt;. The spacing is different than it would be for letters belonging to a single word, and there is no visible difference between such text and actual variables that are meant to be multiplied together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you, however, do use &lt;code&gt;\text{}&lt;/code&gt; for text, it will be written in an upright font and the spacing will be as it is for words. There now is a visible difference between letters belonging to English words and letters that are variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T14:30:47.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7134" CreationDate="2015-10-02T14:42:28.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to comparing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$5$ $m/s$&#xA;$5\,\mathrm{m/s}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ACuriousMind said, they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; look the same. In the first one, &quot;m&quot; and &quot;s&quot; will be italic (representing variables) but in the second one they're in upright font, representing units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you fix that and write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$5$ $\mathrm{m/s}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may look the same to you, but what about to everyone else? What about to people whose browsers can't load MathJax? Or who use a different font that uses differently sized spaces? Or who use console browsers? What about screen readers? The reason there are standards for proper use of MathJax is precisely so that it can render the right way in a &lt;em&gt;wide&lt;/em&gt; variety of different environments. And going beyond that, the source code of a post can also be used by fully automatic parsers. We'd like them to be able to figure out what is meant by a certain piece of markup, e.g. being able to identify that &quot;5 m/s&quot; is a single quantity with a unit, rather than two independent pieces of math. So the source code should contain information about the &lt;em&gt;intended meaning&lt;/em&gt; of what you're writing, not just the information required to make it look the way you want. This is called semantic markup, and it's why you'll see valid edits that combine different MathJax elements, correct &lt;code&gt;\text&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;\mathrm&lt;/code&gt; or vice versa, standardize the Markdown formatting in posts, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, we'd like to have something like &lt;code&gt;\quantity{5}{\meter\per\second}&lt;/code&gt;. In LaTeX, you can do this using the &lt;code&gt;siunitx&lt;/code&gt; package (you'd write &lt;code&gt;\SI{5}{m/s}&lt;/code&gt;), but no equivalent exists in MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T14:42:28.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7138" CreationDate="2015-10-02T16:51:34.480" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a (i.e. only one) helpful flag on my profile page and being relatively new to this community, am not sure what it means. Is it a good or bad thing and why/how did I get this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81209" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T17:10:15.813" Title="What's a helpful flag?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7137" CreationDate="2015-10-02T17:10:15.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click on the number, it will take you to a summary of your flagging history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you flag a post (for not being an answer, or for rudeness, or for being a duplicate, etc.), it gets extra attention by high-rep users who can take action to close/delete the post. Or in cases of custom write-your-own-text flags, only moderators will see the message, and they can choose to take action based on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the high-rep users end up doing what your flag suggested, it is automatically marked as helpful. If the moderator who sees the flag agrees it was a good thing to flag, they will mark it as helpful (this is independent of whether they actually take action or not). Thus helpful flags are a &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; thing -- they indicate that the community things you did a good job bringing something to our attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, after a while everyone accumulates a few unhelpful flags too. Don't stress over those, but take them as feedback from the community that you don't need to worry about those posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T17:10:15.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7130" CreationDate="2015-10-02T20:01:35.410" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an example of the issue Dirk raises, I'll point to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/210088/synthesis-of-fe-based-superconductors&quot;&gt;This recent question&lt;/a&gt;. Now, perhaps it is not the cleanest of questions, but it did come up today. It was put on hold as off-topic, with comments about how it would be best for engineering or materials. Now, given that it was tagged solid-state-physics and superconductivity (and applies to them), and that materials-science is also a reasonably used tag here on Physics SE, I think this is pretty indicative of the general feeling around here. It is pretty hard to argue with Dirk, but I also think that Physics SE should be the place for his experimental questions, as well as questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T20:01:35.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T08:19:15.610" Score="27" ViewCount="1175" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/210552/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; looks in imminent danger of being closed on the grounds that it's a pure mathematics question. This is something that happened a lot when I was more active on the site, and is one of the reasons I'm less so now. I'm wondering (a) whether the on-topicness of maths-as-used-in-physics is something that was ever formally discussed, and (b) whether the current community really finds it desirable to ban such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise there's a strong tradition of defining this site's topic as being &quot;only questions about physics.&quot; The question is whether &quot;physics&quot; here should mean &quot;what physicists do&quot; or the much stricter (and more epistemologically suspect) &quot;what is in the physical world.&quot; The linked question above is a good example, because it's clearly technically about a mathematical concept (Dirac delta functions), yet the topic is also clearly something that was developed by physicists, is taught on every physics syllabus, and is of interest to every physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also realise that there is a mathematics stack exchange where this would be on topic - but in many contexts it is often said that the existence of other Stack Exchange sites should not affect what's considered on topic, so I think that is not relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reiterate, my questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was a consensus ever explicitly reached on the on-topicness of such &quot;purely mathematical&quot; questions, and where can I find the discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it desirable, to the current community, to allow questions about the mathematical concepts on which physics is built?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Ah, the difficultly of searching meta. I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5713/should-pure-math-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;a previous discussion on this topic.&lt;/a&gt; The accepted answer, with +16 votes, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a question which focuses entirely on mathematical details, whilst perhaps appropriate for the mathematics SE, should be kept on the physics SE if it is motivated by physics, even though it may not necessarily be regarding how it is precisely applied to a physics problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would suggest that the linked question is just on topic, period. Still, it seems worth bringing up again to see if that's still the consensus, and perhaps to remind active close-voters that the agreed policy isn't quite as exclusive as they might think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T00:08:45.557" Title="Are questions about mathematics used in physics always off topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2015-10-04T15:35:29.653" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the titular question, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, they are not always off topic. But just because a question is about math used in physics does not make it on-topic either. All of calculus is used in physics and I would be hard pressed to say that somebody asking a question about the formal definition of a derivative or a limit would be on-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is easy to imagine questions that are basically only math but where physicists can provide more applicable information. One example I can think of from fluid dynamics is our somewhat... relaxed... use of Einstein summation notation and things like the Levi-Civita symbol or Kronecker delta. Mathematicians could provide an answer to questions about that, sure, and they would be absolutely correct to boot, but I think many people (myself included) might not understand the answers because the level at which we need to know them and apply them is much more limited in scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the gist of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5717/6634&quot;&gt;the selected answer&lt;/a&gt; the last time we talked about this. Without some tie to physics (aside from the fact the topic in question is named for a physicist or invented by one -- Newton being a physicist doesn't make basic calculus questions on topic) or without some way that somebody experienced in physics can provide more insight (aside from just giving examples where the thing is used), it just isn't on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked to about the Dirac delta function just doesn't provide anything that I am aware of that makes it uniquely physics. It has formal definitions, which OP listed in the question, that are based solely on math. It has alternate definitions/approximations, which are based solely on mathematical constructions (Fourier transform, infinitely narrow Gaussian). Just because it is used in physics (system dynamics, quantum mechanics, etc) does not make it on-topic. We use basic algebra operations too and we wouldn't want questions on how to FOIL a polynomial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I voted to close it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.663" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T00:08:45.557" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T18:00:19.030" Score="4" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I provided an answer to a question that was later put on hold. While the question was on hold, a member commented on my answer along the lines of 'That's not what &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; [my emph.] asked'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commenter was not the same member who had posted the question, the usernames and profiles were very different, so it seemed odd for the commenter to comment in the first person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minutes later I wanted to ask (by comment) whether the commenter and OP were by any chance the same person but the comment had disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although my evidence isn't very strong, I suspect sock puppetry at play here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86889" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T18:43:56.823" Title="Is sock puppetry allowed on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-04T18:15:59.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7142" CreationDate="2015-10-04T18:07:57.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a mother meta question on this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short version is that multiple accounts &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; is OK, but any kind of interaction between the personalities is suspect. In particular accounts voting for each other, or writing comments in support of each other or even voting for comments of the other account are definitely out of bounds. Anything that attempts to change the crowd evaluation &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the sense of consensus is a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that what is disallowed is all the usual things that people might want to do with multiple accounts. The kind of legitimate uses that are envisioned are are mostly related to getting the new user or low rep user view of the site: seeing the site with the ads that are removed for active users, or testing allegations that posts are treated differently according to the reputations (either site mechanics or social) of the poster. All those uses should be completely invisible on the site: you shouldn't be able to figure them out unless the puppet master tells you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any evidence of multiple accounts beyond &quot;I think they sound the same&quot; please bring it to the attention of the moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T18:43:56.823" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T18:43:56.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7146" CreationDate="2015-10-05T09:28:55.300" Score="-5" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I find a physics meme: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spherical cow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: How does a physicist milk a cow?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A: Well, first let us consider a spherical cow...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wdh38.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wdh38.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the notorious Schrodinger's cat, I think a list of meme in physics would be fun. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T16:37:48.200" Title="Make a list of physics meme?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-19T11:24:07.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7144" CreationDate="2015-10-05T12:24:48.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fun, sure, but this site is not the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T12:24:48.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7144" CreationDate="2015-10-05T16:37:48.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe not a list of memes, but somewhat on related lines was this (now closed) question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71067/educational-physics-stories-with-a-funny-punchline&quot;&gt;Educational physics stories with a funny punchline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Actually, there also a deleted question - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70740/do-good-physics-jokes-exist&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/70740/do-good-physics-jokes-exist&lt;/a&gt;, which was also removed for the reasons of moderation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you scroll through the existing comments on the linked page, you can appreciate the reasons why it got closed. Still for reasons of completeness, apart from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7145/46399&quot;&gt;DavidZ's answer above&lt;/a&gt;, it makes sense to reiterate &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71067/educational-physics-stories-with-a-funny-punchline#comment145498_71067&quot;&gt;dmckee's point&lt;/a&gt; in the original thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no format in which you can ask this question. First, the Stack Exchange engine has been carefully built and tuned to deal well with question that have right and wrong answers; and it does not mange lists well. Second, while these kinds of questions are enormously popular that very popularity makes them destructive to the question &amp;amp; answer environment that is what we seek here: &quot;best this&quot; and &quot;favorite that&quot; question push out the substantial content. It took more than two years for a majority of the active users on Stack Overflow to understand this, so we learned the hard way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, long story cut short - even though most people would really like that question and the answers, SE sites are not the appropriate place for such big list questions. Sorry :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T16:37:48.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T15:39:26.180" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I flagged 2 posts by an user named &lt;em&gt;Harsh Raj&lt;/em&gt; (a new user, could not find his profile) as one was a spam and the other was of poor quality (includes poor grammar and bad spelling and irrelevant points). The posts were in reply to an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130654/inertia-and-momentum/210974#210974&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the first post was flagged by me as a spam and the flag was deemed helpful. Minutes later, he came up with the 2nd post, which was of poor quality as earlier mentioned. I flagged it as an answer of &lt;em&gt;very poor quality&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;But this flag of mine was claimed to be disputed&lt;/strong&gt; as per this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/89965&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; (mods &amp;amp; SE team only). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However when I returned to the question, i found that his post had been deleted (either by him or by the moderators, I don't know). So why was my flag deemed disputed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please specify if there is any reason for claiming my flag to be disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T14:22:25.780" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T14:22:25.780" Title="Flag to post (finally deleted) deemed disputed" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7147" CreationDate="2015-10-06T16:16:10.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag is &quot;disputed&quot; because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/101002&quot;&gt;low quality review&lt;/a&gt; was completed with the result &lt;em&gt;Looks OK&lt;/em&gt; since two out of three reviewers voted for that. (&lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; they voted like that I can't tell, of course)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post was deleted by means other than the review of your flag, which is why the deletion didn't cause the flag to be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T16:16:10.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7147" CreationDate="2015-10-06T16:51:25.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some points to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take it easy on disputed and declined flags. The net effect of raising a flag and it being disputed is essentially nothing. If you consistently raise flags that get disputed then it's worth having a look at why and then changing that behaviour. If it's a single flag, just say OK and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your flag summary (&lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/your-user-number&lt;/code&gt;) is obviously private, though moderators and SE team members have access to it. Linking to it without providing a screenshot of the relevant flag is only useful to moderators and the SE team, so it's good practice to indicate 'mod only' on the links or provide a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130654/inertia-and-momentum/210974#210974&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; (10k+ &amp;amp; mods; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9X7z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;) is pretty bad but it's not terrible. It's an honest attempt to address the question that simply doesn't get there. It's always been a bit unclear whether the Very Low Quality flag should apply to these (I would say it does, and it would send them to a review queue where the community can deal with them more effectively to keep the site clean) but overall the consensus seems to be that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the thing to do is downvote, comment if you feel it's appropriate, and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That said, the comments there are pretty unfriendly to a new site member. There's times where new users do need to be met with a cold shower, but I wouldn't say this was one of them. We want a cool site with lots of high-quality answers but that doesn't mean we need to be rude to newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, as ACuriousMind has explained, the flag was marked as disputed because most reviewers thought it Looked OK (with the alternative being Recommend Deletion, which wasn't appropriate). It's unclear, though, why this was deleted at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T17:25:44.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T17:25:44.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7151" CreationDate="2015-10-08T15:17:33.367" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if this is even discussed anywhere in the policies of this network?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6719" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T17:14:00.177" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T17:14:00.177" Title="Can one moderator cancel or reduce the suspension given out by another?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7150" CreationDate="2015-10-08T15:26:40.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has already been answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160246/how-can-a-temporary-account-suspension-be-lifted/160250#160250&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, it can be done, as explained in the post I just linked. Of course, such a measure must be possible since the moderators themselves are not infallible. One cannot run the risk of a &quot;rogue mod&quot; ruining an entire site, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T15:26:40.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-10-09T11:31:22.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thecostofknowledge.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PrE5E.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T11:31:22.833" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-10-09T11:31:22.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-10T18:07:49.813" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the criteria that a question needs to satisfy in order to have it protected by a moderator? It seems to me that this protection is some sort of honor to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T18:32:51.027" Title="Eligibility for being a protected question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2015-10-10T18:13:58.903" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moderator needs to decide that it is attracting (or will attract) too many low quality answers from people not part of our site culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any post that ends up on the Hot Network Questions is likely to need protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not an honor, but a means of protecting the site from  sudden and unfocused inflows of people who have no interest in participating in the site's culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion many questions which need protection are not particularly good questions for the stated mission of the site, but are instead very accessible questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-10-10T18:32:51.027" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T18:32:51.027" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T15:54:09.463" Score="8" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of right now, the sidebar is appearing below the content, with vertical and horizontal scrollbars around the #content div. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine there is a red freehand circle around the misplaced sidebar...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears on Physics and Physics Meta, but I haven't seen it on any other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Google Chrome &lt;s&gt;45.0.2454.101&lt;/s&gt; 46.0.2490.71 provided by Google's Yum repository, on Fedora 22 with KDE. I don't see it in other browsers, so I think it may be something specific to Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, when I reduce zoom from 100% to 90%, then the scrollbars disappear and the sidebar returns to its proper place, but then everything's too small...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ePVG7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ePVG7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot-physics.stackexchange.com 2015-10-14 11-45-59.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16639" LastEditorUserId="16639" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T17:22:20.900" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T20:19:28.800" Title="Site sidebar appears below content in Google Chrome" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7159" CreationDate="2015-10-14T16:26:24.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an issue with the margin-left on the #feed-link element. I see this on Chrome  45.0.2454.101 and Firefox 41.0.1 as well. 100% Zoom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the problem in particular is the #feed-link element, the strange behavior is caused by the margin declaration. Adding a non-zero margin to the bottom margin will resolved this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the exact cause of this problem is but there are three elements related to these elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;#content&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;#mainbar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;#feed-link&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with #content is that on Physics.SE the width is 975px, while on other SEs, like Arqade (a graduated site with a custom style) and Anime.SE (a graduated site with no custom style), the margin is 1000px.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The #mainbar is different here vs other sites for some reason...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rendered style on Anime.SE (which I assume is the beta template without the beta in the name) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#mainbar, .mainbar {&#xA;    float: left;&#xA;    width: 728px;&#xA;    margin: 0px;&#xA;    padding: 0px;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However on Physics.SE, it's like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#mainbar, .mainbar {&#xA;    float: left;&#xA;    margin: 10px 10px 20px 0;&#xA;    width: 728px;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#feed-link is like this on Physics.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#permalink, #feed-link {&#xA;    text-align: left;&#xA;    width: 200px;&#xA;    float: right;&#xA;    clear: both;&#xA;    margin: 15px 15px 0 30px; /* margin declaration here is related to the issue */&#xA;    white-space: normal;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;#feed-link {&#xA;    text-align: right;&#xA;    float: right;&#xA;    clear: both;&#xA;    margin: 15px;&#xA;    white-space: nowrap;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other sites like Anime.SE, the #feed-link selector comes before the #permalink, #feed-link selector (refer below, the latter (#permalink, #feed-link) takes precedence over the former (#feed-link) in the case of Physics.SE). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#feed-link {&#xA;    text-align: right;&#xA;    float: right;&#xA;    clear: both;&#xA;    margin: 15px;&#xA;    white-space: nowrap;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;#permalink, #feed-link {&#xA;    text-align: left;&#xA;    width: 200px;&#xA;    float: right;&#xA;    clear: both;&#xA;    margin: 15px 15px 0px 30px;&#xA;    white-space: normal;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible solution:&lt;/strong&gt; The culprit is very likely to be an element within #feed-link, or more likely something inherited by the #feed-link-text element. I haven't had the time to investigate further, but adding a positive value for the bottom margin (e.g, &lt;code&gt;margin: 15px 15px 1px 30px;&lt;/code&gt;) fixes the issue with the scroll bars and the sidebar. Therefore I must conclude that there's something within the #feed-link container element that's likely causing this display issue, because by applying &lt;code&gt;overflow: hidden;&lt;/code&gt; to this element fixes both problems as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Increasing the width of #content will fix the sidebar but not the scrollbars, the same result occurs when reducing the left margin on #mainbar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26932" LastEditorUserId="26932" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T20:19:28.800" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T20:19:28.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T21:29:37.440" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/212589/why-do-bosons-and-fermions-exist&quot;&gt;Why do bosons and fermions exist?&lt;/a&gt; (or, question A) is currently nominated to be closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/207459/why-must-fermions-be-antisymmetric&quot;&gt;Why must fermions be antisymmetric?&lt;/a&gt; (question B). This seems fair at first glance, since the questions are quite similar and there's a reasonable answer at B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, question B is also closed.  If A is also closed, it won't be possible for normal mortals to add answers to either question.  Seems like a squicky way of avoiding answering a question at all, rather than a useful way to consolidate information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some guideline on closing one question as a duplicate of another question, which is also already closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T17:06:50.763" Title="Duplicate of closed question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-15T00:03:11.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-15T04:28:44.497" Score="30" ViewCount="1108" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework policy is a constant source of confusion for new (and sometimes established) users.&#xA;We see this confusion, for example, when users respond to closures based on the homework policy by defending their post with &quot;This is not a homework problem&quot;, or similar.&#xA;Some users have even been conditioned to claim a non-homework basis for their posts preemptively. &#xA;It seems the word &quot;homework&quot; throws people off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we modify the help center, associated close reason, and our own language to make clear that whether or not a question comes from homework isn't the real issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is very similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4977/&quot;&gt;a previous one&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However, I am not only asking about the tag.&#xA;I'm asking about the help center, close reason, and language used by users as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T08:03:05.640" Title="Should we rename the homework policy?" Tags="|discussion|tags|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-15T04:28:44.497" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&quot;Homework&quot; isn't the issue&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we all agree that whether or not a post comes from a homework assignment is irrelevant, as illustrated by this example question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transmon qubit&lt;/a&gt; with capacitance C and Josephson junction critical current I_c. What is the matrix element &amp;lt;1|Q|0&gt; for this system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be motivated to ask this question in my research job.&#xA;It's not homework, but it is also not a question we would like to support.&#xA;We prefer if I would try the calculation myself, and then ask a specific conceptual question about whatever part has me stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help center's entry on homework-like questions gets that part right when it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have a [homework-like question], narrow it down to the specific concept that is giving you trouble and ask about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, while the help center correctly tells the user &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; to do, it does not correctly tell the user &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; to do it.&#xA;In the help center, what I transcribed as [homework-like question] in the previous quote is actually written as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;question about a homework problem, or any problem of an educational nature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, incorrectly, tells the user that only questions which come from homework assignments or other educational origins are subject to the requirement that they ask something specific and conceptual.&#xA;This is obviously not what we intend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted and much up-voted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;the canonical meta post on this subject&lt;/a&gt; also defines homework-like in a (different!) confusing way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. This includes not just questions from actual homework assignments, but also self-study problems, puzzles, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This classification fails to reject the example question posed earlier in this post.&#xA;It also omits the idea that posts should have a &lt;em&gt;conceptual core&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The notion that questions should be conceptual is mentioned later in the answer, but readers only get to that after they've already been mislead once by the help center and then again by the first few paragraphs of the answer.&#xA;Also, the emphasis on the question's &quot;value&quot; as a pedagogical tool is subjective, thus offering further confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of all the resources related to the homework policy, the close reason is the only one which unambiguously gets at the part that matters.&#xA;It is nice that it refers to &quot;homework-&lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;&quot; questions to emphasize the fact that pedagogical settings have nothing to do with the appropriateness of a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Get rid of the word &quot;homework&quot; (mostly)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should just clear state that we only support questions with a &lt;em&gt;conceptual core&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;If a post just asks how to solve any specific problem, it's off topic.&#xA;Problem solving questions should, as the close reason says, ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort.&#xA;Surely, questions derived from homework will tend to fail this criterion more than other questions [&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;], and that should be noted in the help center and associated close reason, but it should not be the fundamental criterion itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of the specific (small!) changes I think we should make&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(I write &quot;calculation request&quot; as a stand-in label for what we currently call the &quot;homework&quot; policy, but I'm sure we can think of a better name)&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modify the help center to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Calculation requests, e.g. &quot;A 4kg ball is traveling at 8m/s in the x direction, how do I find...&quot;, or requests to have your work checked, e.g. &quot;Here's my calculation, but the answer is wrong, where did I mess up?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics - Stack Exchange is not a calculation service or a work checking service. If you need help with a particular calculation, narrow it down to the specific concept that is giving you trouble and ask about that. Make sure your question cannot be answered with a small amount of research and show that you've made effort to resolve the issue yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modify the close reason to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about particular calculation, whether a request for the calculation itself or a request to have your work checked, must ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We can probably leave the tag as it is, since it says &quot;homework-like&quot;. Changing it to &quot;problem solving&quot; would be better but may not be necessary. I do not know how hard it is to change a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Harder) Stop referring to this whole thing as the &quot;homework policy&quot; and call it the &quot;problem solving policy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some objections and rebuttals&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;We have to call it the homework policy, otherwise new users won't understand.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that problem-solving questions must center on a specific concept is no less clear than referring to homework.&#xA;In fact, as argued above, I think &quot;problem-solving&quot; is considerably less vague and subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;We'll be flooded with homework questions from users who don't know the rules.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If folks are really afraid we can do a few week trial period.&#xA;Stack Exchange gives us awesome SQL tools so that we can measure the effects objectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This isn't worth the change.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by discussions in comments and the chat room, it seems the homework policy is confusing to lots of users largely because people don't understand what qualifies as &quot;homework&quot;.&#xA;The fact that &quot;homework&quot; has an obvious and established meaning which conflicts with how we use it is a clear problem.&#xA;As I've shown, a result of this is that the official documentation disagrees with &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; on the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;] This is probably more because people who have finished school have learned how to ask good questions and use online communities, rather than anything having to do with whether or not the physics problem at hand came from homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T08:53:21.617" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-15T11:15:51.327" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the same objection to this that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4982/6634&quot;&gt;dmckee had last time we talked about this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, everybody who posts a question on this site wants a problem solved. The problem may be lack of understanding, or it may be homework, or it may be just about anything else. But the very existence of a question implies there is a problem to be solved, and such a tag would then apply to everything under the sun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather see the meta tag go away entirely and we downvote bad &quot;homework-like&quot; questions into oblivion and close them just as fast as we are now. There's no need for a tag to point out garbage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;good&quot; questions (ie. the ones that already conform to the policy) don't need a separate tag to tell us that they conform to the policy. They will be well-posed questions looking for conceptual explanations and thus no different from any other good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the close reason needs to say &quot;Homework like ...&quot; nor &quot;Problem solving ...&quot;, it could simply say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which then means that close reason can apply to all of the really bad questions that come in and make no sense nor effort to justify them. It's kind of a &quot;non-mainstream&quot; close reason for mainstream topics. We want all of our questions to be about specific physics concepts -- that's part of what makes us unique from &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;World Building.SE&lt;/a&gt;. We close questions that start &quot;Imagine if the sun instantly disappeared...&quot; as non-physical, so this kind of close reason would work for that as well as &quot;A ball is rolling down a 45 degree ramp...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the help center, I would say it doesn't need changed because we do want to forbid homework questions as they are defined there. And we want to forbid bad questions as defined elsewhere in the help center. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T11:22:58.220" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-15T15:30:39.477" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in the good old days there was no option to close as &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;. Instead we had a close reason described as &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt; was that it was of interest to too few people i.e. it did not fit with the long term aim of the site to become a repository of &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt; information about physics. Homework questions often (but not always) fall into this category because the answer is of interest only to the person doing the homework. I much preferred the &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt; option to &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; because it allowed a lot more flexibility. For example it allowed me to answer a homework question if by doing so I could explore an interesting and useful concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't privy to the reasons why the &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt; option was removed, but I would guess that it was viewed as too vague. You could argue that an answer to a blatant homework question taken from Gravitation would be useful to more people than a answer about some complex bit of string theory. While I can see this, I don't see it as a problem. My view is that &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt; means what the &gt;3000 rep users think it means and I don't see that it would cause any more arguments that the current &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; option does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe we should can the &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; option and bring back &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt; instead. I think this is basically equivalent to Daniel's suggestion, and I don't really care what exact words are used in the close reason as long as the spirit is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response to ACuriousMind's comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACuriousMind says in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It probably was removed because people like you used it as a flexible close reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I freely concede this is probably absolutely correct. My argument is that this is a &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; thing not a bad thing and it should be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now have lots of &gt;3k rep users, so lots of people can vote to close or reopen. I don't see why we need any legalistically precise prescriptions for when a question can or can't be closed. If I vote to close a question as &lt;em&gt;too localised&lt;/em&gt; then any of the many &gt;3k rep users can vote to keep the question open or vote to reopen it. In the end the questions that are closed will reflect the views of the majority (of &gt;3k rep users) as to what this site should look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T16:19:38.773" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T16:19:38.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-17T12:39:20.520" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I come across a homework-like question, like this one &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/212839/&quot;&gt;Terminal velocity of a sky-diver&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that is of little value to our collection, as any answer is only of interest and benefit to the original poster (OP). I know the question will be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I think the OP really wants to learn, however, I occasionally still answer such questions, in the hope that I might help someone. In these cases, I tend to make broad points and suggestions, rather than provide a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this alright? Should I stop answering HW-like questions that will likely be closed? I know HW is a thorny issue on this site. I've read elsewhere that HW-like questions should be quickly shutdown and downvoted etc. Whenever I answer such a question, I'm (in a small way) undermining that strategy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T19:18:18.227" Title="Answering homework-like questions that will be closed" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-17T15:05:48.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP's meta question is a much-needed initiative to improve/change/update the homework policy wordings of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/2451&quot;&gt;meta question 714&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/homework-and-exercises/info&quot;&gt;wiki discription&lt;/a&gt;, and close reason; to make them useful and consistent, and stress that the issue is not whether the question is &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; homework, but rather whether it asks a conceptional question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested policy makers and editors in these matters are encouraged to come forward and meet in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;Phys.SE chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, about a year ago (October 22nd, 2014), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag was already changed after several and long discussions on meta and various chat sessions to the self-explanatory &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercise&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercise&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercise&lt;/a&gt; tag, which has for the past year mostly run smoothly and as intended. Any further change in the tag name seems to warrant a separate meta post, which could possibly be conducted after an overhaul of the above mentioned policy texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a reminder to not forget that that the main objective is to first-and-foremost serve the Phys.SE community of &lt;em&gt;active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy,&lt;/em&gt; as it says in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;intro pages&lt;/a&gt;. In plain English: The interests of people asking off-topic questions might not coincide with the best interests of the Phys.SE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T15:05:48.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-17T15:09:10.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than using the term &quot;homework-like questions&quot; or &quot;problem-solving questions&quot;, or the &quot;too localized&quot; concept, a better descriptor for our objections might be &quot;drill-oriented or standard instructional question&quot; or &quot;standard drill problem.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions that have come through in the past weeks are stock physics drill questions designed to give students practice in learning a concept or technique. These would be questions which have been asked and answered over and over for years.   Many of the OPs say something like &quot;I don't know where to begin,&quot; or &quot;I'm lost.&quot; My first mental response is &quot;Get off the computer and go ask your instructor this question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we already have a catalogue/collection of drill-problem type answered questions we could have a standard link to give to questioners. &quot;This is a standard drill problem. Go to this link and find your related concept.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my short association with this site, I have concluded, happily, that Physics.SE doesn't want to be the first-stop-shop of physics students seeking a drill-problem answer (like Answers.com [gag!], but a compendium of good physics thinking for conceptual questions encountered along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OTOH, if a questioner gives some statement about their thoughts on a drill problem which indicates a poor concept, we could give them a nudge in the right direction, and I've noticed this happening in comments ( Wouldn't those nudges be more suited for a brief Answer?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is fair to tell questioners &quot;This problem/question is a standard drill problem that has been asked and answered many times. Try to get some local assistance.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T15:09:10.017" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-10-17T17:44:27.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tension here, as I see it, is between a general desire to help someone who is struggling (especially when it would be &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; easy for you), and the danger of rewarding behavior that we don't want (thereby encouraging more of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;of course&lt;/em&gt; every time you answer such a question you've ever so slightly undermined the &quot;don't give them what they want&quot; strategy for suppressing the homework rate (which only works so well in the first place). You have to weigh that against the possibility that &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; user could be nudged over the line to be a positive contributor to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than trying to stake out of bright line in that murky landscape I'll ask that if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; help them out, please frame it in a pedagogical way: ask them the question whose answer will help them find their own solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T17:44:27.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-10-18T10:17:01.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone appears to be genuinely interested in physics and is willing to put the effort into understanding it then I can rarely resist the temptation to answer them even when the question is teetering on the edge of the homework precipice. But I agree completely with the point dmckee makes in the last paragraph of his answer. if I yield to the temptation to answer it's because I want to help the OP to understand the principles involved. That means posting an answer that discusses the concepts involved, and not simply giving them the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/80511/how-do-i-derive-the-lorentz-contraction-from-the-invariant-interval&quot;&gt;How do I derive the Lorentz contraction from the invariant interval?&lt;/a&gt;. This question could easily have been closed as homework (it got tagged as such) but I think my answer was worthwhile, and the OP (now an experienced member of the site with 192 answers to his credit) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/212674/why-cannot-a-perfect-clock-exist/212885#comment456331_212885&quot;&gt;thinks so too&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until I master telepathy it's impossible to know whether the OP will really benefit from your answer or whether they'll just transcribe it into their problem sheet then forget it. But if I'm going to err I prefer to err on the side of making the world of physics a slightly better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T10:17:01.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2015-10-18T16:25:24.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I stop answering HW-like questions that will likely be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should. This goes for all types of questions that will be closed; it's nothing specific to homework-like questions. The entire point of closure (a.k.a. putting on hold) is to prevent low quality, off topic, etc. questions from receiving answers, both so that people realize those questions should not be asked without improvement, and also because sometimes the question can't effectively be answered until it is improved. (If it's unclear what is being asked, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this: if putting a question on hold is not meant to prevent it from receiving answers, what is the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-10-18T19:18:18.227" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T19:18:18.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-19T11:04:33.677" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reviewing a post now and due to certain flaws of the post, I had to flag it. Just then  I saw this message at the bottom of the flagging window.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RDU63.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RDU63.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked my flagging history by clicking on the &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;review&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; link given in the message and this is what I saw...&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OsbBR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OsbBR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;em&gt;Is 1 declined post too many? That too many days back? What am I to understand from this untimed message?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any kind of help is welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T11:03:24.993" Title="Flag Post Warning" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7172" CreationDate="2015-10-19T15:58:25.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The criteria for that message are set to try to catch well meaning but overzealous flaggers early. Your flagging history is very helpful overall and you should look at the declined flag as a chance to tune your understanding of when to flag rather than a big problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T15:58:25.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7172" CreationDate="2015-10-20T11:03:24.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/175405/271002&quot;&gt;meta answer&lt;/a&gt;, flaggers with at least 10 handled flags in the past 7 days where at least 10 % of flags were declined will see the warning when they flag again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rWqKJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please review them before flagging this post!&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, you just met these criteria when 10 of your flags were handled in the past 7 days and 1 flag (i.e. 10 %) was declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59991" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T11:03:24.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-22T18:53:26.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll prefix this with &quot;I'm not an active physics.SE participant&quot;, I'm over on another P.SE - programmers. And we too have a problem with homework questions in that the vast majority of the time, they aren't good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this, end, I wrote a post titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6166/40980&quot;&gt;Open letter to students with homework problems&lt;/a&gt; trying to explain what the problem with just copying and pasting homework problems into the text area is, and that even if we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; answer the question, it may lead to problems for the student's future learning endeavors (they learn a short cut that works 90% of the time, but completely fail to learn the long way of doing it needed to understand why it fails in the 10%, or other topics).  This post has since become the highest voted post on Programmers.SE's meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key thing to all this is not so much &quot;its homework, its bad&quot; but rather that the student needs to learn how to ask good questions. This, unfortunately, isn't often a skill taught by many institutions and learned the hard way.  In the context of StackExchange, this is often learned through down votes and closed questions - which, while a necessary and &lt;em&gt;critical&lt;/em&gt; tool for StackExchange is a less than ideal one for pedagogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the focus of a homework policy (named that or anything else) should be on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reinforcing good question quality on Stack Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Setting the expectation of what can (and can't) be answered and timeframes (how often does one see the &quot;urgent - need answer by 5pm&quot; in questions?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note the possible problems that a student who asks a question here may encounter (inadvertently skipping around in the syllabus without proper comprehension of previous material - its in that order for a reason).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encourage that someone needs to &lt;em&gt;discuss&lt;/em&gt; a topic, that chat may be a better resource than a main site question and its comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a quote that I'm fond of from Programmers.SE, slightly tweaked to Physics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Picture Physics like a room with a whiteboard. No computer, no books, no papers. You write your question on the whiteboard and experts walk by. Someone sees one that they can answer, they stop in and help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T17:33:38.010" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T18:53:26.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-10-24T18:11:59.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://what-if.xkcd.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8wlTb.png&quot; alt=&quot;What if? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T18:11:59.957" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-10-24T18:11:59.957" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7162" CreationDate="2015-10-26T03:52:53.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5168/5477&quot;&gt;banning homework questions altogether&lt;/a&gt;, which was a reasonably popular proposal. While I don't quite have the energy to keep pushing for this, I still support it. In the context of your question, I think it would be a good and workable solution. To be clear, the solution would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;homework policy&quot; would be replaced with a new document, which states that homework questions (in a strict sense) are completely banned. No ifs, no buts: your question will be closed if it looks like you're trying to get help with your homework, even if you actually aren't. The only way you can get help with your homework is by asking a conceptual question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; have a new policy along the lines of what you suggest, which can be adjusted to taste independently of the related but distinct goal of making sure we don't supply answers to school/undergrad homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall I feel that this would be less confusing for the users. The current policy of &quot;you can ask homework questions if you ask about a concept&quot; is pretty confusing to the uninitiated and means that a judgement call has to be made every time a homework question appears in the review queue. &quot;No homework, or anything that looks like it&quot; is much clearer for both askers and reviewers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;it has to be about a concept&quot; policy would then require a judgement call only in the minority of cases where it doesn't look like a homework problem, but is nevertheless judged not to be conceptual enough for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;homework &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an issue&lt;/strong&gt; on this site. It is an issue not because homework questions tend to be non-conceptual but because they are homework questions. Answering them here is bad for the students' education and bad for the quality of this site, so let's just have a clear and straightforward policy of not doing so. Non-conceptual problems are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; an issue, but they are a separate one, and better addressed using a separate policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T04:10:02.220" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7180" CreationDate="2015-10-26T09:28:35.480" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if it is possible to calculate the velocity of a surface to air missile like the THAAD missile system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57018" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-10-26T10:10:52.463" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T10:10:52.463" Title="Can I ask this question? Is it possible to calculate the velocity of a surface to air missile?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7179" CreationDate="2015-10-26T09:29:44.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, if you're not sure if a question can be asked or not, just ask it. It may &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; like we're being harsh when (if) we tell you it's off topic, but we won't hold it against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since you asked, this question sounds like it would be off topic for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T09:29:44.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7183" CreationDate="2015-10-26T22:56:14.487" Score="28" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was sometime back that I realized what we are synthesizing here (possibly) is an &lt;strong&gt;archive&lt;/strong&gt; for an expert system. Put the Physics Stack Exchange together with an AI machine and you have a super-physicist. The same might be said of other Stack areas, knowledge bases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will the stack eventually become? Are there longer term goals than to just ask/answer questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45613" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2015-10-27T14:34:41.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T19:15:12.930" Title="Ultimately, what will the Physics Stack Exchange Become? Are there long term goals?" Tags="|discussion|scope|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-10-27T16:44:21.300" Score="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eventually what it will become is a place where anyone who asks any question will be referred to a previous answer before their question is closed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T16:44:21.300" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-10-27T21:46:13.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Humans will cease to exist within a few generations, they'll be replaced by machines. It's likely that our civilization will give rise to one superintelligence, all knowledge acquired by us will be absorbed by it. Digital records are then more useful than paper records, so the files stored on servers containing the contents of this site may make it into the brains of this superintelligence. A lot of the content will likely be interpreted as examples of how primitive biological beings approach physics problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T21:46:13.160" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T10:48:48.220" Score="16" ViewCount="623" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post I speak of is below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/215259/what-does-the-discovery-of-a-pentaquark-signify/215293#215293&quot;&gt;What does the discovery of a pentaquark signify?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst OP has hardly been perfect in their articulation of the question, it does to me seem to be clear what they're asking. They want to know about what the discovery of the Pentaquark means for physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popular media has been reporting about the discovery of the Pentaquark in CERN this July. For those of us who watched much of the Higgs Boson media campaign, it's reasonably obvious that the reporting of big physics news in popular media isn't exactly precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, that for those people who want to know about more exact implications of such discoveries on the Physics world, they might come here and ask questions. I'm guessing that that's what OP was trying to do above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a bit of a problem with comments on the question like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I was first tempted to answer this in more detail, I decided to merely point out that it isn't exactly a physics question. &quot;Significance&quot; is primarily a matter of opinion. Was it necessary to search for these states that are being predicted by the standard model? Yes, it was absolutely necessary and it will be necessary to check the prediction against the measurements to see if there are significant discrepancies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The QCD still works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Is there a theory that it supports or something like that?&quot;... Yes, the theory has been around for decades. It is called Quantum Chromodynamics and it is part of the Standard Model. Pentaquarks are not a surprise and we do not need any new theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone's genuinely curious about the wider applications in Physics that a discovery might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly the way in which this question has been answered, to me, seems condescending and disparaging. Perhaps if the more knowledgable users in the community are not willing to read into these questions to try and work out what OP is actually trying to ask (albeit without much finesse), they should keep the unhelpful comments to themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what solution I'm proposing here. I understand the frustration when someone asks a vague question, but answering it with pointless comments which can be interpretted as condescending seems to compound the problem, not help. I hope this doesn't appear to be a rant about a specific case, either. This is just a recent example which I'm using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89073" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T16:30:19.420" Title="Pointless comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7185" CreationDate="2015-10-29T12:12:26.477" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can flag the comments. For comments like these, the &quot;not constructive&quot; flag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6374/which-flag-do-i-use-for-an-inappropriate-post&quot;&gt;is typically appropriate&lt;/a&gt;, or if it's particularly vicious, use &quot;rude or offensive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth keeping in mind that we want most people who ask questions on this site to be those who care about their questions and the broader physics context. In other words, &quot;I was just curious&quot;-type questions are not really what we're here for. So if someone asks a question without bothering to do simple things &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;like checking Wikipedia, searching the web, etc.&lt;/a&gt;, we will &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt; fail to be particularly accommodating. Same goes for when a poster is asking a question where they are clearly out of their depth (like, hypothetically: &quot;I don't know any calculus but prove to me that the pentaquark should exist&quot;-type questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T12:12:26.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-30T08:42:29.703" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pictures would say better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FZZxB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FZZxB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then this; notice a large bar in the right part of the page; the conspicuous part is the appearance of hot questions at the bottom:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6iNz2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6iNz2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on? I'm using Opera 30.0.1835.88; I then checked the Chem.SE page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8twlH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8twlH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be easily seen the ads are at their proper place; no grey bar present at the right part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the meta PSE page is looking good:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3H096.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3H096.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the main page looking so? I'm having no problem with the other SE sites. Can anyone please tell me what the issue is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7159/site-sidebar-appears-below-content-in-google-chrome&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; also complains of the same problem but his browser is Chrome; I've also Chrome but there the main page looks good:(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latest Update 1: Miracle!! I don't know how but the hot-questions list has come back to its original place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nrJDl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nrJDl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the fonts are still irregularly big &amp;amp; that grey side-bar is still there:(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2: ****! Really no words to say :X It is in coma again;(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LCLtp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LCLtp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T12:17:29.897" Title="Why is the main page of PSE looking so weird in my Opera browser?" Tags="|discussion|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-30T19:34:40.690" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions are protected to prevent low-key answers. Is this applicable to comments as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I want to say that sometimes users with &gt;10 rep also make bad responses. There are plenty of such cases faced by us editors of late answers and other questions. So I request the bar for protected questions to be raised to 50 rep at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T01:28:10.583" Title="Raise in reputation bar for protection of questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7188" CreationDate="2015-10-31T01:28:10.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you suggest a number like 50, I would (and I would imagine the people who actually have to implement it) like to see proof that a substantial number of bad responses comes from people with 10 &amp;lt; rep &amp;lt; 50 and that it would make a dent at all in the signal-to-noise ratio. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are approximately 2800 users with between 10 and 50 rep who have been seen in the past 180 days that would be impacted by this change. This is out of roughly 30000 total registered users who have also been seen during that time. So your proposed change to the barrier would affect somewhere around 9% of the &quot;active&quot; user-base. For comparison, there are approximately 20000 users in the past 180 days with a reputation of less than 10 or exactly 101 (the association bonus). So the current barrier limits posting such that only 33% of the active participants can post. Your proposed barrier would limit the participation to 25%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: All of these numbers were found by poking around in the Data Explorer today -- the last data dump was Oct 25, 2015 so it should be close to current numbers. If anybody in the future decides to run the numbers again, they may not match exactly!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you must somehow show that a non-negligible number of the bad posts to which you are referring are posted by this 9% of the site and that changing the barrier would significantly reduce the amount of bad posts. These numbers are based on your proposed barrier of 50, if you pick a different barrier, the same analysis would apply and the same requirement to justify the number exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T01:28:10.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7191" CreationDate="2015-11-01T05:51:07.573" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen many posts where people refer to the OP of the question. So what does OP stand for? is it the asker of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96438" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-11-01T08:18:06.000" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T08:18:06.000" Title="When people say OP what does it mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2015-11-01T06:24:15.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt; riginal &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; oster of the question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T06:24:15.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T07:16:08.947" Score="1" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I flagged an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/215636/36790&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/149092/36790&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; citing &lt;code&gt;not an answer&lt;/code&gt; as it was providing only a link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, link-only answers are not encouraged here as they may become worthless when the link becomes dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was surprised when the flag was not &lt;code&gt;helpful&lt;/code&gt;; it was &lt;code&gt;disputed&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what is the reason for disputing my flag to that 'link-only' answer? Has the community changed their view on the 'link-only' answers??  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T20:07:01.573" Title="Why was my flag on a 'link-only' answer disputed?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2015-11-01T08:18:03.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4737/what-does-the-disputed-status-of-a-flag-mean&quot;&gt;The disputed flag means one or more of the other site members disagreed with your review&lt;/a&gt;. In this case I would guess someone disagreed with you because the post is an answer - just not a very good one. The appropriate action would be to downvote the answer rather than flagging it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T08:18:03.083" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2015-11-01T08:22:54.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Technically, the not-an-answer (NAA) flag caused the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community♦&lt;/a&gt; to submit the answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;low-quality-post-review-list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Five 2k+ users (which were not 20k+ users) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/104087&quot;&gt;completed the review cycle with the following votes&lt;/a&gt; listed chronologically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Recommend Deletion; Recommend Deletion; Looks OK; Recommend Deletion; Looks OK.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Next the Community♦ provided the feed-back 'Disputed' to the flagger.&#xA;I'm a bit uncertain whether this was caused by the mixed verdict (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4737/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post and below comment by ACuriousMind), or an up-vote on the answer. (The latter is one of 3 reasons mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/95275/209806&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post as a reason for a disputed flag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the answer is not delete, since none of the reviewer were 20k+ users. (20k+ users can vote to directly &lt;em&gt;Delete&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to just &lt;em&gt;Recommend Deletion,&lt;/em&gt; cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/161390/209806&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Next, the disputed status caused the answer to enter the moderator's review tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a moderator converted the answer to a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T20:07:01.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-03T16:24:52.840" Score="6" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/104598&quot;&gt;This suggested edit&lt;/a&gt; erased the first line in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/215997/&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; and replaced it with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think that gravity has an effect on any particle in our universe. Even the photons are attracted by the back holes (despite the fact that some physicists consider photons as having no mass !)&lt;/em&gt; But in quantic physics, particles may adopt one these two behaviours: being &quot;real objects&quot; i.e with a mass or being a wave! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what is the mass ? Does the mass really exist ??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit suggested by anonymous user. It was approved by one reviewer and I just managed to catch it and reject it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are anonymous users allowed to mess up things? At least if an anonymous user does the editing the person who wrote the entry should be primarily responsible for approval or rejection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking, a feature request,   for a veto from the original person who wrote the question/answer that was edited by an anonymous user, as in this case already there was an approval! It would have made the answer really stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit in response to comment by  @user36790.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rolling back is an option that corrects things, &lt;strong&gt;IF&lt;/strong&gt; the original author reads the site often. We have many good answers by very good physicists who have stopped looking in everyday or even month and some not at all. A  distortion of their answers might go unnoticed and get approval by ignoramuses  and destroy the integrity of the site. Moderators cannot be reading everything as postings go through first page very fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T14:29:39.847" Title="Maybe anonymous users should not be allowed edits?" Tags="|feature-request|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-11-03T19:17:50.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Dirk Bruere. Although I hardly post here, on any site you will have &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;homework with some solution attempts, so probably worth giving a particularized answer. Sending the asker to a different problem/example is not that different from telling him to RTFM. And there's an inexhaustible number of homework problems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;tumbleweed questions that usually are too hard to [actually] answer. My SO questions are mostly like that. Well, I get some answers, but it's usually not what I asked... more like extended comments. A small percentage of these will probably get an actual answer over time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two issues are &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/885618/g%C3%B6dels-incompleteness-theorems&quot;&gt;actually connected&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70429" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T19:26:11.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T13:41:14.973" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a completely self studying student, with no friendly post grads around when you need one, I wonder is a question of the format outlined below acceptable here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of what I mean is: I currently understand say, the basic role of the Lagrangian in QFT and the math behind it. From there I would like to ultimately understand how to get to the math description of the weak force gauge bosons, going through group theory or  whatever areas of mathematical knowledge, are needed along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I would not expect the answer to contain even one line of mathjax, as learning the math involved is obviously entirely up to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I would define my starting point, and state what exactly my destination is, and ask for a schematic of the intermediate steps involved. In 99 percent of the text books I own, there no &quot;block diagram&quot; of how concept A is used, through concept B, C.., to the end point.  If you are lucky, the summary at the end might describe the process but this is rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't misunderstood my motivation, I am not trying to avoid the sheer necessity of the application needed by all students  to fully understand a concept, as I would not be studying physics if I did not enjoy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wonder, as this site is intended mainly for full time students in regular education courses, is a question using this schematic approach (with well defined start and end points, involving a small area of physics) suitable for this site, especially when studying alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT I may have inadvertently rewritten this question, which I just spotted: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1355/how-do-i-learn-x-knowing-y-and-other-user-specific-type-questions&quot;&gt;Knowing X, how do I get to Y&lt;/a&gt; and if so, my apologies,  if the above is a duplicate END EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user81619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user81619" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T16:08:39.373" Title="Is a schematic type question acceptable on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7198" CreationDate="2015-11-05T14:03:26.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, you'd be asking for a visual outline of the concepts you'd need to study to get from what you now understand (e.g. QFT Lagrangians), to what you want to understand (e.g. weak force), showing the connections between those concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have an explicit rule about this, as far as I know, but I suspect people would consider it off topic. This is how we've treated other questions about educational prerequisites that have come up in the past. But you can certainly post the question and see what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason to frown on this sort of question is that questions and answers should be searchable. Text is searchable; images are not. So a question that absolutely needs to be answered with an image is not really well suited for this site. That's not a major issue, though, because an equivalent answer that presents an image and describes its contents in text would be just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also point out one thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just wonder, as this site is intended mainly for full time students in regular education courses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually that's not quite true. The site is &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; for researchers and students. It's just that there are a lot more students than researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T14:03:26.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T20:21:49.777" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many questions which come up again and again, virtually every day, trying to propose an alternative explanation for a well-established principle.  I think it would be very useful to keep a list of best-explanations for why the established principle is the established principle, for quick reference (and when marking things as duplicates).  &lt;strong&gt;Here are some of the common issues and best responses (&lt;em&gt;in my opinion&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;.  I hope that this question will open discussions about what other common duplicate questions are, and what the best answers are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Galaxies are moving away from each other because of the expansion of space&lt;/strong&gt; (and not just because they don't like each other).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/114990/is-it-possible-that-galaxies-redshift-is-caused-by-something-else-than-the-expa&quot;&gt;Is it possible that galaxies&amp;#39; redshift is caused by something else than the expansion of space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38779/why-the-red-shift-of-distant-galaxies-is-considered-to-be-the-effect-of-expandin&quot;&gt;Why the red-shift of distant galaxies is considered to be the effect of expanding spacetime?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/108609/how-does-measuring-redshift-make-us-conclude-that-rate-universe-expansion-is-acc&quot;&gt;How does measuring redshift make us conclude that rate universe expansion is accelerating?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Galaxy rotation curves and 'missing mass' are Dark Matter&lt;/strong&gt; (and not because MOND / dyson spheres / really really really dark normal matter).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1008/why-isnt-dark-matter-just-matter&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t dark matter just ordinary matter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26778/how-do-we-know-dark-matter-is-non-baryonic/26779#26779&quot;&gt;How do we know Dark Matter is non baryonic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5762/does-mond-make-good-predictions&quot;&gt;Does MOND make good predictions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6561/are-modified-theories-of-gravity-credible&quot;&gt;Are modified theories of gravity credible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/123661/do-alternate-theories-for-dark-matter-like-mond-explain-its-effect-on-gravitat&quot;&gt;Do alternate theories for Dark Matter (like MOND) explain its effect on gravitational lensing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The speed of light is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; a constant, from all reference frames&lt;/strong&gt; (even if you attach rockets to your rockets, in opposite direction of other rockets attached to the aether)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2230/why-and-how-is-the-speed-of-light-in-vacuum-constant-i-e-independent-of-refer&quot;&gt;Why and how is the speed of light in vacuum constant, i.e., independent of reference frame?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity#Constancy_of_the_speed_of_light&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: Tests of Special Relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You cannot measure both position and momentum exactly&lt;/strong&gt; (no matter how good you are at tennis).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24068/isnt-the-uncertainty-principle-just-non-fundamental-limitations-in-our-current&quot;&gt;Isn't the uncertainty principles just a technological limitation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The double slit experiment cannot be explained by classical physics&lt;/strong&gt; (despite whatever interesting thing happening on your fishing trip last weekend).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8521" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T00:45:55.987" Title="Standard answers to &quot;why can't ____ be explained by ____ instead?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-11-09T09:07:14.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7196" CreationDate="2015-11-06T14:23:30.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Single cases and anectodal evidence are tricky bases to work with here. We notice the ugly suggested edits, but who's to say that there isn't a large body of reasonable suggested edits by drive-by anonymous users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sort this out, I've written two SEDE queries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/386363/suggested-edits-by-anonymous-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested edits by anonymous users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/386364/suggested-edits-by-registered-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested edits by registered users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious observation is that anonymous edits do have a much higher rejection rate than edit suggestions from registered users - 56% approved for anonymous suggestions vs. 87% for registered users, over the latest 500 edits of each. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are also much less common: as &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/386316/frequency-of-anonymous-suggested-edits?NumberOfEdits=5000#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequency of anonymous suggested edits&lt;/a&gt; shows, about one every 10 suggested edits in the entire site history is an anonymous suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that overall this is an acceptable state of affairs, and that the ~45% of bad apples in the anonymous-suggestions apple cart is well handled by the combination of a review queue and a notification for the OP. The thing to do is for people to dig into the actual edit suggestions by anonymous users and form an opinion on whether they're generally salvageable or mostly just rubbish that occasionally passes the bar, and whether there are hidden gems in there that make the whole pile worth it. (I'll leave that bit to others - writing SQL is more fun than looking at a hundred edit reviews.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also note that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/104598&quot;&gt;this particular case&lt;/a&gt; the problem is not the fact that the suggested edit was bad, but that the review was bad: this was one bad edit that might have got through the review queue when it shouldn't. (It's speculation whether someone else would've let it through had anna not intervened. I tend to think it wouldn't, with other reviewers stepping in and the review queue working like it should, but it's a moot question now.) This particular bad edit happened to come from an anonymous user, but I think it's a red herring unless one can rule out the existence of similar bad-edits-that-slipped-the-net from registered users. Unfortunately those are really hard to find, and getting reliable statistics will be even harder. However, I don't see why the review queue should function less well for anonymous suggestions than for registered-user ones - if anything, the anonymous source ought to make reviewers more wary of the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make this decision based on the actual overall quality of the edit submissions we get, rather than anecdotal impressions from a few ugly ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T14:29:39.847" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T14:33:03.480" Score="12" ViewCount="555" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already a Physics Overflow. Why then not being more lenient in the Q&amp;amp;A to be accepted in Phys.SE? Mathematics SE has 10 times as many questions. SO leads with +10M questions. Those other sites are thriving yet feel way more welcoming. In contrast, here there are way too many questions put on hold and closed or receiving way too many negative votes, and less activity is seen in discussing a question and its answers. &#xA;When it comes to off-topic/rules questions, I'd say the goal in those other sites is more on &lt;em&gt;limiting&lt;/em&gt; their number than &lt;em&gt;eliminating&lt;/em&gt; them all together, which is what here seems to be the case. Up-voting is enough a system for rising the content level; &quot;censoring&quot; not so much, as there is no record left of the &quot;wrong type&quot; of Q&amp;amp;A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, SO gives one that kind of reassurance that almost any question either has already been answered or one gets an answered pretty soon. Yes, you may get bad answers, but the good ones rise through the number of answers, not so much through the filtering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relates to the question by Anna V. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/566/&quot;&gt;Is the precautionary closing of immature questions so very necessary?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I just saw it's from four years ago. What has been the change in the number of Q&amp;amp;A in PSE since then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of the overwhelming policing:  This question had 3 answers and there was a couple of meaningful comments exchanged. No trolling I could see at least. Yet, 5 hours later it was &quot;protected&quot; to avoid spam, &quot;me too&quot; or &quot;thanks&quot;kind of answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/217126/&quot;&gt;Feynman diagram for attractive forces&lt;/a&gt; You really get those answers that often that deserves this level of patrolling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90882" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T14:32:57.360" Title="Why is Phys.SE so restrictive in the Q&amp;A it is willing to accept?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7202" CreationDate="2015-11-07T14:43:42.707" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the same reason we weren't a homework help site before Physics Overflow was a thing: &lt;em&gt;because we don't want to be that kind of site&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user base of this site have debated the places that introductory exercises have in this site repeatedly since anna v's question that you link and the current policy is the outcome of those debates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the more prominent instances of that debate (in most-recent first order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy?lq=1&quot;&gt;Should we rename the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6631/homework-the-view-from-the-chat-session?lq=1&quot;&gt;Homework - the view from the chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic?lq=1&quot;&gt;Should any check-my-work questions be made on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework&quot;&gt;Bite-sizing homework&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question?lq=1&quot;&gt;What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether?lq=1&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t we just ban homework altogether?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4977/should-we-rename-the-homework-tag-as-problem-solving-or-such?lq=1&quot;&gt;Should we rename the homework tag as &amp;quot;problem-solving&amp;quot;, or such?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange?lq=1&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T15:11:39.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7202" CreationDate="2015-11-07T15:36:28.593" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is PSE so restrictive in the Q&amp;amp;A it is willing to accept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like dmckee said, Physics Stack Exchange doesn't want to be a homework help site. Such questions tend to drown out the other stuff and turn the site into the sort of place where non-students don't want to post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why then not being more lenient in the Q&amp;amp;A to be accepted in PSE? Mathematics SE has 10 times as many questions. SO leads with +10M questions. Those other sites are thriving yet feel way more welcoming. In contrast, here there are way too many questions put on hold and closed or receiving way too many negative votes, and less activity is seen in discussing a question and its answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite apart from the homework thing, there are some separate issues here. IMHO there are some &quot;naysayer trolls&quot; who don't seem to contribute much at all. They just hang around sniping and doling out close votes and downvotes. I try to lean on guys like dmckee to do more about it, but it's not always easy to get the balance right, especially when you believe in free speech in science. Personally I don't think votes should be anonymous, and I don't think posters should be anonymous either. But it's not my call.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When it comes to off-topic/rules questions, I'd say the goal in those other sites is more on limiting their number than eliminating them all together, which is what here seems to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe they should be politely relocated a Physics Homework-help Stack Exchange site or something.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up-voting is enough a system for rising the content level; &quot;censoring&quot; not so much, as there is no record left of the &quot;wrong type&quot; of Q&amp;amp;A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's much censoring going on here. Unfortunately the question anna v referred to has been &lt;em&gt;removed from Physics Stack Exchange for reasons of moderation&lt;/em&gt;. But there's not a lot that gets deleted. I've seen nastiness deleted, but not much physics getting deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mind you, SO gives one that kind of reassurance that almost any question either has already been answered or one gets an answered pretty soon. Yes, you may get bad answers, but the good ones rise through the number of answers, not so much through the filtering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmmn. I'd say one of the problems here is that questions have been answered really badly, and the guy who gave the bad answer is very quick to claim that some other question is a duplicate that's already been answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This relates to the question by Anna V. Is the precautionary closing of immature questions so very necessary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say not. I share anna v's view on this.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just saw it's from four years ago. What has been the change in the number of Q&amp;amp;A in PSE since then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know, I've only been around for about 7 months. But I've noticed that there are some professional physicists who don't post here any more. Maybe because of the homework, maybe because of the naysayers. I don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T15:36:28.593" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T19:36:44.717" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us suppose that a user of this site receives an answer to a question of his or hers, but (s)he cannot understand some passages in the proof and, after asking the answerer for clarifications, either the answerer refuses to explain the passages or does not answer after a reasonably long time - say two weeks, for example - has passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is appropriated in such a case to do in order to ask for clarifications? Let us notice that clarifications could benefit not only the asker, but also other people reading the site and having the same difficulties, or even lead to the correction of errors that might well exist in a human made proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be allowed to post a separate question containing only the passages that have not been understood? If it would, how should one word a question asking for such clarifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, does an official Stack Exchange policy exists or can the rules change from a site to another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologise if this question already existed, but, after searching some keywords, I cannot find an answer to this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52028" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T19:55:38.077" Title="Asking to clarify an answer" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7206" CreationDate="2015-11-07T19:55:38.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a comment asking for clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you don't get what you want, try advertising your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't work, put up a bounty. That's what they're for.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to put up a bounty because you don't have enough rep, then that's the rep system doing it's job. You haven't done enough on the site for the site to trust you're judgement about what questions deserve more attention. Go earn more reputation by answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T19:55:38.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7181" CreationDate="2015-11-08T19:15:12.930" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would love to see this kind of website evolve into a new place where research may be published and reviewed. Voters and answerers would be the referees, and their &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; may indicate the strength of their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24774" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T19:15:12.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T21:58:11.480" Score="11" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/215997/26969&quot;&gt;a question about the smallest effect of gravity ever measured&lt;/a&gt;, and posted what I believed to be an interesting answer about the forces in an AFM. When I came back a few hours later, I saw that my answer got a single down-vote, and zero up-votes. Further, some other answers had appeared. Based on the comments that had also appeared (to the question and other answers), I realized that the OP was asking for something altogether different, and deleted my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it bothered me that existing questions were not quite getting the point.  So the following day I wrote a completely new answer. Not a minor edit of the previously deleted one - it was as though I was answering a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me a comment from QMechanic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the future, please edit a downvoted answer rather than deleting and adding a second answer. It may be seen as gaming the reputation system to avoid a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the point of up/downvotes was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I had clearly misinterpreted the intention of the OP, so I deleted the irrelevant answer. Good riddance. Then I set about writing a better one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear others' opinions: does one need to keep a bad answer around? Should you delete the entire body of your answer and write the new one &quot;in place of the old one&quot;? Or is what I did OK - just rip up the old one and start again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you consider this &quot;gaming the system&quot;? I hope I don't sound like I'm whining - I just wanted to calibrate myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nov 1, 20:19 - posted original answer&#xA;Nov 2,  1:41 - deleted answer&#xA;Nov 3,  2:38 - posted new answer&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you're interested, here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/216017/26969&quot;&gt;link to the deleted answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T14:37:48.637" Title="Deleting an answer and posting another one" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7209" CreationDate="2015-11-09T22:12:07.600" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see nothing wrong with deleting an answer and posting another one that is completely unrelated to it. I mean, one can even post multiple answers to the same question if they are unrelated, so deleting one and posting a different approach is not inherently seen as bad by the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you delete an answer and only post a fleshed out version of it anew, I'd say that's questionable, but if your new answer really hasn't much to do with the one you deleted - as I'd argue is the case here - I don't think it should be considered &quot;gaming the system&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T22:12:07.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7209" CreationDate="2015-11-09T23:38:03.220" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, there might be cases, where it is difficult to decide whether a new answer should be considered related or unrelated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Moreover, it is a general principle on SE that moderators should not evaluate the physics content of a post. This should be done by user votes and user reviews. In particular, it should be up to the down voter to decide whether to retract his downvote if it is no longer relevant for the edited answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, to keep the system simple and robust, it is better to not distinguish between related or unrelated answers. Which brings us to the main guideline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the guideline is, that one should edit an answer rather than deleting and creating a second answer in the same thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the chronology plays a role here. It is allowed to post multiple different/unrelated answers. What is frown upon, is, if one first deletes a downvoted answer, only to later post a new answer, be it related or unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case, I posted a comment below a deleted answer of Floris (which was meant only for Floris to see, but can also be viewed by 10k+ users, if they scroll down). I had not read Floris's answer (among other things because I didn't bother to open his link), and hence did not check on beforehand if it was related or not. I should stress, that I at no point had disciplinary action in mind with my comment. It was purely meant as an advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T14:37:48.637" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T14:37:48.637" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T05:10:34.737" Score="4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/217432/why-can-protons-collide/217454?noredirect=1#comment468221_217454&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is not a duplicate of the one quoted , and further more, the one quoted is also called a duplicate . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose as the data base increases this nesting of duplicates will increase, and some thought should be given before assigning duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question under discussion is not talking about &quot;touching&quot; but about the infinity coming from the 1/r  electromagnetic potential&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will flag it for opening because it is a bad picture of the site, sending readers on a random walk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T13:52:28.317" Title="wrong duplicate assignement, and nested duplicates" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7212" CreationDate="2015-11-10T05:20:38.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you have a point. Though I'd say your last line (&quot;...because it is a bad picture of the site, sending readers on a random walk&quot;) is hyperbolic - in the language sense, not the math sense, of course. I don't feel so strongly about it, and in particular not strongly enough to override the community votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do believe the question would be improved if it were edited to explicitly identify apparent duplicates and explain why it's not already covered by them. This is, of course, always recommended any time you think a question has been wrongly marked as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T05:20:38.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T11:22:31.473" Score="11" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1719/should-we-ask-for-tag-warnings&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on the Mathematica SE meta, referencing &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/14237&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on Ask Ubuntu, with a new feature SE is trialling in SO. These are &quot;tag warnings&quot;, which are meant to alert users about things they should be doing in the course of adding tags to their question. Here is a relevant screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AZhJW.png&quot; alt=&quot;tag warning example&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes with a warning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;note that this feature is still experimental&lt;/strong&gt;, so we don't know how well it performs, if at all (and &lt;strong&gt;we might eventually remove it&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they could still be useful, and we could volunteer to field-test it in a non-code SE site. Off the top of my head, this could be a good place for the ugly caps in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tags, which have a steady stream of people that ignore them. It could also be a good place for a gentle nudge towards our homework-and-exercises meta page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think Physics.SE should experiment with this feature, please provide a tag and corresponding warning as an answer (consider including an explanation, too!). Upvote suggestions you agree with, downvote suggestions you disagree with.  If, on the other hand, you think Physics should stay out of this, leave an answer to that effect instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T22:50:13.267" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T07:27:35.150" Title="What tag warnings should we have?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7212" CreationDate="2015-11-10T11:41:30.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never understood nested duplicates. I agree with Anna that it sends a pretty bad picture of the site, and it is completely unnecessary. When voting to close a question A, it is perfectly clear that the proposed duplicate (call it B) is itself a duplicate (of, say, C).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Efhxw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few situations that could cause this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C contains answers that answer the concerns in A. The correct course of action is to mark A as a duplicate of C, directly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B contains answers that address the concerns in A, and the answers to C don't, but those concerns are indeed in the question in C. B and C should probably be merged - this is done by moderator action through a flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B contains answers that address the concerns in A, and those concerns are not relevant to the question in C. B and C are likely to not actually be duplicates, so B should be reopened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no situation where it's advantageous to have a chain of duplicates. Moreover, doing that deprives C of having A on its &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; sidebar, which makes it harder to gauge its importance as a frequently-duplicated question. If the intent is to make B known to the readers of A, it is still in the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; sidebar of C and one can still drop a 'Related: ...' comment on A if really necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, I don't get nested duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T11:41:30.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7212" CreationDate="2015-11-10T13:52:28.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the broader question of duplicates of duplicates, I have occasionally VTC'd a question as a duplicate of a question that was already closed as a duplicate. I've done this when I thought both previous questions added value because they and their answers had different emphases. By voting this way I am recommending the OP will gain value from reading both previous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything wrong with doing this. The argument that it looks bad strikes me as irrelevant. This is a site for professional physicists, where by &lt;em&gt;professional&lt;/em&gt; I mean people who know some physics and are willing to work to learn more. Despite the recent upsurge in questions from well intentioned non-physicsts it is the members who are (and I quote from the tour) &lt;em&gt;active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy&lt;/em&gt; that my activities here are aimed at. Such people won't have any problem following a duplicate chain and indeed might find it entertaining reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dispose of the specific case Anna raises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/217432/why-can-protons-collide&quot;&gt;Why can protons collide?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93600/do-particles-ever-touch-each-other-during-a-collision&quot;&gt;Do particles ever touch each other during a collision?&lt;/a&gt; and closing it as a duplicate &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; justified. However &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93600/do-particles-ever-touch-each-other-during-a-collision&quot;&gt;Do particles ever touch each other during a collision?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is not&lt;/strong&gt; a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23797/what-does-it-mean-for-two-objects-to-touch&quot;&gt;What does it mean for two objects to &amp;quot;touch&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; - I note I made a comment saying as much at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate resolution of this is to leave &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/217432/why-can-protons-collide&quot;&gt;Why can protons collide?&lt;/a&gt; closed, then reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93600/do-particles-ever-touch-each-other-during-a-collision&quot;&gt;Do particles ever touch each other during a collision?&lt;/a&gt; and add an answer explaining what physicists mean by scattering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T13:52:28.317" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T18:33:50.360" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Fabrication (usually referring to MEMS/NEMS&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; technology) is a fundamental part of physics, somehow I feel the physics stack isn't the place for it. The physics stack seems most suitable for discussions pertaining to theoretical and experimental results, and posting a question about fabrication techniques seems slightly out of place to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Is the physics stack a good place for discussing how to fabricate MEMS/NEMS devices or should this be placed in engineering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; MEMS = Micro-ElectroMechanical System and NEMS  = Nano-ElectroMechanical System.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27489" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2015-11-11T02:48:16.917" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T19:39:15.840" Title="Fabrication Discussion - Is Physics the place for it?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7217" CreationDate="2015-11-10T19:41:47.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with any other equipment-related questions they could be on- or off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Probably on-topic if:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question related to the underlying physics of how they work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question related to their direct application as experimental equipment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question related to the construction, characterization, calibration and tuning of one-of-a-kind experimental versions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other cases where a solution is unlikely to come from anyone other than a physicist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Probably off-topic if:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question pertains to engineering of these system in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is related to COTS units applied outside of an experimental setting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question concerns hypothetical impacts on society.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of other cases where there is no obvious reason that a physicist should be involved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;References (most recent first order):&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6135/520&quot;&gt;Experimental Physics &amp;amp; Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5553/520&quot;&gt;What is engineering and what is experimental design?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4535/520&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt; Note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2948/520&quot;&gt;Should “How do I solve this experimental problem?” questions be on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1132/520&quot;&gt;Experimental technology questions: on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T19:39:15.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-12T19:16:12.997" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question basically says it all. I am in the midst of writing a thermodynamics textbook, and there is a question I would like to answer that could be answered by pretty much just copying and pasting the relevant sections of the book. Is this a bad idea? Is it considered copyright infringement if I post here &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; and then later on include the same text in the published book? If it's not a problem, would I need to include copyright information in the book that references my answer and Physics.SE and such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83835" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T13:12:44.080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T13:12:44.080" Title="How does copyright here work if I include some of my own posts basically verbatim in a textbook that will be published?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7219" CreationDate="2015-11-12T20:09:57.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the obligatory disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc. For a commercial project like a textbook (well, if you're planning to sell it), you should probably get a real legal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I think this is a pretty clear case under US law: with one possible exception that I can think of, posting something here has no effect on your ability to put that same content in a textbook you write, or to syndicate it to a blog, post it on social media, or so on. This is because, when you post content on a Stack Exchange site, you retain ownership of the copyright on that content, and the license you grant to SE to distribute it is &lt;em&gt;nonexclusive&lt;/em&gt;. As the copyright owner, you can continue to copy, distribute, transform, etc. that content in absolutely any way you want. You can also give other people permission to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that SE receives the content under a particular Creative Commons license is ultimately irrelevant. That only affects what Stack Exchange is allowed to do with your content, and what people who get your content from Stack Exchange can do with it. It doesn't affect what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, as the copyright owner, can do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one exception I mentioned is this: &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you are using a commercial publisher for your textbook, they &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; require that the content you submit to them has not been distributed elsewhere, and they &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; additionally require that you grant them an exclusive license to distribute that content. Exclusive, of course, means that they will be the only ones allowed to redistribute it. If you have already submitted the content to Stack Exchange, then obviously it &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; been distributed, and you can't give your publisher an exclusive license to distribute it. So you will have to either negotiate some different terms with them, or find a different publisher. And if you submit content to your publisher and give them an exclusive license to distribute it, you can certainly no longer submit it to SE - at least not as a verbatim copy. (Unless it falls under the fair use exception, which could get complicated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this exception is all just stuff that your publisher might include in the legal agreements you sign with them. It's not part of copyright law itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T20:09:57.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7222" CreationDate="2015-11-12T21:29:47.007" Score="4" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered -&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/217756/how-much-forward-force-is-exerted-by-an-idling-automatic-car/217990?noredirect=1#comment469162_217990&quot;&gt;How much forward force is exerted by an idling automatic car&lt;/a&gt;- but it was closed as too broad.  I dont particularly care either way, and I respect the moderators judgment, but its closure confused me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it is a general question, broad because it does not specify the type of car, engine, transmission, etc. required to arrive at a precise value.  But, &lt;strong&gt;in my opinion, lack of specificity does not invalidate the intent of the physical question asked&lt;/strong&gt;.  It is possible to demonstrate the physics involved; applying reasonable assumptions, a useful answer is possible.  Even fully specified, an exact answer is not possible (without extensive experimental data) or required to provide a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many broad, useful questions without exact answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/215809/is-it-practically-possible-for-a-large-building-to-be-a-faraday-cage&quot;&gt;Is it (practically) possible for a large building to be a Faraday cage?&lt;/a&gt;: Dimensions, materials, and signal strengths are not specified (needed to determine the effective strength).  The physical concept is discussed in relative terms, yet this is undoubtedly a useful answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physical concepts and practical assumptions often provide useful answers to questions that lack specificity.  Unless explicitly stated, we assume collisions act on the centers of mass, etc.  Concepts and approximations are often more useful than mathematical proofs.  How are these factors considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When are questions considered broad enough to be closed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T19:49:52.373" Title="What makes a question too broad?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7221" CreationDate="2015-11-12T22:13:20.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to use the too broad close vote for one of three reasons:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the answer would need to cover a lot of ground &amp;amp; be rather lengthy (e.g., &quot;a book chapter&quot; long) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is too little information in the post to give a meaningful answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the post is looking for a list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I thought there to be not enough information (the answer depends on car type, car size, engine size &amp;amp; power, road conditions, and so on down the line) and voted accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note here, probably simply as an aside, that answers do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; make a question on topic. So when we vote, we're looking at the content of the question itself and judging on that alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, in my opinion, lack of specificity does not invalidate the intent of the physical question asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think your statement here could be used as the basis for eliminating the &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; close reason altogether. Think about it: if someone can fill in values for missing parameters with &quot;whatever sounds reasonable,&quot; then why bother saying that someone needs to narrow their question down? Someone could just &quot;fill in the blanks.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so I reject this notion entirely. A requirement of a minimum level of specificity is absolutely needed to ensure a quality answer to a quality question (though I imagine that minimum level is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; subjective, but that's why we require 5 reviewers). I don't think that was the case for this particular question (though it could probably be improved &amp;amp; reopened), and it seems that I was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/105586&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;agreeing with 4 other people &amp;amp; disagreeing with 1 person&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T22:13:20.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-13T09:35:17.610" Score="11" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently proposed Science Educators, a site where teachers and tutors of any field of science (physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences) can ask questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to join forces with all sciences since Mathematics Educators is not getting sufficient traffic to graduate (currently at 1.5 questions out of 10 per day, which is low since the site is quite old), therefore I considered it unlikely that any of the sites (physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences) could get launched an Educators site on there own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you are interested, please follow the proposal, and create and vote for example questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the old one was closed, here is a new proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/113414/science-educators?referrer=x3vAYCrjklWdzv01y6-b-g2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/113414.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;250&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A site proposal: Science Educators&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81048" LastEditorUserId="81048" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T19:34:28.573" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:34:28.573" Title="Area 51 proposal: Science Educators" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7226" CreationDate="2015-11-13T16:20:35.627" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the questions on the &lt;em&gt;Recently Active&lt;/em&gt; tab which I don't often do (I usually look up the newest questions tab) and found this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aCmtt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aCmtt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I had viewed the question just a few minutes before that and after this so-called modification by the Community, I re-viewed the question and found it exactly the same.&#xA;This is the second time I am seeing this and that is why I want to know what is this modification done by the Community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just to bring an old question into the recently active part or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T17:16:42.097" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T19:50:15.420" Title="Modification by Community to question in Recently active tab" Tags="|discussion|questions|community-user|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7224" CreationDate="2015-11-13T16:31:22.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, exactly, this is an automatized bump of old unanswered questions. The relevant conditions for this to happen are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/48578/263383&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T16:31:22.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7224" CreationDate="2015-11-13T19:50:15.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an overwhelming majority of cases, this is the bump on old unanswered questions that ACuriousMind describes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, though, this can represent actual alterations. This includes edits suggested by anonymous visitors, which are then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19738/who-is-the-community-user&quot;&gt;owned by the Community user&lt;/a&gt;. As a quick way to tell the difference, look on the upper right-hand corner of the page, for the metrics bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Asked   9 Months Ago&#xA;Viewed  116 Times&#xA;Active  Today&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;Today&lt;/code&gt; (or some date) is a hyperlink that will take you to the most recent activity on the thread. If it's a community-user bump, it will send you to the top of the page. If it's an actual edit it will take you there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T19:50:15.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7228" CreationDate="2015-11-14T12:15:02.070" Score="4" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do I have to award the bounty even if the answer does not deserve it and is downvoted? This is in relation to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/205877/&quot;&gt;question of mine&lt;/a&gt; where there is only one and that too downvoted answer..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89965" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T10:02:48.097" Title="Do I have to award the bounty even if the answer does not deserve it and is downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2015-11-14T13:33:48.573" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You never have to award a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose not to manually award a bounty, it may be automatically awarded to an answer, but not if that answer is downvoted. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount. If two or more eligible answers have the same score (i.e., their scores are tied), the oldest answer is awarded the bounty. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case, the bounty will not be automatically awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T13:33:48.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2015-11-15T10:15:04.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Einstein asks, Schrödinger answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T10:15:04.813" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-11-15T10:15:04.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7202" CreationDate="2015-11-15T14:32:57.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I have seen naive but perfectly reasonable questions being downvoted. Presumably the mindset behind that is &quot;Have a downvote dummy - anyone with a basic physics education can answer that&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand Physics.SE seems snobbish, and on the other fairly useless to people like me who want to know specifics at the leading edge of research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T14:32:57.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-11-15T15:12:44.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/92559/science-educators?referrer=kJpAFl8x1jOj1x29D-RukA2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fNOGN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T15:12:44.807" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-11-15T15:12:44.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10702" CreationDate="2015-11-15T15:35:57.983" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that there are many links in comments that don't have link text, therefore hard for me to know if the link is worth to click. For example, this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47581/entropy-and-the-principle-of-least-action#comment470700_47581&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47581/...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are hesitate to click on that, right? You are feeling to wasting time if you click on that, aren't you? So, if possible, please consider to add the title of the link in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use this userscript to shorten the time and effort to do that: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/4905/29559&quot;&gt;Convert share links to markdown [title](url)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T10:34:00.180" Title="Use this userscript when you share a link" Tags="|discussion|comments|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7235" CreationDate="2015-11-15T15:58:12.270" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, the comments in this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/47588/41634&quot;&gt;Entropy and the principle of least action&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original comment sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many issues in this answer. For instance, it confounds the general concept of &quot;entropy&quot; with the approx. macroscopic entropy used in classical thermodynamics. The entropies used in nanothermodynamics, thermodynamics of small systems and in quantum thermodynamics are not defined &quot;at macroscopic scales&quot;... – juanrga Dec 30 '12 at 14:15    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not sure what exact problems you have with my answer. Reading it again, I have used the oportunity to expand it significantly. Let me know in case you believe anything in my answer is incorrect or didactically sub-optimal. – Johannes Dec 30 '12 at 16:51    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As said &quot;there are many&quot; I gave one example in my previous post, which you have ignored. Your edit adds more misunderstandings and false statements. E.g., your recent &quot;the second law of thermodynamics tells us entropy doesn't decrease&quot; is a typical misunderstanding of the second law repeated by anti-evolucionists for instance... – juanrga Dec 31 '12 at 11:59    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's stick to physics and avoid biased views and crackpottery. – Johannes Jan 1 '13 at 9:36  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As they are viewed as biased views and crackpottery, should we delete them? Should I flag them if I meet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T03:23:06.700" Title="Should &quot;biased views and crackpottery&quot; comments be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|scope|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-15T16:31:14.777" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing this there where 64,202 questions according to the figure given on the questions-newest tab. What does this number represent, is it the total number of questions on the website, the total number of unique questions (i.e. so that duplicates aren't included), does it include questions closed or put on hold etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T06:38:23.257" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T06:38:23.257" Title="What does the question count include?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7233" CreationDate="2015-11-16T03:23:06.700" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, in theory, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; comments should be deleted &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;. (Comments are meant to be transient.) But the question is, should such comments be deleted more quickly than others, just because they are considered to express biased or crackpot views? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the principles of good moderation is that the moderators should not be specially trusted to decide whether a comment or answer is &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt;. Any trusted (i.e. high-rep, in most cases) user is equally qualified to make that decision. And accordingly, we shouldn't be using moderation tools to handle posts that are just wrong. We have downvotes (on answers) and the ability to post followup comments for that. These are better ways to handle posts believed to be crackpottery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, comments can be deletable for other reasons. For example, they might not usefully contribute to clarifying their parent post (the question or answer), in which case they are not constructive. They may have been acknowledged by the parent post's author, but the author declines to make any changes in light of the comments, in which case they are obsolete. They might constitute a discussion of something unrelated to the parent post, in which case they are too chatty. Or, it's frequently (not always) the case that accusations of crackpottery are rude, and the comments can be deleted on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T03:23:06.700" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-16T22:24:37.073" Score="28" ViewCount="1065" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am newer to the SE community so forgive any naivete.  I suspect this is a recurring issue, but I regularly come across users whose reputation continually increases despite many incorrect, or incomplete, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/627/pseudo-answers-are-the-enemy&quot;&gt;pseudo answers&lt;/a&gt; (answers that dont contain references, list equations without explanation, a single picture, etc.).    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By observation, this type of poster gains reputation by answering a lot of questions poorly.  In many cases, their answers are not overtly incorrect (deserving downvotes) but seem to target lower quality (homework type) questions, hoping to receive a statistical percentage of upvotes  from incomplete, pseudo answers. I actively downvote incorrect answers when I feel qualified to do so- &lt;strong&gt;While downvotes do discredit these answers, they hardly discredit the poster or deter incomplete, opportunistic answers.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, an [unnamed-user] answered 67 questions in 14 days, earning +27 votes and -25 votes (net +2 votes)- this results in a net +550 reputation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This practice exploits the fact that a single upvote offsets 5 downvotes!  In my opinion, it undermines the system and deflates the reputation of legitimate users.  In other words, (from the perspective of a new user) their answers carry more weight, as reputation should reflect the communities endorsement.  I argue that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their reputation carries authority that misinforms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Opportunistic answers perpetuate low quality questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They might gain authority to 'vote to close', etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this problematic? How is this currently addressed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that the [unnamed-user] was placed on temporary suspension (presumably independently of this Meta post).  In this light, and combined with dissenting opinions of long term users with valued perspective, I am convinced that the current system naturally responds to abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd like to clarify my position regarding the spread of misinformation with respect to reputation and voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem with that is that science is not a democracy. You shouldn't judge an answer by the number of upvotes or downvotes. That's letting other people do your thinking for you, and for all you know they're colluding and gaming the system. You should judge the answer for yourself, and follow up on the evidence and references and explanation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this (and similar) sentiments misstate the larger problem.  Certainly, science is not a democracy!  However, when an OP asks a question (good or bad), they don't know the answer.  Incomplete answers (correct or incorrect), undermine the OP's (and the community's) ability to learn and objectively evaluate the answer.  In effect, incomplete answers place additional weight on the democratic process (via reputation and consensus).  In that sense, they 'misinform' simply because they are not adequately explained.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Similarly, if the OP does not feel qualified to evaluate an answer (often the reason the question was asked), they will likely defer to reputation.  Reputation carries weight, especially for trivial questions with accepted physics: Whose answer would you bet on, @JohnRennie or @OneRepPoint?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might discourage this practice or expose it by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Increase downvote reputation losses by some agreed amount?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introduce a visible statistic (such as Upvotes/Downvotes, Votes/Answer, etc)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negate reputation awarded when a question is closed, etc.(to prevent opportunistic answers and reduce incentives to answer homework like questions)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are large system changes and as @dmckee notes, NOT likely to happen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What changes are possible within Physics.SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T20:48:53.360" Title="Increase weight of downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7236" CreationDate="2015-11-16T22:44:21.780" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This request has a long history &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7322/should-the-weight-of-downvotes-be-increased&quot;&gt;going back to the early days of Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. You'll notice that question is marked as declined. It was actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-pending&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-pending&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-pending&lt;/a&gt; for months before being declined and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/42769/should-the-weight-of-question-upvotes-be-reduced?lq=1&quot;&gt;instead the question up-vote value was reduced to 5&lt;/a&gt; (from the original value of 10 just like answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt the team will be willing to revisit this decision unless we can show that it represents a real problem (i.e. that a significant number of problem users are gaining access to powerful tools). But I sympathize with your desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T03:12:46.360" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7236" CreationDate="2015-11-16T22:58:33.290" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;After about three years participating more or less regularly here, I've seen a number of what one might judge as disreputable users come and go so, on my view, the system is working (in the mean) to discourage such users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like dmckee, I sympathize with your concern but honestly, I'm not aware of any regular contributor here that is concerned with deflation of their reputation by the occasional opportunistic or disreputable user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, I suspect that the greatest concern is with the quality of questions of late rather than the quality of answers.  But that's a different topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T22:58:33.290" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2015-11-17T01:54:35.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/91841/crystallography&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EoUXC.png&quot; alt=&quot;New site for researches interested in structure determination&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95713" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T01:54:35.513" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-11-17T01:54:35.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7236" CreationDate="2015-11-17T10:46:33.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with all the above. However, would a simple rule like the one active on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Physics Overflow&lt;/a&gt; solve (or, at least, limit) the issue? Namely, I refer to the fact of always showing the total amount of up and down votes, instead of summing them up evening out all the contributions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84488" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T10:46:33.660" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-19T07:15:00.570" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I don't know if this question should be asked here (feel free to remove if this doesn't), since this is only regarding the stack exchange app, my main concern is that I cannot view LaTeX on the comments section and the title, I don't know if this is a problem with the android version I have, or compatibility with my phone (which probably isn't) or a bug in the App. Is there anyone else who is facing the same issue? This happens with other communities too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Android version: 4.2.2 (Jellybean)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;App version: 1.0.75 (latest available version for my phone)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cUlng.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;here&amp;#39;s a picture for reference&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that the LaTeX doesn't seem to be parsed in the comments and the title sections, it's taking as plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74688" LastEditorUserId="74688" LastEditDate="2015-11-19T16:04:03.423" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T16:04:03.423" Title="Cannot view LaTeX on the Comments section and the Title in the stack exchange app" Tags="|feature-request|bug|design|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-19T18:32:03.340" Score="44" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a reminder to please be nice with the comments. It seems to me (in a completely statistically unsound survey based on my own impressions) that we're getting a bit snarky with the comments at the the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly concede that we seem to be getting some spectacularly stupid questions recently, but responding to them with snide or snarky comments isn't the best way to deal with them. If you don't want to take the time to politely explain to the OP how their question could be improved then please just downvote, vote to close or vote to delete as your reputation allows, then go and calm down with a nice cup of coffee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-11-24T06:15:58.327" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T06:15:58.327" Title="Be nice with the comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7248" CreationDate="2015-11-20T06:59:12.223" Score="4" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to ask a question, when this warning appeared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For help formulating a clear, useful question, see: How do I ask a&#xA;  good question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity.&#xA;  Title&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked six questions and not a single one of them has scored negative. Should I ignore this warning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user96370" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-11-20T07:07:47.303" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T07:34:40.683" Title="An incomprehensible warning" Tags="|bug|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2015-11-20T07:34:40.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmmm... this is kind of odd. Your posting history stacks up as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One zero-score deleted question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One zero-score deleted-and-closed question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One zero-score migrated question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One positive-score closed/on hold question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One zero-score open question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three upvoted open questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems like a perfectly reasonable set of questions to me. So I would say you should ignore the warning...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...except that this warning is part of an automated system, and not something that can be manually overridden. It indicates that you're getting close to some threshold of an overall question quality score. I don't know the formula for this score, nor the threshold, and I'm a little surprised that your questions come close to it, but regardless, if you do happen to run over the threshold, the fact that it seems strange isn't going to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to keep posting, and don't take the warning as a sign that you're doing anything wrong, but just be a little bit more cautious about your next couple questions. Don't ask &quot;risky&quot; questions; instead, stick to asking things that you're reasonably confident will not get downvoted, and that you won't want to delete later on. Considering that none of your other questions are downvoted, this shouldn't be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T07:34:40.683" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-20T19:31:14.270" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I want to write an answer to the topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7243/be-nice-with-the-comments&quot;&gt;Be nice with the comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that has the address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7243/be-nice-with-the-comments&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I press &amp;quot;log in&amp;quot; the effect is zero. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am redirected to the same link:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pcp9R.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pcp9R.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;without any warning like &amp;quot;you are not allowed to log in&amp;quot; or other explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99158" OwnerDisplayName="pardaillan" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T02:07:33.777" Title="I can not log in &quot;meta.physics.stackexchange&quot;. Why?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2015-11-21T06:55:29.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you edit a comment 100 times during the 5-minute grace period only the final message is generated to the answer-and/or-question owner and to pinged user. No trace remains in the database about previous versions. If you simply delete it and do not replace it, nobody will ever know what you wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you delete a comment after 5 minutes and change its content and/or ping,  the old message is cancelled and the new one remains in the inbox(es), but both versions are recorded in the database. If the 'victim' hasn't opened their mailbox in-between, they will not be aware of the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user96370" LastEditorDisplayName="user96370" LastEditDate="2015-11-21T07:00:46.673" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T07:00:46.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2015-11-21T10:02:48.097" Score="-5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to award the bounty even if the answer does not deserve it and is downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No you don't, but there is a certain &quot;honour&quot; at work here. I've offered a bounty before, and awarded it even though I wasn't happy with the answers. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/191617/can-you-depict-the-electrons-electromagnetic-field&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. As a result people know that they can trust me. If you offer a bounty and then don't award it, next time you won't get one answer, you'll get none.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is in relation to this question of mine where there is only one and that too downvoted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should ask the posters here if they downvoted that answer. And if so, why they didn't offer an answer of their own. Do note that there are some downvoting issues here on physics Stack Exchange, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6754/we-seem-to-be-over-eager-to-downvote&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question. Always remember that physics is not a democracy. Votes don't make a right answer wrong, or vice versa. You should look to the evidence and explanation and references, and ask for elaboration in the comments. Or ask a new question to tease out the issue and get to the underlying problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T10:02:48.097" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-21T12:19:36.133" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the star which appear on the top of each question mean?&#xA;What happens if we click it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T12:19:36.133" Title="what does star which appear on top of question mean?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-11-23T13:59:29.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7258" CreationDate="2015-11-22T17:53:04.513" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to upload an image to support my question from my mobile browser.I cannot see any option to do it. How can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T18:45:13.207" Title="How do I include a picture to a question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7256" CreationDate="2015-11-22T18:45:13.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mobile &lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt; currently lacks an image upload button, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/153551/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the mobile &lt;em&gt;app&lt;/em&gt; has the button, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/191537/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to either use the app, or switch to the desktop version of the site to submit an image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T18:45:13.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7236" CreationDate="2015-11-24T22:17:35.400" Score="-6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am newer to the SE community so forgive any naivete. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; being rather naïve here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suspect this is a recurring issue, but I regularly come across users whose reputation continually increases despite many incorrect, or incomplete, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/627/pseudo-answers-are-the-enemy&quot;&gt;pseudo answers&lt;/a&gt;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest recurring issue is homework questions and naïve questions drowning out &quot;the good stuff&quot;. Another issue is downvoting, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=downvote&quot;&gt;the various threads&lt;/a&gt; including &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6754/we-seem-to-be-over-eager-to-downvote&quot;&gt;we seem to be over-eager to downvote&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By observation, this type of poster gains reputation by answering a lot of questions poorly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of poor answers out there. But if you think an answer is poor, you could provide a better one yourself. It isn't enough just to downvote, particularly if you don't comment either. You've been here for 18 months and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/46774/thenamescross?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;you've only answered 9 questions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I actively downvote when I feel qualified to do so. While downvotes do discredit these answers, they hardly discredit the poster or deter poor, opportunistic answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really need some examples of such poor opportunistic answers, and then we need to pick them apart. Otherwise there's no meat to your argument. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, an [unnamed-user] answered 67 questions in 14 days, earning +27 votes and -25 votes (net +2 votes)- this results in a net +550 reputation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at some of those answers. They might be wonderful, with references to rock-solid physics, and yet they might have a lot of unexplained downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This practice exploits the fact that a single upvote offsets 5 downvotes!  In my opinion, it undermines the system and deflates the reputation of legitimate users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, without supporting evidence your argument has no weight. For all you know those &lt;em&gt;downvotes&lt;/em&gt; are undermining the system.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other words, (from the perspective of a new user) their answers carry more weight, as reputation should reflect the communities endorsement. I argue that:&#xA;  1. Their reputation carries authority that misinforms&#xA;  2. Opportunistic answers perpetuate low quality questions&#xA;  3. They might gain authority to 'vote to close', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, your argument is weightless without evidence. This is a science website, and the science is settled by evidence, not opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I should note that the [unnamed-user] was placed on temporary suspension (presumably independently of this Meta post). In this light, and combined with dissenting opinions of long term users with valued perspective, I am convinced that the current system naturally responds to abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, what's your evidence? Do you know what this user was suspended for? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I think incomplete answers are a detriment to the interests of Physics.SE (the mutual trade of inquiry, dissent, and value, required to build a comprehensive physics knowledge base), I recognize that current mechanisms do filter good questions, answers, and users over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look carefully and you'll perhaps notice that there are expert users who are ex users. The current mechanisms have filtered &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; over time. Luboš Motl is hardly ever here, nor is Ben Crowell or Carl Brannen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That said, I'd like to clarify my position regarding the spread of misinformation with respect to reputation and voting.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The problem with that is that science is not a democracy. You shouldn't judge an answer by the number of upvotes or downvotes. That's letting other people do your thinking for you, and for all you know they're colluding and gaming the system. You should judge the answer for yourself, and follow up on the evidence and references and explanation&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  In my opinion, this (and similar) sentiments misstate the larger problem.  Certainly, science is not a democracy! However, when an OP asks a question (good or bad), they don't know the answer! When an [unnamed-user] provides an incomplete answer (correct or incorrect), they undermine the OP's (future OP's, and the community's) ability to learn and objectively decide if the answer is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no undermining if the answer includes references to peer-reviewed papers and hard scientific evidence. The OP is free to follow up those references to objectively decide if the answer is correct. However there is undermining if the answer receives a slew of downvotes. That will discourage the OP from even looking at the answer. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/220208/76162&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for example. You can follow up on the references to Einstein/Shapiro/etc to check that I'm not talking out of my hat. And yet there's 10 downvotes, with comments from only one downvoter, who has obviously not even read the answer, let alone followed up on the references.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In effect, incomplete answers (incapable of objective scrutiny) place additional weight on the democratic process (via reputation and consensus), unopposed by scientific inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course they do. But here the scientific enquiry is in following up those references and others. Not on simply accepting what somebody else tells you.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We might discourage this practice or expose it by:&#xA;  * Increase downvote reputation losses by some agreed amount?&#xA;  * Introduce a visible statistic (such as Upvotes/Downvotes, Votes/Answer, etc)?&#xA;  * Negate reputation awarded when a question is closed, etc.(to prevent opportunistic answers and reduce incentives to answer homework like questions)?&#xA;  These are large system changes and as dmckee notes, NOT likely to happen.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What changes are possible within Physics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll see. But if you want to call for changes, you really need to support your case with evidence and references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T22:23:54.053" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T22:59:41.383" Score="2" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/220370/animal-species-network&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; a question about some natural network and after about one hour the question came &quot;On Hold&quot;. A similar thing happened &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/81961/what-is-the-difference-between-scale-free-network-and-small-world-network?lq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;There is many physicists that work on this area, such as ecology networks, biology networks, finance networks, and models related to them. &#xA;What is the difference, in terms of being on topic, between questions of interest to physicists who work on a special laser and questions of interest to physicists who work on a special network? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84314" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T14:12:31.733" Title="Network science can be a branch of physics" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7260" CreationDate="2015-11-25T02:08:54.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly positive what these network models are, but it sounds like they are a mathematical tool that can be applied to a wide-range of applications (including the ones you listed, and most likely more). I can't say if it is on topic here because, frankly, I don't know enough about it to judge. I will say in response to your comment, though, that just because something is closest to on-topic here and there is no other site available, doesn't mean that it should be allowed here. It's possible that there are questions that are off-topic on every stack exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to point out (and I wish I could find where I've said it before, but I can't at the moment) that just because a topic is &lt;em&gt;of interest&lt;/em&gt; to physicists doesn't make it on-topic here. Our scope is questions about physics, not questions by physicists... if a Nobel Prize winner in physics posts a question here about the best apple pie recipe because he/she is interested in cooking, it doesn't mean that it is on-topic. So the focus needs to be on the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; and not just a question a practitioner of physics might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding something that seems to have such a broad range of applications, perhaps my suggestion is best revealed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/435/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this xkcd comic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dqxk9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dqxk9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, one could argue that all science is a subset of physics. But physics can be thought of as a subset of math. So perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;math.SE&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathoverflow.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;math overflow&lt;/a&gt; could be better fits, even if you are looking at a physical application? I can't say with any certainty because I don't participate there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, if you are looking for numerical approaches to these models, &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;scicomp.SE&lt;/a&gt; would work. But... I don't know, I don't personally get my hopes up about things there. Our running joke in chat&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=13923981#13923981&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=13959297#13959297&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=13934821#13934821&quot;&gt;[3]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=13934852#13934852&quot;&gt;[4]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=25553945#25553945&quot;&gt;[5]&lt;/a&gt; is that unless your question can be answered by &amp;quot;Use petsc,&amp;quot; it won't get answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T13:12:54.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7260" CreationDate="2015-11-25T14:12:31.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;tpg2114 makes a good argument on why things used by physicists isn't necessarily physics, so I'm not going to dive in that, but I wanted to put in my perspective on voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was originally hesitant about closing the question because network theory &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; part of statistical mechanics &amp;amp; is studied by physicists. I decided to look up some information about the use of network theory and animal social behaviors (bored while waiting for compiling at work) and posted my findings in two comments on the first link by OP (replicated here in case of deletion and to prevent needing to leave the page):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will admit that, despite networks being studied by physicists, this doesn't really seem to be physics. Google led me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8841.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book by Croft et al &lt;em&gt;Exploring Animal Social Networks&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that may be of interest.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/220370/animal-species-network#comment475013_220370&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6074&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this arxiv preprint&lt;/a&gt; (which is categorized more on social side than physics).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/220370/animal-species-network#comment475014_220370&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book description in the first comment I made says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...a practical guide for researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students in ecology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and zoology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the preprint I linked in the second comment was categorized as &lt;em&gt;Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)&lt;/em&gt;, the q-bio being &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/list/q-bio/recent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;quantitative biology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So because neither of these two sources of information were categorized as physics (or some sub-category thereof), I voted to close. It is possible that &lt;a href=&quot;http://biology.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Biology SE&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; take this question because of the categorizations of the two resources above, but I am not sure as I'm not active on that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T14:12:31.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-26T16:13:11.577" Score="10" ViewCount="511" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/218658/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; closed because it was, strictly, a maths difficulty.  It occurred during my reading of a physics text named in the question.  Admittedly, it was not a profound question, and I did demonstrate my effort to understand the statement, but was self-dissatisfied because my method was tedious though correct.  I thought I ought have seen the answer more quickly. A reader gave me the quick method I sought, and I was pleased.  Then, another reader with a high reputation commented that my question had no physical content, and closed it. I did not mind the closing of the question, but I thought the criticism was legalistic. If a reader of a stated physics text finds a maths difficulty and is discouraged from using your site, then you are not being helpful nor encouraging, in my opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user97621" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T15:49:18.463" Title="Questions with strictly no physics content" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7263" CreationDate="2015-11-26T18:23:33.533" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed due to five close votes by site members, not by anyone in an official role, so the closure doesn't reflect any official site policy but just some of the site members' personal views. Those five people didn't include me, and indeed I would have left the question open were I asked (mainly because I didn't understand it :-). I note the question has a &lt;em&gt;reopen&lt;/em&gt; vote, though since you have your answer it's not obvious that reopening the question would achieve anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be wary of attaching any great significance to the closure of your question. We get so many homework questions that we are sometimes a bit trigger happy when it comes to clicking the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; button. Sometimes mistakes are made and we close a question that should have been left open, and sometimes we fail to close a question that really should be closed. Such failings are an inevitable result of the democratic nature of the site, but I think the site works pretty well most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-11-27T15:49:18.463" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T15:49:18.463" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7268" CreationDate="2015-12-02T06:55:42.280" Score="11" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Baez's old web site has disappeared, presumably since he's no longer associated with the university whose server they were on. In particular his page on the relativistic rocket equations is gone, and that was a useful article for gathering all the equations together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of asking the question &lt;em&gt;What are the equations describing the motion of a relativistic rocket?&lt;/em&gt; and posting a tidied up summary of the article as an answer. That way we have a copy in perpetuity (or until the SE goes bust :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we aren't a blog and our mission isn't to save every physics blog that disappears, so I thought I'd check here before posting. If you want to check what I'm talking about a cached copy of the page is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ratsauce.co.uk/rr.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;temporarily available here&lt;/a&gt;. I'd probably omit all the stuff about the fuel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions please - shall I go ahead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Later:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, it appears the article has not been deleted but &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;has just been moved to this address&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks to John Duffield for pointing out its new location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Panic over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2015-12-02T16:01:55.980" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T16:01:55.980" Title="A canonical relativistic rocket question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7266" CreationDate="2015-12-02T08:34:14.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds perfectly valid to me - of course, with the standard advice about making sure it is actually a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. I don't think this should be too hard in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, Baez's page wasn't a blog either. Not that that has much to do with anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T08:34:14.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7266" CreationDate="2015-12-02T14:11:56.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can't do any harm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm rather in the dark. I'm at work, I can't view the cached ratsauce page, it's classified as &quot;personal sites&quot;. And I don't know what old web site you're referring to. There's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's a relativistic rocket page which used to be this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now it's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only that was written my Phil Gibbs and amended by Don Koks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T14:11:56.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7271" CreationDate="2015-12-03T03:03:34.477" Score="15" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/145110/how-can-a-black-hole-reduce-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; some time back. What I intended to know was understood perfectly by the person who has answered it. Since then, the question has been viewed a thousand times earning me a 'popular' badge. It shows that lot of people had that question in mind. Surprisingly, I have only one up vote for my question but that is the least of my concern. I feel 'closing' this and similar questions based on some technicality will stop people from asking curious questions. Curiosity is the mother of physics. Let us encourage it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25568" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T14:09:48.397" Title="Why more than a thousand views for my 'closed' question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-03T08:05:17.747" Score="7" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my brief study of quantum mechanics I have found that math done using operators typically breaks from traditional mathematics. Almost certainly between linear algebra and probably something else there is plenty of mathematics to accurately sum up operators. That being said, does it make sense to ask questions about the math of operators on math stackexchange when the math is describing entirely physical systems? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if you have the operators A and B that both correspond to observables and you have a question on a bit of math involving them, doesn't it make more sense here where you can simply say that you are doing quantum and one immediately understands how to work with the operators? If you asked in math you would have to 1) be able to appropriately tag your question under the relevant fields of math (who knows what they are) and 2) have to explain very well the background to where the math was coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, sometimes things such as the canonical commutation relation throw a wrench into the works in a way that mathematicians might not pick up. For example when helping someone from a physics standpoint you would know that problems involving &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt; might lead to having an &lt;strong&gt;i hbar d/dt&lt;/strong&gt; pop out somewhere. Whereas in the math forums you would have to explicately remind people that this is something that exists that they could potentially work with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just seems like most math questions that stem from quantum mechanics are much more relevant on the physics forum than on the math forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63226" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T10:18:32.143" Title="Are math only questions relevant when the math is that of quantum mechanics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7269" CreationDate="2015-12-03T08:15:02.947" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit surprised this got closed as &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;. It's really a duplicate and could have been closed on that basis, though I chose to answer the question because I judged it wanted a less technical answer than the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow I have edited the question in an attempt to make it clearer what is being asked. Jay, please feel free to undo my change if you don't think it fairly represents what you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question has an accepted answer it's debatable what will be achieved by reopening it. However I can see that it's annoying to have your question closed when it's a perfectly good question so I have voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T08:15:02.947" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7270" CreationDate="2015-12-03T09:36:53.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of mathematicians who know physics; in fact mathematical physics is considered (in most countries) a branch of mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In math.SE there is, as in phys.SE, the tag &quot;mathematical-physics&quot; to address questions like the ones you are suggesting. However, to ask a question about operators on math.SE you have to know the mathematical language of operator theory (and functional analysis). Operators are studied in mathematics in many branches: e.g. analysis of PDEs, functional analysis, theory of operator algebras. And the terminology, once you get used to it, is not so far from the one used in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;physically relevant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; pure math questions concerning QM are ok in phys.SE. In addition, I have seen more people from mathematical physics active on phys.SE than math.SE (so you would probably get an answer that has a more physical &quot;taste&quot;, nevertheless being mathematically accurate). On the contrary, a pure mathematical question that is only vaguely related to QM because it talks about operators is more suitable for math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give two concrete examples, I would say that a math question like this is ok for phys.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the sufficient conditions on the classical phase space to uniquely define (up to *-isomorphisms) the algebra of canonical commutation relations? And to have then a unique irreducible representation (up to unitary equivalence)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a question like this is not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does there exist an m-sectorial operator with compact resolvent whose real part has not compact resolvent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50546" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T09:36:53.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-03T13:03:03.663" Score="-4" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most people on this website, who happen to have some &quot;reputation&quot;, don't want to solve homework questions, all they want to do is put questions on hold, because apparently , the questions are &quot;off-topic&quot;, and frankly quite stupid, or so I have read. Which coerces me to question, what is the topic? If one asks the process which a gas undergoes in a thermodynamics questions, under the thermodynamics tag, I suppose one's on point , alright . But instead of answering the question, these reputed members of this community put the question on hold. They instead prefer to solve questions which are way simpler, such as questions regarding simple free-body diagrams,because that stuff is dauntingly hard right? Or instead, they love to talk about physics in a  rather random sense, discussing things much beyond their own scope of understanding. The nature of most of their questions is quite whimsical, and more often than not, the said questions reflect no effort on their part, and yet they are the reputed members of this community, just because they took time to edit grammatical or formatting errors in other posts.The perfect way to support this community, as I seem to perceive it, is to blabber about physics , google some more, and then blabber some more again, redundantly. &#xA;What's the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96278" LastEditorUserId="96278" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T13:09:02.140" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T13:48:18.340" Title="Why run the home-work and exercises tag?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-12-06T13:58:57.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2015-12-03T13:32:14.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Against better judgement, I will engage but with the warning now that I don't really plan on participating in a discussion; I will simply post my answer and move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6107/thoughts-on-meta-post-on-homework-question-handling-and-basic-questions/6108#6108&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt;. We (as in the people who have been around for awhile, and who have discussed and voted on policies, and who participate regularly and enjoy the site) have talked about homework and answering those types of questions. And although there is some dissent, we &lt;em&gt;just don't like doing it and don't consider them to be on-topic&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, that's just not the sandbox we want to play in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your closed question specifically -- and I think somebody left a comment there to this effect -- you didn't even put in the effort to properly type and format the question. You took a picture of your homework and stuck it in there and didn't show any effort/respect for the way the site likes to operate. I can't say that typing it up properly and adding your own diagram and explaining your thought process clearly in a way that isn't just a wall of text would salvage the question. But it would certainly earn a bit more respect, at least for the effort made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, even if it were open, I don't think many people would be interested in answering it. You ask for the name of something and the formula. That's not interesting. It may be helpful to you, may be helpful to somebody later who searches for something similar (another reason to type your question as text -- nobody will be able to search for and find your question as related when it's all in a picture) but it just isn't &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; to name something and move on. We're all volunteers here and we participate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6567/why-do-users-answer-questions&quot;&gt;our own varied reasons&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4551/is-it-true-that-physics-se-gets-bored-often&quot;&gt;when it works for us&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if somebody doesn't see the challenge or fun in answering, it won't get answered. And the challenge/fun may be to educate somebody, or because it is thought provoking, or whatever. But naming a formula to use in a photo of a homework question doesn't strike me as either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T13:32:14.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7273" CreationDate="2015-12-03T13:48:18.340" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of this site can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tour page&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about physics, astronomy and astrophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And like every Stack Exchange site, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;certain policies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in place to ensure that we can deliver the stated goal of the site. It may take some time for you to read through them, but those linked Q&amp;amp;A's are important to understand the purpose of this site &amp;amp; what is &quot;on topic&quot; (though a shorter summary can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;found here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among those, is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;homework policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that you have come across. I urge you to read through it (it's actually well-reasoned, despite your assertions it's not). Simply put, we  do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; want the reputation of being a homework help site. We want to be a site that contains high-quality &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; questions about physics (and no, answering homework questions &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; a concept).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want your homework questions answered by someone else, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391/&quot;&gt;there are plenty of other places online&lt;/a&gt; with that expressed purpose; it just isn't what we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T13:48:18.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7269" CreationDate="2015-12-03T14:09:48.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I present a few counter-points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+views%3A950+closed%3Ayes+duplicate%3Ano&quot;&gt;390 closed questions with &gt;950 views &amp;amp; is closed (but not a dupe)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+score%3A5+closed%3Ayes+duplicate%3Ano&quot;&gt;211 closed questions with &gt;5 votes &amp;amp; is closed (but not a dupe)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put: there is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; correlation between views or votes and topicality. Questions that are ill posed, which your original formulation certainly was, can still acquire rep &amp;amp; views, despite a closed status, which is how you got your badge about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't at all believe we should let the view counts (which can &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; decrease) or votes influence whether a question is on-topic or not. That should be decided by the question itself (and the required 5 voters opinions on the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if your question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; closed, feel free to &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; why it was closed (preferably in a &lt;em&gt;timely&lt;/em&gt; fashion, but 1 year is fine too if you want to wait that long) and how you might make it better to get it reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T14:09:48.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T15:09:34.147" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently put a bounty on this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/155795/kinetic-theory-derivation-of-viscosity-of-a-gas&quot;&gt;Kinetic theory derivation of viscosity of a gas&lt;/a&gt; which is not my own. As such, at the moment to check if someone has answered it I am having to physically go onto that question (instead of just looking at my inbox). I think this is a wider issue, lets say there is a question which has been asked and I am interested to know the answer, if this question has currently no answer, I would have to keep going onto that question to see if an answer has been posted. So is there away to get notifications for other peoples question (perhaps even ones that I have no involvement in what so ever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T02:52:58.517" Title="Getting notifications for other peoples questions?" Tags="|support|feature-request|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7279" CreationDate="2015-12-04T15:14:52.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are RSS feeds for questions, users, and tags. Look at the bottom right hand corner of the page on the full (not mobile) site for links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T15:14:52.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T03:57:50.590" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this too vague?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the physical limitations that I have to keep in mind, when writing about nanobots?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like maximum effective speed, waste heat minimums, computation ability minimums, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I move to Worldbuilding, or does this have enough physics content to count as a Physics question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T04:37:09.190" Title="Is this too vague? : What are the physical limitations that I have to keep in mind, when writing about nanobots?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7281" CreationDate="2015-12-05T04:37:09.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I'd say it's too broad. But more than that, it's not actually about physics, so it's completely off topic for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, given that your concern seems to be &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; about nanobots, rather than building or designing them, Worldbuilding is probably the place to start. You would have to ask them whether they consider it too broad for that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T04:37:09.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T16:14:55.587" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/222357/finding-tension-of-ropes-between-objects-attached-via-pulleys-on-an-inclined-pla&quot;&gt;In the comments to this question&lt;/a&gt; I advised that giving a full answer to a HW&amp;amp;E question is not what we should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question which contains nothing of conceptual value, is clearly a HW question and isn't well formatted, appears eligible for 'close' votes (but I haven't voted to close yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After my advice to the member providing the answer the member then asked for upvotes. &lt;em&gt;Per se&lt;/em&gt; there may be nothing wrong with a bit of self-promotion but is it really acceptable? And what would happen to any upvotes if the question was closed later anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86889" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T17:59:17.377" Title="Soliciting for upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7283" CreationDate="2015-12-05T17:59:17.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Per se&lt;/em&gt; there may be nothing wrong with a bit of self-promotion but is it really acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a one-time thing, it doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone says something like &quot;please upvote this answer&quot; (or worse, &quot;please upvote my answer [link]&quot; posted somewhere else), that is somewhat frowned upon, and if they make a &lt;em&gt;habit&lt;/em&gt; of it, they can expect to get a stern talking-to from the regulars, if not also the mods. On the other hand, &quot;please upvote this answer if you think it's correct and useful&quot; is just a reminder of what we should be doing anyway, so that's fine. Basically, a lot depends on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what would happen to any upvotes if the question was closed later anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing happens to votes when a question is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt;, then under most circumstances the reputation from any votes on that question or its answers will be revoked. The main exception is when a deleted post has been visible for 60 days and had a score of 3 or more at the time of deletion. More &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/56541&quot;&gt;details are on Meta SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T17:59:17.377" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-06T11:10:29.950" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a person opens a particular question more than once, are the &lt;em&gt;views incremented just once or multiple times?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93956" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T11:10:29.950" Title="Views for a question" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-06T14:05:20.023" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/77280/73067&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/77280/73067&lt;/a&gt; but have a follow-up question. Should rather create a new question than asking the author to elaborate more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73067" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T14:14:11.870" Title="Follow-up question, how?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2015-12-06T14:14:11.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should create a new question. It's probably a good idea to include a link to the post that inspired it (but strictly speaking, you don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T14:14:11.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-06T19:28:52.287" Score="3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the standard for the formatting of the titles of posts? What is the standard for editing the titles of posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been away for a while, and when I logged in today I noticed that the title of one of my posts had been edited: &quot;Spin Glass Prince Rupert's Drop&quot; has been changed to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90463/spin-glass-prince-ruperts-drop&quot;&gt;Spin glass Prince Rupert's drop&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this edit and am curious about what the standard for such edits are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I was under the impression that the standard for formatting edits was to clarify and universalize (i.e. break up blocks of text, add wiki links for important concepts, fix spelling or syntactical errors, remove superfluous fluff like &quot;Thanks!&quot; and &quot;I hope this gets answered. :D&quot;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I assumed that the standard formatting for post titles would follow that of most other written works - capitalize nouns, verbs, and other major words but don't capitalize prepositions, conjunctions, or articles unless they are the first word in the title. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.santarosa.edu/~kthornle/30/CapitalizationMLAStyle.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; a little PDF I found from a quick Google search that sums up what I understand to be the standard for title formatting.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just a bit confused about why the title of that post was edited. I do not think that the edit improves clarity - in fact, I think that it makes the title marginally less clear - therefore, the edit should not have been made at all. And, in addition, I think that the edit is incorrect from a stylistic standpoint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the standards for formatting edits and post titles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32185" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T21:11:05.883" Title="Guidelines for Title Formatting" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|formatting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7288" CreationDate="2015-12-07T06:13:59.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The First Law of Editing: if an edit makes your question less clear (to readers, not necessarily just to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;), revert it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, your assumption that post titles follow the capitalization conventions of titles in other works is not correct, because the titles of SE questions are more like summaries, not actual &lt;em&gt;titles&lt;/em&gt; per se. A question post's title should be a single sentence that represents the actual question which is being asked, or at least a phrase that conveys the core of that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept that the proper capitalization is not &quot;Title Case&quot; but &quot;Sentence case&quot;, then the question remains of whether it's worth making an edit to fix title capitalization and nothing else. I tend to agree with the view posted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7086/124&quot;&gt;this answer to another question&lt;/a&gt;, which is that these edits span a range from slightly-too-minor to just-significant-enough, depending on how much of the capitalization needs to be fixed. Specifically, if a title has just one capital letter where there shouldn't be one, that's probably too minor to fix, but if &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the words (with, say, a 5-word title) are capitalized according to the wrong convention, it's probably worth an edit. Our view on minor edits here tends to be that any edit which makes the post better is acceptable, and we only consider edits &quot;too minor&quot; when they don't make any improvement to the post at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not think that the edit improves clarity - in fact, I think that it makes the title marginally less clear - therefore, the edit should not have been made at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This edit was never about clarity, it was about standardization. In any case, I think the position that the edit makes the question &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; clear to a majority of readers is difficult to justify. If this truly is the case - that is, if people will understand the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the title differently because it is missing some capital letters - then by all means the edit should be rolled back, but I don't think that's what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T06:13:59.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-07T18:47:29.967" Score="-4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;The experiments at LUX and Xenon500 have all but ruled out particle form of dark matter. If DM exists in our galaxy and interacts with matter, we would have seen it by now. Also, there have been several studies recently confirming that the Higgs particle found in 2013 is the Standard Model Higgs, which pretty much shuts the door on SUSY (unless we redefine SUSY to be any particle that is just beyond the energy level of our accelerators - which seems to be the fashion). I can theorize that it's purple unicorns that makes objects in galaxies spin faster. Since the probability of a dark matter particle is quickly approaching the probability of purple unicorns, when is it appropriate on this Q&amp;amp;A to ask the question: &lt;strong&gt;What other models would explain our universe?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32023" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T12:26:41.183" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T12:26:41.183" Title="When is it appropriate on Phys.SE to ask the question: What other models would explain our universe?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7290" CreationDate="2015-12-07T19:04:33.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't the Physics Forum, it's Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, you've got two things going on in this question. First, you are presenting evidence to support the claim that dark matter is ruled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The experiments at LUX and Xenon500...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...is quickly approaching the probability of purple unicorns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of that is relevant to this meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing you have going on is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...when is it appropriate on this forum to ask the question: &lt;strong&gt;What other models would explain our universe?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sense that you probably mean it, never. This site is not the place for a comprehensive listing of models that explain anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be reasonable, I think, is to ask what alternatives to a certain model exist &lt;em&gt;within mainstream physics&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, you could ask what competing explanations are being seriously considered and actively researched by the community of scientists in the field. Of course, this requires you to (1) know what you're talking about well enough, and (2) do enough prior research, to establish that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; competing models within mainstream physics. If you ask about alternatives to, say, quantum field theory, it's not going to go over very well. (Actually I'm not sure that's true; it's not my area, but perhaps there are competing models that are actively being researched. But it's about as well established a theory as I can think of at the moment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T19:04:33.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7288" CreationDate="2015-12-08T01:47:27.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a pretty long post, but if you want to just get the gist, you can read the bolded lines and the summary at the end.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I begin, I'll mention that I don't disagree with most of the statements that have been made in this thread or in others; however, I do take issue with some of the more pointed ideas. In this post, I will lay out what I think the standards for title formatting and minor edits ought to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Minor Edits -&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Many edits are objective improvements to a post. For instance, they might correct spelling, grammar, and/or math. However, the sort of edit at issue here falls into the gray area of judgment calls: &quot;Does this edit improve clarity? If so, by how much?&quot; or &quot;Does this edit help the post conform more closely to the expectations of our users?&quot; As a result, we must all use our best judgment when making and reviewing such edits. As David Z points out, we must try to make edits that improve the experience not only for ourselves but for everyone. For this reason, I think that &lt;strong&gt;editorial restraint&lt;/strong&gt; is the most important standard for minor edits. That is to say: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Even if a post might be &lt;em&gt;slightly improved&lt;/em&gt; by my edit I should not make this edit if the post is &lt;em&gt;good enough&lt;/em&gt; already.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither I nor anyone else knows what style or structure is most clear for the majority of users on this site because we are all - each of us - only one person. Therefore, just as we ought to try and put ourselves in others shoes when reviewing whether to keep an edit or not, we should also do that when deciding whether to make an edit in the first place. &lt;strong&gt;It is not our place to make sure that every post on this site is as good as it possibly can be, and even if it were, we have no way of knowing that the small stylistic change we are about to make will improve anyone's experience but our own.&lt;/strong&gt; As a result, we ought to err on the side of the author when deciding whether a post is &quot;good enough already.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Title Formatting -&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;There are two slightly different standards for capitalizing titles at issue here.&lt;/strong&gt; The first represents most written works and other works or art (for which I will follow David Z's lead and refer to it as &quot;Title Case&quot;). The second is a common but not entirely universal standard for titling academic papers (which I'll call &quot;Sentence case&quot;). I contend that &lt;strong&gt;both have a place among post tiles on this site&lt;/strong&gt; and that there is no reason to apply one standard over the other in all circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that a good post title conveys the most important information about the post clearly and in the fewest words possible. Sometimes the best way to do this is with a short phrase consisting mostly of nouns - this way the topic is presented cleanly and directly. Sometimes the best way is to use a short sentence fragment usually starting with a participle (this is a style common among academic papers). And sometimes the best way to do this is to ask the question itself in the title; however, this is often not possible because the topic is either too complicated or not understood well-enough by the questioner to allow for this. &lt;strong&gt;The first type of title benefits from &quot;Title Case&quot; while the second two make more sense using &quot;Sentence case.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's address this specific example. &quot;Spin Glass Prince Rupert's Drop&quot; is a newly coined phrase that is the combination of two existing phrases: &quot;spin glass&quot; and &quot;Prince Rupert's drop.&quot; Each word in this new phrase is equally important, and de-emphasizing any of them muddles its meaning. Of course I can only speak for myself, but when reading titles I tend to skim. I read all of the words but really only pay attention to the most important words, and I take my cues on what is important from the capitalization of the title. This is because I have an expectation that the author will both make sense with his words and convey meaningful information to me. I largely ignore lower-case words as essential to the &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; of the title but not to the title's &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore, changing the title to &quot;Spin glass Prince Rupert's drop&quot; is a detriment to the reader because he will instinctively take the title's meaning from &quot;Spin Prince Rupert's&quot; and be forced to focus more closely or read the title again to avoid missing a significant portion of the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I re-emphasize that this is only a marginal decrease in clarity. &lt;strong&gt;The title works either way, but it is for precisely that reason that it should not have been changed.&lt;/strong&gt; Editorial restraint ought to be the standard for edits of this sort, and this edit demonstrates anything but.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3) The Uses of Different Titles -&lt;/strong&gt; As I mentioned earlier, I think that both capitalization conventions have their place. &quot;Title Case&quot; is good for short titles that are conveying a large amount of meaning in a small space, while &quot;Sentence case&quot; is much more suitable to longer titles that are expressing more nuanced ideas. It would be silly to use &quot;Title Case&quot; in a question or a long sentence fragment because it would muddle the readers ability to parse the sentence's meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the title &quot;Finding the electric field outside of a uniformly charged sphere&quot; is vastly superior to &quot;Electric Field outside of a Uniformly Charged Sphere&quot; and slightly better than &quot;How do I find the electric field outside of a uniformly charged sphere?&quot; My reasoning is that the first title emphasizes the fact that the question is about computation while including the necessary information about what the computation will address. On the other hand, the second title is not only exhausting to read it is also vague - &quot;What about the electric field?&quot; the reader is forced to ask. Finally, the question form of that title is pretty good, but it is unnecessarily long and buries all of the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a result, each of these types of titles is good for different sorts of questions.&lt;/strong&gt; Short, &quot;Title Case&quot; titles are good for analogical or existential questions and toy problems. Sentence fragment titles are good for computational problems and problem solving. Question titles are good for succinct, direct questions (like, &quot;What causes a double rainbow?&quot; or &quot;Is there a hottest possible temperature?&quot;). But of course, this is just my opinion and other people might disagree with me. Someone might title a question &quot;The Formation of Double Rainbows,&quot; and I probably wouldn't feel the need to edit it despite the fact that I think that it is a sub-optimal title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is for these reasons that I think that the original title of the post in question is still the best. &quot;Spin Glass Prince Rupert's Drop&quot; is short, direct, and puts all of the important information on display. &quot;Spin glass Prince Rupert's drop&quot; is pretty good but obfuscates the important information unnecessarily. And the post's current title &quot;Is there a spin glass version of a Prince Rupert's Drop?&quot; is astoundingly bad because it buries all of the important information and wastes a large number of words to do it. &lt;strong&gt;It is by no means necessary that all posts have a question for their title: this is a site specifically designed for people to ask questions; we know that they are going to ask a question in the post the title just needs to tell us what the question is going to be about.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;strong&gt;there is no pressing need for the title to be the whole post.&lt;/strong&gt; A well-written post will present its question and the motivation for it clearly. Take, for example, the title post of this very thread. It does not follow some of the conventions that have been put forward by other users, but I doubt that most people would find it confusing or unclear. The title clearly states the issue, the first two sentences ask the specific questions, and the final sentence restates those questions in a different way. &lt;strong&gt;Titles are important, but the content and structure of posts are vastly more important.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4) Summary -&lt;/strong&gt; In short, I feel that edits (especially those made by users who do not require approval) should not be made unless its contribution to the post is substantial. Likewise, reverting edits should follow the same rule of thumb. In other words, we should micromanage less and trust the judgment of users more. Additionally, I don't think that there is a compelling reason to enforce &quot;Sentence case&quot; over &quot;Title Case&quot; in post titles since they both have a place and can be used in different circumstances to varying effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32185" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T01:47:27.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7288" CreationDate="2015-12-08T05:48:46.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second, I assumed that the standard formatting for post titles would follow that of most other written works - capitalize nouns, verbs, and other major words but don't capitalize prepositions, conjunctions, or articles unless they are the first word in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is incorrect.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;We discussed titles at length in the meta&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;One of the things the FAQ says is [1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in the title. Do not capitalize other words.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the FAQ tag there, which I believe indicates that the post there and its accepted answer is considered site standard.&#xA;We should follow that standard whether or not we agree with the stylistic choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that the edit is incorrect from a stylistic standpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter; we have a site standard and we should adhere to it.&#xA;Consistency is much more important than choosing the right convention.&#xA;For example, programmers have a variety of opinions on issues such as &lt;code&gt;camelCase&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;lower_case_with_underscores&lt;/code&gt; conventions for variable names.&#xA;Most people agree that the choice doesn't matter nearly as much as consistency within a language or project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm just a bit confused about why the title of that post was edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made that edit.&#xA;I did it because we have a site standard for titles and I think it makes the front page much easier to read if all the titles conform to that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not think that the edit improves clarity - in fact, I think that it makes the title marginally less clear - therefore, the edit should not have been made at all. And, in addition, I think that the edit is incorrect from a stylistic standpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As DavidZ already pointed out, that edit was not about clarity, it was about conforming to site standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Note that although I wrote both the question and answer, it was edited in accordance with the input from other users. I'm not just promoting my own opinion here. In fact, &lt;strong&gt;the part about not capitalizing all words in titles was not written by me&lt;/strong&gt;. Also, I do not have the ability to put the FAQ tag on meta posts, so someone else with way more power than I decided to make that Q&amp;amp;A the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T21:11:05.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7288" CreationDate="2015-12-08T07:29:44.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number one priority for the site is that we have members prepared to work at posting good questions and good answers. Right now we have a serious deficit of the former, and while we have lots of people working hard at the latter more are always welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared to this any debates about about capitalisation in titles are utterly trivial. The idea that we would turn away a good contributor to the site because they insisted on a certain capitalisation standard is ludicrous, if not also rather arrogant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like the edit then revert it. The OP always has the last say and the only sanction for site members is to close and/or delete the question - neither of which would be done in this case. Your question makes a net positive contribution to the Physics SE regardless of how you format the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T07:29:44.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7270" CreationDate="2015-12-08T23:37:35.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example if you have the operators A and B that both correspond to observables...If you asked in math you would have to 1) be able to appropriately tag your question under the relevant fields of math (who knows what they are) and 2) have to explain very well the background to where the math was coming from...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you correctly state the question in terms of mathematical objects, mathematicians will understand and will immediately refer to the corresponding areas. In the case at hand I do not see any particular difficulty to address the theory of operators as suggested tag and I do not want to believe that you have to explain where the mathematics comes from; that those are observables in quantum mechanics or mere self-adjoint operators, it makes no difference (that is exactly the entire purpose of using the formalism in physics). For example, the below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question: let A, B be two self-adjoint operators such that [A,B] \subset i1 on their domains of definition. Prove that given any L^2 function on the circle then...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;perfectly addresses any physics question related to the uncertainty principle and similars that can be asked on the mathematics platform. This said, I am nevertheless a strong supporter of keeping the mathematics questions on the physics area because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;despite any personal opinion, mathematics &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; play a prominent role in modern physics, especially in QFT, string theory, quantum gravity and related areas. Most of nowadays research in the aforementioned is mainly carried exploiting mathematics rather than physical ideas (for instance I do not see any physics in the renormalisation procedures in QFT, to say one, but that could as well just be me...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;physicists are, according to me, far better than mathematicians in the area of &lt;em&gt;mathematical physics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(warning, very irrelevant!) those questions are the only ones I answer and understand ;-).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84488" LastEditorUserId="84488" LastEditDate="2015-12-09T10:18:32.143" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T10:18:32.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-10T12:40:54.457" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm completely stumped by this. The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/223313/2&quot;&gt;Enegy Expectation Value&lt;/a&gt; uses the LaTeX command &lt;code&gt;\bk&lt;/code&gt;, which is definitely not a standard LaTeX command. Quite fittingly, it fails to display correctly on the question page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7eMkj.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing this, I clicked on the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; button to fix that LaTeX, but to my great surprise I was met by this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dwOAs.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, in particular, that the &lt;code&gt;\bk&lt;/code&gt;s evaluate as bra-ket pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will go ahead and change this into more standard LaTeX, as there exist devices on which this fails to display correctly, but I'm more interested in why and how on Earth this happened. Evidently the display and edit pages are calling different instances of MathJax, but how come they support different command sets? This strikes me as a bug (the OP here thought it would display correctly and it didn't), for one, but more than fixing it I'm interested in any details of the back end that are responsible for this behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm running Google Chrome 47.0.2526.80 (64-bit) over Ubuntu 14.04.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aha, Sebastian Riese &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/223313/energy-expectation-value#comment481409_223313&quot;&gt;points out&lt;/a&gt; that the responsible line,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\newcommand{\bk}[1]{\left\langle #1 \right\rangle}$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;needs to be at the top of the post for this to work on question display mode. This is definitely the expected behaviour, and I'm confused as to why the edit mode thinks it's OK. Maybe it's running MathJax multiple times over the post, and picking up definitions for the next round? This strikes me as buggy behaviour, to be honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T18:29:49.757" Title="MathJax rendering \bk differently in question display and edit modes" Tags="|support|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7297" CreationDate="2015-12-10T14:34:36.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you first &lt;em&gt;view&lt;/em&gt; the question, the MathJax processor goes through the page rendering math, encountering several instances of &lt;code&gt;\bk&lt;/code&gt; which it doesn't recognize, and renders them as errors, as you'd expect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then it gets to the &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;, which adds &lt;code&gt;\bk&lt;/code&gt; into the list of recognized macros.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then when you go to &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; the post, what happens is that Stack Exchange's Javascript constructs the text box and an empty preview pane and inserts them into the page in place of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then another piece of Javascript runs which interprets the contents of the textbox as Markdown, converts it to HTML, and inserts the resulting HTML into the preview pane.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That script triggers &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; run of the MathJax processor, this time only operating on the contents of the preview pane (i.e. the rendered HTML from the previous step). Since the page hasn't been reloaded, the macro definitions from the original page (before you started editing) are still in effect, and thus the MathJax processor is able to render &lt;code&gt;\bk&lt;/code&gt; to a braket.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to check this, go to a question (or start writing a new question) and define some MathJax macro with &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;, wait for the preview to update, and then remove the &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt; macro from the text of the post and let the preview update again. Your definition should still be in place. (In this example, if you remove the &lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\bk}{...}&lt;/code&gt; and let the preview update, you will still see the &lt;code&gt;\bk&lt;/code&gt;s rendered as brakets. Of course actually &lt;em&gt;submitting&lt;/em&gt; that edit will make them show up as errors.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether to consider this a bug, because it exceeds the scope of where MathJax is meant to be used, namely static pages where the MathJax processor runs &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt;, or at the most, live-update pages where content is added on at the end, not replaced in the middle of the page. But on the other hand, it is undesirable behavior. The fix is &lt;em&gt;conceptually&lt;/em&gt; straightforward; SE would have to adjust their preview function so that any definitions made within the post itself are &quot;sandboxed&quot;, and cleared out each time the preview refreshes. It's probably easier said than done, though I'm not sure how much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T14:34:36.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-12T03:37:02.520" Score="3" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;em&gt;Is it acceptable to notify users who ask &quot;solve this for me&quot; questions of a site built specifically for that purpose?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to do is post a comment on &quot;solve this problem&quot; questions referencing how to get help with homework on PSE the right way, and referencing the site where they may find and are encouraged to ask for a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it could be good for PSE by redirecting those questions from the site, and it would be good for the site by giving it traffic it would not otherwise see. I wanted to ask and make sure before doing so however, because I have built the site and do not believe it would be ethical to promote it here without the permission of the PSE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is some background about the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a physics and computer science major from Indiana that created a website structured a bit like a stack exchange site (Question answer format, votes, comments) with a sole focus on generating and providing solutions to STEM major problems you might find in textbooks or in homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent a lot of time scrounging the web for solutions to problems for a variety of reasons over my year of physics courses and am a believer that seeing it done can be a great way to learn efficiently, check your work on problems without answers in the book, and to find some missing details you may have missed while trying to solve a problem without spending an hour trying to realize you forgot something like cm^2 = 10^-4 =/= 10^-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website is &lt;a href=&quot;http://toughstem.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ToughSTEM.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42618" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T17:58:36.607" Title="Ethics - Redirecting homework solution seeking questions to a website built for that purpose" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7299" CreationDate="2015-12-12T11:40:07.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My observations are that it is actually rare for someone to post more than the copy &amp;amp; paste question &amp;amp; rebuttal that &quot;It's not homework!&quot; or &quot;I just need the answer!&quot; before they leave for good&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event that someone does post more than that, I think leaving a comment containing a link to the Meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where you've already posted a link to your site, would suffice for those users who are really begging for help. A message I've saved on my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Auto-comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (but almost never used) is something along the lines of,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange isn't a homework help site, but if you do want that kind of help, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391&quot;&gt;take a look at this thread&lt;/a&gt; for a list of free online homework help resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As an aside, I would say that if you constantly promoted &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; your site on HW questions, it probably would end up being flagged as &lt;em&gt;promotional content&lt;/em&gt; which can get the comment deleted and, if you're persistent enough, give you &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;a suspension&lt;/a&gt;. I'm sure you would love traffic to your site, but whether risking a suspension here for that is worth it is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Whether this is a good or bad thing is a different story and I'd rather not derail this question on that.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T13:20:33.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7302" CreationDate="2015-12-12T16:12:33.907" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/155795/kinetic-theory-derivation-of-viscosity-of-a-gas&quot;&gt;Kinetic theory derivation of viscosity of a gas&lt;/a&gt; has an accepted answer. That answer, however, does not contain the amount of detail that I want for a specific part of the question. I have (in the recent past) placed a bounty on the question asking for more detail, however no other answers where forthcoming. I am guessing that if I re-asked the part of the question I require, it would rather quickly be closed as a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any situations where a duplicate is ok, and if so does my above case fall into one of these situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T16:49:12.293" Title="When is asking a duplicate ok?" Tags="|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7301" CreationDate="2015-12-12T16:49:12.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the bounty asking for an extension/explanation of part of the question did not work, I think it should be okay to post a new question on that extensions/explanation you want. &lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt; you will need to frame it in such a way that you specify exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is different from the older one. For example, saying something like,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This other question (link as well) asks why X is possible, but the answer doesn't describe feature Y that I think is partly responsible or otherwise important. Could someone explain if this feature Y performs the function as I expressed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would go a lot further than simply asking the same thing again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T16:49:12.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-13T09:10:08.307" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must have missed something. What is this &quot;cite&quot;  in the same line as &quot;edit&quot; and &quot;close&quot; in a question, and &quot;edit&quot; and &quot;flag&quot; in an answer. Cite what and where?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T09:10:08.307" Title="what is this &quot;cite&quot; in the same line as edit and close" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-12-13T17:07:19.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-14T05:33:09.713" Score="7" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want your opinions on how useful it is to throw second quantization at students when they have not understood first quantization. I tend to add a simpler answer when I see this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the emphasis on second quantization and statements of the type &quot;all space is filled with electron fields /particle fields etc&quot;  instead of &quot;one can describe mathematically that the ground state of the electron wave function  covers all space&quot; gives a false &quot;aether type&quot; impression . False because if there is no electron at (x,y,z,t) the ground state gives zero probability of finding one, and the impression given is that there exists something there except zero. It is a similar conceptual problem as with virtual versus real. Creating this aether of all  fields  in mathematics does not mean a real physical existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can fit the shape of my computer with a Fourier series expansion or another complete mathematical series expansion from here to infinity. This does not mean that part of my computer is at infinity. It makes mathematics as a reality, which is not the current physics point of view imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T06:00:13.077" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T13:50:55.600" Title="second quantization and elementary questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7304" CreationDate="2015-12-14T11:22:00.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to answers to questions on this site, I think that as long as the answer addresses the concerns of the OP, it is okay to use language &amp;amp; mathematics beyond their ken. You probably won't get terribly many upvotes or accepted answers doing that, but I don't think that's a bad thing&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the answers we post here aren't necessarily for the actual OP, they're for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;100 people who wonder the same question at another point in time&lt;/a&gt; (~45 min lecture by SE founder &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/4/joel-spolsky&quot;&gt;Joel Spolsky&lt;/a&gt;; the hypertext phrase is a paraphrase of something he says in the video). So your answer, while likely advanced for the OP, could actually be beneficial to someone else at another point in time, which is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 I mean that, since reputation isn't really useful outside of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;some privileges&lt;/a&gt;, not gaining more doesn't do anything bad.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T11:22:00.877" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7304" CreationDate="2015-12-16T13:45:01.457" Score="-7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want your opinions on how useful it is to throw second quantization at students when they have not understood first quantization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that it might not be very useful, but you do need to give a correct answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tend to add a simpler answer when I see this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's understandable. If it's a simpler version of the correct answer who could possibly object? I think the issue comes if you start getting sucked into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;lies to children&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also the emphasis on second quantization and statements of the type &quot;all space is filled with electron fields/particle fields etc&quot; instead of &quot;one can describe mathematically that the ground state of the electron wave function covers all space&quot; gives a false &quot;aether type&quot; impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't false. Einstein talked of space as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;aether of general relativity&lt;/a&gt;, check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/find/grp_physics/1/ti:+aether/0/1/0/all/0/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the arXiv&lt;/a&gt;, and see what Robert B Laughlin said &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories#Quantum_vacuum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; about quantum vacuum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;False because if there is no electron at (x,y,z,t) the ground state gives zero probability of finding one, and the impression given is that there exists something there except zero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something there. Space is not nothing. What's false is the notion that the electron is a point particle located at (x,y,z,t). It just doesn't match the hard scientific evidence of electron diffraction etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a similar conceptual problem as with virtual versus real. Creating this aether of all fields in mathematics does not mean a real physical existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But space exists, gravitational fields exist, electromagnetic fields exist, and so on. It doesn't mean to say that electric fields and magnetic fields exist as separate unrelated things. Or that photon fields and electron fields and gluon fields etc all exist as separate unrelated things. But something exists. See Einstein talking about electromagnetic and gravitational fields &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rain.org/~karpeles/einsteindis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in 1929&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;It can, however, scarcely be imagined that empty space has conditions or states of two essentially different kinds&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. According to Einstein, a field is a state of space. And how many states of space are there where an electron is? &lt;em&gt;One&lt;/em&gt;. IMHO little things like this are the key to unification, and the multiple fields of QFT are pulling in the wrong direction.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One can fit the shape of my computer with a Fourier series expansion or another complete mathematical series expansion from here to infinity. This does not mean that part of my computer is at infinity. It makes mathematics as a reality, which is not the current physics point of view imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO some people elevate mathematics above reality, and don't pay enough attention to the scientific evidence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="76162" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T13:50:55.600" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T13:50:55.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7299" CreationDate="2015-12-18T06:41:06.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that for the occasional homework question if it remains without some hints in the answers or has no answers, it would be OK to refer to another site. The policy for homework here is that the site will help if effort is shown, but not to the point of solving the problem for them. But I am afraid adding your site for each homework tag will not be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem for me too, the referencing to another site, because comments of mine have been deleted when referencing a theoretical site where I know many high level theorists are involved. I try to do that when after some time there are no answers or adequate answers, as it is a pity not to point out somebody to a resource that exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T06:41:06.910" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7313" CreationDate="2015-12-18T06:45:39.523" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39216/why-are-we-talking-about-space-curvature-as-if-we-know-what-space-is&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;  there are eleven downvotes. I know from downvotes I have gotten that each downvote subtracts 2 points. 2x11=22 should be deleted. The user has a remainder of 8. How is this possible? Even if he/she came with the dowry of 100 from another site, still 8 is not what it should be:78 is not 8. Is there another rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T07:31:36.440" Title="How did this member get a reputation of 8 from 4 upvotes and 11 downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7312" CreationDate="2015-12-18T07:00:11.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I look at his reputation log:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12803/thomas-an?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12803/thomas-an?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see reputation-altering events that add up +35 (7 upvotes) and -28 (mostly downvotes, but also a couple &quot;user was removed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add in the +1 for what the user presumably started at, and it makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;rule&quot; you're forgetting is that rep can't go below 1, so when you look at his first day, he started at 1, got 1 upvote (+5) and 6 downvotes.  But the first 4 of those downvotes didn't count against him because rep can't go below 1 and they came before he got any upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that also applies to the -1 showing for a downvote the next day: he only had 2 rep, that downvote only cost him 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7894" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T07:00:11.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T08:02:53.760" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the impression that the Darth Vader hat is the most popular. I can't imagine why, anyone would think that (a) physicists are all sci-fi geeks and (b) there's a new Star Wars film out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, is there a way to find the numbers of Physics SE members currently wearing each hat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T08:02:53.760" Title="Can we get the hat frequencies?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-19T13:44:58.977" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with this community? Only here, I am experiencing such blunt closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/224413/if-spacetime-is-discrete-what-would-space-expansion-mean&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/224413/if-spacetime-is-discrete-what-would-space-expansion-mean&lt;/a&gt; -- This question has been corrected. Nevertheless, no one seems to bother to reopen it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/224789/implications-of-observable-universe-growing-indefinitely?noredirect=1#comment484877_224789&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/224789/implications-of-observable-universe-growing-indefinitely?noredirect=1#comment484877_224789&lt;/a&gt; -- what is so unclear? How could people answer and comment then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both questions have been upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is wrong now? Did the second question become yet more unclear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions get upvoted. Why not to reopen? What's the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101515" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T16:01:24.240" Title="Unclear remark that my question is unclear" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7315" CreationDate="2015-12-19T14:15:24.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first question (currently) has 2 reopen votes, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/110249&quot;&gt;3 people said to leave it closed&lt;/a&gt;, so it has been removed from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;reopen queue&lt;/a&gt;. It takes 5 people to reopen it (or one mod), so you need 3 more people with the appropriate level of privileges to get it reopened (oftentimes, bringing the post to Meta will result in the &quot;Meta effect&quot; where questions are reopened (deserved or not)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/110410&quot;&gt;I don't think the second question is unclear&lt;/a&gt;, but 5 other people thought so. Though in retrospect, your first part might be considered a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/90024/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As the universe ages, will we see more stars or less?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It might be the second part that is considered unclear, though I'm not sure I'd agree with that and would hope one of the 5 close voters can comment on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that there &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a requirement that anyone comment on a question about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they're voting such a way that they have. It has been my experience that the first close-voter on a question would leave a comment about why they're voting such a way (e.g., &quot;It's not clear to me what you mean by ...&quot; or &quot;We are not a homework help site ...&quot;). I'm not sure why it wasn't done in this case, but, again, it's not a requirement so I &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; am not concerned about the lack of the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I wouldn't put much stock in using votes as a rationale for your post being okay because (a) there is a small contingent of users on this site that give sympathy votes to (somehow) balance out downvotes and (b) even wildly off-topic questions get upvotes &amp;amp; views simply because (interested) users like the question (I discussed this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7269/why-more-than-a-thousand-views-for-my-closed-question/7276#7276&quot;&gt;previously as well&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T14:25:21.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-19T18:43:39.580" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;While most questions/answers seem to be pretty good about including the link to articles (etc) where they take images from, it seems like it might be good to consistently encourage that the original URL be provided along with the included images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8521" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T18:21:05.330" Title="Should we encourage citations/references to included images?" Tags="|discussion|citation|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7318" CreationDate="2015-12-19T21:26:14.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess the implicit question is whether we should actually do this (though it would be better to be explicit); anyway, yes, this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever you include an image from elsewhere on the web in your own posts, link to the original source, and preferably also identify it in the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you see someone else's post which includes an image whose source is not identified, it's a valid edit to update the post with a link and reference to the original source, if you can find it. The only exception is when the poster created the image themselves. There is no need for attribution when using your own image. And when seeing an image in a post (not as part of a quote), our default assumption should be that the image is the poster's own creation, unless there is reason to believe otherwise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above might be considered our own site policy against plagiarism (though if there is a post that makes it official, this is not it). There is also the &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; matter of copyright. As far as copyright goes, content is submitted to SE under the terms of the license identified in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt;, which at the moment is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0&lt;/a&gt;. This license presumably applies to inline images as well as text, so if you include an image from elsewhere on the web, you had better make sure the use is legal just as you would with a block of text. That &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; means that the image itself must be released under the CC-BY-SA or CC-BY license. And in those cases, the license &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the default licensing is &quot;all rights reserved&quot;, meaning that it's not legal to use an image unless you have an explicit statement (e.g. a license) saying that it's okay. In some cases, the fair use exemption in copyright law can sometimes make the use of an image legal despite it not being under a compatible license, but these cases are probably relatively rare on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T18:21:05.330" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T18:21:05.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-20T09:23:56.240" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a computer science student working on information evolution in scientific literature. Recently I found the &lt;code&gt;APS&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.aps.org/datasets/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data-set&lt;/a&gt; which seems to be appropriate for my works. the data-set includes the following journals :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physical Review A: &lt;strong&gt;Atomic,molecular and optics physics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physical Review B: &lt;strong&gt;Condensed Matter and Materials Physics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physical Review C: &lt;strong&gt;Nuclear Physics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physical Review D: &lt;strong&gt;Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physical Review E: &lt;strong&gt;Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the aggregated data of all of them impose a high computational cost so I decided to choose one of them to work. In computer science some fields change very rapidly. Concepts rapidly emerge and vanish and some fields change slowly and the researches are rather classic. I imagine that the Physics should be fairly similar. I want to know which of this fields is more trendy and evolving over the time to show the evolutionary nature of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100841" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T09:23:56.240" Title="Which field of physics is more evoloving and trendy?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-12-20T16:30:29.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T23:15:39.393" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I find my answers to questions? I see no way to search for them or anything I wrote. And, why do I have to even ask this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99926" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T17:46:08.187" Title="How do I find my answers or anything I wrote here?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7322" CreationDate="2015-12-21T23:27:06.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just go to your profile and click on &lt;code&gt;answers&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sohEz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sohEz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T23:27:06.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T01:00:57.783" Score="43" ViewCount="975" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, I know the need to create standards for asking questions.  However, particularly for first time users, the ability to ask questions in a way that this forum expects can be difficult, often due to a lack of language surrounding the topic they are asking about.  As a result, their question gets closed, they get directed to a site that gives generalities about how to ask a good question rather than specific information about how they could improve their specific question, consequently they get discouraged and never return.  Many would then tell anyone that would listen that this site is pointless, problematic or (put your own adjective here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, a couple of times I have been in the middle of answering a question, only to have it closed under me - wasting my time and reducing my willingness to provide further answers.  In these cases, yes the questions were a bit vague, but a little bit of teacher's nous could see the concept, and often the misconception, that the asker was really grappling with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I do understand that there is a tension between attracting experts (whose expertise is in subject matter and often a predilection towards correct science) and attracting teachers (with expertise in pedagogy and understanding the learning process, which is messy at best).  But, surely there should be a way for answers to be allowed for questions that get closed? Or to flag potential answerers that the question will close in x hours?  (Perhaps I am just not familiar enough with the mechanics of this site - correct me if I aren't and these warnings/options do exist.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98364" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T14:12:24.270" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T22:59:54.490" Title="Is over-vigilant monitoring of questions driving people away from the site?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|close-reasons|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-22T01:32:01.643" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following three points combine to contradict your thesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of questions asked per week has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/396632/questions-per-week#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;steadily increasing&lt;/a&gt; for the entire duration of PSE's existence. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of users joining this site has &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/268232/new-users-by-week#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grown rapidly the last year&lt;/a&gt;, but increasing always as well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of questions closed per week has remained &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/277070/number-of-closes-per-week-the-last-year#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fairly steady over the last year&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is zero evidence that current practice of closing &amp;amp; voting questions is somehow bad or damaging this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you are positing that PSE has &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; been over-moderated, over-moderation would necessarily lead to a &lt;em&gt;larger&lt;/em&gt; ratio of questions being closed over time, there is no way around that aspect. Since #3 above shows a fairly static close question count and #1 above shows an increasing question count, then the above three metric strongly suggest that there is no evidence of over-moderation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, note that there are currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3Ayes+duplicate%3Ano&quot;&gt;~5600 questions closed&lt;/a&gt; (and not duplicates), which represents about 8% of the total questions asked&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. For reference, the other sciences (and SO) closed-non-dupe fractions are approximately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;: 6%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://biology.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;: 7%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;: 2%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;: 2%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;: 7%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;: 2%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while we are on the higher end of the spectrum, we are not egregiously overboard as compared to similar sites. I believe that some of the difference is the fact that Math.SE allows homework questions whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;we do not&lt;/a&gt;, preferring conceptual questions instead. Not sure Cross Validated's position on HW questions. I think we're in good company on this aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that most close-voters do leave comments about why they're voting in such a way (e.g., &lt;em&gt;This question doesn't make sense because ...&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Please note that Physics Stack Exchange isn't a homework help site...&lt;/em&gt;). If you pay attention to these as you write your answer (and are under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/view-close-votes&quot;&gt;250 rep limit to see close votes&lt;/a&gt;), then you will probably find yourself wasting less time writing an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, if you think you understand a question that is closed &amp;amp; think it is worth having around, feel free to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit the post to make it better&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; so that we can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reopen it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. We don't really want to be a collection of closed questions (though some think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7181/ultimately-what-will-the-physics-stack-exchange-become-are-there-long-term-goa/7183#7183&quot;&gt;that is the convergence&lt;/a&gt; we're headed towards), it would be far better for this site if questions are answered&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, surely there should be a way for answers to be allowed for questions that get closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering a question that was closed would be totally contrary to the point of placing a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;on hold&lt;/a&gt;. However, as stated above, questions that are improved &lt;em&gt;can and do&lt;/em&gt; become reopened and answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 The high number in recent weeks is due to the fact that downvoted &amp;amp; closed questions tend to be deleted after around a week or two &amp;amp; deleted questions are not detected/counted by the script. The data is uploaded weekly, on Mondays (if I'm not mistaken).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 Of course, there are many more deleted questions, so this number isn't necessarily real, but unless someone can convince me otherwise, it's a useful metric when comparing among other sites.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3 Assuming, of course, that the question in question isn't a (zero-effort) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework question&lt;/a&gt; because we don't actually want those types of questions.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T20:00:33.693" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T04:02:38.440" Score="12" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've raised a question that was put on hold, here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/225316&quot;&gt;Could a falling office tower cause the melting of its iron or steel support structure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to post for discussion the reason the question was put on hold.  I would preface that I don't want to offend anyone, raise defences, bring questions where not welcome, or rattle an apple cart.  I'm not accusing anyone of doing anything wrong, or anything being out of line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I am having trouble understanding the nature of the rejection of the question, and would appreciate understanding the rationale, and I feel like that might be important for the community of users and potential users.  Any insight shall be sincerely appreciated, but this discussion is not intended for my benefit, but for that of the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I asked struck me as a curiosity. The physics were interesting to me so I napkin-speculated as to the answer but I did not feel myself competent to make any reliable conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel – and it initially appeared — that this would be a question appropriate for this site, and I was (and remain) open to whatever conclusion comes from the application of the physics to the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, all I wanted was an answer to a relatively straightforward physics question that was beyond my capabilities – to learn something.  Thanks to the answers posted (but since deleted), I did.  Then the question was put on hold, and comments became what I perceived as speculative yet judgmental and hostile.  This appears to be because the data and curiosity comes from the geopolitical event we call 9/11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain the tangentiality of the relationship: The question I asked was and remains purely hypothetical, a timeless inquiry into the nature of the relations in the physical world; it has never mentioned or implied a relation to any events at all.  That said, I made what was evidently the mistake of commenting on an answer that the reason I was asking was related to a thread on Skeptics.SE.  Shortly thereafter I was accused of using the Physics site as a vehicle for linking to a WTC &quot;controlled explosion&quot; theory, whereupon I deleted my comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, from the Skeptics.SE sister–site here (where I, for what it's worth, enjoy a little reputation), shall summarize its content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/31144/1792&quot;&gt;On 9/11, was Building 7 destroyed in a controlled explosion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That theory in the linked answer on Skeptics.SE is not a conspiracy theory, in any defensible sense, as by definition a conspiracy theory attempts to find blame. The answer linked only indicates that there is evidence yet–unexplained by NIST, and posits an alternative (which alternative could very well be discredited, particularly by physics or engineering expertise).  It is also not a conspiracy theory in the sense that it is readily falsifiable – potentially, it occurred to me, &lt;em&gt;by way of an answer to the question I posted here&lt;/em&gt;.  It also a genetic fallacy to conclude that by being from a so-called conspiracy one must dismiss the question as not being a curiosity of physics.  Nevertheless, in spite of the logical fallacy and being semantically incorrect, the assertion that the question posted here was a conspiracy theory was evidently fatal to the inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that a question about another geopolitical event, like the Challenger disaster, would be perfectly acceptable, or similarly the same question in a different era or different country.  Which makes me wonder, where does the condemnation and taboo come from?  Certainly there are legitimate concerns if the question was unanswerable, vague or speculative, or the questioner argumentative or unwilling to accept answers that dismissed the theory.  However, my question was easily and evidently answerable, and I am (and always remain) completely open to a credible conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern was raised on the comments that the question I posted here would become a conduit for a conspiracy theory, but the Skeptics.SE question is already quite popular, and in any case the link was in a comment to an answer – hardly a prominent exposure.  It was certainly and apparently not the intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leaves me wondering what the governance and purpose of the site is.  The tour says it's meant for asking about explanations of observed phenomenon.  But that seems to not be adequate. There are contemporaneous and forensic observations of melted iron and steel found at the WTC site, and the question was presented as a hypothetical for possible explanations of that observed phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour gives criteria for dismissal, such as being a homework question, outside mainstream physics, based on opinion, lengthy answers, or need for lengthy discussion, but none seem to apply.  While being a homework question may be improper, the site itself states that it generally should not be a problem. So there's no apparent (or given) basis for dismissal, other than its relation to a geopolitical event, even though such dismissal is inconsistent with the values and rules espoused.  Why bother having the rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always struck me that this site could have questions that are beacons of sensibility, expertise, and (dare I say) sanity in contrast with an Internet chock full of unsubstantiated speculation.  I would like to think that this site could discuss and bring illumination about events of importance, and so ideally &quot;conspiratorial-type&quot; questions would be not just permitted but encouraged precisely to debunk conspiratorial wish-wash.  The answers I received were interesting and useful, precisely because.  I wish this could be a place where I could ask more; there are criteria for dismissing bad questions but relation to a geopolitical event is not one — it is arbitrary, capricious, and fragile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should not the criteria for dismissing questions be independent of the origin of the curiosity causing the question and the source for the data?  Is that not the essence of scientific inquiry, the critical distinction that allows intellectual curiosity to overcome rumination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is all to say, dismissing the question I asked for the reasons given feels wrong – I clearly am missing something.  I feel like closing the question necessitates employing things in opposition to ideals I believe are fundamentally good, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Engaging and involving those curious about physics;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;illuminating relevant details about important events that affect lives; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;honouring the rules of the site presented to the public; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linking to and building relationships with other StackExchange sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the site is missing an opportunity for topics where illumination on the Internet is most wanting.  I've always believed those with greater capabilities have a duty to those who do not to share their illumination, and this site could serve as a place for spreading knowledge about physics related to events that affect our lives.  Otherwise, what is the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not trying to start an argument, upset the apple cart, or step into the unwelcome.  I am not blaming or accusing anyone of anything, nor asking that the question be reviewed or re-opened, nor that any theories be reviewed or speculated upon, nor that any changes be made to the site, its governance, or its policies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't need a response or to be part of a discussion, but I feel a discussion should be had because the criteria for closing questions seems to divert from reason and common sense, to include a taboo of things tangentially related to an important geopolitical event, even where such dismissal is contrary to the guidelines the site offers to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about that doesn't sit right with me, and if this site and its community are important to you then this shouldn't sit right with you either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3485" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:37.237" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T20:09:11.473" Title="Questions related to geopolitical events" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-22T04:06:55.630" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, surely there should be a way for answers to be allowed for questions that get closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh goodness no. That defeats the entire point of putting questions on hold (a.k.a. closing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, there is a way, of sorts: edit the question to make it good, and then it gets taken off hold (reopened). That's exactly what we &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to happen, in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or to flag potential answerers that the question will close in x hours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the point of this. The only reason I can think of to notify people in advance that a question is going to be put on hold is so that they can hurry up and post answers before it happens, and again, that makes closing entirely useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, it's not technically possible. You never know if a question is going to accumulate enough close votes to be closed until it actually does; certainly not hours in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T04:06:55.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2015-12-22T05:16:32.053" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tour says it's meant for asking about explanations of observed phenomenon. But that seems to not be adequate.... The tour gives criteria for dismissal, such as being a homework question, outside mainstream physics, based on opinion, lengthy answers, or need for lengthy discussion, but none seem to apply. So there's no apparent (or given) basis for dismissal, other than its relation to a geopolitical event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tour is a brief introduction to the site, not a rulebook. So the argument that there's nothing in the tour that forbids a particular type of question doesn't make it on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are contemporaneous and forensic observations of melted iron and steel found at the WTC site, and the question was about a possible explanation of that observed phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What observed phenomenon? If you were asking whether iron and steel can melt, or what temperature/pressure/etc. it takes for them to do so, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would be a physics question. An exceedingly basic one, sure, and for that reason probably not a good one, but it is at least a physics question. When you extend that to asking whether the conditions for melting existed at the WTC site, that's no longer physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to think that this site could discuss and bring illumination about events of importance, and so ideally &quot;conspiratorial-type&quot; questions would be not just permitted but encouraged precisely to debunk conspiratorial wish-wash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what &lt;a href=&quot;//skeptics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Skeptics&lt;/a&gt; is for. Our purpose is questions about the study of physics. I don't think this is one. If a question happens to refer to politics, conspiracies, whatever, that in itself doesn't make it off topic here, but it does need to be very tightly focused on the underlying physics and not the events or applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, the main reason your question was closed was because it's just asking us to do a calculation, not really asking about an underlying concept. You haven't shown any effort to work through it yourself. Those sorts of questions don't get a good reception here, and they tend get classified as homework-like as per our &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closure didn't have anything to do with the fact that the question is asking about the World Trade Center collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T06:21:29.963" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T06:21:29.963" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T13:15:50.450" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was asking for a &lt;em&gt;clarification&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/225112/&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was not &lt;em&gt;Homework type&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I had &lt;em&gt;worked out a solution&lt;/em&gt; myself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T13:47:30.803" Title="My question was held off by vote for wrong reasons" Tags="|support|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7330" CreationDate="2015-12-22T13:34:49.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/225112/electric-field-at-a-distance-above-one-end-of-a-straight-line-segment-of-a-unifo&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt;, what you actually ask is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...is my answer right? or is there a mistake in the calculation. Kindly discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking whether your answer is right is not on topic here. That's why it was put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you focus your question more on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you think your answer might not be right, that would be a good start toward writing a better question for this site (and perhaps getting it taken off hold).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T13:34:49.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2015-12-22T13:54:23.457" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly, &quot;debunk this crazy theory&quot; is primarily the bailiwick of skeptics.se - but I think that sometimes the wider physics community can be asked to comment on particular aspects of physics, especially when the calculation is not totally obvious. We should be a resource, not a clique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that spirit I answered the question that was originally asked by OP, and which go subsequently closed as &quot;too homework like&quot;, with a bunch of &quot;we don't want no conspiracy theories on our site&quot; comments. I thought the tone of some of those comments did not reflect the openness and civility that I would like to believe are the hallmarks of physics.se - but that's just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was actually the one who, by making an allusion of &quot;historical events&quot;, may have created the association of the WTC7 event that was the subject of a skeptics question, and which OP subsequently linked in a comment, triggering the comment stream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it might not have been the &quot;best&quot; physics question - but it wasn't a terrible one either, and didn't feel like a homework question to me (otherwise I would have tagged it as such with a comment). I feel more and more that there is a lot of shouting at newcomers, at the expense of the over all quality of the site. We were all new on this site at one point - and we stayed because we felt welcome. Let's do unto others as was done unto us - guiding them to the mores of the site with a gentle firmness, not abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T13:54:23.457" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2015-12-22T15:43:13.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was closed officially as &quot;too homework like&quot;.  I don't think it is, at least it was quite paraphrased if it is homework.  I see people wondering about things like this from time to time-obviously there is potential energy in building materials and it takes energy to melt steel.  Which is greater?  Usually, as here, there is a large difference in the energies involved and it helps one get a picture of the world to know which direction the comparison comes out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are crazy theories about geopolitical events, a simple calculation like this will not influence the true believers.  I think we should ignore those and get on with life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3257" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T15:43:13.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7299" CreationDate="2015-12-22T17:58:36.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;the other solution is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may help to move a question to another site with another policy, accepting both homeworks and answers of another kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user46925" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T17:58:36.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-22T18:18:10.520" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of sympathy with your position and I will generally put some effort into trying to interpret questions that are awkwardly phrased. However I think it's reasonable to expect someone asking a question to put as much effort into researching and writing it as they expect us to put in to answering it. As much can be learned from posting a carefully written question as will be learned from the answers to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not, and has never attempted to be, aimed at the Discovery Channel watching masses. It is intended for people who are serious about physics and willing to put effort into learning about it. OK, we all started out knowing no physics and I'm keen to encourage enthusiastic newcomers. But this has to be a two way process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I too have had questions closed while I was writing an answer. Where I thought I could provide a good answer I have reposted the question myself so my answer wasn't lost. An example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136056/how-does-the-hubble-parameter-change-with-the-age-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;How does the Hubble parameter change with the age of the universe?&lt;/a&gt;, which turned out to be reasonably well received. You need to be careful with this strategy, but it's something you should consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2015-12-25T07:19:23.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-25T23:35:23.123" Score="7" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just recently asked a question which got &quot;on hold&quot; because it was unclear. So I read the related meta-posts, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5929/please-dont-close-questions-as-unclear-because-of-bad-english-repair-them-ins&quot;&gt;Please, don&amp;#39;t close questions as unclear because of bad english. Repair them instead&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6982/how-to-fix-unfixable-questions&quot;&gt;How to fix unfixable questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226338/too-quick-with-the-close-button-for-unclear-what-youre-asking/&quot;&gt;Too quick with the Close button for &amp;quot;Unclear what you&amp;#39;re asking&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that my mixed language might give me a bad impression. But I feel my main problem is that the questions I ask, are outside the main interest, and thus mainly not understood correctly by the common readers. (Source of this idea is the many Revival-badges I've had.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an asker, it's pretty annoying to try to balance between short question and complete background question. Especially when these sources are not in English. At &quot;too quick with the close&quot; meta-post there is a comment from Bratschley; &lt;em&gt;&quot;An asker is by definition very likely to be unable to intelligently discuss the specific topic they're asking about&quot;&lt;/em&gt; And I also agree with the choices given there by George Stocker; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;choices are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ignore the question, hoping the user magically figures out there's a&#xA;  problem with their question (or that for the 9K questions we get, we&#xA;  have enough people on hand to actually close the questions that are&#xA;  unclear).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take the most time I can spare to that question to let the&#xA;  user know why I'm closing it, and putting the impetus on them to fix&#xA;  their question&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take more time, edit it for the user, hope they learn&#xA;  something from the experience, and maybe they'll formulate the&#xA;  question better next time with that magical experience of me editing&#xA;  their question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which of those actions has the greatest liklihood of&#xA;  spreading change throughout the userbase and effecting positive&#xA;  change? It's not #1, and #3 will always lose to the masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my point to this Meta-question is to say that actually a lot of the questions in PSE are &lt;em&gt;&quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;&lt;/em&gt;- to me. But this is obviously my own problem, and I still like to read these. And I think this character won't change even if I had 200k reputation.&#xA;This site's name is &quot;exchange&quot;, and the thing we are changing, &quot;my unclear&quot; to your &quot;clear&quot; and vice versa. &#xA;It's just pretty frustrating to have a lot of dialogue to just the get the question open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my proposal for the solution in a form of a question is;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should there be reputation limit, ie. &quot;Established user&quot; which closes out the possibility to close a question by the reason; &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean established users might be &lt;em&gt;magically&lt;/em&gt; able to &lt;em&gt;figure out there's a problem with their question&lt;/em&gt; against the option that they discouraged away by the continuous struggle with some minor issues in the language and/or contest. As I get such an reply's also in &quot;real life&quot;; &quot;&lt;em&gt;Es ist wirklich schwierig, Ihrem Gedankengang zu folgen, und das liegt nicht allein an der Sprache&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Translated: &quot;&lt;em&gt;It's really difficult to follow your thoughts, and it's not only a language problem&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84038" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T16:38:16.917" Title="Can we stop closing questions as &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot; for OPs above certain reputation?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7336" CreationDate="2015-12-26T15:08:50.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite confident that the SE team would not support this, because it adds complexity to the system without really doing anything useful. To show that it would be useful, you'd have to demonstrate that the &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; close reason, when it is applied to posts by high-reputation users,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is so often &lt;em&gt;wrongly&lt;/em&gt; applied that evidently people cannot be trusted to use it properly on high-rep users' posts, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is so rarely &lt;em&gt;correctly&lt;/em&gt; applied that the impact on the site from losing the ability to use this close reason, when it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; warranted, is minimal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't imagine that the data support that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would note that the close reason is meant not just for questions which aren't clear to you (i.e. a single close voter) individually. It's meant for questions which are unclear to the target population of answerers and readers as a whole. This includes questions which can be interpreted to be asking any of several very different things, depending on who's reading them, as well as questions that even experts in the relevant field would consider difficult to understand due to overly complex or nonsensical language. It also includes questions that simply make some statement but don't actually &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T15:08:50.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7336" CreationDate="2015-12-26T16:23:39.690" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing about rep that magically makes some whose first language isn't English suddenly become a master at the language. Nor is there some way rep prevents someone from asking a meaningless question. So, to the titular question, &lt;em&gt;No, there should not be a rep threshold for unclear question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done in cases of unclear questions, &lt;em&gt;regardless of the asker's rep&lt;/em&gt;, is comments asking for clarification (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Why do you think X?&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Your internet translator didn't work, can you more carefully translate this question?&lt;/em&gt;). This is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;points of comments&lt;/a&gt;, so we really shouldn't have &quot;drive by&quot; close votes as unclear. It has been my experience on this site that questions that are voted to close as unclear &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have such comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your most &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/225721/25301&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt;, I commented questioning your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/225721/1&quot;&gt;original statement of the Navier Stokes being wrong&lt;/a&gt; simply because you couldn't find &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; particular simulation or solution. It's not clear to me why you think that it's wrong due to one simulation given the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/60476/&quot;&gt;list of analytic solutions&lt;/a&gt; (not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of accurate simulations employing the NS equations). I felt that you did not attempt to clarify the question in your responses to me such that I would retract my close vote while 4 other people felt that your question was also unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've since amended your question, asking for that single simulations, which I also commented as being &lt;em&gt;too narrow&lt;/em&gt;, in that you're looking for a Yes/No answer: &lt;em&gt;Does X exist?&lt;/em&gt;  These types of questions aren't good fits for this site because the answer (Yes or No) isn't long enough to even be a valid answer; even asking for a link to the simulation would probably cause the answer to be deleted as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;link-only answer&lt;/a&gt;. It would be better for you to formulate your question asking for something that is more than a yes/no or link-only answer (but also within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;boundaries of acceptable&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T16:23:39.690" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7336" CreationDate="2015-12-26T16:38:16.917" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question mostly needs only a single answer, and must be thus clear only for a single answerer. After it's answered it will be also clear for a wider audience. It will never be clear for &quot;readers as a Whole&quot;. If it would, what's the point to even ask?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I recall my first answer to the site; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/159970/is-it-possible-to-generate-one-half-of-a-karman-vortex-street/190285#190285&quot;&gt;Is it possible to generate one half of a Karman Vortex Street?&lt;/a&gt; the answer was voted to be deleted, but it actually answered the question! What else would you have? The question was also only Yes/No-type of question, and it obviously had also some unclearness-problems before it was answered. &#xA;To me the &quot;V1&quot; of this question was as good as the &quot;v4&quot;. I barely note any difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I now look my answer, I easily notice how I could improve this answer. For this you first need to be familiar with the consept. - and have the motivation to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer from my &quot;first day&quot; was this; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55387/can-a-divider-laminarize-turbulent-flow-and-thus-reduce-friction/190295#190295&quot;&gt;Can a divider &amp;quot;laminarize&amp;quot; turbulent flow and thus reduce friction?&lt;/a&gt; It's another Yes/no type of question which obviously wasn't clear if you look the comments. There is also a discussion what is meant with &quot;a divider&quot;. The asker has &gt;10 k reply. At the comments he writes; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So maybe that terminology should be trashed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This points out how established users makes questions where the &quot;unclearness&quot; comes from the terminology problems. But to me it was clear what was asked, and after the answer -I think- it's clear also to others. (and yes, now I could improve also this answer.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am constructive trying to improve the motivation to use this PSE-tool further. This site is about asking and getting answers. If the future looks like I need all the time ask &quot;how to ask&quot;, the motivation to stay around will finally disappear. As according to my life experience my &quot;terminology problems&quot; aren't going to disappear. I would really wish more ignorance rather than a debate from the used terminology. Providing a promise that you will get rid of this &quot;problem&quot; after you are an established user, would motivate to continue. In the real life it might even happen that when the limit is reached the problem has got smaller. But the multiple Meta-posts, ie this;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7324/is-over-vigilant-monitoring-of-questions-driving-people-away-from-the-site?cb=1&quot;&gt;Is over-vigilant monitoring of questions driving people away from the site?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Points out there is a problem, and &lt;strong&gt;this might be a solution for it.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84038" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T16:38:16.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7341" CreationDate="2015-12-26T17:54:15.177" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just got a surge of 100 &quot;zorkmids&quot; on every of my accounts. I don't object, but I can't find any information why that happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102232" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2015-12-27T05:07:08.423" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T05:07:08.423" Title="Why get 100 reputation?" Tags="|discussion|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2015-12-27T17:31:30.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7340" CreationDate="2015-12-26T18:15:40.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are an experienced Stack Exchange network user with 200 or more reputation on at least one site, you will receive a starting +100 reputation bonus to get you past basic new user restrictions. This will happen automatically on all current Stack Exchange sites where you have an account, and on any other Stack Exchange sites at the time you log in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?&lt;/a&gt; in Help Center &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T18:15:40.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-26T19:32:49.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a Stack Exchange problem, not a Physics Stack Exchange problem. I have had many questions closed on me across SE, and for many reasons. It is often discouraging, and after a question is closed, I sometimes can reword it and get it open, but more often I abandon the attempt entirely and turn to a forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not wish to offend anyone. This is not a rant, nor complaining. But to help illustrate the problem, here are some thoughts I have actually had while using various SE sites:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;SE is full of snobs.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Why did I even bother asking here?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Oh yeah, I forgot, I need to spend three hours crafting my question after spending two hours researching it.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;What good is a site with experts if they only answer black and white questions? What about subjective answers from people with years more background than I have?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;SE is more concerned with policing itself than helping people.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every criticism should be avoided, and hurt feelings are part of life. That said, below are some thoughts on how to reduce the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Not all subjective questions are bad.&lt;/strong&gt; This may go against the SE grain, and policing good vs bad subjectives may be too difficult to realistically do. However, I firmly believe that the best questions experts can answer are those that do not have one correct answer. No amount of research on my part could give me the years of physics background others here already have, and therefore the best questions are those that cannot be answered by quoting a textbook. If subjective questions were ever to be allowed, a label such as &quot;subjective&quot; or &quot;opinion based&quot; may be required, but I know I would love to have the opinions of experts here over the musings of random people on forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Tell users why you voted to close their question.&lt;/strong&gt; Often comments are left, but often those comments are too vague. &quot;This question makes no sense&quot; may be very accurate, but it obviously made sense to whoever asked it. Sometimes a question is so confusing there could be no better comment, but often a little explanation of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; doesn't make sense goes a long way to keeping discouragement down. In general, provide as detailed a comment as possible for why you are voting to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b) This shouldn't be mistaken to mean that an adequate explanation need be long. Saying &quot;this isn't a homework site&quot; is probably enough to convey why you voted to close a question. The comment should help the person either rephrase their question, or explain why the question is outside SE's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45605" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T19:32:49.707" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-27T08:07:42.297" Score="8" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why has my question, entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/226032/&quot;&gt;Automobile Air Bags&lt;/a&gt;, been closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This really leaves me baffled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked a conceptual question regarding the question above ,I've shown my efforts to understand it,I've shown what was the particular point in detail which gives me trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hadn't written one only formula just to show that the question was regarding the structure it self of the question. But nothing, it has been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this really disappointing as I find my self to have respected all the rules for asking questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T13:47:59.203" Title="Why has my question been closed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7343" CreationDate="2015-12-27T10:19:02.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't (and didn't) vote to close your question, but I can see why others might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homework and exercises policy is intended to discourage questions that won't enhance your knowledge of physics. The real target is questions where the principles involved are clear but the answer requires a long and tedious calculation. Since no new principles are involved no-one is going to learn anything, and only the person asking the question is likely to be interested enough to read through the calculation. Questions don't actually have to be homework to fall into this category, hence the description &quot;homework &lt;strong&gt;and exercises&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a superficial glance it looks as if your question is about what acceleration is required to stop an object moving with velocity &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; in a distance &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, and this is the sort of thing we'd close. A more careful reading reveals that your question is deeper than this, and it seems to me a perfectly good question that shouldn't have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my guess is that your question was closed because the people who voted to close it didn't read the question properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this is bad, but I'm reluctant to criticise the people involved. We get lots and lots of homework questions and trying to keep up with the flood requires a lot of effort from site members who do it on their own time and for no personal reward. Your post is a bit long and rambling, and I can see why the reviewers may have just skimmed it rather than reading it thoroughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to deal with such miscarriages of justice is to mention them here, as you have done. I have voted to reopen your question, though it will take four more votes before the question is reopened and I note that in any case you do have an answer that you liked enough to accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T10:19:02.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-28T10:24:15.047" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just had a case during review process, where two identical questions, both asked by first time users, appeared in my queue. Yet, I can not flag one as duplicate of the other since neither has an accepted or upvoted answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it would help, if I could flag such a question as duplicate. Particularly, if it's phrased identically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, it would be nice to see identical titles (and question text) pop up in the list of possible duplicates. If I hadn't gotten both right after each other for review, I wouldn't have known about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I flagged the second question for moderator attention. Is there a more elegant solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53062" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T10:24:15.047" Title="How to flag identical question as duplicate if both don't have accepted or upvoted answers?" Tags="|feature-request|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-28T13:08:07.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to be honest here, i haven't been here long and I've only asked two questions, and already both questions have been been put on hold due to them being &quot;Wrong questions&quot; And &quot;Unclear questions&quot; even though the questions themselves I'm sure a highschooler would be able to understand them (Perhaps not answer them) I believe the entire thing needs a re-vamp with more consideration towards new users and how they are shown in the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102101" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T13:08:07.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-28T14:26:55.130" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a matter of using the software intelligently and compassionately. This is a stack exchange problem not just limited to physics. When people get moderator privileges they have the tendency to act very strict by down voting and closing topics liberally. These sort of functions should be used with respect and caution only for the sake of preserving the integrity of the place. One particular annoyance on another stack exchange I frequent is being down voted for a response without a reference, even though my response falls in line of being a well thought conclusion based on common knowledge within that field.  Simply asking for a reference is harmless, but if you're doing so just to put the &lt;em&gt;stamp&lt;/em&gt; of authority on the post as opposed to seeking actual clarification, this is misguided. Just because something is written in a book doesn't make it correct. Even canonical books are known to contain errors, interpolations, and mistranslations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say some moderation is necessary to keep the place clean, but to be honest the only question I have seen that truly deserved to be closed was some guy asking about freezing urine, which by its language came across as more of an attempt to harass people than acquire real knowledge. One person I saw who got closed, was asking for a QFT reference in a manner similar, but not quite addressed by another post. I think providing the links to the other posts addressing it is great, but I think closing and downvoting should definitely be used with more reservation. This person was frustrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it reflects an overall negative quality in the minds of people, who are out to prove each other wrong or incompetent rather than being compassionate and helpful in guiding people to the truth. This is a grey area. There is a lot of good being done here, I am sure. But we can certainly work on being less combative with our key strokes and mouse clicks, and more intentional with conveying actual knowledge and guidance, treating every question and answer with respect where it is due.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101077" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T14:26:55.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-28T17:15:14.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is over-vigilant monitoring of questions driving people away from the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think so. Only I think it isn't just &quot;over-vigilant monitoring&quot; going on. I see good questions closed by the same old names. Or marked as a duplicate by the same old names. Even when the alleged duplicate isn't a duplicate at all, or when the answers to the duplicate are wrong, and have been supplied by the same old names. Who will of course hotly deny there's any problem, even though we can all see that a lot of users are ex-users. And that some of them were expert users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I know the need to create standards for asking questions. However, particularly for first time users, the ability to ask questions in a way that this forum expects can be difficult, often due to a lack of language surrounding the topic they are asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure we all appreciate that. The site is not meant to be a homework help site, or a site for &quot;lazy&quot; questions. The issue comes when the question is &lt;em&gt;none of the above&lt;/em&gt;, but still gets closed down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a result, their question gets closed, they get directed to a site that gives generalities about how to ask a good question rather than specific information about how they could improve their specific question, consequently they get discouraged and never return. Many would then tell anyone that would listen that this site is pointless, problematic or (put your own adjective here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noted. People don't just make this stuff up. There is an issue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Furthermore, a couple of times I have been in the middle of answering a question, only to have it closed under me - wasting my time and reducing my willingness to provide further answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this particularly irritating. particularly when it's closed by the same old people who are obviously on some kind of ego trip. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In these cases, yes the questions were a bit vague, but a little bit of teacher's nous could see the concept, and often the misconception, that the asker was really grappling with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen questions closed down for being unclear when they're crystal clear. What's also crystal clear is that some people who close down questions aren't always being genuine.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I do understand that there is a tension between attracting experts... and attracting teachers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO the real tension is between people who think of themselves as the experts and the people who really are the experts, and who can and do answer questions. Next time you see a reasonable-looking question closed down, take a note of the names, and look at how many questions they've answered recently.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T17:15:14.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-29T11:44:21.230" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the moderators are just trying to help you get a good answer. There are truly dumb questions regardless of what your 5th grade teacher said and they need to be filtered including half of mine. It's expected and appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2015-12-31T22:59:54.490" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T22:59:54.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7357" CreationDate="2015-12-29T21:36:08.547" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the privilege of Flagging taken from me. How many times can I get rejected before it is disabled? Is this permanent or is there a time for restriction?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mIDMF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mIDMF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T10:53:32.367" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T10:53:32.367" Title="Flagging Rejections and Penalty Time" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7356" CreationDate="2015-12-29T21:58:03.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flagging bans are described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173878/allow-recovery-from-flag-hellban/175405#175405&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If at least 25% of your flags from the past 7 days were declined&lt;/strong&gt;, you're blocked from flagging anything. Depending on when and how those declined flags were cast, this block could last for as little as a day, and won't ever be longer than a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So sometime between now and 7 days from now, you'll be able to flag posts again. This reflects the fact that a flag ban isn't really a big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I suggest reviewing your flag history and the guidelines for flagging to learn how to target your flags better. If you have any questions on how to use flags, you can ask here on meta or in the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T21:58:03.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-30T16:52:25.667" Score="17" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that in &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93205/biophysics&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt; a proposal exists to create an independent &lt;em&gt;Biophysics&lt;/em&gt; SE site. &#xA;I have mixed feelings, but I support the initiative (so far its popularity is low). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I think that in Phys.SE questions heavily based on the knowledge of the related biology (I think in particular to the molecular and cellular level, nanometers to tens of micron) would be likely closed as off-topic, even if the question focused on the physics or thermodynamics.&#xA;Actually I wish the tag will grow strong in Phys.SE together with a stronger (and accurate) biological side. The tag today is not really populated by questions deeply rooted on the biology, but that could change if the Phys.SE community are prepared to think twice before using the &quot;off topic&quot; stamp. Take it as a wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is today research-level Biophysics too much pluridisciplinary or borderline for the (mainly quantum mechanics/relativity oriented) Phys.SE community? I'll be happy if  I'm worrying for nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So far few example questions can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93205/biophysics&quot;&gt;Area51 link&lt;/a&gt;, and I invite everybody interested to post there their example questions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67597" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-12-30T18:27:55.233" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T20:50:34.500" Title="Should &quot;Biophysics&quot; fork?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-30T23:03:57.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are on a SE site, especially a physics site, I think the assumption is that we are capable of learning new concepts, constructs, and approaches for understanding, appreciating, and interacting with the world around us whether in the domain of physics, computer science, literature etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Learning&quot; implies coming to know or becoming more intimately acquainted with some process or idea that we previously didn't know or previously didn't understand and in most cases being able to somehow apply that new knowledge in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get answers to our queries, we must &quot;learn&quot; how to ask a question in a standardized way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't say we want to learn about the complex nature of reality and the physical universe, but we are incapable of learning how to structure our query in a way that prevents misinterpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's because my field is computer science that I find this to be irrational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not just SE, but think about our search engines. We have to &quot;learn&quot; how to enter search terms in a way that will get the answers we are looking for. A bad search produces unhelpful and possibly harmful results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also think about it in terms of databases. Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most common method of retrieving data from a database, but as the name implies, the &quot;query&quot; must be &quot;structured&quot; or standardized so that the database management system (DBMS) can unambiguously determine what we are asking before attempting to respond to our query. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing a DBMS does when queried is analyze the query itself to determine if it is structured in an understandable way. A poorly structured query will be rejected by any DBMS for the same reason that SE moderators close questions, they are not constructed in a way that can be clearly understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that I think we change our expectations of SE since we know that there is a live person on the other end of a keyboard somewhere reading our question. Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order. Instead of thinking of SE like a community of &quot;expert people&quot;, we should think of it as a highly advanced computer system where each &quot;expert&quot; on an SE site is simply a database that we want to pull data (answers) from, but to do so, at minimum, we must form our query (ask our question) in a structured (standard) way that can be processed by all the &quot;databases&quot; (experts) or else the results we get will be unhelpful and possibly harmful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41837" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T23:03:57.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7367" CreationDate="2015-12-31T02:31:58.817" Score="-10" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think a question is too broad or too complicated, you can comment on it and mention these points, however, by putting a question on hold you are eliminating the probability that someone might be interested in answering such broad questions in perhaps a clever way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that this question isn't put on hold, my question is why eliminate the chance of someone coming up with very clever answers for difficult or broad questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40229" LastEditorUserId="40229" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T23:53:00.587" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T02:07:10.360" Title="Isn't putting questions on hold similar to putting freedom of speech on hold?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7361" CreationDate="2015-12-31T02:58:54.323" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No several different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not a government, and doesn't have the power to keep you from saying anything, so there is no issue of censorship even possible. Go forth and say what you want certain that Stack Overflow won't stop you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Freedom of speech does not imply that you have the freedom of someone else's channel with which to promote that speech. You can say what you want with your own resources, but you are not entitled to those of Stack Overflow unless they want to let you use them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Freedom of speech has never guaranteed an audience. You don't get to force anyone to listen to your political manifest and you don't get to force anyone to read your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a community and it has mores and traditions that have been developed by the users over time. These include limitations on what belongs here. You don't wander into someone club house and demand that they listen to you orate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2015-12-31T03:29:21.453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T03:29:21.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-31T05:26:42.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is important to establish a collegial relationship between us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the riot act for questions that may actually have a good point, but may be worded in a way that is not appropriate to the moderators, does not display an attitude of trying to pull each other up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe guiding the inquisitor to clarify, and working with them a bit to show them how to reach your standards, would be better for everyone concerned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, each of us on this site is very interested in the same things and. more so than not, we are all like-minded in our love of understanding our universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98734" LastEditorUserId="98734" LastEditDate="2015-12-31T05:35:47.367" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T05:35:47.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-31T05:33:58.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One other thing: The unfortunate truth is that sometimes, especially for complex (and not-so-intuitive) subjects, such as QM, the question is somewhat bury in the mind of the inquisitor. Yet, they may well be on to something valid and interesting. Therefore, someone with more expertise can help the inquisitor clarify and formulate the question in their own mind. This is how we can pull each other up. People should not be penalized for confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98734" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T05:33:58.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7361" CreationDate="2015-12-31T12:52:00.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you think a question is too broad or too complicated, you can comment on it and mention these points,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally we do. Supposing this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/226129/&quot;&gt;personal experience here&lt;/a&gt;, you &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; told why it was too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;however, by putting a question on hold you are eliminating the probability that someone might be interested in answering such broad questions in perhaps a clever way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, preventing an answer is exactly the point of closing such questions. The reasons for that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;can be found on the Help Center page on closed questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my question is why eliminate the chance of someone coming up with very clever answers for difficult or broad questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every question posed on this site is acceptable, we have limits on what types of questions we want here; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;this Help Center page on acceptable questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;this Help Center page on unacceptable questions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; you feel your question was inappropriately closed, the &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; action is to post a question on this Meta site asking &lt;em&gt;Why was my question closed?&lt;/em&gt; with an explanation as to why you think it was wrongly closed and should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;reopened&lt;/a&gt; (please read this link carefully). Asking the question you have here doesn't help you any (as you can see by all the downvotes on your question and answer), as the old adage goes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can_catch_more_flies_with_honey_than_with_vinegar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;you catch more flies with honey than vinegar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T12:52:00.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7324" CreationDate="2015-12-31T17:53:03.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that Reddit is a good alternative solution, and perhaps the strict question closing policy will drive people away frow this site. Rightfully so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you feel like the policy here is too strict for you then use Reddit, I tell from experience that Reddit is very open community and wellcomes questions that would not be a good fit for SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way Reddit is the liberal SE. I highly recommend using Reddit as a QA site ! Many of my opinion based questions (which would be closed here)  were super well received there and got lot of upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the standards? Why closing? Why not just downvote if the question is bad ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40531" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T17:53:03.660" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7359" CreationDate="2016-01-01T21:05:38.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Biophysics should not fork.&#xA;There may be few biophysics questions on this site, but we should fix that by assimilating biophysicists into the fold, not by fracturing the already small community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that in Phys.SE questions heavily based on the knowledge of the related biology (...) would be likely closed as off-topic, even if the question focused on the physics or thermodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, is there any &lt;em&gt;evidence&lt;/em&gt; that biophysics questions are closed here?&#xA;If not, this speculation that they &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be closed is probably not useful.&#xA;Just post the questions, and if they get closed we will discuss why in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt; or on the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question focuses on the physics it's on topic for this site.&#xA;It is possible that such questions would be closed, but that would be a mistake and I (and others) would object, discuss in the chat room or on the meta, and set things right.&#xA;We are aware of over-zealous close voting and also of users picking the &quot;off topic&quot; reason when they really should be choosing one of the various versions of &quot;poor quality&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the considerations relevant to this meta post are similar to those which have come up in the past regarding questions with mathematical or engineering flavors.&#xA;When engineering questions are closed because the question really isn't about physics, then everything's fine and the user is directed to the engineering site.&#xA;In cases where the question is of an engineering flavor but particularly relevant to e.g. physics lab work, is of a nature such that only physicists can answer, or aims to get a uniquely physics perspective, then I think the question is appropriate for Physics.SE.&#xA;I feel exactly the same way about biophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I detailed and justified the opinion outlined above in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering&quot;&gt;meta post on engineering questions&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;As that answer was upvoted and accepted I think it likely reflects the general consensus of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tag today is not really populated by questions deeply rooted on the biology, but that could change if the Phys.SE community are prepared to think twice before using the &quot;off topic&quot; stamp. Take it as a wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overzealous closing does happen.&#xA;It's happened before with engineering; this results in &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; and improvement.&#xA;If biophysics questions are overzealously closed, please come to the chat room or the meta and point it out.&#xA;The community here is pretty good about self-observation and improvement so I have faith we can work through any initial bumps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So far few example questions can be found in the Area51 link, and I invite everybody interested to post there their example questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that instead you please tell everyone there to not be afraid to pose on Physics.SE!&#xA;Asking us to support the Area51 proposal pushes us &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt; from where we want to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T14:14:42.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7373" CreationDate="2016-01-02T19:38:43.887" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a phenomenon in mind but can't remember the name. Without name or other keywords, I can google for the rest of my life. Where, in general, should I ask in such a case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concrete thing I can't remember the name of right now is the relativistic effect that alters classical gravitational orbits to lose energy so the orbiting objects will finally collide. (Each object &quot;sees&quot; the other at some point slightly behind the position where it would be in the classical case, so gravitational pull is not exactly perpendicular to the orbit.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102232" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T09:06:06.270" Title="Can not remember the name of an effect --- where should I ask?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7372" CreationDate="2016-01-02T20:28:24.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1083/are-physics-related-notation-and-terminology-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;notation/terminology policy&lt;/a&gt;, it would best asked in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h-bar (i.e., physics chat room)&lt;/a&gt;, rather than a question on the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T20:28:24.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7359" CreationDate="2016-01-02T20:50:34.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; - I believe that the expertise in biophysical techniques and biology is low over here and many times biophysics questions are closed due to being too biological. Therefore, another SE website might be needed to fix these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is Biophysics?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biophysics is defined as the &amp;quot;the science of the application of the laws of physics to biological phenomena.&amp;quot; As you can see, biophysics is mainly a subtopic of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why fork?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biophysics have many of its own techniques and methods for analyzing biological systems. Some of these methods may be applied to a broader class of physical systems but still, the expertise on these topics is very low. Being in the field of biophysics (doing a research project in quantum biology), I myself have experienced this. My interest is in the environment assisred quantum transport of excitons. Recently I was researching on Forster Resonance Energy Transfer, a theory describing how the excitons are transferred in certain conditions. I have asked a few questions on that over here. For example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/32966/forster-rate-dependence-on-temperature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This question was orginally asked on Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt; but got no responses. Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/32946/multichromophoric-generalization-of-forster-theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one also got no responses on Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;. If there were a biophysics.SE I believe that it would be more specific to biophysical techniques and that it would bd much easier to find people with the expertise in the field. Therefore, questions like mine, although are purely physics questions, have a better chance of being answered if there is a successful Biophysics.SE website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let me simply analyze some of the questions under the biophysics tag. The first question is about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/226404/why-do-our-eyes-only-pick-up-electromagnetic-radiation-which-has-been-classified&quot;&gt;eye&lt;/a&gt;. This question is mainly physics, but some biology knowledge is needed to understand and answer the question. It seems that not many (active) people in the community have that kind of knowledge or otherwise it would have been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a question I do realize is a little bit on the bad question side but even with research, let's say the question is adapted to more like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't rod receptors only allow us to visualize grey and black at night? What necessary physical factors about the rod receptors would be needed so we could see color at night?&#xA;Based on the reasoning seen in the comments, it seems that it still would be closed as off topic since &amp;quot;it is about eyes, not physics&amp;quot;. On the other hand, if there is a Biophysics.SE site, this question would be definitely on-topic and would make a great question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/187905/why-do-our-ears-pop&quot;&gt;why do ears pop?&lt;/a&gt;. In the comments, there are five people agreeing that this is off-topic because it is about human physiology. Them there are another five people agreeing that this is on-topic (the 6th upvote is by me). This seems to be very debatable. However, with a Biophysics.SE site, we can have such great questions being perfectly on-topic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let me analyze some of the questions on the Biophysics.SE website. Let me start with &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93205/biophysics/93206#93206&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. Certainly, this is a physics question, but you need to know the operation of the dorsal closure of fruit flies. Does anybody here know about that? I don't think so (I do admit I do not know either, but that is irrelevant). Plus. I think many would agree that this requires too much knowledge about a biological process for it to be on-topic on Physics.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93205/biophysics/93966#93966&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; also would have a problem with needing too much biology knowledge about ATP and concentration gradients and molecular motor. I believe that this would also be closed on Physics.SE as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After doing an analysis by sampling questions and including my own experience, here are the main points that support the forking of the biophysics community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is not much expertise in the biophysical techniques in the Physics.SE community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There can be too much biological knowledge needed to answer a question, even though it may be mainly physics-based&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many times the questions will be closed because it is too biological and does not ask much about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65616" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T20:50:34.500" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7377" CreationDate="2016-01-03T08:56:15.430" Score="14" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do moderators know when you are down or up voting all their answers? Is it anonymity for all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T12:44:49.833" Title="Up and Down Voting a Moderator" Tags="|discussion|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7375" CreationDate="2016-01-03T09:47:44.673" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope, moderators don't know who votes on their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can get access to some aggregate information about votes to use for identifying fraudulent behavior. For example, if two (or more) accounts are suspected of belonging to the same person, we have a tool that reveals whether there is a suspicious pattern in how the accounts are voting. But the information we get never extends to the level of individual posts. In other words, the tools never show us who voted on a particular post, whether it's our own post or someone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, even if we did know, we wouldn't care. (There are some cases where we can &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; who cast a vote, using the same logic that anyone else might use, and we don't care about those.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T12:44:49.833" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T12:44:49.833" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-03T10:18:52.423" Score="-7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than half of us probably are not even qualified to ask a proper physics question let alone answer one. Would it be ok to add Layman answers or examples to harder answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="50546" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T11:32:15.653" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T17:11:27.840" Title="The Layman Answer Alternative" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2016-01-03T17:11:27.840" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't give my opinion on this directly, but I would like to point out the site description from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;first line of the Tour page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would read that to mean that answering questions for the layman (qualified in your post as people not qualified to answer nor ask a question) is not within the scope of the site. Likewise, lay-questions are not within the scope of the site. It is possible somebody could interpret &quot;student&quot; to mean anybody with a passing curiosity -- and the community is a bit mixed on that. We do have many questions and answers that are approachable and deal with basic, real-life curiosities. And there are some who feel that is good, and some who feel that it is bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T17:11:27.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-04T06:44:29.250" Score="6" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227391/trajectory-of-projectile-launched-from-planets-surface&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227391/trajectory-of-projectile-launched-from-planets-surface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;raises an interesting issue. The SE system allows for &lt;em&gt;Answer your own question&lt;/em&gt; posts as a sort of mini-blog way of posting interesting information. I think this is a good thing and I've used it several times myself. However here we have a case of an &lt;em&gt;Answer your own question&lt;/em&gt; post being used to provide the solution to a worked example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble is that we have long regarded worked examples as falling into the &lt;em&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/em&gt; category. If I posted the original question and sat back to await answers my question would be rapidly closed. So what should we do in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking forward, if this question is OK then it establishes the principle that worked examples can be answered - if only in an &lt;em&gt;Answer your own question&lt;/em&gt; context. That would open the doors to, for example, people using the site to provide answers to the questions in MTW, Wald, etc. Actually I'm quite sympathetic to answers to worked examples being available on the web, though I don't think this is the right place for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T18:11:09.013" Title="Answer your own question - worked examples" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5203" CreationDate="2016-01-04T08:03:46.700" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. I have been struggling in asking recently. One reason is language. I just found a wiki article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_question#Types_and_purpose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Research question&quot;&lt;/a&gt; about the issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There in &quot;Types and purposes&quot; is quite well defined &quot;how to ask&quot;; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is Creswell's (2009) example of a script for a &lt;strong&gt;qualitative&#xA;  research central question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;_________ (How or what) &lt;strong&gt;is the&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (&quot;story for&quot; for narrative research; &quot;meaning of&quot; the phenomenon for phenomenology; &quot;theory that&#xA;  explains the process of&quot; for grounded theory; &quot;culture-sharing&#xA;  pattern&quot; for ethnography; &quot;issue&quot; in the &quot;case&quot; for case study) &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  _________ (central phenomenon) &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (participants) &lt;strong&gt;at&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (research site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is Creswell's (2009) &lt;strong&gt;example of a script for a quantitative&#xA;  research question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (name the theory) &lt;strong&gt;explain the relationship between&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  _________ (independent variable) &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (dependent variable)&lt;strong&gt;, controlling for the effects of&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (control variable)?&#xA;  Alternatively, a script for a quantitative null hypothesis might be as&#xA;  follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no significant difference between&lt;/strong&gt; _________ (the control and&#xA;  experimental groups on the independent variable) &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; _________&#xA;  (dependent variable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as I also studied the exact definitions for the terms, I present them here to help the other; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_and_independent_variables&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Independet Variable&lt;/a&gt;; Input, the &quot;X&quot; in Y = Xa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_and_independent_variables&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependent variable&lt;/a&gt;; Output, the &quot;Y&quot; in Y = Xa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Control variable; constant, the &quot;a&quot; in Y = Xa &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this site there is also forbidden questions. The Wikipedia has also a page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Question.&lt;/a&gt; And there was a quote from Buddha, where the questions were defined through the expected answers in four categories; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are questions that should be answered categorically [straightforwardly yes, no, this, that].  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. There are questions that should be answered with an analytical (qualified) answer [defining or redefining the terms].&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are questions that should be answered with a counter-question.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are questions that should be put aside. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular site seems to be only for the category 2 questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. Being too narrow or simple ones.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. Being discussion generating and opinion based.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. Being &quot;please do me my (home)work?&quot; - questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this physics forum has a particular Problem in the questions, as the need for &lt;strong&gt;defining or redefining the terms&lt;/strong&gt; builds unclear to the structure, which makes the moderation really challenging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed Change in &quot;how to ask&quot; might help to cope with this challenge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this post, is that I would found it helpful, if newcomers could immediately have such an clear example &quot;how to ask&quot; in the tour, or atleast this could be added on this help page;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84038" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T12:19:32.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7380" CreationDate="2016-01-04T10:06:51.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something to take into consideration when we reformulate the homework policy. (It's happening. Slowly.) For now, I'd say just judge the question on its own merits, i.e. without considering the answer. If you saw this question posted by itself, without an answer, would you consider it to be off topic as homework-like? If so, go ahead and vote to put it on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also take a look at the answer and decide according to our usual criteria whether it should be temporarily deleted, as we generally do to complete answers to homework-like problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T10:06:51.463" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7384" CreationDate="2016-01-04T10:50:10.887" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many times can your edits on another persons question be rejected before it's disabled?&#xA;How long is the penalty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T17:20:23.103" Title="Editing Rejections and Penalty Time" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7383" CreationDate="2016-01-04T17:20:23.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91392/too-many-of-your-edits-were-rejected-try-again-in-7-days&quot;&gt;this post on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When deciding on whether we should ban or not, we now look at your last &lt;strong&gt;7 days&lt;/strong&gt; of activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;code&gt;(rejects - (approvals / 3)) &amp;gt;= 5&lt;/code&gt;, you will be auto-banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78129/is-there-a-penalty-for-ones-edit-suggestion-being-rejected&quot;&gt;This thread&lt;/a&gt; puts the penalty at seven days of edit banning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both posts are fairly old, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173604/losing-the-ability-to-suggest-edits&quot;&gt;this newer thread&lt;/a&gt; confirms them. The exact details might have changed slightly. This is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to say that you should go and experimentally figure out where the boundaries currently sit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/edit-ban?page=2&amp;amp;sort=votes&amp;amp;pagesize=15&quot;&gt;edit-ban tag on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T17:20:23.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7322" CreationDate="2016-01-04T17:46:08.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your profile contains a wealth of information about your activity on the site, including specific breakdowns of your questions, answers, and - under &lt;code&gt;all actions&lt;/code&gt; - your edits, comments, reviews, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=&quot;&gt;search tool&lt;/a&gt; on the site is relatively sophisticated if you know how to use it, and it has a handy guide accessible by clicking the &lt;code&gt;Advanced Search Tips&lt;/code&gt; link on the right sidebar. Some notables are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;user:me&lt;/code&gt; to search for your own posts (or e.g. &lt;code&gt;user:50583&lt;/code&gt; to search for, say, ACuriousMind's posts, since their user id (the number in the url of their profile) is 50583)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;is:question&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;is:answer&lt;/code&gt; to limit the search to just questions or just answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flags for &lt;code&gt;closed&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;deleted&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;migrated&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and a whole host of others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also perform specific searches subject to those constraints, and order them using the tabs just below the search bar on the results page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T17:46:08.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-06T19:58:07.983" Score="13" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, biophysics questions run a wide range from those that are primarily biology questions with a little physics input to those that are primarily physics questions applied to a situation that appears in a biological processes or system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And presumably some fraction of them are on-topic for the Physics.SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is soliciting reasoned and explained opinions about what kinds of questions are definitely on-topic, off-topic and living in a fuzzy gray area. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed texts for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/biophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;biophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;biophysics&lt;/a&gt; summary would be one (good) way to condense your thoughts, but are not required. For reference, the current tag summary reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of methods from the physical sciences to aid in the study of biological systems. Note that biophysics questions are only allowed if they are mainly about physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7359/should-biophysics-fork&quot;&gt;conversation concerning the need for or utility of possible Biophysics beta site&lt;/a&gt; we received &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227647/how-do-proteins-perform-their-function&quot;&gt;a question on the main site concerning the mechanisms of protein action (and a few other issues)&lt;/a&gt;. A subsequent &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635361#26635361&quot;&gt;informal poll of the chat room&lt;/a&gt; revealed surprising diversity of opinion on the matter including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On-topic (at least in part): &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635714#26635714&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635714#26635714&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635720#26635720&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635720#26635720&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635920#26635920&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635920#26635920&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Send it to [chemstry.se]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635657#26635657&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26635657#26635657&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic (no alternate suggestion): &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26640394#26640394&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26640394#26640394&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26640561#26640561&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26640561#26640561&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26641857#26641857&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26641857#26641857&lt;/a&gt; (or should that go on the chemistry bullet?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suggested refinements that would make it definitely on-topic (suggesting to me that the speaker thinks it is borderline as it is): &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26642643#26642643&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26642643#26642643&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should be closed for reasons not relating to topicality. (Not providing separate links for these because they evade the point of this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this meta-question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mainly about the place of post 227647 on Physics SE, but about the broader criteria for deciding such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T23:17:27.993" Title="What are the boundaries of &quot;biophysics&quot; on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7387" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7388" CreationDate="2016-01-07T00:21:14.033" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do moderators here get any kind of compensation for all their efforts and help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-01-07T00:58:27.600" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T01:10:07.343" Title="Compensation for Full Time Moderators" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-01-15T22:38:44.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7387" CreationDate="2016-01-07T01:10:07.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From PersonArtPhoto's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/169222/184688&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; on the Meta Stack Exchange question linked to in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The benefits of being a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A huge say in the direction of a site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Access to the site views.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The ability to choose an organization of a list of a few to receive $100 once a year from Stack Exchange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;More direct access to the Stack Exchange employees.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;That warm fuzzy feeling of making a difference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Access to the Teacher's Lounge, a chat room for moderators.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Once in a blue moon, SE will hire one of the community moderators as &quot;Community Managers&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As has been noted, SE staff also has access, who do get paid. But&#xA;  there are some 200+ (Maybe even more?) moderators, including myself,&#xA;  who don't receive a dime for their services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it needs to be said explicitly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; do not receive any financial compensation for their activities on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T01:10:07.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-07T13:51:17.407" Score="5" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/226186/need-a-collection-textbooks-to-use-as-stepping-stones-to-qft&quot;&gt;&quot;Need A Collection Textbooks To Use As Stepping Stones to QFT&quot;&lt;/a&gt; In my mind, asking about a &quot;no-nonsense intro to QFT&quot; and asking for a set of textbooks together which would prepare one to even read a QFT intro, from the position of only having completed Griffith's Introduction to QM, are two completely different things. QMechanic even admitted to it not being a true duplicate, but closed it anyway, and I really don't buy his explanation of it being &quot;opinion based&quot;, since the thread that I was supposedly duplicating should also have been &quot;opinion based&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101428" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T10:24:32.517" Title="Why was my question, about a collection of textbooks to use to prepare for QFT, closed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7389" CreationDate="2016-01-07T14:05:48.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't close it as duplicate, I closed it as being &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our book recommendations policy is rather strict (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698/50583&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4567/50583&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;), and your question doesn't ask for a single book for QFT (which would already be quite broad), but also for a series of books &lt;em&gt;preparing&lt;/em&gt; you for it. This is more study advice than a recommendation of a book for a specific topic, because you are not searching for a resource containing a defined topic, but you are asking &lt;em&gt;the answerers&lt;/em&gt; to come up with the specific topic you must learn to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the question is very broad - the recommended resources in one answer could even be about different topic that those in another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T14:05:48.577" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7380" CreationDate="2016-01-07T18:11:09.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It says nowhere that this site is restricted to only theoretical or conceptual Physics questions only, and everything related to physics problem solving is banned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell me if I'm wrong about this and point me to the reference, or make a new thread to discuss it to change the scope officially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/12350/mew&quot;&gt;Mew&lt;/a&gt;'s comment below &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/7743&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; from another related question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't believe that providing complete solutions is detrimental to&#xA;  students, and in fact I believe the best way for students to learn the&#xA;  basics of physics is to look at as many complete solutions as&#xA;  possible. I believe this method is far superior than asking the&#xA;  student to attempt to solve the problem by themselves. When a student&#xA;  has seen many problems, I believe they will have no trouble in&#xA;  developing an intuition to solve far more physics problems, and will&#xA;  have much more refined thought process than the students who went off&#xA;  on tangents trying to solve problems using unconventional methods – Mew&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was a student I always got A+ for all may physics exams in high school, because they always included problems of types the teacher already showed us how to solve (not the same problems, but with different numbers and conditions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to my performance I always went to Physics competitions but I weren't too successful in them initially. The reasons: the problems they gave me to solve was of types I never seen before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me show you an example. Electric circuits. Most students learn how to calculate the resistance, inductance and capacitance when these elements connected in series or parallel. But what do you do when you are faced with an arbitrary graph of capacitors, resistances or coils which you cannot rearrange into the usual series parallel structure? I was flinched by these tasks, I didn't even know how to start at all! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually after sending and receiving lots of letters (I didn't even had internet that time), discussing with peers other competitors and teachers, I managed to learn helluva lots of tricks and tips and approaches you can't find in any text book, which eventually got me to the final rounds and took the 4th prize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have 10k+ reputation so I can't open the linked question in the example. But I think catch-all questions self answered or not, that ask&#xA;&quot;What approach should I use when solving problems of this class&quot; (without actual numbers plugged in) would be very useful for students who are preparing for competitions or exams, engineers writing simulation software looking for the methods, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again if this site isn't for helping students learn the methods and know/how of problem solving than we should point that out in the tour and the help/ontopic as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7743" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T18:11:09.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7417" CreationDate="2016-01-08T13:47:42.903" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=days+since+april+14+2015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;six to eight weeks ago&lt;/a&gt;, Stack Exchange announced a programme to re-design the CSS and tweak the site styles throughout the network, including the &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one-new-stat-this-on/&quot;&gt;completely redesigned profile pages&lt;/a&gt;. Since then, we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6790/can-we-have-a-font-which-harmonizes-better-with-mathjax&quot;&gt;made some big requests&lt;/a&gt; to come with the re-design, so we've remained &quot;on deck&quot; for some time. It seems, however, that the deck currently contains... just us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253359/list-of-communities-with-base-css-updates-completed&quot;&gt;List of communities with base css updates completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't really a problem - I'm sure we would all rather they get it right than they get it out fast. However, I'm curious as to know how this matches with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites?cb=1&quot;&gt;recently announced change in the width of the sidebar&lt;/a&gt;, which is admittedly a smaller change in the site design, but still. Moreover, I expect that the change in the sidebar is the reason for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot;&gt;slight delay in the 2016 community ads thread&lt;/a&gt;, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites?cb=1#comment885010_272563&quot;&gt;the new ads will need to conform to the new width&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In which order will the CSS redesign, the new sidebar, and the community ads thread launch?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there known timelines for them? Or will the sidebar launch on par with everyone else on the 12th, with no fixed timeline for the CSS?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to pressure the team, but since we're last on the line I thought it wouldn't be too much to ask politely :). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T07:16:04.950" Title="Is there a known timeline for the deployment of the new CSS?" Tags="|support|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-09T14:55:16.473" Score="-2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to down vote an answer.  The vote count went &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;.  I hit the down button again, and the count went up again!   I'm afraid to try it again.  FYI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T10:09:51.243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T10:09:51.243" Title="Downvote caused upvote" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7395" CreationDate="2016-01-09T15:13:19.903" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who knows, maybe two other people upvoted the answer at the same time? I wouldn't worry too much about the number. Just refresh the page or open it in a new tab and see if that shows a more reasonable number. The SE database stores individual &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt;, and the post scores are derived from that, so if the number is wrong, it will work itself out next time the post score is recalculated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more important is to check that the vote you cast on the answer (if any) is the one you intended to cast. Refresh or reopen the page and see whether one of the arrows is highlighted, indicating the vote that has been recorded for you. If that's not the vote that you wanted to cast, click the arrow again to undo it. But you only have 5 minutes to do this, so in this case it's too late, unless the answer is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T15:13:19.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7398" CreationDate="2016-01-10T17:19:14.223" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Physics I asked a question and got 3 answers, 1 from a moderator and 2 from users. All 3 are good answers, but the moderator is spot on. I can tell 1 of the users are close in quality and took some thought. Since the moderator has 56k reputation and the user 300 would it be ok to award a bounty to a lesser answer while checking the moderator as the preferred answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T17:37:33.773" Title="2nd place gets the bounty" Tags="|discussion|answers|moderators|bounty|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7397" CreationDate="2016-01-10T17:37:33.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can award your bounty to whomever you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T17:37:33.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T10:30:49.503" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is changed! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even at 11:30-12:00 IST, the site was as usual. But when I visited the site again at 2 IST, the appearance of Physics SE. was different!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picture speaks more than words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the snapshot of a question of mine at the &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m3phQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m3phQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it appears as:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AXDWS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AXDWS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is my profile icon with small badges:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dknpu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dknpu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now it looks like this with bigger badges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DUoVm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DUoVm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PXXWa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PXXWa.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now with the favourite mark star appearing smaller: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6FaL5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6FaL5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tDfqd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tDfqd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a7qzz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a7qzz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pFvxn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pFvxn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzhZ0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzhZ0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1VSAk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1VSAk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6g8MN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6g8MN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many others like the favourite, reviews, responses numbers are marked in blue while then they were marked in red; and the most important the logo of &lt;em&gt;Physics Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt; contains only &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That'all what grabbed my notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what actually happened? Is my laptop not working or something else has happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T10:30:49.503" Title="What happened to the appearance of Physics Stack Exchange all on a sudden?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7386" CreationDate="2016-01-11T20:07:33.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just took at look at the question linked in this post, version 4.&#xA;I think the question was closed because it's vague and too broad, not really because it's about biology.&#xA;I think this happens a lot on our site and warrants discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Problems with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227647/how-do-proteins-perform-their-function&quot;&gt;example post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the first three paragraphs of the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's, for example, take a ribosome. It is an enzyme that is in turn just a molecule that must follow the laws of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but it can be looked upon as a molecular machine made up of several pieces. What exactly makes those pieces work together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the ribosome bind to a strand of RNA? Is it just the shape and electric charge or is it something more? Once the ribosome is bound to a piece of RNA, how does it move?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four question marks by the end of the third paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;What exactly makes those pieces work together?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Why  does the ribosome bind to a strand of RNA?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Is it just the shape and electric charge or is it something more?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Once the ribosome is bound to a piece of RNA, how does it move?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having multiple questions is alone a problem.&#xA;When faced with multiple questions, a would-be answer writer has to read, understand, think about, formulate answers for, and then write answers for multiple questions.&#xA;If the probability that a given reader can do those things for one question is p &amp;lt;&amp;lt; 1, then the probability that a given reader can do them for four questions is p^4, which is absolutely tiny.&#xA;This puts a reader at a disposition to regard the question as unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a deeper problem is that the questions bounce back and forth from specific and physics-oriented to broad and biology oriented.&#xA;Questions #1 and #2 are very broad and sound biology-ish.&#xA;A typical physicist probably feels that only a phenomenological bio or so-broad-as-to-be-useless physics answer can possibly suffice.&#xA;This, puts the physicist at a mind to vote for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in question #3 we get physics: &amp;quot;Is it just the shape and electric charge or is it something more?&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; is a physics question.&#xA;Or at least it suggests one.&#xA;We could rewrite the entire post around that one question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ribosomes perform complex tasks in the organism, but in the end they are just molecules and therefore governed by the laws of physics.&#xA;What physical principles are the most crucial for understanding how a ribosome is able to function as it does?&#xA;To choose a specific example, is electrostatics enough to explain why a ribosome sticks to a strand of RNA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we then get question #4: &amp;quot;Once the ribosome is bound to a piece of RNA, how does it move?&amp;quot;&#xA;This is again vague and broad.&#xA;Does the asker want an explanation from the bio point of view or a purely electrodynamical description?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why (I think) the post was closed&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vague, broad posts like this invite closure because they're hard to answer.&#xA;As they translate to &amp;quot;how does X work?&amp;quot;, they invite too many possible levels of scope.&#xA;Posts like this could reasonable be closed as &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot;.&#xA;However, I think its psychologically easier for readers to perceive a question as possibly ok &lt;em&gt;for another audience&lt;/em&gt; rather than stick their chin out and tell the OP that their question is &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Hence, we see a lot of questions closed as &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; where &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot; would make more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least, that's my guess.&#xA;This is not a great situation because &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; tells OP to go somewhere else, rather than learn how to ask questions better.&#xA;We definitely want better questions more than we want to turn people away, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What do to&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; only as a last resort.&#xA;Prioritize close reasons which help OP learn to ask better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can, edit the post to zero in on the relevant question.&#xA;The example I pose above is probably too big of an edit, but a comment can help OP get there.&#xA;It may also be ok to make a substantial organizational edit and post a comment reminding OP that they can roll it back if it misses the mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So what about the place of biophysics?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think interdisciplinary questions get closed a lot because, as illustrated above, it's easy to lose focus and put readers in a state of mind where they feel like the question gets so large that a good physics answer can't address it.&#xA;I think biophysics questions in the vein of my example rewrite given above are solidly on topic.&#xA;So, with all this said, I really think the only legit answer here is that &lt;strong&gt;we need to see more &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; biophysics questions before we can even consider writing down explicit descriptions of which ones are and are not on topic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:38:40.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7403" CreationDate="2016-01-11T23:35:20.197" Score="-2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would prevent you from placing a bounty? How long is the penalty time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T08:56:47.627" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T08:56:47.627" Title="Bounty Rejections and Penalty Time" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7402" CreationDate="2016-01-12T00:45:42.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bounties are well explained in the help center, both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;in their own page&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;the set bounties privilege page&lt;/a&gt;. It's not quite clear exactly what it is you're asking but here are some points to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can have up to three bounties active at any given time on each SE site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must wait at least 24 hours before you award a bounty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have three bounties active, you can offer a new one as soon as you award one of the active ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can have each bounty active for up to seven days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot edit the bounty message after you have posted it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of course, you can add any number of comments on the question, unless the bounty brings you under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;50 reputation&lt;/a&gt; and the question isn't yours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any reputation you offer on a bounty is lost forever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this and many of your recent questions can be answered much more quickly by having a good look in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Help Center&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. the site-wide meta, where pretty much any question you may have about the workings of the site has already been asked). I don't want to discourage you from asking questions here on Meta - believe me, we do notice and appreciate it when newcomers make an effort to figure out the rules of the game, and we're here to help you figure them out. However, more often than not you'll get your answer faster by learning to use the resources that are already there than by waiting for us to see your posts and respond ;-). For small questions like this, it is also worth checking if there's anyone in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the chatroom&lt;/a&gt; who can help - it's also faster than Meta, and it's easier for us to figure out exactly what it is you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T00:45:42.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-12T13:46:59.167" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a program that computes the fast &lt;strong&gt;insert_name_here&lt;/strong&gt; transform of a matrix. I am at a loss of what its application is, what its proper name should be, and find an existing algorithm for it. I posted this question in Computer Science, and one of their members suggested it might be better served here. Does this &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/51446/what-can-i-do-with-this-algorithm&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; belong in Physics? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40289" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:38.257" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T14:24:08.227" Title="Does this question belong in Physics?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7405" CreationDate="2016-01-12T14:24:08.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in the linked post is essentially &lt;em&gt;What is the primary algorithm that solves this problem?&lt;/em&gt; which really isn't a physics question but an algorithm identification one. I also somewhat doubt that the question could be rewritten to be a physics question, but I could be wrong on that. So I would say, &lt;em&gt;No this would not be on topic here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question as posed &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;, which covers scientific programming, broadly speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T14:24:08.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7409" CreationDate="2016-01-12T16:05:25.043" Score="15" ViewCount="1744" Body="&lt;p&gt;In our last chat session two weeks ago (sorry for the delay), we had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/chat-session-on-homework-close-reason&quot;&gt;discussion about updating the homework policy and homework close reason&lt;/a&gt;. I'm making this post to summarize that discussion and solicit feedback on how to proceed afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The current status&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, questions are considered &quot;homework-like&quot; (or &quot;educational&quot;) and fall under the policy whenever&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...[the question's] value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's not always clear whether a question fits this description just from its content. And if you track the questions that we actually close these days using the homework-like close reason, quite a few of them are likely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of an educational nature. Instead, we've taken to using the homework-like close reason on questions that simply ask us to calculate something without the original poster making an attempt at it. We do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;a policy on showing effort&lt;/a&gt;, separate from the homework policy, but it doesn't justify &lt;em&gt;closing&lt;/em&gt; those questions. (Also, it was meant to catch questions that the homework policy doesn't.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that most people believe that questions where the poster asks us to do some simple calculation for them should be off topic. However, it's not clear &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; where we should draw the boundary of what sorts of questions are off topic, and what reason is best to give for considering them off topic. There have been a number of discussions on this in the past, among them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;Banning homework: vote and documentation&lt;/a&gt; (November 2013)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5375/whats-the-current-status-of-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the current status of the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt; (December 2013)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6631/homework-the-view-from-the-chat-session&quot;&gt;Homework - the view from the chat session&lt;/a&gt; (March 2015)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;Should we rename the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt; (October 2015)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The options&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will probably want to create a new policy that replaces the current homework policy, and gives a different criterion for a question that is off topic. This new policy would become the new justification for closing low-effort homework questions (those where it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; clear that it's a homework/educational question), so whatever we wind up going with, it should be some criterion that does catch those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few options that I can identify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which ask us to perform calculations are off topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which don't show sufficient effort are off topic (I suppose this is the nice wording for the poster being lazy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A combination of the previous two - kind of like our current homework policy, except that the criteria of &quot;ask a conceptual question&quot; (more or less) and &quot;show effort&quot; would apply to &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions, not just those we consider to be of an educational nature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the most likely contenders, but for completeness, some other options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which ask for a conceptual understanding of something are on topic, and everything else is not (this is &lt;em&gt;kind of&lt;/em&gt; like #1, but excludes more questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All questions which come from homework assignments are off topic (difficult to enforce)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. etc. And for comparison, our current policy would be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which are educational in nature are off topic unless they ask a conceptual question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; show effort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The issues&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have some ideas for what kind of criterion should replace our current homework policy. For each of these ideas, we should consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there a significant number of questions which are off topic under our current homework policy which would be on topic under the new policy? If so, should they be on topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exactly what sorts of questions would become off topic under the new policy which are not covered by current close reasons? Do we want them to be off topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the answers we come up with will help us focus the new close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in the future, we will also have to discuss the role of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag in this new policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T14:15:50.917" Title="Generalizing the homework policy" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-01-12T16:45:38.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll comment on the options for the new policy you name in order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions which ask us to perform calculations are off topic &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Generally yes, but&lt;/strong&gt; questions which show that standard calulation methods in the field are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; sufficient to obtain the result should be considered on-topic, because then there is very likely a conceptual argument hidden in some step of this calculation. This is a bit different from &quot;requiring effort&quot;, because it requires a &lt;em&gt;certain type of effort&lt;/em&gt;. No amount of effort shown should save a question whose answer is just pages of boring index manipulations, or solving some particularly resilient integrals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions which don't show sufficient effort are off topic (I suppose this is the nice wording for the poster being lazy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once thought the proper course of action for those would be to downvote them. But downvoting them has not the desired effect of &lt;em&gt;deterring people to ask such questions&lt;/em&gt;. The downvoted questions get pity upvotes (or upvotes from people as lazy as the asker), and get an answer sooner or later because the answer is, well, easy to find and it's quickly earned reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, because I see no value in us becoming a repository of questions which are already easily answered by typing the relevant keywords into a search engine, I have come around to the view that we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; close effortless questions. This, however, is wholly distinct from the homework policy - conceptual question like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why do rocks fall down?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; can also be effortless. In particular, showing effort as such is not sufficient to make a question on-topic if there is some other reason for it to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A combination of the previous two - kind of like our current homework policy, except that the criteria of &quot;ask a conceptual question&quot; (more or less) and &quot;show effort&quot; would apply to all questions, not just those we consider to be of an educational nature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should &quot;combine&quot; those policies - they are, to me, about entirely orthogonal issues. Questions which just ask us to calculate something are off-topic. Questions which are lazy are also off-topic. I don't see an &lt;em&gt;intrinsic&lt;/em&gt; relation between those two types of question that would mean the policy should really be &quot;combined&quot;. In any case, I think we can drop the phrase of questions &quot;of an educational nature&quot; entirely, I've never been wholly clear on what that means anyway, and it doesn't reflect any actual practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions which ask for a conceptual understanding of something are on topic, and everything else is not (this is kind of like #1, but excludes more questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind of a strange phrasing, and probably too prohibitive. In particular, this will lead to endless fights over what exactly &quot;conceptual understanding&quot; means, even more so than the homework policy we already have. Don't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All questions which come from homework assignments are off topic (difficult to enforce)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just...no. For one, because we &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; honestly enforce this, but even if we could, if there's a perfectly interesting conceptual question coming from a homework assignment, I do not see why we shouldn't answer it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Altogether&lt;/strong&gt;, I say we enforce 1. and 2. as policies, with a bit of leniency on 1. if the question shows that the &quot;calculation&quot; most likely involves conceptual arguments. Of course it would be preferable to rephrase such question to not make them look as if they're asking for calculations, but I'm not completely sure this is possible in all cases. Additionally, we drop any mention of &quot;educational nature&quot; in our policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T16:45:38.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-01-12T20:00:47.120" Score="29" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Questions which ask us to perform calculations are off topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too broad.  I recognize that it's intended to head off boring copied-from-homework questions like &quot;what's the optimal angle for a 45 mph banked turn if the coefficient of friction is μ = 0.233457821234 also are all those digits important kthxbye&quot;.  However calculation questions like &quot;what's the average antimatter content of a banana?&quot; or &quot;with my eyes closed at sea level, how often should I expect to see Cherenkov flashes from cosmic ray muons in my vitreous humor?&quot; are interesting entrées into a host of more complicated topics.  It'd be the responsibility of the asker to elaborate on &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; of these other topics is really at issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact I find that turning my conceptual questions into model calculations gives me better answers than asking in vague terms, and I'm loath to see such questions closed.&#xA;Furthermore, many of my favorite questions on this site have inspired clever calculations from answerers; I would prefer to encourage these sorts of answers with inviting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might propose as an alternative: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions which attempt to outsource tedious calculations to the community, without any broader context, are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that a key word here (&quot;tedious&quot;) implies a value judgement, and there's a bias in writing these guidelines towards &quot;objective&quot;, judgement-free criteria.  That bias is flawed, which is why we have human moderators and the opportunity to discuss some decisions with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T23:43:31.517" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T23:43:31.517" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-01-13T00:16:30.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the most confusing bit of the homework policy is the &quot;and show effort&quot; aspect found in the close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept &lt;em&gt;and show some effort&lt;/em&gt; to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially when the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;link in that message&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; opens with,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even aside from the fact that the community appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5959/25301&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;against &quot;check my work&quot; problems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I feel that including the &quot;show work&quot; bit is both contradictory and confusing. It suggests that if someone simply adds their attempt to their &quot;do my homework for me question,&quot; then it'd get reopened and answered; even some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7311/25301&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;high rep users are of the opinion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;showing work&quot; would/should prevent closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the point of the &quot;show work&quot; is meant to encourage askers to not pose questions without having thought about the answer. I don't think that the current phrase encourages this position. It would be better if we did one of the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eliminate the phrase so that questions asking us to &quot;do some math for them&quot; are &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leave the phrase so that questions asking us to &quot;do some math for them&quot; are &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replace the phrase with one that more accurately represents what is meant by it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that #3 is the better option of these, though I cannot think of a good phrase outside of something along the lines of requiring OP showing their rationale--I'm completely open to suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T00:16:30.327" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T18:33:14.800" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question from today &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/229145/&quot;&gt;How much difference to interior temperature would a white car roof make?&lt;/a&gt; says essentially &quot;My car is hot so I'm thinking of painting the roof white. How much would that affect the temperature?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question from Feb 2014 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/96574/&quot;&gt;Temperature behavior over time of black or white cars in hot, sunny regions&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;Some claim the black car will stay hotter [than the white car], some others claim it will be the same whatever the color. Do all cars have the same temperature inside in the long run, or are some of them hotter?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I marked the new question as duplicate but it was declined. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T19:51:38.573" Title="Car Color-Temperature Duplicate Declined" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7416" CreationDate="2016-01-13T22:34:24.457" Score="3" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if it was accepted. In my case, for instance, I asked a question in other SE site (astronomy) that would be also on topic here. Unfortunately it didn't get much attention since that site is smaller. I was wondering if I could ask it here too. I've read the FAQ and it doesn't seem to mention this, so I don't think this would be a problem, but I want to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is OK, should I delete the other question first or that is not necessary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89908" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T04:45:21.407" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T04:45:21.407" Title="Is it OK to cross-post a question that you previously asked in other SE site?" Tags="|discussion|questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7413" CreationDate="2016-01-13T22:53:57.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross posting is not allowed on Stack-exchange. See this - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could delete the Astronomy one and post on this site if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65616" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T22:53:57.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7386" CreationDate="2016-01-13T23:17:27.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how I see things in the world of biophysics out there.&#xA;The work (and fun) of biophysicists is to ask questions about biological systems. In their answers, they use (and build from) all the experimental and theoretical tools that the other physicists use in the many other physical disciplines. In this view, a &quot;biophysics question&quot; cannot be about physics, it has to be about a biological system. I'm not talking here about a question on this site, what I mean is that the ultimate object of a biophysical question (or of a biophysical research) is a biological system, not a physical principle, otherwise you have to drop the &quot;bio&quot;. The biophysical &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, is (and has to be) deeply rooted in the way a physicist reasons, and this makes the difference between biophysics and biology. The difference is more in the answer than in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question like &lt;code&gt;How does the ribosome work?&lt;/code&gt; cannot be simply categorized. A categorization is easier to do for the possible different answers, which can be more chemistry-oriented (&lt;em&gt;catalysis of new peptide bonds&lt;/em&gt;), biology-oriented (&lt;em&gt;protein synthesis by reading a mRNA template&lt;/em&gt;), or physics-oriented (&lt;em&gt;nano-machine at low Reynolds that moves on a periodic potential&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to translate this to Physics SE? From what I said, I have to conclude that the tag description&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Note that biophysics questions are only allowed if they are mainly&#xA;  about physics.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a contradiction. Like &quot;Note that relativity-related questions are allowed only if about semiconductors&quot;, if I may exaggerate. But I think it is understandable what that means: &lt;em&gt;we want to focus on physics, not biology&lt;/em&gt;, which is reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my 2 cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that biophysics questions, which have a biological system as an&#xA;  object, should both be answered and answerable from a physics&#xA;  perspective, using descriptions, modeling and tools from&#xA;  physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this, I hope that people with right to vote &quot;off topic&quot; will recognize that &quot;how the ribosome works?&quot; is surely &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt; by a physicist, therefore absolutely on topic, and potentially very interesting for this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67597" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T23:17:27.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7413" CreationDate="2016-01-13T23:31:35.727" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/888/should-users-be-cross-posting-questions&quot;&gt;strongly discouraged&lt;/a&gt;. That said, we are sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4133/should-i-cross-post-this-question-in-chemistry-se&quot;&gt;lenient&lt;/a&gt;. Ultimately, what we really don't want is someone posting in multiple places but not disclosing this, an a scattershot attempt to get any sort of answer from anyone. This can potentially lead to wasted, duplicate effort in answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore say there are two cases where you can post the same question somewhere else:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want a different take on the answer from a different community's perspective. Tailor the question appropriately, and note on both the old and new posts that there is a closely related question on another site. This doesn't really apply just if one community seems &quot;better;&quot; you really need to be looking for something &quot;different.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You posted a question but either realized it belongs elsewhere or got no satisfactory response, and there is another site where it is on topic. This seems to be your case. In that case it's probably best to &lt;em&gt;migrate&lt;/em&gt; the question rather than duplicate it. Use a custom moderator flag on the question and request it be migrated to the other site. The moderators can then do this (or not, if they so choose).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T23:31:35.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7393" CreationDate="2016-01-14T07:16:04.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new CSS has been deployed... uh, sometime in the last week. The new sidebar went live on Tuesday. And the community ads thread should be coming shortly. (I don't have a more specific ETA than that, unfortunately.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We did, however, forget to enable new user profiles when the CSS update happened. I flipped the relevant switches, so that's fixed up now. Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any issues with the updated design, please report them here on meta with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7186" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T07:16:04.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T07:37:11.627" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two minor issues with the profile layout/design. First, when mousing over the impact number, the box is clipped at the top by the top layout:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q9qdS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q9qdS.png&quot; alt=&quot;clipped box&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, most of the explanation text boxes are that black background shown above, except for the post edits, helpful flags, and votes cast boxes -- those have an older-style white background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TW6UL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TW6UL.png&quot; alt=&quot;color choice&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poking around in the CSS, it looks like anything displayed with the &lt;code&gt;title&lt;/code&gt; property has the white backgrounds, which also includes the &lt;code&gt;badge{1,2,3}-alternate&lt;/code&gt; classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T13:08:30.930" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:08:30.930" Title="Minor flaws in the new profile design" Tags="|bug|design|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7536" CreationDate="2016-01-14T07:43:22.613" Score="7" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year, we asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6790/can-we-have-a-font-which-harmonizes-better-with-mathjax&quot;&gt;Can we have a font which harmonizes better with MathJax?&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6792/6634&quot;&gt;answer was yes&lt;/a&gt;, it would be included in the CSS rollout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7417/6634&quot;&gt;CSS and profile rollout is complete&lt;/a&gt;, it was &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26763306#26763306&quot;&gt;pointed out in chat&lt;/a&gt; that we do not yet have the serif fonts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this removed from the CSS redesign? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T18:26:19.247" Title="Serif fonts like Chemistry and Math" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T14:51:17.080" Score="6" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may have noticed some minor updates to site design this week, they are part of a SE network-wide update to a new base css framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The updates allow us to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use SVG icons for retina display&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fix layout bugs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More easily add new features to all of our sites in the future&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But more importantly, it gives you access &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current&quot;&gt;to the new profile&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see any bugs please let us know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T14:51:17.080" Title="Minor design updates to site" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-01-14T15:06:17.807" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, in this discussion there is too much focus on the &quot;question&quot; and not enough on the &quot;value of the question plus the answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the goal of the site is to be a &quot;resource&quot; to all serious students of physics, we need to make sure that the question-plus-answer becomes something of lasting value. &quot;I need an answer to this homework question before 8 am tomorrow&quot; is always a bad start to a question - but if the homework question is in itself interesting enough, the solution to that problem may have some lasting value. I have learnt quite a lot from answering such questions myself; for example, answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/165453/26969&quot;&gt;this question about a ball rolling down a slope&lt;/a&gt; clarified some concepts for me - so although the question was closed as &quot;homework-like&quot;, I have actually referred back to the analysis a number of times in my answers to other questions (not all of which were homework-like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a second example, when I thought about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/229076/26969&quot;&gt;recent question about the frequency response of vinyl records&lt;/a&gt; I discovered some interesting relationships regarding distortion of a vinyl recording as a function of signal amplitude, track velocity, frequency of the signal, and radius of the stylus. That particular question was closed as &quot;engineering&quot;, when in factI think that such analysis, while it is &quot;application of science&quot;, is a nice demonstration of the power of physics-based reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be an outlier in this - but when I answer questions, I do it for my own benefit and that of the community, and not just for the OP. And that's the perspective I would encourage us all to use when we consider how to apply the close vote. That doesn't mean we should feed the lazy students solutions - but I, for one, am willing (perhaps more than others) to answer questions that have an &quot;interesting&quot; angle to them. Where &quot;interesting&quot; is of course a very personal judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T15:06:17.807" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T18:29:51.027" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the new design or if it was there in the old one, but it's there. If I click on the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; button on the Favorite Tags sidebar, it brings up a text box and an &lt;code&gt;Add&lt;/code&gt; button, as well as deletesy &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;s on the tags that are already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAuBC.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't however, move the focus to the text box, and there's no reason why it shouldn't. I either want to delete tags, which I can only do with the mouse, or I want to get typing some new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor change but still worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T18:29:51.027" Title="Move focus to text box when editing favourite tags" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7419" CreationDate="2016-01-14T18:56:21.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't had time to go through enough questions to make up my mind on whether I'm OK with this aspect of the new design or whether I think we should go full blast and change to a serif font, but I do want to note that the problem is at least much better than it used to be - and give credit to the design team for addressing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the same &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/184087/buckingham-pi-theorem-application-the-case-of-only-0-or-1-dimensionless-grou/184099#184099&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; I used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6790/can-we-have-a-font-which-harmonizes-better-with-mathjax&quot;&gt;the original request&lt;/a&gt;, with the new fonts vs the old ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;New CSS&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hEDaZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;New CSS&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Old CSS&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/89LAr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Old CSS&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old fonts, the LaTeX tends to stick out like a sore thumb, but it definitely blends in a lot better with the new ones. I'm holding judgement on whether it's enough or not for the moment, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Added:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed, things are not quite there yet, particularly with comments: consider for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uN04D.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/234007/8563&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and obviously suffering from Sore Thumb syndrome. (Running chrome v48 over ubuntu, MathJax 2.6 with local STIX fonts, in case it's needed. It would be good to hear from others whether it displays this badly in other systems.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, for that same comment, it appears that Firefox (v41 over Windows 7, MathJax 2.6 using web TEX fonts) produces this horrifying sight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZILfC.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T19:51:24.530" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T22:20:20.570" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following chain of questions, presented in chronological order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7060&quot;&gt;Redshifting of Light and the expansion of the universe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21603&quot;&gt;Have red shifted photons lost energy and where did it go?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/172854&quot;&gt;Do photons lose energy due to gravitational redshift? If so, where does the lost energy go?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/229520&quot;&gt;Redshift due to a static gravitational field and the conservation of energy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second was marked a duplicate of the first, and the third a duplicate of the second. Now the fourth is being voted closed as a duplicate of the third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree the fourth is a duplicate of the third, as both ask about &lt;em&gt;gravitational&lt;/em&gt; redshift. The first, however, asks about &lt;em&gt;cosmological&lt;/em&gt; redshift. These are quite different, and indeed the asker for the latest questions points out that the cries of &quot;Noether doesn't apply&quot; in response to the earliest question are just wrong in this newest context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link is the second question, and to be honest I don't know whether it is about gravitational or cosmological redshift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a general flaw in the system, but I'm not sure what the fix is. Two options come to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just ignore this condition. If we close &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;, then even if &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is not really a duplicate of &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;, they'll be related enough that the person can piece together an answer on their own. Besides, &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; usually accumulated &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;-specific answers before being closed, and these probably answer &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrict ourselves to only marking &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicates (in concept if not in words). (I feel the word &quot;exact&quot; used to be here in this context, but I can  no longer find it.) I have anecdotally noticed over the years that as we experienced users see more and more questions, we are more likely to see &lt;em&gt;similarities&lt;/em&gt; to other questions, and are perhaps a bit quick with declaring questions to be duplicates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think? Is there something wrong here? What can we do to fix it? See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/648&quot;&gt;Liberal definition of duplicate questions and the health of physics stack exchange.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T18:17:39.607" Title="What can we do about imperfect transitivity in marking duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T03:05:11.530" Score="15" ViewCount="4381" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;N.B.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The size requirements for adverts have changed. It is &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; appropriate to simply copy over the images from previous years - they won't work. Images need to be &lt;strong&gt;300×250px&lt;/strong&gt; or 600×500px for retina displays, up from 220×250px in previous years. If an image is taller than it is wide, it's the wrong size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's 2016 now, and we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites&quot;&gt;made some changes to the sidebar size&lt;/a&gt;. As such, we can now restart the Community Promotion Ads for 2016!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, we have updated some of the guidelines compared to previously - the changes are marked in bold in the Image Requirements section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;300 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of &lt;strong&gt;150 KB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/7426&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T09:17:59.653" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2016" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="33" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-02-02T15:20:40.653" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T03:05:11.530" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zzY6I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T03:05:11.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T08:16:26.173" Score="23" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/229606/&quot;&gt;Is there really a direction of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is yet another question related to the flow of time, and I was thinking that it would be nice to have a master &lt;em&gt;Flow of Time&lt;/em&gt; question that we could direct people to. I don't think such a question exists. Searching the site I find the following popular questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/15371&quot;&gt;understanding time: Is time simply the rate change?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/17056/2451&quot;&gt;Time, what is it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/52048/&quot;&gt;What is the speed of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71823/&quot;&gt;Is there a proof of existence of time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/104031/&quot;&gt;Is the flow of time regular?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well of dozens of related questions with fewer upvotes. I think these questions pretty much cover the ground between them, and I was wondering if it would be useful to write a grand unified question that grouped all the information in one place. Obviously there would be duplication of existing material, but I think it would be worth it. I'm willing to have a go at writing a question and answer, but it would be Community Wiki so anyone can contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions please. Upvote if you want someone to write this question and downvote if you don't want to see this question posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T17:31:34.097" Title="Canonical question about the flow of time" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7425" CreationDate="2016-01-15T18:17:39.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea behind closing one question (A) as a duplicate of another (B) is that &lt;strong&gt;any valid answer to A would also be a valid answer, or part of a valid answer, to B&lt;/strong&gt;. I don't mean that you should be able to copy an answer from A and paste it into the answer box on B, but more that the core concepts, or &quot;answering ideas&quot;, of the answer-post to A would also be &quot;answering ideas&quot; in an answer-post to B. (I hope my invented terms of &quot;answering idea&quot; and &quot;answer-post&quot; are clear enough.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, in this situation, you might as well post the answer to B instead of A. It helps everyone when the knowledge is centralized in one place as much as possible. (Of course, this assumes that B is still narrow enough that it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; reasonably be addressed in a single answer.) If there is one question that we can treat as canonical on a certain subject, one which many other questions can be marked as duplicates of, that often helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, as I post this I haven't yet read the specific questions being referenced, but in general I would say this: the chain of duplicates should be broken at the point where a marked duplicate question (i.e. a question that has been closed as a duplicate) is asking something that the target of its duplicate link is not, and thus the criterion I listed in bold above doesn't apply. If there is no such point in the chain, then there's no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the theory, anyway. In practice, sometimes a question (A) is a duplicate of a few other questions (B,C,...), in the sense that each concept contained in a valid answer-post to A is also an &quot;answering idea&quot; to one of the other questions, B or C or so on, but perhaps no single one of B,C,... entirely incorporates A. In this case, we can't always put all of B,C,... in the duplicate link list - in other words, it's not always possible to close as a duplicate of multiple questions. It requires at least as many (non-binding) close votes as there are target duplicates (B,C...). So sometimes extra duplicates will be indicated in comments or something, and we should take that into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions are a bit of a special case, and beyond the scope of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T18:17:39.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T18:26:57.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stack-exchange-dynamic-ads.herokuapp.com/physics.stackexchange.com/bounty.png&quot; alt=&quot;Current Physics Stack Exchange bounties&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:50:43.653" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:50:43.653" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-01-15T18:26:57.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T20:02:30.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NS3GV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero reference manager: free and open source&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:49:46.120" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:49:46.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T21:12:41.500" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7nmM.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org - over a million papers, free to access&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T21:12:41.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T21:29:05.310" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ziQXb.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org: the leading open access eprint repository&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:55:34.780" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:55:34.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T21:46:49.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thecostofknowledge.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vu8lo.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Cost of Knowledge - join the Elsevier boycott and take back our scientific publishing!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:51:08.560" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:51:08.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7446" CreationDate="2016-01-15T21:50:48.147" Score="9" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are limited to 600 characters, which I believe is done so that comments are actually comments, instead of lengthy discussions or answers to the question in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is obviously useful, &lt;strong&gt;I believe certain characters should not be counted&lt;/strong&gt; in the 600 limit, because 1) they are not actually displayed (so counting them is irrelevant for the purpose of the char-limit) and 2) because these chars are used to make a more readable comment. Let me make my point clear with some examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some characters, such as &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;**&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\text&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\frac&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\mathbb&lt;/code&gt; are not actually displayed, but they are useful for emphasis/nice formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some commands, such as , &lt;code&gt;\leftrightarrow&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\left(&lt;/code&gt; are displayed, but when rendered the display is way shorter that the char-count.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is: sometimes, when I see that I'm getting close to the char-limit, the only way to fit my comment is to delete some commands, which don't actually make my comment longer (when rendered), but they &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; make it more readable. For example, instead of writing &lt;code&gt;\left(\frac{\mathrm df}{\mathrm dx}\right)&lt;/code&gt; I would end up writing &lt;code&gt;(df/dx)&lt;/code&gt;. When rendered, both are equally long, which mean they are equivalent length-wise. But the first option, despite having a higher char-count, is (IMHO) much more readable and nice-looking than the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: the character limitation, while very necessary, can be counter-productive in some cases. I believe it could be useful to include certain exceptions to the character-count of comments:  the examples above, as well as the &lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt; in every math command, &lt;code&gt;\!&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\_&lt;/code&gt;, (&lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt;+white space), &lt;code&gt;\mathcal&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;_&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;{}&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\overline&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that this is my first Meta post: any suggestion is highly appreciated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T09:28:31.457" Title="Is it possible to make the SE engine to ignore some characters in the character count of comments?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T22:37:44.067" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E9D64.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify: automated LaTeX symbol recognition&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:54:52.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:54:52.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T22:52:49.180" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ei2RL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Engineering Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:51:57.090" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:51:57.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T23:01:00.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://retractionwatch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFSyZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Retraction Watch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:52:51.153" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:52:51.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-15T23:23:59.683" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7426/community-promotion-ads-2016&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6SOhy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Community ads are decided by the community. Come and vote!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:53:50.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7441" CreationDate="2016-01-16T07:32:53.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're running into length problems because of MathJax then you should probably be posting an answer instead, so I don't find this a compelling argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it does annoy me that when I post links in comments the link URL is counted in the comment length. To this extent I agree with AFT's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T07:32:53.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-16T14:40:53.120" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pqs48.png&quot; alt=&quot;physicsoverflow.org&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:51:43.903" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:51:43.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-16T18:38:51.283" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ef9Hl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Stack Exchange Review Queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:55:09.607" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:55:09.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7441" CreationDate="2016-01-17T09:28:31.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a bad idea, but I doubt this will be implemented because it would make the comment system much more complicated under the hood for little gain. It's not something we (i.e. this community) can do ourselves; it would require the time of an SE developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a really important feature to have, for a couple of reasons: first, with respect to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My point is: sometimes, when I see that I'm getting close to the char-limit, the only way to fit my comment is to delete some commands, which don't actually make my comment longer (when rendered), but they do make it more readable. For example, instead of writing &lt;code&gt;\left(\frac{\mathrm df}{\mathrm dx}\right)&lt;/code&gt; I would end up writing &lt;code&gt;(df/dx)&lt;/code&gt;. When rendered, both are equally long, which mean they are equivalent length-wise. But the first option, despite having a higher char-count, is (IMHO) much more readable and nice-looking than the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are transient, and they don't really need to be as readable as possible. They just need to make their point once, to one or two people: the author of the post you're commenting on, and the other commenter who you're replying to. Maybe a few others who are also involved in an exchange in the comments, in some cases. Still, that group is small enough, and familiar enough with the context of the question or answer, that they'll understand what you mean even if you have some mis-sized parentheses and incorrect fonts. So in a case like the one you've described, just write &lt;code&gt;(df/dx)&lt;/code&gt; if that's what it takes to fit your comment into the box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing is that you can post multiple comments. If you run out of space in one, continue it into another one. I've been known to do something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@somebody ...blah blah blah (cont.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(next comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(cont.) blah blah blah...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if you find yourself having to do this, think of it as a &quot;warning flag&quot; of sorts, and check whether you really have to post so much. I find that it's often possible to compress something to fit into the 600 character limit by removing unnecessary words and phrases. We don't have rules against posting multiple comments in a row precisely because we should be able to trust each other not to ramble on and on when it's not necessary (and as things are now, that trust is justified).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with many of these things, the rules/guidelines/recommendations/etc. are a little looser on meta because it's more discussion-oriented, so you may see more multi-comment replies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T09:28:31.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7455" CreationDate="2016-01-18T01:54:28.867" Score="6" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first downvote was reported as an unupvote in my rep score. It cost 10 points. I thought that was normal until I received another downvote and discovered that it cost only 2 rep points. What is the difference between a downvote and an unupvote? I Googled it and got nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77210" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T08:50:16.857" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T08:50:16.857" Title="What is an unupvote and why does it cost more rep points than a downvote?" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7454" CreationDate="2016-01-18T01:58:48.183" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &quot;unupvote&quot; is the removal of an upvote, and consequently removes the rep gain associated with that vote. In my experience they are fairly rare. They are distinct from a down vote (though the effect on a question's score is essentially the same if you neglect that the voter had previously increased the questions score).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users are allow to cancel a vote during a brief window after casting it or after an intervening edit. The user may have changed their mind becuase they read some other answers or didn't like a clarification in the comments or they may not have liked an edit that you (or someone else) made to your post after they initially voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;When you reach 1000 rep you'll gain the ability to click on post scores and see a up/down breakdown as well as the net.&lt;/a&gt; Under those conditions the difference is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T01:58:48.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-18T13:12:30.943" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the sidebar got &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites&quot;&gt;stretched by about 30%&lt;/a&gt;. No problem. This entails a change to the network-provided ads (not visible above certain rep thresholds) and to the community ads. No problem. Some old ads &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites#comment884976_272563&quot;&gt;ran with some extra whitespace&lt;/a&gt; while they were updated. No problem. We need to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites#comment884977_272563&quot;&gt;update all our community ads&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites#comment885010_272563&quot;&gt;to the new size&lt;/a&gt;. Grumble, but no problem, it's a good opportunity to spiff up the graphics on some of them. The community ads thread got delayed a bit this year. Absolutely fine. We &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7426/community-promotion-ads-2016#comment29266_7426&quot;&gt;don't really know when the 2016 ads kick in&lt;/a&gt;. Not awesome on the lack of clarity, but not a problem as long as nothing terrible comes of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/urgvy.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ad is currently running and it comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388#6399&quot;&gt;the 2015 thread&lt;/a&gt;. For comparison, here is that advert as posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TG2kD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you're going to run 2015 community ads in the expanded sidebar, pad them out with whitespace instead of stretching them.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite simple, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273255/please-dont-stretch-the-old-community-ads&quot;&gt;first posted on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Re-posted here as a signpost as it affects this site; give the MSE question some love if you agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T16:45:13.860" Title="Please don't stretch the old community ads!" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T14:13:47.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dissem.in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://dev.dissem.in/img/stackexchange.png&quot; alt=&quot;Are your papers available in an open access repository? Check with Dissemin&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T14:13:47.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T18:20:42.310" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5A7af.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:48:52.230" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:48:52.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T19:41:08.207" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/353zN.png&quot; alt=&quot;History of Science and Mathematics at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:54:18.903" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:54:18.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T20:55:58.923" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxitics.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ANuxU.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv Analytics: specialized web portal dedicated to reading &amp;amp; discussing arXiv eprints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:53:39.090" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:53:39.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T21:37:27.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pefiz.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciRate&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:49:54.420" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:49:54.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7457" CreationDate="2016-01-18T21:55:43.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this has been resolved over on the mother meta. Quoting from a member of the SE team:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looks like we jumped the gun on a sidebar change for community ads.&#xA;  Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The change has been reverted, and the updated build is rolling out&#xA;  into production as I type this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T21:55:43.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T23:21:16.163" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/toYiP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:54:38.903" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:54:38.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-18T23:36:05.487" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com/latex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SaONO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Overleaf: Free online collaborative LaTeX editor with real-time PDF preview&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:53:25.887" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:53:25.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-19T02:16:47.760" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O9ZQy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Computational Science at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:54:08.827" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:54:08.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-19T07:52:01.973" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/noaFv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Haikus are awesome/ Chemistry is more so/ Ask straight away!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104362" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:54:59.967" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:54:59.967" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-01-19T07:52:01.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-19T14:24:53.333" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1wvvA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wayback Machine: experience the Web as it was&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:53:18.763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:53:18.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2016-01-19T17:11:45.347" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a cut-paste copy of a personal blog post I made that combines the resources in previous answers (and a few others) into a single post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;stackexchange.com is a great site to ask questions and receive professional answers, but it usually takes time to get an answer and questions are sometimes closed unnecessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some other options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question is closed on physics.stackexchange.com (which is plagued by &amp;quot;overly aggressive moderators&amp;quot;), try posting on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;math.stackexchange.com if your question is mostly mathematical, or mathoverflow.net if your question is mathematical and fairly high-level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;astronomy.stackexchange.com if your question is about astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;space.stackexchange.com if your question is about space&#xA;exploration, rocket launches, or anything similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;earthscience.stackexchange.com if your question relates to Earth&#xA;science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;gis.stackexchange.com if your question is about GIS or geography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;mathematica.stackexchange.com if you are working physics&#xA;problems with Mathematica(tm) software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;programmers.stackexchange.com if you are writing a computer program to do physics (also stackoverflow.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;scifi.stackexchange.com if you're wondering how physics works in an existing science fiction world, or&#xA;worldbuilding.stackexchange.com if you're trying to create a world and need help with your fictional physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The other answers to this question may also provide additional resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also try visiting the Physics Stack Exchange chat room:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&lt;/a&gt; where the atmosphere is generally friendlier. In many cases, they will help you with homework, even if your problem was closed on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you need help more urgently, or your question was closed on a different Stack Exchange site, you might try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;openstudy.com: near-real-time help, somewhat&#xA;difficult-to-naviate interface&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;wolframalpha.com: if you just need to check your answers, this can be helpful, but it's been having a few serious problems later, so proceed with caution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;quora.com: if your question is more philosophical or discussion-based (instead of looking for a specific answer), Quora might be the place to post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like any other sites listed here, please let me know. The listings below are from individual users, and I have not vetted them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;toughstem.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user854" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditorDisplayName="user854" LastEditDate="2021-09-07T09:49:55.993" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T09:49:55.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-19T19:46:24.583" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ij43t.png&quot; alt=&quot;archive.org - the public library of the internet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:52:15.763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:52:15.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-01-20T18:38:39.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A somewhat late answer, but it occurs to me that there are circumstances where doing a calculation in an answer may be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes see questions that don't ask &lt;em&gt;do this calculation&lt;/em&gt; but rather &lt;em&gt;how is this calculation done?&lt;/em&gt; i.e. what are the concepts behind the calculation? For example look at my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/36167/does-juggling-balls-reduce-the-total-weight-of-the-juggler-and-balls&quot;&gt;Does juggling balls reduce the total weight of the juggler and balls?&lt;/a&gt; in which I basically just do a calculation. If the OP had asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prove you can't cross the bridge by juggling the balls blah blah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it would have been closed as homework and closed, and my answer (with 89 upvotes!!) would never have been posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that I've written quite a few answers like this i.e. answers that are basically just calculations but their value lies in showing how the calculation is done. I imagine most of us would agree this is a fair way to answer, but it feels as though there is a resistance to any answers that are essentially just calculations and I wouldn't want to be prevented from answering in this way in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T18:38:39.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7474" CreationDate="2016-01-21T03:33:50.840" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of students, including myself, have to write lab reports for school. So I would like to ask, is questions regarding how to correctly write a good report allowed here (like how to correctly state a hypothesis, etc) or is it limited to pure physics only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93655" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T07:18:09.683" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T09:01:46.980" Title="Can we ask about how to write reports" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7473" CreationDate="2016-01-21T03:49:21.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my mind this would be a bad question for Physics SE because it is at once&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too general&lt;/strong&gt; There are many different level of detail, many different conventions that the instructor might want you to follow or to ignore. Some instructors expect a rigid report format some don't, and among those that do there is no universal agreement on what the format should be. Different instructors have different pet peeves about graphs; about the absolute necessity of including error bars (or not); about the need for at least seven data point to draw a line (or not) and so on. The level of detail expected in the report varies, as does the level of citation when you're talking about educational labs. Which mechanism should be used for reporting measurement uncertainties? Depends on the class and the instructor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stuff is endless...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too narrow&lt;/strong&gt; If you resolve the ambiguities then the question is only applicable to your particular situation and doesn't help anyone else (which is one of the goals of a good question).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T03:49:21.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7473" CreationDate="2016-01-21T09:01:46.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what dmckee said, I see this site as being for questions about physics, and asking something about how to write a report is not a question about physics. So, no, I'd say it's off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you manage to find a question which is neither too broad nor too narrow, it might fit on another SE site, such as &lt;a href=&quot;//academia.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;//english.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;//writers.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Writers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T09:01:46.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-24T11:42:59.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/102351/science-educators&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/102351.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81048" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-08-27T20:40:42.813" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T20:40:42.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-25T00:33:17.167" Score="-2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens to good Physics questions and answers lost by people who lost their accounts either which a way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2016-01-27T14:17:36.483" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T14:17:36.483" Title="Contributions Lost in Time" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7478" CreationDate="2016-01-25T01:25:06.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone loses access to their account, the posts remain, but the user will be unable to edit them (as the OP) until they regain access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accounts are usually deleted (1) because of administrative reasons such as sockpuppetting or voting fraud, in which case there are likely no salvageable posts, or (2) because the user has requested it. In this case the posts also remain, stripped of a link to the poster's profile and with the poster username sometimes changed to the form userXXXX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as before, seriously: all this information is available with minimal digging at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. If you're asking for a specific reason we can help, but if you're just randomly wondering about stuff, please have a thorough look in those places first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T01:25:06.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-26T23:00:00.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ToughSTEM.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GxO66.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A community on a mission to solve all STEM&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42618" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T23:00:00.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-27T08:53:28.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FlxKZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;For those seeking down-to-earth answers to their questions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67944" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:50:11.293" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:50:11.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T06:44:44.250" Score="-7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I joined 1 or 2 weeks before and i have observed here that people prefer to downvote rather than just making an asker understand the fault in his question . Well , i agree that downvoting must exist in answers , so that every get asker gets the best reliable answer but voting on an &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt; may mislead a random searcher into thinking that votes is the quality of an question. For example we have a millions of questions asking the same thing &quot;why does law of conservation of momentum hold true&quot; , but every single question gets the different votes. This system is really misleading.It would be better if there was a vote of wrong concepts involved only in the post (not right concepts involved because it would again led a system of favoritisized questions) .So should it work the other way or not ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102021" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T08:07:09.857" Title="Should downvoting really exist?" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7483" CreationDate="2016-01-29T08:07:09.857" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting on questions isn't perfect, sure, but the fact is, we do get a lot of bad questions. Sometimes they come from people cheating on their homework, sometimes they come from people who don't know the first thing about physics but are convinced they have disproven relativity, sometimes they come from ordinary curious people and they're just really trivial questions where the asker couldn't be bothered to do a simple Google search to find the answer first. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need some way to distinguish bad questions from good ones, because part of what attracts people to this site is that they can come to read and answer good questions. That's why voting on questions exists. Again, we know it's not a perfect system, but nobody has an idea that's much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why we are fine with the system the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T08:07:09.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-30T05:29:22.170" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/232114/44833&quot;&gt;Backyard experiments to falsify the Flat Earth theory&lt;/a&gt; which has become much more popular than I originally anticipated, and has since been closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-the-simplest-way-to-prove-the-earth-is-round&quot;&gt;What is the simplest way to prove the Earth is round?&lt;/a&gt;. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind too much that it was marked as a dupe since both questions are useful in their own right and the titles at least are clearly similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today someone emailed me with a piece of info that should have been posted as an answer, but he said he didn't have the reputation to post since the question is protected. I resolved to post it on his behalf, but then I realized that it is not possible to add answers to duplicate questions. I suppose the idea is that the new answers should be added to the other question, but it doesn't seem to fit as well there, which makes me think that perhaps it shouldn't be a duplicate after all (although it is certainly a useful related reading).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one commenter points out, there is a difference of wording - &quot;show the Earth is round&quot; vs. &quot;show the Earth is not flat&quot;. My question is geared specifically to collecting practical experiments or observations that disprove the falsifiable physical component of the Flat Earth Theory espoused by the FES, not to showing the earth is round in the abstract. (There is also a social component, that is, showing that NASA is not involved in a coverup, but that's not as on-topic here.) The other question appears to have a more theoretical focus (probably &quot;simplest&quot; in the title was interpreted as &quot;conceptually simplest&quot;), and contains experiments like Eratosthenes that only work if you have already accepted the round-earth model to some degree (one of the answers on my question uses three-point Eratosthenes to circumvent this issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't appear that the question has quite finished its active period, and I would request that it be reopened. Would it be alright if I add a notice at the top pointing to the other question, but with less forceful wording than &quot;this question is a duplicate&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44833" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T08:26:46.447" Title="Adding an answer to a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7485" CreationDate="2016-01-30T08:26:46.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To echo what &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.physics.stackexchange.com/users/36790/user36790&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;user36790&lt;/a&gt; said in a comment, when you think a question (B) which has been closed as a duplicate of another question (A) is not really a duplicate, you should edit it to make it &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; that it's not a duplicate. After editing, the duplicate question (B) should&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ask something that the original (A) does not, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explain &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; why the thing that B is asking is not covered by A (see also below), &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;link to the original question A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side effect of editing is that the question gets placed into a queue to be reviewed for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link and reference to the original question doesn't need to be at the top, the way the automatic duplicate notice is. In fact, I think it's better if it's not at the top. The first paragraph or two of a question should probably give the main point of what you want to ask, and while showing your prior research is important, it's not the main question. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48497&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one example&lt;/a&gt; of how I would do it. (Maybe not the best example, but I think it's good enough to serve as a guideline.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When question B is asking something not covered by question A, that means that any potential valid answer to B would not answer question A. Or in other words, a post that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; answer question B, if it were posted to question A, would &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; be going above and beyond what is required to actually address question A. The fact that one could interpret B to include something that A does not is not itself enough to prevent B from being considered a duplicate. And the fact that the &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; answers to A don't address B is &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; not enough. (Duplicate status is determined based on the question itself, not the answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your particular case, editing the question to ask &quot;How can I show the Earth is not flat without assuming that it's round?&quot; might be a good way to start (of course that would be just the title; what really matters is how you edit the body of the question). Though it's hard to say for sure without knowing what you have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T08:26:46.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-31T08:47:48.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://crypto.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AkQzj.png&quot; alt=&quot;cryptography.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:50:03.027" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:50:03.027" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-01-31T08:47:48.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-01-31T20:31:19.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/90327/geomatics-and-remote-sensing?referrer=8G2asYAyI_To9RoVf1VtPg2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/90327.png&quot; alt=&quot;Check out the Area 51 Remote Sensing Proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83518" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T20:31:19.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-03T10:30:33.190" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every 2-3 days a question pops up on the site related to basic definition/misunderstanding of entropy/black holes. In the process of searching for related questions, I find that there are many answers covering many interesting and valid points. The number of such posts having quality content is so much that going through all of them takes a huge amount of time. I want some  suggestions for a suitable good answers to be redirected to for clearing these basic issues right away. Or does a master question for entropy as given in John Rennie's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7431/&quot;&gt;Canonical question about the flow of time&lt;/a&gt; needs to be created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T10:33:45.830" Title="Redirecting questions related to basic definition/misunderstanding of entropy and black holes" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7493" CreationDate="2016-02-03T10:43:27.783" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/233045/why-is-uhf-so-much-more-popular-than-other-frequencies-for-radio/233068#233068&quot;&gt;Why is UHF so much more popular than other frequencies for radio?&lt;/a&gt; the problem was supposed to be solved by applying basic physics, even though it was inspired by electrical engineering. I don't understand why the question was closed. What are the exact boundaries of engineering on Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T12:38:51.830" Title="Are questions related to physical aspects of engineering supposed to be closed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7498" CreationDate="2016-02-03T21:18:40.653" Score="-4" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one know if you are being serial down voted? How do you reverse it and stop them from voting on your stuff in the future? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2020-02-07T11:29:54.760" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T11:29:54.760" Title="I am being serial downvoted or something else" Tags="|support|questions|answers|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7491" CreationDate="2016-02-04T02:51:55.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should realize that receiving a lot of down votes does not mean that there is a &quot;serial down voter&quot; (in the sense that the down votes are there because the post is by you). It could also be that your posts are just of low quality, like this one: Spelling errors, no capitalization at the start of sentences, the word &quot;perpetuate&quot; dangling at the end with unclear meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7491/i-am-being-serial-down-voted-or-something-else#comment29402_7491&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:09:33.103" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2016-02-04T08:33:58.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is around the borderline between physics and engineering. I didn't vote to close, but neither am I dismayed it got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you revisit your answer you'll find it does not address any basic physics. You make points like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a smaller antenna is able to transmit/receive the signals due to the low wavelength of such waves&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;operating using high frequency supports a greater bandwidth as compared to the low frequency operation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the noise levels are much reduced in this domain as compared to the other&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all of which are perfectly true and good answers. However you don't explain the physical principles behind the three points. This type of answer is symptomatic of a question that is engineering rather than physics. Explaining the fundamental reasons for how the voltage induced in an aerial is related to the geometry and wavelength, why bandwidth can be increased at high frequencies and why noise levels are lower would expand the answer into an essay, so you are forced to give a general answer that will not satisfy any research physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broader issue of where the focus of this site should be, though whether this is the venue to debate the issue is questionable. The fact is that most of the prolific answerers are professional (ex-professional in my case) scientists whose interest is in fundamentals of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now we are experiencing a flood of general and poor quality questions and the site is perceptibly moving away from the vision of an authoritative source of information on physics. On my own part this makes me less tolerant of questions that are very general, show little attempt at research or are poorly thought through. I can't speak for the other site members but I suspect my views are not unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T12:38:51.830" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T12:38:51.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7495" CreationDate="2016-02-05T08:31:22.120" Score="8" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer is placed in the comment box on your question and it would make an answer. As long as you quote it is it OK to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Comments at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7491/i-am-being-serial-down-voted-or-something-else&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:51:05.763" Title="Using Comments as Answers" Tags="|discussion|support|answers|comments|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7494" CreationDate="2016-02-05T08:51:05.763" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good idea to make this a question so I can post my comment there as an answer: yes, this is fine. Actually, in order to avoid arguments over whether it does constitute an answer or not, I'll say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The fact that the content of an answer is taken from someone else's comment is not, itself, a problem.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you can post the content of someone else's comment as an answer, as long as the answer is appropriate in other ways. It is &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; to offer them a chance to post the answer themselves, sure, but there is no &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to do this, you do need to follow our guidelines on plagiarism, as well as the Creative Commons license that covers all contributed content on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Following our plagiarism guidelines requires that you identify the quoted comment as a quote, and that you acknowledge the source (specifically, the user who posted it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Following the CC license requires, among other things, a certain kind of attribution. As I write this, the attribution requirements include linking to the profile of the original poster, and to the original source of the post (which would be the comment you're copying).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course the answer is subject to all the rules and review procedures any other answer would be subject to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that the answer be community wiki. (Some people would say this because it's not fair to get reputation for someone else's content, but I say if the original commenter wants the rep, they should post their answer as an answer in the first place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T08:51:05.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7771" CreationDate="2016-02-05T17:18:56.320" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unable to add more tags in questions I review.&#xA;Is their some specific way to add multiple tags in any question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean Existing Tags and less than 5. &#xA;I use my mobile to review under full site mode. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I directly edit tags or review, both are not working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Opera mini and inbuilt browser of my KitKat.&#xA;Edit:Now lollipop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go to edit option.&#xA;Then I edit question .&#xA; Then I add new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EymRd.jpg&quot; width=&quot;275&quot;/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I click on Save edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Result: Question is edited but no change in tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2jGrD.jpg&quot; width=&quot;275&quot;/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works on Google Chrome where I get a dialog box to select a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T11:43:33.733" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T11:52:59.533" Title="How do I add multiple tags for a question (Opera over Android 5)?" Tags="|support|bug|tags|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7499" CreationDate="2016-02-05T18:20:30.263" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for stats I want to know which nation has its dominance or maximum user on physics.stackexhange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T18:13:33.707" Title="Which country holds maximum dominance?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7491" CreationDate="2016-02-06T16:04:28.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Serial voting is well addressed in the Meta Stack Exchange post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;What is serial voting and how does it affect me?&lt;/a&gt;, and the short of it is that in essentially all the cases that matter, serial voting (which usually means someone going through your profile and either upvoting everything or downvoting a bunch of posts) gets automatically detected and reversed within 24 hours. The precise details of the algorithm are not made widely available to avoid people gaming the system, but the thresholds are generally enough that when serial downvotes really begin to bite the script will kick in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common point of confusion for new users is when a single post accumulates a lot of downvotes in a short expanse of time. Here it's important to note that users can only vote on a post once, so by definition this behaviour is not serial downvoting - it is just a bunch of different users who disagree with the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Serial downvoting usually looks like a series of votes on different posts (with few posts receiving more than one vote), often with those posts having been inactive for some time. If you do see behaviour like that, the thing to do is to wait 24 hours for the script to kick in. If it doesn't, then see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/212332/what-should-you-do-if-youre-serial-downvoted-it-isnt-automatically-reversed&quot;&gt;What should you do if you're serial downvoted &amp;amp; it isn't automatically reversed within 24 hours?&lt;/a&gt; - in essence, that probably means that the downvotes originated from different users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still think that there's a suspicious pattern you can flag one of the posts with a custom moderator flag explaining the situation. There is probably not much that a site moderator can do to help, since by design they cannot see voting histories, but if it does look suspicious they will pass this along to a Stack Exchange team member who can look and see if there is behaviour that requires corrective action. If you do raise such a flag, be very attentive to any feedback you get, and please be receptive to such information and apply it in the future; do not abuse the moderator flag privilege as it does put an undue strain on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you said deserves mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you reverse it and stop them from voting on your stuff in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of voting is to deliver a clear signal about the quality of each post to prospective visitors and to provide a way for quality content to be more easily visible and accessible; this is obviously an integral part of the model. As such, there will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be a facility for you to block any specific user, named or not, from voting on your posts. (This is distinct from voting &lt;em&gt;irregularities&lt;/em&gt;, like serial voting and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sockpuppetting&lt;/a&gt;, which are abuses of the voting system and for which the system already has comprehensive defences in place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you're getting significant amount of downvotes, what it probably means is that people's opinion of the post aligns with the tooltip on the downvote button: &lt;code&gt;This answer is not useful&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/code&gt;. Downvotes on a post (particularly multiple downvotes) should be a flag for you to look carefully and critically at their quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that your grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax is top-notch. The goal here is to build a repository of quality content that will last a long time; poor language shws &amp;amp; if posts r bdly spellled or the bad grammar then th pst becoms much h4rder t read &amp;amp; mch &amp;lt; useful 4 de futur visitors. On the spectrum between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;txtspeak&lt;/a&gt; and textbook language we are shooting for maybe just below textbook level, and the care and polish you put into your posts will directly impact their perceived quality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Double-check that your content is very much correct, and be open and receptive to any comments that claim otherwise. Scour your references to make sure that you've represented them correctly, and make sure that you've represented them fully, provide those references in full, and then go scour the web some more to find better ones. Think critically about your post and look for ways you could be wrong, or alternative angles that cast doubt on your approach; if you find those then it can help to mention them as pitfalls to be aware of (without necessarily needing to delete your post). Recognize when you're out of your depth and be open to the possibility that you might actually not know the answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that you are actually addressing the question as posed, and that you're not going off on a tangent or providing an unrelated rant. This means you need to carefully and critically read the question and identify what is and is not being asked; address the former and delete any content that addresses the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that you're asking a properly self-contained, cohesive, well-researched, well-posed question, that the prospective answers will be of a suitable length and require a reasonable level of effort, and that you've provided all the information necessary for answerers to address your question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, to reiterate, this and similar questions can be answered by an appropriate search on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. I would also &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; encourage you to do a systematic readthrough of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FAQ for Stack Exchange Sites&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which contains clear explanation of all of the essentials of the dynamics on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T19:36:38.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7497" CreationDate="2016-02-06T17:55:19.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;limited amount of site analytics&lt;/a&gt; available to high-rep users but this does not include any geographical information. Geographical data on visitors (not users) is presumably available to the SE team but it is not made available through that channel; you'd have to ask the SE team directly to get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-declared user location data is available through the Data Explorer, but as e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/432881/user-locations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; shows, being user-provided it is a huge mixed bag and you'd need some processing to make statistical sense of it. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/432882/user-count-by-location&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This query&lt;/a&gt; makes things a bit easier to handle, and the corresponding code described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25598/where-in-the-world-do-stack-overflow-users-say-they-are-from&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; can help draw some inferences if that's where you're headed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a similar track, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3367/stackmaps-interactive-maps-of-stack-exchange-communities&quot;&gt;StackMaps&lt;/a&gt; can help provide a geographical view (but not quite a statistical one) on this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, though, this information is hard to come by and to handle. Visitor geographic data is not available, and user geographic data is self-reported, so for one you should take its accuracy with a grain of salt, and there is an enormous selection bias  you need to take into account: 48k of 105k users have not provided any location, and some fraction have provided fictional location. Moreover, it is at least likely that whether a user reports their location is correlated with the location itself (so users from e.g. Africa might feel that declaring their location is not advantageous, so that location gets (severely?) under-represented in the self-reported data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T18:13:33.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-07T14:18:49.017" Score="1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203449/dr-pierre-marie-robitaille-on-the-validity-of-kirchhoffs-law&quot;&gt;Dr. Pierre-Marie Robitaille: On the Validity of Kirchhoff&amp;#39;s Law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there are the following comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this might enlighten you rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pierre-Marie_Robitaille . There was a discussion here on his cosmic background radiation ideas, which really are bizarre. – anna v Sep 1 '15 at 2:44&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are being too kind--indeed inaccurate--by calling it &quot;highly controversial&quot;. He's completely wrong and everyone knows it. There's no &quot;controversy&quot; here at all. – Steve B Sep 4 '15 at 13:36*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looks like you're right, Steve. I saw the rationalwiki link anna v posted above, he's not just making a strange misunderstanding of a physics law, but rather there is some weird motivation about disproving the standard explanation of the cosmic microwave background. – Nanite Sep 8 '15 at 7:07*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do the above remarks answer the physics question on the page cited above, or are they just irrelevant comments? If the latter why was the following 'comment' deleted by the administrators?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nanite - You are mistaken. Professor Robitaille has NOT claimed that epsilon/alpha is dependent upon angle. What he has argued is that unless a cavity contains a black material, such as soot, at thermal equilibrium, the radiation within the cavity is NOT black, and so the radiation always depends upon the nature of the cavity walls, contrary to Kirchhoff who asserted, without any experimental evidence, that the radiation is independent of the nature and form of the cavity walls. Also, thermal equilibrium CAN and IS reached by arbitrary materials, but unless the material is black, the radiation is not black. At thermal equilibrium Stewart's Law applies, i.e. emission = absorption. It does not follow that the emission and absorption are total (i.e. black). Arbitrary materials have reflection as well (unless the material is black when reflection = 0). Reflection cannot build up a black field on its own without violating the First Law of Thermodynamics, and so it does not. Reflection can build up a black field only if it can be driven by input of energy via the walls and a black material, such as a piece of carbon in contact with the walls. In the case of arbitrary cavity walls, infusion of heat into the walls will not produce enough photons from the walls to build black radiation inside the cavity because the temperature of the cavity walls will rise, and thereby drop out of thermal equilibrium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106212" OwnerDisplayName="Stephen J. Crothers" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T14:51:53.517" Title="What constitutes an answer to a physics question on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7500" CreationDate="2016-02-07T17:02:12.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmmm. I just noticed that your rep does not currently allow access to the comment system. That makes many of the remarks below inapplicable to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best thing for the site would be to have a question on the issue at hand so that you can answer it. Which would solve the rep issue as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Kyle said in a comment. You tried to put a comment into an answer, but that comment did not answer the question. So it was deleted as &quot;not an answer&quot; because it was not an answer. Nor is &quot;what I wanted to say took more than 600 characters&quot; a defense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very easy to lose track of the main mission of this site (which is accumulating good answers to good questions) because a lot of interesting stuff happens in the comments, but for all that comments are strictly side-show stuff and if you find yourself trying to defend a position in the comments you're doing it wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things you can do if you feel the need to debate in the comments and it won't fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write an &lt;em&gt;answer to the question&lt;/em&gt; that addresses the point in play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a question about the point in play and write an answer to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invite the other party to chat if they are willing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Live with the disagreement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll occasionally see some people string comments together but I would like to discourage that. From my point of view if you can't condense it into a single comment it is too extensive a issue to be treated in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-02-07T18:48:53.563" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T18:48:53.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7491" CreationDate="2016-02-07T18:27:23.620" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jen, I've seen that your posts are attracting a lot of downvotes, and as dmckee mentioned it is not due to a serial downvoter, so chances are that the quality of your questions are not upto the mark, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that most of your questions are about blackholes and other pop-science stuff, It is great that you want to know about these topics, for which I would say that you are doing a wonderful job trying to understand science (considering most of today's teens), but there is a systematic way to do it. Any good answer to these questions will involve concepts of physics and math that I doubt you would have come across, In order to have a deep understand of physics you need to start with the basics and work your way towards the top. There is no shortcut. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'd say you start out with basics and start asking questions about concepts you find hard to grasp, I bet nobody would downvote these&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And please remember that this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to discourage you, this is intended to motivate you in the right path&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rPoFM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rPoFM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: Internet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74688" LastEditorUserId="74688" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T03:48:38.923" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T03:48:38.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7504" CreationDate="2016-02-07T22:02:51.490" Score="-3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are ways to earn reputation other than &quot;Good&quot; Questions and Answers that do and do not require time and effort for a moderator on each &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;action&lt;/a&gt; on Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T05:46:21.990" Title="Alternative Ways to Earn Reputation" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|reputation|policy|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-02-08T06:24:03.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7503" CreationDate="2016-02-07T23:47:15.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that do and do not require time and effort for a moderator on each action on Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's talk about way to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; make unnecessary work for the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and foremost thing to do is to pay attention to how &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; flags are resolved. Click on the &quot;helpful flags&quot; test in your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HE9Ic.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HE9Ic.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time a flag is declined you're being told that the moderator who processed it thought you were wasting their time. If you're doing a good overall job of flagging your helpful flags will outnumber your declined ones by a significant factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, stop adding bad or out-of-place content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every comment posted as an answer is flagged and most come to a moderator's attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every answer that doesn't come anywhere even close to answering a question gets flagged and most of those come to a moderator's attention. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every question without a clear physics question gets flagged and most come to a moderator's attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every question so garbled that the average reader has no idea what it's about generates flags and most come to a moderator's attention. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every time someone posts three or four badly written variants of the same questions generates flags which come to a moderator's attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every time someone flags a question because they want it re-opened they are directly making work &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; it won't help them because we expect the review queue to take care of that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T05:46:21.990" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T05:46:21.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7491" CreationDate="2016-02-08T05:34:01.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually this site is not appropriate for the enthusiastic amateur/teenager, i.e. somebody who has not sat through a course  relevant to the subject under question. Discussing quantum mechanics at the hand waving level is not the purpose of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have answered some of your questions, because I am sympathetic to the enthusiasm  displayed , and it is good to encourage open questions and the interest of the young in physics, but you have to realize that most trained physicists get impatient with naive questions. So you should shrug  but  try to learn from the negative votes, particularly if there is a comment explaining the -1 . It is all in the process of growing up in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T05:34:01.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7507" CreationDate="2016-02-08T18:50:33.463" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have searched meta questions, but I find nothing about what is necessary to do to have the yellow &lt;em&gt;This question may already have an answer here&lt;/em&gt; text removed from one's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has appeared at the top of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234360/rigorous-proof-of-amp%C3%A8res-law-from-the-biot-savart-law&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt; of mine with a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227477/amp%C3%A8res-law-from-biot-savart-law-for-linear-currents-with-multivariate-calculus/227557#227557&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt;, which I have studied and understood, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227477/amp%C3%A8res-law-from-biot-savart-law-for-linear-currents-with-multivariate-calculus&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt;, which is also mine (notwithstanding the fact that I am not a teenage student, but an adult worker wishing to study physics and mathematics just for love of these sciences, I am not so old as to forget a question I asked one month ago), which is blatantly different from my new question, as it is clear from the very title, although both relates to the derivation of Ampère's law from the Biot-Savart one, the older question in the case of a linear distribution of current, and the newer in the case of a tridimensional distribution of current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were possible to generalise a proof for the case of the linear distribution to the case of the tridimensional distribution, such a generalisation should be proved, and could even constitute an answer, but, unless such a generalisation is produced, I wonder how can my new question be considered a duplicate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to contact the moderators by flagging my question and explaining the issue, but I suspect that something has not worked, since I honestly do not think that a moderator, or any other person, having fully read the two posts or even only their titles, would ever think that the two posts are duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue constitutes a problem for me because I have even been told &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234360/rigorous-proof-of-amp%C3%A8res-law-from-the-biot-savart-law#comment512016_234360&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt; that the words I had added at the top of my post (which were &lt;em&gt;This question focusses on the tridimensional distribution of current, different from the case discussed in another post of mine, whose answer relates to a linear distribution where&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;) = [...] &lt;em&gt;is a line integral. I wrote it from the very beginning - and it also is definitely clear even from the very title - but it did not prevent the appearing of a &quot;duplicate&quot; message above&lt;/em&gt;) were a distraction keeping answerers away, but I frankly have to admit that I fear that the &lt;em&gt;This question may already have an answer here&lt;/em&gt; warning may keep potential answerer away even more than the text I had written before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52028" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T22:44:39.083" Title="&quot;This question may already have an answer here&quot; warning" Tags="|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7506" CreationDate="2016-02-08T19:16:16.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No one except you can see that banner, so it will not &quot;deter potential answerers&quot;. It is a message designed to streamline the duplicate close vote procedure, and give askers the opportunity to shorten the process if they agree with the vote, and force them to make their question more precise if they don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your edit is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; supposed to become an explicit argument for why your question should not be closed as duplicate, rather, the edit should focus on &lt;em&gt;stressing&lt;/em&gt; the aspects of the question that are different, and &lt;em&gt;contrasting&lt;/em&gt; it with the duplicate to make clear why the duplicate does not solve your problem. In particular, do not explicitly reference &quot;duplicate votes&quot; in the edit or use &quot;Edit:&quot; to mark it - a post is supposed to stand on its own, without knowledge of its history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on this comparatively recent feature see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/250981/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T19:16:16.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-08T22:27:26.970" Score="85" ViewCount="2126" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've all seen them: short comments saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Related: http://physics.stackexchange.com/..., and links therein.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we've all seen bunches of useful links to closely-related questions on the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; sidebar over on the right, which are a very useful way to navigate the site. Also, you know what's useful for navigating the site? Correctly-tagged posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of that happens by itself, but mostly it requires active attention and maintenance, and while we all do our equal share, some users have more equal shares than others in this game. I've been keeping my eye on some of the stats, and we just passed a milestone I would like not to go by unmarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single user is responsible for &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/382526/qmechanics-amazing-post-linking-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;over &lt;s&gt;3000&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;4000&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;(just under) 5000&lt;/s&gt; 7000 comments of the form &amp;quot;Related:...&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;...therein&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For comparison, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/433533/users-by-related-and-therein-links-in-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the next user down has &lt;s&gt;150&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;200&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;250&lt;/s&gt; 490 such comments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freeing the query from that particular form, this user has &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/433534/users-by-in-site-links-in-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;4500&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;5500&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;6750&lt;/s&gt; 9700 comments that include an in-site link, to &amp;lt; &lt;s&gt;1.4k&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;1.8k&lt;/s&gt; 2.3k by the next user down&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This user also has &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/433535/users-by-number-of-tag-edits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;eleven&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;sixteen&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;twenty-two&lt;/s&gt; forty-five times more tag edits than the next most prolific tag editor&lt;/a&gt;, at the completely mind-boggling count of &lt;s&gt;19,920&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;30,177&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;43,117&lt;/s&gt; 85,904 such edits, to &lt;s&gt;1815&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;1876&lt;/s&gt; 1911 by the next user down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this has a very definite, very positive impact on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know who you are. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2023-06-05T12:35:17.330" LastActivityDate="2023-06-05T12:35:17.330" Title="In praise of &quot;... and links therein&quot;" Tags="|discussion|moderators|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-09T19:19:08.273" Score="-7" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well Thank you folks. This is wonderful site. I got on to it recently and think should have found it long back. Answers here helped me to get rid of the mystery surrounding my mind in context of quantum entanglement. Now the observed behavior makes complete sense, which is a big relief for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest/request adding experiment groups where people can collaborate with local folks to carry out interesting experiments.&#xA;This is specially applicable to quantum entanglement experiments because it is hard to get access to such equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally wish to do few variations of the experiment to verify a semi quantum semi classical explanation of entanglement behavior.&#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106205" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T20:25:18.047" Title="Adding groups called experiments" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7509" CreationDate="2016-02-09T20:25:18.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I suggest/request adding experiment groups where people can collaborate [...]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a dead end on Stack Exchange. These site were designed from the ground up to be good at one thing: getting good answers to good questions quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you propose requires a different interaction model, so it's not going to happen. But you don't need to take my word for it: go over to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the mother meta&lt;/a&gt; and poke around for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=collaboration%20[feature-request]%20is%3Aq&quot;&gt;questions suggesting way to use Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange as a collaboration platform&lt;/a&gt; (that search isn't as good as I'd like, but it is not an easy thing to search for) and see how they were met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T20:25:18.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="429" CreationDate="2016-02-11T07:36:53.443" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;no one is using maths just for its own sake&quot; ?  Au contraire, all too many answers simply calculate, throwing spherical harmonics at the problem, without considering the physical meaning (or possible symmetries) at all.  Yes, maths is a language, but as with all writing, one should strive to use the simplest words possible, plain English, and not a slew of catch-phrases and verbiage.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the OP requests it or not, we should always strive to use as little maths as possible, even at the cost of imprecision and not making it clear how it should be generalised to other situations.  This is parallel to the common feeling among mathematicians that the best proof is a &quot;conceptual&quot; one, that uses the properties of the objects concerned, and as few formulas as possible, rather than &quot;a tedious calculation yields the result.  The details are omitted for reasons of space&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T07:36:53.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T17:13:01.923" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently,and my browser and configuration have not changed, hardly any maths formulas are exhibited in the question.  Sometimes there is not even a red phrase about an error...nothing to indicate that the formula or symbol is missing.  Has the site changed its rendering or something? &#xA;     And this is recent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OS is Redhat Linux 17 like for years.  Browser is Mozilla firefox 37.0.2, like for years.  And I didn't have this problem last week...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T08:22:04.167" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T09:06:38.397" Title="Math rendering errors?" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7512" CreationDate="2016-02-12T02:36:34.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems as though reloading the page resolves the issue.  But this never used to be necessary.  I will keep myself posted, and thanks for the suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T02:36:34.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7431" CreationDate="2016-02-12T11:19:27.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right, the first draft is now at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235511/what-is-time-does-it-flow-and-if-so-what-defines-its-direction&quot;&gt;What is time, does it flow, and if so what defines its direction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All comments welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T11:19:27.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:47:58.823" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qpQZm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Discover our universe&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93522" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T13:54:01.607" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T13:54:01.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7517" CreationDate="2016-02-13T22:09:16.167" Score="13" ViewCount="1212" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What peer review style questions are acceptable to ask on Physics SE and what actions, if any, should be taken against unacceptable questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I originally encountered &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234449/is-planck-s-proof-of-kirchhoff-s-law-of-thermal-emission-false-and-if-it-is-not&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and its accompanying comments (note the question has since been edited), the asker appeared to be making clear the only acceptable answers for the question were ones that would require a full peer review of an older article, a second paper linked in the post, or both. The linked question may have other issues that I do not intend to address with this meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally of the belief that there was likely a rule against such a request, I searched the Help Center in vain for something that mentions it. I asked an active user in Physics SE chat for an opinion, and the response suggested ambiguity in the actions that would be appropriate in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question was eventually put on hold as &quot;unclear what you're asking.&quot; A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234449/is-planck-s-proof-of-kirchhoff-s-law-of-thermal-emission-false-and-if-it-is-not#comment513059_234449&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; by one of the closers states it is because the question should be self-contained, a problem any peer review style question would almost certainly share. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234449/is-planck-s-proof-of-kirchhoff-s-law-of-thermal-emission-false-and-if-it-is-not#comment513934_234449&quot;&gt;later comment&lt;/a&gt; on the same question states that Physics SE is not a substitute for peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will produce some example fictional questions with commentary here to illustrate what I'm asking about and the variety of questions that could elicit varying responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it seems likely questions of this type will overlap with non-mainstream physics questions, which are deemed inappropriate according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;. In these example questions I will assume they are asking about mainstream physics, but it is possibly worth describing how they would be dealt with differently if this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I recently encountered [this article] online, is it correct?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question could be everything from a misunderstanding of the situation to a literal request that we review the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I recently encountered [this article] online but I do not fully understand [specific part of article], is it correct?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question improves upon the previous one by asking about a specific part of the paper, but it's unclear whether or not it is appropriate to expect site members to go through the entire paper to address the concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I believe [this article] is incorrect because I found [another article] which appears to contradict it. Who is correct?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question could simply be an underlying misunderstanding of the asker, but the asker insists answerers address the specific paper claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I believe [this article] is incorrect because [outline of reasoning addressing a specific section of the paper]. Am I right?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question could simply be an underlying misunderstanding of the asker, but the asker insists answerers address the specific paper claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I recently submitted [a paper] to arXiv and was wondering if the community could comment on my claims.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I recently submitted [a paper] to arXiv and was wondering if the community could comment on my claim about [topic]. Here is a brief overview of it: [long post detailing claim]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is certainly not an exhaustive list of what types of questions could be asked, but is merely intended to be a small list of examples illustrating variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the opinion of the community for how peer review questions should be dealt with and why? How should I report the ones deemed inappropriate? Should there be any uniform approach here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10908" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T11:27:43.563" Title="Is Physics SE an appropriate location for peer review?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7516" CreationDate="2016-02-14T02:39:33.167" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking: &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This site is very definitely not a &lt;em&gt;replacement&lt;/em&gt; of traditional peer review. We simply do not have a community that is broad and varied enough to connect a given paper with an expert that is sufficiently qualified, interested enough, and with enough available time, to review it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This site is also not a very good &lt;em&gt;venue&lt;/em&gt; for peer review, generally because it leads to a much broader discussion than the format can really accommodate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, there's a mechanics issue: peer review requieres back-and-forth discussion over a long list of specific issues, which the Q&amp;amp;A format does not handle well at all, and the discussion will be left as a sorry mess of interlinking questions, answers, comments, edits to the question, edits to the answers, comments pointing to revision histories, more edits to the answers, and so on. This is completely opposite to the purpose of this site, which is (roughly) providing a useful resource for future visitors which can be parsed immediately without going through ten pages of forum discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a bunch of actual problems, which depend on the specific way the request is phrased. So let's go over your examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I recently encountered [this article] online, is it correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is much too broad. It can depend on the specifics of the question (particularly if it's halfway between here and type 2) but in general these should be flagged/close-voted as Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a reason why we close things as Too Broad, and it is that they are particularly unrewarding to answer. A question that is Too Broad as posed tends to require enormous amounts of work to answer (more commensurate with a full paper or even textbook than a simple ~blog post) and it is beyond what you really should be asking of strangers on the internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, though, if someone does try to answer, there is a definite danger that the OP will not be satisfied: &quot;you did all of that work over on that side, but I was actually interested on that bit over there&quot;, so that huge amount of work comes with little reward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why we require that questions be posed in a way that an answer can be recognized as such, and not as soliciting essays on a given topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, depending on the tone, this is a very tricky question to ask, because we're not here to engage in long-winded discussions. In particular, if it appears that the OP already has made up their mind about the topic and they are only here to stir up controversy (as was definitely the case in the posts you link to, but with several milder variants also possible) then the thread is a non-starter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are here to respond to specific, answerable questions, not to engage in long-winded back-and-forth discussions which can be incredibly draining of time, energy, and passion for engaging with random strangers' curiosity on the internet. Questions which are a bait-and-switch, pretending to be the former but obviously hiding a huge chunk of the latter, are very identifiable as a drain of experts' time and energy which should be spent elsewhere on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases, the close/flag reason Primarily Opinion Based applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I recently encountered [this article] online but I do not fully understand [specific part of article], is it correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is much more workable. Depending on how specific the post is it could still be too broad, but in general that just describes a bona fide question about a paper in the literature. Prospective answerers know what are the concepts that need clarifying, and if there are obvious issues with the work they can be brought out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I believe [this article] is incorrect because I found [another article] which appears to contradict it. Who is correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As posed, this can be a legitimate request for an evaluation of contradicting literature. However, there is very little we can do here: depending on exactly how this is phrased, it amounts to a request of full peer review of not one but two papers, and this is really beyond our scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there's very little chance that we'll be able to produce anything near definitive - our community is simply not big enough - and providing inconclusive answers for the consumption of the internet does very little to set the record straight and much to cloud it up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless it is very obvious that there is an objective answer (e.g. the second paper makes a very compelling case, with only a very weak response from the authors of the first one), this is probably over the Primarily Objection Based line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I believe [this article] is incorrect because [outline of reasoning addressing a specific section of the paper]. Am I right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reads as a bona fide, self-contained question: is the argument the OP laid down correct, or not? (Unless, that is, the OP outsources the [outline] to some other journal paper, possibly of their authorship, in which case 'self-contained' obviously does not apply.) Prospective answerers are given a specific thing to address, with sufficient context, so this is probably a good use of the site and its resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I recently submitted [a paper] to arXiv and was wondering if the community could comment on my claims.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a question. The post solicits essays and opinions, and there is no criterion at all for when an 'answer' is 'correct' or not. This is textbook flag/closevote as Too Broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, with questions of this type, it is generally unclear what it is the OP actually wants from the post. Do they want community acceptance to rain down on them? Are they soliciting expert opinions about the correctness or significance of the paper? If so, exactly which experts, and which sections of the community, are they hoping to engage with, and what guarantees do they have that they frequent the site and will see the paper? (Again, we're not big enough to undertake this sort of thing.) Are they expecting problems with their paper to actually surface? (And, if so, will they react in a civil way once they do? Is that something prospective answerers can count on just from reading the question?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I recently submitted [a paper] to arXiv and was wondering if the community could comment on my claim about [topic]. Here is a brief overview of it: [long post detailing claim]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post does actually detail the claim, then this passes the self-containment bar, but it's still not really a question. What is it the OP wants? cf. the above, and again Too Broad for our format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few extra comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The business of bringing together manuscripts that need review with referees with enough time and expertise to review them is a Hard Thing. Academic publishing has sort of kind of got it down to a reasonable standard (but even they still fail often enough at it). At least, they've got it to a standard that has a kind-of acceptable rate of letting bad stuff through, and they've reached some form of equilibrium between the spectrum of (always take the literature with a grain of salt) / (if it's published it at least had a qualified set of eyeballs on it) versus how much energy the community can spend refereeing work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are all sorts of problems with the current peer review model in academic publishing (though physics seems luckily to be less troubled than medicinal chemistry and psychology) and there are all sorts of problems with academic publishing in general. Non-commercial (or small enterprise) academic publishing has done a good bit over the past decade pushing this process to a place where the peer review does only require a talented and well-connected volunteer editor (without the overhead of an editorial office), but even then it's not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoping that just putting a random collection of internet strangers from all over physics next to a random collection of manuscripts about all sorts of topics will somehow manage to work, and work better than academic publishing, has always seemed very strange to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On another track, we're not alone on the attitudes I detailed above. MathOverflow, in particular, is much better posed as a site for professional mathematicians, and they make it pretty clear that they too are no substitute for peer review, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1265/using-math-overflow-to-check-whether-or-not-a-proof-is-correct&quot;&gt;Using Math Overflow to check whether or not a proof is correct&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2328/on-discussion-of-published-papers-at-mo&quot;&gt;On discussion of published papers at MO&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2762/appropriate-or-not-to-what-extent-are-the-results-in-paper-x-correct&quot;&gt;Appropriate or not: “To what extent are the results in Paper X correct?”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;PhysicsOverflow&lt;/a&gt; does have an &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsoverflow.org/activity/refereeing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open paper refereeing section&lt;/a&gt;, which you can check out and see how it's working. If you're looking to solicit feedback on a manuscript, that's one place to turn.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:04.363" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T11:27:43.563" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7516" CreationDate="2016-02-14T02:43:39.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first want to state that, in general, &quot;Am I right&quot; and &quot;Is this correct&quot; type questions are usually terrible questions to ask here because the answer, &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no,&quot; is not long enough to be a valid answer on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that many questions that are closed as off-topic can be easily modified (by OP) to be reopened, peer-review type questions are probably among these. The presentation of the question should be clear and specific, asking the very broad &quot;can you review this n-page-long paper&quot; is a quick way to lose rep (downvotes) and get it closed. However, beating around the bush can &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be viewed as duplicitous and get some downvotes and a close vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic: it's definitively &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; to be answered here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be On-topic: If the question were &lt;em&gt;can you explain why X is the case here?&lt;/em&gt; would be alright. One could do better with, &lt;em&gt;I'd expect Y to be the case, but they argue X the case; why is that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off topic: we are not a peer review system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be On-topic: it could be too broad if OP is critiquing too much of the article, but if it's a small enough section I'd think it okay (though, for similar reasons as &lt;code&gt;2.&lt;/code&gt;, it could use some work).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic: it's basically spam and hardly about physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic: as written, it's not a question and what question could be there is the terrible type of &quot;am I right&quot; questions mentioned at the top.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say it's probably safe to say it's likely that peer review type questions &lt;strong&gt;will get closed as off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;, but there may be ways to get around that. It &lt;strong&gt;definitely&lt;/strong&gt; will require the OP to &lt;em&gt;present the arguments the paper gives in detail&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; require a potential answerer to download &amp;amp; read a paper. And it will require asking a specific physics concept about that section (e.g., &quot;How is this claim made?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T03:45:17.013" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T03:45:17.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7519" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7520" CreationDate="2016-02-14T03:25:13.420" Score="2" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question 2 days ago, which I think is reasonably well worded and clear to understand, but it has no response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/235551/93868&quot;&gt;Transformers: relation between their current, voltage and resistance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally when I post a question, I get an answer within a few hours. If not an answer, I at least get a response of some sort: a comment, upvote or downvote. What I want to know: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) How long does someone generally need to wait before getting a response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) What should you do to get your question noticed if you get no response at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I assumed two days is enough to take care of the time zone differences. Also, I think after a longer period of time, the question will be drowned with all the newer ones and may never be seen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93868" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T11:18:09.203" Title="How long should I wait to get a question answered?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7519" CreationDate="2016-02-14T11:18:09.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) How long does someone generally need to wait before getting a response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To properly answer this would take some data on the answering times of past questions, which might be available at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SE data explorer&lt;/a&gt;, but off the top of my head I think 24 hours is a reasonable time to wait. After 24 hours, it's likely that most of the people who are going to look at your question have already done so. Of course, you might still get answers later; some questions take a long time to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) What should you do to get your question noticed if you get no response at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can bring it up in &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and/or put a bounty on it to attract attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing also bumps it to the top of the active questions list, but you shouldn't overuse this. If there is a good edit to be made that significantly improves or clarifies the question, it's fine to strategically choose &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; you make that edit so that it brings extra attention to the question. But it's not okay to make a bad or trivial edit just to bump the question, and it's not okay to make an excessive number of edits to keep it at the top of the list. (A rough rule of thumb is that any more than 3-4 edits is excessive, but this has a lot to do with how significant and useful the edits are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T11:18:09.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T12:41:17.763" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there are mathematics and mathematical-physics tags, I was convinced that it is perfectly legitimate to ask for a mathematically &lt;em&gt;rigourous&lt;/em&gt; proof, i.e. a methematically correct, once given the assumptions made in physics on the mathematical objects used in the derivation, such as functions, domains etc. (reaching formulae supported and confirmed by experimental evidence by uncorrect mathematical procedures does not obviously fit the usual definition of &lt;em&gt;rigourous&lt;/em&gt; that anybody having studied any mathematics is accustomed to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the existence of those two tags, I was also convinced that it is perfectly licit to ask for a mathematical explanation of steps found in mathematical derivations of a certain physical law from given premises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions could well be also considered on topic on Mathematics Stackexchange, but I am not sure how much the users of that site may be acquainted with all of the physicist's assumptions made on a certain mathematical object, for ex. any assumption on a current density &lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt; (apart from the differentiability on a &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; subset -not necessarily all of the domain where the function is defined-, which I think to be almost universal for any function in physics). On the contrary, I think that the users of this site, if they have already studied the derivation of a certain physical law, are likely to have asked themselves, or to the their Professors, or searched in booktexts for what justifies the equalities they have found when studying the derivation of that law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are such questions on topic here? If they are not, what other kind of question should the mathematics tag be used for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7140/are-questions-about-mathematics-used-in-physics-always-off-topic&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question, linked by Qmechanic, whom I thank, is quite related to what I am asking here, but I am focussing on a rather different issue: the &quot;on-topicness&quot; of questions about mathematical proofs involving mathematical objects subjected to assumptions defined by the methods of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would still be inclined to believe so, unless it had happened to me to become the target of insistent comments, accompanied by down/close votes, telling me that it is not clear what I am asking when, for ex., I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234360/proof-of-amp%C3%A8res-law-from-the-biot-savart-law-for-tridimensional-current-distri&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt; for a proof whose steps can be mathematically justified (and where the answerer is hopefully willing to explain -as any standard mathematics or mathematical physics book does- to the asker and readers what mathematical results (= theorems, known properties,...) allows such steps when they are not trivial), or when I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235898/a-commutation-between-curl-and-integral&quot;&gt;ask&lt;/a&gt; what mathematical result allows to commute an integral and a derivative sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thank any answerer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52028" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T15:22:54.420" Title="How much mathematics is allowed to be the focus of questions?" Tags="|support|scope|questions|content-level|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-02-22T17:31:31.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T12:22:36.790" Score="14" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think I need to tell you that recently there was an historic discovery that captured the interest of the popular press and general public, as well, of course, as that of the broader scientific community. As a consequence, we saw many questions about LIGO (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ligo&quot;&gt;ligo&lt;/a&gt; tag); some simple, others more involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the  moment, we deal with these events in an ad hoc manner, treating questions about them like any other questions. This works OK, and I applaud the efforts of those involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case (and in many similar cases), the announcement was anticipated. Though admittedly such occasions aren't that common, I wondered whether we were failing to exploit the full potential of PSE during similar moments of intense interest in a scientific result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepare high-quality questions and answers in anticipation to make a cool resource, and e.g. display something like &quot;Coming here for LIGO? Click here&quot; on the main page, or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invite/encourage experimental groups to utilise PSE by e.g. having verified users (like on e.g. twitter) spending time answering a few questions, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Organize a set of the best questions and answers recieved about the topic (no prepared answers as in 1.), and as in 1., display them prominently&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? (preferably on the general idea rather than the concrete examples).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T08:39:17.957" Title="Maximizing potential of PSE around major announcements in physics" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7524" CreationDate="2016-02-16T07:35:01.987" Score="1" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know something about the education in physics. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like so-and-so field of physics. Then which course would be better for me to pursue in future? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to study something that is an intersection of Physics and some-other-field (Example: Computer Science). Which course would be better for me then?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does this question belong to academia? But according to me, the physicists should be able to answer such question accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105657" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T07:49:55.730" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T22:19:20.487" Title="Is it relevant to ask questions regarding careers in physics and not actually some physics concept?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7523" CreationDate="2016-02-16T07:49:31.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about educational planning and careers are off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could check on &lt;a href=&quot;//academia.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt; and see if they would take these questions there, but I suspect they don't. I think questions about academic planning are considered off topic unless they are relevant to grad students or professors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also bring up such questions in &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;, although it gets less exposure there than on an SE site. You may or may not get good feedback depending on who is in chat at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T08:41:22.633" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T08:41:22.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7526" CreationDate="2016-02-16T07:54:46.383" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on StackExchange:Engineering. It was active for few days. I edited it again, but I didn't get the response after that. Can I ask the theoretical part related to Physics that was used in that again on Physics? Is there anyway I can transfer the question to StackExchange:Physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105657" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T11:12:36.160" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T11:12:36.160" Title="Can I ask a question that I asked in the Engineering stack exchange here, if I don't receive the desired answer?" Tags="|discussion|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7525" CreationDate="2016-02-16T08:11:08.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can do this. There are two ways to go: first, if the question is off topic on Engineering, you can ask the moderators there to migrate it to Physics, in which case it will be removed from Engineering and sent over to us along with any existing answers and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's on topic on Engineering, you can still post a version of the same question here on Physics. There are a few rules to follow when posting a question on multiple sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't just copy and paste; instead, rewrite the question to focus on the aspects that are on topic for the site you're posting it on. (You could say that it's not really the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; question on multiple sites; it's different questions addressing different perspectives on the same underlying issue.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your reposted question would be quite similar to the original, wait a few days for a response to the original before reposting on another site. The idea is that we don't want nearly-identical questions active at the same time on different sites. (The more your repost differs from the original, the less important it is to wait.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever you do post a question on more than one site, make sure the repost includes a link to any previous versions of the question on other sites. For example, if you repost a question from Engineering on Physics, the one you post on Physics should include a link to the original question on Engineering. It's also probably a good idea to edit the original question on Engineering to include a link to the new post on Physics, though it's really up to the community at Engineering whether you should do this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, you should check that the question actually is on topic on the new site and follows relevant policies, as you would with any other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T08:11:08.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7522" CreationDate="2016-02-16T08:39:17.957" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a big fan of live Q/A because I don't think they produce really good answers. Personally I find a good answer requires me to go offline for a few minutes and think about exactly what is being asked and the best strategy for answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I think the chat session worked really well and was very enjoyable. many thanks to everyone involved. That is certainly worth doing again if a similar situation presents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strength of this site lies in the fact that we have knowledgable users who are willing to sit down and take the time to write well thought through answers, and I think we should continue to play to this strength. We aren't especially well positioned for instant science journalism and I don't think we should try. Pre-writing canonical Q/As is a nice idea, but in practice we could easily find ourselves wrong footed if we fail to anticipate the announcement correctly. Also writing canonical Q/As is a massively time consuming business and I doubt the resource to do it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T08:39:17.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T17:09:53.603" Score="-1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty new here but I was struck by the number of duplicate questions about gravitational waves in the wake of the LIGO discovery a few days ago. This lead me to wonder, perhaps not uniquely, whether it might be prudent to have some sort of temporarily sticky FAQ type posts associated with such high profile news. If these posts stayed at the top for as long as the associated news item remained popular and if previous questions on the subject were collated in them that might discourage reposting of the same questions at least to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104538" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T16:44:19.383" Title="Suggestion: sticky posts for topical questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7529" CreationDate="2016-02-17T16:44:19.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system doesn't have the technical capability to do this. There are two options we do have for giving a question more exposure than usual:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put a bounty on it, which causes it to show up on the &quot;featured&quot; tab and to get higher placement in the list of active questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put a link in the community bulletin, the yellow(?) box off to the right&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these automatically catches the eye of every visitor the way a stickied question would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in principle this feature &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be added by the SE developers, but I suspect they wouldn't do it. Sticky posts are one of those forum-like features that I think they would consider to distract from the core Q&amp;amp;A mission. And they'd be right, on Stack Overflow, but I do kind of see how that could be a useful feature (mod-only, presumably) on smaller communities like ours which actually have major events. Basically, it wouldn't hurt to bring it up, I just don't think there's much of a chance that would happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the underlying issue of reposted questions: the core problem seems to be that a lot of people just don't read. The SE people have been studying this for a long time. There are a lot of cases where very obviously placed notices don't stop people from doing exactly what the notices tell them not to do. Of course sticky posts wouldn't have to &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; block duplicate questions to be worthwhile, but it's quite possible that they would barely make a difference at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T16:44:19.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-02-17T22:27:30.543" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-latex-equations/iaainhiejkciadlhlodaajgbffkebdog?utm_source=physicsSOAd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iPh7Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;Auto-Latex Equations add-on for Google Docs&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90483" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T22:27:30.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T17:43:59.297" Score="6" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238159/are-derivations-of-physical-laws-less-important-than-the-laws-themselves&quot;&gt;Are derivations of physical laws less important than the laws themselves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is attracting a lot of attention, but there is a significant disagreement about whether it's on topic. I want to bring it up here to give the issue more exposure. I don't think I can give any summary that would be an acceptable substitute for reading it, so go read &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238159/are-derivations-of-physical-laws-less-important-than-the-laws-themselves&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt;, and consider this: should it be on topic? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondary question: if it is on topic, what tags should it have? (other than &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T16:50:26.997" Title="Is this question about the meaning of derivations on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7534" CreationDate="2016-02-18T17:49:59.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer to represent the reason I bring this up in the first place: I think the question is about the &quot;meta-study&quot; of how we do physics (epistemiology), or perhaps the process of physics, not about physics itself. It contains a specific example which is physics, yes, but the example is only used to illustrate the deeper issue actually being asked about, namely how derivations affect our knowledge of the validity of physical laws. I think this should be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any topical tags we have that would meaningfully apply to this question, which I take to be evidence in favor of it being off topic. It's a pretty general rule that if question is on topic, there should be at least one topical tag which characterizes what it's about (so, not things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;). We can, of course, create a new tag if the question really should be on topic but no appropriate topical tag exists, but we should think long and hard before doing so about why there was never a need for the new tag in the 5-year history of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T18:00:04.327" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T18:00:04.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7419" CreationDate="2016-02-18T18:26:07.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was not removed. The request was overlooked. Our apologies. We've now updated the site font to match more closely to Chemistry and Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81537" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T18:26:07.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T21:29:25.170" Score="9" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you all might have noticed, our posts appear in a brand new font since today (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7419/serif-fonts-like-chemistry-and-math&quot;&gt;as requested long ago&lt;/a&gt;. However, there are some places where the font has not been implemented, and this leads to some silly &quot;design bugs&quot;. I took a screenshot of one of them (note the two different zeros), but I'm sure there are a bunch of other ones too. I think it is important to note that this &quot;bug&quot; (for lack of a better term) does not occur on e.g. [math.se], where the old font is kept for both the answer count and the vote count. Is this temporary? Accidental? Intentional? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bea1L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bea1L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I guess I'm requesting that the font be consistently implemented. If anyone objects, I'd like to hear so in the comments, or an answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T13:28:19.087" Title="Was the new font incompletely implemented?" Tags="|discussion|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7534" CreationDate="2016-02-19T07:18:51.223" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good question and answer for this site will be one that future generations of physicists¹ will benefit from. That is, having encountered something they don't understand their Google search will lead them here and they'll find the answer to all their problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lofty ideal, and in practice few questions and answers will reach it, but I think it's one worth striving for. However the question being discussed here is just a complaint that physicists sometimes appear casual about the level of proof they demand. There is no definitive answer to this, and I can't see how any opinions we express in an answer will benefit anyone including the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussions like this are great fun in the coffee room (better still in the bar, especially after a few drinks have gone down :-) but they are out of place here. Leave it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ basically that means physics students&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T07:18:51.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7534" CreationDate="2016-02-19T14:17:48.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the following two ways one could think of as what &quot;Physics Stack Exchange&quot; might be about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a platform to ask questions about mainstream physics. Questions should ask about the concepts of the mainstream body of physical theories or how to probe them, which means that ideally, every question has a definite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a platform to ask questions about mainstream physics. All conceptual questions when studying physics are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one actually describes the status quo and is a &quot;physics based&quot;-approach, while the second one is a &quot;physics education based&quot;-approach. Let me quote John Renie's answer above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A good question and answer for this site will be one that future generations of physicists¹ will benefit from. That is, having encountered something they don't understand their Google search will lead them here and they'll find the answer to all their problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my problem: A question about the rigour in mathematics or what one should focus on when learning theories is something that many (future) physicists stumble upon and need an answer to. This is also something all physicists have (at least implicitly) thought about at some point in their life. Ergo, many (future) physicists will benefit from answers to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about how to do physics are in principal a matter of philosophy. This does not mean that anything goes - quite the contrary - but it does mean that most users and even most expert physicists will be unfamiliar with many aspects that good answers should incorporate. On the other hand, (mainstream) physics is what physicists do and not what philosophers want them to do, so the answers, while lacking in certain aspects, could help students assess the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest possibility is always to just refer every question that touches about philosophy of science to philosophy.stackexchange. There, we have the experts. The problem is that the experts in philosophy might not know how it is actually implemented in reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore:&#xA;The Q&amp;amp;A-format can support questions about how things are done. They will generate a lot of bad answers (and one will have to enforce rigid non-discussion policies) but the mere fact that we allow for several answers to the same question and we have a sorting by votes means that meaningful answers will be swept to the top. We might want to have a tag &quot;opinion-based&quot; with a similar disclamer as the &quot;resource-recommendations&quot; and we would need to adapt the close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to illustrate what could be possible and might help physics students in understanding the field (although the answer is far from good - it would definitely need to elaborate and explain the last paragraph and even then, I'm not quite the expert on the matter that I would like to be), see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238383/methodology-how-to-deal-with-non-rigorous-derivations/238403#238403&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where to draw the line? Questions about how to write a paper or how to collaborate with other people are clearly off-topic - they are not about conceptual questions when studying physics. But many cases will be borderline, so this needs some discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, those questions could be made on-topic, but we should create a special tag and special implementation rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T16:50:26.997" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7534" CreationDate="2016-02-19T14:44:58.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; as a mixture of &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I contend that this is not primarily due to its philosophical nature, but to the specific content of the question: It asks for the &quot;meaning&quot; of &quot;derivations&quot; in &quot;physics&quot;. But there is no such unique meaning - the meaning of rigor and mathematical detail in physics varies from subfield to subfield, from person to person and from specific case to specific case. There is no general answer, although I am certain that a sizeable fraction of people will try and convince you &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; stance is the only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there is no &quot;meaning &lt;em&gt;in physics&lt;/em&gt;&quot; here. The question is &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; simply because it will solicit many different answers which are neither right nor wrong - they're just viewpoints, which may be more accurate in some subfields and less accurate in others. So, while I can certainly determine what a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; answer to this question is, how do I determine a good one? Do I vote for the one that aligns most closely with my own? Do I vote for one that tries to list the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? Are those advantages and disadvantages universal, or again dependent on the specific case? So I find myself unable to objectively determine what a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer would be although I expect many different ones to be given. That's pretty much the definition of being &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not really reliant on the question begin philosophical (although it is). I think the discussion of how much philosophy is too much philosophy is not relevant to this specific question, since it is already off-topic just by the broadness of its scope and the subjective nature of its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T14:44:58.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-20T01:05:52.373" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that many of the questions asked in the physics stack exchange are based on misconception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't necessarily support down voting or eliminating such questions (assuming it's not really far-fetched like &quot;turtles on turtles backs&quot;), it would be helpful if we had a &lt;em&gt;misconception&lt;/em&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users that aren't sure could immediately add the tag if they are not sure their question is based in misconception, or the tag could be added after it's determined to be a misconception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45613" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T11:56:20.793" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T11:56:20.793" Title="Should we add a 'misconception' tag?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7541" CreationDate="2016-02-20T01:28:27.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be a meta tag - it has nothing to do with the actual &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; of the question, it doesn't help to define its scope, all it tells you is either &quot;this question is based on a misconception&quot; or &quot;this user thinks they are confused&quot;. The former is entirely useless information, the latter is pretty much par for the course if you're asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there's really not much of a problem with questions that have a misconception somewhere in them - they certainly don't need to be closed or downvoted in general. Good answers correct the misconceptions in a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problematic questions are those where the question is of the form &quot;Given that X, how about Y?&quot;, where X is just false, and Y really has nothing to do with X. One can't really answer them because one is  not answering the question about Y when one says &quot;X is false&quot;, and they are not going to be useful to anyone else than persons with that specific misconceptions. I'm not really sure what to do with those &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;, but I think &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt; is a perfectly valid close reason for most of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T01:28:27.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-20T08:48:09.360" Score="7" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across many questions that I want to know answer of to. But All I do is favourite the question. So I want to make a suggestion to the community to add a feature that would notify me about any new answers added to the questions. So that I don't have to check the question every day from my favorites page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be more efficient and productive! Please present your opinion. :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105657" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T22:11:10.837" Title="Should we add a notify/follow a question feature?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-20T13:25:25.070" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title says it all, really. Normally, when one hasn't done anything the &quot;I'm done&quot; option in the First Post review queue is greyed-out. Now, it is no longer so, but one still cannot click it. Similarly, after having done something, the &quot;No Action Needed&quot; button is not greyed-out, yet unclickable. The same happens in e.g. the Late Answers review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speculate that this bug was introduced with the new font (I noticed it more than one day, but not much more than that, ago), though I have no evidence to support that claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2016-02-21T10:30:50.360" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T10:30:50.360" Title="There is a subtle bug in the review queues: The (up to recently) normally greyed-out options are no longer greyed out (yet remain unclickable)" Tags="|bug|design|review-tools|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7543" CreationDate="2016-02-20T15:51:35.743" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We have a favorite feature for questions already.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below the voting arrows on a question you'll see a star icon (this is on the full site, the mobile app does not have this interface). That is the control for the favorite feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uus74.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uus74.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Access to your favorited questions is found in your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4ZlB5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4ZlB5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;We use RSS for following.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions, tags and users all have RSS feeds at the bottom right of the layout in the full site (again, the mobile app is more limited).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wr0W1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wr0W1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M46MK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M46MK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T15:51:35.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7543" CreationDate="2016-02-20T22:11:10.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was proposed about 5 years ago on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83343/adding-favorites-to-the-stack-exchange-global-inbox&quot;&gt;Adding Favorites to the Stack Exchange global inbox&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/83343?sort=newest&quot;&gt;this list of related/duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt;, the story is that this &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; implemented at one point, but people actually hated the idea and they &lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt; the feature. I somewhat doubt it'll come back, despite the continued requests for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;It was probably actually asked on Meta Stack Overflow before MSE was created, but that's neither here nor there&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T22:11:10.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T06:37:22.790" Score="-7" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will it be better if a user gets some reputations for views of his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89991" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T12:02:01.300" Title="Reputations per view of a question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7549" CreationDate="2016-02-22T12:02:01.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a really bad question. It takes at least 5 users to vote to close it, which means 5 people looked at it. Should somebody get rep just because the first 5 people voted to close the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's borderline and 30 people look at it before it collects 5 votes to close. Or maybe 100 people look at it and think it's off-topic but they don't have the rep to close it as such. Should rep be awarded on those views?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I write a bot that scans the site looking for who knows what, but it loads every question page. Each time I scan it, it increments the view count on the question. Should rep be awarded then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are just the first examples that came to mind. Reputation needs to be something reliable and needs to be a measure of quality, not a measure of popularity. If a question is bad, it gets downvoted. If it is good, it gets upvoted. If nobody sees it because it is very narrow or very uninteresting, well, try to make it less narrow or try to make it more interesting. In the end, if you want rep, just make better questions that are well done and provide a challenge people want to take on by answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you solve that problem, then views will come and rep will come. Start the beginning and build a good foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T12:02:01.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-23T00:43:45.930" Score="12" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a quick peek at the newest '&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;' questions when I noticed something particularly disturbing, most of them are marked either as [closed] or [duplicate].  There were so many that I thought it worth the while to bring it to mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest looking through the first 10 pages of the 'soft-question' tag to get a feel of what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98932" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T09:21:11.687" Title="Has the &quot;soft-question&quot; tag become a bad idea?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7551" CreationDate="2016-02-23T03:58:55.423" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you ask me, it's &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; been a bad idea. I'm pretty sure the only reason we have it is historical; it's one of those tags that gets created on every new site right in the beginning, before we figure out what kinds of questions we want. But these days, as you've noticed, pretty much anything that deserves the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; turns out to be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be in favor of blacklisting or burninating (technical term) the tag so that new posters can't use it anymore. Of course, if we do that people will probably continue to post those questions and they won't be so easy to find, but for organizational consistency, we probably shouldn't have a tag whose questions are so often off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't want to do that, SE is starting to experiment with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/14237/tag-warnings-on-ask-ubuntu&quot;&gt;tag warnings&lt;/a&gt; on other sites: little popup boxes that display some warning text whenever someone tries to use a particular tag. Perhaps we could request a tag warning for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; which points out that questions with the tag are likely to be off topic, and linking to a meta post (to be written) giving guidance on what sorts of soft questions are likely or unlikely to be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-02-28T15:31:16.663" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T15:31:16.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7551" CreationDate="2016-02-23T13:02:03.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote this answer if you think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; should be burninated (i.e. all instances removed, and making it unavailable for future askers), or downvote it if you think that that's a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T13:02:03.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7551" CreationDate="2016-02-23T14:15:23.980" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested in a comment above, I have created a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probably-off-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probably-off-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probably-off-topic&lt;/a&gt; and proposed it as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/soft-question/synonyms&quot;&gt;This seems to require a community vote.&lt;/a&gt;  My proposal for the way forward is to replace the one with the other, so that people who attempt to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; are not-so-gently guided towards this meta question by the renamed tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T14:15:23.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7556" CreationDate="2016-02-23T22:42:56.427" Score="12" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;My questions are getting closed a lot as &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;, which I understand might be entirely my fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I don't quite understand is why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/239142/did-leggett-and-caldeira-solve-the-measurement-problem&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question got put on hold. I was really just asking about the state of current research with regard to a particular topic. My question got answered in the comments, but I think it's a shame that it got closed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general: &lt;strong&gt;How should I ask questions about the state of current research without falling into the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; category?&lt;/strong&gt; Of course people are going to disagree on the topic since the physical problem might or might not be solved, although I don't think that makes such a question subject to opinions in the sense of subjective accounts of the topic (which is what I thought the close option was for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T06:50:46.833" Title="How do I ask a question about the state of current research without falling in the &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; category&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7555" CreationDate="2016-02-24T06:50:46.833" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel your question was unnecessarily closed (and I've voted to reopen) but right now we are struggling to maintain the quality of the site under an onslaught of ill thought out, poorly phrased or even utterly barking questions. With too few reviewers chasing too many bad questions mistakes get made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the standard types of question we get is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do physicists think that ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this isn't a question we can answer, unless I suppose we organise some sort of poll of all physicists. It's really an attempt to open a discussion not a request for a specific answer, and these questions therefore rapidly get closed as &lt;em&gt;opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. in your question you asked (in bold text!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is it not widely accepted that ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I suspect many reviewers would read no further than the word &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; before reaching for the close button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You defer the technical issues to a final &lt;em&gt;For clarification&lt;/em&gt; paragraph, and many people would have given up before reaching it. Had you started with the technical stuff I doubt your question would have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T06:50:46.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7558" CreationDate="2016-02-24T18:45:26.323" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering how an  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Archimedean screw&lt;/a&gt; could be made. Especially, I would be interested how ancient civilizations would do it, say early Greek or Romans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange does not look like the place to ask this, but for all SE it looks like the least mismatch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102232" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T06:30:54.370" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T06:33:21.887" Title="Where should I ask engeneering/manufacturing questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7557" CreationDate="2016-02-24T19:24:08.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm supposing that some features of your question are on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;http://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History of Math and Science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others might be on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;http://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Engineering&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part it would be off topic on Physics unless it was placed in a very specific experimental context, and frankly I don't see it: pumps are a CoTS thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, no guarantee that every question will find a place on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T06:33:21.887" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T06:33:21.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7560" CreationDate="2016-02-25T00:11:56.667" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/239433/70842&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which I suspect is getting downvotes because I have a bunch of karma from it but it only has a score of 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A commenter leads me to believe people find the answer unsatisfactory because they are mixing up the result of Bell's Inequality with the concept of measurement resolution.  If this is true, I may as well set the record straight with a detailed edit.  If I'm not getting that many downvotes, I'll just make a quick reply comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone with enough rep please tell me how many downvotes I have on that answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70842" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:37:39.290" Title="How many downvotes does this answer have?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7559" CreationDate="2016-02-25T00:37:39.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all voting activity so far happened within the same day (as here), it's easiest &#xA;to go to your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation tab&lt;/a&gt;, group the events by post, and expand the post of interest. The upvotes and downvotes are listed there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, one needs a userscript or a bookmarklet. There is a popular userscript &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/3082&quot;&gt;“View Vote totals” without 1000 rep&lt;/a&gt; for this purpose. I tend to use my own bookmarklet &lt;a href=&quot;http://normalhuman.github.io/stackmarklets/#split&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vote split&lt;/a&gt; instead; this is how I see +8 -5 split without having 1000 rep here. (To use, drag the bold link from that page to your browser bar; then navigate to the post and click the bookmarklet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:37:39.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7551" CreationDate="2016-02-25T10:09:28.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag. The issue is that we rarely get &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; soft questions, and the reason for that is that most experienced users of the site know they will be closed as off topic. We should keep the tag, and adapt our policies to be more accommodating to high-quality questions that are of interest to physicists but which are not necessarily &quot;hard&quot; questions about physics. We will be a more useful site that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see what I mean, take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;soft questions over at Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;. This is every bit as &quot;hard&quot; a discipline as physics, but I think their site shows that soft questions, when done well, can nevertheless be useful for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:32:31.777" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T09:21:11.687" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7563" CreationDate="2016-02-27T07:28:12.740" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using MathJax it is possible to make text of a different colour using e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\color{red}{\text{this text would appear in red}}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I rarely see this done and the times I have done it, it has always been edited out. Clearly, this feature could be misused (e.g. by changing the colour of large chunks of text making it harder to read) but it could be used to emphasis key points within a question or answer making them easier to read. So what are people's views on using this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T18:17:41.757" Title="Coloured text in questions and answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-02-27T13:38:15.793" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view is that you should use MathJax markup for things which are math (notation), and that is all. If that means you can't use color in the body of a post, that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For various reasons, we care about &lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; markup here, which basically means using the markup commands to indicate what type of content something is, not to make it look the way you want it. When you use the MathJax delimiters, you are implicitly telling the system &quot;this is math&quot;. It might get treated specially by search engines, summarizers, screen readers, and so on. So you shouldn't indicate that something is math when it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to emphasize a key point of a post, we already have markup for that: either &lt;code&gt;**bold**&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;_italic_&lt;/code&gt;, depending on whether you want the emphasized text to stick out at first glance or just to be stressed without disrupting the normal flow of reading. I'm not denying that there can be good ways to use color in text, but I think we can get by without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, math notation is more limited, so it's often useful to have more ways of marking up the notation than just bold and italic; for example, to distinguish between different instances of the same variable, or to show significant vs. insignificant figures, or to track part of an expression through a computation. Color is useful in these cases. (Not to mention, bold and italic already have standard meanings in most mathematical notation.) I think the reasons we don't need color in text don't carry over so well to math, so I wouldn't support removing the ability to use color in MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T13:38:15.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2016-02-27T18:17:41.757" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;However, I rarely see this done &quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;and the times I have done it, it has always been edited out&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be because it is a horrible, visually distracting thing to do. It's only one step better than blinking. Don't use color for emphasis. You shouldn't even need bold very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T18:17:41.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T10:01:15.990" Score="5" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to plot some phase diagrams that look professional (&lt;a href=&quot;http://yt-project.org/doc/_images/simple_phase__galaxy0030_2d-Profile_density_temperature_cell_mass.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;). I don't really know what tools are usually used to do this kind of diagrams, I've been looking around and found some alternative but I would like to know what is usually used by professional researchers to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen that there is a software tag but there is no usage guidance for that tag so I don't know if it would be on or off topic. Would a question like the above be on topic on this site? If not, where in the SE network could I ask it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92700" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T11:20:35.267" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T11:35:17.330" Title="It is on-topic to ask about computer software useful to do some particular task?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|software-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2016-03-01T11:17:30.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; (which was launched in 2012) instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:35.310" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T11:17:30.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7565" CreationDate="2016-03-01T11:32:40.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-3&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is the most recent word on the matter, and that says software recommendation questions are off topic. I would group the question you're thinking about asking in the same category, and consider it off topic. It could also easily qualify as opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could bring your question up in our &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;, or it might be on topic at the &lt;a href=&quot;//scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Scientific Computation&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T11:32:40.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7565" CreationDate="2016-03-01T11:35:17.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As always, this will boil down to the exact wording of the question on hand. If you just want to know how to plot the data like that, then no -- it won't be on topic. Valid answers are Excel, R, Matplotlib (python), Matlab, Mathmatica, Tecplot, gnuplot, and probably dozens more. Each is capable of generating a scatter plot/heatmap plot and that's all you are looking for there. All with varying amounts of effort and financial investment of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to know how to use software may be used to &lt;em&gt;analyze&lt;/em&gt; data and come up with whatever it is showing, the answer is a pretty solid &lt;strong&gt;maybe&lt;/strong&gt;. But odds are good, for that image at least, the answer is going to just be &quot;Get your data, read it into your plotting program of choice, generate image.&quot; Now, if you had the data and it was in some specialized file format that only astrophysicts would know how to use, that puts it back into the on-topic area here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Places that it may appear on topic with different rules -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;SciComp&lt;/a&gt; if you want help writing code to analyze data in some cool way or &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; if you want help with reducing dimensionality/understanding statistical descriptions of data and visualizing the results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T11:35:17.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T18:44:35.410" Score="12" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/542/50583&quot;&gt;plagiarism is bad&lt;/a&gt;, and unacknowledged citations &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what about answers that properly acknowledge their sources, but consist of nothing but quotes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe such answers do not consititute sufficient effort to be actually counted as answers, and should be deleted. If a user cannot be bothered to phrase the answer to a question in their own words, or to explain and give context to their quotes, they do not deserve to derive reputation from such a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:33:47.837" Title="What is our position on answers that consist almost entirely of copied content?" Tags="|discussion|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7573" CreationDate="2016-03-03T10:44:18.727" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I asked a question on physics stack exchange. It was closed with a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;faq guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question that was closed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/239661/maximum-period-of-a-vertically-spinning-ball&quot;&gt;Maximum period of a vertically spinning ball&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that while this was not a &quot;homework&quot; question, I can understand that it is classified as a homework question according to the faq referenced above. The wisdom of applying &quot;homework&quot; tag to my question is still mysterious to me since the definition of that tag is so general that it can be applied to almost any question that asks for application of general concepts to a particular problem. But that's not the issue that I want addressed. Let's assume that it is indeed a &quot;homework&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue that I want to address is &lt;strong&gt;(1) how this question is inconsistent with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;faq guidelines&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I do not find any inconsistencies with the guidelines myself, I have to assume that such inconsistency does exist since it was closed. If that inconsistency can be pointed, I'd also appreciate a pointer or two on &lt;strong&gt;(2) how to ask an &quot;acceptable&quot; question that qualifies as &quot;homework&quot; under the guidelines.&lt;/strong&gt; By &quot;acceptable&quot; I mean a question that won't be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83488" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T13:03:43.397" Title="Incosistent policy on &quot;homework&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7569" CreationDate="2016-03-03T11:27:39.627" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unacknowledged or unmarked quotes are plagiarism, plain and simple, and they deserve the full weight of community displeasure to be heaved on them: comments, downvotes, and eventual deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if an answer consists completely of well-acknowledged quotations then it deserves to stay on the site - it's not doing anything against the rules, so deletion is not appropriate. In general, though, such answers are of very low quality, and do very little to actually address the problem, so they deserve what all bad answers do: to be downvoted into grayness, with comments expressing this displeasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are indeed cases where &quot;something is so complete and well-written to begin with&quot; that it would  &quot;make it worse&quot; to require the poster to paraphrase it, and if that's the case - the quotation is completely on the mark that it fully answers the question in a self-contained but well-referenced fashion - then kudos to the poster and an upvote for providing a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, though, I say let votes show that we don't like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T11:27:39.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7570" CreationDate="2016-03-03T11:37:48.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/239661/7&quot;&gt;at the time of closure&lt;/a&gt; contains a lot of fluff which makes it an easy target for the gray area around the homework policy. The question in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/239661/9&quot;&gt;current form&lt;/a&gt; is far from excellent but it passes the test as it explicitly asks a conceptual question; I have voted to reopen it and hopefully others will agree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that your edit invalidates much of the existing answer, which is a big sign that the question was ill-posed to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your general point - the guidelines are not inconsistent, but they do include a significant amount of value judgement which, when applied incorrectly, is resolved exactly as you have - by posting here on meta. There is a long-standing effort to reduce this ambiguity but that is a hard problem; the latest bout is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If you have any constructive suggestions we'll be glad to hear them out - just be aware that this is a long and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;storied&lt;/a&gt; problem, and you do need to understand both what the problem is, what the previous solutions have been, and what their pitfalls were, to have a real chance at proposing something that will work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T11:37:48.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7570" CreationDate="2016-03-03T13:03:43.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, we ourselves consider those guidelines a bit of a mess. But I'll bypass that issue and just answer based on the existing homework policy as it stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...how this question is inconsistent with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;faq guidelines&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidance in that FAQ can be summarized in two points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a specific conceptual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show some work toward answering that conceptual question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post certainly meets condition #1; there is a specific conceptual question, namely whether the stated assumption is correct. But in its current form, it fails condition #2: it doesn't show any attempt to understand whether the assumption is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/239661/7&quot;&gt;the revision at which it was closed&lt;/a&gt;, I think the same is true. In that revision you show work toward solving the underlying problem - in fact you have a complete solution - but none of that work addresses the issue you're asking about, namely whether the assumption is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask me, to make this &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; not close-worthy/hold-worthy, it would need to expand on the issue of whether the assumption you've made is correct. A good place to start would be identifying some reason you think it might not be correct. For example, is there some alternative assumption you could make that also seems reasonable? Or do you get nonsensical results by making the assumption? Are you unable to find a justification for the assumption in any references you have access to, despite expecting that it should be justified somewhere? Do you find it necessary to make the assumption even though you think it shouldn't be necessary? Or so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T13:03:43.397" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7569" CreationDate="2016-03-04T14:55:29.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Floris remarks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If a good and complete answer can simply be copied from elsewhere, I&#xA;  suggest that the question deserves the downvotes / closure for lack of&#xA;  effort... But apart from that - if it answers the question, it's an&#xA;  answer. If it answers the question well, it's a good answer that&#xA;  deserves upvotes. If someone write a comment that should be an answer,&#xA;  and after prompting they don't convert it to an answer, you can and&#xA;  should copy it and promote it to answer - with attribution, and&#xA;  possibly without embellishment. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously though I think this depends on just how much effort is put into putting the material in context. Blanket cutting and pasting is really poor and if that's all that people are doing it is no more worthy than a comment featuring a link to the page in question. I rarely upvote anything that contains big blocks of cut and pasted text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="43351" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T14:59:09.397" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T14:59:09.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7569" CreationDate="2016-03-04T14:59:10.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a good and complete answer can simply be copied from elsewhere, I suggest that the question deserves the downvotes / closure for lack of effort... But apart from that - if it answers the question, it's an answer. If it answers the question well, it's a good answer that deserves upvotes. If someone write a comment that should be an answer, and after prompting they don't convert it to an answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7494/26969&quot;&gt;you can and should copy it and promote it to answer&lt;/a&gt; - with attribution, and possibly without embellishment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T14:59:10.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T09:29:55.060" Score="14" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know on this physics stack are far more questions posted than other stacks. But why is that. I can't imagine that a study of biology, chemistry or history etc. would comprise less detailed information or question. Is that because in physics is so much unclear comparing to other studies or is it very difficult to understand is well, or are there just more students doing physics or is it just more interesting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103999" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2016-03-05T10:40:43.110" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T03:05:20.070" Title="What is the reason that there are so many questions at this stack (physics) comparing to the others?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7576" CreationDate="2016-03-05T12:45:40.573" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the sciences only,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; the total numbers can be &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#science-questions&quot;&gt;found here&lt;/a&gt; (sorted by total number of questions). I've made an abridged table here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site          Quest.&#xA;--------------------&#xA;Math         573,000&#xA;Stats         74,000&#xA;Physics       72,000&#xA;MathOverflow  69,000&#xA;Chemistry     14,000&#xA;Biology       11,000&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these sites are more than 3 years old (with MO, Math, Stats &amp;amp; Physics all being more than 5), so I don't think time is a factor here.&lt;sup&gt;see below&lt;/sup&gt; What probably &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a factor is the number of users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site          Users &#xA;--------------------&#xA;Math         241,000&#xA;Stats         78,000&#xA;Physics       81,000&#xA;MathOverflow  53,000&#xA;Chemistry     16,000&#xA;Biology       14,000&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 5 times as many users on Physics as Chemistry &amp;amp; Biology, which seems to correlate to the 5 times as many questions found here than there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why there are 5 times as many users here, I'm not sure. But, I suspect it boils down to several factors: site policy, popularity (both academic &amp;amp; general interest), and difficulty of subject among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Response to criticism:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was presented in the comments that age &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be a factor in the number of questions. On a naive level, it makes sense: if you've been around longer, you're likely to accrue more questions. And this is sorta backed by data:&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XgCwA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XgCwA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All data taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#oldest&quot;&gt;the SE team&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm putting a cap at 1e5 (which ignores a few sites, including Math.SE &amp;amp; SO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But look at ~40500 (which corresponds to about 5 years, 8 months ago). That's quite the spread of question totals on a single date! Look at the table below, these are the sites that are 5 years, 8 months old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Site         Q       U&#xA;--------------------------&#xA;Web Apps      19k     69k&#xA;Arqade        65k     82k&#xA;Webmasters    23k     45k&#xA;Cookign       14k     29k&#xA;GameDev       31k     61k&#xA;Photography   16k     31k&#xA;Stats         76k     79k&#xA;Math         576k    242k&#xA;DIY           22k     31k&#xA;GIS           65k     49k&#xA;TeX          108k     79k&#xA;AskUbuntu    219k    328k&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is just fairly inconsistent with the naive hypothesis that age should be important. Going back to the graph, there are some &lt;em&gt;younger&lt;/em&gt; sites that have &lt;em&gt;more questions&lt;/em&gt; than older sites, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Russian SO&lt;/a&gt; (81k questions in 1 year)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it's reasonably true on a very naive level, I don't see how someone can claim it as an important factor, as was done in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. The technology sites dominate, with Stack Overflow having over 11 &lt;em&gt;million&lt;/em&gt; questions at the time of writing; Ask Ubuntu &amp;amp; SuperUser have more than 200,000 questions as well. All three of those sites have more than 300,000 users as well. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2. A log-linear version of the plot can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OatBO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;found here&lt;/a&gt;; this shows the roughly linear fit (meaning power-law relation, roughly n=-71 at R-sq=0.47).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T03:05:20.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-06T16:42:09.997" Score="-4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17404/e-mc2-why-is-it-c2-and-not-just-c&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$ why is it $c^2$ and not just $c$?&lt;/a&gt; is this question posted. I'm really interested in the answer but why is this question not very broad answered and even bad received. Is it really just a matter of accepting.....?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103999" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T18:53:25.630" Title="Why is a question about the squarity of c in E=mc2 so bad received?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7578" CreationDate="2016-03-06T17:05:22.957" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though I haven't looked at that question recently I can offer at least three reasons that I have for not liking it. Some of the voters might have had similar reactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion is dimensionally inconsistent which makes it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Not even wrong&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. This is a skill that should be mastered early in a first course in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is totally unmotivated. One can do experimental work based on simple-minded fitting to experimental results, but that poster is not making his (or her) suggestion in the context of data; so it's pure whiteboard theory. Theory is done by reasoning from things already known and perhaps extending them in a consistent way. But the poster either hasn't done that or hasn't shown the first indication that (s)he did.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is un-researched in a really extreme way. We already had questions on this site addressing where the $c^2$ comes from including the one offered by Qmechanic in the comments. And basic issues in relativity have been addressed at the popular level for the last hundred years or so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T18:53:25.630" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T18:53:25.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-07T18:57:31.357" Score="-1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somehow my flag for too broad got declines on this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really&quot;&gt;What is time dilation really?&lt;/a&gt;. Just the fact that the answer spans over 3 actually answers proves, by definition, that this question doesn't belong on a StackExchange site. There is a limit on answer lengths for a reason. I wanted to flag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/242043/what-is-the-proper-way-to-explain-the-twin-paradox&quot;&gt;What is the proper way to explain the twin paradox?&lt;/a&gt; as well now because it's clearly too broad as well, but even this one isn't as absolutely terrible as the original one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T17:44:39.907" Title="How is this question not too broad?" Tags="|discussion|support|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7580" CreationDate="2016-03-07T19:11:08.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question, along with the twin paradox one and the first in the series, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235511/what-is-time-does-it-flow-and-if-so-what-defines-its-direction&quot;&gt;What is time, does it flow, and if so what defines its direction?&lt;/a&gt; are intended as canonical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where we get lots of questions on the same topic it's nice to have a definitive answer that we can point people to. But that definitive answer is necessarily rather lengthy because it has to cover lots of details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether canonical questions are a good idea was discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers&quot;&gt;Do we want and need a set of canonical questions with canonical answers?&lt;/a&gt; and the general conclusion seemed to be that they were. In the absence of other guidance I decided to write some canonical Q/As on subjects I was particularly interested in and hope that others found them interesting as well. So far the number of upvotes suggests that the questions are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T19:11:08.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7584" CreationDate="2016-03-11T08:52:07.627" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/242632/84895&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/242632/84895&lt;/a&gt; (10K link only, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cCEld.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;partial screenshot here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the title stays, this got a lot of downvotes and got put on hold while receiving just rude comments that don't take my post seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that way? I was serious with the post, tried to pretty much express what is my motivation about asking, and what aspects I'm referring to, but all this got ignored in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the style in which I wrote? Or is the question at all just off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84895" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T10:16:07.417" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T10:16:07.417" Title="Why is this post against the guidelines and especially not about physics itself?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7585" CreationDate="2016-03-11T09:29:25.097" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question on Physics SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/242499/is-there-an-underlying-physical-reason-why-the-coriolis-force-is-similar-to-the&quot;&gt;Is there an underlying physical reason why the Coriolis force is similar to the magnetic component of the Lorentz force?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I didn't accept any of the answers, I can't find it in the unanswered questions list. Is there a possible reason why this is happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I should clarify I'm totally new here, so please excuse me if I'm missing something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110834" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T07:30:47.787" Title="Why is my question not appearing in the unanswered questions list?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7582" CreationDate="2016-03-11T13:19:52.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/96973/phills&quot;&gt;PhillS&lt;/a&gt; pointed out in a comment, the matter of what it takes to kill a person is a matter of biology/physiology, not physics. So in general, we consider questions asking how to kill a person (or kill an animal, cause brain damage, break a bone, shrink a tumor, etc.) off topic because there is a significant component of them that is not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to handle these sorts of questions is to break them up into a biology part and a physics part. In your case: respectively, (1) how much current does it take to kill a person, and (2) how can I tell how much current can be generated from a 1.5V battery? The biology part you can take to &lt;a href=&quot;//biology.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the corresponding SE site&lt;/a&gt;, though there's no guarantee they will accept it there. As for the current question, you could try to ask here how to determine whether it's possible to produce a certain amount of current from a battery, but even that is kind of on the engineering side, and may still be considered off topic. If you did some research to try to figure out yourself how much current can be produced from a battery, you could ask about some of the physics concepts you encounter in that research, and &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; sorts of questions would be much more likely to be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good of you to come to meta to ask why your question was voted off topic, by the way. We always like to see people considering the community's feedback on their questions, and staying involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Now that I look at it again, the style in which you wrote the question is also not the best, but that's not such a big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T11:41:56.667" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7583" CreationDate="2016-03-11T15:18:36.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question is considered answered if one of the posted answers has a score of &gt;1, which is the case here for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T15:18:36.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-13T16:10:56.120" Score="-1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that high amount of Low Quality posts are preventing to use much time for each review tasks, and thus produces a deleting habit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what is the point of closing/deleting posts, which has even received a bounty?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ie. this answer of me received even a Bounty; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75222/where-does-gravity-get-its-energy-from/238804#238804&quot;&gt;Where does gravity get its energy from?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;...but it was still deleted! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Answer received also the Bounty; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234697/how-can-a-bowling-ball-curve-in-both-directions/241137#241137&quot;&gt;How can a bowling ball curve in both directions?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;... it's also down voted and is proposed to be deleted, at the Comments is said; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the person who asked, even provided me a Bounty for my answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the main problem is that some actively moderating persons are just down voting and closing questions in &quot;Facebook-style&quot;; 5 sec preview and Thumb up/down.&lt;/strong&gt; I noticed this behaviour clearly in this deleted question; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/240766/mysterious-temperatures-of-mimas&quot;&gt;Mysterious temperatures of Mimas?&lt;/a&gt; where every one can see through it's comments how difficult it might sometime's be. The Question might got closed just because it used the word &quot;mysterious&quot; in it's title, though this was a direct phrasing used in the original source of the explaining picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text from question; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But why conductivity should vary so dramatically across the surface of Mimas is a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment 3 from me; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@CuriousOne &quot;But why conductivity should vary so dramatically across the surface of Mimas is a mystery.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment 5 from me; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@CuriousOne &quot;What is the physical explanation for dramatical conductivity variations across the surface of Mimas?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then suddenly, when the word &quot;Mystery&quot; is away; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why didn't you make THAT your question in the first place... – CuriousOne&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/56997/curiousone&quot;&gt;&quot;CuriousOne&quot;&lt;/a&gt; haven't ever asked a single question by himself. With this I don't want to attack against the persons of moderation, but it seems that there should be some mechanism to prevent this &quot;Facebook-like&quot; dalmatian-species-specific-moderation-style to reproduce. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the problematic I have talked before; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7336/can-we-stop-closing-questions-as-unclear-what-you-are-asking-for-ops-above-cer&quot;&gt;Can we stop closing questions as &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot; for OPs above certain reputation?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own deleted-examples about this &quot;Unclear what you are asking&quot; problem;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/240602/capillarity-qed-explanation&quot;&gt;Capillarity, QED explanation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/240840/physics-of-craters-in-moons-planets-only-impact-or-is-there-other-explanations&quot;&gt;Physics of craters in moons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241012/neutron-electron-and-proton-mass-dark-matter-and-dark-energy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is rather &quot;unclear&quot; than &quot;not Mainstream.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These &quot;Unclears&quot; are also about to be Deleted;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/240979/why-in-thermosphere-is-he-and-o-divided-as-measured/241007#241007&quot;&gt;Why In Thermosphere is He and O divided as measured?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227542/how-is-it-possible-that-thermosphere-can-maintain-so-much-heat&quot;&gt;How is it possible that Thermosphere can maintain so much heat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/225721/numerical-model-for-a-air-core-vortex-why-its-still-so-limited&quot;&gt;Numerical model for a Air core Vortex, why it&amp;#39;s still so limited?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Question;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. Should it be prevented to close/delete posts which has received a bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should it be more limited for a single person to give &quot;unclear-close-votes&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should it be more limited for a single person mark questions as a &quot;Low quality posts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84038" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T18:58:32.163" Title="Answer received Bounty but got closed/deleted?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|bounty|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7586" CreationDate="2016-03-13T18:00:17.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be prevented to close/delete posts which has received a bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any posted answer that does not answer the question should be deleted, regardless of upvotes &amp;amp; bounties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think either of your posts answered the questions asked. The one that was deleted made the preposterous claim that gravity doesn't exist and all mass is photons with frequencies less than 1 Hz when the question asked was &lt;em&gt;Where does gravity get its energy?&lt;/em&gt; The post doesn't answer the question. &#xA;In the second case, you're basically explaining &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is occurring in the video OP linked and not giving an answer as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is curving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be more limited for a single person to give &quot;unclear-close-votes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, anyone &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;with sufficient reputation&lt;/a&gt; can and should vote as they think about the question. There is already a maximum of 24 votes allowed per day (24 hour GMT time), with a maximum of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close&quot;&gt;20 reviews&lt;/a&gt; per day, any more limitation would, in my opinion, be a detriment to the system and the site. I would much prefer an &lt;em&gt;increase&lt;/em&gt; in votes and reviews allowed per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be more limited for a single person mark questions as a &quot;Low quality posts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any single person with sufficient reputation &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;can flag a post&lt;/a&gt;. After that, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/&quot;&gt;goes to review&lt;/a&gt; for those with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/161390/&quot;&gt;sufficient reputation to vote to delete the post&lt;/a&gt;; it takes 3 votes from those with &gt;20k rep to delete or 6 votes from those with &amp;lt;20k rep. Again, the 20 reviews per day holds here as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For flagging purposes, a user initially gets 10 flags per day. This increases by 1 for every 2000 rep gained plus a bonus 1 for every 10 accepted flags. The maximum flag count one can accrue is 100 per day. I don't think I've ever come close to using the 100 flags I have available to me, so &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; I could see decreasing this, but on larger sites (e.g., Stack Overflow) it is probably very useful &amp;amp; not with implementing on a per-site basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T18:58:32.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-14T03:59:05.193" Score="31" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a novice at this, and I believe I have only asked a handful of questions in total.  The first were all rapidly tagged as &quot;opinion-based&quot;, and I can see why.  I don't see how to ask for suggestions in any context if that sort of thing is declared to be off limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today for the first time in a long while I asked a detailed question about an electrical wiring error I'd like to understand, and the first answers I received are unhelpful and to tell the truth somewhat angry sounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that there's a warning in my home page (or whatever it should be called) that says I'm going to be locked out if I ask any more inappropriate questions.  I am surprised at how aggressive the forces seem to be that would discourage me to be a user here.  Am I just being unlucky or are others having similar unfriendly reception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I am not trying to be an irritant, but I am coming to the conclusion that I may as well give up.  Or is there a solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  I appreciate the answers and comments so far.  I think the first statements from CuriousOne that were stated in a way that seemed to speak on behalf of the entire community were what I found most bothersome, and that is why I reacted negatively and posted this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I somewhat follow the logic of placing a question in the most relevant category (here in Electrical Engineering), but isn't there surely a connection between that and physics?  Can't the same question be useful in both places? I don't quite see what the benefit of putting questions on hold is in the first place.  Why not just leave them out there in case someone offers a response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must be missing the point in a major way.  I am still confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55515" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T08:33:56.843" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T02:02:37.613" Title="Struggling to not draw ire in responses to my few questions ... failing" Tags="|discussion|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7588" CreationDate="2016-03-14T05:25:37.327" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today for the first time in a long while I asked a detailed question about an electrical wiring error I'd like to understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not how much effort or details you've put into; the question is whether it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; belongs to &lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people fail to differentiate between &lt;strong&gt;engineering&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;natural science&lt;/strong&gt;; same thing is applied here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you really think you've enquired about a physics concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You detailed the problem; but did the problem really &lt;em&gt;seek&lt;/em&gt; any &lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the first answers I received are unhelpful and to tell the truth somewhat angry sounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't know what answers you are talking about, for I'm not seeing any (I can't see any deleted answer). If you are asking about the comments, then I'm not seeing any kind of &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt; talks; the user there who voted to close the question put a legitimate reason for doing so- this doesn't sound rude. Others have also advised you to go at &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;- a very reasonable, &lt;strong&gt;helpful&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;non-rude&lt;/em&gt; and expected behaviour from the users here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I noticed that there's a warning in my home page (or whatever it should be called) that says I'm going to be locked out if I ask any more inappropriate questions. I am surprised at how aggressive the forces seem to be that would discourage me to be a user here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aggressive&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;em&gt;Forces&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not against a particular user; there is no, I mean &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, kind of vengeance acting here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a &lt;strong&gt;no-nonsense&lt;/strong&gt; Q&amp;amp;A site; we are here to create noise-free, useful archive of &lt;strong&gt;quality&lt;/strong&gt; Q&amp;amp;As based on &lt;strong&gt;concepts of Physics&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We definitely discourage &lt;em&gt;low-quality questions&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;Do-the-Work&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Check-my-Work&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Engineering&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Broad&lt;/strong&gt; questions. Physics SE is not at all meant for all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't discourage any new user but in order to acquaint with what questions are compatible, these sort of warnings are given. They are, &lt;em&gt;in no way&lt;/em&gt; harsh or in the sense you are describing the scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I just being unlucky or are others having similar unfriendly reception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You misinterpret the &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; of the site and misconstrue the warnings and moderations that explicitly and implicitly tried to uplift the quality of your questions that are suitable for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but I am coming to the conclusion that I may as well give up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or is there a solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked three questions; two of which are voted to close on valid grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question was asking about &lt;em&gt;Concepts of Physics&lt;/em&gt; and you got a good response at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the solution to the apparent problem is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask questions based on &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt;, that are not too broad to answer and not opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like &lt;em&gt;wire-problem&lt;/em&gt; is definitely frowned at as it is not related to physics anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, don't misapprehend the warnings, moderations, comments; don't try to judge things from one side. We don't have any intention to discourage any newbie to ask here. But questions must be &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:06.300" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T02:02:37.613" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7588" CreationDate="2016-03-14T10:45:31.220" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're getting a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; unlucky, in that most of the questions you've asked happen to be off topic for various reasons. And I agree that some of the responses to your question (they were comments, not answers) were harsher than they needed to be. But the major underlying issue is that, judging by your question history, you don't seem to know the scope of the site - that is, the rules that determine what we consider on-topic and off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that's not so bad. We do understand that new people won't know our scope right from the beginning. If you show that you're willing to learn about how we do things, as you're doing by asking this very question, we'll be pretty forgiving. The thing is, there are a lot of people who &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; willing to learn what sorts of questions fit here or don't; they just post off-topic questions one after another without caring that they're effectively polluting our site. To prevent that sort of thing from getting out of hand, we have several automatic quality control mechanisms built in. They trigger when someone posts just a few questions that get closed or deleted or heavily downvoted, and then you see the kinds of warnings you're getting. The warnings are written in a &quot;no-nonsense&quot; manner to make sure that they get through to people who normally don't read things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the system doesn't really &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; whether you're going to be a good contributor; all it can do is guess based on how your posts have been received. So don't worry &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much about the warnings. I think the fact that you're asking this question shows that you probably &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; going to be a good contributor, if you decide to stick around. You should definitely take a look at our &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; and read the items about what sorts of questions you should and shouldn't ask here, if you haven't already. You can also ask for clarification here on meta, or in our &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. on topic, sufficiently focused, not opinion-based, not &quot;lazy&quot;) question you ask gets you further away from the automatic question ban, so once you learn about our scope and post a couple good questions, you won't be in danger of that anymore, and the warnings will disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:45:31.220" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7592" CreationDate="2016-03-14T21:10:38.353" Score="1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have already two questions &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/243050/is-there-conservation-of-momentum-if-theres-conservation-of-energy&quot;&gt;on-hold&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238663/does-the-kinetic-energy-change-depending-on-the-direction-of-the-velocity&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; because they were considered as homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these people are exaggerating. Who told these people that my questions were about homework questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, resolving homework questions leave doubts and often misunderstandings. Therefore if a person does a general question it should be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, why can't this Questions and Answers site be like &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;? There is ton of homework questions and they are not taken unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there misunderstandings? I would want to know what were my mistakes in my questions so I can do better questions that will be more &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85616" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T10:31:15.473" Title="Why are &quot;homework questions&quot; redundant?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7591" CreationDate="2016-03-15T07:33:01.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closure of the two questions you link does seem a bit unkind and I've voted to reopen them, though I note that both got good answers before they were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just at the moment we are experiencing a flood of homework, poorly written and just plain lazy questions, and I suspect we are getting a little trigger happy with the close button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T07:33:01.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7591" CreationDate="2016-03-15T10:31:15.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that ask &lt;em&gt;How do I prove...&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;How do I calculate...&lt;/em&gt;, as is the case for both of yours, will almost always get flagged for closure because it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework-like question&lt;/a&gt;, defined &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt; as,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. This includes not just questions from actual homework assignments, but also self-study problems, puzzles, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of us spent several years in college and doctoral programs and we're really not interested in doing your work for you (as you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;see as you peruse this Meta.Physics.SE list of questions tagged &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), but we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; interested in answering questions about tough concepts &amp;amp; clearing up your misunderstandings. So to prevent closure, consider what &lt;em&gt;specific physics concept&lt;/em&gt; you are having troubles with and ask about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T10:31:15.473" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7596" CreationDate="2016-03-15T15:14:57.770" Score="-2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/233232/&quot;&gt;What will be final velocity of three charges $q$, $q$, $2q$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I reopen it? All concepts come out from questions. If I know how to solve it, I would know concept automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T15:22:00.333" Title="How can I reopen it?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7595" CreationDate="2016-03-15T15:20:00.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking how to solve problems like that is not on topic here. If you want the question reopened, you'll need to make it ask something else. Identify the specific issue that is blocking you from getting to the solution, and ask about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T15:20:00.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T19:46:17.943" Score="5" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it really on topic to ask questions regarding an exact proof/how to approach the proof of a particular identity, or a physical equation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81357" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T20:11:04.817" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T12:24:04.577" Title="Questions regarding the proof of a physical identity" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T03:49:20.017" Score="9" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time, I've written up substantial answers to naive questions about special relativity, sometimes illustrating them with space-time diagrams and explaining how to read them.  Apparently some novices have found these answers helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least one novice, though, has apparently found these answers infuriating, because they contradict his naive intuitions.  Following a chat session today in which he informed me that a single event can have a velocity, that a single event can have a reference frame, and that in a given reference frame it is not true that distance equals rate times time, this poster seems to have gone on a little vendetta, downvoting several of my posts and leaving bizarre comments on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/240124/time-dilation-confusion/240223#240223&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;, for example, is a good example, where his objection to the (perfectly correct) answer is &quot;I don't think that makes sense&quot;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/210794/question-doubt-about-time-dilation-symmetry-in-special-relativity/210831#210831&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is another, where readers can inspect the diagram for themselves and judge the quality of the comment from the same user.   Note once again that he has absolutely no objection to any of the reasoning (not even a mistaken objection); he just doesn't like relativity, so therefore relativity must be wrong.  This was a follow-on to his comments on my accepted answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/243513/a-train-on-a-track-relativity-paradox/243688#243688&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which he also downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are another half dozen or so equally bizarre and ignorant comments, and accompanying downvotes, on my other answers.  (They still seem to be coming in every few minutes, so I'm not sure of the current total.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvotes are of course mildly infuriating.  The attitude and the wilful ignorance are of course substantially more infuriating.  What I'm not sure of is whether this calls for any action (and in particular whether this meta post of mine is out of line).  I do think that the wrong and misleading comments on my answers threaten to mislead novice users who might really benefit from those answers, so I wish something could be done to remove those comments, but I'm not sure whether there's any mechanism for that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Responding to the comments would of course violate the admonition against feeding trolls.  I made the mistake of responding to a few, but I think I should not repeat that mistake.  Is there anything else I should be doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T21:29:59.737" Title="A Problem With a User" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7600" CreationDate="2016-03-17T07:23:18.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do think that the wrong and misleading comments on my answers threaten to mislead novice users who might really benefit from those answers, so I wish something could be done to remove those comments, but I'm not sure whether there's any mechanism for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is: wait a few days and flag them as obsolete, and we'll go through and purge the comment threads completely. Before doing so, make sure that you've checked the comments for suggestions for improvement and implemented any suggestions you want to, and if there's anything you do want to save from the comments, copy it into a text file or something. (You should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be doing this within a week or so of comments being posted on your questions and answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we don't delete comments for being wrong, because moderator powers shouldn't be used to distinguish correct from incorrect posts. That's what voting is for, or in the case of comments, posting followup comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, come to think of it, there is another roundabout way to get wrong comments deleted: just keep responding until either the OP gives up, or there are so many comments that we can justify moving them to a chat room. That's not something I would really &lt;em&gt;recommend&lt;/em&gt; with a commenter who is being argumentative and persistent, but it does get the comments off the post quicker than would otherwise be the case (or at least it lets you get the last word in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there anything else I should be doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just the usual, watch the comments and flag anything that becomes outright rude or inappropriate. Otherwise, don't worry about it. There will always be some people who will downvote without good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good to make the moderators &lt;em&gt;aware&lt;/em&gt; of this sort of thing, which you did via this meta post but ordinarily can be done with a flag. We'll keep an eye on any voting trends. Any significant spurt of targeted downvotes should be caught and reversed by an automatic script within 24-48 hours; if that doesn't happen in this case, we'll follow up on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T07:23:18.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T10:10:35.913" Score="-3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/243740&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which was based on a conceptual confusion, as was revealed by the excellent answers I received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It made me think that it would be nice if that fact was visible straight away for anyone coming to the page. There would be a second line of tags, relating to the nature of the question, and in my case one could see in that line the tag &quot;misconception&quot; (that I would have added after having read the answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the tags that come to mind would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;technical&quot; for the discussion of a technical point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;perspective&quot; for open questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/242814&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;common-misconception&quot; for questions such as the ones listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6063/109928&quot;&gt; here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;reference&quot; for well-posed questions with good answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;canonical&quot; for even better-posed questions with even better answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;speculative&quot; for questions found to be not quite in line with mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;basic&quot;, &quot;conceptual&quot;, &quot;experimental&quot;, &quot;thought-experiment&quot;, &quot;factual&quot;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having such a set of tags would make the site even more useful. For example I would love to browse the &quot;experimental&quot; collection in &quot;quantum-mechanics&quot;, or the &quot;reference&quot; one in &quot;electromagnetism&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Respectively, coming to a page and be able to see right away that the question is a &quot;misconception&quot; puts you in the right mindset for better understanding the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now who would be allowed to set those tags? Probably the OP (although I can easily see how the OP would find very tempting to remove a not too glorious tag), the author of an accepted or upvoted answer, and also anyone with a large enough reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell this proposal would give a qualitative dimension to the question metric currently based on votes that would also take the answers into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109928" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T11:54:33.323" Title="Would having a second set of tags relating to the nature of the question make sense?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7602" CreationDate="2016-03-17T10:22:56.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they would all be meta-tags&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; which are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;strongly discouraged&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Tags that, by themselves, are meaningless/vacuous/useless, and can only have meaning if added &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; other tags.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T10:22:56.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7602" CreationDate="2016-03-17T11:54:33.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, we should not introduce such meta-tags.&lt;/strong&gt; If you are not convinced of the general uselessness of meta-tags, let me address your proposals specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;technical&quot; is hopelessly subjective. What's technical to one user is pretty straightforward and easy to see to another. This is already apparent in the non-meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt;, which is often misused for questions that just include math, and would only get worse with such a pure meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;perspective&quot;...what makes a question &quot;open&quot;? Is a question &quot;open&quot; simply because it is vague and imprecise? Should questions not be &lt;em&gt;edited and clarified&lt;/em&gt; instead of staying vague? This tag sounds like another variant of the already existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt;, which is already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7551/50583&quot;&gt;pretty bad tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have already rejected the misconception tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7542/50583&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. As for &quot;common&quot;, who decides what is &quot;common&quot;? Does it suffice if the misconception is common among non-physicists (we are supposedly a site primarily for physicists, after all)? Do &quot;misconceptions&quot; count that are really more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lies-to-children&lt;/a&gt;? What would a question &lt;em&gt;gain&lt;/em&gt; from being tagged as being about a misconception?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The idea of tagging &quot;well-posed questions and answers&quot; with special tags serves no purpose because there already is a mechanism in place to promote well-posed questions and well-written answers: Voting. Good content is highly upvoted, bad content is downvoted. If you see a need to tag questions with regard to their quality because the votes are not a good indicator of quality, then I would rather say &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6767/50583&quot;&gt;we need to change our voting behaviour&lt;/a&gt; (I wrote that almost a year ago, but I would not say the situation has changed), not introduce tags for quality, as that would just lead to needless drama over who has the power to add or remove those tags and which questions should receive them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-mainstream questions get &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4538/50583&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt;, not tagged as &quot;speculative&quot;. Speculative question without firm grounding in physics also get closed as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;, I don't see many questions that can be on-topic that would deserve this tag, or of what use it would be to tag them such.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;basic&quot; is again as subjective as &quot;technical&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583&quot;&gt;every question should be &quot;conceptual&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, we already have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-physics&quot;&gt;experimental-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag (which is fine as it actually tells you something about the topic opf the question), there is already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thought-experiment&quot;&gt;thought-experiment&lt;/a&gt; tag and its content looks rather random to me and not deserving of a common tag, &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T11:54:33.323" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7597" CreationDate="2016-03-18T10:27:17.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply asking &quot;&lt;em&gt;How does line X.Z come from line X.Y?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is likely to get your question closed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt; (or maybe &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; if you don't quote the relevant section of the text/paper you're referring to). So for it to remain open and answered, it needs to be framed to be about the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; of what the math is saying, rather than &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to do the math.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one could ask about the assumptions underlying the derivation, but I think it important to include your expectation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you think something is screwy with the derivation (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Why do we take the small x limit here, can't x be big because Reason Y?&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Such a question would likely be on topic over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T12:24:04.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T10:47:54.213" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say that I want source of information that gives worked examples for a very specific topic (let us call it X). I have access to a (pretty good) library and have searched both this and the world wide web endlessly for some examples - to no avail. Clearly what I am after can not be found by a quick google search. Would it be appropriate to ask for such a resource on PSE or would it likely get closed of been off topic. (I suspect the latter hence why I am checking here first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T11:07:28.937" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T11:07:28.937" Title="Resource recomendation - very specific topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T14:12:34.877" Score="-16" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've recently had John Rennie asking &quot;canonical&quot; questions which he's answered himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235511/what-is-time-does-it-flow-and-if-so-what-defines-its-direction&quot;&gt;What is time, does it flow, and if so what defines its direction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really&quot;&gt;What is time dilation really?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/242043/what-is-the-proper-way-to-explain-the-twin-paradox&quot;&gt;What is the proper way to explain the twin paradox?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says his answers are intended to be definitive and authoritative, and that he &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7431/canonical-question-about-the-flow-of-time/7514#7514&quot;&gt;welcomes comments&lt;/a&gt;. But he doesn’t. He said &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/235512/76162&quot;&gt;&quot;why not post your view as an answer?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; but he deleted my point-by-point view without discussion. There were also polite but challenging comments from another poster, followed by John Rennie saying &quot;let's continue this in chat&quot;, but now those comments have vanished without trace. And more importantly, those &quot;definitive&quot;, &quot;authoritative&quot; answers are not correct. Time really isn't &quot;just a coordinate&quot;. A clock really isn't something that &quot;measures distances&quot;. The resolution to the twins paradox really isn't &quot;the metric you use to do the calculation is not the same as the metric I use to do the calculation&quot;. Whilst those answers have received an awful lot of upvotes, I must point out that science is not a democracy. All the upvotes in the world won't make a wrong answer right.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all , I think this canonical sort of thing is fraught with problems. It's the sort of thing that will harm physics stack exchange by saddling it with bad-science lies-to-children answers that can’t be corrected. It is in essence saying “mine is the right answer and all other answers aren’t worth looking at”. It’s imposing an orthodoxy, and it’s the sort of hubristic mindset that gets in the way of scientific progress. It’s more suited to a medieval theocracy than 21st Century physics. IMHO there's already problems with closevotes wherein the alleged duplicate isn't really a duplicate, and/or all the answers are wrong, and/or the closevoter is the author of one of them. This is only going to make it worse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think we should discourage &quot;canonical&quot; questions with &quot;canonical&quot; answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T16:32:21.763" Title="Should we discourage &quot;canonical&quot; questions with &quot;canonical&quot; answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7600" CreationDate="2016-03-18T14:33:32.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From time to time, I've written up substantial answers to naive questions about special relativity, sometimes illustrating them with space-time diagrams and explaining how to read them. Apparently some novices have found these answers helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the general idea!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At least one novice, though, has apparently found these answers infuriating, because they contradict his naive intuitions. Following a chat session today in which he informed me that a single event can have a velocity, that a single event can have a reference frame, and that in a given reference frame it is not true that distance equals rate times time, this poster seems to have gone on a little vendetta, downvoting several of my posts and leaving bizarre comments on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a look at your examples, and to be honest I think you're making too big a deal out of this. He's being a bit critical, which is not good. But you've ended up dismissing him and calling him names. That's not good either.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/240124/time-dilation-confusion/240223#240223&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;, for example, is a good example, where his objection to the (perfectly correct) answer is &quot;I don't think that makes sense&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry Will, but I think he's right about that.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/210794/question-doubt-about-time-dilation-symmetry-in-special-relativity/210831#210831&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is another, where readers can inspect the diagram for themselves and judge the quality of the comment from the same user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid he does have a point when he said if you start out 8 light years away and get closer, you'll never be 13.33 light years away.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note once again that he has absolutely no objection to any of the reasoning (not even a mistaken objection); he just doesn't like relativity, so therefore relativity must be wrong. This was a follow-on to his comments on my accepted answer here, which he also downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can your provide examples please? The two examples so far are not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are another half dozen or so equally bizarre and ignorant comments, and accompanying downvotes, on my other answers. (They still seem to be coming in every few minutes, so I'm not sure of the current total.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, please can you provide examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The downvotes are of course mildly infuriating. The attitude and the wilful ignorance are of course substantially more infuriating. What I'm not sure of is whether this calls for any action (and in particular whether this meta post of mine is out of line). I do think that the wrong and misleading comments on my answers threaten to mislead novice users who might really benefit from those answers, so I wish something could be done to remove those comments, but I'm not sure whether there's any mechanism for that. Responding to the comments would of course violate the admonition against feeding trolls. I made the mistake of responding to a few, but I think I should not repeat that mistake. Is there anything else I should be doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should respond to comments that you think are incorrect or misguided, and/or you should flag them. Not responding, and then making a fuss here and calling the guy a troll is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the right approach.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T14:33:32.233" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7607" CreationDate="2016-03-18T16:27:19.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have always had canonical questions/answers, it’s just that until &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers&quot;&gt;Danu’s post&lt;/a&gt; here in the Meta we didn’t call them canonical. A canonical question/answer is one where the question is so apposite and the answer so clearly explained it ends up being cited many times. Sorting the questions by votes will quickly reveal many such questions. My own favourites include (to list just a few):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47379/what-is-the-weight-equation-through-general-relativity&quot;&gt;What is the weight equation through general relativity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/53802/what-is-delta-t-in-the-time-energy-uncertainty-principle&quot;&gt;What is $\Delta t$ in the time-energy uncertainty principle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95366/why-does-stephen-hawking-say-black-holes-dont-exist&quot;&gt;Why does Stephen Hawking say black holes don&amp;#39;t exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though of course everyone will have their own favourites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the Physics SE isn’t a blog and shouldn’t be treated like one. If we all started writing what amounted to blog posts just because there was some subject that we found fascinating that would quickly alienate the site members. Setting out to deliberately write a canonical Q/A (as opposed to achieving it as a side effect, like the three examples above) is something that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I want to keep things general and avoid specific issues let’s take the three Q/As of mine that John mentions as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the most prolific poster of answers on this site (note that I’m claiming no special merit here, unless you regard fecundity as a virtue :-) I have seen lots and lots of questions and answers - I’ve probably at least glanced at every question on the site for the last five years. As a result I get a feel for when the same topic is being questioned again and again, and the question &lt;em&gt;What is time&lt;/em&gt; in its various forms has been asked countless times. When this finally annoyed me once too often I posted on the Meta asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7431/canonical-question-about-the-flow-of-time&quot;&gt;Canonical question about the flow of time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and got the general impression that a deliberate attempt at a canonical Q/A would be well received. Even then it took me a month to decide how best to write one. So this was not a spur of the moment impulse because I was bored. It was a considered decision based on consultation. In the end I wrote three questions, but they’re all one Q/A really - I just split them into three to make them more digestible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not my three recent Q/As are a long term benefit to this community remains to be seen. I’ve already used them several times as duplicates, or I’ve posted them in comments as a related question, but I haven’t attempted to analyse how many times others have linked them. They have ended up with a middling number of upvotes, but as John says the number of upvotes is a poor guide to quality, especially when a question makes the Hot Questions list as at least one of mine did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the question of canonical Q/As is broader than just the three questions mentioned in John’s question. I have linked my three favourite Q/As mentioned above many, many times, and the site would be a considerably poorer place without them. But of course those questions weren’t deliberately posted to be canonical, they just happened to hit the target, and I think the crux of John’s question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should site members deliberately post questions and answers intended to be canonical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps surprisingly my answer to this is that no they should not. Just because a subject seems interesting to you is no guarantee that it will be interesting to anyone else, and no guarantee that an attempted canonical Q/A on the subject will be useful. You should at the very least discuss it in the Meta before posting, and perhaps bring it up at the fortnightly physics chats before setting pen to paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A last point, and again this is a general point although I’ll address the specific issue of the Q/As mentioned by John. Posting a canonical question and answer does not mean no-one else can answer the question. Indeed, there are frequently many different perspectives on a complicated issue and ideally a canonical question will attract answers from several site members who want to post different perspectives. Indeed this is what has happened with all three of the questions that John mentions. Naturally I think my own answers are the best :-), and they have attracted the most upvotes, but anyone add their own answer if they think they can do a better job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T16:32:21.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7611" CreationDate="2016-03-19T17:15:58.820" Score="10" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of my questions were on-hold and closed. As everyone knows, it comes a yellow rectangle where it explains what it means and why is your question not so good.&#xA;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D516U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D516U.png&quot; alt=&quot;Yellow rectangle&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this rectangle doesn't explain enough why was the question closed or put on-hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to write in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm a bit new in this site and I would like to know what were my mistakes if this question is going to be closed or on-hold. Please write at the comments what were the problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it redundant? Will people take this as bad? I'm asking this because many times they can put the question closed or on-hold, and the explanation in the rectangle isn't enough for understanding the mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will these moderators explain the problem at the comments as I asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85616" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T17:51:25.650" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T13:12:12.473" Title="Asking moderators favors when looking at questions" Tags="|discussion|comments|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7610" CreationDate="2016-03-19T18:10:30.377" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking for close-reasons in comments is of course totally fine. And moderators and other Phys.SE users try to leave comments whenever the standard close-reason banner is insufficient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do keep in mind that moderators and other Phys.SE users are not paid, and it might be difficult to serve everyone in a timely fashion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that scope and close-reasons are further explained on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help pages&lt;/a&gt; and various &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Phys.SE meta posts&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can try to ask for clarification in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;h-bar chat room&lt;/a&gt; (requires 20+ reputation points).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above didn't work, you can also post a new meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T13:12:12.473" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7613" CreationDate="2016-03-20T20:02:38.947" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;For this site and in general for academic purposes: How can I use copyrighted stuff as material? If you can quote someone why can you not quote their work as well? The teacher in a previous class (not physics) told us not to copy word for word but to recall material in our own words. Does that bypass the problem with plagiarism and copyrighted material being used as an answer? Does that also mean I have to redraw an illustration or find one not copyrighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-03-25T17:04:59.677" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T17:04:59.677" Title="Using Copyrighted Material as Answers" Tags="|discussion|support|answers|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-03-30T22:56:12.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7612" CreationDate="2016-03-21T00:39:23.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism and violations of copyright are two different ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/strong&gt; is the use of another persons words &lt;em&gt;or ideas&lt;/em&gt; without giving proper credit. It's an academic idea and a violation of academic ethics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism is against the rules, and physics being an academic discipline, the users of this site mostly take those rules very seriously. You can expected plagiarized posts to be deleted. Moreover, you may find that some users don't approve of large-scale copying &lt;em&gt;even when&lt;/em&gt; it is properly cited. That disapproval might be expressed in terms of down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should note that long established physics is &lt;em&gt;understood&lt;/em&gt; to be long established and you won't see users citing Newton every time they take force as proportional to acceleration, so there is a degree practicality to the application of citation rules. None-the-less, when there is any doubt you should cite sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly if you quote any material from a source directly you should (a) use quotation markup (begin lines with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;), (b) report where you got it with a link and or bibliographic information, and (c) name the actual author.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright violation&lt;/strong&gt; Is the un-licensesd use of copyrighted material in a way not covered by the doctrine of fair use. This is at a minimum a civil violation of the law (and in some cases can be a criminal violation, though that seems unlikely to apply when we're talking about a Stack Exchange post even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IANAL&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts that violate copyright should be deleted or edited to conform, and that can mean finding replacements for copyrighted materials that are in the public domain or covered by a permissive license (google advance search can help with that). In the worst case you might have to construct your own figure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-03-21T00:44:44.183" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T00:44:44.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-21T03:53:23.807" Score="4" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't I ask hypothetical questions about situations that can't happen in the first place, if I'm interested in the resulting phenomena and/or said situation will cause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111868" OwnerDisplayName="Abdul Moiz Qureshi" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T13:57:35.677" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T18:06:35.863" Title="Why can't I ask hypothetical questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7614" CreationDate="2016-03-21T07:23:45.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that science is a description of reality and not a speculative discipline. If you are speculating about a scenario that is not well understood, you can do it as part of hypothesis testing, but if something is well understood, like energy conservation in most regimes, then asking what would happen if it was strongly violated is simply not a scientific question. We can't know what would happen if the laws of nature would not be what they are. Pretty much everything in science is, directly or indirectly, strongly intertwined with everything else. Every one scientific construct is checked and cross-checked for consistency with everything else over and over, again. It's a tightly woven logical fabric. Take one thread out and the entire construction unravels in ways that would require a complete reanalysis that may be just as complex as the process of building what we have now in the first place was... and we would be lacking any guidance from nature, which would turn it, at best, into a field of mathematics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about violations because you are trying to understand the significance of a law or a particular phenomenon, then you can always formulate the question in another way, like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is the law of energy conservation so fundamental in physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we imagine ways in which the law of energy conservation may be broken without unravelling all of physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are actual questions that some physicists are asking for good, both theoretically and experimentally, and they do have important answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we get questions from science fiction authors (or people who are toying with the idea of becoming one) who want a particular plot device validated by science. My advice for those would be to go one of two ways: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Invent a world with completely different physics. That's safe and it gives you many more means of artistic expression. Some of the best  science fiction and fantastic literature is based on that premise. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can't do (1), stick slavishly to textbook physics. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every attempt to walk the fine line between the two that I have seen ended up unmasking the author's inability to stick to his or her own logic. If you need examples for the latter type of literary catastrophe, pretty much every story ever written that has an &quot;ansible&quot; in it belongs into this category and so do almost all stories about time travel. It is extremely difficult to make up scenarios where a plot device lets the author do one particular thing but wouldn't give rise to a much more logical story line that uses the same device in a different way. Unless you are very good at constructing self-consistent story lines (in which case you would likely be making millions in Hollywood, already, and wouldn't have to ask us), don't go there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56997" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T18:06:35.863" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T18:06:35.863" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7617" CreationDate="2016-03-21T13:10:54.260" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to find out how many times a question has been cited by other questions? Obviously this can be done because when you look at a question you can see linked questions on the right under the heading &quot;Linked&quot;, though what I'm after is a simple count rather than a list of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably I'll have to resort to the data explorer, though even then it isn't clear how the list of linked questions has been built. Some of the linked questions have been closed as duplicates, but others appear to just mention the target question somewhere in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I'm curious as to how effective the various canonical questions I've posted have been, and one obvious measure of this is how often they have been cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-03-21T14:09:06.500" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T13:38:54.563" Title="How many times has my question been cited?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7616" CreationDate="2016-03-21T13:30:48.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The count is available in the upper right corner if you click on the &lt;em&gt;&quot;see more linked questions&quot;&lt;/em&gt; below the column of linked questions. If there is no such &lt;em&gt;&quot;see more linked questions&quot;&lt;/em&gt; link, then it means the sidebar is already showing all linked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this also counts questions that have been linked &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; from the question or one of its answers or comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick edit by JR: ACuriousMind managed to find a Data Explorer query that lists questions in order of their number of links. I've done some minor hackery on this and the results are at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/edit/454039&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/edit/454039&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top question is the book recommendations post. The runner up is, well, modesty forbids me from saying ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another quick edit to answer the titular question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/454081/order-questions-by-links-for-selected-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/454081/order-questions-by-links-for-selected-user&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just pop in your user ID number and it will rank &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; questions in order of most linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And not to be outdone Emilio has created a related query to order posts by the number of times they link to other questions. The results are available at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/443461/posts-by-a-user-ordered-by-number-of-links-they-contain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/443461/posts-by-a-user-ordered-by-number-of-links-they-contain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2016-03-22T13:38:54.563" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T13:38:54.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7616" CreationDate="2016-03-21T13:46:18.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/266034/link-the-title-of-the-linked-questions-sidebar-to-the-list-of-linked-questions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and other questions on Meta Stack Exchange, you can get to the list of linked questions for a given question by going to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://[site].stackexchange.com/questions/linked/[question-ID]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page displays a count at the top right. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/136860&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GkJkX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GkJkX.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of count of links&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/the-stack-overflow-unofficial-patch-soup&quot;&gt;SOUP&lt;/a&gt; app transforms the &quot;Linked&quot; header into a link to the page of links, if you want a convenient access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T13:46:18.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7620" CreationDate="2016-03-24T13:09:20.640" Score="7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find myself casting quite a lot of up-votes on questions, usually reaching the daily limit and was wondering if I might be polluting the site with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are other people's mindsets about casting votes?&lt;/strong&gt; Do you have a certain criterion other than that the question has to fulfill the rules of the site that you decide on wether to cast an up-vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T13:41:56.040" Title="What is a good mentality about casting votes responsibly?" Tags="|discussion|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7619" CreationDate="2016-03-24T13:41:56.040" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting isn't really meant to be about satisfying the rules of the site. We have other mechanisms for discouraging/improving posts that don't follow the rules (like putting on hold).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The intent of votes is that you upvote things which contribute to making this site a valuable resource &lt;em&gt;for you&lt;/em&gt;, and downvote things which detract from that goal.&lt;/strong&gt; In saying this, I'm trusting you to remember that this site is nothing without a community to support it, and a post which you &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; do not find useful can still be a good contribution if it helps build the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That criterion still leaves a lot of freedom for each individual person to decide how to use their own votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For questions, you might want to upvote questions which you find interesting, because presumably if you find them interesting, other people will also find them interesting, so those questions bring more attention to the site - though I would point out that not all attention is necessarily good attention. Or you could upvote questions which seem to be well-researched, under the logic that they'll set a good example for other askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might upvote questions that are at a high level, since they tend to attract professionals. Or you might upvote low-level questions from beginning students of physics, because you want to site to be helpful as a resource to students - though much of the community does not really favor this position, and in fact may prefer to &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like most of us, you'll also want to downvote questions which are &quot;lazy&quot; or don't seem to be well thought out by their askers, because those don't really help the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For answers, you'll probably want to upvote answers which clearly and completely answer the questions they were posted on. That's the point of answers, after all. You could upvote answers that show a really good effort on the part of the poster, even if they fall short of answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably not a good idea to upvote answers that are wrong! Those don't make the site useful at all. You should downvote them. (Though it's not like anyone checks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, it probably makes sense to downvote answers that are correct but completely unclear. Bear in mind that what is unclear to you might be very clear to somebody else, and not every answer has to be useful to everybody. In fact, not every answer has to be useful to the original asker of the question! Think of other people who stop by and see the question later, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the community nature of this site, voting (both up and down, as appropriate) helps everybody. I really think people should vote more.&#xA;If we have a lot of people casting a lot of votes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we can more easily distinguish good content from bad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we reward good contributors and keep them coming back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we discourage bad contributors and get them to change their ways (or not come back)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we also have more people with enough reputation to vote, flag, edit, use review queues, close and reopen questions, and all that other stuff which is necessary to keep the site working!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're not polluting the site by upvoting a lot of questions. If you use up your votes, as long as you're using them to distinguish good contributions from bad ones (rather than upvoting &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; to make people feel good), that's great! You're helping. We even have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/72/vox-populi&quot;&gt;badge&lt;/a&gt; for it, to encourage people to do exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T13:41:56.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-27T15:09:00.173" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;For users to progress with badges they have to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/7/critic&quot;&gt;criticise&lt;/a&gt;. Is there a worry that if the badge is earned by criticising someone with little background in the subject will put them off asking questions? Should the &quot;critic&quot; step be removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109388" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T15:39:16.303" Title="User progression" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7621" CreationDate="2016-03-27T15:24:25.277" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be two ideas behind the badges -- introduce people to concepts/tools/features of the site, and encourage people to do things that are needed but may be tedious. The Critic badge you refer to is the former, while badges encouraging X number of edits is the latter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are essential for the health of the website. It is how we distinguish between good and correct answers and bad, incorrect answers. There is no mechanism other than downvoting to establish if an answer is factually accurate. Comments could be left, but they are temporary. Flags are not supposed to be used for wrong answers and so they won't get deleted unless the original poster does so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The badge does not say &quot;Cast downvotes out of spite on a new user.&quot; Like all voting decisions, it leaves it up to each person to vote how they see fit. And that's a good thing. Hopefully somebody is using their downvote wisely and is contributing to the health of the site. If not, well, these things happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So like all of the badges, downvotes earn a badge because it is an essential feature of the site and can be tedious to go through and study questions and answers for their correctness and then vote accordingly. But it needs to be done, or the site dies off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T15:24:25.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T18:35:29.213" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my questions got answered in a comment. What do I do? I could formulate it into an answer myself and write that down, or should I just leave it? Maybe delete the question even?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T13:34:28.743" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T13:34:28.743" Title="What is the procedure if your question is answered in a comment?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-03-30T12:47:31.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T22:55:15.250" Score="28" ViewCount="730" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several times, I've seen 'why' questions dismissed unfairly when a better answer could be given, because of a kneejerk reaction that a 'why' question can never have an answer, because physics is built to model reality. Below are some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/245692/&quot;&gt;Ito and Stratonovich calculus&lt;/a&gt;, asking why we choose one over the other in physics. There are lots of disparaging comments about how such a question is meaningless.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A really deep question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/38137/&quot;&gt;QCD bound states&lt;/a&gt;, which received an answer saying &quot;physics does not answer why questions&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/246036/&quot;&gt;SU(4) symmetry&lt;/a&gt;, which is being received poorly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14932/&quot;&gt;the spin of fundamental particles&lt;/a&gt;, which I can totally imagine being received poorly today, but happened to get a fantastic answer when it was asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As shown by the last example, there are lots of good possible answers to a 'why X' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can show that if X weren't true, there would be some internal contradiction, or you would lose some important, more fundamental principle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can show by analogy with simpler theories (e.g. classical limit) that X makes sense. Or, if there are deeper theories, you can derive X from one of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use anthropics, i.e. argue that something would go horribly wrong with the universe if X weren't true.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these things answer &quot;why&quot; in the philosophical sense, but they do answer it perfectly well in the physical sense. Can we just assume that question posters mean the latter, instead of ridiculing them for possibly meaning the former?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T14:11:52.160" Title="Poor reception of 'why' questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7625" CreationDate="2016-03-29T23:54:32.160" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all &quot;Why X?&quot; questions are created equal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appearance of the word &quot;why?&quot; alone tells you nothing about a question. Let's go through your examples first to see explicitly what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question title &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/245692/50583&quot;&gt;Itô or Stratonovich calculus: which one is more relevant from the point of view of physics?&lt;/a&gt; is badly chosen. The actual question seems to be: &quot;How do I decide when to use Itô and when to use Stratonovich calculus in physics?&quot;, but the title is what people first see (and based on which, I will admit, I first thought this was a primarily opinion-based question). The &quot;lots of disparaging comments&quot; are all from one user, that is hardly representative of any community viewpoint. I don't see why you would label this a &quot;why&quot; question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;really deep question&quot; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/38137/50583&quot;&gt;QCD bound states and fractional charges&lt;/a&gt; is well-received (9 upvotes, no downvotes), and has no answer in the Standard Model (the Rishon model in the other answer is currently not believed to be realized in nature, as far as I know). The answer that &quot;this is what we experimentally find, there is no deeper reason&quot; is a perfectly fine answer from the currently accepted viewpoint, I don't know what irks you about it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/246036/50583&quot;&gt;poorly received question about SU(4) symmetry&lt;/a&gt; was rightfully poorly received. It shows no awareness of how predictions of a SU(4) theory would differ from what we experimentally observe, and it is not clear what sort of &quot;why&quot; it asks for: &quot;Why&quot; is the SU(4) not part of the Standard Model? (Because we don't observe it, duh!) &quot;Why&quot; is an SU(4) not possible in QFT? (Meaningless question, as it is possible) The edit asks: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Can the Standard Model be extended in a straightfoward way to include an SU(4) gauge field?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; which is a much better and more precise question!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14932/50583&quot;&gt;question about spin-2&lt;/a&gt; is indeed a good one, and I would see it well-received &quot;even&quot; today. That is because it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a vague &quot;Why don't we have spin-2?&quot; type of question, but it &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; asks about the reason one cannot construct consistent interacting QFTs with higher spin. It's a fine question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Altogether, I dispute your claim that &quot;Why X?&quot; questions are poorly received. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is poorly received are &quot;Why X?&quot; questions that additionally happen to ask about nothing specific, or that seem non-sensical. For instance, &quot;Why is X not part of the Standard Model?&quot; always has the trivial answer &quot;because we don't observe what X predicts.&quot;, and is a boring question and should be poorly received. &quot;Why is there no consistent theory with X?&quot;, &quot;Is there an extension of the Standard Model with X?&quot; or &quot;Is X possible in ?&quot; are perfectly fine questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T23:54:32.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7628" CreationDate="2016-03-30T09:49:24.100" Score="7" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Charcoal-SE/SmokeDetector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chat bot called Smoke Detector&lt;/a&gt;, active on several other SE sites, that automatically checks for potentially low-quality posts and writes chat messages to notify people about them. These messages can be posted to a dedicated chat room, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/2165/c-r-u-d-e&quot;&gt;for Mathematics SE&lt;/a&gt;, or to the main site chat, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage&quot;&gt;for English SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would we like this active for our site? There is little cost to enabling it, but not much to gain either unless people are watching the corresponding chat room and acting on the messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we do want it, should messages go into the main site chat or a separate, dedicated room?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T12:07:54.743" Title="Do we want chat notifications of potentially low-quality posts?" Tags="|discussion|chat|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7627" CreationDate="2016-03-30T12:07:54.743" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of SmokeDetector developers, I'd like to clarify its scope: it's not targeting low quality posts in a  broad sense, but rather spam and trolling: the kind of posts that can be flagged  &quot;spam&quot; or &quot;rude/abusive&quot;.  Some low-quality posts do get caught by the filter, but this is just a side-effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics has very little spam compared to the site's size. (It seems that science sites are not very attractive to spammers). You can see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;title=&amp;amp;body=&amp;amp;username=&amp;amp;why=&amp;amp;site=Physics&amp;amp;feedback=&amp;amp;reason=&amp;amp;user_rep_direction=%3E%3D&amp;amp;user_reputation=0&amp;amp;commit=Search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;log of reports&lt;/a&gt; of Physics posts, which has only 20 reports in the last month. Only one spam answer in a month,  several inane or offensive posts, and quite a few false positives.  Not impressive, really. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are frequently hit sites where paying extra attention to SmokeDetector reports is worth the effort: Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, Personal Finance and Money, etc. Physics does not appear to be one of those.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T12:07:54.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-31T00:58:56.247" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that users of physics.SE (new and/or old) can't curb their need to ask for resources based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (based on the tag), as explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5307/do-we-need-want-an-overarching-books-question&quot;&gt;herein&lt;/a&gt;. However, many users still ask questions which are duplicate. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/245821/what-is-a-good-primer-on-the-subject-of-physics&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;. So, would it be possible to create a new tag so as to open the Book recommendation FAQ (after necessary edits), so that it could be linked/suggested to users who might ask duplicate questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And/Or, can we have a library feature/tab added somewhere at physics.SE which comes to the immediate notice of most users, if not all (i.e., as soon as they open physics.SE w/o login in/signing up, and which should not come off as an ad or notification, but can be viewed all the time)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the library feature/tab, the book FAQ list can be added along with other repositories of physics, such as a/an list/FAQ of legally available lecture notes on the WWW domain which can be deemed off as standard/good, as well as a/an list/FAQ of video lectures on physics from numerous universities (and their video archives). The lists can be maintained by moderators as well as reviewers or those who have one thousand reputation (or above), and it may be able to stop the &quot;abuse&quot; of the tag &quot;resource-recommendation&quot; as well as build a library of sorts for physics.SE which would, in turn, benefit many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I also noticed that the Book recommendation FAQ of physics.SE is missing references to discussions on book requests for special relativity. Although I couldn't find many questions asking for books on SR, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95609/textbook-on-the-geometry-of-special-relativity&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; which should be linked in the Book recommendation FAQ (in future after necessary edits, if at all), IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36574" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T13:53:53.187" Title="Creation of a new tag for books/resource recommendation and having a resource library for physics.SE" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7629" CreationDate="2016-03-31T07:43:25.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what purpose this new tag would serve. We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; to identify resource recommendation requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have an established procedure for dealing with duplicate questions, namely flagging. (Or voting to close if you have enough reputation.) Overly broad recommendation requests can be closed as duplicates of the master book recommendation question, while others can be closed as duplicates of specific topical recommendation questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-03-31T13:53:53.187" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T13:53:53.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7629" CreationDate="2016-03-31T13:53:37.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt; is a historical artifact, from days before recommendation questions were banned (and later on re-allowed), and it is really an experiment that did not work. It really serves no purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to browse the book recommendation questions on this site, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;look directly at the tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to look for book recommendation questions about a specific topic, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bresource-recommendations%5D+topic&quot;&gt;search for questions with the tag, using the syntax [resource-recommendations], and whatever keywords you want&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of those enable many more features than just a static text list, both in terms of sorting (newest / frequent / active / votes / relevance to search terms) and in terms of further search within those lists. The site also has a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;advanced search options&lt;/a&gt; that can help you dig deeper into those results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only element that the overarching &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt; question offers is curation: some form of guarantee that the questions will be good and represent our top-of-the-line selection. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We already have a system for sorting the good posts from the bad posts: it's called voting. This is why you can sort search results by their scores.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Curation requires an active curator: that is, for an overarching book-recommendations question to actually work, it requires a group of people to actively dedicate their time to maintain it. So far, there is a small number of people who have kept the &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt; itself in good repair, and none of them have shown any interest in maintaining that question. If that changes, then we could bring it up again, but until it does I don't see the point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you envisioning further functionality than what I addressed above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing you seem to be proposing is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under the library feature/tab, the book FAQ list can be added along with other repositories of physics, such as a/an list/FAQ of legally available lecture notes on the WWW domain which can be deemed off as standard/good, as well as a/an list/FAQ of video lectures on physics from numerous universities (and their video archives). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not really something that has worked well in our format. We deal well in specifics, but categories like &quot;video lectures on physics&quot; are much broader than what we can address here. We do have a bunch of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bresource-recommendations%5D+video&quot;&gt;specifically asking for video lectures&lt;/a&gt;, and each of those is more specific and therefore works. If you want an overarching list of the content we do have, use that search; if you want content added to the site, ask a (suitably specific) question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The lists can be maintained by moderators as well as reviewers or those who have one thousand reputation (or above)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suffers from the same problem pointed out above. Recruiting users for this sort of effort has in general proved very hard. If you can show that there's a sizable population of people willing to invest the time into this, then that's a different story - but you need to show it first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T13:53:37.577" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-02T05:23:40.543" Score="15" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question that was originally put &quot;on-hold&quot; (you can look at the question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/245079/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/245079/&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I’ve read the homework policies several times, in an attempt to edit my problem so that it is more in concurrence with the site’s policy. I’ve edited the question already twice. I don’t understand why the question has not been reopened, since my purpose is to understand how to manipulate an operator when dealing with a higher spin system &lt;strong&gt;in general&lt;/strong&gt;, not specifically for the case of my posted problem, which I’ve been working on for awhile now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: what can be done to get this re-opened? Should I simply delete the post and then create a duplicate? I want to respect the site’s policies, and I understand that the Moderators don’t want to be haggled with homework questions, but at the same time... I’d like to get some clarification on the concept I stated above. Thanks in advance for the response! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T06:57:18.750" Title="What can be done in order to re-open a closed question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7633" CreationDate="2016-04-02T06:05:22.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick note on this: Matt posted his question in a series of edits that took about half an hour to reach the final form. I saw the question at an intermediate stage and it looked very like homework hence the close vote. In it's current form the key bit of the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can one obtain the eigenvalues of a higher spin system than ${1/2}$ when operated on by a rotation matrix operator, like $e^{-i{\theta}J_{i}}$, where $J_{i}$ is the rotation group around any of the 1, 2, or 3rd axes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this seems to me to be a reasonable question. However the lengthy preamble and in particular the images that make up the first part of the question do make it look like an attempt to get us to do a problem, and I suspect many site members would have lost the will to live before they reach the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta posts like this one have a high success rate in getting questions reopened, but that doesn't necessarily mean the question will attract good answers. I would be inclined to rethink what exactly is being asked and post a new question that is better focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T06:05:22.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7633" CreationDate="2016-04-02T06:12:21.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is now perfectly acceptable, and I personally would vote to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it's not very good for the community moderation model if I go around closing and opening things willy-nilly. Your question was reviewed twice since you edited it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/124093&quot;&gt;first review&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/124324&quot;&gt;second review&lt;/a&gt;, and all four reviewers thought it was still inappropriate for the site. We should find out why. Hopefully at least one of them stops by to provide an answer (and I'll see if I can bug them about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I simply delete the post and then create a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, don't do &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. Deleting and reposting questions is against our rules (of course as a new member, you probably wouldn't have known). If further edits are required, you can just keep editing the same question. Just try to batch up your edits so that you make all the changes required at once, and that you don't wind up editing the post too many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few edits you could make to your question that would vastly improve it, and even though these shouldn't be the &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; for it to stay on hold, given human nature, these might help the question's chances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't post a screenshot of text from a book. Instead, retype the relevant parts of the text, making sure to use a quote block to indicate what you have copied from the book. (Make sure to acknowledge the source, too.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Improve the math formatting by using the operator macros &lt;code&gt;\sin&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\cos&lt;/code&gt;, and writing kets as &lt;code&gt;\lvert jm\rangle&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;|jm&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps most important, give your question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;a better title&lt;/a&gt;. Even though the decision to put a question on hold should be based on the body, not the title, whatever title you do choose is your question's first impression to readers and it can influence their judgement of the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, &quot;SU(2) Rotation Matrices Problem from Halzen and Martin&quot; says nothing about what you're actually asking. Besides, the key word in the title is &quot;Problem&quot;, which suggests that you want the solution to the problem from the book, even though that's not what you're actually asking in the body. A better title would highlight the conceptual issue you're actually asking about. Based on your wording in the body, you could go with something like &quot;How can one obtain the eigenvalues of a rotated higher spin system?&quot;, or if you want it shorter, &quot;Eigenvalues of a rotated higher spin system&quot;. (Titles don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to be questions, though in my experience it's often easier to write a good title if you make it a question.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T06:12:21.373" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-02T12:56:40.870" Score="6" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for guidelines, but the best I could find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/5739&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.  Is there a better statement somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was hard enough to find.  Perhaps an entry could be put in the help to make it easier to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this was a settled issue, but the comments to the answer I linked suggest otherwise.  Do we have a consensus?  If we are not a homework help site, I would think that we would want to discourage complete answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, I think a clear statement in help would give us something to point to as a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;addendum:  five years later&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any change that makes it easier to find the policy on answering homework-like questions? (N.B. answers, not questions)? Five years after submitting this question I still can't find a policy statement. If there is a statement it should be more prominent. We shouldn't be surprised that we see complete answers even from folk who have more than 100 rep. points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;addendum #2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;help/FAQ&lt;/em&gt; section &amp;quot;How do I write a good answer?&amp;quot; please add a paragraph on answering homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;addendum #3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't post complete answers to homework-like questions.&amp;quot;   Is there some reason we don't post that in a location prominent enough that newcomers see it?  I seem to be seeing more and more complete answers.  Today there's a question with &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; complete answers.  We're becoming an online answer key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="5739" LastEditDate="2021-07-02T12:41:03.000" LastActivityDate="2021-08-01T13:04:00.787" Title="Guidelines for answering homework-like questions" Tags="|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7636" CreationDate="2016-04-02T15:53:56.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was looking for guidelines, but the best I could find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/5739&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Is there a better statement somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, what you found is the official, authoritative policy on homework-like questions. You might find a post that explains a particular point of the homework policy more clearly, but in general, that is the best available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That was hard enough to find. Perhaps an entry could be put in the help to make it easier to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mean like this entry in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kalgd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kalgd.png&quot; alt=&quot;picture of help center&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between this and the fact that this post is linked from &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question closed as homework-like, I think we've made it relatively easy to find. If there is a specific situation in which it would make sense to add another link to the post, we can do that, but we'd need more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought this was a settled issue, but the comments to the answer I linked suggest otherwise. Do we have a consensus? If we are not a homework help site, I would think that we would want to discourage complete answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you don't see is the many weeks of discussion in chat and previous posts on meta that went into crafting that policy. Keep in mind that people who agree with the policy (and in particular, those who were involved in the discussions that created it) have no need to comment on the post. There is a selection bias which makes the comments under the post more likely to oppose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should probably delete those comments as they are very old, and any changes to the policy inspired by the comments will already have been made. (This doesn't stop people from proposing such changes via new meta posts, of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T15:53:56.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7641" CreationDate="2016-04-02T16:25:21.687" Score="8" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;This week I've seen several complete solutions posted to homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One author asked if he should delete his answer.  I'm inclined to answer yes, he should delete it, but I'm putting the question up here to see what others think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah ... the author deleted it on his own, so I can't link to it.  But my question still stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T21:46:44.370" Title="Should we suggest that authors of complete solutions to homework-like questions delete them?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7642" CreationDate="2016-04-03T16:36:15.970" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you all are still correct but some of us have some personal problems due to which we come to sites like this. I think we should be treated well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106752" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T09:36:29.647" Title="Why are homework questions not given proper answers and they don't have much value here?" Tags="|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7639" CreationDate="2016-04-03T16:50:57.700" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point I have written and erased several strongly worded paragraphs expressing my intense frustration with the &lt;em&gt;entitlement&lt;/em&gt; expressed in your question. You seem to assume that our purpose here is to be a resource for you in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if that is not why we are gathered here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some things you could have done to find out if we were going to want to solve elementary problems for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could have taken &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could have read some of the pages in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt;. Particularly those about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;what kinds of questions are welcome&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;what kinds are not&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/246899/the-efficiency-of-a-rough-inclined-plane-is-given-90-the-energy-spent-in-raisi&quot;&gt;your first questions&lt;/a&gt; was put on-hold as being too homework-like, you could have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;the link included in the system generated on-hold message&lt;/a&gt; that contains guidance on how to ask questions about elementary topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I note that some of your questions have been left open and answered. That's because we're not responding negatively to you as a person but to a particular request that you keep making of us: we don't want to be a homework help-site, and we don't care if the questions were assigned as part of a class or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have to take responsibility for understanding what this site is and is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T16:50:57.700" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7638" CreationDate="2016-04-03T21:46:44.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I somewhat regularly mod-flag answers that are complete solutions to (no-effort) homework problems &amp;amp; request deletion. This is in line with what is stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;Homework policy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer to a homework-type question that gives away a complete or near-complete solution, in most cases it will be temporarily deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if an &lt;em&gt;answerer&lt;/em&gt; questions whether they should delete their answer for breaking the policy, then I would say that &lt;em&gt;Yes, they should be recommended to self-delete&lt;/em&gt; and link them to the relevant policy (q/714 on meta.physics.se) as a reminder as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the policy is as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T21:46:44.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7639" CreationDate="2016-04-04T09:36:29.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine the following scenarios: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, maybe you want to study abroad, you need to write a letter of motivation in a language you are not very good at. Now, this needs to be very good, but you don't want to bother your friends with correcting it. You pass by some notice where some language enthusiast club for this particular language advertises their meetings. So you decide to go there and just say &quot;Hey, can anyone quickly correct this letter, please? I'm not very good at it and it's urgent!&quot; Would you expect a good response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you have a dispute with your friend about some grammatical finepoint of your mother tongue (if it was English, maybe you ask yourself about how to correctly use the passive voice in a very intricate and very specific example). What do you do? Well, first you look it up in your English book, but the explanation is somewhat intricate and you don't really want to spend time trying to decipher it. So you decide it's quicker to just ask the experts: you look up your local university and call the dean of the language faculty to ask him or her about that particular problem of yours. Would you expect a good response?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, I suspect that the recipients of your requests will tell you that this is not the place and tell you the rules or show you where to look them up. Sometimes they will be patient, othertimes they will react sullenly, because they are tired of similar requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two examples are not exactly the same as a homework question on this site, but pretty close. In &quot;real life&quot; most people understand that for every question and matter, there are different places to ask - you don't start with the expert, because other people can answer your questions equally well and are willing to do so because they still learn and like to learn from these types of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to understand that it's the same on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30247" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T09:36:29.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T11:44:32.470" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a big problem over many months with a question. I try to tell the story as factually as possible. Help is appreciated. Here we go...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/232086/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on Jan 27 at 14:29.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as unclear on Jan 29 at 23:20.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited for clarity on Jan 30 at 15:45, messaging all who closed it if it was now OK (in the comments). It was not reopened and message was not responded too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited for further clarity again on Feb 8 at 15:49, messaging all who closed it asking of it was now OK. It was not reopened and message was not responded too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see on the link, somebody then deleted these comments, leaving only the comment to define symbols - which was done immediately in the first edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By Mar 19 at 12:30, I had given up hope those who closed question would let the reworded question open. I took drastic step to repost it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/244358/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was marked as duplicate on Mar 21 at 7:11. This was of the course the case - a duplicate of the reworded closed question. In fact, I said this in the quesion &quot;(Full disclosure: this is reworded version of closed question)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1) How can my question appear on the website without stigma of &quot;closed&quot; or &quot;duplicate&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2) Why do reviewers refuse to say why a question was closed?  Notably, it seems to me all symbols are defined and perfectly reasonable equations are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to be good person. All I wanted was reason reviewers kept question closed after I completed edits that they required. I believe the aim should be to increase quality of question until it can be reopened. I do not see how it can happen if moderators refuse to communicate. If you look at the question, I do not believe it is so unclear that no amount of future editing would ever render it comprehensible to anyone on this site. It does not seem plausible situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89260" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T11:51:01.823" Title="How to get explanation why question is unclear?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7646" CreationDate="2016-04-04T19:07:21.187" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find how to see the badge counts etc on the phone app. is it not an implemented feature or am I blind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-04T19:16:17.990" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T02:07:22.493" Title="How to access badges in phone app?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7645" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T13:54:03.680" Score="19" ViewCount="1371" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: post examples of current questions which are edge cases for the new policy, look through the list, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vote answers UP if you think they should be ON TOPIC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vote answers DOWN if you think they should be OFF TOPIC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you feel motivated, fill out &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfm5QLFJVPUiWEQb45fLGtjhZHhxeC560PoE5ia3LrXr6FMiA/viewform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this questionnaire about the answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we last left &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;the ongoing examination&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, the community had come to something of a consensus that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7409/124&quot;&gt;certain low-effort questions asking for calculations should be off topic&lt;/a&gt;. In addition, I've been watching actual question closures over the past couple months since we had that discussion, and I see more and more questions getting closed for displaying unacceptably low effort, whether using the existing homework-like close reason, or a custom reason written in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think it's time we start formulating a new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new policy, along with one or two associated close reasons, will prescribe how we should decide whether questions are off topic for being low-effort and/or being calculation requests. It will &lt;em&gt;replace&lt;/em&gt; the current homework policy, and in the future, we will use the associated close reason(s) for homework questions, &lt;em&gt;instead&lt;/em&gt; of using the existing homework-like close reason (which will no longer be active).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have in mind is a process in 4 steps, of which this is the first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collect examples of questions that should be on topic or off topic under the new policy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepare and edit a draft of the new policy that implements the consensus on the examples as well as possible. This may take a while.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decide on the wording of one or two new close reasons that will be associated with the new policy. Two reasons would be an option in case we want both low-effort questions and calculation requests to be off topic and we can't come up with one reason to cover them both.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make an official &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post with the content of the new policy, deprecate the current homework policy, and swap the new close reasons in for the existing homework-like close reason. This is the easy part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. Collecting examples of on/off-topic questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to guide the development of a new policy, I think it will help to have many examples of questions that should be on topic or off topic. So I'm making this post to solicit these examples from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it will work: each answer should contain a link to &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; question that is currently on the site. Vote up each answer if you would like to see that question be on topic under the &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; policy (that we are going to write), and vote down if you think the question should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote based on &lt;strong&gt;how the question is currently written&lt;/strong&gt;, not based on how you think it could be written if it were improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter so much whether the question is &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; open or closed. If you have feedback arguing one way or another for a particular link, leave it in the comments on that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a lot of questions, the decision is obvious. We don't really need to post those. What I'm &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; interested in are &amp;quot;interesting&amp;quot; cases, such as questions which are currently on topic but which you'd like to see be off topic under the new policy, or vice versa. Borderline questions, which are not &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; on-topic or off-topic, are also good candidates for posting here. For inspiration, you can look at our previous discussions on this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;Generalizing the homework policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;Should we rename the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6631/homework-the-view-from-the-chat-session&quot;&gt;Homework - the view from the chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5375/whats-the-current-status-of-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the current status of the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;Banning homework: vote and documentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/chat-session-on-homework-close-reason&quot;&gt;Chat session on homework close reason&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6001/closing-insufficient-effort-questions&quot;&gt;Closing &amp;quot;Insufficient Effort&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6165/does-insufficient-effort-cover-previous-se-questions&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;insufficient effort&amp;quot; cover previous SE questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4598/questions-that-show-insufficient-effort-by-the-op&quot;&gt;Questions that show insufficient effort by the OP&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6307/what-is-the-meaning-of-effort-that-phys-se-wants-in-homework-questions&quot;&gt;What is the meaning of **effort** that Phys.SE wants in homework questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on, e.g. linked and related questions in those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consensus that emerged from the last meta question is represented by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7409/124&quot;&gt;rob's answer&lt;/a&gt;, which suggested the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which attempt to outsource tedious calculations to the community, without any broader context, are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that a key word here (&amp;quot;tedious&amp;quot;) implies a value judgement, and there's a bias in writing these guidelines towards &amp;quot;objective&amp;quot;, judgement-free criteria. That bias is flawed, which is why we have human moderators and the opportunity to discuss some decisions with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this as a starting point to help judge which questions are likely to be edge cases and how you would vote on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T09:10:48.900" Title="Replacing the homework policy 1: what existing questions should be on/off topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="23" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7644" CreationDate="2016-04-06T02:07:22.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perusing &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta.StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; leads me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/257836/&quot;&gt;this question &amp;amp; answer&lt;/a&gt; from June 2015. The answers to the question both say the app isn't meant to be a replacement for the the main site, that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the app is therefore optimised for this, allowing you to view, comment on, answer, vote and flag posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the (current) answer is that you cannot see the badges you've earned on the site (unless it was a recent one that'd be in your Achievements list, but clicking on that would lead you to the mobile site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T02:07:22.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-06T07:08:42.457" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247719/mutual-e-force-due-to-charged-coaxial-rings&quot;&gt;Mutual $E$ force due to charged coaxial rings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is probably homework because it's really just asking how to solve a problem. However you could argue it's conceptual in the sense that it's asking about how to approach this sort of problem for arbitrary geometries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A belated footnote: the simplest approach I've seen to doing this requires the use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(electromagnetism)#Green.27s_reciprocity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reciprocity theorem&lt;/a&gt;, and specifically that the potential energy of a quadrupole charge distribution in the electrostatic potential from a monopole is the same as the potential energy of a monopole in an electrostatic potential from a quadrupole. Wouldn't answering aalong these lines count as conceptual?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:15:16.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-06T07:30:57.483" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247547/extension-in-a-vertically-hanging-rod&quot;&gt;Extension in a vertically hanging rod&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a homework question, and the OP admits it's a homework question. However the OP isn't asking us to do the problem, they are asking about the physics behind it making more of a &lt;em&gt;homework inspired&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would leave this one open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:15:32.320" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-06T09:55:26.880" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247730/does-this-length-refer-to-wavelength-or-length&quot;&gt;Does this length refer to wavelength or length?&lt;/a&gt; (as of revision 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meets the conceptual question requirement of our current homework policy, but it seems not to show any effort. On the other hand, it's not clear to me what sort of effort we could expect to be shown for a question like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-04-06T15:04:03.330" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T15:04:03.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-06T17:57:30.177" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247829/speed-of-rf-waves-and-ir-waves-is-same-as-3-10-8-m-s&quot;&gt;Speed of RF waves and IR waves is same as 3*10^8 m/s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a very elementary question with a straight-forward answer which can be found in every introductory physics text.  I have not, however, been able to find this basic question on PSE with a straight-forward, well-reasoned, not-overly-complicated answer (or any answer for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want a collection of elementary questions such as this, if they aren't duplicates, even if the answer is easily found in a text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T17:57:30.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-07T09:02:43.147" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/163014/how-to-calculate-the-electric-energy-caused-by-eletrostatic-field-stored-in-a-re&quot;&gt;How to calculate the electric energy caused by eletrostatic field stored in a region, given $V$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question shows a good attempt at a solution, but it doesn't ask anything more specific than what the poster has done wrong (which makes it off topic under the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; policy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T09:02:43.147" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-07T12:25:19.177" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247999/sound-pitch-of-glass-with-water&quot;&gt;Sound pitch of glass with water&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a homework or homework-like question, it's not a calculation request, it's completely conceptual, but the question doesn't show any prior research, or any evidence that the poster has made an effort to figure out the answer themselves. You might think that's perfectly fine. On the other hand, if you believe the poster should have shown more effort, what would you expect them to have done? (You can address this in the comments on this answer if you like.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this question should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T12:25:19.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7625" CreationDate="2016-04-07T14:11:52.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with a comment from @Mew: Feynman's legendary tetchy response to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmtJpzoW0o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'why' question (why magnets repel) from an interviewer&lt;/a&gt; made an impression on many physicists. Feynman insisted that whilst it was an excellent question, it was also problematic, as any answer might precipitate a further question, and, depending on the interviewer's knowledge of physics, be incomplete or dishonest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feynman's reaction to 'why' questions has become something of a platitude that, when invoked inappropriately, closes the door on many reasonable and scientific lines of thought and questions. Unfortunately, the hagiography surrounding Feynman means that it's likely to stick around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T14:11:52.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-07T14:16:04.080" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/248024/specific-heat-ratio-difference-between-dry-air-and-moist-air&quot;&gt;Specific heat ratio difference between dry air and moist air&lt;/a&gt;, which reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For dry air cp/cv = 1.4, but for moist air it is smaller: cp/cv ~ 1.3. What is the reason for this difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fairly standard homework question that probes if you understand what the difference between heat capacity at constant volume vs pressure means. Seems black and white to me, but lets test the boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the most likely issue for the poster is not unwrapping the ratio of the two to get back to the heat capacities proper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T17:53:54.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-07T19:27:47.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to go off the script David proposed and emphasize one point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This programme needs to consider very seriously the role of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, as I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5490/about-the-proposal-to-ban-homework&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, one of the main lessons that came out of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; previous attempt to reformulate the policy. More specifically, it is an inconsistent position to say &quot;homework is banned&quot; and still keep a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag, or at least it is something that is very hard to write around. It will be easier now that the tag actually reads &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; but the problem has by no means gone away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to express (here and now) an opinion on whether we should change the policy or the usage of the tag. But a discussion of the role of the tag is integral in any attempt to reformulate the policy. One big reason for this is that the first encounter of most new users with the fact that not all homework questions are on-topic will be with the tag wiki excerpt that's shown when you try to tag something as homework. Another big reason is simply that the tag is an integral structural part of how we handle these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this discussion needs to include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we want to change which questions are tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we want to keep the tag at all? Do we want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120640/what-does-it-mean-to-burninate-a-tag&quot;&gt;burninate&lt;/a&gt; and black-list it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does the tag documentation - tag wiki and tag wiki excerpt - need to look like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not putting forth any position on these issues at this time, but they do need to be on the agenda; if not, it will simply prove impossible (or at least very, very difficult) to write a consistent set of documentation for the new policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T19:27:47.273" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-07T20:32:16.447" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/248039/47511&quot;&gt;Power dissipation in AC RC circuit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should seriously consider not allowing such questions here. Under the current policy this is allowed homework, because the OP did a reasonable effort to solve the problem. I.m.o., however, we're better off forgetting about the whole homework issue and focus only on how interesting a question is from purely a physics point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it can then be the case that a homework-like question is very interesting but it would not be allowed under the current policy because of lack of effort. On the other hand you can also have questions like this which are not all that interesting but because the poor student did go through all the trouble of working seriously on the problem, we're going to address it. It's better to not take such irrelevant issues into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:16:27.683" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-07T20:47:37.583" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of my questions are about quantum field theory. They tend to get extremely few views and a handful of positive votes before sinking off the bottom of the active list. My non-QFT questions are pretty well-received, so I'd like to think I'm not asking totally trivial questions, but almost all the time, to get a QFT answer, I need to give the question a bounty. I think I've given out about 10 bounties at this point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I doing something wrong? I feel like this wouldn't be necessary if I could bump the question a few times, but I never see anybody doing this. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T20:47:37.583" Title="Is it okay to bump questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7661" CreationDate="2016-04-08T12:02:22.140" Score="-4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some days ago I gave answer to my own question &quot; what is dark matter and dark energy &quot;, it was actually a copy of an old question asked months before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my concern is that I wanted to share some viewpoints related to the concerned problem and wanted to show it to every member here. But as you all know answering old questions is not useful as they won't be seen in the latest questions list. Ultimately my goal won't be achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any solution to so that people don't ask me to remove this question for it is a copy and still it can be seen in the active list (for some time)??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106752" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T12:04:29.673" Title="Can we post question answer in a form of article?" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7660" CreationDate="2016-04-08T12:04:29.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But as you all know answering old questions is not useful as they won't be seen in the latest questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, answering a question bumps it up to the top of the list on the main page of the site, so people will see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T12:04:29.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7691" CreationDate="2016-04-08T15:51:54.467" Score="12" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the moderators all have lives, we've been thinking about getting some additional eyes on chat in the form of &lt;em&gt;room owners&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most chat rooms, ownership is meant &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/243942/56541&quot;&gt;to indicate who is &quot;in charge&quot; of a room&lt;/a&gt; and should be the point of contact for outsiders with questions about its culture. But since The h Bar is a primary site chat room, it's &quot;owned&quot; by the community, not by specific people. What we have in mind is probably more like a room &lt;em&gt;maintainer&lt;/em&gt; than an &lt;em&gt;owner&lt;/em&gt;. We think it'd be better if the chat community didn't always have to rely on the mods to keep the star wall clean, or to add feeds, or bring in new users who don't meet the rep requirement, schedule additional events, or kick-mute people if the conversation starts to get out of hand. (Kick-mute keeps a user from participating in that chat room for a short period of a few minutes.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Owners get &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/87773/56541&quot;&gt;a few privileges&lt;/a&gt;, beyond those available based on reputation, that would allow them to take care of these matters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;room owner&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;edit the room name and description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#star&quot;&gt;pin a message&lt;/a&gt; (a pin is a super-star)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;remove stars from messages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;grant explicit read or write access&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;grant room ownership&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;create and remove feeds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;move messages to a different room&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;schedule events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;kick-mute users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, ideally using these powers would be rare, and most of the time room owners would just hang around chatting as usual. And if there are serious problems, they'd just ping a moderator anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Owners would be appointed by the moderators from trustworthy candidates who are willing to take on the role. It's not really worth going through a whole election process for what is ultimately a very small change in the status quo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm making this post to focus on the &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; idea of having room owners, not as a forum to debate who it's going to be. Thoughts? Any objections we haven't thought of? In the spirit of &quot;better safe than sorry&quot;, I figured I should probably put &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; on meta before we just go and make it happen - even though it's very possible there is not really anything to say about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T09:01:59.763" Title="Additional chat room owners?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-10T22:45:46.850" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/248310/&quot;&gt;Reliable length scales in nature&lt;/a&gt; has been received very poorly, for reasons I don't really understand.  In the help center, it is stated that questions concerning &quot;Experimental designs and results&quot; and &quot;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&quot; are on topic.  I can reasonably interpret a question about how to make a ruler from objects in nature as falling under both of these headings.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spirit of the question I asked was about how to make a measurement.  I suspect that if I had instead asked how to determine a length scale from, say, observations of astronomical objects, it would have been much better received.  (The question of length scales in astronomy is in fact very important for physics--see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the cosmic distance ladder&lt;/a&gt;.)  The differences I can identify between a question about astronomical objects and about terrestrial objects are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have sophisticated ways of measuring distances on earth that render length scales of nature unnecessary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plants and animals which provide reliable length scales are also within the purview of biology, and thus are not exclusively of interest to physicists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why would you need to use natural objects for measuring things anyway?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question to the stackexchange community is: For which of these reasons (or for what other reasons) was the question dismissed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My responses to the above points are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not everyone has access to laser range finders all the time.  It is still of interest to be able to measure things in a primitive way.  (This is also why &quot;back of the envelope physics&quot; is still an important skill.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science is not mutually exclusive. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See response 1.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by the way, there are good answers (in my opinion) to the question in question.  E.g. atmospheric pressure and a lake can furnish a length scale: You could fill up an airtight bag and sink it into water until its volume was half what it was at the surface.  The depth of the bag is then 33 feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110443" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T07:18:48.730" Title="Why is this question about measurement off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7666" CreationDate="2016-04-11T02:38:43.807" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question received let +40 votes.&#xA;Then someone else post a duplicate question .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then should it be down voted besides being flagged for duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T04:59:50.507" Title="If a question is duplicate , should it be downvoted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7665" CreationDate="2016-04-11T04:59:50.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always felt it is a bit harsh to downvote a question just because it is a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the fact the question is a duplicate shows a lack of effort from the OP because they should have searched the site first. However the site search isn't especially good and I often only spot duplicates because I remember seeing the original and possibly even answered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do get cases where even a trivial search would have found the original, and in these cases I find myself strongly tempted to downvote though I usually just leave an acerbic comment instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the end of the day site members can, and should, downvote according to their consciences. We are, after all, just trying to make the Physics Stack Exchange a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T04:59:50.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7664" CreationDate="2016-04-11T07:18:48.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know exactly why the question was not well received; for that you'd have to get responses from the people who voted to close it, or downvoted it (if they care to identify themselves). That being said, my guess is that your reason #1 is pretty close. We have better ways to measure terrestrial quantities than comparing to natural objects. Sure, not everyone has laser range finders and electronic timers. But not everyone does physics. And when people &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; doing physics, they use laser range finders and electronic timers, or more generally, whatever measuring tools are most appropriate for the job. That renders questions about &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; measurement standards likely off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In astrophysics, the situation is different because astrophysicists actually do use things like pulsars and spectral lines for measurement. So the preceding reasoning wouldn't apply to questions about natural measurements used in astrophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I wouldn't say that questions about measuring tools are automatically on topic. One of the principles that determines the scope of this site is that it should be about the physics and not about the tools used to do physics. This is why questions about using Mathematica, for example, are off topic (and have always been off topic, even before there was a dedicated site for such questions). We can also extend the same reasoning to say that questions about math itself are off topic. That being said, we've softened our stance on such questions over the years, so it's possible that a good question on using, say, a photogate timer would be considered on topic now. But it would be a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; stretch to extend that to something like a bag of air in a lake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other reason the question would be considered off topic is that it's an open-ended list question. The SE model doesn't handle such questions well; we prefer specific questions that have a right answer. So in addition to any issues your question may have with fitting into the site's topical scope, it's also too broad, if you ask me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T07:18:48.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-11T09:43:27.863" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/248365/three-dimensional-isotropic-harmonic-oscilator-hamiltonian&quot;&gt;Three dimensional isotropic harmonic oscilator Hamiltonian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an advanced question (on quantum mechanics) that shows detailed effort. It could be argued that it doesn't actually ask anything beyond &quot;what am I doing wrong?&quot;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-04-11T10:03:53.637" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T10:03:53.637" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7662" CreationDate="2016-04-11T19:48:37.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I say yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I know my opinion doesn't carry a massive weight on this site itself, but since I'm around the chat a reasonable amount I thought I'd drop it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the past few months there have been a number of flags from The h Bar. Only some of them have been valid, but each one has required a little moderator time to resolve (yes, I'm aware 10k users can see chat flags, but — forgive me — it's been a while since I saw a 10k'er resolve a situation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of another chatroom I hang around. Or rather, of how that chatroom &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to be — the attitudes in it are changed now, along with the flagging culture. I think that's in part down to the fact that the room got some room owners who could be around — not to &lt;em&gt;impose&lt;/em&gt;, but to gently guide conversations away from topics that would trigger, and to help mediate in disputes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't see that much &lt;em&gt;harm&lt;/em&gt; could come from this action (unless the power gets given to someone ill-qualified to wield it, but that can be dealt with easily enough). That leaves us with a win—no-change situation, where we never &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; anything. It's worth giving a try, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62614" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T19:48:37.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-12T10:32:23.027" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249065/free-falling-horizontal-motion&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249065/free-falling-horizontal-motion&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QpW2W.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screen-shot link here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP clearly isn't asking for help on the problem, they are asking what something in the question means. I think these types of questions are the similar enough to the types of problems that are supposed to be accepted under the policy that we should let them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T10:08:48.153" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-12T19:46:40.250" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to dmckee for digging up an old deleted question asked by me a long time ago here. Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose a plane of mass $M$ flies at constant velocity at a height $h$ above the ground. If $h$ is much larger than the size of the aircraft, what is the pressure increase on the ground as a function of the position relative to the point directly underneath the aircraft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I then added a heuristic way to tackle the problem (some of it was in the comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the velocity field were (on average) to have a radial component that decays like 1/r^2, this amounts to a source, which violates conservation of mass. But you can then imagine a sink nearby, in the limit that they get infinitely close and the sources get infinitively strong, you should get a dipole like velocity field. Then this decays like 1/r^3 at large distances. At the ground we impose zero velocity boundary conditions, the pressure should thus behave like 1/r^6 = 1/(h^2 + d^2)^3 where d is the distance on the ground from the point directly underneath the aircraft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Integrating the total pressure over the surface should yield the weight of the aircraft. If we write the pressure as A/(h^2 + d^2)^3, then the integral of 2 pi A d/(h^2 + d^2)^3 over d from 0 to infinity should equal M g. Solving for A then yields the pressure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P(d) = 2 Mg h^4/pi 1/(h^2 + d^2)^3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But all this is on the basis of purely intuitive reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-04-18T13:15:59.023" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:15:59.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7675" CreationDate="2016-04-13T23:01:14.367" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course the questions with a current bounty are in the featured list. But how to get the questions that used to have a bounty? I'd like to have a look through them since other than votes a bounty is a decent indicator if the question was any good/valuable to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(by &quot;used to have a bounty&quot; I mean where the bounty has been awarded some time ago)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T08:57:29.693" Title="How to get list of questions that used to have a bounty?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-13T23:37:53.797" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this theory that an answer today given to an old question is unlikely to be up-voted highly, if at all. I believe this is because people tend to lose interest in old questions, and can't be bothered to go through all the other answers to see if the new answer adds anything of value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some sort of badge for &lt;strong&gt;giving a highly up-voted recent answer to a very old question&lt;/strong&gt; to check this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T23:37:53.797" Title="Is there a badge for giving a highly up-voted recent answer to a very old question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-14T08:15:05.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249329/relationship-between-velocity-and-position-due-to-constant-jerk-proof-check&quot;&gt;Relationship between velocity and position due to constant jerk proof check&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question shows a detailed derivation, and then asks us to check whether the derivation is correct. It also asks whether there is a simpler derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-04-18T13:16:10.197" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:16:10.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7672" CreationDate="2016-04-14T08:57:29.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange Data Explorer query&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/471411/questions-with-bounties-awarded-in-the-past&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Questions with bounties awarded in the past&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;written by yours truly, gets you that list. If you want more specific search criteria (like tags or bounty amounts) it is easy to fork the query and make it do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T08:57:29.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-14T11:06:35.650" Score="10" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a relatively new user and have already noticed a lack of users with interest in Astrophysics, compared to Quantum Mechanics or Quantum Field Theory. I have interest in these more popular areas as well, so I am still enjoying the site, but it would be great to see more Astrophysicists on here! Is there any way we can encourage this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By Astrophysics I also refer to basic GR, Cosmology and Structure Formation as well as more typical areas like Galactic Dynamics, because the majority of answers on GR and Cosmology I have seen are also related in some way to QFT.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105680" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2016-04-23T00:07:07.193" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T04:21:00.467" Title="How can we encourage more Astrophysicists on physics stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-14T13:52:09.937" Score="-3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that stack exchange allows me to write beautifully typeset equations in LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if, however, I am really lazy. Instead I write my problem out on paper and then take a picture and upload it?&#xA;Will this be annoying for everyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often find that the amount of time that I would have to spend writing up my questions in LaTeX stops me from asking them on here, which is a shame really&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51930" LastEditorUserId="51930" LastEditDate="2016-04-14T17:46:34.677" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T17:46:34.677" Title="Posting a picture of my working" Tags="|discussion|links|image|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7677" CreationDate="2016-04-14T14:11:46.130" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No-one here is paid to answer your questions. In fact no-one here receives any reward for answering your questions other than the feeling of satisfaction that we've left the world of physics a slightly better place than we've found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you expect to attract good answers to your questions you're going to have to convince the site members that taking the time and trouble (often both considerable) to answer your question is a worthwhile undertaking. And one way to do that is to demonstrate that you take your question seriously enough to put a lot of effort into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't necessarily mean no-one will answer your question if you can't be bothered to format it properly, but it does mean your question will attract less attention than competing questions that have been written with more care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T14:11:46.130" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7677" CreationDate="2016-04-14T14:40:43.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will I get a whole load of moderators moaning at me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Not just moderators, but the whole spectrum of site members (as Kyle Kanos mentioned in a comment). And it's not just &lt;em&gt;moaning&lt;/em&gt;; questions which include pictures of something that could be typed out attract downvotes and close votes. They look unprofessional, and (as Qmechanic mentioned in a comment) they are not searchable and are susceptible to link rot or invisible edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes someone will help you out by transcribing the contents of the image. It's not guaranteed, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a new poster does this because they don't know MathJax syntax (or because they don't know how much we hate pictures of text), that's more forgivable, but afterwards we expect you to learn. The basics of MathJax are not hard, and there's a guide built into the posting box. Someone who makes a &lt;em&gt;habit&lt;/em&gt; of posting pictures of text or math is going to find their posts getting a poor reception, and &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; even wind up getting blocked from the site for excessively low-quality contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T14:40:43.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7681" CreationDate="2016-04-15T11:53:39.693" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably answered somewhere, so apologies for my weak search-fu...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can a question have two tags that are synonyms? Shouldn't the synonym instead appear as its &quot;parent&quot; tag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89380/calculus-used-by-gauss-to-find-ceres-position&quot;&gt;Calculus used by Gauss to find Ceres&amp;#39; position?&lt;/a&gt;, [astronomy] and [observational-astronomy] both appear, even though [observational-astronomy] is a synonym of [astronomy].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T13:03:45.470" Title="Why can a question have both a tag and its synonym simultaneously?" Tags="|support|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7680" CreationDate="2016-04-15T12:02:49.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to merging of tags, the creation of synonyms does not alter posts retroactively. If a question is edited after the synonym was created, the tags of the question will conform with the new synonym rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-15T12:09:01.050" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T12:09:01.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-15T15:58:54.060" Score="8" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I see a post in the chat room that I think is potentially inflammatory, what is the best way to bring it to a moderator's attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging seems a near nuclear option, and I've been specifically told not to do this by a chat moderator (not one of our home grown ones). I can use an @moderator in a message, but I may want to keep quiet the fact I'm flagging other users' posts - partly from cowardice of course but partly to avoid inflaming things further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a way/what is the best way discreetly to tell the moderators there is a post in the chat room that they may want to look at?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A quick footnote:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've probably all been in situations where we can tell a conversation is about to turn nasty, but nothing offensive has been said &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt;. Nipping such exchanges in the bud is usually the best way to keep things from getting heated. However &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/28838924#28838924&quot;&gt;the last time I attempted this I was told&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flagging isn't for when someone says something that might turn the conversation unpleasant. It's for after the conversation has already turned unpleasant in spite of attempts to remediate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the point is that flagging notifies all chat room mods across the entire SE, and since they're strangers to the Physics chat they can't know why an apparently innocuous comment could start a fire. That makes flagging pretty useless in this context, but that's is the way the SE chat is designed and there's nothing we can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was how to notify just the Physics mods, who will know enough of the background to judge if a comment should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2016-04-15T16:51:24.620" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T08:27:21.070" Title="Raising issues with the chat room" Tags="|support|flagging|chat|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7682" CreationDate="2016-04-15T16:14:43.647" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, there are a couple different things going on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Potentially&lt;/em&gt; inflammatory posts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly true that chat bystanders can often tell when a conversation is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; to turn nasty. And you're definitely right that it's better to prevent nasty exchanges from breaking out in the first place than to allow them to happen and deal with them afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, &lt;em&gt;you don't need moderators to do this&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any community, when someone starts behaving inappropriately, the first and best way to stop that behavior is for other people in the community to &lt;strong&gt;come right out and call them on it&lt;/strong&gt;. A simple &quot;dude, don't say that&quot; or &quot;I'd rather you not talk about [whatever]&quot; or &quot;let's drop this for now&quot; or something like that is often all it takes. If different people disagree on what's appropriate, the whole group can get together and discuss it, and come to some consensus. There's no need for moderators or any higher authority to get involved, and that's &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; - a community like our chat room should be able to maintain itself without having a moderator constantly watching over everyone's shoulder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Actually&lt;/em&gt; inflammatory posts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually talking to people works when everyone is being reasonable and civil. But that's not always the case in practice. People's tempers flare up sometimes and their control can slip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask someone to drop an issue or tell them something they said is inappropriate, sometimes they respond by insulting you or spouting profanity and completely ignoring what you're trying to tell them. When calling someone out on their inappropriate posts doesn't work, and they escalate to &quot;conversational violence&quot; (insults, rudeness, etc.), &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; what flagging is for. Flagging brings a post to the attention of the chat moderators, and possibly also 10k-rep users, from across the SE network.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Sometimes a forceful word from a moderator is all it takes to get the discussion back on track, but if not, moderators (or a consensus of enough 10k-rep users) have the power to remove chatters who don't have the sense to remove themselves from an argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the thing, though: flags show up to a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of people. Unlike on the site, where we only have 4 moderators and a few dozen 10k-rep users, there are over 300 chat moderators and probably thousands of people with 10k reputation. Obviously not everyone is online at any given time, but still, that's a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of people seeing a flag. So flags should be used with care. You shouldn't be casting flags unless things have really escalated so badly that the people in the room can't deal with it anymore. (Or for spam, but that rarely happens.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical outcome of a flag is that the flagged message will be deleted and the posting user suspended for 30 minutes (or longer if circumstances warrant). For anything that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; deserve that kind of a response... well, is it really so bad you (people in the room) can't handle it yourself? Probably not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that nowhere in here did I address the main point of the question, which was how to contact &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; the site mods privately. Honestly, that's probably not that useful. If we (mods) are logged in at the time, we're probably watching the chat room anyway, and we'll step in when things start to get out of hand. Otherwise, we're not going to see any message you might send us until we do log in, by which time it will be too late to defuse the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is, chat moves fast, and blowups in chat should likewise be handled fast. So once things get to the point where you need to call in outside help (and remember, they should not get to that point easily), it makes sense for that call to reach someone who can respond quickly. If one of us Physics mods isn't already in the room, it's better to bring in a chat mod from another site rather than waiting around for one of us to get there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2911/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; pointed out, there are two kinds of flags. The inappropriate/offensive flag goes to mods and 10k-rep users, but there is also a custom flag that is only seen by mods. The situations described in this answer will &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; only need a generic inappropriate/offensive flag, if any. See &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271267/a-guide-to-moderating-chat/271268#271268&quot;&gt;more information about chat flags on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T08:27:21.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-15T19:41:36.347" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beside the word physics is drawn a figure which looks like a mexican hat/sombrero. Where does it stands for and why is this used. Does it has to do something with condensations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103999" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-15T19:54:36.553" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T19:54:36.553" Title="What does the mexican hat/sombrero logo of Phys.SE stands for?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-04-15T19:56:47.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7682" CreationDate="2016-04-15T22:19:01.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Z has it right. As a moderator who spends a lot of time moderating chat myself, I'll clear up a few misconceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Flagging&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That flag button on the right-hand end of a message? That one is for &lt;strong&gt;offensive or inappropriate messages&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not designed to be used for messages that aren't themselves offensive, but might turn a conversation toxic, because it draws far too much negative attention. You should use this button when someone has said something out of line with the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt; policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message menu (obtained by clicking the dropdown arrow on the left hand end of a message) has an option called &lt;em&gt;flag for moderator&lt;/em&gt;. This is the one you want to use to discreetly signal moderators. It will not go out only to the site mods, but to every mod currently on the chat network, which can be a blessing or a curse. Feel free to ask for a moderator who has room experience to handle the flag and step in (even if it doesn't happen, it's worth a shot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The &quot;never flag anything&quot; attitude&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This attitude refers to the former type of flag (the offensive/inappropriate flag). It's designed to stop people flagging things because it draws the attention of 10k users and moderators across the entire chat network, not all of whom come into the room to be helpful, but to mock and complain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's also false and damaging.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not flagging things that &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to be flagged because they're offensive is a Bad Idea. If someone's out of line, you can talk to them if you think they'll respond to that. More often than not, they won't - and it's time to signal someone who has the tools to resolve the situation. An accurate offensive flag puts that power in the hands of 6 10k users, which is essential for getting stuff removed quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any users turn up in the chatroom and complain or mock people, you can signal for mod attention with a moderator flag, or offensive flag again if they say something out of line. More often than not, a moderator or two will turn up along with the first flag and will prevent those users from grouching about things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62614" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T22:19:01.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7687" CreationDate="2016-04-15T23:10:13.637" Score="13" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a relatively new member of the site and haven't spent enough time to read through rules and meta posts yet to really understand how it all works. So when I see the occasional discussion in the comment section between highly ranked members of the site, I tend to make up my mind intuitively, keeping in mind that it should help the site remain an &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; forum, where &lt;em&gt;reasonable questions&lt;/em&gt; about &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; can be asked. Like I said, most people here have probably spent a lot more time thinking carefully about how to run the site and I appreciate that, but this is just how I generally think a forum should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I really enjoy this site and how it is run for the most part, but there are some questions where I simply can not understand why closing them is any good for the site. In particular the &quot;off-topic&quot; tag seems a bit off sometimes (sorry for the pun), since modern science is hardly ever part of a single subject (The most common overlap is gonna be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7140/are-questions-about-mathematics-used-in-physics-always-off-topic&quot;&gt;maths&lt;/a&gt;, but increasingly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7386/what-are-the-boundaries-of-biophysics-on-physics-se&quot;&gt;biology&lt;/a&gt; etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course one needs it to prevent questions that are nothing to do with physics. My main question here is: &lt;strong&gt;when there is a physics component in the question and when in doubt wether it can be answered here, shouldn't the decision go in favor of the question?&lt;/strong&gt; I am happy to get to know about how the actual rules are intended, but I'd also like to know from an intuitive perspective for a new member of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some other supporting factors, e.g. when the question has a good vote reception. The reason I am writing this post is such an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249606/why-have-our-eyes-not-evolved-to-see-gluons&quot;&gt;evolution/gluon question&lt;/a&gt;. I can not see at all how this is off-topic and @Nathaniel comments seem quite reasonable in this context. There was a similar discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/248333/symbolic-dynamics-of-a-multidimensional-system/248842#248842&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one, but it luckily stayed open. Unfortunately I can't make a more complete list of these kinds of questions because I can't figure out how to search for closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have elaborated why I don't understand this type of off-topic closing of question, now I'd like to return to the title question and ask more generally than &quot;is Math always off-topic&quot; or &quot;is Biophysics always off-topic&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;What is &quot;closing as off-topic&quot; intended for? And why when in doubt is the decision not necessarily for the question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One further thing I'd like to mention is that I of course realize that bad questions that pollute the site have to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T00:48:25.113" Title="Off-topic: what is it for?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7686" CreationDate="2016-04-16T00:04:15.550" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this will be a coherent answer, but let me comment on some points here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] it should help the site remain an open forum, where reasonable questions about physics can be asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92110/263383&quot;&gt;not a forum&lt;/a&gt;. The intent is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to facilitate discussion. The intent is to provide a place where &lt;em&gt;specific questions with clear answers&lt;/em&gt; can be asked, and where every response should be an attempt at answering the question posed (answers) or an attempt to clarify  or add to the question (comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this means that things posted as question which cannot conceivably have an objectively correct answer are not a good fit for the site. no matter whether they actually are about physics or not. This might incur closing as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt;, but it might also draw a custom close reason where the close voter more specifically addresses the question (usually detectable by the stock phase &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I am voting to close this question as off-topic because&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; at the beginning), which, if chosen as the main close reason, will mark the question as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;, even if the custom close reason gives a reason that is not, strictly speaking, saying it is &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; in the sense that it is not about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] I simply can not understand why closing them is any good for the site[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is &amp;quot;closing as off-topic&amp;quot; intended for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main (and arguably sole) purpose of closing a question is to declare that it is not welcome here. Closing a question prohibits adding further answers, and is meant to &lt;em&gt;discourage the asking of similar questions&lt;/em&gt; by communicating to everyone that such questions do not, in the view of the &amp;quot;community&amp;quot;, belong here. It is crucial to realize that this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; necessarily saying the question is not about physics, or that it is a stupid question. It's saying that &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; do not want this question &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;. Physics.SE is intended to cover a broad range of physics, but the intent is expressly not to answer everything that has some connection to physics and ends with a question mark. Being somehow about physics is a &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; condition for being on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; there is a rather nebulous term, and might arguably &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; necessarily reflect a majority position: A question is closed when five close votes are cast on it. To not let five users decide the status of a question forever, five reopen votes will reopen a question. Both types of votes are available to all users with more than 3000 reputation, and the first instance of such a vote will send a question into the corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Three &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; votes in the close queue will remove a question from the queue, and three &amp;quot;Leave Closed&amp;quot; votes will remove it from the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, also addressing your&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a]nd why when in doubt is the decision not necessarily for the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &amp;quot;when in doubt&amp;quot; case seems rather well-handled to me: Closing and reopening is a perfectly symmetric process, no bias is made either way, and in the case of a 50:50 split of votes, the process defaults to the status quo. The reason for not generically being in favour of questions staying open is simply the signal-to-noise ratio. The primary purpose of the site is to provide a knowledge base of precise questions with precise answers. Leaving open all borderline questions just tends to drown out all the &lt;em&gt;really good ones&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One further thing I'd like to mention is that I of course realize that bad questions that pollute the site have to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the entire reason we have repeated and lengthy debates on meta about e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; is that users simply have differing opinions on what constitutes a &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; question that &amp;quot;pollutes&amp;quot; the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I can't make a more complete list of these kinds of questions because I can't figure out how to search for closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To search for closed questions, simply add a &lt;code&gt;closed:yes&lt;/code&gt; to your search query. To access a more comprehensive list of such search modifiers, click on &lt;code&gt;Advanced Search Tips&lt;/code&gt; to the right of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search interface&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;The review queues are the most direct and most powerful way in which &lt;em&gt;we, the users&lt;/em&gt; can shape this site. Use them! Don't only go there when you see a question you really like and want to stay open, go there &lt;em&gt;whenever you find the time&lt;/em&gt;! The more users participate in reviews, the better the average results of the review queue will reflect the actual average opinion of the users here. I keep hitting my maximum daily amount of close reviews - which indicates to me that there is a less-than-ideal number of users doing those reviews. The closing and editing and reopening of questions does not happen by some miracle algorithm, it happens through us individual users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T00:04:15.550" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-16T00:21:51.507" Score="0" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named]'s chat suspension sentence increased from 24 hours to 29 days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6719" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-17T18:12:24.083" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T18:13:11.463" Title="Increase in the duration of chat suspension for [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named]" Tags="|discussion|chat|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7688" CreationDate="2016-04-16T00:59:18.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The longer sentence was imposed after a day's consultation between the physics moderators; the delay occurred because we're always reluctant to impose suspensions on regular users and try not to act hastily in such cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usually, we will not discuss the reasons in public, but [insert-here-the-user-who-shall-not-be-named] was sent a mod message and might divulge it's contents either after his return to chat or in some other place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of asides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it took effect some time after the one day suspension imposed by a passing moderator from another site had expired, rather than extending it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270587/toward-a-philosophy-of-chat&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Toward a philosophy of Chat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is worth reading if you're thinking along the lines of &quot;But &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; room culture...&quot;. There is only so much allowance for room culture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T18:13:11.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7686" CreationDate="2016-04-16T09:59:53.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally an answer in the Physics SE should make the reader a better physicist i.e. help them understand physics better. This doesn't just apply to the person posting the question. Other site members might find the question interesting and be helped by the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question is off-topic if no reasonable answer to it is going to achieve this end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate this is a somewhat extreme view, and in practice I will usually stretch the point and answer questions from interested bystanders if I think it illustrates some point in physics, especially if that point is frequently misrepresented in popular science programmes. However our starting point should always be that this site is, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;I quote from the tour&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We aren't the Discovery Channel and we shouldn't try to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T09:59:53.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7662" CreationDate="2016-04-17T09:01:59.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our first appointments as additional room owners are Chris White and John Rennie. Welcome to your new role!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/users/10851/chris-white&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/10851.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chris White&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/users/1325/john-rennie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/1325.png&quot; alt=&quot;John Rennie&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll continue to add additional room owners in the future as needed, and as qualified candidates become available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T09:01:59.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7693" CreationDate="2016-04-17T15:10:04.807" Score="-1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for your answer. Because I gave the bounty to other answer I will upvote other answers of yours in this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we do something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-17T18:07:42.700" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T19:36:30.463" Title="Is showing thanks via serial upvoting acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7692" CreationDate="2016-04-17T15:15:46.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Votes on answers (or questions) should be votes on answers (or questions) - upvoting or downvoting answers because of their authors instead of their content defeats the whole purpose of voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T15:15:46.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-17T17:54:47.770" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/efficient-energy-use&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;efficient-energy-use&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;efficient-energy-use&lt;/a&gt; seems to be rather ill-defined. The tag wiki excerpt states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use the tag &lt;em&gt;Efficient Energy Use&lt;/em&gt; in questions having to do with processes or engines or constructions where energy is spent or transfered and the efficiency thereof. Efficiency means both the measurement and the techniques and principles for its optimization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to be a useful tag. What &quot;process or engine or construction&quot; &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; transfer energy in some way? Optimizing a given &quot;process or engine or construction&quot; is not physics, it is engineering, and hence &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4535/50583&quot;&gt;off-topic here&lt;/a&gt;. Measuring the efficiency of some &quot;process or engine or construction&quot; seems &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; specific and doesn't deserve its own tag, in my opinion - tagging questions about the measurement of energy efficiency with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy&lt;/a&gt; seems perfectly sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore propose the tag be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T18:23:32.037" Title="Stop [efficient-energy-use] tag!" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-17T23:29:15.310" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my opinion, every homework question should be offtopic. It is because science has very high ethical standards, and although it is only an enthusiast site, the spirit of these standards should be followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letting others solve our homework on the internet,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Solving somebodys homework instead of him,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And finally, giving the homework to a teacher and saying that it is my work,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...all of them are very strongly against the spirit of these standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think, answering a homework question should be also punishable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the community can't examine if a question is really a homework question. Well-formulated questions, especially if the OP is capable to &lt;em&gt;argument&lt;/em&gt; for that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a homework, could probably get their answers below the radar. It would also mean, the OP must consistently lie, cheat and commit plagiarism, but from our side it is impossible to decide about that. Anyways, considering the mean communication level of the homework OPs, if they are capable to credibly argument for that their question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a homework, they are on a highly above the average level of the homework OPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, in most cases, the OP is perfectly incapable even to use the formulas in his task. In very many cases they are even lazy to type in their question and they simply send scanned papers. And they do this from a very new account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, in their case their accounts should be caged for some weeks - most high school homework questions have a much narrower deadline. And they should also get a moderator message about this policy, and that they will be welcomed after the weeks pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99% of them will then go away, and never come back. Actually, they will simply forgot even the existence of the physics SE in the moment, as they understand that the site won't help them in plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining 1% will be good members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T23:29:15.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7701" CreationDate="2016-04-18T20:42:18.197" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that most (all) posts that include an enumerated list of sub-questions are bad.&#xA;Outwardly, this is because they're too broad: a good answer would have to go through too much material.&#xA;Often, the OP has encountered several manifestations of some underlying lack of knowledge and hasn't taken the time to focus the post down to that underlying issue (in some cases this may be a result of that issue being subtle, but in my opinion it usually is not).&#xA;In other cases, there is one obvious real question, and then a bunch of related follow-up questions that aren't really related to the important issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find myself often commenting on these posts, asking the OP to either split the post into several smaller, more focused posts, or to just focus on the thing they actually want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we update the help center to specifically remind people that lists of sub-questions are usually not a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T11:00:14.427" Title="Should we explicitly tell people that enumerated lists of questions are usually a bad idea?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6833" CreationDate="2016-04-18T22:04:52.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than one question per thread is of course allowed, but let me here list some reasons why there should preferably only be &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; question per thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of voting becomes unclear. Should one upvote/downvote a question/answer if the subquestions/subanswers are not uniformly good/bad? How should one compare an answer that only answers subquestion 1 versus an answer that only answers subquestion 2? Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question becomes too broad. Potential answerers may only answer partially, or get discouraged before they get started.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Often readers only read the title question, and ignore other subquestions hidden in the main text. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question is not already in the title, it becomes harder to search for similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The combinatorical number of possible threads on the site becomes unnecessarily large, especially if the subquestions are unrelated.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certain subquestions may already be duplicates of other posts, while others are not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-19T09:32:38.983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T09:32:38.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7686" CreationDate="2016-04-19T09:06:51.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll add a note for users who don't have enough rep yet to participate in the queues - if you want to express your opinion on opening/closing questions, use comments. I can't speak for all reviewers, but comments are the first place I look when I run into a question that's a bit of an edge case. If there's a well reasoned argument there for/against re-opening/closing a question I take it into account when casting my vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T09:06:51.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7697" CreationDate="2016-04-19T10:08:47.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this were to go in the help center, it would probably fit in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to ask page&lt;/a&gt;, and we don't have the ability to edit that. It's the same network-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I doubt that people typically read the help center before asking. I think the most effective way to get the information to them is to post a comment - have them learn in context. You can also just edit out all but one question from a post, if it's clear enough how to do so and if you wouldn't invalidate the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T10:08:47.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-20T07:09:13.200" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how I can type math in physics.stackexchange when I ask a question or answer. I type math in the Office word and use print screen. May anyone help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T07:09:13.200" Title="How can I type math?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-04-20T07:29:41.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-20T14:45:01.780" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some variation of this question gets asked &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have 2 point masses, $m$ and $M$ in a perfect world separated by radius $r$. Starting from rest, they both begin to accelerate towards each other. So we have the gravitational force between them as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$F_g = \frac{GMm}{r^2}$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do we find out at what time they will collide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two instances that seem to be emerging as &quot;canonical&quot;, or at least that both seem to be the &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; of frequent duplicate closures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14700/the-time-that-2-masses-will-collide-due-to-newtonian-gravity&quot;&gt;The Time That 2 Masses Will Collide Due To Newtonian Gravity&lt;/a&gt; (where the above quote comes from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3534/dont-heavier-objects-actually-fall-faster-because-they-exert-their-own-gravity&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t heavier objects actually fall faster because they exert their own gravity?&lt;/a&gt; (has more upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should pick one of these (or potentially another version of this same question) to be the canonical target of duplicate closures. I would probably go ahead and pick #2 except that I happen to have the accepted answer on that question, and I wouldn't want people to think I'm doing it to accumulate reputation. Besides, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; some advantages to #1, namely that the question is more cleanly asked (IMO) and the accepted answer is much more direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we go with? #1 or #2, or another existing version of this, or write an entirely new canonical question for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T12:20:33.533" Title="Canonical question for two masses falling in Newtonian gravity" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-20T15:55:03.887" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually people get mad because we close things too quickly without considering whether they are really on topic or not. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/250400/what-are-the-next-generation-physics-experiments&quot;&gt;What are the next generation physics experiments?&lt;/a&gt; has been open for 2 days and only has 2 close votes, despite being the very definition of too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something on why this hasn't been closed yet, either by the community or by moderators? I'm really surprised that it hasn't been closed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T21:55:39.540" Title="How is this question still open?" Tags="|discussion|scope|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7704" CreationDate="2016-04-20T16:15:27.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can offer the moderator perspective (well, at least my own): when I last looked at it, it had &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; close votes, and I didn't feel like it was obviously enough off topic to close it unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T16:15:27.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7704" CreationDate="2016-04-20T18:18:19.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how I read the question, which is admittedly a bit more concrete than the question text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are huge experiments which are going to run in the future and are currently under development (which means that at least part of the funding is already secured and people start building something). By &quot;huge experiments&quot; I mean experiments of the LHC,LIGO type, which means that a) thousands of people of all continents are involved and spend or will spend a majority of their time on the project and b) the experiment really is one big experiment (such as one telescope, one detector, etc.) and not a very tightly connected net of smaller experiments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it is a big-list question and, as you state, in principle off-topic. I don't think this is a reason to &quot;close as off-topic&quot;, because it's just a general &quot;big lists are off-topic&quot;. We should have a look at why big lists are off-topic. The best (?) reasons I could find are summarised by DavidZ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4044/why-exactly-are-big-list-questions-discouraged-shouldnt-the-faq-say-this-promi&quot;&gt;Why exactly are big-list questions discouraged? Shouldn&amp;#39;t the FAQ say this prominently?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;List questions are junk food for the site, in a way; they tend to be popular and attract a lot of attention, but they don't provide a basis for judging the correctness of answers (so the voting system is wasted on them) and they never really end, thus drawing attention away from other, better questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that these reasons are invalid for this particular question and that this particular question fits into the framework. Here are my reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question (as stated above) is precise, i.e. there is an objective way of judging the correctness of the answer: Is the experiment truly huge? Is it a physics experiment trying to explore physical concepts (on this ground, ITER might not really be a physics experiment) Is it past the initial exploration phase and under development? Is the experiment anticipated by parts of the physics community? This means that it is not overly opinion-based either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is sufficiently focused. Indeed, I would argue that it is not too broad per se: the number of experiments that fits the bill won't be too huge. I bet there are less than twenty experiments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange framework does allow for a number of good answers and can, in principle, support small lists (I'm not so sure about lists like on mathoverflow with dozens of pages) and it is particularly good for questions where maybe not one person has the complete answer, but a complete picture emerges from several good answers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the question might not really &quot;end&quot;, activity is very restricted. Only every few years will there be new experiments that fit the bill. Also, by the nature of the question, even without additions it will stay up-to-date for several years, if not a decade. For me, this is stable enough (who knows what happens with Stack Exchange in ten years?).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is interesting to researchers and enthusiasts alike. Hardly anyone knows all of these experiments, but many like to know whats going on outside their fields at least a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two points that might be problematic: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a sense, this gives a lot of reputation for easy answers, because of the popularity of the question. To counteract this, one might impose a similar rule as on mathoverflow, where all answers are immediately community-wiki. Then again, almost everybody gets their reputation from easy answers, so maybe this is not a real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the question garners a lot of attention. Maybe it draws away attention from better questions. I do not have a good counterargument other than that I feel this is true for almost all hot network questions, whether they are on-topic or not. Often, the physical content is even less than one can learn from the answers to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: I think that this is one of the very rare instances where such a list-based question should actually be on-topic for this site and I argued that the reasoning behind the close-policies allow for such a question to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T21:55:39.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2016-04-21T09:53:03.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question comes in different versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with or without reduced mass.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with or without non-radial motion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with or without relativistic effects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with or without initial velocity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;taking the finite radii of the two bodies into account.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;only asking for total time, or asking for radial coordinate as a function of time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this question is often asked by beginners of physics, it is important to provide duplicates which are at the level of OP. E.g. I have often used &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/19388/2451&quot;&gt;Radial fall in a Newtonian gravitational field&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate since it is easy to read and understand, and provides links for the interested reader. In other words, there doesn't seem to be currently a FAQ that adequately covers all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T09:53:03.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2016-04-21T11:37:31.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A canonical question, that is a question specifically intended to act as a definitive reference, is distinct from a question that just happens to cover the same topic. If I were writing a canonical question I would tailor the question to make it absolutely clear that the question was intended as a reference and to explain what it did and didn't cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case I would write a brand new question and answer that combined the best aspects of the two questions you mention, the question Qmechanic links and indeed any other related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel desperately strongly about this (at least, not strongly enough to volunteer to do it :-) and it's a lot of work writing a canonical Q/A in this fashion. However if you are attempting to provide the best possible reference i think a new question and answer are the best course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T11:37:31.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7676" CreationDate="2016-04-22T15:57:55.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;FYI I'm an astrophysicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how much overlap there is between users of Physics SE and Astronomy SE, but it may be possible that there are some astrophysicists on Astronomy SE that are not on Physics SE (and vice versa).  Is there any way to determine this and/or invite astrophysicists on Astronomy SE to Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can probably imagine, the questions asked on Astronomy SE have a pretty full spectrum in the amount of physics involved in asking/answering a question.  Some questions are very observational in nature (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/14589/jupiter-appearing-odd-through-a-6-reflector&quot;&gt;Jupiter appearing odd through a 6&quot; reflector&lt;/a&gt;) while others are quite physical (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/6562/does-the-radius-of-the-universe-correspond-to-its-total-entropy&quot;&gt;Does the radius of the Universe correspond to its total entropy&lt;/a&gt;).  I don't know how that plays out with the fraction of people on Astronomy SE who would be able to contribute to Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T15:57:55.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7686" CreationDate="2016-04-24T00:39:53.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a newcomer to the site.  I am dismayed to see so many questions being put on hold which appear to me to be reasonable, thought-provoking and 'on topic' as defined by the criteria in John Rennie's post above.   For example :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aaron, URL (version: 2016-04-19): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/250549&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/250549&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AdamG, URL (version: 2016-04-18): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/250301&quot;&gt;Spinning a string with a mass on the end. What makes the mass rotate parallel to the ground?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether these questions are homework or not, discussion of the conceptual difficulties which the questioners have would benefit the site's users.  The problems might be pedestrian but the conceptual misunderstandings are fundamental and common.  The questioners have clearly thought about their problems.  I do not understand why these questions are 'on hold'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think such questioners are possibly being penalised simply because they are novices.  Surely it is to be expected that they will lack the skill or understanding to be able to pin-point the source of their difficulty and to express it clearly in orthodox terms.  What they need is help to refine and clarify their questions.  That requires open dialog and time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By comparison, questions tagged 'Quantum Field Theory' are rarely put 'on hold' although there is - in my opinion - less excuse for these academic questioners not fully researching and putting in sufficient effort before posting their questions.  I appreciate that fewer moderators feel confident about judging such advanced topics.  However, I don't feel it is right to treat novices less favourably simply because their questions are easier to judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T00:48:25.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-26T01:18:20.360" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if this isn't a question fit for this site, but what exactly is the function that's plotted in the website logo/picture? It looks kind of like a simple decaying exponential multiplied by a sinusoid, but I feel like it may be something really interesting that the creator put for a good story/laugh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r2YjL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r2YjL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62755" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T01:24:56.530" Title="What is the function in the Physics StackExchange website picture?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-26T01:25:41.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7676" CreationDate="2016-04-26T04:21:00.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One simple thing that would help is better tagging things as &lt;code&gt;astronomy&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;astrophysics&lt;/code&gt;.  While they are often tagged with things like &lt;code&gt;black-hole&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;general-relativity&lt;/code&gt;, it's really helpful (as an astrophysics person) to just have to search through one or two tags (e.g. &lt;code&gt;astrophysics&lt;/code&gt;) instead of all related phenomena.  I try to do this when I notice, but I'm honestly not here too often these days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8521" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T04:21:00.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-26T04:57:02.880" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to upvote an answer, I previously down voted. It shows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;You haven't cast a vote to undo&quot;.&#xA;.&#xA;How do I cast one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T08:32:13.567" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T08:32:13.567" Title="What is , &quot;You haven't cast a vote to undo&quot;" Tags="|support|status-norepro|voting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7719" CreationDate="2016-04-26T08:40:11.987" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I click a hyperlink to meta.PSE (as posted by e.g. the &quot;Physics Meta&quot; bot) in the h bar, I get the following screen: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HEvvm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HEvvm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I choose to proceed anyways (bottom hyperlink), I get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DX54a.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DX54a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the URL looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/21E1G.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/21E1G.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other times, I just immediately get this screen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ozd7C.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ozd7C.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do manage to get to the correct page by simply deleting the &lt;code&gt;https://&lt;/code&gt; part of the URL and pressing enter. What's going wrong? For reference, I'm on Windows 10, using Google Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T09:00:10.070" Title="I can't follow links from the h bar chatroom to meta.PSE. What's going wrong?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7718" CreationDate="2016-04-26T09:00:10.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/265918/accessing-per-site-metas-gives-403-forbidden-from-cloudflare-nginx&quot;&gt;well known&lt;/a&gt;, and has been for years. The problem is simply that you cannot access any Stack Exchange meta sites using HTTPS. It has nothing to do with chat, or your browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In detail, in order to access a site using HTTPS (an encrypted connection), the site needs to provide a certificate which contains the site's name, an associated encryption key, and a certification that these values are associated with each other. The certificate specification allows a single leading wildcard; for example, it's possible to make a certificate that gives one encryption key to be used by any domain of the form &lt;code&gt;*.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; (where &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; can be anything). But it's not possible to make a certificate that can be used by &lt;code&gt;meta.*.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;*.*.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;, which is what would be needed to make the meta sites accessible over HTTPS. The certification process StackExchange uses is expensive, and they understandably don't want to go through it to get a separate certificate for each meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until Stack Exchange changes their site architecture to solve the problem (if they ever do), a workaround &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-everywhere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HTTPS Everywhere&lt;/a&gt; extension, if it's available for your browser. Its main purpose is to enforce HTTPS usage; it prevents your browser from making unencrypted connections to certain sites which are known to work with HTTPS. But as a side effect, I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; it also prevents the browser from making encrypted connections to a few sites which are known &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to work with HTTPS, including the SE meta sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T09:00:10.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T05:31:45.133" Score="-3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone have questions and most of them may be stupid but we must encourage them right? Even some of Newton's questions were pointless.So the negative votes may cause the curious minds to be unhappy and feel that they are dumb. So why should a question have negative vote in StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115391" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-27T05:51:04.923" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T07:27:32.137" Title="Why should there be a negative vote for questions?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7720" CreationDate="2016-04-27T05:53:59.497" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes send a very clear message: this is not the kind of post we want on the site. (If downvotes outnumber upvotes that suggests the opinion is not that of one grumpy curmudgeon but is perhaps a consensus; if not then the user comes out ahead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For answers that means posts that are wrong, muddled, head off on a tangent unrelated to the questions or are just difficult to read and understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions that means things that are not physics, that presume off-the-mainstream theories, that ask us to do someone's homework, that constitute the eleventy first duplicate of something that &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; asks (search first, seriously) or that demonstrate that the asker would rather we spend our time typing than they spend theirs reading, say, the wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; don't have some obligation to answer—or even welcome—every question. Sorry, but that's the truth: this site isn't answerable to every vaguely curious person on the internet. It's like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt; says: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; It doesn't say anything about being for every internet user who has heard something about gravitational waves being observed; suddenly noticed that time dilation is weird; or read some book by a pop-sci celebrity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None the less the site is actually pretty welcoming to rank beginners if they take the time to understand how things are done here. If they learn to frame those basic questions in terms of concepts rather than problems and to focus on the part of the Wikipedia article they're tripping on with an awareness of what other paragraphs say. In other words, if they starting learning to ask questions like a physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T05:53:59.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7720" CreationDate="2016-04-27T07:27:32.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone have questions and most of them may be stupid but we must encourage them right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope. Not at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is the pithy version of what dmckee said.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T07:27:32.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T11:50:21.610" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reviewing I often have to make this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi and welcome to the Physics SE! Please note that this is not a homework help site. Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;this Meta post on asking homework questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;this Meta post for &quot;check my work&quot; problems&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an automated way to write this comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to keep its copy somewhere else and copy-paste it every time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or there is some shortcut?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastEditorUserId="23785" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T13:20:09.770" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T13:20:09.770" Title="How to automate &quot;not a homework help site&quot; comment?" Tags="|support|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-27T14:17:15.743" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/250549&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/250549&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this&#xA;specific reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show&#xA;some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to&#xA;the broader community, and to future users. See our meta site for more&#xA;guidance on how to edit your question to make it better&amp;quot; – CuriousOne, John&#xA;Rennie, AccidentalFourierTransform, MAFIA36790, ACuriousMind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please&#xA;edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commentators viewed this question as a request for homework help, of the &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; variety. I think it asks more than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see why this question is judged to be off-topic. It asks about a specific physics concept (motion of centre of mass).  The questioner demonstrates his attempt to solve it, but asks whether a simpler approach is possible.  He prefaces the question : &amp;quot;I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around this conceptually.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not the problem has been set as homework is irrelevant in my opinion. The issue is whether it contains a conceptual difficulty, a discussion of which would be instructive to the broader community of users of this website.  I think the answer to this question is a clear Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T16:00:04.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-27T14:50:18.490" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/252007&quot;&gt;non constant acceleration problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question probably arises from homework but the questioner has posted a detailed calculation, obtaining the correct answer after a &quot;very nasty&quot; integration.  He then asks if there is a simpler method of arriving at the answer.  Such a method is suggested by M.Enns and a detailed explanation posted as an answer by John Rennie.  The solution is very instructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see why this is deemed to be 'off topic.'   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T20:59:59.160" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T19:48:53.437" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which have been (or are in the process of being closed as a duplicate) often get answers posted anyway.  What's the best way to deal with these answers?  The problem with upvotes (even to the answers, let alone to the question) is that it more or less pulls focus away from the preferred original question and its answers.  OTOH, it doesn't make sense to downvote an answer purely because the question is a dupe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it best just to ignore the answers?  Would it be useful to  have some sort of automated migration or removal of answers once the question is closed?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29202" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-27T22:08:56.117" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T22:08:56.117" Title="How to deal with answers to duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7727" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7728" CreationDate="2016-04-27T21:02:02.360" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvoted a post mistakenly. Then I tried to cancel my vote but I couldn't because my reputation isn't enough. How can I cancel my vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T21:05:44.490" Title="I want to cancel my vote" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7727" CreationDate="2016-04-27T21:05:44.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cancel a vote by re-clicking the arrow for that vote, which you have the rep for that vote. That is, you cancel a upvote by clicking the up-arrow again. And the rep limit for that is the same as for casting the vote in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you tried to cast a downvote which is a separate action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is a time limit for canceling votes. After 5 minutes (I think) you won't be able to cancel that vote unless the post has been edited in the mean time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T21:05:44.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7723" CreationDate="2016-04-28T09:43:10.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no in-built mechanism for automated comment insertion. Many people who leave similar messages often either re-type them by hand every time, or have a text file or other location from which they copy-paste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are several third-party scripts at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/&quot;&gt;stack&lt;strong&gt;apps&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which modify the SE sites' functionality to add this sort of feature, such as e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which enables you to write your own pre-written comments using a quick button:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L3Cqp.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that I've never used this script, but it looks straightforward enough.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T09:43:10.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-28T18:37:59.473" Score="7" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sponsor a high school astronomy club. Most of my students have completed AP&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Calculus BC and are ready for a calculus-based discussion of astronomical physics. I am searching for a source-book to use for discussions at club meetings. Is Physics.SE a good place to ask &quot;What is an overview of appropriate texts for this purpose?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; These are advanced college placement exams for high school students in the US and a few other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65389" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-05-08T03:24:05.620" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T03:24:05.620" Title="Is Physics SE a good place to ask for textbook references?" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7731" CreationDate="2016-04-29T10:18:25.570" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be a very good fit for our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag... if this question didn't already exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44882/what-are-good-books-for-graduates-undergraduates-in-astrophysics&quot;&gt;What are good books for graduates/undergraduates in Astrophysics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is very general, so you can browse through the list of resources recommended there and pick out the ones that are at an appropriate level. Thus I don't see a need for a separate question that duplicates a subset of the existing one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T10:18:25.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-29T22:05:30.563" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is this? Should we do something about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26221" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-04-29T22:50:49.500" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T22:50:49.500" Title="Heat is both a tag, and a synonym of thermodynamics" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-04-30T04:43:10.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/253025/net-acceleration-of-an-object-if-too-many-forces-are-acting-on-it&quot;&gt;Net acceleration of an object if too many forces are acting on it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This questions has a concept in it but it is so simplistic/nonsensical that it should be closed.  I don't find a descriptive &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; category for it. It's very clear what the question is, but the question is so simple as to be stupid. The OP obviously hasn't thought about the topic long enough before asking.  Can we add another &amp;quot;reason&amp;quot; for closure to take care of thoughtless questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T04:43:10.833" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-05-02T13:02:39.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/253477/specific-function-is-a-linear-combination-of-energy-eigenstates&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/253477/specific-function-is-a-linear-combination-of-energy-eigenstates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My lecturer made a statement: In the infinite square well potential&#xA;  $x\psi_n(x)$ (where $\psi_n$ is just the spatial part of an energy&#xA;  eigenstate) can be expressed as a linear combination of the energy&#xA;  eigenstates of the infinite square well, i.e. $x\psi_n(x) = \sum&#xA;&amp;gt; c_m\psi_m(x)$. This came about by applying the position operator on an&#xA;  arbitrary wavefunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't see how this function is a linear combination of the energy&#xA;  eigenstates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a purely conceptual question (one which does not fall under our &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; homework policy, for whatever that's worth) that nevertheless shows no effort on the part of the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T17:55:38.967" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T17:55:38.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-02T16:49:00.277" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/253515/causal-set-notation-round-brackets-vs-square-brackets&quot;&gt;I just posed a question in causal set notation&lt;/a&gt; (in general relativity), referencing papers 50 years old and 5 years old, seeking to know whether notation has changed or usage is a matter of personal preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been put on hold as being &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what I want to know is the &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt; of whether it is a matter of opinion or whether there is some authority or consensus for one form or another; I am writing a paper intended for submission and need to be correct in my notation if I am to avoid avoidable referee objections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also can't see how to discuss this with the admin who put it on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are such questions to be managed when, as in this case, the asker acknowledges that the answer may involve discussion of matters of opinion but is not seeking opinions about opinions (if they are such) but facts about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Getting rather more meta than I would like, but I can't see how to avoid it!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/253515/causal-set-notation-round-brackets-vs-square-brackets?noredirect=1#comment559239_253515&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1280" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T19:15:24.400" Title="Questions held for being opinion based" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-05-02T23:31:59.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/253583/quick-question-on-rotational-motion&quot;&gt;Quick question on rotational motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is based on a set piece and it starts off with it. The poster has some conceptual questions which are relatively well laid out. On the other hand, the question is rather straightforward and there's not that much to explain other than going through the procedure with the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T23:31:59.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7740" CreationDate="2016-05-03T08:10:08.977" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the rules on awarding bounties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is a bounty awarded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bounty period lasts 7 days. Bounties must have a minimum duration of at least 1 day. After the bounty ends, there is a grace period of 24 hours to manually award the bounty. Simply click the bounty award icon next to each answer to permanently award your bounty to the answerer. (You cannot award a bounty to your own answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount. If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. &lt;strong&gt;If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question&#xA;   owner accepts an answer posted during the bounty period, and the&#xA;   bounty expires without an explicit award then we assume the bounty&#xA;   owner liked the answer they accepted and award it the full bounty&#xA;   amount at the time of bounty expiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special bonus, any reputation you earn from being awarded a bounty is exempt from the daily reputation cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I can't read it doesn't seem to say anywhere what happens to the reputation if no question meets the requirements when the bounty expires. &lt;strong&gt;Does it get refunded to whoever started the bounty? Does it get lost?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="101770" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T16:01:25.277" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T16:01:25.277" Title="What happens to bounty reputation when no answer meets the criteria?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7739" CreationDate="2016-05-03T09:19:26.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;What is a bounty?&lt;/a&gt; page in the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bounty is a special reputation award given to answers. It is funded by the personal reputation of the user who offers it, and is &lt;strong&gt;non-refundable&lt;/strong&gt;. If you see a question that has not gotten a satisfactory answer, a bounty may help attract more attention and more answers. Slice off anywhere from +50 to +500 of your own hard-earned reputation, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;attach it to any question as a bounty&lt;/a&gt;. You do not need to be the asker of the question to offer a bounty on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All bounties are paid for up front and non-refundable under any circumstances.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your new reputation brings you below the requirement for any &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt;, you will lose access to those privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users may only have three active bounties at any given time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions may only have one active question bounty at any given time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To avoid overly promotional bounties, if you are offering a bounty on a question that you have already posted an answer to, your minimum spend is 100 reputation (not 50).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additionally, if you offer multiple bounties on the same question, the minimum spend doubles with each subsequent bounty (50 reputation on the first bounty, 100 reputation on the second, 200 on the third, and so on).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may not cancel a bounty once it has been started.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis in the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14591/how-can-we-close-questions-with-bounties/27103#27103&quot;&gt;precedent&lt;/a&gt; for moderator-enacted (or possibly by SE team members?) bounty refunds in exceptional cases, but this applies only if you can convince them that you set the bounty in error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt; on the mother meta has more on the rationale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happens if there's no answer after the bounty period?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If after the end of the bounty period a question has no answers, no bounty will be awarded and the question will no longer be featured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties are best understood as exchanging reputation for higher question visibility and increased answerer motivation. A bounty does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; guarantee a response and is &lt;strong&gt;not refunded&lt;/strong&gt; if none are received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T10:54:32.020" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-05T02:58:01.553" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/253947/&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But i am not able to delete it? How to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114592" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T14:42:42.333" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T14:08:58.917" Title="How to delete my question?" Tags="|support|questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7741" CreationDate="2016-05-05T06:59:04.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a &quot;delete&quot; link appears below the question, at the left just under the tags, then click that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CRyxi.png&quot; width=&quot;450&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't see that link, it means that something about the question or one of its answers makes it worth keeping. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/56541&quot;&gt;various reasons this can happen&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T14:08:58.917" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T14:08:58.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-05T20:21:14.510" Score="0" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many times I have answered questions only to be told to cite it. So I research and find somebody has already published it. With as much brains around here is it not possible to arrive at the same answer and not have to cite everything. I believe Einstein was a victim of this. &#xA;When I draw a correct answer or even an answer that is a theory without proof do I have to cite it if I came up with the answer myself? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2016-05-05T20:48:15.223" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T21:40:33.730" Title="Citing all your work" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|answers|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7743" CreationDate="2016-05-05T21:40:33.730" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without specific instance of where this occurred, I can only give general advice. This site is intended for professional physicists and students who are working towards that. We welcome non-professionals and non-physicists of course, but only when their questions and answers are up to the standards expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, most people here are academics or were trained in an academic setting. We therefore expect questions and answers to support the claims and conclusions made in them. This is done through citations of relevant information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we aren't as hardcore as a journal or conference. But for the most part, we expect answers to be supported by facts. These facts can include derivations and proofs if you did the work yourself and it is (mostly) original. And if the statement is so obvious that everybody in the field knows it to be true, then no citation is needed. For instance, nobody except a troll would demand a citation for $e=mc^2$. But if you came out and said &quot;The equation you want is $e = mc^2 + 10$&quot; -- well, you better be prepared to either cite where that comes from or provide all the details of how you derived it because that is not considered totally obvious to the experts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So -- if you come up with an answer yourself, that's great, but you need to provide supporting facts if they are not immediately obvious. And if somebody is asking you to cite something, it means it is not immediately obvious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true on this site, but more importantly it is true in all the work you do. It doesn't matter if it is an essay in high school or a journal paper that nets you a Nobel Prize. You must always cite claims and statements, or provide the derivations yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T21:40:33.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-06T16:16:21.267" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/252869/&quot;&gt;Can you deduce absolute motion through magnetism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I loved above question. All my doubts at one place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it too broad?&#xA;It seems to ask a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96487" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T04:19:19.377" Title="Is this question too broad?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7745" CreationDate="2016-05-06T16:37:25.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh yes, &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; too broad. It asks six different questions, and should have been posted as six different posts. (Maybe 4 or 5 if a couple of the questions can be consolidated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is such an egregious case, I've removed the bounty and put the question on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T16:37:25.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-07T15:49:17.620" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's currently an unanswered question with typographical and grammatical errors, which I've been prevented from edited in any way, shape, or form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/254162/red-shift-experiment&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/254162/red-shift-experiment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, between MAFIA36790 and AccidentalFourierTransform, they've rejected any and all of my edits &lt;em&gt;six times.&lt;/em&gt; In two of the latter's rejections, his grounds are strangely that the OP &quot;is asking about &lt;em&gt;gravitational&lt;/em&gt; redshift,&quot; which of course is not the case. In every other instance, it's been the cut &amp;amp; paste reason that my edits &quot;do not make the question easier to understand even a little bit, etc., etc.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What gives? I've now submitted another edit restricting my changes solely to correcting the typographical and grammatical errors in the question,  leaving out any attempt to clarify the nature of the question itself. Are there legitimate grounds to reject these edits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T17:55:35.197" Title="Why are all my edits to a certain question being rejected?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7747" CreationDate="2016-05-07T16:19:59.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've offered the same edit three time and a substantially similar one an additional time. All have been rejected. You have another one pending. In effect you've been engaging in an edit war which is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; discouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When uses have a disagreement about the proper disposition of a post and can't agree on the result then the proper thing for all parties to do is disengage. Leave that question for others to worry about and move on. Or flag for a moderator if you feel strongly about it, but &lt;em&gt;quit arguing&lt;/em&gt;. It's not personal and you don't have to fix the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Six different reviews have weighed in on those edits. The count is four against and two for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point it is incumbent on the OP to unambiguously clarify what (s)he means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-05-07T17:55:35.197" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T17:55:35.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-05-08T12:19:36.350" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/254734&quot;&gt;Basic circuit problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question poses a set piece, shows the OP's working, and asks us to explain what is wrong with their working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a bit of work, it can be rephrased into something that's less dependent on the set piece and helping the OP understand how that circuit behaves as he's being told it behaves. It has an accepted answer which does a good job at addressing the conceptual difficulty at the heart of the question. However, even if fixed, it probably wouldn't be a great question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T18:12:39.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-10T19:17:51.540" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;When answering a question on Physics, should answers that make reference to non-peer reviewed material that is found on, for example, arXiv, be discouraged, or even removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109388" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T09:22:25.670" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T19:15:56.767" Title="Answers quoting non-peer reviewed material" Tags="|discussion|answers|links|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7750" CreationDate="2016-05-10T19:21:15.313" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. A non-peer reviewed reference is better than no reference. The reader can judge the legitimacy of a reference him/herself. In general, Phys.SE encourages answerers to back up claims with references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Concerning self-citations, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/582/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. For link-only answers, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/859/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T19:15:56.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7758" CreationDate="2016-05-11T15:39:11.093" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5098/what-is-the-mark-favorite-question-for&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; the marking a question as &quot;favorite&quot; is so that you can come back to it, i.e. it is sort of a bookmark. This is also how I have been using it, but for mainly two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I see a question that does not have a satisfactory answer and I think I know enough about the topic to &lt;strong&gt;write an answer in the future&lt;/strong&gt;, but need to do some research first to make it sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A good answer/question that is useful to me and that I would like to &lt;strong&gt;read and understand in more detail later&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it turns out that the favorite tag is not actually very good for that. I marked a lot of questions that I could answer with favorite, but never got around to doing that. Now I can't find the questions that I wanted to read in detail anymore, cause they are buried in all the others. Of course that is really just my fault for using the feature in a stupid way. I was wondering though &lt;strong&gt;how other people organize their favorite question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore would it be possible to &lt;strong&gt;implement a feature that makes this organization easier?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.623" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T09:19:33.573" Title="Organizing favorite questions" Tags="|feature-request|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7752" CreationDate="2016-05-11T15:54:46.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is currently no way to &quot;organize&quot; your favorite, although that is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/75944/263383&quot;&gt;open feature request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; search your (or other users') favorites by adding &lt;code&gt;infavorites:&amp;lt;userid&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to a search term , where &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;userid&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is, well, the user's ID (the number in the link to their profile). For your own favorites, you can substitute &lt;code&gt;mine&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;userid&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. You can combine this with searching for tags (e.g. by adding &lt;code&gt;[quantum-field-theory]&lt;/code&gt; to the search term) to quickly narrow down the list of stuff you have to scroll through. If you rememeber a specific keywords of the favorite you're looking for, even better - unless you favorite unusually many things, you'll get a modest amount of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T15:54:46.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-12T08:47:13.453" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the site will do if a user with little/no knowledge of physics down-votes me when I answer his/her question correctly, but that user assumes that my answer is not helpful-answer to the question posed by him/her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51950" LastEditorUserId="51950" LastEditDate="2016-05-12T09:08:44.623" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T09:21:59.667" Title="What the site will do if a user with little/no knowledge of physics down-votes me when I answer his question correctly?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7755" CreationDate="2016-05-12T09:21:59.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site won't do anything. Generally speaking, if the user assumes your answer is not helpful, then it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; helpful to them, and they have every right (perhaps even a responsibility) to downvote it. Note that being correct is not the same as being helpful, although I would hope the two are usually related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write answers that are helpful to many more people than not, you will get more upvotes than downvotes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T09:21:59.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-12T20:00:27.480" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we have some MathJax functions pre-defined so that it is easier to write. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\ket{\psi}&lt;/code&gt; giving &lt;code&gt;|\psi \rangle&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\braket{\psi_1}{\psi_2}&lt;/code&gt; giving &lt;code&gt;\langle \psi_1 | \psi_2 \rangle&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\f{1}{2}&lt;/code&gt; giving &lt;code&gt;\frac{1}{2}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\l&lt;/code&gt; giving &lt;code&gt;\left(&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\r&lt;/code&gt; giving &lt;code&gt;\right)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know each one of these alone does not seem like a big save on writing time but for longer expressions they may make it less of a pain to right. If not why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T06:48:15.750" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T06:48:15.750" Title="Can we have some MathJax functions pre-defined?" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7752" CreationDate="2016-05-13T09:19:33.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is so obvious that I hesitate to post it as an answer, but I deal with questions I want to answer but haven't the time right now by dragging a shortcut onto the desktop. Then I eventually delete them, unanswered, and wish I had more time :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions I want to keep for future reference I drag into a nested series of folders with the folder names acting a rudimentary catalogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T09:19:33.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7761" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7762" CreationDate="2016-05-15T14:31:06.753" Score="8" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I answer a Stackexchange question if some of the content will be published in a paper in the near future? Could it impede my publication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T15:33:29.063" Title="Answering questions on SE before publishing?" Tags="|discussion|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7761" CreationDate="2016-05-15T15:33:29.063" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends exclusively on the policies of the journal. Most journals have a policy that excludes some forms of previously published content, but what counts as 'publishing' on that account varies very much from journal to journal. Some venues take that to mean exclusively publication of exactly that material in a peer-reviewed journal; others use broad definitions where any publicly accessible material counts. In physics, most journals tend to go towards the first case (so e.g. a preprint in arXiv doesn't count as a previous publication of the material), but in other fields this is not necessarily the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing to do, then, (as always when pre-publishing material that may wind up in a journal publication,) is to check your prospective venue's policies on that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T15:33:29.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-05-18T13:48:29.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/256585/entropy-of-unattended-music-streaming-and-other-useless-processes&quot;&gt;Entropy of unattended music streaming and other useless processes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(because you can never have too much data)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T13:48:29.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7769" CreationDate="2016-05-19T15:24:10.067" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a sandbox area where I could test the formatting of my equations without the 5 minute reply limit kicking in?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a long set of equations to type and I'm trying to learn how to format stuff on StackExchange.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117402" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T19:26:27.407" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T10:08:57.713" Title="Scratch/sandbox area where I can try formatting my equations" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7764" CreationDate="2016-05-19T15:42:48.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you type in the answer box, a preview of your answer appears below the box where you're typing. That preview includes the rendered MathJax. Just look at the preview to see how your post is going to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're talking about checking comments before you post them, you can still use the answer box as a previewer. Compose your comment in the answer box and copy and paste the Markdown into the comment box. The MathJax rendering is the same between comments and answers. Just try to avoid display-style equations (with &lt;code&gt;$$...$$&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;\begin{align}...\end{align}&lt;/code&gt; etc.) in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T15:42:48.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7764" CreationDate="2016-05-19T19:31:41.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems natural to mention that meta actually has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/389/2451&quot;&gt;sandbox&lt;/a&gt; (although MathJax/TeX does not work here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T19:31:41.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7764" CreationDate="2016-05-20T10:04:31.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for an off-site markdown editor where you can write drafts of Stack Exchange posts and see their formatting (including math), and save these drafts to come back to later, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackedit.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StackEdit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is probably the best tool for the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j7JzX.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackEdit screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(No affiliation or relation, by the way.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T10:04:31.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-05-20T15:51:02.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-amas&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KHgvq.png&quot; alt=&quot;physics chat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T17:39:49.730" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7764" CreationDate="2016-05-21T10:08:57.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4666/sandbox-for-drafts-of-long-complex-posts&quot;&gt;this sandbox&lt;/a&gt; on meta.math.se that seems to be set up for the purpose you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7901" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:21.967" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T10:08:57.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-23T08:55:46.647" Score="19" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I browse through old questions I usually find myself reading the question and maybe the top few answers. Same thing when there is an old question appearing on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've gathered other people must be proceeding similarly. Even when there is a good question (many upvotes) and the top answers do not resolve the problem, but an answer that was written much later does, it seems to go largely unnoticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there anything the site can do to improve this? Or is it only a problem in my mind?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can I personally do if I am writing such an answer?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T09:01:05.690" LastActivityDate="2022-11-09T15:40:43.293" Title="Answering old questions and getting noticed" Tags="|discussion|up-votes|late-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7496" CreationDate="2016-05-23T11:52:59.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a direct answer, but it's important to note that &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; every browser is officially supported by Stack Exchange. For a full list see &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56161/which-browsers-are-officially-supported-and-what-else-do-i-need&quot;&gt;Which browsers are officially supported, and what else do I need?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on Meta Stack Exchange. As noted there, Opera on mobile is not really officially supported. That means that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it's not one of those, it still may work, but you probably shouldn't expect support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so most of the site should still work, but those little bits of javascriptsy interactingness may or may not work. In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/177509/184688&quot;&gt;regarding Opera mini&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately at the moment we don't support Opera mini.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reason: a combination of amount of work required and amount of visitors using the browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it works, then excellent. If it doesn't, then there isn't really much that anyone can do, short of convincing the Stack Exchange developer team that Opera Mini really is big enough of a platform to be worth supporting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T11:52:59.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7770" CreationDate="2016-05-23T19:44:37.647" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you notice a good answer down the list, you can offer a bounty to reward the existing answer if you think it's worthy. When you put up the bounty, make sure to point out the answer in the bounty message. Leave the bounty up for the full duration of 7 days to maximize exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing an answer... just make it good, I guess. If appropriate, you might comment on one of the highly voted answers pointing out a flaw and referring to your answer, or comment on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's about all I've got for ideas...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T19:44:37.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-24T23:24:11.290" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know where else to place this comment because I think I deleted my earlier question.  This afternoon I asked a question about whether or not it was feasible for a gust of wind to alter the course of a car in a 48 ft. flyover.    The responses I received were very nasty.  Posters were quick to tell me they wouldn't help me, that the accident was strictly my husband's fault, they wouldn't help me in court, etc.  I posed a question here because I thought that those who were gifted in math and sciences would help me.  Instead, I was made out to feel as if I were some sort of criminal and that my husband was totally at fault for an accident.  I was not asking anyone to testify in court; all I wanted to know if it/the wind could have been responsible for the car moving leaving the lane.  Might I ask of you that, in the event someone like me asks a question like this, would you at the very least treat that person with some respect....something that I was never shown.  Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user118255" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T12:21:02.073" Title="Homework guidance" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7775" CreationDate="2016-05-25T05:47:50.443" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments on the deleted question were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've flagged this question for removal because it is simply not about physics. This website is not meant to provide justice to those who may have been potentially wronged by the traffic authorities. – Eh-whaaa 9 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question could be rephrased along the lines &quot;What factors would cause a car of mass 3100 lbs travelling and is hit by a gust of wind ....&quot; – jim 9 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because we are not court appointed expert witnesses and we can not help with legal matters. – CuriousOne 9 hours ago  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These don't seem particularly malicious to me. I should add it's possible that a moderator may have deleted more offensive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T05:47:50.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7775" CreationDate="2016-05-25T12:21:02.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The kind of help you're seeking is not within the scope of this site. Specifically, we don't offer &quot;calculational services&quot; where you present the particulars of some situation and somebody completes the calculation for you. This is a website for people who are interested in physics as an intellectual endeavor, and the questions we accept are those which serve that purpose; what you're asking is not such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;resources for new members&lt;/a&gt; which explain this. Posting a question which clearly does not fit our scope shows a lack of respect for the site, and one might think, if you come into our community and don't show respect to us, why should we show respect to you? I'm not saying one is necessarily &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to think this way, but it is a natural and common viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have a rule that members are required to act with basic civility at all times. I've reviewed the comments on your post, and they don't violate that guideline. If people are saying they won't help you, or that the accident was your husband's fault, that may not be what you want to hear (and it probably would have been better for them to avoid commenting on the details of your situation), but it's not inherently rude or offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T12:21:02.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-28T02:38:06.243" Score="7" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been talk in the hbar of starting an &quot;Ask me Anything&quot; (AMA) series in which featured guests would answer questions from other users.&#xA;These questions would be about physics, the guest's career, or anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What format would work well for a Physics Stack Exchange AMA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T13:44:32.893" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T19:27:01.867" Title="What format should we use for Physics Stack Exchange Ask Me Anything events?" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2016-05-28T02:38:37.807" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Reddit style&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reddit is a forum style website.&#xA;Users post comments to the original post, or as child comments of existing comments.&#xA;In this way, a reddit thread is a tree of comments.&#xA;In Reddit AMA's, the main post introduces the guest and the top level comments (those which are children of the main post) ask questions.&#xA;The guest answers the question in a comment which is a child of the question comment.&#xA;Other users can post follow-up questions as child comments of the answer, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This style probably cannot work in a chat room, but it could work as a meta post.&#xA;Questions could be submitted as comments on the main post, and the guest could write answers as answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-05-29T15:36:37.873" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T15:36:37.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2016-05-28T02:39:43.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Interview style&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this style, users submit questions ahead of time, e.g. here in the meta.&#xA;A moderator (not necessarily a site moderator) filters the questions, e.g. by meta votes, and then conducts a real-time interview with the guest, in the chat room, based on those questions.&#xA;Some allowance for on-the-spot questions during the interview would be good.&#xA;We could open a side chat room for these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-05-29T15:36:14.293" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T15:36:14.293" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2016-05-28T02:40:54.247" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Free-for-all&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could just open the chat room for any and all questions from users and answers from the guest.&#xA;How would the guest keep track of the questions?&#xA;How would participants keep track of the answers if they’re interrupted by messages from other people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-05-29T15:36:52.013" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T15:36:52.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-30T08:23:18.540" Score="16" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hey I'm the scheduled guest for the june 14th &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;Physics AMA&lt;/a&gt; and I was told to maybe make a little presentation and asks for any questions for the AMA people might have, so here it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About me&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am Samuel Lereah, got a Master degree in particle physics from the university of Nantes. My &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19940612/Science/M%C3%A9moire%20Samuel%20Lereah.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;master thesis&lt;/a&gt; was on the topic of non-relativistic path integrals in Riemannian spaces, focused on the problem of operator ordering (with stochastic integrals, phase space quantization and those kind of things). Currently not working in the field of physics (due to job market troubles), but in softwares, but I am still very much so into doing physics as a hobby (I am also still looking to do a PhD, if anyone has some to offer!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interests are mainly in general relativity and quantum field theory. I quite like odd topics in those fields and the AMA will be about causality in physics, mostly on the topic of spacetimes with closed timelike curves (ie time machines, for a more casual term). Probably something along the lines of a general outline of the history of the topic, some important theorems, the behaviour of matter in such spacetimes and the many limitations preventing them from occuring. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you have any questions on that topic you'd like me to answer during this AMA feel free to ask in this thread and I'll do my best to try to answer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Time and date&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AMA will be on tuesday june 14 at 16:00 UTC, in the Physics Stack Exchange chatroom, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;h-bar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36941" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T16:09:06.083" Title="Questions for the June 14th Ask Me Anything" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-30T17:34:23.680" Score="34" ViewCount="1758" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Purpose&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user base of Physics Stack Exchange is rather diverse in terms of cultural background, career progress, field of expertise, and personality.&#xA;While the discussion in hbar is lively, it is mostly focused on physics, with some side conversations on a variety of topics from cooking to favorite software bugs.&#xA;However, it could be interesting to set aside dedicated time in which to learn more about each other as individuals.&#xA;This could be of interest to most users due to normal human curiosity, and especially useful for students who would benefit by exposure to those whose hindsight can help avoid common pitfalls in physics and in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kind of sessions, called &quot;ask me anything&quot; or &quot;AMA&quot; have a solid history in other online communities, particularly on reddit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Schedule&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Upcoming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/7911/jess-riedel&quot;&gt;C. Jess Riedel&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://jessriedel.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://jessriedel.com/index_files/CJR-CV.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.jessriedel.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt;. Date to be determined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Previous&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/114272/mithrandir24601&quot;&gt;Mithrandir24601&lt;/a&gt;, August 22nd 2017&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10085/84967&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/ama-mithrandir24601-2017-08-22&quot;&gt;chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/23473/jim&quot;&gt;Jim&lt;/a&gt;, July 24th 2017&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10000/50583&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/ama-jim-long-may-he-reign-2017-07-25&quot;&gt;chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50764/bernardo-meurer&quot;&gt;Bernardo Meurer&lt;/a&gt;, June 13th 2017,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9898/50583&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/ama-bernardo-meurer-2017-06-13&quot;&gt;chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/121464/heather&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;, Monday, February 20th 2017, 10pm UTC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9613&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/ama-heather-2017-02-20&quot;&gt;Chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/64669/secret?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Secret&lt;/a&gt;, 6 September 2016&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9056/september-6-physics-ama-secret-question-pool&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=32143865#32143865&quot;&gt;Chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/31790/danielsank?tab=profile&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt;, 12 August 2016&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8981/august-23-physics-ama-with-daniel-sank-question-pool&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31650865#31650865&quot;&gt;Chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50546/yuggib&quot;&gt;yuggib&lt;/a&gt;, 12 July 2016&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8814/ask-me-anything-12th-july-guests-introduction-and-questions&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=30980294#30980294&quot;&gt;Chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/36941/slereah&quot;&gt;slereah&lt;/a&gt;, 14 June 2016&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7782/questions-for-the-june-14th-ama&quot;&gt;Question pool and details&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=30352471#30352471&quot;&gt;Chat session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Contributing&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to be a guest speaker, or moderate an AMA session, please ping @DanielSank or @vzn in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;hbar&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you'd like to improve our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7768/31790&quot;&gt;community ad art&lt;/a&gt;, please just submit an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Resources&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7778/what-format-should-we-use-for-physics-stack-exchange-amas&quot;&gt;Discussion of AMA format (meta)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8815/what-was-your-impression-of-the-the-first-ask-me-anything-ama-event&quot;&gt;Discussion of the first AMA session (meta)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T15:00:12.733" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T15:00:12.733" Title="Physics Stack Exchange &quot;Ask me anything&quot; (AMA)" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|ask-me-anything|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2016-05-30T21:32:06.550" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topic of stochastic processes is very valuable in real physics research, yet it is barely mentioned much less taught in the typical physics curriculum (at least in the USA).&#xA;How did you, personally, acquire your knowledge of stochastic integrals etc?&#xA;What was your trajectory through books/papers/courses in coming to a useful understanding of stochastic processes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T21:32:06.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2016-06-01T02:30:32.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your interests are GR and Quantum Field Theory, with maybe some insight into Quantum Gravity (QG), could you summarize with some technical reasonings, what is known and what key findings are still needed for Hawking et al's conjecture that the BMS super translation symmetries and conserved charges are the basis for doing away with the information paradox?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108333" LastEditorUserId="108333" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T03:02:56.930" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T03:02:56.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7787" CreationDate="2016-06-01T07:50:35.567" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder how the (bleep) did this answer get &quot;accepted&quot;, and looked at the question. The account [redacted] was created and only this one post was ever made.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59208" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T10:43:10.177" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T10:43:10.177" Title="Is this user a sockpuppet?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2016-06-01T08:42:49.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7786" CreationDate="2016-06-01T08:42:12.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We (moderators) don't discuss details of moderation actions, so we're not going to answer the question of whether a particular account is a sockpuppet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference, the appropriate way to report something like this, which concerns a specific account, is via a flag, not a meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T08:42:12.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7789" CreationDate="2016-06-04T11:29:43.630" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I got the &quot;Electorate&quot; badge which is awarded for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vote on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that there is a difference between the vote count it shows and the &quot;votes cast&quot; counter on the profile. First I thought that it is because of the 25%, i.e. it only counts maximum 3 answer upvotes for every question upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now my friend has a similar problem and definitely has way more than 25% of the votes on questions. &lt;strong&gt;Why this disparity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T00:24:02.227" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T00:24:02.227" Title="Disparity between votes cast and electorate badge count" Tags="|bug|badges|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7788" CreationDate="2016-06-05T00:23:34.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I imagine you're referring to the count on the badge tracker in your profile page. The Electorate badge is awarded for 600 votes cast on questions, so the count on the tracker will reflect that (i.e. it will tell you the number of votes you've cast on questions), and this is clarified in the display if you click on the progress bar. On the other hand, on the statistics on the right hand side gives the 'total number of up and down votes cast' (as per the tooltip), i.e. all your votes on questions plus all your votes on answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/slDoA.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two numbers are obviously completely independent, and subject only to (total votes) ≥ (question votes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the 25% thing, it works by preventing you from getting the badge if you have too many answer votes per question votes: thus, if at the time of your 600th question vote you have more than 1800 answer votes (i.e. you have 600 question votes, but &amp;lt;25% of your total votes is on questions) then you won't get the badge. If you then cast more question votes, slower than you cast answer votes, you'll get the badge when you have cast less than three answer votes per question vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T00:23:34.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-05T21:34:08.570" Score="26" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I've noticed &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; of close votes, down votes, and comments to the effect of &quot;this question is too low level&quot; or &quot;the answer is on the internet if you search for it&quot; or &quot;you should already know this.&quot; And those are just my attempt at rephrasing things in a more friendly way. This isn't from one user either, but rather from many (sometimes it seems like most) of the active reviewers on the site. Some recent examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/259404/is-there-a-weak-magnetic-field-coming-forth-from-particles-with-a-weak-charge&quot;&gt;Is there a weak magnetic field, coming forth from particles with a weak charge?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/259430/how-are-thermometers-calibrated&quot;&gt;How are thermometers calibrated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/260886/problem-understanding-energy-of-a-electric-field&quot;&gt;Problem understanding energy of a electric field&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly are we trying to accomplish? I don't think this was ever satisfactorily addressed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6001/closing-insufficient-effort-questions&quot;&gt;the last time this issue was raised&lt;/a&gt;. Indeed there's hardly any consensus this should even be a valid close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought this is just about trying to keep things at a high enough level&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; But the more I see these comments the more it seems each high-rep user's threshold is nothing more or less than the boundary between what they can trivially answer and what they can't. Should I really vote to close questions on the basis that I know how to answer them off the top of my head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particular form this takes is closing because the question is &quot;based on a misconception.&quot; What questions aren't, though? Either the person has a misconception (and a valid answer is &quot;this is your misconception&quot;!), or else they just haven't worked everything out yet (so we would close as homework).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My next thought is that we're trying to not duplicate Wikipedia or other standard references. I agree we shouldn't try to match Wikipedia in &lt;em&gt;general-purpose, expository&lt;/em&gt; articles, given they've been refining those articles with an order of magnitude more contributors for many years. But I question how much physics is left for us to do that can't be &lt;em&gt;derived&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;applied&lt;/em&gt; from the information in Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure just about every one of the 502 answers I've written could be replicated with nothing more than access to Wikipedia. In fact, 207 of those answers explicitly link to the relevant Wikipedia articles.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Should I go back and vote to close all those questions? After all, I doubt more than 10 answers of mine display anything more than a bachelor's level of physics knowledge (if anyone disagrees, I challenge you to give me a list of 11 such answers). And where does it end? If the world's leading expert in X is on the site, is that person obligated to close all questions about X since they would all appear trivial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all comes down to these key questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &quot;insufficient effort&quot; mean to the community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some level of insufficient effort that warrants &lt;em&gt;closure&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to, say, downvoting)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, what &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; guidelines should we have on the issue? Given the many orders of magnitude difference in expertise here between different users in different topics, any guideline based on individuals' feelings is decidedly not useful, without at the very least some reduction criterion (&quot;this is trivial for everyone&quot; and &quot;this is trivial for at least one person&quot; are objective; &quot;this is trivial for &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is not).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a philosophical bonus, given how every meta discussion about scope always seems to be about &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; questions, I'll add two more discussion points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the ideal question here, one that everyone agrees is great?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the above exists, are we obligated to close anything falling short of the ideal? Must we be at the extremal tip of the generality-quality curve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Separate but related issue: We have neither a policy nor a notification to users about how advanced a topic must be to be allowed on the site, either in absolute terms or relative to our perceptions of where questioners should be in their education. I &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; suggest those who keep voting to close for such reasons should formalize this notion and &lt;strong&gt;get consensus from the community&lt;/strong&gt;. I for one won't vote to close based on an entirely undocumented reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Get a list of all answers with Wikipedia links made by a given user with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/495383/answers-with-references-to-wikipedia-by-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt;. It probably misses some, for example links to other language pages or to explicit mobile pages.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;Explicit mobile links (e.g. &lt;code&gt;en.m.wikipedia.org&lt;/code&gt;) are a scourge on the internet and should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T03:17:30.203" Title="What does everyone mean by &quot;insufficient research effort&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|scope|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8789" CreationDate="2016-06-06T06:30:16.520" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that I'm probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22%20I%27m%20voting%20to%20close%20this%20question%20as%20off-topic%20because%20it%20shows%20insufficient%20prior%20research%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the leading exponent of closing questions on the basis of insufficient prior research&lt;/a&gt; I'm relieved to see I'm not implicated in the examples Chris cites (I did VTC one of them, but because I thought it was unclear rather than lazy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what I can add here that isn't already covered by my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6005/1325&quot;&gt;previous statement on the subject&lt;/a&gt;. My view is that the Physics SE is a quite extraordinary resource for aspiring young physicists. I suspect many of the regulars don't realise just how amazing it is that a teenage physics nerd can ask a question and get answers from real live working (mostly friendly) physicists. Speaking as one who was a teenage physics nerd back in the 70s I would have given my right arm for an opportunity like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the opportunity is abused it will disappear. What I find really rewarding is when an OP comments to thank me and say that they now understand something that had previously been frustrating them. This makes me feel I have left the world a better place than I found it, which surely only the most cynical of us wouldn't be pleased about. What I dislike is when I feel I'm being used as a lazy alternative to the OP putting in any effort for themselves, and if the latter type of question were to dominate then that would seriously put me off contributing to the site. Although I've stated a purely personal opinion here I'm guessing I'm not untypical and many others will feel the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the judgement I make is whether the question shows a real interest, and the only way I can judge this is to look at the question. How well is it written? Does it show any evidence of independant though? Most importantly how much effort has been put into writing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chris' first question asks what &lt;em&gt;insufficient effort&lt;/em&gt; means to the community, and the above hopefully makes it clear what I think it means. It has nothing to do with how simple/complex the question is or whether the OP is a physicist, schoolchild, OAP or whatever. It is purely a matter of whether the issue matters enough to the OP that they have done their best to research it before coming here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re the second question: lazy and ill motivated questions are actively harmful to this community and they need to be deterred. Downvoting is not enough. The point of closing is that it prevents the question being answered and therefore prevents the offender from being rewarded for their idleness. If lazy and ill motivated questions receive answers that just encourages the asking of such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re the third question: there is no objective measure of this - it's a hopelessly subjective judgement. I have to try and guess whether the OP is genuinely interested and will benefit from the effort I put in to answer it. Maybe this is an arrogant approach - who am I to judge my fellow man? That's a fair criticism and I respond by trying to be generous and error on the side of caution. Chris says &lt;em&gt;any guideline based on individuals' feelings is decidedly not useful&lt;/em&gt; but I disagree with this. At the end of the day the questions are answered by individuals willing to put considerable effort into answering questions for no reward other than the inner glow of having made the world a better place. Deter those individuals and you leave the PSE no better than the myriad of other physics sites that litter the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rant is running out of momentum now, and I should really come up up with some pithy closing statement, but I find myself lost for one. I suppose my basic principle is that we are all here because we want to help, specifically help anyone interested in physics to understand more about it. All I would ask of OPs is to respect that and not to take the piss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T06:30:16.520" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2016-06-06T12:51:05.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you mentioned closed timelike curves aka &quot;time machines&quot;: Are they likely to exist in our universe? And how could they be observationally confirmed in a universe where they exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you could maybe give a layman's explanation as well as mathematical detail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T12:51:05.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8789" CreationDate="2016-06-06T22:19:03.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question might be directed at me.  I cast a lot of down-votes because of insufficient research effort, including both the thermometer calibration and the electric field energy questions which you quote. So I dispute John Rennie's claim to be the leading exponent in this field! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not offended.  Debate is good.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for down-voting is not elitism, but because detailed answers to many fact-finding questions like the thermometer calibration question are already available on the internet (eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coleparmer.com/TechLibraryArticle/358&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.coleparmer.com/TechLibraryArticle/358&lt;/a&gt;), and I think it is pointless for PSE to duplicate such resources.  In this question the OP demonstrates no research effort at all and gives the impression of casual curiosity.  (&quot;...This is quite vague, but I was just thinking about it...&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the electric field energy question the OP says he has just started studying EM and &quot;just read what some books call the energy OF a electric field.&quot;  However, he does not question what these books say - which would be reasonable.  Some explanation is very likely to be there later in the textbooks.  But instead of reading further or researching, or discussing with classmates, or asking his teacher, the OP prematurely asks PSE to explain it to him, probably because that is the easiest option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impression I get is that such OPs are using PSE to avoid doing their own research or thinking.  They would prefer that somebody else took the trouble to find relevant sources, filter out what is relevant to their interests, and spoon-feed them the answers.  This does not encourage them to become good scientists, and in my opinion should be discouraged.  If it is bad to provide detailed calculations for &quot;homework-like&quot; questions which the OP could do for himself, it must also be bad to provide detailed answers to requests for factual information which the OP could easily find for himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always provide a comment to challenge the OP to reveal what research he/she has done.  That is a positive response, not a negative one.  Nobody should be in science who takes criticism personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with a lot of what John Rennie says.  Lazy and ill-motivated questions should be actively deterred (eg &quot;I was wondering, what would happen if...?&quot;).  Unlike John I don't have rep to cast closing votes, so I down-vote instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular I agree that (probably) no objective criterion can be devised for what is &quot;insufficient research effort&quot;.  However, I suggest that questions could be entered into a template which includes fields which ask (inter alia) eg &quot;What effort have you made to find an answer before posting on PSE?&quot;  It won't solve the problem entirely, but it should remind OPs what is expected of them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have absolutely no problem with &quot;low level&quot; questions.  I've enjoyed several elementary questions which are surprisingly difficult to answer and therefore instructive for me also.  My beef, like John's, is with laziness, regardless of level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You allude to high-rep members voting to close elementary questions. I agree that something like that is happening.  Many questions which I have found interesting, and which have shown genuine effort (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/254485&quot;&gt;Balancing forces on a liquid&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/246253&quot;&gt;No buoyancy inside liquid&lt;/a&gt;), have been closed unreasonably (in my opinion), mainly because they are superficially &quot;homework-like&quot;.  And conversely, many questions which obviously (to me) show little or no effort (such as the thermometer question), or are frivolous or speculative (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/259426&quot;&gt;SR and a rotating observer&lt;/a&gt;), are not closed off.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as far as I can see, the criteria mentioned in the PSE policy statements, and cited in the reasons for closure, are not being applied consistently.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T01:57:50.113" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8789" CreationDate="2016-06-07T01:20:00.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To offer another perspective, perhaps the issue is simply that we, the community, are not clear enough about our expectations. Whilst forethought and clarity are integral to the education and formation of those of us who are doctors, masters or graduates of physics, it is not necessarily so for the enthusiasts and students in our community. However, we all appear to agree that would would like not to discourage the latter of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the PSE introduction (help) the following points are given as guidance for what &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Do my homework&quot;-type physics questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-mainstream physics, including pitches for personal theories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything else not directly related to physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an&#xA;extremely long answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These points offer good general guidance, but they are very much open to interpretation. How does one distinguish between a &quot;Do my homework&quot;-type question and the type of &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; question which one would tag as &quot;homework and exercises&quot;? To a non-physics graduate, what is considered non-mainstream? Where is the mention of what comprises reasonable effort in one's forethought and research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those without a very high level of education often lack the most basic research skills, and for some of them a forum such as this is their first port-of-call. It would appear to me that the mechanisms by which we temper their questions should be more constructive and directive. This is already done organically through the community itself: commentators often request that a question be clarified or reconsidered, and they often give directions to an external link or appropriate Internet search string. In the best instances, this is done with courtesy and grace. And kudos do those who have the patience and take the time. In doing so, they are improving our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps all that is required is some clearer guidance for inexperienced users: a more detailed help file, or and handful of useful flags which commentators can apply to offer recurring advice on the improvement to the questions under scrutiny. I believe that such minor changes would encourage the right types of questions without discouraging those who hope to ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120291" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T01:20:00.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2016-06-07T14:28:18.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe a discussion on geometries explaining the expansion of the universe, it's acceleration and some connections with quantum mechanics or QFT. On this basis, some thoughts on the arbitrariness of theoretical models for the expansion, how can we limit them down and what's the potential role of QM or QFT on this subject and on observations that may be based on the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T14:28:18.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-06-07T16:36:49.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://doai.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ndeRs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Digital Open Access Identifier - a DOI resolver that prioritizes open access&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T09:17:59.653" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T09:17:59.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2016-06-07T23:28:33.877" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;thanks very much&lt;/em&gt; for accepting the invited speaker invitation as the 1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; guest! here are some miscellaneous mostly not-so-formal questions that may be of interest to others, partly based on your own (extensive!) prior dialog in the physics chat room &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;H Bar&lt;/a&gt; (which btw for anyone interested and isnt aware, is in a searchable transcript). note some of these can be considered somewhat general &amp;amp; applicable to other guests also who might choose to answer from it. (as reflected here, interestingly the sessions may give us all a chance to focus on more subjective/ personal areas than are typically addressed in the normally tight/ objective-leaning SE format.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;can you talk about testability or falsifiability of CTCs (closed timelike curves)? is anyone working in this area? do any modern experiments/ measurements have any connection to CTCs? do you think its relevant to the field or do you consider yourself more a mathematical physicist not so concerned about physical plausibility?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;youve mentioned you saw the movie &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;interstellar&lt;/a&gt; (you maybe seem to like other scifi movies also) which features some advanced science ideas on CTCs and utilized expert advisors in the area like Kip Thorne to some degree. what are your thoughts on the movie, whats it like to watch, was there anything glaring about it? should hollywood try to avoid serious science, or does it fit in somehow? what other hollywood/ scifi movies do you like, and do any of them also have physics angles?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;youve mentioned the challenges of moving forward to a physics Phd. what do you think of the Phd system wrt physics or more generally? does it work or have flaws? what could be changed about it to make it better?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you have very strong grasp of US/ American (pop) culture and say youve visited on occasion, however your nationality is (apparently) French, and you pepper chat with funny memes etc. can you say anything about the occasional rivalry between these countries, have you noticed it? does it ever come up in chat? where did you get so much enthusiasm for US culture? or is it maybe partly internet culture also? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;can you talk about your experience in school getting your undergraduate/ graduate degree? how did your school compare to neighboring schools? what was your thinking in choosing it in particular? was there anything particularly memorable about the experience? did you &quot;hang out/ socialize&quot; with other physics students or were you more the type to focus on the education?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you work in software engineering as a day job and have written about it as a necessity. what elements of this appeal to you? do you see some connection with physics? did you do any algorithmic work relating to physics in school or otherwise? do you have some languages/ areas you like?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what do you think are some of the leading areas of physics to do research in? besides CTCs, what areas do you focus on? is this a good age for physics? where is it all going/ leading, what does the future hold for the field and you in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;whats your opinion on top physics schools or your favorite journals? if you could choose any school in the world to do a Phd or postdoc at, which would it be and why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what do you think of the physics stackexchange site? do you recall how you 1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; heard about it? what does it mean to you? what kind of direction is it going in? whats there to like/ dislike?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33566" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T23:28:33.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2016-06-09T19:27:01.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is similar to DanielSank's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7779/23785&quot;&gt;idea&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First a meta question is made, asking what questions should be asked to the subject of the AMA. People post their questions as answers to this meta post. Then, there is a period of time where people upvote the questions they want to see answered. Maybe these get community wiki'd to not mess up rep too much. After this voting period ends, the subject of the AMA edits his initial answer into each of the questions (where each question, remember, is an &quot;answer&quot; to a meta post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the subject of the ama makes his initial answer to a given question, discussion can continue in the form of comments, which will get moved to chat. Thus each quetion has its own chat room where a free form discussion can take place. After discussion of one question dies down, the subject of the AMA moves on to the next question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A downside is that a moderator will need to continually edit the original meta post to indicate which question's chat room the subject of the AMA is currently in. The advantage is that the questions are more easily browsable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23785" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T19:27:01.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8789" CreationDate="2016-06-10T03:17:30.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does everyone mean by “insufficient research effort”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for everyone but only, of course, for myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, I choose to Vote To Close For Insufficient Research Effort (VTCFIRE) in the case that (1) the answer can &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; be found (typically, on this very site), (2) it's a bald question without something like &quot;I'm puzzled by the other answers because...&quot;, i.e., &lt;em&gt;there is essentially no evidence of research period&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other regulars here most likely have different criteria for their VTCFIRE and that's fine with me.  This is a community of &lt;em&gt;individuals&lt;/em&gt; each with their own, perhaps evolving criteria for voting as each does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T03:17:30.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T18:43:25.380" Score="-5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262321/large-numbers-in-physics&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262321/large-numbers-in-physics&lt;/a&gt; was closed. Two users gave a &quot;reason&quot;. The first one didnt make any sense at all. And the second one I have adjusted my question to take care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now could we reopen? If not, can I get a reason? I dont get what people have agaisnt my question. I get at first 10 different reasons for closing, why are people so interested in trying to find flaws with the question instead of answering it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do this to any question, if it got any math, just say its not physics, if it got some QFT, just say its not rigorous so it doesnt make sense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user41404" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user41404" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T19:14:15.593" Title="The best Question Grand reopening - Gather" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8800" CreationDate="2016-06-13T19:14:15.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close your question because it is unclear what is being asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes a &quot;number in physics&quot;? Does any dimensionless combination of physical parameters count? How could one possibly determine the &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answer to this question? What does &lt;em&gt;&quot;No numbers which can be defined strictly mathematically is allowed.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean? &lt;em&gt;Every&lt;/em&gt; number can be &quot;defined strictly mathematically - numbers are a mathematical concept after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond these technical problems with the question, it's unclear what the goal here is - why is this question &lt;em&gt;physically interesting&lt;/em&gt;? (This alone would not be grounds for closing, as long as the question is about physics) Often one can determine what a user is really trying to ask if their motivation is known, but you've given us nothing of the sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T19:14:15.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T20:57:15.117" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may seem like a silly question but there is some merit to it. From what I have seen, most of the questions with the electric-circuits tag get voted off or get multiple comments that it should be in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;. Even though engineering (especially electrical) has large overlapping areas with physics, I can understand most physics members not wanting to answer EE questions because it feels like you're outside of your zone. So my question is, with this current state, why not just get rid of the tag to discourage hardware questions on our feed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120647" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:06.300" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T21:21:21.807" Title="Why do we have the electric-circuits tag?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8802" CreationDate="2016-06-13T21:21:21.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason we have the tag is that &lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt; circuits are a part of any standard introductory electromagnetism class. It's a matter of some opinion where you draw the line for &quot;basic&quot;, but it's usually taken to include batteries, switches, resistors (including light bulbs and wires), capacitors, inductors, various kinds of (idealized) meters, and maybe diodes. Simple circuits are a very effective way of introducing some core physics concepts that get used all the way up through quantum field theory etc., so if you wanted to argue that even these simple circuits should not be within our scope, I suspect you'd have a tough time of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any more complicated circuits are generally taken to be beyond the scope of physics. I don't think we get many of those questions, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T21:21:21.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T08:56:52.847" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who should the onus fall on to check if a question has already been asked, the person who asks the question (who may not have much background in the question they are asking) or the person answering the question (especially if they give a different answer to those previously presented)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109388" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T12:46:16.560" Title="duplicate questions" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T09:25:30.917" Score="-11" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262427/spawning-a-vw-beetle&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262427/spawning-a-vw-beetle&lt;/a&gt; was closed. I dont want to speculate on reasons, as none where given. I here give close-voters a chance to explain themselves. If no reason is given, then reopening must ensue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this an abuse of the system to close good questions for abusive reasons, can the users in question get banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that this is the same 5 users who closed my other question, which have a personal vendetta against me, can something be done about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user41404" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T11:34:49.337" Title="URGENT MATTER - reopening of question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2016-06-14T10:59:26.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason we close duplicate questions is to try and make it easier for visitors to find answers. The site search isn't stunningly good at the best of times, and if a search for &lt;em&gt;do masses fall at the same rate&lt;/em&gt; produces dozens of hits for slightly different questions that only makes matters worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But posting a duplicate isn't an offence and there's no sense in which we punish OPs for asking a duplicate, or punish site members for replying to it. I get the impression some members will downvote a question on the grounds it's a duplicate. This isn't something I would do, and in fairness the downvotes may simply be to remove the question from the home page and not necessarily indicate disapproval. Note that neither the OP nor any answerers lose rep if a question is closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to be pro-active in flagging duplicate questions, but that's mainly so the OP can see what has been asked before and decide if they are asking something new or whether their question is a duplicate and the close vote is justified. If the OP objects I'm generally happy to give them the benefit of the doubt and withdraw my close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think duplicates are necessarily bad, as long as they aren't exact duplicates. Similar questions may actually be exploring slightly different issues. It may also be the case that the answers to a previous duplicate have emphasised one aspect of the question and I feel it's worth starting again to provide an answer that highlights a different aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T10:59:26.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8805" CreationDate="2016-06-14T11:34:49.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no onus on site members to justify their actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will generally try and provide a helpful comment if I have voted to close and if I think the question was asked in good faith. For example when I have voted to close on the grounds that a question is unclear I will often add a comment explaining what I think the problem is and how the question could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not required to do this, and sometimes I don't leave a comment because I don't think it would help. The fact I have decided not to leave a comment is not grounds for cancelling my close vote and reopening the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take the question you link as an example, I would have voted to close as unclear because the question is simply unanswerable. There is no accepted mathematical model to describe the formation or otherwise of Boltzmann brains. The handwaving argument is generally that vacuum fluctuations create random collections of matter that have a small but non-zero probability of forming a brain (or in this case a VW Beetle). But the precise mechanisms involved are unclear and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#Proposed_resolutions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;as the Wikipedia article describes&lt;/a&gt; there are physicists who think the whole idea is misconceived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to answer your question would be to review the current models for Boltzmann brain formation, explain which model we are using then do a long and tedious calculation to end up with a number. This type of answer is too long to be suitable for this site, and in any case it would require a heroic effort to write. It is on these grounds that I would vote to close (as unclear) and I believe those who did vote feel the same way. Your question would need to be a lot more precise before it could be answered i.e. state what assumptions you're making. Alternatively you could ask about how the Boltzmann brain calculation would be done and what assumptions are necessary, though I think you'd need to show some evidence you had attempted to research this yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final point that needs to be mentioned is that this site operates on good will. No-one here has to answer a question and no-one here receives any material reward for doing so. We take the often considerable trouble to answer questions out of a desire to help and because it's nice when we are thanked for providing an answer. Taking a confrontational attitude will simply deter the site members from providing answers or even helpful comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T11:34:49.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2016-06-14T12:46:16.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The onus falls on &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt;. Anyone can point out that a question is (or appears to be) a duplicate of a previous one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, we do expect the poster to do some prior research, which includes checking related questions that already exist on the site. If those pre-existing questions are closely related, the onus is on the asker to make it clear how what they're asking isn't already covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T12:46:16.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2016-06-14T16:09:06.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the necessary mathematical/physical background for general relativity and quantum field theory?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you had to pick one book as an introduction to GR and one as an introduction to QFT, what would they be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the standard &quot;advanced&quot; references for GR and QFT (books, seminal papers)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the standard introduction to time travel research? How about advanced material?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59215" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T16:09:06.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-15T00:24:44.073" Score="6" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often have questions about the field of physics itself (as opposed to physics questions). For example questions about the current state of a sub-field of physics, or questions about the implications of experiment results. The latter is especially important to me because my knowledge of physics is focused around classical electromagnetism, so I occasionally am confused about the significance of certain experiments. I am wondering if such questions are considered off-topic, or too opinion-driven to be asked here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120647" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T00:30:02.683" Title="Are questions about the field of physics off topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8810" CreationDate="2016-06-15T00:30:02.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say some, perhaps most, of these questions are physics questions, and thus I'd consider them on topic. Perhaps some other such questions are off topic. I couldn't say without having a better idea of what kinds of questions you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I'd advise you to just ask them, and if they get closed, you'll learn something about what sorts of questions are considered off topic by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T00:30:02.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8813" CreationDate="2016-06-15T19:19:24.463" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an old question asked 5 years ago. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7260/how-much-power-to-keep-surface-of-aluminum-plate-at-given-temperature/262674#262674&quot;&gt;How much power to keep surface of aluminum plate at given temperature?&lt;/a&gt;. How do I answer this in a physics kind of way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my original answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By running a current through one kilogram of metal using a adjustable D/C power supply 1 volt to 12v and slowly increasing the voltage until you read enough resistance to achieve the temperature desired. You can also get an adjustable amperage as well but may cost more. Also try using an after market defroster for back windows of cars. Just stick it on the underside. The plastic insulator should keep the metal safe to touch and will be more efficient. Like a light it is the resistance to the flow of electricity that gives off the light and heat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T00:19:44.077" Title="Engineering questions and answers that are closely related to Physics" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8812" CreationDate="2016-06-16T00:17:30.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... in this case, I don't know that it is possible to answer in a physics sort of way. I actually just voted to close it as an engineering question and thus off-topic for our site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the broader question of how to answer &quot;engineering&quot; questions with a physics way, I actually just attempted to do the same on a new post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262798/prevention-of-fluid-vortex-formation&quot;&gt;Prevention of fluid vortex formation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, the question is sort of on the border -- it is clearly looking to solve a particular problem, but it is also asking for the concepts that are needed for the solution. The concepts are the physics, the design/numbers are the engineering. So to answer &quot;engineering&quot; questions in a &quot;physics&quot; way, it is usually sufficient to address the underlying processes that are needed to solve the problem. In the question I linked, it is explaining how/why the vortex forms and what the equation looks like so somebody could try to design whatever they needed based on the physics of the equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, a &quot;physics&quot; answer would explain the mechanisms that lead to heating (the current flow for example) and the mechanisms that lead to cooling (radiation, convection, conduction, etc). Explain the relevant scales -- things like the non-dimensional numbers that describe the problem. Explain the assumptions made -- what does well insulated really mean? How does it change the equations or assumptions? Based on these things, perhaps provide some information on what terms are important or are insignificant in the governing equations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all that is done, the OP should be able to solve whatever problem they wanted because you've explained the physics of the problem. The numbers, the techniques, the actual devices to get the solution are all off-topic. But the understanding of the mechanisms and equations, that's all physics and is spot on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T00:17:30.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T07:06:57.670" Score="17" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will be the next &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;AMA&lt;/a&gt; guest. So here it is a brief introduction of myself, and you can suggest some topic/questions that can be discussed during the session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Academic Background.&lt;/strong&gt; I obtained a master degree in theoretical physics almost ten years ago, working on the regularization of path integrals for supersymmetric QM models of particles in curved (Euclidean) background space. In particular, I focused on the mode regularization, both for the phase space and usual path integral, in N=1,2 SUSY sigma models. It has been a while, however, since I abandoned those topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, following the same &lt;em&gt;cursus honorum&lt;/em&gt; as many others in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iamp.org/page.php?page=page_start&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my community&lt;/a&gt;, I shifted towards mathematics. My motivation was - and still is - that I don't like the sloppiness with which many subtle and interesting mathematical problems are dealt with in theoretical physics. I therefore did a Ph.D. in mathematics, with analysis and mathematical physics as main topics. During my Ph.D. I started working on the so-called mean field and classical limits of quantum (field) theories; i.e. on rigorously proving the emergence of classical/mean-field effective dynamics starting from the full quantum description of a given system. This is still my main area of research, but I also work in scattering theory (e.g. for Lindblad superoperators) and nonlinear partial differential equations of physical relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested topics.&lt;/strong&gt; Below you can find a list of the topics on which it is more probable that I would have something meaningful to say, but feel free to ask anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classical and mean field approximation of quantum systems (e.g. Bohr's correspondence principle; the emergence of Hartree, Gross-Pitaevskii, Vlasov, Hartree-Fock dynamics from many-body quantum systems; ...);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The interplay between rigorous mathematical results and physics (e.g. Haag's theorem, the von Neumann measurement scheme, representation theory for the algebra of canonical commutation relations, ...);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Partial Differential Equations &quot;of evolution&quot; (e.g. Schrödinger, Wave, Klein-Gordon, Dirac, ...);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantization (from a mathematician's point of view).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think I could at least point to some references if you ask me questions about mathematical physics, apart from some topics on which I am quite ignorant (like e.g. all things related to homology/cohomology applied to physics, string theory, general relativity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, even if I am not at all an expert, I like to read about logic, set theory, and in general the problems that arise in foundational mathematics. So this could also be a topic for a (very informal but interesting) discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When and where.&lt;/strong&gt; The AMA session will take place in the hbar chat room, the 12th of July at 16:00 UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50546" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T05:29:47.890" Title="Ask Me Anything 12th July: guest's introduction and questions" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|ask-me-anything|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T08:06:54.447" Score="9" ViewCount="709" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have any suggestions or improvements for the next one on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8814/ask-me-anything-12th-july-guests-introduction-and-questions&quot;&gt;12th of July&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T15:57:46.427" Title="What was your impression of the first &quot;Ask Me Anything&quot; (AMA) event?" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|ask-me-anything|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8815" CreationDate="2016-06-16T08:27:36.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if sadly I could not attend, I had the impression from the post-session comments that it was not so easy to follow the Q-As because of the &amp;quot;background noise&amp;quot; made by side comments, or independent hbar chatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And @DanielSank (if I recall correctly) suggested a solution: posting AMA questions in boldface, and answering using the reply feature of the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will reprise that suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AMA questions to the guest should be in a single post (if possible, or contiguous posts) with &lt;strong&gt;boldface letters&lt;/strong&gt; (** at the beginning and end of the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should also be either in one post or in contiguous ones (not so easy at times), and contain the appropriate reply tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50546" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T10:21:18.583" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8815" CreationDate="2016-06-16T10:23:40.927" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoyed the chat session and I will certainly attend future AMAs. I've long felt the chat room is an underused resource and it was nice to see the chat room so lively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ... (there's always a &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; on these occasions) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we attracted many people bar the regulars. I went through the log and I counted 31 questions (after eliminating the frivolous ones). The askers were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;vzn          11 (doing his bit as chairman :-)&#xA;secret        5&#xA;obliv         4&#xA;3075          3&#xA;qmd           2&#xA;constantine   2&#xA;daniel        2&#xA;mafia         1&#xA;me            1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around half of the questions were non-technical e.g. &lt;em&gt;Why did you decide to study physics?&lt;/em&gt;. Of the remainder the majority were fairly general e.g. &lt;em&gt;what are the major areas or unsolved questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, there was quite a bit of discussion on CTCs and for me this was the most interesting thing about the AMA. We could have just declared a one hour chat session on CTCs, but I suspect that would ramble a bit. I thought it worked well that much of the meeting was in effect &lt;em&gt;ask Sam about CTCs&lt;/em&gt; as that kept things focussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think we learned a lot about CTCs, and I don't think it was an effective exercise in evangelising. But is was fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record here are the 31 non-frivolous questions I counted. I don't guarantee I haven't missed any or that my definition of &lt;em&gt;frivolous&lt;/em&gt; is trutsworthy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Obliv: @slereah Do you live in france? (since you got a degree at a french uni)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3075: @Slereah Why did you decide to study physics?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: did your MS thesis have connections to CTCs or did you do a lot of separate research in the area? how did you get into/ specialize in CTCs in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;qmd: @Slereah What advice would you give to an undergrad student or someone who has just started studying physics?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MAFIA36790: @Slereah: Do you want to go to other country for phd?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Obliv: @slereah Do you think the job market for physics research in France is more difficult than in the U.S. or other countries?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;secret: What is the major research topic in riemannian space in your thesis, i.e. what is the problem your thesis is going to address in terms of the GR research field (or differential geometry in general)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;obliv: @slereah What other subject of study interests you, outside of physics?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;secret: I see, what are the major results you found during your research in the thesis?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3075: @Slereah what is your profile image?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: S did you do a masters thesis presentation/ defense with advisors? guess that happens &quot;usually&quot; in US, dont know EU/ france...?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah how long was the session? how many advisors or attendees?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;obliv: @slereah when did you and @0celo7 start a blog together at einsteinandtheevidence.wordpress.com&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Constantine Black: Greetings. I see there is a discussion about the system of Master and PhD. May I ask your opinion on how the system works? Would you say you were satisfied in general and maybe if there are certain problems that need to be addressed? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @0celo7 do you have any plans for blog S? news to me that you (co)contributed. (encourage everyone who chats frequently to experiment with blogs, it doesnt take much more effort &amp;amp; allows math formulas etc) =D&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;qmd: @Slereah If you could go back to your first year at university, would you still do physics? why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;secret: In your opinion, what are the major areas or uunsolved questions that any aspiring CTC researchers need to focus more on?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah what would you say about CTC vs string theory researchers? small overlap? compatible somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Constantine Black: chronology protection conjecture : Do we need a quantum gravity theory to attack this problem and why would you say so? Why GR isn't enough. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;John Rennie: If you have a spacetime you could imaging geodesics flowing through it almost like streamlines. A CTC would then look I suppose a bit like a vortex in a flow. Wouldn't there be some very strange behaviour at the stagnation points?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah whats your take on hawking? modern near-einstein? what about his pop science books/ rep vs hard core science? (0celo7 is lately studying him intensely although will prob not admit it) :P&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah did you see &quot;theory of everything&quot;? any reaction? have you heard opinions on it from others? etc&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah re &quot;not that big on string theory&quot; ... ie somewhat skeptical?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah lol (nope! still have ~15m!) slereah re your admitted collaboration with 0celo7 on blog, if you could cowrite a book with him, what would it be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3075: @Slereah did you know much physics in high school?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;secret: (this is more of a general public style question) What is the most important difference between CTCs and the popscience and scifi notion of stable time loops? &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StableTimeLoop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StableTimeLoop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;DanielSank: At some level then, you learned the mechanics of stochastic integration and use it effectively? No need to get into the details?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah re books, youre a big collector, how many do you think you have on physics anyway? do you also use ebooks?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;DanielSank: @Slereah Would you say this book can be understood by a physicist with typical math background?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vzn: @Slereah sounds a lot like virtual particles though!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;secret: @vzn but since the time evolution of a quantum state is deterministic, then it should not be a big deal?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T10:23:40.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8819" CreationDate="2016-06-16T12:08:18.630" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/262947/83380&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lppwk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lppwk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, my other question is about verification of a phenomenon and a value (1 solar mass). This question is about theory of possible transfer of energy in gravitational waves back to more familiar forms of energy, or matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do I have to explain why the answerless, different question is not the answer to my question that has a good answer?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While handing duplicate questions is important, I think doing it recklessly causes undue duress to those really trying to learn how to ask a good question here. Was this duplicate marking though out? Is it justified, or is it more of a &quot;drive-by&quot; in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my linked question - where I'm supposed to find the answer, instead of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/262947/83380&quot;&gt;good answer here&lt;/a&gt; citing Feynman thoughts on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lpsML.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lpsML.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T12:38:48.297" Title="Drive-by &quot;Possible Duplicate&quot; there is not even an answer there!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8818" CreationDate="2016-06-16T12:38:48.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do I have to explain why the answerless, different question is not the answer to my question that has a good answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, your question is not currently &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; as a duplicate, so you don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to do anything at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened is that one person voted to close your question as a duplicate of the earlier one. This is nothing to get worked up about. Just because one person thinks a question is a duplicate, doesn't mean it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate. There's a reason it takes &lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt; votes to actually prevent new answers on a question; there needs to be a consensus of sorts to cause such direct action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, one duplicate vote does mean that one person didn't understand what makes your new question different from the earlier one. I'd take that as motivation to edit your new question (or, in this case, the earlier question) to make it more clear how they are different. Again, you don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to do so, but if you don't, you may be passing up on an opportunity to improve your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; It's just one vote, don't worry about it, and I don't think anything needs to be done about this, but consider using the feedback to improve your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm sure somebody is going to object that moderators and gold badge holders can close questions as duplicates unilaterally. That's a bit different because mods are &quot;trained&quot; to be conservative about unilaterally marking duplicates; we're aware that just because we think something is a duplicate doesn't mean it is, and so if it's not an obvious case, we often defer to the community. And gold badge holders are expected to have a really good intuition about what questions are really duplicates, due to their extensive experience in the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T12:38:48.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8822" CreationDate="2016-06-18T00:57:52.530" Score="18" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some members provide a perfectly good answer to a perfectly good question in the &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt; area under the question rather than posting their response as a standalone &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this practice often occurs among members of high standing in the community, it seems to be acceptable, but I'm wondering why it isn't discouraged. After all, a big disadvantage of this practice is that the original question will appear to be unanswered in the search listing, discouraging a user from drilling down on the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general principle people are using governing when an answer is better off being provided as a comment than as a separate answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121000" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T17:47:17.973" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T20:34:07.390" Title="The practice of answering a question in its comments area" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8821" CreationDate="2016-06-18T01:52:20.983" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason I suspect this is done is that some of us (especially those of us who've been here a long time and have high rep) hold ourselves to very high standards for quality answers.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; There are questions we see and know right away what the answer is, or at least how to find the answer, and we envision the perfect explanation. We have in mind an answer so clear it will dispel any and all misconceptions, enlightening a new generation of students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then we realize how long it would take to write such an answer. We might not be particularly interested or we might have other things to do. But then we don't want to leave the question without any answer at all. And so we dump our thoughts in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an excuse, just an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this probably isn't a healthy practice. Answers should be preserved as answers for many reasons, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments cannot be downvoted;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments can be deleted at any time, leaving no record of their existence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking as someone who has left answers in comments before, I can say that I hope someone will turn them into full answers. Ideally with the details filled in, but I can't begrudge anyone for just copying the ideas as they stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should you do if you come across a comment you feel really should be an answer? I would suggest this course of action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Optional) Ping the commenter and suggest they make the comment an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the answer yourself. If you use the exact words of the comment, it's probably best to attribute the quotation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say (1) is optional because in my mind once I've posted something as a comment I've lost any sense of ownership over that idea (not just legally, but morally). Regarding (2), I've seem some behaviors on the network that indicate a hesitation to do something that might be perceived as benefiting from others' work, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marking the answer as Community Wiki so that it earns the answerer no reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Praising the commenter for their insightfulness, even when no direct quotes are used and the answer clearly builds upon the comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might not be the median opinion on the issue, but I think the above points are unnecessary. If you post an answer, you deserve the credit. If you insist on thanking the commenter for making the comment in the first place, I suggest adding the thanks as a comment to your answer. This way it is as ephemeral as the comment itself. (There are a number of answers on the network that start with &quot;I'll just rephrase the excellent comment by @userwhatever...&quot; except the comment has long since been deleted, so this whole sentence becomes just noise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;More cynically, if you play around with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; enough, you'll start finding niche statistics that you excel at. For example, I'm unhealthily proud of my position in &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/360094/users-ranked-by-average-answer-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; among those with at least 100 answers (or better yet 500).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorDisplayName="user10851" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T02:06:16.337" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T02:06:16.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8821" CreationDate="2016-06-18T16:30:50.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To offer an &quot;official&quot; response: the mods support what Chris said. If you see an answer posted as a comment, you are welcome (and encouraged) to make an answer out of it. You are not required to make your post community wiki nor to credit the commenter in any way beyond what is required by the CC license and our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;rules on plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add to that (otherwise I would have posted the above as a comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As this practice often occurs among members of high standing in the community, it seems to be acceptable, but I'm wondering why it isn't discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again &quot;officially&quot;, it's not acceptable. The thing is, there's no way to prevent it, other than the posters themselves being careful, and still, posting an answer as a comment is a really easy mistake to make. The best we can do is to educate people, and try not to leave these answer-comments sitting around to serve as an example to newer members like yourself. So any time you see an answer posted as a comment, there are three helpful things you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the answer yourself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reply to the comment to remind the poster that it should have been an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the comment as &quot;not constructive&quot; so it can be deleted by a mod&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T16:30:50.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-18T20:06:26.580" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not really a question about this site (though it does have some impact), but I'm not sure where exactly to raise it and I'd like to pose it to this community, which can probably / hopefully help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I discovered that the Wikipedia data I used to produce &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/539/how-many-planets-are-there-in-this-solar-system/592#592&quot;&gt;an Astronomy Stack Exchange answer I'm rather proud of&lt;/a&gt; was, in fact, incorrect. The Wikipedia page has since been corrected (and I'll update that answer shortly), but I'm worried about what happened when I dug deeper for the original data to see where exactly I went wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I went to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Clearing_the_neighbourhood&amp;amp;oldid=575282009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the corresponding page in the edit history of Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and the data shown there are simply plain wrong; specifically, the data table in the Details section is missing the exponent markers and is therefore unusable. This is made very clear by &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20131015071825/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the corresponding version of that page on the Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;, which has the original incorrect data with exponent markers present. This seems to be more of a formatting issue, since there are exponents in the plaintext source, but the html shown in the edit history is still wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm rather disturbed by this episode. Wikipedia editability is always a problem when linking to it, and that is resolved by the edit history, which is always there to resolve ambiguities about what exactly was being linked to. If the edit history is fallible, though, it's a red flag on the whole mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my questions for this community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be honest, I just wanted to vent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can others confirm that this is indeed what's displayed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there anyone more familiar with the finer points of Wikipedia formatting who can clarify exactly what went on there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a specific place in Wikipedia where I can raise this issue? This feels more like a general thing than something for the article's talk page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, on our side:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there anything we can do to adapt our practices given that this can happen?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T14:11:54.537" Title="On the infallibility of Wikipedia edit histories" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8827" CreationDate="2016-06-19T17:01:03.160" Score="8" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes on my own questions and other people's questions, I see users posting very useless comments that just show they only read the title of the question, and blazed through the specifics explained below. I have even seen answers that are like this, and it is extremely annoying, because they basically restate the OP's assumptions as their answer, then the OP has to refer them to the full text of the question and ask the question again. I understand that part of the rules are to read the question fully and understand it before you can answer, but how can we encourage users to actually do this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120647" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T17:43:41.557" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T20:03:21.250" Title="Encouraging users to read the full question" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8826" CreationDate="2016-06-19T17:52:36.007" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a technical writing problem, and it is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; problem as the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Start with a good, representative title.&lt;/strong&gt; If your title reads like a different or simpler question than you intend then &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have communicated something other than what you intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't state the question in the title there is a good chance you are trying to cram too much into a single question. Remember the model is one-question-multiple-answers, not several-questions-many-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make sure the question is suitable for the site.&lt;/strong&gt; Many beginners want to hear opinions on the ontology of various branches of physics and think a question of this sort would automatically be good for the site without realizing that regulars have seen them many, many times and often consider them to be unproductive philosophy suitable mostly for post-tenure noodling.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use the right vocabulary.&lt;/strong&gt; If the problem has a usual name or formulation, use it. This implies that you need to have done a bit research, but that is OK, because if your question is really simple you may find the answer on your own before you post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly, choosing your words carefully is a part of good technical writing. The ideas we want to express are often pretty complicated and it does not help to introduce extra ambiguity by using an not-quite-right word. Similarly, awkward and unnecessarily-long sentences add to the reader's mental burden. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that the formulation used in pop-sci treatments is often different from that used by professionals in important ways. Professional quantum physicists rarely perform &quot;the double slit experiment&quot; as such but often perform &quot;diffractive scattering&quot; experiments (a more general category that works on the same physical principles).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consider including an abstract paragraph.&lt;/strong&gt; Tell them what you're going to ask them as early as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't bog the reader down with a lot of detail without letting them know where the effort of reading and understanding all that stuff is going to take them&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make good use of the formatting tools available.&lt;/strong&gt; Note in particular that &quot;good&quot; does not mean &quot;copious&quot;. If everything is emphasized, then nothing is emphasized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't overlook that the tools on Stack Exchange sites include headings, lists, horizontal rules, and images in addition to changing the typeface.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I&quot;ll note that good technical writing is not easy and is a learned skill. The effort you put into doing a good job writing posts and comments on technical Stack Exchange sites will be rewarded not only here, but on the job if you are in (or go into) a technical field of work (because communication is a big part of every job in all such fields). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T17:58:03.490" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T17:58:03.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-20T06:30:35.523" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post. I need to know if I can ask some homework problems on here? Not full problems but after I provide my attempt at the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121509" OwnerDisplayName="Zlatan" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-06-20T11:33:37.007" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T21:48:40.210" Title="I need to know if I can ask some homework problems on here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8829" CreationDate="2016-06-20T07:31:30.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ideal question on this site will ask about some concept in physics. The aim is that after reading the question and its answer people will end up knowing more about physics than when they started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason we don't like homework questions is that in general they are just about solving some specific question so all anyone reading the answer learns is how to solve one question. Unless answering the question illustrates some general principle the answer won't be of much use to anyone but the person asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of all this is that if you're asking a homework question that doesn't help explain some wider concept we won't care whether or not you show how much effort you've put into it - we will close the question anyway. This isn't because we're mean and/or sadistic, it's because by posting questions like this you make the site a worse place for everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you're going to post a homework question make sure you write it to highlight the concept in physics that you don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" OwnerDisplayName="John Rennie" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T07:31:30.450" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8821" CreationDate="2016-06-20T14:59:00.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Chris White has given the PoV of a member in high standing, I'll offer a n00b's view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do this, I'll typically do it because I am confident that there are currently no correct answers, and I feel I can add to the discussion, but not to the level of a full answer. So perhaps I can give a synopsis of the right answer, an explanation of why existing answers are insufficient, and/or references to more info, but not enough to constitute more than a one-liner answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So either way (comment-answer or one-line-answer) I'll be in the wrong, and I'm not going to try to fake an answer by padding it out with unnecessary words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71103" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T14:59:00.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-20T21:10:42.527" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about the rationale behind closing list-based questions. The problem is that almost any question can be rephrased into a list question, and vice versa. Consider the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List: where is technique X applied in physics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-list: is technique X useful to physics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List: when is the solution to equation X unique?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-list: does equation X always have a unique solution?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List: where does approximation X break down?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-list: what is the useful range of validity of approximation X?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of these pairs, the OP asks for the same information, but we chastise them if they happen to pick the first phrasing. It ends up looking like we're very touchy about a particular taboo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we either stop doing this, or start editing list questions into non-list form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm reviving this because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/268852/is-there-an-example-where-filling-in-a-removable-discontinuity-produces-a-wron&quot;&gt;this example&lt;/a&gt;. The OP interacts with two high-level users. The first thinks it's obvious that &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; examples exist. The other thinks it's obvious that so many examples exist that the question is list-based. This is completely unhelpful and makes it look like we collectively have no idea what we're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T16:44:27.037" Title="Why close list-based questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8826" CreationDate="2016-06-22T19:57:20.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with knzhou that it is more profitable to discuss concrete (linked) examples.  As scientists we like to see the evidence and judge for ourselves rather than adopt somebody else's opinion on an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to imply that the fault is with those who post comments or answers.  Whether or not that is true, I agree with dmckee that if question-setters want better answers, it is their responsibility to ask better questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DanielSank reminds us that detailed advice about how to ask (and how to answer) already exists.  I think the reasons it is overlooked or ignored are that (i) it is not prominent, so users don't know it exists or where to find it, and (ii) it is far too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to suggest that question-setters be advised to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;make the crucial question prominent and clear&lt;/strong&gt;, preferably summarised in the title, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;include just enough context to make the difficulty understandable and well defined&lt;/strong&gt;, but not so much that it obscures the crucial question or that reading it becomes a chore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advice to those who answer also needs to be more prominent, in particular encouraging them to use comments to ask for clarification and further details, rather than to post outline solutions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(See : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8821/the-practice-of-answering-a-question-in-its-comments-area?cb=1&quot;&gt;The practice of answering a question in its comments area&lt;/a&gt;.)      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have suggested in answer to another Meta question, perhaps a very succint reminder of site policy/standards could be incorporated into the question/answer-posting process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T20:03:21.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-24T00:39:23.410" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/263881/56299&quot;&gt;Is running in a zigzag helpful in avoiding being shot by an arrow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has at least 7 upvotes, and the answer has at least 6 upvotes. I want to give the answerer a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't because my question is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I revise my question to be on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71340" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T17:58:19.797" Title="How can I revise my 'running in zigzag' question to be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-24T17:16:02.000" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that the responses, comments and criticisms (down-voting) of many regular users indicate that they are approaching every question as though it were a postgraduate research topic. Questions on basic Newtonian mechanics are invariably dragged into the realm of relativity. Enquiries into the fundamental characteristics of fluid flow are greeted with equations requiring a thorough understanding of calculus. Any discussion of light or waves is necessarily treated with quantum mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is equally concerning, and undoubtedly frustrating for the original posters in these instances, is that the respondents' answers are subsequently up-voted by other users of similar educational level. The more highly educated users are naturally the more frequent ones, so their responses are consequently deemed to be the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answers in each case, but this is clearly incorrect if we value the question of the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not surprising to me, then, that there would appear to be disproportionately little participation from lower level users. I suspect that many arrive and leave in frustration, if not humiliation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any presenter, teacher, communicator should always assess his or her audience before formulating an explanation. If the concepts being presented by the original poster are introductory or fundamental, we should respond accordingly. If the original poster is clearly at school or undergraduate level, our response should be congruous with the materials covered at those levels. There is ample opportunity to discuss higher level themes related to the same topic in another post. If a post is not pitched at a level that interests us, it is our prerogative not respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not mean to suggest that there is no value in introducing more advanced topics related to a post - sometimes it is warranted - but rather that those themes should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be presented as our primary responses. Nor should we up-vote a response as such. We should take care to consider and address each question at its level and context. To use a teaching term, our responses should be &lt;em&gt;learner focused&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it is a consequence of its game format, but it would appear that too many of us treat this forum as nothing more than a competition and an opportunity to showcase our brilliance. It is hard to avoid the perception of academic arrogance amongst some of us. But this is not productive, it is not erudite, and it is not positive for the field of physics. First and foremost, we should agree to respect each member of our community by addressing &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120291" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T21:20:42.847" Title="Respondents' consideration of the level of question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8838" CreationDate="2016-06-24T18:34:58.433" Score="8" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help message that comes up when asking a question says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of homework questions that show a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; amount of effort. Sometimes, they even have disclaimers attached, like, &quot;look! I showed absolutely everything I did, please don't close&quot;. We even get questions on meta where people are confused about why their homework question was closed (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6307/what-is-the-meaning-of-effort-that-phys-se-wants-in-homework-questions&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6131/this-question-shouldnt-violate-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8829/i-need-to-know-if-i-can-ask-some-homework-problems-on-here&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8854/homework-and-exercise-tag&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;) when they read the policy and showed effort just as it said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a problem with wording. The 'show some effort' clause comes second, is shorter, and sounds more final, making it stick in people's heads better. But our actual homework policy (i.e. the de facto community standards, not the blurb) emphasizes the first clause a lot more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose a rewording of the blurb to something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;. Don't just tell us you're confused; tell us why you're confused, and what you've tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wouldn't change anything about our policies, but I bet it would decrease the amount of questions we have to close. Does this sound effective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T18:34:38.337" Title="Slight rephrasing of homework question policy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8834" CreationDate="2016-06-24T19:26:26.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately I posted an Answer before your question was put On Hold.  This allowed me to develop it further without competition (or interest) from anyone else.  The challenge of the question is its own reward : I do not feel robbed without the bounty you would like to offer, particularly since I had no competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My disappointment with the On Hold decision is that it prevents any alternative solutions and contrary views from being explored, such as M Barbosa's vector approach.  Good Answers emerge from healthy debate.  The Up Votes show that it is a popular and slightly controversial question (perhaps Game of Thrones fans like you), so I would have expected at least 2 more Answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the consensus even among those who did not Vote to Close seems to be that the question is &quot;off topic&quot;.  Personally I disagree.  It is Applied Mathematics, and requires calculations of speed, time and distance - but so is any question on kinematics or projectile motion, which are &quot;on topic&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the broader context of the question requires the development of an appropriate mathematical model, instead of being handed one on a plate.  This involves deciding which factors are the most significant, how they can be represented mathematically, and what approximations to make.  Seeing the different approaches and solutions that working physicists with different backgrounds bring to modelling the same situation can be very instructive for everyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if those who did Vote to Close, or up-voted the &quot;off topic&quot; comment, were more willing to discuss where they think the boundary lies between what is on- and off-topic.  Or at least provided Answers to this Meta question.  Merely pointing you to the Help Center is not very helpful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cynically, I think M Barbosa is right : If you had replaced the Game of Thrones context with an artificial one using a few physics concepts - eg neutrinos being fired at neutrons which can somehow be steered left and right (you don't need to say how, just call it a Thought Experiment) - then I think it would never have been put On Hold! My own Answer goes a little in this direction by mentioning &quot;collision cross-section.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, you might &lt;strong&gt;include gravity in your model&lt;/strong&gt; (which is already there in the GoT scenario), making it explicitly a question about projectile motion.  You might also consider replacing the Newtonian Mechanics tag (which is not strictly applicable) with Applied Physics.  Finally, &lt;strong&gt;flag the question for Moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt;, explaining what changes you've made and why you think it is now &quot;on topic&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have no evidence that this would be successful.  I have appealed against the closure of several questions, without any success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since posting the above Answer, I now appreciate why the question is deemed off-topic by those who voted to close it. A change of terminology, or even focussing on projectile motion, would not have altered the decision, for the reasons given by ACuriousMind in his Answer. I think such problem-solving questions &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; be off-topic for the site, but I agree that, as a matter of fact, according to the current site policy this one is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T17:58:19.797" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T17:58:19.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2016-06-24T19:33:42.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt this would have any effect on the number of questions we have to close, because most of the people who ask those questions have never seen this banner in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may change how often people try to argue for reopening of their question despite not really understanding why it was closed. But I suspect the reduction in people complaining that they showed effort would be offset by an increase in people complaining that they asked a specific physics question, where in many of those cases it will turn out that they didn't show any effort at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe alternatives without the &quot;show effort&quot; clause were considered when we first formulated the homework-like close reason. A lot of discussion went into it, and although I don't remember the details, there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; reasons for deciding on the wording we came up with as opposed to any of several alternatives. I'm not saying we got it right, just pointing out that this has probably been considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, we're throwing out the whole homework policy (and close reason) soon, when I get time to get back to guiding the process, and replacing it with something else. I don't think it's necessary to change the wording in such a well-entrenched close reason so soon before we scrap it entirely. We can definitely take this feedback into account when coming up with whatever will replace the current homework close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T19:33:42.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2016-06-24T19:41:58.387" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the respondents in some instances simply do not appreciate the effort that the original poster has put into their question, or otherwise assume that no effort was made due to its apparent simplicity. Of course, there are many instances in which there was none, so judgement plays a role in one's approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many homework-type questions, the OP simply does not know where to start for lack of understanding of the underlying concepts. This does not necessarily imply that he or she has not done due diligence in &lt;em&gt;trying&lt;/em&gt; to understand them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that what might be simple or obvious for one person is not necessarily obvious for another. Furthermore, many of the most simple physical concepts are explained in textbooks and the Internet in a manner that is unclear, presumptuous or even obfuscating. It takes little effort and costs nothing to provide a quick introduction to the theory or a hint at the process to get people going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120291" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T19:41:58.387" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8835" CreationDate="2016-06-24T20:40:05.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the interesting feature of Stack Exchange is that answers (and questions) are intended to have a life after the original asker is satisfied and goes their own way. We're building an archive of well-answered, high-quality questions here so having each question answered at a variety of levels is purely a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T21:20:42.847" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T21:20:42.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8835" CreationDate="2016-06-24T21:11:31.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am with knzhou in asking you to provide concrete examples.  Although, I appreciate your reluctance to be seen to criticise other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are right that there is a tendency in some cases to provide excessively technical Answers.  I think the motivation is that Questions (and Answers) are expected to be of benefit not only to the person posting the question but also to the broader community. There is also an innate tendency in our profession to generalise.  But this sometimes conflicts with the questioner's need for a simple, specific answer pitched at his/her level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, again like knzhou, I don't have the impression that this is widespread or a problem for the question-poster.  Regardless of how many up-votes a technical Answer gets, the OP's choice is what really counts as Best Answer to the Question actually posted.  And I have seen a few embarrassing comments like &quot;Fine, but can you explain what this means - I'm only in Grade 12.&quot;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I too notice quite a lot of abandoned questions, but not because of getting a technical response.  Instead, when challenged to &quot;show your attempt&quot; to a bare question.  To me this shows the questioner is ill-motivated, and I feel no remorse if my comment and down-vote has discouraged posting further questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same vein, I come across too many instances of what knzhou cites - lay questions about popular science topics well above the OP's ability to understand, often rather fanciful &quot;What would happen if...?&quot; questions.  Suggesting that the OP come back after learning some basic physics may seem rude but is entirely in line with the purpose of this site : to help serious students and researchers become better physicists, not to answer every idle question about physics which anyone can possibly think of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T21:11:31.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8829" CreationDate="2016-06-24T21:33:27.020" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with John Rennie's opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is very difficult to learn about physics without discussing and working on specific problems.  That is how I learnt physics.  And judging by the volume of very specific situation-type problems at the end of every chapter of almost every physics textbook, the experts in physics education agree with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping everything general and abstract is frustrating for the student, and frustrating for the person trying to answer the student's questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that there is no difference between a homework problem and any other problem.  The real issue is : What attempt have you made to solve it?  What we are trying to discourage is lazy students who just want an answer without having to think.  So the site policy is to provide hints to help you to answer the question for yourself as much as possible.  That way you get the most benefit from the 'exercise'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T21:48:40.210" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T21:48:40.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2016-06-25T02:22:02.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes I agree.  The stock reason given for putting questions on hold - viz. that &quot;homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to solve the problem&quot; - is confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not that the 1st phrase is being overlooked because the 2nd is distracting, but that many users (even those with &gt; 2k rep) do not appreciate the very literal meaning which is intended for it.  The 2nd phrase is not distracting but misleading and confusing if (as in your examples) it does not in fact apply.  And the meaning of &quot;homework-like&quot; is obscure and inconsistent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I agree with your removal of the 2nd phrase if it does not apply.  These are 2 distinct reasons for closing and should not be lumped together unless both apply. The criterion of &quot;asking about a specific physics concept&quot; should surely apply to &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions.  I don't see any justification for discriminating against &quot;homework-like&quot; questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your amendment &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; attempt to explain what is meant by the 1st phrase, which I still find ambiguous after 3 months as a very active user.  &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; does it fully express the meaning of the policy-makers?  Judging by your examples, it seems to me that it does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that I (and probably most newbies) interpret the 1st phrase is that there must be some identifiable physics within the question - ie it must be clearly within the standard physics syllabus and answerable by the application of physical concepts and principles.  Thus a question about solving a system of pulleys or the static equilibrium of forces on a ladder is presumed implicitly to &quot;ask about a specific physics concept.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The responses to the Meta questions which you cite show that the policy-makers expect this phrase to be interpreted literally - and to a varying extent also rigidly.  The question (and answer) must be confined to asking for (or providing) an explanation of a physical concept. The OP must identify what his/her own conceptual misunderstanding or confusion is.  As Chris White says in (1) &quot;We cannot read your mind about what you do or do not understand.&quot; And if there are multiple sources of confusion in the question, instead of one, it might be rejected for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T02:50:29.370" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T02:50:29.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8845" CreationDate="2016-06-25T07:56:05.173" Score="16" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/264427/84895&quot;&gt;Imagine I&amp;#39;m on a spacecraft that was accelerated to 1.0$c$ could I only move backwards?&lt;/a&gt;, I asked something that came into my mind and I wasn't able to find an answer for it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I posted it, the list of related posts (the list under the title before posting didn't!) showed a question what seemed to be the same. I had a look, found there my answer and marked my post as dupe of that one. Now after that was done I'm getting more and more downvotes for it. What might this reason be? Should I have deleted the post instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84895" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T11:20:10.927" Title="Is this considered bad attitude?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8844" CreationDate="2016-06-25T08:10:31.800" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you have done the right thing. With some many questions on the site it's very easy to miss the fact that a duplicate exists, and to be fair the site search isn't as great as it could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't attach too much significance to the downvotes. It's easy to feel that downvotes are a personal criticism, but really they are just a statement that the question isn't appropriate for the site. Personally I don't downvote duplicates just because they are duplicates, though I know some site members feel differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting does remove the question from the site home page, so there is an argument that a question should be downvoted when we don't want it to appear there. Maybe that's why you have the two downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that it's generally bad form to delete a question. I can't remember the reasons for this, but I'm sure I have seen comments from the moderators that in general questions shouldn't deleted. Just leave the question - there is an automated cleanup process for downvoted questions that springs into life after a couple of weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth you should be congratulated for responding to the duplicate link, reviewing the duplicate and deciding that your question is indeed answered by the existing one. Too many people just abandon their duplicate questions and leave it to the moderators to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A quick footnote to summarise David's comments below&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a bit hasty to suggest you shouldn't delete your question. The Stack Exchange has various checks to detect users who it thinks aren't being serious, and it will eventually block those users from asking any more questions. One of the criteria it uses is the number of times the user asks a question then deletes it - hence my vague memory that deleting your own questions is a bad thing. However deleting one question, or even a few questions, isn't likely to cause a problem. So you should feel free to delete your question if you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A footnote to the footnote&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens the issue of how deleted questions affect your status has just arisen in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8851/what-is-the-positive-question-record&quot;&gt;What is the &amp;quot;positive question record&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;. This explains why having lots of deleted question is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T11:20:10.927" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8825" CreationDate="2016-06-25T13:28:36.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This seems to be more of a formatting issue, since there are exponents in the plaintext source, but the html shown in the edit history is still wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a formatting issue. Wikipedia does not store the HTML. It instead stores a page's wiki markup text. The problem is that the meaning of that markup language changes. Old pages are rendered to HTML using the current definition of the markup language rather than the definition at the time the page was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's exactly what happened here. The October 2013 version of the referenced wikipedia page used (for example) &lt;code&gt;1.7{{Esp|6}}&lt;/code&gt; to represent what we would write as $1.7\times10^6$ as LaTeX code to be rendered by MathJax. (What? No LaTeX on meta.physics.SE?) The &lt;code&gt;Esp&lt;/code&gt; wiki markup template no longer exists; it now redirects to the &lt;code&gt;ESp&lt;/code&gt; template, which apparently has something to do with semi-protected pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast that to the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) works. It captures and stores a page's HTML. That doesn't mean that old captured pages will always display correctly. Some elements of HTML4 marked as deprecated were marked as obsolete in HTML5, and apparently even more stuff will become obsolete with HTML6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T13:28:36.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8844" CreationDate="2016-06-26T15:05:44.997" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with JohnRennie's &lt;strong&gt;original&lt;/strong&gt; view - that you should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; delete your question -  especially if Answers have been posted.  Those Answers might be valuable to the people who posted them, as well as to the wider community.  They might be better than the Answers in the Question you are duplicating.  Comments can also provide valuable information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if no answers or comments have been posted yet, users might be preparing an Answer and it is very frustrating to have done all that work just to find that the Question has been deleted already.  (That has happened to me several times on other sites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I agree that by &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; deleting and heading your question with a note that it is a duplicate, you did the best you could do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The slight problem with this option is that you take the risk of attracting down-votes, which cost you rep.  That is unfair - you should not suffer from doing the right thing.  However, I think it might be difficult to alter the site programming to avoid such a penalty without leaving the rep system open to abuse (posting marked duplicate questions to gain upvotes without the risk of downvotes). Also, the cost is small (-2 per downvote) and few downvotes are likely to be cast if the question is already acknowledged to be a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a &lt;strong&gt;tougher dilemma&lt;/strong&gt; occurs if you realise that the question is actually a stupid one, or is clearly &quot;off topic&quot;, hence is likely to (or starting to) attract many down-votes.  Should you delete it then, even if no Answers are posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you should likewise mark it &lt;strong&gt;in the title&lt;/strong&gt; eg &quot;Withdrawn - awaiting auto-deletion&quot; but not delete it, and again allow the system to delete it according to the auto-delete criteria.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is less of a case for doing this, compared with a duplicate question, since you are unlikely to have gotten any actual or pending Answers - just a lot of negative comments.  Nevertheless, I think it is best not to delete in this case also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE in response to Comment by ACuriousMind :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that, once the Question is posted, other users may acquire a stake in it.  For example, those who are typing/researching an Answer, and those who are debating it via comments or in the chatroom.  The OP may decide that he/she no longer requires an answer, or that the question is stupid, but that should not be decisive.  Others might disagree, suggest edits, and upvote it.  If there are no developments within 30 days, the clean-up process takes care of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This view is consistent with that expressed by dmckee that the purpose of Physics SE is not merely to satisfy users' immediate needs for explanations, but to build an archive of Answers for future reference. If the only purpose of Physics SE were to satisfy the immediate needs of the OP, then of course the OP should do as he/she wishes, and delete even if Answers have been posted.  Furthermore, all questions might as well be deleted if the OPs no longer need them.  But if Questions and Answers have value to the Community of Users, then the OP should not have sole control over their fate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of marking in the title is to alert potential respondents that the OP no longer requires an answer.  That will discourage some (probably most)  users from answering.  Exactly what is marked (and where) is up for debate.  This is only a suggestion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T02:02:01.283" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T02:02:01.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8821" CreationDate="2016-06-26T20:34:07.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents. I've seen it and understand the reasons stated, both from high rep and others. Good reasons. But really it defeats the purpose of both comments and answers. If you think you know spend the time to answer it right. If you are not sure it's complete or totally right, or cannot take the time to answer it right, let others take their chance. Sometimes one goes to answer a question just 30 minutes after being posted, and there is already comments - sometimes some saying it is a bad question, some giving a 1 line or worse 2 word answer (in effect saying a stupid and obvious question that 2 words will answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it can not easily be controlled, except moderators can certainly make it clear the site preferences and rules, and try to enforce it in some extreme cases. I am not advocating for a censure-like approach on comments, just to have some minimal controls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the purpose of comments, I understood it was to comment on what is posted in the question or answer. Such as clarify your question on this xxx topic, or it does not make sense for this xxx reason, or it is an interesting question that could be modified in tHis xxx specific way to be more to the point, or other comments. Not grammatical minor issues, but comments on the topic clarification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then let the people who would try to answer give it a try. One can be quality comment on answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like it's been said before, comments are not for extended discussions. Many questions and answers do merit extended discussions, I know it's in chat that you're supposed to do it, but I have not seen really if that works. When I go to chat I see a million things except some thing I was looking for. I probably don't know how to really use it, but just a point that the extended discussions may not be working well (they don't for me, others may know better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, comments should not be answers or answers to answers, just comments. Many of you have Ben here longer so you may not better, just my two cents&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108333" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T20:34:07.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-26T21:03:46.163" Score="0" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDITED after the question was marked as a possible duplicate: I don't think that all items noted in the comments were part of answers before, not fully developed and explained, and which could be argued. I don't disagree with many of the comments, but find some to be not helpful. Still, this site is a meta site and opinions can be valid answers. I'd like to see some reasoned answers posted, if possible, but, it's been about 8 months since I posted it, it does not matter much at this point. I was just questioning, not creating a controversy, I thought. BB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a little bewildered by what seems to me the few questions posted by participants with medium and higher reputations. I have not compiled statistics, and if I am wrong then so be it. But it seems to me most of the questions are by participants who are relatively new to the site, or otherwise have not posted as much as others. The opposite is true on answers. Now, this is of course relative and one has to be careful, since the population of participants probably has an average or mean in the lower reputation and participation persons. Still, it seems to be a little that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind, and in fact would encourage even more questions by anyone, including lower reputation and participation questions. It is important to have the new blood and ideas. But I'd also like to see more complex or well thought out questions by people who may have more; we may see an increase of quality in the question (well, you never know, but more from a population that could contribute interesting questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDITED, added from here on: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is not why it happens. there were previous questions eg,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/question-self-destruction-why-dont-experts-ask-more-questions&quot;&gt;Question self-destruction: why don&amp;#39;t experts ask more questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that asked that, and the answers were truthful, in my opinion, and elucidated the reasons. My question is whether there might be a way to get those to increase. Some were mentioned in the answers in that url, but if we'd like to increase quality perhaps there are also other ways also. Those mentioned a couple years back didn't seem to take hold &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 Increase the number of points for positive votes for questions&#xA;2 increase more the number of points for positive votes on questions and say more than 3K reputation (I know, sounds like favoritism, propose an alternate)&#xA;3 create a few more tags for eg, for news exploration, paper reviews or comments -- where the question/answer explains the relevance of some new findings, or describes a paper and asks a question on it&#xA;4  others I can't think of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is are there other good ideas for this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T08:22:49.227" Title="Few questions by medium and high reputation participants - EDITED: how to get more?" Tags="|discussion|questions|reputation|quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ClosedDate="2017-02-11T14:08:41.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8834" CreationDate="2016-06-26T21:41:06.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who voted to close, I would say you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; make this question on-topic because it is inherently not about physics - it is about choosing some model for how an archer aims/shoots/hits a target and then computing the outcomes of that model for the two different paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is not apparent what the &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; aspect of this question is, and specifically what physics is being asked about. I would think the primary aspect is actually whether or not human beings can reliably aim such that they hit a zig-zagging object, and I don't consider human archery ability to be an aspect of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As minor supporting evidence of this not being about physics, the existing answer does not actually use any specific &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; to develop a model of probability for the archer hitting the target: A certain way of determining the probability of whether the archer hits or not is chosen, and then the outcomes computed. The model of probability just says &quot;assume an inverse square law&quot;, and then purely geometrical considerations lead to the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many other models are possible, including or excluding certain physical and unphysical factors (like wind, gravity, the archer's eyesight, the archer's tiredness, the (un)balancedness fo the arrows,...) will give rise to different models. So the question is not only about something of dubious physical constant, but also too broad: Regardless of how physical the answers are, how do we determine the correct one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T21:41:06.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8852" CreationDate="2016-06-27T16:36:59.027" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the positive question record in figure below?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0yd4Y.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0yd4Y.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-07-31T12:38:14.880" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T12:38:14.880" Title="What is the &quot;positive question record&quot;?" Tags="|support|questions|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8851" CreationDate="2016-06-27T23:45:30.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was answered in the comments, but to make it more formal: the documentation for this and all badges is in the help centre and in the cross-network &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;; in this case in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234259/asking-days-badges&quot;&gt;Asking days badges&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting from there,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;positive question record&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)&#xA;                                                /total questions &amp;gt;= 0.5&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;triple counts&lt;/em&gt; a question that is downvoted, closed, and&#xA;  deleted. If you ask one that hits that trifecta, you'll need to ask&#xA;  three better questions to dig yourself out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just to emphasise again, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt; is the first place to check for these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T23:45:30.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2016-06-29T07:51:12.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's my impression that the ones that show least effort are the ones that don't get closed.&#xA;Posts with 1, 2 or 3 sentences, either why? how? or what?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do we want the 2-form ω to be closed? What if it is not?&lt;/em&gt; (quoted in full)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Why is there no factor of 1/2 in the lagrangian ..&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;What is the irreducible decomposition of the tensor product of left and right weyl spinor...&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;From Goldstein's Classical Mechanics (2nd ed.), problem 38 of chapter 9 ...&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not supposed to help kids with their homework, but papers for university students, that's ok? That they live on a campus doesn't mean it's not homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about pulleys and weights, about velocity and acceleration, about momentum and collisions, etc.. are also physics. Wouldn't be too much work to sort them, create a decent overview, and display a prominent message when people want to register, telling them such questions are no longer accepted because there is a complete overview available, with link. But a collection of questions without clear and complete answers is useless, so that's not an option...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118178" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T07:51:12.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-29T10:44:07.230" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is there a complete homework and exercise tag, when all the question asked under that category are termed as off-topic. This tab accounts as the second largest tab but still the moderators down vote and also mark the topics under this tag even after providing a complete attempt done by the person who is asking the question. Why don't you people just discard the tag of 'homework and exercise'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second thing, do even conceptual question account for homework and exercise questions?  Recently I just asked a simple question, whether the force in some direction should be zero or not, i even  presented my own view and I didn't even ask the PSE to give me the complete answer to the question(I had only written the conceptual part in which I was facing problem) which I wanted to solve, still the question was regarded as belonging to homework and exercises. Pretty much abstruse!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user118752" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-06-29T10:48:22.860" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T04:47:39.290" Title="Homework and Exercise Tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8854" CreationDate="2016-06-29T12:29:37.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag exists for people who don't want to see homework-motivated questions. They can ignore the tag to filter those questions out of their view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As people pointed out in the comments, your premise that all &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; questions are off topic is false. There are questions which are on topic and yet should have the tag, but it takes some care to ask such a question. In summary, it needs to ask about a concept (i.e. not for an answer or a procedure) and it needs to show how the concept in question emerges in the process of solving the problem. (This is part of what we consider &quot;effort&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, our homework policy is changing soon. Perhaps at that point, we will get rid of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T12:29:37.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8856" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8857" CreationDate="2016-06-30T08:10:24.180" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user offers some bounty for his own question and awards it, can he offer bounty for the same question again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T11:50:10.277" Title="Can a question be offered for bounty twice by a same user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8856" CreationDate="2016-06-30T11:10:28.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, questions (and answers) can be awarded multiple bounties, both by multiple users and by the same user. Examples can be found using the Stack Exchange Data Explorer queries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/406949/answers-awarded-multiple-bounties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Answers awarded multiple bounties&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/506465/questions-with-multiple-bounties-by-any-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Questions with multiple bounties by any users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/506472/questions-with-multiple-bounties-by-the-same-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Questions with multiple bounties by the same user&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T11:50:10.277" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T11:50:10.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8859" CreationDate="2016-06-30T12:41:12.890" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt; which is a catalogue of links to resource recommendation questions. For me it has been (in combination with the individual resource recommendations that are linked in the wiki) one of the most useful things on physics.SE. So thank you to the creators! I absolutely love it!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I wanted to ask if it is still getting updated?&lt;/strong&gt; I've found a few questions that would maybe fit in quite well (although I'm not sure what the criteria are exactly are other than &quot;not too specialised&quot;). Just to give a few of the questions that don't seem to be listed and seem to fit the criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maths: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/127376&quot;&gt;Resources for theory of distributions (generalized functions) for physicists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;QFT: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/41589&quot;&gt;Reading list in topological QFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta-question seems related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5307/do-we-need-want-an-overarching-books-question&quot;&gt;Do we need/want an overarching books question?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I don't want to open a can of worms here, but was there a conclusion/decision about the topic? It doesn't seem to say in the meta-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T14:08:26.080" Title="Does the resource catalogue question still get updated?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8858" CreationDate="2016-06-30T13:16:00.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can certainly add links into the answer there, but I don't think it's a comprehensive list anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original idea was that only resource recommendation questions of the form &quot;books at [level] about [subject]&quot; would be allowed, where &quot;[subject]&quot; would be one of the big fields like thermodynamics, Newtonian mechanics, quantum field theory, etc. That meant the number of resource recommendation questions would be quite limited, and they could all be listed in one question. But at some point, the community changed its mind in favor of allowing a much broader variety of resource recommendation questions. Given that, it's no longer practical to have a complete list in one place. That's why we haven't really bothered to keep the master recommendation question up to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T13:16:00.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8858" CreationDate="2016-06-30T14:08:26.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to know if it's still being updated, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/12176/revisions&quot;&gt;edit history&lt;/a&gt; will tell you what's been going on there lately. There's some activity there, but really not that much compared to the activity of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've advocated before, the overall books question is of rather limited utility when compared to the site's advanced search features. If you're looking for highly-upvoted questions about topic X in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=topic+X+%5Bresource-recommendations%5D&quot;&gt;you can simply search for topic X in conjunction with the [resource-recommendations] syntax, and order by votes&lt;/a&gt;. It's not immediately as useful as the overarching books question - you do need to adjust your search to what you're looking or browsing for - but with some search-fu you can get a lot of good stuff that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the searches don't get you a curated list of recommendation questions. The reason for this is that there hasn't been enough interest from the community in &lt;em&gt;curating&lt;/em&gt; such a list. The tag itself takes a fair amount of work to curate (as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed/&quot;&gt;site policy&lt;/a&gt;) and it took ages to bring the old posts in line with the new policy (which I think is mostly done now?). However, there haven't been any volunteers to commit time to the upkeep of that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that were to change, though, I don't think anyone would mind much, at least at the start (particularly provided that the edits to the overarching question are relatively infrequent, so it's not on the front page &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the time). So if you, or someone else, wants to dig in and make that list answer better - go for it, it's a community project. Just don't complain that the answer is being neglected if you're not personally willing to take charge of its maintenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T14:08:26.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8862" CreationDate="2016-06-30T15:36:51.000" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Form &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;Help Center:&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6h75.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6h75.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But this happened for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/252725/stable-sides-of-polygon-objects/252810#252810&quot;&gt;my answer.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wtePG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wtePG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Am I misunderstanding about sentence that I have specified by red line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T16:20:20.647" Title="Acceptance of an answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8861" CreationDate="2016-06-30T15:53:53.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is just a misinterpretation of the language used. The phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they may not change the accepted answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;doesn't mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; change the accepted answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; not change the accepted answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that even if a better answer comes along the OP isn't necessarily going to change which answer they have accepted. They may not think the new answer is better, or they may simply have abandoned the site and never returned to check for new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had answers of mine unaccepted months or I think even years after they were originally accepted. There is no time limit for an OP to change which of the answers to their question they accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T15:53:53.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8849" CreationDate="2016-06-30T22:05:07.197" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless this were a puzzle site, where questions are intended to challenge or entertain, I don't think there is any purpose in posting questions just for the sake of it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most interesting questions have open-ended answers which would be a matter of opinion or conjecture - in other words, off-topic.  This applies also to your suggestion of discussing recent research papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Average question quality is low because anyone can post a question.  The majority who do are relatively new to physics, and don't know what makes a good physics question, nor what is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the most obvious way of increasing the proportion (but not number) of good questions is to restrict the privilege of asking questions to (i) those with a minimum rep of say 3K, or (ii) those with a minimum education in physics, eg undergraduate.  The 1st is self-checking, the 2nd would probably require an active check of credentials.  This would also solve the problem of getting far too many off-topic questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion of increasing the number of points for questions which get more than say 5 votes (net) seems reasonable to me.  Perhaps also increasing the penalty for down-votes for a question.  However, I don't think many of us ask or answer questions just for the rep.  The incentive will have little effect except encouraging those who are chasing rep to post good questions which they have found on other sites, or even on this site but with sufficient change of wording and tags to avoid obvious detection as a duplicate.  The penalty will be more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the number of low-rep questions is drastically reduced, I think even a several-fold increase in high-rep questions will not make a noticeable difference to the site.  Moreover, the increase in high-rep questions will not encourage an increase in the quality of low-rep questions.  Low-rep users are unlikely to read and learn from high-rep questions, because they are mostly only concerned to get answers to their own questions, and unable to understand the level of physics which high-rep users ask about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is not a new one.  See :&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4337/what-can-be-done-about-the-current-ongoing-flood-of-homework-and-very-basic-qu?rq=1&quot;&gt;What can be done about the (current) ongoing flood of homework and very basic questions overwhelming our site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that Meta Question, posted 3 years ago, which currently has 28 up-votes, Dilaton writes :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The About of Physics SE still says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Physics is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So : What can be done to counteract the overtaking of Physics SE by homework, very basic, and laypeople questions to make it a better and more attractive place for active researchers, academics, and students of the site topic again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... If the targeted audience should still be the one described in the About, something has to be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T17:28:22.720" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8825" CreationDate="2016-07-01T01:24:44.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's indeed a template issue, as Hammen writes. The edit histories of both pages and templates are preserved, but the old pages are displayed using the current templates. Which makes some sense from an editor's perspective: you see what the page will look like when/if you restore that version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some wikimedia extensions can display old pages with the old templates:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BackwardsTimeTravel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BackwardsTimeTravel&lt;/a&gt;, which implements it for history pages, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Memento extension&lt;/a&gt;, supporting the Memento protocol which allows you to browse the web at a chosen date in the past (or at least that small part of the web that supports the protocol). Not available on wikipedia or other wikimedia sites however, the only website listed is w3.org. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me the use of such a poorly designed template seems more problematic. A missing or wrong template should not result in a different value being shown, and there is already a template offering way more formatting options that doesn't have that problem, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Val&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Val&lt;/a&gt;: {{val|3.14e4}} will display 3.14 x 10&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; when the template can be found, and nothing or an error message otherwise, but it won't display only 3.14. &quot;Val&quot; has plenty of people maintaining it, &quot;Esp&quot; seems to have been the work of one person who wanted a tiny bit more space between the x and the 10. Fortunately it's not popular, when the redirect was re-targeted in Aug 2015, it was used 76 times on wikipedia, 48 of those were in the article mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I doubt that raising these issues at wikipedia (one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;village pumps&lt;/a&gt;, policy pages?, noticeboards?, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jimmy Wales's talk page&lt;/a&gt;) would have any impact, because:&lt;br&gt;- editors are already aware that old pages may not appear correctly&lt;br&gt;- they usually look at the wikitext rather than the rendered page&#xA;&lt;br&gt;- all the content is in this case still available, so verification is still possible&#xA;&lt;br&gt;- wikipedia doesn't consider itself a reliable source, so concerns about using it as source, especially using the old versions as source won't carry much weight &#xA;&lt;br&gt;- link-rot is a big problem, many of the sources used in old pages won't work anymore, making the incorrect display of the content a rather minor issue in comparison&#xA;&lt;br&gt;- wikipedia doesn't keep all history: old versions of deleted pages and templates can't be retrieved, so the problem will always exist. Making these available to editors is on the list of perennial proposals, always comes back and always rejected. &#xA;&lt;br&gt;- a proposal to install the memento extension could get some support, but there is so much criticism about almost every technical development coming from the WMF that most would prefer that they first fix all the existing problems (visual editor etc...)&#xA;&lt;br&gt;- Basically, I don't think it would be considered an issue, at least not more than it was already. Most editors have a list of improvements they want to see, things that help editors (better wikipedia search for example). While this could make it somewhat easier to view old pages, editors look mostly at diffs (differences between versions), which are shown in wikitext anyway. &#xA;&lt;br&gt;- on second thought, I may have overstated the &quot;risks&quot; of such a badly designed template. Problems with templates are more typically caused by editors pushing changes in existing templates against concensus. This one is used on some 40 articles, all about astronomy it seems. Probably the persons who wrote it, so they will be alerted when anything happens to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118178" LastEditorUserId="118178" LastEditDate="2016-07-01T14:11:54.537" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T14:11:54.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-01T06:32:40.930" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/265593/thus-what-mediates-the-electric-interaction-between-two-electrons&quot;&gt;Thus, what mediates the electric interaction between two particles&lt;/a&gt; which in the question essentially asks: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;QTF experts say that there are no virtual particles, they are just a calculation trick. So, ok, no particle mediates the electrostatic interaction, what mediates it then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was given as a duplicate the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142159/deriving-the-coulomb-force-equation-from-the-idea-of-photon-exchange&quot;&gt;deriving the coulomb force equation from the idea of photon exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the reference I do not think that the OP will be wiser even though there is a clear derivation of the coulomb force from tree level, it does not address simply  the &quot;mediation&quot; question,  and is , imo, way over the level of the original  OP's background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It boils down on whether one wants layman or beginning physics questions here. It is not just the titles that should declare duplication, and I think that , as in this example, the people who jump on the &quot;duplicate&quot; choice have not really read the content of the one they propose in order  to check if it is on the physics background level of  the original questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T11:05:21.017" Title="precipitate duplicate declaration" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8865" CreationDate="2016-07-01T07:53:16.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to say that I disagree. The question is a clear duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142159/deriving-the-coulomb-force-equation-from-the-idea-of-photon-exchange&quot;&gt;Deriving the Coulomb force equation from the idea of photon exchange?&lt;/a&gt;. I take your point that the answers to that question are somewhat technical, but the solution is to add a less technical answer to the existing question not to leave the duplicate open. I note also that the duplicate does link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2244/the-exchange-of-photons-gives-rise-to-the-electromagnetic-force&quot;&gt;The exchange of photons gives rise to the electromagnetic force&lt;/a&gt; and that has some more accessible answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T11:05:21.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8869" CreationDate="2016-07-01T20:24:48.540" Score="6" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I had some issues regarding an answer (now deleted) that I encountered in the Low Quality queue. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/265664/virtual-work-problem-from-feynmans-tips-on-physics&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt; asked for clarification about a solution by Michael A. Gottlieb, and included a screenshot of that solution without its copyright notice. The reviewed answer recommended to ask Michael A. Gottlieb. I marked the answer to recommend deletion, before noticing that the answer was written by Michael A. Gottlieb himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards, I got a notification of a comment to my review (I didn't know those existed) from Gottlieb, who asked me to remove the copyrighted material. I edited out the screenshot and flagged the question with a custom flag. I also commented Gottlieb that he should have edited the question and/or contacted the mods, instead of posting a non-answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the answer has been converted to a comment by Qmechanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question about this incident are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For future reference, what is the correct course of action in a case like this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4613/78942&quot;&gt;previous meta answer&lt;/a&gt;, DavidZ opined that quoting a textbook (giving attribution) is admisable under the fair use exception. It seems that Michael A. Gottlieb opines otherwise. Are screenshots different from quotations? How this incident affects/could affect other posts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The offending image is still available in the edit history. Is this OK? Is there any way to remove it in a more permanent way (for example, asking imgur to delete it)? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T00:34:32.260" Title="Deleting copyrighted material" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8867" CreationDate="2016-07-01T21:35:49.993" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hm. Well, this is a complicated situation because there are a bunch of individual problems to fix, none of which are really related to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, the main issue on your mind: the possible copyright infringement. I'm not a lawyer and not an official representative of SE, so I can't really give an &lt;em&gt;authoritative&lt;/em&gt; answer to this, but the following is my understanding based on what I've heard and read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you see content on SE that you suspect is infringing copyright, &lt;strong&gt;you are not required to do anything about it.&lt;/strong&gt; The best thing you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is alert the copyright owner, since it's their responsibility to deal with infringements of their copyright. They have the legal authority to force a response from SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pointless to alert the mods; we won't, and perhaps legally can't, do anything about it. You could try bringing it to the attention of the SE team, but they may or may not do anything about it. You shouldn't edit it out, not if copyright infringement is the reason for the edit, because you're not qualified to make a legal judgement on whether a claim of copyright infringement is valid. (But you can edit it out for other reasons - see below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a TL;DR of sorts: once you have either notified the copyright owner or decided not to do so, the recommended course of action completely &lt;em&gt;ignore&lt;/em&gt; the fact that the content may be infringing someone's copyright. You can then proceed to deal with other problems that the content may have, just as you would if there were no issue of copyright at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now that you're not thinking about copyright, the likely next problem to check for is plagiarism. We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;rules about referencing material&lt;/a&gt; taken from other sources, whether that material is an idea, a quotation, a screen capture, or whatever. As a rough summary, the rules amount to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any substantial content or original idea taken from an external source should be attributed to that source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything that is &lt;em&gt;copied&lt;/em&gt; from an external source must be identified as being copied&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Violation of our referencing rules constitutes plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see content that qualifies as plagiarism, you're welcome to fix it yourself. If you know the source and can edit in the attribution required to bring it in line with the rules, go right ahead and do that. Otherwise, if the content isn't essential to the post, you can edit it out. Otherwise, you can always flag for mod attention and let us figure it out. (Especially if you notice someone repeatedly or blatantly plagiarizing, you should bring it to the mods' attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do keep in mind that when you make any edits or cast any flags of this sort, you are dealing with a &lt;em&gt;plagiarism&lt;/em&gt; problem. &lt;em&gt;Not&lt;/em&gt; a copyright problem. The two do often go together - when someone plagiarizes, they are often also committing copyright infringement - but you should ignore the copyright issue and only deal with the plagiarism. Don't mention copyright in your flags or your edit summaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case you're asking about, the source of the content in the picture was not identified, so I would consider that an instance of plagiarism. It would be an easy one to fix by editing in a link to the source, assuming you knew the source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's yet another problem in the post, which is that one should never post an image with textual content. Or in other words, anything that can be typed out should be typed out, not posted as an image. Again, this is an easy one to fix: when you see an image of text, just transcribe the text. When it's a mix of text and pictures, crop the image to include only the parts that you really can't type out and upload the cropped version in place of the original, in the same edit where you type out the text you cropped out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your individual questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For future reference, what is the correct course of action in a case like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully I covered this above&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a previous meta answer, DavidZ opined that quoting a textbook (giving attribution) is admisable under the fair use exception. It seems that Michael A. Gottlieb opines otherwise. Are screenshots different from quotations? How this incident affects/could affect other posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as long as lawyers are not involved, we don't consider screenshots to be materially different from quotations. In fact screenshots should be replaced with quotations whenever possible, as I said above. If the lawyers do get involved, it's up to a court to determine whether they're different, and whether either of them qualifies as fair use. In any case, fair use is a copyright thing, and to really underscore my point that we do not and cannot care about copyright, I'm going to refrain from giving my opinion as to whether this constitutes fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The offending image is still available in the edit history. Is this OK? Is there any way to remove it in a more permanent way (for example, asking imgur to delete it)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason we might care if something like this is visible in the edit history is copyright infringement - but again, we should not worry about copyright infringement. So we should not do anything about the content being visible in the edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-07-02T00:34:32.260" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T00:34:32.260" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-03T14:34:00.143" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/264708/special-relativity-problem-whats-wrong-here&quot;&gt;this elementary question&lt;/a&gt; was closed.  The official reason calls it a &quot;homework-like question&quot; and asks the poster to &quot;show some effort&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue about whether this is homework-like (though it seems clear to me that this is not an assigned problem, but rather something the poster stumbled upon while, quite admirably, attempting to invent and work out an illustrative example).  But surely it shows an appropriate level of effort.  The OP used the relativistic momentum formula (not the Newtonian formula as alleged in a comment) to compute momentum in an unambiguously defined frame before and after an explosion, came up with different numbers, is disturbed that momentum appears not to be conserved, and wants to know what's wrong here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the OP did all the relevant calculations, what additional effort was expected of him?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T08:30:28.947" Title="Why Was This Elementary Question Closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8874" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:04:40.900" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8861/acceptance-of-an-answer&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; identified a grammatically incorrect phrase in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;What does it mean when an answer is &quot;accepted&quot;?&lt;/a&gt; help center page. (Note: This particular page appears to be used across the stackexchange network. The problem is endemic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can see, there's no edit button that lets one propose a change to a Help Center page. In fact, from what I can see, there's no feedback mechanism, period. My question isn't about that particular page. It's more generic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there a mechanism by which mere mortals can suggest improvements to Help Center pages&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T21:58:03.813" Title="How to suggest edits for help center pages?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8861" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:34:25.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I misunderstanding about sentence that I have specified by red line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You understood the underlined clause, &lt;em&gt;they may not change the accepted answer&lt;/em&gt;, perfectly. That clause is in the present tense and uses &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; as a modal verb to denote permission (or in this case, the denial of permission). Since questioners are allowed to change the selected answer, the clause is grammatically incorrect. The clause should have been phrased in the present perfect tense rather than the present tense, and because it reflects a possibility that might or might not have happened, it should use &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A correct rewording is &lt;em&gt;they might not have changed the accepted answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a follow-on to this question, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8871/how-to-suggest-edits-for-help-center-pages&quot;&gt;how to suggest edits for help center pages&lt;/a&gt;. It was suggested that I use the &quot;contact us&quot; link. I did just that and suggested a rewording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording at the cited Help Center page has just been changed. It now reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final statement indicating that the question has now been answered perfectly. It simply means that the author received an answer that worked for him or her personally. Not every user comes back to accept an answer, and of those who do, they might not change the accepted answer even if a newer, better answer comes along later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T16:20:20.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8870" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:46:11.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't say why it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; closed since I'm not the one who closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... as I understand it, the argument you make here is that (1) the homework policy perhaps shouldn't apply to the question in the first place, and (2) the question did show enough effort not to be closed. That's true, but it's not a valid argument against closing the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy applies to all questions whose value lies in understanding the method by which the problem is done, not in getting the answer itself. Not only to assigned questions. In fact this is the &lt;em&gt;first sentence&lt;/em&gt; of the full &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are two main points to the (summary of the) homework policy: (1) show effort &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; (2) &lt;strong&gt;ask a specific conceptual question&lt;/strong&gt;. This question shows effort, yes, but you &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; have to consider whether it's asking a conceptual question (as opposed to how to do the problem, what's the next step, or similar).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, you could argue that this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a conceptual question: asking &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the Newtonian formula for momentum doesn't work. I could see that being a valid argument for reopening the question. It's still not a particularly well written question, and could do with some editing before getting reopened, but I think there is an argument to be made that it's fine; just not the argument you happened to put forth in this meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to directly answer your question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that the OP did all the relevant calculations, what additional effort was expected of him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None. But that's not the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-07-04T08:30:28.947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T08:30:28.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8871" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:48:08.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best bet is probably the &quot;contact us&quot; link in the footer, which sends a message directly to the people at Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also ask a moderator about it in chat, and we can pass on the message for you, but that's less direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you could make a post on &lt;a href=&quot;//meta.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;, where it will benefit from the attention of the entire SE network - at least, those who care enough to check in on that site. If the post gets enough support, it will (again) come to the attention of the SE team and perhaps they will fix it. This is probably better for contentious changes or those that might need some discussion to figure out the correct course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a couple small exceptions, mods don't have the ability to edit the help center ourselves. It's standardized across all sites and has to be done at the &quot;top level&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T15:48:08.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8870" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:53:55.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was going to be a comment, but it got a bit long winded (as usual for me :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial version of the question was rubbish and was rightly closed in accordance with our policy. It has since been edited and now I think it's a lot better. Indeed when it's reopened (as it surely will be) I'll be interested in answering (assuming someone doesn't beat me to it). I think it will be a nice demonstration of why we use four-vectors in SR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the mods are going to let us do the voting to reopen, but as it's already got two reopen votes the (re)opening ceremony shouldn't be far off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T15:53:55.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8882" CreationDate="2016-07-04T22:26:52.833" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in question is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/265027/what-is-the-optimal-distance-to-sit-from-a-tv&quot;&gt;What is the optimal distance to sit from a TV?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see how there are several issues with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could argue that it is &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; because it does &lt;em&gt;not only&lt;/em&gt; involve physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people commented that the question is &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;, which I can also understand partially. There may be a variety of answers to it based on different phenomena.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I can &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; understand is how it is not clear what I am asking. The question is asking to explain an observation, and that observation is clear. Please explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T01:56:24.723" Title="How is my TV question &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8942" CreationDate="2016-07-04T22:35:24.130" Score="15" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are people who do not speak english fluently not allowed here on SE-physics? (Since they may not be able to format properly or choose the clearest words).  Usually i can understand what someone is talking about by context but ive seen complaints and closures.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What can we do if we are being harassed by another user(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ive come to notice some elitists and trolls that post comments not related to the physics question or ridicule others for asking a question they find elementary or uneccesarry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we combat these behaviors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="122066" LastEditDate="2016-07-04T22:39:02.357" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T08:00:40.690" Title="English as a second language and more" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8877" CreationDate="2016-07-04T22:35:30.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read your question, and I found it unclear as well. To simply explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you are watching a show on your computer. You're going to have to be a whole lot closer to watch it properly than if it was on a giant, 48&quot; flat-screen TV. Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration to make a point, but you haven't given any factors for the situation. You give some example parameters, but you don't tell us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How good your theoretical person's eyes are&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How big your theoretical TV is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the pixel size/resolution of the screen is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc., etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever parameters you want to include. Just saying, &quot;Here are some possible parameters...do whatever you want&quot; means it isn't really possible to get an answer. People might be able to make some vague, generalistic statements (i.e., the bigger the screen the farther away the ideal seat could be) but nothing that makes it a question worth answering, because I find that generalistic statement rather obvious. If you want an equation, you have to list the parameters, and give us a way to measure data/take data. This also kind of covers why it is broad...there are too many ways to answer it without knowing who you've designed this experiment for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the box that says &quot;question isn't clear&quot; also says &quot;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need.&quot; That's exactly what we need...additional detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, I don't see how it really involves physics at all, but that's just me.) Anyway, I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T22:35:30.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8878" CreationDate="2016-07-04T23:04:14.373" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange runs in English, but that is not to exclude people for whom English is not a native tongue. When you see what appears to be someone struggling with the language you can (a) ask them if your re-phrasing is what they mean, or if you are fairly confident (b) simple edit (assuming you have that privilege) and make a comment to the effect that you have tried to improve the working and was that correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two aspirations at work here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The users of Physics should be trying to make the question as good as they can.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original poster should take the time to make their question as clear as possible, and actively interact with and support users who are trying to help improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; more likely to get closed, but if they can be cleaned up they should be fairly easy to get re-opened as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T23:04:14.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-04T23:33:03.653" Score="-2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;This stuff is really difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do i make my editted question visable again so that i may hope to find an answer since im not able to post again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T10:15:16.323" Title="Trying to re-post a question to find an answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8877" CreationDate="2016-07-05T01:56:24.723" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a problem of there being unspecified pieces of data. After all, we all know how to leave quantities as variables rather than plugging in numbers. However, the thing that is missing is the &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt; of &quot;optimal.&quot; This is a subjective term, and I don't think you grasp how much it will vary from person to person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, person A might seek &quot;the maximum distance such that the perceived resolution is no worse than a particular number.&quot; Person B might enjoy &quot;whatever distance fills 85% of my field of view.&quot; And person C might be in favor of &quot;close enough so that my screen's resolution matches that of my eyes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself am some combination of A and B, but the number of people who keep buying larger and/or higher resolution screens without changing their distance indicates they're using some completely different criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear which of these you have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note too that the close banner is &lt;strong&gt;broken&lt;/strong&gt;. The system selects &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; reason to present, no matter how many different reasons were chosen by the up to five close voters. That is, quite often it simply lies about what users said. This has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/926/show-all-voted-close-types-when-a-question-is-closed&quot;&gt;brought to the developers' attention&lt;/a&gt; before, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/54917/distinguish-close-votes-by-reason&quot;&gt;again&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172654/could-the-close-vote-banner-please-be-made-less-well-wrong&quot;&gt;again&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/268887/how-can-se-more-properly-represent-close-voters-reasons&quot;&gt;again&lt;/a&gt;. For reasons that can only be attributed to some combination of stupidity, malice, or monumental laziness, this request has been ignored every time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T01:56:24.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-05T04:01:48.093" Score="-2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266221/can-relativistic-mass-be-treated-as-rest-mass&quot;&gt;Can relativistic mass be treated as rest mass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear, pointed, and of broad interest. I doubt most introductory students of physics could answer it without thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122594" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T08:53:44.317" Title="What's wrong with this question? Why did it get downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-05T08:51:43.827" Score="6" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed some answers that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have nothing or little to do with the question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include an undisclosed link to a paper that is either by the answer’s author or particularly liked by the answer’s author – as evidenced by their profile and number of links (22) to that paper in other answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take the current wording of the spam flag (“Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.”) literally, these answers are not spam as they do not promote a product or service.&#xA;However, they clearly abuse this site for publicity, which is more or less what the spam flag is about. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/256602/255554&quot;&gt;(In the old wording of the spam flag, these answers were spam.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged some of these answers as spam either with the spam flag or a custom flag for explanation. In one case the flag was declined, while in the other case the flags were marked helpful, but the respective post was not deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should posts that meet the criteria for spam (exist only for promotion; no disclosure) with the exception that they advertise a paper (instead of a product or service) be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, how should those posts be flagged?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that I intentionally did not include links to the respective post to avoid publicly shaming anybody. Moderators can obtain them from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/36360&quot;&gt;my recent flag history&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36360" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T08:51:43.827" Title="How to deal with “spam” for papers?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8883" CreationDate="2016-07-05T08:53:44.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just added another (just second) negative vote to the original question once my suspicion was confirmed: It is not really a question, it is an attempt to promote obvious misconceptions about relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dmckee gave an answer (which I upvoted). Some of its general lessons are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One should discuss the energy-momentum vectors, not just &quot;masses and velocities&quot; to meaningfully describe collisions in relativity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The final motion of products of elastic collisions is determined from the dispersion relations; and from the energy-momentum conservation law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rest masses of composite systems aren't additive as you demonstrably kept on assuming.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also added technicalities but these three key observations should have been enough for you to try to refine your wrong &quot;derivations&quot;. But you, Will, just ignored everything in the answer and continued to promote your misunderstandings. When I realized that you ignored the answer, my suspicion was confirmed and I downvoted your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also downvoted your &quot;answer&quot; to your own question because it doesn't answer the original question what happens in the collision. The answers should answer the original question. When they don't, they may be reasonably downvoted, even if we ignore the &quot;awkward&quot; fact that the author of the answer and the author of the question are the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on the meta-website, I downvoted your question because I find it absolutely unacceptable for users to complain about every single negative vote they receive, especially when it must be pretty much obvious to them that there are very good reasons to downvote these questions and answers. That's how spoiled brats, not constructive users of a questions-and-answers website, behave. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By these negative votes (for which I sacrifice -1 of my reputation, so it's not for free), I am giving the system some information which is service to the community, too. One of the reasons of the negative vote is that I want you to discourage from posting additional questions and answers to this server because I am gradually concluding that additional contributions of yours won't lead to anything positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1236" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T08:53:44.317" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8881" CreationDate="2016-07-05T10:15:16.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any edits to any post will bump it to the top of the front page. Note, however, that minor edits meant solely to bump a question (i.e. take attention away from questions with actual recent activity) are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; welcome on this site. The edit rate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/265670/why-precisely-do-we-use-regulators-for-infinite-sums&quot;&gt;your latest question&lt;/a&gt; - nine edits in 45 min - is pretty close to the border, but I'm more put off by the belligerence of the text than by any trivial bump edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any edits within five days of closure will also put the question on a review queue for reopen votes, which typically clears quite quickly. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/136911&quot;&gt;review page for your question&lt;/a&gt; shows that three independent people thought it was not clear enough for re-opening, so it's left the queue now. I'm unsure whether another edit will put it back on the queue but if you do edit it then please make a single, comprehensive edit instead of a series of belligerent ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also ask you to keep down the formatting emphasis. If everything is emphasized, nothing is (and, instead, you get a rather jarring, irritating, and hard to read post, for no reason at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to draw attention to a question, the best way is to use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt;. However, I would advise you at present not to spend your reputation points on that; for a bounty to be useful the question needs to be phrased in a way that lets the community know what sort of answer you're expecting (and also in a way that doesn't make potential answerers think that the only thing they've got to gain by posting is a long, angry discussion). I don't think your question's problems at the moment are lack of attention, to be honest - but it's up to you to solicit people's time and help on how to phrase the question in a constructive way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T10:15:16.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-05T16:52:45.180" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;There must be a reply option under each comment, So that I click on it, and reply to that comment directly, rather than writing new comments, again and again!.&#xA;(for example: see facebook)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26665" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T17:04:13.570" Title="Unable to reply to a comment directly" Tags="|bug|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8887" CreationDate="2016-07-05T17:04:13.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you asking for replies to a comment to be displayed under that comment, instead of at the end of the full list of comments? If so, I think you may be using comments for something beyond what they're intended for. Comments are meant for requesting clarification and suggesting improvements to the post, and sometimes for linking to related resources. A threaded discussion model is overkill for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can usually &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-do-comment-replies-work&quot;&gt;reply to a comment&lt;/a&gt; by just starting with &quot;@author&quot; (using the name of the comment's author). In the few cases where that's not clear enough, I would use something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@author (4 comments up): blah blah blah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If even that doesn't work well enough for you, you should probably be using &lt;a href=&quot;//chat.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2051/reply-links-on-comments&quot;&gt;&quot;Reply&quot; links on comments&lt;/a&gt; userscript useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness: there may be something to this idea, if it helps to encourage a request-response model of commenting. But it would have to come along with further constraints on commenting, of the sort &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/278859/56541&quot;&gt;being discussed on mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T17:04:13.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8890" CreationDate="2016-07-06T02:09:28.463" Score="6" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266264/why-do-we-not-see-stars-during-the-day&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question yesterday. Someone posted a comment that was saying: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;This is a very common question. Google your exact title : there are 3+ pages of answers.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which properties should questions have? I think that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of question exist some where in the books, internet, people's brain, past, present, future, etc. So, if a question exists somewhere (except PSE), then that question mustn't be asked in physics stack exchange? If so, then 99.999999 % existent questions in PSE hadn't be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should the question be &lt;strong&gt;very very very hard&lt;/strong&gt;? If someone asks a simple and common question, then he is wrong? His question should be downvoted? If so, I personally know some people that 99.999999 % existent questions in PSE are so simple and common for them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T20:34:43.557" Title="Which questions should be asked in physics stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8889" CreationDate="2016-07-06T02:32:42.960" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Focusing on the question, of how much research you are expected to have done before asking here, and answering only for myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/192136/2509&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/192123/should-stack-overflow-be-a-last-resort-resource&quot;&gt;a similar questions about Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; some time ago. The gist of it is that asking the site things that you could have easily (or perhaps trivially) googled comes down to wasting the time of people looking at your question, and those questions shouldn't be asked. The final expression of that idea there was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is the same as not asking when the answer is in the furnished manual or the first half-dozen links that Google brings up. The answer being in some obscure usenet archive or 400 comments down in a slashdot thread on some other topic is no impediment to asking Stack Exchange, but there being dozens of answer instances all across the internet is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figure the situation on Physics is similar, but not necessarily exactly the same, because it is (in my opinion) easier to to see but not understand a treatment in physics even when you have the minimum preparation for the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking before you have looked at those resources that Google brings up right at the top is a waste of other people's time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; looked and still don't get it, tell us what you found unsatisfactory about those treatments. And &lt;em&gt;&quot;I didn't understand&quot;&lt;/em&gt; doesn't count; say where your understanding broke down. I you stuck on a step in the math or on how it could be written in terms of that math in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be clear about your level of preparation. I've seen so many questions where the OP claims to understand field theory and relativity, but has actually just read some pop-sci book that I can usually guess what the case it, but you aren't doing anyone any favors by muddying the water that way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking for a detailed description of a topic at your level when you simply aren't prepared to deal with the math is a waste of other people's time. We have been open to &quot;layman's terms&quot; questions, but you have to accept that those answer will &lt;em&gt;be in layman's terms&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, part of the goal here is to build a comprehensive database of good questions with good answer. So, shouldn't we allow ever good question, even if they have been answered well elsewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we should, but it is fair to insist that we work on &lt;em&gt;really good&lt;/em&gt; versions of those questions, and that really calls for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers?&quot;&gt;someone who knows the topic to craft the canonical version of the question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any way, those are my thoughts I've wanted for some time to sit and hammer on them to find where they might not be internally consistent, but I never seem to find the time. So perhaps some of the rest of you can show me those spots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T14:23:19.010" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8893" CreationDate="2016-07-06T04:20:29.343" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an answer is recognized as a duplicate, is there a policy about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-08T18:25:14.437" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T18:25:14.437" Title="Is there a policy about duplicate answers by different users?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-07T15:40:32.790" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;About five minutes before I posted this, a question came up in the feed asking users to come up with innovative project ideas for a highschool project with a photoresistor. The question had no research, and it was posted originally without a homework tag. While this question was deleted (maybe a moderator/high-rep user can post a link to this question) after about five minutes, it is still disturbing that a question like this could even come up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is an extreme example, and I know there are other Meta questions discussing the problem of deteriorating question quality and terrible homework questions, nothing has been done. Perhaps we should delete the homework tag and go through all of those questions, deleting and editing where appropriate, maybe we need to have a better homework policy, I don't know. But &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; needs to be done. Besides, this would conclude many back and forth Meta discussions. =) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if anyone has any ideas on how to help this situation, post them as answers and the community can vote up or down to show which ideas are the best. Perhaps moderators can implement them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T15:40:32.790" Title="Problem with questions" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8891" CreationDate="2016-07-07T17:03:35.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given two answers to the same question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they are textual copies of each other, then this is a plagiarism offence, and it is best handled by a custom moderator flag explaining the situation. If they are not identical but still very similar, this can still be a plagiarism case, handled similarly, though there is a big gray area on where it stops being plagiarism. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it's perfectly possible for two answers to have essentially the same content without being copies of each other. This is all in the game and both answers are in a fair competition for votes; ideally the clearest one should rise to the top. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you suspect foul play, flag for moderator attention or make your views known in a comment. If the flag is way off base then the mod that handles it will leave appropriate feedback when declining it. It's not a problem to err on the side of flagging unless it's a repetitive failure on the same issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T17:03:35.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8897" CreationDate="2016-07-07T21:39:13.393" Score="-1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ive looked everywhere on the android SE mobile interface and I cannot, for the life of me, find any way whatsoever to perform a search of previous SE questions without resorting to exiting the program and using a Google search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What gives? Is it buried somewhere? Am I missing something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i be punished for not performing a search prior to asking a question if i cannot perform a search of SE explicitly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="122066" LastEditDate="2016-07-09T12:31:44.523" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T13:10:37.757" Title="How to perform a mobile search" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8898" CreationDate="2016-07-08T09:00:13.610" Score="-1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't believe that there is a stupid question. I have a question that related to judgment about questions (and also answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266913/do-we-not-need-a-zeroth-law-of-motion-similar-to-the-zeroth-law-of-thermodynamic&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think (completely believe) if my reputation was 200000, then &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; (99.999999 %) people were saying &quot;&lt;em&gt;Oh! What a nice question!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they offence and ridicule me because my reputation is very low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think (completely believe) if I was writing in my profile that &quot;&lt;em&gt;I am a post doctor of physics, I am full professor of physics, I have Gauss' chair at the moment, etc.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; then &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; (99.999999 %) people were saying &quot;&lt;em&gt;Oh! What a nice question!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they offence and ridicule me because I am just a nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think (completely believe) if I had answered some questions about quantum mechanic or relativity before then &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; (99.999999 %) people were saying &quot;&lt;em&gt;Oh! What a nice question!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they offence and ridicule me because I just know a little bit about laws of Newton and a little bit about thermodynamics laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above argument is valid about answers too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T00:50:44.047" Title="About questions that seem stupid" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ClosedDate="2016-07-09T06:57:01.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8894" CreationDate="2016-07-08T09:05:18.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the third line of the mobile version of the Physics SE page, there is &quot;All questions&quot; in bold face. When you wait for the page to fully load, a magnifying glass icon appears on the right side from &quot;All questions&quot;. Clicking at this icon gives the same search box that you find immediately in the upper right corner of the desktop edition of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SyI6F.png&quot; width=&quot;250&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1236" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T10:46:47.307" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T10:46:47.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8896" CreationDate="2016-07-08T12:29:43.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;DISCLAIMER: I haven't voted or commented in any of your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the main issue is your attitude. Watching your profile, you have 109 posts, and only two of them have a negative score. I don't think that you have any reason to claim that you are a victim of ridicule or fraudulent voting patterns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, your last question has received a lot of downvotes. You're trying to modify Newton Laws, just for the sake of it, without even proposing a justification. &quot;Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence&quot;, and you have provided none. It's normal that lots of people agree that your question is bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But they are just judging your question, they aren't judging &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't take it as a personal affront, because it isn't. Take it as a chance to improve your question and learn something from the comments and votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice: try to calm yourself and don't visit the page in a couple of days. When you come back, please read some of your comments like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/va0ZE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/va0ZE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PWPal.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PWPal.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that you will realize that your attitude was not adequate, and you will do the correct thing as you did here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FqvmM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FqvmM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand that I'm trying to help you, that my intention is not to offend you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T12:29:43.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8896" CreationDate="2016-07-09T00:50:44.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think (completely believe) if my reputation was 200000, then all&#xA;  (99.999999 %) people were saying &quot;Oh! What a nice question!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is remarkable though, to be honest, not unexpected, that your post is all about how you believe participants here &quot;offence and ridicule&quot; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; - and yet you're evidently profoundly &lt;em&gt;oblivious&lt;/em&gt; to just how insulting the remark above is likely be to those that regularly participate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've essentially painted &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that participate here as shallow human beings that look at one's reputation points as a measure of the quality of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blatant contradiction is this:  if you &quot;completely believe&quot; this, &lt;em&gt;why on Earth are you interested in answers from such human beings?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close your question but honestly, I &lt;em&gt;completely believe&lt;/em&gt; that you should consider deleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T00:50:44.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8902" CreationDate="2016-07-09T03:23:42.280" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone offer me some help on how to change my username and other settings using the android cellphone application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T13:12:22.807" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:12:22.807" Title="How can I change my username, profile, and other settings on the Android mobile application?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8894" CreationDate="2016-07-09T13:10:37.757" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me, at all, what you think is the problem - but then again, I don't normally use the app. However, I just installed it, clicked on the menu button at top left, and selected a random site, which gives this page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JXq24.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the site homepage within the app looks different on your device (in which case you need to provide some screenshots) I really don't see how one would manage to miss the search interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T13:10:37.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8900" CreationDate="2016-07-09T13:45:06.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to be possible to edit user profiles from within the Android app. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191301/profile-page-for-android-app&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange page that introduced it&lt;/a&gt; does not mention it, and the feature request &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/201594/ability-to-update-profile-from-the-stackexchange-android-app&quot;&gt;Ability to update profile from the StackExchange Android App&lt;/a&gt; has been open since October 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear what you mean by 'settings'. On the desktop site, going to your profile &gt; Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings &gt; Preferences, there are what would normally be considered 'settings' for the site - there's really no chance of those being editable from the Android app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you click the menu button (upper left hand on the app) and scroll to the bottom, there is a Settings button that allows you to control the notification settings (on/off, vibrate on/off, notification sound, quiet hours), but that's about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to emphasize a bit - if you have questions about the network-wide functioning of the engine, and particularly with specialized topics like the Android and iOS apps, the mother meta at &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; better place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T13:45:06.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8904" CreationDate="2016-07-09T14:24:00.117" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a tag today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sparticles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sparticles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sparticles&lt;/a&gt;, that I thought would be useful to the community. It seemed like there were a decent number of questions that talked specifically about sparticles as opposed to just supersymmetry. Here are some questions I thought would be good with this tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17841/sparticles-relationship-to-supersymmetry-and-dark-matter&quot;&gt;Sparticles: Relationship to supersymmetry and dark matter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9258/why-are-the-third-generation-superpartners-lighter-than-the-other-sfermions-in-m&quot;&gt;Why are the third generation superpartners lighter than the other sfermions in MSUGRA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93774/how-to-find-susy-with-near-degenerate-masses&quot;&gt;How to find SUSY with near-degenerate masses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/159067/what-does-the-discovery-of-the-higgs-boson-mean-for-susy&quot;&gt;What does the discovery of the Higgs boson mean for SUSY?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/229854/to-which-type-of-particles-gauginos-are-supposed-to-couple&quot;&gt;To which type of particles gauginos are supposed to couple?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be a useful tag to have beyond just a supersymmetry tag. Please tell me what you think of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just out of curiosity, I created the tag, but for some reason it now shows that Community created the tag...why would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T15:57:50.563" Title="Sparticles tag - usefulness?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8903" CreationDate="2016-07-09T15:11:06.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, why not... tags shouldn't be too hard to create for people with enough experience with the site to know when a new one is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we do prefer verbose tag names over abbreviated ones, so I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supersymmetric-particles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;supersymmetric-particles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;supersymmetric-particles&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/superpartner-particles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;superpartner-particles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;superpartner-particles&lt;/a&gt; would be better. The former just fits within the limit of 25 characters for tag names (which is why we don't have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmic-microwave-background&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmic-microwave-background&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cosmic-microwave-background&lt;/a&gt;). If people are not opposed to this, one of the mods can rename the tag. You wouldn't need to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; the tag name has been changed.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're proposing going back and editing existing questions to have the new tag, that's another story. Every edit bumps its question to the top of the front page, so we'd rather not have large batches of edits being done all at once. It's fine to apply the tag to old questions as long as you do only a few at a time (5, perhaps), and make sure to fix any other problems with the questions as you go through them, to minimize the total number of times they need to be edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus answer: when you see &quot;created by Community&quot; or the like, I believe what you're looking at is the tag &lt;em&gt;wiki&lt;/em&gt; edit history, not the history of the tag itself. The tag wiki is an editable information page that is supposed to describe the tag. When a new tag gets created, the system (represented by the Community account) creates a blank tag wiki page to go with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-07-09T15:57:50.563" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T15:57:50.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-09T23:05:12.470" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that i have a question that was closed but users can continue to downvote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am i misunderstanding what a closed question is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought a closed question was such that it is locked from either being seen, answered, or commented on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does a closed question imply that users are not allowed to ask that particular question which was closed (since questions cannot be asked twice)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to ask a different user to post a question that i had previously asked which was closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies, im still learning and i dont quite understand this whole &amp;quot;closed question&amp;quot; stuff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference purposes the question was: Why exactly do we use regulators for infinite sums? and was closed due to being &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; (still seems like a really clearly worded question to me /shrug).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T23:19:21.847" Title="Voting on closed questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8905" CreationDate="2016-07-09T23:19:21.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A closed question can no longer have answers added to it (well, there is a grace period for answers started before the close took effect, but it is limited and post-close answers are rare). Closing a question means that the users voting for that state believe that it is not &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; suitable for the site (and indeed the phrase &quot;on hold&quot; is used for the first few days to emphasize the potential for reversing the state). A subsequent set of users can reverse a closure under the same sort of rules that we used to close it in the first place. This is all part of the normal workflow for rating and moderating questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed question should either be edited to make them suitable or they can be expected to remain closed indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed questions can still be voted on and edited. Comments can be made to the question and all un-deleted answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is your question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; it does not have an up-voted or accepted answer you can delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locking a question is different from closing it. It signifies that the question is in someway unusual and needs to be handled outside the usual workflow. Locked question can neither be edited, voted on, nor commented on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question remains closed it means a quorum of high-rep users believe it is not suitable for the site. Re-posting an identical question is clearly inappropriate, as it offering only a slight variation that does not address the reason for the closure. &lt;strong&gt;Edit the original instead.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may ask a substantially different question on the same topic, but if you post it shortly after the closure of the original it will be subject to considerable scrutiny. Seriously, edit the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first edit to a closed question posts it to the review queue for re-consideration. High-rep users will see it there and act (or not) as they judge best. So, make that edit count. Find out what was wrong with the original, understand the policy under which it was closed and &lt;em&gt;craft&lt;/em&gt; the edit to make it clear that your question is now in a form suitable for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Working around the rule in part 2 is just as bad as re-posting it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T23:19:21.847" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T00:04:21.047" Score="-2" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Im trying to delete a question i had posted which has been closed but i cant find a button for deletion nor can i delete the text of the question.  I also tried flagging it for moderator intervention sonce i cant find a delete button&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can i make this thing go away so that people stop downvoting it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help will be kindly appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T00:06:22.340" Title="How to delete a question using android application" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8907" CreationDate="2016-07-10T00:06:22.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;can not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; delete your own question when it has an up-voted answer. That question has an up-voted answer, so you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;can not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T00:06:22.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8910" CreationDate="2016-07-10T00:20:13.357" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;im trying to delete an answer to a question i posted because the answer does not answer the question i posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can i do this on android application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further complicate matters ive been banned from editing my question to try and make it match the answer and the question has been closed while it racks up downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I either want to delete the question (by deleting the answer) or edit my question. I had previously tried deleting the text of the question since i had been instructed to delete it which is what lead to me being banned from editing it (i dont have a delete button ony android application and im still learning the ins and outs so i thought that deleting the text was how it was supposed to be done)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im having a difficult time with this question and just want it to go away.  This is my only source of negative points because i dont know how to ask my question correctly.  Ive earned quite a bit of points so if think there should be a moderator that is understanding out there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people are just mean and disagreeable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="122066" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T00:36:49.907" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T00:52:23.497" Title="How to delete an answer that is incorrect" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8909" CreationDate="2016-07-10T00:52:23.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216962/allow-us-to-vote-to-delete-from-the-android-app&quot;&gt;this Q&amp;amp;A on mother meta&lt;/a&gt;, the Android app does not allow you to delete posts because some of the required infrastructure (like viewing deleted posts) is not implemented in the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the website, you can delete one of your answers by clicking the &quot;delete&quot; link under it. The exception is if the answer has been accepted; in that case, you won't see a &quot;delete&quot; link, and you're not allowed to delete it. See more information on deletion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;this mother meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that removing the text of a post with an edit is never acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though in this case I believe you're asking how to delete someone &lt;em&gt;else's&lt;/em&gt; answer. That's not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T00:52:23.497" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T02:26:39.903" Score="-1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can i tell if a moderator editted my question on android?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to edit it but ill get in punishment if i try and edit it in case moderator had recently editted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im told to make the question more clear so im trying to do that but first need to know if moderator says it's okay before trying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stuff is so confusing and difficult&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a messaging system or anything that a moderator can contact me thru in order to let me know that i have a green light to try and ask my question more clearly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should i just make a new meta post every tike i want to edit a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T11:26:13.897" Title="Editting a moderated question on android" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8911" CreationDate="2016-07-10T11:26:13.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can i tell if a moderator editted my question on android?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All edits made to the question appear in the edit history, whether they are made by a moderator or not. However, it seems that the edit history is not viewable in the Android app. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/228440/add-the-revision-history-to-the-android-app&quot;&gt;feature request to add it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to edit it but ill get in punishment if i try and edit it in case moderator had recently editted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is not true. You don't get punished for editing a question further after a moderator's edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T11:26:13.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T15:46:04.550" Score="-3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;what the hell?!  I had a Phys.SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/267230/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about regularization that had a beautiful answer by a kind user named tparker and a moderator migrated it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/1854967/11127&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a question about quantum field theory and the answer totally and unequivocally helped me and received several upvotes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cant help but think moderators are intentionally targetting me trying to prevent me from asking questions about regularization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is getting ridiculous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:  how does one ask a question related to regularization without it getting deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am i seriously being screwed with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T18:09:07.713" Title="Question deleted?!1234567890" Tags="|support|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T15:52:05.737" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that physicists use regularization in aspects of quantum field theory.&#xA;indeed you will find regularization in EVERY book on quantum field theory (which in my understanding IS physics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I not allowed to ask about regularization in physics SE? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If regularization is not an acceptable physics SE question then please let me know and I'll stop trying to learn about it here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastEditorUserId="122066" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T16:27:08.077" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T17:30:46.353" Title="Are questions about regularization on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-10T16:00:59.213" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;A conversation with DavidZ prompted this question (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/267339/how-do-i-build-a-transfer-cavity-system-for-lasers&quot;&gt;this question's&lt;/a&gt; comments). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag: when should it be used? Putting it on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; question is kind of redundant...that's what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; tag is for. Also, looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; questions, most are on hold, closed, etc. Finally, it seems like having such a tag encourages such questions - and honestly, that's not what this site is about (as evidenced by the down-votes, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with this in mind, I have three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be used for? What uses are now appropriate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we really need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag? I don't think so, but I want to know what others think. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer to two is no, or not really, should we delete the soft-question tag? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! I'm interested to see what others think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might also add that while I definitely agree with DavidZ's answer, I'd like to see what the community thinks, and hopefully everyone will come to a consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T14:25:14.900" Title="Do we really need the soft-question tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8915" CreationDate="2016-07-10T16:19:34.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; viewpoint: there are no valid uses for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; and we should burninate it (i.e. purge it from the system and forbid future use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, basically all questions which are given the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag are either off topic, or don't really need the tag. I'm not entirely sure &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273/what-is-the-soft-question-tag-for&quot;&gt;what it means for a question to be soft&lt;/a&gt;, anyway, but the questions we do allow that would fit most people's definition of &quot;soft&quot; are already identified by more focused tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this answer emerges as the community consensus, we (mods) will arrange to have the tag removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T16:19:34.383" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8914" CreationDate="2016-07-10T17:30:46.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subject of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regularization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regularization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regularization&lt;/a&gt; is on-topic if adequately put in a physics context. For some well-received examples of this, see e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/3096&quot;&gt;What is the relation between renormalization in physics and divergent series in mathematics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26877&quot;&gt;Regularization of the Casimir effect&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/57965&quot;&gt;Regulator-scheme-independence in QFT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/66371&quot;&gt;Critical Dimension of Bosonic Strings and Regularization of $\sum_{n=1}^\infty n$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/73403&quot;&gt;Why do we expect our theories to be independent of cutoffs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/92411&quot;&gt;What exactly is regularization in QFT?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T17:30:46.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8913" CreationDate="2016-07-10T17:34:46.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was migrated to Math.SE for various reason, e.g.: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the first subquestion was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are ALL infinite sums not divergent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most natural interpretation of this question (and the one used in the answer) is that OP is asking if an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_%28mathematics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;infinite series&lt;/a&gt; a_1+a_2+... can be divergent. This appears to be a pure math question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second subquestion was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not then how can one determine whether a sum is divergent or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also appears to be pure math question. Moreover, it is preferred to only ask one subquestion per post cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6833/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general one criteria for a math question to belong to Phys.SE is that it is put in a physics context, and one could argue this was not done to a sufficient degree for OP's question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the on-topicness of the subject of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regularization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regularization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regularization&lt;/a&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8914/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T17:34:46.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8913" CreationDate="2016-07-10T18:02:40.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question, 'Are all infinite sums not divergent?' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/267230/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/267230/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;), was migrated to the Mathematics Stack Exchange site, and it is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1854967/are-all-infinite-sums-not-divergent&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, along with both of its answers. There is no useful or reasonable sense of the word &quot;deleted&quot; that applies to this question. It has simply been moved to a place where, in the opinion of a quorum of 3k+ rep users of this site, it is more likely to receive appropriate attention and good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, questions on regularization (along with many other topics of mathematical physics) &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; on-topic on this site. However, &lt;strong&gt;not all&lt;/strong&gt; questions on mathematical physics (including regularization) are on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an extreme case, if a question asks for a proof of a general mathematical statement and it is completely devoid of physics context, then it is best posted on the maths site. As another extreme case, if a question deals with the application of a specific mathematical tool to a given physical problem, then it is clearly on topic here. In between the two there is a large gray area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some previous discussions in this meta site on where the line should be drawn inside this gray area are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5713/should-pure-math-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;Should pure math questions be on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5473/asking-math-questions&quot;&gt;Asking math questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7140/are-questions-about-mathematics-used-in-physics-always-off-topic&quot;&gt;Are questions about mathematics used in physics always off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5739/maths-question-on-physics-se-how-to-proceed&quot;&gt;Maths question on physics SE; how to proceed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7263/questions-with-strictly-no-physics-content&quot;&gt;Questions with strictly no physics content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6150/why-are-cosmetic-trappings-of-physics-enough-to-make-math-questions-considered-o&quot;&gt;Why are cosmetic trappings of physics enough to make math questions considered on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6206/by-what-criteria-do-you-judge-whether-mathy-questions-should-or-should-not-be-co&quot;&gt;By what criteria do you judge whether mathy questions should or should not be considered off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please have a careful look at the opinions voiced in those posts (and this applies to everyone reading this post, OP, mods and 3kers alike). It is also important to note that opinions on this topic are very divided, with many posts at score 0 through routes like +5-5 or more. You can see the upvote/downvote breakdown of a score by clicking on the score if you're 1k-rep or above (for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/122803/is-my-chrome-extension-unethically-circumventing-se-privileges?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;performance reasons&lt;/a&gt;); if you can't do that yet you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/meta.physics/query/509962/up-down-vote-breakdown-for-a-post&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; (using the post Id, the first number in the url from the share button), or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/557/votecounts-bookmarklet-to-display-up-down-votes-even-for-rep-less-than-1000&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3082/view-vote-totals-without-1000-rep?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2916/show-post-score-breakdown-early-script?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; userscripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if a question is purely about mathematical aspects of a mathematical tool or topic, it is generally considered off-topic here (i.e. it is migrated to the maths site, not deleted), regardless of how applicable it is to physics. (As an extreme example, linear algebra is useful for physics, but questions exclusively about linear algebra are off-topic here. Similarly so with other tools of mathematical physics.) Personally, I feel your question is squarely in that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are some questions, on the other hand, where the topic is mathematics but there are various reasons to expect that physicists would be better equipped to answer the question, and there is some debate on whether those should be migrated or not. However, I don't think this applies at all to your question, which explicitly thanks a mathematician for its foundation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, it is important to realize that most of the moderation on this site is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; performed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the formal moderators&lt;/a&gt; (which are identified by a ♦ after their username, together with Stack Exchange team members). For details, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A theory of moderation&lt;/a&gt;, but the short story is that most question closures and migrations are community actions, and they require the agreement of five community members. Blaming &quot;a moderator&quot; for things like this is simply not helpful - particularly when question closures and migrations are openly and clearly attributed. (In particular, if a question is migrated, go to the page on the new site, look for the banner that says, 'migrated from $site', and click on the $site link.) Other useful tools for inspecting the moderation history of a post are the revision history (&lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/$PostId/revisions&lt;/code&gt;) and the post timeline (&lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/$PostId/timeline&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T18:09:07.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T00:55:51.390" Score="-4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are non-physicists allowed to ask questions on physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the impression that only people with a good (vast?) knowledge of physics are allowed to ask questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we turn people away when they say theyre 16 years old  or e.g. if someone expresses a lack of understanding of unitarity or if they dont know whatthe weinberg mixing angle is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it that anyone is open to ask questions here and shouldnt be driven away or belittled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is known...im still learning the culture and rules here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122066" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T06:56:59.920" Title="Physics SE is for who?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8920" CreationDate="2016-07-11T06:56:59.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who are not in that target audience may have a bit of a harder time asking questions, because our sense of what constitutes a good question is calibrated to the kinds of questions that students and (sometimes) researchers ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are no level requirements, not in the sense of &quot;you must know [topic] and [topic] etc. to ask a question here&quot;. We only expect that people ask questions which are appropriate to whatever level they are at. In short, don't ask a question for which you're not prepared to understand the answers. For example, if someone who's never studied quantum mechanics asks about the uncertainty principle, it's likely not going to be well received. Similarly if someone who's never studied relativity asks about the interior of a black hole. Or if a complete layperson, who's never studied even basic kinematics, asks about, say, calculating orbits. (These are all rough guidelines; any specific case could be an exception, depending on how the question is asked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also expect that people do a bit of research before asking their questions, enough to get acquainted with the topic and make &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; progress toward solving their problem. For example, as was brought up in the comments, someone asking a question about absolute zero would be expected to do enough research to know that it's impossible to make a real object have that temperature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T06:56:59.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T15:43:12.200" Score="1" ViewCount="2069" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there simple way to color background, highlight some parts of background, equation or some parts of equation?&#xA;something like these Latex codes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{\bgcolor{color name}{equation}} or {\bg{color name}{equation}} for background&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{\color{color name}{equation}} or {\mathcolor{color name}{equation}} to color equations&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;by this code $a^2 + {\color{red} b^2}=c^2$ b^2 must become red&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and by this one $a^2 + {\bg{red}b^2}=c^2$ its background must become red.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26665" LastEditorUserId="26665" LastEditDate="2016-07-11T17:11:12.140" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T17:11:12.140" Title="Is there simple way to color latex equations?" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T16:26:14.707" Score="18" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;One long-standing feature request for the Stack Exchange engine is the implementation of &lt;em&gt;trackbacks&lt;/em&gt; for mentions of the arXiv on Stack Exchange sites. In general, if you have a blog and you blog about an arXiv eprint, you can send the arXiv a specially crafted http message, and then your blog gets listed on a page of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://arXiv.org/tb/paper-id&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that lists a bunch of internet locations that discuss the eprint. Some more examples of how this works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/tb/0905.2658&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of trackbacks to the arXiv preprint &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2658&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:0905.2658&lt;/a&gt; from various blogs. My feature-request is that if a future SE post mentions an arXiv number, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2658&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:0905.2658&lt;/a&gt;, then a trackback is automatically sent to the arXiv.org who then adds the SE post to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/tb/0905.2658&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trackback list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/30320/2451&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; SE answer mentions the arXiv preprint &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/0707.2895&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:0707.2895&lt;/a&gt;. With trackbacks to the arXiv, it would be possible to see on the corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/tb/0707.2895&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trackback list&lt;/a&gt; that this preprint is mentioned on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;More Examples:&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/9727/2451&quot;&gt;SE question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.5222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv preprint&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/tb/1103.5222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trackback list&lt;/a&gt;);&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/48292/2451&quot;&gt;SE question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0545&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv preprint&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/tb/1211.0545&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trackback list&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For recent trackbacks from across the internet to the whole of arXiv, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/tb/recent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/tb/recent&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trackback mechanism was implemented and put online on &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; in 2013, and it has been ticking along ever since. A feature request was posted at about that time on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; to enable this across all the science Stack Exchange sites, at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240520/trackbacks-from-se-to-the-arxiv-org&quot;&gt;Trackbacks from SE to the arXiv.org?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has received a lot of love over the years (currently at score 97) but apparently this has not been enough. So: do you think this mechanism should be enabled on this site? If so, either post an answer here saying Aye, or go show that feature-request some (more) love, e.g. place a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T07:44:21.917" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T07:44:21.917" Title="Please consider supporting arXiv trackbacks on the mother Meta" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|site-promotion|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T21:24:55.850" Score="-7" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266602&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266602&lt;/a&gt; I have asked a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the special theory of relativity been disproved theoretically i.e. logically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the news: The special theory of relativity has been disproved theoretically &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/1WTwbwF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bit.ly/1WTwbwF&lt;/a&gt; via @EurekAlertAAAS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it was soon closed because several people thought it was off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;We deal with mainstream physics here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed. For more information, see Is non mainstream physics appropriate for this site?.&quot; – CuriousOne, Diracology, John Rennie, lemon, Cosmas Zachos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper is published by the international peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays and the news is published by AAAS's EurekAlert. Both are credible sources for academic news and researches. If there is any problem with the news, EurekAlert would have removed the news for a long time, but it has been there for more than four months. EurekAlert has never been spreading hoaxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122884" OwnerDisplayName="Toronto" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T06:40:35.687" Title="Regarding off-topic questions, what's wrong with my question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8925" CreationDate="2016-07-11T21:43:29.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from all that's been said in the comments, this question would (in my opinion) be off-topic even if the paper were clearly mainstream and had been published in a major journal --- because there is absolutely no indication that you actually attempted to &lt;b&gt;read&lt;/b&gt; the paper before asking this question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about how the statement in paragraph 7 follows from the statements in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 might be on topic.  A question along the lines of &quot;What is in this paper?&quot; seems to me to be totally out of bounds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T21:43:29.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T02:17:26.527" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;What publications (papers, books, etc.) have cited questions or answers of Physics StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10024" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T02:17:26.527" Title="Publications Citing Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|citation|publishing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8925" CreationDate="2016-07-12T06:40:35.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the introductory tour of the site&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean that we won't answer questions from non-physicists, but it does mean that we expect the same sort of effort to be put into the question as we'd expect from a physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case you have cited one of the many, many &lt;em&gt;Einstein was wrong&lt;/em&gt; articles floating around the Internet but you have made no attempt to look into the article yourself. So your question boils down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here's an article claiming Einstein was wrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which isn't even a question, though to be charitable there is the implied question of whether the article is correct or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason we (well I) closed this is that there is no shortage of crackpots out there and if we spent our time debunking their claims we'd have no time left for doing any physics. That doesn't mean we completely rule out such questions, but you have to show some effort first. For example your question could have been along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've read a paper by Joe Bloggs in the Journal of Irreproducible Results and on page 4 he claims that &lt;em&gt;blah blah&lt;/em&gt; and I don't see how his follows from equation 666.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even then I suspect you'd find little enthusiasm among the site members to spend their time looking into the more, erm, esoteric claims but at least the question wouldn't be instantly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/122884/toronto&quot;&gt;Your profile&lt;/a&gt; doesn't give any clues about your background, and it may well be that you haven't sufficient experience to read the paper for yourself. If so you could try asking &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;in the chat room&lt;/a&gt; or you could try on one of the many less rigorous sites where people are willing to discuss this sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T06:40:35.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8935" CreationDate="2016-07-12T11:06:18.180" Score="31" ViewCount="936" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6662/revisiting-history&quot;&gt;last visited the issue of history questions&lt;/a&gt;, the dedicated &lt;a href=&quot;//hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; was in its early stages. At that time, we decided against closing questions for being historical, but with the implication that it may make sense to revisit that decision someday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that HSM SE is well established, the time seems right to do that revisit. So, going forward from here, do we want history-of-physics questions to be on topic? Where exactly should we draw the line between on-topic and off-topic historical questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind this is primarily asking about history-of-physics questions to be asked in the future, not old ones that have already been asked here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T13:23:18.777" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T16:52:23.907" Title="Should history of physics questions be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|faq|scope|questions|history|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8930" CreationDate="2016-07-12T12:30:45.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I'd say no, they should not be on topic here. However, I could see myself making an exception for questions asking how a problem in physics was historically solved. I don't mean a homework-like problem; I mean, for instance, how the Bohr model was realized to be incorrect and replaced with the more modern model. Questions asking about the history behind the development of strictly modern physics are probably okay. Questions asking about the history of the physicists themselves, the history of non-modern physics, or about historical practices in physics are probably off-topic. So, I would say that a question asking what the Ptolemaic model was replaced with would be off-topic because it doesn't directly involve modern physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T12:30:45.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T15:34:26.787" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;When trying to go to the highlighted discussion&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8814/ask-me-anything-12th-july-guests-introduction-and-questions?cb=1&quot;&gt;Ask Me Anything 12th July: guest&amp;#39;s introduction and questions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;my chromium browser gives an error message,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your connection is not private&#xA;  Attackers might be trying to steal your information from meta.physics.stackexchange.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This server could not prove that it is meta.physics.stackexchange.com; its security certificate is from *.stackexchange.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something similar on firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:59.520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T10:30:32.493" Title="Privacy (https) error for AMA link in the Upcoming Events list" Tags="|bug|status-planned|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8932" CreationDate="2016-07-12T15:41:16.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are trying to access the meta site over HTTPS. This is not supported yet, because it's impossible to configure a certificate for all (150+ of them) meta.*.stackexchange.com sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to make things work, SE developers will switch the meta URLs to *.meta.stackexchange.com, for example this site will be &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.meta.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://physics.meta.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/327639/use-https-for-snippets-because-some-features-are-https-only#comment365342_327639&quot;&gt;being worked on&lt;/a&gt;. Until then, either use HTTP for accessing the meta, or ignore the warning about invalid certificate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T15:41:16.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8815" CreationDate="2016-07-12T19:08:14.080" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest to change the title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;AMA&quot; ask me &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt;thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it should be changed to &quot;AMAT&quot; ask me &lt;strong&gt;appropriate&lt;/strong&gt; things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then the phrase of appropriate should be elaborated or I suggest that the questions are posted one day before the session for recognizing their appropriateness by competent people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T19:08:14.080" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8930" CreationDate="2016-07-13T12:44:59.527" Score="38" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;History questions are welcome on this site whenever they have any bearing on our modern understanding of physics. However, if a question has only minimal or null bearing on our current understanding, or it specifically requires a historian's skills, toolset, and mindset to answer, then it should be migrated to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History of Science and Maths&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should stay open to a significant set of history questions, and we should keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tag. Unlike mathematics, the historical perspective is very often one of the key ways to understand the world and our knowledge about physics. The way physics is structured is very often centered around key experiments, and these are generally thought of as historical events and their contribution and motivation is understood in a historical perspective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be that way: you can perfectly well motivate, say, special relativity as &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0302045&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of only two possible cases&lt;/a&gt;, with the Galilean case ruled out through muon lifetime measurements, but you don't - you usually start with the Michelson-Morley experiment and tell the story from there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Math, on the other hand, does not have to do this: you can simply start with whatever axioms and definitions you want to work with, and you build your theory. Later on, or as an aside or a brief introduction, you might comment, as motivation, that the axioms went through this and then that version before people found the Right Version to use, but the brunt of the work in multiple fields &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; particularly those taught in depth in physics degrees &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; tends to follow from the axioms to the consequences rather than the historical refinements of the axioms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going through &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bhistory%5d%20closed%3ano%20is%3aquestion%20score%3a5&quot;&gt;recent, good-score questions on the history tag&lt;/a&gt; yields plenty of questions that are definitely of a historical character and yet have direct bearing on our understanding of physics, and which I think should definitely be on topic here. Taking a few non-rigorous picks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/267036/how-did-physicists-know-that-only-negative-charges-move&quot;&gt;How did physicists know that only negative charges move?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266246/how-did-physicists-know-that-there-are-two-kind-of-charges&quot;&gt;How did physicists know that there are two kind of charges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262251/why-was-the-first-discovered-neutrino-an-anti-neutrino&quot;&gt;Why was the first discovered neutrino an anti-neutrino?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249392/how-did-we-realize-that-light-travels-at-a-finite-speed&quot;&gt;How did we realize that light travels at a finite speed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/243144/why-is-a-second-equal-to-the-duration-of-exactly-9-192-631-770-periods-of-radiat&quot;&gt;Why is a second equal to the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of radiations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/229169/did-newton-conduct-any-experiments-to-find-something-called-momentum-or-was-he&quot;&gt;Did Newton conduct any experiments to find something called momentum, or was he such a great genius that he was able to spot it intuitively?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/201149/why-was-the-stark-effect-discovered-much-later-than-the-zeeman-effect&quot;&gt;Why was the Stark effect discovered much later than the Zeeman effect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; questions that should be moved to the history site, because they require a historian's skills, toolset, and mindset to answer, and because they have minimal or null bearing on our modern understanding of physics. From the first page of the search above, for example, this could include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266815/was-einstein-familiar-with-the-michelson-gale-experiment&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266815/was-einstein-familiar-with-the-michelson-gale-experiment&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/75K3O.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/233765/bohr-on-wholeness&quot;&gt;Bohr on wholeness?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/246015/what-was-newtons-own-explanation-of-newtons-rings&quot;&gt;What was Newton&amp;#39;s own explanation of Newton&amp;#39;s rings?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(For full clarity, these questions weren't migrated because it was too late to migrate them when this question was posted. If they were posted now, they would be migrated.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I find that the set of questions that satisfy that criterion strictly is really rather small. There is, though, a relatively large gray area of questions that are primarily of historical interest, but that still illuminate aspects of how we think about physics and why we no longer think or do certain things. Some examples from this category are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/202342/was-leverrier-adams-prediction-of-neptune-a-lucky-coincidence&quot;&gt;Was Leverrier-Adams prediction of Neptune a lucky coincidence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/208901/the-role-of-anharmonic-oscillators-in-heisenbergs-1925-paper&quot;&gt;The role of anharmonic oscillator(s) in Heisenberg&amp;#39;s 1925 paper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/217590/what-are-the-original-papers-on-the-hydrogen-spectral-lines&quot;&gt;What are the original papers on the hydrogen spectral lines?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249507/were-the-michelson-morley-results-a-surprise&quot;&gt;Were the Michelson-Morley results a surprise?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these questions should be allowed here: they could also be asked at HSM if the OP is interested in a science historian's perspective, but there is no need to migrate them if asked here, in which case the focus should be (because it can be) on how that part of the historical record helps explain how we think of physics. If the OP wants to shift the focus specifically to what some historical character thought and did, what information they had available, and so on, then it can move to HSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T19:42:12.573" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T19:42:12.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8937" CreationDate="2016-07-14T14:29:41.160" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that opinion-based questions are not accepted in Physics Stack Exchange but I just wanted to ask:&#xA;Can I post a question requesting opinions on certain books in Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75628" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T15:07:23.957" Title="Can I post a question requesting opinions on certain books in Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8936" CreationDate="2016-07-14T14:34:33.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No.&lt;/em&gt; In fact one of the current close reasons is precisely that answers would be &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-07-14T15:07:23.957" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T15:07:23.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2016-07-14T19:54:23.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wyzant.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.wyzant.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  is a tutoring site but where you can post your question (homework)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99820" LastEditorUserId="99820" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T06:53:12.217" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T06:53:12.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-15T13:58:53.490" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to delete a question with an answer, you have an option to delete that question. But when you have made that option to delete the question it seems not possible. Is that a mistake of this program or is there an other reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: there was one answer but not accepted or upvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103999" LastEditorUserId="103999" LastEditDate="2016-07-16T10:01:46.190" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T11:44:38.197" Title="Why can't a question be deleted with answers which are not upvoted or accepted?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8878" CreationDate="2016-07-16T08:00:40.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the language, I don't think there is a formal solution. In the end, if physics becomes a main discipline for you, you will be in need of learning better English so you can read papers and articles. On the trolling staff, just don't pay attention on the way a comment or a message is being phrased. Rather, consider if there is anything from that comment that might help you evolve. If it is completely irrelevant, ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T08:00:40.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8940" CreationDate="2016-07-16T09:33:00.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, you're asking why you can't delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/268192/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (which you identified in the comments). The reason is that you have accepted an answer. A question with an accepted answer cannot be deleted (except by moderators). However, you can unaccept the answer, which then may allow you to delete the question. (If there is an answer which has received an upvote - note, this is not the same as having a positive score - you still can't delete the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full description of when an answer can be deleted or not is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;in the FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T11:44:38.197" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-16T13:16:14.847" Score="27" ViewCount="916" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am troubled by the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/268345/traveling-at-speed-of-light-seeing-light&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and many others like it.  The (obviously very naive) questioner posits a physically impossible situation (often FTL travel as in this case, but there are other examples), asks what it would imply, and gets jumped on for positing something impossible in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But positing things and trying to understand their consequences is a perfectly good --- indeed admirable --- way to learn.  Professional physicists, mathematicians, and others do it all the time.  We trace the consequences of a hypothesis, sometimes discover that those consequences are absurd, and if so reject the hypothesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posters like this one are often doing exactly that, though with hypotheses that more sophisticated readers have already realized are impossible.  Instead of telling them &quot;your hypothesis is impossible&quot; in a tone that implies their curiosity is reprehensible, maybe it would be better to encourage that curiosity with pointers to the absurd consequences of the hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I object to the closing message that says this is &quot;Not mainstream physics&quot;.  On the contrary, thought experiments like this very much &lt;b&gt;are&lt;/b&gt; mainstream physics.  An experiment (thought or otherwise) does not become non-mainstream just because somebody else has already performed that experiment and knows how it will end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean we should tolerate questions of the form &quot;Ha ha, you guys think that FTL travel is impossible and I'm going to prove you wrong&quot;.  It also doesn't mean that questions like this should stay open; in fact they are almost always duplicates and should be closed on those grounds.  But it does mean that  people who are (as far as we know) making a genuine effort to reason their way through things should not be shamed for their curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T23:17:36.663" Title="Very Naive Questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2016-07-16T18:57:54.923" Score="26" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Topicality&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem is that thee is a conflict between &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;what we say this site is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a very wide-spread belief that it is OK for complete newcomers to a subject to raise their question is absolutely any place on the web that seems to cover the same topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a strongly held belief of many Stack Exchange users (especially those from the earliest days who watched and participated in the original forging of the Stack Overflow we know today) that being completely accepting of either &amp;quot;fun&amp;quot; or know-nothing questions drives out high quality question, reduces the value of the site to its intended audience, and eventually drives out expert answerers. (I am a subscriber to that belief, BTW).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are few places on the web for a rank beginner to go and get good answer to really basic questions in physics like that, but that is not the mission of this site as I understand it and allowing it will only result in endless repetition of the same question and answers over and over again. I saw it on BBSs in the 80s and on usenet in the 90s and you can look around the internet right now and see it on &amp;quot;forum&amp;quot; type internet sites all over the place. You can see it right now on this site by just looking for the insane number of question users who are convinced that they have discovered something wrong with special relativity and can prove it with yet another boring and unenlightening variation on the twin paradox (how many have we had this week, anyway?); of course all that each such question proves is that the asker hadn't really understood the theory in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rudeness&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, there is a second issue. That's the sometimes brusque tone with which such askers are met. If you troll through the archive of meta.stackoverflow.com you'll find &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; places where the team came on and asked people to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be nice to people asking off topic questions while firmly closing the questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag places where people are not being nice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exert what social pressure they can to support the culture of niceness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when they do it works for a while—months, most of the time—before things start to drift away again. That happens because it is fatiguing to hold one's metaphoric thumb in the dike and in time people get frustrated and lash out. Which isn't fair to the poor soul who has made his or her very first overture to this site, but frankly the pure repetitiveness of dealing with one &amp;quot;I don't know any thing about physics but I have a theory...&amp;quot; questions after another for weeks on end isn't really fair to the regular users here either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What you can do&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be an active participant in getting off-topic questions closed &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt; and nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As fast close is a firm message, and if it is a &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; but firm message then the user can go elsewhere without hard feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't answer off topic question. No, not in the comments either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you think that answering them is nice, but it tells that user that they can get what they want from us &lt;em&gt;even when what they want is outside the bounds of what we say we do&lt;/em&gt;. If you answer them, they will be back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag comments where people are being not nice. With enough user flags those go away even before a moderator sees them: the community can insist on niceness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with a closure argue the point without calling the people doing the closure names. Namecalling isn't nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T23:17:36.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-16T19:53:57.420" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is, whether one should downvote a question just because he doesn't understand it or he finds the O.P's formatting or editing as poor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will like to reason something with my example.The place I live is 80% natural environment. Only recently there has been a craze to use smartphones,and that only after 20s. I never worked so badly on Internet, forgot even the basics of HTML and don't have time to learn it for I have lots of other things to concentrate as I am a student. But I am having lots of questions and doubts in my mind. Formatting and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/268399/how-pressure-energy-term-is-equal-to-atmospheric-pressure-here/268403?&quot;&gt;editing&lt;/a&gt; is my weak point especially when working with HTML. I am sure I will become an expert in future but currently my hands are cuffed and if I spend lots of time in these things I fear a dark future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I basically came to this site to get answers to my question which are usually turned down in classrooms as being not specific to examinations which they call &quot;I am not doing smart work&quot;. But I can't help as I am not able to remember things without understanding it but I have limited time.I have great expectations from this site but I am blind over here. So being anxious and worried for posts being voted down for the above mentioned reason as I had mentioned in first paragraph has become another waste of time for me. Either you can tell me honestly to abandon this site if I am not compatible for it, or you may like to find some solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T01:35:44.740" Title="Should a question be voted down for poor formatting or editing?" Tags="|discussion|editing|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-17T00:57:55.460" Score="21" ViewCount="455" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always felt that the criteria for the use of the Very Low Quality flag are fuzzy, confusing, and ultimately wrong, and I recently had a VLQ flag declined that I would like some clarifications on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/268366/8563&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which I'll quote as an image in case it is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AU2Gt.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/184186/&quot;&gt;Why opposite poles of magnet attract each other, why don&amp;#39;t they repel?&lt;/a&gt;, is relatively poor to begin with, but depending on your perspective, this answer is either (i) a load of waffle with very little to do with the question, (ii) a push for a non-mainstream personal theory, (iii) just plain wrong, or (iv) a load of waffle that doesn't even manage to mean much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I find that this answer is in active detriment to the site, and it needs to be downvoted and deleted relatively quickly. As such, a VLQ flag is precisely the thing to put this answer in front of review-minded individuals with independent perspectives and a handy Recommend Deletion button that can remove bad content when acted upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore did just that, and I flagged it as VLQ. The reviewers &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/138149&quot;&gt;apparently agreed with me&lt;/a&gt;, giving it three Recommend Deletion votes to one Looks OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nRj9p.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite the reviewers agreeing with the flag, it still got declined with the usual&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really, really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't get this. The flag text reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is very low quality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the answer ticks all the boxes. It is definitely very low quality, it has severe content problems, it cannot be salvaged without a complete re-do, and as it stands it needs to be removed. A VLQ flag is the organic mechanism we have to deal with content that's so bad that it needs to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it seems that I am currently banned from raising that specific kind of flag, partly from this incident and a VLQ flag on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/267914/8563&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which received a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/137912&quot;&gt;single review&lt;/a&gt; that also agreed with the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have a number of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Procedurally, how did these two flags come to be declined even though reviewers agreed with them? Since both reviews are incomplete (not enough Recommend Deletion votes to delete, but not enough Looks OK votes to kick it out of the queue) I imagine it was manually handled by a disagreeing mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, if moderators are going through VLQ flags, what's the point of the review queue? Or are there clear signs that the VLQ queue is not coping with its job and moderators need to step in and do the community's job for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How are those two answers at all content we want to remain on the site? How do those answers and users contribute anything but a bad image in the eyes of a prospective expert who's looking for a cool place with interesting questions to answer? What reason is there that changes the response away from &amp;quot;delete them as fast as a consensual community process will be able to process them&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Taking as a premise that they do need to be deleted, what review mechanism other than the VLQ queue does this community have available to keep the site clean from detrimental posts like these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the site still at a stage that community moderation (particularly at the 2k+ level) cannot cope with things like this and explicit moderator intervention is needed at every stage, even after the mods explicitly stepped back from going through the Close review queue because the reviewer traffic was high enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, is the site mature enough, and with a strong enough 20k+ population, that direct votes to delete are sufficient to handle posts like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is it that compels us to make available to the world posts like these, even after they've been judged by the community to be somewhere between plain wrong and intentionally misleading? When posting users license their content to SE, give it permission to host it, and ask it politely to do so. There is nothing that compels us or SE to keep wrong content on our walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If flags are not meant to handle &amp;quot;technical inaccuracies&amp;quot;, what on Earth does &amp;quot;severe content problems&amp;quot; even mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that there is a lot of inertia here, and that there is some amount of general guidance that emanates from the Stack Exchange team and broader community, and that some of our moderators take this guidance very explicitly to heart. However, I do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; think that the answer to any of the above questions should be &amp;quot;because SE says so&amp;quot;. That's just intentionally crippling the community moderation mechanisms without any amount of critical analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, we need to recognize that the flagging and reviewing mechanisms are tools provided by Stack Exchange to multiple communities, that they need to be uniform to keep the development process manageable, and that they therefore need to take a very general form that is able to serve over 130 different sites with different requirements. However, these are still only tools, and it is up to us to find the ways and community processes to use these tools that work for us as a site, and that respond to the unique pressures that this site is under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this includes crackpot answers (particularly the lower tier, the ones for which &amp;quot;non-mainstream&amp;quot; is a stretched compliment) that only serve to make this site look unattractive to prospective experts. We have a software tool (VLQ flags then queue) that enables us to efficiently clean these up as a community without unilateral action. What is there, beyond blind SE dogma, that forces us to shoot ourselves in the foot and disable this tool from use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the long rant, but I really don't see it. Rant aside, I really am interested in the answers to the questions above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit, just to have a clear tl;dr proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers which are (i) flat-out incorrect, (ii) so completely incorrect that no amount of editing can make them useful or constructive, and (iii) so completely incorrect that they are actively harmful to the site and its standing, should be flagged as VLQ, which then feeds directly to the Low Quality Posts queue. There, if people agree with that three-point assessment, they should vote Recommend Deletion (or, if 20k+, Delete). Flags should sit there for X hours (where X is much bigger than 1/4), and should only be handed over to the moderator review queue after that time, or if there is obvious conflict in the review outcomes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T15:12:59.063" Title="Why was this Very Low Quality flag declined?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8946" CreationDate="2016-07-17T01:35:44.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; care about formatting your posts to the point where they are easily legible by everyone, but for a different reason: it will make it easier for you to get answers, and it will improve the quality of the answers you do get. Why? because every second that a potential answerer spends being annoyed by poor formatting is one less second of them thinking about the physics, and one second closer to them deciding to simply leave the post aside and going to find another one. Having a question that is correctly formatted, easy to read, and which clearly conveys the heart of the question, is the number one fix to getting better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is formatted so badly that it takes a lot of effort to even begin to understand what it's saying, then some people can and do get annoyed enough that they'll downvote before leaving. This is allowed for the same reasons that there is no requirement for anyone to explain their posts, because it promotes uninhibited voting based on the usefulness of the question, and it helps clear, interesting, useful questions float to the top. A question with terrible formatting is less clear and less useful, so it is right that it does not get to the top.&#xA;That said, if the post has minor formatting problems, a lot of times the response is simply for users to jump in and help with the formatting to help the 'real' question shine better; the cases where this doesn't happen are often because the post is so muddled that we can't even tell what the user means to ask in the first place. Want to see some examples? Take our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot;&gt;recent prolific editors&lt;/a&gt; and see their recent edits (profile &gt; activity &gt; all actions &gt; revisions). You'll find a lot of people jumping at posts that have issues and fixing them instead of downvoting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case, there are two very clear things you can do that will make your posts more readable by a very wide margin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adding a space after every punctuation. In English, all forms of punctuation used in text (&lt;code&gt;. , ! ? ) : ;&lt;/code&gt;) are directly followed by whitespace. Skipping that whitespace (as in e.g.skipping the whitespace,like this) is visually very jarring, stops the visual flow, and takes attention away from your message.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Correct use of paragraph breaks. Paragraphs need to be of an appropriate length (roughly two to four sentences) and they need to be separated by a blank line in the source text to display correctly. Skipping this blank line produces paragraphs which are joined together (either as a single paragraph or as two immediately contiguous ones) which produce a 'wall of text' that's very hard to digest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of how this looks like when it is done incorrectly, consider the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong &#xA;and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.   &#xA;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong &#xA;and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.   &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which renders as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are three white spaces after the end of the first paragraph, which cause the joined-but-malformed paragraphs. Instead, you need to introduce a blank line between paragraphs,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong &#xA;and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.&#xA;&#xA;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong &#xA;and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.   &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which renders as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is some sample text to display how wrong paragraphing can look wrong and detract from your answer, and how the fix is actually very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this is &lt;em&gt;miles&lt;/em&gt; easier to read for most English speakers, particularly with longer paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are easy to implement and they will visibly improve the quality of your posts; all you need is discipline in implementing them consistently. This might take some effort, but you need to accept that we &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; spend effort here to produce the best-crafted questions and answers that we can, and you need to match the effort you put into your questions to the effort you expect answerers to spend on their responses, both in terms of content and in terms of formatting and readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T01:35:44.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8947" CreationDate="2016-07-17T09:31:11.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me address the root of the problem first: the criteria for using a Very Low Quality flag, at least as far as the moderators are concerned (currently), are laid out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6374/which-flag-do-i-use-for-an-inappropriate-post&quot;&gt;Which flag do I use for an inappropriate post?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;very low quality&amp;quot; flag is for answers which are complete nonsense, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;incoherent gibberish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything not parseable as English text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers posted in another language (although if you can edit in a translation, you're encouraged to do so instead of flagging)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a VLQ flag appears in the moderator flag queue, my thought process is basically &amp;quot;Can I read this? Yes: decline/No: accept&amp;quot;. The answer in question is certainly readable, and I think we would agree that it does not meet the criteria quoted above. Its main problem is that it's wrong. That calls for it to be downvoted, but not flagged. If it were to be deleted by three delete votes from non-moderators, that wouldn't be the worst thing, but a VLQ flag is meant to indicate that something is so obviously worthless that it deserves swift and ruthless deletion, even from a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now let me address your individual points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Procedurally, how did these two flags come to be declined even though reviewers agreed with them? Since both reviews are incomplete (not enough Recommend Deletion votes to delete, but not enough Looks OK votes to kick it out of the queue) I imagine it was manually handled by a disagreeing mod.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep, I checked and I'm the one who declined both those flags. (It shouldn't matter &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; exactly did it, but I'm just saying you're getting the closest thing to an authoritative answer here.) This was done from the &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; flag queue, not from the low-quality review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, if moderators are going through VLQ flags, what's the point of the review queue? Or are there clear signs that the VLQ queue is not coping with its job and moderators need to step in and do the community's job for it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243145/hide-not-an-answer-and-very-low-quality-flags-in-the-moderator-flag-queue&quot;&gt;this MSE question&lt;/a&gt;, if VLQ flags sit in their own queue for 15 minutes without being handled by the community, they are then added into the moderator flag queue. When the flags appear in the mod queue, we don't get any information about whether they are under review by the community or what the status of that review is; we only know that they have been sitting around for a certain amount of time and the community hasn't handled them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; take this as a sign that the VLQ queue is not doing its job, but it could also be the case that 15 minutes is too short to reflect the activity level for this site. This was discussed in the comments on that post, so I'd point you there for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are those two answers at all content we want to remain on the site? How do those answers and users contribute anything but a bad image in the eyes of a prospective expert who's looking for a cool place with interesting questions to answer? What reason is there that changes the response away from &amp;quot;delete them as fast as a consensual community process will be able to process them&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, the biggest problem with these answers is that they are wrong. We already have a mechanism to distinguish right from wrong, namely voting. This takes into account that reasonable people often disagree on what is correct and what is not. If we additionally use flags to enforce consequences on wrong answers, that puts each individual moderator in the position of deciding right from wrong, and that's really not what we're here for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking as a premise that they do need to be deleted, what review mechanism other than the VLQ queue does this community have available to keep the site clean from detrimental posts like these?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as I've said I disagree with the premise. I think the system is designed the way it is for a reason: there is no other review mechanism for posts like these precisely because the site doesn't need to be kept clean from such posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the site still at a stage that community moderation (particularly at the 2k+ level) cannot cope with things like this and explicit moderator intervention is needed at every stage, even after the mods explicitly stepped back from going through the Close review queue because the reviewer traffic was high enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, is the site mature enough, and with a strong enough 20k+ population, that direct votes to delete are sufficient to handle posts like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I think you have a point. While I would always like to see more high-rep users active in moderation, I do think the community is capable of handling most of its own moderation, and it might be useful to tweak the thresholds of the review system so that flags aren't bumped up to the moderator queue so quickly. This would require a bit of data analysis on flag handling times, but if people are agreed on that conclusion, we could make a request to the SE team to change the thresholds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is it that compels us to make available to the world posts like these, even after they've been judged by the community to be somewhere between plain wrong and intentionally misleading? When posting users license their content to SE, give it permission to host it, and ask it politely to do so. There is nothing that compels us or SE to keep wrong content on our walls.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nothing compels us to host this kind of content. But again, the tricky part is deciding which content is worthy of hosting and which content is not, and in particular, &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; makes that decision. Like I said, individual moderators shouldn't be expected to distinguish right from wrong. A consensus of high-rep users is better equipped to do it, but still, the main mechanism to indicate wrongness is by voting, not deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If flags are not meant to handle &amp;quot;technical inaccuracies&amp;quot;, what on Earth does &amp;quot;severe content problems&amp;quot; even mean?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means stuff like &amp;quot;jasfoijaw3fjpawejfp0awjefp0asj0pfoajks09ojk3meosoifmasd&amp;quot;. (Yes, we do get posts like that.) Things that you can't even read. &amp;quot;Severe content problems&amp;quot; doesn't refer to the content being &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, it refers to the content being &lt;em&gt;unintelligible&lt;/em&gt;. The sort of thing that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; competent English speaker, whether or not they have any knowledge of physics, would be unable to make sense of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T09:31:11.790" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8947" CreationDate="2016-07-17T10:33:29.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, the very low quality flag is currently somewhere between useless and horribly confusing. Not only I agree, several posts on meta.SE also agree: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/278794/263383&quot;&gt;Remove VLQ as a flag option&lt;/a&gt;, top answer says should be removed for questions, and renamed just &quot;delete&quot; on answers - which I think would be even more useless, considering we do not delete answers that are not either &quot;not an answer&quot; or flaggable as offensive/spam. Shog9's answer has an interesting bit on the purpose of the low quality flag: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See, back in 2011, folks were posting a lot of really terrible stuff. Not exactly nonsense mind you; just... Embarrassingly-bad questions and answers. Stuff that wasn't even wrong so much as just... Annoying. Txt-speak explanations that don't explain anything. Code-only answers where the code isn't formatted and also is copied directly from the question. Questions that are copied from an assignment somewhere, with a few round-trips through a machine translation service en route. Stuff that, given infinite time and patience and clairvoyance could maybe be fixed, but in practice just saps the energy of everyone reading and makes us long for the quality and clarity we used to have over on Yahoo! Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/276982/263383&quot;&gt;Rename “Very low quality” in “unintelligible”&lt;/a&gt;, only answer says &quot;rename to delete&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/104782/263383&quot;&gt;Is the “very low quality” flag necessary?&lt;/a&gt;, top voted answer says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A bad/incorrect answer or an answer that's difficult to understand can still answer the question, albeit badly. I don't think &quot;not an answer&quot; the same as &quot;very low quality&quot; at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in summary, most people seem to agree that either &quot;very low quality&quot; &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; mean posts like the ones you are flagging - posts that technically try to answer the question, but horribly fail at providing anything useful to the reader - or should be abolished. I'll now address a point DavidZ makes in his answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very low quality is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; needed for gibberish posts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234035/263383&quot;&gt;Shog9 explicitly recommends&lt;/a&gt; flagging gibberish as &quot;rude or abusive&quot;, and &quot;not an answer&quot; would apply equally well to gibberish. If &quot;Can I read this: Yes/No&quot; is the criterion for acception/declining low quality flags, there is truly no point to this flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And reading Shog9's description of what the low quality flag was created for, it's explicitly for posts that are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; gibberish, but nevertheless so worthless they do not deserve to be hosted on this site. Now, you may say that &quot;downvotes&quot; are there to fix that. But downvotes &lt;strong&gt;do not fix that&lt;/strong&gt;, in particular when the post is written in correct English but contains no information of value - it &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; gets upvoted by someone, and it takes five downvotes against one upvote to even make that a zero sum game. It is perfectly possible (and it happens!) to get net positive reputation just by posting garbage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there's still a case to be made that we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt;, on the grounds of some imagined fairness, vote to delete answers that try to answer the question just because of our judgement of their content. But when I read crackpots pushing their personal theories, answers that have no grounding in physics whatsoever, I cannot help but thinking that the mission statement of StackExchange is &quot;The best answers rise to the top&quot;, not &quot;Even the worst answer is here for your convenience&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is not a moderator's place to pass such judgement on the content of answer (although I would not have a problem with that). But it should be the community's place to pass judgement on bad answers, and yes, even decide that they do not deserve a space in this community and should be deleted. So my idea would be that low quality flags &lt;em&gt;should not be declined&lt;/em&gt; by moderators if they are not obviously cast in bad faith for some reason, but if the moderator in question doesn't feel they have the right to unanimously validate the flag, they should just refrain from acting on it. Let the review queue do its job. Because, in many cases, I have found that the community rather unanimously decides to get rid of obvious crackpottery and stuff that is so wrong as to be unsalvagable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not at all the intended way the VLQ flag and its review queue should be used, then the flag option needs to be removed, since currently it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; effectively used that way unless a moderator manually declines the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T10:33:29.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8954" CreationDate="2016-07-17T17:59:38.960" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266771/why-does-the-clock-work-slowly-at-higher-speed&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; of mine merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; while the questions were pretty different with each other. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really/266773#266773&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; of Gennaro Tedesco (before is edited by me, even after that!) is completely meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; those questions be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could explain clearly why those questions were merged if the moderator who merged the questions, wasn't deleting comments related to that answer of Gennaro Tedesco. But now, I cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have access to deleted comments and you can recover them, please help for clarification of this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T18:54:02.273" Title="About merging of questions" Tags="|discussion|moderators|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8953" CreationDate="2016-07-17T18:54:02.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This represents a misstep on my part, but it is not easily reversed. (Indeed, I don't know if it can be reversed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time I was concerned that there was a single answer to a closed question that uses slightly unusual language that—in my opinion—might mislead the reader not withstanding that it isn't &quot;wrong&quot; &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. I felt that by putting it in the context of other good answers it would be less likely to mislead, but overlook the fundamentally different phrase of the (same underlying) question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T18:54:02.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8956" CreationDate="2016-07-18T06:16:03.967" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process of closure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/267302/about-time-and-time-dilation&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; of mine has been started. As you can see in the figure below, the number of close votes is 3. (the picture has been taken at 18, July, 2016, 06:00 UTC)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJXua.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJXua.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are just two close votes in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/138278&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; page of that question. (the picture has been taken at 18, July, 2016, 06:00 UTC)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hy7ub.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hy7ub.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addition:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/137518&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the same question of mine has been reviewed once before this time. I wonder how dose the closure process start by a &amp;quot;Leave open&amp;quot; vote? (the picture has been taken at 18, July, 2016, 06:30 UTC)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mwplu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mwplu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addition:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8896/about-questions-that-seem-stupid&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, this question of mine has been closed by five votes. But there is just one close vote in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/review/close/214&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; page. (the picture has been taken at 18, July, 2016, 06:45 UTC)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YLVgO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YLVgO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T23:37:24.147" Title="Why don't close-vote counts agree with the number of close votes on review pages?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|vote-to-close|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8955" CreationDate="2016-07-18T07:22:10.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Review pages only show close votes cast as part of the review process, and they do not show any votes cast independently, i.e. directly on the question page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, questions are put on the queue by a direct vote to close, so there is usually one more close vote than there are reviews. If more people vote independently of the queue, this difference can increase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On the other hand, some questions end up on the queue through a flag as off-topic by a &amp;lt;3k user, in which case all the votes could come from review. I don't know how often this happens, though.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T07:22:10.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2016-07-18T10:39:20.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read through the responses and am one of those individuals who did not understand the actual purpose of this site was for the active researcher, the academic and for students with an eye toward becoming a physicist or an astronomer. It was only after I had posed my first question and moved on to my second that I began to realize the nature of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there was no discourtesy in the responses I received. What I would have appreciated was a response telling me that this question was already asked and answered with a link to the original question. Perhaps before a question is posted it could be vetted by volunteers and handled this way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me tell you that there is a lot of misinformation and trolls lurking around on the internet. When I found this site and saw that it was populated by people who would take a question seriously and give a serious response, I was surprised. Surprised nd very pleased. The people I have encountered here have not tried to make me uncomfortable with my simplistic questions, lack of education and general ignorance. It has been a good experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems that this is not the site for people who are just curious. I am a retired blue collar worker and have time on my hands. Looking into things that I often wondered about but never had time for is one of the things I looked forward to when I reached this age. I hope to find a site that is similar to this one but intended to reach people like myself. Interested in this world of ours but not interested in starting a new career or obtaining a degree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121428" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T10:39:20.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2016-07-19T11:44:37.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they are doing worldbuilding. Most of them did not study college physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a physics student in college too. Sometimes I need to confirm the correctness of my setting, however I can't find my answer on google. I really need to ask someone who have studied physics in college. Before I make some scifi settings, I tried to study some materials related to that topic, but I don't want to use to much time to fully understand all college physics, it is too demanding for a scifi writer. May be he/she doesn't know worldbuilding SE, so he/she asked that question here. I think we can ask whether he/she is trying to make some scifi setting, if yes, we can move it to worldbuilding SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84246" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T11:44:37.680" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-19T12:15:17.250" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I flagged my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/214700/83380&quot;&gt;Why do they think WT1190F is low density?&lt;/a&gt; a few days ago, suggesting/requesting that it be migrated to Space Exploration Stackexchange. When I originally asked the question 8 months ago, I wasn't very familiar with either site, but now I can see that there is probably a better chance of specific knowledge on this object there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can double check that I did flag this question with this request, and if so find out if it is going to happen? I think a workaround would be to delete and copy/paste repost, but aren't situations like this what migration is for to begin with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T13:43:28.947" Title="How to check what's happened to my flag?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-19T12:31:37.213" Score="7" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's best to see once than to hear (or read) a convoluted explanation a thousand times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to answer one question and it was begging for a drawing. So I thought, OK, I draw it on paper, then photo, then send to myself , then edit, then upload. And at that point I decided it's not worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we speak physics we speak formulas and drawings, so in this particular SE a drawing applet should be bolted to the editor and this is the feature I hereby request :D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63723" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T08:32:17.023" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T21:07:00.490" Title="Javascript applet for drawing" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8959" CreationDate="2016-07-19T12:35:01.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go to your profile page, click on the &quot;Activity&quot; tab, and look toward the top right of the pane that appears. You'll see a link &quot;[#] helpful flags&quot;. Click on that, and it shows you a listing of your flag activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gpEJT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gpEJT.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of activity page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding this particular case: your question wasn't migrated because only questions asked within the last 60 days are eligible for migration, and yours is older than that. Also, migration is only for questions that are off topic here. I think this question is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want it to be on &lt;a href=&quot;//space.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Space Exploration&lt;/a&gt; instead, since the question doesn't have any upvoted (or accepted) answers, you can delete it here and repost it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T12:35:01.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8959" CreationDate="2016-07-19T12:35:32.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can check on your flagging history from your profile: on the Activity tab, at top right, there's a line with how many helpful flags you've raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TxvYm.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on that link and it will take you to your flagging history: which flags were marked helpful, and which ones were not and why they were not. If this was a declined custom moderator flag, then it will likely have a comment from the moderator that handled it explaining the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case, migration is not possible because, generally speaking,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;only questions which are less than 60 days old can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt; over on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (which is generally the recommended first port of call for general questions about the SE platform).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, your question looks on-topic here, so I would recommend that you cross-post it to Space Exploration (or possibly &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Astronomy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;), and explicitly mark the cross-post on both versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T12:35:32.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8960" CreationDate="2016-07-19T13:04:55.030" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Feature requests of this magnitude are usually very hard to get past the Stack Exchange team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, this sort of script is very heavy and it significantly adds to the page load times, particularly for users on slow connections. We already have one relatively heavy dependency (MathJax), and adding another one would slow the page down significantly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for the team to give this the green light there needs to be a very strong case that it is really necessary - on the same scale as MathJax, say. (Or, say, on the same scale as the circuit editor is necessary on &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt; and the YouTube embedded player is necessary on &lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Music&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Movies &amp;amp; TV&lt;/a&gt;.) For relevant past requests on this site, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4010/what-about-enahanced-functionality-to-allow-answers-to-have-richer-educational-c&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5028/should-we-allow-embedding-videos-in-questions-or-answers&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Building this sort of thing is also a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; amount of work for the developers, and in fact most such feature requests are only implemented if there already is a working implementation. This means that if you can sit down and code the feature you want, there's some chances it will be implemented, but if you want the SE dev team to write an awesome drawing app for you, you'll be waiting a long time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies even from the tiniest of feature requests (many of which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/the-stack-overflow-unofficial-patch-soup&quot;&gt;already implemented in SOUP&lt;/a&gt; but are yet to be pulled into the main site, and it applies to feature requests with huge popular support like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240520/trackbacks-from-se-to-the-arxiv-org&quot;&gt;arXiv trackbacks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you do find or write a suitable app, it is perfectly possible for individual users to mount this on top of the site via a user script. For examples, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/&quot;&gt;StackApps&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: if you really feel strongly about this, then start coding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.600" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T21:07:00.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-19T19:43:43.980" Score="9" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were two questions marked as duplicated of each other in the closed votes list today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/231495/why-doesnt-an-electrons-charge-rip-the-electron-apart&quot;&gt;Why doesn&amp;#39;t an electron&amp;#39;s charge rip the electron apart?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/268818/if-like-charges-repel-why-doesnt-a-charge-break-itself-apart&quot;&gt;If like charges repel, why doesn&amp;#39;t a charge break itself apart?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is older but apparently got few attention. The second was posted today and attracted much more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy to be followed in such cases? I mean, which question should be closed, the most popular or the most recent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T15:01:28.730" Title="Which duplicated question should be closed?" Tags="|discussion|policy|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8964" CreationDate="2016-07-19T19:48:36.303" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several competing desires for how to close (and possibly merge) duplicates (listed in my preferred order, but that shouldn't be taken to represent official policy): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Priority to the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Priority to the &lt;em&gt;oldest&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Priority to the &lt;em&gt;most popular&lt;/em&gt; question (As indicated by views or by votes or by number of non-trivial answers.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual policy seems to be &quot;whatever the people who get off their backsides and do it decide&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T19:48:36.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6474" CreationDate="2016-07-19T22:25:21.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Kyle Kanos that A2 and A3 are answers, however poor in quality, since they attempt to address the Question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with tpg2114 that A2 Answers require development.  This can be done more conveniently if comments are addressed to this Answer, rather than to the Question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we would all agree that A3 Answers have no value on this site.  However &#xA;if, as Kyle points out, A3 Answers do not fall within the official criteria for deletion - eg because they are comments - then I think they must be - officially - &lt;em&gt;acceptable.&lt;/em&gt;  This situation is not ideal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get round this, I suggest that acceptable Answers on Physics SE should not only &lt;strong&gt;address the Question&lt;/strong&gt; but also &lt;strong&gt;use mainstream physics to do so&lt;/strong&gt;.  A3 would then be unacceptable and meet the criteria for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This criterion corresponds with the requirement that Questions must be &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; and can be closed and deleted if &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;.  Answers must likewise be &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; in my view.  If Questions which ask about Chemistry or Mathematics or Biology or Technology etc can be deemed &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; then Answers which do the same - with no physics content - ought also to be &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty with my suggestion is that fairness probably requires Voting to Close - ie the judgement of one's peers - as with Questions.  But there is currently no facility to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T22:25:21.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2016-07-19T23:42:12.057" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for posting this topic. Yes. There are an unfortunate number of rude people on this site. I refer to them as &quot;Sheldons&quot; because, although they may have significant scientific knowledge, they completely lack social skills. They are not normal in that regard. Their social IQs are very low indeed. Their effect is to deter people from exploring science. It's a shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70958" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T23:42:12.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2016-07-20T13:32:30.310" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Topicality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question comes in 2 parts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1st is about the possibility of crossing the light barrier using a rocket.  Clearly impossible as it would violate SR, and is not something that is likely to change as physics develops.  If the questioner had asked only this I think there would be no dispute over deletion, would there?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2nd part is about what you would see if you were already travelling faster than light.  This does not violate SR, I think.  We have a tag for tachyons, so I presume we accept questions about them.  I think this part of the question is acceptable.  It is hypothetical, but worth exploring, like Dirac's willingness to think about negative energy solutions to his equation for the electron.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an issue of what the majority of physicists think is possible, but of whether the scenario actually does violate established laws or theories.  The site is, after all, one for active researchers, and as has been pointed out this is the kind of question academics ask themselves every day.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the question could be edited to make it acceptable, so I have posted a comment suggesting that the OP do so and advising how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Naive Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You and ACuriousMind suggest that the &lt;em&gt;intrinsic value&lt;/em&gt; of the question is all that counts in deciding whether to close it.  I would like to question that view, playing Devil's Advocate since I am mostly in agreement with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I define a naive question as one posed by a person who is asking about an issue outside of his/her understanding.  We might find some intrinsic value in it which the OP did not have in mind and which is possibly even beyond the OP's comprehension.  Such a situation might be what DavidZ is describing in his comment above to LukeH about good questions from those who are merely curious.  I think it then becomes our question, not the OP's.  Do we then accept the question because answers could be useful to the broader community, or reject it because answers would not address what the OP had in mind or would be incomprehensible to him/her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side issue here is acting consistently between questions.  I do not think it is consistent to tolerate naive or lazy conceptual questions and walk the OP through a detailed explanation yet refuse to help a different OP by pointing out where they went wrong in solving a problem which they have made a fair attempt at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rudeness&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we are talking about &lt;strong&gt;brusqueness&lt;/strong&gt;, not abusiveness nor even just belittling someone.  Some OPs - and some commentators - are offended even by constructive criticism.  eg By my ubiquitous &quot;Have you done an internet search?&quot; and &quot;What have you tried already?&quot;  Some newcomers seem to think they are entitled to an answer, because elsewhere nobody regulates what kind of questions can be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been suggested that we be more tolerant.  While I sympathize with that view, it is inconsistent with current policy and aims.  dmckee's advice about being firm has its merits in being efficient and consistent with policy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have hesitated to use my privilege to VTC, but I can see the sense in getting questions closed ASAP if they are &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;. When answers have been posted, it is more difficult to deal with the closure issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T15:37:21.840" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T15:37:21.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8964" CreationDate="2016-07-20T14:31:01.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got off my backside and, spurred into action by Qmechanic, proposed closure of the earlier question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is the right decision here.  The recent question is not quite as clear - I'm still waiting for the OP to confirm that he is asking about sub-atomic particles rather than macroscopic charged bodies - but it is broader and the answers are considerably more developed.  It makes sense to me that further answers should be posted where they are most likely to be found - on the more popular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was quite an easy decision.  Generally it isn't easy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a new question is posted and gets several upvotes. However, before any answers are posted an exact duplicate is found, with one answer which the OP finds unsatisfactory.  Should the new Qn be closed?  According to policy, I think it has to be closed.  But if it is closed, the OP is unlikely to get an answer, unless somehow the earlier Qn is publicised.  This situation seems bad for the site as well as for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T15:01:28.730" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T15:01:28.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8947" CreationDate="2016-07-20T15:12:59.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is splitting hairs, but while I do not agree there should be a &quot;this answer is wrong&quot; flag (or use of the VLQ flag for this purpose) I do agree with part of Emilio's sentiment—there should be a flag called &quot;non-mainstream physics &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; similar to the one we have for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incorrectness = handle with downvotes. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Crackpottery = handle with flags (and downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T15:12:59.063" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8960" CreationDate="2016-07-20T16:56:20.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While you're waiting, I use Google Draw to create diagrams for my posts on the Physics SE. It's free, and with some practice you can create reasonably convincing diagrams. You can download your drawings in a variety of formats, though I usually just screen grab and paste into my favourite bitmap editor for tweaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T16:56:20.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-20T23:21:17.590" Score="5" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/138733/calculating-the-riemann-tensor-for-a-3-sphere/269118#comment600155_269118&quot;&gt;related PSE post&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/138731&quot;&gt;related VLQ review entity&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a link to a VLQ answer from a new user, who may be capable later to produce high level content. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.garretstar.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is the site&lt;/a&gt; which he refers in his post (I edited the link out to avoid the selfmarketing VtD reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time it seems to me not as the &quot;I found the Holy Grail, gimme Nobel Prize now&quot; line. It seems to be a prof emeritus, but I am not sure. So, the first thing what is not clear to me, if he really has the capability to be once a worthy contributor here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In similar cases I would be happy to let me out from the decision by clicking &quot;skip&quot;. Or, if the post is really LQ, then accelerate the review process by clicking as you probably wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first experiences of the new users are very important, i.e. if he doesn't get a friendly welcome, he will be probably lost. And, with him, the site loses the HQ content what he could have produced. Thus, if he has a possibility to contribute HQ content, then &lt;em&gt;he requires now help, and not disciplining.&lt;/em&gt; We can't want from a prof. emer. to handle the internet on the level as we can, but most of us can learn from him a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be to relax a little bit and don't handle him &lt;em&gt;as usual&lt;/em&gt; - if you see the capability in him to be once a high level content producer. Probably he won't make so many contribution to ever get a high repu, but his contribution could be worthy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/users/699/vzn&quot;&gt;Similar users&lt;/a&gt; in other hard science sites are existing and are being tolerated. (I replay: only if the user has the possibility to be once really HQ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:38.257" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T23:55:47.733" Title="Probably HQ user but with LQ start, I suggest tolerance" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8972" CreationDate="2016-07-21T00:29:28.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual mantra is that we don't judge users, just content. (And, yeah, human beings probably can't achieve that, but the point is to try.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By all means give promising looking users a pointer to our expectations, and make suggestions to help them either fit in with our culture or, if that's not what they want to go away without hard feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But their posts &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; what we are suppose to judge. If they are writing poor posts, then that is what needs fixing not the quality control system of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T00:29:28.077" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-21T03:39:51.437" Score="5" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should I do if I want to ask a question which has already been asked but does not have satisfactory answers? How can I make the older question active again, or re-ask the question without it being marked duplicate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122766" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-07-21T22:43:06.040" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T22:43:06.040" Title="Re-asking a Duplicate Question" Tags="|support|questions|duplicates|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8974" CreationDate="2016-07-21T10:13:19.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can find a good edit to make to the question (or one of its answers), editing will bump the question to the top of the front page. This is an easy way to draw some attention to the question. However, make sure your edit actually &lt;em&gt;improves&lt;/em&gt; the question (or answer). An edit that just changes something but doesn't make the post better is not appropriate. You may want to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;our guidelines on editing&lt;/a&gt; to get a sense of what constitutes an appropriate edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you have less than 2000 reputation, any edits you make will have to be reviewed by high-rep users before they get applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to bring attention to a question is to join &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the chat room&lt;/a&gt; and ask about it. Maybe someone else there can answer it, or at least will be willing to help you promote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the most effective way to bring attention to a question is to put a bounty on it, but you need to have at least 75 reputation for that. When you place a bounty, you give up your own reputation equal to the bounty amount, but in exchange the question gets &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=featured&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; on the front page for a week. At the end of that time, you can award the bounty to an answer which was posted during that time period, and the poster of that answer gets an amount of reputation equal to what you gave up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; ask the same question again. It'll get closed as a duplicate, and possibly downvoted for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;insufficient research effort&lt;/a&gt; (because we expect people to do some searching before posting a question, and your search should have turned up the earlier version of the question if you didn't already know about it). Even if you don't like the answers on the preexisting question, that doesn't stop it from being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're asking something &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than what the previous question asked, in the sense that a complete answer to the previous question would not answer what you're asking, then you can go ahead and post a new question. In this case you should link to the previous question and explain &lt;em&gt;very clearly&lt;/em&gt; what you are adding to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T10:13:19.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8977" CreationDate="2016-07-21T15:45:49.597" Score="9" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had been faced with this several times before. But this time I decide to ask it in a Meta post. I typed this phrase in the search box of the PSE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;What is the field in the physics really?&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the results &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=What%20is%20the%20field%20in%20the%20physics%20really%3F&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13157/what-is-a-field-really&quot;&gt;question with exactly similar title&lt;/a&gt; is the seventh one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I typed the same phrase in the Google search box. You can see the results &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=What%20is%20the%20field%20in%20the%20physics%20really%3F&amp;amp;rlz=1C1RLNS_enIR698IR698&amp;amp;oq=What%20is%20the%20field%20in%20the%20physics%20really%3F&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57.1802j0j8&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the same question with exactly similar title belong to PSE is the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why does Google search PSE's own pages, better than itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T17:34:26.927" Title="Why does Google give better results than PSE search about PSE's own pages?" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8976" CreationDate="2016-07-21T17:34:26.927" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; several times already - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/254399&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185758/should-so-include-a-custom-google-search&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135753/when-searching-is-it-better-to-use-the-built-in-so-search-or-use-google&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/107211/how-does-stack-overflows-search-compare-with-googles-site-specific-search&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and probably others I haven't caught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google was founded in 1998 on a business model based on a search engine. Stack Exchange was founded in 2008 on a business model based on a Q&amp;amp;A engine. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company/team#Engineering&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the current SE dev team - how much money and manpower Google invests/has invested on Search is anyone's guess. It's not particularly surprising that Google is good at search (considering, in addition, that SE spends a lot of time and infrastructure making sure that SE is well ranked by Google).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also perfectly possible to restrict Google searches to only Stack Exchange pages - try &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/search?q=What+is+the+field+in+the+physics+really%3F+site:physics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adding the &lt;code&gt;site:physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; operator to your search&lt;/a&gt;. That's a good way to search PSE if you're looking for something specific and having trouble using the site search. (On the other hand, you lose access to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;SE advanced search features&lt;/a&gt; that do use the internal characteristics of the posts database, like the &lt;code&gt;score:&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;is:question&lt;/code&gt; operators.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T17:34:26.927" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-22T11:02:25.643" Score="6" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that we get lots of questions from people baffled about the way light behaves given that it's made up of photons. For the latest example see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/269356/how-does-a-photon-know-when-to-reflect-in-case-of-refraction&quot;&gt;How does a photon &amp;#39;know&amp;#39; when to reflect in case of refraction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need a canonical Q/A explaining the relationship between light beams and photons? Then we can close questions like the above as duplicates of the canonical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T11:02:25.643" Title="Do we need a canonical question linking photons and light beams?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8979" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8980" CreationDate="2016-07-22T16:29:18.483" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, a few questions recently came up on the feed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/269376/2451&quot;&gt;What is Venus&amp;#39;s core made of?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/269401/2451&quot;&gt;How can core of Mercury be a molten liquid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They made me wonder: when does something belong on the astronomy.SE and when does something belong on the physics.SE (this could also apply for chemistry, electrical engineering, etc)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T20:27:38.887" Title="The fine line between astronomy and physics" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-07-22T22:55:37.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2016-07-22T20:27:38.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since astronomy is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1197/if-its-possible-do-we-want-to-expand-the-scope-of-this-site-to-include-astrono&quot;&gt;within our scope&lt;/a&gt;, most things that would fit on Astronomy SE also fit here. If they are asked here, they should not be migrated. There are probably a few corner cases that are off topic for us and on topic for them, but those are rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other topics, in principle it's straightforward: a question which is about physics (or astronomy) is on topic here, one which is not about physics (or astronomy) is off topic here. Of course, there can be some debate about whether something is about physics/astronomy or not, but again, those ambiguous cases are relatively rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.663" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T20:27:38.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T11:11:00.750" Score="16" ViewCount="717" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/31790/danielsank?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Daniel Sank&lt;/a&gt;, guest for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange AMA&lt;/a&gt; taking place in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;hbar chat room&lt;/a&gt; on August 12 at 16:00 UTC [a].&#xA;I am looking forward to discussing my experience in the USA physics education system from lower education schools up through the PhD program, my research in experimental quantum computing, the difficulties and importance of physics pedagogy, and anything else you'd like to talk about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Post questions you'd like answered below&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AMA will be informal, but to get an idea of what others would like to talk about, please post questions you'd like answered as responses to this meta post.&#xA;See, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7782/questions-for-the-june-14th-ask-me-anything&quot;&gt;questions posted for Slereah's AMA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Education and work history&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born and raised in the United States.&#xA;I went to mostly public schools, with a three year detour into private school for grades 3, 4, and 5.&#xA;I did my bachelor's degree in physics at Yale University and my PhD at University of California Santa Barbara in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/index.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lab of John Martinis&lt;/a&gt; where I worked on precision measurement of &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.2890&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;magnetic noise&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0257&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantum state measurement&lt;/a&gt;, both in superconducting qubits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now continue work in superconducting qubits at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://plus.google.com/+QuantumAILab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;In this position I continue to &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05721&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;work on state measurement&lt;/a&gt;, as well as several other aspects of building a quantum computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Technical interests&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Noise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an experimentalist, I have found it important to understand noise in &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/24372/what-is-the-connection-between-analog-signal-to-noise-ratio-and-signal-to-noise&quot;&gt;signal processing contexts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For obvious reasons, I'm also interested in the noise which limits superconducting qubit performance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have found that a true understanding of noise is absolutely essential to my work, and was mostly omitted from my education!&#xA;It all started when I took the statistical mechanics course as an undergraduate, and I like to answer noise related &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203974/where-is-the-flaw-in-this-machine-that-decreases-the-entropy-of-a-closed-system&quot;&gt;statistical mechanics questions&lt;/a&gt; on the main site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I particularly enjoy random process problems.&#xA;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/6415/does-the-drunk-man-fall-off-the-cliff-a-random-walk-problem&quot;&gt;this Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; for an awesome example (note the amazing variety of answers!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Programming&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Messaging protocols, and particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;capability based protocols&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I am currently working on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DanielSank/cappy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cappy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dissemination of good coding practices and shared code within the scientific community.&#xA;I am a contributing member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/labrad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LabRAD project&lt;/a&gt;, an RPC system in use in use by at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/labrad/labrad/wiki/Who-uses-LabRAD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourteen labs throughout the world&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm happy to talk about any of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DanielSank?tab=repositories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;projects on github&lt;/a&gt; or anything else you'd like to discuss.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pedagogy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I enjoy understanding supposedly complicated topics in simple yet rigorously correct ways.&#xA;Here's and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/138217/complex-integration-by-shifting-the-contour&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; from the Physics.SE main site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I once gave a two-part lecture on the Fourier transform for my undergraduate journal club.&#xA;The positive responses from that form one of the best memories of my entire life and is one of the events that convinced me that time spent preparing very good pedagogical material is worthwhile.&#xA;Those lectures are written up &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DanielSank/FourierTransform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but in need of &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; work (collaborators welcome).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mostly I want to help improve our standards for scientific pedagogy and would enjoy questions/discussion on that topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Nontechnical interests&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Music. I play the classical guitar.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plants and animals.&#xA;At present I have many succulents, a few orchids, and a beautiful &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradescantia_zebrina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tri-color spiderwort&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I am very interested in octopuses, because they are awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cooking.&#xA;I have invented &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lCiOCi-TGSDKAz0qbbaJqwHZQK_AZ20rM3dozLRXXXU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the best vegetarian chili known to man-kind&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I also enjoy talking about pizza crust and the brewing of honey wine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Backpacking.&#xA;So far I've done two trips in Yosemite, one in the Cascades, one in Sequoia, one in the Sierra mountains, and one in the Catskills.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Super Smash Bros. Melee.&#xA;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/QKfGNdSxy5E?t=342&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one example of why&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you don't have the time to watch the entire game linked there, just watch &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/QKfGNdSxy5E?t=535&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this part&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a] For USA users that's 9:00 Pacific, 10:00 Mountain, 11:00 Central, and 12:00 Eastern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:55.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T13:21:38.020" Title="August 12 Physics AMA with Daniel Sank: question pool" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2016-07-24T22:11:16.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my opinion, the users of the site are quite different in their behavior and also in their physical knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Newbies with low rep and low activity, asking mostly very naive questions. There is a lot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enthusiasts with limited knowledge. They can answer the questions of (1) and get often a lot of rep by that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Professionals with very high level knowledge. Their communication is more important as the whole site, and group (2) find probably highly interesting to try to decipher it. They are surprisingly active to answer the questions of (1), but not so in the questions of (2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the social / moderating behavior, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. Deletionists. They are mostly trying to apply rules algorithmically. These rules have a mainly destructive nature packed as cleanup. Despite their algorithmical style, their behavior is often unpredictable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. &quot;Nice people&quot; trying to advice and answer everybody. They are ineffective in cleanup tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conflicts of the past happened mainly between (I) and (II), and not between (2) and (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These differences are leading to continuous troubles on the site and trying to hold the community together leaded only to escalation in the past. The collective behavior is like an ideal gas: everybody moves unpredictably and as you try to hold them together, so stronger they try to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing a lot of other SE sites, the Physics SE looks to me like the silence after a storm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the math, the division between the Mathoverflow and the Math SE solved the problem. Yes, I know, mathoverflow is done by some special agreement with the SE Inc, but it doesn't mean that a similar division wouldn't be useful also here. Now the math SE is one of the most friendly, and best going SE sites. Although there is a significant part of low level content here, if somebody wants to take part only in high level communication with only a limited level of moderation, (s)he can do this by using only the MO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always said that a similar division in the case of the PSE would be also useful, it would make the things clear. Once a Theoretical Physics SE existed, it was closed probably in the lack of interest. Now that many HQ user has gone, this lack of interest was made finally real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw, as the interest existed, but it wasn't admitted, it produced what it wants and now a Theoretical Physics exists again - but it is out of the SE network. Grat, good work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest to not commit the same mistake again. If you don't need a different HQ site, then see how things are being done on the Math SE. If you want a well going site, this is the only way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2016-07-24T23:11:44.870" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T23:11:44.870" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-07-25T08:11:01.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I could attend to your interview, I have some ideas on subjects that would interested me and hopefully others :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)Education&#xA;Some of your ideas for physics in schools&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your opinion on the current existing system of higher education over the world. What do you believe for the way the Masters and PhDs are working in physics. For example, do you think that they are too much directed towards the needs of the working sector or not. Any ideas and experiences on the field. Also, maybe a brief discussion for the PhD program of the USA, do you think it works, should it be like this, is it a good opportunity for someone to study physics in the US and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, as you mentioned for the noise in systems an that it was completely a missing subject in your education, are there any thoughts on reshaping- reformulating the universities programs and towards what directions- what classes should be omitted and what should be added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end to put it compact, do you have any ideas on the didactics of physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)Physics&#xA;This is also important, unfortunately I do not have the knowledge to approach your scientific interests. But, the reason I wrote this post is mainly because I think I can follow a discussion by you of a new paper I found on chaotic behaviour and entanglement- if I am not mistaken you participated on this work. I t would be very interesting to learn something about this since the possibilities this work opens for future understanding of nature are, in my opinion, exceptional. Here is a link: &lt;a href=&quot;http://phys.org/news/2016-07-blur-line-classical-quantum-physics.html?utm_source=nwletter&amp;amp;utm_medium=email&amp;amp;utm_campaign=weekly-nwletter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://phys.org/news/2016-07-blur-line-classical-quantum-physics.html?utm_source=nwletter&amp;amp;utm_medium=email&amp;amp;utm_campaign=weekly-nwletter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I can attend to this meeting( I missed yuggibs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77928" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T08:11:01.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-07-25T11:15:22.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have found that a true understanding of noise is absolutely essential to my work, and was mostly omitted from my education!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am facing a similar problem! I would like to ask: How did you acquire your knowledge about this branch of statistical mechanics? Would you be able to provide any good references? Most standard statistical mechanics books seem to be omitting this topic largely. I found some stuff in Altland and Simons, but would appreciate your input and potentially a systematic structuring of how to learn about the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T11:15:22.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-07-25T13:10:22.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What inspired or motivated you to become a physicist? Were any teachers or family particularly important? or did you discover science yourself through books, TV and the internet? Were there ever any barriers - financial or social, or other - to your career or education? If so, how did you overcome them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23389" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T13:10:22.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-07-26T10:47:58.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another question about noise: what is your view on the current state of a universal theory of noise vs detailed process dependent theories of noise, particularly concerning of 1/f noise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T10:47:58.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8988" CreationDate="2016-07-26T16:35:52.190" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a flag for flagging as insufficient research effort? Or do I need to use a custom reason flag? (Should I even flag a question as such? I know a lot of people do...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is a dumb question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T17:06:31.500" Title="Not enough research effort flag" Tags="|discussion|flagging|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8987" CreationDate="2016-07-26T17:06:31.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this time, there is not a flag for insufficient research effort. And I would say you shouldn't flag for that. If you have the ability to vote to close with a custom reason, you can do that, and downvoting is also a good idea, but it's not the sort of thing we're really comfortable handling with unilateral moderator action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have been talking about replacing the homework policy with a new policy which will likely focus on insufficient effort. So when that process is complete, we probably &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; have a close reason (and a flag) for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T17:06:31.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8990" CreationDate="2016-07-27T09:22:24.193" Score="5" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a recurring problem when writing answers: a massive lag between typing and seeing the text appear. It got unbearable for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266261/trouble-reconciling-doppler-shift-for-energy-and-momentum-of-light&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, probably due to the enormous length of the answers and the many formulae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this is a problem with my system (I use Mac OS and Safari is my browser... so yeah, the trouble could well originate there ;) ). If other people are experiencing this issue too, I think it should definitely be fixed (if that's the case maybe ask on main meta site?). It severely impedes the writing of answers, I had to pre-write my answer in a text document and copy it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T14:16:45.620" Title="Lag problems when writing answers" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8989" CreationDate="2016-07-27T14:11:02.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is generally dependent on the user's system, so the only surefire way to consistently improve it is to upgrade your system. That said, there will always be a point where the page is too big for the MathJax update to work smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been answered in the Mathematics Meta site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2558/feature-request-user-script-or-option-to-turn-off-instant-mathjax-rendering&quot;&gt;Feature request: user script or option to turn off instant MathJax rendering&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting Jack Schmitt's answer there directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't know how you want to do user scripts.  I use bookmarklets&#xA;  mostly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To pause it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javascript:(function(){MathJax.Hub.queue.pending=1;})();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To turn it back on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javascript:(function(){MathJax.Hub.queue.pending=0;})();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Presumably something similar can be done with automatic solutions like&#xA;  greasemonkey.  The turn-it-back-on does not request an immediate&#xA;  render, but you can add the:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MathJax.Hub.Queue([&quot;Typeset&quot;, MathJax.Hub, &quot;wmd-preview&quot;])&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to the bookmarklet yourself if you'd like.  Turning it back on may&#xA;  cause a delay; if so I can adjust the script to more drastically&#xA;  disable mathjax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bookmarklet is simply a bookmark where the URL has been switched to the given javascript code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep the updating but just make the wait longer for each refresh of the preview, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/690/30935&quot;&gt;this userscript&lt;/a&gt; should be able to do the job with a suitable delay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are writing a very long answer, I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackedit.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackEdit&lt;/a&gt; to be a good tool, and it enables you to draft and save long posts in Markdown + MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a more extreme solution, you can get Privacy Badger (which is a good thing to have anyway) and temporarily disable all content from cdn.mathjax.org to disable all math rendering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the lags persist even with MathJax disabled then that is definitely something to report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T14:16:45.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8992" CreationDate="2016-07-27T14:28:38.347" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/139548&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; rollback of an edit by Cort Ammon, where he removed an (in my eyes) good example that was a way to verify one has understood him correctly in what he was saying. At least another user stated in a comment he was thinking so too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought it would be a loss to remove that example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the reviewers of my edit a) didn't carefully enough check the overall case as they identified my edit just as beeing a comment to the question or a seperate answer (which definitely is not the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or b) I simply missed something about this SE site, where it was not good behaviour of myself to roll back his edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what exactly went wrong in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84895" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T15:13:11.337" Title="Should one delete an example that could cause confusion but already helped multiple users to better understand the matter?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8991" CreationDate="2016-07-27T14:49:20.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/270058/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; contains CortAmmon's following edit description for the deletion of the example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I couldn't find a reference for the glass breaking trick, and it may have been confusing, so I removed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While posts on StackExchange can and should be edited by anyone who feels they can be improved, non-community-wiki posts are ultimately considered to be written &lt;em&gt;by their original authors&lt;/em&gt;, and edits that contradict the intent of the authors &lt;em&gt;should be rejected&lt;/em&gt;, there is an explicit rejection reason for this (and I'm a bit puzzled why that wasn't chosen by the reviewers in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what went wrong is that you proposed an edit that explicitly ran counter to the stated intent of the author, and what went right is that it was rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.887" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T14:49:20.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8998" CreationDate="2016-07-27T19:02:55.820" Score="27" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this site, there is a tendency for users to answer questions with terse comments. It's especially prevalent for low quality questions which are in danger of being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've been noticing a lot of comments that are misleading or downright incorrect, especially on lower quality questions. I want to respond to them somehow, but I see no way to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't downvote comments, and existing flag reasons don't apply to incorrect comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't reply in a comment, for two reasons: long discussions in comments are frowned upon and often deleted, and it often takes many more words to correct a misconception than to make one. 500 characters often isn't enough to respond.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't reply in an answer, because answers should address the question, not its comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are no easy responses, and there's no glory to be had anyway (these questions usually quickly plummet off the front page), these comments almost always stand uncorrected. This misleads the OP and gives our site a bad name to anybody who knows their stuff and sees the question later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we deal with this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="83398" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T22:14:54.270" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T22:14:54.270" Title="How should we deal with incorrect comments?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2016-07-27T19:18:40.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an issue on the site right now. For my own part I've started trying very hard not to write pseudo-answers in the comments and I am more willing to consider pseudo-answer as &quot;not constructive&quot; comments than I had been. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside: I wrote this in as a comment first. But, I'm trying not to write pseudo-answer so much these days...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Poll (use votes on this post to indicate your feelings):&lt;/strong&gt; How do people feel about the prospect of mods killing pseudo-answer comments if the same notion appears in an answer (by anyone, not just the author of the comment)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T19:18:40.027" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2016-07-27T19:32:49.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that this is not a solution, especially for stubborn users, but a friendly comment to the point of &quot;you are misleading/mixing things up/wrong here&quot; will still work wonders for a number of the more reasonable users. Your own comment can then easily be deleted by you after you've achieved your goal. A bit of a hassle, though ..  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from them, in the flagging options for comments, I see both &quot;unconstructive&quot; and &quot;other&quot;. Isn't especially the first one useful for exactly that? A misleading short pseudo answer &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; unconstructive and depending on the way the people who have access to the flag queue handle this / interpret this, this could be an easy way to get rid of those, would it not?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, dmckee's suggestion could prove useful &lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt; people might be discouraged from giving pseudo-answers in comments if they see them deleted. Thus, the overall amount of pseudo-answers (and thus the wrong ones, too) might decrease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T19:32:49.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2016-07-27T20:16:38.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed many &quot;answers&quot; in the comments that weren't posted because they wanted someone else to expand it, etc. However, I haven't noticed incorrect answer-comments. I was going to say adding down votes to comments seems best, but it almost seems like encouraging it, because they now have the same options as answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what would be best is to post another comment asking them to post it as an answer. If they don't, you could post the answer under &quot;community&quot; and down vote it (and then flag the comment for deletion, delete your original comment, etc), because really, the policy is to not use comments for answers. When a comment-answer comes up that is correct, encourage them to post it as an answer, or do so yourself (expansion might be necessary). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along this line of thought, maybe comments should be restructured so people don't post comment-answers. What that would entail, I don't know...probably a Meta question for another time. =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per a discussion in chat with DavidZ and EmilioPisanty, what if there was a flag queue for non-moderators (maybe users with 15k+ rep) that covered all comment flags. Another flag for comments would be added for pseudo-answers, and these flags would also go into this same queue, therefore allowing either the original finder of the pseudo-answer to fix it, or 15k+ users to fix it. Then the system could down vote or up vote as the answer's content entails. I posted this (at Emilio Pisanty's suggestion) as a feature request on the mother meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/281783/comment-queue-for-non-moderators&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Please up vote this feature request if you think this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this addresses some of the concerns brought up in the comments below this answer and concerns brought up in the discussion with DavidZ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The new feature request is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213691/create-flagged-comments-review-queue&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; I started a bounty on it as it is 3 years old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T11:57:00.247" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2016-07-27T20:42:04.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer addresses the case where a comment is valid as a comment - that is, it's attempting to improve its parent post, not to answer the question - but it's simply wrong.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preferred way to deal with incorrect comments is to respond with a comment of your own. Now, you made a fair point about why you might not want to do that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't reply in a comment, for two reasons: long discussions in comments are frowned upon and often deleted, and it often takes many more words to correct a misconception than to make one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but here's an easy way to solve both problems: write something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is incorrect because (short summary reason). If you'd like to discuss this further, we can do so in [chat].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the original commenter then ignores your invitation to chat and tries to respond in another comment: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I said, we can continue to discuss this in [chat].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and leave it at that. If you don't actually want to get into an argument, that's fine; you can take the discussion to the chat room and respond once or twice then give up. Heck, you don't even have to follow it up in chat at all. (In that case, you could use wording along the lines of &quot;the place to discuss this is [chat]&quot;) The point of making this comment is not to actually start a debate. The point is (1) to show that there &lt;em&gt;exists&lt;/em&gt; a counterargument to the original comment, and (2) if the original commenter does want to argue their point, to remove that argument from the wrong venue (the comment section) and put it in the right one (a chat room).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I especially want to emphasize that our reluctance to hold discussions in the comments is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a reason to avoid responding to comments. Yes, extended comment discussions are frowned upon, but one or two rounds of back-and-forth commenting do not count as an extended discussion. What does make an extended discussion is when you have several rounds of comments &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; it shows no signs of stopping. And even if you do get sucked into a discussion, it's not really that bad. Nobody gets &lt;em&gt;punished&lt;/em&gt; for that. The worst that happens (or some might say best) is that the whole comment chain gets moved to chat or deleted - which, in fact, is a roundabout way of getting rid of the original, allegedly incorrect comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T11:38:28.967" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T11:38:28.967" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2016-07-28T11:35:50.153" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This ties directly into a larger issue with flag that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8947/50583&quot;&gt;recently came up&lt;/a&gt;. The moderators are currently not deleting answer for being wrong because it is not they who should pass that judgement unilaterally, so it seems inconsistent if they deleted comments for being wrong. So there are two options here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The nuclear option: Delete &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; comment that gives an answer if it is flagged as &lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;, no matter its correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do nothing: Leave answers in comments alone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I belong to the users who leave answers in comments if I'm too lazy or too busy to expand them into a full answer, or because I plainly don't think the question deserves that much effort on my part, or also because some of my comment-like answers have incurred a number of upvotes that are frankly ridiculuous and I don't want my rep to be inflated by giving such effortless answers, I say: &lt;strong&gt;Nuke answers in comments if they are flagged.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are for clarifying questions, pointing out inconsistencies, giving reasons for close/delete/down votes or otherwise improving the post being commented on. They are, obviously, often used for other things - making jokes, giving pseudo-answers, debating related topics, and more. Which is fine as long as no one is bothered by those comments. But as soon as such comment bother someone - indicated by a flag - all comments &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; evidently serving the primary purpose of comments should be deleted, mercilessly and without considering the abstract &quot;value&quot; or &quot;correctness&quot; of their content. The unique quality of the SE model is precisely that it does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow the free form of forums, and we should not compromise on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T11:35:50.153" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-28T19:51:47.143" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking around on the mother meta, and I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/277607/ways-to-give-users-some-specific-education-about-question-quality-and-topicality&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; interesting post. The second answer mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page on stack overflow for new users, where they must check the box at the bottom to confirm before asking their question. I know that there have been a lot of discussions on this meta about homework questions and otherwise bad questions. Could we add this page and design it such that it would give some of these new users pause before posting a bad question? Could this possibly reduce the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; per Emilio Pisanty's suggestion (see comments below sammy gerbil's answer), I have started to work on a query for the stack exchange data explorer. While it is not yet quite done, there is some data you can see currently, so &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/519816/downvoted-posts-and-rep&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T16:01:44.667" Title="Add &quot;is your question on-topic&quot; page for new users?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2016-07-30T01:59:57.190" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with rob - although I cannot tell if he is being serious or sardonic when he says that &quot;terse, incisive comments are always correct&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is not an issue. Heather asked for examples but none have been provided. There are far more serious issues which need addressing, such as the Homework Policy which almost daily causes rancour among those who don't agree with the Vote-to-Close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Asker does not show signs of being mislead by incorrect comments, I suggest that there is no need to correct them, and it is best to ignore them. Comments do not have the status of an official Answer which has been upvoted by the community.  As the Help Centre says, they are &quot;temporary post-it notes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are bothered by incorrect comments, the most constructive response you can make is to &lt;strong&gt;post a clearly correct Answer&lt;/strong&gt; - which does not have to be encyclopaedic.  If a terse comment is always correct, this must be even more true of a terse answer.  And however terse, it is almost certain to be upvoted if it is correct.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting and down-voting an incorrect answer is unnecessary and counter-productive.  Posting it as an Answer only draws attention to something which may have been buried and forgotten in a babble of comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T01:59:57.190" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9000" CreationDate="2016-07-30T20:15:23.807" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this would be a useful feature, in my opinion.  Not a check-box as WORDS implies, but an invitation to state (in WORDS!) what steps have been taken to undertake the expected &quot;prior research&quot;.  Thus reminding the OP of his/her obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggested the same feature myself a couple of months ago, but I cannot find where it was that I did so. Perhaps in a comment. (Yes, I know - &quot;answering in comments&quot;!)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update in Response to Comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you envision this applying only to prospective homework questions, or to all new users' first question? – Emilio Pisanty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect the feature &lt;strong&gt;to apply to all questions&lt;/strong&gt;, irrespective of rep or type of question. I see no justification for discriminating in either case. All users would benefit from the reminder. My understanding is that all questions should show some prior research effort, not only those which are &quot;homework-like&quot;. Users who have made the effort will not mind stating what they've done; those who aren't willing to make any effort will hopefully go away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would suggest it apply to users with less than 100 rep, somewhere where the users are sort of established.– heather&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that it should &lt;strong&gt;apply to all users&lt;/strong&gt;, because&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. I have seen users with &gt;1k rep post questions without making any internet search - perhaps high reps post so few questions that they need the reminder?;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. it helps the OP try to resolve his/her own problem and narrow down the difficulty;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. it lets potential answerers know what has already been tried, so that they do not waste effort doing the same;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. discrimination should be avoided wherever possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many already provide this information in the question, so it should be no additional burden to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What if the requirements decreased for higher rep users? – heather&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the feature should operate uniformly, the same for everyone, unless there is a good reason to do otherwise.  It could include check boxes for &quot;searched this site for duplicates&quot; and &quot;searched the internet,&quot; to minimize typing. I think asking them to confirm they have &quot;read help centre info&quot; is too broad a request and too burdensome. The feature itself should remind the OP - as succinctly as possible - of the minimum requirements for &quot;prior research/effort&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typed description should be mandatory - but with a low minimum of perhaps only 30 characters. Requiring an essay will not be received well. The OP should decide how much is appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the feature is (1) to remind the OP of his/her obligation to ensure the question is &quot;on topic&quot;, and (2) to elicit useful information which will guide potential answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I have focussed on the &quot;prior research effort&quot; requirement, but the &quot;appropriate subject&quot; requirement (&quot;asking about a specific concept of physics&quot;) should not be forgotten in the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have opened a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/43299/new-feature-is-your-question-on-topic?tab=general&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ChatRoom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for anyone wishing to participate in or discuss R&amp;amp;D towards a proposal for this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-08-01T12:31:18.207" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T12:31:18.207" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-31T08:48:53.803" Score="-5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title suggests, I would like to hear everyone's opinion on who should be allowed to downvote. I have seen youngsters downvote good answers simply because they could not understand it. They should instead request a clearer explanation rather than downvoting. What do you think ? Should the reputation for downvote be increased?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47033" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T23:57:06.603" Title="raise the minimum reputation required for downvote" Tags="|feature-request|reputation|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9003" CreationDate="2016-07-31T10:44:30.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's examine the facts: according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/519697/downvotes-by-low-rep-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;last data available&lt;/a&gt;, only 705 users with reputation between 125 and 250 had casted any downvote (out of 4065). From them, only 33 had casted 10 or more downvotes. Yes, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/60480&quot;&gt;an exceptional case&lt;/a&gt;, but the rest seems perfectly normal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you don't know what posts did these users voted (because votes are secret!!!), you don't know their motives, and you don't know whether these users are in fact knowledgeable new users. You don't really know anything about downvotes, but you're proposing to change the whole system based in your prejudices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the technical part, the privilege system isn't controlled by the Physics.SE site, it is a part of the SE engine. In order to propose a change, you have to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. And believe me, you will need much stronger arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T10:44:30.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9007" CreationDate="2016-07-31T11:55:25.710" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8789/what-does-everyone-mean-by-insufficient-research-effort&quot;&gt;What does everyone mean by &amp;quot;insufficient research effort&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, in the third note below the question, user Chris White says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Explicit mobile links (e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org) are a scourge on the internet and should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, in the comments, user Emilio Pisanty says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good point on explicit mobile links. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=en.m.wikipedia.org%20site%3Aphysics.stackexchange.com&amp;amp;gws_rd=ssl&amp;amp;safe=active&amp;amp;ssui=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7.6k of them&lt;/a&gt;! In the tens of percent of all Wikipedia links, too. Is that something we should fix? That's a pretty sizable project there, something like fifteen Copy Editor badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is, should I go through the linked list and edit them so the links aren't explicit? It seems like it would be a good thing to do, but I want to make sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume if it was to be done it would be done only a couple question/answers at a time, so as to not mess with the &quot;active&quot; question list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T13:18:56.397" Title="Explicit mobile links: should I edit to fix them?" Tags="|discussion|editing|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-31T12:13:49.963" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site says we are no longer accepting questions from this account when I try to submit a question in physics section. I don't even have a bad reputation. All I asked was one single question which got me two upvotes. So I don't even know why I'm being targeted or something like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121509" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-07-31T12:20:48.700" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T15:38:52.920" Title="Mistaken block on asking questions" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9005" CreationDate="2016-07-31T13:18:56.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, my question is, should I go through the linked list and edit them so the links aren't explicit? It seems like it would be a good thing to do, but I want to make sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, the change we're talking about is changing &lt;code&gt;en.m.wikipedia.org&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;en.wikipedia.org&lt;/code&gt;, and similarly for other mobile-optimized URLs. That's a fine change to make but it seems quite minor to me, and I'd shy away from making an edit which &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; makes that change and nothing else. However, if you fix other problems with the post at the same time, it's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people may have different opinions on whether an edit which makes that change and no other would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T13:18:56.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9006" CreationDate="2016-07-31T15:38:52.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have been subjected to one of several automated bans that are active on the network. These bans are temporary, but we can't tell you how long they will last. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can suggest that you follow and read the links in the message you get when you attempt to post a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell you about any deleted question associated with your account if you wish, however that is something that will be in public view. Just comment here asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T15:38:52.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-31T22:11:12.813" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270930/relativity-and-time-dilation&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, which I will slightly paraphrase because I'm sure it will soon be deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;I would like to know in simple words why time slows down and lengths change when I am in my private rocket traveling near the speed of light.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I think that almost everyone will agree this should be closed, it's not so clear which of the close reasons to choose.  (In fact, I ended up choosing one pretty much arbitrarily and no longer remember what it was.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this question is a duplicate many times over, but I can't choose  that reason without pointing to a specific prior question, which I'd rather not do, partly because I don't want to spend time hunting up that question and more importantly because I don't want to send a message that posters who can't be bothered doing their own searches can post questions like this and expect others to do their searching for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not really unclear what's being asked.  &quot;Too broad&quot; and &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; don't seem to fit.  That leaves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;This question does not appear to be about physics within the scope defined in the help center.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that's pretty good, but unfortunately I can't choose it without choosing a sub-reason.  And none of those sub-reasons seems to fit.  This is not a homework-like question, it's not about engineering, and it doesn't (to my knowledge) belong on another site on the Stack Exchange network.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it non-mainstream physics?  Well, sort of, in the sense that it seems to confuse a &quot;change in (proper?) length&quot; with a change in the assignment of coordinates, but I think there is a difference between being non-mainstream and being a little confused.  Besides, there are many other questions at about this level which are even more mainstream than this one, but still equally in need of closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves me with the option of formulating a custom close reason, which requires a little extra effort on my part --- all the more so because that custom close reason automatically becomes publicly visible as a comment, so that although all I want to do is cast a close vote and move on, I feel like I need to spend an extra minute or so making sure my comment is fit for public consumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this and other such questions, I would be much happier if it were possible to close with the reason &quot;This question does not appear to be about physics as defined in the help center&quot;, where it is stated upfront that this site is for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me close by saying that we get a lot of questions at this level, some of which show more thought  than this one does (e.g. the questions that arise periodically where someone has actually given some thought to what it would be like to ride on a light wave, has discovered an apparent paradox, and wants to know how to resolve it).  I think it's important to discourage such posts without discouraging the spirit of inquiry that lies behind them.  Telling people that they are engaged in &quot;non-mainstream physics&quot; is, I think, likely to be perceived as disparaging --- which is doubly unfortunate because thought-experiments like this &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; mainstream physics.  (Yes, these thought-experiments have already been done and other people know the results, but naively repeating someone else's experiment---thought or otherwise---is still mainstream physics.)  So I don't want to choose that option, but I do want to dispose of these posts quickly and effectively, and &quot;not within the scope of the site&quot; seems like a far better option than &quot;non-mainstream&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Question 1:&lt;/b&gt;  Can we please be given the option of closing as &quot;Not within the scope...as defined in the help center&quot;, without having to choose or formulate a sub-reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Question 2:&lt;/b&gt;  Does someone have a better suggestion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/b&gt;  Some have responded that &quot;Too Broad&quot; fits this question perfectly.   Whether or not that is the case, it does not dispose of the general issue.  What about questions of the form &quot;I imagined myself riding on a lightbeam, and I don't see how I can square the obvious consequences with the fact that the speed of light is supposed to be invariant&quot;?  This is (I think) far too specfic to be &quot;Too Broad&quot;, far too honest an effort to think things through from first principles to be &quot;Non-Mainstream&quot;, and a bad fit for all the others too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edited to add further:&lt;/b&gt;  I've just noticed that moderators already have access to the exact close reason I'm asking for, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/271022/ideal-coin-toss-experiment-do-previous-trials-affect-the-outcome-of-future-tria&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  Apparently someone thought it was a good idea for moderators to have this option, and apparently at least one moderator thinks it's a good idea to use it.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T18:31:37.497" Title="Reasons for Closing" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9009" CreationDate="2016-07-31T22:45:15.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started to type this as a comment, and then it became an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if I'm mistaken, but I've heard that the homework close policy may be reformulated soon to be more along the lines of not enough effort. It seems like this is really what you want, because as you said in your question, it is more about being a little confused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, though, I think it should be closed as one of the following two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; - It definitely is a duplicate, as you said. I think this is the best thing to close it as, because then the guy gets an answer (or a partial answer) to his question, along with the one already there. I can sympathize with your point about it making posters lazier, but I don't know if that's really the case. And, honestly, question quality is a whole other problem that other meta discussions have gone over.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too Broad&lt;/strong&gt; - As Emilio Pisanty said, this is another great close reason. While opinions on this might vary from person to person, the question is basically &quot;Explain special relativity to me.&quot; We're not Wikipedia. Sure, we can provide a summary, and I personally think it being a duplicate is a better close reason because of that, but this is still a valid close reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is definitely not a &quot;not mainstream physics&quot; question. Special relativity is mainstream, and being confused about special relativity is also mainstream. Besides, even if most people understood special relativity, being a little confused is the &lt;em&gt;whole point of a question&lt;/em&gt; and I think that we need to respect that. Perhaps this guy should've done more research. (The user certainly needed to search for duplicates.) But it is a valid question on the physics.SE forum in terms of topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, ACuriousMind says exactly my point of view on the new close reason you suggest. It is so vague that it doesn't help the asker or reviewers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just my two cents; I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2016-07-31T22:58:57.917" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T22:58:57.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9009" CreationDate="2016-07-31T22:55:55.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the abstract questions you pose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, if you close something as being out of scope, you have to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is out of scope. The pre-existing reasons cover the most common reasons, for the others, you'll have to write a comment explaining yourself. The close reason is there to give the asker feedback &lt;em&gt;what exactly they did wrong&lt;/em&gt;, and just telling them it's &quot;out of scope&quot; doesn't really tell them what went wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from providing valuable feedback to the asker (that is sadly all too often ignored, or taken as a personal insult, but that's another issue), a specific close reason is also valuable for other voters - especially reviewers - to agree or disagree with. But if you just choose &quot;out of scope&quot;, then that doesn't give your peers something to argue with: Either they already agree it's out of scope or they don't, but &quot;out of scope&quot; is so vague as to make it impossible to constructively disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't have a better suggestion because we don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; a better suggestion. If you think a post is non-mainstream then you should close it as non-mainstream. Votes are judgements of questions and answers, not of users. The feedback they provide is valuable only if given honestly - I see no value in &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; voting as you want to vote because of the psychological consequences you fear it may have on the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/270930/50583&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;specific question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; you're talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the least controversial way to close this is as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;. It's a question that basically asks &quot;Explain special relativity to me&quot;, without any research effort shown and without any &lt;em&gt;specific question&lt;/em&gt;. It's not clear to me how one could determine a &quot;correct&quot; answer specifically to this question, i.e. how one would decide when it is actually &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also had two close votes as &lt;em&gt;homework-like&lt;/em&gt;, now hidden by the majority close reason &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;. I don't really understand those, it's not a question that falls under our homework policy by any stretch of the imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the suggestion to close it as &quot;non-mainstream&quot;, either - it's not non-mainstream, it's a question about basic special relativity, no personal theory in sight, just confusion (and little effort on part of the asker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there are so many introductory resources to special relativity both on and off this site, I think closing because of &lt;em&gt;insufficient effort&lt;/em&gt; (as a custom close reason) would also have been defensible if you think we should be closing questions for that. See meta discussions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8789/50583&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6001/50583&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and at further links in those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; close reason is different. You vote to close as duplicate because you have &lt;em&gt;already found&lt;/em&gt; the question it's a duplicate of. Duplicate questions are neither off-topic nor unclear nor too broad nor any other of these reasons. Closing a question as duplicate just says that we already have a sufficiently similar question here. If you're thinking the question should be closed anyway, go ahead and close it for another reason, but &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; forcefully try to make another reason fit &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; because you can't be bothered to search for the duplicate. (I'm not accusing you specifically of this, but I think it's worth explicitly stating in general.) I personally think that there's no value in closing a question that should be closed for another reason as duplicate, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; one then proceeds to close the duplicate for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T23:00:38.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9003" CreationDate="2016-07-31T23:57:06.603" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this can be a problem, but as Bosoeando showed in his answer, with one exception, it's a very small problem. Keep in mind that the cure to a small problem is oftentimes worse than the disease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the biggest areas where this could be a problem have already been addressed. One potential problem is serial down-voting, which is mostly committed by users with a low reputation. The SE software automatically detects and corrects most of these serial voting problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential problem is questions that have made the SE hot list. These hot questions are an open invitation to people from elsewhere on the SE network to join the site. The problem was that users with a high enough reputation elsewhere on the SE network receive 100 points just for signing up with another element of the network. The solution is to quickly mark these hot questions as protected. Newbies who receive those freebie 100 reputation points cannot vote, up or down, on protected questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T23:57:06.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-01T05:18:42.983" Score="0" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a fundamental disagreement with the explanation of a real world phenomenon. That fundamental disagreement renders the current explanations of that phenomenon completely wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest way I could think of to bring everyone's attention to it was by asking a question on PSE (Physics Stack Exchange). It is being met with not just criticism but huge opposition. When I ask the question, it is marked as duplicate. Yes, it is duplicate because other people had same curiosity and they asked it. However, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the answers on previous questions are based on same fundamental which I find flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody answers my question. Some down-vote it and some vote for it to be closed. (Down-votes and VTCs are fellow SO users' right. No issues with that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unrealistic to go to all current answers and point to the answerer how their answer is wrong. I tried to do this with one answer which was accepted and had 28 up-votes and after some time the answerer stopped responding. I cannot make that person justify his/her answer when he/she doesn't want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm left with only one choice and that is to ask a question but I have already seen what happens to my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions to Meta-PSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I invite a sensible discussion on my question? What's happening now is that first people google the topic, second they find a link, third they add it in a comment and finally they proceed to argue. &lt;em&gt;Nobody&lt;/em&gt; has attempted to answer the question, for whatever reason.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My state is something like that I'm saying &quot;Earth is spheroid&quot; when everyone is hell bent on believing &quot;Earth is flat.&quot;. How do I write a question in a manner that people give it an unbiased consideration?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people have probably already seen them by now, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/270957/124734&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/270298/124734&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; are the questions I asked. I hope to have someone answer the meta question of mine without any bias towards the PSE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user124734" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T13:20:48.667" Title="How to ask question about a phenomenon that has been wrongly 'understood' at a global level?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9009" CreationDate="2016-08-01T06:17:47.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have closed it as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really&quot;&gt;What is time dilation really?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question seems as close to an exact duplicate as one could ask, the only caveat being the request in the original question for &lt;em&gt;in simple words&lt;/em&gt;. But then there is a limit to how simple an explanation can be made before it becomes meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't choose that reason without pointing to a specific prior question, which I'd rather not do, partly because I don't want to spend time hunting up that question and more importantly because I don't want to send a message that posters who can't be bothered doing their own searches can post questions like this and expect others to do their searching for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but taking the time and effort to do this is an important part of managing the site. The SE policy is that duplicates are valuable signposts that point visitors to the (hopefully) definitive answer. That is, the duplicates increase the likelyhood of a search finding a relevant question. So if you want to help make the site a better place then I'm afraid the search for duplicates is an essential part of the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T11:27:39.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9013" CreationDate="2016-08-01T12:21:55.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would urge you to reconsider the possibility that your calculations are, in fact, missing something, and that that makes them incorrect. Tone matters a great deal here: you come across (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/270957&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but particularly on this meta thread) as someone who has come to a conclusion and will only listen to people that will confirm it, and that's not particularly inviting. To be honest, the response to your second question looks a bit over the top to me, but that simply tells you that you need to be crystal clear with your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, some suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make it very clear what parts of the standard theory you do agree with or not. If you claim that the tidal bulge exists in the oceans, then you'll simply get an appropriate &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/121830&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; that explains that it doesn't and why it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I gather, though, you mostly have a problem with the forcing term (e.g. the section 'the tidal force' in David Hammen's answer to the link above). If that's the case, then I suggest that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you make it crystal clear that this is the part you're having problems with. If you have maths that conflict with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ihwq2.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diagram&lt;/a&gt;, then I would urge you to really consider the possibility that your maths is missing something. This means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;post the maths in a clear and well-formatted manner, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ask whether there is a mistake in the workings or a hypothesis you missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, tone is very important - you come across as very entitled and certainly not as someone that's likely to have constructive discussions; you're scaring away all the reasonable people that could answer your question constructively. That's up to you but think it carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as a meta note: these are all suggestions for you to use or not as you see fit. I'm not particularly interested in further discussion, though (and particularly if you show the same attitude as in the comment threads and endless re-edits you linked to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T12:21:55.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-08-01T12:46:19.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/271004/falling-hailstones-on-windshield&quot;&gt;Falling hailstones on windshield&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is well laid out, the set-piece components are clearly labelled, and the OP has clearly put in the work and isolated a specific question. However, it is still essentially a check-my-work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T12:46:19.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9013" CreationDate="2016-08-01T15:12:49.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emilio Pisanty says most of what I want to say, but I do want to add two points (the main sentences are bolded).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; try to help you, but I remember your question was not very clear, and it was not until I had read through a bajillion (okay, over 40) comments until I kind of understood what you wanted, and even then, you didn't have your math posted, and I didn't understand your specific objections. &lt;strong&gt;Try to make your questions as clear as possible, and include all the necessary information to answer them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your tone didn't really help matters. Your small print before I edited it seemed to imply a sort of &quot;I have the answer, but I want to see you all be wrong so I can argue with you.&quot; You didn't post necessary information, which also made it seem like you were kind of looking for a &quot;fight&quot;. And, in the comments, you acted in a way that annoyed many people. Tone really threw people off - your responses in comments made it harder for people to listen to you because they weren't super polite, and they made it sound like you were looking for everyone to admit, &quot;yeah, you're right, here's the nobel prize.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;Try to act like you are wrong, not like everyone else is wrong.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I might add that I have nothing against you. I am simply pointing out things that would help your question. (Oh, and don't post the same question twice. People will be ticked off.) I think that if you follow suggestions for the formatting of your question, it will get reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T15:12:49.970" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9013" CreationDate="2016-08-01T15:37:28.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are going about this in the wrong way. Your question should not be - does the Moon cause the tides? To which &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think the answer is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the whole of the scientific world thinks the Moon ultimately causes tides (along with the Sun, the Earth's rotation and other more minor contributions), so your question should be along the lines of - here is an analysis (giving details) of why I think the Moon cannot be responsible for tides on the Earth; is there a flaw in my argument?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just stop and think. Do you really believe that you alone have discovered something that has eluded the millions of people who have thought about this problem already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your statement is not along the lines of &quot;I'm saying 'Earth is spheroid' when everyone is hell bent on believing 'Earth is flat'&quot;; actually it is completely the other way around. You are arguing that the Earth is flat and so &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; need to provide your evidence and invite the rest of us to critically assess that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T15:37:28.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-08-02T09:13:28.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Automating a big part of tuition through interactive e-books. Is it possible?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current tuition system involves a professor explaining, motivating, guiding students, and students reading at home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some big issues with that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pace&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When there are 20-50 students in a classroom being taught the same subject simultaneously, it is impossible to match everyone's pace of learning. Some people learn much faster, and being taught at a slower pace is a waste of their time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requires physical presence in a physical room&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While it might seem negligible, the cost of moving everyday into and out of the room, the cost of building the room, the cost of paying a professor every day for 40 years to go into the room and lecture. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Writing on a backboard&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It has its benefits, but it is also time-consuming. It might seem small, but multiplying the repetitive actions every day by 40 years or so becomes &lt;strong&gt;huge&lt;/strong&gt;. One wonders why most of this process hasn't been automated by everyone. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paper books&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not everything can be understood at school (or university), so students need to read a book at home. A book that often has errors, or concepts that can be explained in a much better way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some irreplaceable benefits:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Along with being motivated by a professor that loves his subject, there is also pressure for being on time when it comes to homework; both due to knowing your professor expects the homework and also due to (inevitably) comparing yourself to other students. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guidance&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not everything can be written in a book, or can be easily found. A student can ask a professor for more reliable advice than looking up specific subjects on their own. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The above lists are not exhaustive of course)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that for centuries there has been a waste of human resources during tuition, mostly due to lack of tools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those tools now exist:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jupyter&lt;/a&gt; (formerly known as ipython)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;StackExchange.... no really. The model of &quot;contribute improvements and we'll reward you with imaginary trophies&quot; has proven to be extremely successful &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/TU-ekKJ3n7o?t=8m33s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mathematica&lt;/a&gt; which allows easily creating  interactive e-books (but then again the &lt;strong&gt;cost&lt;/strong&gt; of proprietary software is a big no for some institutions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to have (university) students gradually rewrite all books in electronic, interactive form, guided by their professors? Their reward: experience on technologies like LateX, Python, and a small bonus to their grades (that's the imaginary trophy), and most importantly, a better book for their peers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No more errors (or at least they'll get fixed extremely fast), concepts can be 3D animated and interactively explained, at the appropriate pace for each student, no more thousands of man-hours spent by professors repeating the same thing over and over again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching through a book will be as easy as pressing &lt;kbd&gt;ctr&lt;/kbd&gt;+&lt;kbd&gt;f&lt;/kbd&gt;. Going to another book could be as easy as clicking a hyperlink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professor-student interaction will not be replaced, it will simply be made more efficient. Instead of repeating something an interactive e-book can teach, professors and students can spend more &quot;quality time&quot; on things a book can't provide. There will also be more time for experiments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71860" LastEditorUserId="71860" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T10:25:20.750" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T10:25:20.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9013" CreationDate="2016-08-02T13:20:48.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recognize that you are in a fairly frustrated state from this. I imagine that in your position, I would be fairly frustrated too. However, given that you are trying to point out that modern physics is flawed, here is the way I would answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You do not invite a discussion here. This site is not a place for discussion on physics. It is a question and answer site; people ask questions about physics and other people give answers about what modern accepted physics has to say on the matter. Whether or not your point of view has merit, you are simply in the wrong place. This isn't a place to definitively change physics; only to state what the viewpoints of physicists would be. You may notice people respond and argue anyway. That is because it is very tempting to engage in discussion anyway; however, site policy remains that we do not discuss new physics. We give accepted physics. To change it, you need to publish a peer-reviewed paper on the subject. Only then will we change our answers. It may seem close-minded of us but remember, we are not offering our point of view, we are offering the explanations of accepted physics whether or not we agree with them. To change our answers, you cannot simply change our viewpoints.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do our best to give every question an unbiased chance. It helps if you are not explicitly calling everyone on Earth wrong. Statistically speaking, that is unlikely. The major problem is that your questions seem too off-topic for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're in a good mood and willing to be facetious/farcical about your situation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rapiddiffusion.com/science/crackpots-bane-science/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;read this blog post&lt;/a&gt;. If you find yourself relating to John Smith, then you should be worried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T13:20:48.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9022" CreationDate="2016-08-02T15:01:46.527" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just reached 3000 rep (yay!) yesterday and I immediately went to the close vote review queue. After working through twenty it said I was out of close votes. Same thing today. Now, I remember reading somewhere (not sure where) that you gain close votes with rep, or review tasks done, or something like that. What I read could've been about flags, I guess, but then I have a question about that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: what are the flag/close-vote increase points, if that makes sense? At what point do the number of close-votes or flags I have increase? (I do know that you have 10 close votes outside of review queues.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to ask if there are any specific things I should be doing as a 3k user besides going through the review queues (which I have been doing as they became open to me). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-08-02T18:44:30.917" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T18:44:30.917" Title="How many close votes do 3k+ users get per day? Is there any way to increase it?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9021" CreationDate="2016-08-02T15:34:03.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a good thing that you're so motivated to go through the review queues!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What increases with successful flagging is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/185890/263383&quot;&gt;number of flags you're allowed to cast per day&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, after you hit 3k, you won't ever use all those flags because all your off-topic &quot;flags&quot; on questions are now &lt;em&gt;close votes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get 24 close votes per day, and 20 reviews in the queue per day. This doesn't scale with rep. Every close vote you cast in the queue is deducted from the 24 votes per day you have. You cannot review when you're out of close votes even if you haven't done 20 reviews that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T15:34:03.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-03T08:40:02.033" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the stack overflow site where people post questions on programming, it makes sense to have a policy where the question asked should state the efforts made by the asker to solve the problem and the problems he is facing in that implementation. But should this policy be applied to the the Stack Physics site as well? I've seen people pontificate on this one point on many questions. The problem with physics is that there are many questions which aren't application oriented and are more theoretical in nature. Further, many of the askers are new to the subject or are just rookies. Should such a policy be encouraged in their cases too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68136" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-08-03T08:45:29.210" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T06:11:21.013" Title="Policy on asking questions in physics" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-08-17T17:54:58.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9023" CreationDate="2016-08-03T08:53:35.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point, in my view, is that it is an insult to just quickly spit out a question and expect for someone to take the time and effort to answer it. If someone tells me or shows me the effort he has made or the research he has gone through, this is, for one, a basic form of courtesy. Further, it makes sense because in case of research questions, I myself know where not to look. In case of more calculation based questions, I can tell him where he went wrong or astray. Both of these are actually helpful for the process of obtaining a good answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But apart from this, it is just more motivating to answer a question which shows that there has been thinking, time and interest included. I have recently spent quite a bit of time on an answer to a question I would normally probably have flagged for closure if it had not stated concisely what the problem, the interest and the motivation for the question are. I think apart from it being a rule that is more or less inforced here on physics SE, this is also just a good strategy to make potential answerers want to deal with your problem and answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T08:53:35.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9023" CreationDate="2016-08-04T06:11:21.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, there are no large differences between PSE and SO in this sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both on the SO, and also here, there is a requirement from the OP to show his attempts to solve his problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the SO, most of the VLQ questions are coming from beginner programmers in a strong need to provide the software what they are incapable to produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the PSE, most of the VLQ questions are coming from physics students in a strong need to provide the homework what they are incapable to produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases is it possible to show, what you tried. A similar requirement would be also a useful defense on the PSE against its degradation to an online, free homework solving service. But there is a such requirement already, and I've seen a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of homework questions closed on this reason (what I agree in most cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A remark: people &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt; to solve problems, despite that they know, it makes them like a w*. People motivated by such urges, can become later productive users of the site. This is the probable reason, what makes the MathSE a well-going site. And, although the OPs of the VLQ questions don't seem really useful content producers of the future, their answerers do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this behavior of the MathSE clearly worsens its mean quality, but if there is a finetuned, predictable way to deal with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758/why-is-stack-overflow-so-negative-of-late/252077#252077&quot;&gt;help vampires and the repwhores&lt;/a&gt; (*), to use their significant content-producing power to serve the site, it can help more as it harms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) I link here a MSO &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, describing the main sociological structure on the SE on a quite funny way :-) I didn't link the question (what is irrelevant in our current context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:31.813" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T06:11:21.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2016-08-04T16:44:35.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/271287/an-apparent-inconsistency-in-the-form-of-spin-z-operator-for-spin-1-2-system&quot;&gt;An apparent inconsistency in the form of Spin-z operator for spin 1/2 system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a homework type question in that it is an exercise from Sakurai's QM book basically about forms of the zero and projection operators for hermitian operators. I think the close tag doesn't suit it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shows a lot of effort (most of the question is done and they even latex'd it in the link). As I've commented in the post that the close reason is essentially &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;punishing a user for doing more work than less work. One could've easily said 'I don't know what the operator in part b) is' and done nowhere near as much work as op. If op didn't have a mistake he/she wouldn't have asked the question!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in fairness Sakurai is a fairly well used book so in principle could be useful to future users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt; it is essentially a &lt;strong&gt;where's my mistake&lt;/strong&gt; type problem which isn't on topic, so I understand that, but I also don't agree with the reasoning  &quot;&lt;em&gt;If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;here on meta&lt;/a&gt; which might for example punish a student that is self motivated to work over a summer break, where the teacher/lecturer is busy, and maybe other classmates/friends don't want to be doing physics over a break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote up if you think this question should be on topic under the new policy, or vote down if you think it should be off topic under the new policy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41998" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T09:08:50.797" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-04T19:44:25.760" Score="24" ViewCount="781" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract&lt;/strong&gt;: We are experimenting with expanding the scope of the very low quality (VLQ) flag. For two weeks, August 8-21, moderators will not decline any VLQ flags. We will allow these flags will sit in the queue as long as needed for the community to deal with them. We ask you, the community, to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;use VLQ flags on posts which are &quot;harmfully incorrect&quot; (see below for what that means), which would ordinarily &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be a valid use of the VLQ flag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;when reviewing low-quality posts, choose to delete such &quot;harmfully incorrect&quot; posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The handling of low-quality answers has been a point of contention and friction, on and off, for a fairly long time in this site. For low-quality questions, it happens that every so often someone sees a terrible answer, flags it as low quality, and finds out that it gets declined with the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which then generally leads to bruised egos and a lot of friction, and also a lot of people unhappy that we don't have a strong enough mechanism to handle the types of posts they wanted to flag. (Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5995/&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6032/&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2858/&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5341/&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5589&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6209&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7147/&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7193&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread is an attempt to explain what pressures the system is under, the way the flagging software works under the hood, the way flags are currently handled, and the reasons for this. I will then make two proposals for how the system could be improved (one of which we can implement ourselves, and the second of which would include software tweaks to support that workflow), and I will propose an experiment to see how well it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worked out several of these aspects after going through the bruised-ego, unnecessary-friction cycle in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8947/why-was-this-very-low-quality-flag-declined&quot;&gt;Why was this Very Low Quality flag declined?&lt;/a&gt;, and the responses  and votes on that post and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/42616/discussion-between-david-z-and-emilio-pisanty&quot;&gt;in a related chat&lt;/a&gt; make me hopeful that there's appetite for a change and a rough agreement that it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I claim that answers that are (1) flat-out incorrect, (2) so completely incorrect that no amount of editing can make it useful or constructive, and (3) so completely incorrect that it is actively harmful to the site and its standing, should be removed from the site. They should be flagged as Very Low Quality, and should be deleted via a consensus of six 2k+ users or three 20k+ users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the next two weeks, let's experiment with this dynamic and see how well it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The pressures&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site gets its fair share of posts, both questions and answers, that are - shall we say - rather below par. This includes a lot of content that a lot of people would rather we didn't have on the site at all and, in particular, all sorts of content drawing from every depth of crackpottery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, we get a lot of questions that assume as a starting point some way-off-standard theory and then (some question or other), in such a way that the only possible responses would either be a complete rejection of the hypotheses, or fringe pseudophysics with no place in any serious physics forum.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We also get a steady smattering of answers that draw on such off-base foundations, and which look something like &quot;time dilation does not actually exist because Einstein was wrong, see my site at  for more explanations&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two types of post above are usually made worse by the fact that in a large fraction of cases the poster will adopt rather belligerent attitudes, refuse to back down on any claim or listen to anyone at all, and very often drag the discussion down to wildly unconstructive mud-slinging, which is unbelievably draining for everyone involved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the above, we also get a steady stream of posts that are just not very good. This ranges from incomprehensible keyboard bashing, to one-liners that only vaguely address the question, one-liner questions with nowhere near enough information to be answerable, 'answers' that are just comments on another post or which ask a separate question, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is, of course, an incomplete list.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, of course, the site has a bunch of ways to deal with these things. For off-the-field questions we can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;close as non-mainstream&lt;/a&gt; and we can downvote them (which, once they reach score -4, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117119&quot;&gt;hides from the active-questions list&lt;/a&gt;). For 'answers' that are really a separate question or a comment we can flag as Not An Answer, and it generally gets resolved rather well relatively quickly. For gibberish posts and one-liner nonsensicals we can flag as Very Low Quality and they eventually disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the very-much-wrong, out-in-the-out-field-of-the-next-field-over answers, we can downvote and... that's it. The way the system works now, there is often precious little that a user can do if she notices a post that is wrong-wrong-wrong. (Think something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AU2Gt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or like &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lCe2d.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.) As long as it is an attempt to provide some sort of answer, the Not An Answer flag doesn't work, and the Very Low Quality flag currently excludes answers which are generally intelligible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our user can then add a comment explaining what is wrong (with the associated risk of getting dragged into an unconstructive discussion), and she can add a single downvote, which often looks like a hopelessly small signal (like, for example, with answers that might get upvoted in a popular question because they 'sound right', or are catchy enough, to enough outsiders, even if any working physicist can see that they're completely incorrect). There isn't even a way to get other experts to notice the post and help fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, I contend, is a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What happens to flags once you flag them&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the system is set up at the moment, there are two moderation queues where a post goes after it is flagged: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts&quot;&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/a&gt; community moderation review queue, and the moderator queue where all flags end up when they require human intervention to get swiftly handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161390/what-are-the-review-queues-and-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;what does the Low Quality Posts queue do&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For questions, the queue looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v4BbY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v4BbY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It enables the reviewer to &lt;code&gt;close&lt;/code&gt; the question if it is off-topic, &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; it if it can be whipped into shape, &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt; it if the reviewer doesn't know what to do, and decide it &lt;code&gt;looks OK&lt;/code&gt; and shouldn't really be in the queue to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For answers, the queue looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpVnP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dpVnP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It enables the reviewer to &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; the post, help get it off the queue by saying it &lt;code&gt;looks OK&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt; it and move elsewhere, and -- depending on the poster's reputation -- &lt;code&gt;recommend deletion&lt;/code&gt; of the answer (&amp;lt;20k rep) or a vote to &lt;code&gt;delete&lt;/code&gt; it (&gt;20k rep). Deletion votes come with the option of posting a canned message that includes a link to the review page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts with a negative score get deleted when they get &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/145287/is-recommend-deletion-secretly-a-vote-to-delete/145292#145292&quot;&gt;six Recommend Deletion&lt;/a&gt; votes, or three Delete votes by &gt;20k rep users. (Posts with positive score with that many delete votes get referred to moderators as a disputed deletion, and they probably do deserve that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Low Quality Posts queue is also populated by automatic processes, which generally get marked by text along the lines of 'this answer was automatically flagged because of its length and content', and includes posts which are very short, have lots of links, are by new users, or probably some combination of those. Generally speaking, the algorithm that catches these is pretty well tuned, and it very often does flag up posts that do require some extra attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts stay in the queue for as long as they need to: until they're kicked off the queue by having more Looks OK votes than flags and (recommended) deletion votes, the queue produces an action on the post (closure, deletion, or edit), or a moderator intervenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, after &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243145/hide-not-an-answer-and-very-low-quality-flags-in-the-moderator-flag-queue&quot;&gt;fifteen minutes of being raised&lt;/a&gt;, Very Low Quality flags also appear on the moderator queue, where moderators can see them and act on them. (However, this time can be changed and indeed it's a one-hour wait in several network sites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How flags are currently handled&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current guidelines for how flags should be raised on this site are at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6374/which-flag-do-i-use-for-an-inappropriate-post&quot;&gt;Which flag do I use for an inappropriate post?&lt;/a&gt;; in addition, there is network-wide guidance on how to review over on the mother meta at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/155538/what-are-the-guidelines-for-reviewing&quot;&gt;What are the guidelines for reviewing?&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, the guidelines for raising a Very Low Quality flag currently read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Very Low Quality&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;very low quality&quot; flag is for answers which are complete&#xA;  nonsense, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;incoherent gibberish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;anything not parseable as English text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;answers posted in another language (although if you can edit in a translation, you're encouraged to do so instead of flagging)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;wrong answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;answers based on non-mainstream physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;followup questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, answers which are wrong or based on non-mainstream physics are explicitly excluded. The reason for this is that Very Low Quality flags very quickly make their way to the moderator review queue, and &lt;strong&gt;moderators are entirely the wrong people to be handling this sort of flag&lt;/strong&gt;. Removing an answer because it's wrong, or because its premises are off-mainstream, is a judgement call based on technical aspects of the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely the sort of task that we use community moderation for - a consensus decision based on the judgement of multiple experts who have been on the site long enough to know what works and what doesn't - but if we ask moderators to handle these flags we're asking them to delete users' content based on technical grounds that they might get wrong. To their credit, the site moderators here understand that this is not their job and they repeatedly refuse to delete posts on those grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, this means that when people raise a Very Low Quality flag on a post that's dead-wrong it ends up being declined by a moderator because the system is asking them to do more than they should be doing. (Comments, of course, are another story.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be done with low-quality answers?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, so the story so far is how the system works, why it works this way, and what problems this causes. So, in an ideal world, how should this sort of post be handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One view which is held relatively widely (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2858/whats-with-the-low-quality-posts-in-perpetual-limbo&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) goes something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Technically, we can't &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; things which &lt;em&gt;answer the question&lt;/em&gt; (even if they're wrong or short/low quality). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contend that this is &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt;: we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; delete answers that are incorrect beyond saving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you disagree, then as I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8947/why-was-this-very-low-quality-flag-declined&quot;&gt;argued previously&lt;/a&gt;: what compels us to host content that is wildly incorrect? Say, things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AU2Gt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lCe2d.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Users &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange to display their CC BY-SA-licensed content, and they &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; the site to display it, but what compels us to host incorrect content?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be a bit more precise, I contend that if an answer is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flat-out incorrect, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so completely incorrect that no amount of editing can make it useful or constructive, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so completely incorrect that it is actively harmful to the site and its standing,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it should be deleted. In particular, it should be deleted via consensus-based community moderation, rather than through unilateral moderator action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites shine because when you land on a question you're likely to find a good question with an easily accessible good answer written by someone who knows their stuff, instead of pages of back-and-forth trying to get the asker to provide enough information, endless discussions over technical details, or off-the-wall posts that are just plain wrong. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8952&quot;&gt;the words of ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the mission statement of StackExchange is &quot;The best answers rise to the top&quot;, not &quot;Even the worst answer is here for your convenience&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or think about it this way: if [insert rising-star researcher in your field] were to stumble on that post on the site, would they think &quot;huh, this is an interesting place&quot; and decide to participate, or would they give it up as a wash because incorrect content gets such an easy pass?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Fixing the VLQ flags, part 1: community process&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully I still have everybody on board (and if you disagree with the above section, I do want to hear your views and I hope you're comfortable sharing them), in that there is a problem to be solved that the current mechanism isn't solving. Luckily enough, though, we do have the software tools to build a community process that can help clean up by putting deletion-worthy content in front of the people who should be deleting it (a consensus of experienced users) rather than the people who shouldn't (unilateral action by a moderator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose, therefore, to change the community guidelines for flagging and reviewing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For flagging: use the Very Low Quality flag for answers which are complete nonsense, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;incoherent gibberish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything not parseable as English text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answers posted in another language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as answers that are wrong, or based on non-mainstream physics, that you think are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flat-out incorrect,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so completely incorrect that no amount of editing can make it useful or constructive, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so completely incorrect that it is actively harmful to the site and its standing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this flag for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;followup questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For reviewing: vote to delete / recommend deletion on posts that in your judgement satisfy the above criterion. If you're not sure, click &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt;; if you think the post belongs on the site, click &lt;code&gt;looks OK&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very Low Quality flags should go to the Low Quality Posts review queue and remain there: that is, mods should not act to decline or dismiss VLQ flags raised over the technical quality of posts (whether they end up in the moderator queue or not), unless the review queue is obviously indecisive about it or is taking overly long to handle a post. I would fix the timescale for this at 2 to 3 days (but this should be easier to decide after the experiment below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Back-end changes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above proposal has the enormous strength that it works completely within the existing Stack Exchange software, which is good because asking for developer time to work on something on this scale requires some pretty strong arguments that it will really help the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, to help it work better it would really help to keep Very Low Quality flags from being shown to moderators for a rather longer time than they do now - substantially longer than an hour, at the very least. This gives the community moderation space to do its work, and refers to the moderators the stuff that can't be handled that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does have the disadvantage that gibberish and other clear candidates for deletion take a bit longer to clean up than they do in the current system. I think this is an acceptable trade-off, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the community moderation process is up and running, we should also consider other cosmetic changes (like, for example, a re-write of the text in the flagging prompt), but the way I see it these are secondary to the change in the process itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The experiment&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, how do we get from here to there? I propose we experiment by switching to the system described above for two weeks and seeing how well it works. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the next two weeks (Monday 8 August to Sunday 21 August) moderators will still see Very Low Quality flags but they will only act on gibberish and non-parseable text, leaving any calls that depend on a judgement call on the technical merit of a post to the Low Quality Posts review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During that time, flag and review as per the above guidelines. If you see content that you think is so wrong it's harmful, flag it for removal. If you review content that you think is so wrong it's harmful, recommend its deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, we'll have a look at as many statistics as we can get our hands on (some of which do require some data digging by an SE community manager) to see how well it worked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Coda&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you disagree with the above (including the case where you think we shouldn't even run the experiment) then I am interested in why you think so. However, there is one thing I do want to ask people not to fall into, and that is 'answer by Stack Exchange say-so'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5676&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which sort of goes &quot;well, Stack Exchange put up these vague text messages, so therefore this is how we should run our own community moderation&quot;. Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5675/#comment16902_5675&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; on that same question, coming from an outsider to this site and just referring to generic SE guidance. If you do want to just refer to generic guidelines, then I do ask that you provide a suitable argument for why they're also sufficient to help this site deal with the pressures it's under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is that the Stack Exchange software and the core guidelines for community moderation need to satisfy the needs of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;a huge array of 150+ sites&lt;/a&gt; with a wide variety of communities, attitudes, situations, and constraints. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The engine and guidelines need to handle the enormous volume of Stack Overflow, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt; so long that people resorted to robotic reviewing so much that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/157121/what-are-review-tests-audits-and-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;review audits&lt;/a&gt; needed to be introduced. They need to handle &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;The Workplace&lt;/a&gt;, which every so often draws in a crowd of outsiders that's pretty sure it can solve everybody's problem. They need to handle the happy atmosphere of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;TeX.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which is just happy to &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6636&quot;&gt;throw upvotes&lt;/a&gt; pretty much anywhere. They need to work for &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;movies&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SciFi&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;RPG&lt;/a&gt;, which inhabit a very different corner of the internet than we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, for many of those sites, the concept of an answer being 'harmfully incorrect' doesn't even make sense. What does a non-mainstream answer look like in &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;? Do they get them in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Photography&lt;/a&gt;? Unless the guidelines you want to quote were built considering an explicit analogue of non-mainstream, harmfully-incorrect answers, then repeating them as-is is simply not helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final question:&lt;/strong&gt; isn't it time I piped down? Why yes, yes it is. Over to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:40:31.880" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T13:23:49.627" Title="Flagging low quality answers: an experiment" Tags="|discussion|flagging|review|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9029" CreationDate="2016-08-04T22:29:31.240" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I know there have been several questions asked about this, but I wanted to see what the current viewpoint was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions in question are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/250400/what-are-the-next-generation-physics-experiments&quot;&gt;What are the next generation physics experiments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/74912/accidental-unplanned-breakthroughs-in-physics&quot;&gt;Accidental, unplanned breakthroughs in physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going through the re-open review queue and the first one was the first question linked. I looked at it, understood that it wasn't exactly with the site policy (too broad, etc) but I thought that since there seemed to be a bunch of support for it in both the number of votes (59 on the question, and 32 on the most upvoted answer) and it also seemed like an interesting exception to have, I voted to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the next question that came up was the second question linked. I read through the comment discussion, and was about to vote to re-open because I thought it was another interesting exception (coincidence that they came up at the same time?) and there was a lot of support in the comments. However, I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4838/why-should-the-list-of-breakthroughs-in-physics-be-allowed&quot;&gt;this Meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; in the comments and stopped to read it. Since there were conflicting answers with a fairly close number of upvotes, I wanted to know what site policy was before continuing to vote to close (I could've skipped, but I wanted to know in case others came up). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I have a official answer on this (or, if there's conflict, or a maybe, an explanation of the boundaries)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T12:22:23.933" Title="List type questions in the re-open queue" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9028" CreationDate="2016-08-05T12:22:23.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is close-worthy under the official close reasons, then it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed, regardless of popularity. This site strives to be a place where quality and professionalism find a home. We intend ourselves to be a place where physicists can turn for answers. Making exceptions for interesting or popular questions creates the problem where questions unsuited for the site's goals can do well and even outperform questions that are a perfect fit for the site. Not only that, it establishes a precedent. Each exception we make increases the difficulty in turning away those kinds of unwelcome questions in the future. Furthermore, making exceptions purely on the basis of votes shows that we more favour popularity over physics. Because of the large number of non-professional physicist users, many low-level and/or incompatible questions can become very popular. Our site's ambitions favour the higher-level questions. Favouring popularity, therefore, can be counterproductive towards making this a quality site for professionals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of all of this, one must ask where it ends. There is a slippery slope from allowing any questions that are popular or interesting to closing questions for being uninteresting. I know that sounds ridiculous and I'm sure no one here would ever start doing that, but if new users see us making exceptions for interesting questions, they might get the idea that interest is more important than quality. When the site turns over and we here are no longer in the majority of high-rep users, they (not knowing any better) might consider it okay to close questions that are uninteresting. Can't you just see this being a meta post in the future: &quot;If we can re-open off-topic questions that are interesting, shouldn't we be able to close on-topic questions that are uninteresting?&quot; To which an answer might be &quot;Yeah, we've done this as long as I've been a mod. I'm hesitant to say yes to closing any on-topic questions, but let's see what the rest of the users think&quot;. Abracadabra, all of a sudden the site is no longer about quality for professionals and it is now about serving popular physics to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I went off on a bit of a rant there. Long story short, questions closed for a good reason should remain closed. No exceptions because of popularity or general interest. This is StackExchange, not Quora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T12:22:23.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9027" CreationDate="2016-08-05T16:10:30.353" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, I claim that answers that are (1) flat-out incorrect, (2) so completely incorrect that no amount of editing can make it useful or constructive, and (3) so completely incorrect that it is actively harmful to the site and its standing, should be removed from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who says they're flat out incorrect? You? What if &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; answers are flat out incorrect? What if you're asking for is censorship of correct answers so that your incorrect answers have no competition? This proposal would allow physics stack exchange to be hijacked and censored by a &quot;cabal of quacks&quot; working in concert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BqN6K.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BqN6K.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;. If there are very-low-quality answers, you &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; why they're very low quality. You hold them up to your own answers in comparison. You do not censor the competition with some vague insinuations that &lt;em&gt;that's not mainstream&lt;/em&gt;. Not when answers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/267302/about-time-and-time-dilation/267328#267328&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; get twelve downvotes despite the multiple references to Einstein. Not when what's &lt;em&gt;actively harmful to the site&lt;/em&gt; are self-appointed &quot;experts&quot; who are sneering and scathing to newcomers and juniors, and whose arrogance is only exceeded by their ignorance.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T16:10:30.353" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-05T17:19:01.957" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flag reason for non-answers is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems clear, doesn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/272747/78942&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, and I flagged it as a non-answer, since it didn't attempt to answer the question. Let's see, point by point, the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this part, OP ask specifically for a mathematical analysis of his problem. But the post doesn't present a single formula. Zero. Just a collection of generalities about diffraction. Maybe fine as a comment, but doesn't attempt to answer the specific question of the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Sorry, I don't know&quot;. Is this an answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP asks for boundary conditions for the Schrödinger equation. But the post talks about solenoids and water waves. No relation at all. Clearly, the post isn't attempting to answer the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Sorry, I don't know&quot;. Again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this last part, we learn that a wave function is... a wavefunction! This is Physics.SE, not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/703/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tautology club&lt;/a&gt;. Even worst, it says &quot;So you might think the electron is pointlike&quot;, but OP didn't say a word about electrons being pointlike: the only purpose of this post is to say &quot;I'm smarter than you&quot;. Again, the post isn't attempting to answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather unsurprisingly, the flag was deemed as &lt;em&gt;disputed&lt;/em&gt;. Yet I don't see even a minimal attempt to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the requirements to flag non-answers? Is it OK to answer &quot;I don't know&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T18:28:51.830" Title="What constitutes non-answers?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9031" CreationDate="2016-08-05T18:28:51.830" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is okay to answer &quot;I don't know.&quot; It's the least helpful answer possible, but it is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see making an exception for an answer which says &quot;I don't know&quot; and adds absolutely &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; else. But I have never seen an answer posted which would meet that criterion. At the very least, someone who posts &quot;I don't know&quot; will typically use that as a springboard to some useful analysis of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, when it comes to flagging answers as &quot;not an answer&quot;, we're talking about things that are not answers even in the remotest sense. Separate questions, for example. Or requests for clarification of the question. Or additions to the question, which should have been edited in. Basically, &lt;strong&gt;a not-an-answer flag means the poster probably didn't understand the purpose of the form field they were typing in&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific post you're asking about does not even come &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; to meeting the criteria for a not-an-answer flag. One giant clue is that it is written in a quote-response form, where it quotes the question parts of the question-post and includes responses to them. A post written in that style is pretty much always an answer, because you generally don't write that way unless you understand that you are answering a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your question, it sounds like you're considering the answer on its technical merits, and whether it is sufficiently helpful to the questioner. Generally speaking, you shouldn't consider those factors when deciding whether to flag. You &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; consider them when deciding to vote up or down, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T18:28:51.830" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9027" CreationDate="2016-08-05T20:31:45.520" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heartily support Emilio's proposal, but to explain why I support it will require a bit of rambling. So please bear with me and I'll try not to make this too painful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Physics Stack Exchange has evolved into an educational resource. We hoped it would be a research tool akin to the MathOverflow but for whatever reason that didn't happen. It appears that the culture amongst research physicists just doesn't lend itself to this goal. The Theoretical Physics SE got canned due to lack of traffic and the Physics Overflow is withering on the vine. So an educational tool is what we have ended up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the above sounds a bit downbeat let me emphasise just how important I think the Physics SE is in its role as an educational tool. Over the five years (good grief!) I've been a member I have explained basic principles of (for example) special relativity to students who have gone on to do PhDs, and it's hugely rewarding to think I might have contributed in some small way to the next generation of scientists. Most of us would, at least in principle, like to make the world a better place and this is one way you can really do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, and it's a big but, if you're going to take on the role of teacher then you have the responsibility of ensuring you teach the truth and only the truth. If a student repeats misinformation that you've given them in an exam, and fails as a result, then you deserve to lie awake at night feeling guilty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point I'm working my way round to is that given our role as an educational resource it is important that our answers here are unimpeachable. This is not a place for trotting out your preconceptions and personal biases. Any answer posted here should not raise eyebrows if it appeared in a mainstream physics textbook. Well that's a grand goal, and of course one we are bound to fail at as long as answers are written by humans, but that's the goal to strive for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think we are pretty good at the peer review process. Not perfect of course, but on the whole I think we do a decent job. We spot answers that are confused, misleading or plain wrong and indicate by comments and downvoting that the OP should not trust the answer (not if they want to pass their exams that is). The point of Emilio's proposal is to make this process still better, and that's why I support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T20:31:45.520" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9071" CreationDate="2016-08-06T14:23:10.297" Score="14" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to enquire about this post I have made on StackExchange Physics-&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270200/conformal-group-in-2d-being-a-subgroup-of-diff-x-weyl-polchinksis-string-the&quot;&gt;Conformal group in 2D being a subgroup of Diff x Weyl - Polchinksi&amp;#39;s &amp;#39;String Theory&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post was closed very quickly after being posted, for being unclear, though one of those who voted to close it left an answer in the comments (which indicated that the person understood what I was asking). Subsequently, there were two other users who discussed the question and provided solutions and references. I had also edited the question several times for clarity and detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the 3rd of August, Qmechanic commented, 'To reopen this post (v5), consider replacing the word Weyl group with group of Weyl transformations'. I made this change, and replied accordingly to Qmechanic in the comments section. However, instead of the post being reopened, I found that Qmechanic's comment and my reply were deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I waited patiently, and reread my question several times hoping to make it clearer, and made another edit to this end. However, there is still no response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is really strange that a question which has elicited detailed responses from four other users can be closed for being unclear. Moreover, the question is about an important point in string theory, and an answer would be helpful for students. Finally, it should be noted that the question has received one upvote, and has been favorited by two users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe such a question which has spurred a healthy discussion involving several users should be reopened. I would be more than happy to make further improvements to the question, I am just trying to help myself and future users learn something important. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110206" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T07:18:37.713" Title="Question with a lot of discussion in comments remains closed for being unclear" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-08-06T16:12:09.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;thx for agreeing to the speaker session and being flexible on the date! some misc questions/ topics that have come to mind over the months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;do you have any knowledge of or can comment on the background on the Martinis-Google arrangement/ merger? it seemed to be a &quot;bolt from the blue&quot; without a lot of behind-the-scenes info available. was wondering who initiated this. were Brin/ Page personally involved? had they expressed earlier interest in quantum computing? what caught their eye in particular about the lab? what is their thinking on allowing the lab to be independent vs acquired by Google? did the environment change somehow after the acquisition? has it been a smooth transition etc?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what initially inspired you to get into physics/ quantum computing? did you have exposure/ ideas on it even as an undergraduate? do you have any particular heroes in the field, and why? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what were particular challenges with your Phd you recall? any &quot;lessons learned&quot;? it appears you skipped the masters degree, what was your decision process there, and are you satisfied with that choice?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;quantum computing has a lot of sci fi aspects and probably public misconceptions. what are common misconceptions? what do you think are the short and long term prospects for QM computing? where does it fit with conventional computing approaches?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there are many labs worldwide pursuing QM computing. could you contrast your own lab approach to them? how much do you &amp;amp; other lab staff follow other research? is anyone particularly on the wrong or right track in your opinion? is your lab focusing on all key aspects or is there some area thats being left to others? also theres a lot of media dedicated to DWave. whats your professional/ personal opinion of their approaches, can you comment? also it looks like your lab has no experiments on adiabatic computing, whats your take on this variant? has potential, or a dead end, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there are QM computing skeptics, one that has come to mind and been &quot;debunked&quot; by others is Dyakonov. some other skeptics argue that noise will not scale well in QM computing systems and will be a severe roadblock. whats your take on noise scaling in QM computing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aaronson is a very prominent QM computing advocate/ writer offering near &quot;play by play&quot; commentary on his blog and elsewhere and has critiqued Dwave strongly and seems to highly favor the Martinis lab approaches. fair/ well informed/ accurate? whats your take on his statements/ attitude?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;youve been active in the hbar chatroom for many months. what drew you into the chat room? what do you regard as its strengths/ weaknesses? if you could change one thing about the site or the chat room, what would it be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;from hbar transcripts, recently you got married &lt;em&gt;(congratulations!)&lt;/em&gt;. any comments on work/life balance in science/ physics? possible, challenging, difficult? does this have any affect on your scientific research; is your routine changed at all?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you have quite a bit of experience in programming. how does this connect with your scientific research? any advice on programming abilities/ skills for scientists? whats your favorite language, how do you use it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you mentioned in the chat room some challenging issues with peer review in submitting publication(s). whats your take on the peer review process, does it mostly work for you? could it be improved somehow? whats the biggest challenge with it? etc&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;many nations have substantial quantum computing science (govt funded) budgets, Australia and Europe come to mind (the latter just announced recently). do you have any opinion/ comment on whether a national science budget for QM computing makes sense in the US? is the private funding sufficient or could there be some major additional benefit with public funding?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what advice would you have for the younger generation for getting into physics, studying it, advancing, etc? does it have a big future? has it overall been a great/ fulfilling choice for you? can you name any downsides/ obstacles/ admonitions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33566" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T16:12:09.543" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-08-07T09:06:02.937" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quantum computing has been around now for nearly forty years, and hasn't delivered anything. Meanwhile ordinary computing has advanced in leaps and bounds. So: is quantum computing just some two-bit jam-tomorrow hype that's never going to deliver anything? Is it going to quietly fade away like string theory, having consumed millions of publicly-funded man-hours, all for nought? Man hours that could have been productively spent on say optical computing, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/#q=taming+light+at+the+nanoscale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Taming Light at the Nanoscale&lt;/a&gt;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T09:06:02.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8972" CreationDate="2016-08-07T23:55:47.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I honestly doubt that notorious and institutional characters would contribute to the contents of this site &lt;em&gt;more than anybody else already does&lt;/em&gt;. Let me rephrase the above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have personally learnt and enjoyed the most physics here in answers (and comments) provided by users who, according to their profiles, are currently students, PhD students or PostDocs in any non-Harvard-or-Princeton University. People, I mean, who, still being professional physicists and reputed mathematicians, have the actual time and desire to write a complete and sensible answer to the posed question, contributing to the details and the comments, without the claim to advertise their last work soon to revolutionise modern quantum physics or tenure positions at the top rank University. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us not work around the fact that, due to many reasons, this site is not a researchers resource or the last frontier for brand new physics to emerge. It is a collection of (still interesting) average questions about standard physics that most (under)-graduate students could correctly answer with no headaches. Although strong emeriti physicists and Nobel Price awardees might be unbelievably gifted scientists, they would hardly contribute to detailed answer for the average questions we have - which is what we aim for, if I have correctly understood the purpose of the site. This with the due exceptions - luckily there are already strong experts who answer &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; questions (usually in their very own research field).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different would be the case if the site were indeed a resource for research in physics; in that case we should indeed promote the best player to stay on the field unless specified otherwise. But it is not (is it?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be to relax a little bit and don't handle him as usual - if you see the capability in him to be once a high level content producer. Probably he won't make so many contribution to ever get a high repu, but his contribution could be worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be, as already pointed out by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8973/84488&quot;&gt;the answer above&lt;/a&gt;, in contrast with the purpose of the site. We judge the content, not the person, and if they provide sensible value according to the rules we are going by (whether good or bad they are) be they welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84488" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T23:55:47.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T03:46:17.183" Score="13" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question makes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;HNQ list&lt;/a&gt;, upvotes and answers from outsiders flood in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The score distributions on these questions are highly abnormal. Often, a mediocre answer that misses the actual point of the question is voted up. Rarely, a totally incorrect answer gets voted to the top: the public loves 'quantum woo', and mysterious but poetic sounding non-explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see a question starting to take off, how can I prevent this situation from happening? There are no flag reasons that apply, and I have only one downvote to give. That's not enough when five upvotes can come in within five minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is a different discussion from Emilio's VLQ flag change, because the VLQ flag can only be applied to answers with zero upvotes. In the situation I'm describing, upvotes accumulate very quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-14T16:53:53.850" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T16:53:53.850" Title="How should we deal with upvoted incorrect answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|quality|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9039" CreationDate="2016-08-08T05:01:15.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no flags for this situation by design. The purpose of flagging is to bring a post which requires moderator action to the attention of the moderators (though it may make its way through a review queue first), and moderators do not judge correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all the ways I can think of to deal with an incorrect answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment to say that the answer is wrong, and why&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post your own, correct answer which explains the problems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post in chat to bring attention to the answer, and get other people to vote on it appropriately (though note that telling people how to vote, e.g. &quot;please vote this down&quot;, is not kosher - you should stick to &quot;please vote this down if you consider it justified&quot; or &quot;vote on this as you see fit&quot; or the like)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it qualifies as flaggable for some other reason, such as not being an answer, flag it accordingly. In the rare cases where something is truly nonsense (moderator-deletion-worthy nonsense, not just wrong) and somehow gets an upvote anyway, you can flag for moderator attention saying that it should be deleted, and why, and mention that you were unable to cast a VLQ flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a side channel of sorts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check whether the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; deserves to be closed. This probably applies in some of those &quot;quantum woo&quot; cases. Closing the question won't remove the answer, of course, nor will it give any indication that the answer is incorrect, but it will take it off the hot network question list, and that stems the tide of gratuitous upvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T05:01:15.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9043" CreationDate="2016-08-08T10:23:20.603" Score="9" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed some &lt;strong&gt;account suspensions&lt;/strong&gt; recently. I thought this feature was meant for people who do not contribute to the site in a valuable way and do not follow the rules of asking/answering questions repeatedly. However the two accounts that were affected recently were two high reputation users who I personally haven't had any bad experience with. The suspension reason is &quot;voting irregularities&quot; and one of the suspension is &lt;strong&gt;a year long&lt;/strong&gt;, which seems seems quite severe to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Do I have to worry that this could happen to myself? How come such a severe punishment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: I don't mean to interfere with moderator activity and the punishment is probably appropriate, but it would be helpful to understand what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T14:28:50.887" Title="Account suspensions" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9042" CreationDate="2016-08-08T11:23:07.417" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125268/my-account-has-been-temporarily-suspended-what-does-that-mean&quot;&gt;Suspensions&lt;/a&gt; go to people who &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;break the rules of the site, are warned about it, and don't stop&lt;/a&gt;. There is no requirement that the user does not contribute to the site in a valuable way - or in other words, even if someone is making valuable contributions in asking, answering, and editing, that doesn't make them immune from suspensions. No amount of rep puts you above the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, &quot;voting irregularities&quot; typically means the person used multiple accounts (&quot;sockpuppets&quot; as we call them) to vote or participate in a way that they wouldn't be allowed to using one account. For example, voting multiple times on the same posts, voting on their own posts, using multiple usernames to give the illusion of broad support in a discussion (most relevant for meta posts), and so on. You can't really trust the reputation of these users because some of it may have been earned invalidly, by voting their own posts up, or by sockpuppet accounts awarding bounties to the main account. There is some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me&quot;&gt;more information on this&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The normal progression of suspensions is that you first get a warning, then a 7-day suspension, then a 30-day suspension, then a 365-day suspension. So when you see someone who has been suspended for a year, that typically means they have been told to stop what they were doing at least 3 times in the past, but they didn't. Now, those are just guidelines, not strictly enforced limits on suspension length - sometimes we adjust the suspension length, or skip the warning in egregious cases (e.g. voting irregularities with new accounts, where the poster doesn't have an established record of good contributions) - but we rarely deviate from the default procedure, and I don't think there's ever been a case on this site of a user being suspended for 365 days without going through the full sequence of prior warnings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever a suspension is issued, it is accompanied by a message which usually looks like the following (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281184/56541&quot;&gt;my answer on MSE&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your Secret Agent Stack Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spies.stackexchange.com/users/007/bond-james-bond&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://spies.stackexchange.com/users/007/bond-james-bond&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Due to clear signs of falsified accounts being used to artificially&#xA;  inflate your reputation, your account has been temporarily suspended&#xA;  for 7 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not fair to other users of Secret Agent Stack Exchange to allow&#xA;  users to gain reputation through sockpuppets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The offending accounts have been removed and the votes invalidated.&#xA;  Please refrain from this behavior in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regards, M&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Secret Agent Stack Exchange moderator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever relevant (e.g. in cases of rudeness), we usually quote 3 or 4 examples of the offending behavior in the message itself. Warning messages are usually similar, except for the part about actually suspending the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is: Do I have to worry that this could happen to myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, what have you been getting away with? :-P But seriously, I hope the above will convince you that you are not going to get suspended by surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To clarify: I don't mean to interfere with moderator activity and the punishment is probably appropriate, but it would be helpful to understand what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, people are welcome to ask about the suspension process in general, &lt;em&gt;as long as specific users and specific suspensions are kept out of it&lt;/em&gt;. The system is designed to avoid public shaming. For that reason, we (mods) do not discuss specific suspensions, and we prefer that other members don't either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, all suspensions are audited by the SE team. If you believe something inappropriate is going on with a specific user's suspension, you should &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T14:28:50.887" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T14:28:50.887" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2016-08-09T13:21:38.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I and others are playing the science simulation game &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Moves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quantum moves&lt;/a&gt;. As we solve the levels and read about the nature article we have some questions about quantum computing in the technical context of manipulating atoms with optical tweezers (which is expanded by question 1 into a more general question that ask about the experimental aspects of quantum computing and the various type of problem in the implementation of a quantum computer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Besides the Atomic Transport problem mentioned in the nature article that talked about the data obtained from this game, what other technical aspects in terms of manipulation via optical tweezers is important in the context of realising a quantum computer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(A more specific version of question 1) On the final level of the game &quot;Get it Together&quot; the aim requires to &quot;fuse&quot; an atom with a bimodal wavefunction together into one that resembles the ground state wavefunction by moving the well left and right and changing its depth. What context in quantum computing requires the fusing of wavefunction of atoms together. Is it in general a hard problem in the building of quantum computers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64669" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T13:21:38.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9063" CreationDate="2016-08-09T16:19:01.193" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggested one edit to a post, but when it was approved I received rep for it twice. I know there's some sort of autmated rep cleanup done regularly (nightly?), but I'm not sure if this is a known issue covered by that or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S6Uei.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S6Uei.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7898" LastEditorUserId="7186" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T23:25:14.347" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T23:25:14.347" Title="Received rep twice for the same edit" Tags="|bug|status-completed|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9048" CreationDate="2016-08-09T18:45:17.323" Score="7" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;After posting an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273124/expectation-value-of-hamiltonian/273154#273154&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; I received good comments highlighting an error in my understanding. To correct it would be a major edit, drastically and conceptually changing around half the text of my answer. But when I go to edit it, I am presented with a text box telling me to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;► fix grammatical or spelling errors&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;► clarify meaning without changing it&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;► correct minor mistakes&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;► add related resources or links&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;► always respect the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to allow the major revision that I want to make. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6012/126646&quot;&gt;This accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; says that &quot;Edits that turn an incorrect answer into a correct one is a &lt;strong&gt;drastic&lt;/strong&gt; change and should not be done by anyone&quot;. Does &quot;anyone&quot; include the original author? Should I post a completely new answer instead? In that case, what should I do with the old, partially incorrect answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me  it feels the most natural to just edit the old answer and mention the edit in the corrected version. But I want to know for sure whether that is the best practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126646" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T17:09:55.470" Title="How to make a major correction to your own answer?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9047" CreationDate="2016-08-09T19:33:13.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, I don't think it's a problem if the OP introduces rather dramatic fixes. If the answer is highly upvoted (I'd put the line at around +5, maybe?) then it's worth putting in a note that says that the current version supersedes a previous one that was incorrect because this-or-that, as a courtesy to previous readers who go  back and may be confused. (For example, I did that &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/539/how-many-planets-are-there-in-this-solar-system/592#592&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) It's better to switch out content on people who had already voted for it than to leave incorrect content up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T19:33:13.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9050" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:17:55.927" Score="14" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;On some SE sites, it is normal that the closing reasons contain also a link to another SE site, where the question could have a better chance to survive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JsefT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JsefT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other SE sites, it is unthinkable and even suggesting this results around -20 on the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s. this question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6501/should-the-engineering-close-vote-be-changed-in-light-of-the-new-engineering-se&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;: that post is asking a &lt;em&gt;migration path&lt;/em&gt; to the Engineering SE, while I am questioning about the advantages/disadvantages of a &lt;em&gt;link to the Engineering SE in the close reason&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T06:35:55.003" Title="Would it be useful to link the engineering SE on closed engineering questions or not?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9049" CreationDate="2016-08-10T06:35:55.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be useful to link the engineering SE on closed engineering questions or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I want to remind everyone that applied physics has a lot of overlap with what you (particularly theorists) think of as &quot;engineering&quot;. If someone posts here asking about lab equipment etc. please do not jump for the &quot;off topic&quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering&quot;&gt;talked about this before&lt;/a&gt; and I gave a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering/6136#6136&quot;&gt;well received opinion on how to think about engineering-ish posts on our site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T06:35:55.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-08-10T06:53:51.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...the criteria of &quot;ask a conceptual question&quot; (more or less) and &quot;show effort&quot; would apply to &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; questions, not just those we consider to be of an educational nature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&#xA;That.&#xA;As I've argued &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy/7163#7163&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, there is absolutely no reason at all that the criteria for judging a post should depend on whether or not that post comes from a homework assignment or from an educational institution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that distinction is absurd; should questions arising from original research done in graduate &lt;em&gt;school&lt;/em&gt; be subjected to different criteria than questions arising from my &lt;em&gt;job&lt;/em&gt; in an industrial lab?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All questions which come from homework assignments are off topic (difficult to enforce)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&#xA;That's not only hard to enforce, it's pants-on-our-head stupid.&#xA;Whether or not a physics question comes from homework is entirely irrelevant to whether or not that question adds value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large fraction of posts coming from homework &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; bad, but it's not because they're from homework, it's because the posts don't ask anything conceptual or show any effort.&#xA;To illustrate by a converse example, suppose I were to post this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the transition rate of a two level quantum system coupled by strength g to a thermal environment at temperature T?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a question straight out of my real research job; it's not homework, but it's also not a good post.&#xA;I should show some work and identify the conceptual (or even technical) step where I'm stuck, and then focus my question on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T07:01:11.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="234" CreationDate="2016-08-10T07:07:41.740" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&#xA;The homework tag should not exist in the first place.&#xA;We shouldn't categorize questions that need partial &quot;hint&quot; answers because such questions are antithetical to the Stack Exchange format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question elicits the thought &quot;&lt;em&gt;I shouldn't give a straight answer because I'd be giving too much away&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then the question is off-topic to begin with.&#xA;Any homework-like (or exercises-like or whatever the hell we should be calling this [a]) questions should show effort and focus on a particular conceptual or technical issue that has the OP stumped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I beg all reading this to comment on homework-like questions helping the OP pose more focused and well-posed questions whenever you can spare the few seconds it takes to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a]: Please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;this meta post regarding re-naming the homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T16:05:07.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2016-08-10T08:07:56.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sagemath.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xcgnf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sage Mathematical Software Environment&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55690" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T08:07:56.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9047" CreationDate="2016-08-10T17:09:55.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How I tackle the problem is to leave the original answer intact, headed &quot;Original Answer&quot;, and put my new answer at the top of the text box, headed &quot;Revised Answer&quot;. Usually I also state why I am revising my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might actually be neater to post the revised answer in a separate text box as a new answer. Then it is clearer which version is being addressed by new comments, and which version is being up- or down-voted. So I would recommend this as best practice for any fundamental revision of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T17:09:55.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-10T20:25:32.233" Score="12" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/64669/secret?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Secret&lt;/a&gt; and will be the next guest for AMA on September 6 at &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;.16:00 UTC (2:00 Syd time and 12:00 EDT. For other timezones, check &lt;a href=&quot;http://everytimezone.com/#2016-8-11,-1200,cn3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post questions you like to ask below&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AMA took place in informal format. Post questions below to get ideas on what topics others are most interested in. For ideas on how this works, see previous examples in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8814/ask-me-anything-12th-july-guests-introduction-and-questions&quot;&gt;yuggib's&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7782/questions-for-the-june-14th-ask-me-anything&quot;&gt;Slereah's&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8981/august-12-physics-ama-with-daniel-sank-question-pool&quot;&gt;DanielSank's AMA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Completed Education&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UNSW Bachelor of science physics and chemistry double major (2012-2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chemistry (physical chemistry: Atmospheric chemistry and molecular dynamics) honours with topic: Investigation of the hydrogen production of acetaldehyde (2016). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chemistry.unsw.edu.au/staff/scott-kable#group-info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to research group page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tl:dr&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I LOVE QUANTUM MECHANICS and I will DIE FOR IT!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My expertise is mainly in chemistry and the major topic of the AMA is likely me talking about my honours project (the only thing I have technical info on that is not too far gone in my memory)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, asking me anything &lt;em&gt;technical&lt;/em&gt; in physics and there will be a &lt;em&gt;almost certain chance&lt;/em&gt; I made wrong statements. However I can talk to you about roughly what I learn when I browse relevant physics topics in the past in popsci, journal articles and also in my uni studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please refer to &quot;short version&quot; for my interest highlighting only the &lt;em&gt;strongest interested&lt;/em&gt; topics in each field&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Science interest (SHORT VERSION)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum mechanics (QM): &lt;em&gt;ALL!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum field theory (QFT): Nonperturbative methods and interacting fields in curved spacetime, mathematical foundation that does not start with classical fields nor particle notations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General relativity (GR): Approaches on constructing wormholes, CTCs and warp drive spacetimes and their interactions with matter, mathematical formulation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Particle physics (PP): Neutrinos. Beyond the standard model physics. Exotics baryons and properties. Negative experimental tests on the existence of magnetic monopoles and negative mass.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Astronomy and Space exploration(A): Non electromagnetic astronomy (Neutrino, Gravitational wave), Titan, Enceladus, Ceres, Europa, Saturn, Pluto, Comets, Microgravity experiments, Next generation space propulsion, beyond the stellar neighbourhood &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theoretical physics (TP): Rule of thumb and thought process of building a model. How to correctly interpret the physics from a mathematical expression in the workings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time: Is time discrete or continuous. Can there exists self consistent events with piecemeal worldlines, models and reports on the origin of the arrow of time. Emergent time, perception of time, nondeterminstic nonrandom evolution of a system (nondeterminstic random evolution is already covered in the context of measurement in quantum mechanics). Experimental tests on the properties of time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum gravity candidates and other gravity theories (QG): &lt;em&gt;All still surviving&lt;/em&gt;, especially how they can be mixed together&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nuclear physics (NP): Catalysis pathways for nuclear fusion and transmutation processes. Muon chemistry and physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics (Stat): Any process that lead to &lt;em&gt;rapid&lt;/em&gt; cooling. Nanokelvin or below physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experimental physics (EP): (Would love to learn about) experiment set up technical details on anything quantum (e.g. preparing a quantum state, measures against decoherence, how to entangle/distangle a system, what to do to perturb the state). Table top experiments for high energy scale physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Condensed matter physics (CM): High temperature superconductivity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematical physics (MP): Noninertial reference frames and their transformations. Noncommutative physical phenomenon. Nonlinear maps and their properties relevant to physical phenomenon. Geometry of the phase spaces, parameter spaces and abstract spaces in different types of systems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computatonal physics (CP): Algorithms on exploration of a physical system by varying its parameters in systematic and user friendly fashion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Microbiology: Microbiome, Microbes in ecology and microbes with special niches and talents,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ecology and complex systems: How species influence each other. How do they interact with the technosphere and the biosphere. Have a tendency to apply biology concepts to cosmological scenarios and as a result a lot of weird models or even pet theories were generated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probability theory: Way to think about probabilities, improbable events, noncommutative probability. Approaches in doing algebra with probability distributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number systems and their algebraic, geometric properties&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geometry of any type. Particularly like noneucldean geometry and other geomoetry that requires wrapping ones mind around them to understand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nonlinear phenomenon (Chaos, dynamical systems, Nonlinear maps, stochastic processes, optimisation etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abstract algebra of any type, the weirder the better&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Infinity and infintesimals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to legally tear down a  proof in order to force a mathematical object to have certain properties not normally allowed by that system of axioms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asymptotic phenomenon and fixed points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tensors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Topology of any type&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to make a good proof&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Counterexamples and why they are counterexamples. Counterexamples as an abstract object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Higher dimensional geometry, including explorations of them in computer simulations (e.g. forum group of enthusiasts that study &lt;a href=&quot;http://hi.gher.space/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&amp;amp;t=2086&amp;amp;start=120&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;higher dimensional geometry&lt;/a&gt;, with some properties of klein bottles investigated via parametric equations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recursive objects (fractals, recursive maps etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any math object that has something to do with the prefix non- and/or the concept empty. For &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1902965/prove-give-counterexample-or-show-trivial-conclusion-of-the-existence-of-mathem&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Symmetry and asymmetry and their properties&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Algorithms and mathematical software for efficient exploration of a &quot;vast&quot; mathematical object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Division by zero systems, absorbers, and 'rg' (rings without identities and negatives) that approximate them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics visualisation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematical modelling on describing complex and networking phenomenon in real life problems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Degrees of freedom in discrete data sets, distributions and systems (Suppose we turn every derived quantity of an n dimensional data into points, how many paramters do these points have in order to reproduce the original data set?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has no interest in prime numbers until I can comprehend their properties&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Psychology and neuroscience (Human behaviour, social dynamics, interplay with neuroscience researches)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Economics (Decision making, various schools of thought, how to use economics on non money type areas such as ecology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophy (Anything to do with the concept nothingness, non analytic thought processes, various schools of philosophy,The nature of time, bias and how to find and handle them, how to think coherently, philosophical problems arises from physics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chemistry interests and research experience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physical chemistry: some experience with Quantum chemistry theoretical frameworks (MP2, CCSD), some experience with transition state models, some experience on calculations with Gaussian 09, some experience on working with lasers in molecular beam ion imaging, some experience with simple atmospheric chemistry and physics models. Wish to learn a lot more about the quantum mechanics of non born oppenhenier systems and state transitions in a chemical reaction. Geometry of the potential energy surface of a system. Unusual molecular dynamics such as roaming and non transition state dynamics. Organic and metal chemistry mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Organometallics: Some knowledge on the basic chemistry of organoruthenium and organoiron. Knowledge on air sensitive techniques. Knowledge on interpreting multinuclear NMR spectroscopy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Interests in: Metal complexes and other coordination compounds, main group chemistry, other organometallics, energy storage systems involving non hydrogen fuel cells and thermoelectrics, organic chemistry that does not involve drugs (unless the emphasis is the mechanism of the drug or drug delivery system (I fed up with too many people simply make a new drug without study much about how it works)), role of small molecules and other hormones in regulating activity of microbes and ecosystems. Radiochemistry for product manufacture roles, superheavy chemical elements and their properties. Theoretical chemistry (various types of models on how chemicals react and bond, their interactions with physical entities such as magnetic fields etc. at the wavefunction level). Green chemistry (environmentally friendly and efficient ways in doing experiments) and much more&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Science fiction related interest and personal projects&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Worldbuilding (approaches, how to ensure consistencies etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time travel model that is physically plausible (or at least consistent) to unify all known time travel plots and thus provide a quantitative way to calculate when things happen, thus make time travel stories less confusing and to address the poorly considered problem of what is seen for the natives and the issue of multiple time travelers (current attempt &lt;a href=&quot;http://secretuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Ripple_dynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics of scifi that can be realised in the near future (Check &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geBmlndUexA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics of the Impossible&lt;/a&gt; for examples on what I mean)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Idea mixing: Massive abusing of analogies and properties of mathematical objects in a less rigorous fashion to make jokes or connecting dots between two dissimilar ideas. Mixing of ideas from other field of study and see what comes out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Question theory&quot;: How to ask/generate sharp and precise questions that optimise potential insights or leave no loopholes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Circumvention: How to abuse legal and semimoral loopholes, and how to detect and close them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Color tiles: Categorise color palettes commonly used in various media and their symbolism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laymanisation: Explaining highly techinical terms in easily understood fashion to a layman without compromising too much rigor and details. Visualisation play an important role on this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irreversibility: How to make a move or process more effective by cutting off as many alternate pathways it can evolve into something else otherwise. How to generate maximal hopelessness to a target. How to interrogate for information without actually using interrogation tehniques&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collector of exotic substance: E.g. Trying to work out how to experimentally stablise particles, chemical species so I can bag them and store them at home. Side effect might be I am particularly good at sourcing and storing all sort of materials that otherwise require careful treatment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nonscience interests&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Music. Played the piano about 10 years ago. Otherwise occassional electronic music fragment composition with music production software like FL Studio and MuLab. An interesting accidental example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2pBMDHz4Os&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Art: I like some impressionist and surreal art, some installation and digital art, non picasso abstract art (picasso's is too blocky and too low resolution thus confuse me everytime I tried to look for the subject of the works), artwork and forms involving geometric shapes, curves and scenery. How to interpret art. Its relation with science, religion and magic. I have little preference for art where people are the subject. (Having said that, my art interest only exploded on 2015, thus please do not ask me technical question about art because I am not an expert)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Magic and esoterics: What makes magic magic, what exactly is the key thing of esoterics, The relation of it with science and religion and other thoughts. Various ways to do magic documented in history. Psychological underpinnings of apparent sighting of miracles. See if there are ways in magic thinking that are actually transferable knowledge that can be used to benefit scientific discovery (I am obviously not an expert since this interest starts also on 2015)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various types of computer games, focusing on the story, the game elements, level design and aesthetics. I also enjoy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;game art&lt;/a&gt;. (Again I am not an expert thus avoid asking technical questions on that)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acting like scifi labs announcement systems: You will see a lot of signs of this in my chat activity, the way I talk and how the example of my work tend to be followed with a science log sounding description.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Science interest (Please note I can only be claimed an expert in chemistry fields because I made too many errors due to lack of physical intuition and incoherent thinking)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@=Have ZERO or effectively zero knowledge because has not started studying yet (or too bad at it thus requires restudying e.g. GR, Stat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;=Have SOME knowledge due to being part of the undergrad study (and reading quantum books for QM). Proceed with caution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;Quantum mechanics (QM): The weirdness, the nonclassical way of reasoning and problem solving inspired by it, nature of the quantum state, properties of entanglement, mathematical formulations and how to teach that to students in a rigorous, but intuitive way. Modern experiments on investigating quantum phenomenon. The nature of measurement. (for others, feel free to add the word &quot;quantum&quot; to the below topics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Quantum field theory (QFT): Properties of various fields. Interacting fields, nonperturbative methods. Fields in curved or warped spacetimes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@General relativity (GR): Geometry and topology of various spacetime solutions to Einstein field equations. Dynamical approaches on modelling events in spacetime (e.g. ADM formalism), Einstein–Cartan theory. Approaches on constructing wormholes and warp drive spacetimes. CTCs and how they interact with other matter. Mathematical formulation and how to explain it to others in intuitive ways without losing too much rigor. Fundamental nature of space and time, properties and information in the context of black holes. Cosmology interest is not as strong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Particle physics (PP): Properties of neutrinos and mathematical formulation. Mathematical formulation of QCD, QED. Beyond the standard model physics, exotics baryons (pentaquarks, tetraquarks) and properties. Dark matter and dark energy models. Updates on possible T, CPT violation phenomenon. Negative experimental tests on the existence of magnetic monopoles and negative mass (because it has been 50+ years and still no signs of them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Theoretical physics (TP): Rule of thumb and thought process of building a model. How to correctly interpret the physics from a mathematical expression in the workings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Time: Is time discrete or continuous. Can there exists self consistent events with piecemeal worldlines, models and reports on the origin of the arrow of time. Emergent time, perception of time, nondeterminstic nonrandom evolution of a system (nondeterminstic random evolution is already covered in the context of measurement in quantum mechanics). Experimental tests on the properties of time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Quantum gravity candidates and other gravity theories (QG): Causal dynamics triangulation and other background independent models, M, Brane, String theory, Loop quantum gravity, Modified Newtonian dynamics, Twistor theory,Induced or emergent gravity models (e.g. entropic gravity). Common ground between all gravity models proposed so far and how to mix them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Nuclear physics (NP): Models for nuclear energy states and configurations. Catalysis pathways for nuclear fusion and transmutation processes, muon and muon containing material chemistry and physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics (Stat): Properties of entropy and information. Any process that lead to rapid cooling, nonequlibrium systems, Chaos, emergent phenomenon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp;Experimental physics (EP): How to interpret data to get a meaningful physical result. (Would love to learn about) experiment set up technical details on anything quantum (e.g. preparing a quantum state, measures against decoherence, how to entangle/distangle a system, what to do to perturb the state). Table top experiments for high energy scale physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Condensed matter physics (CM): Numerous. Primary one being mechanism of high temperature superconductivity and phase transitions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Mathematical physics (MP): Reference frames and their transformations. Groups that encompass all continuous maps between reference frames and their transformations, and their abstract properties. Noncommutative physical phenomenon (e.g. noncommutative topology, noncommutative algebra, noncommutativity in quantum mechanics). Nonlinear maps and their properties relevant to physical phenomenon, and how to solve problems involving them. Geometry of the phase spaces in different types of systems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@Computatonal physics (CP): Algorithms on exploring a physical system efficiently by varying its parameters in a &quot;drag and drop&quot; or command fashion. How the nature of PDEs and nonlinear equations lead to what algorithm is best solving them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biology: Interested in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Microbiology: Want to learn more about the role of different type of microbes and how they interact in the ecosystem. Also interested in the impacts of the microbiome to the society. Also like microbes with special talents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Molecular biology and genetics: Interested in learning at the molecular level on how certain proteins function to carry out the role they are assigned, the mechanisms on how genes influence proteins, regulatory factors and ultimately a biological function. Have no interest in reports that say they find a new gene for  unless they elaborate more about its properties.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ecology and complex systems: How species influence each other. How do they interact with the technosphere and the biosphere. Sustainable approaches of using the interaction between different species and niches in order to carry out a purpose without wasting too much resources and too much waste produced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics (Please assume I have zero advanced knowledge on any of them cause I made too much errors to be significant):&#xA;Interested in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Same as short version)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social science (Again assume I have zero knowledge)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Same as short version)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The weirdness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am weird, VERY WEIRD. You either understand me, or you don't. But I like people who don't understand me, because they are much better at finding out how exactly I think and why I am weird (or not). They are also not easily think what I said implies it is creditable. This &quot;unintentional echo chamber effect&quot; is now identified as a major hurdle to understand myself and me learning knowledge in general. So, in a sense, people who don't understand me actually understood me better than myself and those who understand me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally..A Secret...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of my interested topics are highly correlated to my personality traits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64669" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T09:19:24.807" Title="September 6 Physics AMA Secret: question pool" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7407" CreationDate="2016-08-11T14:15:50.917" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Formulating a policy is only half of the problem. The more difficult part is enforcing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present anyone can ask or answer a question. Few users study the site policy before doing either. The result is that while some are busy reviewing new questions to see if they comply with policy, others are busy answering them regardless of policy. By the time a VTC decision has been reached, the question has often accumulated up-votes and answers which themselves are up-voted. It is rather pointless to close the question in this situation. The only thing we have done is prevent anyone posting a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is just as bad for duplicates. Sometimes the new question receives more answers and up-votes than the original, again making it rather pointless to close the new question. If a duplicate is closed with answers on it, we still have answers to the same question in two (or more) places. Which defeats the purpose of this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see only two consistent options : either (1) abandon any attempt to control the posting or answering of questions, or (2) place questions 'on hold' as soon as they are posted, and do not open them until they have been approved by reviewers who understand and agree with site policy, rather than those who have their own interpretations of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T14:15:50.917" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-11T16:36:21.480" Score="-7" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many times can a moderator or super user vote a user over time? I know if I go to another user's profile and up and down voted multiple Q&amp;amp;A then the votes could get retracted as serial votes. So is there a time between votes that would not red flag? I believe I may be serial down voted slowly. Can there be a cap to how many times one person can down vote another? I feel I ask relevant questions but they are not a smart as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T14:16:27.863" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T14:16:27.863" Title="Serial up and down voting by a moderator" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|status-declined|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9059" CreationDate="2016-08-11T17:37:27.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also mods can't vote more than once to a post. The only possibility to vote multiple times, if you use multiple accounts for the task. Doing this &quot;correctly&quot;, the SE has no way to know, that they are socks. But they are watching quite sophistically the cases, where they aren't done correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to check, if you are serially downvoted, you can do this by sorting the reputation changes in your profile page by time. By default, it is sorted by post. Click &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/102013/jen?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=time&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvotes in short time, but to your different posts, are coming probably from the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is visible on your reputation changes, that you aren't serial downvoted, but somebody doesn't like your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't need mod privileges to serial downvote somebody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are enthusiast in the Physics, and a high school beginner. You have a lot of ideas, and a lot of questions. Some of them are good, some not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your place my main problem wouldn't be the downs, but the closes of my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T17:37:27.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9059" CreationDate="2016-08-11T17:38:55.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting by moderators works exactly the same way it works for other users, and moderators are subject to the same voting restrictions as other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The serial voting detection and reversal mechanism is an automatic system process (no human intervention) and it works the same on moderators as it does on unprivileged users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the system provides some information to moderators on long-term voting tends and cliques which allows for possible human intervention in cases where some user attempts to slip in a slow trickle of votes directed at another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T17:38:55.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9039" CreationDate="2016-08-12T02:03:45.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I see a question starting to take off, how can I &lt;strong&gt;prevent&lt;/strong&gt; this&#xA;  situation from happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will certainly attract disagreement but, on my view, the desire of one ('I') to have the power here to &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; said situation is damning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for &lt;em&gt;discouraging&lt;/em&gt;, through rational argument and pointed comment, behavior one finds wrong or inappropriate here but the power to &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; said behavior should not, on my view, belong to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T02:03:45.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9045" CreationDate="2016-08-12T23:25:07.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a closer look at the post links there. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You proposed two edits - one on the question and one on an answer. They happened to be approved within seconds of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7186" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T23:25:07.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9065" CreationDate="2016-08-13T15:33:34.103" Score="5" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's something strange going on with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/274161/78942&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; (visible to 10k+ users only). I seem to recall reading exactly the same answer written by the same users some days ago. It received some comments about the aether theory, and got negative rep. Nevertheless, the current answer is dated some minutes ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that this is some kind of déjà-vu. I highly suspect that the original answer was deleted, and then it war repost word-by-word by the same user. I can't check my suspicions since I don't have 10k rep and I can't see deleted posts. Note that this is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7209/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, since the deleted and new answers are the same (iirc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone have a look at this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T17:54:03.897" Title="Déjà-vu answer, or a blatant case of reposting a deleted post?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9064" CreationDate="2016-08-13T17:19:44.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct, there &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/273121/50583&quot;&gt;is a deleted post that is exactly the same&lt;/a&gt; (only visible to &gt;10k users). I have flagged the reposted answer for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T17:19:44.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8915" CreationDate="2016-08-14T14:18:54.343" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is not about the usefulness of this tag, but about the usefulness of its topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;The MathSE finds it useful.&lt;/a&gt; They are the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;best going&lt;/a&gt; StackExchange site after the SO.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot;&gt;The MathOverflow, too,&lt;/a&gt; despite they are a grad-level community with quite harsh moderation customs, having many Big Names between them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now think, which direction find you better to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252077/1783163&quot;&gt;Additional info&lt;/a&gt; about the main sociological structure of the SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:54.500" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T14:25:14.900" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T16:12:07.833" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bunch of answers just came into the low quality review queue (coincidentally, many by the same user...) and they all share one characteristic: they are incorrect, but they do attempt to answer the question. Just to confirm: because they attempt to answer the question, I should click &quot;looks OK&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: like I said, many were by the same user, and the answers were ranging from years ago to recent. Was someone digging through the user's answers? Seems a little too many for coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T18:04:32.287" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T13:41:19.760" Title="Low-quality answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T23:34:19.170" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;the new Physics SE guest chat sessions have gone generally well this summer (some brief &lt;a href=&quot;https://vzn1.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/daniel-sank-phd-google-quantum-computing-lab-stackexchange-physics-guest-speaker-aug-12-2016/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;summary/ history&lt;/a&gt;); we now have 3 basically successful events with talented/ qualified speakers and am personally pleased/ happy with the outcome so far which for me is mostly &quot;better than expected&quot; overall. it seems there was a lot of excitement initially over the project that has subsided somewhat; the ongoing/ day-to-day logistics are challenging. not sure exactly what all the initial excitement was related to, maybe partly the idea of increasing the scale/ impact to Reddit size (which is quite substantial/ formidable/ far away if ever!), however another key element of interest was &lt;em&gt;who to invite&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we all have physics heroes we admire, working in fields of our maybe strong personal tastes/ interests. so its &quot;really cool&quot; to imagine them accepting invitations and showing up to this corner of cyberspace so to speak, or even better, having topnotch guests volunteer for the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the basic idea for this post is as a &lt;strong&gt;call for desired guests&lt;/strong&gt;. who would be your dream guest you would invite to our meetings and why? the built-in stackexchange voting can serve as an informal polling mechanism, and also a public indication of community interest for the targeted guests to weigh/ consider. for now, let there be no constraint on &lt;em&gt;feasibility&lt;/em&gt;. this will just be a list without regard to actual feasibility or availability. its a whole other (open) question of how to encourage/ lean on/ incentivize the top desired guests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there were some key names that popped up in the chat of people that others wanted to invite, and have been tracking them &amp;amp; may add them to this post later if there are no immediate objections, have many other ideas on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(response format: it would be nice to have separate answers/ voting for every single guest, but that could get unwieldy with a lot of responses, so am not sure which is preferred/ would work best right now, maybe others have some idea there. also note that anyone &lt;em&gt;already a member of stackexchange&lt;/em&gt; may have a better chance of participating.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33566" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T23:34:19.170" Title="guest chat session top guest wishlist/ call for desired speakers" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-17T00:10:51.293" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9064/9887&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question in scope for meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tthe general question of &quot;Is reposting a deleted answer acceptable?&quot; is clearly in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it isn't clear to me that the linked question is.  It seems plausible that &quot;Can someone look have a look at this?&quot; type questions aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T13:05:43.840" Title="Is this (meta question) in scope for meta?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9069" CreationDate="2016-08-17T07:17:05.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure. It's about the site itself, which generally speaking puts it in scope for meta, and we don't have any rules against such questions that would override that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people start posting a lot of these questions, to the point where they overwhelm other meta posts, then we might have to change that. But as it is, they're quite rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T07:17:05.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9034" CreationDate="2016-08-17T07:18:37.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to wrap this up, the question has been reopened by community review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T07:18:37.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T22:43:01.140" Score="8" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when reading the comments under a question/answer I get very confused. Then I realise that there are random @someones without that person making a comment before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean I get the point why people can delete comments and that is a very useful tool. But why is there not at least an indicator on where/how many comments got deleted? &lt;sup&gt;(1)&lt;/sup&gt; I feel like it would greatly improve the clarity of some discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; (1) The moderators tend to say when they delete comments, but the useres don't. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T22:55:53.237" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T07:20:03.770" Title="Why is it not indicated anywhere how many comments got removed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9072" CreationDate="2016-08-18T23:08:40.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly because comments are not considered a core part of Stack Exchange - they are to request clarification or explanation, and ideally removed once the post has been updated or the issue sorted out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If comments are removed, I'm not sure having an indicator that said something was deleted would actually help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2498" LastEditorUserId="2498" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T08:48:38.630" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T08:48:38.630" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T16:34:51.193" Score="-7" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yet again at least 6 people skimmed the first paragraph and voted to close as duplicate before reading the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rephrased this into the most trivial, obvious manner to make it absolutely 100% clear this is completely different, and yet only one of them retracted the close-vote and voted to reopen. I flagged it for moderator attention a couple hours ago, no reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/275242/what-is-the-latent-heat-of-fusion-and-vaporization-of-water-at-620pa?noredirect=1#comment617565_275242&quot;&gt;&#xA;What is the latent heat of fusion and vaporization of water at 620Pa? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T15:27:41.320" Title="If you don't understand the question, don't vote to close as duplicate of something vaguely sounding the same" Tags="|support|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9074" CreationDate="2016-08-20T17:18:45.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In it's current form your question looks painfully like an exceedingly specific &lt;em&gt;&quot;do my research for me&quot;&lt;/em&gt; demand. And perhaps you were just missing one notion, but when I googled &lt;code&gt;steam tables latent heat of vaporization&lt;/code&gt; the first three non-sponsored links included tables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, for one of them you needed to know that engineer sometime talk about the &quot;enthalpy&quot; of vaporization rather than latent heat, but the others used the term you expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, making assumptions about the knowledge and motives of other users is generally a mistake and casting aspersion in public site is heading afoul the &quot;Be nice.&quot; policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T17:18:45.327" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9074" CreationDate="2016-08-20T21:29:41.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't think you reacted particularly well there. The two questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; very similar, and they deal with much the same subject matter. Generally, when a question is marked as a possible duplicate, we ask that the OP of the new version make more explicit which aspects of the new question are new; this helps keep answers on topic and reduce duplicated work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, you could have responded by adding a line at the end to the effect of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm aware of a previous question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/64031/what-is-the-effect-of-an-increase-in-pressure-on-latent-heat-of-vaporization&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which asks about the general effect of pressure on latent heats and the mechanisms behind said changes. Here I'm asking for a specific reference to the values for water as a function of pressure, and particularly for pressures as low as 620 Pa (which is too low for most obvious search results).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows you've done your diligence, shows potential answerers how far you've gone so they don't need to re-do track you've already covered, prevents answers which are useless to you (particularly since the main question as phrased, &quot;Could someone provide some table, equation, graph that gives these values?&quot;, with the middle triple emphasized, doesn't make it all that clear that if it starts too high then it's not that useful to you), and it makes it clear to close-vote reviewers that you have addressed the duplicate issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you lashed out, did some histrionics, gutted your question and made it much less useful for future visitors, and generally did nothing at all to improve the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, sincerely, saying that this community is &quot;broken&quot; and &quot;analphabete&quot;, when you also failed on parts of your due diligence, is not an amazing way to make friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T21:29:41.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9074" CreationDate="2016-08-22T15:27:41.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broken? Nope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the blame for it being closed in the first place is (kind of) on you. Once the possible-not-duplicate was pointed out to you, you should have updated your question like Emilio Pisanty said, just adding a simple clarification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the question was reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, I was kind of tempted to leave the question be because of the way you made your complaint. Seriously, the best way to get your question reopened would have been to &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; insulting the physics.SE community. There are many smart people on here (though I don't claim to be one of them), and there is no need to make claims about the system being broken or people skimming. Before insulting people, think about the possibility that your question &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; clear, or can otherwise be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are just my thoughts. Hope you get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T15:27:41.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-23T13:46:00.833" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can see, every time somebody favorites a question, which is already favorited by at least 25 users, &lt;strong&gt;it appears that&lt;/strong&gt;(although actually it's not) an extra &quot;Favorite Question&quot; badge is awarded to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CCYST.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CCYST.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94353" LastEditorUserId="162" LastEditDate="2016-08-25T13:46:47.283" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T13:46:47.283" Title="&quot;Favorite Question&quot; badge awarded multi times" Tags="|bug|status-completed|badges|notifications|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2016-08-24T14:49:33.467" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The aim of our site is to be an authoritative source of information for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy, and we want the posts here to be interesting, informative and reliable. To this end we sometimes close questions that don’t fit with the goals of the site. This answer explains why we sometimes close questions as &lt;em&gt;homework and exercises&lt;/em&gt;, and how you can word your question to avoid it being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main things we consider when deciding whether to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first criterion is fairly obvious: the physics community isn’t going to take us seriously if there’s any perception that we help people to cheat with their course work. So if you post a question that’s obviously been copied and pasted from a homework assignment we’re going to close it immediately. We can’t read your mind, so we can’t be sure whether your question really is homework or not, but we will err on the side of caution. If your question looks like homework we will close it. If your question isn’t homework then it’s down to you to explain that in your post, which brings us to the second criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second criterion is a little more subtle and is related to our aim to be interesting and informative. As a general rule homework problems and/or worked exercises are used to reinforce something you’ve been taught. For example if you do a special relativity course you will be taught about time dilation and how to calculate it using the Lorentz transformations. Then you’ll be given endless homework problems requiring you to do basically routine calculations like finding the lifetime of atmospheric muons or whether a fast moving pole will fit in a barn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our view is that while the routine calculations are important this site isn’t the place for them. The problem is that (a) they are routine and (b) there are a near infinite variety of such questions, and they would swamp the site. So if you post a question that is of this type we’ll probably close it with the tag [homework-and-exercises]. That doesn’t mean we think it’s a bad question, just that this site isn’t the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find yourself wanting help with a &lt;em&gt;homework-like&lt;/em&gt; question then it’s probably possible to rephrase it into a more conceptual question. For example rather than asking about the lifetime of a muon traveling at $0.99$ you could reword your question to ask how we use the Lorentz transformations to calculate time dilations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T14:49:33.467" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-24T14:49:33.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9072" CreationDate="2016-08-26T07:24:17.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The moderators tend to say when they delete comments, but the useres don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this were true (the comments indicate that it is not), then it would be a strong indication that this is a reasonable feature request. Whether it is possible to implement this sufficiently unobtrusive is a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chat, deleted messages are indicated as &quot;(removed)&quot; with the user name still associated with the message, which feels much too intrusive. A suitable number of additional grey lines between two successive comments might be a nice indication of how many comments have been deleted. But ten grey lines would already become obtrusive again, so maybe it would be best to just have one additional grey line (in addition to the default grey line separating two comments) for a single deleted comment, and two additional grey lines for two or more deleted comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4846" LastEditorUserId="4846" LastEditDate="2016-09-01T07:20:03.770" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T07:20:03.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9027" CreationDate="2016-08-26T13:23:49.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see where you have provided a definition of the term &quot;harmfully incorrect.&quot; I very much doubt such answers exist. I think those who are advocating the view that some answers are so incorrect that they are positively &quot;harmful&quot; are not acting scientifically, since no evidence of such &quot;harmfulness&quot; has been provided. It seems to me that the &quot;harm&quot; is imaginary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with John Rennie when he says that Answers on this site should be &quot;unimpeachable&quot;. That is setting too high a standard which even those with the highest academic standing in this community may not consistently reach. It is an elitist view which would require most of the Answers on this site to be deleted, and would deter many users from participating by offering an Answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current peer-review system of commenting on mildly incorrect Answers, and &quot;down-voting to oblivion&quot; those which are &quot;harmfully incorrect,&quot; seems perfectly adequate to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science tolerates alternative views, thrives in a climate on honest debate, and is stifled by the censorship of anything unorthodox. The fact that Answers are not mainstream or not wholly correct should not prevent them from being expressed. The advantages of maintaining freedom of speech outweigh any illusory &quot;harmfulness&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T13:23:49.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9067" CreationDate="2016-08-26T13:41:19.760" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure the Answers (rather than the Questions) were from years ago? I have noticed some new users posting brief, comment-like answers to old Questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is the same as that of Kyle Kanos expressed in these 2 posts :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5995/what-to-do-with-low-quality-posts-that-you-just-cant-delete?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What to do with Low Quality posts that you just can&amp;#39;t delete&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5675/is-it-appropriate-to-use-the-low-quality-review-system-to-get-rid-of-bad-answe?rq=1&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to use the low quality review system to get rid of &amp;#39;bad&amp;#39; answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to deal with &quot;bad&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot; answers is to comment and/or down-vote, not to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T13:41:19.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2016-08-26T23:17:46.177" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question looks like: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Here is my homework. Solve it instead of me, now&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563/44126&quot;&gt;You scanned/photographed your textbook.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't show effort or curiosity towards the solution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't bother to begin sentences with capital cases or end them with a &quot;.&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You aren't asking for the numerical solution; you want to understand how you can solve it for yourself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are using Latex / MathJax formatting (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;tutorial here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You explain: 1) what you want 2) what you tried 3) why it doesn't work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget: closing a question is mostly a subjective decision. The reviewers see a &quot;close&quot; and a &quot;leave open&quot; button next to your question. Although there are site rules, it is mainly up to them how to interpret these rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T21:59:54.717" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T21:59:54.717" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-26T23:17:46.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9096" CreationDate="2016-08-27T10:48:48.533" Score="15" ViewCount="803" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract&lt;/strong&gt;: Analyzing the data from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7645/replacing-the-homework-policy-1-what-existing-questions-should-be-on-off-topic&quot;&gt;the last replace-the-homework-policy question&lt;/a&gt; was inconclusive. So back to the drawing board, or really back to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;our starting point&lt;/a&gt;: what kinds of questions do we &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to see closed? In particular, what are better ways to characterize our actual reasons for closing questions where we currently use the &quot;homework-like&quot; close reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important note&lt;/strong&gt;, because I guess this hasn't been clear in the past: the purpose of this series of posts is to come up with a &lt;em&gt;brand new&lt;/em&gt; set of guidelines for question closure. We are not reformulating or tweaking or improving our current homework policy. We are &lt;em&gt;replacing&lt;/em&gt; it entirely - that means we are getting rid of it and developing a new set of policies and close reasons, which will presumably make no mention of &quot;homework&quot; or &quot;homework-like&quot;. Once this process is done, there will be no homework policy and no &quot;homework-like&quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some/many/most people are aware, we are in the midst of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;long-term project&lt;/a&gt; to replace our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; with a new set of guidelines that better reflect what people actually consider on topic and off topic. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7645/replacing-the-homework-policy-1-what-existing-questions-should-be-on-off-topic&quot;&gt;first phase of this project&lt;/a&gt;, we collected some example questions and voted on whether they should be on or off topic, to help clarify the new guidelines we want to come up with. I also collected some opinions on various qualities of these questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfm5QLFJVPUiWEQb45fLGtjhZHhxeC560PoE5ia3LrXr6FMiA/viewform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a separate survey&lt;/a&gt;. The goal was to try to find some correlation between the topicality of the questions, as represented by the score, and one or a few of the attributes, and that would tell us what are the main factors people consider while voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out... that doesn't work very well. I spent a long time &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/diazona/dc434e5121c441e5a31fa0c934ab725d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinkering with the data&lt;/a&gt; and basically what I found is that people's opinions vary widely, making it hard to draw meaningful conclusions. The first thing I checked was whether any individual factor from the survey correlated well to people's impression of whether a question was on topic. There were some correlations with physical context and interest, and to a lesser extent level and effort, and an anticorrelation with tediousness (this means that within our data set, people are more likely to consider questions which concern tedious calculations &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;), but none of these are very strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nLtzX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nLtzX.png&quot; alt=&quot;correlation heatmap between factors and scores&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also looked at whether a combination of factors could provide a good discriminator between on-topic and off-topic questions, in a couple different ways. First, a partial least squares regression to test whether some linear combination of ratings would be able to accurately predict the scores of the questions, but that didn't work at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kGI3m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kGI3m.png&quot; alt=&quot;plot of predicted vs measured scores&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other approach, which I think best mirrors how the actual close-voting logic works, is to find a set of factors such that the on-topic questions rate highly on all factors but each off-topic question rates low on one or more of them. This plot shows the mean minus one standard deviation&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; of the distribution of ratings for each of the highest-score (most clearly on-topic) sample questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cprj9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cprj9.png&quot; alt=&quot;mean minus standard deviation of on-topic question ratings&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this is the equivalent, showing mean plus one standard deviation, for the lowest-score (most clearly off topic) sample questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AjzVK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AjzVK.png&quot; alt=&quot;mean plus standard deviation of off-topic question ratings&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking for a group of one or a few rating factors such that the corresponding columns in the top plot are all red or white, and the columns in the bottom plot between them contain one blue cell for each question. Unfortunately, there is no clear candidate. I even had the computer go through all possible combinations of rating factors to test them out, and all the combinations in which the on-topic questions rank high have large uncertainties in the off-topic questions, and vice-versa. The one factor that does keep popping up is &quot;check-my-work-ness&quot;, which &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be an indicator that people agree that questions just asking us to check work are off topic and that we do okay at identifying which questions those are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the point seems to be that none of the factors in the survey are a particularly good proxy for how we decide whether questions are on or off topic. (And remember, we're mostly talking about questions which we currently close or might consider closing using the homework-like reason.) So before we proceed, I want to throw the question back to the community in a revisit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7407/124&quot;&gt;the question where I first tried to collect possible close reasons&lt;/a&gt;. In light of all the discussion and analysis we've done since then, when we choose to vote to close questions as homework-like, what reasons do we &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; have in mind? Or, how could we do more research to work this out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;The idea is to identify clearly on-topic questions as those for which something approximating the 68% confidence interval of the score is entirely positive, indicating a high score and clear agreement on that score. It's basically the same idea underlying e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reddit scoring algorithm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T17:36:16.850" Title="Replacing the homework policy 1b: what is our scope anyway?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:03:36.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The current situation and its problems (yes, again)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of all the discussion and analysis we've done since then, when we choose to vote to close questions as homework-like, what reasons do we actually have in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking your data, and indeed the continual disagreement in most past meta posts about this topic, at face value it appears that there is no single reason people close something as homework-like, showing that the current close reason is also probably more used as a proxy for a host of different reasons than what's actually written in the policy, or whatever &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be actually written in the policy once we'd chosen one or more &amp;quot;main&amp;quot; reason to close something as homework-like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an uncomfortable situations, and it also &lt;em&gt;explains&lt;/em&gt; why this policy continues to be discussed (other than, say, the non-mainstream policy, about which there seems to be general agreement, and only dissatisfaction about its application in isolated specific cases). However, it also means that &amp;quot;replacing&amp;quot; the homework policy by the things it's used as proxy for is infeasible, because there's no agreement &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; it is used as proxy for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is because the policy was &lt;em&gt;initially&lt;/em&gt; conceived to ban &lt;em&gt;actual homework&lt;/em&gt; to stave off using the site as a cheating resource. This has two issues: How to tell whether something is &amp;quot;actual&amp;quot; homework, and what about &lt;em&gt;good questions&lt;/em&gt; that someone could conceivably encounter otherwise, but that are assigned as homework in the case of the asker? So the homework policy mutated into the &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; policy, looking at the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; rather than the &lt;em&gt;origin&lt;/em&gt; of the question. However, what exactly is &amp;quot;homework-like content&amp;quot; was, at least from some points of view, insufficiently (and somewhat contradictorily) codified in the policy post as such, which is argued e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7163/50583&quot;&gt;this meta answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That therefore the &lt;em&gt;policy as written&lt;/em&gt; is actually not what motivates many closures is what triggered this whole debate, cf. the opening statement of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7407/50583&quot;&gt;Generalizing the homework policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's not always clear whether a question fits this description just from its content. And if you track the questions that we actually close these days using the homework-like close reason, quite a few of them are likely not of an educational nature. Instead, we've taken to using the homework-like close reason on questions that simply ask us to calculate something without the original poster making an attempt at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A radical solution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get rid of the homework close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I mean that. I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; mean to imply that we should leave any of the question &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; that we currently close as homework-like, but this whole debate shows that &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; is really just a proxy for a bunch of more specific close reasons, which would be more helpful to the people asking the question and more helpful to avoid arguments between reviewers over whether something is &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot;, when the arguing parties really mean two different things by that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we don't have enough slots for pre-generated reasons left to cover all of the partial reasons for closing as &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot;. Fortunately, the &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; close reason allows for an infinite variety of close reasons, so we only have to decide which reason deserves to be in the pre-generated spot and which ones the reviewers have to type out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have discussions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6001/50583&quot;&gt;insufficient effort&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; as close reasons. We have broad support for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7409/50583&quot;&gt;closing &amp;quot;tedious&amp;quot; calculations without context&lt;/a&gt;. There are upvoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7164/50583&quot;&gt;arguments&lt;/a&gt; that being a conceptual question and showing effort, as in the current &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; close banner, should apply to all questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these discussions about policy, each of which covers a certain subset of why people want to close homework-like questions, is worth having. These are specific topics on which people can take a stand for or against, and we can sort out where the general community trend lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discussion about the &amp;quot;homework policy&amp;quot;, however, and about a catch-all proxy reason for all the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; reasons it encodes is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; worth having anymore. It's too confusing, people are talking past each other, and we have both historical and analytical data showing a consensus is nowhere in sight. So let's just axe this reason and start having constructive discussions about more specific close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:03:36.043" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2016-08-27T19:17:09.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree completely with ACuriousMind's answer, so I won't go into that, but simply expand on what main reasons I see things being closed as (or should be closed as). These are of course just my opinions, and I would welcome explanation of disagreement in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Close Reasons&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not Enough Effort&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen much discussion about this one; however, I think it is important in a certain formulation. First, I think there are two situations where this is applicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that would normally be considered &amp;quot;problems&amp;quot; where no work is shown, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276675/motion-in-a-projectile-plane&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276675/motion-in-a-projectile-plane&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276640/pressure-cooker-at-a-hill-station&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276640/pressure-cooker-at-a-hill-station&lt;/a&gt; (this can be used on non-math work questions; it is more about showing your thoughts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions whose answers are so blatantly obvious (I don't even mean Wikipedia-obvious, I mean even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; blatantly obvious) that they are not worth answering, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276508/what-is-internal-energy&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276508/what-is-internal-energy&lt;/a&gt;, or (hasn't been asked) &amp;quot;Why do rocks fall&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think questions should be closed for this reason if they do not fall into one of those two categories. I mean, for example, that a question such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276712/method-for-measuring-small-diameters&quot;&gt;How to measure the inner diameter of thin tube (0.5mm to 2mm)&lt;/a&gt; should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be closed for not enough research effort. While it is a poor question, perhaps, and deserves a downvote, it should not be closed as &amp;quot;not enough effort&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I think it is important that this reason is limited to these two categories is because of subjectivity. Most people can agree that questions falling into the two categories above should be closed, but there could be a lot of debate about another question that might have been otherwise closed with this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Check My Work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should definitely be a close reason. I have seen many questions that could (and should) be closed with this reason (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276576/line-of-charge-passing-through-centre-of-a-charged-semicircular-rod&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276576/line-of-charge-passing-through-centre-of-a-charged-semicircular-rod&lt;/a&gt;). This seems to be one of the main categories homework-type questions fall  into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that the check my work close reason should only be used for trivial calculation errors; questions about a conceptual mistake (for example, whether a certain formula is appropriate in a given situation) are on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Purely Calculation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I'd like to point out that &lt;em&gt;just because a question asks about math or includes math does not mean it is off topic&lt;/em&gt;! I say this because I have seen multiple questions that I would consider good, on-topic questions closed under the idea that they are &amp;quot;not conceptual&amp;quot;. I'd solidly disagree with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This close reason is more for questions that are &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; math, or &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;do my math for me&amp;quot;. Tedious do-my-work questions would probably fall under this close reason (aka, calculate this for me questions). An example of a question that is on-topic (even with this close reason) in my mind would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247719/mutual-e-force-due-to-charged-coaxial-rings&quot;&gt;Mutual $E$ force due to charged coaxial rings&lt;/a&gt; (though I am specifically referencing question #3 as listed, #2 is more a mathematics.SE question and #1 is a check-my-work question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ones that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed under this reason would include, for example, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/275704/angular-trajectory-of-body-moving-on-rim-of-a-carousel&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/275704/angular-trajectory-of-body-moving-on-rim-of-a-carousel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if there is a &lt;em&gt;more specific&lt;/em&gt; close reason, then one should use that. For instance, you could say there's some overlap between the check my work close reason and the not conceptual close reason. But obviously, if both are valid, the one that is more specific to the situation is the one that should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Formulation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific formulation of whatever close vote reasons we pick will probably need to be hashed out in their own meta post. But, I'll just give a few starter definitions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &amp;quot;not enough effort&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not show enough effort. It either &lt;strong&gt;does not show the thought process that lead to the question&lt;/strong&gt; (mathematical or otherwise) or the answer &lt;strong&gt;can be very easily found on the internet&lt;/strong&gt;. As such it does not carry any value for future readers. See our [meta site][] for further guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about &lt;strong&gt;checking your work&lt;/strong&gt;, and a trivial calculation mistake, not a physics concept. See our [meta][] for more guidance. Please also make sure that if it is about how to calculate something to try &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;math.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &amp;quot;Purely Calculation&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be &lt;strong&gt;outsourcing a calculation&lt;/strong&gt; to the community without any broader context. Please ask about a specific concept, show work and explain where you got stuck, or provide more context. For more information, see [this meta post][].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please note that where I put [some text here][] I meant for a link to the definitive meta post to go there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps, and any feedback would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I originally worded the title to the third possible close reason rather poorly, and changed it. The third close reason is meant for purely calculation questions, as the title says, and I'll be adding more examples of questions that would be closed under this reason soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T21:31:51.067" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2016-08-27T22:19:13.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slader.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.slader.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Live Tutoring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tutoring on Slader provides users a platform to chat and share concepts visually through images and a live shared drawing board. Slader users can request help from other students in the same subject, host a tutoring session with friends through a unique link, or choose a certified pro tutor (who charges gold). Two brains are always better than one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Textbook Solutions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Slader features millions of solutions to the most popular textbooks in the United States. All of the homework solutions on Slader are written by the&#xA;Slader community. Anyone can contribute solutions to textbook problems, which are viewed and rated by the Slader community. Solutions are always free to view and we encourage contribution to the site in all productive forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question and Answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Slader's Q&amp;amp;A platform is where non-textbook based questions in any subject can be asked and answered. Asking questions and providing answers benefit all users and makes the learning process easier and more enjoyable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T22:19:13.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2016-08-28T03:38:44.150" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Problem as I see it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impression I get is that the site is being flooded by a rising tide of poor quality questions which show little or no effort and often lack even a basic understanding of physics. I am not being elitist, I simply deplore lazy questions from those who are obviously not even students of anything, especially not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since reaching 3k rep, I spend more than half of my time on the site reviewing questions. Currently I vote to close around 7/10 in the &quot;new unanswered questions&quot; queue and a higher proportion in the &quot;Close Votes&quot; queue. This counts questions which I do not feel competent to judge, which I do not touch. Recently I am regularly running out of close votes within 2 hours of getting them, and have to make do with down-voting and commenting instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My expectation is that if this trend continues then in the near future the pool of active reviewers will not have enough votes or time to keep up, with the result that the average standard of questions will fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing questions is frequently pointless. By the time the crucial 5th vote has been cast, answers have often been posted so the question does not get deleted. A few new users respond by posting the same question again. Closure prevents good answers from being posted to bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting-to-close questions provokes resentment and animosity, not only from those posting questions but also other users. Explaining to the OP and others why I have VTC also takes up time - although this is not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current policy is inconsistent. We routinely demand that &quot;homework-like&quot; questions must &quot;show effort to work through the problem,&quot; yet we tolerate conceptual questions which show little or no effort and are ill-motivated (&quot;I read somewhere... Is this true?&quot; &quot;While I was in the bath I had a thought...&quot; &quot;I was just wondering...&quot;). The site is advertised as being &quot;for students, researchers and academics of physics and astronomy&quot; but we allow anyone, even those with no physics background whatsoever, to post any question. We cannot expect high standards if we adopt inconsistent policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever policy is formulated, the most difficult part is implementing it -  getting users (especially new ones) to read it, agree to it and follow it. Unless there is a requirement for users to do so, many will not bother. They come here to ask and answer questions, not to study and enforce site policies. It was only after I reached reviewer status that I accepted the closure criteria.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An Even More Radical Solution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I repeat my suggestions given in my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy/9058#9058&quot;&gt;Generalizing the homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see only two consistent options : either (1) abandon any attempt to control the posting or answering of questions, or (2) place questions 'on hold' as soon as they are posted, and do not open them until they have been approved by reviewers who understand and agree with site policy, rather than those who have their own interpretations of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that both options are highly unpopular, but at least they are workable, efficient and &lt;strong&gt;self-consistent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Abandoning Control&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason for closing questions should be that they are &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;, which should mean that they cannot be answered using mainstream physics. It should be open to any user to decide for him/herself whether or not a question meets his personal standards regarding quality or usefulness or research effort or clarity or broadness etc, and to answer or up/down-vote or comment accordingly. Lack of effort and usefulness are already addressed in the up/down-voting feature, so these should not be reasons for closing a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my preferred option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most users simply want to ask or answer questions. Those who ask usually want a quick response. Few use the site for research. Pre-occupation with question quality is inconsistent with allowing unrestricted posting of questions. Minimising reasons for closure will reduce the growing burden on reviewers, and avoid many bad experiences on both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is patronising of us to decide that some questions should not be answered, and to prevent users who have no objections to the question from doing so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abandoning control will allow more poor-quality questions onto the site, but there are plenty of those already which have been closed but not deleted. Voting already identifies good (and/or interesting) questions. If necessary, a periodic purge could remove questions with many down-votes, perhaps via a review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Voting To Open (VTO) New Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This turns the VTC decision on its head by proposing that all new questions (or perhaps only those from new users with less than say 300 rep, or those with a poor history of closed questions) should be put &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; until approved by reviewers. Criteria for what is &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; would still have to be re-formulated (see below) : the purpose of this proposal is to ensure that policy is implemented effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is far more effective to get rid of poor questions, and deter poor question-setters, before they have gotten an answer rather than after. Those who need quick answers to trivial questions (&quot;Is this right?&quot; &quot;Where have I gone wrong?&quot; &quot;What am I missing?&quot;) will turn away in frustration if it takes 24-48 hours before the question is approved. We would also need to be stricter about &quot;answering in comments&quot; - perhaps by increasing the rep required to comment and flagging such comments for immediate deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is currently impossible to prevent users from answering questions which are under review, making subsequent closure pointless. For the same reason VTO retains the option of migrating the question instead of closing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VTO is consistent with the avowed purpose of the site. Students, researchers and academics will have spent considerable time and effort already working on the problem, and are unlikely to expect immediate answers. Good quality answers to good quality questions often require further research or mathematical analysis, which cannot often be delivered within 24 hours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also consistent with the policy of avoiding duplicates, because there is more time to identify duplicates before answers are posted to the new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reformulation of Closure Policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with ACM and heather that the &quot;homework-and-exercises&quot; tag should be removed and the related policy scrapped. All questions should be subject to the same criteria, whatever those may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated above, my view is that &lt;strong&gt;the only reason&lt;/strong&gt; for closing a question  should be that it is &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that it cannot be &lt;em&gt;addressed&lt;/em&gt; by applying mainstream physics concepts and principles. The question itself need not be mainstream physics, since good science tolerates the unorthodox. I say &lt;em&gt;addressable&lt;/em&gt; because for some questions it may not be possible to give an authoritative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of subjectivity in the other criteria, which I think are not worthwhile :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicates&lt;/strong&gt; : It is very difficult to avoid them, and checking is tedious. Even where they are identified before new answers are posted, existing answers may be unsatisfactory, or there may be a subtle difference. Reviving an old question is not easy for a new user (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8974/&quot;&gt;Re-asking a Duplicate Question&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unclear what you're asking&lt;/strong&gt; : Easily dealt with by asking questions to identify exactly what the problem is. This is what comments are for. Very subjective anyway. It is rather contradictory for a question to be closed for this reason when an answer has been posted - and possibly accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad&lt;/strong&gt; : Easily narrowed down through comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Primarily opinion-based&lt;/strong&gt; : Many such questions (eg resource recommendations, career advice) would be &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; under the above definition (not addressable by applying mainstream physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework-like&lt;/strong&gt; : No justification for discriminating based on style of question rather than its content. Questions asking how to &lt;em&gt;apply&lt;/em&gt; physics are as much a part of physics as those asking for explanation of a concept or phenomenon - especially for students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mainstream physics&lt;/strong&gt; : Questions about unorthodox physics (eg cold fusion, time travel, perpetual motion machines, warp drive, etc) are &lt;em&gt;addressable&lt;/em&gt; using mainstream physics, so they are &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Engineering&lt;/strong&gt; : &quot;The application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem&quot; is what we do all the time as students and experimenters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Insufficient Research Effort&lt;/strong&gt; : Too subjective, difficult to judge, and already addressed by down-voting. The reason quickly becomes pointless when somebody provides an answer or even just points out a duplicate or makes a suggestion. If the OP's laziness disgusts you, ignore the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T04:36:32.203" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9092" CreationDate="2016-08-29T08:19:12.503" Score="-2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be a flag to raise complaints like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Lacks research efforts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Transfer to Chemistry SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276969/how-supersonic-plan-could-create-shock-wave&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276969/how-supersonic-plan-could-create-shock-wave&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276969/how-supersonic-plan-could-create-shock-wave&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114592" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T11:16:23.167" Title="Addition to the flags" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9091" CreationDate="2016-08-29T11:16:23.167" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Lacks research efforts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, this is not something to be flagged. Just downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) Transfer to Chemistry SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this one, if you really have reason to believe the question would be on topic at Chemistry (for instance, you are a regular participant on that site and you know their scope), just use a custom moderator flag with wording like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Off topic here, but may be suitable for migration to Chemistry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not sure whether it would be on topic there, just choose &quot;Blatantly off topic&quot;. Those who have enough reputation to vote to close with a custom off-topic reason can do that instead. I recommend the following wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off topic because it's about chemistry, not physics or astronomy. It may be appropriate on [chemistry.SE].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T11:16:23.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9094" CreationDate="2016-08-30T23:18:52.143" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Title says it all.  My profile picture pattern just changed automatically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kIS8V.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kIS8V.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I liked my old one better.  How can I restore it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Documentation: My old has a 's=32':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8f797ea833cc6940de4268873d28c616?s=32&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8f797ea833cc6940de4268873d28c616?s=32&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8f797ea833cc6940de4268873d28c616?s=32&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while my new  has a 's=64':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8f797ea833cc6940de4268873d28c616?s=64&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8f797ea833cc6940de4268873d28c616?s=64&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8f797ea833cc6940de4268873d28c616?s=64&amp;amp;d=identicon&amp;amp;r=PG&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108554" LastEditorUserId="27166" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T15:07:08.550" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T23:45:30.657" Title="My profile picture pattern just changed automatically; how can I restore the old one?" Tags="|support|profile-page|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9093" CreationDate="2016-08-30T23:54:12.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you got an email address associated with your account? &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139071/&quot;&gt;Usually&lt;/a&gt; the stock profile picture (a.k.a. 'gravatar') is based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hash&lt;/a&gt; of your email address, but if you haven't linked one to this account then it reverts to the hash of your IP address. In that case, if you want the old picture you need to re-log in from your old IP, save the picture, and put it in specifically as a custom pic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you do have an email address associated with your account, it looks like something has indeed changed behind the scenes, and the solution probably involves setting a custom profile pic if you can recover the old one. Googling your username reveals this pretty interesting result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/35Djz.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old picture is still in the Google cache, but it's obviously pulling the new one now, so here it is for you before it disappears,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LMiM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LMiM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that may be your best shot at it. (If it is, in fact, your old pic - I don't really know what it looked like.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, here is @Qmechanic's in case s/he wants the old picture back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ELOe1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ELOe1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new one weirds me out, to be honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T23:45:30.657" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2016-09-02T11:06:53.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my take on the matter. First, let's think about what Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A sites are good for and what they are not good for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Q&amp;amp;A site needs Questions, which can be answered in a concise fashion. There may be several good answers, but if a question needs books to be answered or many answers covering different topics (and thus many pages of answers), it's not a good fit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are an especially good fit are questions where there can be different angles from which to approach it so that many good answers can emerge. This also gives meaning to question ranking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that spark discussions are a bad fit. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The specific idea of Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A sites is that the answers to questions and the questions themselves should be interesting to a broader audience. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the questions are not interesting for very many people, they need to be of research quality. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, as I see it, we have some tradeoff: If Q is the quality of the question in terms of how many people could answer it (&quot;research quality&quot;) and A is the audience that can get some new understanding from the question, then the product QA should be large for good questions. This leaves room for conceptual questions about basic theories as well as high level and extremely specific questions about research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we agree on the above, here is my take on what should be closed and what shouldn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Check-my-work:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions like &quot;Where is my mistake?&quot; or &quot;Did I do it right?&quot; come in two flavours: The first questions make one of a few very common mistakes. Those mistakes are common, because they are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory. They should be closed but could be reworded to ask a conceptual question about the theory, which is interesting for many people. The other type of questions are just algebraic/mathematical mistakes. There are a myriad ways to make mistakes and thus the answer to the question is mostly only interesting to the asker and it usually also is of bad &quot;research quality&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt; Close as check-my-work. If you think there is actually an interesting conceptual misunderstanding in the question, rewrite it and/or leave a comment. Then the question can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Really low research effort:&lt;/strong&gt; Since most of the audience arrives by search engines, those people will actually do a Google search. If this will directly lead them to a Wikipedia article, what do they gain by coming here? So aside from the fact that low effort questions might disparage researchers from staying on the site, they should be closed because they don't actually have an audience: Why should you come here to get a link to the Wikipedia page you could already see in your Google search results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt;  Close as &quot;low effort&quot;, if the question could be commented on by &quot;What about this [Wikipedia/other well-known source that pops up if you type the question into a search engine] is unclear&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are in my opinion the &quot;easy&quot; ones. Now come the &quot;hard&quot; ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Low effort) problems:&lt;/strong&gt; These are questions that essentially ask for the solution to a homework problem while providing or not providing own ideas. The problem with these questions is two-fold: a) if the asking party actually wants to understand the problem, you'd need to discuss with them --&gt; that's not a good fit for Q&amp;amp;A, b) the audience for these questions is often only the asker him/herself (see &quot;check-my-work&quot; questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining a close reason such as &quot;no sufficient audience&quot; won't work and will only spark more discussion, as will &quot;homework&quot; ('oh, but that's not homework, I thought about this exercise myself'). One of the biggest problems is also that these questions are best answered by working with the person and asking questions and giving rough sketches and approaches - so they are just a bad fit anyway. This is particularly true for many questions where the author posts a lengthy and detailed list of her own failed effort. While those questions do signal that the author of the question doesn't just try to dump his problem on us, they are just generally a bad fit for Q&amp;amp;A sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt; One idea could be the following: Introduce a close reason &quot;not conceptual&quot; and apply it to any questions, asking for one solution to a problem where most variables come with numbers attached. This would allow questions asking about how to generally approach inclined plane problems where a set of parameters is given, but it would disallow questions asking about inclined plane problems with a specific set of parameters (for instance and angle of 45°). Having a rule like &quot;A questions where a lot of variables are fixed is closed&quot; would eliminate some of the ambiguity of the word &quot;conceptual&quot;. It would also allow questions asking for different ways to approach some problem, which in my opinion is a valid conceptual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pure calculations:&lt;/strong&gt; Calculations are also difficult, because they can come at any level - and any difficulty. Most calculation questions are only interesting for the person asking them, so they should be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But often when somebody reads a paper, he/she may stumble over some step in a calculation or some line of an argument that they don't understand. What about such questions? Now, often, we can refer those questions to math.stackexchange and be done with it, but often the questions may involve physical approximations and are better left here. Not understanding some equation in a paper is something extremely common - sometimes the equation is also just wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a platform to ask these questions would be a valuable aid to research, because it could save a lot of time (the idea of course being that I invest some time to explain details in a paper that I understood easily, saving the asker hours or days of searching, while some other times, I am the one asking). In principle, they are also a good fit for Q&amp;amp;A and they should have a decent QA product. If we had arXiv-feedback, this could actually help other readers of the paper and enhance overall research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we don't want to explain simple equivalence transformations in middle school textbooks, where the person was just too lazy to think about it for five minutes. And we don't want to do calculations in research papers that were left out, because they are tedious but foundational to the field and can be looked up in text books asking person is just too lazy to do them him/herself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to distinguish these two? If we want to have more people here who are doing research, it might be a good idea to allow paper questions and disallow all others (this would at least get rid of ambiguities). This is somewhat in line with the idea (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy/7409#7409&quot;&gt;Generalizing the homework policy&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions which attempt to outsource tedious calculations to the community, without any broader context, are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but tries to be a bit more inclusive for research-level questions and a bit more exclusive to avoid ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt; One suggestion (needs work): Close non-paper related questions, which want to do outsource calculations with a specific &quot;tedious calculation&quot; close-reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T14:05:04.623" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2016-09-02T13:13:01.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Determining how to redefine this policy is a tricky subject. Not only because of the varying and contradictory opinions about it, but also because we seem to be tackling the issue from the middle. Admittedly, in football, that is a sound strategy, but in politics (and that's just what this is), it's often best to start from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we get ahead of ourselves, we should step back and officially answer some questions that I'm sure many of you will consider already answered. But until we know everyone agrees on them and knows our stance, we can't properly move forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This first question we need to ask ourselves is simply &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What are the goals of this site?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; What is it we want this site to represent? What are the ideals to which we should hold all of the content on this site? Should it be by physicists and for physicists? Should it be a place where people can learn physics concepts? Should it be a homework help site? Again, many of you may think this an unnecessary step, but when there exists so much disagreement concerning a policy, it makes sense to retreat to a position where we can all agree on something and build from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question we should ask ourselves is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;How much freedom are we willing to grant users in deviating from the goals and ideals of this site?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; If the site's goals are to make it a place for professional physicists to ask/answer about research-level physics, how much leeway should we give for users to ask more basic questions? This answer needs to be weighed with how much any amount of deviation will detract from the ability of our site to live up to the goals we agree on. It also serves to provide necessary background and understanding so that everyone can be on the same logical page moving forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we get into some of the more contentious questions. Most close reasons are easy to determine; the ones we need to decide on are the off-topic sub-reasons. So the next thing we must ask ourselves is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What types/topics/formats of questions would be actively harmful towards meeting the goals/ideals of the site?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This should be applied to questions at all levels. By determining what is actively harmful towards the proposed site goals, we can more easily determine what is off-topic. We should also take this opportunity to realize that the freedoms we established in question 2 may indicate sub-goals of the site and that it may be the case that some questions, which do not directly contribute to the primary goals, may be beneficial or detrimental to the sub-goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last question we should be asking is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;What commonalities in these harmful questions can be isolated as reasons to close a question as off-topic?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Here is the important step. This is a place to identify the important patterns in the questions we found to harm the site's objectives. We also should use this step to recognize any biases we have. For example, if we find that everyone is more lenient towards interesting questions, then we need to decide if policy should reflect this or not; allowing exceptions based on general interest or requiring that decisions be made with no regard to the popularity of the question. By approaching this from a standpoint of &quot;Why are these questions harmful to the goals of the site?&quot;, we can more easily divine the set of rules that would prevent such questions. But, again, in order to do that properly, we need to have the answers to all the previous questions agreed on and made explicit. I would expect that reasons like the non-mainstream one will remain, but we may find that our homework-like policy never enters into it. We may also find that much of the misuse of some close reasons spawn from a general disinterest of users, and not from any rational source. That would, of course, be a worst case scenario; I'm just giving examples. At any rate, this step also needs to keep in mind how enforceable any close-reason can be. As we once discovered, closing a question purely because it is taken from a homework assignment is not very enforceable. All one needs to do is slightly reword it and claim it is a genuine curiosity. Furthermore, something like closing because a question is too tedious is too subjective to be adequate. Obviously, reasons should be clear, defined, and effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I may jump back to the beginning of my post, we've been approaching this starting from the third question (David Z's thorough research). While I definitely see the appeal in this strategy and advocate it being a good first attempt, once this fails (as we noticed it did), we should go back and truly start from the beginning. It's a longer process that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; help to create a more permanent solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some of you may point out that I haven't actually done anything towards saying how we could answer these questions, nor have I suggested any way the home-work policy should be changed or researched. You're right. At the moment, I don't see much point in trying to directly address the homework policy, nor can I imagine a situation where we could conduct research and find a clear solution. And if I had included my own answers to the questions I presented, you'd all have voted on whether or not you agree with my answers to those questions as opposed to agreeing with the issue of whether or not the questions need to be addressed at all. Additionally, as demonstrated, people don't seem to have any one thing in mind when they use the homework reason, so the only way I know to fix that is to establish a basis that gets everyone on the same page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We seem to be building a house on sand and every time the tide comes in, we question why part of this house gets washed away and every time, we try to rebuild that section newer and better. Instead, I merely suggest we tear it all down and lay a proper foundation before attempting to build it back up. The tide may eventually erode the foundation, but at least it'll last a good while longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T13:48:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T13:48:09.013" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T03:00:09.953" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277688/space-elevator-solved&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277688/space-elevator-solved&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I don't understand what is unclear about this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T03:00:09.953" Title="How does a simple question get put hold for being unclear?" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T20:28:24.653" Score="5" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I my questions have been clear enough and still they have been put on hold, or closed. There are a couple of members who are always among the close voters. Is there a way I can stop this bias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are my questions that I think were closed in spite of my repeated attempt to clarify. These are my last four questions in a row. You can see few members being there pretty frequently voting for close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277873/quantum-entanglement-observation-in-experimental-data-that-may-be-unexpected&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277873/quantum-entanglement-observation-in-experimental-data-that-may-be-unexpected&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/275678/quantum-entanglement-correlations-role-of-probability&quot;&gt;Quantum entanglement correlations - role of probability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273507/memory-loophole-in-quantum-entanglement&quot;&gt;Memory loophole in quantum entanglement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270780/what-is-meant-by-when-we-say-more-than-two-say-4-particles-are-entangled&quot;&gt;What is meant by when we say more than two (say 4) particles are entangled&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106205" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T02:06:28.837" Title="How can I challenge if I think my questions are unfairly closed or put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9099" CreationDate="2016-09-03T21:03:00.063" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I think the correct way to challenge any closing behaviour that seems weird is to write a meta post and discuss it here, so I think it was a good idea to open this thread.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I however think your description of the situation is a bit dramatic. There is one person who actually voted to close in all four cases - who just happens to be a rather active member here and probably just went to check the queue more often. Otherwise, if I have counted correctly, the 16 hold votes were cast by 13 different people. So there is quite a broad spectrum.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And I have to admit that I really do not understand what you are asking in any of the four questions either - I am really and honestly sorry for that, but I do not understand it. Maybe talking about the topic with someone in the chat to crystallise the question would be a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T21:03:00.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9099" CreationDate="2016-09-03T21:27:59.613" Score="-12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have more than 2000 reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I am the single 3k+ user on the site regularly revisiting the VtC votes, trying to save, what is salvageable. There are some others, too, but they are not really active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we have an inner circle around in 4-6 persons who are regular voters and don't hesitate to close your question if they think it is maybe homework-like, or it is maybe unclear. Or any other. The close reasons of the site are far &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, and it seems they don't hesitate to interpret them always the possible most widely. Their real reason, why they have to continously annoy and harm goodstanding people, is still unclear to me. Asking them for that, I got mostly arrogant reactions and algorithmic citation of well-known rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if you are now at 2k+, then the 3k+ is also not too far. The site requires lenience, friendliness, the spectrum of the possible close reasons needs to be cleared, and the current VtC rampage has to get to an end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest to get the 3k+ ASAP and try to help our VtC voters to differentiate between the &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; offtopic posts and the answerable ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the StackOverflow was in a quite similar state until around the spring 2015 moderator election. After that, their behavior suddenly changed. It is already a surprisingly friendly site. Some vehement moderators silently stepped down, others toke back. Some particularly hostile inner circle members became quite friendly moderators after they got their long-wanted diamond. I don't know, what was in the background, probably I won't ever know it, but I suspect it was actually an induced change from the CM side. I suspect, some similar could happen also there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2016-09-04T11:32:46.003" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T11:32:46.003" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9099" CreationDate="2016-09-03T23:30:06.230" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/275678/quantum-entanglement-correlations-role-of-probability&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for several reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was extremely unclear when it was posted. I asked you to make several clarifications, after which it was &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; unclear. After more requests from clarification from two separate users, and seven revisions in total, it finally made sense. But most close votes had been cast before then.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All four of your questions are about 'quantum entanglement', but none of them clearly define what quantum system you're working with. You keep asking about the 'statistical correlation', but you don't define what you're correlating, and you often mix up entanglement with correlation, when these phenomena are totally distinct. (This problem is invisible to people who don't know quantum mechanics, because your question &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; phrased in grammatically correct English sentences, but it's clear to people who do. That's why you need 3k+ to vote to close.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All four of your questions are made to promote your personal theory of quantum entanglement. If you want feedback on this theory, you should just state outright what it is. If you don't, we're just going to answer with what standard quantum mechanics says, and in all 4 of your questions, it just says &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, I think your questions were rightly closed. Some of them may be accidentally reopened by people who aren't paying too much attention (because it looks vaguely grammatically correct, as in my second point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T23:36:05.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-04T20:53:20.343" Score="5" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only been a member for a few months, but find the site both very good, and pretty fair. Not saying all is perfect, but enough good, imo. I looked to see if there was a similar question to the one posed, didn't find one, but I do think the topic has been discussed before. If so, just point me to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have observed, and maybe a little more specifically in the last couple of weeks, a number of questions that are basically arguing that some known physics is false. I've seen it a few time for relativity and Einstein's work. But it seems to be more general, though that topic surfaces plenty. Some of the time the questions are put on hold and maybe later closed, but not always. Worse, I see that answers that attempt to answer the questions, which are often but not always pretty good, tend to get votes, as well as the questions. Sometimes the answers or comments are more of the same physics negation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions or comments seem to come from users without a significant reputation. [But to insure it is clear I am not impugning those members, sometimes new ones, most of low reputation members questions are actually very good, and of value to the whole community, imo]. So my question is, is there a kind of targeting of this site by some groups to introduce a kind of anti physics or some other intent that devalues the policies of this site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is random I wouldn't be concerned, it just seems like a lot of nonsense sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent example I saw was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/278178/does-einsteins-derivation-of-the-lorentz-transformation-have-a-mathematical-err&quot;&gt;Does Einstein&amp;#39;s derivation of the Lorentz transformation have a mathematical error?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T04:48:55.940" Title="Is Physics SE being targeted by people opposing the modern view of physics, and so called myth busters?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|comments|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9104" CreationDate="2016-09-04T22:15:59.700" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this question tried to validate a non-mainstream &lt;strike&gt;ideology&lt;/strike&gt; theory. I think it could have a better place on the Skeptics SE, but it is border case in the PSE. In an ideal world, it had been migrated there. Actually, we can try to migrate it to there, although it needs a moderator intervention, and they will do it only after they have got the approval of the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far I know, there are no &lt;strike&gt;pseudoscience fans&lt;/strike&gt; non-mainstram physics advocates here, although some questions relating the wormholes, white holes, and similar not yet observed GR things, are closed with surprising probability as non-mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a single user advocating his non-mainstream theory, except that he is sad because they aren't accepted, he is being tolerated. And his theory is not so bad, only not really believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From no one I know from the unpopular members and ex-members of this community to be a non-mainstream theorist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also debates about the policies of the site, for example, currently a significant part of the questions are unfairly closed as &quot;homework&quot; even if they clearly aren't, and they would be a nice content here. There are also other problems as well, but not from this side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T22:15:59.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9109" CreationDate="2016-09-05T02:28:18.047" Score="-4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of times after asking a question I can think of some people on Stack Exchange who may be interested in my question, or even able to answer my question. It would be very convenient if on the some page of my question, there is a button to message those people about my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90492" LastEditorUserId="90492" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T00:54:52.867" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T00:54:52.867" Title="Can we add an &quot;ask to answer&quot; feature?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9108" CreationDate="2016-09-05T05:08:34.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already a thread on meta dedicated to something like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1159/opt-in-to-be-always-pingable-to-answer-questions&quot;&gt;Opt-in to be always pingable to answer questions&lt;/a&gt;. If a person has opted in there, feel free to place a comment under their post to let them know about a question they might be interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is definitely opt-in -- there is not, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/431/any-way-to-send-a-personal-message-to-another-user&quot;&gt;nor will there ever be&lt;/a&gt;, a feature to allow arbitrary pinging of users who haven't even participated in a thread. Remember, this is a question and answer site, not a social network, and the experts are already giving precious time to answer questions as it is. If the site allowed anyone to initiate conversations with anyone else requesting assistance, all of the experts would quickly abandon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note there is a tendency for inexperienced members to single out certain high-rep individuals as being the only people capable of answering questions. You should avoid this tendency. For the vast majority of questions asked on this site, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; people can give equally satisfactory answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10851" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T05:08:34.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-05T19:23:59.243" Score="22" ViewCount="1288" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions posted which ask about what mainstream physics says about something, but imply that the OP has a completely different opinion. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/278393/lets-get-back-to-the-ether-what-is-it&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/278393/lets-get-back-to-the-ether-what-is-it&lt;/a&gt;. The OP has some theory about the ether, as shown in their answers on other questions, and wants to get opinions &quot;before giving my own.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277873/does-this-observation-in-a-probabilistic-experiment-indicate-presence-of-a-balan&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277873/does-this-observation-in-a-probabilistic-experiment-indicate-presence-of-a-balan&lt;/a&gt;. This question (v1) asks if some experimental data is a &quot;coincidence&quot;. The OP has already published a paper claiming that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a coincidence and is evidence for a non-mainstream modification of quantum mechanics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266904/in-einsteins-relativity-of-simultaneity-thought-experiment-would-not-the-pas&quot;&gt;In Einstein&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;relativity of simultaneity&amp;quot; thought experiment, would not the passenger on the train see a dimmer signal?&lt;/a&gt; In this question (v1), OP asked if I &quot;admit&quot; that special relativity says something happens in a thought experiment. 10 comments later, OP triumphantly reveals that an extension to this thought experiment is supposed to disprove special relativity (it does not).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273032/what-exactly-is-a-photon&quot;&gt;What exactly is a photon?&lt;/a&gt; The OP already has extremely strong and non-mainstream opinions on what a photon is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/279189/prove-that-classical-physics-gives-the-wrong-answer&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/279189/prove-that-classical-physics-gives-the-wrong-answer&lt;/a&gt; The OP is &quot;issuing a challenge&quot; to the community, to basically prove that quantum mechanics works. They've already written an article saying that quantum mechanics doesn't work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like answering any of these questions, because they feel fundamentally unproductive. The OP is just using the question as a soapbox for promoting their own opinion, or as an opening to argue with people posting answers. They can't learn anything from the answers because they already have their own. And half the time the OP drags answerers in long and unproductive debates in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's no close reason that directly addresses this kind of question. I believe all of these questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed, but all close reasons above are incorrect. For example, one might try to close as 'non mainstream' or 'opinion based', but neither of those are true. The actual questions have clear, non-opinion-based, mainstream answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, people try to use the 'unclear what you're asking' close reason, because this is also incorrect, because there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a well-defined question in each of these. I think people use this reason because it looks like OP really has another, completely different question (e.g. &quot;is my theory correct&quot;) in mind, but this takes some reading between the lines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should these types of questions be handled?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T18:43:57.987" Title="Questions with an ulterior motive" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2016-09-05T19:47:29.257" Score="-10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should these types of questions be handled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should answer them. If you can't answer them, so be it. Don't carp and complain and make up all sort of fatuous reasons why such questions should be closed &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; you can't answer them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I do not have &lt;em&gt;&quot;extremely strong and non-mainstream opinions on what a photon is.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; I refer to peer-reviewed papers and robust scientific evidence in my questions and answers. However some people reject it all as &quot;non-mainstream&quot; because it doesn't square with some popscience lies-to-children they've accepted unquestioningly. For example they reject aether out of hand despite &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories#General_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what Einstein said&lt;/a&gt;, despite &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories#Quantum_vacuum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what Robert Laughlin said&lt;/a&gt;, and despite &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org:443/find/grp_physics/1/ti:+aether/0/1/0/all/0/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all the papers on the arXiv&lt;/a&gt;. Because they think they know better, when they don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions with an ulterior motive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I detect a certain irony here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The OP is just using the question as a soapbox for promoting their own opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZzCzk.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZzCzk.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T19:47:29.257" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9127" CreationDate="2016-09-05T20:09:18.743" Score="7" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard on the chat, that a post gets out of the review queue if a 3k+ user edits it as part of the review. More details can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/162058/259412&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It may be an unintended side-effect, or a non-trivial interpretation of the spirit of the review votes from the software development side of the SE engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens if a 3k+ user makes this edit out of the review queue? (I.e. right click on the post title, opening it in a new tab and doing the edit in it?) Does this side-effect happen also in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T21:17:28.213" Title="If a 3k+ user edits a post out of the VtC review, does it get out of the review queue?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2016-09-05T22:01:03.577" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question itself is mainstream and merely appears to be asked &quot;in bad faith&quot;, this is not a reason for closure. We judge &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, not their &lt;em&gt;askers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many of these questions trot out questions asked before. The usual duplicate policies apply, and should be stringently enforced. Unless a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question is asked that distinguishes the new question from older ones, these questions should be closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is otherwise on-topic, that means that the &quot;ulterior motive&quot; itself cannot be a relevant part of it. References to personal theories or &quot;alternative viewpoints&quot; should be removed by editing, especially if they are of a promotional nature. In the cases where the non-standard material cannot be removed without making the question non-sensical, then you've found the close reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &quot;non-mainstream&quot;, because it then is asking about the evaluation of non-mainstream theories instead of asking about accepted physics. It might also be &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;, or off-topic by the part of the &quot;non-mainstream&quot; policy against requests for review, because removing the material the asker wanted to have validated might turn the question into a request for redoing that entire analysis (correctly). Either way, there's your close reason perfectly within the already established close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T22:01:03.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9122" CreationDate="2016-09-05T23:16:08.757" Score="23" ViewCount="1378" Body="&lt;p&gt;This discussion question is inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9096/121464&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9086/replacing-the-homework-policy-1b-what-is-our-scope-anyway&quot;&gt;current homework policy question&lt;/a&gt;. The main question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the goals of this site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things to think about when answering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is it we want this site to represent? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the ideals to which we should hold all of the content on this site? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do we want the site to be seen as? (i.e., how do we want it to look to outsiders?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might say this is unnecessary, but I think it is really important. To quote Jim (the user who posted the idea)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before we get ahead of ourselves [and define close reasons], we should step back and officially answer some questions that I'm sure many of you will consider already answered. But until we know everyone agrees on them and knows our stance, we can't properly move forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please try to focus on one question at a time in answers; hopefully once the community has reached a consensus, the answers can be combined into the main answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: after this question, there will be two more questions, plus the close vote question already in existence. I will link to them as each is resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9335/leeway-in-deviating-from-goals-of-this-site&quot;&gt;Leeway in deviating from goals of this site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T19:09:15.163" Title="What are the goals of this site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|content-level|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9115" CreationDate="2016-09-05T23:37:24.277" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conception of the founding members is expressed in the tour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &quot;students&quot; are explicitly included among the audience envisioned for the site, but the members have been very negative on the idea of becoming a resource to which beginners turn to finish an assignment or avoid having to do some basic reading and thinking about concepts that are widely addressed in basic pedagogical materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has taken the form of a much debated and repeatedly mutated 'homework' policy (where 'homework' has never really meant 'something that you were assigned for class', but something more like 'questions copied from texts or that seem to exist in order to teach the subject).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And frankly I don't think there is a large contingent interested in changing those basic parameters (inclusive, but not here to solve endless problems for students who should be practicing those problems). The linked posts are about trying to get a good consensus on what we do and don't want and how to express that in a comprehensible form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that the site should be &lt;em&gt;&quot;for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and that we should encourage posters to think of the site as a tool for jump starting their thinking and not one for getting their work done for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T23:37:24.277" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9115" CreationDate="2016-09-07T03:22:55.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the goals of this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not volitional and thus does not have goals.  While some of those that participate here may not have goals, most do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is it we want this site to represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interests of those that volunteer their time here.  If it doesn't, there will be no volunteers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the ideals to which we should hold all of the content on this&#xA;  site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trader principle - participants here (ideally) trade value for value to mutual benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T03:22:55.433" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2016-09-07T17:36:16.850" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very few good reason to &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; questions at all. Even ones that are borderline off-topic.  What should be closed is basically just spam, outright crankery, flames, etc.  The rest can be dealt with through the normal upvote/downvote mechanism.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T17:36:16.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9126" CreationDate="2016-09-08T05:40:54.493" Score="-2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a request for quote marks to be used solely for their original purpose, that is to quote &lt;strong&gt;verbatim&lt;/strong&gt; a statement made in a post. They should not to be used as part of a logical fallacy /straw man argument. This has happened to me twice in  two days by users with undoubtedly the best of motives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by basing your argument or point on a personal interpretation or summing up  rather than the &lt;strong&gt;actual&lt;/strong&gt; statement made  is completely unfair, imo and is compounded by a lack of courtesy/respect in not acknowledging the fact of improper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask users not to write a comment, altering the words in someone's else's post,  leave a set of quotes around it, along with an implication based on the altered version and then dissappear, leaving the original poster frustrated by a lack of a response after fruitlessly looking to edit a statement that was never made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user108787" LastEditorDisplayName="user108787" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T05:46:11.820" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T13:40:35.173" Title="Improper use of quote marks and straw man logical fallacies" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9125" CreationDate="2016-09-08T13:40:35.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's both impossible and undesirable to police people's writing styles. Who's going to be on the Commitee For Proper Use Of Quotation Marks (CFPUOQM)? How will they enfore the restrictions? Why can't you just point the error out to the person using quotation marks &quot;wrongly&quot; like one would with any other error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think there is a &lt;em&gt;significant pattern&lt;/em&gt; of multiple people using quotation marks improperly, consider that your idea of how quotation marks should be used might be overly narrow and not shared by the general population. In particular, I see &lt;em&gt;no issue&lt;/em&gt; with putting a paraphrase in quotation marks - yes, if the paraphrase is inaccurate, this is building a strawman, but &lt;em&gt;not using quotation marks&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't have changed that being a fallacy, would it? Unless the quotation marks are accompanied by an explicit &quot;You said that:&quot;, I don't think that such marks always imply a verbatim quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are misunderstanding you and putting words in your mouth, the problem isn't that they are using quotation marks to do so, it's that they &lt;em&gt;misunderstood what you were trying to say&lt;/em&gt;! You're trying to solve this communication problem from entirely the wrong angle, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T13:40:35.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9112" CreationDate="2016-09-08T21:17:28.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made a test on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/279038/what-is-the-spatial-extent-of-single-photon&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More exactly: after reloading the review entity, it was still an open review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T21:17:28.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9132" CreationDate="2016-09-08T23:31:41.593" Score="-6" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep getting down voted instantly and as a quick as I flagged my last question it got denied without reason. Can moderator or a user with privileges be kicked for down voting to much? Is there a way to check who keeps instantly down voting me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T17:15:10.483" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T17:15:10.483" Title="Can moderator or user with high reputation be held to the rules?" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|down-votes|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9128" CreationDate="2016-09-08T23:53:04.047" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main mechanism for the reversal of serial voting is automated, because the moderators have access only to summaries of inter-user voting, (not to detailed records) &lt;em&gt;even when our tools alert us to the existence of unusual patterns in voting&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alleging that the moderators aren't doing their job on this is simply silly: it's mostly not our job because the scripts take care of it. None-the-less I've looked into the findings of the automated system related to your account. I can assure you that the system has found no unusual pattern of downvoting directed at you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave it to you to think up some alternative explanation for the large number of downvotes that you receive. Or you could ask for opinions in the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to take this further, use the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt;&quot; link to be found at the bottom of every page: it will let you message the system wide moderation team directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T23:53:04.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2016-09-09T04:19:55.687" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that I might suggest we keep in mind is that an answer is in general not intended only for the OP of a question, but anyone else who is interested. The &quot;What is a photon&quot; question is an extreme example of this- whatever you may think of the OP, there were obviously plenty of other readers who were interested in the responses and not satisfied with those given to the previous versions of the question. I think they were generally well served by the answers that it got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a lower-profile example, I answered a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/250970/bells-theorem-and-fluid-mechanical-experiments-using-droplets-are-local-hidden/251838&quot;&gt;some time ago&lt;/a&gt; before realizing that the OP was asking a question about his own paper, and certainly wasn't going to accept my answer that critiqued it. But the question itself was of sufficiently broad interest and worded reasonably enough by the OP that I don't feel like it was a waste of time to answer it even though I stood no chance of having the answer accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some of the cases you give, the questions themselves were not good in addition to promoting an agenda. That's a separate issue. But when the question would be worthwhile in a vacuum, it should be kept and answered for the broader benefit if nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63994" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T04:19:55.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2016-09-09T05:50:01.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aren't these questions easily ignored? Its not like a conversation where some-one interrupting is taking up valuable talking time. If you don't like the headline question then don't click on it; and if you do decide to click on it, and then don't like the body of the question then again ignore it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one problem that can occur is that it encourages more posts of a similar nature - but given that there is a certain level of sobriety in physics; and that there are enough physicists grounded in mainstream physics that are participating this shouldn't be a huge problem as it is for sites struggling to increase participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-mainstream positions are an index of healthy curiousity - so long as they don't get out of hand; simply by being what they are they're unlikely to attract expert attention - this is why they're non-mainstream. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7993" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T05:50:01.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9128" CreationDate="2016-09-09T20:57:33.983" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mods can be de-modded if they violate their rules, but they do this only rarely. Although they are elected by the community, this election is lifelong, except if a Community Manager decides against it (or they retire, this is much more common). They can de-mod moderators any time. This all is very democratic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically mods belong to the deletionist line of the sites, but they are following the majority opinions of the sites, which is also deletionist, at least on the big ones. It is the result of an unfortunate social selection mechanism: deciding about questions and voting to close them is quite boring after taking part in hundreds of such decisions, thus the only people doing this on the long-term is the few exceptions who enjoy it. This overweights the deletionist line on most sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in your case, not this is happened. Not the mods are harming you, simple users are harming you. As I understand, your main problem is the downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This harm is not really groundless. I am watching you, not because I want to vote you down, but because I want to make your questions salvageable. But it is hard, very hard, mainly because also I can't understand many of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T09:35:58.153" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T09:35:58.153" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9134" CreationDate="2016-09-10T18:48:52.170" Score="4" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get regularly the feedback in comments to use Latex or MathJax. Also I would write beautiful formulas what I can do only on pen &amp;amp; paper. Where can I get info about these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T12:36:04.703" Title="What is the Latex and MathJax, how can I write beautiful formulas in my posts?" Tags="|support|mathjax|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9133" CreationDate="2016-09-10T18:48:52.170" Score="2" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(La)tex is a extensible textual document format for mathematical symbols. Although it is huge, you need only to know a very small subset of it to be able to write real formulas in your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax is a Javascript library what makes the Latex formatting usable in a HTML/Javascript/Css environment. The StackExchange site network uses MathJax on most of the sites what requires it, the Physics SE is one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its markup on the level you need is very simple, much easier even as the HTML. Here is what is enough for you. You can learn it in around 5 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything what you want to be shown in page as formula, you have to include between two \$s. So, &lt;code&gt;a text like $a^b$&lt;/code&gt; will be shown so: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NJJvP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NJJvP.png&quot; alt=&quot;$a^b$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you use double dollars, the formula will be center-aligned in a new line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt; are working as common: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XMr03.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XMr03.png&quot; alt=&quot;$+, -$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For multiplication, you can use 1) nothing (&lt;code&gt;$ab$&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XgYls.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XgYls.png&quot; alt=&quot;$ab$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) 2) &lt;code&gt;\cdot&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;$a\cdot b$&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DDgEa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DDgEa.png&quot; alt=&quot;$a\cdot b$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) 3) and some others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For fractions, there is a more complex syntax: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g4uL6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g4uL6.png&quot; alt=&quot;$\frac{a}{b}$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is expressed by &lt;code&gt;$\frac{a}{b}$&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here you can see, you can use &lt;code&gt;{}&lt;/code&gt; for grouping the terms. It is essentially like &lt;code&gt;()&lt;/code&gt; in math, but it is only for the positioning of the elements and it will be invisible in the result.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use powers, or you can write anything in the top-right index with a &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt;. For example, &lt;code&gt;$a^b$&lt;/code&gt; will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zB3j0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zB3j0.png&quot; alt=&quot;$a^b$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can get things into the bottom-right index by a &lt;code&gt;_&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;code&gt;$a_b$&lt;/code&gt; will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pM117.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pM117.png&quot; alt=&quot;$a_b$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Square root is going so: &lt;code&gt;$\sqrt{a}$&lt;/code&gt; will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bx4aO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bx4aO.png&quot; alt=&quot;$\sqrt{a}$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the common functions, e (in the sense of 2.71...), h (the Planck constant) and c (speed of light), you can use them simply as texts (thus, without the leading &lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YThrA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YThrA.png&quot; alt=&quot;$\pi, \delta, \epsilon$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the other greek letters can be expressed by a leading backslash, like: &lt;code&gt;$\pi$&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;$\delta$&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;$\epsilon$&lt;/code&gt;. The capital greek letters can be done usually by capital markup: &lt;code&gt;$\Pi$&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;$\Delta$&lt;/code&gt;, will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y2Via.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y2Via.png&quot; alt=&quot;$\Pi, \Delta$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Degree, grad is a little bit tricky. There is the &lt;code&gt;$\circ$&lt;/code&gt; to show a little circle: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bEW9g.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bEW9g.png&quot; alt=&quot;$\circ$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Put this into the top-right index: &lt;code&gt;$42^\circ C$&lt;/code&gt; will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nIJ0f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nIJ0f.png&quot; alt=&quot;$42^\circ$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Infinity is &lt;code&gt;\infty&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l7myD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l7myD.png&quot; alt=&quot;$\infty$&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good option to exercise if you start to write a question or an answer on the main site. Below your textbox, you will see, how it will seem after post (&lt;strong&gt;Warning: don't post your tries, it will contaminate the site! Discard them after you're ready!&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework: formulate in MathJax the well-known time dilation formula of the SR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pZOmF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pZOmF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Good work!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T12:36:04.703" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T12:36:04.703" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-09-10T18:48:52.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9115" CreationDate="2016-09-12T04:51:56.953" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems to me this `site' is one of those entities that exists in the perpetual state of an identity crisis. When I read: &quot;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy,&quot; I cannot help being somewhat amused. The reality from what I see is quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I've been a member of this site for a while, I've only been really active (if you can call it that) for a fairly short while. So, I'm still a bit of a newcomer/outsider. I came upon this site more or less in the way that I think 99% of people discover it, by searching the web with a particular physics question. As a result my untested impression was that the goal of this site is &lt;strong&gt;to promote or raise the general physics knowledge of the internet population at large.&lt;/strong&gt; No wonder I was rather surprised at the severely draconian drive to &lt;em&gt;close questions&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The irony is the way it works. One does not need to submit your CV to become a member (not I am suggesting that). Anybody can basically become a member and then build up a `reputation.' How? By getting votes! So basically anybody can get a high reputation simply by sticking around and being popular. Almost anybody can vote. I've seen the most horribly wrong answers getting high positive votes. So my guess is that the portion of the membership that consists of active researchers and academics is rather low. I do believe there are many students, but they tend to be early career students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is high time that the goals of this site is taken into consideration. So I think this is a very pertinent question. And if you find that the actual operational goal of this site has developed into the one I stated in bold above rather than the one quoted in the first paragraph, isn't it time that you drop this draconian drive to close questions? Allow the site to be the organic mess that it is turning into anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Active researchers and academics work on very focused topics. Those questions that appear on this site dealing with such highly specialized topics seldom get answers that are useful. So what's the point? Who are you trying to fool? Open the gates for the populace and allow those ignorant young students that don't yet understand enough to formulate a &quot;clear question&quot; to receive some help. It's happening anyway in spite of your best attempts to keep them away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55261" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T04:51:56.953" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9133" CreationDate="2016-09-12T11:23:31.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this seems like a well-intentioned thread, there is already a comprehensive tutorial over on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site, at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there really isn't that much point in duplicating the enormous amount of work that has gone into writing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T11:23:31.690" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-12T11:42:12.033" Score="21" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Ask a Question page shown to new users contains a lot of guidance, including a link to MathJax help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vfP1W.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/treating-user-myopia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strong UI reasons why this link is nowhere near as useful as we'd hope&lt;/a&gt;, but we can at least make it point to something that's actually useful. It currently points to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tutorial&lt;/a&gt;, which looks like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GPta1.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and which is nowhere near a useful resource. Despite the claims in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9133/&quot;&gt;recent attempt&lt;/a&gt; to duplicate a bunch of work and create a local tutorial of limited usefulness, we do in fact have a long-standing go-to tutorial for MathJax, over on the Mathematics meta site,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HDjiu.png&quot; alt=&quot;MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equivalent link over on Maths.SE links to their tutorial. Since we're already linking off-site for this, why don't we also link to theirs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a fair amount of support. Is it something the mods can change? Do we need to contact the community team? Have already done so? If so, have said whether it's feasible or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-19T08:31:02.137" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T08:31:02.137" Title="Please link the MathJax help to the Meta.Math.SE tutorial" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2016-09-13T18:43:57.987" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think the person is only pretending to ask to get an audience, then downvote and say so.  It may be that you misjudged, but if enough people agree with you, the questioner might get the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T18:43:57.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9144" CreationDate="2016-09-13T20:26:25.783" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed when viewing a question here that a hot network question from Money.SE was formatted strangely. Presumably because it's interpreting the title as math markup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot from this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uocV2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uocV2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenshot from another site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PgqrL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PgqrL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68482" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T08:43:59.593" Title="Hot Network Question titles are interpreted as LaTeX / MathJax?" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9142" CreationDate="2016-09-14T02:50:28.953" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do answers with zero votes mean? &#xA;&lt;br&gt;Can I trust them? Does it mean that there is something wrong but not so noticable in the answer? Does it mean that their answer should not be considered to be a totally complete answer to the question? Or perhaps no one is knowledgeable enough to judge if the answer is correct or not? Or perhaps the answer is too obvious to be upvoted? Or the answer seems to not show any effort, so doesn't deserve an upvote?&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the main point is, can I trust zero vote answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124643" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:17:10.180" Title="What do answers with zero votes mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9141" CreationDate="2016-09-14T03:21:59.253" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see an answer with a net score of zero, it means one of three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not enough people saw the answer to read it, let alone vote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People read it, but thought, &quot;Meh, this isn't &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, but it isn't good enough to warrant an upvote.&quot; Alternatively, they might have thought, &quot;Meh, this isn't &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;, but it isn't bad enough for me to downvote.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were an equal number of upvotes and downvotes on the answer (you can see the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;at 1,000 reputation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first possibility, I'd guess, happens quite a lot. The answerer may have been &quot;late to the party&quot;, so to speak, and answered long after the question was asked, or the answer was simply overshadowed by other answers that accumulated a lot of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second possibility simply means that the answer wasn't good or bad. (Yes, people are generally more willing to upvote than dowvote, which is why I included a caveat: some people won't want to give up one rep point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third possibility means that the answer was controversial; this does happen, and means that people have quite strong views on it. If you check the vote count (once you reach 1,000 rep) and see that the voting's split, be wary, and read the comments under the answer to try to understand the disagreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using that as a segue, you really should judge for yourself the answer, if possible; always read the comments below it, and the answer itself in its entirety.  You shouldn't decide to &quot;trust&quot; or &quot;distrust&quot; an answer based solely on how other people have voted. Votes don't always correlate with quality; some of my best answers (in my opinion) have gotten very few or no votes, while some of my less good answers have gotten inordinate amounts of upvotes. This is often due to a question getting onto the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Hot Network Questions list&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9141/what-do-answers-with-zero-votes-mean#comment34213_9142&quot;&gt;knzhou pointed out&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The takeaway? Judge for yourself. See if you can follow the logic of the answer, and ask questions of the answerer in a comment if you don't fully understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the main point is, can I trust zero vote answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treat/trust them no differently from one-vote, minus-one-vote, or X-vote answers: Judge them based on how well you can follow them. Don't choose to blindly trust them if you don't understand them; always investigate for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T15:20:28.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-14T06:04:58.733" Score="9" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just today, the Community bot bumped a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4513/what-happens-with-the-explanation-of-the-mendeleev-table&quot;&gt;three-year old question&lt;/a&gt;. It's also recently bumped a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7512/math-rendering-errors&quot;&gt;half-year old question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now about 1/10 of the posts on the 'active questions' meta tab are bumps from Community. I don't think this helps at all, and it worsens the signal-to-noise ratio. Can this be disabled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T12:50:19.403" Title="Turn off Community bumping for meta" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9139" CreationDate="2016-09-14T08:43:59.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229363/exclude-tex-se-question-titles-from-mathjax-parsing-in-hot-network-questions&quot;&gt;known issue&lt;/a&gt;. As a workaround, you can install &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/the-stack-overflow-unofficial-patch-soup&quot;&gt;SOUP&lt;/a&gt; (Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch), which will prevent MathJax rendering in HNQ titles unless the site is known to have MathJax enabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T08:43:59.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9143" CreationDate="2016-09-14T08:52:24.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bfeature-request%5D+community+bump&quot;&gt;Requests on MSE to modify the bumping behavior&lt;/a&gt; have been consistently (ignored or) declined, so no, this is probably not going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it worsens the SNR anyway, because these old questions still count in the &quot;signal&quot; category; just because a question is old doesn't make it undeserving of attention. If you think a particular question that has been bumped should not be exposed on the front page, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184485/community-seems-to-be-bumping-new-questions-more-frequently-than-usual/184511#184511&quot;&gt;several ways to fix that&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote the question down if it's bad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote up a good answer, if one exists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a good answer, if one doesn't already exist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the question for closure if appropriate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T08:52:24.023" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9143" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:51:37.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has come up before on meta, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6276/why-does-this-particular-question-keep-getting-bumped-up-by-community&quot;&gt;(Why) does this particular question keep getting bumped up by Community?&lt;/a&gt;. At the time, there was very little for the Community user to bump, so it just kept bumping the same question every month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, more questions have become eligible for bumping, either through having their answers downvoted or through zero-score questions receiving a stray upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, there are four Community-bumped questions on the front page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4513/what-happens-with-the-explanation-of-the-mendeleev-table&quot;&gt;What happens with &amp;quot;the explanation of the Mendeleev table&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7745/is-this-question-too-broad&quot;&gt;Is this question too broad?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7512/math-rendering-errors&quot;&gt;Math rendering errors?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9000/add-is-your-question-on-topic-page-for-new-users&quot;&gt;Add &amp;quot;is your question on-topic&amp;quot; page for new users?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, none of them particularly warrant the extra attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Edit: recently, and even more ridiculously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9393/winter-bash-2016-hats-are-live&quot;&gt;Winter bash 2016 - hats are live!&lt;/a&gt; got bumped to the top of the front page. Because that very much required additional attention once the winter bash was over, you know.]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, these are essentially the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; bumpable questions at this time. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/meta.physics/query/539186/questions-eligible-for-community-user-bumping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; implements the criteria in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184485/community-seems-to-be-bumping-new-questions-more-frequently-than-usual/184511#184511&quot;&gt;this MSE post&lt;/a&gt; and turns up two of the above posts (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9069&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9000&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) plus &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9104&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (which was active 9 days ago). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the other two posts above, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4513/what-happens-with-the-explanation-of-the-mendeleev-table&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; is reported by SEDE as having an answer with score 1, for reasons that are not really substantiated in either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/4513/timeline&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/4515/timeline&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; timelines, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7512/math-rendering-errors&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;'s answer was upvoted after the bump (it's also an old bug report which is useless to bring back up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case: the set of bumpable questions is &lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt;. It can grow slightly over time, as people go into the archives and upvote score-zero questions, or downvote existing positive-score answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than that, though: there really is no reason to dredge old stuff back up, particularly if it is only going to add a 10% serving of noise to the meta front page. Currently, the posts eligible for bumping are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;those scoring &gt;= 0 that have gone at least 30 days with no activity, have at least one non-deleted answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that, and no accepted answer (also, they can't be locked or closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contend that, although it may at times be beneficial to have old feature requests or standing bug reports brought back to light for a while, the current bumping criteria are completely uncorrelated with the kind of stuff that might be worthwhile bringing up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there are plenty of reasons why a discussion in meta can be left with zero score: it could genuinely need more attention, but it could also be a five-year-old debate that ended in a +5/-5 vote that says a fair bit about the community's feeling at the time. The narrow criteria above are posed to bring up a bunch of boring posts, and quite well-tuned to miss the discussions (such as those with e.g. a single answer at score -1) that could potentially use someone dropping in and adding an answer with the consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More damningly, however, is the fact that the current crop of bumps wouldn't have happened without people digging through the archives and voting on things. To me this is pretty strong evidence that the rationale for keeping this mechanism (&quot;bringing attention to old unresolved discussions, open feature requests, and unsolved bugs&quot;) is not actually that necessary - people &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; digging through the archive and finding these things, and the bumping algorithm relies on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's really no call to have this on meta: the idea sounds nice, sure, but it is a very blunt tool that does not work at all for the intended objective. Please turn it off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T12:50:19.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9141" CreationDate="2016-09-14T16:17:10.180" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do answers with zero votes mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means nobody has voted for them, or the upvotes match the downvotes. That's all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I trust them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. But you can't trust an answer with 10 upvotes either. Sometimes I see an answer with a whole barrelful of upvotes, and it's totally utterly wrong. One of the issues here at physics stack exchange is that a popscience wrong answer get a lot of upvotes, whilst a hard-science correct answer gets none. See how HDE226868 said: &lt;em&gt;&quot;or the answer was simply overshadowed by other answers that accumulated a lot of votes&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. What tends to happen is that people vote for the answer with the most votes, and I suspect that some posters who know this &quot;game the system&quot;. They post an answer, then advertise it in the chatroom expecting their friends to upvote their answer and downvote others. Once one answer gets more upvotes than the rest, the rest tend to languish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it mean that there is something wrong but not so noticeable in the answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. Maybe not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it mean that their answer should not be considered to be a totally complete answer to the question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. Maybe not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or perhaps no one is knowledgeable enough to judge if the answer is correct or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. Maybe not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or perhaps the answer is too obvious to be upvoted? Or the answer seems to not show any effort, so doesn't deserve an upvote? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, maybe not. Maybe nobody has voted for it yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the main point is, can I trust zero vote answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is no. Nor can you trust non-zero-vote answers. Nor can you trust that downvoted answers are wrong as per knzhou's suggestion. Particularly if there are robust references in the answer and no comments below it. Voting is not always honest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BqN6K.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BqN6K.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:17:10.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-15T19:19:44.177" Score="-7" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just attempted to ask a question in the regular site but before i was able to i was prompted that my previous questions had been poorly recieved and that i should think about my question before i ask it. I have had several questions that have been uprated and my last question had been responded by a member as a good question.That question has since not been answered by anyone significantly and has not been provided with a definite answer. I am confused are people being punished for asking question that the scientific community don't have answers to. I think this is a narrow minded attitude and i hope others have not suffered as i have. and have not been put off by members answering question they cant answer by a simple statement &quot;we do not know currently&quot; and then putting restrictions on them asking further questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78445" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T22:14:15.977" Title="How to appeal against and remove restrictions on asking questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9148" CreationDate="2016-09-15T19:34:23.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your profile does not show that you are currently affected by any unusual restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; link at the bottom of each page allows you to contact the Stack Exchange community-wide moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T20:07:36.413" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9148" CreationDate="2016-09-15T22:14:15.977" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the sound of it, you have not actually been subjected to an automated question ban (or, if you have, it was short-lived), you've just come close enough that you triggered a system warning. Three of your seven (non-deleted) questions were closed; please take the warning as a prompt to look at those closed questions and understand why they were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/179067/age-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; into something coherent that contains an actual on-topic question then that will certainly help with the prospect of a question ban. Please take the closure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/229487/faster-than-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as a sign of some things that don't really fly here (&quot;I know this has been asked a million times before, and I know it's off-topic, but yo, check this out, if you break physics then physics breaks&quot; ring a bell?), and please take &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/177618/why-should-i-believe-that-matter-does-not-expand-along-with-the-space-between-it&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as a reminder that if you know the question has been asked before then you do need to check for duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can see, this is the automated system working as designed: you have produced a significant fraction of off-topic questions, and it is asking you to think carefully about your next posts before the site actually stops taking questions from your IP address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if I may: lashing out against the community for being &quot;narrow minded&quot; and punishing people for &quot;asking question that the scientific community don't have answers to&quot; is hardly a way to make friends. In particular, your closed questions are well short of the mark in terms of the amount of thought that you need to put into them before you can really claim that you're challenging the established scientific consensus. You're being told that you need to put in the time yourself before you go asking others to put in theirs, and I would counsel you to listen to that. It's OK to express frustration (though not in the rude way that you're doing it now), but you do need to step up to the fact that you've asked bad questions, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T22:14:15.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2016-09-16T17:19:17.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this should be on-topic, since a lot of companies, governments and investors now pouring money into it again, despite it was debunked by mainstream science 25 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130910-300-cold-fusion-sciences-most-controversial-technology-is-back/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cold fusion: Science's most controversial technology is back&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ecat.org/2016/bill-gates-reportedly-funds-lenr-research-at-texas-tech-university/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bill Gates Reportedly Funds LENR Research at Texas Tech University&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sleuths at lenr-forum.com have uncovered some pretty convincing evidence Bill Gates aka William H. Gates III made a $4 or $5 million dollar donation to the Texas Tech Foundation “to be expended expeditiously and essentially entirely on research for the express purpose of … obviating the major extant technical ambiguities surrounding the set of phenomena in metal hydrides generally known as Anomalous Heat Effects (AHE).”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per above article which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services declared it was “aware of recent positive developments” in developing LENRs and noted their potential to “produce ultra-clean, low-cost renewable energy” and their “strong national security implications”. Highlighting too the interest of Russia, China, Israel and India, it suggested the US could not afford to be left behind, and requested that the Secretary of Defense provide a briefing on the science by &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS00/20160427/104832/BILLS-114-HR4909-W000795-Amdt-ETCEB1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;22 September&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the research is back, then I don't see why this should be off-topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per this &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS00/20160427/104832/BILLS-114-HR4909-W000795-Amdt-ETCEB1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services document&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The committee is aware of &lt;strong&gt;recent positive developments in developing&#xA;  low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR)&lt;/strong&gt;, which produce ultra-clean,&#xA;  low-cost renewable energy that have strong national security&#xA;  implications. For example, according to the &lt;strong&gt;Defense Intelligence&#xA;  Agency (DIA), ifLENR works it will be a &quot;disruptive technology that&#xA;  could revolutionize energy production and storage.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; The committee is&#xA;  also aware of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA)&#xA;  findings that other countries including &lt;strong&gt;China and India are moving&#xA;  forward with LENR programs&lt;/strong&gt; of their own and that Japan has actually&#xA;  created its own investment fund to promote such technology. DIA has&#xA;  also assessed that Japan and Italy are leaders in the field and that&#xA;  Russia, China, Israel, and &lt;strong&gt;India are now devoting significant&#xA;  resources to LENR development&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, please see this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/281332/10968&quot;&gt;What recent positive developments in LENR were identified in this US House report?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10968" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T19:52:20.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-19T15:16:56.983" Score="9" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I've seen a bunch of examples on the site of a certain type of question. In order to avoid priming responses, I'm not going to give this type of question a name. Instead, let me show by example what I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281123/how-to-get-a-constant-force-parallel-to-the-inclined&quot;&gt;How to get a constant force parallel to the inclined?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281120/would-someone-help-me-with-a-physics-question-about-current-density-and-magnetic&quot;&gt;Would someone help me with a physics question about current density and magnetic field of two plane parallel plates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281103/finding-displacement-through-non-constant-acceleration&quot;&gt;Finding displacement through non-constant acceleration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281066/dose-any-body-know-how-to-solve-the-problem-in-the-picture&quot;&gt;Dose any body know how to solve the problem in the picture?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281031/solid-state-physics&quot;&gt;Solid state physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we all agree this type of question should be off topic. What I want to ask is, &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; should it be off topic? (Don't say homework. We're getting rid of that.) In other words,  what reason do you, the community, think should be used to justify marking these questions, and others like them, off topic? Questions like these have several shortcomings, but we can only expect to have one close reason displayed on each question; what should it be? We'll want to strike a balance between having custom close reasons be general enough that we can cover most off-topic questions with three of them, while still being specific enough to help askers who would like to improve their questions understand how to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm not concerned about how to handle these &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; questions; my concern is on how to handle future questions of this type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contributes to the ongoing discussion about replacing our homework policy. Actually, it would probably have been better to ask this later on in the process, but since there were so many examples today I thought this would be a good time to make this post, before I forget. I'm not really looking for a quick answer, though; this is one to think about for a while, and we will come back to it later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-09-19T18:14:41.887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T23:24:45.043" Title="Why are these off-topic questions off topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-19T18:02:46.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several of these are off topic for reasons other than what I would generally lump under the homework-like umbrella.&#xA;I think it's important that we make a habit of information OP of that in these situations because the more specific a reason we can give for a question being off topic the easier it is for OP to improve the post and make steps toward being a higher level contributor to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asks for an answer to a specific calculation without identifying a specific conceptual issue at which OP is stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Too many questions &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; they all lack effort and do not not identify a specific conceptual issue on which OP is stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exact same problem as #3 &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; almost unintelligibly written.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, numbers 4 and 5 have awful titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Numbers 3 and 5 are the clearest examples of questions which are off topic because they ask for the answer to a calculation without showing any effort and without identifying a specific conceptual issue on which OP is stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T18:02:46.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-19T20:23:51.963" Score="19" ViewCount="705" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics is scheduled for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;an election starting next week, September 26th&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that election, we will be hosting a Q&amp;amp;A here for candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9196/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to how we performed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2668/2012-moderator-election-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;Town Hall Chat&lt;/a&gt; in the past, but instead of being a real-time chat system, it's a two-stage Q&amp;amp;A done through Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, September 26th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please use link syntax using the &lt;code&gt;[](URL)&lt;/code&gt; syntax instead of the syntax which puts the URLs at the bottom of the post - it will make creating the resulting questionnaire significantly easier if you do so. Placing raw URLs is fine as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the collection phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing (up to) 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, this process is started at the beginning of the nomination phase for the election. We're trying an experiment where we push the two sessions of this back one week - question collection beginning a week before the actual election, and then the questionnaire opening when nominations begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, this will mean that the nomination phase will not exist for users to get information about candidates in order to formulate questions. On the other hand, this will allow candidates to have a fixed set of questions ready by the time they start writing up their nominations, and give them time to have their responses up before any actual voting begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118972/stack-exchange-moderator-faq&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Moderator FAQ&lt;/a&gt;: In order to know what to ask would-be moderators, it's important to understand what moderators do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;2016 Physics SE moderator election page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9164/in-2016-pre-election-what-activities-are-involved-in-being-a-physics-se-mod&quot;&gt;Current mods' opinions of how being a mod affects their use of the site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T08:23:30.970" Title="2016 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-19T20:23:51.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T20:23:51.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-19T21:20:09.920" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86781" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T21:20:09.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-19T21:37:41.537" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Effective communication in the physical sciences, technology, and education relies on extensive internationally standardized terminology, nomenclature, quantities, units, symbols, and typography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How seriously do you take conformity with these requirements with regard to this site? If applicable, what do you consider to be the roles of the moderators or other users in achieving conformity with the requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59991" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T21:37:41.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-20T09:30:40.633" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences about when to do this and when to just take action directly without checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T09:30:40.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-20T11:13:41.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've taken this question from the &quot;standard questions&quot; answer by Grace Note: It is one of the optional questions. I'm putting it in a separate answer because it will otherwise probably not be selected, while I think it's a very good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T11:13:41.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9162" CreationDate="2016-09-20T11:18:03.067" Score="6" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9154/2016-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt;, we're 'scheduled' to have a moderator election later this month. What changes, exactly, will this election entail? Are any of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;existing moderators&lt;/a&gt; stepping down? How many new moderators will be elected? Is the number of moderators changing? If so, does this mean that the current load is more than what's reasonable for the current crew to handle as effectively as they'd like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T15:19:02.413" Title="What changes will the upcoming election bring?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-20T11:19:43.640" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a modified version of a question from the &quot;standard questions&quot; answer by Grace Note: It is one of the optional questions. I'm putting it in a separate answer because it will otherwise probably not be selected, while I think it's a very good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do---and refrain from doing---on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T11:19:43.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9160" CreationDate="2016-09-20T11:25:18.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very brief answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main change is the addition of two moderators to make the work load easier on the existing moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two new moderators will be elected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, see above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David Z elaborated a bit on this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When all four of us are available, we have no problem with the current workload. But if a couple mods are traveling or without internet access, it becomes hard to keep up, and that happens often enough that we'd like to expand the moderation team to avoid being shorthanded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a bit more general information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32331390#32331390&quot;&gt;the chat transcript linked by Qmechanic in the comments&lt;/a&gt;. This is all that's known, for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T15:19:02.413" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T15:19:02.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-20T13:08:47.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not everyone agrees with every policy on Physics; there's always some disagreement. Do you think that, as a moderator, you'll be able to enforce, if necessary, a policy or section of policy you disagree with? Will you put your own interests aside for the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N.B. I don't have any particular policy, issue, or user in mind here, and I'm not aware of this ever being an issue on Physics Stack Exchange, but it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; happen in the future, and I'd bet it's happened elsewhere on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="56299" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T17:36:16.540" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T17:36:16.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-20T17:21:52.443" Score="13" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;moderator election&lt;/a&gt; looming it would be useful to hear from our current moderators how much the role affects their use of the site. Some obvious questions would be how many hours a day does it require, and what are are the day to day tasks you need to do in that time. However it would also be good to hear what it stops you doing. For example being a moderator means you cannot cast a non-binding close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is to find out &lt;em&gt;how much would my life change if I became a moderator?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is already a meta post for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9154/2016-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;questions to ask candidates in the election&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;This post is intended as a place to current moderators to record what they think is relevant information about how being a mod affects their use of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T01:44:13.517" Title="In 2016 (pre-election) what activities are involved in being a Physics SE mod?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-20T17:56:42.363" Score="11" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2016 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&#xA;Here are the relevant links and resources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;Election page&lt;/a&gt;: Includes a brief statement from each candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9196/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;Official questionnaire&lt;/a&gt;: Questions that the nominees will answer as a way of demonstrating why they'd make good moderators. The questions here were selected based on response to a set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9154/2016-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;proposed questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9164/in-2016-pre-election-what-activities-are-involved-in-being-a-physics-se-mod&quot;&gt;Present (2016 September) moderators' thoughts on what it's like being a mod&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45927/2016-physics-stack-exchange-election&quot;&gt;Election chat room&lt;/a&gt;: for discussion of election procedure and asking the candidates questions. This will also host our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9219/2016-moderator-election-chat-october-4-1600-utc&quot;&gt;election chat session&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118972/stack-exchange-moderator-faq&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Main Stack Exchange FAQ on what it means to be a moderator&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Please read this if you plan to vote in the election. In order to cast an informed vote we need to know how being a moderator differs from e.g. 10k or 20k rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Town Hall chat transcript from the previous elections: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/631/2011-moderator-election-town-hall-chat-digest&quot;&gt;2011&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2768/2012-moderator-election-town-hall-chat-digest&quot;&gt;2012&lt;/a&gt;. Useful for background.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please comment on this post to point out that an important bit of information is not covered in the links above, and we will track that information down and add it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta or in the chat room linked above -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T19:29:31.603" Title="Links/resources for the 2016 moderator elections" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-20T18:10:24.433" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q.What would be your highest priority between these options as a moderator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Growth of the site &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Quality of the questions and answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user106015" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T18:10:24.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-20T21:16:43.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of these questions seems to be after an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, probably a number, rather than a &lt;em&gt;solution&lt;/em&gt; which would be useful in other contexts.  A reply which would satisfy the asker would have essentially no value to anyone else ever again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something I've found myself telling my students lately.  I could spend all day making up stupid little problems with stupid little answers and they could spend all day telling me stupid little numbers and nobody would learn anything.  The &lt;em&gt;numerical answer&lt;/em&gt; to a made-up example problem is almost never interesting (though some texts do better than others).  The reason educators assign problems is to cultivate the skill of finding solutions to &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; problems later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A secondary problem with a few of these questions is that they are essentially plagiarized from some textbook or course notes or other source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T21:16:43.587" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-20T23:25:26.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions one two and four are off-topic because it is unclear what they are asking. For example in the first question, the asker is nominally asking for a value of the force. However, if we were just to answer by saying ten newtons (or whatever the correct answer is), the asker would be unsatisfied, because he can't just write down ten newtons on his homework assignment. The asker would wind up editing the question or asking for more details in a comment, and then the answerer would have to change his answer and this might iterate a few times and waste everyone's time. Therefore, the burden should be on the asker to specify exactly what he needs to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions one, two, and four can be fixed to ask for a full solution to the problem, and questions three and five already do ask for a full solution; however, I would say that these questions should be closed as too broad. I believe that for an on-topic question, the asker cannot simply ask for a full explanation on every detail of a given topic. The asker must pose a question, but then also give his prior knowledge of the topic, explain how he has tried to use this prior knowledge to answer his question, and it should be clear how an expert could use their expertise to answer the question. This will tend to focus the question so it will not be so broad. It also makes less work for an expert answerer because they can focus just on using their expertise when needed and not (a) on reviewing background material that is already known by the asker as well as being easily obtainable on the internet or (b) answering menial check-my-work type questions for which no particular physics expertise is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23785" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T23:25:26.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-20T23:47:00.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say something along the lines of the old &quot;too localized&quot; close reason would be a good fit here, for all five questions. Perhaps we could make a more specific version of &quot;too localized&quot; that would cover questions with this issue. Maybe something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too specific.&lt;/strong&gt; Questions should deal with conceptual issues on a broad enough level that the answers will help future visitors to solve their own questions. Consider editing the question to focus on the underlying concepts rather than the details of the calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T23:47:00.947" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-21T14:19:11.813" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;A somewhat obvious question that should be asked is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site?&lt;/strong&gt; (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, &lt;strong&gt;do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think its important that we can rely on the moderator we choose to be there and actually moderate. Obviously, I'm not looking to vote someone in if they'll be absent long periods of time or if they'll only be online an hour a week or something. A permanent position means I expect the elected mod to live up to the responsibilities and be around for the long haul. If you don't think you can put the time into it, you shouldn't be running.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T14:19:11.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-21T18:21:18.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will be a bit brutal here, but I think they should all be closed under a new close reason called &quot;insufficient effort&quot; which applies if it is obvious that someone did not go through the minimal effort of thinking for two seconds on his own or using wikipedia/some appropriate source in the case of clear university level problems. This is subjective, but it at least personally for me is a better subjective than the current homework-like close reason. And, I will admit, it would still allow people to ask &quot;homework-like&quot; questions if they really show some effort and there is a usefulness (and not just a simple algebra error, like in the case of many &quot;check my work&quot;-stuff - because that IS insufficient effort) to well-written questions about problems if someone is conceptually stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could helpfully be added to the tour/help centre is that a question asking for the calculation of a specific numerical value will be off topic in 95% of the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T18:21:18.190" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9164" CreationDate="2016-09-21T22:26:22.813" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to be sure, but I think I spend perhaps 15-30 minutes a day on routine moderation stuff stuff like check the flags and act on the easy ones; scan through the days questions (I do this while looking for stuff I want to answer which feeds into my uncertainty about how long the moderating takes) looking for places where the discussion may be going off the rails and casting votes that seem appropriate; pop in to chat to take the pulse of that subset of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of that is much different from what a high-rep user who is active in the review queues would do except that my votes are binding and I tend to adopt a wait-in-see approach to borderline cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the time spent on less routine things varies enormously. &quot;Less routine stuff&quot; includes investigating the less obvious flags, taking part in the on-going but asynchronous discussions we hold in the moderation chat rooms, and sometimes doing some investigation of hunches (which mostly come up negative, BTW, but have occasionally turned up attacks on the system using many accounts or multiple sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of that is optional and I simply won't do it on busy weeks; particularly the exploratory investigations. But some less routine stuff needs timely action and I have felt obliged a couple of times when I was very busy in &quot;real&quot; life (say when grading final) to take some time off that pressing work for a PSE moderation issue. It's not common, but it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a lot of social pressure to be active every day, but the system keeps score of who is handling the most flags and things like that, so you can see if you are slacking or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two changes I noticed when I started moderating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have to be more judicious in picking things I want to argue for (or against) in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I speak with a `official' voice, I have to be careful to distinguish my opinions and preferences from site policy and I have to keep in mind that my utterances are going to be scrutinized. I've felt at times that I needed to apologize for things I wrote that I might have just left if speaking without the diamond appended to my name.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I haven't missed visiting the site for a single day since becoming a moderator unless I was stay-in-bed-groaning ill or spent at least six hours traveling. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T01:44:13.517" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T01:44:13.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-22T02:11:32.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why should it be off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do my work for me&lt;/em&gt; questions are off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T02:11:32.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9177" CreationDate="2016-09-22T08:23:29.757" Score="13" ViewCount="402" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very disappointed by my experiment on this site. Four days ago, I posted this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/280899/&quot;&gt;Numerical simulation of the double-slit experiment including watching the electrons&lt;/a&gt;  .&#xA;After less that 24 hours, it was put [on hold] by 5 persons as being unclear. So I edited my question a first time in the hope the [on hold] would be removed so that people can answer it, unfortunately it remained in the [on hold] state. I read from the rules that &quot;&lt;em&gt;Questions that are not reopened within five days will change from [on hold] to [closed]&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, so I went deeper in reading the rules from page &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&lt;/a&gt; where it is suggested to re-edit the question and  &quot;&lt;em&gt;Flag the question for moderator attention. Again, explain why it should be reopened. There is more than one moderator, and moderators do reconsider their decisions&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. So I followed these steps, re-edited the question a second time and flagged the question, explaining the moderator why in my opinion the question should be reopened. I was then surprised to get the following answer from a moderator: &quot;declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention&quot;. Hence either he or me does not comply to the stackexchange policy... being novice here I guess that it is my fault, but could someone explain me what I did wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I am very disappointed: I have now spent many hours having to justify myself for asking a question which, unless I am completely stupid, has clearly some interest, and lost hope of getting an answer. I write it here again for information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The double-slit &quot;thought experiment&quot; described by Feynman in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_01.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lectures on Physics Volume 3 section I-6 Watching the electrons&lt;/a&gt; consists in firing electrons through a double-slit to observe the interference of electron waves, and watching them after passing the slits with a light source placed behind the double-slit, at equal distance of each slit. As electric charges scatter light, one can &quot;detect&quot; which slit the electron went through if the photon wavelength is small enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: has this &quot;thought experiment&quot; been simulated by solving numerically the underlying Schrödinger equation? I am aware about numerical experiments of the double-slit, but did not find any including the interaction between the electrons and the photons just after the double-slit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numerical simulation can address other types of particles, the crucial point being the simulation of the observation (here the photons being scattered by the electrons) and its effect on the wavefunction. Its interest could be in particular to better understand in which precise way the observation progressively becomes inoperative when the photon wavelength increases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user130529" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user130529" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:47:48.377" Title="Very disappointed by my experiment on this site" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T10:10:54.153" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question about a real phenomenon I saw at the end of a documentary, I can't help that at the time the only thing I could find on it was at the end of this documentary which isn't something most would consider 'real' science, however the device shown is a known and real phenomenon called an Ionocraft (I now know this). I understand that the name of the documentary may have mislead some, but I assure you that I am asking about something perfectly real and proven to exist in science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before asking the question I looked at the site's help question and I thought this would be on-topic because of this bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Explanations of observed physical or astronomical phenomena&#xA;Example: Why does one experience a short pull in the wrong direction when a vehicle stops?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/281423/&quot;&gt;How does the &amp;quot;lifter&amp;quot;/ionocraft device work?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that it can be reopened or at least for me to be given a proper explanation of why it was closed. Saying you won't answer a perfectly real question and just saying it's &quot;non-mainstream&quot; seems ridiculous to me if it's accepted in science to be real and there is proof for it. If there is a better SE site to ask about this on, then please let me know. Or of how I could improve my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87265" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T18:06:45.460" Title="Why was my question closed as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9175" CreationDate="2016-09-22T11:19:35.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for me to be given a proper explanation of why it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; 5 users here judged that it was off-topic, should be closed, and voted to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to know their reason(s) for judging it to be close worthy, you will have to ask &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or of how I could improve my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kudos for asking!  I recommend improving your question by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) not asking that anyone reading your question go to youtube to view a video; this is just &lt;em&gt;bad form&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) as you've discovered, if a volunteer here gets a whiff of pseudoscience, he/she is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; likely to vote to close.  The title of the video and your insistence that you're asking about a &quot;perfectly real phenomenon&quot; is more than a whiff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) good questions show some effort at researching the topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) good questions are not overly broad or open ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking &quot;how does X work?&quot; without additional context is not good form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:19:35.393" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9174" CreationDate="2016-09-22T11:47:48.377" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which are edited are put into a queue to be reviewed for reopening. This is the &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; mechanism by which questions get reopened after being put on hold. Flagging for moderator attention is a backup option, to be used when the review process isn't working - either because the question is too old to be reviewed, or, if you really believe that the outcome of the review process was wrong and have a good argument for it, you can make that case in a flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in your case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/146574&quot;&gt;the review hasn't been completed&lt;/a&gt;. It's not time to invoke the backup option yet. So your main mistake was flagging immediately after you edited. That being said, a declined flag isn't a big deal. When a flag is declined, it means the mods are just advising you to avoid flagging things like that in the future. In this case specifically, avoid flagging questions for reopening without waiting for the review. (Though to be fair, this review has been sitting around incomplete for quite a while.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple other things which I would advise you to do differently. First of all, you didn't actually explain a reason for reopening the question in your flag reason. If you want a moderator to reopen a question, your best bet is to briefly mention in the flag reason itself why the question should be reopened. This can be very simple; for example, &quot;I've edited the question to clarify the issues brought up in the comments.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the way you worded your flag message is rather rude. Flag messages are considered private, so our normal &quot;be nice&quot; policy doesn't apply to them as strictly as it would apply to public posts, but bear in mind that when you cast a flag to ask someone for help, they will be more willing to help if you do phrase the message politely, and they will be &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; willing to help if you are impolite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one example of how you could write a perfectly reasonable flag message for when you want a question reopened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edited to address the issues brought up in comments; the question should be clear now, but I have been waiting a long time since the edits. Could you review this for reopening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:47:48.377" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9175" CreationDate="2016-09-22T15:56:51.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281423/how-does-the-lifter-ionocraft-device-work#comment631628_281423&quot;&gt;Courtesy of a comment to your original question&lt;/a&gt; you now know the craft in the video is called an ionocraft, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;there is a Wikipedia article that explains how they work&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read the Wikipedia article and run into problems understanding it then please come back to us with more questions specifically targeted at whatever aspect of the physics you are running into difficulties with. Alternatively if you fully understand the Wikipedia article that's great. Either way there's nothing to be gained by reopening the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T15:56:51.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-23T09:45:57.773" Score="9" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a question on which an interesting misunderstanding lead to inappropriate closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the moment, let's think of a question as a chain of proposals linked together through reasoning.&#xA;Only by addressing an important node in the chain can a question be answered (henceforth we refer this as &quot;killing the question&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281657/uncertainty-principle-in-macroscopic-world&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;An analysis of the question structure in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32501360#32501360&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; reduced it to the following logical structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: The Heisenberg uncertainty relation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: There's a limit to the accuracy of physical measurements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X: A ---&gt; B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C: not X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E: We should be able to observe large fluctuations by making precise measurements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D: C ---&gt; E&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't observe E, so by contrapositive, X is true, and so B is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question boils down to asking whether D is true, even though the truth value of X is the one presented as the question.&#xA;The question was then closed as a duplicate, but while the alleged duplicated questions, and the comments, address X or B, D was never addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP's follow up comment then want to tell the readers that none of the comments addressed D, however the comments that followed still only addressed X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the typical fate of these questions is: D was overlooked, OP wants to clarify D, people lose patience for follow up questions and thus no extra response is given, question was effectively abandoned, result in dissatisfied OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all, just wanted to point out what I think is a somewhat common pattern of misunderstanding so we can all be aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64669" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T22:42:04.807" Title="Killing the wrong node in a question's logical chain" Tags="|discussion|questions|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9179" CreationDate="2016-09-23T14:01:25.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, of course you're right...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;...but the next step after all this is to edit the question to guide future readers to the real reason why the OP is confused. In other words, once it's been determined in the comments that the question is really about D, edit the question to ask explicitly about D, and make it clear that the proposed duplicate doesn't answer D. That latter part could be addressed like this, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've looked at [question] and it addresses X, but it doesn't say anything about D, which is what I really want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this would be in addition to changing the core of the question itself to ask about D, not X).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually a moderate-to-major edit, and should probably be made by the OP. But if they don't feel comfortable making the edit themselves, someone else can do the edit while coordinating with the OP so that they check it afterwards. The important thing is really that we know the poster is okay with the post-edit version of the question appearing with their name under it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T14:01:25.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-23T19:31:01.380" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is your open/close/reopen/leave closed vote statistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing the same proportion as a mod, what effect will it have to the site, and particularly to its growth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T19:31:01.380" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9184" CreationDate="2016-09-23T23:53:42.963" Score="-13" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a user who down votes 90% of the time and that is his privilege. How many time can I down vote him before I am interrupted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-09-25T20:46:35.467" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T20:46:35.467" Title="How many times can I down vote a particular user over in a given time frame?" Tags="|discussion|support|status-declined|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9182" CreationDate="2016-09-23T23:58:05.433" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be very frank: you shouldn't even be contemplating this questions; you should always vote the quality of the content and never the user who posted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor will anyone tell you what the limits of the automated vote-misuse detection system are. That would rather defeat their purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T23:58:05.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9182" CreationDate="2016-09-24T00:21:03.243" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The user you refer to has cast quite a few votes, but only about 81.7% of them are downvotes, not 90%. Call this pedantry, but I think it's important to distinguish between claims and facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/58804/274942&quot;&gt;Vote on the posts, not on the person.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Targeted serial voting like this is unacceptable and may result in disciplinary action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not reveal the details of the voting algorithms to any users, even to moderators. If people &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; know, they could do what you're proposing, and try to beat the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You've posted a number of questions that have been downvoted. I wouldn't be surprised if the user you mention has indeed voted on some of those questions, and indeed downvoted some of them. This shouldn't be a surprise, because some of your questions haven't been that great; you've gotten some feedback in this regard and I hope it will lead to better questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; - I repeat, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; - make assumptions about the actions of others. There's no way to see who voted which way on what post, and even if there was, you shouldn't assume that the voting was unjustified. The user in question does downvote a lot of posts; he or she simply has different standards than the next person. Who are any of us to say that this user is incorrect in the way they vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T00:21:03.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-24T07:50:49.127" Score="45" ViewCount="732" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's it! He did it!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1325/john-rennie&quot;&gt;John Rennie&lt;/a&gt;, on 23-09-2016 became the first man ever in the realms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/a&gt; to reach the summit of 200k!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For over five years, he travelled and saved people from the evils of confusion in almost every nook and corner of the kingdom of Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now he has crossed this landmark for the very first time in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the community congratulates the beloved John Rennie for his magnificent  achievement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tloDr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tloDr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;May the light of this old (handsome) nerd never be quelled&lt;/em&gt; ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user36790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T11:07:31.957" Title="John Rennie, the nerd, crosses the 200k. Congratulations!" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9185" CreationDate="2016-09-24T11:07:31.957" Score="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would place a slightly different emphasis on this and instead highlight the progress of the Physics SE. A quick play with the Data Explorer tells me that between us the site members have written about 112,000 answers, and the average upvotes per answer is about 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an extraordinary achievement. Not only are we providing a huge number of answers to questions about physics, but we are providing a huge number of &lt;strong&gt;useful&lt;/strong&gt; answers to questions about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all enjoy the neverending arguments about whether we have the balance of the site just right, whether we should be more or less lenient about homework questions, whether we're too aggressive with closing questions, and so on, and so on. But we shouldn't let our tendency to self criticism blind us to just how much has been achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something of a hobby horse of mine, and apologies to everyone I have bored before on this subject, but as an enthusiastic physics nerd growing up in the UK in the 1970s it was inconceivable that I could ask questions of real live physicists. That todays young physicists can do this is quite remarkable and a testament to &lt;strong&gt;everyone&lt;/strong&gt; who freely gives their time to make this site such a success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T11:07:31.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-24T12:19:08.213" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T12:19:08.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9154" CreationDate="2016-09-24T12:28:46.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot; and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the various grey areas between physics and other disciplines? Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower than it is now? How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T12:28:46.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9190" CreationDate="2016-09-25T07:24:56.200" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of asking the moderators to publish a journal annually, containing the best 100 questions of the year, and their detailed discussion sessions, so that if someone searches for a particular topic 6 years later, it shows up in the journal, along with its detailed discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47033" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-09-25T08:32:40.587" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T08:32:40.587" Title="Publish annual Q&amp;A journal" Tags="|feature-request|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9189" CreationDate="2016-09-25T07:54:49.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a lot of work to ask the moderators to do. However there's nothing to stop you from doing it if you think it's a worthwhile undertaking. I have to say that it's not obvious to me that this would be especially useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T07:54:49.177" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9194" CreationDate="2016-09-25T17:26:37.527" Score="-13" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a user who is always the &lt;strong&gt;first to close&lt;/strong&gt; and down vote most if not all my work if you can call it that. I do not want him on my stuff. I truly feel harassed even though he has not really broke any rules. I just want him to leave me and my stuff alone forever! What can I do?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281831/could-a-levitron-work-above-earth&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281831/could-a-levitron-work-above-earth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T09:39:55.893" Title="Can I ask to have a block or left alone by a user?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|status-declined|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9191" CreationDate="2016-09-25T18:03:34.893" Score="18" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No. You can't.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every user with the requisite rep is entitled to vote on the content you post. That's by design: we use a crowd-sourced evaluation. There may exist users that cast more downvotes than up, and that is allowed. It just means that user has very stringent standards of quality; as long as those standards are applied evenly the user is free to continue in that mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is the problem that you have that a single user is after you: if it was you would never get more than a single down-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; having is that a lot of the content you post is &lt;em&gt;widely&lt;/em&gt; viewed as failing to live up to the standards of Physics Stack Exchange. I am being rather blunt here because you have posted to meta several times and have apparently not taken subtle suggestions to heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are not a criticism of you as a person, but they are a criticism of the post on which they are applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T20:23:07.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9191" CreationDate="2016-09-26T02:25:36.167" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a user that frequents SE sites intermittently (and with less reputation than most, including yourself), please interpret my upcoming critique as independent from the high-rep user/users you believe are targeting you.  You seem to be intentionally ignoring the community's critique, falsely assuming that you are the victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your curiosity - it will serve you well if you put in the work required to graduate from curiosity to knowledge.  But understand that knowledge comes via research, frustration, research, work, work, work, then questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your current asking criteria deserves downvotes, and I have personally downvoted at least two of your posts (purely on their content).  Avoiding debates on a per question basis, Ill simply say that your questions contained spelling errors, incorrect and/or out of context information with no references, and no visible effort on your part.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To me (and I presume to other users), that is a clear sign of disrespect to the community.  You should expect to spend as much time and effort to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592/how-much-research-effort-is-expected-of-stack-overflow-users&quot;&gt;research, research&lt;/a&gt;, contemplate, then write your question as the answer you hope to receive.  To be clear, a link and/or picture helps, but only to clarify concepts - dont mistake them for research or effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to research, develop a (correct) answer, and then write that answer in order to help you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last is especially true for the monumental questions you have asked recently:  Do you think succinct answers are possible?  Do you think its reasonable to spend ~2 minutes asking a whimsical question, and expect an answer that essentially invents/validates a non-existent technology (in a page or two, no less)!?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are great.  Thats why we all choose to participate here.  But realize that when you ask a question, the community expects you to care enough about your question to try, really try to answer it yourself.  Do every calculation you know you should.  Read every article you can find.  Struggle to find the answer on your own, then ask.  Questions should articulate what you dont understand in order to continue answering your larger question - remember, its your question, not ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given multiple closed and downvoted questions, I urge you to reconsider your asking criteria - to reiterate @dmckee, realize that a single user cannot be responsible for closure and multiple downvotes.  I think you should accept that users really do vote on content, not on personal grudges.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely hope this is not recieved as an attack against you personally - its intended to be a candid rebuttal of your question - and I look forward to your future contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:37:55.943" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T02:38:47.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-26T18:50:24.300" Score="8" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was stimulated by comments in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9191/&quot;&gt;Can I ask to have a block or left alone by a user?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@user104372  commented in the aforementioned question: '.. opening downvote  caused a cascade of unjustified downvotes...'. I believe s/he makes a good point here and the same is true of close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked more questions then most on this site&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and have always had the feeling that the way closed votes are used on this site is unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a high rep user (&gt;2999 reps) reads a question I believe they should be making an independent decision, without preconceptions, about the quality of question&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. And should only vote to close if and only if they would have done so without the knowledge of the actions of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the current system this is hard to achieve since the high users are told the whether or not others have voted to close the question&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; (e.g. &lt;code&gt;close (3)&lt;/code&gt; and via the review queues). To me it feels that one close vote almost always leads to the eventual closer of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary when it comes to 'reopen votes' it appears such 'a cascade' rarely happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people's views on this? Is there any statistical evidence either way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/71706/who-asked-the-most-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/71706/who-asked-the-most-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. I will be the first to admit that &lt;strike&gt;some&lt;/strike&gt; a lot of my questions are  poor and do/did deserve closing.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T16:39:17.803" Title="Is one 'close vote' all it needs?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-26T20:00:11.293" Score="16" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9154/2016-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Not every question was compiled - as noted, we only selected the top 8 questions as submitted by the community, plus 2 pre-set questions from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of an ongoing test, we're doing the questionnaire at the same time as nominations are being run. Please do not respond to this question unless you already have submitted your nomination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/baa9b298-7af5-479e-a95e-d45b847c83b4/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;. Oh, and please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9200/50583&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9196/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/9203#9203&quot;&gt;tpg2114&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9206/4993&quot;&gt;Jim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9215/9887&quot;&gt;Alfred Centauri&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9230/44126&quot;&gt;rob&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, what would be your highest priority between &quot;Growth of the site&quot; and &quot;Quality of the questions and answers of the site&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences about when to do this and when to just take action directly without checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site?&lt;/strong&gt; (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, &lt;strong&gt;do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot; and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the various grey areas between physics and other disciplines? Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower than it is now? How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.727" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T04:40:28.493" Title="2016 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9196" CreationDate="2016-09-26T21:49:26.917" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind's&lt;/a&gt; questionnaire answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am rather dismayed that it is possible that this happens, I don't think this is a problem that can or should be solved by moderator intervention - at least, not by using any of the additional privileges a moderator has. That this is possible is an inherent property of the SE engine and the weights it attaches to up- and downvotes. Of course, if significant support for the idea of raising the weight of downvotes was present in the community, it would perhaps fall to the moderators to present this position to the SE team - but then again, everyone can make such a feature request at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question intends to imply that maybe moderators should delete the answers of such users or suspend them, then I don't think that either can be justified. Also, deleting their wrong answers potentially leads to the users &lt;em&gt;gaining more reputation&lt;/em&gt;, depending on what exactly the vote count on the wrong answer was, which doesn't solve the problem at all. Selectively deleting only the answers which contribute to their positive reputation would appear capricious and targeting a specific user instead of specific posts, which is generally inappropriate. Suspensions are only appropriate when an explicit rule was broken - and &quot;posting wrong stuff&quot; is annoying, but not in violation of any policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, what would be your highest priority between &quot;Growth of the site&quot; and &quot;Quality of the questions and answers of the site&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quality. I do think the general voting behavior on this SE currently encourages questions that are much too lazy and ill-thought out. I wrote about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6767/50583&quot;&gt;some time ago&lt;/a&gt; and although the numbers are of course off by now, I still stand by everything I've written there. However, I don't see how this priority of mine would be any more relevant as a moderator than it was as a high reputation user - the primary means of quality control is &lt;em&gt;upvoting high-quality questions and downvoting low-quality questions&lt;/em&gt;, which is completely unaffected by moderatorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences about when to do this and when to just take action directly without checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would certainly wait for consensus regarding suspensions, except in cases where one is immediately needed for the user to &quot;cool off&quot;. I would also, at least at the beginning, wait for input before dismissing custom moderator flags, but perhaps not before validating them, if the case appears clear cut. I would not wait for consensus when reopening or closing a question, but I expect to be casting both reopen and close votes much less than I currently do since I don't want to overuse the unilateral character of these votes. I would also not wait for consensus before deleting obsolete, rude or irrelevant comments, since those are supposed to be ephemeral by design anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site?&lt;/strong&gt; (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, &lt;strong&gt;do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can guarantee a minimum of an hour per day for at least the next year. My time &quot;spent&quot; on the site is usually more, but I'm often doing other things while occasionally checking the site, so the actual time &lt;em&gt;invested&lt;/em&gt; into the site is difficult to determine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confident that 99% of what I have posted will not reflect badly, and that most of it reflects rather well. I can remember some stray comments and chat messages where I might have been less charitable than I should have been, but there is nothing that I would be ashamed of. The most significant change to my routine in the site would probably be that I don't do the &quot;ordinary&quot; review queues anymore, which I currently visit almost every day, and that I might be a bit more careful to distinguish site policy from my personal opinion when commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot; and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the various grey areas between physics and other disciplines? Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower than it is now? How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think our scope is generally quite alright as it is. The very nature of these interdisciplinary questions is that it is difficult to make general policies that cover them - this is where community moderation has to shine, hashing out whether a given question is &quot;just enough physics&quot; or &quot;not enough physics&quot; by several close/reopen cycles if need be, or just by a bit of comment/chat/meta discussion about the specific question. As a moderator, I would refrain from casting my unilateral votes in any binding manner on those questions, i.e. I would only cast them as fifth votes. We don't elect moderators to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; policy, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't make me more effective. Moderators aren't supposed to be &quot;more effective&quot; versions of ordinary users, they're supposed to be trusted janitors who clean up the messes and do the behind-the-scenes work that's unsuitable for community moderation but nevertheless needs to be done to keep the site running smoothly. I love this site and I want to be part of the reason it's working. In the past, I've done so by participating in the review queues every day, which is something I &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; encourage every user with sufficient reputation to do. Now, I get the opportunity to do so in another role - if you want me to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there should be boundaries in terms of &quot;level&quot;, and I don't think there currently are. There are good and bad questions at a layman's or high schooler's level, and there are good and bad questions at research level. I've seen plenty of all of those. What I expect from a question is a reasonable amount of research effort, and an attempt to communicate clearly the &lt;em&gt;conceptual question&lt;/em&gt; the asker is having. I strongly dislike all stances that think questions have merit simply because of their level. Questions have merit because they are &lt;em&gt;good, well-posed questions&lt;/em&gt; that can be answered with physical insight. Note, however, that just because you can write an amazing answer to a question that doesn't necessarily make the question itself any better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case where I see a question closed merely because of its &lt;em&gt;level&lt;/em&gt;, I would strongly consider unilaterally reopening it. We don't have a policy about &quot;level&quot;, and I don't think we should have one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on what kinds of flag exactly this user generates. Generating a lot of &quot;obsolete&quot; flags is a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; thing, since it indicates the user leaves a lot of comments leading to posts being improved, making the comment obsolete in the process. Generating a lot of &quot;not constructive&quot; or &quot;too chatty&quot; flags is worse, although it might just indicate a chatty user. I'd advise the user to use comments only for relevant communication and take longer reply chains to chat instead, but probably take no further action. On repeated offense, I'd be more quick to move the discussions to chat, but if everything's civil, I don't see a need for other actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generating a lot of &quot;rude/offensive&quot; flags is a lot worse, and would probably warrant a suspension if warnings to be nicer do not succeed. As I said above, I would not impose a suspension without waiting for consensus from the rest of the moderators, unless the user is currently generating those flags and no end is in sight. In that case I would impose a short &quot;cool off&quot; suspension to de-escalate the immediate situation, and then consult the other moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd first make sure I understand the reasons for which the other moderator took that action. If I still disagree with the result, I'd take the issue to meta. Moderators should not make policy on their own, so if two of us are in strong disagreement what to do with a certain question, this indicates that the community's larger position on that type of question is unclear or needs to be re-evaluated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T21:49:26.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2016-09-26T23:24:45.043" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say &quot;Purely Calculation&quot; (different from doesn't show work):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be outsourcing a calculation to the community&#xA;  without any broader context. Please ask about a specific concept, show&#xA;  work and explain where you got stuck, or provide more context. For&#xA;  more information, see [this meta post][].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above would be my close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T23:24:45.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9196" CreationDate="2016-09-27T03:22:21.607" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/6634/tpg2114&quot;&gt;tpg2114's&lt;/a&gt; questionnaire answers:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side note -- thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9200/6634&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind's&lt;/a&gt; post for being the first and setting a format)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand such users can, in mild cases, generate resentment about the way the system works, and in more serious cases, gain access to the tools awarded high-reputation users that may be inappropriately used and/or abused. The disparity between reputation for upvotes and downvotes is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4858/what-would-it-look-like-if-rep-for-questions-counted-the-same-more-than-answers&quot;&gt;a question I have raised previously&lt;/a&gt; for discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion at the time resulted in something that I still believe is true: a majority of high reputation users are not doing it for the reputation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6567/why-do-users-answer-questions/6568&quot;&gt;They are doing it to educate others and to share their passion&lt;/a&gt;. So while some users may be able to game the system by producing mixed content, it will be relatively few. And I feel it would take a long time before they earned a high enough reputation to really do frustrating, site-harming levels of damage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long before that point, I would expect such users to either get bored or to mature to the point that it is no longer a problem. I don't think moderator intervention is required until actual damage is done, at which point the StackExchange platform and policies allow easy reversal of the damage and tools to remedy the situation with the user in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, what would be your highest priority between &quot;Growth of the site&quot; and &quot;Quality of the questions and answers of the site&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On some level, I challenge the premise of the question. I don't see that the two are diametrically opposed -- I believe the two go hand-in-hand. Quality questions and answers come from returning users, and the site grows by providing quality questions and answers so that users do return. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in that frame of reference, my focus would be on the &lt;strong&gt;quality&lt;/strong&gt; of the site. By providing a wealth of information on a wide-variety of topics in physics, people will be driven to the site. And those who return will bring questions (and hopefully answers) that challenge and engage the users already here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the role of a moderator in this process is relatively limited. Ultimately, moderators are an insignificant percentage of the content generators/handlers for the site -- the users must be engaged in quality and growth. To that end, as a moderator, my priority is ensuring that quality is maintained in a form that is welcoming and encouraging to users who want to be active participants in the goals of the site. Contrary to many of the debates the site has had previously, quality and friendliness are not opposites; rudeness is not required to communicate one's point effectively. This is, of course, balanced by the limited content length in comments (this is not a forum, after all) and the impersonal nature of the internet that may lead one to feel things are more personal and rude than they actually are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences about when to do this and when to just take action directly without checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consensus is essential when there is uncertainty. Or at the very least, advice and guidance from those with more experience is essential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some actions create obvious situations where action must be taken. I can't enumerate a list here, but I will paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read about the case&lt;/a&gt;) and Lord-Justice Stuart-Smith (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test#Elephant_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the so-called Elephant Test&lt;/a&gt;) -- I'll know it when I see it. Spam, derogatory and offensive language, threats, etc. are all obvious and require immediate action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More subtle topics, particularly those involving returning users, require some discussion and consensus building. Particularly because it may be a one-off instance or it may be a repeat problem, something that a new moderator (or even an existing one) may not be aware of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site?&lt;/strong&gt; (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, &lt;strong&gt;do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, as much as is needed. It would be hard to estimate how much time I actively spend on the site currently, I generally pop in and hang out for 10-15 minutes at a time, every few hours. As a result, it would be easy to catch things as they occur and deal with it accordingly. Naturally, more important or time consuming tasks can be completed as needed with very few scheduling constraints. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next several months, I will graduate. Given my current position in my research lab, virtually any job I take will be less time-consuming than what I am doing now. I may not be able to spare 10-15 minutes every few hours during the workday, but I will be able to dedicate longer stretches of time as needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I am biased in my perception, but I feel that all of my material on the site has been constructive, and most importantly, something I stand behind. My activity on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6634/tpg2114&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; has been focused on formulating policies and helping to define the role of the site. I haven't won every argument, but I feel that I have always been civil, level-headed and supported the results, even when I don't agree with them. I have also engaged in discussions with users who, at various times, have rubbed others the wrong way or been rubbed the wrong way themselves. In the cases I can recall participating, I have tried to remain objective and impersonal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than champion myself, I would encourage everybody to review my participation on the site (and for that matter, on the entire StackExchange network). I will happily discuss any content, past or present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest change in day-to-day activity is refraining from pulling the trigger on the close vote since it is now binding. As a regular user, I have no problem expressing my opinion about whether a question is off-topic -- a question takes 4 others to agree and if I'm wrong as a regular user, no harm. As a moderator, that luxury no longer exists. On the other hand, I don't see putting a question &quot;on hold&quot; as a death sentence or a condemnation of the user or the topic. It is a chance to improve the question in a way that is fair to those who will spend time answering (nobody likes writing an elaborate answer only to have the question change drastically). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot; and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the various grey areas between physics and other disciplines? Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower than it is now? How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this area, more than any others, is the best use of my skills as part of the moderation team. I have started several conversations directly regarding this area: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5553/what-is-engineering-and-what-is-experimental-design&quot;&gt;What is engineering and what is experimental design?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4540/what-is-the-fate-of-the-engineering-tag&quot;&gt;What is the fate of the engineering tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-3&quot;&gt;Should we allow software questions? (take 3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5562/big-list-resource-questions&quot;&gt;Big list resource questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as extensive participation in related areas (as well as the dreaded &quot;homework&quot; topic):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8812/engineering-questions-and-answers-that-are-closely-related-to-physics/8813#8813&quot;&gt;Engineering questions and answers that are closely related to Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7565/it-is-on-topic-to-ask-about-computer-software-useful-to-do-some-particular-task/7568#7568&quot;&gt;It is on-topic to ask about computer software useful to do some particular task?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7260/network-science-can-be-a-branch-of-physics/7261#7261&quot;&gt;Network science can be a branch of physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5603/adding-computational-science-to-the-list-of-on-topic-items-in-the-help-center/5604#5604&quot;&gt;Adding computational science to the list of on-topic items in the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5519/realistically-are-atmospheric-physics-questions-on-topic-and-acceptable/5520#5520&quot;&gt;Realistically, are atmospheric physics questions on topic and acceptable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7140/are-questions-about-mathematics-used-in-physics-always-off-topic/7141#7141&quot;&gt;Are questions about mathematics used in physics always off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8812/engineering-questions-and-answers-that-are-closely-related-to-physics/8813#8813&quot;&gt;Engineering questions and answers that are closely related to Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I firmly believe that we should not look at Physics.SE as isolated from the other sites in the StackExchange network. The entire network is like a library -- there is no reason to go to the physics shelf if I have a question about chemistry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gray areas are okay, provided the content is asking for an underlying explanation of the physics. My favorite punchline whenever this comes up is this: This is a site of &lt;strong&gt;physics&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;physicists&lt;/strong&gt; -- asking for a good apple pie recipe is not on-topic just because you are a physicist. Likewise, how to take derivatives are not on topic just because it came up in a mechanics class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, I would continue to bring up topics for discussion that may reside in these gray areas. I want to make sure the community can provide clarity for what it expects, and I enjoy leading those discussions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two simple answers: first, I will become more effective because I will get access to the moderation tools immediately; second, many flags and interactions with users require moderators and are not available to high-rep users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reputation-earning participation on the site has always been in a small subset of the community, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluid-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt; questions. Because it is a small subset, it would be difficult to get from 10k to 20k and so I would be able to contribute more, immediately, as a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site for researchers of physics and students of physics. This is subtly different from physics students and physics researchers. I feel this site is best served by catering to those whom require and can share knowledge of the many areas of physics and not by catering to those who happen to be students in a physics class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A business major desperately trying to pass a kinematics class is a physics student and not the target audience. But an engineering student who needs to understand why a bridge may collapse is welcome (provided the questions and answers are about the underlying physics) because such a person is a student of physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, we are not limited to physics researchers (those who research topics one would classically consider physics). A chemist who would like to understand the statistical mechanics underpinning of chemical reactions is welcome here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as a moderator, I don't see how my views directly influence my actions. The community decides the scope of the site and it may grow, shrink, or otherwise adapt over time. My position as moderator is to lead the discussions, help formulate the resulting policies, and help educate users in the enforcement of the policies. The community is self-policing and will enforce the standards set forth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes a broad view of a users activity to understand whether there is a problem or not. We've all had bad days and so maybe the comments are out of character. It is also possible that, given the limited length of comments, that some things come across as rude/abrupt because they are succinct. This generally is the case when relatively new users feel slighted because they expect the site to behave like a traditional forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of the flags must also be considered. No user, no matter how knowledgeable, no matter how much reputation, may be threatening, post spam, nor make extremely offensive statements. To a lesser extent, &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks are not welcome either. Content should be criticized, not people. And even in the criticism of content, it doesn't need to be rude to communicate effectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that said, the approach would be to build up a good understanding regarding the track record of the user in question and try to determine the motivations. It may be temporary, it may be targeted (the users in question may have a history together), it may be an overly-sensitive person flagging, or it may be a legitimate problem. And in some cases, it could be a combination of all of the above. Once the problem is understood, it can be approached accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step is to open a dialogue. Just because I feel something shouldn't have happened, doesn't mean that I am correct. It also doesn't mean that I am impartial -- perhaps I feel something shouldn't have been closed, but the policies are quite clear that it should have been. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that moderators should create policy, but they do act as arbiters of policy and as a result, their actions may lead to policies expanding or contracting without it ever being formally written down. As this happens, it is important for other moderators (and especially for the users) to start a dialogue when they feel the actions have extended beyond the scope of the written policy. Maybe the result of the discussion is the actions should be formally written down because it is better for the site; perhaps the result is that the policy is clarified in an opposite direction of the actions taken. In either case, the role of the other moderators is to lead a discussion with the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is strong enough now that I would be hard pressed to imagine a truly egregious action would not be called to attention by regular users. And I hope that is the case -- the users are the ultimate resource of the site and the wishes of the community need to be respected. I would encourage users to discuss the rules and moderation of the site openly -- and most importantly -- in a civil and constructive fashion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T03:22:21.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9207" CreationDate="2016-09-27T13:33:33.093" Score="20" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we're a day into the nomination phase of Physics Stack Exchange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;third election&lt;/a&gt;. We already have 8 candidates for the two positions available, and no doubt we'll get plenty more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pattern has begun to emerge, and it's not hard to see where it's leading. In both nominations and comments, a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of fairly negative remarks have been made about some of the candidates and other users. Here are some that caught my attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my experience, [user X] is most rude and arrogant user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not only you should not be a moderator, you should be deprived of privilege of casting close votes. People like you are a scourge of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking you about your vision on the site, you produced only arrogant reaction, and initiated the now quite common &quot;ignore culture&quot; on the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are others, as well as quite a few more implicit insults aimed at moderators and other users, but these are some of the main ones, coming from all sides (additionally, some others have been deleted, thankfully). Are they &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; over-the-top? Not really. But they build up to something that doesn't really give me confidence in this site. If I walked in without any prior knowledge about the candidates, I'd think that most were incompetent, mean, power-hungry wanna-be Scourges of Stack Exchange. I wouldn't want to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attacks are, in general, not a good way to start any discussion about the way a site will evolve over time. The way things are going, I'm not convinced that this election will end well, and it certainly won't if people continue with name-calling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can we try to be a little bit &lt;em&gt;nicer&lt;/em&gt; during this election? It's not impossible; I've seen it done before on Stack Exchange. I'm not saying we need to talk only about sunshine and daisies; constructive criticism is fine. We just need to tone things down a little. Or a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make this an explicit question, do people think this is an issue, and can we avoid it in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T12:19:56.080" Title="Can we try to cut the vitriol during this election?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9196" CreationDate="2016-09-27T13:52:19.100" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/23473/jim&quot;&gt;Jim's&lt;/a&gt; questionnaire answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That really depends on the specifics of the situation? Is the user trying their best? Are they a form of technically proficient troll? Is is simply a matter of poor use of language skills? It's difficult to judge at a glance. I'd probably have to go through several of their posts and try to establish a trend. Even then, the system itself allows for this to happen. Obviously, you need to keep an eye out for suspicious voting patterns. Make sure there is no sock-puppets. However, in the general case where it's purely innocent, there's not much that can be done. Perhaps I could encourage the user to consider what they write more carefully; properly format their posts; and possibly include references wherever possible. However, if they are getting enough upvotes to sustain a score in the thousands, then I'm not going to take negative action against them without them doing something directly against policy and regulations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, what would be your highest priority between &quot;Growth of the site&quot; and &quot;Quality of the questions and answers of the site&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My highest priority would definitely be quality of questions and answers. In my opinion, our size is large enough to be sustainable for the long term. Furthermore, as a moderator, I feel that maintaining quality and standards is a necessary responsibility of the role. I could not sit idly by and let the quality of posts on this site slip all in the name of allowing it to grow larger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences about when to do this and when to just take action directly without checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I think I'd be generally unsure of actions. I'd probably ask more established mods for advice. Overall, I'd say I'm in the middle. For small tasks or things where the course of action seems fairly obvious, I'm likely to go ahead and take action. But when it comes to an action with significant ramifications or non-refundable results, I'd probably wait for consensus. I generally like to give everything proper consideration. I like to get all the facts I can before deciding, and I always try to ensure I've considered the perspective of whomever I can. Being a moderator is about being moderate; impartial; reasonably stand-off-ish. But when all is said and done, if an action must be taken, I'm the person that won't hesitate to take it, won't hesitate to admit when I'm wrong or don't know, and will ask for help or consensus when I need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site?&lt;/strong&gt; (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, &lt;strong&gt;do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm usually not around on the weekends. I'm off and on most of the day otherwise and I can try to give a solid 1-3 hours at the beginning of my day (I'm on eastern time, fyi). It's not much, but that's all I can offer for sure. I can't imagine any reason why that should diminish in the future. I'll always have time at my computer first thing in the morning. In fact, it might increase in the future. Really depends how my life plays out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I think I've been fairly impartial and diplomatic so far. The added responsibility means I'd probably be a bit more serious (dang it) and I'd probably stop complaining about users (all 3 times I think I've ever done that). But seeing as I usually end up telling people &quot;This is nothing personal, this post is simply not a good fit for our site&quot; or something like that, I'd say my tendencies are already fairly in-line with moderating. Although, I won't lie, I'm definitely going to joke around about my having a diamond on my name. So be forewarned, if you don't have a sense of humour and can't understand that me joking about my omnipotence doesn't actually mean I'd ever consider abusing power, then 1) you should probably avoid all contact with humans in the future and 2) be prepared to be offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot; and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the various grey areas between physics and other disciplines? Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower than it is now? How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of our scope and topics is something that is user-defined. Therefore, it falls to the community to decide the appropriate scope for the site. What I believe is irrelevant. I can offer my opinion of what I think the scope should be on meta, but once decided, all I have to do is enforce it. If a question belongs in another discipline according to our community, I'll move it. If not, it stays. If there's a grey zone and I'm not sure what to do, I'll ask for input from others. It really isn't my call how the site should evolve. That's the community's choice. I would just moderate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tough to say. It'll certainly give my word more weight (which, as King of all Jims, says a lot). I suppose I'd also be able to do something about obvious sock-puppets more than simply following them or flagging for a mod. I'd also be able to read the new posts by new users to old questions and actually be able to get rid of the random garbage ones (like &quot;PHYSX SUX!! LOLOLOL!!1!&quot;) rather than just flagging them. At the moment, however, I'm not entirely sure what all the moderator tools are yet. I have no doubt they'll improve my ability to moderate, much like how reaching 10k rep significantly improved that ability, I just don't know what way that will be yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I adequately covered this question under #6. This even starts out the exact same way as #6. I'm not answering the same question twice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question has been marked as a duplicate by: Jim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life isn't black and white. Things are complex. Stop asking me what I'd do in a situation without any specific details whatsoever. I have no idea how I would handle this yet. Is the person genuinely passionate about an obscure realm of physics? Are they trolling? All manner of details need to be discovered. If they produce valuable answers, then they're worth keeping around. Comments are transient and mostly don't matter. Remind them to be polite and civil and keep my actions within protocol. Consult the &lt;s&gt;Jedi&lt;/s&gt; Moderator Council if I really can't decide what should be done but am sure that an action should be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the other mod aside (likely to a private chat or something) and discuss with them why I think they were mistaken. You don't want to show mod in-fighting in front of our subjects. Hash it out with them, agree on what should be done, then do it. If we can't agree, then call in another mod for a tie-breaker. Or open it up to the community, depending on the situation. I'm not going to subvert the authority of other mods. I respect that they may have a perspective I lack and I'm not going to get into a war with them. Things can be handled with words. If I'm overruled, then I can accept that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T14:01:30.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9205" CreationDate="2016-09-27T14:54:17.990" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have deleted a few comments, including a conversation about wrongly used close votes. As a relative outsider (who nevertheless has enough reputation to vote), those comments did not help me understand the issues and concerns with the nomination they were attached to. Comments are a poor substitute for a meta question where arguments may be laid out without character or formatting restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, I allowed a few comments that verge toward violations of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice policy&lt;/a&gt; to remain. To be clear, that policy applies to nomination comments as everywhere else. However, running for moderator (and, in fact, &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt; a moderator) puts your actions on the site in front of the community for review. If a user closes questions carelessly (to take a criticism made this election) the time to raise the issue with the community is before the election begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, I will continue to delete comments that stray too far off track or read more as insults and less as criticisms. As always, if you find yourself getting agitated with another user, it's better to walk away from the computer than risk typing something regrettable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T14:54:17.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9205" CreationDate="2016-09-28T12:19:56.080" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are users that bear grudges against certain nominees, those comments shouldn't be deleted. It will only lead to even further confirmation of the kind of attitude you described: that there is a certain establishment on this site that acts kind of aggressive when it comes to counteracting policies and opinions they don't share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those comments should be seen as a chance to show leadership and maybe settle those accusations with some moderate and reasonable replies. That in turn could show voters who can actually step aside  his opinions and represent the most of this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it troubling that there is a repeated shutdown and censorship of those people that feel to be underrepresented. Nevertheless, insults should be dealt with in the usual manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75518" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T12:19:56.080" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-28T18:43:05.013" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/282907/looking-for-the-proof&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is now closed as offtopic on 2 reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is mainly math, although its markup and formulation clearly shows the described problem is a physical problem. The current review practice is that also this type of questions are closed as offtopic and sometimes migrated to the MathSE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is considered as a homework question (not by me, but it is a different topic).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the problem is that if you vote to close this question as homework, it won't be migrated to the MathSE, it will be simply closed. This is what happened. As I voted this question (to migrate to MathSE), it had already 2 close votes as homework and 2 close votes to migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My vote to migrate resulted that the question was closed as homework. The criteria to fulfill to migrate a question is hard(*), but there is no reason to not try to fulfill it, if the question is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question had been migrated to the MathSE, it could have been received very well there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it a little bit dishonest, because I hadn't ever voted this to close on the homework close reason, despite that the close reason shows as if it had been also my decision. I voted to migrate it to the MathSE, where it would be ontopic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In this, and similar cases, if you think a question should be closed on multiple reasons, and at least one of them is migration, please vote for migration.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) From the 5 close votes, at least 3 or 4 should vote to migrate, and to the same site. If this requirement is not passed, the question is simply closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T18:50:15.587" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T18:08:51.707" Title="Note: why the migration close reasons are stronger as the others" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9195" CreationDate="2016-09-29T01:07:19.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the risk of you going off on a rail and misinterpreting it, here is the data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/546155/recent-close-reviews-and-their-outcomes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recent close reviews and their outcomes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/546195/recent-reopen-reviews-and-their-outcomes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recent reopen reviews and their outcomes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Most of the data you might want, going beyond this, is also public, in the SEDE. Given that you already know it exist, I don't think it's appropriate to raise this sort of allegation without at least some evidence of having tried to dig into the data.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data shows that a strong majority of close-vote reviews end up with question closure. Most reopen reviews end up with a leave-closed outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is important to note that this sort of dumb counting, without actually looking at the posts and whether they warranted closure/reopening or not. Since you do not have access to the queues it is understandable that you do not have a gauge on the typical content there, but the links above give plenty of information of what actually makes it to the queue. In particular, the second conclusion - few questions are reopened in the queue - bears a close match to the experience of reviewing that queue: for example, a significant fraction of questions on the queue are minor edits that barely begin addressing the problems with the post. The fraction that even approaches reopen-ability is rather low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, moreover, one crucial thing missing from the public data: &lt;strong&gt;you cannot know the frame of mind of the people who reviewed posts&lt;/strong&gt; because &lt;strong&gt;you cannot know the frame of mind of people, period&lt;/strong&gt;, and it is not appropriate to raise accusations that could only be proven if you had psychic powers. You stop short of making the explicit accusation that reviewers are not &quot;making an independent decision, without preconceptions&quot;, but the implication is pretty clear. This accusation is of this latter kind: you could only prove it by reading minds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, and to double down on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9195/is-one-close-vote-all-it-needs#comment34420_9195&quot;&gt;a previous comment&lt;/a&gt;, I don't think that any amount of public data will support your hypothesis. In particular, consider the following possible explanations for the data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reviewers are by and large a fickle bunch and they tend to just close-vote anything in the review queue because it's there&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close-vote reviewers and 3k+ users at large have a generally robust consensus of the type of question that is on- and off-topic for the site, which naturally results in consistent reviews, and tends to put only close-worthy questions in the queue to begin with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(These are, of course, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the only possible explanations.) Both scenarios explain the data, and neither can really be disproved without public data. The lesson I infer from that is that the question was flawed to begin with, but then I suspect I have about a snowball's chance in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;door to hell&lt;/a&gt; at convincing you of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I do want to stress that raising this sort of accusation without data, where you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the data is there, is pretty inflammatory and unconstructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T01:40:50.610" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9211" CreationDate="2016-09-29T17:02:20.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't want to migrate bad questions, but we're not as familiar with other sites' quality standards as we are with our own, so we're not as good at judging what &quot;bad&quot; means for other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a question is pure math with no physics at all, and it's also terrible, like this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a polynomial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want to migrate that because then we're making our trash someone else's problem.&#xA;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; this is a case where we and the math site users are all better off just closing (insufficient research?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we could have a question which is pure math, violates &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; homework policy, but would be perfectly acceptable on the math site.&#xA;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1946690/inverse-trig-function-equation&quot;&gt;real example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you suggest I go about solving this question? I've been thinking about it for ages and nothing comes to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$$\arcsin(x) + \arccos(x) = \pi/2 $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example clearly violates our homework policy as it has zero research effort shown, but it's perfectly fine on the math site.&#xA;In this case, we should migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, &lt;em&gt;we need to be aware of the rules of the sites to which we can migrate questions&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Vote to migrate if the question doesn't fit on our site, but does fit on another site in terms of both topic and quality.&#xA;Vote to close if the question falls short of quality standards on our site and on any of the migration targets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that OP of a closed question can always re-post elsewhere.&#xA;That's not to say we should overzealously close questions, but if you do vote to close something that you think &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; fit on another site, do OP a favor and leave a brief, polite comment directing them to the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:19.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T18:08:51.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9196" CreationDate="2016-09-29T22:03:24.823" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers&#xA;  with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of&#xA;  rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is not explicitly stated otherwise, I assume the user is not violating any current rules and thus, the question should be instead &lt;em&gt;How would you deal with those that complain about this user?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my view, this site is an experiment in &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; moderation.  It's been interesting watching the site and myself evolve over the time that I've participated here.  If I were a moderator, I would act to let the experiment continue with only the occasional intervention now and then when it's clear that genuine malice towards this experiment is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a moderator, what would be your highest priority between &quot;Growth of&#xA;  the site&quot; and &quot;Quality of the questions and answers of the site&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Growth, or lack thereof, would not be a priority at all.  The quality of questions and answers flows directly from the quality of those that freely participate here and, as long as one behaves as an adult, one is free to participate here.  I know that for some, this state of affairs just wont do.  I do not share that view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from&#xA;  the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences&#xA;  about when to do this and when to just take action directly without&#xA;  checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus&#xA;  on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not&#xA;  sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative&#xA;  and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; judgment that immediate action is necessary, I will act in accord with my judgment based on the knowledge I have at the time and I'll be prepared to accept the consequences.  If immediate action is unnecessary and I'm unsure of the proper action (including no action), I'll seek advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site? (A&#xA;  couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good&#xA;  guess) Also, do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time&#xA;  would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No more than an hour a day on average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the&#xA;  past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages.&#xA;  Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you&#xA;  feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you&#xA;  would be a good moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you&#xA;  do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of&#xA;  moderator duties)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of&#xA;  topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot;&#xA;  and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the&#xA;  various grey areas between physics and other disciplines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is interesting and has some relationship, even if small, to &quot;physics&quot;, it's a good thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower&#xA;  than it is now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broader is fine with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a&#xA;  moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very little if any at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more&#xA;  effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if I misunderstand but this questions seems to be asking if I feel being a moderator will make me more effective as a moderator.  I think I'll just move on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of&#xA;  level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics&#xA;  students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your&#xA;  stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even rank beginners can ask interesting questions and producing a quality answer that a beginner can understand is not trivial and often rewarding.  The downvote button hover over includes &quot;This question does not show any research effort&quot; but does not include &quot;This questions is not at a high enough level&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of&#xA;  valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of&#xA;  arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends.  Life is full of valuable people that just don't know how to play well with others and there is no one 'formula' that works in every case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc&#xA;  a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recognize it as a situation requiring action.  However, if I find that I &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; disagree with another mod's close/delete/etc. actions, I'll begin by asking what it is that I'm not seeing, i.e., &lt;em&gt;help me understand what you see in these questions that make them, on your view, close worthy?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T23:31:39.000" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T23:31:39.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9224" CreationDate="2016-09-30T03:02:47.653" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long question short: Changing Minecraft's Gravity via Code: StackOverflow, Math, Physics, or SciFi&amp;amp;Fantasy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Actual Question:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Premise:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, some quick background on the question I want to answer. The Minecraft world is generally depicted as a large cube (which, of course, doesn't make physical sense anyway, concentration of mass and all that), but, assuming it is a cube, I want to write a modification that employs accurate gravity. It does not need to be a perfect model, Newtonian is fine, furthermore, I have to apply force vectors &lt;strong&gt;as well as&lt;/strong&gt; cancel out minecraft's preexisting gravity, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Entity#Motion_of_entities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a bit odd&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conundrum:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you can see, I'm quite split. I am writing &lt;strong&gt;code&lt;/strong&gt; to implement &lt;strong&gt;physics&lt;/strong&gt;, using &lt;strong&gt;math&lt;/strong&gt; in a &lt;strong&gt;fantasy&lt;/strong&gt; world. So, what site do I use? I get the feeling it would be on topic here, since I am trying to be accurate to real-world physics, but then is the question of how to cancel the preexisting gravity also on-topic? I don't have any specific difficulties with the code, as I'm fairly well-versed, so I assume stack overflow is a no go, furthermore, there are too many other parts to my question for it to fit on math, and I see nothing in SciFi&amp;amp;Fantasy's on-topic guidelines that match this question, so that only leaves physic, but the on-topic page for physics specifically states that made-up physics is off-topic. I, however, want to apply real physics to a made-up world... would that make this on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I just wanted to make sure what I'm asking is allowed... maybe there's another site this would be even more suited for. Regardless, any help is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131647" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T21:48:33.927" Title="Is Minecraft On-Topic?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9216" CreationDate="2016-09-30T05:28:25.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5623/520&quot;&gt;The gory details of coding physics simulations are off-topic, even though the details of the physics to be simulated are on-topic.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you left &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science (sometimes called &quot;scicomp&quot; after their URL)&lt;/a&gt; off your list of possible sites. If you know enough about the foundation of numeric modeling that might be the site on which to seek truly expert help to refine a implementation. However, I'm not clear on how interested they are in hearing from someone with no experience in numerical work trying to get a first project off the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:53.973" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T05:28:25.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9216" CreationDate="2016-09-30T05:33:43.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minecraft is not on topic because, in short, it's a fantasy world which is not generally studied by physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you can transform your question into one that asks about &quot;real physics&quot;, then it could be fine. But you should follow the advice in our &lt;a href=&quot;/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; (even though this is not homework; it's generally good advice): specifically, you should set up the problem yourself, make an attempt to solve it, and when you ask your question, ask about the specific step that you get stuck on. You can ask for help formulating your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-b-har&quot;&gt;chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T05:33:43.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-30T07:04:37.467" Score="6" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The election chat has concluded; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45927/conversation/2016-election-chat-session&quot;&gt;the transcript&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our next &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;regularly scheduled chat session&lt;/a&gt;, October 4 at 16:00 UTC/12:00 EDT, will be devoted to the current election. We'll be holding the session in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45927/2016-physics-stack-exchange-election&quot;&gt;our dedicated election chat room&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the main site chat room&lt;/a&gt; as we usually do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;tentative&lt;/em&gt; plan is to split the session into two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A few minutes at the beginning to address any procedural questions about the election process. (Of course, such questions can also be posted here on meta at any time.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The remainder of the session will be open for anyone to ask the candidates questions on the topic of moderation. I hope to run this in town-hall style, as done in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2668/2012-moderator-election-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;our last election&lt;/a&gt;. This will complement the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9196/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;existing questionnaire&lt;/a&gt; by allowing for more back-and-forth discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll update this post with further details as we work them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, this is an announcement, not a question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T17:06:43.263" Title="2016 Moderator Election Chat October 4 16:00 UTC" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-30T18:19:14.457" Score="5" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very few questions can not be answered by searching the web, and if repeat questions are not allowed. The site will slowly move from a forum to a data base. Is the site concerned about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129433" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T11:02:18.537" Title="Have you considered that eventually most questions will be repeat questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9220" CreationDate="2016-09-30T18:24:32.163" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was never a forum to begin. The goal of the site is to provide high quality Q&amp;amp;A from experts in the field. If we've answered every question, then mission accomplished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since science progresses, we will never be able to keep up with the questions at the leading edge of it. If science stops progressing and there is nothing new in the broad areas covered by the site, then there's a lot more to worry about than the future of the site here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I'm not concerned about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And maybe to clear up another point of concern -- yes, most things can be found by using your favorite search engine. But unless the first hit, with the most comprehensive and accessible approach to answer your question, is not this site, then there's still work to be done. If you can get your answer by stitching together a few Wikipedia articles and some Yahoo Ask questions, cool. But that doesn't mean that question (and the resulting researched answer) shouldn't appear here too, as a single, authoritative source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T18:24:32.163" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-30T20:35:32.643" Score="5" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question was asked by someone in March 2015. It had 4 answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added a (fifth) answer on 26th Sep, 2016 (18 months later) and the question was put on hold the next day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain if this sounds normal, or my answer had a reaction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/171581/&quot;&gt;Entanglement, real or just math?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106205" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T17:10:52.393" Title="A question put on hold one and half years after it was asked" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9222" CreationDate="2016-09-30T21:09:02.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments on the post seem to indicate that those closing thought it was unclear. It has nothing to do with your answer -- well, not exactly anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you edit a post or answer a question, it bumps the question back to the front page of the website. When you answered the question, that put it back on the front page and that meant people would notice it. Maybe they hadn't before, maybe they did, who knows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this time, it got put on the front page and enough people voted to put it on hold that it is now there, pending clarification. It's also started to accumulate reopen votes, so at least somebody disagrees with the close reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely the question slipped through unnoticed early on and when it got bumped to the front page, it opened it up for inspection again and at least 5 people found it to be unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T21:09:02.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9216" CreationDate="2016-09-30T21:48:33.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the above. Physics simulations in videogames belong on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Game Development SE&lt;/a&gt;. They even have a tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics-engine&quot;&gt;physics-engine&lt;/a&gt;, for this exact purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:18:43.933" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T21:48:33.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9220" CreationDate="2016-10-01T17:04:52.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a certain density of repeat questions is a good thing, and should be supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I think this is that repeat questions encourage new answers, and the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; may not be repeats.  It's tempting to say 'but physics is a hard science, there's only ever one right answer', but I think that's not true: new answers can present and encourage new ways of thinking about an existing area, and that's a good thing.  This is why, for instance, new textbooks on old areas of physics can still be interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer to this is 'well, you can just add new answers to old questions'.  However, if old questions already have accepted answers then any new answer is extremely unlikely to be accepted.  So anyone interested in reputation is thus going to be put off by that.  Of course, one could then argue that, well, you should not be interested in reputation: that's nice in theory but, in fact, people are interested in reputation and the whole site is predicated on that.  Thus not allowing duplicates is likely to actively suppress new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think a certain, not too high, ratio of repeat questions should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user107153" LastEditorDisplayName="user107153" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T11:02:18.537" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T11:02:18.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2016-10-02T13:43:00.710" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jimius Caeser, leader of the Holy Roman Jimpire (or just Jimius Caesar) because, as you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But all you should be concerned about is that Jimius Caesar, leader of&#xA;  the Holy Roman Jimpire, is commanding you to grant him additional&#xA;  powers. You now have two options. Obey him, or face his wrath. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3#post-282705&quot;&gt;Moderator nomination&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T13:43:00.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9229" CreationDate="2016-10-03T14:49:29.820" Score="6" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question where I put a few things into proper quotation marks, i.e. &lt;code&gt;“&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;”&lt;/code&gt;. Then there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/283732/2&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; which converts those into &lt;code&gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; which are second or inch marks. I do not understand why this edit has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the “loose → lose“ thing I just learned that “to loose” means “to unfasten” whereas “to lose” is what I actually meant, the process of having a loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5705" LastEditorUserId="5705" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T15:10:55.450" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T15:10:55.450" Title="Why did somebody change my quotation marks?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9228" CreationDate="2016-10-03T15:04:18.067" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only guess, but here are my guesses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the edit suggested changing the quotation marks: plain text does not allow for proper (curly) quotation marks, so the &lt;code&gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; character has become the standard to represent quotation marks in plain text and text-based contexts (as opposed to rich text) online. Granted, this part of the edit is probably not an &lt;em&gt;improvement&lt;/em&gt;, because it's rare that a modern browser would have any problem with curly quotes, but given the ubiquity of the straight quote, it's no more than a marginal change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the edit was approved: since the quotes are a marginal change, the validity of the edit is mostly determined by the single most significant change, which fixes a piece of incorrect grammar. Therefore, the edit is considered a net improvement that doesn't introduce a significant problem and it gets approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, those are only my guesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T15:04:18.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9196" CreationDate="2016-10-03T21:25:59.653" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of answers with mixed or negative scores, but still manages to get thousands of rep (because upvotes count much more than downvotes)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first place, I'd trust the community systems to sort things out.  Physics.SE doesn't (so far) have issues with controversial high-vote, zero-score answers.  Controversial answers in this community tend to instead attract more clearly-written answers from other users.  So a string of low-quality contributions is, at best, an inefficient way to gain reputation.  So to some extent I challenge the premise of the question: this doesn't really seem like an issue for a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderation issue arises if a moderate- or high-rep user who provides consistently low-quality contributions also annoys or drives away users who produce high-quality content.  Then we have to have a conversation about what the people involved are trying to achieve and what sorts of behaviors can and can't be tolerated.  But that's a conversation that can be had out in the open, at a relatively slow pace, and the first few times it happens I'll be able to draw on the experience of the rest of the moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;As a moderator, what would be your highest priority between &quot;Growth of the site&quot; and &quot;Quality of the questions and answers of the site&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quality drives growth, not the other way around.  There are attractive, high-quality questions and answers at all levels of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For some moderator actions, the current mods wait for a consensus from the whole group before taking the action. We have varying preferences about when to do this and when to just take action directly without checking with others. Which mod actions would you wait for consensus on, and which ones would you just do without checking? If you're not sure about a certain action, are you more likely to be conservative and wait for consensus, or be proactive and just do it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect that I'll start off cautious and become more proactive as I grow into the role.  For edge cases I'll take the (in)action that seems likely to cause the least damage if it's wrong.  The most obvious cases where I might have a doubt and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want to wait for consensus would be if some sort of comment-thread discussion goes off the rails into argument territory; the right response is to move it to a chatroom and try to de-escalate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site? (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect to contribute a half-hour to an hour most days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm proud of my contributions to this site in the past.  I have made a point, when reviewing questions, to be welcoming and encouraging to new users and to encourage high-quality answers, especially from commenters.  I see this role continuing whether I'm chose as a moderator or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of topic? In other words, where do you draw the line between &quot;physics&quot; and other topics, and how do you feel about questions that lie in the various grey areas between physics and other disciplines? Do you generally feel that our scope should be broader or narrower than it is now? How are your views on these topics likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to swing broader on this question than some other contributors do.  There are plenty of questions asked here that have one foot in physics and another foot in biology or chemistry or engineering or information theory or some other interesting discipline that get closed as &quot;not physics&quot; but which could benefit from an insightful answer with a physicist's perspective.  Currently I vote to keep these open when I see them in the close queue and vote to reopen them if I notice they've been closed.  As a moderator I would want to be more cautious about unilaterally reopening these sorts of questions; I suppose I would work harder to find them better home elsewhere on the SE network, and reopen if this really is the best home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the previous paragraph for an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where do you think the boundaries of our scope should lie, in terms of level? That is, do you see this as primarily a site for physics students, or for physics researchers, or both equally? How is your stance on this likely to affect your actions as a moderator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should be open to &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; questions at all levels.  I don't vote to close questions because the answers are &quot;obvious&quot; or &quot;trivial&quot; to me, because they weren't always; I don't vote to close questions that are over my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd invite that user over to my house for dinner.  At dinner, we'd have a conversation about what it means to be a part of a community.  Probably we would both learn things.  (Nota bene: if you'd like to come over for dinner, generating flags is less efficient than just bringing it up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd ask about it, and we'd have a conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T21:25:59.653" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9222" CreationDate="2016-10-04T17:10:52.393" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for reference, the question has now been reopened. It seems that enough people disagreed with the close reason to reopen it. However, this really doesn't mean that it was somehow &quot;wrong&quot; to vote to close after it had been favorited and answered and upvoted. It just means users believed it was or wasn't on topic. In this case, there are enough users for each side that it swung back and forth. As an aside, I might ask a new meta question asking whether it is or isn't on-topic, as I think that will be an interesting discussion. Finally, as for your answer, it is currently at -6 downvotes and counting. I doubt, however, that this was the reason that users closed it (or at least, it shouldn't have been, in my mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T17:10:52.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9235" CreationDate="2016-10-04T17:26:41.470" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand a new moderator is elected whenever one steps down or there is an increase in traffic to the point that the current moderator team cannot handle it. However, my question is more about when physics.SE might reach that point - i.e., using the current rate of increase in traffic, when will it become too much for the soon-to-be six moderators? Or is there a standard time for moderators to serve and then step down, even though it is technically a life term? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T18:34:29.203" Title="Next physics election" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9234" CreationDate="2016-10-04T18:34:29.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a complete unknown. As you mention, elections are held whenever existing mods step down, or increased traffic calls for an expanded squad, and there's no way to tell when either will happen. There's no way to tell when any of the existing mods' situation might change, and there's no way to tell how the site will grow in the future, or how mod-intensive that future traffic might be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no standard time for moderators to step down - if mods can continue in their role, we want them there, as it's not worth the hassle of an election. If there is a problem with the mods, it can and should be brought up on this meta at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's any guidance, there have been two elections in the past, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;2011&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;2012&lt;/a&gt;. Only one moderator (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt;) has stepped down, without stating any reasons that I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T18:34:29.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T17:07:51.167" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading through some old meta discussions recently, and I was interested in some of the points made, but they never quite seemed to be implemented or discussed further. They also seemed to be buried among the various conversations about physics overflow and the various controversies surrounding that. So, I am asking the current community what they think of the following points; I will post my own personal opinion as an answer soon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too many questions that have math in them are closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The current stance on engineering questions is too harsh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions on these two appreciated. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous Meta Posts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5473/asking-math-questions&quot;&gt;Asking math questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7140/are-questions-about-mathematics-used-in-physics-always-off-topic&quot;&gt;Are questions about mathematics used in physics always off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5713/should-pure-math-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;Should pure math questions be on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65/are-engineering-questions-ok&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions OK?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5553/what-is-engineering-and-what-is-experimental-design&quot;&gt;What is engineering and what is experimental design?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T11:27:06.870" Title="Math and engineering questions: where do we draw the line?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-06T17:02:28.437" Score="-11" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a very dirty trick played on me by another correspondent. I was having a discussion about the Stern Gerlach experiment where I claimed that you cannot split a ray into two dots. First people said I was a crackpot (and that was OK with me). But then when I started to gain traction and show that I was write, one DMcKee posted a comment saying essentially &quot;So what? Everyone knows that the two dots are just a simplified explanation. No one claims the experiment has actually been done&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wrote back and said, &quot;I love this site. First they call you a crackpot, and then when you prove you're right, they say &quot;so what? everybody know's that's true.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This apparently embarassed McKee, so he took down his comment! Now my comment is just sitting there by itself not making sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is a very dirty way to play the game. You make a post, you should stand by it. When someone proves you wrong, it is the height of cowardice to delete your post. I am disgusted at this kind of behavior on this site (and it's not the first time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3253" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T20:09:00.697" Title="Should people stand behind their posts?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9237" CreationDate="2016-10-06T17:23:35.480" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frankly, if you're disgusted by that kind of behavior, you should not be participating on this site (and probably not on SE sites in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate, comments are ephemeral. They can and should be deleted once they no longer have a purpose to serve, with respect to improving the post they are attached to. They may be deleted for many other reasons, or for no reason at all (i.e. simply that the commenter didn't want to have the comment up in public anymore). If you respond to a comment that you later find out is deleted, the proper response is to delete your own reply. If you see that someone else has posted a reply to a deleted comment, the proper response is to flag the reply as obsolete.&#xA;Same goes if you delete your own comment and there are replies to it; you should flag the replies (at least the first two or three, if there are many) as obsolete. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; complain about it, but you will find that any argument for &lt;em&gt;preventing&lt;/em&gt; people from deleting their comments will not be well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers are a separate issue; there are more stringent rules about when we allow people to delete their own questions and answers. But in general, when someone proves you wrong, if you are able to delete your post, doing so is perfectly reasonable. While we wouldn't go so far as to &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; deletion of wrong answers or questions based on wrong information, if you choose to do so, you are presumably reducing the amount of wrong information on the site and thus making it a better resource, which is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:20:44.640" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T13:20:44.640" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9237" CreationDate="2016-10-07T08:09:45.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like the attitude of this question. Don't forget that your ultimate goal when writing a question, answer or comment should be helping other people, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;winning internet arguments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you have found a comment that you know it's wrong. Since you want to help people, you respond with a comment pointing out the error in order to warn future visitors. You even ping the other commentator, so he can read your correction and learn from his mistake. That's fine. Now, the other commentator realizes that he was wrong, and deletes his comment. In that way, future readers don't need to waste their time digging in a back-and-forth only to found out that the original comment was wrong and not relevant for the answer at all. Therefore, deleting the wrong comment is &lt;em&gt;the perfect outcome&lt;/em&gt; of your interaction in terms of the site's goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't feel disgusted because someone didn't stand behind his wrong comment. You should feel proud because the site works as intended, and you've been a part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T08:09:45.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9237" CreationDate="2016-10-07T18:52:10.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I point out that deleting a comment once proven wrong &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a form of admitting one is wrong. The conversation is between the involved people at first. If one points out what they think is an error and the other points out that there is no error and the person is wrong, the comment should be deleted. The objective was to inform the author, but the informant was himself corrected. Everyone involved knows what happened, it doesn't serve anyone to keep the comment. The goal is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to keep something around to show that any person was wrong, it is to improve inaccuracies in the post. Keeping these comments around if they are wrong only serves to embarrass people with &quot;see, people disagreed and they were wrong&quot;. That's not the point. It is spiteful and arrogant to force someone who disagreed with you when you were right to be put on display as an example of them being wrong. dmckee saw he was wrong and admitted it by removing the incorrect assertion. The only way he could have failed to admit his error is if he had left it there and either said nothing or continued arguing the same point. But that's not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be pointed out that had it been the case that he had deleted the comment and left you only with the comments from others that corrected it, other readers would see a response comment, not see the original comment and think &quot;Oh, the other person must have realized they were wrong and removed their comment&quot;. The only problem you seem to have arises because you followed up his actions with a broad accusatory statement that intentionally attempted to further humiliate the person who disagreed with you. It was revenge (whether or not you intended it that way, this is the common unconscious motivation for such actions). They stood against you and tried to belittle what you said and in response, you attempted to point them out as fools. It occurs to me that had you not opted to act out of revenge and spite, there would be no issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The removal of the comment was justified and the most reasonable course of action. When the objective is not to point out someone's folly and only to improve the content on the site, it becomes logical that anything counter-productive to this goal be removed. The comment was wrong, it was removed. Keeping it around does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; improve the quality of content on the site. Had the comment been correct, it could be left there until a corresponding change was made in the post. Once the issues addressed in the comment are dealt with, right or wrong, it can and should be removed. Obsolete or wrong comments only add to clutter and confusion. And for the record, I do strongly advocate removing correct comments if the issue was dealt with. The objective is not to showcase that one was correct in pointing out a fault, that is just as arrogant as forcing incorrect comments to remain. The correcting comment should only stay if the issue was not fixed in the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can fight against this policy all you like, but the idea is to have good and correct questions and answers, not to have records of the myriads of discussions that led to a good answer. We are not here to show how well we can correct other people nor how often other are wrong. We are here to present correct answers to questions. If a proposed correction is wrong, there's no benefit in having it remain. If you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to utilise the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T18:52:10.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9242" CreationDate="2016-10-08T09:17:23.633" Score="8" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a question that has been unresolved for a few months. I have now found a section of a book (1-2 pages) which is excellently written and I wish to share as a possible answer. Am I allowed to just copy the whole section out and reference the source. I fear any attempt by me to paraphrase it will lose some crucial meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124834" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T11:30:01.183" Title="Can I copy a whole section from a book as an answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9241" CreationDate="2016-10-08T11:30:01.183" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... I can't imagine that a quote from a book (and a lengthy one at that) will really be an ideal answer. It's allowed to quote a passage from a book, sure, but at least add something to your answer. Like a summary or something in your own words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T11:30:01.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9244" CreationDate="2016-10-09T02:52:46.720" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the upcoming moderator election we each get three votes - a first, second and third choice. In order to use these effectively, I would like to understand the mechanics of how they will be used to determine the election's outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side panel on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election?cb=1&quot;&gt;the election page&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We will calculate the winners using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSTV&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes#Meek.27s_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meek STV method&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but unfortunately that second link leads to a section on a Wikipedia page that assumes you've already read the quite substantial amount of text about other transferrable vote systems that preceeds it, so it's not very self-contained and not very easy to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the interests of us all understanding the rules of the election, I'm wondering whether someone who's already done the work of understanding it would be willing to post a brief self-contained outline of how it works. I'll attempt to do that myself if I get a chance in the next couple of days, but with only three days until the election it might be quicker if someone else can do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The reason it's important is because it affects tactical voting systems. The aim of STV is to make tactical voting less important, i.e. you can put the person you like the most as your first choice, even if you don't think they're likely to win, because your vote will carry over to your other choices if they don't. I would like to fully understand how that process works in this particular version of the system.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T03:14:34.303" Title="Can someone explain the voting system for the upcoming moderator election?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9243" CreationDate="2016-10-09T03:12:25.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77541/how-are-moderator-election-votes-counted-in-plain-english&quot;&gt;it is explained in some detail on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill single-transferable-vote system except that you are only allowed a short slate. If I recall correctly anyone with a majority is elected, then the person with the fewest first-place votes is dropped and any votes directed at them fail over tho those voters' next choices. Repeat until you have filled the open seats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh yeah. Now that I've found the link I see that there is a partial transfer of votes not fully needed to elect people too. Now &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; a swanky extra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T03:12:25.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9246" CreationDate="2016-10-09T11:00:12.993" Score="5" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;No answers - is this question too hard? I don't think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/278664/83380&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is too hard actually. There must be some way to solve this and I know there are plenty of people here with a solid background in physics and the mathematics thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else further can I do to encourage someone to have a go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T08:16:33.153" Title="No answers - What else further can I do to encourage someone to answer?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9245" CreationDate="2016-10-09T11:28:58.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;That a question gets no answer does not necessarily mean it is &quot;too hard&quot;. It could mean that, but it could also mean that no one knowing the answer found the question interesting enough to spend the time writing up the answer or that no one knowing the answer &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; the question (your question has 78 view, which is not that many). Or the people knowing the answer didn't have time to write an answer and then later forgot to come back. You often can't know the reason a question stays unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to migitate some of the possibilities I said, then the &quot;standard&quot; way to increase the visibility of a question is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;place a bounty&lt;/a&gt;. This additionally offers additional incentive in the form of reputation points to the people knowing the answer to actually spend the time writing it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, you could edit your question to make it more easily answerable and more easily readable. The longer a question, the better your writing must be so that people actually read through it instead of finding something faster to read (it's debatable whether this behaviour is a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; thing, but that's how it is). Ask yourself: Do you explain why this question is &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; at the beginning to get reader interested and read on? Are all those pictures really necessary? If &quot;the question is short&quot;, then why is the question so long?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do edit your question, then that will put it on the top of the &quot;active&quot; questions list again. Please do not use this feature by making trivial edits (e.g. adding whitespace, correcting one typo every ten minutes, etc...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5886/50583&quot;&gt;posts shouldn't look like revision histories&lt;/a&gt;. A new reader doesn't care &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you added the second part historically. They care what it has to do with the question, and how it's supposed to make answering it easier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T11:28:58.190" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-09T13:34:56.117" Score="7" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/285134/revisions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; , while making the question more intelligible, the edit also answered it partially with a link, making the questioner not only negligent in previous research, but also stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/df1X5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/df1X5.png&quot; alt=&quot;q1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result the person got two down votes. I had commented with a link , and got notified on his question about downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I say in the title, editing with links  which answer the question should be avoided, imo.Some questions are naive, which is different than stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T15:49:36.953" Title="editors of questions please do not add links which answer the question when editing it" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2016-10-09T15:09:04.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speaking generically, links and reference make a question more accessible, and editors are encouraged to improve the question any way they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the specific question, I guess as the editor I'm to blame here. I was indeed debating with myself whether it was too much to add the wiki link or not, cf. anna v's above vivid comment: &lt;em&gt;It made the question stupid rather than naive.&lt;/em&gt; I apologize if it did. This was not my aim. My aim is to ensure the quality of Phys.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific example is indeed a very naive question with not sufficient research, so it doesn't make sense to use this specific example to set general rules &amp;amp; restrictions for editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T15:49:36.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-10T16:25:42.087" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen that many question get a bunch of upvotes after a start,there are many questions which remain unnoticed for several time and once it get some upvotes its popularity start increasing.&#xA;Doesn't that indicate that most of the people upvote a question because it is upvoted by others.&#xA;Shouldn't this thing be stopped,that is the reason some exellent questions remain unnoticed.&#xA;Hope my message reach to those who are responsible for this.&#xA;thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128861" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T17:55:09.117" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T17:55:09.117" Title="The reason why some questions get massive amount of upvotes and other not so much?" Tags="|bug|voting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9255" CreationDate="2016-10-10T19:21:22.287" Score="9" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/285307/&quot;&gt;Is this an adequate resolution of the &amp;quot;paradox&amp;quot; of the arrow of time?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed on the grounds that it is not &quot;mainstream physics&quot;, and I was referred to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4538/&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.  That page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a question that proposes a new concept or paradigm, but asks for evaluation of that concept within the framework of current (mainstream) physics is OK. Similarly, a wrong answer that makes false statements but claims to work within the bounds of a mainstream theory is also allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that criterion, my question would be allowed.  It did not propose a new concept or paradigm as far as I know, but it asked for evaluation of an idea within the context of mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T15:44:39.187" Title="Why was this question closed as &quot;non-mainstream&quot; when it asked about mainstream physics?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T08:46:26.560" Score="4" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK - so I rephrase the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/285415/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; to highlight the physics content as suggested and... zilch. It still stays on hold.&#xA;So the only option appears to be to re-post the revised question under a different heading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that how this is supposed to work or should the person who put it on hold actually check on it to see if it was re-edited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T13:01:15.817" Title="Put on hold and rephrasing the question" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9251" CreationDate="2016-10-11T09:18:20.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a question is put on hold and edited, it gets put into a queue to be reviewed for reopening. If enough reviewers think the question is suitable for the site after the edit, the hold will be removed. Otherwise, it stays on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/148926&quot;&gt;the review&lt;/a&gt; has been completed, and the reviewers do not believe the changes make the question on topic, so unless there are further edits, the hold will stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not repost a question on hold to give it another chance. Doing so is considered (a mild form of) abuse of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T11:14:26.787" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9250" CreationDate="2016-10-11T10:24:22.023" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/285307/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (v3) is a valid mainstream conceptional question concerning the thermodynamical &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arrow of time&lt;/a&gt; in the same category as, say, inquiries about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boltzmann H-theorem&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschmidt&amp;#39;s_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loschmidt's paradox&lt;/a&gt;. The question should therefore be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why OP's question was closed as non-mainstream: Well, it seems it was a mistake. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use this opportunity to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remind reviewers to skip a review if they are in any way in doubt. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stress that our reviewers usually do good and competent work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encourage more 3k+ users to participate in the reviewing process. Without reviewers, Phys.SE can not function. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T15:44:39.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T20:19:17.393" Score="29" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;third moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 2 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50583&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/50583.png&quot; alt=&quot;ACuriousMind&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/44126&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/44126.png&quot; alt=&quot;rob&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/5609110007447552/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T15:49:11.773" Title="2016 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9256" CreationDate="2016-10-11T20:27:47.127" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to both new moderators! You'll both be a fabulous addition to the moderator team. Thank you so much for volunteering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwqHE.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwqHE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T20:27:47.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9256" CreationDate="2016-10-11T20:36:17.403" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sincere congratulations to ACM and rob and I second heather's thank you for volunteering your time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T20:36:17.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9250" CreationDate="2016-10-11T21:46:55.863" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't answer for the rest of voters, but I can sort-of explain my own decission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the line between &quot;a question that proposes a new concept or paradigm&quot; and a non-mainstream question is too blurry. You introduce a new concept, &quot;temporally asymmetric initial conditions&quot;, and as @knzhou commented, you didn't define it at all. For me, this was an indicator to decide that your question lies past the blurry line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common pitfall of non-mainstream posts is that they tend to be arrogant: they have solved one of greatest mysteries of all times where everyone before has failed, and they won't stop bragging about it. Your question is a very mild case of arrogance, but I definitely did not get a good impression the first time I read it. Now I'm inclined to think that it wasn't intentional, but I'd recommend you to tone it down a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I must say that I had to meditate my decission because I wasn't sure at all. It seems that the community disagrees with me (since the question is now reopen), so I have to admit that I was wrong, after all. No problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, closure is not a death sentence for a question, it is an opportunity to rethink, rewrite and improve it. I still think that your question needs a bit of work, along the lines I've explained above, in order to be a good question. I encourage you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78942" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T21:46:55.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9251" CreationDate="2016-10-12T07:36:08.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I tried to play the game and join in (hence my 10,100 points) but this forum is almost totally useless for anyone doing experimental physics. I particularly dislike the snobbish attitude of some moderators who cannot tell the difference between experimental physics and that stinking low class &quot;engineering&quot; stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last straw as my question on laser-metal interactions being put on hold and not re-opened. After much googling (in scholar) and elsewhere I discovered the answer I sought. And guess what - it's physics. Clue - plasma frequency v wavelength of light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output I get from here is vastly less than the time I have put in, and I have a paying job being a real physicist (and engineer - but let's not mention that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am unsubbing and won't be back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dirk Bruere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditorDisplayName="user56903" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T13:01:15.817" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T13:01:15.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9262" CreationDate="2016-10-12T07:54:22.840" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I unsubscribe from SE physics?&#xA;I have looked on my profile but can see no method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56903" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T08:16:09.370" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T08:16:09.370" Title="My last question - how do I unsubscribe?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-10-13T08:41:56.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2016-10-12T08:15:01.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; link at the bottom of the page and choose the reason &quot;I need to delete my user profile&quot;, then follow the instructions (if any) that you receive. It may take a few days for the request to be processed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/7979/263383&quot;&gt;How can I delete my account?&lt;/a&gt; at Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T08:15:01.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9256" CreationDate="2016-10-12T12:52:25.540" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Jim, the High King, I officially recognize your meritorious service to the Jimdom. Furthermore, in light of the training, popular approval, and special services rendered to the King (specifically, stepping up to do the job that I really didn't want to have to do) I bestow on you the highest honours that I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this day, I dub thee &lt;strong&gt;Sir rob&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Sir&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;em&gt;insert name here&lt;/em&gt;], &lt;strong&gt;Knights Moderatus&lt;/strong&gt;; members of the Court of Jimelot; with all the lands and dues afforded this rank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rise and never forget the oaths you have sworn this day, defenders of PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T12:52:25.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:28:06.550" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/285830/what-is-the-significance-of-null-zero-vector&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was asked in PSE and after googling it I gave the same question on &lt;a href=&quot;http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100603025915AAxYW7Q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yahoo&lt;/a&gt; with an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can I copy paste that answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130714" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T09:27:27.897" Title="Can I copy paste an answer from an (external) webpage?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9264" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:43:34.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to a non-mod &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/256939/262980&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; on the mother meta site, it is very much frowned on to copy a Yahoo Answer without attributing it, but it seems perfectly okay from a legal standpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend going through that post and any related posts to be sure, but so long as you cite your answer, you should be fine for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T13:43:34.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9264" CreationDate="2016-10-12T15:14:13.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a checklist to run through when considering this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this really the best source to use?&lt;/strong&gt; Perhaps I'm overly harsh, but Yahoo! Answers, is generally not the best choice when it comes to even referencing an answer. If you insist on copying an external source, try to find something of higher quality. Stack Exchange is better than sites like Yahoo! Answers; why should we drop to that level?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could you rephrase the content in your own words?&lt;/strong&gt; This is highly recommended; see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/plagiarism/info&quot;&gt;the tag wiki on plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;. The odds that the phrasing you've found is the single greatest way to explain the concept are slim to none, and you might as well try to improve on the wording. See if you can rewrite the explanation, adding ideas of your own. At the very least, write better than the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; there, which opens with&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this smthg abt zero vector and its uses...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did you cite the source correctly?&lt;/strong&gt; If you're still bent on copying the text, note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/160071/274942&quot;&gt;plagiarism on Stack Exchange is not okay&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be deleted, although it's more likely someone will simply add in the link. Now, I don't know if the text on Yahoo! Answers is copyrighted, but if it is, the answer may be removed outright. If you can't confirm that it's okay to copy the text (with attribution), &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/141240/274942&quot;&gt;don't&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I see no reason whatsoever to do what you're doing, but yes, legally and by the rules of Stack Exchange, you can do it (again, if the content isn't copyrighted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it recommended? No. Is it allowable? Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T16:16:51.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9264" CreationDate="2016-10-12T15:14:32.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an answer to your question from my perspective, not wearing my moderator's hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That particular answer was written by someone else and is their intellectual property, which they've explicitly licensed to Yahoo (via the appropriate Terms of Service) but not necessarily elsewhere.  For you to take those exact words and display them elsewhere as if you had written them yourself wouldn't be honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that you, Ramanujan, are perfectly capable of distilling the differences between the existing answer on the question you link and the answer you have found elsewhere, and the world would be a better place for your efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think there is something ineffable about the answer you've found that can't be reproduced by your efforts, a link in a comment would sit better with me than a big block quotation in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that any of your options here are wrong in a way that would cause trouble, but copy-pasting content from elsewhere is my least favorite among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T15:14:32.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2016-10-12T18:24:25.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIM_mechanism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JIM mechanism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T18:24:25.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2016-10-12T18:24:47.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386588/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gator's girls use jimmies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T18:24:47.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9237" CreationDate="2016-10-13T20:09:00.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the other users here, if you make a post, you think it is right, if someone shows that your post is incorrect then it is perfectly reasonable to take it down, there isn't some sort of contractual obligation to stick by something you know is wrong. It's much better to swallow your pride and just delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123649" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T20:09:00.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-16T19:17:06.583" Score="-5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;My main issue with how the site deals with 'homework questions' is about assumptions. I am an A level physics student and I never ask homework questions on this site. However I will ask questions about things I am struggling to understand. However these questions are often about basic things I need a greater understanding of but because these are basic questions people instantly assume it's a homework question and there for I get the old 'this isn't a homework help site' and then a homework tag is added, etc. When my question wasn't a homework question but purely a question most on this website would see as basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could potentially drive away people such as myself who are learning physics at not an advanced level but still would like to ask genuine physics questions on SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is lot's of talk on meta about how the 'quality' of questions must be improved which makes it sound like we're trying to push the site into an elitist form where a question has to be a certain level of complexity to be deemed 'high quality'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131999" LastEditorUserId="131999" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T19:33:18.540" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T21:02:16.930" Title="Homework policy" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9274" CreationDate="2016-10-16T20:44:32.587" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why you are complaining. I looked at your account. You have only two questions, and both are not on hold &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; they are answered! Not only that, both &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; homework questions. Before you yell at me for being prejudiced too, please let me explain real quick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of your questions are looking for answers that are sort of &quot;calculate for me, do my work for me&quot; questions. It doesn't matter whether or not they are actually homework, it is about the type of question they are: &quot;do my work&quot; type problems (which is why we are trying to reformulate the policy, because the close reasons aren't as clear as we'd like). That is why people are asking you to read the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm not sure you've quite been on this site long enough to see what sometimes comes up. We get questions saying stuff like &quot;solve this problem&quot; with nothing of their own work. Once, we got a question asking for users to come up with &quot;new and innovative ideas&quot; for a project for school. We get some pretty bad questions. When we say on meta &quot;improve quality of questions&quot; we mean trying to make it more clear that that stuff is not allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not about being elitist, or forbidding basic questions. Actually, some of the most upvoted questions might be considered &quot;basic&quot; by a good number of users on this site. Further, some of my questions have been well-upvoted, not closed, and answered, but they've been kind of basic sorts of questions. So the whole elitist thing isn't true at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please, don't go off making accusations without actually considering what is going on. I hope that makes sense, and I hope your future on this site is a tad more pleasant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At DanielSank's request, here are two questions I've asked that in my mind are simple (especially in their respective areas of physics) questions which are both upvoted and answered. In fact, the first one got 27 upvotes (!) which surprised me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/282286/why-ket-and-bra-notation&quot;&gt;Why ket and bra notation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/274558/boltzmann-formulation-of-entropy&quot;&gt;Boltzmann formulation of entropy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T21:02:16.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9280" CreationDate="2016-10-18T09:30:10.700" Score="10" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93421/mirrors-into-infinity&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as a duplicate, and I couldn't disagree more, but for some reason it has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/149686&quot;&gt;passed review&lt;/a&gt; with a Leave Closed outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/93421/mirrors-into-infinity&quot;&gt;The currently-closed question&lt;/a&gt; asks, in essence,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could someone [...] explain why the reflections [between two opposite mirrors] curve away instead of meeting at a perspective point within the reflections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. entirely a geometric affair.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/92301/what-color-would-you-see-if-you-place-2-mirrors-in-opposit-when-one-is-a-one-way&quot;&gt;The proposed duplicate&lt;/a&gt; asks what would happen if one of the mirrors were 'one-way' and the observation were done from behind it (in a pretty rambling way), involving a completely different set of concepts, and also an invalid premise (the existence of one-way mirrors) that requires careful unthreading in the leading answer that makes up the bulk of the required response, and which is entirely absent from the currently-closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How on Earth are these two duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T13:58:51.603" Title="How are these two questions duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-18T10:42:45.970" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short while ago I've received a request from another user to connect via facebook. Well, apart from the fact that I'm not very active on facebook, I'd definitely not like to provide any contact details on this site. That said, I was wondering whether there is some mechanism on this site whereby one can make this possible without the danger of unwanted contacts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice from previous meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/886/2451&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; that one cannot send private messages because &quot;this is not a social network.&quot; I can understand that (tongue in cheek), and I respect that. So this is not a suggestion for such a messaging system, but perhaps some other mechanism to take discussions to a different medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55261" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T10:23:35.713" Title="Is there a safe way to contact other users privately?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9277" CreationDate="2016-10-18T13:41:50.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, those are very different questions.  Currently both are open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T13:41:50.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-21T02:39:50.323" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;New user here.&#xA;I asked this question a few days back. (first post)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/287142/relative-motion-acceleration&quot;&gt;Relative motion-Acceleration&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And i did not get a satisfactory answer for the above question. &#xA;so I framed my question better this time and asked again as I dont see any activity with my previous question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/287809/revisions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/287809/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one moderator has removed my second post saying its a duplicate. How can i get attention to my first post in this case ( as I haven't got the answer yet ? ) or can I keep the second one deleting the first one ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: This is not a homework problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133406" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T09:57:51.070" Title="Repeating question" Tags="|support|closed-questions|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9281" CreationDate="2016-10-21T08:22:36.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7046/getting-attention-for-unanswered-questions&quot;&gt;this question on the &quot;mother meta&quot; site&lt;/a&gt; which rob linked in a comment. Basically, these are your options, roughly in the order I recommend trying them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it were someone else's question, upvoting it would help, but that's not applicable here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have edits that legitimately improve the question (for example, by clarifying it), you can edit the question, which will bump it up to the top of the front page of the site. This is particularly relevant when people have answered your question but the answers are not satisfactory: you can edit to make it clear what you're really looking for in an answer, but in a way that doesn't totally invalidate the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't go overboard on this; you probably shouldn't be editing your own post more than 3 or 4 times total. But you can strategically choose &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; you edit to give the post more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can ask about it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, if you have access to chat (requires 20 reputation total across the SE network). You might find someone who can answer your question, or you might get suggestions about how to improve it so that another person can answer it. (Or both.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can share the question outside the site by using the &quot;share&quot; link underneath it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can offer a bounty on the question, which places it in the featured questions list. Or perhaps you can find a high-reputation user who will be willing to place a bounty on it for you. Just don't be pushy when you ask about that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the mother meta post says, &lt;strong&gt;do not repost your question again&lt;/strong&gt;. We try hard to avoid duplication of questions. And especially don't do anything that makes it seem like you're trying to get around the rules against duplication - for example, if you delete your first question before reposting it, or if you continue to make duplicate posts after being told that you shouldn't. (Not that I think you would, but people do try it sometimes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that asking a separate followup question is a different story. If you have a followup question - and it has to be a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; question - then you can post that separately. In such cases it helps to link to the original question and explain clearly how the new one differs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T08:22:36.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9115" CreationDate="2016-10-21T15:56:43.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an A level physics student, and whilst I see people using this as a homework site, there are students like me who use this site to expand knowledge through asking questions and viewing others' questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think the goal of this site is to teach through community knowledge, to grow the site that more may hear about it and contribute where they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123649" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T15:56:43.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-22T03:45:58.500" Score="9" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/286855/possible-reactionless-drive&quot;&gt;Possible reactionless drive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;My question is [on hold] as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my analysis the system should work and start to move after photons injection on trajectory and my question is if someone find an error in my reasoning and the (closed) system actually won't move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should work with current physics so I don't understand why my question was put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132707" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T15:04:40.290" Title="I don't understand what is &quot;unclear&quot; with my question" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9284" CreationDate="2016-10-22T04:22:36.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close your question, and I wouldn't have picked the reason &quot;unclear what you're asking.&quot;  (And not all of the reviewers picked that reason, either, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/54917/280545&quot;&gt;that information is not obvious&lt;/a&gt;.)  However, I agree that your question as it currently stands (v7) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4538/44126&quot;&gt;a poor fit for Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  You've started with a system at rest that can be described using electrodynamics and relativity, both of which exactly conserve linear momentum, and you're asking whether that system can spontaneously develop nonzero linear momentum.  From symmetry, the answer is: no, you've missed something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T04:22:36.840" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9278" CreationDate="2016-10-22T10:23:35.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mechanism to take discussions to a different medium already exists: you can provide contact information in your profile, or you can share it with another user in a chat room, or in a comment (although I hesitate to really &lt;em&gt;recommend&lt;/em&gt; using comments for that purpose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that all these methods are public. That's by design. The purpose of Stack Exchange sites is to facilitate public communication, primarily Q&amp;amp;A but also discussion in chat; it's not really part of our mission to facilitate private communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're concerned about unwanted contact, I'd suggest something like this: have a dummy email address (or Twitter account or whatever) in your profile that you only use for initial communication from strangers. When you actually want to connect with someone, have them send you an email at that public address (or a DM on Twitter, or whatever), and then reply with your private contact info. Otherwise, you can ignore anything sent to the public address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T10:23:35.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-23T09:15:32.440" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could community downvote or upvote any questions or answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=profile&quot;&gt;profile&lt;/a&gt; it claims that it is not really a person but it's total downvotes are 11,168 . And it's last seen was Nov 1'10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130714" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T09:32:14.833" Title="How can community do downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9287" CreationDate="2016-10-23T09:32:14.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you read the profile? It literally says how this is possible: One of the things it does is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T09:32:14.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9291" CreationDate="2016-10-23T17:00:28.930" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that since the moderator election my flags are getting declined significantly more frequently. Specifically I placed 9 flags since the election, 5 of which got declined. What I find particularly annoying is that some of those post I flagged got dealt with even though my flag got denied. (Example: very low quality -&gt; &quot;declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&quot;. The question is on hold now with 3 downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I just been unlucky in this sample or is has a new spirit entered the moderator board with the last election? I am trying to help by raising flags (and I think above numbers indicate that I don't raise them carelessly). I also take pride in getting a &quot;helpful&quot; on the flags, but if my &quot;helpful&quot;-rate from now on is gonna be 44% (it used to be 82%, for what that's worth) I'd probably stop flagging altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T11:10:23.440" Title="Are the new moderators running a different flag policy?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9289" CreationDate="2016-10-23T17:12:04.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I handled one of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flags that can cost users rep and flag accounts as possible bad actors (spam and offensive) should be used with care and only for cases that fall under the aegis of that flag: things that are offensive and attempts to use Physics as a sales venue or propaganda platform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T17:12:04.950" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9289" CreationDate="2016-10-23T18:39:57.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To whatever extent we have a flag-handling policy, it hasn't changed since before the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has always been, and always will be, some variation in how different mods handle flags - it's simply impossible to eliminate. But the mods, including the new ones, have been pretty good about checking our responses to flags with each other, to try to minimize that variation. So my &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; is that what you're seeing is not a consequence of having new moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked over your recent flags and it does seem possible that this may be a statistical fluctuation. Let me try to be clear what I mean by that. When you get a flag declined, it (almost certainly) indicates some discrepancy between how you think flags should be used and how flags should actually be used. I'm not saying you should ignore that; you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; use declined flags to improve your understanding of what should and shouldn't be flagged. But it is a learning process, and it's totally normal that you get flags declined from time to time just because you didn't happen to know the expected usage of that kind of flag. It's possible that you randomly hit a run of those kinds of posts. Maybe even likely, I would say, looking at your recent flags. You can take this as a learning opportunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to include details of your flagging history here in a meta post, but you are welcome to discuss it with any of the mods in a chat room. Especially if you see inconsistencies in how your flags have been handled since the election compared to how they were handled before the election, that would be a good thing to bring to our attention, and then we can work on explaining the decisions to you and try to be more consistent in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T18:39:57.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9289" CreationDate="2016-10-24T11:10:23.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I'm one of the new mods, I feel like I should chime in and admit that the moderator flag interface doesn't &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; do quite what I expect it to, and there have been a couple of times already where I've handled something one way and thought later that it was a mistake.  So this is a fair question and I'm happy to talk about it or similar questions in the future, either here on Meta or in a chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said: looking at your flagging history, I think DavidZ is right that you just hit a run of unusual posts.  (My inner statistician would like to point out that the change which prompted you to post — four of nine flags helpful, when you were expecting 7/9 or 7.1/9 — is not statistically significant, even at the 2σ level.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: learning curves all round, hugs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T11:10:23.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9284" CreationDate="2016-10-25T15:04:40.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it looks like for me at least, the question is difficult to read and to understand because it is asked at the end of your calculations. However I don't think that's is a reason to close it, and I actually think it is a good question which deserves a proper answer, even if it it has a negative answer based on simple arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should consider rewriting it in a more easy to follow way, AND moderators to consider reopening the issue... For example you can postpone your calculations after the question is asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133816" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T15:04:40.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-26T12:29:33.690" Score="7" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently  accused of plagiarism and this is a summary of the process that I think could be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a moderator is notified of possible plagiarism, the post can be deleted even before you have been notified that you might be guilty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's OK in my opinion, a temporary hold is required until the issue is resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the reference to plagiarism, (which in fairness is probably boilerplate text) you are told &quot;you could probably get away with&quot;...&quot;and shrugging the issue off won't do&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel there is a lack of sensitivity and balance when making a serious charge of plagiarism and  wording similar to the above should be revised and the user given a chance to make his or her own defence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I simply want to have a charge of plagiarism dealt with exactly the same way as if the site was the same as any serious institution,  with no immediate punishment, other than obviously  a temporary hold, a notice of the charge and especially no prior assumption regarding any defence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the site is not a formal institution, but it should not be a star chamber either. A comment from the moderator referring &#xA;to the offending  post and giving the users a chance to reply takes 1 minute to write and I feel this should be incorporated into the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user108787" LastEditorDisplayName="user108787" LastEditDate="2016-10-27T09:49:56.150" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T16:43:21.543" Title="Plagarism accusations : a better way?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9296" CreationDate="2016-10-26T14:59:38.887" Score="19" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9294/8563&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt;, a user complained that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/288694/8563&quot;&gt;one of their answers&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;s&gt;10k+ link at the moment; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CF23h.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt; answer now undeleted, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/288694/timeline&quot;&gt;answer timeline&lt;/a&gt; for more details) was unfairly flagged as plagiarism and summarily deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP there has also asked for no further discussion to take place there (though in my view the OP has no such right - they can ragequit if they want to, but they don't get to decide what others can and cannot talk about) and a moderator has closed that meta question (again, completely unjustified in my view, but oh well). Since the discussion there has been shut off prematurely, I'm posting this as a separate thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, it seems to me that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no plagiarism of the text. There is some indication that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/288694/8563&quot;&gt;the answer text&lt;/a&gt; (10k+ link) is indeed based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://minerva.union.edu/claina/visualmeteors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, but there is nothing in the text that I would classify as plagiarism. The answer could benefit from citing the source, if that is indeed the page the OP consulted, but the paraphrased text is re-structured enough that it is clear that they are the OP's own words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is an unattributed use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sXGtq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this image&lt;/a&gt;. This is an academic problem (always cite your source), and it is not clear that this site is licensed to reuse that image, but this is in no way a fatal flaw in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answer contributes content above and beyond the specified source. This is evident from even a cursory comparison, as the image of the Apollo heat shield, and its associated text, is absent from the purported source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The clear conclusion is that Suzu Hirose's claim of plagiarism in a comment is completely overblown, and at best an example of carelessness when making such a flippant remark.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The moderator action to delete this post seems to me to be completely overblown. The moderator seems to have taken Suzu Hirose's comment at face value, and seems to have thought that the text was taken directly from there, when a reasonable inspection shows isn't the case. The moderator's tone also seems off to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The moderator comment, on balance, seems OK - the moderator has expressed displeasure with the answer, and it does fall to the OP to say something along the lines of &quot;hey, read the post again, there's nothing like that going on here!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On those lines, the immediate deletion of the post seems completely unjustified to me. Deletion &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be justified if the plagiarism was actually there, and(/or?) the OP had been given time to respond (and possibly failed to), but this does not tick any of the boxes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of specific outcomes that I would like to see happen, the answer in question should be undeleted - there is no reason for it to be out of action, because it contains no actual plagiarism. After that, someone (ideally the OP, but they seem to have left) should edit in the image attributions, and probably add the source as a further-reading link, but those are minor problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I read this as a localized instance, and I don't think it is representative of a wider trend. However, there's also no harm in asking the moderators to be extra careful, in general, when vetting accusations of plagiarism, to check that the plagiarism is actually there before summarily deleting any posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T16:33:14.827" Title="Was this plagiarism flag correctly handled?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2016-10-26T17:07:05.143" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fault here is mine. I didn't take enough care in checking the match between the post and the proposed source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only offer by apologies and delete the accusatory comment on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T17:08:30.543" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T17:08:30.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-26T23:10:11.093" Score="7" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to strongly suggest the Phys.SE community to carefully re-examine the following question and the reasons it was put on hold or regarded as not a good enough question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/288987/&quot;&gt;Finding the period of an anharmonic oscillation by substituting the solution for SHM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP's question about the potential energy being $|x|^3$ but it then described as simple harmonic motion seem completely legitimate to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution from the book doesn't satisfy the equation it is supposed to solve, as OP said there very clearly. What effort could OP be expected to make, for example explicitly trying and failing to solve the differential equation using the wrong solution? I don't think there is a reasonable effort lacking here, on the part of OP. As to the people voting to close the question and calling it homework, at the risk of being rude, I'm far from impressed about their level of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also clearly isn't a homework-like problem. OP asked whether that is a case of simple harmonic motion as the textbook says. The answer is that it isn't, and that the textbook he showed the image from is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116059" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T21:02:22.593" Title="Please re-examine this question" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9297" CreationDate="2016-10-27T00:29:29.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. Not only the solution but also the answer is given, so it is difficult to understand the view that this is a &quot;homework-like&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has identified a conceptual issue with the solution provided in the image text. He is not asking &quot;How do I solve this?&quot; but &quot;Is this solution incorrect or am I missing something?&quot; Like you, I don't see what additional work could be attempted by the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question looks &quot;homework-like.&quot; The problem is pasted in as an image; there is very little text from the OP and no calculation (v5). The homework tag was added by the 1st editor. Probably the decision to close was made because of what the question looks like rather than what it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is easy for reviewers to follow the crowd and VTC because other reviewers (especially those with high rep) have already done so. On more than one occasion I have suggested (wrongly) that a question is a duplicate because of a superficial similarity, and other reviewers followed my lead swiftly and closed the question. For example : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/284834&quot;&gt;How does Newton's cradle with balls of different weight behaves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited the question and voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T21:02:22.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9297" CreationDate="2016-10-27T02:02:25.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In its current form (v5), the question looks distractingly like a low-effort question about a photograph of a homework problem.  It takes some effort, including squinting at the text in the photo, to determine that the asker is not having some trivial confusion about simple harmonic motion.  As Emilio Pisanty points out in a comment, that makes the question fair game for closing as &quot;unclear.&quot;  We don't make a habit here of re-opening poor questions which were closed for the wrong reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; several interesting questions that could be asked about the $|x|^3$ potential as presented in that question, such as how the amplitude affects the frequency (already answered) and whether the textbook's solution is justified in approximating the motion as harmonic with some frequency (for which Fourier analysis suggests yes, it's justified).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question were edited to clarify which of those issues is of interest, the edits would &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/196078/280545&quot;&gt;probably&lt;/a&gt; place the question in the reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt;, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;any user with 3k reputation&lt;/a&gt; can vote to reopen or to leave closed.  In that case, re-opening the question becomes a community decision rather than a favor bestowed by the moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T02:02:25.350" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2016-10-28T04:14:08.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to address the accusation of plagiarism. This is definitely a supplementary (not full) answer, but the level of appropriateness of the response could be judged differently depending on whether there actually was plagiarism or not, so it is potentially relevant information. (Also, although this is my answer, I believe it reflects the consensus of all the moderators, so you can take this as semi-official.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer includes this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the fireball travels through the air, a layer of extremely hot gas forms in front of the meteor, which is compressed by collisions with atmospheric atoms and molecules. This results in a &quot;hydrodynamic cushion&quot; that provides the meteor with a measure of protection from direct collisions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This hydrodynamic cushion creates two macrostates ahead of the meteor: One is at 3500-5000K, and one at 10000K.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://minerva.union.edu/claina/visualmeteors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; includes this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the fireball travels through the atmosphere, the hot vapor from ablation is compressed by collisions with atmospheric atoms and molecules. This creates an air cap or hydrodynamic cushion that protects the meteor from direct collisions, which can be seen in the figure below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[figure omitted]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This barrier creates two macrostates in front of the meteor: One at 3500-5000K, which we will call the main spectrum, and one at 10000K, which we will call the second spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The similarity of these two passages, specifically including phrases like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;As the fireball travels through the [air/atmosphere]&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;compressed by collisions with atmospheric atoms and molecules&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This [hydrodynamic cushion/barrier] creates two macrostates ahead of the meteor&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;without any indication&lt;/em&gt; of the relationship between the source text and the answer text qualifies this part of the answer as plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent this from being plagiarism, one could add an indicator like, &quot;To paraphrase &lt;a href=&quot;http://minerva.union.edu/claina/visualmeteors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; along with clear marking of where the paraphrasing begins and ends, and that would be one way to bring the post in line with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;our referencing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this answer only concerns the existence of an instance of plagiarism, and not (directly) the appropriateness of the response given that an instance exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2016-10-28T16:33:14.827" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T16:33:14.827" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2016-10-28T06:35:29.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a comment to DavidZ's answer, but it got a bit long and I'd also be interested to see if others agree with me (i.e. how this answer gets voted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that I think David sets an unreasonably high benchmark for what constitutes plagiarism. If I look back through my own answers then there have been many occasions where I've done little more than paraphrase an article I've found on the Internet. This is what CountTo10 did, and I cannot condemn him for plagiarism unless I want to tar myself with the same brush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many occasions when I've seen a question that I could not answer and thought it was interesting. So I've gone off and Googled until I understood the subject. Then if I'm confident I understood it correctly I would write an answer, and inevitably that answer bore a considerable similarity to the articles I'd read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems entirely reasonable to me. Plagiarism implies you are benefiting from someone else's work, and it offends our sense of fairness. In an academic context it generally means you're trying to advance your career by parasitising other researchers and everyone finds that repugnant. But the reason we try to answer questions here &lt;strong&gt;is to be helpful&lt;/strong&gt;. No-one's career is going to be advanced by posting here. A high rep on the Physics SE does not bring fame, fortune and the intimate attentions of whatever gender you favour - you can trust me on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there limits. If someone has just copied and pasted large parts of their answer verbatim few of us would be impressed. And if I have relied heavily on a particular article I would cite it on some vague grounds that it seems good karma. But I don't think the fact an answer relies heavily on another article makes it plagiarism is the sense normally used in academia, especially when considerable effort has gone into writing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T06:35:29.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9115" CreationDate="2016-10-28T12:38:27.223" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my 2 cents, as a low-rep user of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all many of the sites on this network appear to be dysfunctional (with the exception of the super dorky ones, because dorks are typically decent people who get along well with each other) and generate frustration for both novice and experienced users. Stack Overflow is very similar in its high influx of low-quality questions, high threshold to gather up-votes, and frequent closing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of this site as per Stack Exchange's philosophy, should be to &lt;strong&gt;create and curate a collection of questions&lt;/strong&gt; about physics &lt;strong&gt;that are likely to be useful to future visitors and people googling with similar inquiries.&lt;/strong&gt; With this mindset one can derive an appropriate strategy about closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goal, more often than not, conflicts or is not completely aligned with what many new users imagine this site is for: getting a quick answer to &lt;em&gt;their specific problem&lt;/em&gt; that would mostly benefit themselves. Hence the frustration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another key frustration point is the lack of recognition for users, experienced or not, who put tremendous amounts of effort in answers with little to no reward. The voting culture varies a lot between sites and this one is on the least enthusiastic side of the spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that perspective, here is my modest proposals for a list of idealistic objectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Emphasize the objective of the site&lt;/strong&gt; to new and existing users to ensure people know what to expect, and don't take it personally when their question is dismissed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Work on the form&lt;/strong&gt; when addressing new users about the issue in their question or answer. It's perfectly possible to curate for quality without being rude.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meticulously close&lt;/strong&gt; all questions that do not match the goal stated above, and all duplicates as such, but be more lenient on &quot;unclear&quot; or badly formulated ones. Very good answers can emerge from a poorly written but original question.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Encourage&lt;/strong&gt; non-trivial content creation with more up-votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Challenge&lt;/strong&gt; wrong, incomplete and frivolous content &lt;em&gt;via&lt;/em&gt; moderation or comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46512" LastEditorUserId="46512" LastEditDate="2016-10-28T12:51:21.613" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T12:51:21.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-29T05:10:57.640" Score="11" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present Physics Stack Exchange is more inclined towards answering specific conceptual questions in Physics and not really meant for problem solving at the High School/Undergraduate/Graduate level. Check-my-work problems ( even if they contain the OP's efforts, are discouraged most of the times ). Moreover, we do not have any quality site on the Internet related to problem solving techniques in Physics ( specifically numerical problems ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that in my high school days I used to end up tearing my hairs even after spending hours on a particular numerical problem ( and my teachers weren't always available to discuss the solutions as they would quite busy ) . Several times I would have to wait weeks before I could get someone to explain me where I was going wrong during solving the numerical problem. So, I wish to make a site for students and physics enthusiasts so that they get a platform to discuss their methods of solving problems in Physics. Of course, homework questions with no effort is discouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/103955/physics-problem-solving/103962&quot;&gt;I proposed this site here on on Area 51&lt;/a&gt; and if you wish you can support the site by following it. Feel free to give suggestions regarding the new site proposal in comments or in form of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also feel that this could be a solution to the constant debate whether particular problem-solving question belongs to Physics Stack Exchange or not.&#xA;Then Physics Stack Exchange can go back to its original ideal - that is to serve as a knowledge resource for researchers and academicians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user131786" LastEditorDisplayName="user131786" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T21:05:14.010" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T21:05:14.010" Title="New site proposal specifically for problem solving in Physics on Area 51" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-29T18:53:54.390" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's ignore all the other things that I find wrong with this question for the moment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/289600/&quot;&gt;Is there a tool online that lets me convert acceleration-time graphs into velocity-time and position-time graphs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; appear on it, given that it's more of a software recommendation rather than a book or paper. All of the meta talk I recall and even the tag wiki and banner seem to imply the tag is intended for &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; resources and not for software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are things like this the intended use for this tag? Should software recommendation questions include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T15:00:41.270" Title="Is this what we intended for a resource recommendation?" Tags="|discussion|software-questions|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9304" CreationDate="2016-10-30T10:16:58.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) Speaking in general, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag also covers journals and non-paper electronic materials, such as, e.g., video lectures, on-line resources, software, experimental data files, etc, cf. e.g. its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/resource-recommendations/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, from a practical point of view, why have different standards for books, software, etc? E.g. it seems they should all be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7039/2451&quot;&gt;CW&lt;/a&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) It seems relevant to acknowledge (see several meta discussions, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and links therein) that the Phys.SE community is split on whether resource-recommendations and/or software-recommendations should be allowed or not, since unmoderated, they often tend to turn into too broad, primarily opinion-based link-farms, or even duplicates. The consensus seems to be to allow a limited number of resource-recommendation question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7039/2451&quot;&gt;CW&lt;/a&gt;s. It is up to the Phys.SE community to decide which to keep/close by reviewing and by policy making on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T15:00:41.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9304" CreationDate="2016-10-30T10:41:56.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag was originally &quot;my&quot; project, so I'm probably best placed to speak about the original intent of the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to consider the history of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag. It started out as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/book-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;book-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, and that tag was created with a very narrow purpose: to collect recommendations for &lt;em&gt;textbooks&lt;/em&gt; treating a certain topic at a certain level. Basically, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/book-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;book-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; question would be asked by someone looking to do the equivalent of taking a physics class, except that since they would be studying the material on their own or in a small group, they wouldn't have the benefit of a syllabus that tells them what books to use. The topic and level named in the question would act as the class specification, e.g. &quot;introductory Newtonian mechanics&quot; or &quot;undergraduate statistical mechanics&quot; or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually we generalized the tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; because some people got hung up on the word &quot;book&quot; and thought that only literal printed books should be allowed in answers. That was not the intent. Anything that fills the same role as a textbook would be a valid answer, e.g. a technical blog or a video series (like Khan Academy). However, using &quot;resource&quot; instead of &quot;book&quot; was not intended to change the type of question that the tag would cover. It was still supposed to be for questions seeing recommendations of textbooks or textbook-like resources. The question you're asking about is certainly not of that type, and as far as I'm concerned it should not have the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T10:41:56.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-01T04:11:09.030" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has recently come to my attention that the double surface intregral, namely \oiint, does not work for this site. How can we fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/286268/&quot;&gt;How to infer what integrals and derivatives signify and when to take them?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132789" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T04:34:44.273" Title="Rendering of the double surface integral, Tex" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-11-01T04:37:20.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-01T13:04:19.120" Score="11" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been suggested via a flag that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/286601/44126&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/280545&quot;&gt;deleted by Community&lt;/a&gt; after being closed for ten days, has value to other users asking similar questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally don't understand the closure of this question: in its current form, it's a thoughtful, conceptual question that happens to be phrased in a mathematical way.&#xA;If you're a person who thinks the closure/deletion was a good decision, I'd like to understand your reasoning.  If, on the other hand, you're a person who agrees with me, I'd like a million upvotes. And also a pony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LsHEV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LsHEV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen capture&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T17:31:53.027" Title="Should this &quot;homework-like&quot; question about the AKLT Hamiltonian be reopened, or remain deleted?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9308" CreationDate="2016-11-01T15:39:29.673" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me try to explain why I voted to close, and why I chose not to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, as it is phrased now, seems to ask about very specific aspects of the AKLT model. However, in order to be able provide a specific answer (which does not form a full explanation of the AKLT model), the OP would have to supply sufficient information on their prior knowledge, i.e., lay out the overall scenario considered and their understanding of it to an extent which allows to answer the question in a concise way.  The way the question is phrased now, this is not the case: E.g. the screenshot from the paper is far from helpful for an answer and does not really explain which part of the construction the OP understands (also to me, such screenshots to some extent seem like a low-effort sign), one would have to basically explain the whole AKLT model, which would be a disproportional effort compared to the effort which went into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm not generally against writing a detailed explanation of the AKLT model, but I feel it is slightly lost effort if it is posted as an answer to a question which is seemingly concerned with details -- another poster with questions about the AKLT model will likely not see that the answer contains the full explanation of the model, rather than just assume it is an answer to a very specific question.  Now given the apparent current interest in the AKLT model, I might consider writing such an answer for a question asking about the AKLT model in general. (The downside seems to me that as such, such a question -- which would basically just state &quot;Could someone please explain the AKLT model?&quot; might (rightfully) be badly received here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T15:39:29.673" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6779" CreationDate="2016-11-01T19:29:54.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was reported &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/566&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as issue #566 of the MathJax github page&lt;/a&gt; back in 2013, but I just re-raised it to see what they'd say. The devs indicated that they are working on the fonts for MathJax v3.0, which should arrive next year, and this might solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, they suggested that we add a custom macro to the MathJax configuration for this site, i.e. something of the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You could use the equivalent of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\def\oint{\mathop{\vcenter{\mathchoice&#xA;     {\huge\unicode{x222E}\,}{\unicode{x222E}}{\unicode{x222E}}{\unicode{x222E}}&#xA;    }\,}\nolimits}&#xA;\def\oiint{\mathop{\vcenter{\mathchoice&#xA;     {\huge\unicode{x222F}\,}{\unicode{x222F}}{\unicode{x222F}}{\unicode{x222F}}&#xA;    }\,}\nolimits}&#xA;\def\oiiint{\mathop{\vcenter{\mathchoice&#xA;     {\huge\unicode{x2230}\,}{\unicode{x2230}}{\unicode{x2230}}{\unicode{x2230}}&#xA;    }\,}\nolimits}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to allow &lt;code&gt;\oint&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\oiint&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;\oiiint&lt;/code&gt; to work with their respective unicode characters, with sizing reasonably for displaystyle, and being the proper TeX class to allow limits to be placed appropriately (though the lower limit will be a bit too far to the right, because with won't get the proper italic correction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems excessive to me - there's no need to be hauling around that much specific TeX in the html header for every page on the site over such a seldom-used symbol. If people want to have that solution, they can just use the unicode directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$&#xA;\mathop{\vcenter{&#xA;   \huge\unicode{x222F}\,&#xA;  }}&#xA;$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T19:29:54.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-02T15:20:44.723" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290358/evidence-indicating-that-co2-is-responsible-for-global-warming?noredirect=1#290358&quot;&gt;Evidence indicating that CO2 is responsible for Global warming&lt;/a&gt; was closed as being too broad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many research papers on the topic, however it is a very specific question. If you are willing to suggest edits to re-open this question, I would be willing to listen, but I don't understand why it must be closed. Have I violated a policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hate the fact I have to talk about policy now. But if this question is closed even questions such as &quot;What evidence do we have that GR(insert any theory) is correct?&quot; must also be closed. It is outrageous to me, but it's your site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T15:42:30.037" Title="Why was my question closed as too broad?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9312" CreationDate="2016-11-02T15:35:43.457" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking us to do a literature review on the subject of carbon dioxide and global warming. A student starting a PhD on the subject would spend weeks doing a review like this. Your question was closed as too broad because, well, it's too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T15:35:43.457" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-02T17:51:52.593" Score="-1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290401/methodology-used-in-climate-models&quot;&gt;Methodology used in Climate models&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is annoying and I hate to do this, but I am looking for answers from experts working in the field who have spent several years studying this subject. It is a huge topic and It is definitely not easy to get into. Is it by default that such questions are banned in this site? Is there anything I can do? Because as far as I am concerned it is a very precise question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T20:14:11.610" Title="How do I make this question specific enough to be opened?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9314" CreationDate="2016-11-02T20:14:11.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An elementary approach to your question would be on the size of several textbooks, and it is nowhere &lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;very precise question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your question to be reopened, one approach is to simply make it a resource-recommendation question asking for good introductory textbooks to atmospheric and climate science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you think you can get an understanding of said &quot;methodology&quot; (because yeah, sure, there's only one such methodology, right?) without some serious study, then I'm afraid you're in for a rather steep disappointment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T20:14:11.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9303" CreationDate="2016-11-02T23:33:06.077" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, a whole lot of things have happened, but in a nutshell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our proposal was closed as a duplicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We got an offer from physics overflow to host the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/12350/mew&quot;&gt;Mew&lt;/a&gt; is building the site by hand. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want the relations between our new site, Physics Problems Q&amp;amp;A, and Physics.SE to be friendly. Hopefully, once our site is firmly established, we can establish some sort of protocol for migrating questions between sites, or at the very least recommending the other site to users. We certainly do not want a relationship like that between Physics Overflow and Physics.SE. We would be glad to welcome any users to our site; please see our &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsproblems.nfshost.com/?qa=116/scope-%26-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first draft of our scope and guidelines&lt;/a&gt; to know what we expect. Moderators on the site are myself, S007, and Mew (username Einstein on the new site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site is coming along quite well although there are still improvements to be made, both in the construction of the site and in the general guidelines. If you have any questions, the chatroom on the new site is still under construction, so please ping one of us at &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/47874/physics-problem-solving&quot;&gt;this stack exchange chatroom&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T23:33:06.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9318" CreationDate="2016-11-03T13:47:05.860" Score="8" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know how to ask the question from my practice book &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I add the homework tag and obviously I myself want to know only the concept part and I also give information about what I did and how I approached the problem&#xA;But still my Question was put Off-topic&#xA;if I went wrong in the way of asking the question then I am Sorry for that ,&#xA;I am not that good a communicative english and I completely say and agree 100% that I only require some concept which I may be missing in my approach&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can tell how to ask these problems then it would be really helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already read the meta post but still not getting it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and once again sorry for the bad way of asking my doubt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love physics and also feel it and completely go with concept only thing i am not understanding is how to convey what i want to know&#xA;really I have read the help center and all other stuff and I am trying my best to improve my asking skill in english&#xA;I am a school going student and want to understand the concepts even more by solving the questions itself &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am very sorry for hurting the community I never wanted the value or any thing like that i just needed the concept I wrote the whole question as I thought I would not be very good at asking the question and express my views in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would and I promise that definitely try to improve my communication skills and the way I ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134947" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-11-03T14:17:50.890" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T14:17:50.890" Title="How to ask a practice book question and apology?" Tags="|discussion|support|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9317" CreationDate="2016-11-03T14:16:13.073" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your three questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290344/a-projectile-question&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290337/a-question-of-pulley-and-monkey&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290325/a-question-of-projectile&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) do not really &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; the work you have been putting in - maybe you can be a bit more explicit and write down more clearly and in more detail what your attempts are. Also, questions like &quot;I need to know how to approach this problem&quot; are usually not received as conceptual questions and often seen unfit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that is important to me - you did not hurt anyone's feelings. No one here is going to be insulted or mad because they feel a question might not fit within the policy of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T14:16:13.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9308" CreationDate="2016-11-03T17:31:53.027" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a typical case where an initial close vote encouraged others, in a snowball effect. We've seen a very similar occurrence recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9277/how-are-these-two-questions-duplicates&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This is worrying and should be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think much of this stems from a misguided urge to help the community, the thinking being that if a question already has close votes, it must be bad; hence anybody that can add close votes should do so, to 'get rid of the trash' faster. But the number of close votes required is set at 5 for a good reason, and this kind of thinking lowers the number to 1 or 2, making results much less reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People shouldn't close questions as duplicates unless they fully understand both questions, and their answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People shouldn't close questions that contain equations as 'homework' unless they know how to answer the question themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People shouldn't close QM questions as 'unclear' unless they can confidently answer clear QM questions. (The same going for GR, QFT, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T17:31:53.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9321" CreationDate="2016-11-04T11:18:27.093" Score="21" ViewCount="2574" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, some of you may have heard of how a couple of us tried to propose a new physics site for less conceptual questions and more problem solving, the proposal was closed, and we ended up creating a new site outside of the Stack Exchange network (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9303/new-site-proposal-specifically-for-problem-solving-in-physics-on-area-51&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more details). In this post, I'm going to explain the scope of the new site, the current site construction progress, and at the end, ask about what the community thinks about migrating questions and such matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Scope:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is currently called &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsproblems.nfshost.com//?qa=qa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics.qandaexchange&lt;/a&gt;, and is a site that is for students of physics, physics enthusiasts, and all those who love explaining physics. The purpose of the site is to help answer questions users have about solving specific problems about physics. We do require that work be shown, both the thought process and the actual math - to quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://physicsproblems.nfshost.com//?qa=116/scope-%26-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;our first meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining &amp;quot;efforts&amp;quot; is most certainly not easy and merits some thought.&#xA;[...] We ask that you try to show two main things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your train of thought, or why you were thinking what you were&#xA;thinking. So don't just put the math, necessarily, put why you thought&#xA;that math was appropriate for the situation. Then, the answerer can&#xA;clarify whether or not that approach was appropriate, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What you were thinking. This goes more along the lines of your actual&#xA;attempt, i.e., the math you used to solve the problem. Sometimes this&#xA;is not applicable like in situations where you have absolutely no idea&#xA;what to do. In that case we'd ask that you include #1 and why you are&#xA;having trouble including #2. However, I would always include your math&#xA;if you have it, even down to the more basic steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel welcome to join our site and read through this meta post to have an understanding of what our site is all about, and even contribute to the discussion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Construction Progress:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is incredibly new. Currently, we have a meta, the main site, commenting, answering, flagging, closing, upvoting, downvoting, MathJax accommodation, a basic rep system (I'll be updating this with more information on that for the curious) - in general, the main features of a Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main things we're missing is a full chat room - currently, it is moderators only and doesn't accommodate pictures and such, so currently we are using a &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/47874/physics-problem-solving&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange chat room&lt;/a&gt; (ping us there if you have any questions). We're also designing the background of the site, and the rep system might be updated as we find things we should fix. We're also editing the flagging and closing features such that you pick a reason instead of just typing in whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, please, please: ping us if you notice something terribly wrong or just something that bothers you - we'll work on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Relations between Physics.SE and Physics Problems Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now, the open questions I have for the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you be okay with us copying over (and attributing) some of your closed questions that would be on-topic at our site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you want to have some of our closed questions that would be on-topic at your site? (One of our close reasons is &amp;quot;too conceptual&amp;quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just some thoughts to get the ball rolling. Please, tell me what you think!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-12-03T13:54:17.403" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T13:54:17.403" Title="Physics Problem Solving Site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9320" CreationDate="2016-11-04T15:18:03.653" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll just post a quick note regarding your questions on 'migration'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you be okay with us copying over (and attributing) some of your closed questions that would be on-topic at our site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the user-contributed content on the Stack Exchange platforms is licensed under a Creative Commons license, as indicated in the footer everywhere on the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;user contributions licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc by-sa 3.0&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution required&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you are free to re-post any user-provided content you find on any Stack Exchange sites, as long as you follow the attribution guidelines indicated on the link above (within a reasonable interpretation on the constraints of your platform). Normally this means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicating that the content comes from the Stack Exchange site you took it from, with&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a link to the page it appears in, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a link to the user profile page of the author of the post, along with&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;visual indication of the author's username.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One site that does this correctly is Physics Overflow - if you head over to there and click some random question, odds are that you'll see the post import banner. It doesn't need to be in red, though - it just needs to be clearly visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to these attribution requirements, you also need to comply with the Share-Alike component of the license. You can sell the content if you wish, but whenever you make the content available to other people it needs to be under the CC BY-SA license or &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a compatible license&lt;/a&gt;. Please make sure to take the time to understand this license before re-publishing any SE content - it's good for you, your site, your users, and the internet as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I would recommend that you weigh carefully whether you want to import content directly, as opposed to asking the OP to re-post on your site. That will get you a much more engaged asker, which is particularly important for your model. If the asker re-posts, the legal issues go away, even if it is an exactly identical post. This is because the OP retains the copyright for the content, and they are just licensing it to you separately to the license they gave to SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and, speaking of which, if you haven't done so already, you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to have a clear policy of the terms under which users contribute content to your site. I would recommend a CC BY-SA license as on SE sites and Wikipedia (which among other nice things enables you to use content from SE and Wikipedia), but ultimately it's up to you. Just choose &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, and don't leave it in the air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus far for the &quot;legal&quot; part. As for what the community &quot;wants&quot;, that's mostly what the legal part is for: when users post on Stack Exchange, they agree that their content is re-postable anywhere under those guidelines. (And, of course, if this makes you uncomfortable, you should stop posting now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you build a site that's built entirely (or almost entirely) out of PSE questions then you might get a bit of evil eye from people. This is particularly so if you import questions which are open on PSE and try to hijack or co-opt those discussions (or do stuff that looks like that's what you're doing). If you only re-use closed questions, this is much less likely to be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, though one relatively sensitive issue, and it's to do with how and where you link to your site. If you reuse a closed homework-like question here, the polite thing to do is to inform the OP that you have done so, thus providing them with an avenue for answers on the terms of your new site. I personally don't find it that problematic (particularly for strict homework questions that are clearly not a fit here and which will eventually get sweeped up by the autodeletion mechanisms). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some people here take an exception to that, and it can be perceived as spam. This has happened in the past and it has led to suspensions, so: before you start doing systematic commenting campaigns that link to your new site, make sure that you have a significant consensus both of users and moderators that this is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and one more thing: If you import users in some way, and you make some user board that includes imported users, like Physics Overflow, then do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; list imported users without some visual indication, on the user board itself, that this is what you've done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't do this, then you are making an implicit guarantee that the people you're listing endorse your site, when they may not even be aware of its existence or be less than thrilled at your reuse of the content. This isn't a great way to start a relationship, so be careful with how you present that: be mindful that many people contribute to Stack Exchange under their full names, and that using their names online in ways they haven't approved of is a breach of courtesy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your other question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you want to have some of our closed questions that would be on-topic at your site? (One of our close reasons is &quot;too conceptual&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will continue to accept questions as usual. If someone asks something on your site that's not a fit there but which would be on-topic here, feel free to send them this way. (Of course, we won't relax any standards just because it came from your site, either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T03:02:52.697" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T03:02:52.697" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9323" CreationDate="2016-11-05T18:24:54.640" Score="-4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can people please reopen this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/290723/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/290723/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or can they give me a reason as to why it is an off-topic question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128755" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T23:51:43.130" Title="Can anyone please re-examine this question?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9322" CreationDate="2016-11-05T20:21:11.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the people who voted to close. There are several ways this question took a wrong turn, and I'll try to explain them to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, one thing that annoys a lot of people to death is that you didn't show your work. You didn't show how you got your answer, you didn't show any work that the book did to get its answer, you just gave the problem, your answer, and the book's answer, and was like &quot;figure it out for me!&quot; and people get really annoyed by that kind of attitude. Why? The people on this site are volunteering their time to answer your questions. Most of these people are professors, physicists, and in short, very smart people [1]. You're asking these incredibly smart people who are volunteering their time here to do something as mundane as your homework; the least you can do is make it a little easier for them to figure out the problem by showing your work. If you show your work, people will respect you a lot more here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the problem is a homework problem. Homework is used in a bit looser of a way on this site. Basically, any problem that is some kind of arbitrary type exercise is a homework problem, and we don't exactly appreciate those here. What we simply ask, to prevent questions that just spill the problem onto the page and ask people to solve it, is that you ask a conceptual question - in other words, ask about the thought process, not the actual solving of the problem. You can give the problem to help explain the context, but in the end, we want the answer to your question to be applicable to other people's questions as well, so try to keep that in mind. If your question isn't generalized enough, that is, it really is just, solve this problem, it's probably going to get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also a check my work question, which we just don't allow here. We find they aren't productive questions and don't help anyone else on the site. One thing to keep in mind is the purpose of this site isn't just to help you, it's to help everyone else who has questions about physics. A check my work type question only helps you, and while that is part of the purpose of this site, that isn't the full purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, the question was closed, and will not be reopened. However, if you have a conceptual question, then please ask that, as a separate question, and if it follows the rules of the site, it will be answered. I hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I am not one of those people, I am in fact a middle school student, and I'm very grateful to everyone on this site who takes their time to answer my often-dumb questions. In a nutshell, I don't want you to take this as a criticism of you - this is a mistake a lot of people make when trying to ask questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T20:21:11.007" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9326" CreationDate="2016-11-06T21:27:53.133" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;After I put some tags in a question in a certain order, the site sorts them as it finds best (sort of 'from the more to the less general', probably). At the same time, it seems that the order has importance. For example, the very first tag is prefixed to the question title in my browser bar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't know if there are other effects: are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the rationale behind putting more general tags before, but personally I probably prefer exluding a 'related but not necessarily the main focus' tag than having it right before my title (because it seems like I wanted it there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would it be possible to manually specify tags' order?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should I stop caring about what is the first tag, since everybody know its being there means nothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an example is helpful: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290768/why-are-neutrons-preferred-for-measuring-cosmic-flux-forbush&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is, first of all, a question about cosmic rays and neutrons, and I would be okay in having any of them as the first tag. I assume the answer could be related to the way primary cosmics interact with atmosphere, thus 'atmospheric-science', but I don't see it as the perfect 'first tag'. Would deleting it the correct thing to do? At the beginning I added 'experimental-physics' for quite the same reason, but then deleted it because it struck as the first tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128957" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T21:36:19.777" Title="Manual tag ordering" Tags="|support|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9325" CreationDate="2016-11-06T21:36:19.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109531/how-do-i-edit-the-order-of-tags-on-a-question&quot;&gt;not possible to manually specify the tag order&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77808/does-it-matter-the-order-you-tag-your-question&quot;&gt;second reference&lt;/a&gt;). They are ordered by popularity, from most-used to least-used, and the first one is included in the page title for search engine optimization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE team has never expressed any interest in making it possible to specify tag ordering manually, so I would not expect this to be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I would advise you &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to add or remove tags based on their order, or to try to get a particular tag to show up first. Just use the tags that apply to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T21:36:19.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9328" CreationDate="2016-11-07T12:35:56.553" Score="12" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I write a post that will gain attention from the user's I want to reach? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way should I write my question in order to maximise my chance of obtaining a wide variety of answers, in case I receive just one answer, which may be difficult, or even  impossible, for me to follow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user108787" LastEditorDisplayName="user108787" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T00:12:08.080" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T22:10:25.503" Title="How can I improve the chances of my question being answered?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9327" CreationDate="2016-11-07T14:58:29.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My apologies if  this answer seems patronising in any way. It's based on mistakes I have made myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have this post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;How To Write Good Titles For Questions&lt;/a&gt;, so I will only concentrate on the content part of the question, other than the click bait reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is aimed at users with rep points between 100 and 3000. If you have stuck around that long, you will know the basic etiquette, (for example, don't use all capitals, don't try to be too clever/funny and remember to accept answers, not just upvote them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I welcome suggestions  that serve to improve this answer, within the contraint that brevity is better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some possible ways to improve the chances of getting an answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Think of how your post looks to the users&lt;/strong&gt;. Pick a person that you respect on the site and write as if it's for them. Whether you like this particular phrase or not, you are in effect &lt;strong&gt;selling&lt;/strong&gt; both yourself and your question, every time you post.  People, especially online, like things made easy for them, so make your question as easy as possible to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This type of 2 line question will be closed&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The following data pertains to the performance test of single acting reciprocating air compressor with bore 15 cm and stroke 12 cm. Suction pressure and temperature = 1 bar and 20ºC. Make calculations for the volumetric efficiency.&lt;/em&gt; It shows no effort, no research and basically comes across as a &lt;strong&gt;demand&lt;/strong&gt; for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't write &lt;strong&gt;&quot;There are similar questions&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;...write the link to those questions in your post since &quot;similar&quot; could mean a host of related questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whenever possible, &lt;strong&gt;link to abstracts&lt;/strong&gt; in the first instance and let the user decide from there. If your link to a source necessitates a PDF, include  &quot;PDF Download&quot; in your link, otherwise on tablets and phone, the link won't seem to work, although the PDF is downloading. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid click bait titles&lt;/strong&gt;, you won't get respect for them and they don't improve the standard of the site. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;How To Write Good Titles For Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not use any more images than absolutely necessary&lt;/strong&gt;, and keep them small, as scrolling down unnecessarily large images on phones and tablets will put users off. Big images scream, &quot;look at me&quot;, which does not improve an otherwise valuable post. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3044/hidden-points-of-editing-you-probably-didnt-know/3048#3048&quot;&gt;Reducing Image Sizes &lt;/a&gt; is the place to visit regarding the correct image size to use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use paragraphs&lt;/strong&gt;,  because white space is free. Don't lose the users attention  by hiding a good question  in the middle of 3000 solidly packed words.  A paragraph is easily added by pressing the enter/return key &lt;strong&gt;twice&lt;/strong&gt;, (not once) then preview your post before clicking to add it to the live question list.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A screenshot or photo of a &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt;  extract from a book (within copyright restrictions/ fair usage policies) can be converted to text using one of the many convert to text websites, which may improve your post, compared to posting a picture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Put your question at the end of your post&lt;/strong&gt;, even if you have already got it written in the top and in the title. People misread posts all the time, so make sure you are clear in what you are asking. The readers are actually very often impatient and want to get the question as fast as possible, preferably in the title. If this is not convenient, at least use boldface in the text: My question is such and such, so the reader can skip text. For long posts: a summary that experienced users probably know the details of better than you do, may well suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user108787" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user108787" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T22:10:25.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9330" CreationDate="2016-11-07T16:46:32.030" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens to comments which are moved to chat as times passes by? Are they conserved, or do they disappear after a time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is triggered by the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/271230/ground-state-of-local-parent-hamiltonians-and-invariance-under-local-unitaries&quot;&gt;Ground state of local parent Hamiltonians and invariance under local unitaries&lt;/a&gt; (which got bumped by the Community bot) -- I remember there being a number of comments about clarifying the question, and I don't believe that these discussions have made it into the question. Unfortunately, the link to chat leads to no-where -- is there a way to recover these comments, or are they forever lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T21:40:45.797" Title="What happens to comments which have been moved to chat?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9329" CreationDate="2016-11-07T16:56:48.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#retention&quot;&gt;retention item&lt;/a&gt; of the chat FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, moderators can still see the contents of the deleted room and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/43639/discussion-on-question-by-jacquard-ground-state-of-local-parent-hamiltonians-and&quot;&gt;I have undeleted the one under discussion&lt;/a&gt;. The system will doubtless reap it again in a couple of weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T16:56:48.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9329" CreationDate="2016-11-07T21:40:45.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As dmckee points out, the answer is in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#retention&quot;&gt;Message Retention section of the chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Will these rooms exist forever?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rooms will exist indefinitely, so long as there is at least one person actively talking in the room. A room is considered worth retaining if it has more than 15 messages by at least 2 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/Img/faq-deleted-frozen-rooms.png?v=e77e86064bd6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deleted and frozen rooms http://cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/Img/faq-deleted-frozen-rooms.png?v=e77e86064bd6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rooms not worth retaining which are inactive for 7 days will be deleted. Rooms worth retaining which are inactive for 14 days will be frozen. Frozen rooms do not allow any new messages to be sent, and are not shown in the default room list to prevent cluttering the rooms interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thread you refer to has exactly 15 messages, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191566/clarify-standards-for-rooms-worth-retaining-in-the-chat-faq&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; it was one message short of qualifying. (It needs a full 16 messages (i.e. (strictly) more than 15) to survive. At undeletion it had 15 - note that &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31545734#31545734&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31545735#31545735&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; are separate messages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T21:40:45.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-10T18:51:08.417" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently went trough the marginally pleasant experience of having to take both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;general&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ets.org/gre/subject/about/content/physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physics subject GRE tests&lt;/a&gt; in order to apply to graduate programs in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prepared exclusively using&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;study material provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ets.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ETS&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/practice_book_physics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;practice books containing past exams&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/undergrad/ugs_gre.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ohio State University&lt;/a&gt; makes a total of 4 books available for download each containing 100 multiple choice questions and an answer sheet indicating the correct choice for each),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;online resources such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://grephysics.net/ans/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GREphysics.net&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://physgre.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physgre&lt;/a&gt; for detailed answers, explanations, and helpful discussions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I wouldn't generally recommend this method as a great way for learning anything, least of all the often deep concepts encountered when tackling &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; physics, I believe it is likely the most effective way of preparing for the GREs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, and this leads to my question, the online resources I mentioned under 2 seem hopelessly antiquated. Just take a look at (and then flee again from) &lt;a href=&quot;http://grephysics.net/ans/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GREphysics.net&lt;/a&gt; to see what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no doubt that &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; could provide a vastly superior platform and forum for GRE preparation. Think about it: from MathJax support and commenting to the question-and-answer format and a large knowledgeable user base, it just seems like the perfect place for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all of these test questions admit multiple ways to solve them. So whenever someone posts a GRE question he or she is struggling with (or one might one think about systematically adding all questions to this site), I would expect multiple answers in response. Popular vote can then identify the most concise/quick/accurate one. This rating of content, in my view, is one of the standout features of &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; and something none of the other GRE resources I encountered offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I'm unsure of is what the community thinks of this idea. Searching the site for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=gre&quot;&gt;posts mentioning GRE&lt;/a&gt; currently gives just 33 results and only a few of them contain actual exam questions. Is it just that there hasn't been a lot of interest from users or did the community decide for some reason to suppress any developments in this direction? In other words, what would happen if I went ahead and added a few GRE questions as a start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62859" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T07:43:58.903" Title="Could StackExchange serve as a resource for the physics subject GRE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-10T23:45:24.443" Score="7" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange recently started a collaboration project with the University of Melbourne, in an attempt to improve the automatic detection of duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information on the project and a call for help from the community can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286329/project-reduplication-of-deduplication-has-begun&quot;&gt;Project Reduplication of Deduplication Has Begun!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, Tim Post mentions that Doris Hoogeveen (me) will post a message on the different meta sites to let you know that we're ready for help. This is it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a brief summary, the project is about finding ways to automatically determine if two questions are duplicates, and also to detect the opposite: falsely tagged duplicates. To validate our methods, we need manual judgements from people who really know the data. This is where we need your help. It is impossible to manually annotate all the data from Stack Exchange, and so we have applied several filters to make sure we only show you questions pairs with a high likelihood of being duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participation is completely optional, and there's no minimum time requirement. There's a reputation requirement however: only people who have duplicate question tagging rights on the site can participate. That is people with at least 3000 reputation points, or a gold badge. This is to ensure the annotations are compatible with StackExchange's quality standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in participating in the project, please head over to the annotation interface, which can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can log in with your Stack Exchange account, so no sign up is required. The site also contains some more information on the project, which might answer some questions you may have. And I'm also happy to answer them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134343" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T23:52:10.137" Title="Project Reduplication of Deduplication - Physics" Tags="|discussion|support|duplicates|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-11T22:14:18.877" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post is the second post of a series; the first can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9115/what-are-the-goals-of-this-site?cb=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and the post that inspired this series of questions can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9086/replacing-the-homework-policy-1b-what-is-our-scope-anyway/9096#9096&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much freedom are we willing to grant users in deviating from the goals of this site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the last post, the goals of this site are (by popular vote):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...[this] site should be &quot;for active researchers, academics and&#xA;  students of physics and astronomy&quot;, and that we should encourage&#xA;  posters to think of the site as a tool for jump starting their&#xA;  thinking and not one for getting their work done for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, some points to think about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much leeway should we give in allowing users to ask more basic questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much leeway should we give in allowing users to ask about more practical applications of physics, such as experiment design?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much leeway should we give in allowing questions that could be on chemistry.SE, on biology.SE, on astronomy.SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much leeway should we give in allowing questions that are less conceptual?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the community has reached consensus, as before, an answer will be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: There will be one more foundational question after this one, and then we will return to the discussion of close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.040" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T22:14:18.877" Title="Leeway in deviating from goals of this site" Tags="|discussion|scope|content-level|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9333" CreationDate="2016-11-12T07:43:58.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of the many, many discussions of the homework policy I wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a general rule homework problems and/or worked exercises are used to reinforce something you’ve been taught. For example if you do a special relativity course you will be taught about time dilation and how to calculate it using the Lorentz transformations. Then you’ll be given endless homework problems requiring you to do basically routine calculations like finding the lifetime of atmospheric muons or whether a fast moving pole will fit in a barn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our view is that while the routine calculations are important this site isn’t the place for them. The problem is that (a) they are routine and (b) there are a near infinite variety of such questions, and they would swamp the site. So if you post a question that is of this type we’ll probably close it with the tag [homework-and-exercises]. That doesn’t mean we think it’s a bad question, just that this site isn’t the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still believe this is a valid argument (though not everyone agrees) and it rules out the sort of questions you propose. However let me emphasise &lt;em&gt;that doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad question, just that this site isn’t the place for it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious next question is should there be a site for precisely this sort of question, and as mentioned in the comments to your question &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.qandaexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an experiment to try this is currently underway&lt;/a&gt;. How well this is going to work remains unclear, but at the least the experiment will shed an interesting light on the homework policy here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T07:43:58.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9339" CreationDate="2016-11-13T19:29:38.833" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reputation is 76 and therefore I'm eligible for setting bounties, I can set a bounty for eligible questions and even on my own previous eligible questions, but when I want to set a bounty on my own question that I've given an answer myself (which is incomplete and I'm looking for other answers), instead of seeing &quot;start a bounty&quot;, I see &quot;question eligible for bounty since 6 hours ago&quot;. Clicking on that gets me to the help page. I thought that's because I've given an answer myself (which is fairly logical, but not written in the help page). Therefore, I tried copying my answer to the question details and deleting my answer, but after doing so, nothing changed and I still couldn't set a bounty. I thought maybe that's because I can still see my deleted answer! So I undeleted my answer and made it Community Wiki(!!!) thinking that doing so might help. Even after that, I can't set a bounty!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="135586" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T23:58:03.763" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T23:58:03.763" Title="Why can't I set a bounty on my question that I've answered myself?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9338" CreationDate="2016-11-13T19:43:14.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To avoid overly promotional bounties, if you are offering a bounty on a question that you have already posted an answer to, your minimum spend is 100 reputation (not 50).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T19:43:14.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T20:37:14.777" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackExchange launched in September 2009.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did Physics StackExchange launch in history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12813" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T20:59:24.977" Title="When did Physics StackExchange launch?" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9340" CreationDate="2016-11-15T20:46:29.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;list of Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt; shows some statistics about each site, including its age.  Physics launched six years ago, apparently in November of 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T20:46:29.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9340" CreationDate="2016-11-15T20:59:24.977" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One handy place for this information is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;the user page of the Community ♦ user&lt;/a&gt;, which gives the bot's inception date as 1 November 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, you can go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;the original Area 51 proposal&lt;/a&gt;, which gives a detailed breakdown of the milestones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original proposal was posted on 2 June 2010&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Private beta started on 2 November 2010&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public beta started on 9 November 2010&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The site graduated from beta status on 24 February 2011 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/what-would-be-a-good-celebration-of-physics-ses-graduation-anniversary&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T20:59:24.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-21T13:04:57.410" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to discuss the creation of one or more tags for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_solid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amorphous solids&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glasses&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quasicrystals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many question on the site which address specifically glasses and the glass transition, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23686/nature-of-glass-transition&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76185/glass-properties&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/65740/is-glass-a-liquid&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others are about amorphous solids in general, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/289916/non-glassy-amorphous-solids&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/220302/why-polymeric-solids-are-said-to-be-intermediate-between-crystalline-solids-and&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/233430/why-is-amorphous-classified-solid/&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, other questions are about quasicrystals, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82841/why-do-quasicrystals-have-well-defined-fourier-transforms&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26918/literature-on-fractal-properties-of-quasicrystals&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spin-glass&quot;&gt;spin glasses&lt;/a&gt;, but not a tag for &lt;em&gt;glasses&lt;/em&gt;. I find this to be pretty absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently proposed the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/amorphous-solids&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;amorphous-solids&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm wondering wether it could be useful to create the tag &lt;strong&gt;glasses&lt;/strong&gt; (or glass) since someone asking a question about glasses will probably try to type &quot;glass&quot; instead of &quot;amorphous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it could be useful to create a &lt;strong&gt;quasicrystals&lt;/strong&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the response has been mainly positive (or no one seriously objected, anyway...) I will create the &lt;strong&gt;glass&lt;/strong&gt; tag. As for the &lt;strong&gt;quasicrystals&lt;/strong&gt; tag, I still haven't decided what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T00:03:42.837" Title="Tag(s) for amorphous solids, glasses and quasicrystals" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9347" CreationDate="2016-11-22T13:05:32.573" Score="17" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I come across a post which solely says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;akdhlkfahsdkhfalsdhf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this person is doing a little home-row bashing, but how are we supposed to flag this? My first thought was spam, but I wasn't sure if that was purely for promotional type stuff. My second thought was very low quality, which would've worked, except by the time I had thought that far, the answer had been deleted. =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, given a gibberish post, are we supposed to flag it as spam or very low quality (or even not an answer)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the purpose of the spam flag just for promotional type material or for gibberish stuff as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment brought this to mind: would rude or abusive apply here? Or is that only for, uh, expletive-filled posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T10:32:33.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T19:15:06.080" Title="Is the &quot;spam&quot; flag appropriate for gibberish posts, or is it reserved for promotional material?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9346" CreationDate="2016-11-22T13:19:55.340" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;spam&lt;/em&gt; flag is indeed intended only for promotional posts that have very little to do with the topic at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, utterly meaningless gibberish may well be flagged as rude or abusive. The flag description says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and posting something completely devoid of meaning is certainly inappropriate for respectful discourse. It doesn't need to be actively insulting. Here's the corresponding guidance from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/58035/263383&quot;&gt;the faq post on spam and rude/abusive flags on mother meta&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abuse of the system or community is everything that is created with the intention to harm them. This includes posts that contain no useful content at all – i.e. gibberish posts along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asyuv;laergap897wertp[98 gb;vp98a34&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cats are not allowed to walk across keyboards as part of Stack Exchange posts; this is abuse and should be flagged as such. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/234032/263383&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T14:05:47.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-22T21:59:17.560" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/294243/26969&quot;&gt;Is the definition of the meter arbitrary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/178660/26969&quot;&gt;Is the second defined arbitrarily?&lt;/a&gt; - which is itself a duplicate of &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/73766/26969&quot;&gt;How is a second measured? And why is it measured that way?&lt;/a&gt;. None of these questions, or their associated answers, get to the heart of the closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could close the question for &quot;lack of effort&quot; - but it does explore an interesting aspect of physics, namely the work done to get &quot;truly fundamental&quot; definitions of the SI units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing it with reference to a closed question that itself doesn't address the question is sloppy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to calibrate my thought process. What do others think? I don't think &quot;lack of effort when formulating the question&quot; deserves &quot;lack of effort when closing the question&quot; - unless we make &quot;lack of effort&quot; a valid (and distinct) close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T21:59:17.560" Title="A dubious duplicate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T21:26:29.700" Score="7" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a week-long list of all the questions closed due to the homework flag and tried to gauge whether they were showing any effort at all. This idea came up during a chat session when we were talking about the new physics Q&amp;amp;A site proposal and our homework policy. The hope is to give a few examples of questions that are discussion-worthy (and of questions that are definitely not) and to obtain a feeling for the relative amount of each of those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the chat session of November the first, the question of the homework policy (reformulation) came up again, especially with reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9303/new-site-proposal-specifically-for-problem-solving-in-physics-on-area-51&quot;&gt;turned down new site proposal on SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9320/physics-problem-solving-site&quot;&gt;the newly opened help website&lt;/a&gt;. This led us to consider what kind of questions we would like to be answered there (but not here) and in what way this could affect this site here. (All quotes are from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/chat-session-11-1-16&quot;&gt;chat protocol&lt;/a&gt;.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;David Z: I think it would be useful to have some examples of questions that would be considered good and on topic at the hypothetical new site, from those who are involved in setting it up.&#xA;  Better yet, to have examples of questions which would be on topic there and off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a bit of searching I was not able to find many well written questions closed due to the homework reason and it was not only me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John Rennie :Having gone through a few pages of the search I posted above it's striking how few questions do show significant effort by the OP. The vast majority just post the question and ask how do I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further down the conversation I asked whether the amount of questions which really showed effort but still get closed under the current site policy is that substantial at all. Questions of this form would e.g. be of the &quot;did I do something wrong?&quot;-kind or &quot;I am stuck at this point in my solution attempt&quot;-kind. David wanted to take that to the meta to discuss, but I wanted to collect a bit of data first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Method&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the 1st of November after the chat session until the 8th of November I regularly visited &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?page=1&amp;amp;tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aq%20closed%3ayes&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; of newly closed questions on Physics SE, went through the last 24h and singled out all questions closed for homework reasons. I recorded them and for each of them I gave an estimate whether they could - maybe with a small bit of editing - be made into nice questions that do not fit in with our policy but &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; show effort at solution by the OP. I realise that a) questions get deleted sometimes rather quickly, so I might have easily missed some, b) this is all a bit subjective and c) a week is not that much time. But still, to me it seems like it will be nice to have a bit of a data-based feeling for what we are actually talking about when we are talking about redoing the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Results&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From 87 questions that I recorded as closed due to homework-reasons, I would grade 64 as showing no effort at all. This is 74% of the questions closed for that reason, but still - 23 questions remain. This surprised me, to be honest, and in my mind it is a good reason to actually build up an alternative site for good, well-written &quot;homework&quot;-questions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would be happy about other people doing the same to obtain a bit more data :D I also hope this helps us to decide better when considering how and whether to modify the homework policy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Appendix - List and Links of Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions I gauged as &quot;showing effort&quot; or &quot;being salvagable through small edits&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290321/how-to-prove-that-internal-energy-for-a-system-whose-temperature-is-negative-is&quot;&gt;How to prove that internal energy for a system whose temperature is negative is bounded between 1/2 and 1&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BuuH0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290173/molecular-simulation-of-ideal-gas-descriptive-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Molecular simulation of ideal gas- descriptive statistical analysis&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jz2e1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ixTss.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png 2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290362/question-about-galilean-relativity&quot;&gt;Question about Galilean relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290636/find-the-charges-on-each-capacitor-after-a-long-time&quot;&gt;Find the charges on each Capacitor after a long time&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Si8bJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290728/work-and-kinetic-energy-on-an-incline&quot;&gt;Work and kinetic energy on an incline?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290729/a-neutron-rest-mass-940mev-c-2-is-measured-in-the-lab-to-have-energy-2gev&quot;&gt;A neutron (rest mass 940MeV/c 2 ) is measured in the lab to have energy 2GeV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290987/work-and-change-of-kenetic-energy&quot;&gt;work and change of kenetic energy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290984/a-block-is-pushed-onto-a-conveyor-belt&quot;&gt;A block is pushed onto a conveyor belt&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KSDFI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290922/lagrangian-for-double-atwood-machine&quot;&gt;Lagrangian for double Atwood machine&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oGfwu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291081/find-the-acceleration-for-a-given-mass-and-velocity&quot;&gt;Find the acceleration for a given mass and velocity&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8JkA9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291059/pully-and-inclined-ramp&quot;&gt;Pully and Inclined Ramp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291053/uncertainty-in-the-angle-by-using-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle&quot;&gt;Uncertainty in the angle by using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291022/electric-field-at-centre-of-hemispherical-cup&quot;&gt;Electric Field at Centre of Hemispherical Cup&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GaVyY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291147/oscillation-of-charge-problem&quot;&gt;Oscillation of charge problem&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L6dS0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291133/find-the-time-of-movement-if-the-maximal-height-is-equal-to-the-distance-of-fall&quot;&gt;Find the time of movement if the maximal height is equal to the distance of fall&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wjIYQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291265/two-flashes-of-light-for-two-observers&quot;&gt;Two flashes of light for two observers&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qSXZZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291253/finding-the-period-of-a-system-in-simple-harmonic-motion&quot;&gt;Finding the period of a system in simple harmonic motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291248/how-to-find-the-amount-of-work-done-against-gravity-from-an-object-moving-diagon&quot;&gt;How to find the amount of work done against gravity from an object moving diagonally?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291171/propeller-torque-on-the-shaft-when-rotational-speed-and-thrust-is-given&quot;&gt;Propeller torque on the shaft when rotational speed and Thrust is given&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hkt61.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291377/moment-of-inertia-lab-exercise&quot;&gt;Moment of inertia, lab exercise&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vticH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291294/time-needed-for-photon-to-reach-the-surface-of-a-white-dwarf&quot;&gt;Time needed for photon to reach the surface of a white dwarf &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291266/energy-conservation-basic-qustion&quot;&gt;Energy conservation … Basic qustion&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BZ3RW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291535/quantitative-study-of-mirage&quot;&gt;Quantitative Study of Mirage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions I gauged as &quot;no effort shown&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290130/linear-motion-problem&quot;&gt;Linear motion problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290129/magnitude-of-the-magnetic-field-of-an-electron-moving-with-0-99c&quot;&gt;Magnitude of the magnetic field of an electron moving with 0.99c?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290098/what-is-expected-from-switch-s&quot;&gt;What is expected from switch S?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290075/minimum-velocity-for-a-charged-particle-to-go-through-all-the-magnetic-fields-z&quot;&gt;Minimum velocity for a charged particle to go through all the magnetic field's zone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290051/conservation-of-momentum-and-energy-to-find-speed&quot;&gt;conservation of momentum and energy to find speed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290032/find-the-flux-of-a-charge-through-a-finite-plane&quot;&gt;Find the flux of a charge through a finite plane&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290031/statistical-physics&quot;&gt;Statistical physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290334/calculate-the-velocity-of-the-particle&quot;&gt;Calculate the velocity of the particle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290337/a-question-of-pulley-and-monkey&quot;&gt;a question of pulley and monkey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290344/a-projectile-question&quot;&gt;A projectile question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290236/classical-action&quot;&gt;Classical Action&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290285/oliver-has-a-mass-of-70-5kg-and-can-throw-a-542-0g-rock-with-a-speed-of-10-4m-s&quot;&gt;Oliver has a mass of 70.5kg and can throw a 542.0g rock with a speed of 10.4m/s. What would Oliver's recoil speed be if he were on an icy surface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290286/parachutist-jumps-out-of-plane-find-work-parachute&quot;&gt;Parachutist jumps out of plane - Find work (parachute)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290292/damped-harmonic-oscillator-differential-equation&quot;&gt;Damped harmonic oscillator differential equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290325/a-question-of-projectile&quot;&gt;A question of projectile&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290232/how-do-i-find-distance-if-i-have-acceleration-and-time&quot;&gt;How do I find distance if I have acceleration and time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290228/calculate-the-equivalent-resistance-seen-from-the-e6-generator&quot;&gt;Calculate the equivalent resistance seen from the E6 generator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290218/eigenvalues-of-hamiltonian&quot;&gt;Eigenvalues of Hamiltonian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290175/deriving-bernoullis-equation-from-navier-stokes-equation&quot;&gt;Deriving Bernoulli's equation from Navier-Stokes equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290361/state-the-different-levels-of-stress-and-strain-in-a-rigid-body&quot;&gt;state the different levels of stress and strain in a rigid body&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290365/bosonic-and-fermionic-harmonic-oscillators&quot;&gt;Bosonic and Fermionic harmonic oscillators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290372/mechanics-of-system-of-particles&quot;&gt;Mechanics of system of particles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290480/electric-field-between-three-parallel-plates&quot;&gt;Electric field between three parallel plates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290461/from-special-relativity-to-general-relativity&quot;&gt;From special relativity to general relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290434/how-to-prove-the-following-dirac-matrices-identity&quot;&gt;How to prove the following Dirac matrices identity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290418/angular-spread-in-the-angle-of-refraction-of-the-beam&quot;&gt;angular spread in the angle of refraction of the beam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290415/minimum-area-of-the-disc-to-collect-all-light&quot;&gt;minimum area of the disc to collect all light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290394/nutcracker-problem&quot;&gt;Nutcracker problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290667/quantum-physics-easy&quot;&gt;Quantum Physics Easy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290645/by-how-much-does-the-image-move-when-the-object-is-moved-by-10cm-in-the-given-le&quot;&gt;By how much does the image move when the object is moved by 10cm in the given lens configuration?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290644/what-is-the-acceleration-of-point-d-and-e-when-f-125n&quot;&gt;What is the acceleration of point D and E when F = 125N?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290641/examination-question&quot;&gt;Examination Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290573/how-do-i-prove-that-a-disk-charge-resembles-a-point-charge-if-its-radius-shrinks&quot;&gt;How do I prove that a disk charge resembles a point charge if its radius shrinks to 0? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290546/how-does-the-capacitance-of-a-parallel-plate-capacitor-vary-as-the-length-of-the&quot;&gt;How does the capacitance of a parallel plate capacitor vary as the length of the dielectric inside it changes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290538/how-do-i-express-this-if-i-use-lorenz-transform-it-depends-on-mc2&quot;&gt;How do I express this. If I use Lorenz transform, It depends on mc2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290687/moving-object-vectors&quot;&gt;moving object - vectors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290710/the-classical-theory-of-fields-landau-book-problem&quot;&gt;The classical theory of fields - Landau book problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290837/calculating-magnitude-of-force&quot;&gt;Calculating Magnitude of Force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290739/what-are-the-relationships-between-radius-velocity-and-centripetal-force-on-an&quot;&gt;What are the relationships between radius, velocity and centripetal force on an object?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291006/electrons-during-radioactive-decay&quot;&gt;Electrons during radioactive decay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290965/mechanics-problem-and-confusion-regarding-reference-frame-calculation&quot;&gt;Mechanics problem and confusion regarding reference frame calculation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290955/an-object-that-is-not-accelerating-or-decelerating-has-zero-net-force-acting-on&quot;&gt;An object that is not accelerating or decelerating has zero net force acting on it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290938/confusion-on-conservation-of-angular-momentum&quot;&gt;Confusion on conservation of angular momentum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290930/rotational-imbalance&quot;&gt;Rotational Imbalance&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291079/does-a-current-carrying-solenoid-exert-force-on-itself&quot;&gt;Does a current-carrying solenoid exert force on itself &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291050/classical-mechanics&quot;&gt;Classical Mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291044/do-you-know-why-q2-has-negative-sign&quot;&gt;do you know why Q2 has negative sign?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291032/frame-of-reference-and-work-done-by-pseudo-force&quot;&gt;Frame of reference and work done by pseudo force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291029/induced-current-in-a-circular-loop&quot;&gt;Induced current in a circular loop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291023/x-and-y-collide-find-angle-of-y&quot;&gt;X and Y collide, find angle of Y&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291117/related-to-torque-generated-to-find-input-and-output-torque&quot;&gt;Related to torque generated, to find input and output torque&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291116/moment-of-inertia-in-beam&quot;&gt;moment of inertia in beam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291108/converting-from-rectangular-to-polar-and-vice-versa&quot;&gt;Converting from rectangular to polar and vice-versa &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291096/what-are-energy-levels-sublevels-and-orbitals&quot;&gt;What are &lt;strong&gt;Energy levels, Sublevels, and Orbitals&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291230/boundary-layer-flow-directed-radially-towards-a-sink&quot;&gt;Boundary layer flow directed radially towards a sink&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291209/writing-fokker-planck-equation-for-levy-walker-in-a-given-potential&quot;&gt;Writing Fokker Planck equation for levy walker in a given potential&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291174/what-is-the-kinetic-energy-possessed-by-a-battle-tank-belt-whose-mass-is-m-if-th&quot;&gt;What is the kinetic energy possessed by a battle tank belt whose mass is m if the tank is moving with a constant velocity v?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291459/simple-harmonic-motion-question-with-explanation-please&quot;&gt;Simple Harmonic Motion Question With Explanation Please! &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291444/find-the-height-and-the-instant-velocity-of-a-geostationary-satellite&quot;&gt;Find the height and the instant velocity of a geostationary satellite&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291412/what-are-the-image-formations-at-different-positions-for-plano-convex-and-plano&quot;&gt;What are the image formations at different positions for plano convex and plano concave lenses? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291367/moment-of-inertia-of-semicircular-disc&quot;&gt;Moment of inertia of semicircular disc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291354/poincare-algebra&quot;&gt;Poincare algebra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291582/finding-gravitational-force-on-a-body-of-unit-mass-by-other-three-bodies&quot;&gt;Finding gravitational force on a body of unit mass by other three bodies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/291548/rotational-mech&quot;&gt;Rotational mech&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T23:14:49.160" Title="An attempt at a homework-closure statistic and a bit of input concerning the ongoing policy debate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9346" CreationDate="2016-11-24T05:40:29.343" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have an example? Or is this just hypothetical? I am willing to believe it does happen - but rarely. Is it worth worrying about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything rude or abusive about it. Surely if abuse is intended, something more obviously abusive would have been posted. There's no promotion of anything so it isn't spam either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is gibberish but we have no idea what is intended by it. Assuming this is an answer, it could just be a placeholder awaiting a fuller post. Perhaps the poster already posted an answer, then decided it needs to be reconsidered, but fears deleting may prevent posting another answer. We don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as answers go, such gibberish counts as &quot;not an answer&quot; for which there is a flag reason. Or you could just ignore it and see what happens. It is surely not misleading anyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T19:15:06.080" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T19:15:06.080" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9353" CreationDate="2016-11-24T13:46:40.157" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through the close review queue, I saw the question &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/294480/satellite-is-brought-to-the-earth-s-surface-it-hits-the-earth-with-a-velocity-o&quot;&gt;Satellite is brought to the earth’s surface, it hits the earth with a velocity of 4 km/s - Determine the work done by friction [on hold]&lt;/a&gt; and voted to close as homework. However, before doing so, I saw the close reason &quot;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because '&lt;em&gt;Ive subtracted the values I got, but it says the answer is wrong&lt;/em&gt;'&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this an actual close reason? Would the person who posted that close reason explain their thinking, and/or someone explain if this type of more vague close reason is okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T14:26:04.757" Title="Misuse of custom close reasons" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9352" CreationDate="2016-11-24T14:08:17.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That person was, as you can see in the comments below the question, Alfred Centauri. He was apparently quoting a line from one of the comments that must have, on its own, made the entire post seem close-worthy. I'd not call it a very professional thing to have done and would agree that closing it as homework would be the proper thing to do. My opinion would be that this type of thing is not really okay because it does not actually provide a non-listed but viable close reason, which is the whole point of the custom option. The OP has no feedback about why their post was not acceptable. And there existed another close reason that adequately covered the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, this isn't really good practice. At least, not according to Jim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T14:26:04.757" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T14:26:04.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9356" CreationDate="2016-11-25T21:18:45.660" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've tried to enter both the mathematics and hbar chat rooms, but some weird stuff is happening. Here's what the site rooms page (when you click chat from the drop down stack exchange menu) looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phuhN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phuhN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's what the hbar looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B8EfF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B8EfF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what the hbar transcript looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JSnTI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JSnTI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I restarted my computer; same problem. It was working a few hours ago, then I shut my computer and came back to it just now and it looked like this. I'm using a chromebook. I am at a coffee shop using their wifi, but I'm not sure why that would be a problem. What in the universe is going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="23068" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T09:48:49.753" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T09:48:49.753" Title="Chat is showing up strangely" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9355" CreationDate="2016-11-25T22:38:40.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the sort of thing that happens when a website's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HTML&lt;/a&gt; loads but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CSS&lt;/a&gt; does not: you get the content, but presented with the default HTML style, which has a very 1997 look to it.  My wild guess is that the content and style information, perhaps also for the main site and the chat site, are all served from different machines, and for whatever reason your coffee shop internet is not able to reach the CSS server for the chat site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be plenty of people using the chat server this afternoon, which makes me suspect that the trouble is on your end.&#xA;A check with mods from other sites doesn't raise any reports of problems.&#xA;But I asked if there was any news of a problem on chat :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tentatively blame your coffee shop internet.  See if it's still weird when you get back to your usual configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T22:38:40.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9115" CreationDate="2016-11-26T19:09:15.163" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What most of us would probably not want to see happen is that in a decade or so this site has ceased to exist, that most of the content cannot be accessed anymore. To avoid this, we have to make sure that whatever we do here stays relevant, we need to adapt to new developments in society. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T19:09:15.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9359" CreationDate="2016-11-28T00:33:08.713" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Badge section, what is meant by the following badges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tenacious: Zero score accepted answers: more than 5 and 20% of total&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unsung Hero:  Zero score accepted answers: more than 10 and 25% of total&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are more than 5 and 20% of total, more than 10 and 25% of total?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32229" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T01:19:51.983" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T01:19:51.983" Title="What exactly are the Tenacious and Unsung Hero badges awarded for?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9358" CreationDate="2016-11-28T00:39:21.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;zero score accepted&quot; answer is one the OP has awarded the green checkmark but has a net of zero votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thresholds are somewhat arbitrary, but they are designed to reward people who have a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of such answers by comparison to their total pool of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They mean that you have to have at least [5|10] such answers and those totals have to be at least [20|25]% of the total number of answers you have provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These badges are fairly rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T00:39:21.733" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-28T01:19:48.017" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we see the number on the number count of views (such as 8K view) on a question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that number counting based on the valid account or the valid IP address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is based on the valid IP address, then it does not require a register account to count for the number of views?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user32229" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T01:19:48.017" Title="The view count of a question: Counting on the valid account or the valid IP address" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-11-28T01:20:24.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-29T18:47:29.510" Score="-3" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a Phys.SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/295580/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; based on: &quot;spherical solutions to the Schrödinger equation&quot; and had linked a research paper that formed a basis for my question. I was later informed via a comment by the moderator that the paper I had linked was from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vixra.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;viXra.org&lt;/a&gt;, and that it was not a very reliable source for scientific research information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can anyone provide a list of acceptable(or unacceptable) sites which have reliable scientific papers, upon which questions can be based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what the founder of viXra has to say- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-serious-papers-on-viXra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;click/touch here here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117803" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T17:54:14.597" Title="Reliable sites for science research paper references" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ClosedDate="2016-12-15T19:19:37.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2016-11-29T23:57:14.610" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to provide an update on this old thread: that type of question is not really on topic on this site any more; instead, &lt;strong&gt;those questions should be asked on &lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Academia Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a much better home and will tend to produce better answers. (Moreover, the rare cases that Academia SE is not well placed to answer some particular question can easily be handled on a case-by-case basis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the questions mentioned in dmckee's answer may well be due for a historical lock at this point - they used to be OK, but if they were asked today they would be shipped straight to Academia SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T23:57:14.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9362" CreationDate="2016-12-01T17:54:14.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no site policy that makes it unacceptable to link to papers, or to ask questions based on papers, from any particular source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a short answer but that's really all there is to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are sites that have higher or lower reputations in the research community, but meta is not the place to get into that. You could get a lot of information about it in chat, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T17:54:14.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9368" CreationDate="2016-12-07T09:57:40.503" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/57983/blaze&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; I have 17/5 for the Curious badge. So I have effectively 'earned' this badge more than 3 times over. So why haven't I received it yet? I have maintained a positive question record so what do I have to do to get this elusive badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57983" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T09:15:37.360" Title="Is there some kind of bug preventing me from receiving the &quot;Curious&quot; badge?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2016-12-07T11:24:33.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click on the bronze bar, it shows that having a positive question record is the requirement you need to fulfull.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZdIzU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZdIzU.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of popup on profile&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full description of the requirements for the badge is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions/67399#67399&quot;&gt;on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. It includes the requirement for a positive question record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A positive question record means you don't have too many closed, downvoted or deleted questions, overall. The formula is &lt;code&gt;(total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions ≥ 0.5&lt;/code&gt;. Questions that have been downvoted and closed and deleted count three times in this calculation!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking over your profile, I see that you have enough negative-score, closed, and/or deleted questions to make this statistic less than 0.5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T11:24:33.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T20:49:24.393" Score="7" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When homework-and-exercises questions are voted &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; and put on hold then the OP should be directed to the Meta Question which offers a choice of alternative sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put this proposal into effect, the notification box could be amended to read :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;put on hold&lt;/strong&gt; as off-topic by ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question. &lt;strong&gt;If you cannot do so, recommendations for alternative sites are given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally I had thought of re-directing the OP to the offshoot site &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.qandaexchange.com/?qa=questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Problems Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; set up by heather and Mew, but this might give the impression of official approval of that site by the Stack Exchange community. See :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9320/physics-problem-solving-site/9321#9321&quot;&gt;Physics Problem Solving Site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7299/ethics-redirecting-homework-solution-seeking-questions-to-a-website-built-for/7300#7300&quot;&gt;Ethics - Redirecting homework solution seeking questions to a website built for that purpose&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions in this category are asking specifically for help in solving problems. Typically they include &quot;Is this correct?&quot;, &quot;What did I do wrong?&quot;, &quot;How do I start?&quot; or &quot;What should I do next?&quot; It is far from easy to turn such difficulties into a question of a conceptual nature which would be &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; here, whereas the question as it stands would probably be &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; at sites specifically set up for help with homework or problem-solving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a homework question is closed, the OP often either (i) asks for a recommendation of a website where the question might be suitable, or (ii) asks how the question can be edited to make it &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;, or (iii) argues that the question is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; actually &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;. In the latter case the OP leaves the site having had a bad experience. Recommending where to get an answer will save effort in dealing with these 3 issues and increase the chances of the OP having a satisfactory experience of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please up-vote my question if you approve of my suggestion and would like to see it implemented, or down-vote if you disapprove.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T15:34:08.003" Title="redirecting off-topic homework-and-exercises questions to appropriate sites" Tags="|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9369" CreationDate="2016-12-08T03:37:46.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For now, it would probably make sense to link to the list of alternate sites in the &lt;a href=&quot;/q/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. (Actually, I thought that link was already there, but now that I look it's only in a comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we develop new close reasons to replace the current &quot;homework-like&quot; close reason, we can consider incorporating the link directly into those close reasons. However, we don't have the ability to customize the close reason in the way you're suggesting. The only part we get to write is the middle paragraph,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T03:37:46.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9369" CreationDate="2016-12-08T15:34:08.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have added the following paragraph to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;existing homework policy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Where else can I go?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question was closed as off-topic on this site, and you are&#xA;  unable to formulate it in the ways explained above, there are still&#xA;  other sites where you can ask for help. We keep a list on the thread&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391&quot;&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another&#xA;  internet site where my question might be&#xA;  on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to refine the language further if you want to. It's currently at the end but, to be honest, I don't see a clearer place further up where it could go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of changing the close reason, I don't think that that's really feasible. That middle paragraph is the only thing we can access, and it has some pretty strict length restrictions. It is currently highly optimized and you cannot add stuff without taking stuff that's already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't say any more about this eternal bone of contention, but let me assure you that I do understand where you're coming from - it's just for some reason a much more difficult problem to get movement on than we thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T15:34:08.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-10T18:45:05.533" Score="14" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am bothered by answers chosen by OP questions which are evidently wrong within standard peer reviewed physics , this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/297729/&quot;&gt;an example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since one of the aims of the site is to be searchable and be a basis for physics questions on the net, the set up of a chosen by OP answer with negative votes seems a mockery. A random searcher will not know the rules of the site  and assume the check is for &quot;correct&quot;  and not even go to any other answers even if they have high scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe moderation is reasonable? Could one make such situations unsearchable to the engines? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another solution would be to make a list of such discrepancies and people interested could check up and at least upvote a/the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T09:33:25.353" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T09:33:25.353" Title="Chosen answers with many negative votes" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9374" CreationDate="2016-12-11T06:56:30.423" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that we are not always sympathetic to questions from the less experienced physics fans. In this case the question had attracted two downvotes and no answers by the time I added my rather brief answer. So it's no surprise that when someone took time to write a detailed and apparently considered answer that answer would impress the OP enough to be accepted even though it's wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't want to see this happen the solution is that we collectively have to take the trouble to write a detailed, correct, and most importantly a sympathetic answer. I appreciate there can be various reasons why people don't feel motivated to do this, but if we don't put in the required effort we can't complain about the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2016-12-11T07:38:18.647" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T07:38:18.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9374" CreationDate="2016-12-11T14:28:46.723" Score="-6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am bothered by chosen by OP questions which are evidently wrong within standard peer reviewed physics , this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/297729/&quot;&gt;an example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're bothered by an answer that's &quot;evidently&quot; wrong, you should make some comment to say why it's wrong. Better still you should provide an answer of your own which is correct, and clearly contrary to the answer you think is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since one of the aims of the site is to be searchable and be a basis for physics questions on the net, the set up of a chosen by OP answer with negative votes seems a mockery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the rules. And how do you know that the chosen answer is incorrect? Because it has a lot of negative votes? Judging answers by votes rather than by evidence and references is the mockery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A random searcher will not know the rules of the site and assume the check is for &quot;correct&quot; and not even go to any other answers even if they have high scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A random searcher can soon find out the rules of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe moderation is reasonable? Could one make such situations unsearchable to the engines? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's calling for censorship. I am opposed to that, especially when it's performed by people who get the physics wrong, and they're censoring Einstein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another solution would be to make a list of such discrepancies and people interested could check up and at least upvote a/the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is the correct answer, and yet it has six downvotes. I note  your comment &lt;em&gt;&quot;it is interesting that the OP unpicked the answer after this discussion&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Yes it is. If you'd like to try to explain why it's incorrect, I'd be only too glad to hear it. Ditto for anybody else. An objective of the site is to be a repository of good physics answers. But I'm afraid all too often what you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; is a good physics answers is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T14:39:38.833" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T20:02:41.033" Score="-11" ViewCount="821" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm concerned at Meta posts such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9374/chosen-answers-with-many-negative-votes?cb=1&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. That's where a poster claims that an answer to a physics question is &lt;em&gt;&quot;evidently wrong within standard peer reviewed physics&quot;&lt;/em&gt; when it isn't. Indeed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/297857/76162&quot;&gt;the answer concerned (mine)&lt;/a&gt; refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/401?highlightText=frequency#/vol6-trans/401?ajax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Einstein digital papers&lt;/a&gt; to support its case: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;An atom absorbs or emits light at a frequency which is dependent on the potential of the gravitational field in which it is situated&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer now has 10 downvotes, but there are no comments explaining why it's &lt;em&gt;&quot;evidently wrong within standard peer reviewed physics&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Nor are there any other answers which would inform the reader as to why it's evidently wrong. That's because it isn't, because Einstein was correct. Since one of the aims of physics stack exchange is to be searchable and be a basis for physics questions on the net, a large number of negative votes for a correct answer makes an absolute mockery of the site. A random searcher will assume the negative votes mean the answer is most definitely incorrect, and will assume other answers with a large number of upvotes are correct, even when they're definitely wrong.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've felt this has been a problem for physics stack exchange for some time. I see correct answers with very few upvotes, and incorrect answers with lots of upvotes. It's as if we have some posters who firmly believe that &lt;em&gt;what they think&lt;/em&gt; is correct, regardless of any lack of references or references to the contrary. They then come out with statements to the effect that &lt;em&gt;this is the mainstream view&lt;/em&gt; when actually it's a popscience view based on a rather peculiar mixture of arrogance and ignorance. It surely cannot be good to give free rein to people who don't understand say relativity and allow them to conspire to downvote and demerit or even censor correct answers, then bully posters into removing acceptance flags whilst refusing to address the physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps some moderation would be reasonable to address this? I see a lot of expert posters who are ex posters, and I think that this issue is the reason why, not the many questions from non-experts. Another solution might be to make a list of discrepancies or contested answers and actively discuss them to flush out the issue of what's right and wrong. Without any action, I fear physics stack exchange is in a downward spiral wherein it drives away expert posters and peddles and promotes ever-more popscience misinformation. What to do? Your answers please. Perhaps there's nothing that can be done. Science is not a democracy, all the upvotes in the world won't make a wrong answer right and vice versa. Perhaps the stack exchange model is simply not suitable for science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It's been 4 days now, and &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; nobody has addressed the physics. I rest my case.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T12:59:49.470" Title="How can we combat arrogance and ignorance on physics stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2016-12-13T21:25:45.763" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, there are always multiple reasons for downvotes. Your answer begins with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not quite clear what you're asking  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not downvote your answer, but to me, an answer from someone who's not sure of the question might in general be downvoted because I think it's a bad starting point to answer a question. Further, referencing some paper in a peer reviewed journal does not make the claim true. There has been wrong stuff published in peer reviewed journals by good scientists and we all know it. This cannot be the only criterion for scientific correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the record, I want to state that I have no background in GR and absolutely cannot comment on the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; of the question involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But deviating from your example, which as you said, is just an example and not the main issue: Would it be a problem if people without the necessary understanding of the physics involved kept on upvoting the wrong answers? Absolutely, yes. I do not want to deny that this does happen - wrong answers or answers without the adequate rigor or bad answers getting accepted and voted up while better answers stay unread, things like that. The question is - is it a widespread problem on this website? And to me, and I think to most of the users of the website, it does not seem like it - a small nuisance at most, probably not even that in most cases. I do assume that because I have not heard it brought up often. Therefore, what you will need to do is to provide us with examples to convince us of the issue. For the broader audience, it would probably help if they are a bit more accessible than general relativity (or does the phenomenom maybe only take place in that area?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T21:25:45.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2016-12-14T22:50:50.003" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the specific case at hand there are indeed comments on your answer, as well as there are other answers that are somehow more complete and address all the corner points of the question (maybe not all, but more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would expect from an answer to a question in physic would be at least a minimum amount of calculus to support the claims in the framework where the question takes place; that seems to be lacking for that specific case, as well as for some other links to answers of yours that you have provided. On the other hand, instead, it seems that your argument is to always take only one principium primum (conservation of the energy for instance) and blindly apply it with little to no context: especially for areas like quantum mechanics or general relativity, that are indeed quite complicated from the mathematical point of view, one has to be careful to all details, to the integrations paths, to the convergence of the integrals, to the self-adjointness of the operators and the like, otherwise the application of the principle itself makes no sense. In general relativity this often leads to wrong conclusions and I suppose this is what is meant by &lt;em&gt;&quot;evidently wrong within standard peer reviewed physics&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Those conclusions lack the precision of the details and as such are misleading and should be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover the idea of providing this one reference of this one author or citing this one very famous physicist is a wrong approach to the scientific method. Something is either correct or not, no matter who the person is to claim it. Einstein has marvelously contributed to modern physics, but he is no better to be considered than any other physicist who do their job on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the second part of your concern&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see correct answers with very few upvotes, and incorrect answers with lots of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly agree that the peer review on this exchange is not the best and we regularly have mediocre answers with too many upvotes. Perhaps the entire idea of accepting an answer does not really work on physics, as in most cases the original poster knows little to nothing to distinguish the good from the evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84488" LastEditorUserId="84488" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T00:14:27.043" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T00:14:27.043" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9374" CreationDate="2016-12-15T06:22:31.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer which is &amp;quot;accepted&amp;quot; by the OP is merely that - the answer which the OP most approves of at the time. It is not intended to be the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; and there is no guarantee that it is even &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that a random searcher might wrongly assume the &amp;quot;accepted&amp;quot; answer is &amp;quot;correct.&amp;quot; But that is a fault in the &lt;em&gt;presentation&lt;/em&gt; of the feature rather than its &lt;em&gt;operation&lt;/em&gt; - how it appears rather than what it is intended to do. &lt;em&gt;(Perhaps the green tick needs to be replaced by something less evocative of official approval - a smiley face?)&lt;/em&gt; And no sane visitor would think an answer &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; if it has overwhelming down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Centre explains :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean when an answer is &amp;quot;accepted&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepting an answer ... simply means that the author received &lt;strong&gt;an answer that worked for him or her personally&lt;/strong&gt;. Not every user comes back to accept an answer, and of those who do, they might not change the accepted answer even if a newer, better answer comes along later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules of the site allow the OP complete freedom in choosing which answer to &amp;quot;accept&amp;quot; - even an answer which is &amp;quot;obviously&amp;quot; incorrect. Probably the choice in this case was intended to be a deliberate &amp;quot;poke in the eye&amp;quot; to those who criticised the question. However, any interference with this choice by a Moderator could only be done if there was an abuse of the system, and even then could only remove the green tick and not award it to another answer. I agree with John Duffield that such a practice would stray into censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing an &amp;quot;accepted answer&amp;quot; to ensure that it is the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; would be altering the central purpose of the feature, and it would be fraught with difficulties. If the &amp;quot;best answer&amp;quot; is the one with the most upvotes the feature would be redundant. If it is the choice of some other user or group of users, then who exactly will have this privilege?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large number of upvotes is no guarantee that the answer is &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; or even correct. As with questions, it is only an indication of popularity. Votes for answers only indicate whether or not they are &amp;quot;useful&amp;quot;. This is explained in the Help Centre :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is voting important?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is central to our model of providing quality questions and answers; it is how ...good content rises to the top...incorrect content falls to the bottom...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is &lt;strong&gt;interesting, well-researched, and useful&lt;/strong&gt;, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information. The more that people vote on a post, the more certain future visitors can be of the quality of information contained within that post...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the two Johns that poor or incorrect content should be highlighted by :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;down-voting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commenting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;posting a correct answer which others can up-vote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related Meta questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6867/&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t bad content downvoted and commented on enough&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5675/&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to use the low quality review system to get rid of &amp;#39;bad&amp;#39; answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T06:31:40.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-16T11:28:48.403" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see sometimes that some interesting questions that appear on the site have already been asked in the past and are flagged as duplicates. I thought it could be interesting to have a collection of the most asked, important and/or well-answered questions. It's still a vague idea, also because I don't know completely the dynamics of the site, but I think it could be interesting to have an easy-to-browse encyclopedia, yet at the same time different from the wikipedia style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T18:21:24.317" Title="Encyclopedia of the best questions and answers" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2016-12-16T11:53:15.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of how to decide what is right and wrong in science is a vexed one and always has been. The current approach is peer review, but of course the problem is how to select the peers. Eminent scientists have been wrong in the past and will be wrong again, so ultimately no-one’s judgement can be trusted without reservation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the academic publishing world the editors of journals will select reviewers who have at least proved they can satisfy a PhD panel that they have a reasonable grasp of the subject, and preferably have a track record of well cited publications. This doesn’t mean the reviewers will necessarily be correct in their judgement, but it means they are more likely to be right more of the time than people less qualified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that no review is utterly reliable, but we expect that most reviews will be mostly reliable most of the time, and this is probably the best we can hope for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between an academic journal and this site is that here the peers are self selected. Anyone can join the site and (subject to some very low reputation requirements) vote and comment on content. This makes the votes (up and down) a less reliable method of peer review than traditional academic peer review. The various deficiencies of the voting system have been mentioned in other answers so I won’t go into them here. In any case I want to make a different point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best form of vote is to post an answer yourself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vote takes only a second to post. A comment takes a bit longer, but comments are short and there is a temptation is to be cavalier in comments because they can’t be downvoted and they can be deleted without trace in case of embarrassing blunders. But an answer takes time and effort to write, and by posting it you are publicly exposing yourself to the judgement of the site users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a site member posts an answer contradicting some other answer that is the most effective form of peer review - far more effective than just clicking the up or downvote buttons. This is my own personal stance. If I disagree with an answer to the extent that I want to downvote it I will look to see if there is a better answer, and if there is no better answer I will post one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When competing answers exist this makes it far easier to judge their relative merits. What matters is not the absolute values of the votes received but the comparison between the votes on the two or more answers. The voting process is still subject to the sort of statistical scatter described in other answers, but to that scatter will affect all answers and to some extent even itself out. There is a further statistical averaging by looking at multiple cases where members of the site have posted contradictory answers. And of course site members can look at the profiles of the answerers to judge how well respected they are in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of all this is that I content that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the voting system is (about) as good as it can be under the circumstances&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the way votes are used on competing answers is a good way to judge posts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the PSE is not &lt;em&gt;in a downward spiral wherein it drives away expert posters and peddles and promotes ever-more popscience misinformation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T11:53:15.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2016-12-16T13:49:06.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, first of all, I want to make it very clear that I'm not going to get involved with the topic that is the root of the rant-like part of your question. That there is what we call a &quot;no win&quot; scenario. I'm not touching it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me, instead, address what is the face of your question. Namely, how to combat arrogance and ignorance on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arrogance is defined as having or displaying an undeserved amount of pride in oneself. Acting like you're smarter, faster, stronger, or a better air guitar player than most would agree that you actually are. To some extent, this means that most people you come across will have some degree of arrogance about them. It's only natural that people tend to see themselves in a more positive light than others do. It's true, in this medium, the most common form of arrogance you will encounter is people who sees themselves as much smarter than any empirical evidence would support; this can sometimes be a big problem. I do not mean to say that it is a big problem for us when one person is being arrogant; I mean you will find a large number of people around here who are arrogant in this way (myself included. But I'm the almighty Jim, so my undeserved sense of self pride is completely deserved). This manifests itself in many ways. You will find those that stick to their initial beliefs about a topic, regardless of what references say. You will also find those who stick to what their favourite references say, regardless of what the actual mathematics (which trumps any reference like it was a presidential election (I hate that Donald has ruined the word &quot;trump&quot; for me (Yes! An aside within an aside within an aside. Inception!))) or even more modern references (which have the advantage of hindsight over some of the older, big-name references) might say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that is most likely going to be debated in the comments below until I no longer care about this discussion for the exact same reasons as what I'm going to describe later on is this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sentence makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not the problem; I'm just saying that previous sentence actually makes sense. Go ahead, read it through again, I'll wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there is no universally true indicator for when you are being arrogant. I could say that any time it seems like pretty much everybody is against you and you aren't changing your opinion because you see yourself as right while everyone else is wrong, then you're being arrogant. While I consider that a true statement, it doesn't change the fact that there are times in history where everyone has been wrong except for one person and it's nearly impossible to tell if the lone fighter is actually correct. That said, they're still arrogant because they see themself as smarter, or more logical, than everyone else, which I guarantee you is not true about anyone on Earth. However, it's tough to self-identify when you are being stubborn out of pure arrogance or because you are actually right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, it's exceptionally tough for a group of people to overcome the collective arrogance of &quot;We're right because there's more of us&quot;. What? No. That's really not the way it works. Statistically, you have higher odds of including the correct answer or noticing a mistake in a larger group of people, but that doesn't make it necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so both sides of any deadlock are probably being arrogant, but both can't be right (both CAN be wrong). True, here's a few possible ways to deal with arrogance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Accept that they're arrogant and work around it. We all have faults, forgive them and be patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If you can't get past it in a professional manner, just back off and avoid engaging them on that subject. That might mean that occasionally you have to go &quot;I'm not going to argue about this&quot; and let them think they've won, but you can keep giving your reasoning and conclusions when asked for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) If it's a common cause for disagreement and you have to work through the issue to coexist, try arguing with yourself. Take on their point of view (you need to understand what it is first) and argue with yourself against your own point of view (here's the important part) &lt;em&gt;using their style of arguments&lt;/em&gt;. If they are using math, you have to use math to argue their points. If you end up at a point where you're pretending to argue their side with &quot;It is right because I say so, even though your reference says otherwise&quot;, then you're doing it wrong. You're being arrogant there and failing to be open-minded to another's perspective. Don't feel bad, we all do that every day of our lives. If you can reach a point where you make good arguments for them, then you know how to argue against them. Use that, because nothing combats stubborn arrogance like using their own arguments against them. An arrogant person can't argue with themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for ignorance (right? That last part took a while). Ignorance is the choice (conscious or subconscious, either one) to ignore facts. If people are going to be ignorant, there's one easy solution: ignore them. If it's the entire community, then you're in the wrong place and you need to &quot;get the hell outta dodge&quot;. That's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now serving number 286.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2017-01-03T12:59:49.470" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T12:59:49.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9387" CreationDate="2016-12-16T15:40:50.213" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/121/informed&quot;&gt;Informed&lt;/a&gt; Badge must not be given so easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before giving the informed badge, newcomers should not only be briefed about basic rules and regulations of Physics SE , but also :-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be given more information about the system of badges and reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be given a short article on using Mathjax and Latex.&#xA;( I have seen many newcomers not being aware of these things )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133159" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T15:58:19.300" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T18:42:35.573" Title="Awarding Informed Badge" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9382" CreationDate="2016-12-16T15:51:07.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean kinda like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4653/8563&quot;&gt;FAQ questions (on the main site)&lt;/a&gt;? That's an old effort, though, and I would argue that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are already plenty of automated solutions, including the ability to sort by &lt;code&gt;votes&lt;/code&gt; and by &lt;code&gt;frequent&lt;/code&gt; on the main page and on specific searches. These automated solutions go a long way for e.g. finding that duplicate that probably exists. My impression is that search-then-filter-then-sort-then browse is an underused way to find content on this site, and it's a lot more powerful than we give it credit for.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To go beyond that, you'd need a curated list, and we don't really have the volunteering capacity to keep such a curated list up to date. (However, if we suddenly get five people jumping at the chance, then go for it.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More than that, curated lists have the problem that they're pretty subjective, and if you're relying on the list to be an indicator of things like &quot;good&quot; or &quot;interesting&quot; questions, then making it depend on someone's subjective judgement is not, I think, a direction this site should be taking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if people want to jump on the old thread I linked to above and keep it up to date, there's nothing really stopping them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T15:51:07.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9385" CreationDate="2016-12-16T16:04:35.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have very little control over this. Physics Stack Exchange is part of a network of &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;160+ sites&lt;/a&gt;. All the sites share a common engine, so it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to request and obtain site-specific changes to the common behaviour, but they need to be very well justified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The place to request changes to the engine is at the overarching meta site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, where it is easier to get the attention of the community team and the developers. Our meta site is better for issues specific to this site and its community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I don't think it's particularly problematic. The entry-level badges are awarded easily as an incentive for new users to explore the site's features, by adding some fake internet sugar on top. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's not that important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the MathJax side, though, you're right, but that's not quite the right approach - I advocated &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/please-link-the-mathjax-help-to-the-meta-math-se-tutorial&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; earlier &lt;s&gt;but it's not yet implemented&lt;/s&gt; and it just went live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T18:42:35.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2016-12-16T22:04:13.940" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m going to post this as a separate answer because it’s not a direct answer to the question. However I think, or at least I hope, it addresses the underlying problem that has led to your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crux of the matter is that the theory of relativity taught to today’s physics students is not the same as the theory that Einstein developed in 1915. Yes the core principles are the same, but in many ways the theory has been changed to the point where Einstein would hardly recognise it. Ironically the main developments happened at around the time Einstein died, i.e. starting in the mid fifties, so he never saw them and whether he would have approved or not we can never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally there is a nice article on this subject on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mpg.de/dossier/einstein/relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web site of the Max Planck Institute&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that the physicists answering questions today have been taught modern relativity and not the 1915 theory. Your position seems to be that the 1915 theory is sacrosanct and that any answer that deviates from it is wrong. Well, you’re entitled to your opinion but no-one taught modern relativity is going to agree with you, and when you post answers that contradict what modern students have been taught those answers are going to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your going in point in this question is that Anna V was &lt;em&gt;arrogant and ignorant&lt;/em&gt; (your words) to post a question here stating that an answer of yours was &lt;em&gt;evidently wrong&lt;/em&gt; (her words). I agree that Anna could have chosen her words more sensitively, but the fact of the matter is that your answer does not accord with modern relativity while the competing answers from me and Rob Jeffries do. The result is that everyone taught from a modern textbook (i.e. everyone) downvoted your answer and upvoted my and Rob’s answers, and this is a pattern we’ve seen consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not going to say who is right and who is wrong because I don’t think that’s particularly useful. What I will say is that your steadfast conviction in the 1915 theory places you in a minority of one, with the consequences that brings. We can proceed on that basis, but it will inevitably mean your answers are consistently downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you wish to take this forward I will leave to you, but relativity has changed to make it more powerful and easier to learn and use, and no-one taught modern relativity is going to go back to the 1915 theory. However you personally may feel about this that is the way things are and they are not going to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T22:04:13.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2016-12-17T02:25:07.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, the agony of questions like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arrogance, meh. Physicists have certainly worked through enough degrees and years of maddening &quot;when will I ever get my PhD?&quot; craziness that, while it does sound incredibly fun, also is very difficult. Everyone knows that physicists are the best anyway (at least according to xkcd&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Einstein is rolling over in his grave&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; right now. How do I know this? I don't. But please, don't use his name as a banner of righteousness, because it's not. Einstein was, in fact, wrong&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;(::gasps::)&lt;/em&gt;. Besides, as Sir John Rennie's answer so nobly points out, general relativity circa 2016 is not the same as general relativity circa 1905. I know that it is shocking that science &lt;em&gt;advances&lt;/em&gt; but, you know, it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know, I was reading the other day (I wasn't, really, but I need to set up this joke somehow) and I found an incorrect arxiv paper! I think arxiv isn't suitable for science! And neither is Elsevier, or any of the other journal publishers! And neither is stack exchange, because every once in a while there is a downvoted but wrong answer! It all makes a mockery of science and life in general! Exaggeration! Hyperbole! Exclamation points!!!&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've kind of fulfilled my sarcasm quota for the day (yes, this was sarcasm. shocking, I know) so I'll end this now. Except for footnotes, because everyone loves footnotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jTkLl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jTkLl.png&quot; alt=&quot;fields by purity&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Well, actually, he was cremated, but whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; For instance, he initially rejected the Big Bang, fudged out the cosmological constant...great (wo)men make mistakes too.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; Yeah! Footnote in a footnote! Anyway, as Kyle Kanos points out, the cosmological constant was added back in, but Einstein made the mistake originally (and called it one of the biggest blunders in his life). Just to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Seriously though, just because something is wrong in some spots doesn't mean it is completely wrong. Otherwise we'd probably give up on physics itself. (Ahem, Newtonian mechanics, I'm looking at you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is truly bothered by this admittedly very sarcastic (eh, probably overly sarcastic) answer, do let me know and I can remove it. This was merely to point out the comedic aspect of this question and its answers, and hopefully to make you grin at least a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T19:52:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T19:52:09.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-17T18:19:20.277" Score="1" ViewCount="949" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no intention being rude, and have been hesitating a long time before posting this question. The fact is that a user of the Physics SE includes this quote in his public profile: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There will come a day, when all the lies will collapse under their own weight, &amp;amp; truth will again triumph.&quot;-Goebbels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether it is acceptable to quote a Nazi claim on Physics SE. The problem is not in the claim itself, which, if it was not from Goebbels, wouldn't be shocking, but in the fact that a user willingly claims that he has no problem showing everyone that he quotes a Nazi. Knowing all the horrors done by the Nazis, I find this very shocking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kindly suggest this user to remove this quote from his profile, in respect to all people who died because of the ideas and the crimes of the Nazis. And, especially for a physicist, in respect to Einstein who was Jewish himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: the user has removed the reference to Goebbels. I find it nice from him, it shows he feels concerned by what other people may feel (see the comments that were moved to chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user130529" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditorDisplayName="user130529" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T13:13:56.950" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:13:56.950" Title="Is it acceptable to quote a Nazi claim on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9382" CreationDate="2016-12-17T18:21:24.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one (not that my opinion goes a long way around these parts) think this as a really good idea. With over 87,000 questions and answers on this site and with many of these answers written by seriously good communicators, if collected in properly they could make an outstanding resource (not saying that it's not already :) ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong Physics SE is great but one question, as you would expect, does not naturally lead onto the next. Let us say I am studying QFT and the 'S-matrix' and find a question on this site saying e.g. 'How is the S-matrix defined?' naturally the next thing I would want to know is 'What is the S-matrix used for?' and 'How do I use the S-matrix?' and then possibly  'Any examples of the S-matrix?'. As it currently stands I would find my self having to individually search for each of these answers on SE or in books or on the web&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be great would be a resource that had for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S-Matrix&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How is the S-matrix defined?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What is the S-matrix used for? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How do I use the S-matrix? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Any examples of the S-matrix?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where one question naturally leads to the next and where they are chosen on quality and richness of information. Such a source may already exist, if so please direct me to it. If not I would be happy to contribute in the creation of something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Rarely do I find a source that answers all the questions I have on a topic.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T18:21:24.317" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9390" CreationDate="2016-12-17T20:58:57.437" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;People can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31504/rules-for-profiles/31505#31505&quot;&gt;put anything they want in the bio section of their profiles&lt;/a&gt;, except for egregious hate speech and pornography. The mere fact that a quote was said by a Nazi, or is attributed to a Nazi, does not make it egregious hate speech. So this is fine (or at least, not deserving of moderator action). You can, of course, discuss it with the user yourself and &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; them to remove the quote, but if they ultimately choose to keep it there, that's their right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not extend quite the same tolerance to profile pictures and usernames, because those are displayed everywhere you post throughout the site. For example, using a swastika for your profile picture is not acceptable. (If one did so, a mod would clear the unacceptable content and send you a polite note to let you know that we did so. It's not a suspension-worthy offense, at least not the first time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prepared with the help of information heather, dmckee, and Kyle Kanos posted in the comments&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T20:58:57.437" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T00:34:42.830" Score="28" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hooray, hats! (Shameless plug towards a hat.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hat options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am your father - post/vote on meta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Running ragged - earn 150 rep on three non-SO sites in 15 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;011 - collect 11 hats&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Snapchat - answer in 30 minutes, +3, and accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other hats I haven't yet had time to add, I will =)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus secret hats, of course...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T12:33:18.547" Title="Winter bash 2016 - hats are live!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9397" CreationDate="2016-12-22T12:33:07.337" Score="5" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to post a question here, but felt unsure if it was topical here, or if I should post on World-Building instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, my question has a premise that something magical (and probably impossible) had happened and to ask what the implications of that happening would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm hesitant to post on World-Building is that I'm not asking for the sake of telling a story. I'm interested in the hard physics of my magical hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8916" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T12:41:13.307" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T03:27:24.020" Title="Are the implications of magic on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9390" CreationDate="2016-12-22T20:14:17.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could understand including the quotation,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There will come a day, when all the lies will collapse under their own weight, and truth will again triumph.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, forget who said it - how is the collapse of lies and the emergence of truth a bad thing, let alone anything resembling hateful speech? In physics, we are always after the pursuit of truths about the Universe and the way it behaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, although Goebbels was a Nazi, that does not invalidate or turn all of his statements into hate speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few years ago, Prof. Walter Lewin at MIT was accused of sexual misconduct, and stripped of his Emeritus title. In addition, MIT removed &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; his online lectures, which rightfully caused an uproar, because they were a great contribution to physics education, and whether he was guilty or not, does not mean students can't benefit from them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, it applies generally that the contribution of a person is not invalidated by their behaviour, it can at most change one's perspective of their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this quote is by no means any significant contribution, but including it in a profile certainly does not warrant a tantrum about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T20:14:17.973" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9395" CreationDate="2016-12-22T20:17:12.147" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, questions involving magical situations are not generally on topic here. Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; lists &quot;questions about fictional physics&quot; as one of the off-topic categories. The reason is basically what Kyle Kanos said in a comment,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Pretend the laws of physics are broken, what does physics say happens later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions just don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, depending on what exactly you want to ask and how you ask it, &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; there is a way to make this okay. In particular, if your magical situation is something that could plausibly occur under the physical theory you're asking about, or at least something that makes a valid initial condition for the theory, you can probably frame that question in a way that makes it on topic. This should be considered &quot;advanced Physics SE usage&quot; though, and I would suggest seeking advice in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; before posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T20:17:12.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9393" CreationDate="2016-12-24T11:36:13.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can see from my &quot;Buche de Noel&quot; hat (won on the 24th Dec); there appears to be a bug in the hat software!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T11:36:13.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-24T21:05:41.730" Score="16" ViewCount="614" Body="&lt;p&gt;e.g. shirts or hats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be fun.&#xA;Post design proposals below as answers and we can take the top voted one after a couple weeks and place an order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to do the purchase and distribute the pieces to other users as appropriate, but if the mods can get the SE staff to do it for us that would be nice too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&#xA;Because they're going to take our Winter Bash hats and that's just not cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T02:38:18.003" Title="Let's design and get some Physics Stack Exchange swag" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9399" CreationDate="2016-12-24T22:32:10.787" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;T-shirt design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Front:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SZo9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SZo9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Back:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j7hec.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j7hec.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes: front image is of the equation for the standard model of particle physics; the back is a picture of a Mexican hat. The back picture could obviously be better, but I was in a tad bit of a hurry when I designed this. =) Designed on CustomInk, Gildan Ultra Cotton T-shirt, color: royal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T22:32:10.787" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9395" CreationDate="2016-12-25T03:27:24.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try a Philosophy of Science group. &#xA;Actual magic means something unexplained has happened. That means a hidden explanation, potentially new physics. Provided the observations are sufficiently credible or reproducible it would be worthy of investigation.&#xA;Science is founded on the idea that observed past behaviours can be used to predict the future. And if predicting the future is the aim, there's no better approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140002" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T03:27:24.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9406" CreationDate="2016-12-25T04:46:44.833" Score="4" ViewCount="569" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it permitted or not or frowned upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find a tag for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I hope you'd rather see discussions about &lt;em&gt;&quot;what is physics?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;falsifiability&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (and some of the stuff that Smolin complains about) here among physikers, than in a purely philosophy-bent forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we ask in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt; about whether or not the following is &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt; or is still philosophy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;string theory,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;M theory,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;multiverse?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grateful for any response, including downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37102" LastEditorDisplayName="user36790" LastEditDate="2016-12-25T05:27:05.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T16:30:48.003" Title="May I ask a question about philosophy of physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9402" CreationDate="2016-12-25T06:36:03.563" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You called it in the comments: no, those questions are generally off topic here. We consider things like the meaning of falsifiability not to be physics. They can be of interest to physicists, but that is not the criterion we use to determine what is on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For material of this nature, I suggest going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Philosophy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; and checking their &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/epistemology&quot;&gt;epistemology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/philosophy-of-science&quot;&gt;philosophy-of-science&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T06:36:03.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9402" CreationDate="2016-12-25T20:17:18.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your queries about philosophy applied to things like grand unification (M-theory, string theory) are discussed in the book, &lt;em&gt;String Theory and the Scientific Method&lt;/em&gt; which may be of interest to you. The book addresses more general issues such as testability for a theory, and Bayesian analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, to address your question about whether string theory or M-Theory is philosophy or science, it is obviously science. String theory emerged originally from bootstrap approaches to the S-matrix, and later on the worldsheet action was developed. What emerged was to a large extent simply the product of exploring their consequences and the constraints they give rise to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe to posit the starting point may be argued to be philosophy, but the process by which we have explored the framework that is string theory is certainly scientific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T20:17:18.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9402" CreationDate="2016-12-26T16:58:43.183" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;May I ask a question about philosophy of physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask any such question of me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it permitted or not or frowned upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From moderator David Z's response, it looks like such questions are frowned upon. For myself, I think that if you can't ask physicists about this stuff, and if instead you're sent away to some philosophy forum with a flea in your ear, that's not right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I hope you'd rather see discussions about &quot;what is physics?&quot; and &quot;falsifiability&quot; (and some of the stuff that Smolin complains about) here among physikers, than in a purely philosophy-bent forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would. I view Sean Carroll's stance on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/01/14/what-scientific-ideas-are-ready-for-retirement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;falsifiability&lt;/a&gt; with alarm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we ask in the Physics.SE about whether or not the following is science or is still philosophy: 1.string theory, 2.M theory, 3.multiverse? Just curious. &#xA;  Grateful for any response, including downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you can't ask on Physics.SE, but while we're on the subject, let me say this: there's no evidence for string theory or M-theory. And none for the multiverse. These hypotheses remain speculative even after many decades. Moreover the M-theory &quot;brane-leak&quot; claim as to why gravity is so weak contradicts GR, and the Goldilocks multiverse &quot;just right&quot; claim contradicts running constants. On top of that these speculations can never be disproven, and as such they're on a par with religious promises and claims. They aren't science. What they are is pseudoscience popscience &lt;em&gt;masquerading&lt;/em&gt; as science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="76162" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T16:30:48.003" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T16:30:48.003" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9409" CreationDate="2016-12-26T20:26:19.623" Score="6" ViewCount="1646" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed asking various questions regarding quantum physics, that sometimes, the latex command \ket works (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29443/adding-3-electron-spins/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for example), and other times, it does not, and I am obliged to use \left | \psi \right&gt;. Is there a special way to enable its use or did I miss something ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99654" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T00:25:42.283" Title="How to properly write kets" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9407" CreationDate="2016-12-26T20:41:39.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the source, you see that they include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in their LaTeX. This defines a command &lt;code&gt;\ket&lt;/code&gt; that makes a ket. So you have to define it on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5788" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T20:41:39.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9407" CreationDate="2016-12-26T20:44:56.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/29472/44126&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question you link includes, at the top,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\newcommand{\Ket}[1]{\left|#1\right&amp;gt;}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/29552/44126&quot;&gt;this other answer&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;includes, between &quot;the three vectors&quot; and the first displayed equation,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; $\newcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on that page both &lt;code&gt;$\ket\psi$&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;$\Ket\psi$&lt;/code&gt; do what you want, but the spacing for &lt;code&gt;\Ket&lt;/code&gt; is better because that author used &lt;code&gt;\left&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\right&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral of story: the definition is brief, so include it yourself if it makes your life easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T20:44:56.300" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9407" CreationDate="2016-12-28T00:25:42.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to the other two answers: the bra-ket angles both have unicode incarnations, &lt;code&gt;⟨&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;⟩&lt;/code&gt;, and they are both rendered correctly by MathJax. Thus, if you type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$⟨a|b⟩$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it will render correctly. (On the other hand, this only works for the single-size version, i.e. &lt;code&gt;\right⟩&lt;/code&gt; won't work.) My solution is to have those characters hardwired into my software keyboard, and it really speeds up typing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, this usage is directly in the spirit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt;: having a lightweight source which renders into a nice formatting, but which is also human-readable directly from the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is important to remark that this usage is exclusive to MathJax and it does not work under standard TeX renderers. (In fact, MathJax will correctly render a bunch of off-track unicode symbols, like ≠, ±, ≃, ° and &lt;a href=&quot;http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_math_operators.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so on&lt;/a&gt;, that will send (La)TeX into a belly-up spin.) As such, I consider it impolite to use these characters when editing other people's posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a word of caution: &lt;strong&gt;all the posts on a page share the same MathJax environment&lt;/strong&gt;, and in particular this means that &lt;strong&gt;any commands that you define or &lt;code&gt;renew&lt;/code&gt; can and will affect other posts on the same page&lt;/strong&gt;. This has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6951/should-we-indicate-the-use-of-renewcommand-in-the-help-center&quot;&gt;discussed before on this meta&lt;/a&gt;, with the specific point that &lt;code&gt;renewcommand&lt;/code&gt; should not be used on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining a new command for &lt;code&gt;\ket&lt;/code&gt;s and &lt;code&gt;\bra&lt;/code&gt;s is not terrible, partly because even if other people on the same thread define it differently, you wouldn't expect real conflicts in the output. However, it's important to keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; use of &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;, particularly beyond the simplest, mildest, most standard definitions, can produce unexpected behaviour like e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7297/mathjax-rendering-bk-differently-in-question-display-and-edit-modes&quot;&gt;on this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T00:25:42.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9399" CreationDate="2016-12-28T08:32:03.363" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZUBV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZUBV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1072/physics-swag-for-top-users&quot;&gt;Physics swag for top users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T11:47:34.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9415" CreationDate="2016-12-28T17:34:15.980" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This (indentation by the character &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;this (indentation by  one line and four spaces)?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When are they supposed to be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133159" LastEditorUserId="133159" LastEditDate="2016-12-31T12:15:03.203" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T12:15:03.203" Title="Usage of some special formatting commands" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9414" CreationDate="2016-12-28T17:43:01.113" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is for quoting sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is for code snippets.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the second one is not often used on physics.SE, the formatting options (with the exception of MathJax, which varies from site to site) are the same across &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;the network&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really isn't any other use for either of these. Please, don't use them for emphasis, that's what &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;bold text&lt;/strong&gt; are for. (Don't overuse either of those, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, it is good etiquette to properly format your answers. The code formatting retains indentation (which everyone in the universe appreciates) and please do use the formatting to note when you are quoting a source. If you don't use them in an obvious location, users will usually edit in the formatting (and some may even downvote) but it is not mandatory. It's just highly encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T17:47:01.503" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T17:47:01.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9420" CreationDate="2016-12-31T15:21:13.557" Score="9" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorta new here, so this may already have a standard procedure, but I haven't found it anywhere if it exists. Anyway, I've been seeing a lot of questions along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is the physical meaning of ____?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is there a physical interpretation of _____?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Can someone give me a REAL explanation of ____?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are these questions generally handled? I've tried answering some, and it's very difficult to figure out exactly what people want here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/302096/physical-interpretation-of-amperes-law&quot;&gt;Physical Interpretation of AMPERE&amp;#39;s law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/301894/physical-significance-of-product-of-two-charges&quot;&gt;Physical significance of product of two charges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/301171/meaning-of-the-poynting-vector&quot;&gt;Meaning of the Poynting vector&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/301589/a-real-explanation-of-the-electromagnetic-sine-dependency&quot;&gt;A real explanation of the electromagnetic sine dependency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T16:11:23.497" Title="How to handle questions about &quot;physical meaning&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9419" CreationDate="2016-12-31T16:11:23.497" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, if the questions are unclear, it is usually best to ask clarifying comments and/or flag/vote-to-close as unclear (we have a close reason dedicated just to that issue). Flagging it as &quot;Should be closed&quot; will put it into the review queue and more experienced members can decide if it should or should not be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some of your example questions, the best answer seems to be writing the equation and/or definition and explaining each term in it. For example, &quot;this is the time rate of change term, this is the flux term, this is the body force term, etc.&quot; with examples of what each of those signifies physically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I would say you're doing things correctly. You are asking clarifying questions in the comments when things are unclear. The only next step I would take is to flag the question for closing if you think it is too broad, based on opinion, more about philosophy than physics, or if it is still unclear and the original person has not clarified or refused to clarify. More senior members will decide and you can check back periodically to see if they agreed with you or not. It's the best way to cut your teeth on learning the policies of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T16:11:23.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9422" CreationDate="2016-12-31T16:53:54.110" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that '&#xA;Programming Puzzles &amp;amp; Code Golf' have a best of 2016 meta competition kind of thing (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10938/best-of-ppcg-2016-call-for-categories?cb=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the post). Should we do the same? If not why not? And if so how should we go about doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:59.790" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T19:42:29.133" Title="Best of PSE 2016?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9421" CreationDate="2016-12-31T19:42:29.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think we should do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought that &quot;best of&quot; would be too vague to be successful, but looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10938/best-of-ppcg-2016-call-for-categories?cb=1&quot;&gt;example from Puzzles and Code Golf&lt;/a&gt; I see that by establishing specific categories it is possible to come up with sensible best-of's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should move on to a meta post establishing the categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:46:44.887" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T19:42:29.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:18:50.083" Score="9" ViewCount="986" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9421/best-of-pse-2016&quot;&gt;another meta post&lt;/a&gt;, let's do a Physics Stack Exchange &quot;best of 2016&quot;.&#xA;There's a nice &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10938/best-of-ppcg-2016-call-for-categories?cb=1&quot;&gt;precedent for this in the Puzzles and Code Golf site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Objective&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reward and draw attention to some of the best content our community has created this year.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have fun :D&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Procedure&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Establish categories.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Each answer on this post should name a category for which we'll later vote on the best-of.&#xA;For example, a category could be &lt;em&gt;&quot;Best answer by a new user (i.e. made their account this year)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Voting on the categories will last until the end of January 10&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;We do not specify a fixed number of categories, but based on the Code Golf example I estimate we'll have five to ten.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote for the winner of each category.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;We create a meta post for each of the top-voted categories.&#xA;Under each category meta post, users nominate candidate questions/answers/etc. by posting a answer with a link and a short explanation of why the linked item should win the category.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Select winners.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Whichever answer gets the highest score wins the category.&#xA;Voting lasts a specified amount of time, which I or someone else will decide soon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(optional) Award prizes.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Each winning item &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; receive a prize in the form of a bounty!&#xA;If you're willing to award a bounty for a particular category's winner, leave a comment under the category nomination in this meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Results&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9481/best-of-pse-2016-best-question&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/285886/partition-function-for-gaussian-white-noise&quot;&gt;Partition function for Gaussian white noise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9482/best-of-pse-2016-qa-rookie-of-the-year&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&amp;amp;A Rookie of the year&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/121464/heather&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9483/best-of-pse-2016-less-is-more&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Less is more&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/288614/does-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-necessarily-imply-every/288618#288618&quot;&gt;answer to Does the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics necessarily imply every world exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9484/best-of-pse-2016-most-underrated-answer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most underrated answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277183/how-can-i-adapt-classical-continuum-mechanics-equations-in-order-to-agree-with-g/284988#284988&quot;&gt;continuum mechanics in GR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9486/best-of-pse-2016-best-community-work&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best community work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: None&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9485/best-of-pse-2016-best-self-answered-post&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best self-answered post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/242043/what-is-the-proper-way-to-explain-the-twin-paradox&quot;&gt;What is the proper way to explain the twin paradox?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9489/best-of-pse-2016-never-too-old-to-learn&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Never too old to learn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227960/do-free-electron-lasers-actually-lase&quot;&gt;Do free-electron lasers actually lase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9487/best-of-pse-2016-best-answer-directed-at-the-layman&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best answer directed at the layman&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: None&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9490/best-of-pse-2016-best-answer-by-a-rookie&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best answer by a rookie&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/251014/31790&quot;&gt;How does Zumberge's 1981 gravitational measurements relate to gravitational waves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9488/best-of-pse-2016-best-baby-steps-answer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best baby-steps answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/173818/what-do-we-mean-with-magnetic-monopole-and-dipole/292994#292994&quot;&gt;What do we mean with magnetic monopole and dipole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T15:34:01.873" Title="Best-of PSE 2016: description, categories, and results" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="21" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:20:17.240" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Rookie of the year&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User, who created their account in 2016, who has added exceptional quality to the site &lt;em&gt;in the form of questions and/or answers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this category is used, note that the nominations for winners will be in the form of links to user accounts, with a brief explanation of why that user should win, i.e. some links to their best questions/answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9482/best-of-pse-2016-qa-rookie-of-the-year&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:04:14.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:21:42.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Best answer by a rookie&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best answer by a user who created their account in 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9490/best-of-pse-2016-best-answer-by-a-rookie&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:19:05.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:26:44.947" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Best self-answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best question/answer pair written by the same user, either because they figured out their own problem, or because they took the time to write up something useful/interesting for the benefit of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9485/best-of-pse-2016-best-self-answered-post&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:02:29.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:27:35.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Best layman's answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best answer directed at the layman, which is very intuitive and well-explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9487/best-of-pse-2016-best-answer-directed-at-the-layman&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:08:57.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:29:20.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Most complete or in-depth answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer which addresses a question from multiple angles, covering all aspects and showing, in depth, how these aspects are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-12-31T20:31:34.563" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T20:31:34.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:31:09.070" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Best question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well researched, well formatted, and absolutely fabulous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9481/best-of-pse-2016-best-question&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:04:47.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:32:26.083" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Clarifying comment&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment that helps clarify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-12-31T20:33:19.737" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T20:33:19.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:33:46.590" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Hilarious comment&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funniest comment, including sarcasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2016-12-31T20:34:41.013" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T20:34:41.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:40:32.720" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Best&lt;/strike&gt; Most Stereotypically English Englishman&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ahem, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1325/john-rennie&quot;&gt;John Rennie&lt;/a&gt;, I'm looking at you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5uP30.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5uP30.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Seriously, 209,107 rep? Stop embarassing us, please! =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T20:40:32.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:50:53.537" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Less is More&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best answer to a question in the most concise and clear way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9483/best-of-pse-2016-less-is-more&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(First suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7911/53094&quot;&gt;Martin Ender on PPCG&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:59.790" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:03:45.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T21:32:40.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Best Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarifies the question and turns it from terrible, groan-worthy madness to absolutely fabulous highly upvoted-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T21:32:40.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2016-12-31T23:57:41.320" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Most underrated answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Awarded to an excellent answer, posted in 2016, which doesn't seem to have acquired as high a score at it probably should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9484/best-of-pse-2016-most-underrated-answer&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:03:09.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-01T00:00:22.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Never too old to learn&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best question asked in 2016 by a user who's account is at least two(?) years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9489/best-of-pse-2016-never-too-old-to-learn&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:15:24.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9399" CreationDate="2017-01-01T05:06:00.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T7vEF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T7vEF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a black design inspired by: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1072/physics-swag-for-top-users&quot;&gt;Physics swag for top users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Designed by CustomInk.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T05:06:00.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-01T08:23:57.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Baby Steps&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best answer that starts from relatively simple physics and ends up at a result that is considered fairly complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T15:23:13.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-01T08:34:46.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Community Work&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best community wiki answer or question where two (or more) authors contributed a significant amount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9486/best-of-pse-2016-best-community-work&quot;&gt;Vote here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:06:38.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-01T12:38:25.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Best first answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answer which was posted by someone as his first post after registering (i.e., before asking a question or posting an answer on another PSE question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T12:38:25.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-01T23:13:28.777" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read various posts on bounties, as well as the help center. There, I find the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;If you do not award the bounty within 24 hours of the bounty period ending, half the bounty value will be automatically awarded to the top voted answer posted after the bounty start, provided it has a score of at least 2. If no new answer matches this requirement, no reputation will be awarded at all, and the reputation used on the bounty will be lost forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I recently ran into a situation where &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/242953/26969&quot;&gt;an old question&lt;/a&gt; (to which I had posted an answer several months ago) was bumped with a (small) bounty from the OP. I decided to give it another shot, and improved my original answer with a substantial edit (which eventually led to my answer being accepted by the user, and several additional upvotes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However - the user did not manually award the bounty; and given that my answer was not &quot;new&quot; (in the sense that I did not post an answer after the start of the bounty period), the fact that it was &quot;new and improved&quot; apparently does not make it eligible for the &quot;automatic 50% bounty&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't care too much about 25 points - but I wonder: does this make sense? Would the &quot;auto&quot; rule make more sense if it was modified to award the bounty automatically to one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;new answer with &gt; 2 score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edited answer with &gt; 2 score increase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accepted answer with &gt; 2 score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in all cases, it would be awarded the highest-scoring answer that meets at least one of these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*) In the context of &quot;the exception that proves the rule&quot;, the verb &quot;prove&quot; actually means &quot;probe, test&quot;; in other words, it is by examining the exceptional cases that one gets a better understanding of the (limits of the) rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T23:43:43.090" Title="Bounty (not) awarded automatically - the exception that proves*) the rule?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-02T21:17:45.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Best Visual Effects&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could include use of original graphic illustrations and/or animation. It could apply to Questions or Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The visual effects should add insight to the Question or Answer, rather than be merely an impressive use of technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T21:58:35.307" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T21:58:35.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-02T21:45:05.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Most Original Question (or Answer)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are very popular because they are topical. They might be &amp;quot;doing the rounds&amp;quot; on the internet, and may possibly have been re-posted from another Q &amp;amp; A site. This award acknowledges personal observation and curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Criteria&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There should be some evidence of the personal origins of the question. eg &amp;quot;While I was doing X I noticed Y.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question should not be similar to any earlier question posted on PSE, and preferably should not be similar to any earlier question found on a major alternative site - eg Physics Forums, Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T04:29:07.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-02T21:53:06.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Most Under-rated Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To accompany Daniel Sank's &amp;quot;Most Underrated Answer.&amp;quot; A question which has received few or no answers, but is highly deserving of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T21:53:06.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-03T10:03:22.860" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Everyday counts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best question or answer about an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt; physics effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24774" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T10:03:22.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T17:38:15.020" Score="17" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past couple of days (Jan 1 &amp;amp; 2, 2017), there have been questions asked that have received over 20 votes and over 2000 views. Answers have received dozens of upvotes. Look &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/302555/why-doesnt-hydrogen-gas-exist-in-earths-atmosphere&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/302461/basic-physics-of-bridges&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the questions are interesting, although the bridge question is more engineering oriented and could be considered by some to be off-topic, what concerns me most is the rapid build-up of positive votes.  It's almost like someone in a large group was chosen to post the question which would then be upvoted to get attention.  The questions really aren't that outstanding, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What think ye? Public rabble, what think ye?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an issue of concern, or am I simply letting a bit of jealousy cloud my perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T17:19:41.830" Title="Is PSE getting &quot;flash mob&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T20:41:22.403" Score="5" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently found instances of moderators closing questions (which of course occurs with their single vote) instead of leaving them to be judged by the community in the review queues. For example :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/302625&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/302625&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301955&quot;&gt;How to calculate work done when movement is not in the direction of the force?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301875&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301875&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301834&quot;&gt;Forces behind pulling two sheets of glass separated by a thin layer of water&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion these questions are not blatantly off-topic - they might be off-topic but they are not blatantly so - nor are they likely to disrupt the community, as required by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;guidance for moderators in the help center&lt;/a&gt;. I do not see any necessity for moderator intervention here, depriving the OP of the benefit of his/her question being judged by a cross-section of his/her peers, rather than a single user, however eminent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those exceptional conditions that could otherwise disrupt the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...A lot of the moderation work is mundane: deleting obvious spam, closing blatantly off-topic questions, and culling some of the worst-rated posts on the site. The ideal moderator does as little as possible, but those little actions may be powerful, visible, and highly concentrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This description reflects the StackOverflow blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt; which states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are ... there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt -- if you don't have human exception handling in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; also says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing is a &lt;strong&gt;democratic&lt;/strong&gt; voting process where &lt;strong&gt;the community&lt;/strong&gt; identifies questions that duplicate existing content, are unreasonable to answer in their current state, or do not belong on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis added) David Z has pointed out to me that the help center &lt;em&gt;does not say that Moderators cannot use their unilateral vote to close questions routinely&lt;/em&gt;, but I think it does give a clear impression that that privilege is intended for the exceptional rather than the routine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David's question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1046&quot;&gt;Community, help us close questions!&lt;/a&gt; acknowledges that closure should be a community decision. It indicates that the practice of routine closure by moderators developed when there was a shortage of reviewers, but this surely is not the case today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243&quot;&gt;What guidelines should moderators use to decide when to close questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339&quot;&gt;Can we please let the community close questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that the review queue for close votes might grow alarmingly large at times, but I do not think moderator intervention is the correct way to deal with such a problem. If moderators think the review queue is too slow, or the system is not working, the situation ought to be discussed on Meta (eg David's 2012 call for reviewers to use their votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also appreciate that questions closed unilaterally by a moderator can be reopened by voting. However, that is also a slow process, and it is much less likely to happen than it being closed by reviewers, because there is an inherent bias towards leaving a question closed, especially if it has not been improved since being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that &lt;strong&gt;the moderator's unilateral close vote should be reserved for exceptional cases, not those which are routine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:41:52.097" Title="When should moderators close questions?" Tags="|discussion|policy|vote-to-close|moderation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9449" CreationDate="2017-01-03T21:38:09.297" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that moderators get it right most of the times. But sometimes they err, in which case I can think of four routes you can take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to reopen. If the question is very clearly on-topic, it should get reopened rather fast. I agree with your point that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is much less likely to happen than it being closed by Reviewers, because there is an inherent bias towards leaving a question closed, especially if it has not been improved since being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so this route is not always ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leave a comment in the closed post asking for clarification. Sometimes you might get the moderator to reconsider their decision; if it was indeed a rushed and unjustified closure, I'm sure the moderator will agree and reopen the question. But sometimes the moderator will disagree. In this case, reviewers might read your comment and, if convincing, this will make up for the inherent bias from before.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bring the issue to Meta. If the question was improperly closed, most users will agree with you and quickly vote to reopen. If they disagree with you, there is not much you can do but accept that you were wrong this time and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can always come to the chat, and ask other users (and even moderators) what they think about the closed question. You will usually find several high rep users which can vote to reopen if they agree with you. You can even interact in real time with the moderator that closed the question and they might clear up their reasons (see e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=34153196#34153196&quot;&gt;this recent transcript&lt;/a&gt; where a very similar issue was discussed).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course only answers &lt;em&gt;what to do&lt;/em&gt; when there are unilateral closures by moderators; I leave it to them (or other users) to discuss whether such a closure is improper or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T06:22:27.530" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T06:22:27.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9468" CreationDate="2017-01-03T23:16:21.803" Score="10" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have posted the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301460/44126&quot;&gt;Einstein-Hilbert action as an effective field theory&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I have received a lot of downvotes and it's ok because it was unclear: in order to repair I tried to close it opening a more precise one of the same but now they are downvoting both. I would like to know what is so wrong with them. The new one is&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/302694/44126&quot;&gt;Breaking of diffeomorphism invariance after fixing a background metric&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116309" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T08:48:42.597" Title="Downvotes without explanation" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9448" CreationDate="2017-01-03T23:19:59.610" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Afaict this is caused by &quot;hot network questions&quot;. A question that is approachable to laymen sees a burst of interest which gets it into the hot network questions list. This brings in a hoard of curious people from all across the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95184" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T23:19:59.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9451" CreationDate="2017-01-03T23:46:46.030" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address your title: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/135/280545&quot;&gt;downvoters don't owe you an explanation&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/250177/1650379&quot;&gt;an intentional decision&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your concern that people are downvoting both of your questions: I think that's appropriate.&#xA;Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4068&quot;&gt;don't re-post a question that wasn't well-received&lt;/a&gt;.  Instead follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/7054/280545&quot;&gt;this advice&lt;/a&gt; to improve and promote the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You can &quot;bump&quot; your question by editing the question to &lt;strong&gt;provide status and progress updates resulting from your own continued efforts to answer the question yourself&lt;/strong&gt;. I usually do that unless I really hit a dead end with no further clues to follow. Some times I eventually bring about enough understanding to realise the answer, and thus post a resolution to my own problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If you have at least &lt;strong&gt;75&lt;/strong&gt; rep points, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;offer a &lt;strong&gt;bounty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, promising to give some of your points to the person who correctly answers your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Upvote&lt;/strong&gt; the original question - every upvote helps increase its profile on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;strong&gt;share&lt;/strong&gt; button beneath the original question to advertise it to your networks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To these bits of advice I might add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask for guidance about the questions on Meta (hello!) or in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, and take any advice you get there to heart for present and future questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth I have closed your second question as a duplicate of the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak to the physics content of your question, which is outside of my specialty, but I personally think it looks interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T11:33:38.020" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T23:46:46.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9449" CreationDate="2017-01-04T09:17:11.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental rule of moderation is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators can never win¹&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they don't close egregious homework questions the moment they are posted we moan and if they're over zealous about closing homework questions we moan. The best moderators can do is try not to lose too often, and I'd say they do that pretty well and deserve a hearty round of applause for their efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderation is different, and harder, here than in Stack Overflow or indeed any other SE site I can think of with the possible exception of the Maths SE. The difference is our homework policy. Yes, there are endless arguments about whether our approach to homework is justified or not, but while the policy exists you can't blame the moderators for doing their best to enforce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homework policy only works if homework questions are closed off before someone unaware of the policy answers the question. If the OP gets an answer then it doesn't matter if the question is subsequently closed and/or the answer deleted. If the OP is getting answers that encourages them to ask more homework questions and the flood of homework gets ever deeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is a lot of pressure on the mods to close off homework questions ASAP. The moderator uncertainty principle means some homework questions won't be closed while some questions will be closed unnecessarily. That's life. The main thing is that the moderators get it mostly right most of the time. You've highlighted some cases where you think the mods were wrong (I disagree on some of your examples) and ignored the many cases where they got it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's always worth keeping an eye on the closure of questions because I feel as though the moderatorial consensus drifts between (slightly) too severe and (slightly) too lax. Maybe it's edging towards the &lt;em&gt;too severe&lt;/em&gt; end of the spectrum at the moment, and if so this discussion will probably be sufficient to nudge it back in the other direction. However I strongly disagree with your implication that there is a serious problem and that moderators should intervene only in exceptional cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ and people ask me why I didn't stand as a moderator at the last election :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T09:17:11.973" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9449" CreationDate="2017-01-04T13:17:40.290" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators should never close a question for being off-topic in my opinion. Just get it on topic and you are done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140807" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T13:17:40.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1119" CreationDate="2017-01-05T04:24:02.957" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically if MathJax is enabled on the main site, we turn it on for meta too. I'm not at all sure why it wasn't done here. No doubt there was a good reason (or at least an understandable one, such as &quot;we forgot&quot;). But I can't think of any reason that still holds given our current standards, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;\mathrm{late} &amp;gt; \mathrm{never}&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T11:22:24.263" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T11:22:24.263" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9451" CreationDate="2017-01-05T16:16:20.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to address some points that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/44126/rob&quot;&gt;rob&lt;/a&gt; didn't touch upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I want to say something about your comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just want to understand how to improve a post is good, maybe I made confusion because of my English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me tell you that I sympathise with you because English is not my first language either, and I too sometimes find it difficult to express my thoughts clearly. Like it or not, poor grammar will reduce the overall quality of the post. The reception of a post with poor grammar is automatically worse than than of a post with good grammar, even if the physical content is the same. And this happens even though most users try to focus on the physical content of the question; it is a subconscious process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason you (and I) have to make an extra effort when posting Q&amp;amp;A here. You'll have to live with that. In any case, don't fret too much about it, as most users here have good intentions and they'll try to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back to your post(s). Your first question was edited several times. The first version &lt;strong&gt;is indeed unclear&lt;/strong&gt;, and unfortunately it mentions &lt;em&gt;diffeomorphisms invariance&lt;/em&gt;. Later on you edited it and deleted the part about diff. inv., but the question was still rather unclear&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;. You got an answer but it did not address your concerns (it didn't address your &lt;em&gt;true question&lt;/em&gt;, because it was not clear what your &lt;em&gt;true question&lt;/em&gt; was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point you had two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;strong&gt;edit your question&lt;/strong&gt; and introduce some changes in order to make it clear what your &lt;em&gt;true question&lt;/em&gt; is. The problem is that major edits that change the meaning of the question are discouraged if the question does already contain an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;strong&gt;post a new question&lt;/strong&gt;, which clearly highlights your concerns. You should only do this if the new question is significantly different than the first one; otherwise, it will be closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, your case is very complicated because a major edit to your first question is discouraged, but posting a new one was not well received either, as the second one was similar to the first one (the culprit seems to be that you mentioned &lt;em&gt;diffeomorphism invariance&lt;/em&gt; in the first question, even though you deleted that part later on). If you hadn't mentioned diff. inv. in the first question, the second one would have been significantly different and not closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first read your first question I didn't understand it, and when I read the second one I felt that you were asking the same thing twice. Now I realise that you didn't really have an alternative but to repost the question, because the first question didn't ask what you really wanted to ask. If only you hadn't mentioned diff. inv. in the first one! In its current state, the first question does not mention diff. inv. anymore. Therefore, I would say that the second one is not a duplicate of the first one. Maybe we could ask to the rest of users to consider voting to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this moment, your first question is&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we construct the interaction terms of the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian as a function of $h$?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and your second question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we be sure that the diffeomorphism invariance of the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian is not lost upon the field redefinition $g=\eta+h$? Moreover, how can we prove that such an invariance is kept order by order in $h$?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is about the &lt;em&gt;construction&lt;/em&gt; of the Lagrangian, and JamalS's answer addresses that. The second one is about the &lt;em&gt;symmetries&lt;/em&gt; of the Lagrangian once expanded, and as such, I'd say that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; significantly different than the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that you also mentioned diff. inv. in the first question, but that part is already deleted and JamalS's answer does not address that. To me, the second question should be reopened (and I have already voted to reopen it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Consider replacing &quot;define&quot; with &quot;construct&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Of course, it is possible that I have misunderstood your questions again. If that's the case please correct me in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T16:16:20.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9399" CreationDate="2017-01-06T00:14:20.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's exciting that you all care about your site so much you want to wear your allegiance. The only concern I had when I heard about this was &amp;quot;what would our pesky lawyers say?&amp;quot;. As a rule, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/317531/1438&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. That said, our VP of Community Growth &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/244564/1438&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not object to your individual use of the logo in a personal and private manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like, say for using the logo on a tee shirt you plan to wear yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets a bit tricky when it comes to selling shirts. But as long as the charge is just to defray costs and it doesn't turn it into a business of some sort, I don't see any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we can't coordinate this event; y'all'll have to take care of that yourselves. You might have heard of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303721/who-are-the-winners-in-the-soreadytohelp-t-shirt-drawing&quot;&gt;#SOreadytohelp contest&lt;/a&gt;. It took &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/313937/10-million-questions-giveaway-what-happened&quot;&gt;months&lt;/a&gt; to distribute the prizes and we've concluded its just not one our strengths. Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T00:14:20.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9399" CreationDate="2017-01-06T02:38:18.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will go with the simplest idea, a hat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QEU9L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QEU9L.png&quot; alt=&quot;hat design&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shape of it might need some modification for it to be practical. But you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ixb6d.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ixb6d.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46115" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T02:38:18.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9461" CreationDate="2017-01-06T10:14:17.500" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I tried to edit two questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/301933/boundary-conditions-in-poissons-equation-for-gravity&quot; title=&quot;1&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/302477/confusion-regarding-this-question&quot; title=&quot;2&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. Both my edits were rejected by Community$\diamondsuit$, which I take as &quot;automatically rejected&quot;, because they conflicted with a subsequent edit. Both edits were simply formal: I edited math formulas to make it cleaner and more understandable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I see that the second question has been put on hold so maybe this is the reason behind my edit not being accepted (but, is it?); for the first one I can not think of a reason not to accept my edit; subsequent edits by moderators fixed the spelling but, in my opinion, did not make the post more readable by including LaTeX rendering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my edits were automatically rejected, what can be the reason of such a rejection? In particular, when there is conflict with a subsequent edit, which one is going to win? Is it reputation based, or decided by moderators, or what else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this post is by no means polemic, I think that there is something I am missing about edit &amp;amp; review procedure so I would like to understand it in order to edit appropriately in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157565&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157565&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157926&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157926&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66395" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T11:52:03.297" Title="Why are some edits automatically rejected?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9460" CreationDate="2017-01-06T11:43:04.713" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;On both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157926&quot;&gt;this edit&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/157565&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, the edit was rejected because a user with full editing privileges (i.e. 2k+ reputation) started editing before you submitted your edit, as detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184992/why-does-the-community-user-approve-and-reject-edits&quot;&gt;on this Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A user with full edit privileges saves an edit over yours&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user with full editing privileges for a post (including the original poster) begins editing the post at the same time as you, and they save their edit after you have already suggested it, then your suggested edit will be overridden in favor of their fully-privileged edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T11:52:03.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9449" CreationDate="2017-01-06T14:41:52.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your final statement,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My view is that the moderator's unilateral close vote should be reserved for exceptional cases, not those which are routine,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree. Moderators' question-closure duties &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; include routine closures, where questions are blatantly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies in particular to blatant cases of off-topic non-mainstream and homework-like questions. Non-mainstream questions can prove quite harmful, through a variety of ways. Similarly, answers to do-my-work-for-me homework-like questions do a lot to weaken the policy, and there is a strong &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows&lt;/a&gt; argument that they should be closed before they get even a single answer. As such, if a question is clearly off-topic homework, then the site benefits from prompt closure even if it is via a unilateral moderator vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly the case for your questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301955&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/301875&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt;, and quite a bit for number &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/301834&quot;&gt;four&lt;/a&gt;. Regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/302625&quot;&gt;space needle question&lt;/a&gt;, with its complete lack on the &quot;show some effort&quot; front, I'm confused why you think it is anything but blatantly off-topic in its present form: it can be edited into an on-topic form, which is precisely why it is currently closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, a moderator closure does not pre-empt a democratic look at whether the question is on-topic or not: that is what the reopen review queue is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:41:52.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-07T14:05:52.323" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw this in my rep tab:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzNkE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzNkE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The screenshot was taken on Saturday, January the 7th, around 15:03 in the Italian time zone, that is GMT+1, just before asking this. I was wondering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What user was removed to cause this? Why were they removed? And what exactly was the -2 due to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind losing 2 rep, I'm just curious as to why I lost it, i.e. who and why was removed and how he had given me those 2 points. I am guessing an accepted answer: is that so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76188" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T14:45:08.943" Title="&quot;User removed&quot;: who was removed? And what is the -2 due to?" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-01-07T14:08:06.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-07T22:15:47.877" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I'll have questions that I can't describe well in words, and I was wondering if there were any recommendations for how to draw it out, such as a free download to draw with or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111575" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T22:15:47.877" Title="What is the best way to draw out a physics question for this website?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-01-08T00:00:31.427" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-08T19:31:10.050" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that a question (see below) I asked a while back was deleted without a trace or any notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have an issue with downvotes and closing. The question is admittedly fairly speculative. However, I don't see the purpose of outright deleting a question like this, since it doesn't contain any offensive content, and may in fact be of interest to some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleted question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/296580/2451&quot;&gt;Is mass/energy a measure of computational capacity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously computation requires energy, and there are known entropy bounds in relation to this. Here, I am asking if they are the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sub-questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Is quantum mechanics a mechanism of computational minimization?&#xA;&#xA;Is computational capacity preserved?&#xA;&#xA;Is gravity a mechanism for clustering of computational capacity?&#xA;&#xA;Is a black hole a computationally closed region, which attract computational capacity, but does not have computational power to transfer any subset of computational capacity outside the closed region?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59419" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T20:50:44.293" Title="Why was this question deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-01-08T19:37:23.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9465" CreationDate="2017-01-08T19:35:19.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was deleted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community&lt;/a&gt;. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6787/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T20:50:44.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2017-01-10T07:52:19.590" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Unsung question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question which received alot of views but upvotes less than 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130714" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T07:58:00.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9451" CreationDate="2017-01-10T14:03:29.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it was explained many times, the downvoters don't need to explain their reason. It is because the anonymity of the votes are considered more important by the SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't do too much with it, if they would require to give an explanation, there would be much fewer downvotes, and it would open the door to revenge attacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the other answerers didn't explain clearly: yes, it is not okay. It is particularly &lt;em&gt;evil&lt;/em&gt;, if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is a first downvote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are many downs, all without explanation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the reason of the downvote isn't obvious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can consider this like an election. It would be hilarious if a not elected politician could challenge the people, why they didn't elect him. Although it is quite possible that their reason wasn't fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is not okay, but it seems it is the lesser evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are major differences between the behavior of the SE sites. I think, most people using multiple SE sites actively agree that the Physics SE isn't the friendliest one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, most of the downers won't go back to the post, thus the downvotes remain even if you already fixed your post. And you have no way to ask them to consider a vote change. You can ask this in a comment, but most of them wouldn't see also that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the meta SE, it is a quite common suggestion to implement some feature into the SE software, which could - anonymously - re-attract the attention of the downvoters, after the OP thinks he fixed his post. Unfortunately, the SE (company) doesn't seem very sedulous to implement similar user requests since some years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some tricky ways, most of them is on the border case of misusing the site. Deleting the post and re-posting it would solve the problem, but it would be surely considered as a serious misuse, don't do it (10k+ users would see, what you did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T08:48:42.597" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T08:48:42.597" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-11T01:32:20.890" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not that I'm suggesting censorship, but are there any checks in the Physics Stack Exchange system that exclude questions seeking answers that might be used for &lt;em&gt;evil&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;destructive&lt;/em&gt; purposes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose people capable of answering such questions (and of sounder mind) would flag or else avoid answering and thus prevent or at least limit the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45613" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T16:41:22.523" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T16:41:22.523" Title="Any checks for possible nefarious use?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-01-11T16:41:29.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9470" CreationDate="2017-01-11T13:06:17.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how would be it a real problem, any feasible nefarious physics knowledge would require also a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;engineering&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;diy&lt;/a&gt; effort, which is offtopic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, we can simply ignore the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T13:06:17.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9470" CreationDate="2017-01-11T14:51:45.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We deal in physics here. Anyone with legitimately nefarious motives that present a danger to people would likely be smart enough to ask their question in a way that doesn't reveal their intents. But more than that, we aren't the only source of physics out there. If someone comes by and wants to know the physics of something that seems like it could be used to hurt people, we are still going to answer the question. Information is not evil. Now, we aren't going to instruct them on how to build a thermonuclear device in their tool shed. That would be off-topic as an engineering question. And it would probably be more suitable on DIY.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics isn't confidential and we don't keep secrets about it. The only thing holding back information could do is keep someone from realizing the safety hazards associated with an action, which might put more people at risk. Anyone actively looking to harm others isn't going to be able to do it with math equations alone (except Math Man, but he only does it in self-defense. Best superhero ever!) and we don't accept questions asking engineering or diy details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T14:51:45.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-11T15:18:24.240" Score="-3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would a 'derivations' tag be useful?  i.e. for questions asking about the derivation of established laws and equations.  In my experience, understanding derivations (at least of college-level physics material) can be extremely useful and insightful---often far better than memorizing a result.  A 'derivations' tag might be good to give these types of questions/answers more attention, and let people especially fond-of/expert-at them find them more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary concern with such a tag might be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6031/8521&quot;&gt;it's too meta&lt;/a&gt;.  Being a derivation, however, does directly address the content of the question itself and the relevant skills/material required to address it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional modifier might be good to distinguish &quot;derivation&quot; as in, 're-deriving an equation'; as apposed to derivative 'derivation', as in an anti-integral.  Especially for non-native english speakers, this could be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/304413/rigorous-treatment-of-blackbody-radiation&quot;&gt;This post (&quot;Rigorous treatment of blackbody radiation&quot;)&lt;/a&gt;, for example, might be a good candidate for such a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8521" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T16:22:13.477" Title="Proposed Tag: 'derivation'" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9473" CreationDate="2017-01-11T16:22:13.477" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @rob for linking to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Atwood's Meta-Tag post&lt;/a&gt; (which I somehow always forget about...).  To quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author's skill level[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Meta-tags are actually [...] dependent tags. These are tags that don't say anything by themselves - you can't tell what the question is about unless they're paired with some other tag[...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re [1]: I'd argue that 'derivation' is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; consistent with [1] in that, like the much discussed 'homework' tag, it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; describe the content of the question itself, and seeing the 'derivation' tag would indeed provide a keyword/description of the content of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re [2]: I think [2] &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; apply, but only marginally.  A 'thermal-physics' could go-it-alone, and be perfectly sufficient, while a 'derivation' tag would be missing the actual physical content of the question.  But, that is to say 'derivation' would not be a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; description tag, much like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-physics&quot;&gt;'computational-physics'&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forces&quot;&gt;'forces'&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot;&gt;'mathematical-physics'&lt;/a&gt;.  So I personally don't think [2] is a deal-breaker.  Comments welcome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8521" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T16:22:13.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-11T21:16:07.600" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/303764/95563&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/303764/95563&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it was put on hold, then I added more info and explained that this is my attempt to a solution, but I got no answer and it's still on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T21:28:10.927" Title="What's wrong with my post?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9475" CreationDate="2017-01-11T21:25:41.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most obvious thing that's wrong with it is that you have posted an image of typeable text. Don't do that. You can use images for diagrams, but when it comes to things you can type, you should instead transcribe them into a post and put them in a quote block. You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for math rendering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next thing, and the reason it was put on hold, is that you're not asking a conceptual question. Actually, you don't really &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; anything, but the closest you come to stating a problem is when you say that you're not getting the right answer. That's not the sort of thing we handle. What we're looking for here are questions about procedures, like whether a particular formula is applicable to a particular situation, or how to choose the value of a certain variable, or whether you need to account for a certain force, or so on. So think about your question and identify what exactly it is that's holding you back from finding the solution. If you can't come up with anything other than that you're not getting the right answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;this is not the place&lt;/a&gt; to ask your question. But if you are having a conceptual difficulty, like the examples I mentioned earlier, you can probably ask that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:16.527" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T21:25:41.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9334" CreationDate="2017-01-11T23:52:10.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project is drawing to a close, and I am planning to take down the annotation interface this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much to everyone who helped out, and thank you for all the valuable feedback and suggestions. Hopefully the collected annotations will lead to the development of better duplicate question detection systems, especially for StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134343" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T23:52:10.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-13T23:01:27.127" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;While any of us can need an explanation of some concept we need to get clear in our minds and can't quite grasp, it does seem sometimes that even the most basic step is sometimes lacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could/Should a simple reminder be added above the text entry box saying e.g. &quot;Please do basic research ( e.g. web search, wikipedia etc. ) before asking a question.  Thank you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's already some guidance there, but I feel an explicit reference to this basic step is worth emphasizing ( in bold preferably ) to avoid some of the simple questions we're seeing ( that often get dealt with with comments directing people to Wikipedia or similar ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I do think there's some educational value is dealing with even the simplest questions, but that's not the same as dealing with questions from people who seems to be unwilling to do basic reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T23:21:16.057" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T00:08:39.213" Title="Remind users to do basic research before asking questions" Tags="|feature-request|scope|questions|content-level|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9478" CreationDate="2017-01-14T00:08:39.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a previous incarnation on this site, I wrote this meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9327/how-can-i-improve-the-chances-of-my-question-being-answered/9328#9328&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I improve the chances of my question being answered&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and in looking for it now to add to this answer, I see quite a few others very similiar to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, the question box should contain a link to whatever the community eventually decides on what constitutes a good question, (perhaps it already does), anyway the big problem is that it will probably be ignored by new users, as the homework link is currently ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user140606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T00:08:39.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9448" CreationDate="2017-01-14T17:19:41.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question about the bridges of ships is on the top of the hot questions for this month. A trivial, simple question has been upvoted 104 times up to now whereas questions that really deserved attention are neglected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't understand why my question was so interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110669" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T17:19:41.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:49:33.517" Score="4" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was, in your opinion, the best question asked in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting an answer linking to your favorite question, with a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why it's your favorite, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:48:02.753" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Best question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:53:08.043" Score="6" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which user, who made their account in 2016, has added exceptional quality to the site &lt;em&gt;in the form of questions and answers&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting an answer linking to to a new user's profile and giving a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why that user should win, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T04:29:13.560" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Q&amp;A rookie of the year" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:55:55.080" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the most impressively clear and concise answer in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a clear and concise to a very simple question is not necessarily particularly impressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting an answer linking to a clear and concise answer and giving a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why that answer should win, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:46:32.053" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Less is more" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:58:05.993" Score="5" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the most underrated answer in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underrated could mean that an answer recieved little attention/upvotes despite being of excellent quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting an answer linking to an underrated answer and giving a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why that answer should win, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:20:38.347" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Most underrated answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:02:00.850" Score="4" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the best self-answered post in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-answered posts exist because the OP solved their own problem, or because they took the time to write up something useful/interesting for the benefit of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by making a post linking to a self-answered question and giving a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why that self-answered question should win, or by upvoting an existing submission,&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, self-answered questions are not that easy to search for on the direct site search, so &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/616423/self-answered-posts-from-2016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is a query for all of the 2016 ones&lt;/a&gt;, in case people find it useful (and which can then be refined by score / by tags / etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:56:09.783" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Best self-answered post" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:06:23.693" Score="8" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was, in your opinion, the best answer in 2016 which where two or more authors contributed a significant fraction of the content?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting an answer linking to your favorite community work, with a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why it's your favorite, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:41:01.087" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Best community work" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:08:36.623" Score="6" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was, in your opinion, the best layman answer in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A layman answer is an answer directed at those without expert training in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting an answer linking to your favorite layman answer, with a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why it's your favorite, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:33:17.747" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Best answer directed at the layman" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:10:55.083" Score="5" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was, in your opinion, the best baby-steps answer in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A baby-steps answer starts from simple principles and finishes with a complex and rich result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting a link to your favorite baby-steps answer, with a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why it's your favorite, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:06:21.390" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Best baby-steps answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:15:04.890" Score="7" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the best question asked in 2016 by a user whose account was made in or before 2014?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting a link to your favorite qualifying question, with a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why it's your favorite, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T20:30:55.933" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Never too old to learn" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:18:50.300" Score="9" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the best answer posted in 2016 by a user whose account was made in 2016?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote either by posting a link to your favorite answer given by a rookie, with a &lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt; description of why it's your favorite, or by upvoting an existing post.&#xA;Voting lasts two weeks, i.e. until Jan 29 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/best-of-pse-2016-description-and-categories&quot;&gt;Best-of PSE 2016&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you are interested in providing a prize bounty for the winner (mostly highly upvoted answer of this meta post), please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:27:21.743" Title="Best of PSE 2016 - Best answer by a rookie" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2017-01-15T08:07:39.417" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/121464/heather&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;: For exceptional research effort in her answers and making the site more open to new users from all levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And ~4500 reputation in the first 7 months says a lot, too...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T09:58:26.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9484" CreationDate="2017-01-15T12:35:15.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/296869/25301&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/6634/tpg2114&quot;&gt;tpg2114&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/296863/25301&quot;&gt;How to initialize / bootstrap the Boris algorithm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Boris algorithm is an integrator for solving Newton's laws numerically (well really any force law). For all the questions we have on solving this type of system, no one seems to have discussed how to &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; such a system (as the positions and velocities are solved at half-steps and typically we know $x(t=0),\,v(t=0)$ and not $x(t=0),\,v(t=\Delta t/2)$).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tpg2114 gave a good answer to an interesting problem, but it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computational-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computational-physics&lt;/a&gt; question so it got little love from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T12:35:15.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9484" CreationDate="2017-01-15T15:21:15.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277183/how-can-i-adapt-classical-continuum-mechanics-equations-in-order-to-agree-with-g/284988#284988&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/132418/pglpm&quot;&gt;pglpm&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/277183/how-can-i-adapt-classical-continuum-mechanics-equations-in-order-to-agree-with-g&quot;&gt;How can I adapt classical continuum mechanics equations in order to agree with general relativity?&lt;/a&gt; shows a very profound conceptual understanding of classical continuum mechanics and furthermore contains a vast amount of literature and research a very interesting/relevant open topic. To me, it is strange that it only got a few upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T15:21:15.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9495" CreationDate="2017-01-15T18:22:13.550" Score="-2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am new to this site and I hope this is a proper forum to ask this - if not please do not punish me too harshly. I must seem like a narcissist to inquire - but I posted a question that has +6 up-votes for two answers but no one thinks the question itself is worth an up-vote. I probably won't do it even if I can but it is a bit weird that there can be very good answers to a blah question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141240" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T00:15:04.327" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T00:15:04.327" Title="Can I up-vote my own question?" Tags="|support|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9494" CreationDate="2017-01-15T18:33:44.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go ahead, try it. The site will tell you that's not possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I do think that there may occasionally be very good answers to a blah question; some answerers manage to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cook soup from a stone&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T18:33:44.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9494" CreationDate="2017-01-15T18:34:24.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system will not let you cast a vote for a post created by the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And though we know that most people can be counted on to understand this let me put the policy on sock-puppetry down, just for the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using sock-puppet accounts to vote for yourself is forbidden, and moderators have access to tool for detecting such behavior which can lead to suspension from the site and deletion of secondary account(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-01-15T18:56:39.507" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T18:56:39.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2017-01-16T02:54:01.210" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/108333/bob-bee&quot;&gt;Bob Bee&lt;/a&gt; whose works on general relativity, black holes and gravitational waves are very enjoyable to read whilst bored at work (or other times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~5K rep in 11 months and active in the reviews, the makings of a great contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T02:54:01.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9500" CreationDate="2017-01-16T07:34:10.370" Score="11" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name of the chat room was recently changed to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-barbecue&quot;&gt;the h bar(becue)&lt;/a&gt; as a joke because of the multiple posts about food made by the more rapscallionary members of the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a few rather terse posts suggesting that not everyone is happy with this, so maybe we should try and arrive at a consensus about the room name, or more to the point about the process for any future changes to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I post this as an opportunity for site members to express their views. My own view is that I don't care what the room is called as long as the name isn't offensive or embarrassing, but I was a bit surprised it was changed without some form of consultation. Since it has obviously offended a few people I'd vote that the name goes back to &lt;em&gt;the h bar&lt;/em&gt; until we collectively agree a new name or decide we don't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T08:04:22.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T20:35:42.897" Title="Choosing the name of the chat room" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9498" CreationDate="2017-01-16T08:11:31.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the guilty(est) party, here's my timeline of the recent change, no comment on merits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34773649#34773649&quot;&gt;half-serious suggestion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34773657#34773657&quot;&gt;impossible criterion: moar pun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34773765#34773765&quot;&gt;eventual winner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34774044#34774044&quot;&gt;punny interpretation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34774088#34774088&quot;&gt;resistance crumbles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34774143#34774143&quot;&gt;who put those guys in charge of anything anyway&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=34774163#34774163&quot;&gt;wise observation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposal to implementation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twenty minutes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T08:17:21.490" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T08:17:21.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9498" CreationDate="2017-01-16T08:51:42.430" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As much as I'm all for getting consensus before any significant changes to anything, the chat room name is not a terribly &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; thing, and I can see the value in allowing a room owner to change it temporarily in the spirit of fun. Accordingly, how's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any future changes to the room name, description, or tags should be reverted after roughly 24 hours, unless there is a non-negatively-received meta question seeking to extend the change. By &quot;non-negatively-received&quot; I mean there is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a clear consensus &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the name change proposal. Hopefully most of us should know that when we see it, but for people who like quantitative conditions, a score of -2 or less &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; indicates a consensus against the proposal. A slew of comments giving objections without a corresponding slew in support almost &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; indicates such a consensus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In all cases, changes to the room name, description, or tags should be reverted within a week (168 hours) unless the community has expressed a consensus &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; the change in a meta post. Again, consensus is something we should know when we see it, but in determining this we should take in to account votes as well as written responses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the community finds a consensus in favor of this answer, then we'll change the room name, description, and tags back to what they were soon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and while we're at it: we could formalize that changes to the room attributes should not be made by anyone &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; a room owner or SE staff. This is kind of a moot point because the only ones with the power to do it are other chat mods, and they know better, but I suppose we might as well have it in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T08:51:42.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9498" CreationDate="2017-01-16T16:29:05.033" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote that we keep it as &lt;em&gt;the h bar&lt;/em&gt;. It has the excellent property that it shares its name with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imperial.ac.uk/food-and-drink/catering-outlets/h-bar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;postgraduate bar&lt;/a&gt; back at my uni in London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KHLbI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KHLbI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, not only is it a very clever name, but it is also thought to be a unique and clever name by a bunch of different institutions (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theheightsithaca.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sharepoint.washington.edu/phys/facilities/Pages/H-bar.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186220-d2453787-Reviews-H_Bar_Restaurant-Bristol_England.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T16:29:05.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9485" CreationDate="2017-01-16T18:02:32.540" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My proposal is John Rennie's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/242043/56299&quot;&gt;What is the proper way to explain the twin paradox?&lt;/a&gt;, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/242044/56299&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/244323/56299&quot;&gt;appendix&lt;/a&gt;, as well as several other answers from different users. It's one of quite a few self-answered posts he's written, including a couple others in 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took an undergraduate special relativity course during the fall semester last year, and I was introduced to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twin paradox&lt;/a&gt;, among other freaky results of special relativity. I read several good explanations of how the paradox is resolved, which helped me quite well. John's self-answered questions-and-answer, however, went a step further by explaining how the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindler_coordinates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rindler metric&lt;/a&gt; fits into all this - an addition that seems to be rather rare in discussions of the twin paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm recommending this question-and-answer pair because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It deals with a common problem that almost all beginners to special relativity face.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is just as accessible as most treatments of the paradox, while still keeping all the gory details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It combines equations with spacetime diagrams, the latter of which I've found to be extremely useful tools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T18:02:32.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9485" CreationDate="2017-01-17T08:04:33.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My proposal is John Rennie's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really/241773#241773&quot;&gt;What is time dilation really?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the self answer is very comprehensive and informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T08:04:33.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2017-01-17T08:07:47.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/104696/farcher&quot;&gt;Farcher&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user has amassaed an amazing 19,265 reputation in just 11 months by adding numerous high quality questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T08:22:20.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2017-01-17T08:09:57.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/114696/sammy-gerbil&quot;&gt;sammy gerbil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great contributor having amassed nearly 10,000 reputation in just 9 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T08:24:08.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9498" CreationDate="2017-01-17T18:02:16.277" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote this if you want the name changed back to &lt;em&gt;the h bar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using my superpowers as a room owner I will change the name back if this gets ten upvotes (provided no competing suggestion gets more upvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvote if you don't want the name changed back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T18:02:16.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9509" CreationDate="2017-01-18T02:47:32.167" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about a new question that is based on a premise that I stated in (I did not claim that it - the premise -  was a new idea), and comments and answers  I received in response to a previous question that I posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I (and, if so, should I- ethically/ or in good taste etc.) identify the question title for reference within the body of the text of the new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141240" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T03:00:06.960" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T03:18:45.103" Title="Can I refer to a previous question I asked within the content of a new question?" Tags="|discussion|ethics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9508" CreationDate="2017-01-18T03:02:40.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely, it's a good idea to refer to previous questions (yours or other people's) when doing so is useful. But don't just use the question &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt;; you should include a link to it. If you include just the URL of the question, the SE software will automatically convert the link to display the question title, e.g. if I write &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9508&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I get &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9508&quot;&gt;Can I refer to a previous question I asked within the content of a new question?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can give your own link text by using the appropriate Markdown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[the question about referring to previous questions](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9508)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9508&quot;&gt;the question about referring to previous questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T03:18:45.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9508" CreationDate="2017-01-18T03:02:49.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, why not?*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* We can't really give you clear advice on yes or no without seeing the exact wording of the question in mind. But in most cases, it's fine. Imagine &quot;If pV = nRT, then what happens in a nozzle flow&quot; can easily lead to &quot;Why does pV = nRT anyway?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T03:02:49.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9514" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:33:25.137" Score="6" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've posted a few questions here relating to physics of polymers in solution, and I am surprised every time that there is no dedicated tag for them. A couple of examples of my own questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/256207/hindered-rotation-model-for-flexible-polymers-deriving-the-flory-characteristic&quot;&gt;Hindered rotation model for flexible polymers: deriving the Flory characteristic ratio&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/305930/scaling-argument-for-friction-force-on-a-chain-in-shear-flow&quot;&gt;Scaling argument for friction force on a chain in shear flow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find a good tag to appropriately direct this sort of question on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29259" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:10:01.300" Title="Proposed tag: polymer physics" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9513" CreationDate="2017-01-19T07:23:00.777" Score="-5" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do access the chat room to ask a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141240" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T07:36:10.403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T08:07:33.400" Title="How do I access chat?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9512" CreationDate="2017-01-19T08:07:33.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The URL is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively on the main site click the down triangle near the top left of the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NbaF5.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NbaF5.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Chat link&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and click on the word chat. Then click the link for the h Bar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SE83B.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SE83B.gif&quot; alt=&quot;h Bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T08:07:33.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9511" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:10:01.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have added the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polymers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polymers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polymers&lt;/a&gt; tag to both of your questions. It's now your job to go through the search that tpg2114 mentioned and add the tag as a suggested edit where appropriate. (However, please only do this a few at a time - no more than 2-4 a day - so as not to overwhelm the front page.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people reviewing those edits, please do take the due diligence to check that the tag actually applies to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:10:01.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9481" CreationDate="2017-01-19T18:45:54.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/287399/from-discrete-to-continuous-why-quantum-fields&quot;&gt;From discrete to continuous - why quantum *fields*?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fundamental question invites us to revisit assumptions we probably originally take for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:45:54.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9481" CreationDate="2017-01-19T18:48:02.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/285886/partition-function-for-gaussian-white-noise&quot;&gt;Partition function for Gaussian white noise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this question because it brings together two seemingly disparate areas of physics: noise (i.e. stochastic processes) and the partition function.&#xA;The latter of these two is normally encountered in the context of statistical mechanics, so it's interesting and aesthetically pleasing to see a link established between teh partition function and stochastic processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;em&gt;good question&lt;/em&gt; because OP states the problem concisely, shows effort, and asks for help on a particular step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:48:02.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9485" CreationDate="2017-01-19T18:56:09.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll throw my own hat in here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/302142/consistent-complete-and-generalized-description-of-the-quantum-harmonic-oscill&quot;&gt;Consistent, complete, and generalized description of the quantum harmonic oscillator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The harmonic oscillator is studied so much not only because it models many physical systems, but also because it's a useful exactly solvable system illustrating important principles.&#xA;This self-answered post concisely lays out a pretty thorough set of relations for the quantum harmonic oscillator using variables and notation that are much more clear than typical textbook treatments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:56:09.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9489" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:23:10.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll throw in my own question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/248754/what-do-the-wave-functions-associated-to-the-fock-states-of-each-mode-of-a-bound&quot;&gt;What do the wave functions associated to the Fock states of each mode of a bound state system mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question asks about the fundamental structure of quantum mechanics.&#xA;The distinction between single particle wavefunctions and the wave functions of Fock states for a single &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt; of a distributed system confuses even seasoned physicists (i.e. most of my research group!).&#xA;At the same time, because the question asks about the basic elements of quantum mechanics, it should be interesting to beginners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that after ten years in research questions like this one remind me that I'm never too old to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T20:30:55.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9484" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:04:51.940" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/191451/what-will-happen-if-the-photon-has-non-zero-mass/285624#285624&quot;&gt;What will happen if the photon has non-zero mass?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; is the most underrated answer of 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post is very informative and clearly a lot of effort went into its creation.  Unfortunately at the time of posting this, it has only obtained 1 up-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:20:38.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9489" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:19:50.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227960/do-free-electron-lasers-actually-lase&quot;&gt;Do free-electron lasers actually lase?&lt;/a&gt;, is fantastic and was asked in Jan 2016 by a user who's account was created in 2012.  The question accumulated over 30 up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:34:48.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9490" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:27:21.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say the answer below is the best answer by a rookie in 2016.  A very informative answer by a user who created their account in 2016:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/251001/how-does-zumberges-1981-gravitational-measurements-relate-to-gravitational-wave/251014#251014&quot;&gt;How does Zumberge&amp;#39;s 1981 gravitational measurements relate to gravitational waves?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:27:21.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9487" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:33:17.747" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll nominate my own answer for this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/294763/what-is-the-evidence-for-the-existence-of-gravity/294771#294771&quot;&gt;What is the evidence for the existence of gravity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very clear and concise answer targeted at the layman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:33:17.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9483" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:46:32.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate the answer below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/288614/does-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-necessarily-imply-every/288618#288618&quot;&gt;Does the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics necessarily imply every world exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question provides a short but very informative answer highlighting that unlike in other areas of life, on Physics.SE size isn't everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:46:32.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T00:34:58.590" Score="-2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently it requires a reputation of 50 points or more to post comments to other users' posts. This creates some problems for new users :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Instead of commenting they are tempted to post &quot;answers&quot; which are nothing more than comments. These have to be reviewed and/or flagged for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Instead of being able to ask for clarification of posted answers, they post a duplicate question explaining that they did not understand the answers already posted. The new question is flagged for review as a duplicate. For example : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/307367&quot;&gt;How can the Fermi level be in between the band-gaps?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern is not about the &lt;strong&gt;fairness&lt;/strong&gt; of this policy, as is the case in &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6337&quot;&gt;Why do you need 50 reputation to comment on other posts?&lt;/a&gt; My concern is about the &lt;strong&gt;practicality&lt;/strong&gt; of it. Are the difficulties which it creates greater than the benefits of the policy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are temporary, subject to deletion by moderators, and of less importance than answers. It seems to me inconsistent that it requires more rep to post comments than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should this policy be changed? Should the restriction on posting comments be removed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T09:02:40.727" Title="Should commenting be unrestricted?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|reputation|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9527" CreationDate="2017-01-25T01:27:34.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that new askers are more likely to get their questions answered, and new answerers are more likely to have their answers actually help people, if they post questions and answers rather than comments.  Here are some reasons why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Instead of commenting they are tempted to post &quot;answers&quot; which are nothing more than comments. These have to be reviewed and/or flagged for deletion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that's true, the mechanisms for alerting reviewers and other users to new answers are much more robust than for comments.  A not-useful comment, for instance, can't be downvoted --- only flagged for moderator attention.  It's much more efficient to have the entire community empowered to evaluate low-effort contributions from new or low-rep users than to ask the moderators to shoulder that entire burden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that asking people to write paragraph-complexity answers and questions that five or ten other users find voteworthy to be a pretty low bar for the privilege of leaving a sentence-complexity comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can (and sometimes do) convert brief non-answers into comments, but I mostly encourage people to meet the participation threshold and come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Instead of being able to ask for clarification of posted answers, they post a duplicate question explaining that they did not understand the answers already posted. The new question is flagged for review as a duplicate. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the alternatives here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comment from a new user to an old question: &quot;I don't understand any of the answers here, please explain more.&quot; Depending on the age of the question, its asker may never get notified about the comment.  Commenting doesn't bump a question to the front page, so other users don't notice the new comment either.  New user does not get help. The end.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Duplicate question from a new user: &quot;I don't understand the answers over there, please explain more.&quot; Question appears on the front page and the in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts&quot;&gt;First Posts Review Queue&lt;/a&gt;, where many people see it. Those people will vote and ask clarifying questions in the comments, possibly while the new user is still hanging around.  Maybe the question gets closed, and maybe it gets answered, and maybe both.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Duplicate&quot; question from new user: &quot;I don't understand the answers over there &lt;em&gt;for reasons A, B, C&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;  That's potentially a good new question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that there's a &lt;em&gt;path&lt;/em&gt; from (2) to (3), via editing of the new question, but the path from (1) to (3) is much more tortuous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Furthermore, as ACuriousMind says in a comment, I'm pretty sure that individual SE sites don't have the ability to muck around with the privilege hierarchy.  So this isn't something that could be implemented only on Physics --- you'd have to drag the entire network along.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T01:27:34.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9527" CreationDate="2017-01-25T04:14:00.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The structure of Stack Exchange site privileges is partly gamification to get you hooked, but it is also about controlling both malicious and negligent attacks on the system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not subject to downvotes and are designed to be transient so there is no penalty to a user when a comment is deleted. Which means that they represent a low risk channel for users to be obnoxious. Of course, established users risk being suspended for that behavior, but if we let users access the comment system fully without some kind of vetting then a malicious user could send the mods on a merry game of whack-a-mole as they post nasty comments, get cut off, re-appear from another IP and go 'round and 'round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relatively minor barrier of a low rep threshold represents a short time when a productive member of the community can't play a full role, but slows the hypothetical comment spammer considerably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might still ask if 50 is the right threshold (and I think it is set lower on beta sites), but I rather doubt anyone is going to get very worked up about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T09:02:40.727" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T09:02:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9488" CreationDate="2017-01-26T06:38:06.227" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/173818/what-do-we-mean-with-magnetic-monopole-and-dipole/292994#292994&quot;&gt;Answer to &quot;What do we mean with magnetic monopole and dipole?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer assumes that the OP is new to magnetostatics but is good at electrostatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer starts by drawing the fundamental analogies between the electrostatics and magnetostatics. The answer then slowly explores more analogies through simple derivations and ultimately ends up answering the all of the OP's questions. On its way, it explains important concepts using simple ideas, for example, it explains why magnetic field lines are always closed or why a zero exists on the right hand side of the Gauss Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60891" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:06:21.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T15:46:21.420" Score="5" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/307573/dancing-twins-one-travelling-in-a-rocket-ship-looking-through-telescopes-at-ea&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;asks whether a traveler looking through a telescope will see his earthbound twin moving in slow motion.  It is closed as a duplicate of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/300196/time-dilation-and-twin-paradox-if-they-twins-were-speaking-on-a-phone-of-some-k&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which asks whether a traveler &lt;i&gt;moving away from earth&lt;/i&gt; will hear earth-originated telephone conversations in &quot;slow motion&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't surprise me at all if the closed question were a duplicate of &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt;, but it's not a duplicate of the currently alleged duplicate.  That's because the answer to the closed question depends on whether the traveler is moving toward or away from earth, whereas the alleged duplicate addresses only the (less interesting) case where the traveler is moving away.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in particular, readers are told that &quot;This question already has an answer here&quot;, and then directed to a site where the more interesting part of the question is not answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again---I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if there's a real duplicate somewhere, but it would be good if readers were directed to that real duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T21:07:24.250" Title="&quot;Duplicate&quot; not a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:20:31.867" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to use this site anymore, so how do I delete it? If it's not possible to delete, can I just be permanently blocked from using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149671" OwnerDisplayName="user86072" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:25:25.103" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T19:25:25.103" Title="How do I delete my account?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-01-26T19:25:07.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-27T19:05:42.550" Score="14" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35050094#35050094&quot;&gt;talking on chat&lt;/a&gt; about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/260849/proposed-micro-privilege-site-analytics&quot;&gt;analytics information available to 25k+ users&lt;/a&gt;. This is normally pretty boring, but I went to have a look and I was somewhat surprised. These are the top ten sites that have sent us traffic over the past month:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WoL4q.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(full statistics &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bCREE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) A lot of this comes internally from the Stack Exchange network - I suspect, primarily, through the Hot Network Questions Sidebar - but we do have a fair amount of other external sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I was surprised to find that &lt;strong&gt;the topmost non-SE referrer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://news360.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;news360.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a web recommendations app, which is responsible for about 1% of visits. (This is because that chart only accounts for the 3.1% of visits that come referred from external sites. 7.2% are marked as direct visits, and 89% come from search engines, with 97% of those coming from Google.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remarkably, the news360 traffic is even bigger than what we get from Facebook: that's also around 1%, but a distinct 5% less than the news360 counts. This is for a site that's incomparably small (4M users according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; compared to Facebook's billion+ users, so there's probably something specific at play here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do I want to say about this? Well, first, this is a curious enough observation as is. Secondly, though, I would like to know if there are any ways we can explore what kind of questions that news360 traffic is landing on. With Stack Overflow, we mostly know where it's going on (HNQs, with all the good stuff and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/286020/&quot;&gt;all&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/238420&quot;&gt;bad&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/272230/&quot;&gt;stuff&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/284929&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/222721&quot;&gt;entails&lt;/a&gt;), but I'm in the dark as to what kind of content is getting extra attention from that external source, and I'm not sure the same kind of intuitions about facebook-driven traffic also apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... is there something useful we can say about that traffic? And, if so, does it tell us something useful about the site and how we can improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:23:00.777" Title="The site that refers the most visits to Physics Stack Exchange is…" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9498" CreationDate="2017-01-28T20:35:42.897" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;How has Schrodinger's Chat not been suggested? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's both alive and dead until you open it to observe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1954" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T20:35:42.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T17:43:39.543" Score="-1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;On multiple occasions while browsing through the close votes queue, I've come across &quot;do my homework for me!!!&quot; questions that have a scanned image from a textbook where the the image is sideways. These are much worse than are the typical &quot;do my homework for me, please&quot; kinds of questions. At least they said &quot;please&quot;. Many of them have even have done a bit of work, but then got lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not ranting about those questions. I'm ranting about the questions with sideways images. IMHO, a very special category is needed for people who post a sideways image scanned from a textbook and haven't shown a spot of work. Humiliation would be a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T19:14:37.940" Title="Close question because image is sideways" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9535" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:14:37.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, we shouldn't close questions simply because they are images of a textbook/web page/something else.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Instead you should either (a) transcribe it (assuming it's legible &amp;amp; you have the time) or (b) leave a comment that such a question (i.e., image of textbook/web page/something) is not usually well-received and leave a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;MathJax tutorial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; I have found that these types of questions are often lazy &quot;do my homework for me&quot; type questions that do deserve closure, but it's because of that aspect and not the sideways image.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T19:14:37.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T23:26:59.270" Score="-5" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a simple physics SE be designed for people who have little or no training who are enthusiasts none the less? That way moderators can instant migrate lessor questions there instead of instant close? Consisting of answers and questions for everyone to understand it would provide a new Physics093.beta for beginners. There is plenty of places to learn but not in the SE format that many prefer including myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T00:55:35.833" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T02:48:47.240" Title="Can a new physical science SE for beginners in physics be created?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|homework-and-exercises|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9537" CreationDate="2017-01-30T00:18:35.280" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a question is not in scope for this particular Meta site, but can be proposed over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;, which is where Stack Exchange sites are proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there have been similar proposals (a short list among others)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5697/25301&quot;&gt;Should we have a Popular Physics SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9303/new-site-proposal-specifically-for-problem-solving-in-physics-on-area-51&quot;&gt;New site proposal specifically for problem solving in Physics on Area 51&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/931/how-about-a-physics-problems-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How about a &amp;quot;physics problems&amp;quot; stack exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these have been successful in garnering much interest (i.e., critical mass interest to actually support a site). I sincerely doubt your latest attempt would be any more successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9320/physics-problem-solving-site&quot;&gt;Heather &amp;amp; Mew's Physics Problem site&lt;/a&gt;, but note that (a) it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an SE site and (b) I have no idea what is going on there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T00:18:35.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9537" CreationDate="2017-01-30T04:03:05.903" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone is &lt;em&gt;genuinely&lt;/em&gt; interested in learning physics, there are plenty of resources on the web that are infinitely better for learning than the SE question/answer format. This is likely the reason that previous attempts to start a &quot;popular physics&quot; SE haven't had much interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excellent &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khan academy&lt;/a&gt; courses are a great starting point, as is Wikipedia, as well as the dozens of channels on YouTube that will walk you through anything you'd like to learn. After that, there's the entire catalog of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT OpenCourseWare&lt;/a&gt; that contains astounding amounts of material, plus exams with solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's simply no reason to rehash elementary concepts on SE, when they're so readily accessible with the simplest web search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10334" LastEditorUserId="10334" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T04:36:54.957" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T04:36:54.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9533" CreationDate="2017-01-30T05:23:00.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the intra-SE and external traffic should be handled differently, but for the same goal: to attract more visitors. Maybe two circle diagrams from the internal and external sources could be more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of the site would be to increase the visitor rate. It is an universal rule. Even the never acknowledged &quot;quality over quantity&quot; rule is clearly for that, because LQ content expels visitors, HQ content attracts them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attracting more visitors has these major effects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Popularizes the natural sciences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Helps people to learn physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attracts new users with a capability and intention to produce high quality content here (which attracts yet more users).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Makes money for the SE Inc, helping it to take care more to our wishes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing where the most hits are coming from, it opens the possibility to know the mechanisms and behavior of the source sites, and tune our content and traffic to help it to send more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example: news360.com reflects probably to current events, these current events could be focused more on the front page. It could serve as a &lt;em&gt;hint&lt;/em&gt; to know, that the site frontpage should reflect more the current events. If the top source site would be, for example, the wikipedia, then it would serve as a totally different hint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same could happen also in intra-SE relations, although here the rules are quite different. First, in the case of the intra-SE content, the goal shouldn't be to &quot;rob&quot; visitors from the other side, but a cooperative one: working together to extend the visitor rate of both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T05:23:00.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9537" CreationDate="2017-01-31T02:48:47.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that would work out, Jen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If simple questions are migrated to another site, the experts will not go there to answer them. Users who want to answer questions will stay here, especially the experts who want to find difficult, interesting questions to tackle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users whose questions have been migrated will not get the high-quality answers which they come here for. They will only get a few low-quality answers, because most users of that site will be looking for answers, and will not be able to provide good answers anyway. They will be disappointed and will not keep using the other site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of migrating low-level problems will work out just the same as when they are closed on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason users like you stay here is probably because they value the feedback they get from a broad community of physicists. Sometimes your questions are closed quickly, but even if that happens you still get a lot of feedback from comments, which is valuable even when it is critical. So you put up with the difficulties because they are outweighed by the advantages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T02:48:47.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9543" CreationDate="2017-01-31T14:59:53.073" Score="21" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have tried very hard to comply with the spirit of this forum but obviously still have not got the hang of it. I write a short comment and then am told it should be an answer.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer a question and it is down voted but no reason is given. &#xA;Here is an example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/307799/104696&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/307799/104696&lt;/a&gt; which obviously flummoxed another contributor, @sammygerbil, to this forum. If nothing else I think that this is inconsiderate and possibly rude. It also does not help me to try and do better in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I wish to have guidance about this question and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/308810/2451&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Having recently been told not to write answers as comments I wrote it as an answer. The reason why I wrote an answer is because I thought that I would be helping this student about a physics concept. In this case it is the idea of a non-uniform acceleration where the student thinks that one formula fits all situations. At the start of learning physics many students find this conceptually difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not give an answer or any working I just told him/her how acceleration is defined. After writing the answer and before doing some gardening this afternoon I had an idea that there may be a contrary view when &quot;-1&quot; turned up but without a comment what was I supposed to do? I have absolutely no objection to the forum being overseen but I do wish to be helped to do the right thing and a comment with regard to a down vote would help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T23:36:13.693" Title="Re: Downvoting with no feedback" Tags="|discussion|support|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9542" CreationDate="2017-01-31T15:28:25.610" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would interpret the downvotes on the answers to both of those questions as saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;don't answer this kind of homework questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I agree with that perspective. Providing answers to obvious do-my-work-for-me questions only encourages more of them, and they are a clear drag on the quality of the site. This is a gray area, but if I see a Q&amp;amp;A pair and think&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this question is terrible, the OP is a freeloader, and the question harms the site, and in fact it's so bad that any answer to this question encourages similarly terrible questions, so your answer harms the site regardless of what's actually in it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then a downvote on the answer is pretty warranted. I think that that's the case for both of the questions you've linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T15:28:25.610" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T16:26:08.610" Score="-1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might seem as a stupid question but I would like to upload a word document as an answer to a question. I can convert the document to html and copy its contents but most of the formula disappear when pasting into the stack exchange answer box.&#xA;I dont have a website, which could refer the interested people to an URL. I do have Google Drive and a shared folder, but how can I reference this folder in the answer box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105027" OwnerDisplayName="Jens" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T16:41:44.273" Title="Upload word document as answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9544" CreationDate="2017-01-31T16:41:44.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We generally like answers to be written using the markup facilities provided so they are searchable. That's why we deprecate the posting of images containing the working. If your answer was a screengrab of the document or just a link to the document it would not be very popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I want to compose a long answer I generally write in Word then copy and paste into this site. However I will have already used MathJax to format equations. I'm guessing you've used the Word equation editor or something similar for equations. In that case the only option is to rewrite the equations using MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If redoing the equations is impossibly time consuming then I'm afraid the best option is not to answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A last desparate option might be to post a link to the document in the chat room and ask if anyone would be interested in converting the equations to MathJax. If it's one of the areas I'm particularly interested in (e.g. GR) then I might be willing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T16:41:44.273" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T04:45:09.583" Score="6" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/308754/66322&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; ysterday. I explained there that I was unable to understand how can my speakers make sound when I receive a phone call. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;put on hold&lt;/strong&gt; with a reason &lt;strong&gt;This question appears to be about engineering&lt;/strong&gt;. There was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536/&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to get more details. But I think the question is not about engineering. I read &quot;more details&quot; link. Still I think the question is valid for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T04:55:26.843" Title="Things that occured in life are marked to be about engineering" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:55:26.187" Score="9" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several times when writing long and detailed answers, I am unable to find time to finish it all in one go. I know draft of unfinished answers are saved and if I visit the question again, I can continue working on it. However, I think there should be a separate section where all unfinished drafts are saved so that I don't have to go looking for the question everytime I want to finish a draft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8821" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:24:58.673" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T14:30:35.897" Title="Should we have an &quot;Answer Later&quot; section?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T19:18:48.047" Score="-3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about forces required to lift weights, and I need someone to look over my math.  Should I ask this in Physics or Engineering community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113265" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:33:44.920" Title="Is this a question for Physics or Engineering community?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9549" CreationDate="2017-02-01T19:33:44.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all you want is for someone to check your math, that is not on topic for this site. You could ask in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt; though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;, since that's a different site and I don't know their scope all that well. You would have to ask there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:33:44.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9548" CreationDate="2017-02-02T01:51:26.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it the problem is one of book-marking the question rather than having a convenient place to store the answer while it is being worked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A practical way of doing this is to post your first draft of an answer and delete it. Then all you need to do find the answer again is to search in the list of deleted answers in your profile. Hopefully this is much shorter than the list of non-deleted answers. When you are finished working on your answer you can undelete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the advantage that nobody comments on or (down-)votes your answer while it is still a &quot;work in progress&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The disadvantage is that draft answers will be mixed up with those which you have abandoned altogether but cannot place in the trash can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you could mark the question as a &lt;em&gt;favorite&lt;/em&gt;, if this is the only reason you use that feature. But this does not have the advantage of the &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T13:53:24.073" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T13:53:24.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9546" CreationDate="2017-02-02T02:17:00.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Emilio Pisanty that the question should not have been closed as an engineering question, for the reason he gives, namely that the OP is asking for the physics behind a phenomenon rather than, for example, an explanation of a technical feature of his mobile phone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the question has some similarities to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/308331&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/308331&lt;/a&gt;, it is readily recognizable in this case what the cause is, even though the &quot;strange sound&quot; is not described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry to criticise @DavidZ but I think this is a good example of why moderators should not close questions unilaterally for routine reasons - ie for the same reasons as reviewers. When judgement is called for, the requirement for 5 votes avoids the outcome being skewed by individual differences of opinion. I have complained about this already in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9449/&quot;&gt;When should moderators close questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T04:55:26.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9546" CreationDate="2017-02-02T04:45:17.323" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The decision to close is inconsistent with the criteria expressed in the linked question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site/&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  The top-voted/accepted answer clearly communicates that it's the design process behind Engineering that's off-topic here, not the physics of engineered devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter whether a physical system in question is naturally occurring or artificial; it's still just physics.  The distinction's in the primary intellectual content of an issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Physics&lt;/strong&gt;:  Primary intellectual content is about why a physical system behaves the way it does, including understanding observations and predicting future observations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Engineering&lt;/strong&gt;:  Primary intellectual content is about how to design, construct, or improve a technology.  Engineering often involves physics, but the distinguishing quality is a focus on design rather than observation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Business&lt;/strong&gt;:  Primary intellectual content is about how to gain economic advantage from technology, or how others are doing so.  Business questions may involve physics or engineering, but the distinguishing quality is a focus on marketability.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closed question isn't about how to design a speaker or a specific commercial product.  It's a general physics question about a common physical system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T11:35:32.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:16:45.063" Score="15" ViewCount="1606" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/9554&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T09:42:16.113" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2017" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="31" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-07-17T20:17:37.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:16:45.063" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zzY6I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T14:16:45.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:19:20.700" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pqs48.png&quot; alt=&quot;www.physicsoverflow.org&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:19:20.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-02T17:57:37.590" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ef9Hl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Stack Exchange Review Queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T17:57:37.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9531" CreationDate="2017-02-02T21:07:24.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the first person who voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/307573&quot;&gt;Dancing Twins&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate, I think you make a valid point which is relevant generally. There is always going to be some difference between questions, or some aspect of the new question (or of both) which is not addressed in the original answers. I think the decision has to be made on the broad similarity of the central part of the question. See for example the discussions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5864/not-a-duplicate&quot;&gt;Do black holes exist?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9348/a-dubious-duplicate?rq=1&quot;&gt;Is the definition of the meter arbitrary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case I think you are making a distinction which does not actually exist in the questions. Neither specifies what the relative motion of the observers is. The rocket-bound twin could be circling the Earth-bound twin; this possibility is not addressed in either case. And Electrodynamist's answer to the original makes the same points as you that what is observed depends on the relative speed and is affected by both time dilation and the Doppler effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the question was closed you were able to post an answer which addressed the issue you raised. Even if the question had been closed before you answered, you could (and can still) post a thorough answer to the original question, contrasting the two questions and covering all scenarios. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might indeed be a better original of which this is the duplicate, but finding it takes time and effort, which mortals like us have in limited supply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T21:07:24.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T06:58:09.977" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a chat session coming up next Tuesday at 16:00 UTC in the Physics chat room. Recent chats have been a bit amorphous, so if there are any issues you want to raise now is a good time to crystallise your thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course just an excuse for me to highlight the single most important burning issue of the moment: please, please, please can we rename the chat room to &lt;em&gt;Schrödinger's chat&lt;/em&gt; :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is clearly no enthusiasm for renaming the chat room. You may consider this suggestion abandoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave the question open here in case anyone wants to use it to suggest other topics for the chat session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T08:50:07.603" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:38:22.423" Title="Agenda for Tuesday's chat session" Tags="|discussion|chat|chat-events|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9559" CreationDate="2017-02-03T07:21:42.967" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to the renaming request: we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do it, but we also can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T07:21:42.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9559" CreationDate="2017-02-03T08:42:05.630" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please upvote this if you support the change of the chat room name to &lt;em&gt;Schrödinger's chat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please downvote this if you disagree with the name change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T08:42:05.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T14:08:40.180" Score="5" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for text books of the same style as 'Nuclear and Particle Physics' by W.S.C.Williams - that is, with clearly labeled definitions and sections of concise explanation. However, I am looking for such textbooks in a range of subjects - GR, atomic physics etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is such a question best asked on this site? I feel if asked directly it will be closed for being to broad but if I was to ask for each individual topic it would needlessly clog up the home page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such a question appropriate for this site? And if so what is the best way to approach it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T05:13:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T05:13:10.023" Title="How broad can a resource-recommendation question be?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-02-11T14:12:29.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:06:42.453" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ziQXb.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org: the leading open access eprint repository&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T15:28:34.417" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:28:34.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:23:00.723" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E9D64.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify: automated LaTeX symbol recognition&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:23:00.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:26:51.453" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/toYiP.png&quot; alt=&quot;DLMF: an online encyclopaedia of special functions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:26:51.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:28:53.723" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/353zN.png&quot; alt=&quot;History of Science and Mathematics at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:28:53.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:30:28.490" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9554/community-promotion-ads-2017&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6SOhy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Community ads are run by the community. Come and vote!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T12:07:55.303" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T12:07:55.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:32:07.383" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O9ZQy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Computational Science at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:32:07.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:34:55.543" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5A7af.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:34:55.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:36:06.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com/latex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SaONO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Overleaf: Free online collaborative LaTeX editor with real-time PDF preview&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:36:06.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:39:08.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ei2RL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Engineering Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:39:08.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:41:13.740" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ij43t.png&quot; alt=&quot;archive.org - the public library of the internet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:41:13.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:41:58.917" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1wvvA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wayback Machine: experience the Web as it was&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:41:58.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:42:45.827" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://retractionwatch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFSyZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Retraction Watch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:42:45.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:43:31.270" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://doai.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ndeRs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Digital Open Access Identifier - a DOI resolver that prioritizes open access&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:43:31.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:45:45.580" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thecostofknowledge.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vu8lo.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Cost of Knowledge - join the Elsevier boycott and take back our scientific publishing!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:45:45.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:46:16.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NS3GV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero reference manager: free and open source&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:46:16.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-03T15:47:33.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dissem.in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://dev.dissem.in/img/stackexchange.png&quot; alt=&quot;Are your papers available in an open access repository? Check with Dissemin&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T15:47:33.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9563" CreationDate="2017-02-03T23:43:40.027" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not the sort of thing we have in mind for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions. As the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;the recommendation question&lt;/a&gt; says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It should be of the form &quot;What are good books to learn/study [subject] at [level]?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The style of the book shouldn't factor into the question. It's a fairly subjective thing, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recommended way for you to get the information you're looking for is to read through the existing answers to the recommendation questions for the topics you're interested in. Those answers should describe characteristics of the books, and you can judge which ones might have the style you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T23:43:40.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-04T20:57:04.310" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qpQZm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Discover our universe&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T20:57:04.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-04T20:58:02.620" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sagemath.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xcgnf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sage Mathematical Software Environment&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T20:58:02.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-05T15:19:36.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tuKdN.png&quot; alt=&quot;math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T16:01:40.663" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T16:01:40.663" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-05T15:28:41.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://crypto.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AkQzj.png&quot; alt=&quot;cryptography.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T15:28:41.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-05T15:58:05.570" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/noaFv.png&quot; alt=&quot;chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T15:58:05.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9591" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:00:53.673" Score="2" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been suspended for asking too many low quality questions. They are important to me. Is there a way to check how if I am close to getting suspended again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T18:46:50.610" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:46:50.610" Title="Can I get a warning before I am suspended?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|moderators|suspensions|quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:11:04.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The algorithm for automatic low-quality suspensions is intentionally not public to avoid users gaming it, and manual suspensions (i.e. those issued by moderators and not the SE engine) rarely carry a warning with them for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly if a user already has been suspended in the past for the same behaviour, a warning is unlikely. They have already been told in the private message accompanying their last suspension what the behaviour leading to it was, and given tips on how to avoid it. Continuing the same behaviour after a suspension will inevitably lead to another, typically a longer one, without warning - the warning was the preceding suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are certain behaviours for which you might receive a moderator message but not a suspension. These messages should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be seen as &quot;warnings&quot;, but as messages that are sent &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the behaviour in question reaches a level that is worthy of suspension. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is according to general SE philosophy as laid out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Day in the Penalty Box&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T18:15:10.070" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:15:10.070" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7569" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:33:47.837" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want as many visitors possible. Ideally when some one googles a question your site would come up foremost. Even if it is copied word from word it makes your site another good source and increases the chance for a user finding an answer. As long as there is a link to the original there should be no problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google uses key words to find what the user is looking for as we all know. For example: Why does a balloon pop when it gets to high? But, there are many ways to ask that same question. Keeping the duplicates will assure a return to your site when Googled by new users more often. It is your policies that decide if you will be a Lycos or Google of Physics. Moderators should decide what is bad traffic and pseudoscience an handle it accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:33:47.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-05T20:26:28.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ckdoi.png&quot; alt=&quot;space.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:50.550" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T20:26:28.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-05T20:56:47.957" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yRoYg.png&quot; alt=&quot;tex.stackexchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T20:56:47.957" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:06:25.893" Score="3" ViewCount="919" Body="&lt;p&gt;After discussion at the biweekly chat session starting &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35277884#35277884&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and looking at the answers and comments to this post, the feedback appears to be overwhelmingly negative. As anticipated at the end of the session &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=35278976#35278976&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, it therefore seems that the second part of this meta post should be considered obsolete. Even though there was &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; positive feedback, we're not going to have a chat policy that is not backed by a clear majority of users. Going forward, the only policy governing the h bar is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback&quot;&gt;Be Nice policy&lt;/a&gt; itself, as it were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there has been considerable dissatisfaction with recent moderator actions in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h bar&lt;/a&gt;, physics.SE's main chat room, at least in part because people feel they have not been properly informed about the rules, policies, and consequences of violating them. We'd like to take the opportunity to correct that by giving more detailed thoughts, based on general SE philosophy as laid out on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;, on what the h bar ought to be like and how we're going to achieve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What is chat?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, that sounds like a stupid question in this day and age, but it's not, at least not in the context of SE. See, for instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270587/263383&quot;&gt;Toward a philosophy of Chat&lt;/a&gt; for a recent discussion about what chat is - and is not. Let me reiterate the indisputable facts about SE chat that are listed there (in a condensed fashion):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chat is public and non-anonymous&lt;/strong&gt;: Everything you say in chat is inextricably linked to your SE account, and after a grace period of 2 minutes you can neither edit nor remove it. Furthermore, all transcripts are completely open to be read by the public, even non-SE users, forever. There is no expiration date on the things you say in chat and no restriction on who can read it, or when.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chat is moderated&lt;/strong&gt;: All elected and appointed moderators of all sites and all SE employees possess full moderatorial power in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; chat rooms. They are not confined to the rooms of the site their diamond originates from and they are, in a bind, &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; to moderate all chat rooms if necessary. Furthermore, users with a total reputation of more than 10k can decide whether rude/offensive flags are valid or invalid, once again across all chatrooms. The only exception to global power are room owners, who are granted moderatorial powers only in the rooms they own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point in particular implies that it's &lt;em&gt;not the chatters themselves who decide the rules&lt;/em&gt;. In particular, regardless of how many regulars you get supporting you, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240839/263383&quot;&gt;Be Nice policy&lt;/a&gt; always applies, and it is &lt;em&gt;the moderators' and room owners' judgement call&lt;/em&gt; to act on its violation. In case they abuse their power, proper recourse is, in order of increasing severity, a) to have a friendly discussion about it, b) make a meta post about it, c) contact SE staff through the &quot;Contact Us&quot; form. Proper recourse is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, to further violate the Be Nice policy by attacking moderators, or to continue violating rules that have been set down, even if you disagree with their reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is the structure of chat. What about its content and purpose? The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/&quot;&gt;original blog post introducing chat&lt;/a&gt; phrased it thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I think a web-based real time chat system like Campfire could offer that informal public gathering third place -- a space for people who love the topic to meet, discuss, and collaborate in a different way. It would foster community, and be complementary to both strict Q&amp;A;, and meta-discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in the more recent post linked earlier, Shog9 adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Over the years, folks have used a lot of different metaphors to describe chat: the watercooler (informal work conversations), the tavern (socialization after work), etc. These metaphors work, to a degree... But they also leak when stretched too far: you can't have 20 people all gathered around one jug of water, and rarely does anyone talk to everyone crowded into their local inn, much less expect them to listen and respond constructively. Yet, these scenarios are common in chat. And these forms of social interaction are the source of the problems described above, which cannot easily be resolved with fanciful comparisons to physical gathering-places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by its very nature, chat is going to support more than one conversation at once, sometimes along each other, sometimes asynchronously stretched over several days whenever one of the participants logs in. Due to the permanence of chat transcripts, it is important to realize that chat is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; limited to real-time conversations, and that users do not need to participate in every conversation &lt;em&gt;right there&lt;/em&gt; to read, think about, and perhaps finally reply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also by its very nature, chat is supposed to be related to the SE site it is associated to; it is expected that physics.SE's chat will be a good place to discuss physics or the site itself, gaming.SE's chat a place for video game discussion, and so on. The informal nature of the third place means however that the discussion topic itself need not always revolve around the chat's site's actual topic. When humans (or AIs) with a common interest socialize, they tend to talk about many things that are not actually related to their common interest, and that's fine. However, on SE chat, these unrelated topics are second-class citizens: There is no reasonable expectation that any given topic will be considered on-topic in a room whose main topic it is unrelated to. Both the room description and the people present are the main source of information about what goes where.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Making chat a place for everyone&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As laid out above, chat is for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; SE users. You can choose to ignore it, you can choose to visit it occasionally, you can choose to hang out there all the time, your choice. That means that we view the evolution of exclusionary &quot;room culture&quot; - subsets of users who consider the room &quot;theirs&quot; - with suspicion and concern. Regular visitors to a chat room are going to develop a certain familiarity, and that's fine. In-jokes, references to earlier events or users, re-starting a conversation from months ago, no problems there. However, familiarity does not, in any way, invalidate what I have outlined above about the structure and goals of chat. The moderatorial power over the chat room lies with the moderators and room owners, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; with the users making up the room culture, and SE rules &lt;em&gt;supersede&lt;/em&gt; room cultural norms. Being a regular does not grant you leave to violate the Be Nice policy, not even under the guise of &quot;we know each other, it's not what it looks like&quot;. Remember, chat is public - what &quot;it looks like&quot; is &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; what everyone is &lt;em&gt;seeing&lt;/em&gt;. Chat is not private - if you want to have conversations which will be interpreted badly if one is not familiar with the participants and their history, then chat is not the place to have that conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That chat is for everyone and needs to support more than one conversation &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; means that topics which are inherently off-putting to a sizable number of people are off-limits. This includes no-brainers like child abuse, violent images or detailed discussion of bodily function, but also includes &lt;em&gt;any other topic&lt;/em&gt; deemed disruptive to civil discussion and a welcoming atmosphere. Once again, as laid out above, the ultimate judgement of what is disruptive lies with those with moderatorial power over the room, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; with the regulars, although it is certainly conducive to a welcoming atmosphere to consider the regulars' input &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; newcomers' input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there are two topics that we feel for various reasons are not conducive to civil behaviour in the h bar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sexual innuendo&lt;/strong&gt;: The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240839/263383&quot;&gt;Be Nice policy&lt;/a&gt;, as a subset of &lt;strong&gt;not being a jerk&lt;/strong&gt; explicitly calls out &lt;em&gt;&quot;[i]nappropriate language or attention. Avoid vulgar terms and anything sexually suggestive. Also, this is not a dating site.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Once again, remember chat is public and the minimum participant age is 13. Don't say anything to another user that you wouldn't say to a 13-year-old &lt;em&gt;while their parents are standing right next to you&lt;/em&gt; (possibly with a large baseball bat if that helps your decision process).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Politics&lt;/strong&gt;: Triggered by recent occurences in &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; chat rooms across the network, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/289398/263383&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; gives guidelines on how to have constructive, civil discussions about politics in chat. Of particular note is the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if you want to do that [discussing politics], if you've found others who also want to have that conversation, then make a room for the topic, welcome anyone interested who is willing to be civil, and then actually take it seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have seen too much hate and stupidity and harm and intolerance over the topic of politics both online and offline recently. The h bar is, first and foremost, intended to be a physics chat room, where physicists come to discuss physicsy things - or just socialize. Having a highly emotionally charged debate (and a &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; debate with &lt;em&gt;arguments&lt;/em&gt; instead of insults or jokes is what you're going to have to have in order to not be a jerk about this) is not socializing, it's a debate. It's inappropriate for an informal gathering place as such a charged topic tends to override all other conversations, whether it intends to or not. So everyone wanting to have a political discussion is kindly requested to &lt;em&gt;take it elsewhere&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can abide by the rules of chat at large - in particular, once again, the Be Nice policy - then that elsewhere can be just another chat room on this network, one &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; create for that express purpose. To create a room, go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat's main site&lt;/a&gt; and click on &lt;code&gt;create a new room&lt;/code&gt; on the bottom. The creator will automatically be a room owner with all privileges that entails - and will be expected to keep order in that room, like everyone else with moderatorial powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that this ban on political discussion is of course subject to common sense, and subordinate to its goal of prohibiting inflammatory discussion.&lt;/strong&gt; You will not be banned for mentioning the newest EU regulation on cucumber curvature, or curiously asking what political structure another country has, etc. It should be pretty evident in most cases whether a given topic has the potential to be inflammatory or not - if in doubt, make another room for it or just ask. Even if I have repeatedly stressed that the ultimate power lies with the moderators and room owners, this does not mean you should live in continual fear of triggering their wrath. We don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to take action, really, and compromises can be made; policies changed if their intent is not achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's be decent human beings and have a chat room where everyone is welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this meta post doesn't ask a question, your input is of course welcome. Leave a comment, leave an answer, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13775/physics-meta&quot;&gt;discuss in the meta chat room&lt;/a&gt;. We're probabaly also going to discuss it at tomorrow's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9559/50583&quot;&gt;chat session&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T04:50:19.153" Title="Chat and the moderation thereof" Tags="|discussion|policy|chat|moderation|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9598" CreationDate="2017-02-07T06:19:45.123" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have voted on questions and answers then pondered on it to undo my vote the next day and it is locked in. It says I cannot change my vote until it is edited, but unfairly the people are not notified of Q&amp;amp;A edits that they have voted on. Can a feature be added to where one can be notified when a Q &amp;amp; A has been revised that they have voted on? or is there a way to extend the time period where one can change there vote? Why is it done this way anyways? Many times when I have a good question or answer I type it in right away not to forget it, but may take days or months to fine tune it the best I can or learn more about it down the road. If I try to re ask or answer it gets red flagged so I try to ask or answer Q &amp;amp; A perfectly right the first time but sometimes is impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T06:28:49.713" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T06:57:00.113" Title="Vote locked in till the answer or question is edited" Tags="|feature-request|answers|editing|voting|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9597" CreationDate="2017-02-07T06:57:00.113" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get notified when posts are edited by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/6091/stack-overflow-extras-sox&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Extras extension script&lt;/a&gt;. However it's been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1751/allow-an-edit-to-notify-downvoters-i-think-ive-fixed-the-issue-now-please-c&quot;&gt;declined on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were able to change your vote on a post as much as you want, that allows some methods of gaming the reputation system, which is why it's not allowed. You get five minutes after you cast your vote to change it, and after that it's locked in unless the post is edited. So be careful with your votes. If you find yourself often wanting to change a vote the next day, you should probably just wait: instead of casting a vote, just make a note of the post you want to vote on, and then come back the next day and if you still feel that it deserves the vote, then you can cast it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that, if you have already voted on a post and you were going to edit it anyway, it's fine to change your vote after making the edit. However, your edit &lt;em&gt;must materially improve the post&lt;/em&gt;, as with all edits. Making trivial or harmful edits just to be able to change your votes on posts (or for any other reason, really) is abuse of the system. Don't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T06:57:00.113" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-07T09:56:11.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a purely personal view and does not reflect any official policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the last few months I’ve found the chat room to be a pleasant place to hang out. Everyone is good natured and friendly. I’ve had many useful discussions about physics, and the non-physics related discussions have been generally good humoured and sometimes very funny. Specifically the chat room has been conflict free. Let me highlight that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The chat room has been conflict free&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want conflict I have only to turn on the TV. If I don’t want conflict then, well, I hang out in the physics chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that any area in which people hold strong views is impossible to discuss in a relaxed and agreeable way. Even in real life, where we can judge how much offence we are causing by visual cues, arguments frequently get heated. In the relative anonymity of chat room heated arguments are the norm not the exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don’t want those topics discussed in the chat room, and politics is one of those areas. That’s my view, and many will claim this leads to a rather anodyne conversation. Yes, it does, and that’s just fine by me. I’m not saying these issues are unimportant and/or shouldn’t be discussed, I’m saying I don’t like them discussed in the h Bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that’s my view. As usual feel free to up/down vote to register agreement or disagreement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T09:56:11.080" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-07T12:12:29.427" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view is that the h bar should be a place where the users of Physics SE can hang out and discuss any topic under the sun with other users of Physics SE while maintain respect for one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is likely the most commonly discussed topic, but I don't think topics that aren't physics related should be deemed off topic and I also welcome controversial topics such as politics provided they are discussed in a respectful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T12:12:29.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-07T13:36:46.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some points that were raised in the meta chat on Feb 6/7, starting &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35263257#35263257&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I'm posting this in order to inform users who might not have the patience or time to read through the entire transcript of some things that have been said. If you think there are some other good messages that should be added please leave a comment or edit it in (I favour a comment so we don't have an edit for every single message). I'm not really sure how to do voting on this thing, but I'm also not sure it's useful to anyone, so...maybe just vote this up if you think we should continue to give a such a &quot;digest&quot; of extended chat discussions as they happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;No user input/overly strict enforcement&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35263329#35263329&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;, 1 star:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My proposal is to give the regulars/members of the chat room significantly more say in what is okay and what is not, like in normal site moderation, and also to be a bit less...testy (dunno if that's the word for it) in your reaction to people stepping near boundaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35263558#35263558&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;, 1 star:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the entire SE site runs basically on users saying what's okay and what's not. Why should chat be any different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35265418#35265418&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my concern is because it has been heavily over enforced, in my view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/13775?m=35263996#35263996&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't care if you say &quot;be nice&quot;. People don't do it, but everybody agrees with it. if you say &quot;no politics&quot;, though, I'm upset. there's no reason to do it.&#xA;  (when the real problem is people aren't being nice.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Replies by moderators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264084#35264084&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem is this. The probability that politics is going to lead to unpleasantness is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; high, given previous incidents across the network. If we do as you say and &quot;lay in wait&quot; until people get to the point where they are violating the Be Nice policy, the damage has already been done: Insults have been slung, feelings hurt and the chat conversation disrupted. What &lt;em&gt;benefit&lt;/em&gt; is there to allow that to happen in the middle of the main chat room if we can contain it in dedicated rooms?&#xA;  And if it doesn't happen, no harm has been done either, and the conversation continues happily in that dedicated room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Input from other moderators around the network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35263741#35263741&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do have confidence in the maturity of a lot of regulars in The h Bar - certainly those here now - but discussions do have a way of getting really heated, and that's never fun for anyone. Again, this is based on a lot of incidents network-wide. So the caution here doesn't have as much to do with what could happen as with what has happened and what will likely happen at some point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35265887#35265887&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't... Really consider this overly strict, but I may be callous; I generally just delete (vs. move) discussions I feel are problematic, so this actually strikes me as a fairly light touch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Politics is too unspecific/&quot;Everything is political&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Objections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264107#35264107&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The biggest problem here, with everything you're saying, is that &quot;politics&quot; is way to broad of a topic to ban given the evidence we have on PSE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264168#35264168&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;your ban is not &quot;common sense&quot; like this is saying. mods have deleted every comment even mentioning politics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264178#35264178&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the other problem: you guys are using &quot;political&quot; to mean &quot;political stuff that's likely to cause trouble&quot;. That's just lazy language, plain and simple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264200#35264200&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You guys are playing a dangerous game. You've written policy &quot;no politics&quot;, but then in reality you're willing to allow disobedience of the written policy so long as you're ok with the violation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264664#35264664&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt;, 1 star:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't ban &quot;politics&quot;. Start small, i.e. &quot;Recent discussions about the US immigration policy have been problematic, so we're temporarily banning it in hbar (but other rooms are unaffected) until we can craft a more precise policy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Response from users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/13775?m=35264422#35264422&quot;&gt;vzn&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;look guys (DS + heather) am all in favor of free speech/ no censorship but those concepts are sometimes a lot blurrier than you would think in cyberspace/ chat rooms &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264456#35264456&quot;&gt;vzn&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you guys are all heated up about a single room on SE. there are zillions of rooms. admittedly its a cooler room, but anyway...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Response from moderators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264582#35264582&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While it's evident we need to clarify what exactly the &quot;ban on politics&quot; entails, you should be prepared that there will always remain some sort of grey area. Working on minimizing it is good, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Input from moderators around the network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264217#35264217&quot;&gt;HDE 226868&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I still stand by that the problematic discussions take away much more than the productive ones give, but again, that's based on negative experiences I've had in a variety of chat rooms, meaning that I think it's likely the same thing will happen in The h Bar in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35265284#35265284&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's at best a useful guideline, to help folks gauge their own activity and to help mods / ROs identify potentially problematic discussions before they get out of control. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:36:46.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9559" CreationDate="2017-02-07T13:38:22.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to also have it here: We will likely discuss &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9596/50583&quot;&gt;Chat and the moderation thereof&lt;/a&gt; unless no one present is interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.710" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:38:22.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-07T13:59:36.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that one of the motivations for the &quot;no politics&quot; policy is that it often leads to uncivil behaviour, and moderators and chat owners want to avoid such a behaviour instead of correcting it when it happens. In other words, this is a pre-emptive measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like the moderators and chat owners to discuss/expand on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why is it such a bad thing to let things develop, and warn/ban a user if things get out of hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that most of us want to avoid uncivil behaviour, but I really doubt that a discussion on politics will end up in threats, insults, and really bad behaviour in general. I don't think that such a discussion would escalate to a point that is intolerable. It seems to me that the worst case scenario is just a bit of profanity. And an outright ban of a topic, just to avoid a four-letter word, seems too much to me. It seems much more logical to allow any topic, and delete/move to trash those comments that step  over the line. And if things really escalate, to warn/ban the users that were involved in the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am under the impression that mods and chat owners disagree with this, and I'd like to know why. I would really appreciate if someone would comment on this. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:59:36.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-07T14:03:48.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent undertakings in making the chat conflict-free showed, in my opinion, a deep lack of prepare or consideration from the moderation team. I talk to most of you frequently, and I know you are all honest people (Except ACM who is a robot) trying to do the best for the site, but this is really not the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a little while now the approach to fixing problems in the h-bar is to simply shut down each and every thing that is problematic, and although that does make moderation much easier it makes the usability of the chat deeply crippled. Let's be honest, the Politics ban was put in place to fight back the wave of political discussion that followed Donald Trump's election. My problem with this yielding the ban of all political discussion is simple. Let's take a look at the definition of moderator given by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/moderator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Someone who tries to help other people come to an agreement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Someone who makes certain that a formal discussion happens without problems and follows the rules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Someone who makes sure that the rules of an internet discussion are not broken, for example by removing any threatening or offensive messages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted the three I found meaningful in this context, and my point is it appears to me you simply take a narrow view of what it means and behave according to Definition &lt;code&gt;(3)&lt;/code&gt;. To me, at least, definition &lt;code&gt;(2)&lt;/code&gt; seems &lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt; more fruitful in a chat environment. You shouldn't automatically shut down every topic that goes rough every once in a while, you should actively engage in the conversation when it does and ensure the chat guidelines are being followed. There's nothing wrong with a heated discussion that doesn't break the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore I'd like to take a moment to criticise how this was put in place. You looked at a message in chat that had 8 stars, one of which is from me, took it as some form of common will and used it as &lt;em&gt;casus belli&lt;/em&gt; to ban Politics as a whole. Not only that's not fair to the people who starred that message in context, but had no intention to be part of something like this, it's lack of basic decency. I know you don't have to consult the members about room rules, not even the regulars, but just because you don't have to do it does not mean you can't or shouldn't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand you're working on making the chat a more welcoming place for everyone, but killing it is not the right way to go forward. I'm sure you can arrive at solutions that don't involve painting topics with a broad brush and proceeding to ban them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50764" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T14:10:33.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-08T08:57:05.067" Score="-9" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;[User] was suspended for a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did they do? Only low-level contributions isn't a reason to suspend anyone. Particularly not for such a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they had a lot of interesting questions, too. They are a young titan. I would like to cite @Plutarch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site now extinguished their fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they need at least a significant reduction of their term. In their age, time is going much slower, a year for them is like 5 years for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: just for 2 days ago, they asked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9590/&quot;&gt;Can I get a warning before I am suspended?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T19:13:18.967" Title="Why was [user] suspended for a year?" Tags="|discussion|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ClosedDate="2017-02-08T17:08:45.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9605" CreationDate="2017-02-08T09:10:56.660" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderators do not discuss individual suspensions in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose this doesn't technically answer the question, but then again all I can say is that there will be no answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T09:10:56.660" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:12:05.780" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not heavily invested in the chat rooms and I dont think its been a (major) problem.  But, in my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;the main chat room (&amp;quot;the h Bar&amp;quot;), should avoid politics and equally contentious topics&lt;/strong&gt;.  Given their (subjective) nature and scope, sparse discussion is natural, but excessive debate should be avoided or moved to other chat rooms within Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I participate on Physics.SE for the quality and purity of content, the professionalism, and the community moderation.  Its a refreshing sanctuary from constant discord in the media, etc. - and my optimism is renewed when I see talented people working together, joking, and doing what they love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that contentious topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Waste valuable moderation time&lt;/strong&gt; because they require constant oversight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Place moderators in a no-win situation&lt;/strong&gt;, where decisions are inherently subjective and any action is open to perceived bias&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distract from physics&lt;/strong&gt;, the explicit focus of the site - when discussed, they dominate conversation - after all, people can discuss them in other chat rooms within Physics.SE or on more relevent SE sites (ie. &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;skeptics&lt;/a&gt;, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create a toxic atmosphere&lt;/strong&gt;, and they are nearly impossible to ignore - sure, they're important, but users are excluded from chat if avoiding them.  Too often, they are disrespectful.  We have the 'Be Nice' policy... thats great, but its also been largely ineffective.  We dont need that in the main chat room.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we avoid such topics on &amp;quot;the h Bar&amp;quot;, I think it would have a better atmosphere and allow  more open-ended topics, with limited oversight required.  I think moderation can (and should) be driven by chat participants in place of moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what its worth, I recently came to this conclusion after the CEO of Stack Exchange, Joel Spolsky, posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take-a-stand&quot;&gt;overtly political opinion&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It created a toxic atmosphere, and to many (including myself), the post violates most aspects of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/289398/if-youre-gonna-talk-politics-you-must-respect-those-who-disagree&quot;&gt;official SE policy on political posts&lt;/a&gt;, intended to limit conflict.  Regardless of the post's political content, the community agreed that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342480/should-the-time-to-take-a-stand-question-be-closed-moved&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/342646/3623090&quot;&gt;violated the 'Be Nice' policy&lt;/a&gt;.  Worse, it created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/342440/revisions?page=4&quot;&gt;close/reopen war&lt;/a&gt;, where moderators (including Joel himself) unilaterally reopened the post (multiple times) after the community had closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think its troubling that the SE team believes in community moderation and the ethos we collectively respect and enforce &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/342903/3623090&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;only when it suits them&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  Stack Exchange exists because millions of people (like you) donated their time and expertise.  To me, using it as a political grandstand abuses our trust and efforts, and its narcissistic to believe its the righteous decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, &lt;strong&gt;I think the moderators here do a great job ...thank you!&lt;/strong&gt;  But, Joel's post and the responses from Stack Exchange give me pause moving forward, especially where politics and moderation intersect in central venues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T16:11:24.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-08T20:13:26.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A brief summary&lt;/strong&gt; of the arguments in this post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That there was given a complete lack of explanation of thought process in the days leading up to and even after this meta post by mods - especially a poor announcement of the situation (meta post made after the mods started deleting posts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the ban of politics itself is overly broad, unclear, strange, and without precedent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That there was a lack of user input in this ban in a &lt;em&gt;user-input based site&lt;/em&gt;, and the mods have been strictly against user input (at least, until a lot of people reacted very negatively).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The overly strict enforcement of the ban, with too many deletions, too little explanation of what was okay and what wasn't, and general mayhem in the chatroom even if cucumber regulations by the EU came up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And finally, the fact that the mods haven't done the best of jobs of communicating with users exactly what was going on, what the rules were, and why they were doing what they were doing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A significant portion of this post is supported by a conversation had in the Physics Meta chat, some of which has been posted as an answer by ACuriousMind (though I feel that he cut out significant important portions, but that's as may be). In-chat comments mentioned will be linked wherever possible. This post will probably be updated in the near future as I think of new points or respond to whatever may happen in the comments. Finally, this post was made after ACuriousMind announced in chat the probable removal of this policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we have received little to no truly positive feedback my impression is that the main attitude here is that we should not try to have such a guideline as &amp;quot;try to stay clear of politics&amp;quot;, regardless of what &amp;quot;politics&amp;quot; exactly means. Unless this changes in the next day or so, I think the next step will be to mark the meta post as a failed experiment and return to solely enforcing the Be Nice policy as such - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35278976#35278976&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind, February 7, 4:58 PM UTC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I decided to still post my argument for the record and to formalize the argument I made in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;In-depth arguments&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Lack of explanation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta post is here (thank goodness) but mods enforced the rule (without much explanation, without the clear &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot; mentioned, and with deleting) the day before the meta post went up, at minimum. When the post was finally made, after much criticism, we have not much explanation as to why this ban is even necessary. There's a quote from Shog9's post on mother meta, some hand-waving is done with precedent and uncivility in the chat and then that's it. But the paragraph before the current quote from Shog9's post is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If y'all wanna talk about politics, good on ya - this is important stuff, and deserves to be discussed. We have an entire site dedicated to the topic, and &lt;strong&gt;even sites that aren't dedicated to politics can still have civil political discussions.&lt;/strong&gt; (bolding my own)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if you read the whole post, the paragraph that quoted alone makes it seem like that the community mods want us to take political discussions over to politics.SE or a different room actually falls into context and one takes it as more of a suggestion. There's no real precedent for this decision, either - in Physics Meta chat, user vzn said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Shog9 can you think of any precedent on other sites? eg recorded in meta? it would be interesting to know of other cases around SE for comparison - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35265310#35265310&quot;&gt;vzn, 11:54 PM UTC, February 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Shog9 replies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@vzn Gaming has had various policies like that on and off. Currently mostly off, but at the cost of several unpleasant experiences. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35265327#35265327&quot;&gt;Shog9, 11:54 PM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the precedent is a paragraph suggesting it as a possible alternative in a meta post that's more focused on toning down political discussion, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; removing it, and occasional on and off banning of politics on Gaming.SE. That doesn't seem to be nearly as strong a precedent as the mods seem to be saying - for example, mod ACuriousMind said at today's (February 7) chat session&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, let me also say that this wasn't borne of nothing. [...] - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35278100#35278100&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind, 4:29 PM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't borne of nothing, no, but it doesn't seem to be borne of much at all except a tiny, not really there &amp;quot;precedent&amp;quot; and a decision made amongst themselves - with the best of intents, to be sure, but perhaps not as well backed up as they claim. The mods didn't, and haven't, provided much explanation beyond this supposed precedent. There has been no explanation of the mod thought process towards this decision (which I'd especially like to know now that the mods themselves seem to be ready to mark this as a &amp;quot;failed experiment&amp;quot;) which was both upsetting for chat users and also a bit disconcerting on a user-input based site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must also speak here against the analogies made between the ban on politics and the Be Nice policy. These are fundamentally different and cannot be compared. The Be Nice policy is, as I put it in a chat comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a sort of universal rule - most everyone agrees we should live by it. &amp;quot;no politics&amp;quot; is not a universal rule. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264069#35264069&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No politics is most decidedly not a universal rule like the Be Nice policy. The mods using this as an analogy to justify enforcing it doesn't make any sense to me. A policy like this is distinctly different and requires user input (discussed later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mention of user support also doesn't make much sense; as another meta post here that I agree with says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You looked at a message in chat that had 8 stars, one of which is from me, took it as some form of common will and used it as casus belli to ban Politics as a whole. Not only that's not fair to the people who starred that message in context, but had no intention to be part of something like this, it's lack of basic decency. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9604/121464&quot;&gt;Bernard Meurer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starred messages in chat lead to the changing of the room name, and look what happened there. People got upset (though not as upset here, because it wasn't a super-serious issue, and everyone agreed on a policy to just change it back whenever it was changed). Why should this be any different? Starred messages in chat are not an indication of user agreement with a policy when made out of context, and even in context are not as reliable as a meta post - this is a more formal setting &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; for the creation and implementation of policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit (to this section only):&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to ACuriousMind's comment below that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;tiny, not really there 'precedent'&amp;quot; was neither tiny nor &amp;quot;not really there&amp;quot; but it is in the nature of SE moderation that I can't point you to it because the offending conversations have been removed from the rooms where they happened. I can only point to the fallout in form of the meta.SE posts which I have repeatedly done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote my response in the comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand you discussed it, and that there may have been inflammatory conversations in other chat rooms, and that these may have lead to the meta posts you linked, but I am merely addressing what the linked meta posts say, and these truly have little to no precedent for the decision you made, which was to ban political discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate on my meaning there: inflammatory discussions don't equal precedent for banning that topic of discussion. All they should mean is to keep an extra eye on discussions of that sort. The meta posts caused by these inflammatory discussions would be the place where any precedent would be created, something along the lines of &amp;quot;politics discussions should be banned&amp;quot; - but that didn't happen in the meta posts, as I describe above. So I still must stand by my point that there is little to no precedent for the ban of political discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The ban itself&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The politics ban is overly broad, first of all. If the thing you're banning is large enough there's a whole stack exchange site about it, that's generally a bad sign. All semi-jokes aside though, why are we banning such a large area of discussion, especially one that's been going through without problems until Donald Trump's inauguration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me to my next point about this ban: it's really unclear. The mods have swung back and forth between &amp;quot;no politics&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;no non-inflammatory politics&amp;quot;. There's a difference, and it's important! What constitutes politics? What doesn't? ACuriousMind says that &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot; should be brought into play, but I saw deletion going on in chat on minor items that barely mentioned politics (discussed later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A conversation with DavidZ only emphasized further this point. Another member of the conversation mentioned the usefulness of previous discussions about politics, referencing a discussion about a past law. DavidZ responded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@DanielSank (that's barely even political, anyway) - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264152#35264152&quot;&gt;DavidZ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and some messages later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's barely political, to my knowledge. I don't know what else to tell you. It's just a law. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264308#35264308&quot;&gt;DavidZ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user responded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's... political by definition. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264312#35264312&quot;&gt;Daniel Sank&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself found the conversation clearly political in nature. In a nutshell, we had significantly differing definitions of politics, and DavidZ's differed from ACuriousMind's, which in turn differed from Daniel Sank's and mine. If we have such widely differing definitions of politics, how can we use &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot;? The answer is, we can't, and we must have a more clearly defined issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, we shouldn't be banning politics. The real problem is something along the lines of Donald Trump, or the immigration ban, or Donald Trump as relating to his recent election to president. The problem isn't the whole field of politics. It's something more specific, that's happened recently. Political discussions have been going on for a while without any problems. The mods should have undertook discussion &lt;em&gt;with users&lt;/em&gt; to ascertain the truly problematic &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; line of discussion (remember, users have been talking politics for a while before this ban got suggested) and then maybe if there was a general consensus, that could've gotten implemented as an experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Lack of user input&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack exchange is by nature a site that is based on user input, both in content and in moderation. What is on or off topic is decided on meta and in reviews, by &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;, not mods. In the classic blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;, Jeff says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the very first version of Stack Overflow faq way back in mid-2008, our goal has always been to give power back to the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow is run by you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The precedent is strongly, completely in favor of discussing these sorts of things with users, especially those users affected. But the mods in this case &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; do that. Why? I have no idea. I've seen the idea that this is analogous to the Be Nice policy, but I've shown already that this is not the case - this is about what we can talk about, kind of like rules about what we can post about on the main site. That's decided by users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the mods have stated multiple times that they weren't looking for user input! Why? This seems to be a huge mis-step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[We're] not asking for user-sourced policy because of what we started this discussion with: Both the Be Nice policy and the confinement of politics to separate chat rooms are general SE philosophy; that's not something we physics mods just made up on the spot. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35264069#35264069&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User sourced policy, especially in a case like this, is exactly what should be happening. This isn't the Be Nice policy, there isn't really a precedent - this is, effectively, something the mods have made up after a few days of private debate. Another thing the mods said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, see, that's not exactly a correct characterization of how SE works. Yes, there are large areas of site policy that is determined by user consensus and that moderators merely enforce in a janitorial role. However, these are content policies regarding the main site. This is not true for behavioural policies, such as the Be Nice policy - no user base is given the choice to deviate from it, no matter how strongly the users may demand it. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35263654#35263654&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not political discussion should be allowed is not the same as whether or not participants should Be Nice! The same arguments apply here. What is on and off topic for discussion has been and should be a user-input centered thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Overly strict enforcement&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mods have seemed a little over-eager to delete recently, as evidenced by comments on this page (and in chat) like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] you guys are going crazy with the deleting [...] - Bernardo Meurer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, the moderators are often deleting things that are hardly offensive, like &amp;quot;you're trolling me&amp;quot;. It's very aggravating and does not help anyone feel more comfortable in the chat. - Sir Cumference&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some of these were comments related to the politics ban, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hear there's some sort of embargo against humans coming into my country, my adopting you may not work. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35237626#35237626&quot;&gt;Kyle Kanos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this comment political at all, especially in what was a joking context? When asked, ACuriousMind said that the comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] triggered the rest (Emilio asking to stop, snide comments about countries with oil, etc.) - &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/13775?m=35264285#35264285&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The rest being some inflammatory comments that I haven't seen but were apparently there.) But is this really the appropriate course of action? Why was this comment removed? It seems to me a perfectly reasonable comment that falls well within the bounds of common sense. If the inflammatory comments came up, then remove them and if it has been a pattern, ban the users. Why delete a perfectly on-topic comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been multiple other examples of this issue, and while it extends beyond the question of whether or not political discussion should be allowed, it did happen multiple times where not-so political comments were deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Unclear communication&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout this, the mods have unfortunately had trouble explaining what they meant and not communicating at all until rather late in the game. Case in point: the mods started enforcing this rule and deleting messages &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; the day before the meta post, if not earlier. The mods have also had conflicting messages about what exactly was meant by the ban (see point three), and didn't engage in conversation with users until the day of the meta post. This is unfortunate and made an already poor situation even worse. In the future, I'd request that the mods err on the side of more communication rather than less, and more user feedback rather than less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions/points about what I've written, feel free to comment, and I'll try my best to respond. Anyway, I'd like to point here that I'm most certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; insulting the moderators, in fact &lt;strong&gt;I thank them&lt;/strong&gt; for being willing to step back on their mistake and work to fix it. While I think there's more they could've done and can be doing, they are trying, and I still stand by the votes I cast in the recent moderator election. So I must thank them for their service, and their repeated work to make this site a great place to learn physics, as well as argue over policy on meta. =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T01:07:05.100" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4220" CreationDate="2017-02-08T22:16:13.927" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you convince your administrator to enable mhchem here – chemistry.SE does have it – then you could make use of MathJax/mhchem's &lt;code&gt;\pu&lt;/code&gt; command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$1.38 \times 10^{-23} \, \mathrm{J\,K^{-1}}$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could then be written as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\pu{1.38E-23 J K^-1}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how it renders &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3287/24052&quot;&gt;at chemistry.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background information: &#xA;MathJax is a LaTeX implementation, written in JavaScript. It is not a complete TeX engine, it just does a very similar job when looked at fromt he outside. Because it is completely different at the inside, one cannot simply load LaTeX packages. Instead, one has to create a completely new package in JavaScript. That's the reason, one cannot simply load siunitx with MathJax. You would need somebody to rewrite the whole behavior for a completely different framework. With mhchem, I did such an reimplementation. Because TeX and JavaScript are so different, the two packages look very different inside. They even behave slightly differently (with MathJax/mhchem having more features than the original LaTeX/mhchem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144840" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:50:39.193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T23:05:25.613" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4220" CreationDate="2017-02-09T00:55:50.717" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just noticed that there is an siunitx extension in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-third-party-extensions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax third party extensions repository&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T00:55:50.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T08:47:50.323" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pik4L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pik4L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent questions page tries to show a part of the content when the content is too big to be displayed fully. When a mathjax statement begins but is ended by the ellipsis, the mathjax statement appears instead of the actual equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible solutions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove the mathjax statement completely if it is going to be broken&#xA;by the ellipsis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Display the mathjax statement completely even if it exceeds the character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60891" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:25:50.873" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:25:50.873" Title="Mathjax rendering bug in Recent Questions page when excess content is replaced by ellipsis" Tags="|feature-request|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:11:04.173" Score="9" ViewCount="849" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/121464/heather&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;. I've been invited to be a guest for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;Physics.SE Ask Me Anything (AMA)&lt;/a&gt; taking place in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;h-bar&lt;/a&gt; on Monday, February 20th, at 10pm UTC (for USA users that's 2:00 Pacific, 3:00 Mountain, 4:00 Central, and 5:00 Eastern). I'm excited to talk about just about anything, from teaching yourself physics, middle school (more about that in a moment), coding, math, and just about anything else you want to talk about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Post questions you want answered below&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AMA will be very informal, with questions posted here to help give me an idea of what people want to talk about, but the chat session itself will be a bit of a free for all. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/31790/danielsank&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt; has kindly offered to help moderate the session. Please post questions you'd like answered as responses to this meta post. See for examples the questions posted for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9056/september-6-physics-ama-secret-question-pool&quot;&gt;Secret&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8981/august-12-physics-ama-with-daniel-sank-question-pool&quot;&gt;DanielSank&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8814/ask-me-anything-12th-july-guests-introduction-and-questions&quot;&gt;yuggib&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7782/questions-for-the-june-14th-ask-me-anything&quot;&gt;Slereah&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Education/About Me&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some of you may already know, I'm in middle school. So, in terms of physics education, I'm mostly self-taught, though my dad's helped me along the way, as have the excellent people (and AI's - ACuriousMind, I'm looking at you) here at Physics.SE. A special shout out to Daniel Sank, who invited me to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Martinis Lab&lt;/a&gt; (!) which I visited last November. I live in America, and have always gone to public schools. I'm currently in 8th grade. I also love Physics.SE (and stack exchange in general) - I've earned 4.5k rep in approximately 7 months (though I've slowed down in the amount of rep I've earned...school's been busy recently) and also gotten on the close vote review queue leaderboard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Technical Interests&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum computing is an especial interest of mine, and is what helped me really kick start teaching myself a lot of different things, such as linear algebra and some of the basics of quantum computing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nuclear fusion and plasma physics I couldn't really do anything at all practical (problems/reading books) but it's a sub field of physics I try to read about and am interested in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Particle physics is super cool! What's not to love about smashing things together at high energies? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General relativity I've just started reading a bit about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm trying to start teaching myself the basics as well, as before I really got serious about teaching myself stuff this past summer (which was a little before I found out about stack exchange) I'd only really read pop-sci books. Now I'm trying to learn things the right way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computer science/programming&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python is my favorite language. I'm trying to get better at programming, and I've worked through some of the Euler problems. Currently, I'm trying to write a program that simulates an ideal (and hopefully eventually a non-ideal) quantum computer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complexity classes interest me, though I don't know a ton about them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, computer science where it intersects with quantum computing (see above). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currently I'm trying to learn multivariable calculus and set theory, though I've got a bunch of topics I want to learn. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have taught myself the basics of linear algebra and single-variable calculus, but I'm afraid I couldn't talk much about them (though I could put in a plug for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3Blue1Brown's linear algebra videos&lt;/a&gt; which are absolutely amazing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I love, love, love trying proofs and puzzling about big problems that are way beyond me. I've read a bit about the Collatz Conjecture, for instance, and have tried to mess with it a bit. Trying problems like these (even if I fail miserably, as I inevitably do) always makes me feel like a real mathematician/physicist/what-have-you, which is cool. =)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non-technical interests&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to best teach yourself stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The best textbooks/videos/websites. I have a few recommendations, though I doubt I'm very qualified to give them. =)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I play the guitar, and am absolutely terrible at it, but it's a great instrument. I have an acoustic and electric guitar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rock climbing, which is an absolutely wonderful sport. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to survive middle school - joking (sort of, anyway). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very honored to be invited to take part in this, and it should be fun! Like I said, I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have (if I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; answer them, that is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T21:07:41.937" Title="February 20th Ask Me Anything with heather: Question Pool" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-11T03:13:56.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, to start with, a couple of rather general questions (some of these are more like broad headings than a question, you can decide how and what to answer those live on the AMA in some form later as those broad headings will pop up in some form anyway) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tell us more about your experience in Google Martinis Lab&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's your strategy in self teaching, especially for highly technical topics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rock climbing experience&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the important algorithms and procedures one need to know in quantum computing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64669" LastEditorUserId="64669" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T06:02:19.617" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T06:02:19.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:27:50.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do your parents know that you are internet-friends with people from all around the world, most of which are at least twice your age? What do they think about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T18:29:35.063" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T18:29:35.063" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-11T17:23:22.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you ever had the experience of solving a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; physics problem? &#xA;by &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; I mean more than the end-of-chapter textbook problems: analyzing a real-world phenomenon or observation like a physicist (building a mathematical model, doing the required analysis, interpreting the results, etc.). If yes, tell us about your experience. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And my emphasis here is on the &lt;em&gt;&quot;like a physicist&quot;&lt;/em&gt; part. The problem can be any problem that lends itself to a physics-like analysis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20898" LastEditorUserId="20898" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T18:23:26.870" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T18:23:26.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-11T20:18:30.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you experience any correlation between time spent rock climbing and your capacity for learning?&#xA;I find that exercise strongly influences the flexibility of my mind and my ability to retain information.&#xA;I'm interested in whether someone considerably younger has the same experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T20:18:30.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-11T20:21:36.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are your daily hours split between school/homework, family activities, exercise/sports, and pursuit of personal projects (learning non-school topics, programming, etc.)?&#xA;Are you satisfied with the distribution?&#xA;If not, how would you like to change it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T20:21:36.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-11T21:52:12.740" Score="4" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I welcome anyone to disagree, it is completely plausible to me that scenarios involving a &quot;culture of down-voters&quot; could become a negative burden on the site, and actually discourage potential contributers of positive and/or useful answers to questions.  To me, that would not be a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think the SE does a pretty good job of having rules and intentions surrounding down-votes, and outlining these.  For example, deducting reputation points from those who down-vote, often can make users weigh their reasons for down-voting more seriously.   There are rules regulating serial down-voting in place to prevent such disingenuous actions. I think these rules have clear intentions, in that they are meant to discourage actions that are negative to the site, while at the same time leaving the down-vote in play for the well thought out voter for such things as limiting posts, and responses that are detrimental to the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, albeit subjectively speaking, I am not lately feeling sufficiently impressed with the voting trends, compared to when   I first joined, based on how I see votes assigned to a variety of posts.  I also see a number of posts reflecting the dissatisfaction of people who have been down-voted.  Of course, that does not mean the down-votes were not for good reasons each case (in many cases they are), nor that my subjective senses are objectively coherent.   Never-the-less I raise the question, objectively-- When does down-voting actually harm the site's culture, despite the voting guidelines, and how could such be assessed?  How are/ and are voting guidelines occasionally reviewed/ modified to keep things &quot;pleasant&quot; so to speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41431" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T23:02:03.057" Title="When does down-voting become harmful to the site?" Tags="|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-12T06:28:39.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What made you interested in Quantum Computing at such an early age ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've seen you jump from one topic to another in very short spans of time (especially in Physics e.g. GR,QM,Quantum Computing and Mathematics e.g. Calculus). Are you really able to master them in short spans or you just go through the basics and leave the intricacies for the future? Do you feel your approach to learning the topics is the most suitable one for you? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tell us a few &lt;em&gt;real world&lt;/em&gt; problems (e.g. global warming, diseases, pollution) that you dream of being able to solve in the future for a better world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102705" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T06:28:39.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-12T08:55:19.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which approach do you prefer for learning physics?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all the &lt;em&gt;namings&lt;/em&gt; of the methods below by myself:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A) &lt;em&gt;lean&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;bulky&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lean:&lt;/strong&gt; Read as little as possible (only the minimums required: introductory X, principles of X, reading only very elementary linear algebra before starting QM,...), and maximize time spent on problem-solving to gain more insight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bulky:&lt;/strong&gt; Maximize reading (Comprehensive X, multiple textbooks on X, read a serious textbook on linear algebra before starting QM,...), and then maybe solve the end-of-chapter problems sporadically just to make sure you've understood everything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B) Top-down or bottom-up?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Top-down:&lt;/strong&gt; Reading (mostly) qualitative material on Quantum Mechanics, Cosmology, Quantum Computing, etc. from various sources like Wikipedia articles, lecture notes, SE website,... and then delve into the math, details and prerequisites when necessary; and build your way through the subject and increase your resolution of the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bottom-up:&lt;/strong&gt; Similar to a standard physics curriculum: Start from reading Marion's (or Kleppner's) Classical Mechanics and Griffith's Electrodynamics and working through the required chapters thoroughly and solving all the problems; consult other sources only when necessary. Then start the next subject like quantum mechanics, maybe relativity, and continue expanding your physics knowledge this way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20898" LastEditorUserId="20898" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T11:57:25.857" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T11:57:25.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-12T10:53:45.027" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Einstein or Bohr&lt;/a&gt;? Harvard or MIT? Michelle or Melania? Tesla or Edison? Ubuntu or Fedora? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_picture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heisenberg&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_picture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schrödinger&lt;/a&gt;? Dems or Repubs? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strings&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loops&lt;/a&gt;? Socialism or Capitalism? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequency&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt;?  Trump or Hitler? David Z or Ron Maimon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20898" LastEditorUserId="20898" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:55:52.250" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:55:52.250" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9619" CreationDate="2017-02-12T14:47:51.633" Score="-6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When does down-voting become harmful to the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people collude to downvote good answers with robust references for insincere reasons. Of course, the flip side of this is harmful too. If people collude to upvote each other's poor answers, that's not good. Especially since doing this would provide ample &quot;ammo&quot; points for downvoting.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I welcome anyone to disagree, it is completely plausible to me that scenarios involving a &quot;culture of down-voters&quot; could become a negative burden on the site, and actually discourage potential contributors of positive and/or useful answers to questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anybody could argue with that. What they might argue is that it doesn't happen much so it's not a big issue. I would say stack exchange &quot;officers&quot; have a tendency to downplay any issues and portray the site and the anonymous voting model as more perfect than it really is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To me, that would not be a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Overall, I think the SE does a pretty good job of having rules and intentions surrounding down-votes, and outlining these. For example, deducting reputation points from those who down-vote, often can make users weigh their reasons for down-voting more seriously. There are rules regulating serial down-voting in place to prevent such disingenuous actions. I think these rules have clear intentions, in that they are meant to discourage actions that are negative to the site, while at the same time leaving the down-vote in play for the well thought out voter for such things as limiting posts, and responses that are detrimental to the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure it does. I seem to see a lot of expert posters who are ex posters, a lot of popscience non-answers getting lots of upvotes, and a lot of good answers getting downvotes.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, albeit subjectively speaking, I am not lately feeling sufficiently impressed with the voting trends, compared to when I first joined, based on how I see votes assigned to a variety of posts. I also see a number of posts reflecting the dissatisfaction of people who have been down-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doubtless.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, that does not mean the down-votes were not for good reasons each case (in many cases they are), nor that my subjective senses are objectively coherent. Never-the-less I raise the question, objectively-- When does down-voting actually harm the site's culture, despite the voting guidelines &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and how could such be assessed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By talking through examples. By scientific debate. In for example a chat room. However in my experience such debate seem to be discouraged here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are/ and are voting guidelines occasionally reviewed/ modified to keep things &quot;pleasant&quot; so to speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't answer that. But I will say this: &lt;em&gt;science is not a democracy&lt;/em&gt;. All the upvotes in the world won't make a wrong answer right, and all the downvotes in the world won't make a right answer wrong. Personally I'm perfectly happy for people to know that I've downvoted an answer. When I do I usually say something.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:47:51.633" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9619" CreationDate="2017-02-12T20:56:32.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When does down-voting actually harm the site's culture, despite the voting guidelines, and how could such be assessed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that downvoting would actually harm the culture if all questions and answers were downvoted into oblivion. As long as there are a few competent voters, I have no concerns this would ever happen. Perhaps a looser constraint&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; would be if the number of downvotes over times increases to beyond the upvotes over time (i.e., more downvotes given than upvotes). But &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/edit/627313&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that isn't happening&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple way to address such an active harm would be to post it on Meta as you've done (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6754/&quot;&gt;John Rennie as well&lt;/a&gt;). As JohnDuffield mentioned as well, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;physics chat&lt;/a&gt; is another place to bring this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How are/ and are voting guidelines occasionally reviewed/ modified to keep things &quot;pleasant&quot; so to speak? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; any voting guidelines on any SE site and I don't think there &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt; any guidelines. Ever. Your vote is yours to do with it as you please, even if it's to downvote an answer that is actually correct or give an upvote to an answer that is strongly downvoted.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. I am not sure I'd believe such a statistic, but I think an argument could be made for this one.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. The number of downvotes is increasing, but at a lower rate than posts made and upvotes granted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. Both actions are generally looked down upon here, but there is not actually anything that can be done about it, so we all just live with it.&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T20:56:32.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9542" CreationDate="2017-02-12T23:36:13.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had downvotes to some of my questions and answers before probably with no comment and I didn't have an issue with it. There are other ways to learn how to write a good question or answer. If you write a question with a terrible body, it will be recognized by a bot as being terrible and block you from posting it in the first place until you fix up the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably better to write something as a comment if it doesn't properly answer the question and as an answer if it properly answers the question. It's better to think of a proper answer and write it as a comment than to write an answer that doesn't properly answer the question as a comment but the reason why people are encouraged to write an answer as an answer is probably because when they think of a proper answer, they're able to do something even better than writing an answer as a comment which is writing it as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's probably a reason comments have a 500 character limit. We have no need for something longer than 500 characters that doesn't properly answer the question. If you have an answer longer than 500 characters but it doesn't properly answer the question, I don't think it's a good idea to write it as an answer because you can't write it as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Emilio Pisanty said in their answer, one issue with some questions is that it's the homework question of the person who asked it. I don't think those question should be blocked. If they were blocked, so would those that weren't homework questions but looked like homework questions be. Homework is worth very small fraction of the total marks and for some courses, no marks and entirely to help students study for a test so people get get a much higher mark in a course than they deserve from asking those questions. In some cases, it might help them learn how to answer that type of question and they'll get a higher mark on a test and deserve it because they answered a question on the test properly with no help during the test because they asked that Stack Exchange question earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46757" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T23:36:13.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9628" CreationDate="2017-02-13T11:22:18.360" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can ask productivity and self improvement questions related to programming or computers on software engineering stack exchange .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example this question ,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/141860/should-i-be-concerned-that-i-cant-program-very-fast-without-google&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/141860/should-i-be-concerned-that-i-cant-program-very-fast-without-google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can we not have such tags on physics stack exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a very slow and inefficient learner ,thats why even if I have great love for  physics ,I get  average or below average grades.I would also like to improve my problem solving skills .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May be there are other people like me having the same problems ,they can get help on physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why not such tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133629" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:57.040" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T12:33:38.200" Title="productivity and self improvement questions" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9627" CreationDate="2017-02-13T12:33:38.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my eyes, physics.SE is about the &lt;em&gt;science&lt;/em&gt; of physics, not about the &lt;em&gt;practice&lt;/em&gt; of physics. As such, questions about study advice, career advice, personal productivity when studying physics, etc. are off-topic here. We don't have tags for the things you ask about because having tags for questions which will almost surely be off-topic is not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be this way because all of these questions are inherently opinion-based - what works for me need not work for you, and every personal situation has more deciding factors than one can reasonably communicate through a single SE question. I come here in order to ask and answer &lt;em&gt;questions about physics&lt;/em&gt;, and allowing questions about things not related to the science of physics as such would decrease the signal-to-noise ratio considerably from my viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T12:33:38.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2817" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:58:43.567" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anonymous downvotes should not be allowed. I also think that if you do issue a downvote you should be required to state why you did it in the comments. That will give the person who asked the question a chance to respond. There should be some risk to issuing downvotes. Right now there is no risk at all to the person who is issuing the downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of what I am talking about. A moderator issued a downvote. Fortunately, he did add a comment. That gave me a chance to explain. If you read the comments they will explain what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the thread...&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/311479/can-we-use-the-units-of-planks-constant-to-generalize-debroglies-equation-and-c&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/311479/can-we-use-the-units-of-planks-constant-to-generalize-debroglies-equation-and-c&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, downvotes should not be anonymous. Maybe you should not be required to post a comment explaining why you did it, but who you are should be recorded somewhere. That is the only way to see if a member is being targeted. There should be a list in every users account that shows who were the members who issued the downvotes to each question and answer made by the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143577" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:03:51.770" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9294" CreationDate="2017-02-14T16:43:21.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process already has something to this effect incorporated into it: aside from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;guidance on how to properly reference others' work&lt;/a&gt;, there's also a message template for when moderators reach out to users on these occasions. The relevant message reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has come to our attention that several of your answers consisted primarily or entirely of text copied from other answers or websites. We prefer not to simply copy content already available elsewhere in lieu of creating something that adds value to this site &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever possible, we prefer that posts be your own original work, but when a great answer already exists elsewhere, including a small passage of text from another source can be a great way to support your solution. But please note that &lt;strong&gt;we require full attribution&lt;/strong&gt; with a link to the original author, and please be sure you are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; copying content without permission&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When sent this message, the contacted user has the opportunity to reply back to the moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T16:43:21.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T17:31:03.563" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/9631/2&quot;&gt;My original question&lt;/a&gt; was based on the assumption that there is a universal scientific agreement on the typography of subscripts. However, I have been wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9635/144840&quot;&gt;The discussion&lt;/a&gt; if there was a universal typographic standard was closed as &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;. So this question (about enforcing this standard) is probably &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming there was a universal typographic standard (but in physics, there isn't) that descriptive subscript should be typeset in upright font:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Physics.SE's Q&amp;amp;A's contain $G_m$ instead of $G_\mathrm{m}$, do you care? (It seems, you don't.) Would you edit a posting to correct that? (It seems you won't.) Would this change if it was a little bit easier to input?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144840" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.727" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T16:59:39.013" Title="Do you care about (micro) typography?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9631" CreationDate="2017-02-14T17:51:18.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a point at which I stop caring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I think I care more about typography than most of our regular users (though not the most: we have a few users who are very detail oriented that way), but making one letter subscripts upright is on the wrong side of that line for me: I probably wouldn't even notice if someone else did this unless they called my attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably consider an edit that did &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; this as too trivial, but I wouldn't reject a more comprehensive edit of the typography because this kind of adjustment was included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T17:51:18.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9631" CreationDate="2017-02-14T18:35:47.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my time in physics I've noticed a convention  where single-character subscripts are generally set in italic even if they represent an abbreviation rather than a variable. I grant that there's no good reason to actively &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; this convention, other than ease of typing, but I don't think it's particularly harmful either. So on that basis, I dispute your premise that the subscripts you point out should be upright. (And I say this as one of the members here who &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; most picky about typography.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's why I don't think this convention is a problem. Variable names in physics are pretty much always single characters. And, of course, they are always typeset in italic, as is standard. This means that when I see a run of consecutive italic characters, I immediately know that those characters are meant to be be interpreted &lt;em&gt;individually&lt;/em&gt;, not as a unit.&#xA;$$\begin{align}&#xA;xyz &amp;amp;\implies \text{three things: $x$, $y$, $z$} \\&#xA;\mathrm{xyz} &amp;amp;\implies \text{one thing: xyz} \\&#xA;\text{(for comparison) }\mathrm{x,y,z} &amp;amp;\implies \text{three things: }\mathrm{x,y,z} \\&#xA;\end{align}$$&#xA;In fact, I contend that this distinction of whether I should consider consecutive characters as a single unit or individually is the &lt;em&gt;most useful&lt;/em&gt; piece of information conveyed by the choice of font shape, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; whether the character represents something variable or something fixed. The latter is a piece of information I should already know based on the definition of the symbol (and if I don't know the definition of the symbol, I've got bigger problems). Now, obviously, the distinction between one or multiple things represented is completely irrelevant when dealing with a single character. There is no difference, no ambiguity, in the number of things represented by either $x$ (one) or $\mathrm{x}$ (one). Accordingly, when writing a single character, it's not really &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; useful to put it in an upright font. And, since we get used to this line of reasoning when looking at normal-size characters, we intuitively carry it over to subscripts and superscripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if someone proposed an edit that merely changes the font shape of single-character subscripts as you suggest and does nothing else, I would consider that too minor, assuming all the subscripts were consistent throughout that one post. However, if a post used single-character subscripts inconsistently, i.e. sometimes italic and sometimes upright within the same post, I think an edit that fixed that inconsistency would just barely squeak over the line that makes it acceptable to me. (I'm not going to hold people to conventions but I will hold them to expectations of consistency within their own post, even down to fine typographical details.) Of course, as dmckee says in his answer, it would be much better if an edit that does this fixes other issues with the post as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T21:53:10.313" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T21:53:10.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T04:49:27.253" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26403/45786&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, whose first link is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/1211/how-long-does-it-take-to-travel-36-light-years-with-tolerable-acceleration-and-de&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which is actually broken and goes to a totally wrong post on a wrong site. I noticed that the &lt;strong&gt;Linked&lt;/strong&gt; section on the right contains the correct link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26461/how-long-does-it-take-to-travel-36-light-years-with-tolerable-acceleration-and-d?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. I guess what happened is that the link in the question pointed to the original location of the linked post, but it was subsequently migrated from Astronomy SE to Physics SE, and the link in the &lt;strong&gt;Linked&lt;/strong&gt; section was updated correctly but the link in the post was not. Why is that so? Is there a bug in the SE software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45786" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T06:27:51.070" Title="Broken internal link" Tags="|discussion|bug|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9636" CreationDate="2017-02-15T06:27:51.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Educated guess: I think the answer here is that the current &lt;a href=&quot;http://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Astronomy.SE&lt;/a&gt; is the second iteration of that site. The first iteration failed at some stage in the Area51 process and Physics absorbed many of their questions. Later, apparently, a second Astronomy site was begun. I suppose it's possible that some post IDs got re-used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the correct link, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26461/44126&quot;&gt;physics.stackexchange.com/q/26461&lt;/a&gt;, is to a question, while the link in the text, which redirects to &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/1211/1498&quot;&gt;astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/1211&lt;/a&gt;, is to an answer.  When the new astronomy site accumulated enough new content that the post ID got re-used, then the link went from &quot;just broken&quot; to being broken in the confusing way that you noticed.  However the list of &quot;related posts&quot; is stored in a different table in the database and was apparently migrated correctly when Physics absorbed the first round of Astronomy questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rise and fall and re-rise of Astronomy happened before I joined this community, but there are old posts on Physics Meta about it and probably someone else will chime in with an approximate timeline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T06:27:51.070" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-15T22:19:07.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are more mature that most people my age (and certainly more mature than I!). That is not something very common, so I'd like to ask: what do you think is the reason for that? is it because your parents/some other role model? is it because you've read lots of books? or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T22:19:07.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-15T22:20:36.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the best physics book out there, a must-read for any physicist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T22:20:36.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-16T01:18:31.290" Score="-8" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't I do it? It's stupid, I want to ask more questions!&#xA;And why can't it be for only about 4 hours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145619" OwnerDisplayName="science error" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:45:53.493" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:45:53.493" Title="Why can't I post something on Physics Exchange for 2 days?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9641" CreationDate="2017-02-16T01:33:23.920" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a set of automated quality control policies active on the site that set temporary (and no-so-temporary) bans on posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These bans are specific to either questions or answers and are triggered when a user has too many recently closed, deleted, or down-voted posts of the same kind (question or answer). They are sometimes called the 'q-ban' (for questions) or 'a-ban' (for answers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get them to go away you need to &lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; your existing posts so that users will up-vote them (or at least rescind down-votes). I see that you deleted a number of your own posts, but I am afraid that won't help with the q-ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, of course, simply wait it out but you should be aware that when you come off such a ban the system will still know about those previous posts and will be near threshold for re-instituting the ban, so make sure that you provide &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; content afterward lest the system pounce again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:33:23.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-16T15:54:18.583" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note your interest in quantum computing. I work in IT, and I've taken careful note of the way digital electronic or &quot;ordinary&quot; computing has advanced in leaps and bounds over recent decades. Advances in computing has changed our lives, for the better. In that time I've seen a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/#q=physics+world+quantum+computing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very positive articles&lt;/a&gt; about quantum computing. It's been around for about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thirty-five years now&lt;/a&gt;. And yet it has delivered nothing. To be blunt, it has delivered diddly-squat. So my question to you is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How long will you retain your interest in quantum computing if it delivers diddly-squat?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for a bonus question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How long do you think Google will retain their interest in quantum computing if it delivers diddly-squat?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="76162" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T17:40:54.133" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T17:40:54.133" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9645" CreationDate="2017-02-16T16:07:43.843" Score="5" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105347/is-it-foolish-to-distinguish-between-covariant-and-contravariant-vectors/105360#105360&quot;&gt;old answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; was written, in March 2014, with a commutative diagram,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$&#xA;\require{AMScd}&#xA;\begin{CD}&#xA;V @&amp;gt;{T}&amp;gt;&amp;gt; W\\&#xA;@V{\sigma_V}VV @VV{\sigma_W}V \\&#xA;V^* @&amp;lt;&amp;lt;{T^*}&amp;lt; W^*&#xA;\end{CD}&#xA;$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which looks like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wYKsb.png&quot; width=&quot;125&quot; title=&quot;Commutative diagram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and which on meta renders correctly (at present) as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;\require{AMScd}&#xA;\begin{CD}&#xA;V @&amp;gt;{T}&amp;gt;&amp;gt; W\\&#xA;@V{\sigma_V}VV @VV{\sigma_W}V \\&#xA;V^* @&amp;lt;&amp;lt;{T^*}&amp;lt; W^*&#xA;\end{CD}&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I noticed recently that the diagram was missing from the answer on main, and indeed if I try to add that code to a new question on main I get a &lt;code&gt;[Math Processing Error]&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KBzLY.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody explain what's going on? It looks pretty buggy to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T17:53:11.160" Title="What happened to this question's commutative diagram?" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9644" CreationDate="2017-02-16T17:53:11.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bug in the CommonHTML output for mathJax; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1691&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue 1691&lt;/a&gt; for details.  You probably are using HTML-CSS output here, but CommonHTML on the main site, which is why it works here for you but not there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7901" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T17:53:11.160" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9641" CreationDate="2017-02-16T20:56:22.130" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the message you're shown when you try to ask a question. I'm quoting it in its entirety in the hope that you read it this time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;b&gt;It looks like you might need a break - take a breather and come back soon!&lt;/b&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;You've asked 4 questions recently, some of which have not been received very well by the community. Everyone learns at their own pace, and it’s okay to make some mistakes. However, the reception your questions have received thus far might ultimately block your account from asking questions entirely. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;It's been 1 day since you asked your last question. We ask that you wait 2 days before asking again. Use this time to revisit &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=questions&quot;&gt;your previous questions&lt;/a&gt;, editing to address any issues that folks have pointed out in comments. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;Recommended reading:&lt;/b&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;tips on asking great questions&lt;/a&gt; as well as our guidance on &lt;br&gt;&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;which questions are allowed here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;Additional advice&lt;/b&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;- Examining highly-scored questions in the tags that interest you is a great way to study how to ask better questions, that also get better answers much sooner! &lt;br&gt;&#xA;- We don’t demand perfection, but &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;please&lt;/i&gt; make sure you use proper grammar, spelling and capitalization&lt;/b&gt;, it really helps! &lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Improve downvoted questions rather than deleting them. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Do not delete your account, create new accounts, or otherwise attempt to circumvent these restrictions. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Do not contact us regarding these restrictions, they cannot be lifted. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Failure to heed this advice may increase the severity of these restrictions. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;For more information&lt;/b&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271542/why-wont-the-system-allow-me-to-ask-questions-for-several-days/271543#271543&quot;&gt;Why won’t the system allow me to ask questions for several days?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&#xA;It sometimes takes a few attempts at a good question in order to fully learn how our system works, and what the community expects from folks seeking answers. Just &lt;b&gt;do your best&lt;/b&gt; to make sure you've improved the quality of your existing questions, and we'll see you in 2 days!&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T20:56:22.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T11:05:28.683" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/309624/&quot;&gt;&quot;What books an undergraduate needs to study to get a clear conception of rotational physics?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; has been marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6068/&quot;&gt;&quot;What are some good books for learning the concepts of Kinematics, Newton laws, 2D Motion of Object etc.?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; when clearly the two questions ask for recommendations on different complexity levels on rotational physics. The first at an undergraduate level (apparently not restricted to 2 dimensions or the Newtonian formalism) while the other on 2-d rotations and kinematics apparently high-school level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am facing a similar problem: my post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/312748/&quot;&gt;&quot;Resource recommendation for rotational mechanics (especially gyroscopes)&quot;&lt;/a&gt; has been wrongly marked as a duplicate of the above posts when my post is more specifically about gyroscopes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Different posts target &lt;strong&gt;different complexity levels&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;specific topics&lt;/strong&gt; under the same broad topic. Shouldn't this be taken into consideration when posts are being marked to be duplicates of one another?&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem is especially relevant to resource recommendation requests (as in the examples).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133131" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T17:32:44.357" Title="Should posts targetted at different complexity levels be marked as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9648" CreationDate="2017-02-17T11:36:22.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Resource-recommendation questions are very hard to handle, and they were in fact deemed completely off-topic for several years until we managed to work out a consistent policy that lets the good stuff in without wreaking havoc. The result of the policy is at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you should read it carefully (and ideally its previous revisions and their links to other questions here and elsewhere on the network and the Stack Exchange blog) to get a sense of where the rules come from. In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; gives a good sense of what the problems are with unrestricted resource-recommendations questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the problems, specifically, is that if those questions are allowed to have arbitrary 'level' specifications, it spawns an unchecked granularization that renders them useless. Thus, if you allow &quot;books about rotational kinematics for undergraduates&quot; in addition to &quot;books about rotational kinematics&quot; in general, why not &quot;books about rotational kinematics if I'm halfway through my analytical mechanics&quot; or &quot;books about rotational kinematics for undergraduates but don't use fancy math&quot;, or.... . This makes all of the questions less useful, and it takes a definite toll on the signal-to-noise ratio of the site in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, we tend to err on the side of making questions as coarse-grained as possible. If you don't like it, sorry: this site is not meant to be (and cannot be) all things to all people, and when some class of questions directly harms the site's ability to fulfill its core aspects, then those questions get restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your specific question, my feeling is that the proposed duplicate contains plenty of resources that address what you're looking for (and thus your new question would be harmful fragmentation of the existing lists). If you feel this isn't the case, you can offer a bounty on the old question asking specifically for answers that emphasize a certain subtopic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to propose a change in policy, you're welcome to do it, and this meta is the place to do it. However, as always, if you do it without understanding the problems that the existing structures were meant to solve, and providing alternative mechanisms to cope with those problems (or arguing conclusively that they're not actually problems), then your policy proposals will be of very little use indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T11:36:22.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T17:23:56.353" Score="-3" ViewCount="873" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to raise a point for discussion. It concerns moderation, and I think the best way I can summarise it succinctly is &lt;em&gt;open justice v secret police&lt;/em&gt;. It came up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9606/76162&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, where DavidZ said &lt;em&gt;&quot;the moderators do not discuss individual suspensions in public&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's a degree of secrecy to the moderation at Stack Exchange, and that such is the wrong approach. If in the real world somebody is convicted of a crime, the public are aware of the facts. It's what underlies open justice. Without open justice there tends to be &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; justice. Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&amp;amp;ei=EUM_VY2-Juiq8wfv_oCgDA&amp;amp;gws_rd=ssl#q=family+courts+secret+justice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;family courts secret justice&lt;/a&gt;. Here in the UK we've had some grim stories of people jailed in secret for virtually nothing. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/16/the-terrifying-tale-of-how-britains-most-secret-court-imprisoned/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this report&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The latest case has elements of all these others. It again centres on a septuagenarian grandmother, who was last month sentenced to six months in jail for reasons which beggar belief. Her only offence was to have refused to sign a letter she regarded as 'quite improper', authorising British social workers to remove an 81-year-old man from Portugal, his native country, to bring him back to England against his wishes&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you might say that this can't be relevant to a mere website like stack exchange, but I think it is. Because I'm sorry to say, &lt;em&gt;power corrupts&lt;/em&gt;. No offence to the moderators who give up their time here, but people are very good at confirmation bias and conviction. They have an amazing ability to persuade  themselves that some groupthink or &quot;official&quot; action they're taking is right and proper, even when it isn't. Particularly when self-interest is whispering in their ear. I'd say it's only public scrutiny that keeps them in check. &lt;em&gt;Open justice&lt;/em&gt;. Without that, it's a slippery slope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When moderators do not discuss suspensions at all, and there's no evidence of why a person has been suspended, you don't know if they've been suspended fairly or unfairly. So you don't know if you're getting into a &lt;em&gt;first they came for the socialists&lt;/em&gt; situation. You don't know whether your moderators are turning into thought police. And the crucial point is this: &lt;em&gt;nor do they&lt;/em&gt;. I think that needs to change, because it could be bad for Stack Exchange. I don't think it needs to change totally. But I do think all warnings and suspensions should be listed with a reason and an example. On rare occasions I'd say it's OK not to give the example because it absolutely had to be deleted, but IMHO this should be the exception rather than the rule.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discuss!&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:12:44.683" Title="Open justice v secret police" Tags="|discussion|moderation|suspensions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9650" CreationDate="2017-02-18T13:31:21.127" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the current 6 Phys.SE moderators are democratically elected. All moderators have (electronically) signed a moderator agreement, which de facto implies that moderators cannot discuss specific users &amp;amp; suspensions publicly, and which in turn means that this meta discussion belongs on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt; (rather than on Phys.SE meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have evidence that one or more Phys.SE moderators misuse their positions or the community's trust in any way, then you can report it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;SE team&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T13:36:34.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9650" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:56:11.433" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether I've been a moderator here for long enough &#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;four months now&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;that I can&#xA;talk about our decision-making process &lt;em&gt;in aggregate&lt;/em&gt;, without&#xA;revealing anything untoward about any particular suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How big is the Physics Stack Exchange community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there are several answers to that question.&#xA;I'm not a database person and you're probably not either, so here are&#xA;some answers based on public information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;one of the most active&#xA;Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;my count is about&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest&quot;&gt;4100 new questions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;since the start of 2017, a little under a hundred per day.&#xA;If you assume we're maintaining our long-term average of about&#xA;1.5 answers per question, that's about ten thousand posts to the site&#xA;over the first six weeks of the year.&#xA;It's a lot.&#xA;There is not any one user that has read every contribution,&#xA;and determining overall quality is a group effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of a post is estimated by the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;voting and reputation systems&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;My experience is that most votes occur on posts that are relatively&#xA;fresh, so we can use the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot; title=&quot;Note: &amp;#39;quarter&amp;#39; display currently begins 2017-01-01&quot;&gt;list of users with reputation&#xA;changes&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;to estimate the population of the site over a time interval.&#xA;I count about 4700 users whose reputations went up&#xA;and about 650 whose reputations went down over the past six weeks,&#xA;so I estimate a population of five or six thousand logged-in users&#xA;visiting in a typical quarter.&#xA;Most of them must make one or two posts and not come back,&#xA;to get to our ten thousand questions and answers over that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also look at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot;&gt;voters&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(current rough count: 450)&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot;&gt;editors&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(rough count: 65)&#xA;since the start of the year.&#xA;And what we see is the unsurprising result that, as a participation&#xA;task gets more complicated, the number of folks who participate in it&#xA;is smaller.&#xA;About 10% of our visiting population is actually voting on questions&#xA;or answers.&#xA;About 1% of our visiting population is involved in making edits, and&#xA;a slightly different 1% has&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/62/alltime/physics/2010-11-02/&quot;&gt;enough reputation&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;to access the &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;&quot;10k user&quot; moderation tools&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Close queue reviewers?&#xA;This month,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/admin/review/breakdown?queue=close&amp;amp;daterange=Last30Days&amp;amp;sort=Close&amp;amp;min=1&quot;&gt;there are about thirty&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as far as monitoring the site, making good things appear and bad&#xA;things disappear, we have somewhere at or around a hundred people.&#xA;If you're reading this answer, you're probably one of them,&#xA;and you'll probably recognize most of the names of the others.&#xA;That's a small group, which matters for what I want to discuss next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was the size of the &quot;community&quot;, for a few definitions of the term.&#xA;How big is the role played by the diamond moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/admin&quot; title=&quot;a link that probably won&amp;#39;t work for you&quot;&gt;moderator activity &#xA;log&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;lets me summarize activity&#xA;over a quarter ---&#xA;which we saw above corresponds to about 8,000 questions and 12,000 answers.&#xA;During that interval, the six diamond mods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;processed&#xA;1200 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flags&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Another 1200 flags were apparently handled by the community in the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/stats&quot;&gt;low-quality queue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;removed 3000 comments (mostly to chat, in batches)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;closed 1300 posts, and deleted 500 posts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;edited 2500 posts (of which probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=revisions&quot;&gt;2000 tag-only&#xA;edits&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;--- Qmechanic is an amazing retagging machine)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;cast 4000 votes on questions and answers&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;created 250 posts and 2200 comments&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;sent 28 private moderator messages, including 10 account&#xA;suspensions, of which 6 were for a week or less.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lot of activity to see in aggregate!&#xA;(It works out to&#xA;typically handling two or three flags per mod per day, which doesn't&#xA;feel like much.)&#xA;Hopefully two things leap out at you.&#xA;First, a solid majority of the twenty thousand question and answer&#xA;contributions to Physics Stack Exchange from its user community over&#xA;the past three months didn't get any diamond moderator intervention at all.&#xA;That's a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And second: reaching out to a user privately, and especially&#xA;suspending a user, is &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; rare for us --- about three times a&#xA;month.&#xA;About half of these suspensions have been for voting irregularities or&#xA;misusing sockpuppet accounts; those problems we typically identify on our own.&#xA;The other five-ish suspensions&#xA;(one or two a month, if you're counting)&#xA;were shared among other suspension reasons:&#xA;continued low-quality contributions, vandalism or deletion of upvoted&#xA;contributions, self-promotion, making other users get fighty with each&#xA;other, and so on.&#xA;Those are things that happen in public, that are&#xA;usually pointed out to us in flags or in chat by our 3k and 10k users.&#xA;And the 10k users can continue to see material even after it's been&#xA;deleted, if they feel like going hunting for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what's the &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; of issuing a suspension?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;Suspensions are about behavior, not about&#xA;people&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;In particular,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be&#xA;  recalculated, and your account will resume as normal. We don't hold&#xA;  grudges. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the&#xA;  behavior improves, you are welcome back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important part of making people feel welcomed back is allowing the&#xA;community to forget about their punishment.&#xA;But this is a website: literally the only we have to interact with&#xA;each other here is by making entries in a searchable database.&#xA;Once a thing is said, it's hard to un-say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not issue suspensions without substantial agreement among&#xA;the diamond moderators, and the suspension messages are clear about&#xA;the (mostly public) activities that led to the suspensions.&#xA;But keeping the details private --- or at least, keeping our concise&#xA;statement of these details private --- is an important part of making&#xA;the user feel welcome to return after the suspension.&#xA;What we'd like is to encourage our suspended users to return,&#xA;make quality contributions,&#xA;and eventually join the relatively small cadre of users who help to&#xA;curate the site.&#xA;And part of the clean slate that's needed to become active in that&#xA;community is for the community to forget about old problems ---&#xA;something that's harder if a concise description of those old problems&#xA;is just a mouse click away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to my first question is no: I can't say much more about&#xA;suspensions in aggregate than I could individually.&#xA;There have been so few suspensions that essentially any remark I made&#xA;would permit you, an alert reader, to figure out who I was talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A commenter asks whether prior suspensions are &quot;expunged&quot; somehow&#xA;for purposes of escalating duration (usually a week, then a month,&#xA;then a year).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The records  of private communications and suspensions are not deleted&#xA;from the servers or hidden from the moderators;&#xA;we exercise our judgement.&#xA;For a hypothetical example, suppose a user had a temper tantrum,&#xA;collected a bunch of rude/abusive flags, and needed a time-out.&#xA;If their history showed a previous suspension for the same reason in the last&#xA;year, we'd almost certainly escalate.&#xA;But if their history showed a brief previous suspension for the same reason from&#xA;five years ago, followed by a positive contribution record, I don't&#xA;think we would hold that ancient history against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where exactly is the boundary?&#xA;That I can't say. It's a judgement call, which we'd try to make using&#xA;all the information that's available to us.&#xA;If a user is active in the community, makes good contributions, and is&#xA;encouraging to and respected by other users, we would probably tend to&#xA;be lenient.&#xA;If a user spends a lot of time testing the boundaries of what is and&#xA;isn't acceptable, we would tend to be more harsh.&#xA;But I won't pigeonhole myself in the future by inventing some&#xA;algorithm here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T16:12:16.757" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T07:24:06.517" Score="13" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;In response to the positive feedback progress is now being made towards producing the first ever physics SE book.  If you would like to see your own high quality answer in this book, please nominate your answer below and if there is sufficient interest I will include a section in the book with your requests.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are nominating your answer, please ensure both the question and answer doesn't include any images or references that may be copyright and please let me know of your nomination by &lt;strong&gt;01/03/2017&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone is interested in reviewing the book prior to publishing please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you may be aware, Quora has created a physical book compiling some of the top contributions from a variety of topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ILDNg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ILDNg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there would be any interest in publishing a similar hard-copy book compiling the top posts from Physics.SE or perhaps even have the top posts from a variety of different SE sites in the one book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think?  Would anyone be interested in having such a book and do you think it should be for Physics only or include a variety of topics (e.g. include all science topics)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we've determined the level of interest we can investigate the costs of publishing and if it is feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastEditorUserId="12350" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T08:03:55.793" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T04:41:23.880" Title="The Best of Stack Exchange Book" Tags="|discussion|publishing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-19T20:33:52.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8vNwL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Forums&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T20:33:52.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2017-02-19T21:07:41.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is basically: what circumstances led you here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did you learn what physics is? What do your parents do for their living and what's the highest-level of their education? Do your parents encourage or reward you to learn physics on your own? Do they help you when you are stuck, and taught you how to look for answers when they don't have answers?&#xA;What have your parents taught you academically? Did you see algebra for the first time in school? Do you have a tutor?&#xA;Are you ahead of your math classes in school? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted another person your age to learn (and have interest in) physics as you do, what would you teach them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T21:07:41.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9660" CreationDate="2017-02-22T13:22:17.567" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here comes an odd little low-practical question out of curiosity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the review counter show&lt;/strong&gt;? The little counter in the upper bar is always showing a high number (fluctuating a bit) even when review queues are empty. I might have missed an explanation somewhere when being sworn in with the review privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ik5wg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ik5wg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could of course just be because there are more queues than I am &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;allowed to review at my place in the hierarky&lt;/a&gt; (odd that I would see a tempting counter in that case), but there &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161390/what-are-the-review-queues-and-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;don't seem to be any queues hidden from me&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4962" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T13:30:14.823" Title="What is the review counter showing?" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9659" CreationDate="2017-02-22T13:30:14.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It shows the total number of flags whose review is pending, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/230726/263383&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;. It also includes those you have already acted on (recall that many reviews need more than one user to complete them) and moderator flags which you cannot see. Additionally, the number is cached and may reflect an older status of the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It annoys me to no end to have a number there but nothing to act on, but you learn to live with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T13:30:14.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T13:43:47.883" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9636/broken-internal-link&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; pointed out that there are still a number of links to posts on the old Astronomy SE site kicking around, and that they mostly redirect to new, unrelated questions and answers in the new Astronomy site. I feel those links &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have been automatically edited at the time of the migration, but it doesn't really matter, since a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/628571/links-to-the-old-astronomy-se-site&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quick query&lt;/a&gt; turns up ~30 or so sites, which can easily be edited manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do find one thing pretty weird, though: when those links are posted as a raw URL, they still format correctly, for some reason. As an example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25789/what-is-the-fate-of-the-asteroid-belt&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/25789/revisions&quot;&gt;until recently&lt;/a&gt; contained the explicit URL &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/861/why-did-the-asteroid-belt-between-mars-and-jupiter-form-as-it-did&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/861/why-did-the-asteroid-belt-between-mars-and-jupiter-form-as-it-did&quot;&gt;broken link&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. should point &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26139/why-did-the-asteroid-belt-between-mars-and-jupiter-form-as-it-did&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) but nevertheless still formats correctly into a full title with the old link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zsed9.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feels weirdly buggy to me, though of course the real bug is that the URLs were not auto-updated to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.320" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T13:43:47.883" Title="Why do defunct links to the old astronomy site still format correctly into a linked title?" Tags="|bug|site-salvage|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2017-02-23T01:14:23.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To your first list, I'd like to add another point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chat is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/&quot;&gt;third place&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: When it comes to effort, the primary focus should be on keeping the main site looking its best. The secondary focus is meta, where site policies and norms are crafted. Chat, as the place for social and informal gathering, should not require much, if any, moderation work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last few years we've noticed that as the number of chat participants grow, so do the odds that there will be conflict. At the same time, chat starts to seem more and more important for the community. And indeed, events such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;AMA series&lt;/a&gt; are excellent opportunities to bring people together and strengthen the community of this site. In turn, this lends extra urgency to chat moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But remember, chat is supposed to be a relaxed social environment. It's less about important ideas (those are best for the main site) or site policies (meta) and more about whatever a bunch of people who are interested in physics might want to talk about. That might mean politics or sexy talk or the latest theories concerning baryon asymmetry or whether non-black turtlenecks are legitimate fashion statements. As long as those conversations are respectful and don't outstay their welcome, it's typically fine to talk about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another trouble that comes with bigger crowds is that topics often &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; outstay their welcome. If I explain my views on non-black turtlenecks (grey is acceptable, but not white) odds are someone else will want to share their opinion too. And if two or three other people chime in with their amusing anecdote or ill-considered opinion, it quickly becomes overwhelming to people who just don't care. And if you actively dislike the topic, it can be infuriating to see it roll along ponderously for hours or even days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any upsides to using sexual innuendo in a large chat room and plenty of downsides. Putting the brakes on that seems like a good idea. Similarly, the next time someone is convinced to change their political views by conversations in public chat will be the first time. So there's great wisdom in avoiding these sorts of conversations that trip up so many growing chat rooms. That said, there can be just as much conflict over turtlenecks or baryons given the mix of people in the room. Simply banning topics of conversation just isn't sufficient to keep the peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19709&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most people in a conversation&lt;/a&gt; will adapt to the existing tone. If someone indicates they are uncomfortable with the current conversation, reasonable responses are to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apologize,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the topic,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find another place to continue the conversation, and/or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go do something else altogether.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a small segment of the population that take offense, claim censorship or just generally don't care what other people think. If those people refuse to be reasonable, we have a number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271267/a-guide-to-moderating-chat&quot;&gt;moderation tools&lt;/a&gt; for chat mods, room owners and even other users. In extreme cases, troublesome users can be banned from chat. Far more than topic bans, removing unreasonable users is surprisingly effective at fixing a room's culture. (And even better, sometimes formally unreasonable people find their way to be reasonable. That's rarely possible when you try to moderate topics rather than behavior.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T01:14:23.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T11:59:02.017" Score="6" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have begun to notice that it's nearly impossible to get answers for queries on classical mechanics concepts on this website (despite them involving advanced ideas). While say a quantum mechanics question which asks a basic concept is buzzing in comparison. Why is this? Surely if people can answer advanced questions they should be able to answer the 'simple' ones as well? Why is the site so inactive except for when it comes to obscure (for most) professional physics? How do we allow it to accommodate people of all levels of understanding and knowledge? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, where somebody has a fundamental misunderstanding, their question does not make much physical sense and subsequently gets removed or ignored. Where somebody has a good understanding their question pretty much boils down to a maths problem. Essentially, it's preventing people who will get the most out of it from learning anything. Can we change this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user86425" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T13:38:11.773" Title="Why is there so little answering of elementary physics questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9663" CreationDate="2017-02-23T13:38:11.773" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time someone has asked why simple physics questions are given less focus and/or ignored compared to more advanced material nor will this be the last. I will answer in the same way past and future incarnations of this question were and will be answered. This is not the case. Simply look at our most popular or highest voted posts or our most used tags and you'll find a great number of them are simple physics as opposed to complex topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, our simple physics questions usually get more and quicker answers than the more complicated questions. Easy topics are well understood by more people and are easier to write an answer for; whereas complex topics require more specific knowledge that is known to fewer people and take more time to write an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6272/23473&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the most recent incarnation of this question I can recall. Perhaps this and others like it will supplement my or others' answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T13:38:11.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9654" CreationDate="2017-02-23T17:40:29.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I missed this in the comments, I apologise, but could you trial it on say,  the Kindle platform and see what the response is? I don't know Amazon's terms and conditions, and perhaps you have investigated this already. Best of luck with it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user146020" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T17:40:29.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9669" CreationDate="2017-02-23T23:27:21.103" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a question about best practices for keeping a lab journal (specifically, should one only record experiments, or should one also include research for experiments, or time spent looking around on say McMaster Carr for parts). Is this on topic or off topic? It would seem to fall under experimental physics style questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T01:43:48.667" Title="Lab journal best practices - on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9667" CreationDate="2017-02-24T00:33:50.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see this being argued either way, but I'm inclined to say that would be off topic. It's certainly a topic that is relevant to experimental physics, but I don't think it's actually &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; physics, much like e.g. best practices for structuring a Mathematica notebook is relevant to computational physics but is not really about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T00:33:50.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9667" CreationDate="2017-02-24T01:43:48.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer more or less the same way as DavidZ, but phrased more encouragingly: I think that it's totally possible to construct a question about experimental record-keeping habits that would be on-topic here. (Of course it's also possible to construct such a question that would be off-topic.) I certainly have opinions about record-keeping that I try to pass on to my lab students as part of their physics education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the question rattling around in your head, go on and write it down.&#xA;You may decide afterward that it's a good fit here, you may decide it's a better fit elsewhere, you may come up with an answer you like on your own, or your concern about the question might evaporate --- in any case, you'll have learned something interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T01:43:48.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9650" CreationDate="2017-02-24T01:57:02.380" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I volunteer at the county jail on Saturday mornings. In the jurisdiction I live in, trials are generally open to the public, there are detailed records of the proceedings and, critically, it's easy to find out if a prospective employee has a criminal past. More than false or sketchy convictions, the bigger problem inmates face is finding work after serving their time. Although it is illegal to discriminate against people with criminal convictions, it's hard to get a job with one on your record. Some jobs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_against_persons_with_criminal_records_in_the_United_States#Background&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;particularly those that require a license&lt;/a&gt;, are prohibited from hiring ex-felons. &quot;Open justice&quot; on its own is no protection against discriminatory practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how does that apply to Stack Exchange? Well, one of the primary goals of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;penalty box system&lt;/a&gt; is rehabilitation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be recalculated, and &lt;strong&gt;your account will resume as normal&lt;/strong&gt;. We don't hold grudges. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the behavior improves, you are welcome back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In California, ~65% of former prisoners &lt;a href=&quot;https://californiainnocenceproject.org/issues-we-face/recidivism-rates/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;return to prison&lt;/a&gt;. That's pretty appalling but not surprising since rehabilitation is not a politically safe goal. On Physics at this moment, just under a quarter of previously suspended users have received a second suspension. Some of those users have, perhaps, moved on to other parts of the internet, but many have gone on to be productive members of the site. The evidence suggests we are doing something right when it comes to rehabilitation. I think one factor is that we don't have public listings of previous suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the bigger question you are trying to get at is whether a secret system of justice can be fair. So let me explain our process a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The system encourages moderators to warn users before suspending them. Warnings carry no penalties and there is no public record of them. Users have the opportunity to respond to the warning with an explanation of their side of the story. Many users who get warnings are never suspended, so this step goes a long way toward preventing suspensions in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every message and every suspension is sent to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99338/who-are-the-community-managers-and-what-do-they-do&quot;&gt;community team&lt;/a&gt; for review. On occasion, we've stepped in to reverse suspensions. Usually the problem is a simple misunderstanding or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/288242/1438&quot;&gt;poor guidance from the system&lt;/a&gt;. The community team also has the power to remove a moderator in cases of abuse of power. (This action, thankfully, is very rare.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The system encourages moderators to follow an escalating scale of suspensions: 7 days, 30 days and a year. Volunteer moderators are not able to suspend longer than a year. Again, the goal is rehabilitation. Believe it or not, many people have come back from a year-long-suspension to resume their productive participation on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've investigated many, many complaints about moderator abuse, including complaints of unfair suspensions. Overwhelmingly, it's clear our moderators are very careful about suspending users. Obviously, you'll need to take my word for that. But you can see the results of wise moderation when using Stack Exchange sites. The network tends to be free of rudeness as compared to other, similar networks on the internet. A good deal of the credit belongs to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/moderators&quot;&gt;the cadre of volunteer moderators&lt;/a&gt; who have the power to suspend users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice there's been some concern that moderators on Physics have suspended more users than on other sites. I looked at the statistics on all Stack Exchange sites and found that 150 currently have at least one user serving a suspension. By total suspensions, Physics is tied for 7&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; most. The top site, as you might imagine, is Stack Overflow. But it has an order of magnitude more users than Physics. So it makes more sense to compare the rate of suspensions per users active on the site in the last year. By that metric, Stack Overflow among the least frequent suspension site. Physics is ranked 81&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; or about average. Note, however, this includes network-wide suspensions, which are enforced by employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.477" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:12:44.683" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T19:03:37.393" Score="1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;While answering a question, I usually do it as I would do it orally, which is using the simplest english I can and also trying to make it a bit fun, which is also just the way I speak. &#xA;so the other day, when answering this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/312107/&quot;&gt;electromagnetic...&lt;/a&gt; I said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;short answer : because Einstein said so.[..]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it was a way for me to emphasize that Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect.&#xA;But it turns out people didn't like my answer ( I got a couple of downvotes in the beginning ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Fellow physicist I would like to know your opinion, is it ok to make jokes while answering questions?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118759" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T13:18:31.867" Title="Is it ok to make jokes on your answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2017-02-24T19:19:03.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing inherently wrong with an occasional jokey aside.  (But don't go overboard --- &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;we hate fun here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the comment on your post, which links to a definition of &quot;argument from authority,&quot; is a good explanation of why that &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; joke might have fallen flat.&#xA;People don't believe in the photoelectric effect because Einstein described it.&#xA;People tend to respect Einstein's ideas because he was the first person to describe the photoelectric effect correctly.  He was the first to explain several things correctly, but he certainly published his share of mistakes.&#xA;Understanding the difference between &quot;I believe X because a smart person said so&quot; and &quot;I believe X because it fits observations&quot; is a big part of the difference between people who misunderstand science and people who are successful in the sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:19:03.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2017-02-24T19:31:24.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Humor is (a) subjective and (b) a tool in the communications toolbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting depends on the judgement of the audience, so you need to use humor that the audience will judge as improving—or at least not harming—the answer, and the answer still needs to be a good one on its own merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you are getting comments that the humor is a problem then maybe you should take it out. Or you could wait to see how other users feel about the humor. Maybe someone will defend it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:31:24.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9680" CreationDate="2017-02-24T20:15:36.293" Score="-8" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marchforscience.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;March for Science&lt;/a&gt; is an event/protest/rally being held on April 22, 2017. The main march will occur in Washington D.C., but there will be marches all over the world and across the United States. There is an SE chat room dedicated to the march. As many of our community members are scientists and/or support science, I was wondering if we wanted a community event countdown to be shown on the main page. As the event is somewhat political in nature, I wanted to check with the community before creating an event. The countdown timer is not overbearing and is just a small item on the side bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A response to potential objections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This march is something relevant only to the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope. While the main march is occurring in D.C., there will be marches all around the world (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marchforscience.com/satellite-marches/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an overally political thing to promote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is political, many scientific organizations are endorsing it, such as the AAAS (which publishes Science magazine), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the American Statistical Association (ASA) - you can read more about which organizations are endorsing it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/will-they-or-won-t-they-what-science-groups-are-saying-about-joining-march-science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A community ad will be a much better way to promote this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, for starters, I did create a community ad (as did someone else; my version was downvoted to oblivion, theirs is at -2). However, I think this event is important enough that it's worth advertising beyond just a community ad. Also, I might point out again that the countdown timer is just a small item on the side bar, so it won't interfere with normal use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: some of this (the introduction) was pulled from &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3690/community-countdown-event-for-march-for-science&quot;&gt;an equivalent post over on Academia.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:50:17.333" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T21:38:19.480" Title="Community countdown event for March for Science" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-02-25T00:12:24.837" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marchforscience.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i4XPB.png&quot; alt=&quot;March supporting government policy informed by science&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67917" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T00:12:24.837" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T06:55:25.680" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186999/whats-wrong-with-this-idea-for-recover-energy-from-pressure&quot;&gt;an example&lt;/a&gt; , it was revived by Community . Could not Community acquire some intelligence? The user has been inactive since &quot;Last seen Jun 2 '15 at 23:00&quot; ,  All answers have a 0 vote count and two are later, I suppose from more revivals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could think that an &quot;and&quot; combination of  &quot;ifs&quot; like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long inactive user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zero upvotes or negative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;perpetual motion&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would keep this question in limbo, to keep company with the OP, for good reasons and not waste our time in futile readings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all a search on &quot;perpetual&quot; would find it if somebody is interested in perpetual motion machines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example, I am sure other logical &quot;ands&quot; would eliminate revivals other of useless posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:07.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T08:39:41.343" Title="inactive users and Community revivals" Tags="|discussion|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9677" CreationDate="2017-02-26T08:39:41.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it would be technically possible to make the bumping algorithm more complicated in a way that prevents it from bumping certain posts. But there is a much simpler way: upvote an answer to the post. Or if none of the existing answers is worthy of an upvote, post your own that is. (Or if the question should be closed, vote to close it and use the usual methods to bring the attention of other close voters to it.) Otherwise, the post is probably still deserving of attention, which is the whole point of bumping it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T08:39:41.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2017-02-26T18:38:28.023" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, no.....for the simple reason that you cannot go wrong  with a straight to the point answer, but there's always a very  good chance that  your sense of humour is not shared by everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People want answers first and foremost: not always dry textbook-like answers, so think of interesting &lt;strong&gt;relevant&lt;/strong&gt; illustrations to make your point,  but the odds are in your favour if you keep it straight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a big, big difference between an entertaining answer and a &quot;funny&quot; one, you are in for a fall if you confuse the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I write for websites with large audiences now and again, its not the same as giving a live talk, where you can judge the mood of your audience, on PSE you can't, so I wouldn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user146020" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T18:38:28.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9675" CreationDate="2017-02-26T21:38:19.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Community events, as they're called, are used for advertising events happening &lt;em&gt;within the SE network&lt;/em&gt;. The URL associated with each event &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285947/allow-non-se-urls-in-community-events&quot;&gt;has to be a Stack Exchange URL&lt;/a&gt;, which poses a technical restriction on using such an event for something happening outside SE, but even discounting the technical restriction, we should consider the intent of the SE developers in providing this feature and their reasons for doing it that way. Community events are supposed to be used for advertising things that are relevant for the community's participation &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt;. The March for Science may be relevant to a lot of people here, but it's not relevant to how they participate in Stack Exchange, so I don't believe it deserves the privileged position of being advertised in the community bulletin (that's the proper name for the yellow sidebar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were, say, a chat event associated with the march happening simultaneously, that would be a different matter. Chat events are fine candidates for advertising in the bulletin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE doesn't really give us a good way to advertise external events. The closest we come is community ads, but they're better suited for permanent things, not events that occur at a specific time and then are done with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T21:38:19.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T01:34:00.327" Score="9" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I asked the question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/314626/thought-experiment-ultra-fast-outward-push-inside-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;Thought experiment: ultra-fast outward push inside a black hole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there was a conversation I was having with one of the answerers (it didn't resolve my question but I wanted to read it all as there seemed to be some good substance there). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But before I got a chance to see the response to my comment it was deleted. I googled around (and i admit I might be dumb) but I can't seem to find a way to see the deleted answer without a moderator's help as i'm below 10K rep.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do? OR would one of the moderators be able to send an image of the answer + comment stream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T01:50:43.510" Title="Want to view deleted answer and comment stream:" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9681" CreationDate="2017-02-27T01:43:56.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even with 10K you can't see deleted comments. There simply isn't such a facility. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; see non-deleted comments to deleted answers, however, which is a slightly different matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the official response to complaints about the inconvenience of that can arise because of that is along the lines of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Put anything important in a post or take it to chat; comments are transient and the only official use case is to suggest improvements to the post, anyway&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the moderators understand that in practice they are used a little more widely than that. Try pinging one of us in chat to ask if there was anything interesting posted in response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case there are several classes of comments to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are several deleted comments under the questions. These were deleted by the posters and I wouldn't feel comfortable making the contents public. Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are some non-deleted comments associated with an answer that was deleted by the poster. Some of these seem to be part of a conversation including you. They were posted between 07:00 and 08:00 UTC by the user who posted the (now self-deleted) answer. If these are the ones you're asking about consider pinging the user who posted the answer in chat to find out if he'd be willing to copy them for you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are some deleted comments associate with that deleted answer. These don't seem to have anything to do with you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T01:50:43.510" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T01:50:43.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-01T08:48:23.287" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://i64.tinypic.com/21l7uw2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://i64.tinypic.com/21l7uw2.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the comments from the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/315403/41634&quot;&gt;What is “relatively uniform resonant frequency”?&lt;/a&gt;. I'm pretty sure that the colors are different, maybe their brightness. Is this normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Windows 7, with updated Firefox. I do install the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/6091/29559&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Extras (SOX)&lt;/a&gt; script, but there is no option in it allow changing the comments' color. I notice that this is universal, every section of comments in every question or answer in every Stack Exchange site has this behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T17:43:17.877" Title="Are the colors of this two comments different?" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|design|comments|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T02:48:33.080" Score="3" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/315730/express-laplace-transform-of-voltage-across-a-capacitor-in-terms-of-charge&quot;&gt;Express Laplace transform of voltage across a capacitor in terms of charge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear folks' opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T11:56:03.823" Title="Should question 315730 have the homework-and-exercises tag?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2017-03-02T04:55:20.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/124&quot;&gt;current policy says&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag should be applied to questions which arise in the context of doing &quot;educational exercises&quot;. The defining property of an educational exercise is that the purpose of solving the exercise is learning to use (or gaining further practice with) the method by which it is solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that is the case in this question. It's been claimed that this is the exercise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider a circuit consisting of a capacitor $C$, an impedance $\tilde{Z}(\omega)$, and a constant voltage source $V$ connected in a loop.&#xA;  Suppose in equilibrium the charge across the capacitor is $Q_e$.&#xA;  Now at time $t=0$ we drop some charge on the capacitor, making the total capacitor charge $Q_0$.&#xA;  We'd like to solve for the time dependent charge $Q(t)$ on the capacitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of solving this problem is not for you to learn the method by which it can be solved, I presume. If I understand correctly, the entire purpose of this problem is to provide context for the underlying conceptual question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The paper I'm reading writes an equation which leads me to believe that&#xA;  $$\hat{V}(p) = \frac{Q_e}{pC} - \frac{\hat{Q}(p)}{C} \, , \tag{$\star$}$$&#xA;  but I don't understand why that's the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is equation $(\star)$ correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's completely irrelevant (again if I understand correctly) whether you actually make any further progress in solving the exercise. That would not be the case if your purpose were to learn the method of solution. Therefore, I conclude the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag is inappropriate for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As further justification, another property of &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; all educational exercises is that you get them from some other source: a textbook, a homework assignment, an old contest, a problem book, or so on. As I understand it, this is not the case here. Now, it is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to have a question which does not include an exercise from an external source but is nevertheless a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; question, e.g. if the poster has made up an exercise for themselves to get practice with a certain technique. But this is quite rare. Rare enough that, when a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; based on an exercise from some external source, we should probably avoid applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag unless we know that the poster's intent is to practice the method. I certainly don't believe that is the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:03:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T04:55:20.177" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9689" CreationDate="2017-03-02T22:38:09.910" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of time I've come across minor typos and Mathjax fixes I wanted to make to (other people's) questions which turn out to be too few characters to be passed by the Save Edit checking code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, IMO, especially with Mathjax, even a relatively minor tweak can help readability and clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone feel the minimum character requirement is a bit restrictive ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be changed to a warning, rather than blocking small edits ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T07:21:56.803" Title="Minimum edit size a bit too strict" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9688" CreationDate="2017-03-02T23:13:43.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a known 'issue'. The 6-character limit is inherited from SE-wide policy, and it was primarily designed for sites with overwhelmingly text-driven content where it is very rare (though still possible) for a two-character edit to really make a crucial difference in the meaning of a post. The presence of MathJax does change the equation (ho, ho, ho) a bit, making it more likely that a post will require very punctual but still crucial intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That edit still bumps up the post on the front page and other activity-driven listings, so it still degrades the signal-to-noise ratio of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The six-character limit goes away at 2k with the ability to edit posts without going through peer review, and there is a healthy population of 2k+ edit-active users on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is really rare (though it does happen) that a post crucially needs a 2-character edit but has absolutely nothing else, at all, that can be fixed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the rare case that this happens and it's seen by a &amp;lt;2k user, they can just point it out in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the chatroom&lt;/a&gt; or in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, it's just so much of an edge case that it can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Asking SE for site-specific alterations to the core Q&amp;amp;A engine is possible but there needs to be a very compelling reason behind it; this doesn't make the bar by any stretch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T07:21:56.803" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T07:21:56.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2017-03-04T11:56:03.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: I have written an answer to the question discussed here, so one might consider my opinion in this matter biased. I did not vote on the closure of the question in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question &lt;em&gt;should have&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag, but should not be closed. Clearly, this is essentially an exercise in computing the behaviour of a specific circuit in a specific situation, and the question asks to understand a specific step in the derivation, clearly not because it is interested in the end result since the &lt;em&gt;end result is already known&lt;/em&gt;. So &quot;primarily for educational value&quot; applies as well as being about a specific exercise, and therefore I think the tag should be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think it should be closed - it shows some effort to work through the problem (the equation it asks about in the end was derived by that effort in the first place) and the question of why the voltage is computed in this way &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; conceptual. There is no straightforward &quot;plug-and-chug&quot; derivation that yields eq. ($\star$), it must be arrived at mainly by physical reasoning about the circuit, not computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As supporting evidence that this is not (or should not be) off-topic as homework-like, consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/164914&quot;&gt;3:0 Leave Open review&lt;/a&gt; this question received in the queue. Homework-like questions that are &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; off-topic usuaslly receive quick and almost always unanimous close reviews, so this at least shows it is not &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T11:56:03.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9654" CreationDate="2017-03-04T21:28:58.100" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I trust the tastes of the community generally, so I would like to nominate the most upvoted answers from the most &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes&quot;&gt;upvoted questions&lt;/a&gt;, starting with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon/5510#5510&quot;&gt;Cooling Cup of Coffee with Spoon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then it seems to make the whole point of the book pointless if anyone can access what's already conveniently here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1345" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T21:28:58.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T02:19:19.317" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be very nice if this editor had a diagram drawer, don't yall think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with easy drag-and-drop tools to place boxes and vectors for free-body diagrams, springs, circuit components, etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96435" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T02:19:19.317" Title="Diagram Drawing Tool in Editor" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-03-05T14:28:14.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9695" CreationDate="2017-03-05T13:35:14.703" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unanswered question have answers in physics.se . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hld6W.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hld6W.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a bug or unaccepted answers also show up in this section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130714" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T22:31:10.090" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T22:31:10.090" Title="Unanswered question tab" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9694" CreationDate="2017-03-05T20:50:39.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18870/why-does-the-unanswered-questions-tab-show-questions-that-have-answers&quot;&gt;Why does the “Unanswered Questions” tab show questions that have answers?&lt;/a&gt; at Meta Stack Exchange,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;Unanswered Questions&lt;/code&gt; tab &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/ok-now-define-answered/&quot;&gt;shows questions&lt;/a&gt; that have no answers with a positive score nor an accepted answer. (That includes questions with no answers at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intentional, and it reflects the fact that just because someone has added content through the &lt;code&gt;answer&lt;/code&gt; field it doesn't mean that the question has actually been answered. The Unanswered Questions tab is meant to get you to questions that have not been sufficiently addressed, and the criterion as posed does as good a job as any number-crunching machine algorithm to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reading, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/30/ok-now-define-answered/&quot;&gt;OK, Now Define “Answered&quot;&lt;/a&gt; on the Stack Overflow blog, back from 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T20:50:39.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9654" CreationDate="2017-03-07T03:49:35.973" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;actually if u r really interested in giving out a really quality book how about trying like this&#xA;for one question we can find so many different answers in stack exchange site and also in google we can get some info&#xA;along with that we have many questions which relate very closely to one questions in addition to be having many answers and moreover many links regarding the related stuff are available &#xA;from those links we can get some info &#xA;so how about putting all this info together?&#xA;i know it takes a lot paper work and time and all&#xA;but what i think is if u want to go for something,  it would be always better to go for the best&#xA;so what do u think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145764" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T03:49:35.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T13:37:47.047" Score="5" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 2 questions with one upvote, 3 ques with 2 upvotes and other one with 2 downvotes. Will I get banned if a question I post next is of low quality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I got banned yesterday but the ban was lifted after my 2 questions got an upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114592" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:53:26.230" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:53:26.230" Title="Will I still get banned?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|quality|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9698" CreationDate="2017-03-08T14:49:16.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different restrictions that may be imposed upon you, partly based on the performance of your previous posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General rate limiting:&lt;/strong&gt; Users below 125 reputation can often only ask one question every 40 minutes network-wide, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/164900/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low-quality rate limiting:&lt;/strong&gt; If your questions or answers are poorly received, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243460/263383&quot;&gt;rolling rate limit&lt;/a&gt; ranging anywhere from 1 to 7 days may be imposed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anti-recidivism rate limiting:&lt;/strong&gt; If you deleted your account and created a new one, you may find yourself only being able to post a single question per week, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234610/263383&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comprehensive question ban&lt;/strong&gt;: This is the most severe automatic restriction, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291142/263383&quot;&gt;recently enabled on all sites&lt;/a&gt;. If you have posted a significant amount of poorly received posts, the system will ban you &lt;em&gt;permanently&lt;/em&gt; from posting until these are improved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can neither tell you whether you will be restricted from posting if your next contribution will be poorly received nor for how long because the algorithms that determine this are &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt; not public to avoid malicious users gaming them. However, the system will usually &lt;em&gt;warn&lt;/em&gt; you that your last posts were poorly received before imposing a rate limit, and the permanent ban will only kick in after several such warnings and increasingly severe rate limits. If you follow the guidelines you are shown when a rate limit is imposed (shown by Shog9 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9647/50583&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;), you should not be in danger of getting to that point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:29:41.490" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T14:49:16.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T22:11:09.750" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a question along the lines of &quot;What would we see if there are four accessible spatial dimensions, and we are 'lifted up' then rotated in the fourth axis?&quot; &lt;strong&gt;It will be hard to explain/assess this question without details, so please be patient:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flatland&lt;/a&gt;, there exist fictional flat creatures who only know 2 spatial dimensions, or only 2 perpendicular spatial axes. In the 3-dimensional world, we can lift a Flatlander up from its flat habitat, and rotate it so as to make it no longer parallel to the plane of its original residence, this will allow the Flatlander to see the insides of its fellow flat creatures. (See picture below:)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WG4sZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WG4sZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I want to ask is: what would a human see if it is lifted up and rotated like that by a four dimension being in four dimensional space? In particular, how should the vision of such an individual be &lt;strong&gt;depicted&lt;/strong&gt;? As in, should the person see the interior of other people's internal organs? Would the effect be as though the flesh on the observed be stripped off? What about hallways and solid geometric shapes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking the meta question to find out if such a question belong to the domain of physics S.E., or maybe visual design would be a better place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105751" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T22:48:42.040" Title="Does questions pertaining the depiction of dimensionally abnormal space belong here?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9700" CreationDate="2017-03-09T22:48:42.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to these sorts of questions is generally &quot;just ask --- don't ask permission to ask.&quot;  If it's off-topic, it'll get closed, and there won't really be any hard feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said: seeing as how we don't have any evidence that our three-dimensional space is any sort of surface in a four-dimensional bulk (with thoughtful meditations on spacetime and brane theories omitted here), this particular question might be as happy or happier on &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T22:48:42.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-11T06:22:56.710" Score="-4" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/317780/what-is-the-difference-between-b-and-h-fields?noredirect=1#comment713842_317780&quot;&gt;There&lt;/a&gt; was a small dispute about the downvote of newcomers with less than 110 point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the SE is supported by only a view enthusiasts. And they are doing this very well. But how to grow up more active people without giving them a chance to adopt to SE? It's really necessary to downvote somebody with less than 100 points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AccidentalFourierTransform thinks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...of course I agree... The question is certainly good and there is no reason to downvote it. It is just a duplicate, but its a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Countto10 brightens the situation   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... but it is normal practice either to include some reference you read, but could not follow, or to give your own idea of what the problem involves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why not support newcomers and give them a chance to grow up? Why not establish a netquette about this or better not do give the possibility to downvote under zero? Ok, may be it should be possible if someone upvoted the question to downvote it to zero again, but I think this is contraproductive too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T07:57:11.543" Title="Downvote of newcomers with less than 100 points" Tags="|discussion|questions|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9702" CreationDate="2017-03-11T07:57:11.543" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question linked has been closed as a duplicate and was presumably downvoted because it was a duplicate. This has been discussed before in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7665/if-a-question-is-duplicate-should-it-be-downvoted&quot;&gt;If a question is duplicate , should it be downvoted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re the broader question of downvoting new members, the voting on a question should be based on the question and only on the question. A bad question posted by a newcomer is still a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do think we are a bit eager to downvote questions. Downvoting bad answers is very important because a wrong or misleading answer has no place on this site, but I consider downvoting questions to be less critical. Beginners to physics sometimes have problems writing a question clearly because they don't understand the terminology we use, and in this case I think we should be sympathetic. Where questions are lazy or a thinly disguised excuse for a polemic I feel less charitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.727" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T07:57:11.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T03:57:20.533" Score="8" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;My post here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book recommendation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/318141/&quot;&gt;Book on condensed matter physics focusing on numerical method in quantum system [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I further improve my post so that it is not a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75725" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T20:15:29.990" Title="How can I improve my post here so that it is not a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9704" CreationDate="2017-03-12T07:36:24.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for asking. But in this case, I don't believe there is any way to change your question such that it is not a duplicate, without making it an entirely different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource recommendations are treated somewhat specially, and one of the ways that they are treated specially is that the rules for what constitutes a duplicate are broader than normal questions. In particular, a recommendation question which shares its general topic and general level with another one is considered a duplicate. In your case, your question's general topic is condensed matter physics and its level is what we might call intermediate. There is already a recommendation question seeking intermediate-level condensed matter books. Yours is therefore a duplicate of that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could do is ask the actual conceptual question you would hope to answer by reading the books. That would presumably be a fine question for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T07:36:24.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9709" CreationDate="2017-03-15T11:03:31.453" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always get on physics.se in my free time. I've been doing this for around 2 years now. But I feel like, over the recent weeks, the site has slowed down dramatically. There are fewer people answering questions AND most importantly, most a lot of the questions are duplicates. Is it just me or are we running out of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130713" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T13:22:28.017" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T16:53:50.840" Title="Is Physics Stack Exchange even as active as before?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9708" CreationDate="2017-03-15T12:06:16.123" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone has suggestions for Physics Stack Exchange website's UI where/how or to whom he should make his suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94482" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T15:46:47.887" Title="Physics Stack Exchange website's User Interface" Tags="|support|feature-request|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9707" CreationDate="2017-03-15T15:46:47.887" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always ask it here, but for many feature requests the best place is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Physics Stack Exchange is part of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;large family of sites&lt;/a&gt; which share the same core engine; as a pretty strong rule of thumb, if your question would be as applicable here as in, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gardening.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Gardening &amp;amp; Landscaping Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, then the place to ask is the mother meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For smallish feature requests, like yours,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to suggest that for example a little icon be added next to the caption of some of the most frequently used tags (such as: homeworks, Quantum, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this can sometimes be implemented directly as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenUserJs/OpenUserJS.org/wiki/Userscript-beginners-HOWTO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;userscript&lt;/a&gt;, and they can eventually make it into SOUP (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/the-stack-overflow-unofficial-patch-soup&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch&lt;/a&gt;) if enough people use them. If you're enough of a coder, you can write such a userscript yourself; if not, you can e.g. ask for the feature on the mother meta and mention that you're open to using a userscript for it, in essence soliciting folks to write one for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case, it requires a bit more finesse, because you want to modify the site in response to the details of the user's history. In this regard, if it is doable via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.stackexchange.com/docs&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange API&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. if the API can provide the information you need, then yes, a userscript can do it; this does seem to be the case with &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/me-tags#order=desc&amp;amp;sort=popular&amp;amp;filter=default&amp;amp;site=physics&amp;amp;run=true&quot;&gt;the tags you've been active in&lt;/a&gt;, as well as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/top-answer-tags-on-users&quot;&gt;top answer tags&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/top-question-tags-on-users&quot;&gt;top question tags&lt;/a&gt; for a user. So happy coding ;-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:28.253" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T15:46:47.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9706" CreationDate="2017-03-15T16:53:50.840" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much of the data is public, over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;, so you can go and do some number-crunching yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the data is available only to mods, and some is available to &gt;25k rep users, and it shows no such decline. Over the period since January 2015, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qEuiA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qEuiA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xeyEq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xeyEq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eWGOg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eWGOg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some seasonal variations (such as the obvious dips over the Christmas holidays, and some slower traffic over the summer) and a slow but steady growth. Now, of course, this is an incomplete picture, but the effects you mention should be measurable via the data explorer, so if they're there, you can go and do the number-crunching and convince us that indeed there are some worrisome metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So much, of course, for the measurable stuff. The intangibles are another matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T16:53:50.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-15T20:56:44.707" Score="-10" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;All possible sites given by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-anather-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; are very disappointing in dealing with question &amp;amp; answer and the Physics.SE is by far the best (with respect to design and with respect to active users ) so I should ask two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why there is such a rigorous policy about homework questions and way this type of questions cannot live among other conceptual and more advanced questions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usually, reading the discussions here we get that more advanced researches don't want people to ask 'bad' questions, but the edit possibility shouldn't be used to teach how to ask a good question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why exactly homework-like questions should be deleted? This types of questions are very instructive to high-level research and they are the basis of our teaching standard methods in the world. Even graduate students have tests and questions-type approach's. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I'm thinking if it is not possible to have a less-rigorous policy on the homework-questions, even destroying the tag and leaving this type of questions on site for (i) future students (ii) future doubts on the same questions. Creating a tag for 'do this is correct' it is also important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to see that we should delete duplicate questions and questions that do not show effort on it and for homework question keep presenting just hints and not the full answer but, the way this site is, I think users deleting questions on physics of new users with such a rigorous approach is just killing the site and making more and more a site just for very high level questions that remains unanswered most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think changing the policy would bring more people to study physics by their own and more advanced research level professionals in order to answer questions on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user78217" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:54.727" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T13:58:52.207" Title="Should we change homework policy of physics.SE?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2017-03-15T21:42:28.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some short comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to like Physics.SE better than other sites. Have you thought that, perhaps, this site is better &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of the strict policies? Have you pondered over the possibility that, by relaxing the homework policy, most active users would leave?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You want to eliminate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag, as if this tag was something bad - something you don't want your posts to be tagger with. Why? This tag is not supposed to highlight bad/unwanted posts, but to gather together all posts that are about, well, homework and exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any quantitative data to support your claim that closing homework questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is just killing the site and making more and more a site just for very high level questions that remains unanswered most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T22:15:39.260" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T22:15:39.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2017-03-15T23:42:16.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, I do agree with some of what you say - some questions are overly-enthusiastically closed as homework questions just because they have some math in them (or at least, I've seen it happen). I don't think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag is very useful, either. I also find the homework policy a bit confusing in scope, and I hope that the endeavors to find a better structure for the policy soon come to fruition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think AccidentalFourierTransform is right - the strict moderation and the focus on intuitive questions rather than problems is what makes this site so good. I don't think the lack of homework questions is killing the site - in fact, I think this site is thriving. Not only that, but I think allowing homework questions &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; kill the site. I certainly wouldn't be too happy if the five newest questions were all &quot;gimme teh answer&quot; just like Stack Overflow users wouldn't be happy if their newest questions were all &quot;gimme teh codez&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: the homework policy needs some work, yes. But overall, the idea behind it, of blocking the low quality questions that no expert wants to answer, is an excellent idea indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T23:42:16.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2017-03-15T23:50:38.307" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support the current homework policy.&#xA;I &quot;discovered&quot; this site because some of my students had posted here a question I assigned in class.  I was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; happy to discover this but  enchanted to see the community ignored the question; it was eventually deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not impossible to ask &quot;good&quot; homework-type questions and I've answered a good number myself. In the good examples, the OP makes some incorrect assumptions or makes some technical error, and it is extremely constructive to provide corrections or hints without necessarily giving the whole cake away.  This is what good instructors do anyways when students come to their office to ask questions, and I'm fine with the &quot;show me your work and I'll help you untie some of the knots&quot; approach to answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, SE-Physics could easily become overwhelmed with people simply &quot;farming out&quot; their assignments without discrimination.  There is no value in this for anyone, except the cheaters who get their work done by someone else.  Professionally, I refuse to answer questions from students unless they come prepared to show some work.  This seems to be the accepted &lt;em&gt;modus operandi&lt;/em&gt; here, and I salute this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can higher-level questions coexist with &quot;homework-style questions&quot;? To some degree they do already, and personally I find that overall the balance to be ok.  The higher-level questions for me are often starting points for literature searches and fresh perspectives.  The questions linked and related to individual postings are often enough so that, with very few clicks, I end up getting the inspiration I was looking for.  If the balance is skewed towards too many homework questions, then it becomes a waste of time to search for useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T04:16:46.007" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T04:16:46.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2017-03-16T17:44:07.233" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the best solution would be if we would bind it to reputation. For example, 1 homework question can be asked after every 100 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be easily tested by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the stackexchange api&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using the data.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or by direct queries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't be an essential change - most of the homework questions are asked from rep1 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it probably wouldn't be implemented by the SE team, we could use it as a house rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be very easily implemented as a voting script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T18:11:47.297" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T18:11:47.297" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T03:04:54.103" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title pretty much sums it up. Should I change the accepted answer of my question if someone answers the question &quot;better&quot; or more extensively? Even though the accepted answer is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99654" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T11:56:35.817" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T11:56:35.817" Title="Change accepted answer of my question if a better one appears" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9715" CreationDate="2017-03-17T05:37:51.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, technically you're &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; to accept any answer to your question that you want, and to change which answer is accepted as often as the system allows you to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be a &quot;good Stack Exchange citizen&quot;, you should be reasonably sure that the answer you accept is &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt;. Sometimes there are multiple correct answers. Which one you choose to accept is up to you; you might choose the clearest one, or the most complete one, or the most technically correct one, or the one that most closely matches what you asked, or whatever. So, yes you can unaccept an existing answer and accept a new one if you think the new answer deserves it more. But you don't have to. It's your call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, as a corollary to this, if you want to be a good SE citizen you should not accept an answer without being reasonably confident that it's correct. Sometimes that means you don't accept an answer at all, which is fine, e.g. if none of the answers seem to be correct or even if they might be correct but you are not reasonably confident in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T05:37:51.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T11:04:45.617" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/318328/shankar-quantum-mechanics-proof-inverse-of-operators&quot;&gt;Shankar Quantum Mechanics: Proof Inverse Of Operators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;Hi!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get why my question was flagged as homework plus a down-vote. It is not meant as homework. Also, that line beneath the imgur link was my (poorly?) proof, In the footnote: they said: see for the concepts at the end of Theorem A.1.1. There, the proof was also one line. So what I did was simply switched the symbols and asking if its a valid proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T21:54:30.570" Title="Why is my question on hold, flagged as homework and why the downvote?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9717" CreationDate="2017-03-17T16:25:48.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a hunch (I can't do any better than that, I don't know the topic nor did I vote to close), but I think the reason may be that your question looks like a &quot;Check my work&quot; kind of question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say that because the only part of the question that tries to explain/justify your work or where you are stuck just says &quot;Would this be correct ...&quot; and gives an equation. That sounds a lot like &quot;check my work&quot; or &quot;derive this for me&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot offer any real explanation for how to improve it because it's not my subject area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvote may/may not be related. I would downvote it because you link to a png of fairly long explanation that is both external to the site and a long read. It would be much better to summarize what you are using from that text in the question directly so it is concise and self-contained. Feel free to link to the full text still, but the person who wants to answer shouldn't need to go somewhere else to read and extract what you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T16:25:48.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T18:53:50.623" Score="71" ViewCount="1301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, we use a raster logo instead of a vector logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't know, a raster is an image made of pixels. If you zoom enough, you'll see the image become pixelated (as is the case with our logo). Vector graphics don't become pixelated when you zoom into them, and they'll always remain crisp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost every SE site uses vector logos because they look nicer. An example of a vector graphic is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://cdn.rawgit.com/Sir-Cumference/6d8130dce911769a1113d83ca3bd9a27/raw/395d9e624f8e3fae2dc533a8f7001526f01f2049/physics.svg&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Feynmann diagram is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, courtesy of user &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Joelholdsworth~commonswiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joel Holdsworth&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license&lt;/a&gt;. Modified by changing the color and trimming the gluon spiral. Logo based on Physics SE's logo, copyright of Stack Exchange Inc.; no infringement intended.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made this in a few minutes. Notice how it does not pixelate when you zoom in. Not to mention, the current logo shows up blurry for a lot of larger displays. Shouldn't we update our design to have better quality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: If you decide to use the logo I made, please give attribution to the creator of the Feynmann diagram, as per the Creative Commons license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93522" LastEditorUserId="93522" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T14:43:46.307" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T15:47:42.890" Title="Should we get a vector logo?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9717" CreationDate="2017-03-17T21:25:30.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beyond your protest would you please care to explain how this is NOT a homework question?  It certainly seems like a legitimate homework question that an instructor would ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see your question and I immediately suspect it is taken from an assignment: you took your question out of a textbook, included a page of the textbook as an image to which you refer, you ask the community to check your work, and you provide minimal context to your question (you did not define $\mathbb{V}^n$ or even $n$).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What part of the discussion in Shankar makes you doubt your solution?  Can you find similar examples in other texts, or counterexamples elsewhere for which this simple proof of yours would not work.  This would show prior research and also show that you are interested in something beyond just &quot;check my work please&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T21:54:30.570" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T21:54:30.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T20:15:31.410" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be convenient to include an automatically generated comment when voting to close a question as homework-like? The way things are set up now, if I see a question that runs afoul the homework-like policy, I just cast a downvote. Some people less lazy than me put a comment that looks like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Physics Stack Exchange! Please note that Physics.StackExchange is not a homework help site. Please see this Meta post on asking homework questions and this Meta post for “check my work” problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is helpful because it indicates to the asker what is wrong with his question, where an indication that he has one close vote for an unknown reason does not communicate such information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think automating the comment process would make comment easier for people who already do it, and would get more people like me who aren't doing to do it more, which would be a good thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as far as the implementation, the comment could be completely automatic, or the closer could be prompted with a text box so they can confirm or modify the comment. If the comment is completely automatic, maybe its author should be the wiki user instead of the closer, but this is a detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, do we think any feature like this would be useful? Note that I am not asking if the physics.se mods can implement this feature. There may need to be upstream changes, but I figure the first step would be to would be to see if anyone even wants this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note this seems not totally out of the question because similar functionality already exists for voting to close as duplicate and voting to close for an &quot;other&quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23785" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T20:18:36.143" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T00:26:06.023" Title="Automatic comment when voting to close as homework-like?" Tags="|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9721" CreationDate="2017-03-19T22:46:13.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the SE team needs to be involved since pretty much all of us use the extremely useful &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/&quot;&gt;StackApps&lt;/a&gt; project &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;AutoReviewComments&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (and if you don't, you should). The message can be added to your local copy by adding the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;###[Q]Homework&#xA;Please note that this is not a homework help site. Please see [this Meta post on asking homework questions](http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/714/) and [this Meta post for &quot;check my work&quot; problems](http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/6093/)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7299/ethics-redirecting-homework-solution-seeking-questions-to-a-website-built-for/7300#7300&quot;&gt;another related message&lt;/a&gt; previously, I think others have posted other AutoReviewComments in other Physics.Meta posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:40.557" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T22:46:13.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:29:41.163" Score="-5" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;As some of you might know about the &amp;quot;argument&amp;quot; which took place between me and another long-time user of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;hBar&lt;/a&gt; about discussion of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JEE related stuff&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. As far as those discussions are concerned, they are mostly related to Physics, Math or Chemistry at the high school/ Olympiad level (you can check the transcript).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems some people were disturbed by those discussions and told us to stop (or create a new chat room). Even one of the moderators warned me that he would kick-mute me if I kept discussing  those topics with some other members of the chat. What disturbed me most were comments like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=36126857#36126857&quot;&gt;0celo7&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;I don't hate JEE, I hate when this chat is invaded by JEE&#xA;people&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36126875#36126875&quot;&gt;0celo7&lt;/a&gt;: Because it's uninteresting, annoying, and I was here&#xA;first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36126906#36126906&quot;&gt;0celo7&lt;/a&gt;:It's natural law&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=35635996#35635996&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;: Let me phrase it like this: If you do not respond to friendly suggestion I will kick you from this room if you continue to discuss things when other regulars have expressed a preference for you to take it somewhere else. I would much prefer not to but this room is not yours to hijack against the express wishes of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my query is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the stack exchange system have any documented rule which bars discussions which might disturb one or two long-time users of the room?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102705" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T02:11:08.547" Title="Should discussions on topics which disturb long time users of the chat room be banned?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9723" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:46:50.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me be very, &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; clear about a couple of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, every chat makes a permanent record of everything typed there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second the main chat for the site is a &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; resource for all the users. No one owns it, and time on the site does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; convey any kind of priority.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the public nature we insist on a grown-up approach to delicate or controversial subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the the shared nature, no particular user is not entitled to insist that some topics suitable for polite company not be discussed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip size, if you are engaged in a long-running discussion that &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; other users of the chat find distracting, disturbing, or inappropriate it is only polite to take your discussion to a place where you won't 'scare the horses' (that is, cause a ruckus). That's because you don't own the room any more than anyone else does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that &lt;em&gt;the h bar&lt;/em&gt; is a shared resource and you should be &lt;em&gt;sharing&lt;/em&gt; it. Bring your sensible manners and your good will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T02:11:08.547" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T02:11:08.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9723" CreationDate="2017-03-20T17:10:33.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As background to my message cited in the question, I said this &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35635706#35635706&quot;&gt;earlier&lt;/a&gt; in the same conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No one has a monopoly on this room but when multiple people ask if you not perhaps want to take your conversations about a specific topic to another room I'd kindly ask you to consider that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This already answers the question posed here: No one has a monopoly on the main chat room, or the absolute right to restrict the topics discussed there as long as they do not inherently run afoul of the Be Nice policy. We had a rather lengthy discussion about this related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9596/50583&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, where in the end we decided that the moderators &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; will not restrict the topics discussed for any other reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the point I wanted to make in those messages is different: Because of the shared nature of the room, not only does a single person not get to &lt;em&gt;restrict&lt;/em&gt; the topic, but also the people present should try to work out a way in which they all can use the room. This, of course, requires &lt;em&gt;compromise&lt;/em&gt; - if a lengthy conversation between a small subset of users disturbs the others, and they &lt;em&gt;express their wish those users take it elsewhere&lt;/em&gt;, then the courteous thing to do is to take it elsewhere. Creating a new room costs you nothing (provided you have 100 reputation) and clearly resolves all the tension instantly. I'm not saying one is &lt;em&gt;obligated&lt;/em&gt; to do that, but I &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; that there will at least be a reasonable and civil conversation about the refusal to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are good reasons to keep the conversation in the room (e.g. it's of potential interest to a large set of other users or directly related to site policy or other matters of relevance to the physics.SE community as such), then one should talk about that and ideally the users disturbed by the conservation should show some insight and acquiesce. If it seems that some users are frivolously or one-sidedly requesting conversations to be moved on spurious grounds, one may also talk about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this happened in this instance. The main response was &quot;just ignore us if you don't like the topic&quot;, which clearly ignores the shared nature of the room, and the conversation, instead of trying to find a consensus or compromise, quickly degenerated into mutual attacks and unconstructive comments. This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; desirable behaviour and basically spoils the room's atmosphere for everyone, which is in no one's interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a chat room, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;talk&lt;/em&gt; to each other&lt;/strong&gt;, figure out a way to coexist. Merely insisting on others keeping their conversation out of a room without compromise or explanation is not constructive, and neither is insisting others just have to live with whatever you decide to fill the room with. This is not an issue hard-coded rules could satisfactorily resolve, so there are none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T17:10:33.300" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9723" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:55:56.293" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You left out a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of context; I'm tempted to think you're just cherry-picking bits of that conversation to make others look bad while ignoring your own behavior and how it contributed to the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's something I would consider a &lt;em&gt;really critical&lt;/em&gt; bit of context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3i2bG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3i2bG.png&quot; alt=&quot;a 7-part conversation in which the OP here flatly refused to break a tangential conversation into a different room&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(for casual readers: &quot;anonymous&quot; in this thread is the OP here, the user now calling themselves &quot;2017&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A summary of this conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You were asked, by multiple people, to take a tangential conversation into a different room. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They explained - politely and at length - why this was the most efficient way to deal with the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You flatly refused. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social situations fall apart very quickly when participants cannot respect each other, and this is no exception: you're going out of your way to disrespect others, at very least refusing to give any credence whatsoever to their concerns; in return, you garnered a fair bit of disrespect from 0celo7 and, eventually, ACuriousMind. Thus, the situation broke down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The least-painful way to handle situations like this is for all participants to stop and consider the needs and desires of others before insisting upon their own, then work with each other to achieve compromise. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9723/should-discussions-on-topics-which-disturb-long-time-users-of-the-chat-room-be-b/9726#9726&quot;&gt;As ACM suggests&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a chat room, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;talk&lt;/em&gt; to each other&lt;/strong&gt;, figure out a way to coexist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but if someone is unwilling to do that, it is imperative that the room owners and moderators step in to remove them from the situation &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; social order breaks down. You should've been kicked out of the room the minute you flatly refused to consider anyone else's point of view; please keep this in mind for the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:55:56.293" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T14:01:18.177" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to post a question and I got the &quot;bad question ban&quot; warning. I have searched my previous posts and it turns out I have never posted anything on this SE - could one of the moderators please check if there are any deleted posts that I simply forgot about? If there are no past posts - why do I get a warning then? I have OK rep on other Stack Exchanges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any suggestions on how to improve this SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92254" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:51:40.573" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:51:40.573" Title="Why do I get the &quot;Bad question warning&quot; when first posting here?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-03-22T01:06:59.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9731" CreationDate="2017-03-23T11:20:36.207" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have 103 reputation in Physics Stack Exchange but why there is no any edit option under the posts. In other stack exchange websites it appears very well and I can edit any post and the edits are applied when it is peer reviewed. But this problem is happening with me in this Physics Stack Exchange. Why?? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Any answer regarding this problem will be appreciated by me. Thanks!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147585" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T13:02:53.697" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T13:55:55.253" Title="Why can't I edit any post?" Tags="|support|bug|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2017-03-23T13:55:45.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/147585/sgrmshrsm7?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&quot;&gt;appears&lt;/a&gt;, as of now, that seven of your eight suggested edits have been rejected by reviewers.  And looking through the list, I agree: they're all reasonable changes, but too trivial to warrant bumping a post to the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your inability to suggest new edits is temporary and will return in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T13:55:45.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-23T17:10:16.093" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/3534/revisions&quot;&gt;this edit to &quot;Don't heavier objects actually fall faster because they exert their own gravity?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. (Compare versions 21 and 23).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Motivation for these (last two) edits: I realized that my explanation in the question was incomplete, and that when I talked about the acceleration being dependent on both objects, I was actually using an equation of the force to prove it. Since in acceleration, force is divided by mass, it seemed necessary to explain why the closing acceleration of the two objects still depended on both masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this question since I'm not a super experienced user on Physics.SE and would appreciate any help to improve my formulas or reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T12:25:33.327" Title="Is this a good edit?" Tags="|discussion|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9733" CreationDate="2017-03-23T23:53:55.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't think that edit was necessary. It doesn't make the question any clearer for me, and more importantly I don't see how it would make it more clear to the readership of the site as a whole. But if it does significantly improve the question for a significant number of people, in some way that I'm not seeing, then that's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also say (to echo my earlier comment) that to edit a post which already has many edits - &quot;many&quot; being more than 5 or so - you should be making a &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt; improvement. I don't think this qualifies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T23:53:55.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9736" CreationDate="2017-03-24T21:57:35.637" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I link a related/relevant question in a comment, I use the &quot;share&quot; static link of the question or answer I want to refer to. I've seen some comments where the link is replaced by the question title, but I'm not able to reproduce that behavior (without doing the &lt;code&gt;[link description](URL)&lt;/code&gt; inline hyperlink).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just not a feature on SE (because I distinctly remember reading somewhere that linked questions are automatically replaced by their titles) or is there some special magic need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19979" LastEditorUserId="19979" LastEditDate="2017-03-25T22:09:07.993" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T22:09:07.993" Title="corrected inline link syntax" Tags="|support|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9735" CreationDate="2017-03-24T22:06:14.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question link is converted to its question title in questions &amp;amp; answers but not in comments. (In chat it is possible to one-box a question link.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T22:10:34.420" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T22:10:34.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9739" CreationDate="2017-03-25T03:34:05.997" Score="4" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a search and came up empty on how to use mathjax on this site. Do I need to use a third party or is a math symbols program built into the physics site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129433" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T21:54:12.887" Title="Posting questions with math symbols" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9737" CreationDate="2017-03-25T21:54:12.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathjax.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; enabled, which means that you can essentially use any (reasonable) LaTeX command inside dollar and double-dollar signs (or indeed inside equation or align environments, among others), and it will display as mathematics; thus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$f(x)=x^2$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will display as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$f(x)=x^2.$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For help in getting started with LaTeX as a way to typeset mathematics, the best place is probably the tutorial &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference&lt;/a&gt; on the Mathematics Stack Exchange meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not need any external tools to either view or write MathJax-powered mathematics on this site. If for some reason you don't see the mathematics displaying, you can ask here on meta but be sure to provide as many details about your browser configuration as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T21:54:12.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9741" CreationDate="2017-03-27T02:07:50.540" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do we interpret a question correctly when there exits multiple intepretations? for example in this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/321428/why-does-the-metric-remain-unchanged-in-special-relativity/321433#321433,&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i interpreted it one way and answered, but apparently some others(not the OP) downvoted it saying it dosen't have enough information. Can someone suggest ways to deal with such misunderstandings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47033" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T07:12:08.890" Title="Interpretations of questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9740" CreationDate="2017-03-27T02:39:55.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All questions are a little bit ambiguous, and somewhat open to interpretation. But if a question admits significantly different interpretations, to the extent that a typical answerer might be confused about what they're really supposed to be answering, the best thing to do is flag it (or vote to put it on hold, if you have enough reputation) as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;. That way we avoid having multiple conflicting and confusing answers until the asker is able to clarify the question. To go along with this, it helps to leave a comment pointing out how the question is unclear, or upvote a comment which gives that information if one already exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also downvote the question if you like. A lack of clarity that impedes people's ability to answer the question is one good use of a downvote. You may want to check back later to see if the question has been improved, and if so, remove your downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this applies whether you yourself see multiple confusing interpretations of the question, or some people only see one interpretation and others see a drastically different one. The remedy is the same either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T03:27:30.393" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T03:27:30.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9740" CreationDate="2017-03-27T07:12:08.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you link is largely incomprehensible. I asked the OP for clarification, and since they haven't responded I have voted to close as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvotes on your answer are a little unkind, but they just indicate that a few people thought your answer was unhelpful so I wouldn't assign too much significance to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have answered questions based on my guess about what the OP actually wants to know, but in those cases I normally start my answer by saying something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm assuming you are asking about &amp;lt;insert guess here&amp;gt;. Ignore this answer if this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is clear exactly what question my answer is addressing. I think your answer would benefit from some statement making it clear exactly what your answer is aimed at. At the moment it isn't clear to me what point you are making.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T07:12:08.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-28T15:14:55.173" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we type Young Tableaux on this site? If yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143457" OwnerDisplayName="Shen" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T15:18:42.337" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T16:35:33.077" Title="Can we type Young Tableaux on this site?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9747" CreationDate="2017-03-28T15:42:02.473" Score="8" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/168307&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; case and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/168293&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, review has been completed by a single &quot;Looks OK&quot; vote. While in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/168272&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; case it has been completed by two &quot;Looks OK&quot; votes. Is there a reason for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T22:05:30.073" Title="How is a low quality post review completed?" Tags="|discussion|review|review-tools|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9744" CreationDate="2017-03-28T16:29:31.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd guess only something like the following (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73566/&quot;&gt;the question about making tables in MarkDown&lt;/a&gt;), since MathJax doesn't support ytableau or any other non-math-mode packages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;1&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;2&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;4&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;7&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;8&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;3&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;5&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;6&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;&amp;nbsp;9&amp;nbsp;&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;kbd&gt;10&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course looks ugly, the code for it is even uglier, but the only alternative is ASCII/Unicode-tables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;╭──┬──┬──┬──┬──┐&#xA;│ 1│ 2│ 4│ 7│ 8│&#xA;├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┘&#xA;│ 3│ 5│ 6│ 9│&#xA;├──┼──┴──┴──┘&#xA;│10│&#xA;└──┘&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or images&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xwckI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xwckI.png&quot; alt=&quot;sample Young tableaux&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can make some tables with MathJax, but I'm not sure how to remove edges, so you're left with something like this:&#xA;$$&#xA;\begin{array} {|r|r|}&#xA;\hline&#xA;1&amp;amp;2&amp;amp;4&amp;amp;7&amp;amp;8\\&#xA;\hline&#xA;3&amp;amp;5&amp;amp;6&amp;amp;9 \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;10&amp;amp;\\&#xA;\hline&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastEditorUserId="21441" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T16:35:33.077" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T16:35:33.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9745" CreationDate="2017-03-28T16:52:00.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of &quot;Looks OK&quot; votes depends on the number of flags on the post, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/190639/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each review task requires a minimum number of &quot;Looks OK&quot; reviews (2 on SO, 1 everywhere else) to be dequeued; this number increases by one for each pending flag on the post (edits, closing and deletion dequeue the task in the normal fashion). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T16:52:00.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9750" CreationDate="2017-03-29T20:07:02.953" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to get the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/3/editor&quot;&gt;Bronze Editor badge&lt;/a&gt;, so I edited one post by fixing a few grammar errors and making the question clearer. However, I thought editing was a privilege only earned at 2000 rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I submitted my edit, I got a message saying it would only be displayed once peer reviewed.  Will I still get the editor badge no matter what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149370" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T21:03:47.737" Title="How to get the Bronze Editor Badge" Tags="|support|editing|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9749" CreationDate="2017-03-29T21:03:31.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll get the badge if and only if the edit gets approved by the reviewers in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;Suggested Edits queue&lt;/a&gt;. In your particular case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/168503&quot;&gt;the edit&lt;/a&gt; is approved, and you have accordingly received the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/442/what-kind-of-edits-contribute-to-the-editor-badges&quot;&gt;What kind of edits contribute to the editor badges?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T21:03:31.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9749" CreationDate="2017-03-29T21:03:47.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editing without having the edit reviewed is a privilege earned with 2000 reputation. But you can always &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; an edit, regardless of how much reputation you have. (Even without being logged in!) When you suggest an edit, if you don't have 2000 rep, your edit suggestion is placed in a queue to be reviewed by high-reputation users, and if they approve it, then it goes through as a normal edit. Whereas if you have 2000 rep or more when you submit the edit suggestion, it just goes through as an edit without any separate approval needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T21:03:47.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9753" CreationDate="2017-03-29T21:34:58.360" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently put a bounty on a question, but still no one is answering it.  When the bounty period ends, will the bounty just go to waste?  If no one is answering I would prefer to just answer the question myself and get my 50 rep back, but I don't know if this is possible or allowed.  Any advice would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266216/are-there-exact-analytical-solutions-to-the-electronic-states-of-the-hydrogen-mo&quot;&gt;Are there exact analytical solutions to the electronic states of the hydrogen molecular ion $\mathrm H_2^+$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149370" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T13:10:01.673" Title="Bounty going to waste - what should I do?" Tags="|support|questions|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2017-03-29T22:06:57.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, if the bounty expires with no answers with positive score, it goes to waste. And yes, it is possible and allowed to answer the question yourself, but you cannot award a bounty to yourself, even if the answer is posted in someone else's post. You can get a bounty for an answer to your own question, but only if the bounty was offered by someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, don't worry too much about it: it's only been two days since you offered the bounty, and there are five more days left. It is not unlikely that the question will get an answer in the next few days. But even if it does not, there is nothing you can really do: the reputation will just go away. This is one of the factors you have to take into account when you choose to offer a bounty: you must be willing to let those rep. points go away if there are no good answers after the seven-day period. That's just how things work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my advice is: if the question gets a good answer, award the bounty to it (but please don't award it to a bad answer just so that the points don't go away). If it does not get a good answer, forget about it and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T13:10:01.673" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T13:10:01.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-29T22:56:45.780" Score="4" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so the last time we had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9086/replacing-the-homework-policy-1b-what-is-our-scope-anyway&quot;&gt;focused discussion of the homework policy&lt;/a&gt; was August 2016. Blech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's start thinking about this again. And before you collectively groan, this first post &lt;em&gt;isn't that painful&lt;/em&gt; because there's only one thing in here for debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Let's rename the homework policy.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not change it. Rename it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;Daniel Sank's idea&lt;/a&gt;. Daniel's post got &lt;strong&gt;29&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes, and his answer - that we should - got &lt;strong&gt;24&lt;/strong&gt; upvotes. This was way back in October 2015, and nothing's happened. Let's get something done on the homework policy that pretty much all of us agree on. Some mods (I can't speak for all) agree on this - ACuriousMind said this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9087/121464&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and DavidZ agreed with it in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Okay, so it's pretty clear we agree with renaming/rewording it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; we rename it? Well, first, here's the stuff we need to reword (links lead to various options proposed, numbered in no particular order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9867/121464&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9756/121464&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9762/121464&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag wiki excerpt &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9762/121464&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Help center &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9878/121464&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What we all refer to it as (hardest) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9868/121464&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy on Meta Q&amp;amp;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9869/121464&quot;&gt;[question 1]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9871/121464&quot;&gt;[answer 1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to ask sidebar &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9755/121464&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And that's what I'm asking for in this question - proposals for each of these.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A note:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this was long and painful to read. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35457713#35457713&quot;&gt;Hopefully not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; painful.&lt;/a&gt;) But if you agree or disagree, don't just vote, comment on why you agree or disagree! &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35611883#35611883&quot;&gt;Some of the mods&lt;/a&gt; judge community approval based on comments, not just votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T22:14:19.600" Title="Let's get things rolling again with the homework policy" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-03-30T01:27:06.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How-to-ask sidebar&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that are only asking how to do a &lt;strong&gt;specific calculation&lt;/strong&gt; are not allowed on this site. Please focus on asking about a &lt;strong&gt;concept or method&lt;/strong&gt;. See our policy on meta.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Link to appropriate policy to be added once said post is completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T01:27:06.627" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-30T22:06:24.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-03-30T22:12:01.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;New close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Unfit for Physics.SE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On Physics SE, questions are supposed to both show &lt;strong&gt;a certain level of own research and thinking&lt;/strong&gt; and potential answers are supposed to be of &lt;strong&gt;interest to a broader audience&lt;/strong&gt;. This question has therefore been closed as unfit for this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is a bit general and the text may be a tad straightforward, but this is more or less what I do often think when voting to close as homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118847" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T22:12:01.033" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9759" CreationDate="2017-03-31T05:22:27.583" Score="6" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I try to flag a post, and try to mark it that it does not belong to this site, I only have two options to choose the other site to which the post should be migrated: Physics Meta SE and Mathematics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HVeLR.png&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do if the post belongs to none of these,  but to other sites like  Cognitive Sciences SE? Should I then ask for Moderator Intervention? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I access the site from my smartphone, with user agent mobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T10:02:56.367" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T10:02:56.367" Title="Query regarding flagging posts" Tags="|discussion|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-03-31T06:15:02.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I continue I'd suggest that the underlying (and probably unsolvable) problem is that &lt;strong&gt;users don't read rules&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a unique problem to this website or even in the wider world.  It's just how some people are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, adding rules or making them more complex doesn't, in my view, deal with people who will, regardless, post questions we're not going to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rename it ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a rather bureaucratic sounding &quot;solution&quot; and hardly in the spirit of a site that deals with physical science.  I see no purpose in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions will &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be homework-like and it makes no sense to rename it (and not have a homework-like policy or tag).  We need the policy and the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE 1 - START&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've become more convinced that the homework tag is less than useful and maybe could be retired.  It may even have a slight &quot;stigma&quot; to it and maybe it turns members off questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently still of the opinion we need a homework policy, and am leaning towards Heather's argument that clarification may be needed, in particular to explain to non-voters why questions are closed (something I'd neglected considering in my original post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE 1 - ENDS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make it more specific or add sub-categories ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as, again, seeking a bureaucratic approach to the issue (categorizing things as a substitute for dealing with them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely we need simple rules that allow flexibility in response for this type of question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it removes the freedom of users (and moderators) to allow new users, in particular, the chance to either modify questions to be acceptable under broad homework-like policy (and many do) or gain some insight in comments (as many do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those are reasonable, flexible and effective ways to address homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or different categories doesn't really help anyone.  It's not constructive and inevitably expanding rules makes them more complex and difficult to enforce fairly than allowing some application common sense would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to trust our members and moderators to make sensible judgment calls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not be surprised, particularly in the era of the instant &quot;internet-will-fix-it&quot; generation, that we're going to get questions from people who don't care what the rules are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="104964" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T19:16:03.423" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T19:16:03.423" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9757" CreationDate="2017-03-31T06:24:19.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marking a question off topic and migrating it to another site are really two separate actions, although the system is not very good at making that clear. (Some people have been complaining about it for years.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To mark a question as off topic, from the &lt;strong&gt;off topic because...&lt;/strong&gt; menu, choose &lt;strong&gt;Blatantly off topic&lt;/strong&gt; (or another reason, if it applies).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To notify the moderators that a question is a good candidate for migration to a site that isn't in the given list - which you should not be doing unless the question is also off topic, by the way - choose &lt;strong&gt;in need of moderator intervention&lt;/strong&gt; and write a message like &quot;Off topic; may be suitable for migration to cogsci.SE&quot;. You can also leave a comment on the post suggesting that it might be on topic at another site, though that's mostly for the asker's benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't just do this for any old question that seems to be about cognitive science (or whatever), though. Candidates for migration should be &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;, on-topic questions on their target sites. If it's just a bad or mediocre question outright, we will not migrate it. If it's not within the other site's scope, they will reject the migration, which we'd like to avoid. You should have some idea of the other site's scope, enough to think the question in its current form would plausibly be a good contribution there, before suggesting a migration.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually not sure whether the system will let you cast both of these flags on the same post. If someone with ~100 rep can try it out on a deserving question and report back, I'll edit this answer accordingly. But if it turns out you can only cast one, unless the question is a &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; good fit on the other site, I'd advise just marking it as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T06:24:19.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9761" CreationDate="2017-03-31T11:46:46.167" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/321166/83380&quot;&gt;Under what circumstances might gravitational waves impart linear momentum to an object? (e.g. Quasar 3C 186)&lt;/a&gt; which cites the recoil as one example, but continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is not only about this event&lt;/strong&gt;, but about the effect of gravitational waves incident on objects in general as well. If I have two test objects, a black hole and a star, and a gravitational wave produced from a separate event passes through them, would either of these test objects receive an impulse from the passing wave and begin to move away from their initial position due to the wave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background material in my question covers the case of BH merger recoil, so I've asked about a situation where a wave produced from a separate even is incident on a star and a black hole. I've asked earlier about a passing gravitational wave &lt;em&gt;transferring energy&lt;/em&gt; to an object and received an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/262962/83380&quot;&gt;excellent answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having difficulty understanding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/321714/83380&quot;&gt;the answer&lt;/a&gt; to my current question. It starts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The momentum bestowed by a passing gravitational wave (GW) on an object is always going to be negligible (there may may be situations when the energy deposition is non-negligible... but rarely and frankly unlikely). The key is in the momentum carried away by anisotropic GW emission from the object itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that an unqualified yes? As far as I know, &quot;negligible&quot; does not necessarily mean finite or nonzero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put a bounty on the question, and I'd like to award it. I've asked the poster to simply add a sentence with a clear yes. I did get a yes in a comment, but comments should be considered temporary and not integral parts of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNUWT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNUWT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the dust settles I was hoping for an answer to &lt;em&gt;Under what circumstances might gravitational waves impart linear momentum to an object?&lt;/em&gt; that would be easy enough for future readers to get an answer from without having to go in and start reading the citations of the 7 peer-reviewed references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster is responsive in comments, but resistant to alter or add in any way to the originally posted wording of the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is there something wrong with me asking in this case for the answer to be clearer? Is there any other ways I can ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T13:53:19.627" Title="Anything wrong with me asking in this case for the answer to be clearer? Any other ways to ask?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9760" CreationDate="2017-03-31T13:53:19.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I think that your formulation for the core of the question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under what circumstances might gravitational waves impart linear momentum to an object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is still ambiguous: it could equally well apply to gravitational waves emitted by the object itself as opposed to waves emitted by some external source. If you want to restrict your question to the latter case then that needs to be made much more clear in the body of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to that, if your question really is about the momentum deposited on a system by a passing GW, then the mentions of quasar 3C 186 are entirely off topic and only serve to derail the discussion, since nobody is suggesting that this source got its momentum from GWs derived from a separate source. By making the majority of your post about this source, including a gratuitous image and whatnot, you implicitly make the title question apply to GWs emitted by the object under consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I would interpret the first line of the answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The momentum bestowed by a passing gravitational wave (GW) on an object is always going to be negligible &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a pretty unambiguous response to the explicit question you posed,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;would either of these test objects receive an impulse from the passing wave and begin to move away from their initial position due to the wave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I don't think you can really ask for more with the current formulation of the question. It's true that &quot;negligible&quot; does not equate to &quot;zero&quot;, but it does mean &quot;so small that it will be swamped by a bunch of things that you're not even considering at the moment&quot;, or in other words &quot;so small that you can and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; ignore it&quot;. This means that, at present, the answer does a pretty good job at addressing the question you have posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you really want is an answer to the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under what circumstances might gravitational waves &lt;strong&gt;from an external source&lt;/strong&gt; impart linear momentum to an object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you really need to alter your question to reflect that - and, frankly, if that is what you really want to know, there's no call at all to have any discussion about the recent quasar discovery, because there's no external source in play there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T13:53:19.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-03-31T22:52:01.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tag wiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tag wiki excerpt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tag itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really need these? No, seriously. Do we need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag? I propose that we in fact &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; need it. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a meta tag. And that is bad, for many reasons, which we won't get into here, because there's plenty of stuff on meta explaining this and hashing out this reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the homework policy, it was a bit of a &quot;trash&quot; tag - either the questions in it were closed, or they didn't really need it, because they were formulated so that they were conceptual, and not really exercises. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we're rephrasing the whole homework policy to remove the word homework, it doesn't even serve a purpose as a &quot;trash&quot; tag. Which IMO wasn't a great purpose anyway, but whatever (and for those doubting the whole &quot;trash tag&quot; thing, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation#comment14967_5184&quot;&gt;this comment by Manishearth&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chemistry.SE, for example, is starting a spring cleanup that includes burninating/nuking the homework tag, for some of the reasons I mentioned above and others that are more site-specific. By which I mean, it isn't just us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Editorial Note - if this post gets voted up decently well, I'll post a more formal burnination request/proposal.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T14:18:05.020" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T14:18:05.020" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-01T08:11:48.527" Score="14" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/322598/what-is-special-about-maxwells-equations/322603#322603&quot;&gt;What is special about Maxwell&amp;#39;s equations?&lt;/a&gt; was deleted by a moderator. The OP asked what is special about the Maxwell equations, which, according to the OP, are basically a combination of  &quot;4 equations that were already formulated by other physicists&quot;. It looked like the OP was surprised that the equations that did not contain anything new are held in such respect. I noted in my answer that Maxwell was the first to introduce the displacement current (which is a critical part of the Maxwell equations). I  believed that was at least a partial answer to the OP's question: the displacement current (maybe among other things) does make the Maxwell equations special. The moderator considered the answer &quot;critique of the question, not an answer&quot;. Was the deletion really warranted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT(4/8/2017): Another moderator has just made an indirect contribution to this discussion, converting to a comment my answer to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/298943/can-reactions-be-controlled-electromagnetically/298955#298955&quot;&gt;Can reactions be controlled electromagnetically&lt;/a&gt; . The moderator's explanation: &quot;I'm converting this answer to a comment because it currently is a set of suggested search terms and a reference to a paper, which makes it more like a &quot;link-only&quot; answer than an answer that stands on its own.&quot; What may be somewhat amusing is that the answer was accepted:-) So the OP decided the answer was what (s)he needed (by the way, the deleted answer that I discussed above got quite a few upvotes). Let me note that comments on this site are meant to be volatile and can disappear without any reason. But what is important for this discussion: what standards should be applied to answers? Let me include the rules of the site that I already quoted in my comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful&quot; and &quot;Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&quot;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt;). I also quoted the Community Manager: (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-is-in-another-castle-when-is-an-answer-not-an-answer&quot;&gt;Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?&lt;/a&gt;): &quot;See, this is an answer: &quot;You probably want a FileOutputStream&quot; And so is this: &quot;Look at manual for preg_split, third argument&quot; Yes, they're both very short, and yes, they contain links. But strip the markup, and you still get at least a little bit of useful information.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, according to the rules, mine is definitely an answer, not a comment. So maybe some moderators, who have very high reputation and (unlike me) write excellent answers, apply higher standards than warranted by the rules? It may well be that they are right to do that, but in that case should not they have the rules changed first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T11:53:04.767" Title="Trying to understand why the answer was deleted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2017-04-01T08:22:08.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, here are the things we're talking about since only users with more than 10k reputation can see deleted posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/322598/50583&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is special about Maxwell's equations? If I have read correctly, what Maxwell basically did is combine 4 equations that were already formulated by other physicists as a set of equations. Why are these 4 equations (out of large numbers of mathematical equations in electromagnetism) important? Or What is special about these 4 equations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/322603/50583&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have doubts about your assessment of the Maxwell equations. For example, as far as I know, Maxwell was the first to introduce the displacement current, so he did not just &quot;combine 4 equations that were already formulated by other physicists as a set of equations.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which does not answer the question of why Maxwell's equations are important or special. That Maxwell introduced the displacement current does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; answer why the equations are important unless you explain why the displacement current is important. Remarking that Maxwell introduced the current is a valid critique of the assertion in the question that he just combined some already-known equations, but on its own it does not answer anything about the importance of Maxwell's equation. That's what I meant when I wrote my comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This appears to be a critique of the question, not an answer to &quot;why Maxwell's equations are special&quot;, so I'm deleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T08:22:08.423" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9767" CreationDate="2017-04-01T21:16:06.830" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to upload a pdf file while answering a question, but could find no such option on both the desktop and mobile version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this present and I'm missing it, or absent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T21:34:44.247" Title="How do I upload a pdf file?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9766" CreationDate="2017-04-01T21:34:44.247" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange does not support vector-type images (SVG, pdf, etc.). This means that you can't upload pdf files here. What you can do is to take a screenshot of the file - or to use any vector-to-raster converter - and upload the picture. But please bear in mind that if the content of the pdf is text and equations, you are supposed to actually type those, not to include a picture of the text. Only use pictures to include actual graphs, such as diagrams, photos, drawings, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you don't know how to type math equations here, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-qu%E2%80%8C%E2%80%8Bick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference&lt;/a&gt;. For more information about vector-type images, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92568/allow-svg-image-uploads&quot;&gt;Allow SVG image uploads&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T21:34:44.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2017-04-01T23:56:46.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That answer is in a kind of hazy place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It addresses a misconception held by the asker (and one that I agree needed to be addressed—see the subsequent comment I left), rather than quite answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, normally I consider that kind of answer to belong without question, but that is because usually the misconception is about physics. Instead, the misconception is about the historical assignment of credit, so it isn't quite physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, I also considered suggesting that the whole question be moved to &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, but by the time I looked in there were already four or five answers and the question had been touched by a couple of other moderators who appeared to find it perfectly at home on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T02:16:40.117" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T02:16:40.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T00:50:04.713" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;[username removed] stopped posting here quite suddenly. I remember him to be very critical of the MWI, so I'm going to poke in his eye here by saying that the Universe is in a superposition of all possibilities consistent with the record about his postings, so anything that could have happened to explain why the postings stopped has actually happened. If someone knows what happened and communicates this to me then from my point of view, the universe will effectively split into the different possible answers that I'll get (I'll cease to be identical in the different sectors). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T03:18:04.810" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T03:18:04.810" Title="What happened to [username removed]?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-02T01:34:49.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9769" CreationDate="2017-04-02T01:18:20.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That user appears to have decided to stop visiting the site.  There's some non-public information which confirms that their decision was voluntary.  They had expressed an intention to return, but you know how life is.  Perhaps they'll come back eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T01:18:20.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9772" CreationDate="2017-04-03T13:28:19.777" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a reputation of 126. However, it got reduced to 124 due to a negative vote on an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I see it has become 116, though I could find no negative vote in my activity page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the moderators, or the ones with greater reputation take a look and explain how this happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help is greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T14:00:15.870" Title="Reputation suddenly reduced: got no reason" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9771" CreationDate="2017-04-03T13:40:07.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You deleted one of your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/321644/2451&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;, which has $2$ upvotes and $1$ downvote, thereby removing $2\times 5+1\times(-2)=8$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/149663/wrichik-basu?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=time&quot;&gt;reputation pts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T14:00:15.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9774" CreationDate="2017-04-04T14:46:34.517" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just about to ask a question on math.se when I saw they had a new (I think) tool:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ja202.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ja202.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell it allows a quick way to search and include references in questions and answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ynlRZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ynlRZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be very useful on physics.se - are there any plans for is to get it? if so when and if not why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note this is different from that discussed here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4191/do-we-want-the-citation-tool-from-math-se&quot;&gt;Do we want the citation tool from Math.SE?&lt;/a&gt; which allows for easy citation of questions and answers - which we already have.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70392" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T14:59:05.657" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T12:12:03.743" Title="Citation tool on Math.SE, can we get it?" Tags="|feature-request|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9773" CreationDate="2017-04-05T09:58:38.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some history on this feature: it started as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/semorrison/SE-CitationHelper/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;userscript&lt;/a&gt; written by Scott Morrison with contributions from Physics moderator Manishearth, proposed and developed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1485/formatting-citations-to-the-literature-on-mathoverflow&quot;&gt;this meta.MO thread&lt;/a&gt;, which was then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2583/new-feature-citation-helper&quot;&gt;officially integrated by the SE devs into MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22008/lets-get-mathoverflows-citation-helper-here-too&quot;&gt;subsequently also enabled on math.se&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, if we want this to be implemented on this site, it should just mean flipping a few switches dev-side. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, it's not clear to me what back-end the script is using for the search function, but if it's using things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://zbmath.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;math ZentralBlatt&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathSciNet&lt;/a&gt; then it is entirely plausible that the search will not have fantastic coverage over physics - and indeed it seems that it doesn't; a quick search for &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2015.203&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; on the math.se tool didn't find it by title, which is worrisome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, though, if individual users want to have this, it should be plenty easy to just &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/semorrison/SE-CitationHelper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;install the userscript&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. just copy &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/semorrison/SE-CitationHelper/raw/master/citationhelper.user.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this javascript file&lt;/a&gt; into Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey/your userscript extension of choice). As such, I propose that we gather some reasonably-sized population of users on this site, spanning as wide a range of physics subfields as possible, to take the search back-end for a test drive and see whether it actually works for physics papers in real-world usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; as pointed out in the comments, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/3053/request-for-help-with-javascript-for-the-citation-search-feature&quot;&gt;documented in this meta.MO thread&lt;/a&gt;, it appears that the math.se+MO citation search button does use a ZentralBlatt search back end, which will severely hinder its effectiveness for physics papers. The back-end should in principle be relatively independent of the front-end, so in principle it should be possible to rewrite it to use e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.base-search.net/about/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bielefeld Academic Search Engine&lt;/a&gt; or some other suitable API (which should be possible since &lt;a href=&quot;http://oadoi.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oaDOI&lt;/a&gt; use BASE as their back end, and it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Impactstory/oadoi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open sourced&lt;/a&gt; so we can probably learn from their calls), but it will require nontrivial adaptations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if people really want this, the first thing to do is to look for a suitable back end, as proposed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9775/looking-for-a-back-end-for-a-physics-se-literature-citation-button&quot;&gt;Looking for a back end for a Physics SE literature citation button&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, while we're here, I would like to propose a change to the citation formatting to make it mesh better with the standards in physics, from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Carb\'o-Dorca, Ramon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10910-006-9054-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, J. Math. Chem. 41, No. 3, 209-215 (2007). &lt;a href=&quot;https://zbmath.org/?q=an:1119.81009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ZBL1119.81009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; R. Carbó-Dorca. On Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10910-006-9054-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;J. Math. Chem.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;41&lt;/strong&gt; no. 3, 209-215 (2007)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where in particular we should ditch the ZentralBlatt references, which are only useful to mathematicians, and add arXiv references whenever possible (which e.g. the second result in your search does not include in the citation output, even though it exists). And, if we can get the accented characters like \'o and \v{c} and the like working, it'd be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T12:12:03.743" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T12:12:03.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T09:32:33.557" Score="9" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9773/citation-tool-on-math-se-can-we-get-it&quot;&gt;Citation tool on Math.SE, can we get it?&lt;/a&gt; showcases a really nice feature that started as a userscript some three years ago and which has now been officially enabled on MathOverflow and Math SE, which enables direct and easy referencing to papers in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, however, it seems that the search function depends on an API provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zentralblatt_MATH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zentralblatt Math&lt;/a&gt;, which means that it is heavily skewed towards mathematics and indeed some early testing indicates that it doesn't have enough of a physics coverage to really be useful. On the flipside, though, the front-end and the back-end are nicely decoupled, which means that we can adapt this to physics if we manage to find a suitable back end. In particular, this needs to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accept search strings as input, including things like titles, authors, journal references, urls, dois, arXiv ids, the more the better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Return as output a reasonably-formatted JSON object containing the bibliographic information about the potential matches.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, as a first step in the road towards porting the feature, I propose that we as a community look around and see what tools are available that fit this description, which can then be fit into the front-end to adapt the userscript to this site, on the road to official adoption. So, please have a look around, provide as much detail as you can about the API, and let's get this rolling!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T19:37:19.827" Title="Looking for a back end for a Physics SE literature citation button" Tags="|discussion|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9775" CreationDate="2017-04-06T12:01:55.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a CW post with possible leads to follow up on if people want to chase them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MIT Libraries' &lt;a href=&quot;http://libguides.mit.edu/apis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of APIs for Scholarly Resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.base-search.net/about/en/about_develop.php?menu=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bielefeld Academic Search Engine&lt;/a&gt; - I think there's an API documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.base-search.net/about/download/base_interface.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://oadoi.org/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oaDOI FAQ&lt;/a&gt; which details their sources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://oadoi.org/api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oaDOI API&lt;/a&gt;, but it only takes DOIs as input&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://doaj.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Directory of Open Access Journals&lt;/a&gt; - do they have an API?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.datacite.org/search.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DataCite&lt;/a&gt; have a suitable API?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Impactstory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ImpactStory on GitHub&lt;/a&gt; - they are behind oaDOI and Unpaywall, maybe they've got something with a wider input range in there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NASA ADS&lt;/a&gt; has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/adsabs/adsabs-dev-api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;API&lt;/a&gt; that is probably suitable. It was originally astronomy oriented, but seems to index at a minimum the entirety of what is on arXiv, including metadata for the published version of papers when they exist. The search tools are powerful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="11053" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T19:37:19.827" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T19:37:19.827" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-04-06T12:01:55.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9778" CreationDate="2017-04-06T15:58:17.770" Score="31" ViewCount="1372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I a kid be on this site and ask Questions? I want to but I think they would be silly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151148" OwnerDisplayName="Cash Bell" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T18:15:08.027" Title="I am just a kid can I be on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9777" CreationDate="2017-04-06T16:20:49.280" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Only people aged thirteen years and older may maintain accounts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, you're welcome to ask whatever you like.  Keep in mind that we'll hold your questions to the same standards as everyone else's --- that is, we won't treat you specially because you're young --- which may mean that your questions get downvoted or closed for reasons that aren't obvious to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T23:09:07.950" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T23:09:07.950" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9777" CreationDate="2017-04-07T22:04:25.383" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, you can. (As long as you're 13 or up, as rob said.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a kid too (ahem, &lt;em&gt;teenager&lt;/em&gt;, but whatever), and I love this site. I've asked some pretty darn &quot;silly&quot; questions (or at least, ones I thought were silly) but no one has treated me poorly (or differently, for that matter) because of my age. Once you get enough rep, check out the hbar - lots of people there are willing to help and have helped me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, give it a go! Learn physics and math and whatever else you may be interested in, and use this site to help you out! You never know what you might learn along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T22:04:25.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9785" CreationDate="2017-04-08T14:33:01.157" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathjax frames(hats and arrows) are shifted in Safari 10.1 in MacOS Sierra. However, it was working fine yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WdjLd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WdjLd.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119200" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T14:45:59.747" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T13:00:24.010" Title="Mathjax shifted frames" Tags="|support|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T14:55:30.340" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get that points should be irreversible and the person who has set bounty should not be able to claim bounty award but I don't get it that if no answer is provided or if answer is so horrible that it has nothing to do with asked question ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should the points be returned as already he has not been able to receive a good answer on top of that he has to bear the fact of points getting wasted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it might not seem a big problem for those with thousands of points it certainly shakes the confidence of new user like me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think moderators should be given privilege to decide if the answer given is satisfactory or not and if not points should be returned (provided asker has not chosen any answer as correct)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150294" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T14:56:59.137" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T21:21:22.930" Title="Reputation points in bounty" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9781" CreationDate="2017-04-09T21:21:22.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it might not seem a big problem for those with thousands of points it certainly shakes the confidence of new user like me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it this way: by setting a bounty, you're not 'buying' an answer; instead, &lt;strong&gt;you are buying exposure for the question&lt;/strong&gt;. You've gotten the exposure, and it is important to capitalize on it to do everything you can to optimize the chances that the exposure will translate into an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's simply the case that some questions just won't get answered because they are too hard or the site does not have users with the expertise to address them; getting a bounty optimizes the chances of reaching those users, and typically leaves the question in a much better position to be answered when they do show up - but you do need to do your best in all fronts to ensure the question is as answerable as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a bounty go to waste can indeed be demoralizing if you look at it from a transactional perspective; to avoid that, you should focus on what the bounty does (provide exposure) and capitalize on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it makes you feel better, as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9752/bounty-going-to-waste-what-should-i-do&quot;&gt;the previous thread on the topic&lt;/a&gt;, there's been something like &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/651466/non-awarded-bounties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;740 non-awarded bounties&lt;/a&gt; on the site so far, so this is part and parcel of the mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the proposal to change the mechanics of the bounty award process: this site shares its core Q&amp;amp;A engine with &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;over 160 sites&lt;/a&gt;, and it is very uncommon for site-specific changes to that engine to be implemented. The bounty system is a core part of the Q&amp;amp;A engine and it has been finely tuned over 8+ years to respond to many different pressures - including in particular the temptation for users to game the system, which increases dramatically if bounties can be refunded, and the drive to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;put as much of the day-to-day moderation as possible on the community&lt;/a&gt; and not on the elected moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do want to propose changes of this magnitude, the place to propose them is the network-wide meta, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, where there are a lot more people with a deeper understanding of the ramifications of any such changes. This particular issue has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=return+bounty+no+answer&quot;&gt;come up many times before&lt;/a&gt; there, particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21609/should-bounty-be-returned-if-there-is-no-answer-at-all&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and you should search that site extensively before posting as most variations on that theme have already been asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T21:21:22.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-10T07:53:05.507" Score="37" ViewCount="754" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/321857/why-do-we-assume-the-spatial-volume-is-infinite&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. I got some valuable comments, but the commenters and I disagreed on a few things. After like 5 comments we reached agreement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then @ACuriousMind stepped in and moved almost all comments to the chat. I didn't knew it at the time, but it seems that comments that are moved to the chat get deleted after some time. This makes sense for a chat. But certainly not for comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently read something new about the topic and thought I could add something to the discussion. However, before that I wanted to reread my question, the answer and the comments. But the now the comments are gone. A valuable piece of the puzzle is now simply missing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, the first commenter, whose comment is now upvoted three times and appears undisputed, even agreed that his line of though was wrong - in a comment that is now gone. The content of the discussion has been seriously altered.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What sense does it make to move valuable comments to the chat?&lt;/strong&gt; I get it, when just two people exchange like 20 four-word sentences. If the conversation is &quot;chat-like&quot; and certainly not valuable in the future, it surely can be moderated. However, when there are long comments that add new perspectives to the question or an answer this is simply ridiculous. Especially, given the fact that the comments that are moved to the chat get deleted after some time. It is not as if these comments would take up space and thus &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to get removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of overeager moderation does not help anybody, except maybe the moderator, who can feel some sense of accomplishment, because he &quot;cleaned something up&quot;. It discourages scientific discussions, creates a hostile atmosphere and smells like censorship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37286" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T12:19:54.080" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T12:19:54.080" Title="Can the Mods please stop overeagerly move comments to the chat?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9783" CreationDate="2017-04-10T08:40:15.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've un-deleted your two chat rooms and made you an &quot;owner&quot; of each, so you should be able to mine whatever information you'd like from the old comments.  Check the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt; to understand when a room will be automatically frozen or deleted again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to be temporary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are temporary &quot;Post-It&quot; notes left on a question or answer. They can be up-voted (but not down-voted) and flagged, but do not generate reputation. There's no revision history, and when they are deleted they're gone for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a discussion in the comments that clarifies a post, please edit the new information into the post, or use the new information to write an answer to your own question. Don't rely on comments hanging around for ever, even if you like them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:10.377" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T12:11:41.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9780" CreationDate="2017-04-10T13:00:24.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7901/davide-cervone&quot;&gt;Davide Cervone&lt;/a&gt; writes in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1709&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue 1709&lt;/a&gt; on the MathJax tracker.  Apparently there is a change in WebKit in recent Safari that causes this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T13:00:24.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9783" CreationDate="2017-04-10T18:54:02.060" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a complement to rob's answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What sense does it make to move valuable comments to the chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense to add them to the chat because this allows people to continue the discussion therein without distracting from the question and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense to delete them from the original post because the purpose of Stack Exchange sites is to allow people to ask good questions and get good (e.g. correct) answers. Our purpose is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to host interesting discussions for people to read. Discussions are distracting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other functionality has proven to be necessary to support the core goal of Q&amp;amp;A, and that includes commenting, but it still takes a back seat to questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This type of overeager moderation does not help anybody, except maybe the moderator, who can feel some sense of accomplishment, because he &quot;cleaned something up&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it helps all the readers who find a question here and can directly get the answer without having to delve into caveats, discussions, and arguments that go beyond the scope of the answer. We have seen it happen in the past that people get confused by comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It discourages scientific discussions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is the point. We want to discourage discussions, except to the extent that they improve the questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;creates a hostile atmosphere and smells like censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that seems like a stretch to me, but if you really think so, that's an opinion you're entitled to hold. If you really do believe comment deletion is so bad, this may not be the site for you. That's okay. Stack Exchange is not trying to please everybody; some people are looking for something that they just won't get from our Q&amp;amp;A-focused model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T18:54:02.060" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9777" CreationDate="2017-04-12T13:41:40.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started using this site when I was around 16, because I had already studied topics up to quantum field theory, and did not have people that could help me except those online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the physics SE was a great resource, both the existing questions and the body of experienced users that were able to address mine. I also got a lot of satisfaction from helping other people. I was never treated any differently because of my age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, it may take you some time to learn how to formulate a question that will be well-received and fit all the guidelines, but I and I am sure other users will be happy to provide any support. When we downvote or close, we give suggestions for improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T13:41:40.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-12T13:43:20.097" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been in the chat &quot;h-bar&quot; physics stackexchange chat,  and somebody wrote  &lt;code&gt;$\frac{1}{2}$&lt;/code&gt; and it comes up for me like those literal characters and not as $\frac{1}{2}$   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea why / how I can enable mathjax in chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guy that posted it said he can see it and thought it might be an issue on my end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's a bug of some sort, or perhaps i'm just missing an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12519" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T14:37:53.493" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T18:00:06.453" Title="Mathjax not working for me in chat" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9789" CreationDate="2017-04-12T18:00:06.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MathJax does not work out-of-the-box on chat; the behaviour you observe is precisely as expected. To turn it on, you need to turn a client-side extension which is described in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/97938/any-chance-of-mathjax-in-chat/220976#220976&quot;&gt;Any chance of MathJax in chat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the short of it is that to turn on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1088/should-chat-have-tex-support/3297#3297&quot;&gt;ChatJax&lt;/a&gt;, you can just drag-and-drop the link marked &lt;code&gt;start ChatJax&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; up to your bookmarks bar, and then click the resulting bookmarklet to turn on mathjax in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is handily linked in the chatroom description, if you ever need it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iTxz3.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though indeed it's not the most discoverable text ever written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T18:00:06.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9797" CreationDate="2017-04-13T18:31:48.977" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it true, that long answers to questions attract more upvotes than shorter precise answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many beautiful short answers, but they are neglected and overshadowed by the longer ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141464" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T18:01:37.283" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T13:15:59.780" Title="Are short, but precise answers overshadowed by the longer ones?" Tags="|discussion|support|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-14T14:49:05.327" Score="5" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a tremendous wealth of 'homework' style questions on maths SE ranging from simple concepts such as finding variance in some context or very difficult but solvable integrals. All these questions are rarely downvoted and have a healthy number of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, physics stack exchange is fairly sterilised of homework questions. Even challenging and interesting mechanics question will quickly be blocked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't we be more like maths SE and tackle whatever comes our way unless the answer is clearly a simple calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user86425" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T23:55:11.050" Title="Why are homework related questions accepted on maths SE more than here?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9794" CreationDate="2017-04-14T15:45:13.053" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because this is a different community centered around a different topic, responding to different pressures, in a very different internet environment, and which has made different choices over a very long period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the general feeling around here is that homework and homework-like questions diminish the value of this site for many people who are interested in much more technical content, and that diluting that content with drudgework would drive away many highly-qualified users and therefore strongly diminish the usefulness of this site as a resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longer answer is that this topic has a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long history of discussion on this meta, which is documented on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot;&gt;this tag&lt;/a&gt;. Very many opinions have been voiced over the ~six years this site has existed, and it is not a simple discussion. Given how you phrased things, one place to start could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9710/should-we-change-homework-policy-of-physics-se&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (which is pretty close to a duplicate of this one, to be honest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, since you specifically compare against maths.se, you should keep in mind that the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; changes the equation dramatically, in terms of the outlets for technical content available to professional research mathematicians versus what is available for physics. (The existence of a MathOverflow equivalent for physics is &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; long-storied discussion which you should brush up on before diving into it.) The situation over on math.se is simply not comparable to the environment this site is in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T15:45:13.053" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9793" CreationDate="2017-04-14T18:08:06.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is partially yes, partially not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More exactly, we have different secondary effects which can increase the score of the answers. All of these are my subjective experience, I don't have SEDE queries to support them (although I could produce some if needed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its general quality on the first spot, correct grammar &amp;amp; spelling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reputation of the poster (additional psychological effect if he has some golden badges, too)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Including a beautiful picture in the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer is long&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer contains many complex formulas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these can be considered contraproductive, some of them not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many voters don't read through the whole text, but they vote it up if they think it looks well. These secondary effects are mainly about their votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these secondary effects are overshadowed by the primary effect of the voting score: &lt;em&gt;write good and useful answers&lt;/em&gt;. All of the users of the site with the highest reputation are really good in this, and not in (1), (3)-(5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T13:15:59.780" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T13:15:59.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9793" CreationDate="2017-04-15T02:28:21.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/edit/658747#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; for the task. The results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VtzQu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VtzQu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can see here, is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, the average score of the answers grows monotonically with their length (I grouped them in 20% growing groups).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The length distribution of the answers follows a very beautyful Boltzmann-distribution with a maximum of around 800-1000 bytes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But, the average score per &lt;em&gt;text length&lt;/em&gt;, measured in $\frac{\mathrm{upvote}}{\mathrm{kByte}}$, shows an obviously shrinking tendency, and sets to a roughly constant $\approx 1.2 \frac{\mathrm{upvote}}{\mathrm{kByte}}$ from around 3 kByte answer length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you post 2 1kB answers, you can count with around 50% more upvotes as if you post a single 2kB one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is also a very high per-length reward for very short answers (in the &amp;lt;200byte region). But, in my opinion, it is practically impossible to write ten 100byte-length answer in the time as you would write an 1000byte one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note: a significant part of the work behind answering a question is not typing it in. This part is not measured in this stat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This stat doesn't count with downvotes and with deleted posts. The first would be easy but I didn't count with them. More exactly, this query counts only the voting scores. The second is impossible as the content of the deleted posts are hidden by the SEDE, thus we can't measure their length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This query measures only the vote score of the answers, it can't measure their actual value. We could get a better estimation of it by overweighting the votes of the high-rep users in the average counts, but also the induvidual votes are hidden in the SEDE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T02:28:21.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9799" CreationDate="2017-04-15T06:15:04.770" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there way of promoting our questions to seek attention without bounties?&#xA;I have seen people changing titles, keeping weird and strange titles (&quot;The dark black holes&quot;), sometimes even challenging titles (&quot;Solve it if you can&quot;) and these titles really get a lot of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are against PSE rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover such questions are irritating too (i.e. homework related). Is there a way to stop these types of promotions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141464" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T00:22:02.797" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T12:39:35.337" Title="Ways of promoting questions on PhysicsStackExchange" Tags="|discussion|questions|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9798" CreationDate="2017-04-16T12:39:35.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to draw further attention to your question, editing to improve it is one good way to go. However, doing multiple trivial edits to repeatedly bump the question to the front page is indeed frowned upon. If you see someone doing this, flag the question for moderator attention with a custom flag, or leave a comment expressing displeasure at the behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catchy titles are relatively OK so long as they do describe the question. If they do start to stray into clickbait territory then you can edit it out for something that's more descriptive of the actual question. A title like &quot;Solve it if you can&quot; would be rather outside the envelope and should be edited in favour of something descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding this, though,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moreover such questions are irritating too (i.e. homework related)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the on-topic-ness of a question and the appropriateness of its promotion are independent. If it is irritatingly homeworky to a degree that makes it off-topic then vote to close (at 3k+ rep) or flag as off-topic. If it is irritating but on-topic, then sorry, it's earned its keep on the site. The rules on over-promotion via edits and titles apply regardless of the question type and content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T12:39:35.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-17T14:43:26.293" Score="3" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: I realize there has been a lot of discussion of the reasons for closing, and I haven't followed most of it, so I apologize for any redundancy here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That having been said:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/327165/is-special-relativity-applicable-to-mirrors#327165&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an example of a question that I think everyone will agree should be closed, and to which none of the close reasons seems to apply.  It's not a duplicate.   It's not out of the mainstream (except insofar as it's &quot;out of the  mainstream&quot; to post without giving a minute's thought to what you're asking.)  It's not engineering.  It doesn't belong on another site in the StackExchange network (or anywhere else for that matter).  It's perfectly clear, it's not too broad, and it's not primarily opinion-based.  (And even if were unclear, I wouldn't want to choose that option, because it entails inviting the OP to clarify the question and come back, which is not an invitation I wish to offer.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest fit I can find is that this is a homework-like question that shows no effort.  But that doesn't really seem to fit either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that a substantial fraction of the questions I vote to close are uncategorizable in pretty much the same way that this one is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my immediate question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;What reason should I check when voting to close a question like this?&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My longer-term question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Would it make sense to offer &quot;This question appears to be off-topic&quot; as a reason for closing, without forcing the voter to choose from a submenu of  choices that don't really fit?   (I realize that one can enter a custom reason, but really, &quot;this question appears to be off-topic&quot; is all I want to say.)&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I suspect, but do not know, that my second question has already been discussed to death.  But what is the answer to the first question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/b&gt;  It appears that the example I chose is not quite as egregious as I'd thought it was --- the OP seems to be envisioning a mirror mounted on the car, whereas I thought he was envisioning a mirror mounted on the road.  So this is an imperfect example, but the phenomenon does occur, and often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T22:27:10.717" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T22:27:10.717" Title="Reasons for Closing" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|close-reasons|vote-to-close|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9800" CreationDate="2017-04-17T15:21:10.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your immediate question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What reason should I check when voting to close a question like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has an immediate answer: You should use a reason that &lt;em&gt;tells the user why you are voting to close their question&lt;/em&gt;. If none of the pre-formatted reasons fit, then you can still write a custom one, and that's precisely what that custom field is for. There's a crucial corollary here: If you cannot write down the actual reason why you want to close a question, &lt;em&gt;don't close it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I] realize that one can enter a custom reason, but really, &quot;this question appears to be off-topic&quot; is all I want to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but...I don't believe you. There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; something you want to say - you have a rather strong opinion on this question being off-topic, and you've got to have a reason for that. Maybe you feel you have no &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; way of expression that opinion? Try. For instance, we have discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6001/50583&quot;&gt;closing for insufficient effort&lt;/a&gt; before, and while we never established a consensus on whether or not that's a valid close reason, some users nevertheless use it (users with sufficient reputation can see the variants of &quot;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because of insufficient research effort.&quot; used &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), there are around 20 uses of that over the last 90 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, let me comment on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And even if were unclear, I wouldn't want to choose that option, because it entails inviting the OP to clarify the question and come back, which is not an invitation I wish to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can sort-of understand the sentiment, that's not what we do here. &lt;em&gt;Everyone&lt;/em&gt; who gets a question closed is in principle welcome to come back, improve it, and become a productive member of the community. Your personal prognosis for a specific question or user is irrelevant, we generally &lt;strong&gt;assume good faith&lt;/strong&gt;. It's easy to think &quot;this user posted crap once, they won't ever get better&quot;, but...sometimes they do. And often they don't, but there's no reason to condemn them in advance. If they &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; asking malformed low-quality questions, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9699/50583&quot;&gt;automatic restrictions&lt;/a&gt; will kick in relatively quickly. If they don't keep asking malformed questions, the problem is solved anyway. What would we improve be being as &lt;em&gt;actively discouraging&lt;/em&gt; as you seem to want to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T15:21:10.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-18T01:55:04.803" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I find my previous posts and replies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89283" OwnerDisplayName="murray denofsky" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T12:25:38.750" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T05:59:01.650" Title="How do I find my previous posts and replies?" Tags="|support|profile-page|history|recent-activity|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9802" CreationDate="2017-04-18T02:51:37.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to click on the button which shows your profile picture with your reputation, badges, etc. in the menu bar (shown in the figure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yUhnB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yUhnB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your profile, you can find a list of your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers and questions have their own tab and comments can be found in &quot;all actions&quot; tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f2spl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f2spl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60891" LastEditorUserId="60891" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T05:59:01.650" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T05:59:01.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2017-04-18T05:16:24.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the Homework Policy should be changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after I became a user here (April 2016) the policy was under an ongoing review, which has been a long-term project on this site. The need for change is recognised. The plan was in 4 stages. The last progress (stage 1b) was at the end of August 2016. As far as I am aware there has been no progress since then. See :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7407/generalizing-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;Generalizing the homework policy&lt;/a&gt; (January 2016)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7645/replacing-the-homework-policy-1-what-existing-questions-should-be-on-off-topic&quot;&gt;Replacing the homework policy 1: what existing questions should be on/off topic?&lt;/a&gt; (April 2016) &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9086/replacing-the-homework-policy-1b-what-is-our-scope-anyway&quot;&gt;Replacing the homework policy 1b: what is our scope anyway?&lt;/a&gt; (August 2016) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics SE abolished its homework tag in 2014, and does not appear to have regretted that decision. It has not &quot;killed the site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the homework policy is about banning low-level questions. Many difficult thoughtful questions are rejected, while many easy low-effort ones are kept. The easy ones are often tackled by expert users, so the charge that 'bad' questions will drive away the experts is not justified. It is not necessary to trawl the Newest Questions to find a suitable challenge. There are plenty of other options : Featured, Unanswered, etc. It is entirely possible to ignore the homework questions if you don't approve of them, and leave them to those who do approve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than it being an issue of making rules to enforce the personal preferences of the active decision-makers against certain types of question, I still fail to see what the problem is with homework questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am still confused about what exactly the policy is - as are many other users, I think. Some new eager reviewers use the &quot;homework&quot; reason to close questions simply because they &quot;show no effort&quot;. Possibly a &quot;homework&quot; question is any problem-solving question. But all questions are fundamentally problem-solving. That is the nature of questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition confuses me :  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to imply that giving you the answer is OK but helping you understand how to find the answer yourself is not OK. Exactly the opposite of discouraging &quot;do my homework for me&quot; questions. If you are trying to learn &quot;the method&quot; as an exercise, during your &quot;education&quot;, this is not OK. But if you are trying to find out how to solve some interesting non-educational project, this is OK - especially if you avoid putting in numbers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we deplore being asked to do someone's homework, why don't we also deplore being asked to do someone's research or their thinking? I doubt that homework questions are fundamentally any different from other kinds of question. Ultimately all questions are of the &quot;do my work (calculating/thinking/research) for me&quot; variety, to a greater or lesser degree. There is no inherent dividing line. Which I think explains why after years of discussion, defining and re-formulating the homework policy, this issue never gets anywhere.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T05:22:15.990" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T05:22:15.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9710" CreationDate="2017-04-18T13:58:52.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, allowing blatant homework-like questions which essentially simply pose a problem and ask for the answer would lead to a decline in the populous and quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been to websites where one can pose virtually any question without restriction, and expect to receive direct answers, and the community is - in my opinion - usually not as qualified and useful as the Physics SE. Moreover I find contributing difficult due to the swamp of unappealing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing homework-like questions not in line with our policies would also make it difficult to use the website as a resource; we would go from high quality questions about say quantum mechanics to having to search through hundreds of textbook quantum mechanics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34382" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T13:58:52.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-18T19:24:49.773" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't want to get banned, how can I prevent a bad post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137553" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T19:24:49.773" Title="What is a &quot;bad post&quot;? and how many of them can I have before I am banned?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9808" CreationDate="2017-04-18T22:30:57.013" Score="-7" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/325820/2451&quot;&gt;Why would colder air disperse condensation on a car windshield?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a friendly moderator or two consider upvoting it? The previous answers are not very well thought out, but I cannot do anything to upvote my answer as I'm a new contributor. I would like to comment on the original accepted answer to inform them, but I can't do that either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118063" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T10:36:46.190" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T10:36:46.190" Title="Asking for an upvote to my *correct* answer to a 5-year-old question" Tags="|discussion|answers|specific-question|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9807" CreationDate="2017-04-18T23:45:19.773" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, asking people to upvote your answer is considered to be in bad taste. So the blunt answer is no, we won't upvote your answer because you asked us to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do, however, is post a link to your answer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; (if you have access to it) and invite people to read it and vote on it as they see fit. This is better than asking for upvotes since it's not viewed as you trying to bias the evaluation of your answer away from the true quality of the answer. If the answer is good, it should get more upvotes than downvotes anyway. And posting in chat is better than posting on meta because chat is less formal and less attention-grabbing than a meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, moderators have no special privileges or responsibilities when it comes to casting upvotes and downvotes, so the fact that you're asking a &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; specifically to do it also seems questionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T23:45:19.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9794" CreationDate="2017-04-18T23:55:11.050" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;PSE people are more interested and involved in theoretical aspects of physics.Moreover,they provide enough hints and ideas to approach the problem.&#xA;Physics is more of a conceptual subject.&#xA;Mathematics involves problem solving much more than physics.&#xA;I hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141464" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T23:55:11.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9812" CreationDate="2017-04-19T00:00:02.463" Score="4" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious to know &quot;Why was PhysicsStackExhange made?&quot;I mean certain objectives and did PSE fulfil them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user141422" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T00:01:53.697" Title="Why was PhysicsStackExhange made?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9811" CreationDate="2017-04-19T00:01:53.697" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look up the wikipedia page of PSE .I think this would suffice:&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141464" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T00:01:53.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T17:36:39.010" Score="4" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will start by referring to a question on MSE (Math Stack Exchange) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/19292/404146&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) and an answer on Physics Stack Exchange Meta (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/70/144480&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;). Let me cite the questioner on MSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine I want to ask an extremely precise question with a lot shades in one of all possible subjects on Stack Exchange but I am not fluent in English. Can I find someone here to help me to translate my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is much the same - but instead intended for Physics Stack Exchange. Also, let me cite the answerer on the Physics Stack Exchange Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that multiple languages on one site cause confusion. But we should not &amp;quot;ban&amp;quot; non-english speakers, ... try to translate things to english as good as possible. As soon as the correctness of the translation is verified, the original text should be removed - it will still be available by clicking on the edited by link. Maybe one can edit in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/519/revisions#rev3252802a-affc-499f-9316-3e44d8a4f81c&quot;&gt;original version in russian&lt;/a&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not, at least not according to me, an answer that &lt;strong&gt;clearly&lt;/strong&gt; tells Physics Stack Exchange how to behave should this situation occur. Instead, someone tells you how you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; behave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please forgive me if I have missed some already written rule on Physics Stack Exchange about what I'm asking for here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144480" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-12-21T08:52:07.467" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T09:55:56.083" Title="Asking and answering questions in another language than English" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|answers|language|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2017-04-19T18:11:34.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/19293/166791&quot;&gt;very welcoming Mathematics policy&lt;/a&gt; is consistent with my personal preference for &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/84372/14332&quot;&gt;having patience with non-native speakers and writers&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However, I'm not immediately sure whether I have had the presence of mind to respond that way myself when I've seen foreign-language questions in the past.&#xA;You raise an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that my first response to a question in a non-English language would be to put it &quot;on hold&quot; with the close reason &quot;unclear what you're asking.&quot;  The addition of a translation by editing would put the question in front of the re-open queue reviewers, who would judge the new question on its understandability and appropriateness for the site like any other.&#xA;However if the question never developed an acceptable translation, it would remain closed.  As Jon Custer points out in a comment, the probability that another user would (a) speak the language of the question and (b) take the time to produce a translation that is (c) substantially correct --- those are long odds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm thinking out loud here, rather than wearing my moderator hat and generating policy, but this got too long for a comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T18:11:34.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2017-04-19T18:55:28.870" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official faq &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/13676/263383&quot;&gt;Do posts have to be in English on Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt; on mother meta refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/07/23/non-english-question-policy/&quot;&gt;the official blog entry&lt;/a&gt; on the topic. Note that the focus on &quot;programming questions&quot; is because back then there were only SO, SU and SF around, but the essence still is valid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to be the one place in the world for all programming information in every possible human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Direct question posters to native language resources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is not the community's goal to teach English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The question asker should put some effort into the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a corollary, questions not in English will be closed. Questions that include both an English version and the original non-English version are fine if the asker is uncertain about the correctness of their translation, but this should be the exception rather than the rule, and in particular &lt;em&gt;all further communication&lt;/em&gt;, in particular answers, should be in English. Questions in bad or broken English are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; completely fine - they should be fixed on sight by more fluent speakers, but it is rare that mere language issues make a question so incomprehensible that it would need to be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I oppose the posting of non-English language posts without an accompanying translation attempt, and prefer broken English over a non-English language post because using more than one language within a community splinters said community into smaller camps of users who share a certain language. Things like the review system only work because &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; users can communicate with each other and the idea of meta discussions (such as this one!) is wholly absurd if we do not expect everyone to speak the same langauge. And everyone able to follow the average meta post should also be able to make an intellegible attempt at writing a question in English, no matter its actual grammatical correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, content needs to be moderated. When a question is posted in a language I do not speak, how am I, or any other moderator or reviewer, supposed to decide whether the question is on-topic, or, worse, whether it even is a physics question and not just spam or some abusive rant? Wait for someone who actually speaks the language? How does one find such users? From this point of view, it's completely impractical to allow non-English content while upholding our quality standards and the idea of forming a single community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T18:55:28.870" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:35:55.533" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not our decision. Stack Exchange is a U.S. company and for mysterious reasons they mainly unwelcome any non-English content. They somehow won't understand that it would cause a five times growth in their potential visitor count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some workarounds around it: SE sites about languages can use non-English, and there are Stack Overflow clones in four languages (one of them is Russian). Even the fast growth of these sites isn't a reason for them to change this never directly admitted policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, on the meta sites, English is always preferred to help the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/40353/stack-exchange-glossary-dictionary-of-commonly-used-terms/40354#40354&quot;&gt;CMs&lt;/a&gt; to track the topics, but it isn't enforced in practice very heavily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have multiple hypotheses for their reason, but none of them is really proven. There are some explanations from SE sources, mainly about individual cases as they blocked non-English content/sites, but these are contradictory and aren't very realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently there is an explicit ban on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; for non-English SE sites. Thus, a non-English PSE here is unthinkable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-12-22T09:55:56.083" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T09:55:56.083" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9819" CreationDate="2017-04-20T07:24:01.253" Score="15" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to SE but practically every day I come across constructive, thought-out questions that are very quickly marked as duplicates -- while a simple comparison with the alleged duplicate shows very clearly that they are asking a quite different thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, the two questions are about the same topic but clearly focus on different aspects of it. Other times, the older one (or one of its answers) is an answer to the newer one, which could not be known in advance by the person who asks the new one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since users are enabled to mark a question as duplicate, do we also have a way to &quot;defend&quot; it when we think that such a mark is wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150182" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T08:40:07.380" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T23:30:04.973" Title="A way to mark questions as non-duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|questions|flagging|duplicates|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9818" CreationDate="2017-04-20T09:26:33.320" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have &gt;3k rep, you can directly vote to reopen. This will put the question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/172065&quot;&gt;reopen review queue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once in the reopen review queue, users with &gt;3k rep can vote to reopen. If five users vote to reopen (either through the queue or directly) the question gets reopened. If the question receives enough Leave Closed votes (which I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; is three votes) then it leaves the queue; people can still vote to reopen directly (in which case it will possibly go back to the queue) but it won't be shown to reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the review is completed, its results are publicly available (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/171655&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) and they are accessible from the question's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36303/feedback-request-new-timeline-question-view&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/326280/timeline&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a closed question is not on the reopen queue, editing it will bring it into the queue (exact criteria &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196074/lots-of-questions-in-the-reopen-queue/196078#196078&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). You can edit directly if you have &gt;2k rep; if not, then your edit will be peer-reviewed (i.e. it needs two approvals on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;suggested edits review queue&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most important part of the reopening process. If a question is close to a previous post but it is not quite answered by it, then it is important to make sure the new question references the previous ones and explains why it's different. Ideally this should be done by the original poster, but if you see a clear opportunity for an edit like that which does not conflict with the OP's intent, then go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are important reasons why we close duplicates, most centrally because duplicate Q&amp;amp;As dilute and fragment the knowledge base we're building, and diminish the usefulness of this site as a reference source. If new questions cover new ground they should direct answers onto that new ground, because what we really want to avoid is duplicate answers in separate threads.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you think a question is not a duplicate, leave a comment explaining why! Sometimes people are hasty (because reviewers are human), but a well-argued comment explaining why a question differs from the proposed duplicate can and does make a difference when reviewing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For closure, it is possible for users with under 3k rep to flag as off-topic; this won't cast a closevote but it will place the question in the closure queue if it's not already on there. For reopen votes, this is not possible; it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/186722/can-we-have-the-ability-to-flag-for-reopening&quot;&gt;asked on the Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt; and is currently status-declined - see the answer there for the reasons why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let me comment on your second paragraph for a bit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Often, the two questions are about the same topic but clearly focus on different aspects of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a legitimate reason for reopening, but it often requires an edit on the new question to sharpen the differences and direct the answers onto the new ground.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other times, the older one (or one of its answers) is an answer to the newer one, which could not be known in advance by the person who asks the new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a reason for reopening. This could indeed be known to the person asking the new question - we expect posters to search for previous questions before asking. Very often, the proposed duplicate will actually have been shown to the OP &lt;em&gt;as they were typing the question&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39EcF.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people ask a question that's already been asked and answered, then no biggie: the question gets flagged as a duplicate, the OP gets directed to their answer, and the site gets a new waymarker towards that answer that can help future askers with the same question find the answer. We don't hold asking-duplicates against people (unless it's consistently repeated), but that doesn't mean the duplicate question should remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T09:26:33.320" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T22:29:47.417" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier this month I gave a very good answer to a question about the twin paradox. Yet now I can't find the question or answer, either in my page, which supposedly lists all my answers, or by searching for questions on the twin paradox. Where is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89283" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T18:40:47.240" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T18:40:47.240" Title="How to find a missing post?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9823" CreationDate="2017-04-25T20:32:27.130" Score="25" ViewCount="1209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm prompted to start this thread by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9794/why-are-homework-related-questions-accepted-on-maths-se-more-than-here/9795?noredirect=1#comment36841_9795&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9794/why-are-homework-related-questions-accepted-on-maths-se-more-than-here/&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; about why this site has the homework policy that it does. As I said in that answer, the ecological niche that this site occupies is rather different to the one that &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; does, and a lot of this difference is directly attributable to the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I realize that the details of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this situation came about are unknown to many users who joined after much of the development happened*, so it's worthwhile to go over some of that history. Plus, today marks a bit of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/04/25/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;grim anniversary&lt;/a&gt; in that history, so maybe it's a good time to do some reflecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How come there's only one Stack Exchange physics Q&amp;amp;A site, while mathematics gets two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written an answer with the essential timeline of the history, along with some links to relevant landmarks, and I'll describe from a (very) high level some of the choices different communities made along the way. However, I think it would be nice if people actually involved in those decisions could add their perspective on how we came to where we are at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* Using some kludgy informal queries, I make it that from the users that posted ≥0-score posts in the last year, half joined in the last 18 months, and more than 75% within the past 3 years, which is rather later than much of the relevant history. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T14:57:31.917" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T16:27:53.497" Title="How did mathematics end up with two Stack Exchange sites, while Physics only got one?" Tags="|discussion|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9822" CreationDate="2017-04-25T20:32:27.130" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll take this in roughly historical order, and to the extent that I'm aware of things and can remember them, though there is a definite danger that I'm telling the stories as we'd like to reimagine them rather than as they actually happened, so please go check the original sources and make up your mind from them. This obviously can only be a pretty partial list, so if you have additions or corrections please add them in (just try to keep it neutral).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Exchange started as the trio of hard tech sites: Stack Overflow, followed later by Super User and Server Fault. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has the essentials, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58210/where-can-i-find-out-about-stack-overflow-history&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is a reasonable jumping-off point. Long story short, Stack Overflow launched in 2008 and rose steadily thereafter. The conversation &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; Stack Overflow started on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/forums/1722-general&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its UserVoice page&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/28/cmon-get-meta/&quot;&gt;moved after about a year to Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;; most questions about what would become the Stack Exchange network ended up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; after &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2014/04/17/announcing-the-launch-of-meta-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;MSO split in two&lt;/a&gt; in April 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first science site using the Stack Exchange engine was &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, which started on 28 September 2009 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathOverflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; tells it; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/753/history-of-mathoverflow&quot;&gt;this Meta MathOverflow question&lt;/a&gt; has more details. MathOverflow was started by a set of postdocs and graduate students, who set out to create a meeting place for professional research mathematicians. Some interesting reads about it are &lt;a href=&quot;https://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/math-overflow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the official announcement on the blogosphere&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201006/rtx100600701p.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this slightly later piece on the AMS notices&lt;/a&gt;. From about one year into its tenure, there's pieces on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/beyond-facebook-how-the-worlds-mathematicians-organize-online/63422/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Atlantic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mercurynews.com/2010/08/08/stanford-and-uc-berkeley-create-massively-collaborative-math/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mercury News&lt;/a&gt; that capture a lot of the zeitgeist, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the more technical side, MathOverflow was started as a completely separate entity to Stack Exchange; instead, MathOverflow licensed the software from SE for its own use, a practice which SE did for a short time after it started (other instances including &lt;a href=&quot;http://moms4mom.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moms4mom&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/586/what-is-chiphacker&quot;&gt;chiphacker&lt;/a&gt;, which became &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electronics SE&lt;/a&gt;), and which stopped after they set up &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;area 51&lt;/a&gt; as a mechanism for creating non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44127/what-exactly-does-sofu-stand-for&quot;&gt;SOFU&lt;/a&gt; sites within SE; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/13/changes-to-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;this SE blog post&lt;/a&gt; for more details. MathOverflow migrated to the Stack Exchange 2.0 platform, managed by SE itself, in mid-2013, without really changing much in how the site is run from what I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some interesting bits and pieces regarding MathOverflow are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2142/why-is-what-is-the-difference-between-mathoverflow-and-math-stackexchange-not&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/617/best-of-mathoverflow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta questions. Also, note that the pre-migration Meta MathOverflow, which ran on an old-school PHP bulletin board, is now preserved as &lt;a href=&quot;http://tea.mathoverflow.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tea.mathoverflow.net&lt;/a&gt;, and if one wants to delve into deep MathOverflow history that is the place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An important bit of context from the time around the creation of MathOverflow is the first &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polymath Project&lt;/a&gt;, which started in January 2009 taking off from &lt;a href=&quot;https://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tim Gowers' blog&lt;/a&gt;, and which closed successfully within a couple of months. I don't know to what extent the MathOverflow founders had been thinking of starting the site before this, but it certainly showed that there was a large community of mathematicians online ready to take a more hands-on approach than the (also rather active) existing blogging community of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; started a good deal later than MathOverflow, on 27 July 2010, and it came up through the area 51 mechanism. A good place to have a look at how the conversation looked like at the time it was founded is &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/3355/mathematics&quot;&gt;the proposal's Area 51 page&lt;/a&gt;, which contains example questions and some discussion - and particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/612/two-level-model-mo-math-se-vs-one-level-model-so&quot;&gt;this 2011 question on the one-site model vs the two-site model&lt;/a&gt;. Have a look at the &lt;code&gt;definition&lt;/code&gt; tab for those goodies (I find Robert Harvey's comment &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/3355?phase=definition&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to be particularly illuminating on how things developed), and at the &lt;code&gt;beta&lt;/code&gt; tab for more stats. Tooltips have more precise dates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a lot of relevant discussion on a thread on the pre-2010 Meta Stack Exchange (a meta site for the Stack Exchange 1.0 software and family of sites), which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20100418194227/meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5534/proposal-for-mathematics-se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preserved in the Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, this site came up through &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics&quot;&gt;this proposal on Area 51&lt;/a&gt;, which was proposed on 2 June 2010, and the public beta launched on 9 November 2010 (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9340/when-did-physics-stackexchange-launch&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Again, that proposal gives a good look at how the conversation looked like at the time the site started; another interesting place for how the site scope came to be decided is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scope?page=5&amp;amp;sort=newest&amp;amp;pagesize=50&quot;&gt;the bottom of the scope tag on this meta&lt;/a&gt;. The site graduated from beta to full SE site on 24 February 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an interesting bit of trivia for anyone that joined after &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/463/new-design-launched&quot;&gt;February 2011&lt;/a&gt;, the site design &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/447/design-for-physics-se&quot;&gt;was originally a blackboard-inspired black-on-white&lt;/a&gt;, which was later &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/488/&quot;&gt;changed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The next important step is &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;the Area 51 proposal of a Theoretical Physics site&lt;/a&gt;, on 13 November 2010. By the time that proposal got traction, Physics SE had been running for some time, and there was definite dissatisfaction from some sectors about the level of questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76/level-of-questions&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). The proposal was eventually opened for public beta about a year later, on 4 October 2011, but it is important to note that there was definite pushback against splitting the SE physics community in two: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/612/two-level-model-mo-math-se-vs-one-level-model-so&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; I linked to above, calls to &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/187/theoretical-physics-merge-with-physics&quot;&gt;just merge the TP proposal into PSE&lt;/a&gt;, and a bunch of similar discussions on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848?phase=definition&quot;&gt;proposal definition page&lt;/a&gt;. This came to the point that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/788/disposition-of-area-51-proposal-theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;SE community managers directly moved to close the proposal&lt;/a&gt; (also &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/disposition-of-theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/816/the-theoretical-physic-proposal-is-back-underway&quot;&gt;extensive feedback from this site prompting them to continue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Theoretical Physics site was running, there was some definite ambiguity in terms of where the boundary lay between that site and this one; this is painfully obvious in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105/where-should-research-level-questions-go-theoretical-physics-se-or-physics-rese&quot;&gt;Where should research-level questions go? Theoretical Physics SE or Physics Research SE?&lt;/a&gt;; my feeling is that this probably didn't ever get resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a more personal perspective, I joined Stack Exchange at about this time (9 April 2012), some nine months into my &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/physics/controlled-quantum-dynamics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MRes&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imperial.ac.uk/controlled-quantum-dynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantum information and quantum optics&lt;/a&gt;, and I have to say that I found the Theoretical Physics site to be extremely intimidating, and I felt like I could hardly get a word in edgewise (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27503/reference-request-susskind-glogower-original-paper&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;). In hindsight, I still think that this was a worrying sign - if that experiment were going on right now, I would wish for the level to be accessible to a broad base of graduate students across all branches of physics. But I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this was not to be for long, because the Theoretical Physics site closed on 25 April 2012 (exactly five years ago), through the announcement &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/04/25/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;When a site grows quiet&lt;/a&gt; on the SE blog. This shut down six SE beta sites, including &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51/astronomy&quot;&gt;the initial astronomy beta&lt;/a&gt; (there's now a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40709/astronomy&quot;&gt;new one&lt;/a&gt;), about six months into the Theoretical Physics beta. To see the community's reactions to this, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2609/why-theoretical-physics-has-been-closed&quot;&gt;Why Theoretical Physics has been closed?&lt;/a&gt; on this meta, as well as a variety of post-mortems from different perspectives at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail&quot;&gt;Why did Theoretical Physics fail?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After it was closed, all the Theoretical Physics posts were merged into this site; for discussions of that process, the place to look is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/site-salvage&quot;&gt;site-salvage tag on this meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that the closing of Theoretical Physics took place during the growing-pains stage of the Area 51 mechanism, and at that stage Stack Exchange took a much closer look at traffic stats of beta sites than they do now. In particular, there was a discrete policy change announced on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/257614/graduation-site-closure-and-a-clearer-outlook-on-the-health-of-se-sites&quot;&gt;Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites&lt;/a&gt; that makes it much less likely that a small and slowly-but-consistently growing SE beta site will be shuttered for lack of traffic. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I also want to mention another pair of sites that follow the two-site model that have been successful within the Stack Exchange network, and which we probably don't explore as analogues nearly as much as we should - &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computer Science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;, the Area 51 proposals for which are &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/35636/computer-science&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/8766/theoretical-computer-science&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep an eye on the timings, though: TCS was proposed in June 2010, went to public beta in August 2010, and it graduated from beta in November 2010; the plain CS site was proposed in September 2011, started public beta in March 2012, and it graduated four years later in January 2016. Thus, this is arguably another case where the 'hard' site came before the 'soft' one (bad descriptors, but you know what I mean), though obviously the elephant in that room is Stack Overflow, which isn't computer science as such but has a strong bearing on that discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics and computer science are very different in many respects, but this is nevertheless an interesting model to study.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Over the years there have been definite chafings at the perceived low level of questions on this site, as shown e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4096/what-can-be-done-to-improve-physics-se-as-an-active-forum-for-physics-researcher&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; - there's probably more out there to be found, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhysicsOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, and I think I will leave the telling of this story to its organizers. I will point to the comments section of &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luboš Motl's blog&lt;/a&gt; as the place for the initial discussions (more specifically on &lt;a href=&quot;http://motls.blogspot.com.es/2013/08/discussion-on-old-and-new-theoretical.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this thread and its comments&lt;/a&gt;), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live&quot;&gt;its initial announcement on the MathOverflow meta&lt;/a&gt;, as well as the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se&quot;&gt;What is Physics Overflow and how is it linked to Physics.SE?&lt;/a&gt; on this meta. I do feel it's important not to underestimate how much of the motivation for the foundation of PhysicsOverflow was purely on moderation concerns rather than shooting for a research-oriented site, but I'll let them tell their story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PhysicsOverflow is currently active, though as far as I understand it they still import a fair amount of this site's content through our CC BY license. I really encourage readers to visit and form their own opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do want to touch on traffic as regards PhysicsOverflow, though, because I've seen several people make claims along the lines of &quot;it's OK if we litter Physics Stack Exchange with drudge-level homework because if researchers get offended they can go to PhysicsOverflow much like mathematicians can go to MathOverflow&quot;. PhysicsOverflow reports its traffic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsoverflow.org/statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its statistics page&lt;/a&gt;; in the past year those show an average of about 25 questions per month posted directly to PhysicsOverflow (and about 10 questions per month imported from Physics Stack Exchange), which is about the rate that Theoretical Physics had before it shut down. For comparison, MathOverflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#science-questionsperday&quot;&gt;gets&lt;/a&gt; about 40 questions a day, to 650+ on Mathematics and ~100 on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T13:33:03.417" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T13:33:03.417" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-04-26T02:31:25.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9818" CreationDate="2017-04-27T23:24:36.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the most important thing to do after getting a comment which suggests that your question is a &lt;em&gt;Possible duplicate of&lt;/em&gt; some other question, is to &lt;strong&gt;explain prominently in your question&lt;/strong&gt; why you think it is not a duplicate. It is important to do this &lt;strong&gt;as soon as possible&lt;/strong&gt;, before votes accumulate, and certainly before the question is put on hold. Reopening is very much less likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting your reasons in a comment is not as effective as posting them in your question. When I review a question for reopening I rarely consider more than the edits made to the question after it was closed. (This is inconsistent of me, because I post a comment when I nominate a question for reopening.) I review comments before casting a closing vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting a comment pinging the user who voted against your question as a duplicate is more effective than posting a general comment. Again it is important to act quickly before votes start accumulating. Much as we like to think we vote independently, we are more likely to cast closing votes when we see that others have already done so.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have an inbuilt bias against reopening questions; I think most reviewers would admit to having the same bias. To have any kind of a chance I think you must make a convincing argument. It is not enough to say that the answers in the other question were not helpful or that you could not understand them. You must explain in what way they fail to satisfy you.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither (in my opinion) is it enough to say that the two questions focus on different aspects. The issue is whether or not one of the answers to the other question answers the aspect you are focussing on. It often happens that an answer is more general than the question asked, so it might cover your case also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might pre-empt votes to close your question as a duplicate by citing similar questions and explaining what is different about your question. If you cite possible duplicates, reviewers are less likely to search for them. However, this can also be a liability, inviting your question to be marked as a duplicate if you do not make a good argument for it being different or the other answers failing to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a last resort, if your question is not reopened and you are convinced that you have a good case, you can &lt;strong&gt;post a question in Physics Meta&lt;/strong&gt; asking why your question has been closed. The discussion might persuade voters that your question ought to be reopened.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T23:30:04.973" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T23:30:04.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9822" CreationDate="2017-04-30T16:09:19.400" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ''grim anniversary'' in the history of Physics SE that Emilio alluded to is the shutting down of TheoreticalPhysics SE in April 2012 by the Community Manager of Stack Exchange. Between this announcement and the actual closing act, there was quite some discussion on Physics SE and on the blogs (some of which are no longer accessible; the links are dead) of some participants. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1350/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;one of these&lt;/a&gt; one can read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reason that TP.SE was formed was largely due to wanting somewhere&#xA;  for research level stuff without all of the noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/131113/182065&quot;&gt;a member of TheoreticalPhysics SE wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have succeeded in maintaining high quality site which has become a&#xA;  reliable resource of correct and useful information, which is&#xA;  sometimes not that easy to obtain. We had top people coming to the&#xA;  site and contributing high quality content. Quality, rather than&#xA;  quantity, is of course something that is not easily measurable, but I&#xA;  think it has value nonetheless. Traffic was an issue, but for a highly&#xA;  technical site the pattern of traffic, including how it changes with&#xA;  time, should be evaluated differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But although &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/10/21/when-will-my-site-graduate/&quot;&gt;the officials had said in a more general context:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the&#xA;  Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it&#xA;  will march on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this is quoted in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/04/25/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;shut down notice&lt;/a&gt;, ''making the Internet a better place'' is interpreted from the point of view of the SE marketing perspective only: Commercial viability requires high enough traffic rates and these were not maintained by TheoreticalPhysics SE during its beta existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the reasons for shutting down the site have more to do with the standards of SE for a site to be tolerable in a commercial enterprise than with the quality of the contributions to the site. In the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/&quot;&gt;''Why did Theoretical Physics fail?''&lt;/a&gt; the SE officials didn't question the fact mentioned in the thread opening that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the quality of questions (and answers) was actually good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But SE required growth and high traffic. (Typical argument: ''Physics [SE] was already a bigger and more established site when it launched.'') In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/4528&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;words of one of the active members&lt;/a&gt; of Theoretical Physics SE,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SE closed a Jazz club for not being the same as a Madonna concert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/3722/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual closing message on TheoreticalPhysics SE meta&lt;/a&gt; mentioned that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the questions and answers posted here will be made available for &#xA;  download and re-use by anyone who wants them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an immediate desire to migrate the site outside the SE framework.&#xA;See ''&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/3729/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Where do we go from here?&lt;/a&gt;'', but for practical reasons it took nearly two years to restart the site as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhysicsOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. All questions and answers from TheoreticalPhysics SE and its meta site were migrated to PhysicsOverflow, and the site continues under improved rules. In particular, PhysicsOverflow treats comments on the same level as questions and answers (any length, anytime editing, fully disclosed history, bookmarking). PhysicsOverflow also imports upon request research level posts from Physics SE and MathOverflow; new answers of questions from there are usually reported back on the original site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PhysicsOverflow hasn't become a Madonna concert with all its noise but it preserves the level, quality, and noise-free enjoyment the Jazz club once called TheoreticalPhysics SE offered to the physics research community. Reflecting the high level, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;number of questions, answers, and comments&lt;/a&gt; per month by registered users is highly fluctuating, with long term averages around 25, 25, and 75, respectively. These numbers are comparable to those of Theoretical Physics SE at the time of its shut down and do not include the posts of anonymous users or unregistered users imported from elsewhere, which add about 30% to the other numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9822/&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty's comment&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is also PhysicsOverflow, and I think I will leave the telling of&#xA;  this story to its organizers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;let me add that a timeline of PhysicsOverflow can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/8347&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Due to unrelated events, the relations with Physics SE have been characterized by some tensions, as reflected by the very unusual ratio of upvotes and downvotes in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9554/community-promotion-ads-2017/9556#9556&quot;&gt;promotion ad&lt;/a&gt; (visible to high rep users only). Being quite active on both sites I'd be happy if these tensions would give way to a friendly relationship of the same sort as it exists between Mathematics SE and MathOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="7924" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T16:27:53.497" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T16:27:53.497" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-30T19:10:32.140" Score="5" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading through questions on the Q&amp;amp;A Stackexchange, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/270414/&quot;&gt;this Question&lt;/a&gt; regarding rotational mechanics. I'd been confused a few other times in the past by homework closures and had come to the conclusion that to merit closure under the homework flag the question would have to show a clear lack of effort, and a lack of question about any real concepts, such as a post purely providing information and asking &quot;how do I solve this&quot; or &quot;what's $F =$ to?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question linked above shows effort to solve the question, and also asks about physics concepts, and could definitely be useful to future SE users struggling with similar problems. Why did this question get closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user95137" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T19:50:29.333" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T00:08:42.180" Title="Homework Policy and what justifies closure" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5988" CreationDate="2017-05-01T17:43:46.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enter the chatroom of your choice. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look up the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Chat&lt;/a&gt; profile of the user you wish to invite.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chat profile gives you the option of inviting this user to join you in the room you are currently in, or to start a new chatroom with this user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T17:43:46.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T14:41:07.760" Score="-6" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;From help pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the website at the same time has a &quot;homework policy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these things can actually be combined????? How can asking and answering questions not turn into a discussion?&#xA;How does the first rule make the site useful for anything other than homework questions or just very simple questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153698" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-04T16:53:05.983" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T16:53:05.983" Title="Physics Stackexchange rules?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9829" CreationDate="2017-05-04T15:13:13.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework policy, whilst confusing and a bit poorly defined, basically works like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you asking for people to do calculations for you and give you your answer for you? Then this site likely isn't for you. The same goes if you're asking something incredibly specific, rather than just about the concepts that the question is rooted in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you asking a conceptual question, one that asks about a fundamental physics concept and could actually be useful to future readers, [who aren't just your classmates looking for worked solutions to your class' homeworks] if so then welcome to StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user95137" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T15:13:13.627" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9829" CreationDate="2017-05-04T15:37:00.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see these two policies as complementary, serving as brackets to eliminate two extreme sorts of questions we'd like to avoid. I suppose if the &quot;brackets&quot; were too wide there might not be any middle ground remaining, but I don't think that's a problem we're having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, we want questions that &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; answers. There are plenty of interesting questions that don't have good answers, and shooting the breeze about those sorts of questions can be a lot of fun.  But that's not what the Stack Exchange is for. We have a little flexibility since we can use the chat server for those sorts of open-ended questions. But the model on the main site, with questions, answers, and (ephemeral) comments, is explicitly designed to discourage open-ended discussions.  A predecessor to Stack Exchange refers to such questions as &lt;a href=&quot;http://faq.metafilter.com/70/chatfilter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chatfilter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we frequently have new users who will paste a multiple-choice homework problem into the question box and seem to be expecting someone to answer &quot;it's (c).&quot; Those sorts of questions don't have any value for anyone except the asker --- and don't really have much value for the asker, either, since context-free answers don't have any explanatory power.  A good homework-like question isn't &quot;what's the answer to this question?&quot;; it's &quot;how can I arrive at an understandable answer to this question?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a pretty wide grey area at either end of these brackets. There are homework-like questions that some users see as interesting where others see low effort and low value,. Some users may see a question as open-ended or opinion-based, while another user may be able to provide factual answers.&#xA;That's why we have community moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you spend some time reading highly-scored questions and answers on subjects that interest you, I think you'll get a feeling for the broad range of questions that have interesting answers that become clear with minimal back-and-forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T15:37:00.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2017-05-04T18:10:07.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question because of the 1st clause : there is no question here about a &lt;strong&gt;specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;. The asker showed effort and cannot be faulted for that, but he did not identify a source of conceptual difficulty, such as @dmckee points out in the comments above, or about Free Body Diagrams, as you suggest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are several potential sources of conceptual difficulty in the question, I still cannot see any one identified, even in the comments. The nearest which hello comes is &quot;Every time I calculate the acceleration of each mass, they always depend on other acceleration too. Is it okay?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking &quot;Here is what I have tried but I didn't get the correct answers. What have I done wrong?&quot; and later in the comments &quot;Can you check my calculations?&quot; Asking for &quot;help&quot; is too broad to be interpreted as &lt;strong&gt;asking about a specific physics concept.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that closing the question is unhelpful and unnecessarily harsh, when other users are willing to walk through the entire solution if necessary. Users cannot always see the source of their own difficulty, so they do not know what to ask about. Penalising them for their own lack of insight is perhaps unfair. But that, as I have understood it, is what the homework policy is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T18:10:07.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T23:27:53.647" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a question closely related to (but not identical to) this one.  I promise not to continue posting  variants.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said:  I have just voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/331004/opening-a-portal-between-earth-and-outer-space&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;, because it's entirely unclear what the OP is asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in casting that vote, I am also automatically inviting  this poster to &quot;please clarify your specific problem or add additional details&quot;.  I do not actually want this poster to clarify the problem or add additional details, and I wish I could cast this close vote, for this reason, without having to issue that invitation.  Ought the phrase &quot;Unclear what you're asking&quot;, unadorned, be made available as a reason for closing?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T12:19:40.150" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T12:19:40.150" Title="Unclear What You're Asking" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9836" CreationDate="2017-05-05T14:11:04.300" Score="-2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am still new here, and not sure if I will be staying. I do enjoy helping others and have been a frequent contributor to another similar forum. From what I have seen here so far, I fully expect this critical post to be severely down-voted. Whether I am right or wrong in my prediction it is that feeling and hesitance to contribute that bothers me. On the right side of the screen I see many similar questions where contributors are upset about down-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my recent contributions here had an anecdotal story about falling cats. That comment was critiqued and fact checked doggedly. This discouraged me from wanting to continue contributing here. It is not that the anecdote or meaning I was trying to convey was wrong, it was that the linked articles I posted to support my comments were questioned. I dutifully followed up with further supporting links but never seemed to satisfy the fact-checker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that there is not much we can do to stop people who get satisfaction or pleasure out of this kind of negative behavior but what more positive contributors can do is be sure to encourage contributors and challenge the more negative contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drew K&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149674" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T16:41:08.253" Title="Snobs and down-voters" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9835" CreationDate="2017-05-05T16:33:16.943" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's important to say up front that a downvote is not a judgement of you, it is a judgement of your question or answer. A downvote means the downvoter thinks it is not a suitable question/answer for this site, and that's all it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, in theory. In practice it is very hard not to take downvotes personally, and I hate being downvoted as much as you and everyone else does. But everyone who posts on this site attracts downvotes sooner or later and you just have to decide whether you can live with it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Incidentally I've had my share of rude comments too, which can be even more upsetting. If someone makes a rude comment to one of your posts that's not acceptable so flag it and a moderator will delete the comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to return to the point, if you've got a downvote on an answer you need to have a think about whether your answer does need some improvement. Most of the prolific answerers here regard the site as a sort of encyclopaedia of physics. That is, a physicist, physics student or anyone wanting to learn physics can look at a question here and be confident that the answers are clear, concise and above all unimpeachable. You should be able to treat anything written in an answer here as gospel truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means answers need to conform to certain standards. We aren't keen on answers that just link to some page on the Internet because that link could break and anyway we have no control over what's at the other end of it. I would guess that's why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/330449/elastic-collisions-given-mass-and-energy/330456#330456&quot;&gt;this answer of yours&lt;/a&gt; got downvoted, because it's just a link and a few comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess the cat post got a downvote because it's anecdotal and the anecdote doesn't address the question - though note that that answer got two upvotes as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see where the third downvote is but looking at the two example above I would say the downvotes are justified and you should consider the criticism they imply. It would be nice if downvoters always left a comment to say what aspects of the answer they don't think are good. But to be fair not all answerers respond positively to comments and it can get quite nasty - discretion is sometimes the better part of valour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it can be hard for newcomers especially if they're at an early stage in learning physics, and many of us will bear this in mind when we vote on a question or comment on it. But we don't lower our standards, not even for newcomers. At the end of the day a newcomer's answer is judged by the same standards as answers from veteran site members. It's up to you to be sure before you post that your answer is clear, concise and above all correct. If you aren't sure about this then you should think carefully before you post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great many people have dedicated a great deal of time and effort (for free!) to writing some great answers on this site. Some of the explanations here are staggeringly good and far better than anything I encountered as an undergraduate or PhD student. By titling your post here &lt;em&gt;Snobs and down-voters&lt;/em&gt; you are tarring us all with the same brush, and frankly that won't win you any friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly note that here on the Meta site a downvote just signifies disagreement. So the two downvotes (at the time of writing) that your question has attracted just mean that two people disagree with the sentiments it expresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T16:41:08.253" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T16:41:08.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-07T05:02:05.310" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I noticed just know the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/287610/46708&quot;&gt;Intrinsic spin and magnetic dipole moment of electrons bounded to the nucleus&lt;/a&gt; was deleted. This seems to be a not so often carried out procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an automatically notification to the questioner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure why this question was deleted. Why there are no comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And very specific to this case how &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/287610/46708&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question lowers the quality of PSE? Because only this could be the reason to delete something and not to show that it is a duplicate or to set it on hold because something is not well formulated.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46708" LastEditorUserId="46708" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T06:31:23.210" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T06:31:23.210" Title="No comment to a deleted question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2017-05-07T06:32:42.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-07T16:38:33.607" Score="14" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just watched the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/331528/why-is-2-a-pseudoreal-representation-and-there-is-no-2-2-2-anomaly&quot;&gt;Why is 2 a pseudoreal representation and there is no 2-2-2 anomaly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;turn around from being fundamentally ill-posed, under-researched and essentially unanswerable in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/331528/1&quot;&gt;initial formulation&lt;/a&gt;, to successfully going through the full close → fix → reopen cycle and getting a suitable answer, through suitable input in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ambcI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt; and an OP that was willing to listen to the problems and fix them as they were pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stands in contrast to a fairly common view that closed questions are unfixable and doomed to obscurity, deletion, and censorship. While it's true that some questions are just too far off the grid to be fixed, for a large majority of questions this is not the case: &lt;strong&gt;the purpose of closing questions is so that their problems can be fixed&lt;/strong&gt;, instead of wasting answerer time on flawed formulations. Very often, the reason questions stay closed is that their askers abandon them, are unwilling or unable to understand the problems that make them a bad fit for this site and its format, or are unwilling to put in the work to fix them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I thought it would be nice to have a gallery of examples where this process &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; work out as it's meant to, as a reference for when other questions run into more troubled waters. Here's one - please add more in answers as and when you run across them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;To satisfy the nitpickers: this post uses &quot;closed&quot; and &quot;on hold&quot; interchangeably; they are essentially equivalent in this context.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T16:29:48.993" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:16:52.137" Title="Good examples of turn-around questions that get closed → fixed → reopened and answered" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T05:54:47.773" Score="-2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've posted one question here &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/331646/155381&quot;&gt;Please guide me. This question is related to electrical self energy from electrostatic&lt;/a&gt; but it was put on hold because it was a homework question. So I edited it following the same rules for editing questions as suggested but it is still on hold! &#xA;Please help me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155381" OwnerDisplayName="user155381" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T06:51:14.840" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T06:51:14.840" Title="Why my question is put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9840" CreationDate="2017-05-08T06:20:06.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, as of now, zero people &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/174182&quot;&gt;have so far reviewed&lt;/a&gt; your edited question.  It's not even been an hour. Patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, and more importantly: even in its present form (v3), your question is much more like &quot;solve this problem for me&quot; than like the type of conceptual homework-like questions we accept here. It's not clear whether you are having a mathematical question about relating the distance from a source charge with the radius of a sphere, or whether you are confused about the concept of electrical self-energy, or whether you are confused about the difference between a volume charge and a surface charge.  Without knowing what your conceptual stumbling block is, the odds aren't good that an answerer would be able to guide you to a solution.  In that case, it'd be appropriate for the question to remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try re-reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/44126&quot;&gt;homework guidelines&lt;/a&gt; and reading some other questions on electrostatic self-energy to see the kinds of changes that would make your question answerable here. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T06:20:06.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9839" CreationDate="2017-05-08T11:24:58.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/145110/how-can-a-black-hole-reduce-the-speed-of-light&quot;&gt;How can a black hole reduce the speed of light?&lt;/a&gt; has gone through this cycle when I raised its closure on meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7269/why-more-than-a-thousand-views-for-my-closed-question&quot;&gt;Why more than a thousand views for my &amp;#39;closed&amp;#39; question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25568" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T11:24:58.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T19:13:09.790" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I access this site using Chrome from myou smartphone. Recently, the MathJax formatted writings appear overlapped, for example in the following answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fWoUo.png&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be the reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: problem continues on math SE also. See below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jQqNd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6nTTW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've cleared chrome  (v58) data, cache, browsing history, cookies, everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phone is Samsung Galaxy On7 with Android 6.0-marshmallow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="149663" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T18:20:31.103" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T18:20:31.103" Title="Problem in viewing MathJax formatted writing in smartphone" Tags="|support|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9845" CreationDate="2017-05-09T22:57:19.553" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9049/would-it-be-useful-to-link-the-engineering-se-on-closed-engineering-questions-or&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;, we have a consensus that it would be useful to link to the Engineering SE on closed engineering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It requires a proper wording approved by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current wording is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the&#xA;  application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a&#xA;  specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals&#xA;  with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the&#xA;  natural world works. For more information, see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/a/4536/&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from @DanielSank 's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9050/32426&quot;&gt;reply&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering&quot;&gt;talked about this&#xA;  before&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  and I gave a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/experimental-physics-engineering/6136#6136&quot;&gt;well received opinion on how to think about&#xA;  engineering-ish posts on our&#xA;  site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T23:07:36.707" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T02:00:11.573" Title="How to change the close reasons about offtopic engineering posts to contain the link to the Engineering SE?" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9844" CreationDate="2017-05-09T23:02:52.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a proposed wording for the new close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/a/4536/&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;. Your question may be on topic on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A site for professionals and students of engineering&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T23:39:09.633" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T23:39:09.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-10T20:58:41.017" Score="8" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me today that I don't know what a good approach is for providing hints to homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find any clear policy on how this should work.  The example that brought it to my attention is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/332263/which-one-is-easier-to-push-or-are-they-the-same&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial reaction was to comment with a question to help point him in the right direction; as it didn't seem appropriate to provide an answer to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is usually what I do in these situations; I don't want to completely shun the person from this site. Often times it seems like it's a small piece of information they are missing; so I try to ask a leading question or two in the comments (if the question isn't just a straight up copied textbook question and seems to be a person seeking knowledge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is that I also need to make sure I don't clutter comments with discussion; so this is a somewhat delicate balance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question I linked; I noticed someone else gave a hint as an answer.  I do see some merit in doing that; as it would remove clutter from the comments, and the purpose &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; to help someone viewing the question understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is that obviously it doesn't really &lt;em&gt;answer the question&lt;/em&gt;; and therefore I don't understand how it should belong as an answer. Adding to that, if the question was improved to be more in-line with the site policy; that answer would become very obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw that after I commented saying it was not an answer (and flagged it), the person who answered replied with their reasoning, and someone else upvoted that reasoning and their &quot;answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meat of my question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For homework-type questions, should we be using comments or answers if we wish to provide hints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if it seems like I'm singling out a specific situation; I seem to run into this situation a lot but this is the first I've questioned my approach.  (This is my first post to the meta so I'm also sorry if it feels too long winded or specific)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T21:19:57.593" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T18:34:28.220" Title="Answering &quot;Homework-Like&quot; Questions With Hints" Tags="|discussion|questions|homework-and-exercises|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9846" CreationDate="2017-05-10T21:40:58.533" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way homework-like questions are &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to work here is that the poster presents their homework problem, shows enough progress to narrow down on one specific part of the solution procedure that they are stuck on, and then asks about that specific part. As far as we on this site are concerned, the question is only about that specific part of the procedure. (We call this a &quot;specific conceptual question&quot;.) The underlying homework problem is only there to provide context. Accordingly, answers should address only the specific part being asked about, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the underlying homework problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point is, &lt;strong&gt;you really shouldn't be giving hints for the underlying homework problem at all&lt;/strong&gt;. Unless you would consider an answer to the specific conceptual question to be a hint - but even then, it does answer the thing that's actually being asked, so you should post it as an answer, not a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/332263/2&quot;&gt;the question you're asking about&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I did a exam to apply for a job in mechanics and there is some matter that I am not confortable with: which one of the boxes in Pic 1 is easier to push? Considering that the box is the same weight and so the sticks and the men and also the floor. And also of course the stick is in the exact same spot. Are they the same?&#xA;  Since they won't tell us the correction of the exam this little question is bugging me. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Pic 1 &lt;em&gt;omitted for brevity&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;underlying homework problem&quot; (maybe it's not really &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt;, but that doesn't matter) is asking &quot;which one of the boxes in Pic 1 is easier to push?&quot; This is the thing that you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be answering, nor providing hints for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we expect from the asker is that they narrow down a specific part of the solution procedure (a.k.a. &quot;identify a specific conceptual problem&quot;) and ask about that. Now, as I look at this question, I don't see any actual &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; in it other than the underlying homework problem, &quot;which... is easier to push?&quot;, or later &quot;Are they the same?&quot; which is really just the same thing in different words. Therefore I conclude that the poster has not identified a specific conceptual question. There is really nothing for us to answer. (Incidentally, that means the post should get put on hold under our &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/714&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, suppose the poster had written something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] which one of the boxes in Pic 1 is easier to push? Considering that the boxes are the same weight, and so are the sticks and the men and the floor, it seems that the boxes should be equally easy to push. &lt;strong&gt;How can boxes require different forces to push if they are the same weight?&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Pic 1 &lt;em&gt;omitted for brevity&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the poster would be asking a specific conceptual question, which I've marked in bold. This is a specific question motivated by this homework problem, but applicable to other similar problems. You can write an answer that addresses that specific conceptual question &lt;em&gt;without giving away the answer to the underlying homework problem&lt;/em&gt;. (For example, you could write something about components of the force vector.) If you want to post an answer, &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; the sort of answer you should post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do want to give the poster extra help with their homework, beyond the specific conceptual question they're asking, I suggest leaving a comment inviting them to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;. (You can use the main site room if it's not busy, or create a separate room.) In chat you can give all the hints you want. Note that users do require 20 reputation to participate in chat, though that's a total of 20 across the whole network, so if they have some rep on other sites, that counts too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T21:40:58.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9862" CreationDate="2017-05-10T21:57:55.850" Score="9" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site#comment12043_4539&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on the accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4538/155728&quot;&gt;this question about non-mainstream physics&lt;/a&gt;, @jdm said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+1, I'd add two things: &lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; Questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; non-mainstream physics should be ok, e.g. (&quot;Have Podkletnov's antigravity experiments been independently reproduced?&quot;, &quot;Why do we believe cold fusion can't work?&quot;). Questions &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; fringe physics aren't ok (&quot;Where does the square root come from in this mass-formula?&quot;). &lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; We should be careful about &quot;questions that propose a new concept or paradigm&quot;. Those can be very useful, and generate research-level content, but they can also invite half-baked speculation (like &quot;Are all particles the same string weaving the fabric of the universe&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the answer replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@jdm afaict (1) is not allowed, but I'm not sure. Regarding (2) That's actually OK. While the &quot;one string to rule them all&quot; question wasn't worded too well, it didn't fall afoul of the current non mainstream policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then @jdm replied and said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regarding (1), sometimes I come along something in a paper or a pop-sci article, and would like to know whether it's legitimate or not. Say, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Woodward effect&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Mallett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mallet's &quot;Time machines&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and so on. I'd like to be able to ask &quot;Is this mainstream science?&quot; and if it's not, &quot;Where's the author's mistake, why can't this work?&quot;. Do you think that's OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both comments by @jdm have been upvoted, but the middle comment by @Manishearth has not. However, since @Manishearth is the original author of the answer, I am a bit confused about whether questions of type (1) are allowed on the site, and for that matter, questions of type (2) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the site policy regarding the two question types noted by @jdm in their comment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155728" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T10:51:09.420" Title="Questions &quot;about&quot; vs &quot;in&quot; non-mainstream physics" Tags="|discussion|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9846" CreationDate="2017-05-11T06:22:01.453" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework policy remains a contentious issue and feelings can run high about it so I'm reluctant to stoke the flames any higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if we take the narrow interpretation of &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; as the verbatim posting of a question set as homework or some other form of course work then I suspect most would agree we do not want to see such questions here. So we wish to deter the posting of such questions. Let me emphasise that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We wish to deter the posting of such questions here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By answering or giving hints you encourage the asking of the questions instead of deterring them, and the end result will be more and more homework (as defined above) questions until we are swamped by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you see the more egregious end of the homework question spectrum please do not respond at all. Don't answer and don't give hints. Just vote to close the question and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it gets difficult is when the OP has posted a homework question but it obviously trying to understand the underlying physics rather than just wanting to cheat. My judgement is that the question you cite falls into this category so I'd be sympathetic towards it, though it's a judgement call and not everyone is going to agree. In this particular case I don't see any problem with writing a detailed answer explaining how to calculate the horizontal component of a force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you should provide hints in comments. If the question shouldn't be answered then it shouldn't be answered in a comment either. If it should be answered then write a proper answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T06:22:01.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9846" CreationDate="2017-05-11T14:02:25.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some text from the help center about the differences between comments and answers. Emphasis added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How do I write a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. &lt;strong&gt;Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful&lt;/strong&gt;, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Why and how are some answers deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are [...]   &lt;strong&gt;not even a partial answer to the actual question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;When shouldn't I comment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not recommended for [...] &lt;strong&gt;answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer&lt;/strong&gt;; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always read this as advice that comments are not the place to provide complete answers, partial answers, or hints --- all of those things should be posted as answers instead.&#xA;The way that real users actually use comments doesn't quite fit this ideal, but it's close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question where a complete answer isn't appropriate, don't use the comments section to post a &amp;quot;lightweight answer.&amp;quot;&#xA;Responses which will help the asker solve their problem should be posted as answers.&#xA;Questions that shouldn't be answered are &lt;em&gt;not a good fit&lt;/em&gt; for a question-and-answer site and should be edited, downvoted, or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T14:02:25.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9854" CreationDate="2017-05-12T15:01:13.740" Score="-12" ViewCount="659" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that a chat-room called &quot;JEE Preparation&quot; has been made on Physics SE. For those who are not familiar with the JEE, it is short for &quot;Joint Entrance Examination&quot;--which is an entrance exam organized by (and for admissions to) the Indian Institutes of Technology. I think that the core idea of any such group is at odds with the core ideology of Physics SE. I think that the point of Physics SE is to discuss physics and only that. We remove every little thing that gets even slightly diverted from this line. For example, low-quality homework questions, history questions, metaphysics questions, purely philosophical questions, purely mathematics questions--all these are almost always removed from the website. And that is one of the pivotal things that make Physics SE so good. A channel with the sole motive of preparing for an exam which is not even a proper physics exam but rather an engineering entrance exam seems completely unacceptable. That is why I strongly feel that it should be banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have edited the question only to fix a few linguistic issues. I don't intend to revive the question--I still agree with the answer by ACuriousMind which I have had accepted.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T22:11:52.343" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T22:11:52.343" Title="Should the Chat-Rooms Like &quot;JEE Preparation&quot; Be Banned?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2017-05-12T15:10:09.170" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat is, by design, a &quot;third place&quot;. It is the place where people can do all the things that are fun or useful that would detract from the mission of the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T17:30:08.260" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:30:08.260" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2017-05-12T15:33:01.727" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, such chat rooms should not be banned.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/&quot;&gt;third place&lt;/a&gt; where the users of a site (or of any other site on the SE network!) can meet and discuss...basically anything they like as long as it does not run afoul of things like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240839/263383&quot;&gt;Be Nice policy&lt;/a&gt;. If you drop into our main chatroom, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h bar&lt;/a&gt;, then at any given time you might find people discussing physics, math, food, music, computers, the site itself, or many other topics. It's not restricted to physics, and it never was meant to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is the one place in the SE network where it is appropriate to just socialize and have a little fun, or lengthy, opinion-based discussions, or just talk about whatever is on your mind. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; removed from the Q&amp;amp;A website as such, and just because you can talk about it in chat does not mean it would be accepted as a question or answer on the main site. I do not see how the presence of such rooms detracts in any way from our main mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T15:33:01.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T16:35:04.837" Score="1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a better formulation for a question is reached should the question be deleted and asked again together with copying the already given answers or just edited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153698" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-13T09:42:00.217" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T09:42:00.217" Title="How to reformulate a question?" Tags="|support|editing|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9855" CreationDate="2017-05-12T16:41:53.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is substantially the same question then it should be edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the existing answers apply then it is substantially the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T16:41:53.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-14T07:06:51.807" Score="-3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, valid points are made in both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/988/37364&quot;&gt;Down-voting questions: Please state your rationale&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9835/37364&quot;&gt;Snobs and down-voters&lt;/a&gt;. That is, we need down votes because they discourage poor posts. And it is helpful to have a good attitude and thick skin when you get a down vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we need to not overdo it. Down votes hurt feelings and drive new users from the site. We do more of this than we should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, we might be careful with these. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user asks a homework question with little or no effort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new user asks a really confused question that shows they are missing some basic concepts. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to realize that there is nothing wrong with going on the internet and asking for help with homework. Even if they don't describe any effort, people should not be chewed out for it. Some have worked on it and not said so. People should be pointed in the right direction with no hard feelings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, we don't want no-effort homework questions on our site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often handle homework like questions well. A common response is something like &quot;Welcome to physics.stackexchange. Please see our policy on homework questions.&quot; This is great. Not answering the question helps prevent repeat offenders. Closing the question prevents the site from being cluttered with them. Closing should not be done right away because it is a barrier to adding a description of a specific concept that stopped them from getting their own answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down votes do not fix this problem. If this is the first time someone has asked a question on our site, they do not know our policy. They will not be discouraged from asking a first question by down votes given to other people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confused questions are a judgement call. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people are not native English speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are children.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are physics newbies who would understand a basic lay explanation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some have so little understanding that they cannot frame a question well, or make mistakes. Some of these would be helped by a description of what they are trying to ask about. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people have so little understanding of cause and effect that an answer will not help them. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are so convinced of their own answer that they will not listen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, questions deserve down votes, but down votes would not be helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People expressing political or religious opinions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trolls&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are seeking attention and disruption. It is best to just quietly delete them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37364" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T07:16:16.727" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T10:27:34.807" Title="Please down vote questions carefully" Tags="|discussion|questions|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9858" CreationDate="2017-05-14T10:21:32.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that you're making a big mistake in essentially &lt;em&gt;assuming&lt;/em&gt; that ones own voting behavior should be based on that of others. To me, a person's vote is &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; more than that person's personal judgement of whether he/she/it likes the question or not. Consequently, the votes on a question say nothing more than &quot;out of the people that viewed your question, the number of people that liked it minus the people that disliked it equals X&quot;. Hence, any kind of arguments about how &quot;we as a site&quot; should do this or that when it comes to voting seems misplaced to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, the decision making progress for voting is super simple. When I see a post, I think to myself: &quot;Do I think this is an example of the type of question I like to see on this site?&quot; If the answer is a definite yes, I upvote. If the answer is a definite no, I downvote. If I don't feel strongly about it, I don't vote at all. The assumption/fact that &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; something like a &quot;reasonable judgement&quot; of a post rolls out when you average over a lot of viewers is just some kind of law of large numbers, and should not lead you to believe that individual voters necessarily pursue this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24653" LastEditorUserId="24653" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T10:27:34.807" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T10:27:34.807" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9861" CreationDate="2017-05-14T16:33:45.433" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;If my question was marked as unclear and I have reworked it what needs to be done to either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get it approved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resubmit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127887" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T21:41:32.780" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T15:17:02.260" Title="Resubmitting question" Tags="|support|closed-questions|editing|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9860" CreationDate="2017-05-14T19:22:19.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you first edit a closed question it will automatically be submitted to the review queues. Sufficiently high-rep users have the opportunity to view the new version and vote to re-open it or leave it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing is the only approved method of fixing a question, and you should not resubmit.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you repost it will be marked as a duplicate of the original. Deleting the original and re-posting is also discouraged, and when noticed a moderator will &lt;em&gt;un-delete the original&lt;/em&gt; so that the new instance can be marked as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T15:17:02.260" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T15:17:02.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9848" CreationDate="2017-05-15T10:51:09.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is currently no official site policy other than the one you already linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions of the first kind seem to tread over the line into requests for peer-review, which are off-topic here, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7516/50583&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;. If you manage to ask a question about &quot;Why can X not work?&quot; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; effectively asking us to perform peer-review on a paper that claims X can work, then it's probably on-topic, but for many non-mainstream claims that will not be possible. We are not &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Skeptics&lt;/a&gt;, our mission is to teach accepted science, not to fact-check or peer-review spurious statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second type of questions about &quot;proposing a new paradigm&quot; is clearly off-topic by the current policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T10:51:09.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T09:17:56.450" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333489/&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt;, but it was declared a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/35431/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2838/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7060/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but none of them answered what I originally had in mind. [probably my mistake, the question must have been poorly worded]. I edited but to no avail. So I decided to ask an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333582/&quot;&gt;altogether different question&lt;/a&gt;, but unfortunately I decided to link the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333489/&quot;&gt;older question&lt;/a&gt;. This lead to a slight confusion, ending up in the closing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333582/&quot;&gt;my new question&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333489/&quot;&gt;my old one&lt;/a&gt;. Now the end result has been that both questions are closed. What do I do to get answers to my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148764" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T12:52:10.943" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T12:52:10.943" Title="A slight confusion in resubmitting of a closed question (a genuine attempt to re-word the original)" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T13:03:05.843" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the time when people ask Homework Related questions they are put on hold.They ask for our work on the question.&#xA;Sometimes we all face the situation that we don't even know how to proceed further in a question and its impossible to show working in such cases.&#xA;Why most of the people don't understand it and put our questions on hold?&#xA;I think it would be better if they just give some hints to proceed and not even the entire answer .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141464" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T16:12:48.007" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:24:27.667" Title="How to provide working for the question if we don't even know how to proceed in a question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9864" CreationDate="2017-05-17T13:14:40.533" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that showing your work has barely nothing to do with the on-topic-ness of the post. If the question is off-topic, it will be closed whether you show your work or not. Some people tend to suggest OP to show their work because that might lead to a &lt;em&gt;conceptual question&lt;/em&gt;, if one exists within the post (at least implicitly). But this is not an official policy: it might help, but in general it does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is closed as off-topic, make it on-topic by turning it into a conceptual question (such that it will be useful to a larger audience, that is, to other users not working on the exact same problem as you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see someone else's question closed as off-topic, don't suggest them to show their work - that rarely helps. Instead, link them to some of the manifold posts here on Meta where the on-topic-ness of homework questions has been discussed. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T13:14:40.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9864" CreationDate="2017-05-17T16:24:27.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not a site for providing homework help.&lt;/strong&gt; Fundamentally, that's why a lot of homework questions get closed. If your immediate reason for asking a question is that you are trying to solve a problem on a homework assignment (or contest, exam, review, any sort of educational exercise) and you want help getting to the solution, this is the wrong place to be asking. We've decided on this policy because there are plenty of other homework help sites there already (we try to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;a partial list&lt;/a&gt;), because low-quality homework questions tend to drive away a significant fraction of the experts who we really want to participate in this site, and because the question-and-answer model of Stack Exchange is not particularly well suited to actually helping most people who are working on homework-like problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we can't always tell whether someone's motivation is really seeking homework help. We've tried to make some more concrete criteria that allow people to tell (with some accuracy, hopefully) whether this is the case, and that's why you'll see all this discussion about showing work and asking conceptual questions. But at its core, the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; for the hostility to homework questions is that we are not in the business of helping people in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:24:27.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-05-18T00:24:39.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close reason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions are supposed to both show a &lt;strong&gt;certain level of one's own research and thinking&lt;/strong&gt; and potential answers are supposed to be &lt;strong&gt;relevant or useful to a broader audience&lt;/strong&gt;. This question has therefore been closed as &lt;strong&gt;too specific&lt;/strong&gt; - focused on one problem with no broader context. Try rewording your question so it is more conceptual in nature. See our meta post for more guidance.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Link to appropriate policy to be added once said post is completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T00:24:39.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-05-18T00:25:58.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What to call it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;too specific&quot; policy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T00:25:58.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-05-18T00:33:44.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta post on homework policy: the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are homework questions allowed on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are homework questions allowed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I do if I want to ask a homework question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this is exactly the same as the one proposed by Emilio Pisanty &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5180/121464&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - I think it's pretty clear why the question shouldn't change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T00:33:44.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9872" CreationDate="2017-05-18T00:35:55.530" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333871/132157&quot;&gt;The proper use of the terminology of forces and interactions in The Theory of Relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I have a feeling should be off-topic, but I cannot really localize a specific help center guideline or meta answer that would pinpoint why, so I refrained from flagging it and/or commenting on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Too localized?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; about physics?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132157" LastEditorUserId="132157" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T00:54:25.517" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T01:10:20.153" Title="This site is not a scientific writting forum/publication support service?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-05-18T00:45:05.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta post on homework policy: the answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;The short version:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Homework questions are not allowed on this site. If you can identify the concept you're having trouble with and ask a question about it,&#xA;    then we'll be happy to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;What kinds of questions are considered homework questions?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is a question about a set problem instead of the&#xA;  concepts behind it. This includes questions from actual homework&#xA;  assignments and textbooks, as well as self-study problems, puzzles,&#xA;  etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The general purpose of our policy regarding homework questions is to prevent people from asking questions specific only to their specific situation. This is a good general rule of thumb: if you or someone doing your specific problem are the only people who would benefit from your question, it is probably too specific and not conceptual enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Can I ask a homework question here?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This site is for &lt;strong&gt;conceptual physics questions&lt;/strong&gt;. It is OK&#xA;  to ask a conceptual question if it comes up while doing a homework or&#xA;  self-study problem, but questions about such assignments are generally&#xA;  off-topic. Keep in mind that &lt;strong&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is not a&#xA;  homework help site&lt;/strong&gt;, and it takes more than just showing your work&#xA;  for your question to be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;What should I do if I want to ask a homework question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Identify the concept you're having trouble with&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is crucial that you ask about the specific concept that's giving you trouble. Questions asking us to check your work, asking for&#xA;  hints, tips, or how to solve a homework-like question, or which simply&#xA;  re-state a textbook problem, are not well received and will be closed. If you ask about the concept, instead, you produce a&#xA;  resource that is more relevant to others who might have the same&#xA;  problem later, and additionally you provide grounds for a more&#xA;  interesting answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you find you can't change your question into one that's about the topic you're studying, rather than the specific problem you're&#xA;  trying to solve, you may need to go back to your textbook or teacher&#xA;  to look for a general explanation. If you just need someone to check&#xA;  your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See if an existing question helps you&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Check and see if someone has already asked a question that gives you the information you need. The search box at the top right corner&#xA;  of the page will be pretty useful here. You can also try looking at&#xA;  tags that are relevant to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you find a prior question that seems relevant but doesn't clear up your confusion, mention it and provide a link when you write your&#xA;  own question. That gives the people answering a better idea of what&#xA;  kinds of explanations don't work for you, and what might be more&#xA;  effective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference the source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have a conceptual question that's based on a homework problem, you should still provide the original problem. This is to&#xA;  provide context to your question, and makes it easier to answer. If&#xA;  this comes from a textbook you should include the book and the problem&#xA;  number. Quote the original problem in full, as it may provide crucial&#xA;  information that you might have missed. Again, this should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be&#xA;  the entire content of the post, but rather a useful piece of context&#xA;  for your real question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is OK to ask a conceptual question that is embedded in your solution to a homework problem and depends on that context. You should&#xA;  provide your working to the problem, and you should ensure that you&#xA;  make clear what your conceptual question is. Do this &lt;em&gt;visually&lt;/em&gt; as&#xA;  well: it will do wonders in helping answerers navigate your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about a homework assignment, or any sort of work under a honor code, you should check with your instructor and&#xA;  with your learning institution (middle school, high school, college,&#xA;  etc.) whether it's OK to consult other people before posting your&#xA;  question. Your institution may also have an honor code or rules and&#xA;  regulations, as well as specific class policies, on whether you can&#xA;  post the exact question on the internet, and you should check before&#xA;  you post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do a sanity check.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is your question applicable or useful to people other than those taking your class or doing your homework problem? If it isn't, it may be too specific to the problem, and not conceptual enough.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;What should I do if my question was put on hold, or closed, as homework?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question was put on hold, or closed, as homework, you will see&#xA;  the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Questions are supposed to both show a certain level of one's own research and thinking and potential answers are supposed to be relevant or useful to a broader audience. This question has therefore been closed as too specific - focused on one problem with no broader context. Try rewording your question so it is more conceptual in nature. See our meta post for more guidance.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This usually happens if the conceptual question you're having trouble&#xA;  with is not clear, or if it looks like you're asking us to 'do your&#xA;  homework for you'. In this case, you should do all you can to make it&#xA;  crystal clear what concept you're struggling with. It can also happen&#xA;  that it simply isn't clear what you want us to answer, in which case&#xA;  you should make that clear as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you don't understand why your question was put on hold or closed,&#xA;  you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;leave a&#xA;  comment&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  below your question asking for clarification. (You can always comment&#xA;  on your questions and any of their answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Examples&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Good:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14571/can-the-process-u-overlineu-rightarrow-s-overlines-be-mediated-by-the-em&quot;&gt;Can the process $u\overline{u} \rightarrow s\overline{s}$ be mediated by the EM interaction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/86289/probability-of-different-states-canonical-ensemble-partition-function&quot;&gt;Probability of Different States - Canonical Ensemble - Partition Function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13208/mechanics-thermodynamics-bouncing-ball&quot;&gt;Mechanics + Thermodynamics: Bouncing Ball&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23071/find-the-net-force-the-southern-hemisphere-of-a-uniformly-charged-sphere-exerts&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Find the net force the southern hemisphere of a uniformly charged sphere exerts on the northern hemisphere&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/62669/trace-and-adjoint-representation-of-sun&quot;&gt;Trace and adjoint representation of $SU(N)$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3705/charge-density-in-concentric-spheres&quot;&gt;Charge density in concentric spheres&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57261/find-x-operator-given-p&quot;&gt;Find $\hat{x}$ operator given $\hat{p}$ operator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These questions are based on homework problems but they make it clear&#xA;  what the specific conceptual question is that they're about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Bad:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/79669/basic-physics-question&quot;&gt;Basic Physics Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83317/are-dc-and-ac-currents-produce-electric-field&quot;&gt;Are dc and ac currents produce electric field?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31832/lennard-jones-potential-equilibrium&quot;&gt;Lennard-Jones potential - equilibrium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20828/evaluating-transition-probability-between-different-states-of-hydrogen-atom&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20828/evaluating-transition-probability-between-different-states-of-hydrogen-atom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20763/force-and-laws-of-motion&quot;&gt;Force and Laws of Motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17852/basic-free-fall-problem&quot;&gt;Basic Free Fall Problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These questions are simply restatements of homework problems, don't&#xA;  show any effort put into solving the problem, and don't go beyond&#xA;  obtaining a solution to the set assignment. They are too specific to&#xA;  be of use to anybody except the person asking, and that makes them&#xA;  inappropriate for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: derived from Emilio Pisanty's work &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5185/121464&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;*Or whichever close reason we choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T00:45:05.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2017-05-18T01:10:20.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;close vote privilege&lt;/a&gt; have the option of writing out a custom close reason for special cases like this (which I used when I put the question on hold); the close reason is posted as a comment to the question and counts as an ordinary close vote.&#xA;If you think a question should be closed but can't quite articulate why, you can also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flag&lt;/a&gt; the question as &quot;should be closed&quot; without worrying too much about the reason why; that puts the question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt; and you can let the community decide whether the question is on-topic or not and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T01:10:20.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T13:19:08.630" Score="-16" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I ask a question on this site, the community deals with it in a strange way, such as closing it, marking it as a duplicate, deleting it, or voting down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that this only happens to me or happened to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this feels as if someone tells you to shut up and ask only mainstream physics questions, or whatever. I do not want to change anything here&#xA;but I have two questions about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it polite to manage site like this?! Physicists are people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the quality of the questions raised by this policy? As far as I can see the quality of questions on this site is very low, and has dropped every year.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26665" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T18:15:50.623" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T18:15:50.623" Title="Why are many of my questions closed?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9873" CreationDate="2017-05-18T16:37:46.540" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without specific instances, it is hard to say. But I have looked through your list of questions available to me (you may have deleted more, but I can't see those), I challenge your assertions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of 27 questions you have asked, 7 have been marked as duplicate or off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3 of these questions were asked in 2014. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I agree with the close reasons on all of them, except maybe one, but I don't know enough in the area to be comfortable distinguishing between the marked duplicate and the edited question as posed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only 5 &lt;em&gt;total&lt;/em&gt; questions have a net negative score, all of which are at -1. Meanwhile, your most positive question is at +35. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given all that, I see very little to substantiate claims of being picked on or conspired against. I also don't see anything to indicate somebody was rude to you, unless you perceive close messages as rude. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, to answer your two questions -- yes, this is a polite way to run the site because it doesn't appear anybody was untoward or rude. And yes, this does keep the quality of the questions up, but since there's no objective metric to define that, the discussion in that area will just devolve to personal opinions and it's not a fruitful direction to venture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T16:37:46.540" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T18:32:21.547" Score="-6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my question &#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/333994/&quot;&gt;Why do some people claim that quantum physics and General relativity theory will never get along?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what it called  duplicate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/387/&quot;&gt;A list of inconveniences between quantum mechanics and (general) relativity?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone show me any mathematical equation in duplicate!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is an example of how this site suppress certain users for some unknown reasons (But probably for political reasons) &#xA;As far as I can see my question have been censored&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26665" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T23:05:11.170" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T23:05:11.170" Title="Can anyone show me any mathematical equation in duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9875" CreationDate="2017-05-18T20:02:04.883" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/399/44126&quot;&gt;most-upvoted answer to that question&lt;/a&gt; is a great example of &lt;em&gt;discussing&lt;/em&gt; mathematics as opposed to &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; mathematics.  The meat of the answer is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[T]he real problem is not so much nonrenormalizability as high-energy behavior inconsistent with local quantum field theory. ... With gravity, this high-energy/short-distance correspondence breaks down. ... This tells us that quantum gravity, at very high energies, is not a quantum field theory in the traditional sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with demanding &quot;an equation&quot; is that each sentence in this brief summary concerns concepts that require years of study to answer in a mathematically rigorous way. What's meant by &quot;a quantum field theory in the traditional sense?&quot; by &quot;nonrenormalizability&quot;? by &quot;high-energy/short-distance correspondence&quot;? The existing answer does a nice job of explaining these, but much more depth is really beyond the scope of what this site can do in a single post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you have a question about one of those &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; issues, you might edit your question to clarify which one. But as it is, I think the other answer addresses your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T20:02:04.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T21:48:47.863" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't it be helpful to provide a link under the text box, shown while asking questions or writing answers, to the meta page dealing with MathJax commands: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&lt;/a&gt;  for the &lt;strong&gt;mobile site&lt;/strong&gt; also?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not only difficult but also tiresome to find out the MathJax commands for each and every math formulae, and one has to either store the above link in the bookmarks, or find it out somehow, because it is not always possible for one to remember all the commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, new comers accessing the site from mobile know nothing about this, and that is why under most questions posted by a new comer, we have to post comments like &quot;Please use MathJax to format the equations&quot; or edit it ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new feature, if added, will not only help the new ones, but also the others, because sometimes one may forget the commands, and then it is a whole lot of exercise to find the meta page again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request this feature specifically for &lt;strong&gt;mobile agent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="149663" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T17:40:43.213" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T18:52:56.033" Title="Link to meta page for guide to MathJax commands under text fields (specifically for user agent mobile)" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2017-05-18T22:12:33.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Help center&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions that are overly specific and inapplicable to a broader audience, including (among other types of questions) homework problems.&lt;/strong&gt; On Physics Stack Exchange, questions should be conceptual in nature and relevant to many different people. Questions about how to solve a homework problem or how to solve a specific problem that might come up in one's research aren't allowed here, while questions that focus more on the conceptual ideas behind the problem are. You can find more information on our meta site.*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Link to appropriate policy to be added once said post is completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T22:12:33.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-19T05:28:01.260" Score="5" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we vote a question to migrate away to a different SE site, there is also a non-trivial and lesser known requirement (documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work/10250#10250&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The question needs to have a tag, which exists also on the target site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it doesn't, the migration will be automatically rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule is one of the numerous obstacles with what the SE tries to minimize the number of the question migrations, on unclear reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently we can vote to migrate only to the MathSE and to the Physics Meta (that we can select only from a short, pre-defined list of the target sites, and only mods can migrate a question to anywhere, is another mysterious obstacle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 99 tags existing on both the MathSE and the PSE, these are (generated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/672910/most-common-tags-on-both-of-physics-se-and-math-se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tag                        #Math #Physics&#xA;-----------------------------------------&#xA;algebraic-geometry         13316       27&#xA;algorithm                   6544       58&#xA;algorithms                  6544       58&#xA;analyticity                  664       41&#xA;asymptotics                 4335       37&#xA;bifurcation                  150        5&#xA;big-list                    1056       38&#xA;biology                      176      538&#xA;books                      11135     1178&#xA;brownian-motion             1776       88&#xA;calculus                   68438      248&#xA;category-theory             6188       37&#xA;celestial-mechanics           14      305&#xA;cellular-automata             58       36&#xA;chaos-theory                 262      163&#xA;chemistry                     90      473&#xA;classical-mechanics          837     3473&#xA;compactification              42      126&#xA;complex-numbers             8816      278&#xA;coordinate-systems          1622      592&#xA;covariance                   716      216&#xA;curvature                    728      537&#xA;data-analysis                536      190&#xA;definition                  7545      517&#xA;derivatives                14310      424&#xA;differential-equations     21151      267&#xA;differential-geometry      13936     1418&#xA;differentiation            14310      424&#xA;dimensional-analysis         138      390&#xA;dynamical-systems           2790      112&#xA;education                   2043      568&#xA;electromagnetism              62     7173&#xA;entropy                      575     1017&#xA;error-propagation            188      322&#xA;estimation                   797      337&#xA;faq                           73       27&#xA;field-theory                6397      793&#xA;fluid-dynamics               465     2903&#xA;foundations                  575       71&#xA;fourier-transform            909      538&#xA;fractals                     596       34&#xA;gauge-theory                  91      838&#xA;general-relativity           289     5079&#xA;geometric-topology           737      376&#xA;geometry                   23204      422&#xA;graph-theory               11449       28&#xA;group-theory               24648      680&#xA;image-processing             358       33&#xA;induction                   4999      502&#xA;integrable-systems            41       73&#xA;integration                35037      430&#xA;kinematics                   159     1751&#xA;laplace-transform           2014      540&#xA;lie-algebra                 2895      392&#xA;linear-algebra             59666      316&#xA;mathematical-physics        1902     1420&#xA;metric                      7230      884&#xA;mnemonic                      23        7&#xA;network                      142       23&#xA;noise                         96      111&#xA;notation                    6208      499&#xA;optimization                9070       40&#xA;parity                       121      161&#xA;pedagogy                    2043      570&#xA;percolation                   61       20&#xA;perturbation-theory          334      389&#xA;probability                47334      487&#xA;quantum-computation           99      413&#xA;quantum-field-theory         161     5627&#xA;quantum-information           38     1274&#xA;quantum-mechanics            578    12135&#xA;reference-request          11135     1178&#xA;reflection                   230      707&#xA;regularization               137      200&#xA;representation-theory       4333      422&#xA;signal-processing           1100      148&#xA;simulation                   317      571&#xA;singularity                  185      342&#xA;soft-question               7188     1091&#xA;special-functions           2700       17&#xA;special-relativity             7     4174&#xA;spherical-harmonics          152       83&#xA;spinor                        71      349&#xA;statistical-mechanics        132     2294&#xA;statistics                 17114      248&#xA;steady-state                  17       17&#xA;stochastic-processes        6932       67&#xA;string-theory                 40     1510&#xA;superalgebra                  19       39&#xA;symmetry                     566     1006&#xA;teaching                    2043      568&#xA;tensors                     1360      885&#xA;terminology                 4235     1015&#xA;tqft                           3      229&#xA;trace                        584       57&#xA;vector-fields                580      358&#xA;vectors                     4779      807&#xA;visualization                446       69&#xA;volume                      1379      146&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you vote a question to migrate to the MathSE, please check if it has at least one of these tags, and add one of them if it has not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T20:44:11.263" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T20:44:11.263" Title="To make successful question migrations, we need also proper tagging" Tags="|discussion|tags|migration|retagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9877" CreationDate="2017-05-19T13:31:02.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer addresses &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/9877/1&quot;&gt;v1 of the question&lt;/a&gt;, which asked about the desktop version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean this link,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/please-link-the-mathjax-help-to-the-meta-math-se-tutorial&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vfP1W.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/please-link-the-mathjax-help-to-the-meta-math-se-tutorial&quot;&gt;already links to the meta.math.se tutorial&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean something else, then you should clarify where else you would like those links to be placed. However, if your goal is helping first-time users who have never used the site, keep in mind that &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/treating-user-myopia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;user myopia&lt;/a&gt; is a very real thing. Unless you can work out a way to put that link somewhere in this area,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/treating-user-myopia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e1ojK.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it will be invisible to most new users. And, if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to put it there, then I would also ask how you're going to make it unintrusive for the large population of users who already know how to format their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T17:47:46.247" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T17:47:46.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9846" CreationDate="2017-05-19T18:34:28.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a question may not explicitly ask about a concept - the OP may not understand the issue well enough to distill the problem that way. That doesn't prevent you from giving a conceptual answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question you link, this is demonstrated by John's answer. He shows that the underlying principle (&quot;resolve the directions of the forces&quot;) provides insight that will allow you to solve this question, and other questions like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short - the answer can be a &quot;hint&quot;, but it's better if it explains the principle that allows you to solve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T18:34:28.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9883" CreationDate="2017-05-21T19:26:58.913" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a few months Latex is not displayed anymore on my Firefox on Linux. It's still displayed on Wikipedia and many other websites though, only Physics Stack Exchange (and a Physics forum) seem to have this problem. I do have some extensions, but even when I disable all of them, Latex is still not displayed. So I do have javascript enabled. I'm wondering what I need to enable (in about:config I suppose) to make Latex work here. Any idea what could be the culprit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75916" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T21:03:02.653" Title="Latex isn't displayed since a few months (Firefox on Linux), what does Latex need to be displayed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9882" CreationDate="2017-05-21T21:03:02.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could be related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/294710/56541&quot;&gt;MathJax CDN switch&lt;/a&gt;, which occurred last month. If so, you'll have to make sure &lt;code&gt;cdnjs.cloudflare.com&lt;/code&gt; is whitelisted in any script blocker you may be using, and you might as well clear the browser cache while you're at it too. (I don't know how that could really help, but it can't hurt.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T21:03:02.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9885" CreationDate="2017-05-23T16:50:00.370" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to search in comments, along with searching in questions and answers?  I suspect the answer is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;.  I think that would be a very useful option to have in the advanced search.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45664" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T08:30:19.277" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T08:30:19.277" Title="Is it possible to search in comments?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9884" CreationDate="2017-05-23T16:59:58.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no on-site mechanism owning to the intentionally second-class status of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I really must search comments I use google with the &lt;code&gt;site:physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; specifier, but you often have to search through a very large number of results. The more comprehensive the list of keywords you can provide the better. Also include the username if you know it (say when searching your own comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T16:59:58.727" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9884" CreationDate="2017-05-23T22:36:49.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to dmckee's answer, which is generally quite reliable, if you can't find what you're looking for, then variants of &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/675047/comment-search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt; might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T22:36:49.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-25T20:44:41.267" Score="-2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed this feature of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Overflow&lt;/a&gt; that there is a tab called &quot;Submit a Paper&quot;. What it essentially means is that one can submit a paper that has been previously published (either on arXiv or otherwise) for review. People post their reviews as well as upvote or downvote the paper on two parameters separately - originality and accuracy. We can change the details, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this feature attractive as I think that not only the reviews expressed there will enhance the experience of reading the paper and getting more physics out of it but it can also give junior researchers or students some insight as to how a seasoned eye reads a paper and how to write better papers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it is not an aim of Physics SE to train people to write good papers but as I said, the major benefit is the enhanced experience of reading a paper and getting more physics out of it. The secondary benefit would be to learn how to analyze and write papers. A third benefit would be that it will create a very good repository of interesting papers. Can we introduce this feature in Physics SE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T23:04:25.417" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T23:04:25.417" Title="Can we introduce the &quot;Submit a Published Paper for Review&quot; feature in Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-05-25T22:45:10.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pefiz.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciRate&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T22:45:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9887" CreationDate="2017-05-25T23:03:09.187" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be blunt: no. We don't have the numbers to do this effectively, not by an order of magnitude at the very least, we would be actively harming other efforts to do similar things, there's no guarantee that it can even work to begin with, and the proposal is moot unless you can come up with someone to write the code for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me start with the more prosaic side: there's just simply no one to write the code. The kind of feature you're proposing entails, at the very least, many months of dev-team time, and you can pretty much take it as a given that Stack Exchange won't provide it. From one perspective, they are a business and they can only invest in things with a revenue stream associated with it, but to be fair they have been really awesome at building high-quality software mostly in the spirit of making the internet better, and finding non-intrusive ways of monetizing it a good while after it's been built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, SE has a very clear mindset and anything that takes away time and energy from the core emphasis on Q&amp;amp;A (beyond the jobs site, which does come with a healthy revenue stream) has been politely but firmly declined. So: unless you have a workable proposal of how that software is going to come into existence, the point is a non-starter to begin with. But let's ignore this and focus on all the other reasons this cannot work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, and as I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7516/is-physics-se-an-appropriate-location-for-peer-review&quot;&gt;said before&lt;/a&gt;, this community simply does not have the numbers to implement this at any kind of scale where it would begin to become self-sustaining. Reviewing a paper takes a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; more work than bashing out an answer on the Q&amp;amp;A main - I can think of maybe two or three answers that have taken longer than a referee report. Writing a review is not a trivial task: it requires that you thoroughly understand the paper, a clear vision of the field, and a commitment to doing it fairly. In my experience doing one in less than one full workday is a pipe dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, reviews also have a much reduced field of potential answerers: the proportion of site users that can write useful reviews is small to begin with, and moreover the scope of topics that each user can review in is smaller than the topics they can answer in. This leaves you with very few people, whom you want to ask for a lot of work - and it's just not going to come together in scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned PhysicsOverflow, and indeed they have gone out and built the software for that platform. Do they have the numbers? That's something for people to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/questions/refereeing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;judge for themselves&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't think they do - at the moment I count 22 reviews out of 120+ requests, and I would argue that to the extent that they have managed to build a reviewing community, it's because they have followed in the footsteps of the old Theoretical Physics SE site by focusing exclusively on a rather narrow stretch of QFT and related topics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, though: doing a half-hearted attempt at this kind of thing is actively harmful, and it detracts energy and attention from other projects that are trying to do pretty much the same thing. What you're talking about is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;open peer review&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and it's been a huge part of the conversations on open access and reforming the peer review system over the past decade or two. It's not a new idea, and the reason it hasn't come together is that it's a hard problem to crack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a relatively large number of initiatives regarding open peer review, though most of them are tied to specific journals. However, the platform you propose is pretty much precisely (part of) the platforms over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SciRate&lt;/a&gt; and at &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxitics.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv Analytics&lt;/a&gt; (though the latter doesn't look very healthy at the moment, unfortunately). Those platforms put the peer review at the place where it's most natural - next to the papers themselves. Doing it on SE would have a strong disconnect from that infrastructure, making the reviews less discoverable, which would in turn make the platform less useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've previously run community ads for both arXiv Analytics and for SciRate (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7462/8563&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7463/8563&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for their 2016 incarnations). I'm not sure why there wasn't a 2017 version of the SciRate one but it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9888/8563&quot;&gt;now up&lt;/a&gt;; you can re-post the arXiv Analytics one but frankly the site does not look healthy right now. If people find similar platforms I'm always happy to cook up community ads for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, though: this is a tough space to build platforms in, and this site is pretty much guaranteed to fail: moreover, if it does, it just adds one more ghost town to the mix, one more precedent of how it's just not doable and how we should just stick to the good old closed peer review, and one bit less enthusiasm in reforming scientific institutions that really are in very dire need of reform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, finally - would this kind of site really be as useful as you think it would be? In large part, what makes this Q&amp;amp;A work well (and also what makes traditional peer review work, too) is that there is a relatively clear audience that one is writing for, but that's a lot more hazy with the section you propose, which means that the reviews get harder to write and they become less useful to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the goal a review-on-demand kind of marketplace where Bob needs an expert point-of-view on paper X and requests it? Even if you could get that to work, I strongly suspect that if Alice comes along and writes that review, by the time Charlie comes around with questions on that same paper, they will find Alice's review to be suboptimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, is the goal to build out a repository of good papers? Frankly, that's looking at it backwards - if you want a good collection of papers, find an antology or a review or a book. Or are you building a repository of nice reviews of nice papers? If the papers were already nice, why are you reading the reviews and not the papers? Or are you looking for a good collection of reviews that take apart the section of the literature that's incorrect and patch it up, thereby fixing science? This might sound hyperbolic, but I frankly don't understand what sort of value would accrue to that collection of reviews, who would go in to browse that collection, and what they would get out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if what you want is just to get a nice analysis of how a paper is written and lessons to learn from them to write your own papers later - then frankly the first port of call is a critical reading of the scientific literature you yourself consume, but more generally what you're looking for is a blog post, from the wide variety that are already out in the physics blogosphere, so go out there and look for them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T23:03:09.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9892" CreationDate="2017-05-26T17:40:04.470" Score="-5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently answered the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/335554/find-the-vector-position-of-a-moving-object&quot;&gt;Find the vector position of a moving object&lt;/a&gt;. The question surely isn't well-stated and seems like a straight-forward homework question. Two problems: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) What I don't understand is the strict &quot;no homework questions&quot; on this site. Firstly, Stack Exchange aims to be an archive of knowledge where questions are not only answered to benefit the person asking the question but to build up a database of knowledge. Of course questions have to be well-asked with a description where you are stuck and what you've already tried. Questions that aren't within the scope of the site (off-topic does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that the question isn't well-asked or a homework question, it simply means that the question isn't about physics) should be tried to be improved and not simply ignored / downvoted / whatsoever. Maybe the mods here should look at the homework policy over at Maths StackExchange, where it isn't as strict and leads to more question that can be helpful to people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Why do you have to delete answers to homework questions? That's just childish behaviour and doesn't benefit anybody. What would be the reason to do so? The author of the question didn't ask a good question, sure. But deleting answers shows that you haven't understood what this site is all about. Not only the thread author is meant to benefit from such an answer, but anybody having the same problem. &lt;em&gt;Improve questions like that (the edit/comment button is there for a reason and don't delete work of other people&lt;/em&gt;. My answer was deleted by the user &quot;rob&quot; who didn't do anything to improve the answer. No comment, no edit, nothing. If you are not willing to contribute meaningfully, then why delete answers? That's just childish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homework policy (1) on specific subsites of StackExchange is debatable and of course depends on individual opinion. Just deleting answers randomly (2) is not and doesn't improve anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124437" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:28:27.087" Title="Deleting answers to &quot;Homework questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9890" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:04:43.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether you agree with the homework policy or not, you have to accept that there is one: the community has decided that we/they don't want this kind of questions here. This is just how it is - you can either try to fight against the policy, learn to accept it, or leave the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, and as long as the policy is in force, answers and hints to homework questions are against the rules, because they only serve to encourage this kind of questions. Therefore, the corresponding answers are typically downvoted/deleted. That is the correct - as far as the official policy is concerned - procedure to deal with homework posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, as long as this is an official policy, you'll have to live by it. If you don't like it, protest the policy itself or move on with your life. But you cannot/should not complain that a particular answer of yours was deleted, because that is the correct procedure to deal with homework posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:04:43.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9890" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:28:27.087" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason we delete answers to homework questions is because we wish to deter the asking of such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who wants to cheat isn't going to care whether their answer gets downvoted or closed, or whether they get negative comments to it. They just want an answer that they can write into their homework. And as long as they keep getting answers they are going to keep coming back and asking homework questions. If you answer a homework question you encourage the asking of such questions and make this site a worse place for people who have a genuine interest in physics. That's why your answer got deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is endless debate about what constitutes &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; and where to draw the boundary, and I'm generally pretty sympathetic if I think the OP is genuinely trying to learn. After all I have a gold badge awarded for 1,000 upvotes to answers tagged as &lt;em&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/em&gt; so I can hardly be tarred as an anti-homework zealot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in this case I thought the question was a blatant example of the &lt;em&gt;I can't be bothered with this&lt;/em&gt; school of homework cheat, so I voted to close it and I flagged your answer to the moderators as an answer to a homework question. Whether the OP saw your answer before it was deleted who knows. Oh well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth let me make clear this isn't a criticism of your answer, which I thought was very nicely explained. In your place I would keep that answer to hand as the issues involved are bound to come up again, and that answer would be a great help to someone genuinely trying to learn about vectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:28:27.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T22:07:04.667" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to tackle an teensy tiny bit of the homework debate: &lt;strong&gt;How many people set the homework tag on their ignore list as a way to improve their experience of the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the arguments for keeping the tag around, but there's not much to go on regarding how important this mechanism is, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9762&quot;&gt;the latest go-round of the discussion includes suggestions that it should be removed&lt;/a&gt;, which on some counts wouldn't be a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: there's two answers below; vote on the one that describes you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do have the tag on ignore, I would also like to ask that you disable that for a bit and see how the site feels without it, and add an answer here with your experience. If it turns out that there's a nontrivial fraction of high-value answerers that would find the site much less interesting if the tag were eliminated, then that's an important data point. On the flipside, if there is a population of users that actively looks for homework-tagged questions to answer, then that is also important to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and it should go without saying, but it's worth spelling out: this is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; unscientific polling method and the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. The relative weight between the two options is obviously not very meaningful, since there's a huge default inertia on not ignoring the tag. However, I think there's a reasonable chance of filling in the data point from the paragraph above, so let's give this a go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T22:09:11.187" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T13:24:23.100" Title="Poll: do you ignore the homework tag?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9893" CreationDate="2017-05-26T22:07:04.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, I've got the tag on ignore.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if this is the case. &lt;strong&gt;To keep the numbers clean, please don't downvote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T15:25:00.793" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T15:25:00.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9893" CreationDate="2017-05-26T22:07:23.003" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, I don't have the tag on ignore.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if this is the case. To keep the numbers clean, please don't downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\quad$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T19:42:00.340" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T19:42:00.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9893" CreationDate="2017-05-27T17:19:28.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, I was not aware that this was possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if this is the case. To keep the numbers clean, please don't downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T17:19:28.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-28T12:33:40.073" Score="29" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been noted in the past, particularly in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/question-self-destruction-why-dont-experts-ask-more-questions&quot;&gt;Question self-destruction: why don't experts ask more questions?&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6589/does-reputation-correlate-with-the-question-to-answer-ratio&quot;&gt;Does reputation correlate with the question-to-answer ratio?&lt;/a&gt;, and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8849/few-questions-by-medium-and-high-reputation-participants-edited-how-to-get-mo&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, this site has the peculiarity that, in overwhelming proportion, our 'expert' users, by multiple measures, tend to ask very few questions. Now, whether this is a 'bad' thing or not is debatable, but I think most people would agree that it would probably be beneficial to the site's level and interestingness if more of our 'expert' users asked more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I just passed a question-asking milestone (I am as of today the single recipient of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/196/socratic&quot;&gt;socratic&lt;/a&gt; badge in the first three pages of the rep table), and I'd like to use the occasion to have a critical look at my question-asking history and pick out patterns and question types that I think would benefit the site, and the internet at large, if they saw more widespread use from our more experienced users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I'm increasingly bugged by arguments along the lines of &quot;but I'm &lt;em&gt;paid&lt;/em&gt; to ask questions&quot;, which can be seen e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4574&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (and heck, which I've repeated myself, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8849#comment32751_8849&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but which on further inspection just don't work. For one, the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, a place with very high-quality content powered by people whose day jobs typically include asking questions, pokes a gaping hole in that argument. More generally, though, if you tune your antennas to the right frequency, there's plenty of questions to be had about the world - many more than can rightfully fit inside anyone's research programme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, I think that good questions improve the site and by extension they do improve the internet. For many of the patterns below, they're things that I could probably have worked out on my own (or just let go without following them up), but for which I think the Q&amp;amp;A threads they've left behind form a valuable lasting resource that benefits everyone in the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, without further ado, here are some ways to ask questions that I think are perfectly compatible with the life of an 'expert' user of this site (in the various meanings of the term) which I think would be very valuable if they were used more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nagging, persistent question that you've never really had the time to get around to researching, and which isn't really crucial to your research anyways. Let's face it: you're never going to get round to looking it up, but if you ask it here you can both get an answer and help a generation of students behind you to avoid that hurdle. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/227960/do-free-electron-lasers-actually-lase&quot;&gt;Do free-electron lasers actually lase?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that spring out during teaching, either during preparation or during interaction with students. There's nothing quite like teaching a subject to make you aware of the holes in how you learned it, and students' questions can often point out weak spots in how some topic is taught over a wide range of textbooks - so that a Q&amp;amp;A addressing that can be a very valuable learning resource for a wide population of students. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130800/what-is-the-physical-meaning-of-commutators-in-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;What is the physical meaning of commutators in quantum mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions which arise from reading about recent developments in the scientific press. This often happens with parts of the literature one isn't all that familiar with, but where one can often point out loose ends that are left hanging by the scientific press and that are not easy to puzzle out from the primary literature, and where a decisive Q&amp;amp;A here would be a good resource for the rest of the internet. Moreover, as an instructor, one is sometimes better placed than the students to ask the question in an optimized form that will draw out better answers. Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83633/can-we-infer-the-existence-of-periodic-solutions-to-the-three-body-problem-from&quot;&gt;Can we infer the existence of periodic solutions to the three-body problem from numerical evidence?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76339/why-are-pear-shaped-nuclei-possible&quot;&gt;Why are pear-shaped nuclei possible?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/96131/cloud-maps-of-a-nearby-brown-dwarf-what-do-they-actually-show&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Cloud maps&amp;quot; of a nearby brown dwarf: what do they actually show?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that arise from reading the primary literature closer to your field, but where you could use a wider perspective or a closer reading from someone with more experience. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/111486/optical-chirality-and-its-possible-hierarchy-of-generalizations&quot;&gt;Optical chirality and its possible hierarchy of generalizations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions drilling down on the specifics where the available information on a relevant topic is very vague, and where a good overview would be beneficial to everyone. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/147433/what-are-the-proposed-realizations-in-the-new-si-for-the-kilogram-ampere-kelvi&quot;&gt;What are the proposed realizations in the New SI for the kilogram, ampere, kelvin and mole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The focused self-answered Q&amp;amp;A: places where there's a specific technical point that repeatedly gets lost in the telling in most mainstream resources, and where adding a well-documented Q&amp;amp;A can help put the issue to bed. Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/212614/how-does-one-account-for-the-momentum-of-an-absorbed-photon&quot;&gt;How does one account for the momentum of an absorbed photon?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/224836/are-orbitals-observable-physical-quantities-in-a-many-electron-setting&quot;&gt;Are orbitals observable physical quantities in a many-electron setting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sprawling self-answered Q&amp;amp;A: places where there's a gap in the existing coverage and you feel qualified to (and have the time to) do an in-depth dive into the topic, and essentially write a blog post for future reference. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/77690/square-bracket-notation-for-dimensions-and-units-usage-and-conventions&quot;&gt;Square bracket notation for dimensions and units: usage and conventions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The follow-up question: you see a nice question (or a nice answer) and you see that there is some aspect which is also interesting but which isn't addressed in the existing answers, and for which a follow-up post forms a valuable complement. Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/275571/how-long-does-a-positron-last-in-the-suns-core&quot;&gt;How long does a positron last in the Sun&amp;#39;s core?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/333371/how-much-variability-was-there-in-the-o-16-atomic-mass-standard-and-how-does-it&quot;&gt;How much variability was there in the O=16 atomic mass standard, and how does it compare to the shift to the current carbon standard?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/268271/how-would-cold-neutrinos-get-trapped-by-stars&quot;&gt;How would cold neutrinos get trapped by stars?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273836/whats-the-difference-between-a-realization-a-representation-and-an-implementat&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between a realization, a representation and an implementation in metrology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The follow-up Q&amp;amp;A: you see a nice question (or a nice answer) and you see a missing aspect where you know the answer, and you think it's a valuable thing to add, but it doesn't really fit in as an answer to the existing thread. So, just add it as a follow-up and provide an answer. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/301803/how-different-can-the-directions-of-angular-momentum-and-angular-velocity-be&quot;&gt;How different can the directions of angular momentum and angular velocity be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Technique questions that are genuinely valuable to your research: you're doing some relatively standard analysis as part of your research, and you find that the easily-accessible resources make it a drag to find the details on the application of the method. Instead of (or in parallel to) doing a deep dive into what &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be easy-to-find information, asking here can take out the hassle (or be a place to document your findings if you find the solution yourself) and form a valuable resource for others in a similar situation. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/308009/how-can-i-get-the-axes-of-the-polarization-ellipse-from-the-jones-vector-of-the&quot;&gt;How can I get the axes of the polarization ellipse from the Jones vector of the light?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Technique questions that are genuinely valuable to your research, where you need to understand a tough technical paper in an area you're not that familiar with, but you're just swamped by the literature and you could use a hand. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/222958/how-do-higher-order-optical-chiralities-look-like&quot;&gt;How do higher-order optical chiralities look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Technique questions where you're not actively missing something, but where the existing tools for doing some task, or, say, characterizing some object, are vaguely unsatisfactory, and there is some hope that some other corner of physics has developed more sophisticated tools for equivalent cases. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/336918/what-eigenvector-like-tools-are-there-for-analyzing-tensors-of-rank-three-and-hi&quot;&gt;What eigenvector-like tools are there for analyzing tensors of rank three and higher?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vague and unexplained bit of folklore. I think we've all seen it: there's some random piece of information where everyone in the field &quot;knows&quot; something (even if from some perspectives it could be a pretty dubious claim), but few people can actually source that information to a reliable origin. A question here can sharpen the question to something a good deal more specific, and it can help dispel myths or put vague folklore on a more solid foundation. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/326625/are-non-zero-area-pulses-of-electromagnetic-radiation-possible&quot;&gt;Are non-zero-area pulses of electromagnetic radiation possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions aimed at clarifying some obscure concept in the literature. You find some complicated and technical object in the literature, and really it'd be for the best if it got brought down a notch &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/223991/what-symmetry-is-associated-with-conservation-of-lipkins-zilch&quot;&gt;What symmetry is associated with conservation of Lipkin&amp;#39;s zilch?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions exploring the flip-side of a common (mis)conception: places where the typical mindset says &quot;X always happens&quot;, but if you turn off some implicit assumption Y, the result is no longer true. A good Q&amp;amp;A exploring what happens if Y is no longer true can be quite valuable in understanding why X is an important result. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/311859/how-do-coherent-isotropic-radiators-evade-the-hairy-ball-theorem&quot;&gt;How do coherent isotropic radiators evade the hairy-ball theorem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions tackling a common misconception head-on: for the times when a common misconception is best handled by asking it at point-blank range: &quot;is Z true?&quot;, just to set the record straight. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/311127/must-magnetic-field-lines-close-upon-themselves-or-go-to-infinity&quot;&gt;Must magnetic field lines close upon themselves or go to infinity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The idle wondering. We don't always have to launch into full deep-dive mode at the prompt of some random thought - but it can make for a nice Q&amp;amp;A, particularly if the site has a large population of people who know the relevant field much better than you do, or if the question makes for good practice for some student somewhere. Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/297250/how-many-naked-eye-stars-have-died-since-they-emitted-the-light-we-are-seeing&quot;&gt;How many naked-eye stars have &amp;#39;died&amp;#39; since they emitted the light we are seeing?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/281719/for-a-constant-magnetic-field-is-there-a-gauge-with-both-canonical-momenta-cons&quot;&gt;For a constant magnetic field, is there a gauge with both canonical momenta conserved?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249751/do-any-elements-form-stable-doubly-charged-negative-ions&quot;&gt;Do any elements form stable doubly-charged negative ions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The honest-to-goodness confusion, over terminology or whatever else. It's OK to ask, you know. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88925/p-dq-is-the-tautological-one-form&quot;&gt;$p\ dq$ is the &amp;quot;tautological&amp;quot; one-form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll shut up now, so over to you: go out and ask questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T15:54:13.973" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T15:54:13.973" Title="How I learned to stop worrying and start asking questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-28T22:51:04.440" Score="13" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/2080712/bernardo-meurer&quot;&gt;Bernardo&lt;/a&gt; and I've been invited as the next guest for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange AMA&lt;/a&gt;. The session will take place on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h Bar&lt;/a&gt;, on June 13th at 16:00 UTC. If you, much like me, gets awfully confused by timezones, just click &lt;a href=&quot;http://everytimezone.com/#2017-6-13,240,c8l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Post questions you'd like answered below&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AMA is always informal and relaxed, and you always have the freedom to ask questions that are not here, but this gives me and idea of what to expect to be asked about. Maybe someone really likes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SuperH architecture&lt;/a&gt;, and in that case I definitely need to brush up my knowledge, things like that. You can reference the previous AMAs by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9613/february-20th-ask-me-anything-with-heather-question-pool&quot;&gt;heather&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9056/september-6-physics-ama-secret-question-pool&quot;&gt;Secret&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8981/august-12-physics-ama-with-daniel-sank-question-pool&quot;&gt;Daniel Sank&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8814/ask-me-anything-12th-july-guests-introduction-and-questions&quot;&gt;yuggib&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7782/questions-for-the-june-14th-ask-me-anything&quot;&gt;Slereah&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Education and work&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born in &lt;a href=&quot;https://goo.gl/maps/pQp2PfcLCku&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chiador&lt;/a&gt;, a small town in the Brazilian countryside, and I later moved to Rio de Janeiro. I currently live in Lisbon, Portugal where I major in Computer Engineering. I'm mostly self-taught in what I know, and my favorite classes in uni are the maths ones, although it's what I have the hardest time with. I'm almost always around on the h-Bar if you'd like to catch me. If you really need to talk to me the tales say that if you put a pint of beer and some ICs on your porch I will show up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently about to start my first research position working on how to benchmark &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ARM&lt;/a&gt; in a meaningful way. I also plan on doing some work on adapting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completely_Fair_Scheduler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux Scheduler&lt;/a&gt; to work better with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HMP&lt;/a&gt; architectures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Technical interests&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quantum Computing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm obsessed with P vs. NP. For what it's worth if you haven't yet read it, Aaronson wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3095&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a great survey on the matter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I enjoy the hardware aspects of making a quantum computer possible  a lot, even if this isn't my area of expertise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recently I've been working on adapting a simple ISA, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIPS&lt;/a&gt; to support a quantum computer working as a co-processor, much like how FPU's work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also have a vested interest in figuring out how to create a scheduler that can correctly allocate tasks for the quantum computer. I don't have much at all yet, just some scribbles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Programming&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a passion for getting Linux to run on, say, unusual hardware. Most notably I got the following things to run Linux: My calculator, an FPGA board, a toaster. For those in the know the calculator also runs Doom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software&lt;/a&gt; guy, free as in Freedom. I avoid running proprietary software whenever possible. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I maintain &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bemeurer/beautysh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;beautysh&lt;/a&gt; which a beautifier/ autoformatter for Bash scripts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like C, C++, Rust, and Python.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I try to port every algorithm I see to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://gmplib.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GMP&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openmp.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenMP&lt;/a&gt;. It's more of a hobby than anything else. You can see my implementations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bemeurer/euler-function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euler's Totient&lt;/a&gt;, and of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bemeurer/multi-ackermann&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ackermann Function&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wrote the base of an OS of my own, named DaedalOS, it's totally broken, but you can take a look if you're interested.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hardware&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hardware is my main point of interest, it's where most of my time goes to nowadays. I'm particularly interested in optimizing pipelines currently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I developed my own CPU in VHDL. It runs at a &lt;em&gt;whooping&lt;/em&gt; 25MHz out of a Spartan 6 FPGA. It's based on MIPS, and there's no assembler or compiler or anything. If you want to code you hate to write it in binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've started using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://j-core.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open J-Core&lt;/a&gt; project, which aims to develop a fully open source CPU based on the, now free of patents, Hitachi Super-H architecture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I spend a lot of time reading documentation on architectures, I like AVR, ARM, and MIPS a lot. I dabble in x86_64 and I've been wanting to learn M68000.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I mostly code in the P3 assembly language, which is a made-up architecture by my university. The fact that they did not opt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIX&lt;/a&gt; gives me sleepless nights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non-Technical Stuff&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like audio a lot, I won't say I'm an audiophile because I don't want people to think I'm a douche. And now I probably sound like a douche and I'm just making it worse so I'll stop.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm passionate about beer. Invite me any time anywhere and we can have a beer together.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really enjoy airports&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read some philosophy, in particular I like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Žižek. Also, if I may boast, Žižek &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hBXoR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gifted me a signed book for my birthday&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My favorite movie is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_Seal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Seventh Seal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My favorite composer is Ravel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like biking a lot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm very happy to have been invited to the AMA, I hope we can all have a good exchange. Looking forward to talking to you all soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now that the AMA has happened, you can read the transcript &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/ama-bernardo-meurer-2017-06-13&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50764" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T13:53:40.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T13:53:40.340" Title="June 13th Ask Me Anything feat. Bernardo Meurer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T13:29:40.457" Score="-1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NBB8p.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NBB8p.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an honest question, and I know Bernardo takes the issue very seriously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59215" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T15:03:38.813" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T07:12:38.453" Title="Why was this meta answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9902" CreationDate="2017-05-30T18:59:48.197" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such hyperbolic language, i.e. &quot;censorship, political correctness, and moderator brutality&quot;, isn't appropriate on this site. If someone used that type of language directed at a non-moderator, it'd probably lead to an immediate suspension for violation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;the &quot;be nice&quot; policy&lt;/a&gt;, on at least points 1 and 2, if not also 3. (This is rude and belittling [point 1], doesn't assume good intentions [point 2], and arguably counts as being a jerk [point 3], though I could see that last one being debatable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We usually go a little easier on these things when they're directed at moderators in their official capacity, so e.g. we might hold off on the immediate suspension, but that doesn't make it perfectly okay. Given the inappropriateness of the content, the post doesn't belong here. You should take that as an implicit warning not to post that sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really do believe that there is censorship, political correctness, and moderator brutality happening in the chat... well, generally speaking, if conditions in a community are &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; bad, I'd say the thing to do is &lt;em&gt;leave&lt;/em&gt;. But if you would rather try to resolve the issue and continue to participate, there are ways of doing that too. What you need to do is have a &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; discussion with the people who you have your complaint with, i.e. the moderators and possibly SE staff. Just as with asking questions on the site, you have to come with the attitude of wanting to understand why things are happening the way they are, rather than wanting to lash out at other people. It's also possible to effect change this way, but you have to come with clear suggestions, and be open to the possibility that there might be reasons your suggestions can't be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T18:59:48.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T19:04:05.567" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;For about five years we've been having chat sessions every two weeks - they &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1343/when-should-we-have-regular-chat-sessions&quot;&gt;started&lt;/a&gt; as a way to build up activity in the chat room, but it's also been a nice way to engender a sense of community between chat and the main site and to discuss issues of general interest. But for quite a while we've had very little to talk about in the chat sessions. Should we just cancel the regular schedule, and only hold sessions as needed when there is something big to discuss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T12:46:54.237" Title="Should we stop having biweekly chat sessions?" Tags="|discussion|chat|chat-events|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9905" CreationDate="2017-05-30T20:28:02.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No! A thousand times no! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't often make them, because, well, school. But I love it when I make chat sessions, and I think that while there've been some quiet ones (the one today, I see, was only a few messages, which probably inspired this post) they overall have been a great thing. Just because something fails once or twice doesn't mean you chuck the baby with the bathwater. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...maybe we add a community ad (heheh, puns) or try to otherwise spread the word - in other chat rooms, or whatever. Or, as vzn mentioned in the comments, we could change the time of the session and see what happens. Just don't end these sessions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T12:46:54.237" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T12:46:54.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9908" CreationDate="2017-05-31T03:37:43.930" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been down-voting, nor have I received any notification of a down-vote or &lt;em&gt;user removed&lt;/em&gt;. But somehow over the last week I've lost about 20 rep. And I've done nothing. What's happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142799" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T04:20:49.363" Title="Mysteriously losing reputation" Tags="|bug|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9907" CreationDate="2017-05-31T04:20:49.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/142799/kunal-pawar?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=time&quot;&gt;reputation tab&lt;/a&gt; looks to you, since you don't have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;the privilege of viewing deleted posts&lt;/a&gt;, but it looks like you earned several +2 rep points for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;suggesting edits&lt;/a&gt; to posts which were later deleted.&#xA;You may or may not be able to see these examples:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/334473/2&quot;&gt;for instance&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/334541/2&quot;&gt;for instance&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/333910/2&quot;&gt;for instance&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most reputation changes associated with a post are un-done if that post is deleted. Nothing wrong on your end --- thanks for working to make the site more readable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T04:20:49.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9902" CreationDate="2017-05-31T04:56:07.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a comment, but it got a bit long for the comment box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The going in point that everyone needs to understand is that the chat rooms are not a bastion of free speech and you have absolutely no rights there. The chat rooms are provided (for free) by the Stack Exchange, and what they say goes. If you are suspended by a community moderator then you have no recourse because, well, it's their playground and their word is final. You may consider that an intolerable restriction, and if so don't use the SE chat system. It is as simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE have also made it perfectly clear that when it comes to the chat rooms the moderators (all the moderators) act as their lieutenants and with their authority. So if a moderator asks you to stop doing something then you stop - with no arguments. If the moderator is willing to discuss the matter then you can certainly discuss it with them, but the going in point is that you do what the moderators say. Again, if you don't like this then once again don't use the SE chat system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for exactly why your answer was deleted, well I'm not a moderator and I'm not privy to the moderator discussion areas. However it seems fairly obvious you are attempting to derail the discussion away from physics/maths/technology to the chat room policy. Since, as explained above, that policy is dictated from on high all this could possibly do is result in a round of futile spleen venting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a step back and look at it the Stack Exchange policy is understandable. They are a commercial organisation and they need to make money from the site. For this they want lots of activity on the main sites to impress the advertisers, and it's only worth investing in the chat if it furthers this goal. If their view is that the chat system is attracting disruptive elements who don't contribute to the main site than they'll remove anyone they deem to be a disruptive element, or in extreme cases permanently close the chat room (&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10914/how-come-our-main-chat-mos-eisley-got-frozen-this-time&quot;&gt;as happened to the SF chat room&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A quick footnote:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this answer has attracted a downvote, but I'm not expressing an opinion here. I'm just stating the facts. I don't see how you can disagree, and therefore downvote, unless you think my statement of the facts is wrong, and in that case please add a comment explaining where I'm wrong and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not like this answer but the SE make the rules and they didn't consult me, or indeed our moderators, before making those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T07:12:38.453" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T07:12:38.453" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T14:39:26.690" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked a question that had been voted as off-topic and closed.  How do I migrate the question to a more appropriate stack exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154026" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T16:07:10.277" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T16:07:10.277" Title="How do I migrate an off-topic question from physics to another stack exchange site?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9910" CreationDate="2017-05-31T14:42:00.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Raise a moderator flag on the question explaining where you want to migrate it. Alternatively you can just ask your question on the target site yourself as a new question, there is no benefit to migrating questions unless they have already received answers that would also be appropriate for the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T14:42:00.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T02:28:20.117" Score="24" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is a frequently discussed topic but I am not happy with the current stance of treating Computational Physics related questions as &quot;Off Topic&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple days ago I asked this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336562/&quot;&gt;Molecular Dynamics Software for Coarse Grained Polymers&lt;/a&gt;) about the suitability of different molecular dynamics software for coarse grained polymer simulations. The question was marked as off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been reading the previous discussions on this topic and I cannot see a clear consensus but I would like to put forward some of my thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no other places in Stack Exchange where this question fits. SuperUser, Overflow, softwarerec all focus on general computer tools or programming and development. I don't expect my question on coarse grained polymer simulations will get much response there. I want Physicists and researchers to answer my question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not allowing computational physics related questions unnecessarily splits the content of this site. Just because my question &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; fit on another stack exchange site shouldn't be reason to remove it from here. The question is related to physics research and this is the Physics site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The help and tour pages say that questions about &quot;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&quot; are allowed. I would consider molecular dynamics software to be part of the technology that is used in Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the main concern is that the site will be spammed with coding or general tools questions. I can see why this is a concern but I think the community is being overly strict and cautious and as a result is cutting out potentially worthwhile and useful questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like my questions status to be reconsidered, but more generally, I would like the Physic.stackexchange community to reconsider how strict it is on questions related to computational physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36396" LastEditorUserId="36396" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T03:52:13.377" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T03:52:13.377" Title="Allowance of Computational Physics questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|software-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9912" CreationDate="2017-06-02T03:13:21.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is a recommendation question. That's a category that has seen a lot of history going back to the early days of Stack Overflow, and they are generally frowned on throughout the network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the turning points in the discussion of such things appear as blog posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Jan. 2010&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Sept. 2010&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/23/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&amp;amp;A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Nov. 2010&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Real Questions Have Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Jan. 2011&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there was endless discussion on (then) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;meta.stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt; (now much has been moved to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;), but I don't want to dig up links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is a little unusual in allowing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;some recommendation questions&lt;/a&gt; subject to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed/&quot;&gt;limitations and the willingness of the community to curate them&lt;/a&gt;. It is not at all clear that &lt;em&gt;&quot;Which software package should I use?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; falls into the exception to the general rule that have been carved out here on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all hope is not lost. Many questions that are off-topic on the site (including this one if the community rules that way in the end) are welcome in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the h bar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (our general chat room) and you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;the requisite rep to be a full participant there&lt;/a&gt;. True, you'll have to hope that someone who knows something about the subject looks in on chat, but it is better than nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T03:13:21.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9912" CreationDate="2017-06-02T11:16:26.687" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question should be on-topic. To the extent that it is a software-recommendations question, it's precisely the kind of recommendation question we want to encourage: it is well-researched, it has a clear statement of goals and of the OP's situation, and clear requirements on the answers, which also make it clear that the answers are expected to be more than simple links to software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think a closer reading of the question shows that it isn't so much a recommendation question, and it is much closer to asking for the relative advantages and disadvantages between the available tools, which I think puts it squarely on-topic via OP's point 3,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The help and tour pages say that questions about &quot;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&quot; are allowed. I would consider molecular dynamics software to be part of the technology that is used in Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, while comparison questions can often be not-all-that-constructive, here OP provides plenty of criteria to avoid a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/16/gorilla-vs-shark/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gorilla vs Shark&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; situation - and, indeed, it stays distinctly away from the four criteria of badness listed there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Nobody needs to know the answer to this question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It’s not nearly specific enough.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is difficult to learn from these questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It drives away experts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these apply here, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T12:32:39.610" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T12:32:39.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T17:28:56.577" Score="30" ViewCount="2088" Body="&lt;p&gt;User &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/26969/floris&quot;&gt;Floris&lt;/a&gt; has recently become the third user to obtain the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/27/legendary&quot;&gt;Legendary badge&lt;/a&gt;, which is one of the less awarded badges out there. Being one of the most prolific contributors to this site, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for those amazing ~2.300 answers, thank you for the detailed yet intuitive explanations, for the fantastic diagrams, for taking the time to share knowledge, all in all, thank you for making this site a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE (2017-12-05): As of today, Floris has become the fourth PSE user to become a member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;100k club&lt;/a&gt;. Congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T18:06:03.490" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T18:06:03.490" Title="The User, The Myth, The Legend" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T17:43:12.927" Score="7" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;My recent question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336899/&quot;&gt;significance of further LIGO events&lt;/a&gt; was appreciated, it appears, by all but five people.  I'm lobbying for reopening.  This question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; too broad--it's exactly analogous to asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/235248/&quot;&gt;&quot;Why is the detection of gravitational waves so significant?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, except I'm not asking about the significance of a first detection, I'm asking about significance of further detections (which was not well addressed in the linked question), and the most recent one in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110443" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T20:22:25.147" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T20:22:25.147" Title="Reopening a question about the recent LIGO event" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9898" CreationDate="2017-06-03T15:43:43.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assorted questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why haven't you started learning (modern) Fortran?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why Portugal for University? (great academics, chance to get away from home, etc)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other universities did you apply and/or look at?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What directions do you have for DaedalOS?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is it about airports that you enjoy so much that you included it in the post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SNES or Sega?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Console or PC?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What non-technical books have you read lately? (and not for schoolwork either)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sports do you watch most frequently?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What sports did you play growing up?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why Linux over Unix?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Favorite food?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's all I've got for now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T15:43:43.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9920" CreationDate="2017-06-04T15:02:34.117" Score="-9" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;The community won't become a free homework solving service. Furthermore, if homeworks would be allowed, they would be so many, and so LQ, that it would lead to a significant quality decrease of the whole site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can see enough well, if a question has the general quality to survive here or not, although our ideas about its exact rules differ too significantly to be easily codifiable. It results a half-legal situation where the overwhelming majority of the homework questions are closed, unfortunately with the few interesting and useful ones between them. Furthermore, our homework criteria can be at most &lt;em&gt;decoded&lt;/em&gt; from many, often many year old meta posts, whose knowledge is obviously an irrational requirement from a lowrep user of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal would be to &lt;em&gt;openly admit this half-legal state.&lt;/em&gt; It would result an essential simplification of the homework policy, around into this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Homework questions and exercises are mainly discouraged here, because: (...some reasons, we aren't a free hw solving service, etc...). Although some of them may be allowed if the majority of our voters find them enough interesting/useful to survive. You can improve its chance, if: (...many heuristical ideas, like ask for a specific concept, have a good general writing quality and so on...)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overwhelming majority of the homeworks wouldn't pass this criteria. Thus, nothing would change significantly. What would change: the site rules and the actual vtc practice will clearly match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T20:26:48.417" Title="Yet another homework idea" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-04T15:16:58.190" Score="16" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can whoever is flagging &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; as off-topic because they are &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; please stop doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community decided a long time ago that these types of questions are &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And reaffirmed it a few times since:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7039/book-recommendations-on-topic-on-topic-but-community-wiki-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;Book recommendations: On-topic, on-topic but community wiki, or off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7731/is-physics-se-a-good-place-to-ask-for-textbook-references&quot;&gt;Is Physics SE a good place to ask for textbook references?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5049/the-present-status-on-the-book-policy&quot;&gt;The present status on the book policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet resource recommendations have been appearing in the review queue as being &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. Two recent examples include,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/177244&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/177244&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336316/&quot;&gt;Dependent Motion: Motion of Several Particles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pretty sure there have been more, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/680388/close-votes-on-tag-x?Tag=resource-recommendations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching SEDE turns up the latter of the above two&lt;/a&gt;, but perhaps I'm doing that wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure arguments for such questions being off-topic can be made, but current site policy allows them, so I'd like to understand why they're being (incorrectly) flagged and how we can better inform users that such questions are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T01:41:10.663" Title="Reminder that Book Recommendations are on topic" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9918" CreationDate="2017-06-04T20:26:48.417" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is an &lt;strong&gt;absolutely terrible idea&lt;/strong&gt;. What you're proposing is little more than a Wild West of question closure, where everybody votes to close or to reopen without &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; kind of objective criteria or even guidance on what is and is not OK. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This then makes it impossible for newcomers to know what they can and cannot post, and it makes for some remarkably unfair situations: two questions that are functionally identical may end up with one open and one closed just because of the set of reviewers that caught them, and there's very little that we could then say to the OP whose question got closed. That OP can rightfully complain that the open question is identical, so why should their question remain closed? Do we just tell them &quot;yeah, the other person got lucky, but you didn't, so tough luck&quot;? What does that makes us look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of that, this proposal isn't a step forward, it's more like two steps backwards. It doesn't functionally fix anything, it only makes a huge gray area where nobody can agree whether questions should be closed or not, it makes it impossible for newcomers to know what the response to their question will be, even if they take the trouble to go and look, and it will lead, with overwhelming likelihood, to a vast increase in complaints by people whose questions got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I will also take exception to your characterization of the existing status quo as entirely lacking in objective criteria. For one, there are some essentially objective criteria in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714&quot;&gt;the existing canonical thread&lt;/a&gt;. To be fair and honest, of course, these are only an imperfect representation of the actual practice on the site, which has drifted somewhat over the years. The challenge is to find a suitable text that expresses the actual practice, which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have objective (though, at the moment, relatively vague) criteria to guide it. Ditching that effort and throwing our hands up in surrender is not something I would consider positive or constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T20:26:48.417" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9898" CreationDate="2017-06-05T14:47:41.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't seem to be particularly interested in physics, which makes me wonder why you ended up here in the first place, and more importantly, why did you stay? Of course we love to have you around, I am just curious so I gotta ask. Why the h-bar? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T14:47:41.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9919" CreationDate="2017-06-06T10:51:47.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think there is any dispute about resource recommendations being &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;. But there is a difference of opinion about what this means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation of the policy appears to be that voting to close any resource recommendations questions (RRQs) because they are &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; (POB) or &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; (TB) is a breach of the policy. Routinely voting to close &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; RRQs as POB (or for any other reason) would indicate a misapplication of the policy, but there is no evidence that I or anyone else has been doing that. You have identified only one instance - I do not recall voting to close the Fractional Statistics question as POB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACuriousMind comments :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see no consistent pattern of RRQs being flagged to close as primarily opinion-based (your two recent examples are the only ones among the 20 most recent RRQs), so I'm not sure there is something to understand here - I'd presume the flaggers thought that this particular question was too opinion-based and were not making some general statement about RRQs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your logic appears to be :  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Premise 1&lt;/strong&gt; : RRQs are &lt;strong&gt;necessarily too broad and opinion based&lt;/strong&gt;, as stated in your comment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Premise 2&lt;/strong&gt; : The community has voted that RRQs are &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; - sentence #2 of your question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Deduction&lt;/strong&gt; : The community has decided that the criteria &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; do not apply to RRQs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The error of logic is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_premise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;false assumption&lt;/a&gt; in Premise 1. I think there is also confusion about the meaning of Premise 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Premise 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see Premise 1 expressed or implied anywhere in the policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resources recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt; In fact, it seems to me that the policy clearly states the opposite : that valid RRQs should not be opinion-based nor too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are required to provide adequate details of the kind of book which is required and to specify the level of understanding of the asker. Answers are required to be &lt;strong&gt;descriptive,&lt;/strong&gt; specifying objective qualities of the book such as contents, style and pre-requisites. The objective is clearly that answers should provide recommendations suitable to the asker's needs, rather than promote the answerer's preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list/4567#4567&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; stresses that answers must be based on &lt;strong&gt;facts not opinions&lt;/strong&gt; and that questions should be &lt;strong&gt;sufficiently limited in scope&lt;/strong&gt; : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If these policies are in place, the major problems with books questions are reduced. They're much more relevant and useful now. They also are less &quot;all answers are equally valid&quot;. They're still not conceptual, though, but this isn't so important if the answers are explanatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of the policy is clearly to exlcude opinion and broadness as much as possible. Therefore it is entirely appropriate to vote to close RRQs (and to delete answers) which the reviewer considers to be &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Premise 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation of the policy seems to be that the community has voted to make RRQs inherently &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;. If this is correct, voting to close them &lt;em&gt;for any reason&lt;/em&gt; is a breach of site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation of the policy is that RRQs are not inherently &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; as a category, just as homework-like questions are not inherently &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;. Special requirements apply to both categories, &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; the usual criteria which apply to all questions regardless of the tag, including &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many high rep users (including yourself) have voted to close RRQs for these two reasons. This shows that they do not agree with your interpretation of the policy.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples no more than 6 months old in which &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (among others) voted to close as RRQs as &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/319405&quot;&gt;Where should I start?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/314061&quot;&gt;On the State of Quantum Electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/313131&quot;&gt;Good physics book to discover stuff by yourself&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/297696&quot;&gt;What are the open problems in the field of quantum thermodynamics?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples no more than 2 years old (in which you did not vote) which were closed as &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/326239&quot;&gt;Landau and Lifshitz or Goldstein classical mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/311238&quot;&gt;The best book for learning the renormalization group&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/310348&quot;&gt;Improvement of Von Neumann&amp;#39;s measurement scheme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/293960&quot;&gt;Studying Quantum mechanics from Schwinger&amp;#39;s book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/287570&quot;&gt;Feynman Lectures for a newcomer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/264686&quot;&gt;Any good statistics books under the context of astronomy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/264018&quot;&gt;Books on entropy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/257449&quot;&gt;Recommended reading about antennas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/188610&quot;&gt;Learning physics from a strong math background?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Questions marked with an asterisk ask for suggestions of books or articles; others ask for comparisons between books or opinions of a particular book.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not a particular question is &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; is a matter of judgement, on which any two reviewers may disagree. That is why there is voting : to try to average out such differences of opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, questions are closed when 5 votes are cast &lt;em&gt;for any reason&lt;/em&gt;. Reviewers might find multiple reasons for closing, but they can only select one. They might disagree on any particular reason, but the key issue is that they agree that the question should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because the opinions of other reviewers disagree with your own it does not follow that they are voting contrary to site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Justification of my VTC &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336316&quot;&gt;Dependent Motion: Motion of Several Particles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of what is the &quot;best book&quot; on any topic can only be answered by expressing an opinion - although I admit it is ungenerous of me to take this part of the request literally. The question also specifies that the book should deal with &quot;motor systems in real applications&quot; which I interpreted as meaning that the OP is studying mechanical engineering. In common with many such requests, the OP displays no prior research effort. And the level of study is not specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can see 4 valid reasons for voting to close this question : (1) primarily opinion-based; (2) the request ought to be on another SE site; (3) insufficient research effort; (4) unclear what you are asking. The 3rd is not an official close reason, but has been used before for non-homework questions and is covered under &quot;some other reason&quot; why the question is considered &quot;off topic&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one close reason is allowed per reviewer. I chose the one which came to mind first, and mentioned 2 others in a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not select the strongest close reason in this case. Sometimes that happens by mistake or haste. The decision was then whether to retract my vote altogether, because I cannot change the reason, or to leave the matter for other reviewers to consider. I decided it was more important to put the question in review than to ensure that I only voted for the most convincing reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Insufficient research effort&lt;/em&gt; could also apply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/337069&quot;&gt;Resource recommendation for fractional statistics&lt;/a&gt; : a google search using &quot;abelian and non-abelian statistics&quot; gives several promising leads on the 1st page, many of which are used in the accepted answer. The OP could easily have found the same resources himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that you disagreed with my decision, but that is what voting is for. If others had agreed with me and voted to close the question, for whichever reason, I think that is a proper exercise of the democratic principle on which this site is founded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T01:41:10.663" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T01:41:10.663" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9893" CreationDate="2017-06-06T13:24:23.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I normally don't put tags on ignore, but tried putting the tag on ignore just to try it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hated it, for two big reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It didn't eliminate all the junk - far from it. There's plenty of bad questions that aren't tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; and shouldn't be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It made it harder to get rid of the junk that &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; - because I couldn't really see it (I only had it grayed out, not completely gone). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: if you hate the junk that comes with that tag, don't ignore it, deal with it, and anyway, you'll have to face plenty of junk not in that tag. So.....I didn't find it very useful in the &quot;improve experience&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T13:24:23.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9898" CreationDate="2017-06-07T17:40:18.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How and when did you first become interested in electronics and programming?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How much value do you place in structured, formal learning, such as college, as opposed to self-learning and tinkering?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have you ever done any projects related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amateur (or &lt;em&gt;ham&lt;/em&gt;) radio&lt;/a&gt;? Do you hold, or are planning to get, an amateur radio license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;nano, vim, or Emacs (or ed)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user112643" LastEditorDisplayName="user112643" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T20:48:45.550" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T20:48:45.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-10T11:54:06.637" Score="9" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of the post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/337699/&quot;&gt;Dimensional reduction of Rozansky-Witten theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had commented on this question of mine, and there were some responses in the comments section as well, with some useful information I wanted to refer to later. Now all the comments are gone, and I cannot even remember the username of the person who commented. I do not understand why it was deleted so fast when the question is not even a week old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to reinstate these comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110206" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T12:23:46.490" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T07:30:58.163" Title="Comments deleted under my question" Tags="|discussion|comments|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9925" CreationDate="2017-06-10T12:08:59.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments were deleted because you had addressed them by an edit, so they no longer served any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments on Stack Exchange are mostly supposed to be ephemeral - they should aim to improve the post that is being commented on, and after that aim is achieved, they become obsolete (which is also a comment flag reason). They will also be deleted if they do not actually add anything to the post being commented on (flag reason &quot;not constructive&quot;), if they attack other users personally (flag reason &quot;rude or offensive&quot;), or if they only tangentially relate to the post or are more of a social nature (flag reason &quot;too chatty&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T12:08:59.307" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9912" CreationDate="2017-06-11T16:46:39.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question should be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most mature subdisciplines of computational physics (moleular dynamics, polymer physics, computational fluid dynamics, numerical relativity...) there are only a handful of different codes, and everyone in the field is more or less familiar with all of them. The codes will generally differ practically and algorithmically, and be appropriate for different sorts of problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To design and interpret research projects in computational physics it is &lt;em&gt;critical&lt;/em&gt; to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of these &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; codes. If such questions are off-topic, than computational physics is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By analogy, &quot;should I use GROMACS of LAMMPS for this problem&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like asking &quot;which brand of hammer should I use to fix my fence?&quot;, but rather like asking &quot;should I use a hammer or a screwdriver&quot;? This makes the question very different from asking for a recommendation between, say, vim or emacs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument that the question is basically fine, but simply phrased too much like a request for a recommendation, is empty. First of all, there is quite likely a single most-suitable code for a given problem &lt;em&gt;for reasons that give physical insight&lt;/em&gt;. For example one CFD code might handle, for example, highly turbulent flows better than another. Second, understanding which code is best for which circumstance is itself part of computational physics. Third, even if the above were not true, it is very easy to parse the question into a clearly-on-topic form without needing to explicitly modify, let alone to close, it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93451" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T16:46:39.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-11T16:49:12.670" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question which had a problem that the Hamiltonian was not Hermitian. However, after thinking about it for some time I managed to make the Hamiltonian Hermitian. While it may still have problems I think it can be re-opened at least.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/338344/&quot;&gt;Hamiltonian that can produce random primes?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27939" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T04:54:37.070" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T04:54:37.070" Title="Can my question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9928" CreationDate="2017-06-11T19:17:56.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One can think of $k$ as the measure of smaller solutions it is composed of. In fact, one can impose the condition $y(0)= \ln(p + \hat \epsilon)$ where $p$ is some arbitrary prime. Then, $k$ becomes the number of prime factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last part is rather unclear. The number of prime factors of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now making the change of variables in $ e^y y' = k \hat \epsilon$ such that $e^y = \frac{1}{z}\frac{d z}{dx} - \frac{1}{z} -I_{2 \times 2} \lambda x $,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this is unclear too. A change of variables is of the form $y=f(z)$, and I cannot rewrite your expression into this form. Please try to fix this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NOTE- This is invertible as:&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should remove this part. It doesn't add anything to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Making the change of variables $  z = \exp{((k \hat \epsilon+ \lambda ) x^2/2 + cx )}\exp(S)$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. You didn't define $S$ anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We add an additional boundary condition that removes the additional solution and $\lambda$ being an arbitrary constant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is the additional boundary condition? I can't find it anywhere... Also, where does the equation $\frac{1}{z} \frac{d^2 z}{d x^2} - \lambda = k \hat \epsilon$ come from, and how is it related to anything you wrote before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you cannot take&#xA;$$&#xA;(I_{2 \times 2} \frac{d^2 }{d x^2}  - k    \hat \epsilon) \cdot z  = \lambda z&#xA;$$&#xA;and &quot;Taking dot product with a $2 \times 1$ matrix $\psi_A(z)$:&quot; because the derivatives $\frac{d^2 }{d x^2}$ will act on $\psi_A(z)$ as well (because $z=z(x)$). So you either write everything in terms of $z$ (the function and the derivatives) or everything in terms of $x$. Mixing both variables makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any logical connection from one paragraph to the next. Equations seem to pop in and out with no justification. Some mathematical manipulations are incorrect. You introduce constants and never define them. Finally, and most importantly, how is this a physics question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but the question is just as unclear as before. The hermiticity of $H$ is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T19:17:56.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9912" CreationDate="2017-06-12T18:16:49.313" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think question should be allowed. The answer with an explanation could be very informative. That should be important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154816" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:16:49.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9932" CreationDate="2017-06-13T07:13:11.120" Score="16" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose that an SE user X recently encountered an SE user Y who, after X refused to mark Y's answer as accepted, &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; downvoted X's question, marked it as a duplicate (which is evidently not so) and deleted his/her own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we deal with such hypothetical situations where judgements are &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; passed based on a personal grudge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I am not sure if it would be rude to post a link to a real example of the hypothetical I referred to. Therefore, I will not. I do not wish to defame any user. &lt;strong&gt;Please answer this question assuming the premise that such incidents (which prompt, quite naturally, suspicion of intent) do occur, albeit (perhaps) rarely&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;REQUEST:&lt;/strong&gt; Please do not try to dig into my profile and turn this otherwise honest query about the nature of standard conduct in SE to a personal flame war. I would be much obliged if you do respect my privacy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76347" LastEditorUserId="76347" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T11:07:50.483" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T20:14:41.277" Title="How to deal with negative responses on SE due to personal grudge?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9931" CreationDate="2017-06-13T10:23:00.433" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there are a couple of things to say here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assume good faith&lt;/strong&gt;: Unless the user in question explicitly told you &amp;quot;I have downvoted your question and deleted my answer because you would not accept it&amp;quot;, or something similarily blatant, we all should refrain from ascribing motivations to other users. In particular, since voting is completely anonymous and users are never required to justify their votes (for a plethora of discussions about this, search &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;), we should not assume that a vote was cast by a specific user because a downvote temporally coincided with another action of that user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, voting to close as a duplicate &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; answering a question is not an obvious sign of malice - it's perfectly possible the user answered the question, then remembered &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; they had answered a similar question, and went back to search for it, found it, and voted to close. The deletion of the answer could likewise be because they thought their other answer more fully answered the question, or because they realized what they wrote is wrong. I can personally attest that both of these things happen, and in particular only later remembering that you once answered a similar question is something that can happen easily after you've been here a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nothing here seems a particularly egregious action: Even if cast in bad faith, a duplicate vote does nothing unless others agree - and if enough people agree, then there must have been some valid reason to raise the flag, and the actual intention of the user casting the close vote is wholly irrelevant. A single downvote likewise is both difficult to determine to be cast maliciously and not particularly concerning - this would be different if a user went through several of your posts to downvote them because they don't like you, but there are scripts in place to catch that sort of behaviour. And lastly, since the deletion of one's answer may happen for several good reasons (see the ones I pointed out already above), that is also not an act worthy of any disclipinatory action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T10:23:00.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T13:36:34.737" Score="5" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make a nice printout of an awesome answer with lots of pictures and pretty equations. If I select the answer and use the print feature in the browser then the formatting is lost (paragraphs are too wide) and the equations don't show properly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to turn this (select answer text and print)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xk8In.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xk8In.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into this (properly rendered answer) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oRMz5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oRMz5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose each answer (or question) has a link to a printable page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/339325/392&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastEditorUserId="392" LastEditDate="2017-06-15T13:58:45.150" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T13:58:45.150" Title="I want to print an answer and it should still look good" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9933" CreationDate="2017-06-14T15:04:39.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could be a nice suggestion for mother Meta. In the meantime, I want to point out that if you right-click anywhere on the page, and select &lt;code&gt;Print...&lt;/code&gt;, then you can (at least on my browser) choose PDF as the destination. The result usually looks nice:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvKdl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvKdl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative is to click on the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; button of the answer you want to print, copy the source code, paste into a Latex document, and compile it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T21:20:13.803" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T21:20:13.803" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9933" CreationDate="2017-06-15T00:02:21.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you like the way that the printout of the entire page looks, but you want only one answer to print, try this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Firefox on Windows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open the menu item Tools &gt; Web Developer &gt; Style Editor.  (The style editor is part of the &quot;inspector&quot; and there are a couple of ways to get to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CSS&lt;/a&gt; for the page. Add, somewhere outside of any other block (I went to the end), two lines like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.question, .answer { display:none; }&#xA;#answer-80449 { display: block; } &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you add the first line, all the questions and answers (which live within HTML containers like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;question&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; etc.) will disappear; when you add the second, any code contained in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div id=&quot;answer-XXX&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; will reappear. The phone number is the post ID, which you can extract from the &quot;share&quot; link (or confirm by viewing the source).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your printed view should match what's on the screen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my Firefox seems to be having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/4609007&quot;&gt;this problem&lt;/a&gt;, but since the answer in your example fits on a single page I haven't attempted to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure this feature is available in other browsers. The tricky part is figuring out where to add the CSS; the code that you add should be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see in your comments that you're probably not thrilled about this sort of &quot;clunky interface,&quot; but this is the sort of thing that's probably pretty easy for someone to turn into a browser extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T00:02:21.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-06-17T17:32:05.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cseducators.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B6fyK.png&quot; alt=&quot;You can also join us in the CS room, http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/59701/join-cs-educators&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T17:32:05.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9931" CreationDate="2017-06-19T03:45:15.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you determine that the negative responses were indeed due to personal grudge? by your own personal grudge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to deal with it, just view your reputation as an imagery number rather than real ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158306" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T03:45:15.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9931" CreationDate="2017-06-19T06:09:40.093" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too - when I started out - felt that I was encountering such behavior with no recourse to correct it.  I admit that it is very frustrating and discouraging.  Especially to a site dedicated to the precision of science - this perceived behavior seems to go against all that science ideally represents - the honest evaluation of all worthy questions and hypothesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To relate the behavior to higher systems of knowledge, whenever there is a community that does not fear the consequence of behavior, it appears as an indication of the quality of the answers being given by that community. There is some chance that an answer highly praised is in fact outright incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is &quot;noise&quot; and &quot;defect&quot; in almost every physical evaluation, so too you might notice imperfection - especially when just starting out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I appeal to try to understand these higher systems of knowledge - reserving this site for structured social interaction;  I just keep on writing and eventually these issues are not the main signal but rather the noise in the feedback that I receive on my posted questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always set up your own site void of such issues. Your website might be a handy reference on this site to your &quot;unbiased&quot; answer as you see it - using links that generally do not raise as much site ire as full text.  I found that approach also good to start out.  I have gotten around all the issues so far - so now that my reputation is good enough that such perceived characters no longer want to take that approach.  The initial frustration also helped me look at other answers and learn how to make my answer better - and this is main benefit: to see one's own imperfection also, and to build and remedy one's own defects too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I would like to address some of the comments, but I am unable to comment without a reputation of 50 that I currently lack.  The comments - that the question can be traced to - seem unreasonable to me, a regular simple user of the system.  I cannot find any question of J. Rahman's where it can be shown that he up-voted, down-voted, or did anything whatsoever for that matter.  When I checked his profile, only this one question shows.  Using such &quot;proof&quot; does not seem like any sort of basis to punish him by suspending him from the site.  He has done absolutely nothing in public - as far as the common site-user like me can tell.  I did not even see any of his questions and answers aside from this question being available from his user profile.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comment #1 in question:    The question is easily identifiable, and any&#xA;  10K user can see the deleted question and its author, so you have&#xA;  effectively accused a user of downvoting you. Claims that you aren't&#xA;  singling out an individual are disingenuous at best. As for evidence,&#xA;  there are no comments suggesting that the user in question is&#xA;  offended. If I had answered a question then realised it was a&#xA;  duplicate I would also delete my answer (or move it to the duplicate)&#xA;  then vote to close. In this case I don't know enough about the subject&#xA;  to decide if your question is a duplicate or not. – John Rennie Jun 13&#xA;  at 8:16&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot; The question is easily identifiable, and any 10K user can see the&#xA;  deleted question and its author, so you have effectively accused a&#xA;  user of down-voting you.&quot;  It is a very elite group (almost&#xA;  self-proclaimed judges of the community) that has 10K or higher&#xA;  reputation.  I have no way of making such identification - and I&#xA;  assumed that science operates on the basis of equal access to the&#xA;  relevant facts to come to a decision.  Here, clearly, science does not&#xA;  work that way.  The facts are not generally accessible for the common&#xA;  reader to make an informed decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I consider another comment I see here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comment #2 - A Veiled Threat to the Author of this Posted Question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't see any evidence for your belief that the [person answering]&#xA;  acted maliciously. He has indeed suggested a duplicate, but that&#xA;  doesn't seem malicious to me. You don't have any evidence that he&#xA;  down-voted you. There is nothing in the comments to suggest that he&#xA;  has. Incidentally, note that accusing others of [down-voting] you is&#xA;  regarded as impolite at best and grounds for a suspension in extreme&#xA;  cases. – John Rennie Jun 13 at 8:03&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Response to #2 Comment Threatening the Question Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Incidentally, note that accusing others of [down-voting] you is&#xA;  regarded as impolite at best and grounds for a suspension in extreme&#xA;  cases. – John Rennie Jun 13 at 8:03&quot;  This seems like a threat, using&#xA;  terms like &quot;suspension&quot; when in fact what was being asked in the&#xA;  question being asked is, &quot;How can such bad behavior be dealt with?&quot;  I&#xA;  also receive down votes that I do not understand, and I have some&#xA;  ideas on how such votes might be dealt with.  A site author has to be&#xA;  open to feedback, and sometimes that feedback the author cannot&#xA;  understand.  That is part of being an author.  One has to roll with&#xA;  the negative.  However, I think the best approach for an author is to&#xA;  get together a community that can &quot;independently&quot; evaluate the&#xA;  situation and that can ask questions, comments, and that is also&#xA;  willing as a community to deal with the negative, to provide more&#xA;  constructive criticism instead of immediately having to comment&#xA;  &quot;suspension in extreme cases&quot;.  We need to focus on not punishment but&#xA;  more on guidance of the new-comers and uniformed.  The new authors&#xA;  especially need a warm welcome and help - if this site is able to reach&#xA;  its potential, and not the opposite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157002" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T15:54:07.610" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T15:54:07.610" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T14:08:29.680" Score="5" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that was &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; and some &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; when I was just getting started as an author (again here after many years). I did not think the closure and deletion was fair, but I had no reputation to be able to do anything about it. Plus I was not so familiar with meta until most recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such article is entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/338017&quot;&gt;&quot;What Ionization Does Classical Physics Predict With the Two Moving Rings of Charge Model for Helium-Like Ions&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Heather drastically edited the question to try and restore it, but it &lt;em&gt;did not go back into hold status&lt;/em&gt; even so. What needs to be done with this question here to get it back online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding my current situation, I saw and read &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question already has an answer here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7633/what-can-be-done-in-order-to-re-open-a-closed-question&quot;&gt;What can be done in order to re-open a closed question?&lt;/a&gt; 2 answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that was an entirely different situation, where the article was identifiable and also the senior members of the community provide discrete recommendations on how to perhaps bring the question up-to-par.  The referenced article suggested not to just re-post an archive of the original question, but what can be done, else-wise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One very senior person in the community was trying to mentor and help me get the question to be up-to-par but then I had no permission to edit it to make it better, to learn from someone more the more senior community member what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it possible for an author to search for his deleted questions to modify them and make them acceptable again much later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should stand to reason that after an author gains experience on the site that he his better to edit and ask - and that the site would want to take advantage of that, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the below comments is very helpful for me to solve this situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qmechanic - thank you for your links:  they are very useful.  I am a little new still in what to do to restore a deleted article?  Should the article title be posted on meta, or how can someone reach out for help to take the good out of the question and get it back online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Concerning comments see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9884/is-it-possible-to-search-in-comments&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq%20user%3A157002%20closed%3Ayes&quot;&gt;your own closed questions&lt;/a&gt; by design.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the word 'closed' did you mean 'deleted'? If yes, please edit your above meta post accordingly. FWIW, the deleted questions (associated with your account) are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq%20user%3A157002%20closed%3Ayes&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/338017&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic&quot;&gt;Qmechanic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157002" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:40:54.863" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:40:54.863" Title="Where can closed and deleted questions and comments be searched for - and how can deletion be appealed?" Tags="|support|questions|closed-questions|comments|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2017-06-19T15:56:54.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T01:36:41.917" Score="-2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how could I improve the question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/339959/&quot;&gt;non abelian string in QCD?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It looks to me the question is not too broad, all sub-questions are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one of our moderators puts it on hold. Then I decided to remove the SUSY part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I am not saying any moderator can be a dictator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it looks to me that a single person holds such a power to decide the fate of a question, and he/she also decides the fate of each individual user (for example, they may check your personal private data) -- this sounds to me like the big brother in George Orwell' 1984, wearing the dark glasses, watching all of us. Some of us can befriend to moderators to maintain a good connection to moderators and to each other, but not all of us prefer to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators may stay on the site for a longer period so knows some physics. But Who knows you or me or any of us may be a famous professor or Nobel laureates like &lt;strong&gt;t Hooft or Weinberg&lt;/strong&gt; that simply asks a naive stupid question sometime? In this sense, a profound question can be easily on hold/closed by any moderator if he does not like it for any reason (or he does not understand it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this site is moderated by the moderators (who hold long term non-ending positions), then who are the people moderating the moderators? if the moderators hold too much power interfering the academic activity of site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I understand that there are benefits to have moderators --- they also do good things, but they can also do the opposite, the bad for the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the freedom of moderators interfere the freedom of other users to ask greater questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking people's opinion about the running of the site and how to get feedback on my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42982" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T15:00:25.637" Title="The fate of a question decided by a Moderator?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9943" CreationDate="2017-06-20T07:19:39.767" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems it does not behoove me to comment on my continued role as a moderator, so let me here only explain why I put &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/339959/&quot;&gt;OP's specific question&lt;/a&gt; on hold as &lt;em&gt;too broad.&lt;/em&gt; A question that I btw generally like. OP asks (v3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to say &amp;quot;non abelian string in QCD?&amp;quot; Does &amp;quot;non abelian string&amp;quot; happen for pure Yang-Mills (say SU(N) or SO(N)) without any fermions? Or do we require additional fermions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the most accessible Ref to introduce this topic on &amp;quot;non abelian string&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;non abelian string&amp;quot; have any thing to do with the quantum statistics of strings are non abelian? Like non abelian Majorana for certain solid state systems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should the string form a worldsheet in the spacetime, thus it should be descried by some 2-form field locally? Any precise math formulation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is not so much an extra SUSY question or not, although Phys.SE do generally discourage more than one subquestion per post, mainly to ensure that the post fits the SE Q&amp;amp;A format. The main problem is that Phys.SE usually do not allow to mix explicit resource recommendations (subquestion 2) with actual physics questions (subquestions 1, 3 &amp;amp; 4). Resource recommendations posts are restricted on Phys.SE and made into Community-Wikis (CWs), cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7039/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post and links therein; while actually physics questions are not. This leaves OP's post somewhere in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T14:19:20.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9943" CreationDate="2017-06-20T15:00:25.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for moderators to unilaterally close questions? Yes, and this is by design: moderators are there to implement site policies as decided upon by the community, to make sure the site is held to the high standard that makes it a valuable resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are moderators infallible? No, they're human, obviously. Are moderator actions final and unappealable? Not at all: questions can be reopened (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36415/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19126/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more information), and if five experienced community members disagree with the moderator then the question gets reopened. The moderators' power over the academic aspects of the site are subordinate to the community moderation and if the community agrees that a moderator action was incorrect, then it gets rolled back, as simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do moderators control the fate of all users on the site? Not at all. I just had ice cream the other day, and there was nothing a site mod could do to stop me. (Or, to put it another way: maybe that statement of yours was a bit of hyperbole?) Moderators can indeed access personally-identifying information that you've provided to the site and which is not publicly available, but access to that information is logged and it is reserved for instances where it is necessary. Inappropriate access to or use of user PII is grounds for revocation of moderator privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are managed by the Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99338/who-are-the-community-team-and-what-do-they-do&quot;&gt;Community Team&lt;/a&gt;, and if you suspect any abuse of moderator powers you can contact them directly via &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;the Contact link on the footer of every page&lt;/a&gt;. If you are uncomfortable with this moderation structure, it's important to point out that Stack Exchange is a commercial company and that it's them footing the bill for the servers that host the content (as well as huge investments in the software that powers the site); if you're really not OK with them being arbiters of what happens with your PII, I would suggest not giving them any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that the community team is there for actual abuse of moderator privileges. If it's just a unilateral closure that you disagree with, you should edit it to address any concerns that have been voiced. (In the specific question you're referring to, you failed to do that. You were pointed out that resource recommendation questions are subject to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;specific policies&lt;/a&gt;, and you failed to act on that information. It's therefore natural for the question to remain closed.) If the question does not get reopened after you have addressed any concerns, you can ask a question on this meta to ask why it was closed or to argue that it shouldn't be. If you want examples of this in practice, see e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closed-questions tag&lt;/a&gt; on this meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T15:00:25.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9931" CreationDate="2017-06-20T22:18:58.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please do not try to dig into my profile and turn this otherwise honest query about the nature of standard conduct in SE to a personal flame war. I would be much obliged if you do respect my privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's exactly why you should ignore such downvotes from a single user. It only subtracts 2 points, which is not worth to spend a lot of effort on. You'll always have the occasional user who just doesn't like the sort of questions or answers from you, and reacting too strongly to that may lead to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://backreaction.blogspot.nl/2007/08/lubo-motl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;backreaction  of exactly the short you want to avoid&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastEditorUserId="47511" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T01:11:35.927" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T01:11:35.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T10:28:46.763" Score="6" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a recently asked question which is exactly the same as (or is contained in) an old question then why does marking the new question as a duplicate require the old question to have an either upvoted or accepted answer? I agree that a violation of the above conditions means that the question doesn't have a satisfactory resolution documented but it doesn't mean that we should pile-up similar questions. Rather, we can mark the new question as a duplicate and direct the reader to the old question through something like &quot;this question already has been asked here&quot; and thus, if someone wants to answer the thing then they can answer the old question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if we allow the new unoriginal question to exist owing to the fact that the old question is not well answered then it might happen that in the future, both questions get answered (or worse, the new question gets well answered and not the old) and then I am not sure which question should we mark as the duplicate. Or should we just let two same questions exist with a bunch of good answers at one place and the other bunch at the other place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T22:09:07.467" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T22:09:07.467" Title="Why Does Marking a Question As a Duplicate Require the Original Question to Be Well-Answered?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:34:00.957" Score="-6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vote up the post containing site X, if you want a migration path to site X. Vote down, if you won't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:34:48.097" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:34:48.097" Title="What migration paths do we want on the site?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:34:00.957" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:34:00.957" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:24:33.100" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:35:34.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://engineering.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:35:34.633" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:23:05.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:36:11.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:36:11.063" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:23:22.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:36:25.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:36:25.080" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:23:46.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:37:23.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:37:23.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:41:55.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:41:55.080" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:22:35.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:46:52.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:46:52.270" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:22:48.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T18:59:26.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://electronics.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T18:59:26.910" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:22:42.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:00:41.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://academia.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:00:41.057" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:23:36.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:02:26.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.com&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:02:26.203" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:24:00.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:04:39.757" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to inform the discussion on the topic, for those without 10k+ access to the migration stats, here are the migration statistics as they currently stand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pk0St.png&quot; width=&quot;220&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers mark the total migrations away from this site over the past &lt;strong&gt;90 days&lt;/strong&gt;. (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/293038/why-is-one-migration-showing-up-as-to-a-blank-site&quot;&gt;blank&lt;/a&gt; site up top is this meta.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are migrations away from the site implemented by direct moderator action, which is easily accessible to users via a custom moderator flag. It is then a question of opinion on whether these statistics represent an overwhelming load on the moderator team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, just to put the above numbers in perspective, here is a rough map of SE-wide migration pathways from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/247794/is-there-a-map-of-migration-pathways&quot;&gt;Is there a map of migration pathways?&lt;/a&gt;, which shows the kind of migration volumes that make automation worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/09ypL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/09ypL.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T19:19:28.450" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:19:28.450" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:11:16.910" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:11:16.910" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T19:23:15.653" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9950" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:52:19.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally oppose the community-initiated question migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:52:19.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-23T04:42:01.167" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm relatively new to SE in general, so I may be missing something here, but recently I've been seeing a lot of people apparently getting angry that their questions are marked duplicate. Can someone explain to me what the reasoning is behind this being considered an insult? I haven't come up with anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139781" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T08:28:16.433" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T16:19:35.487" Title="Why are people getting angry at questions being marked duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9965" CreationDate="2017-06-23T05:54:09.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It looks very similar as the closure with a different reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question closed as dupe means that it is a dupe in the view of the VtC voters. It may be not a dupe in the view of the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On these reasons, I typically check if a question deserves also an up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On larger sites, with many golden tag badge holders, it can be a problem if they don't use their decisive vote very wisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T05:59:49.130" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T05:59:49.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9965" CreationDate="2017-06-24T13:58:13.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that some users may have seen the purported duplicate whilst writing their question. Then they read through the duplicate, but although they may accept that is very closely related to their question, they don't understand the answers given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they hope by asking a slight variation of the question that they may get a wider range of answers, one of which will explain the solution in a way they &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; understand, compared to the existing answers that accompany the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154420" LastEditorDisplayName="user154420" LastEditDate="2017-06-24T16:19:35.487" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T16:19:35.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T10:14:15.977" Score="-3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/341300/1&quot;&gt;(now changed) answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question,&quot;Why is $PV^γ$&#xA;constant in an adiabatic process?&quot; received the following comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You do not need to &quot;archive&quot; the question in your answer, that's what the revision history is for. 2. Suggesting people contact you at your website in an answer is inappropriate, and your repeated pattern of doing so borders on spam. Please stop doing this. 3. Information like pointing OP formatting help should be done in comments not answers - answers should contain solely information pertaining to the actual question posed. – ACuriousMind♦ 18 mins ago &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is he trying to say?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What site policies is he referring to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no longer able to update my answer there (currently locked out), getting the following message from his actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DyZJP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DyZJP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this answer really spam-like; if so, why; if not, what can be done to allow me to once more edit the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Post-Script:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed&quot;&gt;HTML formatting link&lt;/a&gt; to be very useful for general formatting.  And this &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9906/how-can-i-type-the-isomorphic-not-equal-and-the-set-of-integers-rationals&quot;&gt;equation formatting link&lt;/a&gt; was also very helpful. Thank you Physics Stack Exchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157002" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T10:58:36.250" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T10:58:36.250" Title="Why might providing contact information be considered spam?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|policy|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9968" CreationDate="2017-06-25T10:24:09.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to say precisely what I wrote there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am referring, among others, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/360/50583&quot;&gt;this policy&lt;/a&gt; about salutations, taglines and links to your own stuff not directly related to the question, which you have been informed about before in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/340131/where-does-all-the-mass-created-from-energy-go/340157#comment762344_340157&quot;&gt;this earlier comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continually calling upon people to contact you and leaving your own website's address in everything you post is considered spam because &lt;strong&gt;that's what it is&lt;/strong&gt; - you are using physics.SE posts to promote your website when it has no relevance to the topic at hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be able to edit your post, you should just reload that page - the message you are getting is the standard message for the case where another user has edited a post you are in the process of editing, and has nothing to do with you being &quot;locked out&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T10:24:09.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9931" CreationDate="2017-06-25T10:54:58.697" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My post on this was recently deleted, and it &lt;i&gt;feels&lt;/i&gt; a lot like the circumstance &quot;How to deal with negative responses on SE due to personal grudge?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point to consider is that a perceived personal grudge may not be so.  It may be a professional grudge - which also does not feel very good.  But there is a difference.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A professional grudge is from someone who sees an opportunity for you&#xA;to improve and is trying to reach out to you to make these (in the&#xA;writer's eyes) necessary improvements to really grow.  The person&#xA;with such a grudge is actually hoping for your benefit!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A personal grudge comes from someone who is &quot;out to get you&quot; for some&#xA;reason that has nothing to do with the subject at hand.  They can do&#xA;so for your benefit or else-wise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the trick is that a professional grudge and a personal grudge can &lt;i&gt;feel&lt;/i&gt; a lot a like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My newest recommendation to deal with such perceived grudges is to try to get the facts on the table in a separate more private forum (to not publicly humiliate the person with such a grudge). Also, it is here recommended to start a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with the action (pictured here) I am posting it as a separate question on the meta, instead of getting into details any more here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xYiQo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xYiQo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Metrocracy feedback&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is a professional grudge.  I will have to see by evaluating the facts on the separate meta question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions, contact me personally.  I am not posting contact information yet because there is some question if this is proper or not still and I do not want to detract from my current answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157002" LastEditorUserId="157002" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T11:37:37.260" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T11:37:37.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T12:30:58.523" Score="-11" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9931/how-to-deal-with-negative-responses-on-se-due-to-personal-grudge/9970#9970&quot;&gt;Physics Meta article &lt;i&gt;How to deal with negative responses on SE due to personal grudge?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt; interesting, because it brought to light the phenomenon where some members of the community are privileged and they use that privilege to harm other users in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1) In some cases, the harm may be justified. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2) In some cases, the harm is not justified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3) In either case of justified or not, the receiver of the harm of course feels hurt in many cases and wants to know what to do about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4) A new user receives proportionally far greater harm than an experienced user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5) So an incorrect judgement call on a new user could result in consequences that an experienced user would never normally face.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In discussing the subject ACuriousMind put forth an answer that included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA; A single downvote likewise is both difficult to determine to be cast maliciously and not particularly concerning - this would be different if a user went through several of your posts to downvote them because they don't like you, but there are scripts in place to catch that sort of behaviour.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And such a response might be justified from his vantage point - with a wonderful reputation, such that one down-vote does not matter too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what was not taken into consideration was the stature of the person who had made the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/76347/j-rahman&quot;&gt;J. Rahman&lt;/a&gt;, that he was a new author without &lt;em&gt;any articles except the one post&lt;/em&gt; - who did not want to make a contribution to Stack Physics Exchange because of how he presumably saw this behavior.  (He still only has the one question post, but now a much-improved reputation of 148 at the time of this writing.)  And from his vantage point, a single down-vote was very significant at the time he wrote the question, with far more impact than on someone with a sizable reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no privilege to comment (which is feedback without possible reputation implications) but did have only privilege to answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PYAO5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PYAO5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Needing more reputation to comment, and not just answer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, consistent with the overall system in place, no consideration was taken about the impact of a suggestion.  I was suggested to &quot;comment&quot; instead of answer when it was very clear from my answer that the reason I posted it there was that I &lt;em&gt;do not have the option to comment within Stack Exchange Physics's System&lt;/em&gt;.  The suggestion posted here &lt;i&gt;felt&lt;/i&gt; like it fit within Categories $2$,$4$, and $5$ in the bullet items above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NSXop.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NSXop.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image showing that Suggestion to Comment *Was Not Possible*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am repeating my response to his claim (and making an archive copy of my response) that the single vote was really not so significant and did not so much harm as evidence so give the moderators and members a full picture of his action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I down-voted your answer and I will tell you why.  Convince me otherwise and I would be willing to reconsider and up-vote it. &quot;It only subtracts 2 points, which is not worth to spend a lot of effort on,&quot; ignores the situation on this site whereby there are a very large number of users who can down-vote, but not explain themselves (without exposing their reputation).  If someone down-votes an answer, that person &lt;em&gt;should always&lt;/em&gt; be allowed to explain in just a few words why.  Otherwise we are not really a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9931/how-to-deal-with-negative-responses-on-se-due-to-personal-grudge/9970#9970&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;meritocracy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but rather a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/76347/j-rahman&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hypocracy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; because we are using the voting system as &quot;the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit.&quot;  The system is constrained so that a voter can down-vote but not have the opportunity in most cases even to explain himself.  So there is &lt;em&gt;no merit&lt;/em&gt; to his vote.  There is no learning opportunity to correct defects from such an experience.  Science is based on the merit of hypotheses and testing these, no matter how simple or seemingly inconsequential.  A down vote without a hypothesis on why it is cast violates the very principles of physics and science that the site claims to promote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek&#xA;  κράτος kratos &quot;strength, power&quot;) is a political philosophy holding&#xA;  that power should be vested in individuals almost exclusively based on&#xA;  ability and talent.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;41&lt;/a&gt; Advancement in such a system is based on&#xA;  performance measured through examination and/or demonstrated&#xA;  achievement in the field where it is implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  Hypocrisy is the contrivance of a false appearance of virtue or&#xA;  goodness, while concealing real character or inclinations, especially&#xA;  with respect to religious and moral beliefs; hence in a general sense,&#xA;  hypocrisy may involve dissimulation, pretense, or a sham. Hypocrisy is&#xA;  the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which&#xA;  one criticizes another. In moral psychology, it is the failure to&#xA;  follow one's own expressed moral rules and principles.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;41&lt;/a&gt; According to&#xA;  British political philosopher David Runciman, &quot;Other kinds of&#xA;  hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks,&#xA;  claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty&#xA;  that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not&#xA;  hold.&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;42&lt;/a&gt; American political journalist Michael Gerson says that&#xA;  political hypocrisy is &quot;the conscious use of a mask to fool the public&#xA;  and gain political benefit.&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;42&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157002" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T12:36:08.247" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T15:14:57.033" Title="Is a moderator's Approach to Delete the Answer Provided When No Comment Was Possible Consistent with a Metrocracy or Hypocracy?" Tags="|discussion|support|comments|policy|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9971" CreationDate="2017-06-25T12:55:10.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussions on meta Stack Exchange sites are discussions, but they are still  expected to have some structure. If you post an answer, then just as on the main site, &lt;strong&gt;it is expected to address the question itself, not another post&lt;/strong&gt;. If your answer is not an answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;it may be deleted&lt;/a&gt;, as per site policy. It is also possible that a moderator with &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/13330/2153&quot;&gt;convert the answer to a comment&lt;/a&gt;, if it is suitable. One reason this was not done was because your answer is far too long to fit into a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/202224/274942&quot;&gt;moderators should not moderate content on their own posts&lt;/a&gt;, as it would be a conflict of interest. Some moderators extend this to not moderating posts on threads they've been active on, lest they make an impression of impropriety. They would say that ACuriousMind should, therefore, not have deleted your post, and let another moderator do it. However, I also think that many moderators - maybe the majority - would agree with ACuriousMind's action; I know I do. The case is clear-cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to make three points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your answer was pretty clearly not an answer. Potential conflict of interest or not, it should have been deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/55822/274942&quot;&gt;assume good faith&lt;/a&gt;. When a user does something, it's possible that they're being nefarious, but it's also quite likely that they're doing what's right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each Stack Exchange site has at least one chat room; Physics has &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;. If you have an issue with another user with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;enough reputation to chat&lt;/a&gt;, I would recommend taking it there and calmly talking it out first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastEditorUserId="56299" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T15:14:57.033" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T15:14:57.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9975" CreationDate="2017-06-25T21:57:01.223" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4200/yes-another-closed-question-question&quot;&gt;previous meta question&lt;/a&gt; regarding whether certain types of questions requesting a learning-path, or resource-recommendation, or any learning-related-things are off topic or not. I couldn't find any vote on meta in which the community had decided this. What is the policy? Are these questions on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A significant portion of my time is self learning physics, and I've found lists with references, especially those saying &lt;em&gt;why a specific book is good, etc&lt;/em&gt; particularly very useful. Also, some of questions such as &quot;learning physics for mathematician&quot; or &quot;learning physics for engineers&quot; has been very useful to me, to separate resources more math-oriented or more physics-oriented, or applied-orientend, or exercise-oriented, or engineering-oriented, or whatever-oriented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you guys that already know a lot of physics find these kinds of questions useless. Maybe you think they pollute the high quality content of Physics SE. In short, I don't know why you guys dislike these questions (or even if you do). But, I am sure others find those quite useful. Especially the ones who are learning (like myself). That being said, I can only hope today, 4 years  later after the linked question, this policy has changed, at least a little bit. Has it? Maybe there is a reason for all this to exist that I am missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has the policy on learning-related questions changed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why do we need it? What are the reasons for this policy to exist?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57094" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T22:16:54.473" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T22:53:22.283" Title="Are request-learning-path questions off topic? Why?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|policy|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9974" CreationDate="2017-06-25T22:53:22.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is a bit confused but I think that you're mixing two types of questions and two separate policies, one of which did in fact change shortly after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4200/yes-another-closed-question-question&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; you referenced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time that question was asked, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; resource-recommendation questions were considered off topic and were promptly closed, by community agreement. (And, while we're here: accusations of a &quot;small group&quot; &quot;taking control&quot; of decisions like that are largely unfounded, I think, and hardly constructive.) In months that followed that thread, however, several things changed: this started with the thread&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which represents a collective agreement that we should work towards a resource-recommendation policy that works better for the site, an effort which culminated with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in a tightly defined line of the kinds of recommendation questions which this community does and does not consider to work with our format and to add value to the knowledge store in our site archives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have found the threads in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag useful, as they stand today, it's largely because of the effort that took place in those months to craft a policy that would allow the questions but only in a form that would make them useful to a wide audience. (In its previous life, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; tag mostly consisted of unannotated lists of books that were of little added value compared to e.g. a page of Amazon search results.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate kind of question is the &quot;how do I learn...&quot; type of query - think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35243/how-do-i-learn-higher-level-physics&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33222/how-do-you-start-learning-physics-by-yourself&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; as examples - and those remain off-topic, though I'm not aware of a single specific thread that documents the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that they are simultaneously too broad and too localized: they tend to require a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; broader kind of answer than our format can really provide, and they tend to only be useful for the OP when they are strictly tailored to their experience, which makes them less useful for a wider audience. In addition, they have a junk-food-like quality to them, in that they attract lots of continuous attention (for a comparatively low objective value of the thread) and thus tend to drown out other content which we do want to incentivize. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These qualities make the genre hard to handle and it makes many people think that they're not worth the trouble, though as you note they are not entirely without interest to a nontrivial audience. A bit beyond that, the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Academia Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; has eased off the pressure on several of the soft-question types of thread, by providing an outlet for them - though I'm not quite sure how on-topic a question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33222/how-do-you-start-learning-physics-by-yourself&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, say, would be on the academia site nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you think that those questions should be allowed, you're welcome to make a case that they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; serve a part of this site's audience (which includes, according to the site charter, &quot;active researchers, academics &lt;em&gt;and students&lt;/em&gt; of physics) and that they can be made to work with the site's format rather than against it. An appeal for a blank cheque is unlikely to go down well, I think: instead, we would need a solid plan for dealing with the problems I listed above (and probably other objections I'm forgetting about at the moment) and a tightly defined way to handle those questions analogous to the one we currently use for resource-recommendation threads. I'm not sure that can be made to work, but you're welcome to make proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T22:53:22.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9931" CreationDate="2017-06-27T13:07:36.847" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has happened to me in the past that I wrote an answer, then thought &quot;that sounds familiar&quot;, searched, found my original, and marked the question as a duplicate (linking to my earlier answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer has not been accepted, you can then choose to delete it (note - you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; delete your answer after it has been accepted although you could still edit it ... but a &quot;harmful edit&quot;, where you delete the entire body of the text, for example, is likely to get rolled back by a high-rep user).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that all the above can happen &quot;in good faith&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes happen. Best advice: ignore and move along. Some questions are wrongly marked as duplicates - come to Meta and argue for them to be reopened. If someone answered your question, and this was helpful - give them an upvote. If it doesn't fully answer your question, leave a comment explaining what you are missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In everything you do here, act with grace beyond what others deserve; assume good intent, even when there is reason to suspect otherwise; and in egregious cases, use the flags under questions/answers/comments to alert a moderator that &quot;something untoward is going on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single downvotes, even if given out of spite, are just part of the fabric of this community. Serial downvotes (where someone unleashes a torrent of downvotes in quick succession) get detected by an algorithm and reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look for the positive, and enjoy the community. Have fun, learn lots, and take regular stretch breaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="26969" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T20:14:41.277" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T20:14:41.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2017-06-28T12:39:46.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how non-mainstream is the same as crackpot-ism. If everyone keeps repeating mainstream teachings it's just religion. Were Galileo's views main-stream? Now, I know this isn't a place for publishing research. But especially considering the various equally valid interpretations of quantum mechanics: There seems to be a strong bias towards the Kopenhagen interpretation on stackexchange.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Majority vote or having read something in a main-stream book has nothing to do with scientific evidence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result of this anti-non-mainstream-policy is that for example renowned physicists like Nobel laureate 't Hooft giving scientific good answers are downvoted simply because what he is talking about is relatively new and not yet mainstream. (Not that it should matter who the answerer is. It just goes to show that the assumption that all non-mainstream posts are basically from 10 year old know-it-alls, is wrong.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainstream orthodoxy and dogmatism have always stood in the way of scientific progress!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not simply a non-mainstream tag instead of a non-mainstream flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97383" LastEditorUserId="97383" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T13:38:23.070" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T13:38:23.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9979" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9999" CreationDate="2017-06-29T09:11:48.297" Score="-6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked several questions in Physics. I never seem to get a satisfactory answer. The only people who do answer are those who are overly concerned about form and structure of the question but does not have anything at all to contribute to the answer of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this site about &quot;how to ask questions?&quot; or is it about asking physics questions to get either mathematical solutions or appropriate answers to the &quot;physics&quot; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27597" OwnerDisplayName="Vick" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T10:34:00.320" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T02:45:35.127" Title="Questions which are clear enough, yet rejected!" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9979" CreationDate="2017-06-29T09:51:59.610" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the seven questions you have asked five of them have been answered with no or only minor edits to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/278003/cosmology-parameters&quot;&gt;Cosmology parameters&lt;/a&gt; was edited because it contained multiple different questions and we require only one question per post. The question was edited and subsequently answered, and you have accepted the answer. In fact four of the questions have answers that you have accepted and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/285596/friedmann-equations-for-an-open-and-accelerating-expansion&quot;&gt;one more&lt;/a&gt; has an answer that seems pretty good to me but which you haven't accepted for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is just the one question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/341873/anisotropy-and-the-planck-results&quot;&gt;Anisotropy and the Planck results&lt;/a&gt; that is on hold pending clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the evidence does not support your claim that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never seem to get a satisfactory answer. The only people who do answer are those who are overly concerned about form and structure of the question but does not have anything at all to contribute to the answer of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T09:51:59.610" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9979" CreationDate="2017-06-29T14:14:20.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has already shown up in the comments, but seems worth promoting to an answer.&#xA;You say, in questions and comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never seem to get a satisfactory answer. ... Whereas the other questions, for want of better answers, I accepted them nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a case of &quot;Doc, it hurts when I do this&quot; being answered with &quot;Well, don't don't do that.&quot;  Accepting an answer is how you announce to the world that you find it satisfactory.  On-topic questions here can accept new answers basically for ever --- there are even badges awarded for bringing an old question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/59/revival&quot;&gt;back&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/44/necromancer&quot;&gt;dead&lt;/a&gt;.  But someone who is trawling through the back catalogue of questions is unlikely to go to the effort of writing a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; answer to your question if you've already got an answer marked as &quot;acceptable.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T14:14:20.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9983" CreationDate="2017-06-30T12:47:14.357" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I asked a question yesterday about how to do quantum mechanics with a Sturm-Liouville Schrödinger equation. Somehow it has disappeared completely :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to guess I might have accidentally deleted it in the app. I did some editing there and have pretty clumsy fingers. However I have deleted other things on purpose before and then I could just find them in the reputation notifications or elsewhere. I believe that also gave the option to undelete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the question seems to have disappeared completely though, so I'm not sure that accidental deleting was the reason. Can someone help me recover it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T13:34:44.573" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T13:34:44.573" Title="My question has disappeared :(" Tags="|support|status-completed|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9982" CreationDate="2017-06-30T13:32:46.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems you accidentally deleted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/342061/2451&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; 5 hours ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: OP has now undeleted his question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T13:32:46.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T17:01:58.230" Score="-13" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not related to Physics obviously, but what I think is that the downvote option to questions on this website should be removed, as on asking a dumb question out of curiosity, the question is generally bombarded with dozens of downvotes which then decreases the reputation and kills the curiosity to ask more questions. The downvote option is kind of a discouragement for newbies on this site, for me too :D. Who else thinks it should be removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158796" OwnerDisplayName="Ajinkya Naik" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T15:40:13.127" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T13:21:17.207" Title="The downvote option for questions should be removed?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9984" CreationDate="2017-06-30T17:12:54.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removing them will lead people to think it's okay (i.e. it won't cause them any harm) to ask questions that: are homework-like, show no research effort, violate site policy in anyway. This would lead to decrease in the quality of the content on the website, which can lead to a pretty bad feedback loop. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes also aren't &quot;weighed&quot; as much as upvotes on positive content, so it's not as bad as you think.  (i.e. 2 upvotes on an answer = 10 downvotes on a question) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the discussion on (especially ACuriousMind's answer): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6754/we-seem-to-be-over-eager-to-downvote&quot;&gt;We seem to be over-eager to downvote&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially one of the comments from an SO user gives good insight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63547" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T17:12:54.487" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9984" CreationDate="2017-06-30T17:18:23.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has been built up by many people, who really worked to establish it's reputation. I don't think your previous question was in anyway dumb,. You are being too harsh with yourself. But the down vote option is vital, imo,  to gauge by concensus if a question is appropriate, in various ways,  to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So dumb questions will get d/v. Always&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your point of view, look at the questions that do get good answers and copy their style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you  know some of your question is ok, go ahead with them in your own words,  then copy (and credit) Wikipedia to express the parts you know that you  know you are unsure about and will  attract criticism if you badly word them yourself..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154420" LastEditorDisplayName="user154420" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T17:47:03.693" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T17:47:03.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9984" CreationDate="2017-06-30T17:19:24.850" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's... unlikely to happen, but it is ultimately not something this community can control. The core Q&amp;amp;A engine is managed by Stack Exchange an shared by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday&quot;&gt;the 150+ sites in the network&lt;/a&gt;, and this kind of change to the engine would have to be done centrally by them. If you want to suggest this change, then the central meta site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, is the place to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can tell you right here and now that there's a 0% chance that SE will implement this: as detailed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt; down-voting answers will cost you 1 rep, but down-voting questions doesn't. That is, there is already a baked-in preference to make it &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; to downvote questions. Why is this? Because bad questions (boring, badly researched, badly written, inconsistent, what have you) make the site boring and drive away the qualified people we want answering questions; for more details, see the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if you do get downvotes on your questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is a single downvote on an isolated question, then seriously, shrug it off. I know it sounds glib for a high-rep user to say this, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; just fake internet points at the end of the day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is a noticeably low score on one or a series of questions, then do pay attention to what aspects of that question might make it a bad fit for the site, ask politely for feedback if you don't understand, and act accordingly if you do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T17:24:44.443" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T17:24:44.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9984" CreationDate="2017-06-30T17:40:16.673" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of sympathy with your position. I will not usually downvote a well intentioned question and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6754/we-seem-to-be-over-eager-to-downvote&quot;&gt;I do think we are sometimes a bit over eager to downvote&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a couple of points to bear in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly a downvote principally means &lt;em&gt;this isn't a good question for this site&lt;/em&gt;. Downvoting removes a question from the site home page and it enables the autodelete to hoover up the question if it doesn't get a good answer in a few days. So downvoting has a purpose and isn't just a way of telling people we think they suck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly we do get some real stinkers of questions from time to time. We get lots of homework questions from people too lazy even to type out the question (they just post a photo of the book), questions that display no thought at all, and questions that are plain incomprehensible. Not to mention questions that are a thinly veiled advert for the OP's own pet theory (usually that Einstein was wrong). So we do need a way of flagging up these questions to readers who might otherwise take them more seriously than they merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally note that a downvote here on the Physics Meta just means people disagree with you, not that it's a bad question. So the three downvotes and one upvote that your question has attracted at the time of writing this just means three people disagree with you and one person agrees with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T19:30:17.847" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T19:30:17.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-01T00:44:14.493" Score="14" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed the &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; close reason misused multiple times (if asked, I can provide links, but I can think of many). However, there was one recent case that made me write this post. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/342162/increasing-the-momentum-of-a-photon&quot;&gt;Increasing The Momentum Of A Photon&lt;/a&gt; has four close votes saying the question is unclear. The text of the question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there another way to increase a photon's momentum other than increasing its energy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guys, this question is perfectly clear! If the answer is &quot;no&quot;, that does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean it is unclear. If it's got an answer that's legitimate (i.e., not spam, vlq, etc) it's probably &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; unclear. I've seen close votes on other questions in spite of these two things many times, and I'd just like to write a community-wide reminder and see what the rational of the close votes there was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: thoughts? Is the unclear close reason being used for a purpose I'm not seeing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T00:55:21.867" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T01:38:33.967" Title="Not unclear if there's an answer" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|down-votes|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9989" CreationDate="2017-07-01T02:26:16.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the unclear close reason being used for a purpose I'm not seeing&#xA;  here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw the question right after it was posted and offered a comment to the OP.  The original post is (from the edit history):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IF! a photon could go faster than the speed of light, would its&#xA;  momentum increase? And also, is there another way to increase a&#xA;  photon's momentum other than increasing its energy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to check but it's entirely possible that the close votes (for being unclear) were cast before the OP edited the question in response to one or more comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the edit, I removed my comment but I see one is still there regarding the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T02:26:16.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-01T06:43:16.827" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UjTCj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UjTCj.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen shot now&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Physics Meta panel on the right is a chat, not active since the June 24 bug? &#xA;Or does it only appear when an interesting/popular  subject is being discussed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T15:38:08.927" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T15:38:08.927" Title="not seeing a meta link on main page" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9991" CreationDate="2017-07-01T07:03:00.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about the &quot;Featured meta posts&quot; section that would ordinarily appear in the yellow box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UGOJY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UGOJY.png&quot; alt=&quot;closeup of right sidebar with freehand circle showing no meta posts&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn't showing up because there are no meta posts eligible to show right now. It's not a bug, it's just an unusual situation which is why it might look weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta questions become eligible to appear in the box in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A moderator manually applies the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/featured&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;featured&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; tag to the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is recent, active, and has a reasonably positive score. The specific criteria are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/130893/56541&quot;&gt;listed on mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the thing you see that is labeled &quot;Physics Meta&quot; is simply a link to a chat room, and it only has that label because the chat room is called &quot;Physics Meta&quot;. It has (almost) no relationship to this meta site that we are currently reading. We should probably come up with a different name for that room at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat room links are completely separate from the links to meta posts that would normally appear in the yellow box. I believe there are always two chat rooms shown, and they are chosen from among all chat rooms associated with this site using some criteria related to recent activity - though I'm not sure what exactly those criteria are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T07:03:00.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9984" CreationDate="2017-07-02T00:52:01.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The downvote option is kind of a discouragement for newbies on this site, for me too :D. Who else thinks it should be removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvote option is not for the discouragement of newbie, no more than the up vote is for the encouragement of newbies, since questions or answers posted by anyone can get downvoted (or upvoted): the downvote option is for bad questions or answers, irrespective of the poster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression - to amplify a comment by @John Rennie - is that some new users are careless with their questions: they expect people to read it, think about it and provide a thoughtful answer when they themselves have put little thought into formatting, editing or researching their question; posting a page from a textbook is a perfect example of this.  Such questions are very rightfully downvoted, irrespective of the seniority of the poster, and I hope without regards for the feelings of the poster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure the OP has noted that the pool of knowledgeable active users on Physics SE is not decreasing: higher-rep users who become less active are replaced by equally valuable contributors, all of which must have started as newbies at some point.  Thus, this community must on balance be doing something right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T00:52:01.140" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9989" CreationDate="2017-07-02T07:40:59.913" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. The votes can be justified&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which have a simple, obvious Yes/No answer are generally disapproved of. See for example the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6669/self-study-students-confirmation-type-questions/6672&quot;&gt;Self Study Students: Confirmation Type Questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7336/can-we-stop-closing-questions-as-unclear-what-you-are-asking-for-ops-above-cer?rq=1&quot;&gt;Can we stop closing questions as &amp;quot;unclear what you are asking&amp;quot; for OPs above certain reputation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user who provided the only answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/342162&quot;&gt;Increasing The Momentum Of A Photon&lt;/a&gt; also commented that the question is trivial :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it is a trivial question to answer. The OP is simply asking can we increase the momentum without increasing energy. The answer would be simply no. – Dvij Jun 30 at 4:58&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is unclear about this question (in my opinion) is why the asker thinks the answer is more complicated than that. The onus is on the asker to show what his/her difficulty is. Without such context or explanation, his/her difficulty cannot be addressed, it can only be guessed at. In that sense I think the question is unclear even after the edit (v2) and the close votes are justified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others may disagree. It is inherent in the nature of reviewing that different reviewers may come to a different conclusion about the same question. Unless there is a policy which specifies what makes a question unclear, the reviewer must apply his/her own individual judgement, rather than try to second-guess others who have not yet voted, or vote with the majority who have already voted. Those who disagree are able to vote to reopen, and have done so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly you disagree with the votes to close the question as unclear. This is a difference of opinion, not a misuse of the close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has not commented upon nor approved the only answer, so we do not know if this answer has addressed the issue which the OP was asking about.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. &quot;Not unclear if there is an answer&quot; is not site policy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @ACuriousMind that the presence of a valid answer does not determine that the question is not unclear. Whether or not a question is unclear (or a duplicate, or too broad, or primarily opinion based, or not mainstream physics, or an engineering question etc) is determined collectively by those who have the rep to review questions, not by those who have the rep to post answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewers must be free to exercise their own judgement, independently and impartially, within the guidance provided by site or network policy. If (as it appears to me) you think some policy is being abused, it is up to you make your case by identifying that policy. Otherwise, you are merely expressing an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the posting of a valid answer makes &lt;em&gt;unclear what you are asking&lt;/em&gt; invalid as a reason for closing, why doesn't it do the same for &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;homework-like&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;engineering&lt;/em&gt;? Or indeed for all closure reasons? Such a policy would give those who answer the question the ability to over-ride the decisions of those who review the question. It would make the process of reviewing pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanatory text for this close reason does not state that the question cannot be answered, but that it is difficult to interpret :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was the case with the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9919/reminder-that-book-recommendations-are-on-topic&quot;&gt;Reminder that Book Recommendations are on topic&lt;/a&gt;, the community continues to close questions  contrary to your interpretation of site policy after your &quot;reminder&quot; was posted. For example : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/343477&quot;&gt;What &amp;quot;things&amp;quot; don&amp;#39;t change?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/343422&quot;&gt;Can you use sun light to heat an objects surface to hotter than the surface of the Sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/343253&quot;&gt;Resistance of filament&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/343086&quot;&gt;Why does the big bang not violate Heisenberg&amp;#39;s uncertainty principle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/342979&quot;&gt;Is a gravity train really possible? If yes, can it be used as a seemingly endless source of energy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/342948&quot;&gt;Are fundamental particles (Electron,Proton &amp;amp; Neutrons) compressible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were the reviewers who voted to close these questions abusing the policy &quot;not unclear if there's an answer&quot;? Or is there no such policy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T02:01:13.867" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T02:01:13.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9996" CreationDate="2017-07-03T07:40:07.840" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/342640/is-the-normal-force-conservative&quot;&gt;Is the normal force conservative?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was marked as a duplicate. However, as I explained when I first asked it, the answer to the &quot;duplicate&quot; post was unclear and contradicted my previous knowledge. I was merely bringing up an example where the question's answer caused confusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it has already been marked as a duplicate, and although I edited the post to explain why it wasn't, it is unlikely the question will be answered. How (and if this happens in the future) can I still get my question answered without reposting (in which it may be yet again marked as a duplicate)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160710" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T09:39:25.840" Title="Is there a way to get my question answered if it is marked as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9995" CreationDate="2017-07-03T09:19:16.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing you need to do is read the &quot;target&quot; (that is, the question that yours was marked as a duplicate of) very carefully, and also carefully consider any feedback you've gotten from people explaining why your question is considered a duplicate. Do your best to understand why they see your question as being already covered by the target question. Remember, people marked your question as a duplicate because they are trying to be helpful: they're pointing you to a resource that, they believe, will give you the information you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that duplicate status is determined by the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, not the answers. If the answers to the target question do not answer what you're asking, that does not keep the questions from being duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can proceed in one of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have something to ask that the target question does not, then you should edit your post to &lt;em&gt;very clearly&lt;/em&gt; identify what it is you want to ask that is not covered by the target. In most cases, you should include a link to the target when you clarify why the target does not cover what you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do keep in mind that, if you go this route, it's &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; responsibility to get people to understand what you're asking that the target doesn't cover. In a sense, once something is marked as a duplicate, we take a &quot;duplicate until proven otherwise&quot; approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always when editing, do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;  include comments or complaints about the question itself or people's response to it - that is, things like &quot;People are saying this is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;http://example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;target&lt;/a&gt; but it's really not.&quot; That doesn't belong in the question. Just ask what you want to ask, and include just enough information to narrow down your question so that it's different from similar questions like the target.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is to try to draw attention to the target, and hope someone will give it a satisfactory answer. As a new member of the site, there isn't that much you can do on this front, but if you are able to participate in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, you might find a high-reputation user who can set a bounty on it to draw attention. Or if you can find something to edit in the question that will improve it, that will bump it to the top of the main page for a little while, which also brings attention to it. (But use edits sparingly - excessive bumping can be considered abuse of the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T09:19:16.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9995" CreationDate="2017-07-03T09:39:25.840" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that part of the problem is that you are unclear what you mean by &lt;em&gt;normal force&lt;/em&gt;. In the duplicate this is taken to mean a force normal to the direction of motion. Since work is given by integrating F.dx when F and dx are normal the work is going to be zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention an elevator, but there the force is in the direction of motion not normal to it because both point vertically up or down. In that case I'm guessing you mean that the force is normal to the surface (i.e. the floor of the lift) that the force is acting on, which is a different meaning of &lt;em&gt;normal force&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your edit to your question just says the answers to the other question are unacceptable - see David's answer for why this isn't going to get the question reopened. If you wanted to clarify your question, in the light of my comments above, and make it clear why what you are asking is different to the previous question then I would certainly reconsider my close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T09:39:25.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T03:46:46.907" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I delete my account? I don't use this site, and I just want it to be deleted. I can't figure out how to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user164839" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T08:16:27.553" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T08:16:27.553" Title="How to delete my account?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-05T04:09:53.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9979" CreationDate="2017-07-05T13:19:30.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;People who post questions on this site are not entitled to answers which satisfy them. They are not entitled to any answers at all. Answers are provided free of charge by users who donate their time, effort and (hopefully) their expertise. They have no obligation to answer even if they have that expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more advanced or specialised the topic, the fewer users who will feel able to answer. Your questions are moderately advanced, so you should not expect to get many answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not satisfied with the answers provided, the onus is on you to explain why. I can see only 1 comment by you among the 4 answers which you have accepted, and that comment (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/317225&quot;&gt;How to induce artificial gravity?&lt;/a&gt;) was answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see only one comment to which you have not received a response, on the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/285596&quot;&gt;Friedmann equations for an open and accelerating expansion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides providing feedback on answers, you can also increase the exposure of your question (and the chances of getting more and better answers) by editing it to make it clearer or to provide additional context. This additional information should appear in the question rather than in comments, as recommended in the comments to your latest question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/341873&quot;&gt;Anisotropy and the Planck results&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&quot;&gt;Editing the question bumps it to the top of the homepage&lt;/a&gt;, giving it more exposure. Comments do not do this, and are easily overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Older questions tend to be neglected. In many cases the asker has lost interest so answers are less likely to be accepted or to get upvotes. So users looking for questions to answer concentrate on those with recent activity. If you still want answers, you have to keep the question &quot;live&quot; by editing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as others point out, accepting an answer indicates that you are satisfied with it and do not need other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who provide suggestions about the form and content of your questions are trying to be helpful. They might not be able to answer your questions, but they can give useful feedback which will make your question more attractive to those who can provide answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T02:45:35.127" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T02:45:35.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T15:12:11.437" Score="14" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Jim and if you haven't heard of me then, whatever &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; is, you're probably doing it wrong (I'm always self-advertising). I've been asked to do an AMA several times and I'm finally getting around to it. We'll get to the timing further down the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About Jim&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Academic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a masters degree in theoretical cosmology (if you're thinking &amp;quot;When is cosmology not theoretical?&amp;quot;, the alternative is observational cosmology. I never used telescopes or real data. If, on the other hand, you're thinking &amp;quot;Why is someone who studies makeup a major contributor to physics?&amp;quot;, then I'd say you're half right. A cosmologist studies the makeup of the universe). I also did my undergrad in space engineering (that's rocket science, with the spaceships and the orbits and stuff), so feel free to delve as deep as you'd like into that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you ask, I am not currently doing active research. You'll note I only have a masters. I have full intention of getting a PhD, but a run of legitimate bad luck (long story, but it really was nothing but bad luck) put my studies on hold for now. I'm currently working at the University of Toronto: Mississauga campus as a technician in the undergraduate physics labs. This is why I'm not always prompt to respond anymore. I'm usually off fixing equipment, designing experiments, or helping students. However, it also means I have a fairly experienced view of academia from a perspective halfway between students and professors (if that gives you question ideas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I have a fairly well-rounded grasp of the sciences in general; however, I'm absolutely terrible with the names of things. If you just ask me &amp;quot;Do you know how best to explain/use so-and-so's theory to do this problem?&amp;quot; I'll be like &amp;quot;Don't know. Why don't you tell me what that theory is&amp;quot;. Being from engineering and physics, there's a lot of competing terminology in my background, so I had to basically decide between knowing what everything is called and knowing how to use/perform it. I chose the latter; makes research easy, but also makes me seem like I don't know anything when talking to those that chose to know the names of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interests&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an avid cyclist, so that's a good topic. I also am interested in neuroscience and neuropsychology. I love to debate. Any silly topic or serious discussion, I will argue with you, even if it's against myself, just for the sake of fun and practice. If you don't like long debates that will likely be ended by me turning it into a joke, then don't feed the bears and avoid starting something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also very into gaming. No MMORPGs or MOBAs. I hate multiplayers unless it's with friends because I find about 10% of random people ruin it for me (and they make the other 90% lose out on the treasure that is having Jim in their lives. That should be a crime). But wanna talk about some of the great single player games out there? Go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Personal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I'm Canadian, eh? And go ahead and make jokes. I've probably made more jokes about Canadia than you could imagine. I live in Toronto, which is probably one of maybe three cities in the whole country that most non-Canadians can name. And yes, I do know Steve from Canada. He's a great guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different note: you might have noticed I tend to ramble on and get lost on a topic. I have severe ADHD, so I switch topics and get lost without knowing it. (That also makes for a good topic of questions; &amp;quot;what strategies did you use to get through university with a learning disability?&amp;quot;, for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Short Form&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cosmology &amp;amp; other space nonsense: ask me anything about it, I'll answer what I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other physics &amp;amp; science: Physics = good. I'm no string theorist or fluid mechanic, but I can do my best. Science = life. I also have experience in practical teaching of physics. Ask just about anything. Chemistry is a wonderful field, but it bores me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal or other interests: ask me literally anything else. If I can't or don't want to answer, I'll say so, but I promise to try not to be offended at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Timing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking that &lt;strong&gt;Tuesday, July 25 at 1200Z&lt;/strong&gt; is the best time for this. I'm also open to Thursday, July 20 at 1600Z if that works better for a lot of people. But unless I hear from a lot of people about that and you see me change it in this post, I'm going to be in chat expecting to answer questions on the 25th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per usual, post questions you want answered below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T11:53:39.523" Title="July 2017 Ask Me Anything with Jim (long may he reign)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-05T21:02:44.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you say above: &lt;strong&gt;I also am interested in neuroscience and neuropsychology.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The physics aspect of, for want of a better phrase, &quot;some of how we think&quot;, has been made more prominent by this recent research, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40131242&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monkey's Pattern Recognition&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, imo is  a story worth reading,  as a math algorithm has duplicated, at least to some degree, the process of neuron firing that the animal's brain went through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to pure ignorance, I don't have any fixed ideas on conscious, if it exists, how it works, etc, etc...but it is an interest of mine, especially if I can use a physics or math based experimental results rather than philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: although Max Tegmark (along with Penrose)  may be out of their field with some of their ideas, I wonder if discussing their approach to &quot;reality&quot;, i.e.  that we / the universe are fundamentally based around math, is asking too much of a physics based AMA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154420" LastEditorDisplayName="user154420" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T00:12:34.230" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T00:12:34.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-05T21:09:30.853" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two related questions about your background in theoretical cosmology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What made you choose &lt;em&gt;theoretical&lt;/em&gt; cosmology in particular? What first drew you to the subject - especially after doing &quot;space engineering&quot; for your undergrad degree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never used telescopes or real data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Engineering work aside, do you think this entirely theoretical background has helped you or hindered you in your studies? Did the theoretical focus make you stronger in that area, or did the lack of experimental experience detract from your understanding of cosmology (not that I can tell!).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T21:09:30.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-06T11:04:38.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't mention anything about music, just wondering your musical tastes/interests. What type of genres/artists/albums do you listen to? Do you find yourself more able or less able to study with music playing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T11:04:38.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-06T13:44:05.280" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a fellow theorist (albeit with a very different focus),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In your view, what are the most interesting theoretical insights cosmology has produced in the last few decades?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In your view, what are the most interesting/most promising &lt;em&gt;open problems&lt;/em&gt; in theoretical cosmology?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a fellow gamer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the best game you've played in the last 5 years?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T13:44:05.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-07T10:04:56.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What aspect of theoretical cosmology did you study? Was it paper-based work or computer-based work? If the latter, what kind of software/languages were used? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T10:04:56.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-07T12:58:26.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does a person suffering from ADHD realise that they have ADHD?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At what point in your life did you realise that you were suffering from severe ADHD?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What strategies did you use to get through university with a learning disability?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60891" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T12:58:26.380" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9984" CreationDate="2017-07-09T13:21:17.207" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The obvious solution of the problem would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to create a different site for very basic level questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instead of downvoting the basic questions to the hell, they should be migrated to this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;higher level questions asked on that site, should be migrated to here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is so obvious, so trivial...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it didn't happen, and it won't ever happen, although it is a good thing to at least try to motivate the communities into this direction. The reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question migrations are a de facto taboo on the StackExchange. Probably nobody really knows why, but it is just so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The StackExchange won't ever allow to create a new site for basic physics questions. They say they don't do this because it attracts content from the Physics SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But, in the practice is that these questions are nearly always closed on the PSE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note, in the PSE, in theory, any basic level questions are allowed!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their view, they don't close/downvote them because they are basic level questions asked by naive laymen. They close them because they are &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;non-mainstream&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; and so on. And these rules are acceptable and reasonable one by one. But their summarized result is that a newbie has a very, very hard time until he can ask his first not closed, maybe even upvoted question on the site. Their patience is unlikely to hold so long, particularly that they feel very well the mainly unjust character what the site provides for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, even a patient newbie will be likely on question ban until that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I absolutely agree your view that this site does a bad work on encouraging young people to attract them to the physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T13:21:17.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2017-07-10T02:47:57.770" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Account deletion is not helpful, with it you only give up rights and nothing get you back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Extension: it also gives up the possibility that once you get back and try to fix things what caused your wish to leave. It is much better to leave on a way while you still hold the possibility to once get back and try to fix things here.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think enough is enough, it is a better idea to simply stop visiting the site any more - maybe once in the future you will need the privileges and the rep here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't really delete all of your posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions can only be deleted if they have at most 1 answer without an upvote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can delete your answers only if they aren't accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the system alarms if you are starting a massive own-post deletion and avoids it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;furthermore, mods can any time un-delete your deleted posts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to leave because some unhappy social situation, then don't worry. Simply stop posting, and nobody will remember you after some weeks (for old, active or particularly.... &lt;em&gt;controversial&lt;/em&gt; accounts, it can be even a year, but not more). But you can come back any time if something would change your mind in the (maybe far) future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to leave because it is your only way to make some of your data unreachable, then note: most of the sensitive information is only available here for only a narrow circle old high-rep users (or mods). Consider a nickname change, or ask the help of the mods/CMs, they are sometimes cooperative, sometimes they want to be but can't (for example, also mods can't delete a single edit from a post history, they can only delete the whole post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the only real reason to delete your account if you fight stackexchange addiction and it seems to be the only way out. But think first for these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using site blocking plugins in your browser.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking the mods/CMs for a temporal suspension, again they are sometimes cooperative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T21:59:13.303" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T21:59:13.303" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10011" CreationDate="2017-07-10T13:09:05.550" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/344909/defrosting-a-chicken-breast-and-the-laws-of-thermodynamics&quot;&gt;one of my questions&lt;/a&gt; has a different view count from the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics.SE homepage&lt;/a&gt;? Which view count is correct? The one displayed in the question itself or the one on the homepage? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For e.g. the question in question (nice!) says 2K views on the homepage and 1,544 views when you open the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138682" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T13:32:36.977" Title="View counter: which is correct?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10010" CreationDate="2017-07-10T13:32:36.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell it rounds to the nearest thousand when it gets that big.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.5K rounds up to 2K, while the number in the question is the actual number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T13:32:36.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-11T13:54:56.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll bite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I'm Canadian, eh? And go ahead and make jokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the top of your head attached to your body?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how much of your day is spent in the vicinity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcqud4yGNiA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trees and/or rocks&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T13:54:56.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-11T14:54:19.450" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently put a bounty on this question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/341968/&quot;&gt;Prove isometry preserving excision is Killing-like?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Valter Moretti answered it just before it expired (I think). I took the weekend to consider his answer and accepted yesterday (Monday, July 10) and don't recall seeing an award bounty button. Valter may not have received the bounty - I can't tell. How do I ensure he receives/received his just reward - which I thought I had awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1280" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T15:41:14.477" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T15:41:14.477" Title="Did I award the bounty?" Tags="|support|specific-question|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10014" CreationDate="2017-07-11T15:34:59.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it appears that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/16065/209806&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; was not awarded. This is only possible to do before the grace period ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T15:34:59.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10017" CreationDate="2017-07-13T09:37:50.127" Score="6" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure there's a formal mechanism to suggest tag synonyms but I can't find it and no one ever votes there anyway, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should we rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teleportation&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-teleportation&lt;/a&gt; and make the former redirect to the latter?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make it equally easy to find and relatively clearer on what it entails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T18:13:42.337" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T18:13:42.337" Title="Should we rename the teleportation tag to quantum-teleportation?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10016" CreationDate="2017-07-13T11:55:19.340" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't think of anything else that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teleportation&lt;/a&gt; tag would be used for, at least not within the scope of actual physics (and hence of this site). Unless there is some such thing, yes, I'd say go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there do seem to be some existing questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teleportation&lt;/a&gt; tag which &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-teleportation&lt;/a&gt; would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; apply to. Most of them are probably off topic, and any others should have the tag removed. So we may want to do a bit of cleanup before actually making the switch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T11:55:19.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10021" CreationDate="2017-07-14T17:39:40.110" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following two cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question asked shows no research effort. It could have been easily solved with minimum research from the side of the user who is asking. But it does not belong to homework-and-exercises tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is unrealistic, that is, it does  asks about something that is not feasible in reality, though the question asked is in Physics, and not &quot;too broad&quot;, as it does not raise any good discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which type of flagging should be done for these two cases? In the first case, I could not flag as it does not belong to &quot;Homework problems should ask for....&quot; flag.  In the second case, I raised a moderator intervention flag, stating the question is unrealistic, but it was denied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A request: any moderator or person with high reputation, who can peep into my account and find about which flags I'm talking of, please don't mention it here to avoid unnecessary discussion. If you find out about what I'm talking here (which, of course, you will), please keep it to yourself; rather let's discuss the cases that I've mentioned here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="149663" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T17:46:52.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T19:03:31.593" Title="What kind of flags should be raised in the following cases?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2017-07-14T18:02:56.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the post contains inappropriate material, flag for mod attention. If there is nothing inappropriate, and you really don't know what flag to use, just leave a comment explaining why the question is off-topic and move on. Or don't leave a comment at all. No need to flag everything you deem off-topic all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a declined flag is no bid deal. Don't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T18:02:56.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2017-07-14T19:03:31.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The question asked shows no research effort. It could have been easily solved with minimum research from the side of the user who is asking. But it does not belong to homework-and-exercises tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the question deserves the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag has &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; to do with whether it should be flagged or closed. So let's leave the tag out of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing I would do to such a question is &lt;strong&gt;downvote it&lt;/strong&gt;. This is literally what question downvotes were made for. It says so right in the tooltip you get if you hover over the down arrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, what you should be thinking about is whether the question qualifies for the homework-like &lt;em&gt;close reason&lt;/em&gt;, which is explained in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like question policy&lt;/a&gt;. (Keep in mind that this policy applies to more than &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; homework questions.) Failure to do basic research qualifies as a lack of effort, which is one of the criteria by which a homework-like question can be closed. So if the question is homework-like and the asker has not done basic research, you can flag it for closure (using the standard flag) on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; homework-like, we do not have a standard close reason that would apply to it for not showing effort. Maybe we should, and maybe we will in the future. Depending on your reputation, you may be able to cast a close vote with a custom reason, in which you could mention the lack of effort. Otherwise, you should probably just downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is unrealistic, that is, it does asks about something that is not feasible in reality, though the question asked is in Physics, and not &quot;too broad&quot;, as it does not raise any good discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussions? Remember, we &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; want &lt;em&gt;discussions&lt;/em&gt; on the main site. We want questions which can be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this type of question will likely fall under our policy against non-mainstream physics questions (which specifically includes any questions about fictional physics in a fictional universe). There is an associated close reason, which you should choose when flagging or voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T19:03:31.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9989" CreationDate="2017-07-15T01:06:23.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find myself in disagreement with the premise of the question.  Simply because a question has one or more answers does not make it clear.  Moreover, simply because the statement of the question is clear does not in itself make the meaning of the question clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an absurd example, consider the question “Is the sky blue because hippopotami are pink?”  (The situation I'm illustrating is similar to the example of the OP in that the question is short, with limited context.)  Certainly the statement is clear but what on Earth does this question mean?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may well be that one contributor will answer as to why the sky is blue, another as to why hippopotami are pink, and even (Heavens forbid!) one might advance an unsuspected link between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the question might be resolved if the OP accepted one or another answer, but until an answer is accepted I feel it is perfectly legitimate to flag such a question as unclear so the OP can eventually provide additional context or sourcing and thus allow for a correct answer more expansive than “obviously not”.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T01:38:33.967" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T01:38:33.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-17T05:20:11.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there anything what you believe (or, at least strongly suspect), but you can't prove?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T05:20:11.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10075" CreationDate="2017-07-17T12:07:33.057" Score="8" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;When editing a question today, I realized that, for whatever reason, we don't really have a tag for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and really, we should. Unfortunately, however, the obvious choice, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-magnetic-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-magnetic-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-magnetic-resonance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is one character too long (26 for a character limit of 25), so it doesn't fit. There's a number of alternatives but in a brief chat exchange with the mods we didn't really come to an agreement on what is the best, so I'll just float a few ideas below and see which ones go to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally we should make as many synonyms as possible, which will redirect to the main tag and help make the main tag show up on the autocomplete, but we still need a main tag for the cluster ─ which will display on all questions with the tag ─ and they all have tradeoffs. So, vote on the one you think is less bad as the main tag, and we'll make the rest synonyms (plus whatever other synonyms people care to suggest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T16:42:08.843" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T22:40:10.813" Title="A tag for nuclear magnetic resonance" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-07-17T12:08:44.497" Score="11" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nmr&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nmr&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nmr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro: the abbreviation is widely understood and recognized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Con: it's better to have longer tags that are self-explanatory instead of just initials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T12:08:44.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-07-17T12:10:18.073" Score="-2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-magnetic-resonanc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-magnetic-resonanc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-magnetic-resonanc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro: gets most of the full name in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Con: lopped off bits make it none-too-pretty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T12:10:18.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-07-17T12:11:19.503" Score="-6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nucl-magnetic-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nucl-magnetic-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nucl-magnetic-resonance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro: gets most of the full name in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons: lopped off bits make it none-too-pretty. It won't show up on autocomplete if people type 'nuclear' fast enough (though with the right synonyms in place it's less of a problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T12:45:56.687" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T12:45:56.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-07-17T12:12:45.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magnetic-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;magnetic-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;magnetic-resonance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro: actual grammatical phrase with correct spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Con: loses some impact and recognizability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T12:12:45.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-07-17T13:12:56.157" Score="-8" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nucl-mag-res&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nucl-mag-res&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nucl-mag-res&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros: gets most of the name in. Abbreviations for each word are common in other contexts --- for example, mag. field, res. freq.  All words are abbreviated to the same number of &quot;significant figures&quot;.  (&quot;significant syllables&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons: Ugly. Won't show up in autocomplete for &quot;nuclear&quot; (but clever synonyms may help).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T13:12:56.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-07-18T15:26:47.703" Score="-2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-magnet-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-magnet-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-magnet-resonance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros: gets basically the full name in without weird abbreviations, fairly recognizable for original term, will show up when people type 'nuclear...' so harder to skip as an abbreviation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons: I mean, it's not the actual term, so nothing's perfect =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T15:26:47.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10035" CreationDate="2017-07-21T11:14:10.277" Score="4" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have flagged any question or answer by a person with high reputation or any moderator, as inappropriate (or any other flag). As far as I know, it will be placed in the review queue. Now, anyone with high reputation or a moderator can access these queues. Then, will that person be able to see that his own post has been flagged? In that case, he will be able to decline that flag, although perhaps it was necessary to delete the post or take action against the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T16:24:43.700" Title="Query regarding review of post flags" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10034" CreationDate="2017-07-21T15:07:11.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-moderator users have no way to know that their posts have been flagged except by the phenomena associated with the review of such flags, e.g. automatic comments with a &quot;From Review&quot; link at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can see all flags, even on their own posts, but we consider it good form to not act on such flags and let another moderator handle them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Their own posts will never be shown to users in a review queue, meaning no non-moderators could ever decline flags to protect their own content. If you have reason to believe a &lt;em&gt;moderator&lt;/em&gt; is abusing their powers to maliciously decline flags that shouldn't have been declined to protect themselves, raise it here on meta or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact the Community Team&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T15:07:11.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10034" CreationDate="2017-07-21T16:24:43.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some points not fully covered in the existing answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All reviews are public, including the (summarized) actions of individual reviewers ─ cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/167776&quot;&gt;this example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All reviews of any given post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/275795/should-the-new-timeline-view-show-links-to-review-items&quot;&gt;are accessible&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36303/feedback-request-new-timeline-question-view&quot;&gt;post timeline&lt;/a&gt; (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76566/list-of-unlinked-pages-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;non-linked site feature&lt;/a&gt;) ─ cf. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/321058/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt; for the example above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All reviews leave a trace on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;, and it is pretty easy to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/699458/reviews-of-a-given-users-posts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;build a query&lt;/a&gt; that will take a user ID and return all existing reviews on all their (non-deleted) posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's less useful for looking up on your own posts (and more useful for getting an overview of how the site reviews are doing as a whole) but all 10k+ users have access to the full history of the review queues, via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/history&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; tab of the corresponding review queue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, all of these are for information only, and are not actionable items. Users cannot review flags that affect their posts (with the obvious exception of suggested edits); I can't find a confirmation on the mother meta (possibly because this is considered obvious) but if it happened I would class it as a serious bug which should be reported asap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T16:24:43.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T22:27:05.143" Score="11" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Qmechanic just &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/38926975#38926975&quot;&gt;raised on chat&lt;/a&gt; the need to take some more action on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag, and I think it's about right: the tag, despite some loud all-caps in the tag wiki excerpt, gets misused all the time, by people who simply have no idea that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathematical physics&lt;/a&gt; is a discipline unto its own and that the term should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be used to describe posts just because they have a bit of highschool algebra in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the more data-minded, &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/699768/edits-that-removed-the-mathematical-physics-tag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; finds all the posts which were originally posted with the tag, at a current count of 1175 over the site's history and there's plenty of clonkers in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Qmechanic proposed some manipulations with the tags that I rather strongly disagree with, but I agree that there's a need and I think there's a better solution to the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Let's have a review queue for this.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I think this could work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a new user posts a question with the tagged mathematical-physics (or some pre-defined set of tags, such as e.g. mathematics), then it gets sent to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/&quot;&gt;First Posts review queue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There the review, instead of being described with the usual tagline&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;strong&gt;first question&lt;/strong&gt; asked by a new user. Help them learn to use the site by reviewing their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it gets the header&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question by a new user has the &lt;strong&gt;frequently-misused tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot;&gt;mathematical physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Please check that the tag has been used correctly and remove it if it hasn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or some similar wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After enough time (say, the user has three positive-score posts on the tag, or 1500 rep, or some linear combination of the two), users' posts no longer get sent to this queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could additionally impose a similar experience requirement on reviewers, so that users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/access-review-queues&quot;&gt;500 rep&lt;/a&gt; will only be shown these reviews if they've got three positive-score posts with the tag, knocking off one of those per extra 500 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All numerical thresholds obviously subject to adjustment, particularly if we find data sources about the existing misuses that are more than me pulling numbers out of thin air.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, once you divide those 1200 posts over the six years of the site's existence you get something like one post every few days, which is a bit sparse but non-negligible, but mostly, Qmechanic does the bulk of the re-tagging around here, and if s/he says it's getting out of hand, then I believe it, period. I think this is enough to show that the problem is real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does involve some nontrivial coding and changes to the UI, but I don't think they are &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; radical, and they can essentially ride piggyback on the existing queues. And, if the queue system does get an overhaul at some point, this could be brought out into its own branch if so required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I think this kind of mechanism would be useful in the wider SE arena: there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/274632/help-the-helpless-with-how-to-ask-tag-tips/274634#274634&quot;&gt;tag warnings&lt;/a&gt; for misused tags (which is something we should also implement) and those have been seen with interest by other sites (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1719/should-we-ask-for-tag-warnings&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1105/let-s-have-some-tag-warnings-to-prevent-common-mistakes-by-new-users&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;), so presumably the sites that implement tag warnings might also be interested in a review queue along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking it here first, though, because it's probably easier to test the mechanism in a site where it's less likely to break things before scaling it up to full-SE-network availability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for clarity, there's several other tags that probably need this kind of additional scrutiny, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/numerics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;numerics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;numerics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laws-of-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laws-of-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laws-of-physics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computational-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computational-physics&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/equations-of-motion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;equations-of-motion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;equations-of-motion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the moment, I've set up a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/63070/tag-review-for-misused-tags&quot;&gt;dedicated chatroom: Tag review for misused tags&lt;/a&gt;, with feeds from those tags, as an ersatz review queue, and as an experiment to see how well that works. (If you do edit tags from feeds in that room, leave a message saying that you've done so, to help track how useful it is.) Hopefully this will help get a sense of the scale of the problem and its available solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T16:01:19.883" Title="A review queue for misused tags" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7214" CreationDate="2017-07-22T12:56:20.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG if a more descriptive tag applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T12:56:20.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7214" CreationDate="2017-07-22T13:00:23.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not use this tag unless your question is about the fundamental research area called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot;&gt;mathematical physics&lt;/a&gt;. Questions do not qualify for this tag simply because they involve math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T07:27:35.150" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T07:27:35.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7214" CreationDate="2017-07-22T13:02:44.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/equations-of-motion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;equations-of-motion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;equations-of-motion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG just because the question contains an equation of motion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T13:02:44.350" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7214" CreationDate="2017-07-22T13:04:15.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laws-of-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laws-of-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laws-of-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG just because the question deals with a law of physics! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T13:04:15.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7214" CreationDate="2017-07-22T21:27:24.220" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computational-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computational-physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG just because your equation has code in it! If your question is on debugging code, ask it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T21:27:24.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7214" CreationDate="2017-07-22T21:29:41.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is NOT a homework help site or a site which solves random problems presented by users. Please show your work to solve the problem &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; ask a &lt;em&gt;conceptual, focused&lt;/em&gt; question about the problem. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T21:29:41.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T21:36:49.063" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-physics&lt;/a&gt; is one of the worst tags I have ever seen. It is a cesspit of filth and agony for good stout-hearted reviewers. It is worthy of burnination with fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, a little more seriously: most of the questions I'm seeing should be retagged/could be retagged. The tag is ridiculous and unnecessary. I'm beginning some edits (not too many of course; don't want to flood the active tab) to start cleaning it up a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have no idea why it shouldn't be burninated. The tag excerpt says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG if a more descriptive tag applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uhm...when would a more descriptive tag &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; apply? Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I should point out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; has already been burninated/removed for all time. How is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-physics&lt;/a&gt; any different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5032/121464&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; there's a score of six in favor of burnination. And yet nothing was done... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T15:25:09.957" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T15:25:09.957" Title="general-physics: a generally terrible tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-23T02:58:41.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T23:21:25.013" Score="7" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we burninate &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4905/121464&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; there were three votes in favor and no dissenters. Yes, there are many questions tagged with it, but really, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt; isn't a good tag - the questions are about what's happening &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the food, and that's what should be described in tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T23:21:25.013" Title="Let's eat up another tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-23T02:59:01.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10052" CreationDate="2017-07-23T14:15:26.453" Score="8" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has bothered me for some time, and since bad tags are on the table, I think this is a good time to do it. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5032/8563&quot;&gt;original burninate request&lt;/a&gt; got good traction, and all that remains is to implement it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-physics%2b&quot;&gt;general-physics tag&lt;/a&gt; is absolutely terrible, because it adds absolutely no information. It is no more descriptive of a question than the fact that it was posted in this site. Moreover, if absolutely no other tags apply to the question, then it is essentially guaranteed to be off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;There were about fifteen questions that had that tag only, of which only &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/252743/are-there-any-expressions-in-physics-which-always-equal-1&quot;&gt;this tricky example&lt;/a&gt; remains. There's still about thirty questions with the tag and there's a slow process to remove the tag from those questions. (That could be speeded up by just &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate&quot;&gt;burninating the tag&lt;/a&gt;, as originally requested, but for some reason, despite the upvotes, it hasn't happened.)&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: it's done: the tag is no more. All the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/701535/posts-originally-tagged-general-physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;posts that had the tag&lt;/a&gt; (60 at the time this question was posted) have been retagged with more descriptive tags, and the tag is currently empty. As things stand, the tag will expire in a few days, but there's still a definite danger that some new user will re-introduce it if they can't find a tag that will fit their post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that's done, though, can we blacklist the tag to make sure that it doesn't come back? Seriously, it adds nothing to the site, and it only works as a misleading marker to some people that their bad questions are on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T15:22:36.740" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T15:22:36.740" Title="Can we blacklist the general-physics tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|burninate-request|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:24:46.543" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note that we can follow the up-/downvotes on our questions and answers, but there is not a convenient place to find stats on the upvotes on our comments on questions and answers.  Is this one of the advanced privileges earned after attaining &gt;10,000 reputation or some other qualifying event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59023" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T15:42:21.163" Title="Where can we see stats of votes on comments?" Tags="|support|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10047" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:38:36.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is another way in which the decision to have comments be second class citizens shows in the interface: there is no feature for tracking such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can construct a query in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; to learn about the situation up to the most recent capture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T15:38:36.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10047" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:42:21.163" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's very little that you can say about comments. This is by design: comments are explicitly relegated to a second-class, transient role, and SE has been very clear that anything that would increase their importance (thereby turning SE into a discussion-board type of forum, at the detriment of the straightforward readability of the Q&amp;amp;A format) will not be taken up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/701024/all-a-users-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt; can find all your comments, including their score, but that's about all the information available. There is no rep-earnable site privilege that enables any additional visibility into the comment statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T15:42:21.163" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2017-07-25T11:53:39.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there anything that surprised you about your field/career? What's the hardest part about being a cosmologist? Lastly, do you consider cosmology to be a branch of astronomy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93522" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T11:53:39.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10046" CreationDate="2017-07-25T20:09:13.193" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of &quot;all physics knowledge that could be described by any human's symbols&quot; is countable and is a subset of the $\sigma$-field of all possible human's symbols. Therefore, obviously, all the tags except &lt;em&gt;general  physics&lt;/em&gt;  are of Lebesgue measure zero. Deleting &lt;em&gt;general physics&lt;/em&gt; is equivalent to deleting all possible physics knowledge from Stack Exchange almost surely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158306" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T11:56:51.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T11:56:51.680" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10046" CreationDate="2017-07-25T21:18:27.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To offer something authoritative: pursuant to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/chat-session-and-discussion-on-tag-removal&quot;&gt;discussion in chat&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5032/124&quot;&gt;strongly supported suggestion&lt;/a&gt; for its removal, the mods are currently working on getting this tag blacklisted. I'll update here when it is done (or if the process fails for some reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T21:18:27.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T15:08:21.110" Score="-3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/applied-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;applied-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;applied-physics&lt;/a&gt; seems like a bit of a catch-all tag like general-physics (which is now removed from all questions and soon to be blacklisted). Thoughts on burnination and blacklisting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's no tag wiki or tag excerpt, making it confusing what it was even intended to be used for in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the questions seem to be pop-science-y (I first noticed the tag when browsing through the questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/food&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;food&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;food&lt;/a&gt; tag).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems like if it was an ideal tag it would be more of a 'not-quite-experimental but not-quite-theoretical' physics tag - but of course, that's kind of vague, and most questions on the site could be tagged with it, which is generally a bad sign. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T15:46:02.933" Title="Let's apply the lighter to this tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|burninate-request|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10053" CreationDate="2017-07-26T15:46:02.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's be careful with getting rid of tags: We should abolish a tag if it literally &lt;em&gt;serves no purpose&lt;/em&gt;, or is actively harmful. As for your specific points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no tag wiki or tag excerpt, making it confusing what it was even intended to be used for in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an argument to get rid of any tag, this is an argument to write a tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the questions seem to be pop-science-y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a reason for deletion either, since nothing about pop science inherently makes a question on- or off-topic at our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems like if it was an ideal tag it would be more of a 'not-quite-experimental but not-quite-theoretical' physics tag - but of course, that's kind of vague, and most questions on the site could be tagged with it, which is generally a bad sign. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely disagree that most questions on the site could be tagged with it. I don't see much &quot;applied&quot; about most of the Newtonian mechanics or quantum mechanics questions we get, for instance. If anything, this tags strikes me as being in the same vein as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/everyday-life&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;everyday-life&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;everyday-life&lt;/a&gt;, which I'm not the biggest fan of, but which certainly conceivably tells you something about the subject of the question. Yes, it's a bit &quot;vague&quot;, but so is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; when you think about all the different kinds and levels of questions it covers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrasting this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-physics&lt;/a&gt;, which could literally be applied to every question, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/physics-careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;physics-careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;physics-careers&lt;/a&gt;, which is just plainly off-topic nowadays, I think this tag is at least minimally descriptive of a subset of on-topic questions, and therefore should not be eliminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T15:46:02.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T18:16:26.333" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if I was too harsh in my comment on this answer to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because that's what I was curious about, silly-headed person. Who are you to come here and tell me what kind of inquiry I am allowed or not allowed to have? You're making philosophical arguments here, not physics ones. Go start your own question if you want to say something different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/346589/1483&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/346589/1483&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer wants my question to be a different one and doesn't like the question as asked. His answer reveals this bias. I'm ok with leaving his (wrong) answer, but why is he trying to convince me the selected answer is wrong? The site agrees that the selected answer is a correct answer to the given, valid, question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I have updated my comment as follows to avoid potentially being rude or abusive, or being flagged as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why? Because that's what I was curious about. Why do you come here and tell me what kind of inquiry I am allowed or not allowed to have? You're making philosophical arguments here, not physics ones. If you want to say something different, how about asking your own question instead of mis-answering mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1483" LastEditorUserId="1483" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T05:32:16.100" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T05:32:16.100" Title="Was I too harsh?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10055" CreationDate="2017-07-30T02:52:50.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Too harsh? Not particularly so. It may have been well earned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it is a tad personal as well, and probably should be &lt;em&gt;corrected&lt;/em&gt; such that it's less likely to be interpreted as a personal attack and earns you a flag of &quot;rude or abusive.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No point making trouble for yourself when there is no need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user159372" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T02:52:50.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10037" CreationDate="2017-07-30T14:45:18.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;FYI: Here is some feed-back of what has happened. In the period July 21-30, 2017, I conducted the experiment outlined in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/38926975#38926975&quot;&gt;hbar chat message here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello h Bar: Perhaps you can help develop a half-baked idea of mine. A handful of tags are prone to misuse and overuse, most notoriously perhaps the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag. Idea: &amp;quot;Protect&amp;quot;, say, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics%2b&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics+&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics+&lt;/a&gt; tag with, say, a plus in the end. (I put the word &amp;quot;protect&amp;quot; in quotation since there are no actual reputation restrictions on the use of tags.) All appropriate mathematical-physics question should be tagged with this new &amp;quot;protected plus&amp;quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No questions should be tagged with the old &amp;quot;unprotected&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag. Next let the &amp;quot;unprotected&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag be a synonym of a master tag, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/please-delete-this-tag&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;please-delete-this-tag&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;please-delete-this-tag&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is that experienced users will soon learn to add the plus to &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; tags (it is suggested from the pop-up menu), while questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/please-delete-this-tag&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;please-delete-this-tag&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;please-delete-this-tag&lt;/a&gt; tag may need attention from editors. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10037&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In detail, both tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics%2b&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics+&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics+&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; were suggested to the asker from a pop-up menu if he started to type &amp;quot;math...&amp;quot; in the tag line, ordered by the number of corresponding questions. There were 1440 questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics%2b&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics+&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics+&lt;/a&gt; tag and 1 question with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The outcome of the experiment was as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, all askers picked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics%2b&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics+&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics+&lt;/a&gt; tag over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag within the 5 minutes grace period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A hbar feed to report &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/please-delete-this-tag&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;please-delete-this-tag&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;please-delete-this-tag&lt;/a&gt; tags were never activated. Presumable because there were none or because they were removed quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion, the experiment appears to be a failure, as it did not reduce the misuse of the math. phys. tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T14:45:18.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:29:23.080" Score="22" ViewCount="702" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348514/why-does-newtons-third-law-actually-work&quot;&gt;Why does Newton&amp;#39;s Third Law actually work?&lt;/a&gt;, the asker states their age in the question.  (They are 10 years old.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, their age does not have anything to do with Newton's Third Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it gives the answerers an idea of what age-level to answer the question at.  For example, if the asker stated that they were 20, they may receive a more advanced answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the user's age be edited out of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52767" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T18:58:25.293" Title="Is an asker's age relevant?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10058" CreationDate="2017-07-31T21:15:21.910" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a minor issue, but strictly speaking, yes, the age should be edited out of the question because it is irrelevant. As you said, the only reason we might care about it is that it gives answerers a very rough guide as to what kind of answer the asker may be looking for, but it's better to express that as something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an answer that assumes zero prior knowledge of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an intuitive explanation, not a mathematical proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broader issue to consider here: to what extent can askers expect answers at a specific level of expertise? In cases like this specifically, should people with zero prior knowledge of physics be able to expect that they will get answers suited to them? I think this is better discussed in a separate topic, perhaps in chat, so I won't get into it here, but it does have some bearing on the relevance of an asker's age. If we were to decide (for example) that askers do not get to dictate what level the answers to their questions should be at, and answers at all levels of sophistication are fair game, then clearly an asker's age and other qualifications are &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; irrelevant, whereas if we decided that answers should be targeted at the level of the asker, it does make sense to have some information about their qualifications in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to edit out the age right now - someone can revert the edit if we decide it should be in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T17:50:05.027" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T17:50:05.027" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1028" CreationDate="2017-07-31T23:09:35.733" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know I'm late to the party, but I'd like to formally suggest &lt;code&gt;Schrödinger's Chat&lt;/code&gt; - complete with umlaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1954" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T23:09:35.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10058" CreationDate="2017-08-01T20:28:36.517" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the OP's age is relevant if they're 10 years old. Although age is not 100% correlated with vocabulary or math knowledge, being 10 does tell us a lot. And someone at age 10 is very unlikely to be operating at a high level of abstraction or logical sophistication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brain development takes time, and even precocious kids do not usually fully develop higher-level reasoning skills until their late teens. I see this a lot when kids at age 15 enroll in my community college physics classes. Although they may be brilliant by the standards of their peers, they are often not operating at a college level of critical thinking and conceptual understanding. They are kids who have excelled at computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And certainly people asking questions should be allowed to request answers targeted at their level of background knowledge. In fact, it's extremely annoying when they don't. Then we get situations where, e.g., answers that are written for a grad student, but the OP then posts a comment on the answer saying, &quot;Sorry, I don't know what a Lie group is. I'm a high school senior.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T20:28:36.517" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10058" CreationDate="2017-08-02T11:09:09.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The age of the asker has nothing to do with the question asked. As stated above by others, being 10 has no impact on Newton's Third Law. In the end, we are just here to answer questions which other people pose on physics, not to question their ability to understand our answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP were to not understand our answers, then it would be our responsibility to edit or further our answers so that it does make sense, but in terms of the effect upon the answer, age of the OP really should not matter. As seen in the referenced post, the &quot;most popular&quot; answers and as one might thus hope, the best, did not really answer the question that the OP posted. What then was the point in such answers? I don't mean to criticise, only to point out the purpose of this community in existing. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Feeling really out of depth as everyone else here has lots of rep and thus has more credit to their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74551" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T11:09:09.940" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T18:57:05.377" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this has already been proposed, I apologize. I have noticed that many questions are answered through short discussions in the comments; it is obvious that the OP is satisfied, so no one bothers to post an official answer. You don't have to look too far to find this sort of question, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/349806/how-does-the-voltage-source-provide-energy-in-a-circuit&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a recent example. I have found several Meta questions (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4089/unanswered-questions-with-several-comments&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7494/using-comments-as-answers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/964/answering-in-comments&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) about this very issue; the prevailing solution that I have seen is to either ask the commenter to post their comment as an answer or to post it as an answer yourself. This seems like a perfectly fine solution to me, except for the fact that I have never seen it done. It may happen regularly without me seeing it, but it still remains that there are questions that are left in this condition, which seems like a problem to me. These questions will go down in the archives of the site as unanswered, and they will likely never receive an answer. This has a negative effect on the organization of the site and poses a problem for people browsing old questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I think that there should be a review queue for old (one week, for example) questions that don't have an answer. The reviewer would be able to distinguish between good questions that no one has been able to answer yet, bad questions that slipped through earlier moderation efforts, and questions that were answered in the comments. The first variety would move on as intended by the site's design, the second would have another chance to be altered as needed, and the third would have a specific opportunity to have the comment turned into an answer (it seems like turning it into a community wiki would be the fairest option). Thus, potentially low quality questions would have a chance to be looked over before they are relegated to their future of likely inactivity in the archives. It seems to me that this process would be immensely beneficial to the quality of the site's archive of questions, which is good since Stack Exchange emphasizes that its questions are meant to be a permanent resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been active on this site for too long, so I would appreciate any response on why this is not a good fit for the site if it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; (sort of): Having written my above question, I searched on Meta Stack Exchange to see if this had been asked there before posting; sure enough, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/262297/prepare-for-archive-review-queue&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that in essence is the same as mine, albeit without the emphasis on dealing with questions answered in comments. The answer states that review queues are best suited for resolving issues through community consensus, and that tasks like the one I am suggesting should be done on one's own. I would just like to say that I don't think that answer is satisfactory; sure, many review queues deal with gaining a community consensus on how to handle a question, but the First Post and Late Answer queues are similar to my suggestion and seem to work fine. Also, I am asking this question because a significant number of people have not taken it upon themselves to police questions that are about to go into the archives and because a review queue would make this process easier, more accessible, and more visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Now that I have had some responses, I would like to rephrase my idea (hopefully more clearly) and add some new information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I am trying to express the fact that I think we need a way to filter out questions that are answered in comments rather than with &quot;official answers&quot;; the questions I linked earlier in this post seem to support this. The solution to this in the past has been to hope that users repost such answers as official answers, but this isn't entirely effective. Thus, it seems to me that the best way to filter out these answers is with a review queue that contains questions that are still unanswered after a week; thus, the reviewer can easily repost any such comment answers as real answers and make any other modifications that need to be made. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know whether:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Others think that having answers in the form of comments is an issue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The current method of hoping for users to notice this and modify it is sufficient&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A review queue is a viable option for fixing it (if necessary) or what a better method would be (if any)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have gotten the sense that people do see it as an issue that is not completely resolved, but that the effort adding a review queue would entail is not worth it. I would like to know why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I used several searches to gather some information that may be pertinent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seven days ago, 162 questions were posted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After seven days (today) 40 remain unanswered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Out of those 40, 18 were put on hold, closed, migrated, or marked as duplicates; 2 needed modification to conform to site policy (not pertaining to being answered in the comments); 11 were fine; and 9 were answered in the comments.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me think that we do in fact need to make some sort of change to address this sort of post; assuming these data are representative (which I think is fairly safe) and putting the first category aside, a user looking for old, unanswered questions has roughly the same chance of finding one that doesn't fit their criteria as they do of finding one that does, which would be very frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user122423" LastEditorDisplayName="user122423" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T17:44:30.577" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T17:44:30.577" Title="Review queue for &quot;old&quot;, unanswered questions" Tags="|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10063" CreationDate="2017-08-03T09:41:00.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There already is such a review queue: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;Unanswered Questions&lt;/a&gt; tab, easily accessible on the main navigation panel between the Badges and Ask Question links. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, you can also filter on a per-tag basis and even add any search terms that you want (click on any tag, or do a search adding &lt;code&gt;[tag] [other-tag]&lt;/code&gt;) and then sort via the 'unanswered' criterion. There's also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;wide array of search criteria&lt;/a&gt; so you can get some pretty fine control over dates as well; as an example, &lt;code&gt;created:7d..&lt;/code&gt; will pull posts created within the past week, &lt;code&gt;lastactive:14d..7d&lt;/code&gt; will find posts whose last activity was the week before that, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a moderate archive of reasonable questions that can still be answered is not a bad thing ─ it is a resource that enables new site members to get up and running by finding old posts that can use some more work and putting in those improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not saying your idea is terrible, either, but I'm not sure I see a problem with the way things are at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T09:41:00.157" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10058" CreationDate="2017-08-03T18:58:25.293" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I do not think that a statement of the OP's age should be edited out, or (as DavidZ suggests) replaced with a statement identifying the type of answer requested. In my opinion this is an unnecessary and unhelpful interference with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most questions (and answers) do contain a lot of irrelevant material. If we are going to enforce a policy that an irrelevant statement should be removed, this should apply consistently to all content, not only to statements of age. I am not aware that there is any such policy, neither have I seen any instances of it being implemented on this site. Doing so consistently would require an enormous amount of extra work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deciding what is irrelevant can be difficult and highly subjective. The key point is that the OP thinks it is (or might be) relevant. Those who think otherwise can either ignore it or leave a comment or address the issue in an answer. To others it might have a significant bearing on the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Replacing a statement of age with a statement about the level of answer required is also subjective and best left to the OP. If anyone is in any doubt themselves, they should (as usual) post a comment asking for clarification - not impose their own interpretation on others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally, age is relevant to the type of answer which I would post. Although there isn't a perfect correlation, it does give some indication of the OP's level of knowledge and ability. This does not prevent anyone else from posting a highly technical answer which the OP could not possibly understand. There should be answers at various levels, but particularly at the OP's level, because the OP has been motivated to ask.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ethos of the Stack Exchange network is one of &lt;em&gt;democracy, tolerance&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;freedom of expression&lt;/em&gt; (within the bounds of politeness). Editing others' posts without prior consent is a privileged interference with their freedom to express themselves as they choose. IMO it should be restricted to the mininum of whatever is helpful to making the question understandable and readable and getting good answers. It should not change the intention of the OP - which replacement might do. I agree with DavidZ that &lt;em&gt;this is a minor issue&lt;/em&gt;. Deletion of material should be restricted to breaches of community standards; it should not include &lt;em&gt;minor issues&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T18:58:25.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T08:04:35.250" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use my mobile to access the site. The chat rooms in mobile view do not have any option to upload pictures. I have to click on Request desktop site to upload pictures everytime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this feature be added like the one on desktop version? Please up vote if you support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a screenshot of how it looks from mobile view in chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qteRD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="149663" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T08:12:46.470" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T08:12:46.470" Title="Option to upload pictures in mobile chat" Tags="|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T10:36:48.007" Score="10" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have &lt;code&gt;mhchem&lt;/code&gt; enabled, by adding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;TeX: {&#xA;  extensions: [&amp;quot;mhchem.js&amp;quot;]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the mathjax configuration. This would be useful to write chemical reactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154997" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T04:08:48.253" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T04:08:48.253" Title="Enabling mhchem to write chemical formulas?" Tags="|feature-request|status-deferred|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T23:42:55.027" Score="23" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;This meta discussion is sort of a spin-off from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10058/50583&quot;&gt;this recent meta discussion&lt;/a&gt; about whether or not an asker's age is relevant to a question, and whether or not it should be edited out. Since the issue of age is fraught with multiple issues, I thought it would be good if we isolated this one specific issue and debated it separately here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two questions ask for essentially the same thing, and the only difference between them is that the asker of one question specifies they know no physics or math beyond the very basics at all, and the other is a graduate student of physics, are these two questions duplicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there are precisely two positions here, namely &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; (excluding a spectrum of &amp;quot;yes in the following cases, no in other cases&amp;quot; positions, of course) which each have some issues we should address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, how should users without the understanding required for currently present answers to a question request answers suited to their level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, should requests for particular levels of explanation in a question be edited out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, how finely-grained should we go here? Is &amp;quot;explain like I'm five&amp;quot; substantially different from &amp;quot;explain like I'm ten&amp;quot;, or is &amp;quot;I'm an undergraduate physics student&amp;quot; different from &amp;quot;I'm just starting to study physics at university&amp;quot;? What about incommensurable qualifiers of the level of sophistication (e.g. &amp;quot;I'm in Xth grade&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;I know only basic physics&amp;quot;, with the added bonus of not knowing Xth grade in which country)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not seeking for a discussion of whether these incommensurable qualifiers are &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; measures of &amp;quot;physics level&amp;quot;, just what we do with them when askers make them. If it turns out we don't really care for the specified level, discussions about how to specify it are moot, anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, do answers that substantially miss the required level of sophistication in either direction constitute &lt;em&gt;not-answers&lt;/em&gt;, meaning they should be flagged and deleted? What do we do if someone posts the same answer with the same level to all questions asking about the topic regardless of the specified level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, is specifying a level &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt;? If it isn't, is the question without any specified level a duplicate of either of the versions where it is specified, or vice versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous related discussion on meta (please add if you fine more!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6682/50583&quot;&gt;How should I ask a question to understand the answer I will get?&lt;/a&gt;, which is basically subquestion 1 here, where I wrote the sole answer with the assumption that &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; was our site's implicit consensus as an answer to the overarching question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4179/50583&quot;&gt;Gauging prefered expertise level for answering questions&lt;/a&gt;, which is more about whether any particular level of expertise is required to answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9648/50583&quot;&gt;Should posts targetted at different complexity levels be marked as duplicate?&lt;/a&gt;, which is more specifically about the question of level in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8835/50583&quot;&gt;Respondents&amp;#39; consideration of the level of question&lt;/a&gt;, discussing whether or not answerers should respect the level requested in a question, making it similar to subquestion 4 here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/648/50583&quot;&gt;Liberal definition of duplicate questions and the health of physics stack exchange.&lt;/a&gt;, where...I'm not completely sure how to judge its relevance to this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T19:21:35.803" Title="Are two questions that only differ in the desired level of sophistication of the answer duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|policy|duplicates|content-level|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2017-08-08T00:44:09.223" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried a couple times, but couldn't get this into a nice paragraph form, so I'm leaving it as bulleted thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't think that asking for a particular level of answer is good thing, or even possible, in many/most cases&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I say it's not a good thing because it's restricting answers to the question and likely misses out on insight provided by someone who &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; think there answer is &quot;at that level&quot; and so doesn't post their answer. As a Q&amp;amp;A site, I think restricting the A part is inherently wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this sense, then any answer (be it to a 5 y/o or a 25 y/o grad student) would be &lt;strong&gt;perfectly valid&lt;/strong&gt; to any question asked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would then be the job of &lt;em&gt;voters&lt;/em&gt; and OP to decide which answers are &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is more-or-less &lt;em&gt;status quo&lt;/em&gt; for the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There also exists a method within the framework of the SE network that allows one to get the answer at the level they want: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounties&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've also suggested this previously, and it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7084/25301&quot;&gt;seemed rather well-liked&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This can prove difficult for new members who do not have the required 75 rep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This can be a two-way street (i.e., grad $\to$ lesser &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; lesser $\to$ grad)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the only viable conclusion is that &lt;strong&gt;asking the same question is indeed a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; and should be closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, if the OP of the closed question wants more details, he can always refine the question to ask to fill in the missing details (i.e., asking something like &lt;em&gt;The questions here (link) state X, but I don't know why this condition holds. Can someone explain it?&lt;/em&gt;). In this case, this would &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7302/25301&quot;&gt;not be a duplicate&lt;/a&gt; and gives the OP the opportunity to get the answer they want without requiring a 'new level' of question. And this fits within the existing framework of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some points to consider as to why allowing obvious duplicates to remain is a &lt;em&gt;bad idea&lt;/em&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allowing different levels of the same question would necessarily lead to $n$ copies of pretty much every question.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most especially as $n=6$, as heather suggested, but even with $n=2$ as AFT suggested this would be the case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;library of detailed answers to every question about physics, astronomy and astrophysics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; perspective, it is better to have &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; question with &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; answers than to have &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; questions and answers--most especially if those &lt;strong&gt;answers&lt;/strong&gt; are at &lt;em&gt;different levels&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This would almost certainly lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126987/what-is-rep-farming&quot;&gt;rep-farming&lt;/a&gt;: Find a high-level, well liked question? Go ahead and say, &quot;Same question, but ELI5?&quot; and then &quot;Same question, but assume I'm an undergrad in physics?&quot; and then &quot;Same question, but assume I'm a chair?&quot; and so on. Easy rep!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As there are already over 100k questions at this point in time, this would only go to inflate the work required of the limited number of reviewers currently available (more on this next).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work required to certify that the answer is at the appropriate level grows and burdens reviewers (who are already over-burdened with reviewing)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For those grad- &amp;amp; research-level questions, this may even prove impossible to accomplish because the number of members able to 'review' it could be too small!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Current implementation &amp;amp; expectations are that we close dupes as dupes&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking us to handle special cases of 'different level' adds to the complexity of the reviewing process (Is it &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; a dupe, or is it a 'new' question at a 'different' level? Am I fully aware of all different level versions of the same question? etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This leads to such questions as: Is moving &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; network-wide implementations a good thing? (i.e., is there a fundamental reason why the close-as-dupe path even exists) Is there a reason to overlegislating how to handle close votes? I'm inclined to say no, that we should stay with the same rules in place that say duplicates are duplicates, regardless of levels, and no one has actually presented any rationale as to why we should allow them to remain open (only that we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; handle it if handled by X).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While noble to want questions at different levels to cater to different users, this would be completely impractical in practice and lead to negative behavior in the site. Instead, we should &lt;em&gt;continue&lt;/em&gt; to allow answers at a variety of levels and let the users decide if the answer is appropriate in the &lt;em&gt;business-as-usual&lt;/em&gt; methods (voting &amp;amp; flagging for deletion, &lt;em&gt;as appropriate&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;vote to close these types of questions as &lt;em&gt;duplicates&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e., &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; change policy &amp;amp; continue with &lt;em&gt;status quo&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T10:08:43.103" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T10:08:43.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2017-08-08T09:43:35.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Premise&lt;/strong&gt;: two posts asking the same question are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;by default&lt;/em&gt;, duplicates if they are both &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; about the desired level of sophistication, and they are &lt;em&gt;significantly&lt;/em&gt; different levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us be more precise about what we mean by the italicised words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Explicit&lt;/em&gt;: the level of the question must be clear in the question itself, not by adding a &quot;I know only basic physics&quot;, but by how the question is formulated. This could be archived, for example, by showing some prior research. If OP wants a &lt;em&gt;low-level&lt;/em&gt; answer, they must show that they researched about the topic and found the literature too terse (quoting unclear definitions, for example, or by pinpointing some particularly unclear concept in a book/set of lecture notes, etc.). If OP wants a &lt;em&gt;high-level&lt;/em&gt; answer, they must specify what they already know, be clear about what definitions they are using, what results can be taken to be known and which cannot (to avoid circular arguments), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Significantly&lt;/em&gt;: this is the tricky part, but I guess we could settle for low-level (high-school/undergrad) vs. high-level (graduate/research level). Anything in-between must be rounded either up or down.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;By default&lt;/em&gt;: questions are to not be closed &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; if the topic is the same. They &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be closed if reviewers consider that the two previous conditions were not satisfactorily met (OP was not explicit enough about the desired level, or the requested level is not significantly different from the duplicate post).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T09:43:35.263" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2017-08-08T15:41:07.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No, these questions are not duplicates.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers are vastly different. An answer about a quantum mechanics question to a grad student will probably be (to generalize) math heavy, highly complex, and over my head. An answer about a quantum mechanics question to a highschooler might be one whose answer I'd be able to write. &lt;em&gt;They're so different that closing as a duplicate helps no one.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A small side note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, bounties, which might normally serve this purpose, don't really help as much as they should. A newer user can't place a bounty, and even when they reach that ability, would they really want to, seeing as they'd then lose many privileges that are often really helpful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Specific concerns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For fine-grained-ness, I'd propose including age if it is &amp;quot;extreme&amp;quot; - i.e., young teenager or younger (this also includes &amp;quot;how do I explain to my 5yo kid&amp;quot; questions), and then level of education for others. For example - my questions might have &amp;quot;young teenager, no formal education but enthusiast/studying on my own&amp;quot;. Other questions might have &amp;quot;Graduated with a degree in physics 20 years ago and don't remember much of it&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;In grad school for chemistry&amp;quot; or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep things narrow - 3 to 6-ish should probably be an &amp;quot;age category&amp;quot;, and 7 to early highschoolers (around 16, maybe?), and then late highschoolers to undergrad students, then grad/professional, and then a final category for an older individual asking say 5+ years after their last class. That leaves us with 5 fairly distinct categories. Not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; many, and distinct enough that answers will be fairly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain what I mean here by class - if a question was asking about such-and-such, at undergrad level, and another question was also asked at undergrad level, then vtc as dupes. But if question A was asked at age 3 to 6 level, and B at undergrad level - well, then they're just not duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that are at the wrong level are indeed NAA, and should be flagged/deleted, though if there's another question which asks for an answer at that level, might be good to alert the poster of that other question. If an answer is cross posted, delete the ones at the wrong level, and keep the one at the right level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Number of categories&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments have suggested that 6 (I cut one, so now 5) categories are too complex. Here's why I think that's wrong: we don't often get the same questions at all different levels. This isn't a proposal that we quick run out and write new questions that are the same as others but at different levels - it's so in the future, if we see a duplicate, we stop and think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, really, if we can't figure out that a 5 year old will not understand an answer intended for a graduate student, I think we have a more fundamental problem than 5 categories. If anyone has any suggestions for consolidation, I'd be glad to here them, but I really think these 5 are quite distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why it's worth the effort&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really not that much extra effort, first of all. Really, the distinction between the categories is fairly clear, and the two categories that questions will be mainly asked in are the late highschool/undergrad and grad/professional categories. It's also fairly rare how often questions will be asked that are similar except for level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it is still some extra effort; so why do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It helps users, especially new ones. New users cannot award a bounty, and currently, when they have a question at a very different level than the answers on the currently existing question, they really have nothing they can do. This is highly frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It organizes content more easily. It's been suggested that answers of different levels can all reside on the same question. Really? That makes it harder to find the answer you want, makes it harder to review the answers, and provides a strange juxtaposition of simplified explanations with complex, equation dense answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Easier judging of answers - the method of multiple answers at drastically different levels on one question may also lead to downvotes for the more &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; explanations or the more &amp;quot;complex&amp;quot; explanations. In other words, it's harder to judge what answers best answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It helps the OP more. Say the OP asks a question, and is a highschooler. If the first answer he gets talks about Lie groups the OP is going to be at least a little frustrated. It's much easier if the level of the answer OP is asking for &lt;em&gt;matters&lt;/em&gt;. If it does, then by consequence answers not at that level are NAA, and from there, those answers should be allowed on questions of different levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T15:24:21.120" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10037" CreationDate="2017-08-08T16:01:19.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another idea would be to add, say, a plus at the end of a handful of problematic tags, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics%2b&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics+&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics+&lt;/a&gt; instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt;, and so forth. The plus signals to editors and the community that the tag is often misused, and might need editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This proposal should not be confused with my earlier &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/38926975#38926975&quot;&gt;July 21 2017 proposal&lt;/a&gt;. The reason why both proposals use the plus character, is that only very few special characters are allowed in a tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T16:01:19.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10025" CreationDate="2017-08-08T22:40:10.813" Score="8" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-magnetic-resonance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nuclear-magnetic-resonance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nuclear-magnetic-resonance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/299490/280545&quot;&gt;Allowed as of today&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons: There aren't any cons. This is the solution we wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T22:40:10.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-09T10:16:52.877" Score="-4" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes very tricky problems that require quite a bit of ingenuity are removed simply because they're exercises in physics/maths. Well, what is the fundamental difference asking about a specific 'concept' as opposed to solving a hard problem? They both involve similar skills and I daresay that solving problems is all you really need to do anyway and the former will come naturally as a result. If the goal of this website is to be a place where people can improve at physics, then we should have a more lenient homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, problem solving is an enjoyable process and this website's popularity would skyrocket if we were more open to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still respect the homework policy in so far as closing questions that clearly show no research or attempt. But we can't keep closing questions whose answer &lt;em&gt;exists&lt;/em&gt; somewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user86425" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T19:56:59.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T15:39:24.510" Title="Why can't the Homework policy be more lenient?" Tags="|discussion|questions|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2017-08-09T14:25:53.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to approach this issue mostly from the viewpoint of the answerers, i.e. subquestion 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If no, do answers that substantially miss the required level of sophistication in either direction constitute not-answers, meaning they should be flagged and deleted? What do we do if someone posts the same answer with the same level to all questions asking about the topic regardless of the specified level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice here is clearly binary - either answers of all levels are allowed, or only those &quot;around&quot; the specified level are. Both possibilities strike me as undesirable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Allowing answers of all levels leads to duplication of answers to &quot;non-duplicate&quot; questions:&lt;/strong&gt; If questions asking for different levels are not duplicates, and answers of all levels are allowed, then &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; answers to one question also constitute answers to the other. This is &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; what the notion of duplicates is trying to avoid - duplication (or potentially quintupulation or worse) of effort with no net gain. Remember, we're primarily &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; here to help any specific person, but the aggregate of users interested in a question as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is inefficient to have several questions to each of which the answer you're looking for could have been given, and then having to click through all of them. It also leads to potential abuse where a user answers several questions of different levels with the same (maybe even excellent!) answer in order to multiply the reputation gain from their effort.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Restricting answers to the same question to a certain level leads to a disproportionate amount of reviewing work requiring &lt;em&gt;expert&lt;/em&gt; reviewers, and will frustrate users:&lt;/strong&gt; If we declare answers of a different level &quot;not answers&quot;, then someone is going to have to review these answers and delete the ones that miss the required level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common ways of specifying level - giving age or state of progress in formal education or distinguishing &quot;basic&quot;/&quot;advanced&quot; knowledge - are far from universal, what an &quot;undergraduate&quot; can be expected to know varies wildly between different forms of education and between institutions. Answerers responding to such questions would always have to fear that their &lt;em&gt;correct, on-topic answer&lt;/em&gt; gets deleted because they misunderstood what level was asked for, because they misjudged what level their answer would be perceived as, or because the flaggers/reviewers applied a narrower notion of the &quot;window&quot; of acceptable answers than they did. Additionally, reviewing such flags would require considerable knowledge in the area of expertise of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same vein and as a lesser but still relevant issue, flaggers will have NAA flags rejected for not agreeing with others what a certain level specification was supposed to mean, or how much the answer deviated from that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that a considerable amount of effort would be spent to &lt;strong&gt;delete correct content that actually answers the question asked&lt;/strong&gt;, in addition to the wasted effort on the part of the answerer. I am strongly against &quot;rewarding&quot; such attempts to positively contribute to our site with summary deletion, and wasting valuable time to &lt;em&gt;decrease the knowledge available&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different, but no less severe issue is that not all questions can be answered at all levels. Some questions intrinsically require a technical answer assuming much prerequisite knowledge, others have answers that don't substantially differ at the &quot;high school&quot; or &quot;post-grad&quot; level. What are we to do with such questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deciding whether a question is a duplicate should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require the reviewers to actually know the answer to a question, but we would end up either closing these questions as duplicates of those whose answers are the same, or leaving open questions that just attract literally the same answers or have no answer at all (because every possible answer is outside the level specified). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of these problems, I am &lt;strong&gt;strongly in favour of closing questions that ask for different levels as duplicates&lt;/strong&gt;, and, in fact, strongly in favour of not asking for a specific level of explanation at all, although I don't think enforcing that though any kind of policy would be useful. We're supposed to be a &lt;em&gt;library of useful questions and answers&lt;/em&gt;, not a help desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it tremendously useful to have answers at all different levels in one place (i.e. at one question), and much less useful to have to click through half a dozen variations of the same question until I have found the kind of explanation I wanted. It is also often useful to compare answers of different levels against each other - for consistency, or for pedagogical purposes. If a particular level of explanation is missing from the answers to a question, the proper course of action is to offer a bounty requesting an answer of that specific level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:25:53.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10077" CreationDate="2017-08-09T14:28:27.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4337/what-can-be-done-about-the-current-ongoing-flood-of-homework-and-very-basic-qu&quot;&gt;The&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7202/why-is-phys-se-so-restrictive-in-the-qa-it-is-willing-to-accept&quot;&gt;has&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;been&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4977/should-we-rename-the-homework-tag-as-problem-solving-or-such&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7645/replacing-the-homework-policy-1-what-existing-questions-should-be-on-off-topic&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9086/replacing-the-homework-policy-1b-what-is-our-scope-anyway&quot;&gt;tension&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9710/should-we-change-homework-policy-of-physics-se&quot;&gt;on&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6016/homework-questions-on-hold&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7324/is-over-vigilant-monitoring-of-questions-driving-people-away-from-the-site&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6107/thoughts-on-meta-post-on-homework-question-handling-and-basic-questions&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6016/homework-questions-on-hold&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7273/why-run-the-home-work-and-exercises-tag&quot;&gt;long&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5152/why-dont-we-just-ban-homework-altogether&quot;&gt;time&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5179/banning-homework-vote-and-documentation&quot;&gt;now&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/fine-tuning-the-proposed-homework-policy-what-to-do-with-the-tag-if-the-policy&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5229/does-banning-homework-do-long-term-harm-for-only-short-term-gain&quot;&gt;helpful&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5490/about-the-proposal-to-ban-homework&quot;&gt;editor&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6107/thoughts-on-meta-post-on-homework-question-handling-and-basic-questions&quot;&gt;could&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9274/homework-policy&quot;&gt;probably&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5964/proposal-putting-homework-questions-on-hold-but-only-for-a-week&quot;&gt;turn&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9840/why-my-question-is-put-on-hold&quot;&gt;every&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5488/a-week-of-community-closing-what-should-be-disallowed-homework&quot;&gt;word&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5369/graduate-and-above-level-questions-arent-homework&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5372/can-we-please-stop-applying-the-homework-tag-and-policy-to-very-advanced-quest&quot;&gt;the&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;previous&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6693/homework-questions-treatment&quot;&gt;sentence&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7002/where-did-this-answer-go&quot;&gt;into&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6159/how-do-we-make-it-explicit-that-please-check-my-work-type-questions-are-off&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6941/is-it-appropriate-to-tell-someone-to-ask-their-teacher-first&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6131/this-question-shouldnt-violate-the-homework-policy&quot;&gt;to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8836/slight-rephrasing-of-homework-question-policy&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8829/i-need-to-know-if-i-can-ask-some-homework-problems-on-here&quot;&gt;different&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6639/homework-questions-as-a-knowledge-resource&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9918/yet-another-homework-idea&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/209/yet-another-what-level-question-this-time-for-physics-101-homework&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4308/physics-se-should-emphasis-on-problem-solving&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;-&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6939/migrate-homework-to-math-se-instead-of-close&quot;&gt;like&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9890/deleting-answers-to-homework-questions&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10083/dismissal-of-non-homework-question&quot;&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;I think that everyone agrees that zero-effort homework questions like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[blurry photo of assignment]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;plz halp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;teh answer is 15.6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;don't add anything to the site.  On the other hand, there are certainly questions which have their genesis in homework assignments but raise interesting conceptual issues. And people's positions evolve over time. One of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/109062/44126&quot;&gt;my first answers&lt;/a&gt; on the site would, if posted today, probably be flagged as a &quot;complete answer to a homework-like question.&quot; I don't know that it would get removed (and I don't think there's cause to remove it now) but if that question were posted today I wouldn't write an answer like that and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the question were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my own opinion about what's an acceptable sort of homework question has changed over time, I'm sympathetic to the reality that some questions will seem okay to some users, and merit closing in the eyes of other users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least two very different  things that people tend to have in mind when they express concern about &quot;homework questions&quot; on the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Academic integrity. I want this site to remain a resource that I can point people at professionally. A low-quality question like the one I invented above is something that could be tossed together on a mobile phone, out of the view of the proctor, at the start of an exam. I'm not interested in helping anyone who would do that, and since it's not possible to judge intentions remotely, I'm interested in making it actively difficult for those sorts of questions to receive answers.  In the process I expect that collateral damage will make it harder for people who are legitimately interested in learning but have poor written communication skills to get answers.  That's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, concerns about cheating age away. I don't have much problem with a complete answer to a homework-like question that is several months old, like the one I linked above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Interestingness.  The way that you get good at solving physics problems is to solve lots of physics problems. My copy of Halliday et al. has probably 3000 exercises and problems in it (about 100 per chapter).  Many of them are very interesting --- but many of them are not very different from the problems that precede or follow them. They were also much more interesting when I did them the first time as a college sophomore than they are now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what if there are some uninteresting questions on the site?  Can't people just ignore questions that don't interest them? Well, yes and no.  I ignore lots of questions on the site that don't interest me.  But if I were to check the front page, and several of the tags that I do like, and find only homework questions, I'd be more likely to wander away from the site altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with your closing sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But we can't keep closing questions whose answer &lt;em&gt;exists&lt;/em&gt; somewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mission of the site is not to record the answers to all questions where an answer exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T21:35:27.187" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T21:35:27.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10082" CreationDate="2017-08-09T18:10:07.673" Score="-3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be hard for people which are not formerly educated in the field of physics to properly tag a question that they are asking. So I think there should be a tag like &quot;should be tagged by a moderator&quot;. Because somebody can be curious about some phenomena without knowing which branch of physics it is a member of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user165955" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T19:17:37.237" Title="A tag for questions that can't be properly tagged by the user asking it" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2017-08-09T18:59:04.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site is rather good (mostly through the efforts of Qmechanic) at re-tagging questions when the original tags are sub-optimal. If you're a new user and you're not sure quite how to tag something, just do your best effort and if the tags need editing then somebody will change them for you. (If you're &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; not sure, then just add a comment afterwards asking for help with the tags.) Don't sweat the tags too much - focus on the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for an additional tag as you propose, it's (i) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;, which we only use when they're really, really necessary, and (ii) unlikely to be discoverable by the bulk of the population that could use it, so it's unlikely to be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T18:59:04.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10080" CreationDate="2017-08-09T19:07:19.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;untagged&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;untagged&lt;/a&gt; tag is blacklisted, and that is probably a hint that SE does not want such tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only need one tag to pose a question. If in serious doubt, you could e.g. try if some of the words in your question exist as tags. (&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; Your Phys.SE question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/351121/2451&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; contains the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electron&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electron&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electron&lt;/a&gt; in the title...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T19:17:37.237" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T19:17:37.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T06:17:07.417" Score="-2" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/351129/finding-electrostatic-force-between-a-sheet-and-half-cylinder&quot;&gt;one of my non homework questions&lt;/a&gt; for which I'd provided my attempt at the solution and conclusions, was dismissed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was clearly not a homework question, and even some of my instructors haven't been able to solve it yet. I was hoping for discussion of various methods to approach the problem, which would ultimately lead to the solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, dismissal of such problems is detrimental to the growth of this community and the 'homework policy' needs to be reworked so as to not lead to dismissal of non homework questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131341" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T07:23:25.450" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T00:07:56.570" Title="Dismissal of Non-Homework Question" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10083" CreationDate="2017-08-11T00:07:56.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closure/on hold banner, which was posted under your question when it was put on hold (and politely linked to in a comment beforehand), contains a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;this site's guidelines for homework and exercise-based questions&lt;/a&gt;; you're expected to read them carefully and act accordingly. If you're not willing to spend the effort to understand the community's standards and adjust your posts to them, this site may not be for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/351129/1&quot;&gt;current form&lt;/a&gt;, your post is an open-and-shut case of a homework-and-exercises question, which this community (for good reasons) holds to specific standards that you need to comply with. As is made clear in the guidelines, it is entirely irrelevant whether this was set to you as homework during some course or not: what matters in this case is that your post is exclusively about a set-piece, that you're not asking at any conceptual depth, and that the question is of extremely limited usefulness to any future visitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the difficulty of the question, including whether any or all of your instructors have trouble solving the set-piece, are entirely irrelevant to whether the post is on topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of problems with your post. To start with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You provide the set-piece as a scan instead of spending any effort in transcribing the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You provide your working as a scan of your notes, instead of properly writing the equations using &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;mathematical LaTeX notation&lt;/a&gt; and supplying the connective tissue of argumentation that links your equations together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This might not yet have been fully impressed on you by your instructors, in which case I would say they're rather at fault. A string of equations with no connecting text is &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; something you should present to other people.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not particularly clear what you're asking, beyond &quot;please solve this set-piece for me&quot;. If that's what you want from this question, without any willingness on your part to ask about the concepts and methods that underpin the task, then your question is unlikely to be on-topic here at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should fix all of the above for the question to begin to be eligible for reopening. Some of these are formatting issues and they are still crucial: they are there make your question parseable by answerers and future visitors without the rather large effort that your question requires in its current form. (Or, to put it another way, if you're not willing to put in any effort into correctly presenting your question in a readable form, why should anyone spend any effort answering it?) Other issues are conceptual: they're mostly to do with the fact that you're not asking about any concepts or methods and in the current form you just want people to do your work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T00:07:56.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T23:16:01.250" Score="13" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Mithrandir24601 (if it's not obvious, that's not actually my real name. Finding my real name is left as an exercise for the reader :P Bonus points for those who know both origins of that username) and I have, for some unknown reason, been asked to do the next &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7783/114272&quot;&gt;AMA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Owing to other commitments, it will be at 8pm (UTC) on the 22nd August.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, the idea is that you can answer this with any questions you've got in advance and, during the AMA, I'll do my best to answer the most popular ones (assuming I get any!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background/Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born and grew up in the cold but green north coast of Northern Ireland before moving to England to start my degree. I've been there as a student for almost 5 years and will (if all goes well) be here for another 3 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did my Bachelor's in Physics and Computer Science, which involved a very broad mix (for the UK, at least) in basic (relatively theoretical) computer science (I only did it for a year), maths for natural science, programming and of course, physics. I then did a Master's in Mathematical physics and am now a physics (well, quantum engineering) PhD student at Bristol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other interests include music, cooking, reading and historical martial arts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Academic Interests&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum Computing&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my third year of my undergrad, I did a literature review on superconducting quantum computers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have spent a week visiting D-Wave (part of the PhD course I do :) )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm a user of IBM's quantum experience&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm just finishing a project in t-designs, which are used in randomised benchmarking of quantum chips. This is a fascinating and rich topic, that seems never-ending in depth and detail&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd really like to learn about noise (specifically gate-noise) processes on quantum chips&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll (most likely) be doing my PhD project on simulating PT-symmetric Hamiltonians on a photonic quantum chip, which will probably also include elements of designing said chips (although I don't actually know anything about chip design)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Quantum) Measurements&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My Master's dissertation was on weak measurements. I'm extremely curious about these and my favourite thing from this so far has to be that even classical measurement results can be complex (at least, in certain situations). This might sound weird, but essentially, a measurement of position that is complex arises from a shift in momentum (this is actually what drove me to the above PhD topic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quantum Communications&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Earlier in the year, I did a project on characterising a network for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Had a great time learning about how light travels through fibre as well as getting measurements of this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've also written an essay about QKD using satellites. Again, I could spend ages trying to learn about this, but there was far, far too much for a single essay. This one was more like learning about light travelling many km through free space, as opposed to fibre&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;both of the above are really interesting and I wish I knew more about both and could spend a lot more time on this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programming (sort of...)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've learned (or at least, have some experience in) ML (a functional programming language). I absolutely love functional programming. Learning this taught me how to program a computer much better than any other language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've also got some experience in C++, Java and Pascal/Delphi. My favourite of these is easily C++. I do not like Python one bit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some programs that I've actually enjoyed writing are (although most of these were for University and so, mostly forgotten): simulation of solar system (I'm still working on improving this!), the knight's tour, drawing parts of the Mandelbrot set, the Ising model on a toroidal lattice and as above, programming hardware to take measurements to characterise a network for QKD (although this was also a bit stressful at times!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Non-academic Interests&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Music&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I play piano, clarinet, sing bass and, my favourite, church organ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've also learned a bit of a few other things, but it's been a while...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've been in a few school and university orchestras, bands, choirs and musicals (although only playing the clarinet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm into classical music and classical church music, although will listen to (almost) anything&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cooking&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I love food. I love cooking. What more is there to say?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer: Tea and chocolate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical Martial Arts&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It started off when I did fencing. I enjoyed it, but got a bit annoyed pretty quickly. Then I tried HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts)... This is as close as we can get to how they used to do swordfighting (it's tricky to put together and figure out how they used to do it for a couple of reasons)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;since then, I've expanded and have done some Wing Chun and currently do Taichi and Kung Fu, which is extremely hard, but very rewarding :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reading&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read in practically every spare moment I can get. I'm particularly into fantasy and quite a bit into Sci-Fi. I'm also interested in the Valyrian language, created by David J Peterson for Game of Thrones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My favourite films are (at the minute) Pan's Labyrinth and Spirited Away. Favourite TV show is Game of Thrones. I also do a little bit of gaming on the side, when I couldn't be bothered to read&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Born really from my time in undergrad as a chapel clerk, I have an interest in theology and religion. I don't know as much about it as I'd like, but I've had many interesting discussions with those who do&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Little known fact to those who only know me online is that I find the service of Compline (particularly as we did it in undergrad) the most beautiful thing ever :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114272" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T21:19:24.333" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T22:57:16.730" Title="Ask Me Anything: 22nd August" Tags="|discussion|chat-events|ask-me-anything|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-14T23:31:59.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You say you're extremely curious about weak measurements. Can you explain to a quantum physicist who knows nothing about them why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What applications do you have in mind for simulating PT-symmetric Hamiltonians, that is, why are you interested in simulating these Hamiltonians out of all possible Hamiltonians? Or is this more about a challenge for the chip than about the PT-symmetric Hamiltonians being interesting in themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(I can understand if you don't want to answer this) You seem to be fond of religious music and you were a chapel clerk. So, are you religious, and if so, in what sense?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You read a lot of SciFi and Fantasy. I do so, too. Who's your favourite author, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T23:31:59.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-15T05:52:25.353" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What role has religion/theology played in your studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60891" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T05:52:25.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-15T13:29:05.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;How come you don't like python? Do you think that C++ has advantages for scientific computing in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T13:29:05.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-16T08:05:48.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; You said that : &quot;In my third year of my undergrad, I did a literature review on superconducting quantum computers&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What were the physics and math courses you had taken so that you could be able enough for a literature review on the topic: &quot;superconducting quantum computers&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was it a compulsory project, or you did it out of your own interest? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did you have any advisor who helped you in the literature review? If so, how did you get in touch with them?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did you get started with it? And what was the outcome (in brief) ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; During your undergraduate years did you study any (technical/science) topics beyond your syllabus for your own interest (as a hobby)? How did it help you later on in your career?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user139621" LastEditorDisplayName="user139621" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T19:44:01.283" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T19:44:01.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10090" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10093" CreationDate="2017-08-16T20:32:39.753" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone, any entity own copyright on the contents of the Physic's Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A that exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45613" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T13:12:04.473" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T13:12:04.473" Title="Are the contents of Q&amp;A and comments in the PSE protected by any copyright?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10090" CreationDate="2017-08-16T22:09:07.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of every page is a link labeled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Legal&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oLIEJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oLIEJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the things found there is the copyright policy. Like all sites in the Stack Exchange network submitting to Physics grants Stack Exchange a license to use your content under a Creative Commons license. See the legal page for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that the copyright has not been transferred, but that certain rights have been granted to Stack Exchange and to the public—the copyright holder can't prevent use of the content that is consistent with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T22:15:18.553" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T22:15:18.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10094" CreationDate="2017-08-17T02:48:55.570" Score="-3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many a times, there are questions which are absolutely vague and have no meaning in them, like: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/352263/if-you-fall-for-a-long-enough-period-of-time-would-you-eventually-hit-or-break&quot;&gt;If I fall from a great height, will I overcome the speed of light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, these are off topic questions, but there are no proper flags for this. Generally I flag this as very low quality, but many times, why I don't know, this flag is not available after one close vote has been submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not homework questions or do not satisfy any other realm of flagging. So, there should be a proper flag as &quot;not-constructive&quot;, so that these off topic questions can stand out, and can be properly flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can close with a custom close reason, but in case of flagging, only option is to call for Moderator Intervention, but I don't feel such questions are of a minimum quality to call for Moderator Intervention, and disturb them everytime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; flag is not a good option, because it is very clear what the asker wants to know,  but the question is foolish and has no dedicated answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there should be a separate flag called &quot;not-constructive&quot;, and a separate review queue to handle them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="149663" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T02:59:51.933" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T04:23:29.770" Title="A new flag: &quot;not-constructive&quot;" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10090" CreationDate="2017-08-17T04:09:29.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, when you post any content to any Stack Exchange site you retain the copyright to that content, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; you also grant irrevocable rights to the public, including Stack Exchange, as to how they can use that content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More precisely, whenever you post any question, answer, or comment to the site, you are effectively doing three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're certifying that you're the creator of all the content that you post (or that any other content, such as images, is covered under fair use);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You retain the copyright to that work; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You provide the work to the public, and as a subset of that to Stack Exchange, under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC BY-SA) license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license enables Stack Exchange (along with everybody else) to distribute the work in any form they want to, and even charge for it if they so desire, so long as (i) they attribute the work to you, and (ii) they distribute it under the CC BY-SA license, or some compatible set of conditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is &lt;strong&gt;irrevocable&lt;/strong&gt;: once you post here and the license is granted, you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; demand that Stack Exchange delete the post, and indeed other people can put your content on other sites without you being able to stop them, so long as they follow the conditions of the license. If this makes you uncomfortable, you should not post here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you retain all other rights to the work not covered by the original license. Thus, you're able to e.g. sell the copyright to a publisher, or sue people who post it elsewhere and don't attribute it correctly, or indeed re-license it to the public under any other license (or combination of licenses) that you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do find your content posted on other sites and you are unhappy with how it's presented (which does happen often enough) then the mother-meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/a-site-or-scraper-is-copying-content-from-stack-exchange-what-do-i-do&quot;&gt;A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt; has good help on what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's important to note that the above only applies to user-provided content. The actual site design, logos, and other SE-built assets are owned by Stack Exchange, and cannot be reused (particularly for commercial purposes) without their authorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T04:09:29.850" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2017-08-17T04:23:29.770" Score="8" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's vague, flag/vote to close as Unclear What You're Asking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you think it should be closed but none of the canned reasons fit, then flag/vote to close with a custom reason. If five 3k+ users agree with you, then it will get closed. If not, then it will get kicked out of the close-vote review queue and the question likely shouldn't be closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is a bad question but it doesn't fit the requirements for closure, then downvote, leave a comment explaining why the question is bad if you want to, and move on. There's better things to do in life than obsess over how to handle marginal edge cases of bad questions on some site on the internet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T04:23:29.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-18T06:15:29.467" Score="12" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday there was a question which I answered, and the answer got  two downvotes, so I tried to understand what I was not communicating well. The question was about &quot;energy conservation appearing because of field theory&quot;. There were a number of comments to my answer by AccidentalFourierTransform and,I think, GenaroTedesco . Thinking it over before going to sleep, I planned to edit my answer to make clear that the energy conservation law applies to closed systems. When I entered this morning, greek time,the whole thing has disappeared. As a high reputation user I see deleted questions by anybody. This has disappeared completely and not edited to a new format afaik.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whats up? For us senior citizens where the A possibility looms, it is disturbing to have to start thinking &quot;did I really answer the question, or did I think I did &quot; (joking at the moment as I still have all my faculties intact, but time flies). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T14:42:36.550" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T14:42:36.550" Title="Question completely disappearing" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10096" CreationDate="2017-08-18T06:42:45.037" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I) In the specific case, the asker deleted the specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/352328/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (and thereby any answer in its thread). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II) More generally,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All users can &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; see deleted items in their own profile page listings, except for the last 60 days by clicking &quot;deleted recent questions/answers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10k+ users can view any deleted post if they have the post's URL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10k+ users can search for their &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3Ame+deleted%3Ayes&quot;&gt;own deleted posts&lt;/a&gt; but not other's.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10k+ users can browse recently deleted questions from the last 30 days on their&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=delete&quot;&gt;mod tools&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T14:40:06.570" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T14:40:06.570" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-18T23:59:06.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a user of IBM's quantum experience, how do you organize use of the program to effectively learn how quantum gates function? Or do you use it for academic findings?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From your lit review, what are your favorite resources for learning about superconducting qubits? Any current developments that are especially interesting to you?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you play in music groups throughout your MSc/PhD? Were you able to balance practice time with research work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T23:59:06.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-20T15:59:53.093" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually hang out at ChemistrySE, where I use \ce{} to format chemical equations. I once tried to use \ce{} here to write a nuclear reaction, and was perplexed when it didn't work. Someone told me that mhchem isn't enabled here. I ended up having to use \text{} instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there any special packages for MathJax here? Or is it just plain old MathJax just like how it's at MathSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148444" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T04:52:29.070" Title="Are there any special packages enabled for MathJax?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-21T13:21:04.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the IBM's quantum experience worthwhile? Do they really run your code on a real quantum computer and how long does it take to get the results? Is IBM's quantum experience more for fun or can you write code that gives you interesting results that you wouldn't have access to otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T13:21:04.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10070" CreationDate="2017-08-21T19:21:35.803" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, these questions are duplicates.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer has to be &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; because it is common practice on the site to answer simple questions with over-complex answers, and there's no real way to control this or to migrate answers to the other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the questions are not just for the asker, but for any potential viewer to the question, so having a multiplicity of answers at various levels is better for someone googling the question and ending up at the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, I don't necessarily see a moral disaster of letting the asker ask for a certain level of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T19:21:35.803" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10103" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:28:29.943" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this legal to post my physics question here for &lt;strong&gt;verification&lt;/strong&gt; only but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; for answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to make sure that my question is on-topic, not off-topic, and fits the rules, like it's &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; too broad and etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already read all the &quot;How to ask&quot; sections on the help center and then in physics stack exchange.com I have asked 2 questions, attempted that these 2 questions will be good, but they were&lt;strong&gt;n't&lt;/strong&gt; well received and I have reached my question limit so quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from now on I want to post my physics question here for validation purposes only and if it passes then I will post it on physics stack exchange.com for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is analogous to the idea when you have created an application and you want first to test it in QA and release beta version of that application first before releasing the released version of the application to the customer, because you never can know if you have bugs in the application you are developing or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; know if my question will get downvoted or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my third physics question will be bad as the two others on physics stack exchange.com then I wo&lt;strong&gt;n't&lt;/strong&gt; be able to ask questions there anymore and I do&lt;strong&gt;n't&lt;/strong&gt; want to be in this state so I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; taking risks anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166571" LastEditorUserId="166571" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T12:15:48.847" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T12:15:48.847" Title="Is this legal to post my physics question here for verification only but not for answer?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10102" CreationDate="2017-08-22T06:06:47.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're having trouble crafting questions that are well-received on the main site, I don't think posting them here for &quot;pre-approval&quot; would be well-received either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/389/44126&quot;&gt;a sandbox question&lt;/a&gt;, but that's for experimenting with formatting rather than experimenting with content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question that you don't think is a good fit for the main site, you might politely try to discuss your question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;We have several active voters and answerers who are regularly available in the chat room, and I believe there have been a few cases of questions that have started off in chat as &quot;I have this vague issue about blah&quot; but were refined into much clearer language in chat discussions before getting posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T06:06:47.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10102" CreationDate="2017-08-22T08:52:30.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule we like questions to be useful to a wide audience. If you post a question that just asks &lt;em&gt;Did I get this right?&lt;/em&gt; that question isn't likely to be of interest to anyone but you, and the question will probably end up being downvoted and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However let me second Rob's suggestion to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;in the chat room&lt;/a&gt;. You can ask anything in the chat room, and we do quite often get students asking about course work. Whether you get a reply, and how quickly you get a reply, will depend on who is in the chat room at the time, but it's always worth asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T08:52:30.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10106" CreationDate="2017-08-23T14:04:17.037" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just noticed that you can use mathjax in this website, i.e. in Physics meta, but why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But mathjax is used only when you ask serious question in physics or mathematics and etc..., but serious question in physics should not be asked here on meta, but on physics stack exchange instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In physics meta you ask general questions about the physics stack exchange website, but when you ask these questions, you need only html, but not mathjax. You won't ever use mathjax here, so why you can use here mathjax at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166571" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T14:24:39.897" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T14:24:39.897" Title="Why you can use mathjax in this website?" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10105" CreationDate="2017-08-23T14:20:15.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nice. Well, sometimes one might have to explain how mathjax works, cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2887/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1119/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; related meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T14:20:15.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T15:41:59.907" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to receive reputation points on meta? I have asked 1 question, which got upvoted, but before asking it I had 101 reputations. After the upvote I still see 101 reputations. I know that every upvote gives you another 5 reputations, so I should have 106 reputations, but not 101.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug that I should report it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166571" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T15:47:22.593" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T15:47:22.593" Title="Is it possible to receive reputation points on meta?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|meta|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-08-23T15:44:07.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10109" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10110" CreationDate="2017-08-23T16:23:51.440" Score="-2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah but you can't get reputations in this website at all, so as a result I always have 101 reputations and 101 &amp;lt; 125, so I won't ever be able to downvote, but no way I see that others do this so what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166571" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T17:51:35.517" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T17:51:35.517" Title="Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 125 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score" Tags="|discussion|reputation|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-08-23T17:54:04.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10109" CreationDate="2017-08-23T16:34:58.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation is awarded for participation in &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the main site&lt;/a&gt;.  Your reputation will be the same on the main site and on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T16:34:58.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10120" CreationDate="2017-08-23T18:07:02.050" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why on Physics meta you neither receive nor lose reputations but on meta stack exchange you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Physics meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone either upvotes or downvotes one of your questions or answers then your number of reputations is unaffected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on meta stack exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone upvotes one of your questions or answers then you receive 5 reputations, but when he/she downvotes then you lose 2 reputations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why it works like that? Why Physics meta is different than meta stack exchange in this manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166571" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T15:52:25.020" Title="Why on Physics meta you neither receive nor lose reputations but on meta stack exchange you do?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-24T10:23:38.783" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm posting in meta for the first time so please don't mind some culturally outrageous thing that I would end up doing here and inform me about my peculiarities. So I have this question on stack exchange physics, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/351374/&quot;&gt;about the fermi level of materials&lt;/a&gt; and I have not received any assistance on it as of yet. Couls you let me know if there's some way to give my question more attention or if I could move the same question to a different forum like Chemistry and then see the responses because I really need to have this discussion and I know that there are people on this site who could really be able to help me with this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64360" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T12:26:37.670" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T12:44:44.920" Title="Migrating a question to a different SE site or asking for more attention" Tags="|support|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10114" CreationDate="2017-08-24T11:41:48.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may be a bit of chemistry, but I read this as being a primarily physics question. It's technically possible for you to delete the question from here and re-post it on Chemistry.SE. Make sure not to cross-post it; that is frowned on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd say leave it here. As for getting more attention, try improving clarity and presentation. The easier and quicker someone can read your post and get the details and question, the more likely they are to answer or, filing that, upvote (which increases likelihood of an answer). If you have doubts about that, try offering a bounty on your question. You spend some of your own reputation to have your question featured in the bounties page for a week. That's probably the best way of drawing more attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like any of those options, you could ask the people on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h Bar&lt;/a&gt; if they can answer the question and then provide them with the link to it. Failing all that AND if there's some special circumstances (like the question gets unfairly closed, severely downvoted, or people express problems that you want advice on how to fix), you could also try advertising the question here on meta (much like you've already done. Kudos for following my advice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T12:44:44.920" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T12:44:44.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10117" CreationDate="2017-08-24T16:00:49.360" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/353506/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; you can see discussion about the closure of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, it quickly got custom flagged as &quot;Duplicate of deleted question by the same user.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of actual site performance, this question is mostly semantics; but I am still curious on the procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this be used as a close reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, because the other question is deleted, we should not vote to close as &quot;Duplicate of deleted&quot;.  I'd think it would be more reasonable to &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; as duplicate of deleted, and vote to close for the direct reason if there is one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find any discussion on this; so I was just curious on what method would be &quot;more correct&quot; on physics.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T18:15:56.430" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T18:15:56.430" Title="Closing Deleted Duplicates" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10116" CreationDate="2017-08-24T16:13:56.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You cannot actually vote to close as duplicate of a deleted question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the asker of the non-deleted question is not the same as that of the deleted question, there is no need to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the asker of both questions is the same user, then you should raise a moderator flag explaining that this user deleted a question and reposted it. This behaviour is generally frowned upon since it is often used to evade downvotes (receive a downvote, delete the question and post it anew with a fresh score of 0) or close votes. Usually a moderator will undelete the earlier question and then close as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T16:13:56.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10123" CreationDate="2017-08-25T13:51:00.190" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you start bounty here on physics meta if your question didn't receive enough attention for example as you can do on the other websites in the network outside meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166571" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T13:52:14.883" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T16:22:41.380" Title="Can you start bounty here on physics meta if your question didn't receive enough attention for example?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10077" CreationDate="2017-08-25T14:53:50.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The community is implicitly lenient when it comes to homework-style questions: it usually takes 5 votes to close a question, and this puts a natural brake on unilateral action by too few members with vote-to-close privilege.  The &quot;uberpowerful&quot; users could in principle close questions by themselves but my experience is that they do so only in clearly appropriate cases: IMO the bulk of questions that are closed certainly deserve to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will stand and be counted amongst those generally biased against tricky questions, unless I feel the trick to solution is &quot;exportable&quot; to other questions, i.e. I recognize that some technically challenging questions can certainly have  good conceptual answers that will be applicable beyond the original narrow posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, I'm game to take the challenge but you can easily argue, for instance, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/327266/36194&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; was so specific that the question and its answer have had at best only a very modest impact on the average user of the site.   This question is an example of the community being &quot;lenient&quot;, although I imagine not in the direction the OP would have wished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another context for leniency,  a marginally bad question often attracts as comments some suggestions on how to improve or rephrase the question.   My experience is thus that there is some (variable) time buffer during which a poster could revise her/his question before the close votes start to accumulate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T15:39:24.510" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T15:39:24.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10112" CreationDate="2017-08-25T19:05:16.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is mostly because of historical reasons. Meta Stack Exchange is a relatively recent site: the role of mother meta was taken by Meta Stack Overflow until the two sites split in 2014 (if my memory serves). MSO was the first meta site and it started with its own rep system; later sites just got theirs from the main site. (I'm not sure why, but the answer is somewhere in the archives of MSE.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: found the relevant blog post, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/07/22/new-per-site-metas/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/07/22/new-per-site-metas/&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-08-26T15:52:25.020" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T15:52:25.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2017-08-25T22:57:16.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have figured out your real name, and many other details you did not publish. The &quot;The works of the Lord...&quot; quote helped narrow down the university where you did your undergrad degree, I know you are doing a PhD in Bristol, and then things fell into place surprisingly quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can confirm it while giving others a sporting chance at figuring it out themselves, I computed the md5 hash with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; echo -n &quot;R..s W.......d&quot; | md5&#xA;&#xA; d72d2f47a620135e84cbe3db2c21a698&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the dots were replaced with the actual characters in your name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T22:57:16.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10099" CreationDate="2017-08-26T04:52:29.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently there are no packages automatically enabled on this site. The community is of the opinion that none of the available packages would be widely useful enough to justify enabling them by default (although there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10069&quot;&gt;an ongoing discussion about mhchem&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T04:52:29.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10118" CreationDate="2017-08-26T16:22:41.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Child metas are designed to have no impact on reputation whatsoever. As a result, you can't use bounties to attract attention to your question. There are a few things you can do, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post the question you asked in chat. Most of the active regulars are active there, and they can help you out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Write a very catchy title for your question. Believe me, I had a couple of my questions top the hot questions list merely due to catchy titles. This is a very sure way to get attention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148444" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T16:22:41.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10131" CreationDate="2017-08-27T21:17:08.997" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does being the first person to answer a question (which is accepted with score 10 or more) merit a silver badge? This seems like a quite arbitrary requirement to me. Is it just to incentivize people to answer questions quickly? In my experience, most good questions get answered within an hour or so anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92058" LastEditorUserId="92058" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T15:31:11.430" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T06:28:23.960" Title="What's the motivation behind the &quot;Enlightened&quot; badge?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10129" CreationDate="2017-08-29T11:29:46.947" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find in the help, or by googling, the meaning of &quot;temporarily deleting&quot; from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/353711/which-bottle-of-water-absorb-most-heat-before-reaching-30c/353715#comment792575_353715&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm temporarily deleting this in accordance with our homework policy. Please don't post complete answers to the underlying problem in homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it sounds like it's deleted for now, but will come back at some point later on, but that meaning sounds implausible to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone point me point me out to the appropriate help page / explain it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T12:18:30.840" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T16:15:00.573" Title="What does &quot;temporarily deleted&quot; mean?" Tags="|support|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10128" CreationDate="2017-08-29T12:57:54.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no SE help pages beyond the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/2451&quot;&gt;Phys.SE homework policy page&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, a temporary deletion usually last 2 weeks, but there is no official policy or commitment from the moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is still deleted after this period, the poster may leave a reminding flag (or comment in the thread/chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T16:15:00.573" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T16:15:00.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T15:19:07.487" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes i know that one answer is to wait. But if you want answer urgently then what to do? What are alternatives? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162215" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T05:58:24.207" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T05:58:24.207" Title="What to do when no one answers your question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-08-29T15:19:59.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10124" CreationDate="2017-08-30T06:28:23.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Participating in the SE has to be fun otherwise people won't do it, and earning badges is part of the fun. As the recipient of a few Enlightened badges they have always felt like a &lt;em&gt;thank you&lt;/em&gt; from the SE for the effort I put in, and actually I like that - it's always nice to feel appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the Enlightened badge is intended to stimulate answers because it's hard to plan for it. If you jump in with a quick answer in an attempt to be first then you risk being trumped by a better and more considered answer later. I suppose the badge might incite you to jump in quickly to be first then rewrite your answer at leisure to make it better. If it ends up with a good answer for the PSE then, well, that's all to the good though I can't help feeling that anyone intent on this strategy really needs to get out more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T06:28:23.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-03T15:51:16.317" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just posted a rainbow related question and thought that a rainbow tag might be useful given that there are a few questions about it. Didn’t want to create one without consulting meta though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60251" LastEditorUserId="60251" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T08:21:21.870" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T08:21:21.870" Title="Would it make sense to have a rainbow tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10135" CreationDate="2017-09-03T16:23:13.250" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;On down-voting an answer, the person who downvoted, loses 1 reputation point. This is a practice that has been started here to prevent misuse of the option to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no reputation is lost on down-voting a question. Why is there an anomaly like this? Shouldn't it be same: either no reputation loss at all on down-voting, or 1 reputation loss for down voting on both questions and answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="149663" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T17:15:03.117" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T09:01:52.987" Title="Downvoting and Reputation-Loss" Tags="|discussion|reputation|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10132" CreationDate="2017-09-03T17:27:11.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question, but I don't think rainbows constitute a specific area of expertise that is worth highlighting with a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about rainbows that are on topic on this site should fall under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt; or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt;, and possibly also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optics&lt;/a&gt;; maybe there's another tag or two along those lines that I can't think of right now. Anyway, those tags identify the areas of knowledge that are relevant to answering questions about rainbows. Between those tags and the title of the question, people will have a pretty good idea of whether they can answer it or might be interested in reading it, and I don't think adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rainbows&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rainbows&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rainbows&lt;/a&gt; would make much difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably wouldn't hurt to have the tag either, but we've got a lot of tags already and I'd vote against adding tags unless they really contribute significant value. That being said, if you have enough reputation to create a new tag and you really think one is needed, you can always just go ahead and do it. Checking with meta first is definitely appreciated but in no way required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T17:27:11.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10133" CreationDate="2017-09-04T09:01:52.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=downvote+on+questions&quot;&gt;trivial search on the mother meta&lt;/a&gt; unearths the post detailing the original proposal for this idea and its implementation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90324/should-downvotes-on-questions-be-free&quot;&gt;Should downvotes on questions be “free”?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motivations are also well explained in the follow-up post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/221858/revisiting-free-downvotes-on-questions&quot;&gt;Revisiting free downvotes on questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, whenever the &quot;here&quot; in &quot;this practice has been started here&quot; is the entirety of the Stack Exchange network ─ and particularly for key aspects of the core Q&amp;amp;A engine like this one ─ the place to check is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. Asking here, particularly for users with nontrivial experience on this meta, can sometimes look a bit along the lines of &quot;please google this for me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T09:01:52.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10138" CreationDate="2017-09-04T17:32:29.640" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently encountered a question about &quot;1000 people whispering&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/353233/26969&quot;&gt;wrote an answer&lt;/a&gt;. Subsequently I did some experiments where I recorded a whispered sentence 19 times, and did some manipulations to show how this makes the &quot;inaudible&quot; audible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to update my answer with this work - but don't know of a good way to include audio files in the answer. Does anyone have any good suggestions - or even a recommended mechanism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;audio controls&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; HTML5 tag doesn't work... so likely this will be &quot;upload the files somewhere and link&quot;. Which is not very satisfying - I hope there's a better solution, especially since there's always the risk that hosting the audio file elsewhere will cause it to go missing in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastEditorUserId="26969" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T17:41:40.173" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T19:11:33.890" Title="Suggestions on including audio file(s) in answer" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10137" CreationDate="2017-09-04T19:11:33.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather surprisingly, I haven't been able to find a similar query neither on this site nor in mother meta. On the other hand, in &lt;em&gt;Web Applications Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt; I  found the post &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/933&quot;&gt;Is there a “youtube like” service for audio?&lt;/a&gt; which contains a lot of interesting suggestions. Please give it a look; I am sure it will prove useful. Cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T19:11:33.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10140" CreationDate="2017-09-06T14:04:25.220" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've asked an off-topic question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/355610/41634&quot;&gt;How to plot forcing oscillation with damping correctly?&lt;/a&gt;. The close notice has only one line of instruction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about physics within the scope defined in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is not about physics, but the lack of continuing instruction bugs me enough to ask on Meta.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/300546/260800&quot;&gt;Where to ask about computational code about mismatched results with scientific theories?&lt;/a&gt; It's until the question is completely closed that I see the link to the help page, and it turns out that the guide has been explicitly said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Implementation details of computational tasks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While computational physics is on topic, we are not a programming site. If your question is about implementing computational code - in particular, if it's about writing, compiling, debugging or optimizing code, or about a specific language or library - then it is off topic. It may be suitable for Computational Science or Stack Overflow, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we implement this on the close notice? The more specific the better. At least it would have save me time to ask the close voter back and forth, and time of anyone who read and answer that MSE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T14:09:13.743" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T16:58:44.500" Title="Should close notices be more specific?" Tags="|feature-request|closed-questions|close-reasons|software-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10139" CreationDate="2017-09-06T16:58:44.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a very limited number of customized canned off-topic closure reasons: at present we have three, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;homework-like,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-mainstream, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;engineering,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which make up &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TbnKf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the current close-vote prompt&lt;/a&gt;. Stack Exchange is extremely reluctant, on UI grounds, to add more reasons, so the only thing we could do is replace one of those - and, frankly, questions about coding are far less common than those three branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, though, there is the option to close as off-topic for all other possible reasons, i.e. you can choose the option&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that will register as a vote to close as off-topic, leave a comment with the reason, and offer that reason as an option to later close-voters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what happened to your question: sammy gerbil voted to close as off-topic with the custom reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is asking about coding, not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which then left &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/355610/how-to-plot-forcing-ocillation-with-damping-correctly#comment796011_355610&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;, and then two or more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/187958&quot;&gt;reviewers&lt;/a&gt; agreed with that reason, resulting in the generic closure banner that you quoted above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, you were given explicit indication of the possible problems with your post from the very first close-vote, which is frankly plenty fair. It might seem harsh, but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; your responsibility to ensure that your posts are on-topic, and to seek out the available guidance when it turns out they might not be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the three main closure reasons, there are plenty of small, valid closure reasons, and it's impossible (and not really desirable, either) to try to hammer them into the mold of a single canned reason. Over the past 90 days, custom close reasons make up about 6% of question closures, with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ozbIu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wide range of custom reasons&lt;/a&gt;. (To get a linked list of such comments, try &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/719512/custom-reason-question-closures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;.) Generally speaking, they make up too broad a range to congeal into a single canned reason, so your proposal isn't really implementable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T16:58:44.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-07T07:38:46.060" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics.stackexchange currently uses 2.7.1 with the config TeX-AMS_HTML-full which is affected by a visual glitch on both desktop and mobile version of Safari under latest OS, &lt;code&gt;\vec{x}&lt;/code&gt; results in the arrow displayed too far to the right (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1737&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue #1737&lt;/a&gt;). This has been fixed in 2.7.2. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154997" LastEditorUserId="7186" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T18:04:48.237" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T18:05:04.023" Title="Update to Mathjax 2.7.2 please" Tags="|bug|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10145" CreationDate="2017-09-07T10:09:31.837" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chat does not show LaTeX, not even in the comments which were moved to chat and had working LaTeX in the comments section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168460" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T10:33:17.683" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T10:33:17.683" Title="Chat does not support LaTeX input" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|chat|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10144" CreationDate="2017-09-07T10:16:42.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to enable it manually on the client side, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/220976/263383&quot;&gt;this mother meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1088/should-chat-have-tex-support/3297#3297&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ChatJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a set of bookmarklets by &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13854/robjohn&quot;&gt;robjohn&lt;/a&gt; to enable dynamic MathJax support in chat.  Commonly used in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/36/mathematics&quot;&gt;Mathematics chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An alternative &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/89/mathjax-in-chat-chatjax-offshoot&quot;&gt;offshoot of ChatJax&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22/manishearth&quot;&gt;ManishEarth&lt;/a&gt;, with support for the mhchem extension used to render chemical formulae.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4370/google-chrome-chat-mathjax-extension&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google Chrome Chat MathJax Extension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: exactly what it says on the tin.  Does more or less the same thing as ChatJax, but packaged as an Google Chrome extension.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vyznev/chatjax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ChatJax++&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greasemonkey&lt;/a&gt; (Firefox) / &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tampermonkey&lt;/a&gt; (Chrome) user script.  Features individual rendering of new chat messages as they arrive, which should hopefully make it a bit faster and more CPU-friendly than the bookmarklet.  Still lacks some planned features, but basic functionality is present.  Requires &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vyznev/soup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SOUP&lt;/a&gt;.  Supports mhchem in the Chemistry and Biology chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/bassup/93f78c0fac2a7be25086&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;script version of ChatJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greasemonkey&lt;/a&gt; (Firefox) / &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tampermonkey&lt;/a&gt; (Chrome), which automatically enables MathJax rendering in all chat rooms. It has no external dependencies, so people who don't want to use SOUP for some reason might find this useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T10:16:42.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10141" CreationDate="2017-09-07T18:05:04.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry about that. I didn't realize the beta was over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're on v2.7.2 network-wide now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7186" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T18:05:04.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T15:05:21.027" Score="1" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics/68417?noredirect=1#comment799094_68417&quot;&gt;discussion with Emilio Pisanty&lt;/a&gt; I was deprived of the opportunity to write comments. I'd like to know the explanation. Which rule did I violate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT. After John Rennie's comment I found that the possibility to add comments returned back to me. But the problem, I believe, did not disappear. @EmilioPisanty accuses me in cheating &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics/68417#comment799080_68417&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You ask for &quot;proofs of the periodic table&quot; without defining what you&#xA;  mean by that term and, frankly, that's little more than an&#xA;  intellectually dishonest bait-and-switch trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics/68417#comment799091_68417&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's the fact that you leave a yawning abyss of ambiguity in what it&#xA;  is you're actually asking which you then use to say &quot;no, see, that's&#xA;  not what I was asking&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at the same time people here &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics/68417#comment143427_16647&quot;&gt;&quot;rolled back&quot;&lt;/a&gt; my words and vote to delete them. This is not called honesty. I explained what I believe is importat for understanding my question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/80146/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;my post at Mathoverflow&lt;/a&gt; (to which I gave a reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics/68417#68417&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). And I tried to explain this here, at physics.stackexchange.com, in what was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/16647/4&quot;&gt;&quot;rolled back&quot;&lt;/a&gt; later. But it's impossible to explain anything if your interlocutors delete your explanations all the way. And I would say, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immoral&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe apart from the rules of this forum there are the common rules for all people in all discussions. And one of them is not shutting the mouth of the interlocutor. My question is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;whether this rule is valid here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25247" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T01:26:42.493" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T01:26:42.493" Title="Which rule did I violate?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10150" CreationDate="2017-09-14T10:47:07.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the comments you make in (v2 of) the question in a definitive fashion: you're conflating three very different issues here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One is criticism I had of your question; that's the quotations you give in this question. I am sorry you have such a hard time accepting the fact that people disagree with you, but I stand by my criticism. This criticism does not impact your ability to use the site in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A second issue is the fact that your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/16647/revisions&quot;&gt;edits&lt;/a&gt; to the question of July 2013 (v4 through v6) do not, as a whole, serve to clarify the question. This is a question-and-answer site, and we expect questions to contain questions and not ongoing discussion, or, in the words of the relevant moderator,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this is not a discussion forum, nor it is a platform for your epistemological arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the edits did not, as a whole, serve to clarify the question, they were rolled back by a moderator, as is standard practice on Stack Exchange. Moreover, at the time of the roll-back (note: roll-back, not &quot;enrolled&quot;) the moderators indicated the reason and noted that the components of the edits that do serve to clarify the question are not problematic. This was perhaps a bit rougher than it could have been but on the whole I find it to be a reasonable moderator action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that no content (other than comments) was deleted, and all edits are available via &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/16647/revisions&quot;&gt;the question's revision history&lt;/a&gt;. Saying that content was deleted is a bit of hyperbole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the parts of those edits that do serve to clarify the question (including e.g. point 1, minus the rant) can be reintroduced, as was indicated by the moderators at the time of the roll-back. You have since declined to re-introduce those parts of the edits, so it is reasonable to surmise that you're satisfied with the state of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The third issue is the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/68417&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; is not an answer to the question, in the judgement of multiple members of this community. As I said above, this is a question-and-answer site, not a discussion forum; we expect questions to contain questions and answers to contain answers. Comments can be used to help clarify and improve posts, but they are second-class citizens and they are liable to be removed at any time; any free-form discussion is welcome in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, either in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;main site room&lt;/a&gt; or by making a specific room. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/39987162#39987162&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; is about: the 'answer' is not an answer, it is an ill-supported rant commenting on posts from a separate thread. As such, if it does get removed, it is not because of &quot;censorship&quot; or any such; it's because it was posted in the wrong format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Similarly, administrative content like the one introduced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/68417/revisions&quot;&gt;v3 of that answer&lt;/a&gt; does not belong in posts, either questions or answers. Use comments or flags instead.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a couple more comments in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that the moderation in MathOverflow is rather different, in some aspects (particularly as regards long-winded free-form discussions), to Stack Exchange in general. That does not mean that MO-style rants are OK here; it means that this venue has different requirements than the ones you might be used to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no site moderation mechanism that leads to users being unable to post comments. Unless you can reproduce this situation, it's impossible to know what gave you that impression.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You keep making categorical statements that &quot;no axiomatization is possible&quot; while linking to the MO thread, which does contain a suitable axiomatization (and without giving any criticism to said axiomatization). As pointed out repeatedly on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16647/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics/&quot;&gt;the physics thread&lt;/a&gt; a QM explanation of the periodic table is not just doable, it's been done, to any physicist's satisfaction. You did a half-hearted search for axioms you liked, didn't find any, refused to look further even when given explicit leads to follow up, and concluded that there are none ─ kinda like in the saying &quot;absence of evidence is not evidence of absence&quot;, but dropping the &quot;not&quot;. I'm not sure why you think that that's a constructive way to go about an interdisciplinary discussion but let me assure you that it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting on meta works differently to how it does on main. Downvotes on questions normally do not mean that the question is &quot;bad&quot;; instead, they're often used to express disagreement with the post's premises or its conclusions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T10:53:05.993" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T10:53:05.993" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-15T02:21:44.137" Score="6" ViewCount="983" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathjax is slow enough that for math-heavy questions or answers my Safari 10 can barely keep up on a 3 years old mac (I am giving these details for precision sake: this is not a bug report but a feature request!). I have been experimenting with &lt;a href=&quot;https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KaTeX&lt;/a&gt; for my own stuff and I am very impressed with the speed. Their web page offers an interactive sandbox to try it. It has been around for a while and it supports most of what Mathjax does, including matrices, underbrace, a lot of AMS math. The most glaring missing feature is the lack of support for equation numbers (not even \tag is supported) and it might be considered a showstopper for stackexchange. Anyway, I think this is worth a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154997" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T03:09:45.073" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T10:39:13.863" Title="KaTeX instead of Mathjax" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10154" CreationDate="2017-09-16T14:00:08.657" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days back, my reputation was 931. However, each day I found it going down by 2, and now it stands at 919.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone account for this loss? It seems no one has downvoted my answer or question as it doesn't cross up in the achievements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T14:20:06.123" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T14:20:06.123" Title="A decrease in reputation from 931 to 919 - what's the reason?" Tags="|support|editing|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-09-16T14:53:21.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10153" CreationDate="2017-09-16T14:09:51.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have previously edited 6 questions and got $2 \times6=12$ reputation points. Later these questions were deleted, thereby canceling the previous gained $12$ reputation points. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/149845/209806&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/296055/209806&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; mother meta posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T14:16:19.187" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T14:16:19.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-17T15:05:33.160" Score="9" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;physics tags page&lt;/a&gt;, the tags &lt;code&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mathematics&lt;/code&gt; are described as &quot;Just because your question involves math!...&quot;  whereas on the actual pages for the tags,&#xA; the descriptions of both begin, &quot;DO NOT USE THIS TAG just because your question involves math!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have to assume that this is an issue with the rendering of the aforementioned capitalized warning. Is there something we can do about this? For reference...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the search results for the tags on the physics tags page linked above:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eT0AN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eT0AN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tags: Just because your question involves math&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here are the actual descriptions of the tags on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/mathematics/info&quot;&gt;respective&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/mathematical-physics/info&quot;&gt;pages&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0usx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0usx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tags: DO NOT USE THIS TAG just because your question involves math&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28942" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T11:21:13.730" Title="Problems with tag notes" Tags="|bug|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10155" CreationDate="2017-09-18T11:21:13.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, this seems like a big &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to see what would happen, I added some dummy all-caps text to an existing tag,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PWrYb.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then it displays correctly in the Ask a Question page,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D2GxD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aaaaaand... bizarrely enough, it displayed incorrectly in the main tags page, but not as incorrectly as the two math tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ltzcD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note that THIS IS is missing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also did a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/348331/revisions&quot;&gt;dummy edit to one of the math tags&lt;/a&gt; to see if the problem would go away, but it didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's obviously some text parsing code gone haywire somewhere in the stack that's causing this buggy behaviour and which should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T11:21:13.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T14:15:33.790" Score="2" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was given an excellent answer to address a practical problem. Then it was put on hold. Reasons given were that it's a homework question, and that nothing was done to attempt to solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the first complaint, the question was simplified by request from the original to make it somewhat solvable, though this made it more homework-like; also a picture was added showing the container in question. Whatever process people are using to identify a problem as &quot;homework&quot; doesn't seem to be 100% reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second complaint, I can only say there's no attempt given to solve the problem on the basis that I don't have the expertise to select the appropriate formula to solve the problem, at least, not the level of expertise demonstrated in @JMLCarter's excellent, detailed, and deleted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/357415/&quot;&gt;How much wind force would it take to move a 20-foot shipping container?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an appropriate way to get solutions to practical problems using the physics site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1094" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T14:17:16.797" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T01:03:30.143" Title="Question thought to be a homework question and put on hold" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10157" CreationDate="2017-09-18T18:01:37.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, this is a question looking for a solution to a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; example.  As such, it would essentially fall under our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;&quot;homework and exercises&quot;&lt;/a&gt; criteria.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of &quot;how fast would the wind need to be to topple this over?&quot; is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; specific to your one problem; and shows no attempt at solving it. &#xA; Although your intentions may be fine, you could have a homework assignment with this exact question on it.  Therefore, in it's current format, the question you ask &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in violation of that policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site for questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; physics; not a site where we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; physics exercises for you (regardless of your intentions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might seem a bit disappointing to you; but it's hard to maintain a high quality site while also allowing questions looking for a worked example.  If we were to get a reputation for that; suddenly we would be everyone's number crunchers every time they got a tricky physics assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T18:01:37.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10163" CreationDate="2017-09-19T18:17:02.973" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the top bar redesign (currently mod-only, broader rollout &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/300829/new-top-bar-is-coming-to-the-stack-exchange-network&quot;&gt;planned&lt;/a&gt; for the next couple of weeks) in Chrome the header seems not to be tall enough to contain its content anymore. In this image, you can see the blue translucent background under &quot;QUESTIONS&quot; overhanging the background pattern on the bottom, and under the &quot;PHYSICS&quot; logo, part of that image also overhangs the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dLN5n.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dLN5n.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of site header&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tested this on a few browsers and found that it occurs with Chrome 60.0.3112.113 on OS X and Chromium 59.0.3071.104 on Linux, but not with Firefox 52.3.0 on Linux, Vivaldi 1.11.917.43 on Linux, or Safari 10.1.2 (12603.3.8) on OS X. So, seemingly Chrome-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be checked and fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="108742" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T06:27:53.457" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T06:27:53.457" Title="Header background not tall enough with the new top bar" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10157" CreationDate="2017-09-20T00:49:16.603" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all have answered or will answer questions in which we give away too much.  Yet in some cases a good answer will very much broaden the scope of a specific question.  I think this is the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question as posted by the OP isn't fantastic for the reasons given by others: basically, the OP asks for the community to solve for him (assuming from the username the OP is a man) a problem that is rather vague and contains very little information.  This lack of specific data makes it unlikely that this is a true homework question, although the OP should have shown greater diligence by suggesting some general principle or demonstrating clearly some effort at solution.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, one member rose to the challenge and actually came up with a solution which contains simple, conceptual and reasonable physics.  Beyond the physics the answer is rather informative.  On balance my personal opinion is that a good answer salvaged the question, and the community would benefit if this question and its answer were undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T01:03:30.143" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T01:03:30.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10160" CreationDate="2017-09-21T06:27:44.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt; Thanks again for reporting. It should be fixed now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108742" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T06:27:44.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10165" CreationDate="2017-09-22T13:18:24.283" Score="0" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my early days of using Physics Stack Exchange, I had no idea how the website worked and admittedly didn't do my research. And I'm talking about one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked only 6 questions - two with a total of 3 downvotes asked a while ago, one without any positive or negative votes, and three (my latest questions) with a total of 5 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, all of my answers except one (which received no up/downvotes) have had positive votes, have been accepted, or have had both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the above, it came to my total surprise when I got the following message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the&#xA;  Help Center to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the article, and while 30% of my answers have downvotes, my 'contributions' obviously outweigh these downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my negative votes were only on my oldest question, and &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; question I asked a month ago (which was succeeded by questions with only positive votes), then why is it that StackExchange bans me? Is the entire system really that undemocratic? Is it a technical bug? Is it some rule that I skipped?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/143777/aditya-radhakrishnan&quot;&gt;account&lt;/a&gt; for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user143777" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T07:32:23.413" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T07:32:23.413" Title="Why was I blocked from asking a question despite recently having only positive answer and question reactions?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10164" CreationDate="2017-09-22T13:41:24.120" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have been automatically restricted from asking further questions due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243460/263383&quot;&gt;rolling rate limit&lt;/a&gt; and/or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291142/263383&quot;&gt;comprehensive question ban&lt;/a&gt;, and should be directed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;this help center page&lt;/a&gt; by the message you get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact algorithm by which these question blocks are imposed is not public to avoid people gaming it, but it is known that questions which are &lt;em&gt;downvoted&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; factor into it, and questions which are all three count with a much higher weight. For another instantiation of this philosophy, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/290546/263383&quot;&gt;notion of a positive question record&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this record is not what the question block uses, but it might be instructive to compute it for your case, anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have asked 10 questions, four of which are deleted, five of which are closed and five of which currently have negative score. This means your question record is&#xA;$$ \frac{10 - 4 - 5 - 5}{10} = -0.4,$$&#xA;which is far below the $0.5$ SE considers the minimum for having a &quot;positive question record&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T13:41:24.120" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10168" CreationDate="2017-09-24T09:50:43.473" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I gained +60 reputation points.  The majority of these gains were from numerous questions/answers I wrote quite a while back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not have this type of gain in any day of the past few weeks, especially not from such a wide variety of questions/answers I wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also just so happens that today I joined Stack Exchange Academia, asked a question there, and answered one question here on Stack Exchange Physics.  Does this have anything to do with my unexpected gain recently?  Does the website make my questions/answers more accessible if I show more activity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149370" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T16:33:52.607" Title="Puzzling Increase in Rep Points Today" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10167" CreationDate="2017-09-24T11:13:39.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens to me from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect when someone sees a question or answer of yours that they like they will then look at your other questions and answers, and they may upvote some of them as well. I doubt is due to the SE bumping your posts because as far as I know having one of your questions or answers upvoted has no effect on your other questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ACuriousMind mentions in a comment, If someone gives you lots of upvotes in a short space of time the SE is likely to conclude this looks a suspicious voting pattern and may cancel the upvotes. If they have disappeared tomorrow that is probably what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T11:13:39.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10170" CreationDate="2017-09-24T14:38:41.463" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying very hard to change my profile pic. How can I do it? I think it is some reputation thing; is it so? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162215" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-09-24T15:19:00.793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T08:41:52.403" Title="How to change Profile pic" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10169" CreationDate="2017-09-24T15:17:12.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation has nothing to do with you being able to change your profile pic. You should be able to change it, as often as you like, and to whichever image you want (with the obvious exceptions, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243285&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;), regardless of your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41277&quot;&gt;How do I change my profile picture, or avatar?&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting the relevant part,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How do I change my profile picture, or avatar?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Navigate to your profile (click on your username at the top of the page)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/edit/current&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings&amp;quot; tab&lt;/a&gt;, and there will be &amp;quot;Change picture&amp;quot; link in the bottom of your existing avatar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &amp;quot;Change picture&amp;quot; and a box will pop up giving you the option to choose between Gravatar, Identicon, your last uploaded picture, or uploading a new picture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &lt;kbd&gt;Save changes just for this community&lt;/kbd&gt; to save the new avatar only for that specific site, or &lt;kbd&gt;Save and copy changes to all Stack Exchange communities&lt;/kbd&gt; to save the new avatar to all sites you have account on. &lt;strong&gt;(Note: this will also override your whole information on all sites, e.g. &lt;em&gt;About Me&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;email&lt;/em&gt; etc.)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Images get updated quite quickly - you may need to clear your cache.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KpuOW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KpuOW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T08:41:52.403" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10167" CreationDate="2017-09-26T11:02:30.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is a good opportunity to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;encourage users to vote. You decide what are quality posts on Phys.SE and what are not. Currently (September 2017) Phys.SE gets around 200 posts and 500 votes per day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;urge voters to vote according to content, not the author, nor because of what others voted, etc. In particular, only voting on posts from a single poster (known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126829/209806&quot;&gt;serial voting&lt;/a&gt;) is frowned upon, and may lead to moderator actions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T16:33:52.607" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T16:33:52.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10174" CreationDate="2017-09-27T05:15:20.370" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/359310/how-do-we-know-tachyons-dont-exist-second-try&quot;&gt;This (admittedly naive) question&lt;/a&gt; (asking whether the existence of tachyons would have observable consequences) seems to me to be clearly about mainstream physics, though it was closed as non-mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is that the existence of tachyons would have observable consequences that contradict mainstream physics, that answer is mainstream physics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainstream textbooks often say things like &quot;Perpetual motion machines are impossible because they would have such-and-such observable consequences which contradict other things we know about&quot;.  Why can't a mainstream Q&amp;amp;A treat tachyons the same way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T07:02:29.000" Title="Mainstream physics closed as non-mainstream" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10173" CreationDate="2017-09-27T05:42:10.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/359310/revisions&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (v2) that was closed as non-mainstream read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title: How would a tachyonic antitelephone work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here's my question. Let's say that in the year 2067, a highly advanced alien race decides to send a message back in time 50 years to Earth in 2017. How could they send such a signal so that it could be detected by 2017 technology? I understand this isn't possible under mainstream physics, but let's assume mainstream physics is wrong. Hypothetically, how could it happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was later edited by OP, and is currently (Sept 27, 2017) in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T07:02:29.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10177" CreationDate="2017-09-27T20:21:22.843" Score="8" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe some old questions would be quickly closed if asked today (e.g.,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/13/75633&quot;&gt;What is sound and how is it produced?&lt;/a&gt; in my opinion is too broad and shows too little prior research effort).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;always leave them alone, 5+ years is history;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consider voting to close, but only if there aren't very good answers &quot;rescuing&quot; it;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not take the question's age into account at all when casting votes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, voting is a judgment call, my question is how (and whether) to take the post age into consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer and discussion in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5378/75633&quot;&gt;Enforcing new policies to old questions/answers&lt;/a&gt; shows we don't shy away from disturbing archaeological questions in case of a policy change, but I'm not convinced the situations are equivalent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T20:24:04.893" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T21:46:36.137" Title="Should we vote to close old questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10175" CreationDate="2017-09-27T21:42:42.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My philosophy when reviewing question is to not look at the date, the author or the answers. An off-topic post is off-topic regardless of when was it posted, by whom, and of the presence of very good answers. And vice-versa: and on-topic post is on-topic because of its content, not its context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, my suggestion is: do not take the age of a post into consideration when voting to close (or to leave open). If it is off-topic today, vote to close it. The fact that it was on-topic back in the day, when policies were under construction, should be of no relevance for this decision. I believe this is what most reviewers do anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T21:42:42.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10175" CreationDate="2017-09-27T21:46:36.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think questions should be considered ineligible for closing because of their age. People do sometimes use those questions as examples to help them learn what is appropriate for the site and what isn't, and in that sense it's strictly better to have questions closed or not closed according to the site's current standards than the alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, old close-worthy questions aren't exactly a priority for closing because they aren't getting viewed very often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is that if you see an old question that looks deserving of closure, post about it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;the chat room&lt;/a&gt;. If you find several other people in agreement who can all cast close votes, you can all cast your votes and make sure the question actually does get closed. If you don't get a response, you can still vote to close as you see fit, but there's a higher risk your vote will age away without the question getting enough attention to actually effect the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR don't take post age into account when deciding if a question deserves to be closed, but maybe take the age into account when deciding how to go about getting it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW I'm rather skeptical of the idea that a good answer can singlehandedly &quot;rescue&quot; a question which otherwise deserved to be closed, but I think that's tangential to the main point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T21:46:36.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-28T15:23:48.997" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that we don't use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1191/add-markdown-support-for-hidden-until-you-click-text-aka-spoilers&quot;&gt;spoiler syntax in Markdown&lt;/a&gt; very often, but it seems it's a bit buggy, at least on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following test of the spoiler tag, containing both some text and an image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;! This is a test of the spoiler tag.&#xA;&#xA;&amp;gt;! ![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vECQ8.jpg)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This displays incorrectly, and it just registers as a normal blockquote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7m91i.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behaviour goes away if you separate the text from the image with, say, a horizontal rule, but this is hardly ideal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TqQb8.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is buggy behaviour and ought to be fixed (and also fixable relatively easily?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T19:21:47.303" Title="Buggy behaviour of spoiler tags when they contain both text and images" Tags="|bug|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10179" CreationDate="2017-09-28T17:39:14.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Buggy indeed. Utill its fixed, here is a workaround:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After the text, insert an invisible &lt;code&gt;$${}$$.&lt;/code&gt; $${}$$ &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dT27P.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T19:21:47.303" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T19:21:47.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-29T20:11:22.063" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;After trying to delete a post, by clicking the &lt;code&gt;delete&lt;/code&gt; link under it, the final deletion prompt mentioned &quot;Repeated Deletion of Answered Questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does this mean? Could I be banned from asking questions just for clearing out trash / malformed questions that received answers that are just of the form &quot;Your premise is wrong&quot; or Duplicates? I could maybe understand the virtue of leaving the former up so anyone else caught in the same moment of confusion / idiocy can learn what's going wrong, but why the latter? Surely deleting duplicates wouldn't harm the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user95137" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T22:11:45.790" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T23:15:22.497" Title="What does &quot;Repeated Deletion of Answered Questions&quot; mean in the post-deletion prompt?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10181" CreationDate="2017-09-29T21:11:05.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you post a question on Stack Exchange, you're soliciting other people to do work for you, in the form of answers. In the Stack Exchange mentality (which I agree with), it is impolite to then remove the content that those other people have produced for you, and the system tends to see that as a negative signal in various ways. As a simple example, of the system has &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; indication that that content has any quality (that is, if it's been upvoted) then the system will not let you delete the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've asked a question with incorrect premises and received answers that helped you realise that fact, then it's a bit ungrateful to then delete those answers. That's compounded by the fact that writing that kind of answer is quite often a significant risk, as it is often hard to gauge whether the OP will get belligerent when their assumptions get questioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for duplicates the standard practice is to leave them up as signposts to the existing, answered question. The thinking is that if you were unable to find that thread because, say, you used keywords that didn't quite match the existing text, then there's a nontrivial likelihood that someone else will come along and use the same search terms, which will lead them to your question and from there to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, only delete questions, and particularly questions with answers, when you really need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if bears mention, deletion sometimes looks like a nice alternative for closed or downvoted questions, particularly when facing their negative effects for things like automated question bans or the 'positive question record' of some badges. This is wrong: the system considers deleted questions as a negative signal &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; the other metrics. Don't delete downvoted or closed posts - fix them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T23:15:22.497" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T23:15:22.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10184" CreationDate="2017-09-30T08:51:38.963" Score="33" ViewCount="4376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I normally only come when clicking on some questions from other StackExchange sites. Every time the questions are protected by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic&quot;&gt;Qmechanic&lt;/a&gt;. Is that something like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Community user&lt;/a&gt;? I don't see this at other StackExchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45330" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T10:07:40.200" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T10:31:44.460" Title="Why are all questions I visit from other sites protected by Qmechanic?" Tags="|discussion|questions|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2017-09-30T09:56:42.210" Score="51" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;HNQs with $\geq 3$ answer are often protected by a moderator to  prevent &quot;thanks!&quot;, &quot;me too!&quot;, or spam answers by new users. Questions can be flagged to let moderators know that they should be protected/unprotected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it would make a difference if I claim that I'm not a bot, so let me just point to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;list of current Phys.SE moderators&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T10:24:54.653" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T10:24:54.653" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2017-09-30T10:31:44.460" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;10k users can see the statistics of all protected questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/protected-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Here are some screenshots for the rest of users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mv7Ca.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mv7Ca.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZZNKq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZZNKq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's play a game: some of these users are human, and the rest are AI's. Which is which?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T10:31:44.460" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-30T19:13:48.090" Score="3" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just curious, why this question is put on hold &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/359891/&quot;&gt;Physics application of $SO(8)$ and Spin(8) triality&lt;/a&gt;, while other questions that have broader ends (a real open list) are left open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61241/physics-applications-of-fredholm-theory?rq=1&quot;&gt;Physics Applications of Fredholm Theory:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/315259/examples-of-kms-states&quot;&gt;Examples of KMS states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266587/examples-of-matrix-product-states?rq=1&quot;&gt;Examples of Matrix Product State(s)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, SO(8) and Spin(8) triality have not been used in physics application other than one example I give in 1+1D BDI Time-Reversal invariant Topological Superconductor and 2+1D Z2-Ising-symmetric Topological Superconductor have ℤ8 classifications (see a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61452/what-is-a-p-x-i-p-y-superconductor-relation-to-topological-superconductors/359521#359521&quot;&gt;related post here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other uses of SO(8) and Spin(8) triality may be in String Theory (but may not count as real-world physics), or possibly in disorder system or nuclear spectrum or Kondo effect (these I am just suspecting, we don't really know and it is certainly widely UN-known). They are not totally obvious examples. And there do not form a big list, if one wants to give precise use and Reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side comment is that scientists and physicists learn by giving examples [don't you?]. I am not sure that what the far-insight to kill questions asking for giving meaningful examples, except that the purpose is trying to suppressing some users to use the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12813" LastEditorUserId="12813" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T23:13:43.997" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:50:11.817" Title="Question asking rare examples of the use of SO(8) and Spin(8) triality" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10186" CreationDate="2017-09-30T20:58:50.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I do agree with the closure of your question: it is indeed off-topic. The good kind of off-topic though: a good, interesting question that is, unfortunately, unfit for the format of this site. Questions asking for an unlimited list of examples are always off-topic here, even if you think that, in your case, the list is actually rather short (and the topic is interesting). We try to treat all posts equally;  all questions are equal, even if some questions are more equal than others.  What's more, in principle you cannot really know whether the list is short or unlimited, so how can you be sure &quot;your question is different&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, let me stress something: questions asking for a list of examples are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; off-topic here, even if some fly under the radar and go undetected, as is the case in the posts you link. I actually voted to close the first two links, as I agree they are essentially more broad scoped than your question (and, consequently, also off-topic). I didn't vote to close the third one: it seems to me that it is kind of specific, though I can't really say I understood what OP is asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally -- what to do with your question. You could try to ask it in the chatroom and hope someone there can help you with it. You could also reformulate it into a resource-recommendation post, though I'm not really sure that will help. A third alternative is to focus on some particular context, such as &quot;is the triality used in [insert some specific area]&quot;. In this case, the answer is either yes or no, so it cannot possibly degenerate into a limitless list of examples (which is what we are trying to avoid here). I don't know what else you can do to get an answer. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T20:58:50.330" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10189" CreationDate="2017-10-01T08:30:01.297" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Initially, I thought a little rhombus behind the names is a crown of topper in reputation. &#xA;Then, I thought it signifies the site administrator &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, I thought it is written by the user himself :-) &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UiNUR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UiNUR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;users in P. S. E. &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which one is right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162215" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T10:45:47.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T10:45:47.437" Title="What does the little rhombus $\blacklozenge$ behind the username mean?" Tags="|support|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10188" CreationDate="2017-10-01T08:50:31.757" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your second guess is closest. The diamond $\blacklozenge$ behind the username signifies &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company/team&quot;&gt;SE team members&lt;/a&gt;. The Phys.SE moderators are listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T10:18:02.170" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T10:18:02.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-06T19:00:53.387" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some data first. As of today, there have been 27636 suggested edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;23490 have been approved,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4146 have been rejected,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6873 were improved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top 20 reviewers have the following stats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FA2z0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FA2z0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you people think of these statistics? are we too lenient when it comes to suggested edits? or the other way around? what would you consider a healthy ratio of accept-to-reject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last column seems an important metric: do you think the numbers are good? should they be higher? do you think it is common for reviewers to accept edits even if there is a lot of room for improvement? what could we do to encourage reviewers to improve the edits when it is necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T19:00:53.387" Title="When it comes to the Suggested Edits queue, what would you consider a healthy ratio of accept-to-reject?" Tags="|discussion|editing|review|suggested-edits|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10194" CreationDate="2017-10-06T19:24:03.277" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's been some disagreement on the topicality of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/361253/where-do-feynman-diagrams-appear-for-the-first-time&quot;&gt;Where do Feynman Diagrams Appear for the first time?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, so I wanted to bring the issue to meta to get input from the community. It could be considered a historical question, which speaks to it being off topic, but it's also asking for the work which introduced a specific notation, which is (at least quite close to) what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; was created for, and I would say that speaks to it being on topic. What does the community think about this question and others like it which ask for the first work to use a certain kind of notation? Should such questions be on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To guide the discussion, here are three possible outcomes I anticipate (but other options are certainly welcome):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could decide that questions of the form &quot;What was the first paper/book/etc. to use [notation]?&quot; are, in general, on topic (and should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could decide that questions of the form &quot;What was the first paper/book/etc. to use [notation]?&quot; are &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;, but questions of the form &quot;What paper announced the discovery of [phenomenon]?&quot; remain on topic (and should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Diverging somewhat from the main question, we could decide to make all questions of the form &quot;What was the first paper/book/etc. to [do X]?&quot; for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; X off topic. That would be a change in the scope of the site - basically we'd be rendering the primary use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; obsolete.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T20:07:51.633" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T07:08:22.863" Title="Should questions about the first use of a notation be on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-07T00:09:07.797" Score="0" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;This evening I have been kicked twice from chat, apparently for not acting in &quot;good faith.&quot; All I said is that my primary concern is whether my messages will be flagged or not. I don't see what's wrong with that, flagged messages are offensive so if I'm not posting offensive messages what is the issue? I also stress that I said it's my &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt;, not my &lt;em&gt;sole&lt;/em&gt; concern. Clearly my messages are meant to be thoughtful, educational, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly did I do wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59215" LastEditorUserId="59215" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T00:33:46.483" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T00:52:19.587" Title="Why do I keep getting kicked from chat?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10192" CreationDate="2017-10-07T00:22:06.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it should be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a fine line, but I think the request for a paper which first uses a certain notation is pretty much &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; tag was for, so I think it'd be kind of inconsistent to make it off-topic but a specific discovery on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely removing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; as an on-topic subject also doesn't make much sense to me. A final note - this sort of question might be one on topic on both History of Science/Mathematics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; here, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T00:22:06.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10193" CreationDate="2017-10-07T00:52:19.587" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I kicked you, twice, and I &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/40405941#40405941&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your sole concern in posting something here is whether it might get flagged or not, I might suspect you are not partipating in good faith in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Be Nice policy, and indeed every sort of rule for behaviour expected of you both on the Stack Exchange sites themselves and in their chats, are not &lt;em&gt;burdens&lt;/em&gt; imposed on you on a whim. If you try to adhere to the letter of these rules but not their spirit, then, frankly, you are in the wrong place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/40405914#40405914&quot;&gt;attempted to start a discussion&lt;/a&gt; about why you might post something in the first place, you flat out refused to engage, deflecting the topic to whether or not it might get flagged. This shows you are not engaging in good faith: You are trying to avoid getting banned from chat, not trying to be the sort of person &lt;em&gt;who doesn't have to be worried about getting flagged in the first place&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the sort of behaviour we want to see in our chat rooms. You have been suspended (in the short or long term) &lt;strong&gt;71&lt;/strong&gt; times for posting inappropriate messages. This is exceptional - though not quite a record -  among &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; users across the SE chat network. If you cannot stay away from inflammatory controversy, then chat is not a place for you. The kicks were intended to reinforce this message: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not concern yourself with whether or not your messages might get flagged. Concern yourself with whether they are necessary to post, with whether they are kind and compassionate, with whether they contribute to a welcoming and constructive culture. Extend to others the good faith you wish were attributed to you. Do not antagonize people needlessly. Swallow your pride and recognize that others may disagree, do not ridicule them, do not invalidate their opinions simply because they are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failure to show &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of that, failure to show any sort of willingness to change or to adapt, failure to respect the Be Nice policy as a statement of intent rather than a legalistic piece of policy is what keeps you getting kicked and suspended from chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T00:52:19.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10198" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10199" CreationDate="2017-10-07T21:15:53.247" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/361486/45808&quot;&gt;an answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; was deleted for being a complete answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since I did not give the final value of the wavelength, why is this &quot;a complete answer&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45808" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T21:37:13.220" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T02:49:01.220" Title="Why is this considered a complete answer?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10198" CreationDate="2017-10-07T21:31:13.823" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; give the final value. If the answer is $4$, and I write $2+2$ and leave it unevaluated, I gave the final value. An arithmetical computation is not a meaningful part of solving a problem, and if that is the only step that separates you from the answer, then the problem is done. Sorry but you don't have a case here -- the best you can do is to forget about this and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T21:31:13.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10201" CreationDate="2017-10-07T22:35:51.783" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question and prose contained in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/357077/experiments-are-monads-i-think-but-are-they-comonads-too&quot;&gt;Experiments are monads (I think), but are they comonads too?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;admittedly sounds like word salad to me, but unlike other theory questions over my head this doesn't even sound like a physics question to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if a question living out on the edge at least gives some background with definitions making contact with mainstream physics, then I feel we could all learn something from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thought that convinced me to ask, is maybe this sounds like world salad to the experts as well, and we have an emperor's clothes situation here. Assuming good faith that there is useful physics content here, I hope we can at least be open and honest enough that if most of the experts don't understand that someone should speak up and ask for clarification. What is being asked and how does this make contact with mainstream physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148599" LastEditorUserId="148599" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T23:09:56.620" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T05:58:00.713" Title="Overly abstract?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10200" CreationDate="2017-10-08T19:16:48.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking in general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;categorification&lt;/a&gt; of physics and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;category theory&lt;/a&gt; in physics are on-topic. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5713/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; related meta post. The quality and fate of this type of questions should be decided (in the same way as any other question) via user up/down votes. There is no need to regulate this topic with a separate policy rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T05:58:00.713" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T05:58:00.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10198" CreationDate="2017-10-09T02:49:01.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt; (ACM) left when deleting your question is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm deleting this in accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/25301&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. Please do not give complete or near-complete answers to homework-like questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment is basically the same thing that is written in the homework policy under the heading &lt;em&gt;Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if you wanted to argue that you did not give a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; answer (which I'd agree that AFT's assessment is correct), one could even more easily argue that you gave a &lt;em&gt;near-complete&lt;/em&gt; answer that is treated the same as a complete answer to this type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T02:49:01.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10152" CreationDate="2017-10-11T10:39:13.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I investigated KaTeX a bit and there is definitively a showstopper for me: there is not support for &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;. It is possible to define macros in the javascript code but it is not possible to write something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\newcommand{\ket}[1]{|{#1}\rangle}\ket{\psi}$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to give&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\newcommand{\ket}[1]{|{#1}\rangle}\ket{\psi}$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I would find that very annoying as it is a great help to write complex answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user154997" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T10:39:13.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10205" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:19:42.837" Score="11" ViewCount="620" Body="&lt;p&gt;On occasions, some questions (usually posted by less experienced users) get massively downvoted - say, score of -5 or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the reputation cannot go below 1, is there a practical site consequence of such massive downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly some questions completely deserve to be downvoted, but where is the line between being dissatisfied with a specific question and downright discouraging new users?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T14:25:27.860" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:08:49.820" Title="Massive downvotes of some questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10204" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:08:49.820" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some effects of highly negative score not related to reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question below -4 will be pushed of the front page (i.e. what visitors see at `physics.stackexchange.com? ), cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/117120/263383&quot;&gt;this meta answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users with more than 20k reputation can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;vote to delete questions of score -3 or lower&lt;/a&gt; immediately after they are closed without the usual 2 day period in which users can't vote to delete closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The 10k tools (a set of statistics available to users with more than 10k reptuation) contain categories like &quot;most downvoted question/answer&quot; in a certain timeframe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me remark that in general, you shouldn't ever hesitate to cast a vote because of the effect (reputation-wise or psychologically) it might have on the user. If the &lt;em&gt;post&lt;/em&gt; deserves to be downvoted, downvote it. If it doesn't, don't downvote it. The author and its current score should not factor significantly in your decision to vote on a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:08:49.820" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:27:43.717" Score="4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the reason behind any act of moderation comes under the domain of the meta discussion of the website. Thus, the reasons behind the suspensions should also be open to discussion on the meta website. I, by no means, intend to say that the decisions regarding the suspensions should be made directly based on such discussions or by popular vote. That right is rightly reserved by the expert moderators for the good. But since the suspensions are decided based on the public behavior of the user and the policy of the SE is also public, I see no harm in discussing the precise reasons behind a particular suspension. And besides, dogmatically not disclosing the information about any suspension (for example, Ron Maimon's to be explicit) seems quite silly if not anti-democratic. I know that the information can be accessed by personally emailing the moderators but I don't see why discussing it on the meta website is not encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T22:04:17.560" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T22:04:17.560" Title="Why Can't Suspensions be Discussed on the Meta?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|suspensions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-10-11T18:35:35.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10208" CreationDate="2017-10-11T18:25:49.927" Score="4" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone has flagged a question for being a duplicate, should I also flag it as duplicate, or does the one flag suffice? (And does this change if it's a duplicate of two questions or more?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in relation to that, when reviewing first questions, marking as duplicate can be enough for a review (In my opinion). However, if someone marks it as duplicate (Assuming I shouldn't flag again), and I have nothing else to do regarding that post, is the &quot;Nothing to do&quot; review fine? As there's nothing for ME to do about it, since it was already done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82528" LastEditorUserId="82528" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T18:30:31.947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T14:12:04.477" Title="Flagging as duplicate - After someone else has done it &amp; Reviews" Tags="|discussion|flagging|duplicates|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10207" CreationDate="2017-10-11T18:35:28.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One flag suffices. Once a post has been flagged, it enters the review queue, where high-rep users can vote to close or leave open. Further flags serve no purpose. But do note that sometimes people point out possible duplicates in the comments without actually flagging, so those posts do not enter the queue automatically. In those cases, you can either wait and see what happens or flag yourself. When in doubt, do flag. No harm is done, and in the worst case scenario the flag is useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reviewing, if you feel that the only thing to be done is to flag, and the flag has already been risen, then &quot;Nothing to do&quot; is fine. Other alternatives are: upvote the &quot;Possible duplicate&quot; comment (to emphasise that you agree with the flag) or upvote or downvote the post depending on whether the question is good (and note that being a duplicate is not by itself a reason to downvote, modulo those rare cases where it is obvious that OP is well aware of being a duplicate and decides to post anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T18:39:03.760" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T18:39:03.760" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10212" CreationDate="2017-10-13T10:37:49.960" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say I have (and I have!) a very technical question related to the (proper) mathematical formulation of physical theories. Should I ask it in one section only (let's say mathematics) and wait for a good/thorough answer there, or should I cross-post it in the physics section, knowing that the mathematically qualified members of the physics section won't really visit the mathematics section to get the chance to see it and answer to it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the right solution for me to ensure greatest chances of receiving a well-formulated answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T04:43:42.080" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T04:43:42.080" Title="Approved/OK form of cross posting" Tags="|support|questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10211" CreationDate="2017-10-13T11:40:58.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have the same core question that you want to ask to two different communities and you really are looking for different input from the two, then it's quite likely that the posts will end up looking rather different. In that case, it's OK to post simultaneously in the two sites, but it is crucial that you mention that fact in both versions and provide cross-post links on both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it can happen that the versions you want to ask on the two sites will be essentially identical, in which case it's not really considered OK to cross-post simultaneously on both. Choose the one you think is best and post there, and wait to see what the response is. If after several days you feel that it's not really what you were hoping for, it's OK to cross-post ─ again, with explicit markers of that fact and the respective links in both versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T11:40:58.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10207" CreationDate="2017-10-13T11:51:45.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important subtlety: Be aware of that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;some duplicate comments under a question are written independently by users; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;while others are generated automatically via &lt;em&gt;flagging&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;voting-to-close&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;em&gt;duplicate.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system does not recognize the former even if a user try to mimic the format of the latter. The question needs one and only one of the latter kind to enter the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T14:12:04.477" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T14:12:04.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-13T19:47:26.327" Score="-8" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/362667/&quot;&gt;Kepler&amp;#39;s Third Law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did my question become off-topic? I just wanted to get a formula and said that I will solve it myself. Why aren't formula questions allowed? As far as i know, the formulas are in conceptual physics. Then, I'm asking a conceptual question. Please, do it at least because you don't admit a conceptual question too. What do you really admit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Giving formulas does not mean ''Solving for you'' If they don't know how to apply that equation or not have any idea about the question, they won't be able to solve question. It depends on what they know. But you all don't have any respect, everyone starts hitting that close button when they see that cool ''homework-exercises'' tag. Answer formula wants at least. We got your homework policies and it seems good. But this is really being funny. The site admits conceptual question and this was really conceptual. That's why everyone does not understand this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, decide what kind of questions you want. If you want a question like this ''What is that?, What is this?'' Everyone can google it so it doesn't matter. What is this site for then? Examined other stackexchange communities, they are very helpful for a student. If you were right, then why do they answer all kind of questions? everyone gets everything well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's talk about physics.se now. Yes, homework-questions should not be allowed and you are too right. But if you don't admit the formula questions, then that's being too funny. Assume I posted my question here, and asked a formula to solve it myself. Did you solve it for me? No. Who did solve it? Me. What did you show? the true equation him ought to use. Did you give the final answer? No. Does him have any idea about question? If answer is no, then he won't be able to solve it =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's talk about other stackexchange communities, They get both questions. Conceptual-Homework. I posted my questions which I really did not get and took great answers. By the way, I leant everything and saw my faults. They are respectful for students because they see that him does not have any idea about the question. You might be right at homework-questions but really not right at formula questions. Believe in me, by doing this, you are helping no one. If you were really right at this, other stackexchange communties may have been following your policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lost my family from a traffic accident and do not have money to go courses and my physics teacher is too agressive as well. By the way, Trying to post my questions here and that's being off-topic without any reason. I asked them a formula, not final answer or something. Trying to learn something from these communities. Please, be respectful. I hope you change I lost my family from a traffic accident and do not have money to go courses and my physics teacher is too agressive as well. By the way, Trying to post my questions here and that's being off-topic without any reason. I asked them a formula, not final answer or something. Trying to learn something from these communities. Please, be respectful. I'm not telling you to answer homework-questions. If you admit the conceptual questions, then you should answer the formula wants. Like i said, him ought to just ask an equation for question. If he wants the final answer or did not show his idea, then it should be off-topic. It seems like this will be off-topic cause telling true things. I hope you all change your unnecessilary policies. As the last thing I'll say, do not help him with calcuation cause the formula will be enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give an example;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/362682/acceleration-of-center-of-disc&quot;&gt;Acceleration of center of disc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did well for this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/362667/keplers-third-law&quot;&gt;Kepler&amp;#39;s Third Law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But look at this question and see what's different between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; The first one wanted you to calcuate and give final answer for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; The second one wanted you to show a formula not give final answer for him and had said that he will solve it hisself. What's wrong then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take my mind as an idea, discuss about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user172034" LastEditorDisplayName="user172034" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T20:47:28.453" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T20:47:28.453" Title="About the formula wants (Let everyone read this)" Tags="|support|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10214" CreationDate="2017-10-13T19:56:40.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;formula questions&lt;/em&gt;&quot; could mean anything. If the question is &quot;give me the formula to solve my problem&quot;, then the answer is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;: such questions are disallowed. On the other hand, if your question is about the physics behind some concept, then the answer is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;: such questions are allowed. Unfortunately, your post is of the first kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that when it comes to undergraduate physics, knowing which is the right formula to use is usually the hardest part of the problem. Therefore, if someone gave you the formula you are asking for, they would essentially be solving your problem for you. Algebraic manipulations to a formula is usually straightforward, and does not represent a significant part of solving a problem. But &lt;em&gt;knowing which formula to use&lt;/em&gt; does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy of this community is: we will not solve your problems for you. We will do our best to help you understand the physics behind the problem, but we will not solve it for you. This is the official policy of this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not discuss whether I agree or not with this policy. But it is there, and until it is changed, we will have to live with it, like it or not. Try to change your question to comply with this policy, and it will be reopened. For now, it will most likely stay closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that people have been trying to modify this policy for years. Don't expect it to be changed because of you, and don't expect us to make an exception &lt;em&gt;just this time&lt;/em&gt;. It won't happen and you would be wasting everybody's time. The best you can do is to edit your post into something that is on-topic. Asking for a formula is not, and will not be in the foreseeable future, on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your concern about this policy goes beyond your particular post, you are welcome to discuss it in general terms, but do note that there are dozens of post here on meta about that. Please read them before making new suggestions. Get used to the idiosyncrasies of the community, and make sure you understand the context behind every decision that has been taken. It will lead to a much more mature and  fruitful discussion. Trying to change how an established community works just because you need something from it at a particular moment of your life is truly execrable and just as selfish as it gets. Trying to change it because you care about the well-being of the community is very commendable and we would all be very thankful for such an attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T20:22:16.910" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T20:22:16.910" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10217" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:57:52.577" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;One more question. Is it OK to reference a particular user in the text of a question (right at the end of the post with an @), just to be sure that that user gets to read my question (he receives an inbox message, I believe) and increase the chances to extract a thorough answer from him/her? It is not necessarily unfair to the other users, I would still choose to upvote all answers and choose the most satisfactory one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T19:37:02.707" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:37:02.707" Title="Ping/Reference a user in the core text of a question" Tags="|support|questions|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10216" CreationDate="2017-10-14T19:09:37.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a feature of Stack Exchange, and I don't really think it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is covered well in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/97474/369105&quot;&gt;this answer/question on the main Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't really a one on one tutoring site, it's all community driven.  If that user is active enough, they will likely see the question anyways if it is one they would usually answer.  They may have contact info in their profile if you really want their opinion (but they may also not want to be contacted for that purpose, so respect that if mentioned).  You can also check the Chat to see if they are online there and willing to take a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't really prompt a specific person to answer your questions unless they already &lt;em&gt;make themselves available&lt;/em&gt; to do so.  That seem fair to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:09:37.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10218" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-14T19:38:55.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T19:38:55.553" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:38:55.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10219" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-14T19:38:55.553" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for Meta discussions about a specific question on the main site." OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T19:38:55.553" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:38:55.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10192" CreationDate="2017-10-15T07:03:50.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur with @heather's answer that it should be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I think that whenever we have a meta question along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should this incredibly specific, very low volume class of questions be on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer should be &lt;code&gt;yes, they are on topic&lt;/code&gt;. I'm not really sure what purpose any other answer could serve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T07:03:50.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10226" CreationDate="2017-10-16T17:45:03.257" Score="7" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you try to upvote a question or an answer and you don't have enough reputation (15 points, it seems to me), a message occurs stating that your preference had been recorded by the system, but actually nothing happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163255" OwnerDisplayName="Erik Pillon" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T18:05:23.337" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T20:05:53.397" Title="What happens when you try to upvote a question (or an answer) but you don't have enough reputation?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10225" CreationDate="2017-10-16T19:55:17.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting is a privilege you have to earn. If you don't have at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;15 rep points&lt;/a&gt;, you cannot upvote; and if you don't have at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;125 rep points&lt;/a&gt;, you cannot downvote. This is done in part to make sure you understand how the community works before you start judging its content. The page &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;Privileges&lt;/a&gt; contains more information about other privileges you can get by contributing to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't comply with these restrictions, your vote will not be materialised. The vote is recorded internally, and it may be used by the developers as useful information. They track these kinds of actions, for statistical purposes. But, for all practical purposes, your vote will be useless. It will never be taken into account as far as what users can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/259583/346882&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post useful if you want some more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T20:05:53.397" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T20:05:53.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T13:06:46.797" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/363483/&quot;&gt;Could you help me please with mathematical model of the soil freezing process?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got it (I fix my question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it &quot;On Hold&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37249" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T13:44:48.767" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T10:22:10.617" Title="Why has my question been put &quot;On Hold&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|close-reasons|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10227" CreationDate="2017-10-19T10:22:10.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to keep the question closed for similar reasons as what Emilio wrote in a comment to the question: you have a wildly specific equation that must have come from somewhere, didn't they explain what it is and how it's derived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it doesn't seem to be &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;, as was originally closed, it's not clear what research of your own you've done to address the issue. Hence, I voted to keep it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;strong&gt;provided the resource&lt;/strong&gt; that gave you the equation &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; some relevant text &lt;em&gt;around&lt;/em&gt; the given equation&lt;/strong&gt; in that resource, it might be easier for &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt; to understand what is missing and, thus, reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T10:22:10.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10230" CreationDate="2017-10-19T16:28:59.493" Score="2" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw this colour scheme in the main site under Newest Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9H2hrm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the first question is yellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never seen this before. And this is happening only with this question, even after some time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4aju4m.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason of this unusual colour scheme on only one question suddenly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T17:16:06.690" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T17:16:06.690" Title="Am I the only person seeing this colour scheme?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10229" CreationDate="2017-10-19T16:45:59.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which have your &quot;favorite&quot; tags are highlighted in yellow in most listings. If you don't explicitly choose favorite tags (using the desktop site), the system chooses some for you based on what tags you are most active in. So evidently the system has decided to designate either &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wavefunction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wavefunction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wavefunction&lt;/a&gt; as a favorite tag for you. (More likely the latter since you say you haven't seen this before, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wavefunction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wavefunction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wavefunction&lt;/a&gt; is more rare.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T16:45:59.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10232" CreationDate="2017-10-20T18:49:37.240" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, it seems that we've been getting several questions that would be more appropriate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/364054/standard-error-poisson-distribution&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is only the most recent example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, the only choices for off-topic migrations are to Physics Meta or &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;. I think we need more choices - like Cross Validated (for purely statistical questions) and maybe even &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; (for certain, strange hypotheticals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just vote to close these as off-topic? Or should we expand the list of migration sites to include other, common areas of off-topic questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32185" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T19:02:10.367" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T19:28:16.753" Title="Is it possible to expand the list of migration sites for off-topic posts?" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10231" CreationDate="2017-10-20T19:28:16.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's certainly possible, in general, to add extra migration paths. But we only do so when there are really a lot of questions being migrated along that path, enough that it starts to tax the mods' ability to handle them case-by-case, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; when the questions being sent there are well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we're trying to avoid the situation where people regularly vote to migrate questions to a site when they don't belong there. It's straightforward to avoid when only mods are migrating to that site, because it's a limited group of people and we know from experience how to respect the other site's scope, but when you open up that ability to all close voters, there's no telling how much care people will take to vote to migrate only what really should be migrated. Hence the reluctance to add new migration paths unless they're really needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I haven't noticed enough questions being migrated anywhere other than Math, nor flags/comments suggesting so, that I really think it's necessary to add a new path. I don't have exact statistics at the moment but I can tell by looking at recent examples that migrating questions anywhere other than Math is pretty rare, which also supports that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do, for now, if you think a question should be migrated: first, make sure it's off topic here. We shouldn't even be &lt;em&gt;considering&lt;/em&gt; questions for migration unless they're off topic for us. Then you've got a couple of options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just vote to close as off topic, and you can leave a comment telling the asker that their question may be better received on another site. I use wording like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think this is off topic here, but it might be better received on [site]. You have the option to delete this and post it there, but do check the rules on [site] to ensure it's on topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that askers can't delete questions which have upvoted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag the question with a custom mod flag saying something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Off topic here, possible candidate for migration to [site]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do either of these or both, as the system allows. Personally, I think it's often better to suggest that the poster delete and repost, if they can do so; migration is more useful for when there's existing content like answers that is worth preserving on the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T19:28:16.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-22T02:11:13.913" Score="15" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that bounties are mostly used to attract better answers but one of the reasons to award a bounty to an answer, as recognized by the PSE, is to reward an existing beautiful answer. I wonder that if a beautiful answer is accepted as an appropriate reason to reward the user with some points then why should a beautiful question not be accepted as an appropriate reason to do the same. I understand that this might be an SE-wide policy. But I would like to know what the PSE community thinks about this and then maybe the question can be moved to the SE meta if it gets a positive response. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T22:01:23.873" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T22:01:23.873" Title="Why Can't &quot;Bounties&quot; be Awarded To a Question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T13:05:22.323" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're asking a question and you click the help button, it will send you to the Editing Help page, which has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/editing-help#latex&quot;&gt;LaTeX section&lt;/a&gt; that looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PriP8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PriP8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect place to have a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;the Meta MSE tutorial&lt;/a&gt; we use elsewhere, but there's currently no such link. Can we add one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-10-30T10:51:01.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T10:51:01.613" Title="Please add a link to the Meta MSE MathJax tutorial to the editing help" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|new-users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-03T09:03:55.917" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it because the quality of questions is low? Or is the Physics stackexchange a bit more hostile than other ones? Should the physics stackexchange community work harder on being more welcoming?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(also, meta-meta if this gets downvoted too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173380" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T13:15:25.763" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T13:15:25.763" Title="Why are there so many downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2017-11-03T15:51:58.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10239" CreationDate="2017-11-03T13:11:27.123" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background: I've been using several SE sites for several years now. I am used to their systems and strict rules, respect them, and try to obey as much as possible. However I do not understand this on-hold one of my posts got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/365567/&quot;&gt;Lyman and Balmer series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is partly a factual physics question. My book did not explain this topic with enough detail for me to be able to make this out on my own. This is not a numerical question. I don't have to do any maths here. So what &quot;effort&quot; do you want me to show?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't understand how my question is NOT &quot;useful to the broader community, and to future users&quot;. It certainly contains a proper question plus a proper detailed answer. This site didn't have this question before, now it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28359" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T13:14:21.150" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T20:35:31.633" Title="Did my question deserve a hold?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-11-03T13:57:03.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we focus on the content rather than the form, your question is certainly conceptual and useful to a broader community. I voted to reopen accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of being accused of gaming the system, I suggest you to edit it to make it look less like a homework question (even if it actually is), and more like something you are wondering yourself. To complement this, do some research about the topic and make it clear you tried to come up with the solution before posting the question here. Otherwise, it would still be off-topic on grounds of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5778/84967&quot;&gt;insufficient prior research&lt;/a&gt;. Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T13:57:03.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-11-03T14:55:41.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is asking us to answer a problem for you. That is, by our definitions, a homework-like question that is explicitly off topic. The link in the close banner explains this in much detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your recent edits to explain that it's not a homework problem assigned by the professor haven't changed the nature of your question, hence I voted to leave it closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be willing to vote to reopen if you made the question less 'do my work for me' and more 'my understanding of the scenario is $x$, but that doesn't seem to address $y$. Can someone explain why $y$ is the case?' (with some details and not just subjects/topics thrown in there). That way it shows what you're thinking and (likely) what you're missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T14:55:41.237" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-11-03T17:35:53.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually think the close gang may have been premature on this one. Probably because you were explicit about the question coming from a text (kudos for openness, but it worked against you here). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in my (unofficial) opinion the spirit of the homework-like policy that is currently in force does not just mean that questions not actually coming from homework can be closed but also that actual homework questions can get a pass when they conform to the 'ask about a concept' rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have a question that is about the physics by which spectra get generated. (And I have to say that the way the problem is framed in the textbook version is too stark and may be contributing to the confusion here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &quot;I've been successful on other sites' is only so helpful because inside a large overarching framework detailed rules vary a lot from site to site. In particular Physics is rather different from some other sites in our expectation for questions that look like exercises for the student: just showing effort isn't enough (it is necessary, but not sufficient). This causes a lot of initial confusions for users who come it thinking that the rules on [math.se], for instance, are universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T17:35:53.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-05T15:51:48.757" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can mark questions as favourites, but usually I would rather want to mark an answer as a favourite. Afaik this is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my profile I could check my upvotes, but there I seem to have only limited means of sorting (no answers only or by reverse time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something obvious? Is there some cute trick to effectively mark answers as favourites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73067" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T16:24:26.450" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T16:24:26.450" Title="Any trick to mark answers as favorites, not just questions?" Tags="|feature-request|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9554" CreationDate="2017-11-05T16:02:44.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicstravelguide.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EFnGI.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Physics Travel Guide&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65572" LastEditorUserId="65572" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T09:42:16.113" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T09:42:16.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2017-11-05T20:35:31.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm popping in a little late here since I only noticed this post just now. Here's the deal: in your original post you identified&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lyman series for hydrogen atom is available for both absorption and emission, but the Balmer series is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; available for emission. Explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as a textbook question. The mere fact that your question includes a textbook question is fine, but according to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;We expect you to narrow down the problem to the particular concept that's giving you trouble and ask about that specifically.&quot; You haven't done that. All you did was post your textbook question and ask us to answer it. That's off topic, and that's why your question was put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you've been saying that you have no idea where to start, but questions like that aren't what we handle on this site. When you have no idea where to start on a problem, the place to go is to your teacher, your fellow students, to your textbook, or to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;dedicated homework help site&lt;/a&gt;. However, when you have worked out how to start but there's some relatively small conceptual issue that is holding you up from making progress, &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; when you can ask here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T20:35:31.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10245" CreationDate="2017-11-07T21:43:50.160" Score="13" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/367560/84967&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; answer only provides a link. As such, it is not unlikely that it will be deleted, and in fact a user has already suggested that the post does not really qualify as an answer (I may presume they also flagged it as &quot;not an answer&quot;, but I cannot know that). But the link is actually useful, so deletion may not be the way to go. I therefore flagged for mod attention, with the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps should be moved into the comment section. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, a mod could study the case and decide on whether it should be deleted, moved into the comment section, or let it be. But the flag was rejected, with the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - Using standard flags helps us prioritize problems and resolve them faster. Please familiarize yourself with the list of standard flags: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;What is Flagging?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't get why this flag was rejected. I always thought that this kind of flags are useful, inasmuch as a mod might be able to act before it's too late -- before users vote to delete the post. A regular flag doesn't work, because regular users cannot turn answers into comments. Thus, &quot;mod attention&quot; seems the way to go. In fact, I have raised similar flags in the past (more than a dozen), and they  were always deemed &quot;helpful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting a flag rejected is no big deal, but it discourages me from keep on raising them. Are these flags helpful or not? Should I keep raising them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T02:31:52.313" Title="Why was this flag rejected?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10243" CreationDate="2017-11-08T00:13:23.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rejection (or technically &quot;declining&quot;) of a flag usually means you shouldn't have flagged the thing at all, but other times (less commonly) it means you didn't flag correctly. That's what the response you received is for. It means you cast a custom flag on something for which a standard flag reason was perfectly adequate. In this case, to indicate that the posted answer was not suitable for the answer section (but may have been suitable for the comments), the standard &quot;not an answer&quot; flag was the one to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand that you wanted to convey more than just that the posted content was not an answer; you wanted to convey that something out of the ordinary should be done with it, namely converting to a comment. But honestly, in those cases I'd suggest just posting the comment yourself, perhaps prefixed with &quot;[username] suggested looking at this website: ...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, though, if you think the &quot;standard&quot; non-moderator way of handling a flag would be inappropriate or insufficient, then you can indicate that by a custom flag - but you should be really clear that you're asking for something abnormal to be done with the content, and not merely reporting that it needs action. In this case, a flag message like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is probably on track to be deleted as NAA but I think it should be converted to a comment instead, which requires mod intervention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;might have helped your chances: it shows that you're aware of the standard way to handle the problem and you have made an informed decision that something different should be done. Even then, though, I'd wonder why you didn't just post the comment yourself. Custom mod flags work best when there's &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; appropriate way for a non-moderator (or the community at large) to deal with the content being flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt about using a nonstandard flag on something that a standard flag appears to handle, you can ask one of the mods in chat, and we'll give you guidance on how (or whether) to flag. Keep in mind that mods can access deleted posts too, and undelete them if necessary, so you shouldn't have to worry too much about having this conversation quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Getting a flag rejected is no big deal, but it discourages me from keep on raising them. Are these flags helpful or not? Should I keep raising them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, no, you should not continue to raise moderator flags on non-answers. If you think you have an exception, I'd say just be clear about why it really &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; to be handled by a mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T00:13:23.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10243" CreationDate="2017-11-08T02:31:52.313" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, hi, that was me.  Basically DavidZ has described my reasoning, but I can elaborate a little more specifically about what I had in mind in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a super-big fan of the &quot;convert to comment&quot; feature. It has its uses, but it's not great for low-content answers from new users without the reputation to comment themselves.  I like that the StackExchange model encourages a new user's first few interactions with the site to be substantive answers or questions, and that making less-substantive comments is a privilege to be earned --- I think it's a clever way to encourage people to participate constructively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comments aren't meant to be permanent&lt;/a&gt;.  If the link is a good fit for the question, then it's worth the effort for someone (perhaps the original answerer, or perhaps another editor) ought to take a few minutes to summarize why, so that the answer stands on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly have converted answers to comments, and will again, but I don't like to do that as a user's first interaction with the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I was imagining would happen when I declined your flag was something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'd flag again as &quot;not an answer,&quot; the standard flag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the couple dozen folks who are keeping their eye on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt; would leave the nice &quot;link-only answers are discouraged&quot; comment template, which I can never find when I need it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original answerer would get that notification and write a useful paragraph explaining what's so much nicer about the derivation in their link than others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original answerer would be inspired by this burst of effort to become an effective communicator of science, writing and publishing widely and improving the lives of their readers all across the globe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first three of these steps have happened to other flagged posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Getting a flag rejected is no big deal, but it discourages me from keep on raising them. Are these flags helpful or not? Should I keep raising them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, raise the flags --- but use the standard ones unless something is super-unusual.  Note that if the review queue doesn't handle your standard flag &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/292878/280545&quot;&gt;promptly&lt;/a&gt;, the moderators will still see it.  Basically, the standard flag puts your concern in front of &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; people, which I think makes it more likely to get resolved sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T02:31:52.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T10:17:38.330" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are special text codes that must be written to generate various mathematical formulae, symbols like limit, derivative, integral, closed integral etc. (in simple keypad) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &quot;**&quot; for italics etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174161" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T10:20:33.397" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T10:20:33.397" Title="Special text codes for generating symbols" Tags="|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-08T10:30:43.860" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10248" CreationDate="2017-11-08T19:59:59.933" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;How may one suggest improvements on a tag wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the name of Huygens in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aether&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aether&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aether&lt;/a&gt; tag description is spelled Huygen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12282" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T20:16:07.960" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:23:00.757" Title="How may one suggest improvements on a tag wiki?" Tags="|support|tags|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10247" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:23:00.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click the 'improve tag info' button on the tag's page (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aether&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aether&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aether&lt;/a&gt;) to edit. (Requires 100 reputation points.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:23:00.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-10T21:01:12.707" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to save an Answer to a Question on Physics and any other StackExchange site. Is that possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact it would REALLY convenient to have a save answer button that lead to a notebook page where I can review all the saved answers, as a reminder and a learning tool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175037" OwnerDisplayName="G.O.N." LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T06:57:59.577" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T11:11:32.147" Title="How to SAVE an answer to a specific question?" Tags="|support|answers|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10249" CreationDate="2017-11-10T21:05:59.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently there is no option to directly save answers in any SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is that, copy the link to the question and save it somewhere, with the name of the user whose answer you want to look at later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" OwnerDisplayName="Wrichik Basu" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T11:11:32.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T11:11:32.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10252" CreationDate="2017-11-12T06:57:44.580" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do i change my profile picture and display name in physics stack exchange?.i cant see any link in my profile settings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170414" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T07:23:42.627" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T07:23:42.627" Title="How do i change my profile picture and display name in physics stack exchange?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10251" CreationDate="2017-11-12T07:21:34.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a post on Meta Stack Exchange describing &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41277/how-do-i-change-my-profile-picture-or-avatar&quot;&gt;how to change your profile picture&lt;/a&gt;. There are a few different ways to do it, depending on where your profile picture is stored, but in brief:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your profile picture is stored on Stack Exchange servers, you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt;, click &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/edit/current&quot;&gt;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings&lt;/a&gt;&quot; then &quot;Change picture&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your profile picture is stored on Gravatar servers, you will need to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gravatar.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.gravatar.com&lt;/a&gt; and follow their procedure for changing the picture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To change your display name, you simply go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt;, click &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/edit/current&quot;&gt;Edit Profile &amp;amp; Settings&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and enter the new display name in the field labeled &quot;Display Name&quot;. There may be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45200/add-warning-when-changing-display-name&quot;&gt;a restriction on how often you can change it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T07:21:34.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-12T12:59:20.820" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unable to log out from Stack Exchange in my browser, in both PC and mobile. After logging out, when I open the site again it appears as I am already logged in. I have not enabled the remembering of my password for this site, either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170414" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T14:15:10.240" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T14:15:10.240" Title="Can't logout from Stack Exchange" Tags="|support|bug|login|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-12T15:27:54.370" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a question which I wasn't sure if this would be the correct site for as it seemed too speculative. But by the time I completed it, it seemed, more concrete than I'd imagined. I would like a second opinion of which site it belongs to before I post it (and delete the other as cross posting is not allowed)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/47140/&quot;&gt;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/47140/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27939" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T16:42:41.523" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T16:42:41.523" Title="Does this question belong in stack exchange physics or philosophy?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10254" CreationDate="2017-11-12T16:01:11.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question probably would belong on physics.SE, if it wasn't ill-posed and unclear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;state reduction&quot; or collapse of the wavefunction is a feature of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, and there exist interpretations that explain the results of measurements other than with collapse. Failure to mention this when talking about modifications of quantum mechanics indicates prior research is lacking here, and makes it unclear what you mean by &quot;modifying R&quot; when R is not even present in all interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is unclear what you mean by &lt;em&gt;&quot;It seems to me everyone in the physics community has been working on modifying U&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. The large majority of the physics community accepts conventional quantum mechanics as correct and does not work to change it at all. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, I would close your question as &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt; regardless of its on-topicness otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T16:01:11.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-13T13:32:24.067" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/368363/175150&quot;&gt;question of mine&lt;/a&gt; has been marked as duplicate. I tried to argue my case in the text of my question but it seems this forum is more appropriate. My apologies if this is not so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a definite duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/10075/175150&quot;&gt;Q10075&lt;/a&gt; which has rather low quality answers: no, superstrings can't predict only 4 dimensions are not compactified. My question was also marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/10651/175150&quot;&gt;Q10651&lt;/a&gt;. It did not seem obvious at first as superstrings were not discussed at all there but I shall thank the moderator for the pointer because one of the answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/10723/175150&quot;&gt;A10723&lt;/a&gt;, cites a paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0506053&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Relaxing to Three Dimensions&lt;/a&gt; by Karsh and Randall which, although it is far too advanced for my current understanding of physics, seems to answer my question with a &quot;yes&quot;. Here is the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We propose a new selection principle for distinguishing among possible vacua that we call the “relaxation principle.” The idea is that the universe will naturally select among possible vacua through its cosmological evolution, and the configuration with the biggest filling fraction is the likeliest. We apply this idea to the question of the number of dimensions of space. We show that under conventional (but higher-dimensional) FRW evolution, a universe filled with equal numbers of branes and antibranes will naturally come to be dominated by 3-branes and 7-branes. We show why this might explain the number of dimensions that are experienced in our visible universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the page of the paper, I clicked on &quot;cited by&quot; and there seems to be a handful of papers arguing the same point, but again I am at the level of matching buzzwords! As for the answer itself which quotes this paper, it is again of low quality as it adds no value at all to the paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise, we are in a situation where existing answers seem either wrong, or are useless to me, and by extension to anybody who is not a postgraduate-level physicist. May I enquire what could be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user175150" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T20:25:16.167" Title="Reopen &quot;Can superstring theories predict our 4 dimensions?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10256" CreationDate="2017-11-13T20:25:16.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To summarise, we are in a situation where existing answers seem either wrong, or are useless to me, and by extension to anybody who is not a postgraduate-level physicist. May I enquire what could be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're having trouble understanding an existing answer, you can ask a followup question about that answer. For example, if you wanted more information about a specific aspect of the answer - say, the assumptions required to get the Karch &amp;amp; Randall argument to work - you might ask something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/10723/124&quot;&gt;This other answer&lt;/a&gt; references &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0506053&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a paper by Karch &amp;amp; Randall&lt;/a&gt; in which they determine that 3-dimensional objects are likely to dominate interactions among different higher-dimensional objects. It says they had to make some unrealistic assumptions to get this to work; what are those assumptions? I've tried [list your other efforts to understand] but I can't make sense of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, adjust this to suit your writing style and the actual aspect of the answer you want to know about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you can do is try to bring more attention to the original question in the hope that someone will post an answer which is more useful to you. You can do this by setting a bounty, by asking for help in chat, or by sharing the link on- or off-site. (In practice, posting a followup question, or a meta post, if one is warranted, are both effective ways to bring attention to a question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; do is post another question asking the same thing as the original question you're looking at in the hope of getting answers that are more useful to you. That's just a duplicate, and will be marked as such (if somebody notices). If you think the answers to the original are bad, or useless to you, that's not an argument against the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; not being a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that when your question is marked as a duplicate, sometimes you can edit it to make it not a duplicate, by explaining what you're asking that the original question isn't. But any argument that a question isn't a duplicate of another must be based on the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; only, &lt;em&gt;not the answers&lt;/em&gt;. Answers do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; factor into whether two questions are considered duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T20:25:16.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2017-11-16T21:36:24.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are a user who just want to read good posts without having to sift through poor posts, read on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the current traffic (November 2017), it only takes in average 5 hours for a post to disappear from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt;. Hence it is easy to miss the quality posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, if you e.g. instead use the search feature &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=Newest&amp;amp;pagesize=50&amp;amp;q=closed%3ano%20score%3a1&quot;&gt;closed:no score:1&lt;/a&gt; with the options 'newest' and '50 per page', you only see the latest 50 open questions with score bigger than zero. It currently takes 2 days for a quality post to disappear from this search. So it is harder to miss the good stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a suggestion. You can of course further limit the search by using certain keywords or tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T21:44:54.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T16:17:16.877" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mainstream&quot; physics is a requirement of the Physics SE site and the definition of &quot;mainstream&quot; is in terms of &quot;reputable&quot; journals.  There are a lot of journals that cover or intersect with physics.  What are the criteria for reputability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3673" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T10:21:32.403" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T10:21:32.403" Title="What are the criteria for journals being &quot;reputable&quot; hence mainstream physics?" Tags="|discussion|non-mainstream-physics|publishing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10261" CreationDate="2017-11-18T15:36:20.567" Score="8" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often come across questions where the author uses a linked image of an equation instead of typesetting it as MathJax. Should I edit the question to typeset the equation in MathJax, comment to let the author know that the site supports MathJax?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find equations linked as images on this site distasteful, but are they actually against policy? I didn't find any specific proscription in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36973" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T18:13:59.900" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T18:47:47.760" Title="Should I edit question to format equation linked as image in MathJax?" Tags="|discussion|editing|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10260" CreationDate="2017-11-18T15:38:53.510" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should edit and/or leave a comment in these cases because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Images are fixed size and will display poorly in small browser windows, particularly on phones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MathJax is searchable, although the search functionality is usually not all that useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MathJax provides a uniform style for typesetting, while the typesetting in images can vary wildly depending on the source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T18:47:47.760" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T18:47:47.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2017-11-19T01:50:02.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m willing to tolerate some number of “non-research-grade” and generally lower level questions because I make excellent use of answers to less specialized questions on other SE sites.  I’m not a professional mathematician, an expert at LaTeX or Mathematica, but I still extensively use these sites because good answers to rather mundane questions are often very useful (to me at least).  I can only hope that users from other sites also find many of the answers to our less specialized questions equally useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean we should not strive to eliminate truly terrible questions.  I seriously doubt if pictures of handwritten questions, or pictures of book questions, can generate insightful answers useful to anyone except the specific OP and a few other lucky users with the same textbook.  Such questions should IMO be systematically downvoted and rooted out as promptly as feasible: if a person cannot take a few minutes to properly typeset (or learn to typeset) a question, one can wonder aloud if this question is acceptable for this (or any other) SE site.   I would even suggest that we have an explicit Vote-To-Close item for such types of questions.  This could be one step towards raising the quality of questions, the quality of answers, and the interest of posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another practical step would be to have, like MathSE, a landing page of “interesting” rather just “newest” questions.  I don’t know how a question is deemed “interesting”, and these disappear within hours (possibly due to the overall amount of questions on the site), but this could highlight some of the better questions when they are posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T01:50:02.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-20T08:26:41.507" Score="5" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/365325/2451&quot;&gt;Dark matter as invisible part of the Heisenberg’s universal matter&lt;/a&gt; (asked 27 October) disappeared with no trace from my SE site together with its upvotes. How can I know what happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171818" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T09:45:13.353" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T11:41:30.687" Title="Disappeared question" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10264" CreationDate="2017-11-20T08:51:08.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/365325/dark-matter-as-invisible-part-of-the-heisenberg-s-universal-matter&quot;&gt;Your question&lt;/a&gt; (10k link only) was deleted by the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, which is an algorithm that automatically deletes old questions which have a negative score and meet some other criteria. The details are listed in the help page I just linked. Specifically, the question you're asking about satisfies the following criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not closed as a duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has a score of 0 or less&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has no answers with a score &amp;gt; 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has no accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has no pending reopen votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has not been edited in the past 9 days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... it will be automatically deleted. These are &amp;quot;abandoned closed&amp;quot;, and are termed as &lt;code&gt;RemoveAbandonedClosed&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This check is run every day across all sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, when something odd like this happens, it's good if you look around the help center and meta &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; posts (here and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; to see if you can find an explanation. If you don't, then asking on meta, as you did, is the thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T10:35:35.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10264" CreationDate="2017-11-20T11:41:30.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should still be available through your profile, but if it has been deleted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt; then it is hidden. To find it, go to the bottom of the &lt;code&gt;questions&lt;/code&gt; tab of your profile and look for a link to &lt;code&gt;deleted recent questions&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DCeoP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DCeoP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions are normally visible through that link for sixty days; after that, they remain visible if you are the owner (or you have 10k rep) and you have the URL, but they are not linked to anywhere on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T11:41:30.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10268" CreationDate="2017-11-21T03:01:38.083" Score="3" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;During my learning I've read a couple books on a topic and have my reviews about them. How should I answer in the book request on that topic, which already has some answers on the books I read? Should I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write them all in one answer for a synthesis of reviews? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;split then in separated answers so that they can be voted independently? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit the already answers because they are wiki posts? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I have only one review, but the other answer on the same book is not even close to what I would write, should I edit it, comment, or post another answer? If what I would write is quite unfavored to the book, would the previous answer still hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastEditorUserId="41634" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T08:23:55.890" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T09:28:13.300" Title="I have several book reviews. How should I answer in the book request?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10267" CreationDate="2017-11-21T05:43:04.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For most &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; types of questions, we always say that you should make unrelated answers as separate posts so they can be independently voted on. But when it comes to recommendations, the voting is fairly meaningless since there isn't really a &quot;best&quot; or &quot;correct&quot; answer to such questions (Griffiths notwithstanding :-P), and in fact there isn't even much of a basis for judging whether one answer is better than another. So for resource recommendations specifically, posting all the recommendations you have as a single answer is an acceptable option. Posting each book in a separate answer is also acceptable. (Exception: if there is one community-wiki answer that everybody is supposed to edit their recommendations into, just do that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you're making one or more posts of your own, as for what to actually include in them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are recommending a resource that doesn't appear in any of the existing answers, then definitely include it in your post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are recommending a resource that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; also recommended by an existing answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your description of the resource is substantially different from how the existing answer describes it, go ahead and post your recommendation separate from the existing one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your description is quite similar to the existing one, just skip it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a special exception to the above two options, if you think the existing description mostly covers what you'd write yourself but you just want to add one or two minor points, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; those points are consistent with the existing description, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the existing answer is community wiki, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you can edit it to contain the few things you want to add. But these situations are relatively rare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this applies regardless of whether what you want to write is favorable to the resource or not. However, keep in mind that we are collecting resource &lt;em&gt;recommendations&lt;/em&gt;, not general criticism. You should only mention resources that you think are worth recommending, and as part of that you should usually have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; good things to say about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you think a resource that someone else has already recommended is bad, you can take steps to point that out, but that's a whole different situation. (TL;DR would be either comment, or edit if it's a wiki post, but make sure you provide a balanced overview of the benefits and problems with the resource.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T09:28:13.300" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T09:28:13.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10272" CreationDate="2017-11-22T05:00:00.397" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/369414/zero-radiation-nuclear-bomb-possible&quot;&gt;Zero Radiation Nuclear Bomb Possible?&lt;/a&gt;  and a moderator completely understood my question, provided an answer and mention he would like to see other answers, but it still got put on hold for being unclear after he posted. How is this? I believe that it was too quickly dismissed without thoroughly reading it by each persons who closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178667" OwnerDisplayName="user178665" LastEditorDisplayName="user175737" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T05:05:33.477" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T09:09:06.117" Title="A moderator understood and answered my question but put it was put on hold as unclear?" Tags="|discussion|bug|questions|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T05:04:18.777" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;After three years I returned to stackexchange to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/369985/2451&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt;. Because it was not recieved well, I am now banned from asking with this account. Really? Three years on and there is no room for one honest question?  I have had a few poorly recieved questions in the past but I have also had a few which were very well recieved. Seems to me, this ban is a bit harsh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33995" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:54:47.887" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:54:47.887" Title="After Three years I returned to stackexchange to ask one question and get question banned .......:p" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-11-22T09:13:01.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10270" CreationDate="2017-11-22T09:09:06.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] How is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that you're asking how it's possible that a moderator answered your question and then it got put on hold. Simply, there's nothing that makes it impossible. There's no rule or anything like that which keeps questions from being put on hold after they have answers. (Regardless of who posts the answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe that it was too quickly dismissed without thoroughly reading it by each persons who closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well then, you basically have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can just edit your question to clarify it anyway. That is, make it so that even someone who &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; spend enough time reading the question will get an unambiguous sense of what it's asking. After the edit, the question will automatically be placed in a queue to be reviewed, and if enough people agree that the edit fixes the issue that caused it to be closed, the hold gets removed (i.e. the question gets reopened).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can try to convince five site members with reopen vote privileges, or one moderator, that the question is fine as is - that is, that all five people who voted to put your question on hold made an outright wrong decision. Honestly, this does not usually work. The bar for convincing people that five close voters all made an error is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; high. That being said, if you want to do this, the best way is by making a meta post clearly laying out an argument for why you think the original decision to put the question on hold was wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T09:09:06.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10274" CreationDate="2017-11-23T19:19:08.950" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;perhaps you can help me track down a question I commented on (cannot find my comments in my list). It was about the Heisenberg and Schrödinger pictures of classical mechanics. I remember telling the OP about the book by Balescu and promised him to find other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was now going to post an answer which would relieve the OP the pain of looking into books, but cannot find the question anymore.&#xA;Has something happened to it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T20:28:45.923" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T20:28:45.923" Title="Cannot find a question upon statistical mechanics I commented on" Tags="|support|specific-question|comments|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10273" CreationDate="2017-11-23T19:41:14.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the concrete case: &lt;em&gt;Yes,&lt;/em&gt; the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/369905/2451&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Time evolution in classical statistical mechanics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was deleted 2 days ago by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/62173/user929304&quot;&gt;OP&lt;/a&gt; along with your comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general: You cannot search comments with the SE search engine, but you e.g. can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?as_q=danielc+heisenberg&amp;amp;as_sitesearch=https%3A%2F%2Fphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; (if the comments have not been deleted). See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9884/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; related meta post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T19:52:07.200" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T19:52:07.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10276" CreationDate="2017-11-23T23:40:22.813" Score="5" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/60173/75633&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; mentions concepts (&quot;canonical particles&quot; and their &quot;radius of hardness&quot;) that only appear in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://inerton.wikidot.com/canonical-particle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; it links to and in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781771885317&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; recently published (by a company of questionable reputation, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2013/08/31/troubling-open-access-cc-by/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarlyca.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/apple-academic-press/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the crackpot smell of the answer, to me it seems to have been posted with the only objective of, without disclosure, advertising. Isn't it spam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T09:18:21.120" Title="Why is this answer not considered spam?" Tags="|discussion|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10275" CreationDate="2017-11-24T00:29:17.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description of the spam flag is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the answer does appear to legitimately (note I'm not saying &quot;correctly&quot;) address the question, so it doesn't exist only to promote a product or service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also doesn't seem to be any sign that the author of the answer is affiliated with the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on those factors, the answer doesn't seem like spam to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only basis for even thinking it might be spam is the link. But this strikes me as a perfectly fine use of a link. The answer references some concepts that the author believes may be unfamiliar to readers, so it links to a website to provide further information on those concepts. Which the website does. That's exactly how links are supposed to be used. Now, the concepts in question may be totally wrong, sure, but that doesn't make the link (or the answer) spam. It just makes it eligible for a ton of downvotes, and that is exactly what has happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T00:29:17.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T09:00:47.907" Score="21" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it’s just me, however, there are some questions where there exist much better answers somewhere which are not the accepted one. I understand that for an answer to be accepted, it just need to &quot;work for the proponent of the question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, a recurrent pattern seems to happen. Many of those answers seem to be chosen as accepted by new users (it happened to me for example). It is also common to see questions with a single answer accepted in less than 24 hours following the same pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that coming from outside, never using this site; it may be tempting to accept the first person who was “nice enough” to answer us or just because of confirmation bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;Why not giving new users at least 24 hours before they can accept any answer&lt;/strong&gt;, considering that this is the time frame that most answers occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130986" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T19:12:52.130" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T19:12:52.130" Title="Giving newbies time to think" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|accepted-answer|late-answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10275" CreationDate="2017-11-24T09:18:21.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to me it seems to have been posted with the only objective of, without disclosure, advertising. Isn't it spam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Z's answer is correct, and I'd add two remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the post in point addresses the question and consequently doesn't strictly fit the definition of spam, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;, it's still likely to have been spam in spirit, that &quot;legally&quot; made use of the (unavoidable) loophole that allows advertising as long as it answers a question;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the keywords above, though, are &quot;seem&quot; and &quot;likely&quot;: we don't have compelling evidence; we have, at most, circumstantial evidence $-$ so, in order to respect the sacred principle of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Presumption of innocence&lt;/a&gt;, that post should indeed &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be considered spam.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T09:18:21.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4096" CreationDate="2017-11-24T13:34:15.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to elaborate on the forceful moderation, as this is my main problem with this site, and what drove me away from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Too many times I have seen an honest, well formulated question, being closed as duplicate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is perfectly fine when the linked question is practically a clone, with a quality answer. But in many cases a question asked at a beginner undergraduate level is closed because there is a duplicate with a advanced undergraduate level. Technically, it answers the question, but it's probably not the answer the poster was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What attracted me to to the site, was the pleasure of participating in an active community of experts and amateurs, willing to help each other out.&#xA;I enjoy scratching my head and reformulate a concept to answer a fellow curious being. Does Physics SE want to become a collection of &lt;em&gt;answered questions&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; a Q&amp;amp;A site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stopped participating on this site because of excessive moderation, and I think I belong to the group of people this site needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77496" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T13:34:15.787" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T21:21:59.323" Score="6" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the community welcome engineering physics question?&#xA;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to build an AOM driver with a DDS board?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is an Evaluation Board?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to using AD9915 chips to build a ~400 MHz AOM driver?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176398" OwnerDisplayName="Michael" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T22:54:47.427" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T01:20:21.797" Title="Does the community welcome engineering physics questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10280" CreationDate="2017-11-24T23:03:08.993" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, questions asking how to build electronic devices are off topic here. There are a couple exceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions about simple circuit design involving only resistors, capacitors, inductors, and AC or DC power sources may be on topic. Even then, though, the questions should not be &quot;how do I build a circuit to do X?&quot; but rather should ask about some conceptual aspect of why a proposed circuit design does or doesn't work a particular way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about building electronic devices for advanced physics experiments can be on topic. In order to show that such a question is on topic you would, at a minimum, have to explain the experimental physics context that leads you to ask it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions you propose in your post don't seem to meet these criteria, so I would consider them off topic. They may fit on &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Signal Processing&lt;/a&gt;, as dmckee pointed out in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T23:03:08.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:14:26.053" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that the physics stack exchange community wants to see physics questions, not philosophical questions about things that are certainly unattainable. My question here is where you exactly put that boundary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions clearly are philosophical, like the question 'Does god exist?', while others are very clearly physical like 'If I shoot this projectile in those circumstances, then when will it hit the ground?'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but there are those that lie somewhere in between, like a discussion of what happens to you if you fall in a black hole. Spaghettification is a logical consequence of the laws of gravity, yet this proces cannot be verified exerimentally even in principle, since no information can escape the event horizon of a black hole. Does that make it philosophical, or does the fact that it has a clear cut logical relation to a scientific theory of whom many aspects have been verified experimentally make it physical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words I am talking about questions of the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does theory B logically imply statement A?,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where B is a theory that is widely accepted and of whom many aspects have been verified experimentally, and A is a statement that can't be directly experimentally verified in it's own right. I was assuming questions of this nature where considered physical and relevant, as it asks something about the logical structure of an accepted physical theory. Even if that particular aspect of it's logical structure can't be tested in the near future, it's still interesting to know weather that theory does or does not imply that. And there is a clear cut anwser to that, either the theory implies something or it doesn't imply it, so the discussion can be purely physical using the equations in the theory to argue rather than relying on vague philosophical arguments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a correct assesment that this POV of mine differs from the vast majority on this stack exchange, and a question is only considered legitimate if it is at least conceivably experimentally verifiable in the near future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I ask this question is because of the fact that, to my surprise, &#xA; this question wasn't well recieved: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370671/does-relativity-of-simultaneity-prove-determinism&quot;&gt;Does relativity of simultaneity prove determinism?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct that that is because, even though the question is logically linked to a well established scientific theory, it isn't directly experimentally verifiable and therefore isn't considered legitimate? And should we then conclude that if someone asks, say, something about the spaghettification process in a black hole and where that comes from, this question should be considered illegitimate too since that proces is experimentally unaccecable? More generally, are questions about predictions of well established scientific theories not allowed if those predictions can't be(in the near future) tested experimentally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is the convention used here, then I agree my question was off topic and I should ask it to the philosophical community. Even though I am convinced that people with a background in physics will have more relevant and good anwsers on questions in the above form than those with a philosophical background, as a good understanding of the physical theories those questions are embedded in are necessary for giving good anwsers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176047" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T17:07:36.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T19:07:21.770" Title="Where exactly lies the line between physics and philosophy/meta physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10282" CreationDate="2017-11-25T20:24:02.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, your assessment is not correct. Questions of the form &quot;Does theory B logically imply statement A?&quot; where B is a mainstream theory and A is not experimentally verifiable in the near future are not generally off topic. Of course specific cases may be off topic for different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, remember the distinction between a question being off topic, and being bad. Questions that are bad should get downvoted; questions that are off topic should get put on hold (a.k.a. closed). Note that your question, as I write this, has been heavily downvoted but it has &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; been closed. There is no indication that the community considers it off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I can give a general rule for identifying when questions are too philosophical. Right now we decide such things case-by-case because they come up rarely. Perhaps by looking at many examples, someone could come up with a fairly general rule, but as far as I know that hasn't been done yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:24:02.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-28T18:25:17.067" Score="19" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is essentially a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/27153/289977&quot;&gt;27153&lt;/a&gt;, from math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that there is a bunch of users that consistently refuse to use MathJax in their answers. One of these users, in particular, has been a member for more than six years and has posted several thousands of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On math.SE the user Simply Beautiful Art asks what to do with these users, and essentially everyone agrees that the best course of action is to downvote and move on. I really don't want to do this, in part because I appreciate the effort these users put into this site, and in part because physics is not math: here words are often more important than formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question: what do &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; want to do here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is badly typed math (in the form of, say, &lt;code&gt;F=ma^2&lt;/code&gt; or a poorly cropped/pixelated image) acceptable at all? Or should we discourage this kind of behaviour? Do we agree that downvoting is the way to go? Or is there perhaps a better solution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-19T08:31:29.533" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T08:31:29.533" Title="How to deal with users that just won't use MathJax?" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2017-11-28T19:03:30.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tell them it's easier than it looks. They can copy most of what they want from Wikipedia (in a lot of questions), and they can use the left key to read as Mathjax when they hover over the correctly formatted text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bonus point might work, for long sessions of slogging through it, but it will never get into the current system, I acknowledge that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most of what they want to say is already available, they just don't realise it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user176049" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T06:01:39.120" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T06:01:39.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10282" CreationDate="2017-11-28T19:07:21.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's covered in mainstream physics, well that's obviously physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about God, it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about the inside of a black hole, that's chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user176049" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T19:07:21.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2017-11-28T21:01:59.273" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see two relevant classes of users here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user in question is a relative newcomer, and they've come to rely on other people fixing posts with substantial amounts of mistyped math for them as if by magic. After a first few occurrences, a sharp indication that they need to do the formatting themselves is in order, followed by downvotes if the poster refuses to do that formatting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user in question has a long-running record of high-quality contributions, which for the most part don't involve math, and only use simple constructs when they do, and which are easy enough to edit in those cases. Here, while it would be nice if the user did that formatting themselves, I'm more inclined to let it slide, particularly when I gauge the user's likelihood of learning MathJax to be low.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only aware of one user in that second class with over a thousand answers, and for that person I have yet to find an answer where the lack of MathJax annoys me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T21:01:59.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2017-11-30T01:57:25.643" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for moderators or admins to deduct or withhold reputation points to users who repeatedly offend ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a &quot;penalty&quot; system should be considered if it's not possible now, so that mods could take action to make it and other repeat offenses clear ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not reputation could privileges be removed ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate Mathjax and Latex may be a bit of an overhead to learn if you're not a regular user, but it's a pretty straightforward system and there is an entire Latex forum on SE as well as a help page on Mathjax.  Once you get into it it's pretty easy to use and I see no excuse for regular users skipping it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T01:57:25.643" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10290" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:08:15.657" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interest is in new physics, from the point of view of propulsion, and experiments that can confirm or disprove related new hypotheses. New physics attracts people who want to casually speculate and not follow through with experiment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New physics necessarily involves paradigm shifting thought which is difficult for anyone. Compounding the problem is that for all of the ideas propounded, the overwhelming majority of them will be invalid. A large number of ideas have to be considered and rejected for each good one that remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bad forum for generating conversation on questions of new physics? Is there a forum that may be a better fit for my interest? Or, if this is appropriate material for this site, what would be the best way to approach the topic here? Perhaps innocuous question with a link to chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175857" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:49:31.703" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:49:31.703" Title="Is new physics a bad fit for Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10289" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:25:23.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, this site is not a forum; it's a Q&amp;amp;A site. It's not for generating conversation at all, it's for questions and answers to those questions. So based on that alone, this sounds like the wrong place for what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could bring up some of this stuff in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt; (or create your own chat room), if other people are interested in discussing it with you. Besides that, I'd suggest looking outside of Stack Exchange for a more discussion-oriented site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting aside that issue, if you wanted to ask a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; about the sort of new physics you're talking about, it may be on topic or not, depending on the topic and the question. Generally, if you ask a question based on content that appears in published research papers in a reputable journal, it should be fine. Other than that, it's probably off topic, but the response you get could vary quite a bit depending on what exactly you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not advise posting questions on something like the EM drive unless the question is &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; based on content from a published paper in a highly reputable journal, with references and maybe even quotes included in the question. &quot;Highly reputable journal&quot; in this case means something like the APS's Physical Review series, or another of a similar caliber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:25:23.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10280" CreationDate="2017-12-02T01:09:35.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Physics Meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/&quot;&gt;Experimental Physics and Engineering&lt;/a&gt; shows that this community's view is that &lt;strong&gt;there is no objective distinction between experimental physics and engineering&lt;/strong&gt; and that whether a particular engineering question is suitable for Physics Stack Exchange is a matter of asking &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What kind of person is most likely to have the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not possible to provide a definitive answer to your general question. Your particular question could be &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; if you identified some knowledge which this community is likely to have. In the absence of any explanation of what you were finding difficult about your project, I voted to close your question because it seemed to me that somebody with expertise in assembling circuit boards was most likely to provide the help which you require. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were clearly aware of the RF output requirements, and even had your own ideas about how to do it (DDS board, Evaluation Board, AD9155 chips). Suitable circuit designs are easily found on the internet. It seemed to me that you probably needed advice about choosing between different designs, selecting suitable components, and then assembling, soldering and testing the circuit. I think you are more likely to get such advice from a community of electrical/electronics engineers who have expertise in doing this for a wide variety of projects than from a community of physicists which majors on answering conceptual questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your question is closed it is common to be offended and to take it personally. A more helpful response is to recognise it as saying &quot;Sorry, we are unlikely to be able to help you. We don't want to waste your time. Try this other site instead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that you have re-posted the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/341667/&quot;&gt;Electronics SE&lt;/a&gt; as I advised, but it has been closed there also, as being &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;. It would have suffered the same fate had it remained on this site. The &lt;strong&gt;quality&lt;/strong&gt; of your question is at least as important as the &lt;strong&gt;topic&lt;/strong&gt; you are asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice also that you have not provided any further information as requested by that community. If you show little or no effort to define what exactly your difficulty is, to look for an answer yourself, and to engage with those who ask for more information, then you are unlikely to get an answer wherever you post your question. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8789/&quot;&gt;What does everyone mean by &quot;Insufficient research effort&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T01:20:21.797" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T01:20:21.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T09:08:25.423" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The app is not showing direct option for chat. I have to open browser to get to chat. When I tap chat option, window comes to open it with app or with browser; when I tap for app, it opens browser. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174161" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T11:57:43.827" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T11:57:43.827" Title="Chat option on Android app" Tags="|feature-request|chat|mobile-app|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10292" CreationDate="2017-12-03T11:57:00.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191334/add-chat-rooms-for-android-app&quot;&gt;a status-deferred feature request on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/226702/include-some-chat-capabilities-in-ios-app&quot;&gt;corresponding iOS version of the question&lt;/a&gt; there (which is generally the place where major requests for changes to the software are best pitched, though they can also be posted here), and it doesn't look like it is particularly high on the list of priorities on the development schedule. If you really want this, those feature requests are the places to add pressure (votes, answers saying why it is critical, bounties, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T11:57:00.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10295" CreationDate="2017-12-03T12:03:53.570" Score="10" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find this a confusing way to lay out our tag space. Lots of questions (say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/372259&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; as a recent example) are about quantum &lt;em&gt;computing&lt;/em&gt; as a field, or about some specific aspect of a given quantum &lt;em&gt;computation&lt;/em&gt;, without necessarily being about the specific hypothetical objects we call quantum computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, tags on this site tend to carry the name of the &lt;em&gt;field&lt;/em&gt; of inquiry, not its central object of study: we say &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluid-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluids&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluids&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluids&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kinematics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kinematics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kinematics&lt;/a&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/movement&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;movement&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;movement&lt;/a&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the main tag be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-computing&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T13:59:50.883" Title="Why does the quantum-computing tag redirect to quantum-computer instead of the opposite direction?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10294" CreationDate="2017-12-03T12:13:23.887" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the time being for pragmatic reasons. Phys.SE used to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-computing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-computing&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-computation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-computation&lt;/a&gt; tag, which were often &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/10279423#10279423&quot;&gt;misused&lt;/a&gt; by some users whenever they had to compute something in quantum mechanics. This practice stopped once they were redirected to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-computer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-computer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-computer&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T13:59:50.883" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T13:59:50.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T06:56:25.750" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a newbie here in stack exchange. This site is very informative. So, I tried to contribute with the little knowledge I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/373574/174490&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer after reading the question, all the other answers and the comments of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't know where I've done wrong. But, I am downvoted. I confirmed from the teacher after that : he said it was good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the dark side of PSE that they don't value the new users here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this happen with most of the new comers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case if I've made anything wrong in my answer, please point out. I'll be pleased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user174490" LastEditorDisplayName="user174490" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T09:07:34.287" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T23:06:23.400" Title="Ignorance towards new comers" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:09:09.860" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;A major part of truly learning any discipline is weeding out the misconceptions that were either planted by others early in life, assumed 'facts', or poorly taught concepts. The matter of of correcting misconceptions in physics, I believe, is highly important but I was surprised that a tag does not exist - or is there another term being used? My intent indeed to &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; discussions on physics misconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did occur to me that people that ask questions probably &lt;em&gt;would not&lt;/em&gt; use the tag since they would probably not know that their question involved a misconception. It would be more useful for persons answering their question to edit the question and add the tag thus adding the question as a resource to study, understand misconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event I would like to get some opinion on this before I propose adding the tag, but that maybe hard to do since I don't have any questions other than in this Meta site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45613" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T21:38:22.173" Title="Why not a tag 'Physics-Misconceptions'?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:36:44.030" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/374275/what-governs-the-temperature-rise-inside-an-oven&quot;&gt;What governs the temperature rise inside an oven?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find myself frustrated with how questions need to be asked... and the pit of 'On Hold / Closed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question to understand and learn about a problem Id like to, even if only on paper, design a solution to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question I provided as much information that was 'on topic' [:)] with all my working... I had tried solving the problem of the design and wanted to confirm that I had indeed used the correct physics concepts (And associated equations), which Im still skeptical about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was put on hold within 1 hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I created another question asking the same thing but dumbed it down, removed the equations and made no mention of having tried to learn about the topic before asking the question... and removed the homework and exercises tag (Reading more in meta; this may be the culprit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question, linked above, attracted some comments and an edit that included other tags. But it was not put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user178564" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T21:36:44.030" Title="Having trouble understanding how to stay on topic" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10297" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:38:22.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like the idea of having this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't really help characterize the subject of a question, which is what tags are for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I doubt that the presence of this tag would help correlate similar questions, which is another thing tags are for. It seems like the kind of tag that would apply to many different questions on disparate topics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't see there being experts in physics misconceptions who would want to follow the tag to stay aware of questions in their area of expertise, which is yet another thing tags are for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conversely, I don't see there being people who would want to ignore questions about physics misconceptions in general, which is sort of an edge use case for tags (but one with significant precedent).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And it's really not clear to me what sort of question this would be used for, or would not be used for - and more importantly, I don't see it being clear to most other people posting on the site. So if this tag existed, I foresee it being used wrongly a lot of the time, which would ruin its effectiveness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T21:38:22.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10296" CreationDate="2017-12-13T22:40:31.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a few possible factors. (I didn't vote on the question/answers though, this is pure speculation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem immediately clear to me what you're trying to say in the answer.  I can follow some of it; but it doesn't seem direct in how it addressed the question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the question was already over a year old and had an accepted answer, so there's even more reason to make sure what you say is really clear about what it is adding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, (as mentioned in a comment) it's really not a big deal.  That vote means that someone found your answer not-useful.  It's only one person's opinion.  (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&quot;&gt;this help page&lt;/a&gt; on the voting model; how it is a democracy, and reasons why one might choose to downvote)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T22:40:31.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T12:55:09.843" Score="3" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I see that this website is tolerant of people (which I choose to call &quot;crackpots&quot;) which have links to their own dubious work in their profile. These people even have thousands of points of reputation, but the minute you check their profile, you're baited to go to &quot;CrackpotLandia&quot; (such as academia.edu).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this OK with you, having reputable physicists (like Cosmas Zachos and Valter Moretti or Urs Schreiber to name a few) alongside crackpots? On Physicsforums, they would be banned (or at least the links in their profiles) the next second after joining. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It doesn't mean that all content posted on personal accounts on academia.edu is junk, but some of it sadly is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastEditorUserId="40726" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T15:19:35.777" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T22:24:55.323" Title="Crackpots and links to crackpot articles in their profile" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|profile-page|non-mainstream-physics|spam|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10301" CreationDate="2017-12-14T13:40:35.620" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Users are allowed to put what they want in their user profiles, within reason.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, users are allowed to put &lt;em&gt;whatever the heck they want&lt;/em&gt; in their user profile. This includes links, images, text... as long as they stick with two guidelines: It should be SFW, and has to be non-offensive to people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means: No naked pictures, but a picture of their kid is fine. No links to porn sites, but a link to a site that promotes non-mainstream science? Fine. &lt;strong&gt;The user profile reflects on the one who wrote it, not the site as a whole.&lt;/strong&gt; What you put in your user profile reflects on &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd advise checking out &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/231362/294691&quot;&gt;this Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;, which explains what is acceptable for user profiles, generally. To sum it up, I'll take the first two bullet points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, your &amp;quot;about me&amp;quot; is just that—what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; want to share with the world, and we try to allow users a good bit of freedom there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, in the rare cases where what's there is likely to be &lt;em&gt;truly offensive&lt;/em&gt; to large groups of seemingly reasonable people, we may not allow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this handy image guide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y7bPe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These people even have thousands of points of reputation, but the minute you check their profile, you're baited to go to &amp;quot;CrackpotLandia&amp;quot; (such as academia.org).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's perfectly fine. You don't choose to put that stuff in your profile; that's fine. But it's perfectly within the rules to put links to your work in your profile - there's even a special field for including a link to your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, may I point out that calling people 'crackpots' may be a violation of '&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;Be Nice&lt;/a&gt;'? I'd advise always sticking with this line from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#nice&quot;&gt;chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect community members to treat each other with respect … &lt;strong&gt;even when they don't deserve it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T14:02:25.917" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10301" CreationDate="2017-12-14T13:56:20.390" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this OK with you, having reputable physicists (like Cosmas Zachos and Valter Moretti or Urs Schreiber to name a few) alongside crackpots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the wrong question. Let's suppose I'm not &quot;OK&quot; with that. What can we do? By SE policy (cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5754/50583&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/31448/263383&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), you can pretty much link to anything you want in your profile as long as it's not egregious hate speech, porn, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, it is &lt;strong&gt;not the moderators' task&lt;/strong&gt; to judge the competence of users or the correctness of answers. If you don't like people whose ideas about physics are utterly wrong having thousands of reputation and running around, then I suggest that you downvote non-mainstream content whenever you see it. Leave comments on their answers and questions pointing out why they's wrong for all the world to see - preferably without calling them crackpots, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/340/50583&quot;&gt;this old discussion about the word&lt;/a&gt;, and without engaging in lengthy pointless discussion afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T13:56:20.390" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10301" CreationDate="2017-12-14T22:24:55.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to bother going over the SE network policy on profiles again, since two answers already have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this OK with you, having reputable physicists (like Cosmas Zachos and Valter Moretti or Urs Schreiber to name a few) alongside crackpots? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's your criteria for judging this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible someone believes in some non-stream ideas; but are also perfectly capable of mainstream physics on other topics.  If answers are good, who cares what the person has linked in their profile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a question and answer site.  We should care about questions and answers; not personal ideologies.  If personal beliefs make the answers incorrect or questions off topic, then address those problems with your voting.  That should be the primary feedback mechanism here; not over-policing the personal aspects of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't really get how you're &quot;baited&quot; to their personal sites.  &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; make the choice to check their profile and then click a second link when there.  No one is really forcing you to look at their links; it's your own curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T22:24:55.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-18T03:15:04.040" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; tag has a tendency to be incorrectly applied in cases where the OP happened to have visible light in mind when they asked the question, but they are really asking about electromagnetic radiation in general. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/375010/whats-the-difference-between-low-energy-photons-and-high-energy-photons&quot;&gt;recent example&lt;/a&gt;, and there are many other &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; questions which I think should really have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetic-radiation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetic-radiation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetic-radiation&lt;/a&gt; instead) I've been thinking for a while that most of the questions which really deserve to be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; are actually asking about color or visual perception, and I think if we were to rename the tag to something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/color-perception&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;color-perception&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;color-perception&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visual-perception&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visual-perception&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visual-perception&lt;/a&gt; or so on, it would probably cut down on its misuse. What do you think - should we make this change and what is a good replacement name for the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For background, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1166/tag-cleanup-light&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; collects some resources related to why we introduced the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; tag in the first place. It was an effort to break apart the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;light&lt;/a&gt; tag into questions about EM radiation in general and questions not asking about EM radiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T03:15:04.040" Title="Renaming visible-light?" Tags="|discussion|tags|retagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T13:48:17.613" Score="4" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/375209/dirac-once-said-that-renormalization-is-just-a-stop-gap-procedure-and-there-had&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question on renormalisation in quantum field theory had a number of comments under the main question, including one of mine; they &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; seemed to have been removed without any indication that they had been so. How come? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7993" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T14:03:46.617" Title="What happened to the comments on a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10309" CreationDate="2017-12-19T14:03:46.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are for criticizing or clarifying the question or for linking related questions, not for suggesting possible answers - that's what answers are for. The comments that have been removed were largely of the latter type. Comments on Stack Exchange are ephemeral and you should not expect &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; comment to be preserved indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more discussion of this, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bcomments%5D+deleted&quot;&gt;discussions about deleted comments on our meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bcomments%5D+deleted&quot;&gt;on mother meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T14:03:46.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10313" CreationDate="2017-12-25T00:29:05.643" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a question about physics, I accidentally came along the &quot;operators&quot; tag. Why is the LaTeX code visible below this tag and not what it is supposed to show? I can't see a mistake in the code. Or am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T16:08:21.573" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T04:32:08.623" Title="Why doesn't the LaTeX code under the tag &quot;operators&quot; shows what it's supposed to show?" Tags="|bug|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10312" CreationDate="2017-12-25T10:01:34.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; that the tag wiki excerpt (the thing that pops up when you hover over a tag or try to add it to a question) is supposed to contain plain text only. Or if I'm wrong about that, at least it is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; limited set of allowed markup, like only links. The point is, I don't think MathJax is supported in tag wiki excerpts, and this one should be edited to remove the math markup. This is not about an error in the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether it would make sense to allow MathJax in tag wiki excerpts, but that's a matter for a separate discussion. (Honestly, I don't think that feature is likely to be implemented.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T10:01:34.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10315" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:14:45.450" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/376382/&quot;&gt;Calculating the height a person can reach in the moon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm deleting this in accordance with our homework policy. Please do not give complete or near-complete answers to homework-like questions. – ACuriousMind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't there be a vote on un-deletion (at what ever rep-limit the community decides) when answers are deleted by moderators? Why delete a complete answer to a homework question (that takes time and energy to write); why don't you just edit some parts to make it a hint or just leave the conceptual part in? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165756" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T20:25:15.467" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T20:25:15.467" Title="Why can't deletion by moderators be voted on?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10314" CreationDate="2017-12-26T16:07:41.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderator deletions are there to enforce policy that is decided on by the community; the example you link to is a clear example of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you feel that a specific moderator action (deletion or otherwise) steps outside of the community-consensus guidelines, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you feel that the community-decided policy should be changed,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you should handle that by posting on this meta making your case for the relevant option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, your answer was deleted because &lt;strong&gt;the community has decided that we don't want this site to provide answers to homework questions&lt;/strong&gt;. The deletion is completely within that policy. If you want the policy to change and you want this site to allow this type of answers, feel free to make a proposal - but please make sure to get a good understanding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10077/why-cant-the-homework-policy-be-more-lenient/10079#10079&quot;&gt;the considerable background of that debate&lt;/a&gt; and be aware that proposals that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; provide answers to the existing requirements and tensions are likely to be entirely ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit more specifically, though, you can ask for your answer to be undeleted in a week or two, as specified by the policy. If this doesn't happen on its own, flag your post for moderator attention. If you want it to be undeleted earlier, then edit it yourself and flag for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, if you don't want your time and energy to be &quot;wasted&quot;, as you say, then the simplest way is very easy: don't provide full answers to homework questions, and play by the site rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T16:07:41.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10318" CreationDate="2017-12-27T07:33:50.920" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some ideas about sub-quarks and sub-leptons and the structure of them. I can't ask this question on the PhysicsStackExchange place because the only questions you can ask there are about mainstream-physics. Can I ask them anywhere, or just talk about it in a cozy chatroom, with a cup of tea? I couldn't find a tag so I put on the discussion-tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T09:10:12.167" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T10:12:42.823" Title="Is there a StackExchange place where I can ask questions about non-mainstream physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10316" CreationDate="2017-12-27T10:12:42.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have some ideas about sub-quarks and sub-leptons and the structure of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are not places to share ideas. I generally wouldn't read too much into your word choice, but the fact that you say &quot;ideas&quot; instead of &quot;questions&quot; does suggest that Stack Exchange is not the place for the kind of post you may want to make, regardless of whether the topic is within the scope of any SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I don't believe there is any site where non-mainstream physics is on topic. But I can't officially speak for other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be fine to bring up your ideas in chat, just make sure that you're not too pushy. In the long run you may be best off finding another site outside the SE network that is oriented more toward sharing non-mainstream ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T10:12:42.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T07:26:22.880" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does one get no 5 points for an upvoted question in this place? I ask this because I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10316/is-there-a-stackexchange-place-where-i-can-ask-questions-about-non-mainstream-ph&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, for which I got 3 upvotes, but no +15 points. Poor me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T13:19:53.490" Title="Why doesn't one get points for an upvoted question on PhysicsMeta?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T07:46:28.560" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can one know if his or her question is non-mainstream? Just by asking it? Or is it supposed that the one who asks knows that for him/herself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T13:17:39.097" Title="How does one know if his question is non-mainstream?" Tags="|discussion|questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10320" CreationDate="2017-12-28T09:10:03.173" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All upvotes and downvotes on META do not contribute to changes in reputation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T09:10:03.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10320" CreationDate="2017-12-28T13:12:52.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it's because there's a fundamental difference between the main site and meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, people are voting based on how good/correct an answer is, which should be tied to your reputation - if you write really good, correct answers about physics, you should have a high reputation because you (presumably) get upvotes on those awesome answers. The opposite should also be true there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On meta, people are voting based purely on opinion. On the main site, we &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; when there's an error in the answer - if someone says $F =m^2 a$, that's just wrong, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. On the other hand, on meta, someone could say that homework questions should be allowed, and another say they shouldn't be, and neither would be categorically right or wrong - we can look at their arguments for each viewpoint and think about who makes the better argument, and vote based on that, but in the end it comes down to opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because you have controversial or well-respected opinions should not affect your reputation, because it has nothing to do with the actual topic of the site and there isn't really a &quot;right&quot; answer on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a quick note from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/07/22/new-per-site-metas/&quot;&gt;the blog&lt;/a&gt; (see point #5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting up or down does not affect reputation.&lt;/strong&gt; You are now free to vote purely based on post content, without worrying about how your vote might positively or negatively affect someone’s reputation score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T13:19:53.490" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T13:19:53.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10321" CreationDate="2017-12-28T18:32:13.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is any many ways a &quot;we'll know it when we see it&quot; thing, but there are some reliable indicators that you will be able to defend the question from accusations of non-mainstream-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Material that appears in major textbooks. This is golden.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Material that has be treated by more than one research group in major journals. Also golden. (If it is new you might need to give references, and it is going to be hit or miss if anyone here knows anything about it).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Applications of established science to new systems to which they clearly apply. The literature isn't (can't be) completely comprehensive and some extensions are just obvious, but if you get creative people might question you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Published speculation by individual reputable physicist (or small groups).  Here you are getting into the cutting edge, and opinions might vary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost anything else is going to run into questions. And yes, this means the Physics is not a place to develop new ideas. Take it to chat or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T13:17:39.097" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T13:17:39.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10330" CreationDate="2017-12-29T01:22:23.360" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like getting attention for the questions I ask. I enjoy answering peoples questions, but personally, a lot of that motivation comes to get &quot;monopoly money&quot; that I can use to put bounties on my own questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it explicitly against the rules to pay someone to put a bounty on my question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T07:02:50.660" Title="Can I pay someone to put a bounty on my question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-29T18:45:05.740" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a look at somebody's profile four times, but it is showing that nobody has visited their profile. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="121464" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T21:05:08.257" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T21:05:08.257" Title="Profile view number is off" Tags="|discussion|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-30T05:40:51.410" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;IIRC, I asked about the etymology of 'entropy': was it deleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user53143" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T06:41:42.483" Title="Was my question on 'entropy' deleted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10328" CreationDate="2017-12-30T06:41:42.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked your question history, including deleted questions, and I can't find anything that looks like the one you're talking about. So, the way it looks is, no, the question was never deleted because you never asked it in the first place. (At least not using this account)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question about the etymology of a term probably wouldn't be on topic here anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T06:41:42.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10325" CreationDate="2017-12-30T07:02:50.660" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of involving real money in SE activity has been discussed a few times on meta sites (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/181153/&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/229225/&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/148785/&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/25615/&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243404/&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; as posted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/84967/accidentalfouriertransform&quot;&gt;AccidentalFourierTransform&lt;/a&gt; in a comment), and while there seems to be broad agreement that it would be a bad idea, I don't know of any rule that explicitly and directly forbids it. Assuming such a rule doesn't exist, I think part of the reason it doesn't exist is that people recognize it'd be impossible to enforce. The moderators and SE staff don't generally know (or care) what you do outside of the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think if you offer anything more than a trivial amount of real money for bounties, it could easily lead to a situation where people are putting bounties on questions that don't deserve them and giving you an excessive share of the attention that comes to featured questions. That would be bad for the site. So I'd suggest that you not do it. But that's just me, speaking unofficially, that's not an outright rule as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T07:02:50.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T15:08:23.063" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed (already a long time ago) that below certain questions one can read **protected by...&quot;. I never quite well understood why this is written there. So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the statement &quot;protected by...&quot; written below some questions and what are the criteria for a question to make this statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T12:07:24.423" Title="What does &quot;protected by...&quot; below a question mean?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T15:50:36.250" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/377273/&quot;&gt;Screw falling in an elevator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;I haven't used this site much before but I asked two questions recently which were both rated -1. I have no idea why this could be and there was no constructive feedback left by the people who rated them negatively. I am only concerned about this because when I made my second question today I got a warning saying that if my posts keep getting negative ratings I may not be able to ask questions anymore which is very unfortunate, especially considering that my questions are very neutral and are simply asking for help on things I don't understand about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice would be appreciated. I hope this site could be more fair in that moderators would review posts and &quot;clean up&quot; the negative ratings on posts which don't deserve it. If you look at my two questions, you will most likely agree that they don't deserve a negative rating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/376890/&quot;&gt;Significant figures when adding and subtracting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/377273/&quot;&gt;Screw falling in an elevator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160255" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T10:30:14.653" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T10:30:14.653" Title="Why are my posts being rated negatively?" Tags="|support|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10334" CreationDate="2017-12-31T15:59:37.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators cannot invalidate votes on individual posts, so whether we agree that your posts do not &quot;deserve&quot; negative scores or not is immaterial.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting on SE is anonymous and explicitly left to the discretion of the voters - if the voters don't leave comments on your posts, there is no way to find out what was the reason for specific downvotes on specific posts. However, in this case I suspect you are being downvoted because your questions are close to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583&quot;&gt;homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt;, which are off-topic here and disliked by many users. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to suggest that there should be some sort of requirement for downvoters to explain their votes, this has been discussed again and again on meta.SE, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/135/263383&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and its linked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T15:59:37.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10337" CreationDate="2018-01-01T03:01:46.227" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a badge awarded for 5 well-received posts.  How does one define well-received?  Based on views or votes?  How many of each are needed?  The badge also mentions positive question record.  What do you mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T05:51:21.950" Title="What is a well-received post?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10336" CreationDate="2018-01-01T05:51:21.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234259/asking-days-badges&quot;&gt;Asking days badges&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well received question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is one that's open, not deleted, and has a score &gt; 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T05:51:21.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-01T08:24:58.090" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Initially I wanted to flag a question because of certain reasons.  However, after the OP edited, I do not want to flag anymore.  1. Would my flag be declined? 2. Should I retract my flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T16:38:46.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T16:38:46.190" Title="Retracting flags" Tags="|support|editing|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-01T09:41:38.563" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens say if u got 2 posts with &gt;10000 views.  Do you get 2 famous question badges or 1?  It is said: Question with 10,000 views. This badge can be awarded multiple times under the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T10:04:13.470" Title="Earning badges more than once" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10339" CreationDate="2018-01-01T10:04:13.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a badge's description says &quot;This badge can be awarded multiple times&quot;, you will get one instance of that badge for each event that matches the criteria for which the badge is awarded. In this case, that means you get a Famous Question badge for each question you ask that has more than 10000 views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T10:04:13.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10338" CreationDate="2018-01-01T16:38:16.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the edit fixed the issue, yes. The flag will probably be rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you think the edit fixed the issue, yes. You should retract your flag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the edit did not really fix the issue, you should not retract the flag, and should not expect it to be rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T16:38:16.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10333" CreationDate="2018-01-03T11:57:35.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;Help pages&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;What are protected questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A protected question prevents answers being added by anonymous and very new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions should be protected when they are garnering lots of views and newbies are adding &quot;me too!&quot;, &quot;thanks!&quot; and possibly even spam non-answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Which questions can be protected?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any question at least a day old can be protected and unprotected by users that have the privilege, provided the question has received at least one answer from a user with less than 10 reputation (such users would then be prevented from posting further answers after the question is protected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information see the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/new-protected-question-status/&quot;&gt;New Protected Question Status&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some additional comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the reasons for protecting a question are limited to a specific time window. This happens most often when questions get promoted to the Hot Network Questions sidebar, which gets advertised across all 150+ Stack Exchange sites, and that normally brings in a large influx of association-bonus users who have a minimal involvement in this site and its community, but who can upvote (but not downvote) questions and answers (leading to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286020/breaking-the-hnq-feedback-loop-on-bad-questions&quot;&gt;pretty pernicious feedback loop&lt;/a&gt;), and who are quite often happy to add in some rather off-topic answers. Protecting those questions is a very welcome tool to keep the discussion on-topic, and (like a bunch of other janitorial tasks, like tag edits or helpful &quot;related: ...&quot; comments) very often it is Qmechanic that gets there first, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10183&quot;&gt;this previous thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the reasons for protecting a question are no longer valid, then it is perfectly reasonable to raise a custom flag on the question (or to pop into &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the site chatroom&lt;/a&gt;, if there are &gt;15k-rep users around) asking whether it should still be protected. If the reasons are no longer present, the response will often be to unprotect the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some questions have long-running reasons for protection, but those reasons will not be visible unless you have &gt;10k rep and you can see all the deleted non-answer answers that caused the protection in the first place. For an example, see the blog post linked above; for something on-site, try e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7615/what-is-in-the-space-between-a-nucleus-of-an-atom-and-its-electrons&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: it might look perfectly reasonable to you, but it has eight deleted (terrible!) non-answers spread out over one year, and the protection is clearly appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question gets protected, the only effect is that posting an answer requires you to have earned 10 rep on this site. This is an exceptionally low threshold (one upvote on an answer, or two on a question), and the body of people with meaningful answers to add that get a participation barrier for them to post it is (while nonzero) small enough that the protection against spam and junk answers is justified. Or, to put it another way: the banner can look big and scary, but its real-world negative impact are generally extremely limited. (On the other hand, there is a selection bias in that if people are turned away, we're unlikely to hear about it. But still.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we're not great at unprotecting questions that no longer need it, which is partly because there isn't a good volunteer base to identify them, and partly because the existing software doesn't have great tools to &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; those questions. (One such tool might be e.g. a review queue of questions that stopped being HNQs three months ago, which are probably ready for unprotection. That's unlikely to be implemented by SE, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's nothing stopping a motivated-enough volunteer from looking through old questions and flagging them (/ asking 15k'ers on chat) to unprotect them. The 10k tools have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/protected-questions&quot;&gt;a dedicated stats page with protected questions&lt;/a&gt;, but all that data is public and e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/777230/protected-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Protected Questions SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent starting point. (If you do go there, though, and you've got &amp;lt;10k rep, be wary of questions with multiple deleted answers, as reported in the query, that you cannot see.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T12:07:24.423" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T12:07:24.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T14:20:04.340" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon looking under the list of posts I flagged, some are pending/ helpful.  Under those helpful ones, some are highlighted in red. What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T14:55:49.347" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T14:55:49.347" Title="Why are some posts shown with a pink background in the list of flags I've raised?" Tags="|support|flagging|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T14:23:23.237" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see my flag being marked as helpful.  What does that mean?  I do not see the post being removed, or anything happening to it.  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T14:27:38.830" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T14:27:38.830" Title="What happens to helpful flagged posts" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-01-03T19:27:52.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10343" CreationDate="2018-01-03T14:46:54.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;highlighted in red&quot; you mean a pink background behind the question title,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S6YR2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S6YR2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then that indicates that the post in question has been deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean something else, then you should provide a screenshot and be more descriptive about the circumstances (type of flag raised, whether it was on a question/answer/comment, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T14:46:54.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10347" CreationDate="2018-01-03T14:57:13.307" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one view the number of views to a particular post?  I can’t seem to find it.  Perhaps someone can send a screenshot to help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:50:23.933" Title="How to view number of views on mobile app" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10346" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:50:23.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be clear: the mobile app (applying to both the iOS and the android apps) is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a full-featured version of this site. The full-featured version is the desktop site as seen on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56161/which-browsers-are-officially-supported-and-what-else-do-i-need&quot;&gt;officially supported browsers&lt;/a&gt;; if you do something else (including using the mobile website or either of the mobile apps) and some bit of the site functionality doesn't work, then that's because you're not using the full-featured version. If you want that feature, either switch to the desktop version on a supported browser, or ask a feature request for that feature to be ported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feature requests like that are in principle on-topic here, but the attention from both community and the dev team that they'll gather is rather minimal; they are very much best posed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;, and indeed (like your specific example, over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/232077/how-to-see-the-number-of-views-of-a-post-on-mobile-app&quot;&gt;How to see the number of views of a post on mobile app?&lt;/a&gt;) they often have been asked already. However, it's important to note that for frills like this on the app, given that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/281120/184688&quot;&gt;some usage-critical features remain unimplemented&lt;/a&gt;, the chance of a speedy implementation is extremely slim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:50:23.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T21:28:23.203" Score="4" ViewCount="790" Body="&lt;p&gt;H${}$i all. Please, have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/8441/84967&quot;&gt;What is a complete book for quantum field theory?&lt;/a&gt;. The post is a standard &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; request. In fact, it is the canonical post when it comes to QFT books. Weird that it is closed, specially when it is not opinion-based. At least, not more than any other &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that when someone asks about QFT recommendations nowadays, the post is always closed as a duplicate of that post above. Yet, the latter post is closed, which doesn't make much sense to me. People cannot ask for recommendations, and people cannot post new recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been suggested in the comment section that the post is not really POB, but that it is a duplicate (&lt;em&gt;of what?&lt;/em&gt;) and/or too broad. I don't really agree with it being neither. For one thing, there are canonical res.rec. about all major branches of physics (Newtonian mechanics, Electrodynamics, Optics, etc.) and they are all open, except for the one about QFT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen this post a couple of times, and the post left the reopen queue with a couple of reopen votes, but it was never reopened. Surely there must be something that I am missing here. Can we please discuss this here? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T21:28:23.203" Title="Why is this question (still) closed?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:03:41.993" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to flag a user for the name?  I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/180516/breaking-jews?tab=profile&quot;&gt;this user&lt;/a&gt;'s name after answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/377998/is-this-posible-in-gr-g-abgab-1/377999#377999&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  I don't know about any policies on user names, but this one seems like it could very well violate such a policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8007" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:43:10.243" Title="Offensive user name" Tags="|support|flagging|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10349" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:43:10.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no way to flag an account, but you can flag one of the user's posts for moderator attention and explain in the message. Of course, now that you've brought it to our (mods') attention by posting on meta, there's no need to flag in addition; we'll look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do allow people somewhat more freedom in usernames than in the content they post, but not as much as is allowed in the &quot;about me&quot; section on their profile. I don't know of any documentation about more specific rules than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:43:10.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10354" CreationDate="2018-01-04T22:44:17.523" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how do I find the question ID of a particular question in order to flag it as a duplicate.  How can I find the question ID of any particular question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T07:03:57.893" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T07:03:57.893" Title="Question ID on mobile app" Tags="|support|flagging|mobile-app|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T02:27:34.163" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/377676/buoyant-force-on-an-object-observed-by-two-observers&quot;&gt;Buoyant force on an object observed by two observers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hold reason&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand five people voted to close my question, so I admit I have obviously made some great mistake in posing my question. I wish to correct my mistake. The problem is, I do not understand where my mistake lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to me, I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;asked about a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; concept:&lt;/strong&gt; My question talks about the difference in the buoyant force observed by two different observers. I could sum it up in one line, so I think it is a pretty &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question. The question is not excessively mathematics oriented, and I have only used a small formula. So, it is indeed a &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;showed some &lt;em&gt;effort&lt;/em&gt; to work through a problem:&lt;/strong&gt; I have clearly shown my logic as to what I expect the observed buoyant force to be for both the observers, with proper reasoning and mathjax. I have also drawn a diagram on my own and pasted it in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to my naive logic, my question satisfies both the requirements mentioned in the close reason. But, I am not here to challenge the close vote or the rules.  As I said earlier, I am here to learn exactly what I am missing from what I question that made it deserve a close vote. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28359" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T05:11:43.190" Title="I need help understanding why my question was put on hold" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10352" CreationDate="2018-01-05T03:01:42.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At its core, this is the question you asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thus want to confirm if my reasoning for $O_1$ and $O_2$ is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not asking about a specific physics concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if your question presents some work (whether that work represents a full or partial solution or some initial thoughts or anything in-between) and just asks to confirm whether that work is correct, it is not on topic here. If your question is of this type, often a good way to start fixing it is to think about why exactly you think it might not be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, asking what the correct approach to a problem is would also be off topic. If your question is of this type,a good way to start fixing it is to start working on it and identify what you get stuck on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two types of questions (asking to check some work and asking how to solve a problem) are the archetypal examples of what we call &quot;non-conceptual questions&quot;, which are off topic as described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like question policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, what you posted isn't even a question. Now, it doesn't have to be; in other words, it's not strictly necessary that your post includes an interrogative sentence. But I find that it sometimes helps make a question more clear if you do phrase it that way. If nothing else, people who want to cut through the extra information and focus on exactly what you're really asking might start by searching your post for a question mark, and it doesn't hurt to put one in there for them to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T05:11:43.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T05:11:43.190" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10351" CreationDate="2018-01-05T07:02:54.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not need the question ID. Click on &quot;share&quot; and copy the link to the question to your clipboard, then insert that into the close dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T07:02:54.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10357" CreationDate="2018-01-05T13:49:31.080" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I see a put on hold message, it will always show put on hold by someone. &#xA; I would like to know who these people are.  Are they moderators?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T21:03:53.957" Title="Put on hold messages" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10356" CreationDate="2018-01-05T14:55:52.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Not necessarily mods&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users of Physics.SE who have over 3000 reputation obtain &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;the privilege&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;Vote to Close&quot; a  Question. At 5 close votes, the post is automatically &quot;Put on Hold&quot;. After a week, its status is changed to &quot;Closed&quot;, unless it is reopened in the meantime. This is also mentioned in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, users which have a gold tag badge in either of the tags of the question can single-handedly close it as a duplicate (aka &quot;hammer&quot;). Moderators can single-handedly close / reopen any question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can distinguish moderators from all other users, because they have a diamond (♦) after their username. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153092" LastEditorUserId="153092" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T21:03:53.957" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T21:03:53.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10359" CreationDate="2018-01-06T02:21:30.523" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have flagged quite a few posts and answers, 2 of which were spam flags and both were declined.  Why?  Isn't spam anything redundant and lengthy?  For instance, if a person's answer is &quot;hieeeeeeeeeeeeeeefiehfihfiehihefhehfie&quot; some random letters like this, is this spam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T16:20:01.387" Title="The problem with spam flags" Tags="|support|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10358" CreationDate="2018-01-06T02:26:01.457" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is not spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On StackExchange, only posts that explicity advertise a specific website, program or product are considered spam. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234035/280545&quot;&gt;Gibberish should be flagged as either &quot;not an answer&quot; or &quot;rude or abusive&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T16:20:01.387" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T16:20:01.387" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10364" CreationDate="2018-01-07T21:52:13.633" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I saw many homework posts rejected.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a decently upvoted homework question.  Why is this so?  Perhaps it is better to remove the homework tag altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T22:42:39.177" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T06:04:15.503" Title="Purpose of homework tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10363" CreationDate="2018-01-08T06:04:15.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework tag has a couple of uses that make it worth keeping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In your profile preferences you can specify tags you wish to ignore - questions with that tag can be greyed out or even completely hidden. That allows people to hide anything tagged as homework.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tagging something as homework will hopefully deter site members from answering it (before it can be closed). This is good since answering homework questions just encourages people to ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T06:04:15.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5778" CreationDate="2018-01-11T03:57:54.690" Score="-4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;1. I think the original intention was only to require thorough researching within &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; site.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8724/how-should-we-deal-with-google-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this meta question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; state that it's permissible for a question (or an answer) to exist elsewhere on the Internet and also on an SE site, even if the non-SE sites can found by searching Google. Some of the ideas are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answering questions on Physics.SE causes it to be a top hit on Google search results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answering questions on Physics.SE drives traffic toward the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers that are given on Physics.SE are inherently higher in quality because, unlike many other external sites where research might be done, people can comment on the Physics.SE answers, ask follow-up questions, and provide further clarification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;help center&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, when discussing the issue of searching/researching, states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;Search&lt;/a&gt;, and research&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;thoroughly searched for an answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both links point to the Physics.SE search tool, not to Google. There's no mention in the help center about doing research on external sites. This suggests that, at some early stage, the intention was for the research requirement to apply to the Physics.SE site: before posting a question, research Physics.SE to see if it already exists. (This would help avoid duplicates, among other things.) I don't see evidence that the original intention is for research to encompass other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. A strict research requirement will tend to favor active researchers over beginner students.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Active researchers have a much greater ability to find an answer through their own research. Besides having access to more experts in their professional sphere, they are also quicker at discerning which sources are valuable, better at understanding how the information in those sources relates to the question, and more experienced with conducting effective research in general. Active researchers can engage much more productively in rigorous background research. And when that research fails them, they can come to Physics.SE able to produce lots of evidence that they've gone through all of the prerequisite steps and still haven't found an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, beginner students of physics often cannot engage in these prerequisite processes anywhere near as effectively or as efficiently. Even if they find a source that answers their question, they might not understand any of it, or they might not realize it answers their question. It's not hard to envision a scenario where the beginner student makes his best attempt to do prior research: he reads through several sources on the Internet, reads through the relevant Wikipedia pages, and reads through a textbook. He doesn't ask anyone because there's no one he can ask. Then he posts his question here, but the experts can find the answer easily online, and they understand too. His question is put on hold and he's asked to explain what he doesn't understand about the sources he has already read. But he understands too little to formulate an intelligent response to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I think a &quot;last-resort&quot; policy (where questions can be posted here only after showing that a rigorous research processes has been suitably performed) will tend to favor questions from highly advanced students over questions from beginner students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. A change like this should be reflected in the help center.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's problematic for the site to have a strict background research policy or to become aimed at usage by active researchers/highly advanced students. Music.SE lists a rule in the help center that basic analysis questions (like what key is this song in?&quot;) are off topic. But holding this policy right now conflicts with the text in the help center. In addition to the search text described above, the help center states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is for active researchers, academics &lt;em&gt;and students&lt;/em&gt; of physics and astronomy. [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Active researchers and academics are already students of physics. It's not appropriate to interpret the text &quot;and students&quot; as merely redundant of those first two groups. Rather, &quot;students&quot; refers to a third, more elementary group of people who don't fall into the category of active researchers or academics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a rationale that &quot;posting questions whose answers already exist in a Google search will encourage users to ask more of those questions,&quot; which would harm the site. But again, this train of thought seems to contain an implicit assumption about which users should and shouldn't be using the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to institute a policy like this, and I think it should be up to the community to decide. But this seems like a very important characteristic which deserves some attention in the help center. Given all of this, I think it makes most sense to institute this only once (a) the community has reached a consensus on the topic and (b) the help center has been changed to reflect the new policy. Until those things have happened, I think there's too much ambiguity with how the help center is written and too little consensus (at least in this thread) to have this sort of stricter background research requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Here are some quotes from the Meta question I linked to.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta question itself is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of questions that can be answered with a simple Google search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For these questions, an answer can be found by just cut'n'pasting the question directly into the Google search field and scanning the first few hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every new user wants to try out the feature and ask a question just to play around with the site. That's fine, and I don't mind it, but how will we deal with it in the long term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm asking because all those trivial questions that can best be answered by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Tried www.google.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;are the reason why I don't visit coding related Internet communities anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second-most upvoted answer (128 upvotes) states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Part of the thinking behind Stack Overflow was for those Google searches to link somewhere useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/15.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/15.html&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By answering questions properly, instead of saying 'just Google it', you hopefully set up a definitive answer that Google will find for evermore.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third most upvoted answer states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to really help with questions like this, post the answer you found and the Google search terms you used to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another upvoted answer states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question seems to be suggesting that Stack Overflow should only be used as a last resort - when an answer cannot be found elsewhere on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Surely this is the opposite of the site's intended purpose. I thought it was supposed to become the first place people would come for answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151083" LastEditorUserId="151083" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T02:42:06.483" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T02:42:06.483" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10376" CreationDate="2018-01-12T08:20:24.310" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/378401/138916&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (previously called &quot;Lagrangian of two pendulums tied together&quot;) five days ago, whereafter it was soon closed as off-topic. The reason for this was understandable: it looked as if I was asking for the solution of some exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I realized my mistake, I radically rewrote my question to embody the real, broader question I wanted to see answered and to be more relevant for others. My question became significantly different: I actually completely rewrote the title and body and changed some tags, so I thought it would be better to post it as a new question, as the comments and closure reason of the old post became completely irrelevant for the new question. However, one minute after my new post, it was marked as a duplicate of my old question and I was told to move it to my old post, so I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is my question still not reopened? What can I do to improve the chances of it getting reopened?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why wasn't I allowed to post it as a new question, as my question essentially differs from the original one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Emilio Pisanty, I was able to describe the core of the problem, so I've rewritten the post for a second time. I kindly ask those who have the necessary privilege to give my question a second chance. In my eyes, the close reason has become completely obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; the post was reopened! Hooray!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138916" LastEditorUserId="138916" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T20:11:26.280" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:17:55.490" Title="Modified closed question won't reopen" Tags="|support|closed-questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T07:21:32.677" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;How frequently I  an ask a question?  Stack exchange says we are no longer accepting questions from this account why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180631" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:54:06.133" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:54:06.133" Title="Duration between two questions which I can ask" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10368" CreationDate="2018-01-13T09:02:59.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's the message you see when you are subject to an automated question ban. These bans are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;explained in detail on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, so please read that post. You should also read the documentation that is linked from the message you see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T09:02:59.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T10:30:57.567" Score="7" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have a system where there are a bunch of canonical resource request questions linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which theoretically cover all the bases; then theoretically almost all questions can be closed as duplicates of them. The problem is that sometimes the scope of the question or the scope of the answers doesn't live up to that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/312/books-for-particle-physics-and-the-standard-model&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is our canonical resource request question for particle physics and the Standard Model, which is hugely important. The OP said they didn't have much background, so all of the answers gave texts appropriate for early-stage undergraduates. At least five other questions at a wide variety of levels were closed in favor of that one.  I think it's a bad move to close a question where the OP wants a book that assumes QFT knowledge (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/312/books-for-particle-physics-and-the-standard-model&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) as a duplicate of a question where the OP needs a book that carefully avoids going into QFT at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I put a bounty on the question, edited it to be more ambiguous about level, and AccidentalFourierTransform came through with an excellent answer, but there are still many questions in bad shape relative to their 'close as duplicate' scope, such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/159120/books-on-cosmology&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on cosmology (asked by a 14 year old)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/149468/reading-list-and-book-recommendation-on-conformal-field-theory&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on conformal field theory (requesting a low level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20260/quantum-information-references&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on quantum information (requesting 'foundations', but which has as duplicates questions about quantum computation, and the AMO physics of building quantum computers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you check these questions, they don't sound narrow anymore, because I've edited them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I invite anybody else who cares about the state of our book recommendations to join me in fixing types of questions up; I can only put up so many bounties at once, and the scope of my knowledge isn't nearly broad enough to fix up every question this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="83398" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T13:39:28.467" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T13:39:28.467" Title="Improving the quality of canonical resource request questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10373" CreationDate="2018-01-15T12:53:07.023" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/380088/solving-the-problem&quot;&gt;Solving the problem&lt;/a&gt;.  Although the user who posted a completely off topic post about cooking, which garnered 6 down-votes in 5 seconds has removed it.  However, I noticed that the answer was sort of greyed, and only when my cursor went on it did it become normal.  Went back to grey condition when my cursor went away.  Why is this so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179737" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T19:54:13.563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T19:54:13.563" Title="A greyed answer" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10372" CreationDate="2018-01-15T13:17:30.120" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is by design: answers with scores below -3 get grayed out, to indicated that they do not have the community's endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T13:17:30.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T07:17:36.470" Score="6" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been here long enough to recognize that most of the questions posted here fall into a short list of different classes. examples: obvious homework or exam questions, high-level mathematical physics enquiries, crank/goofball stuff, everyday physics, off-topic (engineering, electronics, etc.). I'm curious- has anyone here tabulated any statistical data on the frequency with which different classes of questions get posted- and answered- here? best regards, niels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T07:17:36.470" Title="statistics on question types" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9839" CreationDate="2018-01-17T14:16:52.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples I've found that I can think of (one so far):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/378401/finding-generalized-coordinates-when-the-implicit-function-theorem-fails&quot;&gt;Finding generalized coordinates when the implicit function theorem fails&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:16:52.137" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-01-17T14:16:52.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2018-01-17T14:17:55.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to close this off - the question is now much improved and has been reopened. Thank you for your work in improving the question and getting it to a shape where it becomes a valuable resource for future visitors. The thread definitely makes &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9839/good-examples-of-turn-around-questions-that-get-closed-%E2%86%92-fixed-%E2%86%92-reopened-and-an&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; in my books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:17:55.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T23:27:14.223" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102489/how-big-would-a-satellite-need-to-be-to-block-out-the-sun&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on worldbuilding, one which was being debated in the comments. As far as I could tell the working made sense but I thought rather than listen to debates in the comments I could put it to the actual physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure what the rules on that are though, would I copy the whole working over? Do I just point people to the link? (That seems a bit lazy) Is it seen as bad practice to make questions like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152566" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T20:16:53.210" Title="Asking a question about someone else's working on another SE" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10379" CreationDate="2018-01-18T19:53:18.533" Score="6" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious--the choice to upvote or downvote a question or answer should be based solely on the content.  But it's sometimes difficult to ignore what appear to be unfair tallies.  I sometimes have an urge to &quot;cancel&quot; what appears to be a mean downvote on a question or an answer that has no real problem but that ordinarily would not attract a vote either way from me.  Beyond the obvious voting bias this introduces, it doesn't really cancel, in terms of reputation points, because they are not assigned symmetrically.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: is it always wrong to take current tally into account when deciding if/how to vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180385" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T19:58:42.970" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T12:28:10.263" Title="Should existing vote tally ever be considered when voting?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10378" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:10:13.850" Score="12" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10172/2451&quot;&gt;Users are encouraged to vote&lt;/a&gt;. You decide what are quality posts on Phys.SE and what are not. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting should always be based on content, never on previous votes. E.g. comfort-voting is strongly discouraged. Downvoting is an important part of weeding out bad content.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T12:28:10.263" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T12:28:10.263" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-20T09:25:27.963" Score="6" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Vnvy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Vnvy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gut feeling is the red dot means &quot;this queue is important right now/needs help or attention&quot; yet it tells me the queue has been cleared. This is contrary to the grey circles, which go away after I have cleared a queue. What does the red dot mean? If it is to attract attention to a queue, why is the queue empty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastEditorUserId="63055" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T09:33:41.713" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T19:08:37.970" Title="What does the red circle mean next to a review queue?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10381" CreationDate="2018-01-20T09:33:10.127" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions and answers to both are on meta.stackoverflow.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/355233/when-i-look-at-the-review-icon-i-see-red&quot;&gt;What the red circle means&lt;/a&gt; tl;dr it is used to &quot;direct folks to specific queues that need more attention - things like Suggested Edits or Low Quality.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/358151/is-there-an-issue-with-the-review-queue-indicator-today&quot;&gt;Why the red circle shows when there is nothing to review&lt;/a&gt; tl;dr it's a bug/lag? Same &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4891/red-dot-on-suggested-edit-review-queue&quot;&gt;issue reported at The Workplace Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. It seems like each SE site has to have its thresholds tuned manually...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63055" LastEditorUserId="63055" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T22:17:11.770" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T22:17:11.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10381" CreationDate="2018-01-20T19:44:00.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that the review queue indicator is broken and doesn't work very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fairness, it used to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; broken (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5762/the-change-to-the-taskbar-is-massively-annoying&quot;&gt;this post in this meta&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/231051/please-dim-the-color-of-the-review-task-counter-when-there-are-no-actionable-tas&quot;&gt;this one in the mother meta&lt;/a&gt;). That is, it used to display the total number of outstanding review tasks, regardless of whether you could review them or not; SE decided that displaying updated figures on how many review tasks are available for each individual user was infeasible for performance reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This changed when they &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/300829/new-top-bar-is-coming-to-the-stack-exchange-network&quot;&gt;introduced the new top bar some four months ago&lt;/a&gt;, at which point we &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/300829/new-top-bar-is-coming-to-the-stack-exchange-network/300864#300864&quot;&gt;requested that they do away with that behaviour&lt;/a&gt; and it improved somewhat - or at least, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/302226/how-does-the-review-needed-indicator-work-exactly&quot;&gt;behaviour as programmed&lt;/a&gt; looks fairly reasonable, so long as the thresholds are set correctly. The behaviour you note (a red dot that indicates that there are outstanding reviews when the queue is in fact empty) is caused by caching at a finite frequency, and it is a false-positive that reflects thresholds which are ill-adjusted to the site's review patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it appears that per-site manually-set thresholds are not currently being considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With 170 sites, it's not practical to ask each meta to give us their preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, SE is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/305893/what-criteria-should-we-use-to-determine-which-review-queue-indicator-a-site-wil&quot;&gt;currently looking into fixing criteria that will programmatically determine those thresholds&lt;/a&gt; from each site's traffic and review patterns. (More specifically, if I understand that thread and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/304445&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; correctly, they're looking to make a second version of the indicator software that's even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; trigger-happy than ours, and they're looking to set criteria that will enable the trigger-happy indicator for a given site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have opinions to voice on the subject (including, say, &quot;false-positives are Bad Things and they should be avoided because they diminish or even eliminate the usefulness of the review indicator&quot;, in which case I wholeheartedly agree with you) then now might be a good time to voice them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T19:08:37.970" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T19:08:37.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-25T09:31:37.957" Score="11" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often come across answers flagged for LQ in the corresponding review queue which don't really fit into the categories of a LQ post - not spam, not better as a comment, not better as a question, etc. Using a broader definition, the post &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; of low quality; perhaps it's not very clear, or the physics is incorrect, but it remains an apparently honest attempt to answer the question. The correct course of action would seem to be to downvote rather than to vote to delete, but voting isn't offered via the LQP review interface. I often just open the question in a new tab via the title-link and vote there, while completing the review as 'Looks OK' in the other tab. This seems annoying; why shouldn't I be able to vote on content I happened to come across in this queue? Or to take it further, why shouldn't a downvote be an acceptable resolution to a LQP review? Is there a stated rationale for this, or should this become a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11053" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T20:47:53.373" Title="LQP review &amp; voting" Tags="|discussion|voting|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2018-01-26T00:15:13.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue has been discussed repeatedly on mother meta. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/228738/346882&quot;&gt;Add downvote option to Low Quality Review Queue list of potential actions&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/140405/346882&quot;&gt;Why is voting removed from new review system?&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/191276/346882&quot;&gt;(Up)Voting on Low-Quality Posts in Review tasks&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc., and links therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a (debatable) rationale behind the decision of removing the voting option from the LQP queue. I'll copy some relevant paragraphs here, mainly for completeness, but I really encourage you to go there and read the posts for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's always seemed to me that the purpose of the low-quality-posts queue was to automatically detect and remove low quality posts. [...] Voting on the post is unnecessary in order to accomplish this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;${}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The core philosophy here is that each queue focuses on a specific task or question, and provides the tools most important for resolving it. If you want to do something else, there will always be a prominent link to the full question page. A concern with allowing voting in the Low Quality queue specifically is that you're not viewing answers in the context of other answers, or a question in the context of its answers. You're never able to vote in these circumstances normally - it's worth remembering that voting directly from the list of questions was considered early on, and discarded as too likely to produce bad results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may or may not agree with these statements. If you don't, the best you can do is to go there and post an answer (or create a new post, if necessary). Unfortunately, I don't think you will be able to change people's mind, as this has already been thought through and a sort of consensus has been reached. The LQP queue is not, in general, for voting. If you do want to vote, you'll have to open the post in a separate tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T00:15:13.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T02:10:11.480" Score="9" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original intention of the option &lt;code&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/code&gt; is obvious.&#xA;Nevertheless, every now and then there are questions in the closing queue that are actually clear enough, but end up receiving close votes as &quot;unclear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/382224/75633&quot;&gt;Is $Tds=dh-dp/\rho $ a valid definition for entropy?&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold as unclear, but it's only missing definitions of the symbols, which are actually rather standard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/382078/75633&quot;&gt;First law of themodynamics&lt;/a&gt; asks about energy per d.o.f. ($k_BT$) and heat ($Q=mc\Delta T$): whether equivalent and when to use. The question, put on hold for being unclear, is actually understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/382143/75633&quot;&gt;The physics behind Basin structure&lt;/a&gt; has a crystal clear, if trivial question (3 &quot;unclear&quot; votes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why are such holes [in a sink] kept and why is not a large gap produced so that water runs out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What these questions have in common, it seems to me, is that they show a remarkable &lt;strong&gt;sloppiness&lt;/strong&gt; or a remarkably &lt;strong&gt;broad misunderstanding&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the last example might rather be &lt;em&gt;off-topic/engineering&lt;/em&gt;, and the first two probably could be &lt;em&gt;off-topic/lack-of-effort&lt;/em&gt;, I think that voting &quot;unclear&quot;, by requesting the OP to elaborate, delivers more clearly the message that the OP should get his concepts sorted out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if it's too much hair-splitting, but my question is: Is this practice fine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T09:39:46.450" Title="Is it OK to use the &quot;unclear&quot; option for closing clear questions by unclear-minded users?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10386" CreationDate="2018-01-26T08:44:41.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether a question is clear or unclear depends on the reader. For example, a person with beginner knowledge of tensor or relativity might find a question based on relativity unclear, if symbols are not explained. A scientist, on the other hand, doesn't need that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is because of this that review queues were created, so that a close vote is given only when the question is truly unclear, and a new user cannot just vote to close a question. High reputation users, who can just give close votes, are expected to know the site and understand the minds of users to some extent before directly voting to close as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case someone is not sure, comments can be posted, or the matter can be taken up for discussion in chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But voting to close as unclear is perfectly fine according to me, because if one person thinks a question to be unclear, but no one else thinks so, then it'll not be closed (unless the person is a moderator). That's why for normal users, five close votes are required to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE has put in enough checks, so that one doesn't have to be worried so much and just do what he thinks is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149663" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T08:44:41.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10386" CreationDate="2018-01-26T09:39:46.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say no, you shouldn't do that. The &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot; reason should be used for posts which don't have enough information to describe the situation and precisely identify the question being asked to an average topic expert. And accordingly, two of the three questions you linked to didn't really deserve their &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; close votes. (But I do think they deserved to be put on hold for other reasons, and as a practical matter we tend not to reopen-and-reclose a question just because it has the &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; hold reason. So they will probably be left as they are unless they are edited.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third post does strike me as unclear though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In basins, we see that it's outer surface slants downwards towards the middle position.The water runs down through some tiny holes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are such holes kept and why is not a large gap produced so that water runs out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What holes? What kind of basin is the OP talking about? I really have no idea what physical situation is being described. Now, it's possible that this is common knowledge (among topic experts) that I just happen to not be familiar with. But the fact that it's accumulated three close votes, several downvotes, and no answers &lt;em&gt;suggests&lt;/em&gt; that that's unlikely to be the case. The evidence I see seems more consistent with a question where many people are struggling to understand the situation or the problem the poster faces, and that's a perfect setup for &amp;quot;unclear what you're asking&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T09:39:46.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2018-01-27T20:47:53.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a few things going on here that I can see, and I previously ranted about that subject &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9027&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, about a year and a half ago. At the time I proposed trying out a change in the mods' response to VLQ flags, which I think is still in place, but we didn't really have the time or energy to analyze any changes that happened at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to keep in mind is that much of the existing guidance, both on this meta and more generally in SE, was written with the expectation that VLQ flags would be handled by moderators. Within that paradigm, deletion is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the right response: moderators are not and should not be arbiters of the technical correctness of posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just because moderators shouldn't be doing that job, that doesn't mean that the job shouldn't be done at all: the whole point of this site is that we have mechanisms (however imperfect) for recognising people with expertise in the field and knowledge of this site, and which give those people moderation abilities that can affect other users' content, from how prominently displayed they are (via the voting privilege at 10 and 125 rep) through editing (at 2k) all the way up to voting to delete answers (at 20k). The LQP queue is the point of contact that puts experienced users in front of content that might need to be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/382157&quot;&gt;the answer that probably inspired you to write this&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ewgQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt; for stability) is an excellent example of not-even-wrong post that, while it is ostensibly an honest attempt to answer the question (so Not An Answer doesn't apply), is so deeply and completely wrong that this site is not obliged to give that type of content a platform. Those types of answers harm the site: the signal-to-noise ratio matters, very much, in attracting the types of expert answerers that make this site great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: independently of whether the system allows you to downvote, I would encourage you to vote to delete (or Recommend Deletion for &amp;lt;20k users) those kinds of posts. We have some ~30 users with the 20k rep needed to delete answers, and over the past year or so we have started to get more and more community-driven deletions of posts that really shouldn't be given a platform here. As a particularly positive development, a nontrivial fraction of them include Recommend Deletion votes from the much wider and active &gt;2k rep section of our userbase (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/202672&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HxeUS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while I've yet to come across a deletion that I've disagreed with (or that anyone with this site's best interests in mind could reasonably disagree with), the three-20k deletions that currently occur tend to feature, much more often than I'd like, a set of three or four regular faces instead of a wider set of characters, which would be a much healthier situation. So: please review the LQP queue, and please don't hesitate to hit the Delete / Recommend Deletion button, particularly if you're 20k+, if you think the answer really doesn't add anything at all to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, having said all of that, I should add a huge &lt;strong&gt;caveat&lt;/strong&gt;, which is the reason I haven't pushed further in this direction since my previous rant. The wisdom-of-the-crowd method, as implemented broadly by SE, does have its pitfalls, and the claims that it can unduly lead to censorship are real and cannot be ignored. In order for this moderation mechanism to work correctly, that danger needs to be offset by a suitable set of checks and balances, which can detect and correct deletions where the crowd gets carried away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, what we really need here is (i) a list, accessible to 10k+ users, of all the posts that have been deleted (maybe only including 60 or 90 days' worth of data), with the ability to filter according to whether they were deleted by moderators / the roomba / the community, and (ii) a healthy population of users which regularly checks that list and then corrects any undue deletions by flagging or taking them to chat or meta as required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the software tools aren't really up to scratch yet (the closest we have are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=delete&amp;amp;daterange=last30days&quot;&gt;the 10k review tools&lt;/a&gt;, which haven't gotten any love from the dev team in a long time), and I'm not really sure that we're quite there yet in terms of a critical mass of actively-reviewing 10k+ users. It's a problem that can be solved with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/301967/distinguish-automated-vs-mod-vs-community-deletions-in-the-10k-tools&quot;&gt;some additional software features&lt;/a&gt; (← nudge nudge vote vote) and some more time, so I think the best thing to do now is wait some more until that critical mass is there before doing a solid push for the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T20:47:53.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10312" CreationDate="2018-01-28T03:43:30.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MathJax code in excerpts &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; get parsed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/operators&quot;&gt;tag page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q5cGx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q5cGx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/operators/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1lY6l.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1lY6l.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in the hover popups on question pages (and elsewhere):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YqQKG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YqQKG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that, I'd say that the fact that it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; get parsed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags page&lt;/a&gt; is probably a bug, and should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it even works in the hover popups &lt;em&gt;on the tags page&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lt7Ok.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lt7Ok.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual bug seems to be a missing &lt;code&gt;MathJax.Hub.Typeset()&lt;/code&gt; call in the AJAX code that loads the tag list (taken from the tags page HTML source):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;var request = null;&#xA;function finished(txt) {&#xA;    if (request) { request.abort(); }&#xA;    request = $.ajax({&#xA;        type: &quot;POST&quot;,&#xA;        url: &quot;/filter/tags-for-index&quot;,&#xA;        data: { filter: txt, tab: 'Popular' },&#xA;        dataType: &quot;html&quot;,&#xA;        success: function (result) {&#xA;            var domelement = $(result);&#xA;            $(&quot;#tags_list&quot;).html(domelement);&#xA;&#xA;            if (txt == &quot;&quot;) {&#xA;                $(&quot;.pager&quot;).show();&#xA;            } else&#xA;            {&#xA;                $(&quot;.pager&quot;).hide();&#xA;            }&#xA;&#xA;        }&#xA;    });&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding the following lines after the &lt;code&gt;$(&quot;#tags_list&quot;).html(domelement);&lt;/code&gt; statement should fix it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;if (window.MathJax) {&#xA;    MathJax.Hub.Queue(['Typeset', MathJax.Hub, &quot;tags_list&quot;]);&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4646" LastEditorUserId="4646" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T04:32:08.623" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T04:32:08.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T03:41:23.947" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back, I answered yet &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238090/brownian-motion-moving-nano-micro-coils-inside-a-magnetic-field&quot;&gt;another perpetual motion question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The post essentially asks whether or not you can extract work from Brownian motion, which I consider a good question because of how widely spread is misunderstanding of thermodynamic noise and the importance of the temperature of a thing's (electromagnetic) environment.&#xA;Unfortunately, the accepted (and bountied!) answer is at best misleading and by my analysis is just wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, if anything and aside from downvoting, should/can we do about this and similar answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T05:20:17.387" Title="Do we have any particular recourse for accepted answers that are wrong?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10392" CreationDate="2018-01-29T05:20:17.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvote and comment on the answer, explaining why it's wrong.  Your comment could even suggest to the querent that they could remove their acceptance of the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you can post your own correct answer (which obviously you've done in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T05:20:17.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T06:17:49.273" Score="10" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's almost February in 2018, which isn't supposed to be the proper time to cycle these, but for this year it'll be once again, so we'll be refreshing the &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt; for this year now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/10394&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T14:21:19.773" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2018" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="24" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-01-23T12:02:35.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T06:17:49.273" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zzY6I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T06:17:49.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:35:10.280" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E9D64.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify: automated LaTeX symbol recognition&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:35:10.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:40:16.580" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ziQXb.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org: the leading open access eprint repository&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:40:16.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:48:37.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1wvvA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wayback Machine: experience the Web as it was&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:48:37.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:49:30.477" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://retractionwatch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFSyZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Retraction Watch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:49:30.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:50:39.690" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10394/community-promotion-ads-2018&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6SOhy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Community ads are run by the community. Come and vote!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T20:16:56.443" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T20:16:56.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:51:09.353" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/353zN.png&quot; alt=&quot;History of Science and Mathematics at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:51:09.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:51:25.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thecostofknowledge.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vu8lo.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Cost of Knowledge - join the Elsevier boycott and take back our scientific publishing!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:51:25.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:51:54.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O9ZQy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Computational Science at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:51:54.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:52:07.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5A7af.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:52:07.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:52:56.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ei2RL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Engineering Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:52:56.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:53:22.153" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/toYiP.png&quot; alt=&quot;DLMF: an online encyclopaedia of special functions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:53:22.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:54:01.697" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ij43t.png&quot; alt=&quot;archive.org - the public library of the internet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:54:01.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:55:06.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NS3GV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero reference manager: free and open source&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:55:06.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T07:55:25.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pefiz.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciRate&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T07:55:25.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T08:13:24.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dissem.in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HAnRi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Are your papers available in an open access repository? Check with Dissemin&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T08:13:24.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T08:53:55.693" Score="10" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have lots and lots of questions on the symmetry of time dilation. That is when two observers are heading towards each other how can each think their clock is running faster? These questions typically come from people who have just started studying special relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have come up with a good analogy to explain what is going on, so I propose to post a canonical Q/A. &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UBEoXSEwouN3m0z1EzFBIHBVjBK_DtzaqJ4OtKrzgao/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A draft of my proposed Q/A can be viewed here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm aware that these canonical Q/As aren't viewed with enthusiasm by everyone so I won't proceed unless the consensus is that it would be a useful contribution to the site. To this end I'd like two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly please upvote or downvote this question to indicate your approval or otherwise of the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly please answer if you think there are better ways to approach this. For example there may already be a question that is in effect a canonical question on the issue (I did look but while there are dozens of related questions I haven't found one that I thought a good candidate for a canonical question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to everyone who voted or commented. I've now posted the Q/A (reluctantly making the names more sensible :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/383248/how-can-time-dilation-be-symmetric&quot;&gt;How can time dilation be symmetric?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T17:12:33.663" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T17:12:33.663" Title="A possible canonical Q/A on symmetric time dilation?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-01-29T17:26:32.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/12537/?qa=blob&amp;amp;qa_blobid=13238895215271010617&quot; alt=&quot;PhysicsOverflow&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T17:26:32.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-30T12:29:15.883" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about this general feature of Stack Exchange sites: when you answer a question, your reputation and number of badges are shown right next to your user name and profile picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am worried about is that when comparing several answers, a user may be biased towards those coming from high-rep users. In other words, when someone who asked a question is confronted with two equally good answers coming from a low-rep user and an high-rep user, he/she could give more weight to the answer of the latter just because, well, he/she has an higher rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If true, this could lead to a &quot;rich-gets-richer&quot; positive feedback in which high-rep users get more rep than the others, and because of this they get even more rep, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this issue been taken into consideration during the development of Stack Exchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115736" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T12:36:27.097" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T12:36:27.097" Title="Is it really a good idea to show a user's reputation and badges in answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-30T14:29:22.063" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qaCcR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qaCcR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that there are an awful lot of people who come here, create new accounts to ask their homework questions, get downvoted and closed then leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, we have flags, we can attempt to edit and we can vote to show that they ARE not suited for physics SE, but I'm concerned that new users will be seeing new users' questions being voted down and closed but THINK that its because they are new and be put off using this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I am suggesting that new users see a screen with a &quot;how to make homework style questions into good questions&quot; or &quot;what is / is not on topic&quot; or similar. If there is a lot of information, a lot of people will not read it and will just post, but if there is no guidance then they will of course post anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123649" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T15:20:20.517" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T15:20:20.517" Title="How to address high volume of low quality questions?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-30T22:12:48.867" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to get some clarity on the scope of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/material-science&quot;&gt;material-science&lt;/a&gt; tag, or perhaps figure out another tag with the meaning I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/383297/how-do-i-determine-the-breaking-point-of-something&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and thought that only a tag of &quot;classical mechanics&quot; wasn't really enough to describe his concern.  I looked for tags and added the &quot;material-science&quot; tag, only to second guess myself and roll it back after re-reading the &quot;About&quot; section for the tag. (I realized that I forgot to take out the -Josh like I intended too, so I'm done touching that one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if the tag would apply here or not.  Based on the description of the tag, I realized the focus seems to be more towards the stricter description of material science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where we would fit in questions that relate to things like &quot;engineering mechanics&quot; in this case.  The question isn't really about the material properties; it's about the manifestation of those properties and how we would apply that, which is why I rolled the edit back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solid-mechanics&quot;&gt;solid-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; the tag I'm looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't notice this tag until I was making this discussion; but I would like some more input from everyone on if we should use &quot;material-science&quot; for these types of questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T22:12:48.867" Title="Use of Material Science Tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10418" CreationDate="2018-01-30T23:05:42.687" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question but If I have a specific question about a derivation step in a paper published in &lt;em&gt;Physical Review A&lt;/em&gt;, for example. Can I ask it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183253" OwnerDisplayName="Q8i" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T03:13:35.637" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T03:13:35.637" Title="Are questions about derivations in papers published in scientific journals, on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|soft-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2018-01-31T00:32:40.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It probably depends on how you word the question itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you simply ask, &quot;How is this step done?&quot; you will likely find the question closed under the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, instead, you ask, &quot;I thought that situation X should apply here, but they say it's Y and I don't see why. Can someone fill in why?&quot; or something similar, the question will likely remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T00:32:40.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-02-01T11:03:28.293" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ef9Hl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Stack Exchange Review Queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T11:03:28.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10451" CreationDate="2018-02-01T19:31:18.443" Score="13" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I ask a question that is found to be duplicate. If I search the question previously to make sure it was not asked before it does not appear as the language of me and the question is not the same. So how can I stop asking duplicate questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180631" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T19:42:47.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T10:02:24.397" Title="How to stop asking duplicate questions?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10421" CreationDate="2018-02-01T20:26:48.003" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before asking a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq&quot;&gt;built-in search engine&lt;/a&gt; to search for duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, search the Phys.SE site with an external search engine, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?as_sitesearch=https%3A%2F%2Fphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;asking a question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pick a good title which captures your question in one line, preferable in the form of a question. The SE software will then suggest possible duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fill in relevant tags to further help the SE software. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T20:26:48.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10421" CreationDate="2018-02-01T20:28:47.580" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest paying attention to, and reading some of the suggested questions that pop up when you start to ask yours (I know this feature exists on the desktop site, maybe not mobile).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X2ED6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X2ED6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Search bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example from when I type in a new question with the same title as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/383673/paper-white-and-mirror-not-why&quot;&gt;your question from today&lt;/a&gt;; which is gaining some votes as a duplicate.  I actually flagged this one as a duplicate; so I can walk you through the process for &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; I found it, along with the process you could use to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can already see, there are some suggestions here for questions which may contain your answer.  The first link is your question, which it should be, because it has the exact same title; so the system is taking a guess that it could answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could have used the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/298848/why-white-flat-surfaces-are-white-and-not-mirror-like-reflective&quot;&gt;second link&lt;/a&gt;; but I thought I had seen a better answer somewhere else before.  As it turns out, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/321357/if-white-things-reflect-light-and-mirror-reflect-light-why-dont-they-look-the-s&quot;&gt;third link&lt;/a&gt; was a duplicate of the question that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1957/what-is-the-difference-between-a-white-object-and-a-mirror&quot;&gt;I used to flag as duplicate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another sample, the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/379495/dc-current-through-capacitor&quot;&gt;DC current through a capacitor&lt;/a&gt;, I can demonstrate the same technique:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oR3Cy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oR3Cy.png&quot; alt=&quot;sample search 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/168685/why-capacitor-pass-ac-and-block-dc-current&quot;&gt;link below your question&lt;/a&gt; is what your post got marked as a duplicate of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say, you can't apply this to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; your questions.  These ones are really low-hanging fruit, where the duplicate is quite obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For others, such as your black hole question, you may just need to think of other ways the question could be worded.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems as though you don't show any research of your own when asking these questions.  Generally, it's a good idea to try and look up answers on your own first.  Not just on this site; but other places as well.  Then you can narrow down what confuses you, and possibly find duplicates worded in ways that you wouldn't otherwise expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T20:28:47.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10425" CreationDate="2018-02-03T15:16:24.737" Score="4" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been watching a talk about physics by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and I was left with some questions that were not addressed in the talk's Q&amp;amp;A session. Is it appropriate to ask those questions at Physics Stack Exchange? And, if so, is it advisable to bundle them into a single question with a single background? Or would it be better to split them into multiple related but distinct questions, each with its own copy of the common background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183632" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T15:27:45.110" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T07:02:29.910" Title="Is PSE the place to ask for clarification on scientific talks?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10424" CreationDate="2018-02-03T17:03:35.430" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for asking. Yes, you can ask physics questions here. But do note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be as self-contained as possible. Users who did not attend the talk should be able to understand the question anyway, and without the need of relying on external sources (lecture notes, a video, etc.). All the relevant information should be in the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ideally speaking&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, post should contain one and only one question. You can and should open multiple threads, and ask a single question on each one. Of course, you can and should include links to the rest of threads if they are closely related (not only to  help draw a more global picture of your concerns, but also for the sake of future readers). But, again, each post should be self-contained, so make sure to include all relevant information (background, context, etc.) in each of them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The standard policy applies to each of the posts. For example, questions should be conceptual as opposed to, say, arithmetical: we want answers to be useful to a broader audience, so we won't flesh out a mathematical computation for you. If you don't understand a derivation, then try to pinpoint the conceptual obstruction, not the arithmetical one. Strictly mathematical questions (how to simplify this formula?) are off-topic, but they may be on-topic on Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: In practice, though, people usually allow several subquestions, as long as they are all part of a single &quot;major question&quot;. It's not easy to quantitatively measure how far the subquestions can be from one another without becoming too broad -- it's one of those &quot;you'll know when you see it&quot; situations. When in doubt, just post the questions together and if someone thinks there are too many of them, or they are not related closely enough, they'll let you know. You can always delete some of the subquestions and open a new thread.&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T21:28:31.340" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T21:28:31.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10421" CreationDate="2018-02-04T02:39:18.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should search for duplicates before asking your question, but the built-in search engine is really not that good for this task. Doing a google search for your question with &quot;site:physics.stackexchange.com&quot; at the end of your query is a superior way to find duplicates on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare, for instance, my search for duplicates to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/384117/electron-drift-velocity-does-not-explain-observed-results&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=electron+drift+velocity+current+speed&quot;&gt;Built-in search engine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=electron+drift+velocity+current+speed+site%3Aphysics.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The query isn't perfect, but the Google search, unlike the site search, immediately brings up relevant results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T02:39:18.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10424" CreationDate="2018-02-04T07:02:29.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're unsure about asking I recommend asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;in the Physics chat room first&lt;/a&gt;. The chat room isn't ideal for getting lengthy and detailed answers, but it's a good way to firm up your ideas about exactly what you want to ask on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need a rep of at least 20 to post in the chat room, but your association bonus has provided that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T07:02:29.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-02-06T04:55:02.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/noaFv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Haikus are awesome/ Chemistry is more so/ Ask straight away!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104362" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T04:55:02.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-07T11:45:21.613" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often come across interesting questions which I can not answer. As a consequence, I cannot verify the given answers, while some seem to be helpful. Is it recommended to upvote such answers, where my knowledge doesn't reach to verify them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173002" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T20:29:16.397" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T00:30:05.830" Title="Should I upvote answers that I can't verify?" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-07T17:27:24.457" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today was my first time reviewing low-quality posts, and I accidentally pressed the &quot;Looks OK&quot; button a few times for posts that should clearly be deleted, as I was used to reviewing edits and &quot;Looks OK&quot; and &quot;Approve Edit&quot; are in the same place. Is there a way to reverse this decision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139781" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T17:28:51.907" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T19:48:32.590" Title="Is it possible to change review decisions?" Tags="|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10430" CreationDate="2018-02-07T19:48:32.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot change your decision. What you can do is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you meant to vote/flag (in First Post/Late Answer), just go back to the post (outside the review queue) and proceed as you wanted to initially. The end result is the same so no big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you meant to approve/reject an edit, but clicked on the wrong button, you can always go back to the post (outside the review queue) and do the edit manually (or roll it back) . Of course, this is not ideal because the acceptance/rejection has side effects (e.g., +2 rep.points in the first case, and a record of a rejected edit in the second case).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you meant to recommend deletion, you can always go back to the post (outside the review queue) and flag it again (or vote to delete if you have that privilege). Note that three &quot;Looks OK&quot; votes will remove the post from the queue, so try not to miss the correct button. Conversely, if you meant to vote &quot;Looks OK&quot; but the post eventually got deleted, you can always flag for mod attention and explain what happened, or vote to undelete (if you have that privilege).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you meant to vote to close/to leave open, or to reopen/leave closed, but clicked on the wrong button, you can always go back to the post (outside the review queue) and vote manually (or undo your vote). Note that three  &quot;Leave open/Leave closed&quot; will remove the post from the queue, so try not to miss the button.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, in most cases reviews require several votes, so one incorrect vote will not typically change the final action on the post. This is precisely what happened in your case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/205604&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/205604&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/205579&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/205579&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the posts were eventually deleted in spite of your &quot;Looks OK&quot; vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that if you get some review wrong, you can always go to the chat and ask people to review the same item and take the right decision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T19:48:32.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10429" CreationDate="2018-02-07T20:27:37.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6868/25301&quot;&gt;previously argued&lt;/a&gt; that knowledge is probably one reason one wouldn't vote on a question, so I'd be inclined to say, &lt;em&gt;yes, if you don't understand the answer, you probably shouldn't vote on it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T20:27:37.737" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10429" CreationDate="2018-02-07T21:00:45.333" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say yes, but with &lt;em&gt;considerable&lt;/em&gt; moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a large gray zone between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I know exactly what the answer should be&quot;, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I have no idea what the answer should be&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And probably most askers, to give an example, find themselves in this gray zone: they know enough to be able to formulate the question but (supposedly) don't know what the answer is. Of course, authoritative references might give you confidence a given answer is correct, but often you cannot be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I think it's natural to upvote answers one can't assure are correct, when they seem particularly informative and clear; and I admit I probably do that with larger likelihood when they are written by high-rep. users and even more if positively commented and considerably upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of the bandwagon effect and other possible pitfalls and know that this is probably precisely the mechanism behind the few highly upvoted &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; answers one can find here. But the SE is clearly designed to allow all users to vote, not only specialists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, if the answer is at a level you expect to understand, then not understanding it is a measure of the answer being unhelpful, by definition, which means you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&quot;&gt;should &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;voting down a post signals [...] that the post [...] fails to communicate information`.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T00:30:05.830" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T00:30:05.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10435" CreationDate="2018-02-08T01:39:04.547" Score="4" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got taken off a 1 year suspension for the second time. I don't want to do anything that will get me another 1 year suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw many things I wanted to edit on my own stuff while I was suspended. Should I pace my edits or am I safe to edit everything with in scope of coarse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T03:28:03.437" Title="Editing my own stuff get me suspended?" Tags="|support|editing|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10434" CreationDate="2018-02-08T03:28:03.437" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you were suspended last time around for posting low-quality questions (which are a problem because they create work and annoyance for other members of the site) and making scores of edits that didn't substantially improve the posts being edited but did clog the active lists with questions that folks had already seen (which &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; creates work and annoyance for others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... If you want to avoid being suspended again, don't do anything that creates work and annoyance for other users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put more thought and research into your questions before posting them - if you can't formulate a clear, well-researched question, sit on it for a bit until you have the time to flesh it out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put more thought into your edits before submitting them - if you're not sure the edit you're about to submit makes a significant difference in the quality or content of the post you're editing, don't submit it until you have an edit that does. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T03:28:03.437" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T05:29:21.447" Score="9" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally think that the whole point of creating the duplicates is to encourage users to add new answers/comments to the original question of the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what really seems to happen is that the original question rarely receives more answers/comments probably because the question is just old.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$~$&lt;/span&gt;So I think we should add more answers to the original question because those existing answers sometimes don’t encompass or completely address the duplicate one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172742" LastEditorUserId="172742" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T03:00:23.303" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T03:00:23.303" Title="Should we add more answers/comments to the original question of the duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|late-answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2018-02-08T05:37:18.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should answer old questions because most of the time your new answer will definitely add more information to the existing answers and the new answer will give a different way of explaining which also is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172742" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T05:37:18.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10437" CreationDate="2018-02-08T10:52:33.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this happens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;those existing answers sometimes don’t encompass or completely address the duplicate one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then the onus is on the poster of the new question to edit their post so that it delineates itself from the previous question and carves out a new bit of question-space that's not covered by the existing answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that can't be done, but OP nevertheless feels that the existing answers are unsatisfactory responses to the existing question, there's several available routes, including editing the original question so it's clearer what should go into answers, as well as setting a bounty (either by OP or someone else) to draw attention to the old question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an unfortunate fact of life that we cannot answer all questions to a fully satisfactory level, and resource-recommendation questions are not an exception to that. Keeping straight duplicates open just compounds the problem, and I don't see why RRQs should get special treatment compared to identical situations that happen in all the other tags on a regular basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T10:52:33.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T13:46:25.880" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to seek an answer to the following question but am not sure if my question will be considered as off topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that bond angles are almost always measured in degrees instead of radians. A scientist told me that in his research, they always measure the temperature in Celsius instead of Kelvin. In the scientist world there are some other units that are preferred over units from the International System of Units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is, since there is a International System of Units, why should people, especially professionals, respect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184176" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T15:03:19.783" Title="Is it proper to ask about the preferrence of units?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10441" CreationDate="2018-02-08T15:03:19.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do occasionally take questions of this type (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235581/are-ergs-commonly-used-in-astrophysics-if-so-is-there-a-specific-reason-for-it&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was well received), but they're on the edge of topicality as being primarily opinion-based. Questions whose answers are intrinsically subjective &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be a good fit for the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A engine, but they need to be pitched correctly for them to work; in that regard, the main reference for guidance on writing questions that work well is the SE blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the specific examples you give, I would tend to say that they are too localized, and the difference between two different forms of accepted SI units is not strong enough to merit a meaningful answer on this site. As for the overall sociological question of why some fields of science retain the usage of non-SI units despite the overall shift to SI (and indeed, as in my first link, despite specific pressure from field-specific institutions to change to SI units), that's definitely not on-topic here, but it may be a good fit for &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Academia Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T15:03:19.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T18:33:05.430" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may share a slightly tongue-in-cheek theory about some of the users I've observed on SE, and especially a specific user that has come back recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user seems like it could be an AI developed by Google or Microsoft, which has been programmed to simulate human behavior by &quot;participating&quot; in Q&amp;amp;A sites. Here is my evidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The questions it asks are random combinations of loosely-related concepts, with no high-level rhyme or reason between them, and certainly no discernible goal of what it's trying to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to have the ability to &quot;learn&quot; in the human sense.  Despite copious feedback to stop posting low-quality questions, and even numerous pleas to take a break from SE entirely, it continues to post suspiciously similar questions over and over, and insists on wanting to &quot;help&quot; in other ways, as though it never received any feedback at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has a special insistence on editing and tweaking old questions, presumably with the goal of improving the upvote score. This indicates an algorithmic preference towards optimizing for maximal reputation, by testing which kinds of edits will cause an increase in upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More generally, it seems to have no other purpose than to accumulate reputation points (by asking random questions that might accidentally make sense) and receiving badges (mostly for participation).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we do with users like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10334" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T23:40:30.010" Title="Are there AIs among us?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10444" CreationDate="2018-02-08T20:31:11.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The impression of a problematic user having 'come back' can sometimes be caused when a user is suspended but then decides to attempt to circumvent those restrictions by starting a new account. This is known as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57682/how-should-sockpuppets-be-handled-on-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;sockpuppet&lt;/a&gt; and it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an acceptable practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you suspect that that might be the case with a given user, it is certainly in order to raise a custom moderator flag detailing what you think might be happening and any relevant links to past content that feels similar to the new posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T20:31:11.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10444" CreationDate="2018-02-08T23:40:30.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are indeed several users that fit this description, but you have also to consider that they could just be people who hunt for reputation and badges just for the sake of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;reward system&quot; of SE is very similar to that of many social networks: reputation is in some ways not so different form likes, retweets, hearts or whatnot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people just strive for the sensation that receiving such rewards grants them, and their behavior is only aimed at maximizing reputation, without much regard for the quality of their contribution to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115736" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T23:40:30.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10437" CreationDate="2018-02-08T23:52:32.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what I personally do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I see a new question that I know or suspect is a duplicate of an older question, &lt;em&gt;I point it out as soon as possible and I don't post any answer&lt;/em&gt;. This way, I try to divert the attention of the community from the new question to the old one, and maybe someone will post a new answer to the old one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I stumble upon an old question which is good and doesn't have a satisfactory answer, &lt;em&gt;if I know the answer, I post my answer&lt;/em&gt;. Sure, you will get less attention than what you would get by answering a new duplicate question, but gaining reputation for the sake of it is not what the site is for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I stumble upon an old question which is good and doesn't have a satisfactory answer, &lt;em&gt;if I don't know the answer, I consider starting a bounty&lt;/em&gt; on the question, in order to get more attention to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115736" LastEditorUserId="115736" LastEditDate="2018-02-12T07:30:51.413" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T07:30:51.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-10T18:14:10.780" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I upvote/undo downvote of a question/answer/comment which I mistakenly downvoted? Similar is the query about a mistakenly upvoted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="167198" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T18:58:33.223" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T18:58:33.223" Title="Correction of mistake regarding votes" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-02-12T17:01:36.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10449" CreationDate="2018-02-10T18:48:53.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Find a way to improve it. After you edited the post, you can change the vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no way for that, then bookmark the post and watch, maybe others will later edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no change, then your possibilities were depleted. However, the system is driven by the stats and not by the induvidual votes. Thus, if your votes are based on careful consideration, it helps a lot more, as some rare mistake harms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T18:48:53.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10421" CreationDate="2018-02-12T10:02:24.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took the liberty to look at your questions, and I can see a lot of one-liners there. I suggest you research the question you're about to ask yourself, and show that research in your question. If you do that, you'll more likely find similar questions (with answers) or find the answer yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, getting some level of understanding in topics you're interested in really pays off. E.g. if you're interested in black holes, read a book about them before asking questions: most of the basic questions you may have will be answered there, and the remaining questions will be a much better fit on Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83721" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T10:02:24.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10437" CreationDate="2018-02-12T16:01:04.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the points made by @parker in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with &quot;duplicates&quot; is that a new question asked in totally equivalent terms to another older one, may not in fact be asking the same question, and will be dealing with different underlying assumptions by the questioner about what the question means and what a satisfactory answer looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with @EmilioPisanty's view that &quot;the onus is on the poster of the new question to edit their post so that it delineates itself from the previous question&quot;, is that the new questioner may not be able to clearly articulate how their question differs from an older one, or why answers on the older question are not satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, they may have to ask questions about why their question is not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is usually only possible to formulate a question precisely once you broadly have the answer to it and have integrated the two, or have examined the question with the assistance of others, so expecting precise questions puts the cart before the horse on a site designed to answer questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even trained academics do not formulate questions with perfect precision, or re-examine every assumption of their field of expertise in doing so - usually, their work carries so many assumptions that questions cannot be understood at all unless one has been through a process of gaining tacit knowledge of the field, which is why we have a system of education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the problem that, with very old questions and answers, none of the contributors may still be around to discuss them any further. There may also be a &quot;clutter&quot; of old discussion or shared assumptions, that new contributors do not want to be burdened with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure of the site and the way its notifications work, also makes it difficult to be clear that an answer on an old question, is really intended to address a person who created a &quot;duplicate&quot; which was then linked to the old question. The person asking the duplicate also cannot mark the answer accepted, since that is a right which belongs to the person who asked the original question. This is probably why links to &quot;old&quot; duplicates, get little attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the new questioner, whilst not rejecting answers to the existing question (or maybe simply holding that it is not understandable and cannot be evaluated), may also be seeking a fresh or alternative perspective on the same question without necessarily knowing how those alternatives will differ - and these can obviously only be solicited on this site by putting the question again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, if the questioner's position is not explicit, it may be necessary to pump the new questioner for further information on the question to establish whether they have merely overlooked an existing answer, or whether they think it is insufficient in some way, but such dialog obviously will create an administrative burden - quite possibly more burden than simply re-answering a question, or the dialog may simply start to resemble a re-answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another beneficial aspect of &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; duplicate questions, which is that it allows those &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; to rehearse satisfactory answers to the questions (and be assured that we have satisfactory answers), gain an insight into exactly how or why certain questions may be misconceived, and re-examine our own knowledge and ability to explain in the context of what may be a new set of contributors to the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, one does not want the same question asked separately every 5 days, but it might be reasonable to think that after as little as a few months (and certainly after a few years), the population of contributors may have changed significantly or totally - and that even if the questions are the same, new contributors may want to make a fresh attempt at answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that, unless a question is clearly about the formalism of physics and has a straightforward formal answer, we should hesitate to assume that questions ought to be treated as duplicates, merely because the form of words used in the question seems identical to that in another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179462" LastEditorUserId="179462" LastEditDate="2018-02-12T16:06:56.690" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T16:06:56.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-12T16:55:57.033" Score="13" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was sad this morning to see Gil Kalai's great question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27665/the-role-of-rigor&quot;&gt;role of rigor&lt;/a&gt; closed for being too broad. I was even sadder this afternoon when Prof. Kalai's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/385909/the-role-of-rigor-ii&quot;&gt;narrower follow-up question&lt;/a&gt;, was also closed for being too broad. The question also got some downvotes and, in my mind, unnecessarily condescending comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be (slightly) flippant about it, why the concentration on math?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question was put on hold as being too broad, yet here you are again with a subset of that question that is certainly going to be closed for the same reason. You're somehow not getting the message being sent to you. This sort of question just won't be acceptable. I'd suggest you go to the physicsforum.com where they may allow such loose questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first reaction is that it's a shame an extremely knowledgeable and capable mathematics professor is getting condescended to by people who only know the undergraduate curriculum or less, and that this might have something to do with the loss of knowledgeable users from this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second reaction is that I don't agree with the 'too broad' criterion. I got hooked on Phys.SE in the first place by the great answers to 'too broad' questions. If you look through the top questions of all time, almost all of the ones about general theory (i.e. excluding 'everyday-life' tags) are closed as too broad, or would be under the current criterion. The answers I am most proud of are all teetering on the edge of 'too broad'. I would bet that if you took a random 10k+ user and subtracted off the HNQ spam, the same would be true of their top answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put simply, I think questions that are &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; provide enormous value to the site and the physics community at large, and the only negative about them is that they're justifiably hard to answer.  Why not rethink this closure criterion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; it looks like I'm hitting some prescriptivist/descriptivist divide here. To be clear, I'm not asking what the current policy is. I'm proposing we change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T10:57:04.967" Title="Rethinking the &quot;too broad&quot; criterion" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10453" CreationDate="2018-02-12T17:22:38.163" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we need to be a bit cautious with this sort of question because it doesn't suit the avowed aim of the site i.e. to become a reference site for physicists. I find the question interesting, and I'd guess most of us do to some extent, but it's not the sort of question where the answer is ever likely to help a physicist trying to get on with the everyday job of doing (or learning) physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens my reopen vote was the fifth so the question is now open, but whether the question is closed or not wouldn't keep me awake at night. It's not as though a six year old question is suddenly going to attract lots of answers. In fact I'd question whether it's really worth re-examining questions of this sort of vintage. After six years does it really matter? With the &lt;em&gt;Close&lt;/em&gt; queue up to 87 pending questions there are better targets for people to aim at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T17:22:38.163" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10453" CreationDate="2018-02-12T17:48:17.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the current policy, the &quot;Role of rigor&quot; post is as broad as it gets, and should be closed. It would be hypocritical to do otherwise; we should treat all posts equally, even if they are popular or come from knowledgeable users.  In legal terms, laws are to be obeyed whether you agree with them or not. You first debate the law, and only when it changes you may act as you wanted. If you do otherwise, you get fined (or go to jail). Society cannot possibly work if everyone is going to ignore the established order when they find it inconvenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I believe it would be useful to reevaluate the current policy. If we agree it should be relaxed, then the &quot;Role of rigor&quot; post could be reopened. Until we do that, I really don't understand why people voted to reopen it. For what it's worth, I also found the post interesting, and I also believe it could be useful to relax the &quot;too broad&quot; policy a bit. But, again, under the current policy that post is to be closed; we closed posts that were much more specific (but had less upvotes/worse answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T17:48:17.257" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10453" CreationDate="2018-02-12T19:21:03.010" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a need to change the &quot;too broad&quot; policy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although broad questions can be interesting, and spark some good points; I think their very nature can present real problems here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplication for example, could be a real problem with these questions.  If part of the broad scope is answered somewhere else; then having it part of another question duplicates efforts and just in general makes things more messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that by having very broad questions, there's serious risk of lower quality answers.  You may receive good parts for some answers, but there could be pieces of information missing; and more likelihood that a different answer covers some other part of the question better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically; having broad topics risks spreading out answers into multiple broad questions; and diluting apparently quality; because a &quot;good&quot; answer to a question might have trouble addressing all aspects of the question well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead; having more focused questions (that can even build on each other), keeps the information compartmentalized; so that the high quality answers are all-around good answers to the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T19:21:03.010" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-12T20:37:47.047" Score="17" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been bothering me for a while, and I'd like to speak up about it. I see, with a much higher frequency than I would like, comments that look, with rather little variation, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question seems like a list question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and which say nothing else at all. I would like to argue that &lt;strong&gt;these comments do not do anyone any good and they should not be posted at all&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the intention behind these comments is to initiate a closure procedure on the question they're posted under. To some extent, the &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt; offered by the comment tends to be accurate, in the sense that they are indeed generally posted under list-based questions, but the (bare) implication that this means that they should be closed immediately is not. List-based questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic on this site, which means that identifying a given question as list-based is not an &lt;em&gt;ipso facto&lt;/em&gt; reason for closing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are indeed a bunch of good reasons why list-based questions are often such a bad fit for our format that the only reasonable thing to do them is to close them. These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many list-based questions are little more than junk food: they appeal to a broad userbase ('many users enjoy them') but the actual content they invite is quite low. They therefore invite many answers along the lines of &quot;ooooooh, I've got one too&quot; that add very little to the debate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They tend to be phrased in a way that invites contributions that are short / shallow / undescriptive, and this lowers the quality of the responses that show up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a particularly long half-life, staying on the front page for weeks and popping back up for months, thus taking attention away from newer content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because they have a broad possible answer-space, most answers will either be too long or incomplete; this isn't fatal but it is a bad fit for our format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The existence of multiple equally-valid answers puts our voting system into a bit of a tailspin, and it makes its usage for sorting and validation much less useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here is the important thing: we don't close list questions because they are list questions. We close them because of the reasons I stated above (or some suitable superset).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This then brings me to why a comment that says &quot;This question seems like a list question&quot; (and nothing else) is so noxious. The role of comments in Stack Exchange is to help clarify and improve the post they comment on, and that comment does &lt;strong&gt;nothing&lt;/strong&gt; to help the OP (who will very often be quite new to the site) understand why their question might be problematic and how they could improve it to make it a better fit for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that comment is a good deal worse than empty: the only thing that it really accomplishes is serve as a rallying cry. &quot;Here&quot;, says the comment, &quot;I've thought about this and I've come to the conclusion that it should be closed so you should vote to close it too&quot; -- without even bothering to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the question should actually be closed, either to reviewers, other prospective closevoters, the OP, or future visitors. It is very little more than an attempt to shut down the debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, say you've found a list question which you think should be closed, and you're itching to leave a scathing comment. What should you post other than just the self-styled-kiss-of-death &quot;this is a list question&quot; not-actually-an-argument zinger? Well, why not actually explain (from the reasons above, or otherwise) why you think &lt;em&gt;this particular list question&lt;/em&gt; should be closed? That does have the seeming disadvantage that you'd have to think a bit before you close down someone else's discussion - but in this context that is a Good Thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: explain what you mean, or at the very least link somewhere appropriate. Explain to the OP why their question is not a great fit for the site, and point them to a resource that tells them how they can improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I think the canonical place to go is the meta thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;, which makes a pretty solid show of consensus that not all list questions should be closed, and explains the things to avoid and how those differ from the things to shoot for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T14:25:09.207" Title="T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶q̶u̶e̶s̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶m̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶q̶u̶e̶s̶t̶i̶o̶n̶" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10453" CreationDate="2018-02-13T06:19:18.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original question was asked six years ago on the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130361/why-did-theoretical-physics-fail&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/a&gt; site and indeed the connection between physics and mathematics was more natural for that site compared to a general physics Q/A site. Similar questions were very successful on MathOverflow. Although it was originally tagged &quot;big list&quot; question it attracted four good answers. It seems that readers found the question and answers useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the closing massage suggested to edit the question to make it less broad, I tried to make it less broad by splitting it into two questions. It is probably a good opportunity to think about the &quot;too broad&quot; policy, and also about a policy of closing old questions based on current policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1360" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T10:57:04.967" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T10:57:04.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10462" CreationDate="2018-02-14T16:23:58.367" Score="6" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/373905/what-are-the-strongest-objections-to-be-made-against-decoherence-as-an-explanati&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/206387&quot;&gt;deleted&lt;/a&gt;. For anyone who can't see it, the answer was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the simplest way to phrase the main objection is that decoherence doesn't even try to solve anything beyond &amp;quot;for all practical purposes.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine: just imagine that we're sufficiently advanced to make it &amp;quot;practical&amp;quot; to track all the degrees of freedom for the system in question. Then it's clear that decoherence is just a fancy word for simple entanglement, and we're back at square one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit it could have been phrased more clearly, but one comment says &amp;quot;If you have a new question, please ask it by clicking the Ask Question button&amp;quot; and another says &amp;quot;This does not provide an answer to the question.&amp;quot; I don't think either applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; answer the question. A strong objection to the claim that decoherence solves collapse is that it &lt;em&gt;intends&lt;/em&gt; to solve it only &amp;quot;for all practical purposes&amp;quot; (FAPP), which is easily overcome by having enough &amp;quot;practical&amp;quot; ability to track and control all relevant entanglements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Penrose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under normal circumstances, one must regard the density matrix as some kind of approximation to the whole quantum truth. For there is no general principle providing an absolute bar to extracting information from the environment.[...] Accordingly, such descriptions are referred to as FAPP [For All Practical Purposes]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a future technology could provide means whereby quantum phase relations can be monitored in detail, under circumstances where present-day technology would simply ‘give up’. It would seem that the resort to a density-matrix description is a technology-dependent prescription! With better technology, the state- vector description could be maintained for longer, and the resort to a density matrix put off until things get really hopelessly messy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to contact the members who marked it for deletion and ask for clarification? Is that an appropriate course of action? Is there any sense in asking for undeletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47309" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T07:33:27.483" Title="Why was my answer on decoherence deleted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10461" CreationDate="2018-02-15T07:33:27.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your questions directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way to contact the members who marked it for deletion and ask for clarification? Is that an appropriate course of action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of ways you could try to attract the attention of the people who deleted your post, but our system is designed so you don't have to. Quite a few people have the ability to vote to delete or undelete posts, and if it's really appropriate to undelete your post, it doesn't matter who actually does it, whether the people who originally deleted it or others. So in general, when you think it's appropriate to reverse some sort of community moderation action (like closing a question or deleting a post), don't worry about finding the specific people who took the action in the first place. You only need to bring it to the attention of somebody with the appropriate privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting on meta, as you did, is a fine way to do that (although don't make a frequent habit of it). Another option is to check in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, which gives you less visibility but you may get lucky with a quicker response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when it comes to asking why your post was deleted in the first place, only the people who actually deleted it can tell you with 100% certainty. But in many cases, other site members can give you a pretty good guess, and again, that's usually good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any sense in asking for undeletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure. Sometimes mistakes happen and it's totally appropriate to ask for a fix if you think this is the case. But you do have to show that you understand the rules we have surrounding deletion of posts, and you'll have to make a solid argument based on those rules that the reason your post was deleted shouldn't actually apply. This doesn't have to be complicated; in your case something like this is all I'd need to be convinced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question asks for &quot;the strongest objections that have been raised against&quot; the acceptance of decoherence, and I addressed that directly by saying &quot;...the simplest way to phrase the main objection is...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying you have to write it like this, or that you have to use direct quotes or anything like that; all I'm saying is that it can be short and direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T07:33:27.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-15T14:20:52.900" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/276690/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was closed? Especially why on grounds of being &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;? It was quite clear, was it not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148764" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T14:29:17.317" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T14:29:17.317" Title="Why was this question closed on grounds of being unclear?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10467" CreationDate="2018-02-15T14:32:51.967" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am quite sure &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/386428/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was a result of misguided information presented to the OP about Special relativity. But I think the OP only wanted a thought-experiment kind of proof for length contraction. The fact that they thought time dilation &lt;em&gt;causes&lt;/em&gt; length contraction is to some extent irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/206601&quot;&gt;When I presented an edit to this effect, it was rejected&lt;/a&gt;. So are we going to keep down-voting this question and not allow more answers to show up in the true intent of the OP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148764" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T15:21:21.513" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T18:52:04.550" Title="What should be done about this question and questions like this, where the OP is just received misguided information?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10465" CreationDate="2018-02-15T15:12:17.060" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would venture to guess it is because it changes the intent of the question, and we don't like edits that change the intent of the original question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, the information may have been misguided and that's why the original title was what it was. So, somebody answering that question should answer it to correct the misguided information. By editing that out of the title, you remove a key component of the original question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T15:12:17.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10465" CreationDate="2018-02-15T15:39:43.920" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions founded on a misunderstanding of something are a work-a-day reality of teaching physics and on Physics Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the time and inclination, then &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; the misunderstanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes that might just be a comment, sometimes it's an answer to the question (if not he one the OP expected), and occasionally it's not clear which it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; edit the question then several things might happen including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You change the meaning of the question and invalidate answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get in ahead of any answer, but the OP doesn't get the correct they need, they answers coached in language that assumes they understand the &lt;em&gt;very thing that is causing them trouble&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and neither of those are good outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T18:52:04.550" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T18:52:04.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-15T15:46:15.297" Score="4" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the wake of a recent unfruitful discussion I feel it is necessary for the community to come to an agreement on what kind of language we want to use here. In particular, on whether we want to discourage people from using gendered language to refer to other people whose gender is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it is a cultural issue, but to me it is pretty obvious we should always use gender neutral language to refer to other people, unless we know for a fact what gender they identify with. We should never try and guess based on their behaviour. Yet, there is at least one user (with whom I had the aforementioned discussion) who insists on using gendered language despite being told that some people find that offensive; despite being told that it is a dangerous attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, my question: do we, as a community, want to discourage gendered language? Or should we just leave it to the discretion of users what kind of language to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T23:00:16.157" Title="Please use gender neutral language" Tags="|discussion|policy|users|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10468" CreationDate="2018-02-15T22:54:44.470" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, my question: do we, as a community, want to discourage gendered language? Or should we just leave it to the discretion of users what kind of language to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, this proposal is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting using moderator action to enforce the use of ungendered language. Nevertheless I would like to clarify that we won't do that, not unless people at Stack Exchange direct us otherwise. Even if the moderators may think it's a good idea to use ungendered language, it's not something we will enforce in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say that, if a member says that they want to be referred to using a particular gender of pronoun (e.g. &quot;her&quot;), and another member, knowing this preference, uses a differently-gendered pronoun (e.g. &quot;him&quot;) to refer to them, that would be considered a violation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;our &quot;be nice&quot; policy&lt;/a&gt;. This would generally apply to cases in which one uses a pronoun that excludes a group that the member has indicated they want to be considered part of. (So &quot;they&quot;/&quot;them&quot; should be pretty safe, if you want to use it, because it's supposed to be fully generic and apply to anyone; but, for example, don't use &quot;he&quot; with someone who has identified a preference to be considered female.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any other violation of &quot;be nice&quot;, if it happens repeatedly that can be cause for mod action (such as suspension).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T23:00:16.157" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T23:00:16.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-16T22:16:11.857" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question stems from a few issues and similar meta topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the best meta reference for this would be the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10058/is-an-askers-age-relevant?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Is an asker's age relevant?&lt;/a&gt;; I consider this to be somewhat of a follow-up on this.  This is different though, where that question and answers focused on  keeping that age information in the question.  This question is about &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; having age as the indication of knowledge level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, my question is; is the age of the asker alone enough to indicate the level of knowledge we should be answering the question at?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm prompted to ask this based on the (original version of) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/386346/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;; where OP was asking how to explain that we can now see atoms to a 4 year old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's my personal opinion that in the original format, such questions would be considered opinion based.  That's because we don't really know what level of physics knowledge the 4 year old has; and (as shown in the answers) users have quite different interpretations of what a 4 year old is capable of understanding.  There are multiple ways to resolve this, such as by being more explicit with the level of knowledge, or by removing those restrictions completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It became pretty clear that many members of the community consider these questions perfectly acceptable; but I would love to have a clear consensus on this, instead of just discussion in the comments of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T23:00:02.710" Title="Is age a sufficient indication of expected knowledge level?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10470" CreationDate="2018-02-16T23:00:02.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that an age alone does give a reasonable indication of what level we should be targeting, up to maybe 16 or so. When someone asks &quot;how would I explain this to a 4-year-old?&quot; I think we should take that as referring to an average 4-year-old in &quot;Western&quot; society (noting that this site primarily targets English speakers). We don't need to dig into the background of the asker's child or whoever they have in mind. If their child is unusually knowledgeable, then they should be looking for answerers targeted at, say, an 8-year-old instead, or whatever is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answerers may have varying impressions of what a 4-year-old can understand, but I think that's fine. It just means that some answers will under- or overshoot the mark as far as what level of sophistication is expected, which makes some answers better for the asker and others worse, just as with every question. And, as with every question, some answers that are less useful for the asker may be more useful for other readers. That's entirely normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T23:00:02.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T07:34:57.990" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/386826/saturated-bjt-transistors-v-ce-v-be-aka-things-that-make-you-go-hm&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; migrated back to the EE forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted it is about an electronics device, but the atomic level behaviour of the seimiconductor junction is definitely a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally posted it to both forums, understanding that the EE folks have a more behavioural explanation for the phenomenon, but the root physical description of what is going on is much less clear, to many an EE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed the accepted descriptions are, in the EE world, to the most part, accepted at face value with an air of.. &quot;OK, I don't get it, but it explains what I can measure it doing, so let's go with that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd really like so see a deeper explanation than just &quot;oh it's because electron s magically diffuse across despite the electric field going the wrong way and without affecting the base in their travels.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147937" LastEditorUserId="147937" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T16:19:37.453" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T16:19:37.453" Title="Why was this question migrated" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T09:42:18.900" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recurring question on physics.stackexchange is &quot;how do I understand gyroscopic precession?&quot;&#xA;The actual question may take many different forms, but the underlying problem is always that gyroscopic precession seems very counter-intuitive, and what the people are looking for is an explanation that removes the counter-intuitive appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in 2012 I posted a discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47461/what-determines-the-direction-of-precession-of-a-gyroscope/47645#47645&quot;&gt;gyroscopic precesssion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I would like to do:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Keep an eye on new questions, and when a question is posted that is once again effectively asking &quot;how do I understand gyroscopic precession?&quot; I'd like to add a link to my 2012 answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would that be considered to be a form of vanity linking? &#xA;I'm eager to help people understand gyroscopic precession, but I don't want end up in a position where I'm suspected of vanity linking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would it be considered bad form if I look up existing questions to add a link to my 2012 discussion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LATER EDIT:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe I should have mentioned: over the years my answer (out of seven answers) on that page has accumulated 11 upvotes, the second most upvoted has 3 upvotes. (Yeah, tiny numbers, but still.) I'm convinced my discussion is helpful; the upvotes do seem to corroborate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17198" LastEditorUserId="17198" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T10:27:08.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T10:27:08.203" Title="Is it OK to direct many effective duplicate questions to an answer written by myself?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10473" CreationDate="2018-02-17T10:14:55.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think linking to a question you have answered yourself is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I regularly do this myself and have written several self answered questions specifically to provide a canonical question and answer that can be used as a standard reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand your squeamishness - I feel much the same and sometimes (not always!) make my self answered questions community wiki just for my own peace of mind (whether anyone else cares or even notices is debatable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this site is to make the world of physics a better place by providing clear and complete answers to the questions that puzzle physicists. This is a noble aim and everyone who provides answers here is doing their bit towards this end, and &lt;strong&gt;for free&lt;/strong&gt;! If you get a few extra totally valueless Internet points as a result then that's fine by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re your last question, if you can make your answer better by linking to or using material from other answers then you should do this. It's nice to reference the people who wrote the other answers, but at the end of the day your aim is to make your answer as helpful as possible to puzzled physicists. If it makes you look super-intelligent as well that's an extra benefit, which provides some small reward for the time and effort you put in :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T10:20:18.877" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T10:20:18.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10472" CreationDate="2018-02-17T12:29:30.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;General comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As OP already mentions, the topics of electric circuits &amp;amp; electronics have an overlap between Phys.SE and EE.SE. Traditionally, the line has been drawn somewhere between diodes and transistors, meaning that Phys.SE typically allows non-technical questions about passive components, such that RCL circuits and diodes, while active components, transistors, integrated circuits, and technical questions, etc, typically belong to EE.SE. This is of course just a rule of thumb with room for interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general one should not crosspost, as this may waste the time of answerers. If one crossposts, one should at least link to the crosspost (on both sites!). Also it is recommended to adapt the question to the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the case at hand, if OP could stress in the post what aspect of the question that is not already covered in the EE crosspost, then it could be reopened on Phys.SE. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T12:29:30.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10479" CreationDate="2018-02-17T13:20:17.437" Score="-4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are users with less than 125 reputation not allowed to cast their vote? Don't they have right to express their feelings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184625" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T15:39:25.400" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T15:39:25.400" Title="Is it appropriate to deny the right to vote for a person?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10457" CreationDate="2018-02-17T14:19:38.907" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/383475/2451&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post seems like a list question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a standard comment that I have been using in lack of better to bring attention when a question has no unique answer, and fits poorly into the SE Q&amp;amp;A format in its current form.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment is not meant as a full explanation, and there is often no time for that. (It would be good if someone could crystallize the entire &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/2451&quot;&gt;good-list-bad-list&lt;/a&gt; discussion so that it fits in a single comment!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing nothing is not an ideal option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, other users step in and help with explanation, reviewing, and suggesting how the post could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T14:25:09.207" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T14:25:09.207" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10476" CreationDate="2018-02-17T15:36:18.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with over just &lt;strong&gt;25&lt;/strong&gt; reputation are allowed to cast &lt;em&gt;upvotes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is only &lt;em&gt;downvoting&lt;/em&gt; that requires 125 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are good reasons for this, primarily, it's because the SE think's it's more beneficial to focus on upvotes as you are still becoming used to the community.  It should take some time for you to recognize how the community functions, what is good content, and what is bad content in the SE format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is community driven, so the members who primarily drive the voting process should at least be users familiar enough to gain 125 rep somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most importantly, as outlined in the Help Centre, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;Downvoting is a privilege&lt;/a&gt;, not a right.  It is one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;many privileges&lt;/a&gt; that are earned as you become more familiar with the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downvoting privilege page I linked also gives good advice for what to do instead of downvoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the alternatives to down-voting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The up-vote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of voting down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the post is spammy or offensive, flag it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is duplicate or off-topic, flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T15:36:18.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10481" CreationDate="2018-02-17T17:47:37.117" Score="4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348145/question-about-the-operating-of-forces-in-a-physics-problem&quot;&gt;A question&lt;/a&gt; I asked a while ago has been put on hold because the moderators think my question does not satisfy the criteria of a good homework question. I disagreed with that assertion so I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flag-summary/164413&quot;&gt;flagged&lt;/a&gt; my question. It was declined with this response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of&#xA;  content that requires their intervention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may have made a mistake by writing in my flag statement that I wanted an explanation for marking my question as off-topic. I actually wanted them to either remove the off-topic remark from my question or give a clearer explanation about where I went wrong with my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am now unsure about the role of moderators in such cases. Did the moderators not put my question on hold? Are they not the ones who can intervene and mark my question as valid again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164413" LastEditorUserId="164413" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T17:58:54.280" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T11:35:35.897" Title="Role of moderators in reviewing flags" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10480" CreationDate="2018-02-17T18:14:05.840" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reviewing and (possibly) re-opening questions is part of the normal operation of the site—it is the purview of normal users with at least 3000 reputation. It does not call for the intervention of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;elected moderators&lt;/a&gt; (distinguished by a ♦ after their username) who are there to deal with unusual or rapidly evolving cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T11:35:35.897" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T11:35:35.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-18T18:57:14.087" Score="20" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often find the need to have a comment template saved for future use, say when indicating to an asker that they need to write equations in MathJax instead of attaching them as images (with links to relevant meta threads on using MathJax), or trying to get them to improve a question asked with the homework-and-exercises tag by linking to the policy on homework and check-my-work style questions without flagging their question (where I believe the question can be improved to fit inside the scope of Phys.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we have a meta post, or an FAQ page, with a few helpful comment templates for new users? I know a few users have comment templates saved somewhere, and I often simply hunt for the relevant comment in my own comment history, but a canonical location for comment templates that most people would prefer will simplify things somewhat, especially for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36973" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T18:03:54.953" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T11:07:37.530" Title="A place for helpful comment templates?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10484" CreationDate="2018-02-18T19:18:23.400" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Benjol/SE-AutoReviewComments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments&lt;/a&gt; userscript with the following comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please only ask &lt;em&gt;one question per post&lt;/em&gt; — only ask several if they are so closely related that it wouldn't make sense to split them up since they cannot reasonably be answered separately. That way, answerers that might be able to answer one question but not the others still can provide useful, complete answers to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework-like/check-my-work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583&quot;&gt;homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are generally considered off-topic here. We intend our questions to be potentially useful to a broader set of users than just the one asking, and prefer &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; questions over those just asking for a specific computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too little information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's currently unclear what exactly this question is asking. Please add further information about the context so that potential answerers will know exactly what the issue here is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevant question information in link&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's currently unclear what exactly this question is asking without clicking on the link you provided. To make questions more accessible and guard against &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt;, please include all relevant information, such as the explanation of notation or specific terminology used, in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link-only answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not post links without at least a basic summary of what they contain and how that content answers the question, since link-only answers become useless if the link &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rots away&lt;/a&gt;. Link-only answers are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/859/50583&quot;&gt;not considered answers&lt;/a&gt; here and will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm deleting this in accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. Please do not give complete or near-complete answers to homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MathJax, not pictures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not post formulae as screenshots, but use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020/143136&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Text, not pictures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563&quot;&gt;do not post images of texts you want to quote&lt;/a&gt;, but type it out instead so it is readable for all users and so that it can be indexed by search engines. For formulae, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good question titles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider writing more useful question titles, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6413/50583&quot;&gt;How do we write good question titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you too want to use these comments, you can copy the following source directly into the import/export menu of the script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;###[Q] Too broad&#xA;Please only ask *one question per post* — only ask several if they are so closely related that it wouldn't make sense to split them up since they cannot reasonably be answered separately. That way, answerers that might be able to answer one question but not the others still can provide useful, complete answers to a question.&#xA;&#xA;###[Q] Homework-like/check-my-work&#xA;Please note that [homework-like questions](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583) and [check-my-work questions](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583) are generally considered off-topic here. We intend our questions to be potentially useful to a broader set of users than just the one asking, and prefer *conceptual* questions over those just asking for a specific computation.&#xA;&#xA;###[Q] Too little information&#xA;It's currently unclear what exactly this question is asking. Please add further information about the context so that potential answerers will know exactly what the issue here is.&#xA;&#xA;###[Q] Relevant question information in link&#xA;It's currently unclear what exactly this question is asking without clicking on the link you provided. To make questions more accessible and guard against [link rot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot), please include all relevant information, such as the explanation of notation or specific terminology used, in your question.&#xA;&#xA;###[A] Link-only answer&#xA;Please do not post links without at least a basic summary of what they contain and how that content answers the question, since link-only answers become useless if the link [rots away](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot). Link-only answers are [not considered answers](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/859/50583) here and will be deleted.&#xA;&#xA;###[A] Homework answer&#xA;I'm deleting this in accordance with [our homework policy](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583). Please do not give complete or near-complete answers to homework-like questions.&#xA;&#xA;### MathJax, not pictures&#xA;Please do not post formulae as screenshots, but use [MathJax](https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020/143136) instead.&#xA;&#xA;### Text, not pictures&#xA;Please [do not post images of texts you want to quote](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563), but type it out instead so it is readable for all users and so that it can be indexed by search engines. For formulae, use [MathJax](https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020) instead.&#xA;&#xA;###[Q] Good question titles&#xA;Please consider writing more useful question titles, see [How do we write good question titles?](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6413/50583)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2022-08-30T11:07:37.530" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T11:07:37.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-18T23:40:23.993" Score="2" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348145/question-about-the-operating-of-forces-in-a-physics-problem&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold a short time ago and I made some changes in my question (after considering feedback from other users) to make it more suitable for Physics Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could any experienced users let me know if my question is now a good fit for the website? I want to learn how I can use this platform in the best possible way and constructive feedback will be help me meet this objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know what is CURRENTLY wrong with my question. I looked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;good questions&lt;/a&gt; and framed my question according to the pattern followed by those questions. So I don't see why my question is STILL not suitable for this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164413" LastEditorUserId="164413" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T16:27:04.413" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T10:52:39.177" Title="Is my question now acceptable for this website?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10489" CreationDate="2018-02-19T02:51:40.570" Score="-3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I tried to comment to a question I was told &quot;you can't comment  because  your reputation is below 50&quot; and I want to know why they are saying that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184625" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T06:24:22.837" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T06:25:35.463" Title="Why this site is not allowing to us to comment?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10487" CreationDate="2018-02-19T03:59:14.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all seriousness the is no vetting for accounts other than on-site mechanics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a lot of other restrictions this is to limit the amount of damage a malicious actor can do without investing a lot more time and energy than most people will consider worth the pay-off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T03:59:14.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10487" CreationDate="2018-02-19T06:25:35.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put simply, if everyone who signed up was able to comment immediately, all the Stack Exchange sites would fill up with spam overnight.  I don't think anybody really wants this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T06:25:35.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10491" CreationDate="2018-02-19T11:12:30.207" Score="-14" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well I think Its my personal problem .When ask a question its answers are in scientific terms and I was unable to understand it . Can you reduce the scientific terms,? and I know it is little bit difficult because your well versed in science but I am not  ,so please give me answers that I can understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184625" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T11:31:25.660" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T11:34:11.423" Title="Can we reduce the scientific terms?" Tags="|discussion|scope|content-level|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10490" CreationDate="2018-02-19T11:34:11.423" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the welcome message, this site is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the bulk of the discussion on this site will require scientific terminology to occur; we're not going to &quot;reduce the scientific terms&quot; we use on this site because there might be someone out there that doesn't understand them. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but that's just the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is on a question that &lt;em&gt;you yourself&lt;/em&gt; ask, then it is your responsibility to phrase your question in a way that makes it clear what you do and don't understand, what level you're at, and the sorts of terminology and tools that you have not yet studied, so that answerers can know what level of detail and jargon to include in their answers. This should be done in the question itself, but if you get an answer that you don't understand it is perfectly OK to comment under that answer specifying which parts you find beyond your current scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to say anything more specific, though, because you currently have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/386526/what-caused-the-big-bang&quot;&gt;a single non-deleted question&lt;/a&gt; and it has no answers, so if you're referring to deleted questions of yours then nobody (except ♦ moderators) can see them so we can't help there. If you're referring to questions by other people, then as mentioned above we're not going to change the answers to suit you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do find an answer (to someone else's question) that you find interesting but which you don't fully understand, then it is perfectly OK to post a new question asking for clarification and explaining in detail which parts of the answer you find confusing (and, again, being very specific about what level you want answers to be pitched at).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T11:34:11.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T02:31:59.107" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;The order of display of answers to my question (and completeness of that record) is different when I (1) click on the question or (2) reload the page via the browser &quot;Reload current page&quot; icon.  (Note that I use an older Firefox browser;  that may influence how the page is loaded.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185098" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T08:30:03.527" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T08:30:03.527" Title="Differences in displayed order of answers" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10494" CreationDate="2018-02-21T08:29:53.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an intentional feature, if you have ordering by votes selected (which is the default).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YkIio.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YkIio.png&quot; alt=&quot;depiction of ordering by votes with a circle indicating the place to click&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this mode, answers with the same vote total are placed in a random order every time the page is accessed, which is supposed to prevent other factors (such as submission time) from biasing the voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have selected one of the other ordering modes, &quot;active&quot; or &quot;oldest&quot;, as far as I know the order in which answers are shown under those modes should be completely predictable and consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T08:29:53.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T20:45:26.350" Score="-2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could we create a collaborative online ebook that talks about the important physics concepts covered that is normally covered in school?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My normal learning routine has been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read the textbook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hope for good explanation on Wikipedia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search physics.stackexchange for a really good explanation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with wikipedia is that it is a good reference but not good and helping me understand the concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I am learning about Helmholtz free energy; my book and wikipedia did no contribution on helping me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dream would be to have a collaborative explanation of physics concepts. The goal would not be reference, but bridging the gap between knowledge and understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are a hundred posts on here asking for book references. We could fix the book reference question by having each major idea in physics highlighted with a tutorial explaining it and a list of book references on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be amazing if each concept had a list of prerequisite concepts, and optional concepts that would greatly contribute towards wrapping the mind around the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a tutorial object that can contain text &amp;amp; graphics with the intent to explain important physics concepts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a recommended reading list of books to each tutorial object.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a required concept list for each tutorial object.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a recommended concept list for each tutorial object.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123260" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T22:08:45.753" Title="Physics and Math tutorial or a directed learning document" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10497" CreationDate="2018-02-23T21:36:12.397" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, this is basically how you write a modular textbook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a lot of people have worked on a lot of versions of it over the years, and there are some challenges that you've glossed over. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be maximally useful it should use a consistent notation throughout, or at least in large and cohesive sections, but that works against modularity. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modularity comes at the cost of narrative integrity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should have a good set of exercises and include at least a little advice on learning to solve them. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should come with some guidance on larger-scale routes through the thicket. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question becomes &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why would Stack Exchange be the right platform for this endeavor?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside I have been working on a set of modular notes for a while now. Mine are mostly targeted at the upper-division and early grad school level, but I have a few for the introductory course, as well. This is a fun thing to do, but it is also surprisingly demanding; and if viewed in terms like &quot;I want to teach all of physics&quot; it is a dauntingly huge task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notation thing is a bigger problem than it sounds at first. But when I wanted to start giving these notes to students I realized that I had used several different notations to discuss topics in quantum mechanics that I wanted to address during my (one semester) Modern Physics class. I had done that because—from the view-point of someone who was already familiar with those diverse notational conventions—each paper was written in the clearest and most economical way. But for a single course intended for students just starting, that was a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T22:08:45.753" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T22:08:45.753" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-02-27T10:10:47.073" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7jwMY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93522" LastEditorUserId="93522" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T13:51:37.147" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T13:51:37.147" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10543" CreationDate="2018-02-27T14:28:50.493" Score="-7" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to know &quot;How do we know that a photon has some physical form before we observe it?&quot;&#xA;(by we I mean Physicists who working on quantum mechanics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's very clear، And I do not know how I can more clearly ask this question!.&#xA;Can anyone ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/389022/how-do-we-know-that-a-photon-has-some-physical-form-before-we-observe-it#&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question more clearly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185269" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T13:42:59.730" Title="Can anyone ask this question more clearly?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T13:37:13.933" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am banned from writing answers, and all the answers I wrote, the question has been already been deleted by someone. &#xA;Actually they were homework questions and I answered them, so it is not acceptable that I get banned right?&#xA;What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149624" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:57:56.683" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:57:56.683" Title="Answer ban correction" Tags="|support|answers|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T13:56:23.193" Score="5" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the links provided by the mods in a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/389009/&quot;&gt;I recently posted&lt;/a&gt; with an answer, I believe that my question conforms &lt;em&gt;in spirit&lt;/em&gt; the criteria that the moderators have tried to infuse in our site through their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While answering own questions is explicitly encouraged in the link right next to the box saying &quot;answer your own question,&quot; some moderators seem concerned that naughty users may post solutions to the entire  e.g., Sears &amp;amp; Zemansky book, using this format. And the general feeling is that people can post exercises and problems with educational purpose as long as: (i) the problem is not entirely trivial and (ii) who posts them also shows their work toward the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, my question is not completely trivial: I did not know the result before thinking a lot while solving a similar problem. It is not from any book I know of. I agree the formulation is terse, but clear, and I put a lot of work in the answer of the question. I posted it just to share the effort and result. People is free to downvote it to oblivion if they do not like it, but closing it is something else: it is a penalty for something I did wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55531" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-01T17:02:58.933" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T17:02:58.933" Title="Answering own question: &quot;work&quot; of the question in own answer" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10504" CreationDate="2018-02-28T15:56:59.870" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is pretty much irrelevant as to whether the question should be closed, particularly for homework-like questions: that determination should be done based on the question text itself, and the fact that you've also provided an answer to that question not a factor there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific example you linked to, the question itself is very poorly phrased, but it is pretty clearly a paradigmatic example of the questions the homework-and-exercises policy rules out. The extra layer of paraphrasing you've added on top of the exercise does not change that - all it does is make the question less clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly OK to post Q&amp;amp;As on this site so long as the questions themselves are on-topic. If the question is a set-piece from a textbook (&lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; textbook), though, then you really do need to have a core conceptual point that you want to write about, and the question needs to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; explicit in asking about the concept instead of just quoting (or describing) the set-piece whose solution you want to post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T15:56:59.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10503" CreationDate="2018-02-28T16:18:21.573" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple: don't write answers to questions that are going to get deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions get deleted for a reason: we don't want them here. If you answer poor-quality homework questions, you are nullifying the effect of the homework policy and you are providing an incentive for the users whose questions you answer (as well as others who see that those askers got their queries resolved) to post more poor-quality homework questions. That brings the site's content quality down, and it makes it harder for us to retain the expert users that provide the high-quality answers that make this site great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: you've posted a bunch of answers that negatively impact the site's quality as perceived by this site's community, and as a consequence the system is no longer accepting answers from your account ─ that sounds like the system working as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your current options, it depends on how bad the answer ban is, and that information is not available to regular users, and it is only partially available to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;elected site moderators&lt;/a&gt;. For one, you should read very carefully the guidance on the main meta site,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;What can I do when getting &amp;quot;We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it does seem like your account is in pretty dire straits as the answer ban will not time out on its own until you fix your posts (which you cannot do given the poor quality of the questions you chose to answer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fixing this goes beyond the powers of regular users or site moderators, so I would recommend that (i) you fix whatever answers you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; fix, and then (ii) you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;contact the Stack Exchange team&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, linking to this thread, and explain that you are prevented from fixing the remaining answers. If you make a convincing case that you &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; be answering questions that are liable to get closed and/or deleted shortly after your answer, then I suspect that you have a better chance of the answer ban getting lifted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T16:18:21.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T19:10:32.053" Score="1" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a wrong answer is the accepted answer, sometimes a wrong answer is the most voted answer, sometimes a wrong answer is both at once. Should we make a list of those? The purpose would be that newcomers (and any member who hasn't already voted in those questions) would make up their minds and possibly correct, in the long run, the most upvoted answer. By correct I mean that a correct answer would come more voted than wrong answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I see that time does not necessarily make the correct answers float over the sea of wrong answers. When a new and correct answer is posted in an old question, people suddenly see the question (for the first time) and usually, apparently at least, upvote the most voted answer (which is wrong) and do not bother to read all the other answers. At least that's the impression I get when I see a &quot;frozen&quot; question which received no answer in the last months, suddenly gets a new correct answer and people restart to upvote the already wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is then, how do one defines a correct answer? I don't know exactly, but I think you people can think over it and come up with a good answer to that. An idea could be &quot;This question has an accepted answer that is tagged as wrong by X, Y, Z, etc. members on ....(date)&quot;, so if the wrong answer gets edited after the date it has been tagged as wrong answer, people will know it. Also, I'm not sure it's a good idea to edit an already accepted wrong answer to make it right. Because it would completely change its meaning and people voted it for being wrong, not right. So another answer would have to come and replace it as the most accepted answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75916" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T21:41:43.583" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T21:41:43.583" Title="Should we keep a list of wrong top/accepted answers?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10507" CreationDate="2018-02-28T20:51:26.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't think this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For starters, we &lt;strong&gt;already&lt;/strong&gt; have a system established for determining which answers are good and bad.  It's the voting system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If wrong posts are gaining more votes than correct ones, that would be a community issue.  I'm not sure why we as a community would be able to overwhelmingly decide that an answer is bad if it is being highly up-voted.  It would require a pretty strange combination of Hot Network Question and inattentive drive-by voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even worse though; it would completely defeat the operating principle of the site.  Votes are summed through individual user contributions to the voting system.  By establishing a list of answers we deem incorrect, it would lead to severe voting bias driven by whoever is active on the meta topic.  It would basically add redundant quality control that would essentially work against the current quality control; by magnifying it's inherent problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I don't think this site's quality can fairly be dictated by the few select members who may have the privilege of marking answers as incorrect.  Quality is already driven by the broader community; and I think we should keep it that way; or else we risk becoming an echo-chamber (even if that's less of a concern for physics compared to say, politics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T20:51:26.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10507" CreationDate="2018-02-28T20:54:44.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no specialist on what new-comers usually do and I can only speak for myself, but when I first came to this site, I was first magnetised by the list of &lt;em&gt;highest&lt;/em&gt; voted answers and questions, not the lowest. Are you saying that there is a substantial percentage of highly-voted answers that are wrong ? Or are you saying that the community isn't engaging enough with certain questions by new-comers and the answers to those questions end up being upvoted a few times but are somehow wrong ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I'm sold on the first and if it's the second, then you could always drop a comment on those &quot;wrong&quot; answers linking to a related question with a more &quot;correct&quot; answer/interpretation but comments aren't forever so it's better to write your own answer. There's a huge base of really good, conceptual questions with stellar answers on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, your list suggestion seems a bit backwards to me; we instead have a list of the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answers and &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; questions by lieu of voting. Even though it might be that Physics.SE is more of an educational site than a research tool, I'm not sure it's within the objective of Physics.SE to have a list of top answers that are &quot;wrong&quot;. As is oft done, I quote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8952/147472&quot;&gt;words of ACM&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cannot help but thinking [sic] that the mission statement of StackExchange is &quot;The best answers rise to the top&quot;, not &quot;Even the worst answer is here for your convenience&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that all highly-voted answers are correct and infallible, but we'd be taking on quite the task to find, judge and sort these answers when we already have a very good &quot;inverse&quot; list: sort by votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the part of your question about a correct answer, IIRC, isn't this a settled issue ? The system we have for &quot;correctness&quot; is the same system we have for &quot;listing&quot;, i.e. votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more canonical answer I can think of is that, because of the existence of questions &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;What exactly is wrong ?&quot; and &#xA;&quot;Who is to decide ?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we let the voting decide the matter and trust the community to vote a blatantly wrong answer into oblivion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9027/flagging-low-quality-answers-an-experiment&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; on here recently by Emilio regarding a change in the working mechanism of flagging something as a VLQ (very low quality) post, in that a &lt;em&gt;blatantly, dangerously&lt;/em&gt; incorrect question that is so far from saving-by-editing can be flagged as such to then by deliberated upon for deletion by the community where once a VLQ flag would not be appropriate for such an answer. And although the flag usage might be different, the philosophy behind it is unchanged, in my opinion; the community consensus of &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; sufficient-rep users voting determines what an answer should be like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of an accepted answer being radically edited is addressed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/310/what-do-you-do-when-an-accepted-answer-is-changed-from-correct-to-incorrect&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In any case, one &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2932/147472&quot;&gt;should not&lt;/a&gt; hold an accepted answer as the &quot;be-all and end-all&quot; of a question. And if anyone has any problem with any answers anywhere, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/835/147472&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of things you can do by our very own Jeff Atwood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147472" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T20:54:44.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T21:16:55.683" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently proposed the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/free-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;free-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;free-energy&lt;/a&gt;, and wrote a usage guidance for it; however, it has been almost immediately set as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/energy/info&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering, however, whether we should have a separate tag for free-energy. I feel that the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy&lt;/a&gt; is really too vague, and as a matter of fact is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot;&gt;one of the most used&lt;/a&gt;, because it can apply basically to anything, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity+quantum-field-theory&quot;&gt;general relativity&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy+quantum-field-theory&quot;&gt;quantum field theory&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics+energy&quot;&gt;fluid dynamics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free energy, on the other hand, belongs to a quite specific domain —thermodynamics/statistical mechanics—, and it is a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; important concept there (Helmholtz free energy being the natural thermodynamic potential of the widely used canonical ensemble, and Gibbs free energy being fundamental in the study of phase transitions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think free energy deserves a tag of its own: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy&lt;/a&gt; is just too vague sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of questions were I think that the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/free-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;free-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;free-energy&lt;/a&gt; would apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/149493/gibbs-free-energy-intuition&quot;&gt;Gibbs free energy intuition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/72802/why-the-free-energy-is-called-free&quot;&gt;Why the free energy is called 'free'?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/40859/confusion-about-free-energy-and-the-hamiltonian&quot;&gt;Confusion about Free Energy and the Hamiltonian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105774/what-exactly-is-temperature-in-the-gibbs-free-energy&quot;&gt;What exactly is temperature in the Gibbs free energy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/105169/why-is-the-gibbs-free-energy-f-hm&quot;&gt;Why is the Gibbs Free Energy F−HM?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10233/proving-that-the-free-energy-is-extensive&quot;&gt;Proving that the free energy is extensive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are specifically about (Gibbs or Helmholtz) free energy, not about energy in general.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that we should not encourage an uncontrolled proliferation of useless, too specific tags. However, being someone who is mostly active in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics posts on the site, I strongly feel that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/free-energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;free-energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;free-energy&lt;/a&gt; would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if we finally decide to undo the synonym, I volunteer to do the retagging of old questions and check when the tag can be applied to the new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt; (to address the comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think that adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thermodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thermodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;energy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;energy&lt;/a&gt; is not enough to clarify, since in thermodynamics/statistical mechanics there is a thermodynamic potential called &quot;(internal) energy&quot; which is different from the free energy. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's true that the tag may be misused by people asking questions about perpetual motion machine and other crackpottery. The best we can do on this front is write a clear usage guidance and correct tag mis-usages (after all there are other examples of tags which are useful but frequently misused, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt;). However, we must also note that such questions are not so common on Physics SE and also usually they get closed pretty quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I understand that we want to keep the tagging system simple. However, we also want it to be specific enough, and I think that this is one of the cases where additional specification is needed. Also, there are many examples of very specific tags that haven't been synonymized, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/debye-length&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;debye-length&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;debye-length&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-teleportation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-teleportation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-teleportation&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/galaxy-rotation-curve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;galaxy-rotation-curve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;galaxy-rotation-curve&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/superalgebra&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;superalgebra&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;superalgebra&lt;/a&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115736" LastEditorUserId="115736" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T13:30:07.793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T13:30:07.793" Title="Tag for free energy" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-01T19:06:35.120" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please tell me how to delete my account on se? &#xA;(leaving because using it too much.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user181531" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T19:06:35.120" Title="How do I delete my account on se?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-03-01T19:07:40.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-01T19:00:00.947" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this question is irrelevant, but please tell me how to delete my account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user181531" LastEditorDisplayName="user181531" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T19:08:27.353" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T19:08:27.353" Title="How do I delete my account on se?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-03-01T19:08:47.940" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-03-04T02:47:11.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physicsforums.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8vNwL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Forums&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T02:47:11.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10517" CreationDate="2018-03-11T22:10:14.560" Score="-5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some pretty good thought experiments that I would like to share with the physics community here (I'm sure others have them too), but I can't find a way to phrase them as questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read through the rules, and it specifically says &quot;Is your question about physics? We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.&quot;, so I can't ask it on the forum itself... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Meta is only for discussing the website itself, such as format issues, bugs, and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we add a tag for discussion, so that people like me, who are interested in hearing other people's ideas, can do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165485" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T22:13:18.770" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T22:14:15.490" Title="Is it possible to add a discussion tag?" Tags="|discussion|scope|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2018-03-11T22:14:15.490" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, what you suggest is not what this site was designed for. If you want to have a discussion, take it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; or to some other webpage. Cheers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T22:14:15.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T13:13:19.463" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/391682/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/391682/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed as too broad, but - see comments - there is scope for a good answer. I'd have written more (times, energies), but comments aren't the right place for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119010" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T21:45:46.543" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T21:45:46.543" Title="Can this Q be reopened for answering?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T13:31:35.970" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obvious unhelpful comments usually consist of abusive and negative comments as well as completely irrelevant ones and conversational ones. Those kind of comments are easy to spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about &quot;incomplete&quot; comments? Ones where someone is trying to make a valid argument but is incomplete and seems off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/391758/sending-messages-to-the-past&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. One user explains in the comments that travelling back in time is impossible due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The person asking the question doesn't fully understand and wonders if &quot;information&quot; follows this same law. Then a commenter says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A photon is also thermodynamically constrained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although is may seem obvious to some that if any form of information could travel in time, it would be light; but the connection between &lt;em&gt;information&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;photons&lt;/em&gt; is missing. It would sound much more relevant if the (somewhat) obvious had been stated. I tried to complete their argument in a comment of my own:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Information has to take some physical form, even if you use light, as @YuzurihaInori said, photons obey the laws of thermodynamics. So like mechanical messages, photon can't travel back in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this a case where that comment about the photons can be flagged? Can it be considered &quot;unhelpful&quot; if, with a few extra words, it would be fine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176444" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T18:42:49.297" Title="Can an &quot;incomplete&quot; comment be considered an unhelpful comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10518" CreationDate="2018-03-12T18:36:25.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in the comments here, this question is absolutely too broad. That's pretty much always the case for &quot;what could happen if ...?&quot; questions which don't further restrict their scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment on the original question kind of makes the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We might discover new particles, and perhaps new forms of interaction. We might also get a lot more detail and precision (and perhaps new knowledge) about existing known particles and interactions. We could also certainly refine existing knowledge and theories, and exclude a large number of possible theories, so we would be better guided in seeking new knowledge. What would not happen is any kind of global doomsday or &quot;end of the earth&quot; scenario; we know enough from collisions not that much smaller, to say that's almost certainly unrealistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would allow a detailed answer covering any of those points. There could be a dozen different answers not even trying to say the same thing, all of which are equally valid; furthermore, an answer which tried to be complete would be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long indeed, much longer than the site allows. Whenever that happens, it's a pretty good indicator that the question may be too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T18:36:25.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10519" CreationDate="2018-03-12T18:42:49.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general I'd say no, the fact that a comment is incomplete is not &lt;em&gt;inherently&lt;/em&gt; a reason to flag it. If it's so incomplete that it's not even clear what it has to do with the question or answer, though, then that probably warrants a flag. There's a judgment call to be made here, and different people may disagree somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think a better way to approach this is to consider whether the comment is trying to do what comments are supposed to do, which is to suggest an improvement or request a clarification to their parent post. I think in many cases, you'll find that comments that look like they may be incomplete are trying to do something else, like offering up an answer (or partial answer), and in those cases you can flag them on that basis without even caring whether the comment is really complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T18:42:49.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T23:03:37.263" Score="33" ViewCount="705" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307862/ch-ch-ch-changes-left-nav-responsive-design-themes&quot;&gt;Ch-ch-ch-changes are coming&lt;/a&gt; to the site navigation and theming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that that's the case (and that therefore there are designer work-hours already scheduled to attend to our site design), can I suggest that maybe now is a good time to drop the super-awkward-once-you-notice-it (except you rarely do) arrow in the site logo's background Feynman diagram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RMhI5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This arrow seems to have been carried in from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikimedia Commons standard image&lt;/a&gt; for Feynman diagrams, but frankly, it doesn't really pull its weight in the graphics, no one ever sees it except to be awkwarded out by it, and it can just be cut out without harming anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I wrong and there's actually a huge fanbase for the Feynman-diagram arrow out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T11:48:26.407" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T11:48:26.407" Title="Ch-ch-ch-changing the site logo to cut out the weird arrow thing" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10522" CreationDate="2018-03-13T03:50:27.063" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;i've always liked it! it's pretty. maybe replace it with a more technically accurate feynman diagram? at retina resolution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122892" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T03:50:27.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10528" CreationDate="2018-03-13T05:33:45.247" Score="14" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/391775/102207&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; (10K only; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mt5oc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;) is an example of a &quot;super wrong&quot; post.  For the purposes of this discussion, a &quot;super wrong&quot; post is an answer which not only is factually incorrect but is incorrect in such a manner as to contribute to the spread of some popular error in physical understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These errors tend to come in two forms.  One, the passively harmful form, consists of popular simplifications of advanced physics concepts being consistently applied outside the realm in which they are useful.  The linked answer is an example of this, I think, as is the explanation of airfoil mechanics panned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/803/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this xkcd comic&lt;/a&gt;.  These kinds of answers are super wrong by accident, but unlike regular wrong answers they are tapping into something in the way people think about the world.  They are &lt;em&gt;super&lt;/em&gt; wrong because, for whatever reason, a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of people think these things and keep convincing other people that they are true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other form is the actively harmful form.  This is stuff like 'harmonized water' and other pseudoscientific scams, as well as 'the second law of thermodynamics means no evolution', where an explanation for how something works is not only wrong in a way that, for whatever reason, popularizes it, but also the error in thinking is actively perpetuated by people who know or should know it is false to serve their interests (e.g. the guys selling the 'harmonized water').  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, such answers are liable to be downvoted heavily on account of the site community being healthy.  This leaves us with answers in situations like the linked one, with the option of deleting such an answer as very low quality.  Should we delete such material to avoid potentially spreading it or should we leave it up very downvoted in the hopes that a very negative post score will help combat the spread of that misinformation in site visitors / broader society?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102207" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T12:51:30.287" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T11:36:50.313" Title="Should we leave super wrong highly downvoted posts visible or should we delete them?" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|down-votes|quality|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10524" CreationDate="2018-03-13T08:08:47.467" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we leave super wrong highly downvoted posts visible or should we delete them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should leave them. I say that because &lt;em&gt;science is not a democracy&lt;/em&gt;. All the upvotes in the world won't make a wrong answer right, and all the downvotes in the world won't make a right answer wrong. In addition ignorance can lead to correct answers being downvoted. It would be wrong to delete such answers. That sort of thing belongs in a religious theocracy, not in science.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This answer is an example of a &quot;super wrong&quot; post. For the purposes of this discussion, a &quot;super wrong&quot; post is an answer which not only is factually incorrect but is incorrect in such a manner as to contribute to the spread of some popular error in physical understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see any &quot;super wrong&quot; answer there. I can see an answer by Rob Jeffries which looks correct. Am I missing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These errors tend to come in two forms. One, the passively harmful form, consists of popular simplifications of advanced physics concepts being consistently applied outside the realm in which they are useful. The linked answer is an example of this, I think, as is the explanation of airfoil mechanics panned in this xkcd comic. These kinds of answers are super wrong by accident, but unlike regular wrong answers they are tapping into something in the way people think about the world. They are super wrong because, for whatever reason, a lot of people think these things and keep convincing other people that they are true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wnat if the answer is super right, and you're super wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The other form is the actively harmful form. This is stuff like 'harmonized water' and other pseudoscientific scams&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, things like wormholes and time travel and the multiverse. But we have free speech in science, and I'd like to keep it that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;actively perpetuated by people who know or should know it is false to serve their interests &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of people peddling woo, IMHO we need to explain why it's woo, not censor it.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In either case, such answers are liable to be downvoted heavily on account of the site community being healthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what if correct answers are downvoted correctly on account of the site community being unhealthy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This leaves us with answers in situations like the linked one, with the option of deleting such an answer as very low quality. Should we delete such material to avoid potentially spreading it or should we leave it up very downvoted in the hopes that a very negative post score will help combat the spread of that misinformation in site visitors / broader society?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should leave it. I don't agree with scientific censorship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T08:08:47.467" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-13T10:08:48.180" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose we make the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-linear-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-linear-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-linear-dynamics&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/complex-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;complex-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;complex-systems&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-linear-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-linear-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-linear-dynamics&lt;/a&gt; is set as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-linear-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-linear-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-linear-systems&lt;/a&gt;, but I'd like to argue that the most common usage of the term &lt;em&gt;nonlinear dynamics&lt;/em&gt; is in the sense of being the (nonlinear) dynamics of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamical-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamical-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamical-systems&lt;/a&gt; and it should, just as the latter, be considered a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/complex-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;complex-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;complex-systems&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The common understanding of the subject, as described, e.g., by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nature.com/subjects/nonlinear-dynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the journal Nature&lt;/a&gt;, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nonlinear dynamics is the branch of physics that studies systems governed by equations more complex than the linear, aX+b form. Nonlinear systems, such as the weather or neurons, often appear chaotic, unpredictable or counterintuitive, and yet their behaviour is not random.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which &lt;strong&gt;isn't&lt;/strong&gt; expressed by the current description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/non-linear-systems/info&quot;&gt;nonlinear systems tag&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term non-linear or nonlinear has several definitions but is generally used to describe a system that cannot be approximated by a superposition principle or perturbative approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; for Complex Systems lists &quot;Nonlinear dynamics&quot; among its topics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Research institutions around the world clearly consider &lt;em&gt;nonlinear dynamics&lt;/em&gt; as a subject in the context of &lt;em&gt;complex systems&lt;/em&gt;. For instance (research group name, followed by keywords):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mcnd.manchester.ac.uk/pictures.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;granular media, fluid dynamics, turbulence, chaos  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chaos.utexas.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Center for Nonlinear Dynamics (UT - Austin)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;fluid dynamics, granular matter, social dynamics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/433694.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics (Göttingen)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;pattern formation, fluid dynamics, neurophysics, networks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://umdphysics.umd.edu/research/research-areas/nonlinear-dynamics-chaos-and-complex-systems.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos and Complex Systems (U. Maryland)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;chaos, granular dynamics, pattern formation, networks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-bayreuth.de/en/research/focus-areas/advanced-fields/7_nonlinear_dynamics/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonlinear Dynamics (U. Bayreuth)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;complex fluids, soft matter, geoecology, chaos&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ton.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp/nonlinear-old2/english/research.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonlinear Dynamics Group (U. Kyoto)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;statistical physics, structure formation, patterns, neuronal systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.comp.tmu.ac.jp/nonlinear/en/research.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonlinear Physics Group (Tokyo M. U.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;chaos, Hamiltonian systems, quantum chaos&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dsweb.siam.org/The-Magazine/Article/nonlinear-and-complex-systems-laboratory-at-postech-korea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonlinear and Complex Systems Laboratory at POSTECH (Korea)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;pattern formation, self-organization, chaos, brain science&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://portal.if.usp.br/controle/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oscillations Control Group (U. of São Paulo)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;turbulence, chaos, complex systems, networks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T10:11:46.200" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T10:58:47.863" Title="We should reassign [tag:non-linear-dynamics] to [tag:complex-systems]" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10526" CreationDate="2018-03-13T10:58:47.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One suggestion would be to create an umbrella tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-linear-and-complex-systems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-linear-and-complex-systems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-linear-and-complex-systems&lt;/a&gt;. Would that be an improvement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T10:58:47.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10524" CreationDate="2018-03-13T11:35:20.777" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to be of the opinion that we should keep such low quality answers since it's at least an attempt to answer the question, as misguided as the answer may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after talking with other members and thinking on it more, I have come to realize that these types of not-even-wrong answers &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be deleted because leaving them would provide a platform for printing incorrect theories/understandings to such misguided individuals. Even heavily downvoted, it's still promoting an incorrect answer that may sway some of the more susceptible individuals who come across it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of it another way, if we're trying to build a reputable database of answers to physics questions, then we shouldn't want disreputable answers trickling in, we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; prune them out. Otherwise, we're not actually making such a database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T11:35:20.777" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-13T16:26:28.750" Score="-2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/391775/36073&quot;&gt;A recent answer&lt;/a&gt; and subsequent comment discussion revealed there are possibly many bogus science sources on the web that are apparently invading the SE network. I understand that downvoting plays a key role in keeping this kind of information in check, but it seem like it might be beneficial to have an easily-available source to point to, when debunking really bad pseudo-science answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know exactly how this would be handled in the current framework of SE, since most other network sites don't have to deal with this kind of problem, but I think it could be immensely helpful here. Something like a community wiki that could be regularly updated when users of a high enough reputation stumble across bogus news sites, improperly interpreted articles, baseless claims, etc., so that when references to them inevitably come up in answers we can just say &quot;No, and here's the source debunking that: X&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that make sense within the context of Physics:SE? Anecdotally, I've seen more and more pseudo-science cropping up in various places that ends up making its way into the mainstream, so I think having a good, solid, well-maintained list here to refute it could do the community a lot of good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36073" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T18:13:46.080" Title="Should we curate a &quot;bogus science&quot; wiki or similar?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10522" CreationDate="2018-03-13T21:30:20.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(On my screen, anyways) it sits right at the edge between the title bar and the page body, the arrow's line pixel-perfect to the changeover. All I can see is the $▶ t$, and it's so small as to be consistently mistaken for a dirty monitor. I didn't even know it existed until I read this question. Thanks for that, by the way. Now I can't stop noticing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrow has a purpose, though. As seen on the wikimedia file, it shows the progression of time along the Feynman diagram (nevermind that you could rotate the arrow 90 degrees and it would still be &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; accurate.) Even though the diagram doesn't need it, it makes it look even more complicated and physics-y, the kind of thing that would go on a blackboard scrawl in a TV physics classroom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, I guess it all comes down to the apparent costs/benefits of keeping/removing it. IMHO, they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;KEEP&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Costs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people are a little irked about it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Messes up the vertical spacing of the title bar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looks like monitor dirt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Benefits&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It works. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's barely noticeable in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;CHANGE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Costs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inevitable argument about how to change it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Might mess up HTML spacing or something. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Benefits&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cleaner site design&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New feel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175647" LastEditorUserId="115736" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T10:11:27.730" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T10:11:27.730" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-03-19T17:10:48.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10529" CreationDate="2018-03-14T18:13:46.080" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we curate a “bogus science” wiki or similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. It's a lot of work, and it's fraught with issues. For example what do you do if you disagree with another curator? What if something that's supposed to be bogus turns out to be legitimate science? What if something that you think is legitimate science, is actually bogus science?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A recent answer and subsequent comment discussion revealed there are possibly many bogus science sources on the web that are apparently invading the SE network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10524/should-we-leave-super-wrong-highly-downvoted-posts-visible-or-should-we-delete-t&quot;&gt;question on meta&lt;/a&gt; talked about deleting answers, and referred to a particular answer that had been deleted! Emilio Pisanty was good enough to link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mt5oc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a copy of it&lt;/a&gt;. IMHO it's a wrong answer. But IMHO it's better to keep it around along with the downvotes and comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand that downvoting plays a key role in keeping this kind of information in check, but it seem like it might be beneficial to have an easily-available source to point to, when debunking really bad pseudo-science answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing stopping you setting up your own bogus-science website and referring to it. The difficulties come when you have a public bogus-science website. Then you have a repeat of the issues you see on stack exchange.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't know exactly how this would be handled in the current framework of SE, since most other network sites don't have to deal with this kind of problem, but I think it could be immensely helpful here. Something like a community wiki that could be regularly updated when users of a high enough reputation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue there is that a high reputation doesn't mean everything from that user is correct. I'd say this is something like letting the &quot;expert in the field&quot; referee any papers that offer information that demonstrates that the expert is  wrong. Science only advances when the expert in the field is shown to be wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...stumble across bogus news sites, improperly interpreted articles, baseless claims, etc., so that when references to them inevitably come up in answers we can just say &quot;No, and here's the source debunking that: X&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no issue with you doing that provided you link to a clear argument that does show why the wrong answer is wrong. But I've seen people claiming they've debunked something when they haven't, whilst meanwhile peddling time travel, the evil twin universe, the multiverse, and so on. The problem is in deciding what's right and wrong. People can be unreasonable about this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does that make sense within the context of Physics:SE? Anecdotally, I've seen more and more pseudo-science cropping up in various places that ends up making its way into the mainstream, so I think having a good, solid, well-maintained list here to refute it could do the community a lot of good. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's something of a precedent with &quot;canonical answers&quot;, but they present their own problems. What do you do if a &quot;canonical answer&quot; is totally wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts are that there's an awful lot of pseudoscience that &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; made it into the mainstream. But when you try to clear that up with a correct answer,  people who believe in the pseudoscience want to downvote/debunk/delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T18:13:46.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10535" CreationDate="2018-03-16T08:15:42.170" Score="6" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question I asked gets answered by multiple users. And &lt;strong&gt;all of them&lt;/strong&gt; solve the question satisfactorily, which answer should I accept?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be the one that was posted first (first come first served)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be the one that is the longest (cause the user put in more effort)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be the one that is the shortest (cause it's concise and to the point)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider another scenario in which multiple answers are given but not one addresses the complete issue? Reading answers from user-1 and then from user-2 clarifies the concept. So should I accept the answer from user-1 or from user-2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it okay to combine the essentials of all the answers into one post and answer your own question? And then accept it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183700" LastEditorUserId="183700" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T06:39:11.393" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T06:39:11.393" Title="Which answer should we accept if multiple answers address the question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10533" CreationDate="2018-03-16T08:44:31.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which answer should we accept if multiple answers address the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one that you think is the best. How you decide that is up to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be the one that was posted first (first come first served)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not unless you absolute can't decide which answer to pick.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be the one that is the longest (cause the user put in more effort)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if it gives a more detailed explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should it be the one that is the shortest (cause it's concise and to the point)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. Some answers can be long and tedious and wander off the point. But not always. Do you have an example you can show us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now consider another scenario in which multiple answers are given but not one addresses the complete issue? Reading answers from user-1 and then from user-2 clarifies the concept. So should I accept the answer from user-1 or from user-2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends. And remember, you don't have to accept either of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T08:44:31.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10533" CreationDate="2018-03-16T09:05:02.790" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accept the answer you find most helpful. It's your question, and the only criterion you need is how helpful you found the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon that someone will post an answer then someone else will post with more details, which can give you a difficult choice of who to accept. But the same criterion applies - accept the answer you liked best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't worry that people might get offended if you don't accept their answer (especially if they've put a lot of work into it). All of us here are physics enthusiasts who write answers because we enjoy doing it. Many of us will sometimes deliberately write a more detailed answer than was asked for, or an answer at a higher level than was asked for, because we're not just aiming the answer at you but also at future visitors to the site. In that case it's perfectly reasonable to accept a different answer that more directly targets your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T10:14:52.383" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T10:14:52.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T10:21:55.880" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/392587/&quot;&gt;Why not Sun&amp;#39;s gravity affect angular momentum of Earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then QMechanic, a moderator of this web site marked my question as a duplicate of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/111685/&quot;&gt;Tidal force of Sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I searched whether my question is duplicate, but tidal effect is very different to what I expected. I even know the perfect solution to my question. I even verified by some famous books. I request you to write reason for marking the question as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187997" LastEditorUserId="187997" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T13:33:33.613" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T13:33:33.613" Title="I request to write reason if you are marking a question as duplicate to other question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10536" CreationDate="2018-03-16T12:27:06.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do have a procedure in place where users of the site can vote to reopen closed questions, and I see that your question currently has one reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way for you to speed this process along is for you to edit your question with some text like &quot;it's been suggested that this question is a duplicate of [link]. But that's a question about X, while I'm asking about Y. Are they perhaps related because of Z?&quot; The clearer you can be about what you're hoping to get from us, and how it's different from the answers we already have, the better we'll be able to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T12:32:06.253" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T12:32:06.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10522" CreationDate="2018-03-16T12:42:56.340" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, thank you Emilio for pointing that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say leave it there. Sure, I don't think it is useful in any way and example Feynman diagrams like this don't even need a time arrow since they are valid from any angle. However, it's not &quot;not physics&quot; and it would be far less effort to simply leave this barely noticeable, technically correct physics thing in the logo than to go through the effort of having it removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote to reject as: &lt;strong&gt;No improvement whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This edit does not make the logo even a little bit easier on the eyes, easier to find, more accurate, or more accessible. Changes are either superfluous or actively harm aesthetics.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T12:42:56.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-03-18T21:03:45.103" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7EKy0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Quantum Computing Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T16:53:39.113" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T16:53:39.113" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10502" CreationDate="2018-03-19T13:42:59.730" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the thing with this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Asking (good) questions is hard.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't look like it at first, because if you don't think about it for too long then it feels like 100% of the emphasis is on the smart people that answer the questions, but that's not the case. If your question isn't well-posed, then there's a good chance that it won't be answerable, period, or that it will fall down on the first loophole, or that it will rely on faulty assumptions that are boring for answerers to address, or that it will be too waffly to even be a question to begin with, or that it will fall into one of a million possible pitfalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking a good question requires you to get your own thoughts in order regarding what information you want to get from other people. Intrinsically, &lt;strong&gt;we cannot ask your question more clearly for you because we cannot look inside your brain and figure out what's going on inside of it.&lt;/strong&gt; You need to clarify those internal thoughts &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; you ask for external input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That also includes listening to the feedback that's given on this site. If people tell you that your question relies on faulty assumptions, or that it uses terminology that is actually meaningless, and that this renders your question unanswerable (as is the case for the specific example you linked to), then the onus is on you to sort your question out and put it into shape. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your response is to just throw your hands up and say &quot;but it's clear to me!&quot; then you're failing at your task: you need to transfer aspects of the chemical and biological structure of your brain (your core question) through to the chemical and biological structure of other people's brains using only text. If that didn't sound like a hard task earlier, it needs to do so now, because ultimately it's not going to do itself for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably sounds harsh, and it is. The core reason that it is harsh is the fact that Asking Good Questions is Hard, and that's an intrinsic feature of good questions (both on this site and elsewhere) that you need to learn to handle, because it's not going to go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T13:42:59.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10547" CreationDate="2018-03-21T10:43:10.757" Score="3" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;The funeral service for Professor Hawking has been scheduled to take place at 2:00 pm (1300 GMT) on March 31. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.news18.com/news/tech/stephen-hawkings-funeral-set-for-march-31-1695443.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One source&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA; Should we schedule a special event in the regular chat room or create a new room?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6719" LastEditorUserId="6719" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T22:14:44.910" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T22:14:44.910" Title="Professor Hawking's March 31st Funeral" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10522" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:55:48.007" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had never seen that before, but now I will never un-see it. I vote to remove it in the redesign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:55:48.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10545" CreationDate="2018-03-21T21:00:51.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Echoing rob in the comments, I think it would be indecent to turn what is primarily a private event into a public one. If there is a public event related to his passing on some other date, I would be all for following it along in the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T21:00:51.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10551" CreationDate="2018-03-25T14:39:31.257" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to include a diagram in an answer, but Mathjax doesn't support &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGF/TikZ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TikZ&lt;/a&gt;. I therefore wrote the TikZ code in a local .tex file in my PC, compiled it, and included the diagram as a .png file. The problem with this procedure is that it prevents me from sharing the code (in case someone wants to use it themselves somewhere else), and it forces me to keep the .tex file in my PC (so that I can modify it in the future if I need to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great if I could include the TikZ code in the post itself but, preferably, to make it invisible. Is it possible somehow? An HTML trick perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T15:16:18.030" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T13:25:53.567" Title="Is it possible to include invisible code in a post?" Tags="|support|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10548" CreationDate="2018-03-26T05:13:53.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can just define an empty tex macro and wrap your code in that. Like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\def\ignore #1{} \ignore{\begin{tikzpicture}&#xA;\draw (0,0) -- (1,1) ;&#xA;\end{tikzpicture}}$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ \def\ignore #1{} \ignore{\begin{tikzpicture}&#xA;\draw (0,0) -- (1,1) ;&#xA;\end{tikzpicture}} $$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T05:13:53.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2018-03-26T05:15:36.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given $\left\{ a_{n}\::\:n=1,\:2,\:3,\:\cdots\right\} $ is an infinite&#xA;sequence in $\mathbb{R}$, and every term is positive. How to prove&#xA;that the set&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{equation}&#xA;\left\{ \frac{2+a_{n}}{\sqrt{2+a_{n}^{2}}}\::\:n=1,\:2,\:3,\:\cdots\right\} &#xA;\end{equation}&#xA;has a limit point? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem says that every bounded&#xA;infinite subset of $\mathbb{R}$ has a limit point. But how to prove&#xA;it is bounded? I tried this&#xA;\begin{equation}&#xA;\left|\frac{2+a_{n}}{\sqrt{2+a_{n}^{2}}}\right|\leq\left|\frac{2+a_{n}}{\sqrt{a_{n}^{2}}}\right|=\left|\frac{2+a_{n}}{a_{n}}\right|&#xA;\end{equation}&#xA;but does not seem work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or these is another way to show it has a limit point, without using Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="204294" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T06:39:32.543" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T06:39:32.543" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-03-26T05:15:36.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10548" CreationDate="2018-03-26T12:45:56.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can include TeX comments.  For example, the Einstein equation is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$&#xA;E = &#xA;%\gamma&#xA;mc^2&#xA;$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;E = &#xA;%\gamma&#xA;mc^2&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where most people don't include the $\gamma$ that describes the dynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T12:45:56.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10548" CreationDate="2018-03-26T13:25:53.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative to pasting invisible code is to simply post the code to a Latex sharing site, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sharelatex.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ShareLatex&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Overleaf&lt;/a&gt;, and then link to it below the image. Then interested users could go see it without having to clicking the edit button (though it is forcing someone off-site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even repositories such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.github.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://pastebin.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PasteBin&lt;/a&gt; would work, though you wouldn't have the ability to compile and see the results on in these cases as you would with the previous option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T13:25:53.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10556" CreationDate="2018-03-27T15:33:14.493" Score="25" ViewCount="839" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody who's been here for a while knows that the homework policy is not as advertised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the exercise is sufficiently interesting, and the OP is sufficiently polite, the question often stays open and gets good answers. More sophisticated exercises also fare better: an interesting and nontrivial mechanics problem which has nothing to do with homework is much more likely to be closed than a routine QFT exercise literally screenshotted from a homework assignment. This is not the official policy, but it's what we do. For the most part I'm happy with this, though I do wish people only closed the &lt;em&gt;boring&lt;/em&gt; mechanics problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I've noticed a few people posting questions in rapid succession, each with a screenshot of a problem. If you look at the questions as a whole, it's obvious they've split their entire problem set or take-home exam into tiny pieces and asked us how to do the whole thing. However, since each question alone contains quantum field theory, which is viewed as sophisticated, none of these questions are closed or even downvoted, and most have some answers or comments. (Note: if you go check and see there are close votes and downvotes, they're solely mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this kind of behavior should not be encouraged. This is the textbook example of what the homework policy is designed to prevent, and I don't think it should be overruled just because quantum field theory is involved. Before answering a question, consider the context!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T10:57:17.453" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T07:57:12.870" Title="Users that post every question in their homework/exams" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10555" CreationDate="2018-03-27T16:02:30.790" Score="21" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Recently I've noticed a few people posting questions in rapid succession, each with a screenshot of a problem. If you look at the questions as a whole, it's obvious they've split their entire problem set or take-home exam into tiny pieces and asked us how to do the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of behavior, which is undesirable but not necessarily obvious to reviewers going through the vote-to-close queue, is a good reason to cast custom flags for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also helpful to point out what's happening in the comments, with a remark like &quot;previous related questions by this user: [a] [b] [c],&quot; to make it easier for folks reviewing the questions to see what's happening.  But if the close queue process isn't working, that's basically what the diamond moderators are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T17:17:33.170" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T17:17:33.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10555" CreationDate="2018-03-28T02:06:55.170" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;To discourage rapid postings of the type alluded to in the question, methinks screenshots of text should be outright banned.  I can understand a screenshot of a figure, but if it can be easily done with LaTeX/MathJax, there’s no place for a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, the time and effort going to typesetting makes it easier to justify that the OP has done &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; effort - at least a tysetting effort - in thinking about and posting the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course typesetting also means a question becomes searchable and all those advantages, but it seems to me that intolerance to screenshot questions is enough of a deterrent to eliminate the most egregious cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T02:06:55.170" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:12:45.023" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a variety of questions that shouldn't be allowed under current site rules because they are very clearly lacking basic research - 2 minutes on google would probably help them with their question. It seems clear to me that they should be closed, but I am not sure for which reason to flag, I've had a few flags declined recently for incorrect use and wish to avoid this in the future&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123649" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T10:59:57.017" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T10:59:57.017" Title="What to flag for &quot;lack of basic research&quot; questions?" Tags="|support|questions|close-reasons|content-level|quality|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-03-28T18:02:14.637" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10560" CreationDate="2018-03-28T16:43:36.907" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a relatively simple question regarding syntax that I didn't understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/396286/&quot;&gt;What does self-closing bra-ket mean in Robetson-Schrodinger Uncertainty Relation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I received 2 one-word responses which completely missed my expected data type for a response. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I attempted to interact with the users to clarify that it wasn't the anti-commutator but a specific piece of syntax that I was confused about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am given no constructive response to my comments, attempting to tag the responders results in an attempt at humor? (or sarcastic insult, I can't tell). And my conclusion is that this question must be really terrible [since back at Math.Stackexchange if someone were to comment the way I did I would try to work out, what made sense, clearly to most users here this question is so bad, it doesn't even warrant or deserve any further attention]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I figure why this is a dumb question to even ask? I would like to avoid this happening in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to do some diligence with research, I feel like my English is clear, and it feels like its a pointed enough question (enough to make sense to me?). Clearly one of those 3 things must be wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T18:30:55.530" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T21:58:34.573" Title="Why is this a bad question to even ask in the first place?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10559" CreationDate="2018-03-28T18:04:59.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not the worst question I've seen on this site, but it's not good either. For one thing, the notation $\langle \mathcal O\rangle$ is explained in the wikipedia page you linked yourself. Indeed, if you read the very first equation, you'll see the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... where the brackets $\langle \mathcal O\rangle$ indicate an expectation value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that explanation is not clear enough, the words &quot;expectation value&quot; contain a link to the wikipedia page &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_value_(quantum_mechanics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expectation value&lt;/a&gt;, whose very first equation is&#xA;$$&#xA;\langle A\rangle=\langle\psi|A|\psi\rangle&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the notation $\{A,B\}$ is also explained in your first link (and if you click on &lt;code&gt;show proof&lt;/code&gt;, you will also find an explanation for the notation $\langle A\rangle$). In essence, your question is answered in detail in your own wikipedia link. The downvote you got is not mine, but it is deserved, on grounds of &quot;This question does not show any research effort&quot; (which is the message you get if hover over the downvote button).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T18:04:59.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10559" CreationDate="2018-03-28T21:58:34.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually your question is not clear at all since it seemed to me at first you were asking for an interpretation of $\{A,B\}$.  It was only at the second pass that I realized you were worried about the angle brackets and that part wasn’t immediately clear either since you have brackets around your vectors, which are themselves inside brackets, i.e. $\langle &amp;lt;vector &amp;gt; \vert &amp;lt;vector&amp;gt;\rangle$.  If anything, I though you wanted to use $\langle\langle$ and $\rangle\rangle$ and had made a typesetting error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t downvote either (I think the downvote is excessive but I’m amazed it got an upvote) but I also think the question could have been answered with minimal search effort, as already indicated by someone else.  The notation $\langle A\rangle$ for the average value (or expectation value) is extremely common throughout physics and mathematics (if anything $\langle x\rangle$ is very common in QM anyways).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T21:58:34.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10555" CreationDate="2018-03-30T07:57:12.870" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often answer naive questions, if a) the questioner is young,( high school level) ( I look at the profile) or b) if the title is such that general searches will bring the question to the fore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a) because I am a grandmother with high school level grandsons and hope that for any naive questions they ask (wherever) there is a teacher willing to respond. People asking naive questions at 15 may turn out to be brilliant physicists at 25, if encouraged to open their brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this I have my own experience when I had a very bad math's teacher from 12 to 14, and  then got an excellent one at age 15. The internet is a help  venue for such situations and it is a pity not to be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For b) because one of the purposes of the site is to have a repository of questions for searches on the net, and if the title is a clear question the search will land on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So without solving the problem if it is a homework problem, I try to give pointers and links, as I see many others doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vote yes , to stop accepting photocopies, I would make an exception for formulae ( as my computer sophistication does not include formulae programs :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T07:57:12.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10573" CreationDate="2018-03-30T14:24:47.900" Score="40" ViewCount="2081" Body="&lt;p&gt;[This was originally posted as an answer to another question and was transformed into a question following a comment to this effect.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To discourage rapid postings of the type alluded to in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10555/36194&quot;&gt;another questions&lt;/a&gt;, I would suggest the community simply close questions containing screenshots of text.  I can understand a screenshot of a figure, but if the text part of a question can be easily typeset with the built-in editor, there’s no place for a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, the time and effort going to typesetting makes it easier to justify that the OP has done &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; effort - at least a tysetting effort - in thinking about and posting the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course typesetting also means a question becomes searchable and all those advantages, but it seems to me that intolerance to screenshot questions (at least the textual part of the question) is enough of a deterrent to eliminate the most egregious cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to screenshots of equations, there is already a discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10284/36194&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; that would be applicable to questions as well as answers; the discussion on screenshots of equations seems to be inconclusive at this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Here are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/396665/36194&quot;&gt;a first &lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/395586/36194&quot;&gt;and a second&lt;/a&gt; example of questions where text is posted as screenshot.  The OPs are not rapid posters.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="155230" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T06:02:26.483" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T06:02:26.483" Title="Discouraging the use of textual screenshots in questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|mathjax|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10563" CreationDate="2018-03-30T18:39:57.370" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that text should not be a screenshot. A link could refer to the text and the content described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10284/36194&quot;&gt;elsewhere reference&lt;/a&gt; refers indirectly to me, because I am not open to learning mathjax . The reason is age, so &lt;em&gt;if the physics.SE community wants to discourage old physicists, they should state it clearly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started with computers back in 1967 ,often correcting code on binary cards, and by 2000 when I retired C had become the latest programming tool; and papers were written in postcript.I have reached a saturation limit on memorizing tools. What is wrong in using ^ for a power after all? it is another symbol, and the answers are not going to the printer for a pretty book . When I need to use elaborate formulas I use a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing has become clear,though, negative votes with no physics reason behind them, it must be  people who consider that format is very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T18:39:57.370" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2018-03-31T05:20:36.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hat fits me, and also it would fit older users . Everybody ages, and with age memory is not the same, particularly short term memory. I do try to use dollar signs around simple formulae, (since I found out that two $*$ in the paragraph turn everything into italics and destroy the simple formula ! ). The same care I take in spelling and syntax. (syntax sometimes is atrocious in some questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use simple math and / and x and ^ . When more complicated formats are needed I use screen shots. I am grateful to edits for replacing screen shot formulas, even the simple  small ones, (I guess people gain points by doing that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effort for remembering a new format grows with age.One of the reasons I participate here is to keep my physics memories alive, and I enjoy the effort. I do not think format is all that important , these answers are not going to a publisher to become a permanent book. &lt;strong&gt;If physics.SE wants to stick to format as the mathematics.SE does, it should be clearly stated.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit after comments:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made the last sentence in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment blind and people with difficulties in vision were mentioned ( also older ones) where using mathjax  would enable them to magnify the formulae in a tablet or screen sensitive device. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to see how many users of physics.SE consider themselves in this group. In my case, resistance to mathjax is accompanied with resistance to newfangled screens where not so steady fingers have to manipulate tiny areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the same as resistance to new cars, with oodles of electronics, give me a gear shift one any time. All of these new things need a lot of memorizing, motor memory too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can just  promise to use the dollar signs for simple expressions, and give links for any screenshot formulae I use. If mathjax becomes a rule, too bad. I will have to look elsewhere for my physics fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this coincidence interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just saw on TV a young blind boy on the fourth year of a physics course in Thessaloniki university  who &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kathimerini.gr/902542/article/epikairothta/ellada/to-talento-anoi3e-oles-tis-portes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;won a summer student place&lt;/a&gt; in Oxford for astrophysics!  the link is in greek. Last year he had won a place at MIT ! He plans to go for a PhD in the states. His professors talk of an exceptional mind. It seems there are computer based tools which can transcribe books to Braille.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T05:50:10.887" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T05:50:10.887" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2018-03-31T09:20:17.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user's posts are still a net positive to the community, there's no need to &quot;deal with&quot; them. Edit in the MathJax if you have the inclination, and, if not, someone else will probably do it eventually. Looking through the history of the Suggested Edits queue, it seems like we have a decent number of people willing to typeset a few equations here and there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If their posts are so poorly formatted as to be a net negative to the community (i.e. if they require so much fixing that no one wants to do it, if they're unreadable, or if they have issues besides formatting), treat them as you would any other low quality post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T09:20:17.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T11:28:26.333" Score="6" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a duck on the homepage. It is a bright colour and does not scroll with the page, hence it is a hideous eyesore and needs to be removed from my sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I clicked on it, hoping a close option would appear. I was instead presented with a dialog asking if I had a microphone. Naturally I selected &quot;no&quot;, but it activated my microphone and started listening anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duck is evil. I wish it to be gone immediately. Please tell me how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Well, I've killed it with an adblocker now, so fair enough. I'm all for april fools jokes, and yes, you got me - mostly through the not-so-clever trick of doing it &lt;em&gt;in March&lt;/em&gt; - but do you have to make it so difficult to dismiss the thing once we've got the joke?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T09:53:06.913" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T09:53:06.913" Title="How to kill the duck" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10569" CreationDate="2018-03-31T11:31:51.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/308570/263383&quot;&gt;This mother meta post&lt;/a&gt; describe how to tell the duck you hate it so it goes away. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/308574/263383&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is an option to remove this duck &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine] it quacks once. Click on &quot;I hate this duck&quot;. It understands and disappears. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a problem with the duck growing attached to you and coming back after a while, see the other answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T11:31:51.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10563" CreationDate="2018-03-31T11:49:23.670" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, there are generally two types of users who post screenshots of books/papers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users who are asking us to do their work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users who are answering questions (frequently to posts of the first type)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first bullet is usually off-topic anyway, so these ought to be closed and downvoted so that the Roomba can delete them (assuming they're not deleted sooner by high rep members). This already happens on a regular basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second bullet is generally considered low quality &amp;amp; are usually flagged as such, but one should leave a comment leading to the MathJax tutorial (often this could be extended to doing one equation for them as an example as well) in hopes that they become a good, contributing user. Often times, higher-rep members will replace the whole image (this is also true for the first bullet).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the user doesn't respond to the call to typeset their work, then the answers are usually deleted as &lt;em&gt;low quality&lt;/em&gt; but usually just left as downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that there isn't any problem to be solved here: the current policies are already in line with OPs expectations and the community handles them as such in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T02:25:24.460" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T02:25:24.460" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10563" CreationDate="2018-04-01T09:22:01.257" Score="31" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I agree. Screenshots of text have no place on this site.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is simply no reason that plain text should ever be presented as a screenshot, and plenty of reasons why it shouldn't. If you want to quote text from a separate source which you have as an image, it is your responsibility to transcribe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transcribing the text, simply put, makes the site easier to read for everyone. It might make things more awkward for the reader by just a little bit, but it's definitely there and it's your responsibility to make your posts as readable as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, it is an important accessibility concern. Do you have good eyesight, and are you reading this site without accessibility tools or without zooming in on text? Then good for you! but not every user of the internet has that ability. There are plenty of people with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_impairment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;visual impairments&lt;/a&gt;, going from difficulty reading all the way to complete blindness, that have every right to use the internet, which they do relying on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology#Visual_impairments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assistive technology&lt;/a&gt; such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screen readers&lt;/a&gt; that do just fine if text is typeset as text, but which get stopped in their tracks when it comes to screenshots. Using proper typesetting (including good use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;) provides additional HTML syntax that those assistive technologies can use to give a more meaningful account of the content on the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some disciplines that are intrinsically hard for visually-impaired people (say, photography? though even then, there are surprises) and physics is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; one of them. I would like this site to be open to all, and proper typesetting is one of the things that allows us to be that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This machine-readability also makes the text easier to register and index by search-engine crawlers, which makes the post easier to search for and easier to find by other users, and which therefore makes the post more useful for a broader cross-section of internet users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transcribing the text is also an important favour to the potential answerers who might want to copy-paste that text into their answers in order to refer to it in more detail in their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a separate track, transcribing the text in your question is a way to demonstrate that you're prepared to match the effort you're asking others to perform in researching and writing an answer to your question with an effort to the best of your abilities to write the best question you can. If you cannot be bothered to type out two paragraphs of text, which then means that prospective answerers need to spend extra time squinting at a smudgy screenshot, then that speaks very poorly about how you value the effort you're soliciting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This specific thread is explicitly about text, which has no entry barriers to transcribing. Quite often, though, screenshots of text will also include some mathematics, which do require learning to use the LaTeX syntax used by the site's MathJax engine. I do not think this is an excuse: if you want to quote mathematics, it is your responsibility to typeset it accurately. This is indeed an entry barrier, and you do need to learn how to do so - &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020&quot;&gt;the Mathematics SE site has an excellent tutorial&lt;/a&gt; - which goes back to putting in the effort in formatting your question correctly, to match the effort you're expecting from the answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Furthermore, using the correct MathJax to display the math is even more of an accessibility concern. MathJax output is displayed using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathML&lt;/a&gt;, which contains a ton of semantic information that can be used by screen readers. To see just how much, right click on any complicated formula (here's one for convenience, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f(x) = \sum_{n=-\infty}^\infty c_n e^{inx}$&lt;/span&gt;) and click on Show Math As &amp;gt; MathML Code (so, for my example, it produces &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8c64W.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this code&lt;/a&gt;, which is the 'true' internal representation of the maths as the browser understands it). The resulting mess is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; meant to be human-readable (the way LaTeX syntax is) but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a bonanza for an automated system.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, from time to time (and in practice quite often), community members might step in and transcribe an image for you, particularly if you're a new site member. That's great! somebody decided to help you out and help improve the site on their own. However, if this happens more than two or three times, then it quickly starts becoming abuse of the site's community mechanisms. You are responsible for the content you post and for ensuring that it does not unduly waste other people's time, either editors or readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to what this community should do with questions that contain screenshotted text: what we've been doing already, namely downvoting and, where appropriate, closing; leave a link to this thread if you feel like the downvote requires an explanation. If you have the time and inclination, transcribe the image, particularly if it's a new user, but do make it clear to the poster that they should be doing that on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Benjol/SE-AutoReviewComments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments&lt;/a&gt; userscript described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10484/a-place-for-helpful-comment-templates&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and I've added a link to this answer to my copy of the 'Text, not pictures' template, which now reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Text, not pictures&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563&quot;&gt;do not post images of texts you want to quote&lt;/a&gt;, but type it out instead so it is readable for all users and so that it can be indexed by search engines. For formulae, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and as copyable source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;### Text, not pictures&#xA;Please [do not post images of texts you want to quote](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563), but type it out instead so it is readable for all users and so that it can be indexed by search engines. For formulae, use [MathJax](https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020) instead.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This takes a lot of the friction out, and it makes it much easier to autocomment, downvote, and then move on with one's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to deal explicitly with the specific question: is the presence of a non-transcribed screenshot of text, by itself, reason enough to close a question? Frankly, I personally think that that is excessive and not a very effective way to tackle the problem. As I said, I think that screenshots of text have no place on this site, but the close-fix-reopen cycle is too sluggish to deal effectively with the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, though, for the vast majority of questions that fall in that category there will also be other, more established, reasons to close the post, which makes the question moot most of the time. If none of that is applicable then, in my view, the first action should be a sharp word and a pointer to this thread. Typically the screenshot will be fixed one way or another, but if a newcomer insists on forcing others (by their inaction) to transcribe their screenshots then (as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10287&quot;&gt;the &amp;quot;elsewhere&amp;quot; reference&lt;/a&gt; for mathjax) question closure becomes a more appealing option as a way to force them to take notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, of course, people's votes are their own, but to offer a definitive guidance proposal: vote to close on any other applicable reasons first, and if none are applicable for me the relevant question is: does this question's use of a screenshot constitute an abuse of this site's community mechanisms that can be effectively dealt with through a question closure? If the answer is yes, then I'd say a custom-reason closevote pointing here is warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T16:40:16.210" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T16:40:16.210" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10563" CreationDate="2018-04-02T01:41:15.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is posting text as screenshots okay? &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a post is perfectly okay, except that it contains a text screenshot, should we close it? &lt;strong&gt;No, we should fix it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if there is no resource to fix? (= nobody converts it to text or latex before the VtC vote is done). I think, if the post is really useful, somebody will once do it. If it is not so good, then bye.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think rationality dictates to check the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a high school student being lazy to even type in his homework. Then there are also many other problems most likely (homework, unclear, and so on).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other end: if there is an old physicist, not knowing latex, but giving high quality content. I think we should help him on the spot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cases what we actually find in the review queues, are between (1) and (2), but (1) is the overwhelming majority. But the people in (2) are IMHO too worthy for an iron-fist ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Banning screenshots won't eliminate them, because rep1 first-posters don't know anything from the meta site. They don't know the rules. They will still post. We can't eliminate them, because in their first post, we have no idea, if they have the potential to become an useful site member or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the rules should target to filter them. If their first experience with the site is that their post is killed because they were nit-picked, then they likely won't ever come back. In the &quot;first posts&quot; review, we should be nicer and repetitive, like a school teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere I've read an SE insider stat(*), how the first-posters tend to react to the different events what happens to their post. For me, the most surprising result was that they don't take closures so badly as they are. They don't take care to the votes. Their chance to appear and post again is the highest if they get an answer, but even comments and &lt;em&gt;edits&lt;/em&gt; help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the official site rules are binary: something is either okay or not. Un-officially, there is some flexibility in the system. In this case, in my opinion, having a post with screenshot should be a huge disadvantage, but not a standalone reason to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;*: I am ready to hunt for my source on ask.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T01:41:15.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-03T04:13:57.147" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an efficient way to search all questions and answers in Physics StackExchange?  &quot;Help&quot; says to use the search box that's in the upper right hand corner of every page.  There's no search box there.  Is it because I'm using the Firefox browser?  Is there another way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T04:13:57.147" Title="Is there an efficient way to search all questions and answers in Physics StackExchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-04-03T12:39:13.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10578" CreationDate="2018-04-05T16:13:45.823" Score="7" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;The excellent answers to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/331899/83380&quot;&gt;Why do metals only glow red, yellow and white and not through the full range of the spectrum?&lt;/a&gt; are valuable and helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why this question should be considered a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71503/83380&quot;&gt;What causes a black-body radiation curve to be continuous?&lt;/a&gt; These answers do not seem to address the other question at all, and pointing readers to these answers may cause them to miss the better answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this really be marked as duplicate like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough rep to re-open it, hopefully someone else will get the ball rolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@EmilioPisanty &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/331899/why-do-metals-only-glow-red-yellow-and-white-and-not-through-the-full-range-of#comment744770_331899&quot;&gt;has noted&lt;/a&gt; that the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/207654/83380&quot;&gt;What would the RGB color value of an infinitely hot blackbody be?&lt;/a&gt; is related, but the question I am asking about has so many high quality answers I think it should not be pointed to this question either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T05:48:52.923" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T05:48:52.923" Title="Should this question really be marked as duplicate like this? They seem fundamentally different" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10577" CreationDate="2018-04-05T19:41:09.963" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Important note: whether two questions are duplicates depends on the &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, not the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question, which is currently marked as a duplicate of the other, asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why don't metals glow from red to yellow to green to blue etc.? Why only red, then yellow and then white? Shouldn't all wavelengths be emitted one by one as the temperature of the metal increases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If some metals do glow at with different colours, could you give me examples of such metals and the reason why this happens in specific cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the second question asks (at its core)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am wondering what exactly gives rise to a basically continuous black-body radiation curve in real objects? Since atomic energy states are quantized, it seems real life black-body curves would have some degree of measurable quantization to them (or perhaps the degree of quantization is so small the radiation curves look continuous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is about how an object's blackbody spectrum changes as its temperature changes, and the second is about a spectrum at a fixed temperature, namely why there are no &quot;holes&quot; in the spectrum due to quantization. These are quite different and on that basis I agree that there should not be a duplicate relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd note that the first question also goes on to explain what makes it different from the other one. That is, in general, the recommended way for the question author to respond to the question being marked as a duplicate when they believe it shouldn't be. But in this case I think it's clear even without that explanation that these are different questions. Unfortunately, the edit was done in such a way that it's not going to make a whole lot of sense after the duplicate mark is reversed, so that question is going to need either a rollback or some further editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave this here for a few hours to see if anyone raises mitigating factors, but if not, I'll undo the duplicate mark and make the necessary edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T19:41:09.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10582" CreationDate="2018-04-07T12:36:53.480" Score="19" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the purpose of the 'non-mainstream' close reason is for non-mainstream theories. It's for people who have invented their own theory of everything, put it on Vixra, self-published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/RELATIVITY-Theory-Everything-John-Duffield/dp/0956097804&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; about it, and want to have us look at it. This is a legitimate reason to close, as we get a couple of these people every day, and if we don't push them away quickly they'll just overwhelm the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But over time the scope of this close reason has increased to include naive questions. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/398121/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the color of an elementary particle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/397849/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about tachyons (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CpOFP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are perfectly fine, if misguided questions from laypeople who want to know about physics. They can be answered within mainstream physics just fine, even though the answer will be along the lines of &quot;this is not a valid thing to ask, because...&quot;. Can we be a bit more careful about closing questions like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-04-25T13:38:39.307" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T13:51:50.253" Title="Reserving the use of the 'non-mainstream' close reason" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10600" CreationDate="2018-04-07T13:44:47.520" Score="43" ViewCount="2516" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this has come up in discussion, but somebody scraped various tags on Phys.SE and copy-pasted the results together into several books, including one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B01G68FR3E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QFT&lt;/a&gt;, one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B01K1550DA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GR&lt;/a&gt;, and one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B01MS1Y0B1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;optics&lt;/a&gt;. The books in print cost about \$6 while the ones out of print can cost up to \$1000. The prices are so exorbitant I thought it was one of those &lt;a href=&quot;http://fortune.com/2018/02/22/money-laundering-books-amazon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon money laundering operations&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to be serious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anybody been contacted about this? Is this even legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T18:05:47.923" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T06:59:09.993" Title="Somebody scraped our answers and sold them as a book" Tags="|discussion|publishing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2018-04-07T13:47:53.907" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;General comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to non-mainstream topics, such as, e.g., faster-than-light travel, tachyons, time travel, warp-drive, wormholes, antigravity, multiverses, parallel universes, pre-big-bang, etc, the question should be of high quality, well-defined, well-researched, well-documented, and preferably referring to a specific theory, before Phys.SE should accept it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that Phys.SE's reputation as a trustworthy &amp;amp; reliable physics Q&amp;amp;A site is at stake. The Phys.SE community must draw a line between mainstream &amp;amp; non-mainstream. This is best maintained by not being a soapbox.&#xA;The Phys.SE community cannot rely on hoping that potential answers will always correct non-mainstream questions &amp;amp; views. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T13:47:53.907" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10581" CreationDate="2018-04-07T13:59:45.570" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as these &quot;books&quot; meet the attribution requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons license&lt;/a&gt; all SE content is licensed under, i.e. link to the post and author of everything they copy, this is perfectly legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/273989/263383&quot;&gt;this mother meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T13:59:45.570" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2018-04-07T22:19:35.280" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you may be right. I'm not sure the scope of the close reason is meant to be quite as narrow as (it sounds like) you're proposing here, but it is good to be careful not to overuse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;an FAQ post describing the use of the non-mainstream close reason&lt;/a&gt;. And for further context, I went back and dug up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4534/124&quot;&gt;the original proposal of this close reason&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/non-mainstream-physics-close-reason-discussion&quot;&gt;the chat session where we hashed out the wording&lt;/a&gt;. The main focus of all these resources is on this site not being a substitute for peer review. A question that asks us to broadly evaluate the general correctness of some idea, in the manner that a reviewer would, is supposed to be off topic. There's a notion of &lt;em&gt;broadness&lt;/em&gt; there, in terms of what is being asked, that may have been neglected over the years, and we should probably pay more attention to that going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the issue is that questions about fictional physics (i.e. questions that start from a premise that violates a theory and then asks us to use that theory to predict a result) are also meant to be off topic, as described &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;in the help center&lt;/a&gt;. We don't currently have a standard close reason that applies to these questions, so they wind up getting grouped under non-mainstream physics. Perhaps it's worth having a separate discussion about how to handle those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T22:19:35.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-08T05:47:55.723" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have what I think is an insight, based on a set theoretic analysis of the Riemann integral, regarding whether or not there are any physical variables that really are continuous, vs. discrete. For instance, in QM, energy is quantized but position and time are not yet known to be quantized. However, I think that a set theoretic analysis of integration may indicate that for integrals to work for variables like position, then position probably is quantized. It is not really a question but is more of an analysis. Is it OK to briefly state it and ask if people think it makes sense and has any value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have a full blown paper to publish, nor a typical question. I just want to get feedback on a thought that I had that I can state clearly and briefly. If not here, then where could I do that? I am hoping here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98734" LastEditorUserId="98734" LastEditDate="2018-04-08T05:53:01.087" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T15:15:19.233" Title="Can I State a Thought About Physics and Ask for Comments" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10586" CreationDate="2018-04-08T06:10:26.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like the kind of thing that would be off topic under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;our policy on non-mainstream physics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could do is go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and see if anyone might be interested in giving you feedback on your idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T06:10:26.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10586" CreationDate="2018-04-08T14:34:13.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not the place for what you have in mind, neither for you nor for the users of the site.  The site is set up to answer questions rather than discussions, and it sounds like you want to have a discussion.  Web chats work well between people with lots in common, but discussions - especially through a website - on very novel topics are often complicated by the lack of familiarity with the topic.  Presumably few people will be able to understand what you have in mind, the technical terms you use might have slightly different accepted meanings for different participants, and all it takes is a simple typo to stop the momentum of the discussion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that you write some sort of draft to sort out your ideas in a logical manner, and then contact a professional for a live meeting.  There is only so much you can do by writing, and interacting in person with someone is oftentimes the best way to clarify some points and get feedback, i.e. basically overcome all the challenges mentioned above. The difficulty will be finding someone who will listen to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T14:34:13.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10586" CreationDate="2018-04-08T15:15:19.233" Score="-4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I State a Thought About Physics and Ask for Comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but you could state your case and then ask a pointed question about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have what I think is an insight, based on a set theoretic analysis of the Riemann integral, regarding whether or not there are any physical variables that really are continuous, vs. discrete. For instance, in QM, energy is quantized but position and time are not yet known to be quantized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Energy isn't really quantized, in that the photon has an E=hf wave nature, and it can have any frequency and therefore any energy you like. However the photon is quantized, since h applies to all photons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, I think that a set theoretic analysis of integration may indicate that for integrals to work for variables like position, then position probably is quantized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as we know that photon doesn't approach you in steps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not really a question but is more of an analysis. Is it OK to briefly state it and ask if people think it makes sense and has any value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really. Like I said you could state your case and then ask a pointed question about it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not have a full blown paper to publish, nor a typical question. I just want to get feedback on a thought that I had that I can state clearly and briefly. If not here, then where could I do that? I am hoping here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should try here and see how you get on. I wouldn't try chat if I were you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T15:15:19.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-04-09T04:54:25.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicstravelguide.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXiD9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65572" LastEditorUserId="65572" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T05:29:39.847" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T05:29:39.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T06:03:00.240" Score="-4" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10507/&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; to make a comment under a wrong answer and downvote it and upvote correct answer(s), for dealing with incorrect answers. I present &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/398184/why-wont-heat-make-the-inner-radius-shrink-to-free-up-space/398229#comment893050_398229&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; a case of an answer that was incomplete, leaving a question unanswered. It was accepted and utterly upvoted (16 votes), while a better answer was posted and responded to the full question but had only 9 votes. So I commented under the accepted answer, claiming that it left an unanswered question and that a better answer existed below it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A day or so later, the same user made a wrong answer and was again utterly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/398476/&quot;&gt;upvoted&lt;/a&gt;. After a long discussion in the comment section (and a hot chat discussion), the author of the wrong answer realized he was wrong and accordingly corrected his (now absolutely great) answer. However, from this chat disussion, I learned that this user modified the previous question I linked above, &lt;strong&gt;changing the question he had left unanswered&lt;/strong&gt; so now his incomplete answer is complete, and the whole comments I had left below his incomplete answer aren't applying anymore. This is disgusting. How was such an edit even approved? For instance, there's an edit to a answer I suggested an edit to an answer without changing its meaning but it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/214142&quot;&gt;rejected&lt;/a&gt;. Also, during the hot chat discussion I mentioned above, I noticed that one of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/297291/why-isnt-copper-a-little-ferromagnetic/396896#396896&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; was downvoted, no reason given. I don't have enough points to know who did that, but if that person was in the chat as I suspect, this is disgusting because I see this as a downvote of vengance/hate directed toward me for ranting (I agree I ranted in the chat. I even wanted to quit PSE due to the above problems I faced). But downvotes shouldn't be given for hating a person, only to make the questions and answers better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75916" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T06:11:39.097" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T13:09:18.757" Title="User modifies question so that his already posted answer gets correct. Many other problems" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10591" CreationDate="2018-04-09T06:51:36.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the original version of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a metal ring and I heat it up, I will expect thermal expansion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my point of view of expansion, the metal will expand to free space. In that case, the inner radius of the ring should be smaller and the outer diameter of the ring should be bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that is not the case, but why the inner radius will become larger?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edit you're talking about makes one change to this: in the last paragraph, it changes &amp;quot;why the inner radius will become larger?&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;could anyone explain me why?&amp;quot; I don't see how this materially affects what the question is asking. The original version asks why the inner radius will become larger, and the edited version asks us to explain why the inner radius will not become smaller. It's the same thing. So I can't see how this would change a formerly incorrect answer into a correct one, as it seems like you're claiming. (Unless I misunderstood what you're asking?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you're absolutely right that it is wrong to edit a question in a way that materially changes what it's asking; that includes editing a question such that a wrong answer becomes correct, or vice versa. I just don't see how the post you've linked is an example of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the separate issue of downvotes: you can't assume anything based on a single downvote. However, if you receive several downvotes in a short time period, and they don't get reversed by an automatic script within 24 hours, you should flag one of the affected posts for moderator attention and we'll look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you suspect a particular site member of having cast those downvotes, it's fine to mention your suspicions in the flag message, but &lt;strong&gt;do not share that information in public&lt;/strong&gt; (meta or chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T06:51:36.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10591" CreationDate="2018-04-09T13:03:12.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have actually modified it because after seeing the original question and answering it I immediately understood the &lt;em&gt;root&lt;/em&gt; of the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, Giordano Fearghas was told that the inner radius of the ring is growing, probably on some lecture or so. Then Giordano tried to consider intuitively, why doesn't it shrink? The root of the problem was the wrong &lt;em&gt;intuition&lt;/em&gt; that told him that &lt;em&gt;the ring should shrink&lt;/em&gt;, not the fact &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it grows at all. Explaining &quot;why doesn't it shrink&quot; with the answer &quot;because it grows&quot; wasn't really the solution OP was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giordano has &lt;em&gt;proven&lt;/em&gt; my assumptions by commenting &quot;I love this answer&quot; a few minutes after I answered and told me that &quot;he will accept it as fast as he can&quot;, which, again, has proven me that I have correctly understood the original question (otherwise, Giordano would obviously ask me, &quot;and why does it grow?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid confusion around the actual &lt;em&gt;wording&lt;/em&gt; of his post (such as your comment about &quot;you didn't answer OP's question, but the second answer did that, and it is better&quot;), I've decided to edit it. I believe I was right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52290" LastEditorUserId="52290" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T13:09:18.757" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T13:09:18.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10596" CreationDate="2018-04-09T14:55:46.550" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am a user of stack exchange chat. And I am on Android mobile. My questions are &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;) How do I enable Mathjax In chat. Can I? I am asking as the question asked was answered for computer not for mobile.                                                            &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187604" LastEditorUserId="187604" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T16:00:57.753" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T16:10:25.283" Title="How to enable Mathjax for chat on the Android mobile browser?" Tags="|support|mathjax|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T14:57:54.813" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I will give two example to put forward my question.&#xA;Hierarchy Problem now when I heard this question I found it a lot of metaphysical question because it asks why there is so much discrepancy between weak force and gravity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mass generation problem this again ask for the reason why particles get their mass in first place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though physicists are working on these questions I am still skeptical about the idea of involvement of metaphysics in here. Also, I don't understand why metaphysics suffers so harsh criticism by physicists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175031" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T14:57:54.813" Title="Where to draw line between a physics question and a meta physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-04-09T17:22:07.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10594" CreationDate="2018-04-09T16:10:25.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChatJax bookmarklet&lt;/a&gt; appears to be designed for both desktop and mobile browsers, and indeed there's a specific version for &quot;troublesome mobile browsers&quot; to try out if you find it's not working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how you can install a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bookmarklet&lt;/a&gt; on a mobile browser - that will vary depending on the browser, and it may not be possible on some browsers. Your mileage may vary here, and I'm reluctant to recommend solutions as the different routes may or may not apply depending on individual situations (such as e.g. willingness to sync mobile and desktop bookmarks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you could install Tampermonkey as an app and then run the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vyznev/chatjax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChatJax++ userscript over it&lt;/a&gt;, though again that has some significant overheads. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, to the best of my understanding, rather few people in this site's community use MathJax for chat over mobile, given how hard it is to write LaTeX on mobile keyboards so you're mostly doomed to one-sided conversations even if you can see other people's MathJax rendered correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T16:10:25.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T07:30:45.263" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was distressed to find that someone called George Duckett appears to be (trying to) cash-in on stack exchange by selling things &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sIhRDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the terms of the license we publish our work under, but what I see here does not contain proper attributions (and links) to where the material came from or who produced it. There is a copyright page at the back which may or may not spell out the creative commons license, but since I can't see it, then it may as well not exist. In other &quot;books&quot;, such as the one lifted from Astronomy SE, there is no mention of the creative commons license on this page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left a review pointing out that all this material is freely available and searchable already. The book adds no value and is at the very least morally questionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T08:27:23.783" Title="Is this guy really allowed to sell our stuff like this?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-11T09:30:19.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10597" CreationDate="2018-04-11T08:27:23.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to be able to read the whole book to check if it conforms to the CC BY-SA license, as Google Books provides the ability to search the book's full text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no occurrence of &quot;BY-SA&quot;, &quot;ShareAlike&quot;, &quot;Creative Commons&quot;, or &quot;CC&quot; (except for a couple of physics abbreviations) anywhere in the book, it seems pretty likely (although I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice) that the book doesn't conform to the ShareAlike element of the CC BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're the author of any questions or answers copied in the book then this may entitle you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_dmca?product=books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;file a DMCA report&lt;/a&gt; with Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you do or not, it is worth taking comfort in the fact that while it's very easy to put up these kinds of copies (including ones that are more conformant with the license than this one) it seems unlikely it is fooling or profiting from many people at all. They are extremely low cost attempts to collect extremely low value ill-gotten gains. It amounts to very little more than a rather ugly kind of noise in the wastelands of the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191986" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T08:27:23.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10581" CreationDate="2018-04-11T09:41:19.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see that the CC-BY-SA license allows people to produce this kind of thing, but I don't think that excuses the fact that you can go to google books and read these Q+A without being aware that the content has been stripped from elsewhere, with no obvious indication of the CC-BY-SA license and with no proper links to the original source of the material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T09:41:19.340" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10581" CreationDate="2018-04-13T19:58:31.150" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actually, on further reflection, I don't think this is OK at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm all for re-use of the Creative Commons content that I post on this site, including commercial use if people can find ways to monetize it that are compatible with its licensing conditions. However, I'm not OK with reuse of that content in ways which infringe the attribution requirements (i.e. providing electronic copies without hyperlinks to the source post and author profile, and making clear on the text which website the content came from) or the licensing requirements (details below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, it is very easy to get immediately incensed when you see your content used in ways you didn't anticipate, particularly if those ways include money changing hands. In those situations, say, when somebody says &quot;somebody is printing Wikipedia and selling it for a profit&quot;, I often find it useful to append &quot;... and it's being used to tremendous effect in schools in [insert developing country] where internet access is [insert suitable restriction]&quot;, and see if that changes how I feel about it. However, that is not the case with this book series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rob Jeffries is quite right in his initial statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you can go to google books and read these Q+A without being aware that the content has been stripped from elsewhere, with no obvious indication of the CC-BY-SA license and with no proper links to the original source of the material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and although the details vary depending on the precise presentation at issue, most of the ways in which the material is available are problematic enough to be infringing in way way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And frankly: Rob is right, it's time someone took the time to write some sharp lines to that effect. So, I've written a pretty curt email (much longer than I intended, partly to leave no room for wriggling and partly because I didn't have time to make it shorter) to Duckett which &lt;s&gt;I intend to send shortly&lt;/s&gt; I've just sent. I will update this answer as and when I get any news from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Before I do, though, I'm posting it here so I can get some community feedback in case my interpretation of the license is off in some way I'm not seeing right now.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Mr. Duckett,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am writing to you about your book series &quot;Questions and Answers&quot;, collected from the Stack Exchange network of sites, as available through the Amazon and Google Books sites. This email requires action on your part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As you know, user-provided content on the Stack Exchange network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&lt;/a&gt;) that allows you to build upon that content and indeed to use it commercially so long as the license conditions are met: that the work be correctly attributed, that it be licensed under a compatible license that is clearly and unambiguously marked, and that no additional technological or legal restrictions be applied to the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As regards attribution, the requirements for reusing Stack Exchange content are clearly spelled out in the Stack Exchange blog (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&lt;/a&gt;) and they essentially follow the basic common-sense requirement that any reproduction of the work in electronic means must contain a hyperlink to the location of the original work as well as a hyperlink to the author's profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As regards the license, you are required to license your derivative work only under the terms of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license; moreover, as the license makes it clear in section 4.a,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Similarly, as noted in that same section of the license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, as regards the license, I draw your attention to section 7, which clarifies that redistribution of the work in breach of the license's terms will cause its termination, at which point you lose the right to use the work as originally licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This email concerns content whose copyright rests with me, which was made available on the website Physics Stack Exchange (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;) as well as other sites of the Stack Exchange network, and which you have redistributed as part of several collections of your 'Questions and Answers' series, which are available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;as Kindle ebooks on Amazon.com, currently in print and for sale whose profits (ostensibly) benefit you directly;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;as out-of-print paperback hardcopies from Amazon.com;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;as samples of the paperback hardcopies, displayed as electronic copies and attributed to you, on Google Books;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;as eBook samples, displayed as electronic copies and attributed to you, on Google Books;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as well as a variety of other outlets (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=Duckett+&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?q=Duckett+&lt;/a&gt;&quot;Questions+and+Answers&quot;+-site:amazon.*+-site:books.google.com).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can find a selection of the books in your series which contain content under my copyright using the Google Books search feature (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=inauthor%3A%22George+A+Duckett%22+emilio-pisanty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=inauthor%3A%22George+A+Duckett%22+emilio-pisanty&lt;/a&gt;). These include your books on Physics, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Energy in Physics, Electrostatics, Particle Physics, Fluid Dynamics, Physics Exercises, Optics, and Mathematica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your redistribution of the work is in infringement of the CC BY-SA 3.0 in (at least) the following ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Google Books samples, as provided by default, do not contain any hyperlinks to either the source of each work nor the profile of the author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Google Books samples, as provided by default, do not contain any indication of the origin of the work as globally contained in the collection: they have an 'About this book' page which does not reference the website from which the book's content originated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Google Books samples, as provided by default, often contain no indication of the licensing conditions of the work, as the final page (containing the scant copyright and licensing information) is not provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Where the Google Books samples, as provided by default, do contain licensing information, they still do not contain suitable indication of the CC BY-SA license: where the final licensing page is present, the information provided, &quot;All questions and content within this book are licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required&quot; is insufficient. To clarify this point further:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The name &quot;cc-wiki&quot; is essentially meaningless and it was clearly deprecated by both Creative Commons and Stack Exchange as early as June 2009 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/04/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/04/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/&lt;/a&gt;). The correct name of the license is CC BY-SA 3.0, including the license version (which does matter).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The collection does not contain either a copy of the license text or the URI of the license, as required by §4.a of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Google Books samples, in their eBook version, contain no indication of the licensing conditions of the work, as the final page (containing the scant copyright and licensing information) is not provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Kindle ebook versions as provided in samples by Amazon.com do not contain any indication of the CC BY-SA license, nor do they contain the license text as required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Kindle ebook versions contain technological measures (generally known as Digital Rights Management) that prevent their users from redistributing the work, a restriction that is explicitly forbidden by the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The paperback copies (as depicted in the Amazon.com &quot;Look Inside&quot; feature) do not feature any indication of the website from which the work originates, as their 'About this book' page does not reference the Stack Exchange website from which the book's content originated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As indicated above, the infringement of the license terms causes the license to expire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More generally, the core problem is that readers can see the content, both on Google Books as well as on the paperback copies, without having any idea as to where the content came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I should also note that several others have found your approach problematic, as discussed on the Physics Meta site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10581&quot;&gt;Somebody scraped our answers and sold them as a book&lt;/a&gt;), (as well as a previous discussion at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/273989&quot;&gt;Are these eBooks that copy from SE illegal?&lt;/a&gt;); indeed they may contact you independently. If you wish to address these issues in good faith directly with the Physics Stack Exchange community, I would ask that you do so at that thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the final page of each book you include a statement (&quot;If you have or know of copyrighted content included in this book and want it to be removed please let me know at georgeduckett@hotmail.com&quot;) that indicates that you intend to do right by the license terms. Given the fact that the books are already published and that several of your mistakes cannot be undone without altering the record, your options are quite limited, but if you want to retain the license to the work, you do need to fix the problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be clear, I am not requiring you to remove the content under my copyright from your collections: instead, I am requiring you to stick to the CC BY-SA license's terms as stipulated above. This means that you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ensure that all electronic copies of the work, as provided by both Google Books and Amazon.com, contain appropriate attribution, including hyperlinks to the source post and its author's profile page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ensure that all electronic copies of the work, as provided by both Google Books and Amazon.com, contain appropriate licensing information, including the correct name of the license and its full text or the URI of a complete copy of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This will likely require you to ensure that the hyperlink-less copies are removed from Google Books and that the eBook sample is made available without cutting any attributions and without removing the license statement (i.e. likely to make the eBook sample available in full), and ensure that the full and correct license information is available from the landing page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Similarly, this will require you to ensure that the Kindle eBooks (currently still on sale) are amended to include the correct license and a URI of a complete copy, and to ensure that the DRM is removed from all copies of the work, as well as ensuring that the full licensing information is available 'above the fold' on the Amazon.com landing pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are unwilling or unable to fix these problems, or if you do not respond to this communication, my next steps will be, at my convenience, to initiate Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown proceedings against the infringing copies of your books on both Google Books and Amazon.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I look forward to hearing from you regarding your planned actions on resolving the infringing aspects of your published collections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sincerely,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Emilio Pisanty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and finally: I'm releasing this post under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;, in case you want to, say, privately distribute slightly-modified copies of this text by email. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T13:45:49.553" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T13:45:49.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-15T00:07:03.727" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my feed I got this &quot;user was removed&quot;  and - 5 reputation. What does it mean? Am I having any kind of trouble with this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187604" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T00:12:42.433" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T00:12:42.433" Title="What does 'user was removed' mean?" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-04-15T00:12:00.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10581" CreationDate="2018-04-16T21:41:08.493" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the creator of these books. Firstly I should say it was not my intention to break any copyright or cause any ill feeling among contributors. When initially evaluating submitting the books to Amazon/Google/iTunes I checked the terms of the license and checked with Stack Overflow and believe I did everything needed to comply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eBooks and physical books should no longer be available on Amazon. I followed some example links however in each case I checked it said it was unavailable as I'd expect. If you see any that you can buy (that aren't second hand) please let me know and I'll follow up with them. I do believe I complied with all relevant terms for these books while they were available. Print books had all relevant urls for any link (to user/post/license) in the footer of the page the link appeared on for example. FWIW I have not set the prices of the used books that are available, nore the prices any resellers choose to charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the eBooks available via google play, there is no DRM applied. This is a setting per book and every one has the DRM option disabled. I was unaware of the wiki license name change (it's included in that 2009 post, but it's unclear when the notice re. the update was added). I'll update all links where I reference it, and also include the bare link as well as the license name/hyperlink. This is not an instant change but I will update this post when completed. I've updated all books to indicate that I'm the Publisher, rather than the Author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where book samples are concerned I have changed the settings on all books to make 100% of each book available as a sample and to allow for a PDF download as that better reflects the spirit of the license and of SO. As you indicate it looks like the samples are stripping out the hyperlinks to the users/posts depending on how the sample is found (I've seen cases where it includes links properly as well as the examples where it doesn't). A sample may constitute fair use under the license however &lt;del&gt;I'm hoping that the PDF will contain working links and avoids that debate&lt;/del&gt; (it doesn't, see comment). As of writing google doesn't seem to have updated the sample pages; it's getting late here and I've had a long day, so I will check and update tomorrow / when it changes. I will also look into whether I can get the google previews to properly render the links either my raising it with their team, or by changing the format of my eBooks, or whether I can remove the samples all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if any user would like their content removed from all current and future publications I will do so. Likewise, if the physics.se community collectively decide they do not wish to be included in any publications I will remove them from sale and not use this site as a source for any future publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-George Duckett&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Samples&lt;/strong&gt;. I've found an option within google to only allow the epub format as a sample, rather than an auto-generated PDF which mangles hyperlinks. This is in effect now; when clicking &quot;free sample&quot; I get a message that my browser is incompatible (presumably because it can't open the epub file). I've yet to be able to open the sample. I will keep trying various methods until I can verify that hyperlinks are preserved or receive confirmation that the samples will not work anywhere. I will move the copyright section to be immediately below the about section so a casual reader should be made aware more easily. Once that is done for all books I will probably reduce the sample from 100%. Any changes to books' contents will happen over the course of a few weeks as I re-generate and re-publish them on google's platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Author&lt;/strong&gt;. I've changed my name to be &quot;publisher&quot; rather than &quot;author&quot; on Google's stores. As the books are no-longer on Amazon I can't change the data unfortunately. I also cannot find a way to change the Author field on iTunes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 18/04/2018&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Samples&lt;/strong&gt;. I've submitted updated samples to google for all books sourced from physics.stackexchange. The rest of the books will follow. Google says to allow for at least 24 hours to see the changes. I will be keeping an eye on this as I want to make sure the updates worked correctly. Samples are still available via Google Books with hyperlinks not rendering correctly in their preview. I've got a support ticket passed on to the &quot;engineering team&quot; at google (presubably a team specifically for google books) regarding this. They couldn't give me a timeline for when they'd get back to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 24/04/2018&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I have updated all books. Google will take time to update them though, probably no more than a day or two. I have however asked for all books to be deactivated so they won't be listed on Google. This will take time as their content team has to do it given the volume of books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6509" LastEditorUserId="6509" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T06:59:09.993" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T06:59:09.993" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2018-04-21T04:19:13.640" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sort of censorship over non-mainstream theories always makes me uneasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fallacies in science are discussed and resolved using logic and experiment. Not using censorship. Censuring is just putting a lid on the fallacies, and they'll keep on growing under the lid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Censuring is like saying &quot;Shut up&quot;. Well, that's not a scientific argument. A scientific argument is &quot;What you're saying is wrong, as shown experimentally/logically by X in section Y of reference Z&quot;. Arguments like &quot;Shut up&quot;, or &quot;You're wrong, because X said otherwise&quot;, or &quot;You're wrong, what you said appeared in a non-respectable journal&quot; show a lack of scientific arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We usually condemn the Church for making Galilei retract his theories, and condemn the Church's censorship and its &lt;em&gt;Index librorum prohibitorum&lt;/em&gt;. And then go on doing this kind of censorship ourselves. We think we have the right to, because we see mistakes in non-mainstream theories. &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; are right, they are wrong. But the Church censored Galilei because they saw mistakes in his theories too – they gave reasons why his works had to be retracted. They were the &quot;peer-review&quot; of the time. They represented what was accepted and acceptable. In their eyes, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; were right, he was wrong. Do we lack a historical sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer the point of view attributed to Voltaire: &quot;I wholly disapprove of what you say – and will defend to the death your right to say it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important message in Galilei's work, and in the work of others from that period, like Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno, was that every human being has the right to openly put forward a thesis, and other human beings have the right to approve it or criticize it and argue why it is false, and in turn put forward their own. And every human being has the right to examine this kind of exchange, think about it, and come upon &lt;em&gt;their own&lt;/em&gt; conclusions. There's only one true peer reviewer, and that is your own brain. Accepting or rejecting a scientific thesis just because of someone's authority, whoever that might be, is not science, it's religion – we're back at the time of &quot;because Aristotle said so&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, we can say &quot;people who support non-mainstream theories can very well put them elsewhere on the internet, nobody forbids them to do so&quot;, and give some reasons why they shouldn't appear on StackExchange. Yet... I don't know, to me it sounds like &quot;democracy is very difficult to handle, so let's instore a dictatorship instead&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we think of &quot;peer-review&quot; I suppose we ideally think of something like this: someone proposes a theory, and the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; scientific community examine it and &quot;votes&quot; in its favour or against it, from logical and experimental consideration. But actual peer-review doesn't work that way. It's about 1–4 persons making a decision. Statistically speaking that's not a representative sample of the whole community (on top of that they sometimes disagree with one another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the fuzziness in these thoughts. It's an uneasy feeling that I can't put properly into words, related to this kind of discussions about censorship...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I see a lot of answers in Physics Stack Exchange that don't give any references at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132418" LastEditorUserId="132418" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T18:58:00.803" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T18:58:00.803" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2018-04-25T13:51:50.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to address your second example (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/397849/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for 10k+; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CpOFP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;) and questions along that vein. In a nutshell, that question follows the broad strokes of a rather common class of questions that get closed as non-mainstream and which basically read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the laws of physics say that X can never happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that X happened. Then what do the laws of physics predict as a consequence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I have no sympathy at all for those questions, and their closure is simply a good riddance. We're here to discuss physics, not hypotheticals based on some ill-defined concept of how the laws of physics might be modified to indulge Random Internet User's idea of what reality should be like. But more importantly, this class of question is, by construction, a contradiction, and we have much better places to funnel the time and attention of this site's userbase than to threads that are fundamentally unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, similarly, while the non-mainstream close reason's original reason for being was along a different vein than these ones, the overall spirit (that this site is not here to be all things to everyone and that in order to have high-quality content we explicitly restrict our scope from considering all possible variations of the laws of physics) fits these counterfactuals quite closely. I think it's perfectly well-applied here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T13:51:50.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-28T19:55:43.413" Score="21" ViewCount="916" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl/dr&lt;/strong&gt; What specific policy changes or behavior changes do you think would lower the barrier to entry for new users represented by the current homework policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essay is in response to a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/&quot;&gt;recent Stack Overflow blogpost &quot;Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. We've&#xA;had some discussion in the h bar about the logic behind the post,&#xA;but I'd suggest that we leave that aside for a bit and focus on&#xA;the action points suggested in the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let’s shift  from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let’s do something about comments.&lt;/strong&gt; (in particular about&#xA;sarcastic, pointed, or overly terse comments that might tend to&#xA;push new users away)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let’s make it easier for new users to succeed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let’s stop judging users for not knowing things. (We’re a Q&amp;amp;A&#xA;site!)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I'm focusing on the third on ``Let’s make it easier&#xA;for new users to succeed'' in relation to the oft-discussed&#xA;homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary of the Current State of Things&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;The current policy&lt;/a&gt; holds that we don't work individual exercises&#xA;(without regard to whether they were assigned as homework or&#xA;not), but instead are happy to answer questions about physics&#xA;concepts and principle no matter the context in which they arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; policy?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly this is a compromise between a understanding among some&#xA;users that homework-like question flood a internet help space and&#xA;push out more interesting content on one hand and the desire of&#xA;other users explicitly to provide help with the early stages&#xA;education and development and to provide explicit outreach to the&#xA;wider community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The matter has been discussed over and over again, and while&#xA;people are willing to take the opinions of others seriously&#xA;and treat them respectfully they two points of view have never&#xA;been fully reconciled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there seems to be a widespread agreement that current&#xA;policy is not achieving it's goals and improvements are&#xA;needed. They haven't happened in part because of deadlock and it&#xA;part due to burnout over the issue on the part of the active meta&#xA;users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The issue with the policy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem is that extracting the conceptual trouble from&#xA;the middle of an exercise the student doesn't understand well&#xA;enough to complete is an advanced skill: exactly the sort of&#xA;thing that is still in front of beginning students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/54769/440&quot;&gt;I wrote about some of the techniques for teaching the difference in a post on academia&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;and I will emphasize that it can be a time consuming process that&#xA;is often frustrating to the student because they don't understand&#xA;why the things I'm asking them to do are better than the thing&#xA;they are trying to do.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short the policy we have is almost the opposite of &quot;Let’s make&#xA;it [easy] for new users to succeed.&quot; At least when the new user is a beginner in our subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Confession&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While on the whole I think it is not useful to focus on &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; is&#xA;responsible for policy, but I need to fess up to being non-trivially&#xA;responsible for the current situation. I've been (and still am)&#xA;firmly in the &quot;homework-help eats on-line communities&quot; camp, and&#xA;I pushed some ideas that contributed to the current situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What Can Be Done?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear from the blog post that they are contemplating a&#xA;&quot;ask-a-question wizard&quot; type of tool, but we won't see that on&#xA;Physics in the short term.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What Can &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; Do in the Meantime?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the point of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious answers seems to me to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the policy in a way that reduces the barrier, without opening the floodgates of venue-consuming low-level problem-solving.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide more active and positive guidance (and outright aid) so&#xA;that willing posters can get past any barrier that is still in&#xA;the way. &lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but neither one is actually finished in this form. The details&#xA;are still to be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question to be answered&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; policy or behavior change do you recommend (or&#xA;recommend against) and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; My interpretation. Opinions doubtless vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; And they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Maybe we can do some spade work to&#xA;earn a spot near the top of the list? Consider this a solicitation for input from the team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; I tried to work on this at the level of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/402666/a-source-contains-two-radionuclides-initially-10-decays-come-from-one-how-lo?noredirect=1#comment902467_402666&quot;&gt;helpful&#xA;comment to guide the poster in the direction of finding&#xA;conceptual stumbling blocks&lt;/a&gt;&quot; a recent post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2018-04-28T21:01:56.560" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T08:37:44.323" Title="How can we &quot;make it easier for new users to succeed&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|new-users|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-04-29T04:23:43.307" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Implement a &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/274634/7317818&quot;&gt;tag warning&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest a tag warning for hw/exercises that's written with an eye to the user who has a question we want: lead &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; user to write a good hw/exercise question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows how much impact tag-warnings actually have. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/309592/311001&quot;&gt;They show up at the wrong time, after all.&lt;/a&gt;) But the tag warning for hw/exercises &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10043/124778&quot;&gt;already brainstormed here&lt;/a&gt; is largely focused on preventing the asking of bad questions rather than stepping a user through asking one well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said in the question-post, you're not going to immediately get a wizard for crafting good homework-based questions.  But by trying to write into a tag-warning good guidelines/workflow for someone trying to ask for homework help we'll be laying the groundwork for when the time comes: &amp;quot;see, SE staff: we already have one ready to go, for the 2nd-most used and most-problematic tag on one of the Network's busiest sites.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124778" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T02:26:19.137" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-04-30T19:40:30.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We could provide problem solving advice on Meta&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current situation tells posters &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; they need to accomplish, but&#xA;not how to get there. And that is a non-trivial skill, which&#xA;beginners need help learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written advice is not necessarily the best way (it is, perhaps,&#xA;one of the worst ways) to deliver such help, but it is what we&#xA;can do without new tooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For implementation we could either make new answers to the&#xA;existing meta question explaining what the policy is, or generate&#xA;a new meta question along the lines of &lt;em&gt;How do I express my&#xA;trouble with a particular exercise as a &quot;conceptual question&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some pieces of advice that might appear include (each with an&#xA;explanation, of course):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determine (and communicate) all the things that you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;understand about the problem, so that you can focus on the&#xA;disconnect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Focus on the physical quantities present, not the numbers&#xA;present (i.e. &quot;speed at the beginning&quot; instead of&#xA;$12\,\mathrm{m/s}$): the symbols that appear in formulas means&#xA;&lt;em&gt;quantities&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be able to state what physical principles or framework you are&#xA;using to think about the problem. This could be as simple as&#xA;&quot;kinematics&quot; or &quot;conservation of energy&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take the part of the problem that is tripping you out of the&#xA;context of the question where you encountered it and re-phrase&#xA;it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T21:34:25.150" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T21:34:25.150" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-05-01T04:19:23.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary - (Maybe) snappy video FAQs but no rule changes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a difference between being welcoming and being a doormat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let’s shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abuse is already a breach of the rules, it's for users to flag outright abuse if they see it.  It requires no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need to avoid enforcing an artificial code of conduct which acts as a barrier to people staying on the site.  If people cannot feel reasonable levels of freedom to express frustration, irritation and annoyance they will leave.  And those people leaving will be the useful posters, who provide useful answers and some of the challenging questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't completely stifle sarcasm, etc. without making the place feel like a morgue or some sort of gawd-awful genetlemen's club.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's nice enough, IMO.  We're not running a hotel for Mormons, if you see what I mean. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let’s do something about comments. (in particular about sarcastic, pointed, or overly terse comments that might tend to push new users away)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people stop posting their homework (often as nothing more than a photo of the page it's written on) and looking for an answer (and even have the gall to want it explained &quot;clearly and in detail&quot;), I'll stop being sarcastic, pointed and overly terse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These people are not remotely interested in learning physics.  They're interested in having someone else do their homework, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no need to be nice about this and it's a waste of effort doing more than VTCing for homework-type reasons (which will post a message explaining why which they can fix or ignore - their choice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let’s make it easier for new users to succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy.  It's a simple matter of them looking at the site before they post an answer, opinion or question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not have to handhold them.  There's plenty of common sense ways to learn the ropes.  There's a tour, you can just read upvoted questions and answers to get a feel for the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let’s stop judging users for not knowing things. (We’re a Q&amp;amp;A site!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not doormats.  I think we all offer help (in different ways).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's put that another way.  In school (remember that ?) when you were in class was it sometimes exactly what you need to be told to stop wasting people's time (or similar) ?  To be told that a minimum effort is expected of you ?  To not waste people's time because you're too lazy to make any effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's not as if there's isn't a lot of text already posted telling people what's expected of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They often just don't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've all experienced the posters who won't take no for an answer and do things like try and argue in comments why we should do their homework for them, all the way up to the ones that repost multiple times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not aware of any such &quot;dichotomy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have rules for quality.  We have &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; rules for kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &quot;kindness&quot; is not what's needed.  There's a difference between reasonable politeness as a general rule and &quot;walk over us and we'll walk in front of you again and ask for another&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to be kind to people, I'll work on the soup kitchens for the homeless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Change the policy in a way that reduces the barrier, without opening the floodgates of venue-consuming low-level problem-solving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The barrier is there to discourage abuse of the site.  It does it's job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made for making the barrier tougher, not easier.  I think we're already on the nice side of reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide more active and positive guidance (and outright aid) so that willing posters can get past any barrier that is still in the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we already provide a lot of this.  This is something of a &quot;You Can Lead A Horse To Water&quot; thing.  The warnings, FAQs and guidelines are already there and pointed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The YouTube generation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what may be needed, if anything, is &lt;em&gt;video&lt;/em&gt; FAQs, and guidelines for newbies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid the majority of the younger generation are utterly disinterested in &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt; rules.  They need some snappy music backed video telling them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the problem users will continue to be a problem because they don't care about rules.  Video rules might help avoid the problems with some genuine users keen to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe one specific video stating the homework policy prominently on the question entry page ?  With (Gawd help us) a snappy background muzak for the Millennials. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T04:19:23.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-05-06T06:53:34.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Invite people from different backgrounds as newcomers to peer review this site&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get a good idea of problems experienced by newcomers, we should consider inviting a number of newcomers to peer review this site. They can be physics students, professional physicists etc., they are then asked to occasionally post here and keep a file about their opinion on the questions/answers they post and the feedback they get. When the review period is over, we can study the opinions of the reviewers and then decide how best to address problems experienced here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T06:53:34.953" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-05-06T15:14:35.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I remember there was a post way back in the mists of time...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162/should-we-rename-the-homework-policy/7163#7163&quot;&gt;Should we rename the homework policy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That got consensus but still has not been implemented. Perhaps we should finally implement this, as it will probably help users understand what exactly the policy is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T15:14:35.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:35:20.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the concern is that homework like questions clog up the site, would an “easy” solution&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; be to make these posts optionally invisible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One check box removes the content from your feed and search results - yet people who want to help (or need help) can find each other on this site. We already have he ability to have favorite tags. This just extends that concept in the opposite direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would give people who choose to be welcoming and helpful the chance to do so - the ones who want to snark can instead ignore these posts and live happier, more fulfilling lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* I realize that on a common platform like SE nothing is as easy as it sounds...&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26969" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T17:35:20.307" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-05-07T12:23:20.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am here suggesting an attitude/behavior change (let's call it an improvement) rather than a change in rule or given information.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A specific behavior change or change of attitude towards new users with poorly described homework questions could simply be to comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand your task - but why can't you solve it? &lt;strong&gt;What is your doubt&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning, &lt;strong&gt;refrain from solving the question and rather ask for the underlying doubt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, no homework-asker needs help with their homework - they need help with the &lt;strong&gt;tool&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;method&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;understanding&lt;/strong&gt; required to solve the homework. (Apart from obvious cases of poorly stated homework-tasks or typos - or lazy panicking last-minute students.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing on targeting the underlying doubt before the question is of course more the purpose of a teacher who educates than a Q/A-site that answers specific questions without care for the background. But if this site and community really, truly wish to embrace more homework-askers, then prompting for the right question with a doubt-seeking rather than condemning attitude is a &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; necessity IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the standard message given when closing such questions includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence often mentioned for the user in comments before closing. But is this sentence and phrase clear? I do not believe so. A &quot;specific physics concept&quot; could for a not-too-experienced student just as well be interpreted as the homework question itself. So, such sentence may not be as helpful towards a proper rephrasing as asking for the doubt or &quot;what prevents you from solving / starting / doing something&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4962" LastEditorUserId="4962" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T12:30:15.810" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T12:30:15.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-05-07T22:27:08.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;We probably need a revamped tutorial on &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to ask an on-topic homework question.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current title of the homework policy, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, is not a coincidence: in its original form (say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/715/11&quot;&gt;v11&lt;/a&gt;), and as adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-ask-a-homework-question&quot;&gt;the original thread on the mathematics site&lt;/a&gt;, it was intended as a tutorial to help newcomers adapt their set-piece dumps into posts that passed the bar set by the (rather more permissive?) environment on this site all those seven years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years, that post's form and function has morphed somewhat, but if you look at the current post from the perspective of its original goal, it's really not doing its job very well, so if you take e.g. this passage,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to produce a focused, specific question is to show your work. Explain what you've been able to figure out so far and how you did it. Showing your work will help us gauge where you are having problems&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it does some pretty poor justice to the actual policy as implemented in the ground, but more importantly, it's just pointing newcomers in completely the wrong direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for one, there's definitely some polishing to be done on the homework policy itself (which, I would argue, should take it closer to a proper &amp;quot;policy&amp;quot; post with a title along the lines or &amp;quot;Are homework questions on-topic here?&amp;quot; or maybe &amp;quot;Which homework questions are on-topic here?&amp;quot;), but that's probably a debate that's not for this round (again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one thing I think we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; do, given our existing budget of time, energy, and participation, is to write a separate post that actually goes in depth into &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you write your homework question in a way that actually ticks that elusive &amp;quot;conceptual question&amp;quot; checkbox that forms the core of the current requirements. This takes me back to dmckee's premise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic problem is that extracting the conceptual trouble from the middle of an exercise the student doesn't understand well enough to complete is an advanced skill: exactly the sort of thing that is still in front of beginning students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote about some of the techniques for teaching the difference in a post on academia, and I will emphasize that it can be a time consuming process that is often frustrating to the student because they don't understand why the things I'm asking them to do are better than the thing they are trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's actually try and lay out in a long-form, accessible text exactly what we mean by &amp;quot;conceptual&amp;quot; (independently of policy itself), and the rough process for taking a set-piece dump, or a set-piece-dump-with-check-my-work-due-diligence, into a conceptual question that transcends the set-piece the newcomer was originally stuck with and which is useful for future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T22:27:08.283" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2609" CreationDate="2018-05-09T12:44:56.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me repeat in case it is not clear from the other answers that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Theoretical physics questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5922/2451&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1229/2451&quot;&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/a&gt;, and more than welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All$^1$ Q&amp;amp;As from &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;TP.SE&lt;/a&gt; have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1229/2451&quot;&gt;transferred&lt;/a&gt; in 2013 to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1229/2451&quot;&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/a&gt; and most (if not all) are open for new answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^1$ Except for a handful or two, which were migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;TCS.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T14:14:12.820" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T14:14:12.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-10T17:52:49.993" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;This older question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/270220/&quot;&gt;Is the magnetic field zero inside an ideal conductor carrying a current?&lt;/a&gt; is explicitly about a regular conductor, but has been marked as a duplicate of a question about superconductors.  In addition, it has a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the title referring to an &quot;ideal conductor&quot; is a bit confusing.  But I think it should not be marked as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55662" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T17:56:41.030" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T17:56:41.030" Title="Question doesn't appear to be a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10624" CreationDate="2018-05-11T13:20:13.550" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been banned from Physics Stack Exchange, and I think it is mainly because of these two questions which were not received well. The thing is that for both these questions I have received hints from the comments section and I managed to work it out. What should I do about them? Would someone give me some advice as to how I should edit these questions? Or should I delete them? I joined Stack exchange as I am preparing for a very difficult entrance exam, the IITJEE on my own and I do not want to be banned. Is there anything I could do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/404676/&quot;&gt;A rod bent at right angle is placed on a rough horizontal cylinder as in figure, what is normal force at A and B?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/405253/&quot;&gt;What will coefficient of restitution of circular wall be?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the following question has been downvoted and closed, if I delete it would it be a good thing? However it has two answers and I don't know if I am allowed to do so, or if I should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/395546/&quot;&gt;What is the velocity of the block B in the pulley system when it hits the pulley?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174421" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:57:03.787" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:57:03.787" Title="How do I make these questions better?" Tags="|support|questions|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10623" CreationDate="2018-05-11T18:50:39.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the advice we have about asking for help on homework or self-study questions, or other questions of a similar nature, is encapsulated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;our homework policy post&lt;/a&gt;. So I'd suggest taking a look there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the main point you should take away, when it comes to improving your questions, is that when you have a homework/self-study/etc. problem, the question you ask on this site should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be the question asked in the problem itself. Similarly, don't ask things like &quot;how should I start?&quot; or &quot;what should I do next?&quot; or &quot;what am I doing wrong? or &quot;can someone explain this?&quot; Those are all too vague and broad to be good questions for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we'd rather have you do is narrow the question down to one very specific issue that you want to know about, ideally something that other people might also be wondering about even if they're not working on the same problem you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find that some of the questions you want to ask while preparing for an exam like the JEE just aren't suitable for this site - that is, that you can't figure out any way to phrase the question in a way that meets the guidelines I mentioned. Sometimes that happens, and we accept it; this site is not trying to be a home for every physics-related question a person could possibly ask. The community maintains a (non-comprehensive) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;list of other sites&lt;/a&gt; where you might be able to find some help with things that aren't on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as deletion... the system only lets you delete your questions under &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/56541&quot;&gt;certain conditions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can't delete your own question when it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has an answer with upvotes (even if it has a net negative score)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has an accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has multiple answers (even if there are no upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has an answer with an awarded bounty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators generally agree with the criteria used by the system to decide whether to show you a &quot;delete&quot; link at all, so our approach is that if you see the &quot;delete&quot; link there, feel free to use it. However, deleting posts will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; help you get out of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;automatic question ban&lt;/a&gt;. If you find yourself in that situation, I would advise against deleting your posts. Instead, focus on coming up with a good question to ask next time you get the chance to do so. If you have access to [chat], you can ask people there for advice on how to ask a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-05-12T05:25:16.953" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T05:25:16.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-12T02:11:35.170" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the achievements tab as of right now I have gained 20 points and lost 2, yet my reputation on physics stackexchange shows as 19 and here it shows as 21.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a glitch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: after I posted this my reputation here now shows as 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: In retrospect I should have asked two questions: the first one about the inconsistency between sites which has been answered, and another one about the minor inconsistency between what I see and what the site shows (19 shown, but adds up to 18), which still appears to be a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user195162" LastEditorDisplayName="user195162" LastEditDate="2018-05-12T20:37:47.260" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T20:37:47.260" Title="Reputation not adding up?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-05-12T05:15:08.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-12T17:55:59.923" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/405301/ac-circuits-with-frequencies-dependent-on-initial-conditions&quot;&gt;AC Circuits with Frequencies Dependent on Initial Conditions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why this question was put on hold. It clearly matches all the guidelines for homework-type questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question clearly asks about a specific physics concept&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have an attempt at a solution, and the solution doesn't seem to be correct. I don't understand what kind of mistake I made. And it's clearly not a technical mistake, but rather something to do with the right way to approach this type of problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195325" LastEditorUserId="142085" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T20:37:51.657" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T21:35:35.500" Title="Why was my question put on-hold?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10627" CreationDate="2018-05-12T20:14:21.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a clear call: closing this question was a mistake, and I'm voting to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of a common problem on Phys.SE. A lot of experienced users are going on autopilot in the close queue. The minimum judging time is three seconds. I certainly get a bit lazy, but I feel that many users are deciding in just these three seconds with cheap heuristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is introductory physics involved? Quantum field theory gets a free pass, but anything with an inclined plane or a circuit is probably doomed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the question contain equations? If so, it &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be somebody asking for us to check their work, so the question must be closed. Ironically this means that questions with a conceptual core are punished when their writers put in more effort.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many times, after a few more seconds of reading, I have decided a question has a conceptual core and is appropriate for Phys.SE. I'm usually appalled to see that question already has three or four close votes! I don't see how this can be explained without either people going on autopilot or fundamentally disagreeing on what the homework policy is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a perfect example: it contains an obvious conceptual question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The basic thing that doesn't make sense is that the frequency of the current somehow depends on the initial conditions of the circuit.&lt;/strong&gt; In particular, this system is a totally linear system totally described by linear differential equations. And clearly the solution to those equations can't depend on initial conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is very clear that they are confused about the bolded statement. They quote the problem specifically because it makes this statement. A short version of this statement is in the question title. They show their work in full because they don't see how it's compatible with this statement. There are a few distractors, such as the fact that the last sentence quoted here is wrong (it is missing the word &quot;frequency&quot;), but if you think &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; what the question is about you haven't read it at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a useful question for students and it isn't specific to this homework problem at all. However, the question was doomed because there's a circuit diagram right above it (hitting heuristic 1) and equations right below (hitting heuristic 2). I urge other close voters to examine questions more carefully before voting to close. If you disagree and think this question &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed I would appreciate an explanation of how that fits with current policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="83398" LastEditDate="2018-05-13T09:24:15.220" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T09:24:15.220" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10627" CreationDate="2018-05-13T07:04:04.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know why the question was put on hold either; the only people who can truly answer that are those who voted for the hold. Hopefully one or more of them will contribute an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my best guess as to why it was put on hold was that it's not clear what the post is actually asking. In other words, at least some readers had a hard time identifying the conceptual issue you want to know about. If this is what the voters thought, I can see how they would deduce that you didn't meet the part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; where it tells you to &quot;ask about a specific physics concept&quot; and therefore they voted to put your question on hold for that reason. But really, if this was their thought process, we have a hold reason for &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; questions, and that would have been a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll note that, in most respects, your post is one of the better homework-like questions I've seen in a while. It quotes the problem you're working on, summarizes your progress on the problem so far, does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ask for the solution to the original problem, and it does mention a specific physics concept which confuses you. All that is great. But there are two things you didn't do, which would greatly improve the question if you did:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You didn't make it entirely clear what conceptual question you actually wanted to ask. This is not part of our homework-like question policy, it's more of a general communication principle: when you want to ask a question, do it in a way that sticks the actual question in the reader's face, so to speak. Make it impossible to miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you might try any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actually phrase your question as a question, i.e. an interrogative statement with a question mark at the end&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a &quot;question phrase&quot; like &quot;What I want to know is...&quot; or &quot;I'm confused about why...&quot; (this one you actually did, by saying &quot;The basic thing that doesn't make sense is...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put the question at the end of your post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show the question in bold text (usually overkill)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrase your &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt; as a question which asks the same thing that you ask in the post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these changes are required, but I find that they can help your posts get better receptions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You didn't show, or at least didn't explain, your progress toward resolving your confusion about that conceptual issue. This is separate from showing your progress toward solving the original problem - and in fact, I think this is more important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, if I found myself in your situation, here is one possible way I might rephrase the part of your question after the quote block:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The basic thing that doesn't make sense is that the &lt;em&gt;frequency of the current somehow depends on the initial conditions&lt;/em&gt; of the circuit. In particular, this system is a totally linear system totally described by linear differential equations. And clearly the solution to those equations can't depend on initial conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To check my intuition on this, I wrote out the equations describing the circuit in the general case. I'd expect these equations to determine the frequency on their own, without reference to initial conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I defined:&#xA;  $$I_{center} = I_{left} - I_{right}$$&#xA;  and got&#xA;  $$3L (\ddot{I}_{left} - \ddot{I}_{right}) + \frac{1}{C}(I_{left} - I_{right}) = 0$$&#xA;  In other words&#xA;  $$\ddot{I}_{center} = \frac{-1}{3LC}I_{center} = 0$$&#xA;  which has a solution with frequency $\omega = 1/\sqrt{3LC}$. As I suspected, this doesn't depend on the initial conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In light of this, can someone explain how the initial conditions of the circuit could affect the frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably also change the post title to &quot;How can the frequency of an AC circuit depend on its initial conditions?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that I added a phrase or two to make it clear how the calculation represents your attempt to resolve the conceptual issue yourself (as opposed to being just an attempt to solve the original problem, as in your post). I also repeated the main conceptual question at the end, so that it is right at the forefront of a reader's mind as soon as they finish with the post, and I used interrogative phrasing and ended it with a question mark to make it explicitly clear that this is the thing I want to get out of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T07:04:04.940" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-16T18:47:07.097" Score="-12" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months back, I posted what I know to be a very insightful question.  It was labeled as &quot;off topic&quot; for &quot;reasons&quot; which remain incomprehensible to me.  The question has a &lt;em&gt;short answer&lt;/em&gt;, which is &quot;Yes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;long answer&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;Yes $\dots$, but physics isn't mathematics.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone posted an answer which addressed the mathematics, but not the physics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I wanted to give the answer due consideration, so I merely commented that I would return to it when I had time to give it due consideration.  Not only that; but, I live on the road.  I don't always have internet connectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I did return to it, I found it was deleted.  I can't say that I am disappointed by that action.  Indeed, I am pleased to see that other people will not be induced to consider the matter by stumbling upon my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I ask, if, in the future, I demonstrate that my original question is as significant as I am indicating.  Do I have the right to gloat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my question derived from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/exercises-for-the-feynman-lectures-on-physics-richard-p-feynman/1118611786&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics&lt;/a&gt;, I will add this as a teaser: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZZPF9rXzes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZZPF9rXzes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The physics answer to my question lies at the intersection of Newtonian mechanics, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117014" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T12:25:13.613" Title="If the community deletes what I know to be an excellent question, is it impolite to gloat?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2018-05-18T19:05:57.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10630" CreationDate="2018-05-16T18:59:51.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say gloating in general is impolite. Here's the definition of gloat: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To look at or think about with great or excessive, often smug or&#xA;  malicious, satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176400" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T18:59:51.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10630" CreationDate="2018-05-17T12:08:53.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody can make a mistake. Maybe the moderators made a mistake here (difficult to know since the question has been deleted); maybe you did. Or maybe it is something else altogether. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever happened, why take offense and believe you get some right to any revengeful behavior? Contributors and visitors do not care about ego matters anyway; they only come here for physics. Nobody would even try and understand what you are gloating about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109928" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T12:08:53.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10630" CreationDate="2018-05-18T12:25:13.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you absolutely may gloat. Any time you feel like you deserve the chance to gloat, you may gloat. However, before gloating, there are a few things to consider first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; We, and indeed even you, refer to ourselves as a &quot;community&quot;; a collective of people that work together with the intention of benefiting everyone. Gloating is more of a retaliatory action done in response to a perceived injury and does not benefit anyone except the gloating party. In fact, it often harms the rest, which makes it decidedly against the spirit of a &quot;community&quot;. Given that, don't be surprised if you alienate a significant portion of the community when you gloat. This can be bad for even yourself. As John Donne said, &quot;No man is an island, entire of itself&quot;; you benefit more when aided by others. Others aid you when they feel you are deserving of it. Alienating them makes them less willing to help you. So what good comes from gloating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; As I said at the beginning, you may gloat whenever you want. However, consider that others may ignore you, delete your comments, shun you, or pay close attention to your every deed and start calling you out whenever you are wrong about something. And since practically all people on Earth are wrong more often than right, this may not be a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3)&lt;/strong&gt; Some people claim they gloat as a way of teaching others not to repeat a failure. There are far better ways to do this than gloating. Gloating breeds resentment. A more sound strategy would be to thank the community for correcting the mistake. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeah, thanks everyone for correcting the mistake. This whole time I couldn't see how I was wrong about it and I was starting to think I'm crazy. Good to know it wasn't me. I guess from now on we'll have to keep our eyes open so we don't make this kind of mistake again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That shows gratitude, you equalize everyone by implying you could have as easily been mistaken (so nobody feels like they're less than anyone else), then you end by including yourself in the community (&quot;we'll&quot;) and expressing hope for collective improvement. This kind of response is more likely to result in learning from mistakes than a gloat. Gloats make people resistant to adopt the gloater's point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4)&lt;/strong&gt; If you do decide to gloat, NEVER gloat before winning (e.g. being shown to be right, or having a question re-opened). This is a bad idea. All you will do is make it less likely that whatever you are gloating about will come to pass. If what you're gloating about relies on the decisions of the community, then making the community resentful seems like a bad idea. Counting your chickens before they hatch might also be shooting yourself in the foot. This point should be obvious. Plus you don't want to risk what you're gloating about not coming to pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, we will never say that you are forbidden from gloating; however, gloating is a short-sighted action. It provides immediate gratification at the expense of others and, in the long run, it almost invariably is worse for the person who gloats. It is a sign of being what some might call a &quot;sore winner&quot; and shows that a person acts more on immediate feelings than a rational assessment of their situation and future. So, like I've said, you can gloat and I won't stop you (nor will the rest of the community, if they don't mind my speaking for them), but why would you want to gloat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T12:25:13.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-18T18:20:07.047" Score="22" ViewCount="1032" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been chat banned for a year after having served a 2-day sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please point out what I said that was particularly offensive? I don't believe I said anything wrong, at all. (Of course all of the messages are deleted so there's no evidence of anything.) My version of the events is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Balarka Sen called me a &quot;cuck.&quot; I flagged this message as inappropriate.$^1$&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Balarka Sen was automatically suspended for 30 minutes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Art of Code came into the hbar and told me to behave, without citing which behavior was out of line (I don't think I was out of line at all). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Art of Code froze the room for 5 minutes for an unknown reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I made a comment in the math room about moderation being very tough and that we're unable to discuss physics in the current climate. This was half meant as a joke but I don't think it's inappropriate in any case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I said that a hooligan came into the physics room and got it frozen by calling me a cuck. &quot;Hooligan&quot; was meant as &quot;troublemaker,&quot; which is an accurate description.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was suspended for two days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Balarka Sen was suspended for one day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every message was deleted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Today I found I was suspended for a year.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please point out where in here I committed an offense, or correct the record if I have made an error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that someone will say that I have lots of flags so I had this coming, but the flag system is pretty bad. Consider the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rnmwB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rnmwB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was flagged and suspended for this message &lt;em&gt;a week&lt;/em&gt; after it was posted. This was clearly not in good faith, and I believe my record is not &lt;em&gt;that bad&lt;/em&gt; if one filters out these kinds of incidents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, David Z has talked to me about being &quot;more welcoming&quot; in chat. And while I think I am always very  welcoming, I have tried to accommodate his wishes. And in this instance I don't think I did anything wrong, so why was I suspended for a year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^1$ I have talked to Balarka after the fact and this was a joke on his part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59215" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T00:42:45.470" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T11:58:33.493" Title="Why did I get chat suspended for a year?" Tags="|support|chat|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-20T09:19:04.387" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very interested in understanding the meaning of the logo of this website, which looks like a cone with its brim turned halfway outward back onto itself as if trying to turn it inside out. Is there a one-sentence explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196191" OwnerDisplayName="Physics Messiah" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-16T12:02:07.823" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T12:02:07.823" Title="What is the meaning of this site's logo?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-05-20T11:41:11.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10635" CreationDate="2018-05-20T09:48:47.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The logo is that of the &quot;Mexican hat potential&quot;. It arises in the Higgs Mechanism and causes a process known as 'Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking'.  The vertical axis is the value of the Potential, $V(\phi)$ corresponding to a value of a field $\phi$. At the start, suppose that there is a particle at the centre sitting on the tip of the 'hat'. Any rotation will result in the same situation, so it is said to be invariant under rotation. Symmetry is broken by the fact that the maximum in the centre is not stable, and any small perturbation around it will result in a lower potential energy, known as the vacuum potential. So this supposed particle (The Higgs boson) goes into this lower energy state, and in doing so breaks the symmetry. At this point any rotation will result in a different situation (unless it is rotated by a full turn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before symmetry is broken a particle will have terms that look roughly like $$m\bar\psi\psi\phi$$ where $m$ is  a coupling constant, $\bar\psi$ and $\psi$ are fields of a particle and its antiparticle and $\phi$ is the Higgs field. This describes an interaction between three fields. When symmetry is broken the Higgs field can be rewritten as $v+h$, where $v$ is the vacuum expectation value, and $h$ is a new field. So this can be rewritten as $$m\bar\psi\psi\phi=m\bar\psi\psi v+m\bar\psi\psi h$$ The $m\bar\psi\psi h$ term is just another interaction between three fields, however $m\bar\psi\psi v$ is the interaction between two fields (those being of a particle and its anti-particle), which is known as a mass term. So by coupling with the Higgs field the particle and its antiparticle have gained a mass term, so it can be said that they have aquired mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165150" OwnerDisplayName="CooperCape" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T09:48:47.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10634" CreationDate="2018-05-22T11:58:33.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not a moderator so I can't say exactly what happened in this particular case even if I wanted to. For example I can't see the deleted messages. However as a room owner I've been party to various discussions involving moderators from lots of sites (not just our mods), and including the SE community managers such as Shog9 and Ana. What I can do is make some general comments about the view the SE mods take of such things, and the view the SE expect our mods to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me emphasise that what follows is not a personal opinion. I have based this on statements I've seen from the community managers. Whether you agree or disagree with those statements the SE are paying the piper so they get to call the tune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point that the SE mods have made several times is that suspensions are not just based on your last offence. So 0celo7's year long suspension will not have been a result of the most recent fracas. When you get a year long suspension that's the moderators telling you that they think the SE chat is better off without you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any social group trouble sometimes kicks off. Maybe there's a misunderstanding, or maybe someone is just feeling tired and grumpy. This happens in real life and it happens online. When there's an outburst the SE expect our mods to keep track of who is involved, and if a pattern emerges - specifically if the same person is frequently involved - they can expect a suspension. The SE are uninterested in being back room lawyers and they're not going to analyse every detail of every infraction. Basically if you're frequently involved in fights the SE are going to consider you a problem irrespective of whether you started the fights or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that (short) suspensions are not intended to be a punishment. Instead they are supposed to deliver the message that the way you are behaving isn't acceptable. The key thing the SE look for is that the message is received and understood, and that you change your behaviour as a result. If so, that's great. It's when the person involved doesn't change and continues to be involved in trouble that the year long suspensions are wheeled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't take insider knowledge for it to be obvious that this is what has happened in 0celo7's case. He's managed to get himself flagged and suspended more times than anyone else I can think of, and by quite some margin. The current year long suspension is basically the message that the SE thinks he is incapable of behaving the way the SE expects of chat participants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T11:58:33.493" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10640" CreationDate="2018-05-24T15:37:37.780" Score="1" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;As all community members know I am just a beginner of physics. Mistakes often happens from everyone. Why can't everyone give me a second chance to blot out my mistakes and this is how I can improve my knowledge in physics. So I request community members to withdraw my ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user184625" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:47:05.270" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:47:05.270" Title="Why am I blocked from posting further questions?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10639" CreationDate="2018-05-24T17:06:31.407" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are currently blocked from posting further questions by the automatic question rate limiting, whose different forms I also discuss in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9699/50583&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. There is nothing any user or moderator on this site can do to ameliorate this ban, it is a fully automatic consequence of your bad question record: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of your 10 questions, none has a positive score, only one does not have a &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; score, only one is not closed, and five are deleted. The question rate limiting is the system telling you to take seriously the feedback you are getting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the page that tells you you cannot post further questions you should see a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/asking-rate-limited&quot;&gt;this help page&lt;/a&gt;, which gives generic tips for how to improve your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T17:06:31.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T19:10:00.063" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to re-iterate the attention of the readers towards my questions which  remains unanswered for a long time? Can I ask them again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user196434" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-05-24T20:09:51.893" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T20:09:51.893" Title="Seeking attention towards the unanswered questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-24T20:13:57.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T20:57:20.943" Score="-4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/408030/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the users who expressed their apparent confusion, I found the question to be very clear. It also seems like one that would get a &lt;em&gt;whole lot&lt;/em&gt; of Google hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both complained that one could not know the parameters, but there's only three and these are easy to explain. Yes, it could mean anything from nothing to Bad Things, but the &lt;em&gt;reasons&lt;/em&gt; for it being in that spectrum are easy to explain, will explain the underlying physics more clearly.w&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was in the midst of explaining these reasons when the question was suddenly closed mid-edit and all my edit text went into the bit-bucket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131284" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-05-25T17:09:49.210" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T17:09:49.210" Title="Reopen request on a recently closed question" Tags="|support|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10642" CreationDate="2018-05-25T01:31:09.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't support reopening this question (currently, revision 3) because I think it has a couple of issues that justify it being put on hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/176400/enumaris&quot;&gt;enumaris&lt;/a&gt; brought up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/408030/what-happens-if-a-black-hole-passes-by-earth?answertab=votes#comment913853_408030&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This will depend a lot on the mass of the black hole and how close the approach is. There's no way to answer this question without further parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, there are a whole bunch of different physical scenarios we could be looking at, depending on details which weren't specified in the question. This would result in different people posting answers that vary enough that they might as well be answering different questions. Even if each of these people might individually think the question is clear to them, they'd have significantly different ideas about what is being asked, and that justifies the question being considered unclear overall.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, the question just asks &quot;what happens if...?&quot; That's a pretty broad setup - I mean, it's beyond the scope of this site to explain everything that follows from a given set of initial conditions. What winds up happening is that different people will take different interpretations of what, specifically, the asker actually wants to know about; for example, one answer might describe the trajectory of the Earth and the black hole, another might consider the gravitational effect on the solar system, another might consider the effect of tidal forces on the Earth, another might consider the effect of radiation emitted by inspiraling gas, another might focus on how our view of the night sky could be affected, and so on. For a question to be clear and appropriately specific, it really should focus in on one or two of these effects, or something else along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that it doesn't do that would be justification to put it on hold as too broad, or perhaps unclear. This is one of those cases where those two categories overlap a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T01:31:09.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-25T23:06:52.740" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question which was asked on this site, but then deleted: namely the answer to  &quot;How to use the book Classical Electrodynamics by J D Jackson? [closed]&quot; referenced here when I was doing research: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/325322/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/325322/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/321345/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/321345/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't want to ask it since if the original was closed, surely mine would be, but that question might contain valuable knowledge in its answers for me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-05-26T03:21:30.027" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T21:11:00.220" Title="How to view answers to a deleted question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10644" CreationDate="2018-05-25T23:33:36.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For closed questions, any answers that are there would be visible. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52062/is-it-possible-to-speed-up-radioactive-decay-rates&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a closed question without answers, two things are possible. One, answers may have been deleted. These would show up if you have at least 10,000 reputation. In the question you asked about, there are no deleted answers. Which leaves the second possibility -- it never got any answers before it was closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original deleted question also has no answers, but you have to have 10,000 rep to see it. It's probably not great to have a question marked as duplicate when the original doesn't exist, however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T23:33:36.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10648" CreationDate="2018-05-27T04:22:35.837" Score="5" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the most popular questions (viz. those with many views and highly voted answers) here on Physics SE (main site) are simple questions: Why does the cream of an Oreo stick to one cookie? Why is a steel ball more likely to break glass than a pillow is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be answered simply, with basic mechanics, or they can be answered in depth with numerical estimates and attempts to model quantities with equations (kind of like the xkcd what-if articles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When answering questions, are we expected to:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Give the greatest detail that exists, and mention edge cases&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simplify as far as possible&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or use our discretion to judge the OP's background and answer accordingly?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat new here... have I misunderstood our objective while answering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I've changed the words used to describe 'popular science-like' questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T10:28:35.020" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T10:28:35.020" Title="How detailed should answers be?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10647" CreationDate="2018-05-27T05:26:02.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases, you can answer a question anywhere along the spectrum from concise to intricately detailed, and it can be a valid answer. So you're not &quot;expected to&quot; do any of these things. You can write an answer with whatever level of detail you find reasonable. If a question winds up with several different, correct answers at varying levels of detail, that's generally a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, voters may consider a detailed answer to be better than a concise one, or vice versa, and vote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, this applies to all questions, not only to the simple, popular ones you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T19:16:23.987" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T19:16:23.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10644" CreationDate="2018-05-27T18:50:08.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the discussion is partly also about finding out whether a deleted question &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; some answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10k+ users&lt;/a&gt; this is easy. If you have a link, you just look at the question and you see the answers. (Even if the question is not deleted, you can see both deleted answers and answers which are not deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility for users with lower reputation is using &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/data-explorer/info&quot;&gt;data explorer&lt;/a&gt; (a.k.a. SEDE). SEDE contains also the PostsWithDeleted table. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/2677&quot;&gt;Database schema documentation for the public data dump and SEDE&lt;/a&gt; and also the corresponding feature request &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/157462&quot;&gt;Can some metadata about deleted posts be included in Data.SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that data in SEDE are only updated once a week. So recent deletions can appear in this table only after the next data dump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a rather simplistic query to find &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/856409/deleted-answers-to-a-given-question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deleted answers to a given question&lt;/a&gt; from the data in PostsWithDeleted table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this query I can see, for example, that question 1453 &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/856409/deleted-answers-to-a-given-question?questionid=1453&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;had 35 answers&lt;/a&gt; which are now deleted.&#xA;Looking at a &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20130424191118/https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1453/great-unsolved-physics-problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine snapshot&lt;/a&gt; before deletion of the question, which shows 33 answers, that sounds about right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I try the same with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/856409/deleted-answers-to-a-given-question?questionid=325322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;325322&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/856409/deleted-answers-to-a-given-question?questionid=321345&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;321345&lt;/a&gt;, I get zero answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are answers which were deleted, the above still does not help much. You only know that some answers have been deleted, you have a link - but if you are below 10k reputation points you still cannot see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reasonable thing which can help to see deleted stuff is SEDE. If you're looking for something which was deleted recently, the content might be still in the data in SEDE and you can get it from there. If it is older, it is possible that you get it from past &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-dump&quot;&gt;data dumps&lt;/a&gt;. (But this seems to be rather complicated process - and I'll admit that I do not know much about all the technical details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, probably you can try the stuff you would try on some other site which ceased to exist. You can check Wayback Machine, Google Cache, try to find whether the content has been copied by some scraper site. As not to repeat myself too much, I'll add a link to this post on another meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13328&quot;&gt;Are there some possibilities for users below 10k to see deleted posts of other users?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But probably the easiest think to do is to ask politely a user who has 10k+ reputation to check the question for you. (For example on chat. I am not sure whether such request would be considered on topic here on meta. Although it is not unprecedented, here is an example of such post from the past: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5631&quot;&gt;Can I have a screenshot of “Lagrangian of $\phi^4$ theory”?&lt;/a&gt;) I suppose that if this is not done too often and if you ask politely, somebody will help you. And you avoid all the hassle described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also you could simply gain 10k points and you no longer have problems like this - but this is much easier said than done. :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T21:11:00.220" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T21:11:00.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10651" CreationDate="2018-05-28T05:43:16.823" Score="3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;In discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10644/how-to-view-answers-to-a-deleted-question&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; there was some disagreement over whether a question can be deleted by &lt;em&gt;regular users&lt;/em&gt; if it has an upvoted answer. (Here we are talking neither about deletion &lt;em&gt;by the OP&lt;/em&gt; nor deletions &lt;em&gt;by a moderator&lt;/em&gt;. This is about deletions by &lt;em&gt;votes to delete&lt;/em&gt; which are available to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10k+ users&lt;/a&gt; and with a bit less restrictions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;to 20k+ users&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite looking at the same examples and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;the same FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and help entries, different commenters arrived to different conclusions. One source of the problem seems to be that I do not have sufficient reputation &lt;em&gt;on this site&lt;/em&gt; to view deleted questions, so it's difficult for me to include specific examples that can be verified by 10k users on this site. (I am able to find some questions that have upvoted answers and  were deleted using SEDE, but still I do not see revision history and I cannot check whether they were deleted by a mod or by regular users voting to delete.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Can a question which has an upvoted answer be deleted if regular users vote to delete the question? Could you in your answer include also some examples (from this site, if possible)?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-05-31T15:11:11.387" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T01:45:25.557" Title="Can a question with an upvoted answer be deleted?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10650" CreationDate="2018-05-28T18:33:46.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;Moderator Tools privilege&lt;/a&gt; page and Meta SE FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/230312&quot;&gt;&quot;How does deleting work&quot;&lt;/a&gt; are both rather vague on this point, 10k rep members &lt;strong&gt;can certainly&lt;/strong&gt; vote to delete negatively-scored &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; questions with positive score answers.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The screenshots below are from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/386239/how-do-i-solve-this-luminosity-question&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/386239/how-do-i-solve-this-luminosity-question&lt;/a&gt; (10k rep only link), which was closed by 5 non-mods and deleted by 3 non-mods with a question score of -3 and an answer score of +1 (which also wasn't voted for deletion either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hfgVN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hfgVN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xQsSK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xQsSK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tFx6H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tFx6H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Whether this is a good or bad feature is probably subjective and not the point of the post (which is about the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of doing so).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T18:33:46.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10652" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T10:36:19.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag refers to all questions deleted from Stack Exchange sites. The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-question&lt;/a&gt; should also be used when referencing a specific question that has been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T09:06:25.230" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T09:06:25.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10653" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T10:36:19.413" Score="0" Body="This tag refers to all questions deleted from Stack Exchange sites. The tag 'specific-question' should also be used when referencing a specific question that has been deleted." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T18:14:00.057" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T18:14:00.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10654" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T22:28:01.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathjax.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;, which is used to write mathematics on Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basic information &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;in the help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/804&quot;&gt;Is there a standard place to point people to learn how to typeset their equations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/68388#70559&quot;&gt;There should be universal LaTeX/MathJax guide for sites supporting it&lt;/a&gt; - post at Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T18:13:40.523" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T18:13:40.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10655" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T22:28:01.777" Score="0" Body="For questions about MathJax, which is used to write mathematics on Stack Exchange sites." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T09:09:29.377" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T09:09:29.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10656" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-30T13:37:01.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathjax.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;, which is used to write mathematics on Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basic information &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;in the help center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/804&quot;&gt;Is there a standard place to point people to learn how to typeset their equations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/68388#70559&quot;&gt;There should be universal LaTeX/MathJax guide for sites supporting it&lt;/a&gt; - post at Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T18:13:54.660" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T18:13:54.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10657" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-30T13:37:01.193" Score="0" Body="For questions about MathJax, which is used to write mathematics on Stack Exchange sites." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T18:13:33.070" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T18:13:33.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10658" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-31T21:35:09.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with 2000 reputation have the ability to edit any question or answer. This is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;&quot;edit privileges&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users (both registered and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44557/why-should-i-register-my-account&quot; title=&quot;not an everyday food&quot;&gt;cookie users&lt;/a&gt;) who have not reached the level of 2000 reputation (or 100, for community-wiki posts) are allowed to suggest edits. These are not applied immediately, but go into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot; title=&quot;at the level of 500&quot;&gt;a queue where users&lt;/a&gt; who have edit privileges can vote to approve or reject them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your edit gets approved, you get 2 rep. (However, you can earn &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/82020&quot;&gt;at most 1000 reputation points&lt;/a&gt; through suggested edits.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your edit is rejected, a reason will be displayed on the suggested edit page. You can track your suggested edits under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&quot;&gt;suggestions section of the Activity tab on your account profile&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested edits feature also applies to users who don't have 20,000 reputation to suggest edits to tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;More&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot; title=&quot;one by one&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118213/is-there-some-form-of-blocking-in-place-for-rejected-suggested-edits-by-anonymou&quot;&gt;Too many rejections will place a temporary block on further suggestions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T08:31:53.040" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T08:31:53.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10659" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-31T21:35:09.307" Score="0" Body="Users without full edit privileges can suggest edits to posts and tag wikis" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T08:31:32.070" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T08:31:32.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10661" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-03T04:58:08.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt; where users can view and act on posts by other users that the system thinks may need attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/161390&quot;&gt;What are the review queues, and how do they work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T16:07:38.003" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T16:07:38.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10662" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-03T04:58:08.163" Score="0" Body="For questions about the /review path where users can view and act on posts by other users that the system thinks may need attention." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T16:07:35.410" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T16:07:35.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T07:01:44.777" Score="4" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of our moderators was last seen on the 22nd of May; it's now the 3rd of June (the same year, luckily). He's also a mod on Chem SE; he was last seen there 1 month ago. I don't want to name him, even though it's obvious, but he was a really nice and helpful guy when he was active 3 years ago (he last &lt;em&gt;posted&lt;/em&gt; in 2015). Is he shirking a responsibility, or is this normal and acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197438" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T19:52:15.290" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T00:43:01.257" Title="Should an inactive moderator step down?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10663" CreationDate="2018-06-03T13:49:08.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My country is, for some unknown reason, still a monarchy. Perhaps that's the reason I feel somewhat uneasy about permanent positions. I really appreciate the time and effort Manish has put into this site, but perhaps it is time we start thinking whether it makes sense he's still a moderator. Especially because he was elected when this site had less than one tenth of the users it has today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying it particularly bothers me to see the diamond next to Manish' username. But, to be honest, I have never seen him take any moderational action or decision. For this reason, I cannot really say whether he is a good moderator or not. Needless to say, I have no reason to assume he is not; but the problem is that I don't have many reasons to assume he is either. And I'm not thrilled by the idea that someone I know nothing about (moderation-wise) has the privileges being a moderator entails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; calling for a new election (unlike OP). The active moderators we have today do an excellent job as far as I'm concerned. I am also &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; saying that Manish behaviour is unacceptable or something like that. He helped the site become what it is today, and we should always be thankful for that. But I don't really see the point in his staying a moderator. Perhaps this is a conversation we should have at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T13:49:08.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-04T07:16:32.243" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is my question &quot;Electrical resistance calculator question&quot; on hold ? What does this mean ? How can i improve it ? Here is the link to my question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/409278/electrical-resistance-calculator-question]&quot;&gt;Electrical resistance calculator question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184083" LastEditorUserId="184083" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T07:23:00.457" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T10:04:15.493" Title="How can I make a question on topic?" Tags="|support|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-05T03:33:24.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10666" CreationDate="2018-06-04T10:04:15.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For general guidance on what &quot;on hold&quot; means, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-on-hold-or-duplicate-question&quot;&gt;What is a “closed”, “on hold”, or “duplicate” question?&lt;/a&gt; at the mother meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For specific guidance about why your individual question was put on hold, see the link included in the banner that marks the post as on hold, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, if an event X happens that affects your posts and it comes accompanied with a banner Y linking to a detailed explainer post Z (in this case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), then jumping on the Ask button without reading the guidance first isn't a particularly useful course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T10:04:15.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10669" CreationDate="2018-06-04T15:11:01.533" Score="4" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;A large number of our most active members are software developers (emphasis on &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt;, because there are way more than I'd intuitively expect). At least three of our moderators mention in their &quot;about me&quot; sections that they're employed by software companies (hence presumably software engineers or similar), and 2 of them are extremely active physics content creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a certain extent, it makes sense, as there is (apparently) a significant overlap in skills which can encourage people from physics backgrounds to move towards software development. However, it doesn't work the other way: after software engineering and computer science degrees, I'm quite sure you won't know a huge amount of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem at all; even I'm a somewhat active programmer. But it is definitely interesting. &lt;strong&gt;Why is this so? Does it imply anything about Physics SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of talk about how Theoretical Physics SE's questions are supposed to be asked here, now that TPSE's closed, but if so many of our best answerers are software creators, will we be able to cater to them well? Will it be productive to try a survey similar to the StackOverflow developer survey to gauge who we're creating content for, who's using it, and who's creating it? I personally feel that it'll be very beneficial, because it's necessary to know your audience well t write for them, and it's also good to be aware of where the author of an answer is coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like many questions rolled together, but at the heart of it, it's just &lt;strong&gt;What's the significance of the large proportion of software developers on Physics SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer may be &quot;nothing&quot;, but it could potentially tell us something very interesting about what's going on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Some answers and comments have brought up the point that there're no reliable statistics/samples to prove this, which makes sense. I'll emphasize that it was as simple as me being surprised by the number of software developers, and leave the quantification at that. It's possible that I misjudged things. This observation is just my opinion and was based upon a section of active participants only. The theory cannot be extended across all users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T11:42:03.723" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T11:42:03.723" Title="Why do software developers make up such a prominent part of Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10668" CreationDate="2018-06-04T21:13:56.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is kind of a network-wide phenomenon, and of course it's rooted in the history of Stack Exchange. The first site was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, which, for ten years, has remained the most active site on the network. Next came &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/&quot;&gt;Server Fault&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;Super User&lt;/a&gt; - both geared toward people who work in and are enthusiastic about fields related to computers and IT, including software development. From there, Stack Exchange branched out into &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/299104/274942&quot;&gt;some other sites about topics not as closely tied to computers&lt;/a&gt;, before finally adopting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/13/changes-to-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;a new site creation process&lt;/a&gt;, leading to a wave of new sites about . . . everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange will always cater to programmers, developers, sys admins, and that guy in IT who knows why your computer keeps crashing. That's a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; constituency, the largest part of the userbase (the sites for those folks are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic&quot;&gt;the busiest&lt;/a&gt;). Moreover, it turns out that Stack Overflow is one of the biggest referrers of traffic to all the other sites in the network, which you can see if you have enough reputation to check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/260849/274942&quot;&gt;site analytics&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore, a lot of users come from a programming background, and, yes, many work as software developers (I'm talking about the userbase of Physics as a whole here, not specific users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is starting to change, largely within the last . . . five or so years, maybe? There are over 150 Stack Exchange sites (174 at last count, but that's always increasing), and we're seeing a lot of new users come directly for non-programming-related sites. That can be good, insofar as it can attract people who really know their stuff. The network's non-computer-related userbase is changing from programmers enthusiastic about certain areas people who study and work in those areas. And I think that's a good thing. I'm one of those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, there's a viewpoint from which much of this doesn't matter. For this site, if you like asking and answering questions about Physics, you know your stuff (or know what you don't know!), and are committed to helping the community, I don't think anyone cares if you're a physicist or an opera singer. We're here for physics. And that's what's important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T21:13:56.253" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10668" CreationDate="2018-06-05T03:51:51.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10669/124&quot;&gt;HDE's answer&lt;/a&gt; mentioned, I think part of the cause is simply that, among the people who have studied physics in depth, many of them now work as programmers. (Probably not a majority, but a significant fraction.) There aren't enough jobs in physics itself for everybody with the training, so a lot of them fall back on software development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you're just looking at the moderators, that's almost certainly too small of a sample size to draw a meaningful conclusion. But if you did a broader survey of active members, and if that survey gave a similar result, this would probably be part of the reason why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T03:51:51.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10663" CreationDate="2018-06-05T22:26:50.733" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just my opinion, not an official response: yes, I do think that a moderator who can't or doesn't want to participate in the site anymore should step down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I mean this in the sense that it would be considerate for an inactive moderator (who expects to remain inactive) to &lt;em&gt;voluntarily&lt;/em&gt; step down. I'm not suggesting they should be &lt;em&gt;forced&lt;/em&gt; out of the position. Having an inactive moderator doesn't really hurt the site, so I don't personally care about it enough to push for their removal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also note that moderator positions are volunteer positions, in the sense that a mod controls their own level of participation and there's no responsibility to maintain a minimum activity level (at least on this site). So if a moderator is inactive, they're not breaking any sort of official commitment by doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T00:43:01.257" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T00:43:01.257" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2018-06-09T04:13:18.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a just-about-no-longer-new user, I feel certified to take a shot at this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently started a discussion in a chat (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/13775/2018/6/6&quot;&gt;Physics meta room, 6th June '18&lt;/a&gt;) about how homework-help-seekers find us. The discussion was inconclusive. But an important point that Rob (the moderator) brought up was that there's no easy way to do anything about a &amp;quot;student [that] is already in a mindset where they think copying a multiple-choice question from their homework onto a website will be better for their education than reading their textbook [that's one end of the spectrum]&amp;quot;, which I think is a brilliant way of thinking of things. If they didn't want to read the 2-minute tour, even when motivated by a badge ('informed'), there's no point in sweet-talking too much, since they're here to get the question solved and &lt;em&gt;expressed&lt;/em&gt; no &lt;em&gt;evident&lt;/em&gt; involvement, and anyways they'll leave until they resurface with another similar problem. A person with genuine interest (hopefully) will subsequently read the linked documents about homework policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my first couple of weeks (2 months ago), I got the feeling that some users, notably one guy with way more than 25,000 reputation, were pretty terse and mean, and I got pretty intimidated by some comments on my answers. Soon after that, I read a something on meta which, in essence, said that soon enough, your supervisors for early research work are going to be criticizing your work much more aggressively than people here do, and that there's a need to be a little thick-skinned. At the end of it, I'm grateful that the aforementioned high-rep user was terse with the feedback on my posts, because now I've gotten a better idea of how much research and effort needs to go into a post to confirm accuracy and legibility, and learned how to respond to feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my recommendation, as a just-about-no-longer-new user, is that &lt;strong&gt;we shouldn't sugarcoat advice too, but we should tell new users why we're aggressive and what they'll learn from it.&lt;/strong&gt; (Comments are mean because we want to maintain quality standards; listening/cooperating/discussing issues in comments will help you to learn to cope with future research advisers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some cases beyond homework, however, where I think we could be better. In a recent review (no link because it was deleted soon after), I left a somewhat curt message in a comment to an answer. The answer said &amp;quot;This should be a comment, but not enough rep... (suggestion about a solution)&amp;quot;. I included the word 'loophole', and even felt the need to end the comment with &amp;quot;Sorry.&amp;quot; Another reviewer left a similar response which had links to several (more than 3) meta and help center posts. The author of the answer apologized. And then the final review was an incredibly nice comment by stafusa. The comment said something on the lines of &amp;quot;don't lose heart, I'll post it in the comments section of the question; check back there for a response&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to adopt stafusa's approach with such new users who &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; related to the homework fiasco, i.e. the section among which there are several awesome people who genuinely want to contribute. That user clearly wanted to help the asker, but couldn't do it due to the new-user restrictions. (I'm not criticizing those restrictions though; they keep the spam away almost perfectly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I hunted down the evasive review and put together a badly-edited picture. The author of the second comment had about 3k rep; I decided to remove the name because I don't what s/he was feeling while putting his/her comment. Note that the question has been deleted as well.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KJee4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KJee4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's something interesting I read today.&lt;/a&gt; It's about stackoverflow, but the message is applicable to Physics SE to a certain extent. It essentially discusses the fact that the permanent residents of SO (the regular contributors) are a very small population. I don't agree with a lot of the deductions they make: most notably, I don't think that their claims and justifications that SO is &lt;em&gt;declining&lt;/em&gt; are valid. But the relevant takeaway for us is this: most new users are going to pop in for ONLY 1 question, and then disappear with their problems solved. This follows the argument that there's no big point in 'nurturing their interests to induct them into the SE family' or whatever jazz: most are here to take the help and run away without thinking about SE as a community of people contributing in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T08:37:44.323" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T20:45:18.000" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot post a question anymore! What can I do to solve this problem? I think somebody did not like my questions and finally, a m... f... kills me. I do not have a lot of time. What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187498" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T02:19:54.417" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T02:22:26.270" Title="Why I cannot ask question?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-06-12T21:33:02.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T13:34:55.677" Score="8" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an automatic answer ban mechanism that stops users from posting many low-quality answers. However, I'm pretty sure users automatically get immunity from the answer ban if their reputation is sufficiently high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? If so, it seems to me to be a uniquely bad decision for this particular site, because it is relatively easy to get above this reputation threshold by, e.g. answering questions about Newtonian mechanics, then use the immunity to post bad answers about modern physics. Can we change this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:50:20.583" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:50:20.583" Title="Remove the reputation cutoff for the answer ban" Tags="|discussion|answers|reputation|post-ban|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10675" CreationDate="2018-06-13T15:24:55.330" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greetings from one of your &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/75189/280545&quot;&gt;human exception handlers&lt;/a&gt;!&#xA;If you think that there's a user who needs some intervention to produce better-quality content, and you suspect that intervention is not coming in the form of an automatic answer ban, please raise a custom flag on a typical post of theirs to guide our attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have acted on this type of situation in the past, but because we keep such actions private (as best we can) you may not have noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T15:24:55.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10675" CreationDate="2018-06-13T22:33:33.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never seen or heard anything about a reputation threshold above which a  user is immune from the answer ban. Nor have I seen any reason to suspect that there is one. Of course, there could be such a threshold which we don't know about because the criteria are kept secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it looks like there is a threshold, that's probably only because the low-quality answer ban is specifically targeted at users with an &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; poor track record of posting answers. I've understood that to mean not just having more downvoted answers than upvoted answers, but having an overwhelming majority of their answers downvoted and/or deleted. I would expect that once a person has accumulated a decent amount of rep (maybe a few hundred?), they necessarily have to have enough undeleted upvoted answers that they are exceedingly unlikely to meet the quality ban criteria on that basis alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T22:33:33.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10650" CreationDate="2018-06-17T01:45:25.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can a question with an upvoted answer be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it?, yes - someone can, for certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4565/what-are-the-moderation-tools-available-to-10-000-reputation-users&quot;&gt;What are the moderation tools available to 10,000+ reputation users?&lt;/a&gt; for the manner in which things function under normal circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know someone with well over 100K and sometimes things he would have expected to work for him did not, while people under 2K were able to see the thing in question. Sometimes there's breakage and all is not how one might expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it works the other way, another person with over 300K couldn't reproduce a bug nor rollback or view history to see the problem. Things 'just worked' for them; though they could see the before/after they just couldn't wedge themself into the spot to reproduce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is some people have privilege to delete and leave the earned Rep in place, but I can't find the link for a source to quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had my own questions VTC'd and made a trivial edit, getting it reopened - it went on, over time, to be well upvoted. Perhaps it shouldn't have been closed in the first place but people didn't understand the question or know the answer and just jumped on the bandwagon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently they are holding for a week over hammering, though a one or two person hammer sometimes occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between privilege, Rep, physical access, voting, automatic tools and cosmic rays - anything can happen ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can and should are two different things. That's why there's automatic tools to quiz the humans to determine if they vote/edit in accordance with what the 'test question' expects they should do - with the risk of a ban for failure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170832" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T01:45:25.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-18T10:59:51.273" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I've been working in a calculation which is &lt;em&gt;reasonable simple&lt;/em&gt; but I didn't found it done anywhere else. Can I post is in physics.SE and ask what the community think about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know in other SE communities that would not be allowed but in physics that might be, because checking whether the reasoning behind a calculation is correct is the core of the physicist work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27990" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T19:50:37.923" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:50:37.923" Title="Can I ask if my calculation is correct?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-06-18T11:55:59.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T22:08:52.600" Score="8" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask this wondering about my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/412750/if-the-space-time-curve-was-quantified-and-has-a-mathematical-function-what-woul/412771&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;, though this applies in a more general setting. The situation is that the question asks about the physical interpretation of the typical curved-spacetime-as-rubber-sheet analogy, which as has been said multiple times on the parent site, is not a good analogy and should not be taken literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the question as it stands is not answerable; the only answer I can imagine (and the answer I gave) is that essentially the question is wrong, along with explaining why. However, some people thought that should be a comment instead. I can think of three possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answer the question as best I can, even if the answer technically does not answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Close the question. I do not agree with this because AFAIK having wrong premises is not a close reason; I believe such questions are valuable since they address common misconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Simply leave a comment instead of an answer, as some people suggested. I don't agree with this either, since it seems strange that a question should remain open and yet undeserving of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which option is best? (Obviously I support #1.) Is there another alternative? In some cases one could answer a related question that does make sense, but in this particular case that would essentially amount to explaining the basics of GR, clearly too broad for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5788" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T17:17:56.127" Title="How to answer when the question is based on a wrong premise?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-22T00:57:05.733" Score="7" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sparked by the discussion in the comments in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/412889/how-to-teach-modeling-physical-systems&quot;&gt;How to teach modeling physical systems&lt;/a&gt;, especially if it is off-topic, I started looking for pedagogical questions about physics. I didn't find much and there is no site comparable to &lt;a href=&quot;https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics Educators Stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;, where pedagogical concepts and methods are the main focus. What I did find was the meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4244/what-kind-of-education-questions-should-we-allow&quot;&gt;What kind of &lt;code&gt;[education]&lt;/code&gt; questions should we allow?&lt;/a&gt;, which dealt with this topic partially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it, questions about pedagogy in physics are currently not allowed, because they tend to be too broad or opinion based. I think, that if such a question is purely about opinion, than it does not fit the format well, so it shouldn't be allowed. But there definitely are objective answers, because pedagogy is an active field of research and as one can see on Mathematics Educators, there are some general principles one can follow to improve teaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons why I think this is important are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics education is a topic often encountered by teaching assistants and professors on a daily basis, but (at least in my experience) there is barely any pedagogical education beforehand. So these questions would serve as a starting point for improving teaching skills.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are some challenges specific to teaching &lt;strong&gt;physical&lt;/strong&gt; concepts in contrast to general pedagogic techniques. My original question is about such a problem, why it does not really fit on other sites in my opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if one has a general pedagogic background there might be students for who the general techniques fail. In this case it would be nice to have additional options to try, many people learn differently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Science communication is an increasingly important topic and pedagogy can help with it. By learning about effective explanatory concepts, it is easier to find an explanation, that the general public can digest, but is still correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a solution I see three options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the current policy and close pedagogy questions as off-topic. I do not prefer this because of the reasons above. In this case, future questions can be linked to this post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a separate Stackexchange community like Mathematics educators, that primarily focuses on these topics. This would fracture the community a bit and prevent the general users to take a look at these, but keep Physics SE clean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create the &quot;pedagogy&quot; tag on the main site under which these questions can be discussed. This would be my preferred option, as people who don't want to see these questions can block the tag, but it is still available to general users without subscribing to an additional site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there may be other options, but these are the obvious ones to me. So my question is: what stance should we take on questions about pedagogy, specifically for concepts in physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86600" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T11:34:38.390" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T11:34:38.390" Title="Pedagogical questions about physics" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10681" CreationDate="2018-06-22T02:12:44.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual, it depends. Consider the following two extreme cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The premise is so wrong it is not even wrong. In this case, the only thing we can do is to vote to close as unclear; and, ideally, to leave a comment explaining why the premise is wrong. Nobody but OP will find the question useful; and most of the times, speaking from experience, not even OP will. The initial question is meaningless, so it is not answerable, and if you fix it, you'd be answering a question nobody asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The error in the premise is minor. In this case, the error either invalidates the question, or it doesn't. In the first case, correcting the premise constitutes an answer by itself; in the second case, the error should be fixed, but its presence is tangential to the main question. In either case, the question is answerable and useful to other people. Especially when the error in the premise is subtle and you could see more people falling into it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, things are not in general black-and-white. It is not always easy to decide whether the question should be closed or answered. This is one of those cases where reasonable people will sometimes disagree, and there is no general solution to that. Good thing we have a voting system!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T02:12:44.497" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10682" CreationDate="2018-06-22T07:44:52.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that there are Computer Science Educators and Mathematics Educators communities and that this question (or similar) has been raised in the past, perhaps the creation of a Physics Educators / Science Educators / Physical Science Educators community is the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63776" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T07:44:52.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10681" CreationDate="2018-06-22T08:58:13.280" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It rarely does any harm to answer a question, and you never know who else might stumble across your answer and find it interesting. There have been cases where I've written an answer to an essentially meaningless question because (a) I thought there was some interesting physics to talk about and (b) I enjoyed writing the answer - option (b) is often my main motivation :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you're going to find it gratifying to write an answer then do it and damn the torpedoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an argument that writing answers to careless and/or lazy questions just encourages them and makes the site a worse place (this is why we discourage answers to homework questions). Whether this applies to the question you plan to answer is a judgement call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T08:58:13.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10682" CreationDate="2018-06-22T19:15:38.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Mick, that a separate Science Educators website (your option #2) would be the best way forward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might divide the community but there are already divisions in the SE family between Physics and Engineering/Electronic Engineering, Signal Processing, Computational Science, History of Science, Astronomy, Space Exploration, Mathematics, Statistics &amp;amp; Data Analysis etc. Many SE members are active on more than one site, and it is very easy to switch between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When new sites get established this enables those who ask and those who answer to link up more efficiently. Educators get better answers more rapidly from a site which specialises in teaching and learning methods and issues, rather than a site which focuses predominantly on explaining the concepts of physics and applying them to particular situations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4244/&quot;&gt;What kind of `[education]` questions should we allow?&lt;/a&gt; deserves more attention than it got. @Wouter made a very good observation that even the most objective question about physics is subjective to some extent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, questions about teaching and learning methods and also book recommendations, which are both currently officially on topic here, are generally broad and subjective, and it is particularly difficult to identify and specify all relevant circumstances. As dmckee notes in a comment to your Physics question, the same method applied by different teachers often has different results. And even the same teacher does not succeed in applying the same method to all students. What exactly is it that accounts for the difference? From very my limited experience I think that teaching is &lt;strong&gt;an art not a science&lt;/strong&gt; - you succeed by accumulating a broad range of tricks and being adaptable, not being dogmatic about which is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to justify keeping such question on this site while at the same time closing other questions as &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;primarily based on opinion&lt;/strong&gt; - often to a lesser extent - simply because they don't qualify for the protection of the &lt;strong&gt;education&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;resource recommendations&lt;/strong&gt; tags.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T19:55:53.693" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T19:55:53.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10689" CreationDate="2018-06-23T01:59:33.883" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/348145/&quot;&gt;Is the force exerted on the chair transferred to the rope that is pulled on?&lt;/a&gt;  I asked some time ago was deleted because it did not meet the standard of the Physics Stack Exchange website. I decided to revisit the question and modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this question be reopened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164413" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T11:32:30.287" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T11:32:30.287" Title="Can my deleted question be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|specific-question|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10687" CreationDate="2018-06-23T03:32:37.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good of you to ask about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question might be suitable for reopening, but here's why I'm a bit wary about that. Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;policy on homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; says that you need to narrow down the problem to the specific concept that is giving you trouble and ask about that. By showing your work, you've done a very good job of narrowing down the problem to the part that you get stuck on, but then you made a very unfortunate choice of wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not know how to proceed from this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phrase is, in some sense, the death knell of homework-like questions on this site. We see so many people present a homework problem and show a few steps of what they've done, but the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing they actually ask is &quot;what do I do next?&quot; or &quot;I'm not sure where to go from here&quot; or something similar. We don't handle those kinds of questions. Those are people simply looking for homework help, which is not what we do here. This has become so common that a lot of people will see a phrase like that and instinctively hit the &quot;close&quot; button. (Well, it's not technically a button, but effectively it works that way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, though, there's more to your question. You also have this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is the 100 lbs downwards force impacting the free body diagram of the entire system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's much closer to being a specific conceptual question. Admittedly I'm not quite sure what to make of it, since I'm not sure what you mean by a &quot;force impacting the free body diagram of the entire system&quot;, but that's probably a minor wording issue that can get clarified with a small edit. (Chat will be good for that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, I think your question might be pretty close to good but I would like to see the phrase &quot;I do not know how to proceed from this point&quot; removed, which will help make it more explicitly clear to everyone that you're asking a conceptual question about how a force affects a free body diagram (or whatever) and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking for further directions on how to solve the problem. Ordinarily I would probably just make that edit myself because it's presumably pretty minor, but since I'm already writing a meta post, I figured I would just mention it here so you can make the edit if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T03:32:37.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10681" CreationDate="2018-06-24T19:08:37.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The best approach is indeed to submit an answer that pays special and enhanced focus to the alleged error.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a preliminary comment, I think that this question is probably a general stack exchange meta question, not a question specific to physics.meta.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a second preliminary comment, I think option #1 needs to be split up.  Option #1 says, &quot;Answer the question as best I can, even if the answer technically does not answer the question.&quot;  A problem here is &quot;as best you can.&quot;  In most cases, I think a reader would take this to mean, fix the implied errors, and just answer the intended question.  Indeed, in this answer I will end up giving two examples where this occurred.  But, as you've pointed out in your comment, what you actually meant is to avoid &quot;fixing&quot; the question (the opposite), and to focus on the issue(s) with the question instead. In this answer, I will call your intended option #1, option #1, and the fixing option, option #4.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be extra clear, these definitions mean that only option #1 is able to encompass the contentious situation that I encountered yesterday and which the asker, Javier, also apparently encountered in which an answerer submits an answer that &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt; refuses to try to answer a potentially intended (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt;, fixed) question.  However, option #1 is not restricted to this, either.  My option #4 here is the least antagonistic option possible, for it glosses over potential issues and makes the asker look the most intelligent; all the other options #1-#3 are all largely critical of the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reasons I will soon give, I think option #1 is the correct answer.  #2 (closure) is just censorship and it fails to help the poster with their real roadblocks in knowledge.  It is worth noting that closure, originally thought of as a great idea for these sites, was arguably the main thing the founder reversed when he left to to found Discourse.  The raw point system is, itself, already a strong mechanism to prevent worthless clutter.  #3 (a short comment) is horrible because it suggests that the alleged issues are trivial when they rarely are.  I think #4 is the probably the most common route taken on stackexchage, and I will attempt to show why it is a bad option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help think about which approach is best, let us consider the ideal, perfect, learning situation.  Then, let's pretend a writer here wants to get as close as possible to this idealized learning situation.  Then, let's consider how to handle a bad question.  Usually, these are questions which assume something that a potential answerer disagrees with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be hard to dispute that a close-to-ideal learning situation is a tutee learning with a tutor who is knowledgeable in the subject being taught.  One reason is that it is generally thought that a low student-to-teacher ratio is good, and this has about the lowest ratio that is still realistic.  The question at hand, therefore, can probably be narrowed to, &quot;How should an ideal tutor handle a tutee asking an allegedly wrong question?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without any doubt, in this situation the ideal tutor &lt;em&gt;would not&lt;/em&gt; just internally correct the question and continue onward. Rather, the ideal tutor would put a spotlight on the implied alleged error of the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason is that knowledge of a subject, especially one like physics, is like a pyramid.  In this analogy, learning is like building this pyramid of knowledge in a tutee's mind.  A good tutor will try to make a good, strong, pyramid as efficiently as possible.  The middle and upper layers of the knowledge pyramid require a good foundation of math, simpler physics, etc.  Only once a solid foundation is in place should a tutor move the tutee up to the next brick level:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s5YPv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s5YPv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;pyramid&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, in building an upper layer, an allegedly bad brick is discovered, then all attention should be directed just to the allegedly bad brick below.  Otherwise, the tutee will not have an ability to self-re-derive the layer the tutor is working on correctly.  They might be able to memorize solutions to specific cases, but they will fail as soon as they are faced with an altered scenario, because this is when they will need support from that allegedly bad brick.  The upper layer being built will be made of weak material, and tainted by potentially false knowledge.  It will probably just fall apart in the student's mind after an arrogant tutor tricks oneself  into thinking they've successfully built the upper layer and can now go even higher.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my analogy, what such an arrogant tutor (or physicist for that matter) would really be doing is building a jenga tower:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6mIzK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6mIzK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;jenga tower&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire structure of knowledge will just crumble and fall apart as the student, once faced with, for example, a test question they didn't exactly see before, realizes they don't actually understand much of anything about the subject, and that, for example, they are going to get an F on the exam they are taking.  The worst time for them to discover they have no real idea what is going on is during an exam!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few approaches to fixing an allegedly bad brick revealed by an allegedly bad question. If it were me, I would probably say, &quot;Wait a second.  Let's back up a little.  Your question was $x$.  Are there any interesting assumptions you are making here? ... Can you show me how we got this?&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you can see where I am going.  I would want the student to eventually discover own their own that there is an error in their question.  Alternatively, there is the possiblity that I'm wrong, in which case I will discover that I am the one making the error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a good tutor might instead just directly point out the alleged error.  Each approach will focus on the allegedly weak brick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To continue the spotlight on the issue, I'd have the student do some problems about that &quot;bad&quot; brick that prove and demonstrate that the deficit in the question was fully and completely resolved.  Only then would I allow the question originally asked to be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, there is the real possibility that the allegedly bad implied assumption is actually correct.  (This is why I am, arguably irritatingly, insisting on injecting the &quot;weasel word&quot;  &lt;em&gt;allegedly&lt;/em&gt; throughout my answer.)  Here we can really see why #2, #3, and #4 are horrible answers.  By not directing the spotlight to the correct areas, potentially wrong assumptions can then persist in the ecosystem of potentially true and potentially false knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example to illustrate my position are the questions and answers here concerning understanding resistance and Ohm's Law.  The situation with Ohm's Law is that a lot of engineers need to use this law.  However, to derive it from first principles, getting the correct conductivity coefficients from basic things like atomic properties, could be rather complicated.  I don't think it really requires quantum molecular dynamic simulations of finite temperature density functional theory, but this is the implication I gave &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/40907/derivation-of-ohms-law/413329#comment926305_40908&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in response to someone claiming the law is impossible to derive theoretically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this would be over the head of your typical electrical engineer, so my guess is that a lot of textbooks resort to the Drude model in attempting to explain Ohm's law in which the electrons and atoms are treated like a bunch of billiard balls.  The alleged benefit might be that this is easier to teach and give problems on.  Within metals, due to the effects of quantum mechanics and the relatively low energies of the electrons, in my opinion the electrons &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; generally be treated in this fashion.  That is to say, some of the educational models being used are, essentially, not even worthless, but of negative value, getting in the way of real progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you can see where I am going with this.  If not, I think what is happening is that teachers are teaching bad models.  This perhaps results in their students having a lot of questions.  Their questions often have implied alleged errors in them, because the students are genuinely and rightfully confused.  I think that the real problem is probably that the teachers are not teaching physics accurately.  This trickles down into confusion in the students, who come here, hoping to resolve their problem. Some of the poorly instructed students end up here, thus exacerbating the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am arguing that the worst thing possible is that the accepted answers pertaining to issues with the Drude model are glossed over here (the #4 approach).  Stackexchange then just worsens the underlying problems here, arrogantly suggesting the issues a student is having is their fault instead of the teacher's.  It would foster people thinking they know what is going on when they really don't, perpetuating bogus physics and disinformation, stifling creativity and progress.  That is not ideal for stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the currently-accepted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/103082&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;Can someone in a simple way explain [to] me what the Fermi level is and what [it has] to do with conductivity[?]  My teacher said that Cu conducts electric current better than Al because of something in relation to [the] Fermi level[.] I didn't get him very well, so please explain [to] me what it is all about, but in a simple way.&quot;  I think that the currently-accepted answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/413242&quot;&gt;has serious problems&lt;/a&gt;, largely because what is probably the best answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/40917&quot;&gt;involving Kubo's formalism&lt;/a&gt;, is complex and not that simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example underscores the dangers of glossing over issues in questions.  Doing that allows people to think they understand how something like conductivity works, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/413234&quot;&gt;when they probably don't&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not some bizarre example, either.  Can you estimate the fraction of physics papers that convert into Nobel prizes?  A hint is that there is only one prize award per year, but the number of papers published each year is growing rapidly.  Most papers are loaded with what history will prove to be bad, implied, and  ignored assumptions.  This is largely because people want to be nice and to not criticize, something that &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/jasontaylor7/status/727726740689309700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;isn't always ideal&lt;/a&gt;. They gloss over these more important questions, such as the assumptions being made, allowing a train of false knowledge to pollute and weaken the knowledge pyramid.  I think that the progress of correct physics would be greatly increased if people were willing to question their assumptions in a free and direct fashion.  This requires putting the spotlight onto the truly important issues.  Here, that requires a separate answer largely focusing on that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially true because the implied assumptions of a question that an answerer thinks are wrong might actually be legitimate.  In other words, the answerer might be wrong.  Sometimes, an outsider or a bright eyed, bushy tailed wondering student is the first person to discover that an entire branch of alleged knowledge is actually wrong, and needs a full rework.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the arguably simple question about how much work is required to raise the temperature of water some amount.  You probably are thinking this is about the dumbest, simplest question one could ever ask.  I attempted to answer it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/413132&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.   However, I soon changed my answer, and concluded that my original answer was wrong.  It turns out that the questioner was probably asking the question because they didn't think the energy got converted into heat.  So, the issue where I thought the asker was wrong about, and the #4 approach as defined by question (which says we should just gloss over this), was probably the dispositive, deciding aspect of it; the part of the question that I thought was wrong, I now think was actually mostly right.  By comparison, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/413167&quot;&gt;the non-accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; does #4; it glosses over the issue, and blindly assumes all energy is converted into heat, which I now think (like the questioner) is wrong.  This illustrates how the #4 approach is probably bad--it can lead to bad physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can one ever allow an important discovery to be made if it is hushed up by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&amp;amp;nord=1&amp;amp;gbv=2&amp;amp;ei=r9EvW-vQEovNjwS4s6-YBg&amp;amp;q=spin%20electron%20%22it%20is%20indeed%20very%20clever%20but%20of%20course%20has%20nothing%20to%20do%20with%20reality%22&amp;amp;oq=spin%20electron%20%22it%20is%20indeed%20very%20clever%20but%20of%20course%20has%20nothing%20to%20do%20with%20reality%22&amp;amp;gs_l=psy-ab.3...15100.17101.0.18976.14.14.0.0.0.0.150.1268.10j3.13.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..5.0.0....0.whBz9-mLqe8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an arrogant comment&lt;/a&gt; or by &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Wfpw1x9VIIEC&amp;amp;lpg=PT154&amp;amp;ots=h7cTBnuBM1&amp;amp;dq=%22conclusory%20arguments%22&amp;amp;pg=PT155#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22what%20is%20a%20conclusory%20argument%20a%20legal%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conclusary reasoning&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, by reverse logic, if one wanted to impede the progress of awareness of reality, or what was going on, one would intentionally ignore key issues with questions and use conclusory arguments.  At the risk of committing the felony here of using an example from outside of physics, have you ever wondered why a lot of politicians often morph questions away from the literal topic and onto another with a phrase like, &quot;The real question is...&quot;  This is exactly #4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing on arguably trivial issues of a question allows for a stronger knowledge pyramid in a tutee's mind.  It requires being somewhat irritating, pedantic, and taking a more literal approach in which all parts of the actual question are taken seriously.  Keeping within Ohm's Law, a good example of what I mean here to this &quot;literal&quot; approach to answering questions (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt;, not quietly fixing them) is my answer complimenting Thomas' answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/413329&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  (I think Thomas glossed over the Maxwell's equations restriction in the answer.)  I think that glossing over issues (like this) can create ambiguity in the questioner's mind about the real answer to their real question.  Most good students will get hung up on that issue.  The teacher will plow onward, but the student won't take it in, and it will be a waste of time.  Allowing such ambiguity is building a weak pyramid of knowledge, and against the goals of stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summary,&lt;/strong&gt; not only because it is in the best interest to the questioner, but also because it is in the best interest to the field of physics, &lt;strong&gt;the best approach&lt;/strong&gt; to an allegedly bad question is probably to have a tutee focus on the alleged issue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Converting from the tutor-tutee scenario I have invoked to the web-based system here on this site, I think this &lt;strong&gt;entails writing a full-fledged answer (option #1) that brings focus to any alleged issues&lt;/strong&gt; in a question, not in an &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;-character comment (#3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198887" LastEditorUserId="198887" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T17:17:56.127" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T17:17:56.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-25T23:11:03.467" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I find an edit which caused more harm than help by a new user, and which was subsequently approved, is there any action I should take, in addition to fixing the edit? (And in this case, should I just fix the edit, or first rollback and then fix?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T00:15:18.910" Title="Harmful edits: which action?" Tags="|support|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10693" CreationDate="2018-06-26T00:15:18.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is a one-time thing, just fix it however you like – roll-it-back first or don't, whatever float your boat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the edit was too drastic, it is usually easier to roll-it-back first. This changes the status of the edit from &quot;approved&quot; to &quot;rejected&quot;, and the editor loses their +2 rep. points – hardly relevant but it sends a message.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the edit was minor, and rolling-it-back and editing it again feels like a waste of time, go ahead and fix it directly, skipping the rolling-it-back step. The editor gets to keep the +2 rep. points, but no big deal if the edit was in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you feel the editor is systematically suggesting poor edits, or that a particular reviewer is systematically approving poor edits, then it's best to talk to the perpetrator directly. Just ping them in the comment section – they'll get notified. Let them know that their behaviour is unacceptable, etc. If possible, let a moderator know, either by raising a flag or in the chatroom. They will not do anything in particular, unless the case is specially serious, but it won't hurt to keep them in the loop anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T00:15:18.910" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-28T13:39:11.880" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do mods have to follow a hard set of rules, or can they take down anything that they consider inappropriate? Can they take down questions or comments that are relevant to the community just because they don't like them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198084" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-28T13:43:30.447" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T20:49:58.213" Title="Can moderators take down comments that are not breaking any rules just because they don't like the comment?" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10695" CreationDate="2018-06-28T15:43:32.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment in question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ball is made out of an elastic material, when you hit the ball you compress it so it acts like a spring. When the ball is moving towards you, that kinetic energy helps you to compress the ball even more, and then the energy of that compressed ball is released it flies even further. – user3408085 yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is not an attempt to improve the answer which—despite the wide variety of comment left every day—we all remember is the only official use-case for comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your answer to be safe from arbitrary deletion then &lt;strong&gt;put it in a answer-post&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T15:43:32.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10695" CreationDate="2018-06-28T20:49:58.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your question in general: mostly no, there is not a hard set of rules that we have to follow when it comes to deleting posts. Here I'm taking &quot;hard set of rules&quot; to mean rules that, if broken, would result in disciplinary action against the moderator.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; There are a lot of &quot;soft&quot; rules though - by that I mean there are guidelines which we are expected to use to guide our actions. These guidelines come from a combination of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, this meta site, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&quot;mother meta&quot; site&lt;/a&gt;, and conversations with other site members, with other moderators, and with the Stack Exchange community team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to deletion of posts, there are really three cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deletion of comments is pretty free, once it seems they have served their purpose. As mentioned on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;the help center page about the commenting privilege&lt;/a&gt;, comments are meant for requesting clarification, suggesting improvement, and adding other minor/transient information. All of these are inherently temporary purposes, and the comments are prone to be deleted once they've been seen and acted on (or declined to be acted on), or if they've been sitting around for a few weeks. We also aggressively delete comments which don't do one of these things, especially those which fall under the list of things you &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; do in comments on the same privileges page I linked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deletion of answers is more rare. In general, moderators don't delete answers without a specific reason to do so, such as that the answer didn't actually answer the question, or that it was spam. We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;a page in the help center about deleting answers&lt;/a&gt; that lists the most common reasons an answer might be deleted; it's &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; unusual that an answer is deleted for a reason which isn't on that list.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deletion of questions is something we actively try to avoid, because deleting a question takes all its answers with it. Some questions get deleted because they are particularly low quality, but that happens automatically, and we (moderators) have found that if we think a question is not worth keeping around, it &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; gets taken care of by that automatic process. We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;a page in the help center about deleting questions&lt;/a&gt; as well which lists some reasons why a question could be deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt; is an example of a hard set of rules in this sense, but it says nothing about when posts can be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T20:49:58.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-30T13:48:29.453" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment, I want to write the title of a question (to point out that it's a duplicate or related stuff) instead of &quot;pasting&quot; its URL. How can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36793" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-06-30T15:32:20.227" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T05:37:25.953" Title="As a link in a comment how to mention the title of a question instead of its URL?" Tags="|support|comments|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10699" CreationDate="2018-07-01T05:37:25.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm answering so that we can keep an easy copy here as a quick reference, but it's actually there in Qmechanic's comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments use a simplified version of markdown. To include links, use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[As a link in a comment how to mention the title of a question instead of its URL?](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10699/as-a-link-in-a-comment-how-to-mention-the-title-of-a-question-instead-of-its-url)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text which is expected to appear finally should be in square brackets, and the URL immediately follows that in normal brackets. You can't end the stuff inside the square brackets with a space, and you need to include the full URL: 'https://' and all. Note that this works in normal answers and questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T05:37:25.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-01T16:30:09.863" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/297452/&quot;&gt;Criterion for a Feynman loop diagram to give a finite value&lt;/a&gt; long back. Though it wasn't poorly received, I did not get an answer yet. What can I do to improve the question? Of course, I can offer a bounty but many times it has happened that I didn't get any answer even then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36793" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-01T16:57:00.597" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T22:11:20.300" Title="Not poorly received but still no answer: What can be done?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7232" CreationDate="2018-07-02T14:57:26.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will add that the site &lt;a href=&quot;https://normalhuman.github.io/stackmarklets/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bookmarklets for Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; contains several useful bookmarklets. The one called &quot;Formatted link to a webpage&quot; is useful exactly for situation like this - if you want quickly get a link to the current page formatted in the &lt;code&gt;[text](url)&lt;/code&gt; format which is suitable both for comments and for posts on Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I use it on this question I get: &lt;code&gt;[Use this userscript when you share a link](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7232)&lt;/code&gt; If I use if after I clicked on a link to this answer, I get: &lt;code&gt;[Use this userscript when you share a link](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7232#10702)&lt;/code&gt;. Both links are correctly rendered in posts/comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7232&quot;&gt;Use this userscript when you share a link&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7232#10702&quot;&gt;Use this userscript when you share a link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just in case the linked website stops working at some point in the future, here is the source of the bookmarklet and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20180705103212/https://normalhuman.github.io/stackmarklets/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;t=window.getSelection().toString();&#xA;if (!t &amp;amp;&amp;amp; document.querySelector('h1')) {&#xA;  t=document.querySelector('h1').textContent.replace(/ \[closed\]| \[on hold\]| \[duplicate\]/g,'').trim();&#xA;}&#xA;else if (!t) {&#xA;  t=document.title.split('-')[0].trim(); &#xA;}&#xA;u=window.location.href;&#xA;if (typeof StackExchange!=='undefined' &amp;amp;&amp;amp; u.indexOf('area51')==-1 &amp;amp;&amp;amp; /^[qa]/.test(u.split('/')[3])) {&#xA;  u=window.location.protocol+'//'+window.location.hostname+'/q/'+window.location.pathname.split('/')[2]+window.location.hash;&#xA;}&#xA;window.prompt('Copy to Clipboard','['+t+']('+u+')');&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T10:34:00.180" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T10:34:00.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7232" CreationDate="2018-07-03T01:38:45.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/6091&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Extra&lt;/a&gt; add-on for this. It is a userscript that has a lot of features and tweaks for Stack Exchange. Highly recommended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T01:38:45.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10705" CreationDate="2018-07-03T13:27:25.340" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's a good ratio for $\frac{\text{Number of declined + disputed flags}}{\text{(Number of flags raised) - (Number retracted)}}$?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an approximate... 1:50, 1:75, 1:100 or something rough. It obviously will only be even a little significant when you're considering a large number of flags (maybe &gt;80).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to judge whether or not I'm generating too many unnecessary flags. But hopefully this can extend to the whole community so people can place how 'good' they are at flagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Include close votes as helpful/bad flags for the applicable reason, if you believe it's acceptable to do so: I don't know too much about how close votes and the corresponding reviews work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that it's not going to be very effective as an overall metric because for example, I've had 0 off-topic flags declined/disputed in about 150-170, but a noticeable fraction of VLQ flags disputed. Additionally, most of the disputed flags I raised were during my first couple of days of active flagging, but very few are recent, so the ratio neglects historical issues. It also doesn't show if you've been getting flags declined because you're flagging stuff that shouldn't be flagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this measure really conceals extremely important nuances... But it's reasonable as a rough estimate and can tell someone if there's a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; problem. Technically, a simple modification of the formula can be applied to judge each flag type, i.e. I can use the formula on just the NAA flags I've raised, and then again separately for off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T13:49:17.460" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T19:43:39.813" Title="Is a good 'accepted flag ratio' defined?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10704" CreationDate="2018-07-03T14:16:55.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, story time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time, it used to be that Stack Exchange had this thing called &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=flag+weight&quot;&gt;&quot;flag weight&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which was basically pretty much the very metric you're interested in, and which was shown to moderators (when they dealt with your flags) as well as publicly (because... reasons?). To put it mildly, it was, um, contentious: people started really caring about it and it skewed the system in all sorts of unpredicted ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Basically, every time you put a number next to someone's name online, you create an incentive for them to maximize it (or minimize it or whatever); it's just how humans work. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what the incentives do, but the design needs to put the stuff that does good and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; show the stuff that doesn't.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yeah, flag weight died, and it got completely banished as a metric. Instead, we got a nice dashboard giving us a good in-depth look at our flagging histories, and everyone was happier. (To be clear, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; flag information is still public, notably the total number of helpful flags, but no amount of declined or rejected flags will cause any change in public-facing information.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the moral here? Well, for one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;do not worry about individual rejected or declined flags.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously. They're not worth it. What &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; you worry about? Two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator messages telling you that you should change a specific flagging behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A pattern of declined / rejected flags that takes up a significant fraction of your flagging history where all of the flags share rather similar characteristics and were declined / rejected for similar reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absent either of those, seriously (and I know it's hard to drop it), it's not worth it. Flags are there to bring attention-worthy items to the attention of people who can take actions about them, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Very Low Quality queue where random nonsense can be sent packing,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Close and Reopen queues where community consensus can be built up for closure or reopening,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moderator reviews of rude or abusive comments or spam,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;direct removal of abusive comments and spam once enough users flag them, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moderator action on anything requiring detailed attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there's nothing there that actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; anything, beyond the removal of flagrant spam and abuse if &lt;em&gt;six&lt;/em&gt; independent users flag it as such (if I remember the threshold correctly). And, as such, the negative consequences of a few flags going wrong here or there are pretty minimal. If it's a pattern it does need to be fixed, but beyond that, don't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T16:30:10.923" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T16:30:10.923" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10704" CreationDate="2018-07-03T19:43:39.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10705/124&quot;&gt;what Emilio said&lt;/a&gt;, but just to put some numbers on it: if you're concerned about that ratio dropping below 1/50, you worry too much ;-) It can safely be higher than that. Much higher. Actually, the ratio doesn't matter at all, as far as I'm concerned. Even if your ratio is somehow greater than 1 but the flags you're getting declined are for sensible reasons (i.e. not the same stuff you've had declined before), that's not something I would consider to be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T19:43:39.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-06T04:47:17.867" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69222/&quot;&gt;How can I put a permanent current into a superconducting loop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one link at the bottom of the only answer. Can I ask the answerer to fix the link? How?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175857" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T06:02:57.423" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T20:42:04.257" Title="Can I ask an answerer to Fix a broken link in their post?" Tags="|support|editing|comments|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10708" CreationDate="2018-07-06T04:57:51.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know what the repaired link should be, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;suggest an edit&lt;/a&gt; with the correct link.&#xA;However, that's not so helpful in this case, where the address of the broken link doesn't reveal very much about its intended destination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you have earned a little more reputation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/user/175857&quot;&gt;you'll earn the privilege of being able to comment on other people's posts&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;which is the usual way to make this sort of request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the present, I've left a comment on your behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T20:42:04.257" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T20:42:04.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-07T04:46:57.897" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/415471/&quot;&gt;discovered there is a floating&lt;/a&gt; (no tag wiki description) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elementary-particles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elementary-particles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elementary-particles&lt;/a&gt; tag, which description is included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/particle-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;particle-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;particle-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag. Should not these be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T18:17:45.680" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T18:17:45.680" Title="Tag with no tag wiki description which should be merged" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10715" CreationDate="2018-07-07T06:16:06.393" Score="6" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about the recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/415429/why-is-making-a-white-laser-so-difficult&quot;&gt;&quot;Why is making a white laser so difficult?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of days back (when I first saw it) if I recall correctly, I left my usual off-topic-because-it's-engineering comment under it: &quot;This may receive better answers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; The comment has been deleted (probably by a mod), so I'm not even sure if the person who suggested engineering SE was actually me. But one of the other comments quotes my usual phrase &quot;better answers&quot;, and I had left a flag on the question, so it's likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the present state of the question, I think it may actually be on-topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/415474/191954&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty's answer&lt;/a&gt; (to the same question) successfully explains things without going into a discussion of engineering: he says that white light lasers can be made and gives an explanation of how they can be &lt;em&gt;theoretically&lt;/em&gt; created by choosing appropriate gains or dyes. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/415435/191954&quot;&gt;the answer by MrMins&lt;/a&gt; (which is presently the highest voted answer) says that the existing white lasers are purely conceptual and that the technology is not &quot;practical&quot; yet, and basically answers the question by saying &quot;White lasers aren't common because of it's presently difficult to make them run on batteries&quot;, which signals engineering at full volume. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me the question &quot;Why is it difficult to make this?&quot; is definitely engineering if there are practical considerations. Physics in such cases is (IMO) &quot;Is it theoretically possible for such a thing to exist?&quot;, or &quot;How do white lasers work?&quot;. Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/22631/why-make-an-white-laser-is-so-difficult&quot;&gt;the question, when posted on engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;, received a negative score (though only -1), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/a/22632&quot;&gt;the answer there&lt;/a&gt; is definitely engineering-ish: it says that one of the ways of making white lasers is possible but is &quot;a very difficult engineering problem&quot;, and gives you a link to an article about how some people created a single-crystal white laser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My summary: the answers on Physics SE made the question seem to be on-topic, but the identical question on engineering SE received an engineering-ish answer. What do we do with such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I don't have a problem with the fact that a moderator deleted the comment. There's a possibility that it's misleading: I believe the question is off-topic, but apparently most people disagree, and that's fine. If the comment causes an unnecessary confusion, it should go.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In this case, all I knew about the answer to the question was what a quick google search told me: white light lasers definitely exist and have some applications in medical stuff. To me, this strongly suggests engineering complications as the answer to the question assuming the premise that they're hard to make is correct&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I'm deliberately not using the specific-question tag here. I don't want the discussion to be focused  upon this question. This is probably applicable to a large number of off-topic engineering questions: they could possibly receive satisfactory physics explanations in addition to engineering considerations&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T08:43:15.260" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:43:15.260" Title="On-topic answers for seemingly off-topic questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10710" CreationDate="2018-07-07T16:30:50.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/particle-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;particle-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;particle-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag (currently with approx. 3500 questions) is one of a few primary tags. Ideally all questions should be tagged with a primary tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elementary-particles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elementary-particles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elementary-particles&lt;/a&gt; tag (currently with approx. 200 questions) is a secondary tag. It is mainly used for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;particle physics&lt;/a&gt; questions where it is important to distinguish between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elementary particles&lt;/a&gt; and composite particles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt; Phys.SE often gets &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/39590/2451&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; about whether the electron is an elementary particle or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this role the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elementary-particles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elementary-particles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elementary-particles&lt;/a&gt; does serve some purpose, and seems worth keeping.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A related secondary tag is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/point-particles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;point-particles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;point-particles&lt;/a&gt; tag (currently with approx. 100 questions). Note that the notion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_particle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;point-particles&lt;/a&gt; is used also outside the area of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;particle physics&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;classical mechanics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Concerning tag-wikis: Many tags lack tag-wikis. Users are encouraged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10247/2451&quot;&gt;create/improve&lt;/a&gt; them. There is even a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/87/research-assistant&quot;&gt;research assistant&lt;/a&gt; badge for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T18:15:22.190" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T18:15:22.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-07T23:31:59.757" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it because your total reputation is in front of your name and the size of that number is a sort of prestige? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6303/the-secret-to-getting-a-massive-reputation-is&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; when someone expressed frustration that over reputation gain being bias in favor of answering simple questions, it was answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it is correct that the more popular subjects will get more&#xA;  attention than the best questions and answers on less popular&#xA;  subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't fight popular questions, but you can certainly change the system to reward people differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not spend your reputation on putting up bounties? Why is so little reputation (relative to total reputation) spent on bounties? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's simply that the prestige of having high reputation goes down, then why not make the number in front of everyone's name &quot;average reputation flux&quot; or &quot;total reputation earned&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By rewarding top reputation earners to spend their reputation, you'll have a more diverse way of gaining reputation; and it would be possible for more obscure questions to have much more value in answering (in terms of prestige). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T20:54:06.787" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T20:54:06.787" Title="Why won't you spend your reputation (on bounties)?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10713" CreationDate="2018-07-08T00:38:06.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Popular, &quot;every day&quot; questions get a lot of exposure because many more people can explain every day things. Incredibly esoteric or nuanced or specific questions get less attention because fewer people are qualified or interested in answering them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think that's a problem that bounties will fix. If I ask a question on a topic that maybe 10 people on the site are qualified to answer, odds are really good those 10 have already seen it. And if it didn't get an answer, a bounty probably wouldn't help. And using it to get more attention is likely not needed either, because those who know that topic have probably already seen it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I see a good use of bounties is in areas that are in the middle. It could be a topic where the pool of people who can answer it is big, but not huge, and where there's enough questions that it's possible somebody misses them. Then a bounty can be useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, my area of interest (fluid dynamics) isn't quite in that category. It isn't that it's terribly esoteric. But there's relatively few questions that get asked in it so I usually see most of them anyway. And there's a small pool of people here who are interested, and so many times I see a question and go &quot;Oh, I know X will see this and be able to answer better than I will.&quot; And that usually happens. So there isn't an overwhelming need for bounties in those areas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T00:38:06.013" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10711" CreationDate="2018-07-08T11:39:14.090" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it has on-topic answers here, then it's (likely to be) on-topic here. The fact that a similar or identical thread can get on-topic answers of a different flavour in some other venue is irrelevant to that fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question to ask when closing as off-topic, whether it's with a migration in mind or not, isn't &quot;is there a better home for this question out there?&quot;, it's &quot;is this question off-topic &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;. If the answer to the second question is &quot;no, it's on-topic here&quot; but there are still other venues that might be better, then we can suggest them to OP and leave it to them to ask for a migration or (with the usual caveats!) cross-post as appropriate, but there is no need for any further actions on our part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T11:45:22.023" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T11:45:22.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10713" CreationDate="2018-07-08T20:49:52.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the anomaly that rob pointed out in the comments, so I'll weigh in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm concerned, any rep above 25k is fairly gratuitous, given that there are no more privileges to be earned (despite some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/300866/184688&quot;&gt;excellent proposals&lt;/a&gt; for the 30k tier), and it might as well be spent constructively by awarding bounties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To incentivize the right types of questions, i.e. the types of in-depth, well-thought-out, highly non-trivial (but still within the realm of the answerable) questions that, because of a narrower subject matter or some other factor, are less likely to attract upvotes or answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To reward the highly-detailed, high-quality answers that we all wish got a ton of votes but (again through e.g. a narrow subject matter) don't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To give users with a record of high-quality community moderation and content a faster access to the moderation privileges that will make them most effective at helping this community succeed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, since participation in SE is easier to keep to a high standard if you gamify it (at least for me), I decided to make a Data Explorer query to have some concrete numbers to focus on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/344526/users-by-total-bounty-given&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users by total bounty given.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I find very striking from that query is that there are a full &lt;em&gt;fourteen&lt;/em&gt; users who have spent upwards of 80% of their rep on bounties: not a huge fraction of the site's userbase, but those users still deserve a lot of recognition, particularly for the ones who give out a substantial fraction of those bounties to questions by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't see in that table, and would quite like to see more of, is a larger population of the &gt;25k rep userbase, for whom moderation privileges are a gone pursuit, and who have enough experience with the site to have well-defined ideas of the types of questions, answers and users that really make a difference, as well as the reputation to reward them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In informal conversations on chat, I have tried to prod several high-rep users into making bounties more of a regular habit, and the responses have largely been along the lines of &quot;I don't often find posts that fit those kinds of criteria&quot;, to which my answer is roughly: that's rubbish. If you're on the &gt;25k rep side, it's almost a given that you spend a great deal of time browsing the site, and if you keep an eye to the ground with the question &quot;what questions, answers and users really make a difference?&quot;, it won't be too long before one of those turns up on your path. When that happens, just click that bounty button!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, in closing, I'll allow myself one bit of gloat: I'm planning to hit 20,000 rep offered in bounties with my 100th bounty in a couple of months. I hope to see more high-rep users on that leaderboard by that time ;-)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T20:49:52.780" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10701" CreationDate="2018-07-10T22:11:20.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What can I do to improve the question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No offence, but make it more interesting and a possible learning resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that I mean, explain far more about what your problem is,  how you arrived at that point and what you think possible solutions (that you are currently dismissing, based on your own assumption) are. Obviously there's a balance, you can can assume your audience knows what's involved in easier scattering  problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a numbers game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By writing the original question the way you have,  as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The contribution of loop diagrams in QFT are often divergent and sometimes convergent as well. For example, the self-energy corrections in QED are divergent. On the other hand, the Zee model of radiative neutrino mass (for example) induces a finite neutrino mass at one-loop. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you will only attract the relativity few heavy hitters on the site. And this hasn't worked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By explaining in more detail what your problem is, you possibly will get the attention of students (a far larger proportion of site user and &quot;outsiders&quot; who are nearly at your level and are prepared to investigate something that they will need to cover eventually anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more you have to explain it, the better a question it is, in most cases, and the act of explaining it may make the penny drop for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you have been looking at this problem long enough yourself that you can sum it up succinctly to the cognoscenti, but there's very few (to date, none) of those here willing to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I was asking the question, I would expand it as I said above. Loop diagrams are not (no offence again) the most difficult area of QFT. I don't know the answer, but I'm six months away from calculating those amplitudes and I guess many others are as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe (probably) you won't get an answer from less experienced users, but they might give you an idea of how it could be resolved, or a link to a paper  or tutorial or presentation where it has been covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user198207" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T22:11:20.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T17:04:01.007" Score="-2" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presented a very insightful answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/166700&quot;&gt;Can electromagnetic fields be used to deconstruct and reconstruct molecular bonds?&lt;/a&gt;. I put a great deal of time and effort into including diagrams and a 3D perspective of the molecules the question asker was clearly talking about. A moderator &quot;rob&quot; waltzed in and deleted it saying that he felt it was a &quot;springboard&quot; onto another topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is that there is only one reason for breaking molecular bonds using electromagnetism, that is circumventing the mitochondria mechanism in the human body to produce a biological energy source by breaking ionic bonds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, i am very dissapointed by this site and the hypercritical moderation.&#xA;No appeals, no discussions, just unilatteral decisions. I would say that if this moderator is not a biochemist and a particle physicist, he has no right to say what is or is not on topic regarding this post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously why every answer i have seen so far is no more then a couple sentences. Modzillas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, just thought i would point this out before moving to a far less censored site. Just don't want other new people to waste their time here like i obviously did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72902" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Bush" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T20:03:45.100" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T22:57:25.587" Title="Why was my detailed, informative answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10718" CreationDate="2018-07-12T18:03:25.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the Moderator that your post does not answer the question, which asked about the use of electromagnetic fields for breaking molecular bonds (physics), not about how bonds are broken or formed in metabolic processes (biochemistry). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not &quot;clearly&quot; asking about the biochemical molecules mentioned in your answer (ATP, DNA). It mentions only the molecular structure of &quot;objects.&quot; In the context of physics and the separation of matter from anti-matter this &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; means inanimate objects. The question does not use the tags of biophysics, biology or chemistry so answers given in those contexts would probably not be appropriate. You appear to be expounding a topic which you are very passionate and knowledgeable about, regardless of the requirements of the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site for questions and answers about physics. Biochemists are welcome, but their questions/answers must be about physics (eg biophysics), and not biochemistry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are appeals and discussions - which is what you are doing now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are entitled to act unilaterally and do not need to be experts in the topic of a question or answer before they interfere with it. They are voted into office, and because of their long involvement with this site they do know better than most users what is &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not wish the effort you put into your answer to be wasted you could post a suitable question in Chemistry SE or Biology SE and answer your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T20:43:56.390" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T20:43:56.390" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-19T03:24:11.577" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those with an Android phone, what is your favorite app, or whatever, for displaying math symbols on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182409" OwnerDisplayName="Kurt Hikes" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-19T05:27:49.317" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T05:36:35.663" Title="What is the best/easiest way to write math symbols on this site?" Tags="|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-07-19T05:29:07.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-23T04:45:44.283" Score="-1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question at Physics Stack Exchange site, and I uploaded a photograph of the calculation I had done on that. But, I was asked to write all my calculations in the question(and not in the photograph). So, How to write mathematical expressions in questions using android devices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="162251" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T09:11:10.523" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T09:11:10.523" Title="How to write mathematical expressions in questions using android devices?" Tags="|support|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-29T12:27:21.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10723" CreationDate="2018-07-23T06:18:13.060" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; should work on android devices. You'll still be typing out plain text with &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; symbols enclosing the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T06:18:13.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-23T10:55:37.870" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat annoyed that one of my questions just vanished like it never existed. Shouldn't there at least be some kind of notification in my account left? And why not keep questions that don't have an answer, yet?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question was related to quantum scars - a relatively recent research topic, which might not be so popular among the Copenhagen orthodoxy... Censorship? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I managed to find it in my bookmarks but nowhere else! Here it is:      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336433/&quot;&gt;Relation between &amp;#39;t Hooft&amp;#39;s deterministic QM and Gutzwillers trace formula?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97383" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T13:39:48.537" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T13:55:49.620" Title="Question deleted without a trace and without notice?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10725" CreationDate="2018-07-23T13:43:36.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336433/44126&quot;&gt;Your question&lt;/a&gt; was asked thirteen months ago. In that time it was viewed by thirty-three people, of whom zero voted postively or negatively. It was automatically deleted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt; after a year as an &quot;abandoned question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgotten questions are deleted without notice by design --- it helps them stay forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&quot;&gt;What should I do if no one answers my question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your question has now been undeleted by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T13:43:36.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10725" CreationDate="2018-07-23T13:47:07.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP's zero score question without answers was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;automatically&lt;/a&gt; deleted after 1 year. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10264/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; related meta post. It is a deliberate SE design not to inform users of deletions. I manually undeleted OP's question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T13:55:49.620" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T13:55:49.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T19:33:01.310" Score="39" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the level of voting on Physics SE is noticeably lower than on most other SE sites that I frequent and lower that it has been in the past (I have been a user on the site for several years). A casual look down the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;most recent questions&lt;/a&gt; shows that the vast majority are on only 0 or 1 vote. I remember a time when a question would get 1 or 2 up-votes, simply if it was constructive, valid and well-presented. In fact, I get the impression that, these days, the voting system is being used almost exclusively as a tool to 'punish' questions that are deemed unworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people aren't using the voting system, there are two potential issues I can see: firstly, there is a lack of reward/incentive for people to stick around and spend their time answering questions. Secondly, it will lead to a lack of differentiation between good/bad questions and answers - the good will get lost amidst the bad/mediocre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what has happened with the voting? If people aren't using it, then it may as well not be there ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="68181" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T15:27:41.090" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T15:27:41.090" Title="Are people voting less than they used to on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10728" CreationDate="2018-07-28T07:23:16.463" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;These statistics are included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&quot;&gt;site analytics&lt;/a&gt; page (25k+ rep). There is generally a lull in posting rates in the summer and over the winter holidays, but the trend on the votes is less marked. Here are the (weekly-averaged) post and vote rates over the past three years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j0zkV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j0zkV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data before 2015 do show a year-on-year increase, which has since stabilized. I normally don't set much stock on data taken roughly between June and August, as the summer does tend to see much lower traffic (and indeed the traffic tends to show stronger seasonal variations, but a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/309229/184688&quot;&gt;recent data outage&lt;/a&gt; hasn't been fully recovered), but the mid-semester high point in voting last March does seem to be below the high-water marks from 2017 and 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether this is enough evidence to be concerned about, but it isn't conclusive evidence that everything is all right, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If people want to play around with the data, it is easily available from the Data Explorer - &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/880228/daily-voting-totals#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is a query to get you started&lt;/a&gt;, though it's probably easiest to analyze offline.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T07:42:37.387" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T07:42:37.387" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10733" CreationDate="2018-07-29T05:06:33.110" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, both &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/mathjax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathjax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathjax&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/tex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tex&lt;/a&gt; are used here on meta for questions about usage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; in posts on the main site. (AFAICT MathJax is the correct terminology, but unsurprisingly many people know this syntax simply as TeX/LaTeX.) At the moment there are 66 question tagged (mathjax), 31 questions tagged (tex) and 26 questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathjax+tex&quot;&gt;have both tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not ideal to have two separate tags for the same topic - for example, it complicates things when searching using tags. So I think these two tags should be synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've checked a few other sites &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/216606/&quot;&gt;that use MathJax&lt;/a&gt;. On some other metas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Mathematics, (mathjax) has &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/mathjax/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt; (tex) and (latex), with (mathjax) as the master tag. Similarly &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/mathjax/synonyms&quot;&gt;on Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Meta Stack Exchange, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/mathjax/synonyms&quot;&gt;only mathjax tag&lt;/a&gt;. Similarly on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/mathjax/synonyms&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/tags/mathjax/synonyms&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electrical Engineering has three separate tags (&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tex&quot;&gt;tex&lt;/a&gt;), (&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latex&quot;&gt;latex&lt;/a&gt;) and (&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathjax&quot;&gt;mathjax&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/13775/2018/5/31&quot;&gt;previously asked this in chat&lt;/a&gt;. One of the moderators &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45893222#45893222&quot;&gt;recommended to ask on meta&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T09:20:23.920" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T21:06:49.820" Title="Should the tags (mathjax) and (tex) on meta be synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|tags|mathjax|tag-synonyms|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10732" CreationDate="2018-07-29T09:48:56.103" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I have created a synonym &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/tex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tex&lt;/a&gt;→&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/mathjax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathjax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathjax&lt;/a&gt;. The 2 tags are not yet merged, so if the community feels strongly about it one way or another, speak up: It can still be undone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T09:55:25.577" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T09:55:25.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T12:06:54.550" Score="4" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who and why did someone say about me &quot;Apparently, this user prefers to keep an air of mystery about them.&quot; referring to me? FYI - I forgot this place was here. I posted once about the mass of photons (which is described in Feynman lectures bty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202820" OwnerDisplayName="user202820" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T14:18:53.183" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T15:03:53.210" Title="Who said that I prefer to keep an air of mystery about myself and why?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10735" CreationDate="2018-07-31T15:03:53.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a boilerplate template for all users across all Stack Exchange sites. Once you edit your profile, that language is replaced with whatever you wrote in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/251810/230312&quot;&gt;this Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/290394/1276356&quot;&gt;this Meta.SO post&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T15:03:53.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10738" CreationDate="2018-08-01T02:19:38.843" Score="5" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4984/32426&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer, it is generally tied to a large number of downvoted/closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is about the answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the suspended person gets a warning before the ban?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the limit, where is the point where it happens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the typical suspension times for this offense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This post is not about the automatic Q/A ban, but about the temporary suspensions with the reason &quot;for low quality contributions&quot;. These are essentially different things, the Q/A ban is automatic (on unknown rules), while suspension can be given manually by the mods.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T05:04:04.257" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T13:21:06.827" Title="How is the suspension due to low quality contributions being decided?" Tags="|discussion|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10737" CreationDate="2018-08-01T13:21:06.827" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291142/280545&quot;&gt;the automatic question/answer limitations went into place in 2017&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;it has been quite rare for the moderators to issue manual suspensions for low-quality contributions.  I haven't double-checked but I think in 2018 I could count them on one hand. Suspensions for rudeness or for misusing multiple accounts are more common, but we don't have too many of those, either.&#xA;(And a friendly reminder: if anyone reading this paragraph suddenly wants to discuss any possible past or present suspension of another user by name, please go outside and look for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pareidolia&lt;/a&gt; in the clouds until the urge passes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your main question, we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; consider both questions and answers when evaluating the quality of a user's contributions.  In a couple of cases this year I have used variations on &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/840905/most-prolific-answerers-during-date-interval-mean-answer-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; as a starting point to help decide whether a user's recent posting frequency and quality were actually different from what's typical for the site, or whether I (or another mod, or a flagger) had just happened upon a couple of stinkers written by a user whose contributions are mostly pretty good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little reluctant to reveal the existence of that database query, however, because I worry it might leave some readers with the (wrong) impression that the moderation team is looking at some magical number.  We're not.  The goal of the moderation team is to &lt;em&gt;maintain our high-quality community&lt;/em&gt;.  Nearly all of that maintenance is done by the community itself, through voting and commenting.  Only on rare occasions do we have a user who has missed or ignored these community cues.  In those rare cases, the moderation team has a reasoned discussion about whether the best course of action is firmer guidance in comments, or a moderator message, or an invitation for that user to write on other people's websites for a while rather than on our little corner of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's frustrating that this guidance is vague, but it really is how we do things.  The entire reason for having human moderators is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;to handle exceptional cases&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Suppose I were to answer your question &quot;what is the limit?&quot; by making up some number: a person whose posting record is $X$ would probably earn a manual suspension.&#xA;Then in the future we'll find ourselves dealing with an edge case, some user whose posting record is $X-1$, who believes they are immune to criticism because they haven't crossed some magical threshold.&#xA;Public arguments about edge cases (&quot;I've followed all your stupid rules, you can't tell me what to do&quot;) are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; bad for the community.&#xA;What I've written here really is (I hope) a fair summary of how the moderation team has been handling these sorts of decisions, and why we've come to do things that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T13:21:06.827" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-02T09:25:22.380" Score="5" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right so I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/420606/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about something (not really important because the response is the important part).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my responses (who I believe flagged the article) complained that it was not Physics because it was engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know a few engineers and there is no doubt that what they do is Physics and all you need to do is look at what they study (the nature and properties of matter and energy) and know that they love thermodynamics more than most to know that engineering is Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is up with that? Are pure physicists just afraid of engineering questions because it is a new spin on what they already know or are non-traditional Physics questions banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wondering, because it seems we might need an engineering SE otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR If engineering is physics based can it be on the Phys.SE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130274" LastEditorUserId="130274" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T12:03:22.970" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T13:38:05.773" Title="Engineering, what does Phys.SE deem as not Physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10739" CreationDate="2018-08-02T12:19:23.540" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics is for questions that ask about physics concepts mainly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many engineers like physics, because engineering often applies physics, so there is some overlap. In this question; you're &lt;em&gt;applying&lt;/em&gt; physics for material comparisons, and essentially asking which is best suited to a purpose. This type of material selection is far more engineering than physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to know why materials behaved as they did, you could probably make that an on-topic question; but you would have to formulate the question differently, and it probably wouldn't answer exactly what you want to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="127931" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T13:38:05.773" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T13:38:05.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2018-08-07T17:53:21.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.desmos.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DsTFh.png&quot; alt=&quot;A powerful graphing tool&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202461" LastEditorUserId="202461" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T14:21:19.773" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T14:21:19.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-08T12:53:05.400" Score="6" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/measurement-problem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;measurement-problem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;measurement-problem&lt;/a&gt; tag is misused almost as much as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Would it make sense to (1) put a more clear warning on the tag description and maybe (2) introduce a new tag for questions involving quantum mechanical measurements, e.g. [quantum-measurement], which unaware askers might be more likely to pick?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T12:57:50.703" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T12:57:50.703" Title="Misuse of [measurement-problem] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10744" CreationDate="2018-08-08T18:03:40.243" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been able to put pictures in my answers, and I cannot see any pictures posted in other people's questions. Is this an issue on my end, or is imgur having issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T23:49:11.480" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T23:49:11.480" Title="Imgur Issue? Cannot see or upload pictures" Tags="|bug|status-completed|links|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10743" CreationDate="2018-08-08T18:05:39.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an issue on Imgur's side: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/313779/is-stack-imgur-currently-down&quot;&gt;Is stack.imgur currently down?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't have an update on this other than being more than a little angry with the state of things and that I'm working with Imgur to ensure they get it back online ASAP. – Nick Craver♦ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a workaround, use 1000 words: they render independently of Imgur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T18:05:39.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10746" CreationDate="2018-08-09T07:50:03.143" Score="5" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/421836/why-does-it-become-difficult-to-sample-configuration-during-a-phase-change-in-mo&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and saw that it was tagged [molecular-dynamics] which surprised me, since it is nothing to do with MD. I thought I would edit it to include the tag [Monte-Carlo], only to find that it doesn't exist. That surprised me more. Although I can understand that some questions about Monte Carlo simulation might be better suited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science SE&lt;/a&gt;, or even conceivably Math or Stats SE, many such questions are intimately connected with the physics of the system, and would be a good fit here (IMHO). I can't find much serious discussion of this here on Meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I finally get up to the reputation level needed to create new tags, and attempt to create [Monte-Carlo], should I expect some counter-arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user197851" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T09:01:50.283" Title="No Monte-Carlo tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10745" CreationDate="2018-08-09T09:01:50.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Concerning questions about Monte-Carlo, they should first of all be tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computational-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computational-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag and possibly the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simulations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simulations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simulations&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether a new tag [X] should be introduced depends on various factors, such as, e.g., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nearby tags: each question can only support 5 tags. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are people actual going to use the [X] tag, or is it just collecting dust? If tag [X] is only applied on, say, 10% of all subject X questions, it may be more fruitful to search for the word X directly, rather than to search for a tag [X]. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The interests of the Phys.SE community is not uniformly distributed over all physics topics. Certain areas of physics may call for more refined tagging than others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phys.SE is user-driven. If a user volunteer to be a curator for a new tag [X], it is more likely to be realized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reminder to everyone: If you see errors in a post (such as, e.g. a tag that doesn't belong), you are encouraged to edit/leave a comment, whichever seems most appropriate (and provided the main original intent of the post is not altered).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T09:01:50.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T17:49:50.707" Score="10" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether perhaps this is the site to ask such a question, and I may as well ask it here, but if it is not appropriate I would like to know where to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, I am a 21 year-old physics and mathematics student, having finished my second year of undergraduate studies. I have suffered from mild tinnitus and hyperacusis for about 7 years, but within the last year it has become very severe, and is now coupled with very severe unilateral hearing loss (right ear). It has a great impact on me emotionally (because music was a large part of my life) and is incredibly distracting for me on a daily basis. It interferes with my work, and because intellectual pursuits are truly the most important thing in my life- always have been!- I worry greatly about future prospects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am awaiting specialist therapy for this, so am not seeking advice of this form. However I would very much like to hear from other physicists/mathematicians/academics with hearing diasabilities: how it has impacted their research and academic life, strategies they use to cope etc. I would find it very useful to hear about people's experiences, and it would give me hope to know that there are ways of getting around this. I cannot imagine a life in which I am not actively doing research and contributing to science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where would be the appropriate place to ask about such a topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57218" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T19:06:32.443" Title="Where to ask a question about being a physicist with a hearing disability?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10747" CreationDate="2018-08-09T19:06:32.443" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;main site&lt;/a&gt; would not be an appropriate place to ask about this, for a couple of reasons: first, questions about career guidance and similar things are taken to be off topic, but also because a question just asking for people's experiences is more open-ended than what the site is meant for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try checking with people at &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Academia Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; to see if they might consider it on topic there. I think they're more open to career guidance questions, but they may still consider it too open-ended; I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could definitely ask about this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;, but there are a limited number of people who participate there regularly so the chance of finding someone else with a similar experience to share is probably not that great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a question like this, you might actually find the best response by looking  at a more traditional discussion forum outside of Stack Exchange. We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;a list of other sites&lt;/a&gt; at which people can ask certain kinds of questions that are off topic here. It's not quite meant for what you're looking to ask, but it might give you some leads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T19:06:32.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T21:07:03.503" Score="16" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling a little bit with this site and I think I'm starting to put my finger on why.  Physics is about the nature of reality, there must be (at some level) a way to say something is objectively incorrect.  But the way this site works is not really about that, answers are accepted and upvoted because they match what people think (or want to believe) and it's becoming clear that a lot of highly upvoted and accepted answers can't possibly be correct.  As a side-effect, the people that answered gain reputation.  Whether that means they are an expert or not, it will surely be interpreted as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me be clear, I do not claim to be an expert in physics.  I entered university as a physics major but later decided that it wasn't for me.  I learned a lot in those years, mainly about how to evaluate whether something was a plausible explanation using logic.  I mainly enjoy learning about physics as a hobby and I have great respect for those who really do it.  There are some clear experts here.  In fact, the main reason I post anything here is in the hopes that someone will inform me (correctly) that I am wrong.  Then I learn something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But enough about me.  The thing that bothers me is that more and more I see really wrong answers being upvoted.  I wouldn't really care but it would seem that this could result in this site becoming a source of disinformation.  Let's say, for example, that someone creates an answer based on flat-earth nonsense and it were highly upvoted and accepted.  Would that be OK?  I mean, the nature of the universe is not a popularity contest.  &quot;A million Elvis fans can't be wrong&quot; is surely a fallacy and that's especially true when it comes to physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to happen a lot with the 'hot network questions'.  I get the feeling that the actual experts around here don't want to get involved in those.  I can imagine why.  I'm not sure it's a good idea for the moderators to start deleting things.  So we are left with, frankly, outright nonsense as answers and people who post nonsense getting reputations.  This doesn't seem good to me but is that just how it's going to be?  I'm trying to decide if I need to get away from this site as this trend is highly distracting.  I hate watching an otherwise good resource become part of the larger movement towards the 'post-fact' age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this 'just how it is' or is there a possible solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102550" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T13:04:20.150" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T12:10:56.083" Title="Does it matter if answers are correct?" Tags="|discussion|answers|quality|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T21:41:08.500" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was writing a comprehensive answer to a question when it became protected before I could submit my answer. Could a mod please submit my answer for me? I took a lot of time to write up and research and it seems not in the spirit of the site that such research get penalized by not being able to post an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: And now I can't post this question because it says I can only answer a question once every 40 minutes--even though my post never went through on the question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/421895/dropping-a-brick-from-a-balloon&quot;&gt;When a balloon pops and lets a brick fall, where does the energy come from?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer I was in the process of submitting is below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl; dr The energy comes from the conversion of buoyant potential energy to gravitational potential energy. That energy came from filling the balloon with enough helium to lift it and the brick off the ground.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you haven't filled up your balloon yet--you have a deflated balloon tied to a brick and sitting on the ground. Let's call the balloon brick system the airship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The airship is at equilibrium sitting on the ground. It has no potential or kinetic energy. But then you hook up your balloon to your canister of helium and start to fill it up. As the balloon starts to fill, the volume of atmosphere displaced by the helium increases, until the weight of that displaced air becomes greater than the weight of the balloon filled with helium (this only works to lift the balloon because helium is less dense than the surrounding air). That buoyancy provides an upward force on the balloon and the airship. At this point the balloon is floating above the brick, but still lacks the force to lift the airship off the ground. The brick itself is still at equilibrium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You keep filling up the balloon with helium, and eventually the force of buoyancy from the larger balloon provides enough upward force on the airship to overcome the force of gravity on the airship--so you stop pumping helium into the balloon by disconnecting your canister. The airship is now out of equilibrium by being on the ground and begins to rise to achieve a lower energy state. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gravity doesn't change as your airship rises (it technically increases a little bit from the extra atmosphere beneath you, but we can ignore that). If your balloon was strong enough, you'd eventually get to a point high enough up in the atmosphere such that buoyant force exerted on the balloon decreases to the point that the airship is in equilibrium again--the buoyant force balances the gravitational force on the airship. Your airship now has a lot of gravitational potential energy! But where did it come from? It actually comes from the buoyant force which was constantly acting on the airship during the ascent. Your airship, once it was filled up enough to start rising off the ground, gained buoyant potential energy. So as your airship ascended, it was converting that buoyant potential energy to gravitational potential energy. The catch is that during the ascent, there was actually another force acting on the airship as well--the force from air resistance. So you actually &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; potential energy overall by having your airship float into the sky! But that's a good thing--because if it didn't lose potential energy by ascending, it wouldn't ascend in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might ask, where did the buoyant potential energy come from though? It came from filling the balloon with enough helium to overcome the force of gravity on the airship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a nice succinct reference I found that goes over the problem with equations: &lt;a href=&quot;https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.1466552&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.1466552&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73938" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T12:45:33.267" Title="Question was protected while I was writing an answer. Can a mod post my answer?" Tags="|support|moderators|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10750" CreationDate="2018-08-09T22:36:13.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess it would be technically possible, but I believe a better solution is to unprotect the question, which I've done. You can post your answer there now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I don't think it's a good idea for people to be posting answers for other people. Maybe there are rare situations where it's necessary, but I think this is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T22:36:13.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10750" CreationDate="2018-08-10T12:45:33.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP has already resolved his specific problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since a meta post is about policy making, it raises a more general issue about the future: Should a HNQ be protected after, say 3, answers? Past experience suggests a yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if OP is really, really committed to answer a protected question, obtaining the required 10 reputation points on Phys.SE is not an insurmountable task.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T12:45:33.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10758" CreationDate="2018-08-11T01:10:53.683" Score="10" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sometimes surprised at certain questions that have received huge numbers of views. For example, I just stumbled across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I mean it no disrespect - it's a perfectly nice question - but it only has three votes and is quite esoteric and closed as homework-like. I can't imagine that people often search for keywords that lead to this question, or click on it based on its title. Nevertheless, it has almost 17,000 views, which almost puts it within the highest percentile of the most widely-viewed questions on the entire community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be the result of bots or a bug in the analytics? Or is there something about questions like this that I'm missing which makes them immensely popular? (Again, I mean no disrespect to the OP and I don't mean to be snarky - I'm genuinely curious.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92058" LastEditorUserId="92058" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T19:19:51.307" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T19:19:51.307" Title="Why do some random-seeming questions have huge numbers of views?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10753" CreationDate="2018-08-11T01:22:45.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One common answer is the Hot Network Questions sidebar that appears across the Stack Exchange network. Questions that get in the HNQ often attract views (and votes, and don't get me started on that) far out of proportion to the day to day expectations of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, being selected to appear in the HNQ sidebar does not leave a audit trail that is visible even to site moderators, so I can't say if that question did or did not partake of the HNQ effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T01:22:45.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10753" CreationDate="2018-08-11T09:04:52.870" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not the HNQ effect; the upvote/view ratio is all wrong for that, and the views come in over too long a time period. It's just the fact that StackExchange is good at search engine optimization, and the market for high school homework help is &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unusually popular questions have one of two features. Either they contain the exact text of a commonly assigned high school textbook problem, or they contain a common phrase, so that somebody googling &quot;how to convert enthalpy from J/g to kJ/mol&quot; will land on the question with title &quot;Converting enthalpy from J/g to kJ/mol&quot;. If a question's title or body matches what the typical high school student is searching for a little bit better, it'll get 100 times the views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking as a former high school student, I'm sure you'll all agree high school science is terrible. Most things are explained poorly, and many homework questions hinge on arbitrary conventions and unstated assumptions, when they're even correct to begin with. (Last year I helped my sister through a chemistry class where she kept getting zeroes for writing &quot;8.392 kJ/mol&quot; instead of &quot;8.393 kJ/mol&quot;. Apparently, not only the way you round but the &lt;em&gt;rounding convention for intermediate calculations&lt;/em&gt; must match for credit.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not surprising that every day, millions of students return home and start googling for homework help. This market is what gives sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers view counts that are ~100x ours, but also their much lower quality. This is the real reason the homework policy exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="83398" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T09:13:54.817" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T09:13:54.817" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10749" CreationDate="2018-08-11T14:13:14.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I meant to write this as a comment but it turned out too long and it kind of answers the question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example of incorrect accepted stuff: my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/408301/can-low-frequency-electromagnetic-radiation-be-ionizing/408307#408307&quot;&gt;Can low-frequency electromagnetic radiation be ionizing?&lt;/a&gt; had a major factual inaccuracy when it was accepted. I considered deleting it once the comments pointed out the mistake, but apparently accepted answers can't be deleted. Eventually I settled with editing it, so the present version's correct, and fortunately the bad version wasn't up for too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I think of it, the good thing somebody (maybe me) should have done in a case like that where most &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; answers agreed with each other was leave a comment under the question indicating that the accepted answer is incorrect, and the original author of the question can look at all the other (hopefully) correct answers and change the accepted one. Maybe it's odd to bring up myself as a perpetrator of this kind of thing but I think I learned a lesson with that one ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for wrong accepted answers, it's probably good to mention to the asker that there's a doubt about the accepted answer's validity under the question, and then write a detailed contradiction under the suspicious answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, in my opinion, a perfectly valid way to use comments under questions: Is it a temporary note to the author of the question? Yes. Is it suggesting an improvement? Yes. Is it answering the question? No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it only works when the wrong one is accepted and when there are several other correct answers; happily, the latter is a common characteristic of HNQs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it does matter if answers are correct. Use comments to ask for citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T14:13:14.987" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10753" CreationDate="2018-08-11T17:24:17.877" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, search analytics are kinda crap, and we appear to have lost most of the historical data for Stack Exchange sites in Google Analytics. So I can't really give you much in the way of inside info here, other than to note that the view counter doesn't rely on any external system - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36728/how-are-the-number-of-views-in-a-question-calculated&quot;&gt;more info here&lt;/a&gt;. So while view counts aren't perfectly accurate, they're probably pretty solid over long periods of time (which is the case here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's do a bit of amateur detective work via archive.org:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130421052437/https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;15 days after the question was posted&lt;/a&gt; it had 77 views (note that this is the only period where it could've reasonably gotten into the Hot Network Questions list, and clearly it didn't)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20141027104204/https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7 months after being asked&lt;/a&gt; it had 2015 views (avg 287 views a month)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20141027104204/http://physics.stackexchange.com:80/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;18 months&lt;/a&gt; 3919 views (avg 105 views/mo since last sample)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150919025149/http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;29 months&lt;/a&gt; 4342 views (avg 38 views/mo since last sample)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161225033425/http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;43 months&lt;/a&gt; 9681 views (avg 381 views/mo since last sample)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170405184054/http://physics.stackexchange.com:80/questions/60119/kinetic-energy-of-alpha-particle-in-212po-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;48 months&lt;/a&gt; 10944 views (avg 84 views/mo since last)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And today at 64 months it has 16804 views, or about 366 views/mo since the last capture on Archive.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This jibes pretty well with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10753/why-do-some-random-seeming-questions-have-huge-numbers-of-views/10755#10755&quot;&gt;knzhou's theory&lt;/a&gt;: regular crops of students googling for info and landing on that particular question. So I'd probably go with that as my assumption too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To confirm, I sampled the server request logs for a few days over the past year, and all hits to that question came from... Google. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T17:24:17.877" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10760" CreationDate="2018-08-11T21:27:13.080" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/415750/&quot;&gt;How much degenerate matter is there, compared to other states of matter?&lt;/a&gt;  hasn't had any replies. I'm thinking about starting a bounty on it, but maybe it would be more appropriate in Chemistry or Astronomy SE instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17489" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T05:15:13.157" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T05:15:13.157" Title="Is my question in the wrong place?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10759" CreationDate="2018-08-12T00:37:24.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a great question, but I think it is technically on topic here. So no, I would say it's not in the wrong place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're welcome to put a bounty on it to get it more attention, or you're welcome to delete it yourself and repost it on another SE site. (Bear in mind that you won't be able to do this if the question gets any upvoted answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T00:37:24.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10749" CreationDate="2018-08-12T12:10:56.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's say, for example, that someone creates an answer based on flat-earth nonsense and it were highly upvoted and accepted. Would that be OK? I mean, the nature of the universe is not a popularity contest. &quot;A million Elvis fans can't be wrong&quot; is surely a fallacy and that's especially true when it comes to physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alt-text over the upvote button says &lt;code&gt;This answer is useful&lt;/code&gt;, so if someone actually found the nonsense post useful, they're free to upvote it. &#xA;While clearly non-ideal for us, it is okay by SE standards; this is how &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the SE sites work. And, sadly, there's also a contingent of active users on this site who tend to upvote everything, especially new posts from new users, no matter how ridiculous the answer is, though this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/149621/the-current-review-system-encourages-fake-reviews-some-people-upvote-everything/149624#149624&quot;&gt;isn't a Physics.SE-only thing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again: clearly non-ideal for us. Answers (here &amp;amp; other science sites) should be upvoted because they're &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;, not because they were &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;. But there isn't a way to enforce such a system, so plain old up-down voting is all we can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you note an incorrect answer is gaining upvotes, &lt;strong&gt;downvote it &amp;amp; leave a comment as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is incorrect.&lt;/strong&gt; If it's corrected, then you've done your job. If not, future readers of the post will see your argument and will hopefully downvote the answer and upvote your comment. It's been my experience that these types of comments tend &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to be deleted or moved to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This seems to happen a lot with the 'hot network questions'. I get the feeling that the actual experts around here don't want to get involved in those. I can imagine why. I'm not sure it's a good idea for the moderators to start deleting things. So we are left with, frankly, outright nonsense as answers and people who post nonsense getting reputations. This doesn't seem good to me but is that just how it's going to be? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the HNQ effect is terrible for the site because it draws people who upvote things that just &quot;sound good&quot; rather than for being right (especially if the answer as an upvote or two, the train keeps on rolling on that one). It's just something we have to deal with. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/06/07/new-protected-question-status/&quot;&gt;Protecting&lt;/a&gt; the question does help deter some of these bad posts from the HNQ effect, but, again, it is something we have to accept &amp;amp; deal with on the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think moderators unilaterally deleting posts for being &quot;wrong&quot; is a good idea, it's a very &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; idea. These users were elected to deal with the moderation of the site (e.g., ensuring users behaved according to policy), &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to be &quot;ultimate arbiters of truth.&quot;  That job is left to the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall, users with &gt;10k rep can only vote to delete the post if (a) it has negative score or (b) it's been flagged as low-quality. I don't know that we've deleted such a post, but you're &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/history&quot;&gt;welcome to search the low quality review history&lt;/a&gt; to find one. You can also try by flagging it as low quality (along with leaving a comment as to why the post is wrong) and see if that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that reputation is mostly useless, so there really shouldn't be much concern over such posters of nonsense gaining too much rep. Even if they gain enough rep over the years and gain access to the review queues, they can't really damage the site. You may also be interested in reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6039/25301&quot;&gt;this similar question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm trying to decide if I need to get away from this site as this trend is highly distracting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every question will be HNQ, but there will be some. Not every answer is going to be mainstream physics. If you can't deal with either/both of these, then this site is not for you. We thank you for your contribution, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T12:10:56.083" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T12:30:24.640" Score="8" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/422844/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, asking why oceans look blue but rivers don't, was closed as a duplicate of another question, which was answered with a good explanation of why large masses of water, including oceans and swimming pools, look blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;duplicate&quot; does not address the main thrust of the new question, which can be reworded as &quot;if oceans, then why not rivers?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this was closed prematurely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T12:52:25.990" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T12:52:25.990" Title="Prematurely closed &quot;duplicate&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|duplicates|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-17T09:14:22.043" Score="7" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non-native English speaker, I find it utterly confusing to read text containing figures like &quot;1,234 m&quot;, which in English means &lt;em&gt;1234 m&lt;/em&gt; while for a person used to read e.g. French or German (person's native language) it'll mean &lt;em&gt;1234 mm&lt;/em&gt; at first, only to be re-read to reinterpret correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to exist a cure for this: according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Digit_grouping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since 2003, the use of spaces as separators (for example: 20&amp;#8239;000 and 1&amp;#8239;000&amp;#8239;000 for &quot;twenty thousand&quot; and &quot;one million&quot;) has been officially endorsed by SI/ISO 31-0 standard, as well as by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the American Medical Association's widely followed AMA Manual of Style, and the Metrication Board, among others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as the posts on StackExchange contain lots of numbers with comma as digit grouping symbol, I'm reluctant to change them to narrow spaces when editing, because I worry that this may be regarded as a question of style, although I suppose using spaces will help non-native-English audience avoid mistaken reading of the numbers — especially 4- to 6-digit long ones, where there's only one comma (two or more commas is a hint already that it's not integer-fraction separator). So far I've approached this conservatively, only fixing numbers lacking integral part in a decimal number (like &lt;code&gt;.1345&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;0.1345&lt;/code&gt;) by prepending zeros to them, to make it more obvious that there's a point before the digits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is it acceptable, when fixing formatting of a post, to replace commas in numbers to narrow no-break spaces (U+202F)? Or are there any good reasons why I shouldn't do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has also been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/303120/226705&quot;&gt;asked on general Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;, where a suggestion is that the answer may be site-specific, thus this question on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:56:59.963" Title="Is it OK to change commas to narrow no-break spaces in numbers when editing a post?" Tags="|discussion|editing|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10766" CreationDate="2018-08-17T17:05:41.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion: I am perfectly ok with editing posts to comply with stylistic standards and, in particular, I agree commas look silly in science. But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are a &amp;lt;2k user, don't suggest an edit &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; to remove commas. A reviewer will have to go through your edit and, if minor, it will only waste their time. Make the edit significant or don't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are a &gt;2k user, your edit will not require reviewing, so in principle you are only wasting your own time; you do you. But please don't &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; remove a comma on old posts -- this would bump the question into the front page, thus wasting reviewers time. Make the edit significant or don't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T17:05:41.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10766" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:56:59.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;our editing guidelines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's always some tension in meeting &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of these guidelines.&#xA;For instance, there's a software-enforced restriction where single-character and few-character edits can't even be submitted, on the assumption that they are not substantial.  That's not always correct: sometimes an author will accidentally  a key word, and the omission of that key word renders the meaning of an important section of their text ambiguous or incorrect.&#xA;In those cases different editors choose different techniques to evade the software limit.  Some find some other cosmetic improvements to make to the post (good); others fill out the character count with invisible whitespace changes (not so good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/303122/280545&quot;&gt;current answer to your Meta.SE version of this question&lt;/a&gt; contains this nice guidance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Which version of English do we use?&quot; [...] whichever the author wishes. For example, we do not edit &quot;favorite&quot; to &quot;favourite&quot; (or the reverse) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is used to justify &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; editing intranumerical commas into spaces or periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I would suggest.&#xA;If you are reading a post and this internationalization issue is the &lt;em&gt;primary thing&lt;/em&gt; that you would like to fix in an edit, then in general it's better to let the post stand as it is rather than coming up with some other &quot;padding&quot; to &quot;substantialize&quot; the edit.&#xA;But if you're reading a post that has several minor issues --- maybe some grammar problems or LaTeXing ambiguity --- and one of those issues just &lt;em&gt;happens&lt;/em&gt; to be ambiguous or missing interdigital separators, then you might as well replace the ambiguous separators with a space.  If the numbers are in MathJax-typeset text, the TeX thin space &lt;code&gt;\,&lt;/code&gt; is nice, and less confusing for future editors than an invisible Unicode character with strange behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines, please don't make a project of digging back through the archives and fixing minor problems like this on inactive posts; that does distort the front page.  If you're looking for a project, pick a tag that you like, look for old unanswered questions, and write good answers to them. That's the main reason we're here, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:56:59.963" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T14:10:32.423" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/337001/question-on-work-energy-and-power&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; contains a couple of unfortunate typos in the blockquote at the top; however, it seems that I'm not able to propose an edit, because it would be below the minimum limit of 6 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask what the purpose is of this character limit, that is preventing me from trying to clean up this question? The way I see it, even a 1-character typo in a conspicuous place can be irritating ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T18:16:55.100" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T23:33:25.207" Title="Why does the system block typo-fixing edits below 6 characters?" Tags="|discussion|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2018-08-20T14:16:41.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The character limit is in place to discourage the suggestion of trivial edits (e.g. adding a single period at the end of a post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have full editing rights (at 2k reputation), i.e. when your edits are no longer submitted for review but directly applied to the post, you can also submit one-character edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T14:16:41.937" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10770" CreationDate="2018-08-21T23:33:25.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another option is to look at whether the answer could be improved by a judicious minor addition of useful and non-controversial information - taking care to ensure it doesn't detract from or alter the intention of the original answer. The addition thus provides the platform for fixing the odd typo, while at the same time helping to achieve the SE goal of providing excellent and useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113185" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T23:33:25.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T15:13:38.913" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now and then I get a downvote that shows up in &quot;recent achievements&quot;.  I go to the associated question, and there are no downvotes shown at all, on answers or comments.  What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183212" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T16:35:36.750" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T04:50:36.890" Title="Where is the downvote?" Tags="|support|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10775" CreationDate="2018-08-24T04:50:36.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As shown on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/183212/s-mcgrew?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;your reputation tab&lt;/a&gt;, the user &lt;em&gt;unaccepted&lt;/em&gt; your answer, causing you to lose 15 rep from the accept bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/407855/62016&quot;&gt;the answer&lt;/a&gt; on May 24&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP accepted your answer on May 30&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dFsrD.png&quot; alt=&quot;accepted&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP unaccepted your answer on August 22&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BgjR5.png&quot; alt=&quot;unaccepted&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62016" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T04:50:36.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10778" CreationDate="2018-08-28T18:00:22.687" Score="11" ViewCount="549" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here I report a subjectively funny case of a person who posts a wall of text over and over, since at least two years, to answer questions. He does modify it in order to adapt it to the asked question, so one might argue that what he does is entirely legitimate. I personally think that in this case, what would be better suited, is a redirect to his own answer and stating that the case applies for the current question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's also funny is that sometimes his answer is widely negatively viewed, whilst other times it is quite positively viewed, but that's another story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether such a behavior (that one may call &quot;bottish&quot;, from robot behavior) is accepted/tolerated. Is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For starters, here are nine of his answers that are similar: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/397113/energy-levels-and-photons-absorption/400250#400250&quot;&gt;Energy Levels and Photons Absorption&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/423446/what-makes-the-pre-slit-photon-detector-act-differently-than-air-in-a-which-way/423448&quot;&gt;What makes the pre-slit photon detector act differently than air in a which way double slit experiment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/417915/acceleration-of-photon/417922&quot;&gt;Acceleration of photon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/416124/could-light-bounce-infinitely/416185&quot;&gt;Could light bounce infinitely?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/419546/concerning-the-passage-of-light-through-a-glass-medium-and-its-apparent-re-acce&quot;&gt;Concerning the passage of light through a glass medium and it&amp;#39;s apparent re-acceleration, is the absorption explanation supported by evidence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/413467/when-a-photon-hits-a-moving-atom-and-stops-it-why-do-we-take-momentum-of-photon&quot;&gt;When a photon hits a moving atom and stops it, why do we take momentum of photon rather than energy to calculate the change in motion of atom?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/423085/in-refraction-how-does-light-interact-with-electrons-if-it-is-not-absorbed/423095&quot;&gt;In refraction how does light interact with electrons if it is not absorbed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/414792/what-is-light-s-behavior-in-a-medium&quot;&gt;What is light’s behavior in a medium?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/401877/electron-absorbing-a-photon?rq=1&quot;&gt;Electron Absorbing a Photon&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google returns more of such of his answers, but I think nine examples is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Update, since the top answer doesn't really answer the question but instead focuses on the slight differences between each post rather than on the copied and pasted text. Here is a case of a perfect copy and paste of the same answer (a wall of text) in 14 different questions (within 9 minutes): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/207730/ten1o?tab=answers&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/207730/ten1o?tab=answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75916" LastEditorUserId="75916" LastEditDate="2019-08-14T11:34:01.577" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T11:34:01.577" Title="Is it OK to copy and paste part of own answer over and over, to answer new questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10777" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:47:17.143" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there is some overlap, I wouldn't call it a 'wall of text' (which has generally negative connotations). Nor is it particularly 'bottish'. The user appears to be legitimately answering a variety of fundamentally similar questions, which require a fundamentally similar answer. Perhaps your complaint should be why most of those questions have not been closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people have certain phrases that they use often. The comments above serve to remind us of that fact!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T20:47:17.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10781" CreationDate="2018-08-31T00:16:03.347" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;What will be happen to answers given to questions long before the latter put on hold as off-topic? Is it fair to accuse the answerer for problematic behavior if this would happen for many times in series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/423000/electric-dipole-moment-when-charges-are-not-symmetrically-opposite-each-other/423327#423327&quot;&gt;Electric dipole moment when charges are not symmetrically opposite each other&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="227119" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T01:58:02.483" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T16:07:07.237" Title="Answers given to questions long before the latter put on hold as off-topic" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10777" CreationDate="2018-08-31T00:42:17.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/542/170832&quot;&gt;Moderator David Z says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The policy is that content which is copied from another source should be either deleted, or edited to &lt;strong&gt;make it clear what was copied and where it came from&lt;/strong&gt;. If it happens repeatedly, it could lead to moderator action. &lt;strong&gt;Plagiarism is not tolerated&lt;/strong&gt; on the site as an ethical matter.&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-plagiarism&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The &lt;strong&gt;reuse&lt;/strong&gt; of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one's own work &lt;strong&gt;without acknowledging that one is doing so or citing the original work is sometimes described as &amp;quot;self-plagiarism&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;; the term &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;recycling fraud&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; has also been used to describe this practice. Articles of this nature are often referred to as duplicate or multiple publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In academic fields, self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of their own published and copyrighted work in subsequent publications, but without attributing the previous publication. Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because limited reuse of material is accepted both legally (as fair use) and ethically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Self-plagiarism&amp;quot; is a term with some specialized currency. Most prominently, it is used in discussions of research and publishing integrity in biomedicine, where heavy publish-or-perish demands have led to a rash of duplicate and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;salami-slicing&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; publication, the reporting of a single study's results in &amp;quot;least publishable units&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; within multiple articles (Blancett, Flanagin, &amp;amp; Young, 1995; Jefferson, 1998; Kassirer &amp;amp; Angell, 1995; Lowe, 2003; McCarthy, 1993; Schein &amp;amp; Paladugu, 2001; Wheeler, 1989). Roig (2002) offers a useful classification system including four types of self-plagiarism: duplicate publication of an article in more than one journal; partitioning of one study into multiple publications, often called &lt;strong&gt;salami-slicing&lt;/strong&gt;; text recycling; and copyright infringement.&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that I properly quote and attribute. I could have provided my own opinion but it would hardly have the same weight as pointing out established practices. In the event that anyone else or I desire to make reference to this answer there is a 'share link' available to include with your written citation; some sites also have a separate 'cite link' to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self plagiarism is StackExchange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pithy Laconian&lt;/a&gt; version version of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WelcomeToCorneria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welcome to Corneria&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. We don't want to be a platform for &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreatorsApathy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creator's apathy&lt;/a&gt; - where if you ask about one subject and try to find out more information you are confronted with the same high reputation author expounding their favorite stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170832" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T00:42:17.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10779" CreationDate="2018-08-31T01:53:23.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. In short, the &quot;worst&quot; thing that could happen is that the whole post is deleted, but this won't automatically happen if your answer has a positive score. Users/moderators could manually vote to delete the post, but in my experience this hardly ever happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that get closed are so because the community deems them unfit for the site, either because of its content or its form. Answering them encourages users to keep on posting such questions, which is not a desirable behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes find myself in your situation: I post an answer to a question that eventually gets closed. It's natural that this happens from time to time, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reasonableness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reasonable people with good intentions can still disagree over matters of substance&lt;/a&gt;. What I consider on-topic will not, 100% of the times, agree with what the community considers on-topic. In those cases you may decide to delete your answer, or leave it be. I have done both things in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see yourself in this situation very often, though, there may be a problem. In particular, your idea of how this site should work probably does not align with that of the rest of users. In that case, I believe the best thing you could do, both for your own sanity and for the sake of the community's health, is to either try and change your behaviour or to step back. Not doing so will be a waste of time for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users are more vocal than others, and you should not be surprised when someone lets you know they have a problem with your actions, specially when they become repetitive. Needless to say, just because &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; person has a problem with you does not mean &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are the root of the problem (although it does take two to tango; please try and be nice, even when you know you are the one in the right).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: in practice, nothing will happen. The question stays closed and your answer will remain. But, in principle, you should ask yourself whether it is a one-time thing, of you are consistently answering questions that should not be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T01:53:23.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10779" CreationDate="2018-08-31T01:54:46.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually it's no problem if you answer a question and the question later gets put on hold (a.k.a. closed). After all, when a question gets closed, it just means that five people (or one moderator) thought that the question in its current form didn't deserve to get answered. But you might disagree, and think that the question &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; deserve to get answered. And when you come across a question that you think is good enough to deserve an answer, you can definitely go ahead and answer it. It would be silly to make you wait for everyone else to look at the question and come to a consensus on whether it deserves an answer or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you should at least be &lt;em&gt;thinking&lt;/em&gt; about whether questions deserve answers before you answer them. When you look at a question, take a moment to consider whether it meets the expectations for our site: is it on topic? clearly written? specific? and so on. If not, &lt;em&gt;don't answer it&lt;/em&gt;. Flag it for closure instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we notice that a user's judgment about which questions deserve answers is &lt;em&gt;wildly&lt;/em&gt; different from the rest of the community, that could get the user a talking-to by the moderators, and if it continued, it could be justification for some disciplinary action. For example, if someone &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; answers questions which get closed, and many of those questions are very obvious candidates for closure (very far off topic, highly convoluted, or so on), the moderators might want to intervene. In any case I can imagine, this would involve at least one conversation about the norms of the site, and at least one explicit warning (which could be part of the conversation but probably would be separate), and the user would have to be deliberately ignoring those communications, before it escalated to suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T01:54:46.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10779" CreationDate="2018-08-31T12:46:56.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existing answers do a good job with the general situation, but it's also important to touch on a couple of specific cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several categories of questions, which include &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;homework questions, and particularly the blatant do-my-work-for-me variety, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-mainstream physics, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;junk-food list questions, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;among others, which the community consensus classes quite solidly as harmful to the site, through various mechanisms. Unfortunately, the review queues are often not fast enough to close those questions before they accrue at least one answer. For several of those classes, there is also a community consensus that the answers themselves are also harmful to the site, because they encourage the asker, and future visitors that see the thread, to post further off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a given answer falls in this category, is it fair to point out to the answerer that that behaviour is problematic? Yes, absolutely. (So long as it is done in a civil way and following the SE Code of Conduct, that is.) This can take the form of a short comment, a downvote, or a vote to delete, none of which are (or should be) personal, but strictly about the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a slightly thornier side: if a given user repeatedly posts answers in that category, even after having been pointed to the relevant resources that point out the community consensus, is it fair to call out that behaviour as problematic? Frankly, I don't see why that's even a question ─ to me it's pretty obvious that it's fair. That doesn't mean that it the repercussions need to go beyond &quot;somebody told me that X aspect of my behaviour is problematic&quot;, though (and it doesn't, unless you're really pushing the not-listening-to-the-moderators over into suspension territory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as pointed out by AccidentalFourierTransform, there isn't a clear line that marks this sort of problematic behaviour, and in that blurry boundary there are plenty of cases where reasonable people can (and do) disagree about whether a post is on- or off-topic and about whether a given question is harmful enough to the site that providing answers to it is problematic. However, the blurriness of the line is independent of the fact that we get a steady stream of clear-cut cases of harmful answers to harmful questions, and those do require community action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and one more thing, regarding the thread's title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] long before the latter put on hold as off-topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, community closures often take longer than we would like them to, whether this be by hours, days or months. The fact that a given question slipped through the cracks and, for some reason or another, didn't get picked up by the community moderation mechanisms, has absolutely no bearing on any of the arguments laid out above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T16:07:07.237" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T16:07:07.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T17:38:55.017" Score="-6" ViewCount="1271" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Update - the theme and layout is now live for everyone.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your feedback in this process. If there's additional feedback, please feel free to add to the answers below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't see it right now, that's by design! We're hoping to get feedback from you before rolling it out to everyone permanently. If you'd like to review it, here's how:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I enable it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/preferences&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; and check the &quot;Beta test new themes&quot; option. This will turn on the new theme for all sites that have one in testing, including this one. &lt;em&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314542/opt-in-to-beta-testing-new-themes&quot;&gt;more info&lt;/a&gt; on how to opt in.&lt;/em&gt; You can uncheck the box to revert to the older theme until the site is live for everyone (note, it will take a few minutes to go into effect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What type of feedback do we need?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On this post: Bugs related to this site's design elements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help us look for issues/bugs related to the theme design and how we have mapped the old theme to the new. This needs to be done within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307862/ch-ch-ch-changes-left-nav-responsive-design-themes&quot;&gt;limits of the new unified theme&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Meta Stack Exchange: General concerns about left nav or theming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav or the overall approach we are taking to theming, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/310908/live-left-nav-new-theming-and-responsiveness&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; is the right place for feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you may notice, there are some unique design elements like voting arrows and tags that are being standardized in this process. Keeping these custom elements makes our ability to maintain the sites too complex and, while we're very sad to see them go, we're in a difficult position of needing to make the site designs work together so that we can continue to address feature requests and bugs that will make your Q&amp;amp;A experience better. This is addressed in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314799/why-we-initiated-the-latest-round-of-design-changes-and-the-role-of-meta&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; if you want more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What new themes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like, &quot;What the heck are you talking about?&quot;, then you should read the Meta Stack Exchange post entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312365/rollout-of-new-network-site-themes&quot;&gt;Rollout of new network site themes&lt;/a&gt; (and maybe the posts it links to for the full background).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thanks so much for your constructive feedback!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176067" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T04:10:41.853" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T11:33:37.453" Title="Physics' updated site theme is live for everyone" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-08-31T23:32:38.850" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;With some qualifiers (see below), this bit is nice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3zW23.png&quot; width=&quot;450&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9719/should-we-get-a-vector-logo&quot;&gt;vector logo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10522/ch-ch-ch-changing-the-site-logo-to-cut-out-the-weird-arrow-thing&quot;&gt;awkward arrow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Feynman-diagram to the background of the logo is also gone, and you know what? I'm having a hard time missing it at all. It's not like people noticed it unless it was explicitly pointed out, or at least they didn't for a large fraction of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hat logo looks a teeeny-tiny bit too white to me for now, but I'm pretty sure I'll adjust shortly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;However: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the logo still needs more work, potentially amounting to a do-over depending on what the process looks like design-side.At standard zoom on my device (4k monitor) the hat logo does have some aliasing at some patches in the middle, as well as on the lower edge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eL1um.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is noticeable enough that it catches the eye very fast the first time and thereafter at repeated intervals. The SVG definitely looks like it needs some attention, because here are some stronger zooms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7K8vb.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Svr6y.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, in other words, the points are kind of all over the place, and it does affect the visible display at a bunch of different zoom levels. Why not replace all of those with single Bézier curves with intersections? Or use the single-line-segments approach of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9719/should-we-get-a-vector-logo&quot;&gt;the original proposal on this meta&lt;/a&gt;? If the design does require an explicit grid, though, with two parallel lines for each displayed line, then those gridpoints do need to be better placed, I should think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and also, while you're fiddling with the logo, remember to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/304880/184688&quot;&gt;stash a copy in the hat cupboard&lt;/a&gt; for next Christmas. Or swap out the SVG graphics on the front page for my glorious PWMS (paper, whiteboard marker, staples) version, if not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T15:38:05.233" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T15:38:05.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-01T05:34:34.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Logo Alignment &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new vector logo is a great improvement; it's nice and sharp. But I don't like the white at all; the previous one with the pale green was much more subtle. And the Feynman diagram was a distraction; I'm happy that it's gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My real problem is the alignment/location of the site logo. It looks really awkward and skewed. Here's the old theme (I managed to get a screenshot by opening a private tab, because I can't go back now):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3RJIr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3RJIr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logo is comfortably aligned to the text and it looks neat. In the new version, there's this huge bit which is practically 50% of the width which is sticking out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Oi3yc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Oi3yc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figured this would be a problem on a lot of sites with longer names, so I popped over to the main meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312365/rollout-of-new-network-site-themes&quot;&gt;Rollout of new network site themes&lt;/a&gt;. Some of those, like Unix&amp;amp;Linux have the same problem, but I don't think mathematics looks too bad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OAuGT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OAuGT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Music and Electrical Engineering SEs have similar systems (coloured background for the sides) too. ServerFault has the same as Physics SE right now, and I think it doesn't look great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is that they have their background present behind the left bar as well, with the actual Q&amp;amp;A content in a separate white box which is hence very celearly differentiated. Obviously this isn't presently a very good solution for physics SE though, because our top bar is a pretty dark colour for both meta and main. Maybe we could make those green (main) and brown (meta) stuff a bit lighter? It has the added advantage of sharpening the contrast for the logo, and then it'd be feasible to colour our left side bar and the right space, like the math theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;General&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even I have thee usual complaints which have already been put up on the main meta... navigation is split between the left nav bar and the top (for viewing top voting users and top editors and so on), there's that glorious unused space to the right of the Physics SE logo in the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other points which I made in this post have been moved to separate answers to this question so that they can be voted for individually:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10790/191954&quot;&gt;Meta is now orange??&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10789/191954&quot;&gt;We use sans-serif fonts inconsistently&lt;/a&gt; (there's an answer by rob♦ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10787/191954&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; which talks about bits of this too)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10791/191954&quot;&gt;Question titles are now black, which decreases readability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a parent answer with some general points which are probably applicable for a lot of sites, and the Logo alignment issue. Hopefully, voting on this post henceforth indicates support/lack thereof for the proposed changes to the logo's alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I can't quite say I like the changes, but there are definitely some positive things for users, and several good things for the developers (apparently/hopefully).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T04:25:22.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-01T16:11:28.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comments are switched back to serif for your MathJax enjoyment. ~Catija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10786/44126&quot;&gt;longer answer by Chair&lt;/a&gt;, but it jumped out at me so I'll post it by itself anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our previous design, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7419/44126&quot;&gt;for a couple of years&lt;/a&gt;, uses a font with serifs so that inline text and MathJax snippets look less dissimilar. The new design uses a serif font for the body text, but sans-serif for the comments, where people also post MathJax snippets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea behind using a different typeface to help distinguish the comments from the main text.  But unless we're going to add support for sans-serif fonts in MathJax snippets (which is non-trivial, and not necessarily great-looking even if you can get it to work) I think it's better to have inline consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T22:29:47.373" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T22:29:47.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-01T17:50:36.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to complain about the fact that if you switch to Beta view you're stuck with it and can't switch back.  I'm not the first to say that and I have a feeling I won't be the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the new layout the (pointless) sidebar is a few lines that take up a lot of space and waste the entire height of the screen doing it.  It could be just as easily left on the top or if you're going to insist on having the sidebar then move more of header stuff to the sidebar and leave room for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6wx3y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6wx3y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The side bar should be collapsible.  It's rarely needed so why is it open all the time ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A button on the header graphic would be suited to toggling the sidebar open and closed, for example :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/khRjp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/khRjp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter the &quot;Ask Question&quot; button could be in a similar location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These changes would also benefit tablet and phone users who are already short of space and don't need it wasted by permanently placed UI features that are infrequently used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit regarding comment by Emilio Pisanty.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the StackOverflow community may use the sidebar space differently, this does not, IMO (as a professional programmer myself) that the sidebar should not have a toggle button or similar to hide it when not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &quot;Ask Question&quot; area I suggested moving to sidebar, given Emilio's info I would suggest this could also be toggled or given a &quot;drop-down&quot; approach something like a drop down menu when you hover over it.  These are pretty much common as dirt UI elements all over the web and it's odd they're not being exploited to maximize space.  I am aware of the argument that the multitude of devices makes the coding tricky, but it's also coding that is supported by third party libraries and it's not exactly something that they have to completely invent themselves or maintain themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again I'd point to the issues tablet and phone users may experience if they have to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW It's not clear if UI changes are being rolled out on mobiles and tablets at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the mobile UI on my (small) phone I'd particularly note that the current payout (with &quot;Beta testing allowed&quot; flag On) means the tags and the rather pointless update time and user name for the question occupy as much space as the actual question title.  I have a small phone, but I don't think users on mobiles need to see tags as much as they need to see questions.  This is not an issue for desktop and laptop users as they have a lot more real-estate to play with.  Users of larger tablets and phones may not be affected either, but we don't all use large mobile devices precisely because we want small mobile devices.  Here's a crop of a screen shot from my mobile showing what I mean :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9YLc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G9YLc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now 95% of the time I use a desktop myself, so this isn't an issue I experience much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="104964" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T20:59:25.610" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T20:59:25.610" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-02T02:32:59.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm splitting up my huge answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10786/191954&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Occasional lapses into sans-serif fonts &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heading font in the review queues is messed up: it's a sans-serif font, and our usual titles (still) use a nice serif font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dgjUW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dgjUW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows up in revision histories as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tr2PE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tr2PE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find an example, but this would look really bad on questions with mathjax in titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sans-serif font for comments too? &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Feature request because it looks like they blanket-implemented this one without explicitly saying that it's being standardised: Mathematics SE and English L&amp;amp;U both have sans comments but serif posts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine this one was deliberately implemented... but I think the sans-serif font in comments looks really strange. Yeah, it's cool to make headings in sans serif and content in serif, but when you switch &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; to sans serif for comments, it starts getting a bit creepy and looking strange, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sn87v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sn87v.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's convincing to argue that sans-serif fonts were actually optimised for low-dpi environments and are clearer when they're small, while serif fonts show up really badly on low-res displays (particularly when the face is small), but this just looks... strange. For it to look better, we'd need to have the main post content in sans-serif, but that clashes with mathjax (there's a meta post on physics SE which requested a serif font for those reasons, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6790/can-we-have-a-font-which-harmonizes-better-with-mathjax&quot;&gt;Can we have a font which harmonizes better with MathJax?&lt;/a&gt;). And since comments occasionally contain mathjax, we might as well keep a serif font there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Good: Author indicator design and front page navigation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am quite happy with the new sans-serif font in the author profile below answers. It's much cleaner, and for some reason, the sans-serif doesn't clash too badly with the serif in the answers/question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oe2yG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oe2yG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter preformatted text here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Versus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eHXIQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eHXIQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the old front page suddenly looks like a wreck to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tq5vU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tq5vU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But everything in this new image (other than the position of the logo, see my answer about that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10786/191954&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) looks awesome and clear: the absence of highlighting around the 'active', 'featured', and 'hot' tabs in the old version actually looks pretty confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bNpvj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bNpvj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T16:38:32.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-02T02:42:41.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm splitting up my huge answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10786/191954&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why is meta orange? &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of things on meta have turned orange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Links in posts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXOFC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXOFC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have freehand circles. Gotta take this one seriously :P)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old&lt;/strong&gt;: (none of those links shows up as visited because I'm signed out in a private window for this one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hPEHh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hPEHh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Author names and comment buttons&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KMTl1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KMTl1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Other random stuff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8ZPq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8ZPq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really surprised that there are so many orange stuff, because they probably all run on the same style stuff. I popped over to Mathematics meta and Electrical Engineering meta, and even they've ended up with orange. However, the Super User and Server Fault meta sites got their own reddish-brown colour, so this isn't one of those network-wide Stack Overflow-like standardizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In absolute terms, I actually like orange way more, and it looks fun and bright, but it doesn't fit here; our meta is brown and it wouldn't feel like a meta in bright orange. So can we have the old brown? Actually, even the reddish thing on SU and SF metas is ok; it matches the colour of the word &amp;quot;meta&amp;quot; in the Physics meta logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Obtrusive Ask-question button on Meta &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, our meta Ask-question button has been feeling a bit off-color lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bk9IF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bk9IF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wDdmC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wDdmC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit too obtrusive and sticks out like a sore thumb with the rest of the brown/orange (???) theme. Can we have a brown or maroon instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or rainbow stripes. Can't (easily) go wrong with rainbow stripes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T11:32:53.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-02T02:43:53.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm splitting up my huge answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10786/191954&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question title colour &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colour of the question titles has changed. I liked the previous blue; it looked nice, was obviously distinguished as a title, and had some functionality benefits. It was very obvious that clicking that title would refresh the page to focus on the question if you got to that page with a link pointing to a comment or answer on it. That was useful when I wanted to share links to particular questions. The link functionality has stayed the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y0kfU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y0kfU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cSRUc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cSRUc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a clear competition for attention when you use the heading format to start your question. Previously, the blue would draw my attention, but now, I can't help but see the bold text first, even though that isn't actually the title. The only difference to emphasize the title is the slightly enlarged font, which doesn't compete with boldface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F5XqP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F5XqP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T02:52:23.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-02T15:54:25.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more of a minor gripe, and it can ultimately be user-scripted away if necessary, but there's no reason to have bad styling on as a default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;This isn't the nineties. Please get rid of the link underlining.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W4JTc.png&quot; width=&quot;550&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just adds clutter for no real gain. Underlining-on-hover is nice and useful, but always-on underline is a web 1.0 custom that absolutely earned its place in the graveyard of bad ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T15:54:25.170" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10794" CreationDate="2018-09-02T16:56:32.560" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is mainly to help me understand how the reviewing of edits (to questions) works. I recently had an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/230344&quot;&gt;edit&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/426273/how-to-find-the-axis-with-minimum-moment-of-inertia&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; approved by a reviewer (Chair), but then &quot;rejected by Community&quot; because &quot;This edit conflicted with a subsequent edit&quot;. Then I discovered that the &quot;subsequent edit&quot; was my edit! All the changes in this edit, including the text explanation of what had been done, were identical, and were actually made by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not complaining, I'm not that desperate for the editing credit! But I wonder whether the proposed edit is presented to the OP for approval in such a way that he/she believes that the correct course of action is to copy/paste the changes and carry out the edit themselves. Otherwise, how can this event be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also slightly concerned, because I have the impression that SE users who accumulate a lot of &quot;rejected edits&quot; are liable to be penalised in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user197851" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T17:04:16.987" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T18:22:39.790" Title="OP edit is identical with my rejected edit" Tags="|support|specific-question|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10793" CreationDate="2018-09-02T18:22:39.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell from the timeline, but my guess is that the OP was presented with the edit and chose either &quot;improve this edit&quot; or &quot;reject and edit&quot; by mistake, then applied your changes. Perhaps they will enlighten us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can, however, address this concern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm also slightly concerned, because I have the impression that SE users who accumulate a lot of &quot;rejected edits&quot; are liable to be penalised in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single rejected edit shouldn't raise any concern about this. I can't remember whether there is any automated restriction on editing privileges or whether it is brought to the attention of the moderators by a (perhaps automatic) flag. But if you were to discover you had an account restriction because you were making good edit suggestions and other people were applying them on your behalf, I think we would work with you and the team to fix the problem rather than somehow punish you arbitrarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T18:22:39.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10797" CreationDate="2018-09-04T08:30:30.960" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;On those occasions where I have furnished a wrong answer to a question on one of the SE sites &lt;em&gt;and that answer has been accepted&lt;/em&gt;, I find I cannot go back and delete the answer. I instead edit the answer, deleting the original text and inserting words to the effect that the answer was wrong and inviting the correct answer to be provided by someone else. Is there an accepted technique for accomplishing this that I do not know about, or is my way OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T08:47:09.007" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T09:04:02.467" Title="How to delete a wrong answer after it has been accepted?" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10795" CreationDate="2018-09-04T09:04:02.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is not an acceptable way of dealing with the situation. Specifically, you shouldn't delete the original text of your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; thing to do, if you can, is to edit the answer to make it correct. Generally edits shouldn't substantially change what an answer is saying, but when the answer has been accepted you can take a bit more latitude to change it from a wrong answer to a right answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't edit the answer to make it correct, I suppose it's okay to edit in a brief notice at the top saying that you think the answer is wrong. But you should leave the original answer there as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, if you find yourself doing this regularly, take it as an indication that you need to be more careful to verify the correctness of your answers before you post them. (And other people also need to be more careful to verify their correctness before upvoting or accepting them, but that's not a problem you can do anything about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases (rarely), the moderators might be willing to delete an accepted answer for you, but we'll typically only do it if there's reason to believe the answer was accepted under false pretenses - for example, if the asker accepted the first answer posted regardless of its correctness, or if they accepted an answer because they're trying to gain favor with its poster, or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T09:04:02.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-05T00:54:38.940" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, my question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/424837/&quot;&gt;Can a substance have zero vapour pressure above absolute zero?&lt;/a&gt; had 3 upvotes and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/46757/timothy?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;my reputation&lt;/a&gt; was 597 points. Later it had 4 upvotes and my reputation was 602 points. Later it had 5 upvotes and my reputation was 606 points and when I opened the reputation menu, I saw that it said I gained 10 points and lost 1 point and in total gained 9 points today. I think the loss of a point came from me downvoting an answer. Later, my question had 4 upvotes and my reputation was 601 but the menu still showed me as having earned 9 points today. A bit later before I posted this question. I saw that that question had 5 upvotes and my reputation was 606 points and the menu showed me as having earned 9 points today and the glitch seemed to have gone away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Even later long after I posted this question, I saw that my reputation is 604 but it lists me as having earned only 5 points and as having recently lost 4 points so my reputation should be 602 now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46757" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T11:05:49.623" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T11:05:49.623" Title="Glitch in reputation points?" Tags="|bug|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T16:00:08.927" Score="-6" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I was struggling with a problem so I asked for help from two people. 1st from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/4345717/blue&quot;&gt;Blue&lt;/a&gt; . I talked to him before and he is nice dude ready to help. Then I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/users/137524/semiclassical&quot;&gt;semiclassical&lt;/a&gt; who is also cool and very active on math chat. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=%40fawad&amp;amp;user=121998&amp;amp;room=&quot;&gt;He helped me so many times&lt;/a&gt; (just some proof) before also in math chat so I thought he can help me now too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as soon as I tagged him moderator ACM (a cruel man) started ping me and say don’t ping “RANDOM PEOPLE” for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want say please stop that if you don’t know who are my friends. They were not random. I know there are people who don’t like helping me and I didn’t tagged any of them from that 1st warning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is is acm mod is so rude in chat. I know this post will get many downvotes and all but look what happen next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One person asked why I was banned in chat to which acm replied it doesn’t matter to him. If it didn’t mattered to him he would have not texted that sentence. Well I guess if you get banned then nobody will know what happened to you because moderator will do what looks right to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I wanted to put link of chat where someone said only qmechanic is deserving moderator. Guess someone deleted it. We will never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen bad behaviour of him before too. He get support from his friends so he never care what other people has to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I want? I want to say give less powers to mod (especially acm), or at least 1 other mod should agree with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130714" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T09:01:37.803" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T22:08:24.407" Title="Bad behaviour from mod" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|moderators|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2018-09-06T16:27:13.880" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked you to not ping users in chat who hadn't shown any indication of being interested in being pinged by you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please do not ping random users in an attempt to get a question answered. If someone wants to answer your question, they will do so on their own. -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/46615164#46615164&quot;&gt;link to transcript&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (currently) four stars on the message suggest that other users present in the room shared the sentiment. You chose to respond to this by telling me, among other things, to &quot;stfu&quot;. This is not acceptable behaviour (to be clear: what's not acceptable is telling other users to shut up in a rude manner, not the mere usage of the acronym) and earned you a short suspension from chat for rudeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's all that happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T17:22:57.847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T17:22:57.847" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2018-09-06T16:41:22.613" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The offensive comment from Fawad has been deleted, but as a room owner I can see it and I can confirm that Fawad told ACuriousMind to shut the fuck up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Fawad should consider himself very lucky not to be banned for an extended period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T16:41:22.613" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-08T03:35:01.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/faY4k.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I occasionally switch from &quot;mobile&quot; to &quot;full site&quot; view on a recent Android device (Chrome browser). (The mobile site hides basically all of the diamond moderator tools.) The new design seems to degrade to mobile more gracefully than the old one did. However there a few cases where modal dialogs make bad assumptions about the small screen size, and limits on zooming and scrolling can put some controls our of reach. One is the suggested edit review box shown in the screenshot above (reached by pressing &quot;edit (1)&quot; under the question). Another, I learned while making this post, is the &quot;insert image&quot; dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the mobile theme circumvents this problem by hiding the &quot;edit&quot; link while a suggested edit is pending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T03:35:01.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-08T04:42:53.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Chat still uses the old logo &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aosUk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aosUk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like the new logo wasn't implemented there. I don't know if it supports high-resolution vectors, but it'd be nice to have some symmetry for the Feynman diagram and the hat's coloring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older logo also shows up in profile &amp;gt; edit communities. It looks like the lines are much more sparse in the new version. Perhaps the mexican hat which shows up as our HNQ icon would be more appropriate here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JccI0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JccI0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same happens with the question migration stats in the 10k tools&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZxSkr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZxSkr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T16:38:58.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10799" CreationDate="2018-09-08T23:17:37.450" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mods are not always against you, even if it looks so on the first spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods are held on a short leash by the SE. Most likely he couldn't do too much wrong against you, even if he would want. The rules of the site are binding for him just as for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you confronted is imho not the cruelty of a single person, but the general antagonism of the whole system. Of course, people accustomed to it, even liking and driving it, feel themselves much better in it, than we.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an SE-specific problem. Since the Internet exists, so is it going everywhere. The SE is actually not so bad&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; - but only for the people learned it and can defend themselfes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I can say this to you publicly and nothing will happen, except that I get some downvotes which have zero effect to my reputation.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two important things what makes the SE different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here you can get answers from real, hardcore professionals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; defend yourself against the &quot;good old boys&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is that you have to learn the &quot;etiquette&quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your this meta post was a good start, despite its false assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case: it is quite possible that some people you pinged, or who has seen that you are pinging others, actually flagged your comments. If a mod intervenes, it is very likely, that he is doing it because you were flagged. The problem is that from this point it is the mods decision, how does he handle an event - but all what he does, leaves a trace. Just as everything what you post, has a trace even if you deleted it. If there are no flags, the mod has the option to close his eyes, but if there are, something he has to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happened to me many times&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; that a mod intervened against me, while it was clear to me that he is doing it against his best opinion. The real cause of the trouble was the person who flagged my post. Try to not take the mods into such situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mods can see who flagged what, but they are not allowed to talk about it. Even that is a border case, if a post was flagged or not. Furthermore, mods are not allowed to talk about, who is banned and why. It is very important, never talk about induvidual suspension cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is, for example, ACM might defend that &quot;X flagged your comment because you annoyed him&quot; (if it so happened), but he can't do because he is not allowed to explain this. The result is that now you are attacking him and he could defend himself, but he is not allowed to. It is another problem what you should try to avoid, try to not get them into such situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community is sometimes more antagonistic, particularly against new users, as it would be reasonable. But acting too harshly against some wonderful contributors would be clearly irrational; the system is not tuned against you, it is tuned for to motivate you to provide the best possible content what you can. Thus, if an awesome contributor is maybe too antagonistic with you, the best if you try to ignore/tolerate him on the meta/chat. Instead, read his main site posts. &lt;em&gt;Learn physics from him.&lt;/em&gt; I think there is the optimum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not fighting a person, you are fighting a system, and its bad aspects are the property of the internet communities in general, and not of the SE or this specific mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods have also a mediator feature. Many times if a mod warns, he actually tries to mediate between you, and the flaggers. Furthermore, he won't be ever able to understand everything what is in your mind, and what is in theirs. &lt;em&gt;It is crucial to help him to understand, what are you doing and why. The other side does the same, don't allow that they can explain him their views, but you don't do it with yours!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is driven by free contributions, everybody is writing questions and answers for free here. If a hardcore contributor dislikes you, then you are in the weaker position and you have to accustome to that (what doesn't mean that the system isn't defending also you - only it defends them more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;For example, in a facebook-group, you could have got a permanent banning from the whole group. Without any reasoning. From that, you couldn't have even read the site. The FB does it while the mean quality level of their content would be deleted on the SE in minutes as VLQ. Here you got a short chat suspension, and you can publicly challenge the mod for his decision.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Don't worry on meta downs, they are always coming and have actually no effect.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Not on the PSE.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T22:08:24.407" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T22:08:24.407" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-10T14:33:34.960" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/427791/effect-of-temperature-and-surrounding-medium-in-the-cavendish-experiment-to-meas&quot;&gt;Effect of temperature and surrounding medium in the Cavendish experiment to measure the gravitational constant&lt;/a&gt; was closed as 'unclear what you're asking', probably because earlier versions had messy grammar which made it difficult to understand. After an edit by the OP (which was probably a response to the 2 comments which mentioned that several parts weren't clear), I think I managed to put together the meaning, but the question was subsequently closed, much to my surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm kind of confused about what happened, because I'm reasonably sure that a while back, before I decided to try to save it, I had cast a VTC, along with a few others (I think I could see that there were existing VTCs when I cast mine), but right now it says that a moderator closed it with a single vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, it looks like it's in a decent shape now, so can it be reopened? I've cast a reopen vote, but I don't know if that works for questions which haven't been modified since they were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had downvoted it earlier because the grammar impeded my understanding, but now that I've edited it and removed my downvote, it has a positive score (+1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T14:48:10.597" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T14:48:10.597" Title="Can we reopen this question which used to have meaning-distorting grammar?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-10T16:44:55.707" Score="3" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/425124/good-books-to-understand-the-basics-of-material-science&quot;&gt;Good books to understand the basics of material science&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Was marked as duplicate and redirected to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31626/best-materials-science-introduction-book&quot;&gt;Best Materials Science Introduction Book?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The thing is, the second question was particularly about Neutron scattering.But in the first question, I asked for an introductory undergrad text like the book by Van Vlack(Fortunately someone answered my question).Clearly, Neutron scattering seems to be advanced(at least for me).Does this mean, this site is only for researchers and scientists?&#xA;While voting a question as duplicate, do people read the content of the question or just compare the titles?.&#xA;I even flagged the question, explaining that it is not a duplicate.But, I got no response.(In particular, I think &quot;Chair&quot; was one of the persons who voted it duplicate.I am not accusing him.But would like an explanation from him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user196272" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T04:25:34.290" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T04:45:34.133" Title="A duplicate question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10807" CreationDate="2018-09-10T18:52:30.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently I'm one of the people who voted to close this, so I can easily give my opinion on this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His question specifically was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What would you suggest as a good introduction to materials science?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While yours stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;suggest me some good books(introductory level) to understand the basics of material science.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two questions are identical besides formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a note added which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Prior usage and examples would be wonderful, my particular focus is neutron scattering&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that doesn't really change the base of their question.  The question is still about a good introductory book for material science.  They didn't even really say the books had to discuss those topics at all.  They were just showing what their interests/focuses were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9649/127931&quot;&gt;this good related answer&lt;/a&gt; on a very similar topic which gives a good rundown of some reasons why such questions would be closed as duplicates, even in less obvious situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T18:52:30.407" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10812" CreationDate="2018-09-12T12:51:37.613" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE&lt;/a&gt; looks like a pretty active place. They have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/physics/info&quot;&gt;'physics' tag&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/science-based/info&quot;&gt;'science-based' tag&lt;/a&gt;, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info&quot;&gt;hard-science tag&lt;/a&gt;, and many of the people who frequent the site also have reasonably active Physics SE accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of times, I've seen questions which I think belong there, like questions about the laws of physics in hypothetical vehicles. Under what circumstances should I suggest that the OP moves their question to Worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here're some helpful Worldbuilding meta posts I found&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4680&quot;&gt;Physics questions with little to no actual story&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6161&quot;&gt;A proposal to finalize the “are real world questions on-topic” debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the general position over there is that if the situation is realistic and it happens, it's meant for Physics SE. But do we have some counterpart guidelines about when we should tell people that Worldbuilding is the better place for their questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T15:10:23.647" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T15:10:23.647" Title="Which physics SE questions should be redirected to Worldbuilding SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-12T14:07:18.637" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this site somehow let contributors know if a homework and exercise question has been reviewed and found acceptable for answering? Right now we only know when a question is found to be unacceptable and put on hold (sometimes after spending considerable time answering it). I would like to wait before answering these questions until I know they have been found acceptable for answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199893" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T15:31:10.280" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T05:17:55.070" Title="Notify users when homework-and-exercises posts are found acceptable for answering" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10810" CreationDate="2018-09-12T14:52:21.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, the scope of this site is completely independent of the scope of any other SE site. That implies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that a given question might be on-topic elsewhere is entirely irrelevant to whether it is on-topic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that a given question might be off-topic elsewhere is entirely irrelevant to whether it is on-topic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, considerations about whether a given question would or would not be acceptable on other sites do not play a role in whether it should be closed if it's posted here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migration is a subset of closure: we only migrate things which are off-topic here, and that decision is independent of whether they are on-topic elsewhere; that only comes into the process when deciding whether the appropriate action is a straight closure or a migration. If a question is on-topic here, it shouldn't be migrated, no matter how on-topic it might be elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question has been closed and you feel it might be well received elsewhere on the SE network, you're free to suggest to OP that they flag it for migration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question is on-topic but you feel that it would be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; received elsewhere on the SE network, and that OP might not be aware of the possibility, then it is perfectly acceptable to suggest in a comment something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;would X be a better home for this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is then up to OP whether to flag for migration, or (with due regard to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;the network etiquette&lt;/a&gt;) to cross-post a re-tailored version of the question on the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The things that you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to do in comments are spelled out in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;. So long as you conduct yourself politely, there's nothing stopping you from providing such suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T14:52:21.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10811" CreationDate="2018-09-12T15:37:01.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think anything similar can be feasibly implemented. It has been suggested on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; that we implement a system by which posts are made publicly view-able only once they have been reviewed. With such a system, you won't see any homework questions in the first place. But those proposals weren't well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest I can think of to what you were saying is something which counts how many people with Vote-to-close privileges have viewed the post and chosen not to vote to close it, but even that's completely messed up because there are several high-rep users who don't use the review queues, and people with &amp;lt;3k rep can cast helpful flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm sorry, but the only option I see is getting a bit more familiar with the homework policy. It doesn't take too long :) Or once you have the 3k rep privileges, you'll be able to see if there are any pending close/reopen votes on a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T05:17:55.070" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T05:17:55.070" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10811" CreationDate="2018-09-13T12:36:27.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't workable. The process to &quot;certify&quot; that a given post is on-topic would require a consensus of 3k+ users, almost certainly via a review queue, and there is no realistic way to make this happen faster than the existing Close Votes review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem is that the Close Votes review queue isn't currently as fast as we would like it to, particularly for the obvious &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken-window&lt;/a&gt; questions like blatant homework dumps. Ideally, we'd like those questions to be closed &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; anyone has time to post (or even start writing) answers for them, but the current reality is that it's not happening that fast. The solution to that problem requires &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; reviewer time, and diverting reviewer time to a separate queue would be counter-productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to know whether a post violates the homework policy enough to be closed because of it, there's a straightforward alternative: read and understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;the policy&lt;/a&gt; and come to your own determination of whether it's in direct contradiction to those principles. Unfortunately, of course, the stated policy is only an imperfect capture of the actual real-world application; I wish I could tell you that that's about to be fixed but the reality is that the homework-policy debate has taken so long and drained so much energy (see the links &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10079/8563&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for an incomplete sampler) that the chances of movement on that front in the near future are slim. Still, as you see more of the site, you'll be able to get a sense for what does and does not constitute an about-to-be-closed homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as pointed out in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10811/notify-users-when-homework-and-exercises-posts-are-found-acceptable-for-answerin#comment41197_10813&quot;&gt;comment below Chair's answer&lt;/a&gt;, if in doubt, head over to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;site chatroom&lt;/a&gt; and ask. We can't promise to provide a definite answer, but it's quite likely that we'll be able to give a reasonably accurate prediction, together with an explanation of why it falls in either class of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T16:12:16.940" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T16:12:16.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-15T06:02:33.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I signed up for testing, I have been using the&quot;unanswered&quot; link on the left,  and thought it was a great improvement,except, today I realized that checking &quot;my tags&quot; did not give me  a list of unanswered questions in &quot;particle physics&quot;, but I got an old list back , and I thought people were no longer interested in particle physics :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;old list appearing all these days,  I think since I had last checked the &quot;mytags&quot;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZI4hP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZI4hP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no choice for getting the &quot;newest&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the particle tag of a few moments previously to the post. when I hit &quot;particles&quot; in the tags list of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hwEHG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hwEHG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;newest&quot;  in mytags would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I have had trouble with firefox before, giving me old pages  ( for example I sent a correction to hyperphysics, and it kept coming back with the old wrong page, although in a new private window the corrections were there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;treat the above as just a comment on the way I use the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anna&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T06:02:33.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-15T14:07:11.630" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The one I think is the correct one is not working on a different browser. I am logged on  continually in firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T19:47:50.947" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T19:47:50.947" Title="How can I get a new password . Old one not working" Tags="|support|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10816" CreationDate="2018-09-15T17:53:09.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;forgot password?&quot; link on the login page will ask you to enter the email address associated with your account. That mails a password reset link to the email address if there's an account associated with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can confirm that you have two email addresses linked with your profile. Same username, one at Yahoo, and one at a .gr domain which is (according to &quot;down for everyone or just me.com&quot;) not hosting any web server today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can access the login page from your current browser without logging out using a &quot;private browsing&quot; window. In most browsers this option lives in one of the main menus (&quot;file &gt; new&quot;) or you can right-click or command-click around the &quot;new tab&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have trouble getting a password reset link, you'll have to use the contact form that's linked in the footer of every page; the local mods can log you out, but not log you back in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T17:53:09.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10819" CreationDate="2018-09-16T11:52:57.767" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems in some questions I can see the bounty tab but in some I can't.  So how to enable bounty tab in every question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187604" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T12:04:56.973" Title="How to enable bounty option in a question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10818" CreationDate="2018-09-16T12:04:56.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can only put a bounty on a question that is older than 2 days. There is no way to enable bountying for questions that are younger than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T12:04:56.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-17T05:06:21.250" Score="-2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/429208/estimate-the-change-in-temperature-in-upper-troposphere-when-there-is-a-1k-surfa&quot;&gt;Estimate the change in temperature in upper troposphere when there is a 1K surface temperature increase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;I was directed here to ask a homework question.  Linked to original question. Please, any help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206877" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T06:21:53.483" Title="Upper Troposphere temperature with 1K increase of surface temperature" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-10-04T13:03:35.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10820" CreationDate="2018-09-17T06:21:53.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site! Unfortunately, whoever directed you here gave you some misguided advice, since the purpose of this site is not really to provide people with homework help. We prefer to focus on the kinds of questions that a student or researcher might ask simply because they're interested; for example, clarifying a confusing paragraph in a research paper or explaining an apparent inconsistency in a textbook's explanation of some concept. (That's not an exhaustive list, just a couple of examples of the kinds of questions we prefer to handle.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you really want is to get help with a homework problem you're working on, it's probably best for you to try somewhere else that's more focused on giving that kind of help. You can sometimes get that help in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;main chat room&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/54160/problem-solving-strategies&quot;&gt;a dedicated problem solving strategies room&lt;/a&gt;, if you have access to chat. (That requires a certain amount of reputation on the Stack Exchange network.) Otherwise, you might try something from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site&quot;&gt;our list of other sites that deal with physics&lt;/a&gt; and may be able to handle questions that are off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases it is possible to ask a question that will get you the help you need with your homework in a way that still fits on this site. There's some information about how to do that in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;policy on homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt;, but it can be tricky to get the question in the right form without some help. If you want to try that, that's definitely something you could ask about in the chat room (again, if you have access) or on this meta site. The main restriction is that you should quote the homework problem you're working on, but don't ask for the answer to that problem itself. Instead, narrow it down to some specific conceptual issue that you can't figure out, e.g. something that might be useful to other people doing other problems, and ask about that. You would need to summarize the work you did to narrow down the original homework problem to the specific question you're asking, and also show that you made &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;some effort to figure out that specific question yourself&lt;/a&gt; before you came to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T06:21:53.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T18:45:26.107" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/229935/bicycle-counter-intuitive-in-which-direction-it-will-move&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; about which way a bicycle will move when the pedal is pulled horizontally was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/45679/which-direction-will-the-yoyo-move&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about how a yoyo will move when it is pulled horizontally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the same question, because a yoyo is a rigid body, while a bicycle is not even close. The correct answer is that in mid gear, the answer is the same as in the yoyo case, but for low gearings the bike will move forward while the pedal moves backward (so the string still ends up going backward as required). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T12:15:32.793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T12:15:32.793" Title="Two similar-looking mechanics questions are not duplicates" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|specific-question|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-22T18:23:31.347" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;While writing a meta-section in my thesis I wanted to give some examples of important theory proposals preceding experimental verification but I couldn't name very many from the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I knew that Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of the neutrino which was experimentally confirmed about 20 years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since many discoveries nowadays are attributed to the experimentalists (e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt;) I couldn't find a good source on the internet listing the proposals &lt;strong&gt;preceding&lt;/strong&gt; experimental breakthroughs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that big-list questions are a matter of debate (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;) but most of these discussion are several years old. Has the code of practice maybe changed since then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, on other SEs this seems to be more accepted. E.g. I recently got some useful information from discussions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/10103/great-mathematicians-born-1850-1920-et-bells-book-%E2%89%B2-x-%E2%89%B2-fields-medalists/10202#10202&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is now, if I post &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;List of important theory proposals that were later confirmed experimentally&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on physics.SE will I be shot down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137157" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T18:41:20.547" Title="May I ask a big-list question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10823" CreationDate="2018-09-22T18:41:20.547" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am aware that big-list questions are a matter of debate (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;) but most of these discussion are several years old. Has the code of practice maybe changed since then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not particularly. The ethos in the question and the answer in the thread that you linked to is still the basic outlook on those questions, and there hasn't been any significant pushback to that status quo in the intervening ~five years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind this is as good a confirmation as you get that this site's community is still in agreement with those basic principles: basically, we allow resource-recommendation questions if they the question itself is narrow enough to provide a platform for good answers, but the woollier big-list questions are generally out. They're just too much like junk food to work well with this site's format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you propose,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;List of important theory proposals that were later confirmed experimentally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is definitely on that woollier end of the spectrum, and I think it would be closed quite quickly as Primarily Opinion-Based or Too Broad, depending on the exact wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, on other SEs this seems to be more accepted. E.g. I recently got some useful information from discussions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/10103/great-mathematicians-born-1850-1920-et-bells-book-%E2%89%B2-x-%E2%89%B2-fields-medalists/10202#10202&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right in that MathOverflow does have a more permissive policy towards big-list questions. They do they, we do us. Different sites operate in different environments, under different pressures, and catering to different communities, and that affects how well different types of questions can work. The topicality of questions here has very little to do with the topicality of questions elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T18:41:20.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2018-09-23T11:27:42.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rendering of text on Home page Safari browser&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed over a course of a week or so that the rendering of the question titles on the &lt;strong&gt;Home&lt;/strong&gt; page on MacOs Safari browser is not so satisfactory, resulting in overlapping words with the reputable attributes on the left. Is anyone else having this problem? The formatting on the &lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt; page is, however, rendering fine and I've checked both pages on firefox in the same system and it appears fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uL1Wi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uL1Wi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17364" LastEditorUserId="17364" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T11:33:37.453" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T11:33:37.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T19:11:31.973" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of weeks ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/427492/derivation-of-coordinate-transform-for-rotating-frame-of-reference-in-relativity&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was posted, and the question contained a simple typo in the equations for coordinate rotation. The first answer spent two lines politely correcting this. Then, as it happened, I noticed that the same typo was present in the accepted answer to this linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154834/how-do-i-transform-onto-a-relativistic-rotating-frame-of-reference/191329&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt; from three years ago. So I thought, maybe the error in the new question was propagated from the old answer to the new question? And then I made a simple edit to the old answer in order to correct the typo. The edit changed the incorrect equation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y = x'sin\,\omega t + x'cos\,\omega t$&lt;/span&gt; into the correct one: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y = x'sin\,\omega t + y'cos\,\omega t$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My edit was rejected since it allegedly didn't improve anything, despite being objectively correct while the unedited answer still contains incorrect math due to the typo. However, after learning about the rules for editing I now understand that edits are not intended for things like fixing trivial typos (however game-changing they are) in accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: what is the recommended procedure for fixing math errors in old answers, to avoid propagating such errors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132433" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T19:14:31.177" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T00:29:03.857" Title="How to fix incorrect math in old accepted answers?" Tags="|discussion|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10826" CreationDate="2018-09-23T20:05:45.983" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/231051&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the review record of your rejected edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reasons of the rejections were these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of the reviewers represent more the negative voters of the site (gives more down as up, prefer to vote to close, rejecting edit suggestions and so on). You had bad luck in this sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You wanted to edit the post of a high-rep user. Such edit suggestions are typically not very HQ.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being a &amp;lt;2k user, you can only initiate revisions if they change at least 6 characters. You circumvented this rule by inserting 6 periods to the end of the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the problem what you fixed was a real and very obvious one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had reviewed your suggestion, I had probably clicked &quot;Improve edit&quot;, and I had removed your added points at the end. In my opinion, it had been the correct thing to do, but also the reviewers are human and sometimes they have to handle a large mass of crap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing a comment to the post, as AFT suggests, could work, but you have no way to know, when will anybody see it ever. Furthermore, you lose the +2 reward with it, which is your deserved reward for finding a bug in a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also find other ways to reach this 6 character limit. If there is really nothing in the post what could be done better, then improve its tagging (if it is a question). If you can't do that, then this post is non-editable for you and only AFT's idea remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circumventing rules by tricks is generally unwelcomed and serves as a strong argument for the reviewers to click &quot;Reject&quot;. Btw, if you had done it at least as a HTML comment (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- .... --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;), then it had been at least invisible in the rendered version. However, it had been still visible in the markup and counted as circumventing rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such an obvious case, I had either posted a comment, but only after I had looked for other ways to reach the 6 char limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The comment what you write to the edit suggestion is super-important. Write clear and convincing arguments to your edit suggestions, the reviewers see and check that!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the case is very obvious and you are sure that the reviewers mishandled it, then it is not very bad if you suggest the same edit again (this time with more convincing comment). Last time I fixed the formatting of an SU mod on this way (&lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/753753&quot;&gt;rejection&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/753928&quot;&gt;accept&lt;/a&gt;). But never do it 3 times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edit the post of high-rep users very rarely, despite that now I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the meta is also a good idea. You might also try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;site chatroom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T00:29:03.857" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T00:29:03.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10826" CreationDate="2018-09-23T21:15:35.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If you can't make the minimum 6 characters to suggest an edit, don't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd have deemed your edit as harmful due to the use of the periods at the end of the post, even though the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y\to x$&lt;/span&gt; was correct. Since your edit was really for a single character, what &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10826/how-to-fix-incorrect-math-in-old-accepted-answers/10828#comment41253_10826&quot;&gt;AccidentalFourierTransform said is correct&lt;/a&gt;: leave a comment indicating the incorrect point. Don't waste other people's time just to farm 2 rep, it's really not worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't see any typographical errors in the post peterh links, I do see that you could have replaced all italics d's with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/14822/47090&quot;&gt;correct, romanized d's&lt;/a&gt; (i.e., &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathrm{d}x$&lt;/span&gt; instead of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$dx$&lt;/span&gt;), which would have easily jumped you well over the required 6 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T21:15:35.360" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10826" CreationDate="2018-09-23T22:58:28.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a little complicated because your edit did two entirely separate things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It fixed a typo that created an error in the math. This is good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It added extra useless content to the post (the periods at the end). This is bad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding the extra useless content is bad enough that the harm it causes to the post outweighs fixing the mistake in the math, and that's presumably why your edit was rejected - or at least, that's why I would have rejected it if I had been reviewing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do want to clarify that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...edits are not intended for things like fixing trivial typos (however game-changing they are) in accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not correct. Fixing typos, especially when they impact the meaning of the post (such as the one in this case), is a &lt;em&gt;perfect&lt;/em&gt; reason to edit. The catch is that we want to keep the total number of edits down, so you shouldn't just fix the typo itself, but you should take a look at the rest of the post and see if there's anything else that needs to be fixed, and bunch it all together into a single edit. The 6-character requirement is a crude way to &quot;enforce&quot; that. Once you get 2000 reputation, you'll presumably have learned to edit everything that needs to be fixed at once, and at that point you gain the ability to make edits with less than 6 characters' change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you should have done, in this case, is look for something else to fix in the post to go along with your change of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y$&lt;/span&gt;. Read through it carefully and see if there are any missing words or misspelled words, missing or inconsistent math formatting, etc. All of that you can use to build up to the 6-character minimum. It simply needs to be the case that &lt;em&gt;every individual change&lt;/em&gt; you make improves the answer. Of course, sometimes you'll find a post that is really well written and has nothing else to change, and in that case you just have to try to get someone else to make the change for you by commenting on the post and/or dropping a note in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T22:58:28.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-24T17:22:26.730" Score="-3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can happen many a times that a user with even lesser reputation can have a really valuable point/counter question to add, but it may not be complete in itself or simply might not be able to answer the question satisfactorily. In such a condition the valuable addition may be missed out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106752" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T18:07:26.667" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T18:07:26.667" Title="The reputation bar to add a comment should be reduced" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|comments|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10830" CreationDate="2018-09-24T18:16:04.547" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can happen many a times that there will be someone who doesn't do physics or care at all about it, but they have this website www.X.com that they want to promote, and having a bunch of links pointing from physics.se to X.com will help convince Google that their site is trustworthy (because this site is highly ranked by Google), so they will make a bunch of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sockpuppet&lt;/a&gt; accounts and try to post a bunch of comments linking to their site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those comments get very annoying very fast, and they represent a huge source of wear on how this site looks and feels to search engines, casual visitors, new users, and established members. They are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; something we want around. The reputation limits are there to keep them out, and they do an excellent job of keeping out the flood of harmful comments that try to get posted here. The fact that some people with worthwhile things to add are prevented from doing so by this system is unfortunate, but it's an uneasy compromise that allows us to have a high-quality site to comment on in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the systems in place for protecting against spam are run by Stack Exchange itself, and not by the Physics SE site's community. This meta site is primarily for community issues and for software issues which affect this site only. Questions and proposals about features that are common to the entire Stack Exchange system should be raised on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. (And, if you're going to post there, you should do your due diligence and search for the existing threads, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/311700/how-might-we-solve-the-50-reputation-comment-limit&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and the links therein, if you don't want them to close your question as an exact duplicate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T18:16:04.547" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10833" CreationDate="2018-09-24T19:50:18.817" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348145/is-the-force-exerted-on-the-chair-transferred-to-the-rope-that-is-pulled-on&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was re-opened but has been put on hold again by some members of this website. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it due to the fact that I had posted free-body diagrams which made the question seem like a &quot;check my work&quot; question? I have removed the information which caused this suspicion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know what else is still not okay with my question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164413" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-09-30T07:56:26.573" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T07:56:26.573" Title="Has my question been put on hold because it seemed like &quot;a check my work&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|closed-questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10832" CreationDate="2018-09-24T20:10:34.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't say &lt;em&gt;for sure&lt;/em&gt; why the people who chose to put your question on hold made that choice, but I suspect that the question is long enough that the specific conceptual question you want to ask isn't clear. As of the current revision 19, I'm assuming this is the specific conceptual question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] However, would that not cause the force due to pulling to get cancelled out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a perfectly fine thing to ask. I think removing the extra free-body diagrams as you did in the latest edit will help make it more clear, but you could even go a little further and make the summary of the work you did more concise. Remember that the focus of the post should be the specific conceptual question you want to ask (again, presumably what I quoted above), and most of your post should be devoted to setting up that question. Anything else you can just briefly summarize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't mind voting to reopen the question in its current state (revision 19), but I'd like to hear from at least one (preferably several) of the close voters first to see whether there were other issues that caused them to vote as they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T20:10:34.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10835" CreationDate="2018-09-24T21:58:22.980" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle, questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; that do little more than provide a link should be deleted like any other (almost) link-only answer, but is it really so? If we look at most answers to, e.g., the super-question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, we see that most of them have a simple one-paragraph description and a link, which indeed seems fine for the purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a concrete case, recently a resource-recommendation answer was deleted on the basis of being link-only (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/150446/derivation-of-kerr-metric-is-there-any-reference/430596#430596&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, for those who can see it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[user207599] Here is a Kerr metric derivation method by using ellipsoid coordinate transformation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://academicjournals.org/journal/IJPS/article-full-text-pdf/AEE776964987&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://academicjournals.org/journal/IJPS/article-full-text-pdf/AEE776964987&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While similarly long answers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/150446/75633&quot;&gt;same question&lt;/a&gt; have been left alone, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Robin Ekman] The original reference is Kerr, R.P. Gravitational field of a spinning mass as an example of algebraically special metrics. Phys. Rev. Lett. 11, 237.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Mohamed IBrahim] you can also read this paper , it is very useful&#xA;  A Possible Intuitive Derivation of the Kerr Metric in Orthogonal Form Based On Ellipsoidal Metric Ansatz.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Paul Masson] I'm surprised no one mentioned Chapter 6 of Chandrasekhar's Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. Then again, I personally found his derivation so opaque that I wrote my own de novo derivation in Boyer-Lindquist coordinates using the Cartan formalism.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[fazlay ahmed] i think if we follow the Ray D' Inverno book intitled Introducing Einstein Relativity then we get easily this metric. on chapter 19 it is explanied in a very simple method     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should all these four answer be also deleted as being link-only? One of them has 4 upvotes, two have 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closely-related point: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4698/75633&quot;&gt;policy for resource recommendations&lt;/a&gt; states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you come across an old recommendation post, move all of the answers that are against policy into a community wiki list answer, and give it the following banner [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is from Aug 5 '13, so &quot;old&quot; means earlier than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;summary&lt;/strong&gt;, my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the link-only policy loosened for resource-recommendation questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We should only agglutinate link-only resource-recommendation answers if older than Aug 2013? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T02:04:24.627" Title="Applying resource-recommendation/link-only policies" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10834" CreationDate="2018-09-25T01:49:34.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The paragraph you refer to applies to answers that were posted before &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;the resource-recommendations policy&lt;/a&gt; was set in mid-2013. After the policy was agreed on, there was an extended campaign to find and fix as many old &lt;code&gt;[books]&lt;/code&gt; questions as we could, and bring them into line with the new standards. (You can find many of them using &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/901865&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; as a starting point.) Basically, the agreement at the time was that the close-every-book-question-on-sight policy would be relaxed, in the understanding that we managed to put together enough of a community curation of new questions as they came in and of the existing corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That campaign to fix the old answers was quite successful, but we still missed some (as you have found). If you find them, process them as indicated in the policy. Most of it you can do yourself, though some answer deletions do require raising a custom moderator flag to say &quot;hey, I've aggregated all the old answers into a single catchall one, you can delete this one now.&quot; I've gone ahead and done all the user-level processing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/150446/derivation-of-kerr-metric-is-there-any-reference/&quot;&gt;the thread you mentioned&lt;/a&gt;. Hopefully the mod-level answer deletions will come in shortly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/430596&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; you mention, it was posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/150446/timeline&quot;&gt;a full four years&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the question started sporting a banner that states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers containing only a reference to a book or paper will be removed!&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bold font and exclamation sign and all. Feeling sorry for the deletion of a low-quality answer posted in those conditions is pretty moot, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's worth pointing out that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pUCLb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another deleted answer&lt;/a&gt; on that thread; the review link is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/217967&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There's some familiar faces there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For full clarity, when the policy says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you come across an old recommendation post, move all of the answers that are against policy into a community wiki list answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's referring to answers posted prior to the policy itself. It's now been several years since that, so depending on conditions it might be appropriate to extend some amount of leeway to answers posted, say, on 2015. But frankly, if an answer was posted after the banner, then it has it coming, and it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T02:04:24.627" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T02:04:24.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-27T15:16:16.033" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since  the layout has changed I have some problem printing questions and answers: the text is pressed to the left in a very narrow space causing a huge waste of space, paper and toner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text has never filled the whole page because of the items featured onthe right hand of the page, but now the waste is excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is there a trick to get the text of the answers on a full page?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to print this question: it takes a whole page, I get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..&#xA;..&#xA;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the layout has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;changed I have some&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157860" LastEditorUserId="157860" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T15:20:38.140" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T21:10:47.710" Title="Printing questions on PSE" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10836" CreationDate="2018-09-28T20:33:50.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackprinter.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stackprinter.com&lt;/a&gt;, which is a printer-friendly static mirror of the site network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also various (legal) mirrors of the site network on the whole net, including the 3-monthly archive.org &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data dump&lt;/a&gt; (which is being made public by the SE itself). Using it to print a single question is obviously overkill, but if you want to do it with &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; questions, selected and ordered by your own criteria...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The printer-friendliness of the page could be also increased easily by a little  usercss (chrome addon &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-css/okpjlejfhacmgjkmknjhadmkdbcldfcb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2018-09-29T21:10:47.710" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T21:10:47.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10840" CreationDate="2018-09-30T01:59:19.073" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348145/is-the-force-exerted-on-the-chair-transferred-to-the-rope-that-is-pulled-on&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DavidZ has pointed out that it is acceptable for people to not give reasons for closing questions. I understand that the site does not require them to do that. However, if you care about the integrity of this website and genuinely want to help out users, should you not give them  honest feedback about their questions? I explicitly asked for reasons when my question was on hold and I got no response. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't know what is wrong with my question, I am now unsure about properly formulating questions for this website. Don't these people realize that they are hurting the website's reliability and integrity by their actions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164413" LastEditorUserId="164413" LastEditDate="2018-09-30T15:56:05.907" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T21:44:14.857" Title="Should you not give feedback if you vote to close a question to help the questioner better use this website?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|closed-questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ClosedDate="2018-10-01T13:04:00.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10839" CreationDate="2018-09-30T12:06:21.750" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing is wrong with your question, but the site has a superhard policy against homework tasks. It is applied so strictly, that even a lot of questions obviously not being homework problems are closed on this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the current state of your question, there is not too much to do, because the majority of the voters doesn't want it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the homework close reason says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Homework-like questions should &lt;strong&gt;ask about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, re-formulate it to ask about a specific physics concept, and show some effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The funny thing is: probably your question will be still closed or left closed. What I would do: &lt;em&gt;Make clear, that you have both, best if you insert a short excerpt of both in the beginning of the post.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Specific physics concept: I see a contradiction here, on Newton II law the force on the chair should be [..]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;My effort: As we can see it in the second half of the post, ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[and here is your question]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very likely, that your question will be still closed. But, on this way, you will have already enough ammunition to start this meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will get many critics, questions and suggestions in the comments. Do everything what they say, even if they seem irrelevant or hairsplitting for you, it helps a lot in their voting&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. This is your only defense against negative votes: react comments quickly, and do it with quick and convincing comments and edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone explains the reason of the negative vote (down or close) to your post, honor it: nothing makes it obligatory to give a reason for a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, following all of these makes asking a homework question actually harder than solving it for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community consent is very strongly against numerical problems here, there is only an admittedly very narrow &quot;escape path&quot; from this, which is mainly closed despite that it is communicated as if it would be open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your current question is already closed, and getting the 3 reopen votes is possible, but unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;My heuristic (unproovable, but for me realistic) estimation is that for every comment, there are around 2-3 people, who doesn't comment, only votes. And there are around 10 people, who doesn't even vote, but thinks the same. Any time if you get a comment to your post, imagine average 2-3 people who votes the same and 10 other who thinks the same. And voters typically don't come back to reconsider their vote, this is why you need to react quickly.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;The first sentences create a general impression in the reviewers (and any readers), what is your post about. The rest will be interpreted already in this frame. Thus, your first sentences are super-important.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2018-09-30T16:33:29.867" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T16:33:29.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10839" CreationDate="2018-09-30T21:44:14.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to make a question more conceptual is to see if you can phrase it without numbers.  You can always include numbers at the end as examples to give greater materiality to the question, but in general an issue I find in questions with specific numbers is that makes questions overly specific and thus not terribly useful for anyone except the person asking the specific question.  BTW it is IMO likely that, if you can clearly write a question without resorting to numerical values, it will be conceptual rather than overly specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fully honest, a problem I have with your specific question is that it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; look like an assignment question as phrased.  I am personally mostly opposed to people answering specific assignment questions on behalf of an OP, and I will do my best to discourage people from posting overly specific assignment question.  While I don’t have problems in supplying conceptual explanations, i.e. supplying information for someone to complete the question by herself/himself, I cannot abide by people who post with the hopes that someone else will provide a complete solution for them. Thus, for starters I would suggest having a man of mass &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m_1$&lt;/span&gt;, a chair of mass &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m_2$&lt;/span&gt; and a force of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f$&lt;/span&gt; Newtons (the force, BTW, does not have unit of mass so your &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$100$&lt;/span&gt;lbs doesn’t make sense there, and the weight is also measured in Newton, not in lbs there’s a problem there unless you’re using lbs as a unit of force rather than Newtons, and that would be untoward).  I’m not sure converting to variables-only is enough to do the trick, but at least it’s a start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly the problem with your question is that it’s more or less similar to too many found in textbooks and discussed on multiple websites.  Maybe you would do well to search for similar questions and then include as part of your question the contrast between various solutions or paths to solutions, showing you have done some effort and focusing on what part of one or many proposed solutions are still unclear &lt;em&gt;after you have studied these solutions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if I cared to comment on every single question I vote-to-close, I would likely have to reply to equally many comments and wouldn’t have time to get anything else done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose these are my reasons as to why I don’t comment and vote-to-close a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T21:44:14.857" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T15:28:13.670" Score="5" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/432030/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed under the presumption of being off topic for being a &lt;strong&gt;homework-like&lt;/strong&gt; question. Honestly, I cant see how this question is either off topic or a homework question since it ask a conceptual question about a nontrivial physics phenomenon and does not violate any of the rules specified on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5958/&quot;&gt;set of guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm not the only one wondering why was this question flagged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is this a homework question? – user7777777&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ZeroTheHero pointed out in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10839/&quot;&gt;recent discussion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One way to make a question more conceptual is to see if you can phrase&#xA;  it without numbers...if you can clearly write a question without&#xA;  resorting to numerical values, it will be conceptual rather than&#xA;  overly specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is exactly how the question is phrased. Moreover, OP is asking in the comments for guidance on how to make his question better (in case that was the issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can you open it again? Also, why was it closed in first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197798" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T10:16:32.087" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T10:16:32.087" Title="Reopen request - Question about water splash on impact" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T16:42:33.370" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was going through some profiles on the site, I found out some different behaviour in a user's profile. Location, profile views section moved to extreme corner. Link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/206160/akash-b&quot;&gt;Akash.B profile&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y3s65.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y3s65.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of Akash B profile showing change in location position&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, It happens only for that user and not for other users. It looks normal for other users with low profile or regular users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NuosX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NuosX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Profile of another user with a low profile&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a gif showing the difference of the space taken by &quot;About Me&quot; section in both the profiles and the change of position of location and other details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a0WYd.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a0WYd.gif&quot; alt=&quot;gif showing change in position of location etc., in both the profiles&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="205676" LastEditorUserId="205676" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T16:48:38.220" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T00:00:32.610" Title="Profile views, location section moved to extreme right corner" Tags="|bug|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10845" CreationDate="2018-10-02T20:10:54.297" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, what it says on the tin. The mainstream-physics closure dialog, which is accessible on the closure dialog as well as on closed questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/411503/&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;), contains a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538&quot;&gt;mainstream-physics site policy&lt;/a&gt; which contains the user ID of one of the elected site moderators, i.e. the same link that comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/announcer-booster-and-publicist-badges/&quot;&gt;the 'share' button&lt;/a&gt; on that meta thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QjAHR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QjAHR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't think it's the end of the world, beyond &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/54/announcer?userid=7433&quot;&gt;a somewhat-shady Announcer badge&lt;/a&gt;, but now that we know it's there, wouldn't it be better to remove that numerical tagline? Can this be done on a relatively painless fashion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T13:11:39.440" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T13:11:39.440" Title="The mainstream-physics close reason has a link to meta with the user ID of a moderator. Can it be removed?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10844" CreationDate="2018-10-02T21:48:55.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to change the text of an existing close reason. We'd have to create a whole new one, presumably with the same text except for the link URL. Personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble, although you're right that it would be best not to have a user ID in the URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we ever decide that the text of the close reason is somehow inadequate or invalid and we want to make a significant change to it, that would justify abandoning the close reason in favor of a new one. At that point we should definitely make sure not to attach any user IDs to the URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T21:48:55.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10842" CreationDate="2018-10-02T22:40:47.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put that question on hold because it sounded like the type of question that could be a homework problem or educational exercise. Now, looking back at it, I'm not as sure as I was at the time I closed it, but I haven't changed to the opposite opinion either - that is, my thoughts on that question are conflicted but I still come down marginally closer to &quot;should be on hold&quot; than to &quot;should not be on hold&quot;. Nevertheless, as people have pointed out in the comments, it's a duplicate of another question, so I'm happy to reopen it and mark it as a duplicate instead. (We could also discuss whether the duplicate target should have also been on hold as homework-like, but that should be a separate matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big part of the reason I put the question on hold was that it doesn't actually ask anything conceptual. Here is the core of the question for easy reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose that there is a small object (e.g. hand sized) with volume &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$V$&lt;/span&gt; and mass &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m$&lt;/span&gt; that falls into a water container from a height &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$h_0$&lt;/span&gt; and with initial velocity &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_0$&lt;/span&gt;. Is there a way to compute the height &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$h_{\text{water}}$&lt;/span&gt; that the water will reach after the object impacts on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just asking us to calculate something: given some input values, it seems that the question just wants a formula to produce an answer. That's not conceptual. There are a number of ways in which this question could be edited to ask something slightly different that would make it conceptual; for example, if the question had presented an argument for why it seems to not be possible to calculate the desired value from the given inputs and asked about that argument, then it would probably be a conceptual question. Or if the question had demonstrated a significant amount of prior work trying to tackle this problem and asked about a way to connect one specific piece of a calculation to another specific piece, that might also be conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if you might have been led astray about the meaning of &quot;conceptual question&quot; by this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you can clearly write a question without resorting to numerical values, it will be conceptual rather than overly specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that's true. At least, it's definitely not the case that any question that can be written without using numbers is conceptual. If this were the case, you could take almost any do-my-homework-for-me type problem and make it &quot;conceptual&quot; by just replacing the numbers with variables, but I'm sure I could point you to many examples of questions where you could make that replacement and yet we would all agree that it would still be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inverse of that rule might be useful, in that a question which is written using specific numerical values is quite likely to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be conceptual. But it takes more than just removing the numbers to make the question conceptual. Off the top of my head, here are couple rules of thumb that I find useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conceptual questions are often &quot;why&quot;-type questions rather than &quot;how&quot;-type questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most conceptual questions &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; some amount of exposition (i.e. words, sentences, paragraphs) to answer; they're impossible to answer with only mathematical expressions or equations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T22:40:47.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10843" CreationDate="2018-10-02T23:49:42.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not an answer, but can't include an image in Comments...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's even more extreme on my screen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pt5Yw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pt5Yw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113185" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T23:49:42.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10849" CreationDate="2018-10-03T11:37:03.930" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am about to delete my account (and not just stay inactive). Since I am pretty heavily addicted to the website, I fear I might have an urge to post a comment or an answer to a question (...and possible post a question?). Is it possible to do so without any account? It seems so because when I log off, the option to post an answer is available as long as I enter a username and my email address. But on the other hand I do not see any guest posting questions and answers and comments... so I am wondering whether this is really possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other caveat I should be aware of, before deleting my account? I understand that it's a definitive move, I will never be able to recover my account nor my points and badges. Is there more to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;strong&gt;Thanks for all, everyone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signed: coniferous_smeller-something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75916" LastEditorUserId="75916" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T11:49:50.493" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T11:49:50.493" Title="Things one should be aware of before deleting account?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10848" CreationDate="2018-10-03T11:45:36.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to clean up some of your comments that are of no lasting values, just to reduce the amount of debris left behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to answer without registering on the site: typing something that looks like an email address and something arbitrary for a name is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, asking questions on Physics requires registration, it's one of a few Stack Exchange sites that have this requirement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a user who posted just once (either a question or an answer) and never voted has an option to immediately delete their account just by clicking a button in profile settings. This can be used to post-and-go without leaving an account behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user60480" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T11:45:36.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10851" CreationDate="2018-10-04T14:56:44.383" Score="-1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/432404/46133&quot;&gt;asked this question&lt;/a&gt; regarding simulation of Diffuse Interstellar Bands for molecules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far it had only 12 views and any interaction, is it off topic? If not, How do I get more attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46133" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T17:02:41.677" Title="Is my question off topic? If not, how to get more attention?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10850" CreationDate="2018-10-04T17:02:41.677" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So far it had only 12 views and any interaction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a fairly-localized question on a technical topic, like yours, this isn't something that I would be alarmed about. Your question is on-topic (though maybe it falls on some pits that you could have avoided) and you're just seeing the normal pace of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question doesn't get enough attention within a couple of days, you can set a bounty on it, which does tend to attract attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also post on meta and hope that the meta effect will bank you an answer, but that's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a general solution and intentional use of that phenomenon would be counted as abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T17:02:41.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10853" CreationDate="2018-10-06T17:24:00.523" Score="-2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/427801/&quot;&gt;Physical transformation associated with a Pseudo-Orthogonal matrix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was closed because of a unclear ques. Now I have reworded it, it is more clear, still, No one opened it again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134460" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T17:54:17.750" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T18:25:47.310" Title="Vote to reopen my question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10852" CreationDate="2018-10-06T18:25:47.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was not closed for being unclear – indeed, it has always been pretty clear what you are asking, even before the recent edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it does not show any research effort. If you google &quot;pseudo-orthogonal group&quot;, the very first result is the Wikipedia entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_orthogonal_group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indefinite orthogonal group&lt;/a&gt; where you can read that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In physics, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorentz group&lt;/a&gt; O(1, 3) is of central importance, being the setting for electromagnetism and special relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on &quot;Lorentz group&quot; takes you to the corresponding entry, which has a rather detailed discussion of the group, and plenty of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it would have taken you less than a minute to answer your own question by just typing it into google. Such questions are considered off-topic here, because we expect users to try and find the answer themselves before posting the question here: if you are not willing to spend some of your own time in trying to find the answer, we will not waste ours in providing the solution for you. These are the rules of the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T18:25:47.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T22:45:58.537" Score="1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get a fair number of questions that are simply people &quot;asking&quot; about their personal theory.  These get tagged in all sorts of random ways, typically.  I've just seen one suggesting a black hole powers every Sun and it's tagged &quot;experimental physics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm suggesting we have a dedicated tag for these kinds of questions ( &quot;Personal Theory&quot; perhaps, or &quot;Not Mainstream&quot; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be useful in rapidly and properly categorizing these questions, especially as they more often than not get closed as not being mainstream.  We do this with &quot;homework&quot; type questions so I think it's useful to flag questions of this sort properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there's the issue of avoiding creating too many tags, so any thoughts ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T08:59:06.750" Title="Tag for *Personal Theory*?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10854" CreationDate="2018-10-08T22:54:26.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about unpublished personal theories are not on-topic for us. Please flag as &quot;should be closed &gt; not mainstream.&quot; Or cast a close vote if you have that privilege. Then leave the question alone: the less attention off-topic questions get, the less likely they are to recur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a different situation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; because some of those questions are actually on-topic, so a tag is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T22:54:26.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10854" CreationDate="2018-10-09T08:59:06.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have a tag which covers the overwhelming majority of questions of this type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RCdB5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RCdB5.png&quot; alt=&quot;question closure banner for non-mainstream physics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about personal theories are &lt;em&gt;rarely&lt;/em&gt; on topic here. Since many people see the existence of a tag for a given subject as strong evidence that the subject is on-topic on the site, adding a tag for them would send a completely wrong message about their topicality. To say it explicitly: it would be actively harmful to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd suggest your approach amounts to sticking our heads in the sand and pretending they don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't. It amounts to saying as clearly as we can that we do not want those questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, questions don't always get closed simply because they get lost in the flood of new question and no one does a final vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last bit is completely incorrect. &quot;No one does a final vote&quot; isn't a reason why questions slip through the cracks - that's not how the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/close&quot;&gt;Close Votes review queue&lt;/a&gt; works. If a question has pending close-votes on it, it will go to the closure review queue and it won't leave the queue until either it is closed or it gets three explicit Leave Open votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can indeed happen, though, that a given off-topic question will get lost in the flood of new questions and no one does the &lt;em&gt;initial&lt;/em&gt; vote which would kick-start the review process, and said off-topic question will remain open for months or even years. That's not a reason to give up, though - those examples are the minority and they should be fixed as and when they turn up. They're absolutely not a reason to bend site policy into harmful shapes just because our moderation is imperfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, though: &lt;strong&gt;your proposed tag is a meta tag&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Meta tags&lt;/a&gt; are, in essence, tags that describe what a question is &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;, rather than what a question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt;. During its initial years, Stack Overflow had a long process of dealing with meta tags, and the core lesson learned was that it is very hard to make them work appropriately and that they are very rarely worth the trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there isn't quite a complete blanket ban on meta tags throughout SE, but there is a very strong directive to only use them if they're really, truly needed. On this site, the only two meta tags are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, both of which cover a substantial number of questions and provide a meaningful tool for the mechanics of the site moderation, and both of which are under reasonably strict rules on their usage. Your tag proposal fails that first criterion - there simply isn't the quorum of on-topic questions in that category needed to justify the trouble of a meta tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T08:59:06.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-12T09:35:16.243" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/434066/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (10k-only link) and immediately received down-vote, thus, deleted it. Could be question is off-topic, could be someone is happy trigger of down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I known is a strongly practical question but, who doesn't uses a calculator? And I do not see any one that can be configured in SI format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see any entry in &quot;what topics can I ask here&quot; that allows or discard this question, being the most near &quot;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&quot; (allows) or &quot;Implementation details of computational tasks&quot; (denies)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question was:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Utility question, knows someone about a calculator that shows the results in format &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a \cdot 10^b$&lt;/span&gt; where &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$b$&lt;/span&gt; is a multiple of 3 (positive or negative) and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a$&lt;/span&gt; is a real number in decimal format with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1 \le |a| \lt 1000$&lt;/span&gt; with a configurable number of decimals or number of digits ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Allowed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$123.45 \cdot 10^{12} $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1.23456 \cdot 10^{3} $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$12.34$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not allowed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1.2345 \cdot 10^{14} $&lt;/span&gt; should be &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$123.45 \cdot 10^{12} $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1234.56 \cdot 10^{3} $&lt;/span&gt; should be &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1.23456 \cdot 10^{6} $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$0.1234$&lt;/span&gt; must be &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$123.4 \cdot 10^{-3}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usual scientific mode in calculators is a different format than this one, because they allow any integer exponent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164884" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-10-13T11:15:20.983" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T11:15:20.983" Title="Is a question about calculators in SI format according to &quot;what topics can I ask about here&quot;?" Tags="|support|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10857" CreationDate="2018-10-12T10:22:20.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I put the following question and immediately received down-vote, thus, deleted it. Could be question is off-topic, could be someone is happy trigger of down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that 1 DV necessarily indicates it's off-topic; that just means 1 person didn't like the post for any reason. Typically, but not always, someone will leave a comment indicating that it's off-topic for reason X when voting to close it; that's how you can know it's off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not see any entry in &quot;what topics can I ask here&quot; that allows or discard this question, being the most near &quot;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&quot; (allows) or &quot;Implementation details of computational tasks&quot; (denies)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say it's disallowed because it's a software request which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3980/25301&quot;&gt;generally considered as off-topic&lt;/a&gt; (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9304/25301&quot;&gt;this post too&lt;/a&gt;) because they're generally &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; as thy're list-based questions. But again, a single DV doesn't strictly indicate topicality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to resource requests, we are very peculiar, basically restricting it to books/articles/webseries for a variety of reasons, all of which can be found through searching Meta (primary &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/25301&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A is here&lt;/a&gt; + the &quot;Linked&quot; bar to the right). Most of us don't believe that software requests would satisfy the conditions needed for resource recommendations; hence, they're off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T10:22:20.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T19:07:50.613" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241777/which-groups-can-be-lattice-gauge-groups/248772#248772&quot;&gt;my own answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241777/which-groups-can-be-lattice-gauge-groups&quot;&gt;my own question&lt;/a&gt; has been marked as accepted today, and I got +5 rep for it.  I didn't do this, and I didn't think it was possible to get rep for accepting your own answer anyhow.  Did some moderator do this, or is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110443" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T20:53:59.530" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T20:53:59.530" Title="Why was my self-answer accepted, and why did I get +5 rep?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10859" CreationDate="2018-10-15T19:13:23.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You didn't get +5 for the accept - that was just an unrelated upvote today. The answer was accepted by you yourself back on Apr 10 '16 four minutes after you wrote it, as can be seen from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/248772/timeline&quot;&gt;the timeline&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T19:28:33.297" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T19:28:33.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-18T16:15:03.073" Score="13" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/432612/8563&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; recently came up in chat, because a user lost reputation when their upvoted answer went overboard as collateral damage when its question was deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hnkuv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hnkuv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I think this is a dreadful question, and I think it was right to close it, but I don't think this should have been deleted. It's a bad question because it's just built on a large stack of misconceptions presented in good faith, but the response to that should be to answer with corrections to the misconceptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the deletion voters explain their reasoning in this instance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a site consensus that this sort of content should be removed, or that it shouldn't?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of particular note, the question had three upvoted answers with a total of eight upvotes between them, with answerer reps in the low thousands so they do feel the bite. Is there a site consensus that it's OK to remove low-quality questions that have decent upvoted answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T21:53:43.657" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T10:36:48.890" Title="Should this question have been deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2018-10-19T00:51:14.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reckon my standards are higher than average. I don't like low-quality posts to stick around, and I vote to delete them whenever I stumble upon one. Good questions do not make bad answers good, and good answers do not make bad questions good. Echoing Kyle, I don't look at answers when voting to delete questions, just like I don't look at the question when I vote to delete answers (well, of course I do, but mostly to understand the context; but the context will never redeem crappy posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this will sometimes cause collateral damage. I don't feel too bad about it, for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't be answering low-quality/low-effort questions in the first place,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and if you do, at the very least edit the OP to make it less crappy so as to prevent deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, it seems Kyle, Zero, and I are the only ones going through low-quality questions and voting to delete them when necessary, so I think it is justified that we somewhat &quot;aggressive&quot;: it takes three votes to delete a post, and there are only three people doing any voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we are human, so we won't always get it right. Good thing the mechanics of this site allows users to fix these kind of issues: there are dozens of users that can vote to undelete posts that were deleted and should not have been. It's true that deletion/undeletion is much less visible than closing/reopening, something I don't quite like (I want more users voting to delete, and a reliable mechanism to undelete those posts that should not have been deleted in the first place). But do note that the &quot;delete queue&quot; is just as visible as the &quot;undelete&quot; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, and given the size of this community, we are not yet at a point that the special cases cannot be handled here in meta or in chat. So I do not lose sleep over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is basically my reasoning. Maybe we got it wrong this time, and that post really should not have been deleted. (But this is the first time someone complains, so we are not doing a terrible job either). Please do vote to undelete if you think that's the right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T00:51:14.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2018-10-19T17:22:21.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I vote to delete, I judge based on the content of the question (in its current state), rather than the answers it's attained. Typically, if a question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sufficiently downvoted (e.g., &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\leq-3$&lt;/span&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;closed for at least 1 week (so in actual closed state, not 'on hold')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unedited since closure &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's, in my opinion, grounds for deletion regardless of answers: the content of the post is low quality &amp;amp; OP didn't make any efforts to improve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; designed to answer any question posed, regardless of quality (if you want to answer any question posed, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://reddit.com/r/Physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r/Physics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://reddit.com/r/AskScience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r/AskScience&lt;/a&gt;), we have standards (hence closure). Perhaps my standards of quality are higher than others (hence some of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;reviewing&lt;/a&gt; stats?), I don't know. I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know that I'd rather not have -5 questions lying about for some hapless future users to think, &quot;Oh, these people don't have standards, I can ask any old question&quot; which I don't think is correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also echo AFT's sentiments about how answerers should handle low-quality questions (either don't answer it or improve the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at this &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; case, I don't know that the answers would have swayed me anyway. The highest rated answer (+6) basically says, &quot;You're wrong, it's the opposite of what you say. Go read a book&quot; which, in my opinion, is a terrible answer (essentially a link-only answer with no actual link) and have no clue as to how it gained 6 votes; it should be DV'd and deleted anyway. One of the other answers seems to say the same (except the &quot;go read a book&quot; part) and another seems to be someone replying to one of the other answers (as if this were a forum). So we're basically left with only Árpád Szendrei's answer as being any good, in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T03:00:02.343" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T03:00:02.343" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2018-10-21T14:20:54.103" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emilio asked that I turn my comment to an answer, so here goes, with edits, having responded to various comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imo, what one should also be considering when voting for closure or deletion  should be &lt;em&gt;if it is a question that could often come up in search engines&lt;/em&gt; . I learned through the discussion here that closure does not  take a question out of the field of engines and also that answers are still alive as far as reputation goes. If there is already a good answer, then I would not delete the question, reasons expanded below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I answer questions which are candidates for closure or even deletions, this is my criterion, that a clear answer would be found even for a nonsense question , &lt;em&gt;if it is nonsense that   may be often asked by high school children&lt;/em&gt; interested in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Low quality posts may reflect an &lt;em&gt;average non physicist's ignorance&lt;/em&gt; , those are the ones that I consider worth answering, to clear up confusions. A confused post is different than a post where somebody proposes own theories, those yes, I feel no compunction in their  deletion, and the same for answers. But naive questions imo should be treated gently, particularly of new users of unknown sophistication in physics. It is possible to educate people, and  one of the purposes of this site should be physics education. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would set the question above on the naive side, somebody who has not understood special relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a good answer to the question candidate for closure, and the question is on the naive or confused side, then I would not delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now low or high quality judgement is peculiar to the comprehension of the reader. A naive question can be judged low quality as also a confused one. My preference is to be gentle, as we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;  now advised also, and to try at the same time to educate  a general audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As physics becomes more and more esoteric due to complex theories, it is necessary to develop narratives that are correct and simple, understandable by people with just highschool level physics, again in my opinion. &lt;em&gt;It is the level of the answers that characterizes the quality of the site,&lt;/em&gt; not the question itself, as far as I am concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to forget the discouragement of the heavy guns on a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reading a fiction on an apocryphon with a lot of bible quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207%3A9-11&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Which of you,&lt;/a&gt; if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T10:36:48.890" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T10:36:48.890" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2018-10-23T07:54:00.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is terrible.  This is a new user and I would rather not pile it on but I will say that, IMO the post in question, in its contents and its form, is harmful to the site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is unusual because these days I do not initiate much closure - although I did on this one - except for homework questions, so I did find the question to be particularly bad, and sufficiently many agreed with me to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not initiate deletion: Kyle and AFT have given their reasons, which I generally agree with.  I will briefly add that it’s not a good sign for a question when the most upvoted answer starts by stating that the premise of the question is false and, IMO, nonsensical; indeed that’s reason enough to contemplate deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s a pity an engaged user lost some rep as a result of this but it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T07:54:00.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2018-10-24T05:42:50.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question contains a false statement. It should be fixed. Not fixing it would be terrible, because it had left a false statement on the site. But the question itself is not terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP is not a QFT pro, but this site is exactly for questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the correct behavior had been to ask the OP for correction in comments. Or, editing his question (changing increase to decrease). After that, the question could have been closed as dupe, or answered as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to vote this question down or to close, and particularly not to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T05:42:50.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-24T07:14:52.993" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be an issue with the layout on the Activity tab in User Profile. The text and button at the bottom of the badge are obscured by the next row of tabs since the box is larger than normal when it holds a notification that a new badge has been awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Version 1803&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Browser: Chrome Version 69.0.3497.100 (Offizieller Build) (64-Bit)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Browser Extensions: Google Docs Offline, Docs, Presentations, Tables&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ttTXv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ttTXv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63776" LastEditorUserId="63776" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T07:23:33.087" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T07:23:33.087" Title="Profile/Activity layout issue" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-25T13:04:32.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-24T18:04:42.907" Score="8" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10861/should-this-question-have-been-deleted&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; on this meta about the deletion of a recent thread, and I think the responses there are useful but not quite as conclusive as I'd like, to a large extent because (as I realize now) the question wasn't worded anywhere near as conclusively as it should have. Still, it was very useful in putting the core terms of the debate on the table, but I'd like something more general and stable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that regard, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10863/8563&quot;&gt;Kyle's answer there&lt;/a&gt; is the perfect kicking off point - he makes some valid points, but I think it is extremely important that we have a clear community consensus around what does and does not fly for the community moderation on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus my core question here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, if a question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sufficiently downvoted (e.g., &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\leq-3$&lt;/span&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;closed for at least 1 week (so in actual closed state, not 'on hold')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unedited since closure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;does that form sufficient grounds for deletion? if so, what is the basis and rationale for this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ideally like to see the two alternative views on this issue (i.e. yes, they should, and no, they shouldn't) provide answers here, so that the voting on those can give us a better idea of how the broader site community feels about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I think this is extremely important is that question deletion is one of the places where community moderation is lacking the most in terms of mechanisms for checks and balances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To the bulk of the moderation-active population on this site, for the foreseeable future, if a question is deleted, it drops right out of the map, and its deletion is basically undetectable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The analytics on these statistics are absolutely terrible. Even if one does have the reputation to access the stats (i.e. the 10k Tools page), they are very hard to read and extremely hard to use effectively as a tool to audit what questions are and are not getting deleted (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/301967/distinguish-automated-vs-mod-vs-community-deletions-in-the-10k-tools&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this means that nothing should be deleted, but I do think it means that we need an affirmative site consensus that some questions should be deleted, with clear boundaries on what that class of questions is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, it also means that statements like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reckon my standards are higher than average&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should be treated with extreme care in this context. Everybody is entitled to their own standards, and for e.g. question closure, that is perfectly fine: if people disagree, they can detect it and vote to counteract it. Since here the latter mechanism is broken, I think we need a tighter ship in terms of standards. In that regard, I think the criteria set out by Kyle and quoted above are a great description of the class of questions involved, but I think we still need a wider agreement that they are actionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For full clarity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a discussion about &lt;strong&gt;deletion, not closure&lt;/strong&gt;. The on-topic-ness of the question involved needs to have &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; been decided, in the negative, for the considerations in this thread to begin to be applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, if your answer concludes with &amp;quot;such answers should be closed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;such answers should not be closed&amp;quot;, you're not answering the question I'm posing, by a country mile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer includes &amp;quot;such answers should/shouldn't be &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then you're in the right track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for my personal take - I don't have strong feelings either way. But deletion is a very delicate issue (particularly for some unrelated classes of questions) and I care about having strong community processes where it's on the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T15:00:48.483" Title="Should poor-quality questions be deleted in general?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10869" CreationDate="2018-10-24T18:18:54.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the qualities listed above, I don't think there is really any question (hah!) that such questions should be deleted, eliminated, terminated, however one wants to phrase getting them off our books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The down vote total suggest it was not well received by the community. So, why should it be retained?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is unedited, so the OP hasn't bothered to try and respond/fix/reword/whatever. If they don't care, neither should we.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After a week nobody else cared enough to step in and try and rescue it. So, the question is pretty conclusively not considered useful to anyone. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken together, there really isn't a good reason such questions should stay around in any form. They add nothing of any value&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastEditorUserId="38675" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T18:28:09.067" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T18:28:09.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10869" CreationDate="2018-10-25T17:42:18.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some poor quality questions should be systematically deleted.   Examples include &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t7Bg1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t7Bg1.png&quot; alt=&quot;this one&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/435405/if-consciousness-is-energy-is-energy-consciousness-i-e-does-energy-seem-to&quot;&gt;this one:&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iATuy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iATuy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions that should be deleted are closed questions based on false or nonsensical premises.  An extreme example would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that pigs can fly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that all pigs are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this holds how can one keep pigs in a pen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions should not be answered.  Period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position on this is broadly in line with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russell's teapot&lt;/a&gt; argument: it is for posters to make sure the questions are sensible, not for answerers to debunk incorrect claims or personal theories by posters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, suggesting there is a contradiction - and we've seen plenty such questions especially in the context of special relativity - without proper research on the part of the poster cannot be constructive to the site.   Indeed, in such cases the most appropriate course of action would be not to answer but to insert a comment suggesting a reference/book so the poster can correct his/her misconceptions (although in the case of flying pigs it would be a challenge to find even that!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm not sure there is some sort of quantitative threshold (in terms of down votes) to be met in general, closure is usually a good hint that something's not right with the original post: there is ample opportunity to correct misconceptions, if only through comments.   Sufficient time for a poster to make appropriate corrections should be granted, although &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat vague and may depend on the actual post and the &amp;quot;seniority&amp;quot; of the poster: the two questions liked above should be IMO deleted as soon as feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, sure we learn through mistakes but we have plenty of examples of closed questions for people to assess what makes a good or a bad question: we can afford to purge a great many duplicates and poorly received questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T15:00:48.483" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10869" CreationDate="2018-10-26T06:07:17.673" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/56541&quot;&gt;automatically deletes questions&lt;/a&gt; under certain circumstances (using a process semi-officially known as &quot;the roomba&quot;). In this context, the most relevant criteria under which questions are deleted are essentially these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has been closed and not edited for 9 days, has no pending reopen votes and net score zero or less, all answers have net score zero or less, and there is no accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has negative score and no answers and is at least 30 days old&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question has zero score (or a score of one if the user's account is deleted), less than two comments, less than 1.5 average views per day, and is 365 days old&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (diamond) moderators generally take the stance that the roomba, using this and other more niche criteria, does a decent job of keeping the site clean under most circumstances. For that reason, we generally don't use our binding deletion votes on low-quality questions; we figure that if the question is low quality enough that it would deserve deletion by moderator fiat, it should meet one of these criteria eventually and get automatically deleted anyway. And it's quite rare that we think a question is &lt;em&gt;harmful&lt;/em&gt; enough that we can't wait the 9/30/365/whatever days until the roomba gets it. (This doesn't preclude deleting questions for reasons other than being low quality. That we still do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, keep in mind that this is how the diamond mods see things. Non-moderators with the power to cast delete votes don't have to take this approach; they can definitely be more proactive in voting to delete if they want to. We rely on the fact that a post has to receive a consensus of three community delete votes to actually be removed to prevent excessive purging of posts from the site. Nevertheless, the community could choose to adopt a similar approach to the diamond mods, so I'm posting it as an option to be voted on appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T06:07:17.673" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-28T08:41:35.563" Score="6" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for raising this up weeks later, because I just checked my flag logs today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My spam flag on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/433026&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: Post is already deleted and user nuked)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/138185&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metasmoke&lt;/a&gt;, the post content was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM1234567890&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/58035&quot;&gt;this FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rude or abusive&lt;/em&gt; flags are appropriate on this kind of garbage. Quoting below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What makes something rude or abusive and when should I flag it?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abuse of the system or community&lt;/em&gt; is everything that is created with the intention to harm them. This includes posts that contain &lt;em&gt;no useful content at all&lt;/em&gt; – i.e. gibberish posts along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asyuv;laergap897wertp[98 gb;vp98a34&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/41570/conversation/shogs-point-on-flagging-gibberish&quot;&gt;stated by Shog9&lt;/a&gt;, it's fine to use either kind of red flags for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and the same applies to Spam and Rude/Offensive (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/26704952#26704952&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(it is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35745740#35745740&quot;&gt;supported by a previous CM, Pops&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/345333&quot;&gt;another consensus on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; that mixing spam flags and R/A flags are OK, since they're both high-priority red flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synthesizing all references presented above, I think my spam flag is appropriate on that answer, so why is it declined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cast a spam flag instead of a R/A flag because it is more convenient with Tampermonkey userscripts that I have installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. There was &lt;a href=&quot;https://drupal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3672&quot;&gt;a similar complaint&lt;/a&gt; by someone else about a similar issue over on Drupal Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181357" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T09:39:28.577" Title="Spam flag on nonsense garbage declined" Tags="|discussion|support|flagging|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10875" CreationDate="2018-10-28T08:57:18.510" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;spam&quot; is notably &lt;em&gt;missing&lt;/em&gt; from the list of flags (VLQ, rude or abusive, not an answer) Shog9 lists in the answer you quote. The spam flag description reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A gibberish post does not, by any reasonable interpretation, qualify as promoting anything, therefore your flag was declined. Since spam flags feed an automated spam defense mechanics in a way that the other flags don't, please reserve the usage of the spam flag to actual promotional spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T08:57:18.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10878" CreationDate="2018-10-28T18:02:19.420" Score="-1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know from this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8930/&quot;&gt;Should history of physics questions be on topic?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that questions about the history of Physics are considered on-topic, but what about questions about the character or personality of famous Physicists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I am curious as to how Einstein would have responded to flattery or compliments. Say, if someone had said to him at a conference: &quot;Wow, you are the greatest mind that has ever lived!&quot;, how he would have responded. Would a question like that be on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T18:34:18.713" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T22:38:39.223" Title="Are questions about the character or personality of famous Physicists on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10877" CreationDate="2018-10-28T22:38:39.223" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they're not. We don't consider those questions to be about physics, so they would be off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, it's a bit of a mischaracterization to say that history of physics questions are on topic. What the answer to the linked question actually says is that those questions are on topic only when they're relevant to our modern understanding of physics. A question about the personal attributes of a physicist, even if you do consider it to be a history of physics question, does not meet that criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T22:38:39.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-30T17:33:07.147" Score="13" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cseducators.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://cseducators.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; which is geared towards teachers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics teachers seem to lack such platform; has there been any effort to create something like physicseducators (or a more general scienceeducators) stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48881" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T09:58:46.360" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T04:58:09.713" Title="Where to ask questions about teaching physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10879" CreationDate="2018-10-31T11:25:11.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were two previous attempts at creating a Science Educators site, which would have covered physics, and both attempts failed and were deleted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7223/25301&quot;&gt;Physics Meta Link&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/113414/science-educators?referrer=x3vAYCrjklWdzv01y6-b-g2&quot;&gt;Area51 link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/915/37&quot;&gt;Physics Meta Link&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/79366/science-educators/&quot;&gt;Area51 link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As posted on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Area51 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deleted proposals can be re-proposed anew by users with renewed energy and, hopefully, better resources to bring it to commitment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there really wouldn't be any problems to re-re-propose the site in terms of SE policies, but the concerns of participation may still exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you could access the deleted proposals, you could see what did and did not work, thereby making a better future site. I don't know if this is possible currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T19:11:27.383" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T19:11:27.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10883" CreationDate="2018-11-06T07:33:23.337" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm at a loss how to handle the comments below my question. They seem accusatory but not valid or thought out from a physics perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is the same (ridiculous) question posted in several forms by two members on three SE sites. It's time to bury this nonsense question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not even an orbit. Dressing it up with geopotential waffle does not change that. If your question actually had no link to those other questions then why even mention them ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The physics problem itself is not ridiculous;&lt;/strong&gt; a ball, sliding (or driven) on a rod; the pair gravitationally bound to and in an inclined orbit around another mass. The rod-plus-ball has a quadrupole moment, as does the gravitational potential in which it orbits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By modulating the quadrupole moment of the orbiter, torque can be varied throughout each orbit, and angular momentum exchanged between the two bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question linked in my question asks if there is a way to move the ball so that over one complete, inclined orbit the &lt;em&gt;net angular momentum transfer&lt;/em&gt; is non-zero. This allows for a slow raising or lowering of the orbit by exchanging angular momentum with the central body. (Being much larger, it's resulting precession can be neglected.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to solve this orbit-raising/lowering problem, but here I've simply asked if this is a known problem, and if it has been solved already. As written, it seems like a perfectly valid Physics SE question and not worthy of the trouncing the user has given it. I don't know how to respond positively without evoking more &amp;quot;this question must die, here and now.&amp;quot; sentiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd thought of rewriting the question to ask directly &lt;em&gt;how to solve&lt;/em&gt; this problem (rather than if it is a known problem with known solution) but that might be seen as too similar to the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good and civil way to proceed in order to get to the bottom of the existence of a solution to this problem, or perhaps, solving it now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/437604/83380&quot;&gt;Has this unusual orbital mechanical problem been addressed, or given a specific name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T12:02:18.440" Title="How to respond to this user's &quot;geopotential waffle&quot; comments and/or best edit my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10882" CreationDate="2018-11-06T12:02:18.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really find the question you're trying to ask as a good fit to the SE format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically &quot;has anyone researched or named this yet?&quot;  Either the answer is &quot;yes - and it is named X&quot;; or it's trying to prove a negative, which is very difficult.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't understand what a &quot;good&quot; answer to this question would be, beyond a reference to somewhere that it is given a name.  This makes it a very poor conceptual question; which is generally what physics SE is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also seem to reference a &quot;problem&quot;; but it's not clear from the question what you mean by that.  Maybe it's just me being unfamiliar with the terminology; but I only see a set of equations, I don't see what the actual problem would be.  I didn't vote on the question; but I can understand the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T12:02:18.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-06T14:25:47.153" Score="-2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/439157/2451&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; of mine was recently deleted because it was decided AFTER my answer was posted and accepted that the question was off topic. I thought putting a question on hold simply prevented any further answers from being posted. By why delete an answer already accepted before the on hold decision was made. I have answered other questions that were subsequently put on hold, but it did not result in deletion of my already posted answer. This is very frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199893" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T14:55:01.527" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T17:28:12.627" Title="Deleting an Answer" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10884" CreationDate="2018-11-06T14:57:23.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very last comment by @DavidZ is self-explanatory and absolutely appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm temporarily deleting this in accordance with our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. Please don't post complete answers to the underlying problem in homework-like questions.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T14:57:23.293" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10884" CreationDate="2018-11-06T17:28:12.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zero's already explained the bulk of it, but it's worth drilling down a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Your answer was removed because it is considered by the community to be harmful to the site.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explained in depth in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;the meta thread that explains the homework policy&lt;/a&gt; and which is linked in the closure banner of the question. This is the kind of guidance that we expect experienced users to read before coming to meta with complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you answered is absolutely terrible, and its presence (and that of other questions like it) on the site accomplishes two things: to make this site look like a dump of undigested homework questions where lazy students can get others to do their work for them, and then, because of that, to make it much harder for this site to retain expert users who can answer the truly valuable questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By giving that user the complete answer that they wanted, you just encouraged them (and any friends that they might talk with) to post similar questions in the future. This is why those answers are routinely removed on sight by the moderators, as stated explicitly in the site policy that's always linked on homework-closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T17:28:12.627" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-07T22:25:01.023" Score="1" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/437217/position-of-a-electrical-charge-with-mass-at-a-given-time-under-the-influence-of?noredirect=1#comment986147_437217&quot;&gt;Position of a electrical charge with mass at a given time under the influence of the electrical field of another charge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been put on hold for reasons I can't achieve to understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;put on hold as unclear what you're asking by Chair, Aaron Stevens,&#xA;  Kyle Kanos, AccidentalFourierTransform, sammy gerbil yesterday Please&#xA;  clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight&#xA;  exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell&#xA;  exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help&#xA;  clarifying this question. If this question can be reworded to fit the&#xA;  rules in the help center, please edit your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even used bold text to underline the main point of my question.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Also, In the comment section, one guy is suggesting my question is a possible duplicate of this one:&lt;br/&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/217633/what-is-the-distance-between-two-objects-in-space-as-a-function-of-time-conside&quot;&gt;What is the distance between two objects in space as a function of time, considering only the force of gravity?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;What does gravity have to do with electrics charges in this context? I know that some formulas are similar and in some scenarios the workings are similar, but they are completely different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do something to improve my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191113" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T01:06:13.473" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T05:41:29.133" Title="What's wrong with my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10887" CreationDate="2018-11-07T23:47:08.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, according to moderator view&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/437217/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt; for the question, the five close votes included two for unclear, two for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt;, and one for duplicate. The way the system responds when there are multiple close reasons given for a question is to pick one reason to display. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your basic question, how one electrical charge moves in the presence of another electric charge, is a staple of introductory and advanced E&amp;amp;M courses.  In such a class, you would learn how to do this in many different situations: the two charges might have one or another mass ratio, or initial relative momenta, or impact parameter.  If you specified those things, you would be asking a homework-like question. Since you left them alone, there's not enough information to come up with a general answer to your question in a format that's a good fit for us.  That's probably the reason for the &quot;unclear&quot; and &quot;homework-like&quot; votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since gravity and electromagnetism are both &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1/r^2$&lt;/span&gt; forces, gravitational trajectories follow the same mathematics as electrical trajectories (if the electrical interaction is attractive).  That's probably the reason for the duplicate vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't cast any of those votes, but they all make sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The diamond-moderators' view of the timeline contains some information that's hidden from ordinary users, including which users cast which type of close vote and other flag-type information that ought to remain private. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T05:41:29.133" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T05:41:29.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10879" CreationDate="2018-11-11T04:48:46.980" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Come here to the PSE and try to lobby for making it ontopic. The chances are nearly negligible in the short term, but a little shift can be reached if you do it long. I will try to help, but my effect alone is very little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get a lot of deleted SE content from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org&lt;/a&gt; , the last snapshots of the (in my opinion, purposelessly destroyed) proposals are these: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20180102021524/https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/113414/science-educators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20180102021524/https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/113414/science-educators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150507061457/http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/79366/science-educators/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20150507061457/http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/79366/science-educators/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also recreate the proposal on the Area51, import the most upvoted questions there, I will help if I can. The chances are low also on this way, but you can significantly increase it if you try to collect support on the meta sites and in the chatrooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be to create a science educators site, which would integrate at least biology, chemistry and physics (maybe some engineering, too). On this way, you might get help from the communities of all the relevant sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, the A51 shows a linearly decreasing tendency to create new sites since some years. My &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/296587/259412&quot;&gt;extrapolation&lt;/a&gt; is that it will stop working around at 2020. Probably not even the SE has any idea, what to do with it, but the general attitude of the community is very well visible below that MSE post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possibility would be to somehow politely ask some already existing educator site to extend its topic. Unfortunately, the major problem is that most SE communities become itchy if there is any suggestion about the extension of their topic, but they get very excited if there is a way to narrow it. :-(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, small sites are lesser exclusionist, and both the matheducator and the cseducator are small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T04:58:09.713" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T04:58:09.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10891" CreationDate="2018-11-12T09:36:58.387" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, I need to know what is wrong if one posts their homework here and it is well formatted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual thing is they might have tried solving before coming here in the case where they didn't have another place to go seek for some 'thinking' or solution before the real homework correction day reaches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People may not sometimes always post such because they want everything to be solved for them... I personally don't post homework here though given I don't even participate around that often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you can take a look into that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114922" LastEditorUserId="114922" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T11:00:04.563" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T11:25:36.890" Title="I need more light on the homework policy" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10890" CreationDate="2018-11-12T11:25:36.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to @Chair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will not really make sense for anybody to be scrounging through the answers to someone else's homework in order to find out how some aspect of physics works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only people who can be helped in this case are the people who have the exact same homework problem... I think I now get the point, anyway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114922" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T11:25:36.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10894" CreationDate="2018-11-12T12:55:37.163" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read on the Physics S.E website that users get a chance to ask question after 6 months of question ban&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're unable to improve your existing questions, you'll get the chance to ask a new one 6 months after your last question. If that question is positively received, you may be able to continue asking questions; if not, then the ban will be reinstated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but my question ban is not getting removed even after 6 months,so what to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193942" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:59:12.993" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T09:59:12.993" Title="What to do if my question ban is not getting removed?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-12T13:09:27.320" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that even if I mistakenly flag a comment, I cannot be able to retract the flag afterward... I think it will be a good feature to add the possibility to retract flags on comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114922" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T13:09:27.320" Title="Possibility to retract flag on comments" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-11-12T18:20:30.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10892" CreationDate="2018-11-12T15:56:50.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just looking at your history, you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/411600/kinematics-problem-invloving-position-and-time&quot;&gt;asked this question&lt;/a&gt; less than 5 months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the wording you provided yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're unable to improve your existing questions, you'll get the chance to ask a new one &lt;strong&gt;6 months after your last question&lt;/strong&gt;. If that question is positively received, you may be able to continue asking questions; if not, then the ban will be reinstated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should still have about a month to wait before you can ask a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to try to be careful when asking your question on the main site to avoid additional bans.  This question for example showed a lack of research or oversight; which can often lead to bad reception on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T15:56:50.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-16T18:59:31.807" Score="-3" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've told to come here by another user after &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/440121/2451&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold a few days ago for being &quot;off-topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;conceptual&quot; mean? It's a word I see floating around a lot on this site and it's never explained. Ever. I asked the aforementioned user what it meant and they directed me here without actually giving me an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187409" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T03:18:15.253" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T18:00:56.953" Title="What does conceptual mean?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10896" CreationDate="2018-11-18T21:00:25.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sympathetic to your question, which is of relatively high quality and basically sits on the borderline between on- and off-topic, but I do think that it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question starts off quite well, and it sets up a nice conceptual framework about the configuration you're considering. However, in the end, the core of the question itself is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From here, I don't know. I need to find some particular solution of the original equation. Can I assume a solution of the form &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Ce^{-at}$&lt;/span&gt; and would it be possible to do this with the sub-critical damping case instead of the one I've used? The homogeneous solution would then be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that basically reads &quot;please solve the rest for me&quot;, and that's just the type of homework-help that's off-topic here. This is particularly the case because you have a very obvious lead for a solution, and you very clearly have the ability to follow that lead further, but your question as written just refuses to do that work and hopes for others to chip in. (That may not be how you saw it as you were writing it down, but that's what's written.) From this juncture, we would expect a 'conceptual' question to follow that lead and then, if it didn't work, to say something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tried to follow on the obvious lead [i.e., assuming a solution of the form &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Ce^{-at}$&lt;/span&gt;] but it gave me X and that doesn't work because of Y and Z. Why does that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few extra points that fall out of your responses in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The closure reason has an explicit link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;the homework guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, which you were prompted to read multiple times. Writing dismissive statements about the site guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10896/what-does-conceptual-mean#comment41696_10896&quot;&gt;without having read them&lt;/a&gt; is not a particularly positive way to start.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How many people on this site are professionals in what they do? My bet is very little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd be surprised, particularly if you select on the people who answer questions instead of ask them (and even more if you weigh by answers written, i.e. if you instead asked &quot;how many answers on this site are written by people who are professionals in what they do?&quot;). The precise answer depends on the precise way you phrase the question, and there's a fuzzy edge with a lot of people who haven't disclosed either way, but a good initial answer is &quot;a substantial fraction&quot;. It's what keeps the answer quality high, and we're simply not going to do things that risk turning that population away.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If they're interested in furthering the study of their subject, they should be more than happy to answer questions about said subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are. But we don't do this type of &quot;do my work for me&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how does [...] get to be a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;six community moderators&lt;/a&gt;, who are easily identifiable by a ♦ after their username. (That's also the case for Stack Exchange employees, who don't intervene in this type of discussion unless it turns &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; sour.) Everyone else that's doing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;moderation on Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; is just a regular user and they've earned their moderation &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; by dint of providing high-quality content.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the point of the homework tag if you won't answer homework questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partly, the homework tag serves an administrative purpose so that bad homework questions can be identified and closed more quickly and easily before they cause active harm to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also a bunch of on-topic questions that require that tag. To see a sample, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bhomework-and-exercises%5d%20closed%3ano%20score%3a3&quot;&gt;this search for non-closed homework-and-exercise questions with score &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\geq$&lt;/span&gt; 3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm just gonna go to another forum site and ask it. Had enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is a good idea :-). Your question demonstrates that you're able to write thoughtful, high-quality questions, and I look forward to reading some of them in the future if you decide to post them, but I would indeed advise you to keep it to non-homework questions for some time, while you get more experience with the site and see which questions fall on which side of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T21:00:25.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10899" CreationDate="2018-11-22T11:00:37.863" Score="24" ViewCount="1058" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel concerned about a thought that I had recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if the current policy about duplicate questions may become problematic in the (&lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt;) long term for the health of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain: as far as I understand, questions are marked duplicate when they have already been asked on the website at some point in the past. Thus, I can't help but consider the possibility that, at some point in a far future, almost &lt;strong&gt;every single question would have been already answered&lt;/strong&gt; on Stack Exchange and then marked as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, what would be the difference between Wikipedia and Stack Exchange, except for completeness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would we be able to &lt;em&gt;exchange&lt;/em&gt; our knowledge if 99% of questions are legitimately marked as duplicate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, this website would just end up being a massive database of Q/A, with virtually no activity. On one hand, that would be great for readers, but on the other hand, users who love to challenge themselves, learn and share their expertise may lose interest as the activity slows down to zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we want for the future of Stack Exchange? What do you suggest?&#xA;Am I taking this way too far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: Using Chair's contribution in the comments, I produced a graph that shows the evolution over time of the percentage of questions marked as duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sb1B0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sb1B0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data, obtained via this &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/793344/duplicates-posted-over-time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; covers the statistics of the website between august 2010 and november 2018.&#xA;Between 2010 and 2015 the proportion of duplicates increases steeply, however something strange happens around 2016-2017 and then it is hard to tell if the curve is starting to increase again or stabilizing around a constant value of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$7\%$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be interesting to see how this curve behave in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213122" LastEditorUserId="213122" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T12:49:25.797" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T23:31:36.543" Title="Is the demise of Stack Exchange (as we know it) ineluctable?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2018-11-22T13:37:22.803" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and then it is hard to tell if the curve is starting to increase again or stabilizing around a constant value of 7%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is hard. It's pretty obvious to me that the duplicate closure rate has saturated at a value of about 7%. This is vaguely high for SE standards but not something I'd be at all inclined to worry about. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/931244/percentage-of-non-deleted-questions-which-get-closed-as-duplicates-month-by-mo#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a copy of the query Chair linked to, which can be readily switched to other sites, to look for precedent in older databases and sites with a higher throughput.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clearest example is Mathematics Stack Exchange, whose historical duplicate closure rate looks exactly like ours but with a longer stabilized period:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9LySp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9LySp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get a similar situation in Cross Validated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eR750.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eR750.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a fair bit of variation site-to-site, but there's multiple instances of the rise-then-saturate behaviour that's evident in the Physics data,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HLmUg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HLmUg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so I really don't see how the current historical data is in any way a cause for concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase John, when you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am assuming that the number [total number of non-duplicate questions] will be asked on some timescale shorter than the heat death of the universe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that to be an unrealistic assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T13:37:22.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2018-11-24T08:30:36.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though I am a new contributor to SE, I have quite a long knowledge of on-line Q&amp;amp;A or discussion  communities on the Internet. I think that the question hits an important point which goes beyond the pure analysis of data trends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, I can't help but consider the possibility that, at some point in a far future, almost every single question would have been already answered on Stack Exchange and then marked as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this sentence is based on a dangerous implicit assumption: that for each question there is &lt;em&gt;the ultimate answer&lt;/em&gt; and nothing more can be said once &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; good answer has been provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience with physics and teaching physics, but also the analysis of part of the existing SE data, tell me something different. There are answers which could be considered as final, but there are also many answers which may be improved further.&#xA;My strong impression is that  the possibility of improving an existing answer, is somewhat hampered by the mechanism of flagging a question as duplicate. The main reason being that new questions are much more visible than the oldest and the whole mechanism of gaining reputation from the judgement of the original poster of the question may be broken for answers to very old questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then, what would be the difference between Wikipedia and Stack Exchange, except for completeness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this question returns on the same point: a static view of a Q&amp;amp;A site makes difficult to see the difference between Wikipedia  and SE. It is only the dynamic possibility of further improvement of the existing answers based on the history of the previous ones, which can be an important long term added value of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would we be able to exchange our knowledge if 99% of questions are legitimately marked as duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents are that if people would wait, instead of hurrying up to mark as duplicate a question a few minutes after it has been asked, most of the concern about the future of SE would disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T08:30:36.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2018-11-24T20:33:29.527" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as there are new inventions and new discoveries, there will be new questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the network as a whole: find your favorite programming language that is less than ten years old, and search for questions about it on Stack Overflow. Or on Area 51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For physics in particular: consider the timely questions about the OPERA superluminal neutrino non-result. Or look through time at the way questions about gravitational waves were changed by the LIGO detections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we come to a point where the scientific community has stopped coming up with new ideas to test, we will have bigger problems than the end of unique questions on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T20:33:29.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2018-11-25T17:26:44.220" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there ought to be a reasonable time limit (3 month?, as a first bid) after which a question may be putten again without incurring a &quot;duplicate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211169" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T17:26:44.220" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-25T19:38:48.727" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question recently. With the question I included a picture of the question with my best handwriting. But received very harsh criticism from two users who insisted that the question be in MathJax form. I have made the promise that I will learn it later. However, does this mean that without use of MathJax, my question will never be answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119067" OwnerDisplayName="bguner" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-11-25T22:07:40.980" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T22:27:23.503" Title="Does math in my questions need to be in the form of MathJax?" Tags="|discussion|questions|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10905" CreationDate="2018-11-25T22:27:23.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, does this mean that without use of MathJax, my question will never be answered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no, it doesn't mean that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's more going on here than just MathJax. From what you described, it sounds like your question actually had a much more severe problem, which is that you posted images of something that could be typed out. That's a big no-no here. We expect anything that can be typed should be typed, not posted as an image, because images are not searchable, not always archivable, not accessible to screen readers, may not be readable for everyone, take up significantly more storage space and bandwidth, and so on - this has been discussed at length &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10563/discouraging-screenshots-of-questions-at-least-the-textual-part&quot;&gt;elsewhere on this meta site&lt;/a&gt;. Rightly or wrongly, posting an image of text (or math) makes you look kind of lazy, and that makes a lot of people pretty reluctant to help you out - we are much more motivated to help answer questions where the poster has done their research, not only on the question itself, but also on how to properly ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes your question will still be answered even if you post images of text or don't use MathJax for the math, but it probably will take you longer to get an answer, and you're less likely to get a really good one. Using the proper formatting increases your chances of getting a good answer quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as a new member to the site, we understand that you might not know MathJax already, so people can be a little bit more lenient, when it's your first post, if you use images for equations or type them out without using MathJax. In those cases, you'll probably get a comment asking you to use MathJax for the math, and someone may be nice enough to do the edit for you to give you an example of how it works. But that's only for brand new site members. Once you've been told about MathJax, or you've been around for a little while and seen it in use, you should be using it yourself. It's not particularly hard to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;learn the basics&lt;/a&gt;, and as long as you're making the effort (and learning as you go), people will probably be willing to fix up minor mistakes for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T22:27:23.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-26T05:25:44.357" Score="-9" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are questions concerning the consistency of different parts of mainstream physics with one another considered as questions about non-mainstream physics and put on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about how different parts of mainstream physics that to me seemed inconsistent with one another were consistent with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was erroneously put on hold by the users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dale, ZeroTheHero, and David&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question concerned is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/443322/explain-this-critizism-of-the-law-of-conservation-of-energy?noredirect=1#comment995466_443322&quot;&gt;Explain this (critizism of the law of conservation of energy)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask that the question is immediately put back, and that these users are relieved of their moderation privileges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96475" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T06:01:57.630" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T23:35:18.863" Title="Should this really be put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|reopen|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10908" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-26T11:21:26.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about non-mainstream physics are usually closed as off-topic with the following reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T19:31:25.143" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T19:31:25.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10909" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-26T11:21:26.953" Score="0" Body="For (meta) questions about the policy to disallow non-mainstream physics questions on the main site. For details, see the tag wiki." OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T12:31:53.650" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T12:31:53.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10907" CreationDate="2018-11-26T12:04:05.307" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would personally have used the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason rather than &quot;non-mainstream&quot; to close your off-topic question. The experimental evidence supporting conservation of energy is a central part of a year-long introductory physics course, talking up most of two chapters of a typical introductory textbook. Your question is answerable, but it contains so many misapprehensions about how to describe a conservation-of-energy problem that a proper answer would contain nearly as much detail as a textbook chapter --- but with a lot of back-and-forth with you to ensure that some other misconception did not distract you along the way. All of our users who are educators have answered questions like yours from students &lt;em&gt;in person&lt;/em&gt;, and that experience suggests that an answer which will satisfy you intellectually will not be a good fit for our question-and-answer format. That's why your question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not usually take action to change the close reason on a question, even in the more common case where attempts to make the question on-topic actually change the reason that it doesn't work for us. For instance, sometimes the asker of a &quot;too broad&quot; question will edit the question to make it more specific, and turn it into a &quot;homework-like&quot; question. Such questions stay closed, with (hopefully) a justification in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it's quite rare for us to need to revoke someone's permission to cast close/re-open votes on questions, and basically never in response to a disagreement over a single review. Your request for such censure is evidence that you don't yet understand how our community works. Stick around for a while and you'll start to see what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T12:04:05.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10912" CreationDate="2018-11-26T16:27:38.753" Score="1" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;There &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/443260/could-sam-have-pierced-shelobs-carapace/&quot;&gt;is a question&lt;/a&gt; I believe to be well on topic, relevant, and interesting.  It is asking to consider a fictional scenario and evaluate, as given in the fictional scenario, whether it is possible to achieve with classical physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, I believe, people who are misapplying the prohibition against fictional physics, who have voted to put the question on hold.  The prohibition is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions about fictional physics&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Could a warp drive get you out of a&#xA;  black hole?&quot; Questions about physics of fictional worlds which are not&#xA;  sufficiently grounded in real physics are off topic here, but they may&#xA;  be on topic at Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me to suggest the prohibition is against trying to determine whether fictional physics rules would allow something to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is asking for a scenario to be evaluated against real-world physics then off topic?  Is it off topic to ask if a fictional scenario is possible as it is described, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the physical rules being asked to judge it against are real-world rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example, would asking if Verne's moon cannon is possible be off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there recourse if off-topic rules are misapplied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160136" LastEditorUserId="160136" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T22:01:59.673" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T11:05:41.797" Title="What is the line between fiction and physics with respect to off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10911" CreationDate="2018-11-26T18:50:02.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would agree with your assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about potentially fictional scenarios utilizing real physics would be on topic; because that would be in-essence the same as any hypothetical question concerned with real physical processes.  It's important to note that this still needs to adhere to the rules regarding a conceptual focus.  So for example &quot;Why did X do Y when Z?&quot;  isn't really conceptual.  If you can relate it directly to a concept in physics, and explain why that leads to a question, you're usually in pretty good shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there still needs to be enough information to provide a good answer that is in-line with physics, and avoid being broad and opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fictional physics should be off topic, but physics in fiction is not inherently off topic. As long as regular physics concepts can be reasonably applied to the scenario, and it is only about the scope of reality in a fictional scenario, these questions should be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume this relates to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/443260/could-sam-have-pierced-shelobs-carapace/&quot;&gt;&quot;Could Sam have pierced Shelob's carapace?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  If that's the case, I would agree that it's on-topic for this site.  There are actually a couple Lord of the Rings examples that can be cited as well, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122785/could-legolas-actually-see-that-far&quot;&gt;&quot;Could Legolas actually see that far?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/339387/would-molten-gold-push-large-heavy-objects-away-instead-of-submerging-them/&quot;&gt;&quot;Would molten gold “push” large, heavy objects away instead of submerging them?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  Both take events from the fictional story and ask about the physics, and if the depiction is realistic in our own world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen the question because I feel it did fit within the scope of Physics Stack Exchange as it is worded now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T18:50:02.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-26T22:33:37.263" Score="-4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; There are users who have been using the privilege to vote to close a question as off-topic as a way of dealing with &quot;populist&quot; questions (see the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10911/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) believing them to be &quot;clickbait&quot; and/or to bring the professionalism of this site into disrepute as they interpret it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; If a question meets the requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;written rules&lt;/a&gt; regarding what is on topic, is the use of the privilege to vote-to-close a question as off-topic a valid remedy for other issues a user with this privilege might have with the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, this could be posed as &quot;does granting someone the &lt;em&gt;ability&lt;/em&gt; to perform an action grant that person with the &lt;em&gt;authority&lt;/em&gt; to decide when that action should be applied?  In specific, do users with the vote-to-close-as-off-topic ability have the authority to apply that vote to address other issues?  If there is a case where those votes are misapplied (and this isn't suggesting that the example given in the background was such a case), is there a redress process better than going to meta and saying &quot;hey what gives&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160136" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T23:10:05.190" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T12:40:13.353" Title="Is Vote to Close as Off-Topic an appropriate remedy for questions that are deemed too &quot;populist&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|review|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10913" CreationDate="2018-11-26T23:31:21.183" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; The response below was given within the state of the system as of late 2018. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325060/updating-the-hot-network-questions-list-now-with-a-bit-more-network-and-a-litt&quot;&gt;changes to the system were introduced in March 2019&lt;/a&gt;, which (finally!) allow moderators to remove questions from the HNQ list, based on the community consensus currently being formed in the discussion at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11146/data-collection-when-should-or-shouldnt-we-exclude-questions-from-the-hot-ne&quot;&gt;Data collection: When should (or shouldn&amp;#39;t) we exclude questions from the Hot Network Questions list?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this new capability, I don't think this class of close vote is particularly appropriate - if things need to be removed from the spotlight, the correct mechanism should be to flag for moderators (or contact them in chat) and argue for such a removal. At best, the appropriateness of this type of closure would need to be revisited as a community consensus in the light of the changed mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, the emphasis remains: questions are not &quot;owed&quot; time on the spotlight provided by the HNQ sidebar. It exists to promote the &lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt;, not individual questions that would have &quot;earned&quot; (how?) a spot there. If questions do not do a good job of representing the site, they should not be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is Vote to Close as Off-Topic an appropriate remedy for dealing with questions that are deemed too &quot;populist&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;with due apologies, yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, with due apologies, inflammatory language like &quot;too populist&quot; sounds a whole lot like you don't understand the background, so let me fill you in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you're aware with the Hot Network Questions sidebar, which is (with a pretty complete certainty) where you found the question that sparked this. It's less clear whether you're aware of how questions are selected for it: the algorithm, detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, selects for questions with a large number of answers and a large number of votes, and that inevitably selects for lowest-common denominator junk-food questions that a broad audience can upvote (but not for the more valuable questions on the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More noxiously, however, the HNQ sidebar is subject to an extremely damaging feedback mechanism, which allows for runaway snowball effects fed by votes that come from &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; of this site's community, without any particular frame for what counts as a quality question or answer on this site. (Even worse, if external visitors come in, they're welcome to upvote, but they can't downvote.) This leads to a skewing effect that can take what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill question, blast off all of this site's regular quality-control mechanisms, and award huge scores to questions and answers that would otherwise be considered mediocre or outright bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And lest you think that this is just my opinion: here's some examples from &lt;a href=&quot;https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1314/&quot;&gt;Interpersonal Skills&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3288&quot;&gt;Skeptics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3582&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3033&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6293&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;, (then) &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6516&quot;&gt;Programmers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7150&quot;&gt;Code Golf&lt;/a&gt; complaining about the feature. There's plenty more where those came from, though there's plenty of relevant posts (particularly for the bulk of the complaints in chat) that are relatively hard to query for.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of these problems, there has been a sustained series of petitions over the past ~ four years to reform the HNQ sidebar, so that it stops doing damage to SE sites and actually works to promote quality content. (My main posts on the subject are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286020/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286986&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252690/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, if you're interested.) To be clear: there have been multiple, repeated calls on SE to allow communities to moderate what gets shown on that sidebar and control how the titles there represent their sites, to curb the feedback mechanisms that make it harmful, and to reform it into something that puts the spotlight on quality content instead of lowest-common-denominator junk-food questions that alienate the users that communities want to keep. (Have a look through &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hot-questions?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=15&quot;&gt;the hot-questions tag on Meta SE for a sampling&lt;/a&gt;.) Unfortunately, because of a variety of reasons, none of that ever happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... until, that is, all hell broke loose a month ago, in an episode documented in all its gory details (though not necessarily in easy-to-parse chronological order) at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316934/revisiting-the-hot-network-questions-feature-what-are-our-shared-goals-for-ha&quot;&gt;Revisiting the &amp;quot;Hot Network Questions&amp;quot; feature, what are our shared goals for having it?&lt;/a&gt;. It &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; that SE is on the road to fixing this mechanism, hopefully by &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; reforming it so it's biased towards quality content instead of junk-food questions, and by allowing SE communities better and more fine-grained control over what gets advertised network-wide. However, there is no set timeline for this and the solutions won't come quick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when a borderline-off-topic question with a catchy clickbait title gets picked up by the algorithm and starts picking up a snowball of votes from a population of users that have no involvement with this site, the toolset that SE puts at our disposal is essentially limited to one option: to slam the brakes on it. This involves putting it on hold, getting OP to fix the glaring problems (and then, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they're not responsive, doing more major edits that deviate from the OP's intent), fixing the title so that it's no longer a clickbait fly-magnet, and dealing with the inevitable crop of awful answers that generally crop up. Then, once the timer has cooled down, and if the problems have been fixed, it can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that stub a few toes that ideally shouldn't be? Yes, it does. But until SE comes up with better tools to moderate this, the only tool available is to apply a more stringent topicality filter to questions on the list. If you want to change things, join the discussion over on Meta SE and help us pressure SE to fix this mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some final notes regarding some additional inflammatory language like &quot;abuse of reputation&quot; and &quot;authority&quot; - you seem to have missed an important part of the &quot;vote to close&quot; mechanism, namely the &lt;strong&gt;vote&lt;/strong&gt; part. Questions only get closed if five 3k+ users vote to close them, and if that quorum for a consensus doesn't get reached, single close-votes don't do anything to the question. Your problem here isn't with single users, it's with the quorum of (now seven) users who think this question should be closed in its current state and position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is there a redress process better than going to meta and saying &quot;hey what gives&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; what meta is for. Why do you want something &quot;better&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T12:40:13.353" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T12:40:13.353" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10913" CreationDate="2018-11-27T00:10:21.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the title of the question, I would say no.  I don't believe a question that is deemed &quot;too populist&quot; alone should be closed as Off-topic for this site.  Voting is a privilege; but voting to close a question because it is too popular is considered abusing that, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... That said, I feel like the question you're referencing is something else completely.  You're taking a comment pretty far out of context.  That question is quite borderline, and it's reasonable to believe that people are willing to vote it off topic.  If they feel it is off topic, that is well within their right as users who have earned the privilege to vote and help better curate the content here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That brings me to my second point.  It's pretty hard to prove that anyone is closing a question for reasons completely outside the scope of closure.  In this case, it seems clear to me that everyone who voted to close did not feel the question was a good fit for this site.  It was popular and borderline, that's bound to attract close votes if warranted at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed to me like you interpreted Emilio's statement as if it were the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; reason the question had close votes, but that seems pretty far from the case.  I voted the question down myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T00:10:21.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10911" CreationDate="2018-11-27T03:20:07.700" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the lead in voting to close this question, I did so because I don't think analyzing physics in &lt;em&gt;fictional&lt;/em&gt; settings&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; is something we should address here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is simple: it  is fiction. Which means it's fake. As in &lt;em&gt;not real&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why we have the remarks about fictional physics in the help center: to prevent such questions from coming about, thereby lowering the site quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should think it painfully obvious that any analysis of the story should be done in the &lt;em&gt;fictional setting&lt;/em&gt; it is written in, which means &lt;em&gt;not on this site&lt;/em&gt; because we deal with the real world. You could possibly ask such questions at SciFi.SE, but I don't think they're terribly receptive to the &quot;Science of X&quot; queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that all examples given by JMac &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed because they're about physics of fictional settings, which, again, is expressly off-topic given by the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. To address the overly pedantic response in comments: by &quot;fictional setting,&quot; we are not considering end of chapter (EOC) problems in textbooks because these are &lt;em&gt;idealizations&lt;/em&gt; of scenarios aimed at instructing students in physics. We are considering works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;science fiction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fantasy&lt;/a&gt; where laws of science are generally broken/disregarded.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;EOC problems may be off-topic for other reasons (e.g., homework), but they would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be off-topic because of &quot;physics of fictional settings&quot; as mentioned here.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T11:05:41.797" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T11:05:41.797" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2018-11-28T12:43:43.963" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/54160/problem-solving-strategies&quot;&gt;Problem Solving Strategies chatroom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requires a rep of at least 20 points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical questions come from college/university exam preparation (mainly JEE) and undergraduate level physics courses, and cover mathematics and physical chemistry as well as physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChatJax&lt;/a&gt; is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T12:43:43.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10907" CreationDate="2018-11-28T23:35:18.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;With due respect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is to challenge an established physical law, the onus is on the person to present a challenge that is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very well researched,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly stated,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and presents evidence of at least one situation in which the law is invalid, or proposes a situation in which the validity of the law could be challenged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post does not meet any of the criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should always keep an open mind.  This includes the possibility that we ourselves have misunderstood some aspect of a problem, hence the importance of the first criteria.  I’m reminded pretty much everyday that very many people in the professional physics business are at least as smart as I am: this also highlights the importance of thoroughly researching any claims before suggesting they are false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I am a believer in a variant of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russell’s teapot&lt;/a&gt; argument: that the onus is on the challenger to explain his/her claim clearly, not on the audience to waste time debunking this or that elementary misconception on the part of the challenger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T23:35:18.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T10:50:22.207" Score="-7" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/402639/mbnm-measuringbynotmeasuring-thought-experiment-is-this-wrong-if-so-how&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question which I later learned was apparently preposterous and was heavily downvoted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was still positive that some one will one day come across my question who will be generous and patient enough to look through my question and help me understand it better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a few days ago I wanted to check the status of the question, but to my surprise I did not find it in my list of asked questions. And then I looked through my &quot;all actions&quot; tab and &quot;reputation&quot; tab entries. &lt;em&gt;Nowhere!!&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After like 30 mins of search fortunately I found an old conversation of mine, in a chat room , where I had mentioned the link to my question, So I was able to retrieve the question. And it said to undelete the question it required votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are the upvotes from others are possible if you hide the question from everyone?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I commented the link to this question, on my other questions requesting users to analyze it and &lt;strong&gt;upovote for the undeletion&lt;/strong&gt; if they found it right. But then I get a private  message from moderators, that such commenting is not in line with the spirit of the website and I should instead ask in meta site or a chat room, which I found completely justified, so I messaged them back apologizing and told them that I would delete the comments that I posted on my questions requesting the undeletion and I go onto delete the comments, again to my surprise all of my comments are &lt;strong&gt;deleted without my permission.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this is totally wrong on so many levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly&lt;/strong&gt;, we already have the privilege of downvoting the question. If we find someone's question to be inappropriate we can downvote it vehemently, but we should not have the privilege of deleting the question for who knows, after sometime there may come new visitors who will upvote the question more, so by deleting it you are preventing the self correcting mechanism of society. By deleting a question you are removing a data sample from the public access and I believe it is a violent invasion of freedom of speech. And the reason that is given is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when&#xA;  they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance&#xA;  to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a&#xA;  solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will&#xA;  be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For this reason, the Community user will automatically delete old&#xA;  abandoned / dead questions in the following circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will be provided&quot; . This is dangerous as this chooses &lt;strong&gt;practicality over truth&lt;/strong&gt;. That is not how science works, we will have to examine extremely annoying ideas and take on ordeals, to come to the truth of reality. &lt;strong&gt;Instead of deleting the question, question with high downvotes can be shown in the end, therefore fixing nuisance problem.&lt;/strong&gt; And people who are searching the answer will notice the downvotes and will not engage in that quesion. Why don't we let people decide for themselves. Rather than saying here is a question, which many people think is bad, see if you want to spend time on it, it is objectively worse to hide that question from the &quot;those searching for a solution&quot;. A question is not an atomic statement. The question and its description can layout an unprecedented way of thinking which can bring forth valuable insights. By deleting the question all this organic nuanced dynamic is thrown out of window. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly&lt;/strong&gt;, even though we can delete the question, why are we removing every reference of the question, almost obsessively, from the website. In my personal profile, the question is deleted from my list of asked questions. How can we do it? Not just that, every reference of the question, from &quot;all actions&quot; and &quot;reputation&quot; entries is also erased? This was absolutely unnecessary, if I did not have the link to my own question somehow, I would have lost my question, I could have had some potentially valuable information or insight in that question. This is absolutely not acceptable, as this is almost equivalent to destruction of my private data and infringement of my privacy and my access to my own data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thirdly&lt;/strong&gt;, I can't ask any question, because if I try to ask a question it says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You have reached your question limit Sorry, we are no longer&#xA;  accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn&#xA;  more.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously? If we think that someone is not contributing to the community, we can take away that person's reputation. It is one of the purpose of reputation. But we simply cannot excommunicate the user. It seems to be a redundant functionality. And it's also not very effective, because all that someone needs to do is create a new account and start asking questions. This does not fix anything. Instead if we feel like someone is not genuine we can take the reputation off or make his/her reputation negative.  So that particular person will obviously be neglected. And if some one spams with like 100 questions, I think we already have a system that you cannot ask more than one question in a fixed window time period. And lets say if a person just goes on asking gibberish, there should an upper-limit of questions for given reputation-downvote based history of previously asked questions. This is way better solution as compared to ban someone who has asked like 10 questions in my case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summary&lt;/strong&gt; I agree there should be some measures to ensure the ease and quality of the website. And we do have such measures like downvoting, flagging, reputation loss. But I argue that deleting someone's question, and also banning that person from asking questions and obsessively removing references of the question thereby effectively taking away the access to the question, even to the person who asked it, is a blatant invasion of privacy and a violation of freedom of speech. A conflation of moderation with censoring. And a set of redundant unnecessary features which are arguably not the best practices in the field of Science, where truth is of the highest value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I predict that this question will be met with rigorous downvoting, will be put on hold as off-topic or opinion-based, and in a couple of days closed and in a week or a month deleted and wiped clean from the face of this website. &lt;strong&gt;And then someone writes a blog on why stack exchange is hostile to newcomers. Seriously?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I also speculate if &lt;strong&gt;Einstein&lt;/strong&gt; was to be born in this day and age and asks something which is non-populistic, he will not be discussed with, instead his questions will be downvoted, he will be banned from asking questions, his questions will be wiped clean by the &quot;routine&quot; in turn operated by &quot;moderators&quot;. This is not Science, this is online-mob-censoring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: Please do not confuse this with me blaming moderators and SE users. I am aware that deletion and banning happens automatically by preset routine. And that is exactly what I am talking against here. This is me trying to point out that the preset rules which guide the routine as of now, allow for blatant invasion of freedom of speech and privacy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user218113" LastEditorDisplayName="user218113" LastEditDate="2018-12-01T18:01:50.700" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T18:01:50.700" Title="My question is deleted, I am not allowed to ask more questions. Are these really good practices?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="41" ClosedDate="2018-12-01T16:32:21.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10919" CreationDate="2018-12-01T13:40:34.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was not heavily downvoted: it collected two up and two down votes. It was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ciQFj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ciQFj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is quite unclear (as indicated in one of the comments) and FYI, you completely forgot to include any estimates of uncertainty on the time &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt; in your problem.  Another quite appropriate comment deals with the macroscopic nature of your sphere, and the importance of decoherence in such problems.  You chose to ignore both of these so you can't exactly blame the site for automatically deleting your question as being &quot;abandoned&quot; or &quot;closed&quot; (which it was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T13:40:34.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T23:54:24.957" Score="77" ViewCount="1284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please join me in congratulating @Qmechanic upon reaching the 100k rep milestone.  We can all agree that his/her contribution to this site has been nothing short of outstanding, and the recognition that comes with 100k rep is absolutely well deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: as pointed out by @ACuriousMind, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7508/in-praise-of-and-links-therein&quot;&gt;appropriate laudatio&lt;/a&gt; by @EmilioPisanty which deserves to be highlighted in the main post beyond just a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T21:12:51.050" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T21:12:51.050" Title="Qmechanic reaches 100k rep" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2018-12-02T12:28:01.533" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interesting idea would be to publish or have a periodic magazine containing the most popular questions and most popular answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212603" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T12:28:01.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2018-12-02T23:31:36.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is, the number of duplicate questions are unlikely to reach 100%. Therefore, StackExchange is unlikely to completely halt it's Q&amp;amp;A activity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reaching 99% would cause a slowing of activity, but, as common questions are answered and marked as duplicates, non-duplicates will become increasingly advanced and complex. Also, questions which are already answered continue to be commented or alternately answered. So StackExchange will always have a purpose and have activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another note, I have seen many questions marked as &quot;duplicates&quot; which are not truly duplicates yet are similar. A better question might be, &quot;will the proliferation of marking questions as duplicates dissuade users from asking questions out of frustration?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148294" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T23:31:36.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T17:33:40.443" Score="-3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the 'physics' tag not allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because: The 'physics' tag is not allowed.&#xA;  Creating the new tag 'physics' requires at least 1000 reputation. Try something from the existing tags list instead. New tags cannot be created from the mobile site. The tag 'physics' is new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185269" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T20:00:47.487" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T20:00:47.487" Title="Why is the 'physics' tag not allowed?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10926" CreationDate="2018-12-06T17:54:46.020" Score="12" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your first obstacle is that you need 1000 reputation points to create a new tag. If you think a tag is missing and don't have 1000 reputation points, you can suggest it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/175/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have 1000 reputation points, there might be another obstacle: Certain words are blacklisted, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5446/2451&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Returning to OP's specific question, a 'physics' tag would be pointless, because then all questions should presumably be tagged with it. The point of tagging is that the tag word should give non-trivial information about the question. A 'physics' tag would not tell us something we didn't know already: That it's about physics!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T19:59:37.770" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T19:59:37.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10933" CreationDate="2018-12-06T20:22:34.620" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm want to simulate and visualize (render) how would light refract inside a glass mug with complex geometry. Since I'm quite sure I cannot code myself something like that, I would ask for a software recommendation. However, it seems that such questions not allowed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I ask for a software recommendation like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213987" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T06:29:04.757" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T12:39:53.700" Title="Where to ask for a software recommendation about light refraction in a 3D media?" Tags="|support|scope|resource-recommendation|software-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T23:03:25.870" Score="-2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I just asked a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/445427/ftl-drives-and-quantum-mechanics-experiments&quot;&gt;FTL drives and Quantum Mechanics experiments&lt;/a&gt;) about the intersection of quantum mechanics, FTL drives, and some form of relativity (not sure if it's general or special), and it got put on hold for &quot;no questions about non-mainstream physics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But relativity, FTL drives like the Alcubierre drive or wormholes, and quantum mechanics are all mainstream physics, so I'm not sure why it was closed. Could someone please explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178948" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T06:29:44.710" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T06:29:44.710" Title="Why was my question about Quantum Mechanics and FTL drives put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10929" CreationDate="2018-12-07T00:29:21.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, thanks for asking about it here. We always appreciate it when people take the time to learn more about why the community made a decision (rather than, say, ranting about how we are all closed-minded fools :p).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a quick look at your question, it looks like this is at the core of people's objections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;building an FTL drive (assuming that constructing such a device is possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, we don't know if such a device is possible, and if it is possible, we don't know how it would work. There are many details about FTL travel that are not known which could potentially affect the answer to your question. For that reason, we consider your question to fall under &quot;fictional physics&quot;, which includes pretty much anything about the behavior of a system that may not necessarily have a self-consistent set of rules. That's a subcategory of non-mainstream physics, as far as our hold reasons go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to improve your question would be to narrow it down to a specific physical system that is (real or) theoretically well-understood. In this meta post and comments you keep referencing the Alcubierre drive, which is one option for how an FTL drive might be implemented, so if you were to edit your question to ask about an Alcubierre drive specifically (not a generic FTL drive), that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be enough to get the hold removed. Or it might not; I'm not particularly familiar with that area of study, but people who are might say that you have to be even more specific than that, e.g. if there are several variants of Alcubierre drives, you would have to be precise about which one(s) you want to ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T00:29:21.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10929" CreationDate="2018-12-07T00:36:58.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, it would appear that the sum of the parts is non-mainstream - probably due to a very large number of misconceptions you have about mainstream physics. An Alcubierre drive is &quot;main-stream physics&quot; in the isolated context of analyzing a hypothetical solution to Einstein's Field Equations (it does break some energy conditions though so most physicists take its validity with a grain of salt), and many worlds interpretation is main-stream physics in the isolated context of discussing interpretations of standard quantum mechanics (but as an interpretation of QM and not a physical theory, it's true physical content is debatable). If you sprinkle on top of that a bunch of truly vague statements (which I can't make any heads or tails of) like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, my understanding is that information about a location's time&#xA;  propagates along its light-cone, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct,&#xA;  wouldn't that mean information about the collapse of alternate&#xA;  timelines also propagate along its light cone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say your question is now firmly in the realm of non main-stream physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176400" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T00:36:58.780" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10929" CreationDate="2018-12-07T07:11:06.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You asked why your question was closed.  I can't speak for the other voters, but I voted to close because you referred to a &quot;location's time&quot;, the meaning of which I cannot fathom, and then ignored multiple requests to clarify.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, Carnegie Hall is a location, and I asked you what you mean by the time associated with that location.  You ignored the invitation to clarify your meaning, which very much creates the impression that you never had any meaning in mind in the first place.  Unwillingness to engage with a simple clarifying question is pretty much always ample reason to close, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T07:11:06.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10928" CreationDate="2018-12-07T13:04:04.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software Recommendations Stack Exchange site, recommended by Chair in the comments, has had similar questions as what you've requested: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/17669&quot;&gt;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/17669&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/42052&quot;&gt;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/42052&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/16327&quot;&gt;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/16327&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems like a decent bet that it's something you could ask there. I don't know if it's on-topic there, but there is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;SciComp.se&lt;/a&gt;, though I think that site is more suited for queries about writing the code than finding &amp;amp; using libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T12:39:53.700" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T12:39:53.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10935" CreationDate="2018-12-08T01:52:57.230" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently taken to task by another person here who fingered me as having downvoted one of his answers. He was right- but how is this possible? Until now, I was under the impression that a downvote did not carry with it the identity of the person who cast it. So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can the recipient of a downvote determine who cast it?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T06:27:34.850" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T19:47:45.900" Title="How can one identify a downvoter?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10934" CreationDate="2018-12-08T02:27:03.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to identify who cast a downvote.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best a person can do is to make an educated guess that a person who left a critical comment around the same time also cast the downvote, or something like that. In the absence of more information, I suspect that's probably what happened here. But those guesses are not always accurate, and the person who guesses has no way of knowing whether their guess is correct unless you confirm it to them by responding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speculating or making assumptions about who cast a downvote is officially discouraged.&lt;/strong&gt; If someone accuses you of having downvoted in a comment, whether or not they're right, there's a pretty good chance that comment qualifies as either &quot;unfriendly or unkind&quot; or &quot;no longer needed&quot;, so please feel free to cast any applicable flag. Meanwhile, I would suggest simply ignoring the accusation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; To be more precise: nobody except a few high-level Stack Exchange employees has access to the information about who cast an individual (up- or) downvote. Not even diamond moderators. For completeness, I should note that diamond mods do have access to some information about voting &lt;em&gt;patterns&lt;/em&gt;; for instance, if one account is giving an unusually large number of votes to another account, our vote information tools can help detect that, but they don't show the specific posts on which those votes were cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T19:47:45.900" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T19:47:45.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T18:05:10.500" Score="-2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/445766/solving-a-biot-savart-problem-to-completion&quot;&gt;solving a biot savart problem to completion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm gonna be honest, this seems like a classic &quot;close because of miscellaneous reason not related to what I voted for&quot; that is seen across stack exchange, but I'm going to nonetheless ask: What can I do to clarify my question to make it more clearly state the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100335" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T00:02:53.580" Title="What can I do to clarify what I'm asking?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10936" CreationDate="2018-12-09T00:02:53.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed because... well...it is unclear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You do not specify what &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$r$&lt;/span&gt; is and instead you expect the  readers to divine it for you.  To be specific how can you expect someone who was not present at the lecture to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;provide some context about how you would find &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\hat r$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$r$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the problem here?  Is it the integration?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You claim &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the most part, it's just a big QED, because it's calculus, not electromagnetism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t understand what that means.  You have an integral to evaluate hence it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a calculus problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you mean by QED?  &lt;em&gt;Quid est demonstratum&lt;/em&gt; (which I presume must be right) or quantum electrodynamics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X$&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be blunt this is a simple example, and this or similar are found in many textbooks.  Did you consult any of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T00:02:53.580" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10939" CreationDate="2018-12-12T09:24:15.107" Score="9" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is obvious that Physics SE community aren't here to solve specific physics problems. Homework policy, however, states that a question can be narrowed down to a conceptual question. To reinforce what has been said, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a general rule, we do not discourage homework questions, as long as they are related to physics. But do keep in mind that Physics Stack Exchange is not primarily a homework help site; it's a place to get &lt;strong&gt;specific conceptual physics questions&lt;/strong&gt; answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, we can conclude that &lt;em&gt;we're free to ask a conceptual question concerning where we're stuck while solving a specific physics problem&lt;/em&gt;. For instance,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X: A man walks 7 km in 2 hours and 2 km in 1 hour in the same&#xA;  direction. What is the man's average speed for the whole journey? For&#xA;  this problem, I need a conceptual approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Y: You can use &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$S = \dfrac{\Delta x}{t}$&lt;/span&gt; to compute average velocity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be a good example of a conceptual question? The steps are given in a conceptual approach without computing any specific values. I hope this is welcome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198445" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T09:27:52.570" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T04:01:04.553" Title="What are good examples of narrowing a homework question down to a conceptual question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10938" CreationDate="2018-12-12T10:55:49.853" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A man walks 7 km in 2 hours and 2 km in 1 hour in the same direction. What is the man's average speed for the whole journey? For this problem, I need a conceptual approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This absolutely would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be an acceptable question on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement &quot;I need a conceptual approach&quot; is pretty meaningless, or at least plays no role in helping us understand what exactly you are stuck on. And without that, all that's left is a pure homework problem without even the slightest indication of any effort or understanding on your part. Most such questions get closed and quickly downvoted, often to a score of -4 to -6, because it looks like you're trying to cheat on your homework, but also because we consider it fairly rude to ask for our help without putting in any work of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the closest you could get to making this question acceptable for this site would be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is a problem I've been trying to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;A man walks 7 km in 2 hours and 2 km in 1 hour in the same direction. What is the man's average speed for the whole journey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I made a list of the information I have available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;first distance: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$7\ \mathrm{km}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;first time: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2\ \text{hours}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;second distance: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2\ \mathrm{km}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;second time: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1\ \text{hour}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tried putting the distances and times together to get the totals, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$9\ \mathrm{km}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3\ \text{hours}$&lt;/span&gt;, and I also tried calculating the speed in each part, getting &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.5\ \mathrm{km/h}$&lt;/span&gt; for the first part and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2\ \mathrm{km/h}$&lt;/span&gt; for the second part. I know I need to find average speed, but I don't know of a way to calculate average speed from what I have. Is there a formula that lets me do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meets almost all the expectations we have of a homework-like question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It quotes the original problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It shows some work (organizing the given values, calculating total distance and time and the speed in each segment)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It asks a question, &quot;Is there a formula that lets me do that?&quot;, which is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. not asking for the answer to the problem, nor asking for &quot;help&quot; in general, but asking for a way to get through the single step that the asker is stuck on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;conceptual&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. not asking us to do a calculation nor to come up with a whole chain of reasoning out of thin air&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this question still falls short of being &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; acceptable in one significant way: the asker didn't didn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;do their research&lt;/a&gt;. At a &lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt;, we would expect an asker to check a textbook or do a web search to look up information about key concepts involved in the problem, in this case &quot;average speed&quot;, and the &lt;em&gt;top&lt;/em&gt; search result for &quot;average speed&quot; (at least for me) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Average-Speed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Average-Speed&lt;/a&gt;, which gives step-by-step instructions for calculating the average speed. If the asker had done that search before posting, they should have found that page or something like it and at least tried to apply the instructions there. The fact that they didn't mention trying that, and in fact didn't even mention finding that web page, means they didn't do enough research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in this case there is no way to ask the question in a way that would be acceptable on this site - at least, not as long as the thing keeping you from solving the problem is that you don't know the formula. It's simply too easy to look that up. But in general, many homework-like problems are more complicated than this, and there isn't such an easy path to looking up the answer or a procedure for finding it. In those cases, you can search the web, check textbooks, go through some preliminary calculations, and try to make progress on the problem in other ways, and still be left with some conceptual issue, smaller than the whole problem, which you're unable to figure out - and &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; what can make a good question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it seems to be a frequent point of confusion for many people, let me say clearly: the fact that a question does not include numerical values does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; make it conceptual. Even the fact that a question does not ask us to do a calculation of any sort, does not make it conceptual, although that comes a bit closer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T04:01:04.553" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T04:01:04.553" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10938" CreationDate="2018-12-13T00:28:22.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A straight line carrying a uniform linear charge density &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$4\mu C/m$&lt;/span&gt; is&#xA;  stretched along the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$z$&lt;/span&gt;-axis.  Apply Gauss' law to find the field at a&#xA;  distance of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1m$&lt;/span&gt; from the wire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-conceptual question&lt;/strong&gt;: How to I apply Gauss's law for this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conceptual question&lt;/strong&gt;: I know that Gauss' law for this case requires the use of a cylinder.  But how can the cylinder be chosen to have finite length &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ell$&lt;/span&gt; when the line of charges extends from &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-\infty$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\infty$&lt;/span&gt;?  The same type of question arises for the case of an infinite plane with constant surface charge density: why can we choose a Gaussian cube of finite size when the charges extend to infinity in the plane?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, the question is about the process and the assumptions that go into using Gauss' law, whereas in the first it's about the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T00:28:22.303" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-13T05:14:51.320" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice posts a question.  Bob posts an answer.  I want to comment on Bob's answer, and I want both Alice and Bob to be notified of the comment.  Therefore I type something like &quot;@Alice:  As @Bob said....&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then get a pop-up notice that says I can have only one @-sign per comment.   Fine.  The same notice tells me that the &quot;owner of the post&quot; will be notified automatically, and therefore I should allocate my @-sign to the non-owner.  However, I have no idea whether Alice or Bob counts as the &quot;owner of the post&quot;.  Is &quot;the post&quot; the question or is it the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Question 1:&lt;/b&gt;  In this situation, who is the relevant &quot;owner of the post&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Question 2:&lt;/b&gt;  Can the pop-up text be modified so that other users won't have to ask this question in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T14:51:58.487" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T14:51:58.487" Title="Notifications for comments under answers" Tags="|support|comments|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10941" CreationDate="2018-12-13T05:18:16.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the post is an answer, the post owner is the author of the answer. In this case, that's Bob. Ideally, you could say something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;@Alice and Bob, (whatever)&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. If you're commenting under a question, the post owner is the author of the question, and people who've written answers cannot be tagged with &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; symbols unless they have left comments under the question (needless to say, they definitely won't be pinged automatically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need a modification in the message because there's an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; which should be linked in the page the pop-up takes you to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43019&quot;&gt;How do comment @replies work?&lt;/a&gt; It's probably not feasible to add a direct link to the comment &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; replies section because we don't have enough space for that level of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T08:03:40.563" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T08:03:40.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10946" CreationDate="2018-12-15T14:38:03.813" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens to me very often that I see an interesting question that I'd like to know the answer to. I'll favorite it but then never get notified if there is a change. It would be very nice to have a &quot;subscribe to question&quot; feature, which sends me a notification if there is a new answer (or optionally an edit to an existing answer) to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know to what extent this is even within the realm of possibility for physics SE, as it's part of the larger SE framework, but I thought the idea might also be useful for other users, and didn't see this mentioned on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65074" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T15:07:22.107" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T23:00:38.957" Title="Feature: Subscribing to Questions" Tags="|feature-request|questions|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10945" CreationDate="2018-12-15T17:38:43.247" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently received two down votes in one day on an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/365587/&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that was submitted more than a year ago (accepted answer), unfortunately without any comments. At the same time as the down votes, the question was marked as off topic (homework like question...). So I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an active community policy to discourage users from replying to questions that later might be closed as off-topic?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to forward comments/ask for clarification from anonymous users who voted on a question or answer? I know that I cannot see who voted on a post, but it would be nice to be able to ask them to give a hint of what I am doing wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114601" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T17:44:02.673" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T04:37:46.757" Title="Understanding down votes on answers" Tags="|feature-request|specific-question|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10944" CreationDate="2018-12-15T20:04:00.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there an active community policy to discourage users from replying to questions that later might be closed as off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. There is an active community policy to try to close all off-topic questions as and when they arise and before they get answers. Unfortunately we can't get to all of them in time, and we're sometimes late by a few hours / days / weeks / months / years, but when we see an off-topic question which hasn't been closed yet, the question's age (together with the presence or not of answers) does not factor into the decision of whether it should be open or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid posting on threads that later get closed, the surefire way is to not post answers to off-topic questions. This can sometimes be tricky, but the example you posted is a textbook case (ho, ho) of blatant homework, and it is very clearly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way to forward comments/ask for clarification from anonymous users who voted on a question or answer? I know that I cannot see who voted on a post, but it would be nice to be able to ask them to give a hint of what I am doing wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, by design. This is something that we as a community have no control over, and SE has made it repeatedly clear that they are not going to consider changing these mechanisms. The best you can do is to add a polite comment asking for feedback and hope that people answer it. Or, if it's really bad, you can come here to meta and ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, there's a high chance that the downvotes represent people who think that the question is particularly bad and that by answering such bad questions you're encouraging the OP, and others who see the question, to post similarly bad questions. If you want to avoid this type of downvote, I would recommend not answering bad questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T20:04:00.680" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10943" CreationDate="2018-12-15T23:00:38.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already one question-subscription service: each question has a RSS feed associated with it (for this question the URL is &lt;code&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/feeds/question/10943&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link appears at the bottom of the right-hand side-bar, and for this question with my current OS and my browser combination it looks like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j4Hc7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j4Hc7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas this is support for getting notification in your RSS reader, and not an on-site feature which seems to be what most people are expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are similar feeds for &lt;strong&gt;user&lt;/strong&gt; (find the link on their profile) and &lt;strong&gt;tags&lt;/strong&gt; (find the tag search page) you would like to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T23:00:38.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10938" CreationDate="2018-12-16T18:37:22.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good conceptual question is one where the questioner outlines the thought process that leads to an impasse. @ZeroTheHero gave one good example of this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good answer to a conceptual question is one that lifts the impasse without giving out the solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214934" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:37:22.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10944" CreationDate="2018-12-17T04:37:46.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason I rarely leave comments or details on my downvotes is precisely to avoid entering in the kind of discussion that this question poses.  It’s two downvotes: it’s not the end of the world.  You probably received some suspicious upvotes, so just think of those two downvotes as part of a random walk in reputation space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T04:37:46.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10957" CreationDate="2018-12-21T19:53:53.513" Score="10" ViewCount="616" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had comments on my questions and answers questioning my use of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ \int \mathrm{d}r \qquad \text{or} \qquad \int dr.$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have always thought that it should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be italiced as it is an operator. &lt;br&gt; However, some have said that it may be confused with an exterior derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a convention I should follow? Are the situations that are better suited for one or the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just to be clear. This isn’t a physics question. I am just wondering about the usage on this site - whether there is a convention based on precedents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastEditorUserId="37677" LastEditDate="2018-12-25T07:58:24.403" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T01:50:00.563" Title="Straight $\mathrm{d}$ or italic $d$ for differentials?" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-23T21:28:49.530" Score="6" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm on the review queues, sometimes I can't edit the post for various reasons. (I have a maxed out edit queue, or someone else's edit is pending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens on the normal site, a red bar will appear to explain the reason I can't edit, but when I'm in the queue, there's no bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bug, I believe, and I think it should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132789" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T08:24:37.880" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T12:11:32.387" Title="No red error bar in the review queue" Tags="|feature-request|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-26T17:02:10.657" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can somebody please explain what this physics question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/448615/211783&quot;&gt;Is the strenght of the magnetic field the same across the surface of the magnet&amp;#39;s pole?&lt;/a&gt;) has to do with engineering? Is physics not about how nature (in this case magnets) works? Does it matter if I intend to use the answer towards engineering later on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211783" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T20:07:33.560" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T20:07:33.560" Title="Physics question wrongly put on hold as &quot;engineering&quot;" Tags="|support|status-completed|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2018-12-26T19:31:33.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That was me. But I am always happy if the community votes to re-open a question that I've closed: it means the question is more interesting than I realized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left this comment when I closed the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This isn't a fundamental property of a permanent magnet: it depends on details of the materials used in its manufacture, on the process by which it was magnetized, by its history of exposure to other magnetic fields, and a bunch of other &quot;weather&quot; that isn't a good fit for an answer in our format. People who need uniform fields build Helmholtz coils. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stand by that. It's probably possible to build a magnet with a uniform magnetization over the surface. It's definitely possible to build a magnet where the magnetization is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; uniform. And it's possible to take a uniformly magnetized hunk of stuff and screw it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to teach a poorly-designed lab experiment with solenoids and a bunch of old AlNiCo magnets, where the students had a 10% chance of accidentally reversing the polarity of their bar magnet with the solenoid. By the end of the week, when all dozen intro lab sections had learned on the same equipment, I would usually spend an afternoon re- polarizing the magnets so that they matched their labeling, and I would usually discover one magnet that some students had converted into a quadrupole! Switching to the newer rare-earth magnets reduced the chance of an accidental mispolarization, but didn't eliminate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's before we start to talk about the &quot;patch effect&quot; in polycrystalline metals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that this meta response to your question is  physics stories rather than site policy suggests that perhaps I wasn't right to have closed it. I'll let the folks in the reopen queue make that judgement. I think that a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technique&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-technique&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-technique&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;em&gt;how to determine&lt;/em&gt; whether the field you want is uniform would be okay for us. But you seemed to think that you were asking a basic question about magnetism, when you were in fact asking something sneakier about the fabrication and storage of &quot;typical&quot; consumer magnets. That's what prompted me to use the &quot;engineering&quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T19:31:33.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10949" CreationDate="2019-01-01T01:50:00.563" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;David's answer is mostly OK, but his proposal includes several parts which are not OK. Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When editing someone else's post:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If they use plain &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; and there is no indication the choice to make it italic was intentional, you can change differential &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;\mathrm{d}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, no, no.&lt;/strong&gt; If the post uses plain &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; and there is no indication that the choice to make it italic was intentional, then &lt;strong&gt;leave it alone&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice between straight &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathrm d$&lt;/span&gt; and italic &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d$&lt;/span&gt; is a stylistic choice; if you find a post that makes that choice differently than you would have done it, then &lt;strong&gt;tough luck&lt;/strong&gt;. Live with it and move on. It just isn't that important. You do not get to change that user's stylistic choices, and you do not get to introduce non-rendering source clutter like &lt;code&gt;\mathit{d}&lt;/code&gt; into that user's source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David's point 4 needs to read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When editing someone else's post:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If they use plain &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;there are active indications that the stylistic choice wasn't intentional&lt;/strong&gt;, you can change differential &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;\mathrm{d}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Active indications that the stylistic choice wasn't intentional can include things like sloppy formatting overall, both in the maths and in the grammar and punctuation. This is obviously a subjective judgement and there's a significant gray area, so err on the side of letting the existing formatting stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? Because it is a perfectly acceptable choice to have render one's differentials in italics and to use straight &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt;s to render them to avoid the clutter in source that's meant to be human-readable. In this vein, consider as an example the following block of LaTeX source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;\int_0^1 &#xA;\int_0^\pi&#xA;  J_\nu\mathopen{}\left(&#xA;    \sqrt{1-\frac{d f}{d\varphi}(0) \rho^2} &#xA;    \cos(\varphi)&#xA;  \right)\mathclose{}&#xA;  \exp\mathopen{}\left(&#xA;     i k\rho \cos(\varphi) &#xA;   + i \nu \varphi&#xA;   + \frac{d g}{d\rho}(\rho+\delta\rho)&#xA;  \right)\mathclose{}&#xA;\: d\varphi&#xA;\: d\rho&#xA;$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple indications here that the user knows what they are doing and that every choice done here is intentional. There aren't any &lt;code&gt;\mathit{d}&lt;/code&gt;s here and they would actively harm the readability of the source, so they should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be introduced, no matter how much your inner typesetting pedant wants you to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I harping on and on about source readability? Because the site standard for site formatting is Markdown, which is explicitly designed to make both the source and the output human-readable. We should aim to have the same goal where MathJax is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David's stated aim,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's useful to be able to edit posts where people don't really care about the notation to match a convention, while allowing people who do have a specific preference to express that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is good enough, but you should not need to add readability-harming clutter to your source to prevent other users from deciding that they don't like your stylistic choices. There is an ambiguity in plain &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt;s between the authorial intent &quot;I want my differentials italicized, and I don't want to bother with semantic &lt;code&gt;\mathit{d}&lt;/code&gt;s&quot; and &quot;I don't care about the difference between &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d$&lt;/span&gt;s and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathrm d$&lt;/span&gt;s&quot;. Unless you can break that ambiguity through other means, the rule of thumb is to leave it as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T01:50:00.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-01T02:59:03.400" Score="13" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges&#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.&#xA;To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Physics breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                 Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                 50         40&#xA;Users destroyed                                  31          0&#xA;Users deleted                                   176          0&#xA;Users contacted                                  72          0&#xA;User banned from review                           3          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue           315      8,143&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue              200      4,506&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue         15     10,043&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue                1      2,908&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue                11     15,200&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue              284     26,538&#xA;Tags merged                                      21          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                            37          0&#xA;Tag synonyms created                             32          0&#xA;Questions unprotected                             5          0&#xA;Questions reopened                              154         52&#xA;Questions protected                             545        286&#xA;Questions migrated                              171         65&#xA;Questions merged                                  5          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁴                               20      5,947&#xA;Questions closed                              5,303      6,995&#xA;Question flags handled⁴                       1,601      4,366&#xA;Posts unlocked                                    2         68&#xA;Posts undeleted                                  95        761&#xA;Posts locked                                     13        521&#xA;Posts deleted⁵                                2,195     17,375&#xA;Posts bumped                                      0      8,729&#xA;Escalations to the CM team                        6          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                              672          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                 13      5,500&#xA;Comments deleted⁶                            17,158     14,357&#xA;Comment flags handled                         2,346      3,167&#xA;Bounties canceled                                 6          0&#xA;Answers flagged                                  80      6,867&#xA;Answer flags handled                          4,738      2,209&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat            203          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T07:32:52.540" Title="2018: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10963" CreationDate="2019-01-04T10:41:31.973" Score="13" ViewCount="733" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;main site&lt;/a&gt; much, but I have been a regular participant on Physics SE's main chat: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;, for the past two years. Lately, I have been noticing a drastic drop in the number of subject experts i.e. grad students and professional physicists, visiting the chat. I know that some of the former regulars (including professional physicists and grad students) have either &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10668/199113&quot;&gt;shifted to the software industry&lt;/a&gt; or have gotten busier with real-life. Of course, I'm hoping the best for them! At the same time, the main chat seems a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/48345804#48345804&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bit different&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; these days, and we don't get as many interesting physics conversations; simply because there are not enough active chat users. Perhaps, another issue is that many of the main site users are not even aware that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; exists!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few quick fixes I could think of are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10394/community-promotion-ads-2018&quot;&gt;community advertisement&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The 2019 version of community promotion ads should be up soon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resurrect the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9905/should-we-stop-having-biweekly-chat-sessions&quot;&gt;bi-weekly chat sessions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. We could again start conducting &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7783/physics-stack-exchange-ask-me-anything-ama&quot;&gt;AMAs&lt;/a&gt; from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Almost every time I peep into chat these days, I see a couple of new users asking easily Google-able or sometimes nonsensical homework-y questions, with terrible formatting and terrible grammar. Worse is when a user just goes &quot;Is anyone willing to help me?&quot; without giving any hint of their problem.  To avoid that, we should &lt;strong&gt;hold homework and intro-level physics questions to the same standard as on the main site&lt;/strong&gt;, in chat i.e. you should&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;show us your effort and research --- have you done basic Googling at least? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use proper formatting (format mathematical expressions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/97938/any-chance-of-mathjax-in-chat/220976#220976&quot;&gt;ChatJax&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar to the best of your ability.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sol.gfxile.net/dontask.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not ask about asking; just ask&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10563/discouraging-screenshots-of-questions-at-least-the-textual-part&quot;&gt;not simply post a screenshot&lt;/a&gt; of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=48315806#48315806&quot;&gt;ping random users&lt;/a&gt; when asking for help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, the last issue (regarding the asker's displayed effort) is what bothers me the most. Such chat messages which ask into-level physics homework questions or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9723&quot;&gt;JEE-type questions&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;don't follow the above 6 rules&lt;/em&gt;, should be shifted (immediately, on-sight) to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/54160/problem-solving-strategies&quot;&gt;Problem Solving Strategies&lt;/a&gt; room, which was &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; created for discussing beginner-level questions (mostly high school physics) and is less harsh about such rules. I had &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=48071388#48071388&quot;&gt;once mentioned&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine a professional physicist landing up on the main page of the&#xA;  site and noticing such JEE type problems all around. They're sure to&#xA;  go - &lt;em&gt;'tis not the place for serious physics&lt;/em&gt;, and leave the site for&#xA;  good (I half-believe that's already happening :/). Add to that the&#xA;  terrible question formattings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've started to feel the same way about chat. Nevertheless, I would like to hear this community's opinions on this topic and suggestions about how we can bring more experts and &lt;em&gt;enthusiastic&lt;/em&gt; physics students to our chat room who'd be more interested in discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/48076200#48076200&quot;&gt;dinosaurs rather than alphabets&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/191954/chair&quot;&gt;@Chair&lt;/a&gt; has given an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10960/199113&quot;&gt;excellent idea&lt;/a&gt; below, that is, we should write up a set of room rules and link it in the room description. That's great and I'm considering starting a new meta thread about that (listing out the &quot;room-rules&quot;) once this is settled. But what I'm &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; interested in is: your opinions about what we should do &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; a new user &lt;strong&gt;does not&lt;/strong&gt; follow the &quot;room rules&quot; (like posting a screenshot of a homework question, pinging random users, posting homework with questions having terrible formattings, etc.). Should we &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; (on-sight) shift their messages to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/54160/problem-solving-strategies&quot;&gt;problem-solving room&lt;/a&gt; after giving them a warning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; (on-sight) delete their messages after giving them a warning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;just give them a warning and do nothing else?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, we should go with option 1. However, in case of repeated offenses, we should hand out 30-minute timeouts and perhaps suspensions in the more extreme cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10959/how-can-we-improve-the-participation-of-subject-experts-and-enthusiastic-physics/10960?noredirect=1#comment42124_10960&quot;&gt;@Chair&lt;/a&gt;: That's among the main reasons why I was hesitant to write a set of&#xA;  rules as a rough draft. I'm not sure what most people want. It doesn't&#xA;  matter much that I like segregating rooms by topic (i.e. I think&#xA;  homework goes to JEE or problem-solving and meta matters go to&#xA;  physics-meta): if other people don't mind homework, then they stay in&#xA;  the hbar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree with him that &lt;strong&gt;segregating rooms by topics&lt;/strong&gt; would be a good idea. Post homework and beginner level physics questions in the problem-solving room. Post meta-related issues in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/13775/physics-meta&quot;&gt;meta room&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;. Leave the main chat (The h Bar) for discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/48076402#48076402&quot;&gt;dinosaurs&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; physics and other interesting stuff)! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expressing your opinion, at this juncture, is very important&lt;/strong&gt; --- otherwise, we won't know what you (as a community) want and this issue will remain forever suspended. This discussions &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; to take place now so that we can understand the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_opinion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;majority opinion&lt;/a&gt; and act accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*I'm aware that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/13775/physics-meta&quot;&gt;Physics Meta&lt;/a&gt; room isn't too active these days. But I'm sure that if you really want to discuss any meta related issue you can simply mention the topic you want to discuss, in The h Bar; the regulars and mods will follow up the discussion in the Physics Meta room.&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102&quot;&gt;Have we lost the necessary critical mass of professional physicists?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user199113" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T16:31:30.237" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:25:17.190" Title="How can we improve the participation of subject experts and enthusiastic physics students in chat?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|chat|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10959" CreationDate="2019-01-04T11:33:57.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a pretty obvious solution which prevents people from being driven away by help-vampires: &lt;strong&gt;we simply formalize all those quick fixes, and give them more specific recognition&lt;/strong&gt; than 'unspoken canon', which somewhat resembles the present status. Right now, the only written one is 'don't ask about asking', and that's written casually enough for one to easily avoid taking it too seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of having to bring them up each time, we can have a concrete set of guidelines explicitly linked in the room description. I've looked in at the Stack Overflow Python room a few times (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/6/python&quot;&gt;link to the room&lt;/a&gt;), and they have a distinct set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://sopython.com/chatroom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt; prominently positioned. That should help the well-intentioned askers from accidentally making mistakes, and it will provide strong grounds for formally informing homework dump-like questions that they aren't OK. But with what we have together right now, there's nothing to tell me that posting a picture of my homework there is out of line, as long as I don't start thinking about why I was given that assignment in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important consideration is that we should write fun rules which reflect the aspects of the room culture (most notably JR's pictures of food :P), and shows that while there are canons to be conformed to, it's also a place for fun. The Python room does it well: they don't sound like killjoys, and we should make sure we don't either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, we will need to &lt;strong&gt;stop advertising chat as a possible homework dump&lt;/strong&gt;. I've seen a lot of comments under homework questions recommending chat in a rather questionable way. Many comments get this right, by mentioning that askers should format their work appropriately and show some effort, but a lot of them don't. The meta question regarding places to ask homework questions has two answers which mention chat: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10917&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7470&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, the second of which provides less than satisfactory warnings (fortunately it's heavily downvoted, though those seem to be for other reasons). Our advertisements of chat should be carefully worded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves the issue of attracting experts to the chats without a resolution. I think one way to add some interesting content there would be to &lt;strong&gt;redirect &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the questions which are closed as opinion-based, engineering, and non-mainstream on the main site&lt;/strong&gt; to chat. Again, we must be careful about which ones we redirect. The non-mainstream policy is designed to keep out random speculation, which would be just as annoying in a chat. But there are some more subtle questions which would probably be OK, though I haven't seen examples. Engineering questions have a similar case: I'm sure a few of the borderline ones (particularly those &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; resembling 'build this device for me') would be of some interest to chat users, though they're technically off-topic on the main site. I have certainly seen a few well-thought out but unfortunately opinion-based questions closed (though I don't have any links at my disposal), and those would be great chat topics. The standard format of these salvageable opinion-based questions is 'what do you think of so-and-so paper?' (Note: an attempt to create this kind of conversation in chat was very well-received but apparently unsuccessful. The meta post regarding the same is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5144&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I lurk in chat without saying much, so I think that a set of guidelines written by a more regular participant would be a better reflection of what exactly people would want to talk about. I just thought I'd chime in since the Python room's guide looked like something worth mentioning and it answers the question to some extent.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T07:19:59.607" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T07:19:59.607" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10962" CreationDate="2019-01-04T16:22:37.310" Score="-5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to what is the age of users in general. I want to ask this because age determines so many things. A student of age 30 can be far better than a student of age 17. I know it’s personal information which you will not want to share but I just want a rough idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user214211" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T16:26:38.000" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T22:18:35.410" Title="What is the general age of users on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10961" CreationDate="2019-01-04T22:18:35.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This information is not systematically collected anywhere, so the best that you can expect is a general impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few users in our chat room who occasionally reveal their age, directly or indirectly: high schooler students or college undergraduates preparing for entrance exams for college or graduate school, and a couple who are partly or completely retired. But that's not a representative sample of the userbase for the site as a whole. Most of our community doesn't participate in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally don't think that age is very important, so I spent some years aging non-monotonically. For example, I turned thirty-seven in 2013 and 2016,&#xA;and thirty-nine in 2015, 2017, and 2018. (I think.)&#xA;My children are of an age where birthdays and ages are a Big Deal, and they find this &lt;em&gt;infuriating&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T22:18:35.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10959" CreationDate="2019-01-05T14:54:23.267" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am absolutely in favour of reviving the chat sessions if anyone has good ideas. Likewise, I think an ad could indeed increase at least the awareness that chat exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think we need to be careful with the formalization of chat due to its inherently informal nature. Room rules themselves - &quot;no no-effort homework, don't flood the chat, don't ask to ask&quot; - are probably a useful idea so that newcomers don't have to learn the culture by pure osmosis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think declaring in advance what we should do with those that violate them seems both premature and overly specific. The room owners should do whatever seems right in the moment. I can certainly imagine all sort of examples where each of &quot;doing nothing/moving the messages/deleting the messages/suspending the user&quot; would be appropriate. Additionally, it is not guaranteed that the room is 24/7 overseen by a moderator or room owner (although our coverage is pretty good in my impression), so promising a specific consequence would justify disgruntled users pointing to an instance where e.g. the messages were not immediately deleted and asking why it didn't happen there if the rules say this &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; happens. Only promise a specific consequence if you can afford to actually ensure it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, beware a culture where, instead of explaining the rules to newcomers, we just point at the rules and scold the users for not having read them. (No one pays attention to the MathJax link in the room description, so don't expect anyone to pay more attention to any room rules linked there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T14:54:23.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10964" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10966" CreationDate="2019-01-06T10:45:53.460" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7543/should-we-add-a-notify-follow-a-question-feature&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the feature request for adding an option to get a notification when a &quot;followed&quot; question gets answers posted to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top answer seemed to indicate that such a feature was unlikely to be implemented in the near future, &lt;strong&gt;without really giving a reason why&lt;/strong&gt;. However, that question was asked in 2016 and I was wondering if the powers that be have perhaps had a change of heart on the matter (or have been overthrown and replaced by powers that think this is a good idea). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with hopes that this question doesn't get marked as a duplicate I pose the following question (for which I haven't been able to find answer yet). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Exactly why are we unable/unwilling to implement this feature?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56599" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T16:06:04.007" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T20:13:52.793" Title="Adding option to get notification when a &quot;followed&quot; question is answered" Tags="|feature-request|questions|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-01-13T01:09:07.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10959" CreationDate="2019-01-07T01:04:12.177" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be ruthless about it, in order to keep and gain more professionals,  &lt;strong&gt;completely, totally ban&lt;/strong&gt; the homework related questions. Currently,  people that ignore the homework warnings are still treated nicely, but I think this is one area where the &quot;be nice&quot;  policy is actively working to reduce the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been on and off this site for five years, and in that time Google has really picked up on indexing homework questions. This has driven away all but the most dedicated  professionals and I'm  doubtful that this decline can be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-interest disclaimer: The site is an invaluable  resource for self study types like myself, but imo the homework questions are slowly killing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user214814" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T01:04:12.177" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10964" CreationDate="2019-01-07T05:59:20.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exactly why are we unable/unwilling to implement this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no &quot;we&quot; when it comes to implementing features. The entirety of the software that runs Stack Exchange sites is written by Stack Exchange, and it is essentially the same software that's in use for over 150 different sites. We, as the user community of one of them, can request features, but it is up to SE to decide whether those features are worth investing developer time into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a large chunk of the history of SE, the best way to request features for the software which cut across &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;the full spectrum of sites&lt;/a&gt; has been as a feature request on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (previously Meta Stack Overflow, until MSE was unfolded out of MSO in 2014). However, as you may be aware if you followed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316934/revisiting-the-hot-network-questions-feature-what-are-our-shared-goals-for-ha&quot;&gt;this recent fracas&lt;/a&gt;, it appears that SE feels that the feature-request-on-meta is not scaling well enough with the growth of the site base, user base, and code base - see in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/317011&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the feature request you're interested in, there are already MSE posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45360/subscribing-to-questions-and-comments-that-dont-belong-to-you&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83343/adding-favorites-to-the-stack-exchange-global-inbox&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with substantial support. So, with that in mind, it is perfectly legitimate to ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exactly why are Stack Exchange developers unable/unwilling to implement this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the short answer is that we don't know. As Tim Post writes in the thread linked above, the communication channels to and from SE on this type of request have not been working very well lately. There's good reason to hope that they're working on ways to improve those types of communication channels, but for the time being it's hard to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That specific example, for instance, is certainly a worthwhile goal, and if you get ahold of Adam Lear, Tim Post, or Shog9 (say) on the MSE chat, I suspect that they'll tell you that it's something that they would like to implement. However, it's not an easy thing to roll out: there are significant design questions and challenges (how should it work? how should it look like? are users going to understand it?) and there are significant performance challenges (the feature would represent a whole lot of extra calculations regarding who needs to get notified, over a very large userbase×questionbase, and that has a significant impact on server load) so it could be that it's just not feasible enough. Or it could be that it's potentially feasible but they don't feel it'd be useful enough to merit the investment. Or it could be that they disagree that it would be ultimately useful or in line with the site design goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of those is the case, though? at present: we don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T20:13:52.793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T20:13:52.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10958" CreationDate="2019-01-09T08:54:17.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very interesting, thanks for posting this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the past several days I've been browsing these questions on various meta sites and it seems like we have a pretty good balance between actions taken by the moderators and actions taken by the community. Specifically, I see the community numbers being higher than the moderator numbers for most actions except those which only mods can take directly - which is definitely not the case on all sites. For example, consider this compilation of numbers of questions closed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;top 25 sites&lt;/a&gt; on the network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Site                        Moderators  Community&#xA;&#xA;Stack Overflow              22180       331769&#xA;Super User                  6280        4860&#xA;Ask Ubuntu                  808         14513&#xA;English Language &amp;amp; Usage    4343        6418&#xA;Unix &amp;amp; Linux                1129        7063&#xA;Arqade                      273         1694&#xA;Server Fault                5187        1164&#xA;Ask Different               2189        479&#xA;Mathematics                 1954        36414&#xA;Seasoned Advice             497         133&#xA;English Language Learners   1406        1036&#xA;Database Administrators     518         2821&#xA;Home Improvement            216         961&#xA;Android Enthusiasts         1858        115&#xA;Science Fiction and Fantasy 128         1838&#xA;Electrical Engineering      2707        4285&#xA;Motor Vehicles              312         65&#xA;Cross Validated             8834        2261&#xA;Movies &amp;amp; TV                 5306        507&#xA;Web Applications            1350        160&#xA;Tex-LaTeX                   124         5224&#xA;Role-Playing Games          880         1562&#xA;Physics                     5303        6995&#xA;Travel                      1218        2638&#xA;Code Review                 2158        2638&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T07:32:52.540" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T07:32:52.540" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T09:13:08.703" Score="8" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a mathematical physics student and learning  mathematics(algebraic geometry, complex geometry etc.) and theoretical physics (CFT, string theory, supersymmetry etc.) in the meanwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found an interesting phenomenon: students learning math are much more active than those laerning physics on line. Take myself as an example, I discuss math problems with schoolmates in online groups everyday, but I even don't know an online group about physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edit: If you think it's a bias, ask yourself: do you discuss with your classmates about physics problems everyday online? And the frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To math problems, my answer is yes, I do. Believe it or not. Maybe it's related to the difference between math and physics.&#xA;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that because the difference between different physics branches is so large that people studying different areas of physics don't understand what others are doing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit: Maybe I shoule restrict it to pure math and physics. For a math student, no matter what field he's going to study, he' about to learn analysis(real, complex, fuctional analysis at least), algebra(linear algebra and modern algebra at least), geometry(analytic, differential geometry at least), and different backgrounds are more and more needed in math studies. But as far as I'm concerned, for a physics student, after learning classical and analytical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum dynamics and statistical dynamics, they're doing different things. ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is that why Physics SE is more inactive than MSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the first question in MSE is asked in Mar 27 '10, for PSE is Aug 24 '10, but now MSE has &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1040$&lt;/span&gt;k questions while PSE has &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$132$&lt;/span&gt;k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition:(digression)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, math sutdies maybe require more multi-subject backgrounds. For example, if you major in PDE, you may require lots of knowledge ahout manifold since we're more concerned about PDEs on Riemann manifolds. And algebraic geometry is gradually becoming the basic demand for all pure math students. But for physics, there's a huge gap between theoretical and experimental physics, and theoretical physics studies a lot of different things (although they might be the same thing or have some ingerent corrspondence at a very high level, like mirror symmetry, AdS/CFT corrspondence, M-theory etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211543" LastEditorUserId="211543" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T08:13:46.193" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T08:13:46.193" Title="Why physics SE is much more inactive compared to MSE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10969" CreationDate="2019-01-10T16:21:16.827" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is that because the difference between different physics branches is so large that people studying different areas of physics don't understand what others are doing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that's right. The branches of mathematics are of comparable magnitude. But I guess it depends on what definition of &quot;large&quot; you're using? Maybe you could dig up some statistics about the &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; of living mathematicians and physicists, and compare them? Anyway, these are my two &lt;em&gt;conjectures&lt;/em&gt; as for why Math SE has more &lt;em&gt;activity&lt;/em&gt; than Physics SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We close homework and exercises more often than Mathematics SE:&lt;/strong&gt; On Physics SE we mainly deal with physics concepts rather than problem-solving. We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;rather high bar&lt;/a&gt; for homework-and-exercises. It's the opposite on Mathematics SE. There can be an unlimited number of mathematics problems, whereas physics concepts are limited (leaving aside the research front).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10969/why-physics-se-is-much-more-inactive-compared-to-mse#comment42194_10969&quot;&gt;@knzhou&lt;/a&gt;: It's because we close homework. Looking at the Math.SE homepage right&#xA;  now, they would have half as much activity if they didn't allow&#xA;  calculus and high school level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds true to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On Mathematics SE, the number of &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; who regularly &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; mathematics questions is strictly greater than the number of &lt;em&gt;mathematics students&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mathematicians&lt;/em&gt; who regularly ask mathematics questions&lt;/strong&gt;: Most &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology,_engineering,_and_mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;STEM&lt;/a&gt; subjects, excluding mathematics itself, &lt;em&gt;depend&lt;/em&gt; on mathematics. For instance, physics, engineering, and computer science students often have mathematics questions which are better suited for Mathematics SE. On the other hand, the topics which &lt;em&gt;mathematics students&lt;/em&gt; study is generally restricted to the scope of Mathematics SE. You won't find many mathematics students asking physics or engineering or CS questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike you, I don't believe mathematics students are &lt;em&gt;intrinsically&lt;/em&gt; more active online, compared to physics students. As for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I found an interesting phenomenon: students learning math are much more active than those laerning physics on line. Take myself as an example, I discuss math problems with schoolmates in online groups everyday, but I even don't know an online group about physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...that smells of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;sampling bias&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, just as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10969/why-physics-se-is-much-more-inactive-compared-to-mse#comment42193_10969&quot;&gt;@KyleKanos says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) arguments of the form &quot;I see X exists but I don't about Y&#xA;  existing. Why isn't there Y?&quot; tend to have the issue of &lt;em&gt;sampling bias&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, these are &lt;em&gt;conjectures&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;proofs&lt;/em&gt;. I'll leave the burden of data collection and statistics to others. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user199113" LastEditorDisplayName="user199113" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T19:02:53.743" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T19:02:53.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T22:02:46.613" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to search for posts with quantum states &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$| i \rangle$&lt;/span&gt;. Is there any way to search for latex expressions. Is there any way to include puntuation in searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know google ignores puncuation, but for scientific content, these features are important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132789" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T12:59:56.217" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T13:14:40.500" Title="Search bar - punctuation and latex" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10971" CreationDate="2019-01-12T08:56:10.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;in-built SE search&lt;/a&gt; is not sufficient for this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10971/search-bar-punctuation-and-latex#comment42203_10971&quot;&gt;@rob&lt;/a&gt;: A site search for &lt;code&gt;|i\rangle&lt;/code&gt; on the main site brings plenty of&#xA;  questions with states in them, but not limited to states labeled &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt;.&#xA;  Adding quotes to the search term doesn't appear to remove search&#xA;  results with stuff between the &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;\rangle&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, that's what I observed too. However, for the time being you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/revision/961720/1192754/exact-string-search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SE Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt; to search for exact strings like &lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|i&amp;gt;$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|i\rangle$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\left|i\right&amp;gt;$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\newcommand\ket[1]{\left|{#1}\right&amp;gt;} \ket i$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select top 100&#xA;    Id as [Post Link]&#xA;from&#xA;    Posts&#xA;where&#xA;    Body like '%&amp;lt;enter-specific-string-here&amp;gt;%'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you're interested, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/tutorial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's&lt;/a&gt; a quick tutorial for the Data Explorer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I think you're asking this question because of: &lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5185/notational-conventions-of-the-bloch-sphere&quot;&gt;Notational conventions of the Bloch sphere&lt;/a&gt;. Remember that most sources using &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|i\rangle$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;em&gt;label&lt;/em&gt; quantum states rather than using it to denote &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|0\rangle + i|1\rangle$&lt;/span&gt;. I'm afraid the search results won't be too useful for you unless you manage to be lucky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user199113" LastEditorDisplayName="user199113" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T13:14:40.500" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T13:14:40.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10974" CreationDate="2019-01-12T13:34:58.080" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/453511/revisions&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I posted there is a &quot;sentence&quot; visible when you look at the end of the edit version of the answer (visible when you &quot;push&quot; the &quot;edit button&quot; below the answer). The sentence isn't visible in the answer itself though. The  sentence can't be put here and &lt;em&gt;be shown&lt;/em&gt; in my question by putting it in a quote form, by copy and paste or by just typing it. This is the sentence I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- The 6-character limit is plain stupid. Next poster, please remove this --&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question may be obvious: why has this sentence been added to my answer in the edit mode. What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T08:38:31.100" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T08:05:50.177" Title="What does the sentence below, which is only visible in the edit mode of an answer I gave, mean?" Tags="|support|answers|editing|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10973" CreationDate="2019-01-12T13:46:24.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's a comment&lt;/strong&gt;, using the meaning of the word from the context of programming. I can't find anything about that in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;editing help&lt;/a&gt; page, but it's a standard HTML technique which is supported in Markdown. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!--stuff--&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is a simple comment; if I remove the backticks from the markdown to get rid of the code formatting, it won't show up in the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;em&gt;anonymous&lt;/em&gt; user wanted to make a one-character edit, which is forbidden by the 6-character limit, and putting comments like that are a standard way of 'cheating'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ideally, edits which do not satisfy the 6-character limit through visible, useful changes should neither be made nor approved&lt;/strong&gt;, since the limit is implemented to avoid such trivial edits in the first place. If you find yourself noticing such a typo like that, you could either leave a comment (comments are to suggest improvements!), or find other parts of the post which could be improved. But frivolous HTML tags are certainly a bad idea. If you have &gt;2k rep, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; technically do it, but you should avoid it (the 6 character limit is not implemented for those with the editing privilege), because your edits will still bump the post to the top of the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that it's there, it's an ugly blot in the markdown, but I still don't feel it's worth bumping the post to the front page by just removing that comment. If you, or any other future editor has a more legitimate thing to change, it would be a perfect opportunity to delete that bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T08:05:50.177" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T08:05:50.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10976" CreationDate="2019-01-14T05:11:28.797" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/453988/what-are-the-experiments-performed-to-determine-the-position-of-an-electron-insi&quot;&gt;In this post&lt;/a&gt; is an example where &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/453988/revisions&quot;&gt;the editing&lt;/a&gt; by the OP has made a drastic difference and makes nonsense of the answer provided before the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has happened to me again after edits by moderators and others, but usually I return to look at the questions I answer, to see what others have maybe said,  but this happened during my sleep time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there should be a comment left to the people who answered that the question was edited. We get a comment if our answer is edited, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T07:13:46.860" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T08:54:36.677" Title="Should a comment be left when the question has a drastic edit after answers have been provided?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10975" CreationDate="2019-01-14T07:03:33.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally if a question is edited in a way that significantly changes what it's asking and invalidates an existing answer, assuming the original version of the question was itself a decent enough question, the edit should be rolled back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it's a bit of a judgment call whether a given edit significantly changes what the question is asking, but I think this case does meet that bar. So I would suggest undoing the asker's edit in this case. And there's no need for a moderator to do this; anyone with enough reputation can do so. Even the person whose answer was invalidated by the edit to the question can do it, although it might be a good idea to try to get a second opinion because there is the potential for a &lt;em&gt;slight&lt;/em&gt; conflict of interest there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are many &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; answers that would themselves be invalidated by rolling back the edit, then that might be a reason to make an exception; in that case we'd have to balance the harm done by invalidating the new answers against the good done by revalidating the old answers and maintaining the principle that questions shouldn't be drastically edited. When there's doubt about this, it's probably a good idea to make a meta post, but if the balance is close I'd roll back the edit and write the meta post to ask whether to re-apply it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think there should be a comment left to the people who answered that the question was edited. We get a comment if our answer is edited, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you do not get a comment left automatically when your answer is edited. The editor may leave you a comment if they think it's necessary, but they have no obligation to do so. However, you do get a &lt;em&gt;notification&lt;/em&gt; if your answer is edited. It might be reasonable to also get notifications when a question you've answered has been edited, but that could add up to a lot of notifications for some people so there are arguments for an against. This has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2322/notify-us-when-the-question-has-been-edited-after-posting-an-answer&quot;&gt;brought up on Meta SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T08:54:36.677" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T08:54:36.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-14T17:02:07.163" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I posted an answer on Physics SE which has received a fair amount of attention. However, the reputation increase stopped after about 20 upvotes. I’m not exactly sure how the reputation system works — is this an intended feature? It’d also be neat to see a general list of what actions correspond to which increases/decreases of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50493" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T17:21:36.193" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T17:27:22.253" Title="Reputation cap for highly-upvoted posts" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10977" CreationDate="2019-01-14T17:27:22.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is intended. You can earn at most 200 reputation through upvotes in a single UTC day. The reputation through accepted answers is not affected by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T17:27:22.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T02:14:45.993" Score="-5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to report a user because he has been the reason why I was banned from the site. I want strict actions to be taken against him and he should suffer to the same extent as me . Please make it sure. I feel &lt;em&gt;insecured&lt;/em&gt; because this user always blocks and downvotes my answers.&#xA;Please ensure that he is not able to answer or comment on any of my questions. He should be blocked. Please ensure. He has threatened me also on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218974" OwnerDisplayName="TheEnthusiast" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T02:31:45.557" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T06:31:41.137" Title="I want to report a user" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10979" CreationDate="2019-01-15T06:31:41.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to report a user because he has been the reason why I was banned from the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, we do not issue suspensions because of other users. The real reason you were suspended was explained in the message that was sent to you when your suspension began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want strict actions to be taken against him and he should suffer to the same extent as me . Please make it sure. I feel insecured because this user always blocks and downvotes my answers. Please ensure that he is not able to answer or comment on any of my questions. He should be blocked. Please ensure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any moderation actions that may be taken are not up to you to decide. It's inappropriate to make a public post asking for any of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If another member's behavior on the site concerns you, then you can report it to the moderators, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; by making a public post. The way to do so is by &lt;em&gt;flagging&lt;/em&gt; the post(s) where it occurred. In the rare case where the behavior is something written in a profile or otherwise not flaggable directly, then you can flag any of the user's posts for moderator attention, and in the message, tell us what you want to report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, flag messages should simply describe what you observed. As the flagger, it's not your place to tell the moderators what to do about it - at least, not when the flag concerns problematic behavior from another user. If you're concerned that the action we take isn't appropriate, you should probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;get in touch with the Stack Exchange team&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has threatened me also on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; something to be concerned about. You should report it by flagging any posts which contain threats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T06:31:41.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10959" CreationDate="2019-01-15T11:25:17.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Make it visible on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat links looks like an ad banner and my banner blindness automatically filter them out. I have never noticed it's there and I have never used the chat and I have never, ever arrived on any Stack Exchange chat page from Google or from any search engine. Either they are actively excluded from indexing, or have terrible SEO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess others ignored it too for the same reasons so far. If we can fix this, then people will come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7743" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:25:17.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T13:52:37.507" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with the vote to close the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/453904&quot;&gt;Why is the MKS unit of time the same as the CGS unit?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. The question is, when Giorgi proposed to replace the CGS system, could he alternatively have chosen to replace the unit of time instead of the unit of mass. The answer is &quot;no&quot;, because Giorgi aimed for coherence with the practical units ampere, volt and joule. This answer has been accepted by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User FGSUZ voted for closing the question because it might belong to HSM. But we are using SI today, so it is a question about today (why is the kilogram the SI base unit of mass). Kyle Kanos diverts from the question, which is about the replacement of CGS by MKS, by mentioning natural units. Other voters do not explain their vote. Some users incorrectly seem to imply the change from CGS to MKSA was arbitrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71627" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T00:58:55.503" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T03:32:37.507" Title="What is the effect of the votes to close the question &quot;Why is the MKS unit of time the same as the CGS unit?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10982" CreationDate="2019-01-17T03:32:37.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, as originally written is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though other units change in different systems, but time's unit never changes. Why is it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different than your interpretation (&lt;em&gt;Why did Giorgi maintain the unit of time as a second?&lt;/em&gt;). It was later modified to be simply a &quot;Why?&quot; at the end, but since there are no further remarks by the OP to give his/her intention of the question, we can only read it as was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out (by me) in the comments, there are other unit systems in which the unit of time is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the second, so it's not clear to me why OP thinks that there's only one unit of time (i.e., the second) in the other &quot;different systems&quot; that were vaguely identified. I voted to close based on that understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand a vote to close on the historical aspect (i.e., your interpretation), given &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8930/25301&quot;&gt;previous discussion on the matter&lt;/a&gt; of questions of historical context. I don't believe the question implies in any meaningful way that it's a request for an historical perspective (note that it's not even tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt;), so OP accepting the answer based on an historical perspective increases the &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;-ness of the post (though it could just be a &quot;fastest gun in the west&quot; response: jkien answered first, so he gets the check mark).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the titular question: close votes indicate that a subset of users believe that there is a problem with the post that needs remedying. Actual closure of the question prevents further answers from being allowed until the problem is resolved. In this case, OP needs to clarify the historical request (which should be asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;HSM&lt;/a&gt;) or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T03:32:37.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10987" CreationDate="2019-01-17T15:58:18.123" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our moderators have mentioned that they avoid closing questions unilaterally, unless it's a slam-dunk case. I think I've seen similar stances on other sites' metas, and this seems like a good general policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think I've seen some inconsistent wording, and I'm now confused about the exact meaning of this. Do mods avoid casting close votes &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;, or do they specifically only stay away from cases with 1 or 0 pending votes? Like if there are 3-4 pending close votes, do they still hesitate to cast the last one if they feel the question's off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see multiple things to look at: firstly, we could say that the mods shouldn't be doing this because perhaps someone takes it a lot more personally/seriously when one of those close voters has a diamond, whether there are five voters or one. (Or is there some other reason?) I get the feeling (particularity based on the extreme-looking Tor SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/321318&quot;&gt;close stats&lt;/a&gt;) that the data in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10958&quot;&gt;2018: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt; (also see DavidZ's answer there) indicate actions which moderators took along with regular users (e.g. one of the 5 close-voters was a moderator) under the column 'moderators'. That suggests to me that the focus is on the fact that moderators were involved, rather than the &lt;em&gt;extent&lt;/em&gt; of their involvement in the closing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think it's completely appropriate for a moderator to close a question with a few pending votes simply because they feel it's off-topic (or whatever), and they're expressing that as any ordinary (though somewhat high-rep) user would: by votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying there's anything wrong with whatever the status quo is; I'm simply curious about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T03:27:16.623" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T03:27:16.623" Title="Do moderators avoid unilateral close votes, or close votes in general?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10985" CreationDate="2019-01-17T18:02:30.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators need the discretionary power to unilaterally close questions when appropriate, and my experience is that this power has been used wisely: I would rather not constrain their actions through guidelines unless there is an obvious broad problem, and I don’t see one now.  I suppose it’s possible to quietly query a mod through a reply or comment if some specific instance requires clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think moderators should refrain from casting votes-to-close: they are not gods to interfere in affairs of mortals only on rare occasions, but experienced users with excellent background to flag for closure duplicates, low quality questions and answers etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T18:02:30.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10985" CreationDate="2019-01-17T21:24:23.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different mods have different practices, so don't take this as precisely representative of the whole mod team (though I think we all act &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; similarly). Speaking for myself, I wouldn't say that I avoid closing questions unilaterally, but I am more reluctant to close a question unilaterally than I would be to apply a non-binding close vote (if I could do so). The difference has to do with how obvious it is that the question deserves to be put on hold. If I think it's quite clear that the question deserves to be on hold according to our policies, then I'll go ahead and do that, but in cases where I'm not so sure, I'll leave it to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question already has some close votes from other people, I'll adjust my criterion accordingly. The more close votes it has from others, the more willing I am (or, the less sure about it I have to be) to cast a close vote of my own. If a question already has four other close votes, then the threshold I use in my mind is basically the same as if I were casting a non-binding close vote. If it has three close votes from others, then I'd have to be a little more sure than that before closing it myself. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T21:24:23.460" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10990" CreationDate="2019-01-18T08:05:28.527" Score="3" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was asking a QM question recently, and wanted to use the bra &amp;amp; ket notation; however, the MathJax does not support the necessary packages, as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add the necessary requirement to the MathJax system so that we can use the bra &amp;amp; ket notation &lt;strong&gt;easily&lt;/strong&gt; while asking question on Phys.SE ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99217" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T10:39:47.457" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T18:19:12.460" Title="On Bra &amp; ket notation" Tags="|support|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10991" CreationDate="2019-01-18T10:52:02.500" Score="10" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10988/on-bra-ket-notation&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; points out, it would be nice if the site's MathJax environment included something similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/pkg/physics?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physics LaTeX package&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-third-party-extensions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the list of third-party extensions for MathJax&lt;/a&gt; does include a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ickc/MathJax-third-party-extensions/tree/gh-pages/physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physics&lt;/a&gt; extension. I'm not sure if this has been considered before and discarded (and, if so: when and where? and why was this considered not feasible?), but if we haven't already, then we should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note, in particular, that the list includes the &lt;code&gt;mhchem&lt;/code&gt; extension, which the Chemistry site &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26/enable-mhchem-mathjax-extension&quot;&gt;has had enabled for the past six years&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we do the same? Should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T04:48:06.803" Title="Why don't we have the physics MathJax extension enabled? Should we?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2019-01-18T10:57:37.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the mathjax does not support the necessary packages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't true - MathJax has full support for the &lt;code&gt;\langle&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;|&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\rangle&lt;/code&gt; commands, as well as the combination &lt;code&gt;\left&amp;lt; \right&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, which are all you need to typeset bras and kets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to add the necessary requirement to the MathJax system so that we can use the bra &amp;amp; ket notation &lt;strong&gt;easily&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yes, that's a nontrivial point. As mentioned in the comments, MathJax isn't LaTeX ─ it's a fully parallel system with completely different internals ─ and adding LaTeX packages isn't generally possible. As it happens, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a specific extension that does this kind of thing, and whether to enable it or not is a narrower discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10989/why-dont-we-have-the-physics-mathjax-extension-enabled-should-we&quot;&gt;which it's better to have in a dedicated thread&lt;/a&gt; (but the short answer is likely that the extension is too buggy to use at present, even if it were a good idea to enable it if it did work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of that, if what you want is ease of access, then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;MathJax Buttons&lt;/a&gt; browser extension is an extremely convenient way to get seamless access to Dirac notation on the site's text editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have modified the software end of my keyboard to have clean access to the unicode versions of the angled brackets (specifically, the &lt;code&gt;⟩&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;⟨&lt;/code&gt; characters), and those compile just fine with the unicode support in MathJax, so that e.g. &lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|x⟩⟨x|$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/code&gt; produces the output &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|x⟩⟨x|$&lt;/span&gt;, with the benefit of single-keypress access as well as a vastly more readable source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T18:19:12.460" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T18:19:12.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10989" CreationDate="2019-01-18T15:44:29.103" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just from a brief look at this, it seems to me like a bad idea to enable it, for several reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It changes the behavior of various commands. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\sin\left(\frac{1+\frac{1}{1+\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sin\left(\frac{1+\frac{1}{1+\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right)$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\sin(\frac{1+\frac{1}{1+\frac{1}{2}}}{2})&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sin(\frac{1+\frac{1}{1+\frac{1}{2}}}{2})$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, when I look at this in my browser the results are the same as I would expect in standard latex. The parens are big in the first example and small in the second example. But if I load the physics package and compile this document in latex, it automagically supplies the big parens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kind of doubt that this standard behavior was a mistake by Donald Knuth because he wasn't smart enough to make it work better. I'm sure it was a conscious design decision. If we were going to change it at this point, we would break the behavior of old code, and people would start writing code on physics.SE that would not be compatible with standard latex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using the latex implementation of the physics package, then you have the option of turning off this behavior and reverting to standard tex math by doing &lt;code&gt;\usepackage[notrig]{physics}&lt;/code&gt;, but in mathjax on physics.SE we wouldn't have any way to do that, would we?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New commands like &lt;code&gt;\trace&lt;/code&gt; are defined. I doubt that these are compatible with adaptive technologies for the blind, which probably assume standard-ish tex/mathjax math.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the functionality wouldn't be usable in the context of mathjax on SE. E.g., if you want an arrow over your nabla operator, you can do &lt;code&gt;\usepackage[arrowdel]{physics}&lt;/code&gt;, but that won't exist on the SE implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would break compatibility. For instance, if I post an answer on SE and later want to use it in a latex document, I don't want to have to worry about the fact that it may not work because I'm using two different dialects. Although mathjax is different from standard tex/latex math, they are similar enough that the differences almost never crop up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The physics package for latex is fairly new, and the mathjax extension is newer. We would be effectively acting as large-scale testers this mathjax extension. I don't know how good the code quality is or how well supported it will be. What if we have a lot of problems with bugs and incompatibilities and decide that it was a bad idea? We can't switch back without breaking content that people wrote using the extension.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It breaks compatibility between SE sites. We want to be able to say on mathoverflow, for example, &quot;According to this answer on physics.SE, \$...\$&quot; and have the quoted math display properly. When a question is closed and moved to another site where it's more on topic, we want that to work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T15:52:50.177" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T15:52:50.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10989" CreationDate="2019-01-19T02:50:35.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer's a placeholder for votes, to gauge the community's opinion regarding whether it's a god idea or not. As pointed out in the comments, there are a few pretty nasty bugs, and I don't support the addition of the physics package any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually quite fond of the physics &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has a neat support for derivatives: &lt;code&gt;\dv[n]{f}{x}&lt;/code&gt; gives &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{\mathrm{d}^nf}{\mathrm{d}x^n}$&lt;/span&gt;, and it's much more concise than &lt;code&gt;\frac{\mathrm{d}^nf}{\mathrm{d}x^n}&lt;/code&gt;. Also, it makes the &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; straight automatically, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10949&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has &lt;code&gt;\grad&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\curl&lt;/code&gt;, which are cleaner and more readable than &lt;code&gt;\nabla\cdot&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\nabla\times&lt;/code&gt;. (I'm not sure if this supports arrows over the nabla, but you could still use &lt;code&gt;\vec{\nabla}&lt;/code&gt; if you wanted to)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's the advantage of easy/intuitive bra-ket notation, as mentioned in the post you linked in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are 3 pretty common stuff, which I think is good enough evidence that it's going to be used plenty. So if it's stable enough, I think we should go ahead and set it up!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T04:48:06.803" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10994" CreationDate="2019-01-20T16:23:38.183" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25591/does-the-universe-have-a-center&quot;&gt;This question &lt;/a&gt; has been asked 6 years and 10 months ago. How can it be a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136860/did-the-big-bang-happen-at-a-point&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which has been asked 4 years and 4 months ago? Shouldn't the second be marked as a duplicate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T17:51:33.883" Title="How can a question be marked as a duplicate if it's been asked **earlier** than a similar question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10993" CreationDate="2019-01-20T17:51:33.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the second be marked as a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, the first question (together with its answers) is noticeably less clear and useful than the second one, and indeed it covers a strict subset of the latter. How would it help the site to close the second one as a duplicate of the first one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; bothered by the fact that the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1\to 2$&lt;/span&gt; duplicate closure happened as a result of a unilateral action on the part of the author of the Q&amp;amp;A at the second question, which to my mind kind of over-steps what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders&quot;&gt;dupehammer&lt;/a&gt; should be used for. A more appropriate course of action would have been to vote this into the closure queue and let the community decide, I should think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, in this instance I agree with the closure, so I'm not throwing any stones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T17:51:33.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T00:08:00.093" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have doubts about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/455755&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, because it is a question about a software of physics but I don't know if the question is in the correct forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219239" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T00:29:49.793" Title="Is this question in the correct forum?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10995" CreationDate="2019-01-22T00:29:49.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it's not on topic. According to our meta site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2825/should-we-allow-software-questions&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2898/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-2&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-3&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;), questions about how to use software &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be on topic when the software in question is something designed for and primarily used in physics, but questions asking for software recommendations are generally off topic (unless the purpose of the software is educational, similar to how a textbook would be used). I think your question falls into the latter category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T00:29:49.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10997" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10999" CreationDate="2019-01-23T01:34:00.103" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me down votes and up votes should be earned at the same time, but I want to know what the rationale behind them being different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T03:57:16.670" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T04:01:29.870" Title="Why are up voting and down voting thresholds different?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10997" CreationDate="2019-01-23T04:01:29.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is answered in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;privileges section of the help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;up-vote&lt;/a&gt; privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top.&lt;/strong&gt; Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing. &lt;em&gt;(Emphasis mine)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the thresholds being different, there's also a penalty of 1 rep for downvoting answers. The rationale for this is described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;this Stack Overflow blog post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T04:01:29.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T04:40:29.990" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3084079/266049&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; posted to MSE which is more about physics than math. If it remains on MSE, is it kosher to repost it here at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92397" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T22:02:44.577" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T22:02:44.577" Title="Can I cross post a question from MSE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:58:29.450" Score="10" ViewCount="811" Body="&lt;p&gt;2019 is here! And with the new year, as usual, comes a new iteration of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;! Let’s refresh these for the coming year :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/11001&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T15:07:40.987" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T17:18:47.030" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2019" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="23" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-03-05T11:03:03.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:59:16.893" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackphysics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zzY6I.png&quot; alt=&quot;Follow us on Twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T11:59:16.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11000" CreationDate="2019-01-23T15:50:37.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, cross-posting is not recommended without adapting the question to the audience intended. If your concern is the maths, then Math.SE is more appropriate &amp;amp; the question should be written to point out the interest in the maths. If your concern is there physics, then here would be the correct place with indications that it's about the physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it seems to me that your question would probably be closed as a dupe of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/284745/25301&quot;&gt;Contradiction between law of conservation of energy and law of conservation of momentum?&lt;/a&gt; (or one of the linked), were you to post it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T15:50:37.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T16:50:54.683" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I click on Anyone's profile to check if available(online) or even my profile,it doesn't show correctly. When I click on my profile it should show online, but it just show last seen a random time ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user212727" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T17:12:07.110" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T11:14:17.487" Title="Why it doesn't show correctly when someone was online?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11004" CreationDate="2019-01-23T17:17:21.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;last seen...&quot; counter is updated at periodic intervals a few minutes apart, as documented in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/70235/184688&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/261613/184688&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; in the Mother Meta. (Basically, continuously checking every second whether every SE user ever is active would be an excessive load for the Stack Exchange servers.) As such, it is expected to be an imperfect measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you observe &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; deviations, then this might be more interesting. However, the amount of quantitative detail in the data that you've reported,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it just show last seen a random time ago,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not enough to say anything other than &quot;yeah, this is just by design&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T11:14:17.487" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T11:14:17.487" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-23T19:51:36.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1tczj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93522" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T19:51:36.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-23T20:18:24.130" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PYDEq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Quantum Computing Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user199113" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T16:03:27.820" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T16:03:27.820" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11009" CreationDate="2019-01-23T21:02:17.390" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am legitimately curious because if I find someone who understands me can I ask them to edit all my questions that others might not understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T22:16:09.337" Title="am I allowed to ask a user to be an editor for me" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11008" CreationDate="2019-01-23T22:16:09.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, you could &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt;.  I don't know if it would help much though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the nature of this site, users are able to edit, or propose edits, to other users' posts.  There's nothing inherently wrong with asking if users (or I guess one particular user) would be willing to edit your questions to make them understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't think it's a particularly good idea, and I doubt you would have much luck with this plan.  There's no reason why you &lt;em&gt;couldn't&lt;/em&gt; do this, according to site policies that I am aware of; and no technical limitations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several hurdles to overcome, and I believe they would make this practically useless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First is finding someone willing to do this.  Members of this community are volunteering their time, generally because they enjoy thinking about physics in their free time and are willing to share that knowledge.  I don't think many people on this site would want to spend time reading through your questions and fixing them for you.  You may have some luck on a case-by-case basis; but I am very doubtful you would find a willing user who would want to edit &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to the second point - the process of how you would find someone to do this.  The only decent method I can think of would be using the Chat to see if there is anyone willing to help.  I have my doubts you would find anyone there willing to do this for all your questions.  Asking for this anywhere else on this site (such as questions/comments/answers) is something to avoid.  It wouldn't really be an appropriate use of these features, and I doubt it would be successful even if people read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third issue is that having someone edit your questions after the fact may not help you very much.  If the question gets more attention in it's unedited format, it could receive downvotes and other negative feedback that may be hard to reverse if enough users don't notice the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; In theory, you can &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt;; but I have my doubts you would find much help, and you need to make sure you are asking in an appropriate way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T22:16:09.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:30:23.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ij43t.png&quot; alt=&quot;archive.org - the public library of the internet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:30:23.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:30:41.033" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E9D64.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify: automated LaTeX symbol recognition&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:30:41.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:30:55.383" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ziQXb.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org: the leading open access eprint repository&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:30:55.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:31:16.433" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10394/community-promotion-ads-2018&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6SOhy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Community ads are run by the community. Come and vote!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:31:16.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:31:35.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/toYiP.png&quot; alt=&quot;DLMF: an online encyclopaedia of special functions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:31:35.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:32:18.673" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O9ZQy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Computational Science at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:32:18.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:32:33.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scirate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pefiz.png&quot; alt=&quot;SciRate&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:32:33.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:32:46.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/353zN.png&quot; alt=&quot;History of Science and Mathematics at Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:32:46.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:33:27.987" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ef9Hl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Stack Exchange Review Queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:33:27.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:33:54.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://retractionwatch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFSyZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Retraction Watch&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:33:54.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:34:11.673" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1wvvA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wayback Machine: experience the Web as it was&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:34:11.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:35:19.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5A7af.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:35:19.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:35:31.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dissem.in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HAnRi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Are your papers available in an open access repository? Check with Dissemin&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:35:31.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:35:52.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thecostofknowledge.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vu8lo.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Cost of Knowledge - join the Elsevier boycott and take back our scientific publishing!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:35:52.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:36:09.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnYOV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero - your personal bibliographic research assistant&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T00:09:46.967" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T00:09:46.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:36:21.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ei2RL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Engineering Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:36:21.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11027" CreationDate="2019-01-25T01:31:06.787" Score="-1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user is consistently harassing me. I have warned them and they continued&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T03:01:35.817" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T16:28:04.050" Title="A user is harassing me in main" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ClosedDate="2019-01-25T20:48:49.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11026" CreationDate="2019-01-25T16:19:10.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's very little to add to this moderator comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if somebody's rude to you in the comments, there's no internet law that says you have to win the argument. If you see something particularly unpleasant, flag for moderator attention; then &lt;em&gt;disengage&lt;/em&gt;. It'll be okay, I promise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel that you're being harassed, or that some other user is being rude or abusive (or just unwelcoming in some way), this meta isn't a good venue for it. Just &lt;strong&gt;flag the comment and disengage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flagging is a privilege obtained at 15 reputation&lt;/a&gt; (and lost if you go below that for whatever reason), &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/311459/allow-new-users-to-flag-comments-on-their-own-posts&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this is not the case for comment threads where you're participating&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: if you can comment on a post, then you can also flag comments on that post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably important to say this explicitly: several of your comments are on pretty gray areas, and they indicate that your side of the interactions has not been blameless either (and that's only with the comments which are currently visible right now). The fact that (you perceive that) others are being rude or abusive does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that you can reply with similar stuff. It can indeed be hard to turn away, but it's crucial to do so: flag the comments and walk away. A moderator will be there shortly to resolve the situation, and it won't help if they also have to deal with a lot of stuff from your side of the comments as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T16:28:04.050" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T16:28:04.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11029" CreationDate="2019-01-25T20:18:04.167" Score="18" ViewCount="586" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I can improve how my current questions are received because no matter what I do they get received worse? They don't even tell me what needs improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastEditorUserId="220173" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T20:24:41.810" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T14:49:08.697" Title="I am having trouble improving how my questions are received" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11028" CreationDate="2019-01-26T05:52:59.703" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don’t say things like “I know [whatever] due to deep research”. This is pretentious because it is obvious from your questions that you are not yet an experienced physicist, and saying this kind of thing shows disrespect for those who &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; done deep research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, do not mention “the science channel”. We’re all for popularizing science, but you can’t really learn physics by watching TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don’t say “I want as many people to explain as possible.” This comes across as pushy, and all you need is one good explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just ask your question in a simple and clear way, do not embellish your expertise, and don’t make any demands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked your question about iron and star death in a reasonable way, and it did not get downvoted. However, the problem with that question is that you could have easily found the answer by an internet search for “iron star death”. Why should we answer questions that have easily-found answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T06:02:39.573" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T06:02:39.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-26T06:29:42.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicstravelguide.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXiD9.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Travel Guide&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46399" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T06:29:42.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-01-26T14:03:46.997" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GhjWR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chemistry Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59991" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T14:03:46.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11028" CreationDate="2019-01-26T15:20:20.420" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patience patience patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One easy thing to do is to search this site by keywords and by tags.  In many case, less experienced users will not take sufficient care to find duplicates or near duplicates, and their questions are closed as such.  Another virtue of searching the website is that it will help you broaden your understanding of the topic by reading what others have asked, and what others have answered.  It will also provide examples of well received and not so well received questions on this topic, and so will help you detect common pitfalls of closed or poorly received questions, and common themes of well-received questions on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search the web or textbook for material on this topic.  By making a lot of prior research and doing a lot of preparatory reading you will not only improve your knowledge of the topic, but you will also become familiar with the terminology of the area - the technical words - and this will be a help towards writing a question that is clear and concise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10421/how-to-stop-asking-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;This question and its answers&lt;/a&gt; also contains a lot of useful tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this takes time, hence: patience patience patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T15:32:38.103" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T15:32:38.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11028" CreationDate="2019-01-27T11:47:02.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how this answer will be received by the community but I'd like to point out that there are many superficial things that determine how your question is received. I am not claiming that your question was well-researched enough for the community's standards. However there is a certain way of writing which gets results, which is independent of the actual research effort done by the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question (down-voted to -3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found out that iron is the death element for stars, but i couldn't find why can anyone knowledgeable on stars explain why iron causes the star to die?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An edited version of the same question which I expect wouldn't be downvoted as strongly, which doesn't actually have any more research effort than the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I have been interested in the life cycle of stars. I read that if a star is found to contain lots of iron, this indicates it is near the end of its life. It wasn't clear to me, though, why this is the case. Does the iron &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; the star to die? Or is it just the byproduct of some other process which brings a star to its death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An incomplete list of things which have a strong effect on up/downvotes, which I consider superficial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using correct punctuation, grammar, spelling. There are many people who would see your uncapitalized &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; and kind-of-runon sentence style and immediately think less of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider writing your question in a more academic, rather than just everyday-language, kind of way. This correlates with the impression that you are respectable and knowledgable in your field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Longer questions can be good. Then the people who come just to downvote based on superficial reasons sometimes don't bother to read the whole thing, and anyone who &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; read the whole thing has bothered enough to give you a chance and is more likely to at least help you with a comment if the question isn't well-written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could write more but unfortunately don't have the time right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: To be clear, I think that questions &lt;strong&gt;should not&lt;/strong&gt; be judged this way, and I do my best not to judge questions superficially. It is just my experience that many new users have their questions downvoted for superficial reasons like this and the first step to improving that is to point it out. It actually makes me frustrated that this happens, and that is one reason I have given such a long answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I do want to say: This is not an issue, necessarily, with stack exchange itself. Many people in many fields judge by appearances. In some fields less, and in some more. Academia especially can often be very unforgiving about this. I think it is a shame because the focus should be on ideas, not presentation, but this is the world we live in. Each individual can only try not to judge superficially for themselves, and this kind of thing can be improved. It also means that students who don't speak english well but are good physicists are disadvantaged even when the communication of their ideas is clear, and just the details are missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the reason your question here on meta got many upvotes is that many question-askers have some resentment for how harshly their questions are judged, without reasons given which are clear/justified to the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The up-side is: I think there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; many people here who don't judge questions superficially as well, and are happy to answer any question which is clear to them. That is why your questions did get good answers in the end, despite being downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65074" LastEditorUserId="65074" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T14:49:08.697" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T14:49:08.697" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11039" CreationDate="2019-01-27T22:14:51.123" Score="-1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm providing links to a very well received question and my poorly received question and I'd like to know why---in the eyes of this community---one is one better than the other. I'm mystified by what goes on inside the heads of people who upvote/downvote here and I'd like to get a sense of what's going on so that I'm not rolling dice---so to speak---every time I ask something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/122785/&quot;&gt;Could Legolas actually see that far?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/456782/&quot;&gt;Vertical motion of a projectile subject to quadratic drag&lt;/a&gt; (only visible for 10k users)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user113773" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T20:12:47.690" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T20:12:47.690" Title="Terribly confused about what this community is about" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11043" CreationDate="2019-01-28T09:40:09.713" Score="20" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;Refer to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/428986/605&quot;&gt;How would the rotational and orbital mechanics differ on a torus-shaped planet as compared to a spherical planet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is asking about torus-shaped planet rotational and orbital mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this is a question can be answered completely using Newtonian physics, and is as mainstream as the mechanics of spherical planet, however it was closed because &quot;we deal with mainstream physics here&quot;, implying that somehow, Newtonian physics doesn't apply to torus shaped planet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the logic of the closure. Care to explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="605" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T10:30:00.353" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T12:29:32.633" Title="How can &quot;torus shape&quot; planet be &quot;non-mainstream&quot; physics?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11036" CreationDate="2019-01-28T11:15:28.667" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your profile currently lists 25 questions, of which 20 are still open and 23 have score &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\geq 0$&lt;/span&gt;. As such, it feels like you're over-reacting - you obviously have a pretty decent idea of what makes for an on-topic question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the questions that did get closed, other than the duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/432830/why-is-quantum-mechanics-called-quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, also downvoted, is the kind of open-ended opinion-based discussion thread which isn't actually much of a question. It also goes on to very confidently make statements which are dead wrong, and leaves no room for ambiguity in that you're not contemplating any room around that; this isn't what got it closed, but it's certainly not a recipe for upvotes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/399361/all-of-the-postulates-of-quantum-mechanics-without-additional-information&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; just doesn't present a clear picture of what you're looking for in an answer &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; and, to the extent that it does, it's way too broad for our format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones that seem to have you worried right now are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/456270/approximating-the-time-it-takes-for-a-particle-with-a-potential-ax4-to-appro&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/443353/time-evolution-of-a-free-particle-with-a-given-initial-state&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/456782/vertical-motion-of-a-projectile-subject-to-quadratic-drag&quot;&gt;this now-deleted one&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c6LoT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;), which were closed as homework-like. (Speaking of which: you just started a discussion thread and then deleted the example question that you'd brought up for discussion within five hours of posting on meta. Does that strike you as constructive? It certainly doesn't look like you're bringing up this discussion in good faith to me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key thing to keep in mind here is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;the homework policy&lt;/a&gt; holds &lt;em&gt;regardless of the origin of the question&lt;/em&gt;. If it comes up that one of your questions might be in conflict with the homework policy, then you need to step away from the question, and what you know of how you yourself think about it, and then look at it from an external perspective. Does the question text &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; like it came out of a textbook? If so, have you done what we expect good homework questions to do? Are you asking for a concept, or are you just looking for a solution to the textbook-like text? Have you explained what you already know and understand, and how it came up short to what you wanted to do? (For your closed questions, all these criteria came up on the wrong side.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homework-and-exercises policy is applied consistently across the board (or as consistently as we can, anyways), and without any regard to where the question text came from, because that's the only way to keep it fair. If all it takes to ask a terrible question is to say &quot;oh, no, this isn't homework&quot;, then it just scuppers the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the elf-vision question that you seem to be so upset by: as mentioned in the comments, this question was listed in the Hot Network Questions sidebar for a substantial period. As such, it was advertised to a large cross-section of users across the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange network, and its voting patterns can only be understood within that frame. (Though not entirely - from its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/122785/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;, it probably left the HNQ at score ~60, and then went on to more than double that score over the ensuing ~5 years. But then again, there are other self-reinforcing feedback loops besides HNQ.) Long story short, it's completely meaningless to compare post scores on HNQ threads vs threads that didn't get advertised on that sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that makes it sound like we have a sidebar that's advertising junk-food clickbait that doesn't really represent what makes for a Good Question on this site, then... yes, absolutely. Many people have been saying that for years, both here and over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, to little avail. There's &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; hope of fixing the mechanism, which opened at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316934/revisiting-the-hot-network-questions-feature-what-are-our-shared-goals-for-ha&quot;&gt;this ugly fracas&lt;/a&gt; last October, but we've yet to see how that shakes out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and also: do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; remove the homework-and-exercises tag from your posts, particularly when it's been applied by a moderator. The only thing that you'll achieve by getting into an edit war is to get your post locked, which is precisely the opposite of what you'd need if you actually wanted to fix your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T16:54:18.883" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T16:54:18.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-28T11:29:45.773" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently noticed that when I flag something as off-topic by suggesting it to another site(in order to get better answers for that question) I only see the options of Physics Meta Stack Exchange and Mathematics Stack Exchange (shown below in the picture), like no Chemistry Stack Exchange or Biology Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if the coding or suggestion could be fixed somehow to incorporate more science sites. I understand that mathematics questions are the most cross-posted in the Physics Stack exchange but I do believe I've often seen many good chemistry and biology questions end up here which could've been better answered in their respective sites(especially posted by new users). Hence my suggestion for this improvement. Maybe add a search feature like when adding &quot;duplicates&quot; to &lt;strong&gt;link&lt;/strong&gt; another stack exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L3EkA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L3EkA.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157187" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T11:37:34.113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T11:37:34.113" Title="Why can't I suggest &quot;Chemistry Stack Exchange&quot; as another site when flagging a question as off-topic?" Tags="|feature-request|flagging|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-01-28T11:43:13.190" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11037" CreationDate="2019-01-28T12:42:06.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's an acceptable question and I've cast a reopen vote, since it appears to be asking what mainstream descriptions would make of a hypothetical idea to understand how the dynamics of such a body would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, similar questions are also a good fit for Worldbuilding SE (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/6465&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and the linked posts); they have a 'nonspherical-planet' tag too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I don't think &quot;answered completely using Newtonian physics&quot;, the phrase used in the question, is appropriate justification for a claim that a question is not non-mainstream. For example, someone could pitch a theory of their own which completely violates Newtonian mechanics (at orders of magnitude where Newtonian mechanics is correct), in which case an 'answer' would be a description of Newtonian mechanics; such a question would be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T12:29:32.633" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T12:29:32.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11037" CreationDate="2019-01-28T13:48:23.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it's not non-mainstream, but I think the question is overly broad, asking what the &quot;rotational motion&quot; would be in such a place. This is not or less going to require a very lengthy response, probably chapter-of-a-textbook kind of answer to address the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also of the opinion that &lt;em&gt;only OP&lt;/em&gt; should be the one make changes to reduce the broadness, as such a reduction of topicality significantly alters the question asked, so we can only request in the comments the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the given answer basically says, &quot;The projectile motion does change. Here, check out my blog where I talk about this topic!!&quot; And the blog post is not terribly short either, indicating much can be said on the topic. Hence, fairly broad request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T13:48:23.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11037" CreationDate="2019-01-28T15:29:59.903" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Demanding that questions only deal with situations that unequivocally can occur in the real world rules out objects on infinite planes, point masses, Einsteinian trains, Maxwell's demon, supersymmetry, superstring theory, and any of the other standard thought experiments that form the underpinnings of a standard physics education. The ability of applying physics rigorously to unusual or hypothetical scenarios is one of the most rewarding and valuable aspects of physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a serious risk that the site will lose readers and intellectual vigour  if it takes a too narrow view of what constitutes &quot;mainstream physics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper distinction should not be the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; of the question but whether it can be &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt; using mainstream physics. The physics of what happens if Earth turns into blueberries is totally mainstream, whether it could turn to blueberries is non-mainstream. We can all agree on that torus-shaped planets are unlikely, yet analyse their gravitational fields and orbital trajectories with the same means we do with any other mass distribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165299" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T15:29:59.903" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11045" CreationDate="2019-01-28T15:50:13.987" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that a user, whose comment is deleted by a moderator should be notified about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many moderators ask the user to remove their comments however some just remove them without informing the user at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193959" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T17:45:23.040" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T21:05:02.413" Title="Notification to the user whose comment is deleted" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11044" CreationDate="2019-01-28T16:07:32.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ethos in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117854/comment-deletion-notification&quot;&gt;MSE answer&lt;/a&gt; linked in the comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are third-class citizens in our system by design; they are little more than post-it notes on the units of real work, questions and answers. As such they are afforded little protection and the burden of proof is on the comment to be useful and constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;remains the core component of Stack Exchange's attitude towards comments on this platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, there is basically no chance that SE will implement this notification feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want something a bit more definitive, try the answer (by a former SE dev) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/187985/notify-user-when-their-comment-is-removed&quot;&gt;Notify user when their comment is removed&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no comment removal notifications, nor will there be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because comments are second class. We don't see them as important - if you think a comment is important enough, it should be rolled into the post it is commenting on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T16:07:32.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11044" CreationDate="2019-01-28T21:05:02.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removed comments basically fall into three somewhat-overlapping categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The comment was part of a discussion which led to improvement in the post it was attached to. Since the improvement has been achieved, the comment can be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The comment didn't contribute to improving the post it was attached to, but was instead an answer, a part of a side discussion, or a joke.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The comment was actively harmful in some way --- rude or spammy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not any reason to notify folks whose comments fall into the first category; such notifications would just be noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notifying folks whose comments fall into the third category can be actively harmful.  The main reason to remove rude comments is to de-escalate tensions among people who are getting fighty with each other.  Someone who is already fighty is likely to respond to a removed-comment notification by lashing out, or by repeating the troublesome remark, or the like. It's much better if those comments disappear silently: if their absence is noticed, it's likely to be later, after tempers are cooler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forget how notifications work if a side discussion is moved to chat.  I don't think there are any, apart from the moderator comment that gets generated when the comments are moved.  I'm totally okay with that, for the reasons discussed in Emilio's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T21:05:02.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11057" CreationDate="2019-01-29T20:14:32.540" Score="-1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am at a road block because I have some questions with good answers and I don't want to delete them what else can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T08:37:56.923" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T08:37:56.923" Title="What can I do other than wait and edit questions if I am blocked from asking for a while?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11122" CreationDate="2019-01-29T21:34:30.327" Score="18" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/48768543#48768543&quot;&gt;some recent discussions&lt;/a&gt; that it's getting increasingly difficult to find duplicates or near-duplicates of questions posted by new users, on the main site. Similar concepts are getting repeated time and again in answers, leading to duplicated efforts. So what are some tips to quickly search for duplicates on Physics SE? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of our primary search resources are of course&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search engines like Google&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;site-specific search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queries on &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how exactly do you use them to search efficiently? Are there any additional scripts we can use? For example, one of the scripts that I personally use is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/samliew/SO-mod-userscripts/blob/master/SearchbarNavImprovements.user.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searchbar and Nav Improvements&lt;/a&gt; by Samuel Liew. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5048/&quot;&gt;Math SE: How do you search for specific questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/29265&quot;&gt;Math SE: How to search on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user199113" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T14:38:10.520" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T04:00:34.177" Title="Tips for quickly and efficiently searching for duplicate questions on Physics SE" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11055" CreationDate="2019-01-30T01:55:29.357" Score="-5" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it is because of my latest question on main or because of all good help I am getting. can someone tell me if there is a reason I get more faster as I obtain more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T13:28:17.977" Title="my reputation increases faster as I get more reputation" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T05:19:01.480" Score="-7" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to write a question here asking what the appropriate response is to incorrect upvoted answers, but I realized that I'm far from the first person to ask this, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9039/52072&quot;&gt;How should we deal with upvoted incorrect answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5244/52072&quot;&gt;Are technically wrong answers and comments allowed on physics.SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://Flags%20and%20technical%20innacuracies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flags and technical innacuracies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/976/52072&quot;&gt;physics.SE's inability to deal with users who are highly persistent...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10749/52072&quot;&gt;Does it matter if answers are correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/833/52072&quot;&gt;old questions with incorrect answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions on the scientific stack exchanges are highly advanced, and only a small number of people in the world are likely to actually know the answer. However, especially if the answer has the right &quot;popular&quot; flavor to it, it might garner a lot of up votes from people who can't judge it's merit, but know that it sounds good. When I encounter an incorrect answer like such, I've found my options to be very unsatisfactory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Down-voting: The expert to non-expert ratio of voters makes this ineffective.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commenting: Often-times the ways in which an answer is wrong cannot be succinctly summarized in a comment, and often-times comments on older questions get buried below a stack of previous comments, getting no visibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answering: Sometimes it's necessary not just to answer the question, but to rebuke the incorrect answer. Having a long rebuke section in an &quot;answer&quot; doesn't seem appropriate. More-over, such a rebuke is unlikely to get the same upvotes as a nice-sounding answer since it likely brings attention to the nuance and complexity of a subject. This seems like an ineffective mechanism against incorrect answers that already have a lot of vote-mass.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view this is a problem, and has led me to think that stack exchange is an unreliable and potentially misleading source for these types of advanced subjects (although that hasn't kept me from coming back ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought of a potential remedy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A &quot;Requires Expertise&quot; Notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For highly specialized questions, the notice would remind users that they should only answer or vote on questions if they have the expertise to judge whether an answer is accurate or not. I'm thinking of something similar in style to the &quot;controversial post&quot; notice. I'd think that this could be added by mods, or perhaps the questioner themselves, who recognized a question was likely to garner such votes. To be clear I'm not suggesting certain users be labeled &quot;experts&quot; or anything like that or that anything here would be reputation based, just a notice in an attempt to dissuade irresponsible voting &amp;amp; answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Whether it's a good idea or not, I fear the suggestion is being misunderstood, so I've tried to remove some of the fluff in an attempt to clarify. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52072" LastEditorUserId="52072" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T17:36:42.180" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T19:19:55.527" Title="A &quot;Requires Expertise&quot; Notice?" Tags="|feature-request|accepted-answer|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11052" CreationDate="2019-01-30T06:03:05.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;reasons is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Authoritative reference needed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looking for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always interpreted such bounties as evidence that the bounty-setter believes the existing answers, even if upvoted, are fatally flawed.  Offering such a bounty has the dual effect of (a) implying that the existing answers are inadequate, and (b) featuring the question in a place where a subject-matter expert is slightly more likely to happen across it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T06:03:05.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11052" CreationDate="2019-01-30T07:47:03.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notices under questions (popular ones include the 'controversial post' notice on Skeptics SE and the 'resource recommendation' on Physics) are added manually by mods and they need to be removed manually too. This can't just show up for certain users 'when they try to vote', and there's no provision for something with an 'okay box'. This requires changes to the SE code base, and would need to be proposed on Meta SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, this would actually be applicable everywhere, since &lt;strong&gt;however rudimentary the question is, votes should only be cast when someone knows that the content is accurate&lt;/strong&gt;. So adding it as a notice isn't sensible. It's more logical as an addition to the help center, and something similar's already there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever you encounter a question, answer or comment that you feel is especially useful, vote it up! (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;From the privileges section&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T04:12:14.333" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T04:12:14.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11051" CreationDate="2019-01-30T14:00:05.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've been on this site for a sum total of two weeks. That is nowhere near enough data to say &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; conclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the only backing in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/220173/luna?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;your reputation tab&lt;/a&gt; for the observation that you report is the linear progression from January 27 through January 29:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pJVZQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pJVZQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this growth trend is already on some shaky ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest explanation that you're getting more reputation over the last couple of days is that your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/457644/why-does-sound-behave-differently-in-water-than-in-air&quot;&gt;fourth question&lt;/a&gt; is better than the previous three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, though: take it easy. Read as many questions and answers as you can, use them to write the best questions and answers as you can, take your time when writing posts, and worry about the details of site mechanics like reputation later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T14:00:05.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11051" CreationDate="2019-01-30T14:56:04.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11055&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty's answer&lt;/a&gt; covers your specific case pretty well, but it's worth addressing the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;[Is there] a reason I get more faster as I obtain more?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty trivial/general and there's no real need to ask that kind of thing on meta. Obviously, if you participate at almost &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; for some time, you'll get the hang of it and start doing it better. The rep gained is an indication that you've put together a well-received question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/457644&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), and while that may simply be coincidence, it may be because you have a better idea of how to ask. That being said, there is some speculation (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/322722&quot;&gt;this Meta SE post&lt;/a&gt; and links therein) that people are less reluctant to upvote a post by a high-rep user, but in your case (70 rep), I doubt that it's a significant factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, you could relax with the meta posts... questions like this one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11046&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10997&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11008&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; are the kind of thing which you could/would answer yourself if you hang around the site observing interactions and questions for a couple of weeks and exploring the help center a bit. Posting everything on meta is really not necessary, in fact at a certain stage it becomes harmful because it fills up the front page, hiding important stuff and consuming peoples' time. For instance, this week saw a lot of complaints and poorly thought out feature-suggestions (I make that claim since they were heavily downvoted), a few of which were yours, and some stuff which I feel could have spent some time on top (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11050&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11001&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) got submerged. Furthermore, if you have such a large number of meta posts, people will start wondering if you're relying on the 'meta effect' (whereby you draw attention to your posts by 'advertising' them on meta) to get votes, and it will become difficult for people to assume good faith. SE has a complex privilege and moderation system, which can have a big impact on usage patterns, so it's understandable that you're curious. But please, observe, speculate, and research &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; asking everything on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;On a side note, questions which get you rep are, more often than not, &lt;em&gt;not good questions&lt;/em&gt;. A key feature of most high-scoring questions is &lt;em&gt;accessibility&lt;/em&gt;, not quality, due to the HNQ (Hot Network Question) effect. So perhaps if you spend some months/years around and start asking questions which are of interest primarily to people who specifically study physics, the upvotes will slow down.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T05:38:20.250" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T05:38:20.250" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11049" CreationDate="2019-01-30T20:14:34.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like you have triggered our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;automatic question ban&lt;/a&gt;. The algorithm that decides whether you can post a particular question is not public, so there's not much we can advise you that you can't get from reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/280545&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.  But it's worth calling attention to a couple of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Having low-scored questions in your history makes it more likely that you'll be prevented from asking more questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Having &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; questions in your history &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; makes it more likely that you'll be prevented from asking more questions in the future.  Resist the temptation to delete your poorly-received questions. It looks like the ones you have asked so far are safe from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;the roomba&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a very good sign that you are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11028/44126&quot;&gt;actively inquiring about how to improve your questions&lt;/a&gt;, and your most recent question has been well-received. Progress!  But it's worth highlighting a particular bit of advice from one of your answers there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of this takes time, hence: patience patience patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all honesty, encouraging you to edit your questions and wait is the &lt;em&gt;entire point&lt;/em&gt; of the automatic post bans.  As a diamond moderator, I have a little information about your post-ban status, and it looks like you've been blocked from asking several times already.  Take the hint and &lt;em&gt;wait&lt;/em&gt;.  Take your draft question, save it somewhere on your own computer, and sit on it for a while.  If you waited a day before trying to post last time, wait two days the next time; if you waited two days and still got blocked, try waiting four days.  It's easier to wait if you decide in advance when you'll try to ask again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you're waiting, if you find yourself thinking about your question, work on improving your draft.  Spend some time searching other parts of the internet, and modify your question to be clearer about what you already know, what you've found during your searches, and what you're still confused about.  Include in your draft links to the things you've found that are useful or confusing.  Maybe you'll even &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;answer your own question&lt;/a&gt; before you get around to asking it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing I'd advise you do while you're waiting is to &lt;strong&gt;read&lt;/strong&gt;.  If you have questions about stellar evolution, spend some time reading in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astronomy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astronomy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt;.  If you have questions about how sound works, spend some time reading in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acoustics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acoustics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acoustics&lt;/a&gt;.  Look for questions that interest you and that have been well-received, where both the questions and the answers are clear.  And compare the way that those questions are written to the draft(s) of your own question(s) that you're waiting to be able to post.  Time spent reading is time spent learning how to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T20:14:34.933" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11059" CreationDate="2019-01-31T19:03:28.343" Score="-2" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question I have is &quot;We know gravitational waves exist, but how do we detect them?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have heard astronomers talk about gravitational waves being created when two black holes collide or when two neutron stars collide.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;note that this question idea is not complete &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T20:04:16.827" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T21:15:21.870" Title="Are questions regarding gravitational waves allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ClosedDate="2019-02-02T16:43:33.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11058" CreationDate="2019-01-31T19:09:29.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, any topic for which a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt; exists is not categorically off-topic. In this case, there already 723 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravitational-waves&quot;&gt;gravitational-waves&lt;/a&gt;, 580 of which are not closed, so it seems safe to say that such questions are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are just looking for basic information about a topic, as in that you know the name but not much else, we generally expect you to show due diligence in doing prior research, which at the very least includes looking for (and reading) the Wikipedia article on the topic, if one exists, and searching the internet for your question or keywords from it with your favourite search engine. If you have done so and still feel there's something left to know, it is &lt;em&gt;essential&lt;/em&gt; that you reference the knowledge you already have. Only that way answerers will know what they need to explain, and only that way can questions become focused enough so that they are not effectively asking for a book-length introduction to the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T19:09:29.053" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11052" CreationDate="2019-01-31T19:19:55.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every post on our site requires a certain level expertise to evaluate. Sometimes that expertise is having completed primary school, sometimes it is having a dim recollection of high school physics, sometimes it is having studied a particular subfield of physics in depth. But you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; understand any post about science if you do not share a basic framework of knowledge with the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world, users &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; should only vote on posts if their knowledge of the general topic of the post is such that they can evaluate its merits. In the real world, they don't. But this is not specific to &quot;highly specialized questions&quot;, people will vote on questions regarding Newtonian mechanics whether or not they know Newton's laws. All this notice would achieve is give the questions tagged with it an air of elitism (like &quot;Oh, for the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; posts, it's fine if you just vote on it, but for &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; one, you actually need to know something&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, we shouldn't do this. It is SE's basic philosophy that people vote on what they find &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;, and you cannot prescribe to people what they find useful. Some people enjoy reading walls of text, others enjoy reading detailed mathematical derivations, others enjoy reading posts about topics they have not the faintest clue of. That's just the way it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T19:19:55.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11058" CreationDate="2019-01-31T21:15:21.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;ACuriousMind has given a good answer to your question in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your proposed question specifically, searching the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gravitational-waves&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gravitational-waves&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gravitational-waves&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;detect&quot; brings up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/81208/44126&quot;&gt;this poor question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/304212/44126&quot;&gt;this better question&lt;/a&gt; among about four hundred others.  The question as you describe it here sounds like an exact duplicate of the first, but a helpful flagger might link it to another more comprehensive question like the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, repeatedly asking &quot;would such-and-such a question be on-topic?&quot; is not really a good use of Meta.  It's worked out for you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11046/44126&quot;&gt;twice now&lt;/a&gt;, but a better long-term strategy is for you to spend more time reading good questions on the subjects that interest you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T21:15:21.870" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11063" CreationDate="2019-02-01T17:14:36.500" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/458209/does-a-geodesic-always-extremize-its-path-length&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as a duplicate, and to my surprise it was immediately closed. The message in the yellow box lists only my name, which makes it sound like my own vote was the only one involved. Did this change because I recently passed 50k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then I don't think I want this new superpower. Is there some way to work around this, so that I can cast an ordinary vote rather than having my opinion instantly enforced? If it's going to happen this abruptly, then I feel like I would have to spend much more time to really carefully read and think everything through in depth before taking the action, and usually I don't want to spend that amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a threshold at the parameter value x=50k, is it possible just to raise the value of x on this SE site? I doubt there are more than three or four of us on physics.SE to whom this would apply, so maybe we could easily reach an agreement to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T18:05:43.340" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T17:15:03.037" Title="Does the mechanism for marking duplicates change when you reach 50k rep, and if so, can this be avoided?" Tags="|support|reputation|duplicates|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11062" CreationDate="2019-02-01T18:05:35.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a feature added since 2014: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/231212&quot;&gt;Increase close vote weight for gold tag badge holders&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it simply, users can now unilaterally close a question as a duplicate if they have at least a gold badge on one of the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this specific case, you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1236/general-relativity&quot;&gt;a gold badge on 'general-relativity' tag&lt;/a&gt; and closing a question tagged with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62016" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T18:05:35.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11062" CreationDate="2019-02-02T14:24:06.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The gold badge dupe hammer is a little scary at first, but you soon get used to it. ;) (Obviously, I don't yet have close-voting privileges on Physics, but on SO I have a gold badge in Python).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're pretty sure that the question is a duplicate, but you aren't confident that the question you nominated is the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; dupe target, just close it anyway. The dupe target list can have multiple entries, and it can be edited after the question is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is to get dupes closed quickly. Dupe questions aren't inherently bad (unless it's a common question and the OP did zero research to find an existing question), but we do want to prevent the proliferation of dupe answers. I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting that questions should be dupe-closed against targets that are only vaguely related. But if you've found a target question that is a reasonable match to the new question, then close it quickly. And then do a more in-depth search for a better target(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be worthwhile writing a brief comment to the OP, asking if the dupe target satisfies them. A dupe target that contains the required info isn't much use if it's too complicated for the OP to understand, or too simple &amp;amp; general to address their specific concerns. Also, we don't want people to think that they're being punished by having their question dupe-closed, that's less likely to occur if we ask them for feedback regarding the dupe target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP doesn't like the target, try to persuade them to clarify the question as to why your dupe target isn't appropriate. Of course, many OPs, especially new contributors, will just reply in comments, and not comprehend that such info actually belongs in the question body. In such cases, it may be simpler to just edit in the info yourself than to teach them how Stack Exchange sites work. ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, the dupe target &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; what the OP really needs, but they just need a helping hand to see that. And sometimes that can be accomplished with a sentence or 2 and a relevant link in a comment. (Other times it may be necessary to write a brief actual answer to the new question that bridges the gap between the OP's skill level and the info at the dupe target, especially if the answers at the target assume advanced knowledge, or if there isn't clear agreement between them. True, such a bridging answer could be posted on the dupe target page, but if it's a big page the new answer is likely to get buried. OTOH, answering &amp;amp; dupe-hammering the same question is somewhat controversial. ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to nominate a dupe target, but really don't feel comfortable closing the question single-handedly, there's a simple solution: just post a manual &quot;Possible duplicate of X&quot; comment. That makes the link available to other close-voters. And then re-visit the question a few hours later to see if it's gathered some close votes. If it has, then feel free to hammer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option with a borderline question is to mention it in the chat room, to see if other people agree with your target, or if they have better suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T17:15:03.037" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T17:15:03.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-03T12:39:09.270" Score="3" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please help me understanding about How I should improve my questions like this-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/458606/184435&quot;&gt;How does torque operate? What will be going on with disc?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from being downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think I have given the specific difficulty How does the torque operate and which torque is it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shown my work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have given the full details as it is in the source. I think the question has all the details.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Its not a duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have maintained decency in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me in improving my question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit--Now please the question I have edited it and please see if more can be done to make it a better question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="184435" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T09:23:21.180" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T09:23:21.180" Title="I am not able to understand what should I do on this question to avoid it from being downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|down-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-03T23:02:37.197" Score="-4" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started a bounty and I did not mean to can I do anything to undo it.&#xA;if there is not I request that there is a way to retract the bounty on the same day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220173" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T00:50:27.077" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T05:28:27.263" Title="what do I do if I started a bounty on accident" Tags="|support|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11068" CreationDate="2019-02-03T23:41:10.873" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be perfectly clear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;We expect you to take responsibility for your actions.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes every one of your actions on this site, but in this particular context, it's worth emphasising that it includes setting bounties, allowing other people to access your account, and lying or other deceptive behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you set a bounty and then regretted the decision:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to retract or refund a bounty. Moderators do have that ability, which they only use in some rare exceptions, but your case (&quot;I made a mistake&quot;) isn't one of those exceptions. If you don't want to set bounties that you don't want to give away then don't set them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see the FAQ in the mother meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you allowed someone else to access your account and you don't like what they did with it:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still 100% your responsibility, and you need to pick up the tab for anything the other person did. If it's not to your liking, the only remedy is to be more careful with your account credentials, and with who you allow access to your devices, in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it was in fact you, but you're lying to us to try to game the system:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;in no way different&lt;/em&gt; to lying to someone's face in real life. You're in a social situation interacting with other real human beings whom you're asking for help, in an environment where interactions are based on trust and with a basic assumption that you're acting in good faith. This means that you need to treat this exactly like you would a real-world interaction, and that antisocial behaviour is not tolerated. Users who don't stick to those rules can and do end up spending time on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;the &quot;penalty box&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, in which your account gets suspended (for a day or a week, then increasing lengths of time) and you have no access to the site other than reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More generally:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really sounds to me like you're not always able to take your use of the site in a calm manner, and that things sometimes get away from you. &lt;strong&gt;Ask for help with this&lt;/strong&gt; to the people around you, be they a parent, a friend, a sibling, a therapist, a teacher, or anyone else who you trust. There is a (very low) limit to how much we can do to help you with your use of the site, and you should build a real-life support structure that you can run things by before they start to spiral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or that's my take, anyway.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T05:28:27.263" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T05:28:27.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11068" CreationDate="2019-02-04T02:40:47.553" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add some more details regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; part of this question... I should mention why I think adding provisions for users to cancel bounties is a terrible idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have found out how bounties work by now. There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;featured tab&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt; where your question is advertised. So if you want to cancel the bounty after putting it up, there's a possibility that people have already answered the question with that bounty as their motivation, or perhaps they're in the process of writing an answer. Or perhaps someone has seen your question advertised there and decided to upvote it. It's not fair for you to cancel the bounty after that: there's a possibility you've gained rep through the publicity, or someone has invested some effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if neither of those has happened in this case, it's possible that they would happen in other situations, and that makes canceling a feature which can be misused easily. Saying that there are tests to ensure that neither of these has happened before bounties are cancelled are too complicated to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's much easier to convince users to think twice before setting up bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T02:58:39.623" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T02:58:39.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11074" CreationDate="2019-02-07T18:11:43.187" Score="9" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go into the &quot;close votes&quot; review queue and either selecting &quot;Leave Open&quot; or &quot;Close&quot; adds a count to the number of reviews you have done in the &quot;close votes&quot; queue. However, if you are viewing a question outside of the queue and vote to close it, this does not add a number to your number of reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand how in general this could make sense. If you are not doing things while looking at the queue then what you do won't count towards your numbers in the queue. But it still seems odd to me. For example, if I directly click on a question and see that it already has 3 close votes, I could either vote to close it there (doesn't add to my number in the queue), or I could easily just open up the close votes queue and vote to close it in there (does add to my number in the queue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is it not set up to where close votes count towards the number either way? It seems odd to me that the difference is just in whether or not you cast the vote while in the queue. NOTE: I am asking about this for questions that already have at least one close vote on them. I understand why you wouldn't want to raise the number of reviews for new close votes, as one could just go and vote to close every new question to get their number up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T11:08:21.037" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T11:08:21.037" Title="Why directly voting to close a question does not add to your number of reviews in the queue?" Tags="|discussion|vote-to-close|review|review-tools|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11072" CreationDate="2019-02-07T21:10:49.173" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of questions on the site that could use reviewer input as to whether they should remain open, but they might not attract your attention from any of the question lists.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the review queues is to encourage some fraction of our users to occasionally look at a &lt;em&gt;representative sample&lt;/em&gt; of questions that are pending closure.  Without the review queues, we would have higher-quality curation of the more interesting (or more popular) tags and topics on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, imagine that you're poking around in your favorite tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/death-ray&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;death-ray&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;death-ray&lt;/a&gt;.  You find an old question that should have been closed right after it was asked, but somehow it was missed at the time and it's several months old.  You flag it for closure and move on to other stuff.  Without the review queue, you might be the only user on the site who gets that deep in the the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/death-ray&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;death-ray&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;death-ray&lt;/a&gt; backlog before your close vote ages away, and the bad question would stay open.  But with the review queue, I'll eventually get shown the bad question you found, even though I usually don't read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/death-ray&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;death-ray&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;death-ray&lt;/a&gt; questions at all.  I may not know very much about death rays in particular, but I can usually tell a good question from a stinker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That whole process only works if we have reviewers who are willing to spend time going through the queues.  Our population of active reviewers is smaller than it might be: there are only a dozen users who have spent any time going through the close queue in the past week.  Since it takes five close votes to close a question, an extra person looking at the representative problematic questions in the queue can have a big impact on the curation of the site's questions.  An extra person who spends a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of time in the review queues is especially valuable; that's why we award those people review badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T21:10:49.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11072" CreationDate="2019-02-08T00:18:37.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think rob's answer provides some insight as to why the review queues exists, but I think the answer to the question is as simple as  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You aren't &lt;em&gt;reviewing&lt;/em&gt; the question when you are outside the queue; when you click the &quot;close&quot; button from the post page, you are just &lt;em&gt;voting to close&lt;/em&gt; the question, even when there are existing close votes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though the same result occurs (a vote to close), because they were done in different manners they are counted separately. Note that you can view your own total cast vote count from your profile (click on &quot;# votes cast&quot; and then make sure you've got &quot;closure&quot; selected), so the system is still tracking it, even if the review queue isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T10:57:37.110" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T10:57:37.110" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-08T22:19:01.033" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/458137/does-the-gravitational-field-possess-an-inertial-mass&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt; originally asked: &lt;strong&gt;Why is the sign of gravitational inertial mass chosen to be positive like EM inertial mass?&lt;/strong&gt; and was put on hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On hold as unclear what you're asking by Buzz, safesphere, Jon Custer, ZeroTheHero, Chair Feb 3 at 7:50&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading feedback from the answers including &quot;to save writing negative signs&quot;, &quot;how could one know the motives of an author?&quot;, I took out the text in the body of the question referencing introductory textbooks I've read. I then used a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/391558/does-an-accelerating-electric-dipole-radiate&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; from a respected long-term user as guidance for the content of the question's added text: crisp, to the point, with enough information that adds to the question for the audience it's likely directed to: &lt;em&gt;physics graduates&lt;/em&gt; or interested readers of advanced undergraduate texts who understand that potential energy contributes to inertial mass. I edited my question to: &lt;strong&gt;Is gravitational inertial mass positive or negative?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was confident that this should have been enough to remove &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; as the original reason for putting on hold my question, and an answer was added, confirming another answer that the gravitational field contributes negatively to the total inertial mass. But after a few days only one person voted to reopen it. After chatting to a user in PSE chat, I was told it probably hadn't been voted for reopening for indirectly stating in the question that &lt;em&gt;gravitational potential energy has inertial mass.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save me arguing that my question was directed to a particular audience and to just get my question reopened, I edited the question to: &lt;strong&gt;Does the gravitational field possess an inertial mass ?&lt;/strong&gt; which quickly upped the number of reopening votes to four leaving just one more. But today, it's now been closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;closed as unclear what you're asking by Buzz, safesphere, Jon Custer, ZeroTheHero, Chair Feb 3 at 7:50&#xA;  Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.&#xA;  If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the reasons and users quoted are relevant for closing my question in its current form. The idea that gravitational mass makes a negative contribution to the total inertial mass is interesting IMO. So before my question is deleted I'd like to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there guidelines for reopening questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the original problem for putting a question on hold is removed,  should the question be reopened so that different problems also require five votes as for the original problem?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a closed question be deleted and then reposted if the original reason for closing it is corrected?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2146" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T15:19:27.633" Title="Are there guidelines for reopening questions?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-08T22:49:03.917" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just interested. I guess there is a relation to magnetic fiels or quantum physics but I have no clear idea of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221961" OwnerDisplayName="Lampert12" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-16T12:04:05.487" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T12:04:05.487" Title="What does the logo of Physics StackExchange depict?" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-02-08T23:39:24.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T02:00:08.817" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that a lot of our tags here do not have any wikis/excerpts, and they seem like they're almost identical. Can someone please suggest how they're different and whether or not we should remove them or add descriptions? Perhaps some of them could be marked as synonyms too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent example of a question which looks like it has some really redundant tags is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11077&quot;&gt;Are there guidelines for reopening questions?&lt;/a&gt; (v1; not edited by Qmechanic yet :P). I do not blame the OP, since those tags exist and obviously one would be compelled to use them, but I do feel that at that point, they're not helping accessibility: they're actually making it harder to find questions. For instance, if I have a certain question I'm trying to find, of if I want to look for &quot;some&quot; category (note that if there was a tag excerpt for the following tags, I'd know what to replace &quot;some&quot; with), I have no idea if I want &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/close-reasons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;close-reasons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;close-reasons&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/closed-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;closed-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;closed-questions&lt;/a&gt;. IMO if you're talking about a closed question, you're almost inevitably going to discuss the reason why it's closed, and that would also pull in a subset of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/scope&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scope&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scope&lt;/a&gt; tag. However, the scope tag is not present for a lot of these. Similarly, most of the questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/vote-to-close&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vote-to-close&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vote-to-close&lt;/a&gt; tag are not technically about the mechanism of close votes: only &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11072&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11062&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; from the tag's first page appear to be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can we add tag excerpts to these and create a few synonyms? Preferably the creators would do that; I have no idea what those were created for, and the lists of questions underneath them does not really indicate what they're supposed to be categorizing. Hopefully the tag excerpts would contain some notes about where the tag could be used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once the superfluous ones are obliterated/turned into synonyms, and the surviving ones have excerpts/wikis, can I/we go on a tag editing spree for the last couple of weeks' questions? I see a lot of questions just on the front page which I suspect &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; use a fix of that kind, based on my slight guesses regarding the meanings of the tags. Or should we just leave the old ones and make sure that the new ones can be chosen well?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they are indeed distinct tags, could someone post an answer regarding the differences? After that, can I/we go through the first page or so of that tag and remove it from the questions which don't need that, to ensure that the question list gives readers the correct impressions of the use of the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other redundant tags I've noticed: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/moderators&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moderators&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/moderation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moderation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moderation&lt;/a&gt;*, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/review&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;review&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/review-tools&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;review-tools&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;review-tools&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/duplicates&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;duplicates&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;duplicates&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/exact-duplicates&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;exact-duplicates&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exact-duplicates&lt;/a&gt; (though there's a pending &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/tag/s/duplicates/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym suggestion&lt;/a&gt; for those two).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* This is a great example of a case which may seem like perfect synonyms based on the usual usage, but 'moderation' could theoretically refer to broader moderation activities by the community&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T08:38:13.650" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T08:38:13.650" Title="Tag cleanups on our meta" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|meta|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11077" CreationDate="2019-02-09T15:10:28.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are my takes on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are there guidelines for reopening questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should be reopened when there are no reasons why it should be closed. That simple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the original problem for putting a question on hold is removed, should the question be reopened so that different problems also require five votes as for the original problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it shouldn't. Fix &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the problems with the post first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can a closed question be deleted and then reposted if the original reason for closing it is corrected?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would class that as an abuse of the site mechanisms, and well worth flagging for moderator attention, particularly if you're posting an identical copy of text that e.g. has already been voted to Remain Closed by the reopen review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, note that the passage between On Hold to Closed is automatic and does not involve any human intervention. &quot;On Hold&quot; is simply what the system calls closed questions during the first five days after closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T15:19:27.633" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T15:19:27.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11082" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-09T18:25:23.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T18:25:23.670" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T18:25:23.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11083" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-09T18:25:23.670" Score="0" Body="For discussions about the site's tags - what tags we should have (and which ones should be removed), and what topics each tag should or should not include." OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T18:25:23.670" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T18:25:23.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="229" CreationDate="2019-02-10T13:25:21.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frankly, the question you've linked isn't physics at all. You're just asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can [mathematical tool] be applied to quantitative finance such as option value calculation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that is purely a quantitative-finance question; as such it belongs on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://quant.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Quantitative Finance Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site (which opened to public beta &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/117/quantitative-finance&quot;&gt;in February 2011&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't see how &quot;but [mathematical tool] was developed for use in physics!&quot; is a relevant argument. The same is true for calculus - does that mean that all questions about differentiation and integration are on-topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty telling that the supporting argument for this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;much like how engineering physics is physics with engineering application bent,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;goes a good bit of the way towards sinking the general argument: generally speaking, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;engineering questions are not considered on-topic here&lt;/a&gt;. While it &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; concepts from physics, engineering is a separate discipline and to really &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; engineering, one needs to know and apply a whole host of separate tools, concepts and frameworks, which have nothing to do with physics. So, if the question is &quot;which laws of physics underlie this engineering solution&quot;, that's a physics question, but if it's &quot;how does one use X physics to solve this engineering problem&quot;, that's an engineering problem. The question linked here falls strictly on the not-physics side of the divide. Heck, if it were asking &quot;how does one link the uses of path integrals in physics with those in finance?&quot; you could argue that it's a multidisciplinary question, but that's not how it's been phrased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not to mention closing a question when the answerer hadn't even done with his answeris plain-- how to put it nicely-- rude&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the presence or absence of answers, let alone whether the answerer has further edits planned for that answer, is irrelevant to whether the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is on-topic. Closing questions is &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to prevent answers, so the correct reading of &quot;I was writing an answer but the question got closed&quot; is &quot;I chose an off-topic question to answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, though, from the understanding of the site's scope as it has matured in the years since this question was posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we allow econophysics questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as they have a nontrivial component that's directly asking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; parts of physics, then yes. If they're asking how tools from physics can be applied &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; other fields, then no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T13:25:21.113" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11088" CreationDate="2019-02-11T21:30:08.723" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I was suspended for low quality questions. I asked astronomy.SE if it would be ok to write some of my low quality questions from here to a higher quality there?  They said yes and I did and they did well. Now that a better question exist what can I do with that here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/426/can-i-migrate-some-questions-from-physics-se-to-here-that-are-in-scope&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/426/can-i-migrate-some-questions-from-physics-se-to-here-that-are-in-scope&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving them as here can only receive more down votes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I leave my low quality questions alone in risk of getting suspended again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I replace the old question here with the better question from there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I asked a moderator to delete the questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I link them together with their link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the first time I asked this question here.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235419/what-do-sun-spots-look-like-under-the-surface-of-the-sun&quot;&gt;What do sun spots look like under the surface of the Sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is where I re asked it in astronomy.SE.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/24940/how-do-sunspots-move-seen-from-the-side/24944#24944&quot;&gt;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/24940/how-do-sunspots-move-seen-from-the-side/24944#24944&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="148704" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T21:35:22.280" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T23:07:32.740" Title="Is it ok to link my own questions from another SE site?" Tags="|discussion|editing|duplicates|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11086" CreationDate="2019-02-11T23:04:27.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068/280545&quot;&gt;Cross-posting questions is frowned upon&lt;/a&gt;.  If you've managed to do so, the least you could do would be to include links connecting the corresponding questions, to save your readers the trouble or confusion of figuring out by accident what's happened.  It's enough to add a comment like &quot;Cross-posted to [other site]: [link].&quot;  It's polite to leave such a comment at both questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leaving them as here can only receive more down votes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't seem to be a real issue.  You have been inactive on Physics for about two years, and during that interval your reputation changes have been neutral or slightly positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I leave my low quality questions alone in risk of getting suspended again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of a suspension is to tell someone &quot;hey, this thing you do: quit doing that.&quot;&#xA;If a user has already figured out that some behavior was undesirable and stopped it on their own, there's not much point in a moderator suspension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons that the moderators keep the details of suspensions private is so that users can be judged based on their current contributions and behavior, rather than on their past.  A user with a history of low-quality contributions who &lt;em&gt;learns new things&lt;/em&gt; and starts to contribute higher-quality content is unlikely to earn a suspension for behaviors they have &lt;em&gt;quit doing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leave the past behind; focus on the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I asked a moderator to delete the questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators generally don't delete questions upon request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T23:04:27.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11086" CreationDate="2019-02-11T23:07:32.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I would suggest that you should leave those old questions alone, and move on to newer questions &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; it won't help very much to try and fix them, and the only thing you'll achieve is to get back into a deeper examination of questions which didn't do very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should certainly add links as comments under the Physics versions to any existing Astronomy threads where you've asked similar questions, which is something you should always do in any case. But I would leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also counsel you not to delete the old questions, though to some extent this is up to you. For users that have come up against &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;an automated question ban&lt;/a&gt;, it is a distinctly bad idea to delete previous questions, regardless of whether they're downvoted or closed, since the system interprets that as yet another sign that the question was bad, and adds another black mark to the file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your case, however, the restriction was a moderator-indicated suspension rather than a question ban, which puts you on the human side of the system. Which is good: we don't hold grudges. From what I can tell, so long as the content you post going forward is of reasonably high quality, your previous suspension (and the posts that led to it) have a blank slate on top of them, and you shouldn't worry too much about them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, focus on keeping your question quality up: read deeply and carefully, and do your due diligence in searching for duplicates and for obvious answers and sources of information, and incorporate those results into the formulation of your posts. One of the main problems with the questions you churned out previously was to rush through things, so: Think Before You Post. Take it slow, and work carefully on each and every question. Eventually you'll be able to bash out a question quickly, but it will take some time to get there. In the meantime, focus on asking better questions instead of asking more questions faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T23:07:32.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T21:26:53.010" Score="1" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that a user has down voted an answer to a question that they didn't completely understand. Years later, they read the answer again and find it to be good, but cannot change their vote because the answer has never been edited. Is it OK to make a minor grammar improvement for the purpose of reversing the old vote and upvoting the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148704" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T06:35:05.430" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T06:40:28.170" Title="Is it ok to edit to up vote?" Tags="|discussion|support|answers|editing|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-13T08:47:52.947" Score="17" ViewCount="1977" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; room for Physics SE is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h Bar&lt;/a&gt; (yeah, it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1028&quot;&gt;cool name&lt;/a&gt;); it has been an active place for a while now, and a lot of you have probably popped in at some point of time. However, some of the regulars recently got the feeling that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10959&quot;&gt;chat isn't what it once was&lt;/a&gt;, and the consensus of that discussion was that codifying a bit of the room culture is certainly a step in the right direction. So we'd like to clarify some things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the rules?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What to do when you're uncomfortable about something?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T02:44:51.753" LastActivityDate="2023-06-24T05:43:06.933" Title="The h Bar is always open! (Chat Guidelines)" Tags="|discussion|support|chat|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-02-13T08:56:14.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11051" CreationDate="2019-02-13T13:28:17.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add another potential cause:&#xA;Occasionally when you post questions or answers, reputation gains trickle in every once in a while for a longer amount of time, so it's the amount of good questions and answers that boost the speed of your reputation gains and not the reputation itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that in your case Emilio's answer is the accurate one, but if you notice an increased rep gain in the future, this might be another possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182086" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T13:28:17.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11090" CreationDate="2019-02-13T18:10:09.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is feedback for the content in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11094&quot;&gt;answer by Chair&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think several of these points are well-intentioned but either overshoot their intention or make a point not actually in line with what is current practice in the room:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some things are meant for other rooms&lt;/strong&gt;: Meta-issues are frequently best off in the Physics meta chat room, and homework-like questions are more welcome in the Problem-solving room. The meta room is quite still, so you'll probably need to ping a person you'd like to talk to, and the problem-solving room has a few requirements which can be read about here. That being said, there's no requirement that conversations in the h bar must be about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove the explicit mention of meta issues or the meta room.&lt;/strong&gt; Meta issues are &lt;em&gt;just fine&lt;/em&gt; in the h bar, as long as they don't drown out any other conversation, like any other topic. The meta chat room has always been used as an &lt;em&gt;overflow&lt;/em&gt; room - i.e. a room to shift a meta discussion to when the h bar was otherwise busy or the discussion went on for a very long period of time - not as a &quot;room for meta issues&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid sensitive topics&lt;/strong&gt;: These can range from local stuff like suspensions of users on Physics SE (which the mods here prefer to not discuss in public and is bad form when the user can't reply), to broader issues like politics, sex, and religion. They aren't strictly off-topic in the room, but we try to avoid them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Split this into two parts.&lt;/strong&gt; This point lumps together things which don't belong together. That we discourage discussion of suspensions and overly and/or unduly negative discussion of other users' behaviour is indeed a rule the moderators have adopted, and such discussion should indeed be avoided. However, discussion of &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; sensitive topics &lt;em&gt;should not be avoided as such&lt;/em&gt; - you should just be especially certain that you discuss them in a respectful and considerate manner, and that you should be more than willing to drop the issue if someone expresses their discomfort with the topic. The canonical network-wide post on political discussion in chat is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/289398/263383&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The bottom line is &lt;em&gt;be respectful&lt;/em&gt;, not &quot;don't talk about this&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T04:09:31.943" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T04:09:31.943" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-02-13T18:10:09.747" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11090" CreationDate="2019-02-14T04:02:49.277" Score="11" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Chatroom guidelines&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Although chat is a place for casual conversation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/22232&quot;&gt;swearing is generally frowned upon&lt;/a&gt; on SE, so be polite too. This is something you need to be &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; careful about when discussing sensitive topics like &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/289398&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt;, sex, and religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't use chat as a 'replacement' for the main site&lt;/strong&gt;. Though we'll obviously talk a lot of physics, some questions are better off on the main site. In chat, people's answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/320418&quot;&gt;won't be consistently indexed by search engines&lt;/a&gt; like Google, so they won't be 'contributing to a body of knowledge' or 'gaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;internet points&lt;/a&gt;', so clearly questions are a lot more useful on the main site. Some questions which aren't great for the main site (I'm thinking of the opinion-based ones) are great for chat, but if someone tells you that the questions you're asking aren't suitable, please listen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't use chat as a replacement for flagging&lt;/strong&gt;. Don't use the chat to request moderator action. Flags already exist for this purpose, and don't needlessly get other people involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some things are better suited for other rooms&lt;/strong&gt;. Homework-like questions are more welcome in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/54160/problem-solving-strategies&quot;&gt;problem-solving room&lt;/a&gt;. That room has a few requirements which can be read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10917&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. That being said, there's no requirement that conversations in the h Bar must be about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Try to use MathJax for typesetting mathematical expressions&lt;/strong&gt;. It isn't enabled by default, but if you can follow the suggestions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/97938&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, you can enable it for your browser or app. Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020&quot;&gt;basic tutorial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't advertise your recent questions&lt;/strong&gt;. If you just posted something on the main site, give it some time, and don't tell people to go there and look at it. Particularly by pinging people. That's rude. Those who can answer are already watching the queue on the main site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't interrupt ongoing conversations&lt;/strong&gt;. One of the great things about Stack Exchange chat is that the reply system allows multiple conversations to take place simultaneously. But that only works if you're discreet, and you don't post walls of text which occupy space on the screens of people who're talking about something else. If there's a discussion taking place, scroll up to figure out what it's about, and don't force a change in topic (unless what's going on is actually harmful, of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't ping random users&lt;/strong&gt;. You may use pings, but responsibly and sparingly.  Err on the side of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; pinging when you're unsure that the pingee(s) would be interested in your message(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be patient. Don't appear entitled.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't post the same thing multiple times just because the last version disappeared at the top. Even if there's another discussion going on, or nobody has acknowledged your message, understand that it's not considered important or actionable by the current residents, and don't push it again. You'll probably have better luck if you ask your question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#&quot;&gt;appropriate main site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar to the best of your ability.&lt;/strong&gt; Avoid rapid, short messages and txt spk/l33tspeak. These are often hard to read and take up valuable screen space. Txt spk may save you time typing, but it imposes a huge reading overhead on others - you're simply offloading your communications work onto everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use stars reasonably&lt;/strong&gt;. Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/305263/437611&quot;&gt;What are chat stars?&lt;/a&gt;. Stars shouldn't be used as &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot; indicators. They should be used for useful/interesting stuff which you think should be seen by people who come by after the conversation has finished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid speculating about user suspensions and pinging suspended users&lt;/strong&gt;.  The mods here prefer to not discuss suspension reasons in public and it's bad form to intentionally ping someone or talk about them when they can't reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't expect users to respond in real-time&lt;/strong&gt;. Think of chat as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71?m=19779072#19779072&quot;&gt;asynchronous communication protocol&lt;/a&gt;. Instead of asking &amp;quot;Are you free for X minutes?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Can you answer a X minute question?&amp;quot; every time, directly type out the question you want to ask. That way, even after you've logged off, others can answer it. Then you have the answer the next time you log on. But if you just ask &amp;quot;Are you around, user X?&amp;quot;, then, if user X is not around, you haven't gained anything. A late response is better than no response at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Yikes, that's a lot! What &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; I talk about then???&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anything!&lt;/strong&gt; As I mentioned earlier, conversations are not restricted to physics, though we do like to move the homework and meta-physics SE-discussions elsewhere. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sol.gfxile.net/dontask.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don't ask about asking, just ask!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Really, The h Bar is full of people who're interested in all sorts of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Something's wrong...&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see some obviously offensive or inappropriate messages, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kZD67.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flag them&lt;/a&gt;. They will be dealt with appropriately. If there's a more general pattern which is worrying you, ping one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar?tab=access&quot;&gt;room owners (ROs)&lt;/a&gt; or active &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; for anything that can wait, possibly with a request to talk privately if it's not suitable for public discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Notes&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Parts adapted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3890&quot;&gt;Math SE chat room guide&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sopython.com/chatroom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Python room rules&lt;/a&gt;. If you're new to Stack Exchange chat as a whole, also read through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;chat faq&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A few edits were made while this post was part of the 'question', see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/11090/revisions&quot;&gt;the question's revision history&lt;/a&gt; for a list of edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a community wiki post for a reason! Feel free to suggest improvements by editing it. If you have some drastically different rules in mind or opinion about whether we should have rules or not, please write another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="359074" LastEditorDisplayName="user337588" LastEditDate="2023-06-24T05:43:06.933" LastActivityDate="2023-06-24T05:43:06.933" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-02-14T04:02:49.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11089" CreationDate="2019-02-14T06:40:28.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you try to change your vote on a post, you get a message like &quot;You last voted on this post on [timestamp]. Your vote is now locked in unless the post is edited.&quot;  The time window during which votes can be retracted is very brief, like five minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; use case for the feature is if you've voted on a post and an edit later changes the post in a way that changes your opinion of it.  For example, maybe an answer has a serious flaw, so you downvote and leave a comment explaining why.  The author of the post changes it so that it no longer has the problem that bothered you.  In that case, changing a vote would make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your opinion on a post changes even though the post does not, there's an argument to be made for finding a way to improve the post yourself --- a spelling fix or a grammar improvement --- so that you can change your vote on the edited post.  However, &lt;strong&gt;the edit needs to stand on its own its own merits&lt;/strong&gt;.  Users who have earned &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;the privilege of un-reviewed edits&lt;/a&gt; are reminded in the guidance that &quot;tiny or trivial edits are discouraged&quot;; lower-reputation users, whose edits are still &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits&quot;&gt;subject to review&lt;/a&gt;, are discouraged from making tiny edits by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10770/44126&quot;&gt;kind-of-dumb algorithm&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The dumb algorithm is not hard to circumvent, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10973/44126&quot;&gt;we discourage &quot;harmless&quot; hacks whose purpose is to avoid a software limitation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, you could consider the tactic of &quot;make a minor edit to allow a vote to be changed&quot; --- that is, the subject of your question --- as a &quot;hack&quot; to get around the software limitation on changing votes.  That's the kind of thing that might be okay if it happened once, or rarely; however, if you find yourself frequently running up against software restrictions that prevent you from doing something, it's worth asking whether the thing you're unable to do is really consistent with the way that we hope people will use our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case linked in a previous version of this question, a user with a history of trouble with trivial edits proposed a trivial edit to an old post, and left a comment suggesting they were about to embark upon a program of such edits and vote changes.  A &lt;em&gt;series&lt;/em&gt; of trivial edits would be &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more disruptive than a set of old mis-cast votes, and so the proposal drew a somewhat harsh response from a moderator.&#xA;(That moderator was me.  I try not to write harshly, but I miss the mark sometimes.  Sorry.)&#xA;Hopefully this answer supplies a little more nuance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T06:40:28.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T16:30:17.313" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I arrived to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26821/&quot;&gt;physics.SE page&lt;/a&gt; where the first link is broken, presumably because it is pointing to  &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;theoreticalphysics.SE&lt;/a&gt; which does not exist anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what to do in such a case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wouldn't be wise to add some instructions for similar cases in the help centre?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both questions I was not able to find a general answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="183259" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T17:50:33.183" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T17:50:33.183" Title="Broken theoreticalphysics.SE link - What to do?" Tags="|support|links|site-enhancement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T16:36:04.780" Score="-6" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/461176/&quot;&gt;What is wrong about the following reasoning concerning hypersphere cosmology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;I was wondering why it is put on hold. It is honestly not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222766" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T16:45:12.240" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T16:45:12.240" Title="Why has this question been put on hold?" Tags="|support|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11096" CreationDate="2019-02-16T16:37:15.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since all &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics&quot;&gt;TP.SE&lt;/a&gt; threads were &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1193/2451&quot;&gt;migrated&lt;/a&gt; to Phys.SE, it is in principle possible to fix the link, which is hereby done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T16:53:29.963" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T16:53:29.963" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11097" CreationDate="2019-02-16T16:43:42.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your post is currently on hold because it is incomprehensible what the reasoning is supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking an analogy with the 2-sphere, you seem to be claiming that someone moving along the surface of the Earth between the two points moves a greater distance than the distance between the two points &quot;we measure&quot;. But if we were truly creatures confined to the surface (like we would be in the case where three-dimensional space is a hypersphere), we would measure the distance &lt;em&gt;along the surface&lt;/em&gt;, so there is no discrepancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T16:43:42.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T16:52:55.487" Score="6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how to raise this issue, but I was looking for an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/340530/&quot;&gt;How do we know that nuclear decay is truly random and spontaneous?&lt;/a&gt;.  This is an important question because we don't just &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it is random, but it has been proven quite thoroughly that it MUST BE random by Bell's theorem and related experiments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately NONE of the answers mentions Bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is marked as duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/105107/&quot;&gt;Is radioactive decay spontaneous or random?&lt;/a&gt;. That is a different question.  That asks about the similarity and difference of the meanings of spontaneous and random.  The answers there are appropriate to that question, but none of those mention Bell and Bell's Theorem is not an appropriate answer to that anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question ask &quot;what is it&quot; and the other asked &quot;why do we know it is that way&quot;  those are different questions.   I am not allowed to add a proper answer to the &quot;why&quot; question because you can't answer questions that are marked as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to able to point to a correct answer to this question and I am willing to provide it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222992" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-17T19:25:47.817" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T19:25:47.817" Title="Wrongly marked duplicate about why decay is random" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|answers|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T15:45:09.790" Score="14" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I saw that this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/461524/&quot;&gt;Applying energy and momentum conservation to the problem of pulling a bent carpet at a constant speed&lt;/a&gt; about pulling a bent carpet was closed for being a homework question. I think this was an incorrect call that illustrates a flaw with the homework policy and the way people vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question is a subtle mechanics question, where the answer depends on the precise way one models a continuously deforming object. Naive application of conservation laws will give contradictory results. The question is elegant and the setup is nice. Despite this, the question is closed with 4 downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I agree it's important to protect the site from the constant deluge of low-quality questions copy-pasted from introductory textbooks, whose solutions amount to just plugging numbers into standard formulas. But this question isn't remotely one of them! There is real conceptual content here, more than in most questions about quantum field theory. The question text explicitly asks about this conceptual content; the OP has already done the boring calculations for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, I have no idea why this question should have been closed. I don't want to be too rude, but I suspect that experienced close voters are letting themselves slip into an autopilot mode based on cheap heuristics. They see that the question is about mechanics, and that common mechanics equations are involved, and so in less than 5 seconds conclude the question must be trivial without really understanding it. I would daresay that the majority of the close voters would be unable to get the correct answer for this problem on a first try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody stand by the closure of this question? If you do think this question should be closed, why not automatically close &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; mechanics problem containing an equation? Is that really what the homework policy is meant to achieve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T18:08:32.157" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T02:52:36.577" Title="The role of good mechanics problems" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11103" CreationDate="2019-02-19T19:05:00.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first problem I can see is the presentation of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; better organized to get across what the question itself is trying to address.  At first, after reading most of the question, it appears as though OP is just trying to work us through what they believe to be a good solution to a common problem.  It's only at the end that they show another example from a textbook which they are actually running into the problem with.  That could definitely be made more explicit upfront.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this question is providing a lot of information; but it isn't clear on the initial read what the important parts of the question are.  I think this is it's primary flaw, and honestly, I can't say I would personally vote to reopen in it's current state (though I likely wouldn't close it either).  To quote from our page regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;check my work questions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only kind of &quot;check my work&quot; I think we should allow is the one where a derivation is presented, leading to a wrong result, and the question is &quot;It seems as if step X is wrong? But it should be right because of Y, so why is this not the case?&quot;. There must be a reasonable explanation (by established physics, of course) of why the derivation is expected to work in the eye of the asker, and then the answer pointing out the flaw in the reasoning can actually be useful, since the question is then essentially &quot;Why is the physical principle Y not applicable here?&quot; The question should also be edited to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that what OP is trying to ask could fundamentally fit into this point for one of the few types of acceptable &quot;check my work&quot; questions.  That said, in it's current state, it doesn't seem to be focused on any conceptual aspect of the problem, but is instead presenting several entire solutions and looking for us to contrast them in their entirety.  It's not really focused on any conceptual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP wishes to organize his thoughts a bit better and maybe point out where in these derivations we should be comparing, and the theoretical problems with the other answer, it would be perfectly on topic.  As is, I would personally say it could use a bit of work before reopening.  The question could definitely be improved to fit within current policies before being reopened; but the core of the question could still be salvaged (and some people may find it good enough already).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T19:05:00.027" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-20T03:05:12.260" Score="10" ViewCount="1264" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that one of the moderators is pretty much inactive has been brought up many times already (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10663/84967&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; from last year). In fact, he has been invited to step aside a couple of times by now, with no feedback from his side (AFAIK). I believe it is important to have a conversation about it at some point, so why not now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want this person to remain a moderator? Is there any mechanism to enforce the decision if he does not manifest any will to follow the community's wish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T14:12:05.240" Title="Update on the Manish situation" Tags="|discussion|moderators|moderation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11105" CreationDate="2019-02-20T03:08:38.057" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Said moderator logs in from time to time, so we cannot say for sure whether he's actually doing any actual moderation or not. The two options are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He does not moderate at all, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He does perform some actions occasionally, but leaves no trace.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, I'm not too happy about the situation. If this person is not doing any moderation, then the logical course of action is to step aside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if he really is doing some moderation in the background, I would feel uneasy about the fact that a person I never interacted with is doing such important work. I want to hold moderators accountable for their actions. Manish was elected, spent some time moderating, and eventually became inactive, long before I joined SE. I have no idea how he behaves, and I don't want him to have the power that comes with the responsibility of being a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, both options lead me to suggest that maybe he should resign. I am obviously very thankful for his time making this community what it is today, but I see no point in him staying a moderator when he has de facto resigned a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="46399" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T15:36:13.300" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T15:36:13.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11105" CreationDate="2019-02-20T08:43:06.303" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a quick note about the moderator perspective on this: as far as the duties of moderation are concerned, it doesn't really matter to us. After all, if someone is not regularly acting as a moderator, whether they have a diamond or not doesn't make any difference in our ability to carry out those duties. And if something is causing a problem, we have ways to deal with that; for instance, if we feel there are not enough active moderators to handle the workload, we can coordinate with the SE team to schedule an election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any mechanism to enforce the decision if he does not manifest any will to follow the community's wish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separately from what I said above, individual people in the community (including mods) can have their own opinions about whether it makes sense for a moderator to retain their diamond even if their activity is low. However, as far as I know, there isn't a process to turn those opinions into action, at least not a direct one. Moderators' accountability to the community is less than e.g. a democratic system where elected officials can be impeached, and that's by design, since moderators need the freedom to make unpopular decisions sometimes without worrying about their position being at risk. (At least, that's what I read somewhere. Of course if the mods are constantly at odds with the community, that's a whole different kind of problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are &lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt; concerns that would warrant a moderator's removal from the role, there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/157258/56541&quot;&gt;a process in place&lt;/a&gt; by which the SE team, if prompted by &quot;numerous, substantiated complaints from users on the site&quot;, can do it, but I don't think the team would consider low activity enough to start that process. (I'm not saying that is or isn't how it should be, I'm just saying that is the current state of things.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T08:43:06.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11105" CreationDate="2019-02-20T16:36:30.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many actions that the moderators take that aren't visible to users (e.g., cleaning up comments), so the bulk populous of this site would not able to determine how much said moderator is actually doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that so long as the moderator is not actively harming the site (no such evidence) and the current (visibly?) active moderators are not complaining (doesn't seem to be the case, given DavidZ's response), there really isn't cause for anyone to try removing the moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An apparent &quot;invisibility&quot; isn't enough to justify trying to remove a moderator, in my opinion. I think actionable evidence is what is needed to move forward, but pretty much all of us are not privy to such evidence, hence any calls need to come from higher up (i.e., other mods or SE team).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T16:36:30.463" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11105" CreationDate="2019-02-20T17:31:51.547" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll post this as an answer since it seems there's disagreements and it's important to get a feeling for folks' responses to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, I find that a particularly useful tool for gauging moderation activity is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/7433/manishearth?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=all&amp;amp;page=1&quot;&gt;All Actions tab on the Activity profile page&lt;/a&gt;, or at least a reasonably zoomed-out view of it. If you look at any given active moderator's All Actions history, you'll see a bunch of reviews, a bunch of edits, and a ton of moderation-related comments, in addition to the standard-user interactions with the site. We can't see &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of a moderator's actions, since many of them (like, say, deleting obsolete comments) are designed to be invisible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would claim that if a moderator hangs out on a site in a moderatorial mood, for a few hours, then they're &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; going to &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; do those invisible actions - they're going to end up doing stuff like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/331066#comment742553_331099&quot;&gt;moving discussions to chat&lt;/a&gt;, fixing the tags on a post, approving an edit suggestion, or opening or closing a post here or there, which do leave a visible trace. For Manish, the last such activity dates from May 2017. While I have no trouble believing Shog9's assertion that Manish's moderatorial actions over, say, the past six months, are strictly-speaking nonzero, I am having a hard time swallowing the argument that it crosses any reasonable line drawn above 'negligible'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, frankly, it does feel to me that if he's not actively moderating then him having a diamond doesn't make much sense. There's a proportionality to moderator powers: they represent additional authority and powers which we give to some users because we need them to do use it. If the tools are not being used, then they should be put back in their box. There's no hard feelings about this, but I do think the position of moderator should be seen as active, and not just this special status that's conferred on you for life regardless of whether you ever come back to the site or not. I think it's part of an outlook where we do periodically, as a community, take clear looks at our moderation stance and evolve it as necessary. Site culture shifts, and we need all of our moderators along on the ride. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in particular, I think OP is right to want a clear participation and used-in-practice line of communication with every moderator. We have a substantial amount of turnover, and a bit of digging is likely to turn up a substantial fraction of our active user base who joined after Manish effectively stopped moderating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that the stepping-down of a moderator who had become inactive has explicit precedent - &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt; was elected as a moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;in 2011&lt;/a&gt;, together with David Z and dmckee, and s/he stepped down in &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20140706054643/http://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mid-2014&lt;/a&gt;, about some six months after &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/68/mbq?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=all&amp;amp;page=2&quot;&gt;the last of their publicly-recorded moderation activity&lt;/a&gt;. Not to mention stronger precedent on other SE sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, though, to address the key voice that we should be hearing from here: Manish, what's up? What is your take on this? I can very well understand the pressures pointing away from physics and away from internet participation that come from a move to software development. Obviously the 2013-era Business As Usual has been replaced - but by what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T23:44:47.930" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T23:44:47.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-22T19:34:34.547" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without the link that's provided after enough back-and-forth, it's not clear to me how to easily &quot;continue this discussion in chat.&quot; Could someone help on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/3534/1483&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t heavier objects actually fall faster because they exert their own gravity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear the commenter I've been interacting with is looking for an education, and comments on the question are not the place to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1483" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T09:03:07.013" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T09:03:07.013" Title="Please help me convert the comments on this question to &quot;let us continue this discussion in chat&quot;" Tags="|support|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11110" CreationDate="2019-02-22T21:32:50.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can make a chat room &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/new&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, then leave a comment with a link to the room on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T21:32:50.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-02-23T21:43:32.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://texfaq.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K5zzi.png&quot; alt=&quot;All your TeX questions answered!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T21:43:32.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11103" CreationDate="2019-02-25T02:52:36.577" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our &quot;no homework&quot; policy and our &quot;we're not going to check your work&quot; policy are contradictory, we must get rid of one or the other. I prefer to get rid of the &quot;no homework&quot; policy as that will lead to far more well written problems to be addressed here. Generically formulated problems that can be addressed without having to address any mistakes the OP made, are more attractive to people searching this site for questions and answers. Also closing questions by referring to previously asked questions will work a lot better if the questions are addressed in a generic way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of students not doing their homework themselves is an issue that's very easily addressed by their own universities, it's not something we should be concerned about. We should not let the quality of our questions and answers be compromised due to being overly concerned about such a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should worry us is that there is now a de-facto censoring of good questions that people with a basic understanding of physics could benefit a lot from.  If we only have good questions suitable for people who are already into physics, we're not really advertising the subject well to people who aren't already into it. The Mathematics Stack exchange does far better job in that respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0605057&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Question 15.3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A broomstick rests on two wine glasses as shown in the figure. Will the wine&#xA;  spill out after a strong downward blow to the center of the broomstick with an&#xA;  iron rod?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are currently not allowed but would certainly make this site a lot more popular!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47511" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T02:52:36.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11115" CreationDate="2019-02-25T03:56:40.667" Score="5" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/462775&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to my question which both clarified that one of my definitions was correct (&lt;code&gt;F = m * a&lt;/code&gt; is correct, but not super helpful in this situation), and then also provided external sources where people could learn more information to help them understand the answer. (Especially since I did not understand the answer until I used those resources.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would such a comment be deleted? My hunch is that external sources are discouraged, but the usual rationale for that I've heard is that they could be removed later, so you include the relevant information from the sources and then link to them so people can verify it for themselves. In this case, the useful information was already in the answer itself, so I was providing extra resources for people who wanted clarification. As far as I was aware, linking to external sources &lt;em&gt;is helpful&lt;/em&gt; as long as those sources exist, and when they don't, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; that comment should be deleted. (And even then, it's often helpful to still have the comment because the Internet Archive will often still have archived versions of the linked site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was my comment deleted? What was the rationale, and what should I have done better? (And, if it's applicable, is the rationale something that should be applied to other SE sites as well? I'm fairly new to physics stack exchange.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128996" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T05:21:33.403" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T06:38:23.463" Title="Why was my comment deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11114" CreationDate="2019-02-25T06:38:23.463" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, thanks for coming to meta and asking!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not your hunch, though. We don't discourage using external sources; actually, it's encouraged to link or cite useful and relevant external resources whenever appropriate, but when doing so in a question or answer, you need to do it in such a way that your question or answer makes sense even to a reader who won't or can't access the source. (This isn't so important in comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened with your comment is this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comments are meant for suggesting improvements&lt;/a&gt; to the post they're attached to. This includes things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Requesting clarification on an unclear aspect of the post, which implicitly suggests that the post's author clarify that aspect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pointing out an error in the post, which implicitly suggests that the author fix the error&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linking to a related resource and suggesting that the author edit their post to include the link&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. Your comment didn't seem to be doing any of these things. It looked like it was making a statement which didn't have anything to do with the answer, and that's why I deleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the text of the deleted comment (with dummy URLs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be clear, Newton's second law &lt;code&gt;F = m * a&lt;/code&gt; is correct, but thinking of force as a change in momentum over time is useful. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.example.com/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a source with the correct definition of work, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.example.com/2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another source&lt;/a&gt; with an explanation as to how you get from &lt;code&gt;F = m * a&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;F = p / t&lt;/code&gt; (where p is momentum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you've made this meta post, if I understand correctly, it sounds like you had two goals with this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suggest that the answer's author was wrong in saying &quot;Your definitions are incorrect&quot; (because you quoted one definition, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F = ma$&lt;/span&gt;, which was correct), and ask that they fix that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suggest that the answer's author add links to the two webpages you linked into their answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a better way to make these suggestions is to phrase them as questions. For example, respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something like &quot;Actually I did include one correct definition (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F = ma$&lt;/span&gt;), so I don't think it's fair to say that my definitions are incorrect&quot; would work for the first goal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And something like &quot;Could you add a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.example.com/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; which gives the definition of work? And I don't think it's clear how to get from &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F = ma$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F = p / t$&lt;/span&gt;. Would you consider adding a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.example.com/2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; which explains it?&quot; for the second goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would point out, though, that a lot of people might consider it a bit arrogant, as the person who asked the question, to act like you have better references than the poster of the answer could find on their own. So a better phrasing would be just asking for clarification, like &quot;I don't understand how to get from &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F = ma$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F = p/t$&lt;/span&gt;. Could you clarify that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you do this, it's up to the author of the answer to decide whether to accept your suggestions or not. If the author decides not to accept your suggestions, then if you think they're important enough, you can post a separate answer that incorporates your suggestions. Otherwise, I'd suggest just letting it go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T06:38:23.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11118" CreationDate="2019-02-25T15:42:17.610" Score="5" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title pretty much conveys what I want to ask but I would elaborate a bit. If a question is appropriate to be closed due to either of the listed reasons for a question to be closed, should one also downvote the question provided one is voting to close it? In certain categories such as the question being belonging to a different site or the question being a duplicate, I feel it is clear that it doesn't make much sense to downvote as the question simply doesn't warrant being judged on its quality--it simply doesn't belong here or shouldn't exist as a separate question--so up/down voting seems moot. But, what about the cases when the question can be judged for its quality as a physics question but also deserves to be closed? Is down-voting superfluous then or still an important element in the healthy functioning of the &quot;reputation economy&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T21:59:43.800" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T21:59:43.800" Title="Should One Downvote a Question While Voting to Close It?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|vote-to-close|review|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T16:04:50.390" Score="2" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;About every other day, we get a question from a schizophrenic person. By &quot;schizophrenic&quot;, I don't mean crackpots or people making elementary mistakes, I mean people with an actual mental disorder. For example, in their posts, they may mention being formally diagnosed with the disease, hearing voices, hallucinating, and so on. Others seem to be in the first stages of developing the disease and report milder symptoms. My impression is that we get more of these people than other SE sites, because a common symptom of schizophrenia is becoming convinced you have a theory of everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To preserve some semblance of privacy, I won't be linking any examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We always close and downvote their questions, because don't make any sense, and then the Community bot deletes them a while later. Sometimes they receive rather mean comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in accordance with our established results, but do we have some moral obligation to do better? I fear that downvotes and nasty comments might just make their situation worse. Perhaps it's possible to make a standard &quot;get psychiatric help&quot; comment with some useful links? Have any other SE sites or forums dealt with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit in response to comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, I'm not diagnosing people as schizophrenic just because they spell badly. I'm referring to posts where people &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; refer to such a diagnosis. In one particularly memorable post a few months ago, a guy mentioned that his father was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that he had been warned he might be developing it too. The post essentially asked if his hallucinations were real. Some users here left mean comments, and the question got downvoted to hell, closed, and automatically deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have personally noticed one such question about every month, but upped the estimated rate because these questions are usually downvoted off the main page within 15 minutes. After they pass -5 votes, they become invisible, so you essentially won't see it unless you were one of the first 5 people to. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As further evidence that this actually happens -- we had one of these questions literally two hours ago, and yet some commentators claim that they've never seen such a post. That's how fast they get downvoted to invisibility.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="83398" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T17:40:38.850" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T12:11:31.370" Title="How to respond to questions from schizophrenic or pre-schizophrenic people?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11116" CreationDate="2019-02-25T17:11:49.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main advantage of downvoting that closing does not have is that it quickly removes questions from the front page, once the post has a score of -3. If you think a question is probably unsalvageable, by all means downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are voting to close an otherwise good question as a duplicate, or if you think that with some care the question could be reopened, then you shouldn't downvote, since removing it from the front page will only make it harder for it to receive said care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the only rules on voting are not to serial vote or game the system, so you can use any system that makes sense to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T17:11:49.857" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11117" CreationDate="2019-02-25T17:55:31.447" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the following two things are mostly uncontroversial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't leave mean comments.&lt;/strong&gt; This isn't specific to any particular sort of user at all. If you see a mean comment, flag it. It doesn't matter whether you think the target of the comment is a schizophrenic, a troll, a confused child or Einstein.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't diagnose people over the internet, but help where you can.&lt;/strong&gt; In the cases where the post is explicit about mental illness, i.e. no speculation on our part involved, then it's fine to leave a comment with links to resources that help people in this situation. However, leaving this type of comment on any post where there's inference on our part involved would just be asking for trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes are another matter. Every user is free to vote as they like on the content they encounter. Even if there was a self-evident universal moral obligation to not downvote the posts of people with mental illnesses, there would simply be no way to enforce it, so I feel it's a waste of time to debate whether or not there is such an obligation. If you think it's wrong to downvote a certain kind of post, don't downvote it. That's all there really is to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T17:55:31.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11117" CreationDate="2019-02-25T19:15:35.837" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not consider the author's mental (or any other) condition when responding to content on this site.&#xA;Respond to the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; itself.&#xA;If it's a good question, vote it up and think about an answer.&#xA;If it's a bad question (e.g. hard to understand) respond with an edit, a down vote, a close vote, or a helpful comment as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T19:15:35.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T22:35:42.943" Score="15" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;Updated 8 Aug 2022&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are 20 most viewed questions that need answers. Some of these questions may have answers with negative votes. Only questions with upvotes will be removed from this list. This list will be updated as questions are answered (which will be replaced with other questions that need attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How you can help:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer some of these questions!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit questions to make them more polished.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start a bounty on some of the more interesting questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Support askers and answerers with upvotes where deserved. If you take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/11121/revisions&quot;&gt;the edits made to this question&lt;/a&gt;, you can find questions that have been answered by the lovely members of the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is not appropriate for this site, downvote it or vote to close it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I modified a query to fit Physics.SE to give unanswered questions (that are open) and have a high number of views. You can also run the query for one or two answers if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find that there were some questions that were quite popular and disappointingly did not contain any answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone would like to handle some of these questions, that would be amazing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please edit these questions as you see fit (and fix any weird tags.) There is a lot of re-titling to be done and much-needed language cleanup or clarity in the body of the questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1003108/high-views-no-answers?ViewCount=100&amp;amp;AnswerCount=0&amp;amp;TagName=%25&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is the query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hit the 'ole star button on this meta post to get notified of updates.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the top 20 questions needing answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/469042&quot;&gt;How long would it take for a cup of water to fully evaporate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/167239&quot;&gt;Quantum fields from cluster-decomposition principle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/166650&quot;&gt;ratio between conduction current and displacement current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/582129&quot;&gt;What substance is being sprayed during this scene in Chernobyl?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/331873&quot;&gt;Angular momentum of a 2-dimensional system in polar coordinates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/82113&quot;&gt;How to calculate the magnetic dipole moment of a bar magnet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/316578&quot;&gt;What is Curvature of eye lens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/27190&quot;&gt;Experimental test of the non-statisticality theorem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/397687&quot;&gt;What is the difference between Non-harmonic oscillation, Anharmonic oscillation and Complex harmonic oscillation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/142418&quot;&gt;The reciprocal lattice of HCP lattice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/550507&quot;&gt;PDF lecture notes of various courses by Leonard Susskind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/497337&quot;&gt;Why is the Fermi level (energy) shfited in doped semiconductors?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/156431&quot;&gt;How can one calculate diffusion velocity given the diffusion coefficient?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/19960&quot;&gt;When do I know if energy stored in an object is 0 or nonzero? (Heat transfer)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/245293&quot;&gt;Three particles case, finding ground energy state&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/438860&quot;&gt;Why do my glasses make the ground look tilted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/290467&quot;&gt;Most rigid materials&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/117035&quot;&gt;Finding the probability that a $1s$ electron in ${}^3$H remains in the $1s$ state after beta decay to ${}^3$He with the sudden approximation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71427&quot;&gt;Trouble justifying calculation of force on a sphere due to radiation pressure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/79730&quot;&gt;Forces on two boxes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will update the above list periodically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2077" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2022-08-15T09:43:40.230" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T09:43:40.230" Title="20 most viewed questions that need answers" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|editing|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11050" CreationDate="2019-02-26T00:09:49.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain a FAQ file organized in outline format, on the specific topics that I'm interested in and knowledgeable about. Many of the entries in this file are just links to physics.SE questions. The FAQ is at a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lightandmatter.com/cgi-bin/meki?physics/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;publicly accessible URL&lt;/a&gt;, so anyone who's interested in seeing how I have it organized can look at it. When someone posts a question on physics.SE that I think is probably a FAQ or duplicate, I look at my FAQ file, and often it has an entry for a physics.SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This FAQ is in some homebrewed personal wiki software that I wrote, along with my notes on a bunch of other stuff. I have the stuff that's personal or private password protected. This FAQ page is intentionally not password protected. However, I don't really make an effort to maintain it in a condition where I would be proud of it as a professional work for others to use. Some entries may be out of date or may not represent my best current understanding of the topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T00:09:49.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11050" CreationDate="2019-02-27T04:00:34.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one feature of SE which I can't praise enough: tag searches. It's mentioned in the site-specific search link from the question, but it's certainly worth emphasizing. I'm trying a barebones tutorial of the most basic feature of SE search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7508&quot;&gt;one particular user&lt;/a&gt; (and many others, of course), Physics SE appears to have a very well-tagged selection of questions. And these are extremely helpful for people searching for duplicates because &lt;strong&gt;tag searches are blind to language barriers&lt;/strong&gt;: everyone will phrase the same question differently, but the topics covered are necessarily the same, which means some of the core tags will be identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag searches are super easy! There're just a couple of basic commands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the search field, type the name of the tag, including the hyphens for spaces, in square brackets. Like &lt;code&gt;[quantum-mechanics]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One tag probably won't get very far, but you can add several more, and a search like &lt;code&gt;[quantum-mechanics][complex-numbers]&lt;/code&gt; gets you an excellent set of results which covers almost everything in the topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T04:00:34.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2019-02-27T12:30:34.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I think the questions no. 6 and 7 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/11121/1&quot;&gt;v1&lt;/a&gt; of your list should be closed and deleted. I don't think they're particularly on-topic (I don't think they really fall into what we intended either the resource-recommendation or the specific-reference tags to cover), the books they're asking for are unlikely to exist, and they're not doing anybody any good by staying up. They've each been seen some 6-7k times, so that's some 13,000 times that people have been disappointed by what they find here. Closing them is unlikely to help with the disappointed-visitor syndrome - there's really no point to keeping them around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, if any borderline-on-(off-)topic unanswered questions end up in that list again, I think it's worth thinking very carefully about whether they should remain open and undeleted: if they're not good fits for the site, and they're unlikely to get answered, then what good does it do to have those questions accumulating thousands of views and conveying a negative impression of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T18:06:09.250" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T18:06:09.250" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T15:26:26.923" Score="7" ViewCount="670" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent meta post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11121/106502&quot;&gt;20 most viewed questions that need answers&lt;/a&gt;, there was a discussion on whether a couple questions (specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/148723/106502&quot;&gt;Cohen Tannoudji solutions to exercises&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/262979/106502&quot;&gt;Is there any solution manual to A.P. French&amp;#39;s &amp;#39;Vibrations and Waves&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;) that requested solutions manuals for specific textbooks were on-topic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should these questions be considered on-topic? Are they appropriate for the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T15:56:45.153" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T23:37:22.720" Title="Requests for Solutions Manuals" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11125" CreationDate="2019-02-27T15:39:48.650" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, these questions should be &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; as they satisfy the constraints of the specific reference tag that the solutions manual are a &quot;short, non-open-ended list of resources&quot;. Either the book exists (and is publicly available) or it doesn't exist (or isn't publicly available). Answers would either provide the link (which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a suitable answer, as mentioned explicitly in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/specific-reference/info&quot;&gt;tag info&lt;/a&gt;) or state that no such manual exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/262979/is-there-any-solution-manual-to-a-p-frenchs-vibrations-and-waves#comment582619_262979&quot;&gt;mod indicating in one of the posts in question&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...this is a good use of the specific-reference tag. At least, it is among the type of question the tag is meant for. It could still be considered off topic, though; we'll see what others think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which seems to indicate that such questions should fall under the specific reference tag and, since no one raised the point for over 2.5 years, the community seems to have implicitly assumed the position that everything is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T17:26:31.937" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T17:26:31.937" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11125" CreationDate="2019-02-27T15:55:40.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Such questions should be off topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I see no possibility of prior research, which means every question will look like a lazy dump. While this does not indicate on-topicness, I see no reason to explicitly say that questions of a certain type are inherently bad and downvote-worthy but should still be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the OP has not found such a manual by checking obvious places (e.g. websites of the publisher and author), then it is extremely unlikely that any non-paywalled versions can be posted as answers without copyright violations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers would be link-only. There's no concept of DOIs for these, though obscure papers can be cited.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, this site should be in the business of finding the titles of resources for people, not finding out how to access the literature itself. Why? Because some of us would like to just head over to Amazon or whatever and buy a hard copy, while someone may want a PDF. Some people are OK with sci-hub and the like, while others will want to get it the official way. Our site should not support any single stance, and it should not create &lt;em&gt;an assortment&lt;/em&gt; of answers which all follow the same approach.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T16:10:22.780" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T16:10:22.780" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11130" CreationDate="2019-02-27T18:16:50.137" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/9857/222493&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, where the accepted answer had a score of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-7$&lt;/span&gt;, but there was also an answer with a score of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$31$&lt;/span&gt;. As a student who has absolutely no idea about quantum mechanics, or the&quot;correctness&quot; or &quot;wrongness&quot; of the accepted answer, which answer should I prefer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222493" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T18:22:19.043" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T18:58:00.247" Title="Should I prefer the most up-voted answer or the accepted answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|voting|accepted-answer|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11125" CreationDate="2019-02-27T18:21:26.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The questions should be off topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an obvious reason why &lt;em&gt;students&lt;/em&gt; want to find &quot;cracked&quot; copies of solution manuals which exist but they can't obtain legitimately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an &lt;em&gt;instructor&lt;/em&gt; wants to obtain a solution manual or check its existence, there is no need to come to Physics SE. A phone call or email to the book publisher will answer the question, even if the answer isn't obvious from the publisher's website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of attitudes to intellectual property legislation, the only function of answers to such questions on Physics SE is to promote activity which is at best unethical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123188" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T18:21:26.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2019-02-27T18:58:00.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would personally &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; using the most upvoted answer, when compared to a negatively scored accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is because the &quot;Accepted Answer&quot; only reflects what the &lt;em&gt;person asking the question&lt;/em&gt; thought was the best answer.  On the other hand, votes provide you with information about how good &lt;em&gt;the community&lt;/em&gt; thinks any given answer is.  That's not to say a question with +30 is always better than an answer at +2, or that the community will always bring the best answers to the top.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to choose between an answer chosen by the person asking the question (who may have limited knowledge on the subject, which is why they had to ask), or the general community, I would lean towards trusting the community opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again though, this is a very loose framework and will take some critical thinking for every set of questions.  In a situation like the one you referenced, it seems likely that you should consider the positively scored answers over the accepted one.  In general though, if you are unsure, just consider the differences between answers, and use that as a starting point for your own research.  This is all just user-generated content, so it is possible for the community to make mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to be weary of is the effect that a &quot;Hot Network Question&quot; may have on answers.  If a question has a lot of attention in a short amount of time, it was probably visible on the front page of Stack Exchange main site, and got a lot of attention from people who don't regularly visit Physics SE, and who may not have a strong knowledge of the subjects.  In those cases, sometimes answers that are incorrect, but represent a common layman understanding, may receive upvotes that they regularly wouldn't here, leading to potential confusion.  This isn't &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; common; but I really want to stress the fact that as knowledgeable as our community often is, there are ways for mistakes to happen, so it may be beneficial to research for yourself if you don't know which answers to trust here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T18:58:00.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11132" CreationDate="2019-02-27T19:30:38.457" Score="-5" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it against the rules to call someone a kook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user113773" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T23:04:26.443" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T23:04:26.443" Title="Am I allowed to call someone a kook?" Tags="|discussion|comments|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11131" CreationDate="2019-02-27T20:04:21.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this would go against the Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; (also known as the &amp;quot;Be-Nice&amp;quot; policy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No subtle put-downs or unfriendly language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No name-calling or personal attacks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say this falls under both, so it definitely violates the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T20:04:21.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11125" CreationDate="2019-02-27T23:37:22.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an instructor, I am fundamentally against sharing instructor resources.  While it would be foolish to ignore the reality that many solution manuals exist and are out there, I don't feel it's right to promote the distribution of such material, as it only encourages students to spend their time searching for solution manuals rather than thinking about the problems.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is IMO always possible for a poster to ask a conceptual question based on a textbook problem, and I don't see the need to supply more than the answer to such a specific conceptual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T23:37:22.720" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11116" CreationDate="2019-02-28T13:11:50.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvote to say &quot;this content shouldn't be here&quot;, and with the exception of some duplicates, that's what the approach to close-vote-worthy questions should be. Downvotes send yet another message to the OP that the content has a problem.. Furthermore, if a lot of people downvote, the post gets moved off the front page, which helps keep it a bit cleaner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding duplicates: if a post is extremely similar to a suggested duplicate (or if the duplicate is suggested in the &quot;related&quot; bar), I will usually downvote, since those are cases where the OP clearly didn't look at what they were shown. But if the duplicate is found somewhere deeper, then it's nice to keep the question which I'm voting to close as a signpost for future readers who may use certain search terms or phrases, and in that case, it could even use an upvote if it's interestingly written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T16:15:10.280" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T16:15:10.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-02T19:44:59.250" Score="-6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is use of high knowledge of maths in physics and heavy use of MathJax necessary to ask any questions, what if my question do not use heavy maths and do not sound complicatedly interesting like &quot;Quantum Bayesianism&quot;, &quot;Finding angular momentum of an electron&quot;, &quot;Using 'this' Lagrangian to evaluate 'that' &quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many questions that do not post exactly homework type questions but ask simple conceptual doubts regarding one or more topics which gets downvoted just because the the question &lt;strong&gt;word limit does not exceed&lt;/strong&gt; 300-400 words and does not use heavy MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is this necessarily for those who are studying advanced courses in physics like at the level of postgraduates, where questions only like &quot; quantum this and that&quot;, &quot;tensor this and that&quot;, &quot;Lagrangian of this evaluate to that&quot; appear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206281" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-03-02T19:58:20.773" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T15:07:11.907" Title="Is it necessary to use heavy maths and math Jax?" Tags="|discussion|questions|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11136" CreationDate="2019-03-02T20:08:38.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think it's &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; to use MathJax. In fact, one of our top answerers here doesn't use MathJax at all. This is mostly because answers, and questions, are based in physics and not in maths (though often the maths &amp;amp; physics are intertwined so it's kinda difficult to distinguish them). So if you can explain your question, no matter the subject, without maths, that's perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to write your equations in MathJax because it helps readability for more complex statements. Obviously writing &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\psi$&lt;/span&gt; versus ψ  will result in anyone picking up, but if you've got an equation or an integral, it's going to be harder to follow what's being asked without it written up in MathJax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I've actually seen a case where someone wrote something along the lines of &quot;integral of f(x) from 0 to infinity&quot; in the question because they didn't know how to write it as,&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\int_0^\infty f(x)\,\mathrm dx.$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;The point taken is the same in both, but it helps readers read more quickly.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hence, you &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to write your mathy things with MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, in many cases, the users here are friendly enough and help fix MathJax issues, so even if you don't get it quite right, someone will help you. And if don't know the notation fully, there's the ever useful &lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Detexify&lt;/a&gt; which analyzes your input to find the matching LaTeX/MathJax command for it (I've not tried it on iOS, so I can't speak to how good it is there, but on Android &amp;amp; desktops &amp;amp; tablets, it's just fine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Not the case I was thinking of when writing this, but it just happened today again: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/464590/revisions&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/464590/revisions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T15:07:11.907" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T15:07:11.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11105" CreationDate="2019-03-03T14:05:11.820" Score="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, wow, I hadn't realized this was going on :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first just wish to apologise to the community, both Chem.SE and Physics.SE, for my lack of activity. I'll shortly explain what happened, but I also just feel bad for causing this conflict, and think I could have handled this better. Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a bit of background: Around 2014 I started getting involved in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://rust-lang.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rust&lt;/a&gt; community, and my capacity for dealing with stuff online decreased. I also was just busier in college, and balancing my time on Stack Exchange became increasingly harder. I still spent time moderating, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always had a bit of conflict in picking between a career in software vs a career in physics -- I really like physics and picked it as a major, but I've really enjoyed programming. My opinion eventually shifted from being set on doing physics to doing software (for a complex tangle of reasons), and I eventually got a job doing Rust stuff at Mozilla. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also meant that Being Online was a part of my &lt;em&gt;job&lt;/em&gt; so I didn't have as much of an inclination to participate here as I used to. It also decentered physics from my life, impacting my participation similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Stack Exchange used to be a big part of my life. It was an online community I truly enjoyed, and I'd learned so much from it, both in terms of actual physics/etc as well as &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; many things about community dynamics. A bunch of the stuff I've learned here has been applied to the Rust community at a fundamental level, and it's overall been super helpful. So I couldn't bring myself to &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; participating. Instead, I felt like I would eventually have time again, and that would be soon. Sometimes I'd drop by and moderate a couple things and check out the meta and overall be really happy that this place exists and is running smoothly. The comm team sends out these check in emails to semi inactive moderators and that would occasionally spur me into participating a bit again, but it never lasted. I recognized that this wasn't sustainable, but it always felt like &quot;eh, I'll have more time next month&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, tomorrow never comes, and I've only gotten busier over time. I still love this place to pieces, but it's just hard to find time to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, moderation isn't the ideal way for me to participate &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt;, as someone who isn't doing physics all the time anymore I should probably spend more time doing q&amp;amp;a for fun, not moderation. The reason I like moderating is that I really care about communities I care about being pleasant spaces, and I care about it enough to consider it my duty to help. But I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; helping right now, and if I wanted to I can help quite a bit without having the diamond. There's really no reason for me to still have the diamond, it's just taken this nudge to cause the reflection necessary for me to explicitly realize that :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, I definitely should step down. Consider this my resignation letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope to eventually have time to participate again. I'll definitely be dropping by now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="7433" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T14:12:05.240" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T14:12:05.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-03-05T14:34:47.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TUFMz.png&quot; alt=&quot;PhysicsOverflow&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T14:34:47.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11141" CreationDate="2019-03-09T05:08:15.503" Score="18" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last week, I asked a question about an everyday physical phenomenon (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/463593/in-aluminum-how-does-electricity-travel-through-the-surface-oxide-layer&quot;&gt;In aluminum, how does electricity travel through the surface oxide layer?&lt;/a&gt;).  I was fortunate enough to get two answers and some comments offering possible explanations.  All of the proposed explanations seem at least somewhat reasonable to me, and both answers and a comment have attracted a positive score.  Unfortunately, they don't agree with each other, and now I'm not sure which answer to accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One answer says that the aluminum oxide layer is porous and contains moisture, which causes it to conduct electricity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another answer says that the oxide layer is thin and fragile enough to be easily pushed aside when another metal conductor is connected.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A comment (which probably should have been an answer) attributes the observed conductivity to electrical breakdown of the oxide layer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried offering a bounty (is that an appropriate thing to do?), but I haven't received any new answers and there is only one day left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an opinion-based question; in principle, it would be possible to conduct an experiment to determine the correct answer (which might be a combination of several explanations that apply in different conditions). &#xA; Also, I don't think my situation is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10533/which-answer-should-we-accept-if-multiple-answers-address-the-question&quot;&gt;Which answer should we accept if multiple answers address the question?&lt;/a&gt;  I can't tell which answer is most helpful because I don't know which one is correct.  (If I knew, I wouldn't have asked the question!)  Finally, I don't feel comfortable choosing based on the number of upvotes alone.  Votes are a useful signal about the opinion of the community, but truth isn't determined by majority vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, feedback is welcome about the question itself.  If you feel that it's unanswerable or that I wrote it in an unclear way, please say so!  However, if possible, I think it would be best to avoid debating the physics of aluminum oxide here on Meta.  That way, the discussion will be useful for future users who are in similar situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194757" LastEditorUserId="194757" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T05:22:42.610" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T06:19:01.177" Title="Which of several disagreeing answers to accept?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11140" CreationDate="2019-03-09T06:19:01.177" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't compulsory to accept an answer. If you feel that neither answer is acceptable then do not accept either of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't received an answer that satisfies you then placing a bounty is the correct approach. It hasn't worked (so far) in this case, but that's the risk you run. It may simply be that none of the site members are experts in this field. If you placed the bounty after the two existing answers were posted (which appears to be the case) then unless you manually award the bounty it will simply disappear on expiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your place I would require an answer to cite some experimental literature that I could read for myself. Without that you have no way of judging the accuracy of what has been posted. Given that neither of the existing answers provide this I wouldn't consider either of them an acceptable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T06:19:01.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-11T05:38:08.227" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sci-Hub seems to be something many commercial web resources would try to avoid linking to: such links might be compared to links to warez. But I've just seen a question which has a link to Sci-Hub described as &quot;link to paper without paywall&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable for Physics.SE to have such links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T05:38:08.227" Title="Are links to papers via Sci-Hub acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|links|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-03-11T06:31:51.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11145" CreationDate="2019-03-12T16:23:34.607" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often read papers and am stuck on important statements/equations that are not satisfactorily explained to my understanding. Sometimes references are provided, but even then it's cumbersome to recursively look up all the referenced material and many times the answer cannot be found in the provided reference. Sometimes equations/statements appear out of the blue with no chance for explanation. As I observed, most people just jump over them and proceed with the paper, but that bugs me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good platform to ask questions related to papers? Is there any? If not, could we build one on stackexchange? It should be searchable by tags but also by the title, authors and doi of the papers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="208640" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T07:49:16.177" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T11:31:57.307" Title="Questions about statements in papers" Tags="|support|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11144" CreationDate="2019-03-12T17:27:00.520" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you make the post self-contained, that is (a) &lt;em&gt;write the relevant portion into the post&lt;/em&gt; (providing a full reference to the paper, including a stable link, and, where available, a legal free copy of the paper) and (b) &lt;em&gt;expand on the details&lt;/em&gt; of what you don't understand in the quoted portion, I don't see why it wouldn't be accepted here on Physics Stack Exchange. At worst, you may be asked to repost in &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Math.se&lt;/a&gt;, but as long as the question is based on the physics, you should be okay to ask here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are just linking to the paper and say &quot;I don't get Eq 14, can someone help?&quot; you are likely to get the question closed (probably as &lt;em&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/em&gt;) because you are providing zero context and are forcing someone to download &amp;amp; read a paper then try to figure out what it is you don't get and then answer that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T11:31:57.307" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T11:31:57.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-12T21:22:54.910" Score="10" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE team has made&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/325060/280545&quot;&gt;several promising changes to the &amp;quot;Hot Network Questions&amp;quot; system&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;If you have previously found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=hnq&quot;&gt;HNQs to be problematic&lt;/a&gt;, you are invited to participate in the discussion over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this discussion is a new moderator superpower:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators have the ability to remove questions from the HNQ List.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times when the hotness formula selects a question that a site would rather not have featured. Up until now, the only recourse that was available was to close the question (which may be appropriate anyway but isn't ideal when done purely to manage traffic), or to do nothing. We're putting the power in the hands of our moderators to remove questions that don't set a good example for their sites. I recommend each site have a meta discussion with guidance for moderators about when - if ever - a question should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to propose that we &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; invent a new policy on these questions &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;I would prefer instead that we think as a community about the kinds of standards that we already have in place and communicate via voting, close-voting, and flagging, and how this new tool fits into our kit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm imagining a process like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the next few weeks you will, like usual, notice some unusually active questions and think &amp;quot;well, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; shouldn't be HNQ.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you notice this, raise a custom moderator flag on the question and try to articulate what your reasoning is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The moderation team will deal with your flag promptly --- that's the point of flags.  But we'll also save your reasoning someplace, and as we start to get enough flags to divine a pattern, we'll try to summarize it either here or in a new post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also link to posts in answers to this question, and explain how you think that the Hot Network Questions list has affected them.  Those kinds of answers shouldn't be limited to bad posts that should be un-HNQ-ed:  part of deciding what our policy should be will be deciding what we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to keep.  I'm especially interested in articulating, as a community, what types of posts get &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; responses after exposure via HNQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suggest flagging (or linking) &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; questions, because there will be some temptation to base any policy we develop on remembered examples from the past.  For deciding how we think the site ought to work, it's usually better to notice how we are responding when we are using the site organically.  I would hate for us to have a contentious discussion about a problematic question from the past and lock ourselves into some &amp;quot;policy&amp;quot; based on behaviors that don't really occur on the site any more.  That's why I've titled this post &amp;quot;data collection&amp;quot;: I'm proposing that we spend &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/190736/280545&quot;&gt;a reasonable amount of time&lt;/a&gt; just looking for patterns, and try to come to a conclusion around May-ish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2022:  To see what our community keeps or removes from the HNQ in practice, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1575139/hnq-with-and-without-removal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2022-04-04T21:45:53.557" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T21:45:53.557" Title="Data collection: When should (or shouldn't) we exclude questions from the Hot Network Questions list?" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|moderation|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2019-03-13T12:30:50.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I'll start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions about physics in works of fiction shouldn't be on HNQ.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been a point of contention for quite some time, and it has a strong track record of leaving people confused and upset, even several years after the question has had its heyday (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11036/terribly-confused-about-what-this-community-is-about&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10911/what-is-the-line-between-fiction-and-physics-with-respect-to-off-topic&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10913/is-vote-to-close-as-off-topic-an-appropriate-remedy-for-questions-that-are-deeme&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). I'm referring, in particular, to questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/443260&quot;&gt;&quot;Could Sam have pierced Shelob's carapace?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122785&quot;&gt;&quot;Could Legolas actually see that far?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, particularly when the titles are that explicit in their mentions of the fictional context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, this is independent of the decision on whether such a question is on- or off-topic here, which can have both positive and negative answers. As examples, &quot;how does the warp drive in &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; work?&quot; is clearly off-topic, while something like &quot;is orbital mechanics being portrayed correctly in (insert sci-fi story)?&quot; has a much better chance of being a legitimate question about physics, for which the fictional context is relevant and worth mentioning but not overwhelming. The decision of whether a given question along that vein is on- or off-topic is (in a nutshell) &quot;is it about physics or not&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think we need to be significantly more strict when it comes to allowing that type of question on the HNQ list. The reason is simple: &lt;strong&gt;upvotes on those threads, on both the question and its answers, are of extremely low quality.&lt;/strong&gt; The Q&amp;amp;A engine does a (reasonably) good job at vetting the quality of &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt;, both questions and answers, and for regular questions it does an OK job (though with plenty of room for improvement) at vetting the quality of votes. However, for questions about works of fiction, that completely breaks down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the question, upvotes rarely seem to come from a position of &quot;this question is carefully researched, well-posed and well thought through, and it is a useful framework that allows the physics to shine through&quot; and seem to be more along the lines of &quot;this question is about a work of fiction that I like&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For answers, upvotes have a much stronger bias to favour &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;truthiness&lt;/a&gt; rather than actual quality in the ways that it is recognized elsewhere on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, those problems compound themselves, as the wider-than-usual opening on the upvote tap further reinforces the positive feedback loop that keeps these questions in the list, to the detriment of real physics questions that could be getting that spot on the spotlight. And while the three-day cap definitely helps, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286020/breaking-the-hnq-feedback-loop-on-bad-questions&quot;&gt;feedback-loop problems&lt;/a&gt; remain, so I don't see how this class of questions will behave differently in the currently-live scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the fact that questions like these are so likely to explode in popularity means that they present a very skewed vision of this site's scope on that SE-network-facing window. We get maybe one on-topic question about physics-in-works-of-fiction for every 5-10,000 questions, at best? Then, until the mechanisms are tempered such that the natural rate of these questions appearing on the list is one such question per 10,000 Physics SE questions on the HNQ list, they should be prevented from appearing there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-05-25T10:15:53.113" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T10:15:53.113" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2019-03-13T13:21:08.290" Score="15" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Questions about perpetual-motion machines should meet a stricter-than-usual bar in terms of clarity and prior research to get on HNQ.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about perpetual-motion seem to have a particularly easy time hitching a ride on the HNQ list (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/464559/why-cant-we-make-a-perpetual-motion-machine-by-using-a-magnet-to-pull-up-a-piec&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is one recent example), and it's easy to see why: they are instantly appealing to a lot of people, they are generally easy to understand, and they often serve as ways to either make fun of OP (for being &quot;dumb enough&quot; to ask such a question in the first place) or to rail at the physics &quot;establishment&quot; for insisting on trivial such things as having a consistent physical theory of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they get very tiring, very fast. Basically, the only questions on the subject that make the bar for being on-topic are variations on the theme of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I came up with this device and I analyzed it in (insert flawed analysis that concludes with perpetual motion). Where did I make a mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and after seeing two or three of those on the HNQ as Representative Questions of the site, they start to grate very fast. (And, as with the physics-in-fiction vein, they very quickly become a skewed presentation of this site's subject matter.) Frankly, I think we could do with a heck of a lot fewer of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure I'd go as far as proposing that perpetual-motion machines should be completely off-limits for this site's HNQ output, but I would say that for such questions to remain on the list they should be asked in exceptionally clear way, they should have a very clear physics through-line, and they should clearly demarcate themselves from previous iterations of the subject on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T13:21:08.290" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11151" CreationDate="2019-03-13T21:54:30.570" Score="9" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently visited a couple of old questions that I had posted and there were a lot of edits (mainly grammatical but not all) that I wanted to make. I edited a couple of them and went back to the homepage and the homepage had all of these edited questions on it. It seemed like a disruption in the natural working of the homepage. How should I go about it? Should I leave it on the system to realize that it shouldn't flood the homepage with the dozen old posts I choose to edit in half an hour? Or should I refrain from going on an editing spree? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T06:21:24.507" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T08:28:24.773" Title="Should I not edit my old questions on a spree?" Tags="|discussion|editing|best-practices|ethics|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2019-03-13T22:21:51.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should avoid flooding the front page. I recommend doing them in small batches of say 2 or 3 posts at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T22:21:51.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-14T15:43:42.133" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to the question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/466163/effect-of-fiber-optic-on-na/466203#466203&quot;&gt;effect of fiber optic on NA&lt;/a&gt;&quot; was deleted with the reason given being, &quot;Please don't post complete answers to the underlying problem in homework-like questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this was an incorrect decision on two grounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a homework-like question. A homework-like question is one where there is one correct answer, which can be calculated from given parameters, and knowledge that can be contained in a single chapter of a textbook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the question asks for a numerical answer (the NA of the output beam) without giving sufficient information to calculate it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the answer is &quot;it depends...&quot; with some explanation of what it depends on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly this is a question that OP came up with while writing up lab work, and realizing they had done some of the lab incorrectly. But it isn't the kind of question with a single correct answer that we should consider to be &quot;homework-like&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My answer is not a &quot;complete answer&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complete answer OP will need to complete their homework or lab write-up depends on information they (correctly) didn't even include in the posted question. For example, the diameter of the fiber core, and how the fiber was arranged in their experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is certainly not what an instructor would expect as a complete answer if they had, for some reason, assigned this question as homework.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;For those who can't see deleted answers, my answer was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;A 810 nm multimode light source with 0.1 NA is launched into 3 m of multimode fiber whose NA is 0.2...What is the NA of the light exiting the fiber?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most likely, it's about 0.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It could be lower, if the launch into the fiber is made carefully, and the fiber is kept very straight and unstressed so that light launched into one mode doesn't couple much into other modes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the fiber is twisted and/or curved multiple times along its length, the modes will be well mixed and the output beam will have NA of 0.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Does the length of the fiber affect the NA of the light exiting the fiber?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A very short length of fiber (say a few cm or 10's of cm) will not allow much mode mixing, and the output beam is more likely to be closer to the NA of the input beam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Again this also depends on exactly how the input beam is launched into the fiber. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22927" LastEditorUserId="22927" LastEditDate="2019-03-14T16:20:03.643" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T16:20:03.643" Title="Answer incorrectly deleted" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T14:22:15.860" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/466416&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; has been put on hold as unclear. I can't understand&#xA;why. I think I gave sufficient definition of my question and of its&#xA;purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some further explanation of why it appears unclear would be most&#xA;welcome, as otherwise I don't see any way of improving it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it depends on my being rather novel in SE (7 months) so that I&#xA;perhaps have not yet fully understood its policy and spirit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204634" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T14:50:38.723" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T14:50:38.723" Title="About an &quot;on hold&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T14:40:22.650" Score="6" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/466493&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; yesterday, and it got a downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not unhappy about it, but I feel that I don't understand why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my question not relevant for this site? I have almost no formal education in physics. I have a number of questions that are probably very basic and ignorant. I want to know if I should continue posting them on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it just that someone happened not to like it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84975" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T14:49:44.570" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T15:45:46.657" Title="Is this a bad question? Or a poor fit for this site?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11154" CreationDate="2019-03-15T15:45:46.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people downvote questions that look simple or obvious to them, on the grounds that the OP did insufficient prior research, which is a valid downvote reason on all Stack Exchange sites. However, what's obvious to someone with some training in the relevant field may not be obvious to one without that training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So someone may have decided your question was too trivial or obvious, and downvoted it without thinking too deeply about the thought processes that led you to ask the question. That's unfortunate, but there's not a lot we can do to prevent that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who's played with magnets, or looked at a magnetic compass, knows that magnets and magnetic fields can twist things around. So to my mind, your question is not unreasonable or silly. But how on earth would you do research for that question? It wouldn't be easy, unless you were already rather knowledgeable about magnets. And even then, trying to find a decent answer on the internet that's understandable by a lay person may not be easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think your question is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get 1 isolated downvote, it's generally not worth worrying about. If you get a few, and comments giving you constructive criticism regarding your question (or answer), then you probably should consider that you're in the wrong. ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that the people giving downvotes are not necessarily the same people who give negative comments. In fact, there is a tendency to not comment when giving downvotes, to preserve anonymity, and to ward off revenge downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T15:45:46.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:19:36.340" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;It recently came up in a meta post that OP had checked out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; page in the help center, and could not see anything about engineering. That does seem to be the case, and although the tour mentions engineering, I do think it is something important enough to merit a place in the on-topic page (we even have a close reason for that!). Is there a particular reason why we don't mention this? If not, can we add a brief section? A rephrased version of the close reason (just a couple of phrasing corrections) should suffice, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An appropriate version for the on-topic page would be under the section &amp;quot;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&amp;quot;, and would read like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Engineering questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem, are generally considered to be off-topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4536&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T00:52:17.067" Title="The on-topic page in the help center does not mention engineering" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11158" CreationDate="2019-03-15T20:16:18.413" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/466675/how-to-calculate-blending-for-a-plant-using-rosa&quot;&gt;this question on Physics SE&lt;/a&gt; which looks very much like a &quot;trying to find an easy solution by someone else and take the credit at work&quot; kind of thing. I personally think that this kind of question should not be allowed on the site but I looked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;&quot;Tour&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;&quot;About&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  pages of SE (I was trying to find something similar to the Homework question policy) and did not find this to be against the philosophy of the site. So my question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy of Physics SE on industry/work related questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user137661" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T02:02:20.150" Title="Are industry related questions acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11157" CreationDate="2019-03-16T02:02:20.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your direct question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the policy of Physics SE on industry/work related questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't really have one. The fact that a question was inspired by a situation at someone's job shouldn't really have any bearing on how it's received here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific question that you linked to probably has some issues which are unrelated to whether it came out of a real work situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T02:02:20.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-16T16:56:27.773" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/466815/&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold because &quot;homework-like&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like some clarification on this please. I am not asking anybody to do a conversion of me, I am asking whether the conversion mol/mm3 &amp;lt;-&gt; mol/L is always the same and independent of other features such as temperature, pressure, etc. Can somebody please explain why this is not appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213411" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-03-16T17:25:50.537" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:25:50.537" Title="My question was put on hold" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11160" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:15:55.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to have been a little bit to hasty. The question has now been (in my opinion, rightfully) reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:15:55.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11160" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:19:03.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question is now re-opened. I first overlooked the conceptional question. I would suggest to change title to e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is 1 liter always equal to 1 cubic decimeter, independently of temperature, pressure, etc?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to high-light the conceptional question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:19:03.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-17T03:48:20.977" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my question that I asked a week ago is not yet answered. I just wanted to ask if there was something wrong in that question.&#xA;Here’s the link &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/465578/can-flames-be-frozen&quot;&gt;Can flames be Frozen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214149" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T03:54:04.947" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T04:12:19.303" Title="Is this a bad question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11163" CreationDate="2019-03-17T04:12:19.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I see three problems with this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, as worded, it's a yes-or-no question. We prefer to have questions that invite in-depth answers which provide context and explanation. (You may see the term &quot;conceptual&quot; thrown around in some places, and that's part of what we mean by it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it's a rather vague question. What you appear to be asking is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if the flames are cooled during the burning state?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what do you mean by &quot;what if&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you just asking, in general, what happens if the flames are cooled? In this case, we would expect you to have made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;good effort to look it up yourself&lt;/a&gt; before asking here, or at least look up some relevant information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have some idea of what would happen if the flames are cooled, and you want to know whether it's correct? If so, what is that idea, how did you arrive at it, and what reason do you have to think it might not be correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You mentioned plasma in the question; do you specifically want to know if the flames stop being plasma?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how exactly are these flames being frozen? Depending on what exactly you want to ask, the answer might depend on what physical process takes place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm not sure it's even on topic. Questions that ask if something is technologically possible tend not to be on topic here. That would be easy enough to get around by rephrasing the question to be more like &quot;what happens to a flame as its temperature decreases?&quot; which is better but still has some of the same vagueness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T04:12:19.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11166" CreationDate="2019-03-18T08:40:28.050" Score="-8" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/467124/&quot;&gt;Is there any reliable place where i can put my theory of universe (it explained/predicted the behavior of almost everything i came across)&lt;/a&gt; and my comment to it. Lots of similar things have been posted, and then put-on-hold as off-topic. And that's often probably a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe not always quite so good. A &quot;crackpot-but-not-too-crackpot&quot; tag might allow some interesting ideas to be seen here. Or I might be wrong about that. How about we try it and find out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's &quot;too crackpot&quot; supposed to mean? Maybe Pauli's &quot;that's not even wrong&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong&lt;/a&gt; which always cracks me up:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;E d i t&lt;br&gt;--------------&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In case nobody clicked through to my comment under the cited post, I'm cut-and-pasting it below because it elaborates my position on this issue, &lt;strong&gt;carefully distinguishing between crackpot theories and crackpots.&lt;/strong&gt; And I think that maybe most readers aren't appreciating this distinction...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 @amkmishra &lt;em&gt;&quot;at this point its mostly philosophical&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;it does work and explains/predicts behavior well&quot;&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;inconsistent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; statements. Every halfway-decent physicist comes up with at least several crackpot theories during his career. But that doesn't make him a crackpot. Indeed, that just makes him creative. What makes him a crackpot is publicizing his half-baked theories before they're ready-for-prime-time. Your theory sounds sixteenth-baked, at best. Some 99.9% of crackpot theories turn out just plain wrong. Like Golda Meir said, &quot;Don't be so humble. You're not that great.&quot; – John Forkosh 2 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Firstly, of the seven comments already there (at the time I'm writing this), note that mine is the most critical of the op. And that, to repeat, is because the comment &lt;strong&gt;carefully distinguishes between crackpot theories and crackpots&lt;/strong&gt;. And while I'm too polite to directly say it to the op's face, his post strikes me as the latter. And I don't have much respect for those. And I'm &gt;&gt;not&amp;lt;&amp;lt; suggesting that posts from crackpots should be permitted under the &quot;crackpot_theory&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the kind of crackpot theories developed (more likely in the process of development) by non-crackpot theorists can be more than a little interesting. Special relativity might have been considered a crackpot_theory in its very earliest days. Tell me, had physics.se been around in ~1904-5, and had Einstein written about it here first, before publication, would you have accepted it??? In retrospect, I think we can safely say that the rules of physics.se should be such that, yes, you would have accepted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user89220" LastEditorDisplayName="user89220" LastEditDate="2019-03-18T11:31:35.357" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T14:59:58.457" Title="Suggesting a tag: &quot;crackpot_theory&quot; (you get the idea)" Tags="|feature-request|tags|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11165" CreationDate="2019-03-18T09:57:08.277" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As spelled out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt; we accept only questions about mainstream physics, where &lt;em&gt;mainstream physics&lt;/em&gt; is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community. In the case of modern physics, if a theory has not been published in a reputable journal, it is not considered mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while &lt;em&gt;interesting ideas&lt;/em&gt; may well be interesting it is not appropriate for them to be posted as questions here. Consequently there is no need for a tag to describe them. They should simply be downvoted and then closed asap, and left for the automatic deletion to remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean the site members are boring old farts uninterested in anything new. There are no shortage of questions and answers about exciting new publications, and there is usually someone willing to explore the, erm, &lt;em&gt;wilder&lt;/em&gt; aspects of physics in the chat room. It just means that if someone has an exciting idea the onus is on them to get it peer reviewed and published first, then come here to ask about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T09:57:08.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11165" CreationDate="2019-03-18T14:59:58.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to John's points, which are enough to make this a non-starter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments: the tag you're proposing is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;. Those are very seductive, sure, but they're extremely hard to get working correctly - it always starts with good intentions, say, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a poster would presumably tag his post with additional existing tags that more concretely identify precisely what his theory is about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it very quickly spirals into users who &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; use such a question, post some pretty off-topic stuff, and use the existence of the tag to try to defend the presence of the content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site we have exactly three on-topic meta tags (homework-and-exercises, resource-recommendations, and specific-reference) and they all serve very specific purposes to fulfil clear needs, which justifies keeping such high-maintenance tags around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is to say: there's a reason why meta tags are &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; discouraged network-wide. It takes a much stronger case than &quot;oh, I think it will be all right&quot; to get one going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T14:59:58.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2019-03-20T06:21:02.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, improving the content of the site is more important than worrying about what's on the front page.&#xA;If you want to edit, then edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what if your questions wind up on the front page?&#xA;They won't be there for long anyway, and there's nothing wrong with old questions getting attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T06:21:02.010" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2019-03-21T01:34:57.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer really boils down to how you answer the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do the changes you want to make improve the readability or accuracy of the post, or is it just superficial changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's the latter, don't worry about editing it then because no one will care/notice ever.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; If it's the former, then you are probably fine to make the edits, depending on the quantity of edits you want to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, if you want to improve say 2 questions on main, I don't think anyone will mind. If it's closer to 10 (or even beyond!), try spreading it out over a several days/weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking at old Meta posts, you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; need to be considerate since it takes a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time to move off this page (I currently see a post edited on Feb 5 at the bottom of the page; on main question at the very bottom was last touched 5 hours ago). I would be very wary of making changes which are not large/significant improvements to the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, we do have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6413/25301&quot;&gt;FAQ on titles&lt;/a&gt; that says in item #6 to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; capitalize every word in the title, only proper nouns and the first word should be capitals. So if your goal is merely to change the capitalisation scheme (as was done for a few of the updates by OP on Meta) to Capitalizing All The Words, &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt;. Just leave it and worry about factual errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a last note, when you make your edits, please do &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; makes your post look &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5886/25301&quot;&gt;like a revision table&lt;/a&gt;. Don't add &quot;Edit &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$n$&lt;/span&gt;&quot; anywhere in the post, instead you should seamlessly integrate the new material in the original post. All SE posts are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version controlled&lt;/a&gt;, so interested parties can just check out the diffs if they're so interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Of course, if someone else has added an answer or edited the post, so it's already on main page, I think you should be free to edit it as needed.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T11:21:15.887" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T11:21:15.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11171" CreationDate="2019-03-21T02:45:47.970" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's not something usual, I've noticed that sometimes people edit my question or answer with a more complex notation or incorrect information/formulas. While I don't think this is done with malicious intent, it has sometimes confused people when I'm either asking or explaining something, as I don't always notice that my post has been edited with such radical changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best course of action to take in this case? Is there a way to block a question/answer so it can only by edited with my approval? And hopefully it doesn't happen but, if someone edits an answer with blatant incorrect information, is it possible to report that person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204345" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T13:33:16.920" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T13:33:16.920" Title="Dealing with edited questions/answers" Tags="|discussion|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11170" CreationDate="2019-03-21T03:11:45.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can roll-back edits that you don't approve of (click on the date/time of the edit where it is displayed at the bottom of the post to view the edit history where these control are displayed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no user-accessible means of preventing edits (and locks are only used by the moderators for special or extreme cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T06:05:05.053" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T06:05:05.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10952" CreationDate="2019-03-21T09:55:05.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/380969/4751173&quot;&gt;has been fixed&lt;/a&gt; on March 6th, 2019:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting with the next build, we'll be showing an error message same way as we do on regular question pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lWVRB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lWVRB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/298797/editing-a-post-during-review-doesnt-show-an-edit-not-possible-message&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T12:11:32.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11174" CreationDate="2019-03-21T17:29:23.793" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I move a chat back to comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In complying to the automated admonition to move comments to chat, I discovered that MathJax is was no longer rendered.  This is unacceptable in this particular discussion.  I therefore need to undo my action and move the chat back to comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3673" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T08:54:29.950" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T08:54:29.950" Title="Can one move a chat back to comments?" Tags="|support|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11173" CreationDate="2019-03-21T19:15:52.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to move a chat to comments. Comments are transient and not intended for extended discussions, while chat is permanent and intended for many types of discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T19:15:52.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-22T09:58:47.447" Score="4" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I gave a partial answer to a homework questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/467829/how-can-i-determine-the-height-they-meet-the-time-they-meet-and-the-velocities/467870#467870&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (now deleted; screenshots: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m1Zt1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a3rjj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;) and was firmly told in comments that even &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; answers to homework questions are not allowed. Is that correct ? As far as I can see, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;guidelines on homework questions&lt;/a&gt; only prohibits &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow up question: if any answer at all to a homework question is inappropriate, why do we have a &quot;homework-and-exercises&quot; tag ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T12:04:22.240" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T12:15:44.853" Title="Are partial answers to homework questions allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11175" CreationDate="2019-03-22T10:35:48.777" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the quality of the question, I should think. If it only consists of text that is obviously a dump from a homework assignment (or other similar set-piece, like a textbook exercise, say) with no attempt from the OP to engage with the material or ask a substantial question beyond &quot;do my work for me plz&quot; (even if it is tempered with something like this particular OP's comment &quot;Tips only.. Not the solution&quot;, which effectively reads &quot;do my wokr fr me plz, but only some of itplz&quot;), then &lt;strong&gt;please do not answer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving any answers to those questions simply encourages that user, and any others that see those answers, to post the type of no-effort help-vampire extremely-low-quality bottom-of-the-barrel questions that really harm the average level of questions on the site. If that's the type of site you want to post answers in, then there's plenty of such venues &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;linked in this thread&lt;/a&gt; that will happily enlist your efforts to feed the help vampires. On this site, we don't want those questions, and we close them so that they don't get answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a long-standing policy that if someone posts a &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; answer to a homework question (i.e. not just tips) then that does get summarily deleted (potentially only temporarily) by moderators. This is not what's happening with your answer: it is not getting deleted, and it is still currently standing. The only thing that you're getting is people in the comments politely asking you not to engage in behaviours which harm the site's quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your follow-up question: it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to ask on-topic homework questions; for a sampling, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bhomework-and-exercises%5d%20closed%3ano%20score%3a5&quot;&gt;this list of open upvoted homework-tagged threads&lt;/a&gt; - and compare it with the awful stuff you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bhomework-and-exercises%5d%20closed%3ayes%20duplicate%3ano%20score%3a..-1%20answers%3a0&quot;&gt;by searching for closed, unanswered, negative-score homework-tagged questions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Most&lt;/em&gt; of the questions, by number, that we get which fit the homework-and-exercises tag description are off-topic, and they are closed and deleted as promptly as the review queue allows (usually within one or two days to closure, then deleted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt; at about the nine-day mark). The tag exists for the minority of such questions which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on-topic, and which &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please do not answer the off-topic ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, note what ultimately happened to the question, as documented in &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m1Zt1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this screenshot&lt;/a&gt; ─ it was removed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt;, under the following criterion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The system will &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;automatically delete&lt;/a&gt; closed, unlocked questions with zero or negative score having no positively scored or accepted answers or pending reopen votes, that were closed for any reason other than duplicate nine or more days ago and haven't been edited in the past nine days. (&lt;code&gt;RemoveAbandonedClosed&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of cleanup can only happen if any answers have positive scores, so that downvotes on the answers are also a way to ensure that the system handles this type of off-topic question appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T12:15:44.853" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T12:15:44.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11175" CreationDate="2019-03-22T10:53:57.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, like I suspect most long time members of the site, have rather lost the will to live when it comes to discussion of the homework policy and my enthusiasm for reopening the issue is on the limited side. So let me turn your question back to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let's look at the question you answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I determine, the height they meet, the time they meet and the velocities of each when they meet. Can anyone give me some tips? Thank you&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  An object thrown vertical upwards with initial Velocity of 40m/s and 2 seconds later, another object is thrown with the same Velocity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My challenge to you is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you want to see more questions like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because if you provide helpful answers you will see more questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that questions like the above do not make the Physics SE a better place and they should not be answered, not even partially, because that just encourages posting of such questions. Your views may differ of course. All I would ask is that you consider the long term consequences of your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm delighted to answer questions like this in a chat room, and indeed we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/54160/problem-solving-strategies&quot;&gt;a chat room specifically intended for just this purpose&lt;/a&gt;. It's nice to feel helpful and nicer still when students come back and thank you for helping get them through their exams. So I'm not saying don't help with this sort of question. I'm just saying don't do it on the Physics SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T10:53:57.123" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11175" CreationDate="2019-03-22T23:15:32.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we close homework-like questions, we sometimes invite the askers to rephrase them as &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's good guidance for answers to homework-like questions, too.  And your answer isn't an answer about kinematics or conservation of energy; your answer is some algebra.  That's how confused beginners approach physics, but that's not what doing real physics is like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A partial answer that explained conceptually how to attack that &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of problem would probably be welcome.  But the asker of that question hasn't given any indication of what their conceptual problem is, so writing a &lt;em&gt;targeted&lt;/em&gt; conceptual answer would be a serious challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T23:15:32.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11180" CreationDate="2019-03-23T05:25:46.140" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was editing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/468161/1&quot;&gt;a question titled &quot;newton's law of restitution&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and I edited the title to &quot;Newton's law of restitution&quot; (There were latex issues in the body of the question and I was not editing the question just because of obsessing over the title as it might seem from my recent behavior :P). When I finished the edits and tried to post them, the system gave me an error that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/188030/newtons-law-of-restitution&quot;&gt;a question with an identical title already exists&lt;/a&gt;. The only difference between the old and the new title was capitalization of &quot;N&quot; in &quot;Newton&quot;. I think this is a serious issue if someone can smuggle a question with an existing title via tweaking trivial capitalizations. Also, in such a situation, should one simply notify the OP that while the system is not registering an error, they should change the title or should one change the title themselves so as to suit the question? &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/468161/revisions&quot;&gt;I did the latter&lt;/a&gt;--I am not particularly sure I should've done it. This might be a network-wide issue--if so, can this question be migrated or should I ask on the central meta separately?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T13:32:34.640" Title="An Issue with Detecting Identical Titles" Tags="|discussion|bug|questions|moderation|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11179" CreationDate="2019-03-23T10:49:41.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If two questions are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; duplicates of each other and yet their titles only differ in capitalization, then the title is bad and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be changed (preferably on both questions) to a title that is more specific to the individual questions. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6413/50583&quot;&gt;How do we write good question titles?&lt;/a&gt; for, well, how to write good question titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is free to edit other people's posts on Stack Exchange. While you should be trying to preserve authorial intent, if you genuinely believe you've got a better title, just go ahead and edit it in. Do not hesitate to improve other people's posts! (but be sure that it's actually an improvement before doing so)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the questions are duplicates of each other, then it's unavoidable that their titles might be similar. Don't sweat improving the title of a question that's closed as duplicate since e.g. users that are not logged in are automatically redirected to a duplicate's target anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T13:32:34.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11182" CreationDate="2019-03-24T12:21:33.900" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a user profile who has joined today, has not got any upvote for questions nor has answered any question on physics.SE, how did his reputation surge to 101 within such a short period of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226038" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T12:36:56.110" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T12:36:56.110" Title="Reputation of the user increased without activity" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11181" CreationDate="2019-03-24T12:27:00.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users that have (or had at one time) more than 200 reputation on any site in the network are granted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/why-register&quot;&gt;association bonus&lt;/a&gt; of 100 reputation on every other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T12:27:00.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2019-03-26T08:28:24.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you really want to go on edit spree, you could reduce disruption by editing recent posts alongside with your own. If you commit yourself to improve 2-3 recent posts before you touch another post of your own, the disruption will be much less harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be even better if you take longer breaks from editing, either by doing something outside the site, or going through a review queue or writing a new answer to an old question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83721" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T08:28:24.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11186" CreationDate="2019-03-27T21:41:25.327" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about some logic circuits (I have the Boolean functions and truth tables) that I would like to minimise. Where would I post a question about this? I was thinking Physics firstly but possibly somewhere else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187409" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T13:59:40.497" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T13:59:40.497" Title="Where should I post a question about logic circuit minimisation?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11185" CreationDate="2019-03-28T10:28:36.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about logic circuits are generally off topic here. You could try &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt; and see if it would be on topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T10:28:36.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T11:50:33.437" Score="-8" ViewCount="1505" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a big fan of the rigidity, depth and straightforwardness of &quot;Qmechanic&quot; answers, I wonder if he\she has a book\notes in some fields of physics, I believe we can learn much faster by using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder if we can know his real name (if that allowed by StackExchange or he\she has willingness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12094" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T23:47:02.707" Title="Can anyone advice the real name of &quot;Qmechanic&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-01-23T23:02:57.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11187" CreationDate="2019-03-29T12:17:16.860" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the course of his/her participation on this site, Qmechanic has made it consistently clear that they wish to remain pseudonymous and s/he has not mentioned any information (to my knowledge, at least - but I've been here a long time) that could be used to identify him/her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important that we respect this attitude: you can of course ask him/her directly, in a polite fashion, but this is not public information and it should not be made public without Qmechanic's explicit consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T12:17:16.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-30T19:42:31.240" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/469015/&quot;&gt;Can&amp;#39;t we make big magnetic plate to levitate using gravity?&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe late, but I edited the question to prove it unique, but nothing seems to happen. Should I ask the question again? or ask users who marked it duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221932" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T21:15:39.883" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T21:15:39.883" Title="What to do to my duplicate marked question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11191" CreationDate="2019-03-31T06:43:33.123" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to this question- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/465753/wood-a-naturally-occurring-composite-material&quot;&gt;Wood: A Naturally Occurring Composite Material?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was green-checked as &quot;accepted&quot;,  although neither the question nor my answer were upvoted (both show zero). However, my rep tally shows  a red -2 for my answer. Can anyone explain why this is so- was a user removed, for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T10:38:12.440" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T10:38:12.440" Title="Negative rep score when neither question nor my answer were downvoted" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11190" CreationDate="2019-03-31T07:29:55.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accept and the one upvote happened on March 10.  You can see them in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/40292/niels-nielsen?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation change history&lt;/a&gt; on your profile page, where they earned you the usual +15 and +10 reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change of -2 points is due to a downvote that appeared just today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be able to see some of these details on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/465761/timeline&quot;&gt;post timeline&lt;/a&gt;.  Note that you have also earned &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;the privilege of seeing vote counts&lt;/a&gt; in addition to the usual total score on a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T07:37:19.390" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T07:37:19.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11197" CreationDate="2019-03-31T10:37:21.390" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;A nonsense format comes up when I hit on the list  of Physics a question to look at it. Colors and bubbles and distracting fuss. Help please. It happened after I rejected and edit by xray0, but it could be a coinidence. ( for many of the corrections I do not see a difference, for some there is grammar capitals or something)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T20:46:39.503" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T20:46:39.503" Title="Help needed. format turned colored and with bubbles when I hit a question" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11192" CreationDate="2019-04-01T04:09:10.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks everybody for the comments. The format returned to normal when clicking on the  clock image on the top line. It is on the right side of the top line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T04:09:10.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T04:28:33.477" Score="10" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/255372&quot;&gt;Example today&lt;/a&gt; . Many times I cannot see &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; real changes between the left and right side, but it might be my browser or his/her browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are people increasing their reputation by corrections? It kicks the question and  my answers to the top of the queue, and I get a long list of comments. I have only rejected one edit because I could see no difference at all between the two sets. (and it is a waste of time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am bringing this up because maybe I am not the only target. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T10:39:58.380" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T03:43:29.330" Title="Cascade of mostly trivial edits by a user" Tags="|discussion|editing|suggested-edits|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11189" CreationDate="2019-04-01T05:10:48.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is slowly gathering votes to re-open; nothing to do until there is enough votes.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/255214&quot;&gt;The edit you made&lt;/a&gt; is extensive and this may help you (it’s quite a good edit as a matter of fact) but patience is the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T05:10:48.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11192" CreationDate="2019-04-01T05:56:23.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't worry, it''s just an April Fools Day gimmick. You can toggle it off &amp;amp; on with the Clock icon in tbe top bar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Clock icon is supposed to disable / enable it on all pages, but it's slightly buggy, and the devs are working on it. In the mean time, if you use the mobile view you'll see a boring normal display. (The &quot;mobile&quot; button is at the bottom of every page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325996/how-to-disable-time-travel-entirely&quot;&gt;How to disable &amp;quot;time travel&amp;quot; entirely?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The bug is now fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T05:56:23.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11195" CreationDate="2019-04-01T06:16:26.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edit you linked to was (rightly) rejected in review, so nobody will have gained any reputation from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what else there is to say about this. It looks like your question is &quot;Are people increasing their reputation by corrections?&quot;, which they do, but only when the edits are accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T06:16:26.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11195" CreationDate="2019-04-01T06:18:30.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also assume that member decided to go on an edit spree of old high scoring posts to earn a few points. When I noticed the front page getting flooded, I sent them this comment, which I also posted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@xray0 Your edits are helpful, but please do them in small batches so you don't flood the front page with old questions. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11150/should-i-not-edit-my-old-questions-on-a-spree&quot;&gt;Should I not edit my old questions on a spree?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They appeared to stop shortly after my comment, so I deleted it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, you can send comments to an editor of any post. It doesn't work on suggested edits until the edit has been accepted. The auto-complete mechanism doesn't work, you have to type the &lt;code&gt;@UserName&lt;/code&gt; manually (of course auto-complete will work if that user has posted a comment themself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T06:18:30.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11189" CreationDate="2019-04-01T13:15:02.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, your edit does nothing to make the question unique, because the other question covers everything that yours does.  You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The setup in suggested question, has a tendency to flip 180 deg, causing there opposite poles to stick and no levitation occurs, while in my setup, its impossible for disc to flip.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question is not asking about &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; specific setup.  The question asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I know that it's possible to make an object levitate using an electromagnet to hold it up. But is it also possible to do this with regular magnets? Is there a special kind of magnet I need in order to have one powerful enough to hold an object up?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the answers to that question, you will also see that &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of them discuss the specific setup directly, but instead are generically referring to all setups using static ferromagnets.  They are only discussing the generic concept of levitating something with static magnets, the same as your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is not really any different.  You spend a lot of space showing pictures of plates, but your question asks if there is any way, not just why the plate example doesn't work (you even ask about a bowl setup, and if that would work, but then later in the edit say your question is only asking about flat plates?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you applied the actual mathematical analysis and ran into a conceptual difficulty, I could see this being on topic; but as of right now it's a very limited one-dimensional analysis of a 3-D problem that essentially ignores the actual physics (like why are there only vertical forces acting on your plate?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking why you can't use static magnets for levitation; it was closed as a duplicate asking the same thing.  The other question covers all shapes, so there's no real benefiet to having a new question for a specific geometric orientation; unless you have a &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; related question (not just &quot;how does that answer apply to flat plates?&quot;).  I don't think we need a question for each different possible shape of magnets when the post yours was marked as a duplicate of covers every geometry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T13:15:02.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T17:56:25.333" Score="13" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/469869/how-can-a-day-be-exactly-24-hours-long#comment1057223_469869&quot;&gt;the linked post&lt;/a&gt;, a comment was made addressing me with words that might be considered mildly rude by some. I had absolutely no issues with the comment (and thus, I didn't flag it). And yet, the comment has been deleted--it might have been deleted by the commentator themselves but I suspect there is a good probability that it was deleted by a moderator. The whole point of refraining from rude comments is to not make the addressed person uncomfortable. But if the addressed person has strong convictions against censoring speech and doesn't object at all towards the existence of the rude comment, should it be deleted? In the past, I myself might have flagged a rude comment addressed to a third person--so I am not complaining against anyone in particular, I am just questioning the practice. Thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T11:31:19.683" Title="Should a rude comment be deleted if the addressed user doesn't mind?" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11201" CreationDate="2019-04-03T18:35:16.797" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that comment. Even if it didn't bother you, we don't want stuff like that hanging around. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:35:16.797" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11201" CreationDate="2019-04-03T18:35:33.023" Score="21" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Absolutely&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; (AKA the Be Nice policy) is that it is not just a matter of what the two people directly involved in the conversation think about the language used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has the purpose of making our site look welcoming and consistent to &lt;em&gt;readers&lt;/em&gt;.  If someone isn't familiar with this site, and they read a question and see people calling others names, they will likely get the impression that such behaviour is appropriate on the site.  It isn't, so the policy should apply even to posts where the two users don't feel that the posts need to be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fun fact - I know exactly what comment you're talking about, and I totally flagged it.  Although I usually don't care either when users say such ridiculous things to me personally, it is best to keep it off the site.  I found the comment a bit &lt;em&gt;amusing&lt;/em&gt;; but for all the wrong reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:35:33.023" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-05T17:01:25.137" Score="8" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once the question has been closed, one can cast re-open votes and a question requires exactly as many re-open votes as close votes in order for it to be re-opened. Given the homogeneity of time, I suppose this certainly means that a re-open vote, in effect, nullifies a close vote. If so, why a leave-open vote (which is an existent feature), cast while the question has not yet been closed, doesn't cancel a close vote? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One defense of such a choice of mechanism might be that re-open votes are supposed to be utilized when the question has been modified after having been closed and is in need of being re-opened. But, often, a question gets re-open votes without any significant modifications (or any modifications at all) in the question and such votes do count. So this defense is not satisfactory.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T10:36:38.270" Title="Why &quot;Leave Open&quot; votes don't cancel the &quot;Close&quot; votes?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|reopen|vote-to-close|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T18:34:39.823" Score="4" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to answer this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/470965/testing-the-second-type-of-equations-of-lagrangian-mechanics?noredirect=1#comment1058834_470965&quot;&gt;Testing the second type of equations of Lagrangian Mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when I refreshed the page and saw it was put on hold as off-topic. Now, it might be a duplicate (although I can't find one) but I don't think it is directly off-topic and is asking a reasonable question: why do the E-L equations not work if you substitute in on-shell values for the velocity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(OP has clearly recently discovered Lagrangian mechanics and is a bit confused about the whole thing, so they don't make this point clearly but it is the heart of their question. Perhaps this counts as insufficient prior research, although that seems a quite high bar to me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86222" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T11:33:12.507" Title="Why was this question put on hold?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T21:17:35.637" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/44126/rob&quot;&gt;Rob&lt;/a&gt; deleted my answer for the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/470940/137269&quot;&gt;Pendulum in a lift&lt;/a&gt; with the comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi, welcome to Physics! We aren't a homework help site, so I have temporarily deleted this complete answer to a homework-like question. – rob♦&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it is - in this case - counter-productive. OP completely solved their problem but because a logical mistake near the end of their solution they obtained a wrong result. &lt;em&gt;They didn't ask for the correct result, they knew it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answerer gives them a complete solution, by the OP were not satisfied with it (they didn't upvote that correct answer and in the comment they insist to know, where they made a mistake). &lt;em&gt;They refuse other, simpler and correct solution(s), they only want to know their mistake.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer seems as a complete solution, but it only analyzed and approved individual steps, while didn't encounter and pinpointed the place with the error. Of course, it resulted to the correct result, already known to OP. &lt;em&gt;It only repeated the OP's steps, givig them nothing new.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, my answer was temporary deleted. I didn't know, what does it mean &quot;temporary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question itself was putting on hold, which is pitty, in my humble opinion, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OP don't want to solve their homework for them. They wanted learn from their mistakes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137269" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T03:48:47.530" Title="Moderator deleted my answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11207" CreationDate="2019-04-07T03:48:47.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I support the deletion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevermind the fact that &quot;check-my-work&quot; questions are frowned upon, this is just a screenshot rather than a fully typeset question, something &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10563/discouraging-screenshots-of-questions-at-least-the-textual-part&quot;&gt;we also discourage&lt;/a&gt;.  Finally, the OP did not ask for clarification on a concept - like why is the tension doubled or halved, but explicitly asked for worked to be checked, essentially farming out the completion of an assignment to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current consensus is that people do not want to encourage this kind of question presented in this kind of format: it helps very few people beyond the OP.  Removing answers to such questions is in line with this consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T03:48:47.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11206" CreationDate="2019-04-07T11:33:12.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After various improvements, I agree with OP that his question contains an underlying conceptional issue, and have therefore reopened it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T11:33:12.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11205" CreationDate="2019-04-08T08:40:44.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;why&quot; is simply because design choices had to be made when the site was implemented, and it was decided to do it like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion to make &quot;Leave open&quot; more powerful was done in the past. Instead of what you suggest, a change was implemented which removes the question from the &quot;Close Votes&quot; queue after three &quot;Leave open&quot; votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making close votes more like regular votes will be a big change to implement. Think about it: should there be a limit to &quot;Leave open&quot; votes? Should a user be able to undo a &quot;Leave open&quot; vote? How many times? Do you get a new close vote when you replace one with &quot;Leave open&quot; and vice versa? Should there be a special &quot;Close Votes&quot; table in the database, similar to regular votes (AFAIK currently close votes are technically &quot;flags&quot;)? Or should this mechanism be generalized to flags instead (so that one could vote against spam flags for example)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, you're free to suggest that on meta SE, but unless you can provide some sort of analysis which demonstrates the benefits (e.g. how many good questions per day could be salvaged), and weight them against the disadvantages (e.g. such a change will probably inflate the &quot;Close Votes&quot; queue) you're unlikely to convince the SE team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83721" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T08:40:44.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11205" CreationDate="2019-04-08T10:36:38.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because Leave Open votes are a mechanism that works exclusively within the review queue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core mechanism for community-driven question closures is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a quorum of five 3k+ regular users agree that it should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a hard-and-fast rule, with the only exceptions being (1) moderators, who have full control to be used where appropriate but in as minimal a set of circumstances as possible, (2) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/291824/gold-tag-badge-holders-and-moderators-can-now-edit-duplicate-links&quot;&gt;dupehammer&lt;/a&gt; ability of gold-tag-badge holders, and (3) the ageing away of close votes (one a day after four or fourteen days, depending on views). Messing with this rule is a major design change to the system behaviour, and it should only be done after substantial analysis and for reasons of extreme importance. (Or, to put it bluntly: that's just not going to happen. SE is busy enough with other aspects of the system that the type of engine redesign you're proposing is simply not going to end up on their to-do list.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other side of the closure mechanism is the review queues, which exist to make sure that off-topic questions get enough close-capable eyeballs to ensure that they're closed if they need to be. To be clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the primary purpose of the Close Votes review queue is to prevent a situation where an off-topic question gets one closure vote, very few views, and then it slips off the bottom end of the front page, never to be seen (or close-voted) again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works by making sure that any such question ends up in a review queue where, if it does merit closure, it does get closure. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Close Votes review queue is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; intended to act as a Death Row corridor where the only way for questions to get out is by getting closed,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would effectively mean that a single close vote would doom any question, negating the core rule above. There thus needs to be a mechanism by which on-topic questions cease to be considered, and this is what the Leave Open vote does: if the question gets enough Leave Open votes (at present, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139834/what-exactly-happens-with-the-button-leave-open-previously-do-not-close&quot;&gt;three of them&lt;/a&gt;), it gets removed from the queue. This is the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; function that the Leave Open option was designed to achieve. (Moreover, given that the Leave Open option is only accessible within the review queue, it does not make any sense to have it act outside of the review queue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this, of course, naturally raises some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why was it designed this way?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the Close Votes review queue was designed quite a while after the regular closure mechanism was in place (meaning: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139536/new-feature-community-review-tasks-now-in-beta&quot;&gt;all the way back in 2012&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. four years after Stack Overflow started, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/12/31/i-move-to-close-this-question/&quot;&gt;close-voting built from the ground up&lt;/a&gt; at the very beginning of the Q&amp;amp;A engine design). Since the review queues were an addition to the existing mechanisms, they were not built to modify the existing behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OK, but why can't it be changed now?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the core Q&amp;amp;A engine needs to serve the needs of an enormous variety of environments: from the voracious high-traffic environment of Stack Overflow, through a wide cast of 100+ Stack Exchange sites, each with its own community and culture, to the smallest beta sites with low traffic and relying on moderator actions to keep the flow in shape (or trying to pass that baton over to community moderation). This is a system used by millions of people weekly, and changes to the core behaviour should only be done if the disruption to the existing processes can be justified by the extreme need for the behaviour change being considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here there isn't any such need: the system is working just fine as-is. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your proposed re-design could indeed work, but there's nothing in your post that even hints at an argument that the current system doesn't work. Both systems have their own logic, each with its idiosyncrasies (in the existing system, Leave Open only acts within the review queue, which some people (e.g. you) find confusing; in your proposed re-design, there is a review-queue-only option which significantly alters the balance outside of it), and, frankly, the logic gaps in your system are worse than the existing one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T10:36:38.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11213" CreationDate="2019-04-08T17:11:53.970" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;'greyed out' or faded questions seemed to appear for me about a month ago.  I do not remember seeing them before that. What is the meaning of this?  Who does it?  How is it done?  What is its purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the edit history an could not find anything.  There is one related answer &quot;A greyed answer&quot; but it does not answer my questions.  Maybe 'greyed out' is not the correct term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y2FIN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y2FIN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45664" LastEditorUserId="45664" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T17:41:15.470" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T17:43:26.420" Title="What is the meaing of 'greyed out' questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2019-04-08T17:43:26.420" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions are greyed out if they are tagged with a tag belonging to your &quot;ignored tags&quot; (you can also choose to hide these questions completely). You should see your ignored tags on the front page in the right hand side bar at the top, just below current featured meta questions and your watched tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T17:43:26.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11201" CreationDate="2019-04-13T02:47:14.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven’t seen the comment, but...I don’t view this as a free speech issue, while generally being fairly close to a free-speech absolutist myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that comments are ephemeral by design.  And one that is rude is going to be addressed to a particular person, which makes it obsolete and useless as soon as it has been read.  If I call you a great poopy head, you know I don’t like you, but that doesn’t really help anyone else who is reading the question/answer.  Likewise if I say thanks, that was tremendously helpful and you are an awesome person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the comment addressed a problem with your answer in a useful manner, it should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the comment is useful, it can be upvoted which will make it slightly less likely to be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188277" LastEditorUserId="188277" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T11:31:19.683" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T11:31:19.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T08:12:30.140" Score="-5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/332263/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question was closed as homework.As OP said ,It was from an exam ,but I think it was not a homework type question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user227513" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T09:48:12.410" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T14:17:41.910" Title="Question was closed as homework" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11215" CreationDate="2019-04-14T14:17:41.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you've linked to, when boiled down to its essential structure, basically reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was faced with this set-piece exercise question, and I do not know the answer. Please tell me the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is smack in the middle of the class of questions that the homework policy deems off-topic. Note that the policy holds regardless of the origin of the set-piece, so &quot;It was from an exam&quot; is an irrelevant aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I do agree that this question did contain enough of a kernel of a conceptual problem that OP could have edited the question into an on-topic form which could have been reopened &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; but the simple fact is that OP did not do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that there are two aspects with respect to fixing closed questions: there's a difference between who &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; fix such questions, and who &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do so. The onus falls on the asker, and nobody else is really obligated to fix such questions. However, anybody who cares enough &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; fix those questions, if the OP's intent is clear enough and the edits do not alter it (with somewhat more latitude with old, abandoned questions). If you really care about this, you're perfectly welcome to edit that question into a shape that's on-topic as per the homework policy, at which time it can be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T14:17:41.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11229" CreationDate="2019-04-14T20:51:12.740" Score="6" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often noticed that even when a question is an obvious duplicate and it has been pointed out in the comments, some of us are posting answers to such questions without clarifying as to why they think that the &quot;new&quot; question should be separately answered. Of course, as long as the question is not officially marked duplicate, it should have a right to be answered. But, it seems to me that in obvious cases where there is no doubt that the newly asked question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a dupe of the suggested question, one should refrain from posting an answer on the newly asked question. How should one respond to such answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One obviously shouldn't downvote as votes to an answer must be cast based on the content. There doesn't seem to be any other option but to go around leaving comments whenever such answers are spotted--hoping that the poster would refrain the next time. Can we introduce some &quot;extra protection&quot; to questions which have been marked duplicate by some users but have not yet been fully marked duplicate? Here, by &quot;extra protection&quot;, I mean allowing only those users to post an answer who have some fairly high threshold rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T21:29:58.947" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T05:31:43.783" Title="How to respond to an answer to a clearly duplicate question?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|best-practices|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11217" CreationDate="2019-04-14T20:57:03.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the duplication is good enough that the new answer is also an answer to the prior question you can flag the answer for moderator attention noting that it could be moved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't work every time, however, because even though the questions touch exactly the same physics the answers may not be responsive to both ways of wording the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T20:57:03.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-15T20:04:45.847" Score="13" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11246/2019-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is scheduled for an election &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;next week, April 22nd 2019&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until April 22nd 2019 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at currently.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="9426" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T19:22:18.450" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T19:22:18.450" Title="2019 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-15T20:04:45.847" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T20:04:45.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-15T20:05:37.077" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Effective communication in the physical sciences, technology, and education relies on extensive internationally standardized terminology, nomenclature, quantities, units, symbols, and typography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How seriously do you take conformity with these requirements with regard to this site? If applicable, what do you consider to be the roles of the moderators or other users in achieving conformity with the requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59991" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T20:05:37.077" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-15T20:16:28.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Revived from the last questionnaire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site? (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T20:16:28.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-15T20:18:31.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Revived from the last questionnaire &amp;amp; also split off from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11221/50583&quot;&gt;&quot;filler&quot; questions&lt;/a&gt; because I think it's important in its own right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T21:22:27.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T21:22:27.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-15T21:23:14.790" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Describe the current challenges specific to the PhysicsSE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T21:23:14.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-15T21:34:30.623" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you highlight some of your posts on Meta that have been received poorly, and describe what information you've gleaned as a result of those discussions/experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have no such poorly received questions, consider a case where your answer has a highly scored competing/contrary answer to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/380616/1276356&quot;&gt;Originally asked here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T22:47:08.960" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T22:47:08.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-16T02:17:17.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat: How actively will you participate in chat (H Bar) moderation? Do you believe that it needs some more activity from Physics moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T02:51:31.330" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T02:51:31.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-16T02:55:31.913" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/364154&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, do you feel that you've contributed significantly towards some other aspect of site maintenance (e.g. reviews, flags, related/possible-duplicate comments)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T10:04:12.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T10:04:12.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11217" CreationDate="2019-04-16T05:31:43.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think Stack Exchange would be keen to implement an extra protection mechanism to discourage dupes, but I suppose that would partly depend on how hard it is to implement in software. But if they did, where would you put the cutoff? I suppose 3k is a workable cutoff, since those members are expected to be responsible enough to cast close &amp;amp; open votes. OTOH, although many dupe answers do come from low rep users, there are some prolific dupe answerers with quite high scores...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, although dupe close votes cause an automatic comment, perhaps that comment needs to be more obtrusive. Or it could generate a special header saying something like &quot;This question has &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; close votes pending. Please review the linked question(s) before posting an answer here. Also consider searching for alternative duplicate targets.&quot; You never know, it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, questions may be marked as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions&quot;&gt;protected&lt;/a&gt; by users with 15k+ rep,  but that only prevents users with rep less than 10 from answering, and a question has to be at least 1 day old. So this mechanism is normally only used to protect HNQ or historical questions that have gathered a lot of attention. It wouldn't help much with the dupe situation, since the unwanted dupes are mostly posted when questions are fresh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange have already given us an extra tool to deal with dupes: the dupe hammer. That is very useful on SO, it's less effective here on Physics, since there isn't a critical mass of hammer wielders. It's hard to get the required tag score, unless you're very prolific, and very good. On SO, it's not so hard to get a hammer by 10k to 20k rep, if you specialise in one language. Here, you may not get a hammer until 50k or so (just pulling numbers out of the air), and just getting points here is generally slower than on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike other closed questions, dupe questions aren't intrinsically bad. They can be useful signposts, and a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; bit of duplication may be useful. But we have to close dupe questions to prevent the dupe answers from being scattered all over the place, partly because we want to make them easier to find, but mostly because we want to make them easy to compare, and for them to compete with each other for votes, rather than having numerous small voting pools with no simple way to rank answers from different pools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big part of the problem is that there's no tangible incentive to searching for dupe targets &amp;amp; casting dupe votes, apart from the warm fuzzy feeling of doing the right thing. This has been discussed ad nauseum on SO meta &amp;amp; SE meta. So I don't expect dupe-related points or badges to happen anytime soon. But we can live in hope. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, there isn't a lot that can be done. On some stacks, the chat rooms are used to coordinate dupe-voting, but chat here is rarely busy enough for that to be practical, and I don't think the chat room regulars would like the room to be swamped by administrivia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose polite comments on dupe answers are ok. On SO, I sometimes suggest that the author could have done a dupe search, or that they should have noticed that some dupe votes had already been cast. But some people don't take kindly to such comments, although you can probably get away with it if you outrank them in rep. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T05:31:43.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-16T06:32:51.560" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments by other users cannot be deleted or downvoted by users such as me. Why don't we enable the feature of downvoting comments and many downvotes causing deletion? Please don't get me wrong. But I feel that too many useless comments can distract the readers from getting to the actual meat. I know there are good comments but there are also many a times useless comments. I understand that which comment is useful and which one is useless can be subjective but I think there are enough experts in this site. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164488" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T13:14:28.603" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T13:14:28.603" Title="Why can't we downvote comments?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-04-16T13:24:05.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11230" CreationDate="2019-04-16T10:03:07.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;we&quot; you mean the community of users on this site, then we cannot downvote comments because the system's software is designed in that way and we do not have access to that type of changes to the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;we&quot; you mean something more abstract and general, then the answer is that Stack Exchange made this conscious design decision when Stack Overflow was designed in 2008, and it is extremely unlikely that they will undertake such a radical redesign at this stage; in other words, the barebones answer to &quot;why doesn't the downvote-comments feature exist&quot; is &quot;because Stack Exchange doesn't want to implement it&quot;, for a variety of reasons. To explore those, see the ten-year history of the discussion starting at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3615/allow-downvoting-comments&quot;&gt;Allow downvoting comments&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/3615?sort=votes&quot;&gt;its plethora of Linked questions&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T10:03:07.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11230" CreationDate="2019-04-16T11:55:51.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emilio's answer explains how the situation evolved.  I'd like to address this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel that too many useless comments can distract the readers from getting to the actual meat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;raise flags&lt;/strong&gt; on such comments to get them removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T11:55:51.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-16T14:15:13.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What, if anything, would you do with a user who posts a steady stream of answers that derail questions to talk about their own personal theories, while not technically breaking any civility rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T14:15:13.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-18T17:49:46.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts about the ever-controversial homework policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121464" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T17:49:46.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-19T11:54:08.240" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this as a soft question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/473751/&quot;&gt;How to explore Physics research as an undergraduate, keeping in mind the ever increasing weightage on publications?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have explictly asked if this is the right place to post this and if not please suggest an alternative. One of the contributors suggested &quot;Academia&quot; and I have posted the same question there. The question has been downvoted and there is vote to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The problem I see with Academia is lack of subject specific soft-questions.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do not understand why this is not a right question for &quot;soft-question&quot; tag. In the tag-info it is written that we can ask questions asking for advice regarding publication, physics research/study. But I do not understand why my question is not related to Physics research/study technique. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it have to be a Physics research problem/homework problem which can be solved without Physics or does the above sentence mean - doubts regarding doing research in Physics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156705" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T11:56:49.990" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T12:42:56.373" Title="Where am I supposed ask questions regarding Physics education/research?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11236" CreationDate="2019-04-19T12:42:56.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure exactly what you're asking, but one of the main references on education questions is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4244/what-kind-of-education-questions-should-we-allow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which points out that many questions about education are overly broad or opinion-based. I believe the question you asked is among them. That's why it's off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The matter of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag is a separate one, and entirely irrelevant to whether your question is on topic here or not. Bear in mind that tag descriptions are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; what determines whether a question is on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T12:42:56.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11239" CreationDate="2019-04-20T00:22:14.080" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious because &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;the main badges have a count associated with them&lt;/a&gt; (i.e., &lt;em&gt;&quot;altruist, 177 awarded&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), but it's not apparent that you can find out how the number of times a tag badge has been awarded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been active in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acoustics?sort=unanswered&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;acoustics&lt;/em&gt; tag&lt;/a&gt; for rather a long time (and will keep chipping away at the bronze!) but it occurs to me that there are some tags that are a bit more esoteric. Obviously that means there are just fewer questions asked. But it also seems that they are less likely to be upvoted either due to unfamiliarity or disinterest within the community. (Hopefully this isn't too volatile to ask about, I'm simply curious.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152491" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T01:20:19.117" Title="Is it possible to see how many times a particular tag badge has been awarded?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11238" CreationDate="2019-04-20T01:20:19.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=tags&amp;amp;filter=bronze&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=tags&amp;amp;filter=bronze&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can reach it through the menus by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to your user page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &quot;badges&quot; in the horizontal menu.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select any badge you have earned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &quot;Badges&quot; in the box in the upper right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the non-tag badges, it will then tell you how many of each one has been awarded on the site.  To get the tag badge numbers, you need one more step:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on the &quot;Bronze Badge,&quot; &quot;Silver Badge,&quot; or &quot;Gold Badge&quot; under the &quot;Tag Badges&quot; section.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T01:20:19.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T12:45:13.703" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that this question should be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/449938/a-question-on-rigid-body-dynamics&quot;&gt;A question on rigid body dynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was closed as &lt;strong&gt;unclear&lt;/strong&gt; but I think that I explained it at my best! What should I do to edit it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case the questions are closed on this website then how can we leave this website completely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user213933" LastEditorDisplayName="user213933" LastEditDate="2019-04-20T12:55:48.400" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T18:11:12.667" Title="Why this question was closed?" Tags="|support|specific-question|suggested-edits|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2019-04-20T18:11:12.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/dbec999f-6fa6-4876-9c36-707e3ab6cf17/view-source&quot;&gt;the version that was closed&lt;/a&gt;, you have two questions that you're asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the intuition for angular momentum of a point mass relative to a inertial point?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am confused that at the same time the static friction helps in pure rolling by operating in direction opposite to wheels motion as well as it provides the car the required centripetal acceleration by operating towards the centre. How is it possible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are two separate questions. The first isn't clear what &quot;intuition&quot; you seek and what it is you understand. The best we can tell you is what a textbook might say, so you need to clarify what it is that you don't understand and would like further details on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is probably a duplicate of other questions asked in this site (haven't looked to be sure, but it looks like queries I've seen before). It's also not clear how this question relates to the previous one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've already removed the second part, so no need to further worry about that. In order to get the question reopened, you need to explain what it is you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; understand about angular momentum &amp;amp; how you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; see the connection to the relative inertial point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that stating &quot;Answer as fast as possible!&quot; is generally not well received, and often results in downvotes. We all here &lt;em&gt;volunteer&lt;/em&gt; our time to answering questions, your want of a rapid response seems to not care and/or respect the volunteer nature of this service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this is the case the questions are closed on this website then how can we leave this website completely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the most basic option is to just not come back to this site. If you also want to delete your account (an irreversible process), follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleting-account&quot;&gt;these instructions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T18:11:12.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11220" CreationDate="2019-04-21T07:53:12.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you been a moderator, or served in a role that is functionally similar to a Stack Exchange moderator, in another community? (Whether part of SE, elsewhere online, or in real life) If so, how long did you serve and what was the experience like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T02:12:29.767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T02:12:29.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11245" CreationDate="2019-04-21T09:26:46.990" Score="0" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/474010/&quot;&gt;Is it possible that gravitons don&amp;#39;t exist, but are actually something like phonons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous same question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/290924/&quot;&gt;Could gravitons be quasiparticles like phonons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is my fault that I didn't search first, but stackexchange search tab is not that visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6716" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T10:11:07.437" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T15:19:51.187" Title="I did ask the exact same question. But, why did Qmechanic put mine on hold, while he/she kindly edited the exact same earlier question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11243" CreationDate="2019-04-21T09:55:13.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because both questions contain the words &quot;graviton&quot; and &quot;phonon&quot; that doesn't mean they're the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/290924/50583&quot;&gt;asmaier's &quot;exact same question&quot;&lt;/a&gt; actually provides a (however flimsy) motivation using standard GR for the idea that gravitons and phonons are related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question just throws this vague idea at us without any justification, therefore making it seem like a random idea without any roots in mainstream physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T09:55:13.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11243" CreationDate="2019-04-21T15:19:51.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually I do think you have a point. Having reread both questions it's hard to argue why your question should be closed as &lt;em&gt;non-mainstream&lt;/em&gt; while asmaier's should not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACuriousMind points out that asmaier's question is a little more technical. It specifically refers to a technique called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linearized_gravity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linearisation&lt;/a&gt; and it is only in this linear form that quasiparticles like phonons are well defined. Though having said that, I'd say both questions were right on the borderline and I'd have been tempted to vote to close asmaier's question had I seen it back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question weren't a duplicate I would be tempted to vote to reopen it. If a friendly moderator had the time I'd ask them to reopen your question then close it as a duplicate if only because having duplicates can be useful when searching for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T15:19:51.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-22T19:19:32.710" Score="26" ViewCount="1397" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11220/2019-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every question was compiled - as noted, we only selected the top 8 questions as submitted by the community, plus 2 pre-set questions from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/bc1f1f8d-013b-413a-a9e8-cc6824281970/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11272&quot;&gt;Chris&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11273&quot;&gt;tpg2114&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe the current challenges specific to the PhysicsSE community.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site? (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you highlight some of your posts on Meta that have been received poorly, and describe what information you've gleaned as a result of those discussions/experiences. If you have no such poorly received questions, consider a case where your answer has a highly scored competing/contrary answer to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts about the homework policy?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/364154&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) Alternatively, do you feel that you've contributed significantly towards some other aspect of site maintenance (e.g. reviews, flags, related/possible-duplicate comments)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What, if anything, would you do with a user who posts a steady stream of answers that derail questions to talk about their own personal theories, while not technically breaking any civility rules?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chat: How actively will you participate in chat (H Bar) moderation? Do you believe that it needs some more activity from Physics moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T11:57:21.763" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T11:57:21.763" Title="2019 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-22T20:00:00.040" Score="12" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T23:41:31.130" Title="2019 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-04-22T20:00:00.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2019-04-22T21:15:55.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's talk specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by that, I mean, &quot;let me be the first to shoot my own self-interest in the foot&quot;, and argue that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/474379/is-the-born-rule-indeed-wrong&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which I answered, was rightly kicked off the HNQ list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the deal? Well, the question starts off with the title&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the Born rule indeed wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is basically a request to verify the correctness of an unpublished arXiv eprint. As pointed out in the comments, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7516/is-physics-se-an-appropriate-location-for-peer-review&quot;&gt;consensus view on peer-review questions&lt;/a&gt; leans towards classing this question as Too Broad, but I answered it because the literature it was referring to was complex enough for an outsider to puzzle out on their own (in short: a second preprint commented on the paper to point out flaws in the argument, and the authors responded by adding an appendix) but still containable enough that an answer in our format can explain what the deal is. And, also, the paper is awful enough that its flaws can be explained reasonably quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I think that question is on-topic and should remain open, but I do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; think it's a good fit for the type of questions we want representing our site on HNQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For one (though I didn't realize it before posting), the title is clickbait, pure and simple. It can be improved, sure, but I'm not sure I see how far up the slope from &quot;terrible&quot; back towards &quot;vaguely reasonable&quot; it can be brought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the contentiousness of the title (which cannot really be removed, even if it is softened to something more accurate like &quot;Is this paper, which claims the Born rule is incorrect, right?&quot;) simply isn't backed up by a particularly well-thought-through question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More to the point, keeping it on HNQ is just giving free advertisement to a truly awful paper, which really doesn't deserve it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though then again, those are pretty squishy reasons; I wish I could firm it down more but that's the best I've got. (For full disclosure: it got on HNQ and then kicked off before I had time to react - but my first reaction to finding out about the former was that I needed to flag it so it got off.) I'm not sure how much of this can be distilled into a clear policy going forward, and I'm looking forward for people's reaction to this to see how wild off the bat it is, and whether a more clear fingerprint of what made this a bad fit (which can then be used as a benchmark to compare against in future cases) can be hammered out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, though, I think the core point is pretty strong: this was not a question that we want to represent the site, if nothing else because &quot;yeah, we'll fact-check your shallow questions about fifteen-year-old abandoned preprints&quot; isn't really the kind of message I think we should be sending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T21:15:55.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T12:59:23.777" Score="-3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello everyone I want to know that the answer (link given below) was almost complete and correct I think that the answer didn't require any update but why it was downvoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/474362/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/474362/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user213933" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T13:02:55.387" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T15:43:44.270" Title="Why this answer was downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11249" CreationDate="2019-04-23T15:43:44.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was downvoted by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally you answered as if all dissipating forces could be ignored, without stating that in your answer.  I tried to point you to the issue, and you chose to make the edit, but also accused me of not thinking.  You can see in the comments that I pointed out that I thought it was rude, along with your further comments, so I left the downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T15:43:44.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11261" CreationDate="2019-04-24T02:45:15.923" Score="3" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions or answers that cite, refer to or are based on work published in predatory journals (in the sense discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open-access_publishing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://clinicallibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://predatoryjournals.com/publishers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) to be tolerated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, how do we check if a journal is predatory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T13:59:18.940" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T12:58:39.483" Title="How to handle references to literature in predatory journals" Tags="|discussion|scope|answers|policy|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T02:47:34.460" Score="8" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize that this is almost certainly a network-wide question, but I am asking it here, because this is the only site on which I have seen it manifest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there been a change in how daily visits are calculated?  (I noticed this in the context of the Fanatic badge on the physics meta site.)  I have probably visited every day for the past hundred, during my normal working hours; however, up until this time, daily visits seemed to be counted only according to UCT.  Has this changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed this because my Fanatic badge progress was somewhere in the 30s out of 100 yesterday, but then it jumped to me having the badge (with no notification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;  Things now appear to have gone back to what they were before (I no longer have the Fanatic badge of physics meta), so this may have just been a temporary glitch, perhaps never to be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T16:25:23.853" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T16:25:23.853" Title="Has Stack Exchange changed how it counts daily visits?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11251" CreationDate="2019-04-25T07:39:30.950" Score="-4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are questions or answers that cite, refer to or are based on work published in predatory journals (in the sense discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open-access_publishing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://clinicallibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://predatoryjournals.com/publishers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) to be tolerated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You should take a question on its merits. Ditto for an answer. If it's junk science you say so and explain why, and point out that the journal will print any old tosh for money. If it's serious sincere science you deal with it as normal, then you ask yourself why it appeared in a journal you don't rate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is to close down serious sincere questions and/or delete serious sincere answers, which will drive contributors away. You should try to avoid this.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If no, how do we check if a journal is predatory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You go and look up the journal and point out its submission rules. You don't just declare that it's predatory because it's appeared on some list. Note this from the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeffrey Beall&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Joseph Esposito wrote in The Scholarly Kitchen that he had been following some of Beall's work with &quot;growing unease&quot;[27] and that Beall's &quot;broader critique (really an assault) of Gold OA and those who advocate it&quot; had &quot;crossed the line&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the word predatory is something of an ad-hominem, and that all journals are predatory to some extent. We fund science, then we've got to pay through the nose to read a paper that results from that funding. Not just a dollar or two, such that pricing is pro-rata comparable to the price of a book. But tens of dollars. So much that most people don't read it, and express their irritation at a paywall. Also note that journals that use this model do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like Open Access. They have an axe to grind.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/456976&quot;&gt;What is the reason for the reported opposite-of-QM handedness of photons in a Bell test with circularly polarized photons?&lt;/a&gt; and a comment to this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/475637/36194&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/475637/36194&lt;/a&gt;. I took a look and thought it was all serious sincere science. So I think you should &quot;tolerate&quot; it. Especially since there are bona fide physicists who can't get their papers published in a high-impact journal. As to why, I'd say it's to do with the &lt;em&gt;not mainstream&lt;/em&gt; issue. But that's one for another day.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76162" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T14:49:50.590" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T14:49:50.590" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-25T19:39:17.033" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR if you don't want background information&lt;/strong&gt;: Should we allow answers which only provide a single experimental measurement to remain posted as answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other day, an old question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/153839/what-is-the-temperature-of-the-clear-night-sky-from-the-surface-of-earth/&quot;&gt;What is the temperature of the clear night sky from the surface of Earth?&lt;/a&gt;, was bumped by an answer which contained a single measurement, and minimal information about the controls or procedure used to take the measurement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the second such answer on the question, the first of which was posted in 2014, and I believe was +2 before the question was bumped by the new answer.  This would explain why a second user found it appropriate to post a similar answer with their own measurements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assumed this was inherently off topic, but Kyle Kanos mentioned in Chat that his review got quickly declined by users in the review queue.  I decided to give it a moderator flag, because I felt such answers blatantly did not fit on the site.  My flag read for each answer read: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Single point experimental data with minimal details of setup or reasoning for results doesn't meet quality standards for answers on this site.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which were declined for the reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought my flag was quite clear that I was not trying to point out a technical inaccuracy, or an incorrect answer, but it seems that is not the case.  Because of this, I would like to get some sort of community consensus on this going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be posting my own answer, because I have thoughts on how this should be, and shoehorning them into my question more than I already have doesn't seem fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T12:40:22.233" Title="Single uncontrolled measurements as an answer" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11255" CreationDate="2019-04-25T19:39:17.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, these answers do not belong on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary issue that I see is that &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; questions on this site could be answered by taking a single measurement and posting the results.  It is my opinion that such answers based around a single measurement are inherently low quality.  Leaving those answers on questions seems likely to encourage others to answer the same question, or new questions, using this method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it is so easy to take (bad/uncontrolled) measurements for some variables, I think by not deleting such answers we would be allowing for extra clutter that has no benefit. A single piece of data with limited experimental controls is not a good representation of what physics actually is, and doesn't belong as an answer on a Physics Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T19:39:17.033" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11251" CreationDate="2019-04-26T09:23:33.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This Stack Exchange is about &quot;mainstream physics&quot;. It is about mainstream physics whether it is published in leading journals or trailing journals. It is not about non mainstream physics whether the non mainstream physics is published in leading journals or trailing journals. This Stack Exchange is about mainstream physics, not journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can easily find non mainstream physics articles published in leading journals. And anyone can easily find mainstream physics articles published in trailing journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would anyone publish in a trailing journal? I will tell you a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some years ago, I discovered a new method of writing unitary matrices. I messed around with publishing it at Journal of Math Physics but they pissed me off. I'm an amateur. I do not need to &quot;publish or perish&quot;. I do not need to have other physicists read or care about my work. So I put it on to Vixra here where it has presently been downloaded 1082 times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unitary Mixing Matrices and Their Parameterizations&lt;/strong&gt; (2015)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;We present a new decomposition of unitary matrices particularly useful for mixing matrices. The decomposition separates the complex phase information from the mixing angle information of the matrices and leads to a new type of parameterization. ...&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://vixra.org/abs/1511.0083&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://vixra.org/abs/1511.0083&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new decomposition of unitary matrices is an important and unexpected addition to quantum mechanics. So it has been picking up citations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Parametrization of 3 × 3 unitary matrices based on polarization algebra&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Gil, J.J. Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2018) 133: 206. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2018-12032-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2018-12032-0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My paper also gives a geometric calculation for CP violation and is cited here but they replaced &quot;vixra&quot; with &quot;arxiv&quot; in the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Geometric Origin of the CP Phase&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;H. Fanchiotti, C.A. García Canal, V. Vento&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The complex phase present in CP-violating systems such as neutral kaons is shown to be of geometrical origin. It is also concluded that the complex phase of the Cabibbo--Kobayashi--Maskawa (CKM) matrix is a Berry-like phase.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08127&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08127&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paper isn't published (yet), but it is good enough that it is cited in a peer reviewed paper here (as [28]):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Testing CPT violation with correlated neutral mesons&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Roberts, Phys. Rev. D 96, 116015 (2017)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03378&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03378&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a good thing that you do not have to distinguish between &quot;good&quot; journals and &quot;bad&quot; journals. It is a good thing because journals are not static objects. Good journals can become better and they can decay. Bad journals can improve. Good journals can publish bad articles and bad journals can publish good articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not judge people based on their commonalities such as skin color or religion. You should not judge articles based on their authors or the journal they are published in. You do not judge based on skin color no matter how good the statistics you have that prove how bad the average person of a particular color is. You judge people based on their merits and you judge articles based on their content. This is the way that science has been (correctly) done for thousands of years and you are not in a position to change that tradition. Truth is truth, no matter where it's published or who says it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T09:23:33.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11255" CreationDate="2019-04-26T12:40:22.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly disagree with the existing answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be worried about people just going out and doing measurements themselves without adequate formal quality controls. If we applied the same standards to theoretical physics, the entire site would grind to a halt. Often when answering a question, I do a small calculation or derivation myself. Other people present numeric computations or derivations by Mathematica. None of these come with formal &quot;controls&quot; or &quot;procedures&quot;. It would be ridiculously limiting if every one of these answers had to come with textbook references for every result and be checked to the standards of a published paper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have a perfectly good quality control system for both &quot;uncontrolled&quot; derivations and &quot;uncontrolled&quot; measurements: if you don't think the answer is good, then downvote it. If we deleted all answers with measurements, we would lose some of the greatest answers on this site (such as the top three answers of all time: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/121879/can-i-compute-the-mass-of-a-coin-based-on-the-sound-of-its-fall&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/111006/how-does-light-bend-around-my-finger-tip&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;). Moreover, it would send the message that even &lt;em&gt;everyday&lt;/em&gt; physics is something dangerous and inaccessible, beyond the purview of all but certified professionals, which is quite counterproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T12:40:22.233" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11251" CreationDate="2019-04-26T12:58:39.483" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need any additional policies about referring to or questioning about papers published through predatory journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assuming the paper is mainstream...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well, we don't really need to do anything. Maybe, in the case that the post is written by the author of the paper, we could provide a link indicating that journal is predatory, but nothing really needs to be done here, treat the post as any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assuming the paper is non-mainstream...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We already have functioning policies on questions about non-mainstream physics, so I think this would be handled already. We also handle answers based on non-mainstream physics with downvotes (and in some cases deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also close questions based on peer review, regardless of the mainstream/non-mainstream aspect, so this shouldn't be a concern as well. Hence, I don't think an additional policy is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T12:58:39.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11247" CreationDate="2019-04-26T18:08:14.390" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect there may be a lot of people self-selecting themselves out of running because they think that they don't quite have enough experience with the community moderation ─ in a large cohort of users that I think are perfectly qualified. &lt;strong&gt;I, for one, feel that there are a lot of users in, say, the 5k - 15k rep bracket, and with, say, about one to three years of experience on the site, who would be excellent moderators.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't leave the community moderation to the same old faces! There's a lot of highly opinionated users who are very visible on meta and other community-moderation mechanisms (&lt;em&gt;cough&lt;/em&gt;), but I would bet that there's a substantial fraction of our experienced user base (where by &quot;experienced&quot; I mean roughly &quot;has had 3k+ and been reasonably active on the Close queue for longer than a year&quot;) who would offer extremely valuable perspectives that would do a lot of good in broadening how the broader site community is represented in the day-to-day moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you feel that you have a good grasp on how the site moderation works, then please consider running!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T18:08:14.390" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-04-26T18:08:14.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11195" CreationDate="2019-04-27T02:13:08.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think small changes are very valuable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not obvious why. The change shown in the example corrects some minor spelling or typographic errors, and does no semantic changes. It is of minimal value, it practically does not change anything about the question and its answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is true if we had only the goal of giving good answers to questions that fit in terms of topic and quality. Which is not the case - we want also build a collection of good questions and answers. Now, the change is just as irrelevant as in the case above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the goal is a high quality collection in the long term. On the order of centuries (*). I see no reason to limit our optimism much further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on this time scale, many little changes, tens or hundreds of them to some questions, will add up to increase the overall quality significantly. Exactly what is called &lt;strong&gt;polishing, to make it shine&lt;/strong&gt;. Making something much more valuable by not only shaping it, but correcting every minor flaw on its surface. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see that the basic idea makes sense when applying it to Wikipedia, where I often apply this kind of minimal polishing. There, the long term integration of it is just natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) There are good reasons to expect English to become the global language, as opposed to Chinese (which is spoken by the same number of people currently). And it becomes even more valuable to humans if we go only almost extinct by rouge AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42975" LastEditorUserId="42975" LastEditDate="2019-04-27T03:43:29.330" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T03:43:29.330" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11247" CreationDate="2019-04-27T03:05:47.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody get the impression that our questionnaire might be turning people away? I can think of a couple of users with ~10k rep who are reasonably active in review queues (and general close voting), post editing, and duplicate votes, but have no/very little meta and chat presence. However, we have three questions (questions 3, 8, and 10 in the questionnaire) which are about these matters: two are about well- and poorly-recieved meta posts, while the other is about chat (and two of those three questions were my suggestions, but whatever). If someone feels that they won't be able to put together significant answers for &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; out of ten questions, they may be considering themselves bad fits for the position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel that these people would make fine moderators: if they're participating in reviews, they probably have a good enough idea of the policies regarding the scope, so they'll be able to help meta discussions once they're moderators. And some of our present moderators are not very active on chat: some pop in occasionally to make sure that things are going smoothly, and some are barely ever in the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, is there a way to somehow tell people that it's possible to be a competitive candidate with 'null' answers for those questions, as long as they can show their contributions in some other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T03:05:47.650" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-04-27T03:05:47.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11247" CreationDate="2019-04-27T22:28:13.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone clarify why this election is being held?  Is it something that happens automatically every so often, or did the existing moderators request it (either because they feel swamped or for some other reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T22:28:13.487" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-04-27T22:28:13.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11270" CreationDate="2019-04-27T23:06:44.150" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in working in a PhD research on a particular field. I've talked to a professor that despite his interest in supervising this work he would like me to come up with a few concrete research topics/objectives so that we could discuss about those and pick one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to do so and considered asking here. I'm afraid the question is closed as off topic or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: questions about possible research topics for a PhD are considered to be on topic here? Is there a particular way to ask such a question so that it becomes on topic? Or is it completely hopeless and such a question will no matter how asked be off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21146" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T23:16:31.557" Title="Are questions about research topic considered to be on topic on Phys.SE?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11269" CreationDate="2019-04-27T23:16:31.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about suggesting a research topic are not questions that can have an objective answer, nor are they even about &lt;em&gt;physics as a science&lt;/em&gt; (but as a profession). They are prime examples of questions that are primarily opinion-based and have been considered off-topic for years, cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5061&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;What&amp;#39;s a good research topic?&amp;quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T23:16:31.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11247" CreationDate="2019-04-27T23:41:31.130" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/08/03/article-2383977-0B66F6C300000578-81_1024x618_large.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your Phys.SE community needs you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T23:41:31.130" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-04-27T23:41:31.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11246" CreationDate="2019-04-28T11:27:42.533" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Describe the current challenges specific to the PhysicsSE community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is a discipline with many reluctant students, and so we get a flood of low-quality homework questions, which take a significant amount of time to remove and end up diluting the quality of the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also issues with marginally on-topic questions making it to HNQ and blatantly incorrect answers receiving a ton of votes there, but I suspect that's not really unique to PhysicsSE, but a problem for many sites network wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site? (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably a few hours a week for now. In the future, I may have more free time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you highlight some of your posts on Meta that have been received poorly, and describe what information you've gleaned as a result of those discussions/experiences. If you have no such poorly received questions, consider a case where your answer has a highly scored competing/contrary answer to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only have a handful of questions and answers on Meta, but they've all been relatively well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the material I've posted on the site is consistent with the idea that I could be an adequate moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As close and reopen votes by moderators are binding, I would restrain myself more on close and especially reopen votes. I would also take special care to always leave a comment on any action I take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first inclination is to warn them via PM/email and suspend them temporarily if the behavior doesn't improve. I would want to discuss this with the more experienced moderators, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discuss it with the moderator, and possibly opening a question on meta to clarify how the community feels about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts about the homework policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy is fine as is. My impression is that most of the flood of homework questions come from people that didn't read the policy in the first place. Perhaps the small blurb in the &quot;Ask Question&quot; section needs to be more clear about what exactly is needed for a homework question to be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/364154&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) Alternatively, do you feel that you've contributed significantly towards some other aspect of site maintenance (e.g. reviews, flags, related/possible-duplicate comments)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've contributed significantly with reviews (5/6 Steward badges), flags (984 helpful flags), and edited posts (252).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What, if anything, would you do with a user who posts a steady stream of answers that derail questions to talk about their own personal theories, while not technically breaking any civility rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remove the answers (assuming they go against the &quot;only mainstream physics&quot; rule), and PM/email the user with a warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chat: How actively will you participate in chat (H Bar) moderation? Do you believe that it needs some more activity from Physics moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't spend much time in chat, largely due to a lack of time. That might change next year, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-04-28T15:31:34.277" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T15:31:34.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11246" CreationDate="2019-04-28T16:24:55.280" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Describe the current challenges specific to the PhysicsSE community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest challenge is sorting out what is and is not within the scope of the site. Physics is, in some sense, &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/435/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all encompassing&lt;/a&gt; and so we still don't always have clear lines for what is or is not on topic. Engineering, scientific computing, and math questions always seem to have a moving line on what works here, and I think it leads to inconsistent moderation and confusing policies for new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, whether a question on any topic stays open or not should not depend on which set of users happened to see it. There should be more consistency and clarity on where various lines should be drawn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How much time do you expect you can commit to moderating the site? (A couple hours a month? Ten hours a week? Ten hours a day? Take a good guess) Also, do you anticipate any reason why that amount of time would significantly decrease in the future?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been able to visit the site almost every day for many years (holy cow, it's been 7 years already!). My profile says I've visited 2386 days, which is 6.5 years out of the 7.5 years of total time. I pass most of my time while &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/303/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;codes are compiling&lt;/a&gt; to poke around the site and other SE communities. A modest estimate would be an hour or two a day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can you highlight some of your posts on Meta that have been received poorly, and describe what information you've gleaned as a result of those discussions/experiences. If you have no such poorly received questions, consider a case where your answer has a highly scored competing/contrary answer to your own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking through my meta history, anything of substance has been moderately well-received. Although, part of that is because they evolved from conversations (chat, or other questions/answers) and so they tend to represent something that is a consensus among at least a few people who all agree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest thing learned/observed over the years is that many people are very passionate about the site and passionate about what they want to see done here. Sometimes that passion is a little too intense and it leads to problems. So it's important to remember that we all have the same general goals, but we might disagree on how to get there -- there is no one, singular, correct way to move forward and we need to build consensus where possible. And when we disagree, we still need to enforce the policies as they exist instead of going rogue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments and chatroom messages. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. Do you feel like all the material you've posted on the site reflects that you would be a good moderator? Will becoming a moderator induces significant changes in what you do—and refrain from doing—on the site (outside the obvious addition of moderator duties)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to be more &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/203643/physics-is-rotting-into-a-bad-situation-a-request-for-community-manager-interve/203723#203723&quot;&gt;openly opinionated&lt;/a&gt; and perhaps I don't need to be. It was uncommon that I would really get fired up back then, and now it's incredibly rare. I guess that's part of getting older. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recent activity, aside from a few frustrated &quot;Have you even tried to do this yourself&quot; type comments has been benign. I don't anticipate getting too riled up or needing to worry about the extra weight of the diamond. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, we don't know how to solve N-body problems and it would require figuring out where the problem actually lies. I have seen instances of people being antagonistic and so maybe the user &quot;generating&quot; the flags isn't at fault and are being targeted. Or maybe the user is the one acting up and causing problems. It's hard to say what the correct path is for such a vague hypothetical, because each situation is different and may have it's own history or background of the people involved. That's where it is fantastic that we have a long-serving team who are likely well aware of any histories between people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step is to talk to them. But realistically, it's okay to have diverging opinions on things. Understanding why somebody else feels an action is the correct one goes a long way, even if I don't agree. Ideally, a middle ground or clarity emerges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What are your thoughts about the homework policy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That about sums it up. We've had so many discussions/arguments/dust ups/whatever over the 7 years I've been here about this. We reached a middle-ground consensus that did not make anybody happy, but at least made sense and was clear where to draw the lines. All efforts to revise it have not gained any traction. I'm perfectly happy if somebody else comes up with a policy that works, but they need to understand the history and discussions for/against everything that was decided until this point. Because everything recently proposed has either been tried and failed, or was picked apart and rejected before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/364154&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) Alternatively, do you feel that you've contributed significantly towards some other aspect of site maintenance (e.g. reviews, flags, related/possible-duplicate comments)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's hard to point to any particular post. I will crib from my questionnaire in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9196/2016-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/9203#9203&quot;&gt;2016 Moderator Election&lt;/a&gt; answers and say that I have worked hard to address the challenge of designing scope (but have not fully succeeded, if success is even possible): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5553/what-is-engineering-and-what-is-experimental-design&quot;&gt;What is engineering and what is experimental design?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4540/what-is-the-fate-of-the-engineering-tag&quot;&gt;What is the fate of the engineering tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/should-we-allow-software-questions-take-3&quot;&gt;Should we allow software questions? (take 3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5562/big-list-resource-questions&quot;&gt;Big list resource questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8812/engineering-questions-and-answers-that-are-closely-related-to-physics/8813#8813&quot;&gt;Engineering questions and answers that are closely related to Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7565/it-is-on-topic-to-ask-about-computer-software-useful-to-do-some-particular-task/7568#7568&quot;&gt;It is on-topic to ask about computer software useful to do some particular task?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7260/network-science-can-be-a-branch-of-physics/7261#7261&quot;&gt;Network science can be a branch of physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5603/adding-computational-science-to-the-list-of-on-topic-items-in-the-help-center/5604#5604&quot;&gt;Adding computational science to the list of on-topic items in the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5519/realistically-are-atmospheric-physics-questions-on-topic-and-acceptable/5520#5520&quot;&gt;Realistically, are atmospheric physics questions on topic and acceptable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7140/are-questions-about-mathematics-used-in-physics-always-off-topic/7141#7141&quot;&gt;Are questions about mathematics used in physics always off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8812/engineering-questions-and-answers-that-are-closely-related-to-physics/8813#8813&quot;&gt;Engineering questions and answers that are closely related to Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What, if anything, would you do with a user who posts a steady stream of answers that derail questions to talk about their own personal theories, while not technically breaking any civility rules?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal theories are not on topic, regardless of how politely they are stated. The way to handle it is the same as how to handle anybody who repeatedly breaks the rules -- point them to the applicable policies, give them some time to cool down and think it over, and wash-and-repeat until they get it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Chat: How actively will you participate in chat (H Bar) moderation? Do you believe that it needs some more activity from Physics moderators?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to be much more active in chat. But it became fairly toxic and I did not enjoy spending time in the room anymore. This was really due to a select few users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view on moderation, both in chat and elsewhere: This is a site for &lt;em&gt;professionals&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;students&lt;/em&gt;, and so in addition to communicating physics knowledge, we should be communicating &lt;em&gt;professional&lt;/em&gt; norms for behavior in professional environments. That means we should be able to discuss topics without resorting to insulting, demeaning behaviors. It means we should be comfortable with what we put on here being seen by a Human Resources department of our employer. If I were having a conversation in chat, it should be just like having a conversation on my workplace Slack/IRC/whatever. If something is said that HR would find unacceptable, then it should also be unacceptable here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T16:24:55.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11277" CreationDate="2019-05-01T00:47:21.223" Score="-3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past few weeks I have seen users placing &quot;extra&quot; bounties on questions with answers that are &quot;exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.&quot; While the said answers undoubtedly make some of the higher-quality posts that I have seen on SE, to my understanding these &quot;extra&quot; bounties work against its intention of motivating answerers by placing emphasis on the bounty itself, as opposed to any intrinsic motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I am concerned that prolonged use of the bounty system in this way will overjustify the creation of &quot;exemplary&quot; answers and eventually degrade the quality of the site in one of two ways (or both): The answerer, in attempt to get reputation/recognition, is verbose at best OR the bounty system loses its appeal as users find there is nothing to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has &quot;extra&quot; bounties been a recurring event in the past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In moderation is it proper usage of the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user195162" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T05:23:46.607" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T00:25:02.453" Title="Banes and Boons of &quot;extra&quot; Bounties" Tags="|discussion|questions|bounty|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11275" CreationDate="2019-05-01T00:54:53.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is proper usage of the system, and there is even a bounty reason to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwZxQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwZxQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Reward Existing Answer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/369105&quot;&gt;mother meta answer&lt;/a&gt; about bounties which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Can I award a bounty to an old answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can award your bounty to any answer on the question. This makes it possible for users to reward particularly good answers with more rep than a standard upvote would provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To indicate that your bounty will be awarded to an existing answer, choose &amp;quot;Reward existing answer&amp;quot; when asked &amp;quot;Why are you starting this bounty?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, that the bounty can be awarded only after a minimum of 24 hours, after starting the bounty. It is suggested that you wait until the grace period to award the bounty, as due to the additional attention a bounty gives, the answer may receive more upvotes.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T00:54:53.400" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11275" CreationDate="2019-05-01T01:29:12.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My favorite use-case for &lt;em&gt;&quot;Reward an existing answer&quot;&lt;/em&gt; bounties is late answers that are substantially better than existing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example from on-site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/80159/520&quot;&gt;Why has Earth's core not become solid?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing at all wrong with the accepted answer by Kyle K. More than that, it's a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; answer. However, more than a year later David Hammen added an &lt;em&gt;outstanding&lt;/em&gt; answer which has languished in relative obscurity despite my posting links to it here and there around the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; people to take the effort to upgrade the response to old questions, and one way to encourage that is by rewarding the behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar example from Stack Overflow is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/44164075/2509&quot;&gt;this answer by CR Drost&lt;/a&gt;. That question has pre-existing good answers, but Mr. Drost came along much later and did a better job explaining the &quot;Why?&quot; than the existing answer and I would like to reward that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T00:10:08.507" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T00:10:08.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11275" CreationDate="2019-05-01T06:54:08.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will address the concerns pointed out in the second paragraph of v1 of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Verbose answers will not receive bounties for being exemplary. While long answers do frequently merit bounties for exceptional explanations, length is not the sole factor in determining bounty-worthiness. It isn't even &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; factor. Deliberate wordiness makes the answer worse and decreases the chance of a bounty, and everyone knows that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bounties will still be set on questions which are lacking good answers, and in those cases, the appropriate bounty reason will be chosen (probably &quot;draw-attention&quot;). The bounty system will still function in the way which you prefer: it will give questions a spot on the featured tab of the front page, and incentivize  answers to those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The bounty reason &quot;reward existing answer&quot; has been around for a while (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/09/23/bounty-reasons-and-post-notices/&quot;&gt;over seven years&lt;/a&gt;) even though you noticed it recently, and I have never seen any concerns about its effect. It appears to promote good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely that a person will answer a question while hoping for a reward-existing-answer bounty: there is a limited number of users who actively set up these bounties, and they do not set bounties for every good answer they see.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Such bounties, particularly when they're big (150+ rep), are not placed arbitrarily. People are conscious of the existing bounties which were received by the answer and the votes cast on it. The intention is to encourage more answers of that &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt;, and to reward them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user191954" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T13:33:16.657" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T13:33:16.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11275" CreationDate="2019-05-01T14:03:21.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has &quot;extra&quot; bounties been a recurring event in the past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have mentioned, bounties that reward existing answers are explicitly encouraged by the design, and bounties have had that explicit encouragement designed into them since &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/09/23/bounty-reasons-and-post-notices/&quot;&gt;the  bounty system reached its final shape in late 2011&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of such bounties has been in place in this site for the past seven years or so: you can find all of those bounties in &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1040590/reward-existing-answer-bounties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Data Explorer query&lt;/a&gt;, which can also be used (as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1040601/reward-existing-answer-bounty-award-rate#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;) to find the rate at which they've been posted. Graphically, it looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvAN8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Date on the horizontal axis, accumulated number of 'reward existing answer' bounties on the vertical axis.) There is a minor bump in the rate over the past ~month or so, but it does not represent a break with the long-term trend, and it is not the largest localized burst in the rate historically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This represents, at current SEDE count, 192 out of a total of 2920 bounties (full listing &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1040604/all-bounties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, rate graph &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1040605/all-bounties-award-rate#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). (Also, for full disclosure, about a quarter of those 192 were set by me; as I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10716/8563&quot;&gt;argued previously&lt;/a&gt;, we need &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; of those bounties (and bounties overall), not less.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comment on your final set of assertions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Essentially, I am concerned that prolonged use of the bounty system in this way will overjustify the creation of &quot;exemplary&quot; answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly is promoting quality content a problem, again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and eventually degrade the quality of the site in one of two ways (or both): The answerer, in attempt to get reputation/recognition, is verbose at best &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this is a problem, &lt;strong&gt;show it&lt;/strong&gt;. Show evidence of answerers being &quot;verbose at best&quot;, to the detriment of the content, in an attempt to fish for post-answer bounty rewards. (Which, frankly, as a strategy, makes no sense at all. The answers being rewarded are not being prized for being verbose, but for being high-quality.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OR the bounty system loses its appeal as users find there is nothing to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the 192 'reward existing answer' bounties listed in the query above, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1040626/answers-posted-after-a-reward-existing-answer-bounty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a full 53 of them (i.e. 25%) attracted an additional total of 70 answers while the bounty was running&lt;/a&gt;. Given that these were questions that already had quality answers, this seems like it's still working to increase contact between answerers and interesting questions (which have a high correlation with the exemplary answers), thus producing more quality answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this is a problem, then &lt;strong&gt;show it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T00:25:02.453" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T00:25:02.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11282" CreationDate="2019-05-05T04:45:22.953" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reputation is 61. I can't upload photo in problem solving website. When will I be able to upload a photo in this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226059" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T12:36:55.103" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T12:36:55.103" Title="About stack exchange problem solving website" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11281" CreationDate="2019-05-05T05:36:23.887" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need 100 rep to upload photos. For now you can upload the photo to your favourite image hosting site, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imgur&lt;/a&gt;, and then post the link to it in the chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in a comment, the details of chat room privileges are described &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/chat-rooms&quot;&gt;in this article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T05:36:23.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-06T16:15:54.103" Score="8" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some grad colleagues in a local forum were asking about a certain system of equations of unknown origin, and I was wondering if I would be allowed to ask about it in the Physics Stack Exchange. My concern is that I'm not even sure if this system belongs in physics, and I was just hoping someone may have seen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204345" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T18:04:45.283" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T21:12:32.643" Title="Asking about the origin of an equation?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2019-05-06T18:21:03.923" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a good thing to bring up in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;physics chat room&lt;/a&gt;.  If your question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; appropriate for the main site, a conversation in the chat room would be a good way to turn it from a vague idea into a focused question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T18:21:03.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11286" CreationDate="2019-05-07T13:19:13.917" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eight months ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/422768/how-many-calories-in-a-block-of-wood&quot;&gt;I asked a question here&lt;/a&gt; that had almost immediately received a negative scoring with little to no constructive criticism on how I could improve the question.&#xA;I, however, got a useful answer, so I was satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would've been good enough for me, but now that very same question has over a thousand views, and I would like to refactor the question in such a way that it may be more useful to future visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily I'd consider deleting a question with negative value, but it appears that people are still gaining use from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can my question be improved? Move it to Chemistry/Biology Stack Exchange?&#xA;Add more details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204025" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2019-05-07T22:39:06.833" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T22:39:06.833" Title="How can I improve this question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11285" CreationDate="2019-05-07T14:33:32.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time you asked this meta question, your physics question had a negative score, but only a single vote.  A single vote (up or down) without feedback isn't really enough information to base big changes on; it's better to look for voting patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to guess, I would guess that the downvoter thought the question was &quot;homework-like,&quot; but didn't cast a close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions with lots of views but not lots of votes are probably attracting attention from web searches and views from non-SE users more than views from users from within the network.  I interpret that to mean that you've asked a question that is interesting and useful, even if it's not a good fit for our community compared to the kinds of questions that are more commonly successful here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't worry about changing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T14:33:32.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-07T20:01:27.387" Score="21" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;fourth moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/6634/tpg2114&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/6634.png&quot; alt=&quot;tpg2114&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/106502/chris&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/106502.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chris&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly&amp;mdash;please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please join me in thanking Manishearth who will be stepping down as moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opavote.com/results/6517230894317568/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9426" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T23:00:30.950" Title="2019 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2019-05-07T21:12:32.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T21:12:32.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-07T22:03:58.713" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just curious on how that community has grown over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213987" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T13:25:22.427" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T13:25:22.427" Title="Is there a place where can I read about the history and growth of physics stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|history|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11287" CreationDate="2019-05-07T23:00:30.950" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations to tpg2114 and Chris! Good to see that some people's fears of one of you not winning can be allayed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a BIG THANKS to Manish for helping moderate this site! Wish you the best going forwards!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T23:00:30.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T18:30:48.317" Score="3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question was asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/478751/how-does-resistance-affect-the-voltage-drop&quot;&gt;resistance and voltage&lt;/a&gt; today which struck me as off-topic because of no apparent research.  Also, there was no conceptual discussion which indicated a difficulty about understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; the PSE community lays out a comprehensive discussion about sufficient prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read the question, I immediately down-voted it and flagged to close, but there were two answers already posted with no down-votes (their privilege).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose my point for asking this question is to raise the issue, again, that we are getting low-quality traffic and people are obliging it by giving answers.  I am not complaining about a simple question, but about the fact that a quick web search would turn up the answer already written somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are to enforce the prior research clause, would it be appropriate, in addition to down-voting, to flag as &quot;low quality&quot; so that the moderators would have an immediate better picture of what is happening (rather than waiting for members to close).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T10:38:59.767" Title="Are we going to enforce the prior research aspect of good questions or not?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T19:21:31.770" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen some similar questions answered by a certain same person. And when I post my answer, it immediately get voted down by that person before even  enough time for them to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may be gaming the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whom should I talk to, to take a look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86051" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-05-09T10:52:55.773" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T10:52:55.773" Title="Ask to have questionable activity reviewed" Tags="|support|flagging|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11293" CreationDate="2019-05-08T21:05:40.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Raise a custom moderator flag on one of the relevant questions, explain in as much detail as you can the behaviour you've observed, and then go away and leave those threads alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want more of a back-and-forth conversation with a moderator to explain the situation and ask for guidance, then ping a moderador on chat after you've raised your flag, and ask for help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T21:05:40.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11292" CreationDate="2019-05-09T06:28:24.937" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prior research issue is always a tricky one. The problem is distinguishing between someone who simply can't be bothered and someone who is genuinely confused, perhaps because they are just starting out in physics and don't even know what to Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle this shouldn't matter because we judge the question not the person. In practice we wouldn't be answering questions here unless we were enthusiastic about physics and eager to help budding young physicists get up to speed, so most of us will cut OPs some slack if we think it is a genuine question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this question in the review queue and debated with myself whether to vote to close it. In the end I decided not to, but it was borderline and I find myself unwilling to criticise site members for voting to close or for deciding to leave the question open. I think we're pretty good at closing the more outrageous instances of insufficient effort questions so I wouldn't worry too much about the borderline cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T06:28:24.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-09T11:30:09.577" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this is the right place to ask. If not I will delete and ask somexhere else (where though?). I noticed there is a star I can click next to vote arrows close to questions title. So I thought I could bookmark them this way, but I cannot see any effect, nor can I find a list where those marked questions would appear. I am using a mobile phone, Firefox 66 on Android. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: While the duplicate question does exist, there is no valid answer there. The favorite tab is absent from my layout, as far as I can tell. Does mobile version of the site offer it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-05-09T13:30:26.600" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T13:30:26.600" Title="How do I retrieve the starred questions?" Tags="|support|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2019-05-09T12:52:57.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-09T19:27:22.387" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;My most recent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/479034/why-do-we-assume-fundamental-properties-like-charge-or-mass-do-not-consume-anyth&quot;&gt;Why do we assume fundamental properties like charge or mass do not consume anything?&lt;/a&gt; (currently deleted while I rephrase it), was put on hold given the following reason:&#xA;&quot;We deal with mainstream physics here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed. For more information, see Is non mainstream physics appropriate for this site?.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem is, I did not provide personal theories nor new ones. I am merely asking why current mainstream theories assume certain things. I flagged my own question to get a moderator assistance but I am unsure how this works. I have read the post about non mainstream physics but I do not see how my question falls in this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't even know if I can ask about it in meta but assistance redirects here. Please keep in mind this is the first time one of my questions is put on hold, so I am new to this. I have also edited the question to solve certain issues with definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I am asking two things. 1. What can I do to save my question, as it is important to me? 2. What is the workflow with questions on hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: as suggested by Chris, I deleted the question during rewriting. I might post a new one instead of undeleting, given the bad vibes there though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-05-10T04:03:32.383" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T12:27:26.103" Title="How does the reason for closing a question correspond to the actual question?" Tags="|support|scope|specific-question|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11302" CreationDate="2019-05-09T21:22:42.847" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may sound like a silly question but I believe it is not. I recently deleted a question in order to rewrite it, as there were (a lot of) concerns regarding the definitions used and more generally its tone and clarity. But the system has no way to tell if I intend to undelete at some point or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, after I deleted this question that received 4 downvotes, I was the proud receiver of the badge « peer pressure ». And maybe I am too of a free spirit to value social pressure and think of it as something desirable, but I fail to see why I would receive a badge because I deleted a question. I read more about badges and see they are intended to be sources of encouragement and recognition that I understand the rules of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would like to know if everytime I receive downvotes I am supposed to question myself only and delete my questions. In this case, I think it was more important and useful that I would obtain an explanation about the downvotes and try to fix the problem &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it appears that the system does not encourage justification of question downvotes nor discourage them by a reputation cost either. This is unlike downvoting an answer. Is there a reason for this disparity and isnt this a de facto encouragement to light heartly downvote questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this long post can be considered a result of bitterness and if I say it is not, it won't change a thing. But I must say that during my short existence here I have seen a considerable number of questions (not mine) left downvoted without a single comment caring to explain why. So how is this productive in any way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I am new to all this and I like to understand things (which is visible in the number of questions I ask, I assume).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T12:04:04.720" Title="Is the « peer pressure » badge something to be proud of?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11299" CreationDate="2019-05-09T21:51:19.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The badge is there as an award for helping keep the site quality up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion being that you've accepted the judgement of your peers that the post is of poor quality and deleted it. That is why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;it is listed&lt;/a&gt; among the &quot;Moderation&quot; badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T21:51:19.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11292" CreationDate="2019-05-10T05:56:40.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I missed something, but I don't feel comfortable about the word &quot;enforce&quot; in the title of the question. One can enforce some law, but I am not sure answers to a Meta question have the status of a law, they may be suggestions, &quot;nice to haves&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the rules (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&lt;/a&gt;), and I did not find anything cut-and-dried about &quot;prior research&quot;. The  section on &quot;research&quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt; is categorized as &quot;tips&quot;. Again, I may have missed something. So I would think if one feels a question lacks &quot;prior research&quot;, one could downvote it or vote to close (although I don't see &quot;lack of prior research&quot; among the available reasons for closure), but this does not look like &quot;enforcement&quot;, it's more like expression of a personal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I don't feel we have a &lt;strong&gt;duty&lt;/strong&gt; to &quot;enforce&quot; prior research, although prior research may be nice to have. Should we really demand perfection, especially from new users of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T05:56:40.170" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11299" CreationDate="2019-05-10T12:04:04.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I would like to know if everytime I receive downvotes I am supposed to question myself only and delete my questions. In this case, I think it was more important and useful that I would obtain an explanation about the downvotes and try to fix the problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alt-text over the downvote button reads &lt;em&gt;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/em&gt; (I think most people also add &quot;is off topic&quot; to that list of downvote reasons, though it could be part of 'not useful&quot;). When you receive downvotes, I think it would be wise for you to question yourself as to whether the post is of low quality /, as indicated by the alt-text, and try amending it. But, ultimately, whether or not you delete the post is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However it appears that the system does not encourage justification of question downvotes nor discourage them by a reputation cost either. This is unlike downvoting an answer. Is there a reason for this disparity and isnt this a de facto encouragement to light heartly downvote questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This disparity is covered in depth here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&lt;/a&gt; and probably in several posts in Meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I must say that during my short existence here I have seen a considerable number of questions (not mine) left downvoted without a single comment caring to explain why. So how is this productive in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not required to leave comments (also discussed at length of Meta.SE), so it's not a surprise that you're finding it happen. Is it constructive? Maybe not, but I think most people would very much prefer the anonymity in voting (due to &quot;revenge&quot; votes?) than not having it at all. That is to say, the want for anonymous voting is greater than the want for explanations of downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, it's probably safe to assume that your question, if downvoted enough, is low quality in some manner (is homework, asking for non-mainstream physics, not researched enough, etc)--a single downvote probably doesn't indicate much, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T12:04:04.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11297" CreationDate="2019-05-10T12:27:26.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What can I do to save my question, as it is important to me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is still there - even if it gets deleted, it's soft-deleted, which means the content is still accessible to you and other users of the site with appropriate permissions. So there isn't really anything you need to do to save it, other than making sure you have a link to it, which you do because of this meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What is the workflow with questions on hold?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can go one of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the question to fix the issues that led it to be put on hold, and then the hold can get removed. Whenever a question is edited within a few days of when it first gets posted, it goes into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt; where established site members get to vote on whether the hold should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it's fine and even encouraged to ask for help editing in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, or here on meta (though don't overuse that).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or if you don't do anything, the question will likely be deleted automatically after some time. There are some questions which are simply not on topic here, and no amount of editing will fix them without changing them into entirely different questions; in that case, it's usually best to let the question go and make a new post if you do want to ask that entirely different question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T12:27:26.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11292" CreationDate="2019-05-10T14:06:16.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; get enforced. This is a community site-scope policy, documented in this meta's FAQ at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt;, and it gets used all the time to close questions. For a sampling of questions that get closed with comments mentioning that policy, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1045881/comments-mentioning-prior-research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by John and on several places in the discussion at the FAQ post, the question of whether a given question has sufficient prior research or not is ultimately a subjective judgement call, and it is perfectly OK for different users to disagree on whether a specific question meets the bar or whether it should be closed under that policy. This is why these closures are not done by unilateral action, but through a five-vote consensus, so that this variation gets averaged out as far as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T14:06:16.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-10T16:42:23.393" Score="17" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Frequently Asked Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread is an index of Frequently Asked Questions, and other resources, for Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General questions about Stack Exchange&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For general questions about the use and customs of the Stack Exchange platform in general, see the overall FAQ,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FAQ for Stack Exchange sites&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this site's Help Center&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/40353/stack-exchange-glossary-dictionary-of-commonly-used-terms&quot;&gt;This glossary&lt;/a&gt; may also be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Frequently Asked Questions about Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Site scope&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391/my-question-was-closed-on-phys-se-can-you-recommend-me-another-internet-site-wh&quot;&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4490/how-should-we-handle-how-to-find-a-specific-reference-requests&quot;&gt;How should we handle how-to-find-a-specific-reference requests?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;Should any check-my-work questions be made on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1083/are-physics-related-notation-and-terminology-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are physics-related notation and terminology questions on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Moderation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2920/community-help-us-moderate-the-site&quot;&gt;Community, help us moderate the site!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4113/how-do-i-dispute-a-moderators-action&quot;&gt;How do I dispute a moderator&amp;#39;s action?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;General FAQ&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;How do we write good question titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13/can-i-ask-several-related-questions-in-a-single-thread&quot;&gt;Can I ask several related questions in a single thread?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4189/how-can-i-cite-a-question-in-se&quot;&gt;How can I cite a question in SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6795/should-abbreviations-and-acronyms-be-discouraged&quot;&gt;Should abbreviations and acronyms be discouraged?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/582/how-do-you-cite-yourself&quot;&gt;How do you cite yourself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/804/is-there-a-standard-place-to-point-people-to-learn-how-to-typeset-their-equation&quot;&gt;Is there a standard place to point people to learn how to typeset their equations?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11400/why-should-we-link-to-abstract-pages-rather-than-pdf-files-how-do-we-cite-arxiv&quot;&gt;What is the policy for linking? E.g.: Why should we link to abstract pages rather than pdf files? How do we cite arXiv preprints?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ $&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How can a question be added to this FAQ?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask only the question, stated plainly and simply, in the question body.&#xA;The answer goes in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link back&lt;/strong&gt; to this index. Paste this at the end of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; [Return to FAQ index](/q/11305)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tag as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq-proposed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq-proposed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq-proposed&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/support&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;support&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;support&lt;/a&gt;.  When a post seems to have hit a mature state, it will have &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; added by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After the post has the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; tag added to it, add a link in the above &lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;table of contents&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-10-02T20:59:19.543" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T20:59:19.543" Title="FAQ for Physics Stack Exchange" Tags="|support|faq|policy|site-faq|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-05-10T16:43:29.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11292" CreationDate="2019-05-11T10:38:59.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think insufficient prior research makes a question low quality (in the sense of the VLQ flag). If there's something more going on, like a pattern of a single user posting many questions without prior research, then a custom moderator flag might be in order, but in general for individual unresearched questions I think it should be sufficient to downvote and/or vote to close using a custom reason (or one of the standard reasons, if it applies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T10:38:59.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11308" CreationDate="2019-05-11T20:53:01.990" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;When there are too many comments in a question, I am offered to move things to chat. That makes perfect sense, or at least I guess it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, after I accepted the automatic suggestion to create a chat based on the comments, I have recently been accused of making people wait for too long (ten minutes) after I launched the chat. I did not expect that, as I thought the chat was just an extension of the comments (the latter being spaced in time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if I think about it, in a typical chat room (for example IRC), I am not supposed to invite people and then make them wait, so I understand the misunderstanding and the frustration I may have caused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, I cannot be available during the entire lifetime of the new chat if it is to prolong a long discussion. So here is my question: what is it expected from users once they moved a conversation to chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T22:02:02.433" Title="What are the rules of chat when it is used to extend a discussion initiated with comments?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11307" CreationDate="2019-05-11T22:02:02.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat is precisely as asynchronous as comments: Other users may personally &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; you to reply in a certain amount of time in comments as well as in chat, but there is no general rule that you &quot;should&quot; reply within a certain time frame (nor that you must reply at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common sense would suggest that you should not initiate the move of a discussion to chat and then immediately leave, but otherwise it's really up to a participants of each conversation to work out what works for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T22:02:02.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-11T23:46:52.143" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is obsolete, as explained.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After asking about why it was not encouraged to ask downvoters to give a reason, I received a number of firm answers that contain a lot of good reasons (and some less good but that's not the point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, only a few days or even hours after I was told there is no way downvoters would be asked such a thing, I downvoted a question and a notification appeared on top of my page reading: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider adding a comment if you think this post can be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand my surprise. Have the rules of downvoting just changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorDisplayName="user191954" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T15:19:45.750" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T15:19:45.750" Title="Why am I shown a banner which suggests I add a comment whenever I downvote?" Tags="|support|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11309" CreationDate="2019-05-12T00:13:34.847" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That notification has been there for many years at least. Note that it is a request, not a demand. If you want to downvote without leaving a comment, that's your prerogative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one's saying that explaining your downvotes is a bad thing. Just that it shouldn't be a mandatory thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T00:13:34.847" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-13T21:17:29.503" Score="5" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a couple of recent situations I have found myself at odds with the duplicate question policy of the site. The most recent case was this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/479846/proof-of-ohms-law?noredirect=1#comment1077676_479846&quot;&gt;Proof of Ohm's Law [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt; that was marked as a duplicate of two other questions which not only were asking different things but also none of the answers really addressed the OP's question. I actually found a good answer for the question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.09036.pdf#cite.Emch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this arXiv article&lt;/a&gt; but I could not answer because the question was already marked as duplicate (I would need to read the article very carefully because I find it a bit complicated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to note with this is that the duplicate policy (as it is now) has several flaws that reduce the effectivity of the site as a place to share knowledge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions that ask different things are marked as duplicates if the prior question has an answer that may vaguely be related to the latter question. This is clearly a problem because when one answers a question, if you do it right, you have to take care to address the specifics of the question. Redirecting a question to one that is only somewhat related will very likely undermine the nuances of it, and it may not even be a proper answer for the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics evolves and hundreds of articles are published every day. For example if I ask about cosmic censorship in an unspecific way, the question would be immediately marked as duplicate. No one would be able to mention the existence of the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$C^{0}$&lt;/span&gt; stability idea, which is a rather new topic. The result is that even if there is new physics and new ideas, these cannot be shared as effectively because something related has been asked before.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no specific set of guidelines that render a question a duplicate. This makes the decision of marking a question as duplicate a personal decision of the mod, if you are unlucky enough to find an intransigent mod (which are a thing in PSE) before you get a good answer then you will never get an answer. The question boils down to: &lt;strong&gt;What constitutes a duplicate question?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Is it an exact &amp;amp; paste? Is it asking the same thing but with other words? Is it asking for something previously answered but with a different focus? Is it asking for something already answered but in more detail? Is it asking for something that has not been asked before but someone already answered in another question? Is it asking for something related to an answer to an existing question?&lt;/em&gt; ─The problem is that for me only the first two would be duplicates whereas for some users, all of these consititute duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no formal mechanism to appeal to a duplicate question. You can flag, delete, edit and report questions with a single button, but there is no real way to appeal if your question (or one you like) gets marked as duplicate, unless you are a mod or have the gold badge, which most users are not and do not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the solution could be to make a more formal process of appeal (resembling the review queues) where the user is allowed to make a case for his question if he wants. And should the appeal be rejected, a good reason should be given (at least a better reason than &quot;it's duplicate because I say so&quot; which is what is basically implied when the only comment is &quot;possible duplicate URL&quot;, and any debate is dismissed or ignored).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user137661" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T21:32:56.260" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T07:19:58.277" Title="Is the duplicate policy hindering the site?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-14T01:14:52.687" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, it is frowned upon on StackExchange to ask for recommendations, unless the site is specifically for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on Physics, is it ok to ask for recommendations (e.g. for books that cover topics discussed on the site or where one might purchase parts to build devices like a Van de Graff generator and such)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86442" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T01:14:52.687" Title="Is it ok to ask for recommendations?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-05-14T06:30:21.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11312" CreationDate="2019-05-16T07:19:58.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For clarity, let me respond point by point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Some questions that ask different things are marked as duplicates if the prior question has an answer that may vaguely be related to the latter question. This is clearly a problem because when one answers a question, if you do it right, you have to take care to address the specifics of the question. Redirecting a question to one that is only somewhat related will very likely undermine the nuances of it, and it may not even be a proper answer for the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our duplicate policy is that questions which are asking the same thing should be marked as duplicates of each other. Questions which are asking different things should not be. If people are marking questions as duplicates in a way that contravenes the policy, I'd agree that is something that should be improved, but it's not a strike against the policy itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Physics evolves and hundreds of articles are published every day. For example if I ask about cosmic censorship in an unspecific way, the question would be immediately marked as duplicate. No one would be able to mention the existence of the C0 stability idea, which is a rather new topic. The result is that even if there is new physics and new ideas, these cannot be shared as effectively because something related has been asked before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, questions should be marked as duplicates if they are asking the same thing, and not otherwise. I don't see how the fact that hundreds of articles are published every day has anything to do with that, and I don't understand the reasoning by which to conclude that the duplicate policy prevents people from asking about C0 stability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you edit the question to clarify, maybe I can give more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is no specific set of guidelines that render a question a duplicate. This makes the decision of marking a question as duplicate a personal decision of the mod, if you are unlucky enough to find an intransigent mod (which are a thing in PSE) before you get a good answer then you will never get an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, again, the &quot;specific&quot; guideline is that questions which are asking the same thing should be marked as duplicates, and those which aren't asking the same thing should not be. You may want something more specific, but there are many cases (including, I would argue, this one) where we've found it harmful to try to make the guidelines too specific, because we can't anticipate all the actual situations that arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question boils down to: What constitutes a duplicate question? Is it an exact &amp;amp; paste? Is it asking the same thing but with other words? Is it asking for something previously answered but with a different focus? Is it asking for something already answered but in more detail? Is it asking for something that has not been asked before but someone already answered in another question? Is it asking for something related to an answer to an existing question? ─The problem is that for me only the first two would be duplicates whereas for some users, all of these consititute duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe your instinct is correct, that only the first two of these are necessarily duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is no formal mechanism to appeal to a duplicate question. You can flag, delete, edit and report questions with a single button, but there is no real way to appeal if your question (or one you like) gets marked as duplicate, unless you are a mod or have the gold badge, which most users are not and do not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by some people &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11312/is-the-duplicate-policy-hindering-the-site#comment44874_11312&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt;, that's simply not true. To quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are mistaken, there is an easy and &quot;formal&quot; way to appeal a duplicate closure (like any other closure): Edit the question, and explain how it is different from the duplicates. The first edit after closure automatically places the question in the reopen review queue. A single reopen vote (from any user with more than 3k reputation) will also place it there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T07:19:58.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T04:37:44.300" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480642/i-was-wondering-if-the-mass-of-an-object-can-be-measured-by-the-effect-it-has-on&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was considered a duplicate because of a previous question titled &quot;Height of Water 'Splashing'&quot;. However, the previous question only considers the height of the splash, whereas answers to the later question may consider a lot of different effects on the body of water, such as height of the produced waves at a large distance from the point of impact, sounds generated in water, and so on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T04:37:44.300" Title="Is this really a duplicate (object dropped in liquid)?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-19T19:37:52.220" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/16759/81224&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is currently closed for being a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/33215/81224&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. The closed question asks about recommendations about video lectures for quantum lectures while the second question asks about books. The answers to the second question do not contain information about video lectures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this question closed? The two questions are certainly not duplicates of each other. The first question does not have a sufficient number of answers as well. Answers which solely mention video lectures would not be correct for the second question as well since the question asks only about books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81224" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T02:50:29.240" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T06:09:23.630" Title="Why is this question asking about lectures closed as a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11319" CreationDate="2019-05-19T20:28:28.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Resource-recommendation questions are considered on-topic here &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; subject to some tight restrictions. Basically, there is a segment of the community that feels (based on extensive experience coming from the early days of Stack Overflow) that open-ended list-based questions are a bad fit for the site, and that they should not be allowed at all. Back in 2013 a compromise was arrived at which is encased in the FAQ thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;, and which basically allows resource-recommendation questions but subject to a number of restrictions to keep them in a useful form instead of spiraling out of control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of this restrictions is that an endless series of &quot;same as that one over there, but with X minor modification&quot; are not considered constructive or on-topic. This is why the thread you've linked to was closed - a fact that was explained in the comments by the moderator who closed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T20:28:28.133" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-21T01:15:04.047" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently use both physics.SE and math.SE, and one difference I noticed was the new activity counters and notifications on PSE, which were absent in its math counterpart. Now, in my experience so far, these labels and notifications, albeit not intrusive, make it harder to concentrate while browsing the new/unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder, what, if any, use do these little notifiers have? If not, should they stay or be removed? Any ideas or thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Added the relevant images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some clarification: These indicators are minuscule, one counter, read, &quot;(#) Physics Stack Exchange&quot; on title bar to indicate how many questions had new activity since the last refresh, and one bar in top of main page questions popping up whenever a new activity happens. The latter one is rather annoying since it moves the screen a bit down. The former, on the other hand, is a feature I rather not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z3Bgt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;title of phys.se&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h4tGA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;title of math.se&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2oO2I.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is the bar&lt;/a&gt; that appears whenever a new activity happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202336" LastEditorUserId="202336" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T05:50:39.847" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T05:50:39.847" Title="Is the new activity indicators in PSE main page really useful/necessary?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11319" CreationDate="2019-05-21T06:09:23.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short, the reason is that resource recommendation questions aren't allowed to only ask about books. If you look in the body of the second question, it actually asks for &quot;introductory guides&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the title does say &quot;books&quot;, and we should probably change that, but it should be understood as asking for any educational resource that presents the specified topic at the given level. So videos are perfectly good answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T06:09:23.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11324" CreationDate="2019-05-22T20:07:27.750" Score="4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/481557/do-photons-bend-spacetime-or-not/481570#481570&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, 5 comments on knzhou’s answer were moved to chat, but 5 questions on Ben Crowell’s answer were not moved. Neither were 9 comments on the question. (On my answer, 11 were moved, which I am not questioning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do moderators decide what counts as an “extended discussion”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T21:15:32.937" Title="Inconsistency in moving comments to chat" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11323" CreationDate="2019-05-22T21:15:32.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, if I have to scroll through a full screen of comments to see the next answer, I move them to chat, especially if the comments are getting chatty. In this case, the 9 comments on knzhou's answer were quite a bit longer than the 5 on Ben's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I have to see them first. If you feel a comment thread is too long or irrelevant to the post, you are free to flag it with a &quot;no longer needed&quot; flag to summon a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T21:15:32.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2019-05-24T14:59:14.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This initiative appears to have petered out, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/481557/do-photons-bend-spacetime-or-not&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent example of a bad HNQ question, for a wide variety of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was characterized, in answers, comments, and chat, as a &amp;quot;John Rennie vs. safesphere&amp;quot; wrestling match, or even a battle of relativity vs. crackpots, when it was really about a much more boring technical point where both users were technically right. For example, we have this appealing exchange in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dont get the answer yes or no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are currently 36 votes for Yes, 0 votes for No (because there was no answer daring to argue that point of view, other than an answer, not by safesphere, that got deleted after receiving -11 votes), and 0 votes for “what does ‘bend spacetime’ even mean?”. Yes has won.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to imply that basic facts of general relativity need defending, even though neither JR nor safesphere said anything in contradiction with them, and that the &amp;quot;winner&amp;quot; is decided by random coders that come over from StackOverflow and can't even write a complete sentence. This does not give a good impression to practicing physicists; it tells them that posting here is a waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more unappealing is that, in the process, many non-mainstream commentators &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; come out of the woodwork, filling the comments with nonsense. About half were regulars here, and half were random coders. At the same time, I got a pile of downvotes, presumably from users who thought that I was siding &amp;quot;against&amp;quot; John Rennie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of the discussion is just quite low, and brought lower by the HNQ list, and a good indicator of why we have so many fewer practicing physicists than MathOverflow has practicing mathematicians. It shouldn't deserve so much attention, but instead it's on track to being the most viewed question this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T15:04:21.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-26T16:58:34.287" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess mostly because of how relativity is taught in schools, with a strong focus on exercises in special relativity where gravity is totally ignored and then maybe a little bit of info on general relativity, there are in my opinion a lot of questions on this site that is a bit strange in the fact that they ignore gravity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kind of wonder if it had been more pedagogic to start off with the effects in a spherical symmetric gravitational field and then treat the case of no gravity as some kind of special case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions on time dilation from an SR perspective on this site. Usually, in a real life scenario, where you are close to the Earth and can ignore other celestial bodys or when you are in the solar system and can ignore other bodies then the sun, you can treat &quot;the twins&quot; or whoever is experiencing time dilation as two test-bodies in the Schwarzschild solution. I wonder if it would be beneficial to the understanding of the laymen, to take this approach more often in different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/480739/226214&quot;&gt;this answer here&lt;/a&gt; on time experienced by the Voyager space craft I did just that but there are many questions of the same kind that has a strange answer in SR but a less contradictable solution in GR. For instance there are questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/149213/confusion-about-length-contraction-ex-in-muon-decay?&quot;&gt;muon decay&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Should there be some kind of effort to push answers to questions where the person who asks seems to have a clear SR perspective on time dilation (or maybe sometimes length contraction) where gravity is ignored into a GR explanation at least to the level of most simple spherically symmetric case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226214" LastEditorUserId="226214" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T14:06:43.687" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T14:06:43.687" Title="Referring people with SR-questions to test-bodies in the Schwarzschild solution?" Tags="|discussion|answers|best-practices|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-05-29T00:39:48.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T22:07:32.187" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my surprise, I tried to add a couple of tags to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/483200/is-the-weight-of-a-bicycle-frame-significant-compared-to-the-body-weight&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but the edit was automatically rejected with an error message about how the changes must be at least 6 characters long, pointing to the body of the question. Is this a thing now or did I do womething wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I tried to add a screenshot in the present question and guess what? It was rejected with the message &quot;body is missing&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150182" LastEditorUserId="150182" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T22:55:50.147" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T22:55:50.147" Title="Automatic rejection of edit where I only added tags" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11329" CreationDate="2019-05-31T16:14:42.560" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;On May 29, I answered the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/471808/biggest-string-theory-competitors&quot;&gt;Biggest string theory competitors&lt;/a&gt;, which had been posted April 10 on Physics Stack Exchange, that was put on hold later on May 29 because it was felt that &quot;answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that answers receiving no up- or down-votes, or any acceptance by the questioner, might generally indicate a possible deficiency in their formulation, so I'm wondering whether I should delete my answer, which had a score of zero, and no acceptance by the questioner at the time when his question was put on hold.  (My answer, which was the only one visible at the time the hold was established, definitely reflected no opinion:  It simply referred the questioner to a book, by the noted physicist Martin Bojowald, whose comparisons between string theory and alternatives to it seem extraordinarily even-handed and fair-minded, although I understand that his own theory of loop quantum gravity might be considered [by sports fans, for instance] to be a &quot;rival&quot; to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reputation does not yet allow me to see whatever up- or down-votes might've cancelled each other to result in the zero scores of the Q &amp;amp; A.  As that reputation is my only concern, should I withdraw my answer?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T18:50:34.283" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T18:50:34.283" Title="How do answers with a score of zero affect the reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11328" CreationDate="2019-05-31T16:37:28.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exact algorithm that Stack Exchange uses to identify problematic users has never been revealed but I doubt having a zero voted answer matters (your answer has no upvotes nor downvotes). By contrast it is widely accepted that having deleted answers does count against you. So in your place I would leave my answer in place and not delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T16:37:28.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-04T12:19:31.970" Score="8" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did this question but they say it's too broad, I modified but I think they consider it still to broad. I don't understand why, can you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/483886/&quot;&gt;What is the approach to the mathematical modeling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206319" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T18:26:08.077" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T18:26:08.077" Title="Can you help me to make question 483886 more specific?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11333" CreationDate="2019-06-06T19:22:51.670" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it seems like the general consensus of a &quot;good&quot; question is one that includes adequate research/reasoning to provide context for/justify the question being asked, and if applicable cites sources for research and further reading, outlined on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, there &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/305630/&quot;&gt;are&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/473566/&quot;&gt;multiple&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/469308/&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; where its greatness or meagerness appears to boil down to nothing more than a mere agreement or disagreement by users. These questions show &lt;em&gt;absolutely no attempt&lt;/em&gt; at research and differ primarily in how they appear to the layperson. One question is not even more applicable than another (at least, not necessarily).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we as a community looking for in &quot;good&quot; questions? Will we be/are we enforcing these guidelines past a democratic appeal to the false equivalence of popularity to &quot;goodness&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user195162" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T00:10:05.840" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T08:39:59.597" Title="What, really, is a good question?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11331" CreationDate="2019-06-06T20:26:06.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What ends up being a good question will inherently be subjective.  Good for one person is not good for another.  We can point to some objective factors which can help to indicate the quality of a question; but at the end of the day the users here are individuals with their own opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the three example questions you provided, I can point to several factors that I would assume lead to the main differences in how they are received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/473566/how-does-light-choose-between-wave-and-particle-behaviour&quot;&gt;How does light 'choose' between wave and particle behaviour?&lt;/a&gt; is a conceptual question; and a quite a significant one in terms of modern physics.  There also does not seem to be asked elsewhere on the site, so it is a great resource for us to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/469308/how-do-you-know-when-two-objects-are-entangled&quot;&gt;How do you know when two objects are entangled?&lt;/a&gt; is also a conceptual question.  Similar to the previous question, it is a really good conceptual question that has importance to modern physics.  It's well received, because although the question is fairly straightforward, it does have notable significance in physics.  I will say that it does actually appear to be a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/367710/how-can-we-know-if-a-pair-of-particles-are-entangled?rq=1&quot;&gt;How can we know if a pair of particles are entangled?&lt;/a&gt;, so for that reason, I've voted to close it as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/305630/momentum-space-representation-of-the-hydrogen-atom-schroedinger-equation&quot;&gt;Momentum space representation of the hydrogen atom Schroedinger equation&lt;/a&gt; is looking for a method to derive an equation.  Such a question is generally far less appealing to the broad audience when compared to conceptual questions that are physically significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think at the end of the day though, a lot of it comes down to how &quot;accessible&quot; or &quot;digestible&quot; the question is.  I would say a lot more people are willing to think about and read answers relating to the conceptual framework of physics than they are willing to read about the method for deriving a specific equation.  You don't need a mathematical understanding to at least &lt;em&gt;get the impression&lt;/em&gt; that you've learned something, compared to mathematical derivations, which don't serve much purpose if you aren't doing the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accessible questions (like &quot;How does light 'choose' between wave and particle behaviour?&quot;) also get a secondary benefit.  If enough people find the question interesting on Physics SE and vote it up, it will become a Hot Network Question, and get exposure to a far broader audience, which almost always leads to more upvotes, and thus more exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, because we deal with people here, questions that ask something people find interesting are more likely to be well received than questions that people don't care about the answers to.  That is the driving factor here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T20:26:06.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11331" CreationDate="2019-06-08T08:39:59.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably impossible to fully enumerate the characteristics of good questions. For the most part, we rely on people's judgment to determine which questions are good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I think there are some heuristics. In my mind, they mostly depend on the idea of a &quot;hypothetical student&quot; who has studied physics up to the topic and level of the question. For example, given a question about general relativity, the hypothetical student is someone who would already be very familiar with Newtonian and Hamiltonian mechanics, electromagnetism, and at least some quantum mechanics, as well as prerequisite math topics like differential equations and linear algebra - perhaps an upper-level undergraduate or beginning grad student. On the other hand, for a simple question about heat transfer involving common objects, the hypothetical student could be a motivated layperson with some mathematical aptitude and the ability to search the web and identify useful sources. (Granted, this is not the most precisely defined concept, but it's a work in progress.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect the asker of a question to have or find resources and education roughly equivalent to what this &quot;hypothetical student&quot; would have access to, and to use those resources and education to make an honest attempt to figure out the answer to the question themselves. As long as I'm satisfied that the asker didn't miss &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;anything that the hypothetical student would have tried&lt;/a&gt;, then I'll probably consider it at least a decent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not saying the question body necessarily has to include the research/effort that was done. It's possible for a question to be good without describing what the asker checked beforehand. But if I, say, copy and paste the title into Google, I'd better not find that the top result is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, if it looks like the goal of a question is to gain an unfair advantage in any way (e.g. cheating on a homework assignment or exam where outside assistance is not allowed), then I'll definitely consider it a bad question. Same goes for cases where the question appears to come from an educational setting but the asker isn't interesting in actually learning whatever it is they're supposed to be learning. (That being the idea behind &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;our homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if a question is something that the &quot;hypothetical student&quot; would consider particularly insightful, i.e. something that students at that level typically wouldn't think to ask, then it's more likely to be a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T08:39:59.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-09T12:52:36.750" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm starting to study a new topic (spinors) and I don't know where I can study it, is it possible to ask for studying material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206319" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-06-09T13:06:59.777" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T13:06:59.777" Title="Can we ask about book for studying?" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-06-09T14:06:14.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11337" CreationDate="2019-06-14T21:44:19.747" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it has been in place for more than a year, the only question ban I've encountered on any Stack Exchange site was a temporary one that would have supposedly allowed me to ask one more question on the Physics Stack Exchange after it would've been in place for only six months, with subsequent questions allowed if that question would appear satisfactory to the staff. The ban, never removed, resulted in my posting a question, today, on the Astronomy Stack Exchange instead.  As there would appear to have been some oversight, I'm wondering whether I'd have the option of transferring the question to the PSE site.  (I'd like to get the answer from Meta before any transfer or duplication of the question, but, if either the transfer of the question between sites or its duplication on the PSE site might be arranged, I'd like to know.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T09:43:39.987" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T10:22:13.450" Title="What's required for the lifting of a temporary question ban?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11336" CreationDate="2019-06-14T22:11:00.337" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/465424/106502&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on March 9 (i.e. 3 months ago). According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/380389&quot;&gt;the faq&lt;/a&gt; on the mother meta, you have to wait a full 6 months before asking another question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're unable to improve your existing questions, you'll get the chance to ask &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; new one 6 months after your last question. If that question is positively received, you may be able to continue asking questions; if not, then the ban will be reinstated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you had one chance in March and your question was not well-received so the ban was reinstated. You will have another chance in September.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T22:11:00.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T06:47:46.287" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve noticed that obscene, offensive posts get deleted fairly quickly, perhaps automatically based on the large negative downvote they get. But I have not noticed offenders quickly being given penalty time. Does this happen more slowly via moderators? Is there a mechanism for moderators to be aware of what the member did if the post did not get flagged before being deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T13:28:12.533" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T23:08:02.703" Title="Penalty time for obscene posts?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11339" CreationDate="2019-06-18T10:51:53.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics SE does not have an automated system for removing offensive posts. Posts with 3 delete votes from high rep users or 6 spam or rude or abusive flags are deleted automatically. As far as the Stack Exchange software is concerned, no new post is ever deleted without human intervention, though old, abandoned posts are sometimes deleted automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is at least one &lt;a href=&quot;https://metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/sites/dash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;site_id=58&amp;amp;months=3&amp;amp;tab=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third-party automated system&lt;/a&gt; I am aware of that scans posts, notifies users of potentially bad posts, and occasionally flags some of the more egregious ones on the behalf of users who have opted in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are automatic methods to ban users from asking questions or posting answers, but these are both not visible to other users. Users can also be given a warning instead of a suspension. Only full suspensions (i.e. penalty time) can be seen by other users, and those can only be issued manually by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T23:08:02.703" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T23:08:02.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11343" CreationDate="2019-06-18T20:43:20.910" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know as a general rule it's good to keep questions simple if possible. I also think they can differ from case to case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please suggest whether to split &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/486792/concave-magnifier-lens&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; into two? Or leave it together as question 1 may help provide context to question 2?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211783" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T21:24:49.740" Title="Two questions in one" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T21:04:29.127" Score="-1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read the help page various times to get help with asking questions. While that helped, I still sometimes find my questions downvoted or voted to close. That is without explanation. That leaves me guessing and editing without knowing what exactly needs to be edited. Maybe I am not the only one. &#xA;Would it be a good idea to make it mandatory for people who vote to close to also leave a comment explaining the OP what the problem with the question might be?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you vote to close a question, I am hoping you have read the question thoroughly and have given it (and the decision to close) some thought. What's a few more seconds to write a few words explaining your stance and maybe, hopefully be so kind and considerate as to also give the OP a suggestion on how to improve the post? This practice would have a nice side effect where the people voting to close are in a way forced to give their decision some thought and avoid making it a routine (that is prone to come with mistakes).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10953/physics-question-wrongly-put-on-hold-as-engineering&quot;&gt;This old question&lt;/a&gt; is one example where I think the closure was a mistake (the kind pointed above) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11341/two-questions-in-one&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; is now on hold for something very similar. Maybe I am wrong, but communication (real comments as opposed to &quot;drop down menu&quot; reasons) would help.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to open a &quot;meta&quot; question on each of the above questions because of lack of communication in the original question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe before voting to close, consider explaining which part/aspect of the question is a problem. Maybe offer help with rewording, splitting, or even migrating if you have the knownedge and/or the power to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211783" LastEditorUserId="211783" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T07:16:47.040" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T23:30:27.350" Title="Should it be mandatory that close votes be accompanied by comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|down-votes|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11341" CreationDate="2019-06-18T21:24:49.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the general question here -- it is, sometimes, okay to ask a couple questions at once if those questions are so tightly related that they can't really be separated. Your question is actually a decent example of that, because although you have written it as two questions, it's basically just one -- &quot;Does the surface of a lens need to be a perfect sphere segment to operate as a concave lens&quot; or something to that effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the other details and questions are kind of ancillary to that. Once you understand what the shape needs to be for a lens to work as expected, you can answer for yourself whether the lens you proposed would work. Or, at the very least, you could ask a follow on question about what shape (or how to derive/determine the shape) a surface takes under suction or something to that effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your comments, you are concerned because your question has (at this time) 3 close votes. Two of those votes are because the question appears to be about engineering. One is because somebody thought it was unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes 5 votes to close something, and so until then it may not be something to worry about. You got some answers, it wasn't downvoted, so it could just be that a few people have an opinion but not enough to close it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can see why some feel it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site/4536#4536&quot;&gt;meets our definition of an engineering question&lt;/a&gt;. Particularly because you want to know if the approach you've chosen (vacuum pressure on plastic sheets) would work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can easily be modified so it is less about how you create the shape and more about A) what shapes are required, and B) a second question eventually about how to derive/determine/&lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; the shape of an elastic surface under pressure forces. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without knowing the final form of what B) might look like, I can't definitively say what would or wouldn't be on topic. But trying to determine the leading-order terms to balance external forces and internal stresses in a material could be on-topic if it is written correctly and doesn't run afoul of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;policy on homework and exercise type questions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T21:24:49.740" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11342" CreationDate="2019-06-18T22:31:21.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It actually is mandatory to leave a comment (or something equivalent) when voting to close. The two steps of the close vote flow look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First step:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPsEm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPsEm.png&quot; alt=&quot;a list of possible reasons one can close a question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you click &quot;off-topic because...&quot; you get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CTnDR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CTnDR.png&quot; alt=&quot;a list of possible reasons one can close a question as off topic, with a general option that says &amp;quot;Other (leave a comment explaining what is wrong)&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that each option you can choose when voting to close either comes with a stock message, which will be displayed prominently under the question if it's chosen by a plurality of close voters (or a moderator); or, if you don't pick one of the standard reasons, it asks you to leave a comment describing what's wrong, which is then posted as a comment under the question. You can't submit a close vote without leaving some kind of message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it's another thing to require that people leave &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; comments, but that's not a problem that can be solved by technical means. The moderators can look into cases where someone casts a close vote and leaves a comment that doesn't explain a legitimate reason for doing so. (Note that it doesn't require a whole lot of explanation; for example, &quot;I'm voting to put this question on hold because it's not about physics&quot; is a common one, and a perfectly valid reason to vote to close, assuming that is actually the case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T22:31:21.697" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11347" CreationDate="2019-06-20T10:40:38.220" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been on physics stack exchange for about four years. Some of my answers I am proud of some of them not so much. There is one particular answer where I did my best at the time but I lacked the knowledge to understand what OP was asking. Some people however liked the answer and nobody else replied. I'd like to write a new answer. Should I delete the old one? Should I edit it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future I definitely shouldn't answer something I don't understand. I remember wanting to ask in a comment but not having enough rep at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/328108/74376&quot;&gt;If you are curious here is the old answer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74376" LastEditorUserId="74376" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T10:49:08.887" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T11:02:57.573" Title="Ashamed of my own answer. Should I delete it?" Tags="|support|answers|late-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11346" CreationDate="2019-06-20T11:02:57.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to write an &lt;em&gt;entirely new answer&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the new answer has little to nothing in common with the old, then you should post it as a new answer, not as an edit of your old answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your old answer is not accepted, you are free to delete it at any time. However, given that it has a net positive score, apparently some people found it useful regardless of what you think of the answer today. If the answer is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; you should definitely delete - or even better, correct - it, but otherwise there doesn't really seem to be a pressing need to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T11:02:57.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11342" CreationDate="2019-06-22T23:30:27.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually believe that forcing people to identify themselves when voting would simply lead to discord and acrimony.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On balance the current system works quite well, and this particular community does not hesitate to reverse all kinds of closure/downvotes etc when a coherent argument that said closure etc was an overreaction.  Some are thin-skinned users but &lt;em&gt;c’est la vie&lt;/em&gt;: this is definitely NOT broken and definitely NOT in need of a change.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T23:30:27.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-23T07:02:38.703" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't elaborate but what does this these words &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/230533/unique&quot;&gt;people reached&lt;/a&gt; mean? For example:- 15k people reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230533" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T13:37:38.053" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T13:37:38.053" Title="What does &quot;people reached&quot; mean?" Tags="|support|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-23T08:11:34.817" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand why should I be barred from asking questions despite having asked some question with very good reputations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149973" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T08:36:48.343" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T08:36:48.343" Title="Why am I not allowed to ask a question?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-06-23T15:26:30.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11349" CreationDate="2019-06-23T10:01:48.160" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The people reached, or impact score, is a metric loosely based on how many people have seen your posts (both questions and answers). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/were-working-on-a-new-stat-to-help-convey-the-reach-of-your-posts-here&quot;&gt;formulation is based on&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's how we got to the current method, which counts views on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-deleted only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers&lt;/strong&gt; - Views of the parent question for answers that are:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-deleted AND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score &gt; 0 AND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Also meets one or more of the following criteria:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In the top 3 answers OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is the Accepted Answer OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score at least 5 OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Has at least 20% of the total vote count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details on what the goals of the score are and how this was determined, check out the announcement on the mother Meta site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/were-working-on-a-new-stat-to-help-convey-the-reach-of-your-posts-here&quot;&gt;We&amp;#39;re working on a new stat to help convey the reach of your posts here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T10:01:48.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11354" CreationDate="2019-06-25T16:37:00.433" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/414988/change-of-system-of-coordinates-for-the-stress-matrix&quot;&gt;Change of system of coordinates for the stress matrix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment by Samuel Weir (first one) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Engineering/Courses/En221/Notes/Polar_Coords/Polar_Coords.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;links to a url&lt;/a&gt; that is is not displaying the equations (at least on all of my browsers). I found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://solidmechanics.org/text/AppendixD/AppendixD.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to the same basic page&lt;/a&gt; (written by the same author) that is displaying correctly on my computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I'm not high enough ranked to comment in the question to say &quot;FYI, if this website isn't working for you, check out this one with the exact same information.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea what I should/can do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198261" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T17:25:14.137" Title="How to add corrected URL when I can't comment?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11356" CreationDate="2019-06-25T17:14:48.290" Score="-2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/488103/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about pertaining to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aerogel&lt;/a&gt;, and could find the tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aerogel&quot;&gt;aerogel&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aerogel is an innovative technology, I mean before Kistler made it, who would have imagined that jellies were more than just a delicacy. Aerogel makes it mark in active research in the recent years. As Physics.SE is one of the first sites one would ask a question pertaining to physics(personally, I do). Therefore, we as the community would find ourselves duty bound to welcome and support relevant questions to the site. So, I think should be a tag for it, as it is still an emerging technology and it may invite more questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is posted for the community's thoughts on the creation of this tag and opinion of the community on relevance of this tag to Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186536" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T11:34:10.770" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T14:18:20.993" Title="There should be an aerogel tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11352" CreationDate="2019-06-25T17:25:14.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since comments are supposed to be transient anyway, you need not do anything, except to possibly flag the comment as &lt;em&gt;no longer needed&lt;/em&gt; since dead links are rarely needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the information in the comment is a relevant addition to the question or an answer, you might also suggest an edit that adds this information (with the correct link) to the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T17:25:14.137" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11353" CreationDate="2019-06-26T18:27:18.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of today, a search for 'aerogel' in Physics SE comes up with 15 total questions across the whole site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think we need an 'aerogel' tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T18:27:18.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11353" CreationDate="2019-06-27T14:18:20.993" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the reactions here are a bit more negative than they need to be, given that you're fairly new to the site, so a bit more explanation is in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are organizational concepts: they exist to classify and organize the questions that already exist on the site, and to make them easier to discover and link together. They are not magical beacons that will conjure up good questions on a given subject, regardless of whether said subject has been featured recently in Veritasium or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are created as and when they are needed for the population of questions that already exists. As Jon Custer mentioned, there's some fifteen questions on aerogel on the site. This is not sufficient to call for the creation of a tag, I would say: it wouldn't do harm &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but there's not really any great need for one at this stage. If you do think this is important enough (i.e. that there are enough questions, and that the subject is important enough to merit classification on its own), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;you have 1000 rep&lt;/a&gt;, then you can create the tag yourself by taking a meaningful subject of the &lt;em&gt;already-existing&lt;/em&gt; questions and adding the tag yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Generally speaking, the fact that the tag-creation privilege by regular users is available only at 1k+ rep is a strong nudge by SE that this is roughly the level of experience with the site and its workings that will give you a good grounding on whether the tag creation is appropriate or not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just to emphasize: the lack of an aerogel tag does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that questions about aerogel are off-topic or that they are unwelcome here. So long as they fit the site, and there is at least one other tag on the site that describes them, then they're perfectly welcome. (If a question would be described by &lt;code&gt;aerogel&lt;/code&gt; but not by &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other tags on the site, then it's a fair question as to whether it is actually on-topic.) So if people want to ask on-topic questions about aerogel, they already can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T14:18:20.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11358" CreationDate="2019-07-01T21:18:09.247" Score="3" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question which did not receive any attention at all (no comments or answers, just a like). What should I do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198317" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T22:28:18.697" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T22:28:18.697" Title="No response to question" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2019-07-01T22:26:17.597" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What should I do if no one answers my question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, make sure you’ve &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;asked a good question&lt;/a&gt;. To get better answers, you may need to put additional effort into your question. Edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question to the homepage and get more people interested in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, despite your best efforts, you feel questions aren’t getting good answers, you can help by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;offering a bounty&lt;/a&gt; on any question more than two days old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T22:26:17.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-09T04:52:53.927" Score="1" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does this site have any protection against abuse of power by moderators? Is there a way we can report their misconducts? For example, for maliciously deleting comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67685" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T05:34:26.570" Title="Can we report moderators for abuse of power?" Tags="|support|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-07-09T09:10:24.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11360" CreationDate="2019-07-09T05:34:26.570" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the question on the SE meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28867/what-recourse-do-i-have-if-i-believe-a-moderator-has-abused-their-privileges&quot;&gt;What recourse do I have if I believe a moderator has abused their privileges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively for a specific issue see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4113/how-do-i-dispute-a-moderators-action&quot;&gt;How do I dispute a moderator&amp;#39;s action?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However bear in mind that the physics site runs on good will. People donate their time and expertise for free in the belief that doing so makes the world a better place. The same applies to the moderators. They are not paid for the time and effort they put in. It is exceedingly unlikely a moderator has acted for any reason other than they genuinely believe it is in the best interests of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe a moderator shouldn't have acted in the way they did then post a polite message here explaining the problem and you'll receive polite answers. There is no guarantee that the answers will be to your liking, but at least you'll know exactly why the moderators acted as they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T05:34:26.570" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11364" CreationDate="2019-07-09T14:43:54.903" Score="15" ViewCount="818" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/489539/shape-of-a-rotating-rope-with-one-free-end&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; currently has a bounty on it and is receiving a lot of attention. But to me it looks like a question that is normally closed for being off-topic. The question reads like a homework problem, and there appears to be little effort from the OP other than stating a method they tried to use that did not work for them. The question is asking how to solve the problem rather than asking about understanding a physics concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, many of the answers appear to be complete or nearly complete solutions to the problem. Even if the question is acceptable, why are these answers acceptable? I thought complete solutions to problems like these were not supposed to be posted as answers. I did attempt to flag some of the answers as solutions, and I received back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With a score of +9 and no close votes, it seems pretty clear the community does not consider this an off-topic homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why does the fact that it has not been considered an off-topic homework question mean that posting full solutions is fine? They seem to be two separate policies. The bounty did call for actual solutions, so is it fine to go against usual policy if you put a bounty on the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is a very interesting problem whose solution is not straight-forward, but it still seems like it should be considered off-topic. Is this just an instance where the community has decided to forgo the usual rules and tackle an interesting problem? What makes this problem different from other homework problems to make it acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T15:05:53.610" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T08:32:57.560" Title="Why is this question not considered an off-topic homework problem?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|bounty|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-09T18:50:05.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of different things that are happening here, and I'm not sure that I will quite disentangle them while I'm writing this answer, but here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there's the question of topicality.  I've been on record &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5972/44126&quot;&gt;nearly since I joined&lt;/a&gt; with the opinion that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7409/44126&quot;&gt;interesting questions deserve more leeway than boring questions&lt;/a&gt;, and that it's a privilege of the human members of our community to decide which types of questions are &quot;interesting.&quot;  I thought this particular question was super-interesting, so I answered it --- which means that for this discussion I'm participating with my user hat on, and my diamond-moderator hat hanging in the hallway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the goal of the bounty is slightly different from the original question.  The bounty text is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looking for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This problem has presumably been conclusively settled in the literature. Answers here should provide a self-contained derivation and an explanation of the physics, but also suitable references to confirm their material in the literature, particularly given the disagreements between and about the different existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a protocol for asking questions where the primary goal is a literature reference: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Such questions are made community-wiki, and there are standards for answers which are enforced collectively by the community and the moderators.  A pure &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; version of this question would absolutely be on-topic, and the mostly-complete homework-like solutions (again: I'm currently guilty here) would be off-topic answers to such a question.  However, the question wasn't edited into this form before the bounty was added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third is the issue raised in the moderator flag response.  In general, a question with a high score and no close votes (especially absent the HNQ effect, which didn't happen to this question) &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a question that the community has decided to like.  However, the bounty was added early in the question's history, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/conversation/close-votes-on-bountied-questions&quot;&gt;it's impossible to cast a close vote on a bountied question&lt;/a&gt;.  It's possible that one or more users saw the question &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; it was bountied, tried and failed to cast a close vote, and gave up on recording their opinion rather than cast a custom flag or questioning the on-topic-ness in a comment there.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/330696/280545&quot;&gt;Some better guidance in the user interface could have helped here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I am bowing out of expressing an opinion about whether the question should or shouldn't remain open, since I wrote an answer which superficially breaks the guidelines.  But wow, I had a &lt;em&gt;ton&lt;/em&gt; of fun constructing that answer; I learned a lot writing it, and now I'm in a position to appreciate what I'll find in the literature when I make time to answer the resource-recommendation part of the question.  I'm glad the question was posed, and I'm glad for the tension that was pointed out between the early answers --- whether it's eventually closed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T19:08:08.793" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T19:08:08.793" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-09T22:20:03.267" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to agree with your original assessment -- this is not a good example of the kinds of questions we want. And, as a regular user, I would have voted to close it if I had seen it prior to the bounty (because then it is locked). And as a moderator, I would probably vote to close it if it got a couple of other users who voted to close it first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is now a bounty on the question from a very respected user on the site. As a moderator, that gives me a little bit of pause before I would go in and mod-hammer things away. We rely on our users to determine policy. While brand new users who aren't familiar with how things work may not change my mind on whether something is on-topic or good quite so easily, somebody who has been around for awhile and who is very active in enforcing policies correctly earns a little more thought before stepping in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I don't think the question should be open, nor do I think it warrants a bounty, and I think several of the answers should be deleted. All for violating the homework policy. I am very much opposed to using &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to determine if a question is on topic. In other words, it doesn't matter how hard it was to answer or how interesting the final answer is. If the question is off-topic to start, no answer should save it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the discussion on the question and look forward to what others think about it. I think the bounty keeping it open gives us some opportunities to discuss it and could help refine the policy -- if not in the actual wording of the policy, at least in giving guidance on how to enforce it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could be a regular user again for one vote, I would vote to close it as soon as the bounty ended. Since I can't though, I will wait to see how the community decides to handle it once the bounty ends and contribute my vote accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T22:20:03.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-09T22:40:09.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I've been commenting my thoughts, it seems fair I should post them as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer was initially going to be a hard &quot;yes&quot; on close this as a homework question, but I'm becoming less sure.  On the one hand, the people answering the question have put a lot of effort into trying to solve this problem, and clearly it's motivating people, and interesting. OP also does at least mention a method they used and a problem they encountered. On the other hand, it does &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; quite a bit like a homework question with minimal effort shown.  OP talks about the issue he ran into, but doesn't actually show any work.  It seems like it could be used as a bad example for other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the things that still leans me towards thinking of closing it, is that the question itself has quite a bit of positive attention, while still having the problem of how it appears to violate the homework policy as a fairly standard example of what we don't want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just occurred to me while writing this, that much of this situation could be avoided if OP could show more of what he tried and why that led him to search for other methods of solving this.  I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/489539/shape-of-a-rotating-rope-with-one-free-end#comment1104102_489539&quot;&gt;left a comment&lt;/a&gt; to see if OP is able to resolve this issue while it is being worked out here.  To me, it seems like with a bit more show of effort from the OP, this question might be on-topic enough for this to be a non-issue anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it already has a bounty, I'm not necessarily opposed to letting it stay open until the bounty is done.  I'm definitely not opposed to giving OP a little bit of time to solve it at least, just due to the series of events that have taken place on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the bounty is done, and if it still appears the way it is now, I'm inclined to VTC the question as homework-like, unless someone can convince me otherwise (which is possible, I'm almost on the fence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; As of right now, I'm starting to lean more towards closure.  OP has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/489539/shape-of-a-rotating-rope-with-one-free-end#comment1104576_489539&quot;&gt;left a comment&lt;/a&gt; which implies to me that they either don't intend on improving the appearance of the question or did not read the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2019-07-18T08:32:57.560" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T08:32:57.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-10T10:08:42.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To directly answer the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the question is acceptable, why are these answers acceptable? [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why does the fact that it has not been considered an off-topic homework question mean that posting full solutions is fine? They seem to be two separate policies. The bounty did call for actual solutions, so is it fine to go against usual policy if you put a bounty on the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is a very interesting problem whose solution is not straight-forward, but it still seems like it should be considered off-topic. Is this just an instance where the community has decided to forgo the usual rules and tackle an interesting problem? What makes this problem different from other homework problems to make it acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been significant disagreement among high-rep users and also among the moderators about whether this deserves to be put on hold and whether the answers should be deleted. In general, when there is such significant disagreement especially within the mod team itself and no clear path forward, good moderation often means we &lt;em&gt;refrain&lt;/em&gt; from acting until a consensus emerges. Sometimes that works out well and sometimes it leads us down the wrong path, but even in the latter cases, holding back and doing nothing when there isn't even a consensus among the mods tends to be better than forging ahead (like, say, moderators casting counteracting close and reopen votes back and forth, or deleting and undeleting posts repeatedly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, refraining from acting happens to mean that the question remains open, bountied, and with its answers intact. If one of us had put the question on hold and/or deleted some answers first before the disagreement came up, then perhaps refraining from acting would have meant that the question stays on hold and some answers stay deleted (unless and until a consensus otherwise emerged). Yes, this can be pretty arbitrary, but I don't really know of a better way to handle things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But seriously, I wouldn't take this as any kind of precedent. In particular, don't take this to mean that you can circumvent the usual policy if the question is bountied. If you see this as a violation of the rules, then of course you are encouraged to make your case for that (as you did), but if it doesn't wind up going your way perhaps it's best to just consider it a &amp;quot;sacrifice&amp;quot; to the gods of site politics - that is, you could think of it as though we've sacrificed this one instance of following the rules in order to keep things running more smoothly the rest of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T10:08:42.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-10T13:38:59.873" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've spent a lot of time on meta arguing against the closure of good mechanics problems (most recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11103/the-role-of-good-mechanics-problems&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10822/two-similar-looking-mechanics-questions-are-not-duplicates&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and taking a lot of downvotes for it, but here we go again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the homework policy seems to be currently understood, any mechanics problem that requires a specific calculation deserves to be closed. It doesn't matter if it's actually a homework problem or not, or even if it ever appears in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; coursework whatsoever. (The question discussed here, for instance, is far too hard to appear in any mechanics class.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't even seem to matter if the OP &quot;puts in effort&quot; or not; I had to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11103/the-role-of-good-mechanics-problems&quot;&gt;argue at length&lt;/a&gt; against closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/461524/applying-energy-and-momentum-conservation-to-the-problem-of-pulling-a-bent-carpe&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, where OP put in more effort and insight than most of the 9 answerers. In fact, putting in effort on interesting mechanics questions seems to make closure more likely. A question by itself may should open-ended, but if OP puts in effort, it can get rounded off to &quot;just some calculation&quot; and closed for that reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for trivial questions, requiring effort from OP is useful because it filters out people who copy-paste their homework. But for nontrivial questions, I don't see the point. If this site is to act as a repository of knowledge, why should we require every answer to a nontrivial question to be preceded with a bunch of confused attempts by OP? (And they are almost always confused -- because if OP weren't confused, they wouldn't have asked the question in the first place.) What benefit does that give future readers? This is like if StackOverflow mandated that every &quot;how do I do X&quot; coding question include a code snippet that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And this is to say nothing of the fact that many quantum field theory questions on this site are pure calculations, without conceptual content. In my four years on this site I have never seen a QFT question closed as homework, even the ones that are copy-pastes of trivial homework calculations, unless I personally made sure it was. Once we had somebody posting several questions that were literally nothing but screenshots of the same QFT homework assignment or take-home exam. I had to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10555/users-that-post-every-question-in-their-homework-exams&quot;&gt;bring it up on Meta&lt;/a&gt; for any action to be taken at all. Nobody else had cast a close vote or even a downvote, even though several had posted answers or comments that provided the answer. The difference in standards is remarkable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point we have a strange situation where mechanics and electromagnetism questions whose statements or solutions need more than a couple equations are likely to be closed. As I argue on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/490288/when-an-electron-changes-its-spin-or-any-other-intrinsic-property-is-it-still/490316#490316&quot;&gt;post on HNQ right now&lt;/a&gt;, physics is set apart from pop physics by our ability to use equations. We already have lots of systemic factors fighting against equations -- for instance, my post is only popular because it doesn't have any -- and we don't need more. If a question demands we roll up our sleeves and calculate, I say we do it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="83398" LastEditDate="2019-07-16T01:04:00.603" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T01:04:00.603" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-10T14:41:18.650" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a more global problem here.  Regardless of whether this is an actual homework problem, and regardless of the putative small audience of interest, what are we to do about vetting the answers?  I know this isn't a peer-reviewed journal.  My concern is that upvotes on answers does not imply correctness.  What's the value of potentially conflicting analyses to any reader?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29202" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T14:41:18.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-11T06:42:05.433" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say if you keep a tag on homework, any physics related homework problem can be posted, as long as they made the statement clear, that's it. Otherwise I suggests remove that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A homework is a homework, I take it from a book, dont know how to solve it, and ask for help on a site which has homework tag on it. Why do you close ANY of these questions?  If this site cannot stand homework questions, or have many ambiguities about how to handle such questiobs, then close the tag first until it is ready.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24452" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T06:42:05.433" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11362" CreationDate="2019-07-11T13:11:50.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us look at the rules (&lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&#xA;&quot;Do my homework&quot;-type physics questions&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the rules use the words &quot;should not&quot;, not &quot;shall not&quot; or &quot;must not&quot;. In my book, this is not an absolute ban on such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, many people liked the question, so maybe it just should not be closed? See also the discussion I had with @David Z at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88190/the-commutator-of-scalar-field&quot;&gt;The commutator of scalar field&lt;/a&gt; and the link to meta there. Let me note that the rules have not been changed since then, so maybe they are not so bad?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T13:11:50.263" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-11T15:11:42.550" Score="3" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/490495/2451&quot;&gt;What would theoretically lead to a greater burn if both materials are kept at a constant temperature when applied to the skin? Water or Brass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a question that would help with the understanding of specific heat and conductivity and which has a greater effect when it comes to transfer of energy between objects.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote this question thinking it would start a discussion on the difference between thermal conductivity in solids vs liquids and to discuss the reasoning on why one would burn worse than the other if the two are kept at the same temperature. This is a discussion question rather than a homework question. Any explanation would be helpful. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236404" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-07-11T15:36:46.063" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T13:01:36.847" Title="Why was this question put on hold? Reason given was that it is a homework question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11371" CreationDate="2019-07-11T16:12:55.287" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a question that would help with the understanding of specific heat and conductivity and which has a greater effect when it comes to transfer of energy between objects.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is about that, then it should be clear that this is what it's about. In other words, the question could be something like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How do the thermal conductivity and specific heat influence the amount of heat transferred between two objects?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the body of the question would contain what you think the influence is, why you think that, and what part of that line of thinking makes you unsure of the answer. You could then give an example -- water causes worse burns than metal at the same temperature, and they have X and Y for the thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity, but you don't understand why it behaves that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be an entirely answerable conceptual question. This is of course just a rough idea of what the final question could look like, but hopefully it explains the general things that go into making a good, clear conceptual question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And note, the specifics of the setup -- that you're interested in burning skin, the temperatures of the objects, that it's only held by gravity, etc. are all not required for the conceptual question. It could be about transferring heat between any two, different objects with different properties. That all makes it general and useful to other people down the road, rather than being tied to a specific instance with a specific setup. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T16:12:55.287" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11371" CreationDate="2019-07-14T13:01:36.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP's comment on the question shows clearly that he/she doesn't understand why the question is so poor as to be unanswerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &quot;maintain the material at constant temperature&quot; (and let's ignore if that is practically possible) the amount of &quot;burn&quot; has nothing to do with either specific heat or conductivity. It depends entirely on the heat transfer process between the water/brass and skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is more about biochemistry as physics, and the situation as specified in the question is so poorly controlled that the answer could be anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123188" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T13:01:36.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-16T12:49:56.183" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/491872/does-fisher-information-quantify-only-the-precision-of-the-instrument&quot;&gt;Does Fisher Information quantify only the precision of the instrument?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had asked a question recently. There were some comments by someone named Solar Mike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On repeatedly asking him/her on elaborating what he meant, there was no proper reply. I realized most of his answers are similar, on physics.stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28922" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-07-16T13:00:21.013" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T13:00:21.013" Title="My question was downvoted without a reason" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2019-07-16T18:14:50.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-18T21:44:43.163" Score="6" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question was submitted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/62173/user929304&quot;&gt;user929304&lt;/a&gt; titled:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/492105/17198&quot;&gt;Balance of a spinning coin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is about the case of rolling motion, as in, for instance, rolling down an incline. So you see a coin rolling over, say, the floor of a corridor, and it just keeps going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case is the one of a coin that isn't going anywhere; it is made to spin in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are distinct cases, yet John Rennie and Qmechanic have closed the question about a rolling coin, labeling it as duplicate of the spinning-in-place case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough reputation points yet to submit this for reversal of the mislabeling, so I'm reporting it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I noticed the mislabeling because I had written an answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17198" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T16:28:41.027" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T16:28:41.027" Title="A question erroneously labeled as duplicate" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11377" CreationDate="2019-07-18T22:02:49.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Changed the title from &lt;em&gt;Balance of a spinning coin&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Balance of a rolling coin,&lt;/em&gt; and reopened question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T22:02:49.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11380" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11381" CreationDate="2019-07-24T16:06:46.120" Score="7" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made 6 minor edits to my latest answers. The last edit (addition of a link to a lecture on the topic) I did 2 days after I gave the answer. I noticed that the question received a lot of new attention after the edit. It seems with each edit the question is bumped up on the main site again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't you find making such minor edits unethical since they are a way to artificially increase attention to an answer and get more reputation?&lt;/strong&gt; In your opinion, should they be discouraged or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question came to my mind since I felt bad that this answer to an easy non-technical question seems to distract people from more interesting content.&#xA;(Now that I'm writing this up I realize that asking such question is kinda ironic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user224659" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T19:57:57.427" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T18:31:51.533" Title="Cases in which self-edits are an unethical mean to generate attention" Tags="|discussion|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11380" CreationDate="2019-07-24T16:24:22.927" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing unethical about a minor edit, if it &lt;em&gt;improves the post&lt;/em&gt;. The practice of bumping posts by edits is only problematic if the edits don't actually improve the post (e.g. only add superfluous whitespace, replace words by synonyms or phrases by equivalent phrases...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users are invited to flag posts (with a custom moderator flag) when they think a pattern of such non-improving edits is being performed, and the system in fact raises an automatic flag on posts that accrue an unusual number of edits by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T16:24:22.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11383" CreationDate="2019-07-24T23:41:51.110" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost exactly 4 years ago (07.18.15) I asked this average-awful question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/194661/naked-singularity-how-would-it-behave/492387#492387&quot;&gt;Naked singularity: how would it behave?&lt;/a&gt;. At that time I got a mediocore answer the same day that I accepted a bit later, got some views, then the question was forgotten - common boring story of most SE questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast forward exactly 4 years later (07.18.19), my completely buried post suddenly got a huge attention. In the following few days it got two great answers, two ups, comments on answers, etc., and while I'm glad this happened, I don't really understand it. The thing that makes the most sense is that some algorithm looking for old questions found it and promoted somewhere - but why even would this happen? I see no reason. My post had no activity for 4 years, was barely upvoted, and had an accepted answer, it was a completely average and forgettable one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was my question bumped somewhere, or is this a pure coincidence? If it was, what is the reason? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77010" LastEditorUserId="77010" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T23:57:30.600" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T23:57:30.600" Title="Why did my ancient question suddenly got attention?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11382" CreationDate="2019-07-24T23:53:19.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/402602/127931&quot;&gt;One of those answers&lt;/a&gt; was actually from last year (answered Apr 28 '18 at 9:43).  As you can see from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/402602/revisions&quot;&gt;edit history&lt;/a&gt;, Yukterez edited his answer on July 17th and 18th (several times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would have bumped the question to the top of the main page due to new activity, which generally draws attention to a question.  In this case, it led to a third answer, and thus even more attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, it was nothing crazy.  Just regular site activity which caused the question to be bumped, leading to the attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T23:53:19.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11386" CreationDate="2019-07-28T09:32:06.407" Score="9" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am getting serially downvoted now. Five questions were downvoted in short order. Are the answers I gave so bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qAjQo.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to the answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/486605/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/486605/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/490427/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/490427/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/486200/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/486200/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/491152/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/491152/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/492320/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/492320/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user207455" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T16:51:06.100" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T16:51:06.100" Title="Does serial downvoting mean that my answers are bad?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11385" CreationDate="2019-07-28T09:58:52.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you should not take serial downvoting to indicate anything about whether your answers are bad. This type of downvoting is often targeted at the person and does not reflect the quality of the answer. (Which, by the way, makes it not a legitimate reason to downvote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T09:58:52.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11380" CreationDate="2019-07-28T16:24:23.080" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a chronic self-editor. Sometimes I'll make three or four edits to a post in a space of a week or two. The sole reason is to improve the post. I don't always get it as good as it could be first time; what I write might set me thinking, and improvements dawn on me over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A year or two ago I'd made five or six small amendments to an answer and someone commented (very fairly) that each of these pushed the question – and my answer – to the top of the list. I hadn't realised this. I now think very carefully before I edit, but I regard the &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; facility as crucial to the usefulness of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope I don't need to edit this... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149533" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T16:24:23.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11385" CreationDate="2019-07-30T20:54:40.893" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the four answers that I was able to find from your screenshot, it looks like there is a definite pattern, which is that someone asks a question, and you reply very rapidly (5, 15, or 30 minutes later) with a very brief answer (1 or 2 sentences). Then, hours or days later, others come along with longer and more detailed answers. I actually agree with the downvoters in the examples I saw: the answers were not very good. Sorry, but seeing this on meta prompted me to read them carefully and then downvote three of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that at least one of these answers already had a comment explaining why they didn't like your answer. I added a comment to one of the others explaining my downvote. By the way, I don't have any impression of you as an individual, especially because your username is just a string of digits, which I haven't memorized. So, speaking only for myself, this is certainly not a personal vendetta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you take more time to compose more detailed answers. People will respond when they see you putting in time and effort. Even this question on meta shows sort of a similar lack of effort. You posted a screenshot, which made it a hassle for other people to look at what was going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T20:54:40.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11402" CreationDate="2019-08-05T20:27:52.787" Score="-3" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;In these two years I'm always trying to understand how to write well my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of my Physics questions necessarily also require mathematical knowledge that I don't have at the moment and the user of Physics.SE. invite me to write a question on Mathematics.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some users of Mathematics.SE ask me, instead, to write questions about physics, although they contain mathematical aspects, that they are not welcome on the site Physics.SE. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140404" LastEditorUserId="140404" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T18:56:38.283" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T16:47:28.093" Title="How work Physics.SE and Mathematics.SE about mathematical/physic question" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11391" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:04:14.913" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stop using your &quot;student&quot; notes as a reference. We do not care where your question comes from, and unintelligible scribbles from a student are of no use to us.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stop using books/webpages in Italian as a reference. This webpage operates in English, and if that does not work for you, you'll have to find some Italian physics community somewhere online. A screenshot of your book, with a rectangle around an equation, is even more useless the equation itself (cf. pictures vs mathjax).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stop playing the victim; stop using the pathetic argument (in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formal sense of the word&lt;/a&gt;). We judge posts, not users. If your posts are bad, they'll get downvoted/VTCd. Learn from your mistakes and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:04:14.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11391" CreationDate="2019-08-06T21:43:19.440" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is currently extremely unclear (potentially because you're over-relying on unreliable machine translation?), but the three initial versions of the text contain some kind of version of the following,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view there is no homogeneity of views between one site and another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there no coherence between the two web-sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as the (currently utterly unclear)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some users of Mathematics.SE ask me, instead, to write questions about physics, although they contain mathematical aspects, that they are not welcome on the site Physics.SE. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, while this might not reflect what you actually wanted to ask, there's enough here to address a key point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no requirement of a cohesive policy between the Physics and Mathematics sites.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are run by separate communities, serving different audiences for different topics and in different environments, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9822&quot;&gt;vastly different histories&lt;/a&gt;. We're bound by the (very loose) framework of the Stack Exchange ethos and overall rules, but anything above and beyond that is a bonus. In particular, this means that the fact that a certain type of question is on-topic at the Maths site does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; guarantee that it will be on-topic here, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; a clear delimiting line that says &amp;quot;questions on this side go to Physics and questions on this side go to Maths&amp;quot;, in any shape or form. Some questions might be on-topic on both sides, while some questions might not be on-topic on either site. In other words: &amp;quot;this question is too physicsy for Maths SE&amp;quot; does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; guarantee that it will be on-topic on Physics, or vice versa. If that's what's bothering you, then I'm sorry, but this site does not aim to be all things to all people, and it's entirely possible that we're not what you're looking for, and that you'll need to find that elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it can happen that someone on Physics will tell you something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this question is too mathsy for Physics SE, you should try asking it on the Maths site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that your question then gets a bad reception on Maths. (Let's leave aside, for now, the (entirely real) possibility that the bad reception is due to, say, a bad use of language on your part.) If this is the case, you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interpret those comments on PSE as being &amp;quot;guarantees&amp;quot; that MSE will work out: instead, they're clear indicators that the question is too mathsy for our scope, but (unless the user in question is demonstrably a frequent user of MSE) only tentative pointers of other places to try. And again: the fact that it's too mathsy for PSE does not guarantee, in any way, that it will be on-topic at Maths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally: &lt;strong&gt;Language Matters&lt;/strong&gt;. If your questions use unclear language, then they are more likely to be closed as Unclear What You're Asking, and they are more likely to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We close unclear questions because they direct answerer attention from other questions which &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; provide sufficient clarity to have unambiguous answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We downvote unclear questions because they are not useful to future visitors, so they should be ranked lower when search results are presented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are core, integral parts of how the SE Q&amp;amp;A engine works, and they're one of the key reasons why SE shines in providing good-quality content. If these aspects bother you, then you should look for other platforms that don't have content quality as a key tenet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same holds for text that is not in English: the language of this site is English, and including crucial parts of your question in other languages is going to lead to a bad reception, from downvotes to closevotes to comments telling you not to do that. If you want to avoid that bad reception, then post only in English, and only include other languages when absolutely crucial and accompanied with a suitable, high-quality translation. To be clear: machine translation is generally &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of sufficient quality to be posted directly, particularly on technical subjects like physics. &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are responsible for the clarity of the language that you post here, and if it's unclear enough to merit downvotes or closevotes, then edit it to clarify it, or accept the response. Downvotes are not a personal indictment against you, they are indicators about the content of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, on this site there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10563/discouraging-screenshots-of-questions-at-least-the-textual-part&quot;&gt;very strong consensus that screenshots of text are off-limits here&lt;/a&gt;, which means that posts with such screenshots are similarly subject to a bad reception. If you don't want that bad reception, then follow the site consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally: same as with Maths SE, there is no requirement of a cohesive policy with TeX SE. Some things might fly on TeX SE that are not OK here -- in which case, good for TeX SE! but that still doesn't mean that they can fly here. Your text might be clearer on TeX SE (where posts are generally aided by the fact that they contain code, which is much more unambiguous that technical text on physics), but that doesn't mean that text of similar quality passes the standard clarity bar here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T21:43:19.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-08T17:29:07.667" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/495125&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the von Neumann Interpretation of QM (a.k.a. the Consciousness Causes Collapse Hypothesis, CCCH) was put on hold within days of being asked. The reason given was that it was &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, of course, the moderators are correct; but, I think the real problem is that the question cries out for &lt;strong&gt;expert&lt;/strong&gt; opinion yet, judging from their profiles, none of those who have commented are claiming credentials as physicists. (Please note that I am not a physicist either. What I would have contributed had the question not been put on hold was the following information which, I hope, will indicate why expert opinion is needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question cited refers us to an article on arXiv that was subsequently published in Foundations of Physics, a respectable, peer-reviewed journal if I am not mistaken. However, despite the title of the question that was put on hold, the article in Foundations of Physics only mentioned Henry Stapp's theory involving the Quantum Zeno effect in passing. The authors (physicists de Barros, J. Acacio and Oas, Gary) actually proposed an experiment to test the CCCH using trained cockroaches. They then argued that the experiment would inevitably fail and concluded that the CCCH is unfalsifiable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I open a new question wherein I posted the information in the last paragraph and ask for &lt;strong&gt;expert&lt;/strong&gt; opinions as to the validity of the reasoning leading to the conclusion mentioned -- &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; having the question put on hold for soliciting opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224389" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T17:29:07.667" Title="How Can I Ask for an Expert Opinion Without Getting My Question Put On Hold for Soliciting Opinions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11398" CreationDate="2019-08-10T05:09:55.187" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I came across an incident in which I flagged a question as it was unclear. But, the message reads: Put on hold as unclear what you are asking. Even, I suffered a deduction of 2 votes. When I didn't post the question, why is Physics SE specifically targetting me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/495937/&quot;&gt;What is the coefficient of volume expansion for ideal gases?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="234064" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T06:10:25.443" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T08:24:02.210" Title="Error in grammar/distribution of votes" Tags="|support|reputation|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11397" CreationDate="2019-08-10T07:57:26.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/495937/2451&quot;&gt;That question&lt;/a&gt; seems to be a red herring. The yellow on-hold message text is primarily meant for the original poster (OP), not you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deduction of 2 points from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/234064/shishir-maharana?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;your reputation&lt;/a&gt; is caused by something else. For example, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/266326&quot;&gt;suggested-edit&lt;/a&gt; gain of 2 reputation point was later removed again when the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/489185/2451&quot;&gt;edited post&lt;/a&gt; was deleted on August 3rd, 2019. (Deleted posts require 10k reputation to view.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T08:24:02.210" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T08:24:02.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11401" CreationDate="2019-08-14T13:55:41.363" Score="14" ViewCount="614" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a comment to one of my contributions, I received the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the future please link to abstract pages rather than pdf files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine. I am happy to follow up on this suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody tell me why? I.e., what is the advantage of doing it this way instead of differently? I want to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/q/11305&quot;&gt;Return to FAQ index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139287" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T16:37:41.183" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T15:37:22.593" Title="What is the policy for linking? E.g.: Why should we link to abstract pages rather than pdf files? How do we cite arXiv preprints?" Tags="|support|faq|best-practices|links|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-08-15T16:37:41.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11400" CreationDate="2019-08-14T14:08:21.803" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple reasons why it's better to link to abstract pages rather than directly to the PDF versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mobile users and users with slow internet connection prefer an abstract page over a PDF file. (Also, downloading PDFs can redirect to other applications instead of staying in-browser; this should be an explicit choice on the part of the reader.) Often the abstract page is enough information, and there's no need to download the whole PDF file.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For publications, the PDF file is often behind a paywall while the abstract page is free.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For arXiv papers, the abstract page often contains useful information that is not present in the pdf file itself - such as whether and where the preprint was published, or if there is an updated version. The PDF doesn't usually contain a link back to the abstract page, so for the person clicking on the link it's more useful if it goes to the abstract page directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The same is also true with published journal papers - the abstract page contains more metadata than the PDF, and it is often more cleanly collected and easier to find.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When SE eventually gets arXiv trackbacks (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240520/209806&quot;&gt;please support this proposal!&lt;/a&gt;), hopefully it will also work for PDF links, but there's no guarantee.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When citing use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DOI links&lt;/a&gt; (or some other form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permalink&lt;/a&gt; if there is no available DOI) unless the document you're linking to really doesn't have such a link. This is crucial to avoid &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Linking to webpages that require log-in should be minimized.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generally, it's always a good idea to include a full bibliographic reference, mentioning explicitly the author, title, and bibliographic details (journal, volume, page, year, etc.). If permalinks are unavailable this is &lt;em&gt;essential&lt;/em&gt;, to make it possible to reconstruct the link in case of link rot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Linking to private clouds, dropbox, etc, is for various reasons not acceptable on SE. (This can e.g. potentially be misused to update a SE post without propelling it to the front page. They are also extremely susceptible to link rot.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the Phys.SE policy for self-citations &amp;amp; self-linking, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/582/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5336/2451&quot;&gt;To generate an image&lt;/a&gt; the SE network endorses &lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imgur.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how do we cite papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a preprint arXiv:yymm.nnnnn, use the abstract link &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/yymm.nnnnn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/yymm.nnnnn&lt;/a&gt; rather than the PDF link &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/yymm.nnnnn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/pdf/yymm.nnnnn.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For published journal papers, use the DOI link, &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/xxxxxxxx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/xxxxxxxx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use full bibliographic references (i.e. include title, authors, year, and journal/volume/page) whenever possible&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T15:37:22.593" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T15:37:22.593" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-08-15T16:37:54.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11391" CreationDate="2019-08-14T16:47:28.093" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &quot;border case&quot; problem, i.e. if your question is partially math, partially physics. Math is possible without Physics, but practically all Physics use Math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the topicality of the sites is decided by their communities, independently from other sites. Thus, there might be questions which are ontopic on both sites, and also questions which are offtopic on both (while they should be ontopic on at least one of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently the MathSE got a far more closed direction. The PSE was always restrictive, but at least consequent (with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5375/32426&quot;&gt;exception&lt;/a&gt;). The good thing is that there are not too many such &quot;blind spots&quot;, i.e. topics which are offtopic on both sites. The bad thing is that the visible cross-site cooperation to solve these &quot;blind spots&quot; is little or non-existent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is: if you ask a question on the MathSE, it is a Math question from that moment. &lt;em&gt;So less non-mathematical content has it, so better is it.&lt;/em&gt; Similarly, if you ask a PSE question, commit everything to not look it a MathSE question in physics disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also very important, your questions can be closed on many reasons. Carefully watch all the feedbacks you get, and follow them even if they look hairsplitting. Because it happens often, that the comments are wanting meaningless &quot;improvements&quot;. Don't argue them, follow them. Note: they could vote you down/close even without a comment. So it is better to follow them. Furthermore, help them to understand, that you know, what are you asking about, and that you would understand also the answers (links, references, own research). Make the mis-interpretation of your question so hard as it is possible. If you get the comments and answers, react everything and be cooperative with everybody, even if they are clearly visibly.... well, not very useful comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is a border-case off-topic, its chance is much better if it is HQ in all other sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T16:47:28.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11403" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11404" CreationDate="2019-08-15T18:08:05.233" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had recently asked the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/497011/&quot;&gt;Uniform discrete physical theories&lt;/a&gt; (now closed and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;auto-deleted&lt;/a&gt; as RemoveAbandonedClosed; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h4Pip.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the question was closed without any comments whatsoever.  The reason cited was that it was too broad.  I don't see how this is a broad question, as I was very specific: Are there physical theories such that space-time is discrete, isotropic, and uniform.  How is that not specific.  Furthermore, I made it very clear that I am a philosophy student so I may simply lack the ability to use the precise physics language.  I have very little experience with physics, and I was under the impression that this was a place to learn and ask questions.  If the question is poorly phrased, it seems there should be some effort to help me format the question better so that it is appropriate for the site rather than jumping to close the question.  It was closed in no time, this seems rather juvenile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21593" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T15:53:08.667" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T15:53:08.667" Title="Question unilaterally closed by a moderator without any chance of editing" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2019-08-15T18:55:02.053" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking for a list of theories, which is a question without the potential of having a &quot;correct&quot; answer and is usually seen as too broad around here. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; and its linked questions for prior meta discussion of questions asking for lists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T18:55:02.053" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2019-08-16T00:01:35.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “single person” who closed your question is a moderator who is intentionally empowered to close questions unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Edit link is still there after the question is closed, but the edit history shows that you have  not made use of it. May I ask why not? If you will excuse my saying so, it seems that you prefer to complain that the moderator is being “juvenile” rather than comply with their advice. Moderating is an often thankless job and moderators should not be abused simply for doing their job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you edit your question to meet the expectations of the site, then members can vote to reopen it. I assume that a moderator can unilaterally reopen it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand the policies of the site, it is not the moderator’s job, or anyone else’s, to help you compose an acceptable question. That is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; job. The same rule applies to all members, regardless of whether they are physicists or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T00:14:31.057" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T00:14:31.057" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-16T06:03:25.730" Score="17" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked what the most precice measurement we have taken is (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/497087/&quot;&gt;What is the most precise physical measurement ever measured?&lt;/a&gt;).  With 33 views and 6 upvotes, it got mod-hammered as being a &quot;big list,&quot; with the implication that I was asking for a long list which has no single answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do believe there is a single answer, which is the measurement which has the lowest relative uncertainty.  I defined it rather unambiguously.  None of the answers nor comments suggested that this could be turned into a list with no clear answer.  It was simply mod-hammered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every answer that has been given has been an improvement on the last.  It started with 10^-8, then went to 10^-13, then 10^-21.  Its quite clear there is going to be a best answer.  Most answers pointed out that the particular level of uncertainty was accompanied by fanfare in the scientific community.  Its not like this question is attracting arbitrary answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or there would have been a best answer, if it were not for the mod hammer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this question marked as big list and closed without any further comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47472" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T20:07:03.350" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T03:17:46.950" Title="Why was this question considered &quot;big list?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|moderators|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11406" CreationDate="2019-08-16T07:53:38.023" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question of the form &lt;em&gt;What is the biggest X?&lt;/em&gt; presumably means that an answerer should only answer if they are 100% sure that they know the unique answer (which btw may change in the future), and all other answers should be deleted. Of course that's not going to happen, so such questions in practice degenerate into &lt;em&gt;What are examples of big Xs?&lt;/em&gt; For the latter, see e.g. other meta posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; and links therein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T07:53:38.023" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11406" CreationDate="2019-08-16T14:10:41.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer here is not about whether this is a good &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; question, or even an on-topic question for this specific SE or it's rules. I am simply giving my observation about whether or not it is a good Stack Exchange question, and to me, the answer is NO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I come to this question when there is one answer, I will up-vote that answer, as I believe that is the real answer of all answers. Now a second answer is given. A second person comes in and up-votes the second answer, because it is a better one (shows more precision) and up-votes it. Both answers now have one vote. and so on. Some people may come in and vote the last, best, most precise answer. Some may come in later and up-vote it, while not down-voting their first up-vote. Some may up-vote ALL the answers, to award their writers for taking the time to submit them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, now which one is the best? Easy, the most precise. So it gets chosen. And two weeks later a new answer is given which is even more precise. Except the OP has moved on and no longer cares (or has the time for) about this question any more and the chosen answer isn't un-selected and a new one selected. and it happens again. and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;strong&gt;IS&lt;/strong&gt; a big-list question, it really is. The OP says it's not because there should only be &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; answer. That is true, for that second in time, at least until a new one is discovered. And what if, what if there are two &lt;em&gt;most-precise&lt;/em&gt; answers that are completely different, yet happen to have the &lt;em&gt;exact same precision&lt;/em&gt;? Now which one is the best answer? Most votes? That might be one far down the list. Most &quot;precise&quot;? There are two of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for not being more concise in my answer, but &quot;it is what it is.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164938" LastEditorUserId="164938" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T17:00:40.877" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T17:00:40.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-16T20:32:38.180" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just now trying to post a question via my Android based smartphone using the App on Physics SE but it is not accepting my question and sending a message stating that we are no longer accepting questions from this user. However I have neither been banned nor held guilty for any sort of misconduct so why is it so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user204000" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T10:32:57.017" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T10:32:57.017" Title="Unable to Post Questions" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-08-16T20:59:31.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T20:59:59.540" Score="1" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having since a few days this message &lt;em&gt;&quot;You have reached your question limit. Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know the time duration of my blocked account as I am currently unable to ask a question. I have tried in every way to improve my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140404" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T00:32:48.367" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T00:32:48.367" Title="Time of waiting to exit out from the question ban" Tags="|support|questions|user-accounts|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-08-18T21:19:54.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11406" CreationDate="2019-08-19T03:17:46.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well.. I contributed an answer, some have contributed other (better) answers, and I’m glad the question is there: I’m happy to discover some non-obvious answers from other contributors and it’s not as if I can just read &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer in Haliday-Resnik-Krane.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pity the question is currently closed as “too broad”: it suppose it technically is too broad but IMO it still does increase the reference value of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T03:17:46.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-21T18:50:53.467" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am to ask for book suggestions on a certain topic, where should I ask? Should I ask on Physics Stack Exchange? If so, what tag should I use? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233550" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T18:51:34.633" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T18:51:34.633" Title="Help with book suggestions" Tags="|support|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-08-21T18:53:34.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-26T16:32:57.370" Score="4" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been thinking a lot about the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3436/if-a-mass-moves-close-to-the-speed-of-light-does-it-turn-into-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;If a mass moves close to the speed of light, does it turn into a black hole?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I didn't find the answers satisfactory. I have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask the question &quot;WHAT happens if a mass moves close to the speed of light&quot;, cite this question, and then see if it gets a response, if not then create a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way to place a bounty on THIS question, with the added rule that I want a more rigorous mathematical derivation/description of what the observer sees and what the relativistic object sees.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was a way to accomplish (2) I think that would be better for the community because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. There are fewer questions asking almost but not quite the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Almost anyone that reads my hypothetical question would be interested in the OP's and vice versa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T17:33:29.187" Title="How to place a bounty on a slight modification of a question that is not mine?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2019-08-26T17:12:33.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like it might get bad reception either way. The accepted answer of the question you link to seems to be satisfactory to your question as well. The answer is &quot;nothing special&quot;, since relativity says so. I don't think putting a bounty on the question will help get answers that will say anything beyond this, and just posting your &quot;WHAT happens if a mass moves close to the speed of light?&quot; question would probably result in being marked as a duplicate of the question you link to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are actually interested in what happens when this mass interacts with something that is at rest relative to you, then you might as well just post a new question asking about this specific scenario (unless it has already been asked in  separate question as well). Just make sure you ask about a specific scenario. Just asking &quot;what happens when this thing happens&quot; is probably too broad of a question, and it will most likely be closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are no rules against this. If you want to post the bounty, then you can do it. If someone answers to your satisfaction you can award the bounty. If you choose to ask a new question, make sure to explain why the question you linked to is not a duplicate, give specific details to set the question apart, etc. A common thing I see on this site is for users to just say &quot;this is not a duplicate of this question&quot; without explaining or showing why. Make sure this is not you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T17:33:29.187" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T17:33:29.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2019-08-26T17:30:48.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to ask a new question, you should be very explicit about the difference with the old one. And if it is not convincing enough, it might end up closed as a duplicate. If you want to set a bounty on the old question, you can e.g. choose the &quot;Improve Details&quot; option in the bounty menu. The next step will offer you to write a custom subtext to the bounty, where you can explain what you want exactly. This is not an uncommon procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T17:30:48.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11417" CreationDate="2019-08-26T20:52:17.383" Score="7" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a couple of comments under my answer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/498862/21441&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), and was about to reply to a comment of the question author when I noticed that the author had accepted the answer and deleted his account. Then, after I hit the &lt;em&gt;Add Comment&lt;/em&gt; button to submit the reply, I noticed that all the comments vanished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why remove the comments so early? Was it assumed that the OP won't ever return to the post to read the reply? Or were the comments somehow deleted automatically when the OP's account was deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T08:04:20.007" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T08:04:20.007" Title="Why did all the comments on my answer vanish so quickly?" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11416" CreationDate="2019-08-26T23:03:11.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other user in your comment exchange shouldn't have had the privilege of commenting. You happened to be commenting as a moderator was cleaning up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the interest of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/293213/280545&quot;&gt;protecting the privacy of users who can't currently participate&lt;/a&gt;, that's probably all that we can say publicly about this event.  Thanks for respecting that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-08-27T18:04:29.993" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T18:04:29.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11419" CreationDate="2019-08-30T04:17:38.803" Score="4" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to notice an account&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/293213/280545&quot;&gt;link removed&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA; shown as suspended until the nonsensical date of “Mar 18 '92 at 16:28“? I am not asking why the account is suspended, but why the “until” date is 27 years in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T09:52:08.237" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T10:04:51.333" Title="Strange account suspension date" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11418" CreationDate="2019-08-30T10:04:51.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a '92 in the future, not in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspensions longer than one year, or coordinated across sites, come from SE employees; the elected diamond moderators can only suspend up to a year.  That particular user was at some point suspended for 99999 days, until the year 2292.  The number of users network-wide with suspensions longer than ten years is very small, so there's no compelling reason to rewrite the date-display code to sometimes show a century digit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T10:04:51.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-07T18:53:42.997" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a very well defined mathematical problem ABOUT physical systems that I put a lot of work into trying to state clearly but it was closed as unclear:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/500262/&quot;&gt;Superluminal change in moment implies Superluminal travel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenters had requested info and I answered each of their requests, one of them requested clarification and I made sure to edit the body to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the community closed the question stating it's not clear what my question was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the mods still actually feel that way? Or did they just feel my question was NOT relevant to physics.stackexchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I went to the help site as requested, revisited the question and am not confident I understand what is missing here, other than perhaps &quot;relevancy&quot; in the sense that the question is trying to classify ALL the ways the schrodinger model can break, and some people may not be interested in this type of classification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-07T19:22:37.633" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T19:22:37.633" Title="Is this question off topic? or is it actually unclear, and if so, what remains unclear about it?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-10T19:06:11.697" Score="-8" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit I'm a little frustrated. Long ago I asked questions from physics that I didn't know the answer to, and these questions were ignored. Now I know a lot of answers. So I asked questions and gave them answers showing that the questions made sense and were correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/500625/&quot;&gt;How to calculate the internal angular acceleration?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, questions and answers are considered undesirable without giving a reason or proof of erroneous claims. What is the difference between such conduct and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Inquisition&lt;/a&gt;? Is anyone else interested in the truth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170793" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T11:30:54.800" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T20:27:46.150" Title="Which criteria rule in Physics?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11423" CreationDate="2019-09-11T00:22:56.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the criteria that “rule” here are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Be clear.&#xA;Be correct (when answering).&#xA;Be concise.&#xA;Be interesting.&#xA;Use proper English.&#xA;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Don’t use images of text or equations.&#xA;Don’t ask a question that can be answered with a quick search of the web or of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that downvoters explain why they have downvoted. Lots of us experience “Why did I get downvoted?” (I certainly have) and it can be painful. Some people will tell you why but others won’t give you any feedback. It is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; job to learn how to ask good questions, not other people’s job (at least not &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;) to teach you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T00:48:16.807" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T00:48:16.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12426" CreationDate="2019-09-11T02:21:44.403" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a thought-provoking answer to my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/502211/&quot;&gt;How many worlds are there during branching in the many worlds interpretation?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anyway for me to re-see the answer before it was deleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T22:15:50.133" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T22:15:50.133" Title="Is it possible to see deleted answers?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12424" CreationDate="2019-09-11T13:39:15.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know one way, but it's likely not a very satisfying answer right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to see the deleted answer, all you need to do is reach 10,000 reputation points!  At 10,000 reputation, you gain access to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;moderation tools privilege&lt;/a&gt; which gives you access to some extra features on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Included with that is the ability to see deleted questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T13:39:15.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12424" CreationDate="2019-09-11T14:17:59.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer in this case was self-deleted by its author, for reasons which they are not required to articulate.  So the respectful thing to do is to let it be.  (Or, as JMac says, earn 10k reputation and come back to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that user notices this meta post they may decide to identify themselves.  But Stack Exchange intentionally makes it difficult to reach out to a specific user who hasn't posted or commented on a particular question or answer, because SE is not a social network. There are many meta discussions on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T14:17:59.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11423" CreationDate="2019-09-11T16:43:03.927" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the majority of dictatorship will kick my questions out, then let me answer my question again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current criteria rule are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-compliance with books. Something that doesn't match the book must be wrong, currently this is proof of falsity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Written in the correct English. Someone who doesn't speak this language can't be right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-It depends on what the sponsor is behind you. Someone who has no back is nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is not important. Arguments, calculations, mathematical evidence now are rubbish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170793" LastEditorUserId="170793" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T17:55:44.913" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T17:55:44.913" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11423" CreationDate="2019-09-11T20:27:46.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer your question by highlighting something you wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11423/which-criteria-rule-in-physics#comment46406_12428&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't need &quot;good relevant advice&quot;, I need answers and verification of my calculations :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want answers and verification of calculations, we're not the right community for you.  We're in the business of providing relevant advice.  If you start exploring &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;this meta site&lt;/a&gt;, you'll find &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; of discussion on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some starting points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/44126&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/44126&quot;&gt;Should any check-my-work questions be made on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391/44126&quot;&gt;My question was closed on Phys.SE. Can you recommend me another internet site where my question might be on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T20:27:46.150" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12431" CreationDate="2019-09-12T21:07:09.097" Score="-2" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the relevant transcript starts here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/51655733#51655733&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/51655733#51655733&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My summary of it goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a derivation I am not content with. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/501145/validity-of-the-derivation-of-time-energy-uncertainty-principle&quot;&gt;post a question&lt;/a&gt; which gets down voted (regarding this derivation after &#xA;commenting on it and recieving no update). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then I ask chat where I'm going wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be fair I probably wasn't using the best language to get my point across.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After some time Semiclassical and bolbteppa not making sense to me (and &#xA;visa-versa).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acuiousmind joins and understands where I'm coming from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It Semiclassical and Acuriousmind reach an understanding where I'm coming &#xA;from eventually. (In fact this whole thing makes semi-classical realise that &#xA;the physical situation he considers it is applicable is beyond it's scope).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acuriousmind explains to me the scope of the applicability is less than what &#xA;I assume (and I agree).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, Bolbteppa does not agree with any of this (infact my objection does &#xA;not make sense to him).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After speaking to Bolbteppa I realise he does not understand my objection &#xA;because of his views on the nuances of this topic. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later on I understand his viewpoint may enable to circumvent my objection &#xA;and I ask a question on physics stack exchange on the same.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I ask several questions in attempts to clarify my understanding. In fact one in paticular if Bolbteppa can circumvent the objection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But after a point acuriousmind seems to lose is initial patience and starts &#xA;typing stuff like.&#xA;14:&quot;Your &quot;objection&quot; is still non-sensical as I explained at length yesterday (the M-T time-energy relation has nothing to do with measurements happening) and I'm not going to repeat it.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I feel this mis-represents my view as my objection is about the scope of applicability of this derivation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In fact, acuriousmind ends it with: &quot;I won't pretend to speak for bolbteppa. I've said twice now (and also yesterday) that your objection is not, in my opinion, well-defined or meaningful. As you don't appear to be willing to hear that, I'm done with this conversation.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm not trying to be thick I genuinely feel I'm trying to learn something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if any other user had mis-represented my objection and intentionally remained silent after that and also accused me of not listening. I would have let it go. I myself feel that I am not the ideal Stackexchange user. However, for Acuriousmind is a moderator so I'd like to hold him to a different standard (perhaps this is my folly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any course of action I can take to prevent this from happening in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T07:15:31.393" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T07:15:31.393" Title="Ethical violation in chat?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="44" ClosedDate="2019-09-13T12:05:46.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12430" CreationDate="2019-09-12T21:26:31.247" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users (whether moderators or not) are free to disengage from any conversation - in chat or on the main site - whenever they like. You are not entitled to anyone's time on this platform (we're all here voluntarily!), and to suggest that it is &quot;unethical&quot; for someone to stop participating in a conversation they no longer deem useful or interesting is simply absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users are also free to be &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; - yes, even moderators! I may have misunderstood you, or you have misunderstood me, or both. This is unfortunate, but also not a moral failing (unless done with ill intent), nor something that can be avoided in all cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing you can do to prevent other users from disengaging or misunderstanding is to express yourself as clearly as you can, and to listen to their criticisms of what you say as fairly as you can. It will still happen from time to time, and not always through any fault of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T21:26:31.247" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12433" CreationDate="2019-09-14T22:54:23.610" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not going to link the specific answer that prompted me to write this post because I want to make a general point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the policy of &lt;em&gt;not forcing users to comment when they downvote&lt;/em&gt;, as best explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2818/37677&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. And I agree with it, mainly for the privacy concern, in order to avoid revenge-voting and animosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I am concerned, I just want to learn physics. &lt;br&gt; I do not claim to be an expert in any particular field, and I use StackExchange questions as an excuse to learn about new topics in order to later provide answers. &lt;br&gt; I am interested in growing from my mistakes, to deepen and strengthen my knowledge on some (if not all) of the fields of physics touched by questions on this site. &lt;br&gt; If someone has downvoted an answer(s) of mine, there might be a flaw in my understanding and I would greatly appreciate to know what that might be, so that I can do my best to correct it. I don't mean just correcting the answer, but also my understanding of that particular topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: is there a way for moderators to act as intermediaries between users who provide an answer, and users who have downvoted said answer? Or alternatively, a chat room where the downvoter remains anonymous?  &lt;br&gt; In short, is there a way for the downvoted user (e.g. me) to receive (anonymous) feedback regarding the reason for the downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T00:27:03.043" Title="How can answerers learn, if the downvotes on their answers are not justified?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12432" CreationDate="2019-09-15T00:27:03.043" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way for moderators to act as intermediaries between users who provide an answer, and users who have downvoted said answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, that's not a job that I want.  Users who can't communicate in a civil manner with each other on our site can spend their time elsewhere.  This is a great community, but it's not the only place to talk to people on the internet.  And users who don't want to participate in a given conversation here don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, is there a way for the downvoted user (e.g. me) to receive (anonymous) feedback regarding the reason for the downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to reach out specifically to an anonymous downvoter, then no, there is no way to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you want is &lt;em&gt;feedback on your post&lt;/em&gt;, the right thing to do is to politely ask for people's opinions in chat or on meta.  You may or may not get feedback from people who have already voted, but you'll definitely get feedback.  In general I would expect you'd get better feedback from one of those discussion fora than by trading messages with someone who's not thrilled about offering it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that a single downvote means basically nothing.  It may mean that you've made a low-quality post that would benefit from feedback, but it may also mean that someone was having a bad day for reasons that have nothing to do with you.  Or it may have been an accidental misclick.  (A while back, I had a post that I was proud of which got a pile of upvotes and a downvote that didn't make sense to me.  A few days later it received a trivial edit whose edit description was, &quot;how did I downvote this? I had to edit to change to upvote.&quot; I thought this was nuts, and then promptly discovered that I had accidentally downvoted someone else.)  It's more productive to contribute a lot and look for patterns in your feedback than it is to try and address every bit of negativity individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T00:27:03.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-18T19:15:17.077" Score="-3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question a few months ago-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/479846/proof-of-ohms-law&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/479846/proof-of-ohms-law&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;auto-deleted&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0SrqD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking for a particular proof and explicitly mentioned it, but still it was moderator hammered even though the comments state that the questions being linked are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the answers are doing justice to my query, and that is because they aren't supposed to. They were answered keeping in mind the original question which may seem related in terms of looking for a proof, however, they are widely different as they look for proofs in different domains of physics, namely classical mechanics and quantum mechanics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please reopen the question and if not possible please state a proper justification for closing it as the closing notes are not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As S.V. pointed out in the comments, my question is not a duplicate because of the following-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am specifically asking for a quantum mechanics based proof and claiming it &lt;em&gt;exists&lt;/em&gt; on the basis of a reputed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question is asking for the possibility of there being proofs based on Maxwell's theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the other questions had no accepted answers which in any case weren't appropriate for my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: In case anyone's wondering why I am asking this after such a long time, it's because I was inactive for a while and just started using SE again recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user204000" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T13:31:44.210" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T13:31:44.210" Title="Why was my question closed even though the duplicate is different and was unanswered?" Tags="|discussion|support|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12434" CreationDate="2019-09-18T21:00:52.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/479846/2&quot;&gt;current form&lt;/a&gt;, I think the question is &quot;too broad,&quot; which is another reason that we close questions.  In general we don't change the close reasons on closed questions that don't survive the reopen queue; we just leave them closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T21:00:52.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-19T08:56:15.937" Score="0" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to improve my penning-down-a-question skills. I have been through &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;the guidelines&lt;/a&gt; and this great &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9959/how-to-ask-a-good-question/27933#27933&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;. I was hoping to get some examples (/list) of a well phrased question. In order to help my own question framing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would any user like to provide such examples (/list)? More specifically, examples (/list) which clearly shows the questioner posting on a nuanced topic and going the extra mile so that the audience has clarity what he/she is going about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are questions that everyone can agree are well put. And there is visible effort that the questioner has gone the extra mile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-21T14:15:17.310" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T14:15:17.310" Title="Examples of the questioner going the extra mile" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-26T17:56:19.330" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m asking because I noticed a member who has asked five questions, all of which have been significantly downvoted (on average, worse than -7), but who has not received a ban. I thought that members who consistently ask badly-received questions got some temporary suspension of their right to ask more questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T18:49:37.187" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T18:49:37.187" Title="Are the criteria for an automatic question ban known?" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2019-09-26T18:39:37.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-28T15:01:34.567" Score="2" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/111770/150551&quot;&gt;This question on basic principles of image formation in medical MRI&lt;/a&gt; was asked in May 2014, received an accepted answer at the time, and was left unchallenged until August 2019, at which point I decided to attempt to summarize in some detail the topic in an answer that was well received. Soon after, another &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/496241/150551&quot;&gt;(greatly underappreciated) answer by @Farcher&lt;/a&gt; appeared. In the meantime the original question (as well as the accepted answer) went through quite an upsurge of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this positive response in general, a decision was made to close the question as off-topic &lt;strong&gt;because it was considered to belong in engineering&lt;/strong&gt;. I did accept that as part of the rules of the game after getting a response to a flag prompting me to bring up the issue in Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that time I opted not to write a question in Meta because it was bound to be received as self-serving. However, the question has been now reopened, so it may be a good time to bring this point up as an abstract, productive discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is self-explanatory, and what follows are my arguments to consider a more flexible embrace to questions and answers on MRI topics, as well as other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;engineering physics&lt;/a&gt; subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first exhibit is the fact that there are many books that in one way or another (either in the title or in the preface) are presented as MRI &quot;physics&quot; even though they focus their contents on exactly the concepts in the post referenced above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uFJCm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uFJCm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second (and in no particular order of importance), I see that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/mri-physics-question.941999/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Forum&lt;/a&gt; has a similar post, which gathered quite a bit of activity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kVaei.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kVaei.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there are even more purely engineering type of questions in the same forum, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/mri-imaging.321239/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; asking why applying gradients to a superconducting magnet is going to produce audible noise, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/mri-spin-echo-sequence-and-stir.960671/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this other one&lt;/a&gt; strictly engineering question on sequence design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, MRI is part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_physics#Areas_of_specialty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;medical imaging physics&lt;/a&gt;, a branch of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;medical physics&lt;/a&gt;, in turn a branch of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;engineering physics&lt;/a&gt;. MRI is also part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;applied physics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/29c4t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/29c4t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines, a search for MRI on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aps.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Physical Society&lt;/a&gt; does yield background MRI topics of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CbPFR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CbPFR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I would point out that we have appropriate tags for these types of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WjBpf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WjBpf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150551" LastEditorUserId="150551" LastEditDate="2019-09-29T19:14:30.990" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T13:55:49.097" Title="Can we consider MR Imaging questions as on-topic unless they ask for specific engineering solutions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12439" CreationDate="2019-09-28T15:44:02.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm generally a big supporter of engineering questions when they are about the underlying physics. This one is a bit of a unique case though. There were 2 votes to close as &quot;too broad,&quot; and two votes to close as &quot;engineering.&quot; I could have been swayed either way and I distinctly remember thinking &quot;Well, if I'm wrong on it being engineering, I would still vote to close as too broad anyway, so the effect is the same.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth recognizing that our &quot;too broad&quot; definition is used for things that could have an entire book written about them. As it turns out, your post here included covers of books written to explain that question. So it wouldn't be out of line to say it is too broad in its current form. If it had asked about particular components of the process, it wouldn't be nearly as broad and would be entirely on topic (in my opinion). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the question was answered and so somebody could say &quot;It can't be too broad if answers were written!&quot; But, I evaluate questions on the question alone. Whether answers exist or not doesn't matter. A great answer can't save an off-topic question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the main question, I don't think that, in general, MRI questions are off-topic. But, this particular question had a few things going on that make it not as clear, and not about MRI per se. That said, the community reopened it, so the process worked as designed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, I want to point out that just because we have tags for something, doesn't mean it is on-topic. Tags are used to categorize, not define whether it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T15:44:02.540" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12439" CreationDate="2019-09-29T10:19:59.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the basic issue here is that (as Lewis Carroll remarked) &quot;the thing&quot; and &quot;the name of the thing&quot; are two things, not one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing named &quot;Medical Physics&quot; is in reality a branch of engineering: the mission statement of the European Federation of Medical Physicists (quoted from Wikipedia) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Medical Physicists will contribute to maintaining and improving the&#xA;  quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of healthcare services through&#xA;  patient-oriented activities requiring expert action, involvement or&#xA;  advice regarding the specification, selection, acceptance testing,&#xA;  commissioning, quality assurance/control and optimised clinical use of&#xA;  medical devices and regarding patient risks and protection from&#xA;  associated physical agents (e.g., x-rays, electromagnetic fields,&#xA;  laser light, radionuclides) including the prevention of unintended or&#xA;  accidental exposures; all activities will be based on current best&#xA;  evidence or own scientific research when the available evidence is not&#xA;  sufficient. The scope includes risks to volunteers in biomedical&#xA;  research, carers and comforters. The scope often includes risks to&#xA;  workers and public particularly when these impact patient risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any other field, &quot;quality&quot;, &quot;safety&quot;, &quot;cost-effectiveness&quot;, &quot;quality assurance&quot;, etc are in the domain of engineering, not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is also a discipline called &quot;Medical Engineering&quot;, which is basically the old usage of &quot;engineer&quot; as a synonym for &quot;technician.&quot; To quote the careers section of the NHS (UK) website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Medical engineering refers to the process of checking medical&#xA;  equipment to make sure it’s working properly and is safe to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument that &quot;MRI is covered in a Medical Physics degree, therefore questions about MRI are on-topic on Physics.SE&quot; is no more (or less) valid than an argument that &quot;Options trading is covered in a Financial Engineering degree, therefore questions about options trading are on-topic on Engineering.SE.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the final analysis, it's an &lt;em&gt;arbitrary&lt;/em&gt; decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123188" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T10:19:59.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-29T13:33:57.420" Score="-1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you do it? I don't see a &quot;sign/log out&quot; button anywhere. The quality thing is really annoying right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243544" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-09-29T14:56:32.557" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T16:21:42.447" Title="How to sign/log out on this website?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12442" CreationDate="2019-09-29T16:21:42.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UxHun.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UxHun.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing more to say really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T16:21:42.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12439" CreationDate="2019-09-29T22:34:54.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will say that I voted to close this question, although I do not remember why. I think it was because it was an engineering question (most likely) or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can tell you for sure I did not think &quot;Ah a question about MR imaging...this must be about engineering.&quot; I think there are many topics on this site that could be great physics questions as well as not physics questions at all. I don't think the topic alone determines if it is on-topic or not. Therefore, saying &quot;MR imaging questions (or any subject) are on/off - topic&quot; is not something I think anyone should say.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to take it case-by-case. In this case there are two issues. I think that understanding how one builds an image from MRI data is not a physics question. I say this because one could probably think of multiple ways to take the actual data and make some sort of image, but the physics behind MRI will be the same in all cases. Therefore, this question, to me, seems more like an engineering question. How do we take what we know about the physics of MRI, take our data, and produce a useful image? That &quot;the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question might have been a little bit too broad, but I am not sure if it really is too broad, or if it is just a question that requires a lengthy answer (as you can tell from what was submitted). I do not think lengthy answer necessarily means too broad, but I could see how this question would be taken as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on some discussions in the comments, I think I need to clarify my position in more than just a comment's-worth of space:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is an interesting discussion. I am always trying to understand more about how this site operates and what its community wants. I agree that the distinction is not always clear. As I have been saying though, I do not think a question should be considered on- or off- topic based on its subject but rather based on the question in its entirety. So I agree that MRI, LHC, LIGO, etc. questions definitely deal with physics, but questions asked on this site about these topics (or really any topic) could be on-topic or could be off-topic. The question itself needs to be looked at in each scenario. In case I am not being clear again I will reiterate: I am not saying MRI, LHC, LIGO, etc. should be considered to be “not physics”, “less physics”, etc. I cannot speak to others who originally voted to close, but I am being honest in saying this; I have no reason to be deceptive here. I did not vote to close because the question is about MRI. I am not arguing whether MRI should be considered to be physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this question was not specifically asking about physics concepts. To me it even seems like the question is saying “I understand the physics of MRI, but I do not understand how the image is formed.” Of course, on its own it is a good and important question. It has attracted many great answers then even still discuss the physics of MRI. However, as others have also stated, a question should stand on its own, not be based on the answers or potential answers associated with it. If good answers or the potential for good answers determined if a question was on-topic, then we would need to restructure many of the VTC reasons. Users should be able to post homework questions without prior work if someone can give an excellent solution. Users should be able to post broad questions that leave possibility of amazing manifestos to posted. Users should be able to post opinion-based questions so that other users can express amazing opinions with amazing discussions. Why not allow really good pure engineering and mathematics questions? Those could garnish amazing answers too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think this is where the issue is. Great answers or potential for great answers cannot determine if a question is on-topic. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and if I see a question that, to me, seems to not really ask about a physics concept (once again, not because it is MRI, but because of what was stated in the question) then I am going to vote to close since that is the policy of the site. Am I being too strict? Possibly sometimes. Could we lose great questions and answers? Most likely, yes. But to me it is less subjective than basing a question on answers or potential answers. Typically questions that could have great answers just belong somewhere else. This is not the only site for amazing questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, I will say that my answer here is not a petition for this question to be closed. The above is my reasoning and my own thinking. I do not expect (nor want) everyone to agree with me, which is why I am grateful that 5 votes are needed to close a question, and why others can vote to reopen questions. If the community thinks this question is fine, then that is fine with me. But that doesn’t change my own opinion on this question nor why I originally voted to close it, which is what this answer was intended to be about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, just in case someone still feels like saying this, I am not saying MRI does not involve physics, nor am I saying MRI questions do not belong on this site. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;For a different example, projectile motion seems like a great physics topic. However, a question asking how one tracks the position of an object undergoing projectile motion I would say should be closed as an engineering question. Also, I would say a question asking &quot;What are common problem solving techniques for projectile motion problems?&quot; should be closed as being too broad. The subject doesn't determine if it is on/off -topic. The actual question determines that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T13:55:49.097" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T13:55:49.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-03T07:07:38.670" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/505555/what-is-the-magnetic-field-of-a-radially-moving-current&quot;&gt;What is the magnetic field of a radially moving current?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is the magnetic field of a radially moving current?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as a duplicate of &quot;Why is the magnetic field of a spherically symmetric current zero?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless we share a different definition of the word duplicate, asking what is the amount of something and why is the amount of something this value, are not the same as the latter assumes an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The said answer is false because it takes unrealistic assumptions regarding the real world experiment I described. There WILL be a magnetic field.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody cared answering my concerns between the time it was first voted to close and its closing days later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not look good. &quot;probably_someone&quot;, who answered my question, mentioned the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it would seem only the title of the question was used to declare it a duplicate and in a rather loose way. And I still did not get an answer to my real question either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-10-05T17:24:19.367" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T17:24:19.367" Title="False duplicate" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12479" CreationDate="2019-10-08T21:23:28.277" Score="15" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;After an extended debate that lasted several years, our community&#xA;seems to have settled into a pretty consistent treatment of&#xA;homework-like questions.  When such a question is closed, a banner&#xA;appears under the question which currently says, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should ask about a &lt;strong&gt;specific physics&#xA;    concept&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;show some effort&lt;/strong&gt; to work through the problem. We want&#xA;    our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future&#xA;    users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;our meta&#xA;    site&lt;/a&gt; for&#xA;    more guidance on how to edit your question to make it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this guidance is frequently misleading to new users, because&#xA;it suggests that editing a non-conceptual question to show some&#xA;minimal mathematical effort might make it on-topic.  The community has&#xA;been quite clear that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; on&#xA;topic&lt;/a&gt;, but some new&#xA;users who attempt to follow our guidance don't seem to understand&#xA;this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this Meta discussion is emphatically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to propose any&#xA;change to the way that we process homework and homework-like&#xA;questions, but to propose &lt;strong&gt;changing the close reason to better document&#xA;what our community actually does&lt;/strong&gt; for the benefit of outsiders and&#xA;newcomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that &quot;answers&quot; to this question contain&#xA;alternative messages to include in the banner for closed homework-like&#xA;questions, to be voted up or down based on their suitability.  (Please&#xA;avoid suggestions that exceed the 500-character maximum length.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's plan on coming to a consensus this month, and making any changes around the beginning of November.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-11-03T23:21:35.023" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T23:21:35.023" Title="Should we re-word the homework-like close reason to better match how we actually deal with homework-like questions?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-08T21:23:28.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is based on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10485/44126&quot;&gt;canned comment frequently posted by&#xA;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;but with an additional sentence to remind readers that &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;homework-like questions may also be a poor use of everyone's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are generally considered off-topic here. We intend our questions to be potentially useful to a broader set of users than just the one asking, and prefer &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; questions over those just asking for a specific computation.  Likewise, complete but non-conceptual answers to homework-like questions may be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(character count: 482/500)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited so that votes can change, now that there's another new suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-10-18T13:56:36.813" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T13:56:36.813" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-08T21:24:53.293" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think that everything is fine how it is now, and we shouldn't change the wording of the close banner that appears under closed homework-like questions, you might upvote this answer to record that sentiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T21:24:53.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-09T01:08:55.900" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My time machine &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4620/wording-of-the-homework-close-reason?rq=1&quot;&gt;took me back 6 years&lt;/a&gt; and found this alternate wording (updated to include the same check-my-work link and slightly changed to fit character limits):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to understand the problem. The question must be about understanding the concept; questions that just ask us to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/&quot;&gt;check your work&lt;/a&gt; are off topic. We want our questions to be useful to the broader community, and to future users. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;our meta site&lt;/a&gt; for more guidance on how to improve your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Character count: 480/500)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an alternate wording that communicates similar messages. It is almost a hybrid of the existing close message and one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12449/6634&quot;&gt;proposed new close reasons&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-10-09T03:35:04.100" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T03:35:04.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T08:30:46.177" Score="-8" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I desire to contribute for the community. I want to work within the community guidelines while contributing original perspectives. Please note that &quot;original perspective&quot; does not automatically equate as &quot;non-mainstream&quot;. I'm attempting to walk this fine line, and the challenge for your moderators is to distinguish between unfamiliar but valid content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/507014/40586&quot;&gt;Could theory of Relativity be overlooking a relationship between time and force?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question title does not question the validity of Einstein's work. It only asks if something was overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then identify an observation that is strictly defined by empirical measurement. I then describe the circumstance of the observation and measurement within terms of &quot;what is actually occurring within a given system, and within strict literal terms&quot;. In effect, there is nothing within this post that constitutes as being &quot;theoretical&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not venturing theory, but rather just describing the world as it does occur in front of our very eyes, then how can it be said to contradict mainstream? This is my attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I please have my post assesses to judge if I do in fact achieve these criteria? Original and valid content might be an asset for the community, and I'm not motivated to contribute generic work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't be considered as remarkable that accelerated rates of a force-driven system extend implication to that systems operational forces. Accelerated rates empirically define as a modulated value of force. That is simply how the world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time dilation effect is defined by modulated rates of force-force driven systems. Time dilation looks like acceleration and defines as acceleration. Time dilation is entirely indistinguishable from acceleration caused by force. Thats interesting and deserves inquiry, an example of an equivalence that demonstrates a real relationship between values of force and values of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General Relativity can be thought of as possessing two personalities, gravitational force, and spacetime. How exactly Spacetime relates to the generation of gravitational force is a little ambiguous, you have to admit? &quot;bodies following straight lines in curved space?&quot;. At some point we need to develop this conversation, and that's going to necessitate inquiry relating properties of time and force. If we can have that conversation within terms of an empirically based observation and measurement, then all the better. Do we outlaw the inquiry because it sounds unfamiliar? Do we only allow questions that have sanctioned answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please look past the unfamiliarity of this observation and validate that it is empirically verifiable. Observational and not theoretical. How could content that fits these criteria be considered as inappropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Identification of natural relationships is an ultimate goal for science&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your consideration, and I hope my unique brand of contribution can be of use here. I'm willing to take advice on how to modify my approach so that it suits your preferences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40586" LastEditorUserId="4888" LastEditDate="2019-10-12T13:19:23.623" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T13:19:23.623" Title="How can an observation, an empirical measurement be considered to be none mainstream theory?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-10-11T04:27:33.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2019-10-10T10:55:51.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that your linked question uses non-standard terminology, or at least, standard terminology in non-standard ways. That makes the question &quot;smell&quot; non-mainstream on first glance. And those readers who &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; immediately categorize your post as non-mainstream have to invest extra effort trying to read it, and risk misinterpreting what you're trying to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can edit your question, that may help matters. Even changing the title so that it doesn't read like an attack on mainstream relativity would be an improvement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you must use non-standard jargon you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to clearly and carefully define it, to avoid misleading or confusing your readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T10:55:51.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2019-10-10T17:03:23.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;“What topics can I ask about here?”&lt;/a&gt; page says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some kinds of questions should not be asked here:&#xA;  ...&#xA;  Non-mainstream physics, including pitches for personal theories.&#xA;  We deal with mainstream physics here. Anything that couldn't be published in a reputable journal is not appropriate on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that any reputable journal would publish your observation. If you disagree, then you should first &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; it published in such a journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can be frank, your post struck me as mostly gibberish. I feel that you need to learn &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more about physics, and how physicists talk about it, before expecting to be able to make original contributions to the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I suggest studying is how forces transform under Lorentz transformations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2019-10-10T17:14:02.133" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T17:14:02.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2019-10-10T21:14:38.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a professional physicist. What I remember from college though, is that when we create theory, we usually start with some observation, and then use mathematics to make some predictions about real world. About coordinates, velocities, and forces. Sort of what happened with quantum physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we want to adjust existing theory, we again take observations, write some new equations, and establish the parameter space where new equations work better than the old ones (transition from Newtonian mechanics to relativity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't think your problem is being &quot;non mainstream&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; My problem with your original and Meta questions is that there is nothing that can be discussed in terms of mathematics or physics. I see that you would like to have a &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps a conversation. &lt;strong&gt;This website is not designed to help you with discussions&lt;/strong&gt;. Maybe you need to talk in person to a physics professor. She might be willing to have a discussion with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To improve, perhaps write some predictions. Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, I think [...skipped..]. It follows that we should see X and Y, but existing theory doesn't predict that. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75471/what-prevents-this-magnetic-perpetuum-mobile-from-working&quot;&gt;Where did I go wrong&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer might be &quot;nowhere&quot; and then you invent new physics. Congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73635" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T21:14:38.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2019-10-10T22:08:59.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original question is unclear AND non-mainstream.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Modulated force” is not defined and not mainstream terminology.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statements “An ideal and simplest of clocks might be a rotating inertial disk, free of all other effects. The sole property associated with its system being inertial mass, inertial force” are contradictory since, if the disk is free of all other effects, there would be no force (inertial or otherwise) acting on it.  (BTW inertial mass is not the same as inertial force).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing has been clearly identified as “an observation that is strictly defined by empirical measurement”.  Einstein (and those who followed) used mirrors and (massless) light pulses to set up clocks, not force-driven systems.  The core assumption of SR is that the speed of light is an invariant quantity, and time dilation along with other effects &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; from this.  How exactly introducing a mysterious moduluated force would lead to the same experimental verification of all these effects is not clear at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence of this modulated force and it does not seem to solve any outstanding problem.  Indeed to me it seems to complicate matters - at least until the OP points to some experimental fact accounted this modulated force and not accounted currently - since ignoring this (on purpose or by oversight) causes no harm to our current understanding of space time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the question is just an editorial:  it is not clear what connection Einstein has missed or what “deeper associated truth of the worlds mode of operation“ means in practice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T22:08:59.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12458" CreationDate="2019-10-11T09:27:43.277" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question on the Physics stack exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/507276/&quot;&gt;Derivation of temperature / entropy relation from statistical mechanics&lt;/a&gt;. It was put on hold for being 'off-topic'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question looks like a banal homework question but I think it is actually a good example of the barrier between immediately linking statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. I start with some very standard statistical mechanics definitions and try to derive a well known equality from thermodynamics. The derivation fails and I don't think this is through mathematical error. I have written what I think is the answer, but a commenter has suggested that it goes deeper than that. In any case, the answer is not obvious to me and commenters on the question have agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it be re-opened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I hope I'm following etiquette by posting in here, I'm following &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;these guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68222" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T20:04:55.637" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T20:07:10.927" Title="Request to re-open statistical mechanics question" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12457" CreationDate="2019-10-11T20:07:10.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good example of a question which is more subtle than it appears on a casual read, and an appropriate use of Meta as part of the re-opening process.  We're glad to have you here as a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that your question is re-opened, consider posting your answer (preserved in the question's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/507276/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;) as a proper answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T20:07:10.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-12T07:23:44.690" Score="-5" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we know that the physics Stack Exchange site is an international website, there must be a language translation technique for non-English speakers as they face problems to express them freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230533" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-10-23T23:26:23.503" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T09:40:45.640" Title="Shouldn't there be a language translation technique on the physics Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12464" CreationDate="2019-10-15T11:02:11.227" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/508148/sending-information-with-quantum-entanglement&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was asked and I believe the question itself is fine, but my question regards the edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited the question by paragraphing it and improving the grammar in many areas. The edit I made has since been overridden and rolled back and I am at a loss as to why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All thoughts / comments appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123649" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T11:20:45.433" Title="Edit rollback query" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12463" CreationDate="2019-10-15T11:20:45.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't provide a definitive answer because it was the question owner that rolled back the changes. I can say that your edits were good -- please continue to make improvements like this to questions you see that need it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people do not like the idea of other people editing their text, regardless of the changes made. Perhaps that was the motivation here as well, but that is speculation. If that's the case, hopefully as they participate more, they will get used to how things work here and will appreciate the dedication to clarity and quality the editing process enables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, do not worry too much about it. If you think a rollback is particularly problematic, go ahead and flag it for moderator attention. We will look into it. Sometimes it isn't worth losing sleep over and it's best to just move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T11:20:45.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-15T15:02:18.540" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic here, particularly when they are about specific computations instead of asking about the conceptual frameworks that underlie the calculations. Homework questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience, but &lt;strong&gt;please read the links above carefully&lt;/strong&gt; before editing. Note that complete answers may be removed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(character count: 498/500)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-10-18T09:24:17.000" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T09:24:17.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12459" CreationDate="2019-10-16T12:26:36.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There simply are no such language translation tools &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; technical language is too complicated, and machine translation is (intrinsically?) not good enough to handle it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; tool in mind that you'd like to propose, then you're obviously welcome to propose it. However, it is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; job to go and research what tools there are out there, and to put forward a compelling case for why any individual tool you find should be added to the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T09:40:45.640" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T09:40:45.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12468" CreationDate="2019-10-16T16:21:23.833" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm kinda sure that I have seen direct links to answers posted before. How can I get a link to a particular answer? Or am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213987" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-16T16:43:56.103" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T17:44:04.207" Title="How to get a direct link to a particular answer?" Tags="|support|questions|answers|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12467" CreationDate="2019-10-16T17:44:04.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers are followed by several links, one of which is &quot;share.&quot; Clicking &quot;share&quot; opens a little modal window with the permalink in a text box and a button that lets you copy it to your clipboard.  But you can also right-click (or long-tap) the &quot;share&quot; link and copy it to the clipboard using the context menu in your browser, same as other links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;share&quot; link includes your user number after the question/answer ID number.  If you don't want people who follow your link to know that it came from you, it's fine to leave the user number off.  The user-identified links are how you earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/54/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/55/booster&quot;&gt;Booster&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/56/publicist&quot;&gt;Publicist&lt;/a&gt; badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a direct link to a specific &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt;, right-click its timestamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T17:44:04.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-17T07:38:51.940" Score="-4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning: Apparently one is not moderator after they reached 10K, unlike what SE privilege help pages declare, which led to the following incorrect assumption of the answer's author directly erasing comments to their answer. Regardless of that, I didn't vote to close this question because I still look for answers regarding comments asking for details being erased before I can read them (assuming the other comment erased was Emilio Pisanty's comment clarifying the chapter's name, which is uncertain), and/or before I get notified my concern was answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following relates to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/505633/2451&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; written by Emilio Pisanty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, the said answer was referring to a chapter that did not exist in the most recent edition (3rd) of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, I commented about it, asking for details about the edition Emilio Pisanty was referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a while, I noticed my comment was erased and Emilio Pisanty had updated their answer so as to clarify which chapter they were refering to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is the following one, in case this is not self-explanatory already: SE's answers contain plenty of comments asking for corrections and they were not erased after the answers were updated, let alone by someone else than the comment's author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, while I receive a notification after a comment or an answer was posted, I was not notified of the edition of Emilio Pisanty's answer and it took me some time to figure what was going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am asking for a general statement about the right of moderators to erase comments on their own answers so as to make them look prettier, as the moderator also appears to be Emilio Pisanty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I assumed one gained moderation privileges after reaching a specific reputation score, as the following page states:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T18:14:24.613" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T18:15:06.773" Title="Erasing comments for questionable reasons" Tags="|discussion|comments|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12469" CreationDate="2019-10-17T08:03:56.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/8563/emilio-pisanty&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty&lt;/a&gt; is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;moderator&lt;/a&gt;, and therefore cannot delete comments by other users. 2 comments under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/505633/2451&quot;&gt;Emilio Pisanty's answer&lt;/a&gt; were flagged by users as &lt;em&gt;obsolete/no longer needed&lt;/em&gt; and afterwards deleted by moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T18:15:06.773" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T18:15:06.773" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-17T08:57:56.127" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parent question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12469/&quot;&gt;Erasing comments for questionable reasons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get a general policy. My initial concern was about comments to answers that asked for details and/or corrections, and were erased as soon as the answer was updated accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous comments all over SE that were asking for answers updates and were kept online even though the answer was updated. Personnally I think this is good for the question OP because this way they can keep track of answers evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, technically those comments are rendered useless by the updates. So they do fall under the flag category &quot;no longer needed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T10:04:43.540" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T10:06:30.820" Title="Should we flag all comments that are no longer needed?" Tags="|discussion|comments|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12471" CreationDate="2019-10-17T10:06:30.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we flag all comments that are no longer needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are intended to ask for clarification and provide feedback to questions and answers; they are not intended to help anyone keep track of anything. Once those clarifications and feedback have been incorporated into the post, the comments should be deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a threaded forum: the flow when reading this site should be Question, Answer, done. We do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want to have threads that expect the reader to parse pages of back-and-forth to understand what's being asked, or read through reams of ancient debate to find out what the conclusion was. If the content of the comments has been incorporated into the post, the comments' purpose is fulfilled and they become pure noise, which dilutes the importance of other comments on that thread, or which keeps the reader around for longer than they need to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a first approach, comments on SE are second-class citizens and may be removed by moderators at any point. Some comments stick around because they provide lasting value, but that's not the case when they have been incorporated into the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find such comments, flag them as No Longer Needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T10:06:30.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-18T04:50:09.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are generally considered off-topic here, particularly when they are about specific computations instead of concepts that underlie calculations. Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience, but please read the links above carefully before editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Characters: 439/500&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the present &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12465/&quot;&gt;top-voted answer here&lt;/a&gt; with the following changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Added the word &quot;generally&quot; in the first line, to make it a bit less aggressive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various grammatical changes to ensure consistent pluralization in the section about &quot;frameworks that &lt;em&gt;underlie&lt;/em&gt; calculations&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Conceptual frameworks&quot; is too much of a mouthful for people who don't speak English as a first language. &quot;Concepts&quot; works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That last sentence about deleting answers just doesn't belong here, and has been deleted&lt;/strong&gt;. I get that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12448/should-we-re-word-the-homework-like-close-reason-to-better-match-how-we-actually?cb=1#comment46608_12449&quot;&gt;you want more people to see that those answers can be deleted&lt;/a&gt; but this isn't a sensible place at all. It will be shown to 3k+ rep users when they cast close votes, and then it will be shown to everyone &lt;em&gt;after the question is closed and answers cannot be added&lt;/em&gt;. That doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense to point people to close banners when you delete their direct answer to homework: the banner wasn't there when they wrote the answer. If they're answering such questions, they probably aren't the kind who'll read the help center thoroughly and look at close reasons on other closed questions before answering questions. The only option is to recommend that users who do moderation-related activities should include the point about homework answers being deletion-prone in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10485/&quot;&gt;canned comments&lt;/a&gt;, because people who answer those questions probably look at comments under the questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="245116" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T04:50:09.680" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-21T19:57:13.950" Score="13" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked and answered a question on the main site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/508962/what-are-the-energy-eigenstates-for-a-modified-quantum-harmonic-oscillator/508963?noredirect=1#comment1147793_508963&quot;&gt;What are the Energy eigenstates for a modified quantum harmonic oscillator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, this question ended up being re-tagged as homework, which I understand. While the question is not the sort of question addressed in even relatively advanced quantum mechanics books, it has a straightforward answer that requires a straightforward conceptual and mathematical explanation that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be addressed in a quantum mechanics class (although, in my experience, it absolutely never is). While I think that labeling this as homework is unhelpful (because it groups this question in with &lt;em&gt;tutoring-style questions&lt;/em&gt; - the bane of this StackExchange) and unfair (since a lot of people who I think might appreciate the answer block the homework tag), I understand why it was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this question has a clear conceptual question built on an obvious hole the curriculum of standard physics textbooks: &lt;strong&gt;How can the series solution only converge if the series terminates?&lt;/strong&gt; The answer, as I explain, is that that statement is simply misleading, and the actual solution goes entirely unaddressed in standard references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stated a clear conceptual question in my original post, and I then give a clear and complete solution to the conundrum in my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am confused about two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;strong&gt;Why was my answer deleted?&lt;/strong&gt; Is this a new standard that off-topic questions have their answers deleted? That seems wasteful and unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;strong&gt;Why was my question marked as off-topic?&lt;/strong&gt; I stated a clear conceptual question (i.e. how can a series solution converge without terminating if the references say that it doesn't), and I showed plenty of effort considering the detailed answer that I gave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a perfectly legitimate Q&amp;amp;A-style question being unjustly swept into the homework trash heap. It seems clear to me that this question and answer is well-outside what the homework tag is meant to protect against, and I think its worth re-considering if this action against my question was genuinely justified or appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32185" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-10-21T22:18:35.657" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T22:18:35.657" Title="Why was my recent answer deleted, and was it really an appropriate action?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12474" CreationDate="2019-10-21T22:07:06.247" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; is mostly about &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; homework-like questions, but there is a policy for how to answer them as well near the end of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is pretty well covered by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/415&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the Math Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Providing an answer that doesn't help&#xA;    a student learn is not in the&#xA;    student's own best interest, and if a&#xA;    solution complete enough to be copied&#xA;    verbatim and handed in is given&#xA;    immediately, it will encourage more&#xA;    people to use the site as a free&#xA;    homework service. In the spirit of&#xA;    creating a lasting resource of&#xA;    mathematical knowledge, you may come&#xA;    back after a suitable amount of time&#xA;    and edit your response to include a&#xA;    more complete answer. Or even better,&#xA;    the student can post his own correct&#xA;    answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer to a homework-type question that gives away a complete or near-complete solution, in most cases it will be temporarily deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The temporary deletion is just what it says -- we will delete complete or near complete answers to homework-like questions, and at some point we will restore the answer. We usually wait awhile so that whatever homework assignment prompted the question is turned in and whatever improper utility that can be gained has passed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is a bit of an edge-case -- your answer did provide a complete/near-complete answer and was temporarily deleted. A comment was left on the answer to that effect. But, well, since you answered your own question then temporarily deleting it doesn't really have the same impact. For starters, you already know the answer! And two, you can still see your deleted posts, and so it doesn't do anything to prevent you from using the information in it right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happened here is that our usual policy of temporarily deleting answers to a homework-like question was applied -- the answer was deleted temporarily, and a comment was left to that effect. When it was deleted, we didn't realize it was a self-answered question. That's a good sign that we are evaluating posts on their own and not looking at who is involved in asking and answering. It's pretty infrequent that a homework-like question is self-answered right away. Usually a self-answer comes much later when the person asking has worked it out on their own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have un-deleted the answer. But if others provide(d) full answers, those would still be temporarily deleted in accordance with the policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second question about why this was closed as homework -- that is something I cannot answer. But there is a process to reopen questions. If you edit the question, it will put it into a review queue for being reopened. If your edits make it so that it is clearly not homework-like, then the system should work and it can be reopened. The other way to draw attention to it is by posting here, like you have done. There is already 1 reopen vote, and so give it some time for the reopen system to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-10-21T22:17:21.237" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T22:17:21.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-22T07:48:44.447" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like this recent post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/37303/resources-for-learning-chemistry&quot;&gt;Chemistry SE&lt;/a&gt; which is the collection for different types of resources for learning Chemistry ( which I find quite useful) do we have any such thing over here at Physics SE? If not,  then why not? Is it possible do it( if it isn't already available)? &#xA;What I think is that if we too start  such a project then it would help in gathering all those scattered resource recommendation at the same place and help the learning community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastActivityDate="2019-10-22T18:55:49.870" Title="Resource recommendation for Physics" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12476" CreationDate="2019-10-22T18:55:49.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phys.SE has a central/primary &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12175/2451&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, although it is currently closed and locked. The reason for the latter is partly because maintenance takes a lot of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently Phys.SE has also more than 1500 secondary &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;res. recom. qs&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online resources are viewed as part of res. recommendations, cf. its  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/resource-recommendations/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However, Phys.SE usually does not accept res. recom. qs that specifically ask for online resources only, partly because they are prone to link rot. On the other hand, Phys.SE allows answers that only recommend online resources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-10-22T18:55:49.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-24T23:36:04.887" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I liked the answer by @EmilioPisanty but I wanted to simplify the language a little bit (after all, there are a lot of non-native speakers and younger people active on the site) and clarify the last sentence. I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://app.readable.com/text/?demo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tool&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;optimise&quot; the readability of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are&#xA;  considered off-topic on this site, in particular when they ask about&#xA;  specific computations instead of the underlying Physics concepts.&#xA;  Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader&#xA;  audience. If you intend to modify your question, &lt;strong&gt;please read the&#xA;  links above carefully&lt;/strong&gt; before editing. Note that answers with&#xA;  complete solutions may be deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Character count: 448/500)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result of the &quot;optimisation&quot; was that both of the school-grade based scores were reduced by more than 2 years (The Gunning-Fog index&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; decreased from 17.3 in Emilio's proposal, a college graduate level, to 15.1 in mine, a college junior level).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt;Note: The Flesch-Kincaid score was designed to grade from 4th to 12th grade so it's not appropriate in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user137661" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T23:36:04.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12481" CreationDate="2019-10-25T07:53:55.153" Score="-3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/509908/why-does-frictional-force-cause-a-car-to-move-also-is-friction-a-reaction-forc&quot;&gt;Why does frictional force cause a car to move? Also, is friction a reaction force?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the above link for the question to which I answered. I don't find the reason for the answer to be downvoted. Is the answer a low quality answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been downvoted 5-6 times today. I think it is a case of serial downvoting. I hope that the system and moderators would detect it. I have flagged 5 questions which are pending right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that I know the user and I told him that it is the case of serial downvoting which may lead to drastic results, but he didn't stop. Am I really getting targeted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/510084/230533&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/510084/230533&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/510065/230533&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/510065/230533&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/506670/230533&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/506670/230533&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/506361/230533&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/506361/230533&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/488415/230533&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/488415/230533&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/509536/230533&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/509536/230533&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/508641/230533&quot;&gt;Doesn&amp;#39;t the universe violate the law of conservation of linear momentum?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the system and moderators for system check.Today I got the notification of vote reversal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230533" LastEditorUserId="230533" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T06:07:23.507" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T07:20:13.213" Title="Am I getting serially downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12480" CreationDate="2019-10-25T10:47:39.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only the person who downvoted knows why they did so. There's no way of knowing their reason unless they choose to reveal it. (Note that technically, even if someone claims to be the downvoter, it is possible they could be lying.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything about your answer that sticks out as a likely reason for it being downvoted. Perhaps someone thought it wasn't clearly explained or that something was factually incorrect about it. I see you got some feedback to that effect in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T10:47:39.477" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12480" CreationDate="2019-10-25T13:26:58.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, as user David Z said, voting identity is kept private. Only the user who has voted does know the reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover as users downvote an answer, each vote costs the down-voter &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1$&lt;/span&gt; reputation point so that they don't do that just for fun or revenge. We should really down-vote only when the answer is very unclear or incorrect or both and mention the reason so that the answer-er learns where (he/ she) has gone wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="208199" LastEditorUserId="208199" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T17:26:59.067" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T17:26:59.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-25T19:49:12.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would also like to eliminate the word “homework” from the name of the policy as it creates an unnecessary emphasis on &lt;em&gt;how you came to&lt;/em&gt; the question rather than &lt;em&gt;the intrinsics of&lt;/em&gt; the question. I also think that you should give some understanding of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; in this sort of policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a 486-character rephrasing that illustrates what I would find preferable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Direct applications and specific calculations, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/&quot;&gt;check-my-work&lt;/a&gt; questions, are off-topic here because it is hard for others to search for them to get their own questions answered. Please make some effort to work through the problem and figure out where you are stuck and why, so you can ask a deeper conceptual question that is more useful to a broader audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be called say the “direct applications” policy or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73490" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T19:49:12.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12480" CreationDate="2019-10-26T07:20:13.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen that many of your  answer either homework type, or similar to this, which should be avoided, secondly if someone has down voted your answer, ask gently the reason for down voting, it not improves question quality, but their also increase the knowledge. I think you are not serially down voted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233551" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T07:20:13.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2019-10-26T07:57:54.077" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to disagree. I believe that it is the current practice that needs to change in order to match that of SE policy. That may involve some rewording in order that mods won't close every homework-esque question that is still valid according to the policy and wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key phrases are show some effort, ask about a specific physics concept, and with a goal of being of future benefit to the community. Maybe &quot;homework&quot; should be removed. After all there is no fundamental difference between a good homework question and one that one encounters in life otherwise. But we do want to avoid &quot;do my work for me&quot; problems. You are right there. Rewording won't fix that kind of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen a good amount of excellent questions put on hold by overzealous mods for no other reason than that it looks homework like. The poster is asked to reword it according to a link to the wiki that if they follow they find out, hey I already had it worded like that. It really leaves a bad taste for new users on the site and makes SE Physics an unwelcoming site with a culture that stinks like year old yoghurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please mods. Show some moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193094" LastEditorUserId="193094" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T10:22:51.917" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T10:22:51.917" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-27T13:06:04.863" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/510275/&quot;&gt;Einstein&amp;#39;s initial clue that spacetime is curved&lt;/a&gt;  being flagged as off-topic, as it belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History of Science SE&lt;/a&gt;. However, there is a tag here for 'history' and it seems that historical questions have been accepted here in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, the situation has changed because that other SE site was created more recently? So, are history questions no-longer on-topic here? If so, I assume we won't be mass-migrating existing questions under the 'history' tag to that site; however, should we consider updating the tag description for 'history' to make it clear it is now a defuct category?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T13:27:19.293" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:05:27.487" Title="Are all history questions now off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-10-27T14:52:59.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12489" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:05:27.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a defunct tag. History questions that require physical expertise to answer are still on-topic here, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8935/50583&quot;&gt;the FAQ answer&lt;/a&gt; on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That most of these questions are now also on-topic on another SE site is immaterial, since there is no requirement that any given question must be on-topic only on exactly one SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:05:27.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-28T09:35:47.720" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if I had given a wrong suggestion! But I think that Physics Stack Exchange is also a Q/A social media platform, so it would help us to trust the answers of the highly followed users. The follow option may also increase healthy competition between users but it would definitely be a healthy one. Is the suggestion fine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230533" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T18:30:02.277" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T18:30:02.277" Title="Shouldn't there be a &quot;follow&quot; option on profile page of users?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-10-28T10:37:23.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-30T10:58:59.480" Score="-12" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is recently an odd reaction to my questions/answers. I see when somebody dislikes any, it is straightforwardly downvoted &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; probably by somebody else. Or, when I ask a challenging question, in many cases, it is soon voted to be closed with the excuse of off-topic or something, esp. when no one can represent a clear answer in a due time, whereas the question is clear and technical enough to be given full consideration. And much worse, some of my questions have been &lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt; from the site rather than just being closed so that no one has any access to them. Why these questions are deleted? Who is responsible for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to vote to close a question/answer (including this question!); why is not it possible to vote to leave a question open at the same time? (To vote to reopen a closed question, remember that it is not easy to find a specific closed question.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do all these indicate a kind of  &lt;strong&gt;mainstream dictatorship&lt;/strong&gt; in here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I think there is a suspicion against my activities as a critical thinker in this site, and hence, I believe there are some people of the &lt;strong&gt;community&lt;/strong&gt; who are determined to limit my activities and reduce my reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is critical thinking &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; yet logical &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; something forbidden for this website?! Is really any critical thinker or dissident scientist a GUILTY in the community's view or that of the majority regardless of how deep his thoughts/questions/answers are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127415" LastEditorUserId="127415" LastEditDate="2019-10-30T14:14:07.497" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T16:57:26.227" Title="Fast successive upvotes and downvotes: Is critical thinking forbidden here?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2019-11-01T19:48:37.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12494" CreationDate="2019-10-30T15:47:40.140" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;While asking asking a question I noticed that there are two similar tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-interaction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-interaction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weak-interaction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-interactions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-interactions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weak-interactions&lt;/a&gt; which leads to question for their necessity. Should any of these be deleted? If not why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T06:21:11.770" Title="About synonymous tags" Tags="|support|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12493" CreationDate="2019-10-30T15:57:32.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-force&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-force&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weak-force&lt;/a&gt; tag and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-interactions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-interactions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weak-interactions&lt;/a&gt; tag were merged into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-interaction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-interaction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weak-interaction&lt;/a&gt; tag in 2014, partly spurred by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4677/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; 2013 meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General tip: Other synonym tags can be suggested on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/175/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-31T06:21:11.770" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T06:21:11.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12492" CreationDate="2019-10-30T16:29:11.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see when somebody dislikes any, it is straightforwardly downvoted − probably by somebody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diamond moderators have some tools to look at voting patterns, and it doesn't seem like there are any users who are specifically targeting you with up- or down-votes.  It's much more labor-intensive to look into the &lt;em&gt;timing&lt;/em&gt; of votes, so I haven't done that, even though the timing of votes seems to be the main thrust of your question here.  However, I think that what you're seeing is that questions which have been updated recently are viewed by a large number of users while they are on the front page of the site.  As our community has developed, we've come to a pretty firm understanding of the kinds of posts that are and aren't received well, and vote accordingly.  This solidarity &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/07/18/building-community-inclusivity-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;can lead to an unpleasant pile-on effect&lt;/a&gt; for users who aren't comfortable with those norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, when I ask a challenging question, in many cases, it is soon voted to be closed with the excuse of off-topic or something. ... And much worse, some of my questions have been &lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt; from the site rather than just being closed so that no one has any access to them. Why these questions are deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked sixteen questions since September 1; only three of them have been closed, and only one of those this month.  That suggests to me that you are getting better at learning to use our system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of your three closed recent questions, two are deleted.  One you removed yourself, and the other was caught by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt;.  You can view lists of your recent posts which are deleted (but not of older questions which have been deleted recently) from the appropriate part of the activity page on your profile; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/127415&quot;&gt;here's your questions link&lt;/a&gt;.  (If that's actually a moderator-only tool, sorry for misleading you.  Other users note that you should be able to view your &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; deleted recent questions from your &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; profile page, but you may get a &quot;404 - denied&quot; error if you try to view a list of someone else's deleted recent questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is easy to vote to close a question/answer (including this question!); why is not it possible to vote to leave a question open at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to vote &quot;Leave Open&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt;, and enough such votes remove a post from the queue. There's more documentation in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is critical thinking − yet logical − something forbidden for this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critical thinking is absolutely welcome in our community.  However, as one of my favorite mentors likes to say, nothing resembles a new effect quite so much as a mistake.  We're not equipped to help all comers decide whether their &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/&quot;&gt;non-mainstream ideas&lt;/a&gt; are actual discoveries, for a variety of reasons, so we tend to close those types of questions unless they are exceptionally well-written and compelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-10-30T16:57:26.227" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T16:57:26.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12497" CreationDate="2019-10-31T04:44:11.553" Score="1" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me first begin by saying my overall user experience on the Physics Stack Exchange site has been wonderful. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252740/4664265&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; it is okay to downvote poorly written questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in the past I've had an interesting experience where &lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/q/8236/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; was cross-posted to the Physics Stack Exchange site and severely downvoted and closed.&#xA;Then there was also &lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/q/8615/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which is crossposted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/510992/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; again I'm having the similar downvoting experience (note: the overall points I received on &lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the quantum computing Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt; is still positive and the questions are nearly identical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am under the impression these are borderline questions (which they may not be) - thus, the cross posting allows me to compare standards. Why is what is &quot;poorly written&quot; for the Physics Stack Exchange site not &quot;poorly written&quot; for the quantum computing Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it comes down to how to define &quot;poorly written&quot;? I have seen the it is unclear &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252747/4664265&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; too, but because of these comparisons (between quantum computing and physics) I am uncertain why it is unclear? Can I have a concrete answer to this problem I'm facing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: I only have a sample size of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2$&lt;/span&gt; so I am aware I might be &quot;seeing patterns&quot; but am wary that it isn't good if this pattern persists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-11-01T00:54:11.987" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T16:06:00.077" Title="Reason behind my negative user experience?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12496" CreationDate="2019-10-31T06:28:46.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no reason to expect the same question to get the same reaction in two different Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange sites. Different sites have different members with different ideas about what makes a suitable question for their particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvoting and downvoting on SE is inherently subjective, not objective, &lt;em&gt;by design&lt;/em&gt;. This is a feature, not a bug. Unless multiple posts by you are being “serially downvoted” by someone voting against &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; rather than your &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;, your only recourse to being downvoted too often is to change the kind of questions you are asking so they they are better received by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2019-11-01T01:54:02.973" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T01:54:02.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-31T12:39:27.533" Score="-4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently my questions were downvoted, though the reason for such is unknown to me (also it's not quite a big deal for me) but I believe that if the downvoter had given me some suggestions for improvement then I would be able to improve them. I believe that thee sole reason for this behavior found in the downvoter (i.e., the act of downvoting without commenting for improvement)  is the reason that that they feel that the OP might start downvoting their due to grudge. So I have a solution for it which is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever a person downvotes (either a question or an answer) a comment box should, which would be must to fill before down voting to be counted, appear which wouldn't require the downvoter to reveal their identity rather the comments be identified by a set of randomly generated  containing numbers as well as symbols and letters. In this manner the voter can downvote but in due process improve the post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the opinion of you people about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-10-31T21:41:15.960" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T21:41:15.960" Title="Anonymous comment feature to explain anonymous downvote?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|comments|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2019-11-01T11:59:08.310" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12498" CreationDate="2019-10-31T13:16:10.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To leave comments anonymously, choose a pseudonym for your display name. (As you have figured out, I think: I assume your display name is a reference to the famous Ramanujan, rather than your own name.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requirements that comments must accompany votes have been proposed and rejected numerous times network-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T13:16:10.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12496" CreationDate="2019-11-01T15:49:14.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion is that questions of the style &quot;can you disprove this&quot; or &quot;Can you construct an example (or counterexample) of this or that&quot; are actually open ended bait questions that are asking to start a debate and an argument rather than solicit an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly dislike this kind of question.  I do not know if I downvoted any of yours (I probably did downvote &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; given how I dislike this type of question) but similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russell's teapot argument&lt;/a&gt; I believe the onus is on OP to ask a clear question and not on the users to disprove a claim; I'm not surprised they are not so well received. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2019-11-01T16:06:00.077" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T16:06:00.077" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-03T14:04:09.203" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually when I was a new user to the site, I posted the homework-type questions. But as the time passes I learn, and understand how to ask a good question, as I learn a lot from the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now problem is that, if I have doubt, I can't ask a new question, because the site banned from asking the question for six months. I understand that it is not fair to ask it, but I am doing because I can do anything, because questions I asked when I was a new user, were simple and straightforward, if update them user of are watching the question, reverse the question to its original state, I do not know what to do now. Because if I update the question, a user pings that it was not the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, can anyone guide me on what to do now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233551" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-11-03T16:54:11.603" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T16:54:11.603" Title="Regarding asking a question" Tags="|support|homework-and-exercises|answers|user-accounts|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-11-03T14:16:21.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-04T16:29:08.353" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like &quot;Jeopardy&quot; presents answers in the form of questions can I post a physics question and post my own answer to it? The presentation I want to make is a new type of math method to calculate and compare worldlines in relativity. My question would be, &quot;A new math method to calculate and compare worldlines in relativity? Any questions?&quot; Then I'd explain the math method. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220981" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T16:12:26.337" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T16:12:26.337" Title="Can I present an answer in the form of a leading question?" Tags="|discussion|scope|answers|best-practices|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-11-04T17:36:26.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12504" CreationDate="2019-11-04T17:02:39.203" Score="6" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been using/contributing to StackExchange for about a year. I have thus seen what must be a common phenomenon: the same, or very similar, questions coming up again and again. I know there is already some effort to avoid this, but it seems to me the site is in danger of just sprawling ever outward into a vast splodge of information which rapidly becomes hard to find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that there are already ideas and tools to restrain this, but then my question is: what are they and how are they used (beyond just valient efforts by patient users to point out duplicates)? I don't find it obvious from just scanning the site and using it. In particular, is there a quick way to locate answers I know I have seen (e.g. ones I have written) based on some search terms or something like that? Would it be possible for there to be a greater automatic linking of questions, and discouragement of duplicates? Would it be possible for the information stored in all the question/answer pairs to be navigable in some more intelligent way? (At the moment it feels like a heap, or a set of heaps under each tag term). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologise in advance if this question demonstrates ignorance; but in that case the knowledge I should have had is, perhaps, not very clearly available in the way the site is presented to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207910" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-04T18:38:00.420" LastActivityDate="2019-11-04T18:46:28.427" Title="How to navigate answers?" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12503" CreationDate="2019-11-04T17:24:38.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, is there a quick way to locate answers I know I have seen (e.g. ones I have written) based on some search terms or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the search bar start your search with &quot;User:me&quot; and then put in the key words you want to look for. It will reduce the search to just your posts. Additionally, if you know that an answer was written by a particular user who isn't &quot;me,&quot; visiting someone's profile page prepopulates the search box with &quot;user:NNNNN&quot; that you can use for searching. You can also put &quot;is:a&quot; in the bar to search only answers or &quot;is:q&quot; to search only questions, if needed. More searching tips can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for more general linking to questions, I'n not sure there is much to do beyond looking for duplicates. When you vote to close a question as a duplicate it already shows possible candidates. Also on the desktop version of the site there is usually a section showing similar questions. These measures, as well as possible duplicates popping up as a user makes a question, is all that can be done to discourage duplicates I suppose. I think the tour even specifies to search for duplicate questions before posting them? Ultimately there will still be users who do not want to go through the trouble of searching for something that answers their question and just post their question anyway regardless of what is thrown at them to prevent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for grouping together similar questions/answers, I suppose one could make a post like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11305/faq-for-physics-stack-exchange?r=SearchResults&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but I feel like it would be harder to justify including certain things, and I feel like it might become unwieldy fairly quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-04T18:46:28.427" LastActivityDate="2019-11-04T18:46:28.427" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12506" CreationDate="2019-11-08T00:27:29.213" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to a question with bounty was accepted, I suppose by the OP, but I did not get the bounty, not yet, anyway. Granted, the bounty was posted by a different person than the OP. I was under the impression that once the OP accepts the answer the bounty is automatically granted. But is the person who posted the bounty the one who has to award it ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244116" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T00:44:37.297" Title="When is the bounty awarded?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12505" CreationDate="2019-11-08T00:44:37.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;Help Center Bounty page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is a bounty awarded?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bounty period lasts 7 days. Bounties must have a minimum duration of at least 1 day. After the bounty ends, there is a grace period of 24 hours to manually award the bounty. Simply click the bounty award icon next to each answer to permanently award your bounty to the answerer. (You cannot award a bounty to your own answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full amount, if the answer is also accepted).&lt;/strong&gt; If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question owner accepts an answer posted during the bounty period, and the bounty expires without an explicit award then we assume the bounty owner liked the answer they accepted and award it the full bounty amount at the time of bounty expiration.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if no other answer appears with a higher score, you should receive the full bounty when the 7 day period ends (assuming your answer remains accepted).  You will only receive the bounty sooner if the person who posted the bounty manually awards your answer with the bounty before the period ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T00:44:37.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-09T12:50:25.493" Score="3" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/175635/&quot;&gt;Why pouring milk from a height makes a chain shape?&lt;/a&gt; is marked as a duplicate of the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/113314/&quot;&gt;Wavy stream of liquid&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is about the chain-shape of a stream of flowing milk and the second one about the helical shape of a stream of flowing wine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question had an impressive answer that correctly explained the phenomena. This question was later marked as duplicate. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;But note that the questions are not similar, both the phenomena are fundamentally different&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The helical shape is due to &lt;em&gt;rotation&lt;/em&gt; of cross-sectional films, the chain shape is due to their &lt;em&gt;2-D oscillations&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here's where things get complex. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happened to answer a similar question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/512145/&quot;&gt;Why does water fall sort of helically from a cup?&lt;/a&gt; which was actually another duplicate of the &lt;em&gt;Wavy stream of liquid&lt;/em&gt; question. For writing that answer, I had experimented and documented quite a bit on the flow patterns. Now it turns out that the pattern I observed was similar to the one mentioned in the &lt;em&gt;chain shape&lt;/em&gt; question. So I thought the OP was referring to this rather than the &lt;em&gt;helical shape&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hence my answer went on to explain the pattern which was not the one that OP meant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time I got a clear picture of the real situation, my answer had gathered up-votes and was accepted by the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused. I want my answer to be posted in the right place, that is the &lt;em&gt;chain shape&lt;/em&gt; question. The current answers to that question doesn't address the 'chain' shape at all, likely because of misinterpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried putting links to my answer in the comments but it doesn't seem to be effective in gaining much attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, should I post an exact copy of my answer to the 3rd question (helical flow from cup) as an answer to the 1st question (chain shape flow)? Is it right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know if there's any other way. And yes, please do remove the duplicate badge from this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155230" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T20:11:21.393" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T05:34:48.710" Title="Is it right to post the same answer twice?" Tags="|support|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12508" CreationDate="2019-11-09T15:34:44.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exact duplicate answers will be deleted; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Help Centre : Why and how are some answers deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to begin a new answer to the unanswered question with a link to the answer that you are thinking of duplicating, then went on to follow some of the same logic in your new answer as you wrote it off the top of your head, the new answer would almost certainly come out with substantive differences from the first one. Once it's written you can decide whether the new answer is different enough from the other to warrant posting.  But if you post verbatim or nearly-verbatim copies of the same answer to multiple questions, they'll get flagged and probably deleted.  Links are better than copy-paste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your answer that is upvoted but whose relevance you have reconsidered: it might be appropriate to edit the answer to indicate why your thinking has changed, but it could be a mistake to erase, substantially replace, or otherwise vandalize an answer that's earned a lot of respect from the community --- proceed carefully.  (This link is relevant : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1035/44126&quot;&gt;Should wrong answers be edited or replaced?&lt;/a&gt;.)  If the situation as it stands is especially complex, the way to clarify would be with a follow-up question that links to all the relevant posts and is explicit about their shortcomings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to attract attention to an under-publicized question, place a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2020-01-11T20:32:49.170" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T20:32:49.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-11T07:50:56.007" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently there is a terrric question open asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/512834/179151&quot;&gt;how to measure surface area&lt;/a&gt;. It is clear that from an engineering perspective there would be a variety of different methods proposed, while from a mathematical perspective the answer is &quot;ill defined question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to re-ask the question on the Math.SE and Engineering.SE websites, but I would like to stress the emphasis on receiving their professions' perspective. Would such questions be simply closed as dupes? Would the community value or disparage these two additional questions on the SE network?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I've asked the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/31900/determine-surface-area-of-arbitrary-physical-object&quot;&gt;Engineering.SE&lt;/a&gt;. I decided not to ask on Math.SE as the mathematical perspective on the question seems to be well-represented and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conclusive&lt;/a&gt; on the original Physics.SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4877" LastEditorUserId="4877" LastEditDate="2019-11-12T11:13:34.723" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T11:13:34.723" Title="Dupe specific Physics.SE question on Math.SE and Engineering.SE for different perspectives" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12510" CreationDate="2019-11-11T08:09:38.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, it's highly discouraged to post the same question on multiple sites. But when people say that, they're usually talking about copying and pasting the same question from one site to the other. If you edit the question and adapt it to each site, then it might be okay. It would be even better if you focus each version of the question on what another site hasn't been able to cover - that is, for example, make the math.se version ask about something that isn't part of the physics.se version or the engineering.se version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it may go without saying but just to be clear, it'd be up to you to check whether the question you want to ask on each other site is actually on topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T08:09:38.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12510" CreationDate="2019-11-11T14:12:35.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer supplied by David Z is a great way to proceed. IMHO I don't think this surface area question belongs on Physics SE as it stands though. I think it belongs on Engineering SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be more suited for Physics SE if it asked about what many people are debating in the comments and in the answers, which is how &quot;fractal-like&quot; a stone really is and at which spatial scales the surface area is well-defined (if at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure about the question's place on Mathematics SE, since I would assume they don't care about what the stone looks like at various spatial scales, but I have not spent enough time on that site to know how physical they will go in their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-11T14:18:54.373" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T14:18:54.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-11T23:30:08.107" Score="16" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bike-shedding&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is a phenomenon where there is excessive discussion of a topic because it seems easy, so everyone feels that they are competent to discuss it. We seem to have a couple of recent examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/512834/&quot;&gt;How do I experimentally measure the surface area of a rock?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/513149/&quot;&gt;Are we really moving at the speed of light in the time dimension?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In example 1, there is a good, reasonable question (I upvoted), and a couple of highly upvoted answers that state opposite points of view -- followed by another 20 answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In example 2, a question is asked that duplicates a previous question. There are currently 2 close votes, 6 answers, and 22 upvotes for an answer that IMO is very poor and would have been ignored if posted now as an answer to the original question. Buried among these answers to the duplicate question, but with only a few upvotes, is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/513342/4552&quot;&gt;nice answer&lt;/a&gt; from an expert in the field (author of a popularization on the subject) which contradicts the 22-times-upvoted answer and which would have been a nice answer to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we can do to reduce this kind of thing? It's a very negative thing for people visiting the site if they have to sort through all of this to try to find a reliable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that occurs to me right now as a solution would be that possibly activity on duplicate questions could be kept from spinning out of control if votes to close were somehow more prominently displayed -- but this would I guess require a change to the SE software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have the mechanism where people with a lot of rep can single-handedly close a question as a duplicate. But this is not used much, both because people with this power exercise self-restraint and because it's highly tag-specific (e.g., I have the power for general-relativity, but not for special-relativity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-12T07:39:49.773" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T13:20:06.290" Title="Can we do better at reducing bike-shedding?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|best-practices|quality|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12513" CreationDate="2019-11-12T01:41:39.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is much you can do beyond what you have discussed and what is already in place. You just have to trust the users looking at the question to be responsible to look for duplicates first (this one is hard to trust at times), give good answers, vote appropriately, and go through the close vote queues to agree on duplicate votes already cast. People are flawed, so this is not always ideal (as you have shown), but it is what we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that you did not mention that helps with HNQs garnering many answers is protecting questions (which has been done for the surface area question). This does not prevent many or bad answers from being posted still, but I think it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you have found better answers to questions that are duplicates you could explicitly mention these in a comment on the new question. That at least brings further attention to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-12T04:15:12.087" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T04:15:12.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-12T16:17:52.500" Score="12" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been some small discussion in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12513/can-we-do-better-at-reducing-bike-shedding#comment46921_12513/179151&quot;&gt;comments of a recent post&lt;/a&gt; about Physics SE questions appearing in the list of Hot Network Questions (HNQ). It was also brought up that Physics SE can choose to be removed from this list, but even if this is not a choice to be made, I think a discussion about the pros and cons of Physics SE in the HNQ would still be a good one to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell, the good side of the HNQ is that it gets more people to view the site. If the HNQ question they have arrived at is a good question with good answers, then they will most likely learn some physics, which is awesome. Additionally, these new viewers might explore other questions on the site. So the HNQ essentially brings in more viewers and users, and helps spread physics knowledge to the community. I think everyone can agree these are positive outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are instances where HNQ physics questions are not very good questions, at least by the standards of typical Physics SE posts. The question could be poorly written, or it could be about a &quot;pop-sci&quot; topic that many people think they know a lot about, thus garnering many poor quality answers. This is not necessarily bad for regular users and physics experts on the site (although it can be annoying sometimes), but it could be bad for new users to the site and to physics, as they will have an incorrect view of how Physics SE, or physics in general, works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, I think the good outweighs the bad here. Even if there are some &quot;bad apples&quot;, I think more people coming here and learning about physics is always good. Plus, we have measures in place to mitigate the bad side. Users can vote on questions and answers, vote to close questions, and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11146/179151&quot;&gt;flag questions to be removed from the HNQ should moderators agree to remove them&lt;/a&gt;. Of course these measures might not always be enough, but they are what we have at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do other, regular Physics SE users think about the HNQ? What are some other pros and cons, and does the bad really outweigh the good? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this post is not intended to be a discussion on how the HNQ could be better handled on PSE. This post is just intended to be a discussion on how the HNQ affects the site in its current state, and whether it is a net good or net bad effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-14T15:53:13.653" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T18:52:40.253" Title="Do Physics Hot Network Questions help or harm the site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12515" CreationDate="2019-11-12T17:34:04.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever our opinion, it should be based on actual data, i.e., on the full set of questions from this site that get promoted on the HNQ sidebar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325060/updating-the-hot-network-questions-list-now-with-a-bit-more-network-and-a-litt&quot;&gt;the update to the HNQ mechanisms&lt;/a&gt; from March of this year &lt;em&gt;finally&lt;/em&gt; (after &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286986/please-open-the-hot-network-questions-to-auditing-via-the-data-explorer&quot;&gt;years of asking for it&lt;/a&gt;) allowed us to track what does and does not get on that sidebar, exposing this aspect of question history both to the question revisions list and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/54366/feedback-request-newer-timeline-question-view&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt; as well as to the Data Explorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to that effect, a couple of months ago I wrote a SEDE query,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1097679/upvotes-and-downvotes-on-hnq-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Upvotes and downvotes on HNQ questions&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which lists this site's HNQs as well as some statistics on their scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: before you make some categorical statement about things which are Good For The Site, or Bad For The Site, or The End Of Stack Exchange As We Know It, or something, go and have a look and see whether it holds up against the actual data. (Say: if your impression is negative, are you sure that this isn't just because of a &quot;vocal minority&quot; of bad questions that are easy to notice, and that various human biases bring to further prominence than they really should have?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T17:34:04.000" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-13T12:29:03.933" Score="-3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topic of climate change is an exemplary case of an interdisciplinary topic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is not one single scientific discipline of science working on it, but a wide spectrum.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It primarily includes meteorologists, physicists, sociologists, psychologists, statisticians and researchers of media studies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites exist for individual sciences, but also for topics like bicycles and cooking. While usually not regarded as a science, these topics could be seen as scientific in an interdisciplinary way. So I think it is as a topic suitable for Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should a Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange site about climate change exist at all, and are there members of this site interested in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You may want to have a look at a proposal for such a site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/123397/climate-change&quot;&gt;Climate Change&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42975" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-11-13T13:36:01.673" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T16:11:28.933" Title="Would a site on the interdisciplinary topic of climate change in Stack Exchange be supported?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2019-11-17T21:28:17.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12517" CreationDate="2019-11-13T16:11:28.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, this has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334871/would-it-be-possible-to-create-a-site-on-climate-change/334872#334872&quot;&gt;already been explored in the Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. There already is a site that incorporates the bulk of what you're proposing, and ─ as you &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/123397/climate-change&quot;&gt;just found out&lt;/a&gt; ─ the MSE suggestion that your site proposal would get closed as a duplicate of the existing Earth Science site was dead accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to argue that the existing Earth Science site does not fully cover all the topics that you might want it to. &lt;strong&gt;This meta is not the venue for that discussion, which has nothing to do with the Physics Stack Exchange site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you have a beta site or a site proposal on Area 51 that you want to advertise to users of this site, the correct place to do it is the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915/consider-supporting-proposals-of-other-se-science-sites&quot;&gt;Consider supporting proposals of other SE science sites&lt;/a&gt; on this meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T16:11:28.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12519" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12520" CreationDate="2019-11-14T01:53:30.547" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today when I opened physics stack exchange chemistry I found that my reputation spiked up to 495 whereas yesterday it was around 335(not much but still), for which I don't know how it happened? I just want to make sure if everything is OK as I don't know any reasons for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastEditorDisplayName="user238497" LastEditDate="2019-11-14T03:14:08.553" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T03:14:08.553" Title="Spike in my reputations" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12519" CreationDate="2019-11-14T02:14:12.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is due to the recent reputation change that Stack Exchange has made. Question upvotes are now worth +10 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65616" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T02:14:12.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12515" CreationDate="2019-11-17T18:52:40.253" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the main effect by which the HNQ questions harm our site is completely disconnected from their quality: They drown out smaller topics, and they favour questions with non-technical answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their topics are either classical/quantum mechanics at (at most) undergraduate level, questions about everyday life situations or something some pop-science publication wrote about. Additionally, the highest voted answers are usually - and understandably, given that a large share of viewers of these questions are not regular users - those most accessible (and most authoritative-sounding) to non-physicists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with such questions, but it means that people who like to ask and answer questions of this type get disproportionally more upvotes than those who prefer smaller subfields or technical questions. This is &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt; to the voting pool for these things being smaller to begin with because the fraction of regular users who are interested in them and can judge correctness there is of course also smaller for smaller subfields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I can't &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; the following assertion, but I believe that many (not all!) experts naturally are of the second kind of users: They want to answer detailed questions about the subfield they're proficient in, not &quot;general physics&quot; questions. The HNQ questions therefore do us a disservice because they have the potential to attract a lot more askers whose physics knowledge is minimal, but they don't really attract (or might even deter) users competent beyond a general physics education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From personal experience I can certainly say that I find it extremely frustrating when, thanks to HNQ, my second-highest voted answer is a one-liner on basic special relativity, while many answers I poured actual effort into don't even make a double-digit number of votes. As I said, less votes for more specialized posts are to be expected anyway, but HNQ magnifies this effect considerably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T18:52:40.253" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12526" CreationDate="2019-11-21T13:15:54.230" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched for the question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=Negative+mass&quot;&gt;negative mass&lt;/a&gt; and they aren't closed as off-topic. But recently I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/515253/238497&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question and somebody voted to close this as off-topic (non-mainstream).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to know what's our policy on questions of negative mass and such. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Though as for me I would consider this to be on-topic. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia (do see the reference)  article and these &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/DW7VBrKmLS8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/10AP7tio408&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; videos and there are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-21T13:43:07.793" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T16:46:41.667" Title="Are negative mass questions on/off topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12524" CreationDate="2019-11-21T13:42:45.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;General comments (not addressing OP's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/515253/2451&quot;&gt;specific question&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_physics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;negative effective mass&lt;/a&gt; are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions on particles with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imaginary mass (tachyons)&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;negative mass&lt;/a&gt; are non-mainstream, and therefore often off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions on fields with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_field&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imaginary mass (tachyonic fields)&lt;/a&gt; are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-21T16:46:41.667" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T16:46:41.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12524" CreationDate="2019-11-21T14:27:19.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I would reconsider your assumption that the question was closed purely because it asked about negative mass. The only way to know for sure is if those who voted to close decide comment on your question (which can no longer happen since you deleted it) or decide to post here. Typically, questions here are not closed purely because of their topic. Conversely, just because other negative mass questions were not closed does not mean that any question you post about negative mass will not be closed. Many other factors are considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that being said, I will say that I was one of the users who voted to close that question. I did not do this because it was about negative mass. I voted to close for multiple reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was somewhat of a &quot;What if&quot; question. As in &quot;What if negative mass existed, then could we do this thing?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was somewhat of a &quot;check my reasoning here&quot;. Direct quote: &quot;Now considering the figure I concluded that yes electricity can be generated perpetually. - Is it possible to do so?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question was also fairly broad. Continuing the previous quote: &quot;If not is there any other method?&quot; This is a very broad question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So summarizing, you posted a question that was &quot;What if this was real? If it was, is my reasoning correct? If my reasoning is not correct, then how could you do this?&quot; This, to me, is a fairly broad, hypothetical question, and this is why I thought the question should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-21T15:00:24.597" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T15:00:24.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12513" CreationDate="2019-11-21T15:16:53.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the situation you mention is best described by the idiom &quot;If you can't beat it, lead it&quot;. People who would be able to find a duplicate, or downvote a poor answer, are confronted with a crowd of new users coming from the HNQ link, who typically have 101 rep and for this reason cannot downvote or VTC, even if they agree. All they can do is &lt;strong&gt;upvote&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of voting asymmetry leads to the only possible behaviour that has a visible impact and is rewarded with reputation - write your own answer, no matter how poor or controversial it is. Personally I came to the conclusion that unless this voting asymmetry is somehow fixed (by either forbidding 101 rep users to vote at all, or letting them downvote), any other measure will be akin to symptomatic treatment at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: I didn't mean that &quot;If you can't beat it, lead it&quot; should be everyone's &lt;em&gt;modus operandi&lt;/em&gt;. I'm saying that someone who takes time and effort to search for duplicates and downvote bad answers is penalized with rep loss and resentful comments, whereas someone who adds yet another answer to the lot (good or otherwise) is rewarded. Bad answers won't go anywhere until that changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83721" LastEditorUserId="83721" LastEditDate="2019-11-22T13:20:06.290" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T13:20:06.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12529" CreationDate="2019-11-22T18:43:02.807" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was tempted to ask this &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3446764/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (after some slight physics edits - see comment section) in physics stack exchange and would like the wisdom of the community if it would be closed or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why I'm asking Meta first&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Crossposts between physics and math stack exchange are discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It does involve the use of a math formula. Therefore understanding the question would (partially) depend on that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is possibly (indirectly) about an open problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-22T19:25:31.190" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T19:38:45.420" Title="Are questions of this sort allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12528" CreationDate="2019-11-22T19:38:45.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems your &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3446764/11127&quot;&gt;specific question&lt;/a&gt; is fundamentally a physics question (in the area of statistical physics) rather than a math question. It should be migrated to Phys.SE rather than being crossposted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T19:38:45.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12532" CreationDate="2019-11-24T01:38:24.607" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CSpnY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CSpnY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/210030/user33800?tab=profile&quot;&gt;User link&lt;/a&gt; doesn't display any suspension message for me. So how comes his rep is 1 and not 23? (23 is actually correct if you look at his &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/210030/user33800?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation tab&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70429" LastEditorUserId="251215" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T12:58:14.710" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T12:58:14.710" Title="Is this user &quot;shadow banned&quot; here (1 rep seems to make no sense, but there's no ban message)?" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12531" CreationDate="2019-11-24T01:47:31.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no such thing as being shadow banned on the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user in question has a question deleted as &quot;spam or offensive,&quot; which carries a -100 reputation penalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T01:47:31.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-25T04:15:32.297" Score="9" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently somebody is posting their papers on the site in the name of Questions but which doesn't seem so. Rather the papers are (a kind of) show off. Aren't there any policies for such (as we have for Homework and Exercise type question)? Also is there any thing to stop such? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T10:22:57.397" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T15:31:44.843" Title="What to do about somebody spamming the site with posts that don't seem to be Questions but rather a show off?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-25T04:34:16.767" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there are certain times of day, and of the week that questions are most likely to get the most high quality answers on Physics Stack Exchange accounting for the questions asked, and when looking to answer questions if there are times that are most likely to have questions that have yet to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92654" LastEditorUserId="92654" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T06:47:07.887" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T06:47:07.887" Title="Are there certain times of day that are best for posting Questions and Answers on Physics Stack Exchange as of late 2019?" Tags="|discussion|questions|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-11-26T00:31:20.397" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12533" CreationDate="2019-11-25T05:34:26.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In cases like this, where the post appears to have no value at all besides to promote something, I wouldn't hesitate to flag it as spam. Having a post deleted as spam helps limit the rate at which spammers can continue to spam, and if the penalties turn out not to be warranted, we moderators can later clear the spam flags and remove the penalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T15:31:44.843" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T15:31:44.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12537" CreationDate="2019-11-25T13:21:58.510" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago a question was asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/515721&quot;&gt;how close one could safely approach a small non-radiating black hole.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment was made that &quot;Micro black holes do evaporate, so this question is fictional physics and off-topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many highly upvoted questions on the site about non-realistic physics.  For example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/257323&quot;&gt;If we had a “perfectly efficient” computer and all the energy in the Milky-way available, what number could it count to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2072&quot;&gt;On this infinite grid of resistors, what's the equivalent resistance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this site have a policy on questions about non-realistic physics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;think&lt;/strong&gt; that the accepted answer to the following meta question says that these types of questions are allowed, but it's not very clear to me where the line should be drawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10911&quot;&gt;What is the line between fiction and physics with respect to off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90326" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T18:46:57.160" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T18:46:57.160" Title="Are Questions about Unrealistic Physics Off Topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12536" CreationDate="2019-11-25T14:20:53.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my own opinion, but I think it depends on the role of the unrealistic physics in the question. I ultimately agree with the attitude expressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10912/179151&quot;&gt;JMac's answer&lt;/a&gt; on the fictional physics post you link to. If an answer to the question would rely on false physics, then the question should be closed as off topic. However, if the unrealistic physics/fiction is just being used to set up the scenario, and an actual answer to the question would then use legitimate physics, then I think the question is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is just my opinion. There are instances where just a fictional premise causes a question to get closed. One example can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/452237/179151&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If you look back through the edit history, you will see that the question originally asked about a nonphysical scenario of the sun disappearing, even though the heart of the question was &quot;how can angular momentum be conserved when traveling in a straight line?&quot;. The comments have since been deleted due to the question being edited, but there was much criticism due to the bad premise, and the question was closed as being unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I think it is a challenging to try and determine hard and fast rules in scenarios like these. As you have shown, in the same category of &quot;unrealistic physics&quot; there are questions that remain open and get many up votes, and there are questions that are closed  for not being about mainstream physics. I think this is an instance where the outcome greatly depends on which users view the post, how carefully the post is read, who ultimately decides to close the question, etc. Some users are more lenient on questions like these than others, and this could make the difference on some of the more &quot;iffy&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ultimately, I think you just need to take scenarios like these on a case-by-case basis. Is the question asking us to imagine a world where there is no resemblance of physics as we know it? Or is it using an unrealistic scenario in order to explore realistic physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T14:35:15.307" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T14:35:15.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12539" CreationDate="2019-11-25T21:38:41.323" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my answers to an &quot;homework and exercise&quot; question was deleted on the ground of being &quot;near complete&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, knowing I was not supposed to give a &lt;strong&gt;complete&lt;/strong&gt; answer, I was careful &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to solve the problem to the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;near complete&quot; is a bit &quot;fuzzy&quot;, isn't it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244116" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T02:27:13.017" Title="what exactly does &quot;near complete&quot; mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2019-11-25T21:54:56.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking back at the Q&amp;amp;A you are asking about (both Q&amp;amp;A have been deleted, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/512910/2d-elastic-collision-only-given-one-angle/513213#513213&quot;&gt;here is the link for 10k users&lt;/a&gt;), I would actually argue that the answer is essentially a complete answer. It's actually closer to &quot;complete&quot; than &quot;near complete&quot; in my view. The only step the answer omitted was solving a quadratic equation -- the answer even said which of the two possible solutions to pick from the quadratic equation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the answer was complete in terms of the physics and the equations, the only step that was left was the math. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer only described what sign convention to use and how to pick a sign convention, I probably wouldn't call it &quot;complete&quot; nor &quot;near complete.&quot; The asker would still have to figure out how to take the general physics notions and apply it to their problem. They would still learn something by thinking through the process, by thinking through the translation from concept (sign convention) to application and solution. Instead, the answer only made them think through how to solve a quadratic equation -- it didn't even require them to think about which of the two solutions are valid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it is a bit fuzzy about what &quot;near complete&quot; might mean. In the case of the answer you are asking about, I would say it isn't even close to being fuzzy. It's pretty clearly too close to a complete solution, rather than a set of hints and physical concepts to guide the asker to the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, think like the professor assigning the homework. How would they answer the question? It's unlikely they would walk them through all the equations all the way to the end and then say &quot;Okay, now solve this equation, pick the positive root, and then write it down for a grade.&quot; The professor would probably ask them to draw the free-body diagram, ask them how they should define vectors (sign and magnitude), and then clear up any confusions on those two points. Beyond that, the student is on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T23:09:47.287" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T23:09:47.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2019-11-26T02:27:13.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;tpg2114's answer is a great commentary on your specific post. For a more general view on answers that are &quot;near complete&quot; homework solutions, it seems to be a common trend that if a question should be closed as being an off topic homework question, then answers to this question will most likely be &quot;near complete&quot; solutions. Of course this is not a hard and fast rule, but it tends to hold up most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the question was asking for work to be checked and for next steps in the solution. It was correctly closed as an off topic homework question, and all 3 answers to the question were also deleted due to being solutions to the homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore in addition to the advice of &quot;thinking like a professor&quot;, I think this is also a good lesson in not answering questions that are obviously off topic homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T02:27:13.017" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-28T11:39:43.113" Score="-10" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm myself is not an old user but not a new user too. The Physics SE is a little different from other sites and even other Stackexchange sites, new users who come over here generally asks about a question which is not clear or incomplete for the others to understand and so what we do is we down vote that question and sometimes even leave a comment that would make them feel that this site doesn't allow healthy new participation. For example 5 to 6 days ago someone posted an image of the question of and wrote &lt;em&gt;This question involves 10 unknowns so please help me&lt;/em&gt; (there was a line or two which I don't remember properly but it is immaterial over here) and the tag was ** Newtonian Mechanics** and then after sometime someone wrote in the comment with an edit of   &lt;strong&gt;homework exercise&lt;/strong&gt; tag&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot; &lt;em&gt;We don't answer homework questions over here, please read the instructions of this site&lt;/em&gt; &quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know why the user (I mean OP) got a little hurt by this and he wrote  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;This is not a homework question I do a job, I'm relearning the physics and this was a question from a book which I have bought&lt;/em&gt;&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some 30 minutes, I found that the question was closed. Don't you think we should have told him that you should go to Stackexchange Chats and in a problem-solving strategy room @JohnRennie is there to help you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, some undergraduates after learning Relativity theory and Quantum Mechanics sometimes ask a &lt;strong&gt;what if&lt;/strong&gt; question and gets severe comments and tremendous down votes, wouldn't it be better to upvote their question just once (1 upvote and that green color would make them happy) and then to teach them why those &lt;strong&gt;what if&lt;/strong&gt; questions are usually condemned. Due to a downvote and some comments, few new users get violent and they start proving themselves by pointing out non-existing mistakes in other people's work, you can look over here for an  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/515969/would-the-moon-eventually-hit-the-earth&quot;&gt;instance&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some new users even try to write answers (they have relevant information) but since they have never been to a forum where learned men reside they write it very badly and this generally earns them very harsh comments like &quot;&lt;em&gt;how that answers the question&lt;/em&gt;&quot; , &quot;&lt;em&gt;I think you shouldn't attempt to write an answer unless you have some relevant info&lt;/em&gt;&quot; .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to write this, I want to know how you all feel about it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:- @AaronStevens writes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These users here were leaving comments to help explain the down vote (if they did down vote) and how to improve the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say why it’s necessary to downvote that answer? Just tell him why his/her answer doesn’t answers the question and his writing style is quite hard to comprehend by others. If he reacted positively to that then it would be better for him but his negative act could cost him a lot.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: From all the answers that I have received I can conclude that  &lt;strong&gt;IGNORANCE OF LAW IS ONE’S OWN PROBLEM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user240696" LastEditorDisplayName="user240696" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T06:46:49.887" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T14:17:50.673" Title="A request to the existing users on the issue of new users" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="32" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12541" CreationDate="2019-11-28T12:21:59.487" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Physics SE. I am sorry if you have felt like the site is not welcoming to new users, but I think your feelings come from some misunderstandings of how the site works and the intent of its mechanisms, rules, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, down votes are not personal. A down vote on a question means that a user thinks the question is poorly written, does not follow the site policies/guidelines, etc. A down vote on an answer means that a user thinks the answer is poorly written, not useful to there question it was posted on, does not follow the site policies/guidelines, etc. Up votes and down votes are a mechanism to make sure quality content is viewed and poor content is not viewed for the sake of all users on the site. Without down votes new users to the site might get the wrong impression of what is acceptable on Physics SE. So while down votes are &quot;negative&quot;, they are not a violent attack. They are just indications that improvement is needed on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, voting to close a question is not personal. This site, like all stack exchange sites (and really most sites on the internet) have guidelines as for what is/is not appropriate for that site. If something is on a site that should not be there, then it should be removed. I understand the desire to want to help all people with all questions, but there are other places on the internet/real life for that. As a loose summary, Physics SE is intended to be a Q&amp;amp;A site for primarily conceptual physics questions. It is not a discussion forum, not a homework help site, not a personal theory checking site, etc. So while closing important questions can be upsetting, it is not a violent action. They are just a way to make sure the site runs as intended, which is what anything on the internet/in real life does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, these measures are not meant to alienate any users. Whenever a question is closed, the close banner explains why the question was closed and what the user needs to do to have a chance to reopen the question. Up votes give more reputation than down votes, so users who obtain down votes can easily &quot;remove&quot; this from their record by just posting good, quality content.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are instances where a user is rude, or perhaps too extreme in their language. In this case the best thing to do is flag their comment or answer for a moderator to review. However, users using the mechanisms built into the site discussed above should not be taken in this way, as described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address specific examples in your post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and then after sometime someone wrote in the comment with an edit of homework exercise tag&#xA;  &quot; We don't answer homework questions over here, please read the instructions of this site &quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the homework-and-exercises tag should be used on all questions that are asking about a homework-like exercise. It doesn't matter if the question was actually assigned as homework for a class or not. Second, the commenting user is exactly correct: this site is not intended to supply homework solutions, and the user asking the question should most definitely read the site guidelines to learn more. The comment you have quoted, while brief, is truthful and not rude at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After some 30 minutes, I found that the question was closed. Don't you think we should have told him that you should go to Stackexchange Chats and in a problem-solving strategy room @JohnRennie is there to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a great suggestion, and hopefully one you tried to make. However, we sometimes don't advertise the chat rooms as they are not open to all users of the site. But certainly a comment like this is not required, and a lack of it does not mean we are being rude or alienating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wouldn't it be better to upvote their question just once (1 upvote and that green color would make them happy) and then to teach them why those what if questions are usually condemned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the site is not to make everyone happy, as this is a subjective and impossible goal. An up vote on a poor question or answer indicates that it is ok to post poor questions and answers. As explained above, down votes are not personal attacks. If a new user takes offense to the mechanisms of the site, or starts lashing out because of it, then that is on them. We can't be worried about how a user will perceive and act upon a down vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some new users even try to write answers (they have relevant information) but since they have never been to a forum where learned men reside they write it very badly and this generally earns them very harsh comments like &quot;how that answers the question&quot; , &quot;I think you shouldn't attempt to write an answer unless you have some relevant info&quot; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should actually make you happy here. Usually down votes occur without any comments explaining why the down vote was given. These users here were leaving comments to help explain the down vote (if they did down vote) and how to improve the post. The comments you have quoted are not harsh in my opinion, but as a said before, if you think they are then the best course of action is to flag them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to say why it’s necessary to downvote that answer? Just tell him why his/her answer doesn’t answers the question and his writing style is quite hard to comprehend by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up/down votes make sure good content is more visible and bad content is not. Once again, down votes are not personal, and one should not be worried about how other users will perceive and react to a down vote, as this is an impossible task. More in-depth rationale can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6767/179151&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why comments are not sufficient, sometimes users post questions/answers and then don't attend to them for a while. Also, comments are not guaranteed to make the user edit the post to be better. While down votes are not supposed to be a form of coersion, they do indicate to other users that are possibly less familiar with the site that there is an issue. This is much easier and makes more sense than assuming others will comb through comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: From all the answers that I have received I can conclude that IGNORANCE OF LAW IS ONE’S OWN PROBLEM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one is saying this. I'm not saying we shouldn't help new users learn about the site, suggest improvements to posts, etc. and just leave them to fend for themselves. You seem to still be in this mindset that down votes, closing questions, etc. are offensive and bad. This is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to keep in mind is that it is &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt; to avoid offending someone at some point. Additionally, just because someone is offended by something does not mean that the offender is always at fault. I don't think the mechanisms that uphold the quality of the site should be compromised just because certain users will be offended by them or even lash out. In my personal interactions I don't want to offend others, but this is just an internet site devoted to certain types of physics Q&amp;amp;A. The point of this site is not to make sure everyone who uses it always feels happy no matter what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T14:17:50.673" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T14:17:50.673" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12541" CreationDate="2019-11-28T18:55:00.097" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of incorrect expectations by new users of this site.  This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a social network to discuss random physics, so &quot;what if&quot;, non-mainstream and otherwise overly speculative questions are discouraged, along with homework-style questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The style has evolved to this out of the necessity of avoiding pollution.  Unfortunately,  too many junior users are impatient: asking a good question is difficult, and they will not put in the time to read about the site and the guidelines, sometimes don't even bother to typeset the questions, much less bother to search the site for duplicates or near-duplicates from which they could continue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an educator, you can imagine how I would feel if I were to find that questions I assigned to my class are simply farmed out to be solved by &quot;cloud people&quot;.   It may be that &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; question is not strictly speaking a homework question, but the reader of the question cannot know this, and experience has shown that in general more harm than good is done overall by answering those types of questions.  Exceptions occur and abound, sometimes for legitimate sometimes from less legitimate reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry but I'm one of those with a tendency to crack down on homework-style questions.  The reason this site is interesting is because of interesting,  well researched, well written questions and answers. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that one reason you keep visiting this site is precisely because of the quality of the questions and answer.  This is only possible because there is constant quality control by the community.  Speaking for myself, when searching for information on a particular topic I don't want to have to plow through pages of variations on pulley questions.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T18:55:00.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-28T18:35:43.053" Score="20" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the question / answer format, but I would also find it useful to post a piece that I have written (current subjects include cosmology and thermodynamics) to generate discussion, feedback. Warning: I am not theoretical physicist, so some / all may be fantasy, but still may provoke ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238749" OwnerDisplayName="FritzS" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T10:00:44.560" Title="Is there a way to post something for discussion, rather than ask a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12544" CreationDate="2019-11-28T20:32:44.847" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;A better site for open discussion is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physicsforums&lt;/a&gt;. This is not what SE does. Vixra is populated with kooks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T20:32:44.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-28T20:40:35.083" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what happens to a question on hold.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it removed from the forum completely?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it no longer searchable?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it no longer visible but rather archived.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it visible still to the author but not the public?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How long does one have to edit the question so as to put it in a format which is acceptable to the community?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question I am interested in discussing in an acceptable format &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/515762/&quot;&gt;is found here&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247718" OwnerDisplayName="John Shearing" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-11-28T21:27:21.237" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T00:11:47.690" Title="What happens to a question on hold?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12546" CreationDate="2019-11-29T00:11:47.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it removed from the forum completely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. In your example you have given a link that still works, so it has not been deleted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it no longer searchable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. One can still search for questions that are on hold. Just take a question that is on hold and search for it to confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it no longer visible but rather archived.&#xA;  Is it visible still to the author but not the public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is still visible to the public. Questions become &quot;invisible&quot; on the home page if it receives enough down votes, and it becomes invisible to all users with &amp;lt;10k rep if it becomes deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How long does one have to edit the question so as to put it in a format which is acceptable to the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indefinitely as long as the question is not deleted. In your case the question has an up voted answer on it, so this is very unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;On hold&quot; just means the question isn't up to the desired quality of the site and needs to be improved. Once you edit the question it gets added to the &quot;reopen queue&quot; where other users can decide to reopen it if it is of sufficient quality. The &quot;on hold&quot; just prevents the posting of new answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T00:11:47.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12544" CreationDate="2019-11-29T10:00:44.560" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the Physics chat room&lt;/a&gt;. This is exactly what the chat room is intended for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What response you get depends on who is in the chat room and how much free time they have, but it costs nothing to ask and the worst that can happen is that no-one answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T10:00:44.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-23T23:34:25.177" Score="5" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is a site where it is possible to look up formulas. For math.stackexchange, it is possible to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.searchonmath.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.searchonmath.com/&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://approach0.xyz/search/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://approach0.xyz/search/&lt;/a&gt;. But those don't index physics.stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange, there is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://zbmath.org/formulae/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://zbmath.org/formulae/&lt;/a&gt;, but I don’t know anything equivalent in physics for this one either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236278" OwnerDisplayName="dandide" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2019-11-30T03:29:32.963" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T03:29:32.963" Title="Is there a search engine to look up formulas in physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|soft-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12551" CreationDate="2019-12-01T03:22:53.490" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/516885/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; allowed? It seems mentioning video link in a question post is against rules but I never get to read code of conduct until now. I explain everything in my question post and give link in the end to the lecture as these lectures are popular but still I received warning three times by the same user on linking video. Is this a bad practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98422" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-01T03:50:34.660" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T03:50:34.660" Title="Is it okay to give a link to video lecture as reference source?" Tags="|discussion|questions|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12550" CreationDate="2019-12-01T03:32:51.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, we expect posts to be self contained so that all details needed are provided &amp;amp; users do not have to go off-site to find out what you're really questioning. Hence, you should provide a link for additional &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; to the post, but it should not be a &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; to understand what it is you are looking at and/or questioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ben's comment says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please don't post videos. Write a summary so we can tell what the argument is without watching a video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, he's right: you're requiring us to watch a video to understand what is being explained by Prof Lewin that you are questioning--you really don't describe anything in the post itself (i.e., what is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$T_1$&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$T_2$&lt;/span&gt;? What rope? What cylinder?), it's all in the video you link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T03:32:51.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2019-12-01T04:06:58.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the points made in the answers by David Z &amp;amp; Emilio Pisanty, make sure to mention in the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;lecturer, title, etc, of video, so the link can be recreated in case of link rot. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;minute in video, so the reader doesn't have to watch the entire video. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T04:06:58.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12554" CreationDate="2019-12-01T06:43:57.267" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I can start a chat, just copying one or two comments &quot;by hand&quot; won't be a problem, but I cannot even find a way to start it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244116" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T19:05:12.833" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T19:05:12.833" Title="How can I start a chat, if there is not a box suggesting to do it?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12553" CreationDate="2019-12-01T11:26:42.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All users with more than 100 reputation on a site can start new chat rooms. Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; (without this link reachable by clicking on the SE hamburger icon in the top right of the desktop site, where you should see the triple &quot;help chat log out&quot; beside the name of the SE site you're on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the bottom right corner you should see &quot;create a new room&quot; - click it to create a new chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T11:26:42.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-01T16:48:28.923" Score="-3" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/479797/&quot;&gt;This question.&lt;/a&gt; Seeing it closed has shaken my faith in this community, so I am looking for an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A bullet is the most trivial engineering construction I can think of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open any physics problem book and there will be found any number of engineering constructions, easily as complex as a laser. Insofar as the particulars of a construction are not the focus of a question, I do not see how it excludes the question from the field of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a kind of a question an answer to which can glorify physics. It is captivating and educational.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230543" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T02:46:03.693" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T02:46:03.693" Title="Why is this question considered engineering?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12555" CreationDate="2019-12-01T17:44:41.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, this is definitely a complicated question that depends a lot on the engineering specifics.  If it had stuck to the question in the title, and asked primarily about that in relation to faster bullets, other things equal, I could &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; see the case that it's on topic as conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll address your points as best I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A bullet penetrating a plate is absolutely not a &quot;trivial engineering construction&quot;.  Impact mechanics are fairly complicated, let alone the mechanics of a fast moving object shearing through plates.  It's not always trivial; depending on the properties of the materials involved the problem may change quite a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question focused on a series of particulars, such as changing the material, increasing the speed, and greatly increasing the speed.  The particulars are the focus of the question, which makes it quite broad.  I may have voted to close it as too broad myself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, due to how many factors the question asked about; this question can give the wrong idea in several different ways, instead of glorifying anything.  If people answer it without addressing the broad range of different situations, it may give people the false impression the situation is more simple than it actually is.  If people actually try to address everything, it will give the impression that this site allows questions that require entire chapters from engineering books to properly answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming from experience, this is absolutely the type of thing you would find explained in detail in an engineering textbook; in terms of the details OP seems to be asking about.  I can't see any physics textbook digging into all the different conceptual details to answer this.  It really doesn't seem on-topic here unless it can be revised to focus on a specific physics concept; instead of the broad application of many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T17:44:41.300" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12555" CreationDate="2019-12-01T17:57:10.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Engineering? I disagree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There simply isn’t a question about designing or building things there. The question is about the variation of a physical outcome as a function of a (or several) physical parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, engineering shouldn’t mean “this issue is complicated for practical reasons” as that applies to experimental questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the thing that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a problem is the shear scope of the issue. As one of the existing answers points out this is a significant field of study in its own right (and to steal a line it has a “long and glorious history”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2019-12-01T18:11:31.710" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T18:11:31.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12555" CreationDate="2019-12-02T00:59:59.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see how it is possible to answer this using physics principle.  I suppose all engineering is physics (or stamp collecting) but one would need tables of various properties of materials.  This is IMO mainstream engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T00:59:59.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-06T09:47:12.037" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;From I have found that new notice banners have started appearing on questions. Some examples are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5keei.jpg&quot; width=&quot;330&quot; title=&quot;Closed notice as off topic&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Ra53.jpg&quot; width=&quot;330&quot; title=&quot;Closed noticeas needs details or clarity&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what was the reason for this new look? Why aren't they question closed as homework and exercise type show the specific reason? Any other relevant information are welcomed here! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user238497" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-12-08T18:10:00.230" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T18:19:03.670" Title="New notice banners" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-08T16:26:46.907" Score="6" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I found that one user was posting the same answer (copy of a single answer) at different question though they were similar enough for same answer to be posted. So what is the consensus of the community regarding such kind of incidents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also clarify why it should or shouldn't be done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user248197" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-08T18:23:09.847" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T02:04:26.117" Title="Is there some rule regarding a user posting the same answer at different (but similar) questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12559" CreationDate="2019-12-08T18:19:03.670" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, the status and reasons for this change are discussed in detail in the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339700/new-post-notices-are-live-network-wide&quot;&gt;New Post Notices are live network-wide&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange, as well as the linked blog posts and mother-meta threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/339733/184688&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; raises the specific complaint that the new off-topic closures don't show the specific closure sub-reason text which documents why the question was closed and which links to the site's further guidance about what to do in those scenarios, which &lt;strong&gt;absolutely, definitely breaks one of the key mechanisms of that this site has to communicate its scope to newcomers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer is marked, as of this writing, as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-review&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-review&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-review&lt;/a&gt; by the SE dev team. Support of that answer (via votes on the answer and its comments, as well as civil, well-argued comments for why it's important) is probably the best (only?) way to make this change and change quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T18:19:03.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12561" CreationDate="2019-12-09T01:39:05.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure there is a &quot;community consensus&quot;, but it shouldn't be done. If the same exact answer can be used for multiple questions, then it is most likely that the questions are duplicates.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user is just copying and posting the same exact answer to various questions, and the answers don't really apply to the questions, then this is what flags are for. Raise a custom flag explaining that the answers are exact duplicates by the same user. Flag the questions as duplicates if appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;I say most likely, because sometimes a user might provide extra information in an answer that was not the focus of the question it was posted on, yet that extra information might serve as a more focused answer for a different question that is related but not a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this fringe case, I would say that instead of just copying and pasting the same answer, it might be better for the user to post a link to the first answer while additionally pointing out the main key points that are most important in the new question in this new answer. It would also be best to supply some additional information/focus that applies more to the new question. That way the new answer is not a duplicate answer, identifies that the question is not exactly a duplicate, and it provides a way for future readers to learn more on the topic by going to a related question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T13:44:43.307" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T13:44:43.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12561" CreationDate="2019-12-09T04:11:51.893" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8891/25301&quot;&gt;really plagiarism&lt;/a&gt; to copy &amp;amp; paste answers to multiple questions and should be addressed via custom moderator flag indicating it as such. Downvotes &amp;amp; comments on such a post are likely expected, I would also think. There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/104227/230312&quot;&gt;official SE FAQ on the matter&lt;/a&gt; which says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copying and pasting the same answer to multiple questions can cause different reactions depending on what answer you're pasting. The acceptableness of this behavior ranges from &quot;highly frowned upon&quot; to &quot;completely unacceptable&quot;. (Note that it never reaches the &quot;acceptable&quot; end of that spectrum.) If you catch yourself or someone else doing this, please evaluate the answer and see if there is a more correct thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with an additional note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community User&lt;/a&gt; flags duplicated content for moderator review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at the very least, I think one should leave a comment informing the user that this is not typical/expected behavior for answering questions on the site--when doing so, please provide a link to the copied content so that mods &amp;amp; those with sufficient rep can vote &amp;amp; act accordingly as well. It might also be useful to include the link to the SE FAQ on duplicated posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T18:31:51.177" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T18:31:51.177" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12567" CreationDate="2019-12-09T19:37:22.550" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minor issue .. I asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/223610&quot;&gt;http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/223610&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the question has the callout:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Highly active question. You have enough reputation to answer this question. The reputation requirement helps protect this question from spam and non-answer activity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a big deal, but when you click through to it, it's somewhat jarring/confusing in that it speaks of &quot;me&quot; without being aware that I'm the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Perhaps in such a case it could say something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Highly active question. This question, created by you, now has a reputation requirement to answer. The reputation requirement helps protect this question from spam and non-answer activity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10319" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-12-10T10:10:53.527" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T10:10:53.527" Title="The new &quot;Highly active...&quot; post notice is somewhat jarring, particularly for the owner of the question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12566" CreationDate="2019-12-09T20:08:28.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has (mostly) already been called out on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/339709/184688&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the announcement on the Mother Meta, which discusses the protected-question banner on more general grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue should be raised on the Mother Meta, either as a comment on that answer pointing out that the wording is especially awkward if you're the OP, or as a separate answer (probably linked in a comment on the already-existing answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T20:08:28.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12569" CreationDate="2019-12-12T22:44:04.483" Score="17" ViewCount="901" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Update 2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most recent information about this request, see the test announcement post - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14133/testing-3-vote-close-and-reopen&quot;&gt;Testing 3-vote close and reopen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the votes, we will be giving this experiment a try. We are working with the CM team now to figure out what metrics we can measure for comparisons before and during the test and we will update everybody as soon as we come up with a plan and a date to start the test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stay tuned!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In early August, Stack Overflow (the company) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/388313/experiment-ended-closing-and-reopening-happens-at-3-votes-for-the-next-30-day&quot;&gt;announced an experiment&lt;/a&gt; to lower the number of votes required to close or to reopen a question to 3 votes on Stack Overflow (the website). The trial period was 30 days, and at the end (plus time for data crunching), &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390083/threshold-experiment-results-closing-editing-and-reopening-all-become-more-eff&quot;&gt;the results and an in-depth analysis&lt;/a&gt; of the experiment were posted. It was a resounding success on Stack Overflow (the website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly over a week ago, Stack Overflow (the company) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/391832/we-re-lowering-the-close-reopen-vote-threshold-from-5-to-3-for-good&quot;&gt;announced the change to vote counts would become permanent&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow (the website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community Manager team has indicated that other sites are welcome to try out a 30 day test of the same thing if the community agrees. Several smaller sites and beta sites have started the process to undergo the test, motivated by the limited number of active curators on those sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is not a small site, but we're also not the size of Stack Overflow. We have a dedicated core group of curators (thank you!!!), but the group isn't big enough to get quick and effective action on closing or reopening questions that warrant it. A completely not scientific, observation-biased look at the close and reopen queues indicates many questions quickly get 3 or 4 close or reopen votes and then languish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to propose that Physics.SE undergo a 30 day trial of the lowered close and reopen vote counts, so it will only take 3 votes to close or reopen a question. At the end of the 30 days, we can evaluate how the test went and help Stack Overflow (the company) decide if it works on sites of our scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave the discussion here open for 3 weeks (we'll take a final look at the status on 3 January 2020) and if there is enough of a consensus around evaluating it, we can let the Community Management team know and they can enable the new vote count requirements for 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the community interested in experimenting with a 3 vote requirement for opening and closing questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2022-06-29T20:12:10.630" LastActivityDate="2022-06-29T20:12:10.630" Title="Should we test lowering the vote to close and reopen threshold?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12568" CreationDate="2019-12-12T22:44:50.997" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE should undergo a 30 day test with 3 votes required to close and reopen questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T22:44:50.997" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12568" CreationDate="2019-12-12T22:46:10.863" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; undergo a 30 day test with 3 votes required to close and reopen questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T22:46:10.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12576" CreationDate="2019-12-13T16:18:40.117" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am puzzled by an apparent possibility of incoherence of the site behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me use a specific case as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a comment to a recent question on SE.physics,  @dmckee cited a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/431399/2451&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; as a possible duplicate. Going to the linked page, one finds that it corresponds to a closed question and, at the bottom of the paragraph explaining why the question was closed, I read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Viewable by the post author and users with the close/reopen votes privilege)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am puzzled. Are users without close/reopen votes privileges able to see that comment? But, if they can, if I am not wrong, they could not see the link. Should it be considered a normal behavior? Or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;I am fully aware of the new policy about closed questions and I am not complaining about that. What I do find odd is that there could be a reference to something which is supposed to be not visible to part of the community. So, either the cited link works for people without the appropriate  privileges, then citation becomes a way to break the decision of making invisible a closed question, or the cited link does not work for unprivileged users, maybe including the user the comment was addressed to, making the citation unusable and  useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-13T22:47:21.647" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T05:42:47.203" Title="References to closed questions and their visibility" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-14T03:52:01.183" Score="-7" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;More often than not the correct answer here is &quot;Have you considered learning philosophy or art instead?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is kind of blunt but i stress that it correct answer most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192234" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T06:20:30.580" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T06:20:30.580" Title="New flag suggestion" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-12-15T02:05:05.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12571" CreationDate="2019-12-14T04:29:32.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the comment about visibility in the news close notices refers to the &lt;em&gt;content of the notice&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the reason that a question is off-topic. The content of the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, and its answers, is visible to everyone, unless the question is deleted.  (And since deleted questions and answers can be seen by high-rep users and restored from the database, some of the notices call them &quot;hidden&quot; instead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are curious whether something you can see is due to a special privilege you've earned, you can log out or visit the site from a &quot;private browsing&quot; or &quot;incognito&quot; window; all modern browsers support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T04:29:32.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12572" CreationDate="2019-12-14T04:36:40.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: this answer responds to language in a previous version (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/12572/1&quot;&gt;v1&lt;/a&gt;) of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flags are for communicating with reviewers and moderators.  If an existing flag doesn't describe your concern about a post, you can enter custom text instead, which will be visible only to the diamond moderators and the Stack Exchange staff. Please do not respond to low-quality questions by suggesting that the diamond moderators should study philosophy or art. We're fortunate to have a diamond mod team of very well-rounded people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment under a question suggesting that the asker should study art instead of asking about physics would probably be flagged as impolite and removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flag you are looking for is &quot;should be closed,&quot; which puts the question into a review queue.  There's lots of detail about this in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T05:58:35.527" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T05:58:35.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12572" CreationDate="2019-12-14T05:02:33.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your premise for this seems very flawed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe the correct answer to any question here is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Have you considered learning philosophy or art instead?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you will want to rethink how you approach answers.  Asking the user another question is &lt;em&gt;rarely&lt;/em&gt; an answer; and is never a good answer on it's own.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This specific question is not helpful for a vast majority of the questions here.  Even if asking rhetorical questions were an appropriate close flag, this one would not have any practical use here when we already have off topic flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T05:02:33.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12571" CreationDate="2019-12-14T05:42:47.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339700/new-post-notices-are-live-network-wide&quot;&gt;Mother-meta question&lt;/a&gt; linked in the comment by dmckee shows an example of the 3 variations of a closed post notice (author view, privileged view, general view). Here's the privileged view example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HfK8s.png&quot; alt=&quot;closed notice&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The material that is not visible to general readers is beneath a horizontal rule, and in the left margin there's an icon of an eye with a diagonal line through it to indicate that it's not generally visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that these new closed post notices are still being tweaked. There have been numerous changes since the first announcement, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/337013/334566&quot;&gt;New Post Notices rollout on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, and many of the answers on the page dmckee linked are marked &lt;strong&gt;status-review&lt;/strong&gt;. Also, the new closed notice system is easier for the devs to modify, so changes are now easier to implement. If you have feedback about these notices, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; vote on the existing answers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339700/new-post-notices-are-live-network-wide&quot;&gt;Mother-meta question&lt;/a&gt; (or post your own answer if an existing one doesn't cover your concerns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T05:42:47.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12578" CreationDate="2019-12-14T13:51:24.747" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title says it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While surfing through the questions page in Physics SE, sometimes I stumble upon a few closed and duplicate questions which are begging me to get salvaged. Simply put, they have major issues which cannot be ignored. My first thought is to edit them right away. But then I think that it is better not to bump a duplicate or a closed question on the homepage, so I leave it unedited. What should be my approach to these kind of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit :-&lt;/strong&gt; By &quot;salvation&quot;, I mean to correct the spelling, fix grammar, convert normal text to Mathjax, etc. I do not intend to reopen that question by changing it significantly. I just want to lift it up to the expected SE standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastEditorDisplayName="user243267" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T14:52:20.560" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T11:02:54.940" Title="Should I edit closed or duplicate, but recently active questions?" Tags="|discussion|support|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12577" CreationDate="2019-12-14T14:39:49.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...are begging me to get salvaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way are you wanting to &quot;salvage&quot;? Do you mean there are typos you want to fix, or are you saying you can edit the question to not be closed anymore? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the latter, I would probably not edit the question, as you will most likely be changing the intent of the OP. If you think the OP is just not asking the question clearly enough, using the wrong words, etc. then you should just leave a comment suggesting to the OP what they can do to help make their question better. This is what the comments are for. This way if your ideas match what they are trying to say, they can edit accordingly, and if not then the question can remain closed since it will stay in the same state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the former, then I would look at two things. First, try to decide if the question is still useful to future users despite it being closed. For example, perhaps before the question was closed someone still posted a great answer that has some good information in it. Second, is what you need to fix really that important? Is it a minor typo that doesn't really affect the question, or is it something that really needs to be addressed to help the question be much better? I do think typos should be fixed, but if you are worried about bringing up old, closed questions, then perhaps the severity or lightness of the proposed edit could help you personally decide if it is worth it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion, you need to make a decision on how important your edit is, how important the question is, and whether or not it is your place to make the edit you want to make. From there you can decide if the edit should be made or not. I would usually lean towards not editing, since I think it should be up to the OP to fix their questions if they are closed. But there are always special cases to consider, so I won't say never do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By &quot;salvation&quot;, I mean to correct the spelling, fix grammar, convert normal text to Mathjax, etc. I do not intend to reopen that question by changing it significantly. I just want to lift it up to the expected SE standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that if a question is closed, then fixing typos, MathJax, etc. will not raise the question to the standards of Physics SE, as the question will still be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T15:01:40.667" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T15:01:40.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12568" CreationDate="2019-12-14T15:35:36.350" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should test closing with fewer votes. The outcome for thousands of users of Physics SE would be too sensitive to actions of an individual trigger-happy user. If somebody hates a question, (s)he can also flag it. If a moderator does not close the question after that, maybe the question should not be closed, in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6974" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T15:35:36.350" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12581" CreationDate="2019-12-15T13:04:10.773" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a OP has one of their questions closed one of the main desirable outcomes is for the OP to edit the question to address the issues that led to the closure. However, where should we draw the line between editing an existing question and asking a new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/485084/&quot;&gt;How light wave have thermal effect&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the edits would be more appropriate for a new question as they completely changed the question. This means that the answers (including mine) which were valid answers to the original question now are not even remotely addressing the edited question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If another user had made these edits then I would simply roll back the edits, but since the OP made the edits I am hesitant and considering deleting my answer instead. But I find that I am rather irritated by the whole situation since deleting a valid answer to the original question will cost me points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the best course would be for the OP to ask a new question, but what is the actual policy? Shall I roll back the question or delete my now off topic answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-15T13:58:41.393" LastActivityDate="2019-12-15T13:58:41.393" Title="Completely changing a question vs asking a new question" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-12-15T14:06:46.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12580" CreationDate="2019-12-15T13:06:41.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions should not be edited in a way that invalidates existing answers. I have rolled back the edit in this particular case, and all users should roll back such edits when they see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-12-15T13:06:41.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12583" CreationDate="2019-12-16T19:52:27.003" Score="-1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I downvoted an answer and flagged it, too. Now I get negative scores. Presumably, because I wrote a comment on a bad answer, which is downvoted by others too.&#xA;Although, I do not care too much about my score, I am interested in understanding the motivation for the negative scores. Is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159486" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-12-18T20:07:57.880" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T20:07:57.880" Title="Downvoting costs one reputation point" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|answers|down-votes|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12582" CreationDate="2019-12-16T20:05:46.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you down voted an answer then you lose 1 reputation point, which is only viewable to you. Since I can't see this on your own &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/159486/semoi?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation page&lt;/a&gt; I'm guessing that's what happened. You will probably be able to see it on that page though (and any other reputation change history of yours).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't lose/gain reputation for comments in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T20:22:16.580" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T20:22:16.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-17T14:56:29.003" Score="11" ViewCount="640" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to discuss the policy around asking questions which are intended as setups for a joke.  I searched through the meta, and didn't see anything about this directly, so I would like to gauge the community opinion on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of what I am talking about, see today's question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/520065/two-cats-on-a-roof&quot;&gt;Two cats on a roof&lt;/a&gt;.  This question was asked and answered at the same time by the OP, and it is clear that the question is indeed a physics related joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is related to physics, I don't think such questions and answers are really useful to the purpose of this site, which is to share knowledge of physics concepts; not to share physics humour.  The only reason I second guess it at all is because both the question and the answer seem to have a net positive reception.  I assume this is just because people found it &quot;fun&quot;; but having more community opinions on this would help clear up how we should approach such questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, if you have an opinion one way or another on this, I would be interested in hearing your opinions and seeing what the community consensus is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had expected this to be a duplicate, but the closest I could find was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4764/policy-regarding-intentionally-counter-productive-users&quot;&gt;Policy regarding intentionally counter-productive users&lt;/a&gt;, which isn't really the same situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T16:47:42.820" Title="Asking physics joke questions" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12584" CreationDate="2019-12-17T15:55:24.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although it is related to physics, I don't think such questions and answers are really useful to the purpose of this site, which is to share knowledge of physics concepts; not to share physics humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say that the question itself doesn't point to it being a joke. And as I've seen many people discuss on meta before, a question should be judged on its own, not based on the answers it has/may receive/received. With that being said, I would choose to judge it like any other question. It appears to me to be an unclear homework problem. More information is needed, and it doesn't ask about understanding any physics concepts. Therefore, it deserves to be closed on those grounds alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only reason I second guess it at all is because both the question and the answer seem to have a net positive reception. I assume this is just because people found it &quot;fun&quot;; but having more community opinions on this would help clear up how we should approach such questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the answer by the OP shows that the post was intended to be a joke, I agree with you that this adds an additional &quot;off-topicness&quot; to the question. However, there isn't anything that says good public reception should prevent a question from being closed. If that were the case then many other types of questions sound be allowed that are actually quite good questions, yet not on topic for this site.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; Overall, I think the question should have been closed, and physics jokes are not a valid use of this site. That is what the chat, social media, etc. are for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I have also flagged any non-serious answers to the question, since they are not answers to the &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; problem. The fact that the OP replied with a joke should not be grounds for other users to post poor, joke answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; For example, the really tricky/interesting physics problems that get a lot of good attention for the challenge. Yet the only thing that was posted was the question without any initial work, questioning understanding of physics concepts, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T16:47:42.820" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T16:47:42.820" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12587" CreationDate="2019-12-17T17:58:25.773" Score="-2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/479797/&quot;&gt;This question.&lt;/a&gt; Until recent interface changes, I could see that the close reason stated that the question is about engineering, and hence is off topic, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12555&quot;&gt;an inquiry I made&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12557&quot;&gt;has shown that this reason is wrong&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12555/why-is-this-question-considered-engineering/12558#comment47131_12557&quot;&gt;a suggestion that it is, rather, too broad, was given instead&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I can see, the answer to this question needs to consider 4 cases with varying speed and material, which is about as few cases as possible for the question to remain meaningful. But even then, it is not essential for an answer to formally list all four cases, as what is really being asked for is a qualitative characterization of the event, not the specific calculations. &lt;em&gt;(I do claim this, based on the general nature of the question and the arbitrariness of examples asked about.)&lt;/em&gt; Then again, close reasons were recently adjusted across Stack Exchange, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;there is no &lt;em&gt;&quot;too broad&quot;&lt;/em&gt; reason anymore&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it difficult to justify why this question has to be closed. The reason given is faulty, there are no comments, the vote count is positive. I cannot see a fault so gross as to warrant the question being closed. Furthermore, there is a purpose to closing questions, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/323713&quot;&gt;the formal reasons are there only to assist, not to define&lt;/a&gt;. Are we, the community, actually convinced that questions like this one have no place at Physics Stack Exchange? If so, can we give a reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not close questions we dislike — rather, we vote them down, and there are guide lines to that. &lt;a href=&quot;https://psychology.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Some questions could be eventually deleted by a script&lt;/a&gt;, but then again, there are clear rules. If a question is closed unjustly or mistakenly, it should be restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp; Hey folks, this is not a yes/no question, so if you are voting it down to express disagreement, you should leave a comment to point out what you disagree with in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230543" LastEditorUserId="230543" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T19:07:33.340" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T19:47:06.477" Title="Why is this question considered too broad?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12586" CreationDate="2019-12-17T19:39:29.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/em&gt; I'm a bit preoccupied with work today, so the following answer may seem a bit distracted and all over the place. Sorry in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spirit of the question that was asked is a good one. It is interesting enough and I think I agree that it is based more in physics than engineering. However, I would have to agree with the others that the question is too broad. That said, I think it is only just past the line of being too broad and so can understand how you might need clarification on the nature of that decision. So let me try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;too broad&quot; classification is intended to prevent there from being posts that would essentially require an entire chapter or more of a textbook to give a proper full answer. For this question, one could undoubtedly provide a less than full answer to the effect of &quot;this depends on a bunch of factors and sometimes you'll find yes whereas sometimes no&quot;, but that would not be a complete answer; at best it just begs further questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact of the matter is that this question has multiple scenarios to consider and there are many corollaries to each one that would require detailed explanations and each corollary changes what the overall answer would be. That was a confusing sentence... Essentially, the answer to the question in question is highly variable depending on specific parameters. It would be a large amount of information an answer would have to convey so that you could understand all the nuances of the problem and how to effectively determine the correct answer for any given set of conditions. This would span various topics from ballistics to materials science to relativity and thermodynamics. A complete answer would simply be too large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, this question is on the fringe of this classification, according to me. I could imagine a situation where the OP modifies the question so that it is no longer too broad, but they would have to be more specific with what they are asking. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to narrow it would be. What I suggest they do is go to the hbar and start inquiring there. They should learn some of the basics and terminology relevant to the problem and then, when they understand more of what they're trying to find out, ask a more focused question. I recognize that this can be frustrating because the question would seem fairly focused already to someone who does not know the answer, but the amount of physics that goes into it is quite involved, which is why there is so much disagreement in the answers - nobody wants to put in the effort of doing a broad and general answer, so they choose different specific conditions and answer within that framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; I like where the question is going but the complete answer requires too much content for people to grasp it properly. We can't ask users to write a textbook as an answer, so this question needs more focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T19:47:06.477" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T19:47:06.477" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12568" CreationDate="2019-12-17T21:06:21.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be an easy answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should trial this. Stack Overflow tried it and were really happy with the results. And that's just what it is, a &quot;trial&quot;. Rather than speculating on what the ups or downs of this could be, we have the opportunity to experimentally determine the true situation. If it doesn't work well, we don't adopt it permanently. If it works, we accept it. There's very little risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aren't we supposed to be scientists? Why are we standing around talking about what could happen when we can collect real data and test the theory? I don't recall a lot of instances in science when they published a paper saying &quot;there's a 50/50 chance that this theory would work out, so there's no point in anybody running the easy experiment to check the predictions. We'll just assume it's wrong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Save any arguing for the decision on whether to adopt it permanently and just run the trial now. Isn't that why we do experiments after all? Because it's a lot easier to make a definitive case about something when you've got experimental data backing you up. So whatever side you're on, you want to trial it to prove to the other side that you're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T21:15:35.107" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T21:15:35.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12590" CreationDate="2019-12-17T23:15:20.663" Score="-8" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a several questions (for example, one about gravity waves (3k views) in the two last days With more than 2k views. So not too long ago. There is another question (I don't want  with say who asked it because I think this isn't fair) with almost 100 views, that &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; marked as hot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why then are these questions I've made &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; marked as hot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-18T00:59:18.437" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T11:58:27.283" Title="Why aren't my questions marked as hot?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|questions|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12589" CreationDate="2019-12-18T00:23:55.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11602/what-formula-should-be-used-to-determine-hot-questions&quot;&gt;The formula used to determine 'hotness'&lt;/a&gt; (at least, to give the comparative ranking within each SE site) is publicly documented and does not take any account of view counts - it is based exclusively on post scores and ages. (There were some additional modifications to the mechanism in March 2019, documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325060&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but they don't affect this aspect.) Arguments based on page view counts to argue whether it's 'fair' for any question to be on the HNQ list are just based on a complete misunderstanding of how the list is compiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also: &lt;strong&gt;you are not owed a spot on the HNQ list&lt;/strong&gt;, no matter how good you think your question is. The list is a deeply problematic construct, and if your question makes the list then, as likely as not, it is basically a junk-food question (or it will be turned into one by the voting patterns of the off-site audience the advertising will bring). The mechanism was finally, after years of complaints, turned into something that can be controlled by the site's community, back in March, and it's there to serve as advertising of the &lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt;, not of you and your questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to chase the HNQ on purpose by writing questions designed to be 'hot', then in all likelihood you're just littering the site with the low-quality fodder that should be kicked out of HNQ by a moderator the second it gets there. Focus on writing high-quality questions. If they get HNQ'd, &lt;em&gt;and that helps increase the quality of the response&lt;/em&gt; (big if), then great. If they don't, then they're still questions on the site, which is the only thing we (all) have a right to expect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2019-12-18T11:58:27.283" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T11:58:27.283" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12561" CreationDate="2019-12-19T08:55:58.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't approve this behaviour, I'd like to mention that unless there's something wrong with the answer besides it being copied (like plagiarism, or a user posting almost exclusively copy-pasted content), there's not much that can be done with it. You can warn the user of course, however, they are free to ignore you, and flagging doesn't guarantee the expected outcome: mods are rather conservative when it comes to removing answers (and for a good reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the answer doesn't fully apply, it's a bad answer and should be downvoted. Flagging bad answers usually results in declined flags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the answer does apply, the real problem is with the question being a duplicate. If it isn't a duplicate, then posting an applicable answer is actually beneficial, so there's nothing you should do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83721" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T08:55:58.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2019-12-19T09:17:34.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://artofproblemsolving.com/community&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://artofproblemsolving.com/community&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good number of questions closed as off-topic are often of grade 12 level or sometimes of Olympiad Physics level. When PSE veterans see such questions, they will sometimes respond harshly. Although AoPS webpage says that it's for Grade 2-12, many undergraduate discussions and Olympiad discussions take place there. This might be relevant for a lot of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="234936" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T18:57:03.983" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T18:57:03.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12595" CreationDate="2019-12-19T15:16:28.443" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title is a bit vague. Let me explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, just yesterday, I posted a comment like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/520398/how-can-one-e-field-formula-be-rewritten-to-another-version#comment1174273_520398&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/520379/commutator-of-annihilation-operator-and-momentum-operator#comment1174243_520379&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. In these comments, I requested the OP to use Mathjax and to avoid using images. Now, both the questions have been edited (one by the OP and the other by someone else). So, should I delete my comments now, because they no longer make any sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The comments were deleted, so the links are dead.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastEditorDisplayName="user243267" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T09:29:58.077" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T09:29:58.077" Title="Should I delete my comments once the OP has acted accordingly?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12594" CreationDate="2019-12-19T16:41:49.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes... I have nothing further to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T16:41:49.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12594" CreationDate="2019-12-19T18:48:36.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12595/179151&quot;&gt;Jim's very detailed answer&lt;/a&gt;, I will add that you can only delete your own comments. If there were also comments by other users that have become obsolete you should additionally flag these comments as &quot;no longer needed&quot; to be removed by mods. That way there aren't unneeded, irrelevant comments hanging around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T23:08:51.817" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T23:08:51.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-20T09:54:32.930" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm watching Dr.Stone (an anime/manga) and have noticed the rather odd shoe design used by a people of a village (shown below). Can I ask about how those shoes would be of benefit to the environment in Dr.Stone? (Things like area, friction, hardness, stone-and-ground interaction, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpbzj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpbzj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stone shoes (colored)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nyetm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nyetm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stone shoes (black and white)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246985" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T09:54:32.930" Title="Can I ask about these shoes from Dr.Stone?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2019-12-20T23:11:40.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12600" CreationDate="2019-12-20T17:39:16.223" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyday, many questions are posted on this site(Physics SE) which need to be edited because of many different reasons (like MathJax, grammar, typos, tags etc.). Now, I am okay with the grammar, typos, tags, etc. kind of edits, but many posts contain equations written with bare text. Mostly these posts are by new users, and so we expect them not to know how to use MathJax. And thus with good faith, we edit their posts(at least I do). But, many people take it for granted and thus always expect someone else to &quot;MathJaxify&quot; their post, and don't learn how to use MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in the cases, where there are many equations to be &quot;MathJaxified&quot;, I usually drop a comment with a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/tex-latex-mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax tutorial&lt;/a&gt;, expecting them to learn MathJax and edit their post themselves as soon as possible. But when there is not too much(by not too much, I don't mean trivial, but something substantial which won't take me more than 5 minutes to edit) &quot;MathJaxification&quot; to be done, I usually edit the posts myself.  Now, should I do that? Should I let them edit their posts by dropping by a link to the tutorial or should I edit the posts myself? Because I think that people should learn using MathJax if they want to continue posting questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T17:58:28.067" Title="Should I myself edit the question or encourage the OP to do so?" Tags="|support|editing|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12599" CreationDate="2019-12-20T17:53:07.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is more of a personal preference type thing. Sometimes I will just put the link to MathJax, and sometimes I will edit if I am in the mood for it. So in this answer I will just discuss what goes into my decision. To be clear, these are my personal preferences, I am not citing any Physics SE policies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the question on topic?&lt;/strong&gt; For example, if the post is just an off-topic homework problem that has text variables and equations, then the most I will do, if anything, is to give the MathJax tutorial link in a comment. I don't think it is worth the time to edit a question that will be closed anyway. In contrast, if the question looks like an excellent question, but the lack of formatting is getting in the way of the readability, comprehension, etc., then I am much more likely to do the edits myself in addition to supplying the MathJax tutorial link. I might say something like &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; in the future when formatting variables and equations. I have edited your question this time as an example. Please make sure I have correctly interpreted the equations you were using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much editing needs to be done?&lt;/strong&gt; If there is a lot of equations to format, then I am less likely to edit than if there just one or two equations are needing to be formatted. In cases where there are many equations, I might just edit one and then leave a comment talking about MathJax and saying how I edited the first equation as an example. I might then comment something like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; when formatting variables and equations. I have edited your first equation as an example. Please edit the rest of your question accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How am I feeling at the moment?&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes I am just in the mood to edit, other times I am not. That can influence how much I end up editing, or if I choose to comment (or even just move along and not do anything).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My final decision of whether or not to edit and how much to edit is usually decided by the three above questions. Therefore, I don't really have any &quot;hard and fast&quot; rules on when to edit, but this is how my general thought process goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say that I do agree with your sentiment of making sure the OP learns how to use MathJax (especially if they are going to regularly post on the site), but this is a harder thing to control or consider because there is no way to know if the OP will even come back to the question, how much time they will put into editing their own question, and how much time they will put into learning how to use MathJax. So this thought doesn't really influence my decision here. If the OP is one to put the time into MathJax, then whether or not I edit the question will have little bearing on what the OP ends up doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T17:58:28.067" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T17:58:28.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12568" CreationDate="2019-12-21T00:23:23.667" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another method is The Silver Hammer&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^™$&lt;/span&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had this trouble previously: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1048/a-guide-to-moderating-physics-stack-exchange-yourself-close-voting?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;A guide to moderating Physics Stack Exchange yourself: close voting&lt;/a&gt;. Currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders&quot;&gt;Gold Tag has a Dupe Hammer&lt;/a&gt;, extending that to silver adds a whole bunch of people. Not &lt;em&gt;just anyone&lt;/em&gt; but people whom are knowledgeable about the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What we have now: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=tags&amp;amp;filter=gold&quot;&gt;38 Gold Tag Badge holders&lt;/a&gt; with hammers&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What we &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; now: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=tags&amp;amp;filter=silver&quot;&gt;217 Silver Tag Badge holders&lt;/a&gt; with hammers&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no reason why this couldn't be combined with a lowering to 3 or 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous Silver Hammer discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/286037/282094&quot;&gt;Let's Plan the Second Iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality Project!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/240700/282094&quot;&gt;Empowering tag-badge holders part II - let's look at silver?&lt;/a&gt; (OP: Tim Post)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/266938/282094&quot;&gt;Give Lesser Tag Badge holders Dupehammer privileges if they have a Gold badge in a related tag&lt;/a&gt; (Needs a tweak or two)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="170832" LastEditorUserId="170832" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T01:47:58.867" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T01:47:58.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12603" CreationDate="2019-12-21T04:54:31.627" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to bother everyone, but I found this particular link over on the physics main page &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/230919/mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm&quot;&gt;Could the recent evidence of a gravitational force orbiting the solar system indicate not the existence of a ninth planet, but rather a black hole?&lt;/a&gt; and I didn't see a question attached to it but three answers to a question which did not appear to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this question been vandalized? And if so, can action be taken to restore the original question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165041" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T05:07:13.980" Title="Possible vandalism?" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12602" CreationDate="2019-12-21T05:05:01.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/230919/revisions&quot;&gt;edit history&lt;/a&gt; of the question. The OP doesn't like their question anymore, so they want to get rid of it. However, they cannot delete the question due to the up voted answers. So they are trying to &quot;delete&quot; the question by making poor edits that you saw. Other, responsible users are trying to put the question back to the most relevant version. You were watching this short &quot;edit battle&quot; as it was going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you see activity that is odd like this, the best thing to do is just raise a custom flag for moderators to sort out. In this case a moderator has temporarily locked the question to prevent the OP from making more pointless edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T05:07:13.980" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T05:07:13.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12577" CreationDate="2019-12-21T07:35:02.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I'm saying kind of the same thing as Aaron, but I'm going to be more pithy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But then I think that it is better not to bump a duplicate or a closed question on the homepage, so I leave it unedited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general: if you can edit the question in a way that you think will fix the problems that caused it to be closed in the first place, then yes, by all means, edit and bump it to the front page. We &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; closed questions whose issues have been addressed to get attention so that people can vote to reopen them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it sounds like that's not what you're talking about, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not intend to reopen that question by changing it significantly. I just want to lift it up to the expected SE standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your edit wouldn't fix the reason the question is closed, then I probably wouldn't bother. There may be some exceptions, though; for example, if a question needs a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of improvement, and you can make an edit that does most of the improvement and you think someone else (maybe the original asker) could take it the rest of the way to fix the reasons it was closed, then that's probably fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T07:35:02.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12577" CreationDate="2019-12-21T10:57:01.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very important issue here is that the first edit of a closed question not only bumps the question to the front page (for people using the Active tab), it also sends the question to the Reopen review queue. If you make minor &quot;cosmetic&quot; edits that aren't sufficient to make the question worth opening, then the reviewers are unlikely to vote to reopen it, so you're wasting their time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP then comes along and actually fixes their question so that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; worth reopening, the question will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be sent to the review queue, because only the first edit sends it to that queue, so it has to rely on people with enough rep to vote to reopen seeing it in the Active tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should mention that this has implications for suggested edits. If a post has a pending suggested edit when it gets closed, and someone comes along and approves the suggested edit, that also sends the question to the review queue, thus depriving the OP of the chance to have the question reviewed after they fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T11:02:54.940" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T11:02:54.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12608" CreationDate="2019-12-22T07:17:02.893" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/group-representations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;group-representations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;group-representations&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use as a synonym to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/representation-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;representation-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;representation-theory&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we may want to merge them together already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T08:04:59.147" Title="Merge [group-representations] with [representation-theory]" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-12-23T14:15:50.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12607" CreationDate="2019-12-22T07:59:05.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Representation theory is more general than group representations as it e.g. includes Lie algebra representations. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have just made the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/group-representations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;group-representations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;group-representations&lt;/a&gt; tag a synonym of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/representation-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;representation-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;representation-theory&lt;/a&gt; tag. (It was proposed in 2016 with currently 1 upvote.) Depending on feed-back from the community, we can later merge or undo the synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T08:04:59.147" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T08:04:59.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12615" CreationDate="2019-12-23T06:56:59.623" Score="-9" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reputation change on the user list on the Physics SE site this year is about +1500, as can be seen. But according to my profile on that site which can also be seen, my reputation change is only around +500. Some screenshots of these indicators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Users list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EhnhL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EhnhL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My profile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1huNK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1huNK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one can see the difference is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1550-566=984$&lt;/span&gt;! So, again: How can that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="98822" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T05:41:44.490" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T05:41:44.490" Title="Why is the +number in the physics SE users list different from the +number in my profile (on a yearly basis)?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12609" CreationDate="2019-12-23T07:14:38.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems as if your rep change this year is 1,523 rather than 539:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JVu2g.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JVu2g.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Rep change&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that puts you on page four on the list of all users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VPH8k.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VPH8k.gif&quot; alt=&quot;All users&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="98822" LastEditDate="2019-12-25T07:31:59.423" LastActivityDate="2019-12-25T07:31:59.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12614" CreationDate="2019-12-23T16:30:46.870" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;While visiting the chat section I found a room named &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13775/backup-room--the-h-bar&quot;&gt;Backup Room – The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;.Though it seems to me that people don't chat over there rather I found that list of hot network questions are posted. But who post these? Is it automatic? Why is it greyish rather that blue in color? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T19:56:09.857" Title="Who posts in the &quot;Backup Room -The H-Bar&quot;?" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-24T06:51:23.817" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question has been closed with the explanation that it is in breach of the Homework Policy :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/520756/what-will-be-the-total-work-done-by-friction-on-the-system-manboat?noredirect=1#cl_520756&quot;&gt;What will be the total work done by friction on the system (man+boat)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not asking for a calculation nor is it asking someone to &quot;do my homework&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clearly asking for a conceptual explanation of how internal friction relates to work done and kinetic energy. This difficulty has been raised in several similar questions but I have not found a clear and convincing answer on this site. The only answer to this question does not convince me, nor those who ask for more explanation in the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly this question is a duplicate of another - if so which one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly it could be closed as being unclear, because the problem itself is not sufficiently defined. But this can be easily rectified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please vote to re-open if you agree that this question deserves to have a good answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T20:25:00.703" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T20:25:00.703" Title="Why has this question been closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12612" CreationDate="2019-12-24T12:12:48.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it's not really a homework question, though pasting a screenshot of the problem they're working on certainly &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like our everyday HW problem, but as you stated,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Possibly it could be closed as being unclear, because the problem itself is not sufficiently defined. But this can be easily rectified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP requested an explanation but didn't really say of what it was they were looking for and what it was that they understood. Hence, until it's edited (which is significant enough change to the question that it should only be done by OP), I think it should remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T12:12:48.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12611" CreationDate="2019-12-24T19:56:09.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That room is the chat room associated with Physics Meta, in the same way that the HBar is the chat room associated with Physics.  That's probably why the color scheme is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a period where the HBar was one of the most active chat rooms on the SE network, and it wasn't uncommon for two independent conversations to develop at the same time with enough activity that it was confusing about who as talking to whom. During those times the participants in one conversation might decide to move their topic to the &quot;backup room&quot; to make things easier to follow. That was most common during our weekly scheduled chat sessions, but it happened other times, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around the time that I was elected moderator, the HBar needed a lot of moderator attention, and we started using HBar and the &quot;backup room&quot; in a way similar to the divide between Physics and Physics Meta. In HBar people talked about physics, and cooking, and politics, and life; if someone's feelings were hurt and there needed to be a conversation about what kinds of things were or weren't okay to say in chat, whether it had been appropriate to flag or delete a message from someone, and so on, we would have that meta-conversation in the meta/backup room so that main chat could get back to physics and cooking and life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As our community's understanding of itself matured, we needed the backup room less and less often. Sometimes a user would post an HBar-like question in the backup room and no one else would reply for a week or more. When a user wrote a bot to identify new Hot Network Questions (only a few months before changes to the SE API made that information available in a more robust way), we decided to allow the bot to post in the backup room because it existed but didn't get much traffic. Since the HNQ bot now posts in there a few times a day, I no longer know whether new users still try and fail to chat there. We haven't needed it for meta/moderation purposes for quite a while, for which I'm glad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the current state of things is pretty confusing-looking for a new user who doesn't have that history. If anyone has a suggestion about a change to make so that the Physics Chat ecosystem makes more sense to new users, they ought to propose their change in a new Meta question and link it from this one.  But I'm happy if it's just a curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T19:56:09.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12609" CreationDate="2019-12-25T05:21:42.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number on the reputation tab on your profile is the amount of reputation you've gained since the last time you personally clicked on that tab. That fits the pattern with numbers on all of the other tabs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2019-12-25T05:21:42.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-26T13:52:57.000" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EpsAY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EpsAY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this? Is this some sort of wizardry? Or is the server bad at counting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jokes apart! Why is my quarter rep more than my total rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-01-16T01:19:05.637" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T01:19:05.637" Title="My quarter reputation is more than my total reputation!" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12612" CreationDate="2019-12-26T14:06:45.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please vote to re-open if you agree that this question deserves to have a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add to Kyle's answer a something that is often repeated on meta: A question should stand on its own. The choice to close/reopen a question should not depend on the types of answers the question may receive. Otherwise the quality of the question becomes irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if you think this conceptual physics question does not have an adequate answer on this site, then I would suggest just asking your own question that has the clarity that is lacking in the post you link to. That seems like a much more direct way to get the question out there rather than requesting a question be reopened, which might not happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T14:46:28.557" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T14:46:28.557" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12618" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12619" CreationDate="2019-12-26T17:52:04.107" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some posts which I have flagged and some action is genuinely required for those posts. I would say they are &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt;, but there were even more &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt; flags raised by me which were quickly acknowledged. But a few are still unattended/pending. I am not in a hurry to get them reviewed, but I just want to know that how do I again bring them to moderators' attention. Is there any way to &lt;em&gt;re-flag&lt;/em&gt; a post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastEditorDisplayName="user243267" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T19:08:58.387" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T19:08:58.387" Title="How can I re-flag a question?" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12618" CreationDate="2019-12-26T18:32:08.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot &quot;re-flag&quot; a post, in particular not if you are talking about an &quot;off-topic&quot; flag, since users are allowed to flag (or vote) to close and reopen each post exactly once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, off-topic flags are &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; not handled specifically by moderators, but by the user-driven close review queue. So while sometimes you may get &quot;lucky&quot; because a moderator acts on the post, generally you should not expect moderator attention for any off-topic flags. The processing time for these flags highly depends on how many users are currently reviewing them and whether the reviews are unanimous or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T18:32:08.063" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-27T14:03:26.650" Score="9" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I am sure many are aware, we get a fair amount of questions about special relativity that are essentially variances of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice sees this event happen at this time over here, and Bob sees this event happen at this time over there, so then how can Alice see this if Bob sees this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course questions like these don't necessarily need to involve an &quot;Alice&quot; and a &quot;Bob&quot;, but the questions essentially boil down to how to reconcile time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity, etc. of various events as seen by various observers. Some (or many?) of these questions get closed/ignored due to quality, clarity, or &quot;homework-ness&quot;, but there are also ones that survive and receive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some recent examples of questions like these, or questions recent posts have been duplicates of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/521532/179151&quot;&gt;High Fives on the Relativistic Train of Death&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/520488/179151&quot;&gt;Does Special Relativity Imply Multiple Realities?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/511516/179151&quot;&gt;Question about Lorentz transformations with time&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/285737/179151&quot;&gt;Special Relativity - Regarding the Simultaneity of Events During the Train Paradox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/503381/179151&quot;&gt;2 Different Results for Length Contraction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure there are better examples out there, but hopefully the type of question I am am referring to is evident. Questions like these can easily become convoluted in trying to specify when/where events occur in the various frames, what defines the events, etc. But, at least to me, it seems like many of these questions could &quot;easily&quot; be resolved with the appropriate application of Lorentz transformations, rather than some of the introductory equations of time dilation and length contraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I know there are already great community wiki posts for other SR topics, and these serve as great posts to link to as a duplicate for other posts asking about these topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/383248/179151&quot;&gt;How can time dilation be symmetric?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/242043/179151&quot;&gt;What is the proper way to explain the twin paradox?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if we can make a post like the two above that have a similar purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, would it be useful to create a community wiki post that covers how to handle &quot;event comparison&quot; questions described above, or are the questions of this type actually not as frequent as I think or already adequately handled so that a community wiki post would not be useful? If one such post would be useful, what would this post look like, both in terms of the &quot;question&quot; that sets up the post and the type of answer(s) that would be ideal for such a post? Additionally, who would be responsible for creating the post/answer? I am by far an expert in SR, so I don't think I could handle creating an answer (even if it is open for the public to edit and make better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-01-01T23:37:34.447" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T23:37:34.447" Title="Creating a community wiki post for special relativity questions about comparing events in different reference frames" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12620" CreationDate="2019-12-29T01:31:33.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem like a good idea to me. The question would have to be extremely broad and vague. The answer would also have to be extremely broad and vague, something like &quot;Use spacetime diagrams and the Lorentz transformation. Don't try to figure out all of special relativity using length contraction and time dilation. It doesn't work that way.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly it would be useful to create a Q&amp;amp;A where the question was something like, &quot;Can special relativity be reduced to length contraction and time dilation?,&quot; and the answer was an explanation of why not, with an explanation of spacetime diagrams and the Lorentz transformation. Is this different from what you're proposing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastEditorDisplayName="user4552" LastEditDate="2019-12-29T01:37:52.503" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T01:37:52.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12623" CreationDate="2019-12-29T19:10:52.283" Score="-2" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/522011/acceleration-of-a-ball&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and thought to edit it by adding a blockquote, do some MathJax formatting and editing tags. And so I devoted 7 minutes (on a mobile device), trying to make StackExchange a better place. And just when I submitted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/284031&quot;&gt;my edit&lt;/a&gt;, suddenly out of nowhere, @BenCrowell just &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/522011/revisions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; edit (yeah I know his rep is &gt;2000 so his edits are applied immediately...). Now there is nothing wrong with him doing that edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's where the wrong stuff starts... My edit (as you would already have seen, hopefully) was straightaway rejected. You can even see the time... It is like damn close. This made me quite angry (you would have already felt the anger). And yes this has demotivated me from editing more than anything else. I devote my time, on an uncomfortable mobile device, at the time when I was supposed to be having a good sleep, to make a community better, the @Community♦ rejects it. This has not been the first time that a subsequent edit just ruined my efforts, but this time the timing of the events are just too frustrating for anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can't we stop rejecting the suggested edits just because someone else has edited the post after the edit was suggested?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is sounding like a rant and, to be honest, I am willfully ranting because I am really disappointed right now. Some of the things in my post may be impulsive. And I know that I have written a lot of irrelevant stuff here but that's just to show you the frustration. I know this post will surely be closed either as a duplicate or maybe as off-topic(BTW do we have that off-topic reason on Meta?). I know, I know... This isn't a really big deal. I should take it lightly, but I am sorry, it's worthy enough to be given attention and changed. Edit this post. It is my worst one. :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all my sanity, I request you: PLEASE take some action!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question is not a request to accept my edit.&lt;/strong&gt; This question was written with a greater motive. I wanted the system to change. Also I am not demanding any radical changes. So I request everyone who sees this question to not just point out mistakes in my edit and comment about my slow editing skills. I think we all should constructively try to either implement a solution or search a solution (if we don't have one yet). The change demanded here, if implemented, will have broad consequences. If you think this is trivial, then what changes do you expect in an established community? Of course, SE community already has the essential good things. It is only this kind of trivial stuff which needs attention. And working on these trivial but common stuff will make SE even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastEditorDisplayName="user243267" LastEditDate="2020-01-01T13:01:49.007" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T13:01:49.007" Title="Stop killing suggested edits in the name of &quot;conflicted with a subsequent edit&quot;" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-bydesign|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12622" CreationDate="2019-12-29T22:57:38.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't really anything else sensible the system can do- it's not smart enough to combine the suggested edits, so it has to pick one over the other. You are of course welcome to incorporate the new changes into your own edit and resubmit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly unusual edge case anyway- it can only happen if someone starts and finishes editing at around the same time as you do, while you have less than 2k reputation and they have more. Take heart in the fact that it's rather unlikely this will ever happen to you again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T22:57:38.220" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-30T02:51:36.803" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a question related to atomic and molecular physics and noticed that there is a tag of &quot;atomic physics&quot; but not for &quot;molecular physics&quot;. To some extent, I think that the latter is replaced by the tag &quot;molecules&quot;, but the question is, why &quot;molecular physics&quot; is not used as a tag instead of &quot;molecules&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the physical properties of molecules should deserve a tag with a proper name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140194" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T02:51:36.803" Title="About molecules tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12622" CreationDate="2019-12-30T07:05:10.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that there is a way to bypass this problem i.e., by saving the edits made by the given low rep user and then suggesting him/her to recheck it as per the modifications made by the high reps user (rep &gt;2000) and then allowing him/her to submit the modified version. In due process no ones work would go in vain and contributors like you and Ben both would be happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I doubt if this would be possible to implement as the SE team already has a lot of work to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T07:05:10.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12620" CreationDate="2019-12-31T00:42:24.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I really like the idea at a naive level, I feel that it's implementation would be difficult at best and perhaps practically impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal is, essentially, to write the definitive introduction to relativistic mechanics - the one that somehow answers everyone's questions in the order in which they might ask them. I think that there are a variety of sources for learning relativistic mechanics and if the people asking questions were that way inclined, they could learn directly from these. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Physics Stack Exchange does is allow people who do not feel confident with such resources to ask a question in their own way looking for an answer that respects the way in which the question was asked. Even when a question is a duplicate, it is often asked in a slightly different way, and the fact of it being a duplicate is part of the answer provided by the contributors of answers on stack exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Telling people to go read the Wiki, while it sounds like what they should be doing, is likely to be off-putting to someone who is feeling confused about the concept behind the question. It is the one-on-one sense of support that makes stack exchange different from, say, the Wikipedia - which has many excellent articles on introductory mathematics and physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200377" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T00:42:24.917" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T03:18:54.287" Score="7" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges &#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. &#xA;And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? &#xA;So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Physics over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                  Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                  83         53&#xA;Users destroyed³                                  46          0&#xA;Users deleted                                    155          0&#xA;Users contacted                                  143          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue            467     10,842&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue               195      3,911&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          85      6,387&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                29      2,339&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                  5     12,812&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue               567     24,059&#xA;Tags merged                                       17          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                             30          1&#xA;Tag synonyms created                              36          0&#xA;Questions unprotected                              1          1&#xA;Questions reopened                               104         53&#xA;Questions protected                               53        175&#xA;Questions migrated                               110         83&#xA;Questions merged                                   4          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁵                                32      3,695&#xA;Questions closed                               4,297      6,237&#xA;Question flags handled⁵                        1,225      2,494&#xA;Posts unlocked                                     3         67&#xA;Posts undeleted                                  119      1,000&#xA;Posts locked                                      12        396&#xA;Posts deleted⁶                                 1,865     17,313&#xA;Posts bumped                                       0      8,619&#xA;Escalations to the Community Manager team          5          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                               786          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                  15      6,789&#xA;Comments deleted⁷                             13,540     18,769&#xA;Comment flags handled                          1,745      5,064&#xA;Bounties canceled                                  7          0&#xA;Answers flagged                                  108      4,960&#xA;Answer flags handled                           3,703      1,365&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat             254          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &quot;Community&quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &quot;destroyed&quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10958/2018-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2018: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222019%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341507/2019-a-year-in-closing&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="2911" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T02:32:47.500" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T02:32:47.500" Title="2019: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12631" CreationDate="2020-01-01T10:02:42.453" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often suggest tag edits in which I add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag to homework like questions. In some cases, these questions are closed as &lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt; even before my edit is reviewed. So, in that case, I think it is better to not bother the reviewers with my edit. Because if my edit gets approved, then it bumps the useless closed question to the front page. But there's no harm if it gets rejected. So shouldn't there be an option/feature to retract your suggested edit, like the one we have for flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T12:21:56.080" Title="Is there any way to retract my suggested edit?" Tags="|support|feature-request|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12628" CreationDate="2020-01-01T11:25:53.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks Shog9!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective I think these numbers look pretty reasonable: the community is handling a majority, though not an overwhelming majority, of moderation tasks in nearly all categories except for things that can only be done by diamond mods. Tag maintenance seems like the one notable exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T11:25:53.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12629" CreationDate="2020-01-01T12:21:56.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to retract a suggested edit, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/80933/230312&quot;&gt;this Mother Meta&lt;/a&gt; (where it was also suggested that users interested in such a feature should make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; on Mother Meta, but I doubt anyone has in the 8 years since that answer was made).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; to a closed question is a big deal. Sure it'll push it to the reopen queue, but that queue doesn't fill up quite like the close queue does, so having an extra question to address shouldn't be a bad impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T12:21:56.080" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-02T11:06:52.337" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually I find that maximum traffic occurs on this site around (8:00 pm to 4:00 am, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Standard_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indian Standard Time&lt;/a&gt; (IST, UTC+05:30)), but I don't have any concrete data related to it. So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to find out how many people are currently online on Physics.SE?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this because when I get ask question I take care that it is uploaded in the given time interval so that it can get the maximum response from the fellow users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-01-02T15:27:56.287" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T15:27:56.287" Title="Is there any way to know how many users are currently online at a given time?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-01-02T12:21:30.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12639" CreationDate="2020-01-03T18:29:36.540" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making an analogy between the history of arts and physics and wanted to make sure that the physics side is correct. As such, the question is probably not a good fit for this site, but maybe it can be salvaged by rephrasing? Or maybe someone can answer it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We can try and see the progress of the history of arts as a physical&#xA;  phenomenon, but not the deterministic physics &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ernest Rutherford&lt;/a&gt; had in&#xA;  mind, more like the light in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Feynmann‘s&lt;/a&gt; quantum&#xA;  electrodynamics. Indeed, any given light particle photon behaves&#xA;  randomly, and any given art object is random. But, just as the rays of&#xA;  light have predictable trajectory, defined by the environment and the&#xA;  objects that absorb light or allow it to reflect against, the overall&#xA;  trajectory of art is determined by the society within which it is&#xA;  created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am bringing up Ernest Rutherford because of the quote &quot;All science is either physics or stamp collecting&quot; that allegedly belongs to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wanted to check the following:&#xA;  1. my interpretation of Ernest Rutherford's ideas - can you say that, in his universe, the behaviour of light would be fully deterministic?&#xA;  2. my interpretation of Richard Feynmann's ideas - can you say that, in his universe, any given light particle photon behaves randomly, but&#xA;  we can predict the behaviour of a ray of light (jet of photons?) on&#xA;  statistical level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82507" LastEditorUserId="82507" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T00:47:05.963" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T00:47:05.963" Title="Can this question be salvaged? (updated)" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12636" CreationDate="2020-01-04T07:22:43.767" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/521242/249968&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question was posted by user 202. As can be seen from the edit history that the question was incomplete at first(though I didn't knew that till today) (the previous question was scattered all over the post (and till now it almost is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Bernoulli's equation, it can be shown that the water velocity depends on the height of a tank relative to the end of a hose. In reality I find a smaller hose produces a greater velocity on exit than a larger hose. What have I overlooked to cause this disagreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v=\sqrt{\frac{2(\rho g h-Losses)}{\rho}}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP gave a bounty of 150 reps and I therefore invested some time to answer the question as it was in original form (but I also gathered the spread out information from his/her comments,etc.) and then I discovered today that OP found that his/her original question was lacking information (which was much crucial in answering it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as can be seen from its current form the previously given answers have now became irrelevant (though I have modified &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/522727/249968&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should we do now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The dilemma is due to the fact that without this newly added information the question becomes trivial but the answers become relevant and with this information the answers become irrelevant but the scope of the question increases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the OP provides most of the information in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/522783/249968&quot;&gt;his/her answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2020-01-04T19:26:04.633" Title="A question (which now looks like it was previously incomplete) being modified in such away that the previous answers become useless" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12635" CreationDate="2020-01-04T18:23:59.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12580/179151&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4147/179151&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; questions should not be edited to make the current answers invalid. In this case the extra detail doesn't seem to make things too bad, but for yourself you didn't edit the question; you posted an answer. So what are some options for when, in general, you think your answer no longer applies to a changed question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do nothing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't change your answer, but at the beginning of the answer put in something that says your answer was for version &quot;v#&quot;, for whatever version number # you were answering&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't change your answer, and flag the question for a moderator to review. If they think the new edit is too disruptive to the current answers, they may choose to rollback the question to a previous version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit your answer to fit the new question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Combine 2 and 4 by making your edit fit both the old and new versions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you choose to do is up to you, and in general will depend on your/other's answers as well as the extent of the edit to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-01-04T19:26:04.633" LastActivityDate="2020-01-04T19:26:04.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-05T02:40:31.993" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, quite a number of users have been deleted in the last month or so. I've noticed it because, as I haven't been very active lately, my rep score has been declining due to their removed votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw that 155 users &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12628/75633&quot;&gt;have been deleted&lt;/a&gt; in the whole year, so unless they'd been very active in voting, the 5 I noticed seem quite a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some sort of end-of-the-year clean up taking place, an exodus, or is it just a fluke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A1hso.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A1hsom.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T16:38:42.430" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T16:38:42.430" Title="Many deleted users" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12637" CreationDate="2020-01-05T03:09:38.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably a coincidence. 155 users were deleted and 46 destroyed by moderators, but that doesn't include self-deletions. I don't know of any way to get specific numbers of how many users delete their own accounts, but as far as I can tell it accounts for the bulk of overall account deletion. In your specific case, as far as I can tell only 1 of the 5 was deleted by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't go into specific numbers, but if anything December was a slow month as far as moderation is concerned. Certainly there wasn't an end of the year clean up on our part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T15:31:45.377" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T15:31:45.377" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12634" CreationDate="2020-01-05T06:22:49.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is a question in the blockquoted text, it's a question about artistic and cultural evolution, which is not on-topic for our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the beginning of an interesting idea. Best of luck finding a home for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T06:22:49.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12641" CreationDate="2020-01-06T05:06:27.410" Score="-9" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just yesterday, I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and there dmckee♦ posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5102/have-we-lost-the-necessary-critical-mass-of-professional-physicists#comment14673_5102&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; comment, and he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...relatively small fraction of the eligible users apply their power with any regularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there is already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5110/how-much-are-3k-users-moderating-through-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; regarding this comment by Emilio Pisanty, but that just asks for data. Now, I have written this question because of the line from dmckee's comment which I have quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many users which have a &lt;em&gt;high rep&lt;/em&gt; but they raised almost negligible flags, have done only a few edits and reviewed only a few posts (and have asked a lot of questions and given only a few answers, but let's not get into that &lt;em&gt;{This was not said for all the high rep users. But I still argue that you might find a handful of them. But since they do not form the majority so I am not addressing asking or answering}&lt;/em&gt;). I have quite a few examples, but I don't think it's good to publicly say their names, I understand that not everyone has the time to contribute to the community, but there should be, in my opinion, a certain amount of contribution made compulsory after a certain amount of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want some numbers, then I envision that after a reputation of 1000, users should at least flag 10 questions in a month, edit 5 posts in a month and do 10 reviews in a month before they ask their next question. However they are free to answer. The restriction should only apply on asking questions. In this way, we will be able to deal with the ever-growing mass of dumb questions and the moderators and hard-core contributors can then spare some time to answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The burden of holding up the community should be equally divided. We have almost 1600 users who have rep&gt;1000. Even if only 10% of the users are active, then also this will amount to 160 contributors. This is quite a significant amount of people. Also, if the community participates and contributes, then we no longer would have those &lt;em&gt;bad moderator&lt;/em&gt; complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even search about this further using &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;, but unfortunately I am not familiar with SEDE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this change will need to be across all the communities so I should have posted it on Mother Meta. But I think that our community needs this change right now. Moreover, I am reluctant to post on the Mother Meta, but I am not aware of the situation of other communities, so I think it is better not to post there. However, I would be really happy if someone else, who agrees with me and also knows about SE better than me, does that. I have also not added the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; tag as this is just a discussion about whether this idea is feasible or not. If this is received well, then I think I would make another post requesting this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for stressing the contributions to the community is because I consider myself a good and active contributor ad thus when I see other people, more knowledgeable and capable than me but not so active contributors, I can't help but wonder how good this site would be if they also contributed as much as I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this isn't a pressing issue. But it might become a pressing issue in the near future. So right now, we are not really lacking contributors but to prevent any lack of contributors in the future, we must act now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR :-&lt;/strong&gt; See the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user243267" LastEditorDisplayName="user243267" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T07:19:59.213" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T15:09:17.687" Title="Should contributions to the community be made compulsory?" Tags="|discussion|editing|flagging|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2020-01-06T06:54:46.850" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should contributions to the community be made compulsory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely not. No way. Hell no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributing to this site is done on a volunteer basis. If people want to contribute by writing answers, that's great. If people want to contribute by participating in community moderation and other corpus-curation activities, that's also great. &lt;strong&gt;If people want to contribute by writing answers but don't want to participate in moderation activities, that's also just fine.&lt;/strong&gt; We are not, and should not be, in the business of &quot;punishing&quot; people for not volunteering enough of their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is, how can we (positively!) &lt;em&gt;incentivize&lt;/em&gt; 'expert' users to contribute more to the everyday moderation of the site, then yes, I agree that this is an important and worthwhile goal (though not really urgently 'necessary' in the ways that you seem to think it is). But negative incentives are absolutely not the way to go about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a couple more things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want some numbers, then I envision that after a reputation of 1000, users should at least flag 10 questions in a month, edit 5 posts in a month and do 10 reviews in a month before they ask their next question. However they are free to answer. The restriction should only apply on asking questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea why you think this will have a significant effect, but to me it looks like you need to take some time to examine in depth some unstated assumptions there. The population you seem to be referring to the most in this thread &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; high answer count and low moderation participation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6589/does-reputation-correlate-with-the-question-to-answer-ratio&quot;&gt;generally&lt;/a&gt; has an &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; low question count (and indeed, I'd say the goal is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9897/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-start-asking-questions&quot;&gt;get them to ask &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;, not less&lt;/a&gt;). For more on this, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4571/question-self-destruction-why-dont-experts-ask-more-questions&quot;&gt;Question self-destruction: why don&amp;#39;t experts ask more questions?&lt;/a&gt; and its multiple Linked and Related threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I think that our community needs this change right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What specifically is the problem? What metrics would you propose as significant evidence that there is in fact one at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T06:54:46.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2020-01-06T07:09:04.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bread and butter of Stack Exchange are the questions and answers. I can't imagine a system like you describe doing anything but driving away users producing good questions and answers who don't like moderating or just don't have the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and have asked a lot of questions and given only a few answers, but let's not get into that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really. Our highest rep users almost universally provide a lot of answers and ask almost no questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, there's no problem with asking questions. You can't have good answers without good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T15:09:17.687" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T15:09:17.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12648" CreationDate="2020-01-06T19:41:32.250" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;My standing on the Physics Stack Exchange went from &quot;top 16% overall&quot; to &quot;top 67% overall&quot; during a period when I posted only one question or answer (a question posted Jan.5, 2020, MST), plus a few comments.  The question has received 0 votes so far, and I hadn't noticed any up-votes on the comments I've re-checked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the user names can be duplicated, although mine, with the French-language spelling &quot;Edouard&quot;, doesn't currently have any duplicates in PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given my lack of any formal training in college-level physics and a knowledge of it that's been gained almost entirely through a combination of direct observations with my reading of popularizations by well-known physicists (plus a few biographical and philosophical texts reviewing their activities, and some online visits to other physics-oriented websites), I'm imagining my &quot;top 67%&quot; standing, among other users of PSE, to be much the more realistic among the two possibilities I've seen mentioned, but, as the most classic of &quot;idiots savants&quot;, I'm curious as to whether the disparity (which has caused me no inconvenience or serious embarrassment) occurred accidentally or experimentally.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not changed my biographical information, which mentions one or two of my naive observations.  Of course, I'll be disregarding my position in the top-to-bottom range, unless an error is disclosed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T07:59:09.393" Title="Sudden large drop in standing (&quot;top percentage overall&quot;) without numeric change in &quot;reputation&quot;" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12644" CreationDate="2020-01-06T20:09:30.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure it didn't say &quot;top 16% this &lt;em&gt;year&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;top 16% this &lt;em&gt;quarter&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure that looking at my profile, I had a similar change, and I believe it's because it was showing me my yearly or quarterly user percent before the new year, and now it is showing the all time percentage ranking.  I'm pretty sure it's the same for you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although people moving up could account for some shifting of the number, given the size of the userbase in physics SE, there would need to have been &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of activity on users around your reputation for it to change from you being in the top 16% going down to the top 67%.  Like I think that would take at least tens of thousands of users passing your reputation in that time, which seems unlikely to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the simple explanation is that it changed from a yearly or quarterly ranking, to an all time ranking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T20:09:30.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12644" CreationDate="2020-01-06T20:21:20.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's funny that your reputation has only increased in 2019, but you believe you have fallen in the sitewide rankings. (You're currently #5200-ish out of 8200-ish users with 200+ reputation points.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blurb that shows on your profile page changes to show you something flattering.  For instance, if you asked a high-visibility question and got 200 points all at once, it might say &quot;top 1% this week&quot; for a while, before reverting eventually to &quot;top 50% this year.&quot; I remember being confused by this as a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another answerer says, if this is a real change it seems more like many other users overtaking you than a change in your rep.  However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/&quot;&gt;the network recently made a change&lt;/a&gt; which suddenly increased the reputation scores of nearly every user on the network. So if it's been a couple months, you might have been passed in the rankings by lots of people who were retroactively rewarded for past questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T20:21:20.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12644" CreationDate="2020-01-06T23:53:56.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The correct tool to explore this is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/alltime/physics&quot;&gt;Reputation Leagues&lt;/a&gt; page for this site, which (importantly) allow you to examine the results for the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; time period as well as for the previous periods (i.e. last year, last quarter, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to December 31 2019, as pointed out by JMac, you were likely seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/year/physics/2019-01-01/87335?sort=reputationchange#87335&quot;&gt;your rank coming from the entire year of 2019&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rEYhJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. a reputation change over the year of +215, making you #1030 of 6,279 with positive rep changes over the year, which puts you in the top 16.4% for the year 2019...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...or, with a slightly lower likelihood, you were seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/quarter/physics/2019-10-01/87335?sort=reputationchange#87335&quot;&gt;your results for the fourth quarter of 2019&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PPiIA.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in which you had a reputation change of +104, giving you the rank #665 out of 3,760 users with positive rep changes on that period, i.e. on the top 17.7% for Q4 2019.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When 2019 ended, those statistics stopped getting shown, and the system resets to whatever it thinks will be more flattering, i.e. your highest rank for the current week / month / quarter / year / all time. Here the results are easy to see: while you have one question from 2020, you have (as of this writing) not earned any rep this year. Thus, the system will default to your all-time standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can easily find evidence of this behaviour by the system by going through the top users by time period on the Reputation Leagues. Thus, if you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/week/physics&quot;&gt;week&lt;/a&gt;, the top user right now is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/40686/mark&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, and their profile shows &quot;top 0.21% this week&quot;. Similarly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/month/physics&quot;&gt;month&lt;/a&gt; league is currently topped by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/199893/bob-d&quot;&gt;this user&lt;/a&gt;, whose profile attempts to flatter by showing &quot;top 0.10% this month&quot;. There's similar stuff for this year, though note that, since this quarter is currently synonymous with this month, currently nobody gets shown a &quot;top X% this quarter&quot; banner -- those will start appearing on 1 February.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with that in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My standing on the Physics Stack Exchange went from &quot;top 16% overall&quot; to &quot;top 67% overall&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's extremely unlikely that the system reported you as &quot;top 16% overall&quot; at any time, but it's perfectly reasonable that it showed you &quot;top 16% this year&quot; previously, and, upon noticing the drop to top 67%, your brain filled in the blank on the time period with the available evidence (i.e. top X% all time). Given the evidence above that the time period displayed most prominently on the profiles changes depending on what the rankings are: how sure are you that it really was &quot;top 16% overall&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T07:59:09.393" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T07:59:09.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12650" CreationDate="2020-01-09T04:46:04.287" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that a question where I had cast a reopen vote now is listed as having no reopen votes. Do reopen votes disappear under certain circumstances or expire? Do close votes also do the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T11:18:51.910" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T11:18:51.910" Title="Do reopen votes expire or disappear?" Tags="|support|questions|reopen|vote-to-close|close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12649" CreationDate="2020-01-09T05:00:34.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. As stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/120902/380389&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, both reopen and close votes expire after a certain period of time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a question with less than 100 views, they expire one per day &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/250223/380389&quot;&gt;after 14 days&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise they expire once per day, starting 4 days after the last vote was cast.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T05:00:34.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12508" CreationDate="2020-01-11T20:26:29.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly you are asking about posting the same explanatory answer to two different questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not see anything wrong with this, even if the two answers are identical&lt;/strong&gt;. It is possible for two different phenomena to have the same explanation, although you should try to tailor your answer to address the specific issues raised in each question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I think Rob is suggesting, you could post a brief answer on one question which refers readers to your detailed answer on another question. However the brief answer would need to be sufficiently self-contained to avoid being deleted as a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;link-only answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. If the link were to be broken then the &lt;em&gt;link-only&lt;/em&gt; answer would become meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the two phenomena have different explanations, in which case at least one of your duplicate answers will be wrong and is likely to be down-voted. But a wrong answer would not be deleted by the community, only by the person posting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the two phenomena are the same then one question is a duplicate of the other and would usually be closed. Site policy here seems to be that you should not post an answer if you are aware that the question is likely to be closed. For example if there are already 3 or 4 closed votes, and especially if you have yourself voted to close the question, for whatever reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is acceptable for the same user to post two different answers to the same question, for example proposing two different explanations. But if these two answers gave the same explanation, even if they are not identical, then one of them might be flagged for deletion by a moderator. It seems to be acceptable also for the same user to post two or more different answers to the same question which address different aspects of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite often different users post essentially the same answer to the same question. This is often unavoidable and neither answer would be deleted for this reason alone. Such a duplicate answer which was posted hours later might attract down-votes for failing to take note of the earlier answer or to acknowledge ideas borrowed from the earlier answer, but it would not be deleted. Conversely a better answer posted later would not trigger the deletion of an inferior earlier answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the issue of whether the 3rd question is a duplicate of the 1st, I think it is. I agree with voters that all 3 questions are duplicates of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason is that all 3 questions are asking about an &lt;strong&gt;everyday-life&lt;/strong&gt; phenomenon which could quite possibly contain several features which have slightly different - or possibly completely different - explanations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users who posted these questions have used different words to describe what puzzles them (&lt;em&gt;chain shape&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wavy stream&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sort of helical&lt;/em&gt;) but they failed to make any distinction between subtly different features of the same phenomenon. I do not think they were intending to make any such distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question were a purely abstract one then a particular feature could be singled out in the conditions imposed by the question-setter. Those different features with different explanations would distinguish them as separate questions asking about separate issues. However in this case the questioners do not seem to be interested in any particular feature other than the general waviness of the flow while liquid is poured from a container of some sort.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently I think it is up to those who answer these questions to distinguish between the different features of the wavy flow and propose different explanations for them. As I have suggested above, different answers to the same question could legitimately address different features of the everyday-life phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore because I think these 3 questions are essentially the same I do not think your answer to &lt;em&gt;helical flow from cup&lt;/em&gt; has been posted to the wrong question. It is not necessary to re-post it because you would be answering the same question not a different question. Your comment providing a link is good enough to re-direct users to a valuable answer. It will gain up-votes which will attract more attention. The link is also displayed more prominently to the right in the &lt;strong&gt;Linked&lt;/strong&gt; column which serious users looking for good answers will be sure to check out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the question where you posted your answer has been closed, so that further answers will be directed to the open question, your answer itself has not been deleted. The closed question and your answer will still appear in searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2020-01-13T05:34:48.710" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T05:34:48.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12653" CreationDate="2020-01-13T09:29:05.043" Score="8" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/524660/&quot;&gt;Why cant we measure the alleged curve of ball earth?&lt;/a&gt; was closed. Before it was closed I had made a relevant comment. After closure my comments disappeared also. Is this the automatic  result of closure? I was able to add the comment again , so closed questions do accept comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-01-13T20:57:59.910" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T20:57:59.910" Title="Deleted comments at closed question" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12652" CreationDate="2020-01-13T11:09:26.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, deletion of comments does not automatically happen when a question is closed. I'm surprised you didn't know this. (There is one exception that I know of: when a person votes to close as a duplicate, the system automatically posts a comment with the link to the alleged duplicate question; if the question accumulates enough votes to actually be marked as a duplicate, then that automatic comment will be deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments that were on that question were deleted manually because they seemed to be answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T11:09:26.700" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-16T04:40:59.270" Score="83" ViewCount="3647" Body="&lt;p&gt;For eleven years and five months I've been a part of an ambitious experiment in making the internet a better place. For the past nine years and two months that participation has included this site. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;Since April 2011 I've had the profound honor of helping with the sweeping up around here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I can't tell you how much I've learned or how much I've been inspired, I don't even really know. Just that I have been challenged to learn and grow just by hanging around this place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think I need to step down as moderator and take a break from the network as a whole for my self respect. Perhaps I'll try to patch a couple of broken windows I've left around (mostly on other sites)—also for my self respect—but otherwise I'm logging off for a indeterminate period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the good that has come out of the experiment can be laid at the feet of the throngs of helpful users who have selflessly given their time, effort, and expertise. I really, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; hope that things can continue in that vein without end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you're going to have to get on with it without me for now. If you want to contact me, &lt;a href=&quot;https://noswampcoolers.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I've set up a blog&lt;/a&gt; to maintain some kind of presence on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks again,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2020-02-02T05:11:08.170" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T09:51:01.747" Title="Stepping down and taking a break" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-16T05:01:57.513" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a privilege to learn from you, dmckee --- both in physics and in community building.  I offered a few years ago to buy you a beer if we ever found ourselves in the same town, and that offer stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take care, keep in touch, and best wishes on your road ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T05:01:57.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-16T05:11:24.973" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to imagine the site without crossing paths with you frequently. I took a look at some of the stats, and you've posted almost 17,000 comments on the main site -- I can't say I've read them all, but I know that your comments always stood out to me in the past 8 years as supportive, educational, and welcoming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for helping to make this little corner of the internet a better place. And thank you for your support over the years to give some of our smaller user groups some love, particularly experimental physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T05:11:24.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-16T17:49:46.023" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will leave a huge hole to fill considering not only your competence and your institutional memory but also your kind and soft-touch approach to moderating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example to be followed by whomever tries to fill your shoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T17:49:46.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-16T18:55:02.057" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your years of hard work on this site. Your contributions as both a moderator and as a physicist have been very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4552" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T18:55:02.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-17T13:24:48.203" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm so sorry to see you go dmckee! You've been one of the pillars of our community and of the moderation team since the very beginning, and it's not going to feel the same without you around. Of course you have to do the right thing for yourself, though, and I hope your life away from the site, temporary or not, is everything you need it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to shamelessly copy rob and say you have a standing offer of a beer on me if we ever have the pleasure of meeting up in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T13:24:48.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-22T21:13:37.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the last 5 years, in various user incarnations, and particularly as a self study person, this website has been essential to my understanding of physics. Thank you for all your contributions to Physics SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user226006" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T21:13:37.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-27T09:45:13.640" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today when I clicked on Physics.Stackexchange tab on my chrome the site opened up normally but when I clicked on &lt;strong&gt;Ask&lt;/strong&gt; the window the tab opened up saying “confirm your account” and then I saw that my account from P.SE was removed or something like that must have happened. &#xA;I was suspended from asking questions (I think in month of July or something) because my questions were homework-like and always received downvotes so SE told me that I will be able to ask again after six months, are these two events related in any way?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My account on all other SE is as it was only on PSE this has happened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you! Any clarification will be highly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user252603" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T17:45:49.970" Title="What happened to my account on Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|bug|user-accounts|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12666" CreationDate="2020-01-27T12:59:38.830" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a question the was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/267341&quot;&gt;reviewed&lt;/a&gt; and now I can't locate it.  It doesn't show up in my questions asked bin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28196" OwnerDisplayName="KingAndrew" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T13:07:45.490" Title="Where did my edited Question go?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12665" CreationDate="2020-01-27T13:07:45.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/491086/why-cant-massless-particles-travel-faster-than-light&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; (link viewable for 10k users only) was removed by the system automatically, aka &quot;the Roomba.&quot; You can read more about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;the automatic deletion process here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the criteria that triggered your question deletion was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the question was closed more than &lt;code&gt;9&lt;/code&gt; days ago, and ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;not closed as a duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has a score of 0 or less&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no answers with a score &gt; 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has no pending reopen votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;has not been edited in the past &lt;code&gt;9&lt;/code&gt; days&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T13:07:45.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12664" CreationDate="2020-01-27T14:51:20.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This occurred because your account was deleted on Physics.SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe this action is in error and you have not received a message from the moderators or the staff, use the Contact form to contact SE directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T17:45:49.970" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T17:45:49.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-27T21:17:24.697" Score="8" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/527327/&quot;&gt;Confusion over QM Free Particle Propagator - Shankar 5.1&lt;/a&gt; last night and it was closed as a duplicate earlier today, because it is similar to the question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/269627/&quot;&gt;Free particle Schrodinger equation: propagator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the (apparently automatically generated) closure note states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this question doesn’t resolve your question, ask a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, this is precisely what I did. The previous question and its answer were not sufficient to resolve the question for me, so I asked a new one. I tried to make it clear in my new question why the previous one and its answer didn't help and what aspects of an answer I thought would help to resolve my issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have to say, I am confused as to what the site policy is regarding asking similar questions to previous ones and what I should do in this situation, where an answer to an existing question does not help. From my point of view, I did precisely what the closure note says and my question was closed anyway. If that advice is no longer consistent with site policy, perhaps the note should be updated to clarify? Tbh, that note seems to be rather contradictory, since it seems to be recommending to someone to do what got their question closed in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but for me the existing answer to that question simply does not provide a good enough explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68181" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2020-01-31T18:07:27.200" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T18:07:27.200" Title="Confused over site policy regarding similar questions" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-01-28T01:26:13.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you. And — good for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46698" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T01:26:13.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12668" CreationDate="2020-01-28T05:17:16.220" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR It looks like you put the duplicate stuff up front as the title and as the main part of the question, and you hid the new and important stuff at the bottom of a &quot;note&quot;. Therefore, it makes sense that the question was closed, as it really does seem to mainly be a duplicate. This can easily be fixed by focusing on the right things though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a tricky situation. but I think the site policy was applied correctly here. As it stands, the title and main parts of your question not in your &quot;note&quot; are answered in the duplicate. The policy is still fine, and the advice in the banner is still fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you have also included confusions you have with the duplicate, and you have questions based on that. Therefore, I think you are entitled to have a question about it that can be answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are edited can be reopened if other users vote for it to be open, but since you already have an answer on your question, I don't think the best move is to heavily edit the existing question. I would suggest making a new, better question. However, I would make sure to focus on the right things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Take out most of the first part of your question, as it really does make it look like a duplicate. Only include what is necessary to make your actual question make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) This part&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has Shankar glossed over this, in his earlier description of the propagator? If so, why would he do that? Does he address this point anywhere else in his book (as it seems fairly important)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a little too opinion based, and is more about the text book and less about the physics. I don't think it is needed in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) This part&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain more clearly why this Density of States is required and where it comes from? I thought the degeneracy of H was being accounted for by summing over the +/- values of p - why would an extra term be required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the heart of your question that makes it distinct from the duplicate. So then why did you hide it in the middle of a &quot;note&quot; section, and why is your title not about this instead? &lt;strong&gt;Make this the focus.&lt;/strong&gt; Frame your question around this. Then you will actually have a new question (assuming that this also hasn't been asked about before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T05:31:00.107" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T05:31:00.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12674" CreationDate="2020-01-28T11:58:42.830" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to the &quot;Suggested Edits&quot; review queue. Recently, I was asked to review an edit suggested by an anonymous user which if accepted would actively harm our site. I rejected the edit. Is there a way to flag an edit by an anonymous user in order to prevent such circumstances in future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't include that edit in my question as I think it's a really (really) bad edit which affects the sanity of our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I'm not the first person to receive such a terrible edit:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7010/238167&quot;&gt;Why do we allow anonymous users to suggest edits?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238167" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T22:59:42.220" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T22:59:42.220" Title="How can I flag a harmful anonymous suggested edit?" Tags="|support|editing|flagging|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12673" CreationDate="2020-01-28T12:03:23.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Raise a custom moderator flag on the edited post, and we'll look at it. It's possible for the diamond moderators to remove a user's editing privileges, but we almost never need to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anonymous edits that introduce spam or vandalize the post, reject them as spam or vandalism. If enough of those rejections accumulate, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118213/is-there-some-form-of-blocking-in-place-for-rejected-suggested-edits-by-anonymou&quot;&gt;the IP address associated with the edit&lt;/a&gt; will become hobbled and unable to anonymously suggest edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T12:08:35.340" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T12:08:35.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-29T07:00:08.190" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/527341/canonical-distribution-expressed-with-entropy-or-the-number-of-states&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;  is closed as being opinion-based. Perhaps I do not understand English well, could someone explain in more detail what opinion-based is  on this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T07:40:01.993" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T15:33:15.903" Title="Why this is opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12675" CreationDate="2020-01-29T15:31:14.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Is this derivation correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;Check-my-work&lt;/a&gt; questions are generally off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) Does this form have some physical interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly broad question. What type of physical interpretation are you looking for? Additionally this is &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; opinion based, as different people will have different ideas as to what constitutes a &quot;physical interpretation&quot;. For example, is entropy physical, or is it just a really useful tool in statistical mechanics? I am sure you would get a wide variety of opinions on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) Is this a useful formula for calculating some physical value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something is &quot;useful&quot; or not is subjective. And once again, &quot;some physical value&quot; is pretty vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, posts that ask multiple questions are also considered to be off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, your post has many problems as it stands; it is a subjective, unclear, unfocused, check-my-work question. Since there can only be one close reason reported in the close banner (I think?), I am sure one was chosen from the list. However, this is not anything against you, and you can easily fix this. As an additional bonus, since there are no answers on the question currently, you can get away with largely editing the question and getting it reopened if you want to. Or, you can just ask a new, better question that is objective and more focused on physics concepts rather than a computation. I would suggest looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11305/faq-for-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; as well as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about what types of questions are/are not on-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T15:31:14.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12675" CreationDate="2020-01-29T15:33:15.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A commenter writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would not have picked opinion-based, but would have voted to close (although answering question 2 is opinion based). Too broad (3 questions), homework like (1st question), just not a good fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was the one who closed the question, and that's exactly what I was thinking. Not a good fit, for multiple reasons. See the help center for guidance on getting the community to possibly re-open your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T15:33:15.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-02-01T07:51:13.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sad to see you go, you were undoubtedly one of the best mods around. Interacting with you was always helpful to me. You are leaving a footprint you can be proud of on all the sites you contributed to, including here (obviously) and Skeptics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T07:51:13.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12682" CreationDate="2020-02-02T18:44:22.613" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I flagged some posts as &quot;a solution to homework&quot; on the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/527387/179151&quot;&gt;Net Force of Equal and Opposite Gravitational Forces Don't Equal Zero?&lt;/a&gt;. Knowing which posts were flagged is irrelevant for this meta post. My flags were declined with the reason&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question has not been closed as HW, and if OP had not written the question in the style of an exercise, no one would have thought it was one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first want to focus on the latter part of this : &lt;em&gt;if OP had not written the question in the style of an exercise, no one would have thought it was one.&lt;/em&gt; This is true for any &quot;homework-and-exercise&quot; question on this site. We ask students to frame their question to focus on the concepts they are confused about, not the exercise, calculations, etc. So really this argument could be made about any question: &quot;This could have been framed in a way so that it wasn't an obvious exercise/homework question, so it actually shouldn't be considered a homework question.&quot; Therefore, I don't think this is a valid argument. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously a student posting a homework question and asking for someone to check their reasoning and/or give them a better answer. This leads to the first part: &lt;em&gt;The question has not been closed as HW...&lt;/em&gt; Why does this matter for flags on answers? The answers supplied to this post could very well be turned in by the student as an answer for their homework. Just because the question wasn't closed as homework doesn't change this. There are answers here that are solutions to this homework question, and this is why I raised the flags that I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I understand that my opinion is not the only one that matters, and I would rather align with the community than only focus on what I think. So here are some questions I am left with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Should answers that are solutions to homework problems only be flagged as such after the question is closed specifically for being an off topic homework question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If a question is not closed as an off topic homework question then does this mean that its answers cannot be considered solutions to homework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) If I can see a way that the question could be worded to not be an off topic homework question, does this mean it should not be closed as an off topic homework question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;no&quot; is the answer to all three questions, but maybe I'm missing something. I always look forward to learning more about the community and how certain scenarios are best handled, and I hope this post can help myself and others gain more insight here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;Actually, one flag was accepted as helpful, but no action was taken because of it, which makes the declined reason even more odd to me. By the given reason, all of my flags should have been declined, not all but one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-02-02T18:54:08.643" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T02:52:03.357" Title="If a question is not closed for being an off topic homework question, does this mean it shouldn't be considered to be a homework question at all?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12681" CreationDate="2020-02-02T19:16:40.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems I now share Fermat's fate: The margin was too narrow to contain my reasoning. I declined your flags with that terse explanation because the reason text box for declining flags doesn't allow novels. I can also see now that I worded the short explanation that I gave poorly. So here's your (short) novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree on your &quot;No&quot; to your three questions as a matter of general policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not mean to imply any sort of general policy that answers to homework-like questions can only be deleted if the questions have been &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; with that specific reason, nor did I mean to imply that the &quot;obviousness&quot; of the &quot;homeworkiness&quot; plays a role here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I meant to say was, with respect to this specific question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that the question falls under our &quot;homework-and-exercises&quot; policy because it simply asks the conceptual question it has been closed as a duplicate of - why does Newton's third law not imply that the net force is always zero? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think that you (and perhaps others) may think it falls under the policy because it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a homework question in the colloquial sense, i.e. an exercise posed to the asker as part of their academic work. Had they not quoted their exercise literally, i.e. given no clue that they are thinking about this issue as part of an actual homework assignment, I do not think anyone would have been tempted to think of this conceptual question as HW-like.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I take the non-HW close reason as evidence that my view is supported by the majority of close voters. I realize this is only weak evidence, since they may well think it is &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate and a HW question. (However, if the duplicate voters think that, shouldn't they have also voted to close the duplicate as HW?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T19:16:40.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12681" CreationDate="2020-02-03T02:52:03.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should answers that are solutions to homework problems only be flagged as such after the question is closed specifically for being an off topic homework question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If a question is not closed as an off topic homework question then does this mean that its answers cannot be considered solutions to homework?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, of course not. Actually, it's possible (and not even that rare) to have answers to &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; homework questions deleted for this reason - so there can be answers that should be deleted even if the question is never supposed to be put on hold at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If I can see a way that the question could be worded to not be an off topic homework question, does this mean it should not be closed as an off topic homework question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, let's imagine a student who's trying to solve a homework (or similar) problem they've been given, and they want to ask for help here. Whether the question is on topic or not depends on how they do it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the homework problem verbatim, with nothing else, and ask for a solution or a hint: off topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reword the homework problem to make it sound less like a homework problem and post it with no work: off topic, at least theoretically, although in practice we may not be able to tell&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the homework problem with some work or an attempted solution and ask if it's correct: off topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the homework problem with some work or an attempted solution, and ask about something confusing they found while doing that work: on topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't include the homework problem at all, but just ask about the confusing thing they found: on topic, and doesn't even need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag, but it might be missing useful context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make this list to point out that the kind of edit required to turn an off-topic homework question (the first three types) into an on-topic one (ideally the fourth type) is substantial and is generally something that can only come from the original asker. Basically, they have to add information about the specific point of confusion they encountered while working on the homework problem. It's generally not possible for someone else to guess what specific issue the student is hung up on. So I think it's rare that you find a question which appears to be off-topic homework-like but can be reworded to be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you do find such a case, then I'd follow the general principle that editing a question to make it clear how it's on topic is preferable to putting it on hold, as long as your edit isn't too major according to our normal rules about edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T02:52:03.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12685" CreationDate="2020-02-04T06:24:18.073" Score="2" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am banned from asking questions on the main site due to the previous four questions. I wrote them when I just joined the site almost one year ago, but in recent days I am getting downvoted on my questions every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get at least two downvotes on my questions, and the downvoter doesn't give any reason for downvoting, and I am seriously pissed off by this, because the serial downvoter regularly downvotes my posts, irrespective of my content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the example of this question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/524370/why-is-gravity-so-special&quot;&gt;Why is gravity so special?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most recent question I asked, and I received a downvote on it. And the serial downvoting is very irritating and discouraging!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:) today too I got one one down vote on my old question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/486541/reason-for-change-in-colour-of-light&quot;&gt;Reason for change in colour of light&lt;/a&gt; same as yesterday one. &#xA;And &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/524370/why-is-gravity-so-special&quot;&gt;Why is gravity so special?&lt;/a&gt; it really scare me now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233551" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-02-06T17:40:17.690" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T17:40:17.690" Title="Serial downvoting of my old question" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-02-07T18:09:18.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12684" CreationDate="2020-02-04T08:05:03.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are automated tools to reverse serial voting, but they are not perfect. If the downvotes persist for more than a day, raise a moderator flag if you think there is uncaught serial voting going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember that &quot;serial voting&quot; refers to a single other user targeting you with their downvoted specifically. Ordinary users do not have access to any information to determine that this is, in fact, what is going on - it is easy to see patterns where there are none. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T08:05:03.967" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12684" CreationDate="2020-02-04T09:52:27.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked at your 4 questions now and here is what I have found so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/524370/249968&quot;&gt;Why is gravity so special?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 upvotes and 2 downvotes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/486541/249968&quot;&gt;Reason for change in colour of light&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 upvote and 2 downvotes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/485603/249968&quot;&gt;What is the reason for Moon and satellite in free fall condition? [duplicate]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 upvotes and 2 downvotes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/485084/249968&quot;&gt;How can we prove that light is an Electromagnetic wave?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 upvotes and 2 downvotes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now either of the following can be considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are getting serially downvoted by 2 users (with reputation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\gt 125$&lt;/span&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are/were being downvoted by more than two users, who might have downvoted as per the quality of your question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't conclude which of these two might be the case but from my experience on the site (I am quite new user, just a month old) I can say that the second case is most probable. But who knows what might be the case. So as @ACuriousMind says you should raise a custom moderator flag and then see what happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-02-04T12:23:50.847" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T12:23:50.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-09T08:32:11.997" Score="0" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all know users on our PSE come from all parts of the world and it seems obvious that if someone is using the internet he/she must be writing and understanding English properly. But in some countries the web pages are purely in regional language and therefore users from those regions (of course, their mother tongue is not English) finds it hard to communicate in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember my father once told me about his viva (oral exam in Universities). The examiner asked him a question in English, but my father up to his high school studied in a school where regional language was used for instructing, so my father said in his mother tongue  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sir, do I have to tell you the answer in English?&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this the examiner replied:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Language doesn't matter to me, I want to know whether you know the concept or not. You can answer in &lt;strong&gt;our&lt;/strong&gt; language also&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the above thing applies only when all the communicators understand the same language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically I want to ask what can a user do to get the best of this &lt;em&gt;Great Community&lt;/em&gt; while he/she is learning English, no doubt in that and I know that's the most important things, but what else one can do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions will be highly appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user240696" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T01:07:21.320" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T01:07:21.320" Title="How can a user participate on Physics Stack exchange properly if the user have some problems with English Language" Tags="|discussion|support|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-09T13:37:11.397" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/530062/work-done-by-static-friction-in-accelerated-pure-rolling-motion&quot;&gt;like this one&lt;/a&gt;, which have &lt;strong&gt;basic formatting&lt;/strong&gt; issues. I'm not talking about formulas, which are not in MathJax, but rather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no punctuation (not the case in the linked question),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no capitalised letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I encounter a question/answer with such a basic formatting issue I just skip it. Still, the lack of effort (from the author) annoys me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that feature requests are hard to implement. Still, I believe that each question/answer must have at least one capital letter and one question mark. If this criterion is not met, the question/answer should be rejected from submission and the author should be informed to improve the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to read how you handle this issue. Maybe you could even provide me with a new perspective, so that these basic formatting issues do not annoy me anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159486" LastEditorUserId="159486" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T16:16:20.813" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T17:12:56.377" Title="Badly formatted questions and answers" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|editing|quality|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12690" CreationDate="2020-02-09T15:45:29.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary way we influence behavior on Stack Exchange sites is by voting. If you think that a question's formatting makes it unclear or not useful, a downvote is appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the energy to suggest fixes to such questions, whether as comments or as suggested edits, then by all means do! If you lack that energy, just move on to something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T15:45:29.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12690" CreationDate="2020-02-09T17:12:56.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badly phrased questions (or answers) - for whatever reason - should attract downvotes.  I personally avoid editing such questions lest it could be perceived as implicitly encouraging poor postings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of &lt;em&gt;impatience&lt;/em&gt; of some users who care not about correct presentation of their posts cannot be solved by mere mortals in a finite amount of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T17:12:56.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T18:02:58.997" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I see a post which is vandalism (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/531283/2451&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, only visible to 10k users -- consisting of random characters), what am I supposed to flag it as? (Concretely, I remember both &quot;spam&quot; and &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flags being rejected. Do I need to raise an &quot;other&quot; flag and spend time writing a reason?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastEditorUserId="4888" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T10:32:27.300" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T10:32:27.300" Title="Flagging vandalism" Tags="|support|flagging|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12696" CreationDate="2020-02-15T18:11:05.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I declined the flag, I'll answer why -- &quot;spam&quot; takes the definition that the post is intended to drive traffic somewhere else and does not disclose the authors affiliation with the post. &quot;Rude and abusive&quot; is for something that is offensive. Both of these are flags that will lead to IP addresses being rate limited or blocked outright, and so they should be used appropriately. They can also lead to reputation loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, for a post like that one you linked to, something along the lines of &quot;Not an answer&quot; or &quot;Very low quality&quot; is a suitable flag and one that I would have marked as &quot;helpful.&quot; For something that is initially posted as vandalism, raising the NAA flag or the VLQ flag is good. If a user &lt;em&gt;edits&lt;/em&gt; an answer and turns it into junk like that one, then a custom flag to alert us to post vandalism is a safe option because we'll go look at the post and figure out whether it needs to be rolled back, locked, etc.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, although I declined your flag, I still deleted the answer. Which means even if you use the wrong flag, it brought it to our attention and the action needed was taken. So using the wrong flag isn't a big deal really and won't penalize you in any way, unless you end up having mountains of declined flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T18:38:07.947" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T18:38:07.947" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12696" CreationDate="2020-02-16T08:22:56.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6374/which-flag-do-i-use-for-an-inappropriate-post&quot;&gt;our general guidance on flags&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;very low quality&quot; is the most appropriate flag type to choose for this kind of post. It would also be valid to flag it as &quot;not an answer&quot; (for obvious reasons), or &quot;rude or abusive&quot; (under the theory that this is abuse &lt;em&gt;of the system&lt;/em&gt;, though that's really a theory that came from the higher-ups at SE; I think the moderator team here tends to think of the &quot;rude or abusive&quot; flag as being meant for abuse of &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for some reason, you were unable to cast any of those flags, then you could cast a flag for moderator attention (a.k.a. &quot;other&quot;), but in that case you would need to explain in the flag message that you couldn't use any of the appropriate standard flag reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T08:22:56.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12689" CreationDate="2020-02-17T12:33:26.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote from an earlier answer of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language Matters&lt;/strong&gt;. If your questions use unclear language, then they are more likely to be closed as Unclear What You're Asking, and they are more likely to be downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We close unclear questions because they direct answerer attention from other questions which &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; provide sufficient clarity to have unambiguous answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We downvote unclear questions because they are not useful to future visitors, so they should be ranked lower when search results are presented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are core, integral parts of how the SE Q&amp;amp;A engine works, and they're one of the key reasons why SE shines in providing good-quality content. If these aspects bother you, then you should look for other platforms that don't have content quality as a key tenet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same holds for text that is not in English: the language of this site is English, and including crucial parts of your question in other languages is going to lead to a bad reception, from downvotes to closevotes to comments telling you not to do that. If you want to avoid that bad reception, then post only in English, and only include other languages when absolutely crucial and accompanied with a suitable, high-quality translation. To be clear: machine translation is generally &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; of sufficient quality to be posted directly, particularly on technical subjects like physics. &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are responsible for the clarity of the language that you post here, and if it's unclear enough to merit downvotes or closevotes, then edit it to clarify it, or accept the response. Downvotes are not a personal indictment against you, they are indicators about the content of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but this is an English-language site. If a given user has problems with using the English language, those problems will extend to using this site. We can and should do everything in our power to help users for whom English is not a native language to get their questions in good order, but it is ultimately their responsibility to ask for and use this help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T12:33:26.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-19T07:51:08.780" Score="11" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions that relate to how physics is being presented in teaching on topic in this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85705" LastActivityDate="2023-02-14T17:03:19.057" Title="Questions about physics teaching pedagogy" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12654" CreationDate="2020-02-19T09:51:01.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw this and I am sorry to see you leave. You have been one of the few who keep up the flag for experiments. Keep well and productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T09:51:01.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12700" CreationDate="2020-02-19T15:24:58.433" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While in general the subject of a question doesn't determine if it is on or off topic, I will say that, unfortunately, I think questions that relate to how physics is being presented in teaching is off topic for this site&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;. The biggest reason is because most questions like this will probably be opinion-based, which is a reason for question closure here. Perhaps a question about physics education research with actual quantitative data would not be considered opinion-based, but I feel like at that point you are moving away from asking about physics and more about just teaching. And even then, there can be varying opinions about how the data should be interpreted, how one should act upon that interpretation, etc. Therefore, while physics education is certainly important for physics, and I am sure many people here would have some great things to say, I don't think it fits what Physics SE is specifically about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that I don't think such questions are important. I love thinking and talking about physics education. Based on the related links given by @QMechanic in the comments of your post, it looks like there have been attempts to create SE sites devoted to physics education. If you feel strongly about having a place for physics education questions, perhaps you could study what went wrong in the failed attempts to make a better site. I would definitely love to be a part of that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; This is not to say that there cannot be any physics teaching questions on this site. I am speaking more generally about how I think such questions will most likely be interpreted by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T15:36:14.780" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T15:36:14.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12713" CreationDate="2020-02-21T07:52:17.900" Score="15" ViewCount="896" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently some of our (high rep) professional users have either suspended their activities or deleted their account. For example :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ben Crowell (Deleted) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten♦ (suspended his activity)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Luboš Motl (last posted in 2018)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;etc. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at some old post  I found that in the early stage of development our Physics.SE community lost many users. For example this post talks about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5102/249968&quot;&gt;Have we lost the necessary critical mass of professional physicists?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other meta posts that relate to such past issues though I believe that it would not be appropriate to post them here without any genuine reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that if this continues our community may (again) lose much of our critical mass of professional users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this post I would like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What actions we can take, as a community, to increase the critical mass of our professional users? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What actions can I take, as an individual, to increase the critical mass of the professional users? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking this because I am a bit selfish. I want that at the time when I (if ever) turn into a physicist there exist some channel to communicate and interact with other physicists. Much like how MathOverflow acts like an interaction channel for mathematicians (and they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao&quot;&gt;Terry Tao&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; too!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am not implying anything, in anyway, about the quality/quantity of the current users on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-02-21T12:30:22.950" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T14:38:54.213" Title="How to Help the Physics.SE grow (member-wise)? Qualitatively as well as Quantitatively" Tags="|discussion|quality|new-users|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-02-21T15:07:09.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m gonna put it out there that the direction of the mother company is to broadly increase the user base, not the number of professionals.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can draw whatever conclusion you want from this, but for my part I will claim that there is bound to be some friction between a goal to increase/not lose professionals and the broader increase in user base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also claim that the Physics site has matured nicely and that there is already a fountain of information &lt;em&gt;for those who care to search for it&lt;/em&gt;; this last observation means that many need not register to use the site; it also means that impatient users pollute the site with duplicates (and get angry because questions are downvoted/closed/not answered), something that after many years eventually gets to you.  (How many questions &lt;em&gt;per year&lt;/em&gt; do we get on addition of relativistic velocities, or twin paradox?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion: not much to be done at the individual level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-02-22T14:21:05.303" LastActivityDate="2020-02-22T14:21:05.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12708" CreationDate="2020-02-23T12:06:10.813" Score="12" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been some discussions of this topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/q/261/2133&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10617/64206&quot;&gt;metas&lt;/a&gt;, and it seemed to me that the consensus is to avoid MathJax in titles if possible, for various reasons like improving the look of the posts in HNQ and other places where MathJax is not enabled, as well as avoiding the interference of MathJax handling of mouse events with behavior of hypelinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this, I've recently edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/530851/revisions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (see revision 7) to convert &lt;code&gt;$HeH^+$&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;HeH⁺&lt;/code&gt;. In an hour, a moderator edited the post, (among other changes) bringing MathJax markup back with &lt;code&gt;$\text{HeH}^⁺$&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;$\text{H}_2$&lt;/code&gt; items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the position of Physics.SE on this? In the context of question titles, is &lt;code&gt;$\text{HeH}^⁺$&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;$\text{H}_2$&lt;/code&gt; preferable to HeH⁺ and H₂? Do we ever want to avoid MathJax in the titles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T10:23:23.740" Title="Is MathJax in titles OK?" Tags="|discussion|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12706" CreationDate="2020-02-23T12:20:13.613" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, mathjax in titles is allowed and even encouraged for better readability/clarity. The main priority is to optimize the user experience for Phys.SE. The HNQ is separate from the Phys.SE and has lower priority. The HNQ is only relevant for a day or two, while the Phys.SE repository is permanent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T12:48:33.213" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T12:48:33.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12706" CreationDate="2020-02-23T16:06:44.277" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax in titles should be kept to the minimum required, and as readable as possible, but if it is integral to writing a good title for the question then it should very much stay there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if a title requires explicit mathematics, then those explicit mathematics should stay there. Our site has a bunch of questions that are intrinsically about a very technical subject matter, and attempting to dance around the math by trying to describe it with words often results in a bland pulp of a title that doesn't say anything at all. This should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that said, MathJax in titles does come with a cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It comes with the cost that it cannot be displayed on other SE sites in the HNQ sidebar, so it wont' be shown there. This is a red herring -- we're not here to optimize for HNQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The true cost is that it does not render correctly in external search engines. As a reminder, this is what the split for this site's traffic sources looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r1xMG.png&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search-engine pie slice consists of about 96% Google, and about 1% each for Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, with some other tiny sources. The referred traffic is about 35% internal PSE traffic, and the rest of the reported sites are all from other SE sites (read: HNQ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having lots of unreadable MathJax in the title makes it hard to parse in the linking source for 90% of our traffic. This should not be dismissed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, those two criteria are in some tension. Since disregarding the first makes for useless titles, however, we should keep the MathJax when it is necessary, but due consideration should be made so that the title is as readable as possible when seen in un-MathJax-ed plain-text form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked to is a good example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$HeH^+$&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$HeH^+$&lt;/span&gt;) is bad MathJax, and should not be used at all. Element names should be typeset in upright script, not italics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;HeH⁺&lt;/code&gt; (HeH⁺), with plain unicode, is acceptable, but its formatting will disagree with the other titles on the PSE front page (and other pages that list titles) in a way that's likely to either be noticeable or to be jarring even if not noticed. One should also keep in mind that unicode display is sometimes inconsistent: even if it displays correctly on your device, there's no guarantee that it will show up as you intended on other devices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\text{HeH}^+$&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\text{HeH}^+$&lt;/span&gt;) is correct MathJax, but it is clunky and makes it hard to read when rendered in plaintext.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instead, I would argue that the correct typesetting to use here is &lt;code&gt;HeH$^+$&lt;/code&gt; (HeH&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^+$&lt;/span&gt;):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is semantically correct and will render correctly when MathJax is turned on,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is much more readable when seen in plain text,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the text will render in the same font as the rest of the title, so it will harmonize better with its surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, for full clarity: displayed equations (i.e. the use of double dollar signs, &lt;code&gt;$$ maths $$&lt;/code&gt;, which take up a separate line) is &lt;strong&gt;absolutely not appropriate&lt;/strong&gt; in a question title. Displayed maths take up multiple lines in every place where titles are listed, and doing so amounts to an abusive occupation of space, to the detriment to the other questions in the listing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T10:23:23.740" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T10:23:23.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-02-25T03:39:14.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing we can do is be liberal with downvotes, in order to keep inappropriate questions off the front page, where they deter casual visitors with high standards from sticking around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm always a bit surprised and a bit disappointed when I find a two-hour-old question that already has three close votes, but still has zero downvotes.  With very few exceptions, questions that should be closed are questions that give a bad impression to the sort of new users who we'd like to retain.  It is important to downvote those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T03:39:14.050" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-02-25T12:19:48.903" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is my view as a long-time user, not as a moderator. It's only my perspective and doesn't represent the views of the other mods.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BLUF&lt;/strong&gt;: We need to grow organically, systematically, and create the environment in which that happens. We need to find the diamonds in the rough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the challenge in these conversations we've had over the years is that we don't really have a consistent definition of what a &lt;em&gt;professional physicist&lt;/em&gt; is exactly. Our site is targeted, in part, towards them, but what does it really mean? Is it only research-focused people in &quot;physics?&quot; Is it professors of physics? How many professional physicists are there, really, in the world? And would most physics-oriented people who aren't professors or research scientists in national labs/universities identify as physicists, or would they identify as an engineer or something else more applied? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often make comparisons to StackOverflow, which has huge popularity and targets professional programmers. And they are held up as the gold standard for how things should work -- there's experts in &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; there and you can get some really fantastic answers from famous people in the field. That seems to be what people are looking for here also. But I think we face a lot of different challenges that limit how well that can happen. I'll use StackOverflow and programmers in my discussion, but the same holds for IT admins and ServerFault/SuperUser, etc.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Engagement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am a professional programmer and an absolute beast of an expert in, say, Python -- I will absolutely have used StackOverflow before and I may hang out answering questions because it's fun for awhile. But the nature of the programming field means that I may need to pick up some new tool that I don't know. Maybe I need to build something in Rust, or I have to help out on some web front end project and I need to learn that stack quickly. So I will probably ask some questions outside of my beast-mode area. So I'll be engaged everywhere on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Programmers have a professional need to adapt to new technologies and new areas, and so even if they are the world's best in X, they may be a total beginner in Y. StackOverflow offers engagement on many levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's contrast that with physics. If I just won the Nobel prize for my contributions to condensed matter physics, it's unlikely that I will need to start asking questions about basic fluid dynamics to get spun up on my next project. And so if I was a user of the site, odds are pretty good that I would only be answering questions in my subject area and have little reason to be &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; new questions or learning about things outside of my subject area. My only incentive to learn things outside my expertise is &lt;em&gt;intellectual curiosity&lt;/em&gt;, rather than a professional need to keep my employment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our type of engagement is different than sites like StackOverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discoverability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're trying to write some code to do something and you get stuck, what's the first thing you do? For me, I head to my favorite search engine and type in some keywords, or I paste in the core error message and hit search. And 9 times out of 10, StackOverflow is in the first few results. And I can poke around and refine the search based on what I see there and I will likely find my answer -- usually on StackOverflow, but even if not, the Q&amp;amp;A has helped refine the keywords I need to search for so I can find what I want. This is true whether I am just starting out learning how to &quot;print('Hello World')&quot; or if I am paid to write software for a living. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to use the internet to look for help with programming and not end up on StackOverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at what happens when I have a physics question. If you're a new student or a person who has never really studied physics, you do the same thing -- hop on your favorite search engine, type up some keywords or whatever your question is, and hit enter. And you probably end up coming across Physics.SE, although maybe not as prominently and frequently as in the programming example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However -- this is 100% &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; how &quot;professional physicists&quot; search for information! Most professionals in the field, and related fields like engineering etc., will be using specialized search engines designed to return scientific information that has been peer-reviewed. If I'm using Google Scholar, there is a ~0% chance I will find something on Physics.SE. The only way I could come across it is if some journal/arXiv paper mentioned it in the citation or acknowledgement list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we aren't really discoverable by &quot;professionals&quot; looking for physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tool vs product&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I go to StackOverflow and ask my question about programming, I am asking for help on how to do something very specific. I need to know how to read an XML file. Or I need help on optimizing a particular loop. I need to figure out what the 5000 line compilation error message is saying about my template class. In other words, I am asking about a tool or a building block, not asking about my final product. I'm not asking about my entire software stack, just a tiny, bite-sized chunk of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow is largely self-contained and managable questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But physics is a little bit different. Most of the time, my bite-sized chunks and my tools I need to make my bigger product &lt;em&gt;aren't physics tools&lt;/em&gt;! I may need to know when two operators commute (math), or how to write a for loop (programming), or how to optimize a code to run over 10,000 cores (scientific computing), or how to sample my experimental design space to reduce uncertainty (statistics), or how to write up my equations (latex). None of my tools to build my final product are &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; specifically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I won't really be here to ask questions that help me in my professional life -- I will be elsewhere on the network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the number of professional programmers in the world, it is huge. And they don't get together in person terribly often because it isn't a community that does conferences and seminars and the like. So StackOverflow is in many ways their community. There's so many unknown and untapped people who can help them there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the physics world, it's different. Young folks may not realize this because they don't see inside that world. Earlier when I talked about engagement, I touched on specialization -- I don't need to go learn some new area frequently. And that means I know my area very well, and by extension, I know the community very well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a question, I know exactly who to ask. And I will see them in person at a conference at least once a year. I travel to conferences all over the world and I would recognize every living giant of my field. And I know the vast majority of professors/active researchers in my field. If I know it will be awhile before I see them, then I will send an email or shoot them a text. And if I don't know somebody personally, I know somebody who can make the introduction. So I don't need this community to learn things directly related to my research, I go right to the source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is physics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've alluded to this throughout, but it's an important point -- what is physics, really? If you ask a researcher in physics, you'll get a very very different answer than if you ask somebody who is in high school taking a &quot;physics&quot; class. To the high school student, physics is adding vectors and drawing free-body diagrams. But for a researcher, those topics probably wouldn't even be in the top 500 things they use to define physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of what the beginners are stuck on isn't physics, it's problem solving. Many times, we could replace the &quot;physics&quot; part of the vector addition with some other word problem and it would be the same problem to solve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if we go back to discoverability, who is most likely to find out this website exists? The students who think physics == adding vectors. And we see this in the many, many Newtonian mechanics questions we get at the start of every school semester. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we grow?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just listed what I see as the systematic challenges we have here. How do we address them? What can we do to get world-famous scientists involved? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think first and foremost, we probably won't get today's giants of the fields. There's so many challenges to overcome and they probably aren't going to be interested in the site as it is now, for all the reasons (plus some) above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, we need to be making sure the giants of tomorrow find us. We need to make sure that the team discovering the major breakthrough 10 years from now has grad students who asked their early questions about physics here. Those folks who hop onto Google and say &quot;what is F in F=ma&quot; and end up on our site. If we look at a lot of our power users now, the folks who are active professors and researchers, they started out on the site years ago as grad students and stuck around. They grew up with the site and continue to contribute to it. But this growth is slow and organic, it can't be forced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can't be forced, but it can be fostered. We need to be supportive without compromising quality. We can't let the 50 &quot;plz I need this tmw&quot; questions cause us to lose patience and snap at the 51st, because that 51st might be somebody who goes on to be a physics great as they learn and mature. We have to be polite but firm. But we also cannot allow any of those questions to stick around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to make this an environment that is attractive for others to not just come to ask a question or to answer a random question. It needs to be a place where people come to engage with like-minded people between conferences and those in-person meetings. And that means it needs to be friendly and respectful. Anybody who stumbles upon a place that looks rude, or immature, or annoying, isn't likely to go &quot;Yeah! This is where I want to spend my free time!&quot; It needs to be a place that people want to engage with, not just a place for transactions (i.e. come to ask a question and get an answer, then leave when completed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think back to the best instructors I have ever had, and there is a pretty clear trend. They may have been friendly, or they may have been really gruff and unfriendly, but they took their work seriously and they figured out how to motivate me to learn. I could ask my question but they would almost never answer it. Instead, they would help me learn the tools and the building blocks I needed to answer the question. That's what we need to do here as well -- particularly with the huge number of very basic questions. We cannot cast those users off into the internet oblivion, but we also can't hand them the answer. We need to point them to the Q&amp;amp;A here that gives them the tools they need. And we need to help them refine their own toolset. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, some of those folks will go on to be the next greats. And they will have gone through their journey there with the people here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T12:19:48.903" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12723" CreationDate="2020-02-25T18:46:36.113" Score="2" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would this question be closed as Off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/532731/&quot;&gt;How is a 25-year-old can of soda now empty without having been opened or poked?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic seems to be suitable for this site, and the question was also featured as a Hot Network Question and then even tweeted about at &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackPhysics/status/1231730602472288256&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://twitter.com/StackPhysics/status/1231730602472288256&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Featuring it on Twitter conflicts with closing it. One implies &quot;This is representative of what we talk about on this site&quot; while the other says &quot;This discussion doesn't belong here&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't it be re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46543" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T18:56:38.227" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T05:09:24.373" Title="Why was this Hot Network Question closed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12714" CreationDate="2020-02-25T20:02:54.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of tension between the kinds of questions our high-rep, long-time users like to see versus the kinds of questions that the automated processes tend to promote. There have been many Meta discussions about this tension, but in general the robots are here to help the people, rather than the other way around. When the Twitter robots and HNQ pick up a question that's not a good fit, the human users step in to emphasize what kind of site &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say anything about your particular question, which I haven't voted on and haven't discussed with any of the close voters. Perhaps one of those people will weigh in with their specific thoughts about your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your question can be reopened by community vote; the process for this is described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T20:02:54.650" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12714" CreationDate="2020-02-25T20:53:02.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I can't speak for DavidZ, I will say that I voted to close due to &quot;primarily opinion based&quot;. DavidZ picked the engineering reason, so his vote reason is what is shown (to users with high enough reputation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I chose to close as such is because answers to questions like these usually involve much speculation. Usually the OP either doesn't, or even can't, supply enough information for an answer to be an objectively correct explanation of what happened/is happening. Therefore, answers end up being what others think &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be the answer, rather than definitively what the actual answer is. This is very evident in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/532802/179151&quot;&gt;currently highest voted answer&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/532749/179151&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; even admits that they are guessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="127931" LastEditDate="2020-02-26T14:23:38.133" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T14:23:38.133" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12714" CreationDate="2020-02-26T01:07:01.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Stack Exchanges demonstrably (but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/326344/303080&quot;&gt;not really&lt;/a&gt;!)&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/326343/303080&quot;&gt;hottest&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Stack Exchange user, I'll add my two cents. &lt;strong&gt;It's fine when HNQ's are closed, it shows that the system works.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may or may not be helpful to you, but one can see the HNQ and closing process as in some ways &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adversarial processes&lt;/a&gt; in the good sense of the word, and not just a source of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12715/83380&quot;&gt;a lot of tension&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which at least sounds like it could be bad in some ways (in the sense that Stack Exchange angst is bad).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nonlinear HNQ system amplifies views and brings some questions to more eyes than they would have otherwise been exposed to, and the views can lead to more up votes, down votes and close votes. In my opinion the result, though imperfect, ends up okay most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;high-rep, long-time users&quot; are a great resource as long as they are comfortable with how the site works. If they don't like how the site works and can't compel or induce changes they find satisfactory and the community doesn't do it with (or without) them in mind, then they go away. Human nature is what it is, and adversarial systems, while not always pleasant are still &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the worst systems, except for all of the others&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1030066/users-whose-posts-got-most-times-hnq-ed-network-wide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;174 HNQ's&lt;/a&gt;, here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1023391/all-hot-question-across-the-network-for-a-user?accountid=4794992&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list&lt;/a&gt;) note: I'm not taking this seriously, the numbers are real (but incomplete) and I'm using &quot;hotness&quot; strictly &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tongue-in-cheek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tongue in cheek&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="83380" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T05:09:24.373" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T05:09:24.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-26T14:13:11.763" Score="-4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/533228/how-to-exactly-evaluate-the-magnetic-field-associated-with-the-given-electric-fi&quot;&gt;How to exactly evaluate the Magnetic Field associated with the given Electric Field in a lossy medium?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;My question here is that instead of just down-voting my question that i just posted, shouldn't the same person explain why, especially if its the first few down-votes. I genuinely think that there should be such a rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I fully admit that my question might not be of that standard which the viewer/ down-voter expects, but I'm also fully aware of the fact that i did not break any rules while asking my question. I first explained my question, then I also showed my effort in solving the question and then I finally explained what the real problem that I'm facing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean surely there's not too wrong with this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that this sort of things get sorted quickly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, hope for a decent answer or at least a half-decent reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231920" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-02-26T16:34:46.947" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T23:35:50.153" Title="Instead of just down-voting a new post, can't the same person care to explain why?" Tags="|discussion|support|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-02-27T06:39:27.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12718" CreationDate="2020-02-26T14:23:30.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Requiring comments when somebody downvotes a question or answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2817/should-downvoters-have-to-comment-on-why-they-did-it&quot;&gt;is something that has been brought up in the past&lt;/a&gt; many times and each time it is declined. So I think the real motivation of my answer here is to help you decipher why your question was downvoted and why it is accumulating votes to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You stated you did not break any rules, but you sort of did -- if we consider what determines on or off topic as a &quot;rule&quot;. Specifically, this question does not follow our policy on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;asking homework-like or exercise-based questions&lt;/a&gt;. It falls afoul of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;check-my-work type question&lt;/a&gt; rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question presents the work and the problem, but it ends with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem for me here is that I'm not sure if this is the correct solution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and doesn't dive into the misconceptions that might lead to it, aside from being unfamiliar with the area in general. It might be salvageable if you can ask specific questions about the topic that help you understand the issues, rather than checking the math. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the help text for a downvote says &quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&quot; We take the view that check-my-work questions are not useful to anybody except the person asking it, and so that is likely the reason for the downvote. But again -- if you can re-write it to be about the physical concepts where you are confused, it can be a good question and then one downvote won't matter relative to the upvotes it gets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note, leaving comments that insult the people who might agree with the downvoter might make them less likely to help you. It's probably better to ask for help clarifying things, than to lash out at people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T14:23:30.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12718" CreationDate="2020-02-26T15:11:14.323" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stackexchange is not a forum where people can discuss and learn by mutual messaging. It’s a kind of Question-Answer site, every community envisages a certain kind of goal and makes rules accordingly, so if Stackexchange have some rules regarding the homework questions or check my work posts then it is not something to be surprised of. We have some more rules, in forums you can verbally present your dislikeness for some post (and I must mind you sometimes it proves very dangerous) but here we got another choice of presenting our disapproval, i.e. downvote and although we can write ourselves regarding what we dislike about something but it’s sometimes best to leave a downvote.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people here have extreme intolerance towards the homework problems post, and it’s one of the reasons that you got &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; downvote. You’re very right in asking why the downvoter didn’t consider answering your question, I think if someone does that it will count as promoting something which the community restricts to do. But our community does allow normal discussions and solution to homework problems in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chats&lt;/a&gt;, after you have gained some very minimal privileges you can certainly go and talk in there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend why a single downvote has broken you? There are a lot and lots of opposition there in future, they will downvote your question/answer no matter how correct you will be, they will troll you, they will show no signs of understanding about your views, much more is yet to come. I’m not saying that this community is full of evil (no never) but it’s also not free from common evils. So, be strong and don’t let a red colour with “-2” demotivate you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Come on you raver, you seer of visions&#xA;  Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user240696" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T15:11:14.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12714" CreationDate="2020-02-26T18:12:41.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ryan, since you're the author of the post, you should be able to see the explanatory banner about how the close reason is because your question is more about engineering than about science. You've left a comment suggesting this is improperly hidden from you. If so, can you edit this answer to include your own screenshot? I'll use your image to post a bug report in the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PcAH0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PcAH0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen capture of close banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T18:12:41.373" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12718" CreationDate="2020-02-26T23:35:50.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I will come out at the person who downvoted your question on the main site and actually also downvoted your meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will point out (repeating what others have indicated in comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not a check-my-work site, so I downvoted the question on the main site.  I do not see how your rather specific question is beneficial beyond the specific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A bit of searching on meta would have provided an answer to your query, so I downvoted your question on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T23:35:50.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12714" CreationDate="2020-02-27T10:29:53.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to say no, it should not be reopened, at least not in its current form, though of course I voted to close it in the first place so that's not saying much new :-p&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I voted to close it is basically that your question is just asking how some fairly arbitrary thing happened. We get quite a few questions that, like yours, tell us about something that happened in everyday life and ask how it happened. But this site is not a place to get explanations for how random things happened. Here, we focus more on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they happen, specifically in digging down into the underlying physical principles. There didn't seem to be anything about that in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had worded your question a little differently, to make it ask more about the physics involved in the situation, it might have been on topic. For example, instead of asking how the soda got out of the can, suppose you speculated that there might have been a tiny hole, and you wanted to know how to figure out what size of hole would allow the liquid to escape in 25 years. That would be a question about physical principles that might be on topic. Or, perhaps you might want to know whether the fizz or the sugar would affect how quickly liquid could escape through the hole. That could also be an on-topic question. Alternatively, you might wonder whether the liquid could diffuse through the side of the can over such a long time. You'd have to do some of the preliminary research yourself, but you could definitely ask an on-topic question about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might actually be possible to edit your question in a way that makes it on topic and eligible to be reopened. Of course, the trick is that you would need to do so without invalidating most or all of the existing answers, since once people have put in the time and effort to answer your question, it's considered discourteous to change the question in a way that makes their answers no longer apply. If you want to do that, you would certainly be welcome to ask for help improving the question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarity, let me add that the only thing that determines whether a question is on-topic or off-topic is (perhaps somewhat obviously) the topic of the question. Our site scope is not based on popularity. So things that do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; affect the topicality of a question include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vote counts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;view count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asker's reputation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the question is on the Hot Network Questions list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the question is tweeted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2020-02-28T22:20:20.040" LastActivityDate="2020-02-28T22:20:20.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-01T08:42:19.573" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the second time it happens. I pressed by mistake the button &quot;leave open&quot; when examining a post in the &lt;em&gt;Close Votes&lt;/em&gt; queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find a way to change the vote (is there?). Are there alternative options to nullify a vote given by mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T08:51:45.627" Title="&quot;Leave Open&quot; vote given by mistake" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12725" CreationDate="2020-03-01T08:51:45.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe way to fully nullify the vote, no. You can always navigate to the question manually and vote to close it there. Although the vote to leave it open would still be around for the purposes of leaving the queue you still would have cast a close vote for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall I wouldn't worry about this too much. Even if you accidentally cast a leave open vote two other people have to agree with you for it to leave the queue. Though if it happens frequently you might think about whether you are clicking through the queue too fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T08:51:45.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-03-01T20:52:30.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't be &quot;liberal with downvotes&quot; when you only have one per post, and AFAIK serial downvoting is some sort of SE crime in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing that annoys me most on SE (not just this site) are a few members (I'm not going to name them) who regularly post answers that are somewhere between poor and wrong. If I had nothing better to do, I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; post a better answer, but I'm not going to get any thanks (either real or in virtual internet points) for spending maybe an hour doing so. So I tend to let Gresham's law take is course. If the site wants to &quot;reward&quot; them by accumulating thousands of rep points for rubbish, so be it. Life's to short to be the guy here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xkcd.com/386/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second most annoying thing (again not just this site) are a few members who seem to enjoy posting cryptic comments which are not necessarily &quot;wrong&quot;, but IMO don't serve any purpose except to show that they know more than the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, my general attitude to SE doesn't include the notion that somehow it should be the internet's &quot;best&quot; repository of useful questions and answers for all time. There are plenty of websites which started out with that sort of ambition, didn't achieve it, and withered away. I don't see why SE should be fundamentally different. Of course the top management or SE now has a vested interest in preserving it as a source of their salaries, but that is a very different objective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I'm concerned, if there is interesting content here I will browse it, and I don't mind contributing a bit of my 70 years of life experience in return - but that's as far as my relationship with SE ever going to go. As for &quot;rep&quot; - right now, I have more than 2,000 unread messages in my SE inbox, and there used to be more before something (presumably automatic) deleted a few thousand of them. And all my SE email gets autodeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123188" LastEditorUserId="123188" LastEditDate="2020-03-01T21:24:40.863" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T21:24:40.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-03T02:12:52.630" Score="6" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a program and need a way to identify and enumerate the number of possible distinct crystallographic domains when depositing one 2D lattice on top of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've posed this as a question in Math SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3566248/284619&quot;&gt;Number of possible rotational domains of one 2D lattice on top of another?&lt;/a&gt; but possibly because I lack the proper &amp;quot;math words&amp;quot; it might not be receiving views by the users who can answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that this is a solved problem for mathematicians, &lt;em&gt;and for crystallographers!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would this question be on-topic here if suitably rewritten for this site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, might it be likely to receive an answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Snippet from the linked question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Square and hexagonal lattices shown at 0, 30 and 60 degrees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EPsz7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EPsz7m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;square and hexagonal lattices shown at 0, 30 and 60 degrees&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Square and hexagonal lattices shown at +/-10 degrees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PrQaR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PrQaRm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;square and hexagonal lattices shown at +/-10 degrees&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T06:03:58.773" Title="Would this question be on-topic here? Might it be likely to receive an answer?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-03T03:48:37.917" Score="-4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was around, I think, last month that someone in chat noticed that [a specific user] left Physics.SE. I felt somewhat uneasy by that (and I know everyone must have felt it) because he left without any notice. I used to talk to him friendly and he was the one who taught by his small comment that  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gravity is no longer a force in General Relativity  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I saw a meta post and in that @G.Smith sir has disclosed it very briefly that [this user] didn’t leave due &lt;em&gt;dramas&lt;/em&gt; that is going on by CMs of SE but he got problems with the users of PSE. Does anyone know what was this reason? And if someone know it can he/she consider saying it here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to know what really happened to [them]? Can moderators contact him through email and ask him if I can get his email address (I mean can moderators share his email address if [the user] allows them to do so) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user240696" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-03-03T04:16:56.490" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T04:26:27.243" Title="Is it possible to know why exactly [user] left?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12729" CreationDate="2020-03-03T04:26:27.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're an anonymous and pseudonymous internet community. People come and go. Some of us offer reasons; some of us keep those details quiet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know someone's identity off-site, it's up to you to decide whether it's appropriate to contact them through another channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diamond moderators cannot reveal anyone's personally-identifying information. Doing so would violate our moderator agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T04:26:27.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12728" CreationDate="2020-03-03T05:21:58.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my (not very strong) opinion, the question as it stands reads like a homework-and-exercise question of &quot;how do I calculate this?&quot;, but at a much higher level than most questions like that on PSE. I also think it was smart to post on MathSE, as the heart of your question really is more mathematical than physical. So my first instinct is that I would VTC for one of those two reasons (probably the math reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you seem to think that this question might have an answer in the crystallography literature. At that point you might be able to frame your question as more of a reference request, which is on topic here. If you were to post on PSE, then that might be the way to go. Especially given that (hopefully) the math will be covered on MathSE already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I'm not a crystallographer, and I'm sure others would disagree with my categorization of your question. I think I tend to be more strict about these things than other users are. But we have the discussion tag here, so let's have a discussion :) I certainly don't think my opinion is the only one that matters, or that it is even a &quot;correct opinion&quot;. But if you do decide to post, the worst that can happen is that the question gets migrated or closed. It looks like you know how to write coherent posts, so I doubt you would get down voted even if the question did get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-03-03T05:41:14.873" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T05:41:14.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12728" CreationDate="2020-03-03T06:03:58.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer this I would look at the core of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: For pairs of 2D lattices each with either a 2, 3, 4 or 6-fold rotational symmetry (ten possible pairs in total), how can I calculate the number of possible ways I can uniquely configure them with a given angle who's absolute value is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, this is a perfectly good &lt;em&gt;premise&lt;/em&gt; for a question. In order to turn it into a good question for this site, I think you'd need to describe what you've tried so far, otherwise it would trigger my mental &quot;insufficient effort&quot; warning. For example, let us know about any literature searches or web searches you've done, whether you consulted any relevant textbooks, or if you tried any calculations. The partial summary table you presented is a start but I'd rather see something going a little further than that - I mean, evidently you didn't have any trouble filling out part of the table, so what stops you from going all the way and filling out the remaining cells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T06:03:58.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-03-03T11:20:30.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just one factor among many, but I believe that one of the main things that would need to change to attract and retain professional physicists is the somewhat narrow definition of &quot;physics&quot; that the site has developed over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain: I don't know if it's just because of the company I keep, but virtually every professional physicist I've ever met has had interests in some traditionally non-physics field, whether it's machine learning, evolutionary biology, economics, neuroscience, the origin of life or something else. It's in their nature to want to push the boundaries of their field, and a major way they do that is to apply &lt;em&gt;the mathematical tools of physics&lt;/em&gt; to other disciplines. Questions about this sort of thing will generally be closed immediately on this site, which is one source of discouragement for professionals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, even if you are a 'pure' professional physicist, working on understanding some physical system, it's somewhat unlikely that the practical questions you face will be about the physics of the system you're studying. As a professional working on the topic, you most likely know that already, or share an office with someone who does. It's much more likely that you will have a question that is purely about the mathematical tools you need to model your system. Such questions will be closed here because they are considered to be about mathematics rather than physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, a somewhat necessary condition for attracting professional physicists is to widen the scope a bit so that the site can include the questions that are most likely to be of interest to them. (This could go hand in hand with narrowing it a bit in the opposite direction, so that it includes a bit less of the repetitive homeworky stuff, but that's another story.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2020-03-03T12:40:10.870" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T12:40:10.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-03-04T11:06:39.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pro or not, people who are into physics are into physics for the physics, not for energy spent on and arguments about question curation or refinement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look for ways that Physics SE is &lt;em&gt;a little bit&lt;/em&gt; more like waking down the hall, grabbing a piece of chalk and posing a question, and a little bit less like, well, arguments about question curation or refinement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smaller SE communities are often more cordial and/or collegial exactly because they are &lt;em&gt;a little bit&lt;/em&gt; more like waking down the hall, grabbing a piece of chalk and posing a question than the larger ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't &lt;em&gt;have to be&lt;/em&gt; angsty like this. Bigger is not always better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How? I don't know exactly. Has an SE site ever split into two or three? Is that known to be bad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head I'd propose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beginner through undergraduate Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Advanced Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experiments and experimental techniques &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An advantage would be less moderator burn-out, but the corollary is that six more mods would have to be found. And of course there's the &quot;that's impossible&quot; aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T11:06:39.153" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T11:02:35.003" Score="10" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for physics research&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting articles or findings for the curious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/12737&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T19:44:05.370" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2020" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-06-17T10:03:10.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T12:41:50.953" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism online is something of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/technology/lessons-in-internet-plagiarism.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a plague&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What guidelines does this site set itself in detecting and dealing with such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if so, can someone point me towards it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7993" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T19:13:37.923" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T19:13:37.923" Title="Where are the community guidelines in dealing with plagiarism?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T12:49:54.437" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this deliberate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any previous edits when I click on the edit button. This has been the case for the last few days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more precise, when I have clicked on edit in Phil.SE, I can usually see all the revisions that an edit has incurred and then rollback if I so chose. Does this mean simply I haven't accrued enough points for that particular privilege? If so, how many points does one need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7993" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T13:32:43.790" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T13:32:43.790" Title="Why can't I see previous edits when I click 'edit' on a question?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12739" CreationDate="2020-03-05T13:13:26.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit button is not for the purpose of seeing the edit history of a question/answer. For seeing the edit history of the question click on the word &quot;edited&quot; which sits above the user card. See the following image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dKf4S.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T13:15:37.760" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T13:15:37.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T13:15:07.813" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers can easily be plagiarised. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There ought to be some way of saying so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7993" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T16:05:04.340" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T16:05:04.340" Title="Can one add 'likely plagiarism' on the close a question option?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-03-09T23:46:46.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12741" CreationDate="2020-03-05T14:15:18.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in a comment, just raise a custom flag for moderators to take care of. Just make sure to include in your tag where the original source is that is being plagiarized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T14:15:18.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-03-05T15:34:14.340" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GVzhj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Common topics on Matter Modeling SE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155261" LastEditorUserId="155261" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T19:44:05.370" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T19:44:05.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-03-05T15:46:16.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ef9Hl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Stack Exchange Review Queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T15:46:16.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-03-05T23:27:34.517" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/toYiP.png&quot; alt=&quot;DLMF: an online encyclopaedia of special functions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:27:34.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-03-05T23:27:58.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnYOV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero - your personal bibliographic research assistant&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:27:58.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-03-05T23:28:48.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://texfaq.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K5zzi.png&quot; alt=&quot;All your TeX questions answered!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:28:48.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-06T00:01:20.143" Score="10" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may or may not have noticed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344513/the-new-ask-page-is-now-live-on-the-network&quot;&gt;the new ask page is now live on the network&lt;/a&gt;. Go and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;have a look&lt;/a&gt;! Some of the new features are only visible to new users, but it still looks noticeably different even from old accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the new design of the Ask page allows for a fair amount of per-site customizable content, at least some of which is new (and at least some of which was already present? But I can't quite tell which is which). So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which of these features should we take advantage of to make the site work better?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T15:37:07.987" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T22:33:30.583" Title="Let's make the best of the new Ask page design for this site" Tags="|discussion|ask-page|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2020-03-06T00:10:45.453" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one, we should implement a tag warning for homework questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag-related error messages and warnings, regex-based&lt;/strong&gt; (seen with custom error text in screenshot 4, with the default text on screenshot 5, and with a tag warning &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2VrTS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7214/what-tag-warnings-should-we-have&quot;&gt;a round of proposals for tag warnings&lt;/a&gt; &lt;s&gt;last year&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;two years ago&lt;/s&gt; &lt;s&gt;three years ago&lt;/s&gt; (bloody hell, time flies) five years ago, but they don't seem to be in effect as of now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the specific case of homework, I would propose something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is your question homework, or about a specific exercise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not a homework-help site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;these guidelines&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; carefully&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homework questions should focus on the &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; that you don't understand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this is maybe something to be worked out on a separate thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same should probably be true of the rest of the proposed tag warnings from the previous round -- there's plenty of important stuff there, but the wordings for the warnings themselves are maybe not going to be as effective at communicating &amp;quot;STOP and please read&amp;quot; to new users as we would want them to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T00:10:45.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2020-03-06T03:30:12.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should make proper use of the &quot;Welcome modal for new askers&quot; which in its uncustomised form looks as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wwNCA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wwNCA.jpg&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is a customised one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r4pJJ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r4pJJ.jpg&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can edit it along the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Introduction about the the site&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A warning that we don't answer blunt homework questions and provide some appropriate resources.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A link to the topics which are on-topic on PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Giving links to some exemplary posts. (So that a new user can check if their post maybe on-topic or off-topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add other things that you wish should be necessary part of the welcome model.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can give the suggestion for the Welcome Modal over &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12751/249968&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditorDisplayName="user255835" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T15:44:45.200" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T15:44:45.200" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-06T03:30:12.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-06T03:39:20.587" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post is for collecting suggestions for the Welcome Modal, part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/344513/263383&quot;&gt;new ask page design&lt;/a&gt;, which in its default state looks as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wwNCAm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wwNCAm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Welcome Modal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make suggestions along the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Introduction to the site&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A warning that we don't answer blunt homework questions and provide some appropriate resources.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A link to the topics which are on-topic on PSE. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Giving links to some exemplary posts. (So that a new user can check if their post maybe on topic or off topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add other things that you wish should be necessary part of the welcome model.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorUserId="238167" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T12:35:02.790" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T03:04:52.127" Title="Suggestions for the Welcome Modal" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-06T18:37:09.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12751" CreationDate="2020-03-06T04:04:15.270" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion for the welcome model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking a good question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to Physics.SE. This is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can visit our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/asking&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt; for help regarding how the site works and how to ask questions, such as general &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;guidelines on questions which are on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. Search or ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt; for any questions (regarding the functioning of the site) you don't find answered there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic on this site, in particular when they ask about specific computations instead of the underlying Physics concepts. Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some more links that can help you to write a great question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6413/how-do-we-write-good-question-titles&quot;&gt;How do we write good question titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5778/what-counts-as-sufficient-prior-research-when-asking-a-question&quot;&gt;What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/156/are-history-of-physics-questions-allowed&quot;&gt;Are history of physics questions allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T19:03:10.080" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T19:03:10.080" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-06T04:04:15.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2020-03-06T05:15:53.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The old ask page used to explicitly and clearly provide a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/tex-latex-mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;this standard MathJax tutorial&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vfP1W.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Image taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/please-link-the-mathjax-help-to-the-meta-math-se-tutorial&quot;&gt;Emilio's question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the new ask page does not explicitly provide a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/tex-latex-mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;the MathJax tutorial&lt;/a&gt;. Often beginners don't even know that MathJax exists so they don't use it in their questions. Having a MathJax tutorial link easily visible on the main answer page itself will help new users to learn and use MathJax. My suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A MathJax tutorial link in top bar after &lt;em&gt;HTML&lt;/em&gt; and before &lt;em&gt;More&lt;/em&gt;. (In my opinion, we should replace that &lt;em&gt;HTML&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;MathJax&lt;/em&gt; because we don't need HTML formatting on PSE, do we?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8J8HO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8J8HO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Top Bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or we can add a MathJax tutorial link in the &lt;em&gt;Helpful Links&lt;/em&gt; section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/tex-latex-mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for writing math equations and symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/tex-latex-mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for typesetting math equations and symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/umNYv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/umNYv.jpg&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the post on Mother Meta informs us that we can't probably customize the above two sections, so the third proposal (which is not the best way, but mother meta allows us to customize this section):&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We can add a similar message (like the one above) in the &lt;em&gt;Draft your question&lt;/em&gt; section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NOcQ4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NOcQ4.jpg&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user255835" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditorDisplayName="user255835" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T15:40:54.317" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T15:40:54.317" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-06T05:27:43.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12704" CreationDate="2020-03-07T02:49:07.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I debated whether or not to post this; I'm not a long-time user and have little standing in this community, and the question may be inactive anyway.  But while I saw bit and pieces (especially from knzhou), I didn't really see the following perspective stated very clearly, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  My apologies if this is redundant or doesn't add value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My perspective starts with numbers.  As a rough guess, let's say there are 5000 research physicists employed at universities in the US.  Say we double that for physics faculty members who are more focused on teaching.  Add a few thousand more for physicists employed at the national labs and similar places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's tiny.  That's only two or three times bigger than my old high school.  Compare that to literally millions of professional software developers, and the difference in scale becomes obvious.  [And yes, Physics.SE is global, but I'll leave that extrapolation as an exercise for the reader.  It doesn't change the conclusion.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those numbers tell me that something like Physics.SE will never be equivalent to StackOverflow (the scales are too different), and it is not realistic for it to serve as the &quot;go to&quot; source for physicists or grad students to ask each other questions (there will always be better alternatives made possible by the fact that the community is small).  So its main purpose has to be something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, that &quot;something else&quot; is the popularization of physics.  The number of professional physicists is small, but the number of people interested in physics is quite a bit larger.  And physicists tend to love physics -- they love to think about physics, talk about physics, debate physics, and explain physics to others.  And I'll further assert (without proof) that every professional physicist has a hidden but deep-seated belief that the average person should know more about physics than they currently do.  So Physics.SE is a good place for people without a background in physics to ask curiosity-driven questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then the question becomes: how does Physics.SE attract enough high-quality answers that people will want to ask questions?  How do we make it more rewarding for experts to participate?  I don't have a complete answer, but I have a couple thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, be respectful of those asking the question. This is not usually a problem (as far as I can tell); I can't remember any instance of someone not being respectful.  But still, if a person is interested enough in physics to ask a question, that interest should be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, and more importantly, experts such as professional physicists and graduate students should be publicly supportive of each other.  This isn't like an editorial board or peer review session where it's okay to tear apart an argument to make sure it's sound.  This is public. You can usually tell who is an expert and who isn't.  If you disagree with a portion of an otherwise good answer/comment, make sure to say that the answer/comment is good before going on to the disagreement.  If you see an answer that you think is particularly good, add a comment saying why you think so.  If you see an answer/comment being attacked by a crackpot, put in a good word for the person who provided the good answer.  People are motivated by shows of support.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130240" LastEditorUserId="130240" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T14:38:54.213" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T14:38:54.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-03-07T15:35:20.513" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E9D64.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify: automated LaTeX symbol recognition&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238167" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T15:35:20.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-07T20:51:10.100" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to understand the actual stance of this place on homework type questions. The actual practice as I have recently seen on the Physics site seems unacceptable to me.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/534832/179151&quot;&gt;A homework tagged question&lt;/a&gt; was asked about a fluid mechanics problem with which I happen to have significant experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer was posted proposing a method of solution and I wanted to offer a different point of view without directly solving the homework question for the student. Mind you the question had asked for &quot;any insight&quot; and not a solution to the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later another user basically provided 90% of the entire answer to the problem, following along the same line I suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of the other solutions were upvoted by other users. I checked in today to discover that my hint had been commented upon twice as &quot;not answering the question&quot; and subsequently deleted by a moderator as useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's room for differing opinions about how much help is appropriate for a homework style question, but squelching entirely my response as useless seems to be crossing a line. A subsequent reply indicating that the rudeness was unwarranted was immediately deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a place where it's more important to trip over each other trying to get the green check mark then it is to foster any academic discussion? On a homework question? I have a real problem with the way this is playing out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was my first post ever to any Stack site and I'm not impressed. One of my rules is that I don't share my mind with people who are disrespectful from the outset.&#xA;Can somebody explain the actual stance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256040" OwnerDisplayName="jmb" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T00:27:35.007" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T21:58:30.470" Title="Squelched on meta - Homework policies" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12758" CreationDate="2020-03-07T21:54:52.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not entirely sure how a one-line answer “ You can get a solution in terms of Bessel functions of complex arguments“ provides much insight into the problem. Indeed I was hoping my comment would encourage you to expand your answer: surely there must be some physical reason why Bessel’s equation emerges from this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T21:54:52.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12758" CreationDate="2020-03-08T00:45:03.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the users who voted to close this question. I did it because the question is essentially asking how to solve a differential equation. Since at this point the question was past the physics and was more about the math, my vote was to migrate it to MathSE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the majority of votes was for closing it as an off-topic homework problem, and I agree with this as well. Questions of the type &quot;here is this problem, how do I solve it?&quot; are considered to be off-topic on this site. Additionally, just asking for &quot;any advice&quot; is somewhat broad, so this is another issue with the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the above, questions that ask how to solve a specific problem without really asking about any specific underlying physics principles are off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of your personal experience, I think users were acting according to the usual site expectations. One user has already explained their comment in another answer to this post saying the comment was more advice than a call to remove your answer. The other user's comment was actually an automatically generated comment that arises from reviews of answers that have been flagged. I don't think anyone was being rude, but I agree that to someone who is new to the site it can be confusing and even off-putting to see resistance to helping users who ask homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I don't see where anyone called your answer &quot;useless&quot;. You are still free to edit your answer. And you are free to raise a flag to have a moderator restore your answer after you make it better. I agree that your answer as it stands is more of a comment, but given how open-ended the question was, I personally would not have voted to have it deleted. However, your second post was not an answer to the question, so it should have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other answers, in my opinion they should not have been posted. And at the risk of looking like a bad guy, I actually flagged the answers for being solutions to a homework-like question, which is also against site policy. Of course many users either don't know about this policy, or they don't really care about it, so answers that are solutions to homework problems still posted and still get up votes. Sometimes the thrill of solving a fun physics/math problem gets in the way of PSE's homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something you have to keep in mind is that while the site has policies, those policies are not always followed perfectly. Different users will support, ignore, etc. each policy on a spectrum of support levels, so depending on which users happen to see and review which posts, you are bound to see a spectrum of outcomes in regards to how certain policies are carried out. Although I will say that I've never really seen answers that are solutions to homework questions get down voted as much as I think they should (but that's where I am on the spectrum for this policy I suppose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to PSE. I am sorry your first experience was not as great as you (or I) would have liked. My advice is to keep participating and keep learning about the site. When I first joined I did not perfectly adhere to the site policies. I had some answers deleted, and when I go back and look at my early answers I am somewhat confused because I answered questions that I would not answer today in ways that I would now not do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are any other points you want covered, please let me know and I will update accordingly. Thank you for bringing this up. I think it is always important to have discussions about the site policy, how well it is being implemented, and how it is being perceived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T02:22:58.893" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T02:22:58.893" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-08T16:32:59.040" Score="4" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about something I expected to have been asked before, but I could not find anything, neither on physics.SE nor on general meta. Apologies if I have missed something. I started thinking about the topic after reading the recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12704/how-to-help-the-physics-se-grow-member-wise-qualitatively-as-well-as-quantita&quot;&gt;How to Help the Physics.SE grow (member-wise)? Qualitatively as well as Quantitatively&lt;/a&gt; , which is concerned with the loss of professional users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if one can extract a &quot;professional account&quot; from a currently existing one. That is, &lt;strong&gt;I would (potentially) like to create a new account that contains a selected high-quality subset of my contributions here,&lt;/strong&gt; without the two accounts being visibly associated. I am interested both in whether this is a supported feature (e.g. by asking the moderators to arrange it) and whether it is something one should do/something the community supports.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: I started using physics.SE relatively early in my undergraduate and have now progressed to practicing physics at a more &quot;professional&quot; level (not quite there yet, but getting there). Initially, I mainly participated for fun, asked a lot of questions about things I did not understand and answered where I felt I could contribute. While I would not delete any of my answers or questions, the &lt;strong&gt;quality of many of my contributions is not on the level that I would want to be associated with my professional activity.&lt;/strong&gt; In addition, I have participated in other Stackexchange sites, such as rpg.SE, which I would certainly not want to appear, for example, on a CV (related question on that topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5789/is-physics-se-on-your-cv&quot;&gt;Is Physics SE on your CV?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something anyone else has been thinking about or do only I have this problem? Should I just start a new account from scratch? Should I go through all my old contributions in a review fashion? Or is the extraction of contributions into a professional account someting feasible/wanted? If it is not something currently supported, should it be a feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T16:32:59.040" Title="Extracting a professional account from my existing contributions: Is it supported and wanted?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12758" CreationDate="2020-03-09T20:37:59.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;welcome to Physics!  I'm one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;elected moderators&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not the moderator who removed your posts.  It's a shame that your first contact with the site was so frustrating.  I hope that you'll reconsider your decision to not participate; you seem like you would be good to have around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/534832/44126&quot;&gt;question you link to&lt;/a&gt; falls into a funny space vis-a-vis our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/44126&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.  The main reason we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a policy about homework-like questions (which is basically &quot;you can ask &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; your homework, but please don't ask us to &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; your homework&quot;) is to avoid low-effort introductory problems from users who don't have any investment in how the site works.  It turns out, we've learned after many years of discussions, that it's hard to write a single rule that describes those sorts of obviously-bad questions without also describing some questions that other people find interesting and valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you answered is one of those that a different version of the homework policy might allow.  Several users thought (and communicated via flags) that it was a perfectly fine question, but was more about math than about physics, and belonged on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;.  Several other users thought that the structure of the question, &quot;I'm working on this problem, I know some things, but I'm stuck, please advise,&quot; was the kind of homework-like plea for help that we close, and voted accordingly.  And several users, including you, thought that the question deserved an answer of some complexity, and that the complex answers that appeared deserved to be upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it wasn't clear how the question fit into our ecosystem, it also wasn't quite clear how to categorize your answer, which was a single sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can get a solution in terms of Bessel functions of complex arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time you posted it, there was one other answer, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/534882/1&quot;&gt;was at that time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never use complex numbers on a problem like this.  I would represent u as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$u=A(r)\cos{\omega t}+B(r)\sin{\omega t}$$&lt;/span&gt;  This leads to two coupled ODEs in r for A and B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that, as a new site user, you were perfectly reasonable in thinking that those two answers were of comparable complexity and appropriateness.  I would also say that neither of them is a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; answer, and that an appropriate reaction from the asker or from another site user would be to leave a comment encouraging the answers to be expanded somewhat --- which is what happened.  The other answer was expanded.  Yours was flagged, and another moderator who saw the flag removed your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two comments you got were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In its current form this is really more a comment than an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; you will be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment on any post&lt;/a&gt;; instead, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214173/why-do-i-need-50-reputation-to-comment-what-can-i-do-instead&quot;&gt;provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker&lt;/a&gt;. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/290655&quot;&gt;From Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to which you replied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The rudeness was unwarranted. The poster asked for any insight. As far as you know this is a homework question. I provided an insight that was a sufficient clue to help the poster solve the problem. I have worked this particular problem in significant detail previously and could easily provide the exact profile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You accidentally replied in a new answer, rather than in a comment, but another moderator moved your post the right place.)  I don't think the first comment is impolite --- though it's terse enough that it might be off-putting if you're new to the community.  The second comment was auto-generated when the user who wrote it was going though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's extra-confusing that you accidentally made two accounts, because your second account (which posted this meta question) can't see the deleted answers which were posted by your  first account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the point of this long answer is that you really didn't do anything wrong, and that it makes sense for you to have been confused, because there was a lot that was not-typical about your first interaction with the site.  Bummer.  We really do hope that you'll hang around a little more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T21:58:30.470" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T21:58:30.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12764" CreationDate="2020-03-11T11:32:35.910" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I joined physics.SE only for the purpose of asking this question on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a couple of questions regarding acoustic in sound.SE. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://sound.stackexchange.com/q/47023/25426&quot;&gt;What are combs, nodes and how to calculate the nodes and comb frequencies at a given position?&lt;/a&gt; or to a lesser extent &lt;a href=&quot;https://sound.stackexchange.com/q/47013/25426&quot;&gt;How works perforated acoustic wood panels?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions could belong to different SE sites. I originally chose sound.SE because I was interested in an answer from an audio engineer's point of view. However, those questions didn't get much attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a procedure to raise the attention of the physics.SE contributors to questions asked on a different SE site? Or should I request the migration of the questions to physics.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I'm aware that asking that on meta will &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; bring those questions to the attention of users active here. So in a sense, this question contains its own solution--which finally seems quite adequate for a &quot;meta-question&quot; ;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256325" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T15:30:44.763" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T15:30:44.763" Title="How should I handle questions that could belong to physics.SE and other, more specialized, Stack Exchange websites?" Tags="|discussion|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12763" CreationDate="2020-03-11T15:17:39.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In comments, @tgp2114 mentioned two related questions with possible solutions to deal with this kind of issue. I retained three basic ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Post a link in chat&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6931/256325&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6931/256325&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Choice (1), linking to the question in chat, is an old standby and usually works pretty well. These links often get starred so they draw attention even after they've rotated out of the main chat window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Request migration&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6931/256325&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6931/256325&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You posted a question but either realized it belongs elsewhere or got no satisfactory response, and there is another site where it is on topic. This seems to be your case. In that case it's probably best to migrate the question rather than duplicate it. Use a custom moderator flag on the question and request it be migrated to the other site. The moderators can then do this (or not, if they so choose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Post another question tailored for the destination site&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6931/256325&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6931/256325&lt;/a&gt; too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You want a different take on the answer from a different community's perspective. Tailor the question appropriately, and note on both the old and new posts that there is a closely related question on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think the best strategy would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;First&lt;/em&gt;, publish a link to the question in chat. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; this is still not satisfactory:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2.1.  &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; the question is well suited for the destination site, request a migration.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2.2. &lt;em&gt;Otherwise&lt;/em&gt;, post a new question on the destination site, linking both questions with each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256325" LastEditorUserId="256325" LastEditDate="2020-03-11T15:32:57.250" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T15:32:57.250" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-12T09:02:07.380" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in consideration is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/535818/&quot;&gt;Actual eletronic games (as in, games played using electrons)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this question is different from other questions on this site, but I think it can be objectively answered. Not in the sense of a complete answer, but surely we could comply a list of fun ways we can interact with electrons, that could be used as games. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think such games can be very educational and would be a nice way to transport some physics to a younger audience (~8th grade pupil). Games are an excellent way to get kids excited about doing experiments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think this question shouldn't have been closed in the first place. I would like to hear in which sense the particular question is opinion based and why it is not appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user224659" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T17:03:30.233" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T17:03:30.233" Title="Question closed as opinion based, that is unusual but clearly not opinion based" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12765" CreationDate="2020-03-12T10:01:48.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the close voters. The reason I voted to close is because it isn't a question about physics. That doesn't mean it's a bad or uninteresting question, it just means it isn't an appropriate question for the Physics SE. I still think this and will probably vote to close again if the question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should probably have taken the time to write a custom close reason, but the close queue is getting large enough to be onerous these days and the time I have to work through it is limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T10:01:48.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-12T17:43:09.547" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in consideration is: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/535496/could-there-theoretically-exist-a-material-so-light-that-it-can-levitate-in-the&quot;&gt;Could there theoretically exist a material so light, that it can levitate in the air just due to the in height decreasing air pressure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's definitely a thought experiment discussing the underlying physical principles. If I understand it right, then the engineering Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange site only discusses topics about things that one could build in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought one can understand that the questioned material is not supposed to exist in the real world and the question is meant as testing the edge cases of some physical laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I make this clear in my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask the users responsible for closing the question for what reason they decided to to so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't even leave a comment explaining their point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256197" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-03-12T22:33:39.923" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T15:19:35.930" Title="Thought experiment closed as off-topic and better suited for engineering. But that's a thought experiment" Tags="|support|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12767" CreationDate="2020-03-13T05:27:28.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am one of the users who voted to close the question for the reason given in the close banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view of this comes from the main part of your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we theoretically build a material which is light enough or high enough (or both), that can levitate just due to the difference in pressure on the top vs. the bottom...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific problem you are trying to solve is &quot;building a material that can levitate due to differences in air pressure between it's top and bottom&quot;. Your question is not about understanding any physics concepts. It actually looks like to me that you are knowledgeable about the physics concepts you are wanting to apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To specifically address points you make in this meta post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that's definitely a thought experiment discussing the underlying physical principles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a thought experiment doesn't guarantee that a question will be on topic for PSE. Additionally, asking if such a material can be made isn't really a thought experiment in my opinion. And as I mentioned above, I don't think your question is really asking about any underlying physical principles. It starts with physical principles and asks how to apply them to solve a materials problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought one can understand that the questioned material is not supposed to exist in the real world...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically questions that ask about non-physical things are not on topic for this site either, so I would not go this route. Although as seen in answers to your question, one could argue such materials do exist in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...and the question is meant as testing the edge cases of some physical laws&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see in your question where you ask about testing edge cases of certain physical laws. I'm also not sure what you mean by &quot;edge case&quot;, as I wouldn't consider objects being buoyant in the air as anything &quot;on the edge&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I make this clear in my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question was asking about how buoyancy works, how differences in pressure causes objects to float, how strong the buoyant force is for objects of a certain volume in air, etc. then your question would be more on topic for this site (assuming there weren't other issues, like a duplicate question, coming across as a low-effort homework-like question, being opinion based, etc.). In other words, your question needs to be about understanding physical principles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ask the users responsible for closing the question for what reason they decided to to so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can, but they aren't required to answer. The best you can do is ask in comments or here on meta. If no one else answers though then there isn't much else you can do. However, the close banner is supposed to be an explanation at least for what the majority of users who voted to close were thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorDisplayName="user249968" LastEditDate="2020-03-13T07:09:21.050" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T07:09:21.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12767" CreationDate="2020-03-13T15:19:35.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with Aaron Stevens' answer: the reason I voted to close is the one given in the close banner. That being said, the question is not terrible either, and it could make a nice post on some other website. There is a secondary reason, though, which tipped the scale and made me vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post had only 10 views, I probably wouldn't have bothered to interact with it in any way. But it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/535496/timeline#history_598eccba-2481-412f-8d89-bc0c24645a9a&quot;&gt;became hot&lt;/a&gt;, and all of a sudden it had 7k views, most of them from other SE sites. I really think this question is a &lt;strong&gt;very bad representative of the kind of questions we want&lt;/strong&gt; on Physics.SE, and so I felt it ought to be removed from the HNQ list. If we had a mechanism to remove questions from the list other than by voting to close, I would have used it. But alas, we don't, so closing it is our only tool. Sorry for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T15:19:35.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12771" CreationDate="2020-03-15T15:41:23.097" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked the following question a couple of days ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/536209/&quot;&gt;Difference in material covered between Zwiebach or Adams quant mech I on mit ocw?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question was deemed opinion-based (which I in hind sight can agree with), so I edited the question. I instead asked if anyone who had experience with both could tell me whether there was a difference in what material was covered between the two courses. That formulation (i.e. the current one) was still deemed opinion-based. What is required in terms of reformulation the question in order for it to be reopened? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236807" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T17:01:56.410" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T17:01:56.410" Title="Question closed because considered opinion-based. How to change it?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12770" CreationDate="2020-03-15T16:54:07.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does anyone have experience from both of these that can tell me how they differ in the material covered (or if there even is any difference)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users would most likely not agree on how similar/different the courses are. Therefore, this is still a subjective question, so it should still be closed as &quot;opinion-based&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not for discussing the differences between certain courses and their material, so I don't really see how you could make this question on topic and reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T16:54:07.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12751" CreationDate="2020-03-15T22:45:44.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This started off as cannibalising &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12752/105169&quot;&gt;the existing suggestion&lt;/a&gt; for length, but sort of developed into something more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're almost ready to ask your question! Before you do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Check to make sure it's on-topic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Here are our guidelines.&lt;/a&gt; Note that &lt;strong&gt;homework problems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;/ “check my work”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;questions are off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;, but questions you think of &lt;em&gt;while doing homework&lt;/em&gt; might be on-topic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    If your question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; off-topic, fear not; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391&quot;&gt;another internet community&lt;/a&gt; might be able to help you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search bar&lt;/a&gt; at the top of the screen to make sure your question hasn't already been answered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Remember: the clearer your question, the easier it is to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You might find these links helpful for writing your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question? - Help Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6413&quot;&gt;How do we write good question titles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5778&quot;&gt;What counts as sufficient prior research when asking a question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4535&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/156&quot;&gt;Are history of physics questions allowed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4538&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these links should be removed. I don't hang around this site much, so I don't know how important these are, but the bottom four should probably be split off into a brief textual description with Wikipedia-style &quot;source&quot; links, as above. Not sure how to format that with the bottom bit remaining &quot;optional-looking&quot; (so people feel okay to skip past it) and not daunting, but there are currently too many items in the list for it to seem non-daunting &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105169" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T22:45:44.667" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-03-15T22:45:44.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12776" CreationDate="2020-03-16T16:13:28.117" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/536244/254821&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; I asked has been closed by a moderator as an off-topic homework-like question, although it is clearly not a homework question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was it closed as being homework-like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254821" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2020-03-16T16:47:51.617" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T23:45:49.177" Title="Question closed as an off-topic homework question although it is clearly not a homework question" Tags="|support|closed-questions|reopen|voting|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12773" CreationDate="2020-03-16T17:43:54.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I agree that this is not a homework/check-my-work question, but I can see why someone would think that it is based on DavidZ's response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, after thinking about it further, I think the question should remain closed. It seems to fall into the &quot;engineering&quot; category, where the close banner reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question isn't really asking about the underlying physics principles, even though the topic in general involves physics principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-03-16T23:45:49.177" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T23:45:49.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12763" CreationDate="2020-03-16T21:39:25.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that your 2nd question &lt;a href=&quot;https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/47013/how-works-perforated-acoustic-wood-panels&quot;&gt;How works perforated acoustic wood panels&lt;/a&gt; would be very suitable for Physics SE. It is a good fit here and it has not been answered to your satisfaction by anyone on Sound Design SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However your 1st question &lt;a href=&quot;https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/47023/what-are-combs-nodes-and-how-to-calculate-the-nodes-and-comb-frequencies-at-a-g&quot;&gt;What are combs, nodes and how to calculate the nodes and comb frequencies at a given position?&lt;/a&gt; does not seem to me to be suitable for this site because it is asking about the meaning of another person's statement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a follow-up question to an answer you received to an earlier question &lt;a href=&quot;https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/46988/why-not-pointing-the-loudspeaker-toward-the-sky-during-open-field-frequency-resp/46989#46989&quot;&gt;Why not pointing the loudspeaker toward the sky during open-field frequency response measurement?&lt;/a&gt; The user who provided that answer, whose statement you are querying, also answered two other follow-up questions which you asked in the comments, and said he would try to answer a 3rd question if you posted it in the Stack. You subsequently posted the question and this user duly answered it. You have not up-voted or selected his answer but you appear to have run out of follow-up questions, which have all been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The person who makes a statement is usually the best person to explain what it means. He/she should be the first person you ask.&lt;/strong&gt; In fact he/she might be the only person who knows what the statement means.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does not seem to me to be a good reason for cross-posting your 1st question on Physics SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would add to your strategy a preliminary step &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;0. If you are asking for clarification of someone else's post then make a comment under that Question or Answer.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the post is old you can find out from the user's profile whether he/she is still active and likely to reply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T21:39:25.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12773" CreationDate="2020-03-16T23:37:40.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I closed this as being homework-like is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It sounds like the kind of question that might be part of a low-level astronomy class homework assignment. Qualifying phrases like &quot;without using modern equipment&quot; and &quot;a simple and actionable argument&quot; are among the aspects of this question that suggest it is intended for educational value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It also seems like an unusual question for a person to come up with on their own. The question doesn't include any justification for why you wanted to ask it, which could be a plausible explanation of how you would come up with this question other than from a homework assignment or educational exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that in the comments, you mentioned &quot;Additionally, I would like to know how people in earlier times knew this fact without having access to modern equipment, including telescopes.&quot; It's a minor factor but that would have been a good thing to add to the question to make it seem marginally less homework-like (though I'm not saying that I necessarily would have chosen to leave the question open if you had added that).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't show even the slightest effort to research the question and come up with an answer, or even some progress toward an answer, on your own. Even setting aside the homework issue, this is not a desirable attribute in a question, but it's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a trait that we've found to be somewhat correlated with people asking low-level homework questions and expecting us to just hand over the answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, none of that is conclusive evidence that your question should be put on hold as homework-like, but putting all the factors together, it does make it look rather suspicious. The final thing about this question in particular is that it was accumulating a lot of upvotes and had been added to the Hot Network Questions list. Questions on HNQ get a lot more exposure a lot more quickly, and when they have issues, they call for quicker action. So I decided to put the question on hold right away. There's an argument that maybe I should have just removed the question from HNQ while leaving it open, but I thought about it and decided that I was confident enough that the question fits our definition of a homework-like question that I might as well just put it on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, sometimes acting quickly on HNQ's leads to a mistake (not that I'm saying I made a mistake here, but it's generally understood that moderator actions won't be correct 100% of the time). But closing a question, if done by mistake, is relatively easy to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To head off one possible objection, note that I've deliberately avoided saying that your question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a homework question. I don't know whether it really &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a homework question or not, but in the form you posted it, it has enough characteristics that I've found to be associated with homework questions that I thought it should fall under our policy for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T23:37:40.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-17T10:44:56.987" Score="-6" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure I am asking something different than the proposed duplicate. And the question itself demonstrates understanding of the proposed duplicate answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/536455/&quot;&gt;Is there an alternative number to the 100% miscommunicated and hard-to-comprehend &amp;quot;total number of atoms in the universe&amp;quot; cruft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question pertains to why this question comes up so much and how to prevent it. It is not asking the question itself so is a different question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40409" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-03-17T11:09:54.033" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T13:10:26.353" Title="Question closed as duplicate but question clearly demonstrates understanding of duplicate. Is asking something else" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12777" CreationDate="2020-03-17T13:10:26.353" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do agree that it's not really a duplicate; but it should remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, it's hard to understand the question behind the huge rant.  Your rant seems to entirely focus on how unclear &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; people are when they discuss the &quot;number of atoms in the universe&quot;.  From what I've understood, you seem to have an issue with how some people choose to explain the estimates for the number of atoms in the observable universe.  I can see how this led people to close it as a duplicate; your question wasn't exactly clear with what it was trying to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question seems to mostly concern itself with the wording of people saying &quot;the number of atoms in the universe&quot;; when really they are estimating the number of atoms in the observable universe (not estimating the number of atoms that could fit into the observable universe).  Although I think it's useful to make this distinction between the universe and the observable universe, I don't think the question is on topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a primarily opinion based question, based on your dislike for current explanations of that estimate.  I personally also don't really see the issues that you see with the explanations, so that especially leads me to consider it opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T13:10:26.353" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12780" CreationDate="2020-03-19T11:37:21.933" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user has asked five almost identical questions about a misunderstanding of rope tension during the past two days.  They are receiving similar answers, but don't agree with or accept any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should they be warned or somehow restricted for a time?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90326" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T16:40:12.530" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T17:19:13.663" Title="What should be done about a user asking the same question 5 times in two days?" Tags="|support|flagging|duplicates|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12779" CreationDate="2020-03-19T11:55:51.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost identical questions should be flagged and closed as duplicates. Users asking a lot of questions that are then closed are already subject to automated and/or manual restrictions on asking further questions, so no need to do anything else. If you feel strongly about the pattern of contributions of a particular user, you can raise a custom mod flag on one of their posts and we will look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question aren't similar enough to be closed as duplicates, there is no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T11:55:51.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12779" CreationDate="2020-03-19T13:53:01.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should they be warned or somehow restricted for a time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not by you, as you don't have the power to restrict users, and you don't have enough authority to issue a warning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best to can do is flag/close as a duplicate and/or raise a custom flag on the post(s) for moderators to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They are receiving similar answers, but don't agree with or accept any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The participation of a user with regard to answers on their own question is irrelevant with regards to how this situation should be approached in my opinion. A user is free to not be satisfied with answers on their questions, no matter how unreasonable their opinions actually are. And if a user is posting similar questions, the reason why they are doing this doesn't affect that it shouldn't be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T15:51:02.157" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T15:51:02.157" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-23T08:45:34.363" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking at the details of an account  I noticed that it was temporarily suspended:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WWUoX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WWUoX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suspension ends in 1992, or 2092, or generally speaking in *92. None of the years make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that message mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38751" LastEditorUserId="84967" LastEditDate="2020-03-23T11:40:37.940" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T11:40:37.940" Title="How can an account be temporarily suspended until the year 1992?" Tags="|discussion|suspensions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-03-23T08:47:29.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-24T10:53:39.293" Score="-2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;What changes would need to be made to the following question for it to be on-topic on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/536455/is-there-an-alternative-number-to-the-100-miscommunicated-and-hard-to-comprehen&quot;&gt;Is there an alternative number to the 100% miscommunicated and hard-to-comprehend “total number of atoms in the universe” cruft&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EUw0a.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to determine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;why this is the best number for its purpose given how confusing it is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is a better number that would be easier for a lay person to understand - to help more people understand and appreciate physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel I have expressed this in the question but if everyone is shutting it down there must be some sentences or question marks that I am missing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40409" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T15:38:04.280" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T17:24:39.817" Title="Please help with alternative wording of question to conform with expectation of site" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12784" CreationDate="2020-03-24T16:46:35.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of those who voted to close I feel I should respond. I voted to close because I do not think this was a question about physics. No physicist I know cares about the calculation of the number of atoms in the observable universe. It is just one of the superficially impressive statistics thrown around by popular science programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about the average density of the universe and the size of the observable universe are very much on topic because they are related to the spacetime geometry in an important way and neither number is as precisely known as we would like. From these you can work out the number of atoms in the observable universe, but this is at best recreational physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T16:46:35.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12784" CreationDate="2020-03-24T17:24:39.817" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change the title to “Number of nucleons in observable universe”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change the body to “How do physicists estimate this number to be roughly &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$10^{80}$&lt;/span&gt;?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T17:24:39.817" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12788" CreationDate="2020-03-27T20:08:25.250" Score="10" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the early days of the Physics SE we struggled to get people interested in using our chat room &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;. One of the tactics we used was to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/71/the-h-bar?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;schedule a one hour chat session&lt;/a&gt; once every two weeks, and this worked pretty well. However the chat room has become a lot more lively over the years since then, and this scheduled chat session is now largely ignored. The only time I notice it is when I have to field yet another question from a new member asking what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question for the panel is should we cancel it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-03-27T20:39:09.060" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T21:00:15.657" Title="Should we cancel the fortnightly chat session in the Physics chat room?" Tags="|discussion|chat|chat-events|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12787" CreationDate="2020-03-27T21:00:15.657" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should cancel it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been pretty active in chat for the last several months, and I haven't once seen the chat session used as a special event.  If anything, it usually falls on a time when things are pretty quiet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen it brought up in meta for several years.  Any important discussion seems to flow pretty well in comments on meta threads (and chats stemming off of that if necessary).  There doesn't seem to be much need to promote the chat, and I would even say the weekly promotion doesn't seem to actually bring us active users.  I've also seen it lead to more confusion than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to get back to my original opinion, since it doesn't have much use and can confuse people, I think we should cancel it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T21:00:15.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T17:39:38.643" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question as not registered user, after that I registered, is it possible to transfer the not-registered answer to my registered account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer gave is here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/448675/is-there-a-difference-in-the-infrared-absorption-spectrum-of-a-greenhouse-gas-wh/538815#comment1219794_538815&quot;&gt;Is there a difference in the infrared absorption spectrum of a greenhouse gas when pure and when mixed with non-greenhouse gases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257624" LastEditorUserId="257624" LastEditDate="2020-03-28T18:19:53.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T18:19:53.680" Title="Transfer answer from duplicate unregistered user account" Tags="|support|user-accounts|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12789" CreationDate="2020-03-28T17:47:48.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;&quot;Contact&quot;&lt;/a&gt; link in the footer of the page and choose &quot;I need to merge user profiles&quot; as the reason and explain your case. SE will handle the merge manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T17:47:48.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2020-03-29T22:33:30.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also, a &lt;strong&gt;quick-latex reference&lt;/strong&gt; could help a lot including the most used in equations and formula. This stops users from laziness. Regarding the question, I see some users don't &lt;strong&gt;provide resources to their questions&lt;/strong&gt; which leaves doubt to answer and force the comments to be full of resource request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87256" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T22:33:30.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T20:05:53.293" Score="-3" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;This relates to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/540575/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/540575/&lt;/a&gt; . I said what I had to say on my answer itself. It was edited out by a moderator and suggested to me that I post my query here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no queries as such, but I do have (what I feel) an important point to make. Since I spent a good deal of time crafting out my original &quot;rant&quot; (and frankly, a little exhausted) I'll just post the part that was edited out. Sorry I don't have the energy to write a standalone question, but the general direction of my problem should be clear. I request the community's feedback on the issues I attempt to highlight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please ignore the title (it's a rhetoric question). I have to think one up, but my mind is not proving very helpful. I will add though, that I have been using SE for years (for my own education) and have only recently started contributing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do notice now that I am spending more time on SE, however, a very strong strain of anti-intellectualism going around here that I did not notice when I was just using Google search to look up questions on SE. Many closed minded people on this website (just my observation). I think for my own sanity, I should go back to what I was doing formerly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Example of what I am talking about. I received a downvote on my answer on the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; site after I posted this here. How to explain this? Also, the fact that this is all anonymous makes all this so much worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT (II):&lt;/strong&gt; I thought for a while why any of this seems so objectionable. I realize that the point I am making seems so &lt;em&gt;inconsequential&lt;/em&gt; (I mean, there are lots of instances on this website of people losing their shit when faced with the dreaded &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; ; I am yet another in that pile, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; inconsequential (in my opinion). It has, in fact, great relevance to the question of whether this site (or &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other such resource that is of, by, and for the people, to be cliched) manages to be &lt;em&gt;effective&lt;/em&gt;. To do what it is supposed (or advertised) to do. Allow me to explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(1)$&lt;/span&gt; My understanding is that down-votes are reserved for answers (and questions) that show an &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; lack of effort. I should also mention, that I have seen a lot of down-vote worthy (IMHO, of course) content on this website, but have never been able to bring myself to actually press the downvote button. I press the UPvote on the answer which I think is correct instead. This fulfills what StackExchange advertises itself as (a sentiment I fully agree) : I quote (from the front page of SE) : &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The right answer. Right on top&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why I said (to address a comment below as well, although the justification I gave below is also perfectly valid) &lt;em&gt;&quot;...to anyone with a hint of intellectual honesty (and let me add, understanding of physics) my answer is not down-votable...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;IS&lt;/em&gt; intellectually dishonest to down-vote an answer that shows clear effort (irrespective of whether the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; is right ; that's what the upvotes are for)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(2)$&lt;/span&gt; Now, let me add a layer of &lt;em&gt;mindfuck&lt;/em&gt; (assuming you are still with me). First, a few pieces of info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I paid a visit to the SE page of the commentator (and downvoter) that I addressed in my answer on the referred post above. I found that his highest rated answer is to the following question : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/242387/why-does-matter-exist-in-3-states-liquids-solid-gas/242429#242429&quot;&gt;Why does matter exist in 3 states (liquids, solid, gas)?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;Sounds Familiar? (hint: link at top of this post). No comments (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lost my marbles yesterday too over this same issue (details in chat log of hbar). In that case, my answer was down-voted by my &lt;em&gt;co-answerer&lt;/em&gt; on the question! I mean, of course, these things are impossible to prove, but when things are happening in real time, it is not that hard to tell who the downvote came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand &lt;em&gt;emotional&lt;/em&gt; deployment of up and down-votes. That happens a good bit on this website as well (I would say, the majority are just emotional). The above two examples seem much worse somehow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(3)$&lt;/span&gt; Why? There are lots of people with lots of different kinds of fish to fry on this website. Mine was that I wanted to work on my (physics) writing (brevity is not a quality I possess, as may be evident). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how comfortable would you be if people started using the down-vote to help them fry the fish they are here to fry (&lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; of the professional kind)? I think a reasonable claim may be made that such a thing happens fairly regularly on this website (I'll leave it to you to decide if the above two fall in that category, but I think I am not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; far out in suspecting). That is, if the &lt;em&gt;DOWN-VOTE&lt;/em&gt; becomes a &lt;em&gt;TOOL&lt;/em&gt; to gain &lt;em&gt;COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE&lt;/em&gt;? Would that be an appropriate usage of the down-vote? Would that be healthy? Do the OverLords at SE imagine this is a sustainable model? What about the advertising tagline above? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(4)$&lt;/span&gt; It is with good reason that this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the tagline. Any such website would be pointless if the right answer &lt;em&gt;weren't&lt;/em&gt; usually on top. So, for long term &lt;em&gt;survival&lt;/em&gt; of any such platform, it is crucial that this condition is, on an average, true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a question I am asking (except to answer to yourself, perhaps) but take a good look at the Physics SE website. Do you, in your &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; opinion think this condition is satisfied currently? ie, do you think the right answer is at the top (generally, usually etc.). Even if you do, but you too have noticed what I point out in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(3)$&lt;/span&gt;, do you think it will for very long?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(5)$&lt;/span&gt; Which brings me to my final point : I read some highly read discussions on this Meta site regarding if there needs to be a &lt;em&gt;critical mass&lt;/em&gt;  of &lt;em&gt;Professional Physicists&lt;/em&gt; for this website to function. The answer , in my opinion, is &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;. Several people whose work I follow on this website are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, and they are producing good work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Profession is some narrow box we are all boxed into. However &lt;em&gt;doing physics&lt;/em&gt; is much wider than what professional physicists like to think. The only condition that &lt;em&gt;professional&lt;/em&gt; physicists satisfy is that their &lt;em&gt;paycheck&lt;/em&gt; comes because they do physics. That does not mean that people who earn their living through other means cannot be &lt;em&gt;Physicists&lt;/em&gt; (eg., a certain A.Einstein?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it IS crucial that the amount of &lt;strong&gt;bullshit&lt;/strong&gt; on this site does not reach a critical mass. Ultimately, any &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; platform can only function if the public has &lt;em&gt;trust&lt;/em&gt;. If there is no trust, there is nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; I will not &lt;em&gt;apologize&lt;/em&gt; for this &quot;wordy&quot; post. Educated people need to have longer than 5-minute attention spans. I do realize, though, that my writing can be wordy, objectively. So if you read all the way, thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;REMOVED TEXT : @ leftaroundabout's comment:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;... I had to downvote. This is just a more wordy version of knzhou's non-answer ...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I have a suspicion that you do not understand OP's question. But Let me Reiterate. OP's question asks if there is any &lt;strong&gt;unambiguous&lt;/strong&gt; , &lt;strong&gt;macroscopically observable&lt;/strong&gt; (that can be captured in a &quot;3-D image&quot;) criterion that distinguishes liquids and gases. The answer is &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;wordiness&quot; of my answer contains actual Physical arguments backing @knzhou's perfectly valid answer, I suggest you read them. As somebody else has already pointed out below, to anyone with a hint of intellectual honesty (and let me add, understanding of physics) my answer is not down-votable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also, about &lt;strong&gt;downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;. It is fine. I got very worked up over downvotes on an answer yesterday. I am pretty new to this ; however, let me add that it is not necessarily about &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;. It is about making sure that the &lt;em&gt;physics is correct&lt;/em&gt;. It gets my goat a little when my Physics makes sense, but it is downvoted. I'll try to handle this better. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am learning how to write, but still,  I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; sense when I have written a valid and reasonable answer. This is (IMO) an instance. But I see a very strange pattern on PhysicsSE: answers that I know would be accepted by my colleagues in the Physics department (because they contain real PHYSICS) are repeatedly down-voted here. I mean, what do people want this website to be? &lt;em&gt;Quora? Yahoo Answers?&lt;/em&gt;. (Although, maybe based on the quality of some of the answers that are &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;voted on this site, the answer is yes)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;also. Minor Point. It seems like you have your mind made up that liquids and gases are indeed distinct phases in a well defined manner. The point of this &lt;em&gt;bounty&lt;/em&gt; that you have announced seems to be to find a &lt;strong&gt;reputable source&lt;/strong&gt; (exact wording of bounty) to back up your pre-cooked understanding. I'll just say that made up minds are not good for doing physics (or anything, actually). (that is just an opinion)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;... Another (unimportant) matter: you put so much emphasis-markup into your answer that it becomes hard to even read. In particular, please don't use math mode as “super-italic” emphasis....&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ONLY useful (to me) feedback : I have tried to fix this as far as possible on this post. Thanks for this comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, at the person who attempted to delete this paragraph : &lt;strong&gt;DON'T&lt;/strong&gt;. Censorship is not healthy for a democratic atmosphere. Everything (including physics) comes after. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16238" LastEditorUserId="16238" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T07:18:46.550" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T02:36:10.167" Title="Why was my answer censored?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-04-08T20:39:59.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12794" CreationDate="2020-03-31T20:17:22.557" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers shouldn't be used to talk to other users. They should just be used to answer the main question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That part that was deleted isn't answering the question, it is just defending your opinions to other users. The rest of your answer that is valid still remains, so this isn't &quot;anti-intellectualism&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T20:17:22.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12794" CreationDate="2020-04-01T10:32:48.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This whole mess began due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/540575/10&quot;&gt;an edit&lt;/a&gt; which was done by me on the linked post, so I would like to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I was surfing through the HNQ when I found that question and after scrolling down the other answers I came to yours. Well, I'm not a physicist, so I didn't judge your answer from the physics point of view (whether correct or not). (Also note that I didn't vote on it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that bothered me was that you edited your post to use it as a media of conversation between you and the others. This isn't the purpose of an answer. An answer should be (mostly) to the point and the comments are for the purpose of clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought that it would be better to hide (not remove) that portion with &quot;&quot;. And that's what I did. Also I commented on the post (now moved &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/53954321#53954321&quot;&gt;to chat&lt;/a&gt;) where I stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well I hided a portion of your edited question as it seems to be a rant. You should use chat or comment if you want some info to be delivered to a particular person. If you dont agree with my edit then you should just remove those &quot;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I did that edit just to improve the quality of your post (as those rants just add noise). I didn't had nor I (currently) have any grudges against you. That was just done in a good faith. But certainly you didn't like it and hence wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, at the person who attempted to delete this paragraph : DON'T. Censorship is not healthy for a democratic atmosphere. Everything (including physics) comes after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that didn't sound good so I commented about this in the H-Bar (you can look at the conversation &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/53954151#53954151&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). After that, your post gained a bit of attention and then a moderator intervened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user249968" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-04-02T02:36:10.167" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T02:36:10.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12794" CreationDate="2020-04-01T10:42:05.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why was my answer censored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It wasn't.&lt;/strong&gt; This site, like &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; publishing venues, has an established format, which establishes which kinds of content goes where. Keeping to this format is what makes this website a useful resource to read. You posted content to the wrong part of the format, and you got directed to where to post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the moderator's &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.stackexchange.com/q/540065/#comment1222729_540575&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt; for why content was removed from your answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've edited out the portion of this answer that consisted of a reply to comments rather than an answer to the question. Answers should be self-contained and consist only of material relevant to the question as posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is right on the money. The text that was edited out belongs (i) in comments; or, if long enough (ii) in chat, be that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/106170/discussion-on-answer-by-insomniac-if-liquid-and-gas-are-both-chaotic-states-of-m&quot;&gt;a comments-overflow chatroom&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the site's general chatroom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the downvotes: when you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is about making sure that the physics is correct. It gets my goat a little when my Physics makes sense, but it is downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are you sure that the downvote is because the physics is wrong, and not because the presentation makes the content less useful than the 'raw physics' would indicate? For me, your answer (in its current form) is pretty close to the edge of being so wordy and hard to parse that it becomes essentially useless, particularly for the broad (HNQ) audience of that post. Votes are primarily for sorting answers by order of &lt;em&gt;usefulness&lt;/em&gt;, not just correctness, and if the clarity of a post's text is bad enough, then it can definitely impact, sometimes severely, its usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing good, clear text is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;. It takes a long time of practice to be proficient at it. Further, evaluating the clarity of your own text is also and extremely hard task in general. So when you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am learning how to write, but still, I can sense when I have written a valid and reasonable answer. This is (IMO) an instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would invite you to consider the voting on your answer as feedback on how clear your text was, and how accurately calibrated your clear-o-meter is for your own text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other minor comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit: Example of what I am talking about. I received a downvote on my answer on the Physics site after I posted this here. How to explain this? Also, the fact that this is all anonymous makes all this so much worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is known as 'the Meta effect' -- posting about a specific post on Meta will draw attention to that post, and will amplify the reactions to it. If the content is good, then a link for meta will draw upvotes; if it is not useful, then it can draw downvotes. This can happen independently of how the link is framed within Meta. (But, if you post a long and wordy rant linking to a post that looks like a long and wordy rant, then you've primed your audience to notice precisely the problematic aspects of the post you've linked to.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tl;dr: I will not apologize for this &quot;wordy&quot; post. Educated people need to have longer than 5-minute attention spans. I do realize, though, that my writing can be wordy, objectively. So if you read all the way, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop blaming your audience. &quot;Educated people&quot; also need to be able to write clear, concise text. The onus is on you, here. This comment indicates that you realize that the tone and format you chose was harmful to your purposes, but you went ahead anyway. I don't think this is a good strategy here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T10:42:05.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12799" CreationDate="2020-04-01T12:54:44.980" Score="10" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/53957975#53957975&quot;&gt;pointed out earlier today on chat, by Martin Sleziak,&lt;/a&gt; that the scope of MathJax new commands changed at some point in the (recent?) past: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4130/the-scope-of-newcommand-is-the-entire-page/29621#29621&quot;&gt;it was switched for Math SE in January of last year&lt;/a&gt; and on this site at some point in the intervening months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short of it is that answers now start and end with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span class=&quot;d-none&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\begingroup$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;span class=&quot;d-none&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\endgroup$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;markup, which scopes any &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\renewcommand&lt;/code&gt; instances to only that post and not the entire thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Good Thing, and indeed something we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1329#comment46497_1331&quot;&gt;complained&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9407#comment35308_9409&quot;&gt;about&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6952&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt;. However, it does also mean that answers that used commands defined in the question may now be broken, and it'd be good to have a thorough search for them and implement any fixes that may be required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I'm using a SEDE query, &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/739207/answered-questions-with-latex-newcommands&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answered questions with LaTeX \newcommand's&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;, which lists all the relevant questions, in case anyone wants to help me look through them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T22:32:30.797" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T22:32:30.797" Title="The scope of \newcommand changed" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12798" CreationDate="2020-04-01T14:01:31.743" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I've gone through the list of answered questions. There &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be no more broken LaTeX caused by this change on the site, but if you find any more, fix it on sight!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T14:01:31.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-02T09:32:42.297" Score="18" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/540915/&quot;&gt;How to incorporate the uncertainty of the model coefficients in the prediction interval of a multiple linear regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;I am dealing with a rather hard question, and hoped to get some help on stack-exchange. Being a  computational physicist allows me to work at the interface between theory and experiment. This makes what I do, and what I ask sometimes look weird to either the theoretician, the experimentalist, the computer scientist or the statistician (the last part due to ML).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question posted is one of error-analysis, specifically error propagation (typical experimental physics exercises for anyone who ever had physics labs). Alternately, the statistical component makes it also a statistics question, as also that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; community deals with this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; site gets it locked because it may not entirely be in the lingo default by statisticians (which I do not claim to be, hence I was asking the question) and as far as I can tell looks a lot like a default question statisticians deal with, but is uniquely different. Maybe this makes it hard to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting it on a physics forum (error-analysis as I remember it actually seems closer related to the question I have) gets it locked because it is not &quot;physics&quot; related. Indeed it is a &quot;model&quot;...but point me towards a physicist not using models. And if error-bars are not an import concept in physics, or as a physicist you never encountered them during your training, please tell me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that the question may look strange. And any suggestion or question is welcome. The underlying work is rather complex (and long winded), so if you ask a question, and tell me why you need to know, I can give a more understandable and focused answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I feel I am being dismissed out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259147" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-02T09:54:13.683" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T12:58:11.963" Title="Is error-analysis not a physics topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12800" CreationDate="2020-04-02T11:46:01.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a borderline case, so I'm not entirely convinced of my position, but I think the closure reason was valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closure of your question doesn't mean error analysis is not important in physics. It just means that your question is not about any physics principles. As a contrived example, let's say I posted a question that said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I solve this equation for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt;?&#xA;  &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$y=v_0t+\frac12at^2$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the other problems with a post like this, it would be closed for being just an algebra problem and not asking about any physics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I then edited the question to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am trying to solve a projectile motion problem, which is relevant in physics. I know the equations that describe projectile motion, but how do I solve this equation for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt;?&#xA;  &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$y=v_0t+\frac12at^2$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then the post would still not belong on PSE because it is still an algebra question.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is algebra important for physics? Of course it is. Is projectile motion a physics topic? Of course it is. But at the heart of it, my question is a math question, not a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not saying your question is as simple and clear-cut as the example I give. I think your question is more likely to belong on this site than my example is for sure, and I wouldn't be upset or confused if your question were to be reopened. The main point I'm trying to make here is that just because your question comes from physics and asks about techniques used by physicists doesn't mean the heart of the question is a physics question. Error analysis is used in many disciplines, so a question about it doesn't automatically make it on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;I could see this example being better though&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am trying to solve this projectile motion problem. I end up with an equation that looks like &#xA;  &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$y=v_0t+\frac12at^2$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;  and I need to solve for the variable &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt;. The issue is that I get two possible solutions for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt;, as this is a second order polynomial for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt;. What does it physically mean for this equation to have two solutions, and how do I pick the correct one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this question still lacks some things, like more context as to what the specific system is, but it is a step in the right direction. It is a question about how the mathematics relates to the physical system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-04-03T04:50:07.890" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T04:50:07.890" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-02T22:20:57.057" Score="-9" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listen to these questions on this forum: Q: Schrödinger's cat question Q: The Bohm interpretation and Schrodinger's cat Q: Is Schrodinger's Cat itself an observer? When was there a Schrodinger's cat experiment? These questions are all speculation. My question was based on an actual experiment. You have no reason to close this thread because you can't debate the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not fair to close a thread because of a few whining people who are threatened because others are debating the issue. People were debating the issue without any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was based on Theoretical Physicist Carlo Rovelli's Relational interpretation of QM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has worked in Italy, the United States and, since 2000, in France.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; He works mainly in the field of quantum gravity and is a founder of loop quantum gravity theory. He has also worked in the history and philosophy of science. He collaborates with several Italian newspapers, including the cultural supplements of the Corriere della Sera, Il Sole 24 Ore and La Repubblica.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;His popular science book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, was originally published in Italian in 2014. It has been translated into 41 languages[2] and has sold over a million copies worldwide.[3] In 2019, he was included by Foreign Policy magazine in a list of 100 most influential global thinkers.[4]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rovelli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only post this to show that this isn't some crackpot interpretation. So what's the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was also based on the recent Wigner friend experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experimental test of local observer independence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most markedly exposed in Wigner’s eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience seemingly different realities. The question whether the observers’ narratives can be reconciled has only recently been made accessible to empirical investigation, through recent no-go theorems that construct an extended Wigner’s friend scenario with four observers. In a state-of-the-art six-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by five standard deviations. If one holds fast to the assumptions of locality and free choice, this result implies that quantum theory should be interpreted in an observer-dependent way.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, you have questions on here about Schrodinger's cat. These questions and the answers are mostly OPINIONS because there has never been a Schrodinger's cat experiment. I think those questions are great, I just don't think it's fair to anyone on this site to close my thread because a few people were crying because they can't debate the issue. Other were debating it without any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199818" OwnerDisplayName="Genetic Avatar" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T02:32:42.510" Title="How can you close a thread on the Relational interpretation because of opinion when there's threads on here about Schrodinger's cat?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12802" CreationDate="2020-04-03T02:32:42.510" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read your closed post and the reason for the closure has nothing to do with the relational interpretation. There are plenty of open questions about the relational interpretation and there are plenty of closed questions on Schrödinger’s cat, so your complaint here in meta is completely irrelevant to the issue that caused the closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is a question and answer site, not a discussion forum. So concrete questions about the relational interpretation seeking a direct factual answer are appropriate here. Your post read more like a blog post than a question. The few questions you had buried in the blog were more like discussion starters than actual answer-seeking questions. This impression was confirmed by your complaint here where you repeatedly mention “debate”. That is not the purpose of this site and posts that seek to generate debate simply do not fit with this format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for obtaining direct answers to direct questions. It is not for discussion and not for debate and it is not a physics blog. Your “question” was appropriately (IMO) closed and the closure had nothing to do with the relational interpretation topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with debate and discussion. But when you want to drive a nail into a board you grab a hammer and not a saw. Similarly, debate is for a discussion forum, not a Q&amp;amp;A site. SE is simply the wrong tool for that job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T02:32:42.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12800" CreationDate="2020-04-04T17:45:16.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your 1st sentence you say the context is the stickiness of glue compounds. However, that statement on its own does nothing to make your question answerable by physicists. If that sentence is removed your question could apply in any discipline. No physics insight is required to answer it. So I agree with those who voted to close it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because we have tags for error analysis, linear algebra and statistics does not mean that all questions on such topics are &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that physicists have the right kind of answer you are looking for. That might be the case if you &lt;strong&gt;explain your experiment from a physics viewpoint&lt;/strong&gt;. But you have not done so. When you were asked for such information in Cross Validated SE you refused to provide it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with Aaron that it is a borderline case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was closed on Cross Validated SE because it was judged to be unanswerable without further information. That included a user with a rep of 233k. You were unwilling to provide the information asked for. (You were not asked to write a full paper on your methodology.) Whether that information is irrelevant is not something which I am able to decide. The users on that site are probably more expert in the subject than anyone here. If they are unable to answer the question then it is even less likely that someone here will be able to do so. (This comment was also made by Semoi.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that someone here &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to provide an answer is not sufficient to make it &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; here. There are many users here who can answer simple questions about mathematics and statistics, and to a lesser extent chemistry. We have tags for those also, but such questions are not automatically &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt; here.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T17:45:16.553" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12800" CreationDate="2020-04-06T19:48:16.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this could be asked if framed as a traditional physics experiment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, say some students are using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arrhenius equation&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;k ~=~ A \, \exp{\left(\frac{-E_{\text{activation}}}{RT}\right)}&#xA;\,,$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;to find the Arrhenius constant, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A ,$&lt;/span&gt; and the activation energy, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E_{\text{activation}} ,$&lt;/span&gt; from lab-observed values of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$k$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$T .$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, students can take the natural-log of the Arrhenius equation,&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;\ln{\left(k\right)}&#xA;~=~&#xA;\frac{-E_{\text{activation}}}{RT}&#xA;+ \ln{\left(A\right)}&#xA;\,,$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;then plot it as a linear correlation of the form &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y=mx+b,$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;\underbrace{\ln{\left(k\right)}}_{y}&#xA;~=~&#xA;\underbrace{\frac{-E_{\text{activation}}}{R}}_{m}&#xA;\underbrace{{T}^{-1}}_{x}&#xA;+&#xA;\underbrace{\ln{\left(A\right)}}_{b}&#xA;\,,$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;then use linear regression to find the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E_{\text{activation}}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A$&lt;/span&gt; from their data for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$k$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$T .$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But surely it'd be naive for the students to assume that their values for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E_{\text{activation}}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A$&lt;/span&gt; are precise, real-number values.  So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can we quantitatively describe the values of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E_{\text{activation}}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A$&lt;/span&gt; to include uncertainty?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the Arrhenius equation is then used to predict more values of the reaction-rate constant &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$k$&lt;/span&gt; at different temperatures &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$T ,$&lt;/span&gt; then how do the errors in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E_{\text{activation}}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A$&lt;/span&gt; carry through to these predictions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would change if the linear regression were based on multiple independent values?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142085" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T19:48:16.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12800" CreationDate="2020-04-07T02:52:38.267" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Issues: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notions like &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X^T X $&lt;/span&gt; wasn't obvious for physists even though it's undergraduate regression. People simply spoke differently in different &quot;fields&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In physics, people cared about a. uncertainty in experimental observation b. bias in simulations c.  deviation in theoretical calculations.  Thus, complicated estimations of PI or CI in some model was not quite common for quite a while. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Error&quot; was a very dangerous word. i kind of get idea these days, that the &quot;physists culture&quot; wasn't a fan of the words &quot;error&quot;.  This you really want to show that you know what you are talking about when you mentioned the words &quot;error&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="209383" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T02:52:38.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-07T14:16:55.290" Score="-7" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/541017/&quot;&gt;Homework problem ??&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the problem in the above link a homework problem? Really? In which part of this world has a high school student ever received this kind of problem in &quot;homework&quot;? This is an un-conventional question which people have no idea how to solve so that does not mean its a mere &quot;homework problem&quot;. THIS needs to be corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257197" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-07T15:53:11.647" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T15:53:11.647" Title="How is this a homework problem?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12807" CreationDate="2020-04-07T15:38:31.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post you've linked to is in a curious position, in that both of the following are true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not a solvable problem, and it would never ever be set as homework by a competent instructor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is an archetypal example of the type of question that should get closed under &lt;a href=&quot;/q/714&quot;&gt;the site's homework policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me expand a bit on those two points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The problem you're asking about (finding the electrostatic potential of a ring of charge away from the axis of the ring) is not solvable in terms of elementary functions. It is relatively easy (cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1088/0143-0807/30/3/019&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eur. J. Phys.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;30&lt;/strong&gt; 623 (2009)&lt;/a&gt; for a sketch of how it goes) to calculate the potential as an integral of the contributions of all the charge elements around the ring, and this calculation returns an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_integral&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elliptic integral&lt;/a&gt;. This means that this is where the calculation stops, since elliptic integrals cannot be reduced to elementary terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Alternatively, you can approach this via a multipole series; Jackson briefly details it at the end of §3.3, and it's probably not something that you would find satisfying either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, you'd never see this being assigned as an exercise by an instructor who knows what they're doing, unless (i) they were confident that you know enough electrostatics to formulate the integrals and manipulate them and (ii) they were confident that you are comfortable enough with special functions that you'd be able to recognize elliptic integrals and recognize that their appearance means you should stop there; or (iii) they were shooting this as a hardball in the expectation that you'd work hard at it for a day or two, essentially fail, and come to them for guidance, in order to show how fast these questions become unsolvably tough (or a class of similar teaching methods).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty clear from the way you've set the question (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that you've been assigned as an exercise to calculate the on-axis potential, and you've taken it upon yourself to calculate it for off-axis points. (There's several indications of this, starting with the rather clumsy way that you've used &quot;above&quot; to indicate &quot;off-axis&quot;; you rarely see this type of ambiguous language from experienced physicists. The same is true for the inconsistent labelling of the axes in your diagram.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it's pretty clear to anybody who knows electrostatics in detail that this is not a set-piece exercise -- it wasn't assigned by an instructor, and it wasn't given as an exercise in a textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... and yet: it is completely within the class of questions that this community has decided are off-topic under the umbrella term of homework-and-exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? well, here's a sketch of the structure of the question as you've written it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's the problem: &quot;We have to find&quot; object X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't solve it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I suspect tool Y &quot;is to be used here&quot; (in passive voice, no less).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Please help me with this&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(and, conspicuously missing: any attempts on your part to document what you've tried and what's worked and what hasn't. Though note that &lt;a href=&quot;/q/6093&quot;&gt;straight check-my-work questions are also off-topic&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's precisely the script of low-effort do-my-work-for-me homework-and-exercises questions that the community has decided is off-topic here, regardless of the origin of the question. Those rules hold uniformly, regardless of what topic the question is on, or where it came from. (Also of note: that the question follows the script above can be easily determined &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; knowing all of the electrostatics I detailed above, or indeed without knowing anything about the answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that means is that you need to edit your question to take it away from that script: either remove it from that class entirely (say, by being very upfront about why you &quot;have to&quot; calculate this quantity, explaining what you've tried and why it didn't work, and making a clear-cut conceptual question about it -- and, now that you've been given the context, making it context-aware as well) or by treating it as a homework question (i.e. assuming that you've been assigned as a homework problem to take this calculation as far as it will go) and making an on-topic homework question out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of that sounds sour, or unpleasant, then those are the rules as they have been decided by the community. Take them or leave them, or campaign to change them (but then, make sure you're &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=homework&quot;&gt;fully informed about the background&lt;/a&gt; before you do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, while we're here: there's a lot of very emotional language in your post here. It really doesn't help things here, particularly when some of that language starts to blow things way out of proportion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In which part of this world has a high school student ever received this kind of problem in &quot;homework&quot; ??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be high-school level to fall under the homework-and-exercises closure reason. I'd wager that about half of the questions that get closed as that are low-effort help-vampire questions at undergrad level, and questions about graduate-level material are just as likely to get closed if they fall under this script. You're not special here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an un-conventional question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No it isn't. This is a standard problem in electrostatics; it doesn't get included in introductory textbooks because it requires more special-functions knowledge than it is appropriate to assume at that level, but that doesn't mean it's &quot;unconventional&quot;. It's rather an obvious question to ask, and it's pretty self-important to act as if you're the first one to ever think of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;which people have no idea how to solve &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an inference on your part that's entirely unsupported in any evidence at all. The comment thread does include a series of comments that do not seem to be aware of the solution... none of which were posted by the people who closed the question. It doesn't hurt to state this explicitly: &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; accuse people of ignorance unless you have explicit, public evidence to point to (and even then...) that supports that accusation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so that does not mean its a mere &quot;homework problem&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an undue inference on your part. It was closed as homework because it very much follows all the negative hallmarks of homework questions. You might have had this explained politely in comments if you'd asked it &lt;em&gt;politely&lt;/em&gt; to the people that closed it, but you didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T15:38:31.310" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12800" CreationDate="2020-04-08T12:58:11.963" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I share your pain. Physicists take pride in their field being an experimental science, but the art of statistics  - i.e., knowing to analyze the experimental data - has been largely lost among the mainstream practitioners (theorists and to large extent even experimentalists). This finds its reflection in the fact that many physics programs do not even include a course in basic statistics, and many physics PhDs do not know what is &lt;em&gt;likelihood&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;statistical test&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;confidence interval&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Lest the physicists get upset about this, let me note that there are some legitimate reasons for such a state of affairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics measurements nowadays are so precise that analyzing errors does not really affect much the experimental conclusions, so most theorists and even experimentalists may safely ignore this &lt;em&gt;noise&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When statistics is an issue, physicists do get proper background and/or employ professional statisticians - experimental particle is a notable example. The statistical reviews written by particle physicists are well-known even beyond the physics community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you are looking for analyzing some raw real-world data, it may be a good idea to look beyond physics, for less mature fields, such as biology (I mean the computational biology rather than biophysics) and data science (which has shortage of people who, besides knowing programming and algorithms, are also capable of analyzing and understanding data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T12:58:11.963" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12811" CreationDate="2020-04-08T17:45:47.163" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused about how to use the VLQ flag. I saw this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/276821/conducting-and-non-conducting-infinite-sheets-of-charge-have-same-e-e-ele/541621#541621&quot;&gt;one-line answer&lt;/a&gt; and thus left a comment asking the OP to elaborate and at the same time flagged it as a VLQ answer, because the info of VLQ flag states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Very Low Quality:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer I flagged definitely has some content problems. After a quick search of VLQ flag questions on Meta, I found this line by dmckee in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5343/258881&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...These are usually very short or consisting mainly of a link.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this line is meant for automatic flags, but it implies that it is perfectly fine to manually flag such posts as VLQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, to my surprise, that flag was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;declined&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (which means a mod handled the flag and declined it). And the reason given for declining the flag was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;declined -&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when I flagged the post, I was just too lazy to read the whole question and figure out the correct answer and then flag it due to its correctness. I raised the flag only due to the quality, the correctness of the content was secondary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So was this a fluke (on the mod's part), or are VLQ flags not supposed to be used for such answers? If the reason is the latter option, then please explain what should I do with such one-line answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user258881" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-04-08T18:00:56.097" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T18:27:36.837" Title="Should I use VLQ flags for inadequate/one-line answers?" Tags="|support|answers|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12810" CreationDate="2020-04-08T18:27:36.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, VLQ flags are not supposed to be used for such answers. I can refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6375/124&quot;&gt;our big post on flagging guidance&lt;/a&gt;, which gives the following example of a post that would be suitable for a VLQ flag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;jaafjajrefaseoifjaeijfoaisnsdoj ajfauenwofjasndifnaowjnefoaijw3oeiosafaw3efnaso aksdj vaosjdfoa dfoajw efjas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; occasionally make posts like that on the site, although it's quite rare.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a post doesn't have to reach &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; that level of gibberish to qualify for a VLQ flag. Things like incoherent rants would probably also qualify, even though they are made up of English words and are probably somewhat grammatical too. But the point is, a VLQ flag is for situations where it's essentially impossible to extract any meaning from the post. That is not the case for the answer you're asking about, which says in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes it remains the same electric field only change when you move away from the sheet &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fairly clear what that means, and in fact what it's saying could easily be an answer to a question. (Like you, I didn't check in detail what the question is actually asking, since it's kind of hard to read, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to what you're asking here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The length of a post is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a reason to cast a VLQ flag. There is a short minimum length for answers which is checked by the system, something like 10 or 15 characters if I remember correctly, but as long as the answer meets that criterion, from the point of view of the moderators it's fine, and length should not factor into your decision to cast a flag. What you can do, if you feel that a post doesn't include enough detail, is downvote it and/or leave a comment to suggest that the author expand on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although this line is meant for automatic flags, but it implies that it is perfectly fine to manually flag such posts as VLQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you're inferring an implication that was not meant to be there. I mean, dmckee was talking about the criteria that the system uses to cast automatic flags, but those criteria are entirely unrelated to the criteria that you should use to cast manual flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T18:27:36.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-08T23:04:44.333" Score="-2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/542273/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic because I was trying to be sure whether something was a typo or not. It involved no physics concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I think physics.stackexchange should be broader in their mindset. The goal should be to promote physics learning overall. This could come in the form of identifying typos in a book too (without discussing any physics concepts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer (or rather comment) to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/542273/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; saved me some days of time and promoted my physics learning. I hope my question can be reopened and the community turns more liberal about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you all think about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29315" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T03:45:33.467" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T03:45:33.467" Title="Allowing questions regarding typos in books" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|policy|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12812" CreationDate="2020-04-08T23:42:16.667" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is based on a bit of a false premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Errata related to the &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; seems to be accepted as on-topic.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/756/is-it-appropriate-to-ask-about-possible-errors-of-a-specific-book/757#757&quot;&gt;See here.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference in this post is that you're not asking about a concept, you're asking about &quot;what's happening&quot; with the lack of mention of &quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{(4)} R$&lt;/span&gt; in Box 8.4 (pg 202)&quot;.  It's not clear what conceptual difficulty you're having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the best way I can put it is, someone can't really explain the physics behind what is happening in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{(4)} R$&lt;/span&gt; in Box 8.4 (pg 202), because that's not really a physical phenomenon, it's some sort of diagram/figure/equation printed in a textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you spelled out what was in that box, and why it didn't doesn't seem to fit your understanding of the underlying physics, and were looking for some clarity on something the book said, that's &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; on topic.  Though since we seem to have figured out it's just a reference to the wrong spot in the textbook, it might not make a ton of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T23:42:16.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12812" CreationDate="2020-04-09T00:05:32.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12813/179151&quot;&gt;JMac&lt;/a&gt; has done an excellent job at addressing your specific question that was closed. I want to address my issues with this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I think physics.stackexchange should be broader in their mindset. The goal should be to promote physics learning overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very subjective goal. What is &quot;physics learning overall&quot;? Each user will have their own idea of what &quot;physics learning&quot; entails and what promoting it actually involves. For example, what if I think that it is actually better for you to spend &quot;some days of time&quot; on this issue in order for you to develop better work ethic needed for your physics goals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to more issues. For example, working through homework problems is very useful for introductory physics students, as it helps the student learn when/how to apply physics definitions, challenges their existing physical misconceptions, etc. Does this mean that this site should become a homework help site? Would we have more &quot;promotion of physics learning overall&quot; if we supplied homework solutions? Or maybe the current homework-policy already promotes &quot;physics learning overall&quot; because it doesn't feed answers to students, which might hurt them later in their physics goals. Two users attempting to &quot;promote physics learning overall&quot; might implement this goal in different ways, which would lead to inconsistency in what stays and what goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about pure mathematics questions that are better suited for Mathematics SE? One could argue that pure math questions &quot;promote physics learning overall&quot;, so why don't we just combine PSE and MSE? There exists engineering, chemistry, biology, &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/96810/68125&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt;, etc. questions that &quot;promote physics learning overall&quot;, so let's bring all of those in too. That would promote learning in all of these subject areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I am taking this ad absurdum, but it is just to show how such a subjective goal can lead to so many different conclusions. I think the real issue here is that you don't think the question should have been closed, and so instead of learning more about the site policy and the reasons behind it you just conclude that PSE is not in favor of &quot;promoting physics learning overall&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T00:05:32.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12817" CreationDate="2020-04-10T15:21:59.103" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the main reason for a downvote is to convey that a post is not up to the mark, or does not show proper effort on behalf of the person who posted it. In other words, a downvoted post has to be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note that I'm not saying this out of any dislike for downvotes, but as a means to improve (in my opinion, you are free to object) the way the users can work.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I just thought that it would be nice to include a suggestion box (or one similar to the &quot;reason for edit&quot; box) where users can, retaining their anonymity, suggest with a limited number of characters, any improvement that the user who answered can make to improve the overall post, while downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It need not even be mandatory but can help users who keep getting downvotes without actually realizing why, and also fail to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, please note that this is not because I have been downvoted without reason. For, instance, one of my answers about Bernoulli's theorem was downvoted, and it was plain awful (the answer, not the downvotes), fully deserving of the downvotes. It was a poorly constructed and fundamentally wrong answer (thinking back about it), that can become an example of how answers must not be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have also had an answer (which I admit was not great, but I cannot see how to improve it) which was downvoted (This is not a rant, please). The answer did not deserve an upvote, I can say that, and downvotes hardly change reputation, but I wished a feedback (just a phrase, like,&quot; lacks clarity&quot;) would have been of great help in improving myself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I just thought  If users get feedback on why their answers were downvoted, won't it be better for the users of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't really think you need to say why you upvoted an answer, so that feels a bit rudimentary to add)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just my opinions. I would like to know if it is worth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257049" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-10T15:40:15.870" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T15:06:35.720" Title="A suggestion box for downvotes (and upvotes, if necessary)?" Tags="|feature-request|comments|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" ClosedDate="2020-04-18T13:53:19.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-11T06:08:43.000" Score="4" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had spent some time answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/542878/charge-density-of-a-point-charge?noredirect=1#comment1227843_542878&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, when it was made duplicate by an announcement at the top &quot;this question will no longer be accepting answers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it not be possible to give ten minutes grace for people who are in the process of writing an answer? &quot;in ten minutes this question will not be accepting any answers&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my answer was not an answer to the duplicate question (where I would have transferred it, as I have often done), but an expansion on the way singularities are handled in mainstream physics, I also took some time making it into four comments so that the OP could see the depth of the question's answers in physics, not just mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My four comments were also removed as saying there should be no answer in comments!! Catch 22.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T15:41:18.997" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T15:41:18.997" Title="Would it be possible to give 10 minutes warning to people writing answers that the question will be closed or made duplicate in less than 10 minutes?" Tags="|feature-request|duplicates|close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="36" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12815" CreationDate="2020-04-11T12:01:44.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to summarize points being made in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PM2Ring makes the point that down votes are not just for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The primary purpose of votes is to indicate the usefulness of a post to other readers, not just the author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PM2Ring and ZeroTheHero make the point that giving anonymous vote reasons might actually make users more upset, not less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PM2Ring&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's generally agreed that constructive comments can often be very helpful to the author of a downvoted post. OTOH, some authors get defensive when their post is criticized, especially if the post is also downvoted, and it's not uncommon for such comment threads to turn ugly, requiring mod intervention. I don't think anonymous comments would improve that situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ZeroTheHero&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the more comments the greater the amount of debate fodder. If you think attributed comments lead to arguments, wait until you have unattributed ones. The system on balance works well as is, and still serves those interested in improving the contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own views:&#xA;The voting process (up or down) is a quick process that is used to indicate the usefulness, quality, clarity, correctness, etc. of a post. So, they are useful to more than just the poster, and on the individual post level matter more than the reputation gained/lost from them, as users can get/lose reputation from other places. Therefore, I believe adding an additional step of somehow indicating why the down vote was cast could deter users from giving down votes, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6767/179151&quot;&gt;something that might already a problem&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, sometimes for questions that are obviously bad and will be closed, a down vote and a vote to close is sufficient, as the close banner will tell the user how to improve their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that down votes without reason isn't always helpful to the OP, but I think adding an additional step of supplying a reason isn't helpful overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T15:06:35.720" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T15:06:35.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12816" CreationDate="2020-04-12T10:41:13.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really think there is no need to do this. There are essentially three cases here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You agree the question should be closed, and it's closed as duplicate&lt;/strong&gt;. You should just answer the duplicate. If your answer fits the closed question but not the duplicate, then you apparently do not agree the question should be closed, go to case 3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You agree the question should be closed, and it's closed for any other reason&lt;/strong&gt;. You just shouldn't have tried to answer it in the first place. The reason we close question is to &lt;em&gt;prevent them from being answered&lt;/em&gt;, because for one reason or another we do not wish to encourage more of these questions. If you really want to answer this question and think it would be good to have the answer to it on your site, then, again, you apparently do not agree it should be closed. Go to case 3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You do not agree the question should be closed.&lt;/strong&gt; Just vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In neither case is there any substantial benefit offered by allowing answers after closure that I could see. Either you agree the question should be closed and not answer it, or you should vote to reopen it and answer it after it gets reopened. If it stays close because no other reviewers agree it should be reopened, well, that's the nature of the voting system, and it would defeat the purpose of being able to close questions by vote if then individual dissenters could just choose to ignore the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T10:41:13.050" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-13T09:34:02.730" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am getting  a notification that this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/543199/&quot;&gt;If Newton&amp;#39;s third law is true, why do things compress?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is similar to this question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/409109/&quot;&gt;If Newton&amp;#39;s third law is true, why can we sink in sand?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the answers of each are related but not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T10:03:41.993" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T06:39:45.520" Title="What should I do to prove that my question is not similar to existing questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12821" CreationDate="2020-04-13T17:05:53.477" Score="10" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the behaviour of a user who:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the majority of his (well) answered questions doesn't accept an answer and goes on asking further and further questions in the comments, almost always exceeding the scope of the original questions, always with a know-all attitude&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;refuses to accept that an answer of his is not appropriately written, leading to misleading statements (their poor English doesn't help as well)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unaccepts a previously accepted answer, two months after, without any change in the question or the answer and without giving any reasons for it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;considered problematic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so is there a way to moderate this behaviour? If not, what can be done? Because generally this specific user is asking many very interesting questions and the answers always require a bit, to a lot of work and I feel it isn't worth to answer because it will result to an endless conversation in the comments and terrible anger against this behaviour, despite I truly want to answer these questions because they're nice and close to my expertise and possibly useful for other users as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142398" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T17:41:51.687" Title="Problematic behaviour of user" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12820" CreationDate="2020-04-13T17:41:51.687" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, some specifics for the behaviours you ask about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like voting, accepting an answer is completely up to the individual user. Just like there is no &quot;wrong&quot; way to vote on a post, there is no wrong way in accepting or not accepting an answer. The accept mark is really only saying &quot;the asker found this answer the most helpful&quot;. They can do with it as they please, there is nothing problematic about this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similarily, if you have pointed out a possible improvement on a post and the author refuses to incorporate it, just move on - you have done everything you could. Refusing to accept another user's opinion about the quality of one's post is not problematic in itself, and users are not required to respond to feedback. If this devalues the post significantly in your eyes, you should consider downvoting it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments are for requesting clarification of the post being commented on, or for criticizing it. If comments contain questions that could be asked as questions on their own, you should direct users making such comments to ask a separate question. If they don't and you feel they're asking too many questions in comments, remember that you are not required to respond. If the questions are not connected to the post, you might flag the comments as &lt;em&gt;no longer needed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now for some general comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that while questions are asked by specific people, you as an answerer are not beholden to them. If OP doesn't like your answer, maybe other members of the community will. You seem frustrated because the expectations of one specific asker seem unreasonable or otherwise annoying to you. But you can simply refuse to engage in trying to satisfy these - from your viewpoint unreasonable - expectations and let your answer stand as it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is interesting and you already think your answer might be useful to others, then before trying to moderate away benign variations in how people use this site, maybe you could already be content with that and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you consider the behaviour of specific users objectively unacceptable (such as violating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;) and not just annoying to you personally, then please also feel free to raise a custom moderator flag on specific instances of such behaviour. If we ultimately find the behaviour not actionable, there's no harm done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T17:41:51.687" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12824" CreationDate="2020-04-16T15:47:54.407" Score="6" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it quite frustrating if I write an answer and don't receive any feedback. On stack exchange the feedback is designed to work in the following manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By accepting an answer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By providing comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent case which caused me to write this post happened something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wrote an answer to a question regarding dS vacua in string theory. The question was composed of two parts: one which asked what is the obstruction, if any, to construct such vacua (I answered this by mentioning the standard constructions with links to literature and the present status and debate regarding them). The second question was a misunderstanding of string theory basics. (I would like other users not to edit this point as I want to understand what exactly went wrong here)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There wasn't any feedback regarding the same.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I commented that I would like some feedback on my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The asker deleted the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is highly infuriating to say the least, for I believe the question was an important one and I answered it because I thought the answer should be useful to other people, especially beginning graduate students. At some point of time, continued behaviour like this might cause people like me to move away from the site, which they may not want to do in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way which would discourage such behaviour, such as displaying a strong enough message for the asker to give some feedback? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50770" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T16:10:13.327" Title="Is it unreasonable to expect feedback for writing an answer from the asker?" Tags="|feature-request|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12823" CreationDate="2020-04-16T16:10:13.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not &quot;unreasonable&quot; to expect feedback on your answer, but we never require users to give feedback. The main feedback mechanism on our site are neither accept marks nor comments, they are &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt;. These can come from the asker or from anyone else. I understand that on some human level we write an answer for the person asking the question and that we instinctively find it nice when they thank us and rude when they don't, but SE sites are not meant to be focused on this social interaction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the situation you describe is an outlier, and I would consider the deletion of the question rather different from &quot;no feedback from the asker&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Askers &lt;em&gt;cannot delete questions&lt;/em&gt; if they have at least one up-voted answer, precisely to prevent this sort frustration for answerers. If you think the question was on-topic for the site and you'd like your answer back so that at least other people can vote on it, raise a custom moderator flag explaining the situation. Unless we see a reason the question should stay deleted, I think the moderators would generally be willing to undelete the question and hence the answer. While we generally try to respect authorial intent, when two intents conflict in this way, generally the one that wants to keep quality content visible should win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T16:10:13.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-16T16:22:33.663" Score="18" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to implement a &quot;Dark Mode&quot; on the Physics Stack Exchange as is being &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/30/introducing-dark-mode-for-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;trialed&lt;/a&gt; on the Stack Overflow? I personally would prefer that viewing mode. Use the upvote on this comment to express your support if you'd like this feature because it appears they chose to introduce this feature on the Overflow SE due to popular demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233931" LastEditorUserId="274198" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T19:24:21.450" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T19:25:57.297" Title="Feature Request: Dark Mode" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12827" CreationDate="2020-04-16T22:58:35.187" Score="-4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544164/how-do-we-know-the-electric-field-has-infinite-range&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed for not being about mainstream physics, but the question clearly is on-topic. What guideline, then, is being violated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess for the 'real' reason is the opening statement, which some users found 'upsetting' and touted it as some violation. If a mere negative assessment  of some answers is 'unnice', or whatever's closest to the guidelines I've read, then I can claim the &quot;Yes, you are wrong&quot; answer too should be removed, and now we have a censor-parade instead of rational discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;: marked &quot;answered&quot; to close the question - doubt further progress will be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98160" LastEditorUserId="98160" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T14:22:18.623" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T14:22:18.623" Title="Which guidelines does this question violate?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12826" CreationDate="2020-04-16T23:20:46.850" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The close votes are all for the &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Non-mainstream physics&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; close reason, but that's actually a bit misleading here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deal with mainstream physics here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed. For more information, see Is non mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is partially an issue with your wording.  You seem to have a question based on the concepts you know about, and that's usually on-topic.  I think it's word choice of your question that really got the negative reaction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case 2, the carrier cannot be infinite in quantity, as there isn't anything infinite within a finite closed system (e.g. a volume spanned by field after some initial time). However; infinite range demands an infinite carrier - else, the larger the radius, the less of the surface area spanned actually experiences any field. So, for a very long range, only tiny patches of regions will experience anything from the charge; the vast majority of matter at the radius will experience exactly zero E-field. Thus: infinite range is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're going about the question the wrong way in my opinion.  If you want to understand what is going on, and why that inconsistency exists, frame it as more of a question than an assertion that it is wrong.  Something better could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case 2, I don't see how the carrier can be infinite in quantity, as there isn't anything infinite within a finite closed system (e.g. a volume spanned by field after some initial time). However; infinite range demands an infinite carrier - else, the larger the radius, the less of the surface area spanned actually experiences any field. So, for a very long range, only tiny patches of regions should experience anything from the charge; I would expect that the vast majority of matter at the radius will experience exactly zero E-field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, how could we say that the electric field has infinite range?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also want to clean up the opening paragraph.  Instead of deeming the other question irrelevant, it might be better to recognize that it actually &lt;em&gt;led you&lt;/em&gt; to the question you are asking.  Go from there to ask your question (as I tried to show), instead of making it come across as an assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't guarantee that it will prevent the question from being closed, but in my opinion it would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T23:20:46.850" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12819" CreationDate="2020-04-17T06:39:45.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer addresses cases where your question has been &quot;closed&quot; as a duplicate of another one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, take an honest look at your question and the proposed duplicate. Maybe they are similar enough that they should be combined, and if so, there's nothing to be done - presumably you got the information you needed, or at least you got a canonical source to check for that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you really think your question is not a duplicate, the way to show that it differs from existing questions is to mention those questions and say &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what it is that you're asking which the proposed duplicate is not. The way you actually did this is fairly good:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/409109/if-newtons-third-law-is-true-why-can-we-sink-in-sand&quot;&gt;If Newton&amp;#39;s third law is true, why can we sink in sand?&lt;/a&gt; This question is different from this one because there the question is mainly about which bodies the forces act on according to third law while the question I asked is mainly about compression and how much force a body applies against a weight put placed on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(better not to say &quot;Edit:&quot;, but that's a minor matter)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T06:39:45.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12825" CreationDate="2020-04-17T19:38:35.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt;? Sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Stack Overflow (the company) going to invest enough developer time to produce this (and commit to continue to invest enough developer time to maintain it, which is an even taller barrier)? Who knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have asked for this, repeatedly, both on Meta Stack Overflow and on Meta Stack Exchange, over the better part of the last decade. Whether SO will go forward and use the opportunity to invest on the broader network (particularly now that they've invested enough to make dark mode in SO a reality, and given the investment early last year in unifying the theming for the network sites) is currently an open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current status is best summed up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/345762&quot;&gt;this MSE answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/345887&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; gives a short official statement about the current status, but it's too short to tell what the future plans are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to that, as you noted in the comments, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/30/introducing-dark-mode-for-stack-overflow/&quot;&gt;blog announcement itself&lt;/a&gt; states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For now, we have no plans to bring dark mode to the many sites across the Stack Exchange network. Many of the designs on our sites have been around long enough that converting them to dark mode would require redoing the artwork completely. We would prefer to avoid giving anyone across our network a substandard experience and we don’t want to change those elements without the input of these communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which leaves the door at least a little bit open for this to be extended to network sites, but sets a clear bar in terms of the amount of work that would be required for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To be honest, I'm rather surprised that they're saying this, since the uniform rollout of this kind of feature was sold as the advantage for the loss of theming during the Great Theming Debacle of 2018 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307862/ch-ch-ch-changes-left-nav-responsive-design-themes&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and subsequent posts for details). But then again, they know better, I guess?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't thing our site has the clout to request this. We're the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#traffic&quot;&gt;20th site by traffic&lt;/a&gt;, down from SO by a full two orders of magnitude. It took the most-requested feature on SO the better part of a decade to get addressed. It would take a close-to-unanimous, vociferous request for the SE devs to put any kind of priority into this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the best bet if you really want this is to look for voices calling for dark-mode availability on places with more traffic and more clout on the SE network (my first guesses would be Software Engineering, Serverfault and Super User, but none of them seem to have such requests) and lend your support there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or, if not, to try to do it locally using Stylish or the other tools mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/111399&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T20:00:07.497" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T20:00:07.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12831" CreationDate="2020-04-18T14:58:58.877" Score="3" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544655/trying-to-figure-out-the-potential-energy-of-a-hanging-rope&quot;&gt;Trying to figure out the potential energy of a hanging rope&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is said that my answer was temporarily deleted. Now, I put a lot of effort into writing the answer and I'd like it restored, how should I edit it so that it will be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T15:00:49.447" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T15:40:30.893" Title="Answer deleted for being full answer" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12830" CreationDate="2020-04-18T15:33:37.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second part of the comment that comes with the close notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm temporarily deleting this in accordance with our homework policy. Please don't post complete answers to the underlying problem in homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is self-explanatory.  You need to edit down your answer and take out some details, and then plead you case to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T15:40:30.893" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T15:40:30.893" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12834" CreationDate="2020-04-20T15:17:26.620" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/545256/&quot;&gt;Can a harmonic oscillator have different maximum potential and kinetic energy?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do to make it upvoted? Was I not clear in the question or what is it? I haven't particularly asked help in calculations or doing questions just as to why one line of thinking is wrong...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T21:54:12.463" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T06:40:38.417" Title="Why is this question being downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12833" CreationDate="2020-04-20T20:27:33.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe certain users view it as a kind of &quot;check my work problem&quot; (I view it this way, hence my vote to close). You are asking others to check the work you are doing and compare it to / check the work done by someone else as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also some users are very quick to down vote a question that involves a simple mechanics exercise thinking that a user is just looking for homework help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not saying that either of these things are your intention, just giving a possible explanation for the down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T05:43:43.657" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T05:43:43.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12833" CreationDate="2020-04-21T00:12:05.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a typical check-my-work problem that IMO is not terribly interesting beyond answering a specific question by the OP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t downvote the question, but I did vote to close: there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the question but I do think if people ask too many questions of this type the site will become a homework help site and will lose its appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T06:40:38.417" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T06:40:38.417" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-23T07:31:05.113" Score="32" ViewCount="1784" Body="&lt;p&gt;Less a question and more of a heads-up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the Covid-19 crisis, most higher education institutions (that I know of) are moving to online examination. Many of these examinations count towards degree classifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most physics departments (again, that I know of, in the UK), these exams will be open book, and where students will be given a certain amount of time to submit answers electronically. A typical arrangement is that students have 24 hours to return their solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I anticipate that we will see more and more exam-type questions coming in over the next weeks and months, that will be from students unfairly soliciting answers to their exam questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what can be done about this, but from my point of view an effective measure would be if everyone is vigilant at closing such questions and even if they are not closed, did not answer questions with the homework tag (or those that should be tagged as homework) for at least 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/548215/what-will-be-the-tension-force-in-a-movable-pulley-and-the-displacement-of-it-wh&quot;&gt;here is an example&lt;/a&gt; of where people just couldn't show any restraint and provided several full answers to an obvious exam-type question within 3 hours of it being posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="43351" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T12:49:08.667" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T08:14:59.473" Title="Strict(er) adherence to homework guidelines?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2020-04-23T13:34:51.847" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as a university professor, I disagree with a stricter adherence to homework guidelines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's my duty to administer exams where cheating is ineffective, and I would not ask any website to be vigilant on my behalf. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, this is certainly not the only website where students can find help: would you consider submitting such a request to any possible website? There are many fora around the world, some in local languages (do you have foreign students, don't you?), where students can get help. And there are past students, and also professors, who offer their paid &quot;services&quot; to help students cheat. And, finally, students can certainly create a network to collectively solve the exam problems with a strategy to avoid detection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I'd be all to support such a proposal if I thought it's worth the effort, but what I'm implying is that this would actually put an unduly and &lt;em&gt;worthless&lt;/em&gt; burden on this site's users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111969" LastEditorUserId="111969" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T16:36:54.130" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T16:36:54.130" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2020-04-23T14:17:01.357" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not sure what can be done about this, but from my point of view an effective measure would be if everyone is vigilant at closing such questions and even if they are not closed, did not answer questions with the homework tag (or those that should be tagged as homework) for at least 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note that not all questions that have the homework-and-exercises tag should be closed. The tag also applies to valid PSE questions where a homework problem is the context. If the OP is clearly not asking for a solution and is really looking to understand physics concepts behind what is presented, the question should not be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also say that I do agree that we should be vigilant during this time, but I also worry that this call to be vigilant will send the wrong message that once this is all over we can then be less vigilant and less strict with the homework policy. Ideally there really shouldn't be any difference in how things are approached compared to normal. An off-topic homework question is an off-topic homework question. I don't think the motivation behind the posting of such a question should be relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, thanks for the heads up, but I hope our adherence to the homework policies will be as strict as it should be during this time as much as it should be at any point in time. I also hope that we will not become less strict after this is all over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I do agree with the anticipation of more homework/exam questions being posted. The issue with users like me is that I pretty much run out of close votes every day, and most of my votes to go towards homework questions. Therefore, being more strict / more vigilant is not going to do anything for users like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of a call to be stricter on the policy, I would think a better call / proposition would be to allow users to have more close votes during this time (or at least more close votes for the option of being off topic homework). This would then allow the site to take on the increased levels of homework questions. Unfortunately, I believe there would need to be ample evidence that there is actually an increase in the posting of off-topic homework questions and that this increase is overwhelming the closure process to where questions like these are not closed fast enough. Additionally, I am not sure how this would be implemented, as I think the rules on the number of close votes a user has is implemented across all SE sites. So, at the end of the day, this idea probably would not be able to be realized in a fast enough time to combat the problem, should it actually arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T14:30:50.480" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T14:30:50.480" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-23T16:42:05.760" Score="26" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;We like to see MathJax used on Physics SE for equations, but at present when you are typing in a new question I think there is no on-screen link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax  &amp;quot;guide&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; or a reminder to use MathJax for equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9880/104964&quot;&gt;old Q&amp;amp;A on Physics Meta&lt;/a&gt; which says that this has been implemented, but it's not there &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; so must have been removed during site updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might help to have something like this added to the new question edit page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; for equations in questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Physics SE this would ideally be prominently above the edit box in bold maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly if we don't even mention MathJax to new users until after they've posted we're just asking for having to repeat the same thing in comments over and over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="251215" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T17:11:26.907" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T17:13:49.043" Title="Add a link and hint to use MathJax to the new question dialog" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|questions|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2020-04-23T18:42:47.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I agree with the need for increased vigilance which may come in the form of &quot;stricter guidelines.&quot; I'd like to add raise awareness to other aspects of the situation.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also be aware though that some students have legitimate questions and cannot get the regular tutoring or attention they need when at school or around their classmates. Professors are under a lot of strain and students still have difficult concepts to learn. I believe there will also be an above average number of students seeking help online because they don't have the usual resources for help, not necessarily because they are trying to cheat. In a sense, &lt;strong&gt;we have an opportunity to help out in a small way during this crisis&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professors not only have to work from home and use a foreign teaching method, their children are also home and are having the same problem with &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; school and sometimes the professor ends up tutoring their own kid through AP calculus or physics (since science and math usually runs in the family).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I agree. Many will probably post questions at times they aren't allowed to and we should do our best to discern what those exam type questions look like and avoid giving students unfair help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233931" LastEditorUserId="233931" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T08:14:59.473" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T08:14:59.473" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2020-04-24T03:57:58.770" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I respect and agree with the suggestion to show some self-discipline.  These are special circumstances and we need to do more.  Maybe another idea would help :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a 24-hour wait period for &lt;em&gt;new members&lt;/em&gt; before posting questions or the questions appearing be of help ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that many of these homework-type questions are from new Physics SE members.  I feel this would deter many of the problem cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T03:57:58.770" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-24T20:31:00.487" Score="-9" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/546438/is-it-really-true-that-space-is-continuous&quot;&gt;Is it really true that space is continuous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed by Qmechanic♦ on the grounds that &quot;This question already has answers here&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33273/is-spacetime-discrete-or-continuous&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the question I posted having very similar title to the one linked, the body of the question is much different, as can be seen easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am, for example, asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there really legitimate physical theories (or subtheories) where there really seems to be a mostly physical need to assume that space is not continuous?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this question is non-answered in the answers to the linked question, because answers address mathematical constructions and not precise physical needs, whether of theoretical or experimental nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I also ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And, if there are such attempts to actually quantize space, are they consistent with the so far collected physical data and successful models constructed so far?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the answers seem to address some consistency with data and other models while possible inconsistencies are almost not mentioned at all, even if they are only of theoretical nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, furthermore, this is included in the private feedback:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your post has been associated with a similar question. If this question doesn’t resolve your question, ask a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even the edit of the question (which is even not needed) does not resolve this issue but all the effort I included is supposed to be futile since there is a suggestion to ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe that my question is not about re-opening of the question I asked but about abuse of moderator rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, it seems as the question I posted was closed with just a quick glance over it, and without detailed and analyzed attempts to observe how much it is different from the linked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of that, I would like to know what moderators think about this abuse of moderator rights and what is the procedure that needs to be done when things similar to this one happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: After some responses I can agree that was not an abuse of moderator rights, but rather misuse of moderator rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user261976" LastEditorDisplayName="user261976" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T22:17:02.187" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T22:17:02.187" Title="Is this just an example of an abuse of moderator rights?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12842" CreationDate="2020-04-24T20:51:40.657" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not. Moderators are empowered to vote to mark questions as duplicates of other questions, and while our decisions about when to do this won't always be correct, exercising that power is not abuse. (Same goes for users who are highly active in a tag and who have the same power to mark questions with that tag as duplicates.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it would be different if your question was closed as a duplicate of an &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; unrelated question, and if we find this to happen repeatedly. E.g. if your question, &quot;Are there really legitimate physical theories (or subtheories) where there really seems to be a mostly physical need to assume that space is not continuous?&quot;, was closed as a duplicate of something like &quot;How do I compute the normal force for a block on an inclined plane?&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, then that raises some questions, and if a moderator was found to be doing things like that over and over again, then it would prompt a conversation about abuse. But that's not the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Setting aside the fact that &quot;How do I compute the normal force for a block on an inclined plane?&quot; might not even be on topic here....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T20:51:40.657" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-04-25T09:37:00.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://robotics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HDD3r.png&quot; alt=&quot;robotics stack exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5445" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T09:37:00.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12846" CreationDate="2020-04-25T10:01:56.903" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently joined Stack Exchange. So I am not used to this system (also I'm a foreigner; Korean). I joined this group because I want to get physics information. But there are two choices: Physics and Physics meta. Which should I choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm sorry about my English writing skill; I'm practicing now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261801" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T17:31:17.247" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T17:31:17.247" Title="What is the difference between 'Physics' and 'Physics Meta'?" Tags="|support|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12845" CreationDate="2020-04-25T11:17:49.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should choose the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt; site for your actual physics questions. This Physics Meta site is for questions about the operation and policies of the main Physics site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T11:17:49.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12848" CreationDate="2020-04-25T22:50:15.297" Score="17" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a decent answer that received upvotes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/546611/&quot;&gt;a question that was later closed as a duplicate&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Since the answer was well received, I thought it would be good to post it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/359877/44126&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had assumed that this was the desired behavior so that the original question would collect the good answers. So I was surprised that my upvoted answer to the duplicate was deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@rob I would rather keep my points and have my answer to the original question be the deleted one, however I don’t understand this policy. If we wish to collect good answers in the original question then shouldn’t we not penalize users for doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone clarify this policy and/or revisit it? Personally, I think it is counterproductive if one of the goals of the duplicate question mechanism is to collect good answers in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T00:30:10.907" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T13:57:00.223" Title="Good answers to duplicate questions" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12847" CreationDate="2020-04-25T23:40:04.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Totally fair question; I wondered if I'd end up discussing it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if a verbatim-identical answer goes in more than one place, then something is screwy with the duplicate system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My judgement was that the new duplicate question doesn't add much value over the older one, and so would probably be purged by the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt; after a while.  A good answer like yours can save a closed question from being cleaned up. But you found a better home for your answer.  Having two copies of a good answer seems like a way to game the reputation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a proposal. If you think the two questions are distinct enough to both warrant answers, let's use the mechanisms we have to get the community to re-open the closed question: edit it so that the differences are clear and put it into the reopen queue.  When the question is reopened, we can move your answer back from the older one to the newer one.  But I'd prefer not to keep the new duplicate in the archives forever over a difference of two upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to discuss other ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T23:40:04.193" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12847" CreationDate="2020-04-26T13:57:00.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing a pretty intense programming sprint for the past few weeks, and my directive is to hack in a complicated feature into a big legacy code. The directive is to make it work, quickly, and don't worry about polishing it up or making it fit existing standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you've ever written a lot of code, you know that doing the same thing in a lot of different places the same way introduces a whole lot of extra effort. If I found I did something wrong in one of these duplicated code sections, I have to remember to change all of them. And if I forget one or two or many, I will think my corrections didn't work and spend a lot more time trying to figure things out... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bring this up because it's a useful analogy and not because I've spent the past 2 weeks trying to fix something when it turns out I forgot to put a change in all places... yeah, let's stick with that story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I took the extra time up front to make sure duplicate code is put into a single place and referenced where needed, then I just have to fix one thing. And I'd be a lot less frustrated trying to make progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicate questions with duplicate answers have the same potential for regressions. One question (Question B) gets closed as a duplicate of another (Question A) -- this is the system working to &quot;refactor&quot; things into a single place. But duplicate answers are not directly linked to each other. If an answer on Question A is updated, revised, improved... that does not change the form of the answer on Question B. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This introduces a regression. A user can arrive at Question B and see the answer as well as the duplicate banner, then go to Question A and see a similar-but-different answer from the same user. Maybe they check time stamps and put together what might have happened, but that's pretty unlikely. So instead, they ask yet another question (Question C) that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I read Question A and Question B, and they are identical, yet their answers are slightly different. Which one is the true answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now we've made a mess of things. For all we know, Question C collects a different set of answers that are distinct from what is on A or B and now we've failed at creating a definitive, high-quality question-and-answer site. Instead, we have different answers to the same question spread across multiple places. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of letting that happen, deleting the answer on Question B makes it clean. Question B is closed with a link to Question A, and Question A contains all of the answers. In addition, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12848/6634&quot;&gt;rob discussed in his answer&lt;/a&gt;, deleting the answer means Question B can be edited to make it distinct or it will be removed over time because it is abandoned -- again, making the site cleaner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the preferred course of action? We want all of the answers on Question A and any duplicates of A should not be considered source material. There is a moderator tool that can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158066/what-is-a-merged-question&quot;&gt;merge questions together&lt;/a&gt;. This would have taken the answers from Question B and moved them to Question A and preserved rep gained/lost for the people who answered the question. The way to ask for a merger is to A) Vote to close as a duplicate and wait until that is done, and B) Flag the question and explain why it should be merged with the duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sounds pretty great, so why don't we do it that often? Well, the advice I often see from other moderators and community managers is that merging is &lt;em&gt;messy&lt;/em&gt;. If something goes wrong, it's not trivial to unwind the mess and get things back to the way they were. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, merging the question, especially if it happens right after it is closed as a duplicate, prevents OP from editing their question to make it distinct. They would instead go ask a new question that they think is distinct. Minor burden perhaps, but the people who ask 100% identical questions to others on the site tend to be new, whereas people who would know to ask for a merger tend to be established -- I would rather see OP learn to edit their questions than to get into a habit of re-asking the same thing when their original is closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that is to say, for easy-to-copy answers on identical questions, if somebody asked for a merger right after the question was closed as a duplicate, I would probably just suggest they post their answer on Question A and delete it themselves from Question B. Sure, they lose a little rep on Question B -- but posting the answer on Question A bumps it to the front page and if the answer is good, they should get the rep back (and possibly more). And it's a safe, clean way to do it where if something goes wrong, we don't need CM/database developers to fix it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it prevents divergence leading to regressions and follow up questions about why there are different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideal use case I can see is when we have Question A with many great answers, and then Question B is posted and although Question B is a duplicate of Question A, let's say that Question B is a much better question. We want the best questions with the best answers, and so in that case it might be worth closing A as a duplicate of B, even though B is newer. Then it might be worth merging the answers from A into B. But this is a pretty rare thing and we'll cross that bridge when we get there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T13:57:00.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:38:21.457" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that some of my questions and answers have a positive and negative integer score. Where does this score come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user232333" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T23:18:19.340" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T23:18:19.340" Title="Where does scoring of questions and answers come from?" Tags="|support|questions|answers|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12850" CreationDate="2020-04-26T20:07:42.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other members of the site are upvoting (“liking”) or downvoting (“disliking”) your questions and answers. That is what the grey up and down triangles are for. The integer between them is the net vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the community’s feedback to you on the quality and appropriateness of your question or answer, and it determines your overall reputation, which currently is 11. You can see how the upvotes and downvotes affect your reputation by going to your profile, selecting the Activity page, and looking at the Reputation subpage. Upvotes contribute +10 to your reputation but downvotes only -2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T04:07:26.470" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T04:07:26.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12850" CreationDate="2020-04-27T20:35:20.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're a new user, the vote system might be unintuitive because you aren't able to participate yet.  It should make more sense once the website allows you to participate in voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you gain reputation, you can earn &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At 15 rep, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;cast up-votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Up-voting a question, answer, or comment increases its score by 1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At 125 rep, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;cast down-votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Down-voting a question or answer decreases its score by 1.  Comments can't be down-voted, so their scores are always non-negative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At 1000 rep, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;see up-votes vs. down-votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Normally scores are just a single integer.  Once you get this ability, you can click to see how many up-votes and down-votes went into the score.  For example, if a question has a score of 5, you can see that it has 7 up-votes and 2 down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142085" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T20:35:20.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-28T07:30:31.767" Score="13" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/545980/&quot;&gt;How was it determined how many neutrinos result from a single Beta decay?&lt;/a&gt; was asked recently and I had previously researched and written up in my book. As the passage in my book constitutes as good an answer as I am capable of giving, I reused it. As it was my own text, I do not regard it as plagiarism (the rules for &quot;self-plagiarism&quot; which apply to research journals, where authors may be trying to boost their publication count for research papers, do not seem appropriate for a question and answer site). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had not said in the answer that the text was taken from my book, because that seemed like a &quot;vanity citation&quot;. I understand that this was the wrong interpretation of policy. The answer has been deleted and I have been asked &quot;to edit the post to comply with Phys.SE citation policy&quot;, only I cannot find an applicable statement of Phys.SE citation policy. Can anyone give a link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can certainly make a statement that the text is taken from my book, but another moderator has said &quot;but instead [of using the full text] should use short quotes as appropriate to support an independently written answer&quot;. I cannot see how to do this. It is not as though my text is full of &quot;quotable quotes&quot; (quoting parts would indeed be &quot;vanity citation&quot;). Having already written it as clearly and succinctly as I am able, I find I can only damage the answer by editing it, which I am reluctant to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it be sufficient to include a note in my post that I have used text from my book? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255997" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:04:26.883" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:04:26.883" Title="Where can I find a statement of the Physics SE policy on self-citation?" Tags="|discussion|policy|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12854" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is used by staff when sharing concepts in the Discovery phase relating to product or configuration changes. In most cases a direction and/or goal has been established, and there has likely been some amount of time invested into discovery work and research. The post is being presented to the Community for feedback to be taken into consideration. Where possible, the post includes specific questions to help guide Community feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12855" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the post shares product or configuration change concepts during the Discovery phase. Open to receiving feedback from the Community preceding implementation." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Title="product-discovery" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12853" CreationDate="2020-04-28T09:29:44.577" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main place for this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/582/how-do-you-cite-yourself&quot;&gt;How do you cite yourself?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly OK to use text from previously-published own work in your answers, so long as you (i) cite the source, and (ii) make it clear that it's your work. As mentioned in the comments, a simple &quot;This analysis is taken from my book &quot; is more than enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the answer you've linked to, from the moderator comments, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our site policy is that any copied content must be marked as a quote and properly attributed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is indeed right, but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;also, answers shouldn't consist entirely of copied content, but instead should use short quotes as appropriate to support an independently written answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this. If you've written text elsewhere that directly answers the question, I don't see anything wrong with posting something like &quot;I've addressed this before in [reference]: [quote]&quot;. The worst that can happen is that it could look a bit lazy and result in downvotes, but I don't think such an answer should be removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T09:29:44.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2020-04-29T03:50:10.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that most of the 'offenders' who post complete or near-complete answers are themselves relatively new users who are unaware of the Homework Policy and do not read Meta questions. Users come here primarily to ask or answer questions. Most have little interest in reviewing and closing questions, or in site policies which are not prominent and - other than what is available in the 'help' pages - are difficult to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think this call for self-discipline and stricter adherence to site policy will have little effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for making more effort to get Homework questions closed promptly, I am dismayed by the futility of spending my time to vote when answers have often been posted before 5 votes are accumulated. Like Aaron and Zero I find that even in normal times I run out of VTCs quickly. There ought to be a more efficient method of closing blatant Homework questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/547458&quot;&gt;About significant figures&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/547412&quot;&gt;At every corner of square of side a there is charge q as shown&lt;/a&gt; - ideally with a single vote. I suggest that &lt;strong&gt;flagging the question for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt; is the most efficient method, and does not require any alteration to SE software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally I see much confusion about the Homework Policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the Homework tag is applied and VTCs cast - improperly in my view - to any question which asks how a calculation can be made. This deters quantitative answers to interesting problems such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/88965&quot;&gt;What is the physics of a spinning coin?&lt;/a&gt; - with the result that most answers are qualitative, and many which quote formal equations do so unnecessarily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Homework tag is interpreted very broadly by some reviewers, and narrowly by others. Questions which are Homework-like are often closed despite showing effort and asking about a conceptual difficulty (example : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/547166&quot;&gt;Why are approaching discharging initially charged pith balls almost at equilibrium?&lt;/a&gt;). Those who disagree with the VTCs and answer such questions are penalised by down-votes and/or by their answers being reported and deleted (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/532280/analysis-of-stacked-blocks-motion/532473#532473&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). Whether a question which fails to meet the requirements of the Homework Policy &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be closed also depends on how interesting the question is - a view which you have expressed and I am sympathetic with but it makes it more difficult to apply the Policy consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need a clearer, narrower Homework Policy. We need a way of making site policies more prominent to all users, &lt;strong&gt;especially to those who post questions&lt;/strong&gt;, so that policies become mostly self-regulating. Then less time will be wasted voting to close questions, and more time spent usefully in asking, answering, commenting and up- or down-voting.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114696" LastEditorUserId="114696" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:55:18.907" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:55:18.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-30T05:45:03.450" Score="-7" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is doing well in terms of helping thousands of students and researchers in spreading the understanding of physics, with its world best question-and-answer scheme, but making this platform better, or converting our site to an all-in-one hotspot for pure physics related topics, is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel books, research papers, and other material are the most crucial step. Now is the time when we enrich our boundaries, so that users who want to learn from the site can gain more. I agree that people share the links of documents, but they are not in a collective base, and even some resources are not verified either even if they are correct or not! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I put out a proposal for a physics library which will help many of us, so I am here for seeking some good suggestions and am asking the Stack Exchange council, including moderators, to look upon it! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting with me, I suggest we can make a separate room and which is under moderator! But the problem here is the same: to arrange the link and papers in a definite format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233551" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-04-30T21:50:28.387" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T21:50:28.387" Title="Creating a separate platform for books and research papers?" Tags="|discussion|support|resource-recommendation|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12859" CreationDate="2020-04-30T08:30:17.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of sympathy for this suggestion because we all have collections of links to useful books and articles (many of mine are links to questions on the Physics Stack Exchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem is that bitter experience suggests that managing collections of links never works. Links go stale and after the initial burst of enthusiasm no-one keeps the list up to date. We would end up with just another collection of old and partly broken links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have a book recommendations list in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;Book recommendations&lt;/a&gt; and some of these are (legally) available online with a bit of Googling. While I like the idea of a definitive reference for online resources I just don't think it would work. Sorry :-(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T08:30:17.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12862" CreationDate="2020-05-02T01:10:21.463" Score="-3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much energy is needed for a spaceship to go from 0 to Mach 30 in under 10 seconds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spaceship has a circumference of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$20 ft$&lt;/span&gt;.&#xA;A height of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$6 ft$&lt;/span&gt;.&#xA;It weighs &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$7,000 lbs$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, humans, stole the design and created our own, but our copy-cat crumbles up under the intense mass increase due to the unbelievable time that hypersonic speeds are obtained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, strong would the Alien spaceship have to be to not crumble under extreme forces?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay too ask this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107075" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T01:27:37.727" Title="I'm afraid if I ask this question, it would be down-voted on the main site? Simply, because it pertains to the UFO craze" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12861" CreationDate="2020-05-02T01:27:37.727" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no need to mention the  UFO stuff. However, the question is off-topic, because calculation questions like that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T01:27:37.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12864" CreationDate="2020-05-02T02:10:49.863" Score="5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure why this was closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544391/how-do-you-show-that-the-lorentz-metric-is-preserved-for-zeta3-1&quot;&gt;How do you show that the Lorentz metric is preserved for $\zeta^{3,1}?$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; it was closed because I bit off more than I could chew so to speak and should have just asked a more simple question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, what can I do to possibly reopen it? I've edited it to a form which I am pleased. It's short concise, and mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looking for feedback on what I can do to possibly reopen it. How can I reopen this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the feedback!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190337" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T09:51:16.717" Title="Question closed. Anything I can do to reopen it?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12863" CreationDate="2020-05-02T09:51:16.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reopen review for v5 (not substantially different from the current version) concluded 3-0 with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/296876&quot;&gt;Leave Closed&lt;/a&gt;. This indicates your current version is still considered insufficiently clear by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably because e.g. it is left completely unexplained what &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\zeta^{i,j}$&lt;/span&gt; is supposed to be. There are other notational/terminological issues, such as the unusual phrasings of the functions &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f_T$&lt;/span&gt; or &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\phi_S$&lt;/span&gt; - e.g. I would expect you to just write about families of functions &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f_t(x) = \frac{t^2}{x}$&lt;/span&gt; instead of the subscript variable generating sets of curves. The significance of these unusual phrases is left unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions to be intellegible, you should not only ask about mainstream topics (which this question may or may not be about as it is currently hard to tell), but you should also use mainstream terminology. When in doubt, prefer to overexplain notations and terminology used rather than not explain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T09:51:16.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12866" CreationDate="2020-05-02T14:56:28.200" Score="-10" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to suggest a feature i.e. verifying some trusted users and giving them a badge.This will help the new users to trust the good answers given by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230533" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:57:40.097" Title="Feature Request: Verified Users" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12865" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:57:40.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at answers, you should always pay attention to the content, not just who is posting it.  Experienced users can be wrong, and newer users can still provide very good answers.  Having the reputation system already adds bias, which you could argue is somewhat detrimental to fair voting based on content.  The reputation system is crucial to the gamification of the site though, and I don't see why we would want to add another level of something similar to reputation with this &quot;verification&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally the new users will trust the highly voted answers, which should also ideally be the correct ones due to the voting system.  In the best case scenario, reputation doesn't play in to determining quality of answers, they stand on their own.  This would influence that in a bad way in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:57:40.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12869" CreationDate="2020-05-03T03:26:39.713" Score="5" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are so many quantum-related posts that do not use the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; commands for the Bra and Ket in Diract notation. &lt;br&gt; I see a lot of this: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ | \psi &amp;gt; , \quad &amp;lt;n|n&amp;gt;, \quad &amp;lt;E_m|H|E_n&amp;gt;,$$&lt;/span&gt; instead of this:&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ | \psi \rangle, \quad \langle n|n \rangle, \quad \langle E_m|H|E_n \rangle.$$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I am the weird one, but when I see stuff like that I get the same feeling as when I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=fear%20of%20holes&amp;amp;client=firefox-b-d&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk00WYlGMy31-IORhfduREexX7NFvvA:1588476003150&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiEopuf3pbpAhWP9Z4KHXA_AjAQ_AUoAXoECBEQAw&amp;amp;biw=1536&amp;amp;bih=728&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these pictures&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is already using TeX commands to write maths, the use of &quot;&gt;&quot; instead of &quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rangle$&lt;/span&gt;&quot;, it's either because they're taking a shortcut to avoid typing out the command, or because they don't know it exists. The former could be addressed by introducing a shorthand command like &lt;code&gt;\r&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;\rangle&lt;/code&gt;, while the latter could be addressed by having a warning/suggestion message pop up when the question uses &quot;&gt;&quot; and &quot;&amp;lt;&quot; more than (say) twice in the same row. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T12:58:30.493" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T15:15:33.830" Title="Abbrevation and/or warning for $\langle$ and $\rangle$ commands" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12867" CreationDate="2020-05-03T15:13:18.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;kerning&lt;/strong&gt;, noun: in typesetting, the horizontal distance between symbols&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;keming&lt;/strong&gt;, noun: poor-quality kerning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had many mentors who knew less about typesetting than I did. I put them in the same category as &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/84372/14332&quot;&gt;people whose accents are hard to understand&lt;/a&gt;: whether I learn from them has more to do with me than with them. Different people can have different interests and skill sets for entirely healthy reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I get a little niggling annoyance when I read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\langle\frac ab\rangle$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rather than&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\left&amp;lt; \frac ab \right\rangle&#xA;%% Don't make them match, editor. Do a good deed elsewhere instead.&#xA;$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've taught enough people about the auto-sizing feature of &lt;code&gt;\left&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\right&lt;/code&gt; that I know there's not an easy path to it in usual TeX-ish documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angle brackets are buried in the &quot;parentheses&quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020/166791&quot;&gt;the SE MathJax tutorial&lt;/a&gt;, but there isn't any specific advice about how to make bras and kets.  Maybe there should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T12:59:18.997" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T12:59:18.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12867" CreationDate="2020-05-03T16:06:54.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most experienced users of this site would agree that things like &quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|\psi&amp;gt;$&lt;/span&gt;&quot; often look ugly enough for one's eyes to bleed at least a little. But the minor level of annoyance from looking at that text (or the short time it takes to correct it) has to be balanced against the experience presented to new users when the site tells them that they're Not Writing Right, particularly when we're already intimidating enough as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it does look bad. No, it's not that important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[people taking shortcuts] could be addressed by introducing a shorthand command like \r for \rangle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been addressed several times already on this meta, and the short answer is that there isn't a clear way to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introducing non-standard short commands, like &lt;code&gt;\r&lt;/code&gt;, is a pretty noxious thing to do. The site should present and use a standard environment that is as close as possible to standard (bare) LaTeX.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Packages in MathJax are not yet at a level where we could just (say) load the &lt;code&gt;physics&lt;/code&gt; package and be done with it. MathJax is a re-implementation of (part of) LaTeX into javascript, and any packages need to be reimplemented in javascript from the ground up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could change in the future, but I don't think it's ready yet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, in any case, even if we did have a clean shorthand, that still leaves the problem of getting the broader userbase to learn about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[people not knowing the commands exist] could be addressed by having a warning/suggestion message pop up when the question uses &quot;&gt;&quot; and &quot;&amp;lt;&quot; more than (say) twice in the same row&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is remarkably hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For one, it's very hard to write a regex that will really zero in on the relevant cases: you want it to catch the examples you gave, but you don't want it to catch things like &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$a&amp;gt;b&amp;gt;c$$&lt;/span&gt; or, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/540451&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;'s use of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$|\omega|&amp;gt;\Delta.$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this is easy, then I would invite you to write one up and implement it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;, where it can be used as a way to detect such questions for people who are in a mood to fix posts. Once it's proven itself there (say, with some hard numbers about its performance?), it can be used to activate any warnings on the Ask A Question page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if you do have a good regex detector, getting people to notice any advice you're giving them is a hard problem. &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/treating-user-myopia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;User myopia&lt;/a&gt; is a hard barrier to design around, and we already have a large number of other (frankly, more important) things that we want users to notice and pay attention to before they post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heck, it's hard enough &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/344706/184688&quot;&gt;getting the SE dev team to incorporate any mention of math formatting into the Ask page to begin with&lt;/a&gt;. Getting them to add in something which is physics-specific (as opposed to technical-site-specific, as with generic maths) is going to be &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; of an uphill climb.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3373/mathjax-buttons&quot;&gt;MathJax buttons&lt;/a&gt; extension, which makes this type of formatting easier to get right, but its maintainer got pulled away from SE and into real-world business quite some time ago. Maybe you want to take that up (or you know somebody who can), so we can be sure it works reliably and consistently in the new Ask page (and will continue to do so in the future), so we can push it to new users or to the SE devs for them to incorporate it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T15:15:33.830" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T15:15:33.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-04T10:01:17.037" Score="-8" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;At Physics StackExchange, we discuss almost all types of physics topics. Some get more attention and some get less, but it depends upon various things, including our site policy. Our policy has been the same for each topic for many years, which I feel is not right for topics which are not popular topics among the current members of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site aims to be a platform for all types of physics topics, whether they belong to any particular field. Consider the example of fluid mechanics, which is one of the less active topics on site. Why I am saying this is because fluid mechanics is a topic which is less popular among GR and quantum lovers. They straight away flag the post to either homework type or transfer it to another website, which I feel is not right!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can do is ease our homework policy for this topic, allowing some useful answers by some experienced users, creating a separate room for the topics which are less active, and resolving new inexperienced user problems there, to allow all kinds of thought on that particular topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a limited time, we can do this, like two weeks. If beyond that, we can't improve it, then we will be back to our old policy. If this policy works, we can apply it to other physics topics too, and, like math.stackexchange, we soon we will achieve a site which is for all classes of physics lovers. I hope you will share your thoughts on it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have anything better than this, please suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233551" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T17:49:28.003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T17:49:28.003" Title="Easing our policy for some topics" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12871" CreationDate="2020-05-04T13:11:52.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, I don't really see the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have examples of these &quot;less popular&quot; topics being closed as homework or moved to another site in a way that doesn't fit with other types of &quot;popular&quot; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be suggesting that we ease the homework policy for these topics, but that doesn't seem useful to me.  You mention &quot;our policy is the same for each topic&quot;.  I think that's a very good thing.  This would suggest that every topic is on equal footing.  What changes is how interested the &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; are in those topics.  If a topic isn't very active here, it just suggests that perhaps not many people are interested in that specific topic.  In my opinion, that's not really a problem to be solved, it just is what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my suggestion is that we keep trying to treat every topic the same way when it comes to closing, and not be less strict on some questions just to artificially have more questions on those topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T13:11:52.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12871" CreationDate="2020-05-04T15:24:42.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to think that fluid-dynamics questions get closed as homework more often than threads in other tags. This is wildly inconsistent with my observations of the site (as well as many others', from what I can tell). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, however, this is a testable hypothesis, as all of that data is directly available in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;. Go and look at the data, and if your claim is true, then you should be able to produce properly convincing evidence. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to think that allowing more low-quality homework posts for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fluid-dynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fluid-dynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fluid-dynamics&lt;/a&gt; tag, and related tags, will attract expert users willing to answer those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll have to explain to us why you think that's the case, as it's in direct contradiction with this site's experience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T15:24:42.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12876" CreationDate="2020-05-04T22:42:59.623" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my first question on meta, and I am not sure if this is the right place for this. &#xA;I tried to see if it is possible to create folders in the section of favorites, to organise the related question in different topics. Personally I have saved different questions because I still can't understand them properly but many of these could really help me in future, but in this way the section gets quite confusing, allowing to create folders and name them could help to give a lot of order. &#xA;I think this could be a good tool, obviously it is just a suggestion, I am not expecting anything but if it is something that a big part of the community would appreciate maybe could be considered. Thanks a lot &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347480/introducing-the-possibility-of-creating-folders-in-favorites-section&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the same discussion open on MSE as indicated &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260346" LastEditorUserId="260346" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T18:01:04.777" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T09:37:31.307" Title="Introducing the possibility of creating folders in the favorites section" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12875" CreationDate="2020-05-05T11:09:08.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your proposal concerns the underlying Q&amp;amp;A engine that powers all of the Stack Exchange network, so the best venue for it is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; network-wide meta. However, that doesn't mean that it is off-topic here -- and, indeed, posting it here allows for a useful gauge of support from this site's community. SE is currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344586/our-commitment-to-responding-to-meta-and-moderators&quot;&gt;restructuring its process for taking up user feedback on metas&lt;/a&gt; and it's important to take them up on the opportunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, the ability to organize the Favorites list is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75944/favorites-improvements-search-categorize-personal-tags-add-note-favorite-a&quot;&gt;a long-standing feature request on MSE&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7752/organizing-favorite-questions&quot;&gt;has also been suggested on this meta previously&lt;/a&gt;. However, I would treat those threads as valuable historical resources, and instead look to the future: again as mentioned in comments, the dev team is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/345148/upcoming-feature-follow-questions&quot;&gt;currently implementing the ability to 'follow' questions&lt;/a&gt;, and that effort includes &lt;s&gt;on its mid-term future goals&lt;/s&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347558/favorites-are-now-known-as-bookmarks&quot;&gt;as a just-rolled out development&lt;/a&gt; a restructuring of the Favorites section, which &lt;s&gt;will be&lt;/s&gt; has been renamed as Bookmarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, now is a perfect time to put a word in for this feature, and hope for support. One good place would be as an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/345148/upcoming-feature-follow-questions&quot;&gt;the original announcement&lt;/a&gt;, but this is now closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/345661/the-follow-questions-and-answers-feature-is-now-live-across-the-network&quot;&gt;the rollout announcement&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't think an answer there would be useful. I suspect the best way to go about this is to post a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; on MSE pointing to all of these precedents, and asking explicitly for this feature to be built into the next dev cycle. There's no need to close this thread -- just edit in a link to the MSE thread here if you do post there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T09:37:31.307" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T09:37:31.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T12:55:49.257" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that there is not &quot;quantum-technologies&quot; tag on physics.SE. There are various related tags such as quantum-computing, but many other realizations of quantum technologies also do not have a tag for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quantum technologies are currently being realized all over the world and by far not limited to quantum computing, including for example quantum communication and quantum sensing (both do not have tags for themselves). Developing quantum technologies is one of the big frontiers of current physics research and also receiving much attention in the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should there be a quantum technologies tag?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure what it would imply to introduce such a broad tag. For example, many existing questions may have to be retagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101770" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T12:55:49.257" Title="Should we have a tag for quantum technologies?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12880" CreationDate="2020-05-07T00:38:44.233" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly after a very mild online altercation with an extremely high-reputation user who had overlooked the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Cartan_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Einstein-Cartan theory&lt;/a&gt; (ECT) requires (as I was obligated to point out, vis-a-vis his response to a badly-formulated and unacceptably simplistic question that I had posted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;PSE&lt;/a&gt;) that fermions have spatial extent, I found myself faced with a 6-month question ban, which is inconvenient because it also bars access to the question-formulation motor that is normally available to provide enough &quot;similar questions&quot; (and their answers) that I'm left with no need to post most of my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd left a few of my unanswered questions unattended, and, following the system's recommendation to consider editing my questions, I'd edited and answered one of them myself on the basis of information on Wikipedia, which I've since found to be simplistic and very possibly incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been able to locate, through PSE, a compatriot who happens to be one of the very rare participants who is (unlike myself) familiar with ECT's extreme mathematical complexity.  Would it be acceptable to delete the &quot;probably incorrect&quot; answer and &quot;ping&quot; that participant with a request that he considers posting a comment on my question in view of his familiarity with the theory addressed in it (that currently lacks any tag), or would any such request put him &quot;on the spot&quot; to an unacceptable degree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My inclination is toward the latter possibility, but I imagine that suggestions on such issues have already been formulated, although I've made little use of Q&amp;amp;A sites before discovering PSE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T01:07:29.983" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T14:11:15.440" Title="Acceptability of soliciting comments from participants familiar with a major but untagged theory in PSE" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12879" CreationDate="2020-05-07T14:11:15.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange isn't a social network, and tools to contact specific users have been intentionally left limited. Write interesting questions and answers, and active users who share your interests will find their way to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the algorithm which restricts users with &quot;negative contribution records&quot; from asking or answering questions considers a deleted post as a &quot;negative contribution.&quot; You currently have six visible and seven deleted questions, and now your privilege of asking questions is suspended. I would advise caution before you start deleting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T14:11:15.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T09:56:54.483" Score="10" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the COVID-19 pandemic forced many professionals and students to work and learn from home, I was curious to see how the site is doing regarding traffic and activity. Are we seeing more traffic, or less? Is there anything that we should do in response to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T11:57:21.533" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T11:57:21.533" Title="How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted traffic on this site?" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12881" CreationDate="2020-05-08T09:56:54.483" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a brief look at the analytics page, and there's definitely a curious pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bare traffic does not show any noticeable changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RhRdk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RhRdk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(weekly plot from 1 January 2019 onwards), but posts seem to be up by a factor of ~70% with a linear rise starting in mid-March:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9gwal.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9gwal.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a follow-up question, for anybody with the time and inclination: what tags are these new posts mostly being posted in? Does it show a broad overall increase of activity, or are certain aspects (say, homework, or basic newtonian kinematics, or anything else) responsible for the lion's share of this growth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T09:56:54.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T13:58:07.580" Score="-2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/550230/energy-in-a-aa-battery&quot;&gt;Understanding the total energy in a AA battery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a homework question, and seems very applicable to others.  My question had very little to do with the math, and everything to do with the question, &quot;could a single AA battery lift 10,000 pounds a whole foot?&quot;. I showed my logic, with a few simple calculations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could I rephrase the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I rephrased the question, in order to be less &quot;yes/no&quot; and less &quot;check-my-work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a question be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26991" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T18:12:38.383" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T16:08:35.817" Title="Closed question appeal, improvement" Tags="|support|specific-question|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12884" CreationDate="2020-05-09T00:55:38.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, an off-topic question can be reopened, if the author edits it so that it falls within the site guidelines, which are linked in the Closed notice, and in Emilio's first comment above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question currently looks like a &quot;check my work&quot; question, which is why David closed it. That close reason doesn't just apply to checking arithmetic, it also applies to &quot;am I using the correct equation&quot; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it's valid to ask about equations if you express it in a conceptual way. That is, you need to ask why &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$W = mgh$&lt;/span&gt; is the correct equation to calculate the work &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$W$&lt;/span&gt; in lifting a mass &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m$&lt;/span&gt; a height of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$h$&lt;/span&gt; in a constant gravitational field with gravitational acceleration &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$g$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it appears from your question that you don't actually  have a conceptual difficulty  with that equation. You're just bewildered that a little AA cell can do so much work. ;) So maybe  your real conceptual question is &quot;how can an AA cell store 14400 joules?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in any case, you need to change your question so that it's asking a conceptual question, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; edited your question since it was closed. That edit automatically sent it to the Reopen review queue. But your question still isn't a conceptual physics question, so it doesn't yet qualify for reopening. And asking about efficiency is turning it into an engineering question, rather than a pure physics question. Note that future edits will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; send the question to the Reopen queue, but they will bump it to the top of the Active view of the main question page, which means that people will see it and possibly vote to reopen it, if they think it deserves to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(BTW, Google is &quot;smart&quot; enough to answer things like &lt;code&gt;4 watt-hours in foot-pounds&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T00:55:38.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12887" CreationDate="2020-05-10T06:32:37.720" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a simple (?) calculation like question that I can't solve myself due to not enough knowledge. Nearly like homework question, but hopefully not. Can I ask this kind of questions here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For the sake of a short story that I am writing currently, I need to calculate an approximate (not exact) depth to which a bullet will drill when a marksman fires it and misses totally. Bullet hits a soft soil in a city lawn&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marks man uses 9x19 Parabellum which has approx. 396 m/s when leaving a barrel. He shots from a third floor in a direct, straight line way down toward lawn. Assuming 12 metres height plus 12 metres distance and using  Pythagorean theorem, I can calculate bullet distance before it reaches ground to approx. 17 metres. And using a simple velocity formula I can assume that bullet needs approx. 0.04 second to reach the ground.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But I completely fail when it comes to calculating air and soil resistance. Assuming that this is a correct approach into calculating distance / drill-in depth of a bullet in a soil until it comes to a complete stop.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a kind of question that can be asked here? Or would it be treated off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T05:34:48.940" Title="Can I ask here a simple calculation-like questions that I can't solve myself?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12886" CreationDate="2020-05-10T06:50:17.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Calculation questions tend not to be well received on this site, so I think your question would be off-topic as written. In general, we are trying to help people who are interested in learning the underlying concepts in order to further their (or, sometimes, others') knowledge of physics. Doing calculations doesn't really fit in with that mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; there might be a way to rephrase the question so that it would be on topic. If you could make some progress on the calculation yourself, and there's one small aspect of it you don't know how to deal with, you could ask about that one small aspect and it would be more likely, though not guaranteed, to be on topic. Basically, this would be the case if you're trying to &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; yourself how to do the calculation, and getting the actual answer will be just a nice bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T06:50:17.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12884" CreationDate="2020-05-10T08:46:56.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly: your question is not very good for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ignoring losses, does that mean a AA battery could theoretically lift 10,620.9 pounds, 1 foot high?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;YES.  But of course, that’s not a very enlightening answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next paragraph talks about efficiencies, but it’s not possible to answer “what’s the best efficiency you can hope for” as this would depend on the design of just about everything.  Maybe engineers could answer that, in which case your question is still not well suited for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know how one can improve a question to which the answer is a simple yes/no and for which you have already answered YES.  Maybe you could flesh out on what physical grounds you feel this is not right, but if you take out the engineering aspect (which to me is the most interesting aspect of your question: how to do it in practice) it’s basically an elementary calculation.  I personally fail to find anything conceptual (in terms of physics) in the current formulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T16:08:35.817" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T16:08:35.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12890" CreationDate="2020-05-10T16:20:02.573" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;So recently I get my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/550446/prove-that-l-t-v-is-a-proper-lagrangian&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; closed. While it is entirely up to the community to decide whether a question is on topic or not, I got really confused by the feedback:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I followed the two links and here is what I found for the definition of homework-like questions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;homework question&quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I failed to see why my question is a homework like question, as otherwise the underlying method would be a general solution of a generic type of question, with my question be a specific case. However I don't think the underlying method can be generalized, as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$L=T-V$&lt;/span&gt; is already a generic case, and trying to generalize the method to prove that &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$L=4T-\sqrt{3}V$&lt;/span&gt; is proper is just pure nonsense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I don't think the question is remotely similar to a check-my-work question, and I got quite confused for my question to be closed for this reason. I have thought that maybe it would be closed for being to broad, or as a duplicate, yet homework close reason was a surprise for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt; So would anyone explain why my question is homework-like or check-my-work, and how can I improve it and avoid making future mistakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262584" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T16:36:51.277" Title="&quot;Homework and check-my-work&quot; close reason confusion" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12889" CreationDate="2020-05-10T16:36:51.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t understand your question.  BTW there may have been multiple close reasons and the system takes the one with the more votes (I think), and I may have voted to close because it was unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can this proof be generalized to a multiple-object system, considering the forces between those objects are conservative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can’t you take &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$T$&lt;/span&gt; to be the total kinetic energy and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$V$&lt;/span&gt; to be the total potential energy?  That and simply repeating the steps of your question will yield (basically) &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f=ma$&lt;/span&gt;, albeit in component form and in a possible sub-efficient coordinate system.  That’s what textbooks and homework questions require you to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, your question is now linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/78138/36194&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and near-duplicate of it so it could also have collected close votes as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T16:36:51.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-10T19:38:36.507" Score="8" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at old book recommendation questions, I noticed that some of them were closed or locked almost a decade ago. But our policy on book recommendations today is much more liberal. Is it time to unlock / reopen the following questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/10325/&quot;&gt;Graduate Physics Problems Books&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/22696/&quot;&gt;Best physics olympiad resources&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/6157/&quot;&gt;List of freely available physics books&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/101187/&quot;&gt;Best Sets of Physics Lecture Notes and Articles&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/25512/&quot;&gt;What is a good introductory text to astronomy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these are certainly very general, but others are definitely specific enough that they wouldn't be closed today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T19:39:38.020" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T19:39:38.020" Title="Is it time to unlock/vote to reopen old book recommendation questions?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-11T09:40:54.500" Score="0" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that questions/answers receive votes at a rate quite positively correlated with the votes they already have (of course, this only applies for a certain period of time, I am not implying a runaway behavior by this hypothesis :P). A highly upvoted answer seems likely to receive further upvotes more quickly compared to the rate at which it received the same number of votes before it was highly upvoted. Admittedly, this is purely based on personal observation and I have no proper analysis to support the conjecture. But it does seem to fit well with my informal observation as well as intuition. It might also be that once a post gets more votes, it simply becomes more visible and that causes the accelerated upvotes but I am not sure if this is the only factor (again, I have no actual analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if it would be a good idea to keep votes invisible by default and make it so that they can be viewed only by clicking between the arrows (the way the visibility of the distribution of upvotes vs. downvotes works). This would be a safeguard against premature involuntary positive feelings towards a post and it would still be possible for everyone to access how much support each post has gotten simply by a click. Answers can still be arranged according to the vote counts, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is most certainly an SE wide thing but just wanted to float the idea first here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T13:18:03.023" Title="Should votes be made visible only upon request?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12892" CreationDate="2020-05-11T12:56:35.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, questions and answers should be evaluated on their merits. I agree that the displayed score can bias subsequent votes to some degree, but that's actually inherent in the design of the Stack Exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes are intended to send a signal to the post author (and to affect their rep), but their &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; purpose is to indicate to other readers whether a post is useful or not. It's only natural that if the early readers find a post useful (or vice versa) that many of the later readers will agree, and vote the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other effects at play, too. For example, if I see an answer with zero score that looks reasonable I may not vote on it if I don't have sufficient expertise in that domain. However, if the answer has a positive score, and I see a favourable comment or two from people who I recognise to have some knowledge in that topic, then I'm more likely to trust the answer and add my upvote to it. And conversely, if comments from those experts criticize an answer (and I understand that  criticism) I'm more likely to add my downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would be useful to hide scores. We &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; people to be able to quickly see which posts the community has high confidence in, and which one's are probably not worth looking at. Your proposal doesn't make scores invisible, but it does slow down that evaluation process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, mid last year, a score hiding experiment was conducted on Stack Overflow. The idea was to prevent the pile-on effect of downvotes on low quality questions and answers from new members. The system correctly tracked the question's score, but the &lt;em&gt;displayed&lt;/em&gt; score never went below a minimum threshold, both 0 and -1 were tested. This experiment was rather unpopular with the long-term residents of Stack Overflow meta. I can't find a clear statement regarding the outcome of that experiment, but you can read about it here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390178/4014959&quot;&gt;Why can I no longer see that a post has a negative score?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T13:18:03.023" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T13:18:03.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12895" CreationDate="2020-05-12T09:58:20.563" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see some answers which are really good and I'd like to save. Similar to how we follow questions I'd like to have the ability to 'save' answers implemented in this site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T12:11:25.150" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T20:59:54.103" Title="Ability to bookmark an answer" Tags="|feature-request|answers|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12894" CreationDate="2020-05-12T10:06:07.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't bookmark an answer, but you can &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; it. This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/345661/295232&quot;&gt;new feature&lt;/a&gt; which isn't completed yet; at the moment, there's no list of followed posts in your profile, but this will be implemented soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H1YFum.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H1YFum.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the downsides may be that you receive notifications about edits and comments on that answer; for a full list of differences, see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/345783/295232&quot;&gt;proposed FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A temporary workaround might to use the bookmark system of your browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T10:06:07.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12897" CreationDate="2020-05-12T15:59:01.157" Score="7" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/551191/201709&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with this argument that Newton&amp;#39;s second law implies all potentials are quadratic?&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as being “non-mainstream”. But one could argue that this would come under the clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any post that attempts to work within the bounds of what we have determined to be &quot;mainstream physics&quot; is considered on topic for this site barring any other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question arose due to a misunderstanding of notation (a surprisingly common issue) and was clarified in the answers, but is still working within the bounds of “mainstream physics” and I don’t see any other issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for future reference, are questions of this kind considered non-mainstream by the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201709" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T17:34:37.153" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T13:02:23.347" Title="Is this question really non-mainstream?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|reopen|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12896" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:34:17.947" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on some of the comments (now deleted), it looks like the first user who voted to close did so because they were focusing on how the OP was trying to apply scaling space to Newton's second law. Perhaps the first user figured that the OP was talking about their own theory of scaling space then? Although in my (speculative) opinion, this user seemed upset about the OP's question and their approach, but instead of supplying an answer to help relieve the confusion a sort of debate in the comments was opened up. So perhaps the closure was initiated due to what happened in the comments. Then others saw this closure reason and followed along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, being a user who answered this question, I do not think it should have been closed (I have cast a reopen vote). I do not think that this question falls into &quot;non-mainstream&quot; at all. I can understand why users would vote that it needs more clarity, but I do no agree with this either. The question makes sense to me, and so I supplied an answer addressing what I believed the confusion of the OP was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind&quot;&gt;ACM has pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, only three of the five users voted to close as non-mainstream. Therefore, I don't think this question is something that is a good example of this closure reason, and it should not set precedence moving forward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:34:17.947" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12894" CreationDate="2020-05-12T20:59:54.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that you can &quot;favorite&quot; a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, by clicking the star symbol under the vote tally. Your favorite questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; listed in your profile.  It's unusual on our site for a question to have more than a handful of answers, so that might accomplish what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/18L6fm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/18L6fm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen capture with red circle&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T20:59:54.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12896" CreationDate="2020-05-13T13:06:36.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the OP in question and I feel like I should post some clarifications, since some people seem to be jumping to even further conclusions than I did in the post. I don't think there is anything non-mainstream about my question, it was mostly a question about sloppy maths and I was well aware that I was in the wrong when I posted it but couldn't see why mathematically. I deliberately used a provocative wording to attract good replies, but had I known it would attract &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much attention, I  would not have posted it at all. I use physics for a living and I am well aware of the meaning of these equations (and the correctness of physics) but I was just confusing myself over something trivial and decided to ask other people instead of agonising over my bad maths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original post never really implied that &quot;physics is wrong&quot;. It asked whether this silly equation reflects something deeper about classical mechanics - and we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know that classical mechanics is not a complete description of nature - again purely as speculation and I didn't think much of it. Again, had I known that this would cause so much upset, I wouldn't have included it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I would also like to point out that unless the question is obviously anti-science, it benefits everyone to treat even the silliest-looking questions seriously. After all, if they are so obviously wrong, then they should be very easy to disprove. It seems that some people regard questions on everything that they have understood well as trolling / questions that should be censored, and this is in my view not a productive way to look at things, especially on a website made for people asking questions on things they don't understand sufficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moral of the story is that one should be very exact and careful when asking questions without being too provocative, but also that one should answer questions with an open mind, unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in which case the question &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be marked as non-mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264018" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T13:06:36.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-15T15:29:27.780" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it recommended not to ask a question on Physics Stack Exchange if the same user has already asked a very similar question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://aviation.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Aviation Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have received a message (from another user who is not a moderator) to the effect that this is the case and I should delete one of my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intent was simply to solicit the expertise of a different group of people who might approach the problem from a different viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any guidance on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it matters, I did note in the question that I had asked a similar question on ASE-- and provided a link to it-- looking at the edit history it appears that I added this note a few hours after the sole answer had been posted, and about three hours after I posted the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/548011/is-this-vector-diagram-of-the-forces-at-play-in-turning-flight-correct&quot;&gt;Is this vector diagram of the forces at play in turning flight correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is relevant or not, but the question was poorly-received on ASE.  But I have no wish to delete the question from ASE.  I feel that it highlights a significant flaw in the current flight training curriculum.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236723" LastEditorUserId="236723" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T16:40:23.560" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T16:40:23.560" Title="Should I not ask a question on Physics Stack Exchange if I have already asked a similar question on Aviation Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-05-15T15:37:57.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12900" CreationDate="2020-05-15T15:36:01.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently I shouldn't have. &#xA; I have now found this -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt; .  As for what to do next-- guess I'll have to ask a second question to PSE meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/548011/is-this-vector-diagram-of-the-forces-at-play-in-turning-flight-correct&quot;&gt;Is this vector diagram of the forces at play in turning flight correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236723" LastEditorUserId="236723" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T15:57:10.280" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T15:57:10.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-15T15:42:45.887" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not understanding that it was (possibly) inappropriate, I asked a question on Physics SE that was very similar to a question that I had already asked on Aviation SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I understand that it was (possibly) inappropriate, should I delete the question to Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to disrespect the author of the one answer that was received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't want to lose the information content of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be permissible to copy the answer and post it verbatim, fully attributed as to who wrote it and in what part of SE it was originally posted, as an answer to my very similar question in ASE, along with a note that the question to which it was posted was slightly different from the one in ASE?  And then delete the question from PSE?  (I would &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;migrate&quot; the answer without deleting the question from PSE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what other course of action should I take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it matters, I did note in the question that I had asked a similar question on ASE-- and provided a link to it-- looking at the edit history it appears that I added this note a few hours after the sole answer had been posted, and about three hours after I posted the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/548011/is-this-vector-diagram-of-the-forces-at-play-in-turning-flight-correct&quot;&gt;Is this vector diagram of the forces at play in turning flight correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the one answer that has been posted as of yet -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/548011/is-this-vector-diagram-of-the-forces-at-play-in-turning-flight-correct/548030#548030&quot;&gt;Is this vector diagram of the forces at play in turning flight correct?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should I just chalk it up to experience and leave the question and answer on PSE to stand? That would be my preference-- would that be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is relevant or not, but the question was poorly-received on ASE.  But I have no wish to delete the question from ASE.  I feel that it highlights a significant flaw in the current flight training curriculum.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if the moderators at one site notify me that the question on the other site &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be deleted or the other one will be, that would open up another can of worms, and I suppose I would delete the one from the PSE site.  (While &quot;migrating&quot; the answer as described above, unless the consensus is that that would not be ethical or appropriate.)  Likewise, in an even more extreme case where the ASE question were simply deleted by moderators as a duplicate of the PSE question, I suppose I would then delete the PSE question and re-post the ASE question. But, it has not come to any of that yet, and I have no particular reason to think that it will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the current question is, as things stand right now, from the standpoint of the PSE community, is it best that I delete the PSE question, and if so (or if I am essentially forced to delete one of the questions by action of the ASE community, and choose to delete the PSE question), is it alright to &quot;migrate&quot; the one answer that it has received, in the manner described above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional notes-- I do understand that questions considered to be duplicates of another question &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on the same site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; normally get closed, not deleted.  However since I did receive a note from an ASE user (not a moderator) saying I ought to delete one of the questions, I was trying think of what best to do to not lose the answer that was posted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least one answer to this meta question has suggested that the PSE question should be migrated to ASE, where it would undoubtedly be closed as a duplicate, but not deleted, unless moderators decided to take some unusual action for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current inclination is just to leave it alone and disregard the one note I received (from an ASE user who was not a moderator) saying that one of the questions ought to be deleted, but avoid asking such similar questions in the future now that I understand SE policy and philosophy better.  If moderators of either site let me know that this is not acceptable, then I'll consider &quot;migrating&quot; the answer as described above and deleting the PSE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236723" LastEditorUserId="236723" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T13:25:55.310" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T18:06:28.570" Title="Should I &quot;migrate&quot; an answer to another SE site?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12902" CreationDate="2020-05-16T00:37:23.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a solution but it requires a bit of central planning as all great solutions do ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if you're aware of this but users who can cast close votes can also cast votes to migrate a question as a whole (along with its answers, comments, revisions, everything) to another StackExchange site. So, I'd suggest you not to delete your question on your own, after all, it is probably fit for the site if not enough users with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\text{&amp;gt;3k}$&lt;/span&gt; reputation feel that there is no need for migration. And, if it is not a good fit, probably enough users with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\text{&amp;gt;3k}$&lt;/span&gt; reputation will vote to migrate your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question gets migrated to Aviation SE, the ball is then in the court of Aviation SE users. If they think that the migrated question is a duplicate of the existing question of yours on Aviation SE, they will mark it as a duplicate of the same. This way, you wouldn't have any of the content, either yours or of those who answered, erased while the questions would be in their appropriate places and linked via a duplication link if they are indeed duplicates of each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your part, bringing this up on Meta is good enough IMO. You have already linked to the Meta posts on your question. As I mentioned, I'd suggest against deleting the question on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, only moderators can migrate questions to Aviation SE it seems, not all users who can cast close votes. So, the rest of my answer is still valid IMO but I'd add that since the migration to Aviation SE requires direct moderator intervention, it'd be a good practice to make sure the question belongs here beforehand ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T00:46:14.653" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T00:46:14.653" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12902" CreationDate="2020-05-16T05:48:41.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I actually think would be best, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you can pull it off (and I don't claim to know whether this is possible), is to make the two questions distinct from each other by editing each of them to be more specific to its respective site. There's no problem with posting two slightly different questions about essentially the same topic to two different sites; you can have a question here on Physics SE that focuses on the fundamental science aspects of the situation you're considering, while your question on Aviation SE could focus on its applications to airplanes and/or aerodynamics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're going to do that, you have to make your edits in such a way that it doesn't invalidate any existing answers on each site. That's a requirement we have based on courtesy to the people who put in the time to write answers for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not practical to do that, then you have some other options. For one thing, as you suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be permissible to copy the answer and post it verbatim, fully attributed as to who wrote it and in what part of SE it was originally posted, as an answer to my very similar question in ASE, along with a note that the question to which it was posted was slightly different from the one in ASE? And then delete the question from PSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were going in the other direction, then yes, it would definitely be &lt;em&gt;permissible&lt;/em&gt; to do that (although it's a different matter whether it would be well received by the community). Content here is licensed under a Creative Commons license which allows, among other things, copying the content to another site where it will be distributed under the same license. And our rules on plagiarism simply require that content be appropriately quoted and attributed, but they don't prevent copying. We do frown on making an answer &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; out of copied content, but this is sort of a special case since the answer was written for that question, just in a different venue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you would be copying from Physics SE to Aviation SE and making the copied post on the latter site, it'd really be up to the Aviation community whether this would be allowed by their norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another option, you could ask the Aviation mods whether they'd be willing to migrate the question here. Then we could merge it into the Physics version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, it might also be reasonable to just leave things as they are. While it's true that in principle we shouldn't fragment the answers between the two questions, it's just &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; question, and not one that's drawing a lot of attention either, so any harm that may be done by having it in two places is limited in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T05:48:41.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12902" CreationDate="2020-05-16T13:27:53.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a good way to edit to make the questions more different at this point without changing the PSE question so substantially that it invalidates the existing answer or at least makes it kind irrelevant to what the modified question would be.  Perhaps they are different enough already, perhaps not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that actually migrating the question to ASE, so that it could be closed there as a duplicate (while preserving the one answer that was received) would be viewed as a positive step by the ASE community.  Questions on topics such as these tend to be downvoted on ASE, or at least that's been the recent trend.  If PSE moderators see fit to do that, then so be it, but I'm not advocating that at present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current inclination is just to leave it alone and disregard the one note I received (from an ASE user who was not a moderator) saying that one of the questions ought to be deleted, but I'll avoid asking such similar questions in the future now that I understand SE policy and philosophy better. If moderators of either site let me know that this is not acceptable, then I'll consider &quot;migrating&quot; the answer as described in this meta question, and deleting the PSE question.  The point is well taken, from another answer, that before doing so I should first consider whether this is acceptable by the standards of the ASE community, perhaps by asking a question on that Meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236723" LastEditorUserId="236723" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T18:06:28.570" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T18:06:28.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-17T18:48:51.510" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/552586/a-game-of-boxes-with-rotating-gears&quot;&gt;A game of boxes with rotating gears&lt;/a&gt; which was closed due to it being a &quot;homework/check-my-work&quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is NOT homework, it's an original question I had come up with. Moreover the question itself isn't &quot;check my work&quot; since part it is completely unclear to me how to address. And it isn't that elementary since I had done a fair bit of research on systems with balanced angular momentum already on the site and couldn't find anything at all to help met address it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about experimental design, and it feels (to me) like a solid conceptual question that is worth exploring. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the community closed it because it appeared to be homework/check-my-work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I change this question so it meets the communities standards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Improvements I think I can make:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can remove the tidbits about the wizard and make it much more direct, i thought that would have a humorous effect and make it more pleasant to read but perhaps not &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could add additional informations about the internal state of the boxes, [ex: the angular moment = K, the wheel has mass distribution ... ] but these don't REALLY add any value to the question in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T06:20:58.297" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T06:20:58.297" Title="Why is this question actually off topic, how should it be modified so it is reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12907" CreationDate="2020-05-17T19:01:14.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you need to reframe the question somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is something you came up with yourself, it would probably be best to remove the whole puzzle aspect and weird framing.  It makes it seem like it's something you've found somewhere else and are just looking for the solution to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the big thing that makes this like a homework and exercise question, is the question itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How could we design an experiment to differentiate between the two?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this reads like you're just looking for a solution to an exercise presented to you, and not asking a conceptual physics question.  I would at least frame the question as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would there be any way to tell all three apart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you're asking a question about physics concepts.  It's not just &quot;How do I solve this?&quot;; but instead, &quot;Can this even be solved with physics?&quot;.  Based on this meta question, as far as I can tell that is really what you are concerned about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presenting the question as if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a known solution, and you just want it, is more of a physics exercise question than an actual question about the physics concepts, even if the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; might give you insight into the physics concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T19:01:14.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12910" CreationDate="2020-05-17T21:00:01.063" Score="-7" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've cross-posted yesterday this on Meta of the site MathOverflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4597/asking-if-the-following-post-could-be-suitable-for-the-main-site-mathoverflow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asking if the following post could be suitable for the main site MathOverflow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask if the following questions can be potentially interesting for the main site. The problem is that I've asked a similar question in past months (with an account now deleted) on the main site Physics Stack Exchange and was not well received (if I remember well I included some discursive, unnecessary or specualtive paragraphs, thus I accept the situation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to know if some of the following post (see below the title, body with the respective &lt;em&gt;Question&lt;/em&gt; and some tags) can be suitable for the main site Physics Stack Exchange. &lt;strong&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My belief is that the following can be interesting, if you can/want pleas add your feedback in commments or as an answer for this Meta Physics Stack Exchange if it is possible, about if my question can be suitable and be on topic for the main site Physics Stack Exchange. If you can to mention some improvement for the future question that I bring here (below, the post) feel free to comment it: I can rewrite/remove some pararaph or choice the more suitable tags, or other improvements with the goal to ask a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no answers or feedback for this post on Meta or if this post isn't useful for this Meta, please let me to know it, that I can to delete this post published on this Meta as soon is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Falsifiability of a hypothesis about a strange phenomena at the edge of Solar System that I postulate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My belief since approximately a year ago is that at the edge/boundary of our Solar System could exist a special region of space-time enjoying the following feature. I add that this is a speculation that didn't  arise from the scientific method, if not through ideas of which I have persuaded myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Each body having certain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{*}$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;em&gt;mass becomes (when this body is placed in this special region that I evoke at the edge of our Solar System) in a micro black hole which evaporates in its corresponding lapse of time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I evoke certain upper and lower limits for such quantity of mass (ordinary matter) for the body placed in this special region (this upper and lower limits are unknown for my person since this is a speculation): let's say that the mass of an apple or a cat, a pendulum or a prism, but also the mass of aircraft carrier, but not the mass of a planetary body, not the mass correponding to a proton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; A) Is falsifiable my hypothesis? I mean that could exist a special region in some place of the space-time, in particular I'm saying in the neighborhood of our Solar System, in such way that bodies with certain masses evaporate since these become in micro black holes when these bodies are placed in such special region. B) What equations, knowledges or instruments/experiments can you propose or evoke  with the purpose to discuss/contradicting claims or facts about the veracity of previous hypothesis? &lt;strong&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Falsifiability.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(black-hole-thermodynamics), (micro-blackholes), (solar-system), (observational-astronomy), (general-relativity), (quantum-mechanics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250478" LastEditorUserId="250478" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T17:29:42.187" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T17:29:42.187" Title="Asking if the following post could be suitable for the main site Physics Stack Exchange" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12909" CreationDate="2020-05-17T21:33:58.283" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would not be on topic for this site, since questions asking for review or comments on personal theories are out of our scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd note that in general, we don't suggest that people pre-post their questions to meta to ask if they would be on topic. What we recommend is that you read about the site's scope in the help center, and if you think your question fits that scope, just ask it. The normal close voting mechanism will determine whether it's treated as on topic or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T21:33:58.283" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12907" CreationDate="2020-05-17T22:28:44.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to the original version of the question, I agree with what &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12908/124&quot;&gt;JMac's answer&lt;/a&gt; said. Now that it's been edited (currently on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/552586/5&quot;&gt;revision 5&lt;/a&gt;), the question is definitely much closer to being suitable for this site, but I don't think it's quite there yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue, as I see it, is that you're still asking how to do a part of the problem. While that's technically better than asking how to do the whole problem, it doesn't really make a difference as far as our policy is concerned. To get a sense of why, consider a hypothetical case where someone has a homework question that asks how they can tell the difference between a solid box and a box with two counter-rotating wheels. They know that no-effort homework/exercise questions aren't allowed here, so they invent a third box with a single rotating wheel and post a question asking how to tell the difference between the boxes, showing their work on the easy parts (which they invented) to distract from the fact that they haven't put any effort into the &quot;hard part&quot;, i.e. the actual problem they're tasked with solving. That question would be written much like v5 of yours. Now, I'm certainly not saying I think you did that, and I'm not even saying I think this is common, but I am saying that our homework-and-exercises policy would be full of holes if it allowed the modified question but not the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, what I think you need to do to make the question comply with our policy is, at a minimum, show some progress and ask a specific conceptual question about the part of the question you are working on. That means that, instead of just asking how to tell the difference between the two boxes (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$B_1$&lt;/span&gt;, solid, and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$B_3$&lt;/span&gt;, counter-rotating wheels), come up with some experiments you can perform on the boxes and follow them through to figure out whether they would reveal a difference between &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$B_1$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$B_3$&lt;/span&gt;. If, in the process of doing this, you get stuck and you can't tell whether an experiment would be effective because you're unsure about some physics concept, then ask your question about &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you might think about putting each box on a rotating platform, but then it might occur to you that you might inadvertently put &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$B_3$&lt;/span&gt; on a platform in such a way that the axes of rotation of the wheels are perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the platform, and maybe you don't know how to tell whether that would affect the torque required to rotate the box. If that is the case, you should go do a bit of research about how to calculate the things you need about rotation on perpendicular axes, and if your research points you to things which you don't understand (but think you should be able to understand), or if you can't find a particular piece of information you need, then you can come back and make your question about that. (If this winds up being a hint, then I guess you can consider it your reward for patiently discussing the question on meta. I honestly don't know if this will wind up being relevant to how to solve the problem, though; I just picked something you could try that I thought would make a good example of my point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T22:28:44.503" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-18T19:19:19.843" Score="19" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is off-topic, I can take it down, but Phys Meta has generally been receptive to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915/consider-supporting-proposals-of-other-se-science-sites&quot;&gt;promoting other science proposals/sites&lt;/a&gt; in the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://materials.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Materials Modeling SE&lt;/a&gt; entered private beta at the end of April. The site aims to address research level questions about both the theory, methods, and implementation behind modeling systems ranging from molecules and proteins, to nanoparticles/sheets/tubes and polymers, to crystals and topological materials. Users come from a wide range of disciplines (chemistry, material science, computational science, drug design) and use a wide range of different modeling frameworks (molecular dynamics, electronic structure theory, Markov models/statistical mechanics, fluid dynamics, machine learning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is coming up on the decision whether it can move to public beta and we would really appreciate your support. If any of the topics above interest you, or you think there is something in the realm of material simulation/computation that could be addressed well there, please consider joining the site and asking/answering/upvoting some questions. We think this site could have real value to the scientific community and it has already attracted a healthy amount of attention from experts across different fields, but we need the SE network clearly sees that value to ensure that the site is maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more discussion of the scope of the site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://materials.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31/what-topics-can-i-ask-about-here&quot;&gt;Topics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/29831/how-can-this-proposal-be-clearly-distinguished-from-chemistry-physics-computat/29832#29832&quot;&gt;Distinguishing Features&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155261" LastActivityDate="2022-10-29T14:06:46.480" Title="Beta Site: Materials Modeling" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12912" CreationDate="2020-05-19T15:27:43.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this proposal for a new site is very interesting. I hope don't disturb with this answer (really I'm not interested in the site, I'm just an amateur mathematician, but your idea and yours colleagues to create this site seems to me very good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A material that is fascinating for me is the known as sepiolite (I know just the more simple uses of this material, but I'm curious, from a divulgative point of view, about other important applications see the last phrase and reference from the Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepiolite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sepiolite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; from the section &lt;em&gt;Other uses and substitutes&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just to say that good luck with your project, and add my contribution commenting here about that sepiolite seems interesting for me. Feel free to comment if this answer isn't suitable or useful, I hope don't disturb. Thanks you very much, and good day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I remembered this post because I heard on the radio news about a new metamaterial. I think that it is worthy to edit my answer again. The material is known as &lt;em&gt;Copper-Squarate&lt;/em&gt;. The article [1] is for the attention of the professor who edited the original post and for the professor of Physics Stack Exchange (I hope don't bother editing this) after my welcome for the site that was promoted &lt;strong&gt;Matter Modeling Stack Exchange.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Francisco Colmenero, Álvaro Lobato and Vicente Timón, &lt;em&gt;Compressing the Channels in the Crystal Structure of Copper Squarate Metal-Organic Framework&lt;/em&gt;, Solids 2022, 3(2), pages 374-384.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250478" LastEditorUserId="250478" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T13:44:49.007" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T13:44:49.007" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12918" CreationDate="2020-05-20T00:03:57.747" Score="-6" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've edited in a 'meta-comment' into &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544164/how-do-we-know-the-electric-field-has-infinite-range&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was rolled back by a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note: answer accepted for sake of closing the question, though parts remain unanswered, and will be explored in followup(s): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544697/how-does-electric-field-not-disappear-very-far-from-source&quot;&gt;Q1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment's self-explanatory: the accepted answer is not fully satisfactory to the question's intent. I proceeded to make followups, effectively 'breaking up' the question in parts, to keep the format SE-friendly. This is, however, an important caveat for the reader of the Q&amp;amp;A to be informed of. Without meta-commentary, the question's author must ask the answerer to edit in this piece of information - which is an overhead complication, and not guaranteed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ask a more focused question&quot; - I did, or at least I thought I did; if physics has a recurring theme, it's that answers may beg more questions. If I were the reader of the linked Q&amp;amp;A, I'd be completely unsatisfied  - and a directly linked followup would be the most effective means of filling the gaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification&lt;/strong&gt; per requests: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's not accepted&lt;/em&gt; - I unaccepted it after a moderator unrolled my edit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why accept if not suitable?&lt;/em&gt; - Answer is 'sufficient' given scope focus requirements of an SE question, yet incomplete if moving aside any 'regulations'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why &quot;for sake of closing&quot;?&lt;/em&gt; - To 'move on' to more suitable followups; this one wasn't likely to progress further.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: maybe it's inobvious, but as-is, not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; metacommentary is censored; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/381233/why-does-light-reflected-from-an-led-tv-screen-make-a-sharp-x-pattern&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; references and comments about multiple other Q&amp;amp;A's, and so do many others. My request thus isn't to nullify a rule, but to merely expand its scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98160" LastEditorUserId="98160" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T05:45:52.977" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T11:28:44.887" Title="Meta-commentary in questions should sometimes be allowed" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|editing|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12914" CreationDate="2020-05-20T05:18:10.067" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're not satisfied with my answer, you're under no obligation or expectation to accept it. We all write answers that aren't accepted all the time, and I've also written many questions to which I didn't accept answers. It's fine! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The features of this site are centered around providing lasting value to future users. Meta-commentary is not useful, since it gets in the way of the actual question and answer, while acceptance (or the lack thereof) is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no need to retroactively edit questions to link to future questions, either. This is automatically taken care of by the &quot;Linked&quot; section on the sidebar, which already contains the link you want. (To clarify, I don't think it's actively discouraged either -- your edit was probably rolled back for the metacommentary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T05:18:10.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12914" CreationDate="2020-05-21T11:23:13.533" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; metacommentary is censored; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/381233/why-does-light-reflected-from-an-led-tv-screen-make-a-sharp-x-pattern&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; references and comments about multiple other Q&amp;amp;A's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that you're confused about what 'metacommentary' means. The term refers to text included in a question that refers to 'meta' aspects &lt;em&gt;of that very same question&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. to administrative aspects of that thread that have nothing to do with the material that's being asked about. It does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; refer to text in a question that refers to &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/544164/3&quot;&gt;this edit&lt;/a&gt;, the question talks about &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/381233&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; surveys multiple &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; threads, which form valuable academic background and are part of the material being asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some&lt;/em&gt; amount of meta commentary is OK to have in threads, but it needs to be well incorporated into the flow of the text. Your edit is close to the borderline, but it reads rather too much like a rant to be in the safe zone. Compare it e.g. with neutral wording such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544697&quot;&gt;this follow-up thread&lt;/a&gt; explores some details not covered in this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that putting in rants in places like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/544164/how-do-we-know-the-electric-field-has-infinite-range#comment1249410_544164&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; is hardly helpful. Comments are for requesting clarifications about the question; they can be used to include pointers to other relevant resources (such as links like the comment I proposed above), but they're not places to complain that this site has rules that you don't like (and much less for slurs like &quot;bookkeeping&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Indeed, I just raised a moderator flag on that comment, indicating that it doesn't really belong there, and it was instantly deleted. This indicates to me that the deletion was not made manually by a moderator, but by the system as a response to flags being raised on it by multiple users. Please bear that in mind when re-posting that &lt;code&gt;related&lt;/code&gt; comment. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; acceptable to link to follow-up questions in comments, but here there was a clear community consensus that the form you chose for that was not OK.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that you can find meta commentary in question text that doesn't belong there: in this case, please flag it for moderator attention, so it can be handled appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T11:28:44.887" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T11:28:44.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T23:19:19.887" Score="-8" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Facebook eliminated the dislike for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal experience is just wanting to quit after a question gets to -3 for reasons unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting of a question is an &lt;em&gt;inherently negative&lt;/em&gt; process and an even more negative experience for the questioner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requesting clarification is a &lt;em&gt;natural, positive act.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution: A simple &quot;?&quot; button instead of &quot;v&quot; and a simple counter for the &quot;?&quot; clicks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user257090" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T07:42:40.070" Title="Have we thought about replacing the negative 'downvoting' of questions with a positive 'requesting clarification'?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12919" CreationDate="2020-05-24T02:01:22.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... if you want clarifications you can use comments for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself I downvote questions mostly because I believe they are inappropriate - poor or no prior research, easy duplicates of another question already posted, poor typesetting, downright silly.  I downvote answers because at least some elements are incorrect.  In both cases I want to make it clear that I disagree with something in the contents of the post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there are some who think that posting a question is easy: posting a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; question is easy, but posting good question is hard given the immense backlog of questions already on the site.  I’m not surprised when some questions accumulate downvotes as I often recognize the symptoms I mentioned above.  Having 5 questions marks at the end of an question is the same as scoring -5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise I upvote answers and questions because I think the contents brings value to the site - well researched, well formulated, and other such positive reasons.  When questions score “big”, I also often recognize the symptoms that make them good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want all questions or answers to be equal, because I don’t think they are all necessarily equal, and the proxy for that is the score on the question or the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, just maybe, if some people were a little more patient and could afford the time to do basic due diligence on their questions (and sometimes on answers), there would be fewer downvotes overall, but I doubt this will happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T02:01:22.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12919" CreationDate="2020-05-24T05:41:13.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I can understand from your question, you seem to say that &lt;em&gt;&quot;replace the downvote button with a '?' button&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. But that wouldn't really make any difference, except not showing a negative score. Practically, the downvotes would now be substituted by &quot;?&quot;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you are proposing that we need to provide a feedback after we click on that &quot;?&quot;, then honestly, if I would have to write the reason for every downvote I cast, I would probably cast lesser downvotes, which is not at all healthy for the site. It discourages downvoting, and that's why it doesn't seem appropriate. And anyways, if anyone wants to, willingly, acknowledge and explain their downvote, they can comment on the post. Making it compulsory is not at all the right way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And downvotes are far more effective in conveying the fact (to the OP) that the post has some issues with it. I don't think any of the help-vampires would take &quot;?&quot; seriously. So, all in all, it isn't a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get a few downvotes on any of your post, first check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; tomdecide that whether your question/answer is even on-topic/acceptable (respectively) on this site. If not, the downvotes are completely justified. If it's on topic/acceptable (but it was still downvoted), then ask for the clarification from the downvoter in the comments and act accordingly to improve upon your post. At last, if you don't get any response, try asking about it in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and request for feedback. And at the end of the day, keep in mind that these are, after all, internet points and they are there just to indicate that someone thinks that there's something wrong with your post. There's no reason to take them personally :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user258881" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T05:41:13.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12919" CreationDate="2020-05-24T07:42:40.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that cast a downvote is just feedback about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in my view/opinion in some of these sites Stack Exchange a post can receive such  quantity of downvotes in a small lapse of time that I don't understand. I don't understand if it is useful for some person (even the situation is that maybe there were downvotes but not feedback in comments about the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view/opinion also is important to consider the impact for the account of the OP, if he/she was asking with good faith/intention (as usual) a &lt;em&gt;bad or poor post&lt;/em&gt;. I (mean) am evoking the situation that I believe that is true: that there is a statistic about upvotes and downvotes that I need to consider for my account, because if I edit &lt;em&gt;bad posts&lt;/em&gt; and get many downvotes this maybe can to have consequences*. And yes, I have fear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I think that is right cast downvotes because I think that it is a need, but in certain circumstances can be good to limit the number of downvotes per post, and to consider how many downvotes can get a New Contributor in his/her first few posts (in particular the first post, after the first few minutes/hours that was published). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, a simple counter for the &quot;?&quot; clicks, after that certain number of downvotes were casted can be useful and interesting to modulate some situations or circumstances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250478" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T07:42:40.070" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12925" CreationDate="2020-05-25T23:10:48.043" Score="-3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why this was closed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/554590/&quot;&gt;Does a single photon have a constant cross sectional energy?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93338" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T13:25:57.707" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T13:25:57.707" Title="Why was my question, on the 'cross sectional energy' of a photon, closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12924" CreationDate="2020-05-26T09:40:57.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a degree of sympathy for your position, and had I seen the question before it was closed I would have posted an answer. But my answer would be that you have misunderstood what we mean by the term &lt;em&gt;photon&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/303132/do-photons-truly-exist-in-a-physical-sense-or-are-they-just-a-useful-concept-lik&quot;&gt;Do photons truly exist in a physical sense or are they just a useful concept like $i = \sqrt{-1}$?&lt;/a&gt; Photons are only a useful concept when energy is being exchanged i.e. when the light is being created or absorbed. For a propagating wave they are rarely a useful way to describe the wave. Instead we would use the concept of a coherent state, and this state can be delocalised to an arbitrary extent so there is no single well defined spatial extent - it depends on the degree of delocalisation of the state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question here (as opposed to answering the question that was closed) your question was closed because it was based upon a fundamental misapprehension and therefore could not be answered. As I said at the outset I would have answered, but only to explain why the question was meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T09:40:57.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-26T14:00:43.693" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a problem to be solved (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/554896/10196&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and an answer that brings all the necessary calculation steps (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/72682/10196&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). I can't do the calculations myself because I don't have enough knowledge and skills. I went through cited answer seven times and still fail to even start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I should close my question as being homework-like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta question is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12886/10196&quot;&gt;my previous meta question&lt;/a&gt; with the difference that I was asking there whether I can ask for helping me find proper equations and solution. Here solution is given and only calculations, that are far beyond my abilities, must be performed. I guess that this mandates my main site question as off-topic. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As suggested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12886/10196&quot;&gt;my previous meta question&lt;/a&gt;, I have used chat to seek for help, but no one responded to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10196" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T14:13:23.510" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T14:13:23.510" Title="Are &quot;Do this calculations for me&quot; question allowed here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-05-26T14:52:22.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:40:17.823" Score="6" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked a question about how to figure out how fast a room will cool, and what the name for this type of problem is, so I can do more research, and potentially find the answer to it in the responses, or if someone tells me what type of problem it is, by searching Google for the right phrases and doing more reading. The question was closed as &quot;homework&quot; within seconds. I am not in school; I am currently very hot and trying to figure out how long it will take for the room to cool so I can get some sleep. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/555133/265682&quot;&gt;Open window in hot room, how fast will temperature equalize?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among other reasons I have found answers here difficult to Google for so I am hoping that by asking the question in my own words, it will be easier for others to find the answer by searching on Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tens of thousands of reputation points on other sites; I understand how Stack Exchange norms work, in a general sense. I read several pages of linked search results and related questions to see if my question had been asked before; it hadn't, as far as I could tell (all of the other answers I read about room cooling involve AC units.) I also read this question on the meta site, and edited the question I wrote to demonstrate the work I'd done. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12776/265682&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12776/265682&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just curious about the underlying moderation principle. Why would this question be marked as on-topic, if mine is marked as off topic? &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/234646/265682&quot;&gt;How quickly does the temperature rise in a water container submerged in a hot water bath?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="265682" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T15:52:17.617" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T07:47:25.140" Title="Question with broad application closed as homework question" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12927" CreationDate="2020-05-27T16:12:55.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for the moderator who closed the question, but I will point out a part of the closure banner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homework-like&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; questions and check-my-work questions are considered off-topic here, &lt;strong&gt;particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts.&lt;/strong&gt; (Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is asking for a formula or specific computation of the time it takes for something to reach a certain temperature. You are not asking about the underlying physical processes that would cause this to happen. Something that I think would be more on-topic is if you were asking how hot air and cold air come to equilibrium or why certain properties of the air (temperature, volume, humidity, heat capacity etc.) affect the time it takes to reach equilibrium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this view too strict? Possibly. I am just giving my opinion here (I did vote to keep the question closed). IMO I tend to be one of the more stricter users when it comes to question closure. If other users think it should be opened, that is fine too. This is why we have the voting process in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to the question you link to, I think that one should have been closed as well. If not for the same reason yours was, for the reason that it is not focused. It asks multiple questions in a single post, which is also a closure reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving some of my comments on this post to my answer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things to keep in mind &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site policies as well as the users' implementation of them have changed over time, so the older the question the more likely it is that it could have been handled much differently then than now. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can always find examples of pairs of similar questions where one was closed and the other was not. Whether or not a question is closed depends on a lot of factors, such as which users see it, who decides to VTC, who accesses the close queue, etc. Especially in this case had the moderator not seen this question then who knows where we would be at? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, while comparing questions can be useful, I don't think we can always just say &quot;well this one wasn't closed, so mine shouldn't be either&quot;. For example, there are instances of actual homework questions (nearly a copy and paste from the text book) that just don't get closed for whatever reason. Should we allow all homework questions? I don't think anyone would say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;This says &quot;homework-like&quot;, not &quot;homework&quot;. Therefore, whether or not you are in school is irrelevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T07:47:25.140" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T07:47:25.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-28T14:21:46.700" Score="-1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I included a comment that I thought was hilarious (of course, not. I just thought it was a bit humorous) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/555094/20427&quot;&gt;a recent answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;. However, &lt;code&gt;@user76284&lt;/code&gt; removed the comment by editing the answer, documenting that they were &quot;removing irrelevant political comment&quot;, see the edit log for details. I don't think this was necessary as it was a simple joke related to a political topic, not a &quot;political comment&quot; per se. Of course, I can edit it back myself but I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn if there is a policy around the inclusion of jokes in posts (to be clear, the comment comprised of ~25 characters in a post comprising of ~5000 characters). I think it's a common practice to include jokes and I don't see an issue with it so long as they don't take up a significant fraction of the volume of the post and aren't very offensive, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T15:42:27.593" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T16:38:09.510" Title="What's the policy around a jocular political comment within a post?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12929" CreationDate="2020-05-28T14:32:43.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What looks like a joke to you can often look like an offensive or otherwise harmful comment to others, &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; when politics is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make a political comment on a post, and it is not &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; relevant to the physics under discussion (hint: it basically never is), then be prepared for it to be removed, regardless of how much you thought of it as a joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T14:32:43.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12929" CreationDate="2020-05-28T14:47:51.657" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't really have a policy around jokes - they are, for better or worse, mostly irrelevant. Some users like to include humor in their posts, others don't. In general, this falls squarely under the domain of &lt;em&gt;authorial intent&lt;/em&gt; and I'd reject any edit removing or adding jokes as being counter to the author's intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in your particular case, I'd advise you to look not for some sort of generic policy about jokes, but just look at what was removed and with what reason: A user edited out, in their own words, &quot;irrelevant political commentary&quot;. They didn't edit it out because it was a joke, so any policy about jokes is completely irrelevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is pure (and slightly hyperbolic) speculation on my part about the specific motivations of the editor, and I do not want this to turn into a discussion about the merits of socialism. That I felt I had to write the latter part of the preceding sentence is further evidence still that this &quot;joke&quot; might be construed as &quot;political commentary&quot;, and in particular might detract considerably from our primary goal of discussing physics here. Note also that &quot;I didn't mean it that way!&quot; is a valid response to what follows, but ultimately doesn't change anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They edited it out because your &quot;joke&quot; puts the &lt;em&gt;real-world political belief&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Socialism never works!&quot; in the same category as the well-meaning but ultimately absurd other comments of the people criticizing the curious kid in the story. As a metaphor, you &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; intended to say that socialism is a smart idea just like the measurement idea of that kid in the story, and that any detractors of socialism are as misguided and anti-scientific as the people saying the kid's idea won't work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's a prime example of political commentary, which generally isn't what we expect in a technical answer about special relativity. The editor likely saved you from any non-socialists engaging you in a spirited comment discussion about that phrase!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T15:03:39.567" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T15:03:39.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12929" CreationDate="2020-05-28T14:53:22.787" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's your answer, and if you don't like an edit you can and should roll it back. It is a fundamental principle on the Stack Exchange that the person who wrote the post has the final say on edits to it. Of course this may get your post downvoted and ultimately deleted if it is genuinely offensive, nevertheless this is your perogative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, if someone goes to the effort of editing your post it means they think the edit makes the post better, and you should seriously consider whether they might be right. Over the years I have had many of my posts edited and I have rarely found reason to roll back the edits. As a general rule I find that members of this community take it seriously and take editing seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case I found the deleted sentence perfectly harmless, though I have to admit I didn't find it funny either. In your place I would let the edit stand. I am prone to slipping witty asides into my answers on the grounds they make me laugh even if no-one else even notices, and they are only rarely edited out - but then they are only rarely funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T14:53:22.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12929" CreationDate="2020-05-28T16:38:09.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there’s nothing inherently wrong about inserting jokes or jocular comments, the fact that someone chose to edit this one out because it was perceived as something else should be sufficient signal to keep it out, especially as it is not essential to the post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T16:38:09.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-29T17:24:13.507" Score="10" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt;: please make MathJax formatting more discoverable to new users, by adding it to the post formatting wizard.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange dev team &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344513/the-new-ask-page-is-now-live-on-the-network&quot;&gt;recently released a new version of the Ask page&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12748/lets-make-the-best-of-the-new-ask-page-design-for-this-site&quot;&gt;we've gone through some of what we can do to make the best of it&lt;/a&gt; (though there still remains a fair amount of work for this community to do on that front). Part of what came up on the initial go-through is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12755/8563&quot;&gt;we want new users to have a smooth road (i) to finding out that maths can be formatted using LaTeX / MathJax syntax, and (ii) to a good tutorial that shows them how to use it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to some extent, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/344706/184688&quot;&gt;this has already been raised on the initial thread on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, so it's presumably already on the books for the dev team to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/348642/what-posts-should-be-escalated-to-staff-using-status-review-and-how-do-i-esca&quot;&gt;the CM team just detailed the types of posts that they want per-site metas to raise to their attention&lt;/a&gt;, and they've specifically asked us to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;give [them] a top 5 of outstanding site-specific customizations from your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that this feature is in that top 5. And, it seems, we need to make a substantial show of support (i.e. a strong consensus shown on meta scores) for this feature to get the investment of developer hours that it needs to be implemented before the dev team shifts their attention to other parts of the software. In the terms laid out by the CM team,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/344513&quot;&gt;that particular warning that would help your new askers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;features that need dev time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this needs dev time. But yes, this feature deserves that dev time, and no, it's not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much dev time. (CMs: or is it? honest question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;features that are only applicable to your site are unlikely to be given a high priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not Physics-specific &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; there are plenty of other sites that use MathJax, and this would positively impact the friendliness of their new-user experience as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, without further ado, let me pull from my previous answer on MSE regarding how that feature could look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There should be indications on the top and bottom of the formatting tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVeVk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVeVk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The pullout should have a brief description of how to invoke math as well as a link to a suitable tutorial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lo8VY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lo8VY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Physics we use &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;the Mathematics SE tutorial&lt;/a&gt; as the standard resource; presumably that link direction could be freed for other sites to choose as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There should be a link to the tutorial at least &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; on the page even if the formatting tips have been collapsed by the user. It used to look &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vfP1W.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt; on Physics before the change; equivalent functionality should be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T15:34:41.553" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T17:24:13.507" Title="Please make MathJax formatting more discoverable to new users" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|new-users|ask-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-05-30T11:07:31.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-02T07:45:38.123" Score="17" ViewCount="765" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/348746/were-switching-to-commonmark&quot;&gt;announced on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; that we'll switch all sites on the Stack Exchange network to &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonmark.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CommonMark&lt;/a&gt;, a standardized and well-supported Markdown flavor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read up on the details in the post on Meta.SE if you're curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll maintain an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/348750/507720&quot;&gt;evolving migration schedule&lt;/a&gt; to show which site is supposed to switch over to CommonMark when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've got to learn and reflect as we're starting out migrating the first few sites, that's why you'll see that the migration schedule is still pretty empty except for a few sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics (both, meta and the main site) are going to be among the first sites to be migrated and we've scheduled them to be migrated on &lt;strong&gt;Thursday, June 4th, 2020&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why start with Physics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've tested the migration thoroughly on data that resembles production data of some of our communities. Still, we know that certain sites use different styles of writing and there's a chance we're going to detect some issues that we haven't found yet when running our tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is a site that's suitable for fast feedback for two reasons: it's a site we can migrate quickly with its ~400k posts and it's a site that makes heavy use of MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry, MathJax is going to keep working after the migration. However, we want to be double-certain that we're not missing any edge cases, that's why we want to migrate a site with MathJax support first to spot edge cases early and get them out of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can this break existing posts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want to break hundreds and thousands of posts. That's why the migration will only apply updates to those posts that will look exactly the same after being updated to CommonMark. As part of the migration, we'll detect if a post changes visually after the CommonMark update. If it does, we won't update the post automatically and investigate what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if stuff goes wrong?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If things should go horribly wrong, we've got an automated rollback in place that will undo the migration for all posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="266311" LastEditorUserId="266311" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T06:44:31.093" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T06:44:31.093" Title="Physics has switched to CommonMark" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|markdown|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12936" CreationDate="2020-06-02T13:32:51.020" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good news, then!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a user discovers a post that renders incorrectly after the transition. Should that user fix the problem themselves, or cast a custom flag for the diamond moderators, or leave a message at this question, or do something else?  (possibly including nothing at all?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T13:32:51.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12936" CreationDate="2020-06-02T15:20:46.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;How can we help?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to do my part to help this come off smoothly, but I'm not sure how and where we can help. The Mother-Meta announcement mentions the possibility that the migration will break (in the sense that the new html will be different to the old one) for a fraction of the posts, and that when this happens the migration will be discarded and the old html will be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this sounds like it calls for human intervention as a slow go-through by hand of all the failed markdown migrations &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; I would much rather have a community effort to go through these and make sure everything is OK before some inattentive editor does something else on the post, fails to notice something breaking, and pushes the re-render through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will there be a centralized place where we can see the posts whose markdown migration has been flagged by the system, and edit them into the new renderer? If the renderer is getting bumped when you edit, will this be visible to the editor? (Say, as a banner on the Edit page saying that the renderer bumped and that extra care must be taken to ensure nothing is broken?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a quick partial answer -- it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/348882/184688&quot;&gt;seems&lt;/a&gt; that the list of edited posts get attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=profile&quot;&gt;Community ♦&lt;/a&gt; and will be shown on its Revisions listing. For Meta SE they've started to come in (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=revisions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but on Physics they haven't at the time of this writing -- presumably they will show up &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=revisions&quot;&gt;on this listing page&lt;/a&gt; once posts start being edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably this can be queried from SEDE once the data there gets updated, but in this form it cannot be used to query for failed CommonMark migrations, as the SEDE data cannot distinguish them from posts that already complied with the CommonMark spec, if I understand correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T10:17:26.700" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T10:17:26.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-02T19:23:40.937" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been deterred to ask for a brief translation of an old physics Russian paper in the stack. Is it valid to ask such a question according to the policies of the site? If not, could it be worth to include such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking only in certain paragraphs in the paper that could be of importance, not the whole translation or a nutshell of the entire paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42691" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2023-08-17T23:35:46.167" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T23:35:46.167" Title="Is it valid to ask for a brief translation for a paper in a foreign language?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|language|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2020-06-02T20:50:23.300" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't see asking for a translation of a paper to be in scope for Physics. First, it really isn't a question of physics, and second it likely has little value to anyone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might try asking for help over in the Russian Language chat, or asking around your institution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T20:50:23.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-02T23:25:33.347" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past week, I've had two different questions closed as homework questions. In both questions, I &lt;em&gt;included&lt;/em&gt; textbook problems that motivated my conceptual question, but in neither case was &lt;em&gt;solving&lt;/em&gt; the textbook problem the essence of my question. I am concerned that the voters, seeing that the questions were of a relatively elementary nature and included textbook material, have closed these questions on reflex without taking note of the substance of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/556504/is-the-elastic-modulus-needed-to-solve-this-question&quot;&gt;Is the elastic modulus needed to solve this question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question, I asked if the question as posed in the textbook&#xA;is internally consistent. I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do the computations and get an&#xA;answer (close to) the textbook's answer, but the textbook also gives&#xA;other information that may or may not be extraneous to the solution.&#xA;My question is about whether elastic tension is capable of producing&#xA;the geometry described: conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/555604/why-do-tension-forces-count-towards-the-force-balance-constraints-but-not-the-t&quot;&gt;Why do tension forces count towards the force-balance constraints, but not the torque constraint?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I concede that this question lacks a bit of focus, but again, I made it clear in the post that I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking for someone to check my computations. I was trying to reconcile two different approaches to force-balance equations that I have encountered: one where you try to balance the forces &quot;into&quot; and &quot;out of&quot; each node, and another where you balance the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y$&lt;/span&gt; forces acting on the origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited this question once to remove the details of the solution and emphasize my conceptual questions, but it was quickly closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the meta pages on homework and check-my-work questions and I cannot see which policy my posts violate. Could anyone shed some light on why they were closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262628" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T13:59:14.200" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T03:06:49.150" Title="Low-level conceptual questions closed as homework questions when using HW question as motivating example" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12941" CreationDate="2020-06-03T01:11:09.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on a quick look, I believe you're correct that these questions should not have been closed under our existing homework policy. Questions are supposed to be closed as homework-like when they are asking for &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; with solving the problem (or asking for solutions outright, or variants on that type of thing). If a question is asking something conceptual that happens to be motivated by a homework problem or educational exercise, as is the case with yours, that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to make a hasty decision, so I'm not going to act on this right away, but I anticipate reopening your questions unless other people want to post here and argue for them to remain closed (or unless there's something pretty major that I missed in my initial assessment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I do notice is that your questions are a bit long, particularly the second one. That's not a problem in its own right, but it can make it difficult for readers to identify what you're actually asking and thereby convince themselves that your question is not homework-like. So, while you're waiting for responses here, you might want to review your questions to see if there are ways you could either shorten them or reorganize them to make it more clear what you're asking. Strategic use (but not overuse!) of paragraph breaks, headings, display-style equations, bold text, and other formatting can also make a question easier to parse even if it is long. (Though to be honest, I think you've done a better job of that than many people who post here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to note in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/555604&quot;&gt;your second question&lt;/a&gt; is that you're asking multiple distinct questions at the end. We tend to like our questions pretty focused, so it helps if you can reduce your question down so it only asks one thing, or at least has one main question and a few secondary questions that can logically be considered parts of the main one. That doesn't seem to be the case with the question I linked earlier in this paragraph, and thus people might want to argue that it should remain on hold with the &quot;needs more focus&quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T01:11:09.530" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12941" CreationDate="2020-06-03T12:22:45.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, just so we are on the same page here, these are the versions of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/556504/2&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/555604/2&quot;&gt;second&lt;/a&gt; questions before they were closed. They did not have the conceptual questions you claim that they had when they were closed, and they are much more off topic than they are now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like what you have done is asked questions that should have been closed, but then came to meta and only pointed out the good parts of your posts (which were edited in after closure, not before like you seem to suggest). However, if you really were trying to ask the conceptual questions you have stated here, you can easily edit the posts to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general note, just putting something in a question like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I made it clear in the post that I am not asking for someone to check my computations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;doesn't make it true. If your question looks like a &quot;check my work&quot; question then there is a good reason to close it, even if you say it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, onto the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first one let's start with the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the elastic modulus needed to solve this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definitely doesn't help your case here. The title suggests that your goal is to solve the problem, not to ask a conceptual physics problem &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now onto your bold question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What explains the discrepancy between these answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is in bold, it seems to be your main focus. But this makes it look like a &quot;check my work&quot; question. &quot;I have these different attempts, but they don't work. Why do they not work?&quot; In addition to the title, this also gives the impression of the question being off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now onto what you claim the question was about in this meta post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is about whether elastic tension is capable of producing the geometry described: conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then ask that! If you actually have a conceptual question, then make this the focus of the post; don't hide it in the middle of the question, make the title about solving the problem, and put in bold the &quot;check my work&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the first question stands, I still think it should be closed. It can be edited to bee worth reopening though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your second question, for now let's ignore that the many questions at the end of the post give reason for the question to be closed as needing more focus (which has been fixed since posting this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the entire homework problem and your calculations are nearly irrelevant to the questions you ask at the end. Just like before, if you have conceptual questions then ask them. I would strip down the homework problem to just the system and not even ask the entire problem. Include the picture with just the description, and don't include all of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think this second question should be closed as it currently is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the theme here is &lt;strong&gt;if you have a conceptual question then ask that conceptual question&lt;/strong&gt;. Don't bury it in calculations and requests to point out what is wrong in those calculations. Additionally, do this from the beginning. Don't do this after the question was closed and then claim to have been asking the conceptual questions the entire time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T03:06:49.150" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T03:06:49.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12936" CreationDate="2020-06-04T05:17:53.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More precisely, what time and date and timezone does this go live?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on Thursday, June 4th, 2020&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but of course that means different things to different people, so could we get the time and date more precisely from you that the switch happens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is there a specific time when we will be presented with a completely translated site or is this translation (of old posts) being done as they are fetched by normal access or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T15:19:11.870" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T15:19:11.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12936" CreationDate="2020-06-04T15:57:27.707" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tracking the current state to keep you updated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;physics.&lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt;.stackexchange.com has been migrated successfully. CommonMark is now active&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've started probing physics.stackexchange.com (no changes are being persisted). CommonMark is &lt;em&gt;still disabled&lt;/em&gt; and I'm double-checking that MathJax rendering is going to stay sane. Will continue with the real migration as soon as I'm certain that we're good here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The differences we're detecting are expected but our migration script is being overly cautious. Doing a first real migration run right now. I will patch up some things to do a second run tomorrow to fix those posts that haven't been caught in the first run. That means that &lt;strong&gt;commonmark is enabled for physics&lt;/strong&gt; starting now and posts are being migrated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally managed to complete the re-run for the physics main and meta sites. Everything's migrated now - calling this done. Thanks for your patience!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="266311" LastEditorUserId="266311" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T09:48:57.983" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T09:48:57.983" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2020-06-06T05:28:05.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking such questions are not about physics... and not even questions - which is why they are equally unlikely to be welcome in the SE language sites. Thus, while one reasonably hopes that members of the physics community are more qualified to do such translations (and know well the sources), it is not an appropriate place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect of it is that (technical) translation is a hard job requiring high qualifications and time. Asking someone to do it for free or merely for an upvote is an abuse of trust - this is my personal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T05:28:05.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12886" CreationDate="2020-06-06T05:34:48.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it depends on how much calculations are involved. In my opinion, asking people to do a lot of work for the sake of an upvote is unfair. Of course, no one is obliged to do any calculations for you... but people often get passionately engaged in a discussion and may end up actually doing the calculations requested and thus losing a lot of time on an ungrateful task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T05:34:48.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2020-06-07T16:10:09.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this could be done as a &lt;em&gt;resource request&lt;/em&gt; under existing tags, as you are in essence looking for a resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is an argument for making these type of question (technical translation requests) an explicit category (tag) of their own with the proviso that such questions are for translations of small parts - not long documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we've all found old papers we would like to read or examine but which are in languages (and old versions of languages at that) which we do not have the knowledge to translate.  As they are technical documents these require specialist knowledge to properly translate.  I think it's not unreasonable to ask for help from Physics SE and for Physics SE to supply it when someone can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems pointless having a global membership on Physics SE and not accepting that as an asset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T16:10:09.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12950" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:22:01.807" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does an accepted edit to a question allow the subsequent withdrawal of an earlier answer (which had been posted to it) to be accomplished without any resulting potential for limiting or reducing the answerer's ability to post further answers? (If I would've read the biographical info offered by the questioner, I would not have bothered to post an answer almost certain to endure forever--for reasons of conscience-- without their acceptance, but the reading of biographies is hardly what the site is about.)  I'm aware that answers with a zero score can be a factor in an answer ban, which would render the entire site virtually useless to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T19:31:47.480" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T17:38:38.467" Title="Answer posted with extremely little potential for acceptance" Tags="|discussion|answers|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12949" CreationDate="2020-06-07T19:22:31.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are worried about an answer ban, you should not delete answers. See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8851/44126&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/24803/166791&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (although those define an positive contribution record for questions, rather than answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is been edited in a way that invalidates existing answers, that's bad form. Usually the community's response is to revert the meaning-changing edit and engage in a dialog with the editor --- sometimes in the comments, and sometimes escalating to Meta. If you're involved in such a discussion and it's not going well, you can summon the diamond moderators by flagging the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T17:38:38.467" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T17:38:38.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12954" CreationDate="2020-06-08T05:44:09.887" Score="4" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/556441/finding-the-amplitude-for-the-pair-production-gammap-1-gamma-p-2-to-e&quot;&gt;this bountied question&lt;/a&gt;, which is currently a week old. In my opinion, it’s a homework-like question about QED. But no one has yet voted to close it as homework-like, nor has it been closed by a moderator. So is it OK for me to answer it, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point of putting up a bounty is that the OP expects a complete answer. But homework-like questions aren’t supposed to receive complete answers, or even any answer at all. I don’t want to spend time answering it if my answer is just going to get deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T07:14:52.100" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T15:49:55.030" Title="Bountied homework-like question about QED" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|bounty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12951" CreationDate="2020-06-08T06:46:50.570" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view is that you should answer. I would post an answer if I could but the question is far outside my price range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no wish to restart the agonising debate about homework, but for what it's worth my main aim when I answer a question is to help the OP learn something new and/or understand something that they hadn't previously appreciated. Questions set on advanced topics are almost never simple &lt;em&gt;crank the handle&lt;/em&gt; type questions, but rather they are designed to help the student learn more about a difficult subject. This was the point of my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5369/graduate-and-above-level-questions-arent-homework&quot;&gt;Graduate and above level questions aren&amp;#39;t homework&lt;/a&gt;, and that got a considerable number of upvotes though not everyone agreed with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T06:46:50.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12839" CreationDate="2020-06-08T13:27:53.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be useful to have the MathJax help link (at Math Meta) in the &lt;strong&gt;Your Answer&lt;/strong&gt; menu bar in addition to the Question Dialog.  It would help both new and experienced users who are giving answers have that resource while constructing an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also help new users to realize that they should use MathJax rather than taking photos of textbooks to supplement an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T13:27:53.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12951" CreationDate="2020-06-08T15:49:55.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/556441/finding-the-amplitude-for-the-pair-production-gammap-1-gamma-p-2-to-e#comment1260423_556441&quot;&gt;refunded the bounty on this question&lt;/a&gt; so that a regular close review can occur. Users thinking this question should be closed/stay open are invited to vote on it as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the review ends with the question staying open, a bounty can be offered again and answers to it will not be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T15:49:55.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12956" CreationDate="2020-06-08T23:17:58.877" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/152812&quot;&gt;general policy on resource recommendation&lt;/a&gt;, I was not able to answer if paper/book identification qualifies as an on-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/349133/383809&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt; that asks about a particular physics book based on its visual description, content, and particular citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that type of questions be on-topic? Should it be tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152812" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T03:24:57.283" Title="Are book/reference identification questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12955" CreationDate="2020-06-09T03:24:57.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can give you a partial answer: if they are on topic, these questions should be tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;. The difference is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; questions ask for a general class of resources related to a certain topic, where the set of resources that constitute valid answers is large and probably grows over time; on the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; questions have one particular resource which is the correct answer and will always be the only correct answer. Identification questions like the one you linked are looking for a single specific resource and therefore fall into the latter category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as for whether these questions are on topic... personally, my instinct is to say no, but to be honest if we only see them very rarely, it's probably not a problem to have a few of these questions around. I guess what I'm concerned about is that these questions are straying into the subject area of books, i.e. they're questions about books rather than questions about physics. I don't want this site to be about books. But any class of questions that we get only a few rare examples of probably isn't doing any harm one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T03:24:57.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12958" CreationDate="2020-06-09T11:48:53.393" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/558154/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. Before posting, I added the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/length-contraction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;length-contraction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;length-contraction&lt;/a&gt;, but after posting, only the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt; tag remained. I tried multiple times to edit in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/length-contraction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;length-contraction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;length-contraction&lt;/a&gt; tag, but it wouldn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then tried adding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-dilation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-dilation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-dilation&lt;/a&gt; tag, and it worked perfectly. It seems that this bug is only happening for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/length-contraction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;length-contraction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;length-contraction&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254295" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T12:24:50.513" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T12:24:50.513" Title="Adding length-contraction tag won't work" Tags="|support|tags|editing|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12957" CreationDate="2020-06-09T12:16:53.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/length-contraction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;length-contraction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;length-contraction&lt;/a&gt; tag was made a synonym of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt; tag in 2014. FYI, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/special-relativity/synonyms&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of the current synonyms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/special-relativity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;special-relativity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;special-relativity&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T12:16:53.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-13T14:39:16.317" Score="-5" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a physicist, when you are tackling some new problem, shouldn't the first thing that comes to your mind be a rough idea? Why can't you answer questions with those rough ideas first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math is just a comprehensive and precise language. Lots of times, we are not academics asking a precise description; an impression is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equations, solving functions, yield results. Sometimes, we are not asking for a precise result. The question could be why you decided to use those equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many equations dealt with ensemble behavior of a lots of tiny particles. Lots of times, we might want some intuitive microscopic understanding of individual actions that lead to the ensemble behavior of the equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I just want some explanation like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiHN0ZWE5bk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why does light travel slower in glass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118042" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-06-13T15:20:56.390" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T15:25:14.697" Title="Why is everyone so keen to answer physics questions by writing down tons of equations?" Tags="|discussion|scope|answers|content-level|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-06-14T23:34:02.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12959" CreationDate="2020-06-13T15:21:47.373" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is more than one kind of physics question, and more than one kind of physics answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions ask for getting an &amp;quot;idea&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;intuition&amp;quot; of how something works, understanding the physical principles at work more than the underlying equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions ask about specific parts of a derivation, or a rigorous argument for a hand-wavy explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that the latter will naturally attract more &amp;quot;equation-heavy&amp;quot; answers than the former. (I'm not saying these two kinds of questions are the only kinds of questions, just choosing these two to make a point here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also sometimes the case, especially when asking about concepts in theoretical physics, and especially where quantum theory is involved, that questions of the first kind will invariably attract answers saying there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no simple &amp;quot;intuition&amp;quot;, and then show the formal way of understanding the phenomenon. (Whether or not these answers are  always right is another matter and likely depends on what, exactly, we consider &amp;quot;intuitive&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't anything wrong with any of these questions or answers, and they're all welcome here. We can have multiple answers to a question precisely because we recognize that there are often multiple ways of tackling a question, and answers can greatly differ in their use of mathematical rigor, equations and anything else, really. The existence of formula-heavy answers does not diminish the less mathematical ones, nor the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T15:21:47.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12959" CreationDate="2020-06-13T15:25:14.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this question is at least partially based on some bias in what answers you notice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes you think everyone is keen to answer questions based on equations instead of explanations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One obvious example that comes to my mind is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/242949/marco-ocram&quot;&gt;Marco Ocram&lt;/a&gt;, who gained over 5k reputation in less than 8 months, and specifically states in his profile &amp;quot;My special interest is explaining the ideas of physics without resorting to maths&amp;quot;; which is typically how he answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second example (and why I felt this was pretty biased) is myself.  I will frequently write answers with many equations, if it seems like that is what is required to answer the question; but typically I avoid it if it's not needed.  On &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/127931/jmac?tab=answers&quot;&gt;my answers&lt;/a&gt;, literally my 10 highest scored answers don't have &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side of things, some users would &lt;em&gt;prefer&lt;/em&gt; to answer with equations, because that is how they like to explain it.  I do not see this as problematic.  Just like some users prefer to explain using equations, others would prefer to learn that way as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context is also very important, sometimes it is more appropriate to use equations to illustrate a point, sometimes that is necessary in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like you are looking for more answers that include descriptions instead of math.  That is perfectly fine.  If you have those questions, you can ask them yourself, and make sure to point out that you aren't looking for equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If similar questions already exist, you may have to explain why your question is different, or put a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; on the existing question asking for a non-math explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T15:25:14.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12936" CreationDate="2020-06-18T00:50:19.167" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rendering of mathematical material has gotten way, way slower since the changeover.  This makes it more of a pain to write and edit answers with mathematics in them, especially since any change to a mathematical expression causes all the math in a post to be re-rendered, which can take (I timed up) upwards of fifteen seconds.  This makes even small changes very hard to verify, waiting around to see whether what you have typed was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T00:50:19.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12965" CreationDate="2020-06-18T19:39:57.183" Score="13" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am talking about stuff like principle/principal, its/it's, your/you're, effect/affect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I correct these things even though the meaning of the question/answer is clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it come across as rude, or as an &amp;quot;overkill&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T12:47:12.927" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T12:47:12.927" Title="Can I correct grammar in questions/answers even if the message is clear?" Tags="|discussion|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12963" CreationDate="2020-06-18T19:57:59.553" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;Yes, please do&lt;/a&gt;.  Such changes make the site easier to use for all readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T19:57:59.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12963" CreationDate="2020-06-18T20:00:35.240" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if it is by a small amount, corrections like these still improve the clarity of the post. However, I would encourage you to follow the advice of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt;, and look to see if there are any other problems you can correct while you are editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T20:00:35.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12968" CreationDate="2020-06-19T18:52:51.280" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;My fault, when assigning bounty to his question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/558268/&quot;&gt;Lagrangian mechanics, infinitesimal movements expressed in coordinate basis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've pushed on an answer not the expected one (yes, even after the warning about impossible of undo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can moderators undo the action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I at least open a second bounty to reward the other answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164884" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T19:02:55.547" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T19:11:31.150" Title="Error on bounty assignment" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12967" CreationDate="2020-06-19T19:11:31.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty help page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All bounties are paid for up front and non-refundable under any circumstances.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additionally, if you offer multiple bounties on the same question, the minimum spend doubles with each subsequent bounty (50 reputation on the first bounty, 100 reputation on the second, 200 on the third, and so on).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a minor exception to the bolded statement. Since bountied questions can't be closed by ordinary users, sometimes we will refund a bounty in order to close a question. But we don't have the tools to refund a bounty that's been awarded already. I can imagine a lot of mischief and bad feelings that could come from such a power, even if its users intended well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly can offer an additional bounty on the same question. If it's not available immediately after awarding your first one, try waiting a couple of days; the logic is probably like the logic which prevents a new question from being bountied immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T19:11:31.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-26T06:23:00.633" Score="-6" ViewCount="86" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/561800/which-emf-frequencies-have-the-most-spread-and-permeability&quot;&gt;Which EMF frequencies have the most spread and permeability?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has enough details and I explained that to a user in the comments,  operative word is &amp;quot;generally&amp;quot;. That user was trolling, you are engaging in the same kind of trolling by closing the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="268462" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T07:10:37.870" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T07:58:00.023" Title="Why is my question closed when it already has enough details?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12970" CreationDate="2020-06-26T07:58:00.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the close voters that your question is unclear, and I've elaborated in a comment there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe another user is behaving in a way that violates our community standards, you should use the flagging system to bring the situation to the attention of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamond moderators&lt;/a&gt;, which include me. I have to say that there is no evidence from your question or its comments (deleted or extant) that you have been the victim of any &amp;quot;trolling,&amp;quot; disingenuousness, or even impoliteness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd love to help answer your question; we just don't yet understand what your question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T07:58:00.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-26T11:11:43.800" Score="6" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/561758/60646&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/561756/60646&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and it was deleted as a &amp;quot;complete answer&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think can be counted as a complete answer, as I left out all the mathematical details to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60646" LastEditorUserId="238167" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T04:32:40.663" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T05:05:10.357" Title="Why was this answer deleted as a &quot;complete answer to a homework question&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12972" CreationDate="2020-06-26T12:01:15.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer is &amp;quot;it's not possible&amp;quot;, then you have supplied a full solution. However, if you think the answer should be there then raise a custom flag explaining why you think so. A moderator will review it and decide if your answer should come back or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T12:01:15.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12975" CreationDate="2020-06-26T16:00:29.653" Score="9" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are badges awarded (&amp;quot;excavator&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;archaeologist&amp;quot;) for editing old posts; it is clear that encouraging this can improve the site by ensuring that as many posts as possible are written to a high standard. However, making a large number of edits to old questions in a short space of time bumps them all to the front page, which may not always be desired. This effect is especially pronounced if someone performs a large number of small or very similar edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is making a large number of edits to old questions in a short time frame encouraged, particularly if all these edits are similar and near-trivial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197636" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:29:32.550" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T19:03:26.810" Title="Is mass editing of old posts encouraged?" Tags="|discussion|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12974" CreationDate="2020-06-26T16:40:00.077" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is making a large number of edits to old questions in a short time frame encouraged,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing old questions is indeed encouraged, in the understanding that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the thread was inactive and editing bumps it to the front page, the edit is expected to be comprehensive and fix all the stuff there is to fix, in both the question and the answers; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mass edits over a short time frame are not appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to edit a large number of old posts, do so slowly over several days so that they do not drown out other activity on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T16:40:00.077" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-28T04:07:34.327" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I provided an answer to a question, and then another user commented on my answer pointing out some mistakes. I realise my answer has serious flaws and decided to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I want to talk to that user. To follow up the discussion started in the comments. I can start a chat room, but now there is no post / comment thread where I can post the link of the chat room. I cannot find this user in any other active chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I &amp;quot;ping&amp;quot; a specific user, with no previous chat presence? Are there alternatives to chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T06:45:26.523" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T12:32:12.310" Title="How can I start a conversation with a specific user (in chat or otherwise)?" Tags="|support|chat|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:12:12.797" Score="6" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;My recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/562101&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was manually removed from Hot Network Questions and later closed as a homework question, but it eludes me why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CIZaF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CIZaF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; on homework questions, the definition of homework question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;homework question&amp;quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of my question was, on the contrary, to ask whether 13 is really the answer for the problem described in my post. The very title of my question is:  &lt;em&gt;Is 13 really the answer for the Devil's problem in physics?&lt;/em&gt; As I explicitly wrote in my question, I don't study physics. I liked physics at school, but I'm now a university student studying languages, as you can see from my posts on other SE sites. My motivation, as explicitly stated in my question, was this: &lt;em&gt;It's mystical and a bit scary if the Devil's dozen really pops out of nowhere in such a simply stated problem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't interested in learning or understanding any physics methods; my interest was to find out whether 13 is indeed the answer for the problem in question. It's the Devil's dozen that made me interested. For me, the value of the posted solutions is that they &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; that 13 is indeed the answer, not that they &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; me a method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did imply in my question that I wanted to see a solution, but that was merely because I wanted to verify. I wanted to get convinced whether 13 is the answer. And I thought that people reading my question would want to get convinced, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the posted solutions confirm that 13 is the answer, I don't really need any more answers there, but if the question remains closed, visitors won't see it and thus won't be able to appreciate the beauty of the problem and its mystical appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was well received by SE users, getting 25 upvotes and becoming followed by 12 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my question really a homework question, and if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: An answer below suggests that my question is rather a check-my-work question. However, my question doesn't fit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; of check-my-work question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's long overdue that I make this post revisiting our policy on &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; questions. These are questions, often (but not necessarily) homework-like, that present a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; mathematical or logical derivation and ask whether it's correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;complete&amp;quot; is made italic in the original definition, so it's not my emphasis. My question doesn't present any derivation at all. It merely presents a problem and asks whether its answer is 13. I asked to solve the problem. How can it be a check-my-work question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, shouldn't the rules be interpreted in view of their actual intent as well as the mission of the Physics SE? My impression is that the rules about homework and check-my-work questions are there to protect the Physics SE from boring, low-quality posts by lazy students. My question is very different. I believe I posted a very interesting high-quality problem that is especially appealing in view of its elegant and mystical answer. Such problems belong to the physics folklore, and the reaction of the community to my question speaks for itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please ask yourself a simple question: Does the post about the Devil's problem make the Physics SE a better place? I'm relatively new to the Physics SE and will trust your judgement, but I do want you to ask yourself that question. If you judge that it is to advantage of the Physics SE to hide my question from visitors, so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 2: My question got re-opened and later re-closed. I appreciate the detailed answers below, but, to be frank, I cannot but shrug my shoulders, especially when reading arguments like &amp;quot;just being interesting does not make something on-topic.&amp;quot; Sure, an interesting question about biology isn't on-topic on Physics SE, but why wouldn't an interesting question about physics be on-topic there? My question is about physics and is interesting, as evidended by its popularity. I agree that most homework-like questions should be considered off-topic, but only because they are boring and uninteresting. To put it simply, homework-like is a code word for uninteresting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if my question about the Devil's problem deserves to be closed, why doesn't my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/528714&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about a magic wall deserve the same? It's a classical homework problem, and moreover, I posted that question because a friend of mine, who studies physics, got that problem for homework. He mentioned the problem in a casual conversation with me, and this is how I got interested, which eventually led to me posting that question. So why didn't anyone vote to close it? I am perplexed by such inconsistency of your moderation. As a side remark, it's disappointing that no one on the Physics SE was able to post a valid answer for that homework problem, as my friend later learned from his university lecturer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for the sake of demonstration, I've just posted an intentionally boring, uninteresting &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/562915&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. I'm pretty sure that because of your flawed policies and practices, it will be deemed on-topic and remain open, whilst my popular question about a fascinating mechanics problem will remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253093" LastEditorUserId="253093" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T17:38:16.053" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T17:38:16.053" Title="Why was my question about the Devil's problem deemed a homework question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12977" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:23:49.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were just looking for someone to confirm that the answer to the problem was 13 without showing any work, I don't see how that would make the question a better fit for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, that would be off topic as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; type question, and a particularly bad one because no work was shown.  An answer of &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; would not be useful to future readers without a derivation of why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is better suited to conceptual questions which can be useful to future readers as well.  If, for example, you had been looking at a solution to this problem and were trying to understand how/why a specific concept was applied, that is more likely to be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;complete&amp;quot; is made italic in the original definition, so it's not my emphasis. My question doesn't present any derivation at all. It merely presents a problem and asks whether its answer is 13. I asked to solve the problem. How can it be a check-my-work question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're just asking to confirm the answer is 13, then it's clearly a very poor fit for this site. That meta question you linked does seem to single out check-my-work for complete answers; because that is a more nuanced subject.  Asking, &amp;quot;Is the answer 13, and how would you get that answer?&amp;quot; seems off topic for being a check my work &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; being a homework and exercise question to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It merely presents a problem and asks whether its answer is 13. I asked to solve the problem. How can it be a check-my-work question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked if the answer was 13, so you're asking to check &amp;quot;the work&amp;quot; (that isn't presented), and then for a solution, which seems to definitely fall against the homework and exercise policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, shouldn't the rules be interpreted in view of their actual intent as well as the mission of the Physics SE? My impression is that the rules about homework and check-my-work questions are there to protect the Physics SE from boring, low-quality posts by lazy students. My question is very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't really seem that different to me.  You presented a question and then offered no attempt to solve it.  For all we know, you &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; assigned this question, and knew the answer was 13, and decided to frame it as &amp;quot;the devil's problem&amp;quot; to get an answer as a &amp;quot;lazy student&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We treat the questions based on the content, and your question doesn't actually provide any conceptual physics question.  It's purely a physics exercised framed with the story of how you came across it.  You're just telling a story of how you doubt that answer, and want to see the solution.  When you distill out the details, it's a basic homework and exercise question, or check my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please ask yourself a simple question: Does the post about the Devil's problem make the Physics SE a better place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, no.  We have these policies because the active community here decided we don't want to be answering exercise questions for others.  We are willing to address conceptual problems that may arise when solving it, but you never attempted that.  The fact that some people thought it was good (many probably not particularly active here because it was a hot network question so people across the network can upvote it), doesn't mean it's a good fit for this site.  Having it open and in hot network questions could serve as an example to others that such questions are acceptable, which is against the current policies on the site, and could actually cause harm here in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="127931" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T16:31:14.063" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T16:31:14.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12977" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:26:06.207" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, note that not all homework related questions are off topic here. However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't interested in learning or understanding any physics methods; my interest was to find out whether 13 is indeed the answer for the problem in question. It's the Devil's dozen that made me interested. For me, the value of the posted solutions is that they prove that 13 is indeed the answer, not that they teach me a method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually precisely what makes your question off topic IMO. Homework questions that are on topic here are ones that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; ask about physics concepts and methods and &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; ask just for solutions/proofs. This is explained in the FAQ you linked to. I suggest reading it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was well received by SE users, getting 25 up votes and becoming followed by 12 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question made it to the Hot Network Questions list through an automated process. As such it was probably viewed by many users who are not familiar with PSE policies. The votes therefore are not a good indicator of the question's quality in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T14:57:30.537" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T14:57:30.537" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12977" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:27:14.860" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did imply in my question that I wanted to see a solution, but that was merely because I wanted to verify. I wanted to get convinced whether 13 is the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We call these &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt;. Yours is exceptionally interesting, and perhaps the community will vote to reopen it on that merit. But generally check-my-work questions are not high-quality, so we have a guideline which suppresses them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T14:27:14.860" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12977" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:31:35.747" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question does not ask a conceptual question about physics, it simply asks users to solve the exercise you call &amp;quot;the Devil's problem&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That you ask us to solve the exercise not by saying &amp;quot;Solve this for me&amp;quot; but by asking whether a given number is the answer doesn't change anything in my eyes - how is an answer supposed to make the argument that this is or is not the correct solution without actually solving the exercise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our policy about on exercises and homework questions isn't about playing word games, with this argument you could make any &amp;quot;Solve this&amp;quot; question on-topic by claiming an answer and asking if it is true. Note that this maneuver is frequent enough that we have a dedicated meta post about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6097/50583&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; which is also linked in the closing notice. That your question doesn't contain any work except a claim of what the answer is doesn't exactly &lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; the argument for its reopening in my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be taking an extremely literal approach to the formulation you quote. The phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;homework question&amp;quot; is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does not mean that just because &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; don't care about the method by which one arrives at the answer it is automatically on-topic. This interpretation would make any homework question on-topic if and only if the asker really doesn't care about learning anything and just wants to hand in the correct solution, which is clearly not the intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is instead meant to describe the typical intention of someone giving this exercise to someone or someone finding this exercise in a textbook (ideally students do not do exercises to get marks but in order to apply and train what they have learned). The specific intent of an asker is irrelevant - we judge questions by their content, not by whatever is going on the mind of the person who asks them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T16:45:35.713" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T16:45:35.713" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12977" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:59:20.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;With due respect, I think you're missing the larger point here.  This question may or may not be a homework-style question &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt;, but it is definitely a homework-style question &lt;em&gt;for the site&lt;/em&gt;.   In other words, what matters is the value of the question &lt;em&gt;to the site&lt;/em&gt; rather than to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong: this is a cute problem.  I'm likely to use it as an example in my class (including the excellent elements of solutions) but I cannot use it as an assignment problem precisely because students in my class are smart enough to just look up the answer on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T14:59:20.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12977" CreationDate="2020-06-29T06:34:43.133" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't for the life of me understand why you guys closed that question. It was very interesting and popular. It seems unless someone already knows how to solve the problem, this site doesn't want them to ask a question. How do we &amp;quot;vote to reopen&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22412" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T06:34:43.133" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-29T16:34:54.153" Score="3" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a user post a question with multiple parts.I know it's not recommended but suppose he does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/562471/&quot;&gt;A question with multiple parts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a closed question but it's enough to illustrate my point .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My question&lt;/em&gt; is should i answer a question with multiple parts if i only know some parts of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231412" LastEditorUserId="231412" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T23:24:08.413" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T23:24:08.413" Title="Answering question with multiple parts?" Tags="|discussion|questions|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12984" CreationDate="2020-06-29T16:49:42.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Full disclosure: I did vote to close that post as being &amp;quot;not focused&amp;quot; for asking many questions, even though the main closure reason indicated is the homework / check my work reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should i answer a question with multiple parts...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say no. Questions that do not follow the site policy should not be answered. Supplying an answer indicates that you think the question is a good question and deserves an answer. It gives future posts that have similar issues a post to point at and say, &amp;quot;but this question like mine got some nice answers. Why can't I get similar answers on my question?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...if i only know some parts of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say this right here is one of the reasons why posts that ask multiple questions are not encouraged. IMO If you have only answered parts of the question then you have not fully answered the question (although there isn't a rule against this). If multiple users were to answer like this, then it makes it hard for other users coming to learn from the question to find the answer, as it will be scattered across many different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T20:09:43.853" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T20:09:43.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12988" CreationDate="2020-07-03T07:20:40.580" Score="5" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this questiion yesterday: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/563322/does-the-shape-of-the-universe-refer-to-the-curvature-of-spacetime-in-5-dimensio&quot;&gt;Does the shape of the Universe refer to the curvature of spacetime in 5-dimensional space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I now understand and got good answers, my question was closed as duplicate. However, in my opinion, the linked questions are questions around the same topic, but a &lt;em&gt;different question&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following, I try to briefly sum up the core of the linked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/82383/universe-being-flat-and-why-we-cant-see-or-access-the-space-behind-our-univer&quot;&gt;Question 1:&lt;/a&gt; Is your 3-dimensional universe part of the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere [like in the ant-sphere analogy] that we cannot perceive or access?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90592/better-explanation-of-the-common-general-relativity-illustration-stretched-shee&quot;&gt;Question 2:&lt;/a&gt; The correctness of the bend-sheet-analogy for GTR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/133915/the-universe-as-a-four-dimensional-sphere&quot;&gt;Question 3:&lt;/a&gt; Could the universe be bend over a forth dimension to form a 4-dimensional shphere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essence of my question (linked above) was: When we refer to the shape of the universe (being flat e.g.), do we mean the same curvature as in GTR (as in being warped over a forth dimension)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers (again - thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/113699/shashaank&quot;&gt;Shashaank&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/177604/bapowell&quot;&gt;bapowell&lt;/a&gt;!) clarified that I was about half-correct: It is the same curvature as in GTR, but as this is intrinsic curvature, a forth dimension is not necessary (however not wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that the linked questions are somewhat similar (especially the third), but in my opinion, it is still a different question (e.g. all the linked questions either referred to GTR &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the universe's shape but did not ask whether these refer to the same principles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was my question closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I do not ask this question because I am angry about my question being closed (as I said before, I got great answers, so I'm fine) or to hate against those that closed it - I just want to know the reasons so that I can ask better questions in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T07:52:47.643" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T14:14:44.627" Title="Why was my question closed as duplicate although the linked questions are related to different topics?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12987" CreationDate="2020-07-04T14:14:44.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems (to me at least) that most of elements you mention here should be included as part of an edit of your OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’m aware of related questions but:&#xA;[Question 1] is related to ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my question is really about...“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would specifically differentiate your question from others, and the edit would send your modified version in the queue for reopening and possibly be reopened if the case is sufficiently strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T14:14:44.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T08:45:39.740" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wrote a self-answered question on the main site. The answer is really long, and frankly speaking, it takes some time getting all the diagrams right, researching, making sure the explanations are lucid etc. So, I started yesterday evening (IST) and then I stopped for the night and continued today morning (IST)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I was shown when I tried to publish it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QY4a5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QY4a5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am fine with that, I understand: we don't need bots running the sites, we need humans with flesh and blood. But, when I went ahead to tick the box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VXeB8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VXeB8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yk4zm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yk4zm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It comes right back to being unticked. Now, occasionally if this happens, I am fine with it, but this is happening the &lt;strong&gt;third time&lt;/strong&gt; in a row!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, it allowed to continue after I tried it in a new window. I don't know the technical aspects of how captcha works, but why is this happening? Is it because of some server error, that this thing happens every time, or is there something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the captcha looks pretty outdated. Again, I got no clue on how AI or scripts work, but it seems that a script can be well-equipped to tick a box. So, why don't we get something more advanced and efficient: like the ones where you have to select a letter or tick some images with certain objects in it? Why cant we improve captcha, both error free versions and more challenging ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206506" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T08:45:39.740" Title="Why don't we improve captcha?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T18:19:40.313" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Vets' will probably know where this is leading to as most of us have experienced it at some point (it's not my first time!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday a new contributor posed a well-formed question (about a steady-state heat conduction problem). Some members and myself made some decent comments. We got no reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then decided to answer the question in full. I didn't get an immediate acknowledgement of my effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And much to my annoyance the contributor had deleted his question when I checked in this morning.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is both frustrating and ineffective: the question (and answer) had received no down-votes or votes to close and could have been informative for other members or searchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it appears that &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; new contributors simply lose interest in their own question and delete it, together with someone else's work! 'Newbies' are of course not quite as invested in P.SE as regular contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I wonder if some moderator oversight would be useful here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86889" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T12:41:02.987" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T12:41:02.987" Title="Should 'newbie' questions be allowed to be deleted by the contributor without oversight?" Tags="|feature-request|deleted-questions|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12991" CreationDate="2020-07-06T18:49:56.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So... what exactly are you proposing that we do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, I agree that this is undesirable behavior; while we do generally want to allow people to delete their own questions within reason, they shouldn't be able to do so when it takes away content contributed by others that may add value. SE has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/74466/does-systematic-self-deleting-need-to-be-prevented&quot;&gt;taken some action&lt;/a&gt; on this in the past, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/178570/user-quickly-deletes-own-question-once-they-have-received-an-answer&quot;&gt;it probably doesn't go quite far enough&lt;/a&gt;, and I still see complaints about this come up from time to time. Ideally, we'd have some technical restriction like, say, disallowing self-deletion of a question less than &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X$&lt;/span&gt; hours old that has received an answer within the last &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt; hours (e.g. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X=48$&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y=24$&lt;/span&gt;). But only SE can make those changes. The mods can certainly try to bump up the importance of this feature in SE's view, but realistically it's going to take a long time for them to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the short term, all we can do is undelete the question and answer, and to do that we have to be notified about it. I don't remember offhand if you can flag the deleted question or your deleted answer, but if you're able to do so, I would definitely encourage you to cast a flag asking for it to be undeleted. (Readers should note that I'm specifically talking about the case where an answer was posted and the asker of the question deleted it before the answer got a reasonable chance to be voted on; I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; suggesting flagging things for undeletion any more generally than that.) If you're not able to flag the post, you can flag another of your own posts and cast a custom mod flag explaining the situation; or you can ask one of the mods if you happen to see us in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/563969/124&quot;&gt;the question/answer&lt;/a&gt; has been identified, I've undeleted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T02:27:34.880" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T02:27:34.880" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12974" CreationDate="2020-07-06T19:03:26.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I am inclined to reject edits to old posts if they only make trivial improvements, precisely because it is not encouraged to bump them to the front page without good reason. I think it would be better if trivial edits to old posts were actively discouraged so that we did not have the bother of voting on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255997" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T19:03:26.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T19:37:59.867" Score="15" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a number of occasions, I have seen questions closed as duplicates although the linked question either did not have answers, or had only poor answers, and in some cases it had already been closed (often for quite different reasons). In such cases, I think that to close a question on the grounds that it is a duplicate of a question which already has answers is inappropriate. I think that to close a question on this ground, it must not only be a duplicate but also the answers given must genuinely answer the current question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just voted to leave open the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/563765/&quot;&gt;Why do higher harmonics have a lower amplitude than fundamental frequency&lt;/a&gt;. It had been linked to the closed question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/468768/&quot;&gt;Is the first harmonic the prevalent frequency? [closed]&lt;/a&gt; (which does have a single, very good, answer as it happens). It was closed, probably correctly, because the question lacked clarity. Consequently it is not visible to many users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested duplicate question has 1 upvote, and the answer has 5 upvotes. The new question, which is much better phrased, has 21 upvotes and the accepted answer has 36 upvotes. A total of 47 upvotes have been given to the other 5 answers. And yet, there were already two votes to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely we should not be voting to close high quality questions and answers in favour of questions which have already been closed? Can I ask that we do not close questions as duplicates unless they are genuinely duplicates, and unless the answers given completely answer the current question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, should we not look at the way the system works? It does not seem reasonable to me to close a question because it duplicates a question which is already closed and is consequently not visible. It is entirely reasonable to ask whether an answer to a closed question answers the current question. But it is not reasonable to close a question simply because a similar question has previously been asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255997" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T08:44:22.630" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T17:01:43.067" Title="Care over closing &quot;duplicate&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|duplicates|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12994" CreationDate="2020-07-07T03:14:25.830" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;People should be encouraged to close questions as duplicates, but they should certainly take  care to choose an appropriate duplicate target. Even if the target does have answers that correctly answer the new question, it may not be a useful target for the OP of the new question if it uses mathematics and concepts that are too advanced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if the old question is closed (and isn't itself a duplicate), it makes a poor dupe target, IMHO. Across the Stack Exchange network, it's suggested that if you start composing an answer to a question which gets closed as a dupe before you submit your answer that you should instead post your answer on the dupe target (with appropriate modification, if necessary). But that's obviously impossible if the dupe target itself is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, when a new question and its answers are higher quality than the proposed dupe target, it can be appropriate to close the old question as a dupe of the new one. That sort of thing can be organized here on Meta, or possibly in the main Physics chat room, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T03:14:25.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12994" CreationDate="2020-07-08T00:18:17.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is limited correlation between the number of votes and the quality of the question, so your point there is not very strong. Your broad point however remains valid: one should exercise caution in voting to close as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly feel very strongly that overall there is not enough effort on the part of &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; posters to check for duplicates or near duplicates: specific problems can be hybrids between (or variation on) multiple other questions - &lt;em&gt;v.g&lt;/em&gt; problems on elementary circuits - so finding a near-enough duplicate is often enough for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that generic users can definitely see closed questions, but not deleted questions or answers.  Thus, as it is always possible to edit a closed question explaining how it is different from the alleged duplicate, I feel on balance the situation you describe is best corrected on a case by case basis, subject to the reminder of carefully checking the proposed target duplicate.  My experience is that when a reasonably legitimate case is made the question is often re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that there might be multiple reasons why someone would VTC and if the closure reason is for duplication this does not imply that reason was unanimous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T00:18:17.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13000" CreationDate="2020-07-08T10:35:43.457" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently discovered &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsoverflow.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.physicsoverflow.org&lt;/a&gt;. I read some posts here on meta but none of them answered my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I understand that it is not a SE site, but isn't it the same for &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;? Why can I find MO on the list of sites of SE, but not PO?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They do seem to have an &amp;quot;import from PSE&amp;quot; sections. Is it encouraged from (or at least ok for) the SE community to have some link between the two sites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T11:06:05.327" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T11:06:05.327" Title="Questions about PhysicsOverflow" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-07-08T18:32:57.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12999" CreationDate="2020-07-08T11:02:04.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Math Overflow was once not an SE site, but joined the SE network at some point. Physics Overflow is not and has never been associated with Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any import function is one-way and has nothing to do with Stack Exchange. Since all the content here is licensed under a creative commons share-alike license, Physics Overflow is free to copy content from here onto their own site without asking permission, so long as they follow the requirements of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T11:02:04.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-09T06:02:49.260" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/536307/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on PSE and it was considered off-topic and hence closed quoting that it was &amp;quot;Homework-like question&amp;quot;. After that I edited the question following &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; guidelines. However, even after editing and making it on-topic, the question wasn't reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is why it was not reopened. What more should I add in the question to make it eligible for opening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253530" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-09T08:27:52.757" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T01:05:25.423" Title="Question is not being reopened even after editing" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12972" CreationDate="2020-07-10T05:05:10.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I missed the original question, answers, as well as this discussion. I just discover them now, after the request for reopening vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read more than once all related material and I think this is a good case to discuss a little more in general, with respect to this specific case, how the site policy about homework-like question is implemented. Notice that I am not discussing the policy itself. Just its application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first observation is that it is not clear to me why this question was originally classified as homework-like. It is true that the form of the request was apparently stressing more the mathematical side of the problem and that the OP wrote that he/she tried to obtain a function relation without succeeding, thus exposing the question to the possible classification of homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that in a case like the present, the border between homework-like and conceptual question is not well definite. And even the border between Physics and Math is not always clear. Physics SE contains many accepted questions and answers on QM or GR topics which could easily be classified as pure math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain better my point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question was analyzing a particular case, by trying to obtain an answer by brute force. That is something in the direction of a homework-like question. However, it is not difficult to see how it could be recast in the form of a perfectly admissible conceptual question for the Physics site. It would be enough to stress i) the interest in Physics for obtaining a phase space portrait of classical motions and ii) the fact that the case of the damped harmonic oscillator is an example of the more general question about the conditions on the motion which allow to get a functional dependence of the velocity on the position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this the intention of the OP? We cannot know. Maybe it was a real homework or the OP has not enough experience to drive the attention to the underlying conceptual problem. But even if the original question was really originating from a homework (please, take onto account that the tag &lt;em&gt;homework&lt;/em&gt; was not put by the OP), still I do not see why people answering to the question could not have been able to provide a conceptual, general answer. By the way, this could be the simplest method to avoid providing a &lt;em&gt;complete answer&lt;/em&gt; to the specific problem.  In this respect, I think that a behavior more consistent with the &lt;em&gt;reasons&lt;/em&gt; for our policy against home-work like questions, &lt;em&gt;in a borderline case like the present&lt;/em&gt;,  would be not to close the question if there is any chance that it could trigger good conceptual answers. I would rather check the kind and quality of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T05:05:10.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13001" CreationDate="2020-07-11T01:05:25.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/306653&quot;&gt;reviewed for reopening&lt;/a&gt;, and the reviewers unanimously voted to leave it on hold. Strictly speaking, that's why it wasn't reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to give a bit more detail, when I look at your question I basically see this structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[a homework problem]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused that internal forces changes kinetic energy with respect to center of mass frame or ground frame? I found a similar question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/401727/can-internal-forces-change-the-kinetic-energy-of-the-system&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. But it didn't address my concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My attempt:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[some work toward solving the problem]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm stuck here and can't proceed further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;our policy on homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt;, we expect them to ask a specific conceptual question, not just ask how to solve the original homework problem or ask for help solving the problem. Basically, whatever difficulty you encountered in the process of solving the problem, you should ask how to get around that. That's the main thing you're missing that would motivate people not to reopen your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T01:05:25.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-11T12:19:42.947" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/564992/&quot;&gt;Thoughts on neural networks &amp;quot;discovering&amp;quot; physical concepts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that there was a &amp;quot;what is your opinion...&amp;quot; line in it earlier. I have removed it. Please have a look at it in its current form and I hope you will agree that it admits concrete answers even though it is a soft question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I am requesting it to be reopened so that it can be answered by members here who are well-versed in the scientific method underlying physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141925" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T00:07:13.080" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T00:07:13.080" Title="Requesting a question to be re-opened because it is not opinion based" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13006" CreationDate="2020-07-11T14:05:53.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though you have eliminated an explicit reference to opinion, this does not change the fact that IMO the question is still opinion-based.  I can answer yes/no/I think so/I don’t think so without reference to any physical law or principle, and my answer would be just as good as anybody else’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T14:05:53.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T22:16:45.077" Score="-2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/565248/256585&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; is closed by a moderator. I think the reason is that it starts to have too many answers which I didn't expect. How can I reopen this question? I want to convert it to Community wiki post but I don't have any option in the edit box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256585" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T04:07:57.603" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T04:07:57.603" Title="How can I reopen the question as community wiki post?" Tags="|support|specific-question|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13009" CreationDate="2020-07-12T22:39:45.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reason is that it starts to have too many answers which I didn't expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't quite right. We decide whether to close a question on the merits of the question, not the answers. The problem with a question of the form &lt;em&gt;What are examples of X?&lt;/em&gt; is that there are many possible answers, and so it naturally attracts many partial answers, instead of one or a few definitive answers. You can read some discussion on this type of post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/158809/380389&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/106502&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for reopening it, it's hard for me to see how you could edit the question to make it more focused without completely changing what you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T22:39:45.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12737" CreationDate="2020-07-13T13:11:47.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scientific-speculation.codidact.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mlAZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;https://scientific-speculation.codidact.com&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114272" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T13:11:47.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-13T21:37:22.257" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/350722/373520&quot;&gt;this question on Stack Exchange Meta as a bug&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm posting it here for informational purposes and I'd suggest going to the Stack Exchange Meta version and upvoting that if you want (or indeed downvoting it of that's your preference :-) ).  Obviously vote here on Physics Meta if you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/307186&quot;&gt;reviewing an edit&lt;/a&gt; on Physics SE I noticed that an edit made to replace an image of mathematics with MathJax (the preferred choice on Physics SE) was not shown properly when the rendered output was previewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cga83.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cga83.png&quot; alt=&quot;Enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note on the right the new edit version (awaiting approval or rejection) is shown in green, but instead of the rendered output being shown we get the &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; MathJax code.  It's extremely difficult in many cases to tell if the code is an accurate representation of the image it is replacing and we really need to see properly rendered MathJax in these approval dialogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note we already get to see the &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; MathJax when we select the &amp;quot;Markdown&amp;quot; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As MathJax is such a significant element of Physics SE (and other sites) it's important we get to see the rendered output, not just the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness this was on Firefox 78.0.1 64-bit under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux Mint&lt;/a&gt; 18.  MathJax correctly renders on the main Physics SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;EDIT:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the issue does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; affect the edit history which uses a different layout.  That can view rendered and raw MathJax correctly.  This issue only affects the review queue AFAIK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to member Luuklag for showing me it is possible to add a link to items in the review queue, which I had mistakenly assumed was not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-07-17T16:22:48.813" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T16:22:48.813" Title="Edited MathJax not properly rendered in Review queues" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13015" CreationDate="2020-07-16T10:23:49.017" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &amp;quot;Followed posts&amp;quot; list is littered with deleted questions, which I cannot remove off the list, as they've lost their &amp;quot;unfollow&amp;quot; option. How do I prune off these entries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66086" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:25:18.573" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T13:42:15.240" Title="Removing deleted questions from the &quot;Followed posts&quot; list" Tags="|bug|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13014" CreationDate="2020-07-16T10:46:33.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't via the Q&amp;amp;A page itself: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/346423/295232&quot;&gt;How do I unfollow a deleted question?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @MassimoOrtolano indicated in the comments, it is possible now via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=following&quot;&gt;list of followed posts in your profile&lt;/a&gt;. However, you only see deleted posts there if you have 10k+ reputation, so this workaround doesn't work for everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T13:42:15.240" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T13:42:15.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13020" CreationDate="2020-07-23T15:42:25.007" Score="11" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that I had several edit suggestions rejected so I decided to take a look at them, out of curiosity. While most of them were fair, or at least understandable, there was one that I found very weird, especially due to the reasoning of the rejection and what came after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, in the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/554034/definition-of-orbits-of-a-killing-vector-field&quot;&gt;Definition of orbits of a Killing vector field&lt;/a&gt;, the OP was initially using the MathJax function &lt;code&gt;$\textbf{ }$&lt;/code&gt; for bold letters, which I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/301788&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; to markdown syntax. The edit suggestion was rejected by the OP (I didn't know that an OP can review edits of their own post regardless of reputation), with justification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is strange; the change was quite the opposite of drastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, viewing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/554034/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; of the question in question, I find that the OP implemented my edit, as theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am now confused for the reason they chose to reject my edit, as well as about why users of non-sufficient reputation for reviewing edits are allowed to review edits of their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142398" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-07-23T18:17:15.307" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T05:53:39.050" Title="Confusion about rejection of edit suggestion" Tags="|discussion|editing|review|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-23T17:01:11.693" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a general question about how topic tags become associated with a vote-based badge.  For instance, if I receive 100 upvotes on answers  for at least 20 non-community wiki answers with the associated the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt;, then I get a bronze &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/131/astrophysics?userid=59023&quot;&gt;astrophysics badge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, if I get (currently) 103 upvotes on 31 non-community answers associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-wind&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-wind&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-wind&lt;/a&gt; tag, I see no bronze badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are tag badges created/formed for a given tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59023" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-25T11:48:38.550" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T11:48:38.550" Title="How do tags get associated badges?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|tags|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13018" CreationDate="2020-07-23T17:26:37.540" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-wind&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-wind&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-wind&lt;/a&gt; has 80 questions, and tag badges are only awarded for tags which are used on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/68395/295232&quot;&gt;100 or more questions&lt;/a&gt;. Consequently, you also can't track a tag badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/solar-wind&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;solar-wind&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;solar-wind&lt;/a&gt; in your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2020-07-23T17:27:41.243" LastActivityDate="2020-07-23T17:27:41.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13017" CreationDate="2020-07-23T18:13:39.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First of all, let me just assure you that your edit was perfectly fine. It was a fault on the reviewer's side to reject such an edit. Please don't let this deter you from making useful edits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why could this have happened?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that the OP might have pressed the wrong button, however, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/249535/pinkman98?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=reviews&quot;&gt;wasn't the first suggested edit that they reviewed&lt;/a&gt;, so it's highly unlikely that the rejection was just a mistake. It could also be that the OP might not like the idea of using in-site Markdown, and would rather choose using LaTeX (which is not at all recommended). But, as you say, the OP did edit it out themselves in the end. So, you see, we are not going to go anywhere speculating what might have triggered the rejection of your edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of the rejection reason, I can't really think of any other rejection reason to use than this (assuming that your edit is supposed to be rejected, which is definitely the wrong move). That particular rejection reason can be used in cases where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the edit changes something which you'd not want it to change (the most probable case in this scenario)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the edit changes many things, totally changing the goal of the post (not applicable here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in this light, it seems that the OP didn't really have any other options that to select this particular rejection reason (of course, you can write out any custom rejection reason if you want to, but the OP might be too lazy to do so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also leave a comment explaining and requesting the OP to do a certain edit, if they've rejected your suggestion. This way, any user having edit privileges might come across your comment and edit the question right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should the post owners be allowed to review suggested edits on their posts?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. I believe that they should have the power to decide what they want on their post and what they don't. However, in most of the cases, when there are content disputes (misuse of edits, edit wars), you can always raise a custom moderator flag, asking the moderator to lock the post, thus preventing anyone from editing the posts. However, if you want this to change, this isn't the right place. The mother &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; is the right place to raise issues and request changes which affect the whole SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Takeaway&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the best to just ignore this edit rejection and move on. This edit rejection was the reviewer's mistake, not yours. As for your concern on recent rejected edits of yours, I encourage (and appreciate) you to go back to those and see why did they get rejected. Thus form a mental list of &lt;strong&gt;do's&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;don'ts&lt;/strong&gt; when it comes to edits and use that criteria to suggest better edits. I can't wait to see you earn you editing privilege :-) You are halfway there! Good luck, and keep editing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user258881" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T05:53:39.050" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T05:53:39.050" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13017" CreationDate="2020-07-23T19:07:00.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry but frankly this is a trivial edit.  I didn’t vote on it but I would have rejected it.  It is not worth kicking a question back at that top of the page for such an inconsequential notational issue.  &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; an edit corrects an error rather than propose a cosmetic change, I would probably feel differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was perfectly within the rights of the OP to reject this edit as not improving anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-07-23T19:07:00.490" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13017" CreationDate="2020-07-24T15:00:17.683" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specific to the case that you brought up, I'd note that the OP on your post made a different, unrelated edit to the question about 1 minute after yours.  I can imagine a scenario where the OP was concurrently editing, you beat them in, and they didn't want to give up what they were doing so rejected yours just as a means to get past whatever screen they got from the system.  Later they realized that yours was also good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that's just speculation in this case, but I have personally experienced confusion at my options in the system when faced with concurrent changes. I can see where someone might choose a less-than-optimal option just to clear a screen or without understanding what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the ability of an OP to review changes to their own post:  I don't see how it could be any other way.  The question is there with their name under it.  They certainly have a particularized interest in what it says and how it's presented, regardless of their reputation on the site.  As noted in other answers, if an OP refuses help that the community feels was necessary to bring a question into compliance or usefulness, the community has other tools of moderation to bring to that problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T15:22:56.367" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T15:22:56.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13025" CreationDate="2020-07-25T20:41:09.277" Score="7" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I do in no way want to say that the current moderators somehow do a &amp;quot;bad job&amp;quot; at moderating Physics SE. I think that they do a great work at, well, &lt;em&gt;moderating&lt;/em&gt; this network and my full respect goes to them because I cannot even imagine how much work goes into this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often read comments something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have removed some comments that were trying to answer the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;posted by a moderator (of course, since they are as of my knowledge the only ones who can delete comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree that comments are not for answering questions (they can be used, for example, to ask clarifying questions or give hints - I believe this does not count as an answer attempt), I disagree with how these comments are handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least on my questions (when I see answer-like comments on other questions, they are most often already deleted (so I don't actually see them, but you get the point)), the comments often add valuable information. Sometimes, it is just some short explanation or links for further research, but they can still help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the comments are deleted, this information is permanently gone. So I propose one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The writers of answer-like questions should be notified that their comment should be an answer. They will have some time to either a) write an answer or b) if appropiate, add the content of their comment to an existing answer. If they don't do this in the given time, their comment will be deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer-like comments should not be deleted, but either hidden or moved. For example, discussions are often moved to chat; I think we've all seen this comment:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for extended discussion. This conversation has been moved to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this site and thus also comments have to be kept organized; but in the end, SE is a Q&amp;amp;A site. The goal is that users can ask questions and get answers - i.e. users help other users. I think that comments which &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; help should not be deleted (immediately or permanently).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T13:09:43.083" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T14:02:19.973" Title="Should comments trying to answer a question be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comments|best-practices|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13024" CreationDate="2020-07-25T20:55:33.187" Score="17" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One problem with answer-comments you seem to not have considered is that they can be &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;. Answers can be downvoted, but comments can only be upvoted, so there is no proper mechanism to show that an answer-comment is considered wrong and the one-sided upvote mechanism may make it look more authoritative than it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; leave comments like &amp;quot;Please turn this comment into an answer&amp;quot; and users often do so - but after that's happened we'll delete both comments so you don't see any trace of this after the fact. The cases where you see the &amp;quot;answers in comments have been removed&amp;quot; treatment are likely high-traffic questions that already have answers where the comments did not add much value. You'll also see this more on high-traffic questions as a deterrent for the lots of visitors to not leave such comments, but write answers instead. I can't really speak across the actions of all mods but I think it's likely that your impression of what proportion of answer-comments are outright deleted vs. moved to chat or turned into answers is exaggerated because the deletion is &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt; more visible for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T20:55:33.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13024" CreationDate="2020-07-26T01:11:31.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree that comments are not for answering questions (they can be used, for example...giving hints).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, comments should not be used to give hints. If you have an answer, then just post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are giving hints for something like a homework question, then it is likely that the question isn't on topic anyway. Instead of leaving a hint, just flag/vote to close instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are intended for either asking for clarifications or offering suggestions to improve the post. Anything else should either be put into an answer or not put anywhere on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your main point here, I don't think we should leave invalid comments around, because then that makes them valid. The choice should either be to change our policy on what is allowed in a comment, or to actually enforce the current policy. I don't think we should be in some weird in-between where there is a subjective &amp;quot;yeah I know this isn't what comments are for, but &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; this time I can ignore that.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would leads to inconsistent rulings. &amp;quot;I thought my comment was useful, why was it deleted? That comment over there wasn't deleted, and it definitely wasn't as useful as mine was.&amp;quot; If the policy is that comments should be asking for clarification or suggesting post improvements, then that is all that should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least on my questions the comments often add valuable information....When the comments are deleted, this information is permanently gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is exactly why users are told not to post answers in the comments. Just post an answer, that makes it way more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of a recently good answer that others would probably just comment, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/567923/revisions&quot;&gt;v1&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/567923&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer. Yes it is short, but it is an answer. So it should have been posted as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T14:02:19.973" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T14:02:19.973" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13027" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:13:20.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug report with this tag is neither declined nor destined for implementation/fix. When such a decision has been made, the tag will be changed accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple factors that may leave a report under review. There could be consideration of whether the proposed feature or bugfix is feasible or useful. There could be investigations on the complexity of the necessary solution. There could be insufficient information in the feature or bug report as presented. Site developers may provide additional comments to request more information or to provide status updates as appropriate to the status of the review, until such time as the decision for approval or decline is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by staff and ♦ moderators; the latter will only use this tag as part of the escalation process described here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/348642/295232&quot;&gt;What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T14:30:59.390" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T14:30:59.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13028" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:13:20.337" Score="0" Body="Indicates that a change in functionality is currently under consideration, or needs further investigation." OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T14:31:02.330" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T14:31:02.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-27T19:26:45.393" Score="-4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/568540/equilibrium-analysis-of-a-particle-moving-along-a-plane-curve&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; , which I've asked, I got two close votes on it already but I can not understand why. I think having a complete discussion of my question/ answer to it would benefit the community as a whole because if my question is solved then there is a large category of problems which could be solved using the techniques I've discussed in the question. Further, I've put in some effort of my own by analysing the problem to the best of my knowledge. So, I can not understand where exactly I'm going wrong/ making people think this is some homework question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T12:18:59.290" Title="How do I prevent general analysis questions from being close voted?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13029" CreationDate="2020-07-27T20:57:26.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand what you mean by &amp;quot; find the points on the curve where the particle would become at equilibrium.&amp;quot;  Presumably that would be &amp;quot;reach equilibrium&amp;quot; and not &amp;quot;become at equilibrium&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, the notation is unclear.  Your curve is parametrized by &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(x,g(x))$&lt;/span&gt; which is a bad choice because you also use &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$g$&lt;/span&gt; which I presume is gravity.  In your text you use &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$`\mu$&lt;/span&gt;' when I think you meant &amp;quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mu$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot; in quotation mark.  Or did you?  Do you mean to use &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mu^\prime$&lt;/span&gt; as your coefficient of friction?  Why use `&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mu$&lt;/span&gt;' or quotation mark?  Is this static or kinetic friction?  (I presume static as I can't see how kinetic friction would enter in equilibrium.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, you have an inequality &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f_{\mathrm{max}}\ge mg\sin\theta$&lt;/span&gt; but the inequality sign disappears afterwards.  I suspect that&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mu=g'(x)$&lt;/span&gt; should be something like &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mu\ge g'(x)$&lt;/span&gt; but I'm not sure, all the more so as I suppose &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$g'(x)$&lt;/span&gt; is the derivative of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$g(x)$&lt;/span&gt; or is it related to the gravitational constant &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$g$&lt;/span&gt; (which doesn't make sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, you seem to treat the problem as in rotational motion, introducing &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$mv^2/r$&lt;/span&gt;.  As you admit yourself, you cannot find a meaning for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$r$&lt;/span&gt; which I suppose would be the local radius of curvature at &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt;, i.e. find the osculating circle at &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(x,g(x))$&lt;/span&gt; and use the radius for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, how to you define equilibrium when there's friction?  Do you mean if you place a particle there it would remain there?  Then surely there might be a range for if I imagine the slope of the curve is very small everywhere then a particle might be stuck anywhere along the curve and not overcome static friction.  If you define equilibrium position as the position &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; where the particle would come to rest, then it's intuitively clear that this must be the bottom of your curve (or at least a local minimum) since the particle would slowly dissipate energy until it reaches that point with no more energy, and would stop there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on but if you start with these it will immediately improve the question, although i must say it does look like a homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T20:57:26.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13029" CreationDate="2020-07-29T00:10:30.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current version (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/568540/11&quot;&gt;v11&lt;/a&gt;) has several problems. It is not focused, as evident by the plethora of questions in the post. And you're really not asking about any physics concepts per se, you're just asking for the results of physics calculations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I want to find a description of points of equilibrium for which the body was moving already (kinetic friction ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you're also somewhat expecting others to check your work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would there exist no points of equilibria by this derivation or would I have to account for something else there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary it looks like the question boils down to &amp;quot;Hey, I have this interesting problem, and I don't really know how to analyze it. What should I add to my analysis? ... What about this point? ... And what if this were the case? ... If this was the case then what would I do differently?&amp;quot; This, to me, is definitely not on topic for PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the title question of &amp;quot;How do I prevent general analysis questions from being close voted?&amp;quot; I will say that the answer has nothing to do with the fact that the question is about &amp;quot;general analysis&amp;quot; and more about just the quality of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/568540/12&quot;&gt;v12&lt;/a&gt; you are still just asking how to do a calculation/solve a problem. Therefore, I still think it shouldn't be reopened yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T12:18:59.290" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T12:18:59.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-29T19:41:37.117" Score="4" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to Math and Physics Stack Exchange with a &amp;quot;forum mindset&amp;quot; (partly inherited from Stack Overflow and partly from other math/physics fora), where any problem is welcome, excepting duplicates and do-my-homework questions. I then proceeded to mostly ask questions such as these four: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3171551/longest-path-through-a-rectangular-board&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3275000/how-many-legal-positions-are-there-on-a-rubiks-cube-with-two-pieces-glued-toget&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/564126/collision-of-constrained-spheres&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/568997/helium-balloon-energy-gain&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;. They were problems either connected to projects I worked on or just wonderings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions are like homework in that they are specific (as opposed to modular - naturally arising in many situations), but, unlike homework, there is not necessarily an easily achievable solution. I asked them because I had no clue how to even approach them. But, since other people are unlikely to wonder about the same setup as I do, the questions will at most serve a pedagogical purpose if some interesting underlying concept is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these questions were closed, but now, reading through the homework policy, I am not sure whether such a type of question is welcome. I am asking specifically about Physics SE, using the math questions only to provide more examples of the underlying concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226688" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T19:41:37.117" Title="Are questions unlikely to be useful to others permitted?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-29T21:59:48.547" Score="-2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth to mention that I'm still a newbie on Physics SE and SE in general, but during this year or so I found that different sites have different &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; ways of answering (and there's nothing wrong with that in principle). As an example, the Role-playing Games' answers almost all have the same structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Big, concise answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraph(s) explaining the answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventual paragraph(s) on related topics or specifications&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;like &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/172617/53140&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and personally, I find it &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; easy to understand and I try to always answer in a similar manner, as opposed to &amp;quot;specifications, then answer but not clearly stated&amp;quot;, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/568885/220004&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Is there a reason why a lot of people don't do this? Is it just different ways of explaining for different people, or is it a site-related thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not talking about those awesome huge answers that explain everything in a great detail better than a physics book, nor about opinion-based answers (but they shouldn't belong to the site anyway). I'm talking about &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T08:49:27.373" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T08:49:27.373" Title="Why isn't it the norm to put a &quot;TL;DR&quot; one-line answer at the top of an answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13033" CreationDate="2020-07-29T22:23:27.037" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really just personal preference in how one chooses to construct the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people will put a &amp;quot;TL;DR&amp;quot; at the top, or the bottom, to summarize things which is kind of what you're looking for. Not everybody does though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;issue&amp;quot; you describe, where you get a lot of extra information and details before the punchline, is a trend that I notice in my work with other scientists and engineers. I can't tell you how many times a yes or no question gets a 10 minute response in a meeting where somebody tells us about all possible options and not just the one we asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of this could be related to academic writing training -- a formal journal paper isn't really constructed in the way you describe. They tend to be structured with a background, a methods/equations/etc section, results, discussion, and the conclusions. The style of writing you refer to is more like what journalists do -- it's called an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inverted pyramid style&lt;/a&gt; of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inverted pyramid is pretty useful because it let's people read as deeply as they need to in order to understand the point. When possible, I try to write my answers along similar lines -- and I also try to structure my journal articles similarly, at least for the abstract and then within each section, but that's a work in progress (like writing always is)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T22:23:27.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-30T03:50:42.157" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously, whenever I asked a question, there used to be a 'Related' tab on the right side. It used to display links to a lot of related posts. Now, I can still see the tab 'Related', but no suggested posts under it. Has there been a recent change on the site regarding this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164488" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T16:52:54.857" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T16:52:54.857" Title="Why is nothing displayed under the 'Related' sidebar?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-07-31T05:03:27.917" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-31T20:58:34.813" Score="6" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all know that some questions are posted in PSE but they should belong to another Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you vote to close a question, via&#xA;Close question &amp;gt; A community specific reason &amp;gt; This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then the two only options are physics meta and mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read in other posts that only sites whose migrations have been remarkably usual have been included, and those are physics meta and mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: &lt;strong&gt;Why don't we include the option &lt;em&gt;other site&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because there are many times in which I find questions belonging to several sites: biology, hsm, chemistry, geology, and so on. The problem, of course, is that this list is too diverse to ask for a mathematics-like status of all those other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the question is just: why isn't there an option simply called &amp;quot;other site&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, that option should display a selection menu with the list of all sites, and I don't think that's so hard to do, but I'd understand that it can be complex to run afterwards. However, I find the option &amp;quot;Other&amp;quot; quite neccesary. Such an option would just call for moderator intervention, a moderator who would decide where to migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; option be possible? Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157625" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T09:13:58.193" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T09:13:58.193" Title="Why don't we add the option &quot;other sites&quot; in the close votes option?" Tags="|feature-request|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13037" CreationDate="2020-08-01T01:09:18.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you vote to close a question as &amp;quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network,&amp;quot; the question is automatically migrated to the other site. By design, this is limited to a few sites for every site on the Stack Exchange network. If a question should be migrated to another site, just suggest it with a custom flag. Migrations are rare enough that any changes to this probably aren't worth the developer time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A drop down menu probably isn't a good idea anyway. You shouldn't be suggesting migration to a site unless you are familiar with that site's policies. Otherwise it is quite likely the migration will be rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &amp;quot;Other&amp;quot; option isn't likely to be very helpful. If a question is off-topic and you don't know where to migrate it, just vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T01:09:18.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-01T20:19:14.937" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In closing questions to transfer to another site of SE,&#xA;so the &amp;quot;Belongs to another site of SE&amp;quot;  option,&#xA;there is no ready option for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;HSM.SE&lt;/a&gt;, a really crying need:  cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/570622/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, a poster child for the need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an easy way to recommend HSM transfer, or a workaround?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66086" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T11:44:18.177" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T21:12:33.807" Title="Recommending migration pathway to HSM.SE for questions" Tags="|feature-request|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13039" CreationDate="2020-08-01T20:53:16.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The migration pathways can be edited if there is a good reason to, and having a lot of overlap with another site and having a lot of questions that should be migrated over are usually a good opportunity to open a dedicated migration pathway -- we have one with Math.SE, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidelines for migrating are generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't migrate crap&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be certain the question is on topic on the target site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't migrate questions that are on-topic here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are related, of course. If one is not intimately familiar with the target site's policies then it is easy to end up migrating something that is not good quality for the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/169984/174806&quot;&gt;corollary to the guidelines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avoid migrating to beta sites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea here is that larger sites shouldn't be sending large numbers of questions to a site that is not yet on its feet. It is up to the beta community to find its niche, its voice. So flooding it with migrations from outside is frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the case of HSM.SE, they are still in a beta stage. Additionally, we don't have a large number of questions that would be good candidates to migrate. So I think the way to suggest a formal migration at this point is to raise a custom flag and suggest migrating it -- we'll take a look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/258601/174806&quot;&gt;In fact, it appears formal migration paths aren't even allowed for beta sites and it will always require moderator approval.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the caveat to that is I don't know if any of the moderators are intimately familiar with the scope and culture over at HSM. I personally would decline flags to migrate unless it seemed super obvious to me, in which case I would try to go talk to the mods over on HSM to see if it would fit in well there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best option though would be to leave a comment and suggest they post their question there instead, while also voting to close it here (because good migration candidates are questions that are not on-topic here). OP can either edit the question to make it more on topic here so it can stay open (and become a not-good migration candidate), or they can go ask their question on the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment will hopefully introduce them to a new community that they didn't know already existed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T20:53:16.927" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13039" CreationDate="2020-08-03T08:41:36.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To bring some numbers to the table, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats&quot;&gt;migration statistics page&lt;/a&gt; (10k+) lists the following numbers of migrations for the past 90 days:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bFBva.png&quot; width=&quot;240&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That amounts to one migration to HSM every two weeks, so it definitely &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; happen, via custom moderator flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth updating my previous answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9950/what-migration-paths-do-we-want-on-the-site&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to a 2020 edition of what the global migration pathways look at full-SE-network scale (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/247902/184688&quot;&gt;this MSE answer&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b3jkC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b3jkC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This serves, I think, a good role in indicating the types of scales that make automation / user-level decision-making worth implementing as seen by SE. Our migration pathway to math.se is definitely there, but all the others look like rounding errors. Maybe there is a case for migration to Electrical Engineering? But even that looks like it's handled well enough by the mods, unless they report that it's getting to be a hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T21:12:33.807" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T21:12:33.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13037" CreationDate="2020-08-03T08:46:34.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The option already exists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote to close the question as off-topic, with a custom reason if necessary, explaining why the question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a good fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Raise a moderator flag indicating that migration to site X would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 1 is particularly necessary: it is not enough for the question to be on-topic elsewhere, it also needs to be off-topic here. In other words, if migration is appropriate, then the question should be closed as off-topic anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T08:46:34.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-03T09:06:34.593" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read old posts, I come across some informative comments below the questions which are off-topic, i.e., not aimed at asking for clarification, but they do add some value. I have noticed such comments being deleted under new questions for attempting to answer instead of using the answer box. I understand the reasons for their deletion which have been discussed in other meta posts, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13024/238167&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what should we do with such inappropriate comments under old questions like the following?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/149654/238167&quot;&gt;Is $F = G\dfrac{{m_1}{m_2}}{r^2}$ really true?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/9321/238167&quot;&gt;Is there a fundamental reason why gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/8610/238167&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between the five masses: inertial mass, gravitational mass, rest mass, invariant mass and relativistic mass?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To preserve such comments, I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/564408/238167&quot;&gt;once&lt;/a&gt; transferred them to a community wiki answer as per a suggestion given by a user in the main chatroom. But in the above cases, I think the comments (as such) wouldn't qualify as an answer, but at the same time, they aren't on-topic as well. These could be a part of an answer, but I don't think requests like &amp;quot;Please turn this comment into an answer&amp;quot; would not work as these old comments might be by inactive/deleted users. They have been there for so long and might have helped a lot of readers. So, is it fine to leave them as such and flag to delete comments only in newer questions? Further, were the criteria for an on-topic comment less strict or different in the past, as these comments are especially from high reputation users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is directed towards old posts with informative comments, in general, not just the ones I have mentioned here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238167" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T15:07:48.117" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T03:06:41.273" Title="Do we need to delete informative, off-topic comments under old questions?" Tags="|discussion|comments|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13043" CreationDate="2020-08-03T09:52:03.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see little reason to treat comments on old questions any different from other comments. Whether or not our policies today are different from what they were back then is irrelevant, likewise it is irrelevant who authored the comments. (Consider that many high-reputation users have high reputation because they've been here a while, so of course you'll see more contributions of any kind from today's high-reputation users as you go back in time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not the comments &amp;quot;might have helped a lot of readers&amp;quot; is not something we could assess, and it is not considered relevant for newer comments either: You can write the most interesting comment in the world, if it doesn't aim at criticizing or improving the post being commented on, you shouldn't have left it as a comment on that post. So why should it suddenly matter for comments that are a bit older?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T09:52:03.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13043" CreationDate="2020-08-04T07:28:44.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you should do with old comments is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the content of the comments would be suitable as an answer, or if they inspire you to post an answer, go ahead and do it. While you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; ask the comments' authors to turn them into answers, I generally wouldn't bother; it's probably not worth the trouble of coming back to the question again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you feel like making a personal copy of the comments' content, feel free to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag any of the comments as &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot;. Keep in mind that the primary purpose of a comment is to suggest an improvement of some kind (a clarification, a link, etc.) to its parent post, but if comment is months or years old, the OP has had plenty of time to act on it and has either done so or implicitly declined to do so. Either way, it's unlikely that leaving the comment there will lead to a change in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T07:28:44.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T11:45:50.813" Score="5" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to recent questions about the comment policy, and because I have seen this being done often, I am here with another question about comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a certain question a user commented&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A primary purpose of comments on this site is to point out erroneous assumptions in questions, in order to help the OP to improve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the goal is valid: comments should be used to help the OP improve the question. But is this a general principle? Should content that points out errors with the OP's logic/understanding be posted as a comment or as an answer? If such a comment is valid, then what should be the goal of the comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T22:01:04.103" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T03:13:04.347" Title="Comments to point out errors in OP's understanding" Tags="|discussion|comments|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13046" CreationDate="2020-08-04T11:45:50.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose there are different scenarios where this could be applicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The invalid assumptions are not a key point in the question, and they would not really need to be addressed in an answer to sufficiently answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The invalid assumptions are a key point in the question, and so they would need to be addressed in an answer to sufficiently answer the question. Pointing out the flaw in the reasoning might actually be the answer the OP is looking for, even if they weren't explicitly asking about flaws in their assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The invalid assumptions are making the question unclear, so making an answer is not possible. But if the invalid assumptions were cleared up then an answer could be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The invalid assumptions make the question incoherent, and it is hard to know where to even begin in correcting/answering the question. Pointing out the flaws won't really answer the question. Instead it will make the entire question invalid (IMO the question linked to above falls into this category).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the correct response to these are to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post an answer. If possible point out the invalid assumptions and how to correct them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post an answer addressing the invalid assumptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a comment. The comment should both/either ask the OP to clarify the flawed assumption being made and/or suggest to the OP how they can edit their question to better explain, clarify, etc. their assumptions. Depending on the severity of the flaws, vote to close also.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either attempt an answer addressing the invalid assumptions, or flag/vote the question to be closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see above, the only instance where I think a comment is valid is instance &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3$&lt;/span&gt;. This is because this is the only time when a user cannot really do anything else with the question, but clarification can give rise to good answers on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in all of the cases, I do not think a comment should be used just to point out invalid assumptions. Comments like these don't explicitly call for improving the question. If you want to correct invalid assumptions, then just post an answer. If you want to help the OP to improve the question, then post a helpful comment doing so. Something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused about this assumption, can you explain more about why you think this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You haven't stated what you are assuming about this. It would help others make an answer if you elaborated on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be good comments to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T21:57:02.753" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T21:57:02.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13046" CreationDate="2020-08-04T19:28:59.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll pick on your last two sentences, if I may:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should content that points out errors with the OP's logic/understanding be posted as a comment or as an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate guideline for these things (as far as I'm concerned):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it answers the question, it should be posted as an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, if it explicitly or implicitly suggests a change to the question, it should be posted as a comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, it probably should not be posted at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, that's still somewhat ambiguous, but all the ambiguity is in the meaning of &amp;quot;answers the question&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;suggests a change to the question&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some cases where an OP makes an erroneous assumption and correcting that assumption actually answers their question. In those cases, you'd post an answer, not a comment. For example, if a question takes the form &amp;quot;I want to X but can't because Y; how can I X?&amp;quot; where it turns out that Y isn't true, then posting that Y isn't true and the OP actually &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; X the way they wanted to is a perfectly legitimate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, correcting the OP's erroneous assumption doesn't actually answer the question, and in those cases you'd leave a comment. Even just pointing it out is enough - if you bring the OP's attention to an error in their question, that's the sort of thing I consider an &amp;quot;implicit suggestion&amp;quot; to make a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such a comment is valid, then what should be the goal of the comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the goal is to get the OP to rewrite the question in a way that doesn't include their erroneous assumptions. That falls under suggesting a change to the question, so it's a legitimate comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T03:13:04.347" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T03:13:04.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T21:09:20.117" Score="50" ViewCount="1204" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something we should flag early if we want to do something in time for when it happens: &lt;strong&gt;the tenth anniversary of Physics Stack Exchange will happen in three months.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the private beta started on 2 November 2010 and the public beta started on 9 November 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: do we want to do something to celebrate that fact? (For comparison, MO turned ten last year; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4270&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4353&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; show what happened.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that everybody who answered the question &amp;quot;where do you see yourself in five years&amp;quot; in 2015 got it massively wrong, I don't think that in-person meetups are appropriate at this time. But maybe we can organize some form of video meetup? Or, failing that, just organizing some tenth-anniversary celebratory swag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T07:24:04.977" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T17:40:11.707" Title="(Almost) ten years of Physics Stack Exchange" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13046" CreationDate="2020-08-04T21:30:49.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the person whose comment triggered the question, I would like to say that I agree with everything David Z wrote, but not with everything that BioPhysicist wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of this site is that it is the responsibility of the OP — &lt;em&gt;and no one else&lt;/em&gt; — to write a good question. They are rewarded for doing so and penalized for writing a bad one. The purpose of a comment pointing out a flaw in the OP’s thinking is to get the &lt;em&gt;OP&lt;/em&gt; to figure out how to improve the question. A commenter should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be expected to make any suggestion about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to improve it. It’s great if someone &lt;em&gt;chooses&lt;/em&gt; to do that, but it shouldn’t become an &lt;em&gt;expectation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it becomes the policy that I must suggest improvements to the OP when I point out an error, then I will simply stop pointing out errors. Then more errors will likely go unchallenged, leading to readers getting incorrect ideas about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy to answer good questions, but I am not happy to be expected to have to suggest how to improve the poor ones just because I want to point out their flaws in a comment intended to be helpful both to readers and to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T23:12:39.093" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T23:12:39.093" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13052" CreationDate="2020-08-05T19:50:01.640" Score="7" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I joined Stack Exchange I started answering questions and gained a positive response from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these days, I don't feel like my answers help anyone anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look into my physics Stack Exchange profile, you will find that almost 90% of my answers I have provided have neither been accepted nor been upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I took this as a sign that my answers did not help anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really demotivating as my enthusiasm in answering has been hitting rock bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought there must be some major flaw in all my answers that renders them useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if someone pointed out what major flaws my answers have, so that I can try my best to modify my style and contribute to the community the best I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation doesn't matter to me, but when the effort involved goes uncredited then I feel insanely demotivated from further participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't take me wrong. Stack Exchange is a community that I totally love and want to do my best for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259549" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-08-07T18:30:49.210" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T19:47:45.873" Title="What differently can I do to be helpful to the community by answering?" Tags="|support|down-votes|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13051" CreationDate="2020-08-05T20:27:29.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have the time to go look at your answers, but this happens all of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes posters of questions are here for a quick answer. Once they see something they like they don't up vote or choose an accepted answer, and often they are never seen again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other times it depends on time of activity. Some questions just don't get a lot of views. Some answers just get shadowed by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at any high-rep user (including myself). You will most likely see many answers with a score of 0. Votes is not an indication of &lt;em&gt;views&lt;/em&gt;. Many users don't vote on everything that they read or even like. While you can't see how many people looked at your specific answer, you can see how many people viewed the post, and you can assume that some subset of those people saw your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also look at the &amp;quot;people reached&amp;quot; metric on your profile. I see 8,000 currently on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/259549/vamsi-krishna&quot;&gt;your profile&lt;/a&gt;. I wouldn't call that nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a while you will also figure out which questions are worth answering and which ones aren't best suited for this site. Just keep answering. Keep interacting. Your impact is measured by more than just votes and acceptances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T20:27:29.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13051" CreationDate="2020-08-07T19:47:45.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked through all your zero-score answers, and the thing that I noticed first of all was not the quality of your answers: instead it's the quality of the questions. Notice how a sizable portion of the questions (5 out of 11) either are now closed, or have zero score. These factors influence number of views, which is less than 50 for each of these questions. 1 question that currently has 2 upvotes is unclear itself IMHO (I don't think it deserves these upvotes), and the answers there (including yours) can't really be judged since they don't make even the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; clearer, much less the answers themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the 4 other questions, to some of them there are competing answers many of which do indeed look superior—by being fuller, sometimes &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; fuller. They are consequently higher-voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that you read the upvoted answers competing with yours and try to identify what you could have done better. E.g. add an illustration (not necessarily graphical: it might just be an example, toy model etc.), try explaining the subject from different perspectives, try figuring out what other answers lack to satisfactorily answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really feel like answering an unclear question, try to do your best to understand where the asker is confused, and only then consider posting an answer. Otherwise neither the OP, nor the readers will appreciate it, leaving your answer without any votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you edit a zero-score answer (or post a new one) to a question that already has many upvoted answers, don't expect that you'll get an upvote: people are generally lazy, don't want to scroll down too much unless the text really deserves it, and Stack Exchange sites by default sort the answers by vote score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T19:47:45.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13049" CreationDate="2020-08-08T07:26:48.490" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I'll kick it off with an idea: how about a chat session or two? I know we don't have regular chat sessions like we used to, but perhaps just a time at which anyone interested can converge in the chat room to exchange stories or whatever they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not necessarily saying that this would be better than a video meetup or any of the other ideas, but I figure it is something that would be kind of on theme for us, and probably wouldn't be hard to organize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T07:26:48.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13058" CreationDate="2020-08-10T12:15:03.003" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is asking how to derive an expression in a paper on topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not where should I ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46926" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-10T12:16:56.953" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T12:30:27.083" Title="Is asking how to derive an expression in a paper on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13057" CreationDate="2020-08-10T12:30:27.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not generally &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt;, but that doesn't mean that every question asking for the derivation of an expression in a paper is on-topic. Also, keep in mind closure decisions are always made individually for questions by the users voting on the questions, so everything I'm going to say here is what I think would happen, not what definitely &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it very much depends on how you ask this question and how much information besides &amp;quot;How do I derive this?&amp;quot; you give us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just post the expression and ask for its derivation without any further context, I would think that the question is likely to be closed under our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/50583&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt; both for lacking effort shown and for not asking a conceptual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just post the expression and your attempt to derive it and ask us where you went wrong it's likely to be closed as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583&quot;&gt;check-my-work&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post an explanation with context, your efforts to derive it, and make plausible this cannot be found easily in the standard literature of the field, I think it is likely not to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T12:30:27.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-13T13:16:42.063" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I specifically used the formulation in the title from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/bite-sizing-homework/5959#5959&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the only place I found to deal with this. But I do not know, what to take from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To elaborate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question arose from comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/572705/why-work-done-by-friction-is-positive/572732#572732&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. I know the &amp;quot;check my solution&amp;quot; questions are considered off topic. However, I think this is different. The solution is known to be wrong and we are seeking only the mistake, that must necessarily be there. Of course the mistake might be only forgotten minus sign, or the mistake might lead to clarification of important conceptual misconception and in this case, it would be helpful to broader audience. Sadly, as the mistake is unknown, better question than just &amp;quot;spot the mistake&amp;quot; cannot be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me such question can be rightly heavily downvoted - as it is in general uninteresting - but I do not think it should be considered off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the official stance of this site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204534" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T20:35:42.533" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T20:35:42.533" Title="Is &quot;here a problem and my solution with my reasoning for each step, where has my reasoning gone wrong?&quot; question considered off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2020-08-13T15:59:30.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13062" CreationDate="2020-08-14T05:08:38.257" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I was awarded the &lt;code&gt;Talkative&lt;/code&gt; badge on the main site for one message being starred out of ten message posted in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to me, chat is same for main as well as meta site. So, why I didn't receive the badge here, on meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253530" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T08:11:54.017" Title="&quot;Talkative&quot; badge on meta" Tags="|support|bug|chat|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13061" CreationDate="2020-08-14T05:42:37.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you've noticed, badges are separate for the main and meta sites. Some badges just can't be obtained on meta (even though they &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/121922/295232&quot;&gt;appear in the list of badges&lt;/a&gt;), and the chat badges (Talkative and Outspoken) are part of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chat server is shared with all other Stack Exchange sites (except Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Exchange which have their own server). You got a talkative badge on Physics Stack Exchange, but not on Mathematics Stack Exchange, even though it uses the same chat server. Why? Because the 10 messages were posted in chatrooms 'parented' to Physics Stack Exchange. It's not possible (except for some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/325101/295232&quot;&gt;hacking&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13775/backup-room--the-h-bar&quot;&gt;old cases/bug leftovers&lt;/a&gt;) to have a chatroom parented to Physics &lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange, therefore you can't earn the badge here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T08:11:54.017" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T08:11:54.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T14:24:27.000" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously, whenever I asked a question, there used to be a 'Related' tab on the right side. It used to display links to a lot of related posts. Now, I cannot see the tab 'Related' anymore. It was useful to track the related posts. Has there been a recent change on the site regarding this or is it a temporary problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164488" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T10:39:06.207" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T10:39:06.207" Title="What happened to the 'Related' sidebar?" Tags="|feature-request|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2020-08-14T21:48:19.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-16T16:28:57.570" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/371315&quot;&gt;Do absolute space and time exist?&lt;/a&gt;. But at the beginning of that thread is the statement &amp;quot;closed 2 years ago&amp;quot;? Does that mean you can no longer post comments? Can you reactivate the thread by posting the same question again? The thread certainly deserves more answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238206" OwnerDisplayName="Richard" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T16:35:37.310" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T17:37:44.073" Title="Why is &quot;Absolute Space and Time&quot; thread closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13065" CreationDate="2020-08-16T17:27:23.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the banner at the top says, that question was closed because a similar question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/183577/44126&quot;&gt;Is spacetime absolute?&lt;/a&gt;, was already asked and already had satisfactory answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that our community is based on asking questions and getting answers, not on having discussions.  If you post exactly the same question again, the community will probably vote to close it as another duplicate, unless you are explicit about how the existing question and its existing answers don't meet your needs.  If you just want to shoot the breeze about things that interest you, there are other places on the internet to do that (one of which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;our chat room&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;take the site tour&lt;/a&gt; to get a better idea of how we do things here. Welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T17:27:23.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13065" CreationDate="2020-08-16T17:37:44.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible to post comments on the closed question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/371315/123208&quot;&gt;Do absolute space and time exist?&lt;/a&gt;  but you don't have the 50 reputation points required to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;comment everywhere&lt;/a&gt; (although you can comment on your own answers or questions, or any answers to your own questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange sites are not discussion forums, and the Q&amp;amp;A (question &amp;amp; answer) pages here do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; work like the threads on such forums. Sometimes the comments on a page can develop into a discussion, but that is not encouraged: comments should be used to request clarification or suggest improvements to a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do have a new question on this topic which you'd like to ask, you are welcome to do so, but please make sure first that it isn't answered in the existing Q&amp;amp;A pages on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to have a discussion  on physics topics, there are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;chat rooms&lt;/a&gt; attached to the site. The main Physics.SE chat room is &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h bar&lt;/a&gt;. You only need 20 rep points to post in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T17:37:44.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-17T10:45:41.430" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573742/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on the basis that it's a question about physics of a fictional universe, but is entirely grounded in real physics based on the following rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about physics of fictional worlds which &lt;strong&gt;are not sufficiently grounded in real physics&lt;/strong&gt; are off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top voted answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10911/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; suggests it should be on-topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it was closed as 'not mainstream physics.' I thought orbital mechanics were very much mainstream physics so I don't understand this closure; Does this rule preclude me from asking any questions about hypothetical scenarios within our universe such as this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I re-word it to &amp;quot;Could an object in a 1 AU orbit from the sun reach mars with only 460m/s of thrust available in a single near-instantaneous burst?&amp;quot; would it be re-opened? That doesn't fundamentally change the current answer,  but I don't know enough to know if it is actually an equivalent question, or does it oversimplify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224710" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T11:17:15.230" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T13:05:14.830" Title="Is this question a 'Questions about physics of (a) fictional world&quot; or a &quot;Non-mainstream physics&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13068" CreationDate="2020-08-17T12:04:51.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will say that I don't think your fictional scenario itself is sufficient for closure, but I do think in this specific instance there is still some troubles with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other meta post you link to seems more concerned with actual published works of fiction that still has well defined rules and things that happened that other people can go look at. The physics in the questions discussed there are assumed to be the same physics we all know and love, it's just in the context of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case you have made up your own fictional scenario that starts off with something completely unphysical. In general, the issue is that this can often involve assumptions that aren't clear, are wrong, or open the door for nonsensical answers. Assumptions might also not be complete, thus forcing answerers to fill in the gaps can causing the question to not have a unique answer. To quote Stanley Hudson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How 'bout make believe land has anything you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case some of the fiction is confusing. You said the Earth has disappeared, but you are talking about Earth escape velocities, which wouldn't be relevant if the Earth disappeared. Are you wanting to consider the alterations to the orbit of Mars due to the disappearance of the Earth? Or are you assuming in this scenario that also Mars continues on it's same path?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really are interested in real physics, then I would try to find an actual real example to set up your question. This is because you don't need fiction if your question didn't &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; in fiction (like the other meta post describes). When possible, just stick with what is real so that the question can be as clear as possible and everyone is working with the same physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not just ask about a possible scenario of an astronaut on a spaceship in a sun-planet system that is wanting to launch objects onto the planet? Then you don't need to bring in disappearing planets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, in my opinion the question is really just asking for a calculation to be done, as evident by the current single answer. So part of me feels like the question would need to stay closed anyway. It seems like you know the physics already, you just want a calculation to be done. You aren't asking about how gravity, escape velocity, orbits, etc. work in the context of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T13:05:14.830" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T13:05:14.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13068" CreationDate="2020-08-17T12:45:00.847" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could an object in a 1 AU orbit from the sun reach mars with only 460m/s of thrust available in a single near-instantaneous burst?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that would be an acceptable, well-posed question. It is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; important that you be clear exactly what velocity your object starts with (is it travelling at the standard orbital speed of the Earth, 29.78 km/s? or is it stationary, i.e., at the top of a parabolic arc that starts and ends in the Sun?) and what the conditions are for the thrust. But if you do that, it's an on-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also acceptable to include in the question, either at the start or at the end, a section describing the motivation for why you're interested in that calculation. This is where the &amp;quot;Earth vanishes&amp;quot; scenario can be mentioned. (But note that your description of the scenario is currently too vague to be helpful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is crucial that the two parts (non-mainstream motivation, and mainstream actual question) be clearly delineated. If you mix the two then that's where the non-mainstream closures come in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T12:45:00.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13072" CreationDate="2020-08-17T15:57:30.450" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573921/&quot;&gt;Resource reference for Induction due to Time Varying Magnetic Fields (TVMF)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question 5 minutes before posting it here. I have tried to add the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classical-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classical-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classical-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt; but it just shows in the edit menu like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ol101.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ol101.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And upon clicking save edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bPvkn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bPvkn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which basically means there were no edits but neither there was an error shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="270704" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T16:00:07.903" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T16:00:07.903" Title="Unable to add the [classical-electrodynamics] tag" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13071" CreationDate="2020-08-17T15:59:37.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical-electrodynamics tag is a synonym of electromagnetism, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/electromagnetism/synonyms&quot;&gt;its synonym page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T15:59:37.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13074" CreationDate="2020-08-17T16:19:19.437" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573921/&quot;&gt;Resource reference for Induction due to Time Varying Magnetic Fields (TVMF)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the above question with the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;. The purpose behind doing so is that the tag page suggests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;if one has a specific topic to ask, by using this tag he or she shall get it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-as per orders issued by physics community of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is&lt;/strong&gt;, was my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573921/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt; request more than a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; which asks for more &lt;em&gt;data&lt;/em&gt;? And why was it so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I request to describe the tags more appropriately possible with more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A resource recommendation question is one that asks for a resource (which can be a book, website, or other resource) to learn a topic from. It should have the resource-recommendation tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the same as a specific-reference question, which asks for a specific paper in which a derivation or concept is explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mine was asking to &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; a specific concept so should have been the latter. But thinking about it now, it also asks for experimental evidences, lecture notes etc. So I am just confused about which of the tags to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="270704" LastEditorUserId="270704" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T16:48:09.273" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T17:09:19.480" Title="Distinction between [resource-recommendations] and [specific-reference] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13073" CreationDate="2020-08-17T17:09:19.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are confusing a specific topic with a specific reference. Your question is about a very specific &lt;strong&gt;topic&lt;/strong&gt;, but it asks for &lt;strong&gt;any reference&lt;/strong&gt; that covers the topic in detail, i.e. any book, any paper, etc. The list of possible answers is not closed, so it should be tagged as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149907" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T17:09:19.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12839" CreationDate="2020-08-17T17:13:49.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just got a ping from colleagues that the link was added. Please take a look&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/12FTc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/12FTc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hope it is what you've requested!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251215" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T17:13:49.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T01:57:54.697" Score="21" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573927/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was just closed as off-topic.  It is a well presented question, which was well-received, and it got a good, canonical answer.  The stated reason for closing was that &amp;quot;it doesn't appear to be about physics, it's just asking us to identify something.&amp;quot;  I think this is closed-minded and silly.  Nobel prizes have been awarded for &amp;quot;identifying things&amp;quot; like radiation, argon, the neutron, the CMB, and many others.  The distinction between &amp;quot;identifying&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;explaining&amp;quot; is just semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a great question regarding physics of an everyday phenomenon, which is making this SE and physics in general more accessible to non-physicists.  It is very much in the same spirit as many other popular &amp;quot;everyday physics&amp;quot; questions on this site.  E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/387926/&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about inverted pyramid ice spikes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/336709/&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about Oreo's, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/94235/&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about another shadow effect, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/389947/&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about wet tiles.  I'm 120 rep shy of being able to cast a re-open vote, but I will surely be doing so once I can.  What do other people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110443" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T15:18:16.693" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T18:51:33.590" Title="Are questions about the identification of physical phenomena on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13076" CreationDate="2020-08-18T07:09:04.567" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree and would vote to reopen if the closing vote weren't a mod. Reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One does not know before asking the question what the answer is going to look like. Once you've seen the answer then one could say it's a meteorological phenomenon and not a physics one, but &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; it could equally be an optics question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meteorology is intimately related to physics. One could apply to a postgraduate meteorology degree with a physics undergraduate degree. Some programs such as this one even offer a &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/our-degrees/degree-programmes/physics-with-meteorology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physics and meteorology&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; degree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David Z wrote in a comment that &amp;quot;[the question is] just asking us to identify something&amp;quot; and that's not physics. I disagree. Example, lots of physicists spent time to figure out the labels on this image, and a physics exam could easily ask &amp;quot;what process is this? Which particle is the electron and which is the positron?&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kpriM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kpriM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;e+ e- pair production&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bigganblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/I15-70-positron.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bigganblog.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of people who read the physics.SE thought the question was interesting (hence the upvotes). Whether the question is in physics seems rather pedantic as long as it's interesting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177855" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T07:09:04.567" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13076" CreationDate="2020-08-18T07:11:32.037" Score="-11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your premise is flawed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobel prizes have been awarded for &amp;quot;identifying things&amp;quot; like radiation, argon, the neutron, the CMB, and many others. The distinction between &amp;quot;identifying&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;explaining&amp;quot; is just semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has never been a Nobel Prize awarded for &lt;em&gt;identifying&lt;/em&gt; something. If someone shows you a picture and says &amp;quot;what is that thing called?&amp;quot;, you will not get a Prize for answering. You could get one for &lt;em&gt;investigating&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;explaining&lt;/em&gt; the thing in the picture, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the criteria for what make a good question on this site are not the same criteria that are used to determine who wins the Nobel Prize, and in fact they're not particularly connected either, but in this case they share a key factor: &lt;em&gt;identifying&lt;/em&gt; something does not meet either set of criteria, whereas &lt;em&gt;explaining&lt;/em&gt; does. I happen to note that each of the other four questions you linked is asking for an explanation of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; something happens in a particular way, which rules out the argument that they are off topic because they're merely asking for something to be identified. However, the question you're complaining about having been closed was asking nothing more than &amp;quot;what is the thing in this picture called?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I could see &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kinds of identification questions that might be on topic here; for example, asking about a particular piece of experimental equipment might be okay, or asking for something observed in a physics experiment might be okay. Asking about a meteorological phenomenon, though, as in the question referenced, seems firmly out of scope to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because everything in the universe is subject to the laws of physics does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that everything in the universe is on topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T07:11:32.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13081" CreationDate="2020-08-18T07:27:44.177" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/574046/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. I wanted to know if this is an homework or check my work type question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261727" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T08:23:11.990" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T15:02:33.020" Title="Is this an homework or check-my-work type question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13068" CreationDate="2020-08-18T11:39:34.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this SE has an overly trigger-happy closing policy for questions like this, that does have interesting physics content even though they start out by setting up a crazy scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern that making unphysical initial assumptions will make answers arbitrary depends strongly on what the initial assumptions and questions are. The perennial &amp;quot;what if the sun disappeared, would Earth keep on orbiting for 8 minutes?&amp;quot; question really deals with issues of the speed of propagation of disturbances in gravitational fields. Asking why FTL implies time travel is a way of understanding special relativity on a deeper level. The details of how the sun disappeared or the FTL drive are unimportant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mainstream physics&amp;quot; involves not just idealized cases (frictionless planes, free particles) and toy models (various Lagrangians) that in many cases behave quite differently from reality (a solitary hydrogen atom at finite temperature is not stable due to a divergent partition function: stability requires a less idealized case) but also many established theoretical models (MWI, superstring theory, MOND, nonlinear QM) often have parameters weakly constrained by evidence and wild implications. Indeed, tracing out the wild implications and using them as arguments for or against the theories (e.g. nonlinear QM is disfavored because the radical consequences). There is no clear line between &amp;quot;serious mainstream theory&amp;quot; and a &amp;quot;too wild theory&amp;quot;; consider the gradual journey of black holes from argument against GR to mainstream theory (and then empirical fact), or the iffy status of objects like neutrino stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the closing criterion needs to be &lt;em&gt;that possible answers depend too much on scenario assumptions to be of general interest (and answerable)&lt;/em&gt;. And we need to help people asking questions to reframe their questions into an answerable form rather than sniffly close the door to curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165299" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T11:39:34.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13079" CreationDate="2020-08-18T15:02:33.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we explain this phenomenon using ray diagrams?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the issue. At first glance it makes it look like you are just asking for someone to make a ray diagram for you rather than asking about physics concepts here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy fix could be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From ray diagrams it can easily be concluded that using a real object, we cannot get a real image from a plane mirror. But, if we shine a torch on the mirror we see a real image on the wall. Why does a real image form despite ray diagrams showing they do not form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This puts the focus on understanding what constitutes a real image, and how they relate to ray diagrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also help to explain why you think it is a real image (and not just light reflecting off a surface), and maybe even your ray diagrams showing how real images do not form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T15:02:33.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13049" CreationDate="2020-08-18T16:14:12.467" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe we can revisit the top few questions from each year and have a discussion on them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps have a separate chat room where people post how their lives have changed in the past ten years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those with access to site analytics maybe can share a glimpse of the growth?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don’t know how feasible these ideas are. But regardless, celebratory swag should happen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201709" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T16:14:12.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13076" CreationDate="2020-08-18T20:09:09.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The close reason on the question directs to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.  The first bullet point in the &lt;code&gt;on-topic&lt;/code&gt; section reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explanations of observed physical or astronomical phenomena&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there is confusion since the question is asking &amp;quot;what is this&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;why is this&amp;quot;.  Unfortunately, to effectively do research for &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;, you need to first know &amp;quot;what&amp;quot;.  Perhaps the question could include an explicit question of &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;, but I think the phrase &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;in hopes I could figure out what they were&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; include an implicit expectation of &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe these (currently open) questions to be similar to the one in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/376658/33635&quot;&gt;What is this sort of abstract rainbow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/303580/33635&quot;&gt;What is this blue thing in a photograph of a bright light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33635" LastEditorDisplayName="user258881" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T10:42:09.933" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T10:42:09.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13076" CreationDate="2020-08-19T14:54:35.733" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other person who voted to close this question, I will weigh in here as well (bring on the down votes! (although comments opening up a discussion would be greatly appreciated)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, most of the arguments as to why the question deserves to be open here are invalid to use as criteria for a question to be opened or closed. Note that I am not saying this particular questions fail in all of these regards necessarily, but general application of these &amp;quot;leave open&amp;quot; reasons are usually a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question...was well-received, and it got a good, canonical answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question being well received does not make it on topic, just like how a question gaining many down votes does not necessarily mean the question should actually be closed (although this is usually the case). There are many instances where high-voted questions are closed, especially due to the HNQ (but not always).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, questions should not be judged based on their answers or their potential for answers. If this were the case, then any closure policy becomes invalid, as a user could type up an amazing answer to a poor question. An amazing answer could then save the closure of a bad question, which I don't think most users would think should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobel prizes have been awarded for &amp;quot;identifying things&amp;quot; like radiation, argon, the neutron, the CMB, and many others. The distinction between &amp;quot;identifying&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;explaining&amp;quot; is just semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Identifying things is not unique to physics. And physics is certainly not defined as &amp;quot;the science of identifying things&amp;quot;. So identification is not a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a question to be about physics. And even then, not all questions that can be related to physics are on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a great question regarding physics of an everyday phenomenon, which is making this SE and physics in general more accessible to non-physicists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being about the physics of every day phenomenon or making the site more accessible to other users is also not sufficient to allow a question to remain open. Once again, one could easily make poor questions meeting these criteria. Especially in the latter case: e.g. allowing all homework questions would definitely make the site more accessible to new students of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very much in the same spirit as many other popular &amp;quot;everyday physics&amp;quot; questions on this site. E.g. this one about inverted pyramid ice spikes, this one about Oreo's, this one about another shadow effect, and this one about wet tiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One shouldn't use currently open questions to determine if a different question should be open or closed. The popularity of questions can be greatly skewed by the HNQ. Also, you can probably find many examples of questions that should have been closed that are currently open. This happens sometimes on meta when users want a homework question to be opened. They dig through past posts until they find a question that slipped through the cracks. On the flip side, we can find popular &amp;quot;physics of every day phenomenon&amp;quot; questions that indeed have been closed, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/366769/179151&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and another &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/428063/179151&quot;&gt;wet tile question&lt;/a&gt;. Playing the meta-game of &amp;quot;I can find other questions that prove my point&amp;quot; can easily be played by both sides with no clear winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I see that starts moving in the right direction is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a well presented question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly if a question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; well presented it deserves to be closed (usually due to clarity issues). But a question being well presented is not sufficient for it to remain open. For example, there could be really well written questions about a new theory someone has. However, as policy we don't allow questions asking about personal theories because there usually isn't a well-defined answer one can post to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then, why did I vote to close this question? The OP here is not asking to learn about any physics concepts here. They are just asking, &amp;quot;Hey, what is this?&amp;quot;. And while the answer can be stated relating to physical phenomena, like I said earlier, we cannot judge questions based on their answers or potential answers. Additionally, questions like these often are missing a lot of information. Here there is just a picture, and then some information the OP thinks might be useful. Often much speculation is needed, and once answers are posted there are still conflicting answers or thoughts about what is really going on&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; (as has started in the comments of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/573929/179151&quot;&gt;current answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;I do not mean to make it seem like I am saying &amp;quot;Don't judge questions based on answers.&amp;quot; and then &amp;quot;These questions should be closed because of answers.&amp;quot; What I mean by &amp;quot;Don't judge questions based on answers / potential answers&amp;quot; is that it is not valid to say &amp;quot;look at this awesome answer. This question should be open.&amp;quot; Because it could very well be the case that the question is complete garbage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is a Q&amp;amp;A site, where we want definitive answers to questions. If a question cannot garner definitive answers then it should indeed be closed. The various answers could have ranges from good to bad answers, but with varying content. Therefore, this point is still about the quality of the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;, not the individual answers it might be able to receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T18:49:33.583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T18:49:33.583" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13076" CreationDate="2020-08-19T18:51:33.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen, and am pleased to see that an interesting answer has now been given to an interesting physics question. I don't see any argument that this was not a physics question or that it was not on topic. Moderator privileges are intended to shortcut the process of voting if there are clear cut reasons why that should be done. They should not be used to suppress answers according to the personal view of a moderator who (as in this case) does not have a strong physics background. If this were an isolated instance, I would have held my peace. But I have many times seen a moderator (particularly this one) close questions about areas of physics in which he has no particular expertise (notably questions of qm and gr). I would urge all moderators to consider how they use moderator privileges, and to acknowledge that if they are not expert in a particular field they should not unilaterally close questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255997" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T18:51:33.590" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-19T20:32:40.427" Score="8" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very recently a question and answer of mine was deleted [closed, Edit.] here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/573910/cooling-of-a-uniform-sphere-with-convective-heat-loss-at-the-boundary&quot;&gt;Cooling of a Uniform Sphere with Convective heat loss at the boundary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question and answer had been deleted by ACuriousMind alone (but this is not a diatribe against ACM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered my own question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/01/its-ok-to-ask-and-answer-your-own-questions/&quot;&gt;the spirit of this link:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s OK to Ask and Answer Your Own Questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ has contained one key bit of advice from the very beginning:&#xA;It’s also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, as long&#xA;as you pretend you’re on Jeopardy! — phrase it in the form of a&#xA;question. So … if you have a question that you already know the answer&#xA;to…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have applied &amp;quot;Q&amp;amp;A&amp;quot; that way before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard, stated reason for the deletion was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions and check-my-work questions are considered&#xA;off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations&#xA;instead of underlying physics concepts. Homework questions can be&#xA;on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience. If you intend to&#xA;modify your question, please read the links above carefully before&#xA;editing. Note that answers with complete solutions may be deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That definition has never sat with  me very well because it's highly subjective. There are TONS of questions that make it through that filter, yet can EASILY be considered homework-like. Conversely, my question asked about a specific physics concept, concisely worded. And I provided a complete answer, because providing a partial one seemed silly here. Many of P.SE's posts make it into Google (and other SEs) where partial answers are of little value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe deleting interesting, conceptual questions with correct, well-presented answers to be absurd -  Kafkaesque even and contrary to the spirit of physics.stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86889" LastEditorUserId="86889" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T22:15:27.490" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T06:58:03.443" Title="Question and answer deleted: not in P.SE's interest in my opinion" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-20T16:45:58.843" Score="13" ViewCount="728" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a recent question, there was some discussion in the comments about &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;.  With regard to the latter, the OP pointed out that &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; is not apparently defined to be off-topic in the sites help.  I think that some here would argue, perhaps, that it's a sub-case of &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; and therefore covered.  This particular exchange, however, reflects an OP that seemed aware of the site's nominal guidance in help and came to a defensible conclusion that &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; is within the published guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course in review, &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; are two legs of one of the site-specific closure reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I get that there's multiple discussions of this in meta, but I think it's beyond the usual expectation that a new user would have to search meta to determine the topicality of their question.  Usually that's the role of the corresponding section of help.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it somewhere stated in the help that &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; questions are explicitly off-topic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, could we add that to help with and addition example?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the question (with comments under) that motivated my post here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/574533/what-are-the-equations-of-motion-for-this-simple-system&quot;&gt;What are the equations of motion for this simple system?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T03:19:53.457" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T03:19:53.457" Title="Is &quot;check-my-work&quot; defined to be off-topic in the site's help? (Should it be?)" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13087" CreationDate="2020-08-20T20:15:38.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the links given in the close banner for closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check my work questions&lt;/a&gt; give sufficient information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These links aren't visible in the actual close banner for users who cannot vote to close questions and are not the OP. The first link is accessible through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;. I'm looking for the second, but the first link still discusses check my work questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T20:20:42.830" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T20:20:42.830" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13086" CreationDate="2020-08-22T06:58:03.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd just like to chip in on the general idea and rationale behind closing these types of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, and correct me if I'm wrong, the overarching reason we close questions on StackExchange is to curb the addition of content that doesn't add value to the site. In other words, the goal is to reduce noise.&#xA;In the more specific case of homework-like questions on physics.SE, there is also an additional &amp;quot;meta-reason&amp;quot; of discouraging people from seeing the site as a do-my-homework place, which might lead to an increased influx of low-effort questions, thus straining the general efforts of maintaining the quality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these rationales apply to the special case of Q&amp;amp;A-style questions? I'm referring here specifically to posts created for the purpose of sharing knowledge, in which the asker already knows the (or at least &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;) answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that some maintain that these questions should not be treated as exceptions, so that, if taking the question in isolation would lead to it being closed for lack of context or such, the fact that an answer was provided with said question should not affect its assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't see why this should be the case. Why should these types of questions &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be treated with different standards? After all, provided the Q&amp;amp;A provides &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; amount of useful knowledge, how does it not add value to the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answer being provided with the question makes the context of the question (usually) pretty clear. On a similar note, the question comes with an answer attached. It's an open-and-shut case. It literally does no harm (unless one starts worrying about floods of such posts cluttering the front page... which however isn't going to happen anytime soon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that a question being very briefly put is, in the case of Q&amp;amp;A posts, even an advantage. If normally the lack of context would make a post harder to parse and answer in a way that reflects what the asker actually meant to ask, in the case of a Q&amp;amp;A this is not an issue. On the other hand, if someone happens to be looking for that piece of information in the future, the brevity of the question only makes it easier to figure out whether the question deals with what they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It does not encourage people posting homework to the site. Sure, it might provide a target for someone looking for homework, but let's be honest the site will already be a primary google search result in this regard. At least Q&amp;amp;A questions are more likely to come with knowledgable answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a similar note, I also don't see the point of deleting a self-answer to a question that was closed as homework. I understand why answers to homework-like questions are deleted, but how does the reason behind that policy apply in the case of self-answered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there will be exceptions to all this, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; if the answer is badly put together or just plain wrong, if the asker is trying to promote personal theories, etc. But this doesn't look to be the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58382" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T06:58:03.443" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T01:20:22.633" Score="-2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13076/are-questions-about-the-identification-of-physical-phenomena-on-topic&quot;&gt;a significant discussion&lt;/a&gt; about whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573927/&quot;&gt;a question on the main site&lt;/a&gt; should be on topic. I &lt;em&gt;very strongly&lt;/em&gt; believe that it is not a good question for the site and should not be on topic here, but the community thought otherwise. That got me thinking about what defines our site's scope with respect to identification questions. I'm making this post to share my reasoning for why I think identification questions like that one should not be on topic here and see if I can convince the community to agree to make this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, when I say &amp;quot;identification question&amp;quot;, I'm talking about a type of question that simply asks &amp;quot;what is [thing]&amp;quot;, where the &amp;quot;[thing]&amp;quot; might be an object or event seen in everyday life, or an object or optical feature in a photograph of everyday life (i.e. not a photo taken in a science experiment), or rarely, a video of something happening. There's often no indication of any prior research by the asker, and in particular, the asker doesn't share why they think the thing they're asking about has anything to do with physics or astronomy (as opposed to, say, chemistry or biology, or maybe they just thought &amp;quot;hey, scientists know all kinds of random things&amp;quot;). Also, the question doesn't ask to &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; anything. E.g. if the thing being asked about is an event or optical feature in a photo, the asker doesn't ask &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the thing happens, they just want a name. Or if they're asking about an object, they don't (seem to) care about what it could be used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these questions are bad for the site because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They're basically trivia questions which may or may not have anything to do with physics, so e.g. a random person is just as likely to know the answer as a random physicist or astronomer. That doesn't make the question bad, but I think it should mean that this site is not the place for it. I'd like to think that questions which are well-received here are those which are more useful to, and more answerable by the audience described in our help center (active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy) than to the average person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also, these questions don't prompt us to give an answer that shares any science knowledge. And if a question can be fully answered without sharing any science knowledge, it raises the question of what it's doing here, since neither the question nor its likely answers will be related to physics or astronomy. (Often one &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; post an answer that shares some physics/astronomy knowledge by going beyond what the question is asking for, but that's true of a wide variety of questions which I think we would all agree have no business here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A lot of these questions don't get much traction on the site, but the ones that do tend to be quite popular and often hit the HNQ, because visitors who aren't necessarily all that familiar with science can understand them. Tying into my previous point, that means a decent fraction of the questions that do the most work to represent our site are marginally or not at all related to physics or astronomy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that in mind, what I'm proposing is that we make a policy that puts the burden on the asker of an identification question to show why their question belongs here, specifically. I'm proposing that identification questions, which ask &amp;quot;what is [thing]&amp;quot;, must meet one of these criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain why the question has something to do with physics or astronomy specifically (this would cover identification questions for devices used in physics experiments as well as astronomical objects)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask for some kind of physics-related explanation of the thing described, e.g. why it occurs (if it's a phenomenon) or possibly how it formed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this proposal, for example, all four of the following questions that Yly linked in the other meta post are fine because they ask for explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/387926/strange-ice-found-in-my-garden&quot;&gt;Strange ice found in my garden&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/336709/when-separating-an-oreo-cookie-why-does-the-cream-stick-to-just-one-side-only&quot;&gt;When separating an Oreo cookie, why does the cream stick to just one side only?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/94235/why-do-shadows-from-the-sun-join-each-other-when-near-enough&quot;&gt;Why do shadows from the sun join each other when near enough?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/389947/why-are-the-wet-patches-on-these-floor-tiles-circular&quot;&gt;Why are the wet patches on these floor tiles circular?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few questions where the answer would have to do with physics or astronomy but the asker doesn't know that or doesn't have any reason to believe that. Those would be rendered off-topic under this policy. I think that's reasonable because the asker can easily be guided to modify their question to make it clear that it does have to do with physics or astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T21:05:51.147" Title="Can we restrict what kinds of identification questions are on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13090" CreationDate="2020-08-24T16:02:27.327" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathize with the intent of this post but I think it would be detrimental to implement the proposed criteria in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People observing a phenomenon and then asking what it is &lt;em&gt;don't know what it is&lt;/em&gt;. How are they supposed to know whether e.g. some optical phenomenon they see is an optical illusion more explained by biology and neuroscience (think e.g. about still images that look like they're moving) or a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; thing that is explained by physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of requiring an explanation of why they think it's &amp;quot;physics&amp;quot;, I think we should just stringently use the &lt;em&gt;needs details or clarity&lt;/em&gt; reason to close questions where not enough information is given to determine &lt;em&gt;uniquely&lt;/em&gt; the phenomenon happening. If enough details are given, it's either close-able because the answer is not based in physics or uniquely answerable (yes, this is a rare case where I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; think closing a question based on its potential answers is justified). The &lt;em&gt;stringently&lt;/em&gt; is important there - we should not be willing to play a guessing game about physics that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The idea that they should ask for a physical explanation instead of just &amp;quot;what it is&amp;quot; is at first glance reasonable to me, but what's stopping us from simply &lt;em&gt;assuming&lt;/em&gt; that someone who posts &amp;quot;What is this?&amp;quot; on a physics site is interested in a physics explanation of the &amp;quot;this&amp;quot; in question? Why do we need to close the question and force the asker to essentially always just replace &amp;quot;What is this?&amp;quot; by &amp;quot;What is the physical explanation for this?&amp;quot;? This strikes me as policing the formulation of the question more than policing its content. I think it's safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of people asking such questions on &lt;em&gt;physics.SE&lt;/em&gt; will be interested in the &lt;em&gt;physical explanation&lt;/em&gt;, and even if they're not - do we have to care?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the fear here is that if we don't do this then we get answers that just say &amp;quot;This is called X&amp;quot; without any explanation at all then I would like to believe that we'd just not upvote such answers (or even - gasp! - downvote them). If this belief isn't enough I'd prefer just making it a policy that such &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; are considered non-answers (and hence deletable via low quality review) rather than requiring askers to jump through this specific hoop in how they're phrasing their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T21:05:51.147" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T21:05:51.147" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13093" CreationDate="2020-08-25T04:33:57.490" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lZmPN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lZmPN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its been weeks since I asked 5 well received questions, but I haven't yet received the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/194/curious&quot;&gt;Curious&lt;/a&gt; badge. Can anybody tell me the reason to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261727" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T05:06:16.460" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T05:08:06.680" Title="Why did I not get my badge?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-08-25T08:28:11.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13092" CreationDate="2020-08-25T05:08:06.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirements for that badge are five well-received questions, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/24803/311665&quot;&gt;positive question record&lt;/a&gt;. You've fulfilled the first requirement, but not the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be pretty close to even, so it shouldn't take many more well-received questions to fulfill that requirement, as long as you can avoid poorly-received questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T05:08:06.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T07:17:53.767" Score="3" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;The below links are two examples of such questions which are not answered in 7-8 years. I also read on that questions that they were active some 3-4 years ago. What is the problem with these types of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they really don't have answers like proof of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Goldbach's&lt;/strong&gt; conjecture&lt;/a&gt; or yet their answers are very hard and why are they not active now? &lt;em&gt;Can someone answer them now if one finds an answer to such questions?&lt;/em&gt; Is there any difference between questions which show active some time ago and closed questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/72817/&quot;&gt;Linear sigma models and integrable systems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/27190/&quot;&gt;Experimental test of the non-statisticality theorem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236985" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T16:26:45.630" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T14:12:03.660" Title="Why don't some questions on Physics Stack Exchange have any answers for the past many years with very high votes? Why are they not active now?" Tags="|support|questions|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13094" CreationDate="2020-08-25T07:37:41.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a large difference between questions which haven't been active for a while and closed questions. Closed questions are closed because for one reason or another they aren't a good fit for our site, and they &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be answered unless they are reopened first. Older questions are just that - older - and can still be answered normally. If you see an old question that you can answer, go for it! It will then show up as active in the &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; questions tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T07:37:41.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13094" CreationDate="2020-08-25T13:04:14.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some additional points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reason those questions have not been answered is that the questions are hard. This shouldn't be so hard to understand, I hope. Those questions &amp;quot;are not active now&amp;quot; because... why would they &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to be active at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question on Stack Exchange has stood at high score for many years without getting answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It could be because the question is actually an Open Problem as far as all of physics is concerned, i.e., that the problem is widely known to the community at large (beyond SE) and no solution is known to anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But it could also be because the solution is known to someone somewhere, but they have not seen the question or they are not on SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or it could be that it is a new question which is being formulated for the first time, requiring e.g. a difficult calculation, and it has not been seen by the people who can do it, or they've seen it and they didn't realize that they could, or it's waiting for Divine Intervention to give somebody a Eureka moment, or a bunch of other reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, distinguishing between those cases is often impossible. &lt;em&gt;Sometimes&lt;/em&gt;, when you're lucky, it's possible to identify the first case, and indeed this is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/tags/open-problems/info&quot;&gt;the open-problems tag on MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; is about. In physics questions tend to be much more loosely defined, so that type of identification is much trickier, and PSE is not as close to the bleeding research edge as MO, so those cases are much less frequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any given case, the answer is typically.... who knows! Both of the examples you've linked to look like the third case to me, but it could turn out that they're something else, and we won't know more until we know more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers can be posted to any question on the site which is not closed or on hold, regardless of its age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Every&lt;/em&gt; question on the site has a marker, just below the title, of the form &lt;code&gt;Active: [date]&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;[date]&lt;/code&gt; is some temporal indicator (which will give you a precise timestamp if you hover your mouse over it). The &lt;code&gt;[date]&lt;/code&gt; in question is the last time that the question, or any of its answers, were posted or edited, and if you click on that time then it will take you to the post where that last activity occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that not all activity is visible to all users. As an example, if an answer is posted and then deleted, then the time of latest activity will be marked as the posting of that answer, but the answer itself will only be visible if you have 10k reputation. (In this case, the link will just take you to the question.) For an example of this, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/574883&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;, at least as of this writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the two examples you've linked to, there are actually 3 and 7 &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot;, respectively, which were posted over the years, do not actually answer the question, and have since been deleted. In other words, just because you can't see activity on those questions, it doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. (And, also, just because you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; post answers to those threads doesn't mean you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;, if you don't have an actual answer to the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T12:19:04.790" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T12:19:04.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13087" CreationDate="2020-08-26T16:33:54.907" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, it should be.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site's Help pages do a lot to define the scope of what can and cannot be asked here. New users who take the trouble to go to the on-topic help should expect a reasonably-complete description of the main guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the Help pages already link directly to the guidelines on meta, and if OP can't be bothered to follow the link then they have a thin case to claim to be surprised by policies they were unaware of. Moreover, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;core homework-policy question on meta&lt;/a&gt; already includes language explicitly ruling out check-my-work as off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on. Of course, it's still good to include the text of your problem, just in case (more on that a few paragraphs down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but I would argue that this should be clearer. Thus, I would suggest editing point 2 in that list to something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask about the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; concept that gives you trouble&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect you to narrow down the problem to the particular concept that's giving you trouble and ask about that specifically. That produces a question that is more relevant to others who might be having the same problem, as well as probably more interesting to answer. As a side effect it shows that you're not just being lazy and trying to get us to do your work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to produce a focused, specific question is to &lt;em&gt;show your work and your current understanding&lt;/em&gt;. Explain what you've been able to figure out so far and how you did it. Showing your work will help us gauge where you are having problems: if it is a technical thing near the end, a short to the point answer will suffice; if it is some fundamental problem with understanding the subject, somebody will then write a longer, more detailed response. It will also prevent people from spending a lot of time going over ground that you have already covered or understand well already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not enough to &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; show your work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;Questions which only show your attempt at a solution and ask us to check your calculation are also off-topic&lt;/a&gt;: it is not enough to just show your work and ask where you went wrong. If you just need someone to check your work, you can always seek out a friend, classmate, or teacher. As a rule of thumb, a good conceptual question should be useful even to someone who isn't looking at the problem you happen to be working on. Of course, it's still good to include the text of your problem, just in case (more on that a few paragraphs down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't just copy the exact problem from your homework assignment or textbook&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, when you are asking for help, writing in imperative mode (&amp;quot;Show that...&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Compute...&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Prove or find a counterexample: ...&amp;quot;) is at the very least impolite: you are, after all, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/faqs/smart-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trying to ask a question, not give an assignment&lt;/a&gt;. It also turns many people off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference the source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, for good measure, it should be included in the Help Center as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics - Stack Exchange is not a homework help site. If you have a question about a homework problem, or any problem of an educational nature, narrow it down to the specific concept that is giving you trouble and ask about that. You can find more &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;information about acceptable homework questions&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; on our meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T16:33:54.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-28T15:08:46.627" Score="9" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first two sentences of the Homework close reason are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions and check-my-work questions are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts. Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remove a few grammatically non-essential phrases it reduces to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions are off-topic here. Homework questions can be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is self-contradicting and confusing.&#xA;The problem is really in the first sentence, because everything including and after &amp;quot;particularly&amp;quot; is not a modifier of the stuff before &amp;quot;particularly&amp;quot;, so the first sentence says that homework questions are off topic.&#xA;That being the case, the second sentence contradicts the first by reformulating the boundaries.&#xA;The first sentence should probably say &amp;quot;...usually off topic&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;...often off topic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T18:33:31.003" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T18:33:31.003" Title="The homework close reason contradicts itself" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13098" CreationDate="2020-08-28T17:26:19.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are more like comments than answers, but I expect they'll raise replies and discussion, so I'm putting them in an answer to make the comment replies more manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The current close reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12448/44126&quot;&gt;was developed using community input&lt;/a&gt; over the course of about a month, last October.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The 500-character limit is &lt;em&gt;tough&lt;/em&gt;, especially if we want to have two separate links to the &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work&lt;/a&gt; FAQ pages.  In fact, I vaguely remember that the verbiage in the top-voted answer, claimed at 448/500 characters, actually came in slightly over the limit because the answer editor moved the links from the blockquoted text to the endnotes.  My memory is of rather frantically trying to come up with a appropriately trivial edit to bring the text under the limit, because the feedback I got from the site suggested that no one could cast homework-like close votes while I was editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think that if the first sentence were changed from &amp;quot;are considered off-topic&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;are usually considered off-topic,&amp;quot; the message would be at exactly 500 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after our community changed the homework-like close reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/339700/280545&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange made a network-wide change to the way those banners are displayed&lt;/a&gt;, which changed who sees the close banner and under what circumstances.  This probably would have changed our discussion if we had known about it, but there didn't seem to be strong community interest in having another discussion so soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I didn't realize this until I started looking at the close reasons just now, but the new structure allows us to specify close-reason guidance in &lt;em&gt;five distinct contexts&lt;/em&gt;. Below is the guidance in the close-reason editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close dialog option: Brief description. &amp;quot;Briefly describe why this question is being closed&amp;quot; (&amp;lt; 100 characters).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close dialog option: Usage guidance. &amp;quot;Give the user guidance as to when they should select this option&amp;quot; (&amp;lt; 500 characters). I think this is what close voters would see when they choose &amp;quot;close for a site-specific reason.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post notice: Close description. &amp;quot;When a post is close with a single community-specific close reason, this will [sic] message will be displayed publicly above any private guidance.&amp;quot; (&amp;lt; 500 characters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post notice: Post owner guidance. &amp;quot;Provide meaningful actions a user can take to either get their question reopened or have a more favorable outcome in the future.&amp;quot; (&amp;lt; 500 characters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post notice: Privileged user guidance. &amp;quot;Provide guidance for users with the reopen privilege so they can constructively engage the post owner and reopen the question if appropriate.&amp;quot; (&amp;lt; 500 characters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how these actually for a custom reason, there are some screenshots in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13100/44126&quot;&gt;this non-question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is community support for clarifying the way we handle homework-like questions, we could take the opportunity to use the new structure to our advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T18:25:31.323" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T18:25:31.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-28T18:00:43.187" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm experimenting with editing close reasons, so here's a &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; that I can immediately close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how the custom close reason looks in the close-question dialog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cgqtp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cgqtp.png&quot; alt=&quot;close-question dialog&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how the close banner looks to a logged-out user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VJ47m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VJ47m.png&quot; alt=&quot;logged-out banner&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how the close banner looks to the author of the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QBdGz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QBdGz.png&quot; alt=&quot;author banner&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it looks to a non-author with the privilege to cast open and close questions. (Thanks, FakeMod.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ap852.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ap852.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;privileged-user banner&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T19:06:28.650" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T19:06:28.650" Title="Non-question: experimenting with custom close-reason banners in different contexts" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2020-08-28T18:08:18.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-31T18:05:10.540" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I requested reference for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/573921/&quot;&gt;TVMF&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, this question was downvoted without a reason specified giving no space to improve and inappropriately making the question &lt;strong&gt;potentially useless&lt;/strong&gt;. I would like to discuss if I should delete and re-ask the said question. (would this be a violation of any policy?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The currently marked duplicate has this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9246/270704&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; which addresses on how to get attention on a question. It does not answer my question because mine is a &amp;quot;reference request&amp;quot; and besides that, I am asking whether I should refrain from posting another &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;reference request&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (primarily because it has downvotes and it has been marked a duplicate without a proper notification!) or just delete the post and ask a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And right before I am told that a specific reference should have been tagged with [specific-reference] and not [reference-request], one must know that I had previously kept that tag but it was removed on suggestion in meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="270704" LastEditorUserId="270704" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T05:51:12.700" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T05:51:12.700" Title="Re-asking this specific reference request" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|down-votes|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2020-08-31T19:28:16.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:44:30.330" Score="18" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some members do not proofread what they have written, some are used to informal communication channels, and some are not native English speakers. The result is that posts frequently have incorrect capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., making reading them difficult and unpleasant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this has anything to do with whether the questions they are asking, or the answers they are offering, are on-topic, interesting, correct, etc. On the other hand, I remember reading that there is an expectation that members make their best effort to write proper English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I think that someone is just being lazy, and making no effort to improve, is it unkind to downvote them because of their writing if there are an “excessive” number of “obvious” mistakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of “obvious” mistakes, which anyone can learn to avoid by reading English for five minutes: Not capitalizing the first word in a sentence. Not ending a sentence with a period or other appropriate punctuation. Not putting a space after the final punctuation in a sentence. Not breaking up walls of text into paragraphs. Not capitalizing the pronoun “I”. Not capitalizing people’s names, especially when they are very famous physicists or mathematicians. (Perhaps this is just me, but I find that last one extremely disrespectful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no interest in being a cultural imperialist, but, given the fact that this site operates exclusively in English, my opinion is that the English should be at least C-grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am entirely open to arguments that the quality of the English should not matter &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, or that I should simply fix or ignore the posts that bother me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T00:19:20.503" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:57:38.253" Title="Should proper English matter?" Tags="|discussion|style|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13104" CreationDate="2020-09-06T04:33:14.933" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The aim of this site (or least the original aim) is to be an authoritative source of information about physics. That is, anyone with a question about physics can search this site and either find an authoritative answer or ask a new question and hopefully receive an authoritative answer. And I think this has worked well. The quality of many of the answers on this site astounds me and I have benefited enormously from my association with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my view is that it's the question that matters. If someone asks a good question that will attract good answers, but the question is badly or even carelessly written, then we should all make the effort to edit it into shape. I admit it can be a little galling that a lazy OP will then get upvotes as a result of our work, but in the end everyone benefits so it's worth the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I very rarely see questions that I think are good, but have been carelessly written, and if the question isn't worth the effort I will downvote and move on. But I will be downvoting the question, not the effort the OP put in to writing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T15:28:54.963" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T15:28:54.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13107" CreationDate="2020-09-07T07:32:48.183" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alright, this is probably a weird question but sometimes I get two competing answers to a question both of which I think are very good. So, in case of a tie, how do I choose the answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T08:31:44.000" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T08:31:44.000" Title="What to do when you have multiple good answers?" Tags="|support|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13106" CreationDate="2020-09-07T07:40:45.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you feel like two (or more!) answers deserve recognition, but you have only one green checkmark, you could reward the others with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T07:40:45.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13104" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:57:38.253" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tooltip on the downvote button is &amp;quot;this question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&amp;quot;, which I think is a good description of what we should be using the downvote button for. And I do believe that it's possible for bad writing to make a question not useful, if the writing severely interferes with understanding it. In those cases, I'd say that downvoting is an appropriate response, although I think such a question would probably also qualify for the &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot; close reason, and that's probably a better response because it more directly pushes the question to be edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, there are a lot of questions that have some problems of spelling, grammar, formatting, etc. but they're not so bad that they make it difficult to understand the question. In those cases, downvoting is allowed but is probably not all that useful, unless you also leave a comment about the issues. The ideal thing to do, of course, is to edit to fix the issues, but if you don't want to or don't have time to edit, it might be best to just ignore it and move on. (If you would have upvoted the question if it were properly written, then declining to upvote is also an acceptable response.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:57:38.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T16:16:04.420" Score="9" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; questions are off-topic, I understand the reasons behind that, but does this also apply to &amp;quot;check my understanding&amp;quot; questions?&#xA;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the Weak Equivalence Principle is that inertial and gravitational mass are equal.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found some questions like this on the site, but they always included a &amp;quot;bonus questions&amp;quot;, and the answers always ended up answering to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-08-09T16:12:35.080" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T16:12:35.080" Title="Are &quot;check my understanding&quot; questions permitted?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13109" CreationDate="2020-09-10T18:45:39.633" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6097/44126&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, if a full and complete answer to the question is &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;, the question is probably off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest one way to ask a &amp;quot;check-my-understanding&amp;quot; question is to submit the question as a question, on its own, and at the same time to submit your current understanding as an answer.  You would want to be up-front about this in your question, so that readers aren't surprised or confused.  If you pursue this strategy you'll get feedback on your answer in terms of votes and comments in addition to parallel answers.  But what has happened to me when I've tried this approach is that information has moved back and forth between the &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; parts of the post, until I've ended up with a much better understanding of where exactly I was confused and a much tighter question overall --- if I even have a question left when I'm done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T18:45:39.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13113" CreationDate="2020-09-11T10:31:11.887" Score="-7" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;So,  I read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13104/should-proper-english-matter&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; and I'm personally on the side that we should try to see what the user is actually is trying to say instead of focusing over lenses on the grammar of the post. Now with that in mind, I've recently become contributing to this site by editing and fixing questions to uphold them to a higher quality standard. By no means is my English perfect, but, I try my best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping all of that in mind, I feel rather unrewarded even if I spend a while editing a question to make it look much more nicer. As in, there is not enough reputation given for quality of edit, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that no matter how much you edited, the amount of reputation points is ultimately the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm okay with being an altruist with the editing but I think I should have some sort of indicator that my editing is seen as valuable to the site, unless of course, this site doesn't actually value people sending time to edit and fix questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be frank, I really have nothing conclusive to say, and I wish for more viewpoints and the overall opinion of this community on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T12:35:27.353" Title="Should we increase the reputation points for editing/ quality of edit?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13111" CreationDate="2020-09-11T11:47:50.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Q&amp;amp;A site it makes sense that the fastest way to earn reputation is by asking and answering good questions. Note that once you hit 2,000 reputation you will stop receiving reputation points for edits anyway since your edits no longer require approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232440" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T11:47:50.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13111" CreationDate="2020-09-11T12:25:00.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I should have some sort of indicator that my editing is seen as valuable to the site, unless of course, this site doesn't actually value people sending time to edit and fix questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many things one can do that are valuable to the site that don't give you reputation, for example leaving useful comments, spending time in the various queues, flagging/voting to close poor content, participating in the meta site, etc. Some of these things do give you badges eventually, so there is still at least some indicator that you have done these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation doesn't mean &amp;quot;value to the site&amp;quot;. It primary means &amp;quot;value to the questions and answers&amp;quot;. Which I suppose is why you get some reputation for getting edits approved, but edits shouldn't be a substantial source of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T12:35:27.353" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T12:35:27.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-12T11:35:39.417" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/579126/&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Op didn't format the question in a very nice/ didn't put a lot of background.. however I do think that what the actual substance of the question is actually high value. I recall being very confused about how the vectors behave under different transformations when I first started learning physics and I think it'd be a big help to other people if this question wasn't closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason being that I haven't seen even an introductory physics textbook which admits to the mathematical complexity of the true nature of vectors. So, I think that a new person would be able to appreciate how necessary mathematics is and be more motivated to study it if he just knew the real concepts behind the things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I think that the substance of op's question is excellent even though the actual presentation of it is not so great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T00:48:47.620" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T15:19:58.437" Title="Did the question really deserve to be closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2020-09-12T12:43:10.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question for the reason that it belongs on Mathematics SE. The main closure reason was the homework reason, which I do disagree with. I think this question aligns more with the &amp;quot;needs detail and clarity&amp;quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address some misconceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;however I do think that what the actual substance of the question is actually high value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is poorly worded (not barely worded at all) so that this &amp;quot;high value substance&amp;quot; isn't obvious to other users, then I believe it should be closed. One could make this argument about almost any closed question, so I don't think it should be used as a &amp;quot;keep open&amp;quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason being that I haven't seen even an introductory physics textbook which admits to the mathematical complexity of the true nature of vectors. So, I think that a new person would be able to appreciate how necessary mathematics is and be more motivated to study it if he just knew the real concepts behind the things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this, and certainly information about this is helpful to others. However, useful does not mean on topic. PSE has specific policies as to the types of questions and answers we are &amp;quot;curating&amp;quot;. Unfortunately this means that some good content will be off topic, and not all users looking for help will find it here. And once again, this argument could be used on many closed questions, so it also shouldn't be used as a &amp;quot;keep open&amp;quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I think that the substance of op's question is excellent even though the actual presentation of it is not so great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, presentation is important on PSE as well. That's why there is an entire close reason of &amp;quot;needs detail and clarity&amp;quot;. If I was encountering this student while tutoring I would work with them to unearth the true question they are asking in better clarity. However, PSE is not a tutoring site. If you put up a poor question then it should be closed, even if some users happen to be able to glean some meaning from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reasons the question is unclear are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title of the question is unclear since I don't really know what they mean by the &amp;quot;value of the vector&amp;quot;. There are many ways to interpret this in the context of coordinate transformations. Do they mean to ask about how the vector components change relative to the axes? Do they mean to ask about the actual vector itself, asking if we get a &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; vector entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The body does nothing to clarify their question. The body really doesn't say anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just need an answer in a paragraph .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else would the answer be in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be very grateful if i get a quick answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't add anything to the question, and this sentence might be why some users voted to close as off topic homework, as it seems like the case of &amp;quot;hurry I waited until the last minute to do my assignment so I need an answer now.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I still don't know what physics they are asking about. The body could have been used to show the physics context their question comes from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T12:49:31.113" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T12:49:31.113" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2020-09-12T13:59:37.400" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered the question before it was closed (although I think Buraian’s excellent answer is better than mine) and I voted to reopen it after it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason given for closing was “off-topic”, but that is nonsense. The concept of a vector, the important distinction between a vector and its components relative to a given co-ordinate system, and the difference between a vector and a pseudo-vector are key in many areas of physics. To pick one example from many, understanding GR is impossible without being clear about these concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would (and will always try to) prioritise helping a poster with a genuine but poorly expressed question over obsessively maintaining absurd and arbitrary standards of perfect presentation and clarity. By closing this question we are throwing away a clear educational opportunity - and if we are happy to do that then one has to wonder why we are here at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T13:59:37.400" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2020-09-12T21:28:11.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It totally deserved to be closed.  Indications are that the OP wanted something short and quick, possibly because of some deadline on a test or an exam.  Moreover there is no way to answer this question using physics principles, so it is better suited to MathSE than PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T21:28:11.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13124" CreationDate="2020-09-13T14:42:25.870" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Using chemical formulas&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried using, now be careful: dollar-sign backslash letter &amp;quot;ce&amp;quot; opening-brace chemical-formula closing-brace dollar-sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, it is not working here. Did I make some mistake, is it working differently here or not supported at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="102232" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T04:09:45.793" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T04:09:45.793" Title="Using chemical formulas" Tags="|support|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13120" CreationDate="2020-09-13T16:35:07.703" Score="-3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you lose reputation for downvoting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T16:36:30.250" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T16:46:03.020" Title="Why do I get a -1 point every time I downvote a post?" Tags="|support|down-votes|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13119" CreationDate="2020-09-13T16:46:03.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you lose reputation for downvoting answers (but not questions). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/15863/263383&quot;&gt;this post on the central meta&lt;/a&gt; for more discussion on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T16:46:03.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-13T22:06:04.023" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/574123/why-are-turbines-more-effective-than-propellers-on-airplanes&quot;&gt;Why are turbines more effective than propellers on airplanes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it has been closed. The reason is off topic and specifically belonging rather to Engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have the ability or privileges to self-migrate it, and as I understand the rules and guidelines, since the question does have an upvoted answer, it cannot be migrated in the usual way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way for me to do this would be to upload it newly to Engineering, and delete it from this site. The problem with this is that it then would not have the already upvoted question on it (as I understand the answerer is present on Engineering too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is a technical problem, and the question has to be either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;reopened on physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;or migrated to Enginerring&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not make sense in my understanding to leave this on Physics and keep it closed with the reason to belong to Engineering. If the reason for closing it is specifically to be off topic and needs to be migrated, then technically not allowing it to be migrated does not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone please advise or I am asking the moderators sincerely to migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132371" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T19:20:17.137" Title="Can this question be migrated, if the reason to close it was specifically being off topic and more of an engineering question?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13122" CreationDate="2020-09-13T22:28:42.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Except for a migration to Math SE, all migrations require the intervention of a moderator. If you are confident this question (or any other, as long as it is not &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ge$&lt;/span&gt; 60 days old) is off-topic here but on-topic on another site, feel free to flag it for moderator attention with the flag button under the post. It is also possible to just post the question on another site without going through the migration process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that just because something is closed here as an engineering question does not necessarily mean it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic at Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;. Even if it is, it may be better received elsewhere, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://aviation.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Aviation SE&lt;/a&gt;. Please make sure a question is on-topic on the other site before flagging it for a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T22:28:42.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13118" CreationDate="2020-09-14T01:36:49.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;$\ce$&lt;/code&gt; command is provided by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/pkg/mhchem?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mhchem package&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/extensions/mhchem.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available in MathJax&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;but &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10069/44126&quot;&gt;currently not loaded by default&lt;/a&gt; on Physics or Physics Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A workaround is to use &lt;code&gt;$\require{mhchem}$&lt;/code&gt; somewhere in the question or answer where you need it, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;\require{mhchem}&#xA;\ce{np-&amp;gt;d\gamma}&#xA;$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, since 2019, statements like &lt;code&gt;\require&lt;/code&gt; are &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/29621/166791&quot;&gt;local to questions and answers, rather than global to the page&lt;/a&gt;, so you’ll have to include this require statement explicitly in each question or answer where you want it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T11:54:12.490" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T11:54:12.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T09:03:36.533" Score="58" ViewCount="1809" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've decided that it's time for me to step down as a moderator of this site. This has been something I've been thinking about for quite a while; it's a product of numerous events that have occurred over the past year or so. I've already communicated my decision to the people at Stack Exchange, and while I'm not sure when they will officially remove the diamond, I expect it will be soon, maybe this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't plan to be actively contributing here anymore, at least not in the short term, but my profile will remain in place and I'm not ruling out an occasional comment or post. If anyone wants to get in touch, my contact information is and will remain in my profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other moderators and I discussed whether it makes sense to have an election to add new mods. We believe there's no immediate need for one, since the remainder of the team isn't having any trouble with the workload right now, but there might be one a few months down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone who helped make moderating a rewarding experience for the past (almost) ten years!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T14:44:00.053" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T17:14:48.403" Title="Resigning as a moderator" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13132" CreationDate="2020-09-14T10:29:45.780" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I wish to edit a question to improve its quality, what are the general guidelines to keep in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I feel I deviate from the OP's original style when I use formatting. So, what all aspects should we try to preserve in our edits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T17:12:41.603" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T14:38:07.770" Title="What are the principles for editing another person's question?" Tags="|support|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13125" CreationDate="2020-09-14T13:52:34.903" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been a contributor here for the past seven and a half years and in all that time, David Z, you have been a staple and pillar of the community. Your cool and collected moderating style has always represented our site well and I have no doubt that your input has been instrumental in shaping us into a community that can be respected as a source of physics answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm sure everyone here is sorry to see you hang up your hat, not one of us could hold that decision in contempt. You have put in more than your fair share of effort into this site and served it well. We understand the desire to take a step back as things change and shift both on the network and in the world at large. We are all lucky to have had so many great years of contributions from you and could not hold your leaving us against you, seeing how you have given us so much already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It pleases us to hear that you will still visit our community on occasion and we welcome whatever contributions you care to make. I think I speak for all of us at Physics.SE when, for all of the time that you intend to spend away from us, I say &lt;strong&gt;thank you for your service and farewell; we wish you all the best with your future endeavors.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T13:52:34.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13094" CreationDate="2020-09-14T14:12:03.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first question is chock-full of technical jargon and it is about a fairly esoteric subject. It is not likely that there are many people who can adequately answer this question without first putting in copious effort to research it completely. Given that, it's unsurprising that there are no good answers because not many are going to look at it and find it worthwhile to put in such large amounts of effort for an old question. The answer isn't likely to be helpful anymore and the reward in reputation isn't likely to be worth the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the second question, I honestly can't even explain why it was highly voted in the first place. From the look of it, it seems to be saying &amp;quot;I was reading some literature and didn't understand something. I tried doing that thing myself but don't know if I did it right. Here is what I did, did I get something wrong somewhere? What am I missing?&amp;quot; The only difference between this question and the run-of-the-mill questions we close every day is that this isn't basic physics from a first-year textbook. To me, this still looks like a check-my-work question that doesn't seem to be about any concepts and wouldn't really be useful to others. So again, I'm not sure why it was upvoted and I don't personally care why nor that it hasn't been answered. Probably because nobody wanted to check the OP's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T14:12:03.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10069" CreationDate="2020-09-14T14:45:23.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've marked this as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-deferred&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-deferred&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-deferred&lt;/a&gt; since it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13118/44126&quot;&gt;recently came up again&lt;/a&gt; after three years of minimal activity and interest.  If someone wants this feature, let's have a fresh thread about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T14:45:23.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13125" CreationDate="2020-09-14T16:45:00.270" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;A huge loss for the site, not only in terms of (outstanding) moderating expertise but also in terms of institutional memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your years of kindness and for nurturing the site to its current amicable atmosphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T16:45:00.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13122" CreationDate="2020-09-14T19:20:17.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chris has given you good general guidance.  But in the interest of transparency: I declined your migration-request flag, partly because I'm not convinced the question would be on-topic at Engineering, and partly because you have already accepted an answer.  Your question's upvoted answer should protect it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;the roomba&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is that if you have remaining related questions, you ask them on a more appropriate site, with links back to the partly-satisfactory answer that you already have here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T19:20:17.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13126" CreationDate="2020-09-15T03:52:53.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general rule of thumb is to that changes should make the post objectively better, while preserving its original intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, while a massive block of all-caps text with no punctuation could arguably be called a stylistic choice, it is objectively harder to read than properly formatted text. On the other hand, things like adding two spaces after a period or using American and British English are purely stylistic and you probably should respect these styles in any edits you make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, editors should make certain not to change the actual content of the post. For example, this means cutting out parts of a question to make it more focused should be left to the OP, since only they can know what part of their question is most important to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T14:38:07.770" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T14:38:07.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13125" CreationDate="2020-09-15T16:22:02.443" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Z, I've not been participating much on Physics Stack Exchange much for years now, so I was most disheartened to come back exactly one day after you retired! You have been an amazing and vital support to this site for more years than you probably care to admit. I wish you the best on any new endeavors!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7670" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T16:22:02.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-18T15:49:18.680" Score="-6" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone decided to delete all comments posted under my question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/579737/&quot;&gt;Do &amp;quot;almost black holes&amp;quot; exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is insane, there were valuable comments. They should have been moved to chat if they were too numerous as this is usually done, not deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I have seen rob's comment at the location of said comment thread. I do agree with what he says. However there are better ways to enforce policies on SE than throwing everything and everyone to the trashcan without even a warning. The move to chat is way more considerate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly a high profile question, given its score, so mods should be even more careful. Chris did move comments to a Chiral Anomaly's answer to chat and I am fine with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: After reading two mods here, once again, I find SE a hostile environment. You mods seem to have lost contact with how people feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="230132" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T16:56:19.323" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T17:40:06.500" Title="Problem with deletion of comments" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13135" CreationDate="2020-09-18T16:08:51.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My 2p:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this comes up, people love to trot out the old &amp;quot;comments are transient&amp;quot; speech. They're right, of course. We should not hold any allusions that our comments should or will last for a protracted period of time, particularly if they start to venture slightly outside of the &amp;quot;requesting clarification&amp;quot; zone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if you start arbitrarily erasing entire swathes of comments without warning or, frankly, any particularly strong reason to do so, then comments are not just transient: they are entirely without purpose. It means people are literally just wasting their time in writing them. And these are not random jokes or abusive arguments: these are short half-discussions about the question and its wording and its assumptions. They're relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deleting these does not actually add any value to anyone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, either leave them for a longer amount of time such that they actually be read, deal with them in a fairer way, or just have the dev team disable the comments section and be done with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting things for the sake of deleting things is just flexing internet muscle. Please stop it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(But please delete answers-as-comments immediately because these are evil and should never be allowed to happen! Answers deserve peer review in the usual way.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255135" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T16:08:51.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13135" CreationDate="2020-09-18T16:30:31.123" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A large proportion of these comments were made by users who have been repeatedly told not to have lengthy discussions in comments, and not to use comments in lieu of providing an answer where they can be properly downvoted if what they say is false. So I deleted them, since apparently moving to chat has so far not enticed these commenters to play by the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not delete comments because we are evil and want to deprive anyone of &amp;quot;interesting information&amp;quot; - the problem with comments is that corrections and other responses to them quickly get lost in the threads and hard to other users to see, and that they cannot be downvoted like answers. Particularly on popular questions this poses a problem since wrong (but authoritative-sounding) comments might be upvoted by users who think they have been given correct information, and there is no counterweight to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we also do not delete things simply for being wrong (and it is impossible for moderators to be subject experts to the degree that we could always make such a judgement anyway), so comments will be deleted indiscriminately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13025/50583&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8998/50583&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for prior answers of mine on this topic. Because this is a high-profile question, we should not be more &lt;em&gt;careful&lt;/em&gt;, we should be even more &lt;em&gt;stringent&lt;/em&gt; about this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I would very much appreciate it if we could have a discussion about things that happen on the site without calling the actions of other users &amp;quot;insane&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T16:30:31.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13135" CreationDate="2020-09-18T16:39:40.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn’t delete the comment thread, but I’ve read the deleted comments.  I don’t see any that should be restored because they add value to the question.  The interesting back-and-forth was mostly on a tangentially related topic. I understand the purpose of the move-to-chat feature as a way to support an extended discussion &lt;em&gt;about the question&lt;/em&gt;, not as a way to preserve every interesting conversation that happens.  If there’s something in an SE comment thread that you would like to be preserved permanently, you should take action to preserve it: move it into a question, an answer, or start a chat room yourself.  To some extent, the more accommodating the moderators are about preserving inappropriate uses of comments, the more work we make for ourselves from users who don’t use comments for their intended purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to address two errors in this sentence of yours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is insane, there were valuable comments. They should have been moved to chat if they were too numerous as this is usually done, not deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is an etiquette error. “Insane” is not a synonym for “undesirable,” “upsetting,” or “confusing,” and using it that way is unwelcoming for folks who deal with real mental health issues. That usage is common; let’s make it less common here in our little corner of the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is the assumption that comments are “usually” moved to chat.  There is a selection bias there, because moving the comments to chat generates an informative comment, while simply removing problematic comments does not.  I think it was the case when I started as a moderator that more deleted comments were moved to chat in big batches than removed singly; however, in the years since, our community has evolved away from chatty comment threads, so I’m not sure whether that’s still the case or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T16:39:40.100" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13135" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:25:16.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like you have a misconception about what the purpose of comments are. They aren't to have discussions, give &amp;quot;valuable information&amp;quot; etc. Anything worth value should be in an answer. Comments should be used to either ask for clarification from the OP or to give suggestions to improve the post. If they don't do this, then they shouldn't have been made into a comment in the first place, and so I don't see an issue in them being deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionaly, I'm not sure what feelings have to do with this. There is a definitive comment policy. Why should it be ignored in the case when it would go against users' feelings? If you don't like the site policies then you don't need to participate in the site; I certainly don't participate in things I don't like if I have the choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T17:40:06.500" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T17:40:06.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T08:21:11.123" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thrown in the penalty box because I allegedly made rude comments and I had to cool down. What happens if one is thrown in the box for a second (or third, fourth...) time? Will he/she (or I) get extra punishment on top?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is there a limit on the number of times you can be put in there?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Notice I'm not asking how the suspension time is determined. I explicitly ask what will happen after being suspended several times. Do the times you are suspended simply are added up until a limit is reached to be banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="98822" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T08:27:31.573" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T08:27:31.573" Title="What happens after being put in the penalty box twice (or more)?" Tags="|support|suspensions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-09-21T08:22:47.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T08:30:22.533" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thrown in the penalty box because I allegedly made rude comments and I had to cool down. What happens if one is thrown in the box for a second (or third, fourth...) time? Will he/she (or I) get extra punishment on top?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is there a limit on the number of times you can be put in there?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Notice I'm not asking how the suspension time is determined. I explicitly ask what will happen after being suspended several times. Do the times you are suspended simply are added up until a limit is reached to be banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T08:49:46.207" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T08:49:46.207" Title="What happens after being put in the penalty box two (or more) times?" Tags="|support|suspensions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-09-21T08:33:56.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13144" CreationDate="2020-09-22T11:36:40.577" Score="-2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a question about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontologies/html/physical-quantities/FUNCTION-QUANTITY.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;function quantities&lt;/a&gt;, but I didn't find any adequate tags. If I didn't miss something, it might be useful to introduce a new tag, for example &amp;quot;physical quantities&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237923" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T15:54:39.370" Title="New tag &quot;Physical quantities&quot;" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2020-09-22T15:19:58.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I think that the substance of op's question is excellent even though the actual presentation of it is not so great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &lt;strong&gt;edit the post&lt;/strong&gt; to bring the presentation up to an acceptable level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bad presentation is absolutely a good reason to close questions. If you find a question that you care about which you think has a good substance but which has such a poor presentation that its closure is imminent, then the onus is on you to edit it to improve the presentation so that it is no longer close-worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T15:19:58.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13142" CreationDate="2020-09-22T15:48:54.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Function quantity&amp;quot; appears to be a concept confined to the Lisp programming language, and it is not widely used in physics. (If it is, then the burden is on you to show otherwise, to be blunt.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that questions about this would be on-topic here (and not just questions about programming), then they would be suitably covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dimensional-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dimensional-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dimensional-analysis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/units&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;units&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;units&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are not generally created for single questions (and indeed if the tag were created for your question and not used anywhere else, it would be automatically deleted by the system after a set period). If you want to argue for the creation of a new tag, then the criterion you need to meet is exhibiting a sufficient number of &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; questions for which the tag would apply and for which it would be a useful additional organizing qualifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question you mention as a motivation, &amp;quot;I was wondering if there are some people out there, who have further developed and formalized this theory&amp;quot;, the page you linked to references the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/papers/engmath.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Ontology for Engineering Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, also available &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4832-1452-8.50120-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Google Scholar &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?um=1&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;cites=11273013645435649075&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists&lt;/a&gt; just short of 600 citations to this work. (This kind of follow-the-trail is standard, and you're normally expected to be able to follow it on your own in an academic setting.) If you're having trouble finding something specific within that pool, then that could make an on-topic question, so long as the query is actually about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T15:54:39.370" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T15:54:39.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-24T18:52:33.523" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the content on PSE is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$4.0$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I suppose the content that is once posted on PSE becomes part the free culture (correct me if I am wrong), and thus, even if the author decides to delete a post of theirs, the community can still decide to keep the content of the post up (of course, without linking it to their name if that's what they wish). Currently, a no-delete policy only applies to accepted answers, however, I think it'd be a good policy to adopt for all posts (or at least, for all posts with a positive score). As I already mention, I think the user should be allowed to disassociate their name from the post if they wish to do so (it would still be visible in the edit history, I suppose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was led to this idea due to a recent social media post by an SE user who expressed that they plan to delete as much of their content as possible from one of the SE sites because they were disgruntled by a moderation decision made on the relevant SE site regarding one of their posts. The anecdote is not of any particular interest except to drive home the point that we wouldn't like to lose valuable content if a user gets angry at SE (for whatever reason, justifiable or otherwise). And, due to the CC license, I think we have the ability to make sure we don't lose the content in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that this would be an SE wide policy but I suppose it is a good idea to discuss it within the PSE community first. If this is not the right approach towards discussing an SE wide policy, I'd be happy to delete this post and post it on SE wide meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T18:56:44.010" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T20:26:49.073" Title="Should we not let an answer/question be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|policy|deleted-questions|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13145" CreationDate="2020-09-24T20:26:49.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user wants to delete an answer of theirs, we usually assume good faith. Perhaps they've decided their answer is wrong, in which case we definitely want them to be able to remove them. In the unusual case that an answer is deleted that demonstrably should not have been , the answer can be flagged for moderator attention by any user who notices the deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mass deletion, of the sort you are describing in your second paragraph, is a different story.  As described &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/304870/380389&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, mass deletion of answers is not allowed, and moderators will take action to undelete posts that should not have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr There are good reasons to delete posts sometimes. When a post is deleted for a bad reason, it can be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T20:26:49.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13150" CreationDate="2020-09-26T12:13:08.517" Score="4" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see users, including moderators, leaving &amp;quot;helpful hints&amp;quot; comments on various posts. They could be posted on off-topic homework problems pointing the user in the right direction on how to solve the problem, but I also see them on ligitimate posts in the sense of &amp;quot;you should think about this to arrive at your answer&amp;quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't see where this type of commenting falls according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;help page about the commenting privilege&lt;/a&gt;. I don't think it falls under any of the three &amp;quot;When should I comment?&amp;quot; reasons, but I also don't think it falls under any of the &amp;quot;When shouldn't I comment?&amp;quot; reasons either. So where should this type of commenting end up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been expressed before, answers in comments are not allowed because they cannot be down voted, thus preventing incorrect content from being explicitly labeled as such. It seems like &amp;quot;helpful hint&amp;quot; comments would also fall into this category, as no one can down vote incorrect hints as well. I feel like one should just make an answer if they have a helpful hint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, though I'm still not convinced of it, others have argued that such comments fall under the &amp;quot;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post&amp;quot; reason. IMO such comments only help the user arrive at the answer themselves and don't have anything to do with improving the post itself, but I suppose it's still something to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like what sets PSE apart from other sites is the lack of comment clutter, thus giving more attention and emphasis to good-quality questions and answers. Of course, maybe I'm just taking the comment policy way too seriously, but this is an edge case I've been wondering about for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;As an example, consider the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do two objects in a vacuum in a uniform gravitational field experience the same acceleration even if they have different masses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hint comments&amp;quot; might look something like the following examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hint: Set up Newton's second law with the appropriate forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you tried applying Newton's second law to this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about what the gravitational force is proportional to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about what Newton's second law says about forces and accelerations and how they are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course in reality I have seen more elaborate questions with more elaborate hint comments, but those are harder to contrive and still be more general, and I don't want to go looking for examples and call any user out in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T13:10:14.623" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T11:04:25.337" Title="Should comments be used for providing &quot;helpful hints&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|comments|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13147" CreationDate="2020-09-26T12:41:27.843" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since a question is supposed to be well researched, I would say that the type of comments you suggest are, in fact, covered in the &amp;quot;When should I comment?&amp;quot; section. Specifically these two points are relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add relevant, but minor or transient, information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone says &amp;quot;You should think of this to arrive at your answer&amp;quot; I think it falls a bit under both of these categories. On the one hand it suggests maybe they didn't research a particular topic that would have helped them arrive at an answer, and as such the comment implies (albeit it not explicitly) that the post lacks proper research by the user and that the user should consider the suggested path and if they still haven't arrived at an answer add to the question the additional research and why they were unable to come up with an answer after looking into the specified topic that was suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say it also qualifies as &amp;quot;minor or transient information&amp;quot;...  just as alerting someone that the question has already been answered and where to get the answer, it alerts someone as to a place to look that may give them the answer, without actually spelling out what that answer is. It's minor and transient as it is just a nudge in the direction with which a user should look, and not itself a complete answer or even really an answer that would be acceptable by community standards as is (since it only directs a user to a topic and doesn’t provide the full answer, even if the additional step to get to the full answer is not a big leap from there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T02:13:53.293" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T02:13:53.293" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13147" CreationDate="2020-09-28T05:55:43.807" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to notice this question, and this is something I always had a strong opinion about so I figured I might as well share it: no, providing hints is not a suitable use of comments. The underlying rule I'd go by is this: in order for a comment to be appropriate as a comment, it should be implicitly or explicitly suggesting an edit to be made to the post. The goal there is to change the question in a way that helps future readers better understand it, and hopefully even to answer it. If a comment isn't going to lead to an improvement in the question, it shouldn't be a comment. (It may or may not be suitable as an answer, but that's a separate matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I would apply this to the examples you posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hint: Set up Newton's second law with the appropriate forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a valid comment. This is helping guide the OP to the answer but doesn't suggest any change to the question that would improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you tried applying Newton's second law to this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a valid comment IMO, because if the OP edits the question to say whether they have tried applying Newton's second law (and perhaps what they found when they did so), it will probably focus the question on the real conceptual issue they're having. Or if nothing else, it will make it clear that &amp;quot;Try applying Newton's second law&amp;quot;, which would otherwise be a reasonable (albeit not particularly helpful) answer, isn't the response they're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about what the gravitational force is proportional to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also not a valid comment, for the same reason as the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about what Newton's second law says about forces and accelerations and how they are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, not a valid comment, for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose different people might have different interpretations of whether these comments are suggesting edits to the question or not. I would advise people to use the guideline I proposed before: if it looks like a comment is suggesting that the question be edited, it's okay, otherwise it's not. That being said, I think all these comments except the second one are far enough removed from explicitly suggesting anything that I would find it quite odd if someone decided to keep them under that guideline. If that means you think the the second comment is too implicit as well, then so be it. It certainly would have been much &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; for the commenter to say something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you tried applying Newton's second law to this scenario? If so, could you edit the question to ask about the specific part of that process where you got stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, in the end it's not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; big a deal if the occasional comment gets treated the &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; way (or, not the way you or I think it should be). With a select few exceptions (like the autogenerated comments that link to chat rooms), there are really only two things that should happen with a comment: either the OP (or rarely someone else) chooses to edit the question in response to the comment; or they choose not to do so. Or they might decline to make a choice and just let the comment sit there forever, but I would lump that in with the second option. Either way, the comment has served its purpose and can then be deleted. So the comment's ultimate fate doesn't even depend on whether it was meant to ask for a clarification or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T07:12:27.620" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T07:12:27.620" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13154" CreationDate="2020-09-29T22:13:14.663" Score="8" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I find a particular concept which I can't find much description about in the books I know. Is it accepted to ask for references in such scenarios?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T22:14:46.183" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T11:05:53.010" Title="What is the site policy on asking for references for concepts?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-30T07:31:27.517" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to hear the views of PSE community members on the deletion of my two upvoted answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/582682/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I am especially interested in the views of ordinary (non-moderator) members of the PSE community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the questioner already had the answer to their problem, as well as an explanation of the answer. They did not think the explanation was correct because it involved accelerating reference frames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made one post showing how the answer to the problem could be derived using relative motion, without invoking reference frames. In the comments I said that although the particles were indeed accelerating relative to each other, this was irrelevant. The questioner still seemed perplexed, so I posted a second approach that reached the same conclusion without using relative motion at all, although it did require a knowledge of calculus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two answers received three and four upvotes respectively, and no down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ten hours after I gave my answers, the question was closed and my answers were both deleted. The justification given for deleting my posts was that the questioner had not explicitly asked for alternative solutions to the problem so &amp;quot;this is not an answer&amp;quot;. Please note that I am not asking for comments on the closure of the question, only on the deletion of my answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T14:57:03.213" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T14:57:03.213" Title="What are the views of PSE community members on moderator deletion of upvoted answers?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13152" CreationDate="2020-09-30T07:46:55.453" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you were responding to was focused on understanding the motion of one of the particles in the frame of another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why according to particle &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;, particle &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; is in uniform motion? What happens to their acceleration vectors while frames are changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answers amount to &amp;quot;let's ignore what happens to particle &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$B$&lt;/span&gt;'s acceleration in the frame of particle &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A$&lt;/span&gt; and find their speed instead.&amp;quot; While your answers may be interesting in their own right, they aren't answers to the question, so in my opinion ACuriousMind was correct to delete them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that if the original problem was &amp;quot;when do these particles converge,&amp;quot; it probably would have been closed as a homework question and the answers removed as complete answers to a homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T07:46:55.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13151" CreationDate="2020-09-30T11:05:53.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is perfectly acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you should make sure that you follow the guidelines given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;Are resource recommendations allowed?&lt;/a&gt;. To maximize the chances of success of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a description of the concepts that you're interested in with as much detail as you can&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a clear picture of what you do and don't understand, so that book recommendations can be given with the correct level of prerequisites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make sure to look for existing resource-recommendation threads on similar subjects, and if they have a nontrivial overlap with your query, explain why they don't fit your needs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T11:05:53.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13152" CreationDate="2020-09-30T11:53:10.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me start off by saying that moderators have a really good knowledge of site policy and how it should be implemented. Therefore, I would think that you would actually want to hear from moderators to learn more about what is/isn't allowed on the site. Your &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; looks more like an attempt just to see who will go against the moderators and site policy with you rather than learn something, but I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the views of PSE community members on moderator deletion of upvoted answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a moderator has a good reason to do this, then I see no issue with it. Votes are not necessarily an indication of policy adherence. Note that I also don't think that answers with downvotes should necessarily be deleted. The votes on an answer, whether net positive or negative, shouldn't impact whether or not something should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to hear the views of PSE community members on the deletion of my two upvoted answers to this question. I am especially interested in the views of ordinary (non-moderator) members of the PSE community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the decision and the reason. The question should have been closed in the first place and should not received any answers. Now, just because a question should be closed doesn't mean all of the answers it gets before closure should be deleted, but questions that should be closed tend to have answers that also do not follow site policy (which I suppose is one reason why they should be closed). Instead of seeing a question and just making an answer because you can, you should first think whether or not the question is on topic for PSE. Given your reputation and history on the site, I would think you would have a good feel for this and would have known that this wasn't a good question for PSE, and thus didn't deserve an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, independent of the question, supplying solutions to calculations and exercises like this question is also not allowed. Given your reputation and history on the site, I thought you would be more aware of this as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, your answers created the &amp;quot;perfect storm&amp;quot;. I agree with the moderators that you were not answering the question that was asked. Additionaly, you were providing solutions to an exercise. So take your pick as to which deletion reason you want, but I think either one is valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T12:24:32.037" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T12:24:32.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-02T17:23:03.057" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite puzzled as to why this answer I wrote got three downvotes &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/583302/236734&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's question indicates they had a fundamental misunderstanding and probably got lost while self-studying the subject. Something which I can relate to as I self-study as well. So, due to that, I thought of writing the answer from scratch and explaining each concept with the best idea's I could get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparison to mine, some of the almost dismissive answers were accepted over mine and it was this which led me to question the real purpose of the site. Does this site want answers with references and citations or just superficial answers with none of those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've heard people say, I understood this site as a knowledge repository/place where people could pool in knowledge to help a large group of people. Yet narrow and short answers are preferred over long ones that take time and effort to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my points and my answer is factually wrong... I don't know. I based my knowledge of my textbooks and made sure to say where exactly I got my ideas from so that my answer would be open for criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this post is to ask what exactly am I doing wrong... I perhaps guessed that it may have been that my answer was more tending to the teaching side than a direct answer side, but I felt op was so misguided that I had to go out and write it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, let's take the OP's question out of the picture. Even then, I do think that my answer would be useful for a large audience. I mean, wasn't this the reason that homework questions are shunned upon? (That they only help a narrow group of people.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall once reading an established user of this website saying that the votes are a measure of how useful your questions and answers are for the site. I do not have the exact quote/citation. So, correct me if I am wrong, does this mean that people think my question is reducing the qualify of the site somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main reasons, I preferred this site over other q&amp;amp;a sites is that people were supposed to give trustworthy feedback and answers but I really am not feeling it on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The actual question of the OP:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt some people are upvoting answers which is not even related to the OP's question. One person answered momentum conservation using the third law which was not even related to the OP's question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really can't understand why there is no decrease in momentum when kinetic energy is decreased in an inelastic collision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the real question contained in the OP's subject and it is an exact quote which I took. They are simply asking how it is so in an inelastic collision that momentum is conserved, but kinetic energy is changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarifications:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When I said useful to a wider audience, I meant this&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote that as a point here because the OP had pinned up a few specific points out of the topic. I took those topics to the fundamentals and explained from the ground up. I was pretty certain that the OP was misguided as soon as I saw that they were asking about Noether's theorem for explaining the kinetic energy loss inelastic collision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not mean that I think answers which are completely derailed from questions should be seen as valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the individual freedom's to vote:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True, I agree, but I imagine this site to be something more scientific rather than an opinion site. Sure, sometimes things are so complicated that we may have to bring in opinions here and there, but I think we should have the courtesy to explain what is wrong in a piece before giving it a negative reception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I got three downvotes I felt that maybe I am doing something very incorrect because it was the first time I got that many downvotes on an answer. I can not see it myself, but if someone else can see it then I'd be happy to listen if they were to point out legitimate criticism on the material that I have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T10:14:01.410" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T18:06:01.857" Title="Understanding the voting process" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13156" CreationDate="2020-10-02T23:16:23.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find your answer to be overly long; the essential remains buried somewhere within the technical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote is the second part is long and unnecessary and in fact confusing as it goes into tangents on vibrations and such stuff.  The second part (containing the quote) is in fact neatly summarized by the last paragraph of this part, which makes the rest moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example (part 3) you poorly highlight the various momenta in the problem: it’s not clear at all why a final state with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$0$&lt;/span&gt; velocity is possible, which is IMO part of the confusion in the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of your derivation in part 4 is to show that some energy is lost, but  this point IMO would have been better conveyed by a 1d example rather than a full-vector collision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now: I did not downvote your answer.  You obviously put some effort in it, and it’s not technically wrong (that I can see); I just happen to think it’s at the wrong level and it’s unclear (I reserve my downvotes on answers to more aggravating cases than this). However, I can easily see how some might get irritated by the meandering and the overly complicated nature of your solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI I rarely comment on my downvotes as experience has shown it rarely resolves anything but tends to produce discussions that are not very constructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nota: I even find this meta question is overly long and difficult to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2020-10-02T23:21:40.310" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T23:21:40.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13147" CreationDate="2020-10-03T11:04:25.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this kind of issues should be discussed having in mind the spirit of why a site like this exists, more than scrutinizing which comma of a set of rules is exactly allowing a given behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be the main goal of the community behind PSE? I think we all are interested to improve the quality of the site and to increase and to renew the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the vast majority of the cases where helpful hints are added to the question, the OP is a newcomer to this site. I think this circumstance should be taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guidelines stress more than in one place, the advice to avoid to be rude, in particular, in the case of new users. I think that it may be much a better investment for future good contributors, to stress the rules of the site and to flag the question, if it is the case, but, at the same time giving just a hint about some key point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this could be  the right balance between enforcement of rules and, at same time, to show a friendly and open attitude of the community. I believe this is the best way to convey the message &amp;quot;if you follow the rules, this community can be a good resource&amp;quot;. Don't forget that, at the and of the day, if the original question was a homework-like question, it will be closed, independently on any comment. From this point of view comments are harmless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T11:04:25.337" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13156" CreationDate="2020-10-03T14:17:15.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I got three downvotes I felt that maybe I am doing something very&#xA;incorrect ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily. Your answer got two upvotes as well, so some people liked it. If I were you I would focus on the bigger picture, which is that your answers are mostly getting upvotes and your reputation is steadily increasing. Speaking personally, if one of my answers gets a downvote with an explanation in the comments then I will think about how I might improve it, but I just ignore a downvote without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T14:17:15.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13156" CreationDate="2020-10-03T18:06:01.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not downvote your answer (I did not even see it until I saw this meta post), but to my mind the biggest problem with it is right at the beginning, where you derive the equation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$K=p^2/(2m)$&lt;/span&gt; and conclude that KE is a function of momentum and mass.  This is of course true for a particle but not for a system of more than one particle, which is what the OP is clearly asking about.  It seems to me that this is very likely to confuse the OP, and that this is a problem even if the rest of the answer eventually clears up the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T18:06:01.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-04T17:25:31.420" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many cases an animation would make an answer much clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on Physics Meta there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4010/what-about-enahanced-functionality-to-allow-answers-to-have-richer-educational-c&quot;&gt;already the question&lt;/a&gt; if it is possible to add animations to answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment suggests using animated GIF files. The (as of now) only answer is saying that the Stack Exchange team does not like adding additional JavaScript to the page (which would be required for animations not based on animated GIFs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, animated GIF files do not allow user interaction (if this is useful) and longer animations would have a very large file size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would some kind of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; describing an animation be a solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The molecules touching the surface will pass though it with a certain probability. This probability is higher for the smaller molecules. For this reason the diffusion is faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following animation, which can be viewed using the GNU Example App, shows this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;====GNUANIMATION====&#xA;sadfhJHLKJjkzh38302j=/%sadfj=LSDJksdafjhJKhkjdh//(akjsdh))=ad371jd&#xA;sadflkjasd234908009jdj09++//fasd02323d//3fds2939d90+**dsdf3123d23d&#xA;====================&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29017" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-10-04T17:31:55.093" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T11:02:18.303" Title="Animations for answers: Would &quot;source code&quot; be a solution?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13161" CreationDate="2020-10-05T05:33:44.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Animations using code are always potentially a security risk.  I would imagine the development team at SE would be reluctant to open another potential attack vector set into their servers.  This would be a code source and library set they do not directly control, so it is a problem.  If you want to put it simply, the more more hooks you put on the wall, the more likely someone will hang something you don't want there.  It's worth pointing out that the relatively simply image format standards and libraries do have to be regularly patched for security vulnerabilities.  Flash animations largely fell out use because they were a constant source of such worries and Java Applets died for similar reasons.  As a software developer in the past I like coding, but I am also very conscious of the security concerns source code of any kind raises.  Sandboxes designed to contain these things are found to have leaks all the time, so be wary of this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Animations (like images) do not parse nicely and efficiently into a search database.  One of the reasons we actively discourage images of text and equations is that they cannot be searched for properly.  There is also a tendency for people using images to rely on the image to tell people what the question is and omit even minimal text.  Your own argument for using would suggest that people would do exactly that - post an animation and omit the vital text (and Mathjax equations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am particularly concerned about this last point.  I am also of the opinion that e.g. two images before and after something, would be far more compact (in bandwidth terms) and just as clear (if not clearer) for explanation purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that if the poster needs to ask a question about some conceptual issue, it's just as likely there own confusion means they post an animation that does not clarify the issue at all.  Making a post becomes as much a task focused on creating a graphic as it does about the underlying conceptual physics problem.  That is a diversion from what the question asker needs to focus on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Animations also take up space.  While many people are used to and take for granted access to high speed broadband and wifi, this is not at all as widespread as it may seem to some people.  Requiring (relatively) large animation files to be viewed to just read a question is going to present significant problems for many of our members.  What is trivial for someone comfortable off living in a high density population center will be quite a different matter for people who regard high bandwidth telecomms as a luxury.  Many people are also limited by bandwidth capping by ISPs).  Animations also use up battery life on devices where that is an issue and, again, not everyone has the luxury of e.g. phones with large batteries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all in all I think using animations is a very bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand writing out the problem with text and mathematics may not be as flashy as an animation, but it will focus the mind of the person asking on the question they want to ask and the mathematics itself.  From my own experience in university I would say that writing out my own notes was probably the number one way I learned things as I had to structure my ideas to write the notes.  Just having to do this would often allow the concepts to &amp;quot;slot together&amp;quot; and give me the conceptual structure I needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think animation are not a constructive solution and as much as anything else are a diversion and resource hog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my ten cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T05:33:44.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13161" CreationDate="2020-10-05T11:02:18.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems fairly similar to answers that have links to other sites/resources. So I would just make sure you follow the guidelines for putting links in answers, but for the interactive animations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the external resource is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you still want your answer to be a complete answer without the animation. I would think, &amp;quot;If for some strange reason my animation breaks or becomes inaccessible, does this post still provide a sufficient and satisfying answer to the question?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T11:02:18.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13125" CreationDate="2020-10-05T17:14:48.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; much enjoyed my interactions with you in the h-bar and even chat rooms on other SE sites. You are one of the better moderators, and will be missed. You were very often the one moderator that responded with a decent speed, and therefore I do think having an election to add a new moderator would be a good idea, whether or not the other mods agree (they won't be able to see the perspective of the non-moderator user that gets their concerns addressed so quickly by DavidZ and otherwise would have to wait longer, especially if there's one fewer total moderator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T17:14:48.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T11:20:31.353" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I heard since I've joined, I've understood that the purpose of Stack Exchange was to make a knowledge repository, but what if one day we document every single possible question which could be asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the site change policies if such a day came?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T19:44:15.713" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T19:44:15.713" Title="What would be the goal of this site if all possible questions have been asked and answered?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2020-10-06T12:44:07.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-07T06:16:33.673" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;An old answer of mine just got an upvote, which caused me to look at it again, and I was surprised to discover that my HTML tags for italics (that is the letter &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$i$&lt;/span&gt; between two pointy brackets) were not rendering.  This made the answer almost impossible to read, because I had used italics instead of blockquotes to set off quotes from the original question, but the italics weren't rendering, so those quotes and my responses were all run together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the fact that this makes the upvote a little mysterious, this makes me wonder whether something has changed and HTML tags that used to render properly no longer do so.  If that's the case, then a lot of old posts (not just mine) probably need to be edited accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is made more mysterious by the fact that when I attempted to type italic tags in &lt;b&gt;this&lt;/b&gt; post, wanting them &lt;b&gt;not&lt;/b&gt; to render, they &lt;b&gt;did&lt;/b&gt; render, forcing me to go back and write the phrase &amp;quot;the letter &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$i$&lt;/span&gt; between two pointy brackets&amp;quot;.  So is there a difference between the main site and meta?  Or between questions and answers?  Or something more obscure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using the &amp;quot;bug&amp;quot; tag for this, though of course part of my question is whether this &lt;b&gt;is&lt;/b&gt; a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/b&gt;  The original version of the post that triggered this is here:  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/350351/1&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/350351/1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  I see now that this actually renders properly on my laptop, though not on my phone.  In the two revisions that follow, I replaced the italic tags with blockquotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T11:50:02.717" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T11:52:04.483" Title="HTML tag rendering" Tags="|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13166" CreationDate="2020-10-07T10:09:02.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A limited subset of HTML is supported on Stack Exchange. For details on what is and is not supported, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;What HTML tags are allowed on Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/a&gt;. The italics tag &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is indeed supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However:&lt;/strong&gt; the primary formatting mechanism on this site is Markdown. Using HTML is not discouraged, but seriously... why would you use it? &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1306573/posts-containing-explicit-i-tags-from-a-specific-user?UserId=4993&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; shows up 23 posts of yours with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and for none of them can I see a reason to use explicit HTML &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;s instead of the recommended Markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the Ask A Question page explicitly discourages mixing HTML with Markdown, so maybe the problem came from that? Presumably the post in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/350351/1&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which does precisely this mixing. Moreover, the list notation you used there, &lt;code&gt;1)&lt;/code&gt;, was not recognized as a list by Markdown until the recent change of renderer, so it went from not mixing HTML and Markdown to mixing them; that could explain the change in behaviour. On the other hand, the rendered revision I just linked to displays just fine on my device &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; but then again, the Markdown parsers are currently a weird mix, so who knows exactly what happened there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.... but ultimately: who cares. The post renders just fine if you remove the html shenanigans. Use the recommended Markdown and this type of issue doesn't have the opportunity to arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the possibility of there being a fraction of posts whose formatting changed due to this edge case (or some other similar one) of the Markdown renderer migration, I guess it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; worth taking a look to see how many such posts there are. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1306580/all-posts-with-i&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A broader query&lt;/a&gt; finds ~500 posts site-wide with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the body (though this &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1306588/sources-and-edits-with-i&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;may be&lt;/a&gt; closer to 800?). If you want to have a dig, that is one place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T11:58:43.140" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T11:58:43.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13169" CreationDate="2020-10-07T18:47:09.640" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I posted this question about Stefan-Boltzmann law which ended up getting three downvotes over the days. So, I'm wondering what exactly I did wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had asked for help from a friend and found a paper that described the situation and after a discussion with some friends, I came to a conclusion. Maybe my conclusion is wrong but it was my question which downvoted and not my answer. So, what is wrong with my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/584212/&quot;&gt;The question is here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T18:54:52.110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T19:11:21.023" Title="What can I do to improve this question which I posted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13168" CreationDate="2020-10-07T19:11:21.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: Individual users are free to vote as they please - if these specific users haven't seen fit to leave a comment on your question, it's unlikely they'll feel compelled to answer here either, and ultimately only they know why they voted the way they did. I haven't voted on your question either way at the time of writing this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You write in your question that you think&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thermal power means heat after considering all the heat emitting mechanisms whilst thermal radiation is just the heat emittance due to radiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it is left entirely unclear what other &amp;quot;heat emitting mechanisms&amp;quot; you think a black body in this context has. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/468160/50583&quot;&gt;post by Daniel Sank&lt;/a&gt; you cite makes no mention of any other mechanisms, and is pretty clearly focused on radiation throughout. Your question comes across as nitpicking a minor choice of words rather than asking something interesting about physics. This would suffice for me to categorize it as &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot;, one of the generic reasons to downvote a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Usually the following doesn't lead to downvotes on its own, but since you asked for feedback I might give it as well:) Also, your opening sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Concept's of Physics part-2 by HC-Verma, it is written on page 87 right under section 28.10 it is written&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a great first impression: There's a superfluous apostrophe in &amp;quot;Concept's&amp;quot;, a superfluous hyphen in &amp;quot;part-2&amp;quot; and a superfluous hyphen in the name &amp;quot;HC-Verma&amp;quot; (should be &amp;quot;H.C. Verma&amp;quot; in standard English orthography), and you've doubled the &amp;quot;it is written&amp;quot; part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T19:11:21.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13166" CreationDate="2020-10-07T23:27:34.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Your most recent comment suggests that this was a problem which happened only briefly on one platform, so for now I'll tag as &amp;quot;not reproducible.&amp;quot;  But if the issue returns, let's talk more.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that there’s a confirming report from another user, I’ve retagged as “status-review,” which brings the issue to the attention of the team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T18:20:32.290" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T18:20:32.290" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13173" CreationDate="2020-10-11T03:05:48.413" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I had attempted to edit an answer so as to add some detail, I was told that details should be included in comments, as an edit would cause the question and its answer to display on the front page.  However, a recent edit, adding new and highly-relevant information to the answer of a question less than 5 years old, as well as citing the source of the information, did not result in any new display on the front page.  Might the decision-making process determining an additional display of a question on the front page be described?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T04:03:50.147" Title="What are the criteria for putting a question less than 5 years old on the front page after editing it to include info from a newly-cited source?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13172" CreationDate="2020-10-11T04:03:50.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editing questions and answers always&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; bumps the question to the front page, as long as the question has a score greater than -4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn't see a question you edited on the front page, it's possible that you have set one of its tags to be ignored. You can check that at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/tag-notifications/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/tag-notifications/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;There are a few exceptions that don't apply here. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/48579/380389&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you want all the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T04:03:50.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-11T13:13:14.113" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/585074/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is entitled &lt;i&gt;If there is an infinite number of universes doesn't that mean there is a universe where there is not an infinite number of parallel universes?&lt;/i&gt;.   I downvoted this question and voted to close.  I also left a comment that said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;If there are an infinite number of triangles in the plane, doesn't that mean there is a triangle where there is not an infinite number of triangles?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this was a pretty useful analogy for understanding what was wrong with the question (or at least one of the things that was wrong with the question), viz: universes are not elements of other universes, any more than triangles are elements of other triangles.   I also think that the slightly flippant tone in no way detracted from the usefulness of the comment and in fact probably contributed toward making the point clear. This comment was deleted.  I do not think it should have been, particularly because there have been quite a few posts on meta requesting that downvoters should attempt to leave informative comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could perhaps argue that this comment was cryptic.  But I think it was cryptic only in the sense that it's &amp;quot;cryptic&amp;quot; to offer hints rather than solutions to homework problems.  It invites the OP to do a little thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize there have been a great many discussions about comment deletion.  Many of those have centered around long comment threads.  This post, by contrast, is about the deletion of single comments that, by way of analogy, invite the OP to reflect for a moment or two on the internal logic of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13094/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; on meta asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Why don't some questions on PSE have any answers for the past many years with many high votes? ...  Do they really don't have answers like proof of Goldabach's conjecture or yet their answers are very hard?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left a comment that said something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Why do some roads have so little traffic?  Are they just too hard to get to, like Mars?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, I believe the comment makes a point that is likely to be useful to the OP, and that the light-hearted tone does not detract from that usefulness.  This comment was upvoted several times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of deletion has happened several times over the past couple of years, though I haven't kept records so I have no other examples at my fingertips.  Many of the deleted comments were heavily upvoted.   I hope the moderators can be encouraged to tread a little more lightly here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/b&gt;  Some of the answers below suggest that it would be better to turn these comments into answers.  Here is why I don't think that's advisable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave this kind of comment on posts where I think that the OP is making simple and fundamental errors in reasoning.  I think most of those posts should be closed and that when a post should be closed, it should not receive answers that might encourage the OP to continue posting without thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I think it's helpful to the OP to point out those errors in reasoning --- and that one of the most effective way to point them out is to translate the same reasoning into another context where it's quite clear that the reasoning has gone haywire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short:  I want to be helpful, but I don't want to be encouraging (in the limited sense that I don't want to encourage future ill-considered posts).  I think that a) a brief comment pointing out the problem (together with a vote to close) is a good way to further both goals, and b) that often the best brief comment is one that offers an analogy for the OP to ponder.  If the OP is not in a pondering mood, the analogy might be lost, but often it will make a light go on.  I often use this kind of analogy in the classroom.  It seems pretty effective with reasonably good students who have made thoughtless errors, and entirely ineffective with students who are making no effort anyway, but I'm not sure there's any good alternative in those cases, and at the very least no harm is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="4993" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T01:52:27.877" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T14:51:13.250" Title="Another thread about deleted comments" Tags="|discussion|questions|comments|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13174" CreationDate="2020-10-11T14:36:56.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for mods, but I can give my perspective on why those comments shouldn't really stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If there are an infinite number of triangles in the plane, doesn't that mean there is a triangle where there is not an infinite number of triangles?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...I do not think it should have been, particularly because there have been quite a few posts on meta requesting that downvoters should attempt to leave informative comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could perhaps argue that this comment was cryptic. But I think it was cryptic only in the sense that it's &amp;quot;cryptic&amp;quot; to offer hints rather than solutions to homework problems. It invites the OP to do a little thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're downvoting, some people suggest that you explain your downvote (though I don't necessarily agree with that in all cases).  Constructive criticism is generally also okay; the problem is I'm not sure if that comment alone is particularly constructive to the OP.  I'm sure for you, it makes a lot of sense, but given OP's question, I'm not even sure if they could track the analogy.  You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this was a pretty useful analogy for understanding what was wrong with the question (or at least one of the things that was wrong with the question), viz: universes are not elements of other universes, any more than triangles are elements of other triangles. I also think that the slightly flippant tone in no way detracted from the usefulness of the comment and in fact probably contributed toward making the point clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But did you actually &lt;em&gt;mention&lt;/em&gt; that &amp;quot;universes are not elements of other universes, any more than triangles are elements of other triangles&amp;quot; or did you just expect OP to understand that implication?  If your comment was just that one line, I can see how it could be seen as unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, I'm guilty of this too sometimes, but I still think it's a decent reason for deletion.  I wouldn't be that upset if a comment of mine got deleted for being clear to me but not clear to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your second comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do some roads have so little traffic? Are they just too hard to get to, like Mars?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't see how this is even a useful analogy...  They are asking about why some questions with &lt;em&gt;high votes&lt;/em&gt; have no answers.  I feel like the analogy would have to be more like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Why is there multi-lane road with no traffic?  Is it just hard to get to?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; but that is actually a somewhat interesting question.  Why would there be a big road if no one was driving on it?  Does anyone know why that happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had an actual question about something they thought was strange that they noticed on the site, and your &amp;quot;analogy&amp;quot; seemed really dismissive of what the question was about, so I can definitely see why that was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T14:36:56.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13174" CreationDate="2020-10-11T15:05:00.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the comment on the main site question: More than any other reason, I deleted the comment because it was an answer to the question rather than to request clarification or suggest improvements to the post. You acknowledge this in your post here by saying it's a useful analogy to help understand why their thought process is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could have been posted as an answer, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it does not mean that. As an analogy to consider: If there are an infinite number of triangles in the plane, doesn't that mean there is a triangle where there is not an infinite number of triangles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a good answer? Probably not the best. But it's also not a good comment because it is not aiming to improve the post it was attached to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the core of the question is a misunderstanding of a concept, &amp;quot;helping point out what's wrong about the question&amp;quot; is just pointing out what they are misunderstanding about the concept -- it is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T15:05:00.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7523" CreationDate="2020-10-11T22:19:20.487" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to write a very similar question. It seems to be a popular sport on this site to close all questions, which come up, when one searches &amp;quot;Career&amp;quot; in the search bar and similar soft questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this highly dissatisfying for a site which supposedly is made for &lt;em&gt;physics students&lt;/em&gt;. Students also need answers to soft questions, which they can only get from physicists in academia and industry. From people that tend to hang around on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Especially career choice is probably much more important for a student than every single pure physics question he might ask on here.&lt;/strong&gt; Dismissing this out of hand as &amp;quot;not answerable&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; is not helping students, that don't want to blindly march through theit studies but make informed career choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer of @DavidZ is not really an answer to this issue. It is much more an argument along the lines &amp;quot;it is illegal, because it is illegal.&amp;quot; Physics SE rules are probably not mandated by god himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argue that we need to be more inclusive to this kind of questions. If the rules don't allow this, then there should be a debate about whether the rules need to be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user224659" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T22:19:20.487" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13174" CreationDate="2020-10-12T00:47:39.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this was a pretty useful analogy for understanding what was wrong with the question (or at least one of the things that was wrong with the question), viz: universes are not elements of other universes, any more than triangles are elements of other triangles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you didn't point this out as an analogy. You just posted your questions as a comment. What were you intending the questions to do? Were you intending the OP to improve their post? Were you intending for the OP to reach their open conclusions and answer their own comments? IMO your comment was not a suggestion to improve the post nor was it a request for a clarification from the OP. Therefore, it wasn't a valid comment. As tpg2114 has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13176/179151&quot;&gt;already pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, it would have been best to just make an answer instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it should have been, particularly because there have been quite a few posts on meta requesting that downvoters should attempt to leave informative comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there isn't any policy saying that down voters should leave comments. Of course this is a nice and helpful thing to do, but it certainly isn't required. Second, the comment should relate to why you down voted, and the connection should be clear. Based on your comment, it isn't clear that you were someone who down voted nor is it clear why you down voted. Based on this and what I discussed earlier, I honestly don't see how your comment was a useful comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could perhaps argue that this comment was cryptic. But I think it was cryptic only in the sense that it's &amp;quot;cryptic&amp;quot; to offer hints rather than solutions to homework problems. It invites the OP to do a little thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't what comments are for. In homework posts comments shouldn't be used to give hints to how to solve the problem, and comments in general shouldn't be used to invite the OP to do some thinking. If you really want the OP to think about something in the right way, then make an answer. If you want to improve the post itself, then you make a comment. If neither, then move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example: This question on meta asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't some questions on PSE have any answers for the past many years with many high votes? ... Do they really don't have answers like proof of Goldabach's conjecture or yet their answers are very hard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left a comment that said something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do some roads have so little traffic? Are they just too hard to get to, like Mars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I have seen the comment policy isn't as enforced (or isn't enforced at all) on the meta site. Meta is the place for discussions about the main site, and sometimes these discussions extend into the comments. Therefore, I don't think you can take how meta comments are treated and compare them to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of deletion has happened several times over the past couple of years, though I haven't kept records so I have no other examples at my fingertips. Many of the deleted comments were heavily upvoted. I hope the moderators can be encouraged to tread a little more lightly here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes aren't an indication of site policy adherence, so I don't see how number of votes is relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also never understood how some users find comments to be so sacred and get upset with moderators when they are deleted. If you think something is that important, then just make an answer. Problem solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave this kind of comment on posts where I think that the OP is making simple and fundamental errors in reasoning. I think most of those posts should be closed and that when a post should be closed, it should not receive answers that might encourage the OP to continue posting without thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there isn't any way for you to know how much someone has thought about their question. I don't think it's fair to assume that just because there is a flaw in someone's reasoning that is obvious to you that it must mean the person didn't think carefully enough. Furthermore, what you think is a &amp;quot;simple and fundamental error in reasoning&amp;quot; could be exactly the answer the person is looking for, and to them it is anything but simple. A question containing an error in reasoning or thought that isn't careful enough according to some subjective measure isn't a reason to close a question, and it certainly isn't a reason to not answer a question nor to violate the comment policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionaly, if you think the question really should be closed, then you really shouldn't be providing any sort of aid. Providing aid would still encourage users to post bad questions. The thought would be, &amp;quot;I can still post bad questions and get help in the comments even if answers are blocked.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I think it's helpful to the OP to point out those errors in reasoning --- and that one of the most effective way to point them out is to translate the same reasoning into another context where it's quite clear that the reasoning has gone haywire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can and should do this in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often use this kind of analogy in the classroom. It seems pretty effective with reasonably good students who have made thoughtless errors, and entirely ineffective with students who are making no effort anyway, but I'm not sure there's any good alternative in those cases, and at the very least no harm is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with this line of thought for the classroom and with students. I also agree that this is a great way to teach. However, this isn't a classroom, and we can't guarantee that we are dealing with students. This is a question and answer site. Users post questions, and if they do not violate site policy then other users can fully answer those questions rather than engage in an educational discussion found in the classroom.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I don't think the site should treat users differently based on who they are. All users, questions, answers, comments, etc. should have the same applicable policies applied in the same way equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;Is this an ideal way to reach physics? Not always. But that is how this particular site works. I love teaching people math and physics in precisely the way you describe, which is why I also tutor. I definitely tutor way differently compared to how I participate in this site because they are not the same thing. While I'm tutoring I'm not going to take the question a student has and give a complete answer. I'm going to primarily ask the student questions, guiding their own reasoning from where they are to where they need to be. However, on this site there isn't that essential back and forth needed for this type of pedagogy. People have (valid) questions, and we fully answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T03:16:36.643" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T03:16:36.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13174" CreationDate="2020-10-12T14:42:10.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the current version of your question (v3) you write,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave this kind of comment on posts where I think that the OP is making simple and fundamental errors in reasoning. I think most of those posts should be closed and that when a post should be closed, it should not receive answers that might encourage the OP to continue posting without thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I think it's helpful to the OP to point out those errors in reasoning --- and that one of the most effective way to point them out is to translate the same reasoning into another context where it's quite clear that the reasoning has gone haywire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two impulses are both fine to have, but they are mutually exclusive.  If you think that a question should closed unanswered so that future similar questions are discouraged, then close it without answering.  If you think that the question deserves a response that will guide the asker towards a solution to their problem, then provide such a response in an answer.  Please don't use comments as a mechanism to do both of these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been numerous discussions across the network about why blurring the line between comments and answers is unproductive and harmful; I will hopefully add some relevant links later today or tomorrow, but other folks who have different search-fu skills than I are welcome to contribute as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I encounter a question which I think warrants some assistance but shouldn't be answered in its current form, I vote to close it and leave a comment like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greetings! Your question is interesting but in its current form it's not a good fit for our community. Take the [tour] to get an idea of how we do things here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;comment-MarkDown&lt;/a&gt;, [tour] becomes a link to the right part of the help pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T14:51:13.250" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T14:51:13.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-13T06:14:25.920" Score="0" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider the phrase “you guys” to be sexist and unwelcoming (even though I am well-aware that many people don’t). I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this. After a back-and-forth in comments with another member about a post that used this phrase (and about the OP’s intentions, and whether they were relevant), a moderator deleted the phrase and the comments about it, to my relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, may I simply quietly edit it out, or replace it with something more inclusive, myself? Or is this “changing the OP’s intent”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T16:24:02.237" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T08:10:10.463" Title="Language that can be perceived as sexist" Tags="|discussion|policy|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13180" CreationDate="2020-10-13T09:23:10.493" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any time one finds language that could be considered unwelcoming, I think the right course of action is to edit the post to change or remove it. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;usual editing guidelines still apply&lt;/a&gt;, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure the post is still just as clear, if not more clear, after the change is made;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to improve other areas of the post at the same time;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Update the post to reflect clarifications made in comments,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. As with any instance where edits are made, be mindful and respectful of the author and don't leave edit comments that could be perceived as unwelcoming also (i.e. no &amp;quot;Fixed horrible English&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Removed language that reveals OP is a sexist dinosaur&amp;quot; or something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ACuriousMind mentioned in a comment, I'd be hard-pressed to think &amp;quot;you guys&amp;quot; is absolutely critical content in a post and almost always safe to remove. Anything that is not part of the core of the question (greetings, thanks, random musings) is fair game to be removed as part of streamlining a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T09:23:10.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-13T15:54:55.807" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started my participation yesterday, and I was very gratefully and pleasantly surprised to receive a perfect answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also looked through 10 pages of unanswered questions, and I answered a few. Now I wiould like to take a look at these questions I answered to see if my answers were useful.  I have not been able to find any search method for doing this efficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276996" OwnerDisplayName="Buzz" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T18:18:03.180" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T18:18:03.180" Title="Is there a convenient way to find questions which I have previously answered?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13183" CreationDate="2020-10-13T16:08:59.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go to your user profile, click &amp;quot;activity&amp;quot; towards the top of the page. you should find anything you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find your user profile by clicking on your user name under any post you have made (such as this question); there is also a link with your profile image in the top bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233597" OwnerDisplayName="Adrian Howard" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T17:07:13.810" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T17:07:13.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13180" CreationDate="2020-10-13T17:05:11.223" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;@tpg2114's answer is the right one from a policy standpoint, but it's worth making an extended comment to observe that &amp;quot;guys,&amp;quot; specifically, occupies a strange place at the intersection of formal vs. informal language and gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's totally true that, at least in the US, &amp;quot;hey guys&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;you guys&amp;quot; is commonly used as a genderless plural address.  I naturally use it when I'm speaking collectively to my different-gender children (&amp;quot;hey you guys, come to dinner&amp;quot;) and my children use it with equal comfort when addressing same- or mixed-gender groups of their peers.  But all of us seem to use &amp;quot;guys&amp;quot; with a genderless meaning as a term of address, but with a gendered meaning when referring to an unknown person.  This is especially clear among the teenage girls in my life, for whom a sentence like &amp;quot;oh my gosh, you guys, let's talk about guys&amp;quot; (using an all-female and an all-male meaning right next to each other) would be completely idiomatic and immediately understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's ... a weird usage for a word, which I personally hadn't considered until an example like that one was made for me.  Furthermore, for many older US-English speakers I know, the genderless address does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; feel natural, and they feel compelled to address mixed-gender groups as &amp;quot;guys and girls&amp;quot; or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question on Physics.SE that starts with &amp;quot;Hey guys&amp;quot; is overwhelmingly likely to be an effort at being informal, rather than an effort at being exclusionary.  That particular idiom is neither burn-it-down offensive nor problem-free.  Better to remove it, respectfully.  But if a debate arises, it's better to have that debate in a dedicated space like this Meta question than in a comment thread.  Comments are not good for subtlety, and inclusiveness issues are often surprisingly subtle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T17:05:11.223" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13183" CreationDate="2020-10-14T12:49:20.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the listings in your profile page, the modifiers &lt;code&gt;user:me&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;is:answer&lt;/code&gt; can be used in any search to limit the search to your posts and to answers, respectively. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;How do I search?&lt;/a&gt; on the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T12:49:20.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-16T16:53:35.560" Score="1" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is now the second time at &lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Matter Modeling SE&lt;/a&gt;, where we have received this exact same question (both times by an &amp;quot;unregistered user&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5saf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5saf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made the mistake of engaging with it the first time, asking for more details in the comments, for example, and based on the comments it became clear that the user was not &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;truly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; looking for papers on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was then deleted, but just a few months later, we've got the same question again, this time by another &amp;quot;unregistered user&amp;quot;. Unfortunately, one of our newer users who didn't see it the first time, is seriously asking the user for more details (like I did last time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Physics.SE got this exact same question come up too? Because we've now had it twice, and I don't see what the user's goal is with this (it's not like there's a link to an insecure website that steals all my computer's information, it's just a question which wastes people's time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: A similar question was asked 2 months earlier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TPSK5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TPSK5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastEditorUserId="134583" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T00:41:10.910" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T17:17:41.157" Title="Has Physics.SE had this same trolling experience?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13188" CreationDate="2020-10-17T17:17:41.157" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm promoting this comment by knzhou to an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get worse questions every day. Downvote, flag, and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T17:17:41.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13191" CreationDate="2020-10-17T17:48:59.920" Score="6" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that this question about teaching torque is crossposted to the science educators Stack Exchange site? As a question I think it's great, just not fit for this particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/584479/&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T15:36:44.750" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T11:42:45.237" Title="Cross posting a question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13190" CreationDate="2020-10-17T18:01:59.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you'd like the question &lt;em&gt;migrated&lt;/em&gt;, please cast a custom moderator flag on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The folks on Physics Meta can't really tell you what is and isn't okay to ask on a different Stack Exchange community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T18:01:59.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13180" CreationDate="2020-10-18T08:10:10.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider the phrase “you guys” to be sexist and unwelcoming&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a minor point I usually use the expression &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Folks&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; to start a letter or email to a group of people.  This would normally be considered gender neutral.  I dare say it not a perfect use of English, but it works a little better than &amp;quot;guys&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it must be pointed out that practically anything can be considered offensive by someone.  I have even seen people complain they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; being addressed in a gender specific way (not just neutrally, but in a specific way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the common sense idea of editing something (or removing the offending remark) is quite reasonable as long as it does not damage or alter the meaning of the original author.  One thing to note is that (AFAIK) very small edits are not allowed by members with low reputation, so it is not as trivial to do as it may seem, so patience is required by all involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T08:10:10.463" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13049" CreationDate="2020-10-18T17:40:11.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because Monday November 2nd 2020 is just 1 day before the US election, it is perhaps better to officially celebrate the 10th anniversary of Phys.SE on Monday November 9th 2020?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T17:40:11.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-18T21:42:16.290" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently do a search with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[cosmology] answers:0 .&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like the questions ordered by the date they were asked with the most recent first. How can I make this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276996" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:02:12.107" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:02:12.107" Title="How can I get the order of questions in a search to be by date?" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13194" CreationDate="2020-10-18T22:39:20.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually a pretty easy feature, I think you may have just passed over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/472Lw.png!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/472Lw.png!&quot; alt=&quot;Sort by Newest&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you have to do it change from &amp;quot;Relevance&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Newest&amp;quot; in that tab there, and it will sort based on when they were asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0QbMv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0QbMv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mobile view&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is how it looks on mobile browser, it's in approximately the same place and clicking on it brings up options to change the ordering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="127931" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T23:05:50.087" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T23:05:50.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13190" CreationDate="2020-10-19T11:42:45.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a question I think it's great, just not fit for this particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel it is not a great fit on Physics SE then the proper course of action would probably be to close the question (or delete it) and post it in a site that is a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross posting is generally discouraged, but there are exceptions to things where common sense applies.  I would suggest that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you cross post then you should (ideally) link to the cross-posted question, explain briefly why you cross-posted and if an an answer is made that you feel is appropriate on the other site, link to it and close the question so we do not have unanswered questions sitting on the site.  Obviously that is fairly inconvenient to do, so it is best to avoid cross posting for your own sake as much as the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T11:42:45.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13194" CreationDate="2020-10-19T19:57:33.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to have to put in the same settings every time, you can also create your own custom filter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, click &amp;quot;Create a custom filter&amp;quot; on the side bar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PDbqd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PDbqd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you can specify that you want questions with no answers, sorted by date (Newest), and with the Cosmology tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fu8EB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fu8EB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can save this filter using the &amp;quot;Save custom filter&amp;quot; button and name it whatever you want. For example, you could name it &amp;quot;Cosmology: 0 Answers by Date&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pJjIF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pJjIF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now the filter is ready for you to just click on to access&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X0i7P.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X0i7P.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is also nice about this method is that the custom filter will indicate when a new question that matches the filter is made, so you don't even need to search for anything if there isn't anything new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T15:19:54.627" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T15:19:54.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-20T20:05:54.340" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question and I have saved a copy of the text from my answer. Is there a way I can search for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should have added this a while ago, but I forgot about it after I went through the list of all my answers again and found what I was looking for.  My thanks to all the commenters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276996" LastEditorUserId="276996" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T13:28:59.413" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T13:28:59.413" Title="How can I find a [cosmology] question where I cannot remember any text or title for a search?" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13202" CreationDate="2020-10-27T18:37:32.247" Score="20" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/588174/&quot;&gt;recently asked a question&lt;/a&gt; on how the uncertainity principle applies to a situation described there. There have been some comments, which, I think are at least partial answers. I commented that and hoped that one or some of the users who commented would consider turning their comment into an answer. Unfortunately, this has not happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that by &amp;quot;combining&amp;quot; all of the comments, I might be able to write an answer to my own question. My answer would not be very in-depth or precise, but it would be some sort of &amp;quot;intuitive&amp;quot; (which is, without math and purely by describing - and no, I'm not saying that mathematics are always unintuitive. But the answer would only deal with the concept, not describing them mathematically) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not sure whether it is allowed ot encouraged to do so. It does not feel quite right to me to write an answer consisting of information that I did not research or derive - basically, I would be &amp;quot;stealing&amp;quot; the answers (which in this case are however comments) of other users and pack them all in one post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any site policy regarding situations like this, and how should one deal with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T18:40:18.117" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T13:01:29.967" Title="Is it encouraged to write an answer to your own question if it is just a summary of the comments?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13201" CreationDate="2020-10-27T19:59:44.080" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This behaviour isn't really frowned upon, so it should be fine.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7494/using-comments-as-answers/7495#7495&quot;&gt;This answer by David Z&lt;/a&gt; is basically on that exact topic, and gives good advice how to do it properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the comments are over a week old, and you feel they answer your question, I don't think it would be a problem to combine them into an answer, as long as you give proper attribution when relevant. I would even say this is a time where that's actually a pretty good idea to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T19:59:44.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13201" CreationDate="2020-10-28T15:31:54.000" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ultimately agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13202/179151&quot;&gt;Jmac's answer&lt;/a&gt;; however, I am going to go a little further and say that this can be done at any time. I don't think the fact that the comments are a week old matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the exception of comments that link to related questions/material, comments are not intended to be permanent. Comments are intended to either ask for clarification or suggest post improvements and should be deleted once the content of the comment has been addressed. Therefore, answers do not belong in the comments, and if you want to preserve any good content found in the comments, that content should be put into an answer. If you wait too long the comments could be deleted, and the information will be lost, so it would be best to do that as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T15:31:54.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13201" CreationDate="2020-10-29T13:01:29.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could add that it is probably appropriate to cite those who helped you to find an answer (like @BioPhysicist and @JMac). Even though they get no reputation or upvote for this, it is considered a polite thing to do in a larger physics community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T13:01:29.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13208" CreationDate="2020-11-03T16:20:53.807" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/80200/darkorse&quot;&gt;user&lt;/a&gt; made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/189468/trying-to-build-a-real-flying-saucer-v-2-0&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt; about making a flying saucer in real life stating that he was told to go to Worldbuilding by a user on Physics Stack Exchange. Unfortunately I don't have enough rep to view the original deleted question or the comments on it, but it was decided that the question &lt;strong&gt;did not fit on Worldbuilding&lt;/strong&gt; because it is about &lt;strong&gt;real world&lt;/strong&gt; problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course an issue. Neither site wants to have questions that don't fit it. I'm not sure if there were other issues with the original question, but on both Worldbuilding questions there were numerous other issues. Is there a reason these opinion based/improper/IRL questions get redirected to Worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="278831" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T15:33:02.290" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:33:02.290" Title="Why is it that people send questions from here over to 'Worldbuilding' even if they don’t fit there either?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13207" CreationDate="2020-11-03T16:26:00.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment on the Physics post was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome! For guidance about why this was closed, see our explanations of non-mainstream physics and engineering. If you’re constructing fiction, you might try Worldbuilding. rob♦ Oct 23 at 21:26&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where some links were in the original text but didn't copy-paste over and aren't relevant. So in this instance, it was made clear to the user that if it is fictional, Worldbuilding might be a place to go. The user seemed to ignore that criteria and it ended up closed on WB -- which is something we can't really address I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do try to take care to not migrate questions we aren't certain are on topic somewhere else, so I think this was about all we could do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T16:26:00.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-04T05:19:16.040" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw an answer recently which was very different from all the other answers. It had downvotes, but the &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt; had said someone was deliberately targeting him and downvoting his answers. I looked into his profile and saw multiple such answers which were very debated upon and also some questions where the comments were full of conflicts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing all this, I am quite tempted to ask for the user's credentials as he doesn't mention anything in his profile and has answered one of my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="248422" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T15:26:28.017" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:26:28.017" Title="Asking for credentials of a user" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13209" CreationDate="2020-11-04T06:36:25.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange isn't intended to be a social networking site and doesn't provide features aimed at social networking. However there is a physics chat room, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;, where site members can chat to each other. You could try and contact the user there, or ask there if anyone knows how to contact them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start a post in the chat room with &lt;em&gt;@username&lt;/em&gt; it will send a notification to the user. e.g. &lt;em&gt;@JohnRennie&lt;/em&gt; would send me a notification. However this only works if the user has used the chat room recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T06:36:25.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13209" CreationDate="2020-11-04T14:35:33.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not not allowed, I suppose. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13210/179151&quot;&gt;John Rennie points out&lt;/a&gt; the best place to do this would be chat rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where you shouldn't do it is the comments on one of their answers. Comments should only be used to ask clarifying questions about the post or to suggest post improvements. Asking for personal information in the comments doesn't fall under these two categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion SE is set up so that credentials aren't as important. When I read a post, I don't really care what the background of the OP is. I mainly just judge the content itself as well as the votes on the content (unless that content is HNQ). If other users do not think the content of the user is valid (indicated by down votes) then I tend to believe them. The likelihood that a group of users is explicitly targeting a single user is low, so a user with many highly down voted answers might not be very believable, or at the very least they are consistently posting poor quality content despite it being correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T14:36:34.860" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T14:36:34.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13198" CreationDate="2020-11-05T13:18:25.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just looked through your list of all answers and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/587648/23473&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; within a minute. It seems like what you are looking for. Nice to meet a fellow cosmology buff. Makes me feel less bad about my recent inactivity. Keep up the good work and I'm sure you'll surpass me in answer record one day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T13:18:25.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-07T12:26:23.903" Score="6" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does SE return the copyright to its contributors in order for them to partially/completely republish their own material in some peer-reviewed journals, or any written permissions from SE are required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127415" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T13:13:07.560" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T09:45:38.480" Title="Does SE allow me to publish my own material (Qs/As) in a peer-reviewed journal?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13213" CreationDate="2020-11-09T12:17:53.777" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange terms of service&lt;/a&gt; speficy that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You retain the copyright of any content you post to Stack Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you post, you are making the content available to the public (and within that, to Stack Exchange) under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt; license (with the precise version &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;depending&lt;/a&gt; on when the content was posted).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as Stack Exchange is concerned, you own the content and you are able to publish it in any form you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, pre-publication on Stack Exchange could make some journals and publishers refuse to publish the material, but that is a question that we cannot answer for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T12:17:53.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-11T12:02:18.720" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I came across an account (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/293213/why-we-dont-keep-public-records-of-suspensions&quot;&gt;link removed&lt;/a&gt;) which had been suspended for a very long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other instances for such suspensions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the probable reasons of very long time suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do anybody thinks that it's worthy or important to create a system set up which will generate some automated messages that will warn the users from doing such things or to acknowledge the moderator on this type of activities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="274807" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T19:22:00.100" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T19:22:00.100" Title="What is the maximum limit of suspension on the 'Physics' Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|support|suspensions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-11-11T12:12:08.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13215" CreationDate="2020-11-11T12:13:27.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regular suspensions (issued by site moderators) usually last 7, 30 or 365 days, depending on how severe the offense was and the user's history. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;A Day in the Penalty Box&lt;/a&gt;; this also includes some common reasons for suspensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this user has received a network-wide suspension from the site owners, and those can last longer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is a network-wide suspension?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A network-wide suspension is applied to all network accounts of a user. It can only be issued by Stack Exchange employees and can be longer than 365 days. The most common reasons for a network-wide suspension are spamming, trolling, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/323442/364003&quot;&gt;to cool down&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/125271/295232&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do anybody thinks that it's worthy or important to create a system set up which will generate some automated messages that will warn the users from doing such things or to acknowledge the moderator on this type of activities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's just a minor offense, the moderators will usually first issue a warning instead of suspending. So that system is already in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T12:13:27.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13213" CreationDate="2020-11-12T13:28:37.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While you mention publishing your own material, note that if you are publishing material from answers or questions by other people you need to at least make that clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been cases of people selling eBooks based entirely on Q&amp;amp;A material from sites on SE.  That was material they did not themselves write.  This is seemingly legal.  You would, however, normally be required to acknowledge the use of material from SE in any such publication (as was done in those cases eventually, IIRC).  You should not e.g. publish material from an answer by someone else and not make it clear that it was from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend reading the posts about the subject on this Q&amp;amp;A : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10581/somebody-scraped-our-answers-and-sold-them-as-a-book&quot;&gt;Somebody scraped our answers and sold them as a book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T13:28:37.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13213" CreationDate="2020-11-15T09:45:38.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does SE return the copyright to its contributors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, SE &lt;em&gt;can’t&lt;/em&gt; “return” something that they never had. Each contributor owns the copyright on their contributions the whole time (assuming these contributions are actually their own work), unless they enter into some other agreement regarding this copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to what is suggested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13214/279176&quot;&gt;the top-voted answer&lt;/a&gt;, I cannot find a clear statement of this. But we don’t need one. Copyright doesn’t get transferred unless applicable law specifically provides for this or the copyright owner agrees, and neither of those applies to SE contributions in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in order for them to partially/completely republish their own material in some peer-reviewed journals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if SE owned the copyright and subsequently transferred this ownership back to the contributor, the contributor would be free to exercise &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of their rights under copyright, not just publishing the material in selected publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be thinking of how some journals require authors to transfer the copyright to the publisher. In that case, the publisher may licence certain rights back to the authors. That is different to transferring ownership back to the authors, which is what the phrase “return the copyright” suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279176" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T09:45:38.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-15T13:27:51.283" Score="11" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a specific lab equipment, but I don't know the exact English words to describe it, so my searches are useless. To give an idea, I'm interested in a gyroscope with gimbals and a motor to sustain the spinning over the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this type of question is accepted in the Physics are of SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173574" LastEditorUserId="195139" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T18:59:48.710" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T21:08:34.710" Title="May I ask questions about physics lab equipments?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13222" CreationDate="2020-11-20T05:47:47.190" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;What will happen to my account if I post off-topic posts quite frequently, albeit not intentionally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277227" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T07:52:11.157" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T14:06:59.413" Title="Will SE block me if my questions are consistently marked as off-topic?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13221" CreationDate="2020-11-20T06:59:11.180" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE will block your account from posting new questions if your existing questions are judged to be low quality, but the exact criteria they use have never been disclosed - presumably to stop people from gaming the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read your existing questions, and you are obviously enthusiastic about physics. Can I suggest you ask in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange chat room&lt;/a&gt; before posting a question if you are concerned it might be closed. You can ask anything about physics there without fear of your account being blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T06:59:11.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-21T16:25:08.180" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/595401/&quot;&gt;Commutation and Sharing Same Eigenvalues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225585" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T23:31:37.693" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T23:31:37.693" Title="Does this type of question violate the rules?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13219" CreationDate="2020-11-22T18:27:25.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course you can ask that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its clearly about doing physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general remark: Just ask the question in the future. It will get flagged if it violates some rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user224659" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T18:27:25.110" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13219" CreationDate="2020-11-22T21:08:34.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; specifically states that experimental technology questions are on-topic. There's even the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-technology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-technology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-technology&lt;/a&gt; tag, which can be used &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;for questions pertaining to the limits, management, and operation of equipment necessary to experimental physics&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, as described in the tag wiki excerpt. So in principle, questions about experimental equipment are on-topic, unless they contravene any other of the site's policies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That being said, questions on the main site asking just for the name of something would probably be closed because the description might be too broad to answer properly or simply for being off-topic since they attract extended discussion in the comments or guess-type-answers and neither of these things works well in the SE Q&amp;amp;A format. They might be better suited to chat (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7372/149907&quot;&gt;this meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;). You could try to ask at &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149907" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T21:08:34.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13233" CreationDate="2020-11-24T15:55:24.143" Score="20" ViewCount="732" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2012, when the first incarnation of Astronomy SE closed, the community at Physics SE felt compelled to give a home to astronomy questions and overwhelmingly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1197/75633&quot;&gt;voted&lt;/a&gt; to expand the scope of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not long after, however, Astronomy SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5327/75633&quot;&gt;was &amp;quot;reopened&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and is still &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;alive&lt;/a&gt; and well, even if still in beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A degree of overlap in scope between the two sites is completely unproblematic, of course, but I believe there are questions on the more technical side of astronomy that, when there is an SE especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/a/101&quot;&gt;geared towards them&lt;/a&gt;, should be redirected there, to the benefit of both communities (and of the OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Is it time to rethink that decision a bit, and make off topic here questions about technical astronomical topics such as observation and equipment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/594633/75633&quot;&gt;What light pollution levels are required to see the Milky Way?&lt;/a&gt;, which a couple of users felt didn't quite belong to Physics SE and voted to close - only to be reminded by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/50583&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind&lt;/a&gt; that, as it stands, the question is actually fully on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;propose&lt;/strong&gt; the answer is &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt;, see my answer bellow for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="75633" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T14:47:09.370" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T14:47:09.370" Title="Should we leave technical astronomy questions to Astronomy SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|policy|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13227" CreationDate="2020-11-25T10:48:00.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it time to rethink that decision a bit, and make off topic here questions about technical astronomical topics such as observation and equipment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see Astronomy SE added to the list of options to migrate a question to, but not to make questions like this completely off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows the option to either &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; the question by moving it to Astronomy SE or to keep the question alive on Physics SE.  This makes it easy to migrate the questions without needing to make a hard and fast rule about what is Astronomy SE and what is Physics SE territories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think having astronomy off-topic helps users.  It will most likely arise with new users and having your question closed and being told to do it all over again on a different SE just puts off new users.  Let's help them by helping ourselves easily vote to move questions to the best site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know in the past the argument is that this does not arise very often.  OK, but it's not a huge change to implement and maybe it will be used more often if we do have the option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we also need to consider that maybe sometimes answers from the Astronomy SE will be more specific and cover more than we do here.  Also the rules on Astronomy SE are a little different - there is less of an issue with history related questions and homework closing is no an official reason to close on Astronomy SE.  So maybe a question we won't deal with well here could fair better on Astronomy SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of Emilio Pisanty's very helpful post I would amend my preference to leaving the status quo.  No off-topic bans for subsets of astronomy questions and we just suggest the user consider the Astronomy SE site as a better fit if we think that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would still prefer we could migrate directly to Astronomy SE but as Emilio points out it is not possible as it's a beta site, we can only hope SE move it to full status and make the other option viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="104964" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T20:37:22.600" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T20:37:22.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13227" CreationDate="2020-11-25T11:26:34.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think it is. But I would prefer to migrate them rather than say they were off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a reasonably clear distinction between questions about astrophysics and questions about astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that questions about astronomy would be better to migrate to Astronomy SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the distinction here is to ask yourself, where would I go and look for the answer to this question - would I look on Astronomy SE or Physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most professional astrophysicists/astronomers, they would appreciate the difference and head to the appropriate site, but if they didn't find it there then they would head to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the non-professionals and general public, the distinction is not that obvious - but they would tend to go to Astronomy SE first for anything &amp;quot;astro-related&amp;quot;, and this would be especially true for astronomy questions (as opposed to astrophysics). In other words, an astronomy question asked on Physics SE, especially one which is about amateur observing or the night sky, is in danger of being lost to its likely audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My solution would be to migrate anything that you couldn't tag as astrophysics, cosmology or as some branch of experimental physics. And yes, I know there will be grey areas - but the question cited in this post is not an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="43351" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T15:25:25.647" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T15:25:25.647" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T16:10:40.750" Score="-4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking on add a reward to this question (not asked by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/594617/&quot;&gt;Two blocks are placed side by side on a surface (friction is present). What is the frictional force distribution between two blocks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because currently it has four answers, that can be grouped in two answers supporting an idea (uniform distribution of friction), other 2 supporting a different and incompatible one (more friction near external force side). Author has accepted one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My surprise has been that the question is currently closed as off-topic. I've not been able to find more details about which kind of off-topic. The problem seems correctly described, there are four answer, ... it seems to be according to site rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestion about what to do? I've curiosity to known which one of the theories is the correct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164884" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T16:15:27.597" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T16:32:53.340" Title="Reward closed question" Tags="|support|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13230" CreationDate="2020-11-25T16:32:53.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the new close banners don't show the reason for closure unless you are a certain reputation.  I personally think it's useful for others to know the reason, and I don't think it's secret information (though I won't copy the names of who voted to close).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close banner says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts. Homework questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience. If you intend to modify your question, &lt;em&gt;please read the links above carefully&lt;/em&gt; before editing. Note that answers with complete solutions may be deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read those links, you will see some of the types of questions that the community generally considers off topic under this close reason.  In this case, the user has basically just asked us to give the answer to a &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; question.  Typically for a question like this to be on topic, the person has to ask about the concepts involved. Not just present an exercise question, figure out the first part of it, and ask &amp;quot;Which multiple choice answer is right?&amp;quot;.  Especially when followed up by a second part of the question that they haven't seem to put any effort into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the person asking had presented this problem, and then asked a conceptual question &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the answer, say for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this problem [show problem] and I was told the answer is b), but when I thought about [some concept], I thought that would make c) the answer.  Can anyone explain why [this concept] does not work for me here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with actual details about the concept and how they applied it, there is a chance a question like that could be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is, this question doesn't do that.  If you want to read a lot more discussion on it, those two links above in the close banner have quite a bit of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a reopen process for closed questions, but I don't know if it's possible at this point to edit it in a way that makes it on topic. Especially since there are already answers to the off-topic version which would likely be made irrelevant if those edits were done.  That type of editing is typically discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T16:32:53.340" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13227" CreationDate="2020-11-25T17:25:51.727" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both of the existing answers seem to be based on a mischaracterization of how migration and off-topic closures are related, particularly with things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see Astronomy SE added to the list of options to migrate a question to, but not to make questions like this completely off-topic here. [...] I don't think having astronomy off-topic helps users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to migrate them rather than say they were off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migration from one site to another requires two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is likely on-topic at the target site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question is off-topic where it was posted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't say &amp;quot;all of these questions should be migrated, but they're still on-topic here&amp;quot;. Migration is, instead, a way of saying &amp;quot;this question doesn't fit here, but fortunately there's a separate site that can take it&amp;quot;. This philosophy has informed a large number of decisions thus far, and it's baked into how the closure dialog is structured (with migration as an option under off-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what options do we have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can decide to keep the status quo as it is: astronomy questions are on-topic here. Posters can be pointed to astro.se as a potential better home for their questions, but closure is not appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatively, we can decide that a subset of astronomy questions (say, questions about amateur observational astronomy) are off-topic here and should be closed as off-topic (&amp;quot;I'm voting to close this question because it is not about physics&amp;quot;), and consistently flag closed astronomy questions so that moderators can migrate them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we cannot do, however, is set up a direct migration pathway to astro.se, because it is still in beta. I find this faintly ridiculous, given how long astro.se has been running (and therefore how little stock is left in arguments like &amp;quot;it would skew their site definition), but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/258593/do-the-new-graduation-policies-have-any-effect-on-migrations-to-beta-sites/&quot;&gt;this is how things have stood for some time&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/354124/as-of-2020-is-it-possible-to-set-up-migration-paths-to-beta-sites&quot;&gt;SE doesn't seem to be in a rush to update things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there is definitely a good call to make a choice as a community, between the two options above (and to set the scope for the latter), but the existing proposals don't really reflect the current reality, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T17:25:51.727" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13227" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:03:10.540" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your thoughtful replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of the current (3) answers and comments let me spell out my suggestion and perhaps clarify a few points first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Emilio Pisanty &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13232/75633&quot;&gt;already provided&lt;/a&gt; an important clarification, namely that adding Astronomy SE as a migration option isn't possible as long as the site is in beta; this is unfortunate, as it'd be my preferred option, but let's consider it out of the table, since I don't see us swaying SE on this;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Making the whole of astronomy off topic is of course nonsense;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ban&lt;/em&gt; is also too strong a word - if we decide to make observational astronomy off topic here, it will still be up to the voters to decide themselves, for each post individually, where it best belongs;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of questions I'd personally consider migrating to Astronomy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/580554/75633&quot;&gt;Primary focal length of a cassegrain telescope&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/594633/75633&quot;&gt;What light pollution levels are required to see the Milky Way?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/589394/75633&quot;&gt;Definition of a planet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/273765/75633&quot;&gt;Group of stars moving&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/26145/75633&quot;&gt;Need help buying binoculars online for astronomy (10x50)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/25396/75633&quot;&gt;Is there a simple yet accurate formula for where on Earth the Sun and Moon are directly overhead?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/165486/75633&quot;&gt;What is the distance to the closest star similar to our Sun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that is, posts asking for observation instructions, equipment advice, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My two-part suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make &lt;em&gt;amateur observational astronomy&lt;/em&gt; off topic now&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add Astronomy SE as a migration option when it becomes possible to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; And flag moderators so that they can take care of migrating them. This shouldn't be a lot of extra work, since these questions don't really pop up all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T10:03:26.123" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T10:03:26.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13244" CreationDate="2020-11-26T18:37:17.587" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, I asked a question related to the addition of magnetic flux densities when there are multiple magnets in a specific piece of equipment. For some reason, it was considered off-topic, even though it is about the physics involved and has nothing to do with engineering. How do I report this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link for question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/595254/&quot;&gt;How can you find the average magnetic flux density of multiple magnets near each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277753" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T19:05:38.743" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T17:18:55.757" Title="How do I reopen a question that was incorrectly reported as off-topic?" Tags="|support|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-28T13:13:19.393" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/594898/236734&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; kept pushing for more or less the same idea till 21st November. At the time, the question then contained an explicit calculation where the author had tried to explain his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two days later in 22-Nov, an edit was done removing the calculation which the author had shown causing most of the answers to become extremely out of context under the explanation that his edit was inorder to validate back the original answers (??). This inturn actually invalidated three answers out four which referred these calculations which I have mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the original point of the edit may have been to revert the question back to original to avoid invalidating answers posted, but the edits have done exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bothered me because now I saw this question in the close queue under the category that it needs details or clarity.. Hope for a discussion on what other members think of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T00:47:28.353" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T06:35:38.183" Title="Editing a question invalidating answers" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13236" CreationDate="2020-11-28T15:02:26.710" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who flagged this issue, I'll give my perspective here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, it seems really strange to me that you mention that Cort Ammon, Bill Watts, and Dale's answers being invalidated, yet you don't mention my answer.  My answer was posted &lt;em&gt;a day before&lt;/em&gt; the other answers, and was afterwards invalidated by an edit from OP.  Dale's answer also had this happen, and Dale even made a comment; but he chose to edit his answer instead to address the (substantially changed) question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that's fair.  OP originally asked a question, and I spent time answering it.  Then, they decided to just change the question and add an example that seemed to feature completely wrong math (I was talking about this in the conversation moved to chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should the &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; answers be made relevant when I had been the first one to come to the problem and spend time answering it in its original form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no completely fair approach here; but to me it makes perfect sense to keep the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; version of the question which was answered.  Why should the person who was first to help have their answer made nearly irrelevant?  If anything, this shows that changing a question after it was asked is unfair, because if people answered before and after the edits, someone is getting the short end of the stick either way, and it's not really the fault of the one answering, since checking the history of a question to make sure it didn't change too much shouldn't be necessary before writing an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the close votes go, there's only 2 now.  I had actually cast a close vote after the edits from OP, because most of what they added was math that basically didn't show anything relevant, and made the question very confusing.  Since the question was changed back to its original form (which I didn't think was unclear enough to close, which is why I answered it), I just retracted my close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastEditorUserId="127931" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T06:35:38.183" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T06:35:38.183" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13239" CreationDate="2020-11-28T17:10:24.927" Score="-5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my questions from October 16, 2019, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/508572/&quot;&gt;Why is the &amp;#229;ngstr&amp;#246;m not a metric unit? And why is the &amp;#229;ngstr&amp;#246;m spelled with the Swedish/Finnish letters &amp;quot;&amp;#229;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&amp;#246;&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt; has got useful answers. However, my question is downvoted to -6. I cannot understand why my question has got downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212358" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T13:53:45.330" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T13:53:45.330" Title="Why has my question from October 16, 2019 been downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2020-12-04T18:25:28.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13238" CreationDate="2020-11-28T23:54:32.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not see your question until now, but it is easy to see why it was downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The part about &lt;em&gt;why is it spelt that way&lt;/em&gt; is a question about language, not physics.  It could even be opinion based.  So that's two possible ways that part is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is it not a metric unit (in fact it is) is a question only the people who make decisions on the relevant committee could answer.  Again it's likely opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could have done no real prior research as Wikipedia's page on that unit states it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; part of the metric system of units and the page on the metric system also lists it.  That unit is, however &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; part of the SI system of units, so I suspect this is the route of confusion.  The SI system is not the same as the metric system, although they are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some members do not have enough reputation to vote to close a question as off-topic.  That does not mean they'll just ignore questions they think are off-topic and it would not be unusual to find such members downvoting instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however that members on SE can downvote any question and are not required to state a reason or explain their actions.  We expect them to act in good faith and that's all there is to it.  I suspect some automated checks on the site monitor for patterns of voting that could be attacks by one person on another, but I do not know that for certain.  It is polite to either comment a reason for downvoting or vote up an existing comment that already explains your reason, but it is not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite common for questions to get answers (which are themselves voted up) and yet the original question is closed or downvoted heavily.  Getting an answer means the question interests people, but some people being interested does not mean it is on-topic or cannot be even more disliked by a lot of people too.  This is the nature of forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, you can politely ask for people to explain their downvotes, but you cannot force the issue and it really does happen us all from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T04:01:39.917" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T04:01:39.917" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13241" CreationDate="2020-11-29T00:00:12.857" Score="0" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice an apparent asymmetry between the two processes of closing a question or voting for reopening. In the former case, a reason for the vote must be given. In the latter, it is not possible to explain the reason. What is the rationale for such difference? Wouldn't be better to know why there is a request for reopening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T03:18:19.220" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T14:59:19.250" Title="Asymmetry between closing and reopening questions" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13240" CreationDate="2020-11-29T00:37:50.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the system makes sense like it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, a question is basically &amp;quot;on-topic&amp;quot; unless it falls within some off topic close reason.  There are specific reasons that a question is off topic, and those reasons can typically help improve a question.  Casting a close vote just means you do not think the question is on topic in it's current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for reopen votes should essentially always be &amp;quot;It does not fall into any category of an off-topic question.&amp;quot;, so I don't think there is really a need to make users choose a reason for this decision.  Essentially, being open is the default for questions, and users typically don't have to explain or select a reason why their questions fit.  This should apply for reopening as well in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T00:37:50.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13236" CreationDate="2020-11-29T00:44:53.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Meta site really isn't the place to hash out grievances against specific users and their actions; this is what custom flags are for. Therefore I'll just address the general question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question posts should not be edited in such a way that existing answers are invalidated. If you see this happening, raise a custom flag for a moderator to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T00:44:53.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13240" CreationDate="2020-11-29T03:15:26.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't be better to know why there is a request for reopening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really. The only reason is &amp;quot;I believe this question follows site policies and guidelines.&amp;quot; Additionally, if you are choosing to reopen you think that the question is not what the close reason says it is in its current/edited form (assuming you are not those users who vote to reopen just to fight policies they do not like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I could be overlooking something. If you can propose a good way to give reopen reasons that are unique and valuable then you should propose them to help in the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T18:23:27.170" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T18:23:27.170" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13234" CreationDate="2020-11-29T17:18:55.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whittled down your question amount to two things :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know the average magnetic flux density on the surface of the track. Can anyone help me with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would normally be considered a homework-type question.  At a minimum you would be expected to show your own effort to work out the theoretical model.  Even then we generally only answer this category of questions if they have a conceptual issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make appropriate edits to show this your question will automatically be placed on the list of questions to be voted for reopening.  If enough people vote to reopen it, then it will be reopened.  Note that if you repost the question it would most likely be closed as a duplicate of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is (AFAIK) no other way for you to force the question to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other tips or help with this topic is also appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just is not a type of question we deal with.  It is vague and there is no way to define a correct answer, something we generally want to be possible for questions on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding it being closed as &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot;, this could be argued to be a valid interpretation of your question.  You are building something, you want help with some aspect of that - that is engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T17:18:55.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13240" CreationDate="2020-12-01T14:59:19.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When questions are closed, two things happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is anything nontrivial or non-obvious about the closure, it gets discussed in the comments. These comments are for the benefit of people who are voting (or not) to close the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the question actually does get closed, it gets a banner stating that it is closed and with a brief explanation as to why. This banner has two different primary targets:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original asker, whose question has just been closed. For one thing, s/he deserves the benefit of an explanation as to why this happened. But, more importantly, the banner is a call-to-action and an initial resource that points the asker to the resources s/he can use to fix the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future visitors, who can see the closure and its reason and use it to get a better model for the scope of the site and the types of questions that are and are not on topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, when a question is reopened, the closure banner is removed along with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; explicit system traces of the closure on the surface level of the thread. The closure-then-reopening cycle is documented in the edit history and on the question timeline, should anybody wish to delve into those, but in general the question is considered an on-topic open question no different from a freshly-asked one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, there is no point in having an official banner that explains why the question was reopened once the process has been completed &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; it would be actively harmful and it would directly detract from the ethic that threads on SE are &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; questions and answers, without any more superfluous meta commentary than absolutely necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in the run-up to reopening, as the question is discussed, potentially edited, and voted on, any discussion regarding whether it should be reopened can happen in the comments. As a general rule, whenever nontrivial cases come up, this is what happens. If anybody wants to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; there are people that want to reopen the question, they can just look to the comments section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've already partially responded to this idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not always reading comments is clarifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... so what makes you think that having a &amp;quot;canned&amp;quot; reason from a tightly-defined set would be &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; enlightening? With due apologies, it simply does not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there is really nowhere for the information to go. If I am forced to decide on a reason for why the question should be reopened, what should happen to that bit of information? It cannot be shown publicly as a message from the system, because at that stage it is just a partial vote without a sufficient community quorum. The only real place where this can happen would be... as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, there is no denying that reopening questions is an uphill battle, so unless it's absolutely obvious that the question has been fixed, there is a strong onus on the reopen voters to argue for the reopening in the comment thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see a vote for reopening, quite often I ask myself &amp;quot;why somebody thought it could be reopened?&amp;quot; Clearly there is a disagreement with the original vote. But in many cases it is not clear the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not clear to you, then that is just a failure of communication on their part. They needed to convince you that you should vote with them, and they did not explain it well enough. On this site, nobody is forced to explain their votes &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; in this particular case, those people chose not to, and that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a more general note: this type of feature is part of the core Q&amp;amp;A engine behaviour that works for the entire Stack Exchange network, and &lt;strong&gt;this community has no control over it&lt;/strong&gt;. As such, &lt;strong&gt;it is basically pointless to ask about it here&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; the correct venue is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Even if you did manage to convince us that your proposed changes to the mechanisms are sound, the most that this community can do is to tell you &amp;quot;yeah, that could work, you should post it over on MSE and try to get attention to it from a developer or community manager&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T14:59:19.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-03T10:12:25.370" Score="13" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;About a year ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339700/new-post-notices-are-live-network-wide&quot;&gt;the post notices on closed questions&lt;/a&gt; changed across the entire SE platform. This changed a number of aspects of the Q&amp;amp;A engine software's behaviour and how it communicates meta information about threads to different classes of users, but one particularly important change is that for a wide class of users (specifically, people who are not logged in, and users under 3k rep), the closure notice on off-topic questions looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ztSiD.png&quot; width=&quot;600&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, post closure notices became completely uninformative regarding the reason about why the question was closed. This is actively harmful, as it stops us from informing newcomers about what questions are off-topic and why, and from directing them to the resources that can help them get a good experience of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as it turns out, the reason for this is that the software's behaviour has been &lt;em&gt;improved&lt;/em&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/396592/goodbye-off-topic-hello-community-specific-reasons/396597#396597&quot;&gt;explained by Catija on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; the software now supports the ability to show different closure reasons to different populations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pgd5s.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, instead of having a single text associated with the closure reason, the software now allows a detailed breakdown as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A usage guidance text, shown in the Vote To Close interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A public message, shown to &amp;lt;3k-rep users and non-logged-in visitors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A message shown specifically to the question owner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A message shown to &amp;gt;3k-rep users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, this presents a call to action to restore the site's functionality, as well as an opportunity to improve how we communicate our site's scope to visitors and newcomers. I would thus propose that we take on the following tasks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For moderators:&lt;/strong&gt; ask the developer/CM team (on the moderator Teams?) whether these changes can be implemented for the existing closure reasons, or whether we need to make new ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For moderators:&lt;/strong&gt; fill in the existing text into all the fields for the various closure reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the community:&lt;/strong&gt; find better ways in which the closure banner can be customized when shown to question owners and the general public.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T17:00:19.583" Title="Fixing the closed-question notices following changes to the software" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13246" CreationDate="2020-12-03T11:00:21.520" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's kick things off with the most important one - the homework close reason, which currently reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts. Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience. If you intend to modify your question, &lt;em&gt;please read the links above carefully&lt;/em&gt; before editing. Note that answers with complete solutions may be deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a starting point, I would propose the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The usage guidance in the closure interface:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;homework-like question&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;//physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work question&lt;/a&gt; focused on a specific computation instead of the underlying physics concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though maybe this can be expanded with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please point the asker to the guidance on Meta, and make sure the question is tagged appropriately.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post notice to general visitors, which also appears above the more specific guidance for the post owner and high-rep users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts. Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience. Note that answers to homework questions with complete solutions may be deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post notice to the question owner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question can be reopened if suitably edited to ask about the underlying concepts —  &lt;em&gt;please read the links above carefully&lt;/em&gt; to learn how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post notice to &amp;gt;3k-rep users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help the asker edit the question so that it asks about the underlying physics concepts instead of specific computations. If there are any complete answers, please flag them for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T17:00:19.583" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T17:00:19.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13249" CreationDate="2020-12-04T21:16:35.923" Score="-4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not like it my meta question, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13238/&quot;&gt;Why has my question from October 16, 2019 been downvoted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, has also been closed as &lt;em&gt;opinion based&lt;/em&gt; because I asked a meta question about my own question. Why is my meta question closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212358" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-12-06T18:18:00.593" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T18:18:00.593" Title="Meta question closed as opinion-based" Tags="|support|closed-questions|close-reasons|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-12-09T13:12:58.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13248" CreationDate="2020-12-04T22:55:17.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your meta question is actually not a question.  It is a comment that you cannot understand why a main site question of yours was closed.  As a result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I dunno how your non-question in meta can be answered,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if we understand your meta post as a kind of question, it is not possible to answer it in any way except by formulating a speculative opinion on the reason why your main site question was closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an aside, my &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; is that asking for people to justify their VTC is bad form.  It’s enough to understand that the question needs improvement, or that the answer is readily available (as is the case of your main site question relevant to this discussion).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T22:55:17.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-05T04:07:31.517" Score="14" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen two hot network questions in the past two days where one of the highly upvoted answers was a variation on &amp;quot;you did your measurement wrong&amp;quot;.  In both cases, this answer was incorrect--the measurement was right, the simplest physical model was wrong, and there was better physical model that matched the data very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first such question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/598114/&quot;&gt;Why did I measure the magnetic field to vary exponentially with distance?&lt;/a&gt;.  The measurement showed that the magnetic field of certain magnets decayed exponentially.  This differs from the simplest model--that of a dipole--and one of the answers claimed that the OP got the measurement wrong.  It turns out that there was a better model for the magnet in question, namely a Halbach array, which correctly accounts for the exponential field decay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second such question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/598278/&quot;&gt;Pan flute physics&lt;/a&gt;.  The measurement showed that the frequency of a half-open pipe was lower than the naive formula &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{c}{4L}$&lt;/span&gt; would predict.  One answer claimed that this was due to imprecise knowledge of the speed of sound &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$c$&lt;/span&gt;.  However, this turns out to be wrong (for reasons I explained in a comment on said answer), and the right explanation is that there is a better model for the frequency of a half-open pipe which accounts for non-zero diameter of the pipe, and does a better job of predicting the measured frequency.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A key point in both of these questions is that the OP knew the simplest model for the phenomena in question (respectively, field of a magnetic dipole and simple formula for frequency of a half-open pipe), and their questions were essentially &amp;quot;why does my measurement differ from the model?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to make a bold assertion and say that trying to explain away surprising measurements as &amp;quot;bad data&amp;quot; is itself bad physics, and I think answers along these lines should be discouraged.  The reason is that &lt;em&gt;literally anything&lt;/em&gt; can be &amp;quot;explained&amp;quot; in this way, and it prevents you from seeing the &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; physics if it doesn't coincide with whatever simple models the answerer happens to favor.  I think both of the preceding examples prove this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, I acknowledge that there are certainly cases where experiments are performed improperly.  Notably, neither of the aforementioned questions had any estimate of the uncertainty of their measurements (an aspect often tragically overlooked in non-research-level experiments).  However, for the purposes of this site, I think we ought to generally consider experimental error as a legitimate explanation only as a last resort.  We should prioritize answers which explain an observation with physics, rather than fudge factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110443" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T12:35:26.727" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T15:07:00.203" Title="&quot;You did the measurement wrong&quot; is not an answer" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13250" CreationDate="2020-12-05T14:55:51.937" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, neither of the aforementioned questions had any estimate of the uncertainty of their measurements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which means that the explanations provided in the answers to those threads that you objected to, which are basically of the form &amp;quot;the observations are consistent with experimental noise at the level to which you have reported the latter&amp;quot;, are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of experimental observations that don't match the simplistically-expected result and which are instead due to more complicated physics than were anticipated. However, the key aspect of those observations that allows them to make that distinction is the fact that they take seriously the quantification of the experimental uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those two threads, it does seem that there were for a while top-voted answers with incorrect responses to the specific details, but even then (particularly for the magnetic-field one) those answers still provided valuable insights about physics to the wider HNQ SE audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as they were wrong, there's a strong argument to be made that there's nothing specific to experimental physics about it -- it was just simple entry-level answers which turned out to be incomplete or inaccurate upon closer examination, which is a generic liability on this platform. You're right to point out that we should keep an eye out for when OPs' observations might be more correct than we often give them credit for, but does this not also apply to analogous situations on the theoretical side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some thoughts -- I have no strong opinions about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T14:55:51.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13250" CreationDate="2020-12-05T15:07:00.203" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we ought to generally consider experimental error as a legitimate explanation only as a last resort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically by definition physics is defined by experimental verification.  It's not even remotely a &amp;quot;last resort&amp;quot; to suggest an experiment has a fault.  It's exactly what happens &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; who publishes results they cannot explain - the first things you have to do is show you are :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using an accurate &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt; for that scenario&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using reliable &lt;em&gt;technique and equipment&lt;/em&gt; to measure accuratly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Physics SE we have two linked rules for closing questions : &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; type questions and &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; type questions.  These are almost invariably closed by the community.  It would be very easy to argue (and I would) that &amp;quot;explain why my experimental results differ from my theory&amp;quot; questions are off topic under that check my work rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should prioritize answers which explain an observation with physics, rather than fudge factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to make a bold assertion and say that trying to explain away surprising measurements as &amp;quot;bad data&amp;quot; is itself bad physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &amp;quot;you most likely made an experimental error&amp;quot; is not a fudge factor, it's a legitimate observation - it usually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the reason for problems when a reasonable theoretical model has been used.  Having spent an indecent amount of time in labs doing experiments I can tell you it is also the most likely explanation.  As more than one (in)famous example shows, even the most highly regarded of scientists can get it wrong very publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for me, &amp;quot;bad data&amp;quot; is the &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; assumption until it is shown to be &amp;quot;good data&amp;quot;.  This is why repeating experiments and other people repeating your experiments is so important.  It is why peer review is so important - other eyes see what you don't because of (unconscious) confirmatory bias or just mistakes.  But peer-review is not a function of Physics SE, so we do not do these type of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no practical way (on a site like Physics SE) for members to know that the OP did (or did not) make accurate measurements.  The default position for most physicists is that if experiment does not match theory then either you used the wrong theory or (more likely and the Occam's Razor first option) that measurement was not done properly or did not account for some unknown factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics experiments are extremely difficult to do well.  Models are normally going to model ideal conditions whereas experiments never usually happen that way.  Errors are &lt;em&gt;normal&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; and if I saw no errors or unusually low errors I would actually consider the experimental results very suspect (including my own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for me, experimental error is the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; explanation you look for if you think the theory ought to be accurate enough.  Whether it's  a failure to design a good experiment that matches the conditions of the theoretical model or a failure to be diligent enough measuring or an equipment failure, it's the experimenter's job to demonstrate they made no errors.  Not a thing that's typically practical here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;their questions were essentially &amp;quot;why does my measurement differ from the model?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to differentiate between &amp;quot;why does this happen ?&amp;quot; questions (as we get them in everyday physics type situations) which are not experimental but ask for qualitative/intuitive explanations of observations and &amp;quot;check my experiment&amp;quot; type scenarios.  The former is fine, but the later is not practical to answer and arguably off-topic under the &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions you ask about seem to fall under the &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; category (IMO), making them off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My experiment doesn't work&amp;quot; is something Physics SE is just not (in general)  designed to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my ten cents anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T15:07:00.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13248" CreationDate="2020-12-05T22:14:23.430" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is not an opinion. On the metas it is widely accepted to start a question about a main site one. (Typically, OP wants to know the reasons of the down/close/delete votes. Or asks for a discussion about the revival.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting up and down is free, thus up/down votes represent opinions (about your main site question). But, &lt;em&gt;what is the typical opinion of the avid voters&lt;/em&gt;, that is imho enough objective to survive on a meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, your meta question should have not been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your main site question might better match the History of Science &amp;amp; Math site ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://hsm.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; ). There a problem what I can see with it is that the answer is encyclopedic (first hit in any search engine, it is not an interesting question). But possibly the community will decide to remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T22:14:23.430" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13257" CreationDate="2020-12-06T16:17:37.010" Score="7" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that Physics Stack Exchange &amp;quot;is an English language site&amp;quot;, but I'm wondering whether it's acceptable to provide a generic reference (such as a link) to a source, written in a language other than English, whose translation would be very time-consuming.  Would its acceptability be general, or would it depend on its being an official language of one or more of the countries whose &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; languages (acceptable, without interpretation necessarily being required, in the civil courts of at least some of their loclities) include English, or would it not be acceptable at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-12-06T18:16:06.480" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T11:09:47.793" Title="Languages of references" Tags="|discussion|policy|best-practices|citation|language|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13255" CreationDate="2020-12-06T16:43:12.070" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers on Stack Exchange should be fully complete on their own. Any external references, links, etc. should just be used as supplement. So really it doesn't matter what language your sources are in as long as your post on this site is in English and is complete on its own. One key reason for this is to cover the case for when the reference becomes no longer accessible for any reason (language barrier, I suppose, could be one of those reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T16:43:12.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13255" CreationDate="2020-12-06T16:46:02.897" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, while the language of the main body of a SE post should be in English, non-English references are acceptable for various reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A non-English reference is better than no reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is unfair to not recognize a scientific contribution just because it is not written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T16:46:02.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-06T17:52:55.730" Score="6" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of us here frequently use MathJax, whether for this site or another site on the SE Network. Recently SE added support for tables, but ignored the needs of the TeX community, who wish to be able to type TeX symbols/formulas/etc. as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/357525/391772&quot;&gt;This is the feature request on Meta.SE, to support MathJax in tables&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some network-wide examples where such support would be needed (please add anymore if you're aware of any!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/1720/5&quot;&gt;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/1720/5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/1247/5&quot;&gt;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/1247/5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/3857/5&quot;&gt;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/3857/5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/361/5&quot;&gt;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/361/5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Since creating this feature request on Meta.SE, we can now see that MathJax works in the tables, for most examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;A header&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Another header&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Limit&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\lim\limits_{x\to\infty} f(x)$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Matrix&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\begin{pmatrix}1&amp;amp;2\\0&amp;amp;1\end{pmatrix}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Cardinals&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathfrak c^{\aleph_0}=\mathfrak c$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Equation with a tag&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;\begin{equation} x^2+y^2=z^2 \tag{1} \end{equation}&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Centered formula&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$F_{n+2}=F_{n+1}+F_n$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Is the right-side ruined just because there's Mathjax in the header?&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\int e^x=f(u)n$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\int e^x = f(u)n$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/357525/391772&quot;&gt;More discussion about this, including all the Markup code for everything that was tested so far, can be found at the Meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastEditorUserId="134583" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T20:30:37.487" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T20:30:37.487" Title="Network-wide feature request to support TeX in tables" Tags="|discussion|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T06:32:40.263" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Out of curiosity, after I learnt the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; if I thought it necessary (obviously may be not for others), I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference/10116#10116&quot;&gt;the colour code&lt;/a&gt; to mark any point of my question, but some users suggest edits or reputed users usually remove it by editing it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this happen? Is it a regulation? Or is it mandatory to not do such things for asking a good question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="274807" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T12:13:05.847" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T12:13:05.847" Title="Why are coloured parts of questions removed?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13259" CreationDate="2020-12-07T07:27:59.277" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of MathJax is to make mathematical formulas easier to read, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to emphasize text parts of your posts. Use &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; formatting for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar question was asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4820/157510&quot;&gt;Chemistry Meta&lt;/a&gt; and I did an experiment with a screen reader. The 'nicely formatted text'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the heap of my data it looked like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\text{Diamond in a coal mine}$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the diamond was edited to:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Diamond in a coal mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;led to the following being &lt;s&gt;read&lt;/s&gt; heard by a visually impaired user who wants to read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the heap of my data it looked like&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Diamond in a coal mine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Diamond in a coal mine text&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Diamond in a coal mine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But the diamond was edited to:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Diamond in a coal mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That single 'nicely formatted' sentence would be heard &lt;strong&gt;three times&lt;/strong&gt; (with a random word 'text' in between). I guess it's even worse if you put color into the equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T07:27:59.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13262" CreationDate="2020-12-07T10:07:45.300" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, question Q care about problem A and need some material about problem A. Can I answer the question by solving problem A directly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226424" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T12:20:15.963" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T12:20:15.963" Title="Can I answer resource recommendation questions by answer them directly?" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13261" CreationDate="2020-12-07T11:36:32.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Resource recommendation questions are for resource recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T11:36:32.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13272" CreationDate="2020-12-08T10:04:55.940" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;A problem I find with the site is that often answerers don't know how to calibrate an answer to the level of the questioner. This was both good and bad for me personally as I'd get insight into topics I'd never have known about if I had kept my narrow view on topics. But, some people wish for answerers gradated for their own level, so for them, I think this will be a useful addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because Stack Exchange's system inherently puts a value on the person asking the question as it is they who choose which answer is 'accepted' for the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acceptance is not a democratic vote, but an 'ability' of the person who asks the question. If the acceptance is for the person who is asking then he should be able to make it clear to others what type of answer it should be such that they'd accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T10:41:05.927" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:51:57.847" Title="Tags for calibrating answers to the level of question" Tags="|feature-request|questions|tags|content-level|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13263" CreationDate="2020-12-08T15:53:01.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that answers should be calibrated to the level of the question, but I have to say I think a tag for this would be useless: if someone doesn't do this calibration already I doubt a tag would change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is quite annoying to find hifalutin answers, but one can just downvote, or upvote better calibrated answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if the acceptance is for the person who is asking then he should be able to make it clear to others what type of answer it should be such that they'd accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that imposing restrictions on acceptable answers is ideal.  After all, as you point out, it might be extremely useful to have a different perspective (higher or lower level) to an answer; if this perspective is not properly calibrated, the OP can simply not accept this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T15:53:01.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-09T11:34:13.460" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be better if someone can tell me a way through which I can find the post by myself rather than being completely dependent on moderators or the Stack Exchange team. Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="274807" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T15:08:42.117" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T15:08:42.117" Title="Is there a way to find where I have made some comments earlier or recently?" Tags="|support|comments|search|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2020-12-09T11:58:00.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming I've found the correct account, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/274807/david?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=comments&quot;&gt;this page in your profile shows all your comments&lt;/a&gt;. They are in chronological order so if you know roughly when you posted the comment it should be easy to find. I don't think there is any way to search the list of comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T11:58:00.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2020-12-09T11:58:50.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=comments&quot;&gt;list of comments in your profile&lt;/a&gt;. In your case, it's quite short (only 26) so you should be able to find your comment (unless it has been deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8GJaH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8GJaH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching within those comments is not possible, you'll probably need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T11:58:50.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2020-12-09T12:40:37.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, to find the comments you have posted &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; someone else randomly linking you to them, you can follow these easy steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to your profile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on the &amp;quot;Activity&amp;quot; tab&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &amp;quot;All actions&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &amp;quot;Comments&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list is organized by most to least recent. So if you know approximately when you made the comment, it should be easy to find. Otherwise, if you have a lot of comments, you might have to use the SE Data Explorer as indicated by Glorfindel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that this list does not show comments on deleted posts. Additionally, comments are by their very nature only temporary. If a comment does not show up on the list, consider the very real possibility that it no longer exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="23473" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T13:17:15.103" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T13:17:15.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13263" CreationDate="2020-12-09T13:07:20.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Status-declined by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3811/262980&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt;. If you disagree, I recommend taking it up with them. However, I personally agree with their conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T13:07:20.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13263" CreationDate="2020-12-09T13:41:22.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, one should consider the &amp;quot;difficulty level&amp;quot; the OP can handle. But at the same time, SE posts don't exist in a vacuum. Posts are open for all to look at and learn from. So perhaps higher level answers are helpful to way more people than the person asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a good balance is to meet the OP where they are, but to also add any higher level details you think are relevant and useful to future readers. Then your post will have the most impact and usefulness. I think adding tags that discourage higher level content hurts the site overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T13:41:22.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13263" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:15:40.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags of this sort are known in SE parlance as &amp;quot;meta tags&amp;quot;, i.e., tags which don't actually describe what the question is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt;, and instead describe some other (&amp;quot;meta&amp;quot;) aspect of the question. As a general rule, since over a decade ago, meta tags are strongly frowned upon; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;the original blog post&lt;/a&gt; for much of the reasoning for this. In short, there is a very strong consensus that meta tags are bad and should not be used except for very limited exceptions with very tightly defined use cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site, we have very few meta tags. The most common one is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specific-reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-reference&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/research-level&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;research-level&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;research-level&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;popular-science&lt;/a&gt; trailing behind. The first three have &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; clear reasons for existing, and they are tightly codified. The other two are, honestly, in decline, and should maybe be phased out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific tag that you've proposed was discussed back in 2012 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1387/can-we-have-a-level-of-question-tag-please&quot;&gt;Can we have a level-of-question tag please?&lt;/a&gt;, and similar tags were discussed in&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4449/can-we-encourage-the-research-level-meta-tag-what-about-a-popular-tag&quot;&gt;Can we encourage the &amp;quot;research-level&amp;quot; meta tag? What about a &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; tag?&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7602/would-having-a-second-set-of-tags-relating-to-the-nature-of-the-question-make-se&quot;&gt;Would having a second set of tags relating to the nature of the question make sense?&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;For additional background, it is very much worth looking up &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22meta+tag%22&quot;&gt;past discussions of meta tags on a network-wide level at Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as a general rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, if the user asking a question requires a specific level for the answers, then this should be indicated in the question text itself. If the OP does not do this, or if it's not obvious from the way the question is posed (which is almost always the case!), then it is good practice to encourage OP to do so, and to edit it in if OP provides the information as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there already is an incentive (i.e. an additional +15 in rep from answer acceptance) to post answers that OP can understand. And, on the other hand, if any answerer wants to post an answer &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; of that domain (say, because they feel that it would be useful to a wider audience), the can do so &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; and should remain able to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, all that said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, it is not a good idea to encode this information as a tag. This type of tag is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; difficult to maintain and enforce, it has very little usefulness in practice, and the descriptions tend to be to vague to be applicable even in single examples, let alone consistently (and usefully) across different questions by different users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:51:57.847" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:51:57.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13274" CreationDate="2020-12-10T10:32:49.980" Score="14" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;In December 2019, the moderator team posted the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12568/should-we-test-lowering-the-vote-to-close-and-reopen-threshold&quot;&gt;Should we test lowering the vote to close and reopen threshold?&lt;/a&gt;, which was positively received, and there was a clear agreement and intention to go forward with the experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the status of this experiment? Are still waiting for the full data-taking protocol to be finalized? Is everything ready to go and we just need to push the button? Was it swallowed up by The Monster (a.k.a. the year 2020)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to berate anyone -- just a quick prod to see if we can get this back on track =).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2022-06-29T20:10:33.700" LastActivityDate="2022-06-29T20:10:33.700" Title="What happened with the experiment to lower the vote-to-close threshold?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13273" CreationDate="2020-12-10T16:36:29.897" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah Dec. 2019... those were simpler times eh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happened was by Jan. 2020 we were on the list and working to get a more complete dataset defined to extract, and the Community Manager (CM) who was going to write the scripts to do that analysis was let go from the company. So that kind of set things back on getting any sort of custom data defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the rest of 2020 was happening and more changes to the CM team and so on, and so the project was put on hold network-wide for awhile. While it was on hold, a large number of sites said they wanted to lower the threshold, so now there's a backlog of sites that would like to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the lowering of vote thresholds on sites will resume sometime soon, possibly even this month. But rather than a FIFO queue, it's going to be prioritized on getting sites that are really struggling under 5-vote-closures done first and then moving on to other sites that aren't having a hard time but would still like to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that we're going to be somewhere low on the urgency list because we do have a really good group of people who are voting to close things and most stuff does get to 5 votes, although it often takes longer than we like it to. It also probably means we won't have a lot of customized analysis done. It just isn't in the cards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm not sure where we are in the priority queue, I am keeping tabs on it because we'd still like to see how it goes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T16:42:51.200" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T16:42:51.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13258" CreationDate="2020-12-10T19:49:53.307" Score="6" Body="&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Table support&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Working &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Large\checkmark$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;MathJax support in tables&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;test: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\int e^x dx = f(x)$&lt;/span&gt; -- yes, it works! &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Large\checkmark$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Feature requests for MathJax support&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Successful! &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Large\checkmark$&lt;/span&gt;  (no longer needed)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Additional issues&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Unclear -- not explained in this thread&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Nature of support requested from this community&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Unclear -- not explained in this thread&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread looks &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;, insofar as all the goals laid out in the text of the question here have been achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sincere thanks for keeping on top of this as soon as the table support was added, and for pushing the dev team to make this work so fast -- and congratulations on achieving it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this still requires additional support from this community, please do let us know by updating this thread with the details of (i) what aspects of the software are still not ready, and (ii) what we can do to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T19:56:09.303" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T19:56:09.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13255" CreationDate="2020-12-11T11:09:47.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Top scientific journals not only accept references in foreign languages, but sometimes even require that such a reference be provided - the well-known case is JETP/ZhETF, which was an ongoing direct translation of the major journal published in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is in the interests of the community to provide the original sources, as well as, whenever possible, the equivalent sources in English. The former assures that interesting research in not discriminated against, just because of its original language, wheres the latter assures that it is made accessible to broader audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth taking into account that many (or perhaps most) of the members of this community are non-native English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I would like to quote &amp;quot;The Little Prince&amp;quot; by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (available in many languages):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909.&#xA;On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.&#xA;Grown-ups are like that . . .&#xA;Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T11:09:47.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-15T00:52:39.583" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;This accepted answer I wrote a few hours ago was changed to a community wiki:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/600662/&quot;&gt;Dynamics and radiation part of Jackson&amp;#39;s book - reading advice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the original question was not a particularly good one, and it is now closed.  Nor am I upset about the 15 reputation.  I am really just curious about why this was done—whether there is a particular reason related to site policy for that kind of answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T11:19:04.670" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T11:19:04.670" Title="Why was this answer made community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|resource-recommendation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13280" CreationDate="2020-12-15T01:08:50.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concretely, it was made community wiki because OP added the resource-recommendation tag, cf. the policy from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7039/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T01:08:50.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13280" CreationDate="2020-12-15T06:19:21.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that your answer was made CW, but that the question was made CW and that automatically converts all answers to CW as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Qmechanic says there is a convention that all resource recommendation questions are CW, and if you tag your question as resource-recommendation it will convert it to CW and as a result convert all answers too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T06:19:21.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13280" CreationDate="2020-12-15T14:07:25.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned, this is because there is a convention that all resource-recommendation threads should be made community wiki in their entirety, as agreed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7041/8563&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;. The reasoning is that the voting pattern on resource-recommendation threads is very different to regular threads, since the votes often follow the quality of the &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; rather than the quality of the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, and there is enormous potential for simple answers generating massive amounts of undeserved reputation. (You may or may not agree with this; this thread is not the place to litigate it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and, with that in place, I would argue that the CW label does not fit this thread (since the reasoning for CW'ing does not apply to it), and by extension neither does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag nor the accompanying banner. The question deals with books, yes, but it is not asking for recommendations of resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether the question is on-topic -- yes, it is a subjective question, but I think it makes the bar in terms of objectivity and should maybe be allowed to remain open. The general standard here comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;Good Subjective, Bad Subjective&lt;/a&gt; SE blog post, and this thread has already shown that it admits answers based on &lt;em&gt;expertise&lt;/em&gt; that pull together a large body of objective fact into a useful, informative, actionable, verifiable opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T14:07:25.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T01:37:31.540" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Continuing on from this discussion:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13280/&quot;&gt;Why was this answer made community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;  — about a question that had the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in Emilio Pisanty's answer, the main question was not actually asking for a recommendation for a source from which to learn about a topic.  Rather, it was asking about the usefulness of one commonly used resource (Jackson's &lt;em&gt;Classical Electrodynamics&lt;/em&gt;).  Personally, I think it would have made sense to delete the tag, rather than make the question a community wiki—although this might be seen as conflicting with the original questioner's intent.  There is a further question of whether such questions can be on topic at all; the question about Jackson is currently closed, although it does have three reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we think similar questions should be handled in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T20:59:35.257" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T20:59:35.257" Title="What should be done with questions tagged [resource-recommendations] that are not actually asking for recommendations?" Tags="|discussion|questions|tags|resource-recommendation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13284" CreationDate="2020-12-16T11:24:02.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the tag is inappropriate, it should be removed. If the post has already been made community wiki, you can flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T11:24:02.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13287" CreationDate="2020-12-16T16:43:07.977" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a question that's mostly about optics with a little touch of thermodynamics to it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/601045/&quot;&gt;Can you use an invisibility shield to insulate from infrared radiation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm getting 2 close votes to close it as &amp;quot;not mainstream physics&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At worst I am definitely guilty of asking a borderline engineering question, and I wouldn't debate any close votes of that nature. But nothing in my question assumes anything other than classical optics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;assume mirrors heat up when reflecting (which the linked question shows is widely believed to be true by the community, for reasons related to conservation of momentum + energy (which I believe is considered a mainstream theory)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then question what happens if you consider an object like an invisibility cloak (which is definitely possible to build using sets of lenses). Here's a company that literally builds these things out of lenses for the military &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckHomYdiFc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckHomYdiFc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just an extension of a thought experiment FROM mainstream physics, I even link a post that I build off of which is clearly actual mainstream physics as agreed by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do people think that this is not physics? Is there any axiom or assumption I've made in the problem that is not widely believed to be true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T21:27:08.027" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T17:56:30.733" Title="Why would someone think this question NOT mainstream physics?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13286" CreationDate="2020-12-16T17:17:54.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just cast the 4th vote to close, so you're one away now.  I'll tell you why I voted to close:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming that you could have made this &amp;quot;mainstream&amp;quot;, then it would still fall under &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot;, as you noted, and I'd still vote to close. It's not worth a lot of time being fine about the reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your use of &amp;quot;invisibility&amp;quot; does not appear to have any physically relevant interpretation.  You introduce the term here: &amp;quot;I.E. you need something like an invisibility cloak.&amp;quot; with no real definition of what you mean by that.  As it's written, it makes me think you mean like Harry Potter running around Hogwarts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first part of your question &amp;quot;Is my intuition correct, and an IDEAL invisibility cloak around an object would be a perfect insulating material?&amp;quot; has no answer in physics as far as I can see, given how I understand your question.  At best, it would go back to engineering and/or specifying enough detail to answer it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably part of the problem is that your question seems to be premised on your own unsupported assumption &amp;quot;The only way to beat this limit, would be to have a substance which absorbs and re-emits photons in the same direction that the photon came from (so now you have respected conservation of momentum and don't theoretically need to absorb heat)&amp;quot;, which is probably not right and doesn't itself seem to be based in physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could be that you could write a version of the underlying question differently and keep it mainstream, but what you actually wrote, on its face, does not seem mainstream and, anyway, probably would have been closed for the other possible reasons allude by me and by your original meta-question here.  Making us work to ground your question in mainstream is attracting the close votes that you mentioned - or at least mine.  Maybe others took a different view in coming to the same conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T17:17:54.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13289" CreationDate="2020-12-17T05:05:23.277" Score="-7" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why doesn’t Physics SE accept imagination-based theory, man?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just makes a person feel so bad when he asked an imagination-based question and it just get closed by higher members (like Qmechanic). Does imagination-based theories cost this site much money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277740" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T21:09:13.193" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T21:18:49.307" Title="Imagination-based questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-12-17T21:24:20.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13288" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:10:43.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;All theory started as an imagination and they are not forbidden here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is forbidden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-mainstream science (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more clearly&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unclear questions. It must be clear in the terminology of the today mainstream physics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Content posted as question, while it is not (like simply declaring someone’s own personal theory for open discussion).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your posts have fallen into these categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can formulate your post to avoid these, it will likely be welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can have an open discussion about it in the site chatroom (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T21:18:49.307" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T21:18:49.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13286" CreationDate="2020-12-17T17:56:30.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I didn't vote to close for the non-mainstream reason, since it seemed like you were still trying to stay within the realm of real physics. However, I did vote to close for the &amp;quot;engineering reason&amp;quot; due to your second question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible in practice to build something which acts like an invisibility cloak for infrared, and has anyone done so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other issues with this. First, this isn't really a good question because an answer is just yes or no. This question isn't asking to understand any physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But another issue is that you are asking two different questions, which means the question also lacks focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I might not fully agree with the main closure reason, I still think the question should be closed in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T17:56:30.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-18T18:54:55.843" Score="-3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This popular question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/600686/why-cant-the-human-eye-focus-to-make-blurry-photos-video-clear&quot;&gt;Why can't the human eye focus to make blurry photos/video clear?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt; has unfortunately been overrun by incorrect answers and comments.  I'm seeking to draw attention to this in the hope that it can still be straightened out.  At the root of the problems is a confusion on the relationship between imaging and convolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is being asserted in a top comment and a top answer is that a blurry image cannot be deblurred because the image &amp;quot;is a convolution&amp;quot;.  While it is true that a blurry image is a convolution with some point spread function, this is emphatically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; why your eye cannot deblur them.  &lt;strong&gt;All light propagation is described by convolution with some point spread function&lt;/strong&gt;, and your eye automatically focuses to deal with this; the reason why your eye cannot defocus a blurry image is &lt;strong&gt;because the phase information is not recorded in an image&lt;/strong&gt;.  If images recorded both the phase and amplitude of a light field, then you could deblur an out-of-focus image by simply letting light from the image freely propagate to the focal plane (because of hyperbolicity of the equations of motion, if you like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top answer to the linked question is highly misleading for the above reason.  The second and third answers are correct, but they're getting sidelined right now.  (Disclosure: The third answer is mine.)  Is there any way we can fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110443" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T19:25:41.747" Title="Can we set the record straight on this optics question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13291" CreationDate="2020-12-18T19:25:41.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing to &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; here. While it may bother you that an answer you see as misleading is a top-voted answer, votes are - for better or worse - not a measure of correctness, but of how many people that have read an answer found it convincing/helpful/useful/correct/had some other positive feeling about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are therefore also at least partly a function simply of &lt;em&gt;how old&lt;/em&gt; an answer is. If a better answer arrives later, then it will take a while until it surpasses some older answer that may not be as comprehensive or correct, simply because enough people need to see it for it to get as many votes as the older one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should vote up answers that you think are useful, and vote down answers that are not. If you think a particular answer deserves more exposure than it has gotten, you can also consider offering a bounty on the question - one of the standard reasons for awarding a bounty is &amp;quot;reward existing answer&amp;quot;. Beyond this there is no way to influence how prominent any answer on any post will be, and this is by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T19:25:41.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-18T20:55:59.800" Score="8" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/601335/&quot;&gt;How can photons destructively interfere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, definitely and clearly a question about photons, was made duplicate to a general waves question: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/23930/&quot;&gt;What happens to the energy when waves perfectly cancel each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Photons are not waves&lt;/strong&gt;. They are quantum mechanical elementary particles and their wave nature appears in the wave function, leading to probability amplitudes, not energy in motion in three-dimensional space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evident way to vote for unmaking the duplicate action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; after answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize there is a way to reopen, but it is not obvious on the panel of duplicate. How can I vote? By having it hidden, a lot of people who would agree with me do not have a chance to vote. I am on this site practically for ten years (that is why I have a high reputation; years count). Still I do not know how to put a duplicate on a reopen course, and I am sure there are many others like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I propose to put a link on the duplicate panel that leads to the decision queue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I think it is a bad decision: &amp;quot;Yes, the mathematics of wave equations is the same for classical energy waves and for quantum mechanical probability waves the physics, i.e. data, is not. Probability and energy are two different concepts defined axiomatically in physics theories &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; to send a new student of physics to dig out from the mathematics the relevant answer is at least not consistent with the aims of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;Question was answered&lt;/strong&gt; in a comment by MassimoOrtolano:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual line, below the question for flagging or requesting closure, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;share cite edit follow close flag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is variable and becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;share cite edit follow reopen flag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I had not noticed up to now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T15:16:32.390" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T15:16:32.390" Title="What should I do when a question is made duplicate to a not really relevant other question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13293" CreationDate="2020-12-18T21:23:39.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question does mention photons as quanta of energy, but the meat of the question is purely classical—asking about things like destructive interference and the phase, which do not apply to photons (at least, not in the way the question assumes). So the physics of any meaningful answer is going to be essentially classical field theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about whether the question was a duplicate, but I ultimately decided not to flag it and to answer it instead.  However, there is certainly an colorable argument to be made that the duplicate does provide all the necessary information about what is going on.  It is an edge case, and once it had been closed by a gold badge user, I voted not to reopen it when it came up in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T21:23:39.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13293" CreationDate="2020-12-19T03:26:04.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do when a question is made duplicate to a not really relevant other question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You vote to reopen. If others agree, they will vote too and it will be reopened. If not, then it will stay closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW I voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T03:26:04.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13297" CreationDate="2020-12-19T14:11:04.763" Score="15" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should I feel about the Stack Exchange reputation point system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site as a contributor. I try to answer questions that I am sure that I know the answer of. I hope that I create enough reputation and put my Stack Exchange reputation in my CV. So, the reputation points matter to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I spend a lot of time answering a question and then the question is removed! Other times, I work out a detailed question and write down the answer for a bounty questions and I get the most votes but in the end my answer is not picked. There are times, and I write a long answer but no vote up and no vote down. Does anyone read my answers at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I care too much? Should I avoid answering questions with long answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238807" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:04:59.590" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:04:59.590" Title="Is the Stack Exchange reputation point system discouraging?" Tags="|discussion|answers|reputation|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13296" CreationDate="2020-12-19T14:39:26.607" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of your 65 answers to date, you've written 59 in the last ten days.  If you continued at that pace for very long, you would become one of the most prolific answerers of questions in our community.  You don't show up yet in &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/840905/most-prolific-answerers-during-date-interval-mean-answer-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this sitewide query&lt;/a&gt; because of the schedule on which its cache is updated, but if you poke around in dates in the past, you'll see that our most vigorous answerers typically only average one or two answers per day over any extended period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common scores for answers from the authors at the top of that prolific list are zero and one points; you are not alone there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does anyone read my answers at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/238807/kian-maleki?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;user profile&lt;/a&gt; currently estimates that helpful things you've written have been seen by many thousands of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are finding posting frustrating, take a break from it. We'll still be here when you're ready to come back. It sounds like you have some breathing room to be more judicious in choosing which questions to answer, but I'd say overall you are doing just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T14:39:26.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5789" CreationDate="2020-12-19T15:34:00.813" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;${}$&lt;/span&gt;Dear me-from-2014,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, when you finished your PhD and got a job as a postdoc, you did end up including your Stack Exchange participation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://episanty.github.io/about/CV.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;your CV&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, you did this as a single bullet point in the section &lt;code&gt;Science communication&lt;/code&gt;, under &lt;code&gt;Professional experience&lt;/code&gt;, which looks roughly like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Active contributor at Physics Stack Exchange, with ∼2450 posts reaching an estimated audience of 4 million views, 2012-present. Samples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/432137/what-is-chirped-pulse-amplification-and-why-is-it-important-enough-to-warrant-a&quot;&gt;Chirped Pulse Amplification&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/147433/what-are-the-proposed-realizations-in-the-new-si-for-the-kilogram-ampere-kelvi&quot;&gt;Unit realizations in the New SI&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/293359/is-there-oscillating-charge-in-a-hydrogen-atom/293413#293413&quot;&gt;Oscillating charge in the hydrogen atom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(using a font which does not highlight the links quite so aggressively), and together with the rest of your science-outreach activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a few years of using this CV, nobody has commented specifically on this part of the CV, either positively or negatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, adding PSE-specific mechanics (including your SE reputation, badges, or other quirks) feels somewhat crass, and it will not be understandable to the academic hiring panels that will be reading your CV, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/were-working-on-a-new-stat-to-help-convey-the-reach-of-your-posts-here&quot;&gt;the (relatively) new stat&lt;/a&gt; of &amp;quot;people reached&amp;quot; is intuitive enough that it makes the cut. In contrast, it feels much more natural to place the emphasis on the writing samples which took a lot of work, demonstrate in-depth knowledge of physics and good writing ability, and which the readers of the CV can appreciate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum, 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently did an interview for a fellowship where the interviewer explicitly brought up my Stack Exchange participation. My application materials mentioned that I &amp;quot;am passionate about science communication and education, and I have authored over 2,400 science-communication pieces&amp;quot; but did not mention Stack Exchange by name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interviewer (who is a frequent contributor to a science-outreach YouTube channel) explicitly mentioned my Stack Exchange participation in a good light, and then asked whether I intend to maintain that level of public engagement during the fellowship. The results of the interview will take some time to come out, but I'm pretty confident in saying that this was considered as a positive aspect of my application materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, of course, this is a single data point. The funding organization in question places a high value on science outreach, and this probably colours their choice of interviewers as well as the criteria the interviewers are provided. In other places, your mileage will probably vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Since I'm writing to you from 2020: this year, make sure you're well stocked with toilet paper. Since I'm writing to you in 2014: buy some bitcoin!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T17:05:26.897" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T17:05:26.897" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13296" CreationDate="2020-12-19T15:53:27.867" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rob's answer covers most of the ground, but I'll chime in with some additional comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that I create enough reputation and put my Stackexchange reputation in my CV. So, the reputation points matter to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, this is a bit of a weird goal. The specifics of your CV will depend on what type of job you're applying for, and indeed (as explained on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5789/is-physics-se-on-your-cv&quot;&gt;Is Physics SE on your CV?&lt;/a&gt;) there are often several strong reasons why including your SE participation, and particularly your reputation, may not be a good idea or might even be directly harmful, regardless of how high your reputation is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In short, no matter how high the number, it's unlikely that the people reading the CV will know how to interpret it, and if the number is high then there is a distinct risk that it will be taken as a diversion away from your &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you are proud of your writing on this site, and you feel that it is a valuable contribution towards your hireability for the job you're applying for, then your CV is a good place to showcase your best posts and link to a place where more can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some shorter thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I spend a lot of time answering a question and then the question is removed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit unclear. If you mean that questions get closed after you answer, then you should have a look at the closure policies and get a better feeling for what is off-topic here -- but it doesn't seem like you have many of those. If you mean that the question is deleted by the question owner, then this is rather bad luck and not very usual. If this keeps happening, save the links and ping somebody with 10k+ rep on chat -- we should be able to see the threads and help you recognize any patterns involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, as generic advise to stop that, I would recommend staying away from low-effort questions. The higher the effort that went into the post, the less likely that it will be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other times, I work out a detailed question and write down the answer for a bounty questions and I get the most votes but in the end my answer is not picked. There are times, and I write a long answer but no vote up and no vote down, does anyone read my answers at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, it helps to think of the numeric rep as a secondary effect to writing nice posts. The post scoring is correlated with post quality, but it doesn't track it exactly, and it's not a great goal to track. If you can put yourself in the right mental spot for it, it's better if you just focus on writing posts that you yourself find satisfying to write (and you feel are satisfying to read). Keep an ear open for feedback, both in the form of explicit comments as well as under-scoring posts as an indication that the text did not strike a chord with its audience, but don't set too much stock on the numbers. If you write good text, the rep will come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And, also, as you spend more time writing, you get a better sense for what works and what doesn't, and that makes it easier to write posts that hit the mark more often. It comes with time, so don't worry about it! just write stuff you enjoy, and that intuition will build as you go.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally: you're close to 1k rep and 60 answers in less than two weeks -- that is very impressive, and if you keep going like this you'll reach some very high reps very fast. (Also, if you keep going like this, you might burn out early, so take it easy whenever you need to!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, also: welcome to the site! I look forward to reading your contributions :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T15:53:27.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T21:35:46.790" Score="-2" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homework policy doesn't seems like a counter-productive policy on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand Stack Exchange policing their questions, but policing removing answers to &amp;quot;homework like questions&amp;quot; seems counter productive, especially once answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take this question for example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/601359/&quot;&gt;How much room do you need to safely exit terminal velocity?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a middle-aged person, and I just take a general interest into physics.&#xA;I posted a question which perhaps could have been a bit more specific, in what I've attempted to resolve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I know very little in the field of physics.&#xA;My question was graciously answered and accepted before the question was closed.&#xA;Yet the answer was removed due to the homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user took their time to accurately answer my question, so why are we going to penalize them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not in school for this, and even if I were to be, the question accurately described the steps to achieve the goal and would be beneficial to the entire community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy is ambiguous. What determines a &amp;quot;homework like question&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homework policy only punishes new users, because anyone with enough rep will be able to see deleted answers and its would be wrong to assume that people with 15k cannot be students.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This policy seems outdated, and harmful to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand closing a question based off of policy, but what benefit do we get from deleting answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, can you give me a clear concise definition of a homework style question? Or is a homework style question really just a loose term which can be used to close and remove questions based off of individual bias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212199" OwnerDisplayName="johnny 5" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T01:50:21.973" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T01:59:10.343" Title="Deleting answers due to the Homework policy is not beneficial" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13302" CreationDate="2020-12-21T22:49:45.763" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;With due respect: we've already had this debate &lt;em&gt;ad nauseum&lt;/em&gt;.  Check &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/36194&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; from 2014 as a representative example, or more recent posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10555/36194&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; , or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9710/36194&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  PSE is NOT a homework site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this is a homework question &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt; is not this issue: if it is not then you have posted your question on the wrong site.  The community took the decision to avoid the inevitable deluge that would follow if we allowed homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You claim it is not a homework question: fine.  But there is no way for people to know this, and moreover it could be a homework question &lt;em&gt;for someone else&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself as a professional instructor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is already massive plagiarism on various sites on the part of some students.  The objective of assignments is not to hunt for others to provide answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given the current exceptional circumstances where many students now take online exams, I am grateful that PSE is particularly vigilant in promptly identifying and closing possible exam questions; those would resemble homework questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to get away with &amp;quot;homework-style&amp;quot; questions if they are constructed as questions on a specific concept: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10938/36194&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T22:49:45.763" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13302" CreationDate="2020-12-21T22:57:39.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the specific question about the benefit of deleting answers to homework questions, I'll cite &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;the homework policy itself&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why don't you provide a complete answer to homework questions?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty well covered by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/415&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the Math Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing an answer that doesn't help&#xA;a student learn is not in the&#xA;student's own best interest, and if a&#xA;solution complete enough to be copied&#xA;verbatim and handed in is given&#xA;immediately, it will encourage more&#xA;people to use the site as a free&#xA;homework service. In the spirit of&#xA;creating a lasting resource of&#xA;mathematical knowledge, you may come&#xA;back after a suitable amount of time&#xA;and edit your response to include a&#xA;more complete answer. Or even better,&#xA;the student can post his own correct&#xA;answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer to a homework-type question that gives away a complete or near-complete solution, in most cases it will be temporarily deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that means if somebody posts a complete or near complete answer, we will delete it &lt;em&gt;temporarily&lt;/em&gt;. If the question is on-topic and the person who posted the answer pings us some time later, we will often undelete the answer once the danger of academic dishonesty passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course, there's a lot of background on how we got to this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policies on our site (and really all Stack Exchange sites) are designed to strike a balance between many different needs and desires of users. For almost all sites, there are two core tenants that underlie everything:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sites are a place to connect to and learn from professionals in the topic area.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Posts (questions and answers) are designed to help &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; future reader, and not just the person asking the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps more precisely, our policy on &amp;quot;homework and homework-like questions&amp;quot;, tries to thread a complicated needle while upholding those core tenants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through many long discussions within the community, the consensus opinion was that allowing homework questions deters professional participation in the site. People who are researchers or professors or engineers, by and large, don't enjoy answering the same types of questions on Newtonian mechanics where the answer is always &amp;quot;draw a freebody diagram.&amp;quot; I understand that for new users to the site or people new to physics see that as a really interesting and fascinating area, but for people who have worked in the area forever, it's not that interesting and it drowns out the interesting questions if we allowed them repeatedly where the only variation on the question is specific values involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also want to help every future reader of the site, which means questions should be general and conceptual, rather than focused on how to complete a particular calculation. In your particular example, the question is looking for a specific calculation and that's why it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had asked &amp;quot;How would one set up a kinematic problem like...&amp;quot; then it becomes conceptual. Rather than &amp;quot;Here's the distance&amp;quot; as an answer, a good answer becomes a recipe that will be true for solving &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; kinematic problems that are similar. And that's really helpful, because we can point all future users with similar questions to that core conceptual Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T01:59:10.343" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T01:59:10.343" CommentCount="40" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-22T03:39:32.530" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I downvote an answer there is a -1 reputation change. Even though, downvotes and upvotes are supposed to be anonymous. There is a slight chance that user might visit my profile and can see my -1 reputation change from my profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I couldn't find any answer that I could downvote, but hopefully you all get my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="268336" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T17:01:39.897" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T17:01:39.897" Title="We can see downvotes on answers by seeing the reputation of a user" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13305" CreationDate="2020-12-22T06:08:58.203" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only you can see the -1s that come from downvoting. If I look at your reputation history the SE hides the -1s from downvoting so I cannot see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle some careful observation could detect that there had been a -1. For example if I happened to note that your reputation was 2000 yesterday, and you downvoted in the period since then, I could tally up the changes I can see since yesterday and I would find there was a discrepancy of -1. In practice this is unlikely to happen unless possibly you were actively stalking someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T06:08:58.203" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13273" CreationDate="2020-12-22T19:30:28.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Y'all may have seen the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/358188/280545&quot;&gt;update I wrote&lt;/a&gt; as it was linked in the comments but I wanted to give y'all a specific update because the use case y'all have for this is very different from our goals of the test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our focus is on doing two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Increasing the percentage of review tasks that are completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reducing the percentage of review tasks that are completed by moderators who cast first or second votes to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at your stats on those two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a 90 day period starting 30 days ago and reaching back 120 days, you had 3092 questions get flagged or a first vote to close. Of those, 70% were closed, 8% were left open and the remainder 22% were incomplete. In the grand scheme of things, those are pretty decent stats. It's not 100% but some sites are doing far worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the same period, moderators closed 887 questions and the community closed 2396. Now... this adds up to 3283, which isn't 3092, which is likely because the queries aren't perfectly aligned in how they define voting or flagging to close but if we look at the numbers, that means mods are closing (at some point in the process) about 27% of the questions. I haven't looked at the breakdown on which vote the mods are closing - but, while a somewhat high number, this also isn't a burdensome percentage, compared to some sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'll need a bit more info before I can judge whether y'all fall into the groups where we're looking for improvements. You do have a large &lt;em&gt;volume&lt;/em&gt; of posts that are going through review, which is an important point - y'all have the seventh largest number of posts during this time period. Many of the sites with worse percentages aren't very big and don't have a ton of reviews to do. But, of the top ten sites, you have the second highest completion rate, with only SO in Portuguese doing better (84%) and Math a close third at 76%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, based on a query I have, I'm not sure that this test will do what y'all are hoping. This query looks at all of the questions closed in a period of time and lists how many were closed with each number of votes and then how many of those questions were answered before being closed. It then calculates, of those that were answered, how many votes to close were there when closure occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most recent 90 days (not the same period as above), here's what I get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;# of Close Votes when closed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Closed Qs&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Answered&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Average close votes at first answer&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;498&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;114&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;286&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;97&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;158&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;63&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1.314&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;113&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;53&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1.814&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1544&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;869&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1.678&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The really the important rows here - &lt;em&gt;assuming this is correct&lt;/em&gt; - when you have five vote closures on questions, the average number of votes to close that exist before the question is answered is 1.67 or 1.8 with four vote closures. That means that many questions - more than half - are answered before the question gets three close votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd have to look at a distribution to see where all of those answers hit but I'm not a SQL master, so I'll have to find someone to write the query for me. The data above is from a query that Shog wrote and Nicolas refined since Shog's version was somehow incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The takeaway here is... we can test this but I think that to get this answering before closure thing in check, it's going to require more than just changing the number of votes to close - y'all will have to really start thinking about why these questions are getting answers and understanding where the disconnect is -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have people who disagree about whether questions should be closed? If so, changing this could drastically increase close-reopen wars since it becomes far easier to close &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; reopen posts. Maybe better understanding and consensus could help with this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have people who aren't informed about when questions shouldn't be answered because they're out of scope? If so, how can you help inform them to try and prevent answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else? Y'all know your community far better than I - why do you think you get so many quick answers to close-worthy questions? What do you think you can do to change this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176067" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T19:43:43.887" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T19:43:43.887" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5789" CreationDate="2020-12-23T13:46:09.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why you would not, so long as it is in the proper context and not as a substitute for actual qualifications and high quality research outputs and teaching experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all posts in academic institutions now come with the &lt;em&gt;expectation&lt;/em&gt; that you work will have &amp;quot;impact&amp;quot; outside of academia. For people like me who work in astrophysics, and I guess for many who work in areas like particle physics or theory, then it is rather difficult to point to major technological breakthroughs or start-up companies who are going to take your work and produce a new best-thing-since-sliced-bread device. In fact, if your research is more &amp;quot;blue skies&amp;quot;, what you have to argue is that you are reaching out to wide and diverse audiences and having an impact in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, stack exchange does not really fulfil that objective because mostly you are not writing about your own research (I would guess only 1-2% of my answers on Physics or Astronomy SE are linked to my research) and the audience is not that diverse and difficult to quantify. Creating a personal blog about your research area might be more effective in that respect, though I doubt I would have gotten 3 million views of a blog about my research in 6 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What stack exchange does do however (providing that you have written many highly upvoted answers), is demonstrate the ability to communicate about science/mathematics/computing to a variety of audiences and that may be a very important part of the role you are applying for. It may also demonstrate a passion for teaching and often demonstrates the ability to marshall facts and research from a variety of sources to support an argument. So you could certainly use stack exchange as an example of work that you have done which might illustrate your ability or potential for certain kinds of tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, if you are answering many questions per day on average, then it probably just shows you're spending too much time on stack exchange... like most things, moderation is probably to be advised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I don't do SE because I think it adds anything particularly significant to my CV nor am I especially altruistic; I do it because I find it entertaining; it drives me to look at old problems in a different way; it often gives me interesting ideas for student problems and assessments; and has prompted me on many occasions to keep up with the latest developments in some areas. I do add it to my professional CV, in the section about all the other public outreach work I do and I regard it as part of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="43351" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T19:31:16.340" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T19:31:16.340" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T21:56:25.703" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've done some additions to a PSE question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/105895/&quot;&gt;Is the Universe Past-Eternal?&lt;/a&gt; whose own author doesn't seem to be very active on the site recently, and hasn't accepted any answer (-I believe mine remains the only answer submitted).  Upon my last edit, I noticed a box marked &amp;quot;Community Wiki&amp;quot;, so I'm asking what the benefit of check-marking it might be, and whether check-marking it might be appropriate, and might preserve the Q&amp;amp;A involved.  (A lot of my awareness of physics has come from the site, and my answer now includes a reference to the posting of at least one other question on it, but I don't recollect having submitted any question directly related to my answer, partly because of an inconvenient question ban which has finally expired.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T23:35:20.957" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T23:35:20.957" Title="Effects of check-marking the Community Wiki box" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-01-02T00:59:37.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13315" CreationDate="2021-01-02T07:03:53.693" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a mere curiosity, but I looked at the reputation tables and saw the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mya7N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mya7N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these mere coincidences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the &lt;em&gt;total&lt;/em&gt; number of users with 5,000+ reputation is exactly the same as the ones having had a reputation &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; of 5,000+. Have they all started at 0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pardon the quick and not-aligned rectangles on Paint...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T09:22:18.760" Title="Curiosity about 'total reputation' and 'reputation change' table" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13314" CreationDate="2021-01-02T09:22:18.760" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/alltime/physics&quot;&gt;all time leagues&lt;/a&gt;. The 'Reputation Change' you see there is the reputation change since the beginning of the site, so it's expected that that number matches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/leagues/151/week/physics&quot;&gt;weekly league&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see that the 'Total Reputation' stays the same but the 'Reputation Change' is different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXRTh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXRThm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T09:22:18.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13317" CreationDate="2021-01-02T13:11:42.653" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user [link removed] just posted  an answer to a question I had bountied. The answer itself is garbled, and it's unclear whether it's a legitimate answer attempt or an attempt at farming reputation off an unanswered soon-to-expire bounty; the answer sounds like it could have been thrown together by someone without technical knowledge after doing a Google search with key phrases from my question. I then followed the Twitter link  in the user's profile, which leads to a Twitter timeline that seems to be filled with various marketing tweets. This leads me to suspect that the user might not be legitimate, but rather some marketing scheme to funnel people through to their Twitter page. What does everyone else think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141502" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T13:29:40.417" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T13:52:03.197" Title="Is this user a spammer?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13316" CreationDate="2021-01-02T13:52:03.197" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We prefer to reserve “spammer” for users who use their Stack Exchange accounts to post marketing links &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.  It’s not really any of our business if a user has a Twitter account which is used for selling things.  For that matter, the network-wide consensus is that it’s just fine if a user has marketing links in their Stack Exchange profile (ahem).  It doesn’t become a problem unless a substantial fraction of the user’s participation in the community is more about funneling traffic to their own product than about asking and answering high-quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, the user in question has written lots of links to Wikipedia pages, a Google search, and (in another answer) an arxiv preprint written by someone with a different name.  Not a spammer pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if you see a problematic post, it’s more effective to start bringing attention to it using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flagging system&lt;/a&gt; rather than a public call-out.  The flagging system is quite effective at removing clear spam answers (generally in a few minutes); it creates an audit trail which the diamond moderators can use to identify more subtle cases; and it preserves the privacy of users who are actually not doing anything untoward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T13:52:03.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T05:24:36.513" Score="-8" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to the &lt;em&gt;main site&lt;/em&gt; for searching an interesting question about a possible universe inside atoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/457376/&quot;&gt;Universe inside atom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/241361/&quot;&gt;Does our Universe reside in the smallest particle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/249304/&quot;&gt;One particle infinite manifestation universe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all are closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I am not an expert or researcher in physics, I know that these are advanced questions in physics at this point of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is our &lt;em&gt;main site&lt;/em&gt; unwelcoming to those advanced questions? Is it because of the reason that the current day physics cannot answer it? Or to avoid speculations as answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="208649" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T18:43:42.000" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T07:44:32.557" Title="Why is the 'Physics' Stack Exchange site closing some interesting questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13318" CreationDate="2021-01-03T06:01:04.083" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... to put it delicately, these are not anywhere near the mainstream.  To put it less delicately, these are nutty questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is not the place to entertain this kind of unfounded speculations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T06:01:04.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13321" CreationDate="2021-01-03T12:21:38.853" Score="-3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my close vote queue, I sometimes get questions on high-level quantum mechanics or general relativity that I don't know enough to judge. This is annoying to me personally but on a larger scale, it may cause problems as people who are not very familiar with a subject may vote to close before going through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I propose that we get the ability to close vote questions with certain tags only after getting some amount of points from answering and asking questions related to that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T18:39:59.700" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T18:39:59.700" Title="A better system for close voting" Tags="|feature-request|tags|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13320" CreationDate="2021-01-03T14:40:22.703" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;One does not need to be an expert in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; to see that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the questions are clearly subpar and need to be closed. When in doubt, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/review-close&quot;&gt;don’t be afraid to use the skip button!&lt;/a&gt; Alternatively, use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/149380/295232&quot;&gt;review queue tag filter&lt;/a&gt; to focus on questions you do feel comfortable in, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thermodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thermodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion leads to situations where a niche tag would not even have enough expert users with the ability to vote to close to actually close the question ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T14:40:22.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13320" CreationDate="2021-01-03T15:57:53.303" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is already possible&lt;/strong&gt; via a different system: the close-vote review queue already comes with the possibility to filter the questions it can show you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/peI0m.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be on the close reason and on the tags. This allows users the possibility to focus on the parts of the queue where they are most effective and most comfortable that they are making informed decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That said, of course, close-voters are still required to vote responsibly, which includes clicking &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt; if they don't know enough about the material to judge whether the question should be closed. This is an intrinsic feature of close-voting, and it can never be supplanted by automated systems. As such, setting tag-specific thresholds to restrict close-voting would be counter-productive and do little more than harm the system.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the fact that you missed this feature is indicative of one of the biggest problems with the queue: the filter functionality is extremely hard to discover, and does not offer the functionality that it could (or should) to help close-voters be at their most effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, this aspect of the software is currently under active development: see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/346901/improving-the-review-queues-project-overview&quot;&gt;project overview&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/346902/improving-review-queues-design-overview-i-onboarding-and-updating-workflows&quot;&gt;onboarding-improvements&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/346903/improving-review-queues-design-overview-ii-changing-review-bans-and-other-new/347070#347070&quot;&gt;review bans and filtering features&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/356120/creating-new-help-center-documents-for-review-queues-project-overview&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; threads over on Meta Stack Exchange. There are many improvements in the works and many more under consideration (so e.g. my own suggestions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/347070/184688&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). If you feel that the current system isn't working well (such as e.g. the filtering function is too hard to discover), then &lt;strong&gt;please add your voice to the debate on MSE&lt;/strong&gt;, either by voting on existing commentary or adding your own if your concerns have not yet been voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T16:03:53.843" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T16:03:53.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-04T15:30:54.523" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been for several days discussing a question with the asker using comments. Yesterday a message appeared asking me if I wanted to move the discussion to a chat. I asked the question asker if he wanted to  do that and he said no, so we continued the discussion via comments. This morning the question has vanished. I can think of two possibilities to explain this removal, and of course there might be other reasons I have not thought of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The asker removed the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange removed the question because we did not move the discussion to a chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember the title&#xA;of the question of the name of the asker. Is there a way for me to find out why the question vanished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276996" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T01:11:25.240" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T01:11:25.240" Title="Is it possible to know why a question vanished from my &quot;recent inbox messages&quot;?" Tags="|support|questions|comments|deleted-questions|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13324" CreationDate="2021-01-04T15:44:53.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the specific question, it is possible to view deleted posts once you reach &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;10,000 reputation&lt;/a&gt; and gain access to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;moderator tools&lt;/a&gt;. It will show which user deleted the post in the banner at the top, although it will not provide more explanation or context absent a comment from somebody like a moderator explaining why a post was deleted. There doesn't appear to be a way to search for deleted questions or answers posted by others, so you'd have to know the link to the post in question to see the banner once you get the rep to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, though, I checked every question deleted in the past 3 days and none of them have comments from you. So the post you're looking for isn't deleted, and the comment from @Qmechanic is probably the one you're after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T17:17:27.297" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T17:17:27.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13318" CreationDate="2021-01-05T07:44:32.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that unicorns do exist. There is no evidence that unicorns do not exist. Therefore we must consider the possibility of the existence of unicorns. So has any research into unicorns ever been undertaken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to your reasoning about an atom being a “universe”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not how the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scientific method&lt;/a&gt; works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95176" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T07:44:32.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-13T22:19:54.310" Score="8" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a question about something like group-theory, and I would like both a physicist's and a mathematician's perspective on it, can I just post two identical questions on the two sites? Is it wrong/illegal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T16:58:16.200" Title="Questions posted on both physics.SE and math.SE" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-01-14T16:56:52.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-17T07:59:23.133" Score="7" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are already many Q&amp;amp;A related to the improvement of a question by the original author. It is quite obvious and well documented how to proceed to improve the form of a question. However, I did not find guidelines or discussions about the case of poorly formulated questions that will probably be proposed for deletion but someone else could transform into good questions by adding a knowledge the OP is probably missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than&#xA;you found it. Common reasons for edits include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...&#xA;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the reasonable limits of &lt;em&gt;clarifying the meaning of the post&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;For example (but, please, take it just as an example, it is not the focus of my question), today I saw in the Close vote list &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/604815/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the OP should have used the comments to improve the question. However, he/she is new to the subject matter of the question, ii) and a newcomer to this site. As a consequence, no modification was done, and the question is going to be closed. What is the general feeling about the best behavior? Leaving the question in its original state or adding enough details to transform it into an acceptable question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="231159" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T04:47:16.263" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T11:57:34.780" Title="Improvement of a poor question by non-authors" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13331" CreationDate="2021-01-18T11:57:34.780" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, if the owner of a post has provided clear information in the comments under it, then I feel it is perfectly acceptable to incorporate that information into the post itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes, of course, that (i) the post owner has provided a clear and unambiguous meaning for the post, and the edit is only to clarify it, without altering it; and (ii) that it's reasonably clear that the post owner won't do this on their own, either because they are new users or because of inactivity (say, as with an old answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, if (as in your example) it is a new user, and the way the question has been presented is causing it to get a negative reception (be it downvotes or close votes), then I would say: absolutely, go ahead! edit the question before the thread gets further derailed, and help the new user learn the ropes by providing a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On the other hand, if the comment thread is dominated by users demanding for detailed explanations of terms that are standard in the field, then I would advise against incorporating those definitions into the text of the post. In those situations, it can be sufficient to e.g. simply incorporate suitable links to Wikipedia at the terms where points of contention have been raised.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T11:57:34.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T17:29:54.083" Score="11" ViewCount="233" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pU1Al.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Physics over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;74&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;88&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;105&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;122&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;633&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12,029&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;337&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,154&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;76&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,543&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;25&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,056&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13,391&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;87&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;28,278&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;67&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;48&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;49&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;134&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;70&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;33&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;69&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;75&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,632&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,764&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,009&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,745&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,911&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;42&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;126&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,153&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;344&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,708&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16,397&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,577&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;900&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,301&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;17,773&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,840&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,856&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;457&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;61&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,336&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,202&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,185&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;276&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12628/2019-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2019: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222020%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/359735/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big thank you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/620/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/459488/brian-nickel&quot;&gt;Brian&lt;/a&gt; for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2021!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T11:42:36.100" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T11:42:36.100" Title="2020: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T21:44:20.187" Score="-7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/608499/&quot;&gt;Evidence that Time is a Natural Phenomenon?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/235511/&quot;&gt;What is time, does it flow, and if so what defines its direction?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the related question and I don't see that my question is answered. Related discussion on that thread presumed knowledge of the answer to my question as a baseline for their answers. Please correct me if I'm wrong, and if I'm not, please re-open my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286143" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T21:59:26.243" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T17:46:03.670" Title="Please Consider Re-opening This Question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|duplicates|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13334" CreationDate="2021-01-20T15:07:29.923" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of the close-voters, I guess I should speak up: I did not vote to close this question as a duplicate; instead, I voted to close as being primarily opinion-based and therefore not answerable in objective, scientific terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those terms, I would say that the existing closure as a duplicate is a less strict response (in that it sends you to other content which is at least relevant) than the question really warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that there are parts of your question that are not duplicates of the linked thread, they are not on-topic questions for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T15:07:29.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-20T18:35:12.027" Score="-2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer (posted below) was deleted from the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/608893/&quot;&gt;Calculating mass of unknown object using center of mass&lt;/a&gt;. The deleter's comment read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm deleting this in accordance with our homework policy. Please do not give complete or near-complete answers to homework-like questions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't really need torque equations. Just treat the object as a point mass, and use the following equation for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/COM#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoM&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$x_{\rm CoM}=\dfrac{mx+MX}{m+M}$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;where m, x, M and X represent the mass of the stick, position of the stick's CoM, the mass of the object, and the position of the object's CoM (all positions relative to 1 fixed point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I did was provide an equation that is present on the first page of every textbook section relating to the center of mass of two points. And yet this is a 'complete' or 'near complete' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's question read, &amp;quot;How exactly would you go about solving this. I know the answer should be roughly about 108 grams but am unsure how to set up the equation.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP did not ask for an answer. OP asked for a) general approach, and b), setting up the equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general approach is the CoM method for a), and for b), I gave out the standard textbook equation. Furthermore, this problem is of interest to more than OP, as the approach is pretty standard in these introductory problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is still quite some work for OP to do; associate the positions of the masses correctly relative to some origin which is yet to be identified, figure out the connection between a rigid body's CoM and how it plays into a system of particles, and, of course, solve for the mass. If I were to provide a complete answer to this question, mine would &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; with the provided equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I don't see how my answer constitutes a 'complete' or 'near complete' solution. I thought I left enough work for OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes the answer complete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256872" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T07:36:26.077" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T07:36:26.077" Title="What constitutes a 'near complete' solution?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13336" CreationDate="2021-01-20T19:47:33.993" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't say why the mod who did the deletion left that particular comment rather than some other wording. But that homework-like question is not really about a concept (other than &amp;quot;I'm stuck&amp;quot;) and should probably have been closed rather than answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, moderators removing such answers would emphasize that the deletion was temporary, and invite folks who disagreed with deletions to wait a couple of weeks and then flag their answers for undeletion. The idea was to encourage answers that are helpful in the long term, while adding friction for &amp;quot;help vampires&amp;quot; who would like drive-by help getting numerical answers to their homework. However I restore such answers perhaps twice a year, so I have stopped writing &amp;quot;temporarily deleted&amp;quot; in my comments unless I think the homework-like question is particularly likely to survive the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T19:47:33.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-21T16:15:12.913" Score="11" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to physics.stackexchange.com, but I not new to Stack Exchange per se. I asked a question which I consider a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fermi problem&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In physics or engineering education, a Fermi problem [...] is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of extreme scientific calculations, and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The estimation technique is named after physicist Enrico Fermi as he was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the features of such a problem is the fact that the person solving the problem has to come up with assumptions and argue why she/he has chosen them. I asked my second question and explicitly stated that I would be interested in other physicists' approaches and assumptions, in order to avoid a closure-because-of-missing details, and now exactly that happened - the question got closed for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are Fermi problems in scope of physics.stackexchange?&lt;/strong&gt; If not, why not? If yes, could somebody guide me what I need to change so that my question can be reopened, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253424" LastEditorUserId="253424" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T19:04:25.973" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T03:48:25.013" Title="Are Fermi problems allowed on physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-01-24T03:47:25.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13334" CreationDate="2021-01-21T17:30:10.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I re-read the linked post again. I can see why as curators, you don't want a bunch of threads repeating similar discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW: This question has been bothering me for years and I didn't find the thread when I search this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW2: The answer to my question might reside in the linked thread, but in my read the net result is that opinions vary. Clearly there is disagreement among the participants - whatever their qualifications...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW3: The result of incorrectly marking a discussion as definitive is that you prevent further discussion which seeks the correct answer. This is the problem with Stack in general. I've seen it in my area of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286143" LastEditorUserId="286143" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T17:46:03.670" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T17:46:03.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13343" CreationDate="2021-01-23T09:55:10.853" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;That’s all. This might sound stupid, but that’s it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got a comment on one of my questions. It read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is your problem with the result or the Mathematical formalism? Bc you can easily show that the number of images is positive and arbitrarily large, which is the same as 'infinity', or in the, in the limit reaches infinity. You can simply let the first reflection be I_1, show that for every I_i there is I_{i+1} of the same size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused over what ‘bc’ means...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286688" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T10:37:48.050" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T10:37:48.050" Title="What is the meaning of “bc” in physics stack exchange?" Tags="|support|language|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13342" CreationDate="2021-01-23T10:03:17.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's internet shorthand for &amp;quot;because.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T10:03:17.273" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-23T12:11:17.597" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/609612/books-on-general-properties-of-matter-and-fluids&quot;&gt;Books on general properties of matter and fluids&lt;/a&gt;.                                Can anyone please tell why this was closed and down voted? The topic comes under properties of bulk matter, which includes theory of elasticity and fluid flow, pressure, statics, and surface tension. I am looking for a good physics book for self study which has good theory and good problems to test the concepts. I don't know how can I make the question more focused to reopen it. Generally in one book all of the topics are given, so I asked about everything together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user262559" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T14:05:14.280" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T14:05:14.280" Title="Why was my resource recommendation question closed for needing more focus?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-26T16:25:31.050" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;The list of topics for this site on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; includes this entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experimental designs and results&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/185&quot;&gt;What is needed to claim the discovery of the Higgs boson ?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what is meant here is questions related to the &lt;em&gt;design of experiments&lt;/em&gt; themselves, is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, the existing wording gave me a somewhat different and I think unintended impression, something along the lines of: &amp;quot;designs that are uncertain&amp;quot;. (Designs of what? Not clear...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the wording be changed to something like &amp;quot;Design of Experiments&amp;quot;? I thought that expression was a more typical one in the scientific community and to me it seems a more precise description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; includes &amp;quot;experimental design&amp;quot; as an alternative to &amp;quot;design of experiments&amp;quot;, so I guess people in relevant fields may be familiar with both terms. But using the clearest possible term for a wide often non-professional audience seems better for this site, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150180" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T17:14:47.227" Title="Should the on-topic list use the term &quot;Design of experiments&quot; instead of &quot;Experimental design&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13345" CreationDate="2021-01-26T17:14:47.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking my mod hat off and speaking as a regular user here (and one who does not do theoretical physics work so I can't address the suggestion in rob's comment either, unfortunately).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the perspective of somebody in the fluid dynamics field, my immediate reaction is to say that these are two different things, or perhaps that &amp;quot;experimental design&amp;quot; is the laymen terminology for a much broader concept at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Design of Experiments&amp;quot; is a statistical technique to ensure that the conditions tested encompass the response of something to variations in its input. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a decent explanation&lt;/a&gt; of the process. In some sense, it is very similar to uncertainty quantification, although it happens before the system is tested rather than after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Experimental design,&amp;quot; to me, is about how to set up and/or design an experiment to study the physical effect in question. It could be about setting up physical hardware, or how to set up an optics train, or how to calibrate equipment properly as part of an experiment. It can also include how to establish which conditions are required, i.e. it can include the statistical tool &amp;quot;Design of Experiments&amp;quot; as part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would recommend we don't change the name because I see them as different things. &amp;quot;Design of Experiments&amp;quot; is a specific statistical tool, whereas &amp;quot;Experimental Design&amp;quot; can be much broader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T17:14:47.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-27T00:27:16.393" Score="11" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a number of questions on PN-Junctions, Avalanche Breakdown, Biasing and MOS...etc, that have gone largely untouched; which is understandable, do these types of questions belong here or should they be relegated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286107" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T00:48:13.680" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T01:23:25.383" Title="Does 'Semiconductor Physics' have a home in Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13347" CreationDate="2021-01-27T01:23:25.383" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s absolutely a place for semiconductor physics questions here. I’m pretty sure I’ve asked some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions on the topics you list are actually questions about electromagnetism and the movements of charges in materials, about the energies associated with those moving charges, and how those charges and fields are influenced by the various types of perfect and nearly-perfect crystals which make up semiconductors. Those questions are more likely to get satisfactory answers from &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;our audience of physicists&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions about semiconductor topics are about typical voltage-current response curves, about power requirements and thermal stability, or about a device’s response time.  Those types of questions are more likely to get a good answer over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rule of thumb that I use is if I think the answer to my electronics question will involve remembering some numbers from the periodic table, then I’ll ask a physicist; if I think it will involve remembering some numbers from a parts catalogue, I’ll ask an engineer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask a question in the wrong place, once in a blue moon, it’s not a big deal to migrate questions from one site to the other. And if you think that there are existing semiconductor questions that have been neglected here, you’re encouraged to highlight them for a few days by offering a &lt;a href=&quot;/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T01:23:25.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-27T17:52:55.693" Score="41" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have probably seen already a link, on the Featured on Meta sidebar, to an announcement of an upcoming upgrade to the text editor on Stack Exchange, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360033/opt-in-alpha-test-for-a-new-stacks-editor&quot;&gt;Opt-in alpha test for a new Stacks editor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a whole, the project looks extremely useful, and it looks like it will do a lot of good for general text editing, particularly for new users who are not accustomed to writing in Markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the current design philosophy is to get rid of the simultaneous preview of the page, which implies getting rid of the simultaneous preview of MathJax. From what I can see, the envelope of possible design choices includes some outcomes that could keep this site working, but &lt;strong&gt;it also includes many choices that would break this site&lt;/strong&gt; as well as any other SE sites that depend on MathJax to function. Moreover, from what I can tell, the current trajectory is towards those outcomes that would break this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, the dev team has asked for community feedback at the right (early) stage of the process, and this trajectory can be corrected. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/360142/184688&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have written up the issues I see with the development as an answer on the feedback page&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and, if you agree with the issues I perceive, I would ask you to support that answer with your votes and with voicing your opinion there. The dev team has a lot of work in front of it, and MathJax will not be made a priority unless the community makes it clear, through energetic and compelling (but obviously polite and constructive) feedback, that the issues require attention and they require attention &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; harmful design choices become set in stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/soapbox&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; =)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T23:14:56.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T12:22:03.157" Title="The proposed changes to the text editor would break this site" Tags="|discussion|editing|mathjax|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-28T19:23:05.603" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/610290/what-is-the-ideal-gap-between-two-panes-of-glass-for-insulation&quot;&gt;What is the ideal gap between two panes of glass for insulation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site/4536#4536&quot;&gt;Are engineering questions appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When constructing a product for use in the world, there are many considerations that go into the decision-making process. The underlying physical principles are only a part of this. The physics community, while often tangentially knowledgeable in these areas, is not the place to seek guidance when ease-of-use, manufacturing costs, material availabilities, etc. are also primary considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ease of use, manufacturing costs, and material availability are not considerations in my question. I specifically said that it doesn't matter how impractical it is. The material is not a variable. I just want to know what the ideal gap is (and how to arrive at that information), which I suspect makes it a physics problem. A physics problem I still have no idea where to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the responsibility of engineering it: thermal expansion of glass vs. the frame, &lt;em&gt;size&lt;/em&gt; of the glass, strength of the glass, whether the glass will bow or break under its own weight, whether the gap is too large or small for my limitations, fog between the panes of glass, etc. are all not in question. In order to make my sad rendition of a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; balance of these factors, I need to know which direction &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; is, and I don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand the answers I've found range from &amp;quot;basically as close possible without touching&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wide enough to stick your finger in there&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I include a specific thickness of the glass, but how does that make it engineering? I suspect that things like how thick the glass is, whether it's glass, the temperature of the air, the fact that it's not argon (which is what manufacturers put between glass layers) are required information to get an answer that doesn't contain the words &amp;quot;not enough information&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking how to determine a single dimension under idealized circumstances. It's a five-layer sandwich of infinite planes of: hot air, glass, air gap, glass, cold air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that isn't physics, why isn't the question that my question links engineering also?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83619" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T09:23:54.303" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T09:23:54.303" Title="My question is &quot;engineering&quot; but" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13350" CreationDate="2021-01-28T20:06:20.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can actually see several reasons why this question doesn't fit, including the engineering reason that it is closed for.  I'll go through my opinion on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For off topic as engineering, I don't think that blurb you quoted gives the whole picture on why something could be seen as an &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot; as opposed to physics question.  The problem is that the question really isn't asking about physical concepts as much as it's asking about results of the practical application of those concepts under certain conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually leads me to another reason one might close; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/127931&quot;&gt;homework and exercise policy&lt;/a&gt;.  The first part of your question can basically be distilled down to &amp;quot;What is the solution to this word problem?&amp;quot;; this isn't particularly helpful to future readers, as it only addresses a one specific example instead of the broader application of concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might then point out that there are several questions under that which are asking more about concepts; which leads to the third potential close reason.  The question is too broad.  Your question should focus on a single question, but your second paragraph seems to ask three different questions along with the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's possible to get some answers to the things you want to know by formatting the questions better, but you would need to avoid off topic reasons.  I would actually consider posting some version of it to Engineering SE perhaps (though I'm not sure what part you should focus on, it still seems too broad).  That site might be a bit less active, but I suspect people there would be familiar with the situation you're talking about and possibly even be able to point you to good resources on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127931" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T20:06:20.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-01T00:07:25.467" Score="-6" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/611417/&quot;&gt;Find the Thevenin&amp;#39;s Voltage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asker seems a little forward, but there is a deeper question he asks if you read his entire submission, an answer to which would be very typical of SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems a bit unfair - not even a comment was left saying how his question might be rephrased/improved.&#xA;Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259879" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T08:02:55.873" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T08:02:55.873" Title="Why was this circuits question closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13353" CreationDate="2021-02-01T00:23:57.757" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of the question is &amp;quot;Find the Thevenin's Voltage,&amp;quot; and the first line is &amp;quot;Please solve this.&amp;quot; In its current form, it is a straightforward homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a deeper, on-topic question contained inside, then the question should be edited to contain &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T00:23:57.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13349" CreationDate="2021-02-01T12:04:49.333" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one option put forward by the SE developers: switching from MathJax to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prosemirror-math&lt;/a&gt;. For a quick look at how it works, I'll just pull this from their readme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike other editors, this plugin &lt;strong&gt;treats math as part of the text itself&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than as an &amp;quot;atom&amp;quot; that can only be edited through a dialog box.  For example, inline math nodes can be edited directly by bringing the cursor inside of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqCM7.gif&quot; alt=&quot;edit inline math&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Display math supports multiline editing, as shown below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bu9f6.png&quot; alt=&quot;edit display math&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inner workings of the text editing are based on prosemirror, which is the software base for the new Stacks editor, so that's good for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mathematics rendering is done using &lt;a href=&quot;https://katex.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KaTeX&lt;/a&gt;, which is an alternative to MathJax. KaTeX was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10152/katex-instead-of-mathjax&quot;&gt;last discussed on this site in 2017&lt;/a&gt; and the conclusion then was that it was not mature enough, but the software has moved on since then, and it's probably due for a re-evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many of the deal-breakers mentioned back then (say, the lack of support for &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;) have since been fixed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the other hand, at the very least, KaTeX is not fully interoperable with MathJax. At the very least, the &lt;code&gt;align&lt;/code&gt; environment needs to be replaced by &lt;code&gt;aligned&lt;/code&gt;, which entails editing 7.5k posts on physics, 1.8k on MO and 50k+ on math.se. For fancier behaviour we would need to have a very detailed look.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Independently of the maturity of KaTeX, it's unclear to me how mature the prosemirror-math software is. Their To Do list includes &amp;quot;Test in FireFox, Safari, Edge&amp;quot; and their last commit was four months ago, and that's not a good sign.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's unclear to me how fast the preview would be on prosemirror-math, and how it would be affected by a slow connection speed. If there is a danger that the preview slows down on lower bandwidths, then that is exclusionary and unacceptable -- but it isn't detected unless specifically tested for, so it needs to be explicitly checked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, independently of those technical hiccups, we as users should answer the question: is the style of editing offered by this solution something we can work with? I for one find it intriguing, but I don't want to say 'yes' without trying it out (and it's unclear whether there are any solutions that can do that at the moment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math/issues/7#issuecomment-771691057&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the prosemirror-math developer has promised a demo version is coming soon&lt;/a&gt; (while, on the other hand, stating that it is &amp;quot;more of a proof-of-concept than a production-ready library&amp;quot;, which indicates just how long of a road it has ahead of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T12:22:03.157" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T12:22:03.157" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-04T00:24:59.597" Score="19" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since our math editor is currently on the news, here's one aspect worth considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that's been pointed out on the Meta.MathOverflow threads (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4858&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4863&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) is that v3 of MathJax has been released recently (IIUC last April) and that it is faster than the current v2.7. (MathJax v3 is also discussed on Meta SE in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338933/next-math-renderer-mathjax-v3-versus-katex&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;, which hasn't received significant developer attention.) It doesn't seem to break anything we rely on, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/upgrading/v2.html#v2-jax-changes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;looking at the list of changes&lt;/a&gt;, one thing that sticks out is &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/extensions/braket.html#tex-braket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the addition of the &lt;code&gt;braket&lt;/code&gt; extension&lt;/a&gt;, which could potentially be very useful here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time we discussed something similar was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10989/why-dont-we-have-the-physics-mathjax-extension-enabled-should-we&quot;&gt;the &lt;code&gt;physics&lt;/code&gt; extension&lt;/a&gt;, and there it does look like there are good reasons not to include it, but &lt;code&gt;braket&lt;/code&gt; is smaller and nobler and it could do quite a bit to help with on-boarding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming a switch to v3 is coming, would the &lt;code&gt;braket&lt;/code&gt; extension make sense?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it break any existing posts which define their own bra/ket notation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would we want to have it enabled?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T10:52:05.050" Title="Would the braket extension in MathJax v3 be appropriate and useful for this site?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-05T17:16:14.133" Score="-1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bring as an example this question, that has been closed after ~12 hours: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/612468/226902&quot;&gt;What exactly are electrons if they exist in orbitals without real boundaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP seems to be someone that does not use PhysicsSE too much, so he/she may be &amp;quot;intimidated&amp;quot; by the closure. Ok, the question was not super clear, but it was edited by a &amp;quot;high-rank&amp;quot; user. After all, &amp;quot;clarity&amp;quot; is somehow subjective. After ~3 hours since the edit (that improved a bit the question), it was closed. So, from the practical point of view, the edit has been nearly useless: probably, only few people saw the edited post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this website is reached by people from all around the world, living in different time-zones. Moreover, we usually spend ~8 hours to sleep. If the OP posts it in the evening, and then in the morning he/she has to go to school/work, then it is possible that the question will be checked after more than ~12 hours. Someone, living in a different timezone, will not even have the time to see the question (they may comment on it, or even add their interpretation.. this would in any case help the OP, even if the original post is not completely clear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it make sense to have a period of (say) ~24 hours, especially for questions of &amp;quot;new users&amp;quot;, in which the question can not be closed? In fact, a &amp;quot;new user&amp;quot; will never be able to re-open it, I suppose (but maybe someone knows some statistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: maybe the &amp;quot;early closing&amp;quot; may remain as a possibility in the case of homework or for very low-quality (or inappropriate) posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS2: I think everyone should be allowed to vote for closing at any time (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/260263/10659110&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; on stackoverflow META), the point is when it should be closed (a related PhysicsSE META is this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/243/226902&quot;&gt;What guidelines should moderators use to decide when to close questions?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226902" LastEditorUserId="226902" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T17:26:56.540" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:33:47.290" Title="Are some questions closed &quot;too fast&quot;, and is it a problem?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|vote-to-close|new-users|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13357" CreationDate="2021-02-05T19:21:11.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're somehow thinking closing questions means they are &amp;quot;undesirable&amp;quot;.  This is not true of this one: it just needs to be clarified.  I did not participate in the VTC but reading it I have to admit that I would have voted to close this question because it lacks clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The onus is then on the OP to edit the question and clarify why a wavefunction that extends to infinity can be compared to a potential (or a force)that extends to infinity, how the Feynman quote implies anything similar (and similar to what?), and what properties suggest the electron has a conglomerate nature (which it does, without precluding its probability density to be delocalized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T19:21:11.783" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13360" CreationDate="2021-02-06T00:23:58.860" Score="10" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that while most questions get a few views or a few hundred, some rack up, over time, hundreds of thousands. I understand how this sort of thing happens on social media, where &amp;quot;shares&amp;quot; can lead to exponential growth. I don't understand how it happens on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180385" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T16:51:50.893" Title="What is the mechanism for questions to go viral?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13359" CreationDate="2021-02-06T00:38:26.803" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main mechanism for this on SE is the Hot Network Questions sidebar, where &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; questions from one site are shown to visitors across the network on other sites, whose selection criteria are explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/263383&quot;&gt;this mother meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T00:38:26.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13365" CreationDate="2021-02-08T22:13:09.270" Score="8" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/611994/169454&quot;&gt;How do non-mechanical solid-state optical switches work?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic. I don't quite understand why, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13226/169454&quot;&gt;questions about physics lab equipment are considered on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. In this particular case it is more about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13076/169454&quot;&gt;identifying a physical effect&lt;/a&gt; and therefore of interest for a broader community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore I think it shouldn't be migrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;electronics.SE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;reverseengineering.SE&lt;/a&gt; or likewise, because devices like the described one are usually produced by high-tech companies which employ physicists to a large extent, hence it is quite likely that someone active on this site knows an answer to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is also not too broad – it wouldn't have 0 answers then. I would start a reopen voting if I had enough reputation on this site, because I think this question has great potential to attract a high-quality useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169454" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T01:57:00.330" Title="Why was this question on fiber switches closed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13364" CreationDate="2021-02-09T01:57:00.330" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you: while most questions about engineering are off-topic for us, we make an exception for engineering-like questions about experimental apparatus.  I've retagged and reopened the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T01:57:00.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13356" CreationDate="2021-02-09T10:52:05.050" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as a place to gather votes as a clear signal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, the braket extension is appropriate and useful. It should be enabled on this site whenever the MathJax version is upgraded to v3.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Vote up if you agree, down if you don't.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T10:52:05.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13368" CreationDate="2021-02-09T13:30:59.680" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;With this question I would like to know what specific tag I can include in my questions on Physics.SE since most of them are about clarifications or curiosities or doubts that I encounter for my students of an high school of 14 to 18 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not seen nothing of similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140404" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T13:44:49.863" Title="Specific tag to add for my questions" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13367" CreationDate="2021-02-09T13:44:49.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just tag with the appropriate subfield of physics, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Help Center article &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;What are tags, and how should I use them?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Avoid meta-tags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta-tags&lt;/a&gt; in questions. Here are some tips to help you determine whether a tag is a meta-tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.&lt;/strong&gt; Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like &lt;code&gt;[beginner]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[subjective]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[best-practices]&lt;/code&gt;, are not helpful by themselves – they do not communicate anything about the content of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T13:44:49.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13357" CreationDate="2021-02-16T02:17:46.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, closing does seem to discourage a lot of askers, especially those who don't understand how Stack Exchange sites work, but it's supposed to &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; them to improve the question, when possible. We close questions that are off-topic, for obvious reasons. We close duplicates because they've already been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of early closure is not to discourage askers, but to stop &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; being posted. If a question is potentially good, but it needs clarification, we need to close it as early as possible, if the OP can't fix it immediately. Otherwise, early answerers tend to try guessing what the OP's real question is, and we can end up with a collection of answers by different people who've interpreted the question in rather different ways. Sometimes, there can be good quality information in those answers, but the collective impact of the page is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; good because the writers are all talking about different things. That can be confusing to the OP, and to future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, when (if) the OP does finally clarify the question, that can invalidate some or all of those answers, or at least make it appear to future readers that the answers aren't properly responding to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that Stack Exchange is a knowledge repository, not a help desk. Yes, we want to help the OP, but we want to help them in such a way that the question and its answers are helpful to future readers as well. A question and answer page has only one OP, but it may be visited by many thousands of people. Every day, vast numbers of people get useful information from the Stack Exchange network, but only a tiny percentage of those people actually post a question. They may not even be registered members. Most of those people find their answers by searching the existing questions and answers. To keep that knowledge repository useful, we have to be diligent with our quality control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an old essay by Stack Overflow co-founder, Jeff Atwood, on this topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that the attitude of the company has shifted a little in the intervening decade, but for many of us in the community it's still a fundamental core principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T02:17:46.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13357" CreationDate="2021-02-16T10:58:09.677" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think is is a valid question: what exactly is an electron. A question that is not easy to answer at all. In fact, I've thought a lot about this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically I believe modern Physics tends to actually divorce itself from the Physics and focus mostly on the mathematics, which is not entirely a bad thing. Conceptual questions can provoke the more nutty of our brethren, but it is essential if we want to move forward in our understanding. Because conceptual questions are often a matter of opinion (supposedly a bad thing), there are often no clear answer, and discussion can go on without end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it would be better to limit discussion on potentially open-ended topics rather than close them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It actually disturbs me that questions like 'what is an electron' are closed by 'senior' members. Who can forget Einstein's query: 'What would it be like to ride on a light beam (closed)'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257276" LastEditorUserId="257276" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T12:33:47.290" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:33:47.290" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-18T18:19:16.257" Score="30" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F=ma$&lt;/span&gt; competition is the largest physics competition in the United States, and took place online the afternoon after this Meta question first appeared. It is a multiple choice exam with tricky mechanics problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, Math.SE has had problems with cheating on similar competitions. Please be on the lookout and do not blindly answer mechanics questions, especially if they are clearly screenshotted from an online exam. Many &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F=ma$&lt;/span&gt; questions are conceptual in nature and thus would not be closed under the homework policy, but they should not be answered until at least &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2$&lt;/span&gt; hours after posted, when the exam has ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T21:21:28.863" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T21:21:28.863" Title="The $F=ma$ competition was February 18th, 2021" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13371" CreationDate="2021-02-18T23:17:26.300" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exam is over now! Thankfully, nothing went awry on this particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T23:17:26.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12825" CreationDate="2021-02-19T19:25:57.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for this. I know Dark Mode is a highly requested feature. We currently don't have plans to bring it to SE, one of the big issues here is the custom designs many of the sites had, it would make it difficult to build something that would work for all 172 sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/28/the-loop-community-public-platform-roadmap-q1-2021/&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is our current roadmap if you are interested in taking a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="274198" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T19:25:57.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-22T08:40:26.470" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/277509/&quot;&gt;reasonable question&lt;/a&gt; which can be answered. Why was it deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T05:00:07.517" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T05:00:07.517" Title="Why was my question from 4 years ago recently deleted?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13377" CreationDate="2021-02-22T08:51:07.357" Score="7" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a question, and later provided my own answer. I spent a decent amount of time writing up that answer and I would like to have it for my notes, but it seems like it was deleted at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a question about how photons can be expressed in a cavity using the transmission function of a cavity (verses solving with the input-output formalism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas how I can find this? (I think it was likely deleted more than 60 days ago, although I'd guess I wrote the question some time in the last 6 months.) I'm not so interested in fighting some moderator about whether it should've been deleted, I'd just like to get that answer back for my own reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T09:16:58.007" Title="Need help finding old deleted question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13374" CreationDate="2021-02-22T09:10:05.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE has a cleanup process that automatically deletes questions that haven't been well received. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/305602&quot;&gt;The exact criteria for deleting questions are described here&lt;/a&gt;. Your question fell victim to the automatic clearup because it had no answers and a negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T09:10:05.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13375" CreationDate="2021-02-22T09:16:58.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13948/is-there-any-way-to-see-my-deleted-questions-or-answers&quot;&gt;Is there any way to see my deleted questions or answers&lt;/a&gt;? You will need a moderator to find the question for you since your rep is under 10K.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T09:16:58.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-22T20:40:53.450" Score="-1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;It implies that some random answer from the past is &lt;em&gt;the definitive answer.&lt;/em&gt; And we all know that questions can be answered many different ways. And the duplicate question usually isn't an exact duplicate. &lt;em&gt;And&lt;/em&gt; if someone answers my question now, then I can comment and ask a question, but the person who answered five years ago might not even be here now. I understand linking to &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; questions, but closing down questions and leaving the questioners with less of a resource seems pointless. It really just seems like the mods have nothing better to do than search through old questions and shut down threads. Is there really any good rational reason for closing questions? (And now someone will close this thread because someone asked this before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user288901" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T20:44:07.107" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T12:49:08.693" Title="Why aren't &quot;duplicate&quot; questions allowed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13378" CreationDate="2021-02-23T01:06:07.583" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably you can add your answer to the list of the questions being duplicated... Concentrating answers in a single place is usually better than looking at the same basic question scattered all over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, you are missing a critical ingredient: the objective here is not to answer &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; question, it is to answer &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; question, irrespective of who asks the question.  This is not a social network and the objective is not to start anew a never-ending discussion on the same topic every other week: the site would instantly become practically unsearchable because of the enormous number of repetitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think you have a question similar to one posted, but sufficiently different not to be a duplicate, carefully post this questions indicating how you think it is different from other near-duplicates, and how the answers there do not apply to your variant of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T01:06:07.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13378" CreationDate="2021-02-23T12:49:08.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we all know that questions can be answered many different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then new answers can be posted to the other question rather than the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the duplicate question usually isn't an exact duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it isn't, then it shouldn't have been closed. If you see a case of a non-duplicate being marked as such, raise a flag, or vote to reopen (if you have enough reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if someone answers my question now, then I can comment and ask a question, but the person who answered five years ago might not even be here now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question that is close to a previous question, but that question doesn't answer the question you have, then your new question should explicitly address this. Link to the similar question and state what the current answers are missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative solution would be to raise a bounty on the other question outlining what you think is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand linking to &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; questions, but closing down questions and leaving the questioners with less of a resource seems pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that this is a Q&amp;amp;A site. If a question is indeed a duplicate, then we want the answers to that question in as few places as possible. That way other users don't have to look around to multiple different posts to read about the answer(s) to a single question. You might not agree with that, but certainly you can at least see there is a point, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really just seems like the mods have nothing better to do than search through old questions and shut down threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oftentimes, questions are closed by regular users without moderator involvement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty simple to find duplicate questions. The search system does a decent job at suggesting questions automatically. With minimal effort if it's not suggesting the right thing, a duplicate is pretty easy to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've talked with some of the moderators in the chat. They are really nice, and they definitely have lives beyond this site. So I can reassure you that they do have better things to do than to look for duplicate questions (which, as I mention above, isn't too much of a hassle). I'm sure they would rather do other things than look for duplicates though, so we all win when users don't post duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T12:49:08.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13382" CreationDate="2021-02-23T17:10:08.910" Score="17" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upvote mechanism does not always work on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often see great answers with zero votes that are unaccepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what tends happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spend significant amount of time adding an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In comments OP explains what they don’t understand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments or answer is updated, investing more time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP may start arguing and does not even engage with new concepts, this is something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dunning-Kruger effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answerer patiently replies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This goes back and forth and is never resolved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everything fizzles out without any recognition or upvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My latest example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/616081/1194&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/616081/1194&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this might not be widespread, it might just happen that I’m interested in topics that attract said people, and that get little traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions to everyone are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can we make sure correct and great answers are rewarded rather than getting nothing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a problem you encounter?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1194" LastEditorUserId="1194" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T09:12:32.620" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T15:44:01.067" Title="How to promote “hidden gems”" Tags="|discussion|answers|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13381" CreationDate="2021-02-24T13:35:06.667" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be conflation of two issues here. One is suggested in the title: how to bring attention to a good answer that hasn't gotten enough attention. The other is the issue of working really hard on an answer to a question where the OP is just not on board with your answer for whatever reason. These are not necessarily the same thing, and I would argue that they are mainly different since the quality of an answer doesn't depend on the reaction the OP has to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example you give goes to your own answer where it looks like the second case happened somewhat. Maybe you think your answer is also a &amp;quot;hidden gem&amp;quot;, but this looks more like a complaint about the OP not treating your answer the way you think it deserves to be treated rather than a general concern of great answers going unnoticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, let's treat both parts separately for future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we make sure correct and great answers are rewarded rather than getting nothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always put a bounty on the post to draw attention to an answer you think is really good that needs more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a problem you encounter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really. If my answer addresses the main post then I tend to leave it as is. If I sense that the OP is being difficult then I just move on, and I'll ask them to post a new question addressing their other concerns if they are different enough. Yes, we should be helpful to the OP, but we should also keep in mind that these questions and answers are for any future readers. If the OP is changing goal posts in the comments of your answer, then that doesn't help anyone because you will end up answering more questions that are not in the main post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T15:44:01.067" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T15:44:01.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13385" CreationDate="2021-02-24T20:27:11.133" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize if I am delusional and imagined this, but I believe that in a not-so-distant past it was possible to display questions sorted by date so as to get the most recent ones on top of the list. And to achieve this, I selected &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; as opposed to &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; after clicking on the hyperlink &amp;quot;active&amp;quot;. Now when I do that, I get active, hot, bounties, week and month. But no sign of &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; anymore.&#xA;Sorry if I am late and everyone is up to date regarding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T21:33:00.323" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T21:33:00.323" Title="Where are the new questions?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13384" CreationDate="2021-02-24T21:05:10.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just go to the &amp;quot;Questions&amp;quot; and then click on &amp;quot;Newest&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yua5M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yua5M.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T21:05:10.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-27T01:43:08.270" Score="-2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/100559/&quot;&gt;Why does the bathroom become hot after a bath?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the answer but the site prevents me from answering because I have no reputation. What am I to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="290414" OwnerDisplayName="Sreehari S" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T10:23:07.010" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T10:23:07.010" Title="I know the answer but the site prevents me from answering because I have no reputation. What am I to do?" Tags="|support|answers|reputation|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13386" CreationDate="2021-02-27T05:52:22.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question attracts a lot of poor answers, it can be marked as protected. This is done automatically in some cases and manually in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is marked as protected, you need at least 10 reputation in order to answer it. So if you ask any question or provide any other answer that gets at least one upvote you will be able to answer protected questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T05:52:22.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13386" CreationDate="2021-02-27T06:00:43.577" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're logged out, you'll see a banner like this one in the place where the &amp;quot;answer question&amp;quot; box usually is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/llHHK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/llHHK.png&quot; alt=&quot;protection banner screenshot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of our questions don't have this banner and they can be answered by anyone. However, some of our questions attract low-quality answers from visitors who don't yet understand how our site works or what kinds of answers are valuable here.  That particular question currently has two answers which have earned a positive score from the community, four answers that have a negative score, and (you may not be able to see this) two answers which have been deleted or hidden.  Some of the downvoted and deleted questions were written by people who haven't had any other interaction with the site since.  Apparently that question is not a great place for new users to begin interacting with our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To post your answer, you'll need to interact with the site in other ways (take the &lt;a href=&quot;//help/tour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; to see what this means) until you've earned a little reputation. One way to earn this reputation is to find an un-protected question which interests you, and answer it in a way that attracts an upvote from at least one other user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T06:00:43.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13392" CreationDate="2021-02-27T11:58:40.600" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that there is an inconsistency in the number of edited posts between the &amp;quot;editor stats&amp;quot; (which is the dialog that you can see in post revisions) and the user profile. For example, according to the editor stats, I have had 102 edit suggestions approved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIi6x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIi6x.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while on my user profile, the number of edited posts is 61:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hpfZF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hpfZF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is also in accordance with the progress on the &amp;quot;Strunk &amp;amp; White&amp;quot; badge (edit 80 posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which of these numbers is correct? I had two ideas to explain the difference, the first being that the editor stats are network-wide (for all stack exchange sites) while the number on the user profile is only for Physics SE. However, a quick check showed that the editor stats show different numbers on different sites (the same is true for the user profile).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other idea was that the editor stats include the number of my own posts that I edited. This could technically be true since the difference does not exceed the number of my posts, but edits on your own posts do not have to be approved (which is suggested by the editor stats) - if anything, edits on own posts &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be included on the user profile which does not specify that the edits were &amp;quot;approved&amp;quot;. However, this obviously would make no sense since the number is smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is there a difference and which is the &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; (i.e. edited posts of other users) number?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T15:21:28.880" Title="Difference in &quot;edited posts&quot; in editor stats and user profile" Tags="|bug|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13393" CreationDate="2021-02-27T13:59:17.210" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question made by someone who has not been seen on the site since April 29, 2016.  It's my impression that &amp;quot;accepted&amp;quot; answers (answers accepted by the participant who had formulated the question) will be retained, but that others may be deleted.  As my answer has evolved on the basis of further reading, I've added to it, but the possibility of its deletion has required me to keep copies of both the original answer and all of my elaborations of it.  Are there conditions, other than acceptance by the OP, that would preserve my answer (seen by 2K participants so far) on the site, and, if so, will they also preserve my own comments on it (which I've made to reflect its evolution)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T05:05:38.640" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T05:05:38.640" Title="Conditions for on-site preservation of an answer" Tags="|support|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13390" CreationDate="2021-02-27T14:36:59.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three possibilities, of which the first one is to blame for the majority of the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;102 edit suggestions approved&amp;quot; counts edits on deleted posts, while the &amp;quot;61 posts edited&amp;quot; does not. &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1379127/approved-suggested-edits-on-deleted-posts?UserId=253179&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; lists 28 such instances, which is not enough to explain the entire difference.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As noted in the comments, SEDE updates once a week, on Sunday morning, so your most recent edits don't appear there yet. But they're not likely to be on deleted posts; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt; only works on posts older than a week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you suggest an edit to a post twice, and both get approved, the number of edit suggestions approved increases, but the number of posts edited does not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 61 posts edited counts edits to community wikis as well; those don't need to be approved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T15:21:28.880" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T15:21:28.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2021-02-27T15:01:39.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are having a misplaced concern about the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt;, which automatically removes some &lt;em&gt;closed questions&lt;/em&gt; with low views and no positive engagement. An upvoted answer saves a question from the roomba. There is no automatic process which removes old answers, apart from zero- or negative-scored answers on old closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if there is deleted content on the site &lt;em&gt;which you have written&lt;/em&gt;, that content and its revision history are still visible &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt;. It won't show up in your profile or in search results, so you are unlikely to find it unless you have saved the URL somewhere. There is even a link in your profile to show your own deleted content which has been written recently (but not recently- deleted content which was written long ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T15:01:39.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13374" CreationDate="2021-02-27T20:11:53.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add a bit more detail to John Rennie's answer, your question was deleted by the &amp;quot;roomba&amp;quot;, whose operation is described in the Help Center &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The specific reason given by the roomba was 'RemoveDeadQuestions', under these specific criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has −1 or lower score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has no answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is not locked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/277509/timeline?filter=WithVoteSummaries&quot;&gt;timeline for the question&lt;/a&gt; (accessible by clicking the 'clock' symbol below the voting arrows) shows that the question reached a quiescent state at net score zero (+1, -1) some three weeks after answering, and that it then received a downvote on 1 January, bringing it down to negative score and ticking the first box of the criterion (with the other two already ticked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question isn't &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, as such, but it definitely looks like it needs some improvements in presentation to make it clearer, up front, what it is you want to ask. For now the question has two undelete votes, but it's possible that it will fall back under the roomba's weekly sweep if it's undeleted and its score does not go up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T20:11:53.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13396" CreationDate="2021-02-28T15:52:25.347" Score="-2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am following the advice &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36415/how-do-you-reopen-a-closed-question#:%7E:text=Voting%20to%20reopen,question%2C%20not%20only%20their%20own.&quot;&gt;given in community wiki answer&lt;/a&gt; and making a request to the Physic.SE community to reopen &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/402007/doubt-on-an-answer-to-a-mechanics-problem&quot;&gt;this question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I believe the question should be reopened is because it is not a homework question but more of a conceptual question. This question falls in the type 4 category as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6093/should-any-check-my-work-questions-be-made-on-topic&quot;&gt;ACuriousMind's post here&lt;/a&gt;, which most members accept are worthy of being kept open. The OP had provided proper justification for both the type of derivation and is not a solve-my-problem type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I believe that the question should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: I have also edited the question and improved the LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201761" LastEditorUserId="201761" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T16:36:27.277" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T17:46:00.463" Title="Request to reopen an old question" Tags="|support|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13395" CreationDate="2021-02-28T17:46:00.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I don’t think the item 4) you suggest applies.&#xA;This item states that check-my-work question could be allowed when they are of the type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It seems as if step X is wrong? But it should be right because of Y, so why is this not the case?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, we have two competing derivations.  Nowhere in either exposition does the OP identify a step X which is wrong, and justify it should be right because of Y. Rather OP is plainly asking for other users to decide which of the two methods is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was one of the original closers, and I don’t remember why I voted to close.  Looking at it now the question suffers from other problems.  For starters, the variable &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; of method 1 is defined as the extension of the spring whereas in method 2 the variables &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_1$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_2$&lt;/span&gt; are defined from the center of mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extension of the spring should be (if I understand well) &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_1-x_2$&lt;/span&gt;, not &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_1+x_2$&lt;/span&gt;.  This way, if both &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_1$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_2$&lt;/span&gt; are displaced by the same amount, the spring is not stretched or compressed.  Because so little details are provided, it is impossible to verify one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vote to close again as check-my-work or as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarifications could include the actual FBD illustrating the forces, a coordinate system from which the definition of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_1$&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_2$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; can easily be grasped.  This way, the OP could identify steps where the parallel development of the two solutions differ in an essential way, and could then proceed to identify a principle which seems to apply in one case but not another - at least bring it closer to the spirit of the format you quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T17:46:00.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-01T15:35:17.207" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;What close reason should I choose for a question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/617894/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T16:04:24.267" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T16:10:14.840" Title="Choosing a Close Reason" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13397" CreationDate="2021-03-01T16:03:41.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Needs details or clarity&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question should include more details and clarify the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;applies, as it's (to me) completely unclear what the author is asking. It might be that the question is still off-topic even after it's improved, but more clarification is step one. Meanwhile, a ♦ moderator with a crystal ball chose a custom off-topic close reason, which is also fine. The chance that this question, after some edits, turns out to be worthwhile to migrate to another site, is very small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastEditorUserId="77072" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T16:10:14.840" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T16:10:14.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-02T04:45:09.783" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was just writing my answer, I felt the need for the in-built MathJax toolbar for ease in writing equations and formulas without adding commands like \pi R^2 inside double $s. It will just create smooth writing experience for all, particularly the new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="290703" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T10:51:21.570" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T10:51:21.570" Title="A toolbar for MathJax commands would be helpful" Tags="|feature-request|editing|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13402" CreationDate="2021-03-03T09:07:13.470" Score="-2" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this question by Kashmiri, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/615719/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, it was originally posted without the &amp;quot;homework-and-exercises&amp;quot; tag. And if you look at the question itself, nothing about it seems homework-type. Later the question was edited by another user - where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/homework-and-exercises/info&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; (H&amp;amp;AE) tag was added - then the question was closed due to it being a &amp;quot;homework-type&amp;quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the fact that the actual question does not appear to be a homework (HW) type question - indeed the OP sets up a hypothetical scenario from which a conceptual question is asked, is it even considered &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; to edit-tag a question as a HW type question - possibly giving another member impetus to also close it as a HW type when they see the tag without a careful read of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; At the time I posting this question, I did &lt;em&gt;incorrectly&lt;/em&gt; think of the possibility that questions tagged &lt;code&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/code&gt; could hypothetically be given a close-vote by some members, simply based on this tag. Of course, there are plenty of questions with the &lt;code&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/code&gt; tag that do offer a conceptual question, something that wasn't very clear to me (and rules surrounding close voting in general) having only been a contributor to PSE for just on six months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is not the case, and have yet to see such a circumstance by any member. What I have seen is that care is taken when deciding whether or not to close-vote, or any other vote/action, by all our members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95176" LastEditorUserId="95176" LastEditDate="2023-06-14T04:58:12.640" LastActivityDate="2023-06-14T04:58:12.640" Title="Someone other than the OP adding &quot;homework-and-exercises' tag to a question, and then the question gets closed as a homework-type-question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|tags|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13400" CreationDate="2021-03-03T09:41:18.423" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the concrete case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/615719/2451&quot;&gt;it&lt;/a&gt; indeed seems to be a conceptional question rather than a typical HW-like question where the HW tag applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in general, whether a question is HW-like or on-topic is determined by the Phys.SE community (partly via close &amp;amp; reopen votes), and its conclusion should in principle be independent of whether the HW&amp;amp;E tag is applied or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be no need to introduce a Phys.SE policy on when specific tags can be added, partly because such policy would complicate day-to-day operations and be difficult to administrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-11-15T18:09:32.973" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T18:09:32.973" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13400" CreationDate="2021-03-03T11:01:24.313" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the one who edited in the homework and exercises tag. I did so on the grounds this seemed like an exercise i.e. it was just calculating the orbital velocity at the surface of the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it is debatable whether the tag is appropriate, but my view is that if I am in doubt I will edit in the tag then leave it to the other members of the site to decide on closure. Remember that adding the tag does not close the question. It takes close votes from five site members to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question suggests that the site members will cast a knee jerk vote to close when they see the homework and exercises tag. I trust this is not the case. The tag exists only to draw attention to the question, and a vote to close should be cast only after reading the question and deciding whether the close vote is appropriate. In this case the close votes were all cast by experienced members of the site so I believe it unlikely that they voted without reading the question first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it is worth, the first close vote was mine and I stand by that decision. If it's the consensus view that the question be reopened I will respect that decision, but I still consider my close vote justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T11:01:24.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13400" CreationDate="2021-03-03T11:58:22.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll start by just making sure we are on the same page. The HW&amp;amp;E tag (which I'll just call the homework tag) and the closure using the &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; reason are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two distinct things, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not reserved only for questions that were explicitly assigned as homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I point this out mainly for the comment of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I would like to say I don't ask questions that are homework because I don't have any teacher that can give me homework.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onto addressing this post then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you look at the question itself, nothing about it seems homework-type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily... I have worked out problems similar to this before. I would argue the question isn't asking about understanding a physics concept; rather, it is asking how to prove something about a physics concept. In other words, it looks like the OP wants someone to do the work on this for them rather than understand something like &amp;quot;what is the appropriate conditions for a trajectory that is an orbit to be made?&amp;quot;. It's borderline, but I wouldn't go as strong as to say there is nothing homework-like at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;indeed the OP sets up a hypothetical scenario from which a conceptual question is asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is debatable. If someone posted a question that was something like, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Let's hypothetically say we have a box sliding on a table with friction. Would it be possible for the box to stay on the table? I'm not asking for any computation, it is just a theoretical query if something can happen.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then the question would probably be closed as well. This is because in order to answer the question you still have to show the work of whether or not the box can stay on the table. The post in question is more involved than my example, but the idea is the same. It's not an explicit call to work out the problem... but really the question is still, &amp;quot;hey can you work this out for me?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note that just saying &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This question doesn't call for any computation, it is just a theoretical query if something can happen.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; doesn't mean the question is now safe from being closed as a homework-like question. The intent of the question does not (or at least should not) play a role in whether or not it should be open or closed. A post should be judged on its own independent of what the OP says, their background, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is it even considered ethical to edit-tag a question as a HW type question, to then close it as a HW type question - to give others impetus to also close it as a HW type when they see the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is ethical. It's how the site works. Users (with enough reputation) can edit questions how they see fit, and they can vote to close questions. While many questions with the homework tag get closed, getting the tag does not mean &amp;quot;close this question&amp;quot;. Ideally, if users understood the site better before posting questions that deserve the homework tag, then actually none of them would be closed, since it is possible to post a question with this tag that is also on-topic for this site. The tag isn't the reason for the closure, nor is it an explicit signal to other users saying, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;hey, close this question&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think people other than the OP should add HW&amp;amp;E tags, especially in cases where it is not really clear if it is HW&amp;amp;E since it may lead to unfair closing, as happened in the case above (OP is adamant the original question is not HW&amp;amp;E). For obvious HW type questions, OK. But not in such cases. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that is unclear to one user may be clear to another. I'm not sure how one would implement a system that lets you change tags only when it is &amp;quot;obvious enough&amp;quot;. A hard &amp;quot;other users cannot add the homework tag&amp;quot; is a horrible idea, as it prevents the proper classification of questions in the case where the OP has not (or will not) properly classified it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T12:03:55.433" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T12:03:55.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-03T16:47:21.617" Score="10" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question was closed as being off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/616943/why-do-fireproof-safes-capture-and-hold-in-moisture&quot;&gt;humidity - Why do fireproof safes &amp;quot;capture and hold in moisture&amp;quot;? - Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm struggling to think of why this isn't an obvious physics question. I wanted to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; some physical systems demonstrate some physical behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the accepted answer on the meta question linked-to in the 'your question was closed' notification it is written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/290/what-really-allows-airplanes-to-fly&quot;&gt;What really allows airplanes to fly?&lt;/a&gt; that ask how a man-made system works are also on topic, as long as they aren't too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the problem is that, because I'm asking about a 'side effect' or 'downside' of some &amp;quot;man-made system&amp;quot;, I'm suspected of 'really' asking about how to &lt;em&gt;solve&lt;/em&gt; or mitigate that effect? That seems like a possible explanation for why the first comment, by a user with a good amount of reputation on this site, thinks that this question would be a better fit on &lt;a href=&quot;https://diy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the Home Improvement Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;. That's confusing as &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; SE site is, according to its own info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... a question and answer site for contractors and serious DIYers. The core of this site is around parts of your home that are typically included when you buy or sell it, the structure, utilities, and major appliances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 'concern' with editing my question to be a 'spherical cow' version of itself is that that would then be &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's of course possible that, like all SE sites, there is in fact no consistent rule applied to all questions and determining whether they're on-topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What specifically is wrong with my question as it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it just &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; like a thinly veiled 'engineering' question? Must I just accept that there's now no way for the question to escape this judgement? Should I now give up on asking questions here too given that forever more I will be suspected of 'really' asking engineering questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my links themselves suspicious? I included them because they were the &lt;em&gt;inspiration&lt;/em&gt; for my question – &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; because I'm maliciously trying to get physicists or physics enthusiasts to nefariously engage in engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This similar meta question, and its accepted answer, lead me to think that my question was closed because it &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; like 'engineering' and thus is so 'trivial' that it should be field by &amp;quot;contractors and serious DIYers&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13364/why-was-this-question-on-fiber-switches-closed&quot;&gt;Why was this question on fiber switches closed? - Physics Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; appreciate that the question is probably &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; similar to questions that &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; are off-topic. How should I edit my question so that it's &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40466" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T20:50:37.120" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T18:57:48.983" Title="How should one ask a physics question about an engineered artifact?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13404" CreationDate="2021-03-03T22:35:28.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short version, i think the burden is in the wrong place,as described&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in favour of such questions. SE can often come across to the inexperienced as closing questions that the OP feels do really match the site's criteria, and physics SE isn't likely to be an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption that this is a solution-seeking question in disguise feels like bad faith and narrow preconception what someone might ask that's physics, and we shouldn't require &amp;quot;just so&amp;quot; perfect wording and jumping hoops, for the privilege of asking an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, its more experienced users who should be expected to show versatility if there's a possibility its valid - checking assumptions, being welcoming, and so on. Not newcomers and the unfamiliar or inexperienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd therefore rephrase this (meta) question&lt;/strong&gt;, that its for experienced users to address the matter, not for the OP to be told in effect &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I assume you're asking a question you may not be asking, and if you want to convince me otherwise you have to do hoop-jumping and reword it just so. Kthx&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  That's just lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes asking clarifiers is extra work. So is rewording an OP to meet seemingly-opaque demands. Who is best placed for extra work, and least likely to be deterred -  a newcomer, or an experienced user who knows what its about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In finishing, here are some useful ways to handle it or indeed answer it, that don't place undue demands on the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like you may be asking for engineering solutions and answers. If you are, then practical questions about how a device is made, can be asked on Engineering SE. I will limit my answer to the aspects of your question suitable for Physics SE, namely [whatever].  If you did have a different physics question, please edit your post to be clearer, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this approach, the user is given a clear distinction that some aspects belong on another SE. The OP feels welcome, the valid physics point is answered by stating what it's seen as being (not by demanding &amp;quot;figure a better wording&amp;quot;), and if its not helpful, they'll edit or otherwise clarify by further comments anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Update:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/620212&quot;&gt;How far could you see from an airplane at 35,000 feet?&lt;/a&gt; for an example of exactly this, today. A user asks about a flat earth video that purports to show Baja California when its below the horizon. They sound sceptical and looking for scientific understanding what they have missed. They state they have tried horizon calculators but they don't help, could refraction cause the effect. Comment 6 to the OP states that the question should be closed because we don't handle &amp;quot;looney videos&amp;quot;, but the user is genuinely after a physics based understanding whether optical illusion or other refractive effect could be the reason - and I feel when it comes to refraction as a hypothetical scientific explanation for someone else's claimed optical observations, that's fairly and squarely a question we can and should be able to handle here (my comment 8 to OP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119010" LastEditorUserId="119010" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T18:57:48.983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T18:57:48.983" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2021-03-04T00:17:08.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Please don't use computer-generated text for questions or answers on Physics.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past couple of weeks, a new generation of computer language-generating tools has become available to the public.  The main bit of news is about a product called &amp;quot;ChatGPT,&amp;quot; but that's just the most recent iteration of a class of software &amp;quot;chat bots.&amp;quot;  (Whether it's appropriate to refer to these systems as &amp;quot;artificial intelligence&amp;quot; is a philosophical question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a few days of ChatGPT's release, Stack Overflow issued a temporary &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/421831/1650379&quot;&gt;don't-use-this&lt;/a&gt; policy, stating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, because the average rate of getting &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is &lt;em&gt;substantially harmful&lt;/em&gt; to the site and to users who are asking or looking for &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically &lt;em&gt;look like&lt;/em&gt; they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be good and the answers are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow, the blanket ban has mostly been a volume problem. Physics is a much smaller community, and we have so far detected only a smattering of such posts.  However, the ones we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; found have been pretty terrible, ranging from low-information word salad to obvious physical errors.  For example, the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you described, the Drapher's point [sic] corresponds to a temperature of approximately 3,631 K and a wavelength of approximately 3631 nanometers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should raise the eyebrows of anyone whose physics education has gotten as far as Wien's Law.  (It may not, however, raise the eyebrows of anyone who has tried to teach Wien's Law to reluctant intro-astronomy students.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another post, the &lt;em&gt;asker&lt;/em&gt; ended their question with &amp;quot;I asked an AI, but it didn't help me,&amp;quot; followed by a properly-quoted paragraph which hadn't helped them because it didn't make any sense.  I had a little flashback to when my children were small, and would sometimes run excitedly up to me, saying, &amp;quot;this thing! i found it on the floor! it tastes &lt;em&gt;so gross&lt;/em&gt;! you have to try it!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some posts have even crossed the line from well-intentioned to deceptive.  On one now-deleted post, a commenter asked the user who posted the answer to include references, and the post was edited to include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some references for spin fluctuation are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Pairing in Type-II Superconductors Induced by Spin Fluctuations&amp;quot; by D. J. Scalapino, E. Loh, Jr., and J. E. Hirsch, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1983)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Spin Fluctuation-Mediated Pairing in Type-II Superconductors&amp;quot; by D. J. Scalapino, E. Loh, Jr., and J. E. Hirsch, Physical Review B, Vol. 34, No. 6 (1986)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Spin Fluctuation-Mediated Superconductivity: A Review&amp;quot; by D. J. Scalapino, Physics Reports, Vol. 250, No. 3 (1995)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's instructive to compare these &amp;quot;references&amp;quot; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.aps.org/search/results?clauses=%5B%7B%22field%22:%22author%22,%22value%22:%22scalapino%22,%22operator%22:%22AND%22%7D,%7B%22field%22:%22author%22,%22value%22:%22hirsch%22,%22operator%22:%22AND%22%7D%5D&amp;amp;sort=recent&amp;amp;date=custom&amp;amp;per_page=20&amp;amp;end_date=1989&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search of this time period at the Physical Review&lt;/a&gt;, which should turn up the first two. Scalapino and Hirsch coauthored a number of papers on superconductivity in the early 1980s, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.50.1168&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one in PRL v50 (1983)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.34.8190&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another in PRB v34 (1986)&lt;/a&gt;.  However, Loh doesn't seem to have joined the group until 1986, and none of the team's coauthored titles includes the phrase &amp;quot;spin fluctuations.&amp;quot; Likewise, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1016/0370-1573(94)00086-I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;best candidate for the third reference&lt;/a&gt; has a different issue number and title.  Is it a good use of anyone's time to pursue this detective work into thirty- and forty-year-old literature to see whether these rhymes-with-correct citations address the question at hand?  Almost certainly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just examples which have been posted here on Physics by actual users. (That's why they're not linked: this is a policy discussion, not a name-and-shame.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that my &amp;quot;please don't do this&amp;quot; isn't a new fancy policy tailored to existence of an exciting new chatbot which superficially appears intelligent.  Our community has a number of established posting standards which are violated by these low-quality contributions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originality&lt;/strong&gt;.  User contributions on this site are expected to be primarily the poster's own original work. If properly cited, including a small passage from a third party is fine, but complete answers are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt;.  Content which originally appeared elsewhere, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/582/44126&quot;&gt;including your own content&lt;/a&gt;, must be posted &lt;em&gt;with attribution&lt;/em&gt;.  Plagiarized content may be hidden until appropriate attributions are added, or may be removed altogether.  It isn't common, but some serial plagiarists have found their site-use privileges suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Respect for others&lt;/strong&gt;.  If a user posts a question or an answer, our community needs to be able to expect that the post is a good-faith effort to learn things, or to help other people to learn things.  Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/58032/280545&quot;&gt;network-wide policy&lt;/a&gt; is that &amp;quot;abuse of the system or the community,&amp;quot; including &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234035/280545&quot;&gt;cat-on-keyboard gibberish posts&lt;/a&gt;, can reasonably be flagged using the &amp;quot;rude or abusive&amp;quot; option, where enough flags will automatically delete the post and apply a reputation penalty. Surreptitiously involving Physics users in your tests of some chatbot software is rude. Generating &amp;quot;citations&amp;quot; without any idea whether they refer to real documents or not, much less whether the cited documents are relevant, is an abuse of other people's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2022-12-19T14:15:34.473" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T14:15:34.473" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-03-04T00:17:08.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13400" CreationDate="2021-03-04T08:35:42.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really have a direct answer to the question, but I'd like to add some thoughts on the working of the site. So, the ability to close vote is a privilege awarded at 3k rep and these are the only people who can call judgement to close vote or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to reach 3k rep, you must have given quite a lot of valuable contributions with some being superior than to equivalent contributions by other members of the site (that is if you want to reach it in &amp;lt;300 questions and answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this system does make sense that the people who have contributed the most are the people who can decide the fate of questions posted on the site. However, it is also bothersome as I see some members becoming a bit more negative over questions over the years. As in, the ideals of what they find acceptable fluctuates as time passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the homework tag, I think homework and exercises usually means that the question sounds more like a homework to the person who is trying to help than if the question is actually homework or not. In the sense that, there are questions which will force the answerer to think a bit outside what they usually do vs run through some routine procedures. While I personally don't think closing questions such as Kashmiri asked is a good idea, I understand why a close vote would be put by someone who has answered over hundreds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope my opinion laid some insight on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T08:35:42.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-04T16:29:47.350" Score="18" ViewCount="719" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/613691/&quot;&gt;Why is the center of a torch beam visible even through an opaque body like my finger?&lt;/a&gt;, the OP started a bounty stating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really need this material to answer my entrance examination for BSc. and I can't find this answer anywhere online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think we should be answering entrance-exam questions on Physics.SE.  However, since the question now has an open bounty on it, I couldn't cast a close vote on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've flagged this for a moderator's attention, but I have two questions that I'd be interested in knowing the community's opinion about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is more of a conceptual question (the type of question we &amp;quot;like&amp;quot;) than a question about how to work through a specific problem.  The rationale for closing homework-like problems is that they're not really useful to future users, whereas more conceptual questions often are.  &lt;strong&gt;If an OP asks a conceptual question that is based on a homework/exam problem, should it still be closed under this rationale?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should bountied questions be immune from close votes?&lt;/strong&gt;  Is this something that we can control for our stack only, or is it &amp;quot;baked in&amp;quot; to the whole StackExchange ecosystem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81133" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T10:37:01.163" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T16:13:40.393" Title="Bounty on &quot;entrance exam&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|bounty|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13410" CreationDate="2021-03-04T17:43:39.397" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;[moderator hat off: personal opinion]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don’t close homework-like questions based on where they are from. We close homework-like questions when they are about doing some single-purpose computation (what is this coefficient of friction, where have I lost my minus sign) versus conceptual questions (why does energy work like this, why do approach A and and approach B give conflicting results).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One use of this policy to prevent rules-lawyers from keeping low-quality questions open by saying things like “This question isn’t homework! I’m not a student! I have an abiding personal interest in this hypothetical coefficient of friction!”. But another use, more important in the long term, is to &lt;em&gt;encourage askers to re-frame their questions&lt;/em&gt; in ways that are acceptable to us.  This is probably more helpful to the askers in the long term than an answer to their immediate question, though the fraction of low-effort homework-askers who engage in this way is pretty small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, we have an origin-free definition of what makes a question homework-like, which we tend to use to close or improve bad questions.&#xA;I don’t think it’s consistent with this policy to close a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; question because additional information has been revealed about its origin, so I think the linked question should remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T17:43:39.397" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13410" CreationDate="2021-03-05T07:08:10.373" Score="-8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think we should be answering entrance-exam questions on Physics.SE. However, since the question now has an open bounty on it, I couldn't cast a close vote on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think otherwise,  I am for answering questions related to problems in entrance exams. If I recall, the fundamental goal of this site was to help as many people as possible, right? If so, then answering and discussing questions which come in entrance exams on this site really does help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the reason for studying may not be of interest or so, giving answers will lead to a better understanding of the physical world for the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, We shouldn't dismiss questions based on where the questions is from but rather the 'spirit' of the question. Of course, the context may give us an impulse to judge the spirit, but we need to keep our biases aside and be open to new ideas instead of following rules if we want the site to become better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T07:08:10.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13410" CreationDate="2021-03-05T13:33:56.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such questions should be closed as soon as possible, at least in the short term.   It is academically dishonest under all student codes of conduct I know for a student to seek online help in solving exam questions so there is no reason not to act on questions identified as such - because the OP says so, or because there is some clear indication the question is in fact an exam question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most exams - unlike assignments - are expected to be done without help or consultation with &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt;.  We tolerate assignment questions where some conceptual issue is at stake, discourage complete answers to assignement questions and will delete such answers at least temporarily, and rightly do not tolerate obvious assignments questions (including &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10557/36194&quot;&gt;screenshotted questions&lt;/a&gt;).  All of this should apply &lt;em&gt;a fortiriori&lt;/em&gt; to exam questions, with measures for immediate action: one can always reopen the question later if there is a case for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13371/the-f-ma-competition-was-february-18th-2021&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as an example of situations where this can happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover I have to say that several colleagues of mine have had unfortunate experiences in this matter (though not on PSE). The administration then has to contact the site, get the question taken down (usually too late), get user info from the site, etc.  Most sites will gladly comply and take measure against the user for violating this or that policy.  It is not pleasant for any party involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T13:33:56.073" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13418" CreationDate="2021-03-08T08:29:40.823" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some months ago I asked a question entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/568674/&quot;&gt;The &amp;quot;Satellite Paradox&amp;quot;: Twin paradox in orbiting satellites&lt;/a&gt;, and a duplicate version entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/619323/&quot;&gt;Special Relativity in Free Fall&lt;/a&gt;  has recently appeared. I really cannot understand why my question is downvoted despite a clear and detailed explanation, whereas the duplicate version is very well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this show that there might be some contributors who have mistaken me for a crank or an enemy (due to my challenging questions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this show that if a question is narrowly voted down by a few people, then it is possible for it to be downvoted by many other contributors thoughtlessly without pondering enough over the content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127415" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T23:36:28.467" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T23:36:28.467" Title="A downvoted question vs. a very well-received duplicate version of the same question!" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13417" CreationDate="2021-03-08T09:01:33.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was  bit surprised to see your question had been so heavily downvoted. It's a perfectly good question and indeed serves as a good way to understand the intricacies surrounding time dilation. The fact it attracted six excellent answers suggests I am not alone in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't comment on the reasons why people downvoted, but I suspect they had misunderstood your question to be yet another attack on relativity using a version of the twin paradox. The comments suggest this might be the case. If so then that's unfair, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a subject you are interested in I've attempted to write a series of canonical questions explaining exactly what time dilation means and how it explains the twin paradox. The questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/241772/what-is-time-dilation-really&quot;&gt;What is time dilation really?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/242043/what-is-the-proper-way-to-explain-the-twin-paradox&quot;&gt;What is the proper way to explain the twin paradox?&lt;/a&gt;. I'm happy to discuss these &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;in the chat room&lt;/a&gt; if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T09:01:33.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13417" CreationDate="2021-03-08T09:15:07.363" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is always a random element to voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Votes not only refer to the raw &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of a question but also its presentation: How easy it is to read (due to formatting) and understand, how well it makes its argument. That two questions ask about the same phenomenon does not mean both of them are equally &amp;quot;good questions&amp;quot; in this sense, and your first consideration when reading another question that is better received than your own should be &amp;quot;What did this question do better?&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;This shows people vote me down because they don't like me&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, your question opens with &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I want to simply eliminate the effect of acceleration, which is the cornerstone in resolving the traditional twin paradox, through the following thought experiment&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - regardless of what follows, this really &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; as if you're trying to poke holes into relativity, not as if you're simply wondering about how relativity resolves the situation you're describing. Maybe that impression is accurate, maybe not, that's not the point here, but it is the impression I get upon reading. You might call it unfair that people would vote you down for that impression if the question itself is still legitimate, but we can't do anything about that, people are free to vote as they see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There was extensive discussion in comments to your question - long since moved to chat - where you made remarks like &amp;quot;Please upvote the OP's cleverness&amp;quot;, referring to yourself. While votes &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be for what's actually written in the question, it should come as no surprise that this is a site where humans interact and so grandstanding tends to attract negative attention more than it does positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T09:15:07.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13417" CreationDate="2021-03-09T04:07:04.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this show that there might be some contributors who have mistaken me for a crank...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own profile states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a dissident scientist, I could finally publish some articles against Einstein's relativity, showing that the theory is paradoxical, in some ordinary peer-reviewed journals. Some of these articles were rejected over 100 times by many mainstream journals from all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that in some members’ minds this self-identifies you as rejecting one of the foundations of mainstream physics, which is the only kind of physics that this site deals with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, you have written a paper, “Three Fundamental Questions Challenging Einstein's Relativity,” the abstract of which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article, after reviewing briefly the current circumstances of publishing dissenting articles that, say, suggest some rebuttals to relativity or quantum mechanics in (non-)mainstream media, calls into question Einstein's relativity theory accusing it of incompleteness and being ill-defined. It is demonstrated that the physical effects of acceleration have dramatically been overlooked by Einstein as he was extending the special theory to the general one so that such a deficiency gives rise to absurdities in both special and general relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot understand why some members are unclear on whether you are  attacking relativity, when you make it explicit that this is exactly what you are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask questions as if you are simply curious about relativity, but you make clear elsewhere that you consider it paradoxical, incomplete, ill-defined, and absurd. This means that your posts about so-called “paradoxes” have a hidden motive — to try to undermine mainstream physics — of which many (most?) members are completely unaware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is room in physics for dissidents — there are even entire journals and professional organizations devoted to dissident physics, as you well know — but Physics StackExchange is the wrong place to advance dissident views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I did not downvote either of the questions you mentioned. I looked back at your last 10 questions and found that I had downvoted only one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T05:42:07.650" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T05:42:07.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-09T17:40:52.037" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it a bad way to hint at the solution and, ask them to do what they understood and edit the original question to include their steps, and then they follow it up pointing out the mistakes and correcting them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking this question because two of my solutions got closed even though I was exactly following this pattern which I thought was right. I am not sure how else I am supposed to approach these questions, any suggestion is highly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291327" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-10T00:57:34.373" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T00:57:34.373" Title="How to Answer homework-like questions?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13422" CreationDate="2021-03-09T18:50:01.010" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking a look through your answers, the deleted ones are all answers to &lt;em&gt;bad questions&lt;/em&gt;. It’s not you, it’s them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you’re trying to decide &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; to answer a homework-like question, take a moment to think about how you can make your answer useful to &lt;em&gt;future readers&lt;/em&gt; who might have similar problems. Answers about the conceptual underpinnings of the problem usually can be molded into this kind of a shape. Answers consisting of a vague hint on the one end, or an algebra audit on the other, take much more skill to be useful to anyone other than the author of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T18:50:01.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13920" CreationDate="2021-03-09T23:05:40.973" Score="11" ViewCount="637" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have numerous questions on the site about the speed of light, and we have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speed-of-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speed-of-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speed-of-light&lt;/a&gt;  tag for them. However, since the end of October 2020, when the video &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/pTn6Ewhb27k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why The Speed Of Light* Can't Be Measured&lt;/a&gt; was posted by Veratasium on YouTube, we have had a constant stream of questions about the one-way speed of light. Currently, that video has 4,956,740 views so I guess it's not surprising that we're getting so many questions about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were already a few questions here on this topic, but now it seems that a large percentage of new questions about the speed of light are specifically about the one-way speed of light. There are currently 2,251 questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/speed-of-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;speed-of-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;speed-of-light&lt;/a&gt; tag, and 769 results in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bspeed-of-light%5D+one-way&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bspeed-of-light%5D+one-way&lt;/a&gt; list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be helpful if we had a tag specifically for this sub-topic. There have been some great questions and some excellent answers posted, with various useful links, but IMHO there really isn't much more that can be said on the topic that hasn't already been said here. A specific tag would make it easier for potential askers to find those existing questions, and for curators to quickly find suitable duplicate targets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yay! We now have a tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/one-way-speed-of-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;one-way-speed-of-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;one-way-speed-of-light&lt;/a&gt;. So now we need to create suitable &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/one-way-speed-of-light/info&quot;&gt;tag info&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; tag wiki entries...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2021-12-01T11:54:06.047" LastActivityDate="2021-12-01T11:54:06.047" Title="Should we have a one-way speed of light tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13410" CreationDate="2021-03-10T16:13:40.393" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will straight and give my opinion and tell I disagree with the Question being closed. (Note that I think the OP deleted parts of the original question because I cant find it anymore, or maybe I missed it out)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I had the same question when I was a child and so when I asked my science teacher in grade 6, she told me that our body is actually translucent. That of course was the incorrect answer which I soon realised when I got into grade 8, when the laws of reflection and all were thought. So I agree with your first bulletin that it was sort of a conceptual question and deserved to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You also talked about the importance of keeping homework questions off the site as it is useless for future visitors, especially if it involves numerical (especially numerical). I agree, but this specific question definitely shouldn't be counted as &amp;quot;not really useful for future visitors&amp;quot; because a lot of viewers of the question had the same misconception as my teacher did. So I think despite it being possibly an HW question, it still does not qualify for the original reason that this site agreed to keep away HW question, which was so that we shouldn't be providing answers to separate, separate problems as it is of very little use to anyone besides the OP&#xA;(Unrelated to what you asked, but his questions shouldn't also be considered lazy as he seemed to been all across the internet to find the answer for a somewhat fundamental question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I got as an opinion, most of which I only developed from Micheal asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="266713" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T16:13:40.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13427" CreationDate="2021-03-13T20:59:41.860" Score="-2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to change the title of this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/32422/134583&quot;&gt;QM without complex numbers&lt;/a&gt;, to &amp;quot;Quantum mechanics without complex numbers&amp;quot; which I think is more descriptive (I mean the definition of QM might be obvious to most people here, but titles in publications and StackExchange questions look better or at least more professional if things like this are spelled out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this question (closed immediately as a duplicate) from fewer than 3 months ago caused it to be impossible for me to make that edit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/604150/134583&quot;&gt;Quantum Mechanics without Complex Numbers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we make the original question (with 100+ upvotes) have the more descriptive title and change the &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; version's title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T11:49:59.323" Title="Shall we switch the titles of these two questions that are duplicates of each other?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13426" CreationDate="2021-03-13T22:00:36.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent duplicate question looks like a candidate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;the roomba&lt;/a&gt;, so it may not present an obstacle for much longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T22:00:36.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13426" CreationDate="2021-03-14T11:49:59.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leave it as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or swap it. But I don't see a benefit in that, so I'd say it is better to leave it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, having duplicates serves exactly the purpose of directing people searching for the same problem in different formulations (which includes different titles) to the same set of answers. This purpose is served here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the purpose of duplicates is primarily to redirect people &lt;em&gt;searching&lt;/em&gt; for sth. to the right answer. It is not clear to me whether people are more likely to use &amp;quot;quantum mechanics&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;QM&amp;quot;. (Just look around: People are lazy to spell out things and use abbreviations all around. I agree that using less abbreviations would be better (in particular those which are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; easily understood to non-native speaker like &amp;quot;SHM&amp;quot;, I still stuble across that one, and it took me long to figure it out!). But it might well be that people are more likely to use &amp;quot;QM&amp;quot; - would be interesting to find out, maybe SEDE can be used for that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I think the new duplicate question is more valuable than the original question: With this, I don't mean the quality of the question as such (the two questions are aligned rather differently), but what one learns from reading the question. From reading the first question, I don't learn much, except that this might be an interesting question. From the new question, I learn how to express complex numbers as 2x2 matrices, which is valuable, and as far as I can see not explained in any detail in any of the answers. Thus, I think it would in fact be &lt;em&gt;beneficial&lt;/em&gt; if some people end up at the duplicate question first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, looking at the side bar it seems that this question has &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of duplicates, some using QM and some quantum mechanics. So the very fact that the title has QM or quantum mechanics will likely not be enough to redirect people to any of those questions - there's enough different ways to phrase the very same question in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T11:49:59.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-14T16:36:50.200" Score="-8" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite often I spend a lot of time and effort to put together an answer to possibly not-so-robust questions (lacking details or an unclear question) only to be closed before I can submit. It is &lt;em&gt;extememely&lt;/em&gt; frustrating because others have decided the question is beyond salvage or not worthy of answers when &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of us are making an honest effort to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall I think the closing mechanism is used way too aggressively in this site as opposed to downvotes for not ideal questions. Maybe I am guilty too sometimes, looking at a question and thinking &amp;quot;well nobody could possibly answer this question as posed, or it is too trivial or it isn't a question, etc&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would like to propose to put a lock on closing a question until answers have been submitted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a 3day time limit before the closing happens, or if the server knowns when someone is typing (more than X number of characters) to flag the people voting to close that the question is being actively answered right now and postpone the voting process for after all the answers have been submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have resorted to submitting a placeholder answer, deleting it, authoring my answer, and then undeleting it. But this is an abuse of the system. And yes, answers have been accepted after closed and people have been helped if answers are submitted before the closing &amp;quot;axe&amp;quot; comes down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T17:34:28.797" LastActivityDate="2024-03-12T00:45:56.733" Title="Flag questions that are actively being answered when voted for closure and postponing the closing until submission" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|answers|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13429" CreationDate="2021-03-14T17:00:20.993" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A large part of the purpose of closing questions is preventing them from being answered. We close questions that we do not wish to encourage on our site, and receiving answers encourages people to ask more questions of the same kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if we waited to close every homework-like question until someone had given away the solution in an answer, then there would be little point in closing them at all - those just interested in getting an answer to submit on their assignment would get &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what they wanted, and we wouldn't deter them at all from asking further such questions. If we only closed questions asking us to review non-mainstream nonsense until after people had debated with the asker for days, then again where's the point in closing the question after that? That just invites people to ask a string of poor questions that at least one person is interested in answering, rather than inviting them to ask questions that are actually useful and interesting to a larger class of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to argue that we close certain types of questions that in your opinion should be welcomed here instead, you should do &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. But trying to sidestep the discussion about what should be on-topic and what not by effectively removing most of the purpose from the closing mechanism so that anything goes is not something I think we should consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T17:00:20.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13429" CreationDate="2021-03-14T17:33:33.047" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is happening to you &lt;em&gt;frequently&lt;/em&gt;, then the problem is that you have different idea of what kinds of questions are on-topic than (some of) the people who are reviewing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;close-vote queue&lt;/a&gt;. That’s a totally normal and okay difference of opinion.  The way to deal with the conflict is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; employ or develop some technical countermeasure so that you can post answers to closed questions. Instead, vote to reopen the question, or lobby on Meta that its closure was unreasonable, so that the community’s consensus can evolve to include more influence from your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since StackExchange posts are submitted as plain text, you have lots of options for saving a draft of an answer in some other text-editing tool, to be pasted into the answer box when your question is reopened. I was recently reminded of the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/389/44126&quot;&gt;the Meta “sandbox”&lt;/a&gt; for users who want to make test edits using the online editor and its preview system.&#xA;A commenter also mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackedit.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://stackedit.io&lt;/a&gt;, an independent website which is intentionally designed for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have resorted to submitting a placeholder answer, deleting it, authoring my answer, and then undeleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/343/1&quot;&gt;extremely distant past&lt;/a&gt;, there was moderator advice about making “placeholder answers” which could be edited into proper shape even if the question was closed.  However, the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of that advice was that the “placeholder answer” would answer the question &lt;em&gt;from the outset&lt;/em&gt;, even if the initial answer was incomplete. A number of users have interpreted that advice as license to make a content-free “stub” of an answer under an off-topic question, which they can edit into a complete answer and undelete even if the question is closed.  Other users who notice new, complete answers to off-topic questions appearing long after the questions are closed tend to agree with you: it’s an abuse of the system.  Don’t do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to publish an answer to a closed question, and the best way to help the authors of closed questions that deserve answers, is to convince the community that the question is on-topic, and get it re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2024-03-12T00:45:56.733" LastActivityDate="2024-03-12T00:45:56.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13429" CreationDate="2021-03-15T07:00:54.073" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathise because I have had this happen to me. In the past I have seen a homework question and thought that even though it was homework there was a nice conceptual discussion to be had. Then as I'm nearing the end of an answer explaining the concepts the question gets closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens then consider posting your own version of the question, but making clear it's about concepts not just homework. Then post the answer you've been working on. For example I did this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136056/how-does-the-hubble-parameter-change-with-the-age-of-the-universe&quot;&gt;How does the Hubble parameter change with the age of the universe?&lt;/a&gt; If you feel your answer makes a genuinely useful contribution then it's work keeping, but think long and hard about whether it is genuinely useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T07:00:54.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13429" CreationDate="2021-03-15T20:38:32.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is gathering close votes, but you believe that it's worthy of being answered, then you can assist the OP in salvaging it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't just close questions because they are bad, or because they're duplicates. We close potentially good questions that need further work &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; to prevent answers from being posted prematurely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question is too vague or unfocused, many answerers have a tendency to try to guess what the OP's real question is. So we can end up with a set of answers that are answering slightly different questions. This can be confusing to the OP, and to future readers. And if the OP &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; clarify or focus the question, they may invalidate some of those answers. I wrote about that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13369/123208&quot;&gt;this answer from last month&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's better if we can get those borderline questions into shape &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the answers start rolling in. However, I must admit that many OPs are likely to abandon their question once it's closed. They may even repost a duplicate or slightly modified version; the wording of the post closure notice (which was changed a year or so ago) can be interpreted as actually encouraging that undesirable behaviour. (FWIW, there have been various complaints about that wording on several meta sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T20:38:32.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13436" CreationDate="2021-03-18T15:12:09.210" Score="10" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;After answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/622042/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/622042/trace-of-4-gamma-matrices#comment1400310_622042&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; comment that says pretty much the same thing I said. Should I delete my answer because the comment was posted first? Should the commentator have written the comment as an answer instead?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Personally, I think that if a statement answer the question, even if it's just a few words long, it should be posted as an answer and not as a comment, but I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T15:38:30.453" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T10:10:29.060" Title="Why is an answer sometimes given in the comments?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comments|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2021-03-18T15:41:09.210" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that if a statement answer the question, even if it's just a few words long, it should be posted as an answer and not as a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the commentator have written the comment as an answer instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they should have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I delete my answer because the comment was posted first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you shouldn't. One common option, for the sake of politeness, is to preface your answer with &amp;quot;As was mentioned [by X user] in the comments...&amp;quot;, but it's not even strictly necessary. Answers shouldn't be given in the comments. If you don't want your comments to be repeated by someone else as an answer, post it as an actual answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T15:41:09.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2021-03-18T16:08:00.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments should only be used to ask for clarifying questions from the OP or to suggest improvements to the question. Comments referring to further/related information are usually fine also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments should not be used to answer questions, give hints, side remarks, etc. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, so having posts loaded with comments doesn't make the finding answers to questions very clear. We don't want users digging through comments to find answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many users operate under the routine of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF &amp;quot;Is what I want to say a sufficient answer?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True: Post an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;False: Post a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not how to view comments. There should actually be two routines going on (that users often conflate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF &amp;quot;Is what I want to say asking the OP for clarification or suggesting improvements the OP can make to the post?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True: Post a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;False: Do not post a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF &amp;quot;Is what I want to say a sufficient answer?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True: Post an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;False: Either work up a sufficient answer and then post an answer, or do not post as an answer or as a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T11:43:30.810" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T11:43:30.810" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-18T19:10:36.577" Score="3" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to get into a long &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?as_q=definition&amp;amp;as_epq=to+and+fro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to and fro&lt;/a&gt; discussion in the comments, with the user asking the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not okay, then where can we discuss? I have seen some comment threads are imported into chatrooms by moderators. Is that something only moderators can do? Or can we create our own chatrooms to discuss one-on-one with the OP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269418" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T12:53:12.287" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T12:53:12.287" Title="Is it okay to get into a long to and fro discussion in the comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13438" CreationDate="2021-03-18T20:14:00.360" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments aren't a good medium for back-and-forth; that's that chat is for.  There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt; which is useful to re-read once a year or so.  The privileges of &lt;a href=&quot;/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;talking in chat&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/help/privileges/chat-rooms&quot;&gt;creating chat rooms&lt;/a&gt; come pretty early in the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you leave a comment with the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Let us continue this discussion in [chat]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then the &lt;a href=&quot;/editing-help#comment-formatting&quot;&gt;special comment markdown&lt;/a&gt; will make &lt;code&gt;[chat]&lt;/code&gt; a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71&quot;&gt;the main Physics chat room&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11090/44126&quot;&gt;Some guidance&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have enough comment back-and-forth on a particular post, the comment box develops a highlight that suggests, with a link, moving your discussion to a chat room. That chat room starts with a link to the parent post and is populated with the previous comments. Users who don’t have the “talk in chat” privilege yet can participate in the conversation anyway, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/257949/1650379&quot;&gt;apparently moderator intervention&lt;/a&gt; is required; raise a custom flag on the post and explain what’s happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diamond moderators can create such a post-associated room any time, but we can only migrate the comments once.  This happens most frequently when we get an automated flag that a post has accumulated lots of comments in a short time.  Sometimes a user will manually flag a comment thread that needs attention before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, while chat is a better tool for real-time back-and-forth than comments, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/295855/280545&quot;&gt;chat pings&lt;/a&gt; to make chat asynchronous as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T22:26:49.483" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T22:26:49.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2021-03-19T19:41:07.800" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you believe that a comment is an attempt at an answer or a real answer, flag it for moderator attention and say something like &amp;quot;This is an answer posted as a comment.&amp;quot; The mods are pretty quick to review that flag and either delete or leave the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some situations, especially for new users commenting, you could also leave a comment for them that answers should not be put in comments.  You can go back later and delete your own comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T19:41:07.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2021-03-20T11:27:41.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is an answer sometimes given in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find myself sometimes commenting because I feel like my answer is incomplete or only partially correct. Though I agree with the other answers here that comments should not be used for answering and only to ask for clarification, providing relevant links etc and I try to avoid posting answer-like comments - often, they can be transformed into a &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; answer with some more research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though I don't know if I can speak for users other than myself, the reason comments are being &amp;quot;abused&amp;quot; for answers could be that it is sometimes not clear whether the comment &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; is an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I actually was close to posting this as a comment...)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T11:27:41.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-20T13:13:43.837" Score="-3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;What kind of criteria would make a speculative question of sorts a well-founded question? A possible rough draft would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly display some honest work on the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question overlapping carefully enough with mainstream science&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question having loose ends (thereby the &amp;quot;speculative&amp;quot; feature)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not &amp;quot;review-my-equations&amp;quot; kind of question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Stylistic) Narcissistic attitudes are off the table&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some rationale for these points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R1) It mustn't be in the way of: &amp;quot;Here's a vague idea, can you help me fill in the details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R2) Relation to previous working theories should be easily traced back&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R3) It mustn't be a finished idea. If it's finished, it belongs in the peer-review system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R4) Nobody's here to track down your sign mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R5) Nobody's here to admire how clever you are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263785" LastEditorUserId="263785" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T00:12:23.857" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T04:42:59.520" Title="What Limiting Standards should be applied to a Speculative Idea?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13442" CreationDate="2021-03-20T13:23:10.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/13442/1&quot;&gt;V1&lt;/a&gt; of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The largest issue might be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question being open-ended&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a Q&amp;amp;A site, with the goal being the each question has a well-defined answer that can be accepted. An open-ended question means that there could be multiple &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;not incorrect&amp;quot; answers without there ever being a unique, correct answer. Furthermore, there could end up being serious debate on whether one post fully answers the given question, and thus the post becomes more of just a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PSE is not the site to hash out speculative ideas, even if they based on ideas that are well-founded in current science and have the potential to spark interesting and beneficial discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T04:42:59.520" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T04:42:59.520" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13442" CreationDate="2021-03-20T17:29:23.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limiting standard is in part already there: if it's non-mainstream it should be closed.  This is not a discussion forum so speculative questions have limited value unless they are grounded in solid physics and can be answered using physics principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it is speculative and out of place to ask if one could increase the density of angels on a headpin by placing angels in compactified dimensions: this kind of question should be closed immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We must keep in mind that one objective of site is to have value to the community at large and beyond simply the answer of a specific user on a specific question which might have limited interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T18:35:42.530" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T18:35:42.530" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13446" CreationDate="2021-03-21T20:44:18.510" Score="-10" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that a user after just a few minutes that I have been logged on Physics.SE contextually receives a negative vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that a user who has a high number of reputation can have the privilege to spy also the users when are they just connected?? After a few minutes that I switched from TeX.SE. to Physics.SE I have received another downvote, almost immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140404" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T20:56:28.610" Title="Temporal coincidences of negative votes" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13445" CreationDate="2021-03-21T20:56:28.610" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't entirely follow what you're concerned about here with respect to downvotes, but everyone can see on your profile when you last took an action on the site (subject to caching, this time is only accurate to within a few minutes): &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RxZIm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RxZIm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that there is nothing other users could see of your activity - unless of course you do something visible like write a comment or post a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T20:56:28.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-22T13:32:57.720" Score="5" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be quite a lot of questions that demand for textbook answers. These are technically not homework questions - i.e., they are not asking for solutions to problems - but grounded in not having read the relevant chapter of a textbook. They are not necessarily trivial either - i.e., they may concern some advanced but still textbook topics, and often it is the material that the OP might have not studied yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My approach is to indicate in the comments where it can be looked up, and to propose closure of the question as a homework level. However, I would appreciate the opinions of the community on this subject (probably this has already been discussed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Let me propose a definition of a textbook question: it is a one that can be answered by reproducing &lt;em&gt;verbatim&lt;/em&gt; a sentence/paragraph/chapter from a textbook. (Assuming that it is a frequently used textbook or that there are many textbooks on the subject.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me also note that many of us here have spent years studying, reading textbooks, thinking them over, doing homeworks, carrying out research and so on. While not everyone has equal ability, we do expect that people asking questions are making effort to learn things, rather than looking for a speedier way of obtaining knowledge: e.g., by typing a question on the phone instead of paging through a textbook or going to a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastEditorUserId="247642" LastEditDate="2021-03-31T16:15:39.920" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T16:15:39.920" Title="Textbook questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13447" CreationDate="2021-03-22T15:44:11.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://media.giphy.com/media/GrUhLU9q3nyRG/giphy.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Back in the day&lt;/a&gt; we used to close this type of questions with a custom close reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am voting to close this question as off-topic because it shows insufficient prior research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5778/84967&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;the stats&lt;/a&gt; and it seems we haven't been using this anymore, I wonder what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyway, that is always a valid close reason (if four more users agree, obvs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T15:44:11.707" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-23T17:50:01.307" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/622976/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/622976/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed and I was directed to this meta thread by a comment: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13449/&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13449/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is very simple: Should I try to edit this question so it's appropriate for this site in line with the rules, or should I not post this question again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still have a question, but I feel very unwelcome in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you prefer that I never post on this site ever again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the preference of the community is to exclude me entirely, I will never post on this site ever again for the rest of my life.  If the preference is to include me, then why should I bother enduring what I consider to be toxic abuse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a real question and genuinely would like to request help with my research from this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I opened this meta-discussion because I thought this was the right place to find out if I am welcome here or not.  I don't feel welcome, I feel like you want me to go away.  Is meta not an appropriate place to ask this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to face abuse and name calling if it means my question will be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I phrase my question so that my personality is not the main topic of discussion and I don't keep creating work for the mods to close my questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user442" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T21:43:43.693" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:43:43.693" Title="Should I re-ask a question that was recently closed by editing it and removing meta-comments?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13451" CreationDate="2021-03-23T18:22:35.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Name-calling or other abusive behaviour is not something we want to see on our site. Users are expected to be reasonably &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;nice&lt;/a&gt; even to people they disagree with or find annoying. If you see abuse (directed at you or others), please use the flagging system to alert the moderators of it. It is not something any user should feel required to tolerate. Please also do not respond in kind if you feel wronged - just flag and disengage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question was closed, you are of course free to try and post a better version of it. In order to create a version that will not be closed, you need to understand what was actually the problem with the first version. Questions are usually closed by five users with more than 3k reputation voting to close it, and sometimes by moderator vote. Even if you have experienced unwelcoming behaviour in the comments, it is very unlikely the reason for closure was your &amp;quot;personality&amp;quot;. Even if we get the occasional personal grudges, most users interact with posts based on their &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt;, not on who posted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the particular question you ask about: It is extremely hard to understand what your actual question is, and whether it is actually about physics. It starts with three lengthy sections (DISCLAIMER, WHAT I TRIED, REQUEST) before what seems to be the actual question starts, and nowhere does it seem to use any actual concepts of mainstream physics. Additionally, the UPPERCASE formatting is unusual and perceived by many users as the equivalent of shouting - emphasis is usually expressed via &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;boldface&lt;/strong&gt; around here. A total vote of -10 and it getting deleted also show the question isn't just a little bit unclear - there is broad consensus that it is neither clear nor useful, and the delete voters apparently consider it unsalvagable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be free of commentary irrelevant to the question (in this case, e.g. your experience on math.SE, or what color theme you use in your text editor) and they should focus on a clear, reasonably objective question about mainstream physics. If you think you can do that with your question, then you should post a new question that does that. If not, then not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T18:22:35.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-23T21:18:35.260" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, find a screenshot of my PhysSE homepage. Is there any explanation why that question would appear semi-visible? &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XYC43.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XYC43.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T21:44:51.380" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:44:51.380" Title="Question appearing blurred (less visible). Any explanation?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2021-03-23T21:34:03.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us not exclude this explanation (quote from one of the links):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments cannot be downvoted. For unclear questions, if the question&#xA;is clarified or other people interpret the question differently then&#xA;people might downvote an answer that does not answer their&#xA;interpretation of the question. Also someone may be afraid of losing&#xA;rep from an answer that may not be what people want to hear if the&#xA;truth is unpopular or politically incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it may happen that people are unsure if the reply they wish to offer is exactly a) what the person asking the Q wants to receive, b) the rest of the users want to see as an answer, so they leave (a short) version of the intended text as a comment (comments do not get downvotes, nor affect the reputation/respondent's self-esteem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:34:03.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13456" CreationDate="2021-03-24T17:59:19.730" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/623492/&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question received hot attention initially. Then it was closed. I and others didn't agree and voted to reopen. And so it was. Then, again, the question was closed. I wanted to reopen it, but couldn't. I think the ones who closed it could close it again. Luckily the question was reopened, and so it is now. But why can't I vote to reopen again? Is this a privilege for moderators only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T16:15:44.263" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T16:15:44.263" Title="Why can't I vote two times to reopen a question?" Tags="|support|questions|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13455" CreationDate="2021-03-24T18:09:32.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions can go through multiple close and reopen cycles, but each individual user may cast at most one close and one reopen vote per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A restriction like this makes it harder for a small group of persistent voters to override the community's intent on a controversial question, by persistently re-opening a bad question or persistently re-closing a good one.  Note that on &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-controversial questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close votes age away harmlessly if the threshold is not reached after a number of days. If the question has at least 100 views, close votes will age away after 4 days; otherwise close votes will age away after 14 days. Each new close vote resets the timer, so all close votes must be at least 4 or 14 days old respectively before aging occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability to re-cast an aged-away close vote &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/250223/280545&quot;&gt;may be newer than that part of the documentation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T18:38:07.593" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T18:38:07.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T20:48:24.880" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions asking for what the current research topics in a certain field allowed? Under what circumstance would they be? In case they are allowed, after how much time would it be allowed to ask the same question again, perhaps after a big discovery? Regarding this last point, while it's true that new answers could always be posted, it could also happen that the question stays buried unupdated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The reasons I think questions of this kind could be useful are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Undergraduate and Graduate students having to decide wich path to chose could use a clear explanation of some of the active research topics. Furthermore, they may not be used or don't have enough knowledge to understand what those topics are just by reading scientific journals. As Jon Custer noted in the comments, conferences may be an alternative, but it really depends on what you university actually offers and one could be interested in looking for something else anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While it's true that the answer changes with time, I think at any given time these questions could be answered. Of course, the answer is not unique, but so are answers to questions about references and those are allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="267387" LastEditorUserId="195139" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T22:27:31.403" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T04:25:45.653" Title="&quot;State of research&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13457" CreationDate="2021-03-25T04:25:45.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consolidating some ideas expressed in the comments here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a Q&amp;amp;A site. We want questions that have a single, definitive answer that will not change in time rather than open-ended questions that might need to be updated in the future. &amp;quot;What are the current research problems in ...&amp;quot; is too broad of a question; there could be many answers that gave correct content, yet none of the answers could be definitely marked as &amp;quot;the answer&amp;quot; to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons I think questions of this kind could be useful are...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common misunderstanding about the site. The usefulness of a question does not determine if it fits into the Stack Exchange model or policies of PSE. Additionally, just because a question isn't suited for PSE does not mean it isn't useful (or a good question, relevant to physics, interesting, fun, helpful to others, challenging, etc.).&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; I agree it would be extremely useful for people to learn more about the frontiers of a certain physics field. However, PSE is just not the right place for that.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{**}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;e.g. full homework solutions to various exercises cold be helpful to many struggling students, but PSE does not want to be a homework-help site, so we do not allow posting and solutions of homework-like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{**}$&lt;/span&gt;Just like how I love tutoring and helpingb students learn physics through worked examples, but PSE is not the place for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T04:25:45.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T19:22:19.557" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across this (admittedly, pretty old) question on Mathematics Meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/24891/&quot;&gt;Do we want community polls?&lt;/a&gt; In summary&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, it is proposed to have a meta post to find out information about the site's users. Such polls have been conducted on sites such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1564/tex-community-polls&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1310/mathematica-community-polls&quot;&gt;Mathematica&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/467/academia-community-polls&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a poll be in the interest of this site's community? Possible questions could address the community (nations, background (students, physics proffessionals etc.)), usage of this site or interests in physics. Though these are just suggestions (which are similar to those on the Math.SE post) and I would encourage everyone to add their own, should we decide to actually do this poll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the linked sites, the poll was a meta question/community wiki where the answers actually were the questions (the question body was used to lay out rules and some information). One would then comment an answer to the respective &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; (answer) or upvote an existing comment (instead of posting the same comment again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I encourage you to read the linked Math.SE question since most of the suggestions there would also apply to Physics SE (I think).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; However, I could not find any such poll on Mathematics, which suggests that it wasn't conducted, even though the response was mostly positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorUserId="253179" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T19:49:49.997" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T19:49:49.997" Title="Community polls on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T20:09:57.823" Score="40" ViewCount="1437" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/623492/how-do-i-find-the-approximate-surface-area-of-a-chicken&quot;&gt;How do I find the approximate surface area of a chicken?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;underwent a severe close/reopen yo-yo cycle. It was closed once by a moderator, then reopened by community members, then re-closed by community members, then re-opened again, and then re-closed by community vote again (as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/512834/how-do-i-experimentally-measure-the-surface-area-of-a-rock&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt;), and then deleted and subsequently undeleted by community vote. As such, it is clear that there is not a working consensus about this, and we should hash it out on meta before this continues to oscillate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this question on-topic for this site? If yes, why? If not, why not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's form a consensus here and then implement that on the thread itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T18:38:51.303" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T18:51:09.607" Title="Folks, we need to talk about the surface-area-of-a-chicken question" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-25T20:09:57.823" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on it: &lt;strong&gt;No, this question is nowhere &lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt; on-topic. It is simply not about physics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it's a &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt; question, and that this can make it attractive to some people. But we don't set the site scope depending on whether questions are fun or not &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; the site scope is physics, and questions are judged against that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the fact of the matter is, there is no physics here. At best, there is a practical-mathematics aspect, but there is really no physics involved. &lt;strong&gt;For the people who have voted to reopen: can you explain, in clear and succinct language, how the content of the question is about physics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the fun part, I don't think it's &lt;em&gt;deadly&lt;/em&gt; to the post, but it's harmful for the site. (Keep in mind, in Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/&quot;&gt;we hate fun&lt;/a&gt;.) This thread is what has been termed a &amp;quot;junk-food question&amp;quot; on this meta in the past: it's tasty, sure, but it's bad for the site. It invites a continued stream of activity, which feeds on the fact that the question is ill-defined and as such there is no way to select a unique answer at all (or even to go &amp;quot;oh, there's ten answers already, that probably means that mine would be superfluous). And this activity pushes other, valid, fresher questions out of the front page and the top of search listings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T20:17:43.973" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T20:17:43.973" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13470" CreationDate="2021-03-25T21:01:52.147" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of questions on this site that start with a fun, sometimes ironic context. Here are some more recent examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/623492/&quot;&gt;How do I find the approximate surface area of a chicken?&lt;/a&gt; (meta discussion on this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13460/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working on building a chicken army and I'm trying to find out how much metal or kevlar (still deciding) I need to make armor for the chickens. this measurement does not need to be exact I'm just trying to get an estimate for how much I will need. You will be spared when my chickens take over the world if you give me a working answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/619081/&quot;&gt;I need a kilogram of neutrinos. What are my problems?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am a benevolent genius that figured out that if only I had a kilo of neutrinos in a bottle, I could solve some long standing problems (climate change, rockets landing upright, world peace, the usual). What are my problems?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions be encouraged/discouraged? Should questions on Physics SE only contain the actual information that is needed and avoid such introductions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorUserId="253179" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T20:10:31.650" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T03:10:21.747" Title="Should &quot;fun questions&quot; be considered on- or off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2021-03-25T21:05:53.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my opinion on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that it is not a problem to start with some fun context. It can spark interest in the reader and encourage them to read the complete post or answer it. However, I think that the &amp;quot;fun context&amp;quot; should be clearly separated from the actual question (which should of course be about physics) and should not distract from it. There should be no ambiguity about what is the question and what is just the fun part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T21:05:53.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-25T21:23:38.903" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Move to Worldbuilding ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest it is more suited to Worldbuilding SE than Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no real physics concept here.  It's just how do I approximate a surface area of a complex object.  This (as someone commented on) is Spherical Cow territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question itself related to armor for an army of chickens.  I think it would be on topic there.  Now that might generate some interesting answers on WB SE, where there is a more creative approach to questions and a broader interpretation of how answers can &amp;quot;spread their wings&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this would see a situation to move the question to WB SE and see how the folks there react.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T21:23:38.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-25T22:13:31.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13461/179151&quot;&gt;Emilio's answer&lt;/a&gt;, but I wanted to draw attention to it. Especially because &lt;strong&gt;the relevance to physics here is a red herring IMO&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I voted to close this question was because there is no definitive answer that can be accepted as the right answer (the OP could actually accept an answer, but that's not the point I'm making here). To cite explicit policy, the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt; says to avoid questions &amp;quot;where every answer is equally valid&amp;quot;. There are multiple unique methods outlined in the answers that are all (for the most part?) technically correct, but nothing other than the subjective decision of the OP to say whether one answer should be accepted over the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to all of the arguments about the question staying open because of its topic, that is (usually) an invalid argument. Site policy says nothing about this (other than that broad necessary condition that the post be about physics). One should not based close/open votes on &amp;quot;a question about X should/shouldn't be allowed&amp;quot;; that's not how it works (or at least should work). I'm sure one could make a really good post about chickens that is about physics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; follows site policy. One can also make a crappy post that is rooted in correct and interesting particle physics. Questions are  not, and should not, be closed or opened based on their topic unless they are unambiguously not about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I think either side has a good argument about why the question is/isn't about physics, so I think arguing that point further is pointless. The post has other policy issues, one of which I outline above, that are much easier to see and objectively discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T12:16:05.960" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T12:16:05.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T23:50:10.967" Score="-7" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the PSE main site (so not on this site), I normally never downvote a question or answer, but sometimes you change your thought about this (after upvoting). Is it okay to edit (when I wanted to downvote, the message was sent to me that I could do this only after editing the answer) just for the purpose of downvoting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="98822" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T11:09:19.103" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T11:09:19.103" Title="Is it okay to edit a question (on the main site) to downvote it after you initially upvoted it?" Tags="|discussion|editing|down-votes|best-practices|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2021-03-25T23:52:03.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the fun context contains a genuine and interesting question about Physics, I do not see any reason for considering off-topics.&#xA;Of course, people should not abuse this style and one has to consider that what may sound funny, in some cases, could be considered offensive for someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am more concerned by the proposal to close such questions for reasons that sound even funnier than the context itself (the first one should be considered an engineering problem, and confining &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1~kg$&lt;/span&gt; of existing &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; neutrinos should be a non-mainstream physics problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come on, good physicists have always enjoyed some humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T23:52:03.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13466" CreationDate="2021-03-26T00:17:56.483" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please use edits to substantially improve the posts they are attached to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not use trivial edits as backdoors to enable site features that are inaccessible to you for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T00:17:56.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T00:26:49.073" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: &lt;strong&gt;I did not&lt;/strong&gt; give closing or reopening votes for the surface area of the chicken question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say that this is one of the few times I completely disagree with Emilio Pisanty's opinion, usually so wise and equilibrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's forget the funny context the question has been asked. The real problem is how to estimate the surface area of the irregular body of a physical object. Why on the earth this is not a problem of physics? I think that everybody knows that questions like &amp;quot;what kind of geometry is the most suitable to describe the physical world&amp;quot; are considered genuine questions of physics at least since the time Gauss tried to measure the sum of the inner angles of a triangle characterized by the positions of the tops of three mountains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently, identification through measurements of the fractal character of a few physical structures has been considered well inside the perimeter of physics. And in many cases, computer simulation in condensed matter faces the problem of estimating, at the molecular level, the surface area of confining walls. Again a problem tackled as a typical physical problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, reasonable arguments against this question should motivate why the problem should not be considered a problem with an answer based on physics. Just saying that ideal surfaces and theory of measurement are mathematical topics is not enough. A real chicken does not live in a Hilbert space and does not eat accumulation points :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the argument raised by BioPhysicist seems to be quite weak. Why there should not be a definitive answer? However, his point of view opens a different, more fundamental question: how many questions in physics do have an unambiguous definite answer? It is a big question, but for the purpose of the present discussion, I would say that if we use this argument for the present question, we should close hundreds of existing Q&amp;amp;A on PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After exchanging a few comments, I think I should update my answer, at least to clarify my point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer above was mainly focused on the original claim at the beginning of Emilio's answer stressing that the question was not on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, I did not give a vote on this question. Let me add that I see some elements of weakness in the way it was formulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my criticisms of the question are based on reasons different from Emilio's concern about its being not about physics. The only real problem with this question is that the requested level of accuracy for the surface area estimate was not clearly indicated. This is probably a signal that, independently on the way the question was formulated, the author was not really interested in having a serious answer. In this respect, I would tend to agree with BioPhysicist's point of view that relevance to physics is a red herring, although the reason I would give for closing would be completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if some positive conclusion could come from this exchange of point of views, I think it has made explicit a broad range of opinions about the way to apply site policy. In my opinion this should be taken as a signal either that site policy should be stated more clearly, or (not an exclusive or) that this site policy should be better adapted to the present community. But this is something which should deserve a specific discussion, without distractions like the misterious reason one would need to build an armor for chicken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="183259" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T17:36:34.193" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T17:36:34.193" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2021-03-26T04:39:25.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fun&amp;quot; is subjective. As long as the question follows the site policies then it should stay on the site. If it doesn't follow site policy it should be closed. It doesn't matter what else you think about the question. Therefore &amp;quot;fun&amp;quot; questions can be either on-topic or off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &amp;quot;being about physics&amp;quot; is not a sufficient condition for a question to be on-topic. So saying &amp;quot;fun questions are fine as long as they also focus on the physics&amp;quot; is missing some other points about site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T04:39:25.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-26T10:22:34.723" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are interested in another users content (maybe he/she's a professor or you have a lot in common) and you want to keep updated with their questions/answers/content, how do you follow others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="266713" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T10:33:55.773" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T10:33:55.773" Title="Can you follow other users?" Tags="|support|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-03-26T10:28:07.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T11:04:38.603" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose the question had asked “How do I find the approximate volume of an asteroid ?”. I doubt there would be any serious arguments for closing that question. If we are happy to accept a volume/asteroid question then why should we reject a surface area/chicken question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Estimating volume is on-topic for PSE but estimating surface area isn’t ?? But that would be absurd ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about asteroids are fine but questions about chickens are forbidden ??? But that would be even more absurd ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no single definitive answer ? True in both cases - but neither is it the case that “every answer is equally valid”. These are not subjective question. There may be multiple solutions (I can think of at least three for the asteroid question) but these solutions can be evaluated objectively along the dimensions of accuracy, cost, feasibility (“first build a large bath tub ...”) etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="148491" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T13:37:08.283" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T13:37:08.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T11:47:53.520" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why should measuring a surface area be different from measuring a cross-section area? This cross-section is what particle physicists are very interested in (more often the cross-section is said to be the probability that two particles will collide and react in a certain way). High-energy particle physics is considered even the crown of physics. A huge body of mathematics and theory is devoted to making a model (from which cross-sections can be calculated): the standard model, to be equated with a theory to measure the chickens' volume (with or without the chickens' head). Gigantic machines at CERN are built (to be compared with the equipment to measure the chickens' surface) to measure cross-sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T11:47:53.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T14:36:41.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I tend to agree with @GiorgioP that the question is technically about physics. My own answer has involved physics on two levels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Archimedes method for measuring volume&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scaling approach to relating volume and surface&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both clearly make a part of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Having said that, I however concede that the question is low-level and is rather about engineering. It was quite okay to have fun for a while, but keeping this question open indefinitely is clearly counterproductive and useless (I doubt that anyone would be searching Physics SE for an answer to exactly this or similar question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Btw&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Another issue that I would like to bring forward is the massive downvoting of the answers to this question. My own answer was upvoted 6 times and downvoted 7 times, and, from observing the question for some time, I have reasons to think that such massive number of downvotes applies not only to my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I do not think that the moderators could or should do anything about this, I think that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is inappropriate to downvote answers just because you do not like the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you think that the answer is problematic enough to downvote, please leave a comment explaining why you think so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T14:36:41.557" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T15:53:53.567" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue I take with the question is its nonsensical context (&amp;quot;building a chicken army to conquer the world&amp;quot;). If the question were just about &amp;quot;How do I measure the surface area of an irregular object, e.g. a chicken&amp;quot;, it would be fine. However, editing the question this way would make a lot of the answers look odd, since they are answers which in fact try to copy the nonsensical style of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for questions of this type, my feeling would be: If they can be edited in a way which makes them serious science questions (which is possible), and if this does not make the answers given look pointless (this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; given here), then this question - after editing - would be ok. (Note that and edit attempt of mine got rejected by an admin precisely because of that reason: It would render the answers pointless.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless we are willing to generally allow for questions with a nonsensical context (different discussion, certainly tricky, and not the general policy), I would deem the question in its present form - and answers which only make sense in the context of the present form of the question - off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a &amp;quot;minimal&amp;quot; action would be to edit the question to only contain the actual physical point, and delete answers which don't focus on the scientific aspect of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether an edited question is still off-topic as it is too broad is a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastEditorUserId="4888" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T18:45:27.770" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T18:45:27.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T21:51:45.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is imprecise in many respects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is one looking for an average area or for the area of individual chickens?  In my world there’s no chicken army so what other assumptions on the chicken should be made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How accurate need to be the estimate?  Would a typical spherical chicken work (seems like it to me!) or does one need to use an spheroid or ellipsoid chicken?  Will the armour cover the legs, the head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not exactly a match to the rock question since this question is not about measuring the average area of an large collection of rocks, but about a general method for individual rocks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I’m not sure what physics is to be learned from this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T21:57:09.840" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T21:57:09.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-27T11:18:55.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, the question is on-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Measuring the surface area of an object is either on-topic or it is not. It is absurd to suggest that measuring the surface area of a rock is on-topic, but measuring the surface area of a chicken is not. And it seems to be very well-established that the current duplicate target, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/512834/279176&quot;&gt;How do I experimentally measure the surface area of a rock?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on-topic. This is despite the fact that the rock question’s answers seem to contain less physics that then chicken question’s answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This opinion is based purely on the &lt;em&gt;actual question&lt;/em&gt;, and ignores the silly story. Surely the silly story can be edited out of the question, and corresponding silliness in the answers can be edited out as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;the question is ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a general assumption that this question is about determining the area of material required to cover the chicken. For example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/623492/how-do-i-find-the-approximate-surface-area-of-a-chicken#comment1403723_623492&quot;&gt;rob’s comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m voting to close this question because making clothes for animals is a solved problem that doesn’t really involve any physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not what the title says! It just says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I find the approximate surface area of a chicken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This area could be much larger, if we have a well-defined concept of the surface area of feathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rock question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/512935/279176&quot;&gt;has a similar problem&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task isn't well-defined. Do you include cracks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/512834/how-do-i-experimentally-measure-the-surface-area-of-a-rock#comment1236153_512834&quot;&gt;Myridium‘s comment on the rock question&lt;/a&gt; is better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers here are surprisingly terrible. It is a fact that surface area is not well defined. This isn't some pointless pedant statement, it has consequences. Measuring to one hundredth has no meaning behind it. The question cannot be reasonably answered without a specific application in mind, or to compare objects which you know have similar features down to the smallest scale. (e.g. two very similar rocks)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; questions should be closed as needing focus or clarity. But the rock question has not been closed, and I do not know why, so I do not know what should happen to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279176" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T11:18:55.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-27T17:58:35.420" Score="8" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already noticed a certain number of times that some questions have been closed based on the policy for &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; questions. Reading the rationale for that policy, I find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions rather than on facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I fully agree. However, I think that in some cases, this policy has been used in a too wide meaning. The last example is the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/623056&quot;&gt;How can I accurately state the uncertainty principle?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explicit question was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if there is a simple conceptual explanation that uses key concepts such as &amp;quot;observation,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;measurement,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;decoherence&amp;quot; accurately. For example, if I were a teacher, how could I state Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in a less mathematical, but conceptually rigorous way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that it is impossible to provide answers to this question not based on facts, references, or specific expertise, and I would say that all or most all the answers, including the mine, were not opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it is always possible to reopen a closed question, and I see that the process in progress for this question, I pose the more general problem of what I see as a too subjective use of the policy on &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; questions. There was already a question here in meta for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12675&quot;&gt;different question&lt;/a&gt;. Even in that case, I do not see a convincing argument for closing as &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot;, although I agree that the question had other weaknesses. But again, the problem I am raising is not the closure of such or such question but the application of this specific rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T03:51:56.187" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T16:38:22.450" Title="Why is it so difficult to apply the site policy consistently for opinion-based questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|close-reasons|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13478" CreationDate="2021-03-27T18:20:15.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a top level independent of the questions you linked to here, it's important to remember that applying site policies is done by humans, and humans aren't perfect at implementing things -- so there are always going to be examples where something is closed that maybe shouldn't be, or something didn't get closed that should be, and so on. It also tends to hinge on which group of people happens to see a particular question, because there's always a possibility that people refuse to implement a policy because they don't like it or whatever else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting a little more specific about the opinion-based policy, it can also be the case that our own knowledge or experience biases us to see something as an opinion or to not see it as an opinion. For example, a question that says &amp;quot;What is the best way to do X&amp;quot; may seem extremely obvious to me that there is only one answer with my background in computational combustion -- but somebody with a different background might see that there is no best way and so the question is opinion-based and I just don't have the background to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the specific question about HUP -- OP is asking for a less mathematical and more rigorous way to explain something if they were a teacher. This immediately poses a series of things that are unclear and/or opinion-based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Less mathematical relative to what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More rigorous compared to what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the background of the students being taught -- are they just learning about science in general, are they learning about QM in a general chemistry class, or are they at a PhD level class on QM and that's their research area?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last one is particularly challenging because it again comes to the background issue I described earlier. It's pretty well known in teaching circles that sometimes we teach lies to the students. Not because we want to mislead them, but because the important concept they need to know should be explained in a language they understand. If I'm teaching 15 year olds about chemistry, it's enough to say that electrons are kinda fuzzy around the nucleus and we can't possibly measure their exact position and velocity because anything we would do to measure it will change it. Do they need to know more than that? For 99% of the class, probably not because they won't go on to study QM, or physics, or chemistry, or maybe even science in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are elements to that question that are certainly opinion-based because OP gave vague metrics (less mathematical/more rigorous) without a definitive anchor, and because they are looking for the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; way to teach something to a group with an unknown background and unknown learning expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't know that I would have closed it as opinion-based. But I can see why some would. I can also see why some would want to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately it boils down to humans interpreting a policy and we all have different backgrounds/experiences/ideas/intentions and so it's hard to be 100% consistent in application. I haven't looked it up, but I would wager there's way more questions closed as opinion-based that are clearly opinion-based than there are ones that are marginal, and so the &amp;quot;difficulty&amp;quot; in applying it is really just confirmation-bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T18:20:15.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13478" CreationDate="2021-03-27T20:57:36.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my own experience, I VTC as opinion based if the question is asking something subjective, or has some element that users could disagree on and there is no correct position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can somewhat see it for this question in its current form, although it might be a little harsh. I'll still go through what might have happened. In this this particular example, we have the title&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I accurately state the uncertainty principle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if there is a simple conceptual explanation that uses key concepts such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it would be easy to a user to go an answer and say, &amp;quot;No, this is not accurate or simple.&amp;quot; There would be no way for either user to use facts or references to say whether or not a given answer is accurate or simple. It also gives the possibility of the OP saying &amp;quot;this is not as simple or accurate as I want&amp;quot; even though the content of a given answer is technically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for this policy being applied consistently across the site, but that's how I try to be consistent within my own voting at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T21:10:22.577" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T21:10:22.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-28T07:40:59.203" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading these exchanges about the (lack of) ability to follow other posters:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4052/automating-the-ability-to-follow-posters&quot;&gt;Automating the ability to &amp;quot;follow&amp;quot; posters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can follow posters, presumably like many others do, simply by checking their page once in a while so I don't absolutely need this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the reasons given for not allowing this feature is that SE is not a social network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This principle is clearly established and enforced in the way moderators manage interuser communication here. We are to be kind and welcoming, never have a temper nor make too many jokes. Emotion has little place here, except maybe for on-topic awe for some natural phenomena or genius physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the logic behind this and my conclusion is that this is basically creating a Wikipedia in a Q&amp;amp;A form, and we are not supposed to read side jokes or dirty talks inside articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, what is the point of having a page profile here? I am not asking about what I am supposed to enter in the description field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am asking, is how does that fit into SE not being a social network? Is not a directory and the ability to create a chat room with any user, the prototype of a social network already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T08:19:45.560" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T18:50:39.223" Title="Why do we have a profile page and an ability to chat if SE is not a social network?" Tags="|discussion|design|chat|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13482" CreationDate="2021-03-28T10:55:31.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between &lt;em&gt;having social features&lt;/em&gt; (like a profile page and chat) and &lt;em&gt;being a social network&lt;/em&gt; is also discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/65261/263383&quot;&gt;this mother meta question&lt;/a&gt; and in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/103126/263383&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff Atwood explains the importance of having not only a main site and a meta but also a chat in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/05/chat-now-in-public-beta/&quot;&gt;blog post introducing chat&lt;/a&gt; thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you not only need a place to have intelligent Q&amp;amp;A; [...] you need a place to talk about the place, and a less formal “third place” to collaborate in real time with the fellow members of your community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some discussions really are ill-suited to the non-linear Q&amp;amp;A format of the main/meta sites, and having the potential to use chat to discuss these in a more traditional conversational setting is useful. That this chat is then also used to socialize by some users is more of a side-effect than the intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for profiles, I can't find any official word on them but it seems to me that the motivation here is mainly that the gamification via reputation points would be far less effective if users couldn't attach the points they're earning to a recognizable identity. The profile is the only place where users can enter almost anything they want to, and therefore make the account really &amp;quot;theirs&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T10:55:31.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-03-28T14:19:21.147" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's a duplicate, then it should be closed. But not because it is a bit silly. As far as I remember, math problems I had to solve in elementary school were not realistic either.&#xA;However is it a true duplicate? I would not be so sure. It seems people forget chicken have wings and feathers. If this is about area, there is some fractal like complex area to deal with. Chicken can fly and as such this makes an armor difficult to develop by the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230132" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T14:19:21.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13462" CreationDate="2021-03-29T03:10:21.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this gets downvoted to the ground every time I suggest it, but I still think the best option by far is to move these questions to Worldbuilding. &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding.SE&lt;/a&gt; is all about fun, often physics-inspired questions, which rack up tons of questionably-correct but entertaining answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are already written in the characteristic Worldbuilding style, and would probably do well. It is better for this site, and for the questioners, to have these questions answered over there rather than stretch the policy to keep them over here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T03:10:21.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-29T13:55:04.970" Score="7" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where is the boundary between a &lt;em&gt;soft-question&lt;/em&gt; and an &lt;em&gt;off-topic question&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The issue has come up in connection to question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/625503/does-physics-explain-why-the-laws-and-behaviors-observed-in-biology-are-as-they&quot;&gt;Does physics explain why the laws and behaviors observed in biology are as they are?&lt;/a&gt; Although I think that the question is quite interesting, and I have much to say on the subject, my first reaction was to recommend closing... perhaps precisely because there is too much to say about it, i.e., there is no a clear question with a clear answer, as is usually expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, after a bit of discussion in the comments, and seeing that respected community members are posting the answers, I have retracted my recommendationf or closing and posted my own answer. And idneed, the question ahs tag &lt;em&gt;soft-question&lt;/em&gt;, which suggests that it may not have a rigorous answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, the subject seems rather broad and non-specific...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advice/recommendations/guidelines will be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T13:55:04.970" Title="Soft-question or off-topic question?" Tags="|discussion|scope|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-29T14:25:07.640" Score="9" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to one of the possible answers raised in the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13349/the-proposed-changes-to-the-text-editor-would-break-this-site&quot;&gt;The proposed changes to the text editor would break this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosemirror-math is a math editing framework that allows for direct editing of a rich-text preview. The mathematics is automatically rendered, and it is converted into LaTeX source when it is selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bu9f6.png&quot; width=&quot;390&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One of the aspects that came up last time is that the default back-end is not MathJax but KaTeX. This will apparently be expanded in future, so the two decisions will become decoupled.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, the new development is that &lt;a href=&quot;http://benrbray.com/prosemirror-math/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a working demonstration version of this editor is now available&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is now ready to play around with. So &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; what do we think? Is it usable? Does it work to produce complex answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T13:09:57.100" Title="How acceptable is prosemirror-math as an editor style for this site?" Tags="|discussion|editing|mathjax|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13488" CreationDate="2021-03-29T14:55:44.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time this question was asked, the editor was completely unusable on the four different platforms I tried.  A day later, the specific issues I describe seem to have been resolved, which suggests the developer is responsive to issues. However it also suggests that this tool needs a much larger test community than it currently has. Enabling this editor so that authors on Physics would be part of the test community for prosemirror would make the experience of writing on Physics very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To emphasize that I can no longer reproduce these problems, I’ve hidden them behind spoiler tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; On Safari for iOS and for desktop, the editable part of the page never loads at all. The page ends with &amp;quot;The text below this line is all editable, including the math!  Go ahead, try it!&amp;quot; and a change in background color.  [On desktop (14.0.3), the developer console says the definition &lt;code&gt;const REGEX_INLINE_MATH_DOLLARS_ESCAPED = /(?&amp;lt;!\\)\\\$(.+)(?&amp;lt;!\\)\\\$/;&lt;/code&gt; is an &amp;quot;invalid regular expression: invalid group specifier name.&amp;quot; Pasting the regex from the developer console into this edit box seems to double some backslashes, and from Markdown to display seems to double some more; there are several layers of special characters here.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; On today's Firefox  (87.0) for MacOS, the editable part of the page does load. Moving the cursor in and out of math-mode sections causes the display changes in the animation, and editing those things does what you might expect. However the Enter key is broken and doesn't create new lines. This makes it also impossible to write any multi-paragraph text, or (so far as I can tell) to start a new line with $$ and create displaystyle mathematics. [This behavior seems to be fixed after a comment from the author below.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Using Firefox (87.0.0-rc.1) on Android, I get a strange behavior when I try to add text to the beginning of the editable area: I put the cursor in one place, start typing, and the cursor jumps to a different wrong place and the new text appears there instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T13:09:57.100" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T13:09:57.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T00:00:52.117" Score="77" ViewCount="1227" Body="&lt;p&gt;With nearly six thousand answers posted over her first decade with us, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/1492/anna-v&quot;&gt;anna v&lt;/a&gt; surpassed the 200,000 reputation milestone this week.  Her patient explanations, broad knowledge, and insightful writing make our community a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anna v, thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T04:06:53.697" Title="Congratulations to anna v, our second 200k user" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13488" CreationDate="2021-03-30T04:03:45.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried it for a few minutes in Safari on iPad and in Edge on PC and it seemed to work well. In addition to trying hand-editing, I pasted in a few reasonably complicated equations from my existing answers and they rendered properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I miss being able to preview while I type, but if I had to use this editor I would not leave PSE. It’s nice to have \ket, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T04:25:23.293" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T04:25:23.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T09:20:24.350" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13466/is-it-okay-to-edit-a-question-on-the-main-site-to-downvote-it-after-you-initia&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question I asked whether it is a good thing to edit a question with the purpose of downvoting it. It got downvoted 7 times (up till now). This was written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes on Meta are different than on the main site. Here they indicate disagreement with the idea that it is okay to edit a question to downvote it after you initially upvoted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the usual way to express an answer (&amp;quot;no&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;) to a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question on its own isn't up- or downvoted? When user @annav is wished all the best, I can imagine upvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To express it more tangible is the downvote right now (or are the ones to come) to be seen as a &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="98822" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T09:51:36.520" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T22:47:07.473" Title="Are downvotes (on the meta side) regarded as a (negative) answer to your question (on which you can answer yes or no)?" Tags="|discussion|questions|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13435" CreationDate="2021-03-30T10:10:29.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This practice is throwned upon by moderators of the Physics SE, but it turns out to be quite common elsewhere, e.g., in the biology community. The reason is that they adhere to much more rigorous standards for the answers - requiring them to be nearly at the level of scientific publications and including citations (if not, they are mark by a moderator). Thus, when someone wants to give a short answer or do not have time to spend on researching the literature and writing up a comprehensive response, comments is their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T10:10:29.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T16:25:05.897" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not have wanted to write this. In fact, I am so sorry of the fact that many times some questions are not considered as they are too stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/625855/&quot;&gt;Scalar curvature is $0$ for Schwarzschild solution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  has been closed soon after writing and submitting it. I have not understood why...in effect I have tried to show my work and in the comments I have understood that my work is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: does failing a work imply a question closed? I would have hoped that an attempt of work could have been appreciated and someone could tell me how solve my mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291920" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T03:49:03.810" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T03:49:03.810" Title="Why has my question about the Einstein field equation been closed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-03-30T16:29:35.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-01T14:52:43.203" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In regard to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13460/&quot;&gt;chicken question meta post&lt;/a&gt; one of the answers included this paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This opinion is based purely on the actual question, and ignores the silly story. Surely the silly story can be edited out of the question, and corresponding silliness in the answers can be edited out as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement indicates that removing &amp;quot;silliness&amp;quot; from a question in order to clarify the physics question could be appropriate. In other statements in policy locations (I can't rmember where at the moment) and in responses from mods when I have flagged some posts, the idea of editing a question to &amp;quot;make it better&amp;quot; has been encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How &lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt; editing to improve a question and bring it on-topic is allowed and even encouraged? Would removing the context of a chicken army and simply highlighting the possible physics concept/practice be an acceptable edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be helpful for the Phys.SE community to discuss this offsite and then develop some examples of allowed &lt;em&gt;extensive&lt;/em&gt; edits as well as overly invasive edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to remember, the goal of PSE is to have good physics questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T15:41:46.207" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T15:41:46.207" Title="How much editing of a question is acceptable? (e.g. Chicken Question)" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|best-practices|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13502" CreationDate="2021-04-01T15:12:28.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please do keep in mind that the linked question was very polarizing and quite exceptional, so it is a bad example when it comes to setting precedents/crafting policies. [FWIW I don't want to play into in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;both-sides-ism&lt;/a&gt;: the question was polarizing due to its unusual exposure to &amp;quot;HNQ outsiders&amp;quot;. Any (reasonable) habitual user of physics.SE would agree the question is subpar, to put it mildly.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular example (where the post is 95% silliness by volume) I would say heavy editing is justified/required. Or, even better, let the question die and collectively pretend it ever existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the general case there is no hard cutoff. Any editing that improves the question (without changing its essence) is in principle encouraged, without explicit limits. Of course if the OP manifest a wish against a particular edit the etiquette is to step back, or call for mod attention if OP is being silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T15:12:28.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13502" CreationDate="2021-04-01T15:23:34.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, there is no threshold for how much editing a question can go through - as long as it is unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when a question has already received answers, and in particular these answers have been voted upon, editing becomes a bit more difficult - we discourage edits that change the question in ways that invalidate existing answers. Once answerers have poured effort into creating answers, it would be unfair if we just deleted their now &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; posts, but leaving them there might similarly incur downvotes and comments from users who haven't looked at the edit history that are unjustified in the context in which the answer was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the one rule for the size of edits is: Do not make edits that invalidate existing answers. There is broad implicit support for this position in prior meta discussions, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10465/50583&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4147/50583&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that except in certain rare cases where the asker has a track record of bad questions and is rate-limited in posting new questions, there is not really a reason not to just post an &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; that changes a question in a way that invalidates answers as a new question on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T15:29:14.140" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T15:29:14.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-01T16:59:21.000" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to set a bounty to one of my questions, but I can't find a link for that. Is that because I have commented that question myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/626109/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233415" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T04:09:33.327" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T04:09:33.327" Title="How can I set a bounty?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13505" CreationDate="2021-04-01T17:05:36.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is younger than two days, hence you cannot offer a bounty yet. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/263383&quot;&gt;mother meta&lt;/a&gt; for more details on when bounties can be offered and awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T17:05:36.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13490" CreationDate="2021-04-01T18:14:54.017" Score="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you, Rob, it has been a nice trip these ten years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was forced to retire from research in 2000, because of civil service rules, and did not want to stay on (with various grants) because money for research in Greece was, and still is, not enough for high energy experiments. That require a number of trips to CERN and meetings to keep effective in the group work, which means my staying on would not allow the younger people to be active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I got involved in the proposed global warming models, and studied the status (enough for a master's degree). When I came to the conclusion that trying to affect the global warming (yes, the globe is warming) by the imaginary knob of CO&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; was more or less as effective as ordering the tide to stop, I lost interest and was bored with the controversies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately I discovered the physics.SE site and have been keeping my little white (women have white) cells working by the variety of subjects on the site, and also to learn new stuff by the many excellent answers on topics I am not familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have noticed that in my answers I try giving links. That is because, turning 81 in a few days, I want to make sure if I remember correctly the statements I make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T04:06:53.697" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T04:06:53.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-02T04:41:54.773" Score="1" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anatoli Bugorski&lt;/a&gt;, the scientist who accidentally put his head in an active particle accelerator.  My question is about the shape of his wound, and I don't understand why it was relatively circular, not linear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask in Physics.SE, History of Science and Mathematics.SE, perhaps Biology.SE, or somewhere else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226117" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T04:12:20.193" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T04:12:20.193" Title="Where should I ask a question about Anatoli Bugorski?" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-02T10:37:58.800" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to talk in a chatroom with some user to discuss a topic. But that user has less than 20 reputation. Is there any way I can gift him 20 of my reputation points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269418" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T16:32:36.850" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T16:32:36.850" Title="Is there any way I can gift some reputation points to another user?" Tags="|support|reputation|chat|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13509" CreationDate="2021-04-02T10:46:39.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. While bounties technically allow transferral of reputation from one account to another, they are not meant to be used as gifts, and any bounty that is found to be used that way will be refunded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user will have to earn the necessary reputation points on their own. It's not that hard - 20 points are just 2 upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T10:46:39.577" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-03T17:01:20.427" Score="-3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question has been closed because it is off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/626109/&quot;&gt;An approximation for path integral kernels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm presenting a new idea in that post: Set N=2 in the formula of the path integral kernel and derive an approximation for the kernel. This question is definitely not a homework and I'm not asking anyone to check the derivation. I have checked numerically that the derivation is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233415" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T22:12:00.907" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T22:12:00.907" Title="I think that this question is not off-topic" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13511" CreationDate="2021-04-03T17:08:17.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Physics!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its current form (v4) it’s unclear to me what your post is asking about. One symptom: it does not appear to contain a question that ends in a question mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your self-answer suggests that you have solved the problem you were having by locating a factor of two. That’s typical of check-my-work questions, which our community has decided are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are hoping to have a freewheeling discussion about a new idea, Physics.SE isn’t a good venue: we’re a question-and-answer community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T17:08:17.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13460" CreationDate="2021-04-03T21:18:35.330" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a completely legitimate question.&#xA;It's effectively 'how can I find an accurate surface area of some real world, fairly complex shape'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, requiring an approximate amount of material to cover a certain number of these shapes &lt;strong&gt;given that there would be a variance in their exact shape&lt;/strong&gt; is another layer of complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the comedic tone in which the question is framed is especially important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295029" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T21:18:35.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13492" CreationDate="2021-04-05T22:47:07.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that we should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use up/down-votes to indicate (dis)agreement on non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; questions. The reason why is that if a lot of people down-vote a question because of disagreement, that would indicate that it is a useful question that should be addressed, while giving it the appearance of being low-quality or not useful. In other words, this makes it difficult to tell whether down-votes are because it's a bad question or because of disagreement with the OP. Instead, I think that we should vote to express (dis)agreement only with answers and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-requests&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-requests&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-requests&lt;/a&gt;, while voting on non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; questions in accordance with their quality and utility. To indicate (dis)agreement, one should write or up-vote an answer that expresses that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195139" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T22:47:07.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-06T02:25:10.713" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why there's no tag of quantum chaos in physics.stackexchange.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T10:42:22.750" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T10:42:22.750" Title="Why there's no tag of quantum chaos in physics.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|support|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13516" CreationDate="2021-04-06T03:47:04.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a composite topic like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chaos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantum chaos&lt;/a&gt; it is recommended to use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chaos-theory+quantum-mechanics&quot;&gt;tag combination&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantum-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantum-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantum-mechanics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chaos-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chaos-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chaos-theory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tip: To find questions about, say 'quantum chaos', it is often more reliable to search directly on keywords &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+quantum+chaos&quot;&gt;is:q quantum chaos&lt;/a&gt; rather than tags (as tags are not always applied).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T10:40:34.203" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T10:40:34.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-07T02:35:16.783" Score="16" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well known that we do not encourage/allow questions that solicit open-ended discussions or that can only be answered by providing personal opinions, etc. However, at least to me, it seems a bit unclear as to what is the policy around questions that are not ill-defined (in that there is a well-defined criterion for what would be a correct answer and what would be an incorrect answer) but still, there are multiple possible answers (and not just multiple possible ways to answer which is, of course, always the case). Sometimes, such questions can fall under the &amp;quot;big list&amp;quot; question category. But, other times, it is not so clear because the question may not have been asked in the spirit of a big list question owing to there being no way for the OP to know if answering it entails a list of things or just a single thing. There is a somewhat relevant discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; but it is more geared towards book recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question asking for the experimental evidence for a prediction or a law can often fall under the category of questions that I am describing. This example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/627579/experimental-evidence-for-f-fracdpdt&quot;&gt;Experimental evidence for $F=\frac{dp}{dt}$&lt;/a&gt; is what led to this meta question. And an example of an extremely well-received question of the kind I am describing is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15/what-experiment-would-disprove-string-theory&quot;&gt;What experiment would disprove string theory?&lt;/a&gt; where the highest voted and accepted answer includes a list of experiments that would disprove string theory before going into the more general conceptual discussion. Perhaps that is the correct criterion? That answering the question might involve lists but if it also has a genuine place for broader conceptual clarification then the question is a healthy question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T11:29:26.473" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T14:16:21.677" Title="When are questions with multiple different possible answers good?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13478" CreationDate="2021-04-08T11:15:07.943" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After doing some research on this particular question, I found out that my initial notion of the issue was entirely wrong. I have therefore voted to delete that answer and submit one based on more in depth study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is strange to realize, but the site policy to suppress opinion based questions and answers is not due to judgement or preference as a product of free choice, but to the fact that it is incompatible with the underlying technology. The tech base of SE is a heavily modified gaming structure and those are by their nature conclusive. Win or loose. A vote is either up or down. Regardless of how many reasons one may have to choose either one, there is only those two options to choose from and like in a game, SE promotes voting for the sake of voting by rewarding it with privileges and public acknowledgement of achievement. Similar things go for editing and deleting. They simply aren't made to deal with choices that only produce 'probability'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what effectively keeps it from becoming a discussion platform or a chat zone, but it is also what makes it 'repel' opinion, in questions as well as in answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is a subject that by its nature is relatively immune to this. Formulas being its main content and those being pretty conclusive in themselves. However, opinion adds a component of inconsistency to the subject that provokes an entirely different approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we observe how moderation works in other areas in SE that are less of an exact science, like TWP, this gaming base not seldom leads to quite grotesque situations. Downright aggressive moderation practices based on mere glancing over answers does not only occur, but is actually advised as a way to obtain more privileges, expressing the gaming tendency of this moderation. It corrupts the mental attitude of moderators to the extend that I had a hard time getting them to understand that downvotes really don't bother me. They didn't consider that possible, so I had to be lying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that clearly points in the direction of gaming in moderation is the use of scripts, allowing for 'power voting' and other ways to 'cheat' into getting more reputation, awards, privileges, badges and other achievements. Practices one would normally only find in computer games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that this has little if anything to do with reasonable site moderation is something I find quite alarming. Internet gaming is a mayor source of concern, causing severe cases of addiction, social alienation and abuse. The idea that such a game could be hiding in a site like SE, attracting people who otherwise would avoid games, but are equally vulnerable to addiction, is threatening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user292922" LastEditorDisplayName="user292922" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T16:38:22.450" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T16:38:22.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-12T12:19:09.473" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be difficult at times to find quality derivations for 'some' of the basic formula used in high school physics, so I thought what if I post and self answer the basic derivations. Does this sound like a good idea, and would the community be in support of me doing this? I think it is good because it will introduce more people to the site (e.g., imagine it popping up as first result when google searching a famous formula).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/178084/&quot;&gt;Sackur tetrode equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/83751/&quot;&gt;Thin lens formula (I had written one answer to this myself)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/306610/&quot;&gt;Gibb's formula&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/169572/&quot;&gt;Antinodes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T19:49:54.050" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T19:49:54.050" Title="Posting and self answering basic derivations" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-12T12:46:04.127" Score="-4" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/628856/247642&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is unsuitable for this site as opinion-based, and should be closed. Yet, at the time of writing it has only one closure vote (mine), but 6 downvotes. I think this is indicative of a larger problem: people use downvote as a &lt;em&gt;dislike&lt;/em&gt; button of social networks, rather than as a measure of the quality of the content that would help other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; a few minutes later it was -10 downvotes, 4 closure recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T14:34:26.370" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T17:37:18.430" Title="Misuse of downvoting" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|down-votes|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13521" CreationDate="2021-04-12T16:13:10.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something being useful &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; does not mean it belongs here. CPR training is a very good thing to provide, if you are qualified to. But I think we can all agree this is not something that we should be doing &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good-quality derivations of canonical HS problems is a good thing &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;. But this does not automatically mean we should be doing it &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question asks for a derivation, then it will most likely be closed as off-topic. If the question asks for a conceptual explanation of something, then it will most likely be on-topic. Two notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The criterion is the question itself, not its (potential) answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rule does not change if the question is self-answered, although in practice people seem to be slightly more lenient in applying the rules for these. YMMV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you plan to post a question &amp;quot;please solve this free-body diagram for me&amp;quot; and answer it in detail, please don't. It will be closed, and you'd be wasting everybody's time, specially your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you plan to post a question which asks about the physics behind general problems, and then answer it in detail, describing general principles, then by all means go ahead. But again, be careful in how you frame the question/answer. The homework policy does not allow problem-solving questions, so if you don't word it properly it will be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, my personal opinion is that it will be quite tricky to find a good balance. Low-level physics are for the most part &lt;em&gt;just problem solving&lt;/em&gt;. So I'm not sure how you plan to provide conceptual explanations that are neither too vague to be useful nor too advanced for the intended audience. But you do you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T16:13:10.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13522" CreationDate="2021-04-12T17:37:18.430" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you here Vadim, we could have given the user a benefit of the doubt. Downvoting like a nuclear attack on a user who's on the site for first time is a bit extreme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this was simply an 'emotional' decision on the downvoters side rather than some kind of thought out one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T17:37:18.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13526" CreationDate="2021-04-14T09:20:17.023" Score="14" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say i have written an answer to a question. I feel like i have done a good job of answering it and covered all the points that needed to be covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if i see some another answer that i feel brings up some point, that i realise i should have covered in my answer as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to edit my answer to include the new point? Or is it considered bad etiquette or stealing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i just leave my answer as is ? Especially if my answer is the highest voted one and so has a good chance of becoming the accepted answer. While that other answer has no or low votes.&#xA;So leaving it as is might mean, that anyone who comes to this question will likely just read my answer and i feel my answer is really incomplete and would become much more complete and helpful by adding that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the expected etiquette in these kinds of situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269418" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T09:39:37.173" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T09:48:04.050" Title="Is it okay to edit your answer to make it better after seeing some point that is addressed in another answer or is this bad etiquette/stealing?" Tags="|discussion|answers|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13525" CreationDate="2021-04-14T09:48:04.050" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can reference material from other answers, even answers on the same page that were submitted after your answer, but you do need to give proper attribution. Eg,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As [userX mentions](link_to_their_answer), we also need to consider ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no need to repeat everything that userX said, since readers can just click the link &amp;amp; read it for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you probably should upvote userX's answer, because you think it's useful. And there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/58/sportsmanship&quot;&gt;Sportsmanship badge&lt;/a&gt; for upvoting competing answers. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T09:48:04.050" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13528" CreationDate="2021-04-14T22:46:14.293" Score="7" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly, marking a question as a duplicate of either my own question or of a question that I answered is not against the rules. But, there seems to be a conflict of interest in the context of the &amp;quot;reputation-points economy&amp;quot; because I clearly stand to &amp;quot;profit&amp;quot; if a question is marked a duplicate of my question or of a question that I answered because it would drive more people to my post, leading to an increased likelihood of me gaining more reputation-points. I don't think that rules should be restrictive enough to ban such voting, but I was curious if the community thinks that one should err on the side of refraining oneself from engaging in this kind of voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T22:49:17.337" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T15:08:00.443" Title="Should I refrain from marking a question as a duplicate of my question or of a question that I answered?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|vote-to-close|best-practices|ethics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13527" CreationDate="2021-04-14T23:11:14.337" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what I do. I try to be &amp;quot;objective&amp;quot; as in – &lt;em&gt;would I vote to close if the answer was by someone else?&lt;/em&gt; but a little bit more critical with my own stuff. So,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the new question is very clearly and unambiguously a duplicate, and if I feel that my answer is decent enough, I will vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there new question is not an obvious duplicate and there is room for doubt, or if I feel my answer is not above average, then I will only leave a comment: &amp;quot;related/possible duplicate: &lt;code&gt;link to old question&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T23:11:14.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13527" CreationDate="2021-04-15T10:56:27.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're over-stressing about this. Closing a question requires a consensus of five different users (potentially &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13273/what-happened-with-the-experiment-to-lower-the-vote-to-close-threshold&quot;&gt;down to three&lt;/a&gt; at some point in the future) that the question should be closed. It is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; unlikely that you'll get five (or even, really, three) users with conflicts of interest on the same thread. As such, in addition to AFT's existing answer, I would say: vote to close. If it's not a duplicate, the queue will say no, and if it is, it will provide an objective viewpoint, insofar as that is at all possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things change, of course, with unilateral actions (say, unilateral close-as-duplicate once you have a gold tag badge), and there there is indeed a responsibility to be particularly careful that the action is appropriate (and to seek suitable review, say, in chat, if there's any shadow of a doubt). But that's not a common case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T15:08:00.443" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T15:08:00.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-17T03:28:22.823" Score="6" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this exactly fits into the intended scope of the meta but I will try it out. This is clearly an explicitly subjective question with no universally correct answer, but I suspect that the rules on the meta are fairly less stringent than on the main to possibly accommodate this kind of a post. If not, I will be happy to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is a type or category of questions that one uses PSE for if one is in academia (in physics) and has plenty of opportunities to discuss one's questions with fellow students and/or colleagues. It is relatively clear that one being in academia might not have any relevance to what one wants to ask on PSE if what they are asking about pertains to a field that is different from their own field. However, in cases where one asks something that is close enough to their own field so that they can discuss the same with their colleagues, what are the main motivations (or, are there?) for asking it on PSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it to get a broader perspective from a wider community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, if there is disagreement among the people you discuss something with or if you just want to be sure that all of you are not making the same mistake, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it to ask questions that are peculiar/idiosyncratic enough to your specific intersection of interests that your colleagues might not be interested in them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it the case that you don't see PSE as a second step after having discussed something with your colleagues and rather, you just ask a question here if it arises in your mind when you are not in the presence of your colleagues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Framed as a close corollary, does there exist a type or category of questions for which PSE has been useful to you even if you are in an academic setting where you could have or might actually have discussed the same questions with your friends and/or colleagues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastEditorDisplayName="user87745" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T05:16:08.423" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T12:42:37.640" Title="For those of us who are in academia, is there a category of questions that you use PSE for?" Tags="|discussion|soft-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2021-04-17T13:05:16.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For interdisciplinary researchers like me, PSE, MSE and MO are a very valuable resource of information and for problem solving. If you are working on fields bordering on your own, you often do not know at all if questions/problems that are arising to you might be common knowledge to an advanced learner of another field. Usually you know enough to be able to say if it is or could be undergraduate knowledge, then you usually can advance on your own. But is often especially useful to &amp;quot;live&amp;quot; communicate with people rather then doing literature research since one often uses a different &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; which will hamper automated queries and the like. In general active researchers do not have too many possibilities to communicate outside their focus. The further you get away from your say &amp;quot;main&amp;quot; focus the more difficult it becomes to find people who might help you with your questions. Maybe some cube distance law ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113077" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T13:05:16.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13518" CreationDate="2021-04-17T14:04:38.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that is the correct criterion? That answering the question might involve lists but if it also has a genuine place for broader conceptual clarification then the question is a healthy question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's suppose the purpose of Physics SE is to accumulate a database of questions/answers that are helpful to people who are trying to understand physics, and that are likely to be found by those people in a search. The keywords here are &lt;em&gt;trying to understand&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;likely to be found&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the purpose, then maybe that should be the overriding criterion in cases where other guildelines are ambiguous. Maybe even in cases where other guidelines are not ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &amp;quot;What experiment would disprove string theory?&amp;quot; is one that resonates with many people, not so much because they want a Big List, but because they want to know whether or not string theory is good science. That's exactly the motivation given in the body of the question. For that reason, having this question/answer(s) in the database is likely to benefit many people who are trying to understand physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &amp;quot;Experimental evidence for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F=dp/dt$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot; might be more elementary, but the &lt;em&gt;level&lt;/em&gt; of the question is not so important, in my opinion. The overriding criterion is: will people who are trying to understand physics find this question in a search and benefit (gain understanding) from its answers? Whether the answer is yes or no, I think this is the right criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, I confess that I haven't always prioritized this criterion as consistently as I should. The fact that I posted this answer on Meta will help me remember to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206691" LastEditorUserId="206691" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T14:16:21.677" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T14:16:21.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-19T13:46:51.063" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question and put a bounty on it. Looking at the 2-3 answers, it seems there might be a bit of confusion about what exactly I am looking for in the answer. If I add an edit to my question, to clarify it a bit, do the people who have answered get notified of the edit, or will they find out I have edited ONLY if they happen to read the whole question again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269418" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T20:24:29.210" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T20:24:29.210" Title="If I make edits to a bountied question, do people who have answered get notified of it?" Tags="|support|editing|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13533" CreationDate="2021-04-19T14:03:51.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, answerers do not get notified about edits you make. The only people that get notified about edits are those who &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/345661/263383&quot;&gt;follow&lt;/a&gt; your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, there should be no need for such notifications. Note that you should not make edits &amp;quot;in response&amp;quot; to answers, in particular if these edits invalidate existing answers, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13502/50583&quot;&gt;this recent meta thread&lt;/a&gt;. If you have follow-up questions provoked by the answers you receive, ask a new question instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T19:19:13.573" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T19:19:13.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2021-04-19T16:29:00.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually when I don't understand something that I've read in a paper or figuring out where a result/derivation comes from. So they are specific questions about very specific items and they are usually associated with stuff that I am teaching, rather than research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often discuss these with colleagues, but would do that in parallel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/627700/how-is-the-phase-gain-of-a-fabry-perot-resonator-for-gravitational-wave-detectio&quot;&gt;How is the phase gain of a Fabry-Perot resonator for gravitational wave detection derived?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/605163/do-induced-currents-in-a-conductive-surface-result-in-significant-electromagneti&quot;&gt;Do induced currents in a conductive surface result in significant electromagnetic fields outside the surface?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T16:29:00.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2021-04-22T05:55:51.627" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe StackExchange in general is currently one of the best public open forums for scholars on established science and latest respected research. The information shared is at the highest level of academic standards and that is what distinguishes SE from other similar forums. Sometimes it also serves as a peer-review of latest serious research developments and a discussion of their implications. Specially PSE in particular excels on all the above points. If you are doing interdisciplinary physics research (which is today the norm in one extend or the other) PSE in my opinion is the best internet forum for testing, clarifying and verifying your knowledge and if you want serious answers and analysis to your questions it seems that you cannot find any references in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183646" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T05:55:51.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-23T20:51:14.347" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/631590/is-it-possible-to-swim-in-a-vacuum-taking-advantage-of-relativity-is-this-a&quot;&gt;Is it possible to &amp;quot;swim&amp;quot; in a vacuum, taking advantage of relativity? (Is this a joke or hoax?)&lt;/a&gt; is a question I posted just now. Everything seems fine now, but while on this page which is an old question of mine: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/628632/why-does-moderately-distant-lightning-sound-the-way-it-does-relatively-quiet-hi&quot;&gt;Why does moderately distant lightning sound the way it does: relatively quiet high pitched thunder first, and then much louder low pitched thunder?&lt;/a&gt; I clicked asked a question and and was presented with what looked like an edit page for this other old question of mine:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/630171/is-it-physically-possible-to-have-and-how-dense-is-styrofoam-with-helium-or-hydr&quot;&gt;Is it physically possible to have and how dense is styrofoam with helium or hydrogen replacing the air or whatever gas fills the spaces in it?&lt;/a&gt; . In haste I decided to use it anyway, changing everything except the tags. So when I posted the question the tags were wrong. I saw that and replaced the tags. So, as I said, everything seems to be fine now. But why did I get that editing page of a random other question of mine instead of a blank edit page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295887" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T21:18:01.050" Title="Wrong page came up when I clicked ask a question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13538" CreationDate="2021-04-23T21:18:01.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a little trouble following you, but I think you're saying the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to you to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/631590/is-it-possible-to-swim-in-a-vacuum-taking-advantage-of-relativity-is-this-a&quot;&gt;question A&lt;/a&gt;, which didn't exist because you had just thought of it. You happened to be be looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/628632/why-does-moderately-distant-lightning-sound-the-way-it-does-relatively-quiet-hi&quot;&gt;question B&lt;/a&gt; and hit &amp;quot;new question&amp;quot;, but the new question page was populated with the text and tags from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/630171/is-it-physically-possible-to-have-and-how-dense-is-styrofoam-with-helium-or-hydr&quot;&gt;question C&lt;/a&gt;.  You replaced all of the question C text with question A text, and now questions C and A &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; exist, which was your goal, but you are confused about the intermediate step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is that this is a caching problem, either within your browser or within the SE software.  When you're editing a question or an answer, you occasionally get a message under the edit box &amp;quot;draft saved&amp;quot;; sometimes you will close a page with a partially-written answer, navigate back to it later (perhaps many days later), and your draft is intact.  (I think the way this works is that there's just one draft associated with your account on the site, so if you start working on an answer to a different question your other drafts will disappear.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like, in your case, you were presented with a saved draft of your previous question in the &amp;quot;Ask a Question&amp;quot; page, which you replaced with your new question. (An edit would have shown up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/630171/revisions&quot;&gt;question C's revision history&lt;/a&gt;, but there's nothing recent there.) The desired behavior would be that, having asked question C, its draft would have been deleted rather than presented to you again. But caching problems are tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T21:18:01.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13543" CreationDate="2021-04-29T14:34:04.247" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I am not even entirely sure what community questions or wiki questions or posts (or answers?) are, but I have heard about them and I get the sense, that they are some kind of posts that are contributed to by everyone and they are about topics that are deemed to be of help to everyone or maybe topics that are very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried going to help section but could not find anything about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there any way to find all the community questions/posts/answers in one place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there seriously needs to be a section in help center explaining what these are and how they work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269418" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T15:18:21.317" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T15:18:21.317" Title="Where do I find all community/wiki questions?" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13542" CreationDate="2021-04-29T15:17:05.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Community wiki posts are explained in the help center &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and on mother meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/263383&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;search help&lt;/a&gt; explains that you can filter any searches for community wiki posts by adding &lt;code&gt;wiki:yes&lt;/code&gt; to your search, so searching for nothing else &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=wiki%3Ayes&quot;&gt;returns a list of all community wiki posts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T15:17:05.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13545" CreationDate="2021-04-29T18:45:39.547" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/571149/&quot;&gt;What does negative time mean or what does it show?&lt;/a&gt;, this morning my answer got a 15 points reputation loss. what happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T18:57:19.997" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T18:59:19.933" Title="Sudden appearance of a -15 reputation loss on one of my old answers" Tags="|support|reputation|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13544" CreationDate="2021-04-29T18:51:31.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer got &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;unaccepted&lt;/a&gt; by OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T18:59:19.933" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T18:59:19.933" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-30T09:57:14.013" Score="-2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/605833/&quot;&gt;Is it an illusion if reheated tea burns my tongue but tastes cold?&lt;/a&gt; from Jan 6 '21 has been closed on Apr 26 '21 as &amp;quot;Needs more focus&amp;quot;. The question is not unfocused. It is true that the question didn't get an answer within 4 month (or even a comment), but I see no indication that rewritting the question (without performing the described simple experiment more carefully and better controlled) would change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The two differences I see to questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/541655/&quot;&gt;Is it possible that an instant coffee 3 in 1 (or any other type of coffee) is cooling faster than tea?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/476178/&quot;&gt;Does tea made with boiling water cool faster than tea made with boiled (but still hot) water?&lt;/a&gt; is that those attracted attention immediately after being posted, and that the rate of cooling is a bit easier to measure than the difference between surface and bulk temperature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4846" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T08:36:16.333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T08:36:16.333" Title="Please reopen my question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2021-04-30T12:42:37.640" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking the right questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The hard part in research is often a) posing the correct question, and then b) finding an appropriate method for dealing with it. Once the question is posed and a solution method is chosen, the rest is rather technical, i.e., not really &amp;quot;science&amp;quot;... although this is what scientists do most of their time, and it certainly requires high qualifications. (One may call this &lt;em&gt;high-level engineering&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the PSE is intended for getting precise answers to precise questions - any broader questions with possible scientific merit are quickly closed as requiring more clarity or opinion-based. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;PSE might be helpful in terms of dealing with technicalities - helping to find quicker answers to the questions that would otherwise require seriously studying a new subject or performing extensive literature search.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Audience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In more practical terms, it is worth noting that the ranking does contain some known names, and there are some more hiding behind nicknames and/or relatively low scores. However, these are a small sample of the actual scientific community, especially, if we limit ourselves to those who are active in the community. I would be surprized, if there are any Nobel quality people... although everything is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T12:42:37.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13546" CreationDate="2021-04-30T14:07:39.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(For &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/605833/1&quot;&gt;version 1&lt;/a&gt;)You have two explicit questions. The first is in the title: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Is it an illusion if reheated tea burns my tongue but tastes cold?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. The second is at the very end: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;why should there be a difference in how well the oil-like substance is &amp;quot;mixed&amp;quot;?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; It seems like the post is asking about both of these at the same time without any specific focus on either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T17:13:12.143" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T17:13:12.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13550" CreationDate="2021-05-02T14:16:09.503" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually asked a question with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag. Then, I was searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot;&gt;some question with the tag&lt;/a&gt;. I had visited 50 pages. Most of the questions don't have answers. And, most of the questions have a low number of views. But, why don't people come to answer those questions when they see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of physicists either. But, no one comes to answer those questions. What's the reason of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user286470" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T15:12:51.390" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:25:09.010" Title="Why are there few answers on homework-and-exercise questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|tags|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13549" CreationDate="2021-05-02T14:42:33.577" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many instances of homework questions getting answers before they are closed. But in those cases where they do not get answers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many posts that fall under the &amp;quot;homework-and-exercise&amp;quot; tag do not follow the site policy on homework-like questions. Instead of asking about physics concepts in the context of an exercise problem, they are just looking for a solution, how to obtain the result of a specific calculation, etc. Therefore, they get closed, or at the very least users know not to answer questions that should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T14:25:09.010" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:25:09.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2021-05-03T20:46:31.990" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most ways I really like the stack exchange. I do have one grevience though and it is a significant one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really annoys me when I post a question, but an admin sees fit to link it with a strawman answer, marking my post as a duplicate. I use the term strawman in the obvious sense: the strawman answer provided by the admin answers a question that I am not actually asking, and yet does not answer the question that I am actually answering in my post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when I go to pains to show, using elementary logic, that the strawman answer my question, there is a sort of almost bloody mindedness by stack exchange to acknowledge their mistake and allow me to publish my question. I am a physicist and I ask good questions. It is not in the interest of stack exchange to behave that way and simply shutdown what would be an information discussion on physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="205771" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T20:46:31.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13553" CreationDate="2021-05-04T07:32:41.497" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/633903/where-does-universe-occupy&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; today. Within 20 seconds someone had downvoted the question. Here's the proof:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8K9Hm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8K9Hm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not possible for a person to read the whole question in 20 seconds. So why did they down-vote? Is it OK to down-vote like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user286470" LastEditorUserId="231159" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T17:01:25.710" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T17:01:25.710" Title="Why did someone downvote my question without reading it completely?" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|voting|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13552" CreationDate="2021-05-04T08:19:31.300" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;All disciplines have their specialised language i.e. terms that have precise meanings. Some of these terms my be unique to the discipline while others will be terms used in everyday life but repurposed to have a specific meaning that differs from the everyday meaning. This applies whether we are talking about physics or silkworm farming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To people skilled in the discipline it is quickly and easily apparent when someone is using terms they don't understand. Whether &amp;quot;quickly&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;twenty seconds&amp;quot; is debatable, but it doesn't take very long for a physicist to spot that in your question you are using physical terms in an inappropriate way. I'm not criticising you for this because no-one was born knowing physics, but it does mean that your question is meaningless at first glance and that is probably why it attracted the quick downvote. It requires some effort to read through what you have written and try to work out what you are actually asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the quick downvote doesn't indicate malpractice - just impatience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T08:19:31.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13273" CreationDate="2021-05-04T15:20:09.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Update, May 2021&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As recently announced on Meta Stack Exchange at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites&quot;&gt;Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites&lt;/a&gt;, SE has just launched into this experiment, on sites where either (a) questions are ageing out of the review queue before they can be closed, or (b) moderators are carrying out most of the closures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding us (and potentially other sites in similar situations?), the announcement has this to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that some sites want to test this because they'd like to see questions closed more quickly, before they get answered - I understand this instinct and I'm not saying that we won't consider testing whether this improves the situation on those sites in the future but, right now, speed to closure isn't something we're focused on and there may be more effective solutions to preventing answers to close-worthy questions than closing the question before someone writes an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what that last bit really means, but I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/364032/184688&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt;, so let's see what the team says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T15:20:09.610" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-05T09:47:25.997" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;On occasion, questions / answers / comments on physics.se deal with chemical elements. An example  for this may be to discern between the isotopes of carbon, C-12, C-13, and C-14.  I would like to suggest an expansion of the acceptable syntax to write, e.g., &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^{12}\mathrm{C}$&lt;/span&gt;.  At present, I know &lt;code&gt;$^{12}\mathrm{C}$&lt;/code&gt; yields a visually reasonable result, but there may be more efficient approaches (by the number of key strokes) that I'm not yet aware off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On chemistry.se, this problem was solved by adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://mhchem.github.io/MathJax-mhchem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mhchem&lt;/a&gt; to the &amp;quot;vocabulary&amp;quot; of mathJax.   For the isotope mentioned above, the syntax would then simplify to a shorter input of &lt;code&gt;$\ce{^{12}C}$&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional benefits potentially relevant to the audience of physics.se could be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the easier input of chemical sum formulae.  To write e.g., about water, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$&lt;/span&gt; (please, not a mixed roman / italic &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$H_2O$&lt;/span&gt; as obtained by &lt;code&gt;$H_2O$&lt;/code&gt;), the input would be shortened to &lt;code&gt;$\ce{H2O}$&lt;/code&gt; instead of the more verbose &lt;code&gt;$\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describing recorded measurements like &amp;quot;13 kg&amp;quot;, currently entered either as-such in plain text, or formatted &lt;code&gt;$13~\mathrm{kg}$&lt;/code&gt; would be just &lt;code&gt;$\pu{13 kg}$&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntax permitted on chemistry.se equally allows an input of &lt;code&gt;$\pu{-17.3 ^\circ{}C}$&lt;/code&gt; to yield &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-17.3~^\circ{}\mathrm{C}$&lt;/span&gt;; to arrive at the same here on physics.se, I type as &lt;code&gt;$-17.3~^\circ{}\mathrm{C}$&lt;/code&gt;.  The later demands more attention to detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;code&gt;mhchem&lt;/code&gt; brings something special to &lt;code&gt;mathJax&lt;/code&gt; not all web browsers understand (well enough) when providing a table of contents about current questions, chemistry.se established the rule to constrain the use of &lt;code&gt;mhchem&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;em&gt;the body&lt;/em&gt; of questions, answers, comments.  So, it is not the panacea for all formatting issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26061" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T12:27:30.230" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T12:27:30.230" Title="Feature suggest writing chemical elements on Physics.SE" Tags="|feature-request|mathjax|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-05-05T12:28:24.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-05T11:05:02.747" Score="13" ViewCount="1119" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13273/what-happened-with-the-experiment-to-lower-the-vote-to-close-threshold&quot;&gt;What happened with the experiment to lower the vote-to-close threshold?&lt;/a&gt;. (See that thread, and the initial proposal &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12568/should-we-test-lowering-the-vote-to-close-and-reopen-threshold&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for background.) The experiment is currently running on a set of (other) Stack Exchange sites that need it more, and need it for other reasons. The SE Community team seems somewhat interested in running it for our use-case, but they don't seem convinced that the case is strong enough that it would do much of a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, the Community Manager in charge of the experiment, Catija, suggested (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites&quot;&gt;the experiment announcement at MSE&lt;/a&gt;) that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there may be more effective solutions to preventing answers to close-worthy questions than closing the question before someone writes an answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this is something we should consider carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue (contrary to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13549/why-are-there-few-answers-on-homework-and-exercise-questions&quot;&gt;this recent thread&lt;/a&gt;) that we do have a problem with off-topic homework problems getting answers before they can be closed by the close-vote review queue, which is currently too slow to deal with this. One way to handle this is to make the queue faster (by requiring fewer votes per closure), but that may not be the only way. As Catija &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites/364032?noredirect=1#comment1214786_364032&quot;&gt;suggests&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you need better guidance to prevent the questions from being asked such as a customized Ask modal or sidebar. Maybe better education for the people answering about when not to answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modal in question currently looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gv3f1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but it can be customized to look like e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qkRXU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (at Code Review). This is something we should definitely look into, but I don't think this problem lies on the side of the askers &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; I would argue that our problem (off-topic questions getting answers before they can be closed) is largely a problem of user education, i.e., we are not as effective as we should be at communicating site policies to new and relatively-new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a way to address that education problem, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites/364032?noredirect=1#comment1214790_364032&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt; to Catija that we could install&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;something like a modal, or ideally a warning box that appears above the answer text editor box (even better, something that pops in once the user clicks on the editor box), which reminds the user what kinds of h/w questions are on-topic and which ones shouldn't be answered, and which appears, say, on questions with the h/w tag or which have one or more pending close votes with that close reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and she seems to be quite open to the idea. But she has this important set of questions as a framing for such a device:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's important to understand the answerers' motivations. Do they disagree with the questions being close-worthy? Are they unaware that the question should be closed? Do they have thoughts on how they can improve the question - it's possible that the best case scenario for the asker and the answerers is that the questions get improved first and answered - so it's not so much that they can't answer the question but that they should work with the asker to make it a good question before offering a (possibly problematic) answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catija's last comment raises an important point. If we have a problem, we should understand it as well as possible before fumbling for solutions. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many off-topic homework-like questions get answered before they get closed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we reliably measure at what stage in the closing process this happens?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is answering these questions? How much experience do they have with the site, in terms of both time and reputation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they unaware that there is a site policy that strongly discourages such answers? Or are they aware of it but they disagree with it? Or do they disagree that it applies to that particular question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we could probably achieve quite a lot using a pop-up modal, or a pop-in banner, when at-risk users (i.e. the population in question here) attempt to answer at-risk questions (i.e. questions with the homework tag or with a homework-like close-vote pending), but if we want that communication to be effective then we do need to understand who we're talking to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="6634" LastEditDate="2021-06-04T21:03:07.850" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T21:03:07.850" Title="Getting a better understanding of how and why off-topic homework-like questions get answered before they can be closed" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|answers|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-05T15:18:05.383" Score="9" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Community recycling algorithm recently brought &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33834/calculating-impact-force-for-a-falling-object?rq=1&quot;&gt;this homework-style question&lt;/a&gt; asked in 2012 to the Top Questions list. It's interesting to me that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's clearly an elementary homework-style problem asking PSE to check the answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Rennie answered the question by confirming the answer with 4 upvotes and no down votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were no votes to close as homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my empirically-based opinion, if this question was asked today it would quickly be closed based on today's homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the philosophy of these dealing with questions like this one different today than in 2012? Or was the community more relaxed? Or are we becoming more aware of the clutter which these questions cause after a near-decade of activity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which direction should the PSE community go? Accept questions like this 2012 example, or maintain a tougher scrutiny?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T15:40:17.637" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T17:51:11.517" Title="Has the PSE philosophy about homework-style exercises and check-my-work problems changed since 2012?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13557" CreationDate="2021-05-05T15:40:12.927" Score="10" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The essence of the policy has existed in this form since the beginning of the site in 2010, as you can see from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/50583&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; of our FAQ post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specific aspects have been debated often enough that we have a specific meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; for it. These often led to much discussion, but ultimately only minor changes in the actual wording of the policy or tag. (Not because there is consensus this is the best policy, but because there is no consensus another policy would be better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site was certainly &amp;quot;more lenient&amp;quot; in many respects in its beginning days due to overall much lower volume of questions. Many people also probably hadn't yet formed a firm opinion on the necessity of policies prohibiting certain questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T15:40:12.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-05T20:55:33.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions that get closed on our site consist purely of the text (or an image) of a homework assignment, with no attempt by the OP to explain what concept relating to the assignment they need help with, or any thoughts on how they've tried to attack the problem. Some of us call such questions &amp;quot;homework dumps&amp;quot;. On the Mathematics stack, they call them PSQs,  Problem Statement Questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem with PSQs is that we generally don't know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the OP needs help. We don't know what misunderstanding or gap in their knowledge prevents them from doing the homework assignment themself. Occasionally, the OP reveals the relevant information in response to comments, but it can be hard work coming up with the right questions to extract that information, and sometimes the OP responds with impatience or even downright hostility in reaction to such &amp;quot;interrogation&amp;quot;. Meanwhile, eager answerers attempt to guess what the OP's knowledge gap is, and write an answer on that basis, or simply write a solution to the problem that may be technically correct (or not) but which may not be a good match to the OP's level of schooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the typical PSQ, it's unlikely that the OP will transform it into a question that's suitable for our site, no matter how much assistance we give them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OTOH, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I often post a comment on PSQs with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;this link to our policy on homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt;, and request that the OP ask a &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; question that will help them solve their homework problem, but I must admit that it's &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; rare for the OP to reply with a satisfactory response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I get the feeling that the OP is genuinely interested in learning the physics behind their PSQ, I'm happy to assist them into getting their question into an answerable state. But if I get the impression that they just want the answer so they can hand in their homework, then I close-vote (and possibly downvote) and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I agree with Catija that we probably &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; need to make the closing process faster. AFAIK, an OP is very unlikely to substantially improve their question after it's closed, and I think it is pretty rare for closed questions to be reopened, especially if they have a negative score. It would be interesting to see actual statistics on that, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need to make it easier for new OPs to learn that PSQs are off-topic. And we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need to discourage answerers from answering them. (It'd also be nice if people would do a dupe search before answering questions that are highly likely to be duplicates...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally, the Mathematics stack is currently trying to improve question quality and to discourage people (especially those with high rep) from answering questions that ought to be closed. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/33508/207316&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their situation is a little different to ours, though. They do not have a close reason analogous to our homework-like reason for handling PSQs, and the community there is somewhat divided on whether such questions should be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T20:55:33.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-07T15:38:39.217" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post Closed as &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site&amp;quot; by Brick, Bob D, John Rennie, BioPhysicist, Jon Custer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above message is shown for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;. The message is saying that &amp;quot;Not suitable for this site&amp;quot;. So, is there any site of SE where a user can freely ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user286470" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-05-09T14:37:02.707" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T14:37:02.707" Title="Where should a user ask home-and-exercises questions?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-05-07T15:41:21.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-08T10:30:21.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the risk of seeming a bit hard-nosed; there is always the option of downvoting answers to blatant homework/examination questions. I certainly have done for egregious examples in the past and will be doing so more liberally in future, especially as we move into &amp;quot;exam season&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also flag a complete answer to a closed homework question for the attention of moderators: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If there are any complete answers, please flag them for moderator attention.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but this doesn't really address the issue of such questions being answered before they can be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I would prefer to see there being consensus over whether a question is a homework problem or not before downvoting answers that may indeed have correct physics in them. However, after the recent &amp;quot;Armored Chicken&amp;quot; furore, it is quite clear that there is support for using downvotes in this way even if it is just your opinion that the question should be closed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13460/folks-we-need-to-talk-about-the-surface-area-of-a-chicken-question&quot;&gt;Folks, we need to talk about the surface-area-of-a-chicken question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastEditorUserId="43351" LastEditDate="2021-05-08T12:17:05.520" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T12:17:05.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13563" CreationDate="2021-05-09T17:23:53.897" Score="24" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just found this while browsing the bottom of new users page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CjVQh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CjVQh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All accounts start with &lt;strong&gt;w88&lt;/strong&gt;, followed by a random word and a number. Most of them have set &amp;quot;Bangkok Thiland&amp;quot; as their location. Some of them even have &amp;quot;spam account&amp;quot; as their bio. You can also see these accounts by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;searching for w88&lt;/a&gt; in the users tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155230" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T17:48:20.393" Title="Suspicious new user accounts?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13562" CreationDate="2021-05-09T17:48:20.393" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are spam accounts. Their about me says &amp;quot;spam account&amp;quot; because recently a couple of moderators have been editing the original content (which may get indexed by search engines and benefit the spammers' SEO) out and applying the change network-wide (we can only destroy the account on our site, so editing the profile is the only way to do something about it on other sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't bother paying much attention to them. There's still disagreement on the practice of moderators modifying their network profile but they are just profile spammers. You should ignore them; some moderators like myself destroy them, some hunt them down actively, and some just totally ignore them. They're not really for users to see (probably) anyway, just to abuse SE for search engine indexing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164837" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T17:48:20.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-10T18:38:33.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a direct answer to the questions asked, although I think they are good questions. Two ideas come to mind by way of experimental methods for approaching them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physics was not chosen for the 3-vote close experiment recently launched, but we could potentially have a DIY version if we asked our moderators, temporarily, to cast their votes early in the cycle rather than late.  I just did my 20 reviews for the day and I noticed that many of the questionable questions had already been edited by a mod anyway, so perhaps this wouldn't be a big burden?  If they are already seeing the questions almost as they are posted and are taking action on them anyway, we could have a short experiment of 1-vote closures to see how that impacts the quantity and quality of questions and answers.  It does go against the site's philosophy of moderation a bit, but as a limited experiment maybe it's ok?  If we did have 1-vote closure and we still have a problem, that would at least strongly indicate that the speed of the review process is not the driving factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With respect to the last group of questions regarding knowledge and intent of the answerers, perhaps instead of getting a modal that's meant to educate we could get one that asks some subset of the questions above. So don't just say, &amp;quot;hey, make sure you're answering a question that's within the homework policy&amp;quot; ask the person about to answer where they fall on the question's fit within the policy.  So something like checkboxes for &amp;quot;Do you know that this site has a policy regarding homework-like questions and answers? Did you think this question was within the policy?  Do you disagree with the policy and are answering anyway?&amp;quot;  Presumably this would require help from SE to implement and track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T18:38:33.183" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T17:09:00.110" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/635476/179151&quot;&gt;What current would be measured in the following circuit?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was some commentary about it being a homework question, which it isn't, I genuinely want to understand what happens when the point of intersection moves faster than the speed of light. I actually find this an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246786" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T23:52:31.013" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T03:49:53.733" Title="I don't understand why my question was closed?" Tags="|support|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T18:13:15.863" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is a question that asks whether something is possible within the laws of physics on-topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Very vague) Example: assuming any level of technology, can you do this within the laws of physics, or would some law(s) of physics prevent it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a question be on-topic here (with more details of course)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246186" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T18:26:10.170" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T18:29:07.850" Title="Is a question about whether something is possible on topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13566" CreationDate="2021-05-11T18:29:07.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is about physics, then the content of that question does not determine if it is on topic or off topic. &amp;quot;Is is possible&amp;quot; physics questions can be on topic or off topic depending on what the goal is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is asking in order to further a personal theory or design a product (engineering), then I would say it is not for PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is asking if something is possible in the context of trying to better understand a specific physics concept, then I would say it is on topic for PSE.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; Of course, the question also needs to follow other site policies, be understandable, be focused, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T18:29:07.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13565" CreationDate="2021-05-12T03:49:53.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your post looks like an exercise that was pulled from a text book. I would say this is because it involves a hypothetical, ideal situation and it concludes with &amp;quot;what is the answer and why?&amp;quot;, which is a typical way text books end some exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am clearly looking for understanding on how electromagnetic fields affect current in conductors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want the question to be reopened, I suggest asking specifically about the physics concepts you do not understand that are preventing your from answering this question yourself. As of now, I do not see how your post explicitly asks about how electromagnetic fields affect currents. It just seems to ask how to solve this exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what if the question is modified to add that the rods then come to stop, what reading would appear on the ammeter over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post would probably remain closed. Adding another question will not change the content that was there previously when the question was closed. Edit the question to explicitly focus on the concepts you are confused about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T03:49:53.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-12T17:53:06.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, here's a first stab at the data, using the Data Explorer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1407354/users-who-answer-closed-homework-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users who answer closed homework questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This query returns the total number of answers to h/w-tagged questions per user, and the number where the question is currently closed (but not deleted!); it also returns the total score in each category, and the corresponding ratios. The selection can be trimmed by the max age of the question in days, and by setting a minimal total number of h/w questions answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how best to probe that data, or what it tells us... I'm not sure yet. But I can link to it here and hopefully we can see if there's anything to be learned from it. If additional selectors would be useful, let me know, and I'll add them in if SEDE supports them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Finally, the usual caveats &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; this query suffers from selection bias, since it does not include any deleted posts. It should include all &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; answers to subsequently-deleted h/w questions, since those will survive the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/314070/184688&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt;, but any closed homework questions without upvoted answers have a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;${\sim}9$&lt;/span&gt; day horizon to make it into the data before they're deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:53:06.577" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-12T19:37:29.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As quite a new user, here are some comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It didn't seem obvious at first that we aren't meant to answer homework questions, sometimes they have been edited by a gold medal holder and seemed to be legitimate questions.  A message saying we shouldn't give detailed answers came after a while, so that helps.  Perhaps that message should be there on joining if the community decides homework questions aren't desirable on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It also doesn't seem clear what to do if we see a clearly homework type question.  There is the 'flag', but on clicking it, it doesn't have a 'report homework question' option - just a few others that don't really seem appropriate to use to flag a homework question.  The vote to close option isn't always there, perhaps it's for members of a certain reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, rather than discouraging the (probably young) future users of the site, maybe members should be reminded regularly to downvote answers to homework questions that are too detailed. New members could also we warned by the message in 1) that answers to homework type questions that are too detailed are likely to result in downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting seems the ideal tool to deal with this, but to create and keep a culture of downvoting too detailed answers of homework questions, there may need to be regular reminders or perhaps a small reminder box on the screen for all to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124324" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T19:37:29.057" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13557" CreationDate="2021-05-13T08:42:33.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree with the (current) policy on homework questions, and I try to do my bit reviewing them, homework questions have two plus points going for them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they can highlight interesting and important aspects of physics that students need to learn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they are easy for beginners to answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular I fear that the PSE can be a bit scary for newcomers because the questions can be intimidating and hard to answer well unless you have at least graduate and perhaps postgraduate experience of physics. I was such a newcomer when I first joined the PSE ten years ago (how time flies!) and indeed I did my share of answering homework questions in those early days. These days I would not answer the question you posted as an example and I would vote to close it. However I don't think that reflects a change in the PSE policy - just a change in myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think (1) is a good reason to answer a question that is apparently homework, as long as you concentrate on explaining the principles and not just the answer to the question. A good answer will help not only the OP learn some new physics but hopefully generations of students coming after them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T08:42:33.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-13T14:55:17.167" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not hold all questions for a week or two before posting them? That would eliminate the motivation for submitting homework problems.  (Concepts can wait.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238328" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T14:55:17.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13557" CreationDate="2021-05-13T17:51:11.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the philosophy of these dealing with questions like this one different today than in 2012?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think of particular note now is that exams and tests are being conducted online a great deal more (especially with Covid-19 concerns but I think the general trend is there anyway).  There's also (IMO) more of a move to continuous assesment at all levels of education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reality is we are now seeing many questions which clearly have a time element and I've seen questions which rather pointledly want an answer in a hurry.  I've also seen questions posted where the OP gets a &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; answer (e.g. outtline the solution method or explaining the physics principle) but then explicitly asks for a worked out calculation, undermining the idea they are interested in &lt;em&gt;understanding&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I do think the teaching and testing environment out there has changed and this has meant the homework policy is, if anything, more relevant than ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my empirically-based opinion, if this question was asked today it would quickly be closed based on today's homework policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of individual opinions there is a well established principle in law that you cannot (and should not) impose new laws on crimes that occured in the past and should instead apply the rules existing at the time.  OK, homework violations aren't exactly a crime, but the principle of fairness remains.  We should not back-date and revise punishments because at the time people are presumed to have acted in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T17:51:11.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-16T17:06:23.843" Score="7" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been discussed before that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563/&quot;&gt;one should not post images of text or formulas&lt;/a&gt;. However, many users still do – probably because they consider typing all this text too much work, which to some degree is understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I (probably) had the same problem and then found this question on TeX SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/116863/&quot;&gt;Image equation to TeX&lt;/a&gt; which shows some useful ways to easily convert screenshots to LaTeX. I personally have used the proposed tools to edit some of the questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So could we link this somewhere in order for users to have a simpler way to convert their screenshots to text/equations (which hopefully would decrease the amount of textual screenshots)? Possibly below the &amp;quot;Please use MathJax for equations in questions.&amp;quot; in the sidebar when asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VZ3yq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VZ3yq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be in the interest of this community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T17:19:13.450" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T17:19:13.450" Title="Could we link the &quot;Image equation to TeX&quot; question from TeX SE somewhere?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|editing|mathjax|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13166" CreationDate="2021-05-18T11:52:04.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've marked this as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; (it had incorrectly been marked as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;) since we're moving away from mobile views and instead into responsive design land — and this bug appears to be specific to mobile views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T11:52:04.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-18T19:21:07.010" Score="14" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/637288/what-would-you-see-dropping-an-sufficiently-strong-chain-with-substantial-length&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that was closed, and I was given the following instructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KgFV8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KgFV8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those questions listed did not provide me with the answer to my question, so I followed the advice and opened a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/637330/how-do-you-reconcile-issues-of-watching-a-chain-fall-toward-a-black-hole&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that I completely reformatted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was then in turn closed as a duplicate of my original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oJgdO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oJgdO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was then given the following instructions by a moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HsebO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HsebO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to ask this question, what should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298951" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-06-08T15:08:32.847" LastActivityDate="2021-07-14T03:40:54.457" Title="I am being told conflicting resolutions for fixing a closed question, what should I do?" Tags="|support|status-deferred|closed-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-19T07:44:58.340" Score="-8" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble posting anything relating to EM theory derived from Maxwell on this site. I'm continually having posts deleted 7 day ban's refusing to accept references particularly my own work, references not modern enough, &amp;quot;no history on this site&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;only mainstream physics here&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rarely does anyone actually engage to find errors of fact in my posts. Is this in line with SE's charter, to be a good community forum, adding to the knowledge of the community, industry and education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm well respected in my own local community and my previous employment. I reached the highest level attainable in my field of expertise. I'm also a consultant to the department of defence in another country with approval of similar department in my parent country. It seems to only be a problem with Physics on SE. Engineering history, etc. seem OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296320" OwnerDisplayName="barry" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T14:27:17.593" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T14:15:00.203" Title="Is EM theory appropriate on Physics.SE?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13578" CreationDate="2021-05-19T08:28:03.337" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is not designed as a &amp;quot;discuss my research&amp;quot; or even worse &amp;quot;discuss my unpublished research&amp;quot; website. It is designed as a Q&amp;amp;A from already established (i.e. known and typically published in textbooks or research articles already published in peer review journals) knowledge, except solving high-school or college homework which we typically reject, because there are other places on the internet where homework help is offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing, Physics.SE is technically not a forum, we allow comments to questions and answers, but not long comments threads, as on a regular internet forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40726" LastEditorUserId="40726" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T13:36:26.350" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T13:36:26.350" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13578" CreationDate="2021-05-19T15:45:29.480" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the question in the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is EM theory appropriate on a physics forum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electromagnetism&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;electromagnetism&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt; tag on this site has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5belectromagnetism%5d%20is%3aq%20closed%3ano&quot;&gt;12 thousand open questions&lt;/a&gt;. This is the second biggest tag on the site (with QM having &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bquantum-mechanics%5D+is%3Aq+closed%3Ano&quot;&gt;20k&lt;/a&gt; open questions). Any claims of &amp;quot;discrimination&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bigotry&amp;quot; against electromagnetism are entirely divorced from the reality of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, just because a question or an answer involves electromagnetism does not automatically imply that it is on-topic &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; it also needs to be in line with the other site guidelines. This much should be obvious: like all venues, there are some ground rules, and posts that don't satisfy them get closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, when you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this in line with SE's charter, to be a good community forum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you point at what is likely the biggest disconnect here. The basic charter of Stack Exchange sites is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to be a good community forum, or indeed a forum at all. This is a questions-and-answers site. The goal is to be a place where people can ask questions about physics and get high-quality answers, and where future visitors can learn from those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this implies that there are several other things that this site &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be that have been rejected in favour of the core goal of being a high-quality, high-signal-to-noise Q&amp;amp;A site. Among these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8930/should-history-of-physics-questions-be-on-topic&quot;&gt;Questions about history&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic because there is already a dedicated site for them. Questions here should be about physics and not about its history. This keeps the site focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;Homework and exercise questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic, because they significantly reduce the signal-to-noise ratio in the quality of questions, which reduces the engagement from expert users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This site &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7516/is-physics-se-an-appropriate-location-for-peer-review&quot;&gt;is not an appropriate location for peer review&lt;/a&gt;, because we cannot do it in an effective way and it is a very poor fit for the format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More generally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92110/184688&quot;&gt;discussion threads are off-topic&lt;/a&gt;, because they are a poor fit for the format that comes from being a Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A platform. If your goal is &amp;quot;I would like to know X&amp;quot;, then the platform is well suited to finding, sorting and rewarding answers to that question. If your goal is &amp;quot;I would like to participate in a discussion about X&amp;quot;, that doesn't really work with the SE software: it produces endless threads which are hard to navigate, and with endless activity that crowds out more pointed questions. We're not saying that discussion is &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, just that it doesn't fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Non-mainstream physics&lt;/a&gt; is off-topic here. The site scope is physics, as it is understood in the mainstream literature. This is because if non-mainstream physics is allowed (say, if questions and answers taking flat-Earth theory as correct were permitted) this site would lose all of the experts in its community in short order. This is a hard line to draw in an objective way, so sometimes some toes end up getting stubbed in the implementation, but it is an essential component to keeping this site viable, as I'm sure you can appreciate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to that, questions here are expected to be readable, useful, and clear, to suitably back up any assertions they present, and to contain actual questions. Low-quality posts that fail to meet those standards sufficiently get closed, in service of keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio for potential answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Obviously this is a non-exclusive list.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the ground rules that this site has used to become a quality resource and a place where one can get answers from extremely valuable experts in a huge range of topics, starting with electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. If those ground rules suit you, then we'll be glad to have you! If you're looking for something different (say, a venue that can accommodate discussions or peer review), then we hope you find a venue that does suit your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T15:45:29.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-20T08:10:20.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a physicist, before trying to answer a question, I am used to start by asking myself if there are hidden hypotheses in the way it is formulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;this specific question&lt;/em&gt;, I see that the discussion is started as if there would be a clear cut between homework&amp;amp;homework-like (HMWK) questions and the others. Of course, this is not the way things go. It is true that there are crystalline clear examples of HMWK as well as non-HMWK questions. But there is a quite wide space in between. In particular, there are questions that were not originally tagged as homework by the authors but the tag has been added by others. In some cases with a good reason, in other cases, the reason was less obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal feeling is that there is a significant number of cases of perfectly admissible questions that were closed as HMWK. This could be another way of looking at the phenomenon. I know that a serious investigation about how well-founded is my feeling would imply much more work than simply querying a database. However, at least a statistical sampling could be done. I think that we could find that the questions closed as HMWK that received more answers are those with the less evident characterization as homework. If this would be true, it would have an impact on the present discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T08:10:20.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-20T08:24:39.457" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, nothing prevents the users from having identical display names (since they are assigned different userID): &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/224006/vadim&quot;&gt;here is another Vadim&lt;/a&gt;. I admit though that this name is not a particularly rare one, so I will have to think of a better nickname. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? How did you handle it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vadim --&amp;gt; Roger Vadim&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastEditorUserId="247642" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T09:17:30.220" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T00:38:52.720" Title="Users with identical names" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13578" CreationDate="2021-05-20T17:28:33.543" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes E&amp;amp;M is (generally) on topic but to be blunt: a lot of your answers actually aren’t really on topic or actual answers: many are extended comments designed to cause a polemic, start a discussion, and push your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of your answers have been deleted and not everyone can see posts, but a representative of this track is&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/174955/36194&quot;&gt;this post on entanglement and Bell’s inequality&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is quite clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a nontechnical explanation of how the truthfulness of Bell's&#xA;inequality confirms/proves Bohr's interpretation on “entanglement”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but instead you launch into a tirade about Bell’s assumptions and go on to state that “In other words entanglement is unnecessary there is no point in doing more excruciating EPR experiments, local realism and causality are preserved, there the EPR paradox is resolved because photon's don't exist. “ which doesn’t answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/62282/36194&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on measuring the electric field:  again the question is simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know a classical experiment measuring the magnetic field &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec B$&lt;/span&gt; and not the flux &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\int \vec B\cdot d\vec S$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After pointing out that to your knowledge &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec A$&lt;/span&gt; has never been directly measured, you digress into a critique of the Tonomura experiment (with previous reference to one of your papers).  Again, while this critique may be worth another question, that part of your answer isn’t relevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These stand out because you went out of your way to answer old questions with posts that weren’t really answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T21:21:08.790" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T21:21:08.790" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13582" CreationDate="2021-05-21T00:38:52.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not much of a problem. While there may be users sharing a display name with you (many, if your name is Chris or rob), it's unlikely there are other &lt;em&gt;prominent&lt;/em&gt; users that share a display name with you. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1411434/find-prominent-users-with-duplicate-names?minrep=1000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; shows, there aren't many names with two high-rep users, and several of these appear to be alternate accounts of the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, even though there are 173 users named &amp;quot;Chris,&amp;quot; (ignoring case sensitivity), the next-highest reputation &amp;quot;Chris&amp;quot; has only 804 reputation and hasn't been active in years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T00:38:52.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-22T13:27:01.373" Score="-2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to address this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/638202/is-the-electron-actually-a-standing-wave/638205#638205&quot;&gt;Is the electron actually a standing wave?&lt;/a&gt; , but as already today I wasted time and then the question was deleted, I wanted to make sure I would not waste more time , I started an answer and declared it as a place holder, implying I am working on it. The following happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is hidden. It was deleted 3 mins ago by rob♦.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was my place holder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can an electron be both a standing wave and have its wave function spherically symmetric?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;place holder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I should  thank rob for wasting some more of my time today, because the draft I was working on has disappeared too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody tell me how I can avoid closures while working on an answer? Note that this was a recent question, not standing there for hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T17:51:46.990" Title="Deletion of place holder answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13585" CreationDate="2021-05-22T13:54:21.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your placeholder answer had &lt;em&gt;actually answered the question&lt;/em&gt;, it would have stayed in place. It’s totally fine to write a partial answer and then edit it later to be longer or more detailed. But it should actually answer the question the entire time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; answer, whose &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/13586/1&quot;&gt;first version&lt;/a&gt; was just the first paragraph and a sentence promising to write some more. It turned out I was called away while expanding it, so the incomplete version was displayed for longer than I intended, but what was visible was an actual answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice on the subject is still the same as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13431/44126&quot;&gt;this recent discussion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/343/1&quot;&gt;extremely distant past&lt;/a&gt;, there was moderator advice about making “placeholder answers” which could be edited into proper shape even if the question was closed.  However, the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of that advice was that the “placeholder answer” would answer the question &lt;em&gt;from the outset&lt;/em&gt;, even if the initial answer was incomplete. A number of users have interpreted that advice as license to make a content-free “stub” of an answer under an off-topic question, which they can edit into a complete answer and undelete even if the question is closed.  Other users who notice new, complete answers to off-topic questions appearing long after the questions are closed tend to agree with you: it’s an abuse of the system.  Don’t do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that “content-free stub” is a fair description of the first version of your answer, whose entire non-quoted text was “place holder.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, an answer that has been hidden by the moderators for breaking some guideline can be restored if it’s edited into an acceptable form. In many cases, when the mods delete an answer, we’ll include advice about repairing the answer and raising a custom moderator flag for un-deletion.  I didn’t include such advice when I deleted your answer, because my first two drafts sounded like I was offering to restore your answer even if the question was closed. Perhaps I should have tried a third time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it’s a shame that my interaction with your post caused your draft to disappear. I’m sure that was extra-frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T14:55:05.397" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T14:55:05.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13588" CreationDate="2021-05-22T17:47:19.020" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across a user who seems to have accumulated &amp;quot;Steward&amp;quot; badges at an impossible rate; I believe there must be a bug in the platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They received the badge 18 times in the 8 hours and 14 minutes between Jan 29 18:31 and Jan 30 2:45 for reviewing close votes (and twice more for other review tasks). This would correspond to reviewing close votes for 18,000 questions (almost 10% of all the questions in the entire community) in a little over 8 hours, which doesn't seem physically possible. Is this system behavior correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92058" LastEditorUserId="92058" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T01:32:57.537" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T01:32:57.537" Title="User is receiving badges for review tasks they could not have performed" Tags="|bug|review|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13587" CreationDate="2021-05-22T19:03:46.490" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a bug, Steward and its related badges were changed on Jan 29 so that they were now awarded for every 1000 reviews done. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/360279/263383&quot;&gt;this mother meta post&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T19:03:46.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-26T03:22:27.937" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZvgtX.jpg&quot; width=&quot;350&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See that the reputation is not shown for the physics community.&#xA;Why is this happening? And is there a solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300434" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2023-02-17T22:38:38.173" LastActivityDate="2023-02-17T22:38:38.173" Title="Why is my reputation not shown in the &quot;other communities&quot; section?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13591" CreationDate="2021-05-29T07:52:07.177" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;While searching questions by tags, why cannot we choose more than one tag only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us say someone wants to narrow the number of proposed questions, for example, from 100 to just 4-5 questions he or she is interested in, so is this possible on the site? Let us say someone is interested in tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; and can view how many questions are asked and then he or she can choose another tag let us say tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; always with the information of how many questions are present for that tag and all remaining tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239012" OwnerDisplayName="Janko Bradvica" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T12:22:29.377" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T12:22:29.377" Title="While searching questions by tags, why cannot we choose more than one tag only?" Tags="|support|tags|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13590" CreationDate="2021-05-29T09:19:54.057" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multiple tag searches are possible. E.g. the search for both &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;astrophysics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;astrophysics&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visible-light&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visible-light&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visible-light&lt;/a&gt; is done &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/astrophysics+visible-light&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately tags are not always applied consistently, so for a more complete search type &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+astrophysics+light&quot;&gt;keywords&lt;/a&gt; rather than tags, or use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?as_q=astrophysics+light&amp;amp;as_sitesearch=https%3A%2F%2Fphysics.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions%2F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, when you search, there often appears an 'Advanced Search Tips' button. Be sure to check that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T11:36:47.207" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T11:36:47.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13556" CreationDate="2021-05-29T15:57:59.737" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been asked, as an ostensibly &amp;quot;pro homework&amp;quot; contributor, to participate in these discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize If the following has already been addressed regarding the threshold for closing H&amp;amp;E questions, but it seems to me that a single vote to close should be the threshold for one that simply states a problem and nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199893" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T15:57:59.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13590" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:50:21.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, make sure that those tags are defined before. Now, for example, in the search engine, type this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[general-relativity] [black-holes]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you will &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-relativity%2Bblack-holes?tab=Active&quot;&gt;see this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rixkY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rixkY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279183" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:50:21.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-30T06:38:28.877" Score="11" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange explicitly encourages writing a self-answer, when appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derek Muller posted a video about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyQwgBAaBag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a wind-powered vehicle&lt;/a&gt; that can go downwind faster than that downwind itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The design of the vehicle dates back multiple years, but building one that is large enough to move a human (and not kill the human by falling apart) has proved challenging, by the looks of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the video Derek himself indicated that he was not quite confident that he understood the physics of it. I anticipated that questions would start coming in on physics SE, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/639993/&quot;&gt;I posted a self-answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this being a self-answer it felt silly to pretend (in the question) that I didn't know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the subject is: &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'A wind-powered vehicle on wheels that can go downwind faster than the wind itself.'&#xA;I assumed that any physicist would immediately go: &amp;quot;Hang on, how is that possible?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was closed on the grounds: 'needs details or clarity'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm asking for opinion here. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It seems petty to me to close a question because the obvious isn't stated explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the future: &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should the question part of a self-answer be phrased as if you don't know the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17198" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T12:00:40.323" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T16:17:26.597" Title="When I post a self-answer, is it expected that in the question I should pretend I don't know the answer?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|best-practices|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13595" CreationDate="2021-05-30T08:34:35.810" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the close voters, but I voted to close as engineering not as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just read the question then I think it is unclear, so I can see why people have voted that way. When I post a self answered question I usually make the question as brief and clear as possible. If I were writing it I would have just written &amp;quot;How can this vehicle described in the Veritasium video travel faster than the wind?&amp;quot; - well, I would elaborate a bit but I'd still keep the question brief and simple. Then I would wax lyrical in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having reread it I think voting to close as an engineering question is unkind so I've voted to reopen. However I think self answered questions work best when they address an important and fundamental principle in physics and I'm not sure that applies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T08:34:35.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-30T21:03:21.870" Score="-4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if I ask a &amp;quot;what if&amp;quot; question? What are the criteria for the question not to be closed? The question should be about physics. That's clear. The question shouldn't be completely random too. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-What if a massive ball hits my sleeping room wall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-What if a massive ball (radius 10, mass density 0.5,) hits the wall of my sleeping room (area 25, thickness 5, mass density 1) perpendicular in the right upper corner with a velocity 50?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or more abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-What if a sphere with mass with radius &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$R$&lt;/span&gt; density &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rho$&lt;/span&gt; and velocity &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{v}$&lt;/span&gt; hits a wall with area &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$A$&lt;/span&gt;, thickness &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d$&lt;/span&gt; and density &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rho$&lt;/span&gt;, in the middle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could be instructive if you specify the strength of the wall too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about random situations? You can imagine rotating spheres (no matter how they acquired the rotation) hitting with friction another sphere, you can imagine cubes hitting Earth in sea or in the desert, you can imagine whatever. You can make abstractions of the situations: a solid ball of helium on the bottom of the deepest sea becomes a solid ball of helium inside a spherical volume of water at &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$250(K)$&lt;/span&gt;. But when are the abstractions instructive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98822" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-05-31T11:40:32.340" LastActivityDate="2021-05-31T11:50:42.663" Title="What if I ask a &quot;what if&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13597" CreationDate="2021-05-31T11:30:23.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the post was just &amp;quot;what if _____ happened?&amp;quot; then that is way too broad. This is even mentioned in the help center for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;. Additionally, the answers to such questions don't typically need to refer to any physics. Someone could say what actually would happen, and they technically would have answered the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If additional qualification way included that narrowed the scope to focus on the single physics concept that was bringing confusion, then that would be a lot better and give the question a better chance of being on topic. Though, at that point you might as well have the question ask about the physics concept directly rather bring in a hypothetical &amp;quot;what if?&amp;quot; scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-05-31T11:50:42.663" LastActivityDate="2021-05-31T11:50:42.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13595" CreationDate="2021-06-01T13:47:19.157" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to the nature of Stack Exchange as a Q&amp;amp;A site, there should at least be an explicit question to be answered. The most common trap of posting a question for self-answering is that the question usually lacks enough detail &lt;em&gt;for other readers and potential answerers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of self-answer or not, all questions are expected to be self-contained: has enough context/background, not too depending on external sources to understand the issue, has an explicit question to be answered, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of the questions should be judged independently regardless of the existence of the answers, and they should also be answerable by others, not only the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a commentary on this specific question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/639993/1&quot;&gt;first revision&lt;/a&gt; was not self-contained at all. No one could possibly understand the topic without watching the video, and there's also no question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/639993/2&quot;&gt;second revision&lt;/a&gt; was far better; there was the context (and additional speculation possibly as a research effort), but still, no question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/639993/3&quot;&gt;third revision&lt;/a&gt; is now okay with the explicit question to be answered. (Usually, there's no need to mention meta-commentary about self-answer as the purpose, but it's still okay)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62016" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T13:47:19.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-01T14:32:31.900" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;When there is a large number of comments, why not arrange them as pages instead of moving them to chat area? At the bottom of the comment area, just leave a sequence of numbers from 1 to the last page to navigate through the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239012" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-06-02T11:55:08.927" LastActivityDate="2021-06-02T11:55:08.927" Title="When there is a large number of comments, why not rearrange them as pages?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13595" CreationDate="2021-06-01T16:17:26.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I post a self-answer, is it expected that in the question I should pretend I don't know the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a word, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. Stack Exchange is an open Q&amp;amp;A site, and self-answered Q&amp;amp;As should be open to the possibility that someone else can come along and provide an even better answer to the question than the one you initially wrote. (If you're not prepared for that possibility, and you're not prepared to answer any such alternative answers, then a self-answered Q&amp;amp;A is not the venue you're looking for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-$&lt;/span&gt; you're looking for a blog instead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, having a clear question in the Question part of the thread is particularly useful in clarifying the scope of the material that the Answer section will explore. This helps potential readers decide quickly and effectively whether the thread they have landed on will be interesting and useful for their purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want good (and bad) examples of how this can work, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1416372/self-answered-qas-by-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;, which contains all of the self-answered Q&amp;amp;As (i.e. questions with immediate self-answers) sorted by score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as your specific link is concerned, I have not interacted with it much, but one thing that sticks out immediately is the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nice Veritasium video about a wind-powered vehicle that can go downwind faster than the wind itself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no question there, and that's an immediate red flag. The Question, starting with the title, should make it very clear what question is being posed in that thread. If it doesn't, then it should be closed as lacking clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T16:17:26.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13601" CreationDate="2021-06-01T16:29:45.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, a general comment: this site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;) is for discussing the policies and community of the Physics Stack Exchange site. The policies and moderation on this site are, for the most part, run by the community, and this is where we discuss those aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is hosted by Stack Exchange (the company, which also goes by the legal name Stack Overflow), and it runs on software designed and maintained by Stack Exchange, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;the rest of the network&lt;/a&gt;. The main place to discuss this software is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, the network-wide meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post feature requests for the software here, then we will probably be able to point you in the right direction. But for feature requests to be implemented by the SE development team they need a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of community support, and the main meta is a &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; better place to get this than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, regarding your suggestion: it's just not going to happen. As noted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;in the Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, comments are transient and ephemeral, and they're not designed to contain long-lived discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been the overwhelming design philosophy used by the SE developers when designing the systems that interact with comments for more than a decade, and it's not going to change any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-06-02T00:51:31.670" LastActivityDate="2021-06-02T00:51:31.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11117" CreationDate="2021-06-03T12:11:31.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are not experts in psychiatry, and not even a practicing doc could diagnose someone from a single internet post. He would likely need multiple in persona visits for that. So we can not say from an OP that he would be scyzo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, we can not treat them. Scyzophrenia is treated by a combination of mental therapy and medicines, none of them can we give from the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary the common belief, in most cases scyzophreny can be treated well since some decades. There were even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very famous people&lt;/a&gt; living with this sickness. Typically they need to fight lifelong with their own mind, but they can live a nearly normal life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symptomes of the scyzophreny are enough well known, even for us. And there are things what we can do, to help both of the OP and the site. Obviously we must do them so politely and non-intrusively as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To help the OP: we can feedback them that his posts/communication is problematic. Most of them can not see any problematic in his views/behavior. If he seems cooperative, we can also &lt;em&gt;politely&lt;/em&gt; suggest them to get expert help. This is very important - most people living with scyzophreny never visits a doc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To help the site: &lt;em&gt;give them real and useful physics knowledge&lt;/em&gt;. Do not say them, &amp;quot;your idea is a crap&amp;quot;, or close/delete his post. Instead, explain him, what is the problem with his posts, and what is the currently best known scientific reality. Giving them well-connected facts, is not only useful content (for the site), but it also helps them to get a better connection with the reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T12:11:31.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13606" CreationDate="2021-06-03T17:19:55.977" Score="-1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to clarify whether I could ask if someone has the solutions to a completed exam. I presume my question arises mainly due to less clarity with the specific-refernce and the soft-question tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:- The exam happened in May 2020 and the results are out nearly 10 months back and I haven't been able to find the solutions to the Invitational Round of that Physics olympiad anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link to the closed question is down below for reference. The question is closed citing the reason (correctly) that it wasn't about a conceptual physics topic, but I am unsure as I thought the soft-question tag was for that kind of question. Now, I have edited the question from before into what I hope is more appropriate. Although, I am still confused now whether the specific-reference tag is applicable or not also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/641088/does-anyone-have-the-solutions-of-the-invitational-round-of-opho-2020&quot;&gt;Does anyone have the solutions of the invitational round of OPhO 2020?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank You!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296427" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T17:25:36.610" Title="Is it appropriate to ask if whether someone is in possession of the solutions of a completed online olympiad?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13605" CreationDate="2021-06-03T17:25:36.610" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking for the solutions to a specific set of physics exercises is not a question about physics as a natural science. It is also neither a request for a resource recommendation, nor a request for a paper containing specific physics. Hence it is not on-topic on our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that asking for the solutions of the questions directly will likely be off-topic by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/715/50583&quot;&gt;our homework-and-exercises policy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T17:25:36.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13608" CreationDate="2021-06-03T18:07:29.320" Score="1" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since yesterday, a new user started contributing on PSE. This user was very active and apparently very eager about physics and I answered one of their questions. The user was active until a few hours ago! Now we see that its profile was deleted. As far as I know, after confirming the profile deletion by user, the account is scheduled to be deleted in 24 hours. What happened for this user? If the user intended to delete their account, why was he/she so active?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279183" LastEditorUserId="279183" LastEditDate="2021-06-03T18:55:08.573" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T18:55:08.573" Title="A very active (new) user suddenly disappeared. What happened?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13607" CreationDate="2021-06-03T18:20:46.243" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;User accounts can be deleted for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deletion is requested by the user while logged in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators delete an account because it is used to violate a site policy as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_puppet_account&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sock puppet&lt;/a&gt;. Examples include multiple accounts created by the same user to upvote their main account, or accounts created by a currently suspended user to circumvent their suspension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We generally do not disclose information about specific account deletions beyond what is already publicly visible (i.e. nothing, currently).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T18:20:46.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13611" CreationDate="2021-06-06T06:01:40.310" Score="45" ViewCount="1464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this is probably off-topic but I am posting it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having difficulty reconciling myself to contributing content to a site that is now owned by a subsidiary of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naspers&lt;/a&gt;, a South African company with a racist past of supporting decades of apartheid and white supremacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company &lt;em&gt;refused&lt;/em&gt; to comply with requests from South Africa’s Truth and Reconcilation Commission to detail its complicity. Instead, 127 individual employees told the commission that Naspers “had formed an integral part of the power structure which implemented and maintained apartheid”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the company became more global, it decided to “apologize” for its role, but its apology has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thejournalist.org.za/the-craft/whats-missing-naspers-late-half-apology-for-apartheid/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;criticized&lt;/a&gt; as insufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned Naspers’ past in a comment to the CEO’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-overflow/?cb=1&amp;amp;_ga=2.18515705.1961585004.1622783814-482213257.1622783814&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt;, and it was removed. Twice. This is censorship. My comment was completely truthful, but inconvenient to the image of Stack Exchange. Well, in my opinion its image is now &lt;em&gt;awful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to take a break while I consider whether I can be morally complicit in the new corporate regime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not interested in being encouraged to stay, but I will respectfully listen to opinions arguing why Naspers’ past should be irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199630" LastEditorUserId="199630" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T06:18:37.483" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T14:34:40.030" Title="Stack Exchange, Prosus, Naspers, apartheid, and white supremacy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13609" CreationDate="2021-06-06T07:09:16.830" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I have some sympathy for your viewpoint, you cannot police the world.  The issue surely is whether it's a racist company &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;, not how it behaved when most of white South Africa was complicit (by action or apathy) in the crime of apartheid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experience shows that even when a company or organization senior management want to apologise for some past action or actions (e.g., controlled by departed managers), you will find lawyers advise them not to, simply to not accept potentially unlimited liability claims.  What you are looking for probably won't happen for that simple reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is any of that right or ideal?  Of course not.  It is, however, the fundamental nature of politics that we accept necessary compromise as progress, rather than reject it as that is not constructive.  The hope would be (and this does happen) that over time the company can move to a point where its apologies are more complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note, and I have seen this many time in my own country, that for some embittered groups (whether right or wrong), no apology would ever be good enough.  South Africans have, in the main, had to accept that whatever happened in the past, some line has to be drawn under it.  This same process happened in Northern Ireland (my late father's birthplace) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_truth_and_reconciliation_commissions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in many other places&lt;/a&gt;.  That is necessary practical political reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a matter for your own conscience whether you feel your actions are appropriate.  I do know that your absence here would be felt by a community that has no real power to address the grievance you feel or achieve the goal you seek.  Your contributions are valuable to a community that seeks to learn physics - many of them born long after the misery of apartheid ended - and subject to their own miseries in their own time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned Naspers’ past in a comment to the CEO’s blog post, and it was removed. Twice. This is censorship. My comment was completely truthful, but inconvenient to the image of Stack Exchange. Well, in my opinion its image is now awful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is hardly surprising and it is, let's be honest, overly optimistic to expect a business to let you use their own private resources to attack them.  This isn't constructive of them, but it's not like we haven't had to deal with that before on other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are perhaps better ways (in the long run) to achieve your goals than complete withdrawal.  Perhaps an email campaign from interested members direct to Naspers and the South Africa government would be better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck with your decision and you have my respect for your contributions here on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="104964" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T12:50:26.397" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T12:50:26.397" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13609" CreationDate="2021-06-06T14:22:12.920" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your time is valuable -- invaluable, actually, since time is the one thing we can't buy or create -- and you have the absolute right (and responsibility) to use it in pursuits you support. So to &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; your &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; posed at the end of your post -- the past, present, and future of any company or entity you provide your time (and money, for that matter) to is as relevant or irrelevant as you want it to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reality of the world is that, unfortunately, any company that has been around for any length of time will likely have been a party to something objectionable. This is true for all of the major US companies, European companies, Chinese companies, Russian companies, etc. etc., for the past 100+ years (and in some cases, longer). Some of those companies were active participants in the atrocities. Others went along, and still others might have found it offensive but didn't speak up or do anything about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some companies may have tried to atone for their past. Others may have tried to hide it. Still others may refuse to move on. Perhaps it is performative, and perhaps it is substantive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak to the issues at play in this particular instance because I don't know the background in enough detail. There may be other issues or concerns with Prosus, its subsidiaries, other holdings, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can say is that we are volunteers here with our time and our expertise. Hopefully we're here because we find joy in sharing that with others. But, StackExchange is a for-profit company and our passions and time support their bottom line. If who owns that bottom line gives you pause or troubles, then it's always worth asking yourself if you still enjoy the experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't attempt to change your mind. That's not my place. And I wholeheartedly support you exploring your social and moral responsibilities with respect to your time and expertise. Do some research, if you want to, into what commitments have been made, or not been made, with regard to the issues you find important. Arguably the most important benefit of a free marketplace is that companies provide what consumers demand. For a long time, the primary demand has been low prices. But there is a growing demand for social responsibility in corporate behavior, whether it is in investing, purchasing, doing other business with, or in our instance, volunteering for/participating in their community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide you no longer find joy in the experience with the site because of the issues you identify, then I encourage you to use your time in things that do bring you joy. Nobody can replace your time. Your contributions here have been immense and you would definitely be missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do decide to continue, then I hope it is as rewarding and fun for you as it has been. Okay, well I actually hope it is even more rewarding and even more fun than it has been because this is a great community with tremendous potential and I'd like people to enjoy things more than they already do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T14:22:12.920" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13609" CreationDate="2021-06-06T19:39:07.363" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company’s past is not irrelevant, but what the company does &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; is more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, to quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/desmond_tutu_454135&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desmond Tutu&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends.  You talk to your enemies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Engagement always works better than annihilation. I suspect that continually posting respectful and well researched questions on their website, and organizing others to do so,  will in the long run have a greater impact than boycotting the company, but of course the run might be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-06-07T02:01:37.173" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T02:01:37.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-09T09:25:58.847" Score="-2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have voted to re-open this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/644320/179151&quot;&gt;Is spacetime thickness constant everywhere?&lt;/a&gt; and I am interested in the views of other PSE editors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question uses non-standard terminology (“spacetime thickness” - looks like the author has in mind the bowling ball on a rubber sheet/trampoline analogy) but the intent is clear - does a given mass always curve spacetime by the same amount, or can this vary ? This is an interesting question - we think Einstein’s and Newton’s gravitational constants are universal constants, but how much evidence do we have for that ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the question was closed less than an hour after being asked under the “needs details or clarity” reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rapidly closing a valid and interesting question only because the questioner uses non-standard terminology seems to me to be very hostile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-06-09T12:45:13.253" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T13:09:42.520" Title="Views on question that uses non-standard terminology" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13613" CreationDate="2021-06-09T13:02:09.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rapidly closing a valid and interesting question only because the questioner uses non-standard terminology seems to me to be very hostile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the closure reasons is &amp;quot;needs more detail and clarity&amp;quot;. If the OP is using terminology in such a way that makes the question unclear, then that's a valid closure reason. Furthermore, I don't see any hostility anywhere; the comments just ask for clarification, and question closure is a normal part of how Stack Exchange sites work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, as reminders to everyone (myself included)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question being &amp;quot;interesting&amp;quot; is obviously a subjective measure. Additionally, there is no site policy that says questions that are interesting should remain open no matter what. So the interest level of a question should have no bearing on whether it stays open, is closed, or is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;validity&amp;quot; of a question is only a necessary condition here, not a sufficient one. Just because a question is &amp;quot;valid&amp;quot; (whatever that might mean) does not mean it should stay open. Questions here must also be clear, focused, objective, and follow the site policies. There are plenty of amazing questions with the potential for amazing answers that could be asked here, but if they are unclear, unfocused, or objective, then PSE is not the best place for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions should be judged &lt;em&gt;as is&lt;/em&gt;. If one has the ability to pull from a poor post a (valid and interesting?) question that is a diamond in the rough, then that's awesome. What one should then do is either help the OP edit the question into a better form through the use of the comments, edit the question themselves while making sure to keep the intent of the OP (really make sure you have it right; you will probably need to use the comments for this as well), or they could even make a new, better post with the question they think is hiding in the poor post.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; By posting answers to poor posts we are essentially bypassing the conditions raised in point 2 above, and at that point any question is up for grabs since one could argue for pretty much any post that it is a &amp;quot;valid and interesting question&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt;I think this solution would best achieve the reasons usually stated for answering off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question you find valid and interesting gets to be on PSE and not closed (assuming you made a better post that shouldn't be closed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You still get to post an answer to the question, since you can answer your own posts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can still help the original OP by putting a link to your question on their question for them to look at. If the questions are similar enough, but yours is a better post, then you could even vote to close the old post as a duplicate of your new post. Additionally, since you have made a good post, it could attract other answers that could also help the original OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-06-09T13:09:42.520" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T13:09:42.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-10T21:24:38.307" Score="-6" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do people comment, with a derogatory statement, almost immediately, but then fail to reply or interact with me, the author, thus degrading the question entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do that to someone else? I have a strong feeling that the same person also down-voted. That makes me so angry.&#xA;I never expected an instant downvote and comment. When someone comments I expect an answer back when I reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/644735/&quot;&gt;Virtual Photon Laser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="265090" LastEditorUserId="265090" LastEditDate="2021-06-11T20:02:36.267" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T20:02:36.267" Title="Quick to comment, but never a reply" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13616" CreationDate="2021-06-10T22:54:13.837" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like the comments were removed, so I can't say anything about this particular situation (which is probably a good thing). Some general points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions stand on their own. Comments on questions don't degrade the questions then themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you think a user is making derogatory comments, please flag them for a moderator to review and continue on with your day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not an instant messaging/social media site. Users are not expected to reply instantly to comments, nor are they expected to reply at all. Of course it's not fun for someone to comment something and then &amp;quot;ghost&amp;quot; you, but that happens here sometimes. However, given that your post is only a few hours old, you should definitely give it some more time before you give your judgement in the way you have; it is pretty common for people to leave comments, go live their lives, and then come back to the site many hours later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-06-10T22:54:13.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13620" CreationDate="2021-06-13T02:10:19.660" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent a few hours this morning, attempting an edit of a PSE question (similar to many bearing on those aspects of space that are often described as representing its expansion) that I'd attempted to relate to two cosmological models:  Penrose's CCC model and Poplawski's torsion-based model.  Although I'd written the edit down, I've misplaced that paper content and am surprised to find that I can't locate the electronic one either.  (I'd expected the approval of the edit to be fairly routine, as I'd included references that observationally sustained some of the aspects of those models, as well as references to recent work by a Rutgers professor of philosophy which explicitly bore on both of those models:  However, the usual search term algorithms bring up nothing, and neither does the algorithm relating my PSE icon to my &amp;quot;activity&amp;quot; today [MST].)  Is there any way I can see my very recently-edited version of a PSE question that had been put on hold (for reasons that I don't recollect exactly, but basically due to its lack of specificity)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T04:36:20.453" Title="Is there a way to retrieve one's own edit of a different participant's PSE question, if the edit was rejected within hours of being sent?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13619" CreationDate="2021-06-13T04:36:20.453" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can just go to &amp;quot;Activity &amp;gt; All actions &amp;gt; Suggestions&amp;quot; on your user profile to see all of your edit suggestions, both approved and rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming your edit in question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/346854&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, your edit pretty clearly just replaces the question wholesale. If you want to ask a new question, just ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T04:36:20.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-13T09:42:06.093" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions tagged with my watched tags used to be yellow, and I found that super useful. Why are they not yellow now? Is this a problem on my end, or a change of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-06-15T10:24:47.027" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T10:24:47.027" Title="Why aren't my watched tags yellow?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13609" CreationDate="2021-06-14T14:34:40.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to consider is that actions of any individual, company or a nation that has existed for a significat amount of time (on the appropriate time-scale) can be called in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if we apply modern day standards to the actions committed sufficiently far in the past&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if we look into it in sufficient detail&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if we apply standards of our community to other communities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could give many examples of acceptable points of things generally considered &lt;em&gt;horrible/awful&lt;/em&gt; or horrific sides of some people or historical events that are treated as honorable... but this would necessarily generate lots of outrage and name-calling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me also point out that boycotting is not necessarily the best strategy to help those in need - it may actually have the very opposite effects, and thus be just as immoral. In this case, when the crime is in the past, boycotting probably comes at the expense of overlooking human right abuses elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T14:34:40.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13621" CreationDate="2021-06-15T08:23:12.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok it works now: is was a StackExchange-wide problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T08:23:12.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-16T01:34:47.437" Score="35" ViewCount="1337" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heyo folks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The time has come for me to wind down some of my activities here, and so I will be turning in my diamond and resigning as a moderator in a few weeks time. It's... been a year... and a lot has changed. Now that things have started to turn a corner and circumstances have changed in both meat-space and across the network, it's time to lean into new opportunities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fear not, the changes are (hopefully) positive! New responsibilities at work, new chances to take on a wider range of topics in my research, and a realization that I should probably spend a little less time in the basement on my computer (work from home is a mixed blessing) all mean it is time to refocus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the next several weeks, I will be jotting down the various ideas bouncing around in my head and still handling the flags like normal. Exact timelines are a little fuzzy, but I expect to formally step down in mid-July. Absolute latest would be end of July, cause I'm going to take a nice vacation in France at the start of August!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first started as a moderator, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. My first impression is the same I have now -- y'all do a fantastic job of handling the curation as a community, and the moderators really can step back and act as exception handlers to do things the community cannot. I am amazed at the amount of effort put in by everybody to keep things moving in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what will I do with my time when I'm no longer deleting comments (honestly my favorite flags to handle -- it's oddly satisfying)? I'm sure few know this, but I used to race bicycles on the velodrome and traveled the country doing it, but ended up putting the bike down while finishing my PhD. In addition to picking up my degree, I picked up an extra 45 lbs // 20 kg. So I plan on spending my extra time away from computers to get out and get back in shape, even if I may not race again soon (I no longer live near a track, unfortunately).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, between the fantastic community members, the great group of moderators who remain, and the renewed commitment from the company and the CMs (even if it isn't obvious to the outside, they really have stepped up their support), I think Physics.SE is in a good place and headed towards even better ones. I hope y'all keep up the hard work and continue to share the amazing depth of knowledge that makes this community what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2021-06-16T03:23:35.680" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T03:23:35.680" Title="Turning in my diamond shortly" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-16T01:41:57.243" Score="24" ViewCount="1314" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you haven't heard, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13624/turning-in-my-diamond-shortly&quot;&gt;I am stepping down in a few weeks time&lt;/a&gt;. There has been some additional turnover on the moderation team in the past year, and so we'd like to discuss with the community whether there is interest from folks in running to be a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you interested in becoming a moderator? Are you thinking about it but have questions you'd like to discuss? Want to know more about what it entails? Let's use this space to discuss!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously expressing interest now is not committing anybody to anything, and not expressing interest now doesn't keep you from running if there is an election!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion here will help the current team figure out when/if there should be another election and how many positions there should be to ensure it is competitive. We also want to make sure if folks are on the fence because they don't know enough details, we can help fill in info as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6634" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2021-06-16T03:23:16.980" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T08:23:11.630" Title="Are you interested in becoming a moderator?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13625" CreationDate="2021-06-16T14:28:05.317" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might be interested, but I'm generally not a confrontational kind of guy and getting angry messages from disgruntled users isn't my idea of a good time.  My concerns are heightened in that my username is my real name and my profile lists my occupation &amp;amp; employer.  This was a conscious decision on my part when I joined, since I view my time here as a sort of &amp;quot;public outreach&amp;quot; that's part of my occupation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it also means that if someone really wanted to really harass me, it'd be relatively easy.  Already, I occasionally receive back-channel e-mails this way concerning answers I have posted.  I'm cool with that as a &amp;quot;private user&amp;quot;, but I'd worry that it would get much more stressful if I was closing or deleting people's posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question for the current mods is:  Would having my real name, occupation, &amp;amp; employer easily accessible to the world be an impediment if I became a mod?  I suspect that given my history on the site, it would be difficult to completely dissociate my account from it at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81133" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T14:28:05.317" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13625" CreationDate="2021-06-16T18:50:21.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested, but I feel like i don't have enough experience to know which decision to make when, for example, a question is flagged as homework (sometimes I find that the question isn't bare homework and should be considered on-topic, but it's closed anyway). Is there something one could do to improve their moderation skills, so to speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220004" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T18:50:21.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13625" CreationDate="2021-06-17T00:28:52.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be interested in becoming a moderator.  I visit the site almost every day, and I try always check on the review queues when I log in.  Compared to a the other Stack Exchange sites I visit, Physics gets a lot of off-topic questions—especially homework (and homework-like) questions.  While I have never been a moderator on any Stack Exchange site, my wife has been a moderators on several sites over the years, and so I am quite familiar with the duties and practicalities of being a moderator.  What I don't know much about is the time commitment for moderators on this particular site.  I know that different moderators can have somewhat different approaches and put different amounts of time into a site, but I am curious about how the fairly large number of off-topic questions affects the workload on Physics specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T00:28:52.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13625" CreationDate="2021-06-17T00:42:31.293" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be interested, but to be quite honest if my name were on the ballot I would not vote for myself :D  &lt;br&gt; Mainly because I am not active on Meta. I do check the main site every day, but I rarely if ever participate/answer/comment to discussions on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How important is being active on Meta to being a (good) moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, my reputation is &amp;lt; 25k. Would that be affecting anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastEditorUserId="37677" LastEditDate="2021-06-17T08:23:11.630" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T08:23:11.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-17T10:03:01.030" Score="8" ViewCount="662" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;September update:&lt;/strong&gt; Community Ads are now live network-wide. All ads with a score of 6 or higher, or with a score of 4 or higher &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; no downvotes will be displayed (except for any that have a note from the CM Team explaining why it wasn't selected). Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;the main post on MSE&lt;/a&gt; for a list of the ads that are being displayed. And stay tuned for 2022's edition for the next opportunity to submit more ad proposals!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AUGUST NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; This post has now been locked and new submissions are not being accepted. Ad submissions are now undergoing review by the Community Team, and this question will be updated once the ads are live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're almost halfway through 2021, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;in case you missed it&lt;/a&gt;, Community Promotion Ads are gonna be a bit different this time! &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: submit and vote for ad proposals before August 2nd!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, or on other sites in the network. They can show up in the right sidebar, or in banners in question pages. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be considered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99341/208518&quot;&gt;the Community Management Team&lt;/a&gt; to be displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. The goal of this initiative is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. You may want to promote external resources, or Meta guidance for newcomers, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This initiative has an added goal of providing your community with &lt;em&gt;an opportunity to showcase exemplary questions from your main site, as well as frequently-linked-to guides from your Meta site&lt;/em&gt;. While the latter makes sense to be shown solely on this site, the former can be shown all across the network. These should avoid hot button topics, and instead focus more on evergreen questions that show what your community’s all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. Historically, we've reset the ads every year — since this is the first run of a new format, we'll run the ads collected in this post through the end of 2021 and reassess the rotation cycle then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a previous exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there restrictions to the ads I can post?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All proposed ads need to abide by &lt;a href=&quot;/conduct&quot;&gt;our Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/advertising/guidelines&quot;&gt;Our ad creative guidelines&lt;/a&gt; also generally apply (note that the first 2 bullet points on the “Tracking” section do not apply, and a lot of the guidelines surrounding claims, comparisons, proof, etc., while still applicable, may not be particularly relevant). Finally, ads can not be promoting products nor soliciting programmer time or resources for: knowledge sharing or collaboration tools for technologists, or for sites where ad buyers are primarily targeting technologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Each answer must relate to a single ad submission.&lt;/strong&gt; Please do not post multiple ad submissions in the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers must be in one of the below formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have an image for the ad you want to display on this site (must be the case for ads to external sources):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Image name. Example: &amp;quot;community_ad_name_300x250&amp;quot;][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://image-url&#xA;  [2]: https://clickthrough-url&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to create an ad for a question from your main or meta site, to be advertised on this or other sites in the network (staff will generate a frame for the ad with this site's theme, for brand consistency):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Question title  &#xA;Question URL&#xA;Ad size (right sidebar or banner ads)&#xA;Site(s) to be displayed in. Can be:&#xA;  - &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed on this site&#xA;  - &amp;quot;all&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed all over the network&#xA;  - a specific subset of sites&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels for right sidebar ads or 728 x 90 pixels for banner ads. Images can be double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF, PNG, or JPG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Selection process&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This post will remain open for ad submissions and voting until August 2nd&lt;/strong&gt;. At that point, the question will be closed/locked, and no more ad submissions will be accepted. For ad submissions to be considered for selection by the Community Management Team, they must have &lt;strong&gt;a minimum score of 6 at the time the post was closed/locked for submissions.&lt;/strong&gt; Given this is the first run with this new format, we may adjust the score threshold to be a bit lower if we see ads struggling to get to it (especially if the ads are not getting downvotes) by the time submissions and voting are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reporting statistics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this cycle is over, at the end of 2021, the Community Management Team will provide you with reporting statistics, as described in the &amp;quot;reporting&amp;quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to use the question's comment section to ask for any clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T11:31:14.913" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T11:31:14.913" Title="Community Ads for 2021" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-17T22:49:50.857" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1LCZs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Common topics on Matter Modeling Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T10:59:56.377" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T10:59:56.377" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-06-17T22:49:50.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13633" CreationDate="2021-06-18T15:13:50.097" Score="2" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should I do if my answer to a question has a downvote for no reason defined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree if there is maybe some mistake in my answer but I am not able to find. Then, yes. I agree with the downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for this answer, I don’t think a downvote was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I did write in the comments : “ Why the downvote?“.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else should I do in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/645911/287551&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/645911/287551&lt;/a&gt;   This is the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="287551" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-06-19T00:14:03.937" LastActivityDate="2021-07-05T13:00:45.467" Title="What should I do if my answer to a question has a downvote for no reason defined?" Tags="|discussion|support|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13632" CreationDate="2021-06-18T16:07:45.343" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is not much that you can do other than improving your answer or hoping that the downvoter leaves a comment. Votes are private and there is no obligation for voters to explain themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if someone targets you and votes on many of your posts in a short span of time, the system will automatically detect and revert the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174766" LastEditorUserId="174766" LastEditDate="2021-06-18T16:15:27.763" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T16:15:27.763" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-19T06:16:33.083" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/113061/find-your-physics-partner&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MBEmi.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mathematics Educators Beta&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226060" LastEditorUserId="226060" LastEditDate="2021-06-21T16:40:47.470" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T16:40:47.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13632" CreationDate="2021-06-21T08:35:35.460" Score="-12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I call downvoting without leaving a comment &lt;em&gt;cowardly downvoting&lt;/em&gt;, since the downvoter didn't have courage to express/formulate their critique of the answer in the comments. It might be that they even do not understand the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some reasons for &lt;em&gt;cowardly downvoting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There may be multiple reasons for such downvoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some users treat &lt;em&gt;upvote/downvote&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;like/dislike&lt;/em&gt; buttons on social networks, i.e., they do not realize that votes on SE are an equivalent of &lt;em&gt;peer review&lt;/em&gt; in scientific community - they are not to express whether the answer pleases us, but to signal to other users whether it is correct or not. (Note also that many social networks nowadays do not offer a dislike button, to avoid bullying.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes downvotes come due to competing interests - the user may have also published an answer, and wants their answer to appear above yours, which may potentially bring more upvotes. Such competition may become especially sharp when dealing with bounty questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may be a user that you have recently argued with about something else, and who is now taking their revenge, without any relevance to the content of your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, in some cases downvoting is a form of a &lt;em&gt;collective punishlment&lt;/em&gt; - the user may not like the question or the topic in general, and they downvote everyone's answer to discourage the discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remark:&lt;/strong&gt; I do expect a few random downvotes by people who are offended by what I have written above - which would only confirm the points made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestions for principled downvoting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here is the practice that I suggest for dealing with an answer that you do not like (which pretty much follows the tradition in scientific publications):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a comment on the answer, explaining what you think is not correct. This way you a) give opportunity to other users to understand the issues and participate in the discussion, and b) give opportunity to the author to correct themselves or argue for their viewpoint.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have discussed the issue with the author, and you still believe that the answer is incorrect/misleading, then downvote. Note however, that you will negate everything that is contained in the answer - so downvoting because of a minor issue, while the bulk of the answer is correct, is not necessarily a good idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a few clarifications in view of the discussion in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main point of this answer was to stress the importance of leaving a comment when downvoting, not to discuss particular motivations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My least of reasons for downvoting that I consider illegitimate was not intended as comprehensive. I added qualifier &amp;quot;some&amp;quot; in the preceding sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is disagreement about some of the reasons cited, at least to rhe extent that they are not excluded by SE policy. Still, others are clearly beyond the pale. Sadly, no one seems to have a problem with those (judging by the downvotes.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In any case, it is important to remember that everyone carries a moral responsibility for their own actions. When you downvote, it is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; downvote. You own it, even if no one know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The reactions to this post seem to focus on only one type of situation - where obviously low quality content is downvoted by a high-reputation user. This was not however the situation that I had in mind when writing this post, as I hope should be clear from (re-)reading it. Given that most of the members in this community are either students or non-physicists, it could be very well that high-quality content is downvoted by the users who do not even understand it - due to the lack of background (general or specific to the question discussed) or due to not bothering to read the context freely. I wonder, if statistics is available on the number of downvotes by the reputation of the downvoters and the downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-07-05T13:00:45.467" LastActivityDate="2021-07-05T13:00:45.467" CommentCount="46" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T10:38:06.533" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E9D64.png&quot; alt=&quot;Detexify: automated LaTeX symbol recognition&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T10:38:06.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T10:38:38.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dlmf.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/toYiP.png&quot; alt=&quot;DLMF: an online encyclopaedia of special functions&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T10:38:38.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T10:39:13.980" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ef9Hl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Physics Stack Exchange Review Queues&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:08:41.317" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:08:41.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T11:15:36.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://texfaq.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K5zzi.png&quot; alt=&quot;TeX FAQ: All your TeX questions answered!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:09:10.167" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:09:10.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T11:17:10.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GnYOV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Zotero - your personal bibliographic research assistant&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T11:17:10.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T12:40:08.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13630/community-ads-for-2021&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6SOhy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Community ads are run by the community. Come and vote!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T12:40:08.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T12:43:12.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O9ZQy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Computational Science at Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T12:43:12.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T12:44:59.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5A7af.png&quot; alt=&quot;Academia Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T12:44:59.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T12:46:00.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/353zN.png&quot; alt=&quot;History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:11:16.427" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:11:16.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13645" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-22T13:45:05.253" Score="-1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are sometimes rather low quality questions appearing in the bounty section. Today these are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/646643/247642&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/646689/247642&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. In my opinion both require quite a bit of work (such as a discussion in the comments) to make them understandable and answerable. In normal conditions they would be closed, but, since the bounty has been already promised, they cannot be closed till the bounty expiration (probably a week from now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't it be better, if one could vote to close bounty question, provided that the bounty is reimbursed to the author, if the question is closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-06-23T09:43:11.597" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T09:43:11.597" Title="Bounty reimbursement" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|vote-to-close|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T13:56:23.043" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ziQXb.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org: the leading open access eprint repository&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T13:56:23.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13645" CreationDate="2021-06-22T14:13:00.667" Score="12" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting to close bountied questions is a feature that has often been requested at mother meta, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/121448/263383&quot;&gt;Allow users to vote to close bountied questions&lt;/a&gt;. So far it has not been implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being of &amp;quot;low quality&amp;quot; alone is is not a reason to vote to &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; a question, it's a reason to &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; it. Being &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, however, is a close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bounties can only be offered 2 days after asking a question. If no one votes to close a question during that time period, it's an indication the support for closing them may not be as strong as you think it is. If an on-going close review is interrupted by a bounty, this is more problematic. In either case, if you think a bountied question should be closed (or at least an on-going close review on it be completed), you can raise a custom moderator flag since moderators can refund bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T14:13:00.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T14:24:18.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1tczj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93522" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T14:24:18.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-22T14:37:07.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://unpaywall.org/products/extension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m8A2y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Unpaywall Browser extension: click the green tab and skip the paywall to read research papers for free, legally&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T11:12:43.167" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T11:12:43.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-23T15:21:19.747" Score="5" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommended deletion in review of a submission with the reason corresponding to &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; (NAA) on this Q&amp;amp;A: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/647154/what-does-h-parallel-ab-mean/647190#comment1452621_647190&quot;&gt;What does $H\parallel ab$ mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was in the &amp;quot;low quality posts&amp;quot; review queue. At least one person appears to have agreed with me, and, since it was in the review queue, I think someone before that must have flagged it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rob came after an added a comment, &amp;quot;While this post may be unsourced speculation, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an answer to the question.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This to me is an interesting corner case.  The question itself, in this case, has already been closed for lack of enough information to formulate a proper answer.  Before that happened, we got the &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; at issue, which is pretty much pure speculation as the terms have not been defined.  There is some technical sense in which I agree that Rob is correct, but I question whether it's a meaningful sense in the case here.  When I reviewed it, I was thinking more along the lines that there is no answer to this question because the symbols aren't defined, so &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; here is NAA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we really think that it's ok for any user who comes along to guess what the symbols meant here and speculate on an answer?  I don't think that's what we want.  Is there a different flag or category that would have been more appropriate in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For contrast, I think the situation would have been different if the question had been well-formed with the terms defined.  The problem here, in my opinion, is the interplay between the poorly written question and the speculative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical mother-meta post on the NAA &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; seems to be this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185073/how-do-i-properly-use-the-not-an-answer-flag&quot;&gt;How do I properly use the &amp;quot;Not an Answer&amp;quot; flag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an earlier discussion on the NAA &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; in context of Physics SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5589/are-we-clear-on-what-the-not-an-answer-flag-is-for&quot;&gt;Are we clear on what the &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; flag is for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these seem to cover the primary cases, but I still think the case raised here is different and probably rarer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2021-06-23T16:15:50.573" LastActivityDate="2021-07-01T04:56:34.713" Title="What constitutes an &quot;answer&quot; when the question is unmeaningfully vague?" Tags="|discussion|answers|review|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2021-06-23T16:07:21.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My personal guidelines for cases like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you think it’s a &lt;em&gt;not-useful&lt;/em&gt; answer, it would be appropriate to downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you think it’s a &lt;em&gt;very low-quality&lt;/em&gt; answer, there’s a flag queue for those. If you think the post should be removed, that’s the flag to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is “what does this notation mean,” and the response is “I think maybe it means X,” that’s absolutely an answer to the question. Partial answers should be posted as answers. Use the not-an-answer flag for posts that are new questions, misplaced comments, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T16:07:21.910" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2021-06-24T05:35:09.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics is a vast field of knowledge, using many different subfields of mathematics, each with its own conventions and symbols. Even with decades of experience in the field, it is simply impossible to master all possible physical theories and all possible formalisms and symbol conventions. This has a few trivial consequences in general and also applicable to the present issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the side of the question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP should have clear in mind that even the apparently simplest question would be more clear by adding some context information. In the present case, the information about the research paper, and even better about the context of the research paper the notation was used, would have made a clear question. However, I would also consider the evident absence of experience of the OP about this site policy. However, in a case like this, I think we should try to help new users to improve their question skills, not repel them. It is also possible that the general knowledge about physics of the OP was not enough to allow him to understand that his question was not clear for everybody. Then, his only real responsibilities are i) not to mention immediately the research paper triggering his question and ii) not editing his question after the comments. I would say that this a typical case where, after waiting at least one day, any experienced user with editing privilege could incorporate the clarifying information into the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the side of reviewers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I would be sharper. Reviewers are not obliged to know everything, but I would expect more experienced users to have clear what I wrote in my introductory paragraph. This should imply that if there is any possibility that they do not master the question subtopic, they simply skip the vote on the answer. Although dubitative, the answer we are discussing &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the correct answer to the original question, and I do not see how many more words would have been necessary. Voting or even classifying as NAA the answer to a question one has not understood should never happen. Unfortunately, I have the impression that this is not an isolated case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-06-24T16:01:54.480" LastActivityDate="2021-06-24T16:01:54.480" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13630" CreationDate="2021-06-25T13:38:22.810" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uu2rK.png&quot; alt=&quot;See our tutorial for typing mathematics using MathJax and LaTeX&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-06-25T13:45:07.467" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T13:45:07.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-27T04:54:55.823" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/647910/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP found a way to solve it using conservation of energy, and wants to investigate how the acceleration can be calculated using forces and torques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP also posted their method of solution, but got a wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized that OP did not take into account the acceleration due to rotation of the mass on the ring, and the expressions of the normal force and friction are wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we reopen this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this is not a &amp;quot;do my homework&amp;quot; problem (OP already solved it using another method, and showed their work on another (more interesting) method), and it requires some careful thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we reopen it, then of course, the answer should not solve the whole problem, but rather, point out the mistakes OP made (they need to properly consider the acceleration of the rotating mass in order to calculate the friction and the normal force).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60646" LastEditorUserId="60646" LastEditDate="2021-06-27T05:58:17.867" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T13:19:29.770" Title="Can we reopen this mechanics question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13656" CreationDate="2021-06-27T08:25:08.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW I have voted to reopen the question, but experience tells me the chances of reopening are very low. PSE moderators don’t like to admit to error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T08:25:08.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2021-06-27T11:23:22.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the guidelines for determining whether a response is not an answer are quite clear; they say the text of a response is not an answer if it does not attempt to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those terms, the response given in the Q&amp;amp;A cited is patently an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe an answer is inappropriate because it makes unjustified assumptions about the meaning of a question, then you might downvote it with a helpful comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242949" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T11:23:22.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13656" CreationDate="2021-06-27T13:04:32.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO the question should completely scrap the explicit mathematical work and asking for others to check it. If there really is a conceptual question, then it should be able to stand on its own. Putting in the work and asking others to check it (even with inserting the word &amp;quot;conceptual&amp;quot;) makes it seem like a check-my-work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest though, I'm not fully convinced this is a conceptual question. As the question is so far, the &amp;quot;concept&amp;quot; seems to be, &amp;quot;how can I write down the correct equations?&amp;quot; Of course, another user can pull relevant concepts from this, but the question isn't actually asking about them. And as a reminder, just because you see a concept to talk about does not mean that is what the post is actually asking about (It's a nice way to justify reopening almost any question though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, it seems like a borderline case. It looks like it will be reopened since there are 4 reopen votes currently despite a unanimous &amp;quot;leave closed&amp;quot; in the review (if one calls for a borderline question to be reopened in meta, chances are it will be reopened; there are many users who are fairly lenient on site policy and definitions therein), but I think I'll pass on making a judgement on this one without thinking more about it and looking into it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we reopen it, then of course, the answer should not solve the whole problem, but rather, point out the mistakes OP made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is what the answers need to be then indeed the question should remain closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-06-27T13:19:29.770" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T13:19:29.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-29T03:51:03.037" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/648411/&quot;&gt;Which hypothetical gravitons are in models where effects of mass are from specific cummulative motion patterns at small scales disturbing spacetime?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a question regarding my post which falls under the category of non-mainstream physics questions about which presumably well known hypothetical particles fit or match a given physics model or group of models matching a given description. Are there any Stack Exchange sites where this would be an appropriate question to ask? Could &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE&lt;/a&gt; work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298692" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-06-29T10:07:05.920" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T18:38:01.410" Title="Is there a section of Stack Exchange where it is appropriate to ask this question regarding which hypothetical particles fit certain physics models?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13660" CreationDate="2021-06-30T16:10:56.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a fit to any SE site that I know.  But since you've identified a candidate, it would be better to ask about fit to their site on their meta rather than on ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2021-06-30T18:38:01.410" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T18:38:01.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2021-07-02T17:45:33.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;However, I have seen a lot of books say that flux only depends on charge enclosed...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, when textbooks say that flux depends only on the enclosed charge, they are referring to the flux of a closed surface like a sphere or a cube. I assume your question is precisely about how the flux through a cube and a sphere is equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, by all means, do the integration to find flux enclosed by a cube, but the integration becomes a bit tedious given that the electric field isn't a constant and reduces as we move away from the centre towards the corners. You can go the extra mile by all means and ask &amp;quot; well if we put a charge very close to the surface wouldn't &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E$&lt;/span&gt; be changing for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$dA$&lt;/span&gt;? How can their integral, ie flux, be equal???&amp;quot; Soon you realise that where &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E$&lt;/span&gt; is scarce on a portion of the closed surface, it is compensated by an excess of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E$&lt;/span&gt; in other regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can think of it this way. Take a spraypainter, the one you use for graffiti. Take it very close to the wall, about &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$10 cm$&lt;/span&gt; and spray the paint. You notice that the region is painted thickly and darkly, but concentrated in only a small region. Now pull back the spraypainter by about half a meter and spray once again. This time you see that the area being painted increases. But at the same time, the painted region become lighter and thinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vQ4q5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vQ4q5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image courtesy of Wikipedia&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Image courtesy of Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also another reason as to why Gauss' law is true. And that's because electric charges obey &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inverse square law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had they obeyed inverse cube law, this may not have been possible. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/282593/does-gauss-law-depend-on-the-fact-that-electric-force-law-is-inverse-square-law&quot;&gt;this SE post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="266713" LastEditDate="2021-11-21T20:31:31.737" LastActivityDate="2021-11-21T20:31:31.737" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-07-02T17:45:33.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13666" CreationDate="2021-07-03T01:28:57.217" Score="21" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the differences between Physics.SE and Stack Overflow is that SO has at least one review queue which we don't have: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-triage&quot;&gt;Triage&lt;/a&gt;.  From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278380/1650379&quot;&gt;2014 announcement&lt;/a&gt; comes this description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been trying to find a more automated way to categorize questions when they're asked rather than requiring each and every question to be moderated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Behind the scenes, a &amp;quot;quality score&amp;quot; is calculated for each question based on an automated analysis of the content. Those that score well are sent immediately to the homepage; those that score poorly will now be sent to Triage. From there, they'll go to one of three places based on human input:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The homepage, where they can be answered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The close or moderator flag&#xA;queue where they can be reviewed and eventually deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new &amp;quot;Help&#xA;and Improvement&amp;quot; queue where they can be edited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, there exists a machine-learning toolset which flags some questions that &lt;em&gt;shouldn't be answered right away&lt;/em&gt;, but should be looked at and possibly improved (or closed) first instead. These questions can be reviewed by anyone with 500+ reputation, just like the other review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/363552/280545&quot;&gt;recent Meta post on updates to the review queues&lt;/a&gt;, under &amp;quot;Planned changes,&amp;quot; appears the statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Triage queue will also be available on all sites but only turned on by default on Stack Overflow. Have a meta discussion and ask a moderator to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-review&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-review&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-review&lt;/a&gt; if your site wishes to add the Triage queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post says that more details about the upcoming changes to the review queues will be available later in Q3 2021, closer to their launch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on Physics, we get a fair number of questions from newcomers and passers-by which are off-topic according to our site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. While the homework policy was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10079/44126&quot;&gt;frequently discussed in the past&lt;/a&gt;, Meta activity about it has died down in the past few years as our community's consensus has matured. However, we still have a regular trickle of off-topic homework-like questions which accumulate answers before they are closed. Evaluating whether an answer to a homework-like question is &amp;quot;complete enough&amp;quot; to warrant deletion is my least-favorite part of going through the moderator flag queue. It'd be much more fair if those types of questions could be hidden from answerers who don't yet know they are off-topic, so that those answerers don't waste their time on off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, discuss. Is a Triage queue something that we want on Physics? Attempting to train Stack Exchange's AI to keep low-effort homework questions off of the front page — is that a reasonable goal? How would we decide if it were working like we wanted? What would be pitfalls or problems to beware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-10-10T13:10:04.100" LastActivityDate="2021-10-10T13:10:04.100" Title="Should Physics enable a &quot;triage&quot; review queue for homework-like questions?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|homework-and-exercises|review|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13663" CreationDate="2021-07-03T07:00:42.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evaluating whether an answer to a homework-like question is &amp;quot;complete enough&amp;quot; to warrant deletion is my least-favorite part of going through the moderator flag queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't envy the moderators this task. Having to do crap like this is one of the reasons I have never wanted to become a moderator. I don't mind voting to delete when I have four other voters to hide behind but I would find it stressful if mine was the sole responsibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it grates against my OCD tendencies I think the best strategy is probably to just ignore the answers to homework questions. In the main they are from new members who are only trying to be helpful. As long as the question gets closed reasonably quickly I'm not sure it matters whether it gets answers. If an OP is abusing the system by repeatedly asking homework questions the SE's auto-ban algorithm will eventually get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am amongst the more determinedly anti-homework elements of the site membership, but when it comes to eliminating the homework questions we don't need to be perfect as long as we are good enough - and I think we are good enough. So I don't believe the triage system is necessary, though I have no objection to it if others feel it is worth while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't help the mods who have to deal with the flags, but you could relieve the stress by simply rejecting most of the flags unless you're seeing the same user names coming up repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T07:00:42.663" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13663" CreationDate="2021-07-03T23:31:41.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we really &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; this ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong - it's a tempting idea, however ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existing system does provide at least one benefit : it lets more experienced users demonstrate to newer users how the homework policy works.  I think it is important that new members (not just passer-by types) see how this works in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a lot of magic happens behind the scenes we're actually &lt;em&gt;hiding&lt;/em&gt; a member policy as well.  Remember, this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a policy written in stone.  It could change.  It seems to have recheached a consensus now, but those change over time.  It's going to be a lot harder to change an AI to respond to finesses or even complete changes in the homework policy.  Not all the science orientated sites have a homework policy, so that's also an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we would be shifting the workload from the general membership to either moderators or those who actually do check the review queues (sense of guilt there :-) ).  I suspect that makes the existing system more practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans, those all handy general purpose machines, will tend (I think) to do a better job of working out what is and is not homework than some machine.  Particularly as the &amp;quot;adversary&amp;quot; here is also human and they're bloody devious, these humans.  If we're going to have to triage them anyway, let's at least be &lt;em&gt;visible&lt;/em&gt; about it and show new member the &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; of the policy and give them a feel for what is black, white and grey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's Terminator to worry about.  Say no to AI before it's too late. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T23:31:41.920" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13663" CreationDate="2021-07-04T04:02:39.427" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went into Stack Overflow and handled a few questions from the Triage queue there to remind myself a bit how this works. I've done over 1,100 triages on SO, but it had been a while so I had forgotten a few details myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As background, if you're not familiar with this queue, you might want to skim the workflow here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-triage&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-triage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now a couple of misconceptions that I think I see in both the question by rob and some of the answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rob framed this in terms of the HW policy on Physics.SE, but we should be clear that there's no reason to think that questions entering Triage would necessarily be HW questions only or that all HW questions would get sent there.  The behind-the-scenes scoring would likely catch other questions and miss some that are definitely HW.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Triage queue is about &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; and not answers.  The system does not put answers into this queue at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions in Triage are not necessarily (ever?) held off of the homepage while in the queue.  The material that rob quoted suggests that they are - and maybe it is true in some way - but I tested that I can access questions in the queue directly on  SO without going through the queue.  It also happens that some of the questions in the queue already have comments and even answers. (To be explicit, I pasted the URL of a question in the queue into a new browser tab. So that's not the same as finding it on the homepage.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For questions heading to closure, there is no extra work incurred here by the community.  If I select one of the top-level options in the review that leads toward closure, I end up casting a close vote directly from this review.  For questions that are OK, it does look like this might add a couple of reviews, since the material that I read indicated that it takes 3 &amp;quot;Looks OK&amp;quot; votes to clear it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This queue has a companion queue on SO for questions that are marked for edit by community (rather than edit by author) where they go for &amp;quot;help and improvement&amp;quot;. It wasn't clear if we'd get that queue too if we enable Triage.  For those concerned that this queue is strictly punitive, however, this option might appeal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that as background, the question here is still whether or not Physics.SE wants to turn this on.  My initial reaction was that we should, but that was based in part on the apparently wrong belief that items heading into this queue would not immediately go to the homepage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If it were true&lt;/em&gt; that items in the queue would not go to the homepage until cleared, then I think this would be a definite improvements in these respects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would reduce or eliminate the incentive for people to post poor questions in the first place, most especially the egregious HW ones that demand an answer in a very short time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would reduce or eliminate answers to poor questions, including some HW questions, if they could be closed before they got posted to receive answers.  This would have secondary benefits of facilitating roomba clearing these questions out automatically and reducing the number of flags going to the moderators to deal with HW answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that it's not true that the questions are held though, I'm inclined to think that enabling this queue will not help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On SO, where the question volume is high, it helps ensure that experienced users look at all of these questions, so there's value there even if the questions are on the homepage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics.SE has lower volume and I suspect that there are already a handful of users who eventually look at every or nearly every question that's posted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ultimately the main problems that I see directly or most discussed arise from lack of people (in total and per unit time) participating in the review queues that we have and/or using the downvote according to its SE purpose. For a few who are particularly active in the queues, one might argue instead that it's the 20 review-per-day limit that's the problem in their cases. Adding a queue isn't going to address those problems.  It probably won't make it worse, but I don't think it can help - unless it comes with a hold on the question being posted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-07-20T08:47:51.380" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T08:47:51.380" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-09T06:32:08.150" Score="-4" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I found an email in my inbox that the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/25185/&quot;&gt;Who should I contact if I see an unknown object in the sky?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been closed today as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has been asked and answered in June 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it is ridiculous and inappropriate and shows a complete lack of respect for the way a community develops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there is no point reopening it because it is already answered. However, you showed me your disrespect and disdain and I want to express my disdain in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3415" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-09T06:47:24.670" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T17:02:26.687" Title="Closing a 10-year old answered question as off-topic" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2021-07-09T07:34:46.187" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone (I don't know who it is) has been going back through old questions and voting to close old questions that don't meet our current guidelines. While I admire the commitment involved I'm not sure it helps the site that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, I suspect your question received a close vote as part of this activity, and once a question has received one close vote it appears in the review queues where other site users will see it and can also vote to close. I can see why people have voted to close your question, as these days we'd probably migrate it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; since it isn't really a question about physics. Of course the Astronomy Stack Exchange didn't exist in 2011 when you posted your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall seeing your question in the review queues, but if I had I would have voted to leave it open as I think it's  perfectly good question and I see no benefit to anyone in closing it. Anyhow while I cannot speak for those who did vote to close, I doubt they intended any criticism. The close votes would simply have been because it's a question about astronomy rather than physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2021-07-09T09:33:23.320" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T09:33:23.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2021-07-09T08:54:51.483" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing questions is not an expression of disdain. It's merely saying that a question like this is not suitable for the site as it is today, in this instance because it is not inside the scope of &lt;em&gt;physics as a natural science&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the scope of a site changes, which inevitably happens over the course of the years (and in particular we are today simply stricter about many of the policies that in principle existed already ten years ago), questions that once were on-topic become off-topic. It is &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; that they can be closed after the fact, and age is not a reason not to close them (but there's usually no pressing need to go hunting for old, now off-topic questions), because users contributing to the site &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; often look at the questions that are already here to figure out what kinds of questions they can ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order to signpost that certain kinds of questions would no longer be considered on-topic if they were asked today, old questions can and should be closed. Note that, since it is upvoted and has upvoted answers, the question will not be deleted, and you did not lose any reputation you gained from it. We recognize that it is not your &lt;em&gt;fault&lt;/em&gt; that the question was once welcomed here but no longer would be, and there is no negative effect beyond users no longer being able to add new answers to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a somewhat silly simile, I would ask you to think of this not as a lack of respect for site history, but as the equivalent of preserving relics of old - they will last and can be viewed, but no longer be touched or used by members of the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T08:54:51.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-09T12:26:03.770" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help pages for badges list them all, nice, but it is unclear which badges can be obtained multiple times. Could this be indicated, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some this is rather obvious, like, &amp;quot;Enlightened: First to answer and accepted with score of 10 or more&amp;quot; can obviously be obtained only once. But these descriptions are ambiguous examples: &amp;quot;Explainer: Edit and answer 1 question&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Revival: Answer more than 30 days after a question was asked as first answer scoring 2 or more&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Enthusiast: Visit the site each day for 30 consecutive days&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Nice Answer: Answer score of 10 or more&amp;quot; ... just from that text there's no way of knowing that some of these are awarded multiple times, others are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243047" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T13:25:51.600" Title="Can we add on the help page which badges can be obtained multiple times?" Tags="|feature-request|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13670" CreationDate="2021-07-09T13:25:51.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick search on Meta Stack Exchange produces the FAQ thread&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/what-are-the-badges-i-can-earn-on-each-site-and-what-are-the-exact-criteria-for&quot;&gt;What are the badges I can earn on each site, and what are the exact criteria for earning each badge?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which explicitly includes &amp;quot;awarded once&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;awarded once per question&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;awarded multiple times&amp;quot; for all badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including this into the formal descriptions in the help center is not necessarily obvious -- that resource needs to balance completeness with compactness and accessibility. If you feel strongly about this, the network-wide meta is probably a better place to campaign for this, though there are threads asking for this feature &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7424/mark-which-badges-are-capable-of-being-won-1-time&quot;&gt;dating back to at least 2009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T13:25:51.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2021-07-09T13:40:59.693" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since my motives are being questioned, let me add this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close this question because I didn't think it was about physics as defined in the scope of this site. That's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see that the age of the post (which I didn't notice) makes any difference. Perhaps the criteria have changed in the 10 years since this question was asked? There isn't any statute of limitations. If there were, then such questions would not be close-able and wouldn't appear in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I vote to close &lt;em&gt;a question&lt;/em&gt; I am not showing &amp;quot;disdain&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;disrespect&amp;quot; to the person who asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T13:40:59.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2021-07-09T14:02:29.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing the question in order to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make it explicit that it is legacy and is no longer on-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;prevent others from adding new answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were I the author of such a question, I wouldn't feel offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it's far from a good thing that it now begins with a  totally inappropriate suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269999" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T14:02:29.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13577" CreationDate="2021-07-14T03:40:54.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds to me like SE doesn't think this is a problem. I suggest you &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/364874/294226&quot;&gt;take a look at their response to this issue.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote your conscience and leave a comment there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="63690" LastActivityDate="2021-07-14T03:40:54.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-17T08:28:07.623" Score="10" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I type &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+tachyo*&quot;&gt;tachyons&lt;/a&gt; into the search engine of the site I find a lot of open questions about tachyons but my question about tachyons was closed as off topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/651573/&quot;&gt;If electrically charged tachyons exist, could multiple electrically charged tachyons be bound to each other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment said that tachyons aren't considered mainstream physics but if that's the case why wouldn't other questions on tachyons be closed as off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand special relativity does not forbid particles that move faster than light, but instead forbids particles that are not already moving faster than light from accelerating to a speed faster than light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason I see given for tachyons being thought to not exist is that they can travel back in time and so create causal loops, but from what I understand the known laws of physics aren't known to forbid time travel or causal loops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92654" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T09:55:16.633" LastActivityDate="2021-08-02T01:21:56.900" Title="Why would my question on tachyons be closed as off topic if most other questions on tachyons are still open?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13675" CreationDate="2021-07-17T09:41:40.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Briefly speaking, asking about faster-than-light &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tachyonic particles&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;non-mainstream/primarily opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; and usually&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; off-topic (unless it's about experimental searches), while asking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_field&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tachyonic fields&lt;/a&gt; can be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; No rule without exceptions, especially if the question is well-researched/well-documented, or illustrates in a particularly clear way related concepts, e.g, causality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T19:07:51.380" LastActivityDate="2021-07-24T19:07:51.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-17T12:45:06.263" Score="9" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my comments on the following answer was removed:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/651684/21299&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/651684/21299&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I clearly remember posting to ask @Qmechanic whether their (novel to me) Dirac delta appears in the context of HEP or GR or string theory, which are my areas of interest and, I gather, also Qmechanic's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually was looking forward to receiving some context from Qmechanic! The fact that someone deleted my comment addressed to Qmechanic with no reason given is rude, but doing so without notifying me is plainly unprofessional. For example if I knew Qmechanic personally I could have thought they were ignoring me for some perceived slight. (I do not in fact know them personally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway this prompted me to delete my account which I understand will happen in a few hours' time. I'm sure on some level that a mistake was made in this instance (as opposed to my comment being in violation of whatever policy) but it is frankly an enormous waste of my time to post any content on a website that can just lose my contributions either due to error or due to bad policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21299" LastEditorDisplayName="user21299" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T13:45:28.973" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T16:36:09.957" Title="Comment removed bizarrely and unprofessionally" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13677" CreationDate="2021-07-17T12:54:24.577" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are not for follow-up questions, comments are for clarifying or criticizing the post being commented upon, and hence your comment was removed (I deleted it together with some other obsolete comments). It seems likely that you expect comments to fulfill a different function than they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We - both &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19757/263383&quot;&gt;SE at large&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Comments are disposable: unlike posts, there's no public revision history, and they can be deleted without warning by their authors, by moderators, and in response to flags.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bcomments%5D+deleted&quot;&gt;this site in particular&lt;/a&gt; - have always been very explicit that comments are temporary and ephemeral and so you should have no expectation of them lasting forever. It is neither bizarre nor unprofessional to follow through on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T18:03:32.020" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T18:03:32.020" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13677" CreationDate="2021-07-17T15:21:32.643" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I can't help but comment on OPs (over)reaction. We get people complaining about deleted comments very often, but this must be the first time someone deletes their account because of it. OP has contributed to the site for more than eight years, and this was the last straw? What really happened here? It baffles me that you chose to delete your account before even posting this question on meta, before getting any feedback, and before you had time to think about what happened. Is there any chance you could reconsider? Hopefully it is not too late to cancel the deletion, and it would be sad to see you go because of &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, let me show you my sympathy. Getting your comments deleted can indeed be bizarre the first time it happens. Now, it turns out that this is a by-design feature: SE wants comments to be temporary, so you should very much expect your comments to disappear eventually. But, indeed, if you are not familiar with this aspect of the site, it can be very confusing when it happens. I already got used to it and I think it is a useful feature, but I was also uncomfortable at first. All I can say to you is: it will take some time before it feels natural, but eventually you will hopefully agree that it does more good than harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, I would expect moderators to not delete comments on their own posts nearly as often as on other threads. Otherwise it is very easy to abuse this feature. What prevents a moderator from deleting comments that criticize their posts? Or comments that they do not want to spend time and effort to deal with? This is not an option for regular users, so it should not be one for moderators either. Therefore, in this particular instance, I believe whoever deleted those comments did not behave properly. The comments should have been addressed via other comments, not via deletion. &lt;em&gt;Even&lt;/em&gt; if the initial comments were off-topic and should not have been posted in the comment section, the moderators should not have deleted them. They should have explained, also in the comment section, that the comments do not belong there, etc. And only after the whole issue is resolved and everyone understands that the comments should go, can they be deleted. So I kind of agree with OP here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T15:21:32.643" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-19T00:49:58.887" Score="30" ViewCount="746" Body="&lt;p&gt;I progressively feel that a typical user interested in the &lt;em&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/em&gt; tag, like me, is not welcomed in the community; not to mention, that at least as I can tell, the community is not explicit enough on exactly what is acceptable, or not, under this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Personal examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4200587/geometric-intuition-for-mathcall-m-oplus-mathcallm-rightarrow-t%22&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Geometric intuition for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathcal{L}^{-m} \oplus \mathcal{L}^{m} \rightarrow T^{2}$&lt;/span&gt; Calabi-Yau threefolds&lt;/a&gt; was posted and voted-to-close four times on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; (PSE); at the end, it was migrated to &lt;em&gt;Math Stack Exchange&lt;/em&gt; despite of the fact that I've received (and accepted) a really wonderful answer from a PSE user. My question manifestly was about the &amp;quot;physics way&amp;quot; to understand a mathematical idea used in physics papers (actually submitted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt; under the high energy physics label and no reference to mathematics) by famous physicists (Vafa and Jafferis). Honestly my question was about math, but, my point is that I consider my question as legitimate under the mathematical physics tag in PSE and not off-topic as the treatment it received from the community suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I offered an answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/466301/connectedness-on-special-kaehler-manifolds&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Connectedness on Special Kaehler manifolds&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Again, this question is about a mathematical topic (special geometry) discovered by physicists, relevant for (black hole-) physics that is virtually not discussed by mathematicians at all. A moderator in the question comments immediately pointed that this question was &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; in this site. To me, this is also a legitimate question in PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I had to close some drafts before posting the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/592368/references-on-mathematical-stacks-for-a-string-theory-student&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;References on mathematical stacks for a string theory student&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In all of them I received comments saying that this was &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; in this site, until a version of the question was considered &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;acceptable&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; but still received comments saying: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;this seems off-topic&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I don't understand what you are saying&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;; despite of the fact that I specify that I'm a physics oriented student and my question was manifestly about the math-background needed to understand physics papers, written by physicists and that I didn't wanted an answer from a mathematician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I have the possibly subjective perception that the community was far more tolerant in this respect before I started to post in PSE (four years ago). For example, I find the following questions and answers nice and not evidently different from the examples I gave, except that they are apparently &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83687/how-algebraic-geometry-and-motives-appears-in-physics&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;. To be honest, I find very discouraging and ambiguous the treatment a question in this tag receives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then my question is: How can I understand &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; what a permissible &lt;em&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/em&gt; question is? Is this a generalized attitude against the mathematical-physics community?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126923" LastEditorUserId="126923" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T13:48:21.113" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T15:22:33.330" Title="Little tolerance with mathematical-physics questions" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13680" CreationDate="2021-07-19T03:30:39.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For one, I don’t think you’re a typical user.  Check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag to see typical questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For another, you present your question in a way that maximizes hifalutin mathematical jargon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You admitted yourself - in reply to a comment of mine - that at least one of your question was basically a math question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case of the specific question “ References on mathematical stacks for a string theory student”, you actually supply your own background, which suggest the answer is unlikely to be useful to the community at large.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not quite sure why you think the community has little tolerance to math/phys questions.  The activity in the mathematical physics and cognate tags shows otherwise.  Your questions (or answers) require quite specialized knowledge to understand, which restricts the number of people with the expertise to view or answer.  None of your questions or answers you give in examples have been downvoted.  Sorry if this shatters any illusion that mathematical physics is somehow equivalent to string theory: it is just not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T20:20:52.907" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T20:20:52.907" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13680" CreationDate="2021-07-19T10:04:58.100" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the impression you are confusing the mathematical-physics tag on Physics SE with the one on Mathematics SE.  They are not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics SE :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematical physics is the application of mathematics to problems in physics and mathematical methods suitable for such applications, e.g., partial differential equations (PDEs), functional analysis, variational calculus, and potential theory. It also includes the study of problems inspired by physics within a mathematically rigorous framework, such as rigorous derivation of an atomic energy spectrum, rigorous construction of a quantum field theoretic model, and rigorous description of a phase transition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-physics&lt;/a&gt; just because your question involves math!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on Mathematics SE it's :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE THIS TAG for elementary physical questions. This tag is intended for questions on modern mathematical methods used in quantum theory, general relativity, string theory, integrable system etc at an advanced undergraduate or graduate level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really think it's clear your questions fit the Mathematics SE definition better than the Physics SE one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are also very specialist questions and while I have no doubt there are people on Physics SE who can handle them the mathematical level required is more likely to receive a match on Mathematics SE.  You say you want a physics related answer to them, but there seems little physics here (like a lot of String Theory IMO).  In at least two cases you yourself say they're more suited to Mathematics SE and one question never (as far as I can tell) had a mathematical-physics tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate you find this a problem, but I think the nature of your questions may be more suited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/string-theory&quot;&gt;Mathematics Overflow&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T10:04:58.100" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13680" CreationDate="2021-07-19T12:21:35.810" Score="17" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-physics&quot;&gt;mathematical physics&lt;/a&gt; questions are on-topic and more than welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that advanced questions naturally tend to have fewer views, upvotes, and potential answerers. But don't get discouraged by that. You'll just have to be patient. If Phys.SE currently don't have the expertise to answer them, we might get it in the future!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it is a good idea to provide context, hyperlinks, and references to advanced questions to make them more accessible to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically about OP's examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/4200587/11127&quot;&gt;Geometric intuition for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathcal{L}^{-m} \oplus \mathcal{L}^{m} \rightarrow T^{2}$&lt;/span&gt; Calabi-Yau threefolds&lt;/a&gt; is a typical mathematical physics question in string theory, and should not have been migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/466301/2451&quot;&gt;Connectedness on Special Kaehler manifolds&lt;/a&gt; in its current version (v6) is pure math. Consider to add physics context, cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5713/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/592368/2451&quot;&gt;References on mathematical stacks for a string theory student&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;resource recommendation&lt;/a&gt; question. Such questions are restricted on Phys.SE, cf. various meta posts, cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question. Also the current version (v5) seems to be &lt;em&gt;opinion-based.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/83687/2451&quot;&gt;How algebraic geometry and motives appears in physics?&lt;/a&gt; is well received by the Phys.SE community although it is a bit broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T12:21:35.810" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13677" CreationDate="2021-07-19T16:36:09.957" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There wasn't really a question in this meta, but I'll throw in that, with respect to deletion of comments, my primary issue is the opposite.  I'd like the mods to delete more comments more often, especially on questions.  I did a quick search, and it seems to me that thousands if not tens of thousands of unanswered questions are sitting on the site ineligible for Roomba solely based on having more than 1 comment sitting on them. (See criteria for &lt;code&gt;RemoveAbandonedQuestions&lt;/code&gt; here &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&lt;/a&gt; .)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these are surely good questions that just didn't get attention and might someday get an answer, but many of them are low-quality / off-topic questions that will never be answered and were asked by users who haven't returned in quite some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a particularly chatty community.  Sometimes that is part of a constructive process, so it shouldn't be shutdown completely.  At the same time, there comes a time for cleaning up partial work that isn't progressing.  Within the structure of the SE sites, that has to mean deleting comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T16:36:09.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13675" CreationDate="2021-07-19T16:50:00.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The possibility that someone else might ask a question with the word &amp;quot;tachyon&amp;quot; in it that's on topic doesn't seem germane to the issue of whether your question is, on its own merits, on topic. (That's before considering that some open questions probably should have been closed too but slipped through for some reason or another.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment by Chiral Anomaly on your question seems pretty descriptive.  Your question does not allow for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answer within mainstream physics.  The premise of your question is inconsistent.  That's different than (drawing a few examples from the search that you suggested) questions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why tachyons violate causality (uses the term but asks about them in context of why existing theory disfavors them)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various questions about the potential for tachyons to exist in unproven but plausible theories that have sensible limits to accepted theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Existence or non-existance of formal solutions to mainstream-theory equations with (real or perceived) FTL characteristics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T17:17:25.347" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T17:17:25.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13667" CreationDate="2021-07-19T17:02:26.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this question in the review queue, and I voted to close it because it is not on topic. I typically do not check the age of a question when I see it in review - nor does the guidance for the workflow of the queue or the norm on any site that I use suggest that I should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it's worth it to go back through old questions to start this type of process is a matter of opinion, but once it's in the queue, I think it's definitely worth following through.  As a representative example, not long after you posted your meta here, we got another meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13675/why-would-my-question-on-tachyons-be-closed-as-off-topic-if-most-other-questions&quot;&gt;Why would my question on tachyons be closed as off topic if most other questions on tachyons are still open?&lt;/a&gt; that basically says that there are old questions open with (perceived) similar topic matter to this user's new question, so his/her question should stay open too.  Having off-topic questions draw more off-topic questions isn't great - And closing the old questions is the only available tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T17:02:26.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13688" CreationDate="2021-07-19T17:31:40.573" Score="13" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/652106/formula-to-calculate-round-trip-travel-time-based-on-current-distance-to-far-awa&quot;&gt;Formula to calculate round-trip travel time based on current distance to far-away galaxy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it was very well and clearly defined and answerable. In fact, it received an upvote before being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed for being a homework-like question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What really got to me was that it was closed with no comments and no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it would be a waste of time for there to be answers to infinite variations  of the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;E.g., a mass of _ and an acceleration of _. What is the force?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, my pattern will be that someone will give me an answer/comment that will lead to me to find the right answer and then I can post it as answer and accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing questions for being homework-like leaves no room for someone to answer their own question if they find the answer based on a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part of the homework-like policy stuck out to me though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader&#xA;audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, my question seemed like it was relevant to broader audience. I did some searching and was unable to find something similar that had been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I searched &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=expansion%20of%20universe%20time%20required%20to%20travel%20distance%20calculation&amp;amp;safe=active&amp;amp;dcr=0&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk00e9H2QoOetjmtT4phOyIcw62tvpg%3A1626715624001&amp;amp;ei=57X1YPnFPMXY-wSx6LmAAg&amp;amp;oq=expansion%20of%20universe%20time%20required%20to%20travel%20distance%20cal&amp;amp;gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMYADIFCCEQoAE6BwgAEEcQsAM6EQgAELADEIoDELcDENQDEOUCOgQIIxAnOgIIADoGCAAQFhAeOggIIRAWEB0QHjoHCCEQChCgAToECCEQFUoECEEYAFDvc1iVqAFgpq0BaBFwAngAgAG7AYgBpyOSAQQ0MC43mAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesgBCsABAQ&amp;amp;sclient=gws-wiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and there was not anything remotely accessible to me on the first page of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For someone who is it at a lower level of physics such as myself, such a question being answered would (in my opinion) be a blessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we too easily close homework-like questions? Could we more welcoming to new users and those with lower physics levels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="270728" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-07-20T08:44:33.570" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T08:44:33.570" Title="Are questions marked as homework-like too easily?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13687" CreationDate="2021-07-19T18:09:21.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have closed this particular question as too broad, but it has elements of HW and opinion-based.  You're asking for someone to give you a specific model of the universe and do this calculation for you.  It's not clear what concept(s) confuse you, and it reads straight up like you want someone to do this work for you given concepts you seem to already understand (HW-like).  Beyond that, it's not clear how or why any specific model should be chosen (opinion-based to some degree), and the amount of work that would be required to answer this questions, depending on the model, might be quite large (too broad).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read it the first time, I did think it was &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;, but being interesting and being on topic here are not the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T18:09:21.880" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-19T20:00:51.330" Score="23" ViewCount="628" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/5#questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;next week, 2021-07-26&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s how it’ll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2021-07-26 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will post the final questionnaire on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;Election page&lt;/a&gt;. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176067" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-08-13T14:41:52.407" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T14:41:52.407" Title="2021 Moderator Election Q&amp;A – Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13691" CreationDate="2021-07-19T21:14:07.127" Score="7" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do PSE mods (or SE more generally) keep track of comments deleted for “ harassment, bigotry, or abuse”.  Should they? If yes, are there consequences for repeat offenders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T21:43:32.000" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T21:43:32.000" Title="Keeping track of “abuse” (or other) flags?" Tags="|discussion|comments|policy|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13690" CreationDate="2021-07-19T21:43:08.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;automatic&lt;/em&gt; consequence for repeated flags for rudeness or abuse. However, there are automatic flags raised when particular users accrue a number of these flags in a certain timeframe, prompting moderators to review the behaviour in question. This system is not perfect, so if you observe a pattern of rudeness and you want to make certain the moderators are aware of it, please do raise a custom flag explaining this pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users that repeatedly show such behaviour will often receive a message pointing this out to them, which can also include a temporary suspension, depending on the severity. The length of such suspensions increases with repeated infractions, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2759/50583&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; - the usual pattern is 7 days for the first issue, 30 days for the second, and a year for the third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T21:43:08.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13680" CreationDate="2021-07-20T08:40:43.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that if the question is about mathematics per se, it is out of scope, even if the mathematics is commonly used in physics. It would be in scope if the question was about how to apply or interpret the mathematics in relation to physics. For example, if someone were to ask how to solve a quadratic equation, that would stand on its own mathematically and be out of scope, notwithstanding the fact that the solution of quadratic equations is a useful method in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242949" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T08:40:43.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13689" CreationDate="2021-07-20T17:19:09.083" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are major challenges specific to PSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-07-20T17:41:28.400" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T17:41:28.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13689" CreationDate="2021-07-20T17:41:09.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;How well do you think your previous behavior and actions on PSE have aligned with current PSE site policies? Do you think this will change at all if you are a moderator, and if so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T17:41:09.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13689" CreationDate="2021-07-20T17:51:26.567" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any PSE site policies that you find insufficient for the problem they try to solve, superfluous, or even actively harmful to the site? In the case where these policies cannot/will not be changed, how will you make sure to adhere to and promote these policies despite not agreeing with them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T17:51:26.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13689" CreationDate="2021-07-21T16:53:15.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What, if anything, would you do with a user who posts a steady stream of polite answers that derail questions to talk about their own personal theories, while not technically breaking any rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83398" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T16:53:15.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13585" CreationDate="2021-07-21T17:51:46.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise of this question is flawed. You seem to believe that your placeholder answer would prevent the question from being closed or deleted, and that is not generally true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP of a question can choose to delete their own question (together with your answer) at any time until one of several criteria are met to block that action. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that/5222#5222&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;). It could be that something about the circumstances of when you posted your stub would have triggered one of those, but generally speaking one would hope that there are not a lot of answers going onto questions that are getting as heavy negative feedback as you've suggested  for at least one of the questions that you references in comments nor upvotes on a stub that doesn't (yet) provide a real answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if you expected the question to be closed, which can happen even if answers are already posted, then roomba could well delete the question and answer in as few as 9 days depending on how many votes are cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, your answer stood a chance of being deleted sooner or later if the question had serious problems. (And if it didn't then the stub was unnecessary by any measure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond the technical points, what you're doing with the stub answer is trying to circumvent both the SE software and the other users on the site.  Provided the question had issues that justified your concern about deletion or closure, then it would seem that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Realized that the question had problems;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Realized that other users also saw the problems are were providing feedback including downvotes and/or close votes; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feared that the OP of the question would act on that feedback by deleting their question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A primary purpose of downvoting a question is to induce the poster to delete it. (Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/&lt;/a&gt;) That's why SE refunds the reputation lost on delete posts - Part of the &amp;quot;don't hold a grudge&amp;quot; approach taken by the site for users who correct their mistakes.  In addition to trying to keep a question that you evidentially thought was poor on the site, if you had been successful you would also, as side effects, have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negated what you saw as the community's overall response to the question; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prevented the OP of the question from deleting their question, which then would expose them to more negative feedback rather than allowing them to gracefully back out, perhaps to regroup and post better later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really thought the question was salvageable, then the appropriate recourse would be to fix the question first not to provide an answer to a question that even you (apparently) thought had significant issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T17:51:46.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13699" CreationDate="2021-07-21T19:39:40.143" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/652465/141502&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. The question itself depends on specialist knowledge about laser devices. As you can see in the comments, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/261973/jos%C3%A9-andrade&quot;&gt;user José Andrade&lt;/a&gt; said that, by not using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laser&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laser&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laser&lt;/a&gt; tag, a lot of people who are specialists in laser devices, but do not monitor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/photonics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;photonics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;photonics&lt;/a&gt; tag, would miss the question. Furthermore, you can see that I replied that, &amp;quot;based on the tag description for &amp;quot;laser&amp;quot;, I thought it seemed more-so for questions about light amplification by stimulated emission (more pure laser questions), rather than photonics (lasers and laser electronics), so I left it out&amp;quot;. I am posting this question to seek clarification about when to use the laser tag. What is the proper way to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/laser&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;laser&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;laser&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141502" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-21T20:36:58.843" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T20:36:58.843" Title="What is the proper way to use the &quot;laser&quot; tag?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13698" CreationDate="2021-07-21T20:35:20.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My rule of thumb is that more (relevant) tags are better than fewer tags. Every tag that you add puts your question on another list, in front of more other users, and helps the related-question algorithm suggests related questions. You can only have five tags, so feel free to pick the five best ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is totally about lasers, so I added that tag (and a couple of others). Feel free to fine-tune further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-07-21T20:35:20.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13689" CreationDate="2021-07-22T07:03:02.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Site policies need interpretation and interpretation of rules is never like proving a mathematical theorem. Moderators could play an important role in maintaining coherence in the interpretation of the site policies. However, elected moderators should act as an expression of their community. Do you think discussions here in Physics Meta could help? In the case of a positive answer, do you think this mechanism could or should be improved? How? In the case of a negative answer, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T07:03:02.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13711" CreationDate="2021-07-22T15:50:42.013" Score="40" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/43351/profrob&quot;&gt;ProfRob&lt;/a&gt; surpassed the 100k reputation threshold on Physics Stack Exchange, and as we've done for other users, I'd like to congratulate him on his efforts and his many contributions to the site. Only six other folks have reached 100k here, and ProfRob's accomplishment is doubly impressive because today he also passed 100k &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/users/2531/profrob&quot;&gt;on Astronomy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, becoming the first person there to do so (as well as the first person to reach 75k, 50k, etc. - he's set more records than I can list). Congratulations to him on a pair of remarkable achievements!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56299" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T20:04:30.983" Title="Congratulations to ProfRob on reaching 100k!" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13703" CreationDate="2021-07-22T16:16:24.857" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; it says that comments should not contain compliments, criticism etc.. Now if I see such a comment is it better to add another comment making the user aware of the linked site, which would violate the conventions stated on the same site, or just to ignore it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already tried to find an answer on this meta site and in the &amp;quot;help center&amp;quot; of the normal physics site, but without success, although I cannot really imagine this topic has not come up before...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="307301" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T17:16:29.503" LastActivityDate="2021-07-23T12:52:34.133" Title="How to react to comments containing compliments, criticism, etc.?" Tags="|support|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13702" CreationDate="2021-07-23T01:28:26.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;comments should not contain compliments, criticism etc.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Criticisms [that] do not add anything constructive&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all basically boils down to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If you don't have anything useful to say, don't say it.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There might be some confusion caused by the use of &amp;quot;which&amp;quot; where &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; would be more appropriate for the restrictive clause.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269999" LastActivityDate="2021-07-23T01:28:26.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13702" CreationDate="2021-07-23T12:52:34.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Ray's answer, if you do see comments that do not adhere to the comment policies, you should flag those comments for moderators to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-07-23T12:52:34.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13706" CreationDate="2021-07-24T01:58:30.363" Score="9" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is this sites opinion on users answering questions by promoting their own 'non-standard' research? By non-standard, I mean research which makes claims that are generally accepted by the physics community to be either wrong or not useful. While it is tricky to know when this is  happening every time, I worry that people visiting this site will see answers which seem credible but are the opposite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198952" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T04:07:11.563" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T12:54:56.420" Title="Self-promoting your non-standard research through answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13705" CreationDate="2021-07-24T02:53:38.090" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this sites opinion on users answering questions by promoting their own 'non standard' research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I care less about the opinions and more about the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post is not an attempt to answer the question, it should be flagged for review/deletion. If the post is an actual attempt at answering the question, then it deserves to stay on the site. However, if the content is incorrect, detrimentally speculative, etc. then users should downvote the answer. This then helps mitigate your following worry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is tricky to know when this is happening every time, I worry that people visiting this site will see answers which seem credible but are the opposite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer has enough down votes, then the answer will not be as easily visible, and it indicates an issue with the post and &amp;quot;caution&amp;quot; should be used when looking at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T04:20:50.943" LastActivityDate="2021-07-24T04:20:50.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13675" CreationDate="2021-07-24T07:58:31.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I do not like tachyonic physics as a subject, but I'm afraid I have to disagree with Brick's and Qmechanic's point of view about the non-mainstreamness of the subject and this specific question for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the subject &amp;quot;tachyons&amp;quot; is still nowadays present in serious papers published in reputable journals. A fast search on Web of Science returns more than 125 papers from 2015-01-01 with tachyons in the topic. Some of them are not directly related to faster than light particles, but some are and are papers by reputable authors in reputable journals;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the Meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4538/is-non-mainstream-physics-appropriate-for-this-site/4539#4539&quot;&gt;Is non-mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt; I read: &lt;em&gt;a question that proposes a new concept or paradigm, but asks for evaluation of that concept within the framework of current (mainstream) physics is OK.&lt;/em&gt; In the case of the present question, I see a question that &lt;strong&gt;doesn't propose a new concept or paradigm&lt;/strong&gt; but asks for evaluation of a concept present in mainstream literature within the framework of current (mainstream) physics. A non-opinion-based answer is in principle possible by using only mainstream physics or (if any) existing analysis published in mainstream journals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, according to the public information about this site policy, I would say that the original question was in-topic, independently on subjective preferences about tachyonic physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that further discussion on this issue will stick to the objective points I have just raised. I deliberately avoided any consideration based on my personal beliefs about tachyons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2021-07-24T07:58:31.353" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13705" CreationDate="2021-07-24T13:21:12.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s what downvotes are for.  Once the post reaches a specified negative score, senior users could choose to vote to delete it.  In outrageous cases, flagging can be used&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be courteous and useful to add a gentle comment like “Would you have additional references to your method” or something like this. As it is always difficult to judge if a published paper is really non-standard, there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be some niche literature on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, (I’m sorry to say that) many once-reputable journals are now quasi-homeopathic: the good stuff is diluted to the N’th degree with fillers of highly suspicious quality, so simply going by the journal brand might not be enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T16:25:16.707" LastActivityDate="2021-07-24T16:25:16.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-24T14:24:20.377" Score="5" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/652663/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; of mine was closed on the grounds of being non-mainstream. &lt;em&gt;Mainstream&lt;/em&gt; is defined below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community. In the case of modern physics, if a theory has not been published in a reputable journal, it is not considered mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition having been written in a community answer (87 % Manishearth) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4538/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question asks at what point a black hole would leave Earth uninhabitable in its approach. More specifically, I asked for an upper and lower limit, as the point it would leave Earth uninhabitable would depend on the characteristics of the black hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only criticisms I got in the comments were about how a black hole wouldn't affect the solar system any differently than another object of the same mass. Now this may be true, and I posted a comment displaying willingness to edit my question to be more general if someone posted an answer showing how this is the case (though this was done after the question was closed). I get that an unnecessarily specific question is sub-par, but it is surely not grounds for closing, as it creates opportunity for more learning (they could dismantle any notion that black holes are any scarier than a passing, rogue star or something). Also, I was basing my assumptions that a black hole would decimate us differently than other massive objects on a comment made on an answer (by Fraxinus) to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/44929/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; of mine on the Astronomy.SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I may have misunderstood something, but I don't see how the criticism I received in the comments is of the type &lt;em&gt;you question isn't mainstream&lt;/em&gt;. If this is the case, if my question was closed on different grounds than the criticisms in the comments, then I'd like to receive an explanation for this. Basically, more core question is this: &lt;strong&gt;How is my question not mainstream?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it not a fact approved by the mainstream in physics, that a black hole passing through the solar system could leave earth uninhabitable? Or is this idea a crackpot hypothesis? Or is it a component of my question that is non-mainstream, like the part about x-ray radiation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; As user rob mentioned in the comments, some users chose &amp;quot;Needs details or clarity&amp;quot; as their close-vote reason. Again though, I don't see how my question is unclear. Given how this wasn't the main reason for their close, it shouldn't be the main question here either, but if anyone wants to answer how my question was unclear as well, that'd be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204011" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T08:52:15.047" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T16:51:30.217" Title="How is this question about a black hole passing through the solar system non-mainstream?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13709" CreationDate="2021-07-25T00:29:49.357" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one think the question is unclear or too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Inhabitable” is not really defined, and actually hard to define.  One can imagine the surface of the Earth is cold but that doesn’t make it uninhabitable: some animals may thrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The physics side is also vague.  You do not specify anything about the black hole or its orbital parameter, so there is probably a continuous range of solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it seems to me this question is a poor fit to the site: a reasonable answer would probably take pages of computation and a non-trivial  simulation on which you give no guidance &lt;em&gt;whatsoever&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for an estimate of the distance at which tidal forces due to a black hole of given mass would break up the Earth is a better defined problem, although I would not know how to answer this myself.  At least this removes the issue of estimating timescales over which ecological factors would change enough to make the Earth inhabitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T00:29:49.357" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13701" CreationDate="2021-07-25T20:04:30.983" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks. I aimed for simultaneity, but missed by a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably time to get on with some proper work now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T20:04:30.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T02:08:44.393" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/653251/&quot;&gt;Classical limit in quantum mechanics proof&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please reopen this question. I tried to make it more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="307786" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T12:42:46.107" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T12:42:46.107" Title="Please reopen a question I asked" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13713" CreationDate="2021-07-26T04:44:37.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have reopened the edited question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T04:44:37.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13705" CreationDate="2021-07-26T12:54:56.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Worth noting in this context, that there are quite a few answers that are of low quality simply because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the person answering does not know physics very well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the person knows physics well... but they specialize in a very different field, and base their answer on vague recollections&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the answer is hand-waving or watery, because the answerer didn't have time (or didn't bother) to write up a proper answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, some of such answers may have many upvotes - depending on the qualifications of users who noticed the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be very difficult to delineate between such marginal quality answers and actually non-standard research that the OP has in mind. And both are in agreement with the community rules, unless the claims are too obviously outrageous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T12:54:56.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13709" CreationDate="2021-07-26T13:16:48.677" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree in full with @ZeroTheHero.  Some additional points here.  There are only a few canned options to choose when voting to close, so a person closing sometimes has to choose the best fit of several that could apply.  I don't remember which of the choices I selected, but there are a couple of problems with this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's no compelling evidence that I know for the idea that there are rogue black holes flying through the universe that are likely to pass through a solar system. (Not mainstream - there are some realistic arguments for BHs moving around, but the dynamics of that depends on the size and what formed them while none that I know suggest any sort of serious probability of hitting a distant solar system.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If one did, then the comments that you referenced apply where, gravitationally, this wouldn't be different than any other massive object passing nearby unless you got especially close. (Just a fallacy of the original question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other effects (X-rays, Hawking radiation, etc.) that you mentioned may or may not occur for a given black hole but the amount, directionality, etc. would depend a lot on the history and size of the specific black hole that happened to come through your solar system. (Not enough detail to answer, but probably also a case where if you give it enough detail you run further afoul of the first bullet.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if we make assumptions for you on all of those, then you still want someone answering to get into how those factors would or would not combine to make Earth uninhabitable. (Not physics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I also think you misunderstood the answer on Astronomy.SE that you say prompted your question here, but taking that on too is too big of a scope for me now and in this forum.  Even assuming that you did understand it, note that the answer that you've identified did exactly what we've mentioned here in order to formulate an answer at all:  It locked in on a specific type of black hole, made assumptions about its accretion disk, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T16:51:30.217" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T16:51:30.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T20:00:17.293" Score="13" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2021 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-08-13T14:41:42.143" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T14:41:42.143" Title="2021 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderators|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-07-26T20:00:17.293" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13719" CreationDate="2021-07-26T23:19:57.843" Score="-2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find out information about voting behaviour against me on this site (Main and/or Meta). Does such information exist? If so, where can I find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A stalker or more stalkers on Stack Exchange is downvoting every new post I make. How can I find out who it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What indication should be reported to the managers of Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to consider these links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/781493/25-most-downvoted-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/781493/25-most-downvoted-users&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.physics/query/691667/top-downvoters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.physics/query/691667/top-downvoters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to identify a possible downvoting stalker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140404" LastEditorUserId="140404" LastEditDate="2021-07-27T21:38:56.313" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T21:38:56.313" Title="Serial voting: procedure for to advise the managers of the SE site" Tags="|discussion|support|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13718" CreationDate="2021-07-26T23:24:24.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not 100% clear what you're asking for, but the same SEDE queries you have on TeX.SE can be used on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T23:24:24.527" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13718" CreationDate="2021-07-27T08:35:07.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the history of all my downvotes as someone continually harasses me and I would like to know the details&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to see a list of all the times you have downvoted other people's posts, it is available on your profile, under Activity &amp;gt; Votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want information on who has downvoted your posts, it is simply and unambiguously &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; available. This is an explicit choice on the part of SE and the developers have spent significant effort to prevent any loopholes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is downvoting your posts inappropriately and at a large scale, there are several safeguard mechanisms built into the system that will detect it and delete the votes. If you feel that you personally (as opposed to your posts and their content) are being downvoted inappropriately targeted, raise a custom flag on one of the affected posts so moderators can take a look (and, if needed, escalate to SE staff).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T08:35:07.510" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-27T13:27:04.030" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/653231&quot;&gt;Why does the melting point of water decreases with increase in pressure?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and answered it. I found a day later that an earlier, almost identical question had been asked by the same author, so I improved my answer and submitted it as an answer to the earlier question. That (later) answer, which I prefer, has been deleted (from the earlier question) by a moderator. How do I get that answer back and the other deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263121" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T07:41:14.907" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T07:41:14.907" Title="Answer deleted when posted to duplicate question" Tags="|support|duplicates|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13721" CreationDate="2021-07-27T14:18:53.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem here was the duplicate questions: one of them should have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since both versions of the question had upvoted answers, I’ve merged them, and the answers are migrated. Feel free to edit your live answer on the merged question into a form that you’re happy with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We very rarely merge questions — this is probably the first one I’ve done in 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T14:18:53.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13680" CreationDate="2021-07-29T15:22:33.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it should be noted that the decision of this question is intimately linked with the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What should Physics do with String theory heritage?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an open secret among theoretical physicists that much of the String theory community has migrated during the past fifteen years to other questions than quantum gravity (the reasons are the positivity of the cosmological constant, the string theory landscape, and the absence of supersymmetry observed at LHC). Now it is concerned mainly with various QFT models that mostly find their application, if any, as highly idealized condensed-matter systems. The game is, for instance, to find various dualities that may translate various theories and their computable results into one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many-a-theorist in &amp;quot;String theory/HEP theory/...&amp;quot; will admit to you that they are just doing some interesting mathematics and that they have no illusion of the applicability of their work to real systems. They will also admit that putting a &amp;quot;String theory heritage&amp;quot; label on their work allows them to work on the topics in high-status settings with a large and active community (unlike the case of a number of areas in Pure Mathematics). This is a self-sustaining effect, since research institutions are often largely financed on a citation-metric basis, and String theorists still hold tenured policy-making positions at Physics departments. Very often, String theory itself is not even involved any more, instead field theories and dualities that were discovered &lt;em&gt;in the course of investigating&lt;/em&gt; String theory are used. This is why I call this field &lt;em&gt;String theory heritage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the way the work is motivated is nowadays more similar to Pure Mathematics. It would be simply untrue to say that Pure Mathematics has no applications in the real world. For instance, number theory has immensely important applications in banking. But would we call Number theory a branch of Banking? Do Pure Mathematicians working on Number theory &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; choose goals with banking applications in mind? Of course not, they have their own criteria. I feel similar statements are in order about at least some of the sectors of &amp;quot;HEP theory&amp;quot; that come from String theory heritage and their relation to Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said, I certainly do not want to say that the work done in String theory heritage is not generally scientifically interesting or done badly. Also, there are many areas of Theoretical and Mathematical physics where the very same statements would be possible; Exact solutions of Einstein equations are particularly close to home for me personally in this regard. Or, e.g., the proof of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_energy_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;positive-mass theorem&lt;/a&gt; not in dimension 4, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05490&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in general dimension&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there are &amp;quot;singular sets&amp;quot; causing problems in the proof of the theorem for dimension larger than 7. Would I consider a detailed question about these sets as on-topic on PSE? No, I would not, but I am not ironclad. The line is really quite thin, because if you restrict these types of questions too much, you restrict the possibility of diversity and exploration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So really no final judgment here, I just wanted to point out that this is not the issue of just PSE, but of the entire Physics community at the moment. This is a choice the PSE community has to deal with, but either choice makes some sense!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52394" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T15:22:33.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-29T16:55:55.133" Score="8" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen the spoiler formatting used on other sites where, say, they discuss plot elements of movies and people don't want to give away a key element to someone who hasn't seen the movie and is browsing casually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; It looks like this and requires that you explicitly choose to see the text by click on the &amp;quot;Reveal spoiler&amp;quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't realize that this was implemented by a generic feature of the markup that is, apparently, available on other sites.  I just saw it used in the answer to a homework question here, so I'm wondering what people think about its appropriate use, if any, on physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/653309/electric-field-due-to-line-of-charge&quot;&gt;Electric field due to line of charge: A special case&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once seen, I wonder if people will try it more. I'm inclined to think it should be discouraged because I cannot see where it would be legitimately used.  Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-08-03T05:11:44.287" Title="Is use of &quot;spoiler&quot; formatting appropriate on this site?" Tags="|discussion|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13729" CreationDate="2021-07-29T19:37:09.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a primary use for it on PSE. I can definitely say that it shouldn't be used to hide parts of solutions to homework problems. I guess I understand the intent, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're trying to hide solutions from the OP expecting them to work it out first before checking, there is no way to guarantee this will happen. You're essentially still providing a solution; the spoiler doesn't change that. A more effective way to hide solutions is to not provide them at all. And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your answer requires hiding part of a homework solution, chances are the question is off topic and your answer is violating site policy by providing full solutions. If it's a valid homework question that shouldn't be closed, one's answer should focus on the relevant concepts, not on providing a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose outside of this one could find edge cases where a spoiler was effective? I can't think of anything right now though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T19:37:09.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-30T16:34:21.760" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question about what it is (if anything) that provides and upper limit to the speed of a turbine in a fluid stream: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/656018/&quot;&gt;Maximum rotation rate of a turbine in a fluid with a given speed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot;. The linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4535/&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are any engineering questions allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions inspired by engineering considerations can be on-topic on this site. For instance, it would be valid to ask if there is a fundamental &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; limit to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How well one could resolve an object with a telescope,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How energy-efficient a computer can be, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How small a current can flow through a wire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, questions like What really allows airplanes to fly? that ask how a man-made system works are also on topic, as long as they aren't too broad. Questions about the physical reasoning and analysis that lead to design decisions are on topic; questions seeking help designing or building something is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this question, about a physical limit, is explicitly allowed under that guidance. It's not asking how you could build such a turbine (in fact, it's explicitly not concerned with the exact geometry of the turbine and allows for a zero-friction mechanism, so clearly not related to any real device), just asking what physical rules any turbine operates under with respect to its speed relative to the fluid it's driven by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34666" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-30T16:44:21.740" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T16:44:21.740" Title="Please reopen my question about a physical limit" Tags="|support|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-30T17:00:44.373" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for being asking non clarified questions. That won't be repeated. Is it ok to remove the ban?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305533" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-07-31T13:21:39.513" LastActivityDate="2021-07-31T13:21:39.513" Title="Reopen my question on physics" Tags="|support|questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-07-30T17:13:23.523" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-30T21:45:05.363" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10321/how-does-one-know-if-his-question-is-non-mainstream&quot;&gt;answer to a question&lt;/a&gt; I read that a defense for if a question is accused of being non mainstream is applications of established science to new systems where they clearly apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One naive interpretation I can think of is that if it's possible to use the mathematics of a model in mainstream physics to answer a question then it's using an application of established science to a new system.  If this is considered the correct interpretation then that would make it a viable defense when questions about things like faster than light tachyons or bodies with negative mass are accused of being non mainstream as on paper it's possible to insert tachyons and negative mass into equations that describe models in mainstream physics and get results.  However I don't know of this argument being successfully used to keep open a question on something like tachyons or negative mass, that would otherwise have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another naive interpretation I could see is that in order for it to be an application of existing science to a new system, for which it clearly applies, means that the system can only be interpreted using mainstream physics, however the problem I can see with using this criteria is that even well known systems that are predicted by mainstream models can be interpreted using non mainstream models.  Also I would argue that if a new system can be interpreted using mainstream models or non mainstream ones then it is more natural to interpret it using mainstream models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is what determines applications of established science to new systems, to which they clearly apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92654" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T21:45:05.363" Title="What would determine applications of established science to new systems, to which they clearly apply?" Tags="|discussion|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-01T11:51:25.487" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/653428/&quot;&gt;Why linear displacement is length of the arc?&lt;/a&gt; which is similar to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/618522/&quot;&gt;Confused about linear displacement in circular motion&lt;/a&gt;. The second question has been published earlier. So when I tried to flag the new question as a duplicate, the old one didn't appear on the list becuase it has no upvoted or accepted answers. But the new question has upvoted answers. So what should be the duplicate one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-01T11:53:44.607" LastActivityDate="2021-08-01T11:53:44.607" Title="What should I flag as duplicate? New question or old question?" Tags="|support|duplicates|best-practices|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13675" CreationDate="2021-08-02T01:21:56.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be too late (I didn't notice this Meta post until after several half-lives of viewing activity had already elapsed), but I'll clarify the intent of my original comment. Here's a copy of the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tachyons are not consistent with mainstream physics, so the only way to answer this &amp;quot;what if&amp;quot; question is to use a non-mainstream theory. What theory do you want to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of casting a close-vote, I posted this comment as a request for clarification. I'm guessing that the question intended to use Maxwell's equations but with a charge-current four-vector &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$J^\mu$&lt;/span&gt; that is nonzero only along a spacelike worldline, but that's still not enough information. In order to answer the question about bound states, we also need to specify the equations of motion of the charged matter (maybe the relativistic Lorentz force equation but using proper length in place of proper time?), and we need to define what &amp;quot;bound state&amp;quot; means when the particle world-lines are spacelike. Neither of those is self-evident, at least not to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding whether or not the question should have been closed as off-topic: In my opinion, a question may be on-topic for this site even if it's about a &lt;em&gt;toy model&lt;/em&gt;, which is what physicists call a simplified/modified model that isn't necessarily a good approximation to anything real but that is used to explore some specific mathematical feature(s) of other theories that are good approximations. The study of toy models makes important contributions to the progress of mainstream physics, so in hindsight, I probably should have worded my comment differently, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tachyons are not consistent with our current understanding of nature, so the only way to answer this &amp;quot;what if&amp;quot; question is to specify a toy model. What toy model do you want to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding why other questions about tachyons are still open: maybe many of them shouldn't be. I don't know. I haven't even read most of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206691" LastActivityDate="2021-08-02T01:21:56.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13729" CreationDate="2021-08-03T05:11:44.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is not a good idea to mention homework or homework-like questions. It immediately triggers a defensive barrier, here on PSE, which prevents people from seeing that such a tool can have interesting uses. The first I see is the possibility of hiding some more formal passage, showing a more discursive first layer of an answer immediately visible and leaving more technical details in the &amp;quot;Reveal spoiler&amp;quot; boxes. I think it could be an interesting feature to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2021-08-03T05:11:44.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13740" CreationDate="2021-08-05T05:53:50.623" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;To get someone notified about my message, should I use &lt;code&gt;@reply&lt;/code&gt; syntax in &lt;em&gt;chat rooms&lt;/em&gt;? Who will get notifications when I send a message to a chat room without &lt;code&gt;@reply&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastActivityDate="2021-08-05T06:48:31.257" Title="Notifications about chat room messages" Tags="|support|chat|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13739" CreationDate="2021-08-05T06:48:31.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to notify someone you should @ them. If you don't @ anyone, nobody will be notified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-08-05T06:48:31.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-07T02:51:10.000" Score="5" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot wrap my head around how can you not have a wrong answer in physics. It's not philosophy that we are talking about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I improve my question to open it again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/657538&quot;&gt;Can 0 acceleration be termed as constant acceleration?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304205" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-08-07T10:42:39.280" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T14:14:25.617" Title="My question got closed saying that it was opinion based" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-07T07:49:22.847" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here on Physics.SE, it culturally seems to be much easier for us to close questions than to reopen them. Recently, I've noticed several cases where a closed question, which appears to be on the edge of being appropriate for the site, shows up in the reopen queue after being edited.  Reviewers often vote to leave such questions closed and then simply move on.  I propose that it would be more constructive to also leave a comment suggesting how the question could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, here are a couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/353623&quot;&gt;Constructive and destructive interference pattern in the double slit experiment&lt;/a&gt;  This question started out as a lengthy, rather disorganized word salad.  A diamond moderator closed it unilaterally, and I agree with that decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after the question was closed, the author shortened it dramatically to clean it up.  Then, he received another critical comment (&amp;quot;Your questions don’t match your title&amp;quot;) and responded by clarifying the title.  In my opinion, both of these edits were appropriate responses to feedback, and they significantly improved the question.  Therefore, I voted to reopen the question.  So did three other users.  However, we were outvoted (by only three people, by the way) and the question has now left the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we either give the OP a second chance to get answers, or offer more feedback on how he can improve the question.  I am not suggesting that we owe him an unlimited amount of tutoring.  Rather, I simply think that we should be more friendly to a new user who appears to be making an honest effort to learn about physics and follow the rules of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree: what, exactly, do you think OP should have done differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/353661&quot;&gt;Why does a charged black hole affect the trajectories and event horizon for uncharged particles?&lt;/a&gt;  A high-rep user closed this question unilaterally as a duplicate, using his gold tag badge.  However, I voted to reopen because I don't think the question is really a duplicate.  As pointed out in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question linked as a &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; (and its answers) does not actually answer this question. The question here can be paraphrases &amp;quot;Why is the Reissner–Nordström metric different from the Schwarzschild metric?&amp;quot; while the answers to the linked question can be paraphrased as &amp;quot;charge does effect the curvature because the Reissner–Nordström metric is different from the Schwarzschild metric&amp;quot;. It is quite clear that the OP is aware of this last fact. Lets do better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to reopen this one, too.  Given that the OP explicitly mentioned the Reissner–Nordström metric in his question, I think he made it fairly clear that he is aware of the information in the answers at the older question.  According to previous Meta answers, we &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10070/are-two-questions-that-only-differ-in-the-desired-level-of-sophistication-of-the?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;explicitly allow&lt;/a&gt; many questions that differ only in the desired level of sophistication, and we also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7301/when-is-asking-a-duplicate-ok?rq=1&quot;&gt;allow&lt;/a&gt; new questions that expand on older ones, as long as the difference is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would arguably be appropriate to ask OP to explicitly mention the older question to clarify the difference.  Would this change be enough to reopen the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194757" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T07:49:22.847" Title="Should we offer more feedback when we vote against reopening a question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13741" CreationDate="2021-08-07T10:46:04.733" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I do not speak on behalf of the other close voters, the facts are clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the velocity is constant, the acceleration is zero.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a quantity is constant, it does not depend on time (in this context).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_constant#Table_of_selected_mathematical_constants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zero is clearly a constant, and a constant can be zero&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore, constant acceleration comprises two cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uniformly-changing velocity, which means that acceleration is non-zero but constant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Constant velocity, which means that acceleration is zero.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is the second case which objectively has both constant velocity and acceleration. The facts end here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest becomes opinion-based because we are only allowed to pick one &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; option. I see at least three issues here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This boils down to a matter of &lt;em&gt;usefulness&lt;/em&gt;. I'm guessing that it's more useful to say &amp;quot;constant velocity&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;constant acceleration&amp;quot;, because the former gives more information about the motion of the object than the latter. But that doesn't make the latter any less correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If option (d) is correct, then so are (a) and (b).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The velocity and acceleration &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; constant. If we take into account the usage of the word &amp;quot;may&amp;quot;, it could also be argued that &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of them are correct because it suggests that there is a non-zero chance for the velocity and acceleration to not be constant, which is wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, determining which option is &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; is about guessing the intention/wording of the question setter rather than objectivity, which is why I voted to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174766" LastEditorUserId="174766" LastEditDate="2021-08-07T14:56:57.143" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T14:56:57.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-07T15:07:21.320" Score="7" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/657234&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/657234&lt;/a&gt; (now deleted and visible only to users with 10k+ rep; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bwFPD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screenshot&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me to clearly be a question seeking a &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; answer. The question was preceded by reasoning clearly supporting the &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot; answer, so I added to my answer, &amp;quot;Your reasoning is excellent.&amp;quot; Accompanying the deletion of my answer were the following comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;An answer should contain arguments.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to these comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why should a Yes-No question need an argument?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way is this comment related to the question and answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291206" OwnerDisplayName="Buzz" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-08-25T09:50:09.400" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T09:50:09.400" Title="A question (quoted below) was asked which I answered, and my answer was deleted. I would like to ask the logical reason for the deletion" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13744" CreationDate="2021-08-07T20:15:12.880" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question linked, in its current form (v2), suffers from the issue pointed out by ACuriousMind in the second part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/657234/was-the-universes-relative-dark-energy-content-close-to-zero-right-after-the-be#comment1475019_657234&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;. Essentially, seems like a check-my-understanding question. These types of questions are not very good, since they encourage answers that do not really add value to the site and will only be useful to the asker. Besides, our Q&amp;amp;A format, by design, needs answers which are more substantive than a simple yes or no. Read the answers to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13109/149907&quot;&gt;Are &amp;quot;check my understanding&amp;quot; questions permitted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6669/149907&quot;&gt;Self Study Students: Confirmation Type Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and more generally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/149907&quot;&gt;Should any check-my-work questions be made on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to get an idea of how the community feels about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149907" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T20:15:12.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-08T20:17:19.103" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is some confusion regarding my &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/658048/time-asymmetry-in-newtonian-mechanics?&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (which is not obvious to me). And for now it has &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$4$&lt;/span&gt; downvotes and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2$&lt;/span&gt; upvotes (and the comment section has become a mess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone enlighten me as to what I can do to write the question clearer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-08-09T15:53:37.947" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T15:53:37.947" Title="What can I do to improve this question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-09T20:07:39.143" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moderator (ACuriousMind) refuses to open this question on physics forum. He claims it needs to be more focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is related to double-slit experiment.&#xA;Is this question terribly unclear and a bad use of English language?&#xA;Here is the question I posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the double-slit experiment, is there a clear relationship between the unobserved screen's constructive interference pattern and the observed screen's particle behavior pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user232620" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-08-10T19:07:01.957" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T19:07:01.957" Title="Why was this question of mine closed by a moderator?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13747" CreationDate="2021-08-09T20:12:50.747" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you are talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/657245/50583&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it has been reopened by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/353623&quot;&gt;regular reopen review&lt;/a&gt; around the same time you posted this question. This site does not work in real-time and after I closed your question I had no further interaction with it, i.e. I neither actively refused to reopen it nor did I reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/657245/1&quot;&gt;first version&lt;/a&gt; I unilaterally closed was very different and read more like a stream-of-consciousness than a well-formed question about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-08-09T20:18:53.063" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T20:18:53.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-09T20:50:24.240" Score="0" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, two of my questions were closed seconds after I wrote them as not about &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am asking, what is &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot; then? For instance, is hypothetical but mathematically viable spacetime considered &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot; or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/658356/properties-of-the-4-th-type-of-dimensions-anti-minkowskian-spacetime&quot;&gt;Properties of the 4-th *type* of dimensions (anti-Minkowskian spacetime)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are physical properties of an imaginary spacetime with different number of dimensions or different metric mainstream or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is asking what would be mechanical properties of an imaginary spacetime on-topic or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-08-10T19:32:14.673" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T19:32:14.673" Title="What is &quot;mainstream physics&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13749" CreationDate="2021-08-09T21:26:00.947" Score="9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Closed seconds after I wrote them&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a mischaracterization - your question was closed 6 minutes after it was posted. (While this might seem like a petty complaint, I want to make it clear I read the question before closing it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have presented no citations or support for your claims that &amp;quot;dual numbers represent Newtonian spacetime&amp;quot; or that &amp;quot;impulse&amp;quot; (do you mean &lt;em&gt;momentum&lt;/em&gt;?) is related to the areas you draw in your pictures. They strike me as distinctly non-mainstream. If you can supply references to the literature for these claims, this would do a lot to make your question seem less than a personal theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please be mindful that other people &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; have the context of what is written in the question for judging it. After presenting us with several unsubstantiated claims about different number systems relating to spacetime, you start talking about the complex numbers and finish with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intervals between all points are time-like. One can travel back and forward in time, as well as in those &amp;quot;anti-Minkowskian&amp;quot; directions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which really does not follow from what you've written before. Not only is your question non-mainstream, it is also unclear since you did not spell out a single argument in it, apparently expecting readers to intuit from your pictures what you are talking about. When in doubt, always err on the side of explaining the premise of questions more thoroughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your characterisation of your own question as a question about &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;imaginary spacetime with different number of dimensions or different metric&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; suggests this is the problem here - questions about different time dimensions or metrics can be on-topic when they are clearly formulated and based in mainstream physics, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/43630/50583&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and its linked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T21:26:00.947" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-10T20:05:18.093" Score="25" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;Moderator election #5&lt;/a&gt; on Physics has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/70245&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/70245.png&quot; alt=&quot;Buzz&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/37677&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/37677.png&quot; alt=&quot;SuperCiocia&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They will be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opavote.com/results/5763439621308416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176067" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T00:15:16.510" Title="2021 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13751" CreationDate="2021-08-10T20:39:27.867" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MinOH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MinOH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T20:39:27.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-10T21:24:49.447" Score="5" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/658360/&quot;&gt;What is the Schr&amp;#246;dinger equation in position velocity space?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally made a careless mistake when writing the Schrödinger equation in velocity space, as I had originally put a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m^3$&lt;/span&gt; in the denominator of part of the equation instead of putting &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m$&lt;/span&gt; in the numerator, which I have since corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the way I made this mistake is that I thought about how &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{v}=\frac{\vec{p}}{m}$&lt;/span&gt; and from getting the velocity and momentum mixed up, changed &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{p}^2$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{v^2}{m^2}$&lt;/span&gt; instead of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{v}^2m$&lt;/span&gt; and failed to see that I had implicitly assumed &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{p}=\frac{\vec{v}}{m}$&lt;/span&gt; until I edited my question to show how I derived the Schrödinger equation in velocity space and noticed my mistake.  The reason I didn't notice when someone commented on my question that &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{p}=m\vec{v}$&lt;/span&gt; is because I assumed that he/she wasn't thinking about the form &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{v}=\frac{\vec{p}}{m}$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in general if a wrong equation can be explained by a careless mistake such as mixing up &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{v}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{p}$&lt;/span&gt; in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vec{v}=\frac{\vec{p}}{m}$&lt;/span&gt;, or forgetting a term in an equation, when a question and the equations in it are long, it should be considered a sign of a careless mistake rather than asking from the perspective of non-mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92654" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-17T13:23:18.263" LastActivityDate="2021-08-17T13:23:18.263" Title="Careless mistakes in formulas shouldn't be treated the same as non-mainstream physics" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13753" CreationDate="2021-08-10T21:44:52.763" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote to close but I do not see a relation between the two comments pointing at the maths mistake and the closing vote. That is, I don't think the typo is what led them to close the question as 'non-mainstream'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually don't know why someone would treat this question as non-mainstream as I personally find it makes sense and fits within the current, established formulation of QM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users (including me) have voted to reopen the question, and it has now been re-opened. I have deleted the comments pointing out the mistake just not to derail the focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T21:44:52.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13751" CreationDate="2021-08-10T23:15:20.740" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you.  I appreciate the community's show of faith in me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am familiarizing myself with all the new controls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dhAeU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dhAeU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Buzz&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T23:15:20.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13751" CreationDate="2021-08-11T00:15:16.510" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to thank everyone who put their name forward.  It is testament to the quality of all contributors to this forum that once again I felt completely confident that any outcome would result in an outstanding moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T00:15:16.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-11T07:30:30.477" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to close my account since I was not able to close it in this meta site.  Please delete my account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user232620" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T08:17:08.600" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T08:17:08.600" Title="Close my account please. Delete it" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-08-11T07:33:37.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13759" CreationDate="2021-08-12T14:29:20.897" Score="9" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when I am going through the reopen queue I come across questions that have been edited by another user who is not the author of the question. These edits are mostly or entirely cosmetic in nature (fixing grammar, typos, formatting, etc.), but because the question has been edited after closure it ends up in the review queue. Unless the question was closed because of the cosmetic issues that were fixed, the only option is essentially to vote to keep the question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, at least to my understanding, is if the question is edited by the OP while the reopen votes are being cast, this does not undo previous votes. So if the question was improved later on to be good enough for reopening, it might not be reopened because of the previous votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably an edge case, but the question still stands. If a question is already closed, should other users make purely cosmetic edits that do not do much, if anything, to aid in the question being reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T11:15:36.773" Title="Should cosmetic edits be made to a closed question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|editing|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13758" CreationDate="2021-08-12T15:36:07.197" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/369013/263383&quot;&gt;remodeling of the review queues&lt;/a&gt;, users now have the option to explicitly mark their edits to closed questions as significant enough to warrant reopen reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as long as the editors refrain from marking their cosmetic edits as significant, there is no longer any reason to refrain from such edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-08-27T11:15:36.773" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T11:15:36.773" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-13T04:10:04.697" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have posted a question, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/658628/&quot;&gt;Fidelity between initial state and final state&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. But due to inadequate details, it got closed. Now I have added details as much as possible. When will my question open again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="311073" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-08-13T08:12:52.530" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T08:12:52.530" Title="When does a closed question become open?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13760" CreationDate="2021-08-13T07:48:30.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first edit after closure automatically enqueues the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/354379&quot;&gt;for reopen review&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the reopen review finishes depends on how many users currently use the review queues, how full the queues are, and how many feel qualified to judge your particular question, so it is difficult to predict exact time-frames. Our site does not generally work in real-time, but asynchronously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T07:48:30.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13741" CreationDate="2021-08-13T08:37:23.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fully agree that this question &lt;strong&gt;should not&lt;/strong&gt; have been closed and &lt;strong&gt;should be reopened&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A teacher has asked an ambiguous and opinion-based multiple-choice question to a student followed by a wrong or poorly worded reasoning. The understandably confused student then asks on Physics SE what is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a physics point-of-view the answer to this is very clear. As the answer from Vincent clarifies here in the meta thread, as well as my own and other answers to the question on the main site, there is no doubt that a non-changing value of zero indeed should be considered constant in physics contexts. There is no doubt that the teacher has been unclear or incorrect in the given question. The answer to this is not opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not unusual that students in schools and educational institutions come to SE to ask questions about unclear and confusing content from their teachers. This question is perfectly fine for this site, imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vote to reopen this question and frankly do not understand the argument for closing or keeping it closed. &lt;em&gt;At the moment of writing, there are 4 votes out of necessary 5 to reopen the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4962" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-08-13T09:24:52.780" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T09:24:52.780" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13741" CreationDate="2021-08-13T14:14:25.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As written, the question is not an ideal fit for the site.  The complete answer to the question in the title of the OP is simply “Yes” but the OP is suggests that “ Speculations on solution would really be appreciated.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear from the answers that these answers are primarily opinion-based or at least depend on the interpretation of the statement by the instructor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, the question should be closed as either it needs focus to distinguish between the speculations and the actual answer, either it is opinion-based, or either it is unclear as it depends on the state of mind of the instructor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T14:14:25.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13765" CreationDate="2021-08-15T07:00:34.823" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/659436/41634&quot;&gt;Why isn&amp;#39;t the principle of least action named as &amp;quot;the principle of optimization&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that one solution is to define what optimization/optimal state/optimized state is. This brings to a new question: would asking &amp;quot;How is optimization/optimal state/optimized state defined in physics?&amp;quot; be opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastActivityDate="2021-08-17T08:55:46.737" Title="How to make the question about &quot;the principle of optimization&quot; not opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13764" CreationDate="2021-08-15T09:29:25.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is asking about a name, and the names of ideas in physics are often historical accidents that have little significance. So in general it's a bit pointless asking why a particular name was chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the name &lt;em&gt;principle of least action&lt;/em&gt; is actually appropriate - well almost. It's because for any trajectory we can calculate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_(physics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;action&lt;/a&gt; and then we find the trajectory for which this value is least. Hence &lt;em&gt;least action&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; because we actually extremise the action i.e. it can be a minimum or a maximum, but as I said the names for things in physics are often not especially appropriate. Anyhow, &lt;em&gt;principle of extreme action&lt;/em&gt; sounds like a gangster movie :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T09:29:25.923" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13768" CreationDate="2021-08-16T12:02:08.673" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I suggest an edit for another's post and immediately realize that I've missed something, I can re-edit it. But can I undo suggested edits (bring the post to the original or previous state) before it is approved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T12:55:57.837" Title="Undo suggested edits" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13767" CreationDate="2021-08-16T12:55:57.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that you can't. You have to wait for the edit to be either approved or rejected. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/80933&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/307514&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/317347&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174766" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T12:55:57.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13764" CreationDate="2021-08-17T08:55:46.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it can be asked on chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41634" LastActivityDate="2021-08-17T08:55:46.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-17T12:24:19.123" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Ef2K.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Ef2K.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until yesterday, my username was visible in this circle. But now it does not seem to be there. So I have to search my name under the 'users' section to go to my profile. Am I the only one facing this problem? What is the reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-08-18T18:50:09.407" LastActivityDate="2021-08-18T18:50:09.407" Title="User name disappeared" Tags="|support|bug|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13777" CreationDate="2021-08-17T22:41:44.067" Score="7" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many posters report claims in statements such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This author claims that…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some claim that… OR Someone claims that…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read that…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;containing no supporting evidence, source or reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we insist that claims always be supported in the body of post (question or answer) by a source citation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we create a comment template requesting that sources be indictated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-08-18T01:02:59.713" LastActivityDate="2021-08-21T11:32:05.460" Title="Justifying claims" Tags="|discussion|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13774" CreationDate="2021-08-19T04:53:41.710" Score="10" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is how flagging is described in help centre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging is a way of bringing inappropriate content to the attention of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are comments like, &amp;quot;Thank you&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;Good question&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Nice answer&amp;quot;, etc. inappropriate content? Should we flag them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2021-08-19T05:06:16.140" LastActivityDate="2021-09-01T19:07:22.940" Title="Should we flag comments like &quot;Thank you&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13773" CreationDate="2021-08-19T05:04:58.470" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are not really intended for chit-chat.  So, if you wish, you may flag comments that don't add any clarification are are purely social using the reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's no longer needed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This comment is outdated, conversational or not relevant to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, generic positive comments are not a significant impediment to the smooth operation of the Physics Stack Exchange site, and if they don't all get flagged and removed, it's that's not a big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I should also mention that different Stack Exchange sites can have different standards for thank-yous and similar positive comments on questions and answers.  For example, on Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy (where I am very active), expressions of thanks are fairly commonplace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2021-08-19T05:04:58.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13773" CreationDate="2021-08-19T05:07:43.030" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Technically&lt;/em&gt;, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;our policy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not recommended for any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Compliments which do not add new information (&amp;quot;+1, great answer!&amp;quot;); instead, upvote it and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;pay it forward&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the same page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;temporary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;Post-It&amp;quot; notes left on a question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, they are not meant to contain any information that it would be sad to lose. There is no revision history for comments. Clarification requests are usually followed by edits to questions/answers, and/or chat discussions. The exception being if the comment explains why a post was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, as a moderator, I am seeing a lot of people using the &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot; flag to delete comments that had been addressed to in the post, and also for comments that were never needed in the first place (e.g.  'thank you's and what not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-08-19T05:07:43.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13744" CreationDate="2021-08-19T17:57:19.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the reference to the username was cut (@Giorgio instead of @GiorgioP), I did not receive notice of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote in a comment &lt;em&gt;An answer should contain arguments&lt;/em&gt; and I maintain this is my point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I can give is pretty simple. This site is an open space, and questions and answers should not be considered private conversations between the asker and who answers. Therefore, even if everything would be obvious for them, I feel that answers should contain some rational argument supporting an affirmative or negative yes/no understandable by everybody else. Otherwise, it would be a kind of authority principle. It could work in the case of a university lecture. It cannot work here. Remember that independently of what we are in real life, here we are just nicknames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="183259" LastEditDate="2021-08-20T08:47:26.167" LastActivityDate="2021-08-20T08:47:26.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13772" CreationDate="2021-08-21T11:32:05.460" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that such reported claims should be judged case by case.&#xA;There are completely different scenarios connected to claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;my teacher claims that blackbody entropy is proportional to the surface and not to the volume&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;in a book, J.Smith claims that we can get energy from the orbital motion of asteroids&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I read somewhere, that Newton used the concept of energy&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I recently read that Swendsen claims that the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{1}{N!}$&lt;/span&gt; factor in front of the canonical partition function has nothing to do with the indistinguishability of particles&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For different reasons, I do not think it is reasonable or important to ask for a source citation for the examples from &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1$&lt;/span&gt; to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3$&lt;/span&gt;.&#xA;In the case of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1$&lt;/span&gt;, the original claim is not verifiable but this does not hamper the possibility of an answer addressing the underlying concepts independently of the context where the question originated.&#xA;In the case n. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2$&lt;/span&gt;, it would probably be wise to ask for clarifying the question, independently of the exact title of the book.&#xA;Answer to question &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3$&lt;/span&gt;, even without references, should be simple to answer for everybody who knows that energy was formally identified and used almost a century after the Principia.&#xA;In my opinion, the only case where a specific source for the claim would be required is n. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$4$&lt;/span&gt;. However, if a reference to Swendsen's papers where the problem is addressed would be made in an answer, that would be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2021-08-21T11:32:05.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-24T00:35:06.077" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please reopen this question per the discussion we had in the comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/660967/&quot;&gt;What is the maximum possible temperature of a 1mx1mx1m cube that is the focal point of an array of mirror reflected, concentrated beams of sunlight?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a link says it has been asked, which is untrue. The question asks what particular physics will limit what could be achieved in practice in an Alabama field (under earth’s atmosphere for one thing, without 360-deg access etc) on a specific object. It also asks how number of mirrors would scale. That would be affected by things that wouldnt affect the asymptotic limit to the radiating body, such as finding a way to differ the emissivity across the body. The linked question asks about the theoretical limits of solar furnaces approaching the temperature of the radiating body. Different question altogether&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has the following unique twists (which are relevant because it was closed as being a duplicate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Discussing the number of mirrors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My new answer added physics but not engineering issues about this (nothing about materials or how to achieve it, but the concept of differential emissivity for example). From a physics standpoint will be the exponential increase in mirrors needed per Kelvin increase. I was about to add this to an answer. People have mentioned in related questions that the temp of sun is a limit, but this is an asymptotic limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking about practical implications in an Alabama field:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Engineering questions aside, what hard limits might there be in the physics of doing this on earth (other than the second law limiting it to the temperature of the sun which has been discussed). For example, is there a limit imposed by losses through the atmosphere? If we assume constant atmospheric absorption, what does that do? What the atmosphere changes frequency profile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="307354" LastEditorUserId="307354" LastEditDate="2021-08-25T06:40:01.227" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T23:10:06.927" Title="Reopen question request" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13781" CreationDate="2021-08-24T13:32:45.283" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;When flagging a question as a duplicate, a comment appears under that post: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Does this answer your question?...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that sometimes this comment has been upvoted. Also I have noticed that the post has been closed as a duplicate after that comment got 5 upvotes, which led me suspect that the number of upvotes indicates the number of close votes. Is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, then what happens when a community member who has not yet gained privilege to cast close votes (&amp;lt;3k rep), upvote that comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-24T14:13:14.583" LastActivityDate="2021-08-24T14:45:06.983" Title="What happens when upvoting the automatic comment indicating duplicate?" Tags="|support|comments|duplicates|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13780" CreationDate="2021-08-24T13:38:48.250" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing happens if you simply cast an upvote on it. Whenever a user votes to close as a duplicate, they also automatically cast an upvote on the corresponding comment. If the user is the first one (and therefore the comment does not exist), they will automatically create the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the number of upvotes on the comment does not necessarily correspond to the number of close votes for that duplicate, as others might have simply upvoted it without voting to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174766" LastEditorUserId="174766" LastEditDate="2021-08-24T14:45:06.983" LastActivityDate="2021-08-24T14:45:06.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13779" CreationDate="2021-08-25T14:38:42.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, in its original form, was correctly closed as a duplicate of the indicated question. The only theoretical limit is as previously answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the edits change the reason but not the outcome. Under the edits it is no longer a duplicate, but it is now an engineering question. Engineering questions are explicitly off-topic here. So the edits still should lead to a closed question, but merely for a different closure reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that there is a way out here. The only physics theory answer is as already answered. Any modifications you make to the question so that is not the answer will make it an engineering question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastEditorUserId="204834" LastEditDate="2021-08-25T15:08:47.793" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T15:08:47.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-26T20:45:02.290" Score="14" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post is just a thank you post for all of you being helpful I'm new to this site and I'm really very very happy and thankful for exchanging interesting information. You are amazing and helpful. I'm really very grateful and thankful to all of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="312102" OwnerDisplayName="Evan Brown" LastActivityDate="2021-08-26T23:02:09.837" Title="A thanks message for help" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2021-08-26T23:02:36.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-27T08:33:20.330" Score="13" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;While on the main site equations should always be written using &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;, this is not natively supported in the chat rooms. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/97938/any-chance-of-mathjax-in-chat&quot;&gt;various hacks for making MathJax work&lt;/a&gt; in the chat, but these can be intimidating for the beginner and if you are using a phone it is even harder to make MathJax work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frequently have to type equations in the chat rooms, and while MathJax remains the best solution I have found an alternative that works well enough to be useful when MathJax isn’t an option.  I’m posting this to record the details for future chat room users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone else has found other ways to enter equations easily in the chat do please record them in answers to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-27T08:39:28.890" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T08:39:28.890" Title="An alternative to MathJax in chat" Tags="|support|mathjax|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13785" CreationDate="2021-08-27T08:33:20.330" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Unicode character set contains most of the characters that are needed to construct equations. For example you can write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ds² = -(1 - 2GM/c²r)c²dt² + (1 - 2GM/c²r)⁻¹ dr² + r²dθ² + r² sin²(θ)dφ²&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just using Unicode characters. The problem is that from a keyboard the only way to enter Unicode characters requires you to remember their character code and few us can manage this. The solution I have found is a Chrome add-on called &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magical-text-expansion/iibninhmiggehlcdolcilmhacighjamp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magical - Text Expansion&lt;/a&gt;, which despite the slightly silly name works pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the addon you can define character sequences that are converted to the required Unicode symbol, for example I have defined &lt;code&gt;int_&lt;/code&gt; to produce ∫, &lt;code&gt;approx_&lt;/code&gt; to produce ≈ and so on. The addon makes it straightforward to write equations like the one above since it’s a lot easier to remember the character sequences than the Unicode character codes. Of course you still have to define all the sequences, but I’ve appended the definitions I use below and you can import these into the &lt;em&gt;Magical - Text Expansion&lt;/em&gt; addon with a few mouse clicks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should emphasise that MathJax remains the preferred option where possible, and you should only use MathJax on the main site. However for the chat rooms the &lt;em&gt;Magical - Text Expansion&lt;/em&gt; addon provides a fallback solution that is worth mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;  &amp;quot;version&amp;quot;: 3,&#xA;  &amp;quot;shortcuts&amp;quot;: {&#xA;    &amp;quot;_0 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₀&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_1 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₁&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_2 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₂&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_3 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₃&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_4 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₄&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_5 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₅&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_6 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₆&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_7 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₇&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_8 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₈&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_9 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;₉&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;_t&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ₜ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;--&amp;gt;&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⟶&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^-&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁻&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^+&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁺&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^0 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;°&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^1 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;¹&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^2 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;²&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^3 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;³&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^4 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁴&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^5 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁵&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^6 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁶&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^7 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁷&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^8 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁸&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;^9 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⁹&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;+-&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;±&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;&amp;lt;--&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;⟵&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;1/2 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;¹⁄₂&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;1/3 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;¹⁄₃&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;1/4 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;¹⁄₄&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;2/3 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;²⁄₃&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;3/2 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;³⁄₂&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;3/4 &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;³⁄₄&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;a_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;α&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;approx_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;≈&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;b_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;β&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;D_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Δ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;d_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;δ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;del_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;∇&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;e_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ε&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;f_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;φ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;F_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Φ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;G_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Γ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;g_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;γ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;h_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;η&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;inf_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;∞&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;int_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;∫&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;L_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Λ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;l_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;λ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;m_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;μ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;n_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ν&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;nabla_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;∇&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;ne_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;≠&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;O_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Ω&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;p_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;π&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;propto_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;∝&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;q_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;θ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;r_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ρ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;s_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;σ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;S_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Σ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;sqrt_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;√&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;t_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;τ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;times_&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;×&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;w_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ω&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;Y_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Ψ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;y_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ψ&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;z_ &amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ζ&amp;quot;&#xA;  }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T08:33:20.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13773" CreationDate="2021-08-27T23:22:19.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps if you argue from a very short-sighted, by-the-rules perspective; and indeed, retaining this argument for deleting these comments is probably useful if their volume ever gets out of hand on particularly popular questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I doubt it's healthy in the long-term to discourage people being nice to each other. Who's it hurting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="268036" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T23:22:19.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13789" CreationDate="2021-08-28T13:43:13.803" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to read the highest scored posts in the PSE. If I watch posts under a specific tag, I can find a tab which sorts posts by votes, under &lt;em&gt;that tag&lt;/em&gt;. For instance, if I choose the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;, I can find the highest scored posts under &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/newtonian-mechanics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;newtonian-mechanics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;newtonian-mechanics&lt;/a&gt;. Though on the home page, which contains &lt;em&gt;all questions&lt;/em&gt;, there is no tab called 'votes'. Is there a way to find the highest scored posts, regardless of the tag, without searching for each tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-28T13:52:48.297" LastActivityDate="2021-08-28T14:08:26.317" Title="How can I find the highest scored posts of all tags?" Tags="|support|search|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13788" CreationDate="2021-08-28T13:47:55.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the most up-voted question type &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq&quot;&gt;is:q&lt;/a&gt; in the SE search engine, and click &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aq&quot;&gt;votes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, for the most up-voted answer, type &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=is%3aa&quot;&gt;is:a&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-08-28T14:08:26.317" LastActivityDate="2021-08-28T14:08:26.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-30T21:02:11.343" Score="9" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/662283/81133&quot;&gt;answer here&lt;/a&gt; (in which a new user posted an elaboration on their question as an answer) has the following comment from the Community bot, presumably due to its review in the new &amp;quot;First Answers&amp;quot; queue (bolding mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please add further details to expand on your answer, &lt;strong&gt;such as working code or documentation citations.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume this message is fine for the Stack Overflow mother ship, but it doesn't seem quite right for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this message be changed?  Suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Simply eliminate the second clause, so it just reads &amp;quot;Please add further details to expand on your answer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Revert the message to what it was under the &amp;quot;First Posts&amp;quot; queue.  (I can't recall what that exact phrasing was, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other suggestions are, of course, welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, does the new &amp;quot;First Questions&amp;quot; queue have similar software-centric automated messages that need to be modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81133" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-08-31T09:22:28.473" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T09:22:28.473" Title="Confusing message from new review queue?" Tags="|bug|comments|review|community-user|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13792" CreationDate="2021-08-31T03:46:54.653" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/560429/&quot;&gt;Identifying parallel and series capacitors for capacitor system with dieletric inserted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP had posted this question with large images and lack of MathJax formatting. I have edited it and made it much more presentable. There is a very relevant and conceptual question at the end of the OP's text. If the community could help me reopen it, that'd be excellent. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="236734" LastEditDate="2021-08-31T09:31:42.820" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T09:31:42.820" Title="Request to reopen an old question which I have edited" Tags="|support|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13791" CreationDate="2021-08-31T07:44:18.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your edit automatically enqueued the question for reopen review - it used to be the case that every first edit after closure did that, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/369013/263383&quot;&gt;recent changes to review queues&lt;/a&gt; included the introduction of a checkbox with which you can mark your edit as significant enough to warrant reopen review. There is therefore no need to make separate meta posts about questions you have edited - just tick the box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/355892&quot;&gt;reopen review&lt;/a&gt; you triggered concluded 3:0 unanimously with &lt;em&gt;leave closed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T07:44:18.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13794" CreationDate="2021-08-31T13:36:36.567" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/662390/305718&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; has been published 23 minutes ago, while the question was closed 25 minutes ago, &lt;em&gt;at the moment&lt;/em&gt;. Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/661486/305718&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; was published a minute after closing the question (another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how does this happen? It is something like answering closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T14:01:10.477" Title="Is there a grace period to post an answer to a question after it is closed?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13793" CreationDate="2021-08-31T14:01:10.477" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, under certain technical circumstances it can happen that an answer is posted up to 4 hours after closure. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91928/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE answer&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T14:01:10.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-01T17:25:07.613" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been hanging around physics SE for quite a while. I am just a student who craves for some knowledge in mathematics and physics and thus I joined SE. I am not an expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to my questions, I receive downvotes and the reason is not specified. The problem is not the downvotes to my question. Anyone can downvote my question, but a reason can be specified to give a real meaning to that downvote. Only when the mistake is shown can we move forward to correct it. At least a suggestion to improve the question can be given in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only to my question. Most of the questions that are simple are getting downvoted, even when enough necessary information is provided to give an excellent answer. But not everyone can provide so much details and do research as some may have &amp;quot;less&amp;quot; clarity in the subject of the question. And now, I just need some support on why my questions were downvoted. So that it will definitely help me in the future. Can people who are downvoting at least specify the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="311445" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-09-02T10:25:53.793" LastActivityDate="2021-09-02T10:25:53.793" Title="Why downvotes to question?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-09-01T17:31:27.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13773" CreationDate="2021-09-01T19:07:22.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should. Although thank you comments don't bring anything pragmatically useful to the discussion at hand, there's nothing inherently wrong in expressing your gratitude towards someone who helped you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though there's no moral value in flagging these type of comments, I don't think it's prudent to encourage it since it might be interpreted as their gratitude not being welcomed, which can be either insulting or hurtful. People being nice to each other will only help the community and does not bring any detriment whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277861" LastActivityDate="2021-09-01T19:07:22.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13799" CreationDate="2021-09-03T04:09:24.787" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I researched some question about book recommendations and I found a lot of books on Google Search, and here in physics.se the book recommendation question was closed because it is a broad question, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12175/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is specific: What are the books used nowadays in USA for learning physics in college and university?&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning popular books) I am working as a freelance tutor and knowing the material reference from a specific country could improve my services of tutoring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to learn physics for my university and we use Resnick, Serways, Sears &amp;amp; Zemansky. I don’t know if those books are popular in colleges and universities of USA...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ask this here? And if yes, is it a good idea ask for which books are popular by country? Is this question more related to the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Open Data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="292014" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-09-03T14:29:02.320" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T14:29:02.320" Title="Can I ask for specific books recommendations? using the [resource-recommendations] tag" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13798" CreationDate="2021-09-03T10:46:57.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say, as a general rule, that &lt;em&gt;geographic&lt;/em&gt; limitations on this type of question are not appropriate here. Asking for what's popular in a specific geographic area will produce results which are only useful to a thin sliver of future visitors, and that's enough to sink that idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resource-recommendation questions are hard to get working correctly, and this site struggled significantly with them some years back, including a full ban on the whole type. The current policy is documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, based on discussions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/good-list-bad-list/4567#4567&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7039/book-recommendations-on-topic-on-topic-but-community-wiki-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Threads that do not follow those guidelines are generally closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding other places to ask: this is not really on topic on Academia, and it has as much to do with Open Data as it does with Cooking or Travel. It &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic on a (hypothetical) Science Educators SE site, but the various attempts to start one have stalled short of the goal. Unfortunately, just because a question is interesting to someone doesn't mean that there must be an SE site where it can be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T10:46:57.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13801" CreationDate="2021-09-03T18:48:58.930" Score="7" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once in a while I see a suggested edit that claims to &amp;quot;correct a formula&amp;quot; (this is usually written in the edit summary). Is there a general &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot;/recommended procedure for such edits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually skip them, because I am not familiar with the formulas involved, so I don't think I can properly judge such an edit. However, if we let that aside for a moment, are such edits to be considered to be against the author's intention? Even if the edits make an obvious correction (let's for example assume someone forgot the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^2$&lt;/span&gt; in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt;), it could be the case that it wasn't just a typo, but the question arose due to a misconception based on a wrong formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how should one proceed with edits that claim to correct a formula?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-05T11:01:11.113" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T15:11:09.357" Title="How to treat suggested edits that &quot;correct a formula&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|review|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13800" CreationDate="2021-09-03T19:18:50.623" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think formulae are really special in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you see an edit but you cannot tell whether it actually improves the post or not, skip it. Whether that's because you're not familiar with the formulae or the topic of the post in general is immaterial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you see an edit that corrects a typo, approve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you see an edit that actually alters the substantial &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the post (such as changing a formula when the post is actually &lt;em&gt;based&lt;/em&gt; on the original version of the formula), reject it as conflicting with author's intent or as not improving the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't judge whether the correction is a typo fix or the post is actually  based on the uncorrected version, that's just the first case again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T19:18:50.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13802" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13804" CreationDate="2021-09-04T09:03:03.280" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had got 20 reputation for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/663980/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. But, I wonder how I got reputation from that question because, that question claims that no one had upvoted neither downvoted. Even, no one had bookmarked it. So why did I get 20 reputation from that? Is that because that was my first question? Is that a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I got downvote then why my reputation didn't decrease?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user311383" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-04T09:46:26.433" LastActivityDate="2021-09-04T09:46:26.433" Title="Why did I get 20 reputation without any upvote or bookmark?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|voting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13802" CreationDate="2021-09-04T09:10:12.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question has been upvoted twice and downvoted twice. The &amp;quot;net votes&amp;quot; on the post is thus 0, making it look like there is no vote at all. Users with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;Established User Privilege&lt;/a&gt; (1000 reputation) can view vote counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you gained 20 reputation by 2 upvotes on your post but these were not visible to you because there were also 2 downvotes. These should also each have removed 2 of your reputation, which you should be able to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253179" LastActivityDate="2021-09-04T09:10:12.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13802" CreationDate="2021-09-04T09:43:46.480" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, the -4 negative reputation points for the 2 downvotes (which were cast before the upvotes) were exceptionally not counted because that would have resulted in a total non-positive reputation for the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2021-09-04T09:43:46.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-04T16:12:49.270" Score="-11" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;People often speculate rather than answer. If you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you know the answer then you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="331516" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-09-04T17:41:37.180" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T07:50:43.517" Title="Should we downvote answers that begin with &quot;I think...&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13805" CreationDate="2021-09-04T20:46:40.717" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a terrible idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastActivityDate="2021-09-04T20:46:40.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2021-09-05T15:20:38.763" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.codidact.com/categories/59&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://physics.codidact.com/categories/59&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user313061" LastActivityDate="2021-09-05T15:20:38.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-05T18:23:30.663" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/522163/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; does not seem to have a single correct answer posted.&#xA;Which of the following are true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assume that there will never be one right answer posted (i.e. because there is not in principle a right answer).&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This was a bad question and should be closed/deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave it how it is. It's ok that there will never be an accepted answer for this question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We should post a new answer with a list of all relevant good information taken from other good answers in the thread, and mark that new one as accepted. That answer can be updated to include any relevant information from new answers that show up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assume that a right answer may eventually be posted, so leave it how it is until the messiah answer arrives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kind of don't like options 1.2 or 2 because it's been long enough that I &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; like I should accept something.&#xA;Then again, I really believe in the integrity of the accept button and I want to use it where it's deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-09-07T19:20:08.793" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T19:20:08.793" Title="Do we have a policy or guidance for questions with no one right answer?" Tags="|discussion|best-practices|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13817" CreationDate="2021-09-06T06:52:16.127" Score="2" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the draft of a post which I was going to publish later, is accidentally deleted, I will lose the links of the images I've already uploaded. Is there a way to recover those links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also applies if the link was deleted (accidentally, while trying to edit) within the grace period of five minutes after publishing the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T19:09:22.277" Title="Recover deleted image links" Tags="|support|links|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-07T11:36:22.590" Score="20" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/369013/review-queue-workflows-final-release&quot;&gt;review queue update&lt;/a&gt;, I have seen multiple instances of the following situation: a new user asks/answers a question, a reviewer finds the question unclear or lacking sufficient detail and leaves a canned comment, which are generic by design and not tailored to the specific issue on the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP then tries to guess and fix what was the problem with the question and then asks to the &amp;quot;user&amp;quot; Community for feedback. Nobody will be notified. Nobody will respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see several problems with this situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The canned comment is generic and the OP may fail to understand the issue with their post, &amp;quot;fixing&amp;quot; something that was fine, while leaving the weakness of the post untouched.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lack of a feedback from Community may lead to confusion and frustration for the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP is often a new user, if this is their first interaction with the site, it may leave them a bad impression and discourage them to post further.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a post is so unclear that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it should be closed. If it is a good post but could be improved, I think that, instead of leaving a generic canned comment, it could be better to provide a specific comment, tailored to the post, explaining exactly what should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/664413/308051&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/664413/308051&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/664145/308051&quot;&gt;Why do icebergs flip over?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/664643/308051&quot;&gt;Why dispersion is not seen in a glass slab?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue has already been raised &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/369062&quot;&gt;on SE meta&lt;/a&gt;, but while they decide whether and how to fix it network-wide, should we refrain from using canned comments during review?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308051" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-09-07T19:12:11.053" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T19:12:11.053" Title="Should we refrain from using canned comments when reviewing?" Tags="|discussion|comments|review|community-user|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-09T20:17:08.997" Score="20" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/369568/263383&quot;&gt;is making the way accepted answers behave configurable per-site&lt;/a&gt; and is looking for input from our side what our preference is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, accepted answers - answers that the asker of the question has explicitly marked as answering their question - always are shown at the top of the list of answers when sorting by votes, regardless of whether there is an answer with a higher score. In the future, it seems we will be able to decide that instead it should just be sorted by its votes, ignoring its status as the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are your opinions on this topic? Would you like the answer to be unpinned, and if so, why? Would you like the behaviour to stay as it is? Again - if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the linked meta question there is a deadline by Sept 19th for SE to decide what the &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; on all sites will be going forward, but this post is about your preference for the behaviour of accepted answers &lt;em&gt;on physics.SE&lt;/em&gt;, not about your preference for the default for all sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/369568/unpinning-the-accepted-answer-from-the-top-of-the-list-of-answers?noredirect=1#comment1234355_369568&quot;&gt;configured separately&lt;/a&gt; for the main site and our meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-09-15T07:01:44.613" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T15:43:41.520" Title="Do we want accepted answers to be pinned to the top?" Tags="|discussion|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-10T03:47:42.597" Score="18" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Link-shortener services (e.g. exe.io, bit.ly, etc) route traffic to a destination website without allowing the end-user to see what website they are clicking into before clicking. This can be used for malicious purposes, so I make an effort to never click them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore link-shortener services pay account-holders a small dividend per unique clickthrough, creating a profit motive for fake accounts, although I doubt that's much of an issue on a low traffic forum like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="285671" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-10T04:27:51.687" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T14:54:17.710" Title="Should link-shortener services be off-limits?" Tags="|discussion|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13811" CreationDate="2021-09-10T05:48:51.320" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Physics SE the best answer is selected by the community.  That, IMO, means the answer with the most votes.  It is the answer &lt;em&gt;of most use to the community&lt;/em&gt; and hence to Physics SE going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason I think it is valid to make the most up-voted answer the one at the top of the list.  By logical extension, the order of appearance should be vote score.  There is an argument for making the accepted answer at least the second one listed, even if it's vote score would not warrant that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; answer is to allow the asker to make a special reward to an answer &lt;em&gt;they personally&lt;/em&gt; found most useful.  However this answer need not be the most useful to the community and might not even be correct in terms of physics — I believe I have seen this happen, but cannot locate a specific example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should prioritize the answers that the community as a whole considers the most useful, not answers which may have more limited appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2021-11-03T15:43:41.520" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T15:43:41.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13811" CreationDate="2021-09-10T06:49:50.113" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we already have an &lt;em&gt;against pinning to the top&lt;/em&gt; answer, so I'll do &lt;em&gt;for pinning to the top&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally like the idea of having some control over the ordering of answers in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; questions. I can imagine many scenarios where this is actually a good thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general I would say that the person who asked the question is probably the one who is most likely to really understand the topic. For example, a short and superficial answer may be easier to digest and therefore gather more votes than a long and detailed one. As the OP, I will probably spend more time and effort in going through the answers, and therefore my choice of &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; is better informed than that of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Selecting a best answer by hand fixes issues introduced by the &amp;quot;time factor&amp;quot;. An early simple answer is more likely to have more votes than a recent one, even if the new one is clearly superior. Specially in the case of HNQ posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the same vein, selecting an answer helps counter the natural inertia of &amp;quot;most voted answer keeps getting more votes&amp;quot; even when it is not substantially superior to other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the question is somewhat controversial (or is disliked by the community for whatever reason), it is easy to game the system and post an answer that intentionally does not really address the core of the question, but instead dismisses it by either explaining why it is a bad question, or by focusing on an entirely different reinterpretation that will satisfy the casual reader. An actual answer to the OP will get fewer votes than the dismissive one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the opinion of the community is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh7-WPKoWG4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not always the best&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I can also imagine many scenarios where this feature can be abused, but in my experience this has never been a real issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-09-10T14:10:39.220" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T14:10:39.220" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13812" CreationDate="2021-09-10T07:33:39.943" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should avoid shortened links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to use shortened links on our site - almost no post ever runs into the upper character limit for posts, and by default you should use links as hyperlinked clickable text &lt;code&gt;[text](url)&lt;/code&gt; so the length of the URL is entirely irrelevant because it is not part of the visible text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T07:33:39.943" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13811" CreationDate="2021-09-10T14:57:02.480" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to give some voice to the data: Nihar Karve created (and I helped refine) a SEDE query,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1458833/questions-with-accepted-answer-pinned-above-highest-scoring-answer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Questions with accepted answer pinned above highest scoring answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which lists the threads affected by this potential change. Under the current dataset in SEDE, the change would affect 5505 threads, which seem to cover a decently thorough cross-section of the site's threads, at least in terms of score. I don't know how useful it is, but it's interesting to take a look at, if nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T14:57:02.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13809" CreationDate="2021-09-10T19:09:22.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer here is &amp;quot;probably not.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you click the &amp;quot;add picture&amp;quot; button in the editor, your image gets sent to Imgur, who re-host the image. They give your image a unique line-noise name like &lt;code&gt;AbCdE.jpg&lt;/code&gt;, generate medium- and small-sized versions with names like &lt;code&gt;AbCdEm.jpg&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;AbCdEs.jpg&lt;/code&gt;, and then host and serve those images for the duration of the Imgur-SE contract, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/18/new-image-upload-support/&quot;&gt;just started its twelfth year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you re-upload your image, it'll get a new name like &lt;code&gt;fGhIj.jpg&lt;/code&gt;.  The previous version is still there, but you are extremely unlikely to guess its name.  If &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the name, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/250344/280545&quot;&gt;ask to have it deleted&lt;/a&gt;. But if you have forgotten the name, there is no easy way to recover that name from the private list of every image uploaded from the entire SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem here is probably that the SE &amp;quot;saved a draft&amp;quot; feature is kind of delicate (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13538/44126&quot;&gt;see confusion here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/291774/280545&quot;&gt;see explanation here&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;Consider saving your drafts in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/389/44126&quot;&gt;this Meta sandbox&lt;/a&gt;, which uses the SE version history features, or using a service like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackedit.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://stackedit.io/&lt;/a&gt;.  If you are editing version 5 of a post and you need an image link you created in version 3, you can just grab it from the edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T19:09:22.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-11T04:19:53.117" Score="11" ViewCount="402" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m sure everybody is aware of the question that people love to ask, i.e. some variation of “what’s the experience of a photon (or someone traveling at &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$c$&lt;/span&gt;, etc)?” This question is always roundly downvoted. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the question is not strictly about physics because...why exactly? Aren’t there clear ways to interpret this question that are consistent with reality? I feel that we are missing a pedagogical opportunity for a question that is obviously quite popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, we could talk about limits. What is the experience of an observer in the limit &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v \to c$&lt;/span&gt;? We could talk about line elements or spacetime diagrams. What’s the length of a light-like line? What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never answered one of these myself because they’re widely derided and closed. But I’m worried that we’re interpreting this question too rigidly and literally, to the detriment of the curious public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why don’t we answer these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165813" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T23:13:25.650" Title="The “experience of a photon” question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13818" CreationDate="2021-09-11T06:50:03.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think I have ever downvoted this kind of questions, or at least the ones I think you are referring to. I do think I had voted to close a couple in the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I reckon that the vast majority of these questions, especially when asked by (new) low reputation users, can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be answered by some variation of &amp;quot;there is no rest frame for the photon&amp;quot;. Which is counter-intuitive, sure, but also a popular answer present in a myriad other posts both on this site and on others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if the poster were to ask about more specific and interesting nuances, such as the limits &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v\rightarrow c$&lt;/span&gt; that you are mentioning, that would be an indication that they have already done some research on the subject or given some thought about the question. Which would then make it more stimulating for people to engage in writing an answer and participating in the ensuing discussion. Instead of, for example, closing it as a duplicate or for lack of focus/needs more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-09-11T06:50:03.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13818" CreationDate="2021-09-11T14:06:27.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Aren’t there clear ways to interpret this question that are consistent with reality? &amp;quot;  None that I can think of.   What's an example of one of these &amp;quot;clear ways&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nonsense about limiting behavior is clearly not an example, since every single change in velocity is an increase in velocity in some frames and a decrease in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand what &amp;quot;talking about spacetime diagrams&amp;quot; means, but I have no idea how that talk could yield a clear way of interpreting this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/451711/4993&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for this:  &amp;quot;This question is always roundly downvoted. Why?&amp;quot;.  I downvote them to keep them off the front page, where I believe they convey a misleading message that this is not a site for thoughtful people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="4993" LastEditDate="2021-09-11T14:51:04.293" LastActivityDate="2021-09-11T14:51:04.293" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13811" CreationDate="2021-09-11T14:07:50.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my mind, the most upvoted answer should appear at the top. If this is not the accepted answer, the accepted answer should come in second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At worse, this will encourage users (including the OP) to reflect as to why the accepted answer is not the most upvoted in situations where this occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-09-11T14:07:50.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13800" CreationDate="2021-09-13T15:05:20.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you got the most important part right about reviewing edits: if you can't tell whether the edit is an improvement or not, skip it and let it be reviewed by someone who can. This applies to any edit on any SE site, not just formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, formulas are used in a context, at least in good answers. That context often allows you to distinguish typo fixes from edits which change the intention of the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;energy is proportional to the mass: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot;, corrected to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt; - typo fix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;energy is proportional to the velocity: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot;, corrected to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt; - changes the meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;energy is proportional to the velocity squared: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot;, corrected to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt; - typo fix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;mass-energy equivalence, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot;, corrected to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt; - typo fix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I found this formula in a book: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot;, corrected to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt; - changes the meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I found this formula in a book: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc$&lt;/span&gt;&amp;quot;, corrected to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E=mc^2$&lt;/span&gt;, with the comment &amp;quot;formula fixed according to comments&amp;quot; - typo fix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83721" LastEditorUserId="83721" LastEditDate="2021-09-13T15:11:09.357" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T15:11:09.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13818" CreationDate="2021-09-13T21:59:44.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One could, of course, find some version of such a question that has some nuance that makes it novel. For the vast majority that you mention, however, you've essentially answered your own question: The large number of variations of the question &lt;em&gt;with answer&lt;/em&gt; here and on other easy-to-find resources suggests strongly that the asker of such question now didn't do sufficient research before posting.  So that's cause for a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, such question is almost certainly a duplicate.  That means that you should be flagging / voting to close as duplicate rather than answering.  You should not be answering questions that you know are duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Obviously it sometimes happens that you answer a question not realizing it's duplicate.  There might also be some reasonable disagreement about how exactly matched questions have to be to be duplicate for closure. But by premise of your question, that doesn't apply in these cases.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2021-09-13T23:13:25.650" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T23:13:25.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-14T08:44:31.687" Score="9" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a long time the way I tended to see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schrödinger equation&lt;/a&gt; written, some of the notation was like a foreign language to me, and so I couldn't work out how to actually use it to model anything, but then I saw it all the terms that were written out in what was a mathematical foreign language I didn't understand translated into a language I did, which allowed me to then work out how to use it to approximate the motion of particles through numerical methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as how I got confused by some of the ways I've seen the Schrödinger equation written out, I was thinking about making an original post to help others understand the Schrödinger equation as a differential equation, instead of to ask about the Schrödinger equation.  Since I got confused by some of the notation, but can now understand it, I can then write it in a way that the maximum number of people can understand how it can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this type of original post be off-topic, seeing as its intention would be to help others understand something instead of to seek personal knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92654" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-09-14T12:24:54.847" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T03:11:47.750" Title="Would original posts meant to share knowledge instead of ask questions be on topic on the site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2021-09-14T08:57:48.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6060/do-we-want-and-need-a-set-of-canonical-questions-with-canonical-answers&quot;&gt;Do we want and need a set of canonical questions with canonical answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this needs to be used with care to avoid turning the site into a blog. In the past when I have been contemplating a post like this I have usually asked here if people think the specific post I had in mind would be a useful contribution. The question you describe sounds interesting and I would be interested to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T08:57:48.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2021-09-14T09:48:06.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, your posts have to follow the Q&amp;amp;A format of the SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, you are allowed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;self-answer&lt;/a&gt;, cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4362/2451&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T09:48:06.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2021-09-14T13:34:49.860" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about making an original post to help others understand the Schrödinger equation as a differential equation, &lt;strong&gt;instead of to ask about the Schrödinger equation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PSE posts need to be Q&amp;amp;A. Essentially make the question as if you were actually asking it and didn't know the answer. Then you can make an answer yourself. The post should not just be something aiming to cover your own subjective understanding of the Schrodinger equation; the post should not be something like a blog entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this type of original post be off topic, seeing as it's intention would be to help others understand something instead of to seek personal knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While being helpful is typically seen as a necessary condition for a question to stay open, it's not a sufficient one. In addition to the post following the Q&amp;amp;A format, as mentioned above and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/13826/179151&quot;&gt;by QMechanic&lt;/a&gt;, you should also make sure the post follows PSE policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's hard to tell what the question would actually be from the post here. I see two things you have focused on. Would you be asking about how one should view/understand the terms of the Schrodinger equation? Or would you be asking about how this understanding leads to further understanding of how the equation can be applied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both, then I would say a single post would be closed for lacking focus. If you do want to discuss both, I suggest actually making two separate posts, one for each question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onto each individual question. The biggest danger I see for the first one is making the question subjective, even if you have an answer prepared for it that the asker (yourself) is looking for. It would be tempting to say something like &amp;quot;what is the best/correct/easiest way to understand the Schrodinger equation and its terms?&amp;quot;, but this is a subjective question. Maybe you could ask something along the lines of &amp;quot;What does each term of the Schrodinger equation represent / where does each term come from?&amp;quot; One might argue this is still unfocused since it is asking about each term, but I think overall it's still a single, comprehensive question, so it should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one is a little trickier. A question like, &amp;quot;How can understanding the Schrodinger equation lead to understanding its applications?&amp;quot; would be too broad to have a single answer, and it might be somewhat subjective. Even something like &amp;quot;How is the Schrodinger equation used to approximate the motion of particles through numerical methods?&amp;quot; would still be too broad and unclear IMO, as there are many contexts where this applies, and thus there wouldn't be a single correct answer. You might have to narrow the scope down to a single application: &amp;quot;How is the Schrodinger equation applied in &lt;em&gt;insert context here&lt;/em&gt;?&amp;quot; could work as long as you really are focusing on the physics concepts and not the details of the application, such as the numerical methods, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, before you make any question, you should check for duplicate questions. If you find a question that is similar to yours, but you find that the question doesn't sufficiently cover the points you want to ask about, make sure your new question is clearly distinct from it while possibly even addressing that question in your new post if needed. If there is an exact duplicate, but the answer you want to post is not covered in existing answers, you can just post your answer on that question instead. If the answers on the exact duplicate are really poor/non-existent, you might be able to still make your entire Q&amp;amp;A post and then flag &lt;em&gt;your question&lt;/em&gt; as the duplicate of the other, thus closing the other post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-09-14T16:49:07.387" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T16:49:07.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-14T15:36:21.660" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading the answer by SuperCiocia to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13773/should-we-flag-comments-like-thank-you&quot;&gt;Should we flag comments like &amp;quot;Thank you&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, I learned about the comment flag for &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this was interesting because, from time to time, I stumble on dead-end questions that are being kept alive from Roomba solely based on having more than one comment.  Specifically that it meets the criteria for being &amp;quot;abandoned&amp;quot; except for having 2+ comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&lt;/a&gt;  Many times these comments have no real content that advances the archival value in general, and especially not after many years. (After 9 years, I think it's safe to say that the OP is not going to respond to a request to add details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I picked out a couple of examples that I thought were particularly egregious to see how they'd be handled.  Most were declined, which didn't really surprise me except that the mods had just weighed in on the meta question linked above indicating that such flags were appropriate.  I don't necessarily care about these specific comments, but I'd like to get some community sense about why or if we should be keeping some of these questions on life support by keeping these types of comments in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples (obviously these may become out of date if the comments are eventually deleted, so keep that in mind if you come around later):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First comment here is link-only.  Moreover it doesn't link to anything other than a search engine, so it's essentially spam.  I raised a custom flag with comment &amp;quot;Dead link / spam link. There's nothing useful on the other side of this link in any case.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39524/experimental-realization-of-quantum-teleportation-of-spin-not-polarization-not&quot;&gt;Experimental realization of Quantum Teleportation of Spin, not polarization, not ions or atoms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First comment here says nothing except that the person commenting knows &amp;quot;nothing about&amp;quot; the topic of the question but that the person might find someone who could answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23859/in-what-environments-can-a-dipolariton-form&quot;&gt;In what environments can a dipolariton form?&lt;/a&gt; The second of two comments, which I didn't separately flag, just says thank you to the first person.  So this is a closed-loop of two comments that at best is out of date and, arguably, had no chance of long-term value from the start.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Last comment here is a thank you, which is essentially the topic of the meta that I linked above as an example of the type of comment that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be flagged under the policy plus a request to post an answer. (After 10 years, I think we can assume that request will not be met so the comment is &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot;.) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15636/is-this-a-known-entropy-formula&quot;&gt;Is this a known entropy formula?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Last comment here is a request that a comment above be turned into an answer.  This flag was marked &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; but the comment wasn't deleted.  At almost 9 years, I think we can assume the request will not be met and so the comment in question is &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38063/folded-and-or-compacted-dimensions-in-m-theory&quot;&gt;Folded and/or compacted dimensions in M-theory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are 4 examples, but there are many on the site where &amp;quot;chatty&amp;quot; comments that either could not or, with hindsight now available, did not advance questions toward answers.  Having tried to use the site over the last few months to find information rather than just answering new questions as the arise, I'm confident that this noise is reducing the archival value of the better questions that do have answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing a question-by-question search for this situation probably isn't a good use of our time, but to the extent that they are found during normal use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the community's view on cleaning up some of these older comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What criteria are the mods using to handle the flags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;POSTSCRIPT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had forgotten about this part:  I also flagged a couple of questions for closure rather than flagging the comments as a control in the experiment.  I went back and checked those, and most were ultimately closed in review.  Interestingly, in each case they were closed by a moderator casting a binding vote.  There's no way to see who handled the comment flags, so it might be a difference in approach between mods.  Given that the comments are definitionally ephemeral though, and the questions get more a presumption to be preserved, it strikes me as odd that the mods took decisive action only on the closure of the questions themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this scenario, closing also puts the questions in line for Roomba, just in a different category, so either by approving the comment flag or agreeing to the closure they effectively decided to delete the question.  For some reason there seems to be a preference for path over the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastEditorUserId="89784" LastEditDate="2021-09-14T18:27:00.127" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T18:27:00.127" Title="What's the criteria for a comment &quot;no longer needed&quot; flag?" Tags="|discussion|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13828" CreationDate="2021-09-14T15:36:21.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect there will be other perspectives, but I'll get things started with an answer in favor of deleting most comments in these scenarios.  Possible criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comments are &amp;quot;chatty&amp;quot; without contributing anything that advances the question toward an answer.  Examples are &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;good question!&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;I don't know&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comments are link-only, especially if the link is already dead or spam.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comments stood a chance of advancing the question at the time they were posed but are far enough removed in time that they are &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot;.  Examples would be comments that request an essential clarification or detail when such detail is never added.  These comments, at the time they were made, had a chance to be useful, but without a response the question cannot get a reasonable answer.  We may disagree on where the cutoff lies, but at 8, 9, or 10 years I think we can be confident that the OP is not coming back to provide those details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, the last category could arguably also be handled by voting to close.  I think that's a respectable alternative, but it seems like senseless work to put a question that's been &amp;quot;abandoned&amp;quot; for many years into a review queue rather than doing a small clean-up of comments and letting the Roomba process do it's job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89784" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T15:36:21.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13828" CreationDate="2021-09-14T17:32:46.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the moderator that rejected most of your flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were 4 or 5 flags from the same user in a very short span of time, on questions from 10 (or something) years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the intentions you are now describing are noble, as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt; definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the&#xA;increasingly-small chance that an answer will be provided ,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't deny I initially thought someone was trying to get &amp;quot;easy&amp;quot; helpful flags to get Deputy or Marshal &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;badges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Responding to your linked questions in order, these were &lt;em&gt;my personal&lt;/em&gt; motivations for rejecting most of your flags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are right, that comment can be deleted as it's useless. I had confirmed it was technically neither dead nor spam (rude/abusive). But upon reviewing it now, it's the only thing keeping the question alive and it adds nothing to it so I have deleted it. It was last active 9 years ago though but ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same as before&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The comment here is &lt;code&gt;Thank you for your great answer! If you could post this as an answer I will most definitely accept it.&lt;/code&gt;. In my view, this confirms that the previous comment (upvoted by more than one user) contains a satisfactory answer to the OP's question. This may well be useful to the community and to &amp;quot;those searching for a solution&amp;quot; (Roomba quote) because it contains useful content. Useful enough that the OP themselves said they would accept it if it were an answer. Removing the comment and having the question eventually deleted would be a loss of useful content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same exact thing as for previous answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your controlled experiment in flagging questions for closure, I only found one where you raised the flag and I cast the decisive closing vote -- and that question was 2 days old (as opposed to 10 years old for the comment flags you had raised). So the question was still active, interested &amp;amp; involved users were probably still checking it, and it was indeed 'cumbersome' on the homepage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have answered your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What criteria are the mods using to handle the flags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by giving you my personal reasons for the decisions I made. Maybe you'll get other answers from older / more experienced moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the community's view on cleaning up some of these older&#xA;comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is concerned, I guess an 'official' answer should be based from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;help centre page&lt;/a&gt; and from precedent (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13043/do-we-need-to-delete-informative-off-topic-comments-under-old-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). If one were to follow those rules and discussions to the letter, then yes, one should delete most if not all the comments you flagged, as they are using the comments to answer the question instead of 'asking for clarification' etc. Truth be told, if comments like this were to occur on recent questions (active, where the interested users are still checking it), I would probably delete them (as I have already done sometimes). I just didn't think it was worth it for 9+ years old ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T17:32:46.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13828" CreationDate="2021-09-14T17:39:03.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/15636/44126&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/38063/44126&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; have comments that should have been posted as answers, and replies saying &amp;quot;thanks, please post this as an answer.&amp;quot; You have proposed to delete the thank-you comments, which will permit the Roomba to cull the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better solution might be to transfer the should-have-been-an-answer comment to an answer, then mark both comments as obsolete.  When I do this, I usually write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Promoted from a comment by [user]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[answer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and mark the answer as community-wiki, so that it's clear I'm not trying take credit or reputation for someone else's words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T17:39:03.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2021-09-15T03:11:47.750" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Q&amp;amp;A format, a thread which is a genuine &lt;em&gt;attempt&lt;/em&gt; to share knowledge, but is actually wrong, can be given a better answer by others and the OP's wrong answer down voted. (I'm not talking about trolls or crackpots here - just honest errors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;blog post&amp;quot; which doesn't clearly define what question it is asking or answering is harder to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123188" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T03:11:47.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13835" CreationDate="2021-09-15T09:35:59.093" Score="5" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't written many answers, but after I have identified what the user is asking, I usually go with a conversational tone, going over whatever has a question mark over it and any context supporting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optionally (if you have the time), recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/666062/the-direction-of-the-velocity-of-a-body-can-change-when-its-acceleration-is-cons/666067#666067&quot;&gt;one of my answers&lt;/a&gt; got downvoted. Any flaws and anything to improve my answer will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273460" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-09-15T20:14:58.743" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T02:44:50.230" Title="How do I write better answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13834" CreationDate="2021-09-15T13:56:36.703" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at your &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/273460/reet-jaiswal?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation tab&lt;/a&gt;, this seems to be only the second downvote you’ve received after a year on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll let other folks comment on the specifics of your answer (which also has an upvote). But I’ll offer this general advice: don’t worry very much about a single vote one way or the other. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to look for patterns in the ways that people respond to you. But people use the voting tools in lots of different ways, only some of which are scrutable. Don’t let a single vote sway you very far one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T13:56:36.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-17T02:45:53.780" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/666421/why-doesnt-my-phone-scroll-if-i-put-a-ring-flat-on-the-screen&quot;&gt;Why doesn&amp;#39;t my phone scroll if I put a ring flat on the screen?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been closed as being too engineering-based, and the Feedback message gave options of other SEs it might fit in. I didn't realise that there was a separate Electrical Engineering SE (although I did choose your electrical-engineering tag, which I suppose means I should have looked!), so it probably would fit better there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, whoever closed it didn't migrate it. Is that because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. You don't migrate questions&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b. You only migrate questions if asked to&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c. You do migrate questions, but didn't think the question was good enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could just re-write the question on the Electrical Engineering SE, but that seems untidy — it could end up with a closed question here and a successfully answered version elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And I don't know if I should have asked on meta, but couldn't work out how else to do it! I'll delete this later if you want.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314060" LastEditorUserId="314060" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T02:50:45.847" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T19:04:35.247" Title="My closed question probably fits better in a different SE — do I have to ask for it to be migrated?" Tags="|support|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13837" CreationDate="2021-09-17T03:46:27.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not the moderator that cast the decisive vote to close the question. Personally, I would have no problem just going to your question and migrate it to Electrical Engineering. However, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/140571/migrating-closed-questions&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, moderators cannot simply migrate closed questions. One would have to first reopen, then vote to close (again), and migrate it as part of the closing procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing over migrating is probably due to your question not been &amp;quot;phrased&amp;quot; correctly for the SE one would migrate to. In my experience on this site, I have predominantly seen questions being migrated to Mathematics SE -- those questions are usually heavily mathematical, so quite an 'easy' judgement. For an Electrical Engineering SE question, I guess you'd have to be more &amp;quot;practical&amp;quot; in your question than you'd normally be on Physics SE, e.g. giving part numbers &amp;amp; such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I think you can just copy and paste your question to Electrical Engineering SE as is, I think it's enough detail. The question on Physics SE will &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;automatically be deleted&lt;/a&gt; after some time anyway so no risk of duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, the &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; to your question is probably that iPhones use capacitive screens (that detect the flow of electricity from a conductor touching the screen, e.g. a finger or a ring), whereas the Kindle uses 'touch sensing' which works optically (infrared) and hence allows the use of the screen with e.g. gloves. But I see something along these lines has already been discussed in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T03:46:27.780" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-17T17:15:23.763" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I would suggest that an askers knowledge of terminology should be taken into consideration is that if by research effort we mean looking something up on the internet before asking a question, then a person's knowledge of terminology can actually have a impact on what he/she/they can find in a search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for example a question could be quickly answered by looking up atoms or molecules, but the asker did not use the words &amp;quot;atoms&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;molecules&amp;quot; in the post then I think it would be possible that the asker has heard of neither, and &amp;quot;atoms&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;molecules&amp;quot; wouldn't be likely to just pop into someone's mind as something to look up if someone had never heard of them.  I could imagine person searching, &amp;quot;smallest pieces of stuff,&amp;quot; if he/she hadn't heard of atoms or molecules but depending on what the asker asked it could be difficult to guess what he/she/they would think to use in a search and some keywords an asker might think to use in a search may not have the words, &amp;quot;atoms&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;molecules&amp;quot; come up in a search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in general a lot of us probably think in terms of what keywords we would personally use in a search, as we take for granted what terms we know and it can sometimes be difficult to guess what words someone would use in a search if he/she/they didn't know the the terms we know.  I think for this reason someone who isn't as familiar with physics terms could in some cases do a thorough search using words he/she knows or can think of and still give the impression of little research effort to someone who knows a lot of terminology in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if an asker doesn't use a given term in a question, should we take into consideration that the person might be unfamiliar with the word and so unable to use it in a search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92654" LastActivityDate="2021-09-18T13:31:10.257" Title="Should we take the terminology an asker might be unfamiliar with into consideration when it comes to expectations for research effort?" Tags="|discussion|scope|policy|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-17T18:04:14.847" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an existing discussion/request for a system to tag or otherwise indicate level of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1387/can-we-have-a-level-of-question-tag-please&quot;&gt;Can we have a level-of-question tag please?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/29/differentiate-research-level-questions&quot;&gt;Differentiate research-level questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that people answering or searching could use this to filter questions. The indicator could for example be a tag, or else some other thing which is a required ingredient and would be selected from a pull-down list. Here is a possible set of choices for such a list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from zero to around early high school, including teaching of same&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;advanced high school or university (undergraduate), including teaching of same&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;graduate study to open research question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this post I am re-asserting the existing request(s). It is true that the level of most questions becomes clear early on when reading the question, but a tag would help people wanting (3) to avoid looking at (1) altogether, and &lt;em&gt;vice-versa&lt;/em&gt;. The choice of tag need not be checked by the system; if someone picked the wrong tag then they would simply reduce the chances of a response useful to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207910" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T18:12:23.053" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T18:12:23.053" Title="Maybe add an indicator showing level of question" Tags="|feature-request|questions|tags|content-level|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13837" CreationDate="2021-09-17T18:56:53.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think your question is a better fit elsewhere, you have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask a moderator to migrate it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask it yourself at the other site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second option is always better- most questions need some editing to fit the other site better (at a bare minimum,  the tags usually need to be changed). This is made worse by the fact that migrated questions only get one chance- if they are closed they are automatically locked and can't be commented on, edited, or reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will usually migrate at user request, but we may deny the migration if it is too old, if we can't decide if it's on-topic at the new site, or if we just think it isn't a good question. It can also be &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; rejected for a few reasons. In fact yours would be automatically rejected if we did migrate it, because the only tag it uses (electrical-engineering) does not exist on the target site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before asking for migration or asking the new question on the other site, please familiarize yourself with their site. At a minimum, you should their help page on what is on-topic, &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. Just because the topic of your question is related to the name of their site does not necessarily mean your question is on-topic or will be well-received there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T19:04:35.247" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T19:04:35.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13843" CreationDate="2021-09-18T03:38:01.600" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;About 24 hours ago, I posted an edit to my answer to a PSE question concerning the time when interstellar travel (in any form, or, at least, without specification of its form) might have begun:  As stated in that edit, it replaced nearly all of the original answer, which had discussed only the time (2017) when the first arrival of an object from interstellar space had been interpreted (by a well-known astronomer appointed by an Ivy League university) as representing the probable arrival of an artifact designed by an alien civilization. My attention had been drawn to my significant error by a downvote and a couple of helpful comments, but some other comments had been absurdly derisive and seem to have had some humorous intent, as they could literally be read as casting aspersions about the astronomer's motivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had deleted most of my own comments, and included, in my edited answer's opening paragraphs, my motivations for the complete revision of my answer:  However, when I added some detail in a new comment on the edited answer a short while ago, I was sorry to see that the entire barrage of comments (minus one or two of my own, which I had been able to delete upon the posting of my answer's edited version) remains visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I believe I'm qualified to access review queues, it may be that I should've deleted the humorous comments when editing my answer, but I'm not sure of the procedure.  In any case, for the moment I'm hoping to have them removed promptly.  Is it necessary to flag a moderator to have that accomplished, or is there a procedure allowing me to accomplish it myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-19T10:31:13.717" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T10:31:13.717" Title="How can I accomplish the removal of comments by another participant, on an answer I had posted, that might be considered derogatory?" Tags="|support|comments|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13842" CreationDate="2021-09-18T04:12:20.363" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't delete other people's comments directly, in review or otherwise. If you think a comment is rude or abusive, or just no longer needed, you can flag it for moderator attention by clicking the little flag icon next to the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-09-18T04:12:20.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13839" CreationDate="2021-09-18T13:31:10.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The familiarity of an OP with the terminology should not enter into anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broader objective of the site is not so much to provide answers to questions of individuals, but to provide answers that are useful beyond the OP to viewers at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, I make no accommodation for poor use of terminology in questions (or answers): since the terminology is poor, such questions by definition they will not reach much beyond the OP and will not be much useful to anyone beyond the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is always possible to edit the contents from comments or answers, and thus reverse the effect of negative actions such as downvotes or votes to close if the edit is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel very strongly that allowing poorly researched question will result in a decrease in the quality of the site as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-09-18T13:31:10.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13846" CreationDate="2021-09-20T10:34:33.947" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just answered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/667040/305718&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and edited it within a short period. But this is what I saw:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gD5kD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gD5kD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to the grace period of 5 minutes for editing a post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T12:31:14.447" Title="Is this a bug with editing posts?" Tags="|support|bug|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13845" CreationDate="2021-09-20T12:31:14.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The comment broke the grace period.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/251876/241919&quot;&gt;ex-CM Shog9's answer&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits will be rolled into the previous revision if the previous revision was created by the same author and &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of the following conditions are present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The previous revision was created 5 minutes or more in the past&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A comment has been added to the post after the previous revision by anyone &lt;em&gt;other than&lt;/em&gt; the editor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An answer has been added to the post after the previous revision (even if the answer was posted by the editor)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The previous revision was a rollback&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The new revision is a rollback&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/341105/closure-should-end-the-grace-period-for-edits&quot;&gt;as of April 3rd, 2017&lt;/a&gt;] The question was closed after the previous revision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Emphasis added)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/667040/timeline&quot;&gt;the post's timeline&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2021-09-20 10:19:55Z: answer posted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2021-09-20 10:21:12Z: OP commented; breaking the grace period&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2021-09-20 10:22:52Z: answer edited; new revision was created due to above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62016" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T12:31:14.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-24T10:15:14.207" Score="5" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encounter quite often questions that are based on poor research, misunderstanding basic definitions, and likewise. In my opinion such questions should be closed rather than answered. Nevertheless, it is my policy to give people a hint or send them to a relevant text, so that they can improve their understanding. &lt;em&gt;I would like to stress that I am not giving a full answer, but helping people to learn and/or ask a better question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in opinions and practices of the other members of the community in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remark:&lt;/strong&gt; I am posting this as a new question, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13849/247642&quot;&gt;my earlier question&lt;/a&gt; was closed, perhaps because of misunderstanding due to the example given in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's take &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/670096/247642&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: the OP overlooked complex/hermitian conjugation. Does it merit a full answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/670517/247642&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastEditorUserId="247642" LastEditDate="2021-10-08T14:42:53.137" LastActivityDate="2021-10-08T14:42:53.137" Title="Helping out in comments, when the question is too weak" Tags="|discussion|comments|best-practices|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-24T19:18:25.120" Score="6" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question we want to ask might have been posted by another user years ago. It is possible that the question did not get any answers or the answers were/are not satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do for each case? How can we bring an old question back to the attention of the community, i.e. make it appear in the &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; page again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282521" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-09-25T12:20:47.900" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T12:20:47.900" Title="How can we bring an old question back to the users' attention?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13851" CreationDate="2021-09-24T22:21:01.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any user with more than 75 reputation points can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;“spend” some of that reputation on a bounty&lt;/a&gt;.  Bountied questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/?tab=bounties&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; for up to a week, and new answers (or other activity) on bountied questions will put them on the front page like other active posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T22:21:01.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13834" CreationDate="2021-09-25T00:23:05.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read your answer to which you linked.  It looks great to me, so I just upvoted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your answer is clear, informative, helpful, and easy to read.  All are attributes of a quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only very minor recommendation is to be cautious about phrases like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;if you are confused about this&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  Because tone is very hard to detect online, that phrase can either be read as either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This is naturally a bit confusing, so please allow me to help further.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;  - This is what I believe you intended.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;You're an ignorant fool, so if you're &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; confused, here's even more help for your tiny brain.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - I'm exaggerating in a humorous way here, but my point is that such a phrase &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be considered condescending if the reader is not aware of your good intention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the rest of your answer is 100% helpful, I would find it a bit odd if someone had the second interpretation.  Still, it's worth being mindful of how expressions like these can be perceived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to reading more answers from you in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81293" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T00:23:05.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13834" CreationDate="2021-09-25T02:44:50.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have upvoted, but still, one criticism of the answer is that you referred to an explicit basis when explaining ( cartesian). But otherwise, I think is certainly valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T02:44:50.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13857" CreationDate="2021-09-26T16:39:05.847" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does it make any difference in using&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13855/305718&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13855/proper-formatting-of-links&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&#xA;(Link is of this post as an example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen several times that the second one had been replaced by the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="305718" LastEditDate="2021-09-26T16:44:48.790" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T17:22:47.047" Title="Proper formatting of links" Tags="|support|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13855" CreationDate="2021-09-26T17:10:31.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; not, but it is most safe to use the permalink format suggested when clicking the share button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sometimes makes a difference if the URL contains extra stuff (e.g. accidentally linking to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon#comment176355_5510&quot;&gt;specific comment&lt;/a&gt; if the intent was to link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5265/2451&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; The word &lt;em&gt;presumably&lt;/em&gt; because SE presumably will make sure that links  work in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-26T17:22:47.047" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T17:22:47.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13855" CreationDate="2021-09-26T17:10:59.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s no difference for the person clicking the link, but there are minor differences for the person posting it, and for a hypothetical person who might read the URL but not click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magic number that’s common in your two examples, &lt;code&gt;13855&lt;/code&gt;, is the database identifier of your post.  When you visit a link of the first form, your browser is redirected to a URL of the second form, with an appropriate &lt;code&gt;#anchor&lt;/code&gt; to the middle of the page if the link is to an answer rather than to the question.  You generate links of the first form by copying from the browser URL field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You generate links of the second form by clicking the “Share” button under a post.  The other number in the first form, here &lt;code&gt;305718&lt;/code&gt;, is the user ID of the person who has clicked that button – which you can verify by clicking on your profile name and looking at &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; URL.  That user ID is used to award the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/54/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/55/booster&quot;&gt;Booster&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/56/publicist&quot;&gt;Publicist&lt;/a&gt; badges.  So if you’re motivated by badges and gamification, you might prefer to click the “Share” button instead of copying the URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person who is reading the link, but not clicking, can divine the content of the question from the first form, because it includes a version of the title of the question.  However, if the title of the question is edited, the old links will still work. The only valuable part of the long-form link is the question/answer ID; everything after that slash is ignored.  That means that you can in principle deceive people about the content of the link with the long form: the URL &lt;code&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13855/im-a-big-dumb-poopy-head&lt;/code&gt; also redirects to this question, even though no one here is a big dumb poopy head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person who is reading the link, but not clicking, can determine your user account on the site from the short form.  So if you were to send an email to your boss that said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hey this SO question solves our problem &lt;code&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/a/952952/1650379&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then your boss could, if motivated, visit your Stack Overflow profile page, notice from your list of linked accounts that you sometimes write long answers on Physics during so-called “working hours,” and give you grief about that.  Someone who was more concerned about privacy than about Announcer badges might strip their user ID from the short-form links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T17:10:59.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13850" CreationDate="2021-09-26T17:17:15.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you’d like to help someone out by improving their question, that’s an appropriate use of a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’d like to help someone out by posting a link to a resource elsewhere, or by suggesting a search term that may help them find such resources on their own, that’s an appropriate use of a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’d like to help someone out by completely or partially answering their question, please use an answer instead of a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T17:17:15.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2021-09-29T06:52:57.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to use that &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\nabla$&lt;/span&gt; is the Levi-Civita derivative and the Riemann tensor is given by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$R_{abc}^{\quad d} \omega_d = [\nabla_a, \nabla_b] \omega_c,$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\omega_c$&lt;/span&gt; is a 1-form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lie derivative with respect to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X$&lt;/span&gt; of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\nabla_a \nabla_b \phi$&lt;/span&gt; is given by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\mathscr{L}_X \nabla_a \nabla_b \phi = X^c \nabla_c \nabla_a \nabla_b \phi + (\nabla_a \nabla_c \phi) \nabla_b X^c + (\nabla_c \nabla_b \phi) \nabla_a X^c.$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;\begin{align}&#xA;\nabla_a \mathscr{L}_X \nabla_b \phi &amp;amp;= \nabla_a (X^c \nabla_c \nabla_b \phi + (\nabla_c \phi) \nabla_b X^c)\\&#xA;&amp;amp;= (\nabla_aX^c) \nabla_c \nabla_b \phi + X^c \nabla_a \nabla_c \nabla_b \phi + (\nabla_a \nabla_c \phi) \nabla_b X^c + (\nabla_c \phi) \nabla_a \nabla_b X^c\\&#xA;&amp;amp;= \underline{(\nabla_a X^c) \nabla_c \nabla_b \phi} + R_{acb}^{\quad d} X^c \nabla_d \phi + \underline{X^c \nabla_c \nabla_a \nabla_b \phi} + \underline{(\nabla_a \nabla_c \phi) \nabla_b X^c} + (\nabla_c \phi) \nabla_a \nabla_b X^c,&#xA;\end{align}&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the underlined components are present in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathscr{L}_X \nabla_a \nabla_b \phi$&lt;/span&gt;. Using the symmetries of the Riemann tensor, we get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$R_{acbd} X^c \nabla^d \phi = R_{bdac} X^c \nabla^d \phi = R_{bda}^{\quad c} X_c \nabla^d \phi  = ([\nabla_b, \nabla_c] X_a) \nabla^c \phi.$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice also that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;\begin{align}&#xA;\nabla^c \phi ([\nabla_b, \nabla_c] X_a + \nabla_a \nabla_b X_c) &amp;amp;= \nabla^c \phi (\nabla_b \nabla_c X_a - \nabla_c \nabla_b X_a + \nabla_a \nabla_b X_c)\\&#xA;&amp;amp;= \nabla^c \phi (\nabla_b \nabla_c X_a + \nabla_b \nabla_a X_c - \nabla_b \nabla_a X_c\\&#xA;&amp;amp;\quad \quad \ \ + \nabla_a \nabla_b X_c + \nabla_a \nabla_c X_b - \nabla_a \nabla_c X_b\\&#xA;&amp;amp;\quad \quad \ \ - \nabla_c \nabla_b X_a - \nabla_c \nabla_a X_b + \nabla_c \nabla_a X_b)\\&#xA;&amp;amp;= \nabla^c \phi (\nabla_a \mathscr{L}_X g_{bc} + \nabla_b \mathscr{L}_X g_{ac} - \nabla_c \mathscr{L}_X g_{ab}\\&#xA;&amp;amp;\quad \quad \ \ + \nabla_c \nabla_a X_b - \nabla_a \nabla_c X_b - \nabla_b \nabla_a X_c).&#xA;\end{align}&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plugging the former in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\nabla_a \mathscr{L}_X \nabla_b \phi$&lt;/span&gt; gives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;\begin{align}&#xA;\nabla_a \mathscr{L}_X \nabla_b \phi - \nabla^c \phi (\nabla_a \mathscr{L}_X g_{bc} + \nabla_b \mathscr{L}_X g_{ac} - \nabla_c \mathscr{L}_X g_{ab}) &amp;amp;= \mathscr{L}_X \nabla_a \nabla_b \phi\\&#xA;&amp;amp; - \nabla^c \phi (R_{acb}^{\quad d} X_d + \nabla_b \nabla_a X_c)&#xA;\end{align}&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277861" LastEditorUserId="277861" LastEditDate="2022-11-12T18:10:53.250" LastActivityDate="2022-11-12T18:10:53.250" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-09-29T06:52:57.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-30T01:28:39.390" Score="-7" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;This topic was discussed many times before but I hope to inspect it a bit differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be awesome if everybody knew why a question was down-voted. That way everyone could see the situation from others' perspective and realize the shortcomings better -if there are any. It would also help to see if the down-voter is just being a jerk or not, by keeping the anonymity intact of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without any feedback it puts me into confusion trying to understand what specific part of the question was problematic. Was it due to misconception on physics, word selection, site rules, clarity of the question, wrong sign and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really do understand the site is trying to keep a threshold on the quality of questions and trying to prevent the place turning into a [you fill it], but using no-feedback-downvotes, especially an avalanche of them, is not the best way to achieve that in my opinion. It is using fear to drive the crowd in the end. What good would it do to hear &amp;quot;you did bad&amp;quot; again and again without being told the reason. It would only make people more hesitant. Many users might be used to this type of treatment from their families / friends and might be thinking this is the right way to do it, but after some thinking this is not the way I want to be guided or to guide anyone. A compassionate teacher is what I prefer and they would tell me kindly what I did wrong, instead of abandoning me with an obscure frown / bad mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it looks like a clear feedback mechanism will regulate the site much faster than the moderation is trying to do and this is why I suggest the feedback feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282521" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-09-30T04:06:01.917" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T01:01:31.027" Title="Do you think downvote feedbacks would contribute to the site?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comments|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13862" CreationDate="2021-09-30T08:34:47.173" Score="10" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/668922&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; comment-like answer was posted by a rep-1 user with no (AFAICT) other posts, and then silently deleted within 15 minutes, leaving the poster wondering why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user then posted a copy of the answer, where some others have commented and let him know that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This place is not like a forum. Your answer should literally answer the question.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. A while after this the answer was deleted too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second deletion was OK. But the first one could have been better IMO. Particularly, I'd expect either the moderator to post an explanation (maybe canned, as available in the Review), or there to be a banner (or whatever it's called here) above the post, explaining what's wrong with the post and linking to the relevant documentation. The Q&amp;amp;A format is not very familiar to many new users, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I missing something? Is there already an explanation that's not visible to anyone except the poster of the deleted answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastActivityDate="2021-10-09T08:49:23.607" Title="Silently deleting answers by a new user is not welcoming" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13861" CreationDate="2021-09-30T11:55:43.887" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;That was me. I usually leave such a comment, but on this occasion I didn’t. A mistake, for which I apologize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T11:55:43.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13812" CreationDate="2021-09-30T14:54:17.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's clear I'm outvoted, but every now and then I use shorteners here and would miss them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some URLs are very long and, when linking something in a comment (say, a page from a book), they can really be an annoyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd suggest that: &lt;strong&gt;If shorteners are banned, then make urls not count towards the character limit in comments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T14:54:17.710" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13860" CreationDate="2021-10-01T00:10:42.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may: you seem to have some misconception about what the site is about.  To quote from the tour page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please look at the first sentence of the quote: it’s about getting answers.  It’s not about being a compassionate teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now look at the second sentence.  It’s not about turning every vote into a discussion or debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of users come to this and other sites as a resource. A lot of them aren’t even members.  When I need a resource for a class, a trick for Mathematica or LaTeX, I come here or go there because I find good answers, as do thousands of others.  I don’t care if the answer that works best for me has been upvoted, downvoted, the most upvoted, the most downvoted, accepted or rejected. I do not care if the poster has a lot or a little reputation; I do not care if the answers come from posters with a lot or a little reputation.  I’m just glad some took time to provide his or her insight into the particular question, and if I find it useful I use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere on the tour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our goal is to have the best answers to every question, so if you see questions or answers that can be improved, you can edit them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People downvotes for their own reasons.  They upvote for their own reasons as well. Presumably it is to rank answers and questions according to their judgements as per above.  Just live with it and be happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2021-10-01T01:01:31.027" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T01:01:31.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13850" CreationDate="2021-10-02T21:29:17.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ideas which form the basis for interesting papers written by students. But when a full professor comes up with one, it is more common that he or she will judge the idea to be insufficient for a publication by itself and instead pass it along to a colleague working on similar topics. To a lesser extent, this is sure to play out on Phys.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the official purpose of comments is more specific. But in practice, people post comments when they have something to say which requires less effort than what they typically put into answers but is nevertheless likely to be of some use to the OP. Disabusing the OP of a misconception is a perfect example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the bar delineating comment material from answer material &lt;em&gt;depends on the experience of the user&lt;/em&gt;. I think it's sensible for Phys.SE to embrace this trend. Some help is better than no help and it would be a shame for the interesting comments I've seen to disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219346" LastActivityDate="2021-10-02T21:29:17.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-04T14:35:43.290" Score="11" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/649558&quot;&gt;What happens to the vacuum when entanglement is harvested?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was closed as off-topic a couple of months ago, and I don't understand why. The topic is basic quantum field theory: the entanglement structure of the vacuum is fundamental to understanding basic things like the interplay between causality and the structure of two-point correlation functions, understanding why a strict position-operator doesn't exist in relativistic QFT, and so on, not to mention its central role in more exotic (but still very much mainstream) things like Hawking radiation, the black-hole information paradox, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. In case the fundamental importance of the vacuum entanglement topic in quantum field theory is unfamiliar, note that Edward Witten wrote a review paper about it (Notes on Some Entanglement Properties of Quantum Field Theory, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04993&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:1803.04993&lt;/a&gt;). This particular question is about &lt;em&gt;harvesting&lt;/em&gt; entanglement from the vacuum, which is not something that has any practical utility, but it does have pedagogical utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is plenty of precedent on this site for regarding theoretical physics as on-topic as long as it's mainstream, even if it is purely a pedagogical thought experiment with no forseeable practical applications. I'm curious to understand why this particular question about basic quantum field theory was deemed to be off-topic. Not complaining, just sincerely curious to know what the reasoning was, in case I'm overlooking a good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206691" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-10-04T16:14:58.147" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T01:26:44.960" Title="Why was this entanglement-harvesting question closed as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13811" CreationDate="2021-10-04T14:48:42.947" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I find the accepted answers to be more often helpful than the most upvoted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is true often because the person who asked the question is often the person with the most interest in if the question is actually answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think often wrong or not-fully-correct answers are upvoted because they seem right. Often answers that are quick and lazy that maybe only address a small part of the question are often upvoted. Communities are subject to herd-mentality, and I think often most upvoted questions often completely miss the point of a question that's been asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T14:48:42.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13850" CreationDate="2021-10-05T14:34:30.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bulk of questions I have come across don't quite know what to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have personally used comments to point out the obvious, stop the  OP in their tracks and reform or withdraw the question, with an anticipated &amp;quot;oh!&amp;quot; [forehead-slap]. But I have only succeeded twice in getting such questions to be withdrawn. On the other hand, a fair number of questions are edited in response to comments. My sense is that closed questions simply alienate askers who often opt  for not coming back to them, and accept the fog as a price of doing business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &amp;quot;partial answer comments&amp;quot; are often misconstrued by moderators: they are part of the discussion that retargets, reframes, and clarifies the question as it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have been asked. It is quite frustrating to whack all the moles raising their head out of the question, only to have the  OP come back with &amp;quot;no, that's not what I meant! You failed to read my mind. Try again! Tell me what I don't understand, not what I should understand!&amp;quot;... So, patient, reasoned &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; that deconstruct the question waste too much time shadow-boxing with conjectural illusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the  OP should come back with either &amp;quot;I know that, I'll focus my question to what I'm really asking&amp;quot;, or else, &amp;quot;Oh, can you tell me more? If, indeed, ..., then why ...?&amp;quot;. Not sure how to second-guess the  OP attitude, though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66086" LastEditorUserId="66086" LastEditDate="2021-10-06T19:09:32.340" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T19:09:32.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13811" CreationDate="2021-10-06T15:06:37.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestion 1:  Why not present the answers in a random order?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It seems to me that the arguments in favor of pinning to the top the accepted answer or the most upvoted answer are essentially a question of personal convenience - so that one does not have to look through all of the answers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but this is precisely the problem with the most upvoted answers: there is often a snowball effect of the answer that is not totally wrong and which was posted rather early gets more and more upvotes, even though the later answers may be more complete, better research, and on occasion even proving that the most upvoted answer is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestion 2: Let users with sufficient reputation have the accepted answer pinned to the top&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Again, the problem with pinning the accepted answers is that the OP author may be too unexperience to judge correctly the quality of the answer. On the other hand, reputed users are more likely to be capable of judging the good answer better than the average member of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T15:06:37.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13850" CreationDate="2021-10-06T19:41:31.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess the issue is that you are trying to balance &amp;quot;useful to the site&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;helping the OP no matter what&amp;quot;. The site policies and site goal is not to help every single person who posts a question. The goal is to curate higher-quality questions and answers to help a wide variety of people, not just the person asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come across a &amp;quot;weak question&amp;quot; that you think should be closed, then you should vote to close the question. However, if you think you can help the OP improve the post, then leave a comment giving your suggestions, and if you think the question lacks some clarity, ask the OP a question to clarify. Note that these are not mutually exclusive decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not think the question should be closed, then just leave an answer, which is way more helpful than a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, posting hints in the comments of questions you think should be closed is just trying to circumvent the closure policy. It rewards poor questions, letting posters think &amp;quot;well, I know my question isn't good, but if I post it I'll still get help in the comments.&amp;quot; I think the best way to be the most help overall is to close bad questions and use the comments for their intended purpose of helping improve the post so that it is useful to more people rather than helping a singular person and encouraging poor posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, a really good way of handling this I saw recently was by user @Chemomechanics, who saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/668755/work-done-in-compression-of-a-spherical-bubble-inside-water&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; had been closed, so they went ahead and just made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/669077/why-does-an-elasticity-approach-for-an-adiabatically-compressed-bubble-give-a-di&quot;&gt;better version of the question&lt;/a&gt; and then answered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-10-06T22:30:34.063" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T22:30:34.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13867" CreationDate="2021-10-07T01:26:44.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question (before I was a mod), and I have racked by brain to remember what I was thinking, but I just don't recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that I read the question and misunderstood something—so that it just sounded &amp;quot;nutty&amp;quot; (as some of the above comments put it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T01:26:44.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13805" CreationDate="2021-10-07T07:50:43.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phrasing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; that downvoting and criticizing questions should be based on their (physics) content rather than on the particular phrasing - which may reflect one's individual habits, cultural background, or simply the turns of phrase used in the one's native language (many users of PSE are non-native English speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Falsifiability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On more scientific level: the notion that all questions have an answer, and that this answer is unique is simply not true. In physics we are closer to this notion, since we deal with the subject that can be extensively tested experimentally in controlled conditions (which is not always the case in biology, economics, social sciences, etc.) Yet, even physics theories cannot be proved, but only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;falsified by new evidence&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, &lt;em&gt;thinking&lt;/em&gt; that our answer is correct rather than &lt;em&gt;believing&lt;/em&gt; that it is correct is the difference between the science and a religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Criteria of correctness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are also many known logical fallacies, where correctness of a statement is judged not by objective criteria, without perhaps even realizing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Years of schooling make us consider as correct whatever the graders typically consider correct&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Popular opinion - e.g., judging the answer as correct, because it is highly upvoted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appeal to authority - e.g., judging the answer as correct, because it is made by a high-reputation user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anecdote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A popular anecdote is that the original idea behind the IQ testing was to give as many answers to the same question as possible, using different reasoning... but it became a multiple choice test, in order to adapt it to general population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T07:50:43.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13876" CreationDate="2021-10-07T10:22:30.937" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;First questions queue is not working properly. I noticed this a couple of hours ago and it has been not fixed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bBdhR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dWtFv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dWtFv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bBdhR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Screenshots on mobile device)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305718" LastEditorUserId="253434" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T14:43:42.907" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T14:44:00.910" Title="First questions queue is not working" Tags="|bug|status-completed|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13874" CreationDate="2021-10-07T13:39:22.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my MacBook Air running BigSur 11.6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Console:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CjoCi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CjoCi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bq1jK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bq1jK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T13:39:22.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13874" CreationDate="2021-10-07T14:44:00.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be fixed now. Please let me know if you see it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253434" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T14:44:00.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13861" CreationDate="2021-10-09T08:49:23.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Is there already an explanation that's not visible to anyone except the poster of the deleted answer?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; that. It appears as a banner just underneath the deleted answer, and it is only visible to the original author of the answer. It links to this Help Center article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;Why and how are some answers deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it is unnecessary noise (not to mention a needless waste of time) for diamond moderators to leave comments underneath an answer when that answer is deleted for one of the standard reasons discussed in that Help Center article. You only need to leave a comment when you are deleting an answer for an exceptional or uncommon reason, and/or if you want to give additional, targeted advice to the user on how to improve the answer to make it meet the guidelines and therefore achieve its undeletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8929" LastActivityDate="2021-10-09T08:49:23.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13663" CreationDate="2021-10-09T14:30:09.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature has been enabled on September 9th; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/triage/356894&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; was the first review in the new queue, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1482503/first-triage-review-items&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first one in the network outside Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2021-10-09T14:30:09.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-11T05:39:42.117" Score="5" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posit the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most circuit questions on this site can be easily answered by drawing a circuit diagram, so asking a circuit question without a diagram often bumps up against the homework policy (i.e. show your effort).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A circuit diagram almost always makes a circuits question easier to understand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The point of this site is to create useful content. Circuit questions are more useful if they include a diagram.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With those things in mind, I propose that we add a rule that circuit questions should include a diagram. I personally want this so that I can direct users who ask circuit questions to an authoritative statement indicating that they should include a diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'm grumpy about this issue right now, but I still think it's the right thing to do. What do you say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T11:18:39.747" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T16:16:39.420" Title="Should we require that circuit questions include a circuit diagram?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-14T07:20:49.310" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many new users are quite unaware of the required format of asking questions. A sample of closed questions that were edited and then reopened could be assistive for most of new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also so far I have noticed a few new users use this site for homework questions. They should be warned right there that this site is not intended for homework solutions and could be referred to such a list, analyzing closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277227" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-10-14T23:21:52.180" LastActivityDate="2021-10-14T23:21:52.180" Title="Closed and then reopened question samples" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2021-10-15T02:22:31.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-14T16:59:51.090" Score="12" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a question regarding a specific electrical circuit, and which would be significantly clearer if I can include a diagram of the circuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What software tools can I use to quickly, simply and efficiently create and add a circuit diagram?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, such tools should (i) be completely free, (ii) not require registration or other major barriers to entry, (iii) generate their output as images, ideally in a way that's simple to load onto the SE imgur service, but nevertheless (iv) remain easy to edit after the fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt; has a good built-in plugin for this, but insofar as it's not (yet?) enabled here, similar equivalent solutions are desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-10-17T15:05:10.670" Title="How can I create circuit diagrams for use on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13882" CreationDate="2021-10-14T17:22:33.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm partial to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CircuiTikZ&lt;/a&gt;. It's a LaTeX package so there's a bit of a learning curve, but it works well to quickly make circuit diagrams once you get used to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-10-14T17:22:33.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13882" CreationDate="2021-10-14T19:14:12.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An obvious answer would be to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;EE.SE&lt;/a&gt; and use their plug-in to generate the circuit, and then copy the Imgur URL here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked their site and I found people were also using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.circuitlab.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.circuitlab.com/&lt;/a&gt;, which seems a reasonable tool too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84967" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-10-17T15:05:10.670" LastActivityDate="2021-10-17T15:05:10.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13882" CreationDate="2021-10-15T06:04:40.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple and easy to use schematic editor is &lt;a href=&quot;http://darwinne.github.io/FidoCadJ/#:%7E:text=FidoCadJ%20is%20a%20free%20user,%2C%20Linux%2C%20Windows%20and%20Android&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FidoCadJ&lt;/a&gt;. It easily exports in various graphic formats, and it's used embedded in an Italian forum (I've used it extensively there). It's not a simulator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great advantage of this editor is that a schematic can also be shared in a compact text format, e.g. in a code block, so that others can easily modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example circuit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jejQ6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jejQ6.png&quot; alt=&quot;An example circuit&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the code generating it, which can be directly copied and pasted into FidoCadJ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[FIDOCAD]&#xA;MC 50 55 0 0 480&#xA;MC 50 75 0 0 045&#xA;LI 50 55 75 55 0&#xA;LI 75 35 75 75 0&#xA;SA 75 55 0&#xA;MC 80 35 0 0 170&#xA;MC 95 60 1 0 170&#xA;MC 95 40 1 0 080&#xA;MC 80 75 0 0 080&#xA;LI 75 35 80 35 0&#xA;LI 90 35 110 35 0&#xA;LI 75 75 80 75 0&#xA;LI 90 75 110 75 0&#xA;LI 95 50 95 60 0&#xA;LI 95 40 95 35 0&#xA;LI 95 70 95 75 0&#xA;SA 95 55 0&#xA;SA 95 35 0&#xA;SA 95 75 0&#xA;MC 110 55 0 0 045&#xA;LI 95 55 110 55 0&#xA;TY 110 35 4 3 0 1 0 * V1&#xA;TY 110 75 4 3 0 1 0 * V2&#xA;TY 40 50 4 3 0 1 0 * Vi&#xA;TY 85 25 4 3 0 1 0 * C1&#xA;TY 100 45 4 3 0 1 0 * R1&#xA;TY 85 80 4 3 0 1 0 * C2&#xA;TY 100 65 4 3 0 1 0 * R2&#xA;TY 45 55 4 3 0 1 0 * +&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/em&gt; I know the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111969" LastEditorUserId="111969" LastEditDate="2021-10-15T11:03:37.510" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T11:03:37.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-17T20:25:34.050" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have difficulties to log in the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_%28web_browser%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Opera&lt;/a&gt; browser. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your connection is not private&#xA;This server could not prove that it is physics.stackexchange.com; its security certificate is not valid at this time. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you connect to a secure website, the server hosting that site presents your browser with something called a &amp;quot;certificate&amp;quot; to verify its identity. This certificate contains identity information, such as the address of the website, which is verified by a third party that your computer trusts. By checking that the address in the certificate matches the address of the website, it is possible to verify that you are securely communicating with the website you intended, and not a third party (such as an attacker on your network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot visit physics.stackexchange.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I do on the Opera browser to fix this issue to log in Physics Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42982" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-10-18T14:02:36.093" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T14:02:36.093" Title="Opera browser blocks log in Physics Stack Exchange - HSTS issue" Tags="|support|bug|login|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13890" CreationDate="2021-10-18T11:52:08.623" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have edited some posts of mine and others which are older than a year, including modifying some tags, but I did not get the badge. How exactly do you get it? Does it have to be precisely inactive for six months?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-10-18T13:51:58.657" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T19:04:09.497" Title="How do you get the Excavator badge?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13888" CreationDate="2021-10-18T19:04:09.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edits to your own post, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/409345/revisions&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; do not count; see the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/115012/295232&quot;&gt;Should I have earned an &amp;quot;Excavator&amp;quot; badge for this?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag-only edits like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/301131/revisions&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; don't count either; you have to edit the body of the post (and/or the title if it's a question). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/126624/295232&quot;&gt;Do tag edits count for Archaeologist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77072" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T19:04:09.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-18T23:09:38.343" Score="-7" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Non-mainstream&amp;quot; physics is often equated to fallacies and fringe theories, including on this forum. Mainstream physics is rigorously categorized in specific historical scientific contexts, subject to unscientific beliefs of the time. As physics advances as a science, it corrects itself. What was mainstream to wrongly presume gets falsified by corrected mainstream knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these premises, are future corrective physics discoveries properly categorized as mainstream, in advance, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Thanks Buzz, for moving this to Meta, despite the rules. I'll use edit function to work around my lack of user powers. I've now edited the question for better clarity and detail. The following comments are what I can manage as a new member with a low reputation of 1.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its very confusing to newbies that a &amp;quot;mainstream&amp;quot; physics Q&amp;amp;A forum does not have the virtues of a Physics Forum as a friendly place, but rife with anonymous down votes and poorly supported deletions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Social media like this can in fact do some good for open peer-review questions. Its Turing complete. Planck could just as well &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; Einstein with a fountain pen, or here, and it would be helpful peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did &amp;quot;reputation&amp;quot; become elevated to mainstream physics? Traditionally, Appeal to Authority was classed as a logical fallacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see now Stack Exchange was created by Jeff Atwood, whom I know via Discourse meta discussion we have had. Great guy. His life has become increasingly occupied with &lt;em&gt;unintended social consequences&lt;/em&gt;. Physics Stack Exchange is one more curious instance, in that physics and software Q&amp;amp;A and cultures are not really the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atwood's Discourse forumware would be a better match to physics as a community that both answers questions and allow a Galileo and a newbie to co-exist more equitably, provided Moderation settings and Moderation were enlightened. Atwood said there is not much hope when a draconian whack-a-mole moderation culture takes hold, although architectural mitigation meta-analysis in Atwood's circle continues to seek solutions. Discourse Forums do not inevitably devolve into flamewars that only downvotes and deletions can prevent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reductio ad absurdum example of how this site is so weird-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question about non-mainstream physics: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Is non-mainstream physics allowed here?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paradoxical Answer: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;No, questions and answers about non-mainstream physics are not allowed here.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cannot ask about what Newton got wrong (like absolute space and time, point masses, and so on), as its no longer be mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments below help answer &amp;quot;meta&amp;quot; questions facing this software platform as a basis for physics community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="316745" OwnerDisplayName="wave" LastEditorUserId="316745" LastEditDate="2021-10-20T06:09:29.193" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T06:09:29.193" Title="Are future physics discoveries properly categorized as mainstream or not?" Tags="|discussion|scope|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2021-10-19T05:11:55.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13891" CreationDate="2021-10-19T01:51:42.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will answer just the physics-related question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;New discoveries in physics&amp;quot; typically means either 1) new data from experiments which unexpectedly (or not) furnish new verification of existing physics (for example, the Standard Model or special relativity), 2) new data from experiments containing discrepancies which hint at physics beyond (i.e., not derivable from) an existing physics model (for example, neutrino masses), or 3)(most rarely) a new mathematical structure which furnishes an explanation of puzzling data and which makes specific (though possibly untestable) predictions about other phenomena (for example, string theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is rare for physics originating in the &amp;quot;nonstandard&amp;quot; realm to represent &lt;em&gt;new physics&lt;/em&gt;, because &amp;quot;nonstandard physics&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;usually refers to&lt;/em&gt; assertions (often untestable) which either are 1) presented nonmathematically, 2) premised upon concepts already known to be flawed, or 3) mathematically consistent but incommensurable with observational facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastActivityDate="2021-10-19T01:51:42.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13891" CreationDate="2021-10-19T03:41:03.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these premises, are future physics discoveries properly categorized as non-standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And precisely how do you propose we determine which of the completely whacko theories and the vaguely plausible theories might turn out to have some practical use &lt;em&gt;in the future&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most scientists do not even live long enough to see their theories completely validated or fully accepted.  Many do not even live long enough to see their work gain enough evidence to make it from &amp;quot;wild or interesting speculation&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;promising theory&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we consult our crystal balls or just build time machines out of DeLoreans?  Scientists have proposed multiple theories which for many years were considered crackpot, then for one reason or another became more widely investigated, only to be discarded as wrong in the end.  At which point in the imagined future of theories do you propose we decide on how to treat them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best we can only go by what we know now about theories.  Not what we expect/hope/believe will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not a discussion forum and opinion based question (almost everywhere on SE and SO) are off-topic.  The site is neither intended to have discussions or designed to handle discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking for the site to do something it's not designed for and not intended for and not adaptable to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cannot ask about what Newton got wrong, as it would no longer be mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Newtonian physics and its replacements are considered mainstream here.  We deal with questions on Newtonian physics all the time, although many more questions break the homework-type question rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physicists use Newtonian physics rather a lot and it works extremely well.  Newton didn't get much wrong if you allow for the limits of the knowledge he had to base his theory on, so the basis of that question would be flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its very confusing that a &amp;quot;mainstream&amp;quot; physics Q&amp;amp;A forum is not classified as a Physics Forum. Its not a friendly place for answers when what is produced is anonymous down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is intended to help people understand &lt;em&gt;mainstream&lt;/em&gt; physics.  The definition of mainstream is certainly not rigidly defined here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anonymous downvotes (which is Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow wide policy) are there to prevent people starting wars with other users.  If you publish the names of voters and how they voted, you get warfare on the site.  Close votes are published and frankly that's as far as the site should go.  I was recently the victim of serial downvoting (detected and reversed by the site's software I think) and it's quite clear that some of the site's users are not mature enough to behave fairly to other members.  So publishing downvotes would be a nightmare scenario and create chaos IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like downvoting you need to propose a mechanism that will achieve the same end result without introducing more problems that it tries to fix.  Given the extreme nature such a change would be for the site engineers and users, it's hard to imagine any better system.  There is also the issue of what to do with *existing downvotes (and upvotes) on questions for such a change (and note that these votes affect reputation score).  If you think you have a solution you are free to post it on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-10-19T14:46:32.883" LastActivityDate="2021-10-19T14:46:32.883" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13891" CreationDate="2021-10-19T04:56:22.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are future physics discoveries properly categorized as non-standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are not, in this site. Discoveries from new experiments is how the present &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot; expands its theories and any discovery is allowed. View the g-2  discussion here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/362960/experimental-g2-measurement?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=2%7C71.6445&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/362960/experimental-g2-measurement?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=2|71.6445&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/588160/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermilab?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=3%7C64.5020&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/588160/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermilab?r=SearchResults&amp;amp;s=3|64.5020&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the theories that fit the measured data that may be considered non mainstream and questions not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know anything about the development of Physics theories you would know that there are various mathematical models,  that fit the present data, these are called &lt;em&gt;mainstream&lt;/em&gt;, well validated. A &lt;strong&gt;basic criterion&lt;/strong&gt; for a theoretical model to be classified as mainstream here is that at the limits of its validity it mathematically approaches well validated theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take General Relativity, for low masses and velocities it can be shown that Newtonian Physics emerges. Take quantum mechanics, for macroscopic dimensions the classical theories can be seen to emerge mathematically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;String theory is considered by many as an extension of mainstream, because it can model the well validated Standard Model. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Model&lt;/a&gt; of particle physics  is  the mathematical fit to the  data base of all experiments, with few exceptions now. If you read the history of the standard model it is continually modified to fit new data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; mathematical theory, not hand-waving  suppositions,  should be able to demonstrate mathematically that the theories that fit the data &lt;em&gt;emerge&lt;/em&gt; from the &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; mathematics. If so, than it would not be classified as &amp;quot;non mainstream&amp;quot; as it would contain &amp;quot;mainstream&amp;quot; . Hand waving &amp;quot;what if&amp;quot; propositions without the mathematics, is not physics , that is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="1492" LastEditDate="2021-10-19T05:01:41.007" LastActivityDate="2021-10-19T05:01:41.007" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-21T06:57:46.717" Score="-5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/672741/&quot;&gt;Is it sufficient to have some anti-gravity generator to make an Alcubierre drive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I ask this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="316840" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-10-21T18:29:24.153" LastActivityDate="2021-10-21T18:29:24.153" Title="Where should I put this question?" Tags="|support|specific-question|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13895" CreationDate="2021-10-21T07:43:42.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we managed to generate anti-gravity with some machine and manipulate it ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is firmly in non-mainstream territory since there is no such thing as &lt;em&gt;anti-gravity&lt;/em&gt; in mainstream physics, and as such any questions about on this site are going to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle &lt;em&gt;exotic matter&lt;/em&gt; could exist, and this can create systems that have a gravitational repulsion, but exotic matter has never been observed and there are some excellent theoretical reasons for believing it cannot exist i.e. it would violate conservation of energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally in your question you have the common confusion between &lt;em&gt;exotic matter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;antimatter&lt;/em&gt;. As far as gravity is concerned there is no difference between matter and antimatter, and in particular antimatter does not have a negative mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can discuss this in the Physics SE chat room, but you need to have a reputation of at least 20 to use the chat rooms. If you can get this level of rep I'd be happy to discuss it there. However you won't be able to ask your question, or any similar questions, on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2021-10-21T07:43:42.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13880" CreationDate="2021-10-22T05:57:29.460" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Next thing you will want is that all questions require equations. No need to limit discussion to professional physicists. There are many others out of a deep interest who would like answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299952" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2021-10-25T16:16:39.420" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T16:16:39.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-25T22:19:11.513" Score="3" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/672714/bomb-attached-to-accelerating-charge-as-viewed-from-a-co-moving-frame&quot;&gt;Bomb attached to accelerating charge, as viewed from a co-moving frame?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it was closed, and then it was downvoted. I do not understand why we are allowing downvotes (or any votes) on closed questions. But that is not the only question here I am trying to ask, rather, if after this I can ask the community to delete this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, it has no answers, and is in a net downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand why it was closed as a duplicate, because I specifically stated I am not asking about gravitational acceleration (free-fall). None of the stated questions answer my specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked for re-open, but nothing is happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sincerely asking for one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;please community delete it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;please re-open, and give people a chance to answer my specific question (which I believe has not been answered)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that I am able to delete the question, but that would affect my contribution record. I think it would be fair if community would give a chance to re-open or delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, since it was closed, I edited to make it more clear and have a real question at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132371" LastEditorUserId="174766" LastEditDate="2021-10-26T04:16:19.980" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T12:54:42.630" Title="My question was downvoted after it was closed, can I ask the community to delete it?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13899" CreationDate="2021-10-25T22:29:28.227" Score="15" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question failed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/361144&quot;&gt;reopen review&lt;/a&gt; with no vote to reopen. From the timing it is evident that least two of the three reviewers saw your edited version and did not think it merits reopening. Note that the lack of an explicit question was not the reason for closure as a duplicate, and your edit did nothing to address my point that it is unclear how this question is substantially different from the similar paradoxes in the linked duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the question does not have any answers, you should be able to delete the question yourself. None of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/263383&quot;&gt;criteria that block self-deletion&lt;/a&gt; of questions seem to be fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, we do not delete closed questions unless there is a specific reason (e.g. rude or spammy content) - being off-topic alone does not merit deletion, and would prevent reopening altogether. Note also that deleting a question counts against you in the eyes of several automated quality measures like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/290546/263383&quot;&gt;positive question record&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt; to it being closed, i.e. a closed and deleted question is twice as bad as merely a closed question with respect to these measures. This is true &lt;em&gt;regardless&lt;/em&gt; of whether the question was self-deleted or deleted by any other process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2021-11-02T12:54:42.630" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T12:54:42.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13902" CreationDate="2021-11-01T22:40:53.183" Score="11" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've been getting a lot of physics questions, and I'm at the point where I'm asking a couple a day. Should I restrain myself, or can I go willy-nilly as long as they meet the standards of the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="310823" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T06:38:24.783" Title="Should I avoid asking too many questions in a given time period (say, a day)?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13901" CreationDate="2021-11-01T23:36:45.490" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no rule against asking too many questions.  More questions make the site better.  If you have three questions today, ask them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, however, rules about asking too many low-quality questions. And, because writing and being creative is hard, users who ask a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions frequently start having trouble asking consistently &lt;em&gt;high-quality questions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/840905/most-prolific-answerers-during-date-interval-mean-answer-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this data.SE query&lt;/a&gt; for identifying people who write lots of questions and answers (beware that the column names don’t change when you switch to questions). For the week ending 2021-10-31, which is the most recent available, you were in fact the top asker on the site, with seven questions. For the month, with nine questions, you’re in the top ten or so. But we had 2653 total questions in October, so your nine make up about 0.3% of the month’s questions for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From having used that query for several years, our most active askers tend to cap out around one question per day, and our most active answerers tend to cap out around three.  Some people will do more for a burst, but people’s activity level on the site tends to ebb and flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as your questions are attracting upvotes and answers from other users, feel free to ask more. If you start to get negative feedback on your questions, such as downvotes, close votes, or comments suggesting improvements, take that feedback seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2021-11-03T01:26:04.683" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T01:26:04.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-02T11:26:45.803" Score="-2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a purely hypothetical question regarding the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I had an infinitely strong and fast laser that can cut through anything it passes. If it has a fixed diameter (let's say 10 cm) and I pointed it from my location to the center of the earth, what would be the consequences for the planet and for the humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such question on-topic on this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="318168" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-11-02T11:59:10.983" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T11:59:10.983" Title="Is this question on-topic? Infinitely fast and strong laser targets the Earth" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13903" CreationDate="2021-11-02T11:52:00.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is, largely, not on topic. &amp;quot;Infinitely strong&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;infinitely fast&amp;quot; are not real physical descriptors for a laser pulse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, to the extent that there's a concrete physical setup at stake, asking &amp;quot;what would be the consequences?&amp;quot; is rather too open-ended for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question along those lines &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, but ultimately you have to check with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T11:52:00.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13906" CreationDate="2021-11-02T17:38:58.517" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently moved a conclusive comment (made by myself) on an OP's question into the body of my answer to it.  In that process, the underlining and color-coding that characterize a link was (probably by an automated process) removed from the relocated verbiage.  As an opening paragraph in the linked material provides a key element in the answer, is there any way that its functionality as a link can be restored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T17:55:06.777" Title="Can the effect of a link be restored after relocation of the comment containing it into the body of an answer by the commentator?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13905" CreationDate="2021-11-02T17:55:06.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/672960/7&quot;&gt;this edit&lt;/a&gt;, in which a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265788031_A_New_Approach_to_Cosmological_Bulk_Viscositye&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this url from a deleted comment&lt;/a&gt; has been rendered as &lt;code&gt;researchgate.net/publication/…&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy-paste does not, in general, pick up links, formatting, and the like.  Click the &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; button under this answer to see what your &amp;quot;source text&amp;quot; should look like to produce the link you want. Or click the question mark at the top-right of the editor window, which gives an in-place summary of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;more comprehensive editing help&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T17:55:06.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-03T02:44:18.567" Score="3" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have the highest-rated answer pinned to the top and not the accepted one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13811/do-we-want-accepted-answers-to-be-pinned-to-the-top&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; currently at 23 for pinning the accepted answer and 21 for pinning the highest-rated answer, why is the opposite policy currently in effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm tagging with &amp;quot;bug&amp;quot; because it looks like &amp;quot;unexpected behavior in the system that needs to be fixed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177855" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T02:44:18.567" Title="Why is the accepted answer not pinned to the top?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-04T02:34:47.223" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/675251&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about what a strangelet would look like to the naked eye, and it was closed because it needed details or clarity. As far as I can tell, there was no need for either, because it was a simple question. Was there something I failed to elaborate on simply because I didn't know about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="310823" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T21:37:19.947" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T21:37:19.947" Title="In what ways is this question lacking detail or clarity?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13908" CreationDate="2021-11-04T06:13:05.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comment from ACM for if the OP is asking about the technical term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strange matter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll note that even if one guesses that the question is about strange matter in the technical sense, that still doesn't tell us enough because &amp;quot;non-strange matter&amp;quot; also has extremely varied appearance depending on its actual atomic/molecular structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if not...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we've found a piece of strange matter and have found a way to contain it so that we can examine it safely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The premise is really unclear. The only thing we know here is that the matter is &amp;quot;strange&amp;quot; and we can examine it. Being &amp;quot;strange&amp;quot; is a very unclear and subjective term. Certainly this is not enough information to know what we are actually looking at here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would it appear to the naked eye? Would it be a perfect black body? A perfect mirror? Completely transparent? Something weirder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would anyone be able to answer any of this? All we know is that this is &amp;quot;strange&amp;quot;. How is there any way to conclude this would be anything at all? What is &amp;quot;something weirder&amp;quot;? Weirder than what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question makes no sense, and there is no way to give a definite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T11:38:11.880" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T11:38:11.880" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-05T06:18:55.377" Score="11" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;The overarching &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations&quot;&gt;book recommendations answer&lt;/a&gt; has been quite helpful for a lot of people me included. Is there / should we make a similar one for online lectures? Or maybe add it to this answer. I mean there are gems in youtube like Frederic Schuller's Lectures on GR and QM whose contents are not picked up from any book easily and whose formatting is quite unique. Feel like a storehouse for such gems would be greatly helpful for many of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="249502" LastActivityDate="2021-11-15T22:06:36.240" Title="Community Post for online courses similar to Book Recommendations" Tags="|discussion|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13910" CreationDate="2021-11-06T14:20:51.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a problem with this idea: links becoming dead over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Books are books and they can become difficult to find over time, but the reference to the book does not become out of date.  The reference is always valid (e.g. an ISBN).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, online lectures can disappear dues to the many forms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt;.  Some sources are better than other for this, but none of them are really permanent references.  YouTube videos can be removed or blocked and written texts can be removed or the host site reorganized or the material removed when people e.g. change job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we generally prohibit (at or least strongly discourage) answers that rely on links, this seems to imply that a category of question which will result in answers completely relying on links is not really within the current way we do things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure we can find a way to fit this type of question within the rules.  It's not like we don't already post such links, but if a post has answers with nothing but these types of links, that seems problematic in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly opposed to the idea, but we need to understand that we're opening the site to the possibility of dead answers moving forward.  Is that really useful to members?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-11-06T14:58:25.847" LastActivityDate="2021-11-06T14:58:25.847" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13910" CreationDate="2021-11-07T12:02:20.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The more or less consistent practice about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; questions so far is that they in principle don't distinguish&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt; between books, websites, online lectures, whether they are free or not, etc. This is to avoid a proliferation of closely related &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; questions. [There is already a division into different levels of a topic: beginners, advanced, etc. There are currently (November 2021) more than 2000 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; questions.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, Phys.SE usually doesn't allow &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; questions that only asks for e.g. online lectures but not books. This alone means that OP's proposal is a non-starter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other objections are that online content is prone to link-rot, and that it would require curating from dedicated users. It is symptomatic that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/12175/2451&quot;&gt;main resource recommendation question&lt;/a&gt; was closed in 2013. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/2451&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt; and various other meta discussions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^1$&lt;/span&gt;In contrast, the answerers are welcome to focus on whatever type of resources they prefer (as long as they comply with the Phys.SE policy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-11-15T22:06:36.240" LastActivityDate="2021-11-15T22:06:36.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-09T09:23:32.223" Score="6" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/675410/ohm-s-law-holding-true-on-temperature-dependent-resistances&quot;&gt;I asked a question&lt;/a&gt; a few days ago. It got closed for needing to be “more focused.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;According to the site guidelines&lt;/a&gt; , in the &lt;em&gt;Needs more focus&lt;/em&gt; part, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can often be fixed by breaking the question into multiple&#xA;questions or focusing on a specific part of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked just one question, which is in bold in the post, and which I repeat: “Doesn’t that make metallic conductors not obey Ohm’s law (since the voltage is not directly proportional to current)? Or am I wrong (if so, how)?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question has many valid answers (but no way to determine which - if any - are correct), then it probably needs to be more focused to be successful in our format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it has “many valid answers.” Either you can answer it with a “yes”, or a “no” and give reason(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough&#xA;detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct&#xA;questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this&#xA;question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is limited to a specific problem: on whether we can correctly say if Ohm’s law is satisfied in metallic conductors or not. I didn’t ask multiple questions. I wrote a bunch of details (to show I had done research and to share my understanding, but I received a “much ado about nothing” comment), and I explained why I thought Ohm’s law wasn’t valid. And it’s possible to identify an adequate answer: the one by Philip Wood not only answered a “yes” to my question in part (a) of his answer, but he further explained that there are two versions of Ohm’s law in macroscopic form which I hadn’t even considered, where in part (b) the answer to my question is “no” (but please remember I hadn’t thought about this); clearly he answered my question and shared a great observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was my question closed for not being focused enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239434" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T14:45:36.607" Title="Why was my question closed for not being focused when it actually was?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13913" CreationDate="2021-11-09T11:17:24.360" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could be wrong, but it could be the case that users saw a really long post broken up into multiple parts and thought &amp;quot;this isn't focused&amp;quot;. You do only ask one question, so I don't think the close reason is completely justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the post does read less like a question and more like, &amp;quot;Here is a point I want to make, and here is all of my evidence supporting it. Oh, and since this is a Q&amp;amp;A site I'll put on a question that is essentially just 'Am I right or wrong?'&amp;quot; I don't think this is your intention, but that was my first impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, it's hard to follow where you are going throughout the post, and therefore it seems unfocused. Honestly, you could greatly reduce the content of your post to make the question more obvious and focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2021-11-09T14:45:36.607" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T14:45:36.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13901" CreationDate="2021-11-15T11:20:01.113" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that some SE communities do punish asking to many poor questions (i.e., questions that do not get any upvotes) by limiting the user to asking no more than one question in a specified period, e.g., half a year. Although they give one the possibility of editing one's old questions (potentially completely rewriting them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know, if PSE follows this practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247642" LastActivityDate="2021-11-15T11:20:01.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10524" CreationDate="2021-11-18T23:45:05.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should leave them be, because the downvotes make it clear that it is wrong, and showing that something is wrong is useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I read an answer that retells &lt;a href=&quot;http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/airfoilmyth.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;the airfoil myth&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and it has -17 downvotes, I will assume that the airfoil myth is wrong, which is correct. I actually learned something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer was deleted, then maybe the idea of the airfoil myth may creep into my mind some day from other less reputable sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A biology point of view:&lt;/strong&gt; Being exposed to harmful answers in a controlled environment, where they are downvoted, shows you they are wrong and thus gives you an &amp;quot;immunity&amp;quot; to them, that remains after you leave this site. Very much like a vaccine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A geometry point of view:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Ideally&lt;/em&gt;, positive votes show how correct an answer is. Then, negative votes show how incorrect it is. If an answer is a 2-D vector pointing towards an idea, then a negative count inverts the direction, pointing &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt; from a wrong idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A logic point of view&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Raven paradox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An engineering point of view:&lt;/strong&gt; Squeezing some right knowledge even from wrong answers is &lt;em&gt;efficient&lt;/em&gt; at the least. Deleted answers give nothing at all. Plus moderators don't have to be deleting extra stuff. Unless storage space becomes crucial, then yeah, delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: the original answer used &amp;quot;chocolate electrons&amp;quot; as an example, hence the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123183" LastEditorUserId="123183" LastEditDate="2021-11-19T11:36:50.313" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T11:36:50.313" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-21T16:15:03.743" Score="20" ViewCount="862" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a new Veritasium video, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Big Misconception About Electricity&lt;/a&gt;, which is prompting a bunch of nearly identical questions. Currently, although the questions are nearly identical most questions have not yet been closed as a duplicate, and it is unclear as to which of the many questions will eventually be the &amp;quot;primary&amp;quot; one that all of the others are duplicating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to automatically or retrospectively merge all of these questions? As it is, we are generating a lot of disconnected responses, which is not intended. But the usual paradigm assumes that questions on a specific topic trickle in, not as a flood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678127&quot;&gt;Doesn&amp;#39;t Veritasium&amp;#39;s Recent Video About Circuits Violate The Speed Of Light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678359&quot;&gt;How is the answer to this question $1/c$ seconds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678180&quot;&gt;Alternate explanation for energy flow in electricity as explained in this video&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678174&quot;&gt;Veritasium Electricity Follow-Ups: Insulators, Switch Location, larger gap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/677809&quot;&gt;A loop of wire with circumference of a lightyear is connecting a bulb and a battery. How long will the bulb take to light up?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678320&quot;&gt;How does energy flow in a circuit? (Veritasium vs. Science Asylum)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678284&quot;&gt;A question on Electrical Currents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/679282&quot;&gt;Electromagnetic field around a conductor with current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/679581&quot;&gt;In a simple electric circuit with battery and lamp, how does the lamp light up?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678880&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/678880&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/707402/veritasium-electricity-videos-where-does-the-majority-of-energy-really-flow&quot;&gt;Veritasium Electricity videos: where does the majority of energy really flow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastEditorUserId="204834" LastEditDate="2022-05-08T02:57:28.843" LastActivityDate="2022-05-08T02:57:28.843" Title="Is there a way to easily/automatically merge the many Veritasium questions?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13917" CreationDate="2021-11-21T17:11:28.527" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Promoting this answer from a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merging questions that are not literally identical is technically possible but almost never a good idea since someone has to be the OP of the resulting question and the other authors - and the rep they got from their question - just vanish into the ether. In addition, several of the linked questions insist they are not duplicates of the others (though whether that's true or not is another matter). Just vote to close as duplicate as you see fit.  –&#xA;ACuriousMind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to voting to close questions based on the most appropriate duplicate (or perhaps eventually a “canonical” question and answer), a person who was curating this situation might leave a comment like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;There are [multiple questions about this video](https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13917/44126)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the new question, then follow the link back here and add the new question to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right way to group related-but-distinct questions is with a tag. But a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/veritasium&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;veritasium&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;veritasium&lt;/a&gt; would be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4743/44126&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt; which doesn’t by itself do anything to describe the physics content of the question. The questions might be grouped by something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poynting-vector&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poynting-vector&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poynting-vector&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/signal-propagation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;signal-propagation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;signal-propagation&lt;/a&gt; (though I haven’t checked to see whether those tags exist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2021-11-21T17:11:28.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-25T07:10:16.930" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we make a tag for one-way speed of light questions? I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/679026/can-we-measure-the-one-way-speed-of-anything-at-all&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which included a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq%20%5Bspeed-of-light%5D%20%22one%20way%22&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt;, which combines a tag search with a text comprehension search in what seems like a pretty ugly way, that'd be much better handled by creating a proper one-way speed of light tag. It wouldn't be a meta tag, it'd simplify searching for questions on the subject, and it doesn't seem to violate the Physics SE rules, so shouldn't the community do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that there has already been a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13424/should-we-have-a-one-way-speed-of-light-tag&quot;&gt;post on this subject&lt;/a&gt; eight months ago, but given the lack of answers to the question (and thus the lack of consensus on the proposed solution, since there were no proposed solutions), I figured that posting a question here was probably a better course of action to kick off conversation and consensus-building than just posting an answer to that one, given my relatively low Reputation on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178948" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T07:10:16.930" Title="One-way speed of light tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2021-11-25T09:05:19.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13424" CreationDate="2021-11-29T14:33:31.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think a tag is warranted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aq%20%5bspeed-of-light%5d%20%22one%20way%22&quot;&gt;This search for &amp;quot;one way&amp;quot; within speed-of-light-tagged questions&lt;/a&gt; returns 59 threads, most of which fit the proposed tag and many of which form a steady trickle up to very recent dates, as well as several quite-old threads (as opposed to a single glut right after the publication of the Veritasium video).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is more than enough to show that this specific sub-topic is popular enough on this site that a dedicated tag is a useful organizational tool. And that is in itself sufficient to set it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2021-11-29T14:33:31.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2021-12-03T09:41:02.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;physics.qandaexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site is for students of physics, physics enthusiasts, and all those who love explaining physics. The purpose of the site is to help answer questions users have about solving specific problems about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12350" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T09:41:02.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13926" CreationDate="2021-12-07T06:52:05.943" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently got the Review Questions privilege, so I know very little stuff about how to review questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was recently reviewing some questions, but after checking 3 questions, it said &amp;quot;This queue has been cleared&amp;quot;. I have also experienced this on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Space Exploration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but I have no clue why this is occurring. Can someone please help me out with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="318676" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2021-12-07T17:37:31.727" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T09:53:10.357" Title="Why does it show &quot;Queue has been cleared&quot; every time I check 3 questions?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13925" CreationDate="2021-12-07T11:27:49.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The counter &amp;quot;Your daily reviews X/20&amp;quot; just means that you can do a maximum of 20 reviews per day per queue, not that there are actually 20 items in the queue for you to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The queue has been cleared&amp;quot;, on the other hand, just means that the queue is empty for you, i.e. there are no more items you are currently eligible to review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2021-12-09T09:53:10.357" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T09:53:10.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-13T13:03:17.643" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently this old question came to my notice because of a downvote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/114982/do-magnets-redshift-light&quot;&gt;Do magnets redshift light?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content of the question is all about a hypothetical experiment full of unphysical hypotheseis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;glaring unphysical ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the smaller paramagnetic material (Titanium Brick) is somehow converted into photons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These photons are shot upwards via an perfect mirror perpendicular to the paramagnetic material above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they reach the magnet's original position they are again converted into mass in the form of the titanium brick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the question to be deleted, because the answers do not correspond to the title, and the content of the question  is science fiction, so search engines will be coming up with no sense answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason the flag was &lt;em&gt;Your recent flag was declined - please review it before flagging this post!&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought one of the  aims of physics.se is about questions and answers on mainstream physics to be available for search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-12-13T15:22:26.577" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T15:22:26.577" Title="Inapproriate content to title" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|close-reasons|delete|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13929" CreationDate="2021-12-13T13:10:24.650" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you actually review your flag, you should see the following reason for it being declined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;declined - Please vote to close the question normally if you think it is off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators do not delete questions just because one user flags them to be deleted, and we do not &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; questions just for being off-topic anyway. Questions that are off-topic should be &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt;. If you think this question is inappropriate for our site, just vote for it to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T13:10:24.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-13T21:05:38.107" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been in the habit of upvoting each question I'm answering, but it has recently occurred to me that this may be counter-productive in a collective enterprise such as PSE, since whoever posted the question might thereby be encouraged to disingenuously delay their acceptance of any answer, so as to artificially inflate their PSE reputation.  I'm sure I'm overlooking some factor(s) which would discourage that practice, but might it be possible to specify them for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-12-14T08:45:38.163" LastActivityDate="2021-12-14T08:45:38.163" Title="Once a question has retained one net upvote, is it undesirable for each answerer to upvote it?" Tags="|discussion|voting|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13932" CreationDate="2021-12-13T21:31:34.113" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should up vote any question you think deserves an up vote. Usually this is for reasons such as it fits well on the site, it is clear, etc. I don't think there needs to be anything beyond this. We should be evaluating the posts independent of who is asking them and what may or may not happen with their reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T21:31:34.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-15T06:28:40.343" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wish to point out a recurring observation... comparing the questions in physics SE and math SE (which you can also do by opening &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the math SE page&lt;/a&gt;), the math SE questions often seem more down to earth, as in they are usually very specific about what they want: suppose we know A and we know B, prove that we can also know C as a result, kind of questions... Why do physicists' math questions often seem more esoteric (abstract/symbolic) than even the mathematicians' math questions? I am interested to find out as to why there is this difference...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user315366" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T11:30:43.530" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T12:31:41.057" Title="Why do physics SE math seem more abstract than mathematics SE questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13934" CreationDate="2021-12-15T12:31:41.057" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your impression when comparing physics.SE and math.SE is likely a combination of several factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;physics.SE's policy on homework-like questions is much stricter than any comparable policy on math.SE, i.e. you see a lot of &amp;quot;concrete&amp;quot; questions about solving math exercises on math.SE whose equivalent on physics.SE would be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; SE sites for mathematics: math.SE and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. The latter is where questions by professional mathematicans and advanced math students tend to go, so to get a proper comparison, you would have to compare the &lt;em&gt;union&lt;/em&gt; of the questions on math.SE and MO to the questions of physics.SE. In other words, math.SE alone is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the correct sample for &amp;quot;mathematicians' math questions&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;physics.SE gets &amp;quot;math questions&amp;quot; of a kind very rare on a pure math site: Questions by mathematicians trying to understand physics, and by physicists trying to understand a more mathematical formulation of their field. These questions tend to be very general questions about the &lt;em&gt;mathematical structure&lt;/em&gt; behind a (sub)field of physics and thus might seem very &amp;quot;abstract&amp;quot; to you compared to questions focused on &lt;em&gt;solving&lt;/em&gt; a particular problem of understanding one has encountered. Again, you probably need to compare these questions more to &amp;quot;general&amp;quot; questions on MathOverflow than anything on math.SE to get a proper comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T12:31:41.057" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13939" CreationDate="2021-12-16T18:54:32.157" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/683776/&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt;. It's getting downvoted and so far it's only been viewed 14 times. It's not obvious to me why it's being downvoted. Why is there disapproval against the question I asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would understand if it was unclear and people were voting to close but this not happening. How can avoid this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-12-22T09:32:27.653" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T09:38:44.283" Title="How can I improve my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-17T05:50:14.157" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a question be &amp;quot;front paged&amp;quot; by staffers for reasons that are not closely related either to significant developments in physics or to edits (either to the question itself or to the answers to it), such as events widely considered to be depressing, or the arrival of a time of year when weather in the more populous of earth's hemispheres might leave a larger proportion of its population looking for indoor diversions as substitutes for athletic or other outdoor events?  (I'm not necessarily objecting to such a practice, which would tend to increase the population involved in the site and, consequently, the questions and answers which might allow me to have some slight influence on the future development of science and the civilization based on it:  I'm simply curious about whether such an arbitrary practice exists as a basic aspect of the physics site's functioning, as there has been at least one potentially influential question whose latest reappearance seems unmotivated by any individual user's requests for clarification of that question, or suggestions for improvements of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T05:50:14.157" Title="Are questions front-paged for unspecified reasons perhaps related to popularization of a site?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13937" CreationDate="2021-12-17T11:57:39.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few personal thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title is highly unspecific. &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Using non-unitary time evolution for a computation?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is not really a question. It says nothing about what is actually been asked. I also don't really understand where the &amp;quot;computation&amp;quot; bit comes from when reading the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Notation is better than the previous iteration of the question (which, btw, why did you not simply edit the other question in the first place?), but still, the presentation could be improved. The main missing thing is why one should care about this sort of thing in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You were already given other pointers/suggestions/criticisms in the comments of the question. Not directly addressing those by editing the question accordingly makes people think that you are not willing to accept constructive criticism and act on it. That, generally speaking, regardless of the merits of the comments themselves, tends to erode people's &amp;quot;good faith assumptions&amp;quot;, which significantly increases the likelihood of getting downvotes, votes to close, and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point, you were asked &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Why are you doing this?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and you answer in the comments with &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;As the title says: Using non-unitary time evolution for a computation?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, which clarifies next to nothing, and might be construed as condescending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a more general note, in my opinion, there are some types of questions for which Stack Exchange is simply not a great venue. You tend to ask questions about rather involved situations without giving sufficiently strong reasons why one should care about it. Such questions are imo rather hard to be put into a form that is well-fit for Stack Exchange. It would be much better to break up what you don't understand or find unclear about whatever problem you are working on, and ask more specific questions about specific points that might be of more general interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58382" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-12-22T09:38:44.283" LastActivityDate="2021-12-22T09:38:44.283" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-20T07:00:09.687" Score="12" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several questions on Physics S.E. which have been marked as duplicate targets, yet their answers disagree with another. Two such examples would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/590926/&quot;&gt;Is energy conserved in an expanding universe?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/682651/&quot;&gt;Continuity of the wave function in quantum mechanics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the later, about half of the answers are in direct contradiction with another, yet they all stand at zero or positive votes. To make this explicit, one answer writes &amp;quot;Generally, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Psi$&lt;/span&gt; must always be continuous&amp;quot; while another answer writes &amp;quot;It is not true the wave function has to be continuous&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a person with no background in the particular field Googles any of these questions, they will have a hard time getting an answer because they will not know which response to trust. Yet if they ask a new question asking for clarification, it will probably be marked as a duplicate of the previous ones. The result is the OP wont learn the correct answer, and new people Googling the question wont either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do in such a situation? Just to clarify, I think the moderators and community have correctly followed the rules by marking the questions as duplicates, but while the form of the policy has been followed, I think the intent has been missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145846" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-12-20T08:45:34.943" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T10:03:38.190" Title="What to do when duplicate targets disagree?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13945" CreationDate="2021-12-20T09:55:01.587" Score="5" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a question I asked several years ago (about quantum mechanics and nonlinearity) which have been deleted. How can I find them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177855" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-12-20T13:39:53.410" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T13:39:53.410" Title="How can I find my deleted question &amp; answers?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13942" CreationDate="2021-12-20T10:03:38.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; do. This is how the system is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question is asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answers are provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other users have the same question, or one so similar that it has the same answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are closed as duplicates, creating a signpost towards the first post with that question and its answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions and answers are voted according to whatever motivation the voter possesses - learning new information, gaining new insight, finding them funny, agreeing with the political stance, the coin landed heads, and more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those answers are the best we've got, repeating them on another page won't suddenly make one answer more correct, more popular, or more worthy of attention. It just spreads out the work required to effectively moderate the content and means that some of it will get missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114606" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T10:03:38.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13943" CreationDate="2021-12-20T10:13:00.270" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you have 10k reputation, you should be able to search for your own deleted questions just with the query &lt;code&gt;deleted:yes&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A177855+deleted%3Ayes&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;. A user without 10k reputation would have to ask a moderator for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T10:13:00.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="391" CreationDate="2021-12-24T07:34:13.357" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.askthephysicist.com/homework.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ask the Physicist!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user279106" LastActivityDate="2021-12-24T07:34:13.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-26T23:16:25.777" Score="11" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of topics in this SE seem to be either school/college course related (i.e. with no relation to experimental practice) or academic topics related to all sorts of theoretical physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my personal experience at many universities and research centers, the staff working in experimental physics departments greatly outnumbers those in theoretical physics, so I would expect much more focus on experimental questions in a general &amp;quot;physics&amp;quot; exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering is there a separate SE aimed at experimental physics or how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on initial discussion here a further interesting and related question is: &amp;quot;how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?&amp;quot; (quoting Daniel Sank)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299634" LastEditorUserId="299634" LastEditDate="2021-12-27T19:47:35.273" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T16:39:17.473" Title="Too focused on theoretical physics? Or how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-27T02:23:15.270" Score="8" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topic of cross-site duplicates has come up in many Physics.Meta questions so far, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7413/134583&quot;&gt;Is it OK to cross-post a question that you previously asked in other SE site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/888/134583&quot;&gt;Should users be cross-posting questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7122/134583&quot;&gt;Cross-posting similar/same question on two SE sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/11000/134583&quot;&gt;Can I cross post a question from MSE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6963/134583&quot;&gt;Cross Post From StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4133/134583&quot;&gt;Should I cross-post this question in chemistry.SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6793/134583&quot;&gt;Reporting cross-posting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13190/134583&quot;&gt;Cross posting a question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on reading those question, I understand that cross-posting is generally discouraged on Physics.SE, though one answer pointed out that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6794/134583&quot;&gt;Cross-posting is not a violation of any written rule&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, and other sites might allow a question from Physics.SE to be cross-posted there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what to do when a question from Physics.SE has been asked on a different site in the SE network, and received a good answer there, but still takes up space in the unanswered queue here on Physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this question on Physics.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/508605/134583&quot;&gt;Can we invert Density Functional Theory through sufficiently accurate experiment?&lt;/a&gt; received very little attention in the last 26 months (0 upvotes, 0 answers), but &lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/q/1642/5&quot;&gt;the same question when cross-posted&lt;/a&gt; received an answer within 7 days. Now, do we keep the question on Physics.SE opened, or should I flag the question to bring attention to the diamond moderators if the consensus is to close or delete such questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/542754/134583&quot;&gt;Does the Schrodinger Equation yield a unique wave function and density?&lt;/a&gt;, and whereas the cross-posted version of the question got an answer more than 1 year ago, the question on Physics.SE remained unanswered until about 6 months ago. Considering that Physics.SE got an answer to this question about 6 months ago, perhaps both versions of the question will get more answers over time, but those answers will be split between two SE sites rather than all in one place. When someone notices something like this (say the other site got a well-received answer first), would it make sense to flag for a diamond moderator to close/delete the Physics.SE version, or should we keep both questions and their respective answers on each site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2021-12-27T10:52:17.670" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T18:05:09.230" Title="Once a question has been cross-posted on a different site (i.e., a cross-site duplicate) and received an answer on the other site, what should we do?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|migration|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13948" CreationDate="2021-12-27T13:11:24.370" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's any reason to assume anything has substantially changed from the &amp;quot;we strongly discourage this, but sometimes it's okay&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, cross-posting the &lt;em&gt;exact same question&lt;/em&gt; without mentioning the cross-post in the question itself is bad because it leads to duplication of effort: People on one of the sites won't see whether the question might already have received answers elsewhere, and might just write the same answer someone else already has written elsewhere. So, at the very least: &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; you cross-post, mention the other versions of the question directly in each version so users are &lt;em&gt;aware&lt;/em&gt; of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, posting the exact same question verbatim to different communities is rarely the optimal way of phrasing that question for any particular community: Each SE site has idiosyncrasies in what it likes to see in a question, and if you're going to post your question to multiple communities you should tailor it &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; these communities. I am much more likely to vote to close a careless copy-paste as a cross-post than something where effort on the part of the asker is evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what to do with cross-posts: Since our stance is &amp;quot;discouraged, but not always forbidden&amp;quot;, moderator flags are not an appropriate way to deal with this, since moderators then need to make a judgement whether or not this is a case that should be discouraged or not. It is much preferable to just vote to close the question (with custom reason, e.g. &amp;quot;because it is cross-posted&amp;quot;, with a link to one of the meta discussions we've had about that) and let the ordinary community review decide whether this is a case of an unwanted cross-post or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T13:11:24.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13947" CreationDate="2021-12-27T18:40:49.673" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering is there a separate SE aimed at experimental physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, and in my opinion there shouldn't be. The most important asset of this website is the set of users, because they create the content. As a user and an experimental physicist, I want &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the users looking at my questions. In my daily work as an experimental physicist, I benefit enormously by intimate collaboration with theorists. They notice important features in data, suggest good experiments, explain observed data, and provide useful calculations related to our experiments. Splitting the users seems unwise, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are two reasons. First, there certainly was a bias against experiment questions here, and there's some recorded history on that issue. Once upon a time in 2014, I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/135259&quot;&gt;question about lab equipment&lt;/a&gt; which attracted a number of close votes; certain users (who I surmise do not understand the nature of experimental physics), voted to close as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;. The discussion arising from that (and other) incident lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6135/&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; and its &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6136/31790&quot;&gt;accepted and most-upvoted answer&lt;/a&gt;, which in my opinion suggests that questions of the type that I asked should be welcome here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, has anything changed, i.e. are we better about allowing experimental physics questions to live here? My impression is that yes, things have changed. However, perhaps someone could run queries with the various experimental physics tags to see if we've actually gotten better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I've only discussed whether or not the situation surrounding &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; has improved. A functional Q&amp;amp;A site also needs answers. I can't say whether or not that situation has changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I think the most important factor is that &lt;strong&gt;experimental physics is less well represented in written material than is theory across all forms of written information.&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, if there's less experiment than theory on this site, it's probably because there's less experiment than theory &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; in any written format. When you were a student, were you ever assigned to read a book on experimental physics [1]? In the highest impact physics magazines (Nature and Science) what's the representation of works focused on experiment? Experimental &lt;em&gt;results&lt;/em&gt; are well received, but the techniques and engineering (the kinds of stuff I'd expect to be well served by Q&amp;amp;A) are not. Throughout my career, referee feedback on papers has pushed details on the experiment itself into the &amp;quot;supplementary information&amp;quot; section of the paper (which is not even peer reviewed!) [2]. When I review papers, I regularly have to push authors to include relevant details of the experiment into the main text, even when those details are critical to the message of the paper. I speculate, therefore, that the relatively low fraction of experiment-oriented material on this site correlates with the relatively low fraction of experiment-oriented material in physics literature at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I wrote this answer attempting to address the actual questions in the main post, and I wonder if those are the questions the author really wanted to address. An obvious related question could be &amp;quot;how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I wasn't. In fact my physics degree didn't even require basic electronics or even computer programming. It was very focused on theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] See for example the enormous supplement of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the paper on quantum supremacy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastEditorUserId="31790" LastEditDate="2021-12-27T19:06:45.603" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T19:06:45.603" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13947" CreationDate="2021-12-28T07:36:34.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of topics in this SE seem to be either school/college course related (i.e. with no relation to experimental practice) or academic topics related to all sorts of theoretical physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's probably to do with what people have problems with that can be addressed practically on a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a lot of people have trouble with theory note that many people self-studying don't ever do experiments (and it's not practical for them to try).  Many people who do experiments as part of a course have hands-on help explaining the concepts in class before and during.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves people doing their own research.  Well that's a problem for the site as they'll typically have implementation specific issues that are not of use to a general audience.  That kind of thing is probably better handled by networking with other researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my personal experience at many universities and research centers, the staff working in experimental physics departments greatly outnumbers those in theoretical physics, so I would expect much more focus on experimental questions in a general &amp;quot;physics&amp;quot; exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear at all what you expect questions about experiments to be about or what you expect answers to be like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site we're mainly docused on physics &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt;.  So a question asking for a concept to be explained makes sense here, but many questions about experiments will involved specific details (essentially engineering) of specific implementations of experiments.  That's not really a good fit here as we want questions that are useful to a large audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering is there a separate SE aimed at experimental physics or how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on initial discussion here a further interesting and related question is: &amp;quot;how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?&amp;quot; (quoting Daniel Sank)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that in answering questions on a specific implementation we're typically not answering questions on concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands it's perfectly acceptable for people to asking about experiments in terms of concepts (and this happens a lot - e.g. double slit experiment questions crop up frequently).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2021-12-28T07:36:34.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-31T03:11:28.733" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found and answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/685018/168783&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on why some particles are defined with square roots in their expressions. It has a bunch of downvotes, but the comments doesn't seem to clarify the reason for this. Also, there doesn't seem to be any close votes at the moment I'm posting this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After showing the question to friends, I noticed people without a background in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;particle physics&lt;/a&gt; might not be familiar with the notation and hence the question might seem quite unclear. Is this what is going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2021-12-31T16:45:25.270" LastActivityDate="2021-12-31T16:45:25.270" Title="Why is this specific question on particle physics being downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13954" CreationDate="2021-12-31T11:07:54.070" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote on the question either way, but I'm not surprised it is being downvoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'd wager people who &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; the question and &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the answer expect anyone who cares about the technical notation for particle states and the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sqrt{2}$&lt;/span&gt; to understand how quantum mechanics and normalization works in the first place, i.e. the question jumps in &amp;quot;at the deep end&amp;quot; when it shouldn't and that's what it's being downvoted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, people who &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know the answer can't really tell what it's about because it just throws a Greek letter and some fraction with a square root in it at them. There's no link, no context given by the asker except the vague reference to &amp;quot;particle compositions&amp;quot;. While I don't think anyone should downvote questions just because they don't understand the subfield being asked about, there is a clear lack of effort on the asker's part here to make the question approachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the lack of close votes just reflects that people agree this is indeed a question about physics that is sufficiently clear to people with expertise in the subject. The downvotes reflect their opinion that it's not a particularly &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; such question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2021-12-31T11:07:54.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-01T04:01:35.410" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question that was closed with the following motivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deal with &lt;strong&gt;mainstream physics&lt;/strong&gt; here. Questions about the general correctness of unpublished personal theories are off topic, although specific questions evaluating new theories in the context of established science are usually allowed. For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539&quot;&gt;Is non mainstream physics appropriate for this site?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to edit my question and remove the “non-mainstream” bits. But I don't know who to ask about what is non-mainstream in my question (you can find the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/685707/lets-build-negative-mass&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How am I supposed to do that? Who can I ask for help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264705" OwnerDisplayName="moonblink" LastActivityDate="2022-01-01T05:46:31.903" Title="Who can I ask for feedback to reopen a question?" Tags="|discussion|soft-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13959" CreationDate="2022-01-02T21:34:58.137" Score="5" ViewCount="227" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/686526/if-antiparticles-are-particles-moving-back-in-time-would-messages-from-the-futu&quot;&gt;If antiparticles are particles moving back in time, would messages from the future be possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was marked a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/391/is-anti-matter-matter-going-backwards-in-time&quot;&gt;Is anti-matter going backwards in time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance, these questions are obviously not the same. I'm asking if future-to-past/present messages are possible, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; Feynman's interpretation of antiparticles is true. I'm not asking whether or not it is true, that would ultimately (at least for now) be a philosophical question. Instead, my question asks about whether or not &lt;em&gt;something else&lt;/em&gt; would be possible, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; the Feynman interpretation is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just because our questions are different, it doesn't mean that I can't find an answer to my question in those provided to the other one. So, I looked through them. Perhaps I'm too illiterate in physics, but I don't see how the answers to that question answer my question. And don't say &amp;quot;it's obvious that messages could be sent from the future to the past/present if this interpretation is true, as this interpretation, by definition, allows retrocausality&amp;quot;. Just because retrocausality is possible, doesn't mean &amp;quot;retrocausal communication&amp;quot; is. It seems obvious that faster-than-light communication is made possible by quantum entanglement, but it isn't. I didn't know that until I was told. So, applying the same principle of ignorance here, I need to be told by those that actually have expertise, whether Feynman's interpretation of anti-particles actually allows for future-to-past/present communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324324" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T01:31:33.700" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T01:31:33.700" Title="This is not a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13958" CreationDate="2022-01-02T22:18:25.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When asking a controversial question, like, if messages from the future would be possible, it is recommended to tie it to the academic discussion, e.g. mentioning Feynman's interpretation. I edited and reopened the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T11:44:22.733" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T11:44:22.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13961" CreationDate="2022-01-03T11:44:46.177" Score="2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/685538/179151&quot;&gt;Are the following claims flaws in Relativity?&lt;/a&gt; was closed for not being mainstream physics, and it received a number of down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I haven't studied SR past brief coverings in my undergraduate and graduate classes, and I haven't really covered GR beyond knowing its conceptual underpinnings, so I could be missing something. But I can't see why this question was poorly received. It just looks like a question asking about the compatibility and validity of SR and GR. There are even well-received questions covering the various parts linked to by one of the close voters. If anything, I could see it being closed as lacking focus, but the two claims do seem to go together into a single post asking about how these theories work together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what am I missing here? Why is this a poor question, and why is it non-mainstream? Hopefully such a discussion will help me know how to interact with other SR/GR questions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T16:19:15.710" Title="Why was this question down voted and closed as non-mainstream?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13960" CreationDate="2022-01-03T12:40:47.713" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's all about phrasing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How are accelerated frames treated in special relativity?&amp;quot; is a perfectly fine question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Special relativity cannot work with accelerated frames! Prove me (or &amp;quot;my friend&amp;quot;) wrong!&amp;quot; is not. It presents a non-mainstream claim (&amp;quot;SR can't explain non-inertial motion&amp;quot;) without any substantiation beyond &amp;quot;my friend told me&amp;quot;. If someone wants to know how a specific thing works, they can &lt;em&gt;just ask that&lt;/em&gt;, there is no need to ask us to debunk random claims with no substantiation about that thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the viewpoint of the voters (at least in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; interpretation, of course I cannot read other people's minds), the first is an honest question asked by someone interested in relativity. The latter is output typical of non-mainstream &amp;quot;physicists&amp;quot; who will reject any mainstream explanation anyway, so there's no point in bothering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relativity, both special and general, are a favourite target of non-mainstream &amp;quot;physicists&amp;quot;, and therefore the reaction to such questions in these tags might be more hostile that you would expect e.g. in Newtonian mechanics. The amount of good faith people are willing to extend gets lower when there's a higher rate of that good faith being abused. One &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; make the argument this question isn't actually off-topic because it is &amp;quot;clear&amp;quot; the OP really just wants to understand relativity rather than evaluate the specific claims from their friend - but then again, OP could be bothered to actually phrase the question in those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If saying &amp;quot;My friend told me X, is this true?&amp;quot; made a question on-topic, we'd just invite every non-mainstream &amp;quot;physicist&amp;quot; to suddenly get a bunch of friends repeating their inane theories back to them so they can ask about them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T12:40:47.713" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13960" CreationDate="2022-01-03T15:57:49.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close but I’m not sure it was for the “non- mainstream” reason (I actually don’t remember… it could have been).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have multiple issue with this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, as a variation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13772/36194&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, there is a question of attribution, and I think I would have VTC for “more details”.  If we want the site to be authoritative, then “my friend and I” rarely meets this standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, any post headlining “flaws” in a theory based on a discussion between two friends does not do good to the site. For this reason alone I could have VTC as non-mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the OP shows no attempt to research the claim and back it up by solid arguments.  In fact it’s not that hard to debunk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question was rightly closed, lest we implicitly want to encourage people “shooting from the hip” and posting questions with provocative titles but minimal contents.  If you want to ask about “flaws”, you should know your stuff first and ask later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T16:19:15.710" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T16:19:15.710" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-03T21:28:52.543" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused as to why the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/686726/falling-to-earth-from-orbit&quot;&gt;Falling to Earth from orbit&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; question.  I don't know whether the OP found our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;advice about asking homework(-like) questions&lt;/a&gt; before posting;  but if they had, they would have found the following advice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;[N]arrow down the problem to the particular concept that's giving you trouble and ask about that specifically.&amp;quot;  The OP did that:  they realized that the needed to integrate the force with respect to time, but that the force itself depended on the position, and they couldn't see how to address that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The best way to produce a focused, specific question is to show your work.&amp;quot;  The OP provided their work up that had led to their point of confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Reference the source&amp;quot;.  There's no source referenced, but this seems to be a question that occurred to the OP on their own, so this may be moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt; tag.&amp;quot;   Fair enough, they didn't do that;  it was edited in later.  I doubt this was the reason for closure, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, this seems to fulfill the criteria listed there.  I'm not sure that the OP could have asked the question much better than they did (except for the braggy &amp;quot;top-20 university&amp;quot; stuff at the top, but hopefully we can let that slide.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly speaking, it seems to me that any question that looks the &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; bit homework-like is quickly closed, even if it asks about conceptual problems and is more than just a PSQ.  This doesn't seem to be consistent with our stated policies around such questions, which imply that there is a good way to ask such questions.  Have these policies changed?  Should our close reason be updated accordingly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to poke the bear here.  I'll admit I'm something of a noob around here compared to many users, and that there was plenty of discussion about the homework policy predating my time here.  And I'm definitely mindful of the problems that would arise if we let pure PSQs get answered as a matter of course.  But at the same time, it is frustrating to see people who come to this site asking interesting, thoughtful questions getting shut down summarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81133" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T12:29:33.113" Title="How could this question have been asked to avoid closure under the &quot;homework-like question&quot; policy?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13963" CreationDate="2022-01-04T00:53:19.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer was made for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/686726/2&quot;&gt;version 2&lt;/a&gt; of the question on the main site, which is what I made my close vote decision on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to close because it looks like &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot;, and the only question they ask is &amp;quot;Any advice/the answer?&amp;quot; They also tack on &amp;quot;If there's a cool equation using relativity instead of Newtonian mechanics, I would appreciate that as well.&amp;quot; So even if it doesn't follow the current close reason, the question is still pretty vague as to what they actually are asking for here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also might be a duplicate of the question linked in the comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14700/179151&quot;&gt;The Time That 2 Masses Will Collide Due To Newtonian Gravity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/686726/3&quot;&gt;version 3&lt;/a&gt;, in my opinion &amp;quot;Any advice on how to proceed?&amp;quot; is still fairly vague. It still just seems like the OP knows the physics already, and the question is just &amp;quot;help me do this calculation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2022-01-04T12:29:33.113" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T12:29:33.113" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13948" CreationDate="2022-01-04T18:05:09.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think ACuriousMind's answer largely covers everything. As a small addendum: if a question is on-topic here, has been open for a while (i.e. too old to migrate), and then gets re-posted and answered elsewhere, I think it's entirely appropriate to post a brief answer saying roughly &amp;quot;This question has been answered at [link]&amp;quot; and providing a brief synopsis of the answer. This allows the answer stub to be accepted, thus removing the thread from the Unanswered listings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T18:05:09.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13967" CreationDate="2022-01-06T04:08:36.513" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see &amp;quot;question has been closed&amp;quot; sometimes stating &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; with no other rationale.  It says potential improvements should &amp;quot;address reasons for closure,&amp;quot; but I'm not seeing how to view those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="313823" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-01-06T12:46:49.010" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T12:46:49.010" Title="How do I see the reason a question was closed?" Tags="|support|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13966" CreationDate="2022-01-06T12:12:33.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can have various causes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question was closed with a custom close reason one of the close voters entered as an individual comment. Look for a comment starting with a phrasing like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I’m voting to close this question because&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It is unlikely but &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that the comment has been deleted, in which case there really isn't any information left to see for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since you're lacking the 3k reputation for the close/reopen privilege, you only see the &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; version of the close notice. There &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be a meaningful public version of each of our standard close reasons that conveys at least some information, but it's possible something's messed up there. Please link to an example so we can make sure that isn't it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T12:12:33.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13947" CreationDate="2022-01-06T22:37:20.147" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on initial discussion here a further interesting and related&#xA;question is: &amp;quot;how can we improve this site's accessibility where&#xA;experimental physics is concerned?&amp;quot; (quoting Daniel Sank)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be penalties for those who participate in closing posts that are obviously not off-topic. I don't participate in reviewing posts very much, but I know there are rewards for doing so -- and therefore I suspect there are rewards for closing questions and users get more points for being trigger happy and over-moderating posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T14:20:53.877" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T14:20:53.877" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-09T07:37:06.533" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/686093&quot;&gt;My answer&lt;/a&gt; got me -15 points. Was the OP booted off the site, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just wondering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-01-10T02:35:03.430" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T02:35:03.430" Title="My answer got me -15 points! Why?" Tags="|support|down-votes|reputation|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13969" CreationDate="2022-01-09T07:56:42.900" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user accepted your answer on Jan 1 at 22:15 (UK time), giving you +15 points, then today they changed their mind and unaccepted the answer so you got a -15 point reversal. Overall your net rep became just the +10 from the single upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/40292/niels-nielsen?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;your reputation&lt;/a&gt; you'll see the -15 reversal is labelled &lt;em&gt;unaccept&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T07:56:42.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13947" CreationDate="2022-01-11T16:15:52.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also want to add my own summary of this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the bias towards physics theory questions can be indeed explained by the number of people concerned with physics theory. In my question, I only took professional physicists into consideration (such as employed an institutes and universities), of which a large share work in experimental physics. At least, from a point of view of solid state physics, where experiments &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be relatively mundane and can be conceived, built and run by single persons (as opposed to high energy physics or cosmology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when including all the school students, and even most undergraduate students, the situation changes. Most of them do no experimental physics, at least not in the way that they need to solve their own problems but instead stick to prepared protocols. However, they do have to solve their theory problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe when counting everyone who visits physics.SE (and not only professional physicists) the numbers indeed strongly tip towards behind theory heavy. So this is a natural explanation for the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299634" LastEditorUserId="299634" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T16:39:17.473" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T16:39:17.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-12T15:06:27.970" Score="12" ViewCount="227" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZntT.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Physics over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;80&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;77&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;78&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;94&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Triage queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;190&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;546&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,974&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;392&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,601&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;70&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,477&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,185&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;59&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,835&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,820&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,479&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;597&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;26,292&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;27&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;149&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;106&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;73&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;157&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;106&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;138&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,261&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,405&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,048&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,620&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,714&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;63&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;103&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,101&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;438&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,485&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,983&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,241&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;871&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,729&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14,872&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,861&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,204&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;543&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;82&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,024&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,231&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,879&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;221&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13333/2020-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2020: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222021%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/374784/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T03:16:44.410" Title="2021: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-13T19:33:26.613" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I have done a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/688541/291611&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; where I have presented a problem that I have solved. I know that usually the questions are closed without any suggestions or help by the user if a problem is proposed to do without any attempt of working. I have tried to do work but I am not sure of my steps and I have a specific doubt linked to the use of information of the problem...why anyone cannot help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291611" LastEditorUserId="291611" LastEditDate="2022-01-13T20:10:52.260" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T20:10:52.260" Title="Closed question of a problem with shown attempt...please help me!" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-18T11:20:32.670" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been closed:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/688998/&quot;&gt;How was mass increase measured?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m voting to close this question because &lt;em&gt;it concerns the history of physics –&lt;/em&gt; Bob D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed. &lt;em&gt;This question is off-topic&lt;/em&gt;. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been around for a few years and have never heard anything so weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are loads of questions bordering history, but mine does not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/68471/&quot;&gt;Who (and Why) started the &amp;quot;electrons are negative, protons are positive&amp;quot; convention?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many more concerning past experiments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/95801/&quot;&gt;How to measure the mass of the electron?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;I have chosen two examples answered by an illustrious member, and I hope there was no discrimination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I clearly explained, the question was absolutely legitimate, since in 1894 the mass spectrometer was not yet available and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomson&lt;/a&gt; had not even discovered the electron. Is that really off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157860" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-01-21T14:47:43.857" LastActivityDate="2022-01-21T14:47:43.857" Title="Measurement of mass increase doesn't concern physics. Really?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-18T13:07:00.427" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/325411/martinusa?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;relatively new user,&lt;/a&gt; who has asked a number of questions to which I have commented. The questions have disappeared, and they are not on his/her activity profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I have noticed this is because I became interested in the subject and had some links in comments to the disappeared questions which I can no longer find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this happen? The user deletes the questions and then they disappear from the profile? As all the questions are about the same subject, it defeats the purpose of the site, as there can be no buildup of knowledge if the user deletes questions he/she is no longer interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-01-18T13:37:01.810" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T13:37:01.810" Title="Puzzled by disappearance of questions" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13979" CreationDate="2022-01-18T13:31:59.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questions you remember are simply deleted (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/689245/50583&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/688961/50583&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/688794/50583&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/688789/50583&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;) - authors can delete their questions that have no positively-scoring answer. If there is a positively-scored answer they cannot delete their question, so knowledge that at least one user found valuable &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; just vanish by people deleting their old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T13:31:59.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13978" CreationDate="2022-01-18T13:37:38.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our policy on historical questions is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8935/50583&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - just being about history does not make a question off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not being about physics &lt;em&gt;as a natural science&lt;/em&gt; does. Apart from asking &lt;em&gt;three different questions&lt;/em&gt; and hence being too broad (please only ask a single question per post, unless they are so closely related they cannot be meaningfully answered in separation!), your second question &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;why Einstein is credited with the formula, when since 1900 the equivalence had been found (/ proved?) by WIEN?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is more about sociology and the dynamics of how attributing credit works than physics as a natural science, and hence off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T13:37:38.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13973" CreationDate="2022-01-19T14:27:15.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find this worth highlighting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;73&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a significant imbalance here, and I suspect that at least some of those ~100 protected questions only required that protection for a limited period of time (particularly when under the HNQ spotlight).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's probably a case for us to systematically re-examine our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tools/protected-questions&quot;&gt;existing stock of protected questions&lt;/a&gt; for whether they should remain that way, and (depending on the outcome) to keep this re-evaluation on a systematic ongoing basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2022-01-20T03:16:44.410" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T03:16:44.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-24T06:31:36.807" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some questions, and I'm new here.&#xA;I’d like to ask what references one would need to post here. Does it have to be peer reviewed journals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326213" OwnerDisplayName="Adrian Lee" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T15:10:27.147" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T22:38:32.813" Title="Required references in questions" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13985" CreationDate="2022-01-25T00:29:32.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you haven't already. please take &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask what references one would need to post here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same qualifications required to become a cabinet minister of any country.  None at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need no formal qualification or experience of physics at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said you are expected to post questions you have made a reasonable attempt to find an answer to yourself and post answers that are properly researched and checked (not guesses or opinions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean references to documents or quotes then if you say 'I read in a book', we'd like to know the book. If you copy a picture from somewhere, we'd like to know from where. If you refer to a paper, we want a real reference to the paper.  Ideally references to academic papers should be links to the &lt;em&gt;abstract&lt;/em&gt; page, not a direct PDF link.  Gives the authors and title and ideally a reference number so people have a reasonable chance of finding the document even if a link goes dead, as they often do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it have to be peer reviewed journals ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of your posts here are what counts.  There are definitely some current and retired full time physicists who are regulars, however there are many, many &amp;quot;amatuers&amp;quot; who contribute regularly as well.  It's how &amp;quot;professionally&amp;quot; you behave here that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will, in short, take anyone willing to make the effort to keep the standard of questions and answers high.  The community will tend to downvote bad questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="104964" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T22:38:32.813" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T22:38:32.813" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2022-01-25T00:29:32.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-27T22:23:08.363" Score="4" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/691010/168783&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was closed under the site's homework policy. However, I fail to see how it is related to a specific calculation or is &amp;quot;check-my-work-like&amp;quot;. While it does refer to a particular sort of expression, it seems to me that it mostly focuses on its physical meaning and how it can be found in Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is wrong with the linked question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users/44126/rob&quot;&gt;rob&lt;/a&gt; pointed out in the comments that only two close votes were homework-related, while other two requested more focus, and the last one asked for my clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I understand the clarity vote (even though I don't personally agree with it) since the question is incredibly general, but aren't the two questions quite related to each other, hence justifying them being asked together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-01-30T13:18:40.890" LastActivityDate="2022-01-30T13:18:40.890" Title="Why was this vector calculus question closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13987" CreationDate="2022-01-28T17:04:35.723" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question is a poor fit to the site and not specific enough to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing, the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if this type of term is encountered anywhere in physics and mechanics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence that's a list-type question and these are generally considered off-topic as there's no way to judge an answer - one example is as good as another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we attribute a physical meaning to such terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is entirely dependent on what the vectors are.  You cannot attribute any special meaning to this beyond that without a context for the vectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-01-30T13:16:51.077" LastActivityDate="2022-01-30T13:16:51.077" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13992" CreationDate="2022-01-31T00:14:19.220" Score="1" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;An hour ago, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/691760/168783&quot;&gt;Can (and should) wifi internet be considered a force?&lt;/a&gt; was asked, and it already has 5 downvotes as of me writing this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absence of close votes suggests other users agree with me that the question is focused, clear, and mainstream. While it seems to me that one might challenge whether the question is useful for other users, I think similar sorts of questions could arise for other people interested in Physics but that do not know much about it yet. The last possibility that strikes me is that it is being downvoted due to lack of research, but I don't really think it is easy to find any sources in the internet discussing why wifi is or isn't a force, and OP did mention the line of thought leading to their conclusion. Hence, I do not understand the reason for the downvotes, and would like to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me mention I do understand the downvotes some of the answers are receiving, since they spread misconceptions and are, as a consequence, not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-01-31T07:04:25.877" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T19:51:42.593" Title="Why is the question on wifi being a force being downvoted so much?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13991" CreationDate="2022-01-31T09:42:14.600" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone asks &amp;quot;Should X be considered a Y?&amp;quot; I expect them to exhibit some form of understanding of the definition of Y, and some form of understanding of what X is. While one may not find sources discussing whether wi-fi is a force or not, it is very easy to find sources discussing &lt;em&gt;what a force is&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;how wi-fi works&lt;/em&gt;. The question shows no effort at all to do so, and instead puts forth the vaguest of definitions of producing a &amp;quot;physical reaction&amp;quot;, showing no indication of understanding how wi-fi works at all, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If pollen makes me sneeze, that's a &amp;quot;physical reaction&amp;quot;, so does that mean pollen is a force? The &amp;quot;definition&amp;quot; of force used in the question strikes me as &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; absurd/lacking, and instead of trying to understand the idea of force first, the question instead chooses to ask about wi-fi being a force. Being about wi-fi adds nothing to the question, the OP clearly needs to understand what forces in general are, first. Or, conversely, if they just want to understand how wi-fi works, why isn't the question about that but instead chooses to be so specific as to ask whether it's a &amp;quot;force&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think you're &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; that people are downvoting for &amp;quot;no effort&amp;quot;, and saying that it's really difficult to do research on &amp;quot;is wi-fi a force&amp;quot; is a red herring: The research that's lacking is into the elementary &lt;em&gt;components&lt;/em&gt; of the question (force and wi-fi), not into the specific question - I have a hard time seeing how someone doing due diligence on those components would still come up with this question in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T09:42:14.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-31T10:59:07.127" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a few interesting chats years ago, and I remember some dates. I tried to trace them, but the full transcript can be scrolled back only one day at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reasonable way to read the chat transcript of, say, Jan 31 2018?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157860" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-02-01T16:12:44.107" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T16:12:44.107" Title="How can I use the chat full transcript?" Tags="|support|chat|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13993" CreationDate="2022-01-31T11:05:08.830" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no functionality for this exposed in the UI, but it's pretty easy to do by writing the URL manually. The current URL pattern for chat transcripts is&#xA;&lt;code&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/&amp;lt;room-number&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;year&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;month&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;day&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, so for example the URL for the h-bar transcript from Jan 31 2018 would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71/2018/1/31&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71/2018/1/31&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T11:05:08.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13991" CreationDate="2022-01-31T12:57:32.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone with the slightest understanding of physics would know that wifi is not a force in the sense in which that word is used in physics. I can readily imagine, therefore, that the question was downvoted on the grounds that the person who asked it had failed to acquaint themselves with basic physical concepts. There are many other terms in physics which have different meanings in other contexts- there is a charge for using a car park- is it subject to Coulomb's law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242949" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T12:57:32.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-31T23:48:39.953" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially when a user cannot delete their own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93338" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-02-02T07:57:11.240" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T08:05:08.603" Title="Why close an answered question when both answer and question have positive vote counts?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13991" CreationDate="2022-02-01T19:51:42.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two existing answers explain most of what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's worth emphasizing for clarity: close/open and score (up/down votes) are independent variables. It is perfectly possible for a question to be open (on-topic, well-scoped, clear, etc.) and also &lt;em&gt;absolutely terrible&lt;/em&gt; and worth downvoting to the bottom of every listing on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples of this, you can go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?page=3395&amp;amp;tab=Votes&amp;amp;q=closed%3ano&quot;&gt;the bottom of the 'by score' listing, filtering on open questions&lt;/a&gt;. (The link is to the current last page, and as such will require further scrolling for future visitors.) The wifi question at hand does stretch the limits of on-topicness-while-terrible, and as such it is the current record holder for negative score while remaining open. But the runners-up are not that far, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T19:51:42.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13996" CreationDate="2022-02-02T01:50:52.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, closing a question is not usually an instantaneous thing (and rightly so) so it is entirely possible that, during the time a question accumulates the required number of votes to close, other users upvote or even answer the question.  In fact I would not be surprised if à faire fraction closed questions had some votes (up or down) and/or some answers (also with votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One perfectly legitimate reason to close an upvoted question with an upvoted answer is duplication.  Failure to close will eventually generate huge amounts of repetition and will make the site difficult to search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question should not be a race, and neither should up- or downvoting.  As a result, I do not think that up-voted questions with answers should be immune from closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is also my experience that many posters fail to properly search the site for duplicates or near duplicates, or fail to understand that direct homework questions are off-topic.  There are many other examples where the natural delay built in the closing mechanism is likely longer than the time it takes to cast an upvote or write a simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-02-02T08:05:08.603" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T08:05:08.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14002" CreationDate="2022-02-06T17:52:06.400" Score="6" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;To close a question that might be conceived to be against homework policy, or lacks clarity only 4 users need to vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some obscure questions might be unclear to a majority of the users, but clear to a small minority and those questions gather up close votes quickly, almost with a herd mentality. I have come across this several times, where a question is almost perfectly clear to me, but others don't understand it (out of their field) and quickly close the question before any answers are posted. This leads to frustration and loss of time from both the poster and the dedicated users of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose to add a &lt;strong&gt;vote not to close&lt;/strong&gt; in the community reasons to close a post. This will allow dissenting votes to be heard, or at least seen. This might reduce the herd mentality as it will show X people have voted to close, and Y people have voted not to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would preempt the Close first, and the vote to open later process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this change will improve the experience of this community. Some of us have been active since the beta days 11 years ago and are so happy to be part of this experience, and want nothing more to welcome more and more people to be apart of [Physics.SE].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/11211/392&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; which claims that there is considerable inertia in the system not to change the close vote mechanics. That is understandable, but is the overall [SO] ecosystem so rigid? From a technical point of view, it would be just another reason to close, but with a negative effect on the total vote to close score. That does not seem to be a great challenge to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T18:40:18.320" Title="Add a vote *not* to close button to counter the vote to close for questions that might have dissenting votes" Tags="|feature-request|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-06T18:01:04.240" Score="11" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently seen the following (actually very long and well accepted) question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/tour&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/23478&quot;&gt;Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Which I think is a great &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; and one can learn a lot from such a post, because the thing about &amp;quot;common false beliefs&amp;quot; is that they are common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched Physics.SE for such a post and of course didn't find one. Then I thought &amp;quot;okay maybe I could start such a post&amp;quot;, recognizing that the &amp;quot;big-list&amp;quot; tag description explicitly says not to ask such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do we ban questions like the one on MathOverflow cited above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257521" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-02-06T19:21:01.897" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T19:21:01.897" Title="Why are &quot;big-list&quot; questions no longer allowed?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14000" CreationDate="2022-02-06T18:40:18.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do this from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;review queues&lt;/a&gt;, but not from the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It used to be the case that our close queue was generally not much larger than the maximum number of close votes you can cast in a day, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;currently 24&lt;/a&gt;. In those days, if there was a question you wanted to keep open, you could pop over to the close queue, spend ten or fifteen minutes helping to curate your community, and be reasonably certain that your question of interest would appear in that workflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now the close queue is too big for that to work well (it shows me 99 questions to review).  But that may be because the number of close queue reviewers is currently pretty small, with only about a dozen reviewers active this month, and only four (!) users averaging more than one close review per day.  This is a case where just a couple of additional people could make a habit of visiting the review queues and have a big impact on the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other options, from less effort to more effort, include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add the question to your list of followed/favorited/bookmarked posts, so you can come back later and keep an eye on its progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add a comment explaining why you think the close voters are mistaken and the question is actually on-topic.  (But: politely.  While it may be the case that close voters are big stupid doo-doo heads who want nothing more than to suck the fun out of everything, we don’t have to tell them about it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit the question so that it is more obviously on-topic. But be careful not to change it to a different question.  I often leave comments of the form “this question (v1) is probably off-topic, but a related question that was like X might work for us.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answer the question.  I have certainly read questions that I thought were unclear, then read answers which made me say “oh, so that’s what the question was actually about.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T18:40:18.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-07T04:57:36.433" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/692997/78922&quot;&gt;My answer&lt;/a&gt; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/692994/78922&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was deleted under homework policy. The question didn't seem like homework. It was a genuine doubt why the user was getting a wildly different answer than the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78922" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-02-07T05:03:06.170" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T09:20:49.137" Title="Why was this answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14003" CreationDate="2022-02-07T09:20:49.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my eyes, it's the &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; part of the policy that applies here - technically, it's the &lt;em&gt;work in the linked video&lt;/em&gt; were supposed to scrutinize (which additionally makes the question prone to link rot if the video vanishes), but the essence is the same: The question asks about the correctness of a specific calculation, and your answer points about the specific part of that calculation that is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could understand if people disagree with this interpretation - if the question is reopened, please flag the answer so it can be undeleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T09:20:49.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-09T10:10:43.613" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about turning my account in a professional one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there are a few questions I asked in the past I would be a little bit annoyed if they would still be attached to my account. Is there a way to remove the link between my account and the question? I would like to not delete the question as people took time answering them and they might be useful for other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T10:19:42.090" Title="Dissociate an account from a question" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14006" CreationDate="2022-02-09T10:19:42.090" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact&lt;/a&gt; link and explicitly request dissociation. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/96746/263383&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that you cannot delete questions with positively scored answers anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T10:19:42.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14009" CreationDate="2022-02-10T07:36:34.470" Score="5" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I get problem ideas from real life. Is it OK to ask for a solution here, even though I would (probably) be able to solve it myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a disclaimer, those problems are weird enough to convince anyone that they are not school or uni work or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199349" LastActivityDate="2022-02-11T03:14:11.757" Title="Making others solve my problems..ok?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14008" CreationDate="2022-02-11T02:07:58.130" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a disclaimer, those problems are weird enough to convince anyone that they are not school or uni work or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a huge misconception about site policies. We don't care if a question comes from school, assigned homework, or from your own thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy in regards to exercises is that you don't just post the exercise and ask for a solution. Ideally, your question wouldn't reference an exercise at all and would be purely about the concepts you would need to understand in order to solve the problem on your own. Of course, this isn't always possible, and so the next best thing is to use the exercise only to frame the context of your question. The goal should always be understanding the concepts, not looking for a worked solution or calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to ask for a solution here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without further information, I'm going to say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2022-02-11T02:07:58.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14008" CreationDate="2022-02-11T03:14:11.757" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to ask for a solution here, even though I would (probably) be able to solve it myself ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general we explain concepts, not do specific problems for people.  The &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; policy states that people answers should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; provide worked out answers in general.  That's precisely what you are asking for, so IMO you're off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are also required to provide your own attempt at finding the solution and you are attempting to just not bother making an attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's completely against the letter and spirit of the policy IMO..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2022-02-11T03:14:11.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14015" CreationDate="2022-02-12T01:27:04.333" Score="-8" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/693654/a-new-way-to-define-matrix-vector-products-to-relate-physical-fundamental-const&quot;&gt;A new way to define matrix-vector products, to relate physical fundamental constants and units of measure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why such a question could have been considered so &amp;quot;harmful&amp;quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cut-paste the last version (3 edits, all rejected: check &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/693654/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;) in the math community and nobody got scared or offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While here, people wasted their and my time just to &lt;em&gt;prevent me from asking a question and discussing an idea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is wrong with these people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219279" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-02-12T16:42:58.080" LastActivityDate="2022-02-14T02:23:24.350" Title="The same question, little interest in the maths community and blind opposition here" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14011" CreationDate="2022-02-12T02:17:47.453" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a quick skim, some obvious issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your primary question seems to be &amp;quot;is this correct?&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6097/44126&quot;&gt;Such questions are off-topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your secondary question of &amp;quot;is this new/interesting/useful?&amp;quot; seems like a request for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7516/44126&quot;&gt;peer review, which we don't do either&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question seems to be mostly about mathematics in a physics context, rather than a question about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563/44126&quot;&gt;photograph of your question&lt;/a&gt; rather than your actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see evidence in the comments under your question of harmfulness, fear, or offense. It's just not good fit for us in its present form.&#xA;I don't know whether your question could be edited into an on-topic form or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-02-12T02:17:47.453" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14014" CreationDate="2022-02-12T20:59:02.110" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/693654/a-new-way-to-define-matrix-vector-products-to-relate-physical-fundamental-const&quot;&gt;A new way to define matrix-vector products, to relate physical fundamental constants and units of measure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to convert my post to MathJax, but since it's a long post, I cannot &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;see what I get&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, while writing those complex MathJax expressions &amp;quot;blindly&amp;quot; does not help...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the editor side by side with the preview would be better to me, while just adding a scrollbar to the preview too (only the editor has one) would still work and would require very small changes in the Stack Exchange UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219279" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-02-13T13:14:52.307" LastActivityDate="2022-02-13T13:14:52.307" Title="Is it possible to have the editor and preview in a side by side mode? Or maybe just a scrollbar in the preview?" Tags="|feature-request|editing|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14013" CreationDate="2022-02-12T22:40:15.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly not; changing the editor is a network-wide change which requires a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of investment in usability testing across multiple browsers and platforms..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13349/44126&quot;&gt;previously&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13488/44126&quot;&gt;previously&lt;/a&gt;. You might use &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/389/44126&quot;&gt;the sandbox&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackedit.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackEdit.io&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-02-12T22:40:15.910" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14011" CreationDate="2022-02-14T02:23:24.350" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you taught me a though lesson, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, nothing to compare to what I've gone thru when, in 2016, I tried to come up with something new on SR... &lt;em&gt;sacrilege&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for a topologist in Bononia, who spent some time trying to understand my point, and maybe Rovelli too, nobody would listen... A topologist, one that doesn't care for the measurements and metrix, helped me with semi-norms, that's what spacetime distances are... &lt;em&gt;I'll come back, that was not BS!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It didn't end up well with me, I'll spare you details, but when I saw my question blocked for no meaningful reasons... &lt;em&gt;not again please no&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then your reasons became increasingly meaningful, while the underlying hostility didn't go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd have dozen of question to ask on both the representation and the map, as to me they're related: what's the model behind Planck's units? or at least the interpretation he tried to give? I recall about orbiting photons... &lt;em&gt;Of course&lt;/em&gt; I have another model, and a set of units whose &amp;quot;regular matrix&amp;quot; is not an I, but is full of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\pi$&lt;/span&gt;s on the diagonal. Let alone this model fits perfectly in the map, explaining the apparent &amp;quot;broken symmetry&amp;quot; there... &lt;em&gt;my Galois-Noether conjecture is approaching fast!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I know this community is only to ask straight questions like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;are there upper and/or lower limits to frequency values, for photons?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, without any details in why I might be interested in that. &lt;em&gt;I'd feel sorry for you, doing so!&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some more constructive work, I'd go for HSM, where I already got something quite good done, not to mention those people do not have neither these obsessions of yours (with a rationale, but still annoying), nor that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;here comes the inquisition&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;corrado&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219279" LastActivityDate="2022-02-14T02:23:24.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-14T16:55:55.213" Score="-1" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First: as a new non-scientist member of Physics SE I want to say thank you for the wealth of knowledge, interest and patience with my ignorance I have encountered here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: I was very surprised to see that there is a &amp;quot;downvote&amp;quot; function for posts and answers. After trying to think of scenarios where such a function would enhance the quality of scientific discourse I am still at a loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strength of this f̶o̶r̶u̶m̶ question-and-answer website is that it is highly specialised, and it's assumed that the vast majority of questions are not understood or of interest for the vast majority of people, be they physicists or not.&#xA;I for one would be very busy if I would take the downvote button seriously and start voting on all posts that are &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;not useful&amp;quot; to me, the same way I upvote those that I find interesting. (Edit after comment: by this I mean that I don't understand 99% of the questions, but that says nothing about their quality, sincerity or usefulness for others, only my lack of knowledge.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand the 'upvote': it gives an indication on how popular a questions is, which means that there's a higher possibility that I will find it interesting. And it gives me an opportunity to send a small appreciation to those who taken the time to answer my question, or asked questions that enlightened me. But how can the distinction between a post with 0 votes (not popular) and one with -10 (very unpopular) help me to find the information I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my honest question is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the rationale for the ability to downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you point me to a specific case here where downvotes has achieved the intended function, that could not be achieved with other tools available? &lt;strong&gt;Is there research and/or data that shows that such a button enhances the quality of questions and answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note after comments: I fully understand that the caretakers of this site are rightly proud and protective of it. I see myself as a grateful guest on PSE, and by no means am I criticizing or proposing changes. As a naive empiricist I am honestly curious on how exactly downvoting can have the function stated over and over again on the site and in comments below, as for me it seems counterintuitive. I apologize if this was a provocative issue. Please feel free to express your critique by downvoting this question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231168" LastEditorUserId="231168" LastEditDate="2022-02-17T12:54:55.923" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T16:55:25.517" Title="Rationale behind downvote button" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14016" CreationDate="2022-02-16T01:40:20.800" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After trying to think of scenarios where such a function would enhance the quality of scientific discourse I am still at a loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the first problem is that it's no scientific discourse we're aiming for here. This site is a &lt;em&gt;question and answer&lt;/em&gt; site to which we are (voluntarily) providing (potentially) &lt;em&gt;useful information&lt;/em&gt; to readers. Whether the content is useful or not is intended for the community to decide, literally &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;why voting is important&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that it might be useful to consider scores on posts as being akin to grades on homework or tests: it provides a useful metric to others as to the knowledge content in the assigned work. While we may be used to the percentile grading system, it wouldn't be too difficult to adjust the scoring to see how far above or below the median (or even passing) would be. For instance, instead of a 90%, you got +5 to a mid-B or a 60% being -25 to the mid-B. In this sense, it is easier to see how bad you did (due to negative score) versus how good you did (positive score).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are very much the same here: they convey a measure of knowledge content in the post: those with useful content are positively scored while posts with little useful content are negatively scored. So really it's just a measure of the &lt;em&gt;relative worth&lt;/em&gt; of a post, given our own understanding. And this measure of relative worth is a nice by number attached to the top of your post.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Comments, on the other hand, are tiny and buried &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; the post. So not only do you have to read the entire post, but then what could be dozens of comments to parse the usefulness or potential issues of the post. It should be obvious that a big fat &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-X$&lt;/span&gt; at the top is a lot more clear indicator of problems than a tiny &amp;quot;this is wrong!&amp;quot; at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to alternatives you've proposed,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No expressed consensus&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then everything is correct and there is no reason to vote up or even comment on anything. In fact, why bother asking or answering?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment the mistake/error&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a good first step (I've argued &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10761/25301&quot;&gt;so previously&lt;/a&gt;), but it does not, by itself, work to replace votes because (a) comments are generally temporary &amp;amp; such a comment mentioning the error might be irretrievably erased and (b) there is no guarantee that future viewers will actually read the comments to find the error.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ignoring the post&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then not only is everything correct, but you are actively damaging the site because users who don't know better might think the bad post is actually good when you really know it is wrong (#2 below addresses the case when you cannot judge the content).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flagging it for moderators to review&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flags, as discussed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, are for &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; instances of posts (e.g., someone using an answer to reply instead of a comment, spam), rather than a catch-all for bad content. Using moderator intervention in this manner is actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10749/does-it-matter-if-answers-are-correct#comment40811_10749&quot;&gt;not in line with their wants&lt;/a&gt; and, even worse, then relies on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;these 6 people&lt;/a&gt; being, effectively, the ultimate arbiters of truth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, none of these provide any meaningful way to convey an incorrect/problematic post; voting is the only reliable mechanism to indicate a usefulness measure (positively or negatively) while an answer still exists (for deletion, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Help Center article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other remarks on downvoting in general,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't have the time to downvote&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Well this doesn't preclude you from actually downvoting, it just says that you're either not interested in curating &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; plain lazy (it really doesn't take much time or effort to hit that button as you see posts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One may not understand the content&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Great, it happens to all of us (because we're not all experts in all fields). Fortunately, this doesn't preclude you from voting on subjects &lt;em&gt;you do know&lt;/em&gt;, just the ones you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's more people who don't know enough about a given topic than who do know about that topic&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is probably an idea you had based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/692338/25301&quot;&gt;your experience&lt;/a&gt; with the Hot Network Question effect (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12515/25301&quot;&gt;this Meta post&lt;/a&gt; and links therein), but in most cases, this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; true. Most posts only get a few upvotes. More advanced or specialized topics get even less.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T01:40:20.800" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14016" CreationDate="2022-02-16T23:24:50.953" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Low quality questions on the front page send a signal to first-time visitors that this is not a site worth exploring.  Downvoting low-quality questions helps to keep them off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T23:24:50.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-19T15:21:54.670" Score="-5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was attended to a question here on this site after I noticed in a question that a member does a whole lot of tagging these days. But they always did. In 2016 they added about 20 000, in 2018 about 40 000, and who knows how many now? Can one see that? Does adding a certain amount entitle you to wear a golden tag? Maybe at 100 000 additions of tags? It seems they made a comparable number of links to similar questions asked. A golden link maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this to award a golden tag to a member who adds tags to all questions. Just imagine. 100 000 tags added.. if not more... Nit to mention the links. She/He deserves it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327234" LastEditorUserId="327234" LastEditDate="2022-02-20T09:29:55.900" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T14:30:28.960" Title="Can one earn a golden tag after adding 100 000 tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14022" CreationDate="2022-02-20T07:42:09.773" Score="6" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/695534/315444&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt;, I wanted to write &lt;code&gt;∼&lt;/code&gt;, but that wasn’t showing. I think it wasn’t showing for Markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought I should use &lt;code&gt;\tilde&lt;/code&gt;, but it came on top of the next letter. How can I write down tilde in MathJax?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315444" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-02-20T16:18:09.720" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T16:18:09.720" Title="Why can't I write down tilde? Is there any MathJax syntax?" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14021" CreationDate="2022-02-20T07:49:59.883" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;∼&lt;/code&gt; is a small space, while &lt;code&gt;\tilde{}&lt;/code&gt; is an ornament of a character. Use instead e.g. &lt;code&gt;\sim&lt;/code&gt;. More generally, for such LaTeX questions, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Detexify&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-02-20T07:57:38.633" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T07:57:38.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14020" CreationDate="2022-02-20T14:18:27.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;badge system&lt;/a&gt; has a very low distinction between tag edits and more general edits (i.e. edits that also modify the body or the title of the question). There is already a badge series that rewards editing activity: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/3/editor&quot;&gt;Editor&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/12/strunk-white&quot;&gt;Strunk &amp;amp; White&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/33/copy-editor&quot;&gt;Copy Editor&lt;/a&gt; series, which requires 1 / 80 / 500 post edits. That said, the Copy Editor badge explicitly disregards tag-only edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, it's important to mention the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1217/explainer&quot;&gt;Explainer&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1218/refiner&quot;&gt;Refiner&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1219/illuminator&quot;&gt;Illuminator&lt;/a&gt; series, which requires users to &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; edit and answer the post at roughly the same time. As Stack Exchange badges go, this is relatively recent, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239898/new-three-tiered-badge-idea-explainer-%e2%86%92refiner-%e2%86%92-illuminator&quot;&gt;having been introduced in 2014&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an interesting observation that tag-only edits are not rewarded all that much within the existing system: there is only a bronze badge, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/5/organizer&quot;&gt;Organizer&lt;/a&gt;, awarded for the first tag-only edit, and that's it. There is definitely an argument to be made that this should be expanded to a full bronze / silver / gold series, since re-tagging is one of the key ways to keep Stack Exchange sites well, uh, organized. In keeping with the numbers on the other series, I would put the silver and gold tiers at something like 100-500 and 1000-2000 tag edits, respectively. If the goal is to reward retagging beyond that, then the gold badge could be made multi-earnable, in the same way that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360279/steward-badge-can-now-be-awarded-multiple-times-backfill-details&quot;&gt;the Steward badge for completing review tags is&lt;/a&gt; since last year. These numbers might sound low as compared to the volume of tag edits that you've mentioned in the question, but it's important to emphasize that gold badges should be accessible to everybody, and should not require a decade of activity (at levels that far outpace everyone else) in order to get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to propose this, then this site's Meta is not really the place to do so, since it is part of the core Q&amp;amp;A engine that powers the entire Stack Exchange network; as such, the correct place is the network-wide &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. And, indeed, a similar discussion has already taken place, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/311672/what-should-we-do-with-the-organizer-badge&quot;&gt;What should we do with the Organizer badge?&lt;/a&gt;. (To provide some useful context, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/811/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; was an SE Community Manager at the time, and was and remains one of the most knowledgeable and influential voices in how the Q&amp;amp;A engine works and how it interacts with its human users both individually and collectively.) One of the key points raised there is that re-tagging can be relatively easy to abuse, so one needs to be careful not to over-incentivize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you feel strongly about this, I would encourage you to think of ways that the badge progression can be specified without over-incentivizing behaviour that could be harmful. (And, in doing so, keep performance in mind. It is tempting to say &amp;quot;tag edits that are followed by upvotes&amp;quot; or something like that, but if you scale that kind of complex database lookup to the millions of posts in Stack Overflow, it will break the server farm. Proposals whose performance would break the system simply won't get implemented by the SE dev team.) Once you have such a proposal, you can float it on Meta SE, and see what people say there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one more thing: if you do this, don't get hung up on single users. Physics SE has one particular user that does a much larger share of re-tagging than others, but this user has already been &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7508/in-praise-of-and-links-therein&quot;&gt;amply rewarded&lt;/a&gt; and adding shiny bells and whistles at Q&amp;amp;A-engine level just to reward one single individual is not really in the spirit of SE. It is the community as a whole that does the work, and it is definitely good to have rewards for behaviour by anyone that benefits the community, so things like badge proposals have much better chances of being implemented if they're pitched within this spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2022-02-20T14:30:28.960" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T14:30:28.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14029" CreationDate="2022-02-21T10:25:48.930" Score="5" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reference to my question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/695692/what-would-be-essential-math-topics-to-read-for-general-relativity-from-a-parti&quot;&gt;What would be essential math topics to read for general relativity (from a particular book)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a book and wanted to get a clear understanding on what topics from that book are essential as mathematical prerequisites for grad level general relativity. I searched before posting as is required, and found no other questions in the same spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either the answers therein are general book recommendations, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15002/mathematically-oriented-treatment-of-general-relativity&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or they give a broader idea about what math fields are involved (like &amp;quot;understanding of differential geometry&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;abstract algebra topics like scalar product spaces&amp;quot;, etc.) - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14074/what-are-the-prerequisites-to-studying-general-relativity&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. What I'm looking for is much more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told that the question is a duplicate (I'm not convinced that it is) and later on that it's opinion-based - again, I'm not so sure because mathematical topics needed to tackle grad level GR doesn't sound like a subjective topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping that members of the community experienced in GR could help out in that regard, and so it's important for me to have that question open. Could I get some feedback on how I can improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160162" LastActivityDate="2022-02-26T17:38:20.713" Title="I need to get a better idea about essential mathematical prerequisites for GR from a book. How can I improve the question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-22T23:28:08.563" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everytime I access Physics SE I get this type of preview window:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wt75l.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wt75l.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I have to click outside the frame to enter the page. How can I get rid of this? Why is this implemented in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7532" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2022-02-22T23:48:34.003" LastActivityDate="2022-02-23T00:07:54.600" Title="How can I get rid of the &quot;preview&quot; view when I load a question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14025" CreationDate="2022-02-23T00:07:54.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @ACuriousMind 's comment I was able to figure out this: It is not an implementation of Physics SE: it is the &amp;quot;Reader View&amp;quot; from Safari. It suffices to deactivate this setting in the browser and the preview window will no longer appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7532" LastActivityDate="2022-02-23T00:07:54.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14024" CreationDate="2022-02-25T00:36:53.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Read Einstein's 1916 review article on general relativity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/158&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/158&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with the mathematical prerequisites about tensors that you'll need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing more enterprising than learning from the master himself! From my personal experience, I had tried learning the subject using several books, but most of them had proved too thick or thin or overwhelming for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a companion book, I found first few chapters of Tensor Calculus by Synge and Schild a fairly useful read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.in/books?id=7ey7AQAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.co.in/books?id=7ey7AQAAQBAJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328936" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T00:36:53.493" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14024" CreationDate="2022-02-25T22:01:09.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One big problem I see with this question is that it's very narrow. Part of the philosophy of Stack Exchange is that it should act as a compendium of questions and answers with broad interest. The questions here should be questions that people other than the original poster have or will have in the future. Such people can then find their question already asked and answered here for as long as SE stays around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be basically &amp;quot;Which sections of this specific book are necessary for learning general relativity?&amp;quot; This is not a question with broad interest for people learning or thinking about physics; it really only applies to people reading that specific book with the goal of applying its contents to GR. I am not sure that your question would not be closed anyway if you tried to make it more broadly applicable, but I think it would be much more likely to stay open if it were about more than one specific book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37496" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T22:01:09.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14024" CreationDate="2022-02-26T17:38:20.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resource-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resource-recommendation&lt;/a&gt; tag info tab says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions asking &amp;quot;What is a good book about X?&amp;quot; or more generally, &amp;quot;What should I read to learn about X?&amp;quot;, typically where there is not a single authoritative reference. These sorts of questions have multiple answers and will acquire new answers as more books/papers are written on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then links to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4697/25301&quot;&gt;resource recommendations FAQ&lt;/a&gt; wherein you'll see that questions under this tag should be specific about the actual request (material covered, style, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question, rather than being of the form &amp;quot;what books should I use to learn GR&amp;quot; (i.e., a resource recommendation) is instead &amp;quot;what chapters of this specific book can I skip?&amp;quot;. This type of question is asking for an opinion, as some people might feel all chapters are necessary to learn the material, while others might say you would be able to skip some chapters and still others might say you could skip even more chapters and still consider the material as learned. Ergo, any answer to your question is an &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; and not an objective one that is preferred here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, even adjusting the question to follow the resource recommendation format (which would not be subjective), would be a duplicate of the linked duplicate (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247150/where-do-i-begin-in-order-to-study-relativity;&quot;&gt;Where do I begin in order to study relativity?&lt;/a&gt; itself a dupe of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14951/introduction-to-relativity-books&quot;&gt;Introduction to relativity books&lt;/a&gt; and maybe also of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/363/books-for-general-relativity&quot;&gt;Books for general relativity&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2022-02-26T17:38:20.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-27T15:38:51.137" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/696698/has-gr-really-passed-every-test-it-has-faced&quot;&gt;this closed question&lt;/a&gt;, the comments were moved by @rob to a chat. I was not interested in chatting, I just wanted to make an observation on the question itself, so I wrote a comment, which I found was removed today, as if it were useless to the OP. The comment did not appear in the chat either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the rule about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-02-27T19:40:36.393" LastActivityDate="2022-02-27T19:40:36.393" Title="Comments sent to chat and addition of a new comment after that" Tags="|discussion|comments|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14030" CreationDate="2022-02-27T17:12:29.017" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;move comments to chat&amp;quot; button only works once. After that, comments can be deleted, but not moved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we move comments to chat, we'll sometimes rescue one or two comments that are especially helpful in clarifying the post they're attached to.  Likewise, a comment that comes after a move-to-chat but is clearly helpful may stay around.  But in general, on a post where people have gotten so chatty in the comments that the comments have been cleaned up once, a follow-up comment is likely to generate an additional discussion.  And because people don't like to read long threads, especially with the modest barrier of a chat link, the resurrected discussion tends to have overlap with its predecessor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not interested in chatting [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't let this stop you from using chat.  There is no obligation to use chat &amp;quot;synchronously,&amp;quot; where you keep the browser window with the chat room open and stare at it waiting for your correspondent to reply.  If you step away from chat and get an @-reply, you'll get a notification in your Stack Exchange inbox just like if you'd gotten a comment reply.  Feel free to ignore all of the real-time bells and whistles of chat, and treat it as a place to make comments without worrying (too much) about their number or their immediate or long-term usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the rule about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule is that, if you've written something and thought &amp;quot;I certainly would be annoyed if this disappeared,&amp;quot; then a comment is the wrong place for it.  This is independent of the move-to-chat schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-02-27T17:12:29.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-02T04:40:43.803" Score="12" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time I come across posts that are closed by a user/users who has/have also submitted an answer to the question. I feel like this goes against the goal of closure, which is to prevent answers to questions that should not be on the site. It also gives the impression (to me) that the user/users think they deserve to give an answer to the question, but others should not (once the question is closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something and there actually are situations where answering while also voting to close is fine (or even encouraged), or does this always go against the goal of the site and question closure? Showing how this relates to site policy is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2022-03-02T05:01:47.347" LastActivityDate="2022-03-07T21:43:25.213" Title="Should users answer questions that they think should be closed?" Tags="|discussion|answers|policy|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14032" CreationDate="2022-03-02T05:03:15.360" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the (or at least one of the) user(s) in question, and I think that your impression of my motivation is mistaken. Since at least part of your concern is your view of my motivation let me state my thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer questions that I feel capable of answering and willing to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vote to close questions that I feel don’t fit within the site’s scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two categories are not mutually exclusive. Some questions I am unwilling to answer are within the site’s scope, and some questions I am willing to answer are not. Of course, most questions that I vote to close I am also unwilling to answer, but not all. And I don’t think that it is necessary for those categories to match exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you didn’t ask, I also think that up- and down-voting has different meaning than close votes. I have on occasion even up-voted a question that I also voted to close, particularly when I thought it was a good question that simply belonged on a different SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not trying to convince you to adopt my view, but hopefully this clarifies my motivation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T05:03:15.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14032" CreationDate="2022-03-02T18:45:58.537" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you. There are many good (or even great) questions which are for various reasons off-topic as per current site policy or community guidance. I feel&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^\dagger$&lt;/span&gt; that while answering them may be satisfying, it sends the message that asking more questions of that type is to be encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is very good but not a good fit for the site, I think the OP should be encouraged to reshape the question if at all possible. This is one of the few things that comments are actively &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; in this community, but I rarely see proposed content edits in comment sections to off-topic posts.  If the question cannot be made on-topic through edits, then no answers should be posted and it should be closed.  Providing answers to off-topic questions adds a wink and a nudge to the question closure which I would personally prefer to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were &lt;em&gt;desperate&lt;/em&gt; to answer a question I believe to be fundamentally off-topic, I would create a chat to start a discussion. Unfortunately I find the chat feature on SE to be abysmal, which I would guess is a barrier toward getting this to be a more widely-adopted policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course reasonable people who may disagree as to whether a question is on- or off-topic, so I don't downvote good answers to questions I think should be closed. However, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; think that the behavior you describe is contradictory, and I think a vote-to-close should preclude a user from then answering the question anyway and vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^\dagger$&lt;/span&gt;That begin said, I must plead guilty to occasionally answering questions which &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; should be closed - in my case, typically because they should probably be migrated to the Math SE. I can only ask the forgiveness of the community for my occasional lapses in judgement, and that they accept this friendly emoji as a token of my regret :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156895" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T18:45:58.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14032" CreationDate="2022-03-03T15:46:17.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental issue here (for me) is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are we here to help people or follow rules ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm quite keen on rules (what liker of physics could not be ?), but I'm mostly here to help people.  To each his own but I assume that's the prime motivation for a lot of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now help does not include doing homework for people or similar, so that's one rule I enthusiastically invoke.  However there are going to be situations where a question is not really on-topic (e.g. veers off quickly into non-mainstream or personal &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;/wild-idea) but where it would be perfectly reasonable (in my view) to help the poster by explaining how things really work.  But you might feel you still have to Vote To Close.  So there are situations (of which this is an example) where you might provide an answer without really trying to some sort of radical tearing down the system (which I don't have the hair for anymore :-) ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also be situations where people write an answer but then feel that they should VTC after a rethink, or that they do the opposite - VTC and then come up with an answer they feel is reasonable to share and simply forget to undo the first part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there can be other reasons why people do answer questions they voted to close.  I don't think they're necessarily bad reasons or good ones, they just different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was persistent offending related to something serious (like the homework policy or wildly off-topic questions) then maybe that's something to flag to a mdoerator for higher level consideration, but beyond that I think it's trying to force people to think in straight lines too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2022-03-03T15:46:17.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14032" CreationDate="2022-03-07T21:43:25.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you we shouldn't answer posts that we vote to close or that should be closed, though I'm sure I have on occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I do post an &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; it is typically for homework and exercise type questions where my answer attempts to focus on specific physics concepts that the OP apparently does not understand, and not on solving the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess in response to @StevenG-Help Ukraine statement &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Are we here to help people or follow rules ?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I sometimes &lt;em&gt;bend&lt;/em&gt; the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199893" LastActivityDate="2022-03-07T21:43:25.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2022-03-12T00:36:28.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What bothers me to a degree in the statements that the questions asking to check one's (home)work should be &lt;em&gt;unconditionally&lt;/em&gt; closed, regardless of the level of the work done is that every working scientist publishing a paper is implicitly asking the same “Am I right?” question of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The level of scrutiny the published papers receive, regardless of the their depth or the level of novelty, directly attests to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be argued that the degree of difference between a homework solution and a research paper is qualitative. Having read a lot of research papers (especially speaking of conference papers), I have to disagree. I'd be surprised to find myself alone in this camp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is uncommon, but if a homework solution is correct and is not of the run-off-the-mill shut-up-and-calculate kind, but is rather demonstrating an approach to the answer from the physics standpoint, I would certainly feel ashamed seeing it closed “because rule”. A question with an interesting and correct answer posited in a form of a question “am I right?” is as useful as one separated into the question and answer parts. The “because rule say so” argument becomes, in this case, rather bureaucratic-smelling “because you filled the form incorrectly.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly hard to come up with a hard-and-fast rule, but I'm certain than all folks with the powers to cast close votes are more than experienced to tell an interesting solution to a problem from a boring one. The problem is, of course, that this cannot be communicated as a universal, easy-to-follow rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the situation is rare and&#xA;would probably not bother to reach for a pen, but this topic is personally touching to me. I was more often bored than not by my undergraduate homework and often sought to come up with a solution that would, e.g., exploit a non-obvious symmetry, or, in general, stay in the realm of physics before switching to math when all that was implied in the problem was to solve an Euler-Lagrange equation with math, math and more math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, I often had to question my assumptions (and at times they were indeed wrong). If &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; existed 35 years ago, who knows if my question would be closed because of the homework rule…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115253" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-03-12T18:10:09.543" LastActivityDate="2022-03-12T18:10:09.543" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14041" CreationDate="2022-03-15T08:53:49.970" Score="7" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't remember seeing posts about the interpretation of experimental results on SE, so I am not sure whether such a question is SE-legitimate. Concretely, after reading some rather old and largely forgotten/ignored experimental papers about organic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;high-temperature superconductors&lt;/a&gt;, I wondered and am still wondering whether a widely-cited theoretical model might be applied to them. To my knowledge, the connection has not been discussed in what little relevant literature there is, hence the question concerning the experimental results arises naturally. I am asking here first because formulating it in a meaningful way would require some work and I am not sure it would be deemed acceptable. If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259972" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-03-16T12:57:39.770" LastActivityDate="2022-03-16T12:57:39.770" Title="Is a &quot;how should these experimental results be interpreted?&quot; question admissible?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14040" CreationDate="2022-03-15T10:20:46.107" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the specific question you seem to have in mind here - &amp;quot;can the results of X be explained with theory Y?&amp;quot; - is perfectly on-topic, as long as X and Y are parts of mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broader questions about interpretations of experimental results (like &amp;quot;Here's a dataset, please explain it&amp;quot;) might be more difficult to ask, in particular as they become closer to original research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-03-15T10:20:46.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-19T15:46:01.697" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/699655/is-big-bang-an-illusion&quot;&gt;asked a question&lt;/a&gt; about the Many-worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics and it was closed just 3 minutes after it was asked. Is this topic unwelcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; In 2012 I made a questionnare about whether this topic should be allowed, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1472/1186&quot;&gt;it was voted positively&lt;/a&gt;. Has anything changed in the policy since then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastActivityDate="2022-03-20T12:10:10.917" Title="Is Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics considered non-mainstream on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14042" CreationDate="2022-03-20T11:26:33.773" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about physics are not closed based on topic here. They are closed based on policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I could ask a question about projectile motion that would be closed if it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a homework question asking how to do a calculation rather than a conceptual question about the physics of projectile motion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a question asking how to design a device to track a projectile through the air&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a question just asking how to solve for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt; in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y=v_0t+\frac12at^2$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a vague question where it is not clear what is being asked of, such as &amp;quot;how often does projectile motion succeed on Earth?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a post that involves multiple questions about projectile motion all at once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a question asking for opinions, such as &amp;quot;is projectile motion your favorite type of motion, and if not what is?&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;why is projectile motion taught to introductory physics students so often?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of the closure reasons above are valid, but that wouldn't mean projectile motion is a forbidden subject here. The only subjects that are not allowed here are ones that are not about physics at all. But if you pick anything related to physics I am sure you could make a question about that topic that would remain open here (I'm sure there are edge cases, but I think you can get the point I'm making here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, a question being closed for whatever reason doesn't mean we think that subject is equivalent to the closure reason. For example, we don't think all projectile motion questions are off-topic homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in your case, just because your question was closed does not mean as non-mainstream doesn't mean MWI is considered to be non-mainstream or isn't allowed on this site in general. I am sure you can find MWI questions here that were not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2022-03-20T12:10:10.917" LastActivityDate="2022-03-20T12:10:10.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-27T04:45:03.803" Score="4" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a question on the Newest Questions page (the 3rd question in the image below) whose title and body were rendered in a smaller font compared to other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here : &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i2wEo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i2wEo.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reloaded the page several times, but it continued to appear like this. After a new question popped up in the feed, the font became normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is the font change for questions intentional, or is it a bug? Or this is only happening to me? Because I have previously seen this font change several times as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit (1): Just to avoid a confusion  from comments below, the screenshot I have shared here is from phone (android , chrome-desktop mode).This is how I am seeing all the texts fonts (which is rendered normally in my device) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page no (3) : &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UMTlc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UMTlc.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page no (2) : &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bpPx0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bpPx0.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page no (1) : &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Cncl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Cncl.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventhough those texts are larger compared to the view from other devices, they are uniform except the third question in problem screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit (2) : I've replaced the screenshot image from the question by its image link, because when I viewed from PC, the image figure was showing comparatively larger in size, but the same screenshot looked normal when I viewed from my phone.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user320397" LastEditorDisplayName="user320397" LastEditDate="2022-06-16T19:46:35.177" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T19:46:35.177" Title="Why does the font size appear different for this question?" Tags="|support|bug|status-norepro|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14048" CreationDate="2022-03-27T18:52:05.050" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are typically the criteria for marking a post as Community Wiki, besides having too many edits? I ask because I had a previous question get labeled as CW; if I understand correctly this label stops the post from being bumped or giving reputation for answers. After this the post was ultimately not answered despite the question being +5 and it seemed like the CW tag was related. I wonder if an early CW-label is preventing some questions from getting answers &amp;amp; I wonder if this is taken into account in the guidelines for when to label something CW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What reminded me of this was a recent CW label in the following question which I gave an answer for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/700943/&quot;&gt;Videos on history of quantum physics or relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65074" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-03-28T08:02:51.477" LastActivityDate="2022-03-28T08:02:51.477" Title="How does community wiki get decided on?" Tags="|discussion|questions|resource-recommendation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-27T22:20:23.370" Score="-6" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question whose formulation had (possibly thru an OP's lack of familiarity with English-language rules for capitalization) effectively limited responses to it to the context of a single universe, rather than one or more of the local universes of an inflationary multiverse.  An edit suggesting a modification of the question's title to include local universes has been rejected, so, am I allowed to back my answer off by back-spacing, rather than using PSE's &amp;quot;deletion&amp;quot; process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T23:52:50.413" Title="When might the elimination of an answer by back-spacing (rather than &quot;deletion&quot;) be acceptable?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14046" CreationDate="2022-03-27T23:52:50.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Never. If you want to delete your answer, delete it. If you vandalize your answer as you've described, it will likely be deleted or reverted back to its original form in short order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2022-03-27T23:52:50.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14045" CreationDate="2022-03-28T05:51:16.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resource-recommendations&quot;&gt;resource-recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag automatically converts a question to community wiki, and that's what happened in this case. For more on this see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tags/resource-recommendations/info&quot;&gt;the tag info&lt;/a&gt; and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4697/are-resource-recommendations-allowed&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-03-28T05:51:16.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14052" CreationDate="2022-04-02T09:59:03.383" Score="8" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I’ve run into a post and decided to give a pretty long answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My purpose was to post a thorough answer that could attract attention of many people who are not otherwise generally interested in physics . I was very glad for the question becoming hot network post, but today, about 3 hours ago, a moderator removed the post from hot network questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn’t appear to be off-topic or duplicate, since it wasn’t closed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both the question and my answer got some upvotes and no downvotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I kindly ask, why should that post have been removed from HNQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/701647/&quot;&gt;Post link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/701647/revisions&quot;&gt;Post revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52290" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-04-02T10:29:43.803" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T07:57:50.820" Title="Why was a question manually removed from hot network questions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14049" CreationDate="2022-04-02T10:26:59.043" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I removed it from the HNQ queue because the post seems like a hybrid between 2 (admittedly commonly asked) questions on Phys.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A technical hardware/software question about how to use an electronic device to measure acceleration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A homework-like question about elementary kinematics/projectile motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem like the kind of post that should be promoted in the HNQ queue. At the time of my action the post had already attracted 2 close-votes from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2022-04-02T10:26:59.043" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14049" CreationDate="2022-04-02T12:56:32.983" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “Hot Network Questions” system is an automated algorithm based on views, votes, and perhaps some other secret sauces.  From &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13775/backup-room--the-h-bar&quot;&gt;this chatbot output&lt;/a&gt; you can see that most HNQs on Physics are first promoted when they have just a couple of upvotes.  Students of physics and statistics will recognize that the timing of the first  few upvotes will be susceptible to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shot noise&lt;/a&gt;, and may not accurately predict the timing of upvotes as a question is viewed by more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of the HNQ is therefore to show questions on the site quasi-randomly to two different audiences.  The “hot” questions are shown to everyone who browses the SE network, while the much larger volume of “cold” questions is shown to users who choose to visit Physics specifically.  These two groups of users have different ideas about what sorts of questions best represent the character of our community. We have the ability to remove questions from the “hot” list in order to privilege the opinions of our regular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you have linked here is okay. When the first accelerometer-equipped laptops appeared, the condition &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$|a|\approx0$&lt;/span&gt; was used as a trigger to move the read heads away from the hard disks, which made them much more likely to survive being dropped than laptops without accelerometers. That application is kind of an “aha” moment the first time you see it; it might have warranted a patent.  It’s less important now that solid-state storage is more affordable, because phones and laptops now have fewer moving parts to break when they suddenly decelerate upon hitting the floor, but it’s still interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your linked question isn’t a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; question.  A person who has spent a month in a physics class should have learned that an object in free-fall has zero acceleration.  We get a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions on our site from people who have been studying physics for about a month and are working through the process of kinematics. And that takes us to the difference between the two communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes our community &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; are its regular users: people who are interested in browsing the list of new questions, recognizing questions where they have some unique insight, and writing great answers.  We have a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; community here, with frequent and prolific contributors who have deep knowledge in their domains and a knack for explaining their deep knowledge clearly.  But like any community, there is some amount of churn.  People have life changes and move on.  New people find the site and get interested enough to join.  And if a new user with deep domain knowledge were to happen upon our site and see a front page full of freshman-physics questions, they might reasonably decide to move on past us.  Teaching freshman physics is an interesting and valuable experience, but doing freshman physics homework is an experience with diminishing returns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your linked answer is a good one. It represents a lot of work, and has a lot of upvotes.  Compare with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/840905/most-prolific-answerers-during-date-interval-mean-answer-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;score distributions for our prolific answerers&lt;/a&gt;: our users who write more than a dozen answers per month tend to average a score of +2 or +3.  The decision to exclude your post from our partially-curated list of “hot” questions is about the question, not about the answer.  The question of “hotness” is different from the question of on-topic-ness (addressed by closure) and also different from the question of usefulness (addressed by votes).  You shouldn’t interpret it as a criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-04-02T12:56:32.983" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14049" CreationDate="2022-04-04T14:12:19.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the points previously made in the existing two answers, but I also recognize that you had useful and important motivations that should be given the right place to help the site grow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, what is one to do when one sees...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a question that just got on the HNQ list,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which is on-topic, though maybe a bit marginally so,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which is low-quality and liable to rub a large fraction of site users the wrong way, but which nevertheless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;offers a nice opportunity to write a clear and useful answer that will be a useful resource for the wider audience of the HNQ list?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is simple: &lt;strong&gt;fix the question&lt;/strong&gt;. If there are close-votes on it, edit it to address them and remove the concerns, and similarly so if there are problems voiced in the comments. If it looks low-grade, or homework-y, or engineering-y, or too &amp;quot;thin&amp;quot;, or too poorly researched by the OP themselves, then fix those problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sometimes tricky, as it can end up requiring significant edits that could end up changing the original intent of the OP, or (more often) removing parts of it. This is ultimately a judgement call, but particularly when the parts that you are removing are the parts that make the question liable to downvotes or close-votes (which for the question at hand includes the engingeering-y parts with explicit code, and so on), I would say it is justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When doing this kind of surgery, it is often good to leave a courtesy comment explaining to OP that you have edited the post in ways that change the meaning, that they have the option to roll-back, and including a justified recommendation of why your version is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, ultimately, looking at your posted answer, it certainly looks to have consumed quite a significant chunk of time and effort. For a low-quality starter question like the current one, I think it is reasonable to expect you to spend at least a small fraction of that effort on improving the question if you want to champion it, and particularly if you want to argue that it should act as a representative of the site to the wider SE audience that sees the HNQ listings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T14:12:19.217" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14067" CreationDate="2022-04-06T12:41:24.593" Score="4" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I received several notifications at the same time indicating &amp;quot;-2&amp;quot; in different answers of mine (old and new). I never understand why this happens. Is it that somebody is skimming at my answers and  downvoting me every time? Is it a user that was banned and the positive votes were erased? What is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-04-11T13:53:37.290" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T13:53:37.290" Title="Why am I being downvoted in various posts?" Tags="|support|reputation|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-06T18:49:42.293" Score="-6" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I question the purpose of some Internet websites which include the present.  As a now returning student of physics, admittedly with slower or less remembered skills, I find that the answers offered are most often expressed in the most elegant terms, using techniques of the greatest generality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though this practice provides a means for the respondent to make his (or her) erudition plain for all to see, it is not in my view the best teaching practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far more helpful would be to offer answers that use methods that are close to the accomplishments, as may be surmised, of the person asking the question.  This would be far more helpful than answers that provide a stage for the respondent to show his/her learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325561" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-12T10:05:09.160" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T10:05:09.160" Title="Is the purpose of physics.stackexchange to teach or to provide a stage?" Tags="|discussion|scope|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14054" CreationDate="2022-04-06T19:00:30.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. Users answer questions for two reasons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To supply an answer to the person asking the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To supply answers to others who come along later wanting to know the answer to the same or similar question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't call this &amp;quot;a stage&amp;quot;. Many users here are not using their actual names for their profiles and do not share much about themselves personally. For those who do, I don't think much on PSE gives them anything beyond PSE itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be far more helpful than answers that provide a stage for the respondent to show his learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you are suggesting more knowledgeable users do not put the best of their knowledge into their answers? Any good answer will get more attention and up votes. That's the point of this site: to find the best answers to the best questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T19:00:30.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14054" CreationDate="2022-04-06T21:33:06.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though this practice provides a means for the respondent to make his (or her) erudition plain for all to see, it is not in my view the best teaching practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is not a teaching site. Its purpose is not to teach (physics in this case), but to answer a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the level of questions and answers on the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site vary wildly, from beginner high school level to a professional/academic level. What may work as a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; answer to one person may not work for another; what may help one person to understand physics better may not help another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn physics, I would instead direct you to didactic books, that start at whatever level you deem appropriate, and build from there, rather than jumping in at very disconnected points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243047" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T17:45:45.443" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T17:45:45.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14054" CreationDate="2022-04-06T21:46:53.830" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to other points raised, there are some practical issues with fulfilling this request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is often difficult to gauge the level of a questioner from the question, unless it is explicitly stated. Even if you can accurately guess someone's &amp;quot;level&amp;quot;, everyone has different educational experiences and interests, and an answerer can't know what a questioner does or does not know, given that this is an anonymous internet forum. When answering questions, I try to give the best answer I know how to give to the stated question, without trying too much to guess what I think the person knows (which, in any case, I think runs the risk of being condescending). Of course, if the stated question is firmly within a subject like Newtonian mechanics, I'll stick to arguments in Newtonian mechanics, and if the question states that they want answers with limitations on the mathematical techniques used, I'll try to stick to those those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The correct answers to many apparently simple questions in physics are technical and nuanced. This is especially true in advanced subjects like QFT and GR. That can cause issues when someone asks a question in those subjects without having studied all of the prerequisite background. Then there is often no hope of giving an answer that is simultaneously correct, satisfying and understandable to the user who asked the question, and shorter than textbook-length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult remember what it is like to not know something, especially something you learned a long time ago, and so it's very possible for someone to write an answer that is at too high a level without intending to. This is always a problem in teaching. It is especially pronounced in an online Q&amp;amp;A format, because you type up an answer without getting any non-verbal feedback (stunned silences, confused looks) that would tell you to change course in an in-person interaction. For that matter, you can't even get verbal feedback until the answer is already posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it is worth, I would consider a comment on an answer that I wrote like &amp;quot;I don't understand the argument you presented, can you pitch it at X level instead?&amp;quot; to be totally reasonable and I would usually try to accommodate to the best of my ability, or at least explain why that is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27732" LastEditorUserId="27732" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T22:06:30.833" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T22:06:30.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14054" CreationDate="2022-04-06T22:46:04.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stated purpose of the site is to create library of questions and answers about physics. In practice, the site rewards answers that its members deem 'useful'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking whether the site should encourage answers that help people develop knowledge in preference to answers that showcase the knowledge of their author. It is down to the community to decide what sort of answers should be encouraged, and they do that by voting for 'useful' answers, so a member of the community who wants to reward answers that follow what you call 'best teaching practice' can do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that most physicists are not good communicators, or, rather, they do not write about physics in a way that maximises the chance that other people will find the writing easy to understand. Given that, I tend to reserve my 'useful' votes for answers that are lucid, that explain why rather than focussing on what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242949" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T22:46:04.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14054" CreationDate="2022-04-07T00:21:40.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First you question the purpose of the site.  That’s your prerogative of course but it’s like questioning the purpose of patrons going back to the same pub: surely it’s because they like it, irrespective of your own opinion about the establishment.  This specific site is objectively doing quite well so there must be sufficiently many people who find the current format to their liking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if you like an answer, upvote it.  If you think an answer is overly sophisticated, then don’t upvote it or downvote it.  You can participate in the process of improving the site through votes (positive or negative), so express yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course if you don’t like how the site is run because it does not cater to your priorities or you do not like how a subset of people behave, then start a better one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T00:21:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14049" CreationDate="2022-04-07T05:43:33.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@rob's and Qmechanic's answers highlight an important issue, how to best keep who happy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote the following comment under @EmilioPisanty's answer before deleting it seeing the other answers and seeing that educational accelerometry is &lt;em&gt;persona non grata&lt;/em&gt; here because it might scare away &amp;quot;the good users&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a large fraction of the planet is not rich with fancy laboratory equipment and can benefit from teaching physics with cell phones whenever possible. See for example ProfRob's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/518906/83380&quot;&gt;How come a mobile phone signal is blocked by aluminium foil, but Wi-Fi gets through?&lt;/a&gt; (thought that's not because Prof.R is poor) I fear catering to the potentially vocal rubbable few at the expense of less rich people benefitting from a great physics teaching opportunity might be revisited, i.e. I think the question is on-topic and should not have been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love physics and though I love Stack Exchange, have asked 5,000+ questions among a variety of sites and have 500+ HNQ's and have no problem asking Physics-related questions in sites like Chemistry, Astronomy, and Matter Modeling SE. But I find Physics SE's ambience (for lack of a better word) just too oppressive, and &lt;em&gt;I think I know the reason why this has happened and was probably deemed necessary at the moment:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Physics SE is too big!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12734/83380&quot;&gt;this answer to &lt;em&gt;How to Help the Physics.SE grow (member-wise)? Qualitatively as well as Quantitatively&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason there is constant hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth is that there are too many extremes that folks here are trying to keep happy at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm convinced there is a optimum range of sizes of Stack Exchange sites (measured by question rate, site scope and user base volume) and sites like Stack Overflow and Physics SE are substantially larger than the optimum size for site happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's time to stop thinking that bigger = better always, and this site needs to grow to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead I recommend that some serious consideration be made to splitting the site and opening that discussion up to the community by the moderation team posting an exploratory question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several axes along which the cleavage can take place, and an exploratory question in meta by the moderation team can ask the community to think about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don't be scared;&lt;/em&gt; please consider giving it a try!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastEditorUserId="83380" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T07:57:50.820" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T07:57:50.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14016" CreationDate="2022-04-07T16:55:25.517" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think there is a mechanism like, you cannot change the vote of a downvoted and commented answer, before the answer is not re-worked. Accordingly, I would love to see the common attitude, that a downvote comes with a qualifying comment, so the author has a chance to re-act and common quality of both, Q &amp;amp; A, is raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Else downvoting remains on the level of selectionism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="332384" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T16:55:25.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14063" CreationDate="2022-04-08T12:41:01.877" Score="7" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should tell people to cite from documentation when they use link. I always look at old posts to learn something new, but some answerers give some link, but they are dead now (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/21127/315444&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;). His first link seems to be broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even currently there are more than 1000 answers which contains links and those links are broken. So if they cite what they want to tell then everyone can learn (say, 100 years later my granddaughter came to read one of my posts. If she sees my links are broken and I didn't cite anything then she, perhaps, can't find what she was looking for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my suggestion is we should tell people to cite rather than only linking document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315444" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-04-10T14:19:02.810" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T14:19:02.810" Title="Cite documents rather than linking only" Tags="|support|best-practices|links|citation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14062" CreationDate="2022-04-08T14:57:04.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dead link in your particular example has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/2011*/http://www.phy.syr.edu/%7Esalgado/papers/VisualTensorCalculus-AAPT-01Sum.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preserved by the Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;.  The Internet Archive is a fabulous project, and if you don't know about it you should spend some time getting acquainted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at the link, it appears to be a student poster presentation from an AAPT meeting, whose &amp;quot;formal&amp;quot; citation is probably only an abstract in a meeting program from 2001.  I made some conference posters around that time, which I may or may not have thought to put on my squiggle-username university student website, and which therefore may or may not still exist anywhere to be retrieved using a citation.  (One of my posters from that era survived for a surprisingly long time as a letter-sized printout on my mother's refrigerator, but I think it was replaced by some mushroom people drawn by my own children.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a comment says: an answer which isn't useful without its link is not an answer, for exactly this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware also that some links are better than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For publications, a link to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;digital object identifier&lt;/a&gt; may be more useful to users of this site, especially casual users, than a traditional citation.  A person who doesn't know what to do with &amp;quot;Phys.Rev.Lett.867-5309(Jenny)&amp;quot; will almost certainly know to click on the underlined text, and the digital object identifier is supposedly stable even if the publisher updates their internal linking scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Links to the arXiv preprint server also likely to be stable long term (though if you notice a link to &lt;code&gt;arXiv.org/pdf&lt;/code&gt;, please edit it to &lt;code&gt;arXiv.org/abs&lt;/code&gt;, so save casual clickers the pdf auto-download).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is great, but beware that your Wikipedia link won't say quite the same thing in five years as it does today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Youtube URLs seem to be mostly stable, but videos do sometimes disappear. Video links are also less accessible than text links, because they're mostly impossible to skim.  We mostly don't have the problem of people trolling with links to irrelevant music videos, but there is always the risk&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/6WTdTwcmxyo?t=52s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Links of the form &lt;code&gt;school.edu/~squigglename&lt;/code&gt;, as in your example, are practically guaranteed to vanish when their maintainer graduates or moves to a new position. There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sns.ias.edu/%7Ejnb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few exceptions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T14:57:04.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-09T14:29:48.690" Score="-2" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where is a statement of the purpose of physics.stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325561" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-04-09T14:32:47.180" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T19:41:59.080" Title="Where is a statement of the purpose of physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|support|scope|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14064" CreationDate="2022-04-10T03:56:43.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original purpose for the physics SE was to furnish a place where professional practitioners of the art could get assistance from their peers in solving specific technical problems in their field. Over the years it seems to have also become a place where lay people can pose questions about physics to get help understanding it across a fairly broad range of sub-topics within the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this evolution in purpose is a good thing has been a topic of debate for as long as I have lurked here (~8 years and counting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40292" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T03:56:43.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14053" CreationDate="2022-04-10T21:35:44.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd preface this by saying that I don't see a particular reason why you got those downvotes all on the same day.  The answers, at a glance, seem OK.  Maybe a moderator or admin could have a look to see if you're being downvoted by one individual.  I'm neither so I cannot investigate further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, as far as I recall the system automatically detects when someone is going through one user's questions and voting on them.  This (apparently) happened me in the past and the system will automatically reverse them if it detects them as such a pattern, which it did do sometime later (may have been days) in my case.  So maybe give this a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon to get votes up or down out of the blue on older questions and answers.  That's pretty much the site working correctly as it's supposed to keep old questions and answers to help peopel with the same or similar problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T21:35:44.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14064" CreationDate="2022-04-13T19:41:59.080" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; (available from the big question-mark symbol at top right) states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about physics, astronomy and astrophysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the statement of purpose of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T19:41:59.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-17T22:00:05.833" Score="-9" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe at this point the strict homework policy is reducing the ability of the site to grow. The initial idea of banning homework so that people don't use this site as course help has been long outdated as there are many other sites which can give provide help of that sort (eg: reddit, discord etc). So, why when this site has already so many questions rich in theory should growth be kept limited by such a policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of something similar to the policy which MSE has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-04-20T08:01:01.283" LastActivityDate="2022-04-22T03:42:04.383" Title="Has it become time to change the homework policy?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14070" CreationDate="2022-04-17T22:29:07.887" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial idea of banning homework so that people don't use this site as course help has been long outdated as there are many other sites which can give provide help of that sort&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a strawman argument. The reason we don't want homework questions here is not because we think it will keep people from cheating on their homework and think they'll give up if they can't find it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons that different people don't want homework questions here. The most salient to me is that the front page being filled with homework questions makes it difficult to find questions I actually find interesting. What's worse is that this may drive off the kind of users that want interesting physics questions instead of homework question after homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics SE's policy means their front page is absolutely inundated with homework questions. At a glance, it is currently close to 50% blatant homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, if you want a homework help site there are plenty on the internet. Why would we want to become another one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2022-04-17T22:29:07.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14070" CreationDate="2022-04-18T07:25:24.843" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Homework problems are a very important part of the learning process and no-one here thinks homework problems are an evil work of the devil¹. I say this as someone who spends a lot of their time helping students with homework problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that there is a vast number of students with homework problems and unless we discourage them we will end up swamped by them. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, but it has long been the majority opinion here that the value of this site lies in the more conceptual problems and answers. It is this that distinguishes us from the Physics Forum or Reddit. It means we will never be as large as the Physics Forum or Reddit, but this is not a concern to those of us who believe quality trumps quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to lose sight of what an extraordinary resource the Physics SE is. Perhaps you have (like me) to have started your journey in physics before the Internet existed to appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ though some undoubtably are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T07:25:24.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-21T08:46:31.423" Score="8" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many links on the SE physics site presently go to my old web address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/%7Eneum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/%7Eneum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This web site migrated to a new place,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arnold-neumaier.at&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arnold-neumaier.at&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd therefore like to ask the moderators to update all affected URLs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to have corresponding changes on the other SE sites where I was posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7924" LastEditorUserId="307392" LastEditDate="2022-06-23T16:10:21.633" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T21:44:26.577" Title="Updating links upon site migration of https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|links|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14070" CreationDate="2022-04-22T03:42:04.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NO&lt;/em&gt;!  If people want that kind of help they can use Chegg or whatever else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is one of very few that can be used as a resource across the curriculum.  Homework questions will just pollute the site and make searching impractical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-04-22T03:42:04.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-05T20:13:20.320" Score="1" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/707136&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; was flagged as duplicate to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/148216/reality-of-length-contraction-in-sr&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but I couldn't understand all the replies very well. Mr John Rennie's reply seems to agree with my initial thought process, but I could be wrong; &lt;strong&gt;Is the answer to my question a Yes or a No?&lt;/strong&gt; Because I'm confused...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we interpret the length contraction of an object (or event) that someone observes in spacetime, as a result of his own (the observer's) rotation in spacetime? Just like we can observe a different part of an object's shape in space if we move around of that object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180625" OwnerDisplayName="Nuke" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T13:29:28.097" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T13:29:28.097" Title="Post flagged as duplicate, but I still don't know the answer to my question!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2022-05-05T20:36:00.180" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-08T23:17:09.987" Score="-1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/659173/is-it-possible-to-calculate-the-fine-structure-constant&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on whether the fine structure constant can be calculated has been deleted by a moderator on the basis that the linked article is to a &amp;quot;non-mainstream publication.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the article is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the Arxiv, a very well known repository for theoretical physics. Notice it was only published there in 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author is Tejinder Singh, a professor at a very well respected and distinguished research facility - The Tata Institute of Fundamental Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that basis, I would like the post reinstated as the justification given does not stand up to scrutiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise I have no option than to think that this particular moderator is prejudiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7993" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-12T10:04:05.717" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T10:04:05.717" Title="Why has my answer to whether the fine structure constant been deleted?" Tags="|discussion|non-mainstream-physics|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14077" CreationDate="2022-05-09T01:01:11.793" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;That was me.  Out of concern that I might be prejudiced, I did some research before I removed your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4539/44126&quot;&gt;policy about mainstream physics&lt;/a&gt; says, in part,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What defines mainstream physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community. In the case of modern physics, if a theory has not been published in a reputable journal, it is not considered mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in fact true that the paper you mention &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07548&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been deposited at arXiv&lt;/a&gt; (though it would have been polite for you to link it there).  However, the arXiv is explicitly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a peer-reviewed publication.  The bar for submitting to arXiv is quite low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular paper has furthermore appeared in &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218271821420104&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a journal with an impressive-sounding title&lt;/a&gt;, where its abstract has the footnote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essay received an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218271821020016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;foreword to that issue of the journal&lt;/a&gt; explains that the entire issue is a special publication related to the essay contest.  There is a confusing sentence in that foreword which makes it unclear whether the papers involved went through the journal’s normal review process, or whether the contest board served as the reviewers.  It is sometimes the case that “reviewed conference proceedings” go through a less rigorous review process than papers submitted to a journal through its normal channels.  I have published such papers myself (with mixed feelings).  I’ve also had the experience of hunting down a promising but obscure reference, only to discover that it is a low-quality paper that was slapped together after a conference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have doubts about the provenance of the paper, I applied the first part of our policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainstream physics is physics which has been accepted by a significant portion of the physics community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have a paper which has been freely available on arXiv for half a year, which was published in a journal with a fancy name and a multi-decade publication history at the same time, and which claims to have solved &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the most famous questions in the history of physics&lt;/a&gt;.  This paper has, according to its impact-factor-conscious publisher, zero citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in no way the case that “a significant portion of the physics community” has “accepted” this calculation.  Your answer gives no hint of this, stating simply that “the fine structure constant is calculated in a paper,” and give no hint to the casual reader that any of this context exists.  That’s why I hid your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T15:26:01.117" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T15:26:01.117" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-11T19:52:13.423" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/708152/&quot;&gt;Can time dilation be used to prove that relativistic mass does not really increase at speeds near $c$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="335248" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T20:17:52.280" LastActivityDate="2022-05-18T12:46:04.697" Title="Why is this question closed? I am finding no satisfactory answers from the personal comment" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14079" CreationDate="2022-05-11T20:12:46.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should see two other questions linked at the top, where it says it's a duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QkYwZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QkYwZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think your question is really different from these other questions discussing relativistic mass, please &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; it to explain why the answers to these other questions don't answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T20:12:46.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-12T16:08:05.297" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider the question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/708306/which-time-interval-is-this-question-referring-to&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; to be a &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; question.  This is because OP didn't understand which time interval to calculate - the question wasn't about the calculation itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally I provided a hint which I think is in accordance with the current policy.  Isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I do admit that after that, I said that I will provide a complete answer to the problem if OP doesn't manage to solve it themselves.  At the time of posting the answer, I had not read the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone posts an answer to a homework-type question that gives away a complete or near-complete solution, in most cases it will be temporarily deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have since deleted that part of my answer.  My apologies, I'm quite new to the site :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="311314" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2022-05-12T18:25:08.477" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T18:25:08.477" Title="Why was this question closed as a homework-like question?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14081" CreationDate="2022-05-12T18:21:49.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not really a conceptual question, at least not what one usually means by conceptual. A conceptual question is one that asks about physics concepts. This does exclude questions that only ask for calculations, but this doesn't mean that any question that doesn't involve a computation is conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post in question here is really just asking how to interpret an unclear question. It's not really asking how to understand a physics concept, but rather how to parse a question. Additionally, one would need to work out the problem to check the work of the OP in order to verify/refute the answer by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T18:21:49.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-14T15:17:56.947" Score="15" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I have seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/708549/would-it-be-more-insightful-to-teach-students-lagrangian-hamiltonian-mechanics-b&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; closed as an &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11236/where-am-i-supposed-ask-questions-regarding-physics-education-research&quot;&gt;previous (short) discussions&lt;/a&gt; about the issue of questions on physics education topics in SE (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4244/what-kind-of-education-questions-should-we-allow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), but I do not see a rational policy about these kind of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, we should consider the existence of a tag &lt;em&gt;education&lt;/em&gt; whose description is: &lt;em&gt;How is physics taught and learned. Teaching strategies, class examples, and demonstrations; learning resources, career advice, etc.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;Why is there a tag like this if any question related to it would be classified as &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;? At least, it seems to me there is a contradiction between the existence of such a tag and the way some users (and moderators) interpret the site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I want to get to the heart of the issue, which is the relationship between physics education research and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;PSE&lt;/a&gt;. The description of PSE on the main Stack Exchange page is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A for active researchers, academics, and students of physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have difficulty understanding why a question relevant to physics teachers (academics) cannot be formulated on PSE. Taking also into account that there is no specific site for physics education questions (like is the case for mathematics education questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10682/pedagogical-questions-about-physics&quot;&gt;discussion about the same issue&lt;/a&gt;, the suggestion was to create a specific site. That could be fine. However, I think that before the process of creation of a specific site goes on, questions about physics education could be hosted in PSE. If I am not wrong, something like that was done in the past for questions about astronomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the form of the question is important. However, I disagree that every question about physics education automatically triggers &lt;em&gt;opinion-based answers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_education_research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics education research&lt;/a&gt; is a well-established field of specialization for physicists, and there is well-established scientific literature containing scientific results, not just opinions. I think that questions and answers remaining inside the perimeter of rationally justified arguments should have the right to appear in PSE. If the majority of the community has a different idea, it should be explicitly stated, and, in that case, I would suggest eliminating the &lt;em&gt;education&lt;/em&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-05-15T11:40:21.730" LastActivityDate="2022-05-15T11:40:21.730" Title="Education tag and questions on physics education" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-17T17:10:23.287" Score="7" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I solve physics problems from a textbook that I enjoy. However, I am not a student and my questions are not &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot;. I am a hobbyist. Do I need to tag these as homework questions? (I was directed here because this is a meta-question about the site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175230" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-17T17:12:18.350" LastActivityDate="2022-05-18T01:29:19.227" Title="I am not a student and my questions are not &quot;homework&quot;. I am a hobbyist. Do I need to tag these as homework questions?" Tags="|support|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14084" CreationDate="2022-05-17T20:37:49.273" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know if you're a student, and it doesn't really matter to us if you are. Tags are to inform the community about the question. This specific tag tells users that the question is &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people really like answering homework-like questions. Others really hate it and would prefer to not even see them on the site. If you tag homework-like questions as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework-and-exercises&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework-and-exercises&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework-and-exercises&lt;/a&gt;, you make both groups happier and increase your question's visibility to the people who are most likely to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2022-05-17T20:37:49.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14084" CreationDate="2022-05-18T01:29:19.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of the homework policy is not to discourage homework questions &lt;em&gt;from students&lt;/em&gt;, but to avoid encouraging &lt;em&gt;homework-like&lt;/em&gt; questions irrespective of the status of the poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions (as opposed to conceptual questions) tend to be very specific in that they tend to have limited use beyond the specificity of the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you feel your question can be worded as conceptual and appeal to the community beyond the specific numbers or setting of the cadre of the example you necessarily need to use, then it’s totally legitimate to ask such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-05-18T01:29:19.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14079" CreationDate="2022-05-18T12:46:04.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've chosen not to respond to clarifying questions about how you're defining relativistic mass.  This makes it entirely unclear what you're asking, and is sufficient reason to close the question regardless of whether there are any duplicates out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2022-05-18T12:46:04.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14089" CreationDate="2022-05-24T01:25:15.647" Score="9" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone interested in physics and creating theories for games, I tend to develop realistic physical models that might explain them out of curiosity. However, I do not know if it fits the Physics Stack Exchange website sharing them for others to check it, that is, for others to verify if the line of reasoning is correct (and also for recreational reasons as a secondary purpose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is a model I created for the famous game Agar.io to describe the radius of the sphere (player) as a function of time, considering conservation of momentum, energy gains and losses, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="281576" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-26T07:18:45.723" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T11:15:42.733" Title="Is sharing recreational physics models allowed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14088" CreationDate="2022-05-24T08:14:33.813" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether the origin of your question is &amp;quot;recreational&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;professional&amp;quot; doesn't really matter to us - what matters is that it is an on-topic question about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, if you're just asking us to check your models for correctness, these questions will likely run afoul of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583&quot;&gt;policy on check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt;. If you have more specific questions about your models, they would likely be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-05-24T08:14:33.813" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14088" CreationDate="2022-05-26T10:44:13.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's &lt;em&gt;applied mathematics&lt;/em&gt;, not physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are making models of how games work, but that is not what physics is about.  Physics attempts to model the real world.  So I would say that what you are doing is not physics.  Games sometimes have what they call a &amp;quot;physics engine&amp;quot;, but this is simply an internal model for the game's own rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you were modeling real world objects you'd also be breaking (IMO) the &amp;quot;personal theories&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; policies which are both off-topic anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are doing is probably best described as &lt;em&gt;applied mathematics&lt;/em&gt; rather than physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-05-26T11:15:42.733" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T11:15:42.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-27T09:20:22.647" Score="-3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that there are some similar questions like this one, but I have a genuine concern. For example, the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/710807/&quot;&gt;A puzzling simple question on thermodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/710509/&quot;&gt;another&lt;/a&gt; I had deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently this community does not like being asked questions on genuine problems and questions which someone may be stuck on. I see mostly concept and theory questions being asked, but I sometimes I am unable to solve tricky sums and need help. And they are not homework sums as many assume (even moderators).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is by no means a complaint, just a guy seeking how he can get his questions answered online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="336223" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-05-28T19:47:29.457" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T04:11:51.053" Title="Questions being responded to negatively" Tags="|discussion|support|scope|questions|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14092" CreationDate="2022-05-28T00:00:48.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I simply do not understand how you can believe that a question taken from a physics olympiad is not a homework question.  It may not be a homework &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt; but it is or will likely be homework for someone.  Remember that the purpose of the site is to provide answers that are useful to visitors beyond  the OP, not just for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your other question, you did not even bother typesetting it.  In all fairness, it would not have been useful to do so as it is also clearly a homework question.  Cut-and-paste of images is also highly frowned upon, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563/36194&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that, if you are stuck on a questions &lt;em&gt;for days or weeks&lt;/em&gt; (not for merely an hour!), or if you have exhausted multiple textbooks without answers, it is likely to be a conceptual question, which is what this site is devoted to (as you correctly identify).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T00:00:48.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:59:20.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as positive on potential,&#xA;but it is not present in the current work timeline. It is also not guaranteed to be implemented - when&#xA;it resurfaces the proposal may be re-evaluated and declined depending on how the situation has changed since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt;, in which a feature is something that the site developers have&#xA;definitively approved for implementation but the timing is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T18:50:00.780" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T18:50:00.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:59:20.153" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, but not in the near term." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T18:49:34.720" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T18:49:34.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14097" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:59:57.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as definitive to implementation. However, either there is ongoing investigation on the methods to implement the proposal, or there are other active projects that are ahead of it in priority for the site developers. Ideally, this tag indicates that&#xA;the proposal is intended to be implemented in the near term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-deferred&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-deferred&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-deferred&lt;/a&gt;, in which the feature is of lower priority and may be re-evaluated on feasibility at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T18:49:56.603" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T18:49:56.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14098" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:59:57.513" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, ideally in the near term." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T18:50:17.450" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T18:50:17.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14100" CreationDate="2022-05-29T17:02:57.480" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/5265/2451&quot;&gt;Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the fastest method to cool a cup of coffee, if your only available instrument is a spoon?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most successful question in this SE. Almost 800 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriousily, does it have any sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333176" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T18:44:11.130" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T18:44:11.130" Title="Why is the most voted question &quot;how to cool my coffee with a spoon&quot;?" Tags="|support|specific-question|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14099" CreationDate="2022-05-29T17:37:36.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5265/cooling-a-cup-of-coffee-with-help-of-a-spoon#comment1254165_5265&quot;&gt;this comment under the question&lt;/a&gt;, that question was linked by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://what-if.xkcd.com/71/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very popular science-communication-humor website&lt;/a&gt;, which drove a big spike in traffic and votes about three years after the question was asked.  Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1244042/score-of-a-post-over-time?postId=5265#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this plot of score over time&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dl0JN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dl0JN.png&quot; alt=&quot;votes versus time&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a question has become the top-voted post on a site, new or casual users who are interested in what the site is about might go to the list of all questions, click &amp;quot;sort by score,&amp;quot; start reading the first few highest-voted questions, think &amp;quot;hmmm, they're right, this is pretty good,&amp;quot; and add an upvote.  This positive feedback means that the most-upvoted questions tend to run away from their neighbors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common internet-name for this phenomenon is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_phenomenon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the exponential growth of a virus in a naïve population&lt;/a&gt;.  But since we're a physics community, we might call it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_runaway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thermal runaway&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T17:37:36.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14101" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T19:45:28.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered not reproducible if it is a bug that the site developers&#xA;would fix, but cannot due to an inability to recreate the problematic behavior in&#xA;spite of attempts to do so. Reports that are not reproducible typically represent&#xA;bugs that come from using unsupported browsers and tools, or because of sunspots&#xA;and other activity entirely unrelated to the site creating a momentary issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a bug can’t be reproduced due to being immediately presented as being through&#xA;an unsupported browser, thus bypassing the need of the site developers to even&#xA;attempt to reproduce the bug, then &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the reporter of a bug that receives this tag, it may indicate&#xA;that the bug was intermittent, or merely that you didn't thoroughly explain&#xA;the circumstances under which you encountered it. First, verify that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;can still cause the bug to appear, and (if you can) then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe in detail what you were doing when it happened. Include links to any relevant pages / posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;List the steps you took to encounter the bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe your environment: browser make and version, OS, add-ons, userscripts (if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include screenshots if applicable. Use hand-drawn circles to highlight key portions&#xA;of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T04:24:20.990" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T04:24:20.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14102" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T19:45:28.967" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were not able to replicate the behavior reported." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T05:49:52.713" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T05:49:52.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14103" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T19:46:15.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered reproduced only if the site developers have successfully reproduced the bug.&#xA;This tag should only be applied if the site developers cannot immediately address the bug, such as if&#xA;it requires further investigation into solutions or if the implementation of a fix would be stalled&#xA;for other reasons. When a fix is eventually implemented, the tag should become &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T17:31:48.920" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T17:31:48.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14104" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T19:46:15.457" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were able to replicate the behavior reported, but cannot address its cause at this time." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T04:25:20.763" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T04:25:20.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14105" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T19:47:26.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before posting your question, please check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;FAQs&lt;/a&gt;, and do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt; to see if your problem already has a known solution or procedure. If you cannot find an answer, we will be happy to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T04:25:05.210" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T04:25:05.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14106" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T19:47:26.447" Score="0" Body="You need help with the use of one or more of the site's features." OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T17:31:44.397" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T17:31:44.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14092" CreationDate="2022-05-30T04:11:51.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag we use to represent homework question is called homework-and-exercises. We always assume exercise-related question is homework. And Olympiad questions are also called exercises. hence it is homework. Furthermore, any kind of question (not talking about conceptual questions) in books or in any exam is considered to be an exercise. Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/315444&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315444" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T04:11:51.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14110" CreationDate="2022-05-31T05:25:29.063" Score="-4" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Rennie's answer in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/&quot;&gt;meta thread&lt;/a&gt; currently has ~3x the upvotes of ACuriousMind's accepted answer. This seems to indicate we should allow check-my-work questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we still consider these questions off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177855" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T06:01:58.143" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T12:35:36.430" Title="Why don't we allow check-my-work questions?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14108" CreationDate="2022-05-31T05:31:20.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A blatant &amp;quot;spot my deliberate mistake&amp;quot; question is always going to be off topic, but I would urge site members to consider whether the mistake is conceptual rather than arithmetical. If it's a conceptual mistake I think there is some justification for answering the question as long as your answer is mainly concerned with the concepts involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't &amp;quot;check-my-work questions should be allowed.&amp;quot; This is &amp;quot;please be discerning about what is a check-my-work question and what is actually a conceptual question.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-05-31T12:35:36.430" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T12:35:36.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14108" CreationDate="2022-05-31T06:15:19.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I look at a question is to ask whether the answer is going to be of interest to many members of the site or just to the one person asking the question. For example I've answered many questions on special relativity that are dangerously close to &lt;em&gt;check-my-work&lt;/em&gt; because I felt I could explain a general approach that would help not only the OP but lots of other people trying to learn SR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other other hand I've close voted many more &lt;em&gt;check-my-work&lt;/em&gt; questions than I've answered because I felt the answer would achieve nothing but to get the OP a better grade on that week's assignments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that &lt;em&gt;check-my-work&lt;/em&gt; is a vaguely defined category that is not an especially useful way of classifying questions, and therefore your question is not a well defined one. The point of the answer of mine that you linked is that we should look hard at &lt;em&gt;check-my-work&lt;/em&gt; questions and decide whether they are really asking for an explanation that is (a) conceptual and (b) will be of interest to lots of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T06:15:19.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-02T19:02:29.063" Score="-2" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please reopen this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/711833/cosmology-consecutive-steps-to-get-the-posterior-of-parameters-1-determine-fi&quot;&gt;Cosmology : Consecutive steps to get the posterior of parameters 1) determine fiducials, 2) Forecats with Fisher information 3) Validation with MCMC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that I estimate useful for all people working in a Beyasian/Fisher information/Markov-chain in a Physical context, especiallly in Astrophysical and Cosmological context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may help to better understand the different steps from the etablishment of a model and how to find the fiducial values of parameters up to the final estimation of parameters (posterior) to see the validity of the theoritical model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in comment, I think this would be a disgrace to not take into account all the methodology to apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you could re-open it, I would be grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user87745" LastActivityDate="2022-06-03T01:30:34.493" Title="Reopen question request that may be useful for a large public" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14111" CreationDate="2022-06-03T01:30:34.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think your question requires some physics-specific knowledge to answer, you should make it more clear. As it is, I could pretend the first paragraph of your question doesn't exist and it wouldn't change how I answer the question. The first version didn't even mention physics at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though it arose in the context of physics, as far as I can tell the question you're actually asking is pure statistics. Not only is it not really on-topic here, it would probably get answered &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; by the exposure it would get on Cross Validated that it would not get here. And anyone else looking for an answer to this question is just as likely to find it there as they are here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separately, you have too many sub-questions. You should focus on one thing per question. Your migrated question was closed for not being focused enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2022-06-03T01:30:34.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14114" CreationDate="2022-06-04T07:32:45.180" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone tell me why this question received 3 downvotes yesterday? I really thought it was well asked, it surprises me. Moreover, it received 3 upvotes before, so I believed it was alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/711007/333176&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Forbidden zones&amp;quot; of a quantum particle trapped in a harmonic oscillator potential&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333176" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-06-04T08:05:12.540" LastActivityDate="2022-06-04T10:55:59.437" Title="Strange triple downvote on my (well-received) question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14113" CreationDate="2022-06-04T10:55:59.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No one except the downvoters themselves can tell you why they downvoted your question, and if they didn't leave a comment, it's not particularly probably they will answer here instead. However, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; currently two critical upvoted comments on your question (whether they are from downvoters or not) that you haven't addressed in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if I get a comment that says something like &amp;quot;I don't understand this&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;This doesn't make sense&amp;quot;, then I'm not &lt;em&gt;surprised&lt;/em&gt; if I receive a downvote afterward, and I'm not really sure why you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You started a bounty on this question. This exposes the question to more views and hence also more votes - you got +2 votes before the bounty, and +2/-4 votes after the bounty at the time I'm writing this answer. So people's opinion about your question is split, and I wouldn't see it as strange that you got a few upvotes before the first downvote arrived - I mean, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the votes have to come before the others, and statistically there's no reason the downvotes should arrive before the upvotes or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, people tend to look at bountied questions more critically: Not only do these questions grant a lot of rep to people answering them, they are also much more visible. I suspect that people might be more willing to downvote a bountied question that they find pointless or uninterested than they are to downvote a normal question that's just not very interesting to them, but I can't really prove this assertion either way (and I personally try not to let the bounty status influence my voting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-06-04T10:55:59.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14115" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-06-05T09:54:08.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered bydesign if, after review of the detailed erroneous behavior,&#xA;it is determined that the behavior is desirable to keep in place rather than fix. This&#xA;is independent of whether or not the behavior was formerly known to the site developers&#xA;prior to the time of the report - the important thing is that the behavior will not be&#xA;altered because its current behavior is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should only be used on questions reporting what is purported as erroneous behavior&#xA;and suggests them being fixed / reversed. For when a question that is requesting a new&#xA;feature that addresses a behavior that the asker believes to be erroneous,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T17:31:21.300" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T17:31:21.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14116" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-06-05T09:54:08.540" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the reported behavior is intentional and not subject to change" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T17:31:26.167" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T17:31:26.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14118" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-14T19:18:40.883" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently trying to find labs and groups that are exploring a certain topic. The background is that I'm trying to apply to grad school and looking for labs that are suitable for my interest. The problem is that since I'm fairly new to physics research, I'm having difficulty phrasing my questions specifically enough to find what I'm looking for. I was wondering if it's appropriate to enquire about this on physics stack exchange or if it's not? I'd be asking things akin to &amp;quot;how do I find labs that are approaching this question?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;what are better ways to phrase this [conceptual question] as a research question?&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;how to find labs who are researching [insert]?&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user337317" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T22:15:29.997" Title="Is it okay to ask how to find certain labs on physics stack exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14118" CreationDate="2022-06-14T22:15:29.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you have in mind doesn’t seem to be about physics as a science, answerable by a principle from physics or a closely related field, but rather about research groups in physics.  The latter types of questions are usually off-topics on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T22:15:29.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14121" CreationDate="2022-06-16T18:49:28.643" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/714140/237923&quot;&gt;Today I questioned&lt;/a&gt; the claim that &amp;quot;SR is way easier and more beautiful to understand with tensors&amp;quot;. I think that knowing about vector spaces, their duals and bilinear forms (i.e. bilinear functions) is enough to formulate the theory and I was genuinely curious to know whether some parts of the theory can really be formulated more conveniently using tensors. The question was immediately closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237923" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-06-17T01:15:01.233" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T01:15:01.233" Title="Why was my question immediately closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14120" CreationDate="2022-06-16T18:55:14.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I thought the close reason as opinion-based was reasonably obvious, I've now left a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/714140/sr-is-way-easier-and-more-beautiful-to-understand-with-tensors-is-it#comment1596797_714140&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; making it explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether one formulation of a theory is &amp;quot;easier&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;more beautiful&amp;quot; than another is a matter of subjective opinion, not an objective question about physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T18:55:14.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14123" CreationDate="2022-06-18T19:27:24.150" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/714397/315444&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; as example, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/714408/315444&quot;&gt;someone&lt;/a&gt; solved the problem for the author whereas mine was related to hint (cause there's some steps left to think/solve). But -1 on my answer is for what? Solving a homework question isn't our goal. IIRC, it's (solving homework for someone) against the rules also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315444" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T19:53:14.903" Title="We shouldn't answer homework question directly, should we?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14122" CreationDate="2022-06-18T19:53:14.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that the question is closed (and obviously close-worthy under our homework-and-exercises policy), I would submit that no one should have answered the question in the first place, full answer or not. I see no point in litigating individual votes on answers to off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T19:53:14.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14125" CreationDate="2022-06-18T22:01:05.310" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a math question &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/4475036/342834&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/4475036/342834&lt;/a&gt; in an area where physicists are likely to have a great deal of practical background.  I had originally intended to post the Physics SE, but forgot to switch communities.  I believe posting the same question to both communities is frowned upon.  &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; I wanted to move this question to the physics community, how should I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117014" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-06-21T00:20:17.723" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T00:20:17.723" Title="(How) Should I move a question from Math SE to Physics SE?" Tags="|support|questions|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14124" CreationDate="2022-06-19T07:17:30.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click the &lt;em&gt;flag&lt;/em&gt; link under your question and choose the option &lt;em&gt;In need of moderator attention&lt;/em&gt;, then leave a message for the mods asking to migrate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it isn't clear to me whether the question would be better here. Maybe give it a few days where it is and request a migration if you don't get and answer on the Math SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-06-19T07:17:30.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14073" CreationDate="2022-06-23T16:10:15.530" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for raising this one to our attention. We've now executed the requested change. As with all link replacements, we do expect a bit of routine cleanup work, so be on the lookout for any cases that look odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual, let us know if you run into any major fallout as a result of the change and we'll see what we can do to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="307392" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T16:10:15.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-27T09:55:48.397" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a -10 serial upvote reversal today. I was a bit puzzled since I had not seen much activity on my account recently. It seems that yesterday, someone upvoted two of my answers on neutron stars and the algorithm decided this was serial upvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is upvoting two answers, even in quick succession, really &amp;quot;serial upvoting&amp;quot;? How long do you have to wait between upvoting two answers by the same user to avoid this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it that the serial voter was upvoting lots of answers in a short period of time and only two of them were mine (which would make more sense)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2022-06-27T10:57:19.463" Title="How serial does serial upvoting need to be?" Tags="|bug|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14127" CreationDate="2022-06-27T10:57:19.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As rob mentions in a comment, voting reversals that don't seem to correspond to serial voting are almost certainly due to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/379788/263383&quot;&gt;cleanup of duplicate votes&lt;/a&gt; which is running this week for the first time in the site's history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't explain exactly of what nature the race conditions are that allow a user to vote for a post twice, but if you got a single vote (which the &lt;code&gt;-10&lt;/code&gt; indicates - remember that questions and answer both grant 10 reputation for an upvote since a few years) reversed by this then that means that some user voted for one of your posts twice (likely by accident, not deliberately abusing the race conditions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't worry, there's no &lt;em&gt;serial&lt;/em&gt; voting involved here, but a different cleanup of illegitimate votes and the help center text for voting reversals just hasn't been changed yet to indicate this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-06-27T10:57:19.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14130" CreationDate="2022-06-27T15:16:49.627" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask for an example in which the minimum energy principle is used (thermodynamics). However, I've never seen a question in which examples are required, so I got the doubt that it's not allowed to ask for examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="206319" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-06-28T15:05:59.997" LastActivityDate="2022-06-28T15:05:59.997" Title="Can I ask for an example?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14129" CreationDate="2022-06-27T16:10:18.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions asking for examples are &lt;em&gt;list questions&lt;/em&gt;, discussed on meta already at e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/50583&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10823/50583&quot;&gt;May I ask a big-list question?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13518/50583&quot;&gt;When are questions with multiple different possible answers good?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10186/50583&quot;&gt;Question asking rare examples of the use of SO(8) and Spin(8) triality&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall the question you have in mind is likely to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-06-27T16:10:18.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14073" CreationDate="2022-06-29T13:22:21.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Redirect&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that links to this domain are redirected to the new domain. For example, take this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/592907&quot;&gt;Can you represent neutron as stable superposition of decay products?&lt;/a&gt; (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/revisions/592907/1&quot;&gt;current revision&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;It contains link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/%7Eneum/physfaq/topics/unstable.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/topics/unstable.html&lt;/a&gt; - and after clicking on the link I am redirected to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://arnold-neumaier.at/physfaq/topics/unstable.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arnold-neumaier.at/physfaq/topics/unstable.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the links supposed to be replaced even if the redirect is working?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other Stack Exchange sites&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that some links &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1067159/list-of-all-edits-where-edit-summary-contains-given-keyword?keyword=univie.ac.at&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have been edited by the Community user&lt;/a&gt; - but I do not see any edits &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1610076/edits-with-the-given-word-in-the-summary-user-and-date-range-multisite?num=1000&amp;amp;accountid=-1&amp;amp;Date1=2022-06-22&amp;amp;Date2=2022-06-24&amp;amp;keyword=univie.ac.at&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on other sites&lt;/a&gt;. (Both queries return 53 posts - the first one searches only on Physics, the second one is network-wide.)&#xA;Was this on purpose? Are the links on other sites supposed to be edited manually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3a%22%2Amat.univie.ac.at%2f%7Eneum%2A%22&amp;amp;pagesize=50&amp;amp;page=2&quot;&gt;Searching for url:&amp;quot;*mat.univie.ac.at/~neum*&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; returns 57 posts at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remaining posts on Physics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that there are still some posts here on Physics Stack Exchange. At least, I am getting some links from &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1585616/posts-containing-the-given-word-id-and-body?word=mat.univie.ac.at/%7Eneum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1585616/posts-containing-the-given-word-id-and-body?word=mat.univie.ac.at%2F%5B%25%5D7Eneum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. (Although those posts are found through &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/data-explorer/info&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt;, I did not know how to modify &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3a%22%2Amat.univie.ac.at%2f%7Eneum%2A%22&quot;&gt;search on this site&lt;/a&gt; to find such posts. At least some of them are shown if I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3A%22*mat.univie.ac.at%2F%257Eneum*%22&quot;&gt;search for &lt;code&gt;%7Eneum&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;~neum&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Amat.univie.ac.at+url%3Aneum&quot;&gt;Searching for url:mat.univie.ac.at url:neum&lt;/a&gt; - as suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/379940/what-is-a-reliable-way-to-search-for-urls-containing-tilde/379942#379942&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - returns only 6 results, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this just an oversight? Or the bulk replacement tool cannot edit those links? Are they supposed to be edited manually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the links from the above queries - I have checked that at the time of posting this answer they contained the &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/632610#633122&quot;&gt;Phase plots: The exact particular solution is a function of time, can't find fixed points. Now, in this situation, how to draw phase plots?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/592907&quot;&gt;Can you represent neutron as stable superposition of decay products?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/588446#591507&quot;&gt;How can I estimate a confidence interval for experimental results with only one run?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/277565#277597&quot;&gt;Where is the evidence that the electron is pointlike?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/193506/edit&quot;&gt;What is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\phi(x)|0\rangle$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/32769&quot;&gt;Probability vs. degree of belief in facts of nature (&amp;quot;&amp;quot;Plausibility&amp;quot;&amp;quot;)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/32085&quot;&gt;Why are particles different sizes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/32028&quot;&gt;What is a tensor?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/26825&quot;&gt;What are some critiques of Jaynes' approach to statistical mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/24586&quot;&gt;Concept of a point particle in quantum mechanics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/23094&quot;&gt;Does locality emerge from (classical) Lagrangian mechanics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22819&quot;&gt;Entanglement and relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22610&quot;&gt;Do &amp;quot;&amp;quot;shape&amp;quot;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&amp;quot;volume&amp;quot;&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;&amp;quot;space&amp;quot;&amp;quot; have any meaning for an electron?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22522&quot;&gt;Suggested reading for renormalization (not only in QFT)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22521&quot;&gt;Is QFT mathematically self-consistent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22515&quot;&gt;Is the form of the Lagrangian relevant before the renormalization procedure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22428&quot;&gt;What does the appearance of a classical particle fundamentally reduce to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22421&quot;&gt;Are there books on Regularization and Renormalization in QFT at an Introductory level?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22366&quot;&gt;The nature of time, according to quantum field theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22029&quot;&gt;Are W &amp;amp; Z bosons virtual or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/22019&quot;&gt;Is the quantum analog of a probability distribution the wave function or the density matrix?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/21810&quot;&gt;Energy Measurements in a Two Fermion Double Well System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/21800&quot;&gt;Electrons - What is Waving?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/21745&quot;&gt;In layman's terms, what is a quantum fluctuation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40443" LastEditorUserId="40443" LastEditDate="2022-06-30T21:44:26.577" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T21:44:26.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-29T20:10:17.783" Score="15" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;After &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12568/should-we-test-lowering-the-vote-to-close-and-reopen-threshold&quot;&gt;discussion about this was started two and a half years ago&lt;/a&gt;, I'm here to share that I'm enabling a test of three-vote close on Physics today. Firstly, I'd like to thank you for your patience. There's been a lot of discussion about this and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13273/what-happened-with-the-experiment-to-lower-the-vote-to-close-threshold/13308#13308&quot;&gt;I mentioned my primary concerns about making this change here the last time I posted&lt;/a&gt;, about six months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time, I wasn't certain that my data was quite correct and I've gotten a chance to review it. I will say that, while there was clearly something wrong with the data, in the end, the results were the same - essentially, if your primary hope is that three-vote close will prevent lots of close-worthy questions from being answered... and the answer is mostly - it'll prevent some but not the majority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chart below needs a bit of explanation - it graphs the number of answered questions closed per month by users - moderators are excluded since this change would only impact user closures - grouped by whether the answer was posted before or after the third vote to close - that is, whether the outcome (&amp;quot;got answered&amp;quot;) would have been changed if three-vote closure had been live on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OutcomeNotChanged_NoModClosures&lt;/code&gt; - the upper (yellow) line indicates the number of questions per month that were closed when the first answer came in before the third vote to close. Each month, this was around 250-350 until July 2021, and it's since dropped to around 100-150 per month - this change coincides with your last moderator election.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;OutcomeChanged_NoModClosures&lt;/code&gt; - the lower (blue) line indicates the number of questions per month that were closed when the first answer came in after the third vote to close. Each month, this was around 30-40 until July 2021, and it's since dropped to around 20-30.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IiiC6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IiiC6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Graph as described in the paragraph and bullets above.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at recent months, here are the numbers - as with the chart above, this only covers closed questions that have answers, not all closed questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Month&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Outcome not changed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Outcome changed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Total&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;% not changed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;% changed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2022-01-01&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;156&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;41&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;197&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;79.2%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;20.8%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2022-02-01&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;123&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;30&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;153&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;80.4%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;19.6%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2022-03-01&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;111&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;127&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;87.4%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;12.6%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2022-04-01&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;132&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;163&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;81.0%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;19.0%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2022-05-01&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;133&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;20&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;153&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;86.9%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;13.3%&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These numbers would have been lower the last time I checked, since it was prior to (or very soon after) your last election. It's not uncommon on medium sized sites like this for an election to have big impact on reviewing since the person who gets elected is frequently an active reviewer - as such, I wanted to check in on the numbers for the balance between community closure and moderator closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I somewhat expected, while users had been closing more without moderator action prior to the election, since, it's pretty much 50-50.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLwgU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLwgU.png&quot; alt=&quot;Graph of questions closed and reopened per month with lines for &amp;quot;all closed/reopened&amp;quot; &amp;quot;moderator closed/reopened&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;community closed/reopened&amp;quot;. Prior to August 2021, users did more of the closures than moderators. After that point, they did about equal amounts.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be a drop in overall closures, so I wanted to check whether the number of questions completing reviews had dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EzTcp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EzTcp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Graph of questions being reviewed per month based on their outcome - close, leave open or nothing. The percentage of completed reviews (closed and leave open combined) is relatively flat, between 70% and 90% with a slight increase over time.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, it seems like the percentage completed hasn't changed or it's improved (it's more likely to be between 80-90% competed than 70-80% completed) - so if there's a reduction in questions closed it's either due to there being fewer nominated for closure initially or there are fewer close-worthy questions asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I do notice is that you have a relatively high percentage of &amp;quot;leave open&amp;quot; reviews, which can indicate disagreement between the first flagger and the reviewers or it can mean that you get a lot of edits that improve questions to the point they're salvageable before getting closed. While this is generally under 10%, this is high compared to many other sites that I've reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that the moderators also mentioned as a concern is just how full the close review queue is at times. This can seem like a huge load that will be difficult to overcome and I can understand that. It's much nicer to see only a handful of questions in review rather than 100 or more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all of these reasons, I've enabled three vote close and reopen as of this posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please use answers here to bring up any concerns or issues you run into. Because there's so much more close activity here, we'll be checking in after about 6 months to make sure things aren't going off the rails but if you're noticing issues, please bring them to my attention before then - our main concern is close-reopen warring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176067" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T13:52:54.307" Title="Testing 3-vote close and reopen" Tags="|discussion|reopen|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-02T08:16:22.923" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to understand the Doppler effect across different mediums on the SE site and came across the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/327387/doppler-effect-and-change-in-medium&quot;&gt;Doppler Effect and change in medium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it's a homework question, I was attempting to understand the solution posted by the OP. Even after rereading and attempting it myself, I am unable to understand the answer posted. I believe the OP is now inactive based on his profile, hence I didn't post my query as a comment. I avoid asking it as a new question as it may be flagged as a duplicate. How can I get the said answer further clarified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305568" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-07-02T20:54:31.867" LastActivityDate="2022-07-02T20:54:31.867" Title="Further clarification needed on someone else's question" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14207" CreationDate="2022-07-02T08:18:46.460" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I open a link on Stack Exchange, the math equations just can't show correctly. How do I fix it? (I've tried reinstalling Chrome, but it wouldn't work. But things go well in the Edge browser.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when I open &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/381328/why-particle-hole-symmetry-and-chiral-symmetry-are-called-symmetries&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; I see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xXnhS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xXnhS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328871" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-07-30T14:14:19.057" LastActivityDate="2022-10-10T11:21:09.987" Title="Why do equations display weirdly on my computer?" Tags="|support|bug|status-norepro|mathjax|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14134" CreationDate="2022-07-02T13:27:43.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Follow-up questions are fine. Be up-front about it. Clearly state how you understand the existing answers, and what your question is in light of those answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-07-02T13:27:43.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-03T17:25:22.550" Score="17" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed over the last few months that some moderators add short comments when flags are declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very good initiative as it often provides context on the thinking of the mods in taking their actions, and I would like to strongly encourage all moderators to continue in this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T06:24:18.540" Title="Comments on declined flags: thank you mods" Tags="|discussion|flagging|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-03T17:22:16.047" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone help me find the post of the person who wondered why, with all the light rays bouncing off of multiple objects and crossing in complex ways, do we see distinct objects instead of a light &amp;quot;blur&amp;quot; of some sort. He put a drawing in that showed many light lines crossing and said that was how he construed what our eye should be seeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a neuroscientist with a strong interest in physics. I have an answer for him but I cannot find the original question. Could someone help please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238786" OwnerDisplayName="Cate B" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2022-07-05T13:25:58.770" LastActivityDate="2022-07-05T13:25:58.770" Title="Searching for a recent question: Why do we see distinct objects?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14138" CreationDate="2022-07-03T17:50:32.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/713354/179151&quot;&gt;this it&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we do have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;search feature&lt;/a&gt;. It might help to tell us what you tried doing to search for this on your own so we know how to help users in the future find certain questions they are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2022-07-03T17:50:32.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-08T13:03:37.617" Score="7" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Bioacoustics Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt; has reached the Beta stage and is LIVE! It is also in a critical stage, and we need your help to keep it alive.  Bioacoustics uses methods from physics, signal processing, biology and more, so you may be interested to join!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have only 2 weeks to prove we have the community to support the site! Please help as you can!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JOIN&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;VISIT&lt;/strong&gt;: Make it a habit to check in on the site regularly. We need &amp;gt;&amp;gt;500 visits per day!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VOTE&lt;/strong&gt;: We need to show participation! Vote on all good Q/A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ASK&lt;/strong&gt;: Have a new bioacoustics-related question? What about your older questions? You can even ask/answer your own question! These questions will be archived for future use, so ALL good questions are welcome! We need &amp;gt;&amp;gt; 10 questions per day!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ANSWER&lt;/strong&gt;: Have an answer to one of the questions, or additional information? Share your expertise where you can! Is there a question you are often asked? You can pair up with someone to ask/answer it again to be archived! If someone asks you a question-- tell them you will answer it on the Stack Exchange! We need ~2.5 answers per question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INVITE &amp;amp; SHARE&lt;/strong&gt;: Invite others to join! Share on social media, with your collaborators, etc.!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DISCUSS&lt;/strong&gt; the proposed site at the Meta page to suggest features and get help&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DO NOT DELAY!&lt;/strong&gt; Participate today and every day that you can. We know our community can support a site, but it takes time to create this habit. Unfortunately, this proposal has a deadline and we need ALL the help we can get, as often as possible!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do we need a SE site in Bioacoustics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it is one of the fastest growing fields in both marine and terrestrial science. It gives us a unique opportunity to observe animal behavior and track populations’ distribution non-invasively.  Additionally, if done correctly, it can be easier and cheaper to collect data than traditional survey techniques. Most bioacoustic equipment is several thousand dollars/euros, sure, but that equipment can be left unattended, collecting data, ranging from weeks to months. This makes it more accessible to a larger group of researchers, and smaller companies are cropping up to make the startup costs even cheaper. However, analyzing that data can be a headache. You can find yourself with terabytes of acoustic data, and not know what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But I’m not an expert, so this doesn’t sound like it’s for me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need folks from ALL walks of life! We need experts, yes, but we also need enthusiastics, students, related professionals, and folks that are just curious.  We need folks asking questions that those of us conducting research wouldn’t think to ask in addition to the folks that can answer those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please, check it out, and join us! And if you have questions, you can reach out to bioacousticsse@gmail.com or shannon.rankin@noaa.gov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EXEMPLE QUESTIONS WHICH INVOLVE PHYSICS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/425/why-are-high-frequency-sounds-absorbed-more-than-low-frequency-sound&quot;&gt;Why are high frequency sounds absorbed more than low frequency sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/403/microphone-calibration-stability&quot;&gt;Microphone calibration stability?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/155/is-it-possible-to-estimate-particle-velocity-from-a-pressure-microphone&quot;&gt;Is it possible to estimate particle velocity from a pressure microphone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/95/modeling-acoustic-propagation-for-underwater-environment&quot;&gt;Modeling acoustic propagation for underwater environment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/67/simulating-sound-propagation-to-test-analysis-workflows&quot;&gt;Simulating sound propagation to test analysis workflows&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/49/how-to-compensate-for-atmospheric-attenuation-of-a-broadband-sound&quot;&gt;How to compensate for atmospheric attenuation of a broadband sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/25/why-does-sound-from-ships-propagate-better-in-deep-water-than-in-shallow-water&quot;&gt;Why does sound from ships propagate better in deep water than in shallow water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/3/can-we-measure-distance-from-the-animal-harmonic-calls&quot;&gt;Can we measure distance from the animal harmonic calls?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/522/distant-impact-on-sea-mammals-of-propagated-sound-wave-of-underwater-nuclear-tes&quot;&gt;Distant impact on sea mammals of propagated sound wave of underwater nuclear tests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="336424" LastEditorUserId="336424" LastEditDate="2022-07-09T19:06:37.500" LastActivityDate="2022-07-09T19:06:37.500" Title="New bioacoustics SE site may be of interest to you" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-10T11:30:14.270" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;My post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/716162/&quot;&gt;Is there a steady state for two conductors at different temperatures connected to a battery?&lt;/a&gt; was closed under homework policy. Nevertheless it is clear that is not a homework. How do I reopen the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-10T11:52:08.523" LastActivityDate="2022-07-10T11:52:08.523" Title="Question closed due to homework policy?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14143" CreationDate="2022-07-10T23:57:02.940" Score="6" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to throttle serial editors who insert minor corrections, unnecessary links and make other similar trivial edits to posts with the sole purpose of farming reputation by editing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———————————&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional info: the situation is clearly getting worse with a limited number of users proposing 10s of time daily edits as trivial as changing all in-line equations to block equations and adding capitalization to meet the minimum character requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-07-27T11:10:40.847" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T11:10:40.847" Title="Discouraging serial editors" Tags="|discussion|editing|reputation|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14142" CreationDate="2022-07-11T00:10:49.807" Score="17" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users cannot gain more than 2k reputation from edits, cf. the &amp;quot;Can I earn reputation?&amp;quot; section &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/76284/263383&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, so there is a natural and rather low limit to such &amp;quot;farming&amp;quot;. Note that once users have more than 2k reputation their edits are no longer suggested but directly applied to a post, so they do not confer reputation after that anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Minor corrections are not unnecessary ones, and the rejection reason of &amp;quot;too minor&amp;quot; for suggested edits was abolished SE-wide a while ago with the argument that any improvement is still an improvement, so I would caution against throwing &lt;em&gt;minor&lt;/em&gt; corrections that are nevertheless still corrections in the same bin as truly &lt;em&gt;unnecessary&lt;/em&gt; edits. Again, users can earn at most 2k reputation from such edits, so if you are concerned about users gaining major privileges that way, don't be (remember that close and reopen voting comes only at 3k reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users who repeatedly suggest edits that are rejected in review will be eventually banned from suggesting further edits, just like users providing low-quality answers or questions are banned from making further posts, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/78192/263383&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you still see users repeatedly suggesting (or making) pointless or even harmful edits, consider pointing this out to them in a comment - you can ping editors of a post via &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt;-mentions in comments. If you don't want to engage personally in comments or if they have ignored your previous comments, you can always raise a custom moderator flag explaining the issue. Pointless or even harmful edits are just as detrimental to quality as any other low-quality contributions and the moderator team will deal with them in that fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T00:19:09.243" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T00:19:09.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14142" CreationDate="2022-07-11T06:33:53.527" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're being unkind when you assume the purpose is to farm reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect I know the user you mean since I've been seeing a lot of suggested edits that consisted mostly of adding links that didn't seem essential to me. But I have seen no reason to suspect the edits weren't suggested in good faith, and most of them I have approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only get two points for an accepted edit and some of the edits showed a significant amount of effort. Perhaps I am being over generous, but my reaction was that at worst the user is guilty of an excess of enthusiasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T06:33:53.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-11T15:02:12.507" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we all know, scientific data must be gathered, processed and interpreted. Now, there is a somewhat old Nature article reporting on an experiment conducted by the authors, actually a replication of other published experiments, in order to test a null-hypothesis. They conduct a statistical analysis and acknowledge that the experimental results violate the null-hypothesis. Still they conclude that the null-hypothesis holds, but that there is an unknown variation source messing it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic straddles different scientific disciplines, but at its core it can be cast as a physical problem. Would a question about this article and its arguments be allowed on this site? I fear not, but I have trouble figuring out a rational argument why it should not, so I would appreciate an explanatory answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="259972" LastEditorUserId="179151" LastEditDate="2022-07-12T11:12:24.380" LastActivityDate="2022-07-12T11:12:24.380" Title="Is critique of mainstream interpretation of experimental results allowed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-07-13T10:22:55.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14147" CreationDate="2022-07-12T18:27:28.617" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there are already policies, but I'm asking specifically about the situation I'm providing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/717902/&quot;&gt;How can quantum tunneling happen conceptually?&lt;/a&gt; and there were a lot of responses that were helpful, many views, and a good amount of upvotes for the questions. The answers were really awesome, and I was asking for clarification for two answers in the comments because I think two answers seem to be conflicting. Why did this question get closed, and how can I get it reopened? I don't understand this website at all. Many people were answering, bookmarking, upvoting, and commenting, so why did it have to get closed? It wasn't unclear or confusing to everyone engaging in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user337317" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-12T19:05:58.317" LastActivityDate="2022-07-12T19:05:58.317" Title="Why was this question closed that was really active?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14146" CreationDate="2022-07-12T18:57:34.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote to close this question, but I will remark on a few general aspects of the closure of questions, some of which the question seems to not realize, and then offer some speculation on the question in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14133/50583&quot;&gt;running a trial&lt;/a&gt; where questions need only &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; instead of the standard five votes to get closed or be reopened. This means that questions - for better or worse - currently get closed &lt;em&gt;faster&lt;/em&gt; than both you and the close voters might be used to from past closures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The level of engagement a question gets in the form of votes, answers, comments, etc. is not really related to the question of whether a question is &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; or not, in particular not once a question hits the list of Hot Network Questions like this one did (this is visible in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/717902/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt;), which causes the influx of a lot of viewers that are not necessarily familiar with physics in general or physics.SE's policies in particular. Engagement measures only how &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; the question is to a broader audience, but &amp;quot;interesting to a broader audience&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;on-topic for physics.SE&amp;quot; are two distinct notions (that of course have broad overlap at the point of our most popular, on-topic questions!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, when a question is closed as being unclear - as in this case with the &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot; reason - the correct response is to &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; the question and add the missing details or clarify what was ambiguous. You can tick a checkbox when editing the question that the edit resolves the reasons for closure and then the question will be enqueued for reopen review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In particular for this question, while none of the close voters left a comment and so this is only speculation, I suspect the issue is the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;know&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How does the object &amp;quot;know&amp;quot;[...]?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;': You evidently are aware that this is a strange sentence because you felt the need to put &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; in scare quotes, but you didn't really explain what you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; mean by this: Are you assuming that quantum mechanics must be a &lt;em&gt;local&lt;/em&gt; theory and so the value of the potential at a &amp;quot;far away&amp;quot; place cannot affect the wavefunction of a particle confined to a box? Are you assuming that each particle somehow has to &amp;quot;run&amp;quot; the computations of quantum mechanics and you're asking how that happens? Something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the meaning is obvious to you, but it is not to me (although I am somewhat confident it is my first option above if you pressed me to pick one). It is always good to keep in mind that other people will generally &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; draw the exact same implications from something we write, and to be &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; about contradictions and missing steps when we ask about them. There is no need to hide behind the nebulous &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; when there is something more precise you could write instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-07-12T18:57:34.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14133" CreationDate="2022-07-15T06:17:37.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An observation. In the two weeks before this announcement, we had a relatively constant 100-ish questions in the close queue.   Since the change, the close queue has completely emptied; there are currently seven questions in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about your statistics: our close community is &lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt;, like fewer than a dozen regular reviewers over the last month, and probably 90% of the votes in the close queue cast by about six people.  You mention that we have a lot of “leave open” reviews, but if I look at the advanced review statistics, I say, “oh, it’s those two users, who have an educator’s patience and respond thoughtfully to questions that sometimes are initially dismissed by the community.” Looking at aggregate statistics can be misleading if the data set being  aggregated is very small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irrespective of the outcome of our three-vote experiment, I think there would be value in coming up with ways to encourage more &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; users to be part of the regular-reviewer population. In the old days we might  have “gamified” this by adding a badge.  For instance, a user might get a bronze badge for reaching the “the queue has been cleared!” message where they’ve reviewed everything that’s available, and a silver or gold badge if they can get to the end of a queue on some respectable  number of different (perhaps consecutive) days.  You approve the only pending suggested edit in the queue? Bronze badge.  You do that every day for a month?  Silver badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven’t noticed any changes in the available badges for ages, and “gamification” isn’t trendy in the way it used to be. But I have noticed other recent innovations in “hinting” across SE. For instance, if I visit a site where I’m a lower-rep user and I upvote a nice answer, sometimes I get a little modal dialog that says, “hey, you haven’t voted on any questions in a while! also upvote questions!” A message like that to potential queue reviewers might be possible using similar logic. If someone has a habit of casting good close votes but not of visiting the queues, and the length of the queue is “large” compared to the number of frequent reviewers, perhaps casting a close vote could pop up a similar dialog which says, “hey, you haven’t visited the review queues for a while! consider clicking here and reviewing just this one question.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from my spitballing about getting a more diverse community of reviewers: I’m really pleased that the close queue is manageable again, hooray about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T06:17:37.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14137" CreationDate="2022-07-15T06:24:18.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this a post about appreciating moderator feedback, I suppose it’s appropriate to reply (on behalf of the team) with “you’re welcome.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T06:24:18.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14151" CreationDate="2022-07-19T02:10:24.873" Score="11" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: per rob's comment, I've started a Physics Chat room for this purpose here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/137879/binomials&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/137879/binomials&lt;/a&gt;!&#xA;I am an undergraduate physics major.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I am not referring to a study group for doing homework. I am envisioning a study group for the sake of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a group of interested and motivated students who frequently discuss physics associated with Physics Stack Exchange? If not, would anyone like to start one with me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about a group of students (beyond introductory physics) who self-study or learn via other methods who would benefit from discussing questions or concepts more fluidly, i.e., in conversations or chats. For example, someone I talk to frequently is self-studying Quantum Mechanics from Griffiths over the summer and we discuss problems and concepts from that book (@relativisticcucumber). Likewise, I am working through some sections of Jackson E&amp;amp;M and discuss with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I miss out on the opportunity to work with other interested students due to the nature of my university's size and emphasis (on not physics). It seems Physics Stack Exchange would have a greater concentration of the described students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326183" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-19T07:14:22.543" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T07:14:22.543" Title="Are there any advanced undergraduate study chat rooms on Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14150" CreationDate="2022-07-19T05:58:55.533" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth a try, and I see you've now created a chat room for the purpose. The problem is finding enough like minded site members to keep the room active. Over the eleven years I've been a site member I've seen this attempted many times and it rarely works out. So don't be too disappointed if it's not a success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have specific questions about physics then asking them in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;the h Bar chat room&lt;/a&gt; is always worth a shot. We have a broad range of physicists hanging out there and there's likely to be someone who can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T05:58:55.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14133" CreationDate="2022-07-20T13:52:54.307" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll add what I have noticed in my own behavior so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have started getting more into the close queue more than I had been recently. My activity had dropped off, partially due to the business of life, but also because voting for question closure seemed somewhat futile. Questions that clearly needed to be closed would sit in the queue for a while, and in that time they would be answered anyway. At that point, closure is basically just an indicator of site policy rather than an actual preventative measure and a tool to use to get users to improve the quality of their question (thus improving the quality of PSE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have been getting into the reopen queue more as well. Knowing that questions can be closed so easily makes me want to check the reopen queue to make sure there aren't questions that were closed too hastily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to leave more helpful comments on questions in both closure/reopen queues rather than just voting and moving along. Regarding point 1, now that questions are actually being closed before receiving answers, a comment on how to improve the question is much more helpful, as users whose questions are quickly closed will now have more of a reason to actually improve their posts rather than just get their answer and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this to say, so far, at the very least, I think this change has the potential to make the site much better. More users leaving helpful comments guiding users on how to reopen their question, as well as more users being active in the queues themselves (as Rob points out), should give the 3-vote closure the best chance at being an improvement and not a detriment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T13:52:54.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-22T18:32:26.957" Score="0" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any thoughts on opening a YouTube channel for Stack Exchange physics?  This would be to better the quality of science education on YouTube.  If a transcript were included, that could be searched along with the title.  The videos would be under peer review as questions are in stack exchange.  It might be a way to add credibility to Physics videos that are on YouTube.  I know it wouldn't be practical to attempt to review the multitude of videos already there.  Rather, maybe people could submit their own videos to stack exchange as papers are submitted for peer review.  This is just the beginning of an idea I hoped could get discussed.  You have a good system here.  It might be a way for people to find good quality physics videos.  I have been viewing some topics for years on General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but am still searching for some answers that might be explained in a video format. Any suggestions, thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231801" OwnerDisplayName="Joe Bigler" LastEditorUserId="231801" LastEditDate="2022-07-30T06:20:49.347" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T06:20:49.347" Title="Is there a YouTube channel for Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-27T11:54:16.207" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello I recently was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/232990/are-there-any-known-negative-heat-capacities&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and the top &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/232996/339095&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; had this line “Remember that you cannot do classical thermodynamics without equilibrium anyway.” I want an explanation of this line. The answer was made 6 years ago and the answerer’s account seems to have been deleted. So commenting on the answer won’t help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I feel my question is too trivial to make a new post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched a bit and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/135647/339095&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; just keeps defining what thermal equilibrium &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339095" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T12:36:13.623" Title="How to ask for clarification on a very old answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14154" CreationDate="2022-07-27T12:36:13.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just ask a follow-up question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel like your request for clarification is &amp;quot;too trivial,&amp;quot; then spend a few minutes trying write down an answer for yourself. Either you'll succeed (great!) or you'll get stuck on something more specific, which you can use in making the nature of your follow-up question clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if you are finding other material (answers, books, etc.) which seems like it ought to be helpful but isn't, some explanation of what that other material says versus what you &lt;em&gt;wish&lt;/em&gt; it said will help the community to understand what the meat of your follow-up question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T12:36:13.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-27T16:58:42.203" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I commented to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/720292/44126&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; because it had &amp;quot;particle&amp;quot; in the tags, which I edited out and left a comment to that effect. Of course the revised final does not have &amp;quot;particle&amp;quot; in the tags, and the comment becomes irrelevant, BUT, please remember that there are older physicists answering and commenting , who continually have to check if they should still be doing so. Disappearing comments do not help in this. Please leave a comment for the writer to delete the useless comment, instead of just tidying up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-27T17:59:08.473" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T17:59:08.473" Title="Who has the power to delete comments?" Tags="|support|comments|moderators|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14156" CreationDate="2022-07-27T17:29:03.627" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diamond moderators can delete comments.  Comments which meet certain criteria may disappear after flagging by certain non-moderator users without further intervention; I don't know where those criteria are documented, but I've seen it happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That particular question is a little weird because it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/720267/44126&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/720292/44126&quot;&gt;twice&lt;/a&gt;.  You edited one of them, and then commented about your edit on the other one.  This kind of confusing strangeness is a good reason for fixing closed questions rather than re-asking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please leave a comment for the writer to delete the useless comment, instead of just tidying up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect us to start doing this for comments which are clearly obsolete, because it means the moderators would have to touch every such post at least twice: once to identify an obsolete comment, then sometime later to check whether the obsolete comment had been removed by its author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T17:29:03.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-28T05:51:46.443" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I set a bounty, I lose my reputation to someone else.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;If I lose my reputation because of a bounty, will it be the same as losing reputation because of downvotes, bad questions etc.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I mean will I lose privileges and badges as well?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304112" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-28T05:59:40.003" LastActivityDate="2022-07-28T07:02:51.137" Title="If I set bounties do I lose privileges?" Tags="|support|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14158" CreationDate="2022-07-28T06:05:29.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;the Physics SE help page&lt;/a&gt; on bounties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your new reputation brings you below the requirement for any privileges, you will lose access to those privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badges are not linked to your rep and won't be lost just because your rep decreases when you set a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2022-07-28T07:02:51.137" LastActivityDate="2022-07-28T07:02:51.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-28T18:41:20.400" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/720454/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it was almost immediately closed, so I edited trying to make it more focused, but it still remained closed. The question is about the mathematical background needed to understand a physical subject (QFT in GR), &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; considering the mathematics needed to understand the singular parts (QFT and GR) that constitute it and that I already know. I really want to know how to understand the subject, so how can I ask the question in a way that fits the site policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="267112" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-29T08:32:57.053" LastActivityDate="2022-07-29T08:32:57.053" Title="How can I ask this question without it being closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14135" CreationDate="2022-07-28T19:13:58.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We haven't been able to reproduce this so I've retagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-norepro&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-norepro&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-norepro&lt;/a&gt;. If others begin experiencing this issue again feel free to add any relevant screenshots, details on browser, device, etc. That way moderators or staff can retag as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-review&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-review&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-review&lt;/a&gt; if this issue is experienced again in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289458" LastActivityDate="2022-07-28T19:13:58.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14160" CreationDate="2022-07-29T03:37:02.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difficulties are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it’s not possible to answer this question using physics principles so &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; it’s not a good fit for the site,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it’s not possible to make a sensible resource recommendation without understanding your background,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You question has its own answer: the background needed is that required to understand the book by Fulling.  Depending on 2. and on what is meant by “basics” of QFT and GR, this could be a lot or not much.  Clearly, despite your claim that you know the topics independently, you clearly need to know more, but more than what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a personal opinion, I’m not sure it’s possible to “understand a physical subject (QFT in GR), without considering the mathematics needed to understand the singular parts (QFT and GR) that constitute it”, but maybe I’m misinterpreting what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-07-29T03:42:29.130" LastActivityDate="2022-07-29T03:42:29.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14160" CreationDate="2022-07-29T04:55:18.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note that (at the time of writing) your question has one reopen vote, and I've just added a second so there's a decent chance of a third vote reopening your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, I'm not sure whether you'll get a useful answer. This site works best when we get a well focused question to which we can write well focused answers. Your question feels to me more like the opening of a discussion as at the moment it's a bit vague what you do and don't know, and the site was never intended for forum type discussions. Good luck anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-07-29T04:55:18.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-30T17:50:06.420" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/720759/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed by three users, none a moderator. I thought (from observation) that five were needed, or a moderator? What are the rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-07-30T18:23:14.903" LastActivityDate="2022-07-30T18:23:14.903" Title="What are the rules for closing a question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-07-30T18:17:27.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-01T15:34:28.933" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know what Poiseuille's equation is then &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/721019/2451&quot;&gt;Physiology question about velocity and radius&lt;/a&gt; is perfectly clear and a straightforward answer solves the questioner's conceptual difficulty. Yet the question was closed with the tag &amp;quot;Needs details or clarity&amp;quot;. Was this appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-08-01T15:58:11.587" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T15:58:11.587" Title="Why was q721019 closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14167" CreationDate="2022-08-15T00:06:03.220" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13811/do-we-want-accepted-answers-to-be-pinned-to-the-top&quot;&gt;Do we want accepted answers to be pinned to the top?&lt;/a&gt;. I read the accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21942/why-do-ice-cubes-come-out-easier-from-top-trays?rq=1&quot;&gt;Why do ice cubes come out easier from top trays?&lt;/a&gt;. I understand what it's saying. I think it's a good answer. I actually read it because it was accepted and then found it a good answer and upvoted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46757" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-08-15T09:38:22.553" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T23:25:15.560" Title="Are accepted answers generally good answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14166" CreationDate="2022-08-15T23:25:15.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Accepted&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;most upvoted&lt;/em&gt; serve two different functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An accepted answer is one the question asker found &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; more useful and allows them to personally reward a post in addition to any upvote.  The most upvoted answers are, in general and outside the specific needs of the asker, of good quality and the majority of users found them most useful.  Those are two different purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should not think of them as related operations - they're independent of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2022-08-15T23:25:15.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-17T10:07:35.457" Score="4" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to the question here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/723418/&quot;&gt;What does $|λ,μ\rangle$ mean in Dirac notation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I've noticed a lot of questions closed or downvoted when the answer is obvious to someone who already knows the subject well, or when the answer would just be very short and uninvolved. However, I think that many of these questions can cause a learner to stumble for a long time (certainly I've lost a lot of time on things myself that only became &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; in hindsight).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the reason given for closure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions and check-my-work questions are considered off-topic here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;clearly does not apply to the question; the context is confusion about a learning video, which is neither homework nor work of OP. The score is negative, and also there are &lt;strong&gt;no comments on why it was closed or downvoted&lt;/strong&gt;. The user, with 11 reputation, is not experienced with stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we could greatly improve the site by helping to &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; new members like this if there is something wrong with their question, rather than silently closing the question. This can simply be done by focusing close votes on quality, not quantity, when it comes to close/downvoting, by explaining why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, it seems like this question may have been closed for no good reason, but I'm not intimately familiar with policy here; under which criteria was the answer closed? Is there ever justification for closing a comprehensible question without any comment to an OP who is new to the site? I can find some gripes with the post myself (could be formatted rather than / in addition to screenshotting, could explain better what &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Psi_{\lambda, \mu}$&lt;/span&gt; is) but it was clear enough for me to correctly answer what was being asked without asking for further clarification, and I feel like it would be more productive to focus on explaining to such new users how to improve their question, rather than silently removing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65074" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-08-17T10:18:45.837" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T22:31:22.350" Title="Why was this question closed and downvoted with no comments?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14168" CreationDate="2022-08-17T21:50:04.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I VdTC as unclear: is this a question about Dirac notation (as per title) or about eigenvectors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure how one is supposed to answer such a question for which there is a descriptive video with the answer screenshotted.  I had initially written a comment but deleted once I realized that the answer was in the framed shot and the OP didn’t bother to put in context, like what is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Psi_{\lambda,\mu}$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we could greatly improve the site by helping to teach new members like this if there is something wrong with their question, rather than silently closing the question. This can simply be done by focusing close votes on quality, not quantity, when it comes to close/downvoting, by explaining why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally disagree.  One should &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; posters to have done due diligence on posting questions.  If you want people to invest time in providing good quality answers, invest time in producing a good quality question.  If we don’t stick to expecting due diligence, the site will be inundated by variants of questions like this one where OPs expect the community to function like an instant answering service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, this question is so specific and its scope so narrow that I wonder what value it has on this site beyond the viewers of the video.  Finally, I agree in all respects with @JonCuster&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; some technical question requires an answer, then chat functions as default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-08-17T22:31:22.350" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T22:31:22.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-20T17:21:30.407" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask a 'homework'-like question and I ran into a problem with the style of it because I have never seen a question like that. The general problem was that I didn't know how to express an operator which is in terms of creation and annihilation operators, as an operator in terms of the field operator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question would be helpful to many people as the issue isn't specific to this one computation and can be applied in many circumstances. Are there any edits I can make to get this question reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/723485/&quot;&gt;How can I find a operator originally expressed in terms of raising and lowering operators in terms of the field operators?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="217903" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-08-22T12:05:09.783" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T12:06:11.757" Title="How can I make this closed question address the general problem with the computation?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14170" CreationDate="2022-08-21T17:18:24.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of those who VTCd so here are some &lt;em&gt;minimal&lt;/em&gt; steps for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove the screenshot as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10563&quot;&gt;this guideline&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As you point out, there is an identity involving &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\delta$&lt;/span&gt;-functions and exponentials.  What is this identity and explain why can't you use it. It's a pretty standard identity so find it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;momentum operators involve derivative, so what is this identity and why can't you use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you need to use commutation relations.  Does this help you or not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that these last two  points are where the conceptual struggle is located.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the following can help to identify the conceptual hurdle.  Can you compare with ordinary 1d momentum operators or a harmonic oscillator with given frequency?  In other words, if you started with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a^\dagger a$&lt;/span&gt; and wanted to covert that to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$p$&lt;/span&gt;, how would you go about doing this?  What is the dispersion relation and how does this come into play in relating &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$k$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\omega$&lt;/span&gt;?  Is it important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can re-edit your question so as to make it broader, and include the above elements so you clearly identify where the (conceptual) problem lies, then &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; your question will be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that writing goods questions is hard, and writing good homework-like questions is harder.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10938/36194&quot;&gt;There's a thread&lt;/a&gt; for discussion, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/36194&quot;&gt;another thread&lt;/a&gt; containing good examples, so be inspired by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-08-21T17:18:24.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14174" CreationDate="2022-08-26T18:59:34.320" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the current site policy we have is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7039/168783&quot;&gt;resource recommendation questions should be community-wiki&lt;/a&gt;. Also, as far as I know, only moderators can make other people's questions community wiki. Given these, is pointing out resource recommendation questions that are still not CW a fair use of the &amp;quot;moderator attention&amp;quot; flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking because while, as a non-moderator, it seems like a way of helping to identify questions that need to be made CW, if too many users flag those posts then the moderators could be facing some problems with too many flags once a new resource recommendation post comes by (I do not know if flags from different users on the same post for the same reason count as one or many).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T21:18:40.250" Title="Should I flag non-CW resource recommendation posts for moderator attention?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|moderators|resource-recommendation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14173" CreationDate="2022-08-26T19:20:11.747" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, please flag such posts - there's no guarantee that moderators don't miss these posts otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, please also don't worry about overwhelming us with flags: If you feel something deserves a flag, flag it, that's what flags are for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2022-08-26T21:18:40.250" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T21:18:40.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-28T08:14:22.973" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for books on non equilibrium statistical mechanics and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/226929/71413&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; severely lacking in good answers. Also the reason for closing it was a &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; question about statistical field theory books, which I don't even know what that is although I had a course in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in uni.&#xA;Can this question please be unlocked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71413" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-08-30T07:55:15.960" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T07:55:15.960" Title="Could book recommendations for non-equilibrium statistical mechanics be reopened?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|reopen|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14175" CreationDate="2022-08-29T06:52:48.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post has now been reopened as statistical mechanics and statistical field theory are different topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T06:52:48.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14179" CreationDate="2022-08-30T13:05:40.163" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;With some frequency I stumble across posts that, while interesting, are asking something about the History of Physics rather than Physics itself. As a consequence, with the same frequency I find myself typing the closing reason &amp;quot;I believe this should be asked over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I checked the Help Center and it seems mods can migrate questions to any site in the network, but since I feel this is a sort of common closing reason not listed on the current options, I wanted to ask your opinion on whether it would be interesting to add it as a closing reason. What I have in mind is to add HSM to the list of &amp;quot;This question belongs in another site in the SE network&amp;quot; group, alongside Meta and Math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question that has been asked before is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13037/168783&quot;&gt;this one about adding an &amp;quot;Other&amp;quot; option&lt;/a&gt; for the list of migration sites, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5690/168783&quot;&gt;this one about Electrical Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4869/168783&quot;&gt;this one that also asks for an &amp;quot;Other&amp;quot; option&lt;/a&gt;, but I believe the specific case of HSM hasn't been discussed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm raising this discussion because I feel like I might be voting to migrate to HSM more than to Math, although I don't know the actual data for the whole site (would love to see the numbers if anyone has them!). Also, it seems the previous discussions might be outdated. How does the community currently feel about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T23:41:23.013" Title="Is it worth adding a button for migrating for History of Science and Mathematics in the close reasons?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14178" CreationDate="2022-08-30T13:22:37.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think a migration path to hsm.SE is a good idea. Let me remind you that &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8935/50583&quot;&gt;most history questions are still on-topic here&lt;/a&gt;, even if they are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; on-topic at hsm.SE. In general, questions should only be voted to be migrated when they are &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; here, not simply when you think they might be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; elsewhere. When &lt;em&gt;authors&lt;/em&gt; want to have their questions migrated (which is perfectly fine even when the question is on-topic herE), they have to use custom moderator flags anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T13:22:37.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14178" CreationDate="2022-08-30T23:41:23.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before today, the last question to be migrated to HSM was &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/q/14457/7425&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, all the way back in May.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrations tend to be problematic for a number of reasons. If a question is migrated away, it is gone with no chance to be reopened without moderator intervention. Even more problematic, if the question is closed on the target site, it is rejected and is no longer able to be edited or reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fairly typical pattern network-wide is closing a question that has minor issues, editing those issues, and reopening it. Migrations break this pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, questions shouldn't be migrated unless they are already on-topic on the target site &lt;em&gt;without needing any edits&lt;/em&gt;. This is sufficiently unusual that in most cases I think it is better to encourage the poster to edit their question and ask it on HSM themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/261196/380389&quot;&gt;When should we consider adding a default migration path?&lt;/a&gt; makes it clear that it would be rejected by SE anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single digit migrations in the last 90 days and/or rejection rates that can order a drink without ID are signs that the path will be a waste of time to establish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T23:41:23.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14183" CreationDate="2022-08-31T15:00:00.343" Score="3" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that are not clearly described are quickly closed down by a moderator, who are almost unlikely to help the asker clarify their confusion by asking suggestive questions such as &amp;quot;do you mean...&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;do you want to ask...&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can an asker do to make their question, which has not yet been conceptualized clear enough, acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly，it sounds like a paradoxical question. On the one hand, if the questions are clearly defined, the asker can search the relevant literature on the academic engine directly with the specific keywords and concepts and get the relevant answers, which is more efficient and systematical than posting on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is usually referred to when a right keyword or clear statement is not found. However, if it is not clear enough (even worse, sometimes, the question is interdisciplinary), it will usually be closed by the administrator without a specific reason and won't be reopened even when the askers provide more details and clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the role of Stack Exchange as a bridge between academic research and practice and a more open alternative to earlier question and answer websites to help promote the development of new research will be limited. Is there anything the questioner could do to make the question &amp;quot;clearer&amp;quot; and more specific?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341761" OwnerDisplayName="Kevin" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-09-01T17:44:25.960" LastActivityDate="2022-09-01T17:44:25.960" Title="How can I ask a question on Stack Exchange about a poorly conceptualized physical phenomenon to avoid being closed by a moderator?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14181" CreationDate="2022-08-31T15:23:29.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are not clearly described are quickly closed down by a a moderator, who are almost unlikely to help the asker clarify their confusion by asking suggestive questions such as &amp;quot;do you mean...&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;do you want to ask...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, many questions are closed by regular users. Typically moderators close questions only if it is an obvious &amp;quot;bad post&amp;quot; or if they will be the final close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, why do you think those who vote to close asking clarifying questions is unhelpful? If a question is not clear, and someone indicates what is not clear by asking a question, the OP can edit the post accordingly. At the risk of coming across unhelpful here... what do you exactly mean by this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, if the questions are clearly defined, the asker can search the relevant literature on the academic engine directly with the specific keywords and concepts and get the relevant answers, which is more efficient and systematical than posting on Stackflow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is literally the purpose of this site. Really any question asked here could be looked up elsewhere or learned somewhere else. Certainly those answering the questions themselves have not found the answers on stack exchange. There is nothing wrong with asking questions here that could be looked up and learned elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it is not clear enough (even worse, sometimes, the question is interdiscplinary), it will usually be closed by the admin without specific reason and won't be reopened even the askers provide more details and clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have evidence to support this? Every closure has a reason. And many questions are reopened after users edit the question. I have voted to reopen many questions that started off unclear and then ended up clearer after edits. Of course there are cases where questions fall through the cracks, but do you have a reason to believe there is a systemic issue here where questions that are sufficiently edited are still not reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering if there was anything the questioner could do to make the question &amp;quot;clearer&amp;quot; and more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Add more details. Ask a specific question that can have a specific answer. Listen to those who are commenting questions and suggestions and edit the post accordingly. And look through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; and relevant meta posts to learn how to ask a good question. Spending time on PSE also helps develop an intuition of what is a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; post as well. I know when I first got here I did not have a full understanding of these things. Over time I picked it up though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179151" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-08-31T17:36:40.553" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T17:36:40.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14181" CreationDate="2022-08-31T15:28:57.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My usual advice in this situation is to participate constructively in the community until you have earned enough &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; that you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;talk in Physics Chat&lt;/a&gt;.  Our main chat room is &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71/the-h-bar&quot;&gt;The h Bar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The realtime back-and-forth nature of chat makes it much more conducive to &amp;quot;spitballing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;workshopping&amp;quot; questions which might not yet be well-formed enough for the main site.  There are also users who use chat to discuss and solve questions which would be off-topic on the main site.  But of course the chat room gets used for lots of things.  There may or may not be anyone in there at all, and there may or may not be anyone who is interested in your particular question; patience and politeness are the keys to getting help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T15:28:57.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14181" CreationDate="2022-08-31T22:23:26.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you cannot pose a clear question, don’t post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your premise appears to be incorrect: the purpose here is not to help &lt;em&gt;you and only you&lt;/em&gt;.  Rather, it is to help the broad community by answering your question.  In other words, your question should be valuable to the community beyond your (necessarily more narrow) interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you cannot pose a question clearly, what value will this question have &lt;em&gt;to users of the site&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T22:23:26.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-11T15:06:17.570" Score="14" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/727063/&quot;&gt;Why is the ground warm during winter and vice-versa?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;deemed to be &amp;quot;about engineering&amp;quot; and closed, when the OP clearly stated he was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking about how to employ the difference in temperature between surface and ground at a depth  but instead &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; there is a difference in temperature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;My question is not why we feel it warm, but why is it warm?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the meta post linked in the motivation to close it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Physics is a natural science. It seeks to study how and/or why nature works the way we observe. Engineering applies our understanding&#xA;of nature to specific, real-world problems, creating new devices,&#xA;products, or processes to solve those problems.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this not a question on &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; nature works the way we observe (why the ground layers are not at the same temperature of the surface) and &lt;strong&gt;not on how&lt;/strong&gt; to employ this difference to solve the problem of heating/cooling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me this question was closed because some answer focused more on the application of the physics than on the physics itself. But isn't the question about the underlying physics?&#xA;The book I cited in my answer is &amp;quot;Partial Differential Equations &lt;em&gt;in Physics&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;in engineering&amp;quot;. I was entertaining the thought of expanding my answer with the reasoning employed by Sommerfeld, but not anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside: closing this question prevents further answers to the physics question to be added, for example on how much of the heat is due to the surface heating from the sun, and how much comes from the hot core inside. What will the average temperature at 10 or 100 meters be if we switch off the sun, or if we remove the hot core?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35604" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-09-11T15:10:17.040" LastActivityDate="2022-09-11T15:10:17.040" Title="How is this question &quot;about engineering&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14190" CreationDate="2022-09-13T11:30:33.627" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I routinely check for new questions with tags I follow, using &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged?tab=Newest&amp;amp;tagMode=Watched&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged?tab=Newest&amp;amp;tagMode=Watched&lt;/a&gt;. Given my Watched tags, that list often is clogged with closed questions. Can I remove closed questions from that list display? Some option &amp;quot;only show open questions&amp;quot; somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I trust folks here, so if a question got closed, I don't want to be bothered with it anymore. Would make my stackexchange experience a lot more fun without those distractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243047" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-09-13T11:59:40.697" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T20:45:18.713" Title="Avoid display of closed questions" Tags="|support|feature-request|closed-questions|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14189" CreationDate="2022-09-13T14:28:28.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If doing a search, you can simply add closed:0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is currently no way to combine &amp;quot;my watched tags&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;closed:0&amp;quot;. There &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/7913/263383&quot;&gt;have been requests&lt;/a&gt; that the display of closed questions would be one option in the filters but this is currently not implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of that, the next best thing is to first use the URL in the question to get the expanded search term. Add closed:0 to that search term, and voila. If your list of watched tags is rather long, you, like me, may be running against limitations e.g. in the search bar. But with a bit of manual editing you can create a lengthy, static URL that looks like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=[tag_1]+or+[tag_2]+...+or+[tag_n]+closed:0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that works. Obviously and unfortunately, this URL doesn't update when your list of watched tags changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243047" LastEditorUserId="243047" LastEditDate="2022-09-13T20:45:18.713" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T20:45:18.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14192" CreationDate="2022-09-16T17:58:12.380" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;How exactly does having a question that I posted being closed, affect me? Does it increase the chance that I'll be banned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276451" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-09-17T09:00:21.480" LastActivityDate="2022-09-17T09:00:21.480" Title="A question on having my questions closed" Tags="|support|questions|closed-questions|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14191" CreationDate="2022-09-16T19:48:01.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Kyle Kanos mentions in the comments, the question ban algorithm is a secret, even the diamond moderators don't know the details. But we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know that closed questions with a negative score aren't good, and that deleting such questions doesn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only see one closed question on your profile, and it has a positive score, so you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be ok, unless you also have negative-scored questions which you've deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/726933&quot;&gt;that question&lt;/a&gt; you state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that PSE doesn't usually accept questions like this, But I'm really lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowingly posting an off-topic question is a &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; idea, even when you're desperate. It could even encourage people to close-vote or downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, that question is &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; on-topic. We have a strict policy regarding homework-like questions here on PSE. As the close notice says, you need to ask about the &amp;quot;underlying physics concepts&amp;quot; which will help you do the homework problem. And you've kind of done that! But your question is dominated by that photo from the textbook(?), and that photo makes your question look like a typical off-topic homework question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to get rid of that photo and write any equations you want to refer to using &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/notation&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt;. Clearly state the relevant concepts that you're sure about, and then ask about the thing that's puzzling you. Eg, &amp;quot;I know A, B, and C are true. And I think that D is also true, but that would imply Z, which doesn't seem right&amp;quot;. Remember to focus on the concepts, not the arithmetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you edit your question to make it on-topic, it will go into the review queue, and it will be bumped to the top of the Active page, so there's a reasonable chance of it being re-opened (although that's not guaranteed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T19:48:01.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14194" CreationDate="2022-09-16T21:21:04.927" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just me, or has there been an increase in upvoting recently? Can mods determine any trends? Is there a reward for upvoting that could drive such an increase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/728071/whats-the-force-between-2-bodies-from-different-frames-of-reference&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which to me make absolutely no sense as written, yet nevertheless received two upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-09-17T08:20:55.067" LastActivityDate="2022-09-17T08:20:55.067" Title="Has there been an increase in upvoting recently?" Tags="|discussion|voting|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14193" CreationDate="2022-09-16T21:34:16.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mod analytics tools show no remarkable trends - the total number of upvotes and downvotes over a time period correlates with the total number of posts made in that time period pretty well, and the ratio between up- and downvotes also hasn't really changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you notice more (or more &amp;quot;unexplainable&amp;quot;) upvotes, it's much more likely you happen to look at more or different posts than you did before, or you just started paying attention to different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T21:34:16.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14196" CreationDate="2022-09-19T13:59:34.553" Score="7" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question 450511 &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450511/does-a-physical-interpretation-of-density-matrix-cross-terms-exist&quot;&gt;Does a physical interpretation of density matrix cross-terms exist?&lt;/a&gt; of which I recently updated my answer, has been marked as duplicate of question 536038&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/536038/non-diagonal-matrix-element-in-density-matrix&quot;&gt;Non-diagonal matrix element in density matrix&lt;/a&gt; which is actually newer and considerably less clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can question 450511 not be flagged as duplicate? For the future, is there a way to put forward a similar issue without asking a question on meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1619" LastActivityDate="2022-09-19T14:21:11.690" Title="Question marked as duplicate older than supposed duplicate" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14195" CreationDate="2022-09-19T14:21:11.690" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've reversed the closure and closed the newer question as a duplicate of the older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, in general, age alone is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the only criterion for how we close questions as duplicates. Particularly when both questions have been left open for long enough to accumulate answers, there is no &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; rule that the older question always &amp;quot;wins&amp;quot;. However, in this case it seems clear to me that the older question is the better original, both from the way the question itself is worded, because it has two lengthy well-received answers, and also because it has more total views already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-09-19T14:21:11.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-27T01:30:32.997" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted the following question several hours ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/729494/&quot;&gt;Electric field inside sphere - Griffiths Problem 2.14&lt;/a&gt;. In doing so, I showed my attempt in detail and provided my thought process behind it. Within two hours (and downvotes within &lt;em&gt;minutes&lt;/em&gt;) -- and after only one answer was posted that I felt did not answer the question -- the question was promptly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking a homework question here; I'm trying to prepare for an exam, thus the need to make sure that I'm applying concepts correctly. I also think it is unfair to lump me into the category of new users who lazily post in the style of &amp;quot;Here's my homework question, do it for me&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this question be updated so as to be reinstated? I'm trying to learn, and while the topic may seem rudimentary (a) we all start somewhere and (b) all I get told is that I'm using the wrong formula without any further explanation. How is an environment like this conducive to learning physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="346764" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-10-02T14:40:02.747" LastActivityDate="2022-10-02T14:40:02.747" Title="How can I make my question on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14197" CreationDate="2022-09-28T02:30:42.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With due respect: it may not be an assignment question &lt;em&gt;to you now&lt;/em&gt; but it is definitely an assignment-type question: how can it be otherwise when you quote the textbook for the statement of the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot see how it can be salvaged in its current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer provided is actually a very good direction to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FYI the integration you are attempting is technically non-trivial because of the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vert \vec r-\vec r’\vert^3$&lt;/span&gt; in the denominator, and a change of sign in the antiderivative between two regions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-09-28T02:36:38.450" LastActivityDate="2022-09-28T02:36:38.450" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14197" CreationDate="2022-10-01T22:16:00.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;General comments&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will first share my point of view about this particular bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn, and while the topic may seem rudimentary (a) we all start somewhere and (b) all I get told is that I'm using the wrong formula without any further explanation. How is an environment like this conducive to learning physics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) At least in my opinion, Physics SE tends to be quite aware that we all start somewhere. Most people on the site will tend to know or be interested in something about Newtonian Mechanics, but only a handful will be discussing a given very specific research topic, for example. From my point of view, most of the questions and answers in this site are exactly to help people that are starting from somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) While Physics SE is a website for asking Physics questions, not all questions belong here. For example, some questions are way more adequate to Mathematics SE, although they might relate to Physics in some way. For many reasons, the community of Physics SE has decided some questions are not suited to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of someone who's asking, this is usually a bummer. Fairly often I'm stuck on a problem and want to ask something here, but I know the question will get closed due to being homework-like. This is definitely quite frustrating, and I've seen many people complaining about this both on the site and in real life, when chatting with friends of mine who come in here now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is important to consider that this site works based on other people voluntarily answering questions for free (or for internet points hahaha). As I started staying around for a little longer and taking the time to answer other people's questions, I started noticing that I was also naturally complaining about some questions. For example, from the point of view of an answerer, it is a bummer when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;equations are written on MS Paint instead of MathJax, making them difficult to read&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions that just want you to solve their homework for them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions that are asking lots of different stuff in the same post and you can't answer because you only know how to address one or two points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. These sorts of behavior need to be discouraged by the site to avoid it from spreading. The issue if these sorts of things become too common is that you'll eventually learn users no longer want to answer questions, and the premise of the website ends. Very often, edits are enough to correct the question and put it to a good standard. Whenever I have the time, I convert equations and texts posted as images to MathJax and leave a heads up for the author so they correct it next time. Closing a question that lacks focus has the author focus on what they are interested and perhaps separating the questions into a few more, so they become manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question in particular doesn't have the issues I mentioned, but it does have some characteristics that do not match the site's style. In my point of view, an issue with &amp;quot;What did I do wrong?&amp;quot; is that while your question is particularly short, many aren't, and actually expect answerers to read paragraphs of calculations to find a mistake somewhere. If the site ever gets too filled with these sorts of questions, people will just stop answering. Furthermore, &amp;quot;Where is my mistake?&amp;quot; is a question that applies only to you, not to a broader community. Hence, from the point of the view of other users, these sorts of question are hardly useful. They are too specific to be found through search engines and you'll hardly end up in them to understand why this particular method works or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How to improve this question in particular?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main suggestion is to get rid of &amp;quot;What did I do wrong?&amp;quot;. Using Griffith's question as an example is not an issue (textbook questions are very often good starting points for deeper questions), but asking what you did wrong is sort of a red flag. As you mentioned in your post, you are confident that you did the integration right and checked it. Hence, you don't really need the details of the computation in there, nor do you need people to check what you did wrong. You already noticed that the problem seems to be in your expression of Coulomb's law (which is indeed wrong, as pointed out by the answer). Hence, isolate what you are actually concerned with and leave the details of the solution to the problem out of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A structure for the question (I absolutely expect you will not copy this verbatim) could then be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm attempting at solving Griffiths Problem 2.14, which is [text]. I know how to do it with Gauss's Law, but when I tried using the fact that the electric field is given by [expression] I got a different answer, which led me to wonder whether that expression holds in every situation. What are the limits of applicability of this equation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice this question has the following different features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doesn't provide complete solutions to lazy people that might lurk on the site later;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the focus is no longer on checking your computations, but rather answering a conceptual question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, not everyone on the site might agree that this reformulation is adequate. Each person has a different interpretation of the site's rules and it is overall built as a community effort. In my particular understandment, this formulation would be more adequate (and it would allow for fairly interesting answers on how Coulomb's law gets adapted in Electro&lt;em&gt;dynamics&lt;/em&gt;, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastActivityDate="2022-10-01T22:16:00.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-02T08:41:19.990" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an interesting post by post by user # xyxy. I tried to reach other posts by the same author, searching by &lt;em&gt;user:xyxy&lt;/em&gt;, but I didn't get any returns, since the account has been deleted. Is it impossible or there is a way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="157860" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-10-08T10:56:59.377" LastActivityDate="2022-10-08T10:56:59.377" Title="How do you trace posts from inactive members?" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14204" CreationDate="2022-10-04T17:06:40.480" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is no tab &amp;quot;bookmarks&amp;quot; anymore in the activity section of the profile. Are all my bookmarks gone? Will they come back? If not, can the bookmarks be recovered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the same happen to the &amp;quot;following&amp;quot; tab? There I save interesting questions/ answers and it would be problematic if the list would be deleted, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232314" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T19:45:32.913" Title="Where are my bookmarks?" Tags="|bug|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14202" CreationDate="2022-10-04T17:12:35.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue is explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/382019/bookmarks-are-evolving-into-saves&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that the bookmarked threads will be migrated to the new feature &amp;quot;saves&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new tool actually looks nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232314" LastActivityDate="2022-10-04T17:12:35.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14202" CreationDate="2022-10-05T06:23:17.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/382019&quot;&gt;Update Oct 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saves has been temporarily disabled network-wide due to some site performance problems. These problems didn't appear until partway through migrating existing bookmarks into saves. We've temporarily reverted back to Bookmarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All saves, private notes, saved lists, and migrated bookmarks are unavailable. They are still saved in the database and will be available again when we turn Saves back on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All unmigrated bookmarks are currently available while Saves is disabled and Bookmarks is turned on. When we turn Saves on again, we'll resume the migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2 Oct 5&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site is stable again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saves is enabled again for all users network wide. Your saves, saved lists, private notes, and migrated bookmarks should be available to you now. Bookmarks that were made during the outage period will be unavailable until we finish migrating tonight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All bookmarks should migrate tonight. Until then, sites are either fully migrated or not migrated. The only exception is Stack Overflow which is still partially migrated with 360k of 14mil bookmarks migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a maintenance window planned starting at 00:00 UTC. If all goes as expected, it should be done by 02:00 UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2022-10-05T19:45:32.913" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T19:45:32.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14206" CreationDate="2022-10-05T09:26:28.843" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/730637/book-recommendation-for-blackhole-thermodynamics&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and got an upvote on it but it's not reflecting in my reputation. Why is that? Is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gNpyK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gNpyK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2022-10-05T09:56:15.027" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T09:56:15.027" Title="Upvote not reflecting in reputation points?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14205" CreationDate="2022-10-05T09:56:01.790" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question has been turned into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/263383&quot;&gt;community wiki&lt;/a&gt; because it is a resource recommendation question, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7039/50583&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki posts do not grant reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T09:56:01.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14135" CreationDate="2022-10-10T11:21:09.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a personal problem rather than a general one. Turns out that I have to manually delete all directories related to Chrome, because uninstalling Chrome is not enough. Now all things show quite normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328871" LastActivityDate="2022-10-10T11:21:09.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-11T15:45:00.680" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/731536/finding-the-number-of-meetings-in-the-given-time&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; today which is a shortened version of the previous question I posted here so that users may get the point I'm trying to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a &amp;quot;check-my-work question&amp;quot; and neither a &amp;quot;home-work question&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the given links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I ask a homework question on this website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See if an existing question helps you: None&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask about the specific concept that gives you trouble: That's what I'm asking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reference the source: The question is complete in itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the homework tag: Did&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also conforming to everything in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange/9084#9084&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm a new user and just closing the question despite the included details, formatting, etc. and providing no reason via comments whatsoever doesn't seem right at all. (I'm really unable to make out head or tail why the question should be closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that, in light of the above, the question should be opened but despite reviews it has been choosed to kept closed. Hopefully it will be opened or I'll get at least some valid and constructive comments/answers that tell me how the question that I asked is wrong, or the way that I have asked is wrong etc. so that I may improve the question in whatever way I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347808" LastActivityDate="2022-10-11T15:45:00.680" Title="Why is this question closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-12T06:28:57.003" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/731663/&quot;&gt;Could the particles of the standard model be states of a smaller set of particles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user338734" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-10-12T06:31:17.147" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T06:45:18.387" Title="Why did you close my question? the link does not answer it" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14209" CreationDate="2022-10-12T06:45:18.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked questions asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What paper(s) or theory(s) describe or prove that the elementary particles that we have determined today cannot be made up of smaller more fundamental particles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so it specifically includes theoretical evidence as well as experimental evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T06:45:18.387" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-12T11:30:28.510" Score="1" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only indication that I got was that someone considered this not to be mainstream physics. They don't explain why or what I could edit to improve my post. Furthermore, this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a legitimate physics question because I have been working on it with a physicist in real life. In any case, I am now banned from making new posts, despite the fact that I only &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; 2 posts (now 1). So, this kind of moderation is effectively a trial, judgement, and execution with no possibility for appeal, improvement, or education. I don't understand how this approach edifies anyone whatsoever. What kind of community just murders people on sight without warning or explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the message that I get when I try to ask a new question: Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from your account...Please do not create a new account. &lt;strong&gt;Instead, work on improving your existing questions by editing them to comply with the site's guidelines and address any feedback you've received.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only have 1 question on my account and I haven't received any feedback! This is not community improvement; this is ostracism. How can you learn if you can't ask questions? How can you ask good questions if you don't have feedback? In all seriousness, what option do I have but to make a new account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/731568/&quot;&gt;Is it possible to show that gravity emerges from cosmic expansion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this paper: &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11658&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11658&lt;/a&gt; the authors discard unitarity in favor of isometry for the time evolution of quantum systems. In this alteration, they are able to show how time is a quantum error correcting code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, in this paper, since the motivation toward isometry is also directly linked to the expansion of space, it is clear that in this framework, this expansion is responsible for the creation of new information which is isometrically mapped to information in the past. Thus, the expansion of space is a mechanism for the creation of quantum information that encodes the flow of time. Therefore, it seems intuitive to me that spacetime curvature may arise from the regional differences in the rate of expansion. Since energy densities are known to cause spacetime curvature, I am wondering if the expansion of the universe is a default state from which energy densities necessarily depart in their expansion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are energy densities regions of spacetime that cannot expand at the same background rate as empty space and, therefore, do not produce as much information change as empty space does in its expansion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="278148" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T07:10:47.757" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T07:10:47.757" Title="Banned because 1 question was considered not mainstream?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14211" CreationDate="2022-10-12T12:12:50.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I closed your question as non-mainstream because the core of your question is about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the expansion of space is a mechanism for the creation of quantum information that encodes the flow of time. Therefore, it seems intuitive to me that spacetime curvature may arise from the regional differences in the rate of expansion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is not really supported by the text of the paper you refer to, hence a personal theory (or &amp;quot;intuition&amp;quot;) that you're asking us to evaluate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for you being unable to ask questions: No user is blocked (temporarily or permanently) from posting on our site just because of a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You, however, are subject to the automated question block due to excessively many deleted questions, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9699/50583&quot;&gt;this meta answer&lt;/a&gt;: The problem is not the question that is still visible nor only the one that got closed as non-mainstream, but that you have altogether now &lt;strong&gt;ten&lt;/strong&gt; deleted questions and only one non-deleted question. Deleting a question does not erase it when the system evaluates the quality of your question record, on the contrary, deleted questions are weighed negatively just as closed questions are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, please note that &amp;quot;making a new account&amp;quot; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an option here: As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/57682/263383&quot;&gt;this meta.SE post&lt;/a&gt;, sockpuppets on Stack Exchange sites are not allowed to circumvent system restrictions, such as asking questions from one account while the other is restricted from doing so. Users found in violation of this are likely to have their secondary accounts deleted and their main account suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T12:12:50.120" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-12T14:02:59.627" Score="0" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14211/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, I detail how my account has been effectively permbanned. The ultimate reason is a lot of deleted questions that I realized were irrelevant and became disinterested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I joined this site, I assumed it was a forum like any other, where &amp;quot;delete&amp;quot; meant delete. Apparently, however, delete just destroys your ability to participate on the site. I have no way to remedy these deleted posts and the reality is, when I was doing all the posting and deleting, I was new and I had no idea that I was permanently ruining this account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every community I've ever been a part of, new members are granted more freedoms to screw up because, definitionally, they're new. This community doesn't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of creating a new account, which I've been told would amount to a circumvention of system restrictions, I have no way of continuing to participate on the physics Stack Exchange website. I've only been active in the last two months and already I am fully ostracized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should allow new members to reset their reputation if they fall into this trap. I would've posted &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; differently if I had known how utterly different the rules are on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what to do. I have no way to fix this account and making a new one is apparently worse than deleting posts (which is apparently the worst thing ever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have been permanently banned from the Physics Stack Exchange for no reason other than deleting my own posts and with absolutely no recourse, this is likely my last post and I would simply like to tell all of you that, in my experience, you have no consideration, respect, interest in, or dignity for new members on your forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="278148" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-10-12T18:07:48.313" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T18:07:48.313" Title="The Physics Stack Exchange site doesn't care about new members" Tags="|discussion|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14215" CreationDate="2022-10-12T15:12:05.360" Score="-1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have put a 50 point bounty on my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/731002/&quot;&gt;If photons have no rest mass, where does Planck&amp;#39;s constant come from?&lt;/a&gt; 3 days ago. 4 days are left before the bounty expires. However, I have not yet received an answer there I cannot understand why people are getting so late to answer my question during the bounty period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212358" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-10-12T18:03:53.833" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T13:18:30.647" Title="Bounty on my question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14214" CreationDate="2022-10-12T15:19:30.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a thing that happens. A bounty increases the visibility of a question, but doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be seen by a person who knows a good answer and is willing to take the time to write it up. I’ve certainly had failed bounties of my own, both on my questions and on others’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your bounty expires, you can add another one afterwards. Be aware that subsequent bounties cost more reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-10-13T13:18:30.647" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T13:18:30.647" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-12T17:50:44.560" Score="-8" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/731736/why-2d-lvert-v-1-v-2-rvert-while-overtaking&quot;&gt;This is my &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3^{rd}$&lt;/span&gt; question&lt;/a&gt; being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what &amp;quot;concepts&amp;quot; are any more! The basic concepts are available just about on any site and if one is not good at them then they should mostly revise their texts/notes, etc., but what mostly the issue is their application that is hard and one needs help in. The basics of Newtonian physics are its three laws. Is it really the case one won't ever get stuck after reading and understanding them? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just marking every question as a &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; question and then judging the users from that lens is utterly distasteful. None of my questions are homework questions per se and when someone responds while saying that &amp;quot;they expect you to do it this way&amp;quot;, I'm asking myself who are &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; (and neither is anybody expecting anything) and though many questions come here might have that as their origin, not in my case and each case really must be looked at that way and trying to not err on the closing side, but the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new here and in all the closed &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3$&lt;/span&gt; questions I've been pestered that my questions are not conceptual. Why have the questions been asked to be shaped according to the answers? It's really topsy-turvy and shouldn't be how the things should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3$&lt;/span&gt; questions are related. First, I asked while mentioning my working related to it and where I was struggling. It was closed. Then I asked it as an open-ended question, so no one had to really bother with my working which I was anyway mentioning without being the focus (but that's how not it was being seen). Lastly, my recent post I added after I received an answer on another  SE site and in that I was unable to understand something from a physics' perspective, but again it was closed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is not in the mood of helping, kindly don't spend your time instead of some other recreational activity than to in review queues; it's really not adding value. It's just too much curation, imho. Probably the view has shifted from instead of looking for dirt to now establishing some gold-standard which is too far and counterproductive from what the actual intention must be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still think I'm wrong, kindly just tell me how to correct at all? And also if you think I came out harsh in the above, I was really not meaning to. If you think all the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3$&lt;/span&gt; posts were correct to be closed or that the post can't be corrected and is simply irrelevant that would be fine as an answer too as I'll get the takeaway from the site and might rarely post anything which if I feel is really &amp;quot;conceptual&amp;quot; (and trivial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just that there are a thousand users here and many I feel might be interested in helping users like me and even find the question itself interesting, but some users are too keen on doing a service to them which I think is a disservice or over-service at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, considering the following which is present in one of the links that is now above my question for which it got closed is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zHb4R.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zHb4R.png&quot; alt=&quot;Enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; my case, but feel free to just trying your best to trying to paint or prove that that's not the case. It would have been much better and constructive that even if that's the case if not 100% but 60% and so allowing and rather having a discussion on that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pleased to inform that the post is now opened. Kindly feel free to try and take a jab at it. It's really is mind-boggling. Special thanks to Jim, David Bailey, Jacopo Tissino, Kshitij Kumar and also thanks to all those who pay heed to my concerns. And last but not the least, thanks (and congrats) to PSE. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347808" LastEditorUserId="347808" LastEditDate="2022-11-25T16:50:11.077" LastActivityDate="2022-11-25T16:50:11.077" Title="Too much closing (for missing &quot;concepts&quot;)?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14216" CreationDate="2022-10-13T00:09:40.397" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not take a deep breath here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have been member for all of three days, whereas the site has been around for 11+ years, yet you are comfortable in declaring that it &amp;quot;shouldn't how the things should be.&amp;quot; and there are too many closures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered an alternative scenario whereby people value the site precisely because &amp;quot;things are the way they are&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the difficulty with many new users is they see the purpose of the site as one where their &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; questions are answered.  Yet the purpose of the site is precisely NOT that: we strive instead to answer questions that are of interest to users beyond the original poster, i.e. to provide value &lt;em&gt;to the site&lt;/em&gt; rather than merely to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit that your specific question is not without conceptual interest but I respect the opinion of those who thought it was a homework-like or &amp;quot;do my work&amp;quot; question, especially as your two previous attempts with posting this question resulted in closure.  I certainly &lt;em&gt;do not agree&lt;/em&gt; with your statement that there is too much closing on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A constructive approach to re-opening any closed question after it is closed the &lt;em&gt;first time&lt;/em&gt; is not to repost it without improvements but instead to edit it and try to resolve the issue.  It is not easy and it takes time to write good questions, and honestly after 3 helpings of the same question over slightly more than 48hrs it's difficult to believe you took time to write a good question or make useful edits.  If you are in a rush, don't blame others for closing your question quickly: this is not an answering service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, you could consider digesting the answer from MSE, making your own graphs and try isolate from the graphs the origin of the disputed &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\vert v_1-v_2\vert$&lt;/span&gt; factor.  Does this factor make sense if both velocities are the same?  How would you see this graphically?  You can always use chat to discuss how to best clarify your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-10-15T22:05:10.133" LastActivityDate="2022-10-15T22:05:10.133" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-14T21:03:51.573" Score="1" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am autistic. It's easy for the physics Stack  Exchange team to say I need to amend, so I'm learning as I go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One criticism was that a poster couldn't understand a question. I showed them the question in a different way and they didn't reply back when I asked if that cleared it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another poster said, why post something so long? I replied, it's kind and shows effort to show understanding, besides, I've posted short posts before and been accused that it was too short. When is something too warm, too cold but just quite right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another poster said I was wrong to post the entirety of my question on two pages, except after a threshold the system reported it could detect emspelling errors, and typing slowed down as a result. Catch 22?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, I assumed that I had to split it into two posts as I didn't think it would post it. I thought that wasn't a bad assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've been banned from posting for an &lt;em&gt;undisclosed&lt;/em&gt; time? Further, I've noticed a repeating characteristic behaviour. Instead of asking concerning content in a post, and waiting for a reply they downvote immediately, not giving me a proper chance to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am autistic, and I suffer badly from this kind of behaviour. At least please have the decency to let someone explain. Why are players here so gung-ho to just downvote? One moderator the other day couldn't understand why a variation in g_00 led to a metric non-conservation. I went on to say because any variation must lead to a change, where g_00 is the correct mathematical language to express the energy of a vacuum. So he downvoted me because of his own ignorance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-10-16T21:38:47.403" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T21:38:47.403" Title="My posts downvoted" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-15T12:36:02.120" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failed to upload image; an error occurred on the server&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the image is shown in diminution on the left or not, and whether it's is JPEG or PNG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2022-10-17T05:56:16.510" LastActivityDate="2022-10-17T05:56:16.510" Title="Trying to upload images I get" Tags="|support|bug|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14219" CreationDate="2022-10-15T12:40:01.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Testing from my account …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WUcb0m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WUcb0m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/382916/280545&quot;&gt;this network-wide Meta post&lt;/a&gt;, this is a problem which has been intermittently fixed and reoccurring recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-10-15T12:40:01.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14222" CreationDate="2022-10-16T06:30:55.813" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have to keep looking at the site to look at the comments and respond to them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327995" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T17:12:38.580" Title="Do you have to be responsive to comments on your question to get good answers?" Tags="|discussion|comments|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14221" CreationDate="2022-10-16T17:12:38.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have to be responsive to comments on your question to get good answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment someone may ask for clarifications on your question, in which case yes, only by clarifying what you want to know you can expect someone to address that in an answer. At the same time, people in comments often point out reasons why the questions might be closed (e.g. it may go against community guidelines on homework, level of effort, or how many questions you are asking in a single question), so addressing those will guarantee your question stays open. Also, people often comment on the style of the question, specifically whether the maths is in Latex or not, which improves readability and hence chance of someone answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have to keep looking at the site to look at the comments and&#xA;respond to them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't fully understand this question. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;You don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to do anything, if you don't want to. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;This website is free, so people dedicate their time to answer questions. I guess it is a courtesy on your side to follow up on answers to your questions by upvoting them, accepting them, or leaving comments asking for clarifications on the answer -- but it's all optional. For comments left on your question, it is in &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; interest to address them, for that would increase the chance of having someone answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T17:12:38.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-25T01:09:07.120" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/733606/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed for lack of clarity.  Although it's a bit awkwardly worded, I think the clear intention was to ask &amp;quot;Why does the speed of light show up in an equation that relates mass to energy?&amp;quot;, which seems like a reasonable question for someone who has not studied relativity. I think it should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T08:15:38.813" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T17:53:53.633" Title="Reopening a question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14223" CreationDate="2022-10-25T01:44:42.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has &amp;quot;Not speed of light&amp;quot; in the title, and later says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not talking about the math working out, or why it needs to be &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$c^2$&lt;/span&gt;.  But rather, what is the nature/essence of light that allows it to be a conversion factor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what that means.  It seems to be specifying that it is not about why the &lt;em&gt;speed&lt;/em&gt; of light appears—but rather about whether there is something intrinsic about light itself.  However, since it is the speed of light, not &amp;quot;light&amp;quot; in the abstract that appears in the equation, I don't understand what the querent is trying to ask about.  So it does not seem surprising to me that other users voted to close the question as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T01:44:42.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14223" CreationDate="2022-10-25T17:32:33.147" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please help me! I’m not stupid, I just need some help. I’m a medical doctor not a physicist. I’m new here and I don’t understand why I keep getting shut down?  My question is basically: “Why does the speed of light show up in an equation that relates mass to energy?&amp;quot; I don’t understand why this phrasing is more elegant. But YES this is what I want to know. What should I do now? I have asked this question to many cosmologists, mathematicians and physicists. Everybody relates it back to making the math work. But I think I’m asking a more profound question. Thanks Peter I really appreciate your understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="349080" LastEditorUserId="349080" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T17:53:53.633" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T17:53:53.633" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-02T11:25:27.800" Score="4" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/734728/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; following the thought that an inner structure of spacetime can be embraced in a structure function &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$s(x)$&lt;/span&gt;, to allow for a field theory with macroscopically curved background that is also microscopically nontrivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problematic question because the concept &amp;quot;inner structure&amp;quot; of spacetime was not well-defined by me; I don't have this concept more than at the level of an image or intuition. Also the field theory I was referring to is not explicated: I didn't give an expression for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathscr{L}$&lt;/span&gt;, because interested only on &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$s$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still want to ask this question, because I desire to know about the subject of spacetime topology (maybe is a more correct term), so how can it be asked, considering the intrinsic ignorance of who's asking? How can it be made more clear or detailed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="267112" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-02T17:25:37.890" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T15:54:58.553" Title="How should I ask a question about an idea if it's not a known physical subject to me?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-04T11:57:31.550" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there anyone who wants to attend to a physics of philosophy online forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello, I'm a high school student in Korea who truly loves physics. Recently, I have been very interested in the philosophy of physics, so I have studied specialized books and major books, and I thought I would like to share them with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The philosophy of physics is quite abstract, so many other people probably felt the same way. Places like Reddit and Quora cover too broad a topic, so I thought it would be nice to have a community that is limited to the specific field of philosophy of physics. I think it would be great if we could provide an opportunity for education in this field that people are relatively unfamiliar with, and that we also publish a periodical publication and create a forum for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd probably like to expand the community based on the website. Anyone who wants to study the real philosophy of physics, &lt;em&gt;leave a comment below&lt;/em&gt;! I would be grateful if you leave an email address as well. (It's okay if you don't know much about this field! It's enough if you can study with fun and enthusiasm.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="349981" OwnerDisplayName="민성우" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-04T17:02:10.960" LastActivityDate="2022-11-04T17:02:10.960" Title="Is there anyone who wants to attend to a physics of philosophy online forum?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-05T12:49:42.653" Score="4" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I was unable to perform a physical calculation correctly, and I could not find any explicit proof of it, not online or in any book, to understand what I was doing wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This calculation involved more than a page of passages and when I asked about it, I asked for a source or an hint, but I didn't ask, for example, if someone that had done it in the past could post his/her result. I read the policy of the site, but I don't understand if a specific long and tedious proof is something that can be explicitly asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any clarification on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="267112" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-05T18:52:00.783" LastActivityDate="2022-11-13T13:53:39.667" Title="Can I explicitly ask for a specific proof that involves a long calculation?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14229" CreationDate="2022-11-06T21:32:41.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of this question as it currently stands is that it is of limited interest to anyone but yourself, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; it is of limited value &lt;em&gt;to the site&lt;/em&gt;.  In addition, it is severely lacking context (what is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$n$&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there’s a way for you to turn this into some that has broader appeal.  You could provide better context for one, provide multiple sources to confirm to confirm you are incorrect, and identify &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; where things go sideways.  It would likely still be specialized and of the check-my-work type, but at least you will earn some good will by clearly identifying where conceptually you are diverging from the known solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T21:32:41.753" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-08T03:08:53.507" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;For whatever reason, when I put the first equation in the question box it renders correctly (in the preview) on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;math Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;, but wrong on the physics Stack Exchange site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;PSE&lt;/a&gt;). The opposite is true for the second equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I right-click on the second equation in the preview and select &amp;quot;Show Math As TeX Commands&amp;quot;, it shows me the LaTeX code of the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; equation. I think this is some kind of bug. I'm mainly posting this as I'm wondering what it'll look like in the actual post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$Γ{}_{\mu} T_{\kappa}{}^{\lambda }$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$Γ{}\_{\mu} T\_{\kappa}{}\^{\lambda }$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Ok, that's just weird. So now that it's posted, the top equation looks right, but the bottom one is all messed up? Why? The bad thing about this is new questions need to be made to test this out (maybe answers would work too?). It looks the same in edit mode as it does when posted. How odd...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2: Simplified the example. Also, the glitch doesn't manifest when posting an answer, only question creation. My browser is Google Chrome/Version 107.0.5304.88 (Official Build) (64-bit) and my operating system is Windows 10, 21H2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99319" LastEditorUserId="99319" LastEditDate="2022-11-08T15:13:06.313" LastActivityDate="2022-11-08T15:13:06.313" Title="MathJax discrepancy between physics and math Stack Exchange sites" Tags="|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14231" CreationDate="2022-11-08T11:30:59.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understood correctly, from the two copies of the equation on your post, on PSE,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the first one looked erroneous on preview but looks fine on final render on your browser, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the second one looked OK on preview but displays errors on the final render.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your question, on my browser, the first one looks OK and the second one (which has clearly incorrect syntax) does not. If I copy your question text into the answer box (or into a new question), I see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SNCjs.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my browser (chrome 107.0.5304.87 64-bit over Ubuntu 22.04), MathJax is thus behaving as expected. So it sounds like the problem might be local to (some component of the software stack on) your machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2022-11-08T11:30:59.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14227" CreationDate="2022-11-09T00:43:41.733" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried similar things, but they didn't work. I found that Stack Exchange is the wrong place for such discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange is for software programmers. They want short answers to specific, well defined questions. If they don't like you, they delete your post or downvote you. I will be surprised if this answer goes through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="344842" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-10T13:20:43.617" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T13:20:43.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7770" CreationDate="2022-11-09T15:40:43.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very pertinent question that should receive more attention from the community. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/58134/how-to-understand-the-work-energy-theorem?rq=1&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as an example. Disclosure: I just submitted an answer because I wasn't happy with the only answer provided to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has 11k views, so clearly it is a topic that people are interested in. If someone contributes an answer two years after there is an accepted answer with several upvotes, it seems likely that that answer is likely to be buried simply due to the timing of its posting, regardless of the merits of the new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible remedy to this issue might be weighting upvotes on answers based on their age; this would ensure that as newer answers are added, they have a shot of moving up if many people think it is an improvement over previous answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123502" LastActivityDate="2022-11-09T15:40:43.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14227" CreationDate="2022-11-10T15:54:58.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the true purpose of the question is that you want to learn about some subject, then that's what you should ask for. Use the [resource-recommendations] tag together with a description of your background, the reason you are interested in this subject, and maybe what kind of material you're interested in (books, articles, popular explanations, etc.). Your personal thoughts can be included for context, but they shouldn't be the focus of the question (since by your own admission, this is a subject you don't know much about).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broad questions such as &amp;quot;I want to learn about spacetime topology&amp;quot; tend to not be a good fit for this site, because they would require very long answers. Book-long answers, in fact, which is why we have resource recommendation questions, so that people can direct you to a resource instead of trying to fit a book in the answer box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5788" LastActivityDate="2022-11-10T15:54:58.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-12T18:01:15.823" Score="24" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost every time I ask for a specific concept using an example in a book, my post keeps getting closed. I didn't want for an answer to the specific problem or get my answer checked, but only to understand certain concepts. However, the only answer I get is the infamous &amp;quot;Homework are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is I'm not sure what I do wrong. I guess I keep repeating the same mistake, but I'm not sure to understand. I thought that by giving the book and the page could place a certain context. Furthermore, since I can't reach any moderator and I would like to fix this problem, the only place I found to find an answer is here, and to be honest I don't know if this is the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347951" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-12T19:13:27.740" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T18:07:04.847" Title="Why is there a homework tag if the posts keep getting closed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14229" CreationDate="2022-11-13T13:53:39.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider how long it would it take you to write up your full derivation. Then consider how long it would take an answerer to check your derivation and then write an answer that confirms or disconfirms your derivation. If you are asking yourself to spend over an hour just to write your question, you are probably asking too much. If your question is essentially asking an answerer to spend over an hour to check your derivation and then to write an answer, you again are probably asking too much. Even half an hour is pushing the limit of what most answerers are willing to contribute per answer as pro bono (i.e., no charge) consultants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52112" LastActivityDate="2022-11-13T13:53:39.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14237" CreationDate="2022-11-15T00:05:10.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the homework tag shouldn't exist. This site should care about question quality only, not the motivation behind the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the homework policy should be renamed and not involve the word &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot;. We want good questions, and we want to avoid questions that ask for solutions to specific problems without context; if we ask a question about a specific problem, we want to show what we've tried and ask for how to get unstuck, because that's useful insofar as it generates an answer likely to call out a pitfall or clarify a point of confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7162&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31790" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T00:05:10.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14237" CreationDate="2022-11-15T08:22:31.400" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this post emphasizes, once more, a real problem of PSE: some inconsistency between the stated policy of the site and how it is applied in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stated policy says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A 'homework question' is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading such a statement and taking into account the stress on &lt;em&gt;conceptual questions&lt;/em&gt;, one would be induced to think that a question not asking for hints on a mathematical step or not confined to a specific exercise but focused on the right use of concepts would be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this is not the case. I think a recent example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/736722/entropy-of-a-system-of-quasiparticles&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; closed today as &lt;em&gt;homework-like and check-my-work question&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The question explicitly mentions its origin from an exercise in Pathria's Statistical Mechanix textbook. However, whatever its origin, I see a question on the issue of applying a formula thought valid for distinguishable particles to a case where no mention of distinguishability was present. In my opinion, the only possible answer to this question would address &lt;em&gt;the method by which the question can be solved rather than getting the answer itself&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, perfectly in line with the policy statement, and useful for more persons than the OP. Instead, it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using this question as an example. Therefore, I would not like to discuss the motivations for its closure in detail. Certainly who voted for its closure thought it was the right thing to do. Nevertheless, as a member of this community, I would have a hard time explaining to a newcomer the exact reason this question infringed the stated policy of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without clear evidence of coherence between the stated policy and the practice, I see the risk of establishing on this site a tendency I often saw in forums about Physics. The community of the most experienced users unconsciously tends to adapt the threshold for acceptable questions to its increasing standards of quality. I think that some reflections on such a potential risk would be useful for keeping the PSE site an open and inclusive community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T08:22:31.400" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-15T13:18:07.087" Score="9" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/736711/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is of the form &amp;quot;Here is a striking empirical fact.  Is there an explanation for it?&amp;quot;.  It's been closed, with comments suggesting that questions of this form are &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot; and/or that experiment and observation render explanations superfluous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that standard, it would have been either &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot; or a fool's errand to ask whether there might be some deeper explanation for Kepler's laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might or might not be true that with the current state of knowledge, there is no interesting answer to this question.  But the question itself is inherently interesting, and I very much hope it gets reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I could see perhaps closing as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21753/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-11-15T18:11:22.943" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T18:11:22.943" Title="Question for reopening" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14242" CreationDate="2022-11-15T13:59:19.327" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote on this question either way at the time of writing this answer. However, I think you are interpreting the &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; close vote rather uncharitably here. So I'll give my similarly unfounded charitable interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21753/50583&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt; this question links to is a clear duplicate if we interpret this question to ask, as you do here, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Here is a striking empirical fact. Is there an explanation for it?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. The currently closed question is explicit that it finds the answer &amp;quot;No, it's just a fact.&amp;quot; dissatisfying, but this is not a reason to re-ask the question. If there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; an explanation for the equality of charges, then it would be a valid answer to the other question, and so this question is a duplicate regardless of whether there is an explanation for the equality of charges or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reading in which this question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate is if we read it as the more general inquiry at its end: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;And if not, does that mean that it is viable for a world to exist with protons and electrons having unequal or different charges and no physics principle would be changed?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is the part that I believe is described as &amp;quot;science fiction&amp;quot;. I don't really think that's the right word, but I agree this is too opinion-based for our site because this depends on vague personal judgements of what constitutes a &amp;quot;physics principle&amp;quot;: E.g. at one extreme one might say that &amp;quot;proton and electron have equal charge&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a &amp;quot;physics principle&amp;quot; and render this question self-contradictory and at the other extreme one might say that the only &amp;quot;physics principle&amp;quot; is that physics needs to reproduce experimental observations and render the answer to the question tautologically true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, this broader version of the question generates certainly interesting &lt;em&gt;discussion&lt;/em&gt; but doesn't really have a useful objective answer because it implicitly pre-supposes very specific beliefs about the philosophy and structure of physical theories in order to even be meaningful, and different epistemological viewpoints will arrive at different answers here with neither being &amp;quot;more correct&amp;quot; than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the other broader formulation given in the question, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Is there some scientific principle for why the things are the way it is?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, is similarly reliant on assumptions about what a &amp;quot;scientific principle&amp;quot; is and how exactly science relates to reality. In particular this question is completely non-sensical in one popular view of science as &lt;em&gt;modelling/predicting&lt;/em&gt; but not &amp;quot;explaining&amp;quot; reality but will make a lot of sense to people holding e.g. platonist ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, this broader question really falls much more into the realm of &lt;em&gt;philosophy&lt;/em&gt; of physics - meta-physics in the literal sense - rather than physics itself. Altogether I therefore think the current close reason is fine, and anyone who disagrees that the question is opinion-based must take the narrower interpretation and should then agree it is a duplicate, so there is no reason either way to reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T13:59:19.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14237" CreationDate="2022-11-15T14:29:26.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I follow GiorgioP answer and as first, maybe trivial, thing I stress the conceptual uncertainty about the word &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot;: if I have a question about a passage regarding a propagator I can certainly ask for it, by experience I asked myself and I saw it done many times, but how if this is leaved as an exercise for the reader in some books; is this an homework? It clearly is not, because it wasn't in the first case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This uncertainty seems to be solved, stated in the advice you cite, because&#xA;a question is very likely to be categorized as homework if you are interested only in the conceptual structure of your passages and not of the theory you are considering: at the same time though, physics uses mathematics as a tool, and is inevitable that many physical questions involves mathematical uncertainties and errors, not just physical errors regarding the way the theory is thinked by the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as a personal opinion, the conceptual privilege reserved to the site quality, that make the site go against this type of questions, is dangerous since it puts the site way above the heads of the users and the moderators too, that make it exists, posing it far away from the intent of discuss physics; seems to be this idea of purity in the background that repels discussion and dialectic. Also this makes the site to have a too rigid approach that I think also quite ansiogenic for the new users, so detrimental for the site on the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, I personally don't have anything against homeworks, but I understand that a low-limit should be put to avoid questions like: &amp;quot;solve me this exercise&amp;quot;. I agree on this, but I think also there is too strict and rigid moderation on this, that in my opinion should be relaxed to make the site breathe a bit more. Nobody gains anything, and the richness should be in the discussion and in putting on the table different opinions: maybe I idealize too much, because every-day moderation I imagine to be quite harsh, because not everyone wants really this and many people want to just have their problem solved, but at the same time I think the site should remain open to give space to this spirit. And if an homework is a way to discuss physics, why not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="267112" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T14:29:26.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14237" CreationDate="2022-11-15T18:07:04.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, tags are very useful tool in searching the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a question is on-topic or off-topic is determined by the Phys.SE community (partly via close &amp;amp; reopen votes), and its conclusion should in principle be independent of whether certain tags are applied or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that banning certain tags would not cause users to stop asking certain questions. It would only make it more difficult to identify them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T18:07:04.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-17T03:10:43.270" Score="6" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/736857/euler-angles-and-inertia-tensor?noredirect=1#comment1649429_736857&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; on diagonalizing the inertia tensor using Euler angles was closed as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186359/how-to-prove-that-any-rotation-can-be-represented-by-3-euler-angles?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;suggested duplicate&lt;/a&gt; is a question on converting a rotation matrix to Euler angles.  My question is how to &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; find the Euler angles to diagonalize the inertia tensor in terms of the entries of the inertia tensor.  The inertia tensor is not a rotation matrix, so &lt;em&gt;the suggested duplicate does not address my question (or parts thereof)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the comments were moved to chat, but basically the only somewhat useful comment is a suggestion to diagonalize the inertia tensor by finding the eigenvectors, recover the rotation matrix from this and then convert to Euler angles.  The core of my question asks if there is a method to &lt;em&gt;precisely&lt;/em&gt; avoid this path of first diagonalizing (which presumably yields a cubic that is “hard” to solve in terms of the entries of the inertia tensor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible there isn't any simple method, and I’ll take that as an answer.  I figure that, if this were possible, it would be discussed &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; in the literature but could find anything relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggested two possible solution paths, one of which does not work (details supplied) and the other which looks horrible.  If someone has a better idea I’ll be glad to hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-17T17:15:22.370" LastActivityDate="2022-11-17T17:15:22.370" Title="Yet another question for reopening" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-18T17:07:49.750" Score="8" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/736934/penetration-of-electromagnetic-waves-in-insulators&quot;&gt;Penetration of electromagnetic waves in insulators?&lt;/a&gt; be classified as engineering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be sure, the only answer seems to have focused on some particular issues that some might consider &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot;, but what was actually asked was a general question about the attenuation of electromagnetic waves in insulators, i.e. dielectrics. This is a topic covered in a myriad of courses and texts on classical electromagnetism taught and written by physicists. Should any question on index of refraction also be rejected as engineering, since it is also a concept used by engineers and involves electromagnetic waves in dielectric media?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-18T17:09:10.577" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T14:35:18.773" Title="How can a question on electromagnetism in dielectrics be considered engineering?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14247" CreationDate="2022-11-19T06:48:28.863" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The change to require only three close votes for a question to be closed has been very effective at closing the more outrageous homework questions rapidly, but it is also causing a small but significant number of questions to be closed inappropriately. Recently I have found myself voting to leave open or reopen almost as often as I vote to close when reviewing the queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think the change is worthwhile and shouldn't be reversed, but it does mean the onus is upon us to think before we close vote. I would urge everyone to consider carefully when deciding if a question really deserves the nuclear option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-11-19T06:48:28.863" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-20T23:03:09.203" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there (or should there be) a canonical question/answer about entropy? Or more specifically, about the various definitions of the term entropy and their relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seem like everyday there is some &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/737560/why-do-the-units-of-entropy-include-energy-and-temperature&quot;&gt;new horribly-confused question&lt;/a&gt; about &amp;quot;entropy.&amp;quot; It seem to be a similar situation as questions about the word &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; or the &amp;quot;flow of time,&amp;quot; for which we have a canonical question and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a number of good answers on main regarding entropy that differentiate between various meanings of the word in physics and make an attempt to reconcile the various definitions (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$dQ/T$&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$k\log(\Omega)$&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sum p\log(p)$&lt;/span&gt;), but I'm not aware of a canonical question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, we have software people pretending like you can &amp;quot;calculate the entropy of a file&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/737448/does-it-make-physical-sense-to-assign-an-entropy-to-a-microstate&quot;&gt;or of a password&lt;/a&gt;, which is getting really far afield from a realistic and meaningful use of information entropy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it time for a canonical answer about that various definitions of the word entropy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastActivityDate="2022-11-20T23:03:09.203" Title="Canonical Question about Entropy" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-22T07:49:17.777" Score="-1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked four questions in recent days and all of them are being closed for the same &lt;em&gt;annoying reason&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/737711/square-wheels-on-bumpy-road-setup&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;, despite garnering popular attention, was closed due to the same reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework-like questions and check-my-work questions are considered&#xA;off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations&#xA;instead of underlying physics concepts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, in all questions I tried to present the question and even showed my active attempt to solve them. I also asked &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; I am lacking any crucial concept which I probably am, which is why I asked it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to no avail; they are all being closed down. They say homework-like questions are off-topic. Then why even bother adding a tag for the same, if they are bound to be closed anyway? I have seen questions that end in a few lines asking bluntly about some idea, and they are hardly closed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to at least reopen the latest question which I actively researched and added all parts of it to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276270" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-22T16:47:51.607" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T16:54:45.040" Title="Question closed despite being popular" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14247" CreationDate="2022-11-22T14:35:18.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a symptom of trouble in academic physics: the drive to abstract mathematical formulation at the expense of practical, real-world science. What's our biggest problem in physics these days? I think it's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sadler's social experiment&lt;/a&gt; revealed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264639" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T14:35:18.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14251" CreationDate="2022-11-22T15:59:05.060" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;With all due respect, it is difficult to read your OP and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; think it is an assignment question.  In particular, statements like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me. Is my approach wrong? suggest some other way if you can. Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is basically begging for others to do the work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a conceptual core to your question but have not done a good job of highlighting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$p_1$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$p_2$&lt;/span&gt; are not properly defined in your figure so it is &lt;em&gt;conceptually&lt;/em&gt; difficult to understand what &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$I_{p_1}\omega_1=I_{p_2}\omega_2$&lt;/span&gt; really mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your values of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$I_{p_1}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$I_{p_2}$&lt;/span&gt; are not clear, especially as the moment of inertia is given as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ma^2/6$&lt;/span&gt;.  Are you invoking the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/parax.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parallel-axis theorem&lt;/a&gt;? For completeness,  &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{req}$&lt;/span&gt; is also not defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also here the question of someone supplying (in the video at least) an external force by pedalling, so it's not clear why angular momentum should be conserved although the video seems to illustrate something a little different from the question you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On balance, I have to say this looks like homework question where a student is stuck and is asking (in your case explicitly) for help, which is reason enough to close.  It can be rephrased as a conceptual question if you clarify some of the terminology.  In particular, given you have the answer, I would personally expect an energy argument (based on the rotational kinetic energy) would appear somewhere, but this is nowhere to be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-22T16:54:45.040" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T16:54:45.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-22T20:55:31.587" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/737401/330899&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Physics SE. Thinking about it for a while, I thought I had come up with an answer and thus answered my own question. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/23615/triatticus&quot;&gt;Triatticus&lt;/a&gt; pointed out how my solution is wrong in the comments of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am not sure what should I do, that is, should I delete the answer I posted? Or make an edit and if an edit then how? Since I can't delete the answer because of valuable suggestions made by Triatticus in the comment section which may provide insight for anyone who thinks they know the answer just like I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330899" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-23T18:04:52.673" LastActivityDate="2022-11-23T18:04:52.673" Title="What can you do when you know your answer is wrong, but has the &quot;right&quot; comments below it?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answers|delete|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-23T16:58:34.307" Score="0" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4583510/is-this-differential-equation-solvable&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has been migrated to Mathematics SE (MSE) a few minutes ago. I find it embarrassing since the question is clearly ill-posed both from the mathematical point of view (how the relation between &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x, v$&lt;/span&gt;, and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a$&lt;/span&gt; follows from the definition of velocity and acceleration?) and from the physical point of view (dimensional inconsistency). I voted for closing because the question needs clarification. However, my closing vote was the second. Before me, it was selected migration to MSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think the reputation of our community in MSE will increase after such a migration. Even worse, I do not see a trace of my closing vote &lt;em&gt;being different&lt;/em&gt; from the migration solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that people in a hurry for closing questions at least would spend a few minutes to understand the content of the question instead of sticking to the title only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-23T18:02:03.420" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T03:44:57.497" Title="Embarrassing migration" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-23T17:05:59.610" Score="-2" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/737563/why-high-frequency-has-high-energy/737570#737570&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; have so many upvotes? How is it even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I implore you; go downvote this ridiculous answer. (And upvote correct answers!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; The answer was deleted, thanks to Pat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-11-24T17:43:30.787" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T17:43:30.787" Title="How can this answer have so many upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" ClosedDate="2022-11-24T19:14:01.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14256" CreationDate="2022-11-23T19:45:23.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer can have a large number of upvotes any time there are enough users that find it helpful and accurate. I believe that addresses all of the questions in this post, however I will continue addressing the spirit of your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with its accuracy, you should downvote it and leave a comment for the author with suggested corrections, or post a correct answer yourself. However, the author is still free to post the answer at the risk of downvotes and/or votes to delete. If other users disagree with your appraisal, they might still continue to upvote the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel it has been upvoted far more than it should and deserves some focus from users on that front, then a proper strategy might be to point this out on the hbar. This keeps our Meta site clean and free from examples of us mass shaming specific answers that we do or do not agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2022-11-23T19:45:23.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14255" CreationDate="2022-11-24T03:44:57.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have exactly zero concern about this “embarrassing” question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The culture at Mathematics is a little different from over here. They are a bigger community, and they frequently answer questions that I would close if they appeared on Physics. If they don’t want this question, they’ll just close it, and the stub here will change from “migrated” to “migration rejected.” If we started sending them lots of low-quality questions, they would talk to us about it. Just one isn’t a big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your close reason is recorded in the question’s timeline.  I don’t know whether seeing that information is a moderator superpower or not. Mostly no one cares about that, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T03:44:57.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14260" CreationDate="2022-11-24T10:56:37.413" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/737936/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; with the 'other' option for flags, and described it as 'Homework question'. The post was closed as a homework question, and my flag was declined. The justification was that I did not use a &lt;strong&gt;standard flag&lt;/strong&gt;, and was referred to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;What is flagging?&lt;/a&gt;. In this page it is not specified which flag I should have used, and since Homework questions must be one of the most important types of flags my question is twofold: why is there no explicit explanation in that page on what to do in 'solve my homework' type of questions? What flag should I have used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="343870" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-11-24T13:57:53.960" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T13:57:53.960" Title="Flag declined even thought it was (possibly) correct" Tags="|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14259" CreationDate="2022-11-24T11:21:03.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a custom close reason for homework-and-exercises questions, and hence there is an option to explicitly flag posts to be closed with this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with more than 3k reputation should do so by voting to close via the close menu. As described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; already linked in the question users can flag posts with custom close reasons by choosing &amp;quot;needs improvement&amp;quot; in the flagging menu, then &amp;quot;A community-specific reason&amp;quot;. This menu contains all custom close reasons for a site, and you should see one corresponding to homework-and-exercises questions when you open this menu on physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that flagging to close with less than 3k reputation only enqueues a question for close review, it does not cast a close vote on the question, so the choice of reason at this point isn't actually all that relevant in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-11-24T11:21:03.273" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14216" CreationDate="2022-11-25T04:17:33.883" Score="-11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users here don't want to &amp;quot;brain-storm&amp;quot;. They simply want to see questions that they can solve &amp;quot;easily&amp;quot; without taking any pains. &amp;quot;What is momentum?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;What is the difference between momentum and kinetic energy?&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;Oh my! such a pitiful confusion, let me get my pillow, lie on the sofa and spread my legs... yup, so here the solution...&amp;quot; - while this might not be the case at all but that's how things came across to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed much more uncomfortable (relatively) when someone asks an application (which is not strictly that either in my case, but users here don't want to see the &amp;quot;concepts&amp;quot; in it) based question which seems in &amp;quot;your&amp;quot; opinion is devoid of any concepts. In my case, for example, the working I got from a user on MSE was all apparently correct but the physics wasn't fitting well. This should have been a really interesting problem here but I was disappointed to know the reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pic attached in the question (in the OP's question above) says exactly that but NO! Once some 2 or 3 users have decided that the post must be closed, like sheep, all huddle together and support that decision in one voice. Note that it's not how your question is that matters, in the end, it is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether you have spent enough time. (Minimum 24 hours just to frame a question though 48 would be apt)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether site is having a tough time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the user who posted the question has been around particularly on PSE (not on any other related site as we our just something else). Of course, we safely assume you never visited this site ever before for any post whatsoever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the question cries of having some confusion in a &amp;quot;concept&amp;quot; and that too directly (indirectly is just too much pain to figure out).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewers here don't have the attitude to search for which questions could be saved but the exact opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did you (that is, me) come here again? Well I got a comment from a user which again lead me to ponder over this issue so ya in all likelihood this is not really worth it but anyways, most likely the last time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, before we feel to start some discussion, why not take a deep breath here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347808" LastActivityDate="2022-11-25T04:17:33.883" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-28T19:32:15.757" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been much discussion in the past on both Physics and other Metas about &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7726/145491&quot;&gt;How to deal with answers to duplicate questions&lt;/a&gt;, especially when the duplicate questions or its answers are useful.&#xA;It is possible to merge questions, but this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12849/145491&quot;&gt;can be challenging&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicate questions are closed with a banner and link to the original question, but there is usually no indication on the original question that a duplicate exists with possibly useful answers.&#xA;Would it be possible and useful to have the option, where appropriate, to place a banner at the top of  original questions pointing out the existence of possibly useful duplicates?&#xA;This could be a precursor to eventual merging, but until that happens it keeps all the relevant answers connected with less work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if a banner is not possible, would it be problematic for users to add something like this to the beginning or end of the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/319819/145491&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;This question&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/22897/145491&quot;&gt;a duplicate&lt;/a&gt; which may also have useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could add a comment instead of editing the question with a note, but visitors are less likely read the comments, especially if there are lots of comments and they have to click on &amp;quot;Show … more comments&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by today's closing of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/738208/145491&quot;&gt;What does the angular momentum vector really represent?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; as a duplicate of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/583504/145491&quot;&gt;Is direction of angular velocity just a definition or has a physical significance?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. I wondered if it would be useful to make visitors to the original question aware of the highly scored duplicate answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few other examples where the closed duplicate has interesting highly ranked answers are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/286964/145491&quot;&gt;Should zero be followed by units?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/28069/145491&quot;&gt;Why is boiling water loud, then quiet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/250363/145491&quot;&gt;Why do I see better under water using swimming goggles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/454292/145491&quot;&gt;Is the Higgs boson an elementary particle? If so, why does it decay? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T19:32:15.757" Title="Should useful duplicates be obviously linked from their nominal original question?" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-04T19:51:59.553" Score="8" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see an interesting and accepted answer that includes useful ideas on nuanced topics, but that (I think) ultimately has flaws that makes it wrong. I hope to learn the proper etiquette for handling such answers. I personally do not like downvoting if I think an answer contains some useful ideas, though I am comfortable commenting when I think there are flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a couple of options. One is to open a bounty on the original question and specifically writing in the bounty description box that the current accepted answer is incorrect and giving detailed reasons why, and requesting an answer that resolves the incorrect features of the accepted answer. I am unsure if that that might be an abuse of the bounty system, especially as I'm unsure which bounty reason to use in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to open a new question, following largely the steps above. That is, the new question would ask the same question as the original question, but with some additional paragraphs pointing out why the accepted answer to the original question was incorrect and specifically requesting an answer that does not make the same errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential option would be to write an answer to the original question, but the trouble is, I often don't know the answer to the original question. I only have reasons without much evidence why I believe the accepted answer is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am likely missing other important ways to address incorrect answers to other peoples' questions, so please let me know of other methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example to make my claim concrete, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/739114&quot;&gt;Andrew's answer discussing the black hole information paradox&lt;/a&gt; is what I would call &amp;quot;includes useful ideas in answering a subtle question, but is ultimately incorrect.&amp;quot; As I commented on the answer, the answer incorrectly assumes that the Hilbert space dimension of a set of degrees of freedom is the sum of the individual Hilbert space dimensions rather than their product, making the resulting claims suspect. There doesn't appear to be a simple way to remedy the answer, and this is not an area of physics in which I would feel comfortable making my own answer to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196574" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-13T19:14:03.933" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T19:14:03.933" Title="Proper procedure for addressing an incorrect accepted answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14267" CreationDate="2022-12-05T13:45:25.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE model allows anyone to answer a question.  The intended way the site operates is that voting is used as the primary mechanism to decide what the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; considers the best answer of those available.  That does not mean an answer needs to be perfect or even entirely correct, but simply that it is the best of those available &lt;em&gt;as far as the community is concerned&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So any individual who considers a particular answer wrong (in their opinion !) has limited options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can vote down&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can write their own answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can make a comment asking the poster to address their concerns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can propose an edit to the answer (which can be rejected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no obligation on the answer's author to respond to comments or agree with objections or proposed edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you may feel that an accepted and/or highly up-voted answer is wrong in some way, this is a community driven site and it's a matter of fact that if you cannot persuade the community you are right and they are wrong then the site does not give you any right to force the issue based on your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You must ultimately accept the community decision to be yourself acting in good faith on the site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words you are free to disagree with the community decisions (votes) and to state your objects in different ways, but you cannot reasonably force your view on other people against their will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Correct&amp;quot; on this site basically &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; highest voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting a bounty is an option, but perhaps not the right one here as you cannot control what answers are provided.  You won't necessarily get an answer you prefer over existing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential option would be to write an answer to the original question, but the trouble is, I often don't know the answer to the original question. I only have reasons why I believe the accepted answer is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that the site does not allow for the kind of exhaustive examination of the fine points of any question and answer.  By the nature of the site answers have to have some limitations and in general we're not aiming for perfect answers (although it would be ideal) but for &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; answers.  In practice I think overall the various mechanisms of commenting and editing do allow answers to be very good more often than not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an imperfect system (all systems are) but it's doing the job it was intended to do.  It may simply not be the job you want it to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although notionally SE aims to provide an accurate knowledge base, it's not ever going to be a definitive repository of knowledge on any subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2022-12-05T13:45:25.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14272" CreationDate="2022-12-07T23:38:09.417" Score="13" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I joined the site 8 years ago now and I'd be curious how things have changed over time. Have we been gaining traffic? Losing traffic? Are there particular seasons or times of year that users flock to the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing important, just a curiosity. I think that with 25k reputation I could view this stuff through PSE itself, but I'm still far from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65074" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2022-12-12T09:11:47.823" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T20:55:02.507" Title="How does PSE traffic change over time?" Tags="|discussion|users|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-08T04:20:53.197" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find summer internships for physics in the USA and as an international student, I am having a tough time finding more options. I was planning to ask this question on the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange (PSE) site and get some suggestions, but I wasn't really sure if it is an appropriate question to be posted on PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273990" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-08T16:11:41.957" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T16:11:41.957" Title="Can we ask for the physics summer internships options on the 'Physics' Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|scope|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14267" CreationDate="2022-12-13T11:16:45.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could downvote the incorrect answer, leaving a comment explaining why, perhaps even with a caps WARNING, if you want. This way, fewer people will be mislead by the answer, and you're more likely to get the OP's attention, who hopefully might be able to amend their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As comments might be easily deleted, a similar but more useful option than just pointing out the mistake is (also) posting an answer where you refer to the incorrect answer and try to sketch how its corrected version might look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, if you really can't answer the question yourself at all, I indeed don't see any other options for action but to set a bounty. As for the reason, certainly &amp;quot;Draw attention&amp;quot; is fine and even &amp;quot;Improve details&amp;quot; wouldn't be far off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-asking the question sounds like a bad idea - even with good intent, it's still a duplicate, and it'll probably be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75633" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T11:16:45.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14269" CreationDate="2022-12-13T20:55:02.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;final privilege you can earn&lt;/a&gt; is, indeed, access to some internal (i.e.: posts and votes) and google (i.e.: traffic) analytics for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, as of right now, no data from before February 2018. (This was caused by some change in Google Analytics, and IIRC it was discussed on Meta Stack Exchange at the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analytics look like this (with all numbers being weekly aggregates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gdxt5.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The time axis is, unfortunately, rather useless. I tried to pull it into Excel and it messed with the labels (don't trust them below), but you can use the time axis here to asign specific times to features in the official graph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xe1kP.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this is useful and/or interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T20:55:02.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14278" CreationDate="2022-12-15T07:54:22.217" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was dissatisfied with one of my own questions due to a lack of clarity and focus, which became clear after other users provided comments, but I thought that it could be worked into an interesting/good question. I would like to return to it in the future after giving it more thought, to improve its focus and to increase the clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to hide the question until I am finished, so that other users won't waste their time working on an answer, since the focus might change in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is the proper way to handle such a case? Should I delete my question or should I flag the question for closure? Or is there a feature that I am unaware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165488" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-31T13:00:18.467" LastActivityDate="2022-12-31T13:00:18.467" Title="Is there a way to hide a question for editing?" Tags="|feature-request|editing|vote-to-close|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-15T10:46:26.373" Score="0" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to complete my four-year physics degree and want to write briefly on the topic of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've spent a lot of time on the physics Stack Exchange site (not on this account) and believe, overall, it's hugely detrimental to the physics cause - more specifically, the general public's aspirations, understanding and enjoyment of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I constantly see excited learners ask reasonable, enthusiastic questions but are rejected for stupid reasons. What's wrong with a homework-like question? Homework questions are specially written to expand and question one's understanding - it's a totally valid way of learning. If you think someone's trying to cheat, don't answer (or even comment) on the question - the beauty of a website like this is that if people don't respond to crappy questions they won't be popular/seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen many, many question written off as one for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;maths Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, the arithmetic/solving is obviously maths - hence the language of physics - but the explanation, the understanding, is obviously physics - don't reject someone for asking how to solve something physical using maths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, if you spent the same amount of time complaining about someone's question as you did answering it, your impact would be genuinely positive and fantastic. For those who think this site could be some definitive Q&amp;amp;A textbook - it isn't and never will be. Wikipedia will always be wider-reaching and more democratic - and if you want to contribute to a textbook/people's question, go write one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe in physics you should want it to grow - stop controlling the learning of other less knowledgeable students of the universe - it's not big and you're hampering our progression as a species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350520" OwnerDisplayName="Again" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T02:56:29.243" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T02:56:29.243" Title="Allowing mathematical and homework questions on this site" Tags="|discussion|scope|tags|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14274" CreationDate="2022-12-15T13:08:49.637" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it is fine for a site to decide what is on-topic and what is off-topic for the site. A different choice wouldn’t have been wrong, but having a specific policy (whatever it is) allows a site to focus and excel in that niche. Other needs outside of that niche are then best met by directing people to the places that already have that focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen many, many question written-off as one for the maths stack exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t agree with your point about math questions. Directing people to a better site is not writing off a question, it is sending people to another site with a better focus for that question. They will get better help at a site focused on their specific needs than they would here with a topic that is outside of our focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with a homework-like question? Homework questions are specially written to expand and question one's understanding - it's a totally valid way of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a valid way of learning, but it is not well suited to the Q&amp;amp;A format. What students usually need in homework help is not an answer to the question, but a discussion of the particular conceptual hurdle they are facing. That is more suited to a discussion format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think would be helpful is to point such students to physicsforums.com where homework help is already available. They are already staffed and focused and structured to best help. Similar to how math help is handled, quickly pointing students to physicsforums.com would help better than trying to handle their needs here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is better to excel in a specific focus area and point people to other excellent places as needed than to degrade our focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T13:08:49.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14274" CreationDate="2022-12-15T14:17:39.583" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe in physics you should want it to grow - stop controlling the learning of other less knowledgeable students of the universe - it's not big and you're hampering our progression as a species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a huge generalization. This specific site, physics.stackechange.com is one of thousands 830,000,000 , when I asked on google &amp;quot;sites physics questions answers&amp;quot; . A number of  them are interactive and it is logical that limits to the type of question an answer should be set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose what suits you better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T14:17:39.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14274" CreationDate="2022-12-15T15:05:50.367" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but the idea that our site policies are &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;controlling the learning of other less knowledgeable students of the universe&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is just plainly ridiculous. That people on the internet won't volunteer their time to answer your homework question is not &amp;quot;controlling your learning&amp;quot;, it's just people not wanting to do your homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, physics.SE could stop accepting new questions altogether tomorrow and it still wouldn't be exerting &lt;em&gt;control&lt;/em&gt; over anyone's learning. No one is forced to come here. When we say a question is off-topic that doesn't mean it will be impossible to ever get an answer to it - as you rightly point out, there are other sources on the internet!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every site needs to have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; boundary for what sort of content is acceptable on it. We've apparently chosen to draw this boundary on physics.SE narrower than you would like, but you seem to think that we could just expand that boundary and everything else would stay the same. However, it is not unlikely that changing our policies would alienate some contributors - again, everyone is here voluntarily, because they &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; to answer questions here, and presumably because they like (or at least can live with) our policies. Getting a lot more questions while having previously prolific answerers leave would certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be an improvement for the overall quality of physics education this site provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, regardless of what physics.SE chooses to do, we're not &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;hampering our progression as a species&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - that's just pointless hyperbole. The problems our species faces at large will not be solved by a website teaching slightly more people slightly more physics. Please reserve apocalyptic language for the non-zero amount of actual existential threats humanity faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T15:05:50.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14273" CreationDate="2022-12-15T15:16:36.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pressing the &lt;kbd&gt;Delete&lt;/kbd&gt; button on your own question hides the question and does not delete it. It can still be viewed by going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current&quot;&gt;the user profile&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;Activity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=questions&quot;&gt;Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;View all questions&lt;/em&gt; → scroll to the bottom → &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/deleted-questions/current&quot;&gt;Deleted Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It is not possible to edit the question while it’s deleted, but it can still be viewed by the author. The question can be undeleted and then edited again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further explanations are given&#xA;in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;Why and how are some questions deleted?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165488" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T02:06:14.420" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T02:06:14.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14274" CreationDate="2022-12-15T15:19:44.813" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with a homework-like question? Homework questions are specially written to expand and question one's understanding - it's a totally valid way of learning. If you think someone's trying to cheat, don't answer (or even comment) on the question - the beauty of a website like this is that if people don't respond to crappy questions they won't be popular/seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is not meant to be all things to everybody. You are accusing this community of being actively detrimental to physics because we have a very strict policy regarding homework and homework-like questions, but that policy is supported and enforced by the community. We have collectively decided that we don't want the site to become inundated with check-my-work style questions, which (as Dale points out) are better suited to a discussion forum.  And in fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQxzk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQxzk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If PSE has a policy against explicit homework help but PhysicsForums has an entire section dedicated to homework help for various levels and subjects, why wouldn't you simply go to PhysicsForums instead? Why should this community change its policies to suit what you personally think they should be, especially if other (both free and paid) sites which cater to those desires already exist in the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's because you prefer this site's Q&amp;amp;A format, or the general quality of the answers received, or the breadth of knowledge of the community as a whole, consider the possibility that these aspects of PSE are inextricably linked to its policies. Speaking as a sample size &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$N=1$&lt;/span&gt;, I am not an active user on PhysicsForums precisely because I don't like the relentless back-and-forth of a discussion forum. I am looking for interesting questions with thoughtful, authoritative answers, which is why I am here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen many, many question written-off as one for the maths stack exchange. Yes, the arithmetic/solving is obviously maths - hence the language of physics - but the explanation, the understanding, is obviously physics - don't reject someone for asking how to solve something physical using maths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guilty of answering more than a few questions which, objectively, should have been migrated to MSE. First, migration is not writing a question off. Questions which are purely mathematical in nature are being sent to a community of experts in mathematics which is &lt;strong&gt;better equipped&lt;/strong&gt; to answer the question in a clear and authoritative way. To be sure, there are likely many people at PSE who might be able to answer the question - but there are also people at PSE who can tell you how to change a tire or cook pasta. The point is that purely mathematical questions are not our community's focus, so we send such questions to a community that's a better fit. I can't imagine a way in which this is anything but positive for the question asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; physics involved in the understanding then by definition it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a pure mathematics question. If anything, this community errs on the side of keeping such questions open (in my experience, at least). Asking how many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_vector_field&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Killing vector fields&lt;/a&gt; must exist on a generic pseudo-Riemannian manifold is a purely mathematical question; asking why Killing vector fields correspond to physical symmetries is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, if you spent the same amount of time complaining about someone's question as you did answering it, your impact would be genuinely positive and fantastic. &lt;strong&gt;For those who think this site could be some definitive Q&amp;amp;A textbook - it isn't and never will be. Wikipedia will always be wider-reaching and more democratic - and if you want to contribute to a textbook/people's question, go write one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly this site is not what you are looking for - and that's okay. You are well within your rights to want to change things rather than simply leave, but we are equally well within our rights to keep things the same if the community disagrees with your proposed changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it is of course true that the community moderation does not always align with my views. Some questions are closed which should, in my opinion, remain open, and vice-versa.  Sometimes community members make mistakes or vote hastily, and voting is by no means universally consistent (which is certainly true of me). In such cases, I vote to re-open (with edits if necessary); if the community disagrees, then c'est la vie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think the policies as they are currently are more positive than negative. Disagreements are part of being in a community, and I will accept that sometimes there will be no reconciling my opinion with that of a majority of other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156895" LastEditorUserId="156895" LastEditDate="2022-12-15T15:24:36.313" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T15:24:36.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14274" CreationDate="2022-12-15T16:07:55.867" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My intention was to write this and not reply to the answers - that way danger lies. I will say one final thing though, which could have equally belonged to the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of homework-like questions and moving to the maths site are just &lt;em&gt;examples&lt;/em&gt; of the point I was trying to make. Of course there are justified, reasonable reasons for these rules, obviously. Many of the responses have reduced the conversation to just site policy chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote this out of frustration at the way enthusiastic learners are often pushed aside. If they didn't ask the question in the right way (which is often the tricky part) why not make a few assumptions about what they intended and try to teach them something at least on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think discarding questions as homework or belonging to the math site are examples of the widespread sh*tty/controlling attitude that will discourage people from the subject, and that makes me sad. At the very least, my own experience of this website, as someone who &lt;em&gt;loves&lt;/em&gt; physics, has been off-putting in the vast majority of cases. That's it. That's my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's not big and you're hampering our progression as a species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is hyperbole. But I genuinely believe a swathe of people interested in learning about physics will have been discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350520" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T16:07:55.867" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-19T14:07:18.703" Score="78" ViewCount="2358" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the impatient reader, the guidance is in the title: please don't use computer-generated text for questions or answers on Physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Computer-generated text violates our expectation that users are posting substantially original content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Computer-generated text which is not identified as such is plagiarized, and should be flagged as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Computer-generated answers are, in our experience, quite likely to leave the initial question unanswered. The most common failure modes are non-sequiturs, complete nonsense, or plausible-sounding fictional information. Such non-answers are an abuse of our users' time, and should be flagged as &amp;quot;rude or abusive.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has, in mid-2023, expressed concern that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/389583/280545&quot;&gt;automated detectors for computer-generated text may discriminate against non-native writers of English&lt;/a&gt;. The moderator team here on Physics have reason to believe that our approach to moderating suspected chatbot output has, in the first half of 2023, not suffered from the false-positive bias which is suspected for the network as a whole. We therefore have no plans to substantially change our moderation strategies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the moderation team &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14438/44126&quot;&gt;do not intend to ignore or decline flags on low-quality content&lt;/a&gt; because the flagger happens to speculate about the involvement of computer-generated text. We will instead continue to evaluate posts in the interest of cultivating and maintaining our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original version of this post follows below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past couple of weeks [in late 2022], a new generation of computer language-generating tools has become available to the public.  The main bit of news is about a product called &amp;quot;ChatGPT,&amp;quot; but that's just the most recent iteration of a class of software &amp;quot;chat bots.&amp;quot;  (Whether it's appropriate to refer to these systems as &amp;quot;artificial intelligence&amp;quot; is a philosophical question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a few days of ChatGPT's release, Stack Overflow issued a temporary &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/421831/1650379&quot;&gt;don't-use-this&lt;/a&gt; policy, stating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, because the average rate of getting &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is &lt;em&gt;substantially harmful&lt;/em&gt; to the site and to users who are asking or looking for &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically &lt;em&gt;look like&lt;/em&gt; they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be good and the answers are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Stack Overflow, the blanket ban has mostly been a volume problem. Physics is a much smaller community, and we have so far detected only a smattering of such posts.  However, the ones we &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; found have been pretty terrible, ranging from low-information word salad to obvious physical errors.  For example, the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you described, the Drapher's point [sic] corresponds to a temperature of approximately 3,631 K and a wavelength of approximately 3631 nanometers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should raise the eyebrows of anyone whose physics education has gotten as far as Wien's Law.  (It may not, however, raise the eyebrows of anyone who has tried to teach Wien's Law to reluctant intro-astronomy students.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another post, the &lt;em&gt;asker&lt;/em&gt; ended their question with &amp;quot;I asked an AI, but it didn't help me,&amp;quot; followed by a properly-quoted paragraph which hadn't helped them because it didn't make any sense.  I had a little flashback to when my children were small, and would sometimes run excitedly up to me, saying, &amp;quot;this thing! i found it on the floor! it tastes &lt;em&gt;so gross&lt;/em&gt;! you have to try it!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some posts have even crossed the line from well-intentioned to deceptive.  On one now-deleted post, a commenter asked the user who posted the answer to include references. The post was edited to include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some references for spin fluctuation are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Pairing in Type-II Superconductors Induced by Spin Fluctuations&amp;quot; by D. J. Scalapino, E. Loh, Jr., and J. E. Hirsch, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1983)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Spin Fluctuation-Mediated Pairing in Type-II Superconductors&amp;quot; by D. J. Scalapino, E. Loh, Jr., and J. E. Hirsch, Physical Review B, Vol. 34, No. 6 (1986)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Spin Fluctuation-Mediated Superconductivity: A Review&amp;quot; by D. J. Scalapino, Physics Reports, Vol. 250, No. 3 (1995)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's instructive to compare these &amp;quot;references&amp;quot; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.aps.org/search/results?clauses=%5B%7B%22field%22:%22author%22,%22value%22:%22scalapino%22,%22operator%22:%22AND%22%7D,%7B%22field%22:%22author%22,%22value%22:%22hirsch%22,%22operator%22:%22AND%22%7D%5D&amp;amp;sort=recent&amp;amp;date=custom&amp;amp;per_page=20&amp;amp;end_date=1989&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search of this time period at the Physical Review&lt;/a&gt;, which should turn up the first two. Scalapino and Hirsch coauthored a number of papers on superconductivity in the 1980s, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.50.1168&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one in PRL v50 (1983)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.34.8190&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another in PRB v34 (1986)&lt;/a&gt;.  However, Loh doesn't seem to have joined the group until 1986, and none of the team's coauthored titles includes the phrase &amp;quot;spin fluctuations.&amp;quot; Likewise, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1016/0370-1573(94)00086-I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;best candidate for the third reference&lt;/a&gt; has a different issue number and title.  Is it a good use of anyone's time to pursue this detective work into thirty- and forty-year-old literature to see whether these rhymes-with-correct citations address the question at hand?  Almost certainly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that my request to &amp;quot;please don't do this&amp;quot; isn't a new fancy policy tailored to the existence of an exciting new chatbot which superficially appears intelligent.  Our community has a number of established posting standards which are violated by these low-quality contributions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originality&lt;/strong&gt;.  User contributions on this site are expected to be primarily the poster's own original work. If properly cited, including a small passage from a third party is fine, but complete answers are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt;.  Content which originally appeared elsewhere, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/582/44126&quot;&gt;including your own content&lt;/a&gt;, must be posted &lt;em&gt;with attribution&lt;/em&gt;.  Plagiarized content may be hidden until appropriate attributions are added, or may be removed altogether.  It isn't common, but some serial plagiarists have found their site-use privileges suspended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Respect for others&lt;/strong&gt;.  If a user posts a question or an answer, our community needs to be able to expect that the post is a good-faith effort to learn things, or to help other people to learn things.  Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/58032/280545&quot;&gt;network-wide policy&lt;/a&gt; is that &amp;quot;abuse of the system or the community,&amp;quot; including &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234035/280545&quot;&gt;cat-on-keyboard gibberish posts&lt;/a&gt;, can reasonably be flagged using the &amp;quot;rude or abusive&amp;quot; option, where enough flags will automatically delete the post and apply a reputation penalty. Surreptitiously involving Physics users in your tests of some chatbot software is rude. Generating &amp;quot;citations&amp;quot; without any idea whether they refer to real documents or not, much less whether the cited documents are relevant, is an abuse of other people's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-06-03T09:34:19.147" LastActivityDate="2023-07-03T10:00:40.680" Title="Please don't use computer-generated text for questions or answers on Physics" Tags="|discussion|faq|questions|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14285" CreationDate="2022-12-20T14:20:18.507" Score="5" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title says, given a question of mine with one or more answers by other users, is it rude to provide a more focused answer by myself? I find that sometimes I solve my own doubts through the input of other users but the answers they provide sometimes remain obscure even if the answers aim to the same solution (even after requesting more details in the answer's comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen some posts where people answer their own question but still give the checkmark to another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the etiquette here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="168640" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T10:15:25.877" LastActivityDate="2023-01-07T17:03:14.280" Title="Is it rude to answer your own question yourself after other solutions are available?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14282" CreationDate="2022-12-20T20:33:34.323" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it rude to answer your own question yourself after other solutions are available?&#xA;given a question of mine with one or more answers by other users, is it rude to provide a more focused answer by myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are just copying one of the other answers, then yes. But generally, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the etiquette here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T02:30:53.143" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T02:30:53.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14282" CreationDate="2022-12-21T00:19:51.880" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question-and-answer community. It is not rude to provide original and useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is entirely possible for restatement of another answer, or a synthesis of multiple other answers, to be original and useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T00:19:51.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14282" CreationDate="2022-12-21T02:19:28.970" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...is it rude to provide a more focused answer by myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but the answers they provide sometimes remain obscure even if the answers aim to the same solution (even after requesting more details in the answer's comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an avid SE question-asker, I try to keep &lt;em&gt;future readers&lt;/em&gt; as the primary focus of all my actions, with the balance towards answer authors. So the more answers the merrier as long as each brings something new and different, and is actually an answer or important supplementary information to existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Go for it!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not seeing persistent down-voting of your answers or complaints in comments, then what you are doing is probably fine :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen some posts where people answer their own question but still give the checkmark to another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do this exact thing regularly (when I actually have something of value to add) and I don't recall any complaints. Again, focus is squarely on future readers and the value we bring them. They are our customers as question-askers, not the other answer authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T02:19:28.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-26T05:33:06.813" Score="-2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every question marked as &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; will be pointed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;How Do I Ask Homework Questions on Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. There are a lot of opposite opinions under the highest answer. Why do we still apply the current homework policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never posted my homework on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/a&gt;, but my questions were sometimes marked as a homework and even downvoted. This situation makes me frustrated. I usually spend hours to search an answer before posting the question. I even asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt; for help when it was available. No matter how I worked hard to find an answer before posting the question, once some experts feel my question is trivial or simple my question will be closed. This culture is a little bit toxic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer of the post I linked mentioned we should ask teacher, classmates etc for simple question (how to define simple? Lagrangian is not simple to high school students). It assume everyone is a undergraduate student on physics. That is not true. I graduated in computer science. If I have the resource mentioned in that answer, why I have to come to Phys.SE to use a language which is not my native language to ask a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see there are many comments with different opinions. Do we consider refer to Stack Overflow where seldom downgrades a question to make Phys.SE more inclusive to everyone who are not expert?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203452" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T22:48:47.670" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T22:48:47.670" Title="Why do we still apply the homework policy even when there are many opposite opinions?" Tags="|discussion|homework-and-exercises|down-votes|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14286" CreationDate="2022-12-26T06:03:42.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange is designed to be run mostly by its members. As soon as your site reputation reaches 3000 you can vote to close questions, to leave them open or to reopen closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the site has some general principles about homework questions, as discussed in the question you linked, every site member can vote to close, leave open or reopen as they wish. There is no obligation on individuals to vote in a specific way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the simple answer is that your questions are being closed because that's how the site members feel about them. Or at least, it's how the site members who can be bothered to vote feel about them. The sad reality is that only a few of us care enough about the site to vote regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look through &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/203452/ivanagyro?tab=questions&quot;&gt;your questions&lt;/a&gt; and as far as I can see only one of them has been closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/742590/why-the-first-order-derivative-is-missing-when-composing-a-hamiltonian-of-simple&quot;&gt;Why the first-order derivative is missing when composing a Hamiltonian of simple harmonic oscillator by the lowering and the raising operators?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally wouldn't have voted to close this as I think there is educational value in questions like that, but then I have only one vote (like all site members). However I see you did get your answer and have now resolved the problem so it has worked out OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reluctant to criticise anyone for voting to close questions because we get a deluge of blatant homework questions and it's a significant amount of effort for the few dedicated site members to go through the review queues weeding out the questions that really should be closed. If sometimes questions get closed when they shouldn't that's an unfortunate side effect of those few dedicated site members having to review a lot of questions. The fix is for more people to get involved with reviewing. Remember that ultimately this site works the way you want it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T06:03:42.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14286" CreationDate="2022-12-26T16:56:52.250" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is in fact massive consensus for closing &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; homework-like questions.  The most recent expressions of this consensus are found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14274/36194&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14216/36194&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every so often someone complains about this and the community overwhelmingly reaffirms the general policy that this is not a site to get help with homework or checking work of others. Indeed one closing reason is for &amp;quot;homework-like question or check-my-work question&amp;quot;: both reasons are in support of the policy.  If these questions are not closed the site will be rapidly taken over by people asking for homework help, when there are already sites specializing in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not make the &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; tag useless, nor does it mean all homework questions should be disallowed.  However, some tend to forget that posting a good question is actually quite hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the specific case of this post, it is difficult to believe that you spent &amp;quot;hours to search an answer before posting the question&amp;quot; since this is discussed in very many textbooks.  Nevertheless, I will take your word for it, and suggest that next time you are in this situation, insert details of your search, such as &amp;quot;[this textbook] approaches this problem in this way , whereas [that textbook] solves the problem in that way&amp;quot;.  This will provide additional context to your question and will make it easier to pin down the conceptual problem you are facing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T02:16:32.043" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T02:16:32.043" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14281" CreationDate="2022-12-30T08:18:53.450" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a difference should be made between questions and answers. While I agree with the cited violation of standards for the answers, I disagree in the case of questions. Information from AI may trigger a desire to understand its validity precisely, like in the case of information provided by humans or found in books (which are the ultimate source for AI too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T08:18:53.450" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-30T12:13:47.780" Score="-1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only asked about five questions on the site so far, and about 15 questions across the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blender.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Blender&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed a pattern of when I would continue to ask questions about someone's answer to my question they would blurt things like &amp;quot;just Google the concept of (blablabla)&amp;quot; as if I was wasting their time by asking further questions, even though I had adapted them in some way to fit the context of the question. They perceive I am trying to aggressively prove them wrong somehow even though I'm just curious about the topic at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was worried about my account getting permanently banned for this sort of thing, so I just want to know if it falls under the &amp;quot;Rudeness&amp;quot; rule in the site guidelines to ask too many questions. After all, they have the option to ignore my replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user350881" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-30T16:22:21.820" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T16:22:21.820" Title="Is there a rule against being overly persistent and inquisitive in comments?" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14290" CreationDate="2022-12-30T12:51:19.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say it is rude per se, but perhaps some comments are in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics is a subject that grows exponentially fast, in the sense that new knowledge tends to use a great deal of previous knowledge. For example, if you ask a question about General Relativity, people will assume you are familiar with, say, Electrodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sometimes means you might ask a question about GR and the person answering will give an answer that uses concepts from Electrodynamics you might not be aware of. I don't find it that unusual for someone with little physics background to ask about some &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; complicated stuff and get a complicated answer. Of course, this might lead to many follow-up questions to understand the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has some issues. Many of these follow-up questions might be also quite complex and impossible to answer in a comment and deserve a post of their own. In other cases, the follow-up question might not be suitable for a post because it is, say, the third class of an Electrodynamics course. In such a situation, I find it reasonable to expect that either you can understand the concept with a Google search, or you lack the proper Electrodynamics background, in which case we have a completely different problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This different problem is that the answer might have no chance of being useful for you right now. In some of my questions, I have received answers that are great in hindsight, but I definitely had no way to understand them at the time I asked the question. A way to avoid these issues is to try to make clear in your post what you expect of an answer. For example, it seems to me that the majority of users on this site are currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Physics or already have one. Hence, it is really common for answerers to assume this. It is, of course, completely okay for someone on high school to ask questions in here, but making clear in your question that you expect an answer accessible to high school students will lead you to much more useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Relativity example I gave. Relativity is an interesting subject here because there are questions asked by people working with the theory, and there are questions asked by people who know very little physics and are just curious about the Universe, and everything in between. And sometimes it is not clear from the question alone if the person expects an answer for a layman or an answer heavy in differential geometry. Depending on how I answer, the answer might be extremely useful or useless. Hence, adding context about what you expect in an answer might make the answers way more useful and minimize the amount of follow-up questions necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168783" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T12:51:19.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14290" CreationDate="2022-12-30T14:18:27.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the type of rudeness you describe in the comments under answers to your questions here on Physics. It's possible that I missed an inappropriate deleted comment, or that you've gotten those remarks in other communities, or that you are paraphrasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; notice that you tend to use comments under answers to your questions as a springboard into discussions of related ideas. That's a ton of fun, but it's not the way our community works. As the help center explains, we're a question-and-answer community. We specifically discourage extended back-and-forth discussions in the comments; for extended back-and-forth, we host a collection of &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=site&amp;amp;host=physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat rooms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule of thumb I use is to relate the complexity of a follow-up comment to the complexity of the answer it's attached to. If I'm looking at a ten- paragraph answer and I think my follow-up question will add one more paragraph (or less), then I'll ask in a comment. But if I am looking at a one- paragraph answer and I expect my follow-up question to add two paragraphs ... well, that answerer may have already volunteered all of their writing time for today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's almost always okay to ask complex follow-up questions as &lt;em&gt;separate questions&lt;/em&gt;. Many more people will see a follow-up question than will see a comment under an answer, so you're more likely to get help. It is polite to link to any related questions or answers, including those cross-posted to other sites, and to be clear why your follow-up question is distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T14:18:27.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-30T19:41:26.673" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I think this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/743234/&quot;&gt;On the definition of positive linear supermaps on Hilbert spaces&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may be an interesting mathematical question about Hilbert spaces, why is it not closed for belonging instead to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as this question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/743143/&quot;&gt;Cooling of 2 hot fluid streams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was closed for belonging to engineering, not to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31748" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2022-12-31T12:34:55.280" LastActivityDate="2022-12-31T12:34:55.280" Title="Why is &quot;this&quot; question physics, but &quot;that&quot; question is not?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14273" CreationDate="2022-12-31T03:19:01.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can cut and paste your LaTeX code to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackedit.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stackedit.io&lt;/a&gt;, edit it there at your leisure (it’s almost the same markdown editor as StackExchange) and then once you’re happy paste it back in place of your original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to first un-delete your post for a few moments, long enough to use the edit feature to copy the LaTeX code, and re-delete it immediately if you want your post to remain hidden except for the few moments where you captured your original LaTeX code.  Then do this again to paste the edited version back in place, obviously without deleting you newly edited post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2022-12-31T03:19:01.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-31T17:18:48.150" Score="-2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/743237/&quot;&gt;Is the average position for the ground state of a 1D simple harmonic oscillator zero?&lt;/a&gt;. I asked why the average position of the ground state of a simple harmonic oscillator (SHO) is not zero. And what is the meaning that the position is not zero? That is absolutely a question helping me to complete the physical concept in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To let others clearly know why I claimed the average position of the ground state of a SHO is not zero. I provided my proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to my experience, I feel my question is easily be marked as &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;, so I tag my question as &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot;. Evenly, it is not homework and I didn't ask others to check my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my question is still closed due to &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;. I guessed the reason is the answer pointed me out that a|0&amp;gt; is 0 not |0&amp;gt; (In fact, &amp;quot;a|0&amp;gt; is 0 not |0&amp;gt;&amp;quot; is a physical concept). Before I got the answer, I didn't know, it was unfair to say I wanted to others to &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always introspect after my question was closed because closing my question makes me feel I am wrong. I think if I hadn't listed those equations showing how I derived the average position, voters will not feel my question was &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;. But I don't think skipping equations is better. For people answering the question, more details more confidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you show me how to ask that question so that the question will not be closed as &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203452" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T07:06:28.643" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T11:23:58.163" Title="Why my question is still closed as &quot;homework like&quot; or &quot;check my work&quot; even I asked for the concept?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14296" CreationDate="2022-12-31T20:55:01.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP asks why the question is considered &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; as it was closed as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an extremely specific calculation, and the OP is stuck trying to find an error in the evaluation of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a\vert 0\rangle$&lt;/span&gt;.  This is exactly the kind of question that &lt;em&gt;defines&lt;/em&gt; check my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of elementary due diligence means this question has limited reach beyond the specific answer to the OP.  A simple Google search &lt;a href=&quot;https://site:physics.stackexchange.com%20creation%20operator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;site:physics.stackexchange.com creation operator&lt;/a&gt; will yield multiple similar questions and it is difficult to believe the OP even bothered to check answers on this site to such questions before posting their own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To improve, the question should (IMO) at least be asked for any &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$n$&lt;/span&gt;, i.e., something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The average value of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt; for any harmonic oscillator eigenstate is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$0$&lt;/span&gt; by parity.  Yet, when I compute &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\langle x\rangle$&lt;/span&gt; using &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a^\dagger$&lt;/span&gt;, I get&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;a^\dagger \vert n\rangle = [\text{something}]\, ,\quad&#xA;a\vert n\rangle = [\text{something else}]\, .  \tag{1}&#xA;$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;with the result that &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\langle n\vert x\vert n\rangle \sim&#xA;\langle n\vert a+a^\dagger \vert n\rangle\ne 0$&lt;/span&gt; using Eq.(1) and orthogonality &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\langle n\vert n+\pm 1\rangle=0$&lt;/span&gt;.  Clearly I cannot reconcile the result using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bra–ket&lt;/a&gt; with the physical result that should be 0.  Therefore...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry to say that this kind of question - at least as it is currently phrased - should IMO never be reopened and in fact should be quickly closed.  I am but one voice, yet I do not see how this kind of question is helpful to the site.   Again, IMO, the question in its current form does not bring much to anyone interested in a better understanding of the action of creation and destruction operator because of its specificity, except possibly for a student who is faced with an assignment question where they need to evaluate &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a\vert 0\rangle$&lt;/span&gt; or &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a^\dagger \vert 0\rangle$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do hope others will include their suggestions on how to improve this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T11:23:58.163" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T11:23:58.163" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-01T21:28:20.970" Score="5" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/742748/status-of-absolute-lorentz-transformation-theory&quot;&gt;this closed question&lt;/a&gt; I was asking about particular claims made by a nonmainstream theory in the literature. I was asking about it since I didn't find much info about it elsewhere, so I wanted to know whether in the first place it is considered a &amp;quot;crank&amp;quot; theory, or just merely a minority opinion similar to Neo-Lorentz theory, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bohm's interpretation&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QM&lt;/a&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons I chose the particular paper I did is, in addition to having the central claims I asked about, is because it also references most of the authors who have studied the theory, and you can see the journals they published in. This includes journals like Modern Phys, Modern Phys Letters, Foundations of Phys and General Relativity and Gravitation. I don't know if these are considered to be 'red flag' journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm rather new to SE so if there was something wrong with this question, or there is a way to improve it, I'd love to know. I removed one last question asking about the experimental part of the paper if that was part of the issue with the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114852" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-01-02T14:04:18.107" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T14:04:18.107" Title="Help with understanding if question is appropriate and/or how to reframe it" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-01T22:10:12.933" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently edited a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/742810/44126&quot;&gt;closed question by another user&lt;/a&gt;, in an attempt to reopen the question. For that I had to somewhat modify the question, by removing fluff like 'please answer this' but also &lt;em&gt;adding some context&lt;/em&gt;, which was added to my taste. After my edit the question got a downvote. It is &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt;, of course, that the downvoter downvoted because of my edits. Not only do I not get punished for that, I still keep my +2 from my edits, and the OP got punished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For major edits, shouldn't the editor also put reputation at stake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="343870" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T22:21:51.747" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T20:29:19.277" Title="Should editors share the punishment for downvotes?" Tags="|discussion|editing|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14299" CreationDate="2023-01-01T22:40:13.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the edits were accepted then presumably the edits were considered improvements.  The question of when downvotes occur rarely depends on edits: assuming the edits are good, this question would likely have been downvoted anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s a separate issue as to doing significant edits (which IMO you should not do, or should not be accepted at any rate.). If you feel bad about your edits, you can always ask for a rollback and see of the downvote disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Alternatively of course, one could envisage &amp;quot;penalizing&amp;quot; all those who accepted your edits.  :) ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-01-02T20:29:19.277" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T20:29:19.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-03T14:17:56.313" Score="11" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: appears fixed as of 01/26?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I go to the reopen queue and choose to keep a question closed, one possibility is to choose that the question still does not meet a community-specific guideline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FT4T2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FT4T2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on this takes me to a secondary menu where specific reasons are listed, as illustrated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/njyF7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/njyF7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I choose any one specific reason from this menu, I cannot complete my vote because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rj8YD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rj8YD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to register my vote as a sub-reason of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FT4T2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FT4T2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2023-01-30T17:57:41.500" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T17:57:41.500" Title="Bug in the reopen queue?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|voting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14282" CreationDate="2023-01-07T17:03:14.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scenario you describe is analogous to writing a review paper where you summarize the current contributions in a field or discipline.&#xA;The same etiquette applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="334569" LastActivityDate="2023-01-07T17:03:14.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14307" CreationDate="2023-01-12T13:06:32.603" Score="6" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the title (hopefully tries to convey) - Is it advisable to answer a question with an answer that is more &amp;quot;supplementary&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like, based on other answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say, maybe, if the user (asker) is new, and an answer is (although correctly and accurately) explaining in a very detailed way - exactly what the question is asking about; I thought if I could write an answer based on the other answers, but in a &amp;quot;simpler&amp;quot; &amp;quot;language&amp;quot;. That is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(for a concrete example)&#xA;(&lt;em&gt;note I am kind of making this up, just to not make this question incredibly long&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: What is a simplest black hole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A1: A Schwarzschild one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A2: A hole that doesn't have angular momentum and no charge.&#xA;(...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on A1, it is a Schwarzschild black hole (and, based on A2 - it has no angular-momentum(in other words it does not spin) and no charge(no electric charge)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Based on a comment I edit this to be a bit better example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on A1 and A2; it is a Schwarzschild black hole (related to the Schwarzschild metric (being, an solution to Einstein's equations in General Relativity, that describes the gravitational field outside a spherical mass(Like Earth), on the assumption that the electric charge of the mass, angular momentum of the mass, and universal cosmological constant are all zero. -Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Some things in the answer could be&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Added examples (when applicable).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explanations (at a different &amp;quot;level&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;point of view&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More related (directly/indirectly) links.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;External Links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/19558/would-it-be-advised-to-answer-already-answered-questions-with-alternative-answ&quot;&gt;https://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/19558/would-it-be-advised-to-answer-already-answered-questions-with-alternative-answ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this was a Ubuntu question i posted; which I forgot about; adding it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276316" LastEditorUserId="276316" LastEditDate="2023-01-13T22:36:45.207" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T22:36:45.207" Title="Is it advisable to provide a supplementary answer to a question?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14306" CreationDate="2023-01-12T15:42:09.203" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need to formulate specific criteria about which answers are &amp;quot;advisable&amp;quot; or not. If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, the author of the answer, think that the answer you are writing &lt;em&gt;adds something&lt;/em&gt; over the answers already present, then you should post that answer. What it adds - being simpler, being more illustrative, being more complicated, being more mathematical, whatever - isn't really all that relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If other people agree that your answer is useful, they'll upvote your answer, if they disagree, they'll downvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing you should perhaps consider when your potential new answer has a lot of overlap with other answers already present is whether it might be more efficient to suggest an &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; to an existing answer instead of writing a separate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; you give in your question is, in my opinion, rather bad. It's bad on every level: Not only does your proposed answer not really add anything over the two answers already present (it just &lt;em&gt;repeats&lt;/em&gt; the other answers with slightly different words), the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is already unclear (what does it even mean for a black hole to be &amp;quot;simplest&amp;quot;?), and the two suggested answers are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; bad (e.g. just saying &amp;quot;Schwarzschild&amp;quot; without at least linking to an explanation of what that means is almost completely useless). I would have downvoted both the question and all the answers in this example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T15:42:09.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14311" CreationDate="2023-01-13T22:17:28.433" Score="10" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t have enough reputation to vote to close or migrate questions, so instead I commented on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/745327/how-to-transform-circle-from-cartesian-to-polar-coordinates&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and wrote “This question is about math, not physics.” The comment was deleted. Was it wrong, rude, or otherwise inappropriate for me to write this comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321853" LastActivityDate="2023-01-14T02:37:13.783" Title="Was my comment inappropriate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14310" CreationDate="2023-01-14T02:11:57.827" Score="14" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;A poster has written &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/745328&quot;&gt;something long-ish which was voted as off-topic/personal theory&lt;/a&gt;.  I don’t have any issue with that.  However, they state in comments that they intend to leave it closed and undeleted so that they can give the link to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am happy if people leave this without deleting it. It has given me excellent formatting, and &lt;strong&gt;a simple link I can give out&lt;/strong&gt;. People can contact me personally, so they will not flood StackExchange [sic] with responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bold highlighting is mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this is appropriate as the site exists to explain mainstream physics, not to help promote personal theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this post (and any similar ones in the future) be deleted so that Physics SE is not connected to personal theories or used as a repository for them?  My view would be to delete this, but that raises the question if &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; personal theory-type questions should be deleted for consistency.  That seems a bit drastic and leaves us with considering on a case by case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some community guidance would be useful here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note it was suggested by another user that the post might be auto-deleted anyway by the system.  Can anyone confirm that this is they case or not?  If so, it would make my concerns about linking to it irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-01-14T15:34:55.400" LastActivityDate="2023-01-14T15:34:55.400" Title="Off-topic posts being used to link to from outside" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14309" CreationDate="2023-01-14T02:20:52.470" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posting something that is not an on-topic question merely to use our site as storage for it is a misuse of the site and should not be tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this specific question is closed, downvoted and without answers, it would not have stayed undeleted for long anyway due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba&lt;/a&gt; (see the link for the specific criteria for auto-deletion), but I have hastened its deletion manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine to vote to delete such posts (remember that users with &amp;gt;20k reputation can vote to delete any post) or to raise custom moderator flags if you think any particular off-topic post needs to be deleted faster than the usual roomba logic would delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-01-14T02:20:52.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14308" CreationDate="2023-01-14T02:37:13.783" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user posted essentially the same question twice, presumably by accident, then (correctly) deleted one of them.  Your comment was on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/745315/polar-coordinates&quot;&gt;the other&lt;/a&gt;, nearly-identical question.  (However, you will not currently be able to see anything by following that link—since you have to have 10k reputation to see deleted questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2023-01-14T02:37:13.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14313" CreationDate="2023-01-16T15:25:10.723" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are frequent questions based on external videos, specifically YouTube popular physics videos. For example, there are many questions based on Veritasium experiments. Would it be worth it to have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/veritasium&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;veritasium&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;veritasium&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;veritasium-container&quot;&gt;veritasium&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/youtube&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;youtube&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;youtube&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;youtube-container&quot;&gt;youtube&lt;/a&gt; or at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-physics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;popular-physics-container&quot;&gt;popular-physics&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, things could be said for question about frequently used books like &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/griffiths-electrodynamics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;griffiths-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;griffiths-electrodynamics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;griffiths-electrodynamics-container&quot;&gt;griffiths-electrodynamics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="195139" LastEditDate="2023-01-17T20:33:22.637" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T20:33:22.637" Title="Do we need a popular videos tag or specific author tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14312" CreationDate="2023-01-16T17:34:41.247" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, these tags describe the &lt;em&gt;sources&lt;/em&gt; of the questions themselves, not the &lt;em&gt;subject matter&lt;/em&gt; of the question. Hence, you would not be able to tag a question with any one of those, making them &lt;strong&gt;dependent&lt;/strong&gt; on other tags on the question. These would then be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;meta tags&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which are generically frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/popular-physics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-physics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;popular-physics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;popular-physics-container&quot;&gt;popular-physics&lt;/a&gt; tag, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4449/25301&quot;&gt;this prior post&lt;/a&gt; on the topic (and probably all the linked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T17:34:41.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14315" CreationDate="2023-01-21T01:54:58.510" Score="7" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a user who has answered almost 90 questions and gotten, if I added correctly, a net -76 votes. The range of net votes on individual answers is from -9 to +1. This indicates to me that this user is not contributing productively to the site, although this is obviously just my own opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the algorithms that block users from contributing endless low-quality answers set by the corporation? Can moderators step in and apply their own judgement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This user’s profile page indicates that these low-quality answers have already “reached” 20,000 people, which I find disturbing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321853" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-01-21T03:43:40.327" LastActivityDate="2023-01-21T04:22:46.307" Title="What does it take for a user to get an answer ban?" Tags="|support|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14314" CreationDate="2023-01-21T04:17:28.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for not identifying this user publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the algorithms that block users from contributing endless low-quality answers set by the corporation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.  There are a few different “bans,” which are discussed more on the network-wide Meta in various posts.  Some low-quality contributors get “throttled,” so that they can only post one question (or answer) per week. For questions,  other users are just blocked until their “question record” rises above some threshold. The question record counts every question asked worth +1, but then questions which have negative score, are closed, or have been deleted get -1 for each status. This means that deleting a downvoted and/or closed question makes your posting history “worse,” from the perspective of running up against quality restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar set of automatic thresholds for answers.  However, some of the &lt;em&gt;automatic&lt;/em&gt; bans also account for user reputation, and may not apply to high-reputation users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I’m writing this summary without digging though the various Metas to confirm details. If I’ve gotten something wrong, please link to an authoritative post and I’ll fix it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can moderators step in and apply their own judgement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.  Moderators can and do suspend users with a pattern of low-quality contributions. If you think you have identified such a user, please flag one of their posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The range of net votes on individual answers is from -9 to +1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the moderator team is discussing such a user, there are a few things like this that we usually discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the user in question an especially prolific poster? At some point I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/840905/most-prolific-answerers-during-date-interval-mean-answer-score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; to identify such prolific users. Somebody who is posting several times a day (which, recently, is nobody) is much more likely to attract site attention than somebody who is only dropping by every few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prolific posters pose potential problems whether their answers are high-quality or not. For instance, I happen to be an astounding genius who knows everything about physics and explains with stunning clarity. (sarcasm emoji) But if I were to answer every question, so that the site turned into “rob’s awesome physics blog,” that would be weird and bad for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are the posts in question &lt;em&gt;recently&lt;/em&gt; low-quality? People come here to learn, which starts off with not knowing things. Several users have responded to feedback (from the moderators, from the community, or both) about low-quality posts by becoming better writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are the posts in question a distraction to the community? We’ve had users in the past who have posted low-quality contributions and then fought about them in comments, in chat, on meta, leading to bad feelings all round.  We also have users who attract downvotes, but aren’t disruptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;answered almost 90 questions and gotten, if I added correctly, a net -76 votes … these low-quality answers have already “reached” 20,000 people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s nobody in the SEDE query linked above with a negative mean score on their recent answers.  The “reached 20k people” metric works out to about 200 viewers per answer … but I think that counts everybody who loads a page containing an answer, whether they scroll to that answer or not. I wouldn’t take that number seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next time you notice a bad post by this user, you might raise a flag and point out that it’s part of a pattern of low-quality contributions. Flag histories accumulate, and we may or may not take action immediately, and our response may or may not be visible to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2023-01-21T04:22:46.307" LastActivityDate="2023-01-21T04:22:46.307" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-22T03:18:55.590" Score="9" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, when answering a question, I have taken advantage of the availability of online calculators. Theses calculators do specific and useful calculations like determine the grams of water in air based on relative humidity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many instances, these calculators are part of business websites as a customer service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I attach a link, then I'm attaching a link to a business which could be misconstrued as using the Stack Exchange to promote a business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an issue? Is there a Stack Exchange policy on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="334569" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-01-22T03:28:26.863" LastActivityDate="2023-02-11T16:22:06.437" Title="Posting links to online calculators" Tags="|discussion|links|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-22T18:40:45.793" Score="13" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the temporary nature of comments in phys.SE (and generally in the SE network) and their primary scope to ask for/point out clarifications on a post, or to suggest edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, upon a brief exchange of comments with @BioPhysicist &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/746509/142398&quot;&gt;under this answer&lt;/a&gt;, they pointed out that anything that doesn't fit into the above two categories, should not be a comment at all, or more precisely, &lt;em&gt;if it's not an edit nor an answer, then it shouldn't be posted at all.&lt;/em&gt; I am, thus, left wondering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a question, where I have an interesting thought or comment&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, that is not elaborate enough to be an answer, or that does not address all the points in the question, but that I think would benefit the OP and the readers of the question, should I refrain from posting it? Should I go even further as to flag such comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't think I should refrain from posting my thoughts as a comment (and then obviously I wouldn't flag other, similar, comments), because despite the temporary nature of comments, hey, someone might have read it while it was there and found it helpful. If they didn't and the comment is now deleted, no big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to hear possible reasons why I &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; refrain from posting such comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, please, do not go into details about the linked question that motivated this one. My question is a general question about the usage of comments in phys.SE and is self-contained in this post, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; whether @BioPhysicist or me is right about that particular answer answering the (currently actually closed) question sufficiently or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; comment in the traditional sense of the word, not the technical sense &amp;quot;words in the little 300 character space under a post&amp;quot; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142398" LastActivityDate="2023-01-22T19:03:22.217" Title="Usage of comments" Tags="|discussion|comments|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14317" CreationDate="2023-01-22T19:03:22.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brief answers, or partial answers, should be posted as answers. For responses which are neither comments nor answers, the internet is a big place with many non-SE websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-01-22T19:03:22.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-26T15:16:26.860" Score="10" ViewCount="149" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V0TPg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Physics over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;154&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,446&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;716&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;168&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,989&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;980&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;256&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9,213&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11,529&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,226&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;875&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,266&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,226&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12,955&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;363&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;90&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;872&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;60&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,229&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,619&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,930&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,946&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;271&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,863&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;85&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;77&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;57&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;152&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;257&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;26&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;25&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;126&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,878&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;60&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,737&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;109&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9,291&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;68&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,010&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;120&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,035&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;270&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,082&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;606&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,632&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Triage&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;257&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;122&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;110&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;120&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;98&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;85&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13973/2021-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2021: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222022%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/386090/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T18:15:52.073" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T18:15:52.073" Title="2022: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-28T17:43:16.217" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new to SE and I am wondering what is the best thing to do when I ask a question that remains unanswered (not even through comments) for a long time? Is it allowed to re-ask the same question after enough time has passed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s. I am excluding bounties as they seem costly for me right now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353789" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-01-28T17:54:43.610" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T17:54:43.610" Title="What to do about old unanswered questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|duplicates|best-practices|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-01-28T18:00:50.637" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-30T00:30:22.140" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm frequently visiting the physics Stack Exchange site via my phone and sometimes I ask a question too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While by design the phone is not optimal for asking a question as compared to a laptop or PC. I'm curious, do we have data for the number of phone users vs. question score (and question closing) obtained? And if the distribution is not satisfactory, maybe we can discuss some policy over phone users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-01-30T14:32:10.127" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T14:32:10.127" Title="What is the distribution of phone users vs question score?" Tags="|support|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14321" CreationDate="2023-01-30T02:24:44.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that Stack Exchange, like any large website, keeps statistics about how many of its users use various browser versions, which includes some information about operating system and can be used to distinguish phone users from tablet users from desktop users. But&#xA;I suspect that accumulated statistics about &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; users use &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; operating systems would run into hairy privacy territory. There is certainly nothing like &amp;quot;browser type&amp;quot; in the public Data Explorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one datum, I access the site both ways.  I seem to make shorter paragraphs when I'm writing on a phone than I do when I'm writing on a desktop. Occasionally, I'll revisit a phone-written answer from a desktop computer, and think &amp;quot;why did I make all these short little paragraphs?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T02:24:44.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-02T02:37:04.523" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; makes things convenient and far more readable, it seems unfair to demand fresh new users to learn it before posting a question, which is something of a common occurence here. A lot of these questions usually recieve quick downvotes and are sometimes closed. I wonder, if beginning undergraduates or some of the many high schoolers on the site are not intimidated by the barrage of symbols and formatting lessons that go along with learning MathJax as so many experienced users ask them to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps we can make a stronger requirement to use MathJax for users who have asked more than a certain threshold (say, 5?) of questions composed of handwritten stuff or images. Should they be readable to at least some degree, one could flag these questions as suboptimal (a new type of flag?) and more than 5 such flags could result in bans and harsher bans on a repeat of this. What this does according to me is to give new users enough time to get around to familiarise themselves with MathJax while also giving them room to ask any pressing queries keeping them awake at night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who prefer seeing uber-readable questions who will downvote a slightly more difficult to read one without a second thought, this can also be a good system to simply avoid such questions by flagging them as such. However, questions under this flag should still be open for answers, albeit filterable for those who get ticked off by issues with readability. Would this be a reasonable thing to do and is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195854" LastEditorUserId="168640" LastEditDate="2023-02-02T09:57:42.920" LastActivityDate="2023-02-02T09:57:42.920" Title="MathJax usage for questions by new users" Tags="|discussion|editing|mathjax|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14323" CreationDate="2023-02-02T08:50:21.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course I do not know the voting behaviour of other people, but I think you're inferring causation where there is only correlation. The following things are probably true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions by new users often don't use MathJax, and will receive comments that they should use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question by new users are on average downvoted more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no hard evidence for this but anecdotally I also believe that questions by new users that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; use MathJax might be downvoted less often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not mean that the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; the questions that don't use MathJax are being downvoted is that they don't use MathJax. I think the correlation here is caused more like this: Users who start out using MathJax &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; have lurked enough around the site to understand this is the ideal way to write formulae &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; they are already familiar with TeX from elsewhere - probably because they are at least university students of a STEM field. In both cases these users will also tend to have a better understanding of what is on-topic here and/or how to ask a well-formed question about physics as a natural science, and hence their questions will be downvoted less often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is possible that there are people who downvote questions just because they don't use MathJax, but we can't do much about that - voting is anonymous and completely up to individual users; if someone wants to downvote a question because it is Tuesday they can and will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mention that these questions are &amp;quot;sometimes closed&amp;quot;. I have never seen a question closed for the reason that it doesn't use MathJax, and if this indeed happens it would be a misuse of our closing mechanism since we have no policy that not using MathJax would make a question off-topic here. If you claim this happens regularly, I would be interested to see examples, and I encourage everyone to vote to reopen in such cases. (But again: that the question is closed and doesn't use MathJax doesn't imply it is closed &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it uses no MathJax)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Altogether I am not convinced that we have any problem here that could be solved by dealing with questions that don't use MathJax differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-02-02T08:50:21.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14327" CreationDate="2023-02-02T09:56:39.840" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user suggests an edit, two users with access to the review queue are necessary to validate the edit, even if the first user has the &amp;quot;edit applied immediately&amp;quot; privilege. Why is that so? Users with edit privileges can override the edit, do the same edit themselves, and get it applied immediately. However, if instead they accept the edit, it is necessary to wait for another user approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason to keep this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some answers to this question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78799/why-do-we-need-multiple-approvers-for-suggested-edits&quot;&gt;MetaSE: Why do we need multiple approvers for suggested edits?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="168640" LastEditDate="2023-02-02T17:32:25.867" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T22:31:02.470" Title="Why accepting edits with edit privilege should not be immediate" Tags="|feature-request|review|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-02T14:48:19.623" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/747786/ball-rolling-in-a-cylindrical-trough&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed with the comment that it is a &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; question. I have read the posts recommended by the reviewers to address the issues and edited the question several times. However, the question remains closed with the only comment being &amp;quot;Original close reason(s) were not resolved.&amp;quot; Without specific pointers to which parts of the question violate the policy it is very difficult to fix the violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there seems to be no mechanism to request information on which parts of the question specifically violate the policy. Editing the question blindly, with only more comments like &amp;quot;Original close reason(s) were not resolved.&amp;quot; in the offing, feels like a find-me-a-rock quest. Can anyone please help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44763" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-02-02T15:28:16.290" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T00:50:56.733" Title="How do I get the reviewers to provide more informative comments on question closure?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14325" CreationDate="2023-02-02T18:10:06.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested, this question is actually concerns MetaSE, so after some research I will self-answer it. There are indeed some answers to this question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/386316/why-is-it-that-a-reviewer-with-full-edit-privileges-cannot-single-handedly-appro&quot;&gt;MetaSE: Why do we need multiple approvers for suggested edits?&lt;/a&gt; The reason summary was given by another comment in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/386316/why-is-it-that-a-reviewer-with-full-edit-privileges-cannot-single-handedly-appro&quot;&gt;duplicate question of mine&lt;/a&gt; by @Spevacus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The TL;DR is... Quality. It's extremely easy to hit &amp;quot;Approve&amp;quot; on an edit that might not be that great of an edit. It's less likely that two people robotically click &amp;quot;Approve&amp;quot; on a bad edit. It's much less likely that someone hits one of the improvement options and actually makes changes themselves and those end up being bad changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168640" LastEditorUserId="168640" LastEditDate="2023-02-04T22:31:02.470" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T22:31:02.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14329" CreationDate="2023-02-03T05:33:39.690" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/748272/&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; PSE question is now closed for being a duplicate. This means that no one (less than 10k rep?/no unprotect priv.) can answer. The purpose of &amp;quot;protect question&amp;quot; is to &amp;quot;Protect this question if it is highly active and likely to receive spam activity or non-answers. Anonymous and low reputation users can’t answer protected questions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &amp;quot;protect question&amp;quot; dialogue/button is available even though the question is closed - I just clicked (then unclicked) this button and the question went into protect mode. So my question is, is there anything more this action does apart from preventing anon/low reputation users from answering? Or could it just be something the developers haven't got around to fixing if it needs to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95176" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-02-03T11:36:21.300" LastActivityDate="2023-02-03T11:36:21.300" Title="Possibility to protect question even when closed?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14328" CreationDate="2023-02-03T06:48:23.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Protect / Unprotect privilege is at 15k, but Open / Close is only 3k. It may be desirable to protect a closed question, in case it gets reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Also, people may be less inclined to cast a reopen vote on a protected question.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, the usual Protected banner is hidden on closed questions, but it re-appears if the question is re-opened, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/131638/334566&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t display &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; notice if the question is locked or closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123208" LastEditorUserId="123208" LastEditDate="2023-02-03T08:22:05.387" LastActivityDate="2023-02-03T08:22:05.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14326" CreationDate="2023-02-03T23:24:46.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add to the main concern, that physics.meta.SE is the right place to get feedback on what constitutes policy violations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was one of the reviewers who &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/404760&quot;&gt;voted&lt;/a&gt; to keep &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/747786/ball-rolling-in-a-cylindrical-trough&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; closed (though I did not originally vote for it to be closed). One thing that stands out is the fact that there does not appear to be a &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; question in your original post. At least not in a form that is considered acceptable.&#xA;It would appear that after trying to solve a physics problem, you went over what you did then asked members to help you identify where you went wrong and what caused inconsistent results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the policy of PSE, this is could be interpreted as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;check-my-work question&lt;/a&gt; type, and is therefore off-topic. When a question is of the &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; form, the appropriate close vote reason falls under the &lt;em&gt;singular&lt;/em&gt; category &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; check-my-work questions&lt;/em&gt;. Though what may have caused your initial confusion as to why the question was closed was your thinking that it was more along the lines of &amp;quot;this is not homework&amp;quot;. And most would agree it is not homework, but agree it is &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that if there was a separate close reason (and I certainly am not suggesting the need for such) specifically for &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; type questions, then perhaps you would not be wondering why, since this seems more specific to the close reason.&#xA;In any case, I would guess that if you sufficiently clarify what your actual question is, that might be enough to get the question reopened, and increases the likelihood of a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95176" LastEditorUserId="95176" LastEditDate="2023-02-04T00:50:56.733" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T00:50:56.733" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-03T23:44:36.727" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10583/630228&quot;&gt;main Stack Exchange documentation&lt;/a&gt; says that five votes are required to close a question, except for a list of networks that does not include Physics SE. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14133/testing-3-vote-close-and-reopen&quot;&gt;this Physics Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; post seems to suggest that there is currently a test ongoing that lowers the threshold to 3 votes. But the latter post is long, heavy on analytics and so hard to read, and does not highlight the policy change very clearly. Moreover, the title makes it seem like it could just be an idea for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 3 votes is indeed the current threshold to close a question on Physics SE, then I would suggest that someone clarify the main SE Meta answer to state that, and also rewrite the Physics SE question to make it clearer that this test is in fact in effect. (Perhaps add &amp;quot;Announcement:&amp;quot; in the title, add a bold sentence right up top announcing the new policy, and clarifying how long the test will last and what will happen after it ends.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92058" LastActivityDate="2023-02-03T23:44:36.727" Title="Update the SE documentation to clarify how many votes are required to close a question" Tags="|feature-request|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-04T00:09:50.143" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/747513/&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as &amp;quot;not suitable for&amp;quot; Physics SE. Based on the comments, the voters seemed to think that it belongs to Biology SE instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this reasoning. Answering this question requires answering two sub-questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the flux of radiation at the Earth's surface if the Earth didn't have a geomagnetic field?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the impacts of that radiation flux on human health?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sub-question is clearly a physics question. The second sub-question is &lt;em&gt;arguably&lt;/em&gt; more of a biology question, although I personally feel that the impacts of radiation on biological tissue is a biophysics question that lies well within the intersection of both fields. But even if we granted that the second sub-question was a better fit for Bio SE, then I don't understand why, if the first half is a better fit for Physics SE and the second half a better fit for Bio SE, that makes the whole question not suitable for Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One commenter claimed that &amp;quot;the crux of the question&amp;quot; was the second subquestion. I don't understand this claim; one needs to answer both halves in order to answer the question. Arguing over which half is &amp;quot;the crux of&amp;quot; the question seems to me to be about as well-posed as arguing whether the engine or the steering wheel forms &amp;quot;the crux of&amp;quot; a car. You need both in order to function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A separate question was also raised, which was which title best summarizes the content of the question. I believe that this is an orthogonal issue to whether or not the question is on topic. My understanding of SE best practices is the purpose of question titles is to quickly convey the point to a viewer, but the title is not considered to be an &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; part of the question for the purpose of answering, and by design it often deliberately omits critical parts of the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that in situations like this, where different &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; sub-questions of a question might (arguably) be optimal for different networks, a question should be considered on-topic for any of the networks. Do others agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92058" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-02-04T03:17:48.810" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T03:17:48.810" Title="How should we handle &quot;multidisciplinary&quot; questions with subparts that are appropriate for different SE networks?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14332" CreationDate="2023-02-04T01:08:29.123" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the fact that even the meta question here talks about different &lt;em&gt;subquestions&lt;/em&gt; is simply an indication the question is not focused enough for the SE model: Yes, to answer the question you are interested in - &amp;quot;What effects does the radiation flux in a certain setting have on human health?&amp;quot; - you need the answers to both subquestions - but that doesn't mean the best way to model this in terms of SE questions is as a single question. Just because it is &lt;em&gt;grammatically&lt;/em&gt; a single question in the English language doesn't mean it can't still be too broad for an SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no obvious reason you could not simply ask this as two separate questions, i.e. &amp;quot;What is the radiation flux in this setting?&amp;quot; first, and then, after you've gotten an answer to that, &amp;quot;What is the effect of this level of radiation flux on human health?&amp;quot; as a second question. This would make the rather subjective discussion about which of the two subquestions is the &amp;quot;crux&amp;quot; unnecessary. It also means I disagree with the claim in this meta question that the two subquestions are somehow &amp;quot;necessary&amp;quot; parts of a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, questions can be on-topic on more than one SE site - we have discussed this in the past with respect to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8935/50583&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5548/50583&quot;&gt;astronomy&lt;/a&gt; questions. That another SE site exists on which a question would be on-topic is in principle &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an argument that it should be off-topic here. This point is sometimes misunderstood because we also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/64073/263383&quot;&gt;discourage cross-posting&lt;/a&gt; to several sites at one, but these policies are actually complementary: If questions could only be on-topic on one SE site, then there'd be no need for a cross-posting rule because the question would only be on-topic on a single site anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really think it is useful to talk about questions with &amp;quot;subquestions&amp;quot; from different disciplines in general because - as with this specific example - I would expect that one can &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; split these questions up in such a way as to avoid the discussion at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second subquestion specifically, we do not seem to have an established policy on whether the biological/medicinal effects of things like radiation are considered on-topic here (the only related meta question seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5883/50583&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; which is 9 years old and has no answers). If someone thinks we need one, I would suggest making a separate meta question about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-02-04T01:08:29.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-09T13:58:01.170" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;So one rule of thumb I've noticed is that if the upvotes of a question is more than the upvotes of any of the answers. Then somehow the community feels the question was not answered satisfactorily. (This is more of an observation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people who like to answer questions this might be a useful filter. How do I see/create such a filter? The intention is to use this as a criteria for random bumping of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="150174" LastEditDate="2023-02-10T11:56:59.317" LastActivityDate="2023-02-10T11:56:59.317" Title="A rule of thumb of answer satisfaction?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|up-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14334" CreationDate="2023-02-10T04:37:19.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want to write a query using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;. I don’t speak SQL fluently enough to freestyle a query for you here, but there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/dataexplorer&quot;&gt;a stack overflow tag&lt;/a&gt; for well-formed questions.  Questions and answers both live in the &lt;code&gt;Posts&lt;/code&gt; table, but have different &lt;code&gt;PostTypeId&lt;/code&gt;s, and answers have a &lt;code&gt;ParentId&lt;/code&gt; which refers to their question; both types of post have a &lt;code&gt;Score&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such a query exists (perhaps because it’s the future and someone has written it), it’d be appropriate to link and describe in a separate answer to this Meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-02-10T04:37:19.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14316" CreationDate="2023-02-11T16:22:06.437" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wolfram is a business. I'm not going to stop posting links to various useful stuff on Wolfram Alpha (so long as it remains free).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Journals are also published by businesses, but I guess we have to reference journal papers too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test is surely just whether the link is relevant and useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2023-02-11T16:22:06.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-11T19:39:40.530" Score="-8" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/748919/2451&quot;&gt;What will be the final temperature in this case?&lt;/a&gt; Which contained information about a thermodynamical process and asked to calculate work done. The question was tagged &amp;quot;homework type&amp;quot; and then closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I deleted that one and asked again in a different version from different account. But it was closed too. Why are these people closing these questions? This type of question helps me and others clear concepts. Which concept I missed in the particular question and there could be other approaches for that question that gives new ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange sites don't do these types of silly things. Why do PSE does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="354581" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-02-12T18:02:57.103" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T18:02:57.103" Title="Stop closing questions that are considered &quot;homework type&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-02-12T19:23:33.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14337" CreationDate="2023-02-11T22:12:47.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the question you link, you explicitly ask for someone to find &lt;em&gt;for you&lt;/em&gt; a solution method, exactly as if this question were part of a homework and you did not know how to solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community has chosen and reaffirmed its preference to focus on conceptual questions, rather than direct help for narrow and specific questions of the type you posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need assignment help, you should read answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/391/36194&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;http://physics.qandaexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quandaexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;  and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physicsforum.com&lt;/a&gt; are functioning perfectly well right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-02-11T22:12:47.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12700" CreationDate="2023-02-14T09:12:40.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Motivated by an exchange of comments with @Ghoster in connection with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/750044/teaching-the-standing-wave-model-vs-bohrs-model?&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I come back to this discussion (I also re-read the related links indicated by Qmechanic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that most of the points of view, here and there, assume that every question about how physics is being presented in teaching is necessarily a question about pedagogy. I would agree with considering them off-topic on this site if it were true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, teaching strategies about Physics is not only a matter of pedagogy. Without a sound and deep understanding of &lt;strong&gt;concepts&lt;/strong&gt;, no purely pedagogical strategy may work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point of view is that the border between on-topic and off-topic questions mentioning teaching strategies should be established on the ground of the presence or not of a need for conceptual clarification. Clarifying concepts is perfectly admissible on this site and should not be considered opinion-based. The possible mentioning of the origin of the question from teaching needs should not be an argument for classifying a question as off-topic automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="183259" LastEditDate="2023-02-14T17:03:19.057" LastActivityDate="2023-02-14T17:03:19.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-17T17:10:08.073" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was an answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/749738/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that I thought was really helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I really need the references provided in that answer, but I don't have enough rep to view deleted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would someone be able to get those for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82754" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-02-17T21:59:34.860" LastActivityDate="2023-02-17T21:59:34.860" Title="Getting Copy of Deleted Answer" Tags="|support|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14341" CreationDate="2023-02-17T17:17:09.923" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posts are usually deleted for a reason; we will not provide access to the text of deleted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this particular case, the &amp;quot;references&amp;quot; are completely useless to you anyway since the answer was plagiarized from the output of an artificial language model (also called &amp;quot;chatbots&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;AIs&amp;quot; recently) and the specific &amp;quot;references&amp;quot; mentioned do not actually exist - the now-deleted answer is the only search result for these exact titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-02-17T17:17:09.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-19T02:02:04.177" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/750764/nabla-cdot-nabla-nabla-cdot-nabla2-what-do-they-do&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as &amp;quot;not focussed enough&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given I got exactly the answer I wanted in next to no time, I find that hard to believe. Especially considering how concise and to the point the answer is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly is it not focussed enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82754" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T07:43:30.377" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T07:43:30.377" Title="Why is this not focussed enough?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14343" CreationDate="2023-02-19T05:01:36.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote to close, but if you see the reasoning behind a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;being closed&lt;/a&gt; for &amp;quot;not being focussed enough&amp;quot;, you'll find the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Needs more focus&lt;/strong&gt; - If your question has many valid answers (but no way&#xA;to determine which, if any, are correct), then it probably needs to be&#xA;more focused to be successful in our format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question currently includes multiple questions in one. It should focus on one problem only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can often be fixed by breaking the post into multiple questions,&#xA;or by focusing on a specific part of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question did indeed include multiple questions in one. Each of the 4 points you listed could have been addressed by user in an answer, therefore resulting in multiple answers partially addressing your whole post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you got an answer that satisfied your question, it is worth to point out that said answer may be considered far from exhaustive given the many example equations you had listed in your post. The answered just wrote the definitions of the symbols (except the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\cdot \nabla$&lt;/span&gt; one that you also asked about, though it was addressed in a comment), but another answerer may have well given you explanations using the written out &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\nabla$&lt;/span&gt; in the context of hydrodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all you wanted were the definitions of the symbols, you could have avoided the list of many equations (and slides) of hydrodynamics which may have led readers away from your main question, that was about the mathematical definitions of the symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my interpretation as to why the question was closed for &amp;quot;needing more focus&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37677" LastEditorUserId="37677" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T07:10:17.977" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T07:10:17.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8930" CreationDate="2023-02-21T16:52:23.907" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Since many physics questions are better understood when  there history is learned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358264" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T16:52:23.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-26T10:24:06.067" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/544303/83380&quot;&gt;Gravitational field from virtual photons; does $\rho c^2 = \frac{1}{2} \epsilon_0 |E|^2$?&lt;/a&gt; ~230 views have zero votes (+0/-0), and both good answers have only my single upvote, while the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/751698/83380&quot;&gt;If I suddenly store a lot of energy in a small space, this induces spacetime curvature. Does that create gravitational potential energy?&lt;/a&gt; gets +7 votes and two highly upvoted answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A charged capacitor with an electric field inside might be seen as similar to a volume filled with an excess of virtual photons)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is one example, but I often see that questions of the class &amp;quot;Why is there momentum?&amp;quot; answerable with multi-pargraph prose explanataions are far better received and answered than those requiring the use of math to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are wordy questions and wordy answers more appreciated here in Physics Stack Exchange than those that use (and need) equations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83380" LastActivityDate="2023-02-26T10:54:54.937" Title="Why is a question about gravity from a charged capacitor and its answers so much better received than one about gravity from virtual photons?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14347" CreationDate="2023-02-26T10:54:54.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asked about the writing process of &lt;em&gt;A Brief History of Time&lt;/em&gt;, Stephen Hawking famously recounted that one of his editors had told him that he should assume that every equation would halve the number of sales. Hawking ended up using no equations at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is just an anecdote, there is of course a very real effect that questions about specific equations or mathematical results start out with a smaller potential audience than those who do not directly involve mathematics, since there are certainly users here proficient in the English language but not proficient in understanding mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of the two questions you link, the more successful one became a Hot Network Question (&amp;quot;HNQ&amp;quot;, as visible in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/751698/revisions&quot;&gt;post history&lt;/a&gt;), so comparing the views and votes between the two questions is essentially pointless: One of them has been exposed to a far larger potential audience than the other, and the HNQ audience also consists mostly of non-physicists and non-regular users of physics.SE. The votes and views of HNQ questions arguably do not in any real sense reflect the appreciation &amp;quot;Physics Stack Exchange&amp;quot; has for that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12515/50583&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; for more discussion of the effect HNQ has on our site specifically and also note that your own question was never eligible to become HNQ because &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/61343/263383&quot;&gt;it contains MathJax in the title&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-02-26T10:54:54.937" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-27T13:05:06.407" Score="17" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't drop into this sub too often because my interest is mostly in fusion as a power source, and questions on the topic typically come up about every month or so. By the time I see them, questions on the topic have almost always been closed, often as &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;, and I can't answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the questions are perfectly fine. Consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/752080/&quot;&gt;latest example&lt;/a&gt;, which asks if there are accident scenarios in fusion similar to Chernobyl and Fukushima. This was closed as &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;, apparently only moments after it was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, as asked, does not ask for an opinion. It is asking a yes or no question. Are there accident scenarios similar to these examples? There either are or there aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of fusion power safety is the topic of hundreds of reports and has well-known fact-based answers. In particular, the possibility of tritium release is a concern that is going to require confinement systems similar to those used on large fission plants - particularly, those on the CANDU fleet. That is the answer, and it is not opinion based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something I'm missing here, a historical precedent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="131284" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-02-27T18:37:18.097" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T18:37:18.097" Title="Fusion related questions almost always closed as &quot;opinion-based&quot;" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14349" CreationDate="2023-02-27T14:05:41.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;apparently only moments after it was posted&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; If you hover over the &amp;quot;x hours ago&amp;quot; time indicator almost everywhere on SE sites, you can see a precise timestamp. The question was posted at 11:06 UTC and closed at 11:25 UTC, i.e. 19 minutes after it was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This specific &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; doesn't even really ask a question, it just states that the asker thinks there could be dangers, but even if we interpret it as asking &amp;quot;Are there accident scenarios similar to nuclear fission reactors for fusing?&amp;quot; it is not clear to me this makes the question on-topic. I'd agree it is likely not &lt;em&gt;opinion-based&lt;/em&gt;, but this seems like an &lt;em&gt;engineering&lt;/em&gt; question as the possible accident scenarios would seem to me to heavily depend on the specifics of how the actual real-world reactor is constructed, and not merely on the general physics of fusion as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The historical precedent around fusion is that the early site had a lot of trouble with &amp;quot;cold fusion&amp;quot;  - the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?page=1&amp;amp;tab=Relevance&amp;amp;pagesize=15&amp;amp;q=fusion&quot;&gt;meta search for &amp;quot;fusion&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; has almost exclusively years-old discussions around questions focussing on cold fusion. I can't find any major discussion about the topic of fusion in general; it is possible that the &amp;quot;cold fusion&amp;quot; discussions have bled into heightened scrutiny against any post mentioning fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T14:05:41.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-03T18:10:01.430" Score="-7" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/753720/352388&quot;&gt;My question about sending internet packets through time&lt;/a&gt; was closed as &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; as it was &amp;quot;non-mainstream-physics&amp;quot;. This seems like mainstream physics to me, so it should fit on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="352388" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T22:26:06.023" Title="Question of sending internet packets through time closed for &quot;off topic&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2023-03-03T21:29:18.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question about closure has already been answered under your physics question on the main site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/52386/44126&quot;&gt;first related question&lt;/a&gt; you'll see why time travel is basically considered impossible. On Physics SE we don't start with &amp;quot;let's pretend it is possible&amp;quot; because that's not physics, that's fantasy. What would happen is basically whatever the sci-fi writer wants to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T21:29:18.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2023-03-03T22:26:06.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is entirely unclear, because you don't say what &amp;quot;time travel&amp;quot; means.  And once you specify what you mean (e.g. motion along a closed timelike curve), the answer is probably obvious--- under your assumptions (whatever they are) what happens is exactly what you've assumed will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T22:26:06.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-05T13:15:37.357" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;Physics'&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;starting page&lt;/a&gt;, the color used for the topic texts is quite pale blue, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.color-hex.com/color/0587AC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#0587AC&lt;/a&gt; to a color picker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most pixels are even brighter than that because they are anti-aliased against the white background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such low-contrast texts might build barriers, reduce legibility and reading them is more fatiguing to the eye than necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; is using a much darker color of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.color-hex.com/color/0F3559&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#0F3559&lt;/a&gt; which is much more comfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current color scheme on PSE is such that already followed links get darker, which is easier to read.&#xA;Maybe something could be improved about this? Once there was a request due to hard&#xA;noticeable color difference between fresh links and followed ones in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5051/251841&quot;&gt;Physics.SE color layout change&lt;/a&gt;, which is also a point to consider, but less important IMHO than legibility in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251841" LastEditorUserId="251841" LastEditDate="2023-03-07T10:21:17.377" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T10:21:17.377" Title="Text color of topics on Physics.SE frontpage" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14356" CreationDate="2023-03-14T16:17:22.597" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted the following question about a mechanical system described in an exercise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/755218/acceleration-of-masses-connected-by-a-leaning-pole&quot;&gt;Acceleration of masses connected by a leaning pole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am emphatically not looking for someone to check my work, and I am emphatically not trying to get help on a homework problem (I'm self-studying and already solved the original problem anyway). I just think this is an interesting physical system and I'm curious about how to model its motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I acknowledge that the question I've asked is extremely specific and maybe not interesting to a general audience, but it concerns a force acting on a mass in a nontrivial and nonuniform way, so I thought it might clear the bar. But even after editing, and explaining that it's not a homework problem and it's not work-verification, it's still closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new to studying physics and I'm new to the Physics Stack Exchange community. Is there another reason this question is off-topic? Is there a way I can better write questions about physical systems that I find interesting, but difficult to study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="359218" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-03-14T20:49:07.797" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T00:19:18.343" Title="Are questions about specific mechanical systems off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14355" CreationDate="2023-03-15T00:19:18.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am emphatically not looking for someone to check my work, and I am emphatically not trying to get help on a homework problem (I'm self-studying and already solved the original problem anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't define homework as &amp;quot;an assignment you submit for a grade.&amp;quot; It's loosely defined as a question in which the &lt;em&gt;solution to the posted problem&lt;/em&gt; is the key point of the post, rather than the underlying physics concepts. Your post is asking us on the method by which you could solve the problem, ergo it is a homework like question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you don't explicitly ask for it, posting your method of obtaining the ODE is probably rightfully considered &amp;quot;check my work&amp;quot; as well, as you’re almost surely expecting others to check the derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another reason this question is off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it's posted pretty clearly at the top of your post what the problem is with your post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/25301&quot;&gt;Homework-like questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/25301&quot;&gt;check-my-work questions&lt;/a&gt; are considered off-topic here, particularly when asking about specific computations instead of underlying physics concepts. Homework questions can be on-topic when they are useful to a broader audience. Note that answers to homework questions with complete solutions may be deleted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to check out those links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I can better write questions about physical systems that I find interesting, but difficult to study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but it's somewhat vague and possibly difficult: you have to take a step back from attempting to solve the problem, look at the physics concepts you're applying (e.g., Newtonian mechanics, balancing forces) and ask about whatever it is of &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; concepts that's preventing you from solving the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T00:19:18.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-15T08:49:06.853" Score="-3" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked 9 months ago the post below on MathOverflow. The post with identifier &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/423567/crisis-in-physics-great-picture-for-professional-mathematicians-and-the-interp&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;423567&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and same title (see below) was closed and deleted, there was an answer from a professor, and several comments from professors, on MathOverflow eight months ago. I'm not physicist, I'm mathematician, but not a professional mathematician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question for Meta Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to ask if I can to ask on Physics Stack Exchange the post below (see title, body and I would to add also a choice of tags, if I edit the post on the main site Physics Stack Exchange). Is this post (see below) suitable for the main site Physics Stack Exchange? &lt;strong&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is an interesting and important question for MathOverflow and for Physics Stack Exchange that isn't opinion-based. I'm going to read your answers on Meta Physics Stack Exchange  and comments that I appreciate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Crisis in physics: great picture for professional mathematicians, and the interplay of mathematics as optional question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I've read several articles published in a popular science magazine and books*, I've wondered that the following question could be suitable and interesting. Notice that I'm inspired in these but the authors didn't assert that there is a crisis in physics, thus I'm asking the following question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; A) Is there a crisis in physics? Why? B)(Optional) In case that you think that there is a crisis in physics in theoretical or experimental physics can the (mainstream mathematical theories or models) mathematicians help about it? &lt;strong&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For A) you can to add/refer the literature and/or explain the symptoms/clues about why there is a crisis in physics or well your discussion and considerations if you think that there is no such crisis to ellucidate a good answer for my question, at level of graduated students in mathematics. For B) that is optional, you can to add your ideas about if it is possible that mathematicians can to help with the available theories and models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I add the comment that I had added in the original comment thread of the cited post of MathOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation:&lt;/strong&gt; I know the Spanish edition of the book [1] by professor Sabine Hossenfelder of Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, that was the starting porint of my research about my concern (the starting point of my motivation to think that there is a crisis in physics). She is author of videos on YouTube as [2] (I don't this video, I've read the mentioned book and I know [3]). The Senior Editor Natalie Wolchover of Quanta Magazine edited [4], she was awared at 2022 with the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, see Wikipedia. Maybe you know better that I, the site [5], the author is the professor Peter Woit of Columbia University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've edited the comment below with the link for the slides 41/53 of [6], by professor David Tong, University of Cambridge. I read the article, and I've read the claims by professor of the Radboud University Renate Loll, in last section of the article [7]. In penultimate paragraph of [8] the Senior Contributor and theoretical astrophysicist as refers Wikipedia Ethan Siegel and, respectively, the cited Contributor Group, of a column in Forbes refer the scale of the particle collider that you need to probe some theories in physics. Physics of a star is [9], where the Spanish astrophysicist explains (if I refer well) a discussion about the chemical composition of our Sun, and Richard Panek a journalist who specializes in the topics of physics that refers Wikipedia, in particular he edited articles in Scientific American, awared with many notable awards in his profession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Sabine Hossenfelder, &lt;em&gt;Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray&lt;/em&gt;, Basic Civitas Books, (2018).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;em&gt;The crisis of particle physics | Sabine Hossenfelder, John Ellis &amp;amp; Jim Baggott&lt;/em&gt;, from the official channel &lt;strong&gt;The Institute of Art and Ideas&lt;/strong&gt;, edited on YouTube two years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;em&gt;Is science about to end? | Sabine Hossenfelder&lt;/em&gt;, from the channel &lt;strong&gt;Big Think&lt;/strong&gt; uploaded two weeks ago on YouTube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] Natalie Wolchover, A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws, Quanta Magazine (they have a website) March 1, 2022.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] The website Blog &lt;strong&gt;Not Even Wrong&lt;/strong&gt;, edited by Peter Woit professor of Columbia Math Department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[6] David Tong, &lt;em&gt;Are the slides Physics and the Integers&lt;/em&gt; (Trinity Maths Society, 2010) University of Cambridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[7] George Musser, &lt;em&gt;La paradoja más famosa de la física se acerca a su fin&lt;/em&gt;, Investigación y Ciencia, Febrero 2021, Nº 533 (the article was also published in Quanta Magazine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[8] Ethan Siegel and Starts With A Bang, &lt;em&gt;Ask Ethan: Why Can't The Large Hadron Collider Put More Energy Into Its Particles?&lt;/em&gt;, Forbes (Feb 1, 2020).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[9] Héctor Socas Navarro, &lt;em&gt;El gran problema de la física solar&lt;/em&gt;, Astronomía Época II Año XXXVII, Nº 281 (Noviembre 2022).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[10] Richard Panek, &lt;em&gt;La crisis en torno a la constante de Hubble&lt;/em&gt;, Investigación y ciencia (it's the Spanish edition of Scientific American), Nº 524, 2020, pp. 20-27.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250478" LastEditorUserId="250478" LastEditDate="2023-03-20T16:19:48.187" LastActivityDate="2023-03-20T16:19:48.187" Title="Asking if a post deleted on MathOverflow could be suitable for the main site Physics Stack Exchange" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2023-03-15T12:17:39.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14357" CreationDate="2023-03-15T09:23:39.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, &amp;quot;Is there a crisis in physics?&amp;quot; is both too broad (&amp;quot;in physics&amp;quot; can mean anything from metereology to quantum gravity) and too opinion-based/unclear (it is not clear what objective criteria something would have to fulfill to be a &amp;quot;crisis&amp;quot;) to be a suitable question for physics.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While one can infer from your comments that you seem to aim at specific discussions in the realm of quantum gravity, &amp;quot;crisis&amp;quot; still is far from specific enough to generate useful answers rather than personal rants reflecting opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics.SE is for specific, objectively answerable questions about mainstream physics as a natural science. It is not for discussions of the sociology of physicists, academic turf wars or anything else of the sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T09:23:39.123" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-17T04:05:21.070" Score="-2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/755514/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question that got closed as off-topic and I don't know what makes it on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking on one of the links takes me to a page that says &amp;quot;A homework question is any question whose value lies in helping you understand the method by which the question can be solved, rather than getting the answer itself.&amp;quot; Then what I'm I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its is a regular physics problem on rolling yet the close comment says it's not useful to a broader audience  :( The comment also says asking  about specific computations makes the question off-topic but I was just showing my attempt (which I guess is necessary here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250433" LastEditorUserId="250433" LastEditDate="2023-03-18T05:02:11.473" LastActivityDate="2023-03-18T05:02:11.473" Title="I don't know how to be on-topic" Tags="|support|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14360" CreationDate="2023-03-17T22:02:44.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of issues with your last closed question which I'll explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homework-type question are essentially off-topic &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt; they are about explaining a concept.  Your post does not appear to involve any need to explain a concept, but you just ask &amp;quot;what to do next&amp;quot; - that's not a conceptual issue, that's just solving the problem for you, which is explicitly off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The check-my-work rule also comes into play here as it seems you're asking us to check what you did in order to tell you what to do next.  Yes you show your work, but with no conceptual issue apparently involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get the question answered you would need to make clear what conceptual issue you are having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We simply do not provide worked out answers to questions like these, nor do we check arithmetic.  If we did half the planet would be posting homework problems here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably worth also saying that when teachers set homework problems it is to often to identify what problems students are having solving them, not simply to grade them.  It is actually useful to a teacher to know when a student is struggling and what they are struggling with.  The the teacher can address that in class or individually.  Having an internet website solve the problem for the student is interfering with the feedback a teacher needs to see what they need to teach.  This is not the reason for the homework policy, but it's an issue I think many members here would be aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the onus in on the poster to provide a conceptual issue that needs to be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T22:02:44.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-21T08:54:26.800" Score="4" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/755524/237923&quot;&gt;In my question&lt;/a&gt; I ask for a reference that presents the recursive calculation of the HaMiDeW coefficients. The resource-recommendation tag seemed perfectly suitable to me, but both the tag and my request were removed by another user. In addition, I think that the intent of my post is not clear anymore. What do you think? Is the edit legitimate? If yes, can someone explain it to me please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237923" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-03-21T09:32:33.513" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T09:32:33.513" Title="Why was the resource-recommendation tag removed from my question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14364" CreationDate="2023-03-21T09:32:00.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Res. recom. qs are restricted on Phys.SE. They usually cannot be combined with other questions in the same post, but should be asked separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T09:32:00.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-24T19:24:15.470" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a question be closed or called a duplicate if it has already been asked with or without answers on another Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since many topics of physics and biology tend to intersect with chemistry, is it possible that a question might be called a duplicate for being asked on another site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a person post the same question on two sites to get the answer from different perspectives or in case it is unanswered in one site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304112" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T00:34:10.227" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T02:50:14.770" Title="Can a question be closed if it exists on another Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|support|questions|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-24T20:25:57.823" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions with negative votes are generally not displayed at the top and are sometimes hidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to specifically look up for negative voted or inactive questions on the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions with negative votes are generally not shown, but sometimes some of those questions might actually be good or may be informative if answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if a question is downvoted for lack of clarity or due to not being focused, it may still have many good questions in it. Although an edit option and reopening features are available, it might fail to get the question back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this site is for research-oriented questions, but some of the best teachers, etc. are on this site, and it might help some people to get a hold of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While most people would not like to answer bad questions, there should at least be a way to look them up. There might be a user who actually likes answering not so good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent bad questions from inhibiting answering good questions, maybe reduce the increase in reputation on answering a bad question to 25% of its actual value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if someone has an acquaintance it will help them get an answer for their bad questions and that may help many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature may also help separate the good questions from the bad ones completely. While it isn't recommended for homework type questions or questions with more than -(7-10) votes, it may help the lesser negative questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, negative answers are still visible, aren't they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304112" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T00:39:25.313" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T00:39:25.313" Title="Is there a way to search for downvoted or negative questions to answer?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14366" CreationDate="2023-03-25T02:50:14.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called &amp;quot;cross-posting,&amp;quot; and has been discussed on Meta previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general guidance is to be upfront about what you are doing. It's generally poor form to post &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same question on multiple sites, because each community has different expectations about their questions and offers different expertise. If you post closely-related questions on different sites, it is polite to link each question to the other. As a rule, if other users discover your cross-posted questions, they'll add such a link in the comments, but it's better for you to do so yourself soon that you can provide some context about you expect from each community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We occasionally have users who cross-post &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of their questions. Don't do that, please. We expect contributions to Physics to be substantially original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T02:50:14.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-25T21:10:14.803" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/756692/296708&quot;&gt;asked a question about capacitors&lt;/a&gt;. It was closed under the &amp;quot;homework-and-exercises&amp;quot; tag and my submit-to-review appeal was rejected. I'm not coming here to complain, I'm just genuinely curious what the actual issue is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, I am used to the culture of close votes over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;MSE&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Mathematics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site) where I spend a lot of time. I cast a fair few close votes myself. But I claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My question had as much of my own thoughts and efforts as possible, given my confusion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was about as concise as it could have been, to cover all those thoughts and what the issue is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contained more detail than is common in &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is certainly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an actual homework question, in my edit I made it clearer that I'm focused on the concepts that would help me figure out the electromotive force in an unfamiliar situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On MSE this would tick all the necessary boxes. Indeed, questions with less effort or detail would and do still pass for good questions, with no close-vote issues. So, the 'etiquette' over at physics SE must be different. Maybe you're flooded with more homework question problems than we are on MSE, so that the rules are stricter (or the fear that something is just a homework problem is higher), or maybe it's something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, I do have some interest in physics and I'd probably like to keep posting here from time to time. But I can't do that if I'm met with this baffling difference in the 'etiquette'. Could someone please explain this difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296708" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-03-26T13:43:12.690" LastActivityDate="2023-03-26T13:43:12.690" Title="Why was this considered a 'bad question'?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-26T12:21:20.963" Score="1" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: People have generally swayed my opinion here. It's really only the &amp;quot;unanswered questions top voted&amp;quot; tab that seems to have an oversized string theory content. And partly it’s because of old questions going unanswered for a long time. Otherwise I'm exaggerating and nitpicking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At my university, string theory courses are restricted to people who have taken about two years of courses on quantum field theory and the standard model. Only theory PhD students would ever take the class (a very small fraction of physicists). But there's so much string theory on the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site - probably a lot more string theory than quantum field theory. Do other universities allow people to learn string theory without really learning &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QFT&lt;/a&gt; (so they can join this research field as quickly as possible)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356606" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-03-27T12:40:46.313" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T16:27:27.997" Title="Why is there so much string theory on the Physics Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14370" CreationDate="2023-03-26T13:58:54.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question from 2011. So yeah over the years a mix of people may have stumbled upon it and upvoted, although admittedly it is a &lt;em&gt;very high&lt;/em&gt; score for such a technical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should keep in mind that the clientele of the site, and the ratio of various types of questions asked on the site, have evolved over the years (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5102/36194&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; from 2013 for instance).  There is now &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhysicsOverflow&lt;/a&gt; which deals with questions at this level of sophistication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt many other questions like this have this number of upvotes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's also likely some amount of bandwagoneering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="49107" LastEditDate="2023-03-27T12:46:03.177" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T12:46:03.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-27T11:09:05.663" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/756793/&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; closed (by a bot? It looks like it from the first comment) and when I saw this, I rephrased and tried to abide to the comments (should be more focused).&#xA;This happened yesterday, and the question is still closed, but I cannot understand whether it's been reviewed and rejected a second time, it is in the review pipeline, is not going to be considered or what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the first time I get a question rejected, so I don't know what to look for and expect. Can you help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137639" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-03-27T12:31:28.153" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T12:44:49.910" Title="When are modified closed questions reviewed again, and how is this visible?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|reopen|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14372" CreationDate="2023-03-27T12:44:49.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be seeing something like this at the top of your question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VB9rk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VB9rk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember if the list of close voters is visible only to users with the close vote privilege or whether you as a question owner can see the list of users, too, but in any case: Bots don't close questions on physics.SE, users do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This post was edited and submitted for review yesterday&amp;quot; should be visible to all users looking at this post and it means that the review is still ongoing. When the review finishes, the question will either get reopened or the text will change to say &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;... and failed to reopen the post&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; after the time stamp saying when it was submitted for review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T12:44:49.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14376" CreationDate="2023-03-27T12:47:02.413" Score="-2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got a recently posted question edited by a third person for what I consider very small elements that do not really add or subtract from the understanding or the meaning of the conveyed message. I don't know how to relate to this, I find it slightly intruding. Maybe it's just in good faith, a sort of proof-reading, but I just find it strange.&#xA;I would like to know what the community consensus is about the topic.&#xA;Here are the edits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPBhB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPBhB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137639" LastEditorUserId="137639" LastEditDate="2023-03-28T20:04:52.940" LastActivityDate="2023-03-28T20:04:52.940" Title="What do you think about editors editing your English form in the questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14375" CreationDate="2023-03-27T13:08:55.560" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edits that improve the grammar or spelling of posts are unquestionably welcome. StackExchange sites generally have a far weaker notion of &amp;quot;ownership&amp;quot; of posts than many other websites, and only 2k reputation are necessary to be granted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit privilege&lt;/a&gt; that allows users to edit any post they want without having to go through review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;help center page&lt;/a&gt; on editing spells out that this is &lt;em&gt;intentional&lt;/em&gt; and calls out &amp;quot;To fix grammatical or spelling mistakes&amp;quot; as a valid reason to edit, among other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T13:08:55.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14412" CreationDate="2023-03-27T21:49:44.043" Score="12" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not recall being introduced to a new moderator: user842563.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u6Uc7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u6Uc7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the moderation team comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="176067" LastEditDate="2023-05-09T03:21:00.773" LastActivityDate="2023-05-09T03:23:09.457" Title="Do we have a new moderator?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|moderators|users|community-moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14514" CreationDate="2023-03-30T11:27:48.780" Score="8" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just submitted &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/757455/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't like the way my .png image renders. I often make diagrams in questions and answers using Microsoft paint, which produces a .png. In Physics stack exchange it displays always as big as humanly possible. Is there a way to make the picture display smaller?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356606" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T17:14:50.047" LastActivityDate="2023-09-05T15:52:21.360" Title="How do I make png files display smaller?" Tags="|support|image|faq-proposed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14378" CreationDate="2023-03-30T11:47:29.607" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get three different sizes from imgur pictures by manipulating the URL directly: For your example, we start with &lt;code&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&lt;/code&gt; and append either s, m or l in front of the file extension:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![enter image description here][1]][1]&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJs.png&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yields&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![enter image description here][1]][1]&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJm.png&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yields&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![enter image description here][3]][3]&#xA;&#xA;  [3]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJl.png&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yields&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T11:47:29.607" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14385" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-10T15:37:14.250" Score="-11" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a petition for the attention of moderator team, and the professors of Physics Stack Exchange, about the clousure of my post on Physics Stack Exchange about gravitational geons in our Solar System, to be reopened. If I can I order better this list of reasonings and expand this with other ton of reasons, as for example that you can not to remove the foundations/bedrocks of the Great History of Life, humanity, journeys of of discovery...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; I add below some reasonings why you can to reopened &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/758263/falsifiability-of-a-hypothesis-related-to-a-gravitational-geon-at-the-edge-of-so&quot;&gt;our post edited on Physic s Stack Exchange with identifier &lt;strong&gt;758263&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; few days ago, please do it. Please reopen my question 758263 on the main site Physics Stack Exchange. &lt;strong&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Philosophers don't know what's the nature of truth for a specific story/tale, and physicists, I think don't know what's the nature of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Our tradition was the exploration of the natural environment and to carry the fire (nuclear propulsion) to unexplored territories, and downvoters seem to reject this fact, in circumstances of need such as those that humanity lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-I think that was broken the fundamental rule in technology by Andrew Grove because we have not traveled using nuclear propulsion of spacecrafts  designed by Dyson and other scientists to explore our Solar System. In addition, I don't understand (and I reject this specific application) the application of Gott's copernican principle for the space race. I think that the reality of our Solar System is rare or strange from my point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-In the past there was academic corruption of mathematical physics because there were epicycles in the explanation of nature motion of planets of our Solar System, instead of observations. Your observatories are able to use the technology of gravitational waves, and your knowledges of quantum mechanics and general relativity to elucidate the veracity of our &lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt;, The study of gravitational waves or very distant black holes&#xA;it must be postponed until we know what our Solar System is like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-The astronomic knowledges of many regions of our Solar System seem be describd as hypothetical or conjectural, because you've not enough information about the edge of our Solar System (carries of information that tell it to you). You don't know the initial conditions or the events that occurred in our Solar System in the remote past. To me close my post seems unfair, because you as physicists don't care about these facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-While you know that the nature of matter/radiation, quantum mechanics and general relativity of space-time and the fundamental interactions of nature are counterintuitive, were casted downvotes and was closed my post and upvoted the kindly answer of the professor who added the argument of Russell's teapot in our unexplored Solar System. I must emphasize that there are many people who make sports bets daily, and who spend part of their salary, because they believe have a hope of winning (it's a very sad story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-The size of the instrument that you need to probe the theories that you consider mainstream science could be related to your deficient knowledges of our Solar System: the horizont that seems cenrosed by the Nature. You are insisting in that there was  not a crisis in mathematical physics, but I believe that there was a problem in past with an  article by Hneri Poincaré, in the context of the stability of our Solar System: pure mathematicians arose (this is my testimony, I got 5 downvotes in MathOverflow when I edited my post with just 12 views).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-I believe that Life probed our Solar System, in a similar way that humanity exploited patterns in waves, winds. Please the downvoters who casted votes against my post could to seem refractary to critical thinking or passionate about theories as string theory, wormholes,  supersymmetry, Dyson spheres, alien probes or primordial black holes in our Solar System, Fermi paradox,... Please moderator team of Physics Stack Exchange consider that you must demarcate what considering you by mainstream science: I would like to know if the content of the video with title &lt;em&gt;Gravitational waves: a new frontier?&lt;/em&gt; , by professor Paul Davies edited yesterday on the official channel of YouTube &lt;strong&gt;The Institute of Art and Ideas&lt;/strong&gt;, could be considered by this moderator team as mainstream science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-It seems that there are physicists who think that they can get a theory of everything of Nature  from their office or laboratory, this seems self-centered, in my opinion. But the important part is that many physicists don't criticize this thought. Physicists don't even hear about problems like the problem of odd perfect numbers, applications of Lucas–Lehmer primality test or what is the Riemann hypothesis, while pure mathematicians like very much that a problem as Riemann hypothesis have hundred of equivalent formulations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-In this site Physics Stack Exchange there is is freedom for denial of importance of Schrödinger's cat, I can to add the identifier of post. My post is downvoted without a refutation. We need a framework in which we can to elucidate these paradoxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-In this kind of forums could be persons who denied that physics is a continuous process of learning from Nature, for example you get first a diagram of kind showed in System of the World from the Wikipedia &lt;em&gt;Newton's cannonball&lt;/em&gt; that unifies certain phenomena, secondly you draw the diagram that illustrates the &lt;em&gt;Equivalence principle&lt;/em&gt; (see Wikipedia)... This is the way, and don't trust that from a laboratory or office of an universitity a physicists can to deduce the physics of cosmos. Always there were transfers of mathematics, navigation, astronomy, physics... and  manufacturing artifacts/devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-There is a reasoning that I don't trust either, and it is the issue that professors of the past did physics and mathematics, but that seem to be contributions that are not related. For example Hermann Minkowski did work on relativity but also presented his geometry of numbers, as refers Wikipedia. I can't trust the reasoning of the downvoters or the persons who closed my post if I don't know what they think about these issues. Would they, for example, criticize an eminent professor of physics who made, after a honest career as academic, some statement that cannot be verified? I do not think so, because they maybe have fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-While, Life is projected upwards, towards the skies with changes of the symmetry of biological organisms. My belief is that Life probed in remote past our Solar System, this incredible Life that began on our Planet Earth, these incredible LUCA and the last eukaryotic common ancestor LECA, or the biofilms. Many physicists may not care about quantum biology, but I am neither a physicist nor a scientist, it does matter to me and it fascinates me. Please, ... scientists try to copy the performances of living organisms, by biomimicry. And living organims are masters of navigation as you can to read in the book by David Barrie &lt;em&gt;Incredible Journeys&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-It is worthy to propose new ideas in science, for example Lynn Margulis and her endosymbiont hypothesis. Know the limits of reductionism, to debate ideas concerning the physics of our cosmic habitat, our Solar System, is justified and is interesting for this site. You may be specialized in particle physics or fluid mechanics and maybe you don't want to give my post an opportunity/chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-My question is suitable, humans could always travel before discovering new science of navigation. The attitude of being quiet and mute when things in your profession are going wrong is reinforcing the problem. Procrastination can also be a problem, because of your belief that things can get better in a decade or two. In a decade or two, the site Physics Stack Exchange will continue to editing posts related to mentioned theories (string theory, wormholes, M-theory, Dyson spheres, supersymmetry ,...). In a decade or two, the hopes of many students and readers of Physics Stack Exchange will have waned. The decision to cast downvotes as soon a post is edited, or close my post causes erosion and I can't trust the site Physics Stack Exchange. My post 758263 on the main site is answerable, it seems that you want to abandon the study of the Solar System due your preferences of some theories that could not be falsifiable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Science fiction adventures have always fascinated and captivated many scientists, but we have only gone with astronauts to the Moon. We can honor all those astronauts who dedicated their lives to space exploration. I am not going to spend my leisure time or my money on science fiction. How can I be sure of your votes if you don't think about science like me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-It seems ridiculous for me that I've tried, along years, to ask the cited question on MathOverflow and Physics Stack Exchange and I got antagonism instead of a constructive discussion elucidating the veracity of our question. You will not be able to hide your ignorance behind a wall of downvotes, your science is plasticine modelling clay if you've abandoned the methods and reasonings of physicists of past to deduce the truth of our cosmic habitat, our Solar System.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-The clousure of my question seems wrong because it reinforces the modern astrology, in my view, the astrology of zoo hypothesis, alien probes in our Solar System and other, as ancient aliens, UFOs,... Your downvotes and votes to close this question erodes the site Physics Stack Exchange and could to promote the myth, the fear and skepticism in science. In my view erodes the work of astronomers and physicists of past, dirtying their golden helmets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Academicism, and dogmatism must also be taken very seriously, if they have contaminated this site. I have the freedom to ask my post on this site Physics Stack Exchange, that is about your science: &lt;em&gt;if the three fundamental interactions (which you are able to get technologies, and you know an unified theory for those), the the strong and weak interactions and electromagnetism can be vanished in some region of my cosmic habitat: our Solar System&lt;/em&gt;. How ridiculous that you say that this is my speculation (my personal theory), when &lt;strong&gt;it is your own science!&lt;/strong&gt; Our Hypothesis is just a case of scientific deductions, an achievement of physics of past decades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-The birth of the Web had a context, in the same way that my question and explanations. This Stack Exchange network was not designed for the selfishness and whim of a few users, who use their power to silence the scientific truth, scientifc questions are very important as well as the debate. I invited to you with my question to get a view from the top of our Solar System, and your response was a response similar than the Earth is flat. Becasuse for you maps have not importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-You abandoned your work of studying our Solar System and energetic phenomena and catastrophes that could have happened, and now you are neither thoughtful nor generous when I'm asking an obvious and scientific question.&#xA;You have no right to censor me (I consider that you have lost the perspective of what science is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Can't avoid groupthink? I did the petition to the attention for the person(s) who closed my post on the main site with identifier &lt;strong&gt;758263&lt;/strong&gt;, please reopen it. I suffered a lot of downvotes defending my right to ask on Physics Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-The answer, of professor who edited a post as response of my Hypothesis, was sweet as likes a buttered toast with jam, with tea and sugar of course: his argument is neither a complete answer nor a scientific argument. Nothing is proven at that date. &lt;strong&gt;I am a mathematician and&lt;/strong&gt; I stated &lt;strong&gt;this Hypothesis to be true.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've raised the following flag concerning the message of Moderator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt that the Moderator was wrong because this person ignored my suffereing, and this Moderator edited the message in which the &amp;quot;...I wish you luck finding a place that operates by standards... &amp;quot; that seems an invitation for me to leave the site Physics Stack Exchange, and said that my flags are frivolous, which leaves me helpless. This seems  premonitory in the way that this person has denied help/duty as Moderator. I was victim of harassment and now I can't edit more posts on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250478" LastEditorUserId="250478" LastEditDate="2023-04-13T12:53:15.430" LastActivityDate="2023-04-13T12:53:15.430" Title="Petition about the clousure of my post on Physics Stack Exchange about gravitational geons in our Solar System, to be reopened" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-04-11T20:43:41.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14385" CreationDate="2023-04-11T01:46:26.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment you put under the question states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not any rational explanation of my hypothesis, I have not astronomical observations about it, and my knowledges to support my hypothesis are just speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes it definitively a personal theory and thus not mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastActivityDate="2023-04-11T01:46:26.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-14T12:54:40.027" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed an answer which, according to the author, was written by ChatGPT. The question was very poor (about quantum entanglement, from a person who have learned about entanglement from a popular magazine). I thought it can't be reasonably answered, but ChatGPT understood what kind of answer is expected (popular, without long deep explanations). That makes me think, are ChatGPT answers (or answers from another AI service) allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17504" LastEditorUserId="17504" LastEditDate="2023-04-15T11:18:32.590" LastActivityDate="2023-04-15T11:18:32.590" Title="Do we have ChatGPT policy?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-04-14T12:59:26.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-16T06:55:08.360" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will give an example  of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/644002/&quot;&gt;negative vote I just got&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem with this vote is that I do not think anything is wrong in the physics of my answer. I accept that the reader does not &amp;quot;like&amp;quot; my answer as appropriate to the question, which is a popularity vote, but I also accept that I may have an error in my physics arguments. In this case the reader does not want to take the trouble to inform me in a comment so that I can correct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;dislike&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;disagree on the physics presentation&amp;quot; are tied together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one needs an extra check for physics in contrast to popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO this is important as the trend is for a lot of questions to be based on theory, as if theory dictates the observations instead of modeling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-04-16T07:03:37.527" LastActivityDate="2023-04-16T12:47:48.657" Title="Is the voting format of SE which confuses &quot;like&quot; with &quot;correct&quot; appropriate for physics" Tags="|discussion|answers|down-votes|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14388" CreationDate="2023-04-16T12:47:48.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the specific case my impression is that you would be voted down simply because you're disagreeing with the OP, right or wrong.  No logical argument, evidence or proof of your case would convince them.  I think we've all experienced these cases and no system will avoid them, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the general issues not the specific case, I think the problem with separate &amp;quot;dislike&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;disagree&amp;quot; votes is threefold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly it requires implementing two vote systems in the same UI.  This would lead to confusion, IMO, as people, particularly newer members or members who vote infrequently, will simply mistakenly use one when they should be using the other one.  Two similar functions is always asking for trouble in user interfaces in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly it allows people to both vote on popularity (&amp;quot;Do I like this member&amp;quot;) and accuracy/usefulness (&amp;quot;This answer is useful&amp;quot;).  It's potentially possible with both voting systems active to vote up an answer for being useful while voting it down because you don't like the member.  You could double whammy someone by voting the answer down and the member down.  At the moment we just vote on usefulness - not necessarily accuracy, but whether it's a useful answer.  Sometimes an answer which provides e.g. a simplified explanation or intuition is better than a strictly accurate answer.  I think that's a good overall balance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly it makes a member's &lt;em&gt;popularity&lt;/em&gt; a legitimate factor in voting.  I think this is fundamentally the opposite of what SE tries to achieve.  We want people to vote on how useful an answer is, in their opinion.  Now I am sure some people use it as a popularity vote if they don't like someone (or just don't like the answer, accurate or not), but notionally at least it's about the usefulness of answers and my impression is that most people seem to vote with their heads and not their hearts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO this is important as the trend is for a lot of questions to be based on theory, as if theory dictates the observations instead of modeling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see answers linking theory to experimental knowledge more, but I don't think an extra vote mechanism will do it.  Getting people to make answers like this requires a lot of &amp;quot;Leading from the front&amp;quot;.  That is to say it requires the more knowledgeable members and those who post and vote often to both write answers like these (e.g. &amp;quot;..and experiment X shows this...&amp;quot;) and to encourage people to expand their answers by using comments (e.g. &amp;quot;I'd vote up if you could add some intuitive or experimental/empirical support for your answer, which is otherwise good&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a shortcut to achieving the goal you want.  It requires community effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2023-04-16T12:47:48.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-17T01:18:46.317" Score="-5" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who or what closes questions here on the Physics Stack Exchange site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of my questions are &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; questions, and I wish whoever closes them would actually &amp;quot;read them more closely&amp;quot;. Is it some dumb AI algorithm or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356760" OwnerDisplayName="pete" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-04-17T11:13:48.617" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T15:24:48.303" Title="Who or what closes questions here on the Physics Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|support|closed-questions|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14391" CreationDate="2023-04-17T01:56:14.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On physics.SE, questions are closed by a voting process. Voting is permitted for members whose reputation is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ge 3000$&lt;/span&gt;. Questions can also be closed by moderators&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; and other high reputation members&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; (for example, a member with a &amp;quot;gold&amp;quot; tag badge - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=General&amp;amp;filter=gold&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;). It takes three member votes to close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AI is &lt;em&gt;most certainly&lt;/em&gt; not involved in any voting processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not a question asked was actual homework (e.g., assigned by your teacher/professor) is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; relevant. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post for more information. Well thought out and researched &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; physics questions are most desired, whereas those asking about a specific computation are not usually desired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your assertion that members do not read questions to determine whether or not to close a question is incorrect. This is why experienced SE users are awarded the &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^*$&lt;/span&gt; In such cases, other votes are not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95176" LastEditorUserId="95176" LastEditDate="2023-04-17T02:01:36.083" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T02:01:36.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14394" CreationDate="2023-04-17T02:31:48.760" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Home page of Physics Meta, the question “Why can I still no longer ask questions?” is attributed to user250478, but on the Questions page it is attributed to a user who uses his name. Why do these pages differ like this when displaying the same question? Is it a bug or a feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321853" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2023-04-17T09:13:34.013" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T09:13:34.013" Title="Meta question displays differently in Home and Questions" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14393" CreationDate="2023-04-17T03:29:08.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mine looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EsrWh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EsrWh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that user250478 recently &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; the question, rather than asking it. This would be less confusing if you had enough site reputation to see their modification — they posted, edited, then deleted an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T03:29:08.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14391" CreationDate="2023-04-17T15:11:35.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm one of the persons who voted to close your question on spin direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, your question is confused. There's no concept here. One does not arbitrarily choose &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\cos\theta$&lt;/span&gt; or &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\cos\theta/2$&lt;/span&gt; or &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\cos^2\theta$&lt;/span&gt;: you just correctly work out the math, as done in details in multiple textbooks and I'm sure on multiple websites as well.  In its current form your question is like asking: what is underlying physical concept to compute the probability of rolling two dices and getting the total (die face 1 + die fact 2) to be &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$7$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty is that,  with some (minimal) amount of research, your question would become &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot; or an homework-like questions because it is precisely the type of question that one would ask in an assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-04-17T15:24:48.303" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T15:24:48.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-22T21:00:17.237" Score="9" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I referred to Google Bard in a comment as a “confident idiot” and the comment was deleted. Did I violate the “Be nice” policy, or was the comment deleted for another reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321853" LastEditorUserId="321853" LastEditDate="2023-04-28T18:23:51.457" LastActivityDate="2023-04-28T18:23:51.457" Title="Do we have to be nice to chatbots?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14396" CreationDate="2023-04-22T22:33:40.030" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't delete your comment, and I haven't discussed it with the moderator who did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe that a chatbot has passed Stack Exchange's captchas and is posting on its own, that is a much more interesting problem than whether we should be polite to them. But if a person is copying and pasting some chatbot's output, we owe it to ourselves to be kind to that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14281/44126&quot;&gt;chatbot-generated &amp;quot;theories&amp;quot; are a waste of everyone's time&lt;/a&gt;. Don't give them oxygen by coming up with clever zingers about them. Flag as rude/abusive and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-04-22T22:33:40.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14396" CreationDate="2023-04-23T00:20:07.643" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I primarily deleted this as it was an answer to a closed question. Comments should be used to suggest changes to a post, not to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rudeness did affect my decision somewhat. I was not actually aware that Google Bard was a chatbot, and assumed it was the username or pseudonym of some real person that developed this theory. This doesn't really change that the comment serves no useful purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2023-04-23T00:20:07.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-27T12:22:06.557" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;So a question of mine was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/761400/&quot;&gt;Probability distribution for the momentum of a particle undergoing a collision?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it was decently written (post the edits) however I guess it's still not up to standard. From a learning perspective can I have some feedback?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-04-27T12:32:26.440" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T12:59:59.197" Title="Feedback on closed question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14403" CreationDate="2023-04-28T16:39:04.480" Score="-5" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made several edits to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/761618/how-are-the-wavelengths-of-light-measured&quot;&gt;a question about wavelengths&lt;/a&gt;. Each version of this question was marked as off-topic. Since I cannot post new question on the Physics site, I need to work on improving my existing questions by editing them to comply with the site's guidelines and address any feedback I have received. So, what improvement to the wavelength question will make it on-topic on the Physics site?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Even on the Spanish site, I had to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/posts/35317/revisions&quot;&gt;several edits&lt;/a&gt; to get an on-topic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: &amp;quot;Stephen G&amp;quot; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's arguably a question (even in the form I suggested) which is opinion based or which is a moving target (the extremes we can measure will change with technology as it improves). So it's a problem to answer this question beyond stating roughly what low and high wavelengths we can measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what question based on facts could I ask about wavelengths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made several edits, but I am getting frustrated that the question is not getting reopened. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/592752/revisions?page=2&quot;&gt;One question on the English site took several edits before it finally reopened&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question has finally reopened and I have two answers, still the question has 6 downvotes and 1 upvote. Why is the question still attracting downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212358" LastEditorUserId="212358" LastEditDate="2023-05-02T14:28:58.180" LastActivityDate="2023-05-02T14:28:58.180" Title="On-topic question about wavelengths" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14401" CreationDate="2023-04-28T20:45:13.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote on this question, but off-hand I can see two potential issues with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly &amp;quot;all wavelengths&amp;quot; is either vague (what start and what end range ?) or kind of impossible, as we cannot realistically measure a spectrum at every wavelength from zero to infinity.  An infinitely long wavelength is kind of meaningless - it's equivalent to zero energy.  A zero wavelength is kind of meaningless to as it's infinite energy.  So we cannot really measure those limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We sometimes integrate &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt; functions over these ranges, but realistically when &lt;em&gt;measuring&lt;/em&gt;, we cannot cover that range ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that &amp;quot;all wavelengths&amp;quot; seems too vague.  It might be better to ask what extremes of wavelengths we can measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue I see is that it's arguably a question (even in the form I suggested) which is &lt;em&gt;opinion based&lt;/em&gt; or which is a moving target (the extremes we can measure will change with technology as it improves).  So it's a problem to answer this question beyond stating roughly what low and high wavelengths we can measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is also why it's attracted some down votes.  Technically we're supposed to use down votes to say &amp;quot;a question is not useful for the purposes of the site&amp;quot;, which some people may feel to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2023-04-28T20:45:13.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14401" CreationDate="2023-04-29T15:11:53.543" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is posed without context: basically, it's a link followed by a simple question.  The question should be self-contained and clear, and I'm not sure why the OP expects people to read another webpage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more interesting version would summarize the contents of &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; sources (not just one) on this, maybe summarize the latest results and provide some sort of physics motivation for the question.   If not the answers could be not very illuminating, such &amp;quot;this many picometers&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;that many kilometers&amp;quot;, both of which are trivia facts and do not bring much value to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T15:11:53.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14406" CreationDate="2023-04-30T06:41:49.893" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some days ago someone asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/756325/&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; which was genuine. I don't know, but why was it deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324939" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-04-30T13:55:52.643" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T13:55:52.643" Title="Why was this question deleted despite having no issues as far as I can see?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14405" CreationDate="2023-04-30T10:14:57.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can see the question at all, you should see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A deletion notice saying &amp;quot;This post is hidden. It was deleted last month by Community (Bot).&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That the user that asked the question no longer exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ways of deleting users delete some or all of their posts with them, and that is what happened here, in particular &amp;quot;destruction&amp;quot; of an account (point 13 &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/263383&quot;&gt;in this meta post&lt;/a&gt;) deletes all posts and comments associated with the account. User deletion may happen on request of the user (this usually does not result in destruction) or for moderatorial reasons, but in either case we generally do not make the specific reasons for user deletion public unless it seems absolutely necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;sufficient reputation&lt;/a&gt; consider this question useful enough that it should be undeleted, they can vote to undelete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T10:14:57.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14410" CreationDate="2023-05-02T17:19:57.357" Score="-6" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the same question which I have mentioned at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14401/&quot;&gt;On-topic question about wavelengths&lt;/a&gt;. It took several edits for the question to be reopened. Yet, my question has 6 downvotes and 1 upvote. Apart from all the edits that I made to reopen the question, what further improvements not prevent the question from getting downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212358" LastEditorUserId="212358" LastEditDate="2023-05-06T15:42:36.950" LastActivityDate="2023-05-06T15:42:36.950" Title="Question still attracting downvotes" Tags="|support|specific-question|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14409" CreationDate="2023-05-02T20:15:18.523" Score="8" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot of part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/33078/36194&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; as displayed by Chrome on my MacBook Air:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n3Unq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n3Unq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that some characters are rendered as boxes.  Here's more or less the same bit as displayed on Safari:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2J9Dj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2J9Dj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems Chrome struggles to properly display some specialized fonts or characters.  Is this normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T12:19:11.927" Title="Bug in MathJax rendering using Chrome?" Tags="|discussion|bug|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14408" CreationDate="2023-05-02T21:09:27.813" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is a problem with macOS. To fix it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Right-click on some of the misrendered MathJax.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &amp;quot;Math Settings&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &amp;quot;Math Renderer&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click on &amp;quot;Common HTML&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326183" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-05-03T12:19:11.927" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T12:19:11.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14407" CreationDate="2023-05-02T23:45:52.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Downvotes mean, according to the tooltip when you hover over the button, that the question is unclear or not useful. Users have also described using downvotes to indicate that a question shows a lack of research effort, or that they think the question is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that users who downvote a question may or may not see that question again to reconsider their vote. The question may not appear in the activity lists which the previous voters use to explore the site; they may see the title and not click into the question to see what has changed; they may view the changes and decide that the question still merits their downvote. Note that Meta questions (like yours here) bring visibility to the questions they link, for good or for ill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users are not required nor expected to publicly explain their votes, so for a detailed explanation of the votes you are out of luck unless a voter volunteers. Try not to worry about it too much; just ask better questions on the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-05-02T23:45:52.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14407" CreationDate="2023-05-03T11:31:25.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This version of the question is unclear: you can get an answer in most textbooks, web sources (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.toppr.com/guides/physics/waves/the-speed-of-a-travelling-wave/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) or in many videos.  So what exactly do you want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not for the bounty, the current version of the question would likely be closed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-05-03T17:41:12.120" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T17:41:12.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14377" CreationDate="2023-05-09T03:23:09.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens every once in a while, though in this case it wasn't for the reasons it usually happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone made a small error in using our system to give a staff member a diamond and since the user is not staff, they appeared on the mod page. Upon seeing this post we fixed the issue in a short period of time (thanks so much for the report!) and we've since changed the system to prevent this from happening again in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies for the confusion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176067" LastActivityDate="2023-05-09T03:23:09.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14415" CreationDate="2023-05-11T08:04:27.090" Score="-6" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Courtesy link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/441290/&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/441290/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question above was closed as needing more focus after the question already had an answer. I had to edit the question so that it asks only one question. Then the question was reopened by a moderator and a regular user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing has happened to my last question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/761618/&quot;&gt;What are the underlying concepts of the wavelength?&lt;/a&gt;. The question was closed as opinion/based when I posted the first meta question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14401/on-topic-question-about-wavelengths&quot;&gt;On-topic question about wavelengths&lt;/a&gt;. Then the question was reopened after so many edits, and the question now has two answers. The question again has been closed no longer as opinion-based, but as off-topic with a notice saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question can be reopened if suitably edited to ask about the underlying concepts — please read the links above carefully to learn how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since the question now has two answers, all future edits should still validate the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will be a plausible title and text that will still validate the existing answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: The difference between this meta question and the other one is that in this meta question, I am asking for a title and text that validates the existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212358" LastEditorUserId="212358" LastEditDate="2023-05-11T20:29:55.083" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T04:12:43.293" Title="Question about the underlying concepts that will validate the existing answers" Tags="|support|specific-question|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14414" CreationDate="2023-05-12T04:12:43.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will be a plausible title and text that will still validate the existing answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no guarantee that such verbiage exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, repeatedly editing the post, currently at version 37, will probably alienate readers who might be sympathetic. For example, after your question was closed (for the second time) on May 8, it has been subject to six reopen reviews, during which it received eighteen “leave closed” votes and one “reopen” vote.  Some of your “leave closed” voters participated in multiple reviews, and probably noticed that several reopen reviews were generated by trivial edits, like bouncing around between “wavelength and frequency,” “wavelength” or “frequency” alone, or sometimes “frequency formula.” The review queues are telling you that the types of changes you are making are not improving your question. Listen to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posts which are edited too many times actually generate a flag for moderators to step in and make sure nothing strange is happening. I don’t know if that threshold is public knowledge or not, but it’s many fewer than thirty-seven edits. Remember that each edit bumps your question to the top of the home page, where it displaces a question by another user who said what they wanted in one go. That’s an inconsiderate way to use the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my eye, the problem with your question is that it’s too broad: the answer occupies a healthy fraction of a chapter in many introductory books. You might mean something more specific, whose answer would be a better fit for our community, but you have not managed to clarify. You have, however, gotten two positively-scored answers for your trouble,  and have indicated that one of those answers has solved your problem. That sounds like a successful question to me!  The fake internet points only have the value you give them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users whose asking histories have too many downvoted, deleted, or closed questions will be prevented from asking new questions until either (a) their question history is improved, by editing old questions so that they are upvoted or reopened, or (b) waiting for some unspecified period of time to ask a new question.&#xA;The exact details of this algorithm are secret, but a question which is downvoted, closed, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; deleted counts against you three times — we want our community to produce high-quality, lasting content.&#xA;Sometimes a user will fixate on this advice and demand that their old questions be upvoted and reopened so that they can post their next question &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;. But that’s not how it works. Not every question has a home in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are in this situation, use the time you cannot post to &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; the site. See what types of posts stay open and what types get closed, and try to frame your next question more like the left-open ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T04:12:43.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-12T05:05:39.880" Score="13" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/763656/&quot;&gt;Why doesn&amp;#39;t a photon state have to be infinite in length?&lt;/a&gt; in the answer given by [user A] there is a comment by [user B] that is advertising his/her personal theory on photons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I commented on this, and [user A] answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have long since given up on the duo who love to go around every question mildly related to theoretical issues and spamming their pet theory views. It would be helpful if we can flag comments for non-mainstream physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good suggestion, if it can possibly be implemented. Maybe even if one could flag comments like this for moderator attention it would be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW today there was no link to Physics.meta on the page. I had to search on the net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-05-12T05:55:43.897" LastActivityDate="2023-05-14T04:39:02.033" Title="Flagging non-mainstream comments in questions and answers" Tags="|feature-request|comments|flagging|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14416" CreationDate="2023-05-12T06:00:00.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;It's no longer needed&lt;/em&gt; flag option is described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment is outdated, conversational, or not relevant to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I suppose the &lt;em&gt;not relevant to this post&lt;/em&gt; would apply to non-mainstream comments. Alternatively there is the &lt;em&gt;Something else&lt;/em&gt; option, though I can't help feeling it is unfair to expect the moderators to act as our thought police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diverging slightly from the question, the best way to deal with &lt;em&gt;niche&lt;/em&gt; opinions is to post a good answer, i.e. lead by example, as indeed naturallyInconsistent did. It is always better to be positive than negative. As for comments, a good answer beats any number of negative comments every time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diverging even further from the question, we need to be careful before we judge in these situations. There have been decades of arguments about photons, and indeed more generally about the physical interpretation of quantum field theory. A quick search of the Physics SE will find several highly upvoted questions on this issue. We do get crackpots on the site from time to time, and I have crossed swords with some of them, but it isn't clear to me that the people involved in this discussion have crossed this line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2023-05-12T06:08:39.077" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T06:08:39.077" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14416" CreationDate="2023-05-12T13:37:22.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm glad you brought this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are users who &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; abuse comments, possibly as they realize these cannot be downvoted (hence no reputational cost).  It seems in fact some  users have been emboldened over time to include increasingly controversial comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only practical way is to flag the most egregious ones.  Possibly custom flags would be more appropriate as they would cumulatively highlight problematic users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty is that reputation does grant commenting privilege so it's difficult to police individual abusers who have sufficient reputation, unless it's a direct action by the mod team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Although asked in a different context &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13690/36194&quot;&gt;this old question of mine&lt;/a&gt; is pertinent: are there consequences if a user abuses their commenting privilege?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T13:37:22.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14416" CreationDate="2023-05-14T03:16:14.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the problem with many of these comments is that not that they are out of the mainstream, but that they are nothing more than announcements of the commenter's preferred way of thinking about things, and therefore inappropriate for the same reason that repeated announcements of the commenter's preferred breakfast cereal would be inappropriate. (The inappropriateness is often compounded by an unwarranted aggressive tone, but that, I think, is secondary to the main point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will mention in passing that I feel exactly the same way (and for exactly the same reasons) about the people who feel compelled to announce at every opportunity that they prefer not to think in terms of relativistic mass.  It's usually not my preferred way of thinking either, but I can't imagine why anyone would find that interesting enough for me to post a comment about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also mention in passing that there used to be another user who sometimes posted  useful content, but who also posted a lot of quite tedious comments expressing views extremely similar to those of User-B (and in much the same tone). That user stopped posting several years ago. I have wondered whether User-B is the same person with a new name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="4993" LastEditDate="2023-05-14T04:39:02.033" LastActivityDate="2023-05-14T04:39:02.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-18T14:52:15.087" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know why hot air holds more water vapor. There is this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/364738/118769&quot;&gt;Why does hot air contain more water?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would like a more quantitative explanation. Ideally, an explanation based on, e.g., the perfect gas law, plus of course the intuitive reasoning behind the math. Should I ask a new question or should I put a bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have much reputation, but I could sacrifice it, if necessary. The only issue is that my requirements are quite different from those of the original question which doesn't mention any math. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118769" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-05-20T01:35:53.200" LastActivityDate="2023-05-20T01:35:53.200" Title="I want to ask a question that is similar, but not identical, to an existing one" Tags="|discussion|support|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14422" CreationDate="2023-05-21T06:22:38.553" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post in question is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/764910/&quot;&gt;Mathematical Expression of Heisenberg&amp;#39;s Uncertainty Principle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had commented that the question was a duplicate question and then provided the link. A few minutes later another user makes an analogous comment. When the post was closed, my comment was deleted and the other user's kept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326183" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-05-21T06:45:56.823" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T10:21:56.367" Title="My comment was deleted while an identical, later posted comment was kept?" Tags="|discussion|comments|community-user|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14421" CreationDate="2023-05-21T06:38:32.757" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your flag comment (about the duplicate) was automatically deleted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;community bot&lt;/a&gt; when the question was closed as a duplicate. The other comment presumably used a format that the software didn't recognize (and therefore didn't delete) during the clean-up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-05-22T10:21:56.367" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T10:21:56.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-22T09:57:02.293" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that someone doesn't like me, for whatever reason, because three answers of mine have been downvoted in less than one minute the Mar 19 at 8:45 (votes corrected now):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/652159/can-black-holes-evaporate-into-neutron-stars/652200#652200&quot;&gt;Can black holes evaporate into Neutron stars?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/596642/finding-the-metric-tensor-from-a-2d-line-element/596643#596643&quot;&gt;Finding the metric tensor from a 2D line element&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/751467/how-does-an-electron-know-if-a-photon-was-emitted-by-a-positively-or-negativel/751509#751509&quot;&gt;How does an electron &amp;#39;know&amp;#39; if a photon was emitted by a positively or negatively charged particle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And three other answers of mine also have been downvoted 11h ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/740873/has-it-been-proven-the-fine-structure-constant-fsc-changes-with-time/740874#740874&quot;&gt;Has it been proven the fine-structure constant (FSC) changes with time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/749502/on-the-mechanism-driving-hawking-radiation/749528#749528&quot;&gt;On the mechanism driving Hawking Radiation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/751467/how-does-an-electron-know-if-a-photon-was-emitted-by-a-positively-or-negativel/751509#751509&quot;&gt;How does an electron &amp;#39;know&amp;#39; if a photon was emitted by a positively or negatively charged particle&lt;/a&gt; (again)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answers were well-received (only one of them hadn't any upvotes, but I admit I was a little too categorical in this one, and another one had only 1 upvote). Still, I don't know if this is personal, or if this is some algorithm that is automatically downvoting some random answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be the possible reason for this? Had my past behavior on PSE created some defiance against me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="265331" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T09:57:02.293" Title="Why downvotes on three separate answers in a short amount of time, two times?" Tags="|support|answers|reputation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14425" CreationDate="2023-05-22T13:46:38.137" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason my avatar just randomly changed over the weekend from the one on the left to the one on the right &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TSJD9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TSJD9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason that it was changed? I did not do so deliberately but I certainly could have accidentally done it if such a thing is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind the new one, but I have been posting with the old one for several years, so if I can revert it I would prefer to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T13:51:45.453" Title="Random avatar change" Tags="|bug|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14424" CreationDate="2023-05-22T13:51:45.453" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This change is intentional, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/389123/263383&quot;&gt;main meta&lt;/a&gt; for further information. As for getting your old image back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we do not recommend you to continue using your old identicon, we can give you back the image so that you may upload it as a custom avatar. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; asking for it and we'll be able to give you the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T13:51:45.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-23T06:41:03.083" Score="12" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;Observing the behavior of many community members about closing votes, I feel more and more doubtful about the coherence between the rules written in the help center and the practice. The last example is the case of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/765140/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; closed a few minutes ago, as homework-like and check-my-work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-reading the Meta page on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/&quot;&gt;How do I ask homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, I have difficulty seeing the difference between the above question  and the examples indicated on this Meta page as examples of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; homework questions. In particular, the problem is clearly stated; the steps to solve the problem are shown; a strategy to overcome the problem is provided, and a conceptual doubt is clearly stated (the final sentence &amp;quot;I guess that we are dealing with energy which is a scalar quantity and hence signs should not be used. Not sure of this, though.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else is missing? Why is this question not acceptable according to our rules?&#xA;I feel that the reasonable policy against bad homework-like questions of limited interest is sometimes transformed into a conditioned reflex to close every question related to exercises, independently of its actual content and quality. Am I wrong? The community can favor such an approach, but the stated policy should be consistently modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-05-23T08:06:40.597" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T16:25:58.747" Title="Some doubts about the coherence between rules and practice" Tags="|discussion|scope|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14426" CreationDate="2023-05-23T11:47:13.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also think the question you refer to is a good conceptual question and I voted to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions differ and people will fall on different sides of the line but one strength of this community is that more controversial decisions to close can be reversed when a good case is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T11:47:13.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14426" CreationDate="2023-05-23T14:17:48.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question starts with the oddly specific assumption that the initial velocity is 4.5 m/s.  This doesn't convey much confidence that the OP did much experimenting with other values to try to get a handle on what's driving the apparently wrong conclusion.  That in turn doesn't convey much confidence that the OP did much experimenting with alternative approaches to the problem.  That sort of experimentation is likely to have led to an &amp;quot;aha&amp;quot; moment, which is exactly what a good homework question is supposed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this question was closed appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T14:17:48.533" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-24T22:04:02.460" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, this might be a little personal and not much useful, but I am just curious, so bear with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;First&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a moderator's job a full-time paying one or is it more like a hobby, like for most other users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Second&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not a full time job, how come every question asked by every user on this site is reviewed and sometimes answered by them? How are they able to deal with that much traffic of closing/opening, answering, editing, questions on meta, perhaps some other SE sites and what not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="304112" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-05-25T12:23:30.760" LastActivityDate="2023-05-25T12:23:30.760" Title="How is a moderator's job?" Tags="|discussion|moderators|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14429" CreationDate="2023-05-24T22:20:29.573" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone who is a moderator on the Stack Exchange network is completely voluntary and there is no pay. You may see employees with moderation privileges, but being an employee is not the same as being a community moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/169205/do-moderators-earn-a-salary&quot;&gt;Do moderators earn a salary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For question two, Stack Exchange is also built on a system of community moderation using a reputation system the more reps you earn the more &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; you can gain. This means that the users who are doing those task you mentioned don't have to be moderators. The regular users can also do moderation task as well. Therefore taking some of the load off the moderation team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it says Stack Overflow it still does apply to the SE network as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack Overflow is run by you!&lt;/strong&gt; If you want to help us run Stack Overflow, you’ll need reputation first. Reputation is a (very) rough measurement of how much the Stack Overflow community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing other Stack Overflow users that you know what you’re talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is taken from the blog post titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second case for question two is that a site may not have as much activity which can allow the moderators to watch over the site and keep things under control more easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137543" LastEditorUserId="137543" LastEditDate="2023-05-24T23:21:52.130" LastActivityDate="2023-05-24T23:21:52.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14429" CreationDate="2023-05-25T02:40:11.723" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not anywhere near a full-time job. We only receive about a dozen flags for moderator attention daily. Most of them require very little of our time. A lot of our activity on the site is organic- we wouldn't have become moderators if we spent no time here, and we answer questions and review posts just like any other user would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow aside, most Stack Exchange sites don't have &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much traffic. Physics is currently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday&quot;&gt;6th largest&lt;/a&gt; in terms of questions per day, and we only have 57. We don't have to individually interact with that many of them before it looks like we're everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2023-05-25T02:40:11.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-26T08:01:27.090" Score="-1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been actively asking and answering but now it seems like just because of some negative votes I am unable to ask questions, and downvotes don't even leave the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324939" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-05-28T11:25:25.100" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T11:25:25.100" Title="I can't ask questions even if there are only 2 questions with negative points, why?" Tags="|support|questions|reputation|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14432" CreationDate="2023-05-26T16:02:56.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we compute &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/324939/pradyuman?tab=questions&amp;amp;sort=newest&quot;&gt;your&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/290545/280545&quot;&gt;question record&lt;/a&gt;, we find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 total questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 deleted questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 negative-scored questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 closed questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;\frac{&#xA;\text{total} - \text{negative} - \text{closed} - \text{deleted}&#xA;}{&#xA;\text{total}&#xA;}&#xA;= 0&#xA;$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; question record is a score above 0.5, so you appear to be underestimating the impact of your old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact details of the question ban are secret, but there is some general guidance.  You are probably up against &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/243460/280545&quot;&gt;the soft rate-limiting question ban&lt;/a&gt; rather than &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/280545&quot;&gt;the hard question ban&lt;/a&gt;, which means that you'll be able to ask questions again at some unspecified time in the near future, and that your question-asking privileges may be influenced by other positive interactions with the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-05-26T16:02:56.417" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-31T20:57:35.813" Score="9" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I look through questions on Stack Exchange, it appears that the community used to be more active. It feels like the most often years I see are 2013-15. The majority of questions I come across appear to be older than say 2016. Is this just a sampling bias or did Stack Exchange use to be more active? Furthermore, if it is less active, are there identified reasons for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like this online community. It is an excellent resource and I think its existence is very cool. I hope the usage isn't declining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347171" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T09:07:15.520" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T09:41:57.573" Title="Has activity on Physics Stack Exchanged decreased over the years?" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14434" CreationDate="2023-05-31T21:23:38.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I cannot share specifics of the activity data available to moderators in public, it should not be true that the majority of content is older than 2016. We're not dead yet!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But due to our practice of closing duplicates and linking older relevant questions under newer ones, if you explore the site &amp;quot;organically&amp;quot; - by searching for the &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; questions and following the related links in the side bar - I would expect that you disproportionally encounter older content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-05-31T21:23:38.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14434" CreationDate="2023-05-31T23:35:25.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stats available for ordinary mortals are decreasing, but not so badly. I think the death of the site might happen after a decade or more later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE gives us a way to create a lot of useful statistics from a large part of the public data available here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/649165/number-of-open-closed-and-deleted-questions-by-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can see the count of the open, closed and deleted questions by month. Numbers are decreasing, but not very heavily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/1756958/attractive-power-generated-by-month?OmitLastMonths=6#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can see the &amp;quot;attractive power&amp;quot; of the questions generated by that month. By &amp;quot;attractive power&amp;quot; I understand the sum of the average daily clicks of the questions posted in the given month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I see as a larger problem, is that the size of the Internet (i.e., count of the people and their activity to find content) has more than doubled in the last ten years. In my opinion, in this relative sense, the fact of the failure is beyond doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And PSE had the capability to revolutionize the Internet as we know it. At least for us, &amp;quot;intermediate people&amp;quot;: we with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science%2C_technology%2C_engineering%2C_and_mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;STEM&lt;/a&gt; mindset, education and profession, with a strong physics interest, but without (or with very little) formal physics education. I think we were the largest group of the visitors and even contributors of the site, yet our interests and views were considered the least. That was a mistake, and that mistake was fatal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between physics and any other, there is a very characteristic difference. High level physics is very hard and it can not be learnt on the Internet effectively. To be a master of a programming language, you only need focus, time and experience. To know cutting edge physics well, most of us don't have any chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;PSE&lt;/a&gt; could have become a bridge to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have learnt basic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QM&lt;/a&gt; on my own. As I bought my first QM textbook, I did not understand anything in it. Note, I knew math well enough (operators, wave functions, eigen-things and so). The problem was that the text had a lot of things obvious for the writer and for a beginner physics student, but not for me. I needed to buy multiple textbooks, compare them, and hunt Google a lot. It was much longer and it required much more effort, as an ordinary physics student does in the frame of his/her formal education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, that &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; as a function operator means the operator which converts f(x) to x*f(x), and that was for me months to understand. All my textbooks, without a single exception, simply forgot to mention this little nuance and I could not ask anyone: What is that? PSE did not exist at the time, but today, with my current skills, I would still find hard to formulate such a question in a way which would not be closed on the site now. I think, asking this is practically impossible on the current site for a beginner (both in physics and in PSE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could have become a pretty learning platform where we could learn a lot of physics, what we normally could not learn on the Internet (or not effectively). It did not. Opinions differ; why not? My opinion is the large amount of expelled users and unfairly killed content. Contradicting opinions typically cite the need to preserve the site quality, and the indirect deeds of the Stack Exchange company seem to side with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can search for Stack Exchange critics on the Internet. I think their common point that they are mostly false in the &amp;quot;logical framework&amp;quot; of the site rules and working mechanisms, but they are painfully right in the viewpoint of people just looking for answers to the questions he/she could not ever ask from anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T09:23:01.037" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T09:23:01.037" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14434" CreationDate="2023-06-01T14:04:05.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do agree with the sentiment that there were some great users in the past who don't seem to contribute anymore, and sometimes, seeing that, you feel the level of the discussions has reduced a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a feeling that the sentiment stated in the first paragraph is sort of meaningless now that AI has been picking up steam. Maybe in the future, AI could answer all our questions immediately, in which case, whatever could be the point of Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that, higher physics essentially becomes something like pure mathematics. And, questions in those can be asked in &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;MSE&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/tour&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. The amount of genuine physical questions, one could ask is relatively less. That is also why I believe that questions which don't involve a very detailed framing becomes popular here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/607329/what-is-the-physics-behind-origami&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The physics Stack Exchange site is, I feel, more about experts sharing knowledge to nonexperts rather than people of some equal academic level to discuss (yes, I disagree with PeterH here). &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/623492/how-do-i-find-the-approximate-surface-area-of-a-chicken&quot;&gt;See my favourite question on this site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also is a distinction from this site to other SE sites where super technical research is expected (say: the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange sites). &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/173136/does-opening-the-windows-increase-the-rate-at-which-a-floor-dries&quot;&gt;E.g.&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/108789/are-there-any-examples-of-social-animals-which-show-collective-behavioral-change&quot;&gt;or&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the lack of popularity of either of these questions as these sites are looking for people of similar academic level to discuss (there is also a hint of toxicity on &lt;em&gt;Chemistry&lt;/em&gt;, which a moderator themselves have confessed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5190/why-did-activity-on-chem-se-decline-rapidly-in-the-last-few-years/5213#5213&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing, from all of my participation in various Stack Exchange sites is that the kind of site it becomes is entirely dependent on who gets moderator powers in the beginning. But, one could argue back, saying that the subject would determine who probably gets the moderator powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: The site is running its natural course, AI development has accelerated, and there is a lack of number of question which experts feel good about themself to answer/ engage in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236734" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T09:41:57.573" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T09:41:57.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-01T18:23:47.983" Score="206" ViewCount="3966" Body="&lt;p&gt;We, the moderators of physics.SE, are deeply concerned about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/389582/263383&quot;&gt;recently announced &amp;quot;network policy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; regarding computer-generated content on the SE network, which effectively attempts to forbid moderators from issuing suspensions or deleting posts for the undisclosed usage of computer-generated content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When text generated by new GPT models became a pressing concern in December 2022, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14281/50583&quot;&gt;we explained&lt;/a&gt; that we consider the undisclosed use of such models to violate the standards of honesty and integrity physics.SE strives to uphold, and that we treat such content as violations of our pre-existing policies on plagiarism and interacting with other users in good faith, regardless of the quality of the content. In particular, while we are generally fairly cautious with moderator action towards posts that are merely of low quality, plagiarism in general and the use of computer-generated text specifically quickly lead to suspension of the user and deletion of the plagiarized posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since December, we have issued 17 moderator warnings — most of these together with 7-day suspensions — for plagiarism via GPT-like models, and we have no evidence whatsoever that any of these warnings were in error. While we of course are fallible, we are convinced that these suspensions protected and continue to protect our site from a higher influx of plagiarized computer-generated texts, and we are prepared to explain our reasoning for each of them, if requested, in public or in private. We have received no such request from either the users involved or SE employees before this new network policy was instituted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, we reject the implication in the network policy that there has been an unacceptably high false positive rate in the way we deal with computer-generated content, and we see no reason to change our processes. We owe this to you, the physics.SE community, since our promise to safeguard this site from computer-generated content on this meta was met with almost unanimous approval (it has received only a single downvote at the time of writing) — a rare thing for policy discussions on physics.SE, and a strong sign this community wants us to continue to act as we have before the announcement of the new network policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We call on all moderators of other sites in the network who value honesty and integrity and who value the core identity of our SE communities as places where amateurs and experts alike interact &lt;em&gt;as humans&lt;/em&gt;, to do the same and rank the needs of their communities above this ill-considered network policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2023-06-01T22:00:52.107" LastActivityDate="2023-06-05T03:37:00.333" Title="Physics.SE remains a site by humans, for humans" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2023-06-02T16:02:37.503" Score="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I firmly applaud the stance taken by the moderators here. AI-generated text has many demonstrated problems that disqualify its use, without significant human intervention, for technical (e.g. physics!) uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65202597&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a recent BBC article&lt;/a&gt; points out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people use ChatGPT, they are shown a disclaimer warning that the content it generates may contain &amp;quot;inaccurate information about people, places, or facts&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on its public blog about the tool, OpenAI says a limitation is that it &amp;quot;sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not the attributes of a solid scientific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, as a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14281/please-dont-use-computer-generated-text-for-questions-or-answers-on-physics&quot;&gt;Physics Meta&lt;/a&gt; post pointed out, AI is perfectly happy to flat out invent &amp;quot;references&amp;quot; to make it sound more authoritative. Peer reviewing a journal article is one thing, but having to go look up references in Physics SE postings to see if the poster (or AI) invented them is asking too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use AI to take your human-generated text and improve the writing quality, well, OK, that isn't bad. Relying on AI to get physics right is asking way too much of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, thanks to the moderators for trying to eliminate nonsense in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-03T06:39:19.567" LastActivityDate="2023-06-03T06:39:19.567" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2023-06-03T18:32:18.347" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible explanation would be, if you want ChatGPT answers, then ask ChatGPT, and not the humans on the PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, plagiarism is not a really effective argument, because the content of the ChatGPT is free and anyway we have our rules for citing other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more important question is the race between us and the machines. Or, between the content created by us, and the content created by the machines. Currently, ChatGPT can not create really high quality, useful answers, but odds are that soon it will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site would have even a little bit of collective wish for the long-term survival, for the long-term success, we should think about, how to prepare for that world already now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32426" LastEditorUserId="32426" LastEditDate="2023-06-05T03:37:00.333" LastActivityDate="2023-06-05T03:37:00.333" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2023-06-04T05:29:24.623" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14438/physics-se-remains-a-site-by-humans-for-humans#comment54737_14438&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;, Braiam asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many of those users came back after the suspension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at 16 profiles with a plagiarism mod message since January 1. (One of the suspensions on the list of 17 wasn't actually ChatGPT-related. That's one of the perils of data analysis: typos.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;description&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;count&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users with mod message&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users who visited after mod message&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users who read mod message&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users who returned after reading mod message&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users who returned after end of suspension (&amp;gt;7 days later)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users with undeleted content since end of suspension&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users with &amp;gt;100 reputation&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users from outside usa/europe&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users whose entire answer history occurred on one day&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;mean answers per single-day user&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;5.1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;users who can't currently ask questions&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's dangerous to overinterpret a small dataset like this one. But a little more than half of these users joined the site, posted as many as fifteen low-quality answers on the same day, and were suspended for that. Those users are now mostly subject to the automated answer ban, and wouldn't be able to post answers again if they wanted to.  Of the six users who aren't subject to the automated answer ban, one hasn't been back since about three weeks &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; their suspension (apparently their low-quality contribution flew under everyone's radar), while about half of the others have returned and posted new content. Two users actually replied to their moderator messages with apologies, which is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more understanding than usual.  One of those has in fact returned regularly; the other is still suspended, but they did check in today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-06-04T05:29:24.623" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-05T19:33:00.167" Score="6" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some Stack Exchange sites are clearly closely related to each other. For example, &amp;quot;companions&amp;quot; of the physics Stack Exchange site might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;History of Science and Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Electrical Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Quantum Computing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And others...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we don't want to discourage people from asking questions on the physics Stack Exchange site, we ultimately should want questions to be asked wherever we can expect them to find the highest quality possible answers. Oftentimes that's here, but sometimes this simply isn't an appropriate setting for their question (resulting in removal), or the people who would best be suited to answer that question just more commonly frequent one of these &amp;quot;companion&amp;quot; Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368753" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-06T20:53:48.013" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T20:53:48.013" Title="Is there somewhere that we could officially recommend &quot;companion&quot; Stack Exchange sites?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|questions|migration|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14445" CreationDate="2023-06-06T13:08:09.297" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/767090&quot;&gt;answer a question&lt;/a&gt; and in the edit mode MathJax shows the equations properly, but when I click on &amp;quot;save&amp;quot; some equations are not rendered (?) at all, and I see only the MathJax code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I click on &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; again, everything seems to be OK, but in normal viewing mode it is screwed up on my &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brave&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edge&lt;/a&gt; browsers. I tried to edit again, start a new answer, etc., but I still had the same problem. What is wrong with my equations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31748" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-06T22:07:32.573" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T22:07:32.573" Title="MathJax does not show the equations properly" Tags="|support|mathjax|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14444" CreationDate="2023-06-06T13:40:51.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be caused by the use of &lt;code&gt;\label{}&lt;/code&gt;. Here is your first equation, with and without that command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ h(t)\nabla \times \tilde {\mathbf H} = \mathbf J +\epsilon_0 \dot {e}(t) \tilde {\mathbf E} \tag{1}\label{1}$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ h(t)\nabla \times \tilde {\mathbf H} = \mathbf J +\epsilon_0 \dot {e}(t) \tilde {\mathbf E} \tag{1}$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both look identical during editing, but the first is sometimes (but inconsistently) mangled in the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unaware of how &lt;code&gt;\label{}&lt;/code&gt; works in MathJax, and whether it is truly supported. But do you really need it? Why not use just &lt;code&gt;\tag{}&lt;/code&gt;s, and hard-code any references in the text? (i.e. use &lt;code&gt;$(1)$&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;$\eqref{1}$&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8563" LastEditorUserId="8563" LastEditDate="2023-06-06T13:45:54.727" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T13:45:54.727" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14447" CreationDate="2023-06-07T19:58:41.200" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;privileges page for creating tags&lt;/a&gt; it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When should I create new tags?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most common tags already exist on a mature site. You should always favor existing tags; only create new tags when you feel you can make a strong case that your question does cover a new topic that nobody else has asked about before on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this doesn't seem to answer my question. It's unclear if a tag should only be created when there are no other tags that appropriately apply to the question, or if it's okay to do so whenever you personally feel that a topic isn't adequately covered by existing tag options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose you had a question about the Bekenstein bound. It would be appropriate to use tags like &amp;quot;black-holes&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;black-hole-thermodynamics&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;event-horizon&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;gravity&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;general-relativity&amp;quot;, but there is no existing tag for &amp;quot;Bekenstein-bound&amp;quot;. Yes, that's within the realm of topics enveloped by those other tags, but none of them specifically address that concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or alternatively, suppose you had a question about the complementarity paradox. Appropraite tags include things like &amp;quot;hawking-radiation&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;entanglement&amp;quot;, and possibly &amp;quot;black-hole-firewall&amp;quot;, but there exist no tags for &amp;quot;complementarity-paradox&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;fuzzballs&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;ER=EPR&amp;quot;. So should such tags be created, or should you just rely on the existing ones since they are inherently connected topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to push any buttons or start any arguments. I'm just seeking further clarity on when this privilege should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368753" LastActivityDate="2023-06-10T18:31:13.800" Title="Should new tags only be created when **no** other tags apply, or just generally when there's not one that applies to a given relevant topic?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14446" CreationDate="2023-06-07T20:23:47.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, if you have the privilege to create new tags, you can use it. The idea is that if other users find your tag useful, they'll start adding it to other questions, and if they don't, they won't. The existence of &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; tags isn't directly harmful when they're only on a single question, and tags get automatically deleted when there aren't any questions tagged with them, so deleting a &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; tag is as easy as removing it from the question again and waiting for a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, tags should be useful in grouping together sets of related questions, and there is a maximum of five tags per question, so we need to try to hit a sweet spot with the specificity of the tags - if the tag is so specific only very few questions could be tagged with it, should it take the place of another tag that would group the question together with more questions that are a bit more different but still of potential interest to people interested in the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take an example, &amp;quot;ER=EPR&amp;quot; (aside from containing a '=' that doesn't work in tags) to me seems to be a full subset of &amp;quot;entanglement&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;general-relativity&amp;quot; - any question that could be tagged with &amp;quot;ER=EPR&amp;quot; could be tagged with &amp;quot;entanglement&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;general-relativity&amp;quot;. At the same time, it's very specific to a single (though somewhat influential) conjecture. Are there really people who'd want to search for questions tagged with &amp;quot;ER=EPR&amp;quot; that wouldn't be fine with looking at questions tagged &amp;quot;entanglement&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;general-relativity&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;wormholes&amp;quot;) instead? Couldn't people interested specifically in &amp;quot;ER=EPR&amp;quot; just search &lt;em&gt;for that term&lt;/em&gt; without use of a tag? I feel this way about most of your other proposed tags, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, within reason (so don't go off creating 100 new tags...), feel free to experiment with tags you think could be useful and see how others react to them, or, if you're not sure, ask here on meta whether others think a specific tag would be useful first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T20:23:47.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-08T10:35:11.990" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently encountered the review queues section, where I found that questions of my &lt;strong&gt;watching tags&lt;/strong&gt; don't appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be really nice if the site adds this functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357431" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-06-08T10:35:47.527" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T10:35:47.527" Title="Adding tags to review queues" Tags="|feature-request|tags|review-tools|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14434" CreationDate="2023-06-10T05:05:20.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I predict a significant incoming spike of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is currently a poll on &lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/r/AskPhysics&lt;/a&gt; asking users there if the subreddit should go dark in protest of Reddit's recent announcement of API changes. Currently, the vote stands at 83.5% of the 575 voters supporting &amp;quot;Go dark until major changes have been obtained from Reddit&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I support this goal (and am part of that 83.5%), I question if Reddit will bend to these demands. If it does not, then that subreddit will shut down for the foreseeable future, resulting in an exodus of users - many of whom will find their way here instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no telling what the long-term ramifications of that will be, but that subreddit has over 128,000 subscribers. Granted, there is no telling how many of those subscribers are inactive or already present here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368753" LastActivityDate="2023-06-10T05:05:20.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14446" CreationDate="2023-06-10T18:31:13.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it may depend on the specific situation. Keep in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A tag is not really useful unless it is consistently applied. If tag X is only applied to a tiny fraction of all the posts belonging to topic X&#xA;then searching for keyword X rather than tag X produces much more useful and complete results. So it is pointless to introduce a new tag X unless you're are willing to make an effort to apply it consistently (or at least for the leading posts) within topic X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since a post can only carry 5 tags, too many different tags can fragmentize tag coverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2023-06-10T18:31:13.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-11T13:09:40.043" Score="3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is motivated by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14426/some-doubts-about-the-coherence-between-rules-and-practice&quot;&gt;related post&lt;/a&gt;, which questions the practices for closing [homework-and-exercises] questions. My own question is about older posts that remain closed and about the process for reopening them. My understanding is that recently closed posts have a time window for users with enough reputation points to vote to reopen. After this window passes a closed question comes for review only if the OP (or perhaps anyone else?) makes an edit to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These mechanisms keep some worthy questions closed indefinitely. Here are two examples and I'm sure there are more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/743237/is-the-average-position-for-the-ground-state-of-a-1d-simple-harmonic-oscillator&quot;&gt;Case 1&lt;/a&gt; The question was downvoted (I have upvoted it since), but has an accepted answer with 6 upvotes (none of them mine). The discussion apparently was useful –to some users at least, including the OP. It remains closed as a Homework-like and check-my-work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234/how-should-a-physics-student-study-mathematics?rq=1&quot;&gt;Case 2&lt;/a&gt; This question has received 46 upvotes and has 8 answers with a combined 82 upvotes. It remains closed since 2010 because &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;is not a good fit for our Q&amp;amp;A format&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the community's feedback, as demonstrated in the activity generated by a question, the number of answer and total votes, count as an endorsement for reopening closed questions? I am thinking of some automated process that periodically checks closed questions for activity and decides whether to reopen them. There will be gray areas of course, but it seems to me that Case 2 is an excellent candidate for reopening, and personally I would argue in favor of Case 1 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214934" LastEditorUserId="214934" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T13:40:25.420" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T13:40:25.420" Title="Reopening old closed questions" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14426" CreationDate="2023-06-11T16:25:58.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an engineering professor, I teach thermodynamics, I certainly don't want my students to google the answer to their homework or get it without effort from some well-meaning expert in Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want them to get the answer. If they ask me I will lead them, and if they ask the wrong question I will tell them to try again with a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; question, to get them to focus on their point of confusion, which is usually &lt;em&gt;not obvious at all&lt;/em&gt;, even to the OP themselves. When a student finally asks the right question, much of the time they will also answer it themselves. I've seen it happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that when it comes to the debate about homework, which seems to have been going on for a while on this site, most of the emphasis is on preventing free answers with less emphasis on teaching the OP something new. I don't claim to have the answer because the balance is delicate. But I would rather err on the side of giving perhaps too many free answers for the benefit of teaching few, than to stifle the opportunity for learning by being overly strict with what questions are or are not allowed. Believe me, those who get &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; answers will not sail to success because of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example: In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/767731/number-of-degrees-of-freedom-for-a-gaseous-mixture?noredirect=1#comment1722830_767731&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; the OP asks a question that is vague. The OP's answer to my comment makes it clear that the question as asked is a small part of a bigger question, but this context is missing from the original post making it impossible to give a meaningful answer (my own answer does not address the point because it is based on my misreading of the OP's misstated question). The OP is new to Physics SE, inexperienced with asking questions on the platform and unsure in their own understanding of the physics they discus. One could choose to close this question for lack of detail, but this would only cause harm because it would merely prolong the OP's confusion on the subject. A better way would be to prod the OP to improve and focus the question without the humiliation of a closed post. Perhaps Physics SE is not set up for this kind of thing, especially given the volume of questions. Still, it is something worth thinking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214934" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T16:25:58.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-14T06:41:31.663" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I go a downvote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/768202/&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; which I suspect is related to the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You haven't really demonstrated a problem here, and it looks like there's a lot more information than needed to set up what you're asking. You might want to try rephrasing your question&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to provide links as well as a solution. How can I improve the question and yet be concise? Any thoughts and feedback would be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-15T10:09:39.713" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T10:09:39.713" Title="How can I write a concise and complete question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-24T06:59:48.723" Score="-2" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I wrote a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/769447/&quot;&gt;(you can see here)&lt;/a&gt;. Which doesn't involve finding the value of an expression, nor a difficult calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing: This should not be considered a &amp;quot;homework and exercise&amp;quot; question. Since, this question is nowhere in an exercise; it is purely conceptual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing, my question was closed. I don't know why; I asked question very politely, and it is not even a &amp;quot;check my work question&amp;quot;, or nor I am asking you to find the value of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt;. I asked about a concept involved in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do these ruthless people consider closing my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;80% of my asked questions are closed here. I see many higher physics problems (even numericals) on PSE are not considered as homework and exercise and are even open, but high school-level questions have no value here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I (and people like me) go? Is there another Stack Exchange site that gives value to high school-level question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it like politics in the field of studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="361248" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-24T18:18:35.563" LastActivityDate="2023-06-24T18:18:35.563" Title="Why are all questions given a tag homework and exercise and then closed?" Tags="|support|questions|specific-question|close-reasons|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14454" CreationDate="2023-06-24T12:55:19.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is written like an assignment question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is taken from a textbook, is extremely specific, not written to emphasize concepts but instead emphasizes calculations, so ask yourself: except for you, who else will be interested in this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important point of your question is&#xA;&amp;quot;So, this gives me that work done by normal is zero. But this was mathematics not physics.&amp;quot;  This appears to late, after a long (and boring) calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to fix this (and it may not work to the satisfaction of the community):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start by phrasing the problem clearly.  For instance:  &amp;quot;In the problem below, I will show that the work done by the normal is zero, but I'm not satisfied with my answer.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarify the conceptual issue: &amp;quot;If the wedge was fixed, this would be obvious: there is never any displacement perpendicular to the surface of the wedge.  But here the wedge is actually moving so this argument does not seem to be so obviously hold.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrase the question crisply: &amp;quot;In this kind of problem, how can I understand or calculate the work done by the normal force?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's the example calculation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sequence places the conceptual problem at the top and decreases the emphasis on &amp;quot;just solving a problem&amp;quot;.  Your question is still very much a homework-type problem and may remain closed: the choice of this community is to answer &amp;quot;explain why&amp;quot; and close &amp;quot;check my answer&amp;quot; questions, but at least your question would now be more in the &amp;quot;explain why&amp;quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I downvoted your question here on Meta.  There is nothing ruthless about the choice to close homework-like questions, else the site will become indistinguishable from other homework help sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-06-24T13:11:56.470" LastActivityDate="2023-06-24T13:11:56.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14456" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14458" CreationDate="2023-06-28T18:24:04.447" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I posted this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/770025/&quot;&gt;A List of Divergent Series and Where they appear in Physics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I want it to be a community wiki not a standard Q&amp;amp;A question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process here appears to be done on the answerers side of things: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;What are &amp;quot;Community Wiki&amp;quot; posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I as a question asker on physics.stackexchange make it into a community wiki? Or would it be acceptable for me to post a question, with an answer myself and then mark it as community wiki for people to update freely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more context, the reason I think this is on topic is because i'm not just asking for some calculations but rather I want each divergent series supplied to be from a distinctly DIFFERENT part of physics than all of the previous examples in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is aggregating a bunch of CONCEPTS together, not just calculations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have expressed my view in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/14457/&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/&quot;&gt;Good list, bad list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-06-29T06:16:03.960" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T06:16:03.960" Title="What is the proper way to make a community wiki at physics.stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2023-06-28T18:33:07.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm pretty late to the party and have a biased interest here, but I'll voice my opinion nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think sometimes lists are good. People want to organize information in a way that's easy to access and continuously update and doing it here in physics.stackexchange makes a lot of sense, because there are many high skilled people here that can contribute good value to such a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my particular example, I wanted to collect a list of divergent series results  that breaks the usual mold of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1+2+3+4... -1/12$&lt;/span&gt; because Casimir effect&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and searching for such examples using the search feature turned up very few cases surprisingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine that there are other lists like this one that would be of interest to some people and so I would like to propose we allow for lists as long as they consist of a list of conceptual physics facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my particular example, I am enforcing that each divergent series result comes with a reference or explanation to an actual physics result where that series came from which should be different than all the examples in the list up to that point of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14456/what-is-the-proper-way-to-make-a-community-wiki-at-physics-stackexchange&quot;&gt;This meta post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/770025/a-list-of-divergent-series-and-where-they-appear-in-physics&quot;&gt;this actual post&lt;/a&gt; are the meta and actual question for the list I am trying to generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To back up my view further: consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13518/when-are-questions-with-multiple-different-possible-answers-good&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; meta post. The highest rated answer starts off with a thought experiment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Let's suppose the purpose of Physics SE is to accumulate a database of questions/answers that are helpful to people who are trying to understand physics, and that are likely to be found by those people in a search. The keywords here are trying to understand and likely to be found.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that lots of people (especially from the math world who know about divergent series results formally, but are curious about how they manifest in physics and the other experimental sciences) would probably google for &amp;quot;divergent series in physics list&amp;quot; and ideally this post could be the first thing they run into with a long list to satiate their curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, this type of thing is very common in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/tour&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Which is absolutely tiny compared to physics.se; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=grid&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. So I don't believe allowing lists will suddenly destroy the site, because they don't have the number of users as on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The community should be picky about what kinds of lists they allow and don't allow, but to categorically refuse them is not a good policy, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-06-29T08:46:50.180" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T08:46:50.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14456" CreationDate="2023-06-28T19:37:29.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Community wiki is described at length on the mother meta, as you've seen. You can make community wiki answers, but the only way to make community wiki questions is to ask a moderator to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering your own question is perfectly appropriate. There is really no reason to make it community wiki. Community wiki doesn't make off-topic questions suddenly on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, your question is closed as off-topic. If you believe it should be on-topic, you should make another meta question asking the community specifically about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2023-06-28T19:37:29.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-29T20:20:10.290" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/769334/359074&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, which is simply about how an outside observer would observe an in falling object into a black hole. The question is simple and clear: Due to the slowing of time as the event horizon nears, would the object eventually appear flattened to an outside observer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to see how this question is lacking in clarity. What more needs to be clarified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="359074" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T20:20:10.290" Title="Why does my question need 'details or clarity?'" Tags="|support|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-04T01:16:48.143" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm interested in formally asking if &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/770025/&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question to collect examples of divergent series in physics can be opened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples of this that come up in QFT and I found one example closer to Chemistry but there's not single resource which covers all such examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question got closed (very reasonably) because as it stands its asking for a list and needs to at least be vetted the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm sure there might be a couple questions about &amp;quot;why should we allow this?&amp;quot; and I'll address them as best as I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;It's just a list, its not about conceptual physics and might even attract low quality answers&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This question actually elicits a good amount of conceptual physics and is therefore on topic. The way I want the list to be structured is to strictly contain new examples along with where the example came from without repeats. So every addition to this (I'm planning on making a community wiki answer) will necessarily be linking a new piece of conceptual physics along with a divergent series. The fact I have already mentioned the casimir effect/riemann zeta function means that this low hanging fruit is no longer available for an answer and so that ensures we have some quality control/easy ability to prevent pointless/repeated answers. Moreover this question is NOT an opinion based question. You either have a new example that isn't already documented or you don't and that example either is a real calculation from some part of physics (possibly purely theoretical) or it consists of invalid math/incorrect modelling. So we can definitely ensure the quality will be high&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;But if we give an exception here what about other exceptions, why not a list of type ___ while we are at it, where do we draw the line?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I don't know where to draw the line and I'm not asking meta the hard question of what that explicit line should be. If someone cares about __ topic enough they can just ask on meta and test the reception for themselves, just like I'm doing here. I do know that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; care about divergent series, and I think there other people who do care too, and so I am asking about this specific topic which I find interesting and is linked to a lot of interesting physics .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Maybe you're the only person that cares about this?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This question is interesting to more than just myself, divergent series appear in pure mathematics (such as number theory and complex analysis) and people from that space (such as myself) would probably be curious where and how divergent series appear in physics. Here is a post from mathoverflow setting up a small such table: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/q/401386/&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.net/q/401386/&lt;/a&gt; moreover a quick check on the search bar reveals many questions about divergent series have popped up in the past on physics.stackexchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;If we make this exception, we will be flooded with requests that we cannot sustain&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I did some research for an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4561/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and found that mathoverflow which is a considerably smaller site is able to allow the occasional list/table without being overwhelmed so I think allowing this list to form (once its vetted and debated on meta) will not overwhelm physics.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;But the rules/norms are already set. We shouldn't be making exceptions&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I like the answer of Chiral Anomaly &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13518/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; which tries to explore what the purpose of physics.stackexchange MIGHT be. The post there addresses that the core value add should be to organize questions and answers that are useful, of high quality, and easily found by others. I think that I've addressed the first two points but the last point is key, asking it HERE on physics.stackexchange would make it very EASILY found by others compared to using any other resource/place. So I believe this is a good home for this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if that covers everything but it hopefully addresses some concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know what changes/modifications/upgrades to the question you would like to see to make you feel comfortable about it being posted on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-07-04T10:40:41.303" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T10:40:41.303" Title="Formally asking for allowing this *specific* list like question about divergent series" Tags="|discussion|questions|scope|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-10T03:15:13.197" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25591&quot;&gt;Does the universe have a center?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;(original, unpopular)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, look at this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136860&quot;&gt;Did the Big Bang happen at a point?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;(duplicate, famous)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you notice, the duplicate post has a comment by a moderator that redirects to the original post:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5mxTz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5mxTz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Duplicate post's comment&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the original post has this message with its strange reason to close (that redirects to the duplicate post):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6RGr3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6RGr3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Original post's closure message&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like a paradox, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, we see that the original question is closed, being unpopular, but the duplicate is not. Does this imply we should not mark a duplicate post as a duplicate if the original post is not-so-popular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="371971" LastEditorUserId="371971" LastEditDate="2023-07-10T04:20:08.900" LastActivityDate="2023-07-10T04:20:08.900" Title="Should we flag a duplicate question if it has more engagements comparing the original post?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|close-reasons|duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-11T05:28:27.790" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the borders between various disciplines are slowly vanishing with the advent of interdisciplinary areas like Biophysics, Environmental and climate studies, and Complex systems, how do we deal with such questions in Physics SE? Usually, I try to answer questions that can be reasonably explained with physics. Others I vote to close or ask to migrate to Biology or the sister sites.  But how much exactly is &amp;quot;reasonable&amp;quot; is a matter of debate. I have two concerns that need to be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To what extent can we create new and new interdisciplinary SEs whenever a new field emerges? Would that be sustainable in the long run?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the real reasons why there should be separate SE sites when the disciplines they address themselves are getting more and more interconnected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155230" LastEditorUserId="155230" LastEditDate="2023-07-11T12:16:22.030" LastActivityDate="2023-07-11T12:16:22.030" Title="How do we deal with interdisciplinary questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|scope|close-reasons|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14464" CreationDate="2023-07-11T20:14:49.177" Score="4" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just now looking at my recent reputation changes and I see eight downvotes on various different answers I posted over seemingly one single day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this is serial downvoting by a single user (who I presumably must have offended somehow?) or just some odd coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this can kind of activity be &amp;quot;flagged&amp;quot; or not. It's not urgent, but is somewhat annoying to me and I curious how best to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The serial downvoting has been reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-07-12T07:15:17.827" LastActivityDate="2023-07-12T07:15:17.827" Title="Is this &quot;serial downvoting&quot;?" Tags="|support|down-votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14463" CreationDate="2023-07-11T21:41:37.907" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126857/263383&quot;&gt;faq on meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; says in the section &amp;quot;What if I think I'm the victim of voting fraud?&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the voting fraud is currently happening or has just happened recently, don't worry about it. You should wait at least 24 hours after the voting has occurred before becoming concerned. In most cases, the system should automatically detect it and reverse it for you within 24 hours. You don't need to take any action during those 24 hours, as all that moderators can do during that time is tell you to wait for the automatic detection script to run (they can't run it for you just this once).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the 24 hours have already passed and the suspicious votes have not been reversed, you can then flag one of your own posts for &amp;quot;in need of moderator intervention&amp;quot; and explain in detail what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is strongly preferred that you do not ask about serial voting on a site's meta. The details of the investigation are private and will not be divulged, and there's nothing that normal users can do. Such meta posts often lead to inappropriate speculation as to the cause, who the voters are, etc., and they also tend to result in people engaging in additional targeted voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-07-11T21:41:37.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14463" CreationDate="2023-07-12T03:21:00.050" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a brief look at the recently downvoted answers, I do not believe that what I'll say below applies to you in particular, but it does seem to be relevant to the question in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I encounter a question or answer that I think is particularly bad, curiosity sometimes leads me to look at other posts by that same person.  And sometimes many of those other posts are equally bad, which is not surprising because there are some people who are consistently thoughtless about what they post.  Therefore I discover, in short order, several posts by a single user, all of which seem to merit a downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On those occasions, I'm never sure what to do, because I don't want to be flagged as a serial downvoter.  I sometimes compromise by downvoting only the two or three that seem most egregious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that I do not think that a whole lot of downvotes in rapid succession, even if you could somehow know they all come from the same source, indicates that anything untoward has happened.   Again, though, I don't think this explanation applies in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2023-07-12T03:21:00.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-16T05:40:35.553" Score="-2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/772105/365056&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed marked as off topic and not main stream physics and serially downvoted with no one even understanding the question in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked two points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has this &amp;quot;loophole&amp;quot; been addressed until now?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would happen if the said experiment is performed, and what would the possible results mean?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer could be very easily:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes or No or we don't think this is a loophole, here's why.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such and such would happen if you do this experiment; here's why and this is what it means.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead it has been closed as non-mainstream physics, which is unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I get this question restored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="365056" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2023-07-17T00:24:18.913" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T00:37:45.370" Title="How is my question off topic when I'm asking what would be the outcome of a particular experiment and what would the results mean?" Tags="|discussion|support|down-votes|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14466" CreationDate="2023-07-17T00:37:45.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question posits the possibility of faster-than-light communication.  That typically means a question is not concerning with mainstream physics.  I say &amp;quot;typically&amp;quot; here, because there is a small but significant literature looking at possible local violations of special relativity.  This is useful, for example, for understanding and quantifying the results of the current generation of updated Michelson-Morley experiments.  In fact, it is something I work on myself.  However, it is a fairly technical field, and mainstream work in this area has to be very careful about mathematical definitions and methods; sloppy treatments tend to descend into self-contradiction pretty quickly.  So it is possible to ask questions about, say, how well the possibility of faster-than-light signaling in various experiments has been experimentally constrained, but useful questions of that nature generally require a much more sophisticate treatment that the one in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the question specifically talks about signaling that is superluminal but not instantaneous.  However, that turns out to be an illusory distinction in relativity.  The very first thing that Einstein showed in his first 1905 special relativity paper was that the invariance of the speed of light (that, as observed in the Michelson-Morley experiment, the speed of light is observed to be the same by all observers, regardless of their own velocities) meant that different observers would not generally agree on whether two events were simultaneous.  What this means for faster-than-light travel or communication is that while one observer may see signals being sent faster than light, others will see signals being sent instantaneously (that is, with infinite apparent speed), and still others will see them going backwards in time.  So it is difficult to see how your proposal for faster-than-light but not instantaneous communication could be at all consistent with what we understand about relativistic physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T00:37:45.370" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-19T22:19:36.430" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask you to reopen my question which has nothing to do with an alleged homework:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/772416/a-problem-involving-adiabatic-expansion-of-ideal-gas&quot;&gt;A problem involving adiabatic expansion of ideal gas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or at least explain what is wrong with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133315" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2023-07-19T22:57:37.910" LastActivityDate="2023-07-19T22:57:37.910" Title="What is wrong with this question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|close-reasons|homework-and-exercises|reopen|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14470" CreationDate="2023-07-24T20:24:46.233" Score="7" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized the font of question titles and score numbers are bigger than before. Am I alone or does anyone experience the same thing? When you want to start writing your question you see it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In meta it is not like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the new policy are you ok with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/47ILh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/47ILh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Site font&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247001" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2023-07-25T20:53:34.690" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T20:54:44.303" Title="Am I alone or the font of the site is changed?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14469" CreationDate="2023-07-25T20:54:44.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a bug, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/391582/380389&quot;&gt;confirmed fixed on Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;. It may take a few days for the fix to appear on different sites due to caching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T20:54:44.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-28T00:01:01.407" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/773752/1186&quot;&gt;Regarding the recent superconductivity claims video&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about a specific experiment. The reason for closure is that this is about an unpublished theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-07-28T07:53:21.600" LastActivityDate="2023-07-28T07:53:21.600" Title="Why was this question about the recent superconductivity experiment closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14471" CreationDate="2023-07-28T03:48:39.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In its current form (v1), the question in its entirety is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding the recent superconductivity claims video&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody please tell why this cannot be electrostatic repulsion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[some link]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is not self-contained. It cannot be answered without following the link. The link goes to a website that I'm not familiar with, and I haven't clicked it; it could go to a well-written paragraph, or a technical paper, or to a three-hour video by a raving lunatic, or (worst) to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;short video&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the question on-topic, one step will be to make the question self-contained, so that an interested person can gather enough evidence to answer the question without necessarily leaving our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why two of your three close voters chose &amp;quot;non-mainstream&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; for their close reason. Note that part of our &amp;quot;non-mainstream&amp;quot; close reason is that we don't peer-review unpublished material here; perhaps the applicability of that reason would be obvious if I had clicked on your link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-07-28T03:48:39.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-28T04:34:16.693" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I took sometime to try to understand a mix up of duplicates, due to a user submitting three times a question, and flagged it for a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This morning all three questions have disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried the moderator tool, but I could not find the question. As I do not remember the user, I cannot check if he/she also disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there were valid answers in one of the three, I am puzzled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-07-28T11:37:27.210" LastActivityDate="2023-07-28T12:13:41.853" Title="Question disappeared" Tags="|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14471" CreationDate="2023-07-28T05:27:27.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question as &lt;em&gt;Opinion based&lt;/em&gt;. There is no way we can judge whether or not the experiment is genuine just by looking at a short video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2023-07-28T05:27:27.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14473" CreationDate="2023-07-28T12:13:41.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this is what happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At about 6:30 in the morning in Greece,  I entered the site and wanted to see what had happened with my flagging a mix up in the duplicate references. The way I find such interference by me, I go to my activities and check my comments, which have the links . All my comments were gone, and going through the Questions list I could not find highlighted the duplicates I had checked last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After John's comment, I checked my activity again, and my comments are there, and so are the three identical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the questions must have been temporarily not available,  in the process of editing out the errors in the duplicate attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2023-07-28T12:13:41.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-03T02:51:27.367" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been thinking about the idea of illusionary current. Consider the following situation&#xA;I have a rod which has a mass &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m$&lt;/span&gt; and hence does have the virtue to perform work against the gravitational field of the earth. I will for now neglect the air resistance and any such dissipative forces. I will now charge the rod via induction and then ground one of its ends . So I assume the rod has charge  Now if I raise the rod some height. The rod will fall freely.&#xA;Now looking at the situation can we say current is flowing? Also is the potential difference caused by gravity here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is wrong with this question and what extra details need to be added.&#xA;It says it lacks clarity and I have already got an accepted answer. But this question was closed and hence I lost the privilege to ask questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link to the question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/774431/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="352764" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-08-05T11:14:39.253" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T14:44:20.853" Title="What is this question lacking?" Tags="|support|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-03T03:45:27.853" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have gotten 30 of the required 30 days with well received questions required to get inquisitive and yet I’ve not been awarded the badge, why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TvS7i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TvS7i.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263465" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-08-03T06:13:24.760" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T15:28:55.300" Title="Why haven’t I got this badge yet?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14484" CreationDate="2023-08-03T07:47:33.920" Score="-12" ViewCount="1262" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/737485/&quot;&gt;How to interpret the velocity from relativistic Doppler effect/equation for the redshift of cosmic background radiation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that all recent downvotes on the original question are related to this complaint, not the question itself. It had &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1$&lt;/span&gt; upvote for the last &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$8$&lt;/span&gt; months. Yet another issues are the recent closing after this complaint and the downvotes on this complaint. No one should be a judge in his own case or a case, in which he is a party to the conflict (recent closing). Remember, what the downvote means in the first place: &amp;quot;This question does not show any research effort&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whoever downvotes this now or the original question without giving a reason related to the content below, hopefully does not participate in the cancel culture, because these posts are not meant to be deleted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was advised to post my deleted comment to ProfRob's &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/737487/&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;(He has just &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/737487/revisions&quot;&gt;edited&lt;/a&gt; his answer, that was given last year).&lt;/strong&gt; I'm giving it in slightly changed form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In this case&lt;/em&gt;, Doppler gives us current velocity &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Hubble gives us current velocity for the current distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words in italics are added. Please, don't judge right away and let me elaborate on it. The argument below was given in my previously deleted comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comoving distance and proper distance are defined to be equal at the present time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the source, given by ProfRob himself: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_and_proper_distances&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_and_proper_distances&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If the comoving distance to a galaxy is denoted &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\chi$&lt;/span&gt;, the proper distance &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d(t)$&lt;/span&gt; at an arbitrary time &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt; is simply given by&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d(t)=a(t)\chi$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The proper distance &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d(t)$&lt;/span&gt; between two galaxies at time &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt; is just the distance that would be measured by rulers between them at that time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the current value of the scale factor &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$a(t)=1$&lt;/span&gt; we have &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d(t)=\chi$&lt;/span&gt;. This means, that Doppler equation, that gives us the relative velocity between two co-moving frames at the co-moving distance, is currently appropriate for the proper distance as well, because they are defined as equal at the present time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for yourself. Calculate the velocity from the Doppler equation for the current CMB redshift and compare it with the velocity given by the Hubble's Law for the current value of Hubble constant (even assuming different, inconsistent measurements) and the distance equal to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ct_0$&lt;/span&gt; where &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t_0$&lt;/span&gt; is the current age of the universe. In his &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/737487/revisions&quot;&gt;recently edited&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answer,&#xA;ProfRob argues, that &lt;em&gt;Using Hubble's law with light travel time distance yields a velocity that is roughly &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$c$&lt;/span&gt; multiplied by the look back time as a fraction of the age of the universe.&lt;/em&gt; - Not At All. It yields &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$c \pm 0.03\ c$&lt;/span&gt;. If you want ProfRob, you can multiply it by &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1$&lt;/span&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;a fraction of the age of the universe&lt;/em&gt;. Calculate it. In addition, he explains his miscalculation by the reciprocal of Hubble constant not being exactly equal to the universe age and concludes, that therefore this velocity makes no physical sense. Not only that explanation makes no sense, but it's based on miscalculation. The interpretation of the result of proper calculation of this velocity is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/737486/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ProfRob's start point are the values &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$46.5$&lt;/span&gt; billion light years and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.2\ c$&lt;/span&gt; and his whole further argumentation is based on them. I'm questioning them in my other &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/769308/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, that is also given below with wider description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand ProfRob argues, that I can't use the Doppler, because of general relativity, superluminal expansion with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.2\ c$&lt;/span&gt; (Doppler's velocity is limited to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(-c, c)$&lt;/span&gt;) and the fact, that the cosmological redshift is caused by the expansion, not the movement through space. Below I'm explaining, why I use the Doppler precisely because of the expansion and not the movement through space. On the other hand he writes, that if I &lt;em&gt;do choose to interpret the velocity from the Doppler shift formula, then that is the relative velocity between the gas that emitted the radiation then to us now.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Then&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Now&lt;/em&gt; are two different, cosmic epochs, separated in time roughly by the age of the universe. That doesn't change the fact, that Doppler gives us current velocity. So &amp;quot;general relativity&amp;quot; and Doppler can't be both right in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument about &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; actually applies to the case with the accelerated movement of the emission source through the non-expanding space. At the moment of emission, there was a redshift &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$z_e$&lt;/span&gt; due to the relative velocity &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{relE}$&lt;/span&gt; of the source and the receiver at the moment. I'm introducing a shifted wavelength at the moment of emission: &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\lambda_{e}=(1+z_e)\lambda_0$&lt;/span&gt;. Receiver gets &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\lambda_r=(1+z_r)\lambda_e$&lt;/span&gt; for the Doppler eq. with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{relR}$&lt;/span&gt;, that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be the relative velocity, if the emitter was moving with the constant speed from the moment of emission. If that was the case with expanding space, ProfRob would be right, but it's not. In the expanding space, photon's wavelength changes like the photon itself was a piece of a rubber band, stretched between the emitter and the receiver. That's why its redshift gives us the current, relative velocity from the Doppler eq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the source of inconsistency between general relativity (which is supposedly a basis of calculations giving &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$46.5\ GLy$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.2\ c$&lt;/span&gt; values) and the Doppler is in calling the integration-based calculated recession velocity (as well as the proper size of the universe) a part of GR. Friedmann equations, as a solution of Einstein's equations, are a part of GR. Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker metric is a part of GR. Explicit form of the scale factor, derived from the Friedmann equations, is a part of GR. In my opinion, what is not a part of GR, is the integration of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre%E2%80%93Robertson%E2%80%93Walker_metric#General_metric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generic metric&lt;/a&gt; that gives the current, proper distance. This metric equation uses the explicit form of the scale factor derived from GR and may be valid for every single spacetime frame, but if you integrate it, you get this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/769308/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/769308/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Davis &amp;amp; Lineweaver (2003)&lt;/a&gt; given by ProfRob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The relationship between proper time at the emitter and proper time at the observer is thus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Delta t=\Delta t_0 \gamma (1+v/c)$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\quad =\Delta t_0 \sqrt{\frac{1+v/c}{1-v/c}}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\quad=\Delta t_0 (1+z)$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is identical to the GR time dilation equation. Therefore using time dilation to distinguish between GR and SR expansion is impossible.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The determinant of our time dilation relative to the emission source frame at the moment of emission is redshift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta t_0}=(1+z)$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(1+z)$&lt;/span&gt; is equal to the Doppler value &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sqrt{\frac{1+v/c}{1-v/c}}$&lt;/span&gt;, so we can get the velocity from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one more piece of a puzzle. It seems that even ProfRob didn't read, what he recommended: &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1081&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bunn &amp;amp; Hogg 2009&lt;/a&gt;. Please, find equations &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(5)$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(6)$&lt;/span&gt;, read the description and compare it with the above calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the conclusions at the end of chapter III:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We do not expect to have convinced purists who refuse even to talk about &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{rel}$&lt;/span&gt; to change their minds. They would dismiss &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{rel}$&lt;/span&gt; as a mere &amp;quot;coordinate velocity,&amp;quot; not an &amp;quot;actual velocity,&amp;quot; and take no interest in it. If purists have the courage of their convictions, they would say that it makes no sense to try to attach labels such as &amp;quot;Doppler&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;gravitational&amp;quot; to the observed redshift. This position is unassailable, and we have no wish to argue against it. We do claim, however, that if you wish to try to talk about &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{rel}$&lt;/span&gt;, then the definition proposed in this section is the most natural way to do so. Because this definition of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$v_{rel}$&lt;/span&gt; results in the Doppler formula entirely explaining the redshift, we claim that you should either be a purist and refuse to try to label the cosmological redshift, or you should label it a Doppler shift.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last argument against ProfRob's answer is the other &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/737486/&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/207910/andrew-steane&quot;&gt;Andrew Steane&lt;/a&gt;. I leave it up to you to judge how much it agrees with my arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257508" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2023-09-13T22:24:27.957" LastActivityDate="2023-09-13T22:24:27.957" Title="One of moderators keeps deleting one last single comment with the crucial piece of information, that clearly explains, why the given answer is wrong" Tags="|discussion|moderators|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14477" CreationDate="2023-08-03T11:04:22.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/195/inquisitive&quot;&gt;Inquisitive badge&lt;/a&gt; is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask a well-received question on 30 separate days, and maintain a positive question record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you have asked questions on 30 separate days (hence the 30/30), you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A263465+is%3Aq+score%3A-100..-1&quot;&gt;several questions with downvotes&lt;/a&gt; and some that are closed (not sure if this means anything with regards to the inquisitive badge, however).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you haven't gotten the badge because you haven't yet met the qualifications for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T11:04:22.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14477" CreationDate="2023-08-03T15:28:55.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to maintain a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/290546/380389&quot;&gt;positive question record&lt;/a&gt;. This means that you need&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ \frac{\text{closed}+\text{negative score}+\text{deleted}}{\text{total questions}} &amp;lt; 0.5 $$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that closed, negative score and deleted questions count triple against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my count is correct, you have 21 questions with a negative score, 26 deleted questions, and 36 closed questions. Since you have 138 total questions, you will need 28 more questions if all of your questions are well-received to get to a positive question record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T15:28:55.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14476" CreationDate="2023-08-05T14:44:20.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;em&gt;totally&lt;/em&gt; unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First there is no such thing as an &amp;quot;illusionary current&amp;quot;. You have not defined it in any ways and physics is not about illusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, &amp;quot;I will now charge the rod via induction and then ground one of its ends&amp;quot;: this would discharge the rod thus &amp;quot;So I assume the rod has charge &amp;quot; is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding this, and assuming the question makes sense in the way I make sense of it:, &amp;quot;The rod will fall freely. Now looking at the situation can we say current is flowing?&amp;quot;.  Yes current is flowing but not along the rod.  In what way is this an illusion? If you take a charged particle and drop it over some height, there is a current: it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineering/Electro-Optics/Book%3A_Electromagnetics_I_(Ellingson)/06%3A_Steady_Current_and_Conductivity/6.01%3A_Convection_and_Conduction_Currents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;convection current&lt;/a&gt; and not a conduction current.  Your question (if my interpretation is correct) would then be related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/444189/36194&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T14:44:20.853" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14478" CreationDate="2023-08-08T12:18:58.583" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several moderators deleted your comments on ProfRob's answer because you left &lt;strong&gt;17&lt;/strong&gt; of them without anyone else commenting in between. Comments are not for extended conversations, even if only with yourself. Physics.SE comments are not a discussion forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot provide your criticism of an answer &lt;em&gt;concisely&lt;/em&gt; in a comment or two, write a dissenting answer and leave a comment pointing to it. Meta-commentary (such as claims that no one is responding because they cannot refute your marvelous arguments) should not appear either in the answer or the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have no special powers to add or remove downvotes on posts; each user has one vote on a post, and they are free to cast it as a downvote whenever they like. The community is expressing its disagreement with and dislike of your content through these votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T12:18:58.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-09T03:46:55.890" Score="-2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In posts on a PSE Q&amp;amp;A, I found two diagrams &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/136881/1325&quot;&gt;in this answer&lt;/a&gt;, each connected to verbiage by arrows in a sequence that conflicts with information in a more recent NASA video.  As my experience posting graphics on a computer is nonexistent, am I limited to pointing out that conflict in a comment, without obtaining any credit for the two edits needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87335" LastEditorUserId="1325" LastEditDate="2023-08-09T06:57:25.317" LastActivityDate="2023-08-09T07:01:16.747" Title="How can arrows connecting verbiage in an incorrect sequence to diagrams be edited?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14485" CreationDate="2023-08-09T07:01:16.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you need to edit a graphic in a post then what I suggest is you download the image to your PC, edit it as you see fit, then edit the post to include the new image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However please do not do this to the answer you have found. There are two different definitions of the term &lt;em&gt;Big Bang&lt;/em&gt;, both of which are in widespread use. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/132794/is-the-big-bang-defined-as-before-or-after-inflation&quot;&gt;Is the Big Bang defined as before or after Inflation?&lt;/a&gt; for more on this. Anna's answer is using one definition while the video you have linked is using the other definition. Neither is wrong, so please do not edit Anna's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1325" LastActivityDate="2023-08-09T07:01:16.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14490" CreationDate="2023-08-10T17:47:11.967" Score="-1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/529772/25301&quot;&gt;I posted a question&lt;/a&gt; about using transfinite arithmetic in relation to renormalization, and if memory serves me right, my question was closed for being &amp;quot;fringe.&amp;quot; So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago, upon reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960077996000550&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruno Augenstein's &amp;quot;Links between physics and set theory&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and seeing him ask &lt;em&gt;exactly the question I had asked&lt;/em&gt;, except with way more details and fully indicating that the question was admissible in the mainstream-physics context (e.g. by citing Ulam's own musings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, Augenstein was not a fringe scientist, much less was Ulam an outlier. So why was my question closed? Was there a different SE that the question was a better fit for (I've seen that there used(?) to be a Theoretical Physics SE or something, for example)? Would it have been possible to migrate my question from here to a better-fitting locale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have no interest whatsoever in my question being reopened, here, since having read Augenstein's essay, I got pretty much all the answers I could reasonably expect to have gotten in this connection. I just think it was weird that the question got the response that it did on this site. I've only just started learning calculus in detail (via Keisler's book) and I don't think that I would, on average, be a good contributor to the PhysicsSE, since I wouldn't be able to answer other people's questions helpfully at this time. So I'd rather not dilute the PhysicsSE with weak attempts at contributions. But all that being said, I don't see that this one contribution years ago (of two or three total, I don't remember for sure), was all that bad, since it would have been easy enough to answer (someone could have just cited Augenstein's essay).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253537" LastEditorUserId="25301" LastEditDate="2023-08-10T18:17:13.430" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T16:49:45.030" Title="What is the definition of fringe science/was someone like Bruno Augenstein a fringe scientist?" Tags="|discussion|scope|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14489" CreationDate="2023-08-11T02:39:21.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; article on a topic does not make the topic mainstream.  Moreover, one can do perfectly good mainstream science yet still dabble in fringe stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many (if not all) truly novel ideas will initially not be part of mainstream physics: if they were mainstream, they wouldn’t be that novel.  However, if the ideas are good, they are eventually assimilated in the mainstream: how an original idea survives digestion through the passage of time determines if the idea is or is not mainstream.  In this perspective, “non mainstream” is not a synonym for “crackpot-ish”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I would not call the specific case that you have highlighted as mainstream.  I’m not sure where is the threshold for “mainstream”, but I know that a single paper “a few weeks ago” does not meet it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t have an issue with this policy.  It would be very difficult to provide a definite and useful answer to a truly novel idea shortly after this idea has been published.  The best anyone can state is an opinion that it would look like a good idea (or a bad one), and I’m sure smart people would immediately see refinements to do away with the more immediate issues that come with novel idea: imaging having to answer a question on the Bohr model immediately after Bohr’s publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: I’m not sure what your point is beyond bragging rights that someone else has an idea similar to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-08-11T02:39:21.583" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14494" CreationDate="2023-08-11T22:28:28.007" Score="3" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking in to account the majority of posts and comments concerning very basic (not homework) questions here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4337/287083&quot;&gt;What can be done about the (current) ongoing flood of homework and very basic questions overwhelming our site?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone suggest where I might get some clarity for a basic Ohm's law question, please?  (Unless, that is, the community's opinion has changed in the last ten years and they're now accepted as on topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've drafted my question, and can add it here if needed but basically (pun intended) I don't understand why an increase in amps caused by decrease in resistance doesn't have &amp;quot;shocking&amp;quot; result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="287083" LastActivityDate="2023-08-14T16:08:02.887" Title="Site recommendation - basic question concerning Ohm's law" Tags="|discussion|scope|resource-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14489" CreationDate="2023-08-12T16:49:45.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scientists are not equally competent in all fields, nor does their competence necessarily remain the same over their entire careers.  Somebody who is extremely knowledgeable in one area may nonetheless harbor deep misunderstandings of even relatively closely related fields.  Moreover, skilled scientists can still develop totally crackpot ideas—like Linus Pauling's beliefs about the curative effects of large vitamin C doses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bruno Augenstein was a respected scientist in ballistics and space science.  However, his ideas about quantum mechanics (to say nothing of quantum field theory, which he does not seem to have understood) are typically considered crank-ish at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T16:49:45.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14492" CreationDate="2023-08-13T03:40:57.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested by ACuriousMind in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14492/site-recommendation-basic-question-concerning-ohms-law#comment55106_14492&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; and by Kyle Kanos in &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14492/site-recommendation-basic-question-concerning-ohms-law#comment55108_14492&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; the recommended site for asking your question may very well be Physics.SE. If you use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ohms-law&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ohms-law&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ohms-law&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-ohms-law-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;ohms-law&lt;/a&gt;, the tag will automatically be converted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/electrical-resistance?tab=Newest&quot;&gt;tag:electrical-resistance&lt;/a&gt; which has 2646 questions so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ohms-law&quot;&gt;514 questions with the &amp;quot;ohms-law&amp;quot; tag at Electrical Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;. They actually have a tag for ohms-law that won't get converted into a more general tag like electrical-resistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Engineering.SE also has &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VzTGP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few tags related to electronics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask the question on one of the sites (e.g. Physics.SE) and it turns out to be more appropriate for a different site (e.g. if it's very engineering-related and much more likely to get an answer at ElectricalEngineering.SE), questions can be migrated between the sites as long as the migrations happens within 60 days of the question first being posted. There is actually a close reason on Physics.SE that is described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This question appears to be about engineering, which is the application of scientific knowledge to construct a solution to solve a specific problem. As such, it is off topic for this site, which deals with the science, whether theoretical or experimental, of how the natural world works.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You probably have enough site suggestions now&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but I'll briefly mention another site that might be of interest, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Matter Modeling SE&lt;/a&gt; since the policy there is essentially that if someone wants to answer the question, then it's on-topic. A question will almost always only be considered for closure if it can't be answered by anyone for a while (e.g. &amp;quot;needs details for clarity&amp;quot;) or if it's a VLQ (&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;ery &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;ow &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;q&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;uality in the typing/formatting) or if it's a duplicate of an existing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134583" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T03:40:57.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14492" CreationDate="2023-08-14T15:32:01.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... you have no current posts so I presume you have deleted a bunch of closed questions so it's difficult to understand what kind of questions you are asking or why they were closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that your are just asking basic homework questions, and those will always be closed.  Before you post again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you made a search of the site to look at questions similar to yours?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does your question differ from previous ones?  Can you highlight the differences so your question is not closed as a duplicate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you asking for just a calculation or is there something about the physics of Ohm's law you do not understand?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember this is not a site for homework help: the goal is not to help you solve a problem, but to help you &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; a problem.  It's ok to ask basic Ohm's law questions, but it's difficult at this point not to duplicate another question on Ohm's law unless you can highlight the way in which your new question is different from any one of the old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-08-14T16:08:02.887" LastActivityDate="2023-08-14T16:08:02.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14497" CreationDate="2023-08-17T15:31:50.300" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I know which is the oldest tag of Physics Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="374956" LastEditorUserId="149907" LastEditDate="2023-08-17T23:32:25.637" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T23:32:25.637" Title="How can I know which is the oldest tag of Physics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14496" CreationDate="2023-08-17T15:49:04.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the database IDs were assigned sequentially, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/edit/1776354&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SEDE query&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T15:49:04.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-23T05:47:03.267" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/777210/&quot;&gt;If an observer at the middle of a spaceship shines laser in both directions and the ship changes on contact with laser, what will earth observer see?&lt;/a&gt; was closed as homework-like. It's a genuine confusion that came to me while watching Scienceclic's video on special relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what universe is that &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot;? Are genuine conceptual doubts also discouraged at Physics SE now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141925" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-08-27T09:31:01.983" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T09:31:01.983" Title="Question closed as homework-like even though it clearly isn't" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14498" CreationDate="2023-08-23T15:10:54.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;But this is actually a great homework question (I might steal it!).   The answer reveals itself as soon as you draw and correctly interpret the spacetime diagram; that's almost the definition of a good homework problem at this level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2023-08-23T15:10:54.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14498" CreationDate="2023-08-25T03:25:59.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry but how can one understand “How can this apparent contradiction be resolved?” as conceptual but not as a “please-solve-this-for-me” aka assignment-like question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where have you highlighted the conceptual difficulty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-08-25T03:25:59.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14503" CreationDate="2023-08-26T22:08:24.977" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking regarding potential questions I might pose soon. While asking a well formulated question about tachyons in special relativity is allowed (as I did last week), I’m wondering how far that goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll be specific: I want to ask about more obscure hypotheticals. Specifically graviphotons and graviscalar particles in higher dimensional hypotheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid wild speculation, should I cite specific &lt;em&gt;academic papers&lt;/em&gt; or is naming the model in question ok. Or, since such higher-dimensional models are not part of currently accepted physics (thus, unlike Special Relativity), so such questions don’t belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance! Want to make sure I don’t break the rules nor turn this place into a science fiction forum! I’m perfectly fine asking such questions elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373601" LastActivityDate="2023-08-26T23:18:16.210" Title="Mainstream Physics: Unconfirmed Particles" Tags="|support|scope|questions|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14502" CreationDate="2023-08-26T23:18:16.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking about the detection status of specific quanta that are predicted in theories of beyond-the-standard-model physics should be fine.  Looking for new particles is, of course, a major activity in experimental particle physics.  Moreover, there are also secondary observables that are also indicative of the presence of new physics.  (For example, the mass of the top quark had already been &amp;quot;measured&amp;quot; to within about 15%, even before it was detected directly in 1995, because of the top's outside influence as a virtual contributor to certain lower-energy particle processes.)  When one has a particular quantum field theory model in hand, it is often straightforward to determine what new effects we would expect to see in that model, as a function of its parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such predictions can also be turned around and combined with experimental data to place constraints on the models (assuming that the new particles they predict have not actually been seen).  For example, while supersymmetric extensions of the standard model have a number of very attractive theoretical features, we have never seen the superpartner of a standard model particle.  Over the last several decades, increasingly energetic and precise experiments have led to region of the SUSY parameter space that is phenomenalistically viable continuing to shrink—to the point where many feel that relatively-low-scale SUSY is no longer even a theoretically attractive option.  There is an extensive literature on these kinds of constraints for SUSY theories and other kinds of extensions of the standard model, and they surely fall within the heading of &amp;quot;mainstream physics.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70245" LastActivityDate="2023-08-26T23:18:16.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-27T18:30:10.320" Score="7" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed something about the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; tab mechanism that I wanted to bring to attention. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/777119/what-is-the-electric-field-around-an-inductor&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; of mine, I linked to two physics stackexchange posts (please do not edit the links there). I specifically made one hyperlink to be of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/442183/kirchhoffs-voltage-law-in-a-general-electromagnetic-field/446505#446505&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and another of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/473662&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one is a shortened link that comes from the &amp;quot;cite&amp;quot; feature available on the physics and math stackexchange sites. I noticed that when you use the unshortened links, the referenced post is added to the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; tab. However, when you use the shortened link, it fails to be added to the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; tab. I find this an interesting observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case this gets messed up for whatever reason, I'll add a screenshot providing some evidence. You'll have to trust me that the two hyperlinks lead to different pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZFmts.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZFmts.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question/Proposal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume this was not a conscious choice but simply an oversight (not sure if &amp;quot;bug&amp;quot; is the right term). What do people think of this? Should shortened links by the cite feature be added to the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; tab? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we agree they should be added to the tab like all other PSE links, is there a way to get the attention of someone higher up to change this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious to hear what people's thoughts are on this. To be clear, I've noticed this many times before as well. I just decided to bring it up now with a concrete example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123113" LastEditorUserId="148225" LastEditDate="2023-08-30T16:34:13.987" LastActivityDate="2023-08-30T16:34:13.987" Title="Shortened links to PSE posts generated by the &quot;cite&quot; feature don't seem to be added to the Linked tab (as of August 27, 2023)" Tags="|bug|status-review|links|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14506" CreationDate="2023-08-30T03:52:48.237" Score="3" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third question I posted to this site was, in retrospect, awful. I deleted it after an hour of it being posted and learned to pose better questions since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I’ve become aware that a deleted question haunts a person’s question score permanently. I’m concerned that there’s no way to fix it without it being a weird variant of much older answered questions regarding the tachyon antitelephone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should I just not bother and move on, or is there a good strategy to salvage an early mistake like this? Link to question posed below (but only mods can see it, since it’s still deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/777498/&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/777498/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373601" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-09-19T11:53:58.067" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T11:53:58.067" Title="What to do with a horrible question haunting my question record?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|best-practices|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14505" CreationDate="2023-08-30T05:18:53.803" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just continue to participate in the site in a constructive way, and don't worry about one deleted question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your early participation includes &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of downvoted/closed/deleted questions, you may encounter some limits on how frequently you post. Those limits are not punitive: their purpose is to encourage users to &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about how our community works and how their participation can mesh nicely with it. If you are already thinking about those things (which your thoughtful post here demonstrates), you are unlikely to need that automated feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-08-30T05:18:53.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-30T15:53:35.500" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/778089/&quot;&gt;The question&lt;/a&gt; doesn't involve the application of any physical principles to the design or manufacture of any real-world product, nor does it involve any consideration for practical utility*, costs, material availability, or existing technologies. Additionally, the creation of nano-scale hook and loop fasteners is a profoundly stupid idea, as adhesion via intermolecular, electrostatic, and/or magnetic interaction is infinitely easier (and presumably less costly) to achieve at this scale than mechanical adhesion**, so &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; this &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; intended as an engineering question it wouldn't be a very good one. It would make very little sense for me to ask the question &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; out of pure, academic curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4535/are-engineering-questions-appropriate-for-this-site/4536#4536&quot;&gt;linked meta post&lt;/a&gt; regarding the distinction between physics and engineering questions explicitly states that questions inspired by engineering considerations may be considered on-topic. In particular, questions regarding physical limits of man-made systems (e.g. telescopes, computers, wires) are considered relevant. My question concerns the [estimation of the] theoretical lower limit of the diameter of the fibers/wires used in the construction of hook and loop fasteners. I believe that this should be considered an engineering-inspired question, rather than an engineering question, in the same manner as the listed examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considered at the level of a single hook and loop, the question is quite nearly &amp;quot;what is the smallest possible diameter for a spring?&amp;quot; The reason I didn't ask &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question is that 1) I already know the answer (either &amp;quot;smaller than we can resolve&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;define spring&amp;quot;) and 2) that isn't what I'm concerned with. The entire reason for asking the question is that I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have a neat form-fitting model for the seemingly simple system under consideration, and I want to make an educated guess. It's a physical Fermi problem which I find particularly interesting for its occupation of the unknown (to me) space between &amp;quot;quantum&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;classical.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I can understand if the writing is misleading, so I will try to clarify the things that look the most engineery or otherwise non-physicsy to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I included some details regarding the hypothetical (and potentially impossible) construction of atomic-scale fasteners using graphene, and maybe this made it seem that I was genuinely proposing the creation of such a &amp;quot;product.&amp;quot; This was not my intention, the point was to illustrate a scale at which I am confident that hook and loop fasteners &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; work, and to give some justification for my thinking. I named graphene as a material because carbon compounds are exceptionally well-studied, and it would be the easy to find any information I might need for an estimate of, say, the rate of formation of chemical bonds between the strips. I &lt;em&gt;could have&lt;/em&gt; assumed sheets of an arbitrary two-dimensional material instead, but that would make the problem harder than it already is. The whole point of the introduction was to establish that there is probably some limit to the size of hook and loop fasteners, so attempting to account for every possible version of the atomic setup would only make sense if I thought it would produce a positive result.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I could be entirely wrong. Maybe interactions between atom-thick hooks and loops &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; predominantly mechanical; but that's why I'm asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, I bring up that certain biological structures can become tangled. The point of this was to indicate that classical effects (e.g. stiffness, friction, other stress/strain type stuff) persist at the μm scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I later mentioned biological activity as a source of deterioration. This second reference to biology is unrelated to the first, and was not meant to indicate something to be accounted for in the problem, rather to illustrate that macroscopic hook and loop fasteners are not immune to chemical, thermodynamic, etc. effects and to provide an example of such an effect - as well as to illustrate why such effects can generally be neglected in the macroscopic case. I wanted to distinguish mechanical failure from failure due to chemical decomposition, because the latter becomes increasingly significant at smaller scales. The point I was trying to make is that while deteriation through means other than mechanical failure does occur even in the macroscopic case, it is less significant. To still count as &amp;quot;hook and loop fasteners&amp;quot; the same relation should hold at the microscopic scale - we need the hooks and loops to remain intact for at least as long at takes to undergo structural failure. If molecular interactions overtake mechanical ones &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; structural failure, then the system shouldn't be considered an example of hook and loop fasteners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the least clear of my points, and I can see how it might be counterintuitive. At the macroscopic scale, we don't usually think about chemical interaction at all, we just assume that everything is made out of pure geometry, and immune to thermodynamics. But at the microscopic scale, chemical interactions are often more significant than mechanical ones. In order to count as a hook and loop fastener, interaction between the hook and loop needs to be primarily mechanical and the structures need to remain stable long enough for this interaction to occur multiple times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I suppose that the use of the academic &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; and the specific naming of Velcro (a registered trademark of the of Velcro IP Holdings LLC) &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; make it seem that I am representing Velcro or some other company. This is certainly not the case, I used the term &amp;quot;velcro&amp;quot; (note the lack of capitalization) colloquially in place of &amp;quot;hook and loop fastener&amp;quot; because 1) it is a commonly understood name for the mechanical system in question and is more likely to be recognized by the casual reader than the technically correct &amp;quot;hook and loop fastener&amp;quot; 2) it is shorter and less tedious than &amp;quot;hook and loop fastener&amp;quot; 3) it carries the denotation of a &lt;em&gt;surface&lt;/em&gt; with many individual hooks and loops, whereas &amp;quot;hook and loop fastener&amp;quot; is ambiguous and could refer to a single hook-loop pair. Similarly, my use of &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; was meant in the usual sense to refer to the speaker/writer (myself) and the listener/reader following the convention of scientific and mathematical literature when posing hypotheticals, definitions, or conventions, as in &amp;quot;we adopt the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(+,-,-,-)$&lt;/span&gt; sign convention.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The additional use of &amp;quot;Atomic Velcro (TM)&amp;quot; was intended to be humorous and does not, to my knowledge, refer to any existing, planned, or proposed product or trademark of Velcro or any other company. As stated previously, the creation of literal atomic scale hook and loop fasteners is wildly impractical, if not wholly impossible, and, more significantly, entirely pointless given the existence of much better alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the use of the term &amp;quot;velcro&amp;quot; is in violation of any site rule and/or negatively impacts the clarity of the question, I am happy to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from these issues, I'm not sure how the question could be misinterpreted. Is there some other reason that the question is off-topic? Is there anything I can do to improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Beyond &amp;quot;the structure in question must remain physically stable for long enough that its classification as 'hook and loop fastener' makes sense&amp;quot;. If we regard this as an engineering concern, rather than a definition, then the retention of elasticity in a spring is likewise an engineering concern and should neither motivate nor be included in the discussion of mass-spring systems. That is to say, we should regard the long-term retention of elasticity - operationalized analogously to my question as &amp;quot;not undergoing degradation through non-mechanical means in less time than is required for structural failure (permanent deformation and/or loss of elasticity through mechanical means)&amp;quot; or equivalently as &amp;quot;doesn't turn to dust after a single cycle&amp;quot; - as an engineering concern. (Taken to its logical conclusion, the continued consideration of &amp;quot;springiness&amp;quot; as a physical property, rather than engineering concern, then either makes &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; capable of deformation (for example, a steel chair) a &amp;quot;spring,&amp;quot; or leaves the term &amp;quot;spring&amp;quot; undefined. Or it renders our categorization of things as &amp;quot;of concern primarily to physics&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;of concern primarily to engineering&amp;quot; arbitrary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**In fact some of the world's most brilliant engineers have recently proposed an innovative design for a new kind of adhesive surface which operates on precisely these principles. They're calling it &amp;quot;adhesive tape.&amp;quot; While it's still experimental, it could become commercially by the early 1920s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="214987" LastActivityDate="2023-09-01T21:56:24.070" Title="Why is my question off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-30T16:46:27.857" Score="6" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\require{mhchem}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inspired by a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/175914/&quot;&gt;chemistry.se&lt;/a&gt; (now closed, because it was a cross post from &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/778114/&quot;&gt;Phys.SE&lt;/a&gt;), I observe the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mhchem.github.io/MathJax-mhchem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mhchem&lt;/a&gt; extension can be used here provided the question/answer contains once &lt;code&gt;$\require{mhchem}$&lt;/code&gt;*  to render e.g., &lt;code&gt;\ce{C6H12O6}&lt;/code&gt; (sum formula of e.g. glucose) as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ce{C6H12O6}$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the current second version, the post includes, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\epsilon_n = 1.775\times10^{-20}\,\text{J}$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the OP currently defines by &lt;code&gt;$$\epsilon_n = 1.775\times10^{-20}\,\text{J}$$&lt;/code&gt;.  With mhchem's &lt;code&gt;\pu{}&lt;/code&gt; command (physical units) on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; requires &lt;code&gt;$$\epsilon \pu{1.775E-20 J}$$&lt;/code&gt; only.  Here on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the resulting &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\epsilon \pu{1.775E-20 J}$$&lt;/span&gt; suggests some support is missing.  At present, the nested application &lt;code&gt;$\ce{\pu{3 kg}}$&lt;/code&gt; does not work fully either (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ce{\pu{3 kg}}$&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is this an issue the moderators of &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; may address to the maintainers of Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;alternatively, is the use of a different (perhaps more siunitx like) approach more suitable here on &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* As recommended both by &lt;a href=&quot;https://mhchem.github.io/MathJax-mhchem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the author&lt;/a&gt; and comments on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Physics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10069/enabling-mhchem-to-write-chemical-formulas&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  It is engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26061" LastEditorUserId="311812" LastEditDate="2023-10-30T19:21:28.387" LastActivityDate="2023-10-30T19:21:28.387" Title="Apparently incomplete support of mhchem on Physics" Tags="|support|bug|status-declined|mathjax|software-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-30T17:49:54.970" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Either myself or someone else had asked a question here about how the volume of a metal block changes as it becomes positively charged (extracting electrons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going through my question history I couldn’t find it so I assume someone else asked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the search bar for “charged block volume”, I came up empty handed. Does anyone know where that question went?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastActivityDate="2023-08-30T17:49:54.970" Title="Help finding a question about charged metal block expanding in volume" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-30T18:02:22.210" Score="14" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 4 variations of essentially the same question about the effect of pressure on dew point. From oldest to newest they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/777960/145491&quot;&gt;How does athmospheric pressure influence dewpoint?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/542687/145491&quot;&gt;To calculate the dewpoint ºC increase in a compressed air line&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/466141/145491&quot;&gt;How does atmospheric pressure affect dew point?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/371175/145491&quot;&gt;What law or formula discusses the relationship between pressure and dew point?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I nominated the the newest one for closure, and was thinking of nominating two more, but am confused about which one to keep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 2 has the most understandable &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/542868/145491&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; in my opinion, but needs links and a bit more physics details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 3 has clearest title and the most views.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question 4 is the oldest question with the most answers, but they are not all that clear in my opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no one else does it, I might eventually be tempted to write (what I hope is) a clear canonical answer with cross-references to the helpful answers in the various questions, but wouldn't know which question to attach it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should 3 of the 4 be closed as duplicates, and if so, which 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastActivityDate="2023-08-30T18:02:22.210" Title="How to resolve multiple open duplicates of essentially the same question" Tags="|discussion|duplicates|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-01T09:31:19.077" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/778186/330899&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question which got closed because its answer was based on opinions. But that was exactly the point of my question, and hence the usage of tag of &amp;quot;convention&amp;quot;. So I am not sure why it got closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="330899" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-09-01T10:02:07.310" LastActivityDate="2023-09-01T10:02:07.310" Title="Isn't convention tag meant to allow discussion on opinions?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|tags|close-reasons|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14511" CreationDate="2023-09-01T09:56:20.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking in general, the existence/non-existence of a tag does not imply that a certain question is on-topic/off-topic, respectively. This is instead decided by the Phys.SE community, e.g. via vote-to-close/vote-to-reopen, or e.g. via Phys.Meta policy posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2023-09-01T09:56:20.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14507" CreationDate="2023-09-01T21:56:24.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see your question as difficult to answer using physics principles, but easier to answer using engineering principles.  I’m not an engineer and I could be wrong of course.  So it seems it’s better suited for an engineering SE subsite (or possibly even chemistry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good that you read in details the closure reason, but maybe your reading is somewhat overly narrow and excludes my (possibly erroneous) understanding of engineering principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, it is a good question, just possibly not such a good fit for Physics SE, and you might find better answers on an engineering subsite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-09-01T21:56:24.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14378" CreationDate="2023-09-05T15:52:21.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should not do what ACuriousMind suggested – directly linking to downscaled image URLs on Imgur – because the Stack Exchange software isn't aware of it, and as a result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The downscaled image is used even on high-DPI screens, where it looks fuzzy. On my phone, the &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; sized images in ACuriousMind's answer appear the same size; the only difference is that the &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; image is blurrier. Even on my 100dpi laptop screen, the &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; image and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full-sized image&lt;/a&gt; are the same width, but the &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; image is blurrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clicking/tapping the image to follow the link to the Imgur page still shows you the downscaled image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a downscaled image, then the full-sized image might as well not exist, except to the 0% of users (like me) who will manually edit the URL to delete the extra character. I assume the downscaled images are meant for thumbnail pages. I don't think it makes sense to use one of them as the only version of the image that will ever appear to anyone who sees your question. If the image really is overlarge, you should downscale it before uploading it to Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a way to adjust the size of the presented image without reducing the pixel size, by writing an &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag with a &lt;code&gt;width&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;height&lt;/code&gt; attribute instead of the &lt;code&gt;![]&lt;/code&gt; Markdown syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[&amp;lt;img src=&amp;quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&amp;quot; width=&amp;quot;400&amp;quot; title=&amp;quot;enter image description here&amp;quot;&amp;gt;][1]&#xA;[&amp;lt;img src=&amp;quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&amp;quot; width=&amp;quot;250&amp;quot; title=&amp;quot;enter image description here&amp;quot;&amp;gt;][1]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&quot; width=&quot;400&quot; title=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4x2NJ.png&quot; width=&quot;250&quot; title=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's annoyingly verbose, but it does the right thing on high-DPI screens, and it gives you more flexibility in choosing a size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: HTML in posts is censored by an annoyingly restrictive regex. The attributes must be in the order &lt;code&gt;src&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;width&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;height&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;title&lt;/code&gt; (with the last three optional), and must all be quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56188" LastActivityDate="2023-09-05T15:52:21.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-15T22:24:05.117" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read it that &lt;em&gt;this badge can be awarded multiple times&lt;/em&gt; I thought it means every year it will be awarded once to the active member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I see that my own badge is awarded twice and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; 3 days apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8gWDP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8gWDP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Yearling&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247001" LastActivityDate="2023-09-15T22:47:43.270" Title="Why was Yearling badge awarded twice 3 days apart?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14517" CreationDate="2023-09-15T22:38:34.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are idle for two years and then return, each 200 reputation points appear to give you a Yearling badge until all of your unclaimed years are used up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't know this for a fact, but it's consistent with unexpected Yearling badges I have earned on sites which I visit only occasionally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2023-09-15T22:47:43.270" LastActivityDate="2023-09-15T22:47:43.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14525" CreationDate="2023-09-19T13:30:43.437" Score="10" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question asked a few days ago on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/780683/145491&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Reaching 50% the speed of light using a centrifuge&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; that is effectively answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/686011/145491&quot;&gt;a very nice answer&lt;/a&gt; to a different question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/685982/145491&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Does a spinning disk weigh more than when it is stationary?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  The person who provided the nice answer, @PM-2Ring, notes this in a comment on the first question. Since comments are officially transitory and often not read by subsequent readers of a question,  I think would be nice to have a permanent visible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question has now been closed as a duplicate, with the duplicate target being a third question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/602216/145491&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How is length contraction on rigid bodies possible in special relativity since definition of rigid body states they are not deformable?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; whose answers don't seem relevant to me, and all three questions seem distinct to me. For example, the answer to the first question might depend on how strictly one defines &amp;quot;centrifuge&amp;quot;, e.g. does a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencealert.com/einstein-s-cross-is-helping-measure-the-spin-of-distant-supermassive-black-holes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Hole accretion disk&lt;/a&gt; or a cyclotron count?  The second question could have been answered without answering the first. The third question and its answers seem to be about linear, not rotational, motion and require some expertise to apply to the first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed other cases where questions are closed as duplicates because another distinct question has the answer buried in its answers. When I look at that question and its answers it can take me some time to find the relevant component. Sometimes I can only recognize that it is relevant because I am an expert, which is unlikely to be the case for the person who asked the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should the protocol be when a second question is not a duplicate but has the answer to the first question somewhere in its answers. Should we ask the user who gave the relevant answer to mostly copy their answer over to the first question? (This would seem to be okay according to the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10777/145491&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Is it OK to copy and paste part of own answer over and over, to answer new questions?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.) Or should the first question be closed as a duplicate but give specific directions to the relevant answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T09:59:31.893" Title="What to do when a non-duplicate question has the answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-21T06:27:31.760" Score="-8" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/781254/&quot;&gt;Question about entanglement&lt;/a&gt;. I would expect that people commenting on the question would be familiar with this phenomenon and its philosophical issues. But someone made a comment that shows a complete lack of knowledge of what entanglement is. When I tried to clarify my question, they made a nasty sarcastic remark, and then claimed that I was the one being off-topic. Just after that, I got a note saying my question was closed, without explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that they closed my question. How can they have that authority if they doesn't know the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23467" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2023-09-21T08:00:52.440" LastActivityDate="2023-09-24T05:45:42.690" Title="Who closed my question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|vote-to-close|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14523" CreationDate="2023-09-21T08:00:10.463" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only moderators (recognizable by the diamond behind their names) can close questions unilaterally. Your question was closed by three regular users with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;close vote privilege&lt;/a&gt; agreeing that it should be closed. That you cannot easily see who specifically closed it is &lt;em&gt;intentional design&lt;/em&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/332502/263383&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think other users are unduly sarcastic or otherwise unkind to you, please raise a moderator flag in the future instead of attempting to publicly shame specific users on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T08:00:10.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14522" CreationDate="2023-09-21T09:59:31.893" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the questions are not duplicates, they should not be closed as duplicates. Of course there is interpretational leeway in how similar questions need to be to justify closing one as the duplicate of the other, but if we buy the premise of this meta question that the questions are not duplicates, then they shouldn't be closed as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But copying answers is also not the best solution: If the original answer is improved by an edit, the copy won't be. I think the preferred solution should be that an answer to the new question simply links directly to the relevant answers on the old question and explains how they apply to the new case at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T09:59:31.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14523" CreationDate="2023-09-21T16:35:34.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not vote to close, and I'm not sure why your question was closed as non-mainstream: in my book your question completely unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your title refers to entanglement but your question does not.  Two particles are arranged to be on different paths and arrive at different detectors at vastly different times.  Under what possible scenario would the detectors register the same times of arrival when they arrive at different times?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exactly what degree of freedom is entangled in your question?  Polarization? Spin? Momentum?  Something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a comment to an answer you write &amp;quot;And if an orientation was changed between the two arrivals, would the statistics indicate the earlier or the later setting?&amp;quot;.  What orientation are you talking about?  How can changing the orientation of a detector affect the detection time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sooo... May I humbly suggest you clarify your question and pay attention to comments before lobbing comments about the qualifications of contributors who have earned the right to vote on closing questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T16:35:34.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-21T21:42:46.747" Score="0" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;A well-received question that receives a large amount of upvotes means that the physics community at large likes the question and thinks that it is a meaningful question. Questions with very large numbers of upvotes in questions and answers that are closed seems extremely contradictory with evidence that the community deems it worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/780679/how-do-we-know-what-physics-or-science-textbook-said-is-correct&quot;&gt;this highly-viewed, highly upvoted question&lt;/a&gt;, with answers that received massive amounts of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that this question being an opinion is simply an opinion. An opinion that is clearly outweighed by the community at large. I do not think that this question is &amp;quot;opinion-based,&amp;quot; and also the criteria for what is and isn't closed is incredibly vague—so much so that virtually any off-beat question that has some degree of popularity gets closed (I assume by a minority of participants with strong opinions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the point of locking people out of participating in these kinds of questions? And how can such a system possibly be justified when questions are this well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60683" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-09-22T18:27:37.117" LastActivityDate="2023-09-22T18:27:37.117" Title="If the current system of closing questions functions well, why are there particularly well-received questions that are closed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14528" CreationDate="2023-09-21T22:27:48.273" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the current system of closing questions functions well, why are there particularly well-received questions that are closed? ... And how can such a system possibly be justified when questions are this well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is like asking why, if the current system of parents explaining nutrition to their children works well, candy is still popular and children would still make poor choices if left to their own devices. Or why, if Wikipedia's system of editing and reversion works well, the admins don't seem to care, when pornography is posted on arbitrary pages, how many people liked seeing it. (Here I am glossing over the fact that I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; in fact think Wikipedia's governance works very well overall - they have many problems, but this isn't one - and that Wikipedia is &amp;quot;not censored&amp;quot; and would allow sexual content that was on topic and appropriate to explaining the subject matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-recieved question that recieves a large amount of upvotes means that the physics community at large likes the question and thinks that it is a meaningful question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that users of physics.stackexchange.com like the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean they're in the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites have rules, guidelines, principles and mission statements for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?&amp;amp;q=reddit+let+the+votes+decide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Even Reddit has understood this for at least 12 years&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A sites, like physics.stackexchange.com, have a much clearer and more focused objective than social media like Reddit or discussion forums like Quora. The goal is to produce reference questions and answers that meet guidelines and are helpful to people who use a search engine to look up information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site standards are also allowed to change over time. This has happened to some extent globally across Stack Exchange. The &amp;quot;Opinion-based&amp;quot; close reason was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184154&quot;&gt;added globally more than 10 years ago&lt;/a&gt;, and there was a lot of careful thought and deliberation behind it. The user-facing rationale is also described &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;in the help center&lt;/a&gt;, which is more or less copied and pasted to every SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider this highly-viewed, highly upvoted question, with answers that received massive amounts of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting aside the previous points - that none of this actually matters - this is &lt;strong&gt;nothing&lt;/strong&gt;. The top questions and answers on Physics sit at around +800. The most viewed question is over 850,000 views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that this question is &amp;quot;opinion-based,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is your true objection, given how you have phrased the rest of the post here to complain about the policy generally. If it is, then you &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4113&quot;&gt;should have&lt;/a&gt; posted about the specific question, given concrete reasoning opposed to the closure, and &lt;em&gt;not ranted about established network-wide policy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also the criteria for what is and isn't closed is incredibly vague – so much so that virtually any off-beat question that has some degree of popularity gets closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &amp;quot;opinion-based&amp;quot; is easy to understand as a closure reason. The question clearly asks &amp;quot;should I trust it&amp;quot;, which is blatantly a matter of opinion. Whether you &amp;quot;should&amp;quot; trust &lt;strong&gt;any given thing at all&lt;/strong&gt; is a matter of personal values. Further, the answers clearly offer opinionated advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would have voted to close this question instead as &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt;. It is either about philosophy (&amp;quot;how do you know that true things are true?&amp;quot;) or politics (&amp;quot;why should we be able to trust published research without attempting to replicate it ourselves?&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also clearly &lt;strong&gt;not focused&lt;/strong&gt;; there's no way to answer &amp;quot;what is the process to get science knowledge by ourselves?&amp;quot; that isn't either a completely unhelpful &amp;quot;uh, do the experiments yourself anyway I guess?&amp;quot; or else a complete treatise on the scientific method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A properly focused, on-topic question in this sphere would look more like &amp;quot;How can I do an experiment at home to verify [insert here: &lt;strong&gt;one, specific, clearly understood&lt;/strong&gt; scientific principle]?&amp;quot; - and OP would have to be prepared to be told that it isn't feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the point of locking people out of participating in these kinds of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The point of locking people out of participating in these kinds of questions, is to lock them out of participation&lt;/em&gt;. This is intentional, and a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for doing so, is because it is beneficial to the goals of the site to do so. Considered in a consequentialist framework: &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; locking people out of participation encourages more such questions; and a site full of such questions &lt;strong&gt;is ipso facto not useful as a searchable reference on an objective topic&lt;/strong&gt;. Such questions dilute search results and attract other unwanted behaviours, such as treating the site like a discussion forum. Physics is about as &amp;quot;hard science&amp;quot; as it gets, so these principles are especially important here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378404" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T22:27:48.273" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14528" CreationDate="2023-09-22T01:23:19.800" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good point but I think you are confusing a general good question with a good question &lt;em&gt;for this site&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree the question is interesting and it comes as no surprise (to me at least) that it should be popular: philosophers of science have asked similar questions (especially since the end of WWII) as the distance between verifiable experimental results and everyday experience continues to  grow.  (Paraphrasing here) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Polanyi&lt;/a&gt; asked why does society believe in science but not in black magic.  The OP is asking a not-so-black-and-white version of this: when (or why) should we believe in established science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that such important questions are a poor fit for the site: they cannot be answered using physics arguments or laws of physics.  In fact the question is applicable to chemistry, biology, and a lot of other disciplines grounded in experiments.  IMO such questions about philosophy or sociology of science should go to PhilosophySE, which is “for those interested in the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge”, amongst other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-09-22T01:23:19.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14532" CreationDate="2023-09-23T06:53:00.817" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed something extremely strange: on my end, I appear to be the only person that has voted on any Physices.SE Meta Posts this entire month. I'll post a screenshot since this is unbelievable even to myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IpO7i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IpO7i.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is impossible, as I've clearly observed certain questions being upvoted and downvoted recently on this Meta site. The vote-count above matches my vote-count on the Meta end of things from me (21 verses 90 on the regular Physics.SE site), so the issue seems unrelated to any mix-up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this normal and intentional to only see yourself on this screen, or is this a new bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="373601" LastEditorUserId="106502" LastEditDate="2023-09-23T15:20:34.520" LastActivityDate="2023-09-23T15:20:34.520" Title="Users &gt; Voters on Meta Page: I cannot be the only one voting this month!" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|voting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14531" CreationDate="2023-09-23T07:06:09.937" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&amp;amp;filter=quarter&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; is only showing users with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\geq 10$&lt;/span&gt; votes presumably by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2023-09-23T07:06:09.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14523" CreationDate="2023-09-24T01:43:56.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your question is a duplicate because it implicitly asks whether information can travel faster than light, and there are already a great many answers on this site explaining that the answer to that question is &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Independently of that, your question is non-mainstream because it is entirely unmotivated, just as if you had asked &amp;quot;Is it possible that particle detectors record incorrect times on Fridays?&amp;quot;.  That is non-mainstream because there is not a shred of a reason in mainstream physics to think that the day of the week affects the timestamp.   Ditto for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have some story about why entanglement might cause incorrect timestamps, then you are very confused, but your question could still be on-topic &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; you provided that story in enough detail so that people could help you pinpoint the locus of your confusion.  You did not do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastEditorUserId="4993" LastEditDate="2023-09-24T05:45:42.690" LastActivityDate="2023-09-24T05:45:42.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14537" CreationDate="2023-10-05T16:01:46.510" Score="5" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to those questions whose answers can be found easily by googling the question. For eg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/783181/357431&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like such questions show very little research effort and should be closed with a suitable comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357431" LastEditorUserId="195139" LastEditDate="2023-10-06T03:34:43.257" LastActivityDate="2023-10-12T08:45:50.643" Title="Should questions with obvious answers on the web be closed?" Tags="|discussion|scope|close-reasons|insufficient-effort|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14536" CreationDate="2023-10-07T09:02:52.450" Score="28" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should questions with obvious answers on the web be closed ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not unless they are duplicates. We do not need yet another highly subjective reason to close questions. If you think the question has an adequate answer at some other site (e.g. Wikipedia) then provide a link and a summary of that site's answer. However, remember that an answer that is &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; to you may not be obvious to the OP, so some  expansion or clarification may be helpful. Similarly, &amp;quot;very little research effort&amp;quot; is highly subjective - our questioners often come here &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; they do not know what other resources are available or do not know the correct terminology that would allow them to access those resources. If we shoo them away rather than trying to help them then we undermine the very reason for this site's existence. We should instead &lt;em&gt;welcome&lt;/em&gt; questioners who choose to bring their curiosity here rather than relying on dubious responses from ChatGPT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="148491" LastEditDate="2023-10-12T08:45:50.643" LastActivityDate="2023-10-12T08:45:50.643" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-09T03:51:29.303" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, while I was trying to solve a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schrödinger equation&lt;/a&gt; with a specific type, I came across with this &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/170546/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I thought that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; I ask a similar question for a different potential and add my work to make readers grasp what I am trying to solve, it should be fine. Then I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/783616/&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;. Then it was closed, which I was OK with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do try to understand the reason mine is closed while the question I linked to is not closed. Before asking this, I read a few other meta posts, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9826/&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators usually remove it if it focuses on &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Am I right?&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; or lack of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;asking about a specific physics concept&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, which I believe is not the case for my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;It seems my question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289086" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T07:09:24.970" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T07:09:24.970" Title="What is the difference between homework-like questions/check-my-work questions and a normal question?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-09T08:15:00.160" Score="-1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this Q&amp;amp;A style question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/783653/&quot;&gt;How do I solve this projectile motion problem?&lt;/a&gt;. The reason for posting this is because I know that there are a large number of questions regarding how to approach projectile motion problems. I also know that college and AP courses are covering this content now, which is likely related to this upsurge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answering these questions, I would like a resource in the form of a stack exchange question to reference. I think the framework I provided in the answer is solid and answers a very relevant question in a way that I did not see on the site previously. I answered the question myself, and I intend to accept that answer since that is what the Q&amp;amp;A was made for. Despite this being the (in my opinion obvious) goal, the question was closed. I do not understand what the point of this is, and I think the question should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why must this question stay closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="337317" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T06:24:06.540" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T16:26:06.767" Title="Why was this Q&amp;A closed?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|reopen|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14539" CreationDate="2023-10-12T19:34:55.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why must this question stay closed?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well it's not anymore, but it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be closed. There are several problems that I see with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad&lt;/strong&gt;: as there are several different types of parabolic trajectory problems (e.g., flat level, elevated origin, elevated end point, ranges, max heights, length, etc) and even more kinematic problems, what you're asking for is essentially a list of methods that could be used to solve a problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unclear&lt;/strong&gt;: you could be asking for a specific problem, but since you've not identified it, it's hard to say.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework-like&lt;/strong&gt;: the method by which you solve a problem is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a concept and we routinely close questions asking &amp;quot;how do I solve this&amp;quot; given our long-standing &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/25301&quot;&gt;policy on the matter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, I would think that #3 is most strong reason for closure, but #1 is probably not too far behind; #2 is then the weakest reason for closure, but would still be valid in my books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2023-10-12T19:34:55.283" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14539" CreationDate="2023-10-13T00:23:06.400" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why the question should be closed. In particular, the question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not too broad:&lt;/strong&gt; Every single kinematics problem is the same. If you cannot see this, then I'm not sure you've ever done kinematics problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not unclear:&lt;/strong&gt; See point 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not homework-like:&lt;/strong&gt; The way that one understands and does a kinematics problem is certainly based in concepts. Splitting motion into orthogonal components is a &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$N$&lt;/span&gt; first order differential equations requiring &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$N$&lt;/span&gt; initial conditions to be specified is a &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326183" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T00:23:06.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-13T07:00:01.153" Score="-2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some questions that are closed with the &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot; tag are in fact perfectly clear and specific questions, often with simple and straightforward answers. This is not an infrequent occurrence - I believe I see examples every day. Here are three examples from the last 24 hours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/784174&quot;&gt;Theoretically, is it feasible for the dark matter density to be constant and homogeneous, as dark energy is, and the two to be related?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/784162&quot;&gt;Bell&amp;#39;s inequality for angles 120&amp;#176;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/784137&quot;&gt;Interference with multiple beams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I am alone in thinking that these questions are in fact completely clear and specific, since (a) in some cases other posters have put answers in comments which correspond with my understanding of the question and (b) these questions are quite often re-opened on review, sometimes without any significant changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if I believe the question should not have been closed then I can (and do) vote to re-open. But I am puzzled by the frequency with which this criterion is being incorrectly applied. Is there some explanation for this ? Is this tag being used as &amp;quot;shorthand&amp;quot; for some other reason for closing these questions ? Or could this test be too subjective to be useful as a closing criterion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148491" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T16:35:25.410" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T16:35:25.410" Title="Is &quot;needs details or clarity&quot; too subjective to be a useful closing criterion?" Tags="|discussion|questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14543" CreationDate="2023-10-13T07:37:10.200" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between &amp;quot;I can tell what this question is asking&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The question is perfectly specific and clear&amp;quot;. Remember: Questions should be useful for &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; users on the site, too, not only for the person who asked them, so the level of clarify and details in a question should be such that most readers who encounter the question will be clearly able to tell what it is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of your three examples, I do not agree that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of them was &amp;quot;specific and clear&amp;quot; when it was closed (and I didn't vote on any of these questions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is only in the title and not in the body. In fact, I opened this question and was completely mystified why anyone would think this question is clear because &lt;em&gt;there isn't a question in the body at all&lt;/em&gt;. Even if we ignore this poor formatting decision, the body is still mostly unclear - what does a statement like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;But if both are included in a generalized gravitation theory, the picture can change.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; even mean? What is a &amp;quot;generalized gravitation theory&amp;quot; in this context? Are you &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; what this user wants to know is really the observational facts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question was much improved by an edit after being closed and so is a perfect example of an unclear question becoming clearer after being closed, i.e. it does not support the point in the question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine: Yes, people with the same book or who have been taught using the same notation can tell what this question is asking, but the question itself gives &lt;em&gt;no context at all&lt;/em&gt; for what any of the symbols here mean. What are 'd', 'theta', 'k'? To a reader unfamiliar with this specific choice of notation the question is &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; mystifying (and no, I do not believe that &amp;quot;but this notation is very standard&amp;quot; is a good counterargument here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, in this case I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; believe that you (and probably I, too) perfectly well understand what the question is about. But instead of complaining that other users who don't (or who think the asker should make the effort to phrase the question in a way accessible to everyone) close the question, I think the correct action is just this: If you really like this question and think it should be open, then &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; it so it is really specific and clear to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; without having to make a bunch of educated guesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So altogether I don't think the problem here is that a question being &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; is very subjective as such, it's that you seem to apply a much weaker interpretation of &amp;quot;clarity&amp;quot; (i.e.: you think that you personally have a reasonable guess of what the question means) than the close voters (i.e.: every reader familiar with the topic the question is about should have an unambiguous idea of what the question means).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T10:48:04.513" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T10:48:04.513" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-14T04:15:17.010" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;This old question, with answers, appeared today with the only indication, &amp;quot;modified today&amp;quot;, without any link to what has been modified: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/332645/experiment-pendulum-with-constant-driving-force&quot;&gt;Experiment: pendulum with constant driving force&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can one see the modification and judge whether to spend time on the new appearance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-10-14T23:12:28.613" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T23:12:28.613" Title="How is an old question &quot;modified today&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14545" CreationDate="2023-10-14T04:49:14.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can see the revision history by clicking here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ndmR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ndmR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows you the revision history, which shows all of the changes. In this case, it was bumped automatically, not actually modified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bot occasionally bumps questions to give them more visibility. You can read more about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/184511/380389&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106502" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T04:49:14.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14539" CreationDate="2023-10-14T16:26:06.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question cannot be answered using physical principles.  Also, there are so many possible variations on this type of question that it cannot be answered without additional details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to pass judgment on something I do not know in this specific case, but whenever students ask me a question like this, they want to be told how to choose a particular equation to solve a problem based on the format of the question, but show limited interest in understanding the methodology behind the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not your case, maybe you can provide an example of a specific question and identify what &lt;em&gt;conceptually&lt;/em&gt; confuses you in this example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T16:26:06.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14549" CreationDate="2023-10-18T09:57:02.013" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the site allows me to tag an individual member at the start of a comment by typing @username, but sometimes it does not recognise the name and the string beginning with @ is automatically deleted from the comment. Am I doing something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="242949" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-10-18T10:40:40.897" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T21:02:24.680" Title="Trying to ping users in comments: @username disappears" Tags="|support|comments|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14548" CreationDate="2023-10-18T10:00:08.067" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens when you're trying to ping the &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt; of the post you're commenting on. The author gets notified of every comment on their post anyway, so the system automatically deletes such superfluous pings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make it clear you're addressing the author of the post, just start your comment with their name but leave out the &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/263383&quot;&gt;precise condition&lt;/a&gt; for the ping to get removed is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no comments, or only you or the author have commented on the post so far, the @name will be automatically removed from the beginning of the comment, as it adds no value. (To avoid breaking sentences, mentions not at the beginning will not be removed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this condition is &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; from the author being included in the autocompletion list for pings, which is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only users who have commented on the post are populated into the list. Editors and other users from the post's history will never appear there, even if they are able to be notified by typing manually. The author is also not included unless they commented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2023-10-19T21:02:24.680" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T21:02:24.680" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-24T23:36:22.603" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for help on a calculation of mine that is related to Black Hole Quasinormal Mode undergraduate research I am doing with my university. This is not homework or anything, but I'd rather not bother my professor with this question, because as it stands I probably bother him with the number of questions I already ask, and I want to keep most of our conversations productive. But I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is kind of tough, and niche, and I am not sure how much I am expected to show from my work when posing the question to Physics SE. I have much of it written out, but it’s getting to be a bit of a wall of text and equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper way to ask for assistance in a situation like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244531" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-10-26T07:39:35.780" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T07:39:35.780" Title="How to properly ask for help on a complicated Question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-25T12:48:23.247" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was about to ask a question on Physics Stack Exchange, but found it had already been asked, and then closed since it was apparently already answered. I have looked at the link that is given as an answer, and I don't see how it answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/480622/&quot;&gt;Vanishing partition function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how the integrand is a total deriviative. The linked answer just says the author can see that it is a total derivative. This isn't helpful for those of us who can't see that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218123" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-10-26T07:39:32.263" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T13:01:18.160" Title="Request to reopen an old closed question" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14551" CreationDate="2023-10-26T13:01:18.160" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One option is to flag the question for reopening, which is a privilege that comes before you can vote to reopen questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were in your shoes, though, I would ask a new question. The way to avoid the dupehammer is to acknowledge that the other questions exist. You do this by linking to them, summarizing what you think they say, and explaining the gap between the other answers and your understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T13:01:18.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-31T10:30:30.987" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/786340/310742&quot;&gt;Possible mistake in Lancaster’s QFT pg 351?&lt;/a&gt;) 2 days ago, but the site still thinks it was asked “yesterday”. I remember checking yesterday and it saying “bounty is eligible in 7 hours” and now it says “bounty is eligible in 11 hours”. Why did the time go up? How can the glitch be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user310742" LastEditorUserId="50583" LastEditDate="2023-10-31T10:40:49.653" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T10:40:49.653" Title="Eligible for bounty in X hours glitch" Tags="|bug|status-norepro|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14553" CreationDate="2023-10-31T10:40:38.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no glitch: The question was asked on 29.10.2023 at 22:10:40 UTC and questions become eligible for bounties exactly two days after they are posted, which is indeed in about 11 hours at the time you posted this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you can reproduce the bug that it displays a shorter time like 7 hours under some conditions, there is no indication anything is wrong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T10:40:38.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-31T19:57:45.560" Score="-8" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I think I can't guess the context of the reader but as an exercise can someone tell me how to improve my question writing for example here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/786623/what-is-the-size-of-the-dirac-delta-function-in-flrw-metric&quot;&gt;What is the size of the dirac delta function in FLRW metric?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me and the moderator managed to reach some sort of understanding on the validity of the question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64656807#64656807&quot;&gt;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64656807#64656807&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Would recommend a complete reading here is the gist of it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anyone thinks FLRW is a particularly accurate model of&#xA;the universe at all, it's just a model for the very large-scale&#xA;structure on top of which you can then layer the local perturbations&#xA;that correspond to galaxy clusters and whatnot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Acuriousmind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150174" LastEditorUserId="150174" LastEditDate="2023-11-01T05:35:21.703" LastActivityDate="2023-11-01T15:46:29.763" Title="On assuming context of the reader in PSE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14555" CreationDate="2023-10-31T23:06:59.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question about the Dirac delta in the FLRW metric is like asking about Justin Bieber's greatest hits in Schwarzschild spacetime. Those things have nothing to do with each other, so there's not much to improve. That question didn't make any sense at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FLRW metric is homogenous and isotropic, so there isn't any Dirac delta anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24093" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-11-01T15:46:29.763" LastActivityDate="2023-11-01T15:46:29.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-08T20:00:43.723" Score="17" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question about etiquette and manners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are answering or have answered a question and you disagree with something written in another answer, would you think it was ok to directly criticise that other answer in your own?&#xA;For example, by editing your answer to include something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;ProfRob's answer doesn't add much. In his answer he says x, y and z but I think he is wrong because of alpha, and beta.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, do you think that you should, at least initially, raise that objection as a comment on that answer, maybe with a downvote if you feel strongly, so that the other author knows they are being criticised and might perhaps resolve a misunderstanding or make a correction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say the latter. I think whether the criticism is justified or not, some courtesy might be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem with the former approach is that at best, it seems discourteous and will likely lead to an extended &amp;quot;exchange of views&amp;quot;, and at worst it denies the right to respond if the other author is unaware of the edits being made in another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14267/proper-procedure-for-addressing-an-incorrect-accepted-answer,maybe&quot;&gt;Proper procedure for addressing an incorrect accepted answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43351" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T22:31:43.620" Title="Is direct criticism of another answer in your own answer ok?" Tags="|discussion|answers|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14559" CreationDate="2023-11-09T12:12:04.930" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many posts on this site where users write something along the lines of &amp;quot;this extends SoAndSo's answer&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;this complements SoAndSo's answer,&amp;quot; so it seems reasonable that something along the lines of &amp;quot;this contradicts SoAndSo's answer&amp;quot; would &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also of the opinion that the wording probably matters. For instance, I think &amp;quot;doesn't add much&amp;quot; that you wrote is probably a bit unnecessarily harsh. It would be better to identify &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they went wrong, for example: &amp;quot;SoAndSo assumed Scenario X, but that doesn't hold here because of Y&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the comment and/or downvote side, I believe that at least a comment is warranted in this case. It could be something as minimal as, &amp;quot;Hey, I've pointed out why this answer is wrong in my answer.&amp;quot; or, if it fits within the 600 characters, you can identify the problem in the comment, &amp;quot;You seem to be assuming X, but that doesn't hold here.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whether you want to downvote it or not is up to you, but I've frequently argued that we should downvote bad/wrong answers as we see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T12:12:04.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14559" CreationDate="2023-11-09T16:36:41.370" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is direct criticism of another answer in your own answer ok?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think such references should be avoided (and are often annoying to me). They should be avoided for the same reasons that any distraction inserted into an answer should be avoided. I don't think there is any upside that outweighs the downside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I say that Kyle_Kanos's answer &amp;quot;doesn't add much,&amp;quot; this distracts from my own answer, since the reader probably wants to jump up (or down) to Kyle's answer and try to figure out just why I think it doesn't add much. In this sense, references to other answers are kind of like footnotes--they are a distraction from the main text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, such references almost necessarily introduce data that can go stale, such as references to usernames, which can be changed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7015/name-changes-dont-get-fixed-in-comments&quot;&gt;This issue can also be a privacy issue, such as the situation where a contributor wishes their previous username to be forgotten, but that username has been hard-coded into a comment or an answer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, an answer should be reasonably self-contained. This is also the reason we avoid link-only answers. An answer that references some other answer becomes at least partially reliant on that answer sticking around, not being edited, not being deleted, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation would be: Just put your head down and write your own answer as clearly and independently as possible. Then use comments, votes, and suggested edits to critique other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T00:21:04.940" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T00:21:04.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14571" CreationDate="2023-11-14T22:52:25.373" Score="7" ViewCount="717" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of days ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/788014/ground-state-energy-of-infinite-heisenberg-xxx-model-with-open-or-periodic-bound&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question has been asked (IMHO a good question and it also received two good answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I noticed that this question has extremely many views, especially compared to other questions the last days. IIRC, two days after the question has been posted, it had like ~5k (also very many), at the time of writing this post here ~16k and now 20k views?! As far as I can see, it neither has become a hot network question nor was posted on Twitter. Also there were no edits which would make it appear on top again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on here? Is this a bug? Or why does this question generate so much traffic? And if it is really no bug, then why on earth do the question and answers only have a few votes and other interactions? If you compare this with other questions with high view numbers, this seems very strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232314" LastEditorUserId="232314" LastEditDate="2023-11-16T07:41:20.220" LastActivityDate="2023-11-18T20:50:54.657" Title="Why does this question generate so much traffic?" Tags="|discussion|bug|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14568" CreationDate="2023-11-17T18:06:46.407" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user posts a question which has potentially interesting answers but then deletes it themself, should the original poster be given credit if another user (who read the original question) decides it is worth reposting?  One would not want to take credit for another user's idea, but we might also be cautious about naming that user since deleting the question may mean they no longer want to be associated with the question. Since SE sites do not allow direct messaging of users, one can't just ask the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta question is inspired by a recent question about the &amp;quot;speed of electricity&amp;quot; that was initially unclear, but after clarification it turned out to be perhaps worth answering.  (Although the poster did not realize it, an answer to the final question would involve discussing how the rise time of signals in lossy transmission lines depends on the conductor's resistivity.) By the time I got back to it, however, the question had evidently been further downvoted and then deleted by the original poster.&#xA;I thought about reposting and answering the question myself, which made me wonder how and whether I should acknowledge the original question if I ever get around to doing so. At the very least I would certainly say that it was based on a deleted question, so I guess this meta question is essentially about whether one should name the user who posted the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastActivityDate="2023-11-19T02:51:20.560" Title="Etiquette for reposting a question deleted by original poster" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2023-11-17T18:15:14.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone doesn't want something associated with their name, then don't recreate that thing and associate their name with it.  We never know why people delete things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastEditorUserId="70245" LastEditDate="2023-11-17T19:39:41.827" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T19:39:41.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2023-11-17T20:32:56.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a user posts a question which has potentially interesting answers but then deletes it themself, should the original poster be given credit if another user (who read the original question) decides it is worth reposting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, don't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what do you mean by &amp;quot;reposting&amp;quot;? Do you mean literally word-for-word reposting? If so, don't do this either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would not want to take credit for another user's idea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, if you literally repost word-for-word you are not just &amp;quot;taking credif for another user's idea&amp;quot; you are plagiarizing. Don't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if you are not literally reposting word-for-word, but creating a new (and hopefully better) question, then there is still no reason to worry about &amp;quot;taking credit for another user's idea.&amp;quot; Nobody owns abstract ideas. Steal them as much as you like. When you &amp;quot;steal&amp;quot; an abstract idea, you are stealing next to nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meta question is inspired by a recent question about the &amp;quot;speed of electricity&amp;quot; that was initially unclear, but after clarification it turned out to be perhaps worth answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you could re-write such a question to make it clear and answerable, then go ahead. But, I don't think it is a good idea to make any reference to the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; question, or the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also, some similar reasons for not @-ing people (or referring to their usernames without @-ing them) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14559/is-direct-criticism-of-another-answer-in-your-own-answer-ok&quot;&gt;in the answers to this somewhat-related question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2023-11-19T02:51:20.560" LastActivityDate="2023-11-19T02:51:20.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14564" CreationDate="2023-11-18T20:50:54.657" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh boy. Did you take a look at the title? 8.5 billion searches take place per day on google. 10 to 20% are related to you know what… And that title has it all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="344470" LastActivityDate="2023-11-18T20:50:54.657" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14559" CreationDate="2023-11-21T19:15:32.197" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, when you post an answer with other answers already existing, you will have something to add to the other answers or take a different point of view that may contradict them (after all, there is no point in merely repeating already existing answers). In this case you should bring your own answer into context with the other ones in order to show that your answer is an informed one that does not ignore the other answers. After all, it is only discourse that drives science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question whether you should contact the authors of other answers about the criticism you raised:&#xA;the purpose of SE is to answer the question asked by the OP, not to directly get into contact with the authors of other answers. When I criticise  other answers in my own answer, then only as an obligation against the OP. I don't feel I have a commitment against the authors of the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35485" LastEditorUserId="35485" LastEditDate="2023-11-21T22:31:43.620" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T22:31:43.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14574" CreationDate="2023-11-28T05:21:14.337" Score="1" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little while ago I asked a question on the Matter Modeling SE, and it has not received any answers. This question is regarding the way anharmonic force fields are calculated in computational chemistry programs (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/questions/11809/how-do-you-calculate-a-full-quartic-force-field-for-anharmonic-frequencies&quot;&gt;How do you calculate a full quartic force field for anharmonic frequencies?&lt;/a&gt;). Basically, given the fact that semi-quartic force fields are generally determined to calculate anharmonic properties, I was wondering what it would take to calculate a &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; quartic force field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After attempting to add a previously unused tag, 'anharmonicity', to the question, I was made aware that there was no justification for the tag to be created, as not enough questions concerning anharmonicity have ever been asked on MMSE (the figure I was quoted was 5/3500+ contained the word ‘anharmonicity’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was surprising, as I had assumed MMSE would have received many questions regarding anharmonicity. The lack of discussion of anharmonicity on MMSE suggests that I am unlikely to receive an answer there. My next instinct would be to ask at the Chemistry SE, because the question is about the calculation of anharmonic force fields for molecules, but I think there may be a larger audience of people who know about anharmonicity in the Physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here is where I show my chemistry bias) Essentially, I would like to transfer the question to the Physics SE, but I am not sure if the question is too applied for it. I have several books and many articles where the theory behind anharmonicity is laid out; I want an answer concerning the &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering it does not fit at MMSE, how likely is it this question would receive an answer if deleted on MMSE but posted on PSE instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385757" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-11-29T13:48:29.183" LastActivityDate="2023-11-29T14:11:00.917" Title="Advice on appropriateness of question for physics stack" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14573" CreationDate="2023-11-29T14:11:00.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little while ago I asked... (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/questions/11809/how-do-you-calculate-a-full-quartic-force-field-for-anharmonic-frequencies&quot;&gt;How do you calculate a full quartic force field for anharmonic frequencies?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Considering it does not fit at MMSE, &lt;strong&gt;how likely&lt;/strong&gt; is it this question would receive an answer if deleted on MMSE but posted on PSE instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anyone here can provide a factual answer regarding &amp;quot;how likely&amp;quot; it is that your question will receive an answer on PSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, your question might randomly receive a bad or thoughtless answer (or worse an A.I. hallucination answer). I suspect that is not the kind of answer that you are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; whether or not your question would receive a good/useful answer on PSE, I would guess that the answer is &amp;quot;no, it will not.&amp;quot; But my only real justification for this guess is that when I look at your question I do not personally want to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastActivityDate="2023-11-29T14:11:00.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-14T14:05:35.683" Score="-1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a new user myself (just 22 days old), I feel as if the downvoting policy needs a major rejig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree to the fact that downvotes must be anonymous - as if the person who is downvoting is known, then revenge downvoting may be rampant. But the point is when we come across new contributors who are unaware / don't know the policy of PhySE, we have to try and make an inclusive environment for them as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Stack Overflow, I have seen that new users are taken through a good-enough tutorial while posting their first question. They ask the motivation of the user for the question, why he/she thinks it is relevant, what is his understanding of the question etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to introduce a similar culture in PhySE also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever we are filling out the form to ask a question, we need to start subdividing as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP's question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the underlying concepts and his understanding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is he not able to solve the question and where is he stuck&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What could be the motivation of his problem (will use it for experiments, research, hypothesis etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally tagging and duplicate checking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will help reduce the number of downvotes and as a result bans, and also will create a major difference in the culture of PhySE as we know that EVERY QUESTION has been indirectly scrutinised through this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this should not apply only for first-timers, but for every question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may have been raised before but it's high time it's raised again.&#xA;What is the community's say on my opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cygs7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cygs7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aFEHO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aFEHO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D7ciu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D7ciu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user385297" LastEditorDisplayName="user385297" LastEditDate="2023-12-14T17:20:01.030" LastActivityDate="2023-12-14T23:07:07.573" Title="Our downvoting policy needs a major rejig" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|down-votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14575" CreationDate="2023-12-14T22:57:46.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is going to be a little off putting, and maybe it’s just a question of style,  but by your own admission you have been around for less than a month and suddenly you think we need a &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt; change of culture on PSE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m all in favour of changes and constructive criticism but may I respectfully suggest you first understand the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; culture before suggesting a major rejig? Have you yourself synthesized from the multiple posts and discussions on vote closing and downvoting on PSEmeta what the culture of PSE actually is and why the community consensus has evolved to where it is now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community here has had numerous reflections on downvoting, and you were not part of any of those discussions.  Outside input is important and welcome (at least for my part) but before you propose a solution, maybe you should make it clear that you are aware of the previous topical discussions on PSEmeta, why you think the community should dismiss cogent arguments made by others (including by some quite experienced and well-regarded users) and why you think that a site that has maintained reasonably high standards and has done reasonably well &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; to introduce a new culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;unlikely&lt;/em&gt; that impatient users who do not care about reading current guidelines will pay much attention to any parts of a process that will come between them and quickly posting to get an answer as fast as possible.  Impatient users will remain impatients irrespective of the hurdles you insert in the process.  It may deter some poster but this will be a minority.  In fact, as pointed to in comments, the problem is that we don’t downvote enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, maybe you also can start thinking about what you will say to the next new user who - after less than a month on the site - disagrees with you and suggest we &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; another new change of culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-12-14T23:07:07.573" LastActivityDate="2023-12-14T23:07:07.573" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-17T00:54:12.247" Score="-8" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a very extensive answer using a computer program to verify the identity given above, which honestly might be useful for future visitors and contains some good content at least about the levi-civita tensor. I want to include that answer in the closed question. I don't really care about getting any reputation from it. I'll include the answer to this meta post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I didnt 'post this answer is because close to finishing it I stepped away from my computer to help with a small family thing and by the time I returned the question was already closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linked question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/793805/&quot;&gt;Demonstration of equation involving Dirac gamma matrices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-17T11:58:17.097" LastActivityDate="2023-12-17T12:23:52.143" Title="I want to open question 793805 to post an answer and then close it" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14577" CreationDate="2023-12-17T12:23:52.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, questions are closed by vote.  It is considered that the community has voted to close a question.  With rare exceptions (due to a very high reputation level related to a specific tag or moderator action for moderator reasons), one person cannot close a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By logical extension, that decision should not be over-turned by one person who wants to ignore the community closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a well defined process for reopening a question, which requires more than one person to vote to reopen.  Then it's considered that the community has voted to over-turn the close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is any of this perfect ?  No, no system is perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would any other system be better ?  Probably not because every system of voting would be flawed in some way or seen as flawed by people who didn't agree with the vote.  A system which allowed one person to effectively ignore the close vote (by asking to reopen for them and then close again) would be farcical as we might as well not close questions at all in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I didnt 'post this answer is because close to finishing it I stepped away from my computer to help with a small family thing and by the time I returned the question was already closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have experienced similar things personally and I'm sure most frequent posters have as well.  That doesn't mean you should expect the community vote to be ignore for you (or me).  You have to respect the community decision, but you are free to vote to reopen and you can hope that others agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, by the way, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many math applications which can handle tensor mathematics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2023-12-17T12:23:52.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-19T10:16:01.950" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm studying physics, I get questions I can't answer constantly. I usually leave a question after I try to solve it 2 or 3 times and don't get anywhere. I return to it again after a week or two and that sometimes helps, but I still have lots of them unclear ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's why I joined this site, but I'm a bit worried about asking too many questions. Seeing there are about 230 000 questions on physics.stackexchange and that a new one is asked about three times per hour, I wouldn't wish mine completely overflowing all others, especially because I'll mostly be asking in a few certain tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a limit and to which extent can I ask in the same tag without abusing the site and other members?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387014" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2023-12-28T01:02:57.420" LastActivityDate="2023-12-28T01:02:57.420" Title="How frequently can I ask questions on one site and in one tag?" Tags="|support|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14580" CreationDate="2023-12-19T16:32:58.627" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no limit but you would be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; prolific if you could ask more than one good question per week, although initially you might have a backlog of good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is NOT easy to ask good questions because the site is fairly mature and already has a large repository of questions on a large number of topics, so your question might quickly be closed as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, &amp;quot;check-my-work&amp;quot;-type questions, or assignment-like questions, are also rapidly closed as this is not a site for help with homework or derivations (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/36194&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). The good questions are conceptual, as discussed&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/10938/36194&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and experience has shown that most users struggle to frequently ask good conceptual questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If too many of your questions are closed or downvoted because they are not good, you may end up into a forced pause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastEditorUserId="36194" LastEditDate="2023-12-22T17:27:10.083" LastActivityDate="2023-12-22T17:27:10.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-23T09:19:25.243" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/791935/&quot;&gt;Gravitation and Electrostatics - A mathematical analogy or much more?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted this question, and though really good answers have been posted, it has been closed off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a new member here, and would like to know your expectations on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know how I can improve my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user385297" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-23T09:22:41.300" LastActivityDate="2023-12-23T11:56:11.310" Title="May I know how can I improve my question?" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14582" CreationDate="2023-12-23T11:56:11.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if anyone could validate these observations. Further points showering more clarity of the same are also highly welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is too open-ended, and the first part pretty much off-topic as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6093/50583&quot;&gt;check-my-work question&lt;/a&gt;. Around here, we expect questions to be &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; so that it's easy to judge whether answers are answering the question or not. Just inviting users to add &amp;quot;further points&amp;quot; is the opposite of a specific question, in particular because it remains unclear what connection between electrostatics and gravitation &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; you think you have found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples of more specific questions about the analogy between gravitational physics and electromagnetism, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/76354/50583&quot;&gt;Geometric interpretation of electromagnetism&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/123862/50583&quot;&gt;Has a metric formulation of electromagnetism ever been attempted?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2023-12-23T11:56:11.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-25T20:20:28.440" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to request consideration to re-open this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/794422/&quot;&gt;What if black holes doen&amp;#39;t evaporate by Hawking Radiation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as being not about mainstream physics.  Although I understand there is well-established rationale for Hawking radiation, to date there is no experimental evidence for it - direct or indirect.  Physics, like other branches of science, ultimately require some form of experimental verification in order to move forward. This is a key principle of all science.  Therefore it is in fact &amp;quot;mainstream&amp;quot; physics to question the existence of Hawking radiation, and what the implications / experimental observations would be in the absence of Hawking radiation.  Please consider re-opening this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59021" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-25T20:26:57.073" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T01:03:15.057" Title="Re-open a question about the fate of the universe in the absence of Hawking radiation" Tags="|discussion|support|specific-question|reopen|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14585" CreationDate="2023-12-26T23:22:34.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion to the OP of the original question would be to re-frame the question along the lines of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On what general theoretical grounds is Hawking radiation believed to exist? Alternatively, what principles would seem to conflict with the possibility that Hawking radiation &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That provides a fairly direct question about the reasons that mainstream physics typically assumes the existence of Hawking radiation even in the absence of direct measurement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note to the OP of this meta post, the weakness of gravity makes direct evidence for gravitational phenomena somewhat sparse, especially when it comes to black holes. Recall that the EHT's first image of a black hole was published only a few years ago, and Hawking radiation is a vastly weaker and more subtle signal to try to detect. As a result, if Hawking radiation exists, it should be wholly unsurprising that there is no direct evidence of it given our current capabilities. Just something to bear in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156895" LastEditorUserId="156895" LastEditDate="2023-12-27T01:03:15.057" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T01:03:15.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14589" CreationDate="2023-12-30T21:34:18.217" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will often blockquote from OP's question, especially when I want to steal OP's MathJax markup rather than re-write it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when an edit is pending I know of no way to view OP's MathJax. In particular, when I click on the &amp;quot;Edit&amp;quot; button, I can't view the MathJax, I can only approve the edit (and I don't have the authority to fully approve on my own), and therefore I can't view OP's MathJax when an edit is pending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to view OP's MathJax when there is an edit pending?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-30T21:39:40.857" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T00:34:02.053" Title="How to view MathJax markup while an edit is pending" Tags="|bug|mathjax|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14588" CreationDate="2023-12-31T00:34:02.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have not already approved the edit, then when you hit the Edit button with an active edit suggested, select the option &amp;quot;Reject and Edit&amp;quot;, which will open up the editor where you can view everything written. It won't actually reject the edit until you press the Submit button at the end, so you will still be able to cancel and then approve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can always right-click on the rendered MathJax and select &amp;quot;Show Math As...&amp;quot; option, then the &amp;quot;TeX Commands&amp;quot; option, which will open up a new window with the tex commands (obviously) that you can copy &amp;amp; paste into your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T00:34:02.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-31T16:27:34.893" Score="-9" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Physics Stack Exchange moderators often close questions because they seem them as &amp;quot;homework-like&amp;quot;, asserting that it fosters independent learning. However, this practice may inadvertently discourage young enthusiasts from exploring their curiosity. Moreover, those spending all day closing posts, may have an abundance of free time, rather than promoting a genuine learning environment. For many lacking access to a physics teacher or resources, this forum serves as a vital resource for knowledge. Striking a balance between maintaining quality and nurturing curiosity is essential, ensuring that the platform remains a valuable resource for diverse learners seeking guidance in their physics journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S&#xA;Obviously this post is gonna be taken down and censored by the moderators&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="331022" OwnerDisplayName="WilliamHarvey" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2023-12-31T18:14:09.633" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T18:16:38.970" Title="Moderators close questions as &quot;homework-like&quot; excessively" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|homework-and-exercises|reopen|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14590" CreationDate="2023-12-31T17:10:29.383" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question shows a couple of misunderstandings about how this site operates and its mission. But there is also a grain of truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: the “homework closures” you mention are not done by moderators. They are done by the community. The community can also easily reverse a closure, so when that doesn’t happen it means the community agrees with the closure. The moderators are largely irrelevant for homework closures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: the purpose of this site is not to help an individual by answering their question. The goal is to answer general questions that many users will have. Questions about calculations are likely only helpful for the individual user rather than many users, so they are discouraged here. Users can go to other sites, like physicsforums.com for homework help. There is no need to duplicate that effort here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the grain of truth: I do agree that many questions closed as homework questions are actually conceptual questions, so they shouldn’t be closed as homework. The &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; is often too quick to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for most of those homework-like conceptual questions, the underlying conceptual question is a duplicate and should have been closed as a duplicate instead. I would prefer that the community close them as duplicates, linking to the previous answer, but that requires finding the original. It takes less effort to close as homework if the question fits that mold. So questions that could be closed under either reason will typically be closed as homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204834" LastEditorUserId="204834" LastEditDate="2023-12-31T17:20:20.613" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T17:20:20.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14590" CreationDate="2023-12-31T17:52:23.160" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone that spends time closing many of these questions, there is nothing wrong with questions that are “homework-like” in an absolute sense. The problem is when the question either displays absolutely no effort on the part of the asker or is merely a computational exercise. The former case include questions that want the community to do homework for the user with no effort. This is obviously inappropriate and is the most infamous problem. The other, more subtle, issue is that users fail to identify the concept with which they are struggling or that a future user could learn about in the question. This makes the question very difficult to answer well, and it further makes the questions less useful overall. This obviously has a lot of overlap with the details or clarity flag. In the latter case, there is little that anyone else can learn from the question since it merely shows a broken step in a derivation or problem. At worst, it would just be a large pile of math with no context that is useless unless you happen to need that exact thing for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good homework-like question, by contrast,&#xA;needs to give background for the problem in question, properly contextualize the user’s knowledge and efforts on the problem, and clearly identify a valid conceptual issue that the community can address. Such questions, despite being ostensibly a homework question, do just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286319" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T17:52:23.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14590" CreationDate="2023-12-31T18:16:38.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am one of those uses @Dale mentioned that is in favor of closing homework like questions on physics.stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is ironic that one of the biggest uses of Stack Overflow is for homework like questions. I use it all the time to find out how to solve simple issues in my code. Though recently, I find chatGPT is even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reflects a difference in how programming and physics are done. Professional programmers need to solve little homework like problems all the time. The purpose is to get a job done. We already understand the concept. We might need help with the syntax. Or a reminder about details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary users of the physics site are students at levels varying from high school to grad school. Simple exercises are homework. Doing homework yourself and thinking about how to do it are major tools to learning the concepts well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the concepts is the biggest service we can provide. So we answer questions about concepts even for homework like questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do also get people with problems to solve, people who are curious, people with their own theories, and so on. Some of these are closed where an answer would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some should be closed. Some people don't have enough understanding of physics for us to be able to straighten out their misconceptions. Some don't want to understand. They may want to be the genius that revolutionizes physics with a new idea. They have an idea that satisfies them, and just want us to understand its brilliance. Some may be convinced that physics is wrong for religious reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, there are two types of question that are unjustly closed the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First are questions that are not clearly posed. These are difficult. If you don't understand what a question is asking, how do you answer it? But sometimes it is possible to pick out the concept that someone is confused about. You can explain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, questions that disrespect physics in some way. This can be trivial, even a poor choice of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question like this is likely to be closed and down voted: I see this. It shows that this law is wrong. What is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is much more likely be answered: I see this. I am confused. Doesn't it contradict this law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that say physics is wrong are from people we cannot help. They should be closed. But we are too quick on the trigger sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37364" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T18:16:38.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-01T18:46:04.473" Score="2" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: A version of this was posted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/395806/proposing-answer-endorsement-by-high-rep-users&quot;&gt;mother meta exchange&lt;/a&gt; in case you want to cast your agreement/disagreement there. Ironically, it being at +3/-3 here is so positively surprising to me that I went ahead and did it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know many &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1092/&quot;&gt;flavours&lt;/a&gt; of this have been asked time and time again, but it seems the last time this was brought up was 6 years ago. Also, I don’t have access to site analytics so I am only going to talk about how things &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; as a user (apologies!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of talk on question moderation (righty so) and question downvoting but there is less talk about answer moderation and upvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a (basically) new user to the site, it is frustrating when I answer a question or see an answer to a question that gets basically no community feedback. I am taking about &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$0$&lt;/span&gt; votes answers that users put genuine effort and thought into. Very often OP  (or anyone) won’t even put a comment/vote in let alone mark it as accepted. I still like to answer despite this risk because I like physics and I know it might help googlers in the future, and maybe it helps the new user who originally asked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community, i.e literally anyone with 15/125 rep, who is in charge of upvoting good answers and downvoting bad ones is thus responsible for moderating answer content. This doesn’t &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; like it works because I see good and bad answers sitting at &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-2&amp;lt;x&amp;lt;2$&lt;/span&gt; votes long after the question was asked, and of course, no acceptance either. This is not only my answers as I described above but many users’. There seems to be very little participation in the community when it comes to moderating answers, which is crazy given almost anyone can vote. This unmoderated answers are thus of unknown quality to whomever unearths the question years later. Not very useful...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JZQNk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JZQNk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;So, I propose, for both user retention purposes and answer moderation purposes, a &lt;strong&gt;x &amp;gt; (some rep) user endorses this answer&lt;/strong&gt; badge, like Piazza has for instructor and TA. This could have a queue like the first question queue. High rep users on some tag (excluding rep on accumulated solely on Homework tag) could browse questions that (since they passed Question moderation) are useful, and have been answered, but with an unmoderated answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that they can already do that with their 40 votes per day and a little comment saying “this makes sense to me” but this endorsement, next to where the accepted answer checkmark is, would make people perhaps feel more secure the answer is correct (which ironically the check mark does and it shouldn’t). It also could come with some associated rep which maybe would entice people to answer questions more and just use the site more in general. Also this might help with the common side problem of users answering in the comments, making their answer unjudgable by the community via votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This endorsement badge would maybe counter the frustration that comes with answering (to be) abandoned questions that have been deemed worthy by the community, and would also make the a site more useful resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an idea for a new feature, let me know your thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I’d love to know if site analytics disagree with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, to give this (pre-edit quote) visibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..it is frustrating that I come here to answer questions and sometimes I end up wondering if anyone read the answer... this line sounds to me like it is a &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; problem more so than a &amp;quot;site&amp;quot; problem  - Kyle Kanos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very fair take on my post. Maybe other people feel the same way I do though. Let me know what you think of the feature idea. Ultimately, this is about a potential improvement to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250039" LastEditorUserId="250039" LastEditDate="2024-01-03T00:36:29.803" LastActivityDate="2024-01-03T00:36:29.803" Title="Proposing answer endorsement badge" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|voting|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-05T14:50:09.957" Score="19" ViewCount="835" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/395881/sites-can-now-request-to-enable-a-banner-to-warn-about-their-policy-on-ai-genera&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; they recently announced a new option for individual sites to have a &amp;quot;AI-generated content&amp;quot; policy banner, offering several options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will initially offer two banner text options that all sites in the Stack Exchange network can opt-in to. Those options are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reminder&lt;/strong&gt;: Answers generated by Artificial Intelligence tools are not allowed on [Site Name]. Learn more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reminder&lt;/strong&gt;: Answers generated by Artificial Intelligence tools must be cited on [Site Name]. Learn more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we wish to opt in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastEditorUserId="44126" LastEditDate="2024-01-06T04:33:50.703" LastActivityDate="2024-01-06T04:33:50.703" Title="Do we want to implement the new AI policy banner on Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14595" CreationDate="2024-01-05T17:36:57.317" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;For voting purposes to determine a consensus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; we should add a banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal preference is the first (not allowed), but we could discuss on a separate Meta question if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastActivityDate="2024-01-05T17:36:57.317" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2024-01-05T17:36:57.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14595" CreationDate="2024-01-05T17:37:25.737" Score="-16" Body="&lt;p&gt;For voting purposes to determine a consensus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt; we should not add a banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38675" LastActivityDate="2024-01-05T17:37:25.737" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2024-01-05T17:37:25.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14615" CreationDate="2024-01-06T14:36:13.610" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was on the Physics Stack Exchange site and just somehow went to view the profile page of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community bot&lt;/a&gt;. I did not notice this before that the number of people reached by it is designated as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\infty$&lt;/span&gt;. I know that this shouldn't bother me as this is not a serious issue. Nor should I increase traffic by asking such a trivial question here. But my curiosity got the best of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might have been the purpose of doing so by Stack Exchange? Is it supposed to imply that SE is the greatest Q&amp;amp;A site ever and probably that shall ever be? Or is it just something spooky created by SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="382250" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-01-07T02:10:56.830" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T12:59:00.580" Title="Why is the number of people reached by Community bot infinity?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14602" CreationDate="2024-01-06T18:59:06.570" Score="5" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user has been asking questions (mostly) about Newtonian Mechanics from time to time (which happens to be my top tag). Said user generally begins questions with &amp;quot;I aspire to become like you guys and am only a beginner&amp;quot; (they even made a question out of it once) (I can put up with that). They regularly post homework questions- and reject answers because it doesn't satisfy their intuition. I've left multiple comments on their questions but they're all ignored. They don't seem particularly familiar with the scope of this site, and responded to a (helpful) comment as &amp;quot;please don't talk to me you downvoted&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, the questions could actually be valuable if they were better phrased and contained less of what the user feels about this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A previous version of this Meta post included a screenshot typical question by this user.]&#xA;I'd have linked some more, but most of them have been deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the Physics SE deal with such users generally, apart from downvoting and commenting? Is there a more effective way to guide them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380387" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2024-01-07T08:22:20.453" LastActivityDate="2024-01-07T08:22:20.453" Title="Problem with new user" Tags="|support|flagging|best-practices|moderation|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-07T01:04:19.713" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/796283/whats-the-connection-between-force-and-energy/796284?noredirect=1#comment1788176_796284&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which seemed like an honest good faith question (although the asker is clearly not yet competent with using LaTeX).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They clearly state how their mental models work, and it’s already clear that their mental models are vague and not very sophisticated: &amp;quot;I know that energy is equal to the work done and work is equal to the multiplication of force and displacement caused my the force in the direction of the applied force.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then articulate what area of problem solving they are having conceptual issues with: &amp;quot;But when friction is involved, things seem to be unclear to me...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they articulate exactly what the two contradictory views are that are consistent logically with their mental model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then say that doesn't make sense and at this point anyone with a good understanding of mechanics can not only know how to answer their question; they can also clearly see where the source of the confusion is for the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in my opinion, a good conceptual question, albeit not the most beautifully formatted, and also probably elementary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was shocked that the given closure reason was &amp;quot;This question needs details or clarity.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What details are lacking? Four different users thought the question was coherent enough to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might add for context, this question had a single downvote almost as soon as it was asked. I think a good faith downvoter probably looked at the lack of LaTeX and elementary flavor of the question and thought to themselves &amp;quot;this looks like homework&amp;quot;, but ultimately that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; why this was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would need to be done for this question to be opened? I want the OP to have constructive feedback on how to ask and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to feel like they are being alienated/pushed away by the community.  It feels wrong that a question with five upvotes and three downvotes, and four answers is suddenly closed due to &amp;quot;lack of details&amp;quot; and not a single comment was made by any of the users saying &amp;quot;your question is unclear because ...&amp;quot; or even just a comment asking &amp;quot;what are you asking?&amp;quot;, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-01-07T02:07:02.997" LastActivityDate="2024-01-07T20:34:20.553" Title="Why is this question unclear? What details should it have added to make it clear?" Tags="|discussion|questions|specific-question|closed-questions|close-reasons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14600" CreationDate="2024-01-07T01:13:13.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this question unclear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear at least because it starts out with OP asserting that something false is true: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I know that energy is equal to the work done...&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;  No. No, it's not. (As I commented on the question, the &lt;em&gt;net work&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; in kinetic energy and the &lt;em&gt;individual work&lt;/em&gt; due to any &lt;em&gt;individual force&lt;/em&gt; is the negative of the &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; in that individual potential energy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the rest of the question is moot, since the user begins from such a confused and unworkable place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this seems like a questioner who just hasn't read their textbook carefully. They are asking a confused question with a false premise, and that is likely not helpful to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website isn't about sorting out one person's confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2024-01-07T20:34:20.553" LastActivityDate="2024-01-07T20:34:20.553" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14599" CreationDate="2024-01-07T01:45:01.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have identified the user in question based on your post. (Users without moderator superpowers can't use exactly the method that I used, but I've edited your post a little bit just in case, to give this user a little more privacy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've left multiple comments on their questions but they're all ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware of a cognitive error here. A message which does not receive a prompt written response, or even a bit of advice which is not immediately followed, has not necessarily been ignored. A commenter under your post points out that your comments may also be valuable to other readers of the questions, in addition to the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[they] responded to a (helpful) comment as &amp;quot;please don't talk to me you downvoted&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's rude. Flag it. (In fact, this particular comment was flagged and removed.) If you find yourself feeling baited into responding in kind, turn off your computer and take a walk instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, the questions could actually be valuable if they were better phrased and contained less of what the user feels about this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are prepared to engage in a mentoring relationship with this person to help cultivate such improvements, good for you. If you don't have the patience for such a relationship, or they aren't receptive, that needs to be okay. If there is an &lt;em&gt;exceptional&lt;/em&gt; question which you think deserves to be salvaged, you might consider asking an on-topic version of that question yourself — making sure to refer back to the original, and perhaps making your question &amp;quot;community wiki&amp;quot; so that you don't seem to be just farming reputation points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one time their question was closed and they just reposted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, people do that, especially new people. It ordinarily doesn't take much correction for them to stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the Physics SE deal with such users generally, apart from downvoting and commenting? Is there a more effective way to guide them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, an optimist, would also include upvoting of useful content in that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we bring the moderator's attention to a particular user? I know how to flag, but that's just for questions and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can raise a custom flag which explains the pattern you are seeing. Multiple standard flags will have the same effect — we keep an eye on usernames as we monitor the flag queue. There are a number of situations which can cause a user with low-quality contributions to have their ability to contribute restricted, and those also send the user to the various relevant bits of the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-01-07T01:45:01.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14607" CreationDate="2024-01-23T22:32:44.533" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that previously-working images in some posts now flickers for a second before eyes and are hidden immediately.  While inspecting such problematic image links in the posts, I have noticed some discrepancies, like the link Markdown structure in the post is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![image description][ID]][ID]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the second ID from the markup and additional square brackets works, like changing the above code into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;![image description][ID]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were there some site maintenance tasks which have broken some posts' embedded links? I feel this problem must be escalated, because all image links in all posts should be cross-validated now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Platform details :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Distributor ID: Pop&#xA;Description:    Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS&#xA;Release:    22.04&#xA;Codename:   jammy&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Browser details :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Google Chrome   121.0.6167.85 (Official Build) (64-bit) &#xA;Revision    3f98d690ad7e59242ef110144c757b2ac4eef1a2-refs/branch-heads/6167@{#1539}&#xA;OS  Linux&#xA;JavaScript  V8 12.1.285.26&#xA;User Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36&#xA;Command Line    /app/extra/chrome --disable-features=WebAssemblyTrapHandler,DesktopPWAsRunOnOsLogin --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --origin-trial-disabled-features=WebGPU&#xA;Executable Path /app/extra/chrome&#xA;Profile Path    /home/null/.var/app/com.google.Chrome/config/google-chrome/Default&#xA;Active Variations   78ce0fb-ca7d8d80&#xA;be9ac099-12ede6a2&#xA;8c693aa5-ca7d8d80&#xA;692c4a33-477edaa&#xA;50eef52b-a79d803f&#xA;b0a56918-ca7d8d80&#xA;b05e1e6c-ca7d8d80&#xA;5f8b0593-ca7d8d80&#xA;19cad42d-ca7d8d80&#xA;f301790-ca7d8d80&#xA;b334488c-ca7d8d80&#xA;eddd0d82-7723ede9&#xA;aba1243e-82d6e34b&#xA;e18619cd-ca7d8d80&#xA;87f33ad6-377be55a&#xA;65df225-ca7d8d80&#xA;3095aa95-3f4a17df&#xA;5e26295f-ca7d8d80&#xA;521a59ad-f9a43703&#xA;6d3329df-ca7d8d80&#xA;b4fb8450-ca7d8d80&#xA;cba02cf0-ca7d8d80&#xA;87ccf3f3-ca7d8d80&#xA;82ada734-ca7d8d80&#xA;44666d99-ca7d8d80&#xA;9c4e9263-12ede6a2&#xA;ddb8ff70-ca7d8d80&#xA;7fc2c6dc-bf95fb92&#xA;b2cff759-b2cff759&#xA;6f55e1a1-377be55a&#xA;f8411335-ca7d8d80&#xA;a582a1b8-5ad3f43d&#xA;669a7db8-ca7d8d80&#xA;494e2c16-ca7d8d80&#xA;ce9b8a32-4d2fac87&#xA;d92d97b4-ca7d8d80&#xA;ae1924b1-2840b4af&#xA;e88c95b8-ca7d8d80&#xA;c5109773-ca7d8d80&#xA;8eb498bd-ca7d8d80&#xA;26665953-ca7d8d80&#xA;27f750c-ca7d8d80&#xA;1d865dc8-65334638&#xA;3fd33f16-ca7d8d80&#xA;d9384a1d-ca7d8d80&#xA;62f811c6-ca7d8d80&#xA;6b9250af-ca7d8d80&#xA;c272f203-12ede6a2&#xA;95a095bd-12ede6a2&#xA;f6264095-12ede6a2&#xA;bacf219a-ca7d8d80&#xA;8d182722-377be55a&#xA;910af27f-694968cf&#xA;d4d0c0cb-ca7d8d80&#xA;7999ec3c-ca7d8d80&#xA;784a7e92-ca7d8d80&#xA;fc9ceed7-ca7d8d80&#xA;d664a1aa-ca7d8d80&#xA;dfc2d5d9-ca7d8d80&#xA;2b4e7fda-4a4621d9&#xA;ea90e0df-91a3a8c2&#xA;39f17c85-ef1fc9f7&#xA;4bc95f1e-ee3cba41&#xA;84f2bb65-eafdd735&#xA;16c46fd0-485ec16e&#xA;b8b71ed9-dabe7183&#xA;ab1d6da3-ca7d8d80&#xA;dcceede7-f13ce319&#xA;4a8bb706-1f8c5973&#xA;2e89c181-377be55a&#xA;fa33ceb5-2b6ed456&#xA;cb87f652-33c3eba5&#xA;314a184e-ca7d8d80&#xA;da493d3c-ca7d8d80&#xA;72bafd3e-12ede6a2&#xA;3ed7dfc4-ca7d8d80&#xA;ea9324c5-ca7d8d80&#xA;3ed94085-b59f7663&#xA;5d1017fe-ca7d8d80&#xA;94ea64fd-ca7d8d80&#xA;59a12fbe-6cf8754c&#xA;bb73ab6c-7b676c3b&#xA;ea23a088-377be55a&#xA;8c584bf0-ca7d8d80&#xA;349863a7-ca7d8d80&#xA;bff0815b-ca7d8d80&#xA;c88cdb84-ca7d8d80&#xA;45a2f2f-4993f9d1&#xA;83514069-6edc92c7&#xA;dca2449f-ca7d8d80&#xA;137f6fe-4d2fac87&#xA;86362250-ca7d8d80&#xA;36c3226a-377be55a&#xA;b88dc83e-ca7d8d80&#xA;4ea303a6-11610cc8&#xA;4190c9c9-ca7d8d80&#xA;258151b3-ca7d8d80&#xA;5af3ddb7-5419e7bd&#xA;f1efb311-1f8c5973&#xA;d7d493f4-905ae853&#xA;f3b6291d-ca7d8d80&#xA;a6caa730-ca7d8d80&#xA;1edcddf4-31889cb4&#xA;278baf51-387c1f0e&#xA;e2e21759-ca7d8d80&#xA;c1771bc6-ca7d8d80&#xA;c65eafdb-377be55a&#xA;3dc7b4fe-377be55a&#xA;f9be514e-ca7d8d80&#xA;5f656ab9-377be55a&#xA;ea0d881d-ca7d8d80&#xA;3f752d-ca7d8d80&#xA;fd4b313c-f23d1dea&#xA;b2615123-377be55a&#xA;1918000d-e2351cfe&#xA;cd1a6113-9abe4278&#xA;23226e84-12ede6a2&#xA;3797f84b-ca7d8d80&#xA;4d3350df-ca7d8d80&#xA;f43e9210-377be55a&#xA;ef85228a-203e66b8&#xA;c845dfe2-d0134b67&#xA;83d1a239-377be55a&#xA;ce43899a-377be55a&#xA;ec637609-ef8c3c9a&#xA;4e762e93-ca7d8d80&#xA;94f1fa38-ca7d8d80&#xA;3fc87288-ca7d8d80&#xA;6cfccc3-ca7d8d80&#xA;90860314-2155f233&#xA;494d8760-52325d43&#xA;eadcacdf-6bdfffe7&#xA;7b2873c2-f9e34637&#xA;3ac60855-486e2a9c&#xA;f48c01d3-c9708222&#xA;63dcb6a3-58ca20a&#xA;e706e746-7da8925a&#xA;f296190c-9ce370dd&#xA;4442aae2-a90023b1&#xA;f690cf64-6bdfffe7&#xA;ed1d377-e1cc0f14&#xA;75f0f0a0-4ad60575&#xA;710c3f90-6bdfffe7&#xA;e2b18481-6e3b1976&#xA;e7e71889-e1cc0f14&#xA;67ca41ce-ca7d8d80&#xA;858aa29b-377be55a&#xA;bea4a9c2-ca7d8d80&#xA;1ae0f6fa-ca7d8d80&#xA;5a18fe50-ca7d8d80&#xA;542d15b1-377be55a&#xA;ff1dade5-12ede6a2&#xA;f38ef081-12ede6a2&#xA;22baf79f-ca7d8d80&#xA;3906c665-ca7d8d80&#xA;dd08905f-f637b7e7&#xA;6dcf9601-ca7d8d80&#xA;c55491ea-4b0b636c&#xA;a38f69b3-f23d1dea&#xA;3bd26dba-ad071dfc&#xA;8d549a7a-5fe72c56&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it must be a browser/OS problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="205969" LastEditorUserId="205969" LastEditDate="2024-01-28T12:05:41.830" LastActivityDate="2024-01-28T12:21:53.603" Title="It seems some image links in the posts are not working any more" Tags="|support|bug|status-norepro|site-enhancement|image|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T16:56:06.130" Score="5" ViewCount="146" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks — folks like you. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmN7M.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Physics over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community User¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community²&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;154&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,185&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;931&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;89&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;554&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,470&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;905&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;236&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;32&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁸&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,885&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;379&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10,351&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,138&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;875&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,231&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,149&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,710&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,337&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;382&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;98&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;714&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;67&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,163&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,872&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,100&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,853&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;239&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;224&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;157&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,247&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;54&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;115&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;47&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;27&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;136&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;498&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;20&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,314&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,915&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;47&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9,177&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,161&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;61&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,762&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;218&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,192&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;337&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;251&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,542&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Triage&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;708&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User review-bans lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;76&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;60&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed⁴&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;123&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;64&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;136&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² This refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Physics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14319/2022-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2022: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222023%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/396299/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27856" LastEditorUserId="27856" LastEditDate="2024-01-24T18:58:04.120" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T18:58:04.120" Title="2023: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-27T01:47:40.033" Score="-8" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were an adversary of the US and I needed some information to solve a problem, I might ask a question on Physics Stack-exchange with the goal to get info I'd not get otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do I ask this question?&lt;/strong&gt; It's human nature for people to &amp;quot;out perform their peers&amp;quot; to get up-votes and be &amp;quot;the one&amp;quot; that gets the status of &amp;quot;public approval&amp;quot;. Our adversaries know that Americans are rats for this bait and easily take it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the DoD been aware that people might be using this platform to gain knowledge they might not get otherwise? What measures are taken by Stack-Exchange to prevent escape of sensitive information? &lt;strong&gt;Well on second thought, I'm not sure the staff here would know how to detect sensitive information... so there you go.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why so many downvotes&lt;/strong&gt;? Where's the &lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;iversity, &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;quity, and &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;nclusion? Isn't this question just as valid as others? I feel offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390852" OwnerDisplayName="steveK" LastEditorUserId="390852" LastEditDate="2024-01-27T22:22:13.693" LastActivityDate="2024-01-27T22:22:13.693" Title="Does Physics Stack-Exchange monitor questions for sensitive information?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14605" CreationDate="2024-01-27T04:05:23.777" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a commenter writes: knowing what to share and what to keep silent about is the responsibility of persons who maintain security clearances. Those people are unlikely to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a story from the 1990s about a person at a US laboratory who was working without a clearance and preparing to present some research at an international conference. His work was close enough to classified subjects that his managers required him to obtain a clearance, so that they could tell him whether he knew any secrets, so that he would not accidentally disclose them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of at least one user who had to substantially stop contributing to the site when Stack Overflow was sold to a non-US company, due to rules about volunteering for foreign organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If classified material did somehow make it into Physics Stack Exchange, a public request for removal would probably just lead to a &amp;quot;Streisand effect.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't so much an answer to your question as it is an explanation of why I don't expect your question to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-01-27T04:05:23.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14603" CreationDate="2024-01-28T12:21:53.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found the reason of this issue. I have some AdBlocker plugin active in my Google Chrome browser. Strangely, it interprets embedded image links of &amp;quot;double ID format&amp;quot; as an Ads (probably because you can click on them), and removes them from the page. Disabling AdBlocker solves the issue. So seems that what is Ad and what is not Ad,- hard to guess these days. Anyway, maybe this info will help somebody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="205969" LastActivityDate="2024-01-28T12:21:53.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-31T18:48:08.570" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I want to ask -&#xA;How is a physics question made difficult in competitive exams? I want to know this so as to overcome the hardness/fear of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I ask this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385600" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-02-02T00:05:04.700" LastActivityDate="2024-02-02T00:05:04.700" Title="Where can I ask guidance-related questions about physics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-03T18:06:48.647" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just made this self answer : &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/800083/how-does-a-bicycle-work&quot;&gt;How does a Bicycle work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very much obvious that this question is too broad. But I wish to cover every possible concept about a bicycle in this answer in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw a bicycle question a couple days ago and I had answered it. I was pointed out in the comments that a part of my answer was wrong and upon further research, I verified that my answer was partially wrong and had updated it. I did some more research on many of the topics regarding a bicycle and planned on making this guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already spent around 3-4 hours on this and willing to spend a lot more time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to accomplish this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390596" LastActivityDate="2024-02-04T02:39:01.250" Title="How do I make a comprehensive guide on a particular topic?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14611" CreationDate="2024-02-04T02:39:01.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour page&lt;/a&gt;, you'll actually see that users should avoid asking (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Questions with too many possible answers or &lt;strong&gt;that would require an extremely long answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the SE model as a whole isn't intended to provide &lt;em&gt;comprehensive&lt;/em&gt; answers to subjects, it's intended to provide &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; answer to &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; questions. So by design of the site, you are not able to &amp;quot;cover every possible concept about a bicycle in this answer&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be possible to break your answers into smaller pieces asked separately, but I suspect a good portion of them would fall afoul of the engineering or homework policies &amp;amp; closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2024-02-04T02:39:01.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14614" CreationDate="2024-02-06T03:26:06.610" Score="12" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken, the user who &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/798472/is-there-a-force-associated-with-relativistic-length-contraction&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; appears to have found a hack to make their posts undownvotable: Just &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question multiple times and make sure they're all really terrible non-answers.  The question itself isn't terrible — or &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; before the petty edits.  According to the OP's own edit to the question, there seem to have been a good number of us who downvoted more than one of those non-answers to the question, which were then reversed.  In fact, the OP isn't the only one who answered multiple times with extremely poor answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really how the serial-downvote-detection algorithm should work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8007" LastEditorUserId="8007" LastEditDate="2024-02-06T03:35:31.690" LastActivityDate="2024-02-11T00:56:47.990" Title="&quot;Serial downvoting&quot; because of multiple terrible answers to the same question" Tags="|discussion|down-votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-06T05:03:38.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good question, in the Stack Exchange model, is one that has definitive answers. If a user writes three different answers to the same question, either the user doesn't understand what it means for a question to have a good answer, or the question is not a good fit for our format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I saw that question, it had already accumulated thirteen answers, with multiple answers from at least two users.  There was actually an anonymous flag on the question, pointing out that the &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; were being used as a back-and-forth discussion, and suggesting deleting the whole question.  At that point the question was five days into a seven-day bounty period. I wasn't comfortable with single-handedly disappearing the question entirely, nor with trying to assist the users involved in combining their multiple answers into one apiece.  I'm willing to take the blame for this one: I should have cleaned it up then — especially since the users posting multiple answers were low-rep users who generally benefit from gentle guidance. But I didn't. Mea culpa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the faults of the Stack Exchange bounty system is that a question with an active bounty is protected from close votes. This means an off-topic question can't be closed by normal users; instead normal users have to raise a custom moderator flag, asking for the bounty to be cancelled and the question closed.  That's not ideal.  Part of the solution is for &lt;em&gt;the community&lt;/em&gt; to keep up with the review queues, and to engage actively in upvoting good questions and downvoting bad ones. That helps us avoid the situation where a low-quality or unclear question gets lots of attention via the bounty system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T05:03:38.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14598" CreationDate="2024-02-06T12:59:00.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/396567/552049&quot;&gt;official answer&lt;/a&gt;, posted by a staff member (Aaron Bertrand) on the main meta site. In short, values for the community user were calculated in the past, leading to performance issues due to queries that don't produce any particularly useful data as the network grew. So the query was removed entirely. The reason why an infinity symbol is now shown instead of something like N/A is apparently that another staff member (Adam Lear) found it funnier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49107" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T12:59:00.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-06T15:43:13.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question, in the Stack Exchange model, is one that has definitive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it. I also understand that this is not entirely consistent with how Physics works. However, even though it is a significant limitation, I can accept Stack Exchange's point of view as a practical filter for the acceptable questions on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the real question is, how can people without enough experience in physics know that their question does not have a definite answer? And a similar question is valid for people trying to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point of view is that they can't. As a consequence, I would not be too much concerned about the existence of a few cases like the example. I would consider an issue only in the presence of a statistically significant number of similar cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183259" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T15:43:13.737" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14618" CreationDate="2024-02-07T15:14:01.487" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently downvoted a post by accident, but I didn't realize my mistake until some 3o minutes or so later when I noticed the downvote in my reputation log. I meant to upvote the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to fix this? The system would not allow me to change my vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387158" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-02-08T02:22:05.193" LastActivityDate="2024-02-08T02:22:05.193" Title="How can I fix an accidental downvote?" Tags="|support|editing|down-votes|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14617" CreationDate="2024-02-07T15:54:20.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might remember that when you tried to undo the mistake, it showed that you can reverse it only if the post is edited. So you must try to edit the post that you accidentally downvoted. You may be able to find something in that post that could be edited, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$e.g.$&lt;/span&gt; tags. If you don't have enough reputation, your edit will be suggested and hopefully accepted. Once the post is edited, you may reverse the downvote and do upvote. Hope it helps you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="382250" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T15:54:20.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14620" CreationDate="2024-02-07T17:42:59.190" Score="-2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just made a account on chemistry stack exchange and I got rewarded 100 reputation points on both sites because I was a well reputed member of the physics stack exchange community. And there are 170+ stack exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I were too create a account on all the other 170 or so sites, will I get 17000 reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well. If this is how it works, doesn't that give me the access to almost all privileges. And if it were this easy, wouldn't spammers and other toxic people for the community take advantage and exploit this since they would have a lot of privileges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well. I am aware of the 200 reputation limit. I am not sure if it applies to this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390596" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T18:02:21.117" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T18:02:21.117" Title="Is there a reputation limit from creating accounts on other stack exchange sites?" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14619" CreationDate="2024-02-07T17:47:07.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called the &amp;quot;association bonus.&amp;quot; It grants you some of the basic per-site privileges like being able to comment, based on your having been granted these privileges elsewhere on the network. The association bonus does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; grant &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of these privileges: for example, people who have only their association bonus can't comment on &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your network-wide reputation is never really used for anything, so if you feel like making 170 accounts and never using them, go ahead. But if all you want is a big number, you could just write a big number on your hand with a marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T17:47:07.687" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14623" CreationDate="2024-02-07T18:15:07.980" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to make a wrong answer, would people lean towards downvoting my answers more in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390596" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T21:51:46.373" Title="Would I get judged on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1081" CreationDate="2024-02-07T20:40:18.900" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Overview of &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, I present three different example of how to create a new command in your postings on the subject of physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that you will copy, paste, and edit parts of my examples to suit your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 1: The Example with Arrows&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bbox[20px, border: 4px solid]{A \to B \to C}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following two columns of code produce the same final &lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; I mean that the final result looks the same to humans eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Example with Arrows&lt;br&gt;Code 1 of 2&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Example with Arrows&lt;br&gt;Code 2 of 2&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\SES}[3]{ #1 \to #2 \to #3 }$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt; &lt;code&gt;$\SES{A}{B}{C}$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;$A \to B \to C $&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt; stuff should go somewhere near the top of your posting, and you should only write it once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in our example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;#1&lt;/code&gt; gets replaced by the letter &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;#2&lt;/code&gt; gets replaced by the letter &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;#3&lt;/code&gt; gets replaced by the letter &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the new command is &lt;code&gt;SES&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The brackets with a number three &lt;code&gt;[3]&lt;/code&gt; show how many inputs the new command accepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 2: The Blackboard Bold Letter &amp;quot;ℝ&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bbox[20px, border: 4px solid]{\newcommand{\R}{\mathbb{R}}\R}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following two columns of code produce the same final &lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; I mean that the final result looks the same to humans eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Example with Blackboard Bold Letter &amp;quot;ℝ&amp;quot; &lt;br&gt;Code 1 of 2&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Example with Blackboard Bold Letter &amp;quot;ℝ&amp;quot; &lt;br&gt;Code 2 of 2&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\R}{\mathbb{R}}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt; &lt;code&gt;$\R$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\mathbb{R}$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 3: Example with Parentheses&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bbox[20px, border: 4px solid]{\left(\dfrac{1}{x}\right)}$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that parentheses &lt;code&gt;()&lt;/code&gt; usually stay small no matter what is inside of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equivalently, parentheses &lt;code&gt;()&lt;/code&gt; do &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; automatically get bigger, or smaller, based on what is inside of the parentheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The various ways to make parentheses bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;LOOKS BAD&lt;br&gt;TO HUMAN EYES&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;LOOKS GOOD&lt;br&gt;TO HUMAN EYES&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\text{The reciprocal of } x \text{ is } (\dfrac{1}{x}).$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\text{The reciprocal of } x \text{ is } \left(\dfrac{1}{x}\right)$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following two columns of code produce the same final &lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; I mean that the final result looks the same to humans eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Example with Parentheses&lt;br&gt;Code 1 of 2&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Example with Parentheses&lt;br&gt;Code 2 of 2&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\b}[1]{\left(#1\right)}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;br&gt; &lt;code&gt;$\b{\dfrac{1}{x}}$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\left(\dfrac{1}{x}\right)$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306401" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T20:40:18.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14621" CreationDate="2024-02-07T21:51:46.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;People down-vote bad answers, so that could impair your ability to post on the site at all, as there's a more-or-less secret internal formula the system uses to decide if a poster is so bad (or badly behaved) that they should be banned for some period.  Note that deleting your (bad) posts typically makes that more likely, not less, as deletions are discouraged in this scoring.  The theory is that people who write mostly good posts don't need to delete the odd bad post, and we don't want bad answers and the people who write them misleading people.  If this was not done we'd be plagued by the flat-earth brigade and other people determined to push non-mainstream theories (the site is purely for mainstream physics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answers were so bad they drew the attention of people who frequent the site, who tend to be more active in reviewing and voting, then your future posts might come under more intense scrutiny.  Any flaws in those future posts would thus be more likely to generate more down-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other point: the system does automatic checking for serial (or even group serial) voting targeting someone.  You're therefore unlikely to have all your posts targeted by a small group of people in a brief period.  The details of the algorithm checking this are secret, but I've been a target of such voting and the system automatically detected and corrected it, so I know it's there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T21:51:46.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-09T16:14:31.863" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/463724/would-blowing-someone-elses-candle-out-make-mine-shine-brighter&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as not &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot;. Could I ask for this decision to be reviewed please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was dealing with the very real nature of combustion, not in any pseudo sciences. I learnt something from the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the objection is the joke &amp;quot;What do you mean the candles aren't literal?&amp;quot; that I added to the end (added only to acknowledge that I'm deliberately misinterpreting the original sign's author's intention) then I'm happy to remove that but it would make some of the answers that address this sub-question look like the answerer has gone on some un-asked tangent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8916" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2024-02-09T17:57:44.390" LastActivityDate="2024-02-09T17:57:44.390" Title="Review - Question closed as non-mainstream physics?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|reopen|non-mainstream-physics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-11T00:56:47.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the author of the subject question. There was no intention to 'hack' the system, but I did make the mistake of posting answers to point out the multiple errors in some of the &amp;quot;terrible&amp;quot; answers instead of using the comments section. For that I apologise. I felt compelled to respond, because I assumed knowledgeable high rep users would either downvote the terrible answers or post quality answers with the correct solutions and point out errors, but they did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also posted an edit complaining about the amount of serial down voting, because some people were were so outraged to the challenge of their ingrained worldview, they not only downvoted my posts in that thread, but when on a campaign of looking for my historical posts in other threads and downvoting them as well and I am glad that the algorithm corrected that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, rob deleted some of my self answers and comments in the question and to be honest I was glad he did, because the whole thing had got messy and I apologise for being partly responsible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good question, in the Stack Exchange model, is one that has&#xA;definitive answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel my question does have a definitive answer which is &amp;quot;Given a mechanism to stop the chain coming off the gears due to centrifugal force and given a long enough chain so the major part of the chain drive is straight, the chain drive will contract and the spring on the left will be stretched.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, judging by the yo-yo voting on the question about 50% of members think the chain will contract and the other half thing it will not. Clearly if a measurement was made there would be a definitive answer and after over 100 years of relativity we should be able to calculate what would be measured. The answer is not an opinion, its a fact. What would be measured?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I am concerned the question is a good question, It has garnered more than a 1000 views and the voting reveals that about half the responders have the opposite view to the other half and so a large number of the members are suffering from a misconception which needs clearing up. I feel high rep users could help by either posting authoritative answers or at the very least, downvoting the 'terrible' answers or upvoting the good answers which takes less than a minute. Isn't that how this forum is supposed to work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any way, I think rob did the right thing and the question is much better for his edits and I apologise for the inconvenience caused due to getting too emotionally involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388464" LastActivityDate="2024-02-11T00:56:47.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-15T17:02:09.423" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that on the left hand margin there is a tab entitled &amp;quot;Saves&amp;quot;. What exactly does or can one save there. What is this feature's intended use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387158" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2024-02-17T17:35:48.227" LastActivityDate="2024-02-17T17:35:48.227" Title="What is the &quot;Saves&quot; option used for?" Tags="|support|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-16T12:48:04.953" Score="7" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a number of posts being sabotaged by a couple of new users. How do we prevent such indecent acts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="352764" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2024-02-17T17:32:43.127" LastActivityDate="2024-02-17T17:32:43.127" Title="Preventing acts of spam" Tags="|support|best-practices|spam|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14628" CreationDate="2024-02-16T15:44:43.807" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's what flags are for! See &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/flagging&quot;&gt;the help center&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50583" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T15:44:43.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-18T09:29:26.067" Score="-4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are my questions not getting views? Even if they get some views, there aren't any answers or votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383768" LastEditorUserId="66086" LastEditDate="2024-03-20T14:20:01.647" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T15:40:11.793" Title="Why are my questions not getting views?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14630" CreationDate="2024-02-18T18:01:34.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see six undeleted questions, of which four have upvoted answers. That's not too shabby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your four deleted questions all seem to be self-deletions. The closed ones would have eventually been pruned by an automatic process, but the ones you deleted while they were open might have gotten more traction if you hadn't deleted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to feature your questions for additional attention, you can click &amp;quot;start a bounty&amp;quot; under the question. The bounty process is described in the Help Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like some interactive feedback about whether your questions are clear enough to get good answers, you might ask politely in &amp;quot;the h bar,&amp;quot; our chat room. There's a chat link near the bottom of this page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-02-18T18:01:34.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14630" CreationDate="2024-02-18T22:02:06.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why my questions are not getting views?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is that your questions are poorly written and/or not appropriate for this forum. Did you review the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;Help section&lt;/a&gt; on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I took a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/793877/why-equilibrium-and-not-steady-state&quot;&gt;a recent question&lt;/a&gt; of yours and it is not the kind of question that I would usually interact with or attempt to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like this recent question is about the semantics of the words &amp;quot;equilibrium&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;steady state.&amp;quot; If that is not the case, it still seems that way to me. You have to write your questions in a way that your audience can understand what you mean. Maybe try re-writing the question with a focus on clarity of meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it seems like this recent question is based on your own (perhaps incorrect) perspective regarding what &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; do. Also, your recent question seem to misapply universal qualifiers: &amp;quot;Why &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; state of equilibrium is used...&amp;quot; (Emphasis added.) Why do you suppose &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; &amp;quot;state of equilibrium&amp;quot; is used? Have you surveyed all the literature to ensure that &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; &amp;quot;state of equilibrium&amp;quot; is used? Also, double checking your grammar and spelling before you post a question would probably help too. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/quality-standards-error&quot;&gt;this Help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you are (at least sometimes) asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/801836/query-regarding-approach-to-solve-a-fluid-kinematics-problem&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;homework-like&lt;/em&gt; questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not matter if the above-linked question is not &lt;strong&gt;literally&lt;/strong&gt; a homework problem. It is homework-&lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help section&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/714/how-do-i-ask-homework-questions-on-physics-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt; about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2024-03-25T15:40:11.793" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T15:40:11.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-18T22:41:06.913" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/802005/&quot;&gt;a recent question&lt;/a&gt; on the Stone-Neumann theorem, and there are countless others especially on tensor analysis/differential geometry presumably related to general relativity. As this question is being asked, if we were consistent, it should belong to the math SE. We have been sending clearly elementary and not so elementary calculus questions there, rightly so, especially if there is no indication of any direct relation to physics. But where a question should belong should not depend on being at undergraduate, graduate or postgraduate level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should the rule be? Maybe the problem is not that it is a purely mathematical question, but that it is being phrased without an explicit statement why this question is relevant to a particular branch of physics, and just placing a &amp;quot;relativity&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;quantum mechanics&amp;quot; tag should not be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31748" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-02-20T01:25:11.563" LastActivityDate="2024-02-20T01:25:11.563" Title="Why this question is OK, not others" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14633" CreationDate="2024-02-19T13:49:46.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have discussed this in the past with the quintessential post &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5717/25301&quot;&gt;found here&lt;/a&gt;. The key point is the first two sentences of the top answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions devoid of any physics content (or reference to physics), which focus entirely on mathematical details should be migrated to the mathematics SE. If the question is regarding a mathematical method applied to a physics problem, then it is appropriate for the physics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though this point seems a bit moot since it has been migrated away already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, at the time of writing, you've earned more than 6 times the required minimum for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;privilege of Voting to Close&lt;/a&gt; and have &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/badges/106/custodian?userid=31748&quot;&gt;participated in the Close Review&lt;/a&gt; at least once. Perhaps the next time you feel a question is not suitable for this site, you could just vote to close it (and optionally, maybe even leave a comment indicating why you think it should be close)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2024-02-19T13:49:46.987" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-19T18:07:39.303" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused about why &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/802005/revisions&quot;&gt;this QM question was migrated from PSE&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/4865565/&quot;&gt;this question on MSE&lt;/a&gt;. I believe the more appropriate forum for this specific &lt;i&gt;mathematical-physics question&lt;/i&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;PSE&lt;/a&gt;. Could someone please shed some light on how the migration decisions are made and if question-authors' decisions for choosing a specific SE site to post questions are taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was migrated to Mathematics Stack Exchange (MSE) because it can be answered by people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields. Migrated 9 hours ago by Miyase, ZeroTheHero, Hyperon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="325197" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-02-20T01:31:06.987" LastActivityDate="2024-02-20T10:11:56.223" Title="Protocols for migration of questions between different Stack Exchange sites?" Tags="|discussion|specific-question|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14635" CreationDate="2024-02-20T10:11:56.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That one’s easy: it’s a math question.  There is no physics (at all) attached to the question.  True, the SvN theorem is used in physics, but this doesn’t make every SvN question a physics question, no more than a question on unitary groups is automatically a physics question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the premise was a physics problem and the question presented on that premise, then it might very well be a physics question, but this is not the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2024-02-20T10:11:56.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14639" CreationDate="2024-02-23T19:16:55.223" Score="11" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've resumed work on a font I'm currently developing, meant to be released as a completely free, open-source, OFL-licensed font designed specifically for use in academic and formal writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides being free and open source, it aims to have exceptional symbol coverage among many different languages (in particular supporting Latin-based scripts, Greek, and Cyrillic-based scripts), as well as coming with optical sizes, which can be thought of as extra families of the font designed specifically for certain sizes, like for footnotes or book covers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the regular style of the font looks like this (please ignore the currently defective spacing at certain parts):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9BgFN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9BgFN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are many typographical choices and specificities connected to physics and its practice, I wanted to ask for suggestions/wanted features from physicists, which might have slightly different typographical needs which I'm not aware of as a mathematician working in an area that is quite distant from physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/q/5856&quot;&gt;outlined&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/463883/&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; such a question for mathematics, but I'm sure that ― although there's certainly an overlap in needs of mathematicians and physicists when it comes to fonts ― there are also countless such necessities arising from physics which I'm unaware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/463883&quot;&gt;features already pointed out in the MathOverflow thread&lt;/a&gt;, there are, for example, the following instances of special features needed in physics writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some areas require special symbols, such as:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ш for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_comb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dirac comb&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ð for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-weighted_spherical_harmonics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spin-weighted spherical harmonics&lt;/a&gt;, which have shown up in general relativity and in the study of Dirac monopoles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ƛ for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength#Angular_wavelength&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reduced wavelength&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some areas require specific notation which is not properly handled usually, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_slash_notation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Feynman slash notation&lt;/a&gt;, where the placement of the slash can be quite inconsistent and end up looking ugly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe being able to ask the physics community in Stack Exchange about features and necessities of a font for physics would allow me to gather extremely useful suggestions and feedback on what such a font should include and how it would be best implemented, and in this way I would be able to produce a better font that would then be freely usable and beneficial to the community in turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when looking at it alone, a question like &amp;quot;Suggestions for the design a font optimised for physics writing should have&amp;quot; would arguably at best be a soft question, and at worst off-topic. Nevertheless, given the free, open-source, nature of the font and the fact that ultimately it will be available to the broad physics community, I believe it would be reasonable to make an exception in this case, asking for input &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; the broad physics community here at Physics Stack Exchange with the intention of developing the font with the physics community in mind, and I believe the physics SE would be a great place for receiving this kind of input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a question be suitable for the physics SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="215184" LastEditorUserId="215184" LastEditDate="2024-02-24T13:04:54.603" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T17:12:43.267" Title="Suggestions for the design of a font for physics" Tags="|discussion|scope|specific-question|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-24T10:27:55.013" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;After finishing my PhD, I'm struggling with my post-doc search and, more generally, approaching and learning physics in a way that is compatible with academic work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good place to discuss these things, whether it is under the Stack Exchange umbrella, or on another website entirely (preferably with a community of people currently in physics academia or versed in scientific pedagogy, which is always hard to gauge on the Internet)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought about &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;academia.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, but I feel the problems I'm facing are fairly specific to physics or at least &amp;quot;hard sciences&amp;quot; (though I hate that terminology), and would get too broad of a reply on there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123484" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-02-25T00:56:53.820" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T18:37:55.170" Title="What would be a good place to discuss my troubles with learning and practicing physics in an academic context?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14637" CreationDate="2024-02-24T17:12:43.267" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking such a question on the physics site would surely get it downvoted and closed rather quickly as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's not actually about physics (and probably not even a tool a physicist would use unless it is pushed into a TeX package; even then it'd only be for personal use documents as major publishers already have specific fonts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's not asking a specific question looking for a specific answer, but instead a pool of &amp;quot;feature requests&amp;quot;, making it &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot; to be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since what you want is effectively an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/features/issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Issues page in Github&lt;/a&gt;, why not just start on Github (or Bitbucket or whatever online repo you please) since they cater to exactly what you're looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25301" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T17:12:43.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14638" CreationDate="2024-02-26T16:31:09.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good place to discuss my troubles with learning and practicing physics in an academic context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; would be a better option than the Physics Stack Exchange (PSE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the PSE, if you look in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Section&lt;/a&gt;, one of the links you will see is titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; Clicking on this link, the first consideration reads: &amp;quot;First, make sure that your question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic for this site&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;on-topic&amp;quot; help page lists the following bullet points for the topic you should &amp;quot;stick to:&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explanations of observed physical or astronomical phenomena&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experimental designs and results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experimental technology used in physics or astronomy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accepted and/or actively researched theories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics in the context of physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question does not seem to fall into any of the above-listed topics. Therefore, it seems to me that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia stack exchange&lt;/a&gt; would probably be a better place to ask these types of questions. In particular, the Academia Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;seems to encourage questions about education in the context of academia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72068" LastEditorUserId="72068" LastEditDate="2024-02-27T18:37:55.170" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T18:37:55.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14642" CreationDate="2024-03-04T07:59:56.207" Score="19" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a disruptive person who has been present on the site for months or years but flouts its rules. He posts nonsense and gets banned, sometimes for a year or more. He creates a new account and gets banned, either for low-quality posts or for “rule violations”. He creates a new account and gets banned. One of his accounts has a century-long ban. He has confessed/boasted (in a comment to me) to creating &lt;em&gt;hundreds&lt;/em&gt; of accounts. Recently he has not even tried to “hide” by choosing a significantly different user name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain obsessions and stylistic quirks make his posts easily recognizable. His posts attract downvotes like garbage attracts flies. He is a troll who exhibits no interest in actually learning physics and is often belligerent in comments when challenged. He also projects various of his disruptive behaviors onto other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I report that he has established a new account, it sometimes takes many days for his latest account to be banned or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there no effective way to keep such ban-evaders from continuously disrupting the site? Other SE sites re-ban him considerably more quickly than Physics does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I keep flagging posts that I am reasonably confident are from this person? Or should I just downvote and stop being bothered by the fact that bans — even for rule violations — are so ineffective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I refer to this person using male pronouns because I have reasons to believe he is in fact male.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321853" LastEditorUserId="321853" LastEditDate="2024-03-04T20:17:09.710" LastActivityDate="2024-04-04T04:01:53.970" Title="Ban-evading user who posts nonsense" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14641" CreationDate="2024-03-04T22:18:54.970" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The lesson here is &amp;quot;don't feed the trolls&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably won't be something that can be solved easily or quickly, or maybe at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a fact that in wider society there are people who flout laws and bans by courts with staggering regularity.  Some people just like causing trouble, for no useful reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a case for escalating this to the highest level.  Perhaps some kind of ban can be made to work.  Speaking as a technical person, technical people like a challenge.  Perhaps someone on staff can devise a better mechanism to detect/deter this kind of nuisance.  Perhaps legal steps can be taken to e.g. deny them the use of their VPN (if that's what they're doing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ultimately we may simply have to accept that some flies won't buzz off.  Eventually, of course, they push their luck and annoy people who swat them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we should do, is not engage them.  Just vote to close and down vote and move on.  People like this want attention, take away their attention and they go away and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't feed the trolls.  Don't debate with them, or try to explain or waste your energy on them beyond the minimum required to close them down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2024-03-04T22:18:54.970" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14644" CreationDate="2024-03-05T19:25:56.787" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed an account whose profile says “Member for 6 days” but whose question list includes a question from 7 weeks ago. How is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can provide a link to the account if requested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a second account with the same name which says “Member for 4 months” but has no questions. (This isn’t a problem. I mention it because there may be a bug related to accounts with the same name.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another account says “Member for 26 days” and has questions dated back to 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This account has a century-long suspension. When a user is suspended, does the “Member for” time reset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321853" LastEditorUserId="321853" LastEditDate="2024-03-05T23:26:41.630" LastActivityDate="2024-03-06T05:43:13.673" Title="Inconsistent dates" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14643" CreationDate="2024-03-06T05:43:13.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't done any research to find the account you're looking for. But this is the kind of behavior that you might expect if two accounts are merged, if the older account disappears and ownership of its posts is given to the newer account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspensions longer than a year can only be issued by Stack Exchange employees, and generally apply to users who cause problems on multiple sites across the network. Abusing duplicate accounts is one of the ways to earn a multi-year suspension.  The presence of a century-long suspension makes it more likely that the account you describe has been the subject of a merge or other account-ownership shenanigans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-03-06T05:43:13.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14650" CreationDate="2024-03-11T17:00:00.503" Score="0" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question. Why does the &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site not encourage homework-like questions while the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site does, or in the very least, does not close those questions. Why is there a disparity??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358739" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-03-13T05:48:54.947" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T05:48:54.947" Title="Why is there a difference between the Stack Exchange sites Mathematics and Physics?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14649" CreationDate="2024-03-11T19:53:40.680" Score="4" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that there are a good number of questions that come through that are clearly off topic, e.g., &amp;quot;here do my homework please...&amp;quot; However, as of late, questions are being rapidly closed without any good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, someone just asked a question about the appearance of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, i.e., why it didn't have integration over the angular variable as it seemed to the OP that it should. The question was not one of those &amp;quot;do my homework&amp;quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to what I have read on policy here at &lt;em&gt;Physics&lt;/em&gt;, it is okay to ask questions about homework so long as you show your effort and try and ask about the concepts involved. However, lately, if it smells like homework (doesn't actually have to be) it is just immediately closed. In addition, the policy is not enforced fairly. Some of these &amp;quot;homework problems&amp;quot; seem to go unmolested. Why? There is one floating around right now on functional derivatives, just happily sitting there without anyone bothering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SE wants to be a site where only elite geniuses come together to exchange insight on the foremost frontiers of physics only, then why doesn't it redefine itself, so that the rest of us won't come here and waste our time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: close it if it is a clear case of: &amp;quot;whiney please do my homework&amp;quot;. Questions shouldn't be closed or downvoted simply because it doesn't suit someone's sense of aesthetics regarding the &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; physics question. Pride goeth before a fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387158" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-03-13T05:55:12.463" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T05:55:12.463" Title="What the Heck is going On in Physics SE?" Tags="|discussion|close-reasons|homework-and-exercises|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-11T20:45:31.750" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just angry because right when I am in the middle of typing a bunch of stuff for a response, suddenly that &amp;quot;this question is closed&amp;quot; banner pops up and all that hard work goes down the drain. Perhaps someone who has Imperium around here will see this and consider: why can't we let any one already working on a post go ahead and post, kind of grandfather them in as it were, that only seems fair, then if you want to close then by all means. Would that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387158" LastActivityDate="2024-03-11T20:45:31.750" Title="Could this work? A partial solution to closed questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14646" CreationDate="2024-03-12T00:17:12.167" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see questions that deserve to be closed or deleted, please use the appropriate flags to put them into the review queues. Likewise for closed questions which deserve to be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-03-12T00:17:12.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14645" CreationDate="2024-03-12T00:39:15.800" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question. Why Physics StackExchange does not encourage homework like questions while Math StackExchange does, or in the very least, does not close those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've had attempts (on Meta) to change the no-homework policy and it has been consistently voted to keep as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's something the community wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note we do not ban homework completely.  We do require homework type questions to be focused on explaining concepts (and not to have been answered before).  Many people literally post homework questions with little more than a &amp;quot;how do I do this&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I'd agree that there's a huge difference on Math SE, however even if there is, that would not change the fact that Physics SE members have voted to maintain the homework policy here consistently.  There's no requirement for different SE's to have the same community policies, not least because they have different communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104964" LastActivityDate="2024-03-12T00:39:15.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12561" CreationDate="2024-03-13T02:04:26.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen some instances of this strategy lately -- posting the same answer in response to many different old questions -- and wanted to point out what I think is the most (and perhaps only) serious problem with allowing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the multiply posted answer is bad, we can't downvote all instances of it due to the serial voting algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180843" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T02:04:26.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14653" CreationDate="2024-03-13T12:48:48.440" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I flag posts for being off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any option for that when I try to flag a post. Is it appropriate to use the custom flagging option (I think it is the moderator intervention one..)? I ask because similar post here on Meta seem to indicate that this is an option that appears for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="387158" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2024-03-18T02:05:31.173" LastActivityDate="2024-03-18T02:05:31.173" Title="How can I flag an off-topic post?" Tags="|support|flagging|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14652" CreationDate="2024-03-13T14:11:29.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/buAEC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/buAEC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Flag menu screenshot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you click &amp;quot;flag,&amp;quot; you (currently) see a screen like the one shown above.  Choosing &amp;quot;needs improvement&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;the question can't be answered or belongs elsewhere&amp;quot;) gives you the same off-topic options that are available to users who have the &amp;quot;vote to close&amp;quot; privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44126" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T14:11:29.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-20T12:28:59.310" Score="-1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the second post a matter of opinion but not the first one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27209/what-do-theoretical-physicists-need-from-computer-scientists?rq=1&quot;&gt;What do theoretical physicists need from computer scientists?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/807013/do-physicists-need-to-study-functional-analysis-in-depth-in-2024&quot;&gt;Do physicists need to study functional analysis in depth in 2024?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297527" LastActivityDate="2024-03-20T12:28:59.310" Title="Consistency re what counts as opinion?" Tags="|discussion|closed-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14657" CreationDate="2024-03-25T19:25:50.580" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/807637/145491&quot;&gt;this link-only answer&lt;/a&gt; and thought I should flag it, but discovered that &amp;quot;link-only&amp;quot; is not in the criteria under the &amp;quot;I am flagging to report this answer as... &amp;quot; &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; option. Does this mean we should not flag link-only answers, or click the &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; option, or enter &amp;quot;Link Only&amp;quot; under the &amp;quot;In need of moderator intervention&amp;quot; option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I would find a answer here or on the mother-meta, and there certainly are related questions such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7193/145491&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Why was my flag on a 'link-only' answer disputed?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/290742/356966&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How to flag link-only answers / what happened to the very low quality flag?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but to my surprise I could not find a simple, clear answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2024-04-02T20:07:34.360" LastActivityDate="2024-04-02T20:07:34.360" Title="How should I flag link-only answers?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|best-practices|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14656" CreationDate="2024-03-25T21:03:25.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the best option in this case is the &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; flag, based on the guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225370&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This applies if there is absolutely &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; content in the answer other than the link. As such, the answer you linked falls into this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174766" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T21:03:25.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-30T18:28:54.193" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two problems with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-expansion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-space-expansion-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;space-expansion&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;(1) &lt;strike&gt;The tag info is factually incorrect.&lt;/strike&gt; [now corrected, thanks!]&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Space expansion is a cosmological phenomenon wherein the proper distance between two spatial points for a given inertial reference frame increases from one moment of time to another. That is, space itself expands; the added distance is not due to relative motion of points or objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common misconception, unfortunately propagated in many old answers on this site. The contents of the Universe are expanding, but there is not an objective sense in which &lt;em&gt;space itself&lt;/em&gt; expands. Within the context of mainstream physics, &amp;quot;expansion of space&amp;quot; is not a physical phenomenon. It's just an artifact of common coordinate choices in cosmology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This point has been discussed at length in many answers. See for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/807720/180843&quot;&gt;Space expansion is a description of the coordinates and not the physics.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/505727/180843&quot;&gt;There is no concept of &amp;quot;expanding space&amp;quot; in general relativity.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/771021/180843&quot;&gt;Expansion of space is not distinguishable from objects moving away.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that I can submit an edit to the tag info without posting a meta thread about it. I did, and the edit was rejected. There is also a deeper problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;(2) &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/space-expansion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;space-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-space-expansion-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;space-expansion&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cosmic-expansion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmic-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cosmic-expansion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-cosmic-expansion-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;cosmic-expansion&lt;/a&gt;, and not the reverse.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a research cosmologist, I would never write &amp;quot;space expansion&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;expansion of space&amp;quot; in a paper. The standard terms for the expansion of the Universe are &amp;quot;cosmic expansion&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;expansion of the Universe&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Hubble expansion&amp;quot;. This preference is borne out in the statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&amp;quot;Cosmic expansion&amp;quot; appeared in the abstracts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3D%24fq_database%7D&amp;amp;fq_database=(database%3Aastronomy%20OR%20database%3Aphysics)&amp;amp;q=%3Dabs%3A%22cosmic%20expansion%22%20year%3A2014-2024&amp;amp;sort=date%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&amp;amp;p_=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;625 papers over the last decade&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G4bBB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G4bBB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&amp;quot;Expansion of the Universe&amp;quot; appeared in the abstracts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3D%24fq_database%7D&amp;amp;fq_database=(database%3Aastronomy%20OR%20database%3Aphysics)&amp;amp;q=%3Dabs%3A%22expansion%20of%20the%20universe%22%20year%3A2014-2024&amp;amp;sort=date%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&amp;amp;p_=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1747 papers over the last decade&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3UHbC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3UHbC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&amp;quot;Hubble expansion&amp;quot; appeared in the abstracts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3D%24fq_database%7D&amp;amp;fq_database=(database%3Aastronomy%20OR%20database%3Aphysics)&amp;amp;q=%3Dabs%3A%22Hubble%20expansion%22%20year%3A2014-2024&amp;amp;sort=date%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&amp;amp;p_=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;300 papers over the last decade&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R4Q7t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R4Q7t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&amp;quot;Space expansion&amp;quot; appeared in the abstracts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3D%24fq_database%7D&amp;amp;fq_database=(database%3Aastronomy%20OR%20database%3Aphysics)&amp;amp;q=%3Dabs%3A%22space%20expansion%22%20year%3A2014-2024&amp;amp;sort=date%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&amp;amp;p_=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;131 papers over the last decade&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;and most of them are not even related to cosmology&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YF8ul.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YF8ul.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just one paper from the most recent 10 is a cosmology paper:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DN6rH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DN6rH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;&amp;quot;Expansion of space&amp;quot; appeared in the abstracts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3D%24fq_database%7D&amp;amp;fq_database=(database%3Aastronomy%20OR%20database%3Aphysics)&amp;amp;q=%3Dabs%3A%22expansion%20of%20space%22%20year%3A2014-2024&amp;amp;sort=date%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&amp;amp;p_=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;152 papers over the last decade&lt;/a&gt;, and a significant fraction of them are not related to cosmology.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwN8L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwN8L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just four papers from the most recent 10 are using &amp;quot;expansion of space&amp;quot; in a cosmology sense:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sggS6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sggS6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180843" LastEditorUserId="180843" LastEditDate="2024-03-31T20:09:02.147" LastActivityDate="2024-03-31T20:09:02.147" Title="Fix the &quot;space-expansion&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-30T20:01:36.660" Score="-12" ViewCount="91" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/808364/does-thermal-radiation-from-a-colder-object-get-absorbed-by-a-hotter-object&quot;&gt;Does Thermal Radiation From A Colder Object Get Absorbed By A Hotter Object?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have very little faith in the moderation of this site, and have already asked about this unaware of the meta forum. Therefore, I will not add further comments regarding the science of the original question. See the original post and moderator's note within it. Please let me know whether the question itself genuinely falls outside the purview of &amp;quot;mainstream physics&amp;quot; as a &amp;quot;pet theory&amp;quot; or whether it is merely a question seeking clarification about how physics works (that may possibly be politically inconvenient for certain positions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just one other question in light of this. Do physicists and this site's moderator team have a professional obligation derived from ethics to censor discussion on the basis of activism to &amp;quot;save the planet&amp;quot;? Or, does science itself require open discussion to prevent the influence of politics and money on scientific consensus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question would seem to settle the original question about the nature of moderator behavior here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I have found the meta forum, this is my final post on the topic unless moderation policy changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="398745" LastActivityDate="2024-03-30T23:25:15.073" Title="Please Review Whether Moderation Appropriately Flagged Question As &quot;Off-Topic&quot; Or Whether Flag Was Politically Motivated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14659" CreationDate="2024-03-30T23:25:15.073" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;So first, I know that facts get in the way of good stories but let's agree that no moderator was involved in the closure or comments of your question ont the main site (at least at the time of this writing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, this site is NOT one where questions of the type &amp;quot;please peer-review my theory&amp;quot; are accepted.  You can rant about this, but this is basically what your question is as per your:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would specifically like for answers to address the flaws or merits in the reasoning I present...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to debate your personal theory or challenge the scientific consensus, then do so &lt;em&gt;elsewhere&lt;/em&gt; as the site is dedicated to mainstream physics only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36194" LastActivityDate="2024-03-30T23:25:15.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
</posts>